A Possibility of Whales

by Karen Rivers

  So why did seeing all this stuff make her feel so flat? She flopped backward onto the couch and folded her legs, origami-style, into her body.

  “What are you doing?” said Harry. “Is that yoga?”

  “Yes,” she said, because it was easier than trying to explain. “Ohmmm,” she said. “That’s meditation.”

  “Okaaaaaaay,” he said. “You’re being super weird.”

  “I’m not,” said Nat, and she crossed her eyes. “I’m just jealous of all your stuff. I don’t have any stuff. My dad is a minimalist.”

  Something dark passed over Harry’s face. “My dad is a jerk,” he said.

  Nat stopped smiling. She didn’t know what to say.

  After all, Harry might have a lot of stuff, but he also had a dad problem.

  She didn’t have a dad problem.

  Not really.

  Unless having a famous dad is a problem, which it was, in a lot of ways that probably Harry wouldn’t understand because to him having XAN GALLAGHER as a dad probably looked pretty great.

  It was Harry’s dad who told the school that Harry was Harriet.

  It was Harry’s dad who told them that Harry was a girl and must be referred to as “she,” even though Harry said he was a “he” and, as far as Nat was concerned, this should be up to Harry.

  “Forget it,” said Harry. “I shouldn’t have said that.” He smelled like Doritos and laundry soap, which was weird because they hadn’t eaten Doritos.

  “Did you know that all dogs’ feet smell like Doritos?” she said.

  “I didn’t know you had a dog!”

  “I don’t. But my best friend . . . I mean, my old best friend. My friend, Solly. She had a dog. Has a dog. She still has it.”

  “Huh,” said Harry. “Doritos are good.”

  “They smell like dogs’ feet,” said Nat. “How can you eat them?”

  Harry rubbed his stomach. “I’d like some right now,” he said. “Mmmmmm, dog-foot chips! My favorite.”

  They giggled.

  The leather on the couch was cool and smooth under Nat’s hand. She rubbed her hand on it. “This is a really nice couch,” she said, which she knew was the wrong thing.

  “I don’t know who my mom is,” she mouthed, but didn’t say out loud.

  “I saw something in that magazine and I’m freaking out,” she added.

  My mom is a makeup artist. She tried to believe that one, but now she wasn’t sure. She closed her eyes. She is, Nat told herself. She’s French. She’s a makeup artist. She loves whales. My mom is made up. Made up with makeup. She didn’t want to cry. She wanted to tell him though. She wanted to say something. She just didn’t know what, exactly, to say.

  “Why are you moving your mouth like that?” Harry said. “You’re not making any sound. I can’t hear you.”

  Nat shrugged.

  “Do you believe in telepathy?” she said.

  “What’s that? You mean like mind reading?” He snorted. “Duh. No.”

  Nat flinched.

  She decided right then and there that she wouldn’t tell Harry anything about her mom until he asked.

  She knew he would never ask.

  She picked up all four game controllers and laid them out beside her on the couch. “What should we play?” she said.

  “Duh,” he said, like it was obvious.

  She wasn’t sure she liked how he said “duh” all the time, but she knew you could like a person without liking everything about them. She tried to erase her bad thought about how he said “duh.” It wasn’t up to her to judge. That was another one of her dad’s things, the thing about never judging people. “People are weirdos!” he’d say. “Freaks and weirdos! All of us! It’s what makes us so great!”

  Harry went to one of the game consoles and fiddled with it, then came back.

  Being with Harry outside of school felt different; the atmosphere shifted around them. It was, she thought, like looking at the pavement in a heat wave. Everything felt shimmery and surreal, not like real life.

  “What are you girls up to?” Harry’s mom materialized out of nowhere. She was carrying a hamper full of dirty laundry with the cat balanced on the top. “This cat,” she said, and laughed, putting the hamper down.

  When Harry’s mom said “girls,” Nat felt something in her mouth that burned. She wondered if she might throw up. She swished the spit around in her mouth and swallowed. It tasted bad.

  “Mom.” Harry frowned. “We’re playing video games, OK? Can you leave us alone?”

  “Is that rude?” his mom said. “Harriet?”

  “Don’t call me Harriet!” he shouted.

  Nat couldn’t believe how fast he got mad. She’d never seen anyone get mad as quickly as Harry did, except for her dad, and that was just that one time.

  “Your dad says . . .” Harry’s mom said.

  Nat looked around; she wanted to crawl under the sofa and hide but there was only about an inch of space. There was no way that she would fit. She considered just running away. She could keep running until she was back at the Airstream trailer, where her dad was probably right now steaming twenty-seven pounds of shrimp. The shrimp here was really good. She wished she were there with him now, sneaking some shrimp from the basket.

  Nat hadn’t known that it was possible to feel homesick for your own house when you were just hanging out with a friend after school.

  “Don’t talk about it!” yelled Harry. “Can’t we just not talk about it for ten seconds?”

  “I’m just trying to do the right thing here,” said Harry’s mom.

  Nat glanced at the window, which was one of the half windows that people have in basements. She was eye level with the ground. She pictured herself climbing up and out and then crawling away, but she knew she wouldn’t. She wasn’t the kind of person to abandon a friend. “I—” she started.

  “It’s your name!” his mom interrupted. She had a steely determination in her voice. Her words glinted like roofing nails. “Your father and I named you Harriet.”

  “I don’t want to fight about this right now!” Harry yelled.

  Nat cleared her throat. Both Harry and his mom stared at Nat like they’d forgotten that she was there. She was definitely there. She took a deep breath; it smelled like cat (which was nothing like Doritos) and leather. She thought about what she should say.

  “Oh my goodness,” said Harry’s mom. “That was so rude of us. I’m sorry, Nat. We didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable!”

  “Why do you call her Nat? That’s a boy’s name! If you call her Nat, you have to call me Harry,” said Harry. “She’s a girl! She doesn’t even look like a boy!” He looked at her. “Well, she does a little.”

  “I’m a girl,” said Nat quickly. “I used to have short hair and people said I was a tomboy, but I was just . . .” She let the sentence trail away. It was too complicated in the moment to explain about her Tomboy Years. It had to do with her dad wanting her to hide her true self from the media, just like he did.

  Except he didn’t. XAN GALLAGHER was XAN GALLAGHER, period. He wasn’t different when he was just her dad, he was just sometimes less jovial.

  Nat tapped her fingers against her cheek, and then she looked at the cat, which—like her—didn’t seem to know where to go but looked like he wanted to run. The cat meowed.

  You can just jump down, Nat told the cat telepathically, and he did. Cats were very in tune like that. Nat smiled.

  The cat’s departure unbalanced the laundry, which spilled out all over the floor. Then it was like all the air rushed out of Harry’s mom at once, and she sagged against the door frame. “You’re right,” she said quietly. “I’m so sorry.” Then she walked away, leaving the mess behind.

  Harry still hadn’t said anything.

  He seemed paralyzed. His mouth was open a little bit.
Nat was tempted to stick her finger in his mouth. That’s what she would have done to Solly if Solly made that face. But Harry wasn’t Solly, so she didn’t.

  Nat picked up one of the game controllers, the gold one.

  Harry was still not talking.

  Nat got up and pressed the reset button on the game, which had gone to sleep. “Ready?” she said.

  Harry nodded.

  He had freckles in a perfect arch that went over his nose. It looked like an upside-down smile, or a sad face, if you thought of it that way. Nat was starting to understand why Harry looked so sad all the time.

  It was because of Harriet.

  It was because his mom was trying to do the right thing, and by trying to do the right thing, she was doing the wrong thing.

  It was because his dad wasn’t even trying to do the right thing at all.

  Having a dad who did not understand about his Harry-ness must have felt insurmountable. “Insurmountable” was one of Nat’s favorite English words. There were some good ones, after all. It was a word that made her think of mountains too high to climb, glistening with snow and ice, sharply carving lines into the sky. Also, it contained the word “mount,” which made her think of the creepy bear head she had noticed hanging on the living room wall in the upstairs of Harry’s house, which they had to pass on their way to the stairs that led to the playroom.

  The more she thought about it, the more insurmountable became reshaped as a headless bear in her mind.

  She shivered.

  Nat hadn’t explained to Harry about the words she collected—all kinds of words, from regular ones to foreign ones to made-up ones—and how they made shapes in her head, the foreign ones more roughly hewn than the English ones, which were so sanded down and polished by being spoken out loud so much around her that they were all uniformly smooth and sometimes not meaningful enough.

  She tried to concentrate on the game.

  She didn’t know how to play it, and her character kept dying. Harry’s didn’t.

  Just then, he shouted “HEY” at the screen. She watched as his character fell down a tunnel.

  “Watch out!” she said, way too late. “I don’t really know how to play this,” she added. “It’s harder than it looks.”

  “It’s not hard!”

  “Did I just die? How am I supposed to do this?”

  “Argh!” he yelled. He stood up and started jumping up and down. “It helps when I jump!” he explained, even though she hadn’t asked. “It totally helps!”

  Nat stood up and started jumping, too, her sock feet landing with gentle thuds on the thick carpet while her character re-spawned for the tenth time. The game played a jaunty, enthusiastic song.

  Nat and Harry jumped and jumped in Harry’s basement. Nat was a little worried that the magazine in her jeans was a) showing or b) about to slide down and out the bottom of her pants.

  How would she explain that?

  She stopped jumping.

  “Why aren’t you jumping?” Harry said.

  “I got tired,” she said, sitting down.

  “OK.” He sat down, too.

  “When I was little, I saved all my fingernail clippings in a jar, because I didn’t want any part of me to get thrown in the garbage,” Harry said, for what seemed like no reason.

  “What about your toenail clippings?” Nat’s character ran into a bad guy and evaporated. The game bleeped. Even the music sounded disappointed in her.

  “Toenails are gross! I threw those out.”

  “I’m glad you have such super-high standards,” she said. “Now I know we’ll be friends.”

  “Duh,” said Harry, but he looked at her funny and then he shook his head. She wasn’t sure if that meant they were friends or that they weren’t.

  “Unguim,” said Nat. Unguim was the Latin word for fingernail.

  “Whatever,” said Harry. His character grabbed the giant diamond from the top of the turret and raised his hands in a victory dance. The video game played a jaunty tune.

  “I won,” he said, but he didn’t sound as happy about it as Nat would have expected.

  Harry

  Nat was the first person Harry met.

  Nat was the person he sat next to.

  Nat was the nicest one.

  But Harry did not want to be best friends with Nat. Nat was a girl, and his whole plan was to start the school year with a posse of boys, doing only boy things.

  It was because Nat was so easy to hang out with that this was happening. That the coolest boy in his class, Seth, and those guys didn’t want him in their squad and wouldn’t let him sit with them at lunch.

  He was so frustrated. He didn’t know what to do about it or how to deal with it. And the stupidest part of it was that NAT WAS THE ONLY PERSON HE COULD TALK TO ABOUT IT.

  Harry picked up the phone and dialed her number, which she’d written on the inside of his math textbook.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m at the beach,” Nat said. Harry could hear the wind blowing through the receiver. “I’m waiting for whales.”

  “Stay there,” he said. “I’m coming.”

  He yelled to his mom, “I’m going to practice on the board!”

  “Be back by dinner!” she answered. She was on Facebook on her computer. She was always on Facebook on her computer. Harry hoped she was maybe finding a group of parents of trans kids or something, the good kind of parents, the nice supportive ones. He knew they were out there. He looked over her shoulder. It was a group of people who collected vintage dresses. He rolled his eyes. “Mom,” he said.

  “What?” she said. “I love these.”

  “Those dresses look like cartoons,” he said. “When would you wear those?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe one day your father and I will go somewhere that I need to dress up. Are you going to the skateboard park?”

  “Nah,” he said. “Just around.”

  “Wear a helmet!” she called after him. He waved in response.

  He went to the garage and got his longboard. It was painted with a skull and crossbones, all black and silver and BOYISH. He loved his board. He dropped it on the pavement and hopped on. It was all downhill to Nat’s place; he’d barely even have to break a sweat. He could just coast, almost the entire way.

  Postcard Number 2

  Hi Soleil, Nat wrote at the top of the next postcard on the pile.

  It felt like she was writing to someone she didn’t know, so she didn’t know what to say. What did you write on a postcard to a stranger?

  Writing to a stranger might actually be easier than writing to someone who used to be a friend, but was maybe not a friend now and actually maybe never was.

  Nat glowered at what she’d written so far.

  “Soleil” looked all wrong.

  It wasn’t Solly’s name. Not the Solly Nat knew. She guessed maybe it was the name of this new version of Solly who kissed boys and had her period and wanted to grow bigger boobs.

  Nat did not want those things.

  Not yet.

  “I’m just not ready,” she told Stick Monkey. She had taken Stick Monkey out of the box and put him on the shelf next to her head. “I will be eventually. Maybe.”

  She looked back at the postcard. She wanted desperately to talk to Solly about the magazine, which she’d put in the box where Stick Monkey used to be. She wanted to ask Solly if she should look.

  But that was dumb.

  Solly already knew who Nat’s mother was.

  Solly had already Googled it.

  Nat knew this because one day, when they were in a fight, Solly had said, “Who are you really talking to when you say you’re talking to your mom on the phone?”

  Nat’s blood had run cold. She
had started to shiver, hard. “My mom, duh. Why?” She tried to make her voice sound natural.

  “Uh, because your mom is—”

  “Shut up,” Nat had said, before Solly could finish her sentence. She put her hands over her ears, like she was three years old or something. She closed her eyes. She could still hear Solly, but she couldn’t make out the words. Then she’d grabbed her backpack and put it on so fast that she didn’t realize it was upside down. She’d run the whole way home, dropping her homework all over the street.

  Sometimes, people just aren’t who you think they are. It takes a long time to really know a person, like maybe a year.

  Maybe longer.

  Maybe it took a whole lifetime.

  Having a great time, wish you were here, Nat wrote in huge block letters. She went over and over them again until they were thick and heavy and showed through the other side because she pressed so hard.

  Then she wrote her name in cursive: Natalia Rose Baleine Gallagher.

  If Solly was going to be Soleil, she could not be plain old Nat. That’s how it worked. It was math. But x does not equal y. Nat did not equal Solly. Not anymore. Maybe she never had.

  Anyway, she did not very much feel like a Natalia Rose.

  Natalia Rose felt like a name she was eventually, maybe, going to grow into.

  Natalia Rose felt like someone she wasn’t ready for yet.

  Underneath her name, in very tiny letters, she wrote, Congratulations. It was so small, she wondered if Solly would even see it. She probably wouldn’t bother to look. She’d be too busy kissing Evan and looking in the mirror to see if her boobs had arrived yet, like they might come by FedEx in the night and just appear by magic in the morning.

  Nat, for one, was sincerely hoping that it didn’t work like that. Well, she knew it wouldn’t literally work like that, but she still hoped it wouldn’t work in any way like that. She looked down at her chest: still flat.

  Nat felt nothing but relief.