AJ moved quickly to pick the lock on his mother’s closet door. She was on her way to the market and this was his chance. She had always kept it locked during his entire childhood and he never thought much about it. But since talking to his father and seeing her face on the FBI’s most wanted list his curiosity got the best of him. He didn’t want to believe all the horrible things that he was exposed too on the internet. Granted he had grown bitter towards her over the years from all the moving around, and the fact that they always seemed to barely be scraping by. For the life of him he couldn’t understand why she couldn’t get a job like the rest of his friend’s moms. It’s like she didn’t want any better for herself. Whenever he questioned her motives she always broke down in tears and told him that she was suffering from severe depression. At the end of the day he always took her side. After all who was he to question his mother’s suffering?
Just as he was about to give up and grab another tool the lock popped open. His heart raced as the door creaked open. Once he was inside he flipped on the light switch. Everything seemed normal on the surface however all it would take was for him to simply move a few clothes and shoes boxes out of the way for the truth to be revealed.
A large black trunk sat against the back wall that had been strategically camouflaged. As luck would have it, it was unlocked. AJ braced himself for what he would find inside. He grabbed the lid and slowly let it fall back. On top were a ton of wigs and bags of hair. Underneath were several sets of men’s clothing, including men’s shoes. He slowly pulled out each piece for further examination. Next he noticed a rectangle box in a satin bag. Once he slid it out he opened the lid revealing what looked like six dildos in different sizes.
“What the hell?”
Adrian did know want to know that much about his momma if she was using these to play with herself. However as he hurried to put the case back in the bag he noticed that the lid said Velvi Vaginal Dilator.
“This is what they said the men with the fake coochies have to use to keep it open.”
He remembered reading up on this during his research. It was becoming blatantly clear that something strange was going on. Maybe it was true after all. Pebbles really had been a man. Before he made his final judgment he decided to dig deeper.
He then pulled out a photo album. The very first picture was of a young boy. He peeled back the sticky paper and removed the photo. The back of it read: Peyton, age 7. He turned the page to see two pictures of the same boy, except this time he was in a photograph with two other children, a girl and a baby boy. When he looked at the back of those they said Peyton, Bria and Meeko. Were these his siblings?
The next few pages had pictures of the same boy a few years older. In one of the pictures the boy had on girls’ clothing.
AJ swallowed the lump in his throat as he fought back the tears. He recognized the boy in the picture as his mother. He sat on the closet floor and flipped through the entire album, revealing the identity of Tasha, his dad’s sister and once the best friend of Peyton. They appeared to be around 13 or 14 years of age, and finally one last picture of them that looked to be when they around 18 years of age. Peyton was once again dressed like a female.
AJ cried as he raked through the contents of the chest before pulling out another album. The front of the book was Peyton’s entire journey through his sex change documented every step of the way. The tears fell freely as he finally got to the end and saw Pebbles as she was today, as a woman.
So it was true. He was now faced with the reality that the person he thought was his mother was really an imposter and that she had been lying to him his entire life.
“I hate that bitch!” he yelled as he pulled the entire contents of the trunk out onto the floor. “What the fuck else is she hiding?”
When he found the wedding pictures of Pebbles and Adrian he sat on the floor staring at them, trembling and sobbing. This was the first time he got to actually see what his father looked like. The entire time she had told him that he walked out on them when he was a baby. But here sat the photographic evidence of all three of them as a family when AJ was an infant, at the hospital as well as shots of them in the nursery at home.
Upon reaching the very bottom of the trunk he found a secret compartment with a latch. Based on what he had already found out he didn’t know if he even had the strength to see what it would reveal. What he would find this time would cause his head to spin. There were hundreds of newspaper clippings that documented the murders of Tasha and his surrogate Fallyn, naming Pebbles as the killer, as well as the murder of Adrian. She told him that he wanted nothing to do with them, when in fact she left him for dead once he found out her true identity. There were also articles from various newspapers discussing the nationwide man hunt for Peyton aka Pebbles.
Everything was true. Pebbles was a sinister killer who had been lying to him his entire life. As he staggered out of the closet his first instinct was to call the police however his shock and disbelief had now turned into pure rage.
His eyes were bloodshot and he gritted his teeth as he made his way to the kitchen to wait for Pebble’s to return. It all made sense now. All the running and moving from place to place while he was growing up, never getting the chance to make any real friends, all the stealing, even the occasions that he questioned her about hearing a man’s voice coming from her room. It was Peyton the entire time.
It suddenly dawned on him that if she would go as far as killing her best friend and attempting to kill the man she loved, what would make him any different? There was no telling how she would react if she was cornered and felt threatened. AJ decided that it was best that he grab himself a weapon. He pulled the biggest knife from the butchers block, sat at the kitchen table and waited.