Coffee Boy

by Austin Chant

Trust Marcus to promise him a trans-friendly workplace and not even bother to find out if anyone around him is trans-friendly.

“He’s,” Seth says, loudly. “Him.”

“I talk a lot,” Kieran says. He does. He likes the sound of his own voice. He just knows what it sounds like to other people. High, affected—girly. It’s the Mean Girls voice he cultivated in high school. “I’m shrill, you know. It tricks their brains. I can tell them to call me he, but I can’t change what’s going on in their heads when I talk to them.” “Don’t make excuses for us,” Seth says quietly. “You can expect better here.” Kieran glances sidelong at him and accidentally makes eye contact. Seth gives him a faint, sincere smile. Kieran clears his throat, startled. “Yeah?” “Yes.”

“Your comfort is the most important thing. If I’ve made you uncomfortable, I’ve mishandled things.”

He’d just been miserably sure, for half a second, that somebody might get it. That somebody else might be as exposed as he is every fucking day. That somebody else might be wearing a glaringly obvious secret on his skin. He thought maybe that was a thing he and Seth had in common: an inability to hide whatever made them different, whatever made them queer.

It’s a sharp, nasty reminder that he’s not wearing his binder, that he’s in girl mode, and that this is not the kind of flirtation Kieran would like it to be. The familiar gut-stab of dysphoria drags him back down to earth.

Sometimes he takes a count of how many times he gets misgendered in a day, just to have the statistics, even if he’s never liked math very much. It’s not exactly fair, since he’s not out at the job, but it’s also not like anyone has ever asked him what his pronouns are.

The truth is that people like him fine as long as he doesn’t ever raise his voice and as long as Seth isn’t correcting anybody for misgendering him. They don’t get him, though; they don’t really know what he is, because nobody ever bothered to tell them.

“Yeah, sorry. I do get it. You’d rather not have to be queer at work.” Seth winces. “I’m not overly fond of the word ‘queer’, either.” “Oh.” “It’s not that I don’t identify with the general idea, it’s more that I can’t help thinking of it as…” Seth’s face closes a little. “As the kind of thing boys call each other when they can’t think of anything worse.” Oh. That’s the kind of experience Kieran can’t really identify with, since he never got much of a shot at boyhood. Although he doesn’t want to, he feels a prickle of resentment. “I guess I think of it as what we called each other in college when we didn’t want to use gay to refer to everyone who’s not straight and cisgender.” Seth ducks his head. “I understand that. It doesn’t bother me so much when other people talk about the community, about themselves. I suppose, since I didn’t come out until I was older, I just never had much of a chance for positive associations with being called queer.”

“Some people seem so confident in reclaiming everything that’s ever been thrown at them.” Kieran shrugs, a little uncomfortable when he thinks about some of the things he’s had to reclaim. Like having a voice that most people associate with mean cheerleaders in high school, not bitchy trans boys who ditched the cheering but kept the persona. Like his long hair, which he loves, but which does a great job of convincing strangers that he’s a girl. Like having a roster of experiences that mean he’ll never relate to guys—most guys—in the way he relates to girls, and having to wonder if that means he’ll ever really be seen as a dude. Like wondering if he’ll ever really be seen as a dude if he’s dating another guy.

“Marcus thinks I’m brave for getting out of bed in the morning. He doesn’t take me seriously. He takes my problems seriously.”

There’s nothing he can do about it. Because who he is means that no matter what, any kind of success will only set him up for being seen, being dissected. He already walks into his dream internship and feels a dozen pairs of eyes fix on him as their owners desperately try to remember, Oh yeah, this is the girl I have to pretend is a boy. Only if he does something bigger, it won’t just be the twelve people he hands coffee to. It’ll be the city. The state. The country. Everybody staring at him and picking him apart and wondering what he is.

Could you tell Marcus I was sick or something, not that I’m—” Having some kind of disproportionate emotional collapse because somebody asked if I was okay?

he’s irrationally irritated by the fact that Marcus has Seth, a reasonably hot, eagerly devoted bisexual guy, mooning over him and doesn’t even have the decency to notice. Like, how hard is it to tell when a guy is uncomfortably (and visibly) turned on by your bare arms?

The longer they sit and talk, the more Kieran realizes he’s bound to embarrass himself where Seth is concerned. He has a growing, horrifying suspicion that it’s obvious how everything Seth does is endearing to him. Everything Seth does—like eating fries and sliders with impeccable table manners—makes Kieran want to stay there all night, even for the awkward parts. He wants to know more. Wants to crack Seth open and memorize him.

“What are you doing here?” Seth looks so miserable. He presses his back up against the wall, glancing down at the floor as a few dancers shuffle past them toward the bathrooms. “Finding a distraction.” “A distraction from what?” Suddenly Kieran remembers his own damn advice. “Oh. Finally going to find a guy to tear you away from Marcus?” “No,” Seth says. “From you.”

“Go back to the part where you like me and explain why you ran off like a punk bitch when I kissed you.”

“It’s cool,” Kieran says. “If my dick could stand up on its own, it would’ve by now.”

“Is there anything I should know,” he begins, “about what you—how you prefer to be touched, or called, or anything like that?” Kieran shrugs, pleased. “I’m not big on ‘girlybits’ or ‘ladyparts,’” he says. “Other than that, whatever. I like my body.” Seth smiles a little. “I do too.”