Both Can Be True

by Jules Machias

  “I’m not lying to her. She’s my friend.”

  “Fine, I’ll tell Mom you’ve been sneaking out at night. And that I found your hoodie behind the shed and it smelled like pee.”

  I look up at him. He looks back at me evenly, his arms still crossed. His jaw set.

  He knows this is messed up. And he’s doing it anyway because he’s that tied in knots over this girl.

  I grit my teeth. Mitch has a competitive streak a mile wide. He once told me I’d spent thirteen and a half hours doing stuff with Dad during Christmas break, and that Dad had only spent six hours with him. He lives to get even. I can’t tell him no or he’ll bust me and Chewbarka will be killed.

  But man, I do not want to do this to Fiona. It’s so unfair to her. I focus on the trailer tires, trying to think up some other solution that won’t involve lying to her.

  Mitchell takes out his phone. “I could text Mom right now.”

  “Fine,” I snap at him. “Just . . . ugh. Really? Really?”

  He at least has the decency to look a little sick that his gross plan worked. “Tell her you want to meet at Frosty Stop. Eleven o’clock.”

  I curse Mitchell out mentally, then text Fiona: Can you meet me at Frosty Stop at 11? Need to ask you something. I am a complete freaking jerk.

  I guess, Fiona writes back. Everything cool?

  Yup, will tell you what’s up when I see you. She’s going to destroy me for this. And I’m going to deserve it. “She’s in,” I tell Mitch. “If I’m not back before Mom gets home from church and volunteering, tell her I went to the kennel.”

  “You didn’t put Frankie’s bed in the trailer. Are you actually going there?”

  “Do you actually care?”

  Mitch steps into the shadows of the garage. He picks at a chunk of dried dirt on an empty pot and looks at me sideways. “I’ve thought of like fifty reasons for you to sneak out every night and come home reeking of outhouse. None of them are good. Are you like . . . okay?”

  I wheel Vlad and the trailer out of the garage and yank the door down behind me. I am never, ever playing spin the bottle again.

  Sometimes when I’m biking, my brain spits out an insight I belatedly realize has been stewing in the back of my head. Like a computer program solving an equation while the user does something else, and then boom: an answer. On the way to meet Ash, while I’m thinking over everything I told her about Cole, it occurs to me that saying I’m sorry and crying was just me doing the same thing that drove him to drop me in the first place: focusing on myself. On how I felt. I felt sorry, I felt regret, I felt guilty. And I expressed that.

  What I should have done was what he always did for me. I should have said I understood where he was coming from. Cole is brilliant at repeating what someone says so they know he’s understood them. I should have done that in June, when he was mad I kissed Fiona. I should have said I didn’t think about how much it would hurt you to watch that happen.

  There’s more I need to think about with this, but I’m nearly to the corner where I agreed to meet Ash. The second I see her, a surge of nerves hits. She’s on Sir Reginald Bevis the Steadfast, one foot on the ground and the other on a pedal, rolling back and forth. A purple helmet that matches her frilly purple shirt dangles from the bike’s handlebars. She sees me and her face lights up.

  My heart does the same thing. It’s . . . surprising. And reassuring. I was starting to think something was wrong with me since I’ve never caught feels for someone the way it seems like everyone around me has already.

  Then again, I also never thought I’d be hauling an incontinent Pomeranian in a bike trailer halfway across town to an apartment my dad lives in because he doesn’t live with us anymore. But here we are.

  “Morning!” Ash says brightly as I approach. “How’s Chewy digging the trailer?”

  “She cried at first and I felt terrible. But she calmed down.” I glance inside the netting. She’s panting and has a doggy smile. “You ready for a long ride?” I ask Ash.

  “Abso-posi-toot-ley.” She puts the helmet on. “Lead the way, noble rescuer of cute leaky doggo!”

  It doesn’t take long for my legs to burn and my butt to hurt from the bike seat. I Google Mapped a back way that keeps us off the busy roads, but hauling the trailer, even though there’s only an eight-pound Pom in it, is tiring. I keep slowing to pull down the hoodie around my waist so it’s over the bike seat to provide extra butt padding.

  Six miles in, we stop for drinks at a gas station. We pull our bikes behind the dumpster and lock them together. It’s shady and cool back here, even though it stinks. We take our helmets off and head inside. “What’d you tell your mom you were doing this morning?” Ash asks.

  “Nothing yet. She does church and then volunteers at a food bank, so she won’t be back till like two or three. How about you?”

  “Minecraft Bed Wars tournament with Griff. She wasn’t thrilled, but she didn’t demand I come home, so.” Ash shrugs.

  In the store, I’m debating between blue Gatorade and red and Ash is looking at the snacks when she glances at two people at the end of the aisle and goes tense. Her eyes dart to the plain black hoodie around my waist. “Can I borrow that a sec?”

  I hand it to her, curious. It’s not cold in here.

  She pulls it on and ties her hair back as a kid comes over. He looks about our age and says “Sup” to Ashley like he knows her.

  “Hey,” she answers stiffly.

  The kid seems like he wants to say something. He shifts his bag of chips from one hand to the other and looks at me like he’s trying to figure out what the deal is with me and Ash.

  I’m tempted to step closer and take her hand. But something makes me stop. She seems taller all of a sudden, almost as tall as me, and she’s holding her shoulders rigid. She looks different with her hair tied back. Like . . . really different. Older, or something.

  “Tyler’s a total scumbag,” the kid says. “Him and Jackson have been—”

  “It’s fine,” Ash says quickly. Her voice is deeper, sharper. “I don’t need to know.”

  The kid glances at the woman he came in with. “Well. We’re getting hammered at the meets this year. Our team scores suck without you.”

  Ash opens the fridge case and takes an orange juice off the shelf with a shaking hand. I notice she’s not wearing nail polish anymore. She doesn’t look at the kid. She’s blushing so hard her neck is red.

  “Okay, um,” the kid says. “I guess good luck at the new school or whatever.”

  Ash nods, still without looking at him. She beelines for the cash register like a girl on a mission.

  As soon as we’re out of the store, she yanks out the hair tie. She takes off the hoodie and gives it back to me without eye contact.

  “So . . .” I don’t know what to say. It seems weird to not acknowledge whatever just happened. “Why’d you ask for my hoodie?”

  She looks like she doesn’t know if she wants to kick the dumpster or burst into tears. “It was cold in there.” She kneels by the trailer. “Hey, pupper. Doing okay?”

  I busy myself with unlocking our bikes, a million questions in my mind. I start to ask who the kid was, how she knows him, why she made herself look different. Sort of like a guy. What kind of team he was talking about. Why she didn’t want to talk to him.

  But when I look at Ash again, she’s getting on Sir Reginald Bevis and avoiding my eyes. She might as well have hung a Closed sign around her neck.

  I don’t want to upset her. So I don’t ask.

  13

  Dude Mode: Activate

  Ash

  Daniel’s unasked questions drift behind him on the warm fall breeze as we get back on the road. The longer he goes without saying anything, the more I want to tell him everything.

  Well. Not everything. Just enough to explain, sort of, why seeing Nate freaked me out. I can’t tell Daniel how right it felt to be a boy out loud, just for those few seconds, even inside the awkwardness. How right it fe
lt to be myself, and how that feeling banged up hard against how much I like Daniel and want him to think I’m a girl. And how that locked me all up and turned me into a socially awkward robot in front of Nate, who thinks of me as a weird dude who dresses like a chick sometimes and not a chick who’s a tomboy sometimes.

  Maybe I could tell Daniel how I wound up at Oakmont. Without the details. I promised Griffey I’d at least think about telling Daniel the truth.

  So as we ride, I start talking. I tell him about my appendix going kablooey, and that my parents’ fighting got way worse when that happened, and how they split up while I was in the hospital. I tell him about Griffey moving to Oakmont when his dad got a better job here. I tell Daniel I failed sixth grade, and that everyone made fun of me for it—which they did, even if their focus was my flip-flopping gender, a detail I definitely don’t tell Daniel—and I tell him how I only had one friend, Camille, and we weren’t super close but she was kind to me. I tell him the bullying got bad at the start of this school year. Which isn’t a lie. And that it got so bad that my mom decided we’d move, which also isn’t a lie. And that Oakmont seemed better to her than Bailey in a hundred ways. Plus Griffey was here and she loves Griffey almost as much as I do. Which also isn’t a lie.

  I fall into silence and drop my gaze to my pedaling feet. I just gave Daniel like 30 percent of the real story. I left out everything about why Dad bailed. I left out that the only reason Camille was my friend was because she was the only person I knew at Bailey who was comfortable being herself out loud—like she was open about being bi and about being a total Wings of Fire fangirl—and who didn’t also make a hobby of policing other people’s identities. I left out Tyler and the song I drew and what he did to me. I left out Camille filming it and posting it in an effort to get adults to finally see how bad I was getting bullied. I didn’t tell Daniel how the video spread like wildfire on social and wound up with Mom cussing out the superintendent and yanking me out of school.

  Nothing I said just now was a lie. But it was such a small part of the truth.

  It occurs to me as we pedal that I could just . . . say it. All that’s keeping me trapped in this dumb girl act is me. I don’t want to be wearing this frilly shirt, I don’t want my hair down, I don’t want to have on these fitted jeans with fake front pockets and stupid sequins on the butt. I’m wearing a girl costume over boy-me so Daniel will like me.

  It’s so fake. So wrong. Like I’m in drag against my will.

  I look up, on the verge of telling him. But I have no idea where we are. He could turn on me as fast as Tyler did. Maybe faster, because I never kissed Tyler and I have kissed Daniel, and maybe that’ll make him furious. He doesn’t seem like the type to get furious, but I didn’t think Tyler was either, and boy, should I have taken a cue from how he acted when his little sister cracked his phone case to know how he’d respond when he felt lied to. Even though I never lied to him. Not exactly. I just didn’t tell him everything.

  Like I’m not telling Daniel everything.

  Daniel won’t do what Tyler did. He won’t pretend everything’s fine and then turn on me when no grown-ups are around. He won’t.

  Anyway, Tyler would never have gone to so much trouble to save a dog.

  Ahead of me, Daniel’s foot slips off the pedal and he bashes his shin into it. He sucks his breath in and I realize that the jagged shapes dancing through my head, the ones I haven’t been paying attention to because I was focused on myself, are the sounds of his breathing getting choppier. “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “No. Yes. Fine.” He gets his foot on the pedal. His back is to me, so I can’t see his face, but he sounds like he’s doing that gasp thing people do when they’re trying not to cry.

  “You want to stop for a minute? Or trade? I can haul the trailer.” I’m not sure I could, really. Sir Reginald Bevis isn’t that steadfast. He’s rusty and his shifters don’t work. It takes about all I have to keep up.

  Daniel doesn’t answer. He slows to a stop. I put my kickstand down and walk to him. He smears his face with his sleeve and turns like he doesn’t want me to see.

  “Hey,” I say quietly. “What’s up?”

  “That sucks that all that stuff happened to you. I’m really sorry.”

  “That’s why you’re upset?” Jeez. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.

  “No, I just—I mean yes, I’m upset that people were mean to you. That’s awful.”

  “But . . .” I’m getting the idea that’s not why he’s crying.

  “I don’t want to screw this up,” he blurts. “I’ve seen Dad twice since he moved and both times I cried like a stupid little kid and I’m gonna do it again and I just—” He turns away, wiping at his face with both wrists. He barks out a triangular laugh. “I’m basically a five-year-old. Or, like, a toddler throwing a fit at the grocery store. That’s my maturity level. Fit-pitching toddler.” He laughs again, but it’s more cry than laugh.

  I want to pull him into my arms and fold up around him and protect him from all the ways the world makes you feel bad for having feelings. But he’s standing with his back and shoulders all stiff like if I do he’s not going to be able to keep the epic meltdown in, and it’ll make this even harder.

  “We need a story,” I say to distract him. “Since the truth could end in . . . well . . .” I glance at Chewbarka watching us with her cloudy eyes, her pink tongue poking out of her mouth.

  Daniel takes a deep breath. “Yeah. I’ve been thinking about that.” He wipes his face. “So I thought—” His voice cracks. He clears his throat. “I thought I could say Tina found her in the woods behind the kennel. And that she stuck her in a cage till she could figure out what to do with her. And then the car wreck thing, and I can say I sort of blurted out that I would take care of Chewbarka. But that I’ve been hiding her from Mom because Mom’s so against getting a dog. But I’d say it’s only been since Friday. Not all week.”

  “Right, good. That’s good.” It incorporates pieces of truth. Like I just did. “Except don’t use Chewbarka’s name? Because if she didn’t have tags, you wouldn’t know it.”

  “I didn’t think of that.” Daniel cracks a small smile. “I’m glad you came along.”

  A burst of joy spreads through me. “Would he ask why the dog couldn’t stay at the kennel till Tina came back?”

  Daniel’s smile fades. “Oh. Yeah, I guess he will.” His face goes glum. But then he brightens. “Or, wait. I was in the kennel once when Gavin the office guy was giving a customer a tour. He said that to be boarded, a dog has to be up to date on shots. So like, you wouldn’t know that about a stray, right? So a stray couldn’t stay there.” He nods like he’s agreeing with himself. “Yes. Yeah.” He blinks and focuses on my face. “I’m glad you thought of that too. You’re a genius, Ash.”

  My skin’s going pink, but for once, I don’t care. “Will he ask if you tried to call Tina?”

  Daniel nods. “I actually thought of that. I’ve been trying to find her on Facebook but there’s so many Tina Martins. I messaged three I thought might be her. Only got one answer, from someone who didn’t know what I was talking about.” He checks his phone. “Make that two someones who don’t know. Still no answer from the third.”

  “Who’s the genius now?”

  “You. Still you. Definitely.”

  I laugh. I feel so light and free and happy that I lean forward to kiss him again. But our helmets knock together and our chins bump and we both crack up.

  “Awkward!” I practically shout.

  Daniel looks embarrassed but happy. “So, um. When we get there . . . can you help me explain? I don’t think I’ll cry like a two-year-old, but”— he waves his hand—“let’s be realistic, it’s probably gonna happen.” He looks pained.

  “Of course,” I say.

  “Thank you.” Daniel smiles sadly. “My mom said once that her and Dad always wanted a daughter. I guess my life would be easier if I were a Danielle instead. It’s fine if girls cry at the drop of a hat
. But for guys, once you’re past preschool . . .” He shrugs and forces a laugh.

  I do too. It sounds like I tripped over a goat. Daniel says something about Mitch and Fiona that I’m too confuzzled to catch, and then we get back on our bikes and ride, and I can’t get the image of him as a girl out of my head.

  If I found out he really was a girl, and I thought I’d kissed a girl instead of a guy, would I be mad? Or upset?

  I think I would.

  I think I’d feel like I’d been lied to.

  I don’t know what to do with that. So I just keep pedaling.

  14

  Bodily Function

  Daniel

  I thought I was ready, I thought after joking about being a Danielle, I thought after we came up with a story, that I’d be cool. That I wouldn’t immediately melt down and beg Dad to please come home so my life feels like a complete picture again instead of a puzzle with pieces missing. So I can sleep at night and do photography and return to my regular level of freaked out instead of this DEFCON 1 nonsense.

  But standing at his door at 10:42 a.m., holding a smelly, diapered Pomeranian whose tongue won’t stay in her mouth, I’m suddenly . . . not ready for this.

  I can’t even knock.

  Ashley lifts her hand toward the door. She raises her eyebrows to ask if I want her to knock for me.

  I nod. She nods too. Then she waits a minute like she’s aware I need it.

  She always knows exactly what to do. How to be around me without making me feel bad for feeling.

  Cole used to be like that.

  Ash knocks.

  My heart pounds hard. I don’t even know if Dad’s here. Which, wow, how did it not occur to me until this minute that he might not be here? He’s a creative director at an ad agency and sometimes has to go out to LA to direct commercials. For all I know, he’s not even in town.

  Footsteps inside, and the door opens, and he’s so extremely here that I freeze up and can’t even say hi. I just stare at his blue-gray eyes, level with mine, which is so weird, like he’s been bigger than me my whole life and then I barely see him for two months and I’m as tall as him now? Have his shoulders always seemed so small?