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  A Beginner’s Guide to the Fifth Commandment

  Brian

  I made it back up to my apartment, sprinted into my room, locked the door, slid down along the side, and hugged my knees against my chest. He knew. He didn’t just know I was Rose. He knew about where Rose came from. He knew about my past. My shame. My vow.

  The vow I’d broken today to cover my own cowardly ass.

  I looked at the gown with which I had adorned myself, the one I’d bought and paid for and climbed into after setting up my decoy at the coffee shop. I clutched my chest, hating my disappointment at finding it hard and ft and cking. I breathed in and out of my mouth rapidly, the world spinning around me as I attempted to reassert control, impose some kind of reason or logic onto it. It came up as cking as my body. As cking as my mind. As cking as my soul.

  Fuck.

  ‘Brian, honey? Could you please stop with this nonsense,’ Mom said, and her words were more than memories. They were explosions of sound that echoed through the hallways of my byrinthine mind, smming against stone and pinballing ever forward until the twists and turns were all saturated with the echo of her reprimand. ‘I’m tired of you pretending to be a girl. I need my son back. Your father is gone now, and there needs to be a man in this house. I need it, your sisters need it, our family needs it. And you need it. I… I let you do this for too long. You’re all confused now, thinking you’re something you’re not. What are you going to do when you go to college? When you get a job? A girlfriend? Do you think anyone else will be as tolerant of these… Discrepancies… As I’ve been? As your father was?

  My hands shook as I tried to avoid thinking about how much I loved the feeling of the long, flowing skirt around my legs; how much serotonin pumped through me when I looked at the beautiful red rose pattern; how much it felt like…

  Like me.

  No, no, not me. Like Rose. And Rose wasn’t real. Rose was pretend. Rose was a game of make-believe I’d pyed as a kid, and one I’d mistakenly allowed myself to py again as an adult. Rose was something I put on and then took off before getting back to my reality. Before getting back to… To Brian.

  Brian was the real me. He was. He had to be. Because if he wasn’t, then… Then…

  ‘Think of what the Good Book says, Brian. Honor Thy Father. Do you really think a son who pretends to be a daughter is honoring his father’s memory?’

  I crossed myself, and the words appeared on my lips, a harsh whisper begging God for the strength to put this all away… Only for another cavalcade of auditory memory to sound through the recesses of my warped mind: ‘God wants you to be happy.’

  I’d sat there in my bedroom, no older than ten, my father having asked my sisters to clear out so he could talk to me. He was a slender fellow, lean and wiry like me, with gentle brown eyes and auburn hair worn slicked-back. He’d come home one day to find me dressed like Princess Aurora, complete with a blonde wig, and he’d sat down on my bed with me and put his arm around me. Held me tight. ‘Are you mad?’ I’d asked.

  ‘No. I’m scared for what this means, but I’m not mad. I just… I just want you to be happy. Because God wants you to be happy. So promise me that you’ll always try to be. Okay, kiddo?’

  Honor thy father.

  He wanted me to be happy. And according to him, so did God.

  But what made me happy? I was happy when I was doing my duty, living up to my responsibilities. My family, my mother, expected things from me. They expected someone to go into business, like she had, and like my father had. I was happy when I was what they wanted me to be. It was why I’d… Why’d I stopped. Why I’d put this part of myself away. Why I’d made that promise to Dad at his grave.

  But I’d made him another promise. I’d made Dad a promise, and I’d made God a promise. But what made me happy? What made Brian happy? Brian barely was a real person. He had nothing. Nobody. So why did it hurt this much? If I wasn’t even a real person, then why did the pain feel so real?

  What made me happy?

  I raked a hand through my hair, disappointed to find it so short and boring. Even Dad had worn his longer than I wore mine. Mom had always gotten on his case about it, saying how girly it made him look, how embarrassing it was, but Dad had stubbornly refused to crop it. ‘It makes me happy.’ That was always his response.

  Because God wanted him to…

  Because God wanted me to…

  So how did I do that?

  I was happy when I kept my oaths. But I’d broken one today. I’d bought and paid for women’s clothing with my own money. This ridiculous, gorgeous gown that I’d probably never get a chance to wear. I’d broken my vow, all to avoid a confrontation. All for something I’d never wear again. The only way I’d get to is if I went to a fancy dance, and the odds of that happening were low. But I’d done it, and the first rule of business was to make good on your investments. This was an investment. I had to make good on it, especially when I’d crossed the proverbial fucking rubicon for it. I had to make good on it because that was how I lived up to my responsibilities, and I had to be happy because it was the only way I could keep the remaining promise I’d made to my father.

  I was finally interrupted from my spiral by a knocking sound on my door. I failed to suppress a high-pitched yelp, revealing my presence to whoever was outside. Not that there was anyone else it could realistically be besides-

  “I know you’re in there, O’Neil,” Kyle said.

  I heaved a sigh.

  “I heard that.”

  “Dammit,” I whispered.

  “And that.”

  “Fuck’s sake,” I said, louder this time.

  “And that-”

  “Yeah, I get it!” I said, still with my back pressed to the door.

  “Someone’s in a mood today,” Kyle said.

  “What do you want, lunkhead?” I asked, pinching my eyes shut as tightly as possible.

  “Just checking on you. How’s your throat?”

  Bet you ask girls that question all the time, I thought, then nearly gasped as my lips silently wrapped around the words, felt the whole length and width of them inside my mouth. ‘Girls.’ But that was ridiculous, because I wasn’t… “It’s okay.”

  “And in general? You good?”

  “Uh… Yeah, I guess,” I lied.

  “Good,” Kyle said. He didn’t ask to come in, didn’t compin about having to talk through the door, didn’t… Didn’t mind it. Didn’t mind me. I didn’t think that was possible. “I ran into Rose while I was out.”

  My eyes shot open wide. “Oh?”

  “Yeah. She seemed good. We had a nice, long chat.”

  Inside my brain, I could feel the walls of the byrinth shift, forming entirely new puzzles of its hallways. What was he on about? There was no way he… “What did you talk about?”

  “We’ve got another date lined up for tomorrow night,” Kyle said.

  The hell is he getting at-

  “I’m gonna take her dancing.”

  I gulped. “Like… Clubbing?”

  “No, I was thinking somewhere fancy. She just bought this gorgeous gown, said she wanted an excuse to wear it.”

  “Is that right?” I said, the walls inside changing and rerouting ceaselessly.

  “Oh yeah, real fancy. It looks great on her.”

  My head went hot, the skin of my face burning like a radiator. It was like he was reaching through the door, and wrapping his arms around me, holding me tight with his words and keeping me close and warm and cared for. Seen.

  But how could he see something, see someone, who wasn’t really there? What kind of game was he pying now? Something had changed. A subtle shift in our little battle of minds, an amendment to the rules and to the object of the game itself.

  “But you know me, I’m not much for fancy stuff,” Kyle said. “I was wondering if you knew a pce where a fel could take a beautiful girl dancing. Somewhere cssy, high-brow. Somewhere my girl could get her Scarlet O’Hara on.”

  I balked. Yeah, he was changing the rules on me. That was exactly what the hawker who’d sold me this dress had said. He knew, and he knew I’d almost lost by my own rules. So why was he changing the rules, changing the game, when he was so close to victory? I had to know. So I decided to py, to stumble down the changing hallways of the byrinth and see if I could figure out where this was all going before I got there. “I think I know a pce.”

  “Cool,” Kyle said. “Would you mind arranging it and sending me the details?”

  “A-are you s-sure you w-w-wanna give me that responsibility?” I asked, picturing him picking me up and carrying me to safety in his arms, a handsome prince who wanted to bring his princess to the ball and trusted her enough to guide him there. Even down the winding, ever-changing path through the dark.

  “Of course,” Kyle said.

  “O-okay,” I said.

  “Cool,” Kyle replied. “You sure you okay in there? Need me to get you anything. Do anything?”

  I sat there for a second, silently contempting, wondering if God would give me the answer. But then… He already had. In that moment, I knew how to keep my promise, how to honor my father and my investment both. I knew what made me happy. This game, our game, made me happy. And so did Kyle. “I’m good for now,” I said, a smile slowly bubbling up to the surface of my face. “Let me make some calls, and I’ll tell you what I’ve got.”

  “Sounds good,” Kyle said. “Briar.”

  For a second, I flinched. I thought I’d heard… Well…

  But he hadn’t said that. He’d said…

  He’d said…

  Briar. Like Briar Rose. Like…

  ‘You look good, by the way,’ Dad had said to me that day in my room, where he’d seen me dressed as Sleeping Beauty, told me what he expected of me, what God wanted of me. ‘You look happy like that.’