What We Left Behind. Robin Talley
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to anyone. I’ve barely even talked about it with Toni besides the really basic stuff. Toni and I talk a lot about how male and female are such restrictive, limiting terms, and how our society is so rigid about labels and it’s so damaging and...to be honest, mostly it was Toni who said all that. I nodded like I understood it all because I wanted to be supportive, but there was an awful lot I didn’t follow.
“Sorry.” Carroll shakes his head. “Look, I’m from this tiny town way out in Jersey, okay? We don’t have this stuff out there.”
I sigh. I can tell Carroll really doesn’t know any better.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I didn’t mean to freak out on you.”
“Seriously, I’m just trying to understand,” he says. “I didn’t mean to say the wrong thing. But what does this all mean? Did she, like, get a sex change operation?”
I lean my head against the base of my roommate’s bed. Carroll’s flicking through my yearbook again.
“No,” I say.
“So, what, she’s just a butch lesbian?”
The truth is, I’m not really clear on where the lines are between all these things. I was always afraid I’d say the wrong thing if I asked Toni too much about the details.
“No,” I say. “Toni hates the word lesbian.”
“So, what is she?”
“It’s complicated.” I’m getting tired now. “You should look it up sometime. Genderqueer. It’s, like, a really well-known word.”
“Right. Okay. I’ll look it up.”
I should look it up again, too. I read some stuff online back when Toni first told me about it, but I got kind of anxious reading all that, because it seemed really complicated, and I couldn’t figure out where Toni and I fit in. So I stopped reading. That was more than a year ago.
This whole conversation is making me feel really guilty. Not just because I outed Toni to Carroll, though I’m kind of wishing now that I hadn’t done that, either. But talking about Toni at all just reminds me of what I did. Of how Toni looked at me last night.
I need more distractions.
So I show Carroll yearbook pictures and tell him more about my friends back home. He’s shocked by how many gay people went to our high school.
“I think it was partly because it was an all-girl school,” I say. “Going across the street to the guys’ school was so much effort. People got lazy.”
“At my school, I was the only one,” he says.
“That you know of.”
“No. I’m positive. It was a small school. Everybody knew everybody’s business.”
He’s got to be totally wrong, but I let it go. “Were you out?”
“No, but everyone knew anyway. It sucked.” He sticks his lip out in a fake pout. “Do your parents know?”
“Yeah. I told them the summer before ninth grade.”
“Wow.” He shakes his head. “Do your girlfriend’s parents know, too?”
“Yeah. Well, not totally. Toni’s out to them as gay, but not as genderqueer.”
“Is she going to tell them?”
This one I do know the answer to.
“Not at least until college is over,” I say. “Toni’s mother is awful. She’s this total rich bitch. She practically kicked Toni out of the house just for being gay.”
For some reason, Carroll smiles.
“Hey, are you hungry?” He stands up. “I’m starving.”
“Yeah.” Now that he’s mentioned it, I’m starving, too. “Is there a vending machine?”
“Who cares? We’re in New York! They have twenty-four-hour delis here.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. He’s like a little kid.
We take the elevator down fourteen floors again and go outside. I’ve forgotten how much I missed New York at night. Even the stores that have their shutters pulled down for the night still have their signs lit. People are walking down the sidewalk in groups, laughing. I’m going to miss this next semester.
There’s a deli at the end of the block. We pick out ice cream and crackers and peanut M&Ms. At the counter, Carroll asks the clerk for a box of condoms.
I laugh. “What, you think you’re getting lucky tonight?”
“You never know who you’ll meet at breakfast,” he says, all mysterious.
We stop by Carroll’s room so he can drop off his stuff. Juan’s honking snores are so loud we can hear him from the hallway. This sends me into a giggle fit.
“Shh,” Carroll whispers. “I don’t need to give him any more reasons to hate me.”
“Why do you think he hates you?” I ask on the walk back to my room.
“He’s a jock. Jocks always hate me.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“It’s in the jock DNA. It’s like, jocks are born with a fear of falling, a taste for Pabst Blue Ribbon and a powerful hatred of Carroll Ostrowski.”
I laugh and push open my door. The light is out. Strange—it was on when we left.
Then I see a dark shape on one of the beds.
“Crap! She’s alive!” Carroll stage-whispers behind me.
“Shh!”
Wow. I’d forgotten I even had a roommate.
“Mom? Is that you?” the lump on the bed mutters.
Carroll loses it.
I shove him back out the door before his echoing laughs can wake up Samantha. I grab a blanket out of the nearest open laundry basket, dart out into the hall and lock the door behind us.
“Sorry about that,” Carroll says, but we’re both cracking up now.
We go to the lounge at the end of the hall. It’s not much bigger than my room, but it has a microwave and a TV and a couple of unsanitary-looking couches. I find spoons for our ice cream and Carroll turns on the Food Network. It’s a show about waffles. We sit on the least gross couch and eat ice cream out of the cartons with my blanket spread over our laps.
“It’s like a sleepover,” I say. “We should’ve gotten popcorn.”
“Should we go wake up your roommate and invite her?” he says.
“Only if we get your roommate, too,” I say. “Except then he’d just be honking in here.”
“Yeah, it’s better with just us,” he says.
We watch the waffles bake in silence for a while. Then Carroll asks, “So, what do you do for fun when you’re not eating ice cream and watching the Food Network with your new best friend?”
I laugh. “Back home, you know, the usual. Hanging out, parties. I played volleyball and did debate all through high school.”
“Oh, no, you’re a jock, too,” he says. “Are you playing here?”
“No way. College volleyball is crazy intense. Besides, I was never really a jock. I liked playing, and I guess I was pretty good at it, but it was never my absolute favorite thing. Not like with you and theater.”
“Why do you assume I’m obsessed with theater? Just because I could sing you the entire score of Wicked right now?”
I smack his arm and bounce in my seat. “I used to love that