MAJOR ARCANA: Part Three, Chapter 8

The Moon

Major Arcana is a serialized novel for paid subscribers. For more details, both about the novel and about subscriber amenities, please see the Preface. Previous chapters are accessible (in reverse order) under the Major Arcana tag.

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PART THREE

Chapter 8. | The Moon

The pandemic came during their junior year in high school and relegated their friendship entirely to the online world. In the months before in-person schooling shut down, they’d been planning, singly and together, a pronoun change. A year and a half since their announcement of their nonbinarism, their they/themism, every Tom, Dick, and Deborah in the high school now seemed to be going the “they” route. Even the blonde girls in the Model U.N. and the FBLA—even Maddie Scholtz herself, Maddie Scholtz of the end-of-the-summer pool party and the bloody cashmere sweater—were magnanimously putting “she/they” into their email signatures and social profiles, while many of the (female) teachers, proffering pronoun stickers, also seemed attracted to the polite expansiveness of “she/they.” Ari Alterhaus and Ash del Greco judged this less an expansion of gender than an evasion of it. Whatever the “they” signifier had once been meant to signify to them, to “them” singly and to “them” collectively, whatever Overman-inspired reconfiguration of the flesh by the spirit they’d intended to achieve, it now spelled, as far as they were concerned, the new normative, the new dominant, the new conformist. “She/they,” they thought, was nothing more than a politically advantageous concession to a never-enacted “but maybe I’m not” allowing a blonde girl’s cow-eyed blonde-girlness to persist amid queer critique, while, still worse, “they/them” had become the garbage bag of a reified third sex into which to dump the school’s freaks and losers and to forget about them—indeed, to forget about they/them. 

What pronoun would be more impersonal than “they,” would force a confrontation with mind’s superiority to matter? Some of their classmates took up what were called “neopronouns” like xi/xir, but leaving the English language seemed to literal to them, “them” singly and “them” together. Then one day they had it: sitting on Ari Alterhaus’s bed with their tablet between them, they faced each other and said as one, “It!” Only “it/its” seemed provocative enough in its nihilistic impersonality to recover their mission’s original astringency.

They, individually and doubly, planned to unveil this pronoun shift when they attended the next meeting of the school’s Rainbow Alliance. The organization’s other members looked on them warily, with cold politeness, even though they were ostensibly their fellow “queer kids.” This was how the club’s members tended to describe themselves; Ari Alterhaus and Ash del Greco judged it a contemptibly auto-infantilizing locution and further judged the club’s members as unserious posers who would probably be married with children inside of 15 years. 

Afraid of them, of them together and of them apart, the members of the Rainbow Alliance tended to avoid Ari Alterhaus and Ash del Greco, who had always, since the ninth grade, sat by themselves, in a conspiracy of two, at lunch. Ash del Greco had once overheard in the lunch room the president of the Rainbow Alliance, a beskirted demiboy of what were called weeb tendencies, refer to them—that is, to Ash del Greco, and on account of the scar—as uzumaki, and then laugh nervously.