I met Nico in the coffee shop next to Powell’s Books, where I was spending ten of the twenty dollars my father had given me and praying to any god to let me find a place to go for the night. She wore a studded leather jacket and a pair of huge silver hoop earrings. Her hair was buzzed on one side of the head, and allowed to grow wild on the other. I wanted nothing more than for her to leave.
Instead, she sat down next to me, put her hand on my shoulder, and said “well, you’re a disgusting fuckin sight. Bet you’ve got a story to tell. Unless you like being on sponge duty.”
I stared up at her, my mouth dry.
She looked down at me, halfway pitying, halfway like I was a roach and she couldn’t wait to stomp on me. If only I wasn’t so full of weird goo.
“So?” she said.
A few hours before, I told my parents I was on estrogen. My mother burst into tears almost immediately, telling me that I had promised to wait until 25. My father said he’d noticed I was growing boobs, wanted to believe he was dreaming whenever he stared at my chest. When I told my mother how happy the estrogen made me, she only cried harder.
“Viviane, you’re not taking that under my roof. I don’t want you ruining your beautiful, strong body,” she said.
Once, during a family therapy session, he said trans people couldn’t exist, and mother called him a bigot. Sometimes, Mother almost made it to my side. Most of the time, she was misled. She found herself deep in the echo chamber of Parents with the Intolerable Truth about Trans (PITT), after she wrote a panicked article asking what she could do with me. Every two weeks or so, she’d stage an intervention in the kitchen, where she would tell me about the articles she read on how transgenderism is the new satanic panic or how most trans people detransitioned.
When Father spoke, it was to tell me that he would destroy the pills for me. I had been so grievously deceived. To think that I would be so insistent on my femininity that I would take those awful medications.
It was worse than I had expected—I couldn’t even grab my emergency backpack, which I stashed under the bed with two months supply of estrogen, my combat knife, two hundred dollars, two fresh sets of clothing, a fire-starter, and Little Darling (the plush sheep I’ve had since I was four).
I walked towards the door, meaning to leave, go anywhere else, maybe just vanish. Father caught my wrist as I walked by, pressed a twenty dollar bill in my hand.
“Think it over. I still love you.” He said.
Nico and I sat together outside the coffee shop, my mocha forgotten inside. She listened to my story, and when I finished talking, she laughed at the ground. Her laugh was a shocking, humourless bark. “Isn’t this world such a beautiful place?” she said, “everyone can be so fucking awful. Especially to horrid girls. Name’s Nico, by the way. I’m also an evil beastie.”
I didn’t answer. I’m still not sure whether I was allured or revolted by the way she spoke. Being with her made me realise that I was a parody, slumped against the wall. Like something out of a graphic novel, the kind that wins prizes for being the most stereotypical depiction of trans suffering.
“So, what’s next for you?” Nico asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, “might kill myself.”
“Nah, you haven’t got it in you.”
“What?”
“Here, give me your number. I’ll call you. We can meet when you’re more than a piece of garbage.”
After that, I drifted through life. I slept on friends’ couches, leaving before they made it clear I wasn’t welcome anymore. Life rushed by me, spraying me with moments in time. I returned to my parents’ house in the middle of the night to steal my emergency backpack from myself. The dog barked at me, as I went in the house, but my parents didn’t seem to notice, or maybe just didn’t care. I waited.
I tried to work at a department store. I tried to become a barista. I fucked people who’d never seen trans girls as anything more than sex toys. On the night that Nico called me, I was spending the night with an ex of mine.
Nico wanted to meet me by the Witches Cottage, just off of Wildwood Trail, which was really just a heavily-graffitied defunct guardhouse that everyone liked to pretend was haunted. One of those Portland things. She wanted to meet the next day, early on, before the regular hikers ruined the forest for us. I slipped away from my ex without leaving a note and went to the forest.
She sat on a rotting bench, down by the stream, one dedicated to a beloved politician that nobody remembers. She was working on a piece of art, the earth drowned in an ocean, a peacock sitting atop the sun.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Glad you came.”
“Yeah, nothing better to do,” I said. Above, the clouds had let loose a light mist, which polished the trees to a malachite shine.
“I don’t believe you gave me your name.”
“Oh, I’m Viviane.”
“I’m Nico. I’m the evilest goddamn dyke you’ll ever meet.”
It became our ritual, sitting at the bench by the Witch’s Cottage before anyone else was awake, throwing stones into the tiny stream, sometimes venturing into Portland to grab food and talk further. Sometimes, we didn’t talk at all. She would run her hand through my hair and tell me that I really was a beautiful specimen. She told me that she had tried cocaine, and it was a beautiful experience, like reaching God and learning she was a sniveling thing like the rest of us. She couldn’t draw when she was high because a proximity to God kills the necessity for art.
Two months into knowing each other Nico introduced me to her favorite band, Hop Along, and told me that she wanted to run away with Tibetan Pop Stars blaring from the bluetooth speaker attached to her hip by a carabiner. I asked whether she meant away from Portland, or away from the world, and she said that they were really the same thing.
She told me that she believed at the basis of everything was stippling, that no piece of existence is more than a series of tiny spheres, so all art is ultimately destined to be reduced to circles. Art should not be for anyone, it’s just a way we propagate ideas. That’s all it can ever be.
We argued for a while, and she said she knew I would be more interesting when I wasn’t quite so sad. She called it an artist’s hunch.
When Nico overdosed in my care, I gave her CPR. We had known each other for three months, and she was my most beloved friend. She told me, once, that art in any form is the most selfish thing someone can make, and all people are works of art. I rode the ambulance with her to the hospital, and she squeezed my hand before the doctors told me to let go so they could restart her heart. I never learned if it was my imagination, or one last moment of clarity before the doctors tore her away. I wasn’t allowed inside the building.
Author Bio
Viviane Fae-Moss (she/her/hers) is a young trans writer hailing from the BFA program at Southern Oregon University. She is a fencer, writer, baker, and an all-around enjoyer of things. She tries to find beauty in the small places of the world. Often she can be found talking to things like trees, lizards, and rocks. She has been published in places like 7th Circle Pyrite, Laurel Moon, The Core Review, Ascendancy, Main Squeeze, and Still Here Magazine.
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Yours with mischief,
Alexandra
Lovely. We take care of our trans son, but the stories he tells me about friends turned out by their families break my heart. I hope that you have found some peace.
This is an amazing piece of writing and incredibly touching. Thank you so much for publishing this and, to the author, for sending this out into the world – we need this.