by Leah Thomas
So what if I used to love running? These days, I couldn’t shake the vision of Patricia lying on the trails, and the idea that her rapist’s ghost was still there in the woods. Some dangers you can’t run from.
I broke the news to Coach Ma in her office before practice on Wednesday. She folded her hands and stared at me as I explained my situation. I told her I was needed around the apartments. I said that my mom would never say so, and she cared a lot about my extracurriculars, but she needed help because she was a single mother, etcetera. I pushed a note toward Coach Ma. She raised her eyebrows at the inky signature; Mom had sleepily signed it that morning.
“I can’t stop you from quitting,” Coach Ma said. “But I’m not sure I buy your reasons. I’ve seen your mom at the Big Anchor, but I’ve never seen her at any of our meets.”
I managed a shrug and an awkward smile. “Sorry for letting you down.”
“Mmm.” Coach Ma set down the note and leaned in, elbows on her spotless desk. “No, Dani. I’m worried I’ve let you down. I pick up on things, you know. Tell me the truth: Did something happen between you and the other runners?”
I didn’t answer.
“Look.” She sighed and hesitated, as if chewing through a difficult thought. “I know what kids are like—and yes, I know you’re teens, not kids, blah blah, but I’m an old lady and you’re all very young to me. Kids say and do some awful things to each other, and are the quickest to insult what they don’t understand. You get me?”
“Um, not really.”
“I’m saying—I’m saying, sometimes kids are afraid of what’s different. And scared dogs bite. So you wanna tell me what’s really going on?”
It was clear she didn’t know what had happened between me and Charley. But obviously Coach Ma had her own theories about why I was quitting. I suspected Charley was being very specific in the story he was telling: But hey, if you’re a lesbo, just say so.
The pickle of it was, it was an open secret in Rochdale that Coach Ma was gay. No one ever talked about it, but she’d adopted two kids with her partner, a dentist named Sheila, and the four of them had been a family for as long as anyone could remember. Coach Ma never said a word about it, and no one else did, either. It was like there was a quiet agreement that so long as she kept getting runners to regionals, her sex life was fine.
But it was also understood that if she ever talked about being gay, ever validated kids who were, too, she might have to find work elsewhere.
There were so many ways to be trapped.
“Dani? I’m waiting.”
I couldn’t look at her. Coach Ma thought I was quitting because I was gay and fed up, which wasn’t exactly untrue. I was grateful for her concern. But this wasn’t a conversation she felt entirely comfortable having, based on the lines in her face. Coach Ma was gruff and grizzled, firm in her convictions. I’d never seen her uncertain.
And I wasn’t a lesbian. I still couldn’t bring myself to say aloud what I thought I was, because it seemed impossible.
I shook my head. “Sorry, Coach.”
“Fine,” Coach Ma said, disappointed. “My door is always open, Dani. Except when I’m at practice, where you should be.”
I left with my heart in my throat.
MOD PODGE
While Sarah was preoccupied with exorcisms and ghost hunting, Patricia fixated on her own darling: the shelter aspect of our cockamamie plan.
Patricia still couldn’t touch anything physical. While she’d begun to turn the lights on and off, she didn’t have Sarah’s knack for manipulating technology. And she needed a lot of help when it came to redecorating. Now that I didn’t have cross-country practice, I spent many hours in the lobby with her while Sarah worked at the library.
I convinced Patricia to leave most of the book pages on the walls, partly because they looked neat, but mostly because I didn’t want to peel them away. We added splashes of color by pasting photographs wherever there were gaps or blank spaces. We must have gone through gallons of sloppy homemade papier-mâché by the time the walls were finished, but the end result looked like modern art. The leftover pages we placed carefully in order and stacked in a drawer beneath the counter, bound together with my old shoelaces.
“Who knows,” Patricia said. “Some of the new girls might be bookworms, too.”
I didn’t say what we were both thinking: Who knew when we’d even get any new ghosts? Across five years, the three of us had only found one another. No matter what Sarah said about the prevalence of other ghosts, there might be those we’d never meet because they were lying perpetually in gutters, haunting dry creeks or the narrow spaces under porches. They were forgotten, or nearly so, and who knew if we’d stepped through them on a bad day?
“It’s good to be prepared,” I agreed.
Patricia smiled. “Now that reminds me of my days at Faylind Middle: Prepare for the worst, and hope for the best.”
I suspected seeking out dead women would amount to both.
Soon we managed to scrounge up a bit more decor and furniture. I stole enough of Mom’s singles from her tip jar to buy a few Dollar Tree pillows, picture frames, and candles. I asked for a new comforter for my sixteenth birthday, then moved my old one to the lobby, where Patricia instructed me to drape it across the sorriest sofa.
All of these additions, the rugs and the tiny vacuum we’d found in the basement that Sarah could operate and Patricia almost could (she could turn it on but it refused to move across the carpet), had finally made a home of that hexagonal room. I hardly smelled the mildew anymore.
Patricia had endless ideas.
“I used to love teaching history,” she said, “because it was an easy excuse to ask for dioramas. Dioramas are fantastic, don’t you think? An entire world within a box.”
If I’d ever been assigned a diorama at school, I sure as hell hadn’t made one, let alone turned one in for a grade.
But there was something fantastic about Patricia’s dioramas. Behind the counter, in each of those little mailbox cubbies, Patricia designed homes in miniature and used my hands to execute her visions, guiding my clumsy fingers with gentle words and suggestions. As Sarah always said, ghosts felt safer in small, dark spaces, but Patricia insisted that people felt most comfortable when they were surrounded by books, chairs, blankets, and beds. People felt better, she said, with walls around them.
“Let’s not forget that ghosts are people,” she trilled, as I strung golden Christmas lights along the bottoms of the boxes, illuminating each cubby in a warm glow. I’d found some dollhouse furniture at the Goodwill, and Patricia had asked me to check out a few oddball books from the library about making minuscule furniture from recycled materials like jars, spools, milk cartons, bottles, and bottle caps.
I had never been good at art, but Patricia was an amazing teacher. With her help, I turned each mailbox into a bedroom or living room. I cut one of my old wool sweaters into tiny squares that served as blankets, I folded cardboard toilet paper rolls into tables and chairs.
“I’m sure you read The Indian in the Cupboard in elementary school,” Patricia insisted while I glued fabric to craft foam couches. “It’s been required elementary reading for years, or it was when I was teaching.”
I shrugged. I’d spent a lot of elementary school hiding or moving from one trailer to another.
“I hope you’re reading the books I suggested, at least?”
I changed the subject. “Do you think we should make the beds softer? Do ghosts care about that kind of thing?”
“That’s a familiar tactic.” Patricia raised an eyebrow. “Don’t forget that I was a teacher and a mother, and I know when someone’s trying to sneak one past me. You haven’t read those books yet, have you?”
“Sorry, Mom,” I grumbled. To my surprise, she laughed. I plucked a tiny table made from a spool of thread from the pile of slapdash furniture on the counter.
“I never thought I’d like that name,” she pondered, watching me set the table onto a ti
ny rug made of scrap fabric. “When I was your age, I didn’t want to be a mother. Let alone a grandmother.”
I stared into a tiny living room adorned with Mod Podge and tissue paper and I thought of my mother, who’d never seemed comfortable with motherhood, who couldn’t cook and didn’t care about meeting other moms after school. Who seemed in some ways like a child, as confused as I was.
“I thought I’d study until I reached the stars, that I might be a philosopher or even an astronaut, of all things. I was pretty keen on astrophysics and even, god help me, astrology, in my youth. That was before I decided I liked fictional monsters more than real ones.”
“When did you change your mind?”
“I didn’t really change my mind.” Patricia shrank seamlessly to doll size and tested the felt bed beneath her tiny weight. “There was no reason I couldn’t be both, if I wanted. You know, the world tells us that we can be either independent women or homemakers. And there are some people who shame you for choosing the first, and others who shame you for choosing the second. There’s always one reason or another to tack a scarlet letter on us.”
“You’re referencing a book again,” I said, leaning back against the counter.
“Not all women are destined for motherhood, and even those who choose it might regret it. But I think the important thing is not to limit the expectations of what a woman, what a person, can or should be.”
“I’ve never really thought about it that way.”
“A lot of boys your age don’t think about motherhood. So you’re not alone.”
I felt a little thrill run through me and heard myself say, “Thank you for calling me—for saying that.”
“I’m stating the facts, backed up by significant evidence.” She drew and grew herself up, until she was leaning beside me, large as life. “Don’t thank me for common decency. Just remember to give the same kind treatment to everyone else, too, no matter where you end up.”
For some reason, Seiji’s face appeared in my mind.
Seiji had never been especially decent to me.
But I had never been decent to him, either.
ORLANDO BLOOM
The first time I bound my chest, I accidentally cut off my circulation.
It was mid-November, and my chest had grown large enough to betray me. No matter how much I longed to look as androgynous as Sinéad O’Connor or, hell, some femme version of Orlando Bloom, my body seemed determined to be curvaceous. Even hoodies couldn’t help me hide, and so on a cold morning when Sarah was preoccupied, I stopped by the Rite Aid before school, bought two large ACE bandages, and shoved them into my backpack.
I was late for second-block English because I spent the first ten minutes in a bathroom stall, wrapping the stretchy material around my diaphragm, ignoring all the advice I’d read online about ACE bandages bruising and battering rib cages, because I’d also read that it more or less worked. My breasts felt like tumors, parasites. I was desperate to be rid of them, and no matter the warnings, everyone knew that if you wanted to suffocate a boob and cow it into hiding, ACE bandages could do the trick.
By the time I emerged from the bathroom, my breathing was a bit labored, but my reflection looked more like me.
I doubt anyone noticed the change—after all, I wore hoodies almost every day, and I’d stopped talking to people in general. But to me, the difference was everything. When I looked down at my chest, I felt a release at the sight of a flattened, androgynous plane.
So what if I was a little light-headed?
I was also a little lighthearted, which was such a rare feeling. And if I’d learned anything in the past couple years of living with ghosts, I knew beautiful moments went a ways toward undoing the suffering of every ugly moment.
———
By fourth-block geometry, I sat sweating in my desk, barely listening to Mrs. Harper’s droning over the sound of my breathing. I felt an ache on either side of my ribs, as if I were being squeezed by a giant hand. I’d read online that bandages got tighter as time wore on, but I hadn’t taken that too seriously. I’d even relished the idea.
I was an idiot. A flat-chested idiot, but an idiot all the same.
“Go see the nurse,” Mrs. Harper advised, staring at the sweat on my brow. Apparently she’d asked me a question or three, because everyone was looking at me.
“It’s fine,” I protested weakly. “I’m just hot.”
“Then take off your hoodie, Dani!” Charley called. To anyone else he probably sounded genuinely concerned.
“Corina, can you take Daniela down to the nurse’s office?”
I cringed. I knew that she’d chosen Corina because Corina was friendly. The walk to the office felt both very short and very long. Halfway there, with my numb arm draped over her shoulder, Corina asked, “Hey, is it that time of the month?”
“Um,” I wheezed.
“I feel your pain. I get terrible cramps, too. By the way, did you know that people are spreading rumors about you?”
“Um.”
“Like, people are saying you’re a raging lesbian. Is it true? It’s not true, right?”
“Not true,” I agreed, while stars clouded my vision.
“People love gossiping, you know? Especially in redneck towns like this. Everyone’s in everyone’s business, don’t you think? It’s more a girl problem.”
God, did I ever have the biggest, worst girl problem.
———
The next thing I knew I was slumped over on the chair in the nurse’s office, wheezing and aching as if my ribs were on fire. I couldn’t feel my fingers and my cheeks tingled like snow had fallen on them. Corina was leaning in my face while someone else held me upright by the shoulders.
I was the world’s biggest trans cliché, and I knew it. It was like I’d fulfilled a tired prophecy because I had no idea what else to do.
“Sorry!” Corina cried. “I’m so sorry! I can’t believe I dropped you!”
I hadn’t realized she was supporting me. She seemed too small to have lifted me, and I realized she must not have, and the other person—
A voice shouted, “Go find the nurse!”
Seiji fucking Grayson’s face displaced Corina’s in my vision. His hands scraped his hair from his forehead again, and he was wild-eyed and pale.
“Can you breathe?” he demanded. “Why can’t you breathe?”
“My chest,” I tried to say, but when I gestured at my shirt, my hand flopped like a weak, landed fish. Seiji seemed to get it, because the next thing I knew he was helping me take off my hoodie. I think he was about to do CPR, because he pressed his palms on my sternum—
“Bandages,” I wheezed. “Too tight.”
All I could see were his big black eyes, and then the black spread everywhere.
———
When I came to, Seiji was gone and Corina was back, loitering in the back of the small room. The school nurse held my bandages in her hands, frowning in confusion. “What on earth were you trying to do?”
“Um.” I guessed from Corina’s expression that she was about to tell the entire school what had happened. Hazy though my mind was, that sent a spike of fear through me. “A new exercise . . . technique?”
The nurse frowned. “You might have cracked a few ribs, if you’d waited much longer to remove it. As it is, you’ve got cuts and bruises all over your chest, silly girl.”
Not a girl, I mouthed. I’m not a girl.
And then, like the worst stereotype of every high school girl ever, I started sobbing.
———
By the time the nurse let me leave, there were only twenty minutes left in the school day. Corina insisted on staying with me the whole time, and the nurse, taking her for a friend and not a salacious gossip, hadn’t told her to leave.
“You scared the daylights out of Seiji Grayson,” Corina said. “You should have seen his face. He looked downright traumatized.”
I frowned at her. “He doesn’t care about me.”
&n
bsp; “I don’t think it was about you so much as, you know—the choking thing.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, wishing she might vanish and wishing Sarah or Patricia were here with me instead, but also grateful that they weren’t.
“You know, after what happened to his mom,” Corina whispered.
Whatever curiosity I felt was put off by the way she treated this news like a delicious snack.
The nurse had had enough. “That’s enough. Out.”
“I was just explaining why—”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
Corina left at last, doubtless running off to share the news of all the nonsense she’d witnessed here.
“Nurse,” I said, “what—”
“Mrs. Mykonos, not Nurse. I couldn’t get ahold of your mother. Will you be all right if I send you home?”
“Mrs. Mykonos, what did Corina mean, about Seiji’s mom?”
“I’m surprised you haven’t heard. If you want to know what happened, you should talk to Seiji. And you should thank him—he likely spared you a trip to the hospital.”
“Right.”
“Corina might buy that lie about this being an exercise technique, but I don’t.”
I froze. “I don’t . . .”
“If you want a number for counseling, or a hotline or . . . look, come see me. You aren’t the first student I’ve known in your position, okay? If you want to change things, there are healthier ways to go about it. Understand?”
Mrs. Mykonos’s knowing look chafed me to my center.
CAMPBELL’S
The walk home seemed to take hours, complicated by the cold air, an icy downpour of steady slush—not rain, not snow, but some evil hybrid—and the bruises under my clothes. When had I last been warm?
The few pedestrians on Main Street hurried through the freezing rain to their cars. The sparse streetlamps and half-hearted Christmas lights in the occasional shop windows did little to allay the encroaching darkness.
