Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven

Avery

THAT NIGHT LINGERS about me like a persistent cologne I can't wash off my skin or out of my clothes. Not that I want to wash it off. I indulge it every chance I get — in the shower, in bed, even once in the kitchen while making my morning tea. The feel of Diego's hands on my body and tongue delving into my mouth sticks to my skin like syrup coating every place where he touched me. I return to it over and over again, even as he does everything in his power to completely ignore me in the days following the drag show.

It's made it hard to concentrate, even when I'm at the Boyfriend Café and my entire job is concentrating on the distressed computer science major drinking tea with me.

He's been complaining about his classes while sipping the calming chamomile with lemon that I brewed for him. I made jasmine for myself. It's my favorite flavor, but it's also the tea I made for Diego the night he broke down in front of my house, and I shamelessly use it to stir up those memories.

"Maybe going to college just isn't for me," the computer science student, Steven, groans. "Maybe I'm too stupid for it."

"Hey, don't say that," I cut in. "You got in. So they believe you're smart enough for it."

"But everyone else is struggling way less than me. Why am I the only one who doesn't get it?"

"You assume everyone else is struggling less than you. I'd be willing to bet the truth is that a lot of your classmates feel exactly the same way you do. Have you tried making a study group or something? You might be surprised by what your classmates reveal in private."

It's advice I've given at least a dozen times during my semesters as a server here. It's amazing how many people think they aren't good enough compared to their peers, when those peers are just as anxious as they are.

"That's … that's a really good idea," Steven says. "Thanks."

I let a genuine smile break free. "That's what I'm here for."

The rest of my hour with Steven switches to lighter topics. He seems a bit more at ease by the time our session winds down and I stand to shake his hand and escort him toward the door.

One customer down. Two rounds to go. I resolve to be less distracted next time. It would be humiliating for a customer to catch me distracted when they're all college students paying good money for this experience.

I reheat my tea in the microwave that we hide from customers (at least a few of them would be scandalized by this tea faux pas) and then pace the basement before the next round starts. Cameron raises his eyebrow at me, but his nearly permanent scowl doesn't change in any meaningful way. Julian jumps up to join me, calling it a fun game, and that deepens Cameron's scowl to a look of actual disgust. But before they can start bickering again, it's time for us to line up and greet our next round of customers.

"Welcome to the Boyfriend Café. We look forward to serving you."

My next table is a girl looking to go into early childhood education after she graduates. Anna loves working with kids; it's the adults who are getting her down.

"Kids are just so honest, you know?" she says. "It's adults who are always speaking with some double meaning. Like the other day, we had this class of kids we were working with, and one walked right up to someone in my class and asked them what non-binary means. All the adults in the room were so awkward, but the kid was just asking a question. He didn't think anything of it."

A familiar bolt of dread shoots through me. I don't make any secret of my gender here at school, but it rarely comes up as a topic of conversation, especially in a setting like this. My customers don't have any reason to talk about it, except I suspect Anna brought this up deliberately. She's fishing for my opinion on the matter, or perhaps for my approval. It wouldn't be the first time someone wanted me to pat them on the head for not being a bigot, but how is that my damn job?

"What did your classmate say?" I ask mildly. I'd prefer for her to talk about this instead of me.

Anna jerks her shoulders in a shrug. "They said some people aren't boys or girls. They didn't want to talk too much about it."

I understand the feeling. I don't really want to talk about it either, but I'm at work with a customer, and she isn't doing anything wrong by bringing up the subject.

"What would you say?" she prompts.

Ugh. What would I say? I don't know. The same things I've had to say over and over since coming out, probably. The same things I'll be repeating to everyone I meet for my entire life. It gets easier, but it never really becomes fun trying to explain your existence to another person.

"It sounds like your classmate had a good answer," I say.

"Yeah, I guess. I mean, the kid didn't ask any more after that. He seemed to accept it. "

Kids often do, I've found. The feeling of being nebulous, neither, different , isn't as strange to them. They're often less poisoned by expectations, so hearing that someone isn't really a boy or a girl doesn't rock their world. If only everyone could take it in stride and go back to playing with their LEGOs.

Anna has apparently gotten the approval she was seeking from me. She moves on to complaining about having too much homework, and I relax and encourage her along. Once she leaves, I take my last table of the night, a pair of friends both going for photography degrees. They're the best table of the night since they're mostly there to gossip rather than complain or throw awkward questions at me, and I lose track of time chatting with them.

I'm still grateful when their time is up and I get to escort them out. It's been a draining night, especially with Diego consuming a good fifty percent of my brain power. Even when I'm not thinking about it, I'm kind of always thinking about it. Any time I have a free second, the memory of our dancing floods back in, bringing with it every sense and sensation from that night.

He never asked me about my gender. I corrected him one time and that's been the whole discussion on the matter. If a guy who has spent his life mostly in the middle of nowhere, a guy who's encountering this stuff for the first time, can take it in stride that easily, what is everyone else's damn excuse ?

Granted, Diego is studying gender and sexuality. So he might not have met someone like me before now, but his entire academic career prepared him for that meeting. Still, I don't think people need a freaking degree to just chill the hell out. Is it really that hard?

I'm so distracted by these thoughts that I go through the motions of cleaning up the café on auto-pilot. I'm surprised when I realize we're done and I should lock up the basement and head outside with the rest of the staff.

I walk them all around the house and bid them goodnight. They leave in a cluster, Cameron and Julian already well on their way to arguing. Poor Henry. He has to walk home every café night with that. It's a wonder the guy stays so relentlessly cheerful, but he's never complained in the slightest.

When I head inside, our manager, Mia, is lounging on the couch in the living room, as I knew she would be. I flop down beside her and start unbuttoning my vest and loosening the laces on my shoes. I dress like all the others for café nights. It's very masculine, but it's become the café's uniform, in a way, and I don't really mind it. If I wanted to show up in a dress or skirt one night, no one would care.

"How was it?" Mia says as I sprawl beside her. She lifts her feet to make space for me, then plops them in my lap.

"Fine," I say.

"You look exhausted. Even compared to usual." She shuts the laptop perched on her thighs and sets it on the coffee table. "I finished the scheduling for the next month and updated the waitlist. I also made sure we have some social media posts ready for special events. Oh, and I paid Montridge Munchies, so we're good for another month with them."

I nod, too worn out to care. Mia has been on top of everything I could ask her for and more.

"Hey, seriously, are you okay? You look like you're going to pass out sitting up," she says.

"I feel like I'm going to pass out sitting up," I reply.

"What happened? Did you have a bad customer?"

What didn't happen in the past few days? Bad customers, awkward gender questions, plus whatever the hell is going on with Diego. He went from sticking his tongue down my throat to pretending I'm not sitting right in front of him in his class. I want him to give me another chance. I want him to stop running away. But I don't know how to convince him to do that when he won't even look at me.

"Avery?"

"A little of everything," I say.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

I shake my head because if I try to say it out loud, she'll hear the lie. I do want to talk about it. I want all of these mixed up feelings about Diego to come gushing out of me so I don't have to hold them all myself. Yet I know if Diego ever learned I'd breathed a word about us to anyone he would somehow grow even more distant than he already is.

Mia drops her legs off my lap and scoots over on the couch to hug me. I sink into her embrace, and for a while she simply holds me, accepting my refusal to talk but seeing my need for comfort regardless. I got so much more than a manager for the café when I hired her.

"I think," I say slowly, "I think you and my brother are right. I think I am missing out on part of my college experience."

"You're just so busy, baby," Mia says. "When was the last time you really had fun?"

When my TA was groping me on a dark dance floor.

"I don't know," I say in place of the truth.

"I really want to go out with you some time," Mia says. "There are a couple places that I know we could get into. We just have to play it cool and stay away from the bar. My friend can get us into this one place near the city."

"I'll think about it."

"You better. Otherwise I'll have to kidnap you and drag you out there by force. You need some fun in your life, Avery."

I agree entirely, but the most brilliant, fun, enticing person I've ever met insists on pushing me away.

I am exhausted from talking tonight. Talking about me, talking in my head about Diego, talking with customers about gender. I'm exhausted with all of it. I curl up on the couch, my head in Mia's lap while she obligingly combs her fingers through my long hair.

Fun. How the hell am I supposed to make time for fun ?