Felix Ever After

by Kacen Callender

  “Had a fight, eh?” he says to me as I get into the car, slamming the door shut behind me.

  I nod, staring at the palms of my hands. I’m exhausted. After Declan left my bedroom last night, I didn’t sleep for a single minute. I kept looking at my phone—opening and closing texts to Ezra. The last time I wrote something heartfelt and vulnerable was that email to my mom, which she still hasn’t responded to days later. I’m afraid that Ezra will do the same.

  Tully lets out a sigh. “Young love. What else is there to say?”

  Twenty-Three

  THE PRIDE MARCH IS ON THE LAST SUNDAY OF JUNE, IN just a few days. It’s amazing just how much can change in a single month. That’s what I’m thinking about as I sit in the empty photography classroom with Leah. I took her up on the offer to hang out, and I’m glad I did. It’s nice to have someone to talk to, instead of moping around, thinking about the fact that I’ve lost both Ezra and Declan and have no other friends . . . and besides, even though it took forever for me to figure out, Leah’s pretty effing cool.

  “Do you think you’ll apply for the end-of-summer gallery?” she asks.

  “Yeah. I was thinking about it, anyway.”

  “You definitely should. Your self-portraits are amazing. Like, seriously. Really fucking good, Felix. Everyone thinks so.”

  I can feel my face heating up. “Really?”

  The door opens, and we both turn in our seats. Austin is at the entrance, peeking in. A jolt goes through me. The last time I saw Austin, he was still with Ezra. Now I’ve only seen Austin from across the parking lot, hanging with Tyler and Hazel and the others, our non-relationship back to the way it was before.

  Austin sees me, then hesitates. “Oh—sorry, I didn’t realize anyone was in here.”

  “That’s okay. Come in,” Leah says, taking a bite of her PB&J.

  He doesn’t move. He looks at me again, then forces a smile. “No. Seriously. I’ll just—”

  Leah frowns. “Are you still feeling weird because of Ezra? I mean, it’s okay if you are, but—”

  “I’m not feeling weird.”

  “Then come in and sit down.”

  Austin sighs as he walks into the classroom, closing the door behind him. He drags himself over and scrapes out a chair, sitting down at the table and pulling a pizza out of a greasy brown paper bag. “You can be so pushy.”

  “That’s what family’s for,” Leah says. She adds, “It’s okay if you feel weird about Ezra.”

  “I’m fine. I’ve decided to move on.”

  I’m definitely feeling a little more than awkward. I stare at my cup of ramen noodles and the swirling steam. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” I tell him.

  “No, you’re not,” he mutters.

  I look up at him, surprised.

  “Austin!” Leah gapes at him.

  “What? He’s not.” Austin shrugs. “Now he gets Ezra to himself. They’re in love with each other. Everyone knows that. You’ve said it yourself more than once.”

  Leah’s face pinkens, and she glances at me. It’s a question that I myself haven’t known the answer to, that I’ve been confused about—but the more that I think about it, the more obvious the answer becomes. I’m starting to feel like an oblivious idiot. It looks like everyone knew exactly how I felt, even before I did.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter,” I say, leaning back in my seat and crossing my arms, “because he hates me now. He won’t even look at me.”

  No one speaks for a second, until Leah murmurs that she’s sorry. “Maybe things will still work out. You never know, right?”

  The lunch is awkward—I don’t think it could never be not awkward, with me and Austin sitting across from each other—but the conversation eventually picks up as we talk about the last TV shows we binged, what movies we’re looking forward to, what we’ll do during the day once the summer program is over. Once upon a time, it wouldn’t have been a difficult choice: I’d spend every second of every day with Ezra. Now I’m not even sure what my life looks like without him. I’ll have to do a lot of rebuilding, a lot of reimagining, but I’m not sure I even want to. I’ve seen him in hallways, across the parking lot, on opposite ends of the classroom. He always ignores me, and I’ve been too afraid to reach out to him—to tell him the truth. To say that he was right, about everything. To tell him that I love him.

  “Austin,” Leah says, “are you still going to that Ariana Grande concert next month?”

  I’m swinging my foot beneath the table, but at the word grande, I freeze. Austin hesitates. He stares at the cheese pizza he’s barely picked at. “Still trying to, yeah.”

  “Mom’s letting me buy tickets, too.”

  “Okay.”

  “It should be fun to go together, right?”

  “Jesus, you really don’t know how to figure out when a person doesn’t want to talk about something, do you?”

  Leah turns to me with a grin. “He’s embarrassed, but he’s obsessed with Ariana Grande.”

  “I’m not obsessed.” He won’t meet my eye.

  “You’re a little obsessed. It’s nothing to be ashamed of—I mean, she’s a fucking star. It’s okay to be obsessed.”

  Austin doesn’t speak. He glances up at me before looking away again. And even though I’m staring at him, I can barely see him. All that I can see are the text messages from grandequeen69. The anger, the hatred this troll had for me, the fucking gallery of me and my pictures and my deadname, driving myself crazy as I tried to figure out who the piece of shit was, if they were sitting in my class . . .

  “It was you,” I say.

  Leah looks at me, startled—then confused. “Sorry, what?”

  Austin still won’t look at me. He knows exactly what I’m talking about.

  I’m shaking my head. The confusion, the shock, the anger—it spills through me, and I can barely make sense of how I’m feeling, how I should even react. I want to laugh and cry and scream and launch myself across the table to beat the shit out of him all at once. There’s only one thing I want to ask him. “Why?” He still won’t look at me. “Why did you do it?”

  Leah’s confusion is turning to fear as she looks back and forth between us, realization dawning on her face, though it looks like she’s having a hard time believing it, too.

  Austin swallows as he stares at his pizza.

  “Why did you fucking do it, Austin?”

  “You don’t have to shout,” he mutters.

  I close my eyes and take a deep breath so that I don’t freak out on him. If I hit him, I’ll be kicked out of St. Catherine’s.

  “It was a mistake,” he tells me. “It was a mistake. That’s all.”

  “It was a mistake to hack into my Instagram and take my fucking photos and tell the entire world my deadname? And all those fucking messages—the transphobic bullshit you put me through. That was just a mistake, too?”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “Why?” That’s all I want to know, the question repeating itself over and over again in my head.

  He takes a second to answer. When he does speak, he says, “I don’t know why the gallery was such a big deal. I thought you were proud to be trans.”

  “Are you fucking serious?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Leah says. “You? It was you, Austin? Please tell me you’re fucking kidding.”

  My hands are balled up so tightly that they’re shaking. “I am proud to be trans. But that shit was personal. Those photos. My old name. It wasn’t your place to put it on display.” My voice is rising again, but I don’t care. “You didn’t have my permission to do any of that. It was fucking abusive. It was a fucking attack.”

  Austin swallows and looks down, hair falling into his face. He swipes some strands back behind his ear.

  “Please tell me that you’re kidding,” Leah says, her voice tinged with desperation.

  “You really pissed me off,” Austin tells me. “You know?”

  “How’d I do that?”

>   “I wanted to talk to Ezra,” he says, “and it was like I could never get a chance to speak to him alone. You were always with him, and he was always fawning all over you, and it was bullshit, because he’s into guys, and you—you’re not even—”

  Leah interrupts him. “Don’t,” she says. Her eyes are wet, her cheeks red. She’s crying. “Don’t you dare say that, Austin.”

  He has the decency to look a little ashamed. “It felt unfair,” he says. “It’s not like it’s easy to be gay, even if we are in Brooklyn, even if this is New York City, and now we have to deal with people like you taking our identity, taking our space.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Leah says.

  “Trans people aren’t taking anything,” I tell him.

  “Is that why you wanted me to show you my hacking programs?” Leah’s shaking her head, eyes wide.

  “And it’s annoying, too,” he says, “seeing you—I don’t know, pushing it in our face that you’re transgender. Not everyone can be as open. Not everyone gets to be out. I don’t get to be out. My parents wouldn’t accept me. But you’re just flaunting it every chance that you get.”

  “I’m not flaunting anything. I’m just existing. This is me. I can’t hide myself. I can’t disappear. And even if I could, I don’t fucking want to. I have the same right to be here. I have the same right to exist.”

  He’s staring at the surface of the table, still refusing to look up. “I just hoped Ezra would see the gallery and remember that you’re transgender and not be interested in you anymore. That’s all.”

  “Remember that I’m transgender and not be interested,” I repeat. “Like, what, because you think trans people are unlovable? You’re wrong, Austin. You know that you’re wrong.”

  “Fucking hell,” Leah says, her voice getting louder. “You know, Austin, the real issue isn’t that you’re jealous of Felix, or that you’re pining after Ezra—which, by the way, will never fucking happen, so get the fuck over it. The real issue is that you’re used to having everything. You’re used to being a white guy in Brooklyn, used to always getting your way—no, fuck, I don’t care that you’re fucking gay, because people like Felix are queer and trans and Black, and they have to deal with so much more bullshit than you or me. And, okay, yes, you are marginalized for being gay, but instead of being a fucking ally to other marginalized people, people even more marginalized than you, you buy into the racist and patriarchal bullshit and act like you’re above them because you’re a white guy, and you act like they’re taking your space, and you think that you’re owed this whole fucking world, and when you don’t get what you want, you act like a fucking asshole, and God fucking damnit, Austin!”

  She’s screaming now. Her voice echoes through the room, and I’m surprised that people haven’t opened the door to see what’s going on. Austin is staring at her, wide-eyed, as though she’d reached across the table and slapped him across the face. He’s crying. I’m crying. We’re all crying.

  “I’m sorry,” Austin whispers, his voice hoarse.

  Leah rolls her eyes, wiping them. “That’s not enough. Saying that you’re sorry isn’t enough.”

  He can’t look at me at all now. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I don’t know what else you want me to say. I’m sorry.”

  God, this is so fucked-up, so fucking wrong in a million fucking ways. But the longer I sit here in the quiet, watching Austin as he stares at the surface of the table, the more the rage I have dissolves, leaving only an echo behind. Yeah, he hurt me, and yeah, the anger is still there—but it’s never been more obvious that Austin is just so ignorant. He’s created his bubble of privilege, where no one is allowed but people like him, and because of that he doesn’t understand the world around him—doesn’t want to understand the world around him, because it’s too scary for him, too challenging. I start to feel a little sorry for Austin. I think of the gender-identity discussion group, with Bex and the others—Callen-Lorde and the LGBT Center and all the different types of people, different genders and ages and races, a quilt of identities that ties all of us together. The people he’ll never be able to meet, to learn from and love. Even though he’s a white guy, and he has so much more privilege than I do, I realize that he’ll never get to experience the world in the way that I can. How can I stay angry at someone like that? I don’t want this anger inside me, eating me up from the inside out.

  Leah tells him, honestly, that she has no idea if they can get past this—that she never thought her own family would do something like this, and Austin says that he’s sorry, again and again. I actually do believe that he’s sorry, even if it’s only because he was caught. But I also know it’s my choice to not accept his apology. To not forgive him. I don’t have anything else to say to him. I stand, scraping my chair back, and Leah follows me, holding my hand as I go to Dean Fletcher’s office, exactly like I should’ve from the very beginning.

  Twenty-Four

  TODAY’S THE PRIDE PARADE. THE LAST TIME I WENT TO THE march, I couldn’t even see the parade itself because the streets were so packed with a crushing wall of bodies standing on tiptoe and each other’s shoulders, people cheering and clapping and blowing whistles with every float that passed by. It’s everything I hate. It’s everything Ezra loves.

  Leah texts me, asking me if I’m sure I don’t want to come. She plans to meet up with Ezra. She says she’d told Ezra about Austin—everyone knows now, I guess, since Austin was kicked out of St. Catherine’s. She says Ezra feels responsible, somehow, for Austin’s gallery and his trolling; feels guilty for not figuring it out himself when the two of them were dating.

  God, of course it isn’t his fault.

  Maybe you should come to the march and tell him that yourself. He won’t admit it, but I’m pretty sure he misses you.

  The idea of seeing Ezra at the march fills me with nerves. No, not just nerves. Outright fear. The last time I saw him was when he said he needed space after our huge fight, and we haven’t spoken since. I love Ezra. I know that I do. It’s been a slower realization, since Ezra told me he has feelings for me—a realization that just as long as Ezra’s been in love with me, I’ve probably been in love with him. The sort of love I have for Ez—it’s the kind of love that fills me so much that I can’t stop thinking about him. It’s the sort of love that makes me wish that I could touch him, hug him, kiss him again. It’s the kind of love where it almost feels like I’m not just Felix, and he’s not just Ezra, but we’re connected in a way that I’ve never been connected with anyone else before, like our spirits have somehow mingled together to create one, and . . . Shit, that kind of love is downright terrifying.

  I can see myself a little more clearly now. I’ve been too afraid to let myself love Ezra, but I was willing to put up with Marisol. I told myself I wanted her to realize that I’m worthy of love and respect, but I knew she would never understand that. I was willing to let myself love Declan, knowing that he only loved the idea of me—loved Lucky. I knew our relationship wasn’t going to work, but I let myself fall for him anyway. I was willing to reach out to my mom, knowing that she wouldn’t reach back to me. She still hasn’t responded, and I know that she never will. It’s almost like I was looking for the pain and the hurt, because it was easier to live with the idea that, even though I want love, I’m not the kind of person who deserves to be loved.

  I’m sitting cross-legged in the living room in my favorite chair, Captain curled up in the corner of the seat. My dad sits on the sofa, crossword puzzle book out, TV on some reality show neither of us is watching. I hold my laptop, skimming through the drafts of hundreds of emails I’d written to my mom. Why do I keep writing these emails to her, knowing that she’ll never love me—not in the way that I need her to?

  I click on select all.

  I hesitate, pause—then click on delete.

  There’re so many that it takes a second for my laptop to reload. As it does, and as I see the emails disappearing page by page, I can feel a lightening. Something
I’d been holding in my chest, anger and hurt and pain, starts to fade away. It wasn’t anger and hurt and pain I’d had for my mom. Though I’ve got plenty of that, too, this was anger and hurt and pain I’d had for myself, for writing all those fucking emails in the first place—for refusing to let go.

  Would it feel this good, to go to Pride like Leah suggested? I imagine walking through the streets—finding Ezra covered in rainbow-colored paint and glitter—telling him that I’m sorry, and that he was right. That I love him, too. Anxiety pricks my chest. What if he doesn’t accept my apology? What if he says that he doesn’t love me anymore?

  God—what the hell should I do?

  “What’s going on, kid?” my dad asks.

  I look up at my dad, who frowns down at his crossword puzzle.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re pretty quiet,” he says, glancing over at me. I don’t answer him—proving his point, I guess. “Things still not going well with Ezra?”

  It’s a little weird how easily my dad can read my mind sometimes. “Not really,” I admit. “He hasn’t spoken to me in over a week.” We used to speak every day, multiple times a day—we’d eat our chicken, drink our wine, curl up on his mattress, smoke weed out on his fire escape, run through the sprinklers at the park and pass out in the grass. I’m in love with him, but even if he doesn’t feel the same way about me anymore, I just miss him so fucking much. The loss is a physical pain, a cramp in my side.

  “Have you tried speaking to him?”

  “He won’t answer my texts.” He didn’t answer my texts, anyway, for the first few days after our fight. Leah says that he wants to apologize, but he’s too afraid and embarrassed to talk to me. Would he answer my texts now?

  “Well, fights happen, and people move on eventually,” my dad tells me. “Maybe he just needs some time to cool off.”

  We go back to sitting in silence. I wasn’t planning on saying it—wasn’t planning on telling him anything about my identity, not when he can’t even say my name, can barely remember my right pronouns—but the words are out of my mouth before I’ve even registered that I’m speaking.