Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

Diego

I CANCEL MY next office hours. No one but Avery has made use of them anyway. I retreat to my apartment, giving myself a day to focus on my own classes. I have plenty to do outside of my duties as a TA. I am here for a degree, after all.

I hunker down in the living room, where my roommate and I have placed a couch that we got off a curbside. I have a bed, but no desk. The expense simply isn't worth it when I have an office on campus. Plus, I haven't had much time for anything but going to my classes and teaching.

It doesn't make for the most ergonomic setup. An hour into hunching over my laptop, which sits on a pillow on my thighs, my back is aching. I sit back and stretch my arms overhead. My back issues an alarming series of cracks. My eyes water after staring at a document for so long. I lace my fingers together to stretch out the cramps induced by all that typing.

I allow myself a short break for tea. It's just store-brand black tea, cheap stuff that comes in boxes of fifty. As I wait for it to steep, I can't help comparing it to the tea Avery made for me on the night I met them. It was definitely nicer than this, but I bet Avery could make even this utilitarian black tea decadent. They would brew it perfectly, then add something like honey or milk that smoothed out the bitterness.

I want to slap myself. I sequestered myself away today and avoided my office hours so I wouldn't think about Avery, and here I am doing it anyway. Their phone number sits tucked away in my wallet. I didn't have the courage to throw it away like I should have, but I also haven't used it. What would I do at a drag show anyway? I'd be so out of place, and everyone there would know it.

Tea in hand, I drag myself back to my coursework. It's early in the semester, but the papers and assignments are already piling up, which provides yet another handy excuse for why I absolutely should not go to any shows with Avery. When would I have time for such a thing? All I do is work and go to class and I'm still buried under unfinished tasks.

Focusing on my paper narrows my awareness to nothing but the words on the page in front of me. It's a nice break after spending my entire first weeks in Montridge flitting from one disaster to the next. I don't mind the tedious work. It helps clear my head and remind me of the real reason I came all this way and left my cozy hometown behind.

I barely notice my roommate Leo slouch into the apartment, too engrossed in my paper. I found Leo through the university. He's a grad student as well, so it was a good match. It's nice living with someone who's here for the same reasons I am, enduring the same sort of life I am. He's studying math, which is so far outside of my realm that I can't even fathom it, but he seems to love it as much as I love my studies, and that has formed an easy amicability between us.

And he wasn't weirded out by my chosen field. I can think of plenty of people back in my hometown who would be, but despite being straight Leo didn't bat an eyelash. He doesn't seem to care. The whole thing is insubstantial to him. I have to admit, it's been strange to encounter such casual indifference when back home views are typically more … polarized.

"Hey," Leo says as he tosses his keys on the counter in the kitchen. "Working here instead of at your office?"

"Yeah, thought I could use a break from being on campus."

"I feel that." Leo sighs and scrubs his hand through his brown hair. "This shit is intense . How do you feel about getting a pizza tonight? I'm assuming from the bloodshot eyes and pile of books that you haven't bothered eating."

My stomach grumbles as though leaping to respond. I touch it gingerly. I got up for tea without ever once thinking about the fact that I haven't eaten much today. My body does not need to be put under any extra stress thanks to my tendency to get lost in my work, so I nod at Leo.

"Yeah, that sounds good. Whatever toppings you like are fine with me," I say.

Leo treated me to my first "real" pizza shortly after I moved in. He seemed aghast at my Midwest sensibilities. I have to confess — I don't really get what all the fuss is about. This East Coast pizza is thin and floppy and delicious, but pizza is pizza, right?

I will never utter that sentiment out loud. Leo seemed very insistent that this pizza is unique and special and the best in the world.

He plops onto the couch beside me and orders the pizza. I leave him to it, returning to my essay while I can. If I work until the pizza arrives, that'll make for a nice break. Plus, I'll need to clear my textbooks off the coffee table. It's the only table we've got in this sparse apartment of ours.

Leo tucks into some assignment of his own, and the sound of typing and flipping pages fills the apartment with a soft susurrus for the forty minutes between Leo ordering and a delivery guy knocking at our door. Leo leaps up from the couch to answer and recover our dinner, and I hastily clear off the table to make space for a massive, greasy pizza box. This is way too much for the two of us, but as I tuck into my first slice, I rapidly discover I could probably take down half of this pizza on my own.

"Thank you for ordering," I say around a mouthful of cheese and dough. "I'll get you back."

Leo waves away the offer. "Buy the next one."

I shrug. Seems fair enough to me. We split the rent and utilities here, but otherwise we haven't fussed too much about groceries and pizza and things like that. We're both broke and both working a ton.

"So, what were you working on?" Leo says after we've each scarfed down a slice.

"Just some paper. Trying to get ahead of some things before I have a million papers to read for my class."

"It's insane trying to teach on top of everything else, isn't it?"

Leo doesn't know the half of it. If only I was merely concerned about the teaching and lecturing and grading itself, and not also panicking over the phone number tucked into my wallet.

He starts talking about his class, but it sounds like it's all going pretty well for him. He's a smart guy, and I'm starting to suspect that he's handling this way better than I am, a fact that does not help me contend with the shame spreading thorny roots through my chest .

"Your class must be cool though," Leo says. "Any of them writing about your field?"

"Actually … yes," I admit. "One is working on something pretty close to my own studies."

I don't want to talk about Avery. I don't want to think about Avery. I was doing so well, but the only truthful answer to Leo's question is that Avery is researching exactly the sort of things I'm here for. I might not be trans, but gender presentation and how people express themselves along that spectrum has always been a special interest of mine. It doesn't just mean people like Avery. It's also the blue collar guys I grew up around, the queer men at the one gay bar a few towns over, the teenagers growing up in that small community but with ample access to the internet. Every time they get dressed in the morning, whether it's for work or school or a date, they're making conscious choices about how to present themselves to the world.

"Hey, that's awesome," Leo says. "You could mentor them. That's gotta be exciting."

Maybe a little too exciting.

"Yeah," I say mildly. "It's interesting. They have some fascinating ideas they're planning to chase down."

"Like?"

"Well…" I feel the words piling up, feel my ability to hold them back breaking down. "They want to do all this research on gender presentation in society, but there's only so many historical documents on that kind of thing. The language for it has changed a lot over time, and there's certainly been periods where certain types of expression were outlawed, explicitly or implicitly."

"Right, right, makes sense."

"So they were thinking of going to a drag show," I say. "Maybe even interviewing performers."

"Whoa, okay, that's awesome. And so far above and beyond. You must love this student. They're as nerdy about this stuff as you are."

Leo laughs, but every muscle in my body tenses. Avery is indeed every bit as passionate about this topic as I am, perhaps moreso since it's got a personal component for them. And that's kind of the problem. If they were just an attractive person I met, it'd be one thing, but their mind is even more enticing than anything else about them, and that's the part that's truly dangerous. I could talk to Avery for hours. I could go to that drag show with them and experience things that have resided purely in the realm of theory for me. My entire queer universe has been books, the internet and one lonely gay bar up until now, but I know that if I follow them, I'll experience so much more.

I want that far more than I should let myself want that.

I love my hometown, but it was certainly a sheltered experience. Scared as I am, I do want to experience more of my community. I do want to take advantage of all the queer bars and shows and events and community out here. But letting Avery be my guide through that would be … dangerous.

"They want me to accompany them to the drag show," I say.

I don't know why I'm telling Leo this. Maybe it's been stuck in my head so long that I need to say it out loud and let someone else tell me I'm crazy.

But Leo doesn't say that. He says, "Oh, that sounds cool."

"Does it?" I glance over at him. "They're a student. Isn't that a little inappropriate?"

Leo shrugs. "It's just a drag show."

"I thought those shows were kind of raunchy."

Leo laughs and pats me on the shoulder. "Man, I keep forgetting how small that town you grew up in is. I mean, yeah, they can get raunchy, but even I've gone to a drag show, and I'm straight. It's not porn, dude, relax. It's like lip syncing and stuff. It's fun."

"I just worry about how it would look if someone from the university saw me at a thing like that with a student."

"Why? You're just going to a show. It's not a big deal. I promise. And you really should get out more. This seems like a perfect excuse."

It does. It really does. And Leo's reassurance makes me want to say yes so badly that later, after the leftover pizza is tucked into the fridge in tin foil and I'm in bed staring at the dark and unable to sleep, I fumble around on the floor for my pants, then dig out my wallet and that phone number secreted away inside it.

Even as I tell myself I'm an idiot and a fool and worse, I put in the number and type out a simple message: I would like to go to a show some time. Just tell me when and where.

My hands are shaky when I muster the courage to hit send. I toss my phone on the floor without waiting for a response and turn onto my side, throwing the covers over my head like that will hide me from what I just did.