Barry, their host, pounded on the table, sparing Julian the need for further banter.
“Welcome, fellow scholars,” Barry said. “I’m glad you all could make it. And I’m especially delighted that our esteemed professor has decided to grace us with her presence. Dr. Fairchild, it’s a privilege to have you in my humble neighborhood tavern. You really class up the joint.”
Dr. Fairchild blushed and waved off the compliment as the students drank a toast in her honor. Julian made a point of clinking glasses with everyone at the table—Barry, Dumell, Russ, the professor, Eve (Brendan Fletcher’s mom, weirdly enough), the hilariously named Mr. Ho (who spoke very little English), and Gina (the chatty motorcycle dyke). Aside from Barry, who was one of those I’m-an-asshole-and-proud-of-it guys, Julian liked them all just fine, and he was even feeling okay about Barry, considering that he was picking up the tab.
Fuck you, he texted Ethan. These are my people.
*
Julian knew he was too smart for Eastern Community College. Everybody said so—his parents, his teachers, his friends, his former guidance counselor, who was a bit of a dick, but still. He had the GPA and the SATs to get into a good four-year school, and his parents had the money to pay for it, or so they said. It was just that senior year of high school had been a total bust—he’d been seriously depressed for most of it—and he hadn’t been able to complete his applications in a timely fashion.
He didn’t start feeling better until the beginning of summer—they’d adjusted his meds for the fourth or fifth time, and finally stumbled on the magic formula—and by then it was way too late to get in anywhere decent. His parents and shrink agreed that it would be wise for him to take a few classes at ECC, to get his feet wet, as they insisted on putting it. If he liked it and got good grades, he could transfer somewhere better for sophomore year, somewhere more commensurate with his abilities.
Julian hadn’t expected much from community college, and for the most part ECC had lived up to his low expectations. His Math class was a joke, way easier than high school. He regularly dozed off in Bio and still got A-pluses on the first two tests. Gender and Society was the only exception to this general rule of mediocrity. It was a wild card, a night class full of rando adults, taught by a female professor who’d been born a male and had transitioned, as she liked to say, in her late thirties, which definitely enhanced Julian’s academic experience. It was one thing to have a professor tell you that gender was socially constructed, and another to hear it from a person who had actually done construction work.
There was a lot of funky jargon in the reading assignments—cisgender and heteronormative and dysphoria and performativity and on and on—but he didn’t mind. It was one of those classes that actually made you think, in this case about stuff that was so basic it never even occurred to you to question it, all the little rules that got shoveled into your head when you were a kid and couldn’t defend yourself. Girls wear pink, boys wear blue. Boys are tough. Girls are sweet. Women are caregivers with soft bodies. Men are leaders with hard muscles. Girls get looked at. Guys do the looking. Hairy armpits. Pretty fingernails. This one can but that one can’t. The Gender Commandments were endless, once you started thinking about them, and they were enforced 24/7 by a highly motivated volunteer army of parents, neighbors, teachers, coaches, other kids, and total strangers—basically, the whole human race.
Any hot chicks? Ethan texted.
Ha ha, Julian replied.
Sad to say, it was slim pickings in Gender and Society. The only halfway hot female close to his own age was Salima, the Muslim babe, and she wore a fucking headscarf. The rest of her clothes were normal enough, and she had a cute round face, but that headscarf was black and forbidding. When they’d interviewed each other, she told him she didn’t drink, date, or dance—which explained her unfortunate but totally predictable absence at the bar—and was saving herself for marriage to a good Muslim guy. She said she was happy being a woman, except that just once she’d like to know what it felt like to punch someone in the face.
Only three ladies at the table. A dyke, Brendan Fletcher’s mom, and my professor The tranny? Ethan texted back. Holy shit!
Julian snuck a guilty glance at Professor Fairchild, who was deep in conversation with Mrs. Fletcher. Early in the semester, he had unthinkingly used the word tranny to describe his teacher, before she’d had a chance to explain how offensive it was, and now his friends wouldn’t stop using it, no matter how many times Julian asked them not to. They insisted that tranny was just a harmless abbreviation, and called Julian a pussy for scolding them about it.
She’s a nice person, he wrote.
Hot?
They’d been over this ground before.
Not especially
Professor Fairchild wasn’t a freak or anything, far from it. She was what his mother would have called an attractive older woman. She wore tasteful conservative suits like a lady lawyer on TV, always with a colorful scarf tied around her neck. Lots of makeup and nice perfume. A little manly around the jaw, but otherwise pretty convincing.
What about Fletcher’s mom?
This was a harder question. Mrs. Fletcher actually was kind of pretty, as much as he hated to admit it. Not in a young woman way, but pretty-for-her-age, which he didn’t know exactly, beyond the obvious fact that she was old enough to be his mother. She had a nice face, maybe a little sad around the eyes, or maybe just tired. There was some gray in her hair, and she had a little belly, but she had a decent body overall. Excellent boobs, and she still looked pretty good in jeans, which was a lot more than he could say for his own mom, despite her Paleo diet and yoga addiction.
She’s okay, he texted back. Except that she gave birth to a raging asshole *
The bar wasn’t all that crowded on a Tuesday night, but it was pretty noisy, with classic rock blasting in the background, songs that Eve remembered from high school—Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin and “Little Pink Houses”—more than a few of which inspired Barry and Russ to trade high fives or break out their air guitars. Eve hated most of those songs—cock rock, her college friends used to call it—but the lyrics were permanently engraved in her memory, courtesy of every boyfriend she’d ever had.