Being Emily

by Gold, Rachel

  Claire sat up straight again and opened her mouth. I didn’t want to have to bat down another false guess.

  “I’m a girl,” I blurted. It wasn’t the elegant explanation I’d intended, but I had to start somewhere. As soon as I said it, I blushed and couldn’t look her in the eye, so I stared at the left side of her jaw.

  Claire cocked her head to one side and blinked, her eyebrows drawing close to each other. Her mouth opened and closed and opened again.

  “What?” she said with a sideways shake of her head.

  The iron fist in my throat eased now that I’d started. “Ever since I was a kid I’ve known I was a girl,” I said. “But I got stuck with this body. I thought God made a mistake, and I kept waiting for Him to fix it.” I ran my hands down the front of my chest. “This isn’t who I am.”

  Her face was white enough that I worried she was going to faint or something, but she reached toward me with one hand and laid it alongside my cheek. Then she traced her thumb down the line of my nose and across my lips. She put her fingertips between my collarbones and ran them down to my sternum.

  “How?” she asked.

  I didn’t know if she was asking how I knew or how I planned to fix it, but I wanted to answer that first question, so I did.

  “When I was about seven, Grandma Em sent me a set of books for Christmas,” I began.

  I told her how the set included The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Marvelous Land of Oz, and especially Ozma of Oz. The first book was cool, Mom rented the movie and we watched it, but the second and third were a revelation. In them a young boy, Tip, escapes a wicked witch and goes off on an adventure to find the missing Princess Ozma. At the end of The Marvelous Land of Oz it’s revealed that Tip is Ozma—that the princess had been bewitched into a boy’s body and now would be restored to her rightful self.

  I remembered how the first time I read that scene an electric shock traveled from the hair at the very top of my head down to the soles of my feet. In the scene, Glinda asked the witch, “What did you do with the girl?”

  And the witch said, “I enchanted her…I transformed her—into—into a boy!”

  At first Tip protests but Glinda says very gently, “But you were born a girl, and also a Princess; so you must resume your proper form, that you may become Queen of Emerald City.”

  I told Claire how I’d read the scene over and over again. How I searched everywhere in my life for the magic to turn me back into my rightful self. I knew I was born a girl, and I wanted so badly to resume my proper form as Ozma had. Claire closed her mouth and her eyes turned down at the corners.

  “How old were you again?” she asked.

  “Seven or eight,” I said. “I knew even before that, though. I mean, I knew I was a girl. In kindergarten, I kept lining up with the girls when it was time to come in from recess and the teacher would make me go over and get in line with the boys. Before I was about five it didn’t really matter if you were a boy or a girl, but as soon as we started getting divided up, I knew I should be with the girls.”

  “So what…what happened next?” she asked.

  “I tried harder to be a boy,” I said. “I thought maybe I’d just missed something, that maybe everyone has to work at it, so I had Dad teach me about cars, and I went out for the swim team, and I hung out with guys and did what they did. And after about six years of that I started to think that I’d become a very good fake.”

  “But you’re one of the sweetest guys I know,” she said. “I always thought you might be gay. You’re so…” She trailed off.

  “What?”

  “…different from the other guys,” she finished. “I mean, there’s the cars and the swimming and stuff, and you look like a really cute guy, and your parts work—” She gestured at my crotch, causing me to reflexively cross my legs. “But you don’t talk like a guy. At least not when we’re alone.”

  “Talk like a guy?” I asked.

  “I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s just different. The only time you really talk like a guy is when you’re mad, otherwise it’s a little like talking to my girlfriends.” She pressed the heel of one hand to her temple. “I think my brain is scrambling.”

  She stood up from the bed and stepped back a few feet across the room and stared. I watched her eyes travel up and down my body a few times.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t understand how you can be that way.”

  “There are some good websites that explain it,” I said and wrote a few on the pad of paper by her computer.

  “How are you going to be able to live like that?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “It’s not like you can turn into a girl or anything.”

  Her voice sounded distant and she was still standing across the room, away from me. I couldn’t tell how upset she was just by looking at her. Was she in shock or was she taking this relatively well? I couldn’t afford to let myself hope yet and so my answer came out harsher than I intended. “I can get a sex change,” I said, the words hanging in the air like icicles.

  “You’re kind of tall for a girl.”

  I stood up. “I should probably go.” I wanted her to contradict me and tell me to stay. I needed to know she was going to be okay with this revelation.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

  My heart clenched, and I went into the living room and put on my boots and coat. She followed and watched me.

  “Does this mean we’re going to split up?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  Claire’s face was still paler than usual and at first she only stared, as if I hadn’t been speaking in English. “What?” she asked.

  “Are we going to split up?”

  “Chris, don’t ask me that. I don’t know.” She sounded angry, each word bitten short.

  “Well tell me when you make up your mind,” I said and stepped through the door into the freezing air.

  By the time I’d started the car and driven halfway to my house I wanted to turn around and take that back, but I was afraid I’d find her still standing in the living room and staring after me in shock.

  When I got home I had no appetite, so I told Mom I didn’t feel well and I was going to bed early. Up in my room I set my alarm for four a.m. and then lay down and stared at the ceiling. The conversation with Claire played over again in my head until I finally fell asleep.

  CHAPTER THREE

  CLAIRE

  After she did the dinner dishes, Claire wandered around the house twice before settling into her room. She lay down on her bed and stared at the blank ceiling. Chris thinks he’s a girl, sounded in her brain like a gong that rang and echoed and rang again. Chris thinks he’s a girl. She didn’t know what to feel. When he’d told her, she felt angry, and then sad for herself. But as he talked about it, Chris looked so relieved that all her own feelings kept turning into guilt.

  Most of the time he was so sad or angry or under a dark cloud, and this afternoon as he talked to her, his eyes lit up from deep within, and then he’d relaxed with her in a way she’d never seen in him before. She couldn’t begrudge him those feelings, but the whole situation was so awfully bizarre.

  Could she ever stop thinking of him as “him,” she wondered? That made her brain ache and tilt sickeningly sideways, so she sat upright on her bed and put one hand on either side of her face to try to hold her mind still. There had to be answers. Chris had left the address of some websites on the pad next to her computer. It was risky because Mom would probably wonder what she was doing looking at those sites, but she already visited gay and lesbian teen sites, and Mom would never suspect Chris was… whatever Chris was. She could say it was for a school project or something.

  Her mom knocked on her door, waited for Claire to say “Yeah?” and opened it. “Want to watch CSI?” she asked.

  Claire made herself smile. “I’ve got a lot of homework.”

  Her mom nodded and went back into
the living room and Claire figured she was feeling lonely again. Mom’s last boyfriend had been a dud and they’d split up before the holidays.

  Claire called up the websites and read until her eyes burned and all the little optical muscles around them felt sore. When she closed her eyelids, her eyeballs wanted to drop backward into her skull.

  The science was hard to understand, and she’d seen a lot of information about genetics and gametes that she couldn’t wrap her brain around. What stood out to her was the fact that female bodies were the default setting for human beings. In the absence of the right amount of testosterone, a fetus in the womb would develop female. Also genetics weren’t the final story, at least not the way they’d been taught during those two weeks of sex ed in junior high school. She thought everyone with XX chromosomes automatically turned out with a female body, but because of the impact that hormones and other factors had on fetal development, they could actually turn out male or somewhere in between, and the same was true for XY. Some people were even born with XXY chromosomes or XYY and in very rare cases XXYY.

  The cause of transsexualism and the broader category of “transgender” wasn’t known. “Transsexual” meant people who felt they were the other sex from how their bodies were born and “transgender” was a broader category that included all sorts of gender varieties. The words made her think of the singer and drag queen RuPaul. She liked some of RuPaul’s dance songs, but she couldn’t picture Chris having that kind of big hair and wearing low-cut outfits with heels.

  Being transsexual was rare, but not as rare as she first thought. A summary of ten studies over eight countries found that one in about 11,900 to 45,000 people were male-to-female like Chris said he was. But then other sources taking data from the U.S., U.K. and India found numbers closer to one in 1,000 to 3,000. That meant there were well over a million people like Chris in the world.

  Some people online said that thinking you were transsexual was all psychological, but others pointed toward a physical cause. Two studies performed on the brains of transgender and non-transgender people who’d donated their bodies to science had really interesting results. There was an area of the brain about the size of a grain of rice called the BSTc. When they examined the brains of the transgender women—those born with male bodies who identified as women—they found the BSTc was the same size as women born with female bodies. Men who weren’t transgender had bigger BSTcs.

  The study size wasn’t very big. After all, how many people donated their bodies to science in the first place? But if the studies pointed to a physical truth, then it was possible that Chris had been born with a girl’s brain but his body developed male. All this time he’d been thinking of himself as female when everyone else naturally assumed he was a guy. How weird would that feel?

  Claire put her fingers to her temples and rubbed her sore head.

  After a little more looking she found an actual website with photos of men who’d become women. Some of them looked funny, their noses or jaws were too big, but a lot of them looked really good and a bunch of them actually looked prettier than most of the women teachers at their school. A few were models or actresses, and some were scientists and doctors and stuff.

  But she didn’t want Chris to be a woman. She liked him as Chris, maybe a Chris who wasn’t sad as he was now, but still the guy she knew. It made her feel sick to think about any guy turning into a woman, let alone her boyfriend. There were men and there were women and you couldn’t just go from one to the other.

  It just seemed unnatural. But when she’d started to wonder if she was attracted to girls as well as boys, she heard plenty from people who found that unnatural when to her it only made sense to like whomever she liked and not bother about what kind of person they were. Was it any different with Chris?

  Sure it was, the back of her mind said. We’re talking about changing his whole body. You just like to experiment, but he wants to turn into a woman. Guys don’t just turn into girls, the world isn’t set up that way.

  Claire couldn’t even understand how it could be done medically and wasn’t sure she wanted to. In the articles online, there were references to surgery and often multiple surgeries. How could it be right to change like that if it involved all that medical intervention? Didn’t that point to the unnatural craziness of it all? Who needed to take a perfectly good working body and turn it into something else?

  And even more importantly, why would God create a world in which women could be born as men and vice versa?

  She turned off the computer and sat on her bed. “God?” she asked in a whisper. “What were you thinking? Why would you make people transsexual?”

  She talked to God a lot and sometimes God answered—or maybe God always answered and sometimes she was too boneheaded to figure it out. She’d been raised Lutheran, like just about everyone in these parts, but her relationship with God came from her earliest memories of Sunday school when she remembered Jesus as the kindest, wisest man in the whole world. At times she could feel Him near her.

  She went to church sometimes, but she didn’t always feel God there. More often she attended an open Bible study held after the regular service. She didn’t believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, but she did believe it was a divinely inspired text and a way to engage in a relationship with God. Maybe it was because she loved words in all their forms that it was easiest for her to feel God’s presence when she read the Bible or even in the words of poets and writers.

  Pulling her worn Bible off the shelf by her bed, she let it open where it wanted. Her eyes fell to a verse toward the end of the Book of Job after Job loses his family and his health and all his money. He cries out to God for a reason for all the bad things that have happened to him.

  “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” God asks Job. “Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know!”

  What was that supposed to mean? She read it again and tried to remember what the Bible study leader said when they studied Job. In the end of the story, Job actually gets to speak to God—if she remembered right, it was the last time God spoke directly to a human being before the birth of Jesus. That was a really big deal. The whole Book of Job was about testing the depth of Job’s faith, just as this situation with Chris tested her faith in God’s design. Job got to hear God answer his questions and came out of the situation with renewed faith.

  While Job suffered, his friends blamed all his misfortunes on him and were basically jerks to him. That was the other lesson Claire remembered learning about this book. Job was a story about compassion.

  If she could sum up what God was telling her, it was that some hard things that happened to people were beyond her understanding. What God made for the joy of creation, that was God’s work, and if that included men who turned into women and women who turned into men, who was she to argue? Was she there when God created the world? No. Did she help to determine its measurements? No.

  Her work was to have faith and not be a blaming jerk like Job’s friends. No matter how upset she felt, Chris didn’t deserve to have her take it out on him.

  In the next verses, God asks Job if he knows what the foundation of the earth was laid upon, “or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

  She loved that image of the world being created and the sons of God shouting for joy. The world was made for joy. Did that include transsexuals? She didn’t understand how it could, but maybe she didn’t have to. Plenty of people in the world were going to be awful to Chris if he kept going down this path, and she didn’t need to be one of them.

  But Chris also asked if this meant they were going to split up. Not being a jerk to him was one thing but being his girlfriend was a lot more than that and she just didn’t know if she still could. If he started to change his body like that, how could she still be attracted to him?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The small, quiet alarm be
side my pillow chirped once and was silent, but that was enough to wake me. I wanted to run over to Claire’s house and ask her again if she was going to split up with me, but it was four a.m.

  Avoiding the creaky part in the middle of my bedroom floor, I got up and slid the bolt on my door to the locked position. I’d installed the sliding bolt last summer and Dad let me keep it. He realized that I could only lock it when I was inside the room and contented himself in knowing he and Mom could still search for drugs, or whatever they looked for, when I wasn’t home. He probably thought I’d put it on so I could masturbate without Mom walking in on me. Dad thinks like that. I wasn’t going to argue as long as I had some measure of safety for what I really wanted to do.

  When I’d come in from school that afternoon, I carried my backpack in and up to my room, along with a nondescript black nylon gym bag. No one paid any attention to it, of course, which was the point. I’d thought all this through to the nth degree, and the bag was not only beneath notice but it bore a luggage tag on it which had Claire’s name and address.

  At least up until I’d come out to her the day before, Claire wouldn’t mind me using her name on the bag in order to throw my parents off the track of a secret; she was pretty sneaky herself and had taught me a few tricks about hiding files on my computer. Luckily I had the kind of parents who hardly knew how to turn the thing on, unlike Claire’s mom, who had probably installed two kinds of cyber-snoop software to protect her one precious daughter from sexual predators online. Claire came over and used my computer whenever she had something “of a delicate nature” that she needed to research, and paid me back in tips about how to keep my parents in the dark.

  The duffel bag had her name on it because inside it was a pair of girls’ jeans, a long skirt, two sweaters, a cute hat, underpants and two bras. None of them were anywhere near Claire’s size, but if they looked in the bag, my parents would never consider any possibility beyond the obvious explanation that the outfits belonged to Claire. Plus they had no idea that she hated hats.