Brianna’s roommate and supposed best friend Sierra （a doubleD whose biological viability had by junior year already been twice proven, both times requiring Brianna’s presence at her side in the waiting room of Planned Parenthood） was also enrolled in the class, and each night over dinner at their co-op, she reported the day’s highlights to their male housemates. For instance, wasn’t it amazing that during ovulation, women’s voices increased in pitch? And wasn’t it more amazing that when played audio recordings of women’s voices and asked to rank them by attractiveness, heterosexual men picked the ovulating woman? Every time! Sierra’s high, vivacious voice would go on and on, the pheromones rolling off her like heat, enveloping and intoxicating the rapt boys surrounding her, while Brianna, deep-voiced, narrow-hipped, glandless virgin that she was, shoveled forkful after wretched forkful of quinoa into her mouth.
The term had culminated in Brianna’s conviction that she might actually have ended up with a tricky dissembling Y chromosome, like those Olympic athletes who, despite their convincing vaginas and outward appearance and gender identification, are actually genetically male. These things happened all the time! Or at least to one in thirty thousand people. Brianna’s doctor had shaken her head, dismissing the studies on Swyer syndrome Brianna had printed out and presented her with. “People with Swyer syndrome do not menstruate regularly,” she said, and refused to order any tests, instead writing a script for Ativan.
Brianna’s Smart Starts! students are designed for reproduction, every last one of them. Every day in the classroom, she sees the biological markers of fertility: those high baby voices, the curves in their ill-fitting skinny jeans, the plunging necklines that emphasize their young full breasts. The absolute recklessness. Of course these girls were desired. This classroom is the single realm in which Brianna might feel grateful—smug even—that her own biology and family history and social context and personal decisions didn’t predispose her to this fate. Instead, Brianna is acutely aware that she is, on the deepest level, unqualified for her job, and she’s always waiting to be found out. On her worst days, like today, she looks at her students, not with compassion, but with envy.
Brianna isn’t hideous or sickly-looking. She is clear-skinned and intelligent, reasonably socially adept, reasonably well-adjusted, employed, possessed of her very own double bed. Everywhere you look, people are having sex—in books, in movies, in the bathrooms of Blake’s Lotaburger—her own students have had sex in the unlikeliest of places—but Brianna is trapped by her own cowardly nature, her terrible reserve, and also, she likes to think, by her competence.
The girls start rustling and packing away their journals and books, despite the fact that there are still eight minutes left of class, but Brianna doesn’t bother to correct them. They swivel in their seats, talking to each other, and begin to stretch and stand, while their teacher sits glum and distracted at her desk.
Brianna aligns her pens, closes her grade book and centers it with precision on top of the Nurture Now textbook. The school day is almost over, thank god, and Brianna thinks with longing of home. She’ll sit in the garden outside her casita with her novel, unless her landladies are puttering about back there. In that case, she’ll take her book and her vibrator into the bath and then think about dinner.
Brianna doesn’t feel the need to bear children. She doesn’t feel any urgency to disperse copies of her genetic material into the world. She just wants to have full vaginal intercourse with an adult human male at least once by the time she turns twenty-six.
Amadeo’s mother wakes at five every morning to get to the Capitol building in Santa Fe in time for her job as a secretary—nay, administrative assistant—in the office of Monica Gutierrez-Larsen, Chief Clerk of the House of Representatives of the State of New Mexico. Amadeo has never met Monica Gutierrez-Larsen, but she exerts a force in their house. Yolanda isn’t typically awed by other people, but her boss is the exception. “That Monica is wonderful,” she says frequently. “So educated. Work always comes first for her.” Yolanda shakes her head and concludes with admiration, “A real professional.”