Being Emily

by Gold, Rachel

  Jessica, the blond girl who sat next to me and I think had a crush on me, rolled her eyes. “What a jerk,” she whispered.

  “For the next two weeks we’re going to look at different aspects of sex and gender,” Mr. Cooper said. “I’m going to hand out permission slips you need to fill out in case any of your parents don’t want you to hear about sex, as if that will stop you. We will be talking about normal and abnormal sexuality, and we’ll have someone coming from the Gay and Lesbian Action Center.”

  I thought about putting my head down on my desk and crying, but then that would probably give me away as being the wrong gender. I pushed the permission slip into the front of my psych book. I’d forge the signature in study hall tomorrow. That was one conversation I didn’t want to encourage with my folks.

  Mr. Cooper spent the rest of the hour explaining how sex often referred to a person’s physiological characteristics, while gender pointed to the psychological, cultural and learned aspects. I could have taught the class. Instead I sat very still and felt like someone wrapped one hand around my heart and with the other hand crushed my throat.

  CHAPTER TWO

  English saved me. I had a chance to recover while Ms. Judson lectured on 19th Century British writers. Claire met me outside the classroom door when we were done and gave me a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek. I must have held her too close because she looked at me searchingly.

  “You okay?”

  “Long day,” I evaded.

  “I’ll see you at the meet,” Claire said. “I’m driving over with the yearbook staff so we can have our meeting on the way.”

  Despite her protests about being unpopular, Claire was on the yearbook committee, in the drama club and in a poetry workshop that I sometimes attended. She said she got in the habit in junior high when her mom wouldn’t let her come home early and now she was hooked.

  Liberty-Mayer High School didn’t have an indoor pool, so we swam at the city pool after school most days until 5:30 or 6:00 p.m. It was a great way to avoid being stuck at home with my family. I could get home in time for dinner, eat, and then go up to my room for homework until it was time to sleep.

  Tonight was the last of the boys’ swim team’s regular competitions, and our last chance to qualify for sectionals. I wasn’t the only one on the team convinced that we didn’t stand a chance. We competed against a lot of bigger high schools with their own pools and a larger student base to draw from. Plus our team wasn’t particularly competitive, which was another reason I stayed on it. Our coach always emphasized beating our own personal times over beating another team, though that may have been a tactic to keep us from getting too depressed when we didn’t stand a chance against most of the other teams.

  I didn’t mind being in the boys’ locker room any more than I minded using the boys’ restroom at school. Actually the locker room was better because it didn’t have the same level of disgusting graffiti. I don’t know why guys are so obsessed with their junk that they have to draw it all over the stalls. Plus, I lucked out in not being attracted to guys, so the only part that embarrassed me in the locker room was changing into my swim trunks. I just turned into my locker and did it quickly.

  Our team trunks looked like black biker shorts with the school symbol on the front of the right thigh and our colors up the sides. I pulled them on fast and shoved my clothes into the locker. Then I turned and smacked my shin into the low bench between the rows of lockers.

  “Shit!”

  Blake turned around a few lockers up and shook his head. “Again, Hesse?”

  I had a reputation for knocking into things or tripping over my own feet just about every practice session. I did it at home too. My shins, knees and feet always had two or three bruises on them.

  “It’s for luck,” I told him. “Part of the ritual.”

  He laughed. Blake was a senior and the team captain. He took an immediate liking to me last year when I said I’d swim the 500 freestyle because it was the event no one else on the team ever wanted to swim. He had wild, curly dark hair that stood out from his head in all directions, naturally tan skin and the best muscles on the team. At least a dozen girls at school had crushes on him, according to Claire.

  I put on my cap and my goggles so that they rested up on my forehead. Then I wrapped the big towel with our school emblem on it around my shoulders like a shawl and followed Blake out to the pool.

  There were a lot of reasons to love swimming and the format of the meets was one. Unlike football or basketball where most of the team is on the field the whole time, we spent most of the time sitting by the pool stretching and bullshitting. There were twenty guys on the team but at most we had four competing at a time. Those of us out of the water only fell silent during the races, which usually took a minute or two. Each guy could swim two to four events. I only swam two: one leg of a relay and then the 500.

  The 500-meter freestyle is the longest solo swim of the meet—more than double any other. It’s ten laps in the pool and covers about a third of a mile. I actually liked it, but the guys never believed me when I said that. Of all the events, it was the one where pure muscle strength was less important than pacing, endurance, breath control and strategy. I really had to manage how fast I swam the first six laps so that I had the right energy available for the last four.

  It was also the most boring event of the meet. Watching guys flash through the water racing against each other for up to two minutes is exciting—watching that same thing for about five minutes really loses its thrill.

  Our relay came early in the meet, and then Blake and I sat on the side of the pool and stretched. The 500 was always one of the last events and that gave me time to recover before I swam again.

  “How’s it going?” he asked and jerked his chin toward where Claire sat in the bleachers.

  She looked like an inkblot on a bright painting. Three colorfully dressed girls from the yearbook committee sat with her in the middle of a larger, spread out grouping of family members, friends and girlfriends of the team. Shrugging, I rubbed my big toe around one of the tiny octagonal tiles that covered the floor.

  “Do you like it?” he asked.

  I looked up at his face. Blake got around, we all knew that, but he wasn’t one of those guys who bragged about it. At least not more than usual. I knew he’d had sex with at least two girls already this year, so he couldn’t be asking how I liked sex with Claire, could he?

  “What?” I asked.

  “Being with the same girl that long,” he said. “You’ve been together like half a year?”

  “Just over,” I said. We’d passed the seven-month mark two weeks ago, but I didn’t want it to seem like I paid too much attention to that. He seemed to be waiting for me to say more. I had to split my mind into two halves—one half held all possible real answers to his question and the other half pretended to be him and scanned the answers to find the acceptable ones.

  /error scan: boy test

  for each answer string (item in list)

  if item sounds like girl—discard

  else—echo item

  1. test “I feel at home with her”

  2. discard—sentimental

  3. test “I don’t have to do as much work”

  4. echo

  5. test “I like the emotional intimacy”

  6. discard—major boy fail

  7. test “she’s a sure thing”

  8. echo

  “It’s easy,” I said. “I mean, I know what she likes so I don’t have to work at it. And she’s a sure thing.” Guilt lurched through my gut. My relationship with Claire was so much more than that. With her I felt more myself than I did with anyone. Sometimes when we were flopped out on her bed together reading a poem and talking about it, I forgot that I had to play a boy and got to be a person for a while.

  I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t risk losing that.

  “You don’t get bored?” Blake asked. “Or look at the prettier girls?”

  “Pre
tty girls are a lot of work,” I said.

  “Ha!”

  They called the 500 and I got up, leaving my towel next to him. My head spun with thoughts of talking to Claire.

  When I started on the team, Blake was swimming the 500 and he told me the trick to it: have two songs cued up in your head. The first song has a good steady pace and the second song is a little faster.

  I didn’t have a waterproof MP3 player, but I listened to my songs whenever I did strength training. When I hit the water, I started Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable” in my mind.

  The upbeat R&B rhythm of the song gave me a moderately fast pace.

  The problem was I really wanted tell Claire. How bad could it be? No, that was a terrible question to ask because it could be awful if I misjudged and she told everyone and stopped speaking to me. What if I was replaceable to her? I couldn’t tell her.

  By the start of lap five I was trailing badly. Obsessing while swimming was a terrible strategy. I switched to my second song early. “Girlfriend” by Avril Lavigne.

  Well that is what I wanted—to be Claire’s girlfriend.

  Hitting the second to last lap, my lungs burned and a dull fire ran along my arms and legs. In the water, feeling my whole body didn’t bother me. The soft pressure reassured me of my reality. The water didn’t judge. I pushed hard into the pain.

  Fifteen seconds behind first place. Not bad. The coach slapped me on the back as I climbed out of the pool.

  “Good swim, Hesse, you really picked it up. That’s your best meet time.”

  “Thanks.”

  I stumbled back over to Blake where I sat against the bleachers and tried to catch my breath. My time wasn’t good enough to go to sectionals. Even the guy in first wasn’t going to do well against the stronger teams from the Cities. But the time was good for me and all the effort had cleared my mind.

  I had to tell Claire.

  ***

  “Go chill at my place, I’ll be there in less than an hour,” Claire told me when the meet was over. I was glad she didn’t drive with me because I didn’t know how I’d manage small talk when I had something so important to say.

  Unbeknownst to any of our parents, Claire had given me a duplicate key for her house so I could go wait for her when her extracurricular activities went longer than my swim practice. Her house was on the other side of town from mine, all of a mile-and-a-half apart, but she thought it would be silly to have me go home for an hour and then meet her at her place, so she copied her key.

  Her house was nothing like mine. First of all, it was tiny and in the well-to-do part of town that bordered on our one lake, and therefore more expensive than my family’s larger house. Secondly, it was obsessively neat. At our house, Mikey or Dad always left junk around in the living room and kitchen, and Mom complained periodically and instituted weekend cleaning times, but it was never finished and tidy. Claire’s house looked like a furniture showroom. Even the bookcases were designed more as works of art than functional pieces; each shelf held a few books and then some small statue or knickknack or a picture turned at an angle for effect.

  Her mom worked at a flooring and countertop store and helped people pick out expensive tile and granite for their fancy houses. This house had simple wood floors, but the kitchen did boast the yummiest counters I’d ever seen, black stone flecked with reflective bits of other colors. Claire’s mom made a good living and still got money from Claire’s dad, who lived in St. Louis, so Claire rarely wanted for anything. She didn’t have a car, true, but she did have her own TV in her bedroom and a Mac G5 desktop with a blazing-fast Internet connection and a monthly online game subscription to World of Warcraft. She let me have three of her character slots, so I logged on and fired up my level 85 Mage, Amalia.

  Sometimes these online games got tedious for all the monsters a character had to kill to get to a new level, but it was more than made up for by the great gear I could buy and make, and the cool spells I could cast. Claire didn’t have the patience to play magic-users, but they were my favorite. I admit, the fact that they always wore robes figured into that preference.

  When I logged into the game and selected Amalia on the character screen, I could turn her 360 degrees and admire how awesome she looked. She always had beautiful long hair and sometimes I got it styled in one of the game’s barbershops, but then it was flowing free all the way down her back. Her robes hung gracefully around her figure in violet and gray hues with gold tracery. I pushed the button to enter the game as her and got to step into a world fully female.

  While I moved her around the city, I felt what it was like to be in her body. Some of the characters in the city were other players like me, but the computer created all the shopkeepers and city guards. They called me “m’lady” and simple as it was, that made me grin.

  I was shopping for a new mage’s robe when I heard the key in the door. “Hi honey, I’m home,” Claire yelled from the entryway. I immediately started sweating while my skin went cold, which didn’t seem fair. My body should have picked one or the other, but instead I ended up a damp popsicle.

  I heard the thomp of her boots coming off. Claire had three pairs of thick, black boots that she rotated through in the winter. Each pair made her at least two inches taller, but when she appeared in her bedroom doorway she was her usual petite self. Today she wore a black crewneck sweater and black jeans with a bunch of silvery bracelets around her right wrist and a silver cross hanging down the front of her sweater. Her entire wardrobe was black. She once told me she started it when other girls teased her about trying to look fashionable in the eighth grade. Not only could she avoid those taunts ever again, but this look let her get away with wearing an ornate cross and no one knew if she was really serious or not.

  She was serious about her own brand of radical Christianity. From time to time she could even come up with a surprisingly contextual Bible quote. The one she liked to give people who hassled her about her all-black, heavy eyeliner look was: “Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear—but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.” That shut people up really fast and was pretty fun to watch.

  I gestured toward the computer screen. “Amalia’s got a new robe,” I said, trying to sound normal while my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. “Plus120 Intel.”

  “Sweet, and it shows off her cleavage. She’s hot,” Claire said, trying to trip me out, like I’d care. Wow, was I about to test her true coolness factor. With a silent prayer, I logged out of the game.

  She put her arms around my shoulders from behind and kissed the side of my face. “Mom’s not coming home for a few hours,” she said quietly, running one hand across my chest.

  Our relationship had been getting more sexual over the last few months, and I had the distinct impression that Claire liked it a lot more than I did. To be fair, I’d like it a lot better if I had the right equipment. We hadn’t gone “all the way,” but at this point we’d done a lot of other things, some working better than others since I had trouble connecting with my body. She’d been sexual with a couple of other people and said I was the least selfish guy she’d ever met, which I suppose was a compliment.

  Claire spun my desk chair around to face her and sat down on my lap. It would’ve been a lot easier to just let her talk me into fooling around, but I really had to have this conversation with her and if I waited, I was only going to feel worse.

  “Can we talk about something?” I asked.

  She ruffled my hair with her fingers. “Whatever pops up,” she quipped.

  I don’t know what look I had on my face, but I suspect it was an echo of the crushing feeling I had in my chest because her eyes opened all the way and she stood up. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What happened?”

  “Sit down,” I said, which was stupid because her eyes got even wider.

>   She sat on the edge of the bed. “Are you sick?”

  “No,” I said quickly.

  “There’s someone else?” Those bright golden-green eyes narrowed.

  “No.”

  “You’re gay,” she declared, leaning back on her hands and kicking my shin lightly. “I knew it. Of all the luck.”

  “No. Claire, let me talk.”

  She sighed and flopped all the way back on her elbows. Claire had this fantastic mass of black hair that spilled down her back. I loved to play with it. Unfortunately, what she didn’t know was that half the time I was thinking about what it would be like to have hair like that. She complained about it frequently: how long it took to dry, how hard it was to keep it from frizzing out, what a pain it was to dye it goth-black when her natural color was a mousy brown, but she never made a move to cut it off. Lying back on the bed with her hair spread out behind her, she looked like a pixie with small bones and big eyes. I offered a quick prayer to anyone who was listening that she could understand what I was going to try to tell her. My brain kept coming up with things to say, but my mouth wouldn’t cooperate because everything sounded so idiotic.

  “You’re sure you’re not gay?” she asked while I struggled. “I mean, it’s okay if you are, though I’ll be a little upset ’cause I like fooling around with you.”

  “I like girls,” I said through my constricted throat.

  “And me in particular?” she asked. “Did you screw around on me?”

  “No, again no, give me a minute.” I couldn’t really breathe, but now that I’d gone this far, I had to keep going.

  “Chris, you’re kind of creeping me out here,” she said, but then stared up at the ceiling. “I’m shutting up.”

  Time stretched into an infinite plane. I thought about just running, standing up and going for the car, driving until I got to Minneapolis and never coming back. Then I considered telling her I was gay after all, but then I’d lose her and gain nothing. It wasn’t too late, I told myself, just jump her, she’ll eventually forget the whole thing. But she wouldn’t. Claire was not only smart, but she remembered entire conversations weeks after they happened. You could not get anything by her.