This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

  And which was worse, Penn thought. Out of hatred or love? Loyalty to one’s sister or loyalty to one’s beloved? In the heat of battle or the heat of bonfire? But before he could decide, the door opened again.

  “We did it.” Rigel and Orion sounded like creepy twins in a horror movie. They sounded like little boys. They sounded like they might cry, and Rosie tried to recall the last time they had.

  “Remember when we accidentally told everyone at the Grandersons’ barbecue?” said Rigel, and Penn did. In fact, he remembered that it wasn’t Rigel who’d said it but Orion, and he was touched at Rigel’s instinct to shoulder some of his twin’s blame. Maybe in the dark, it wasn’t clear even to them which one was which.

  “The next week at school, this kid we sort of know came up to us at recess and asked why we said that about Poppy,” Orion explained.

  “We started saying how we were just joking and about Captain Cockroach and Harry and Larry’s dog,” Rigel continued.

  “But then he interrupted and said he thought he might be … like that too. Like Poppy. And maybe we knew what he should do or who he should talk to or whatever.” Rosie noticed how steady Orion’s voice had become.

  “And we did,” Rigel said simply. “So we told him.”

  “He was really sad and scared,” Orion added, “so it seemed like the right thing to do. We thought of all people, he wouldn’t tell, but maybe he had to so someone would help, you know? Maybe he had to so someone would listen.”

  And maybe it was because it was becoming less clear by the moment who was responsible, and maybe it was because it was becoming more clear by the moment the size of the hole in the hull of this secret, and maybe it was because the good reasons there were to tell were finally unfurling—or maybe it was just that it was nearly morning and no one had yet slept—but Rosie and Penn found their predominant emotion wasn’t anger but pride. At least for a predawn hour or so.

  The only one they never heard from that night was Poppy.

  I’m Nobody! Who Are You?

  The next morning, two hours later, everyone was generally groggy and cranky and still a little shell-shocked. Their world had changed again; they were just waiting to see how. In the meantime, there was school to go to. There were patients to see and words to write. And they were all of them grateful for those traces of normalcy, all except Poppy, who, as everyone else was rinsing out cereal bowls and getting dressed, still hadn’t emerged from her room. Penn imagined she’d had trouble falling asleep and didn’t want to wake her if she’d finally managed to do so. Rosie imagined she’d committed ritual suicide any of twenty or thirty ways just off the top of her head and had to be bodily restrained from barging in to check. When at last she could stand it no more, she and Penn opened Poppy’s door without knocking, one creaky millimeter per breath, slow enough to bore slugs. When they finally had it wide enough to look inside, what they found was not as alarming as suicide, but not all that far off either. What they found in Poppy’s room, there on her unslept-in bed, was Claude.

  They recognized him at once though he was, in fact, a stranger. They had not seen Claude since he was five, so here at ten, he was an apparition. Poppy, their creative, confident, shining daughter, was nowhere to be seen. This child though, this ghost of a child, was dark and sullen with puffy red eyes he would not raise from the floor and arms that would not unwrap themselves from their stranglehold on his ribs. He was wearing Poppy’s most masculine pants—a plain pair of gray sweats—and a much-too-big Mariners fleece of Orion’s. In a large box next to the bed were piled all Poppy’s dolls and stuffed animals, her dream catcher, her ballet shoes, and all her framed photos—one of PANK on the last day of fourth grade, one of Poppy and Aggie both dressed as ponies one Halloween, one of Poppy in a lavender sundress smiling out from among her brothers at Rigel and Orion’s middle school graduation. And all around Claude—on the pillow and the sheets, in the box, on the desk, on the floor—spread Poppy’s long, thick hair, streaked around the room like threads of dark blood. Rigel’s electric shaver, put to use at last, lay on the floor next to the bed like a murder weapon, and tears coursed down Claude’s cheeks under an uneven, stubbly scalp that broke his parents’ hearts.

  “I am not going to school,” Claude wept, his first words to his parents in five years, “ever again.”

  Rosie went to call Yvonne to cancel all her appointments for the day. Penn held his sobbing child against his chest and wondered at this moment come at last, come anew, come again.

  * * *

  When Penn called school to explain why Poppy would be absent, Mr. Menendez was not surprised. “Everyone’s talking about it.”

  “It’ll die down.” Penn, after all, had done this once before.

  “How did people find out?” the principal asked. “Who told?”

  “Don’t know.” This was true. There were, apparently, a whole host of candidates. But Penn wasn’t prepared to say that the answer to this question, even if he had known it, was any of the principal’s business. He wasn’t sure that his other kids didn’t need protecting in this moment too. “Doesn’t matter,” he told Mr. Menendez. This was less true.

  It took the principal three days to figure it out, and when he did, the answer was none of the above. None of the middle-of-the-night confessors had been the culprit. It was all Marnie Alison’s fault as Poppy, for one, had known all along.

  Roo’s English class was writing practice college admissions essays. The mock-prompt was Write about a moment of great change in your life. Roo’s essay was not about Claude or about Poppy, but it was about how his own life had changed when his brother became his sister—what could be counted on, what was unalterable, what was rooted in the physical and what eluded it. The past should be immutable, Roo wrote, but it wasn’t. The future hadn’t happened yet, so it shouldn’t be so strange when what you imagined could no longer come to be, but it was. The essay was heartfelt, well written, and insightful, and a few months later, an only slightly revised version would gain Roo offers from several institutions of higher learning despite his failing a quarter of history in tenth grade and having a suspension for fighting on his permanent record.

  Roo’s English teacher graded papers at her dining-room table. One morning, her husband grabbed her folder instead of his on the way to work. When he realized his error in the middle of a meeting, he called in his assistant to swap it out. The assistant looked inside and recognized Roo’s last name and read his essay and relayed that remarkable piece of gossip to her own husband in bed that night. The assistant was Marnie Alison’s mother. She had a very loud voice. Or a daughter with very good ears.

  This is the way the world ends.

  In the three days it took the principal to put this together, Poppy—Claude—refused to take phone calls from Natalie or Kim. He refused to notice that Aggie did not call or text or come over. He refused to reply to his teacher who emailed to say that Poppy or any version of Poppy was welcome back at school at any time, where she would be loved and accepted for who she was, and anyone who didn’t like it could consider that fact from detention. He deleted without rereading a message from Jake who texted to say he was sorry and Marnie was a bitch and he’d only been teasing, and if he’d known it was true, he’d never have gone along with it. Claude did take a call from Carmelo, whose grandmotherly advice was, “Fuck the bastards,” and though those were in fact the most comforting words he received all week, they weren’t enough to convince him to leave his room. He ate only cereal. He did not answer the door when his parents knocked and called gently from the other side, “Sweetie? Are you okay? Can we bring you anything? Would you like to talk?” He was not okay, obviously. There was nothing they could bring him, also obviously. A time machine? A new body? A different life? Those were what he needed, and they were things his parents could not bring. He did not want to talk. He would rather die than talk. There was nothing to discuss about a life that was over except where to bury the body, and his life was over but there was nothi
ng to bury. As usual, his body betrayed him in every way.

  On the third night, the knocker was Ben instead of his parents.

  “Go away.” Not angry. Desperate. A plea.

  “Dude. It’s me,” said Ben. “Let me in.”

  Claude peeked his bald head through the door. “Why are you calling me dude?”

  “That’s what guys call each other.”

  “It is?”

  “Let me in.”

  He did. “All guys?”

  “Yeah. So. How’s it hangin’?”

  “How’s … what hanging?”

  “It’s an expression,” Ben explained. “It’s how guys ask each other how they are.”

  “Why don’t they just say ‘How are you?’”

  “They don’t want to get beat up.”

  Claude’s eyes were wide. “Guys get beat up for asking how you are?”

  “Guys get beat up for everything. Asking how you are. Caring how you are. Using big words. Pronouncing them correctly. Wearing colorful things.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. And that’s just the beginning. If you’re too smart, too dumb, too cool, too worried about being cool, too nicely dressed, too hiply dressed, not hiply enough dressed, listening to the wrong music, listening to the right music on the wrong device, asking stupid questions in class, asking smart questions in class, asking questions in class that lead to more work in class, slow in gym, nice to a little kid, nice to a teacher, nice to your mom on school grounds, too good with computers, too often reading, or discovered during a field trip to Washington, DC, to be in your hotel room watching a movie with subtitles, if you’re a guy, someone’s going to beat you up.”

  Eyes wider still. “Who?”

  “Someone.” Ben shrugged. “So it doesn’t really matter who. You also have to walk the right way, which you don’t. You’re too bouncy. You’re too sure about where you’re going and too excited to go there. Low. Slouchy. Don’t give a crap where you’re going or whether or not you get there. These are your goals.”

  “I walk like normal.” But it came out more like a question.

  “Not for a guy you don’t. And no more giggling. In fact, laughing at all is bad unless you’re laughing at someone. No speaking in French anymore, ever, not even in French class if you can help it. No words over three syllables. I mean it. And you’re going to have to change your name—again—because Claude is seriously European and borderline gay.”

  Claude narrowed his eyes. This story, like all the stories told in his household, was starting to smell suspiciously like there was going to be a moral to it. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I’m helping. You want to be a boy now, you’re going to need help. A tutorial. Regular boys learn this stuff along the way. You were all playing with dolls and being accepted for who you were. But don’t worry—I can catch you up. I got your back.”

  This was not his point, and Claude knew it. “This is not your point.”

  “Obliquely.”

  “What is your point nonobliquely?”

  “I have two. One is that fitting in and being normal doesn’t exist. Not for a few years in the middle. Your thing is you’re a girl with a penis. My thing was I walked wrong and talked wrong and wore the wrong clothes and read books and knew a lot about computers and knew a lot about a lot of things but not enough about when to keep my mouth shut and feign ignorance or disregard. You can have matching genitalia and still not fit in. You can have matching genitalia, and still kids will be mean and make fun of you.”

  “So what do you do?” Claude kept trying to tuck his hair behind his ears. Except he had no hair anymore.

  “Come home. Have a cry with your family. Let them tell you you’re awesome. Wig out. Shave your head. Go back the next day and try again.”

  “Does it stop? Does it get better?” He was crying again, which didn’t seem possible. At some point, shouldn’t your face run out of water?

  “Some,” Ben promised. “If anybody overheard it though, I could still get beat up for having this conversation.”

  “And the other one?” Claude said miserably.

  “Other one what?”

  “You said you had two points.”

  “The other one is you’re not a guy.”

  “I am a guy.” Claude held his arms out from his sides like he would fly right out his window if he could. “Look at me.” He touched his head. “Look at me.” He peeked down the neck of his sweatshirt. “Look at me.” He pulled his sweatpants open at the waist and gazed down. “Look at me. Look at me. Look.”

  “I am looking,” said Ben. “You look sad. You look like someone who’s going to regret very rash hair decision making. You look like someone who’s just realized ten-year-olds can be horrible human beings. But you don’t look like a guy.”

  “I don’t because it’s worse than that.” His voice was breaking, and every other part of him felt like it was breaking too. “I don’t look like a guy, but I am one anyway. I can’t pretend I’m not. I have to learn to be one. I should have been learning all along. Now I’m behind and I’ll never catch up. All I needed was help. I live with like a thousand guys, and no one would help me.”

  “We did help you.” Ben could hear his voice rising. “Are you kidding? We did nothing but help you. We said okay when you switched to dresses. We said okay when you changed your name and grew out your hair. We moved across the country for you. We kept your secret for you.”

  “That’s not the help I needed.” Claude’s hands tried to grab fistfuls of hair at his temples but came up empty. “I needed help being a boy. I didn’t need help being different—I am different—I needed help being the same. I needed help being like you, and no one helped me, and now my life—both my lives—are over. I can’t be Poppy and I can’t be Claude. I can’t be anyone.”

  “Everyone’s someone,” said Ben.

  “I’m nobody.” Claude was studying Emily Dickinson in school. Back when he used to be enrolled in school. “Who are you?”

  “I’m nobody too.” Ben’s voice was shaking. “There’s a pair of us.”

  “No there isn’t.” Claude was crying again. Ben looked like he might too, which made Claude feel a little bit better. But only a little bit. “There isn’t. I’m the only only one.”

  * * *

  Claude ignored the tapping on his window, which commenced at 11:24 and continued until five minutes past midnight when he just couldn’t take it anymore. He pulled open his blinds and then his window and leaned into the dark rain. Could a rival princess be a prince? Could a princess have a penis if it weren’t a secret? Or was Aggie just one more thing Poppy had to lose? The night wind chilled Claude’s hairless skull. It was raining hard enough to soak them both but not enough to mask the tears he’d have given anything to hide from Aggie but could not keep from rivering out of his swollen eyes.

  “Nice hair.” Aggie sounded mad.

  “Yeah. Thanks.” So Claude sounded mad back. Mad was better than gnawing grief, than agonizing mortification and terror, so it felt something like relief.

  “So. You’re a guy?” There was something under Aggie’s mad, but even Claude—even Poppy—could not tell what it was.

  “No. I’m nothing.”

  “But you have a … thing?”

  He nodded. The only way to keep the crying from turning to sobbing was to clamp his mouth tight as a tourniquet.

  “My mom said that doesn’t make you a guy,” Aggie shook her head hard, “but I don’t understand.”

  Claude shrugged miserably. “Me neither.”

  “Is that why you always change in the bathroom? It’s not because of Roverella?”

  “I guess,” Claude said.

  “You lied to me.”

  “Not really. I didn’t want Roverella to see me either. I didn’t want anyone to see me. I’m gross.”

  Aggie nodded. That made sense to her, which made Claude feel even worse, which he hadn’t realized was actually possible.

&n
bsp; “Well”—Aggie made her eyes widen and her head shake and her shoulders shrug in the most adult way she knew to express befuddlement—“have a nice life I guess. Though I don’t really see how that’s possible.”

  She pulled her head inside and started to shut her window.

  “You hate me because I’m a boy?” Claude sobbed. He was going to just go back inside too, but when he accidentally opened his mouth, that was what popped out. When he imagined life without Aggie, he imagined tipping himself over the lip of the turret window and crashing into the pavement three stories below.

  “You said you aren’t a boy,” Aggie sneered. “You said you’re nothing.”

  “You hate me because I have a penis?” Claude whispered the last word.

  “I hate you”—Aggie was being too loud; their parents were sleeping—“because you didn’t tell me.”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t like me anymore if I told you.” Claude was whispering all his words now because it felt like any force behind his voice might come out as howling.

  “That’s even worse,” said Aggie.

  Claude raised his gaze from the ground finally. “Why?”

  “Because you don’t trust me. I’d have loved you no matter what except you don’t trust me and you lied to me. You think I care what’s under your underpants? I don’t. You could tell me anything. But you didn’t.”

  “Your mom told my mom not to.”

  “We ignore practically everything my mom says.” Aggie just looked at him. “Why’d you listen this time?”

  “I don’t know,” Claude admitted.

  Aggie’s head went back into her room and then slipped out again. “I couldn’t hold it at night until like a year ago. I got up after we got in sleeping bags and put on a diaper every time we had a sleepover. Does that change how you feel about me?”

  “No,” Claude said.

  “See? I told you. I had faith in you. You should have had faith in me.”

  She pulled her head back in and shut her window before Claude could consider that she’d never told Poppy until now.