MOM AND DAD LEFT THE next morning, earlier than they needed to. I helped put their bags back into the car, and then we all congregated on the porch.
Dad hugged me tight, activating those seat belt bruises that had indeed appeared hours after my near accident in Isobel’s station wagon. He kissed me on the cheek, and then gave me one of those swift, firm guy pats on the back for good measure. “Only a phone call away, Chris,” he reminded me yet again.
When it was Mom’s turn to say good-bye, I honestly didn’t know what would happen. She opened her arms, uncertainly. I moved in to give her a hug, but her body went rigid, as if she was trying to keep space between us. When we parted, she opened her mouth, but it was like she couldn’t force herself to say anything remotely kind or comforting or reassuring, so she didn’t. As Isobel and I stood there watching them drive away, I felt a lump in my throat, bubbling up slowly from somewhere in my chest. I coughed out a quick laugh, only to keep it from choking me.
Isobel turned to me. “What’s so funny?”
I shook my head, because of course nothing was funny at all.
“What?” Isobel repeated, smiling, waiting to be in on the joke.
“She hates me, doesn’t she?” I asked, although it really wasn’t a question so much as an observation.
Isobel’s smile faded. She wrapped her arm around my shoulder and gave a little shake. “Come on, don’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s true. She fucking hates me.”
“Your mother does not hate you, I promise. She just—she needs more time, that’s all.”
I nodded, tried to believe she was right.
“And by the way,” she added, an afterthought, “you really shouldn’t say ‘fucking’ in front of your aunt. I mean, who the fuck raised you, anyway?”
I laughed. Hard. Isobel always seemed to know what to say to make me feel better.
She sat down on the top step, patting the spot next to her. “On the bright side,” she continued as I sat down, “your dad seems to be handling it all really well.”
It’s true, he was. Or at least, he thought he was.
Yesterday he’d offered to help me set up my telescope, which he’d never shown any interest in before. And last night before it got dark, he took me to the garage and said I was going to help him fix the gutter falling off the side of Isobel’s house. He handed me tools from my grandfather’s workbench, one by one, telling me what each one was called—brackets and hangers and screws and drill bits. When he placed the power drill in my hands, it felt heavier than it looked. I wondered if he would have asked me for help last summer, back when my voice was still high and light.
We carried the tall, rickety ladder and set it up next to the side of the house. Dad climbed up one side of the ladder, and I climbed up the other. He seemed so confident in me when he told me to keep a firm hand underneath the gutter while he drilled the screws in place. He smiled like he was proud. I’m not sure if he was proud of me, per se. Maybe he was proud of himself for trying to get on board, in whatever way he knew how.
Then to top it off, he took me outside and popped the hood of the station wagon, started showing me where to check the oil and coolant, and demonstrated how to go about changing a tire. It was like he was trying to have some kind of odd medley of makeup, rite-of-passage, TV-father-son moments with me, all over the course of two days. When I casually told him how I would’ve gladly done stuff like this with him even before, he just said, “I know that,” but I think he missed the point I was trying, gently, to make: My ability to use tools and fix things had nothing to do with whether I was a man or not.
“Yeah, I know,” I finally told Isobel. “It’s weird, though. I thought for sure it would end up being the other way around—just when I thought I had them figured out, they go and change things up on me.”
“You know, that’s probably what they’re thinking about you too, kid.”
She had me there. I tried to look at everything from their point of view. I really did. But I was still so confused about their reactions. Mom had always been the one who was cool about everything, so understanding, so supportive of anything I ever wanted to do or be.
In second grade when I wanted to quit Girl Scouts after the first meeting.
In third grade when I flipped out backstage at the school concert because of the dress, the tights, and the fucking bow in my hair that matched the rest of the girls in the chorus.
In fourth grade when I told them that I despised the name Christina and would only answer to Chris from then on, which is what most everyone called me anyway.
In fifth grade when I refused to try on anything but boy’s clothes during our annual back-to-school shopping trip.
In sixth grade when she finally let me get the haircut I really wanted. I remember it so clearly, the way the hairdresser was beaming as she spun me around in the chair to face the mirror, how it felt to run my hands along the shaved sides of my head. That was the first time I’d ever looked at myself and thought, This is me.
In seventh grade when I told them I liked girls.
In eighth grade when things got really bad and I was getting bullied every day about my hair and clothes and liking girls.
And then in ninth grade, I really started to feel like a stranger in my body, the body that had served me so well up until then. The body that used to feel so light and free and unencumbered, the body that could run faster than any other kid in the neighborhood, the body that had always felt strong and lean, was suddenly weighed down with new softness and curves that more than embarrassed me; they made me want to hide away from the world, from myself. It wasn’t that I felt ashamed, exactly, just wrong. And the worst part was that this new body seemed to come with a whole new set of rules, expectations of ways I was supposed to think and act and be. Maybe those rules had always been there, but they were now being ruthlessly enforced at every turn.
When I talked to Mom about it, she tried to tell me every girl feels what I felt. But I wondered if that could be true. Could it be possible that every girl could feel, in such excruciating exactness, the world rearranging itself around her, setting up all new borders and limits? Was every girl walking around in such pain, feeling the price of her body like I did? Maybe. But for me, that price was too high. I wasn’t just losing myself; I was becoming someone I was not. And that scared me.
Anyway, Mom was the one who dealt with all of that.
Dad, he was good when it came to the fun stuff. It was easy to cheer me on at the track meets, and it was easy to say “good job” when I brought home straight As. But with everything else, he just sort of kept his distance, nodding along. He didn’t have much of an opinion on anything, and was content to let Mom do the heavy lifting. I try not to think about a lot of the things that happened before.
• • •
Running helps. It always has. I took the gravel driveway down to the main road, and my feet immediately fell into an easy rhythm with my breathing. I was getting stronger every day. The sun was going down at my back, my shadow stretching out before me, measuring the pace, pulling me forward, keeping me company as I sped past the field and the blue house and the barn and the trees.
When I was driving this road the other day, I hadn’t noticed the incline, but I felt it now, burning into my muscles, hurting in the best way. It was like my body could gauge when I’d reached one mile, two miles, three. It was then that my lungs started to ache, the pressure in my ribs becoming almost too much. But I ran harder, ran through it. I told myself to push just a little farther. Keep breathing. Keep moving.
Up ahead, I saw another gravel driveway spilling out onto the road, and I let myself slow down to a jog—I’d make it to the driveway and then circle back around and return the way I’d come. But as I reached it, I saw that the driveway quickly got lost beneath a thick cover of overgrown weeds and brush. There was a chain strung between two of the big trees alongside the driveway with a sign attached that read: PRIVATE PROPERTY. I tried to peer in, but it was just woods as far as I could see. Yet something caught my eye, a spark of metal glinting in the sunlight.
I looked both ways to make sure there was no one in sight before I stepped over the chain. A few feet in, I could see that it was a handlebar: a bike. I was sure it was her bike, the girl who I almost ran over. An image of her flashed through my mind like a photograph: the pajama pants and her neck and her hair flying through the wind.
I could make out the beginnings of a foot-trodden dirt path. I took one step, and a wave of panic sliced through me. The familiar pinpricks in my chest, the uneven breaths I couldn’t control, shallow then deep, my whole body flashing hot then cold, the sensation in my fingertips going tingly. It was that old fear working its way, slow and mean, through my body, because the last time I’d followed a dirt path leading into the woods, I’d almost died.
• • •
Usually I practiced after school on the track, but when the weather was nice like it was that day—the perfect end-of-September chill in the air—our coach would let us run on the trails that wove through the woods behind the school. Coleton had joined track that year. I think partially just to hang out with me, but mostly to appease his parents. They didn’t like the fact that he sat around playing video games and reading comic books and watching sci-fi movies and getting into heated debates online about all of the above. His parents never really got him, and they hated that other kids thought he was a weirdo, but that’s probably why we became friends in the first place.
When we started high school, his parents told him he needed to join something, expand his social circle. Which was code for: I made them very nervous. They thought it was my fault that he was constantly getting bullied, and I knew they blamed me for that time someone had written HOMO on his locker in giant red letters. I knew they called him names like that for hanging out with me, even though it didn’t even make any sense because I was a girl. Well, sort of.
Anyway, he wasn’t very fast and didn’t have much stamina. I tried to hold back that day, since it was just the two of us on the trail, but I left him behind pretty quickly.
Underneath the music from my headphones, I thought I heard someone call out my name. I thought maybe it was Cole, but when I turned, I saw it was another kid from school: Ben. He was off the path a ways, deeper in the woods, along with two other boys from my class, Tobey and Jake. That part wasn’t too unusual; sometimes kids cut through the woods on their way home.
“Hey, wait up!” Ben shouted.
That was the part that was unusual. I glanced behind me again, not thinking much of it because he couldn’t possibly be talking to me. We’d gone to the same school our entire lives, and I don’t think Ben and I had ever exchanged even one word. But there he was, jogging up behind me. I slowed down and came to a stop too abruptly, messing up my rhythm.
“Huh?” I finally answered, pulling my earbuds out, music seeping into the air.
“Dude, you gotta come see this,” he said to me in this relaxed way, like we talked all the time. “We got some fireworks,” he continued, gesturing behind him to where Tobey and Jake were waiting. “We’re about to go set ’em off. You wanna come?”
I shrugged, pretending to consider it before politely declining. “No, I don’t think so,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “I gotta keep moving.” I took a couple of steps, about to sprint off before my heart rate went down too much.
“Fine,” he said, holding up his hands like I’d insulted him. “Just trying to be friendly. Sorry. Won’t happen again.” This was another one of those unspoken rules I’d been getting more and more familiar with. When you’re a girl, some boys will try to make you feel guilty for saying no, regardless of the circumstance. The truly terrible part is that sometimes they succeed.
I should’ve known better. But it felt so damn good to think, even for one misguided second, that maybe they really were just trying to be friendly. That maybe they saw me. Not the tomboy, not the dyke, not the freak. Just me. Wasn’t Mom always saying I needed to give people a chance to see how great I really was on the inside?
“Wait,” I said as he started walking away. “I guess I can come for a minute.”
He twisted around and smiled, saying, “Cool,” in that casual way. “Come on.”
As I followed the three of them deeper into the woods, getting farther off the path, I kept looking behind me to see if maybe Coleton had caught up after all. But there was no one in sight.
A small voice inside me whispered just one word: Run.
But I had gotten pretty good at ignoring the voices in my head.