Old Enough

by Haley Jakobson

I checked for rainbow paraphernalia. I didn’t see any, but they didn’t really seem the type. They shifted in their seat, and I heard the jingle of keys from underneath the table. I strained my neck until I clocked a silver carabiner hooked around their belt loop. Bingo.

After Nova ghosted me over the summer, I decided I should make an effort to look gayer, so I had gotten my septum pierced in July and bought a pair of Birkenstocks. Besides that, I was pretty femme and my nails weren’t even that short, and I was too tall to cuff my jeans without them looking like capris. I thought Doc Martens were absurdly expensive for a wildly uncomfortable shoe.

I had no idea how some people could wear their personality so effortlessly. I had regular panic attacks deciding if I could pull off gold hoops.

We found a worthiness in being tan, like being made anew, even with the warnings that it would ruin us one day. But we wanted to be ruined; all teenage girls do. A tan meant summer, and summer an endless promise.

At home I was a totally different person, so much so that I had to remind myself that I wanted the lifestyle you said you wanted. Most girls in our town did. Money and husbands and Burberry trench coats. Hints of anything else were tiny flashes I tried to forget. Even when I won the poetry competition in third grade. Even when I spent a summer at art camp and sobbed the whole car ride home, dreading going back to school. Even when we took a class trip into the city and saw a woman perform spoken word and I leaned very far forward in my seat because I didn’t want to miss a single word, even when she looked right at me when she spoke and her face was pretty but her voice was so deep that she was at once both beautiful and scary, even when I whispered her poetry to myself in the mirror every night after for a whole week. Even then they were all just tiny flashes. Little moments. Nothing I couldn’t dismiss by shaking my head and calling them weird.

She spoke like sandpaper was stuck in her throat.

I loved nights like this, where one fun thing led into another and it felt like the universe was conspiring to show you a good time, to show you that you were worth having a good time.

I came from the land of I Want to Be Her and had no idea that was a telltale cover-up for I Want to Date Her.

A cis boy wearing eyeliner who introduces himself with his pronouns is fucking bisexual catnip.

“Oh, um, she uses she/they pronouns. So, like, you can say ‘she’ or ‘they.’

Boys like him don’t usually have quirks. Golden boys who are good at sports and make friends easily and get their braces off quickly, who are mostly nice in the way that boys are expected to be nice and therefore rewarded for that niceness, who aren’t really funny but whose straight-toothed smiles trick you into thinking they are, because boys like that are always smiling. Boys like that always have a reason to smile.

I did have one sweatshirt that read trans rights are human rights, which was—as far as politically pointed sweatshirts go—the absolute bare minimum.

9

Lovely chapter

“We like what we like. It’s hard enough being gay as it is; try not to judge yourself for liking it when I call you a dirty slut.”

At first, I convinced myself that I actually wasn’t gay and just had completed the prerequisite experimenting that women were supposed to do in college. But then I thought a lot about Shane from The L Word and changed my mind. If I wanted to have sex with Shane, I probably wasn’t straight. And then I contemplated being a lesbian for a while, but I Love You, Man popped up on Netflix and I thought a lot about Paul Rudd too, so I decided that wasn’t right. After consulting a Healthline article, I decided that queer felt okay. And bisexual was okay too.

I went back to my room and googled all the phrases I hadn’t understood. I was directed to a plethora of queer digital mags, and subreddits, and one site dedicated to The Golden Age of Lesbian Tumblr, which apparently had gone downhill after Tumblr had changed its nudity policies. I followed as many radical queer Instagrams as I could find, and I added a bunch of books that were considered “queer canon” to my Christmas list. I knew my mother would love nothing more than to buy them for me, and subsequently read them with me, as she had told me over the summer that she wanted to be a part of “my community” and added a tiny gay flag to the pencil cup on her desk.

It had been four months since that queer hang, and I finally looked forward to having weekend plans. Candace invited me everywhere, like Gay Bowling Tuesdays at the alley in town, and queer book club, and she binged all of Atypical with me in two nights.

I felt an apology prick my lips. I swallowed. I knew if I said something it would make it real, and I knew she wouldn’t engage. It had been the first Thanksgiving I hadn’t been home for since we were ten. I had gone to Florida with my parents instead. “How did you feel about it?” I asked. “I mean, I wasn’t trying to have sex. But, like, it happened.” “Yeah.” “Whatever. He’s hot.” “Mhm,” I said, shutting my eyes tight. “I gotta go, Sav, I can’t duct tape my boobs with one hand. Love you.” “Love you,” I said, but she had already hung up.

Should I wear my shirt that read bicon that I had panic-ordered during Pride or would that make it seem like I only like two genders, “bi” meaning “two.” I needed a shirt that read bi as in horny for gender expansiveness. Maybe I could get that custom-made on Etsy.

I also relished hearing about her high school years, loved the stories she told me about her crew of friends, who were equally competitive and focused, but whom she would go to house parties with just to steal the alcohol and go hang out in a city park until three in the morning. I wished I had known her then. I wished I hadn’t been the one who stayed at the house party, waiting for some future frat boy to notice me and finger me by the washing machine.

It was yet another thing I hadn’t given thought to growing up.

I wondered if Izzie’s friends all thought I wanted to fuck them now that I was gay. I mean out as gay. I was always gay. Right? Nope, no, I could save my bisexual crisis for the train ride back.

Why did it feel a hundred times harder to impress someone who was nice and nerdy than someone who was shitty and aloof?

she had gone to visit, begrudgingly, because she didn’t want to be associated with “rich people bullshit” or contributing to tourism. She said it was capitalism’s fucked up little sister.

“Doesn’t this stuff get to you?” I asked. She leaned her head to one side, inquisitive. “What do you mean?” “I mean, when we talk about—” I took a deep breath. “Rape. When we talk about rape. It’s a lot.” Professor Tolino nodded fast. “It certainly is. Is it hard for you?” “Yeah,” I said, the word flying from my lips. “I was raped. In high school.” What the fuck am I doing? “I’m so sorry, Savannah.” Her face softened. “Thanks.” “Sometimes I think it doesn’t count.” “I think a lot of us feel that way.” Us. Why was I telling her all this? “And I have to go to this wedding. And he’ll be there.” Professor Tolino leaned back in her chair and whistled. “Well, that fucking sucks, doesn’t it?” I had never heard her curse before. I kind of loved it. “Yeah. I don’t talk about it. Ever. Even though I know what it was. But I’m so fucking scared sometimes, that if I say it out loud, someone’s going to tell me I’m wrong. Because it was someone close to me. Someone that I liked. Had feelings for. And we were drinking. And Lara said this, like, in one of our first classes, and it just haunts me. How some people drink, and do things, with people that they have feelings for. And they don’t wake up and regret it or hate themselves and feel like they want to die. They think it’s funny. I don’t understand that.”

I wish it clicked sooner for me that I didn’t want to sleep with your brother the night of the barbecue. I wish I understood that even if I had wanted to sleep with him, that wouldn’t have been bad either. The only bad thing I did was lie to a friend. I was a child. I was just a little girl.

“Wait, wait. You’re not an idiot. Going home is a fucking trip, feral sorority girl bridal shower or not. It’s okay to want to do something to counteract that, even if it isn’t the best thing.” I looked at her, saw such a softness on her face. I wondered what it would have been like if someone had comforted me like this when I was in high school. Took the stakes down. Talked it out with

H-Club stood for Heathens Club. It was started in the sixties by a bunch of feminists who had been called heathens by the administration for rejecting patriarchal norms and spending a lot of time naked on the quad together. Eventually, it evolved into a community organizing effort. They held protests every couple of weeks, everything from sleeping in the library for fifteen days until Huckleberry Finn was removed from the shelves to demanding we no longer outsource eggs in the dining hall and instead have our own chicken coop on campus.

“Oh, um, well, I haven’t really—” Izzie looked over at me desperately. “Oh, yeah, she doesn’t know. Should we get dessert or—” “Yeah, she doesn’t know until she, like, needs to know. You know?” Izzie was smiling again. “No, I don’t know?” Candace’s lips were pursed. “I could have dessert!” Vera scrambled for a menu. Izzie leaned in as if she had some hot goss to share. “It’s just like, well, Sav’s bi, you know? So if she marries a girl, then we’d obviously tell her. But if she . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Alex, can I get ‘Biphobia’ for one thousand?”

“Sometimes I wonder if I’d even be here if it hadn’t happened,” I whispered. “It’s why I started caring about other things. College. My future. It’s like, it’s like I don’t know who I would be if it hadn’t happened. Is that so fucked up? That I had to be raped to be awake? To care?”

“Savannah?” My whole body glitched when they said my full name. “Yeah?” “I don’t see you a certain way. I just see you.”

While she painted the three men, Vera broke down the definitions of consent as described by three different dictionaries. She then had each man read written accounts of how teenage and adult men had described consent on a Reddit forum. When they finished, she stopped painting. “The blood on these men is the blood their parents drew when they taught them non-consent for the first time. When they were circumcised.”

“There’s far too much focus on dysphoria, on the pain and trauma of the trans experience, and it’s time to change that narrative. We should not have to prove that we are lacking joy in our gender to get the gender-affirming care that we need. We deserve care, period.”

“It took me three years to understand that I was raped.” My voice was firm. “And I think part of that was because it was easier to stuff it all down than think about what I was ‘supposed’ to do. Because what I was supposed to do sounded like hell. And for most survivors, it is hell. Fuck proof. Fuck trial. Fuck the police.”

“Oh my god.” I felt more blood pooling into my palm. “Does this happen a lot? Should I get you a tampon? Like they do in the movies?” “No, it doesn’t, and yes, okay.” “Okay! I don’t have one!” They were speaking very loudly. “I don’t either, I don’t have my bag with me!” “Oh no. Like, I, um. I don’t get my period. Oh, this is a weird way to tell you I’m on testosterone! Okay! The tampon search commences.”

We weren’t kissing politely anymore, pretty much just mauling each other’s mouths the way you do when it isn’t about being good at sex, it’s about the sex itself.

“Should we go over house rules?” “Oh! Yes. For sure,” I said, a little embarrassed that I hadn’t thought to ask what was and wasn’t okay first. Wes rolled over and we both sat up. “Great. Okay. So, uh, as you may have noticed, I wear a binder. Which I love! It makes me feel really good and masculine. I don’t like to take it off when I’m having sex, and if I do, that’s not a place I like to be touched.” “Got it. Makes sense.” “Okay, you go.” I go? Right. I have rules too. “Um, I like to talk. Not like, dirty talk. Although I like that! But I mean, if we can keep a conversation going, it helps me stay present. Not get in my head.” “I love that. Totally, can do.” “And, um, sometimes stuff flashes in my head, and I can’t really control that. And if it does, I think taking a break would be good. But it wouldn’t be because of you. I would just need to take a break.” “That also makes sense. Breaks are good.” Wes shot me some finger guns. “Your turn.” “Right.” They thought for a moment. “Oh, duh, okay. So with, uh, down-there stuff? I like the word ‘crotch,’ or ‘groin,’ but no specific genitalia talk, if that makes sense.” “I can do that.” “Any words you like? For your body?” I paused. I hadn’t really thought about what words I liked. I scanned through words I’d heard other people use to talk about my body in bed, or words from porn. “I like ‘pussy.’ I don’t like ‘cunt.’ ” “Perfect. ‘Pussy’ it is. Very into pussy.

“Why are you sorry?” “I fell asleep in your bed for five hours, Wesley.” “Why in the world would I complain about that, Savannah?” “You probably had plans?” “If the girl you can’t stop thinking about ends up in your bed with you on a Friday night, you cancel all of your plans immediately.”