Being Emily

by Gold, Rachel

  I unzipped the bag and then habitually paused to listen. Silence. More silence. Chirping bugs outside, neighbor dog barking, distant sound of a car and the rapid thud of my pounding heart.

  I shucked my pajamas. The next few minutes were the best and worst of my whole day: the worst because I felt like such a freak, and the best because I slowly became visible. I went from being a charcoal outline of a person to being a flesh and blood human being, my skin filled from the inside out as I arrived into my body and my life.

  I put on the underpants and the skirt. Because I was into competitive swimming, I had an excuse to shave my arms and legs—plus it got Dad off my back about doing something I could letter in—but mostly it was the smooth skin of the swimmers that caught my attention. If they’d told me before my sophomore year that they shaved for meets, I’d have been swimming my whole school career.

  I put on the bra and hooked it, filling the cups with cotton balls, because they were easy to have around, and I found it impossible to actually stuff a bra with socks the way girls did in books. Then I pulled on the short-sleeved sweater with the scalloped neck that was my favorite and set the hat on my head, tilted back.

  The inside of my closet door had a mirror that I could easily avoid in the mornings, but now I opened it and looked at myself in the darkness. Subtle light from the moon filtered in through my unshaded windows and mixed with the light of my computer monitor. I preferred that to the bright overhead light that would reveal too many of the rough details of my face. In this dreamy light I felt whole.

  When you’re a little kid, you don’t really think about what you are; you just are. Some of my happiest times were when I was four and five. We lived in a different town then, across the street from a blond girl named Heather whose mom would bring her over to play with me in the basement all afternoon. Heather’s mom often marveled that I was such a quiet kid, so thoughtful, and that I played so gently with her daughter. It seemed natural to me. We’d sit in the middle of the basement playroom that my dad had set up, and she’d show me her dolls and we’d dress them up in the other dolls’ clothes and drive them around in the cars I’d gotten for my birthdays or build them houses out of the empty boxes Dad brought home for me to play in.

  “Isn’t he such a sweet boy,” Heather’s mom said one afternoon. “He’s made a house for the dolls.” I didn’t know who she was talking about, but I started to feel that something bad had happened and I didn’t know what it was.

  I ran into the laundry room and hid until Heather and her mom had gone. From then on, I was on the lookout, trying to figure out what had happened to make Heather’s mom talk about me like I was a boy.

  When I went to first grade, the problem started to become clear to me. The teacher wanted the girls to line up on one side of the door and the boys to line up on the other side. I lined up with the girls and she told me to get in the other line.

  “I’m not a boy!” I told her.

  She knelt down and took me by the shoulders. “Are you afraid of the other boys?” she asked. “Did they do something to you?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m a girl.”

  She laughed, right in my face, her breath dark and earthy. “You’re funny,” she said. “You’re playing a game with me, aren’t you? You’re pretending to be a girl today, but I know you’re a boy. Do you know how I know?”

  I shook my head.

  “Because of your name, Christopher. That’s a boy’s name, so you get in line with the other boys.”

  I got into line with the boys. She had said one thing I understood: “pretending.” Something had gone wrong with the world and I had to pretend to be a boy until I could figure out how to fix it. I knew how to pretend.

  When Mom came to pick me up, I asked if I could have another name. At six, I thought that maybe if I changed my name I could be a girl.

  “Why don’t you like your name?” she asked.

  “It’s a boy’s name,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, obviously not getting it. “It’s a good name for a boy. Your grandfather was named Christopher.”

  “I want a girl’s name,” I said.

  She stopped the car and looked at me. She looked at me for so long that another car started honking behind us. Then she let out a long breath.

  “Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes Chris is also a girl’s name. It can be short for Christine.”

  I beamed. I don’t know what prompted my mom to say that, but it was one of the best things she’d ever said to me. The teacher was wrong, I did have a girl’s name. I was going to be all right. Ever since then I’ve heard my name as “Chris, short for Christine.”

  Of course it turned out the name wasn’t really the core issue, and Mom didn’t stop Dad from giving me a good whipping when he found me in her dresses a couple of years later.

  My body is the problem. It’s hard to tell people that you’re a girl when everything physical screams “guy.” Even in the semi-darkness, my reflection in the mirror had these broad shoulders and no waist. I inherited my mom’s thick lips, but my eyebrows look like Cro-Magnon man. They’d probably look better if I could pluck them, but I’m not too old to get a good whipping from Dad, so I leave them shaggy. I can still see his face, the grim set of his lips and how quiet his voice sounded when he told me when I was eight to take off the dress while he pulled his belt free from its loops. I think we both felt ashamed afterward, but for very different reasons. I never wanted to be the kind of kid my Dad would have to whip, so I retreated into my dreams and stayed away from girls’ clothes until this year when I was sure I could wear them in secret.

  I turned away from the mirror and went to my computer. It was an iMac that I got off eBay for a few hundred bucks a year and a half ago. Although slow, it still had some life in it, and anyway it only connected to the Internet at a blazing 56K. I wanted high-speed access, but Mom and Dad wouldn’t pay for it, and I didn’t want to spend that much of the money I made helping Dad with his cars just to get online.

  There were a few good communities online, but my favorite was called GenderPeace. Even the name was cool and the administrator described it as a place for people “in the process of surviving transsexualism” which I liked, because I didn’t want to be “a transsexual,” and be a woman stuck in a man’s body my whole life.

  I’d found the website last fall and had been hanging around on it for about six months. A few hundred members participated from all over the world and they gave really good advice and talked about their lives. I spent a few months lurking and just reading the public posts until I decided to create a free account and become a member. I had to sign in each time rather than being logged in automatically, because I erased any evidence of my having been there when I logged off for the night, just in case Mom and Dad suddenly figured out computers. I assumed I could never be too paranoid.

  My user name was “EmilyCH” for Emily Christine Hesse. I thought I’d keep Christine in honor of my Mom’s cool moment and the choice they made to name me in the first place, and I got Emily partly from my Grandma Em and, I confess, a little from Emily Dickinson.

  A couple of days ago, a new thread caught my eye and one posting in particular from a girl whose online name was “Bratalie.” In her profile it turned out her name was Natalie and she had already transitioned and was going to high school as a girl in Minneapolis, an hour’s drive from me. First I had a gut-wrenching pang of jealousy. To be able to go to school as a girl, how amazing! But then I just wanted to know all about it. I’d sent her a quick note saying I was in Liberty, Minnesota, still living in boy drab, and asking what it was like for her to go to school as herself.

  When I logged in that night, I saw that I had private mail from her.

  “Hi Emily,” she wrote. “We’re neighbors! Liberty is out in the boonies, though, how do you survive? You should come into the City! We could have lunch!” She included her cell phone number in the closing, along with a few more exclamation points.

  Be
tween my excitement about Natalie, and the growing dread in my stomach about seeing Claire at school, I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I stayed up posting on the GP board for a while and then doing my homework.

  Twenty minutes before my other, loud alarm was due to ring, I erased the evidence of my web surfing, undressed, put my clothes back in the decoy duffel bag and dropped it casually at the foot of the bed so it would look like I didn’t care about it. Then I crawled under the covers and waited for the alarm to ring while I looked at the stars through the window. I could only see a couple points of light in the murky, dark gray sky.

  “You look awful,” Mom said when I appeared for breakfast in my jeans and sweater number two.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. I didn’t want to attribute it to Claire or she’d think we’d had a fight and possibly ask why. “I might be getting a cold.”

  She touched my forehead. “You feel fine, but I want you to bundle up.” Then she turned back to the sandwiches she was making. “Chris, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about seeing a doctor for your moods.”

  “What?”

  “You’re so unhappy all the time. I want you to go talk to someone professional and have them help you.”

  I tried to figure out if I was supposed to fight about this or not. It really depended on the doctor whether it would be worthwhile. I settled for indifference, which always worked when I didn’t know what to do. “Sure, Mom,” I said.

  “Good, because you have an appointment today after school. I want you to meet me here at three forty-five and we’ll go over together.”

  Okay, that was my cue to get mad, which wasn’t hard since I already felt like crying. She’d messed with my schedule without asking, that was a clear violation. “What? You made an appointment without even asking? Mom, what the hell!”

  She closed a paper bag with a sharp snap and glared. “Chris, watch your language, young man!”

  That shut me up, but not for the reason she thought. I hated being called “young man” even more than “son.” I took a deep breath. “You didn’t even ask me.”

  “I’m your mother,” she said. “Sometimes I can do things just because they’re good for you.”

  I shrugged. On five hours of sleep for many nights running, I didn’t have the energy to keep fighting. “Fine.”

  “Don’t be late.”

  I stood up and automatically kissed her cheek though at that point I was honestly pissed.

  I was already halfway to school when I realized I’d forgotten my lunch and would have to eat a dry hockey puck, or whatever the cafeteria was serving.

  A doctor? Some kind of psychiatrist, I was sure, when what I really needed was an endocrinologist to put me on the right hormones. I felt a miserable disconnect between my body, which wanted very badly to punch something, and my heart, which just wanted to cry. My eyes burned but didn’t actually tear up, which was probably for the best if I didn’t want to get my ass kicked by the football guys.

  When I rounded the corner of the main hall, I saw Claire standing at my locker with her back to me. Momentum carried me toward her for a few more steps and then I stopped. If she dumped me now, I would fall apart.

  She turned and saw me, then pushed through the two dozen students between us, while I stood frozen in place. She was wearing her favorite black sweater with a cobweb design stitched around the elbows and a long, black skirt over her boots.

  “You look miserable,” she said.

  “I’m sorry about last night,” I told her.

  “Sorry for telling me?”

  “For my stupid question about us being together.”

  “Is that why you’re upset?” she asked.

  All I saw in her face was confusion, and what I really wanted was certainty that she wasn’t going to break up with me. I didn’t have the guts to ask again if we were still together.

  “That and Mom wants me to go to a shrink,” I told her almost inaudibly.

  She shrugged. “That could be good.”

  The bell rang, warning us that we only had a minute to flee to class.

  “Hang in there,” she said.

  I tried to smile, but failed pretty badly. She hadn’t said we were still together. Was she trying to let me down gently?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I stumbled through the day on autopilot.

  /run: please teacher

  1. raise hand

  2. give correct answer

  3. repeat once per class

  /run: lunch with the guys

  1. pick one parent—complain

  2. mention sports

  3. mention car

  4. joke about girls

  5. nod

  6. nod

  7. nod

  8. grunt

  9. nod

  While that was going on externally, I tried to figure out how Claire felt from our brief conversation that morning. She hadn’t said one way or the other if we were still going out or how she was dealing with everything I’d said. Was she freaking out and hiding it, or was she genuinely supportive? Did she want to break up with me and just not know what to say?

  In psych class we learned how embryos are differentiated in the womb, which was a good distraction though I had to keep my eyes half-closed in mock boredom and remember to groan when the guys did. In the first weeks of gestation, embryos are all basically anatomically female, and then when certain hormones start, the undifferentiated material of the fetus turns into the female or male configuration. It was actually more complicated than that, but Mr. Cooper didn’t get into it, and I didn’t blame him.

  Even as the fetus developed, it wasn’t necessarily as clear-cut as simple male and female. Mr. Cooper didn’t talk about it, but a small percentage of babies were born with ambiguous genitals, neither fully male or female. In the past doctors picked which one they thought the baby should be, but recently some had started letting the kids grow up and say for themselves what gender they were, which made sense to me. I wished I’d had a chance to tell a doctor that I was a girl and have them just work that out for me.

  By the end of class I really wanted to talk to someone who would understand how I felt. I hightailed it for the door the minute it ended. The school lobby was a mess of sound, but I went for the pay phone anyway. I had no cell phone for the same reason I had no high-speed Internet: cha-ching. I crammed a bunch of quarters in the phone.

  On the third ring, someone answered.

  “Natalie?” I asked.

  “Who’s this?” she asked and my heart fluttered because she had a girl’s voice, a little throaty, but clearly feminine.

  “I’m from GP,” I said neutrally. “You sent me your number last night. I’m the one in Liberty.” I was hyperaware of everything I said because there were about a hundred students who could overhear me if they wanted. Of course none of them were listening, but I couldn’t be too careful.

  “Emily?” she asked.

  “Um, yeah, I’m at school. No cell phone.”

  “Oh, you can’t talk, got it. Do you have a car? You want to meet this weekend?”

  “Totally.”

  “Saturday afternoon? Do you know where Southdale is?”

  I grinned. “I can figure it out.”

  “Great, meet me at two in the lobby of the theaters. What do you look like?”

  “Orlando Bloom,” I said. “Only taller and a lot less cute. And my hair’s lighter. You?”

  She was laughing. “I’m tall with red-brown hair. I’ll wear a black skirt and black boots and carry a flower or something.”

  “Hey, can I bring my girlfriend if she wants to come?”

  “The one you just came out to? Your post was awesome! Of course, that would be great. She sounds fantastic! See you on Saturday!” She talked with as many exclamation points as she used in her emails.

  “Cool,” I said and hung up. Then I looked at the clock hanging over the big double doors of the school and bolted for my car. I drove it cold, groaning and complaining all the way, and
skidded up to my house at three forty-five on the nose.

  Mom came out of the house as I pulled up; obviously she’d been waiting just inside. I slammed my car door and crossed the icy front lawn, hands jammed deep in my pockets. She was still in gray slacks from work with her eyes madeup and little earrings glinting in the amber sunlight.

  “You’re pushing it, kid,” Mom said as she locked the front door behind her and gave me a shove toward her car.

  “Sorry, school’s crowded when it lets out, you know. I don’t have a clear shot home.”

  “No lip,” she said. “Get in.”

  We drove in silence a couple miles to a low office complex.

  On the second floor was a uniformly beige waiting room where we waited. Mom filled out a bunch of forms and then a man came out of an office and shook her hand. He was almost handsome, with short black hair that grayed in that dignified way over his ears, and steel blue eyes. The two elements that messed up his good looks were his really thick brow ridge, like seriously caveman thick, and the way his smile looked like someone had just pushed the sides of his mouth up with their fingers and he was trying hard to hold the shape.

  “I’m Doctor Dean Webber,” he said. “Thanks for bringing Chris in to see me.”

  He shook Mom’s hand and then mine. His hand was strong and dry, but really smooth and I slipped out of it mid-shake.

  “Thank you for fitting us into the schedule,” Mom said.

  He nodded to her. “I’ll have him back to you in an hour.”

  Dr. Webber showed me into his office, which was big enough for a long couch, a couple of comfy chairs, a few folding chairs and a clunky coffee table. I sat down on the couch.

  “Hi, Chris,” he said, as if we hadn’t just met in the lobby. “Your mother tells me you’re not very happy.”

  I shrugged. He hadn’t done much to sway me one way or the other to liking him or disliking him, but I erred on the side of caution.