“I got fired for looking how I want,” I said with my head down.
Nora gestured before me with her gilded hand, and drew me back into her eyes. She looked determined to keep us both charged. She also seemed so confident and comfortable with herself, so I finally asked her.
“How long have you been alive-for-real?”
“Just a few years,” she shrugged, not affronted, nor breaking her intent gaze. “I mean, my parents knew something was up, so we all worked it out together. I had a feeling they’d be cool about it.”
Damn, if only.
She asked me how I knew Debbie, and I told her how I’d been kicked out of my mom’s house and fled to the city where Debbie met me in group, and happened to be looking for another housemate at the time.
“Wait, your mom kicked you out?”
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s really bad with her.”
“Don’t apologize! She’s the one who should be fuckin’ sorry.”
I asked Nora if she’d like to grab a drink when/if she had a free moment in the city. She said hell yeah and we exchanged info. Turned out she lived in that house.
Later on, I got a text from Debbie saying that she’d decided to stay over at her girlfriend Allison’s, and she could catch the train down if I wanted to head back on my own. I texted back “OK COOL I think I will.” I didn’t want Nora to think I was only interested in a one-night stand. I think about this a lot now—Nora had been practically dragging me toward her room. To this day, I don’t know why I was so shy about that. It was like I was denying the possibility something good might happen for me. It was like I couldn’t fully process her affinity.
She didn’t let me get away without a hug, and then an obvious re-invite-kiss.
During my drive back to the city, I realized I totally should have stayed there with Nora.
7
A minute or so before I was stabbed to death, I pulled into this highway rest stop that had a big food court. I got out of my car and looked around. There were some Mack trucks resting in the darkness of the other lot, and beyond them, only the night-full, black woods. The air felt humid, so I was glad I was just wearing my camo tank top and an emerald, knee-length skirt. I looked down. Did my flip-flops make my feet look huge? My hands, shoulders, and neck also? But it was high summer. I hadn’t wanted my toenails to smudge, hence the need for open-air feeties.
I wanted to stop thinking about my mom, who would point out every defect in me.
I went inside.
The main area looked mostly deserted, only one dude wearing a crisp, white, collared dress shirt at a far table, calmly eating a cheeseburger. The menu choices up on the displays didn’t appeal to me. Pizza Mania, which was closest to me in the hall, had this big, scowling white dude behind the counter. He was staring at me. His face scrunched as I passed by—not passing.
I might have made a face right back at him.
Or maybe I just averted my gaze and sped toward the bathrooms.
Whichever it was, I wish I had chosen the other.
I went into the ladies’ room, and I thought of the mouse again. Had it been a whole year since I’d watched it dying on the cushion? It had been summer then, too.
I think I loved the mouse.
I picked the cleanest stall I could find, sat down, and peed. I thought of Nora. Did she think I was a big dumb jerk? I wondered if I’d ever see her again.
I wanted to.
I flushed with my foot, and went to wash my hands. This place had those pain-in-the-ass, motion-activated towel dispensers, where you have to wave your hand at limited intervals for a little bit of paper. I dried my hands after a few tries.
I opened the exit door, and was immediately shoved back by a nightmare.
As soon as my eyes locked with his, my heart started racing. At first, I didn’t recognize him as the guy from Pizza Mania. He took that little moment to punch me in the stomach, and then my face. I stumbled back against the sink. It hurt.
The bathroom smelled like decades of wrong in a way it hadn’t just seconds earlier.
I realized what was happening, but I couldn’t adapt to it. Any semblance of my survival instinct remained passive. My system had given up.
He shoved me with both hands back into the stall I’d used. His eyes narrowed to glistening slits.
“I’m going to kill you for coming in here, you fucking degenerate.”
He grew so much bigger as he approached. First I tried to get past him, but I was walled in. I fumbled for my phone, then realized I’d left it in the car.
“I’m going to cast each and every one of you freaks into the fire,” he promised me as he grabbed a switchblade from his back pocket. “HE COMMANDS IT.”
He clicked the weapon open.
Then there was only me, him, the knife, and a suddenly compressed world. I didn’t have mace, a panic alarm, a flamethrower, or anything else that might have helped me. Just my ID holder and my keys on a coiled ring. I held the keys sharp-end-out toward him. He smiled and raised the blade. The fluorescent lights hit it just right, and the knife gleamed with divine judgement as it came down at me.
8
A second or so before I was stabbed to death, the Pizza Mania guy looked down at me as I tried to shield myself.
“Please,” I begged him. “Please, just let me go home.”
He shook his head, and sighed, “It’s too late.”
“I’ll give you my car.”
“I take my orders from God,” he said. “Not from fags.”
I remember thinking I wanted to tell him about the mouse.
The first stab was the loudest as it came in a low arc, right up into the middle of my stomach. I screamed “NO!”, long and drawn-out. My voice sounded weird.
He grinned wide and twisted the knife in me.
“You’re getting what you deserve,” he spoke softly into my left ear. “You made me do this.”
My arms and palms bore the brunt of the assault, until he went for other places on my body, and my screaming and kicks and pleas spiraled into a more exhausted moaning.
“I’ll suck your dick if you’d just let me go.”
He seemed astonished at my temerity, and said “NO!” in a mocking lilt.
I don’t know how many times he stabbed me. It seemed to never be over. The pain got worse every time.
I still feel it now.
When I finally collapsed onto the cold tiles, a mist of simple incredulity enveloped me.
I was twenty years old.
9
A second or so after I was stabbed to death, the air burst with bright energy as I began to rise. I looked down at my body for a second, wondering if I would take long to heal, and would they give me pistachio ice cream in the hospital. My blood pooled beneath me, a creeping oval of darkness. My eyes were wide and still. I looked—diagonal.
The pizza guy was washing my blood off his hands when he glared toward the bathroom entrance. The dude wearing the crisp, white collared dress shirt I’d seen eating at the far end of the food court was aiming a handgun at him with two strong arms.
I began to weep as everything began to sink in.
And then the whole scene—just everything—faded away.
10
A minute or so after I was stabbed to death I stood on the shore of an obnoxiously bright lake.
I was still wearing my camo tank top, my emerald-green skirt, and my flip flops. My blood was collecting and then draining out viscid at my toes. There were stab wounds on my abdomen, stomach, forearms, palms, neck, face, and groin. Most of my skin was drenched with blood. I wanted to wash it off and curl up somewhere. I wanted the mouse.
The bright water was right in front of me. It was the only place left to go. It was calm and welcoming.
I tried not to think of Nora, Jennifer, Debbie, Brooke, or my mom.
I wanted to go home.
I didn’t know where I was. That happened to me a lot in dreams, I’d float to someplace I couldn’t recognize.
It always felt uncanny and bewildering. But this was different. I couldn’t scare myself awake.
I crouched onto the tightly-packed sand and watched the sun-bright, milk-white water.
And then I saw the mouse.
It broke the surface of the lake, forming small ripples that glided out to me. It sat on the same cushion it died on and peered in my direction. I’m not sure what it thought of me looking all gross. The mouse brightened, and invited me to come into the water.
I wanted to look like my old self again.
I wanted be cleansed.
Plus, there was the mouse again—calling me, accepting me.
I went in.
The water felt nice and calming, and I began to wade toward the mouse. Its tail writhed happily and its whiskers moved as if it was eating something. Then I remembered the poison.
I called out to it, “NO DON’T!”
It was at the D-CON, a little sprinkling of death. I had to get the mouse to stop eating, to spit the poison out. Then realized I was too late when it stopped moving its tail, and fell onto its side. Its hind legs twitched in the air a moment, and then stopped.
The mouse faded away.
I lost my sense of direction. I felt a new fear that I’d hit a dead end of some new mistake. There was nothing around me but the lake’s vast, white featurelessness.
It got colder as I looked down at myself, and saw my wounds bleeding worse than before, forming dark, swirling rivulets around me in the bright water.
I kept swimming, desperate to regain the mouse and try to save it. A shadow moved ahead of me—it was something to lock onto. I rushed toward it, until I hit the stark reality of the far shore.
I emerged from the lake. I was drenched and cold, and my wounds still bled. I looked around.
Everything around me was just as unvarying the lake, a simple white all around me, even more disorienting than the water, because there was no horizon.
The mouse was gone.
11
An hour or so after I was stabbed to death, I still hadn’t found my way. There was nothing to latch on to, just that bright haze all around. After wandering for a while, I finally came to a rift. It looked like someone had cut an exit door in a veil of white lace. I couldn’t see anything through it but darkness, yet maybe it offered a way out. I went through the opening, and found myself back at the rest stop.
It was still night.
The pizza guy was sulking in the back of a police car. My blood was all over him. I went back into the food court, toward the bathroom. My body had been removed, and the homicide detectives were testing the scene. There was blood everywhere. Someone was muttering about my being trans, that I was probably HIV positive, and that they probably needed hazmat gear. He went on to say there wasn’t much mystery to what provoked the attack. I didn’t want to stick around and listen to him extrapolate.
I left them and rose into the summer air. The woods were dark, and the roads not so busy at that late hour. I let the winds take me wherever, and I screamed at the stars until dawn.
12
The day after I was stabbed to death, I visited the house I’d lived in with Debbie and Brooke. The mouse couch was still there. I wondered if anyone was home. The kitchen was empty.
I went right up to my room. I still had some weed left, and I wanted to smoke it all at one throw. I knew it wouldn’t do anything for me, but I liked the thought anyway. My desk still had a half-full mug of orange tea on it, and I wanted to drink the rest. I looked at the books on my shelf, and I wanted to finish reading them.
I went down the kitchen and tried to think things through.
I looked across into the TV room, at the mouse couch. Nothing there. I groaned.
I didn’t find Brooke in her workshop, so I figured I’d just leave.
I went out into the calm summer day, and heard a clamor of voices down the block.
I followed the noise.
Brooke and Debbie were sitting at the bus stop, holding each other. Their contorted faces were huge and open. Debbie was screaming through her sobs.
I watched them for a little while. I couldn’t reach out to them and say goodbye or anything, so I shot up into the sky. When I returned to the white, featureless waste, I reached level ground and looked down at myself.
I was still bleeding all over my front. It seemed to be pulsing out rhythmically, as with an artificial heartbeat. I dropped to my hands and knees and began to crawl, leaving a trail of slime behind me that reached back forever.
13
A week after I was stabbed to death, my mom buried me.
She was the last person on earth I wanted to claim my body, but she did.
I hadn’t made a will, so she dragged her toxic ass-crack into the morgue and instructed them to completely detransition me, starting with cutting my hair short. My breasts had grown a little from about two years of HRT, but she put me in a button-down shirt two sizes too big to conceal that. They acetoned my nail polish off. The tie they clipped onto me was a sober navy blue, and it looked stupid—the suit jacket looked even worse.
This was such an indignity, and she carved my deadname onto the cold, Plexiglas marker even though I had legally corrected my name several months before. She even made the wake open-casket to drive her point home. The media came in droves, gloating over the scandalous marvels of aberrant existence.
My mom didn’t cry once. She just looked inconvenienced. She might as well have worn a tracksuit to the ceremony.
I hope I never see her again.
I was curious to see who the Pizza Mania guy was, so I went to his arraignment. His name was Paul Butler. He’d been a registered sex offender for six years and had assaulted four women since his late twenties. Class act.
Someone decided to be awesome, and held a candlelight vigil for me near The Common. A few hundred people showed up, including Nora, Jennifer, Brooke, Debbie, Allison, and even our landlady. They walked about a mile to the state house, and someone I didn’t know (she looked famous) gave a speech about the need for stronger hate crime laws and that the so-called “bathroom bills” were just hate-legislature, by my very example alone. I don’t think any new laws would have stopped the pizza guy from doing what he did to me, but it was nice to have someone finally speaking up in my favor.
Nora hooked up with Brooke. I watched them holding each other at night. They looked happy. It was good that Nora found a better person than me.
Someone on Fox News suggested that Paul Butler had killed me to prevent me from sexually assaulting a young girl in the ladies’ room, therefore my murder was justified.
The clip was re-Tweeted and liked thousands of times.
I attended Paul Butler’s trial. I hovered in the back. They tried to play on that “bathroom” and “trans panic” defense, but it didn’t fly. He never showed any emotion, even during his sentencing. He was found guilty, and he’s in prison for a while. He reads his Bible a lot. Every time I go to check to see if he’s feeling sorry for what he did to me, there’s just less and less of him. Our fun is over.
14
The month after I was stabbed to death, Jennifer died of a blood clot that traveled to her lungs. She’d rubbed her sprained ankle after falling off a horse and after she began to fade, her roommates rushed her to the hospital the next morning.
She died on the way there.
I felt the shockwave and raced to her side. I saw her hovering near a far ceiling corner in the brightly-lit morgue. I asked her if she was okay and if we could be friends again. She turned to me slowly, then her face scrunched up as if she was trying to see something past a glare. She shrugged and went away. I looked down at her body. She looked peaceful.
Unlike mine, her wake was packed with real people. She was cremated according to her wishes, and she was eulogized under her correct name and pronouns. Her parents were nice to everyone who went up to them. I wanted to say something about how happy she’d made me when she’d first asked me out. I had never thought anyone woul
d like me, and she ended up showing me a world of animals, music, and kindness. She had helped me feel better. The memory of my time with her stood in such stark contrast with how I’d felt before, and how I feel now.
Toward the end, when people were lining up to pass by Jennifer’s remains, her white roses, and her photograph, I saw her hovering high up at the back of the chapel. She wore a billowing, white, knee-length dress. Her shoulders looked pretty, and her hair floated like a bed of happy eels. I floundered toward her but my progress was slow, like when you try to run waist-deep in the ocean.
I called to her and she looked up at the rafters, as if she sort of heard me but couldn’t pinpoint the direction of my voice. I saw her smile at something else up there, and then she glided forth, eclipsed a sunbeam, then vanished completely.
I never saw Jennifer again.
15
The Christmas after I was stabbed to death, something odd happened.
As I stumbled through the bright, unchanging haze—sobbing and bleeding as usual—I encountered another presence. It was small, and at first I thought I bumped into a mannequin or something. But no, there was someone else there. Alarmed, I shot upright. I couldn’t believe I had made physical contact.
But she was there, crouched in a fetal position, covering her ears with her hands. She wore a pretty white dress like the one Jennifer’s spirit had on during her wake. Her hair was a little shorter than mine had been when I was murdered. She looked up at me, and then stood about the same height as me. Her eyes looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place her. I said hi. I told her my name and asked hers.
“Hi?” she said. “I—don’t think I have a name.”
I nodded, sure.
I didn’t press her to try to remember it.
She’s confused and traumatized—maybe even a fresh death, I thought. Just try to draw her out. You fucking need her, whoever she is.
I felt a little embarrassed in her presence too, there was no way for her to not notice my horrific appearance. Blood pumped from each of my stab wounds. But I remembered and applied what I’d tried to practice in life—when I was in the presence of another person, I always tried to at least seem affable. That was usually impossible when I was alone, because I couldn’t stand myself. And now that I found another person in that void, I felt I should try and help her not feel alone.
Wicked Haunted: An Anthology of the New England Horror Writers Page 10
