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For Chris
Whoever you are holding me now in hand,
Without one thing all will be useless,
I give you fair warning before you attempt me further,
I am not what you supposed, but far different.
—Walt Whitman
I’m grown, and I’m going to wear my dresses.
—Billy Porter
Chapter 1
I grew up in the wrong house. The ceilings were low and there was too much stuff everywhere. Books crammed into leaning bookcases. Blankets folded on the back of the couch. In certain moods I wanted to run away. There are a lot of stories about teenagers who run away. But that always seemed like too much work to me. The teenagers who run away just come back again. And the message of the story is something like, Why run away when you could learn to be at peace with where you are? Stories like that didn’t help me. I didn’t like where I was. It made me itch. Being in that house, alone with my parents, made me itch. Running away seemed like too much work, and I didn’t know where I’d go.
You wouldn’t know just meeting me that I was the sort of kid who wanted to run away. I got pretty good grades, and grown-ups tended to like me. I could be quiet, but I smiled a lot. If you smile like you understand when people tell you things, they like you. I’d worn the same jacket with a broken zipper since eighth grade. I didn’t care about clothes. That’s the kind of smiling, nice kid I was.
My best friend was Mabel. Mabel was a badass who wouldn’t seem like she’d be friends with someone like me. She was tall—taller than I am—with a thick straight bob of black hair; she would stand there with her head dangling from her neck like a bird. Usually she would hold her hands in her pockets or behind her back, because when she didn’t put them away they’d flutter all over the place. We met freshman year and I think she knew right away that I wasn’t the person I seemed to be. When I was with Mabel, I would feel a creature wake up in me and run circles around my insides. We used to laugh a lot and go to this coffee place called Carma’s, and Mabel would tell me about the girls she had crushes on. I’d laugh and give her advice and then we’d speculate about the future of the world. Coffee was starting to be our big new thing, at the end of sophomore year.
But then Mabel’s dad got a job in Pittsburgh and they moved.
Her last night in town we climbed up to the roof of our favorite parking garage. We took pictures of ourselves with the four views behind us—the north, the south, the east, the west.
“Maybelline,” I asked her, “what am I going to do without you?”
“Alexidore,” she replied, which is what she called me, even though my real name is Alex, short for Alexander, “it’s simple. You’re going to live your best life and conquer the school.”
And we both laughed. We peered down at people who talked with their hands as they waited in line to buy movie tickets or drifted out of the Spanish restaurant. Later we bought a pack of cigarettes to smoke, but they made us sick, so we gave the rest of the pack to a man on a bench. I was sad from that minute on. I get this sadness sometimes that comes over me like a blue shadow, and I got it then. I knew that as soon as the school year started all the teachers would say hello and I’d wave back and smile and people would like me because I was the same person I’d always been—the person they thought they knew me to be.
After Mabel moved, I had about two months of summer left to sulk. I knew other people, yes, sure, but they weren’t my real friends. They didn’t wake up that little creature inside of me, so why would I want to see them?
I did do one social thing after Mabel left. This was late in July, and the whole city was hot and the Orioles had just won some big tournament, so everyone’s cars had flags in the windows. I ran into Jen and Jo, who I sort of knew from our class, in the aggressively air-conditioned produce section of the grocery store, and they said I should come hang out with them sometime. Jen balanced a soda bottle on her head as we stood there. Jo’s hands were full of oranges. I could see the goose bumps on their arms from the AC. I was sweaty and I smelled like the sunscreen my mom made me put on. They told me they were going to this pool party at someone’s house that night and I should come. They told me Tracy would be really glad if I did. Tracy was the smartest person in our class, with a really nice smile, who I always found a little intimidating.
“Okay, sure,” I said, and shrugged.
I didn’t know what to make of what they said about Tracy being glad if I came, but Jo pinched my arm until I promised I’d be there.
“I don’t know anybody with a pool, so I guess it’d be cool to see what that’s like,” I said, and immediately decided I sounded dumb.
Jen took the soda off her head; she put her and Jo’s numbers in my phone. We parted ways by the tomatoes.
At the pool party, I felt like I kept doing stupid things. I didn’t want to take my shirt off because I never liked the way my stomach sagged over the edge of my bathing suit. My chest was pale and my nipples were little soft points. So instead, I ate more chips than I wanted and dripped salsa on the redwood deck. I tripped on the hose at one point and made a weird noise as I fell into the grass. But Jen and Jo and Tracy were nice and made fun of me just the right amount. Even their friend James, who had a buzz cut and an earring and usually made me nervous, seemed like he didn’t mind I was there. By the end, I was telling stories about my mom’s childhood in North Carolina, on what she always described as a post-hippie commune. These were stories I knew would impress people. They weren’t about me, but I got to tell them, which meant I got to be at least a little bit impressive. I also told them about this eco-warriors documentary I’d seen. Jen and Jo laughed and came and went with paper plates full of chips and baby carrots. Tracy just sat and listened.
The next morning I woke up knowing I’d been a doofus the night before and decided that none of them would ever want to hang out with me again.
I have this theory that some people are Real People and some people are not. Real People are comfortable being themselves and don’t have to think about what they want. They laugh out loud and they eat when they’re hungry and they say what they’re thinking no matter who is listening. And the paradox of it is that the harder you try to be Real, the deeper you know that you’re not. Going to pool parties tricks you into thinking you might get to be Real for a little bit. But then you wake up the next morning and you almost don’t want to get out of bed because you feel like your body is a costume and your voice is a recording and whatever little kernel of Realness you might have is buried or drowned or dead. That kernel will never, not in a million years, see the light of day.
But maybe that’s just me.
I still didn’t know what to make of the thing Jen had said with the soda bottle on her head, that Tracy would be glad to see me. Tracy had barely said anything to me during the pool party. And I hadn’t said anything to her in particular, just the things I said to everyone. I told my dumb stories and c
ould tell she was listening. At one point I’d asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. That was something my dad would always say as a joke to other people his age, and it could be pretty charming when he did it, in a dad sort of a way. But I guess it’s less obviously a joke when you’re saying it to someone who’s still a sophomore in high school. Jo had answered for Tracy—jumped in before Tracy could open her mouth.
“Tracy is going to change the world,” she said to me, quite seriously.
Chapter 2
The morning of the first day of school, we were all in the auditorium and Dr. Royce was raising his voice over the din. Teachers were waving at former students across the room, some with open mouths and big smiles, others with subdued nods and tugs at their lanyards; Mr. Wolper-Diaz was offering little bows and military salutes. A freshman sat in the broken chair in row M and screamed, and everyone laughed because anyone who had been in the school even five minutes knew that the chair in row M would dump you on the floor if you tried to put your butt in it.
Dr. Royce used to be a preacher, so when the room settled, we all got ready to listen as he gave us a sermon. The message of his sermon was (a) welcome, and (b) you can think of this school as a microcosm of the world, (c) so when it comes to treating each other with respect, (d) every one of you needs to step up to the plate. I thought about that phrase for a little while, but I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Step up to the plate. What did that mean? Work hard? Take initiative? Dr. Royce wore a tailored green suit, and his hands looked big and strong as they gestured or folded over the front edge of the lectern. My sophomore year, there were a bunch of fights and someone got sent to the hospital, so he was probably thinking about that.
I had come in with my homeroom class, and we were all sitting toward the back. Where were Jen and Tracy and Jo? I didn’t see them in the section in front of me. To my right was this girl named Caitlin. She was my lab partner in bio last year. She told me she wanted to be a professional dog breeder. We started eating lunch together, but listening to her talk about dog breeds made me want to die. That’s when I figured out I could eat lunch in the Spanish classroom if I was nice to Señora Green. To my left was Sabina, who had been president of our freshman class and described herself as a “dynamo.” On the other side of her was this weed dealer, Matt. Matt the weed dealer had his arm around Sabina the dynamo, so maybe they were dating. Matt’s ex-girlfriend Cierra had once asked me what planet I was from. It made me mad, thinking about that now, it made me feel sad and angry, but generally when I get mad I stuff the anger down inside me. In front of me was Jake Florieau. It’s hard to describe Jake as anything besides very gay. We had been best friends for about two months freshman year, but then I went to this concert with him and it turned out there were a bunch of drugs there and my parents found out and I got in trouble, and that was sort of the end of our friendship.
He turned around in his seat. “What’s up, Shapelsky?” he said.
“Hey, Jake,” I replied. “Not much.”
“You ready for a big ol’ brand-new year?”
“I guess so.”
“You don’t seem so excited.”
“Eh…”
Dr. Royce ran through the demographics of the school, like he did every year. He put numbers on what we all knew already: that we came from different parts of the city of Baltimore, that we had applied to get in here, and that we looked somewhat like the population of the city: a lot of Black kids and Latinx kids and a few Asian kids and some white kids. I was one of the white kids. I had gone to a small Jewish middle school with other white kids. When I finished eighth grade, I was excited to be around people who didn’t all look like me. I thought I might learn about other people’s cultures, but I mostly learned about my own. I learned how peculiar white people are. White people are stressed about a lot of things and passive-aggressive about a lot of other things. White people want to fix other people’s problems but at the same time don’t like the feeling of owing anything to anyone. Jewish white is different from Catholic white, of course, which is different from Lutheran white, but you get the idea. Two things that make white people uncomfortable are loud rap music and other people calling them white. Every year at this opening assembly I remembered why I liked going to this school: it made it harder for me to sneak away from who I was. I liked going to this school, I told myself, even though as a junior I still felt like nobody knew me all that well.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if Jake and I hung out just because we were both white. Freshman year, we used to go to these open mics at the One World Café. We’d sit together toward the back and listen and clap and make fun of the stuff that was bad, but then afterward we wouldn’t really know what to say to each other. I guess it’s depressing, but beyond being white, I don’t think we had much in common. I don’t know if Jake ever went back to the One World without me. I do know he started making dances. For Spirit Day last year he choreographed something to a really catchy song and did it in purple glitter boots on top of three tables in the cafeteria. I never did things like that. I didn’t know catchy songs. I just smiled and did my work and people liked me.
After the assembly we had shortened periods of English, history, and Spanish, and then lunch. I almost went and sat with Jo, Jen, Tracy, and James—I could see them across the cafeteria, near where the softball people sat—but instead I sat by myself, in the spot Mabel and I used to share. Mabel’s first day at her new school was also today. I wondered how it was going. I took a picture of her usual chair and was going to text it to her, but then that seemed a little sad. Instead I texted, “Eep how’s day one” with a grimace emoji. When I finished my sandwich I picked every scrap of bread and tuna out of the crinkled sheet of aluminum foil. Mabel texted back right as the bell was ringing. It was a picture of Katharine Hepburn in a safari outfit.
The rest of the day went by in a blur of announcements and handouts, and I was getting my stuff together at my locker when Jen touched me on the shoulder. “I’m having people over for a movie later,” she said. “Like seven o’clock. Tracy’s coming. You should come too!”
“Okay,” I managed to say. I raised my eyebrows earnestly and nodded.
“Text me?”
I nodded again.
“Also, you should tell Tracy you like her haircut.”
And she bounded off down the hall.
* * *
My dad asked who Jen was, and when I said she was a friend, he winked at me. My dad was always acting like he and I shared some secret. When he did that, I would hold my face really still and not make any expression. His job was to write for the newspaper about Maryland real estate, but I don’t think that was ever what he really wanted to do. My mom used to describe him as an eighties dreamer-poet who “gradually made the slide into standard-issue middle-aged male.”
“Who also happens to be dazzlingly charming,” he would add.
People found my mom dazzlingly charming. She could talk to anyone and was always helping people out. As a social worker at an elementary school, helping people out was sort of her job. I felt like I could tell her most things. But she also worried about me a lot, so I tried to hide it when I wasn’t feeling great.
Wherever we went, my parents loved to describe my life to other people, even when I was standing right there. I usually just let it happen.
“I know Alex really loves school,” my mom might say to her friend Theresa if we ran into her at the grocery store. “Am I right, sweetie?”
And I would nod and smile and look over at the rows of meat wrapped in plastic.
Or: “Alex is doing really interesting things in history class,” my dad might say to his editor if we were stopping by the newspaper some Sunday afternoon. “What was that book you had to read?”
And I would dutifully tell the editor what it was called.
I wondered sometimes if other people’s parents were this obsessed with the details of their kids’ lives. Certainly Mabel’s dad didn’t seem to be. Mabel told
me once that her dad spent all of her freshman year thinking Mabel loved French. “Maybe after you graduate,” he told her, “we can take a trip together to Paris. You can take me around and explain everything to me.”
“Dad,” Mabel told him, “I take Spanish.”
“Oh,” he said back. “Why did I think you took French?”
At Jen’s I rang the bell and someone shouted, “Come in!”
On the couch inside was a kid I recognized as Jen’s older brother, long and sprawled, handsome, in mesh gym shorts. The TV was on, loud, and there was a guy in a baseball cap answering questions while cameras flashed.
“… very proud of our team this year, our staff, our players, all we’ve been able to accomplish…”
“They’re upstairs,” he said without looking at me.
“… we fought through, we’re moving in the right direction…”
“Cool. Thanks.” I hesitated, until his finger indicated the unlit hallway.
“… that was our goal, goal number one, to get to this point in time, and be able to say…”
Upstairs I could hear them all laughing. I knocked lightly on the doorframe of what seemed like their parents’ bedroom. Jo’s face was very red.
“I’m not saying I want to date him, I’m just saying someone should!” she was insisting. “Hi, Alex! Okay, conversation over.”
Jo stood up to hug me, and Jen and Tracy just shuffled over on the couch. There was a king-size bed at the far end of the room, neatly made, covered in pillows. Jen pulled a hair tie off her wrist and redid her ponytail while she clarified that they were talking about Mr. Simon, the drama teacher who’d just started this year and who everyone apparently had a crush on.
People used to say that Jo, Jen, and Tracy looked like they belonged on the cover of a booklet advertising some college that wanted to show how diverse it was. They had been inseparable since freshman year. Jo was half-Korean, Jen was white, and Tracy was Black.
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