by Rachel Gold
I unzipped it and felt inside until I hit hard plastic. I pulled out Mikey’s Starfire action figure with her insanely skimpy costume and hair down to her knees.
Claire told me, “He wanted me to take her so we could strategize beating his team when we get back. But also he said he thinks she’s transgender, so he wants her to hang out with you.”
I brushed my thumb over Starfire’s big, green eyes. Mom was so wrong about Mikey having trouble with this.
I said, “Starfire is an alien. We don’t really know what gender she started as. She could be trans. I love how it’s just not a big deal to him.”
“How’s your mom?” Claire asked. She must’ve seen us talking through the doorway.
“Still weird. She might have been trying to make a joke. I don’t know.”
I held onto Mikey’s action figure and watched the passing darkness, wondering how much I’d have to leave behind and how much I’d want to. I’d never miss Liberty or that high school. But I’d miss Ramon and a few other swim guys. I’d miss hearing them rag on how bad coach’s pep talks were; now that I wasn’t on the team, they re-enacted the pep talks over lunch for me. Ramon had gotten into a good school on the west coast and most of the other swim guys who would graduate this spring planned to flee our small town for bigger cities.
I’d miss Claire when she went to Iowa in the fall, so much that I couldn’t stand to think about that.
I liked the idea of having my own space, but what would it be like not to see Mikey’s messed up hair every morning? Not to hear him running through the house making flying sounds for his heroes? What would it be like to go an entire week without seeing Dad in his fifteen-pocket vests? And, for as crappy as the last eight months had been around Mom, I’d miss talking to her about the news or hearing her office gossip.
I hadn’t put all the pieces together until now, talking to Mom and her asking if I was coming home as a woman. Of course that’s what I wanted. I’d been planning to go to college as a girl. I’d turn eighteen in April and then I’d change my name and paperwork. By the time I started in the fall, I’d have been on hormones for a year. I didn’t want to keep pretending.
When I’d imagined moving to the Cities and going to college, and coming home on weekends—hanging out with Dad in the garage, playing with Mikey and complaining about it but liking it at the same time—I’d assumed I’d be me. I’d be Emily.
Would I have to dress up as a guy again to visit home? Was Mom serious about the cousin thing? She hadn’t even touched the topic of me coming out to my grandparents. What would happen when she saw me as a woman? Or when Dad did?
I’d thought coming out to them at Dr. Mendel’s would be it, but they had a lot of road to travel, too.
When we arrived at Natalie’s, her mom opened the door and hugged us both. Music drifted up from the lower level. I had my duffel bag over my shoulder and Natalie’s mom pointed us to the upstairs bathroom. Claire came with me and sat on the edge of the tub while I did my makeup.
“I feel like that scene in every show with a trans girl ever,” I said, brushing on eye shadow.
“What scene?”
“The big reveal where she gets all fancy and the viewer sees her…” I put down my brush so I could do air quotes, “…‘as a woman’ for the first time. It’s like every time they have to show this whole business, like it’s artificial. Like we’re not just who we are all the time.”
Claire put her hands between her knees, watching me. She said, “You look like Emily all the time to me now. I mean, you look like yourself. It’s your eyes, I guess, or, if you don’t think this is too sappy, your soul.”
From her it wasn’t too sappy. And it reminded me. “I got you a Valentine’s gift.”
I went into the side pocket of the duffel bag and pulled out a wrapped rectangle: red and pink paper but not garish. Claire ripped off the paper and opened the two sides of the hinged frame. One side was a photo of us that Natalie had taken just after New Year’s. I’d been sitting on the couch in Natalie’s basement and Claire had come up from behind and put her arms around my shoulders. I was grinning like I’d won the lottery and Claire had this joyful smirk like “Can you believe this girl?” mixed with “Can you believe this is my girl?” It was the first photo I had of me that I liked.
The other side of the frame said: “Do everything in love.”
Claire murmured, “I have mixed feelings about the apostle Paul, but this is so perfect. I got you something too.”
She opened her shoulder bag and pulled out a compact, wrapped package, all shimmery red foil. I slit the tape with my thumbnail and unfolded the foil to reveal a cell phone box.
Claire said, “I had the girl at the store set it up. My number’s in there. I paid the first few months already. And I set the wallpaper for you.”
I thumbed it on. The background was her paladin character in full armor. In the contacts, she was listed as, “Claire the Mighty.”
“I was going to get one, honest,” I told her, grinning. “But I still see you every day.”
“And you’re going to keep seeing me every day for months, but now you can also text me.”
She looked at the frame in her hands, mouth turning down, and I knew she was thinking about fall, like I was.
“Come on,” I told her. “Let’s go party.”
We headed down the stairs. On the first floor landing, Claire grabbed my hand. “This is our first semipublic date as a girl-couple,” she said.
“You should’ve worn a dress,” I told her, because I was in my long skirt.
She stuck her tongue out at me and we walked down to the basement. There were about ten people there: Natalie and her new beau, who was a trans guy she’d met at the support group, plus Steve and Badri, and a few people from Natalie’s school.
After the introductions, Steve and Badri went back to dancing together, as did two of the girls from Natalie’s school. Claire wandered off to get a plate of snacks as I caught up with Natalie.
Once I had all the Cities gossip, I spotted Claire sitting alone in an armchair near the back of the room. I pulled out my new phone, found her number and texted her: want to dance?
She felt her phone buzz, read the screen and grinned. By then I was standing next to the chair. I knelt down next to her. “You okay?”
“Are you going to get bored with me now that you have a bunch of trans friends?” she asked.
“Um, no. Are you going to get to Iowa and decide you want to date someone else?”
She shook her head, looked down at her phone, whispered, “I’m going to miss you so much. I don’t want to go, but I have to.”
“I know,” I said. “We have months. Iowa isn’t that far and I have a car.”
“You’re going to drive to Iowa in the Thunderbird?”
“It’s sturdy.”
I’d sold my other car a few weeks ago and now had an impressive amount of money in the bank—enough for my first two years of college and a good start on the surgery I wanted. Plus Steve and Badri had cleaned out their four-season porch and offered to rent it to me cheaply until I found an apartment near school.
A year ago, when I’d tried to imagine my future, I could only see what I wanted to look like, who I wanted to be, but nothing else real about my life. Now that I could be that person, the life around me also took shape. I’d live in a cool city with amazing friends. I’d figure out how to visit Dad and Mikey and Mom; we’d get used to being a family with one son and one daughter. I’d be in college learning how to write code so I could make more online spaces for people like me.
“I get to go to college as a girl,” I whispered.
Claire lifted my hands and pressed my fingers to her lips.
It hadn’t hit me until now that this life—surrounded by friends, music, food and warmth, my hands in Claire’s—could be mine all the time. I tugged on Claire’s fingers.
“Want to dance with your girlfriend?” I asked.
She stood up and pulle
d me up with her. “Do you want to dance with yours?”
“More than anything,” I told her.
We moved over to where the others were dancing and put our arms around each other. She rested her cheek on my shoulder. Through the window I saw the gentle winking of the soft white holiday lights that the neighbors hadn’t taken down yet. Above that, bright stars surrounded a glowing, nearly full moon.
Soon I would live a few miles from here and everyone would know me as Emily.
Epilogue
Ten Years Later
A lot changes in ten years. From the time I came out to Claire, spring 2008, to now, transgender became a household word and same-sex marriage was legalized. We watched our country take so many steps forward and too many steps back. Still I’m hopeful as much, maybe more than I’m heartbroken.
Claire wanted our wedding to be ten years to the day that I came out to her. She calls that our anniversary because that’s when she got the chance to start dating Emily, instead of the well-constructed fiction of Chris. And she still loves coincidences, only she won’t call them that: miracles, divine intervention.
Too cutesy for me—the ten years thing, not miracles. But she’s a better planner than I am, so our wedding date turned out to be ten years, a week and a half from when I came out. That is it would be, if we managed to pull off the wedding itself.
* * *
Claire and I had gone to our separate colleges and split up halfway into that first year because the distance felt too hard. I’d moved to the Cities and started community college officially as Emily Christine Hesse. I earned a two-year degree in Computer Science, worked full time for a year, got the surgeries I wanted. Then I enrolled in the University of Minnesota for two more years.
Claire got most of the way through her four years in Iowa and started telling me “I miss you” a lot. It took me longer than I want to admit to get the hint. In her last year of college we started getting together again, carefully, in case too much had changed. She moved to the Cities the summer after her graduation, but we didn’t get a place together until that winter—slogging through the January snow to look at duplexes because we were back in love with each other and didn’t want to wait any longer.
Claire and I had been living together for about two years—girlfriends for three years, or five, depending on how you counted—when I started wondering if we should talk about getting married. Because I’d grown up looking like a guy, I’d been trained to be the one to ask and I didn’t want to. But then Claire had been trained to be the one to wait to be asked, and I didn’t know if she’d untrained that.
I found a ring that would be perfect. Super adorable. But then I couldn’t ask because I couldn’t figure out how to do it without the whole guy-gets-on-one-knee thing. And besides, I really wanted to be asked.
The engagement ring sat in my dresser drawer for months and months. Life went on.
We have a pretty great life. Claire works in (that is, unofficially runs) the communications department for our church. I work for a healthcare company, in their tech department, supporting a phone app that helps people take better care of themselves. It’s a big company and the tech department, which includes way more than the app support, is about twenty people at the location where I work.
The day it happened, around lunchtime, one of my coworkers who sits by the window got up, paused, and still peering out the window said, “I think there’s a bunch of elves on the lawn. I’m definitely seeing pointed ears.”
A few of the others clustered around the windows and then one called across to me, “Hey, Emily, isn’t that your girlfriend?”
We all ran down the stairs to where dancing elves twirled ribbons in the air. Claire wore a cute dress and some of her armor pieces from Minnesota’s huge Renaissance Festival, just the artsy ones, like the vambraces with their etched metal and leather.
Claire got tongue-tied. She said something about paladins not being much without people to protect and other stuff about magic. I thought she was trying to set something up for Fest next year.
But slowly I was getting the idea that this wasn’t a practice run for some future performance piece. Plus Beatrice from HR started crying.
Claire realized if she got on one knee while I was standing, we’d be way too different in height, so she steered me over to a bench and knelt and said, “I want to be your person for the rest of our lives.”
I remember that part exactly.
Then I was crying and she was crying and my coworkers all applauded. Thankfully, Beatrice pulled it together enough to say, “She’s asking you a question about the rest of your lives. You’re supposed to give her an answer.”
I stared at Claire in wonder and said, “Oh, of course.” That made everyone laugh and the elves started ribbon-dancing again.
Claire had gotten me a gold ring with a diamond, the most perfect ever. And I told her, “I have a ring at home for you. In the dresser.”
“You do?”
“Waves of black and gold. I had to buy it.”
So I took the rest of the day off and we went home to get it and, since it was conveniently in the bedroom, not leave for a while.
* * *
That was last summer. We didn’t talk about the wedding for months. I was afraid Claire wanted a big church wedding, which, if we had it at our very queer and very trans church, wouldn’t be too bad. My mom, who ended up being better about me being transgender than me being a lesbian—once she got over that I really was never going to marry a man—seconded the big church wedding idea..
Dad just said, “That Claire’s a good one.”
And Mikey, who’s in his second year of college now, went on about how weddings are great places to meet girls and would I please invite some single girls who like guys. He added, “And I mean all the girls, not only the cisgender ones.”
Because my brother grew into the kind of guy who knows that “cisgender” means people who aren’t trans and can work it easily into any conversation about him getting a date. He’d also grown into a giant, getting the muscle mass of Dad’s side of the family and the height of the men on Mom’s side. His hockey buddies called him “Colossus,” from the X-Men; he’d grown into a real life superhero.
When I finally asked Claire, “How far out are we supposed to book the church for a wedding?” she gave me a quizzical look and shook her head.
She fished in her bag and then held out a clump of printed web pages stapled together. It was the info for a romance-themed science fiction and fantasy convention in February that would have a wedding chapel set up in a lovely atrium with a different theme each day.
“I love our church, but wouldn’t you rather get married on the Enterprise?” she asked.
“You are my very favorite person in the whole world,” I told her. “Can we have a fantasy theme? Nobody looks good in a Star Trek uniform. Except maybe Nico. But Nico looks good in everything.”
“We can’t have a Game of Thrones wedding,” Claire insisted. “I’d be scared the whole time. Star Wars cantina, hm, no. Oh wait, look, on Sunday in the afternoon they’re switching it over from GoT to World of Warcraft.”
Which is how I came to be standing in an atrium of the convention center with rain beading the dozens of windows, worrying how much longer I might have to wait. Claire wasn’t there yet. A third of our guests weren’t there. A few of those, like Claire’s mom, might not show.
Should we postpone the wedding?
Who do you ask?
The atrium was a huge room, windows on three sides with a broad hallway making up the fourth side. Chairs had been set out in rows with a wide central aisle. The ceremonial dais was covered in fake stone with pillars flying banners from World of Warcraft’s Horde and Alliance factions.
Our friend Ella, from Ohio, stood by the open end of the room as a greeter, looking like a slight, blond elf, even without a costume. She asked people “Horde or Alliance?” instead of “Are you with the bride or the bride?” Claire had taken the
Horde faction, saying she didn’t want to be stuck as a human.
I couldn’t ask Ella about when to postpone a wedding. Her boyfriend had gone back to China, saying he’d get as good as job there as he could in the States and likely be treated better. She wanted to join him but couldn’t leave her grad school program.
Our friends Nico and Tucker had driven up from Ohio with Ella, but they’d gone off with Claire and Mikey to watch the end of the costume competition. It must’ve run long because it was starting to overlap our wedding time. We only had forty-five minutes left for the ceremony before the next wedding group got to come in and set up. We didn’t need that much time, but we definitely needed some. And I only planned on getting married once, so I didn’t want to rush it.
Elizabeth, Vivianna and most of the support group were here. Steve and Badri might have some wisdom about weddings, but I wasn’t sure Steve wouldn’t dis me for buying into the patriarchy or something like that.
The front of Claire’s side of the room, reserved for family, remained empty. Her dad had sent gifts but didn’t come. Her mom hadn’t responded to any of the invitations, though we’d only sent paper and email. I kept telling Claire we should go in person, but she’d scowl and tell me I didn’t know what her mom’s new husband was like. He was the reason for her mom’s absence, so I didn’t argue.
The back of Claire’s side was jammed with people from Claire’s writing group and our church. They knew more about weddings than anyone, but I didn’t know them as well as Claire did. She should be the one to ask them and she wasn’t replying to my texts.
This left me standing at the front of an audience with a minister from our church dressed gamely in a World of Warcraft Priest’s robe. Claire had even found a robe that looked a bit like one of my old character’s favorites: all flowing white and purple. My dress was white with embroidered flowers and a simple, elegant shape. Claire ended up being the one in lace on top of lace, which looked great next to mine. If she’d been here to stand next to me.
I went down the two steps to the front row of the Alliance side, where Mom and Dad sat. “How long do I wait?”
