“I’m actually really liking this,” Nick said. “And we’re being paid?”
“Yeah! It’s not much, though. I probably should have mentioned it will only be like a hundred for the night. Is that cool?”
“It’s one hundred more than I had yesterday, and half the tow truck rental that I need to pay, so yeah. It’s good.”
Nick’s chest still felt tight when he thought of money. Even if this did knock a dent into his tow truck fees, there was still the tux, his phone bill that was already late, and the eventual couple of grand he needed for the car. When the thoughts of his budget became too much, Nick rose from the table and walked over to the laptop. “Do you mind if I turn on something else? I need something to work to.”
“Yeah. Go for it,” Katie said. “I’m almost done with the collages, and then I was thinking I would help you with the envelopes.”
“Are there more?”
Katie gave him an awkward smile. “Maybe . . .”
“Then that would be nice.” Nick exited out of iTunes and decided to flip through Netflix instead. He smiled when he found exactly what he’d hoped for. He set the movie to play and cranked the volume while the screen loaded.
“What did you pick?”
“Shhh.” Nick pointed to the screen. He walked around the table, packing up their dishes, as the beginning of Pretty in Pink started.
Katie groaned, but Nick could see the gleeful smile she was trying to hide.
“What’s wrong with this?” Nick sat down again. “I thought you liked this movie?”
“I do, but it makes me think of high school too much.”
“And what’s wrong with . . .” Nick stopped before he finished the statement. Katie would have had a different experience altogether, and her memories might not have been as pleasant as he thought. “Sorry. I didn’t think about . . . I can change the movie, if you want?”
“No, no. It’s okay. You don’t have to apologize for that. High school for me was a little weird. But it’s probably not what you’re thinking. I was . . . into monster trucks.”
“Wait. What?”
Katie rolled her eyes. “It was something my brother did. I went with him. I don’t know. For a while, it was a good distraction. I had a lot of anger I needed to work through before I figured things out. This was a time before I found music, so watching trucks slam into one another seemed cathartic. Don’t worry. The phase didn’t last too long.”
“Oh, I’m not worried. Just . . .” Nick bit his lip, trying to hold back his laughter.
“What? What’s so funny? It can’t be that bad, can it?”
“No, I’m just trying to think of a really, really bad Transformers joke. Is . . . is that okay to say?”
Katie’s eyes lit up, and she started to laugh. “Actually, Ilana’s made that one before. I told her I went to monster truck rallies and she called me Optimus Prime, who desperately wanted to be a Decepticon. I’m not being used as the butt of the joke in that case, so it’s fine. Funny. Totally okay to laugh.”
“Good,” Nick said, laughing easily now. “Because I didn’t think I could last another minute.”
“What’s so funny, you two?” Dunja asked, sticking her head in the living room. Neither one of them had a chance to answer before she saw Duckie on the screen and let out a laugh herself. “Man, great choice! I love this movie.”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “Me too.”
An hour into the movie, Dunja sauntered into the kitchen with her car keys. She no longer wore the smock and goggles, but a nice white summer dress and aviator sunglasses on the tip of her nose. “I have to make a stop off at the gallery in Kitchener. You guys gonna be here for another hour or so?”
“I don’t think the buses are running anymore at that point,” Nick said. “So I don’t know—”
“I can give you a ride when I get back. Is that cool? You don’t have to work the entire time I’m gone, but I’ll head to the bank after and get your pay.”
“Sure,” Nick said, nodding. “That works great, then. Thank you.”
“Not at all.” Dunja lowered her sunglasses as she eyed Katie. “Now, you be good while I’m gone.”
“I can’t help what I am,” Katie said, affecting a dramatic tone. “But yes, D, I’ll be good.”
After Dunja had shut her door and Nick heard the car drive away, Katie shot her gaze directly at him. “You ready?”
Nick’s heart skipped a beat. “Ready for what?”
Katie shuffled the remaining envelopes with stamps off the table and into ready boxes labelled outgoing and processed. She grabbed the boxes and materials, and placed them on Dunja’s staircase with ease.
“Off,” Katie said, gesturing to Nick’s chair.
He rose and watched as she took both chairs they’d been sitting on and rearranged the laptop on the seats like some cheap entertainment unit. She pushed them towards the wall, under the air conditioner window unit. Then, to Nick’s surprised, she flipped the dining room table onto its side.
“Whoa? What’s going on?”
“Fort time. I’m building a TV fort.”
Katie rolled up her sleeves. Her biceps flexed as she shifted the table around, making Nick’s body tremble at her strength. And beauty, too. Katie’s skin was rosy from her exertion. Some of her bangs fell over her head, but her hand caught them and tucked them away, just as she finished pushing the table into the right place.
“Now, for pillows.”
She walked into the next room, pulled an armful of throw pillows from Dunja’s couch, and tossed them onto the ground. She finished with a crocheted blanket in blue and green, along with a purple blanket that was covered in small ghosts shouting, Boo! Many of the small pillows were made to look as if they had been cross-stitched by grandmothers, but when Nick looked closer, he realized they had quotes from TV shows like The Simpsons, or random internet slang on them instead.
“What do you think?” Katie asked.
“This is . . . incredible,” Nick said. “All of it. I’m in awe.”
“Good. My favourite is my Boo blanket.” Katie held up the purple one with ghosts on it. “Dunja bought it for me because she knew I liked purple, but the ghosts were an added bonus. Are you going to sit with me now?”
“Of course.” Nick glanced over at the laptop and noticed they had missed a huge section of the movie. “Just let me back it up.”
Nick reconfigured the progress bar, deliberately pushing it too far back so many of the scenes were repeated. Katie didn’t seem to notice his apparent error, or she wanted more time with him under the blankets like he did with her. Katie took the left side of the table, propping pillows up in the corner and wrapping sections of the blanket around the table leg so it gave the illusion of making a large room. On the right side were enough pillows for Nick to arrange, along with the crocheted blanket for cover. Nick did the same looping around the table legs to produce a cave that Katie did. When he was done arranging his pillows, he noted the underside of the table for the first time.
“Are those song lyrics?” Nick traced his finger around the Sharpie marks.
“Our own graffiti.” Katie pointed to a small Sharpie drawing of a dog with its tongue sticking out. “I’ve done this TV fort cave a lot, as you can see. Dunja and I, sometimes with her boyfriend, will have a fort like this when we hang out and watch old movies. I draw things here whenever I can, and since Dunja got the table from a garage sale anyway, she doesn’t care. The first time we flipped it over, actually, we realized the previous owners had written all these nasty slurs underneath. So Dunja painted over it and encouraged me to write my own stuff. Or copy out song lyrics, whatever.”
Nick scanned and saw a few mauve patches of paint near the place where the leaf went in the table. He spotted more lyrics in the corner, but couldn’t recognize any of those. There were more drawings of animals, insects, arrows, and some hearts.
“Oh,” Katie said. “I know what I should draw this time.”
She re
ached for a Sharpie close by and uncapped it. The smell lingered as Katie drew, but Nick was too fascinated to see what she would eventually produce. Even before she finished by adding a cityscape in the middle, Nick knew she was drawing his tattoo.
“Thank you for that.”
“Not at all. But now you have to be creative with what you add.” Katie tossed him the marker. “It’s pretty much tradition now.”
“Um . . .” Nick took a moment to deliberate before he scrawled his message. By the time he pulled away, Katie was humming the song in approval.
“‘The Kids Are All Fucked Up.’ Nice. Told ya they’d grow on you.”
“Only a little.”
When the two of them settled back in front of the screen, Nick realized they’d gone too far without watching it—again. “I’ll fix the movie.”
Katie reached out and grabbed his arm before he could. “I’ve seen it before, so I can follow. I assume you’ve seen it before too?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Good.” Katie still kept a grip on Nick’s arm, soft and urgent. She scooted closer to him. “So you don’t mind missing a little bit of the movie?”
“Not at all.”
Katie smiled and pressed her lips against Nick’s. Nick gasped, though he’d known it was coming. Katie took his open mouth as an invitation to slide her tongue alongside his. Nick tasted her again: the lime from the chips, the lemonade, and her own particular flavour. She was soft in his hands, and yet still rough around her chin and jaw. She was unlike anyone he’d ever kissed, and Nick knew this was beyond gender. Katie was an entire experience, and as he ran his hand over her arms, up her shoulders, and to her neck, he wanted to taste and touch every last bit of her.
Katie slipped her leg in between Nick’s, rocking their bodies together. Nick nipped at her lip, sudden and harsh as his arousal grew. Was she aroused too? She touched and kissed him like she was, her breath was choppy and her hands insistent. But when Nick rolled his hips over hers, he could only feel his dick getting harder. Not hers—but then again, referring to her dick was odd. Did she have one? Nick struggled to remember what she’d told him in the Grad House. She was on hormones, and so were most people in the YouTube videos he’d watched. She’d said she was done with therapy—but what did that exactly mean? Nick hated that these thoughts piled up in his head like incoming tests to grade, especially as it took him out of the moment.
Katie pressed her lips against his, then pulled away with a nod. “I should probably stop, right?”
“No, I don’t want you to. I just don’t . . . know . . . I’m unsure.”
“You’ve done a lot of reading today, right?”
“Yes. But it still feels like I know nothing.”
“Yeah, that’s because every trans person is different. It’s an identity category meant to unify common experiences and feelings, but some of those feelings and experiences are so individual and unique that they don’t match up for everyone. So I hate to say it, but forget most of what you learned today.”
“Uhhh.”
“Well, okay, maybe not everything. Terminology is pretty good to have. You know the cis/trans difference right?”
When Nick nodded eagerly, Katie placed a hand on her chest. “Oh, thank goodness. As much as Trans 101 is cool, I can’t teach that anymore. Ilana ordered a business card a while ago that said, There’s Google For That, so she could hand them out to people asking dumb questions.”
“I don’t want to ask dumb questions.”
“Of course. But you still have questions. And I should tell you things instead of pretending this is like Pretty in Pink and we’ll just understand each other.”
They both laughed. Nick paused the movie and shifted closer to her. He did feel like they understood one another. Even when she’d bodychecked him with the door and he’d helped pick up her books. There was something so casual and innocent about that moment that it struck him as pure, like the meet-cutes in those rom-coms he adored. But those films also glossed over the everyday struggles, the conflicts (unless they were for drama), and got right to the good bits. As much as Nick wanted to take off their pants and have fun, they needed to talk first.
“I want to hear about you,” Nick said. “Gender is part of that, I guess, but I just want to know more about you so I can understand this a little bit more.”
“Okay,” Katie said. “This may take a while, so I’m glad we’ve already eaten.”
To Nick’s surprise, when Katie started to talk, she told him nothing about her earliest childhood memory, like most autobiographies started. She didn’t talk about how she’d discovered who she was (aside from her long discussion about the punk rock Sheena she’d told him about earlier) or her childhood dysphoria. She spoke mostly about her family.
“They are my most difficult supporters or critics. I can write off the random strangers or people at the bank who fuck up and don’t respect me, but my family? Oh. That’s so much more complicated.”
“Do you still talk to them?”
Katie waved her hand, signally fifty-fifty. She said her parents still referred to her as their son, but because she wasn’t a kid anymore, she didn’t really have to spend that much time with them outside of family holidays. Even those visits were becoming shorter and shorter with age. “It’s really my younger sister and older brother who I still talk to and respect. They get it and call me Katie, but they’re both at different levels of acceptance. My older brother Randall is the family favourite. Golden child, golden boy. And that’s cool, it really is. So he accepts me as Katie, but I know for a fact—though I don’t have proof—that he still uses my old names and pronouns around my parents. And that sucks, but I understand his strategy. Even if I don’t condone it.”
“And your sister?”
“Oh. Shelly.” Katie laughed. “Well. When I came out, she had just started to work in mental health and addictions in a Toronto clinic. She was so relieved I wasn’t on drugs anymore. She helped me to get the government forms in order when I changed my name and helped out when I was first applying for surgery. But now she is upset about my ‘lack of follow-through.’” Katie made air quotes.
“Lack of follow through?” Nick repeated.
“With the whole surgery thing. There’s a process and timeline for gender transition, and I used to be right on track. I got on the waiting list for the clinic in Toronto. I saw the right doctors, got on the right hormones, and had a ton of therapy sessions. But after six months of dealing with clinic doctors, I realized it was bullshit. Ilana and I started to hang out and talk more, and we both realized how stupid it was. I think that’s why they keep trans people apart when we go through transition and therapy. When we’re together, we just question everything.”
“Okay, I think I get that. Tucker and I do the same thing, really. Or we’ve been starting too. We’re not trans, but . . . gay and asexual. So we question a lot of the ways in which relationships are depicted.”
“Yeah, kind of like that. Ilana and I started to question if this was really the ‘right’ way to be trans. I stopped the surgery narrative. Said fuck it. I couldn’t dangle a happily ever after or a magical transformation up ahead, you know? Still like the hormones, though, so I’m taking those and just doing whatever.”
“But you’re not in therapy anymore?”
Katie shook her head. “Not for gender stuff. And I’m not going to get the surgery.”
“No?”
“No. Probably not. I mean . . .” Katie bit her lip as she thought for a moment. “I don’t know what I’ll say ten years from now. I don’t know what I’ll say in twenty or thirty. Maybe I’ll get sick of taking something to suppress testosterone and I’ll get an orchiectomy.”
Nick made a face as soon as he remembered what that surgery term was. He squeezed his legs together, as if his balls had been cut.
Katie sighed, her tone sad. “I’m serious, Nick.”
“So am I. I didn’t mean to be offensive. I just—”
�
�I know. But there’s something you need to know and understand about all of this, though. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said, though he shifted under the weight of her gaze.
“There is no magical transformation at the end of this. If you continue to see me, this is not going to be like the trans stories you see on TV. We’re not going to be some wonderful heterosexual couple after I get the final surgery. Even if I do change my mind ten years down the line—there’s no rising above and becoming a phoenix.” Katie smiled, but it was a strained and tired smile, as if she’d made this remark before. “That’s the common metaphor and analogy in trans circles. I’d need both hands to count how many trans people I’ve met called Phoenix because of it.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah. The symbolism is killer.” Katie chuckled before the same sad, crooked smile came to her face. “I used to fall for the symbolism too. I even got a butterfly tattoo on my shoulder blade when I first started transitioning because I wanted to transform so badly. But I don’t want to transform anymore, because it means that I’m not beautiful now. So when I look back at that tattoo, I don’t think I’m going to transform. I think that I’m already beautiful. I don’t need the metaphor of change anymore. The metaphor only makes me feel like shit.”
“I . . . I think . . .” Nick stopped before he could finish his sentence. He watched as Katie wrung her hands in her lap, and started to chip away the lingering flecks of purple nail polish on her thumbs. He wanted to take her hands and tell her to stop, to keep the colour because it made her beautiful, but he wasn’t sure how to say any of that now without it sounding like the butterfly metaphor she apparently hated. He was an English student, someone who studied metaphors all the time. How could any one of them hurt someone so badly? He tried to work through this problem. Maybe someone’s identity being a metaphor wasn’t good because it didn’t allow people, who were flesh and blood, to be something beyond a concept? That has to be the answer. But when Nick tried to vocalize this conclusion, he choked again. Just when he thought he could understand something, his world was flipped again, and he was worried he’d always get it wrong.
Hopeless Romantic Page 10
