Where I End and You Begin

by Preston Norton

  Principal Durden hired him on the spot as an adjunct teacher.

  When she asked him his thoughts on filling the class two-thirds of the way through the school year, he said, “Do kids get detention around here?”

  They did, obviously.

  “Send those kids my way,” he said.

  • •

  When the Durdens arrived at my cul-de-sac, everyone had already finished their chalupas, gorditas, and Doritos Locos Tacos. I offered to dispose of the garbage and ended up with our original to-go bag stuffed with every article of trash in the car—minus Holden’s half-filled Baja Blast. He was still sipping on it when he rolled down his passenger-side window and offered his fist. I bumped it.

  “Later, hero,” I said.

  “Later, gator,” said Holden.

  “Later, gator?” said Principal Durden. “Do kids still say that?”

  “How dare you question what my generation says! I am my generation. And it rhymes. It’s timeless!”

  Holden rolled up his window, flashed a peace sign, and the Durdens rounded the cul-de-sac and sped off.

  I turned around. It was now—and only now—that I chose to address the issue of the car in the driveway.

  It was a modified, skeezy-looking Honda Civic with obnoxious yellow paint, a custom black hood with a gaudy scoop, a spoiler that belonged on a spaceship, and a NASCAR-level sticker treatment. It was covered in brands and decals that said things like ILLEST and LOWLIFE.

  I recognized the car from the school parking lot. (What can I say? It stood out.) I also had no idea who it belonged to. Unfortunately, this was normal.

  I took a deep breath and started for the front door. I was halfway up the driveway when I heard the screaming.

  “Fuck you!”

  “No, fuck you!”

  “FUCK YOU.”

  The front door burst open and out came Jayden Hoxsie.

  Jayden was a breed of male teenager in the Douchimus maximus family. He had spiky black hair, only worked his upper body at the gym, and typically wore his polo shirts so tight that his nipples were visible nubs in the fabric. He was also in the same grade as me—a junior—which made it all the more painfully awkward that he was in my house.

  There was only one reason he would be there.

  “Get the fuck out of my house!” said Willow.

  Willow was my little sister. She was fourteen—a freshman. She was basically the human embodiment of Hot Topic—drawing a fine line between punk and nerdcore. She was 40 percent hair—long black emo hair, layered and styled for maximum volume—and wearing a Spider-Gwen tank top and black skinny jeans.

  “Gladly,” said Jayden. “Stuck-up whore.”

  Jayden took one look at me, then smirked like I was in on the joke. “’Sup, Ezra. Tell your sister to stop being such a bitch.”

  He clapped me on the shoulder as he walked past. I just stood there, dumbfounded.

  “Fuck you!” said Willow. “Fuck you and your shitty car!”

  “Ouch,” said Jayden. “And here I thought you liked cars.”

  For whatever reason, that really set Willow off. As Jayden climbed into the driver’s seat, she screamed and stormed out into the driveway, and started hitting and kicking the nose of the car. Jayden turned the key in the ignition with one hand and flipped her off with the other. He held it the entire time that he was backing out of the driveway. When he hit the gas, the modified exhaust let out a cracking roar that sliced across the neighborhood for blocks. A pair of burned rubber tracks followed him out of the cul-de-sac.

  By the time he was gone, I heard our front door slam. I turned around.

  Willow was gone, too.

  “Willow?” I said.

  I followed her inside.

  Our house—like every house in the cul-de-sac—was a four-bedroom, three-bath, two-story exercise in upper-middle-class monotony. They only varied in their daring shades of gray. On the inside, our house was neat and clean and even a little “chic”—but in a boring, IKEA sort of way. Like my mom was replicating pages out of a catalog. It looked less like a home, and more like a display. If it had any sort of personality, it was an eerie Stepford Wives sorta vibe.

  I crossed the cream-gray living room to the suede-gray stairs, and followed those up to a villa-gray hallway. Stopped in front of Willow’s door, marked by a bright Adventure Time poster featuring nearly every character crammed together in a colorful tessellation. It was an act of open rebellion against the gray, and Willow knew it. Pure mutiny.

  “Destroya” by My Chemical Romance was blasting from her speakers, with the volume set to I Don’t Want to Hear Anything Outside My Door.

  I knocked anyway.

  “Go away, Ezra!” she said.

  I opened the door and walked inside.

  Willow’s bedroom was covered in pop-punk bands, Ryan Reynolds, and a wealth of nerd culture—anime, video game characters, obscure comic book superheroes who had yet to be milked by the Hollywood machine. Willow loved a lot of things, and she wore that love on her sleeves. She was rather shameless about it.

  Willow herself was sprawled facedown on her bed, willing herself to disintegrate.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She leaned up on her forearms and looked at me. Her eyes were red, swollen, and seeping with sadness.

  “Whoa, are you…okay?” I said.

  The word “okay” sounded feeble and useless coming out of my mouth. She clearly wasn’t. Willow responded to it like she did to Jayden’s “I thought you liked cars” comment. She bolted up from her bed, marched straight at me, and started shoving me out of her room.

  “Get out,” she said.

  “What happened?” I said. “Why was Jayden here? Did he do something to you?”

  “Why don’t you ask Jayden, since you two are such great friends, and I’m such a bitch.”

  “What? No. Willow, we’re not friends. I’ve never even talked to the guy.”

  “He knew your name.”

  “I mean…sometimes I let him cheat off my science homework.”

  Willow went back to shoving me out of her room. “Get out, get out, get out!”

  “Hey, it’s not like I want him to cheat off my homework. It’s just easier than…”

  I hesitated.

  “Easier than what?” said Willow.

  I had just stepped outside the confines of her room, but she stopped. Folded her arms. Waited patiently for a response.

  My mouth gaped.

  It’s not that I had nothing to say. It’s just that in every possible response I could think of—every possible scenario—I hated myself.

  Willow shook her head, disappointed. “God, Ezra. You’re such a pussy.”

  She took a step back and slammed the door in my face. My nose was half an inch from the poster on the door and the anthropomorphic purple blob character known in the Adventure Time canon as Lumpy Space Princess.

  “It’s easier than getting my ass kicked,” I mumbled.

  • •

  I had a secret, and no one knew about it. Not even Holden.

  You see, I lied when I said that my greatest strength was math. Math was merely my least embarrassing strength.

  Yeah. I wasn’t lying about accepting my inevitable life of celibacy.

  If you were to go on YouTube, you would discover a channel under the username EzwardSlevinhands. This channel had upward of ten thousand subscribers and consisted entirely of Johnny Depp character impersonations (in full makeup, of course—the makeup was important). They were all performed by a single enigmatic teenage boy, and I’m obviously biased, but he was kind of good.

  He was also me.

  So here was the thing about Johnny Depp: as celebrity heroes go, he had kind of become a huge fucking disappointment. I had spent the greater part of my life idolizing the guy, and then his domestic abuse case hit the news. At some point, I just had to separate Johnny Depp the person from all the characters and roles I had grown to know and love.

  I could d
o that.

  His characters were amazing. They were also kind of terrible. But mostly, they were batshit gonzo insane. They ranked from pure, eccentric genius (Ed Wood, Sweeney Todd, Jack Sparrow) to bad, oh so bad (Tonto, Mortdecai, Jack Sparrow). Yes, the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise had seen Johnny Depp all across the board. It was a blurry line that separated Johnny Depp’s greatness from his not-so-greatness. But if I had to draw it somewhere, it would be between The Curse of the Black Pearl and Dead Man’s Chest.

  Nevertheless, I embraced all of Johnny Depp’s roles, regardless of their critical reception: the Mad Hatter, Willy Wonka, Barnabas Collins, Sam from Benny and Joon, Raoul Duke from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (whom I bought the perfect bucket hat for, and then took it a step further and purchased a bald cap online, blending it perfectly into my scalp. It was my greatest makeup feat to date). Each video was essentially a highlight reel of my favorite quotes, edited into a phantasmagoria of Johnny-Depptitude.

  SAM: “How sick is she? Because, you know, it seems to me that, I mean, except for being a little mentally ill, she’s pretty normal.”

  RAOUL DUKE: “Let’s get down to brass tacks. How much for the ape?”

  WILLY WONKA: “Everything in this room is eatable. Even I’m eatable, but that is called cannibalism, my dear children, and is in fact frowned upon in most societies.”

  JACK SPARROW: “Me, I’m dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly, it’s the honest ones you want to watch out for.”

  SAM: (Stabs a pair of dinner rolls with a pair of forks.)

  (Makes them dance.)

  (Like, performs an entire fucking dance number.)

  If this seemed out of character for me, that’s because it was. I liked to draw attention to myself as much as I liked to draw dicks on my own face. This hobby started quite by accident. By the time I realized what I had gotten myself into—what I had become (a minor-league YouTube celebrity)—it had taken on a life of its own.

  Maybe some lengthy, convenient exposition is necessary.

  It all started on Halloween, my freshman year. I was Edward Scissorhands, and Willow (twelve years old at the time) was Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice. With Mom and Dad’s help, our costumes and makeup were on fucking point. I had ultra-realistic fake scars on my face, my longish hair was moussed up into a gravity-defying mess, and I had, like, honest-to-Gozer scissors for hands! (I’d tell you how expensive my costume was, but then I would have to kill you with my bare scissorhands, because it was a shameful, ridiculous amount.) We got the costumes for Mom and Dad’s Halloween work party. The two of them were dressed as Morticia and Gomez Addams (The Addams Family), respectively, and they seemed as madly, macabrely in love with each other as their TV personas.

  The Slevin family stole the show at the Memorial Hospital of Carbondale.

  When we came home, Willow and I couldn’t get out of costume. The costumes were just too good to be shed like snake skin, discarded ritualistically, never to be seen again.

  So we went trick-or-treating.

  For the record, Willow had vowed not to go trick-or-treating that year—or ever again, for that matter. And I hadn’t gone since I was eleven, out of some skewed sense of maturity and/or masculine responsibility. It wasn’t unwarranted. The last time I went, I was the victim of an insidious form of prejudice known as You’re a Bit Old to Be Trick-or-Treating, Aren’t You? It wasn’t always spoken, but it was always conveyed. You could see the disappointment in the eyes of some old dude, expecting toddlers dressed as cupcakes, or princesses, or the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and instead getting this lanky impostor dressed as the purple ninja turtle. To be fair, I was a smidge tall for my age—at least a solid foot taller than my trick-or-treating companions, Holden (dressed as the red turtle, Raphael) and Willow (April O’Neil). Everyone thought they were fucking adorable. I mean, they were—but still!

  The injustice of it was infuriating and humiliating and dehumanizing.

  But the Edward Scissorhands year was different. That year, my costume filled me with power. Willow and I were high on the spirit of Halloween, and we talked each other into it.

  It was amazing.

  Even though we were starting late, catching the tail end of acceptable trick-or-treating hours, the people loved us. All of them. Every. Single. Door. Not only did I not get the stink eye—not once—but they praised me! Hailed me as some sort of All Hallows’ Eve hero.

  The costume didn’t just make me feel powerful. The costume, itself, was power.

  As we walked home, bags heavy with candy, my mind was reeling. Churning over the events of the evening. Processing what had just happened.

  People thought I was cool.

  People liked me.

  When was the last time I was liked? I couldn’t even remember. Maybe I was never liked. Not like this.

  I had an idea.

  “Do you want to make a video?” I asked Willow.

  “A video?” she said. “What kind of video?”

  I could tell by the way she asked, she was already in.

  The idea was this: Edward Scissorhands Gives Lydia Deetz a Haircut. (That was literally the title of the video when I posted it to YouTube.) Here’s how it went:

  Lydia sits in a chair in the kitchen. Edward, meanwhile, fumbles to put a disposable hair-cutting cape (one of Mom’s) around her neck with his scissorhands. By the time he finishes, the cape is mostly in shreds, but nevertheless, successfully wrapped around Lydia’s neck.

  Cut to Edward standing over the Gothic architecture that is Lydia’s hair.

  Edward proceeds to hack away like a poetic maniac. All we see is Edward—close up—and chunks of black hair spewing from the source like volcanic ash. (Mom sacrificed her Morticia wig for the cause.)

  Edward finishes.

  Cut to Edward standing over Lydia. She is wearing Willow’s normal hairstyle, which is big and black and emo. Her hair is ironically twice the size it had previously been.

  “I love it,” says Lydia, flatly.

  Edward and Lydia immediately start headbanging to the chorus of “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” by My Chemical Romance, and the video ends.

  I posted the video to YouTube but never told Willow about it. I don’t know why. Maybe I was afraid she would make me take it down. Maybe I was being selfish. Like, I wanted this one special thing all to myself.

  Either way, the video exploded. A thousand views in its first week. Ten thousand views its first month. Today, “Edward Scissorhands Gives Lydia Deetz a Haircut” had over a hundred thousand views.

  There was a fire inside me, and I hadn’t realized it until that moment. I had to make more videos. ESGLDaH was a spur-of-the-moment experiment, but I quickly fine-tuned a formula, consisting of things that I liked:

  Johnny Depp characters.

  Extravagant costumes.

  Catchy lines.

  Acting.

  You’d think, at this point, I would have milked Johnny Depp for all he was worth. But that wasn’t quite true.

  Not just yet.

  Johnny Depp was famous for collaborating with Tim Burton, who facilitated his need for weird roles. They were a match made in Weirdo Heaven. But my all-time favorite Burton/Depp collaboration—my favorite Johnny Depp role, period—was the criminally underrated Ed Wood.

  God, I loved Ed Wood.

  Ed Wood (1994) was the (mostly) absolutely true story of the eponymous cult filmmaker of the 1950s, often referred to as the “worst director of all time.” Filmed in glorious black-and-white, it told the story of Ed Wood as he attempted to make several really bad films, leading up to his distasterpiece, the so-bad-it’s-good Plan 9 from Outer Space. It was a tale of friendship (namely his friendship with iconic Dracula actor Bela Lugosi). It also explored Ed Wood’s fondness for wearing women’s clothing. He was straight as far as the history books were aware, but man oh man, the guy liked himself a nice angora sweater. Tim Burton was famous for humanizing marginalized characters, and Ed W
ood—in all its quirk, kink, sincerity, and odd charm—was his magnum opus. On its surface, the film was about delusion and self-denial, but at its core—its beating, human heart—it was an ode to personal artistry in cinema, to being true to oneself, to being happy.

  Despite its being my favorite Johnny Depp role, I had yet to deliver the inevitable Ed Wood video. Because if I was going to do Ed Wood, I had to do it dressed as a woman. I had to. It was not up for debate. This was a matter of necessity. And even though my YouTube channel was a secret, it was an open secret, with over ten thousand subscribers in on it. The pressure was real.

  I think the fact that I wanted to do it so bad sort of scared me. It brought up years and years and years of me feeling like I was packaged improperly. Not “female trapped in a male body,” per se. That was vastly oversimplifying the issue. Not even gender-fluid. (Trust me, I’d done my research.) That seemed to encapsulate something graceful—a sort of elegant transitioning between states—which sounded even further off from whatever I was. I was less a “fluid” and more a deformed solid. Like a half-eaten chocolate bar that had melted in the car and hardened into something vaguely horrific and probably inedible.

  Honestly, all my research had probably only increased the confusion. There were just so many words, and labels, and ways that you could identify, the sheer volume was overwhelming. I was lost in it.

  All I knew was that I felt…off. Misaligned. Sure, I didn’t feel masculine. But I didn’t feel like a fucking human being either! I was just this…thing. This thing that I fucking hated.

  That was the one thing I could identify with, really.

  The self-loathing.

  • •

  As a general rule, I never “went to bed.” In fact, I avoided my bedroom entirely. It added a sense of claustrophobia to my need for sleep.

  My brain just didn’t work like that.

  Instead, I would take my meds and then read web comics on the living room sofa, or watch movies, or seek out new (or old) music, or participate in some similar nonactivity. Or, if I was particularly wired, I would deliberately solve math puzzles. For fun. (I’m telling you, I have a problem.) If I was lucky, I fell asleep—at least for a little bit. It was like Russian roulette, except I was hoping for the bullet that made everything go away.