Being Samantha Masters

an homage-prequel to Being Christina Chase

A Good Old College Try

Sammy’s phone buzzed him awake at 8:30am.  He hadn’t been sure that he was going to fall asleep, but he had set the alarm just in case he caught a few hours.  Apparently he’d finally dozed off, but he was pretty sure he saw the sky light up with dawn before that happened.  Most of the night he’d spent rolled up in his sleeping bag, staring at the ceiling, alternating between thinking and panicking.

If his bag—his actual bag, with his actual, boring clothes from home—was here in Rowan and Zoey’s room, then where was the bag that he’d been using?  The bag with all the girl clothes.

He’d checked that bag with the Preview Days people while he did the tour and the classroom visitation.  Otherwise he’d had a hand on the bag since he zipped it closed it in Rowan’s townhouse.  Or his uncle did; maybe his uncle let go on the subway and it got swapped then?  But that made less sense than Sammy’s more hopeful conclusion.

Because it seemed obvious that the girl had to be here at Preview Days.  She must have also checked a bag with the Preview Days table—only she’d checked his bag, of course.  And then when they’d picked up their bags to go meet their student hosts, they’d inadvertantly switched them back.

Which meant she was somewhere on campus, and so was her bag.

And Sammy needed that bag back.

Rowan loved him—as a cousin, the non-kissing variety—and supported him and defended him because she believed that he was trans and queer and a girl, and because of all that, she believed he had been open and forthright with her.  They had a bond of radical honesty, and that bond was predicated on a lie.  To preserve the bond, he had to preserve the lie.

He could not just throw on a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie for the last Preview Day.  He couldn’t just say, “oh, right, these are my actual clothes, I’ve been wearing somebody else’s clothes this whole time, and also I’m not actually trans or a girl, and also I’ve been lying to you.”

So he had to get the bag back.

If the girl whose clothes he’d been wearing was here at Preview Days, then she had, just like Sammy had, a paper coupon for breakfast at the dining commons.  That opened at 9:30 (if he went here, some distracted corner of his brain mused, he could get used to breakfast at 9:30 instead of 6:30 like at home).

He could wear the same outfit as the night before—the outfit he’d slept in for lack of pajamas—but like a fool, like a blithering fucking idiot, he’d scrubbed his face and put on some damn face lotion.  Zoey had insisted.  So now he had an hour to borrow some of Rowan’s makeup, replicate the steps he’d half-seen her do to him, and then hightail it across campus to see if he could spot the girl.

And then he would, like a fucking creeper, follow her back to her dorm room and then… somehow he’d get her bag back, and then everything would be okay.

Makeup was harder than he’d ever imagined.

There were so many steps and so many products and it seemed like more than half the time the products weren’t even labeled, so how was he supposed to tell an eyeliner from a lip liner or a blush from a bronzer from a contouring highlighter?

About half of Rowan’s makeup was in one organizer with tiered shelves, so he carefully and quietly lifted it out from the rest of the detritus that covered her vanity and crept out to the sitting room.  Then he sat on the floor in front of the full-length mirror, makeup scattered all around him, and watched YouTube videos for makeup tips.

Pressed for time, he always picked the videos with the shortest run time.  He didn’t need nuance, he just needed the basics.

Even the basics were complicated.

There was so much blending involved!

He tried to do foundation twice before he realized he was an idiot.  Rowan’s skin wasn’t anything like his, nothing she had matched his skin tone, and consequently she hadn’t ever put foundation on him.  Fifteen minutes burned on nothing.

So he wracked his brain trying to remember what she had in fact done: something with his eyebrows and a very weird-looking stick, some eyeshadow, some eyeliner, some mascara, and those bright red lips she liked putting on him.

He found the weird-looking stick.  He found brow powder.  He watched a video, replicated the steps, and wow did he put on too much.  It was like somebody had used those extra thick sharpies with the wedge tips to define the tops of his eyesockets.  But luckily you could use the weirder end of the stick to scrub most of that off, and he did so until it looked moderately natural.  Right.  Eyebrows done.

The video tutorials for eyeshadow really wanted him to use, like, four different colours that were all perfectly selected to complement each other, and he just didn’t have time to parse all that out.  He picked one sparkly green and dusted the outsides of his eyelids.  He blended, blended, blended, until he wasn’t even sure there was any product left on him, but it also didn’t look like he’d lost a fight with a children’s paint set.

Next up: eyeliner.  On this one he was saved by remembering the idle advice of his cousin as she’d worked on him: liquid eyeliner looked great but was very fiddly, and he’d be best served by using a eyeliner crayon.  He found one of those, pulled his eyelid tight, and lined his eyelid.  First time perfect!  Was luck actually on his side?  But then the second eye didn’t go so well, and he looked lopsided.  He tried to use the corner of a remover wipe to clean that up, but all he ended up doing was erasing a swath of eyeshadow in the process.

Grumbling under his breath, he scrubbed off that eye completely, redid the eyeshadow, blended until his wrist was sore, and then applied eyeliner.  The result was not good, but he didn’t care.  It was passable, and that was all he was after.

Mascara was, somehow, easy—blink into the brush, the tutorial said—although there were little clumps that he decided weren’t too much of an issue.  It was enough, and the longer black lashes completed the look of his eyes.  He recognized those eyes.  They looked right.

He lost a precious minute or two forcing himself not to think about how his made-up eyes looked right and his make-up-less eyes did not.  Lipstick.  Do lipstick.

Lip liner and lip stick were another “two different colours that complement each other” quagmire, and besides he was running out of time.  He grabbed the brightest red he could find, but paused before applying it.  What if he tried something else?  Something a little less screaming bright red, maybe something darker…

He rooted around in Rowan’s supplies (there were a lot of lipsticks) and finally selected one.  He ran it over his lips, careful around his cupid’s bow as directed by a tutorial video.  Then he sat back, looked in the mirror, and smiled.  Yeah.  That did look better.

And he was out of time.

Sammy scooped Rowan’s supplies onto the little organizer, crept back into the bedroom, and deposited it where he’d found it.  He texted both Rowan and Zoey that he was heading out for breakfast and he’d see them later in the day.

He took one last look at his reflection before leaving the dorm room.  His makeup was not, by any stretch of the imagination, good.  He could see a dozen places where his hand was unsteady, where the edge of lipstick or eyeliner wobbled, or where—somehow—he hadn’t blended enough.  But the look as a whole came together if sloppily; it clearly communicated ‘feminine,’ and that matched his clothes.  He wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

He grabbed his borrowed fracket and slipped out the door.

Sammy hurried acoss campus.  He didn’t think getting there ten minutes after the dining commons opened for breakfast would realistically risk missing the girl, but he didn’t want to take any chances.  The half-asleep check-in clerk accepted his paper coupon with a nod and then he hustled into the large and mostly empty room.

It was a simple matter to scan the room and see she wasn’t there—no Black girls at all among the twenty or so students who got here before Sammy.  And then his stomach rumbled, and he figured: he was here anyway, and it might be a while until she showed, so he might as well eat.

Plate piled high with pancakes, sausages, home fries, and bacon, Sammy found a high table where he could watch the stream of people come in to eat breakfast.  He could just perch here, eat tasty food, and keep an eye out.

He was halfway through his plate, having scanned maybe a hundred students shuffling past in all their morning glory, when his plan went exactly sideways.

A loaded tray hit his table and the hoodie kid from the day before sat down opposite Sammy.  Directly across from Sammy, right in the way of his watchful gaze.  “Uh, hey,” the guy mumbled.

Sammy squint-glared at—or rather, through—the guy, but didn’t want to say anything.  It seemed rude to tell him to fuck off, and besides, they’d sat together the day before, it was natural to sit together today, right?  For a moment he thought about suggesting the guy move to the next seat over, next to Sammy and out of his precious line of sight, but his stomach dropped through the floor at the thought that the suggestion might be mistaken for flirting.  

He shuffled his own stool to the right, which almost but didn’t really fix his view, and replied, “Hey.”

Hoodie buttered his belgian waffles—there was a whole row of waffle machines, but Sammy hadn’t wanted to split his attention between cooking a tasty breakfast pastry to completion and keeping an eye out—and they ate in silence for a while.  Finally, hoodie asked, “So did you do a class yesterday?”

“Uh,” Sammy responded, mostly looking past him to the flow of breakfasters.  “Me and Cindy went to, uh, Intro to Anatomy.  Mostly to introduce her to my uncle who was teaching it.”

Hoodie nodded.  “That’s cool.”  He was quiet for a few beats, not even eating.  “I, uh, went to an Algorithms class.  It was cool.”

“Mm,” his unwilling tablemate responded limply, and then felt bad about it.  “That’s your thing, yeah?  Computers and tech and stuff?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he answered.  “It’s not like I could get into, like, football or cars or whatever typical guy stuff.”

Sammy shrugged.  “I could never get into that stuff, either,” he answered without thinking.  “Always seemed, you know, kind of silly.  Strutting around and, uh, posturing about bullshit that doesn’t matter, you know?”

“Yeah,” the other kid nodded.  “I mean, there’s a ton of that in video games, too, but.  It’s not in person, so it’s easier to ignore, you know?”

“Just words on a screen,” Sammy nodded absently, which was quoting somebody but he didn’t remember who. (Later, he’d remember that it had been a vice principal at a school assembly, dismissing a spate of online bullying as beneath everyone’s notice and trusting that, if properly ignored, the haters would just fade away.  The whole school had quoted him, in all sorts of contexts, for the rest of the year.)

“Yeah,” hoodie agreed, thought for a long moment, and then offered, “Sometimes when I’m in chat, I say I’m a girl, so I don’t have to do any of that stuff.  Nobody expects any of it, and I can just, you know, be me.  Not some big masculine caricature.”

Sammy craned his neck to the side.  There was a tall Black girl coming down the aisle… but it wasn’t her.  “Yeah, I used to do that, too,” he answered, distractedly.

Hoodie smirked.  “Yeah?  You mean, like, before you, uh, transitioned?”

Fuck.  He hadn’t been paying attention to the conversation.  “Uh.  Yeah,” he scrambled.  “I guess I wasn’t so much pretending to be a girl, as… you know, just being me.  Girl me.”  But that contradicted his purported status as an Always Knew Tran, and he couldn’t remember if he’d talked about that at lunch yesterday or later in the bathroom.  “I mean, I always knew I was a girl.  But, uh.  Nobody believed me except… except in chat.”

Hoodie nodded and was quiet for a long while.  “But you always knew?” he finally asked.  “That you were a girl?”

Sammy nodded.  He could not keep up this conversation and also scan all the students filtering into the dining hall.  There also seemed to be a sudden flood of them, as if everybody had agreed that 10:15 was the right time to show up at the dining commons.  “Yeah.  I always knew.  But that’s, uh, apparently super rare.”

“Really?” hoodie perked up.

Sammy looked past him.  “Yeah, my cousin—she’s trans, uh, as well—she figured herself out in high school.  And my uncle transitioned a lot later in life.  He had a kid, like… grown in his belly and everything.  Although I’m not a hundred percent sure on that timeline, to be honest.  Anyway, I’m pretty sure he was an adult.”

“That’s, um, that’s really interesting,” said hoodie, staring down at the puddles of syrup left on his plate.  He was quiet for a while, and then asked,“I mean, I know you didn’t have that sort of revelation yourself, but do you think—”

Then there she was: the same tall Black girl he’d shared the bus with from Dover, still strikingly pretty, striding down the entry aisle.  She was wearing a Columbia-branded sweater and what looked like the same jeans she’d been wearing on the bus.  No makeup, which Sammy was surprised to notice.  Had he ever noticed anybody’s makeup before?

Given what she was wearing, perhaps she hadn’t even opened her bag once she recovered it.  Maybe she didn’t even know they’d switched back.

The girl was talking animatedly with her companion, who Sammy was surprised to recognize: Agatha!  She even gave him a short little smile of recognition as the two of them passed his table.

He watched as the two Black girls filed into the breakfast buffet.  Agatha gestured around, talking; the girl nodded.  Yep.  Aggie was showing her around.  Which meant she was probably the girl’s student-host.

Which meant—

“I’ve got to go,” he said to hoodie, and piled all his breakfast detritus onto his tray.  The other kid had been saying something, but Sammy had no idea what.  “Uh.  See you next year, maybe?”

Hoodie nodded, a little confused at the sudden departure.  “Um.  Yeah, sure.  It was nice talking to you, uh, Samantha.”

Sammy barely heard him and didn’t have the bandwidth to respond.  He hurried out the door by way of the dish return, then bolted across campus, back to the dorm.  He hopped from foot to foot waiting for the elevator, and then booked it down the hall to Zoey and Rowan’s door.  He turned the knob and—

It was locked.

Wincing, he tapped on the door, hoping that he’d get a sleepy-eyed Rowan or Zoey, that he could apologize for leaving without a door key and having to wake them up, and let them fall back into bed.

But instead he got Rowan, bright-eyed and smiling.  “Told you not to leave without a key.”  Then she gasped.  “Oh my god, you did your own makeup!”

Sammy let himself be pulled inside and examined up close.  Rowan kept squealing.  “I mean, obviously there’s some tips I could give you, Sammy, but for a first time?  This is so good!” she enthused.

He smiled distantly and thanked her, apologizing for borrowing her supplies without asking, but couldn’t help looking past her.  There on the hook by the door: two keyrings, one of them with two identical-looking dorm keys.  Zoey’s key to Agatha’s room.

Sammy had to get Zoey’s keys plus his own roller bag and leave the dorm room—without Rowan asking what he was doing.

“I was actually hoping to… grab a shower,” he stammered, bending over to extend the handle of his suitcase.  “Think I’ll change in there.”

“And wash off all this good work?” she gasped playfully, pinching his chin as she waggled his painted face back and forth.

She had a point; a shower didn’t make much sense.  But maybe he could turn it into something she’d want to happen.  “Uh.  Maybe you could, like, watch me do it a second time, and give me those pointers?” he suggested, hoping she’d take the bait.

She beamed at him like a thousand suns.  “Oh, I’d love that!  I’m in the middle of a paper, but I could use a study break in, like, twenty.”

“Okay great, back in a bit,” he gushed, grabbing Zoey’s keys and pushing for the door.

Rowan called him back—shit, had he been caught?—but she only wanted to drape a towel over his shoulders and give him her toiletries bag. She also reminded him that he’d have to shave.  He let the door close behind him and heaved a sigh of relief.  Then he bolted back up the hall to the elevator.

Rowan had said that Agatha’s room was upstairs, and there were only two floors above 15.  He pushed the button for 16 and then stalked up and down that hallway, examining the decorated doors.  Not every door was festooned with craft supplies, but decorated doors typically had girl’s names prominently displayed and—there.  Aggie.

With a glance up and down the hallway—deserted on a Sunday morning—Sammy sidled up to the door and tried one of the dorm room keys.  It slid in but didn’t turn.  He took a deep breath, forced himself not to panic, and tried the other dorm key.  It slid in.  It turned.  The door swung open onto a darkened room, window blinds pulled down against the morning light.

Like Rowan and Zoey’s, it was a two-room affair, but this one had a bed in the first room, with a prominent lump in it.  A sleepy voice grumbled, “Thought you were having breakfast.”

“Shhhh,” Sammy whispered, for lack of anything better to say, and darted as quietly as possible into the second room.

“Zoey,” the lump groaned, “if that’s you, I told you no booty calls this weekend, we have a guest.  And Aggie’s not here, anyway, she went to breakfast.”

Sammy ignored the roommate, hoping she’d stay under wraps, because there in the second bedroom was his goal: a blue rollerbag, identical to his own but with very different contents inside.  He rolled his bag up, shifted hers over, and moved his in to replace it.

Then, gripping the handle of her bag as tight as he could, he bolted out of the dorm room as fast as he could.

Sammy was becoming something of a connoisseur of surreal experiences, but nothing so far had topped watching his reflection in the mirror, inexpert makeup making his eyes look all pretty, while he shaved his face.  The incongruity was staggering, but also as every swipe revealed more of his face, the result was both not what he was used to seeing in the mirror and also disturbingly pleasing.  His beard shadow had interfered with his amateur makeup, and removing it made all the features of his face work together again.

As soon as he had scraped the last of the shaving cream off his face, he hurried to pull out one of Rowan’s makeup wipes and scrub his eyes clear.  He looked into the mirror to make sure he’d got it all, but he did not actually see his own reflection; not his whole face.  He let the little brown gremlin go unobserved.

The moment he had locked the door of the bathroom behind him, he’d verified that the bag he’d stolen had girl clothes in it, and wasn’t somehow a third bag loaded up with, who knows, bricks of cocaine or something.  Now he threw himself into the shower to scrub and disassociate… but not take too long.  Rowan was expecting him back and didn’t know—and didn’t need to know—that he’d taken a little field trip up to floor 16.

He dressed in the only-slightly-steamy bathroom, complete with fake boobs this time.  Remembering the chilly weather, he pulled out a flannel to wear overtop everything else.  It was pinky-orange plaid, but complemented the stretchy grey tank and pleated black skirt he’d also found in the bag.  Then he returned to his cousin’s room to show off his newly-acquired make up skills.

She confirmed that she didn’t have any foundation or contouring that would work for his skin, but did suggest a light layer of blush, which Sammy had to admit did emphasize his cheekbones nicely.  He was not to worry too much about eyeshadow—it was fun, but not necessary—but she complimented him anyway on the tint matching his own colouring.  Not that he’d even thought about that.  And apparently the weird scissor-thing that opened and closed its little rubber jaws was an essential step before applying mascara.

She also remembered, halfway through, to supply him with his morning pill, which he eagerly slipped under his tongue.  She then showed him how lip liner was actually just an easier version of the eyeliner he’d used.

The end result of Sammy’s newly- and hastily-acquired makeup skills paired with Rowan’s guidance was a visible upgrade.  At his cousin’s enthusiasm, he forced a smile into the mirror; only when she looked away did he look again and allow himself a much smaller, more genuine smile for a job well done.  Even if it wasn’t a skill he’d ever use again, it was nice to be visibly good at something.

“So what’s on your schedule today?” Rowan asked.  “After lunch.”

Sammy glanced at his phone.  It was, indeed, very nearly noon.  “Um.  Apparently I get one-on-one meetings with admissions and financial aid, at 1:40 and 2:20.  That sounds super fun and very skippable.”

His cousin considered him for a long moment.  “You should go,” she told him, uncharacteristically serious.  “They’ll know exactly what you need to get in here.  Which you want to do, yeah?”

Sammy looked away.  He strongly suspected they’d only tell him that he didn’t belong here and that he didn’t stand a chance of getting in.  Rowan had to prompt him again before he answered.  “I mean, I do.  Want to go here.  But.”

She laid her hand on his shoulder and suddenly he was fighting back tears.  Where the heck had this come from?  He never cried.

“Hey Sammy,” Rowan said softly, and waited until he looked at her.  “You’ll never know unless you try.  Right?  I think you owe it to yourself to give it as good a try as you can.  Which means going to the one-on-one.  And taking notes.  You need a notebook?  I’ve got so many notebooks!”

Which is how Sammy came to be carrying a sickeningly vibrant notebook, all the colours super-saturated as they depicted what could only be a drug-induced hallucination involving kittens, dolphins, and horses, all at once.  It even had glitter stamped along some of the illustration’s lines.  Rowan insisted it was “retro” and an homage to Lisa Frank, whoever that was.

He waited in the admissions office lobby for his one-on-one with the lurid notebook on his knees, trying not to look at or get lost in the nonsensical scene its cover depicted.  Finally, his name was called, and he went in to give it his best try.

“It was terrible,” Sammy moaned.  “I was so useless.  I didn’t know what to say or how to say it.”

“It couldn’t have been that bad,” his cousin said soothingly beside him.  They were sitting at a little cafe that somehow served both fancy coffee and killer fries.

He sighed gustily at her.  “It felt like getting called into the vice principal’s office because your grades are shit and they are really concerned about your social development and they want to know what the problem is and you can’t just tell them, ‘it’s because I’m shit at everything’ but they really think there’s some other single, simple answer to the whole problem—the problem that is, you know, the fact that you’re shit—and they think that you also know what this other problem is but you’re just kind of embarrassed about saying it out loud, so they’re going to be really nice to you until you spill it out, but there is no answer because the fact of the matter is, you’re just useless and you always have been.”

“You’re not useless—” she started to protest.

But he cut her off.  “According to every teacher and guidance counselor I’ve ever had, I am.  I mean, they never said ‘useless,’ but every single one of them gave me this look of disappointment, as if I could have been a better student, a better athlete, a better—I don’t even know—student journalist or wood shop carpenter or whatever, if I just—” and here he waved his hands as if performing a magic trick “—applied myself.  But nobody ever told me how to do that, and I never figured it out on my own.”  He took a shaky breath.  “If that’s not useless, I don’t know what is.”

Rowan put a cool hand over his on the table.  “A lot of us feel that way growing up,” she said gently.

“Yeah, well they all seemed to think it was just me who was specially fucked up.”

“Well,” Rowan said with a rueful sigh, “they’re just not set up for trans kids.  Especially a little country school up in the mountains.  They don’t understand us.”

Ah, thought Sammy.  “A lot of us feel that way” wasn’t just people who had difficulties; Rowan’s sympathies were limited to trans kids.  Barking up the wrong tree again, not that it was her fault.  Sammy’s problem wasn’t that he had been trans all along, Sammy’s problem was that he was a fucked up failure.  But he still had to play along.

So he shrugged.  “That didn’t seem to matter in the one-on-one.”

“But you took notes, yeah?” she asked, patting the notebook where it lay on the table between them.

“I mean, yeah, fat lot of good it will do me.”  He stuffed more fries into his mouth.

“This place is intimidating,” his cousin said, tipping her head to the side.  “Even for me, and I basically grew up on campus.  It’s understandable if you feel overwhelmed.”

He nodded, ate more fries, washed them down with a drink that seemed like it was as much cream and sugar as it was coffee, not that he was complaining.  Maybe, if he let her believe he was comforted, she’d drop the issue and stop trying to blame all his problems on being trans, which he, you know, wasn’t.  “Yeah, I guess.”

Rowan smiled.  “You know what you need?”

“More fries?”

She slapped his forearm.  “You need to come chill with your people.”

He didn’t know what she was talking about, and told her so.

“The last bit of the Preview Days schedule is affinity group student organizations,” she explained with a grin, “which I know because I helped prep the open house for Seekyuway.”

“For what now?”

“The Columbia Queer Alliance,” she all but squealed, grinning like a loon.  “CQA.  We’re the oldest queer student organization in the world!”

“Uh, that’s… cool?”

“And today we have pizza.”

“Well.” Sammy scraped the last bits of french fry out of the basket.  “That’s a compelling argument.”

“This is, like, the queer lounge,” Rowan explained as she pushed open the door labeled Stephen Donaldson Lounge.  “All our events are here.”

The lounge was mid-sized but packed with people who collectively bore a surprising diversity of hair colours.  Or maybe that wasn’t so surprising, after all.  There were, though, all sorts of people there—tall, short, broad, skinny, hot, and… well, not so hot.  Sammy had worried that everybody would be beautiful and sexy and he’d just be, you know, him.

He’d gone the whole day with makeup that he’d done himself, which wasn’t as good as Rowan had done the days before.  Throughout the day he’d thought about it, worried about how it might be slipping or fading off his face or something.  A few times he’d ducked into a bathroom or reversed his phone camera to double check. Rowan had made sure he took her borrowed lipstick with him, and that, at least, he’d touched up a couple times.

But he still felt a little naked today, as if his girl costume was a more tenuous than it had been before.  As if his real gremlin self was showing through the pretense.  He didn’t like the feeling.  Sammy always felt self-conscious, but this was a whole different level.  He couldn’t ignore it, he couldn’t distract himself; it was as inescapable as his own face.

With so many bodies it was rather warm, which made Sammy rethink his last-minute stop to swap out the skirt he’d been wearing for Zoey’s favourite jeans.  He consoled himself with the thought that he could use overheating as an excuse to bail.

Sammy was pretty sure he was queer in some way—after all, he’d rather enjoyed kissing Vikram and Finley the other night, not just Agatha and Zoey.  So he qualified to be here, even if his qualifications were different than Rowan might think.  But he still felt out of place, like he had invaded somebody else’s space.  He wasn’t sure how long he could stay here, feeling like a trespasser.

The music playing behind the waves of conversation cut out suddenly and a young woman leapt up onto a chair.  “Hello and welcome!  This is the Columbia Queer Alliance open house and mixer-thing and you’d really think that by now we’d have a good name for this event that we do every year because we are the oldest queer student organization in the woooorrrrrllld!”

The rest of the room broke out in cheers at that, and with a reluctant smirk Sammy joined in.  The brag had the feel of an old joke, but he could tell the students were also rather proud of their group’s distinction.

The girl on the chair went on: “My name is Lena; my co-conspirators Allison and Patrick are around here somewhere, lurking in the background.”

A hand shot up from one end of the room and waved; from the other side somebody griped, “Somebody’s got to refill the soda tub!”

“There they are,” Lena crowed, pointing at those two corners of the room.  “Anyway, I’m gonna do a quick schpiel that I’m going to repeat every fifteen minutes or so as people come and go, so my apologies to the regulars who’re here for the whole time slot, because I’m pretty sure you’re already tired of my voice!”

Despite a few good-natured, shouted protests, she went on: “CQA has two primary purposes here on campus.  First, we’re a safe space where queers of all stripes can come socialize, make friends, eat pizza, and, well, pick each other up.”  The room laughed.  “And I should be clear that last one is not one of our institutional priorities, it just sort of happens.”

“The other side of CQA is our commitment to activism,” Lena continued, and then had to stop herself to allow for cheers, again.  She nodded in happy acknowledgement.  “CQA was founded as an activist organization to lobby the school administration to support its queer community and today we still do that and we also reach out to the surrounding community to foster understanding, acceptance, and celebration of queer life, community, and also we queers ourselves.”

“If you are a queer who comes to Columbia, this is the place where get your sweet sweet hit of queer community and this is the place that we organize from,” Lena declared proudly.  The room yelped and whooped.  “There’s some pamphlets and posters and stuff over on that wall about some of the stuff we’ve done.  And you can also ask the people you meet here what it’s like to be queer at Columbia.”  She put the back of her hand to her mouth, as if she were sharing a secret, even though she kept speaking at the same elevated volume: “It’s pretty awesome!  Anyway, welcome to our mixer-thing, I will return to say the same exact thing in like fifteen minutes!”

And with that, she dropped off the chair and the room went back to its varied conversations.  Rowan squealed, waved over the heads of the crowd, and then dragged Sammy across the room to where she’d spotted Finley.

The genderqueer was dressed down from the club—a long skirt, a band tee shirt, and about the same amount of makeup, just without the glitter tonight—and smiled wide when they saw Sammy approach.  “Hey, lover,” they grinned, and pulled him close for a crushing hug.  When the hug was done, Finley kept their arm around Sammy’s waist.

Sammy was being introduced to other people, but his brain worked, molasses-like, on how he felt about Finley’s lingering contact.  He didn’t mind it, exactly; it was comfortable and warm and a part of him wanted to lean into their side.  But some part of it rankled just a little.  Wasn’t Finley being a little presumptuous?  Especially after they called Sammy ‘lover,’ even if that had been playful.

He caught a giddy look from Rowan and suddenly he realized the image that they were presenting, that he was a willing participant in.  He was the girl on Finley’s arm.  And yes Finley was genderqueer, but they were taller and stronger than Sammy and had that immaculately-kept beard and…

Whoever Sammy had just been introduced to, they probably thought Finley had fucked him.  Like, in the butt.

Sammy’s whole body flushed hot and he almost did lean into Finley’s side just for support.  He was very suddenly very not okay with this.  His lips worked, trying and failing to find words.

Only Rowan seemed to notice, her look turning from giddy to concerned.

A few neurons in Sammy’s brain connected.  He looked down at his phone, then to his cousin.  “Uh.  Jessica just texted,” he stammered.  “She, um, she needs help.”

“Oh,” Rowan responded, covering her surprise well enough that Sammy doubted anyone else noticed.  His cousin reached foward to pull him away from Finley.  “Scuse us, folks, we’ve got an errand to run.”

She dragged him through the crowd towards the doors, but before they got there he tapped on her hand where it was vice-gripped on his forearm.  “We don’t need to leave-leave,” he told her, and they came to a stop.  “I just… needed out of that situation and didn’t know how.”

Rowan shifted her grip on his forearm to bring him into a hug.  “Okay, I get it.  Good use of the Girl Rules, though.  Jessica comes through for us once again.  We are such good friends to her.”

He nodded, catching his breath.  “Thanks.  Yeah, I dunno, it’s not like I don’t like Finley, it was just… a lot, all the sudden.”

“Yeah, well, Finley is a lot, all of the sudden,” Rowan sympathized.  “You want me to talk to them?”

“No,” he answered immediately, and then tipped his head side-to-side, considering.  “Well, maybe.  It’s not like I’m going to see them again this weekend, and I don’t want to leave with them thinking… I don’t even know what I want them to think.”

Rowan hugged him again, gently.  “You don’t have to figure it all out right now,” she cooed.  “Come on, let’s get some pizza.”

As one of the event volunteers, Rowan was scheduled to spend all three hours of the open house restocking snacks and answering questions.  Sammy didn’t have to stay, she told him; there was a coffeehouse thing happening across campus that he could check out, or even just crash in the dorm room if he wanted.  But Sammy was content to eat free pizza and shadow his cousin around the room.

She seemed to know everybody and everybody smiled at her when she struck up conversations.  She moved around the room familiarly, like it was the living room of her house.  Sammy had to smile a little.  This wasn’t the Rowan on show, like she’d been at the club or the frat party or even with her parents, shining her light so bright it dazzled all onlookers.  This was Rowan at home.  Comfortable.  With her people. 

More than once somebody called her over to talk to a prospective student about being trans on campus.  Sammy stood on the periphery of those conversations, half-listening.  He’d expected her to introduce him excitedly, saying, “This is my cousin Samantha, she’s trans, too!” but that never happened.  She gave him space.

On the fourth or fifth such conversation, Sammy surprised himself by giving his name.  He didn’t say he was trans; he knew he looked like it, and the actual trans kid grinned in patent recognition.  They talked about superficial stuff: what they’d done and seen through the weekend, what they hoped to study, how pretty the campus was.  The conversation was short and Sammy found himself smiling as they parted ways.

Lena climbed up onto a chair and repeated her ‘schpiel’ a few more times, each version tighter and more streamlined and more ignored by the crowd who’d heard it all before.

As the crowd was starting to thin out, a delicate pair of arms wrapped around him from behind and he was hugged fiercely for a moment.  Zoey then let him go and crushed Rowan in the same hug.  “Hey, bitches,” she sighed happily.  “How’d it go?  Sorry I couldn’t be here.”

Rowan responded enthusiastically, noting that they’d gone through more than twenty pizzas.  The three of them chatted for a little bit—Zoey complimented his choice of jeans—with the deflating energy of a busy event finally wrapping up.

“What were you up to?” Sammy asked Zoey, “if you couldn’t be here and all.”

“Oh, Aggie and I were showing her prospective student guest around campus,” the girl answered.  “Spent most of our time at the Black Caucus, which was super comfortable for my white ass, let me tell you.  I just stood on the sidelines and tried not to look like a member of the oppressor class.  But we couldn’t end the evening without visiting CQA.”

Sammy faked a laugh to match Rowan’s genuine amusement while he furtively scanned the room.  Agatha’s guest was here?

She was.  Grabbing a soda across the lounge, chatting with Agatha.  The girl looked up towards Sammy.  Their eyes met.

He had to stop staring at people he was trying to not make eye contact with.

The girl lifted one eyebrow—a minute gesture that Sammy could feel across the room—and her lips spread into an odd sort of smile.  Like a cat who’d spotted her prey.

Sammy struggled to smile back without looking awkward, embarrassed, or guilty.  Here he was, having stolen her bag and now wearing her clothes.  He’d been caught red-handed.

The girl sauntered over, taking her time to traverse the thinning crowed but also never taking her eyes off of the thief she was hunting.  And then she and Agatha stepped into the conversational circle of Sammy’s trio.  Aggie pecked her girlfriend on the cheek.

“I’m Sydney,” the girl from the bus told him, and nodded at her own flannel pulled around his shoulders.  “You know, I used to have a flannel just like that one.”

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