Crooked Words

by K A Cook

of a professional who can reassure them and point out when their thoughts are illogical, by meds that help them sleep a little more and chew their fingernails a little less.

  The program continues to run; Melissa sits absorbed by the box, pays Chris not the least bit of attention. Chris sighs and lets out another hissing breath, turns their head to survey the lounge in search of a distraction from their fingernails and the urge to run through their rehearsed conversation yet again—to survey a room furnished with all the care of two students who have no money but do have a landlord who bans hooks and blue-tack on the walls in order to preserve the beige paint. They don’t even have a painting Chris can pretend to be engrossed in, just the brown drapes over the window and the yellow-brown carpet, Chris’s purple-painted bookshelf beside Melissa’s slanting brown DVD rack. Chris grits their teeth and tries not to jiggle their knees too much, but they can’t sit still. Perhaps they should get up and get a book? Get out their latest in a long line of unfinished cross-stitch attempts?

  They’re just about to stand when the show cuts to the ad break and Melissa finally turns her head. Her eyebrows creep to her hairline as if seeing Chris for the first time, her green eyes wide and startled. “Woah. You going someplace, Christine? Is that waistcoat new?”

  “Yeah.” They shouldn’t answer, should get straight to the point. “Do … do you like it?”

  Melissa reaches up to tug a lock of brown hair free from her messy, stubby ponytail. “You look like a butch dyke going to a wedding. Like Ellen. Why do all lesbians look like Ellen?”

  Why will Chris never learn that they can never anticipate the kinds of comments that knock them breathless? “Uh. I don’t … I mean…”

  “Oh … oh.” Melissa gulps and raises a hand to her mouth. “I didn’t mean you’re a lesbian. Unless you are. Are you? Is this why you’re dressing so strangely?”

  How the hell do they answer that? The one time Chris tried to explain pansexuality to their co-workers, all thanks to an innocent conversation beginning with science fiction and ending with Captain Jack Harkness, they’d been forced to answer questions about inanimate objects, bestiality and non-human life forms. No, they do not want to fuck a tree or any non-sapient creature, and why do people ever think they would?

  Do people, at heart, believe all the conservative Right bullshit about marriage equality opening the door to wedding pets and kitchen appliances? Do people think queer folk, pan folk, that perverse, that wrong, that the thought must cross their minds long enough to ask the question?

  “Ah,” Chris says, or something even less coherent, not at all sure they want to have this conversation here, now. Just talking about their name is going to be hard enough. “I don’t—”

  “You are, aren’t you, Christine?” Melissa spins around on the couch to face Chris. “It makes so much sense—your hair, your clothes. I thought it was weird, but if you’re a dyke—or is it ‘lesbian’? Anyway, it makes sense.” She runs her eyes up and down Chris’s body and breaks into a frown. “Although, you know, right, that you don’t actually have to go all Ellen to be gay? You can be Portia. You can still wear make-up and dresses. I don’t know why it’s a thing, but you don’t have to do it, okay? You can be gay and be you—the person you are. I’m sure the lesbians will love you anyway.”

  Try as they might, Chris can’t think of a single thing they’ve ever done that would explain or justify Melissa’s absurd speech. They nod, too stunned to say a single word, and raise a hand to brush over their spiked-up, clipper-cut hair. The hair cut is the best thing they’ve ever done: ever since they’ve watched those drab brown locks fall to the floor, they’ve felt as though they spent their whole life as this inner, secret short-haired person bursting to get out. Moulding paste, hair straighteners and hair dye have opened up entire new worlds to a person who spent their life just tying their hair in a ponytail and letting it hang—finally, they have colour and texture and style! They can leave the house never looking the same way twice! They can look in the mirror and see this strange, amazing, vivacious-looking person who dared, dared spiked hair and a waistcoat, and as narcissistic as it may be, Chris can’t tear their eyes away from the mirror, from shop windows, from anything that lets them see their new self. It’s been a wonder, a revelation … but Melissa thinks they transformed themself just to look like Ellen? Because of some ridiculous cishet notion that all queer women must look alike?

  Was she lying that night when Chris came back from the hairdresser, just about floating on air, and Melissa squealed and said they looked fantastic?

  “I’m not…” They stop for a desperate gulp of air, try to calm their breathing and their tongue. “I’m not lesbian.”

  Melissa stares at Chris for one awful moment before raising her hand to cover her face. “Oh my … I … you don’t look that much like Ellen. I was just being an idiot. Ignore me. Your hair … it’s really good. I told you that, didn’t I?”

  The floor, of course, won’t open up and swallow them whole no matter how much Chris wishes for the world to oblige them.

  Now what? Now try and tell her that Chris isn’t lesbian, but they are queer? Lie and tell Melissa that they’re bi, even though that presumes the existence of two distinct genders that Chris doesn’t any way think allows for or celebrates their existence—or encompasses the kinds of people Chris finds attractive? Tell Melissa the thing they’ve only told their psychologist and sit back and watch as this awkward evening becomes all the more horrific—because it is obvious, beyond obvious, that Melissa does not understand? She might think she does, she must believe she’s being supportive, but she has no idea, none at all, what it feels to sit here and listen to her make mockery of the most empowering choice Chris has ever made.

  They didn’t want to look like Ellen; they just wanted to look like Chris.

  “Christine? I didn’t offend you, did I? Because I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just—you know. You see it all the time, every dyke with an Ellen haircut. It’s kind of ridiculous. But yours is different, so different. Yours is good.” Melissa reaches across to the coffee table and scrambles for the remote; without turning around, she points it at the TV. The screen goes dead, leaving the pair in the horrible blank silence of the too-small lounge room. Nothing on the walls to look at, no distractions. Nothing but the pleading desperation in Melissa’s awkward, stiff smile.

  “It’s okay.” The words spill out of Chris’s lips, force-of-habit, before they realise it isn’t. In fact, it is anything but okay: why the hell did Melissa have to go and make it so fucking awkward? How is Chris supposed to have a simple, reasonable conversation on the thing that really matters—Chris’s fucking name—when Melissa can’t even look at Chris’s clothes without leaping to absurd and offensive conclusions? “I mean, you—” They stop, not out of a realisation but out of a desperate floundering to find something, anything, to finish off the sentence: you made a mistake? You meant well? You didn’t hurt me? You just made the best thing I ever did seem like some attempt to be fashionable? You blithely assumed that queer women are robots who want to look alike?

  About the only thing they can say, and mean it, are three simple words: you fucked up.

  Melissa’s face sags in relief despite Chris’s lack of an answer; she sighs and leans back against the armrest. “It really does look good, Christine. I was thinking about getting my hair like that myself, except I think my face is too round to pull it off.”

  They know Shakespeare didn’t intend Gertrude’s line to be so interpreted, and yet Chris can’t help but think the modern use appropriate: how does the lady not protest too much?

  What the hell are they supposed to say to such an obvious lie?

  “So.” Melissa doesn’t wait for a response; she just looks down at her lap, leans across to the coffee table, scoops up the remote in her right hand. “Was there anything else, Christine?”

  It occurs to Chris that no, she wouldn’t wait for a response—she wouldn’t even notice a lack of response, becau
se when does Chris ever say anything, outside of therapy? When did they ever say anything before this quest to get better, stop hiding, be who they really are? And yet—what is there to say? Does it even matter? Melissa will go and say something ridiculous and stupid, but what the hell can Chris do about that? How is there any way to make this conversation not horrific?

  The realisation doesn’t diminish the anxiety or the stutter.

  It does make them speak.

  They rehearsed it in the mirror before they risked the lounge, one long, pleading, explanatory speech: I don’t feel comfortable when you call me Christine. Everybody else calls me Chris, and I’d appreciate it if you’d call me Chris as well—I feel like it suits the person I am, and as I’d eventually like to change my name, I figure I should start here with my friends. Please just try to call me Chris, okay? I know you’ll make mistakes—we all do—but could you please just try?

  Of course, the words never make it out as intended to Chris’s lips: the sentences fall apart, words are lost and forgotten in the quest to get the letters to sound as they should, points and goals vanish amidst the anxiety of speaking at all. They hate the fact that they can never speak like they wanted, never make the words come out right,