Cam Girl

by Leah Raeder

  When the weather warmed, Max said, he’d teach me to swim. You can’t live beside the ocean without knowing how to swim.

  He didn’t say it, but I knew he left the stone uncarved because he couldn’t accept either fact: that Skylar was gone or that she was a she. If he left it blank, he could keep denying it. Committing to it meant the past was over, that the future had started. A future without his only child. That pretty face, those sparkling blue eyes.

  “Accept her the way she was,” I said. “She still needs that from you.”

  “Don’t you see?” Ellis said, touching the headstone. Her hair streamed in the wind, a torch of color against the gray. “You’re not cutting off her future by carving a name. You’re giving her memory a future.”

  Blood pulsed in my head like the heartbeat of the ocean. Ellis was speaking to both of us.

  She caught my eye for a second before I looked away.

  Max and I understood each other in this. We hung back, hesitating.

  Afraid to raise the chisel.

  * * *

  “Tell me what it’s like,” I said, lying on my side, gazing at her across the pillow. “What do you feel like inside?”

  “Like nothing. Like everything. It’s hard to explain.”

  Ellis turned to the ceiling, Christmas lights dappling her face. Why do we always look up when we don’t understand? Maybe it’s a remnant from when we’re kids, tugging at a parent’s sleeve. Mami, explain. ¿Por qué?

  “Do you feel like a boy inside?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Do you ever feel like a girl?”

  “Rarely. And sometimes I don’t feel like either. Like . . . a third gender. Or none at all.”

  “Is there a word for that?”

  “Only a million. But I guess genderfluid is pretty close. It’s when the gender you identify as changes.”

  It didn’t seem strange anymore. At times I’d seen her more as a girl, a boy, both, neither. I’d never had a word for it.

  Now it felt like something we could talk about. Something I could think about more clearly.

  Names have power. They give contour to ideas. Lines to color inside, or to break free of.

  “Does it bother you when people call you ‘she’ or ‘her’?”

  “Not really. I’m used to it. And I like it sometimes, especially when you say it. But remember those guys you scared off the first day we met?”

  “Of course. I’m the cat who saved the bird.”

  “It bothered me when they saw me as a girl. To them, girls are just pieces of meat. I hate being seen that way.”

  “Little secret: cisgender girls hate being seen as pieces of meat, too.”

  “I know. And you’re different. It feels equal with you. Safe. It’s other people who make me feel like I have the worst of both worlds. I’m either a girl who’s just a sex object, or a boy who’s a weak little pussy.”

  Something twisted in my chest. “Is that how you feel? Like you’re weak, as a boy?”

  “I did until I invented Blue.” Lights rippled over her skin, garlanding her in white-gold. “That was the first time it didn’t make me feel ashamed. This part of myself. I felt powerful. Strong.” Ellis glanced at me. “You were so different.”

  “How?”

  “You cared more what I thought about you. You tried harder to please me.”

  “I was less of a selfish bitch, you mean.”

  “I didn’t say that,” she said anxiously, but I laughed and she relaxed. “I think it’s more the male gaze. You felt like a man was looking at you, so you behaved differently.”

  “Is that really a male/female thing, or because we were strangers?”

  “I don’t know. But it felt good, when you treated me like a man.”

  A thrill shot into my belly when she said that. “Duly noted.”

  If we were being all confessional, it was time to own something I didn’t like about myself.

  “Ellis, remember when you said I’m afraid of femininity? You’re right. It’s why I’ve always been so flaky about girls. I took to you so fast because you’re a tomboy. You’re like, my ideal person. Smack in-between, unpindownable. But I think I’ve got some internalized misogyny going on, or something.”

  “Lots of people do without realizing it. Society wants us to see our femininity as a weakness.”

  “It’s not a weakness in you. It’s perfect. You’re just right.”

  She smiled. “It’s perfect in you, too. You’re the strongest girl I know.”

  We looked at each other across the bed. I traced her cheekbone.

  “Do you think you’ll ever change yourself outside, to fit how you feel inside?”

  “Not right now. Maybe not ever.” She took a deep breath. “But some days I do want to be a boy. If I wanted to stay a boy, would that freak you out?”

  “A little bit, yeah. Change is scary. Would it freak you out, if you wanted to stay that way?”

  “A little bit, yeah.”

  I cupped the side of her face. “What if you’re actually trans?”

  “Can you be trans without wanting to transition?”

  “You can be whatever feels right. I’m bi, even if I never sleep with a guy again. And I’m an artist even if I never draw.”

  She bit her lip. “Would you leave, if I was?”

  “Nope.”

  “That’s it? Don’t you have to think about it?”

  “What’s there to think about? I love you no matter what you look like on the outside. It’s what’s inside I love. There’s this—okay, I have to give you a mini art lecture. Don’t roll your eyes, Ellis. Blue loves my art lectures.”

  She groaned. “I’ve created a monster.”

  “Yep. Now shut up and listen.” I levered myself to a sitting position. “So, what is art? We take reality, and we filter it through our eyes and minds and hands, and remake it. What comes out is both more and less true than what went in. It illuminates some part of reality just as it obscures other parts. Art is an imperfect impression of the world. As the self is an imperfect impression of the soul.”

  She stared at me, her lips parting.

  “Anyway, my point is that I love whatever intangible essence makes you Ellis. Your soul. The thing you don’t believe exists. The rest is just very pretty art.”

  She fluttered her eyelashes, deliberately coquettish. “Are you objectifying me?”

  “A little bit, yeah. Because I really kinda want to fuck you right now.”

  Ellis laughed, that pretty musical laugh, and I knelt over her and lowered my mouth to hers.

  * * *

  My gallery opened on a blue February night. Ellis’s twenty-fourth birthday. I’d leased an old fishery up the coast from Portland, gutted the interior, rehabbed it with polished concrete and new drywall. Track lights glittered in the rafters like strings of diamonds. Tonight we opened with a photo exhibit. I’d angsted about what to title the show until Dane, genius of the simple, said, “Why not just Her?”

  The gallery bustled with cammers, college kids, our friends, everyone we knew. Including the staff from my studio.

  I was no longer a cam girl. I was a business owner.

  My studio was basically an artist colony with a porn twist: they cammed and I comped their tuition, art supplies, gallery fees, everything. I only took people with big dreams. People who needed a leg up, pun intended. The castoffs society would have thrown away, kids with talent but no lucky break. Too many of us were drawn to camming because we’d been dealt a bad hand by life—figuratively and literally. They’d rather make art; I gave them a chance to make art and cash at the same time.

  Technically, Katherine, I’m a patron of the arts now, too. Not bad for a twenty-three-year-old Boricua from the West Side, is it?

  I found Max wandering alone, spending long minutes before each photo. We’d blown them up and printed them on giant canvases. I joined him at a close-up selfie: one intensely blue eye, half of a red lipsticked mouth. Shaggy blond hair. />
  Max glanced at me, expressionless.

  “Let me show you something,” I said.

  I raised my hand, obscuring the bottom of the photo. The top half of Skylar’s face looked like a pretty boy in guyliner. Then I moved my hand upward and instantly the face changed, becoming a girl’s mouth, coy and alluring.

  Max looked confused.

  “This is very strange,” he said, “but she was beautiful. She would’ve been a—”

  He cut off, turning away, and I grabbed him in a hug. He stood still for a second and then wrapped his arms around me.

  “Are you going to be okay?” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  We leaned apart but I kept my hands on his shoulders.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” he said. “How to feel, how to look at her. I never really had a daughter.”

  “I never really had a dad. Maybe we can figure this shit out together.”

  His eyes tightened, a smile flickering in them. He squeezed my waist and let go, and I watched him drift into the crowd.

  A little thread of my heart went with him.

  Naveen, one of my cam boys, caught up with me. His ears glinted with hand-tooled silver rings. My cammers all made things: Naveen worked with metal, Aurora was writing a novel, Li designed clothes.

  “So, does it fit?” he said.

  I smiled, the kind of smile you put on when you’re actually terrified. “Don’t know yet.”

  Naveen winked.

  “Have you seen Ellis?”

  “Nah, sorry, mami.”

  They thought that was hilarious—calling me “mami.” I punched his arm.

  Across the floor, Frankie and Dane stood gazing at a sad photo: a curled fist, red furrows raking across a long blue vein. Ellis and I had debated: Should we show the bad as well, or only the good? I said only the good. Why should Skylar’s suffering linger on? Why not let her rest, celebrate her life? But Ellis said showing the suffering was important because somewhere in that crowd tonight, someone else suffered, too. Someone would see those photos of her pain and feel a resonance. The point of art, of any communion between human beings, wasn’t to make people feel good—it was to make them feel less alone.

  She was right. Ellis was always right.

  Frankie and Dane looked as elegant as the night we’d met, her in clinging pale silk and him in a smart bespoke suit. As I approached them, I froze. Dane was whispering something in her ear; Frankie’s hand brushed his back. They leaned into each other, intimately.

  I turned around, leaving them undisturbed.

  So getting details later.

  People kept detaining me to chat, and I tried to be the gracious gallery owner but a wildness brewed in me. I spied a flash of rust red in the crowd and chased, only for someone to step into my path. My body was on autopilot. I smiled, carried on entire calm conversations while my heart rampaged. It was a relief when I ran into Brandt.

  He sat on a wooden bench before a photo of a washed-up sea raven, a weird fish: dark garnet scales, ragged shreds of skin trailing from its fins, as if it had been torn partially from something whole. Totally Brandt. Totally me, too.

  I sat beside him. “Seen your cousin?”

  “She was looking for you.”

  “Figures.”

  He gave me that trademark Zoeller squint. “Trouble in paradise?”

  “You wish.”

  It was strange, being around him after everything. He and I were the only ones who knew the whole truth about Blue. Brandt looked up to Ellis like she was an older brother. Plus he’d driven a boat to Peaks Island in a snowstorm to rescue me, which was major Boy Scout points.

  “Still sure you don’t want to come home with us?” I said.

  We were planning to visit Chicago soon. I hadn’t seen my family in ages. And I might have news to tell, which made my insides lurch, my heart rising and teetering like a Ferris wheel car.

  “Yeah. Do me a favor, by the way.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t mention my name to anyone there.”

  I frowned. “How come?”

  “Trust me on this one.” He cocked his head. “Ellis was smart to change hers. Some ghosts we deserve, and some we don’t.”

  “You’re right. I guess you and I deserve ours.”

  Something strange glittered in his eyes.

  I still didn’t know what had really happened to him, but we felt similarly about our scars: they were earned.

  “You’re nervous about something,” he said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You keep putting your hand in your pocket. Touching something. Or maybe you’re rubbing one out.”

  I elbowed him, and he grunted.

  “That left is getting strong,” he said appreciatively.

  “Want to know a secret?”

  “Always.”

  “I’ve been drawing with it.” I flexed my hand, feeling a good, familiar soreness. Still awful drawing lefty, but every day the lines were a little less bad. “I’ll probably never be as good as I was, but I won’t let it stop me. This is who I am. I’m a creator. I’ll keep trying till I’m dust.”

  Brandt gave me an odd look. “ ‘Out of the night that covers me, black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul.’ ”

  “What’s that?”

  “Old poem.” He smirked. “A girl I knew loved poetry. You might say she beat her love for it into me.”

  “You are so weird.”

  “You have no idea. Hey, there’s my cuz.”

  When our eyes met across the gallery, I stood, feeling weightless. Everything else went grayscale and indistinct, a faint sketch beneath the brilliant colors of the only person I really saw. I left Brandt without another word.

  Ellis met me in a clear bubble of space under the bright lights. I’d seen her dressed like this a million times—hair raked boyishly above her eyes, plaid sleeves rolled up, all rustic and sylvan as if born and raised in Maine—but every detail took on deep significance. Because tonight would become a memory. One I would never forget.

  “There you are,” she said. “I’ve been looking everywhere for—”

  I took her face in my hands and kissed her. Like Klimt’s painting, tilting her head back, pouring all of myself into it, the world dulling, all the colors gathering inside us instead. Her lips opened against mine and she breathed into me. I kissed her like we were the only two people in the room, in the whole world, and for that kiss, we were. When I pulled back we were both hazy-eyed, smiling goofily.

  “Happy birthday, baby,” I said.

  “Was that my present? Because that was pretty amazing.”

  I shook my head. Speech was hard. I took her hand, tugged.

  My palm was sweating. Man.

  I led her through the gallery, past photos of a pretty girl we were all making new memories of, past our friends and the lights and voices to the doors that let onto the wharf. We got our coats and practically ran outside, drinking in the brisk air, the salt breeze, the stillness. When the doors shut we did run. She dashed off first and I followed, our feet thumping on the dock.

  We raced to the end of the pier, screaming for no other reason than that we were alive. Screaming into the face of this cold universe. Against unkindness, against accidents and inevitabilities. Against the randomness of being born into the wrong body or the wrong family, of hurting the wrong hand. Our voices carried over the water long after we fell silent, mine throaty and brazen, hers an avian shriek. At the pier’s edge I collapsed, panting. Ellis sat next to me. For a while we stared out at dark water and clear sky, wild with stars.

  “Want your present now?” I said.

  She nodded.

  I reached into my coat. My hand shook, and she saw.

  “Vada,” she said, my name drifting to me in a white scroll of breath.

  I withdrew a piece of paper and unfolded it in the starlight. My first sketch of her. The day we met at
the train, the two of us sitting side by side. For some reason I’d drawn us with hands clasped, casually, as if we’d been best friends for years. The idea of it had seemed pretty to me. Meeting someone who felt so familiar, so much like home.

  “Remember this?”

  “You hid it from me. You were terrified I’d think you had a crush on me.”

  “ ‘Terrified’ is a strong word. I was mildly concerned.”

  “You locked it in a jewelry safe, Vada.”

  I laughed, but my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. The paper shivered.

  “The truth is, I couldn’t figure out what to get you. I racked my brain. But nothing was big enough, epic enough. Nothing was good enough. So this is it. I’m all you get this year.”

  She took the sketch, tucked it into her coat. Cupped my face. “You’re good enough. And you’re all I want.”

  My heart was too full. It couldn’t hold this.

  I kissed her again, pressed her down to the pier planks. I kissed her mouth, her cold cheeks, her warm throat. “I don’t deserve you,” I whispered. “But I want to be your everything. The way you’re mine.”

  “You’re going to make me cry.”

  “Not yet.”

  Her brow knit, but I kissed her again before she could question me. I could stay here forever. In this eternal moment, in a picture someone would draw of us, a story they would write, so it would never end.

  But I wanted the next moment more than anything.

  “People will wonder where we are,” I said.

  “Let them.”

  I smiled, pulled her to her feet. She hung on to my hands.

  “Why are you shaking?” she said in a soft voice. “You’re scared. Why?”

  “I’m just cold.”

  Ellis squinted. I swung our arms playfully.

  “Come on, birthday nerd. They’re waiting.”

  I took off running back down the pier and she made a surprised sound and followed. I let her catch up, overtake me, fly past. Then I staggered to a halt and dropped to my knee, fiddling with my shoelaces.

  Ellis spun around and walked back. “I refuse to win by default.”

  “Ever so noble.” I beckoned. “Come here. I need you.”

  “Did you seriously trip over your shoelaces? What are you, five?”