Parrotfish

by Ellen Wittlinger

  And Mom kept coming back to it like a tongue to a sore tooth. I wasn’t sure why. I knew she loved her sister, but she didn’t seem to be able to stop herself from constantly poking and prodding at her as if she were a clay statue that wasn’t quite dry yet and could still be reshaped. Every now and then, Mom reminded me of Grandma Katz, always wanting everybody to do things her way, but I knew Mom would pass out if I ever told her that.

  “I know, I know. I’m sorry,” Mom said, grabbing the tissue box from the sideboard and slapping it on the table. Unlike Grandma Katz, Mom did usually realize when she’d hurt someone’s feelings. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I just worry, is all.”

  “You never mean to, but you keep doing it,” Gail said, sniffling.

  “I’m sorry,” Mom repeated. “You know I’m a worrywart. At least nursing pays well, and you’ve been at the hospital long enough to get a daytime schedule. That’s all good.”

  Gail continued to glare at her.

  “Let’s talk about something else entirely,” Mom said. “My problems. Angie’s problems.” Her mouth curled up on one side as she looked across the table at me.

  “I don’t have any problems,” I said, taking a long slurp of tea and standing up.

  “Well, I think there’s something you ought to tell your aunt. We can talk about it. You can get her opinion.”

  “I have homework to do,” I said. “Besides, I’ve had enough opinions for one day.”

  “What is it, Angie?” Gail wanted to know. She’d wiped her eyes and pulled herself together. “Tell me, honey.”

  I’d always adored Aunt Gail, and I trusted her not to freak out on me. Still, I was already tired of the moment of revelation, seeing the weird ways people took the news. I was beginning to wish I had a card to pass out to people. Something like I AM A TRANSGENDERED PERSON. FIND OUT WHAT THAT MEANS BEFORE YOU SPEAK TO ME AGAIN. But I sighed and rose to the task. “You know how you said my haircut looks like a boy’s?”

  She nodded. “Do you want me to shape it up for you? I can make it look more feminine.”

  Mom let out a little puff of disgusted laughter. “She doesn’t want it more feminine. The whole idea is to look like a boy. She’s changing her name, for God’s sake. No more Angela. My daughter is becoming some boy named Grady!” The anger in her voice surprised me. I knew she wasn’t happy about my changes, but suddenly she seemed furious.

  I couldn’t stand it. It wasn’t my fault this was happening. I was just trying to straighten things out—live the life I was supposed to live. Why was everybody freaking out about it? It was my life.

  Gail was looking at me, confused. “What’s your mother talking about?”

  “Aunt Gail, I’m transgendered, okay?” I was pretty sure a nurse would know what that meant. “I’m a male, a boy. And I want people to call me Grady, not Angela.”

  “Oh,” she said, looking back and forth from me to Mom. “Well, wow.”

  “Yeah, wow,” Mom said sarcastically. “Big wow. So, every time you think you’re having a hard time with that little baby, just remember this is the easy part. Someday he’ll be a teenager and all hell will break loose.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said quietly. “Thanks for your support. I’m so happy to know that you think of me as a big terrible problem!”

  And of course after that I made a fast getaway to my room, punctuating my remarks with the obligatory door slam. I was glad I didn’t have to stick around and hear how shocked Aunt Gail was, how she never suspected, and all the rest. I wanted this first part to be over. I wanted Grady to be a real person, for people to know him. I wanted to start life over again.

  I got the hot-water bottle from the bathroom I shared with Laura and filled it until it bulged. Then I crawled under the covers, hugging that rubber gut-heater as if it were my baby.

  Around three o’clock, as I was staring at my Global History book, pretending to read, Mom knocked on my door.

  “I’m sorry I got so mad before,” she said. “I’m working on how to feel about all this, but it’s hard.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  “Well, it’s not okay, but I really came up here to tell you you have a phone call.”

  “I do?” Eve was the only person who ever called me, and she’d been AWOL for a week or more. Unlike most other high-school kids, I had no cell phone and no need for one. Mom handed me the cordless phone from downstairs.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, where did you go? You weren’t in TV Production.”

  “Is this Sebastian?”

  “Yeah. I was going to tell you about my Environmental Science project, remember? Stoplight parrotfish?”

  Save me.

  SEBASTIAN: You wanna come over and see my aquarium? I have two red warthog google-fish and three blue wiggle-whammies! Gosh, fish are so cool!

  ME: Sure, Sebastian. I hope your fish have one of those little castles to swim in and out of. That’s really exciting.

  SEBASTIAN: Oh, yeah. I have a castle in the tank—and a mirror in there too, so they can watch themselves going about their busy lives.

  ME: And so they get their lipstick on straight.

  SEBASTIAN: Ha! Good one!

  ME: What do fish do all day, besides eat and poop?

  SEBASTIAN: Well, eating and pooping do take up a lot of their time. And dying. Sometimes they do that too.

  ME: The old belly-up routine, huh?

  SEBASTIAN: Yeah. Oops, just lost another one!

  “Are you listening to me?” Sebastian said. “The Smithsonian website says that in lots of fish, gender ambiguity is natural—especially in reef fish. I picked the stoplight parrotfish for my report because they’re so pretty, and because they change color when they go from female to male—from dull gray to bright green with a yellow stripe. Isn’t that awesome?”

  He had my attention now. “What? Fish change from female to male?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you. Stoplight parrotfish do. Actually all parrotfish do. And the two-banded anemonefish can change either way. Slipper limpets can change back and forth, and so can hamlets and small-eyed goby and water fleas and slime mold—”

  “Fleas and slime mold. Wow, I’m in good company. Does the hamlet fish carry around a skull and ponder suicide?”

  Sebastian was quiet for a second. “I thought you’d be interested in this, but it doesn’t seem like you are.”

  I sighed. “It’s just . . . I don’t know what this has to do with me, Sebastian. I’m not a fish.”

  “Do you know a lot of other people who were born girls but want to live their lives as boys?”

  I had to smile; Sebastian didn’t waste words. “No, I don’t, but I know there are some.”

  “I’m sure there are, but I thought you’d like some real evidence here that you are not alone in the animal world. There are other living creatures that do this all the time. ‘Nature creates many variations.’ I’m using that line in my paper.”

  When you thought of it that way, it did seem kind of amazing. “You’re right, Sebastian. I’m sorry I blew you off.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, without a trace of hard feelings. “So, do you want to know more?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, the parrotfish has a beaklike jaw of fused teeth, which is where it gets its name. Besides its regular teeth, it also has a row of sharp ones at the back of its throat—”

  “I don’t need to know everything about it. Just get to the sex part.”

  He snorted. “Spoken like a real boy, Pinocchio. Okay, some of the parrotfish are born male—those are called primary males. The secondary males are born female, and when they change into males, they’re called terminal males or supermales.”

  “Hey, I like that,” I said. “The ones who change are supermales—like Superman.” I flexed my biceps, not that anyone could see my little muscles pop to attention.

  “Well, Superman only changes his clothes, not his gender.”

  “Okay, okay.
Go on.”

  “The females change into supermales in response to population density; that is, they change when there’s a need for more males. The supermales are dominant over the primary males. They apparently get more than their share of the girls.”

  “Wow. And you just happen to be doing a paper on this fish?”

  “Yeah. Life is full of surprises, huh?”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Are you gonna be in school tomorrow? I’ll bring the pictures I got off the Web.”

  Sound of me plummeting back to earth. School. Tomorrow. Crap. “Um, I’m not sure about tomorrow. I mean, I’m feeling a little sick.”

  “Yeah, but staying home isn’t going to cure you, is it?”

  What a know-it-all. “Sebastian, how come this doesn’t throw you like it does everybody else?” I asked him. “Aren’t you freaked out by me at all?”

  He barked out a laugh. “Are you kidding? I want to be a scientist and a filmmaker. You’re, like, my perfect subject!”

  “So you’re mostly interested in putting me under a microscope.” Great.

  “Or maybe in front of a camera. But that’s not the only reason. You know, I liked you before, too. I always thought you were a very cool person.”

  I thought about that. At least this one weird, geeky little guy thought I was cool. It was a start.

  “Okay, I’ll meet you at the lockers tomorrow,” I said.

  “Come early,” Sebastian said. “I’ve got lots of pictures!”

  “Hey, Sebastian,” I said before he could hang up. “Do you by any chance have an aquarium?”

  “Grady,” he said, sounding a little hurt, “what do you think I am, a dork?”

  Chapter Seven

  Tuesday was not much less awful than Monday, especially at the beginning. The news about me seemed to have gotten around the school, and most kids just wanted to stare. People who’d never bothered to glance in my direction before suddenly needed to gawk openly. They studied my walk, they watched my face, they looked for the clues they hadn’t picked up before.

  I decided not to bring up the subject with my other teachers. My math teacher, Mrs. MacCauley, was about ninety-eight years old and never remembered anybody’s name anyway. She usually just pointed at us, although she’d called me both Andrea and Andy a few times, so maybe she was smarter than I thought. Mr. Ludlow, my Global History teacher, called us all by our last names. Being Ms. Katz-McNair had always seemed weird, but becoming Mr. Katz-McNair somehow seemed even more bizarre. A mister was a grown man, like Dad, and, although I was happy with the identity of “boy,” I wasn’t at all sure about making the transition to “man.”

  Mrs. Norman continued to call me Angela, of course, since no directive had come down from God. Ms. Marino called me Grady, loud and clear, no matter how many groans and giggles issued from the class. And Ms. Unger turned out to be pretty great, or at least as great as somebody who’s basically a grouch can be. Not only did she let me use her shower and bathroom, but she told me I could leave a box of pads in there for whenever I needed them.

  Which was a big relief. The whole bathroom issue was a much bigger problem than I’d imagined it would be. Before this I probably never used a school bathroom more than once a day, if that, but now, suddenly, I felt like I had to pee all the time. So even though Ms. Unger’s office was way the hell on one end of the school and most of my classes were on the other end, it was comforting to know that at least there was someplace I could urinate—or hide out—without fear, even if it meant being late to my next class.

  I would talk to Mr. Reed in TV Production about all of this sooner or later, for sure. He was a good guy and I didn’t think he’d make a big deal out of it. But of course I wasn’t 100 percent sure, and the idea of my favorite class being ruined scared me. As a matter of fact, I was surprised at how much general fear and anxiety lurked inside me these days. I’d never been a fearful person, never even understood phobias like fear of heights or water or snakes or any of those things. And while I knew that my coming out as a transgendered person was going to throw certain people for a loop, I somehow hadn’t realized how much it would throw me.

  I didn’t meet people’s eyes as I walked down the hall or through the cafeteria. Suddenly, I wasn’t raising my hand in class. My legs were shaky as I changed into my gym clothes in Ms. Unger’s office, and I jumped at every noise, thinking somebody would come in and see me wearing the binder. And worst of all, as much as I hated to admit it, I was afraid of that damn Danya.

  On the plus side, however, was Sebastian. He was waiting for me by our lockers first thing Tuesday morning, notebook in hand. He had enough information about parrotfish to publish a book. I looked through the pictures he’d printed from Internet sites and listened to his excited yakking while the snickering hordes walked behind us. Sebastian didn’t even seem to notice them, and having something else to focus on helped me pretend I didn’t either.

  It turned out that Sebastian also had lunch the same period I did. I’d never noticed him there before, since he liked to sit at a small table in the corner behind a stack of books. And he wasn’t one of those kids who read at lunch because no one will sit with them—it’s more like no one would sit with him because all he wanted to do was read. I could tell he was making a big sacrifice by asking me to join him.

  Sebastian was the only kid I’d ever seen actually eating the hot-lunch choice. He was picking away happily at something called “meatloaf and mashed potatoes” that was drowned in brown goo. I had to move my chair back from the table a little, because the smell of the stuff was enough to make me gag on my hot dog and fries.

  “Do you like Stephen Jay Gould?” he asked, picking up the book on the top of his pile.

  I shrugged. “Don’t know—never read him.”

  Sebastian’s eyes widened. “Really? You have to.”

  “I’m not much of a science person. I like writing and filmmaking. That’s what I really want to do, I think. Write screenplays.”

  “That would be cool. I want to find a way to use science in my films.”

  “You mean, like science fiction?”

  “More like science fact. Documentaries. But I like all kinds of movies.” He pulled a heavy book from the bottom of his pile. “I got this from the library—have you seen it?”

  I took it from him. Movies of the 90s. Full of color pictures.

  “It’s turned me on to some movies I would have missed,” he said. “Like Groundhog Day and Being John Malkovich.”

  “I’ve seen Groundhog Day,” I said. “Bill Murray is great.”

  Sebastian left his fork standing up in his socalled mashed potatoes and rose off his chair a little bit, stabbing his finger in the air. “I love movies where one little thing is different, and then because of that everything changes. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded. Sebastian got more excited about things than anybody else I knew.

  “And I also like movies about oddballs. You know, like Welcome to the Dollhouse and, oh, Napoleon Dynamite! Have you seen that?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll rent it for us sometime. You have to see it.”

  All of a sudden a tray smacked me in the back and I felt something cold pouring down my neck. I turned around to see a couple of creeps I didn’t even know standing there, collapsing in hysterics.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, sir,” one of them said. “I seem to have spilled my milk!”

  The other one was laughing like a maniac.

  I reached back to feel my shirt—sopping wet. Shit. And everybody in the vicinity was turning around to see what had happened.

  “You’re a perfect example of what I was just talking about, Grady,” Sebastian continued. “You change one little thing, like your gender, and suddenly all the idiots in the school are too clumsy to carry a tray across the room. Your change has affected everything.” He smiled up at Dumb and Dumber as though he’d complimented them.

  “What?” They looked confused.


  “Grady’s shirt is all wet; maybe you could loan him yours?” Sebastian said to one of them.

  The guy laughed. “Yeah, right. Like I’d let that pervert wear my clothes.”

  “It’s okay,” I mumbled to Sebastian. “Let it go.” I knew he was trying to help, but had it occurred to him what would happen if I had to take off my shirt in public? Just because I wanted to live as a boy didn’t mean my body had morphed overnight. Was I crazy to bring all this on myself? I’d been practically invisible in this school for more than a year, and now suddenly everybody was talking about me. I knew they were. Talking about private, personal things that were none of their business, imagining what my body looked like, wondering about my sex life. I knew it. I knew it. And it was my own fault. I could have kept it a secret longer—until I was out of high school, away from home, where I wouldn’t upset my mother and Laura and Eve. I could have just moved somewhere nobody knew me and started all over as a boy.

  And then Sebastian was standing up, all five feet of him. Standing up with his puny arms crossed in front of his chest, glaring at my harassers. “What is wrong with you two?” he said loud enough for many onlookers—and there were many—to overhear him. “You’re acting like six-year-olds—dumping food on somebody because he’s different from you!”

  One of them laughed. “Hey, that’s no he; she’s just a sicko with penis envy. But maybe that’s all you can get, huh, midget?”

  Sebastian was red-faced now, and shouting. “I suppose you think you’re the standard we should all measure ourselves against!”

  “Yeah, Kleinhorst,” a male voice yelled out. “I wanna be just like you! Ignorant and wasted!” A ripple of laughter swelled around us.