Love Hurts

by Malorie Blackman

  And I’m already trying to forget that.

  We do an awkward handshake before he leaves. He calls me ‘bruv’. I watch him wriggle his feet into his worn-down trainers without even untying the laces. He has dirt behind each nail, like he’s been digging with his hands. Then I watch the way he opens my front door, says Later without even looking me in the face. He can’t wait to get out.

  ‘Bye, June!’ he calls to my mum, who peeps her head, all flustered, round the kitchen door.

  ‘Oh, going already, are you, Isaac? That was quick.’

  ‘Yeah, I got football.’

  ‘OK, well, come round again soon, for dinner next time. And tell your mum I’ll give her a call.’

  ‘Will do. Bye. Bye, Dan.’

  ‘Bye.’

  And I watch him, rushing down the garden path as though he’s desperate not to be seen coming out of mine. Not looking back. Not even once.

  ‘How did it go?’ Mum asks. She wants to hold me, but I won’t let her. She knows that.

  ‘It didn’t.’

  ‘Oh, Danni.’

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘I thought we discussed this?’

  ‘Yeah. Well . . .’

  ‘It’s almost ready.’

  ‘I don’t want to eat.’

  ‘Danni.’

  ‘What? I’m not hungry.’

  ‘I’ve already told you: we’re not going through with this unless you eat. Remember?’

  Her love for me is like a rash. I hate it. It makes my skin crawl. But it’s all over me. As close as it can possibly get. It’s the only thing that I know is real about me.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Chicken. Without the sauce for you. Cooked in the spray oil that you like. And ri—’

  ‘I’m not eating rice.’

  ‘Danni, you’re not doing this, not today.’

  ‘I’ll eat the chicken. But I’m not eating rice. Is it breast?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t want it off the bone.’

  ‘I know that. No flavour what-so-bloody-ever.’

  ‘No salt.’

  ‘I know. Dry as a bone.’

  ‘OK, but no bones? It is breast, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, of course it’s breast. Do you not listen?’

  Awkward forever silence.

  ‘I wish you had told him, Dan.’

  I wish I had too. But I don’t say that. It has to look like my decision. Her words just annoy me.

  I boil the kettle. We wait in silence as it boils. The sound of it rushing to a climax is almost too much noise for me to bear.

  Of course I wish I had told Isaac too.

  Dad walks in. He has been walking Sherbet, our Jack Russell. Dad still kisses my mum when he sees her. He does this now when he enters the kitchen: a kiss on the side of the face, in between the eye and mouth somewhere. I don’t see why they have to do that. They only saw each other a couple of hours ago.

  I know Mum sent Dad out deliberately to give me space for my ‘chat’ with Isaac, because usually Sherbet just has to walk himself at this time, in the garden. Dad looks at me with loaded eyes, hoping that I’ve changed my mind. The way he looks at me every day; hoping he can change my mind.

  ‘All right, Dan?’ says Dad, all big and caveman.

  ‘Nni,’ Mum adds under her breath for him. ‘NNI.’ As if her saying it out loud cancels him not saying it.

  ‘Danni. Sorry. Are you OK?’ The question is a gun, aimed between my eyes.

  He takes Sherbet’s brace off and Sherby begins hurling himself around the kitchen, rebounding off the cupboard door, excitedly hoping for a meal. It’s not his usual mealtime. The walk has thrown him. Poor Sherbet’s had his itinerary messed with only for me not to do what I set out to do.

  The kettle finishes shaking. I reach for my Nescafé sachets. I like the light low-fat ones and I like it that everything is included inside one sachet. I like the way it’s neat and tidy and all done for you. The smell of powdered baby milk fills the room with the dense heavy reek of processed caffeine. On the back of the Nescafé box they recommend waiting thirty to forty seconds for your coffee to set before stirring it. To demonstrate this, I guess in case you either don’t know what waiting looks like or you can’t understand English, they have a picture of a blissfully happy woman with her chin perched proudly on her fist. She is waiting. I always think about trying that pose while I’m waiting for my coffee to set, but I never do. Instead I stir it. Incessantly. I’m always fidgeting, you see. I never know what to do with my hands. And then I begin blowing on it automatically, even though I know it’s still too hot to sip. The ripples of the coffee froth move like passing clouds. I sip. It’s too hot. I sip again. It’s still too hot. I know it is.

  Dad and I catch eyes. I do that short smile; that one you give when you see a neighbour in the street. Polite, distant acknowledgement.

  My coffee gives me something to do. I am in control.

  I wish we could move somewhere else. But Dad has his job here. And Mum says, It’s not about running away, it’s about adjusting.

  I know she still wants me to wait a year. Another year. But I think I’ve already waited fifteen years too long. She says the start of college might be a better time, but I don’t think there’s any good time for a thing like this.

  They have a schedule, my parents. Of how it will all work. They have written the jobs in different coloured pens to show who each job is delegated to, so that the stuff doesn’t lean on one parent too much.

  Tablets.

  Doctors.

  Therapist.

  Tablets.

  Eyelash implants.

  Laser surgery.

  More implants.

  Hair removal.

  Tablets.

  Therapist.

  Doctors.

  Shopping.

  Beautician (at home).

  Hair stylist (at home).

  Laser surgery.

  Tablets.

  Therapist.

  Mum’s jobs are written in green and Dad’s jobs are written in orange. Mum deliberately chose those colours, I think; colours without identity. Without sex. Without prejudice.

  The schedule is mostly covered in green. And even though there is some orange pen on the schedule, I’ve seen him, Dad, drunk, hating me. Hating that he has to even have a colour. That there has to be a schedule. That I have to be Danni. And that there are no brothers and sisters.

  Just me.

  I was more than enough.

  2.

  Mrs Swan always said that God makes no mistakes.

  She calmed us down at the end of the day by making us sit nicely on the carpet. We sat nicely by having our bottoms on the mat and our mouths zipped up.

  On the rare occasion that this exercise didn’t get results for Mrs Swan, she made us take out an imaginary pair of ‘spectacles’ from our pockets and unfold them and put them over our eyes.

  For some reason, it worked. We’d concentrate in silence. We listened to a story afterwards, and then went home.

  There was no opportunity at school to put my hand up in the air and say, ‘Mrs Swan, I don’t think I am a boy.’

  Even if I had, I knew the other kids would laugh at me. Or think I was gross. Or weird. Or trying to be funny. And thinking back, Mrs Swan, as accommodating as she was, wouldn’t have a lesson plan up her sleeve for Identity Crisis, and wouldn’t know what to say to the tiny five-year-old on the carpet. Granted, in that big building, the teachers must have been expecting one of us to not feel the gender we were born into – but I’d never really thought that person was going to be me. Would you have?

  You are on your own, kid.

  Years passed and I thought perhaps I should talk to my best friend, Isaac, who I’d known since we were both babies, and our mums were mates too, so I knew I could trust him. But we were both kids and we didn’t really do talking. So I pretended to laugh at the same jokes with the other boys my age, and I played football and computer games
and learned to like girls in the same way that boys do, and hoped it was just a phase that would wear off like a sleeping pill or a bad cold. But Monday rolled into Tuesday and Tuesday into Wednesday and Wednesday into Thursday and weeks into months and months into years and I knew, I knew that my body had let me down and that Mrs Swan was incorrect. That she didn’t know everything. And that actually, Mrs Swan, God did make a mistake.

  God made me.

  3.

  I’ve been wearing this grey tracksuit. It feels like a comfort blanket; a cocoon to wrap myself in until I’m ready to show my new self to the world. Until then, this is all I’ll wear. Something brandless, ageless, sexless, comfortable. Sometimes I imagine the same grey will feed up my throat and wrists and hands and feet and cover me completely. Cover everything. We could all just be grey. Uniformed. Then none of this would even matter.

  I don’t want the little hairs sprouting out of the follicles. The sprawling eyebrows. Sideburns. The snail trail. The armpit and leg hair. The BO. The blackheads. The acne.

  I want to be clean. Natural. Effortless. Beautiful. Pretty. A girl. A woman.

  After eating in my bedroom with the door closed, I look at my school uniform again. The one I’m going to wear on my first day back. I’d wanted to move schools, but Mum said Better the devil you know, which is a weird way of saying that no school is perfect and at least I know what I’m dealing with at the school I’m at now.

  The bra is white. Lacy. Pretty, I guess. Boys’ underwear is never pretty. It’s comedy, if anything. The chicken fillets aren’t too big, because I’m skinny and I want to start small first. Mum says I should put on weight, really, that other girls of fifteen are more soft and squidgy and that everything would look more natural if I plumped up a bit, but I can’t put on weight because I don’t want to take up any more space than I already do. I want to go unnoticed, to slip through school like a ghost. A shadow. Just to fit in.

  I’m going to wear the skirt. At my school it’s OK for girls to wear trousers too, but if I’m going to start the new year as Danni I can’t be in this in-between phase any more. They all know I’m different by now, anyway. I haven’t used the Boys or the Girls toilet for months; I use the disabled toilet and I go there to change for PE, too. I have to stick to this rule even when I go back, because I haven’t had my op yet.

  I have a complex about not acting ‘too female’ in front of my friends or the wrong company and then I beat myself up about hiding my femininity and true self when I’m alone. Then, because of the self-guilt, I practise being me for when I get to be me; how I should speak, sit, hold cutlery, walk.

  That kind of hyper hawking can send a person crazy.

  I know Isaac knows. I’m sure of it, even though he hasn’t ever said. And Luke. And James. And Lee. And Eddie. And Andre. And Callum. And all the other boys that put up with hanging out with me because of Isaac. I’m sure they all know, because when you’ve got a different person living on the inside to what’s on the outside, it’s not easy to go around unnoticed. I guess they think there’s enough of them being all masculine and macho and alpha male and that it cancels me out. I’m a glitch. I know that.

  Sometimes I think it would be easier for me if I didn’t have Isaac, because I could just make this change without having to think about how it will affect him. His reputation. His relationship with me.

  And then there’s her . . .

  4.

  ‘I like you.’

  ‘I like you too.’

  ‘You don’t act like it.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why do you always say sorry so much?’

  ‘Sorry. Sorry. I just said it again, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yeah. I can’t help but feel like there’s so much more to you than the others.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. I can’t explain. You’re just more gentle.’

  ‘Sure it isn’t just my hair that gives that impression?’

  ‘Hahaha! I know, it is good hair.’

  Sara kissed me on the mouth. She tasted of coconut lip balm. Her lips were soft. I was shy, my mouth loose. Tender. Like a two-day-old bruise.

  ‘Did I do something wrong?’

  ‘No! Not at all. Sor—’

  ‘I thought you liked me?’

  ‘I do! I do. Sara, I really do.’

  ‘This has been going on for too long though now, Dan. I’m sick of this “Will they, won’t they?” Everybody keeps asking me what’s going on between us. It’s getting embarrassing. I sit on your front wall every day before school and wait for you like a total mug.’

  ‘I like it that you sit on my wall.’

  ‘Yeah, I do too, but everyone must be laughing at me! So desperate! Like some stalker!’

  ‘Why do we have to care what everybody else thinks about us?’

  ‘We don’t. We don’t. But I care. I want you to be my boyfriend. I want you to be my boyfriend, Dan.’

  I LIKE YOU SO MUCH. I NEVER WANT YOU TO NOT SIT ON MY FRONT WALL. YOU SAY YOU LIKE ME BUT IT IS NOT ME THAT YOU LIKE. YOU DO NOT KNOW ME BECAUSE I AM NOT ME. NOT IN FRONT OF YOU. AND I AM TOO AFRAID TO SHOW YOU WHO I AM BECAUSE I AM TERRIFIED THAT YOU WILL NEVER SHOW YOURSELF TO ME AGAIN ONCE I DO. AND I DON’T WANT TO LOSE YOU. AND RIGHT NOW I AM CHOOSING YOU OVER ME BY NOT BEING ME.

  I wanted to say this, but I didn’t. I just got up. Sara’s eyes searched me for an answer. For a decision. She’s popular. She has friends she could talk to about what a dick I am, and they will nod their heads and agree. I don’t have that privilege. I could tell Isaac how she kissed me and I went like a cold wet fish and he and the boys would laugh about what a pussy I’ve been.

  HA. HA. HA.

  I walked away, feeling sick and gross, licking my lips from her coconut balm. Then I changed my mind and used my sleeve to wipe her kisses off. The way she’d do when she found me out.

  I was always less worried about what the girls at school would think. The girls were easier. They were more understanding with me, said I was a gentleman because I was sensitive, took my time. I wasn’t a gentleman. Not at all. I was a gentlewoman, if anything. The boys were worse; they’d all just decided I was frigid or gay. Gay was easier for them. Gay was a pigeonhole. But I hated being called gay, because . . . well, because I kind of was, really. If you thought about it. They were right, they just didn’t know it.

  I wanted to kiss girls. I fancied girls. I wanted to sleep with Sara. Truth be told, I wanted Sara to be my girlfriend.

  But if Sara was my girlfriend, it would mean Sara being a lesbian. I guess. And she didn’t even know it.

  And the only way I was going to get close to Sara was to stay as Dan. Dan the gentleman. Dan who she fancied. Not Danni, who I really was inside.

  It was all so much to digest. Not only was I a girl: I was a girl that was attracted to girls. Could I have drawn a shorter straw?

  I didn’t feel gay. But then, what does gay feel like?

  A girl who was born a boy and was in love with a girl who loved the boy she wasn’t – not the girl she was.

  I just wanted to be accepted. But it seemed too much to ask.

  5.

  Dear . . . . . .,

  The reason for this letter may be a little unexpected and out of the blue. We wanted to write to you all personally, and we felt a letter was the truest way to give you this news.

  As you know, we are very proud of Dan and love him very much. Although Dan has had a wonderful childhood and is growing up to be the adult we always hoped (and more!), something has not sat right with Dan since a young age. I think we always knew that Dan was different and unique, special for all the right reasons, and it has been a great weight off our shoulders to understand what that issue was.

  From now onwards, Dan would like to be known as Danni and would like to be referred to as ‘she’. This change is making Danni much more confident and happy already and that, in turn, is making us a happier family too. You will notice some changes in Danni in the coming weeks, and some
of you that we have the pleasure of seeing more regularly will have noticed some changes already. We trust you will be sensitive and supportive about these changes and treat Danni no differently to anybody else.

  We feel very fortunate to have the pleasure of watching a healthy young person find their brave way in the world, and in no way do we feel we have lost Dan. It’s always been Danni. It’s just Danni.

  Please don’t be a stranger; Danni would love to hear from all of you.

  Lots of love and hope to see you soon,

  June and David x

  I watch Mum stack the letters up. I don’t see it as anybody else’s business, to be honest, but Mum says that people are very simple, simpler than you think, and that if they believe they are invited to be a part of something, then they will back it. Support it. It’s about involving them.

  Sara hasn’t come to sit on my wall once since I walked away from her that day after the kiss. So there’s nothing to lose now. Still, I feel sick. The white envelopes look like bank letters. Buying envelopes was a ‘colour orange’ job, so I think that was Dad’s doing. Making this reality as disconnected as humanly possible.

  Together with Sherby, we post the letters. I start to panic. Once I saw somebody pour a can of Sprite into the postbox. What if somebody does that this week and all my letters get drenched and ruined? Or would that be better?

  I start to care. Really care, about everybody and what they’re going to think of me.

  It isn’t my fault that there was a mix-up. Maybe I was wired wrong, or incomplete? Or maybe I was meant to have this challenge? This obstacle?

  The letters leave our hands like confetti. There’s no going back.

  I see Sara and her friends catching the bus into central. Sara’s long hair hangs down around her chest and shoulders. She has a freckle under her brown eyes. She wears bright colours. She is always laughing. She wears coconut lip balm and her teeth are wonky. When she finds something funny she grips her hand around your wrist like she needs something to hold onto, just in case she floats away. Her nose scrunches up.

  She sees me from across the road and waves politely.

  Her friends sort of wave too. I am a dick, remember.