I Am J

by Cris Beam

  That night, on his bed, there was a note from Carolina. J, she wrote in her tiny, boxy script. We have to talk. Before school. I’ll wake you up.

  No we don’t, J thought, his head swimming from the talk with Melissa. He couldn’t handle any more interrogations; he’d used up all his words. This apartment was too small for three people; he needed to breathe. I can’t be myself here, J thought. How can I explain myself to you if I can’t explain myself to me?

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  J spent the rest of the night roaming around his neighborhood. It was already two a.m. by the time he got home from the pizza place; he figured he only had to wait a few hours before it was light again. But it was late fall, and it was cold. Better weather to focus my thoughts, he said to himself.

  J was glad he and Melissa were friends again, but he wasn’t sure how long it would last. She was hinting, wasn’t she, that she understood that he wanted to be a man, that he already was a man, that part of him was a man, or something like that? The conversation was already jumbling in his head, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle when it scatters to the floor. Or had Melissa made the conversation all about Melissa, as she always did? Did she say that part about him being like a guy (Did she even say that? Was he making it up?) to justify her attraction to him? If he told her about the chest binder, about the testosterone idea that was slowly becoming more and more feasible—would he lose his only friend? J felt especially in need of a friend, alone and freezing on a side street in the middle of the night. Get used to it, he thought. Welcome to the wonderful world of homelessness.

  He’d seen homeless teenagers on the piers when he was younger. Once he and Manny had gone fishing there, back when Manny was trying to spend time with him. Manny had taught J how to bait and tie a hook, and the two of them sat in the fading sun, waiting for fish that never bit.

  From their spot on the bench by the water, J could gaze openly at the kids that his dad said had run away. Here were boys who looked like girls and girls who looked like boys, dancing to music on portable speakers, their hair all kinds of colors, their shoes bright and fantastic.

  “Don’t stare,” Manny had admonished J, who was twelve at the time. “Don’t ever stare at people with problems.”

  But J couldn’t help it. A black girl with enormous breasts wore Ben Davis pants and two Hanes T-shirts and had her arm slung around another girl, skinny and loudmouthed in a skirt and rainbow bracelets up to her elbows. The loud girl kept shouting to other friends down the pier, a motley crew of teenagers who were repeating the steps of some kind of coordinated dance. “Show me the money!” the girl kept shrieking.

  Finally J asked Manny, “Why does she keep saying that?”

  “Because they’re prostitutes,” Manny answered. J looked back at the girl couple.

  “Not them,” Manny said. “Them.” He jerked his fishing pole toward another group of teenagers, walking and laughing, pushing each other along the pier. They were black and white and even Puerto Rican, J noticed. One wore a Puerto Rican flag bandanna as a skirt. These kids were loud, too, and they made exaggerated faces with their lipsticked mouths. Two were boys acting like girls, and doing a pretty bad job of it, J had thought at the time; one hadn’t even shaved her legs, and the other had her wig askew. But the other two were really girls, J thought. They wore tank tops and tight shorts and sneakers with no laces, their faces pretty and slender.

  “They don’t look like prostitutes,” J said, thinking of the movies he’d seen with women in red dresses, leaning into cars.

  “They are, and they’re all boys. You know that, right? It’s disgusting,” Manny said, looking back at the water.

  At the word disgusting, J felt a flash of recognition. Hadn’t his dad ever looked at him? He didn’t look like the prostitutes, but he sure resembled the girl in the Ben Davis pants. What was his father trying to say? J almost couldn’t muster the word, but he had to know. “Why?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.

  “Because they got no money,” Manny answered, misunderstanding the question. “But they got no money out of choice. They’re choosing to be freaks. Kids down here don’t have parents.”

  J must have looked scared, because Manny suddenly offered to buy him a flavored ice from an old man who was pushing a cart down the pier. “Don’t worry—you’ve got your parents,” Manny said. And then, more quietly, “I shouldn’t have taken you here. I heard the piers had been cleaned up.”

  But J wouldn’t have his parents, not if he really fully transitioned, not if that’s what Manny thought of kids like that. And now that he was on the street—J glanced at the clock on his cell phone—at three a.m., he’d be in so much trouble when he got home, he might as well go through with his plan. This wasn’t a game anymore, playing boy at a silly café with silly girls downtown. This was his life, and he had to live it. Even if it meant living on a pier.

  I can fight, he thought as a rat scurried across his path. In a way, he liked the thought of surviving on his own. If people mess with me, I could kill them. He ran through the countless fantasies he’d had in his head, of beating up people who humiliated him, of being the gangster his do-good parents had never let him be. Then he thought of the camera in his backpack, how he really wasn’t tough at all, how he was a nerd underneath it all, how he didn’t know what he was. I need to take that photograph, J thought. For Melissa.

  J walked a few more blocks, his body so numb from the cold he almost couldn’t feel it anymore. Near the hospital on 168th, some new construction was going up. The site was mostly just an enormous dirt hole, and J could see from the streetlight the outlines of diggers and Dumpsters and one giant crane. The fence was just cheap plywood, and J kicked at a section until it splintered and caved to his boot; glancing quickly over his shoulder at the silent street beind him, J dropped to his knees and crawled into the site.

  A path had been carved into the dirt, a street of sorts for the utility vehicles, and J made his way down the construction path and toward a yellow digger, bulky and eerie in the moonlight. Oddly, someone had left a jackhammer lying on its side, along with an orange vest, though J didn’t see any cement to break up. Maybe I can do something with this, J thought.

  The jackhammer was heavy as J dragged it toward a Dumpster about fifty yards away. The handles were thick and worn down, and the bit made a satisfying scraping sound as he lugged it along. Like dragging a dead body, J thought. He propped it upright against the bin, which was garbage-truck green. Nearby, J noticed, a security light was shining toward the bin, casting long shadows. He realized that if he lay down, just right, in front of the jackhammer, and set the timer on his camera, he could capture a picture of just his shadow with the jackhammer driving right through it. He worked quickly; the light was pretty bright, and he didn’t want to get caught. J set his camera up on the back of an orange cone he found. He set the timer for thirty seconds, turned off the flash, and lined up the shot. Then he carefully lay down a few feet in front of the jackhammer, so the length of his body cast a shadow.

  When he came back to check the results, he shivered. The jackhammer glowed an eerie yellow against the Dumpster, and the shadow of his face and torso was strangely clear, if a bit distorted; you could tell the form was human. The hammer seemed to be driving straight through the shadow’s heart. Maybe it was scary and maybe it was cheesy, but if J had the courage to send Melissa the photograph, she’d understand what it meant.

  Stuffing the camera back into his backpack alongside the chest binder, the comics, and the change of underwear he had grabbed before he left, J climbed back out of the construction site. He didn’t want to think about what was going on at home if his parents had noticed he wasn’t in bed. He had turned off his cell phone. It was four a.m. now, still cold and still dark. He needed a little sleep, but he knew the twenty-four-hour diner wouldn’t let him rest his head on one of their Formica tables. They’d think he was on drugs and throw him out. Then he saw the lights of the hospital, the red sign of
the emergency room beckoning to him from a few blocks away. He could sleep there, in the waiting room. Waiting for an emergency, J thought. Perfect.

  Outside the Starbucks, J was nervous and exhausted. He’d changed into his chest binder at the hospital and gotten some coffee, but he knew he looked rumpled and worn. It had rattled him a little, sitting in the emergency room for hours, watching families struggle in with feverish babies, and homeless people coming off their highs. One guy had been shot, rushed in on a stretcher, and two different women were hyperventilating or having asthma attacks or something and were sent straight to the back for oxygen. A cop dragged in three scared kids in pajamas and diapers, followed by their hysterical mother screaming that she’d get a lawyer. He tried to watch the television running an endless cycle of weather reports and sports recaps, but the room was so grim that he couldn’t focus.

  He realized that no matter how angry or messed up he was inside, he’d have to come up with a better plan; sitting around in emergency rooms was no way to get one’s head together. He decided to go back home for the weekend, take stock of his meager finances, get a few good nights of sleep, and then run away for real. He’d figure out a place where he could live for cheap, and he’d start his transition. Testosterone, ever since he’d read about it online, was burning a fierce tunnel in his brain. Everything else would have to follow that.

  But right now there was Starbucks. His heart fluttered at the sight of Madison and Blue, flocked by three other girls who looked vaguely familiar. Amazing, the power of a little crush. The three other girls peeled away as soon as Madison and Blue got close.

  “Hey,” Blue said.

  “Hey.”

  “What’re you reading?” Madison asked.

  “Just manga,” J said, handing over his comic book.

  “Do you like this stuff?” Blue asked, thumbing through the pictures. J felt stung; did Blue think comics were stupid?

  “Not really,” J answered.

  “Hey, J wants to see your art,” Madison said, hopping forward on one foot. Blue shot her a look that said shut up. Madison was so intense; he felt a little bad for Blue.

  “Do you have anything on you?” he asked.

  “No, not really. Just sketches. But they’re lame. My real stuff is at my house.”

  “Her house is cool,” Madison said. “Her mom is, too.”

  “No, she’s not!” Blue said, looking incredulous. She was wearing what looked like a Brownie uniform, some kind of brown jumper, with black tights, and combat boots speckled in paint. J thought she looked hot. Blue glanced up at him.

  “You could come over tomorrow. I mean, if you want, and see it,” Blue said, half shy, half defiant. “I don’t live too far. Just, like, five stops on the L.”

  “Um, tomorrow it’s Saturday and I have something to do,” J said, thinking of the shit that was going to hit the fan as soon as he got home. He hadn’t ever stayed out all night before, hadn’t done anything remotely close to that, and so far Carolina hadn’t even called his cell; maybe she wouldn’t let him come home. Blue’s cheeks reddened with the rejection. J cocked his chin up. “Want to do it today?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Blue said, happier. “Lemme call my mom.”

  Blue’s apartment was filled with toddlers. Her mother ran a day care out of the living room, and the place smelled like Play-Doh and diapers.

  “Sorry,” Blue said as she stepped over a Big Wheel and tousled a wailing baby’s hair with her free hand. “The rats are running free.”

  “That’s okay,” J answered, amazed by the chaos. “I like rats.” His own apartment was so quiet, you could hear the clock tick and Manny chew from across the room. At Blue’s place, crayon markings tattooed each available wall, and toddler shrieks bounced off the endless surfaces of cheery-colored plastic chairs and toys. The Brooklyn brownstone’s living room had once been grand, with its ballroom-style chandelier, but now the wooden floors were scratched and pockmarked, and the windows were cracked and taped and smudged with tiny noseprints.

  “Basia?” A voice called from another room. “Come help me with snack?”

  Blue rolled her eyes. “Want some delicious Goldfish out of Dixie cups? Or maybe some graham crackers and generic jelly?” Blue trotted off through what used to be French doors. J followed.

  “Who’s this?” asked a thin woman in jeans, her hair tied up messily in a bun.

  “This is J. He’s a new kid at school. The art teacher asked him to work on a painting project with me.”

  “Maybe you can get Basia to use some”—here Blue’s mom gave an overly dramatic gasp—“colors!”

  “Mom, don’t bug him,” Blue said, grimacing. She picked up a tray of fruit punch and baby bottles and took it into the living room. “Come with me.”

  Blue shared a bedroom with her older sister, the space divided with a piece of masking tape that snaked straight across the center of the floor. The sister’s side was filled with books with titles like Mission of the Apostles; she was apparently studying religion, and there was a cross above her bed. Blue’s side was crammed with paintings. Big ones on paper and cardboard and canvases, taller than J, and little ones the size of a postcard, leaned against one another. Madison was right, they were all blue, but J hadn’t known there could be so many shades. There were night blues and day blues, cruel-looking blues, the blues of water, and the blues of sun-beaten wood porches. And Madison was right about another thing, too: Blue’s work was amazing. The top canvas, the one Blue appeared to be working on now, was the face of an old man. His forehead was prominent and angular, as was his jaw, but his lips were loose and somewhat sexual. His eyes looked at J dead-on, like he was accusing and, underneath that, forgiving. The weird thing, which J hadn’t noticed at first, was that the guy was missing his nose. In its place was a dark wedge of deep blue, swirled with an almost imperceptible blackness.

  “Why doesn’t he have a nose?” J asked.

  “Um, I’ve been learning online about this thing called trepanation, where people drill parts of their own skull away to increase blood volume to their brains and make them more psychic,” Blue said. “So I was thinking about this old guy who kind of wasted his life, and he wanted to see why. So he did trepanation, but he did it between his eyes and lost his nose. I guess it’s about what you have to give up to gain something else.”

  J sat back on the bed. Did you always have to give something up for a gain? He looked at the old man’s eyes. Now they were mocking and sad—two opposites again. “It’s deep” was all he could think of to say. He knew it sounded stupid.

  “Thanks,” Blue answered. She saw J glance over at her sister’s side of the room. “Oh, she’s a religious freak. Supersmart, and I love her and everything, but she’s really into God.”

  “I hate that,” J answered.

  “Me, too. Is your family religious?”

  “Sort of. I mean, maybe culturally my mom is—she’s Catholic. My dad’s Jewish, but he let her have all the religion in the family.”

  “Oh.” Blue didn’t seem to know what to say.

  J didn’t want her to stop talking. “Why blue? Why do you paint only in blue?”

  “I don’t know. I just love it. It’s the only color that seems to make sense inside me. I like it so much, sometimes I eat the paint.”

  J imagined this. A plate of blue mashed potatoes next to a cereal bowl full of paint. Or a wine glass sloshing around with gloppy, gluey paint. And Blue licking her lips, the tip of her tongue blue as a plush Smurf toy. He laughed.

  “You think I’m a freak, don’t you?” Blue asked, looking closely at her cuticles.

  “No!” Freak was a word J never used. It was a grenade, tossed from car windows, meant to land at J’s feet and blow up in his face. He knew that Blue had no idea how many times he’d been called that word; J would never say it to a friend.

  “You’ve probably never wanted to be anything different than what you are,” Blue said. “You seem so, I don’t know, confident.”
<
br />   Confident? J thought. Confident? And then, I’d better kiss this chick before she changes her mind or figures me out. Or her religious sister barges in. Suddenly J wanted to know, more than anything, what it would feel like to be a guy kissing a girl. Not a girl pretending to be a guy, as he had when he played “bar” way back when, or a girl kissing a girl, as he had with Melissa. Just a regular guy, on a regular day, copping the moves on a regular girl. He didn’t want all this deep talk that made his head hurt, didn’t want to think about his parents or shooting testosterone or getting kicked out of his house. He just wanted to get away with whatever he could, while there was still time.

  But he said nothing and looked at the old-man painting again. He had to answer her question. “Of course I have.”

  “Like what?”

  “I dunno.” Crap, J thought. What to say now? “I guess I’ve wanted to be less shy.”

  “I like you shy,” Blue said, picking up a pencil from a can full of brushes and pens on her desk. “It means you’re not an asshole like other guys.”

  She knows, J thought with a sharp constriction of his throat. Blue was giving him a message. He tried to quickly make eye contact, but Blue had picked up a pad of paper and was sketching a cheekbone and what looked to be part of an eyebrow. Was she trying to communicate that she knew he wasn’t really a guy or that he wasn’t really an asshole? He suddenly felt that he was going to have a panic attack, like that one time when he was stuck in an elevator for twenty minutes with two families and three strollers. Too many people, too many chances to be watched. He had to switch the focus. Back on the girl, he told himself. If you ask women questions about themselves, he had read in a men’s magazine, they’ll be more likely to give it up. “What kind of paint do you eat?”

  “I don’t eat that much,” Blue answered, tipping her head to see her sketch from a new angle. She started drawing an eye. “Watercolors are fine for you. So are tempera paints—they’re made for preschoolers. Besides, I just need a few tastes to feel like I’m changing inside, like the color is moving me.”