by Amber Smith
I lay down in bed and stared at the ceiling. I pulled the covers over me, then threw them off again. I sat up and repositioned my pillow, lay back down, closed my eyes, opened them. I had messed everything up with Maia, just when it had seemed like maybe things were going somewhere with her. But I couldn’t even think about that. This whole night had scrambled my brain—pushing things around, rearranging my thoughts like furniture, making my mind a maze of old memories bumping up against the new ones, confusing me. I closed my eyes and there it was, the inevitable, moving forward from the place in the back of my mind: That day. Everything that happened next.
• • •
My parents had pressed charges against all three of the boys who beat me up. They were expelled from school for the rest of the year. Their parents had to pay my medical bills. They’d be on probation until they each turned eighteen. But big fucking deal—they had already finished with their stupid community service while I was still laid up in bed.
My two broken ribs were pretty much better by then, though those first weeks of breathing exercises with Isobel had been excruciating—I’d have just as soon stopped breathing altogether if that had been an option. The surgery for my broken nose and the orbital fracture of my right eye socket had gone well, and I had recovered from my bruised liver and sprained left ankle all within a few weeks. But I’d still had to wear that back brace for the spinal fracture and go through weeks and weeks of physical therapy before it fully healed.
Coleton was the one who kept me from going over the edge. He was my only real connection to the outside world, especially after Isobel left to go back home. Most days were spent sitting or lying in bed, finishing my online classes in no time at all because they were so fucking easy. After my eye was better, I read like a fiend. A book a day, sometimes more.
Then at night, after my parents were in bed, I watched all the videos on the Internet—every last one I could find. About being trans. About transitioning. I didn’t need to watch them all, though, because within the first thirty seconds of the first video, this guy was sitting there already telling my whole life story. Someone on the other side of the world, whom I didn’t know and whom I would never meet, knew me at my core. I always believed there was an infinite universe out there, and somehow, I was supposed to be a part of it. At least, I tried very hard to believe that. And for maybe the first time in my entire life, I was finally beginning to see a way to make that happen.
The voice in my head started changing then—no longer telling me I was unacceptable. It was a different voice, but one I’d heard before. It was the voice that had told me to run that day in the woods, the one that had been whispering to me in a million different languages every day, telling me all the ways that this was not the life I was supposed to be living. The only thing that was right was my mind. My mind wasn’t confused. It had always known itself. All alone in my bedroom, day in, day out, that voice got louder and stronger, until I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
Isobel was the first person I told. She didn’t even pause a beat before she let me know she was behind me forever, no matter what—those were her exact words: Forever, she told me. No matter what.
The day I finally told Coleton, he had come over after school as he did most afternoons. He dropped off my new library books and talked about how much everything sucked at school without me, which I appreciated hearing, even if I knew he was the only one who felt that way. We played video games like we always did.
But after hours of running through the same battle and losing horribly, he finally said, “I probably really need to get home after this try.”
I knew it had to be now or I’d never work up the courage again. I paused the game. I took a deep breath—I’d gotten so good at breathing deep that it barely hurt anymore. He looked over at me like he knew it was something big.
“What?” he asked.
“I just—I wanna talk to you about something.”
He set the controller down on the floor and turned toward me. “Okay.”
“So you know how there are some people who are born one way and then, they like, change their bodies?” I began.
“Okay,” he repeated, squinting at me.
“Well, it’s like their bodies don’t match their minds.”
“Oh-kay,” he said again, less certain this time.
I paused, took another full, deep breath. I wasn’t explaining it right, I knew that—I was just having trouble saying the word, like getting the actual word out of my mouth: transgender. It felt like a forbidden word, a word from a language nobody ever spoke out loud, or at least nobody I’d ever known.
“Like someone who has the body of a boy when they’re supposed to be a girl. Or you have the body of a girl when everything else about you is like a boy—I mean, not like a boy, is a boy. You are a boy. And these people, they end up changing their bodies.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding again, understanding, getting it, at last. “And?”
“Well, that’s—me,” I said.
He stared at the carpet, in the space between us, for what felt like forever. “That seems pretty extreme, don’t you think?”
My heart started pounding. I couldn’t tell if it was out of anger or sadness or fear. This was not the reaction I’d been expecting from him. “Why are you saying that?” I asked, hearing the edge in my voice.
“Listen, you already look like a guy. I mean, no offense or anything, but most people wouldn’t even know. You remember those girls we met at the mall that one time?” he asked, in that tone he often used back then, like he was trying to cheer me up.
“Yeah, that one time. That one time I got a girl’s number.” He was always bringing that up whenever I needed a boost, except it wasn’t going to cut it this time. “But then I was too afraid to ever call her, because what would be the point? God, it’s not about girls, Coleton!”
“Well, I don’t know!” He threw his hands up. “I don’t know what to say, okay?”
“And besides, I don’t look like a guy. When we were kids, maybe I used to, but—it’s not about just looking like a guy, anyway.”
“Well, what’s it about, then?”
“It’s not about looking like anything. It’s about . . . being. Being who I really am, a whole person. Not just someone who confuses people and gets weird looks all the time.”
He considered this for a moment before responding. “You know I’ve never thought of you as, like, a girl-girl, right?” Three months earlier I might’ve believed him. Then again, three months earlier he might’ve meant it.
“Even after what happened?”
He looked down at the spot on the carpet again. “Is that what this is about?” he asked. “Because you can’t let them—”
“No!” I interrupted. “That, and all of this”—I gestured around my room, at my back brace, my books, our game, at everything my life had become—“it just made me realize I can’t wait any longer to start living or my world is just going to keep getting smaller and smaller. I can’t be afraid anymore. This is who I’ve always been. I can’t keep lying to myself and everyone else.”
He sat there, quietly, for what felt like minutes but had to have only been seconds. “I’m not trying to argue with you. I just want to make sure you’ve really thought about it.”
“Believe me, I pretty much think about nothing else.”
“All right,” he concluded with a shrug.
“All right,” I repeated. “Is it, though?”
“Yeah, of course it is,” he said, picking his controller up off the floor and nodding toward mine, still held tight between my hands. “Come on, one more?” he asked.
As we sat there playing, I was surprised things felt a lot like they always did, except a lot lighter. A few minutes in, he started laughing and paused the game again, turned to look at me with wide eyes. “Holy shit, what are Joe and Sheila gonna say?”
And even though my parents’ reaction to what I’d just told him was definitely not going to be a
laughing matter, I laughed so hard that my lungs and ribs and back ached. If things could’ve stayed like that between me and Coleton, then I think we’d have been fine.
But they didn’t.
So, at 2:43 in the morning I sat up, the smell of woodsmoke still stuck to my skin and hair, and I picked my phone up off the nightstand. I tapped out the only response that felt possible, even if it was a lie: It was awesome.
PART TWO
july
MAIA
I WAS STUCK WITH FITTING room duty: handing people plastic tags with numbers printed on them and unlocking doors and picking clothes up off the floor. Clothes weren’t the only refuse of the changing rooms. Old sodas, iced-coffee cups, chunks of gum whose flavor had run out, receipts, the occasional petrified french fry or well-aged Cheerio that had been dislodged from a stroller . . . they all found a temporary resting place in the Bargain Mart fitting room. Someone even decided it was an appropriate place to dispose of their child’s dirty diaper.
In between all of those fun tasks, I had to answer the phones and talk over the loudspeaker, telling different departments to pick up the call on line one, line two, line three, and then I had to talk to the person again when they called back, angry, because no one ever picked up in the department I transferred them to in the first place.
Hour after hour passed the same as the one before.
I’m friendly enough to not get fired, but not so friendly that people want to stand around and have whole conversations with me. It’s a delicate balance.
My phone kept vibrating in my back pocket, but I didn’t look for two reasons:
1. I wasn’t supposed to have my phone out on the sales floor.
2. I already knew who it was.
Hayden and our friend, Gabby, had returned from the beach a couple days earlier, and they’d been texting me practically on the hour, every hour, since.
The phone at the fitting room rang. I picked up, reciting the same lame greeting we were forced to say each time: “Thank you for calling your friendly Carson Bargain Mart. How may I direct your call?”
I had my next line all prepared—“Hold, please”—when Hayden’s voice broke the static on the other end of the line. “What’s the deal, did your phone stop working?”
“Oh, hey,” I said, doing my best to sound happy to hear from her. “Sorry, I was planning on calling you later today.”
“I’m just getting off work now.” I heard a sequence of beeping sounds I immediately recognized. She was getting into her car; they were the alarms that go off when you’ve turned the key but haven’t buckled your seat belt. “Can you take a break?”
“It might be tough to get away right now,” I lied.
“Well, try. It’s been so long, I’m not gonna remember what you look like! I’ll be there in five.”
She hung up without giving me a chance to make up another excuse.
I walked out into the forest of bras and underwear to find Donna, the older woman who just last week had hugged me in the break room and cried on my shoulder over Mallory. Her pity was as oppressive as her smothering hugs. But it meant I could count on her for favors.
“Hey, Donna, can you cover the fitting room while I go on lunch?”
She squeezed my hand and said in the most solemn voice, “Of course.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
By the time I made it outside to the cluster of old rusty metal picnic benches that have no doubt been sitting behind Bargain Mart since Donna started here in the 1970s, Hayden was already waiting for me there. As I approached I saw that she had two Styrofoam DairyLand cups sitting on the table. I already knew mine was a strawberry milkshake, and hers was vanilla with mini peanut butter cups.
The sun was blazing, the humidity ratcheting up by the minute. It felt like the inside of a dog’s mouth: sticky and stinky and wet. Welcome to July in the South, also known as hell on earth.
“Hey,” I said as I scooted into the bench.
“Oh! Sorry, but”—Hayden tore off her DairyLand hat and placed it on top of the table—“I’m saving this spot for my friend who I haven’t seen in forever ’cause she’s been avoiding me.”
I smiled as I sat down.
She clutched my milkshake, like she was protecting it.
“Wait, Maia?” She reached across the table and took my face between her hands, smushing my cheeks and poking at my forehead and chin. “Is that really you?”
I batted her hands away and whined, “Stop!”
“Fine,” she said, pushing the strawberry milkshake back to its spot in front of me. “So?”
“Yeah?”
“So . . . ,” she repeated as she unbuttoned and wriggled out of her DairyLand shirt, which bore the DairyLand Fairy mascot emblazoned across the back. I always thought it looked more like an evil ice-cream swirl-haired demon with insect wings than a fairy. “Why are you avoiding me?”
“I’m not avoiding you.”
“Liar,” she said as she moved the strap of her tank top aside to examine the sunburn line on her shoulder, wincing.
“No, I’ve just been kinda busy.” Lie, lie, lie. “Working and everything. The usual.” I didn’t know how to tell Hayden that lately being around her, or anyone, only made me feel completely alone.
“Well, how about you come over tonight? Just the two of us? I need to show you our pictures, so you can see all the fun you missed.”
“Gee, thanks, Hayden.”
“Well, then you’re gonna wanna come next time.”
“I already do.” I sipped on my milkshake, but it did little to cool me down. “Can we do it sometime next week instead?”
“I guess.” She paused, then added, “You’re still coming with us to the Fourth, right?” I studied her face as we sat across from each other, but I couldn’t tell if she actually wanted me to say yes or no. I looked down into the now-melted, soupy milkshake and gave it a stir with my straw, uncertain if I could bear attending the Fourth of July town celebration this year.
“Earth to Maia,” Hayden said, waving her hand in the space between us.
“Of course I’m coming. It’s practically mandatory, isn’t it?” I tried to joke, but like all the words that seemed to pass my lips lately, it came out wrong.
“You make it sound like community service or something.” She slurped her milkshake and gave one of her polite, tight-lipped smiles. Then she squinted out at the baking parking lot, the sun bright against her burned cheeks, and looked back at me with that pity face she’d learned since Mallory died. If she could quit doing that, then just maybe we could get back to some sort of normal.
“Are you okay?” she finally asked.
I shrugged. “I’m fine.”
She raised her eyebrows, and I counted the seconds she stared, not believing me—one, two, three—“Look, I heard about what happened at Bowman’s.”
“Oh, that?”
“Yeah, that—the party you went to while we were at the beach, even though you vowed to never again attend another party without me.”
“It’s been a week.” I spooned a soggy lump of milkshake into my mouth. “Hasn’t someone else done something stupid or embarrassing in this goddamn town by now?”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“I don’t know, probably to avoid the are-you-okay conversation.” That got me a laugh, but she was still watching me too closely. “It really wasn’t a big deal, Hayden. Neil hates me. I don’t care for him either. That’s all. End of story. No one even took a video this time, so it couldn’t have been that bad, right?”
She laughed again, but this time it was faked; she wasn’t letting me off that easy. “No one said it was that bad, but . . .” Her voice trailed off in that way she often does when she’d rather the other person finish her sentence for her, like a song that fades out because it doesn’t know how to end.
“But what?” I asked.
“Is it true that you were hiding and watching them?” She scrunched her face up like this
conversation was putting her in actual physical discomfort. “Did you really have Mallory’s camera?”
Part of me wanted to tell her about everything—the gas station wall and the quote and the pictures and Chris. Especially Chris. I wanted to know what she thought of Chris trying to step in and help me with Neil. Was that chivalrous or sexist, Hayden? I wanted to ask her because I’d replayed it in my head so many times and I still wasn’t sure. But I couldn’t.
So instead I said, “I should really get back in there.”
“Yeah, okay. But—”
“Thanks for the shake,” I told her as I stood and threw my empty cup into the garbage.
“See you on the Fourth?” she called after me.
I smiled my big fake Bargain Mart smile. “Can’t wait.”
• • •
When I got back to the fitting room, Donna was there with a whole shopping cart full of socks and underwear that needed to be repackaged. Why people felt the need to rip open the plastic and touch the socks or underwear prior to deciding whether or not they were going to buy them, I would never know.
Every once in while a customer would stop by, talking about the weather—it was getting dark and cloudy. Another person told us that the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning. People were not buying clothes; they were stocking up on batteries and bottled water and milk and bread. I understood the need for batteries and water, but why they all planned on making milk sandwiches was beyond me. Granola bars and beef jerky seemed more logical.
Donna talked my ears off about living through Hurricane Hugo in 1989, which she would tell me about every time we had some kind of weather going on. “Trees uprooted, no power for two weeks, flooding, windows blown out of buildings.” She went on and on. “I thought it was the end.”
