Track 9 Delilah #2
They’ve seemed more relaxed this morning, as if sleeping on the hard ground all night somehow took some of the tension out of them.
Even their face looks a little softer, Delilah thinks, casting a glance at them.
Their jaw is smoother than it was—there’s no trace of yesterday’s faint stubble—and their features are a little rounder, less sharp.
Delilah considers for a moment, then decides to take the leap.
“Would you have wanted to? If it was an option? I mean, I’m not trying to be offensive, but I’m guessing your not-dad wasn’t really down with the whole genderqueer thing. ”
“Genderqueer,” Emmett repeats slowly. They don’t say it like a question, but Delilah hears the uncertainty in their voice anyway as their hand drifts to the pin she bought for them yesterday, still attached to the lapel of their jacket.
“Nonbinary?” she offers. She catches Emmett’s frown out of the corner of her eye, the way they’re twirling their fingers around the fringes of their tzitzit, braiding and unbraiding and rebraiding the strands, and tries again. “Gender-fluid? Not-cis?”
Emmett fidgets for another moment. “I don’t know what any of those words mean.”
Delilah feels a pang of guilt. “You don’t have to,” she says quickly. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot.”
“It’s all right.” Emmett seems to catch themself twisting the fringe of the tzitzit tightly enough around one finger that the tip starts to darken, and they shake the strings loose.
“It wasn’t anything I ever considered before.
Ruth and Noah were—they’re younger, and they were on the internet even though Jacob hated it, so they learned more about things like that than I think Jacob would ever have wanted them to, but I never really… I didn’t ask too many questions.”
They look down at their hands. “I remember Ruth buying a copy of Angels in America and thinking that her father would have taken it if he knew she had it. She asked me to keep it in my room and said I could read it if I wanted, but…” They shake their head.
“It probably sounds ignorant, but I think…I didn’t want to learn something that I couldn’t unlearn.
Especially if it was something that I couldn’t share. ”
Oh, Delilah’s mom can never meet Emmett, actually. She’ll have adoption papers drafted within half an hour.
“I don’t think it’s ignorant,” she says.
At Emmett’s skeptical look, she goes on.
“I mean it. Look, I was raised by academics and eccentrics and artists and drag queens, okay? That was my mom’s whole village, especially after my dad died.
I had the vocabulary to figure out I was queer when I was like…
ten. I got to play around with makeup and drag and gender and all that stuff, while other kids my age were signing up for soccer. ”
“Would you have preferred soccer?”
“That would be a hard pass, thanks. You want sports gays, talk to Iris.”
A snort. “Is that more her thing?”
“No, but it is for all her exes. She’s got a thing for jocks.
” Delilah maneuvers Roscoe around the minivan that’s been driving four miles under the speed limit for the last ten minutes.
“Anyway, I’m aware that I’m the exception, not the rule.
It’s not weird to not be fluent in queer theory, especially if you’re still new to it.
” She peers into her rearview mirror, then nods in satisfaction when it seems like the driver of the minivan isn’t cursing her too obviously.
“My mom had this one friend who was a drag king—she’s actually the one who taught me to play guitar, out of drag,” she continues, resetting the cruise control.
“She had this gorgeous natural tenor, but she’d done all this voice training so that when she was onstage, her drag persona could pitch down to a baritone and sing live instead of lip-syncing.
She’d do everything from Sinatra to Johnny Cash to Bowie, and I always had fun trying to figure out if she was going to swap around the pronouns or not, depending on the cover.
I asked her about it once, and she said she never really planned it in advance, just went with whatever felt right.
I ended up doing the same thing when I started performing. ”
Emmett makes a questioning sound. “Drag?”
“Ha—no. Well, a few times, just for fun, but it was never really my thing. No, the pronoun thing. Deciding whether to make a cover queer or to sort of queer myself by not making it queer or to play around with where I could mess with lyrics here and there so that the whole thing turned androgynous.” She taps her fingers against the steering wheel, a light staccato rhythm.
“I think that’s how I started writing music, honestly.
Playing around with other people’s words until I ended up with something totally different.
Then I had to write a new melody to make the words fit. ”
“I listened to some of your songs last night,” Emmett says, almost shyly. “You’re very good.”
It sounds like a confession, though Delilah’s not really sure why.
It’s not like she hasn’t been sort of expecting Emmett to look her up—especially after all her babbling about Sam and the album and the recording timeline—but they still sound almost guilty about it.
“What did you listen to? Please don’t tell me it was ‘Sugar.’ That got so overplayed.
Even I was sick of it by the time it finally went off the charts. ”
Emmett shakes their head. “One of them was called ‘Butterfly,’ I think? You were the one singing. I recognized your voice.”
“Oh,” Delilah says, surprised. On the first album that she and Sam put out, “Butterfly” was one of the few songs that Delilah kept almost full ownership of—she’d written it, workshopped it, and done the lead vocals on the track.
She’s always been secretly pleased at how much staying power it has.
“Thank you. I like that one too.” Sam had jokingly called it Delilah’s baby, for how proud she was of it.
“I liked it better than some of the others,” Emmett admits.
Delilah shoots them a grin. “Are you just saying that because I’m driving and you don’t want me to kick you out onto the highway?”
“No,” Emmett laughs.
“Good answer.”
An unexpectedly comfortable silence settles between them.
Delilah isn’t usually good at silence. She always feels an impulse to fill it—with words or music or just the rhythmic tap of her fingers against the nearest surface.
But at least for now, she’s content to just listen to the rush of the pavement under Roscoe’s wheels and the distant sound of the wind.
“Gender-fluid, I think.”
Delilah glances across the cab at Emmett, who’s resolutely looking out the window, not meeting her eyes. “What?”
“I think that’s…I think that’s the right word. The one I like best.” They say it quietly, like they’re still tasting the way it feels in their mouth, and then, “Can we—could we listen to something?”
Delilah smiles. “You’ve got it,” she says, and reaches to turn the radio on.
They arrive in Pittsburgh in better time than expected, thanks to Delilah’s lead foot and a lucky lack of traffic, and spend two delightful hours at 5801, being serenaded by drag queens.
Delilah talks Emmett into splitting a plate of challah French toast that’s approximately the size of both of their heads put together, but Emmett barely picks at it, too busy focusing on the show.
They take the whole thing in with rapturous delight and bright, shining eyes, watching the queens like they’ve never seen anything like them before.
Their wide-eyed wonder has about the same effect on the local queens as it had on their waitress in Philly and the bookstore clerk who’d kissed their cheek.
Delilah hides her smiles behind her mug of Irish coffee as every single one of the queens swings by their table to flirt outrageously with Emmett, who goes a deeper pink every time.
She’s not sure if it’s Emmett’s pretty face or the aura of pure amazement that radiates off them like an almost physical wave, but they seem to attract flirtation like a springtime meadow drawing a swarm of honeybees.