3. Michaela
MICHAELA
“So,” Jay’s voice came from the doorway and Michaela jumped from where she was putting the final touches on her just-made bed.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you!” Jay said, straightening in the doorway and raising her hands in a placating gesture.
She’d changed into a pair of wide-legged jeans and wore a black tank top with a black choker.
She’d topped the whole outfit off with a serious shade of red lipstick and door knocker earrings.
The look suited her, and Michaela was struck with a pang of both marvel and envy.
Michaela hadn’t really known what to make of Jay when she’d finally laid eyes on her.
Jay had been standing there in a sundress, her long black hair tousled like she’d run to meet her.
Jay had stared for a few beats before she smiled, a radiant smile that went all the way to her brown eyes.
Her brown skin was slightly flushed and Michaela thought she caught the light dusting of freckles on her cheeks.
The whole sight filled Michaela up on the inside, like a warm hug.
But there was more to it than the moment.
Once they’d introduced themselves, Jay had shown her around to their little suite, and Michaela had been so happy to confirm the ensuite bathroom.
While Jay talked and referenced little things they’d discussed via email, what posters they’d want to hang up, what music they could play, Michaela couldn’t help but notice how confident Jay seemed to be.
In a sundress. In a sundress with lean muscles and flat chest and everything.
On display. Not only was Jay confident, she seemed happy—or at least content.
It was a feeling Michaela considered foreign, something she’d never truly felt in her skin, though since meeting Jay, she finally understood why.
And now, here she was again, in red lipstick and a tank top that showed off her midriff. The sight intrigued Michaela but also made her pull down her own long sleeves. Jay’s body was a reminder of her own and how wrong it felt, as though Jay’s confidence was a declaration of a contradiction.
“Hey,” Michaela finally said after realizing that she was simply standing and staring. Well, more like analyzing. She knew her eyes had been roaming all over Jay.
Jay smiled knowingly back at her. “You okay?”
“Yeah, you just scared—startled me,” Michaela tried to catch the slip.
“Didn’t mean to! But how sick is this, we get our own rooms—at least for now. We will have to figure out what to do with the living room,” she said, moving into the room. Michaela caught the scent of citrus and vanilla and realized it was Jay.
“I need a job first,” Michaela said, knowing it was one of her priorities in the first week. She needed income before she could even think about furnishing the place. Michaela added, “I haven’t had my own space in a long time.”
“Oh right, you lived with someone outside your family right? Boyfriend?” Jay said and waggled her eyebrows ridiculously.
Michaela felt her face grow hot. “Something like that.” Michaela swallowed and then said more confidently, “My ex-boyfriend.”
“Oof bad break up?” Jay said as she situated herself on Michaela’s bed.
Normally this would have annoyed Michaela, someone just walking into her space, but unlike the way Brian used to do it, this didn’t feel like Jay didn’t care.
It felt like Jay was trying to pull her closer.
The genuine way she’d asked her last question made that clear.
“You could say that. I kinda, well, just left.”
“Cold,” Jay said, but it didn’t seem like she was judging.
“Yeah well, he had it coming. It was complicated. Anyway–” Michaela shifted to one of her many strategies to get people to stop focusing on her.
“What about you, do you have an ex-boyfriend? I mean, girlfriend? Girlfriends?” Michaela had been expecting Jay to say that she in fact, had lots of ex-girlfriends.
With all her confidence and self assuredness, it wouldn’t have surprised Michaela.
What did surprise Michaela was her reply.
“Yes, an ex-girlfriend, as in just one,” Jay said. And then as if lost in her own train of thought she added, “I’m like, one hundred percent lesbo so definitely no ex-boyfriends for me.”
Michaela let that hang in the air for a moment, her mind struggling to compute. Jay had said online she was a lesbian, but she still was taken back by the ease at which Jay declared it in person.
“You seem confused,” Jay said, arching a perfectly shaped eyebrow.
“I mean, you said you were gay, I just–I am sorry, this is all really new to me. Like I told you, there is still plenty I am trying to figure out.” Michaela decided to go with the truth, even if her cheeks flamed as she looked down at her white Adidas, not wanting to be barefoot before cleaning the floors.
Looking at Jay’s Filas, she wondered if her roomie felt the same.
She had taken the plunge coming to school.
She could do this. When she gathered the courage to look back up, she saw that Jay was merely sitting on her bed, studying her.
“That’s okay,” Jay said finally, and she smiled, making Michaela feel the reassurance she poured into her response. “I don’t know everything either, and the stuff you sent me here was really helpful. I do know that I both love women and am a woman.”
“But how can you just be so comfortable, like, your body–I don't know how to feel sometimes,” Michaela forced out. She was a little apprehensive that this was their first interaction. But there was something about Jay’s presence, something in the way she looked at Michaela that made her suspect she saw all of her.
Michaela had nowhere to hide with Jay, and that in itself was unnerving.
“A body is a body, Mickey,” Jay said slowly, and Michaela’s head jerked up at the nickname.
“Sorry, is Mickey okay?”
Michaela nodded her head. She had never had a nickname before.
Not even before her father insisted that everyone call her by her “name”.
It had always bothered Michaela; nicknames evoked a certain intimacy, like you knew the person who gave it to you really liked you.
“Yeah so, I was born in this body and I have these parts, but well, how do I put it? When I was with my girlfriend, my ex, Diana, we started renaming things, renaming parts. At first it was a little joke between us, but then that’s how I started thinking about it.
And it made me more comfortable. And then there was her sister, Julia, who also went out of her way to minimize her breasts.
Like there are so many different bodies out there, and mine is just one of them. That’s how I see it, anyway.”
Michaela tried to take that in. On one level, it made sense.
She had aunties who were curvy and aunties who were tall and skinny.
She had never heard of someone minimizing their breasts, but she had heard of girls stuffing their bras, or wearing two Wonderbras at once for a bigger bust. Maybe it was all different sides of the same coin.
But while Michaela tried to make sense of things, she also realized she didn’t fully connect to it.
“Anyway,” Jay said, as if trying to guess at Michaela’s rollercoaster of thoughts, “here we are, in college. What better time than now to explore and learn?”
Michaela smiled at that. “Fair.”
“On that note, looks like you met Davis too? He invited us out tonight to meet up with him and some friends for dinner, if you wanna go? Or it can just be us, I’d love to talk to you, like really talk now that there isn’t a screen and internet connection between us. Or—”
Jay’s voice cut off like she was waiting for Michaela to fill in the blank.
Michaela’s default reaction was to start with just getting to know Jay, but then, she wouldn’t want to keep Jay from making friends.
She figured she’d eat alone, and then wait for Jay to come back to the room.
Michaela didn’t necessarily consider herself shy; the type of nerves she got from meeting new people or being in crowds were more about the way other people looked at her, or the fear that they would.
Michaela couldn’t shake the feeling that she was lying by simply existing.
The knowledge she’d uncovered had cracked something open in her, her truth, and now she felt like even more of a fraud.
“Um, I don’t know. I mean, I met Davis and he seemed nice,” was all Michaela could get out as curiosity and fear waged war inside her.
“I get the feeling he keeps an eye out for people like us,” Jay said easily.
“People like us?” Michaela repeated.
“Queer as fuck,” Jay said.
“That’s not a nice word, my–” But Michaela stopped herself, recognizing that Jay said the word with something like pride, versus the way her parents spat it out.
“We are reclaiming it,” Jay reassured her.
Michaela nodded slowly as she took things in. “So you think Davis sees us like him? Like, he welcomes us?”
“Girl, we are people like him,” Jay said, laughing and raising an eyebrow.
People like them. Did Davis consider them people like him? Why else would he have sought them out? She was finding more and more people who surprised her. When she left Brian, she had expected to find more people at worst, like her parents, and at best, like Brian.
But she had met up with Calliope, the girl who drove her to school.
It turned out she was half Greek and half Guatemalan.
“But one hundred percent Californian,” she’d joked.
Michaela had laughed. Not because she thought the joke was that funny, but because she was so relieved that Callie was just being silly with her.
Talking to her normally. It had been the first time Michaela had introduced herself as Michaela in person, and she had done it on a whim, drunk off the adrenaline of finally leaving Brian and living her life.
Calliope, who went by “Callie”, hadn’t even batted an eye.
It was so small but so monumental, so completely divorced from Michaela’s experience up to this point, that she had felt giddy.
She wasn’t much of a talker by nature, but that was okay, Callie had been, and she had steered the conversation, covering everything from favorite foods to recent episodes of The X-Files, which they both liked.
“Scully and Mulder are so yummy,” Callie had remarked, piqueing Michaela’s interest in Callie’s interests, but she hadn’t felt the courage to push just yet.
Besides, the X-Files chatter had led them down a rabbit hole of another mutual interest, science fiction, for hours.
The whole time, Michaela had felt a lightness she didn’t know was possible.
Here we are, in college. What better time than now to explore and learn.
“Yeah let’s go to dinner, I mean if it’s okay that I come too,” Michaela said thinking of Callie and their easy-going car ride before she could talk herself out of it.
“I just invited you, silly,” Jay said smiling.
“I can let you finish getting unpacked, unless you want help? I am all finished. I can put on some music if you want? Though it might take me a while to figure out West Coast stations, unless you have any favorites? We can turn my radio up nice and loud.”
Michaela smiled. “East Coast girl, huh?”
“Well, yeah, guess so,” Jay said, “but I appreciate good music, so tell me what you like.”
“Well, let’s see if I can find the equivalent of Power 106 up here in the Bay.”
Forty minutes later, they’d washed the floors, and their suite was now filled with Toni Braxton’s “You’re Making Me High,” and Michaela was holding a handful of Jay’s clothes.
It hadn’t taken long for them to both realize that Michaela’s wardrobe consisted of lots of oversized—and not in the fashionable way, clothing.
Brian had encouraged Michaela to hide her body, and given how she felt about it most days, she didn’t push back.
So Jay was helping her find something to wear that wouldn’t be too flashy or revealing, but enough for Michaela to feel like she was really trying.
“Look at your waist and butt, oh my god,” Jay said, and Michaela fought the urge to run from the room. “You have a butt and thighs under there, mama!”
If Michaela were being truthful with herself, she’d always loved her butt. So had Brian, but he also made fun of her for it. He used to say she had a “girl’s butt”, which of course now…
“What do you think will look good, all I have are baggy jeans and I think yours would be too short, even if we wear the same size.” Michaela tried to stop herself, but her eyes roamed over Jay’s body, and she felt a small swoop in her belly.
Unlike when she looked at other women’s bodies, Michaela found that she didn’t get the same pang of envy; all she saw was Jay’s smaller frame, her small waist, and the way her tank rode up to expose her tight stomach.
Michaela realized she was staring and hastily met Jay’s eyes. When she did, she was mortified to find Jay smiling knowingly at her.
“If you are going to go with baggy jeans, let’s get you in a tight top?” Michaela started to protest but Jay continued, “I have a flannel we can throw on you if that will make you feel more comfortable.” Michaela let out a laugh of relief and nodded her head.
“Cool. Now, let’s pick out some light jewelry and accessorize.”
Michaela did her best to stomp down her nerves at this new person she was going to be here on campus. And when she stomped them down, she found a little bit of excitement behind them.