Chapter 6 #2
She turns back to me. Giddy pride pulses through me, like when I won the sixth-grade spelling bee on insouciant after Efraín guessed e in place of the a. I want to puff out my chest like I did in the photo Naomi took of the principal handing me the blue ribbon. I was so proud
of myself.
Then Dagny says, “Nice haircut, Eli.”
Except her words don’t feel nice.
The way her lip curled at Efraín’s pop of pink reminds me of another curled lip. The reason I didn’t puff out my chest at the spelling bee, when I looked past Efraín and his red second-place ribbon to where Mrs. Reyna stood,
fuming.
I don’t know what I feel anymore, but “proud” isn’t it.
I made my choice, I didn’t dye my hair, and now I have to live with it. So I say, “Thanks,” because that’s my line in this
script, even if my heart isn’t in it.
“Just one more thing,” Dagny says.
This is it. Now she’s going to address Efraín’s pretty-in-pink rebellion.
I’m not proud, happy, or self-righteously smug. I didn’t predict this would happen because I wanted to be right; I wanted to prevent it.
Except Dagny isn’t looking at Efraín when she says, “You can’t wear that.”
“Excuse me?” She’s looking at my chest, I think. I’m wearing my uniform polo, tucked in, all three buttons done up. I’m compliant to the point of complicit. I made sure of it.
“The pin. With the . . .” She gestures at my pronoun button, and apparently, I’m supposed to read some deeper meaning in her inchoate gesticulations.
She could mean something benign as text, but I doubt it. Does she think pronoun is a dirty word?
“There’s nothing in the uniform policy about buttons.” I triple-checked the employee handbook last night.
“It’s political speech,” Dagny explains.
I don’t understand. “Political?”
“We can’t allow anything that might interfere with institutional messaging.”
I blink. And I blink. And I blink as the barn flickers, and I see this set in 1962, when the Spectors entered the bunker,
when Victor Kane grew up here, before Stonewall or Compton’s Cafeteria, in the days when you had to wear at least three items
of clothing that corresponded to your assigned gender at birth in case the gay bar in which you sought refuge was raided;
and I see the barn in 1983, when the Spectors stepped into a new world, when Victor Kane filmed a show that said things were
different, sort of, but queer men were dying in droves, and Reagan wouldn’t say “AIDS” publicly for another year. I blink
the barn back into focus, back into the present, and the scene looks exactly the same.
My binder’s too tight, or maybe I just need my inhaler. I’m sweating again, even though goose bumps threaten to outnumber freckles on my forearms. The Fruit of the Loom tag on my polo scrapes my neck, and the polo sags where the button weighs down the cotton poly blend.
“Institutional messaging?”
“The museum welcomes everyone,” Dagny says. “Partisan messaging makes guests feel uncomfortable.”
“I—”
I want to object. I want to turn down the lights and crank up the AC and cut the tag out of this shirt. I want to know: How
can a 2.25-inch pronoun button threaten an institution? How can a pronoun constitute a partisan message? How can the museum
welcome everyone if my pronouns are unwelcome?
What does that say about my welcome, let alone my comfort or safety?
What about the welcome, comfort, or safety of any trans guests who step up to this ticketing counter?
“You understand, right?” Dagny’s smile is a fixed point even as my universe shifts beneath me. “NSX is about bringing people
together, just like Nuclear Seasons itself. That’s the messaging we need to convey.”
The messaging we need to embody.
Because my body is political. My existence is partisan. My very presence triggers arguments.
I’m half expecting Efraín to say something, but apparently, he’s taken the saddle off the white horse. Of course he has. Telling a trans person to take off a button is such a microscopic microaggression that it wouldn’t register on the transphobia Richter scale for most people.
Because unless you’ve won the genetic lottery, misgendering is a condition of living while trans. Accepting it without undue
fuss is just one condition of parole—of this tentative cultural plea agreement where trans people get to exist, and cis people
only curtail some of our rights and only sometimes try to kill us.
Because this is nothing. I know this is nothing.
I’m overreacting, and worse, every second I delay reads as insolence, but I’m not trying to defy Dagny. I’ve already made
sacrifices to keep this job.
I don’t understand, but even if I wanted to fight this, the arithmetic hasn’t changed since yesterday. My cost-benefit analysis
is the same.
With shaky fingers, I unhook the button and hide it in my fist.
Dagny says, “Thank you, Eli.”
I have no idea what she’s thanking me for. But I’ve learned this script the hard way. Someone thanks you, and you say, “You’re
welcome.”
“I’m off to the salt mines. Listen to Stanley; he’s a pro. And welcome to the family!”
She crosses the barn and badges into the employee stairwell, while Efraín immediately pulls out his phone and starts typing.
I don’t have the energy to chastise him.
Instead, I turn to the rattling barn doors as they slide open. An elderly couple in matching Hawaiian shirts make their way up to the ticketing counter, stars in their eyes.
I shove my fist, pronoun button and all, into my pocket and plaster on a smile that would make Dagny proud.
“Hi,” I say. “Welcome to the Nuclear Seasons Experience. What can we do for you today?”