Being Emily (Anniversary Edition)

by Rachel Gold

  6. repeat 3–5 until bell rings

  My mornings are drab. I start with science, a scheduling glitch that is an offense against all night owls, and then go to American history. Between history and study hall I usually pass Claire in the hall and she tucks a note into my pocket.

  That day the note said: “Hey boo, are we on after the meet? Mom’s working late. I’ll see you after school.” One tiny piece of notebook paper and my heart started racing again.

  Sitting in the library for study hall, I tried to concentrate on schoolwork, but I had to figure out how to talk to Claire. I had plenty of “friends” from the guys on swim team to various kids I had class with, but Claire was the only person I felt excited to see on a regular basis. With the other kids it was too hard to keep up the pretense of being Chris all the time. My life could be worse, and if I lost my relationship with Claire, it would be. I didn’t know how much worse I could handle, but if I didn’t talk to someone soon there wouldn’t be any of me left at all.

  Claire breezily described herself as bisexual and she was the weirdest person other than me that I knew. But she’d never had a relationship with a girl…well, other than me, but I didn’t really count because I looked like a boy to everyone. What if she didn’t like girls as much as she thought she did? What if she stopped liking me?

  I stared at the distant gray sky outside the library window. What was the worst that could happen? She could dump me and tell everyone at school and my parents. Then I’d either have to lie and say I made it all up as a joke, or run away.

  I had to do this right.

  There was no way I could use the library computers to research anything to help me come out. I’m sure the school monitored our computer use, and some other kid would probably walk by. All I needed was for one of the swim team guys to see COMING OUT AS TRANSGENDER in huge letters over my shoulder.

  Opening my math book, I made my eyes focus on the hardest problems. That distracted me until the bell, and then math class itself kept me occupied until lunch. Unfortunately, Claire pulled fourth period lunch this year and I had fifth, so I sat with the swim guys or did homework at the table.

  After lunch the tiredness from being up half the night caught up with me. Could I sleep through my sixth-period psych elective? The teacher was cool, but we’d been talking about schizophrenia for most of the week and I was over it. I leaned back in my chair, preparing for an eyes-open doze, when Mr. Cooper wrote two alarming words on the board: “Sex” and “Gender.”

  “Can anyone tell me the difference between these two?” he asked.

  Mr. Cooper was a tall man with messy red-brown hair that my dad would call much too long, even though it only covered his ears and the back of his neck. He had super pale Irish coloring and a case of ruddy windburn on his cheeks, so I couldn’t tell if this subject was making him blush as much as it made me. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his small gut pushed out, and shifted his weight from left to right and back again. But his eyes swept over the class calmly.

  I could answer his question, but no way was I opening my mouth. A football kid in the front row volunteered, “Sex is what you do, gender is who you’re doing it with.”

  Laughter all around.

  Jessica, the blond girl who sat next to me and I think had a crush on me, rolled her eyes. “What a jerk,” she whispered.

  “For the next two weeks we’re going to study different aspects of sex and gender,” Mr. Cooper said. “I’m going to hand out permission slips you need to fill out in case any of your parents don’t want you to hear about sex, as if that will stop you. We’ll be talking about normal and abnormal sexuality, and we’ll have speakers coming from OutFront Minnesota, an organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer equality.”

  I contemplated putting my head down on my desk and crying, but that would probably give me away as being the wrong gender. I pushed the permission slip into the front of my psych book. I’d forge the signature in study hall tomorrow. That was one conversation I didn’t want to encourage with my folks.

  Mr. Cooper spent the rest of the hour explaining how sex often referred to a person’s physiological characteristics, while gender pointed to the psychological, cultural and learned aspects. I could have taught the class. Instead I sat very still and felt like someone had wrapped one hand around my heart and with the other hand crushed my throat.

  Chapter Two

  English saved me. I had a chance to recover while Ms. Judson lectured on nineteenth-century British writers. Claire met me outside the classroom door afterward and gave me a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek. She was in the black knit sweater with textured lines down the arms that I liked.

  I must have held her too close because she peered at me searchingly and asked, “You okay?”

  “Long day,” I evaded.

  “I’ll see you at the meet,” Claire said, pulling her backpack strap up higher on her shoulder. “I’m driving over with the yearbook staff so we can have our meeting on the way.”

  Despite her protests about being unpopular, Claire was on the yearbook committee, in the drama club and in a poetry workshop that I sometimes attended. She said she got in the habit of extracurriculars in junior high when her mom wouldn’t let her come home early and now she was hooked.

  Liberty-Mayer High School didn’t have an indoor pool, so we swam at the city pool after school most days until 5:30 or 6:00 p.m. It was a great way to avoid being stuck at home with my family. I’d get home in time for dinner, eat, and then go up to my room for homework until bedtime.

  Tonight was the last of the boys’ swim team’s regular competitions, and our last chance to qualify for sectionals. I wasn’t the only one on the team convinced that we didn’t stand a chance. We competed against a lot of bigger high schools with their own pools and a larger student base to draw from. Plus our team wasn’t particularly competitive, which was another reason I stayed on it. Our coach always emphasized beating our own personal times over beating another team, though that may have been a tactic to keep us from getting too depressed over our competitive futility.

  I didn’t mind being in the boys’ locker room any more than I minded using the boys’ restroom at school. I could robot through it. At least the locker room didn’t have the same level of disgusting graffiti as the boys’ restroom. I don’t know why guys are so obsessed with their junk that they have to draw it all over the stalls. I lucked out in terms of not being embarrassed because I’m not attracted to guys, so the only awkward part in the locker room was changing into my swim trunks. I turned into my locker and did it quickly.

  Our team trunks resembled black biker shorts with the school symbol on the front of the right thigh and our colors up the sides. After pulling them on I shoved my clothes into the locker. Then I turned and smacked my shin into the low bench between the rows of lockers.

  “Shit!”

  Ramon turned around a few lockers up and shook his head. “Again, Hesse?”

  I had a reputation for knocking into things or tripping over my own feet just about every practice session. I did it at home too. Downside of being a robot. My shins, knees and feet always had two or three bruises on them.

  “It’s for luck,” I told him. “Part of the ritual.”

  He laughed. A junior, Ramon was in the running for team captain next year and already swayed decisions about the team. He took a liking to me last year when I said I’d swim the 500 freestyle. It was the event no one else on the team ever wanted to swim and he’d been stuck with it. He had curly black hair, inches longer than mine. Add his deep tan skin, big masculine chin and the best muscles on the team, and at least a dozen girls at school had crushes on him, according to Claire.

  I put on my swim cap and rested my goggles up on my forehead. Then I wrapped the big towel with our school emblem on it around my shoulders like a shawl and followed Ramon out to the pool.

  Unlike football where most of the team is on the field, the swim team spent most
of each meet sitting by the pool stretching and bullshitting. There were twenty guys on the team but at most we had four competing at a time. Those of us out of the water only fell silent during the races. Each guy swam two to four events. I only swam two: one leg of a relay and then the 500.

  The 500-meter freestyle was the longest solo swim of the meet—more than double any other. Ten laps in the pool covers about a third of a mile. I actually liked it, but the guys never believed me when I said that. Of all the events, it was the one where pure muscle strength was less important than pacing, endurance, breath control and strategy. I had to manage how fast I swam the first six laps so that I had the right energy available for the last four.

  It was also the most boring event of the meet. Watching guys flash through the water racing against each other for up to two minutes is exciting—watching that same thing for about five minutes really loses its thrill.

  Our relay came early in the meet, and then Ramon and I sat on the side of the pool and stretched. The 500 was always one of the last events, which gave me time to recover before I swam again.

  “How’s it going?” he asked and jerked his chin toward where Claire sat in the bleachers.

  In her black goth clothes she looked like an inkblot on a bright painting. Three colorfully dressed girls from the yearbook committee sat with her in the middle of a larger, spread out grouping of family members, friends and girlfriends of the team. Shrugging, I rubbed my big toe around one of the tiny octagonal tiles that covered the floor.

  “Do you like it?” he asked.

  I examined his face but couldn’t read his half smile. Ramon got around, we all knew that, but he wasn’t one of those guys who bragged about it. At least not more than usual. I knew he’d had sex with two girls already this year, so he couldn’t be asking how I liked sex with Claire, could he?

  “What?” I asked.

  “Being with the same girl that long,” he said. “You’ve been together like, half a year?”

  “Just over,” I told him. We’d passed the seven-month mark two weeks ago, but I didn’t want it to seem like I paid too much attention to that. He waited for me to say more. I had to split my mind into two halves—one half held all possible real answers to his question and the other half pretended to be Ramon and scanned the answers to find the acceptable ones.

  /error scan: boy test

  for each answer string (item in list)

  if item sounds like girl—discard

  else—echo item

  1. test “I feel at home with her”

  2. discard—sentimental

  3. test “I don’t have to do as much work”

  4. echo

  5. test “I like the emotional intimacy”

  6. discard—major boy fail

  7. test “she’s a sure thing”

  8. echo

  “It’s easy,” I said. “I mean, I know what she likes so I don’t have to work at it. And she’s a sure thing.” Guilt lurched through my gut. My relationship with Claire was so much more than that. With her I felt more myself than I did with anyone. Sometimes when we were flopped out on her bed together reading a poem and talking about it, I forgot that I had to play a boy and got to be a person for a while.

  That’s what made me think I could be a girl with her.

  But I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t risk losing what I already had.

  “You don’t get bored?” Ramon asked. “Or look at the prettier girls?”

  “Pretty girls are a lot of work,” I said.

  “Ha!”

  They called the 500 and I got up, leaving my towel next to him. When I started on the team, Ramon was swimming the 500 and he told me the trick to it: have two songs cued up in your head. The first song has a good steady pace and the second song is a little faster.

  I didn’t have a waterproof MP3 player, but I listened to my songs whenever I did strength training. When I hit the water, I started Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” in my mind. The upbeat R&B rhythm of the song gave me a moderately fast pace.

  The problem was I really wanted tell Claire. How bad could it be? No, that was a terrible question to ask because it could be awful if I misjudged and she told everyone and stopped speaking to me. What if I was replaceable to her? I couldn’t tell her.

  By the start of lap five I was trailing badly. Obsessing while swimming was a terrible strategy. I switched to my second song early. “Girlfriend” by Avril Lavigne.

  That is what I wanted—to be Claire’s girlfriend.

  Hitting the second to last lap, my lungs burned and a dull fire ran along my arms and legs. In the water, feeling my whole body didn’t bother me. The soft pressure reassured me of my reality. The water didn’t judge. I pushed hard into the pain.

  Fifteen seconds behind first place. Not bad. The coach slapped me on the back as I climbed out of the pool.

  “Good swim, Hesse, you really picked it up. That’s your best meet time.”

  “Thanks.”

  I stumbled back over to Ramon, sat against the bleachers, and tried to catch my breath. My time wasn’t good enough to go to sectionals. Even the guy in first wasn’t going to do well against the stronger teams from the Cities. But the time was good for me and all the effort had cleared my mind.

  I had to tell Claire.

  * * *

  “Go chill at my place, I’ll be there in less than an hour,” Claire told me when the meet was over. I was glad she didn’t drive with me because I didn’t know how I’d manage small talk when I had something so important to say.

  Unbeknownst to any of our parents, Claire had given me a duplicate key to her house for days when her extracurricular activities went longer than my swim practice. Her house was on the other side of town from mine, all of a mile-and-a-half apart, but she thought it would be silly to have me go home for an hour and then meet her at her place, so she’d copied her key.

  Her house was nothing like mine. First of all, it was tiny and in the well-to-do part of town that bordered on our one lake, and therefore more expensive than my family’s larger house. Secondly, it was obsessively neat. At our house, Mikey or Dad always left junk around in the living room and kitchen, and Mom complained periodically and instituted weekend cleaning times, but it was never finished and tidy. Claire’s house looked like a furniture showroom. Even the bookcases were designed more as works of art than functional pieces; each shelf held a few books and then some small statue or knickknack or a picture turned at an angle for effect.

  Her mom worked at a flooring and countertop store, helping people pick out expensive tile and granite for their fancy houses. This house had simple wood floors, but the kitchen did boast the yummiest counters I’d ever seen: black stone flecked with reflective bits of other colors. Claire’s mom made a good living and still got money from Claire’s dad, who lived in St. Louis, so Claire rarely wanted for anything. She didn’t have a car, true, but she did have her own TV in her bedroom and a Mac G5 desktop with a blazing-fast Internet connection and a monthly online game subscription to World of Warcraft. She let me have three of her character slots. I logged on and fired up my level 85 mage, Amalia.

  Sometimes these online games got tedious for all the monsters a character had to kill to get to a new level, but that was more than made up for by the great gear I could buy and make, and the cool spells I could cast. Claire didn’t have the patience to play magic-users, but they were my favorite. I admit, the fact that they always wore robes figured into that preference.

  When I logged into the game and selected Amalia on the character screen, I turned her 360 degrees to admire how awesome she looked. She always had beautiful hair. Sometimes I got it styled in one of the game’s barbershops, but right then it was flowing free all down her back. Her robes hung gracefully around her figure in violet and gray hues with gold tracery. I pushed the button to enter the game as her and got to step into a world fully female.

  While I moved her around the city, I felt what it was like to be in her body. So
me of the characters in the city were other players like me, but the computer created all the shopkeepers and city guards. They called me “m’lady” and simple as it was, that made me grin.

  I was shopping for a new mage’s robe when I heard the key in the door. “Hi honey, I’m home,” Claire yelled from the entryway. I immediately started sweating while my skin went cold. That didn’t seem fair. My body should have picked one or the other, but instead I ended up a damp popsicle.

  I heard the thomp of her boots coming off. Claire had three pairs of thick, black boots that she rotated through in the winter. Each pair made her at least two inches taller, but when she appeared in her bedroom doorway she was her usual petite self. Today she wore a bunch of silvery bracelets around her right wrist and a silver cross hanging down the front of her sweater. Her entire wardrobe was black. She once told me she started it when other girls teased her about trying to be fashionable in the eighth grade. Not only could she avoid those taunts, but this style let her get away with wearing an ornate cross and no one knew if she was serious or not.

  She was very serious about her own brand of radical Christianity. From time to time she came up with surprisingly contextual Bible quotes. The one she liked to give people who hassled her about her all-black, heavy eyeliner look was: “Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear—but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.” That shut people up fast and was pretty fun to watch.

  I gestured toward the computer screen. “Amalia’s got a new robe,” I said, trying to sound normal while my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. “Plus 120 Intel.”

  “Sweet, and it shows off her cleavage. She’s hot,” Claire said, trying to trip me out, like I’d care. Wow, was I about to test her true coolness factor. With a silent prayer, I logged out of the game.

  She put her arms around my shoulders from behind and kissed the side of my face. “Mom’s not coming home for a few hours,” she said quietly, running one hand across my chest.