Chapter 28
Twenty-Eight
When the lights dim at Blue Plate on Thursday afternoon, management has already conducted the first round of interrogations.
Efraín and I sit in our usual seats, silently reading the first victims’ debriefs on our phones.
Everyone has held the line. No surprises in the lines of questioning: What do they know about recent disturbances? (Nothing,
unaware of any disturbances.) Have they been pressured or threatened by other employees? (Nope, good vibes all around.) What
do they know about a letter circulating among the staff containing vicious accusations and lies about management? (Nothing,
haven’t seen any letters.)
Then, in the time-honored bad cop tradition of “Have you stopped dealing drugs to schoolchildren?” interrogation tactics,
the loaded question: “How long have you been part of the union illegally operating on these premises?” Everyone successfully
sidestepped the complex question fallacy by saying that they’ve never been part of such an organization.
I don’t realize how vehemently I’ve been flicking my thigh until Efraín circles his fingers around my wrist.
“Elisha.” He smooths his thumb over my pulse point, firm pressure that soothes me in spite of myself. “They’re doing fine.
We’re all okay. You’re safe.”
I want to laugh because, God, he has no idea how far from safe we are and how very far from okay I am. But he doesn’t know what Dagny will demand I give away tomorrow
or what will happen when I—well, I haven’t plotted my escape route yet. Efraín doesn’t know, and I can’t tell him. So I just
rest my head on his shoulder, and breathe in the faint, familiar tropical aroma of his shampoo.
He drapes his arm around my shoulders, pulling me close. After the MGM lion’s telltale roar, the opening sepia-to-black-and-white-to-color
montage from Soylent Green rolls.
But Efraín keeps whispering against my curls. He doesn’t tell me it’s all going to be okay; he doesn’t speak in future tense.
In present tense, he tells me, again and again: we’re fine, we’re okay, we’re safe.
Here, in this moment, I almost believe him.
Snowpiercer excites Efraín like no other film we’ve watched. At first, I assume he has a crush on bearded Chris Evans, but the more he
talks about Tilda Swinton’s terrifying shoe monologue, it clicks.
Everything I’ve ever tried to tell him about the radical political potential of media has clicked for him. He’s chattering faster than the eponymous transglobal locomotive itself as he talks about what a perfect metaphor it is for a Marxist revolution.
I could listen to him talk allegory for hours, but I also really want to kiss him. It’s quite the dilemma.
We end up at Lou’s, in my favorite booth in the back. Efraín slides in next to me like an absolute psychopath, and it’s downright
surreal. Efraín’s obsessing over a movie and sitting next to me in my favorite booth. I would live in this moment forever
if Nuclear Seasons hadn’t taught me that kind of thing always has unintended consequences.
Ma comes by to take our order, and as the two of them get into a verbal volley about how the eggplants in the community garden
are thriving this season, I pull out my phone and immediately wish I hadn’t. I want to bury it in said garden, except the
electronics would poison the plants, and then I’d be a plant murderer in addition to an assumptive collaborator.
Anya Sobol
Reminder: Check-In
Hi Eli,
Just reminding you that your “check-in” is scheduled for tomorrow morning, first thing after pre-shift. Dagny will be sitting in, and we hope this will be a mutually beneficial conv . . .
I stare at my lock screen, harsh blue light straining my eyes. It’s either eyestrain or tears, but testosterone wouldn’t let
me cry even if I wanted to. I don’t want to cry. Why am I thinking so much about crying?
I don’t realize I’ve slapped my phone face down on the table until Efraín’s hand covers mine.
His smile is so unbearably soft. “Did you get Stanley’s message alert? His interrogation went fine—”
“I have to tell you something,” I blurt before I can chicken out. I can’t keep lying to him.
“Something you need to warn me about first?”
I can’t look at him.
“You’re afraid I’m going to judge you.”
“Oh, you’re definitely going to judge me.”
“Hey, no, wait. You spent how many years worrying what I’d say if you told me why you couldn’t do protests and shit? I don’t
want this”—he squeezes my hand in his—“to be like that.”
“It’s not that.”
“Then what—”
“One rhubarb iced tea and a black coffee from the dregs of the pot,” Ma interrupts, sliding our drinks on the table, and winks
at me.
After Ma is out of eavesdropping range, I force myself to face Efraín. “There’s something I didn’t tell you about my meeting with management.”
“You can tell me anything.”
I cannot imagine any universe in the multiverse where I would ever feel secure enough in a relationship with any version of Efraín to tell him
anything, but telling him that now would definitely make this worse.
“Do you remember when you thought I was a sleeper cell spy?”
“What?”
“When you asked me—never mind. Dagny asked me to spy. In exchange for the internship. And the right to wear my own pronoun
button, maybe, but—”
“Wait, I don’t understand,” Efraín cuts in, that telltale tilde etched in place. “Dagny asked you to spy on the union?”
“Yes.”
“Last Friday.”
“Yes.”
“Then you went to the union meeting and helped plan an action that hinges on management knowing?” He cocks his head thoughtfully.
“I can’t decide if that’s smart tradecraft or—”
“Why aren’t you mad?” I ask. “Why aren’t you yelling or fuming or—”
“Why would I be mad? You didn’t tell them anything.”
I open my mouth to disagree, then sip my coffee instead. It’s bitter, but not bitter enough to be from the dregs of the pot, as advertised. “You aren’t even going to ask if I did? You just know.”
“If you’d told management anything, they wouldn’t be interrogating everyone. Besides, Elisha, I know you.”
“But I didn’t tell Dagny anything; I didn’t turn her down. That’s the problem. She told me to think about it, and I should’ve said no right away, but I didn’t. I couldn’t.
I wanted to, I swear, but everything was happening so fast, and—”
“You let her believe you’d be her mole.”
“Not on purpose,” I insist. “And now they’re intimidating everyone with these interrogations, and when I go in there tomorrow,
Dagny’s expecting me to tell her everything.”
“But you’re not going to.” He says it so simply, neither question nor command—just a statement of fact, said with such conviction
and moral certitude. “You’re not telling her anything.”
I feel feverish. I want to laugh. “You don’t know that. I don’t know that.”
“You wouldn’t be telling me any of this if you were planning to snitch.”
“Don’t you get it? If I don’t give Dagny something—if I don’t give up the union tomorrow—all bets are off. She’ll fire me,
and that’ll be it. No top surgery. No—fuck.” I blink back tears. I don’t get to be upset about this, not when I’m the one
in the wrong.
“Oh,” Efraín says suddenly, his grip tightening on my bicep. “Is that . . . no, sorry, don’t answer that.”
I’ve only ever heard Efraín stumble over apologies a handful of times, like that night at the gazebo. This is how he gets
when his latent Catholic guilt kicks in, after he realizes he miscalculated some piece of privilege calculus he’d taken for
granted.
I run back the tape on my own words.
Oh, fuck. Why does it always come back to this?
I lean back, needing that extra sliver of space between us so I don’t overthink the asymmetrical geometry of our bodies. “If
that was your way of asking if ninety-five percent of my summer earnings have gone straight into my personal top surgery fund,
then, yes. It’s not a secret, but I just . . .” I shake my head, glancing at all the familiar faces around the diner, kids
from school and adults who’ve known me since Mom moved us here fourteen years ago. “It isn’t exactly fun to talk about.
“Thanks to the current legal landscape, there aren’t that many surgeons even in the Bay Area who will operate on an eighteen-year-old,
no matter how long you’ve been on T, and there were never many to begin with who accept patients with unfavorable body types. My best-choice surgeon doesn’t take insurance.
“Moms will contribute what they can, but it’s still a lot.
Especially because I want it done before college, and college alone is going to clean out their savings.
I need basically everything I earn this summer for my portion of the down payment to reserve a date for next summer, and I was hoping to get the internship to pay for the surgery itself.
It’s not the end of the world without it.
I can probably make it work, picking up odd jobs during the school year.
But that’s all academic if I can’t cover the down payment.
We still have a month left, and I can’t afford—”
“You can’t afford to get fired,” Efraín breaks in when my voice cracks.
I can’t look at him because whatever’s happening on his face might kill me. Instead, I study the glimmering gold chain tucked
under his shirt, attached to a pendant of which I’ve only caught glimpses. I don’t know what it means. For everything I know
about Efraín, for all the passion he wears on his sleeve—often literally, with anti-establishment patches on his jean jacket—there
are so many secrets he keeps close to the chest.
He told me so many times that he couldn’t make sense of me, but I still don’t understand. I don’t understand what he sees
in me. I don’t understand how he went from accusing me of being a spy to trusting that I’d never sell out the union.
“That’s why you were holding back,” he’s saying softly, like he’s just solved a puzzle.
I don’t remember him reaching for my hand again, but he’s laced our fingers together without my noticing.
“When you said you needed the job, you meant it. Because if you got fired, you wouldn’t be able to pay for top surgery. ” He scrubs his free hand over
his face. “Fucking hell, Elisha, why didn’t you say something?”
“Um. I did say something; I said I needed the job, repeatedly.”
“But you never said why. If I’d known, I would’ve—”
“Marked it as an excused absence when I declined to join the union?”
“You thought I wouldn’t believe you.”
“I thought you wouldn’t understand,” I reply bitterly, “but don’t take it personally. I stopped expecting cis people to understand a long time ago.”
He curses in quick, quiet, and thoroughly extensive Spanish that I can’t translate. Now he won’t look at me. I can hardly
get a grip on my own emotions, so I have no idea how I’m supposed to handle it when this boy who feels so damn loudly curls in on himself.
I squeeze his hand. “Sorry. That wasn’t fair. I told you I don’t like talking about it.”
He shakes his head. “You don’t have to talk about anything. It just puts things in perspective. Like, fuck, you spent all
week feeling like you couldn’t tell anyone what really happened, so you’ve been carrying this by yourself. The point of the
union is—”
“An injury to one is an injury to all, I know.”
“No, the point of the union is that no one has to carry anything alone.”
“The union can’t fix this. This whole time, we’ve been betting that management won’t illegally fire anyone, but Dagny made
it clear that my luck has run out. When I don’t name names, she’ll give me the boot, and . . .”
The diner lights are too bright, the dinner crowd too loud.
Those tears I’ve been doing a pretty admirable job of repressing finally break through, percolating at the corners of my eyes.
“Elisha.” Efraín cups my cheek. His hand brushes through my hair and settles at the nape of my neck. He leans down, tents
his forehead against mine. “I promise you, Elisha,” he whispers, sounding so much more like himself. “You’re not going to
get fired. I won’t let them fire you.”
I look up at him through my lashes, the extreme close-up distorting this face that has become so familiar and unexpectedly
dear to me these past few weeks.
I never expected that I would care about him like this, or that I would believe him when he made baseless promises. But I believe him. I believe he would burn
down the museum before he let them fire me.
“I know,” I tell him, “but it’s not up to you.”
Efraín’s eyes burn like an oil fire.