Viv perched on the edge of one chair across from my desk. Mick sank into the other, picking at a weepy bit of acne on his face and gazing at the floor. My office was the only room in the building with a door that closed, so students at The High Desert Bodywork Institute came to me as a de facto guidance counselor. Officially, I was the admissions director, and a licensed massage therapist, a recent graduate of the school, myself. 

“Nelson misgendered Mick, and it was not the first time,” Viv said.

I set aside the Thai salad roll I was eating. Takeout for lunch, the translucent rice wrap and the hint of licorice from the basil, made me feel like I had finally become the adult I was destined to be. An adult who could make a difference in people’s lives, on their journeys to becoming massage therapists. An adult who could really go vegan, instead of accidentally ordering queso fries when drunk. Whose jeans fit right and whose cowboy boots were perfectly broken in. A queer role model making this tiny corner of the world a safer space. It was my job.

“He called him—” Viv dropped her voice to a whisper and said Mick’s deadname, as if Mick couldn’t hear her. “When everyone corrected him, Nelson said it was like that on the attendance sheet.” I waited for it. “You said you’d fix that, Claudine.”

“I’m trying to make that field print. The software is really old, it isn’t set up that way.” In fact, the school had purchased new software. I hadn’t figured out how to migrate the data, yet. Viv didn’t need to know that. “You know this is important to me too,” I said. “My boyfriend is also a trans man.” I felt weird saying it. Parker was old school, stealth.

Mick slouched down further, running his hand through his limp curly hair. “I just don’t want to be called she.” He wasn’t the first trans student at the school, but he was the first to transition during the course of the program.

“I’ll talk to Nelson personally, for sure, for sure.” I knew Nelson, our Swedish massage instructor, was trying. He was a yogi with a bicced head and an even tan, his uniform a black t-shirt tucked into black scrubs. He lectured with a heavy southern accent, in a confident martial arts stance: feet wide set, hands behind his back. Misgendering Mick had nothing to do with his regional background. He’d staked his life’s practice on the principle of yin and yang, the duality of the masculine and feminine, informing and opposing one another but never bleeding together or switching places.

I wanted to do right by Mick and Viv. I had a big soft spot for Mick. I’d poked around that tenderness and decided I wasn’t being creepy, even though I was in a position of power. I tried to imagine knowing Parker, my boyfriend, when he was a teenager, before HRT. I liked to think I’d fight as hard as Viv. Really, gender was not one of the problems that Mick and Viv were bringing to school. Those included: falling asleep during class, smoking pot on the breaks, bickering in the kitchen, and being unreliable with their clinic internships.

“One more thing while you’re both here. You know the part of the handbook with the hygiene guidelines?”

Mick and Viv’s hair had gotten greasier and greasier over the last three months, and even though I personally liked to catch a draft of body odor—it reminded me of volunteering with Food Not Bombs when I was in college—the handbook required students to shower daily. Which was fair, since they were all training by touching each other. Another student had come to me after trading treatments with Viv. “She didn’t smell like regular stinky feet,” he said. “It was like fungus. Are there any essential oils I should recommend?”

Mick and Viv looked blank. Of course, they wouldn’t have read the handbook.

I pulled two off a stack. “I don’t care, but it’s a courtesy to your classmates. Read the hygiene guidelines and try to follow them, okay? I’ll talk to Nelson. Is that cool? Are we cool?”

They nodded. Viv coughed a gnarly stoner’s hack and they slunk down the hall where their best friend from the program, Kayleigh, waited for them. She sang a made-up song about all the weed they were going to smoke.

Nelson was in the classroom talking to Logan, one of the more spiritually minded students. Logan had a man-bun and wouldn’t shut up about his DMT experiences. But we were both from Oregon, so we had bonded over that. Nelson hugged me, the customary greeting at our school. I’d never had muscular men in my life and was always surprised by the way I almost bounced off him, even as he pulled me in.

“Claude, what’s on your mind?” Nelson asked.

“Can I talk to you privately? About Mick?” He and Logan exchanged glances. In my office, I said, “You gotta work on the pronouns.”

Nelson put up his hands. “I know. I was reading the roster, I wasn’t thinking. Maybe you could start writing the name in for me.”

I tried to speak his language, as I ground my teeth at his request for my extra labor. “Being misgendered activates the sympathetic nervous system.”

“Got it.” His intentions were good. “I have to ask you about something else. I have been hearing, overhearing—this is what I think I’m hearing—do you think Mick could be pregnant?”

That activated my sympathetic nervous system. “You mean Viv.”

“No.” Nelson’s eyebrows rose toward his shining scalp. “I mean Mick.”

“What makes you think that?” I worked to keep my voice even.

“We’re doing the pregnancy massage unit right now. Vivian keeps reminding me to say pregnant ‘person’ instead of ‘woman,’—”

“She’s right.”

“I’m trying. Vivian and Kayleigh make comments toward Mick when we talk about pregnancy contraindications. Mick’s been missing morning classes, and when she’s here—when he’s here—spending half the time in the bathroom. The ladies’ bathroom.”

“A healing opportunity,” I said, referring to the school’s conviction that all illnesses occur as part of an ultimately therapeutic process. They had traditionally called it a healing crisis, but recently put a positive spin on the idea. “Or a hangover. Those kids like to party.”

We had to do something about the gendered bathrooms.

After Nelson left, I texted my boyfriend, Parker. “You know my trans student. He’s pregnant.” I wasn’t violating confidentiality, I convinced myself, because I had never used his name.

“All the cool guys are doing it,” Parker texted back.  

“Ha right. He is 18. Too young!”

“Still cool.”

Parker worked in animation. We had met in Albuquerque, a movie city. Now he worked in Vancouver BC, another movie city. I’d just started the admissions gig when he went up north, putting the Canadian border between us. Temporarily.

“Would you do it?” I asked. I had never wanted to have a baby, but if Parker would carry, that opened a whole world of unconsidered possibilities. I felt faint, on a precipice.

“Yeah no,” he typed. “I can barely take care of myself.” My heart slowed to normal.

I worried about Parker alone in Vancouver, sedentary in front of a computer, eating fast food or not eating at all. We had plans to move in together when he returned to New Mexico. I would cook for him: macrobiotic, Ayurvedic. Before that, we had plans to meet at my parents’ house in Portland on the mid-term break at the end of June.

Our romance was essential to my vision of my adult life. When I thought of my future, I made sure Parker was the shadowy, loving figure with whom I shared a home with a breakfast nook and an apricot tree in the yard. I made sure that shadowy, loving figure did not morph into one of my students. It was fine to sneak glances at Mick as long as I didn’t do anything about it. What could I do about it, anyway? Viv would kick my ass.

♡

The first half of the following week, Mick and Viv erased their names from the internship schedule and didn’t show up for classes. On Thursday, they made it to Maxine’s foot reflexology session, Viv giggling with Kayleigh, Mick with his head down on the table next to Logan.

Maxine was my favorite instructor. She was a high femme with snow white hair who shared her encyclopedic knowledge of vitamins and supplements and waxed poetic about the beauty and perfection of the foot. She’d gotten her start in bodywork doing sensual massage and exotic dancing in Seattle. She told me not to listen to our colleagues who insisted that sex work delegitimized therapeutic massage, they were full of shit. Maxine was in her sixties. I wanted to be just like her when I grew up. I was thirty.

“You look good for your age,” Mick said to me once, when Kayleigh asked how old I was. I laughed, tried not to feel flattered. His assessment didn’t necessarily imply attraction.

Mick stayed mostly upright for the lecture. We moved into the treatment trade, Maxine demonstrating the sequence on Logan who did, indeed, have beautiful feet. As the TA, I usually roamed the classroom, answering questions whispered over low-volume New Age music. But we had an odd number, so Mick practiced on me. After a few minutes, he left the room. I got down from the table. Kayleigh was working on Viv, who had her eyes closed and didn’t notice Mick’s departure. I caught Kayleigh’s eye and nodded at her to keep going, then followed Mick into the bathroom. The ladies’ bathroom.

“Hey, it’s Claudine,” I said. Under the stall door, I could see Mick crouched on the floor. “You all right?”

He coughed quietly. After a moment, he stood and flushed, and came out trying very hard to be cool. He washed his hands.

“Are you sick?” I wanted him to confide in me.

“No.” He sounded annoyed. “I had to piss. Sorry. We can finish the treatment.”

Back in the classroom, I shrugged at Kayleigh, but she was busy sharing eye contact and subtle gestures with Mick. It occurred to me then that I was not the trusted friend in this equation. I was the authority figure.

I ran into Kayleigh in the clinic that afternoon, and asked if she knew what was up.

“Mick’s pregnant. They’re going to have a baby. Isn’t that cool?” Her smile wavered when I hesitated too long.

“I don’t know if it’s cool,” I said. “You’re all so young. And babies are…expensive.”

“Don’t include me, it’s not my baby.” Kayleigh waved her hand to clear my outburst. “It’ll be fine. Viv’s dad is helping them out. They were visiting him in Taos.”

Visiting meant asking for money. I said, “They have to make up every missed class.”

“They know. Claude, don’t look so sad. Celebrate new life!” Kayleigh hugged me and minced down hallway in her tiny cutoff shorts, jelly sandals smacking the terra cotta tile.

I wondered who the father was, then reminded myself the father was Mick.

♡

“I can’t come to Portland,” Parker told me over the phone, a few days before I flew out. “I can’t leave work. This project is running way longer than expected. We have to wrap it up.”

Silence. Without even speaking, I was a nagging woman with too many expectations.

I said, “I want to start our life together.”

“I kind of thought we were doing our own things.”

“You’re doing your own thing. I’m here waiting for you.”

“You do important things at the school.” Another silence. Then he said, “I might not be back in New Mexico for awhile.”

“Parker, are you breaking up with me over the phone?”

“I know it’s a shitty thing to do, I get it. I’m a piece of shit.”

My voice rose to a whine. “But when I was there in February, you said—”

He interrupted me. “I thought we deserved one last good time.”

♡

Waiting for my flight to Portland, I scrolled on my phone, refusing to process the loss of my relationship. Kayleigh had posted a picture of herself wearing big sunglasses in the driver’s seat. Viv leaned forward from the back, sticking her tongue out. Mick’s shoulder was barely visible. Hashtag summer break, hashtag 505, hashtag taos bound. Viv posted a picture of mountains blurring past. Mick turned around in the passenger seat to look at her, obscuring the lower part of his face with his hands.

I wondered if he had prenatal vitamins. We could ask Maxine which ones were best.

Waiting for my flight back to Albuquerque’s Sunport, I saw Kayleigh’s post captioned, ‘miss u already.’ On a restaurant patio, Viv kissed Mick’s cheek ostentatiously while his hands covered his eyes. Viv commented with hearts and ‘my #seahorsedad.’ The hearts were insincere. She didn’t really love him, she just loved the idea of him. I couldn’t stop wondering how she’d contrived to get him to carry her baby.  

♡

Kayleigh and Logan were in the kitchen before class on my first day back at work. Logan had both hands around Kayleigh’s skull, with his eyes closed, tracking her core current.

“Claude, did you hear Mick and Viv left?” Kayleigh asked me.

“What do you mean, left?”

Her head ticked to one side and back, subtle. Logan murmured, “Yes, unwind.”

She let out a ragged groan and reached up to touch Logan’s hand, saying, “Thank you, love.” Logan let go and gave her a high five. He was ten years older than her, and married. “They left the program,” Kayleigh said.

It was my job to hear these things first. “Why didn’t they contact me?”

“You were away,” she said. Miss u already clicked into place. “They’re in Taos.”

“I hope it’s for the best,” I said. I did not believe it was for the best. Viv couldn’t take care of Mick. Now I wouldn’t be able to guide him through. Heading for my office, with every intention of closing the door, I ran into Nelson. He hugged me and said, “Welcome home.”

Home was different, now, without Mick to watch over, without the fantasy of my domestic future with Parker. I asked myself if I’d really loved him, or just loved the idea of him. I didn’t feel like an adult, more like a mopey teenager. I started eating cheese and eggs again, comfort food. I bought new cowboy boots that pinched. I left them in my office and walked around the school barefoot. I bought trendy high waist jeans and had to undo the top button when I sat at my desk. I rolled my eyes at the inclusive rainbow flag I’d affixed to the window. It didn’t keep anyone safe from anything.

♡

In October, during Balloon Fiesta, somebody called my name as I filled a takeout box at the Whole Foods salad bar. I looked around, bewildered, then noticed Mick waving wildly from behind the deli counter, engulfed in a too-large chef’s coat. He was smiling bigger than I’d ever seen him smile at school. I hadn’t recognized his voice, cracking and deepening with the unmistakable nasal quality I’d heard in all my friends who started testosterone.

I couldn’t help but grin back. “What’s going on? I didn’t know you worked here.”

“I’m almost off. Can you wait like, eight and a half minutes?”

It felt good to have someone so enthusiastic to see me, especially Mick. I ate at a table outside and waited for him. The acrid smell of roasting green chiles billowed from a rotating metal cage in the parking lot, weirdly appealing.

Without his chef’s coat, Mick was skinny in a black T-shirt.

I always wanted to ask pregnant friends if they’d been trying, or if it was a happy accident, but there are certain things you can’t ask. It had only been a few months since I’d last seen Mick. There was no way he had a baby.

All I could say was, “How’s it going?”

“Viv and I broke up,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“Good,” I said. “I mean, I hope that’s good for you.”

He kind of nodded.

I said, “My boyfriend and I broke up too.”

“You’d been together a long time, right?” Mick chewed on a cuticle.

“Three years.” I thought that would sound like a long time to someone his age.

“That’s how long Viv and I were together.” My heart squeezed, picturing them as fifteen-year-old punks. “She wasn’t always good to me,” he said. It sounded like he was repeating something someone else had told him.

“How’s the job?”

He brightened. “I get a discount. If you ever need, like, lotion and stuff, I got you.”

“Do you think you’ll finish your massage training?”

“Maybe.” He drew out the word, thinking about it. “It wasn’t a good time for me to be in school. I needed to figure some stuff out.” He looked away for a moment. “I have my own apartment now. Do you want to come over and smoke a bowl?” He asked like it was something we did together regularly.

He lived in a dingy studio with aluminum blinds shutting out the afternoon desert sun. Two camping chairs were splayed in front of a sticker-covered laptop with electrical tape around the power cord, propped on a milk crate. Mismatched sheets swaddled a twin mattress and box spring on the floor. Next to an elaborate glass bong, a gauzy beta fish meditated in a bowl.

“It’s my first place all to myself.”

“Even I have roommates,” I said. “I’m impressed.”

We got high and showed each other dumb stuff on YouTube, sitting on the mattress and trading the laptop back and forth, more reclined the more we smoked.

He put his palm on my leg without looking at me, heavy, warm and damp through my jeans. He hadn’t changed out of his work clothes and a sour food odor came from his nylon track pants. I didn’t care. I hooked my hand around the inside of his thigh. He twitched.

With my other hand, I touched his face and turned it toward me, zits peppered across his cheekbones, pretty brown eyes no longer averted or covered.

Mick wasn’t my student anymore.

I hadn’t gotten laid in awhile.

He knew what he was doing. He asked for consent in a hoarse whisper and removed my clothes slowly. I could tell by the way he used his tongue when we kissed that this was going to be good. His sweaty palms dragged across my skin and he wiped them on the sheets. He took his time, moving his mouth from my clavicle to my iliac crest, from my talus to my greater trochanter, until he reached the heart of the matter. I barely had to do anything, except when he came up for breath and asked me to pull his hair. I got my fingers close to his scalp and tugged.

I hoped Viv would hear that Mick had given me head.

Before I left, I went to pee. On the bathroom countertop, Mick had a half-dozen hand-labeled flower remedies with black rubber dropper lids purchased from the student clinic. A dozen smaller bottles of essential oils with rainbow-colored names were lined up in front of them. I was relieved they weren’t the brand Nelson hawked through multilevel marketing to his captive classroom audiences. I sat on the toilet and stared at them for a long time.

As I was heading out the door, Mick asked if I’d buy him beer. I refused his money and called it a trade: I’d smoked his weed. We took my car back to Whole Foods, and I got nervous, but I asked him anyway.

“Were you really pregnant?” I glanced at him and back at the road. Was he ashen, or just stoned in the pale streetlight glow? “Sorry, you don’t have to answer that.”

“No, I can tell you. I was. I lost it.”

“Maxine says—”

“I know. You only lose a baby when it’s not going to live. It wasn’t my fault.”

“How far along?”

“When it came out, it wasn’t much, but it wasn’t nothing.”

“Who was the…donor?”

He told me it wasn’t like that. He was fighting with Viv at a house party. She left in a huff, so he got blackout drunk and fucked Kayleigh’s cousin.

I winced. It wouldn’t do any good to raise the question of whether a blacked-out person could consent, but I couldn’t let it go unmentioned. Mick said his friends told him he’d been all over the guy. Who was only a high schooler.

I thought about the straightedge, upper-middle-class feminists I had gone to college with at the University of Oregon. Self-policing kept us sober, our heads shaved, taking back the night over and over again. Kept us from being interested in boys and men, their dicks or their music. Kept some of us from transitioning, or even identifying as femme, until long into adulthood. How different Mick and Viv had it, queer kids in New Mexico a decade later. A trans guy could fuck a cis guy and get pregnant. His friends and his girlfriend thought it was cool, not a social betrayal. Not the worst thing that could happen, just something that happened.

The Whole Foods parking lot still smelled of blistering chiles, roaster glowing with blue-orange propane flame. I bought a six pack of Marble Red and a four pack of La Cumbre tallboys.

Back at Mick’s apartment, we sat in the camping chairs. He drank quietly and steadily, playing Pink Floyd and Led Zep through the pathetic laptop speakers. He offered me a bong rip and I shook my head.

“Claude, have you ever been pregnant?”

“No, I’m a—” I almost said I was a gold-star lesbian, something I used to brag about before I got with Parker. “No. I haven’t.”

“It fucks you up,” he said. “The hormones.”

I had missed my window for leaving gracefully. I opened a second tallboy.

“You’re on HRT now?”

He told me he had started right before all that, stopped while he was expecting. He’d been injecting testosterone regularly for three months now.

“You feel good?”

He hiccupped, swallowed hard, took a breath, and shrugged. “Yeah. Pretty good.”

“You still talk to Viv?”

“Man, fuck Viv. She was not good to me.”

“She seemed pretty stoked you were gonna be her seahorse dad.”

“Don’t fall for her crap. She is not a good person. Not like you, Claudine.” He turned to me, his eyes glazed half-shut. “You, I would have a baby for.”

I forced a laugh.

He said, “I would like to have a kid, someday. I’ll always remember that one, but I’m glad they didn’t have to grow up with Vivian in their life.” He was growing misty. “I think I could do it again,” he said. I did not want to deal with a crying drunk. “I’m not getting a hysterectomy, just in case.”

He gazed into middle distance, shoulders jerking with his ragged breath. He’d worn a binder while we’d been intimate. Maybe he was putting off top surgery in case he might chest feed, but I didn’t ask any more questions. I had heard enough.

He finished the six pack and drank the two remaining tallboys. When I asked if he really needed another beer, he flipped me the bird, seeming to have forgotten what a good person he thought I was. I felt obliged to spend the night miserably big-spooning him in his narrow bed, on his side so he wouldn’t choke if he puked. But he didn’t puke until morning, and I slipped out while he was in the bathroom.

♡

I was going to have to start driving twenty minutes out of my way to shop at the other Whole Foods, past the grids of strip malls, closer to the foothills. But Mick wasn’t at work yet, if he worked that day at all, so I went to his store for a breakfast burrito, full of melty cheese and fluffy eggs, coffee with cream.

            It was still early, and the horizon filled with hot air balloons. I drove in the opposite direction from my house, toward the Balloon Fiesta grounds. Some were traditional shapes in primary colors, others with neon blocks against black, some cartoon faces or big-bellied bodies, animals with stubby cylindrical legs. The sheer number of them going up at the same time couldn’t fail to strike awe in me, despite how rotten I felt, raw and stunned.

I found myself making snarling faces, thinking of Mick’s bleeding hangnails and chapped lips on my body, in my body. I told myself I was going to have to get tested for STIs. I shouldn’t have indulged my crush. Shouldn’t have become the trusted friend, shouldn’t have made space for his drunken oversharing. Being good at eating pussy didn’t make him a good person.

He had called me a good person, but I wasn’t. I just wanted to play house, play girlfriend, play admissions director, play grown up. I didn’t know how to be an adult. I was pretty sure I didn’t have what it took. Did anyone? We were all a bunch of assholes. Viv, Parker, that kid who knocked Mick up. Nelson with his sun and moon energy bullshit. I was supposed to be the treatment model in his class that afternoon, students learning to tie and tuck the sheets carefully, so they never saw a boob or a pube while their hands were all over one another. There was no calling out. The school wanted us to come in when we were sick, to play natural therapeutics.

Mick had texted me. The preview showed, “I had a great time…”

I considered what the rest of his text might say.

I had a great time, let’s do it again.

I had a great time, let’s have a baby.

I had a great time, until you started asking invasive questions.

I had a great time, Claudine, until you ruined fucking everything.

I turned off my phone. I was going to keep driving north. Past the hot air balloons, past Santa Fe, past the Colorado border.

I couldn’t stand the idea of being touched.

♡

April 21, 2025