by Rachel Gold
* * *
The following Saturday, sitting on Claire’s couch with her, I asked her if I didn’t think like a girl. It had been bothering me all week, but we hadn’t had time alone to talk. Now we were in our usual feet-to-feet position, leaning against the couch arms, reading and eating the egg sandwiches I’d brought.
She deftly pried out of me the details of the entire conversation with my mother. Then she about fell over laughing.
“Why are you laughing?” I demanded.
“Let me get this straight, figuratively speaking,” Claire said. “In the middle of a conversation in which you got out of seeing Dr. Webber by insinuating that he has a sexual interest in you, your mother suggests you don’t think like a woman. I don’t know what girl manual your mom got, but that’s in the first five pages of mine. No straight teen guy I know would say some man was leering at him, even if he was.” She paused and added, “Guys should be reporting sexual harassment a lot more than they are. My point is: manipulation isn’t big in the guy playbook.”
I said in my best Valley Girl impression, “So, I’m, like, totally a girl.”
“You’re more of a girl than I am,” she agreed. “You actually enjoy makeup. You’re like an eleven-year-old worried that you’re never going to get your period. Chill out.”
I made myself sigh, look down at my half-eaten sandwich and frown.
“What?” she asked with a hint of real concern.
I said, “You’re right, I am afraid I’m never going to get my period.”
Claire leaned forward and caught my hand. “You will,” she said. “I read about that online, a lot of trans girls get PMS and everything except the bleeding part. Maybe we’ll sync cycles.”
I felt teary, which happened a lot lately on the hormones. I took a sip of my coffee and swallowed hard.
“Why were you were researching trans girl periods?” I wondered out loud.
“Um, curious.” She hopped up and carried her sandwich wrapper into the kitchen.
I followed. “Claire?”
She tossed the wrapper into the trash under the sink and then turned a slow circle, searching the kitchen, as if her mom would pop out of a cupboard. When that didn’t happen, she grabbed my hand and pulled me into her bedroom, shutting the door behind us with her foot.
In her room, she dropped my hand and stood by her desk, flicking the pages in her notebook with her fingernail. She’d cut her hair to just beyond her ears this fall and it made her face even more pixie-cute. I’d grown mine out another two inches. At what point would my hair be longer than hers?
I remembered trying to come out to her in this room and all the wrong guesses she’d come up with, so I waited for her to talk.
Claire finally said, “I was looking for ways to, you know, be in bed with you.”
“You don’t like how we are?”
She caught the stack of pages with her fingernail again and let them ruffle down. “Last winter, before you told me, I thought I had this boyfriend and all he wanted to do was make out and make me feel good. Other girls at school kept talking about how their guys pressured them for sex. And if they did have sex, it was over when he was done and he didn’t seem to care if they had a good time too. I figured I’d super lucked out.”
She peeked sideways at me and added, “Which I have. Except now I’m starting to feel like I’m the guy in a bad way, like it’s all about me. But also like I’m the girl in a bad way, like you get to have me in a way that I don’t get to have you. I want it to be different.”
I turned away and moved into the open part of her room between her bed and closet. I didn’t want things to be about me. Not while I didn’t like what I had to work with.
I grumbled, “Boy parts.”
“You don’t have ‘boy parts’,” Claire said, sounding angry, but maybe not at me. “I’m sorry I ever said that phrase. You have girl parts that look different than mine.”
That seemed implausible. I wanted it to be true, but I couldn’t see how. In the nine months since I’d come out to her, we’d slowed way down while she got used to me being a girl, and then slowed down again when I got depressed from the Dr. Webber trips. Only a few weeks ago, we’d gotten back to where we’d been early last spring. That explained why she was researching this now.
But what could she find? I kept my back to Claire and shrugged. “What if I really wish I had different parts?” I asked. “What if being touched like that just reminds me of feeling wrong.”
She didn’t say anything for so long that I turned around. She’d moved from her desk to the window, rested her fingers on the sill but wasn’t looking out. Her eyes had a broken-glass sadness to them.
“Is it that bad?” she asked.
“Sometimes,” I admitted. “Most of the time.”
She half-turned toward the window, face tilting down, the sound of tears in her voice. “I wish I could make everything feel right for you. When we’re kissing and you touch me, I feel so close to you. But then there’s this wall and I know it’s not your wall—you didn’t put it there—but I really want to climb over it.”
“You want me to throw you a rope?” I joked, trying to lighten the air between us.
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
I wanted to give her something, to get us closer again, but I didn’t know how. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water and one for Claire. When I got back to her bedroom, she was still standing between her desk and the window, her eyes red-rimmed. I put her glass down on the desk and drank half of mine, then set it next to hers.
I sat on the end of the bed and said, “The wall—Dr. Mendel said this cool thing—for two people to have intimacy, there have to be two bodies there. Like my body and your body. But you can take your body for granted because it’s the way you expect it to be, while I have to imagine my body. There’s how my body’s supposed to be, but there’s also how it looks and feels now, and I have to make up the difference. That’s a lot of work. I think that’s part of the wall.”
Claire ran her thumb along the rim of her water glass. She took a sip and put it down again, returned her thumb to its edge.
“Can I help you imagine your body?” she asked.
“How?”
She took a step toward the bed. I thought she’d sit next to me, but instead she nudged my legs apart so she could stand between them, right in front of me. She wrapped her arms around my shoulders and pulled my cheek to her chest. Her chin rested on the top of my head.
“See, you’re tall,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean you have to feel tall all the time or most of the time if you don’t want to. Same goes for everything. It’s how we think about it. We don’t have to do boy things with your parts. We’ll do girl things. We’ll call your parts by the same names as mine and go from there.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“Because mine look so different.”
She moved back enough to look at my face, resting her hands on my shoulders. “If we close our eyes, isn’t it all just squishy bits?” she asked with a half grin.
I stared at my big feet and Claire’s little ones. “Mine don’t squish the same.”
Her fingers walked in from my shoulder and brushed my cheek. She asked, “Can we at least try? We’ll go slow, but someday I’d like to take your pants off.”
That sounded kind of great but really scary.
“Just your pants,” she said. “Not your panties. I’m not trying to pressure you.” With a half laugh, she added, “I’m not that kind of guy.”
I caught her hips and tugged. She came close and put her arms around me again.
“You could probably get into my pants now,” I whispered into the fabric of her sweater. Her hold on me tightened and she made a light, happy murmur.
I asked, “What if it doesn’t work?”
“If you don’t feel good, tell me. We’ll go watch Law & Order and snuggle under a blanket. It’s not like we were grea
t at kissing the first time either,” she pointed out.
“How long’s your mom gone for?”
“Hours,” Claire assured me.
She tipped my face up and kissed me. I liked being the short half of the couple.
Also Claire was wrong; she wasn’t the luckiest girl in our high school, I was.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The strangest thing happened a few days after Christmas. Mom was going through another phase of not talking to me; probably having trouble finding a new shrink who thought they could fix me.
Claire had gotten her acceptance letter to that university in Iowa with the great writing program. I couldn’t imagine what I was going to do without her. I didn’t have the money to go to a really good school and if I did have the money, I’d spend it on surgery anyway. I planned to a community college for a two-year degree and then transfer to the University of Minnesota for the last two years.
But that remained a long way off and so my Christmas was bleak. Claire went to visit her dad, and I was stuck in the house with Mom glaring at me every time I did something girlish and with Dad wrapped up in his cars. He’d sold the Bronco and picked up a 1977 Ford Thunderbird two months ago. He must’ve been in love with it, because he worked on it every night.
Two days after Christmas while I was slumped on the couch trying to be interested in the television, Dad opened the door to the garage and said, “Come here.”
I followed him into his workshop that was, as usual, littered with tools and car parts. He picked a small, badly gift-wrapped box off his worktable and tossed it at me.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Late Christmas present,” he said. “Open it.”
I did. It was a small box with a set of car keys. “Dad, I already have a car.”
Standing next to me, he turned me toward the Thunderbird. It was still a bit of a monstrosity, but, as he often boasted, for something he’d picked up for twenty-five hundred bucks, who could complain. It had good lines and with all the work he’d put in and the right paint job it would run and look slick.
“Now you have two,” he pointed out.
“What am I going to do with two cars?”
“Sell one of ’em,” he said, like that was obvious. “What do you think you can get for the Chrysler?”
I felt my jaw loosening, wanting to drop open. “Sixteen,” I said with effort. “Maybe seventeen grand.”
“Good. There you go.”
“For school?” I asked, not quite believing my ears.
“For whatever you want. I don’t need to know what you use it for.”
Was he suggesting I use it to pay for surgery?
“Dad—?” I started.
He turned to face me fully. “Look, I don’t understand this gender stuff. It makes no sense to me. And it doesn’t have to. All I know is that you’ve been angry and sad damn near your whole life, and now sometimes you’re happy. I want you to stay that way. You do whatever you need. And if I hurt you when you were little…well, I’m sorry.”
I started crying. I couldn’t talk.
He threw an arm over my shoulders and tightened it once. “Jesus Christ,” he said roughly.
After a minute he dropped his arm and walked across the workshop to his latest project. “What do you think I can get for this shit?” he yelled back to me. “It’s shot to hell.”
I wiped my face and walked over to where he was standing. “It’s worth something,” I said. “I’ll look it up.”
He didn’t bring the topic up again, but I spent more time over that holiday working on the Thunderbird with him. And I could’ve sworn he’d stopped calling me “son” and started calling me “hon.”
* * *
Our school had a Valentine’s Day dance on Friday, but we didn’t go. Who goes to a school dance on Friday the thirteenth? And we didn’t feel like trotting out as Chris and Claire again. We had to do that at school all the time anyway.
The rumors about Claire being queer were dying down. Mainly because Ramon was a champion. From the many girls with crushes on him, he’d found one he liked—Claire and I liked her too—and brought her out on a few double dates with us, then talked about it loudly at school. Plus Claire and I kissed each other in the halls often enough that any theory about us not being together sounded ridiculous.
Pretty funny, since we were by far the queerest couple at the school.
For Valentine’s Day itself, Natalie had invited us to a party at her house. I was supposed to pick up Claire a bit before dinner and we’d drive to the Cities together, getting something to eat on the way. Her mom was seriously dating the guy she’d started seeing the previous summer and kept bringing him back to the house. At least her mom still worked one weekend day, so we had that to ourselves. And those days together now sometimes involved more undressing than dressing up. But not today. Her mom had the day off and I got a panicked mid-afternoon call from Claire about there being “Valentine’s Day grossness.”
I drove over and brought her back to my house. Her arrival was the excuse Mikey needed to get every action figure he owned and bring them into the living room. He insisted Claire do battle and she rose to the challenge. They pushed the coffee table back to the couch and set up the field of battle. Mikey crouched on one side in his Hulk T-shirt and Claire sat on the other in a navy sweater with cute white stripes that could almost pass for a superhero uniform if I squinted a lot.
I went to make nachos. We had leftover ground beef from taco Thursday, so I sprinkled that over the chips, cut up tomatoes, and added shredded cheese, feeling smugly domestic.
I headed toward the living room to ask Claire and Mikey what they wanted to drink with the nachos, but stopped when I heard Mikey tell Claire, “My brother’s going to be my sister.”
“I know,” Claire said, her grin audible.
“But you’re still his girlfriend?”
“Yeah, I like her a lot. Girls can date other girls. And she’s the same person, just more fun.”
“I guess,” he said. “She’s still not as good at games as you are. You should teach her to be better.”
Claire laughed. “I’m working on it. She might be too nice.”
Then there was a bunch of laser and punching sounds and Mikey yelling, “I’m killing you!”
I was grinning so huge my cheeks hurt, until I turned back toward the kitchen and saw Mom. She stood at the bottom of the stairs, between living room and kitchen, her face a plastic mask.
“What if he says that at school?” she asked.
Now that she’d found me a new shrink, we were on speaking terms. Her new thing was all variations on “what will people think?” and about how hard this would be on Mikey.
“I’m gone in a few months anyway,” I said. I didn’t want to get into it with her again. Not today.
She pursed her lips in a tight frown. “You don’t have to.”
Did she mean I didn’t have to move out or was she back to saying I didn’t have to transition? If she meant not moving out, how would that work?
I saw Dr. Mendel at least once a month, even though I had to see the other shrink too. Dr. Mendel kept telling me that my folks had their own process and to give it time. She didn’t get how hard it was to live with this person who was supposed to take care of me and kept wanting the real me to vanish.
I softened my voice and told Mom, “It’s better if I’m in the Cities. I’ll come visit.”
“As…a woman?” her voice held layers of disbelief and worry and maybe curiosity.
“You could always tell the neighbors I’m a cousin.”
The microwave beeped and I hurried back into the kitchen. When I’d pulled out the nachos to cool, I turned around to see Mom standing in the doorway watching me.
“A cousin from which side of the family?” she asked and the side of her mouth twitched up a little.
“Dad’s?”
She nodded and almost smiled. Before I could ask if she was trying to make a joke, she
went back upstairs.
I carried the nachos into the living room and took a pillow to the face.
* * *
When it was time to leave for the party, Mom and Dad were both in the kitchen. Mom sat at the table with the paper in front of her and Dad was unloading the dishwasher. They were talking about going out to brunch tomorrow, just the two of them.
Somehow despite Dr. Webber’s advice being awful, they’d managed to ignore the whole “model male and female poles” thing and remember they liked hanging out together. I think Dr. Webber had pissed off Dad enough that he started doing more of the “female” things around the house. He’d been cleaning more and I caught him folding the laundry. He was really good at it too.
“I’ll watch Mikey,” I said, though they’d probably assumed that anyway.
Dad lifted a stack of plates into the cupboard and gave me a nod. He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, got out a twenty and said, “You’re taking Claire someplace nice, right?”
“Yeah.” I hadn’t told them we were going into the Cities. I figured it would just freak Mom out. “It’s okay, Dad. I’ve got money.”
“Someplace nice,” he repeated and held out the twenty until I took it.
I hugged him. And then, because it would be really weird not to, I went over and hugged Mom too. She held on long enough that I started to worry she thought she could squeeze me back into being her son.
Claire came in and said her good-byes. On the way to the car she asked if she could drive. “I need more practice,” she said. “For driving back from Iowa. But you have to tell me which way to go, I’m totally lost.”
“We’re standing in my driveway.”
“Yep, not a clue which way to the Cities.”
“You wanting to drive—is this a metaphor?” I asked as I got in on the passenger side.
“It is now.” She backed out, got us going in the right direction and then said, “Oh hey, speaking of metaphors, check my right jacket pocket.”
