Nico in his The Velvet Underground & Nico shirt.

My name is Nico. It has always been Nico. It felt like a good name when I tried it on. My mother named me after a singer most people my age don’t even know. On most days it sounds like a boy’s name, though on some days, usually a Sunday morning, it sounds like a girl’s name, but I’m definitely not a girl. My name sounding like a girl’s name doesn’t bother me anymore. It used to, like when I was a kid, hey faggot, how come you got a girl’s name, but not anymore. There aren’t very many Nicos, maybe a barber once in one of those ghetto barbershops where everyone is tripping over themselves to look cool, a skin fade kid with a Wahl in one hand and a girl’s digits in the other, grey sweatpants and black Vans and a drooping eyelid that’s somehow endearing, I’m stealing glances of him while in the chair waiting for the next call, hoping he’s the one, the double quicksilver echoing my reflection in a thousand shop windows, I’ll be your mirror, and when you have an unusual name like mine you always pay attention to others you share it with, like when you notice all the cars just like your car, my mother’s favorite song, Sunday morning, a song father approved of, when my days were laid out for me, my life simple because everything was preplanned, I didn’t have to think of what to wear, what to say, deciding if I was a boy or a girl, the fate of the nation trapped in the web of my lattice fingers. I pull on my threadbare brown corduroy pants and a green cardigan mother found at Goodwill for 12.99, so today I will be a boy. 

James Nulick is the author of several highly acclaimed novels including Plastic Soul, The Moon Down to Earth, and Valencia. He is working on a new novel.