April 17, 2015

  Camille

  “Camille…” she whispers.

  I look into Nick’s eyes, our heads pressed close. I feel like I’m sixteen again— alive, sensitive, arg into a woman’s touch. She graces my stomach with her fingers. Softly, delicately, she moves around to my back, makes her , and es back forward, broadly, softly cirg my breasts, and holding them.

  It’s all the sweeter with Nick, having found my way back to who I was after all of this time, in the bed my… “husband” sleeps on.

  “Please…” I whisper, uo ceal the desperation in my voice.

  She leans forward and kisses my neck, knowing, by this point that it drives me crazy, aly, but firmly, pinches my nipples, sending warmth through of my chest, as I tense.

  “Oh…”

  Nick ughs a little bit, pleased with herself. “It’s been a while for you, hasn’t it?” she asks, though she knows the answer. All I do is nod my head, guilty of having wasted so much time not being with women, not being with her. She goes ba to kiss my neck more, I tell she wants to su it, and I wao, but I ’t risk a mark. She starts massaging my breasts while she does it, drivis, and I don’t think so muymore. Feeliouch, riding the chemicals, everything feels so good, eyes closed, all sense shut off except for touch, and listening to her whisper things to me.

  And then there’s a crack of the bedroom door opening, so hard that the sound is absorbed by the surrounding walls and the rest of the house. Suddenly, Nick’s hands stop moving, a go of me, and all the chemicals drain out of me. David is looking at me, with Nick locked in my legs.

  She pushes me off of her, and I pull part of the bedsheet in front of myself, feeling my hair whip around as I quickly turn to cover myself up.

  “I’m gonna go”, she says, and I ’t bme her, as she quickly puts her clothes on.

  I hear doors closing because David just got home with the kids, and I see in my head the living room from a specifigle, the boys watg this very gay looking woman awkwardly leaving right after they got home.

  “So that’s your friend.”

  I open my mouth to try to say something—

  “Leave.”

  “Wh-

  “I thought you were over this, but evidently you’re not. That makes you shitty, Camille. Leave.”

  There’s something so childish about the way he says it. The thoughts of a man who has never really had to work through anything logically. It’s not as if he’s wrong— I did tell him I was over women, in an attempt to keep the peace, and he did believe it because it was easy, and I ’t bme him-- it’s not like I didn’t want him to believe it.

  Shame coats my insides as I put my clothes ba, and pull my hair back, the room no longer elegantly filled with natural light, but strangely dark, almost damp feeling on the cool carpet. A membrane has been breached, something’s ged, but it feels more like something finally happehat’s been, in hindsight, obviously going to happen for years. It doesn’t take long for this perspective to set in, which means maybe he’s not surprised because he was already fag the fact that it would happen.

  I feel like I’m doing the walk of shame as I exit into the living room, grab my purse, and leave.

  Chloe

  I hear the door close, which is weird, because we all just got home. A car starts and I go out to see— it’s Mom, abruptly leaving. I wao talk to her after having to spend all day with Da Boyz, as Sylvan calls the group to Dad. I pull out my phone and send her a text, “where are you going???”

  I go out into the living room area. Casey and Sylvan watch TV. “Mom just left…”

  “Who cares?”

  Okay, I’m not really sure what else I expected. “Great. Thanks man.”

  I find Dad, standing i, washing dishes.

  “Where did Mom go?”

  He looks bothered.

  “Ask her.”

  “Well, I texted her, but she’s probably driving. But you told her to leave.”

  “I don’t know where she went. Holy, Ross, I really don’t care.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t. If you’re upset, tell her, so she e pet on you like she always does.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know. You always have your fug headphones in, why don’t you go do that?”

  It’s upsetting but I have to stop and remind myself that the message here is just an eborate way to tell me to go away, so I do, but I turn bad ask about something.

  “Who was that woman?”

  He doesn’t take his eyes up from the sink, but he shuts the water off and flicks the water off his hands into the sink.

  “I guess it was your mom’s girlfriend.”

  We all look at him, but none of us say anything. I turn around and walk bato my room.

  Through the wall, I hear Sylvan start to say “I don’t know what his deal is”, the usual Sylvan tactic of starting to talk about me to break tension, because I’m an acceptable target, girly and emo. The only one who likes Mom very mu this house, where tensios pumped through the vents instead of ditioned air.

  I try to look at my phone, but it all seems meaningless. None of the i line break jokes capture my brain. I scroll through music to try to soundtrack the moment and use the songs to get a foothold on how I’m feeling, but nothing in any of my lists seems to make any sense.

  So I put it away, take oep forward and ba my room, stantly. The air feels still, and I feel frozen, watg the dust orbit in the light from the window, and I realize, for ohat the feeling mounting in my stomach is actually pure ay.

  I pull my pho and call Mom, but it goes to voicemail.

  “Hey, uh, I was w where you went. I wao talk to you whe home. Not anything serious just about, you know. Whatever. I’ll… talk to you ter, I guess.”

  I stand, looking at the air for a while, before it feels like some weird loy brain stem releases and I think again.

  I sink into my puter chair, and move between different tasks that do nothing other than keep my hands busy— drawing art css assighree-dimensional shapes and shading them with the same song o, thinking about things I want to read ter, pying a game for a few minutes. I remember I have homework to do, so I stare at the Math worksheets, but they don’t make any fug sense because I always miss something in css, and then Mr. Burke won’t tell me the thing I missed when it’s actually been handed out. “You should have taken notes” he always says, as if he ever told us what to write.

  An hour passes and I hear my phone vibrate.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey, where did you go?”

  “I’m… at a hotel. Your dad told me to leave.”

  “What happened?”

  She pauses, like she’s thinking something over.

  “It’s hard to expin.”

  “He said you had a girlfriend.”

  There’s a pause.

  “Are you gay?”

  Another pause.

  “I think so” she starts, hedging her bet. “Nick isn’t my girlfriend, but… yes. I’m gay.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “Are you upset?”

  “Not really. Not like I bme you.”

  It’s awkward and quiet for a few moments.

  “I love you.” I tell her. I do, and she o hear it. “I wish you were here.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Like I said, I ’t really bme you, I guess. I just wish…”

  I wish she didn’t have to leave.

  “Don’t bme anyone.”

  “I’m not… it just… sucks.”

  Another aause.

  “I know. I have to go. I love you though. I’ll see you soon.”

  “I love you.”

  And the phone call is over. Life is different, my body is ed in ay. I look around and suddenly I’m not tuning anything out anymore. The baseboards against the wall, the sound of the tral air, the smell of the bedroom, as if I’d walked into it after spending days away. Everything feels immediate, real. Shit.

  June 3, 2016

  Chloe

  “So, what do you think?”

  In Mom’s house— a do inside of a brownstone— she looks at home, wearing her professsses and greying updo, among the occasional exposed brick wall, tasteful decoration, and bookshelf, filled with English teacher certified novels and poetry. There’s a coffee table, with the book of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville’s love letters on it, and several pens around, because Mom treats every book as if it’s a workbook. There’s also Diving Into The Wreck, and I shift unfortably, knowing that the woman who wrote it spoke positively about The Transsexual Empire.

  “I like it a lot.”

  It’s something I always thought, but now it’s real. At home— ba Raleigh— she never got to be this much of herself. Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, I see months of Mom, finding furniture for her little home, finally able to make it in her own image, rather than being crushed by happenstand a ck of fideo a generically decorated house for her four children, one of which was her husband.

  She leads me to a long, narrow room, shaped like the building is, only much smaller.

  “Here you are! It’s not much yet, obviously, but we’ll go shopping soon.”

  It’s empty, aside from a full size mattress on a box spring, but one of the walls is brick, and there’s a window that overlooks the street, like I’ve always wanted.

  “Oh wow…”

  She seems a little surprised by my gratitude at a tiny bedroom in a small do, but lets it go.

  “I’m gd you like it.”

  “I do!”

  She hugs me, asks if I’m okay and if I need anything, and when I tell her no, she hugs me, and heads to her bedroom to get ready for bed.

  I pull my ptop from my suitcase, and lie otress, trying to look at all the stuff ohat I usually do to distract myself. Mood boards of clothes I’d like to wear, i forums full of trans women talking about how they just started HRT and not all of them are programmers, and the occasional girl who’s sixteen and transitioning and thriving, and then my longstanding fear bubbles to the surface, and makes me feel bad again. I wish I felt like a dam about to overflow. I’d cry and bawl and sob, but I ’t. I keep imagining a teen movie type breakdown, where everything’s dramatid Mom es to me and makes everything okay, but that’s not how anything works. I mostly feel endlessly disappointed and helpless, slowly pushed toward the iable testosterone apocalypse. And what I’ve been thinking for hours: I feel so ruined. It feels like more of a life definihan anything else does. Ruiainted, made impure and gross by the south, by the way I was born, by being a boy.

  Limbs heavy, I go to the bathroom, and look at myself in the mirror. I’m thin, always around ten pounds underweight, five foot five, with thick, brown-almost-bck hair, going down to my shoulders. Looking at my body doesly help, but it pulls me back from the edge. I’m not a linebacker. Yet.

  I brush my teeth, pag slowly around the bathroom so that I don’t have to stare at my fa the mirror, and crawl into my new bed, feeling childish and small. I think about the way Mom looked, standing in the living room, in front of the kit. How vibrant she looks now that she’s finally in her element. She spends her entire life here being able to be herself, as a woman who loves women, and now she has a dipshit fourteen year old son weighing her down.

  She’s in her mid-30’s, she’s gay, and I’m an artifact of the time of her life she probably regrets, ging to her for reasons I’m too chishit to actually tell her. I’m never going to fit in here. Any cool New Engnd lesbian she meets is going to be put off by her 14 year old son. I hate it.

  I should feel like I’m staring at the fig tree, seeing some sort of ce to be myself, and e out, and all of this stuff. I got out of North Carolina. I’m with Mom. She loves me. But instead, I feel like a twenty to tied to her ankle. I don’t even know if she’s okay with transgender women. Maybe she hates us.

  But I don’t regret ing here, and I don’t wish I were in Raleigh still. I regret… being. My life feels like never ending effects of a choice I never actually made, and any attempt to put it on the right track, or even just be myself, or be anything other than “never aowledging anything whatsoever” or “HELL YEAH MOTHERFUCKER I LOVE BEING A GUY. CARS” gets looks, jokes, sideways gnces, ents, “fag”’s, and Sylvan being a dick to try to make Dad ugh, which isn’t very hard because the guy ughs audibly at Two And A Half Men. It’s a fug nightmare.

  I y, repeating this all to myself in my head, uo get out of the circle that always leads back to the same clusion. Ruined, nightmare. As I ehe fuzzy state iween awake and asleep, I see sce book pictures of fluid in veins, and instinctively feel afraid that it’s testosterone. I feel the pained shape of my mouth, as my eyes stick, and I fall asleep.

  June 5, 2016

  Camille

  As we walk through an Ikea, something’s wrong with Ross. I watch him look at the all of the different pieces of furniture he might want for his room, all the little things he might want or need, and he looks so… small. Thin, and kind of sad. He doesn’t really ask what I think. He’s not a normal fourteen year old boy, for which I’m extraordinarily gd. Even if he hadn’t been pig out the most austere colle of furniture he could manage, he gazed at the paintings in the living room and the books in the bookcase enough for it to be obvious that he did actually care. It’s been a long time sinyoually asked him what he thinks about anything, so he doesn’t think to ask me.

  Watg him quietly work, pig things out that match each other, trying to decide between different things that he likes based on how things fit together, I love him. He’s thoughtful aailed, quiet ale, very odd for a fourteen year old boy. The others aren’t like this.

  Still, it’s hard to not ache a little bit, watg him, thin and spindly, “aspiring scruffy art school student” bck sweater sitting on him a little bit awkwardly.

  None of this is pletely new or surprising, I guess. He was like this in Raleigh, but not to this extent. He alluded to it the other day— clearly everything was worse for him after I left. It hurts to think about.

  More than once, I ask him if he needs help pig things up or making a decision, but he just looks at me, and trying to sound chirpy, says “No thanks! I’m good!”

  So I watch him pick everything out, and slowly piece together his new life, and my heart swells. He carries the same calm thoughtfulhat he always has, and there’s something so sweet about how he’s always this way. I just wish he could get out of his own head.

  I walk over, heels g in the showroom, and hug him. “I love you.” He looks up at me, a little bit like a child. “Thanks. I love you too.” He says it nervously. I smile, and he’s clearly overe with relief.

  As time passes and we walk around and he decides on more things, he cautiously opens up. First, he starts asking me what I would think about this bookshelf or that desk in the room. At first, I tell him it’s all up to him, but after he looks disappoihe firs time, I realize what he’s doing. When he says “What do you think?” he wants to know what I think, not strictly if it’s okay to get. He’s asking the question as if I were a peer, not a parent.

  So I tell him what they remind me of, that this nightstand would go well with the desk he was looking at, and when he wonders aloud if everything is too minimal and austere— an instance of him questioning his fual taste ihing, for as long as I’ve known him— I remind him that the point of all of these things being minimal is because they get out of the way of the things you use them for, that the bookshelf isn’t the point, the books on it are.

  Things get quiet again, as we’ve made decisions and go to grab the boxes.

  “I’m reading The Bell Jar.”

  He says it quietly, like he’s testing the waters.

  “Oh yeah? Where are you?”

  “Right now she’s pnning on writing her own Bell Jar within The Bell Jar.”

  I smile.

  “What do you think so far?”

  He thinks for a moment. “One of the things I like about it, that no one ever mentions, is that she’s hirious.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He lights up. This is my favorite thing about him— the pure, childlike way he gets excited whenever someone engages him about something he’s clearly eager to talk about. “Oh, I mean all of the stuff she says about being a woman is obviously very meaningful, but she tells stories about how someoioning the price of the roast made her feel like she was eating pennies, and the story about her actally eating the finger water at the Japanese restaurant like it was an after dinner soup, and how it taught her that if you just do stuff fidently you get away with it.”

  “I’m really gd I didn’t have to teach you that! How long have you been reading it?”

  “Off and on for a few weeks.”

  “So back at home?”

  “Yeah. Sylvan and Dad really enjoyed aed well to the fact that I was walking around with this book that had a picture of a woman’s legs on it but not in a sexy way, and pi.”

  I figured as much. It feels good to draw him out of his head.

  “Well, their thoughts don’t matter. It’s a good book. Have you read any of her poems?”

  “I’ve tried. Sometimes they’re a little harder for me to get through, maybe because I’ve read more books than I have poems.”

  “You might like Anon. I have a bunch of her books.”

  “I saw, actually. I might do that. I think I like reading women more. I usually end up… reting to them a lot.”

  He suddenly looks away, realizing what he said. It’s... maybe not surprising, but the openness is. The way he doesn’t seem to be bothered by reting to women, and seeing himself in us, the way most fourteen year old boys probably would.

  We talk more, idly, as I help him pick up furniture, though he grows quieter. I pay, ah go outside into the disgusting New Engnd summer rain. As we sit iraffic, I try to engage him, but it’s like we’re on the car ride from the airpain. Out of the er of my eye, he’s gone— yet again, fully receded into the moody, hair-not-quite-brushed-enough teenager, gazing out the window. He fades, like a lot of introverted people, but rarely this suddenly, with this much cause. It’s not like he got tired and shut down, but he’s… embarrassed.

  At home, he builds furniture one piece at a time, turning me down when I offer to help him.

  His boxes arrived while we were gone, and so I stand i and start sshing through the tape. One has the notebooks he always writes in. One is clothes, another is books and CDs, and then there’s a slightly smaller, lighter one.

  Inside, a carefully id out colle of feminine, vaguely emo looking clothes in about Ross’s size, and some drugstore makeup.

  I pause for a moment, trying to figure out what to do as a million things and memories shoot through my brain. I ’t figure anything out, though, and so I close the fps on top of the box, and put a heavier one on top.

  “Ross, do you have room for your boxes?”

  “Uh… yeah, just about” I bring them into the room.

  “Thank you” he says, a little ftly, as he tries to gracefully push his desk into the er. He’s focused, and still has a little bit more to go, and I’m gd.

  I bring the rest of the boxes in, including the one filled with Stephen King books and CDs by groups called things like Enlighte Croquet, or JILTED.

  “Do you need anything?” I ask, trying to sound light and g, as if nothing is amiss.

  “Uh…” he starts, trying to think while he’s w. “No, not that I think of. Why?”

  “I was just w.”

  “Okay. Well, let me know if there’s anything I do.”

  I sound clipped and nervous. Like the time David almost caught me, before he did.

  “Alright” he says, ever afraid to impose, even on his mother.

  It’s just as well. I think of him as a kid. How, when David made him py baseball, Ross, bored ifield, sat down, and blew the newly white dandelions, mesmerized by the seeds flying away, while boys chaotically ran after every hit the ieam got. How I read books to him while he was learning to read, and his favorite characters were always girls. How I gave him a bath when he was six, and he asked, “Is this going to fall off?”

  How he looked up to me as a kid, and asked to py the flute when he found out I had taken lessons as a girl.

  And even now, the bck sweaters in the summertime. ing. The thing he said the other day about The Increasingly Male Living Space. The times he would get irritated with Sylvan being a teenage boy, or even his dad, and not be able to stop himself from pig an argument. The way he thoughtfully regarded the book of Virginia and Vita’s letters, talked about The Bell Jar, and oh my god, he literally said he reted more to women.

  Does he want to be a girl? Is he a girl?

  I ache. He was stuck with David, Sylvan, and Casey for months. I only imagine how they talked about women. They barely stopped short of saying that Ross was too feminine, right in front of me, before David caught me with Nick. It had to have gotten gross. How do I let him know it’s okay to tell me? How do I tell him that I would actually be very excited to have a daughter, and that I never really saw him as one of “the boys”, but that ing from me, that’s a very good thing? What if I say that, and it destroys him?

  What if I’m also just hoping to have another queer girl around? Am I projeg this onto my son?

  Everything from earlier. Whatever happened internally that made him quiet down so much, looking so pained, after just… opening up.

  How I show him it’s okay?