“Hello everybody, my name is Vanessa Wolfe and I’m going to be your cssmate for the foreseeable future. My favourite subject is history and my least favourite subject is physical education. In my free time I like to py video games and stare longingly at clothes I can’t afford and wouldn’t look good on me anyway. I look forward to studying with all of you”
I delivered my monologue emotionlessly. I had practiced it till I could recite it in my dreams. With any luck it would be the only time any of them heard me speak for the next 3 years. It was not well received. I could feel their gres as I approached my seat. Which was weird. It was meant to slide off the brain. To express just enough personality to make my ck of personality go unremarked. But I guess its impossible to completely blend into the background in a podunk town where you’re probably the first person to move there since the civil war.
“Thank you Vanessa, that was very… interesting” the teacher responded, with a forced smile. “Might I ask, Of all the schools in all the towns in all the mountains in all the world, what led your parents to this one?”
“Tax reasons” I said, and did not eborate further. He obviously found this profoundly unsatisfying, but my family history was no concern of his.
“Right…” he said, with a frown. “You mentioned you’d be here for the foreseeable future. Are there any sort of thus far unforeseen circumstances that might alter your parents pns?” he asked.
“Not that I foresee” I intoned monotonously. He frowned at that.
“And what do you mean by ‘The foreseeable future’? Are we talking just until you graduate or…” - “Don’t you have a css to teach” I interrupted him. “Right… right…” he said. For a moment his curiosity seemed inclined to drag the conversation out, but apparently professionalism got the better of him and he began to call the roll. I tuned out for the most part. I had already made a seemingly poor impression. Learning their names at this point just sounded like giving them a shred more power to hurt me with. Afterall, its easier to write off hurtful words from a stranger than an acquaintance, if only slightly.
I was driven from my disassociative miasma when the teacher repeated a name for a third time, louder, as if he was certain its owner were present and deliberately ignoring him. “ADRIAN, COOPER!”. He was staring daggers at a pretty blonde girl a few seats over from me. Whatever remained of my optimism of the day ending without incident dried up like brains in a venture capital startup. I could remain uninvolved of course. But I’d know. I’d know that this podunk town in the mountains was as tolerant of home grown diversity as it was of diversity of origin.
“Who’s Adrian” she scoffed. “That sounds like a boys name sir. Do I look like a boy sir?” she asked while deliberately drawing attention to her chest by rolling her shoulders at opposing angles to one another. She grinned mockingly, and if I had to guess only barely resisted the urge to stick out her tongue.
“My apologies Alice. Would you mind returning to your own css and sending your brother and take care not to mix up your csses again” he said, clippedly. “I don’t have a brother” said Alice, tilting her head to the side in mild confusion. I took a quick survey of the room. They were mostly looking at me, gauging my reaction.
“Don’t look at me. Where I come from we treat transgender students with respect and dignity” I said with my best condescending scoff. So much for flying under the radar. The teacher turned to face me as if he had only just remembered my existence. “Trans… what now?”
“Transgender. People who were born into bodies incongruent with their internal gender identity. Boys and men who happen to have an F on their birth certificate and girls and women who happen to have an M on theirs”. I did not bother to eborate further. If attempting to expin non-binary people didn’t make his brains squirt out his ears then there’s a fair chance he’d have me burned at the stake for witchcraft.
“Oh. Is that something that… happens a lot in… other pces?” he asked. “Yes”, I replied shortly. “And how do they… deal with that sort of thing?” he asked, somewhat taken aback. I did my best to remember some boring PSA that was shown to me years ago. “The best approach as agreed by the American Psychiatric Association is the gender affirmative approach. Essentially if Alice here wishes to be referred to as Alice and not whatever other name you might have in your book there then the polite thing to do is to refer to her as Alice. And if she’d rather be referred to with feminine terms like she, her or ‘little miss’ then the polite thing to do is refer to her by such terms. To do otherwise constitutes bullying, and st time I checked the state school board does not smile upon a teacher bullying his students.”
“We don’t answer to the state school board” he said coldly. “I doubt the state school board takes kindly to schools that operate within its borders but outside its jurisdiction either” I replied. “I would strongly appreciate if you did involve the state school board in matters that do not concern it” the teacher said quietly. The sort of quiet that heralds a storm. “I see no reason to report an infracture if the issue may be otherwise resolved” I said. “Agreed” he sighed after a brief pause. “Agreed” I returned coldly. There was a moment of silence while the teacher tried to recall what we had been arguing about in the first pce. Then, with a sigh: “Alice Cooper” he called. “Here!” answered Alice, with a smile like a cat who’d knocked their owner’s breakfast onto the floor and thus been rewarded with a meal the FDA deemed fit for human consumption.”
The teacher was alright. Nothing to write home about. He taught out of materials which were only published 20 years ago, which was a nice surprise. He wrote notes and questions on the board, which I had to write down like a caveperson as they would not be repeated. I could probably pickup a copy of his study materials next time I was out of town, or at worst send out for them. But that felt like work that I didn’t trust tomorrow’s Vanessa to carry through on, so instead I wrote until my wrist ached.
In spite of my fears, once css was in session the css quickly forgot I was there. Within a few short hours the bell rang (a rge mechanical device that must have been heard all over the district. Would an electrical system be so complicated guys? You have electric lighting like!) and the cssroom quickly emptied. I was routing around my backpack for my morning snack (lunchables) when I felt someone lightly tap my shoulder. I rounded on her, 100% ready to kill her, but it was only Alice, who quickly raised her hands in surrender. “WHOA girl. Easy there. Watch where you’re pointin them peepers. You could kill someone with a stare like that!”
I defted. “Sorry, usually when someone touches me its because they want to commit grievous bodily harm” I said ftly. “You’re funny” she chuckled brightly. I couldn’t help but smile back. She had a disarming sort of charm to her. “Lets be friends” she said, as if that was something people just did. It couldn’t be that easy. Not that I had much experience in the making friends department, and what experience I had was better described as being adopted by the kids who thought they were good people for deigning to include me till such a time as I dared to express an original thought, but surely it was more complicated than walking up to someone and saying “lets be friends”. There had to be some prerequisite!
And there was of course! It was my heart afterall, I could guard it as jealously as I choose! “What’s your favourite pokémon?” I yelled with all the righteous passion of Phoenix Wright atop his stand of justice. The teacher shot me a dirty look and I shot him back one of my own and he suddenly decided he had important teacher things that needed doing and went back to ignoring me.
“What’s a… Pokémon?” she asked, with the same confused head tilt she used when the teacher had invented a brother out of thin air. Surely no pce in the first world could be so podunk to have escaped pokémania. But perhaps not. I defted. “Sure, lets be friends”. I suppose I could always drop her like a bad habit when she inevitably hurt me ter. And her ignorance was a nice change from being ughed at for the unforgivable crime of watching a children’s show when I am for the next three years, still legally a child.
“Yay!” she squealed, and pulled me in for a hug. Her voice was painfully high. How was it so high? She was like 15 or something. Most AMAB kids’ voices break by then, right? Was she on puberty blockers? How would she even get them in this podunk town? Also those… pillows she was now pressing against me. No way in hell they came out of a bottle. They were pushing the limits of pusibility to have naturally occurred on her frame, and I knew for a fact you couldn’t legally get on E till you’re 16, and even then it was not so fast acting to expin those. She must have been on E since she was 12 or something. And where in the world does one find a parent who lets their 12-year-old go on HRT? Which meant they had to be fake. But they didn’t feel fake. A part of me screamed that I must extract her secrets by any means necessary. But I shot it down. Friends don’t torture each other, nor pry into their private medical histories.
The hug abruptly ended. Then she dashed off and returned dragging a desk. “So these transgender people you’ve met out of town… What are they like?”. And then she proceed to ask a series of questions that seemed to imply that she had somehow managed to transition passing perfect in a podunk town that had never heard of HRT, and seemingly reinvented being so from first principals. Not that she’d have been the first what with all the historical erasure. In hindsight that should have been my first clue that there was something up with this podunk town but my brain became heavily preoccupied with the bazaar sensation of having a friend who gave a damn what I had to say and wasn’t just trying to earn social credit by benevolently spending time with the sociodevelopmentally disadvantaged and shorted out five minutes into the conversation.
