The 57 Bus Read online

  “Multiple people would come out and you’d be like, okay, they’re this and they use this name and this pronoun now,” says Sasha’s friend Carrie. “I mean, like, not everyone was good at it, but the people who were friends with trans people were.”

  The friends who made the effort to get it right gave Sasha the confidence to correct the acquaintances who got it wrong. And more and more, the pronoun he felt wrong.

  “I don’t want for people to think of me as a he, and when they say he, not only does it reinforce in their brains that I am a he, it also reinforces it in the brains of the people who are listening,” Sasha explains. “It doesn’t really directly affect me, at least to hear it—it’s more like, Huh, that’s not right. And when people use the right pronouns, when they use they or another gender-neutral pronoun, it feels validating.”

  A card called Luke … Sasha … Person was added to the index card deck. If someone calls Sasha by the wrong name, the card instructed, the offender must discard a card from his/her hand.

  BATHROOMS

  Sometimes, Debbie felt as she stood at the gas station, the whole nonbinary thing was a pain in the ass. It was Thanksgiving 2012, Sasha’s junior year of high school. Debbie, Karl, and Sasha were driving to southern California to spend the holiday with Debbie’s sister. A couple of hours in, Sasha had requested a bathroom stop, which was why they were now parked at a gas station off Interstate 5. But Sasha had surveyed the two options—Men and Women—and walked back to the car.

  “There’s no bathroom for me,” they said, climbing into the backseat.

  Debbie was furious. Was this really how Sasha was going to go through life—with their bladder full to bursting?

  “It’s not healthy,” she fumed. “There’s not always going to be a bathroom available for you. You have to be more flexible.”

  But Sasha refused to budge. They held it in for the rest of the six-hour drive.

  It was tough sometimes, watching Sasha navigate a world that didn’t even have a category for them. Occasionally, Debbie wished Sasha would ease up a little—resist correcting well-meaning relatives who said he instead of they, for example. But there was something admirable about it, too, Karl pointed out. Knowing how shy Sasha was, he admired Sasha’s newfound willingness to speak up, to stand out, to be seen.

  “I wonder, if Sasha hadn’t been in a school where alternatives to the norm were part of the culture and accepted, if they would have been struggling more to figure out where they fit in the scheme of things,” he said. “It feels like making this discovery has really helped Sasha become themself.”

  BATHROOMS REVISITED

  Over the course of the next year, Sasha found a way to deal with the problem of bathrooms.

  At Maybeck, they used the staff bathroom.

  Out in the world, they used whatever bathroom had the shortest line, whatever bathroom was closer, or whatever bathroom was least conspicuous.

  If they had to use the bathroom multiple times in one place, they alternated. Nobody seemed to care which bathroom they used. Or if they did, Sasha didn’t notice.

  SKIRTS

  Sasha wore a skirt for the first time during sophomore year, on Maybeck’s annual cross-dressing day. This was before they started thinking about gender, when dressing up as a girl was just a gag that the whole school was taking part in, everyone, regardless of orientation, clothed in exaggerated masculine or feminine costumes. Sasha borrowed a skirt from their friend Carrie, who lived in Sasha’s neighborhood. What struck them then was how comfortable it was to wear one.

  In January 2013, when Sasha was a junior, they turned to Carrie again.

  “I don’t have any feminine clothes,” they complained. Sasha had been identifying as agender for almost a year by now, but they still dressed the same as they always had—like a boy.

  “I have lots of feminine clothes,” Carrie replied. “Too many!”

  She brought a garbage bag full of hand-me-downs to school—mostly skirts she’d worn in middle school. Sasha sifted through them, and after trying on a few skirts in the bathroom, chose three to take home. Aside from during one school trip to China, they never wore pants again.

  Previously Sasha’s style had tended toward steampunk—top hat and tweeds, vests, bow ties, even a pocket watch and a pair of fighter-pilot goggles. Sasha liked the sartorial gender mash-up that came from adding a skirt to this ensemble—masculine above, feminine below. But there were plenty of days when they didn’t bother getting fancy, pairing one of Carrie’s old skirts with a T-shirt and kneesocks.

  The outfits weren’t flamboyant, but they made Debbie nervous. She knew Sasha would be fine at school—if anything, the skirts gave them a little extra cachet at Maybeck, where unconventionality was an asset. It was the bus that worried her. Wearing skirts meant that Sasha was shedding that cloak of invisibility. Now they weren’t just visible, but conspicuous. And outside of the cocoon of Maybeck High School, being conspicuous wasn’t always a good idea.

  Transgender people are the victims of an astonishing amount of violence. One out of every four trans people has experienced a bias-driven assault, and the numbers are higher for trans women, trans people of color, and people who identify as neither male nor female. Of the 860 nonbinary people who responded to the 2008 National Transgender Discrimination Survey, 32 percent had been physically assaulted.

  “Did anyone give you a hard time?” Debbie would ask when Sasha got home from school.

  The answer was always no. No, it’s fine, I’ll be all right.

  One day at a bus stop, an older woman approached Sasha. “Why are you wearing a skirt?” she demanded. “You’re not a girl!”

  “I’m wearing a skirt because I like wearing skirts,” Sasha replied.

  That was the worst of it—a single unfriendly question from a woman old enough to be Sasha’s grandmother.

  Even so, Debbie worried.

  RUNNING

  Karl was out for a run on Hillegass Avenue, a residential street close to the border between Oakland and Berkeley. It was late November 1987. He was in his early twenties, unmarried, and working at a nearby café. Fugitive scents wisped past his nose as he ran: oak leaves, fog, jasmine, car exhaust, ocean breeze, his own sweat. He was lost in the staccato thud of his shoes hitting the pavement, the huff of his breath, the metronome of his heart.

  “Hey, I like your legs!”

  A truck slowed down to roll behind him.

  Heartbeat louder now, his chest a megaphone. A side-eye peep: three young guys in a pickup.

  One leaned out the window. “Let me suck your prick.”

  Adrenaline gushed into Karl’s veins. He veered down busy Alcatraz Avenue, legs churning. The truck followed. He doubled back to Hillegass, heartbeat pounding out the words of his puzzlement: What do they want from me?

  His pursuers threw the truck into reverse and revved past him, slowing down to let one of the men get out. Karl sprinted down a side street. The truck zoomed forward again, following.

  Karl’s T-shirt was damp with a mélange of different kinds of sweat: heat, effort, fear. Adrenaline kited him down the street.

  Then the truck pulled over just in front of him. The driver got out, blocking the sidewalk. “Hey, why don’t you talk to us?”

  Karl halted in midstride. Alarm swamped his ears. “Because I’m busy,” he choked out.

  He didn’t even hear the second guy come up behind him.

  When he came to, he was lying on the sidewalk in a circle of concerned bystanders, his head and face aching. The police were on their way. The guys who had attacked him were long gone.

  That evening, he wrote about the incident in his journal. Pretty bizarre, he commented. He didn’t bother ruminating on why he’d been singled out, why the men had assumed he was gay. It was just a random event. A onetime thing. Not likely to be repeated.

  THE PETITION

  All-school meetings at Maybeck are held every Wednesday in the sanctuary of the Presbyterian church downstairs. Studen
ts sprawl in the pews to hear musical performances, make announcements, and sometimes hear a guest speaker. One day in March of junior year, Sasha mounted the semicircular stage and announced three things:

  1. I’m Sasha and I identify as agender.

  2. It’s important to respect people’s preferred pronouns and if you’re not sure what those are, you should ask.

  3. I’m petitioning the White House to recognize nonbinary gender.

  Anyone can start a petition on the We the People website at Whitehouse.gov, requesting that the federal government address a problem or change a policy. If a petition gets enough signatures within a thirty-day window, the White House will issue an official response. Sasha’s petition read as follows:

  Legal documents in the United States only recognize “male” and “female” as genders, leaving anyone who does not identify as one of these two genders with no option. Australia and New Zealand both allow an X in place of an M or an F on passports for this purpose, and the UK recognizes ‘Mx’ (pronounced “Mix”) as a gender-neutral title.

  This petition asks the Obama administration to legally recognize genders outside of the male-female binary, and provide an option for these genders on all legal documents and records.

  To Sasha’s astonishment, the petition garnered more than 27,000 signatures. That would have been enough to trigger an official response from the White House were it not for a petition circulated a couple of months earlier asking the White House to build a Death Star like the one in the movie Star Wars. After the Death Star petition got more than 34,000 signatures, the White House raised the number of signatures required for an official response from 25,000 to 100,000.

  Still, 27,000 signatures wasn’t too shabby.

  “That was 27,000 people reading and agreeing with my words—words that I had written,” Sasha said. “That felt pretty great.”

  CLIPBOARDS

  At the end of the school year, Sasha went to Sequoia Elementary School, where Karl worked, to help pack up his kindergarten classroom for the summer. As they boxed up books and folders and unpinned words from the word wall, Sasha noticed the pair of clipboards parents used to sign out their kids at the end of the day. One clipboard was marked Girls. The other was marked Boys.

  “What about the kids who aren’t either one?” Sasha asked. “Which clipboard do they go on?”

  “It’s just a logistical thing,” Karl explained. “I want to have clipboards on both sides of the door, so there isn’t a big line—it’s just easier this way.” He couldn’t imagine that kindergartners would care about gender one way or the other.

  In August, when Karl returned to his classroom to set up for the new school year, he unpacked the clipboards from the box where Sasha had stowed them. As he hung them up on their hooks by the door, Sasha’s comment came back to him. Would it really be that hard to divide things up some other way? Using a black Sharpie, he wrote new labels for the clipboards: A–M and N–Z. It was a little thing, easy enough to change, he decided.

  Three years later, Karl’s classroom included a boy who sometimes liked to dress as a princess and a girl who talked about maybe being a boy someday.

  “Turned out, Sasha was right,” Karl said. “Kindergartners don’t want to be pigeonholed.”

  BEST DAY EVER

  Best day ever. It was a trademark Sasha phrase. As in, That was the best day ever! If you have a lot of obsessions, a lot of things you really like, the opportunity for best days ever increases. On a college visit to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge the summer before senior year, Sasha met a fellow fan of the intricately plotted web comic Homestuck on a subway platform. The person complimented Sasha’s skirt and said, “I would be wearing mine but it’s in the wash.” The two exchanged Tumblr URLs.

  Best. Day. Ever.

  Because subway. Because Cambridge. Because Homestuck. Because Tumblr. Because skirt.

  DRESS CODE

  Sleek or flouncy

  cinched at the waist

  pleated, knitted

  patterned, plain.

  At El Camino Real High School

  in 1968, girls wore skirts or

  went home.

  Pants! Pants!

  Let Girls Wear Pants!

  Debbie and her friends stood up

  on two fabric-swaddled legs

  and won.

  Still, there were rules.

  No jeans. No minis.

  Once, Debbie made herself a dress

  from an Indian bedspread:

  high neck, paisley print

  hippie meets granny.

  The school sent her home.

  That ruffled draping skirt, they said,

  was just

  too long.

  SASHA AND NEMO

  The call to evacuate came about an hour after the students from Maybeck arrived in Yosemite for the school’s annual camping trip. It was August 2013, just before the start of Sasha’s senior year. The Rim Fire, the third-largest wildfire in California history, was sizzling toward the campsite near Groveland, turning the sky a smoky orange. Sasha climbed into the back of a U-Haul-style truck with Nemo, who was a year younger. The truck was airless, hot, and cramped.

  “We kind of died,” Nemo explained later.

  “We didn’t actually die,” Sasha said.

  “We were both freaking out,” Nemo said. “That was our first date.”

  The two of them were talking to filmmaker Lonny Shavelson, who was making a documentary film about nonbinary gender called Three to Infinity. Nemo identifies as gender fluid.

  “To me gender fluid means I have the potential to be anything, any gender at any time,” Nemo explained. “I can be male, female, masculine, feminine, neither, both.” Like Sasha, Nemo uses they/them pronouns.

  Sasha and Nemo knew each other from the school’s Queer Club and had gone to see Les Misérables together the year before. But after their ordeal in the back of the evacuation truck, their relationship changed, although neither of them was exactly sure how to define it. Both teenagers were shy and awkward, looking at each other more than at the camera. But they did their best to explain.

  “Our relationship is…,” Sasha said.

  “Confusing,” Nemo finished.

  “It’s a platonic relationship,” Sasha said, “but with elements other people might consider romantic.”

  “Cuddling and kissing and stuff,” Nemo added. “But it’s not romantic. It’s also nonsexual. It’s like, take a regular relationship and instead of kissing, put cuddling and stuff like that. And instead of ‘I love you’s’ it’s like, ‘You’re the greatest.’”

  “I’m aromantic,” Sasha explained. “So I don’t really do romantic relationships.”

  “And I’m asexual, so I don’t do sexual relationships,” Nemo said.

  “Our relationship sort of sprang fully-formed on that camping trip, or that fire evacuation,” Sasha added. “It just started happening. It was like, ‘Yup, this is it. This is how it works.’ We sort of stabilize each other. Or complement each other.”

  In Homestuck, it’s called a moirail. A most important person. A soul mate, maybe, but not in the romantic sense. The fact that both of them identified as nonbinary wasn’t the reason they were together, it was just another thing they had in common.

  PART 2

  RICHARD

  BOOK OF FACES

  (Pictures of Richard posted on Facebook)

  Smiling beside his cousin’s

  slit-eyed hilarity.

  Deadpan in ladies’

  tortoiseshell sunglasses.

  At fourteen, in a beanie:

  round-faced, bright-eyed.

  At sixteen: jaw slack, brows raised,

  expression asking, What?

  Soft-eyed on a sofa,

  younger brother cuddled on his chest.

  Standing with Skeet, spines straight,

  chins up, peas in a pod.

  And later, beside Skeet’s picture,

  wearing a
bandanna in tribute.

  Mirror selfie: hand lodged

  in his waistband, not even looking up.

  None of it captures

  how he looks in conversation

  how his eyes hold your eyes,

  seeing you see him.

  His own secret power:

  that paying attention.

  FIRST DAY

  The smell that is the lemon-pine-disinfectant

  of just-mopped floors,

  that is new jeans still chemical-scented,

  pencil shavings, sweat, fryer grease,

  body spray, reeking bathrooms, weed

  smoke, morning breath—

  The smell that is the salty press of bodies changing classes

  that is socks that is feet that is blood that is bones

  that is finding your way through halls and up stairs

  to a classroom filled with unnamed faces—

  That smell is the pungent eraser that wipes

  the whiteboard clean, so just

  ignore the ghosts of last year’s scrawl

  still there, still showing through.

  AN OLD FRIEND

  Cherie couldn’t believe it when she saw Richard at Oakland High School. “Oh my God!” she cried, hugging him. The two of them had grown up in the same apartment building over by Eighty-Seventh Avenue, a two-story, tan-stucco building with a couple of windblown Monterey pines in front. Back in ninth grade, they’d been inseparable, even though they went to different schools. Now they were juniors and they hadn’t seen each other for more than a year.

  It had been a terrible year for both of them. They were still broken; maybe they’d never be fixed again. But it was so good to see each other. Even depressed and hurting, Cherie sparkled. She was funny, sassy, and head-turningly pretty, with creamy brown skin, long straight hair, and a perky, pierced nose. Richard was good-looking too—round-faced and hazel-eyed, with a way of holding your gaze that could make you feel like you were at the center of the world. He was so light-skinned that people often assumed he was mixed, and he acted younger than he was—hyphy, as they say in Oakland. Always smiling, always joking, always goofing around, whether or not it was the time for it.