“Of course. Are you sure you don’t want me to cancel? I don’t mind reading a book or watching TV while you sleep.”
“No. You go. We’ll be okay, won’t we, Elvis?” She kisses the top of his head, and he snorts happily and wags his tail.
Inside, I’m relieved. I’ve been looking forward to spending time with Eddie. I’ve barely seen him since I started playing derby. But I feel like a lousy girlfriend—even a lousy secret girlfriend—for not staying and taking care of her. She told me to go, right?
I put some food in Elvis’s bowl and leave it on the kitchen floor, then fill his water bowl and set it down beside the food, then return to the bedroom.
“Okay, I put food and water out for Elvis. If you want to let him out in the backyard, I’ll clean it up when I get back later. Call me or text me if you need anything, okay?”
“Thanks, T.” She reaches up for a hug and I kiss her briefly on the lips.
“Feel better, baby.”
Elvis, the big traitor, doesn’t even look up when I leave.
Traffic near the marina is insane, and I had to run by my house for my swimsuit, so I’m late getting to the slip where Eddie’s cruiser is docked. When I finally sprint up the dock toward it, he’s standing on the deck, pulling out his phone.
“Sorry I’m late. Is everyone here already?”
“It’s about time.” Eddie rolls his eyes dramatically. “And yes, everyone is here except you and Elvis. Where’s the mutt?”
“He’s with Joe.” I untie the first line and toss it to him. “She has a summer cold, and I left him with her to cheer her up.”
“And who, Tina-cakes, is Joe?”
I undo the second line as he pulls the bumpers inside the boat. I use the rope in my hand to pull the boat close enough to the dock, and then hop across, taking Eddie’s waiting hand to steady myself.
“Joe is a new friend. And she is way cuter than Ben.” I find myself grinning at our old joke. A friend like Ben? Or like a girlfriend?
Eddie finishes packing away bumpers and ropes, so I start stripping down to my bikini. For as long as I’ve known him, Eddie’s boats have been places of sanctuary for me, places I can be free and comfortable in my own skin, my own name, my own pronouns. So when he shouts, it startles me.
“What the hell happened to you?”
I glance down at my leg—green and purple bruising runs from my knee to my hip. I touch it and a goofy smile spreads across my face. “Nasty fall. Not a serious one though.”
“It sure as hell looks serious.” Oh, that’s rich, coming from Eddie. The guy goes out to sex clubs and comes home bashed up like he’s been in a fistfight. “And what are you grinning about?”
How to explain it? That the way I feel about derby is like falling in love? “You know how when you meet someone, and you get all wrapped up in them, giddy at the thought of them, and the time you spend with them seems brighter and more intense than anything else in your life?”
He peeks up then, not at me, but at his hot younger boyfriend, who’s slapping sunscreen on his shoulders and grinning at a gorgeous lady who must be his mom. Wow. Good genes. Eddie’s face gets soft and sweet, an expression I’ve never seen on it before. Holy shit. Eddie Russell is completely smitten.
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” he says, still making heart eyes at his lover. Then he looks back at me, a little flushed and unfocused. “So, you feel that way about this Joe?”
Yes. The intensity of the thought takes me by surprise. I laugh, and I lie. “Nope, I feel that way about derby.”
“Derby? Like, roller derby?”
“Yep.” I tickle his ribs. “You should come see our next bout.”
His face changes and he goes into business mode. “I can do that. Send me the details, and Wish and I will make a date of it.”
I have no doubt that they will. Eddie takes his social calendar seriously. It’s one of the things I like best about him—his ferocious commitment to his friends. But there’s something else there too—the way he’s including Wish, drawing him into our circle. That’s almost as big a hint about the nature of their relationship as that sappy eye-fuck he bestowed on Wish.
“I saw you look at him just then,” I tease.
“So what?” He turns a glare on me, and I laugh, holding up my hands.
“Nothing, not saying a word. Put some sunscreen on my back, okay?”
On the night the interview airs, Stella’s boss closes the bar for a private screening for the team. My hands shake and knees wobble as I explain to them that the interview is me publicly coming out as trans after years of quiet retirement, but the girls all hug me and tell me they’re excited to see it. That goes a long way toward calming my nerves.
Stella brings me a beer in the back corner booth. I have a decent view of the massive wide-screen dominating the space over the bar, but I’m separated enough from the rest of the team that I don’t feel like I’m under a microscope.
“I’m so proud of you.” Joe, sitting across from me, squeezes my hand.
The theme music for Weekend Sports starts, and before I’m even prepared for it, Amber is introducing me.
“Oh God.” I scrub both hands over my face. “This is really happening.”
“Oooh, your hair looks so good!”
I manage a wan smile at Bex.
Amber’s first question gets right to the heart of things. “Tina, you’re the first transgender athlete we’ve had visit us on Weekend Sports. Is there anything off limits for tonight’s interview?”
The me on the screen smiles nervously. There in the bar, I mouth along with the words. “My ex-wife, my current relationship status, and the contents of my underwear.”
Under the table, Joe’s foot bumps mine, and I look up to see her staring at me, wide-eyed. “Thank you,” she mouths. I shrug. It hurts me, the fact that she still hasn’t told anyone about us yet. I understand why—and I don’t begrudge her the time to figure out how best to tell the team—but a part of me wants her to stand up and say, “Hey, I’m hers, she’s mine, and if anyone has a problem with it, tough.”
On the screen, a home video plays of teenage Ben and preteen me sitting on the sundeck of Eddie’s daddy’s MasterCraft and talking about the air we were gonna get that summer. Ben looks like a young blond god, all muscle and smiles. I look like a kid. The camera pans right to show two alligators sitting on the bank of the cove, not ten yards from the boat.
Lauren gasps. “Are those real?”
“You didn’t grow up in Florida, did you, Lou?” I laugh. “But that video is twenty years old. Not many gators on Lake Lovelace these days.”
Up on the screen, Amber asks, “How old were you when you first competed as a pro?”
“I was seventeen. It was a different sport back in the nineties, you know?”
Amber’s questions stay focused on wakeboarding, then my work as a personal trainer, including footage of me and Jeremy at a bodybuilding competition he’d won.
“She brings out the best in me. Makes me work for it, takes my health and my limits seriously. She was born to do this.”
The footage switches to the roller derby scrimmage back in August, and Amber’s voice-over continues. “But Durham found a second wind for her own competitive spirit in the form of roller derby.”
Me at practice, weaving through the cones of an obstacle course, then the image cuts back to the interview.
“What initially attracted you to the game?”
“Joe Mama, the coach. She made it sound badass and crazy fun. She talked about how it felt to be a part of a team—which is something I never really had before. And honestly, I missed competitive sports.”
The questions turn to my retirement and transition, and I tune them out, instead peeking around at the rapt faces of my teammates. When I talk about feeling wrong in my skin, Bex’s face twists up like she’s going to cry.
When I point out that my wakeboard tournament winnings financed my medical transition, that I had to choo
se between transitioning and college, and that I was lucky and privileged to be able to make that choice, Stella nods and looks over at me. “I know that’s right.”
“Do you ever regret ending your wakeboarding career when and how you did? With a voluntary retirement?”
I glance up at the screen then, at myself. On-screen me shakes her head.
“When Ben Warren broke his back, it changed everything. For one, without my idol and best friend in the boat with me, it wasn’t as much fun. For another, with him out of the way—” On-screen me laughs and gazes right into the camera. “Sorry, Ben! With Ben out of the competitions, I was winning more and able to save more money—enough to transition. When I retired, some would say I was at my peak. But for me the best thing about the sport was the time spent on the water with my friends, and that peaked when Ben and I were friendly rivals.”
“And derby? What’s the best thing about derby?”
“I think, for me, it’s being accepted and included in female friendship, in a space that isn’t dominated by men. In a space where our bodies aren’t for decoration, and every body type has an advantage.” On-screen me takes a drink of water and smiles at the camera.
“What’s wonderful about derby is what makes it so beautifully subversive: it empowers women to love what our bodies can do.”
“Hell yeah!” Lauren shouts, pumping her fist in the air. She jumps down from the high-top bar table where she’s been sitting and rushes me for a hug as the credits roll.
Before I know it, the rest of the team is piling into my booth and onto the table to hug and kiss me.
Across from me, Joe laughs and holds the beers out of the way.
It’s over, and my team loves me. I was afraid I might cry, but as I hug my friends—that’s who they’ve become—I’m flying high from their affection and their company.
Riding back to Joe’s place later—in her van because I have a buzz—with Elvis in my lap and the window rolled down, I let out a giggle of pure relief.
She glances over at me. “You were amazing. That was—that was crazy brave.”
“No, it wasn’t brave.” I shake my head. “But it might have been crazy. I was scared to death. Still am.”
“I’m sorry that you couldn’t be open about our relationship. I want to tell the team, but I’m not sure when would be the right time. You understand, don’t you?”
“I guess. I mean, eventually we need to tell them. It’s not fair to expect Lauren to keep our secret, and I have been shacking up at your place for the last month.”
“I know. I know. But with my history with Chloe . . .”
And that pisses me off. I’ve been fine with the secrecy—to a point. But now she’s just making excuses.
“Your history with Chloe has fuck-all to do with you and me. And you quitting your former team to try to save your relationship with her has even less to do with me.”
“I know! But Stella isn’t going to see it that way.”
“And Stella is fucking Bex, so who gives a fuck what she thinks?”
“I do. I give a fuck what my best friend thinks. I give a fuck about her trust. I can’t— If Ben thought you were doing something shitty, wouldn’t you give a fuck?”
My annoyance turns to ice-cold fury.
“So what, now our relationship is something shitty?”
“Don’t put words in my mouth; that is not at all what I meant.”
“It’s what you fucking said.”
“Okay, yeah, it’s what I fucking said, but you know me well enough to know that’s not what I fucking meant.”
Our voices are rising, and hers is growing hoarser by the moment. And I hate it, because I want to yell and scream it out and get past the fighting to the kissing and making up—but I’m worried about her vocal cords.
“You know what? Don’t strain yourself. I think we both need to cool off. Take me home, okay?”
“We’re almost to my house. We’ll go inside and talk it out.”
“Don’t you think we’ve hurt each other enough for one evening? Please take me home now.”
She pulls the van into her driveway, cuts the engine, and looks at me. “Tina. Please?”
And that “please,” especially when her voice cracks like that? It would usually be enough. But not tonight. I can’t. I can’t have this conversation now, because when it comes right down to it, I want her to choose me. I want her to choose derby and me. And if she can’t even tell the team she and I are dating, on the night I told the whole world I used to have a dick? Then I don’t know if it’s ever going to happen. And I don’t want to be the one who forces her to say that.
I pull my phone out of my purse and call my knight in shining armor.
“Ben, can you come get me?”
I manage to hold it together when she screws up her face and says, “Fine, fucking fine. I was proud of you tonight. I’m still proud of you. You want to put your feelings of shame and inadequacy on me, that’s your deal.”
I manage to hold it together when first the door to her van, and then the front door to her house slam shut.
But when Ben pulls up in Dave’s Range Rover, and I put Elvis in the backseat, I lose it. With shaking hands, I open the passenger door and climb inside, and then the sobs come, racking my whole body with silent agony.
“Are you safe?” Ben reaches across the console and picks up my hand.
“Yes.”
“Do you want to stay with me and Dave?”
On the one hand, there’s the little house I shared with Lisa, and all the ways it still feels like ours and not mine, like there’s a ghost living there with me. On the other, there’s Ben’s big house, and how he and Dave will be walking around giving each other besotted glances.
Rock. Hard place.
“Maybe I can sleep in your car,” I mumble.
“I have every movie Linklater’s ever made on DVD.”
“Yeah?” I sit up straighter, remembering a time in the late nineties when Ben and I stayed up all night in some lame hotel in Orlando, watching Before Sunrise and talking about nothing and everything. “Do you have any Phish Food?”
“We can stop at Publix and get some.”
And for a minute, it seems like drowning my tears in a pint of ice cream while watching movies is exactly what I need. But once again, it’s Ben to the rescue, someone else fixing everything so I don’t have to deal. It’s time for me to start taking responsibility.
I shake my head. “I’m gonna be okay. I don’t need babysitting.”
“Honey, Dave and I watched your interview—which was amazing, by the way. You might not need babysitting, but I bet you’d like company. It’s okay to need people.”
“I need to be alone.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“It really is.”
A few minutes after I walk in the door, my phone rings. Joe.
I think about letting it go to voice mail, but at the last minute I pick up.
Her voice is rough like she’s been crying. “I’m sorry, Tina. You were right.”
“I don’t want to be right, but I don’t want to keep our relationship a secret anymore, either. We’re going to keep fighting about it and hurting each other, and that sucks, Joe. It’s not who you are and it’s not who I am.”
“I need more time. I need—”
“How much would be enough? Two weeks? A month? Until the beginning of the season? Or, better yet, the end of the season next June?”
“I don’t know how much!” Her voice cracks on the word “know.” The line is quiet for a moment.
Finally, I say, “Secrets always come out. They’re like—like a heart condition you’re born with but don’t know about, until the stress is too much and you have a cardiac event.”
“I can’t— I’m not ready.”
“I know. And I get that, Joe, but I don’t think we can keep doing this. Maybe we should just walk away now.”
I want to take the words back. They hang there on
the line, and they choke me from my own throat. Every fiber of my being is screaming that I’m a fuckup, that I’m wrong, that I’m destroying a chance to be happy.
“Walk away—you mean break up?”
Her voice cracks again—is she crying? I don’t want to break up. I don’t want to make her cry.
And now it’s too late.
“I’m sorry, Joe.”
“Why are you sorry? I keep hurting you without meaning to. Why are you sorry?” Her sharp gasps tell me I was right, she is crying, and I hate it, but like before, it’s that catch in her voice that firms up my resolve. I need her to choose me, and I can’t make her do it.
“I’m sorry it can’t be different.”
“Will you still play derby?”
I sit down in the doorway to my kitchen and let my head drop against the wall. “Of course I will.”
“It’s going to be really hard.”
I know she’s not talking about the sport.
“Treat me like one of the other girls. Treat me like Stella or Bex. Don’t do that cold-shoulder thing you tried before.”
“I won’t. God, Tina, I’m so sorry.”
“Me too.”
“So, I’ll see you at practice?”
“Yeah.”
She apologizes again through the good-byes, and I set the phone on the floor. Elvis, leash still clipped to his collar, stares at me from across the room. I lift my hand, and he stands up and comes over to me, nudging my hand with his head and whining.
I wrap my arms around his warm little body and sob into his fur.
“Resuming regular workouts” in two weeks was optimistic of Jeremy’s doctors. Pouring sweat, he steps off the treadmill after a short run and glares at me. It’s a month past his ablation and he looks ready to throw something.
“Am I free to go now?”
“How are you feeling?”
“I just ran my slowest mile in three years, and I feel like I ran a marathon. My whole body hurts. I’m so tired I could literally lie down and fall asleep on the floor. In other words? Like shit.”
“So, recovery is going well.”
He starts stretching, wincing when he gets to his left leg. “Seriously? At the rate it’s going, I’m never going to compete again.”
Roller Girl Page 11
