“No. I mean, I’ve always liked girls, but there was nothing strange about that because I didn’t know I was winkte at the time,” said Gogo.
“You never told me what that means,” said Vern.
Gogo bit the inside of her cheek and shrugged. “It doesn’t translate to English.”
“Try,” said Vern, sensing that Gogo was holding something back. It raised Vern’s defenses, and she braced to be lied to.
Gogo looked at Vern, and Vern looked back, their eyes locked fretfully. “For wasicu,” began Gogo, “it’s simple. There’s men, there’s women, and that’s it. From birth, you’re forced into a role, and fuck you if you can’t fit into it.”
Vern understood this perfectly well. She’d been victimized by this same system.
“For Lakota, there’s more flexibility, more than just man and woman. So, me? I’m one of the more. When I was born, they guessed from what they saw that I was a boy, but I wasn’t a boy. I’m winkte. That’s the best I can explain it.”
Vern, throat dry, took several moments to digest Gogo’s words. “You mean you used to be a boy?” she asked, whispering.
Gogo shook her head. “I was never a boy. It’s like—like Howling and Feral. One might get one idea from looking at them, but one wouldn’t necessarily be right,” Gogo said. “I thought you’d understand.”
“I do understand,” said Vern defensively, taking in Gogo’s words. “I guess I thought I’d invented it, is all.”
At least that made Gogo laugh, and the tension dissolved between them.
“I’m kind of like you, too,” Vern admitted, and Gogo looked at her questioningly. “I don’t know if there’s a word for it. I was born … wrong.”
In the woods, Vern’s differences were a point of pride, but she never knew when, among people, they’d reveal themselves as flaws.
“Nothing’s wrong with you. Nothing. You can tell me anything,” said Gogo.
“I’m in-between,” said Vern quietly, looking away shyly.
Gogo reached for Vern’s chin and turned her face to her. “It’s okay,” she assured. “There’s a word for that, you know. In English.”
“I’d rather not know it, then,” said Vern.
Gogo nodded. “Why not?”
“Because without a name for it, it’s just something I am. A part of life. Once it’s got a name, I know that means someone has studied it, dissected it, pulled it apart. When something has a name, they can say it’s bad,” said Vern, and she didn’t want to hear anybody else’s thoughts on what was bad anymore.
In fact, the more likely someone was to say something was bad, the more thought Vern would give to its potential goodness. Folks said disease was bad, but the fungus had gifted her a power she’d never had as plain old Vern the Cainite. Even the hauntings had a splendor.
In the living room, the frozen girl-children shivered by the woodstove. Lucy read. A woman chopped onions, and a magpie pecked at the body of a black bear.
Though their presence tore away at Vern’s sanity, they were—or would be—a fount of knowledge. She needed only to figure out how to reach them.
Her body existed beneath a veil, but that would’ve been true without the fungus, too. Every body held something hidden, millions of microbes dwelling inside each person. Babies gathered them at birth and in their early years. For the rest of their lives, they remained. Passengers.
Whatever Eamon Fields and Ollie had done to Vern, that was not the fungus’s fault. Complex enough to hold the lives of however many thousands in its cells, it was a living being as much as Vern was.
Vern thought of Howling and Feral, how they’d lived in her body. During that time, she had nourished them, but after their birth, with all their love, they’d been the ones to nourish her.
So, too, would the fungus.
19
WINTER SOFTENED into spring, and Vern luxuriated in the damp, golden afternoons. The mountains glistened with light, but the conifers still hid a shadow world.
Vern stood half-naked at the edge of the clearing where snow-speckled grasses transitioned to woodland. Wind washed over her, and her passenger shuddered, alive. It was not lost upon anyone that it was growing. Vern could no longer wear her own tops. She lived exclusively in Gogo’s baggy hand-me-downs, but she preferred her nakedness.
Vern’s exoskeleton was hard as bone, but it had flex, too, swelling over her shoulder blades and down the sides of her back, connected to bony nodules along her spine.