Chapter 25
Twenty-Five
Everyone knows California is an earthquake state. Where other kids grow up learning to prepare for tornadoes or hurricanes,
Californians know our most imminent existential threat—short of a wildfire—is the next Big One. After growing up on the San
Andreas Fault—taking field trips to the geysers and studying striations along rock faces—trust me when I say: Living with
a severe anxiety disorder is like living on a fault line.
An earthquake could strike at any moment.
There are minor tremors every day, so small that you stop noticing them. But there’s some part of your amygdala that’s always
on alert, aware that the best early alert systems won’t give more than ten seconds’ notice. Then, any time anything bad happens,
your catastrophizing impulses are validated.
So it is equally terrifying and vindicating when Dagny’s reply drops into my inbox forty-eight hours after the email zap.
I’m literally on my way to work, the carpool cruising with the windows down.
My shift starts in fifteen minutes, and the ground is shifting under me.
This early earthquake warning hasn’t bought me anything at all.
I pass my phone to Efraín, who’s sitting next to me. By some unspoken agreement, Naomi took shotgun this morning, and Efraín
kissed me hello like it was nothing.
“What the actual fuck?” Efraín curses at my phone.
“Arson, murder, or jaywalking?” Lola calls.
“Jaywalking?” Naomi mutters, vexed.
“Worse,” Efraín says. “Unfair labor practice.”
“It’s not—” that bad, I don’t say, because it is bad, just not prohibited by the National Labor Relations Board. “It’s a meeting invite. Dagny, Anya, Billy, and me. Right
after pre-shift. It’s—” I swallow down my panic and pry my phone out of Efraín’s death grip. “Dagny wouldn’t put ‘dress code’
in the meeting title if the meeting were about firing me.”
“That would be illegal, wouldn’t it?” Naomi asks.
“If they say it’s about the dress code, yeah,” Lola answers as she turns down NSX’s private road. “They can’t fire you for
a collective action. No one else got a meeting invite, right?”
“Nothing in the chat,” I confirm.
“You took the button off right away,” Naomi reasons. “They can’t single you out.”
Efraín’s silence says everything. He doesn’t trust bosses to follow the law.
Maybe it’s naive, but I don’t think I’ve been invited to my execution today.
There were other days when I was so sure I’d be escorted out by security, but not today.
Although I agree that management doesn’t care about the law, I believe they have more sense than to fire an openly trans employee two days after an email zap, which is proof of concerted activity.
Dagny may be callous, but it’s a calculated indifference.
Lola snags the last employee parking space. We get out of the car, but no one moves. Then Lola whispers something to Naomi,
who gives me a grim nod and heads toward the barn.
Efraín’s hand is on my arm. “You don’t have to do this alone,” he says, so damn serious. “Just say the word, and—”
“Ef,” Lola cuts in, lips pursed, tangerine glitter gloss sparkling in the morning light. “I’ve got this. Go inside.”
“I can help,” Efraín insists. I don’t know if he’s trying to convince her or me. “I’ll crash the meeting. Just let them try
to fire you then—”
“I’m glad you’re still on board with the ride-or-die credo here, but we’re not at DEFCON Thelma and Louise yet.”
Efraín’s raring for a fight. I can’t help but remember when Lola called him el toro bravo, ready to charge at anything and
everything.
“You’d just raise the temperature in the room. Do more harm than good.” Lola shakes her head. “You know I’m right.”
Efraín looks like he swallowed a jumbo Lemonhead whole, but he trusts Lola’s judgment, even against his own, because that’s
what the ride-or-die credo means. “Yeah, okay.”
Then he turns to me, a flip-book of microexpressions animating his face far faster than my brain can piece together. Finally, he settles on, “Let me know if you need me. I’ll be there in ten seconds.” Then he presses another chaste kiss against my forehead and jogs away.
As soon as he’s out of range, Lola’s expression softens. “Same offer.”
“But you just said—”
“Efraín isn’t the right person to walk into that room with you, but he’s right,” Lola says. “You don’t have to do any of this
alone, and—” She steps closer, her corkscrew curls fluttering in the breeze. “I know how it feels, to be surrounded by friends
but still not—”
“The mortifying ordeal of being known but not seen while trans?”
“Seen but not known, for me, I think.”
I look at Lola and ask myself: What do I see? What do I know? I know she makes it all look so easy—living, loving, feeling, to say nothing of passing—but nothing is ever that easy.
I still don’t know what to say to Lola’s offer. Part of me—the chronically anxious kid cowering under a desk in advance of
an earthquake—wants to accept. But this didn’t start with union-organized button making. It started with me wearing a button
on my second day of work and continuously centering myself, my pronouns, my priorities.
I’ve made my choices.
“Thank you for offering,” I tell Lola, steady as I can, “but I’ll be fine.”
“Eli, it’s not about being fine—”
“I can handle this on my own.”
I need to do this alone.
“Let me start by saying, we’re not insensitive to your struggles,” Dagny Kane tells me twenty minutes later.
In the conference room next to Anya’s office, I’ve been seated across from Dagny and Anya. Billy hasn’t looked up from his
yellow legal pad.
The flat-screen on the far wall is cycling through a presentation for high-roller donors. One Plutonium Tier donor could cover
my top surgery down payment, and anyone in the top Polonium Tier could pay for the entire surgery outright.
I flatten out the crumpled papers I retrieved from my backpack. I’m trying to do this right. My original meeting-with-HR notes have headings and subheadings, points and counterpoints, and arguments for each
of Aristotle’s categories of rhetoric.
I’m perfectly capable of handling logos, ethos, and pathos all by myself.
“With all due respect,” I begin, in a neutral tone that hopefully implies respect I don’t feel, “this isn’t about my ‘struggles.’ I’m here to express concern about this week’s dress code changes.”
Then I challenge management’s claim that pronoun buttons constitute “political speech” by making them specify whether the
pronouns or the buttons are political. I trap Billy into admitting that pronouns aren’t political speech. Once Dagny says
the buttons themselves are the problem, I badger them about which part of the buttons is problematic. Anya insists the “PLEASE
DON’T MISGENDER MUSEUM WORKERS!!!” line is offensive to guests.
I don’t disagree. “Hypothetically, if the only text was the pronouns themselves—and we’ve agreed that pronouns are not political
speech—would the buttons still be banned?”
“It’s different,” Anya protests.
I watch the blood drain from Billy’s face while Dagny flushes red. I have them. “Was the problem that everyone was wearing matching buttons?”
Dagny’s sudden smile alarms me. “There’s a reason we have a dress code. We need our staff to be recognizable and uniform. Our branding is curated as carefully as our collections.”
I have altitude sickness from how close I am to convincing them, but—
Forget Aristotle. This is some Icarus shit.
How am I supposed to argue with branding?
Then I remember: When Efraín sent me his earliest button mock-ups for critique, I sent back pictures of the most effective buttons from my personal collection. He criticized my personal favorite, calling out the logo for Dr. Mburu’s clinic. The branding.
“That’s a good point.” I can work with this. “The buttons would be more successful if they matched NSX branding. What if the
museum made pronoun buttons?”
I don’t know what I’m expecting, but it’s not Anya’s raspy laugh. “But who would pay for the buttons?”
I don’t know what the correct response is, but it’s not my stupid, kneejerk, “How about the Polonium Tier donors?” That response
is so David-Rose-voice incorrect that literally anything else would be an improvement. Why wasn’t Lola concerned about me having a meltdown?
I have to fix this. There must be something—
“Give us the room?” Dagny’s abrupt not-question stops me from blurting out something catastrophically worse.
I push back my chair.
“Not you, Eli.”
Oh, fuck.
Billy seems to agree because he leans over to Dagny and whispers furiously, futilely, before he follows Anya out. After all,
he’s an employee, too.
Dagny watches me with tented fingers. “I’m going to tell you a secret, Eli. Can I trust it won’t end up as trivia on your
next tour?”
I nod, dumbstruck. How did arguing about buttons turn into sharing corporate secrets?
“When my father died,” Dagny says, “my mother was preparing to file for divorce. She could never admit it and stuck to the story that she’d moved back to LA for her career.
When she had a dry spell between callbacks, my mother threatened to strip the estate for parts.
He’d left it all to me, but she controlled the trust. She said we needed the money, but we would’ve been fine if she didn’t spend every paycheck on Rodeo Drive.
“I wanted to remember my father at his happiest. When he showed me around set. When he spun bedtime stories of the episodes
he never got to write, a flashlight under his chin. When I called him from LA and told him I’d horrified my teacher by bringing
grotesque NS props to show-and-tell.”
Dagny’s smile is faint and distant, but still the most genuine emotion I’ve seen her perform.
It stirs something in me, despite the wall I’m desperately trying to keep between us. How many of my teachers did I horrify
with my NS obsession? And, God, what wouldn’t I give to hear about those unwritten episodes?
Shame curdles my curiosity.
I shouldn’t be lusting after her secret knowledge; I shouldn’t feel any kinship with the boss who doesn’t respect me as an
employee, let alone as a human being.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I want you to understand the price I paid for this museum a decade before I built it. I convinced my mother not to sell the estate by pursuing the acting career she’d always wanted.
I hated it, but the limelight turned my father’s tarnished reputation into something mysterious, something beautiful—his name got me auditions.
So I took the Nickelodeon gig, my mother took my paychecks, and I didn’t lose what little I had left of my father. ”
Dagny’s watching me so intently, waiting for the socially prescribed dram of empathy her story demands.
Except I can’t give it to her. It’s not that I don’t feel anything. I’m not that heartless; on the contrary, I know I feel something because my heartbeat is syncopated, unpredictable.
“What I want you to understand, Eli, is that every social interaction is transactional—but that doesn’t mean we can’t both
get what we want. I know you want the internship. You know it’s between you and Gwen. Normally, I’d schedule interviews, and
I’d discuss your work performance with Anya.
“Gwen’s sales numbers are better than yours, and she doesn’t have a history of—shall we say—troublemaking on her record. On paper, she’s the more attractive candidate. So what if you’ve given a few tours? From a hiring perspective,
it doesn’t matter how passionate you say you are about this museum; that’s what everyone says.”
Other people lie during job interviews.
“Passion does matter to me, Eli. Whether you’re selling tickets or updating our collections database, I want everyone who
works here to love Nuclear Seasons even half as much as . . . My father’s legacy—his memory—should be a blessing. It must be protected. You believe that, don’t you?”
“Of course,” I whisper in spite of myself.
“We have to make sacrifices—compromises—to protect his legacy.”
“What do you want from me?” I ask, too tired to maintain even a pretense of tact.
“I want to protect this museum, and I want to see the internship go to the most dedicated employee. I believe that’s you,
Eli.”
I should feel ecstatic. Dagny’s offering everything I ever wanted on a silver platter, but if this job has taught me anything,
it’s that if something sounds too good to be true, it definitely is. “So you’re offering me the internship in exchange for . . .
what, exactly?”
“Your cooperation,” Dagny says.
“You want me to shut up about pronoun buttons and transphobia at the museum.”
“Nothing so crass. We may be able to work something out regarding a personal pronoun button for you. As for the rest of it . . .
If you see something, say something.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Maybe you’re too young to remember, but after 9/11, that slogan was a public counterterrorism initiative—”
“No, I understand the reference.” I have been inside an airport, after all. “I just don’t understand the relevance here.”
“Let’s just say, I wouldn’t want you to be collateral damage in the event of any future workplace disturbances.
It wouldn’t just be the internship on the line.
If anything else happens this summer to disturb operations, there will be consequences, so when the time comes, it will be in your best interest to tell us what you know. Or else . . .”
I should ask what kind of consequences, but all I can think about is my old Ken doll under the razor-blade guillotine Efraín
and I made for that French Revolution diorama.
“I’d hate for you to suffer the consequences of other people’s poor choices,” Dagny continues. “I trust you to make better
decisions.”
I have a newfound sense of empathy for every bug I’ve ever watched Sputnik hunt.
Dagny Kane is sitting across from me, holding a carrot and a stick. Betray the union, and I’ll get the internship I need to
pay for top surgery. Stay loyal, and I’ll be fired before I can earn enough to cover the down payment.
She can’t threaten to fire me outright for concerted activity, but she’s sure insinuating it.
I blink at her, struggling to make sense of everything. She looks so much like her father, a man I’ve idolized since I was
eight years old, watching Nuclear Seasons for the first time, wishing I could step through the TV screen.
That first morning on the job, I said I’d bury a body if the museum asked.
Now Dagny’s asking me to bury the union alive.
She has the most placid poker face, even though she knows she’s holding the winning hand.
Because bosses always win.
“I’ll give you some time to think it over, Eli. I’m sure you’ll see we can both get what we want.”