I SLAMMED THE DOOR BEHIND me. I didn’t mean to.
“Chris?” Isobel called from the living room. I tossed my keys onto the kitchen table, just as she came into the room. “You’re home early.”
“Yeah,” was all I could say, my voice tight and strained. I’d driven around for at least an hour, trying to calm myself down, but I still had all of this adrenaline racing through my body and my brain. I felt like I’d have to run a damn marathon to get it all out of me.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Did someone do something to you?”
“No, god!” I was pacing, but the kitchen was too small for pacing so it felt more like I was trapped in a cage, so I tried to stand still. “I just—I don’t know why I even bothered. People are assholes everywhere.”
I started pacing again, but no, that was worse. “Forget it. I’m just—I’m going upstairs.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” she said, and she was holding her arms out toward me. “Come on, talk to me.”
I backed away from her and held my hands up so she wouldn’t try to touch me. I could not handle being touched right now, and I hated myself for that.
“I really, really just want to be alone, Aunt Isobel. Okay? Please.”
“Okay,” she relented. “But I’m here. All right?”
I nodded and started walking away.
“I love you, kid,” she said to my back. I couldn’t bring myself to respond.
I made it up to my bedroom, and even though I wanted to slam that door too, I didn’t. I toed my sneakers off and kicked them across the room. I threw my jacket on the floor. Didn’t even bother unbuttoning my shirt, just tore it over my head, balled it up, and chucked it into the corner—my undershirt is always the last article of clothing to go. I was taking off my jeans when my phone vibrated in my pocket—it was Coleton.
How’s the party going?
I regretted telling him about the party, regretted getting excited about it in the first place. I regretted all the extra time I took getting ready, all that stupid optimism. I regretted how proud I was for a minute when I thought about how I no longer had to double and triple up on sports bras and spandex tops because Dad had willingly—no, happily—let me use his credit card to buy real binders. I regretted how confident I felt as I looked in the mirror and smoothed my hands over my chest. But the thing I really fucking regretted was thinking that maybe I’d actually made a couple of friends here, or that life really could be different, that I could just feel normal for once, whatever the hell “normal” even meant.
I looked at the screen for a moment, considering a response, but set my phone facedown on the nightstand. Later, I told myself, I’ll talk to him later.
I tried to go outside to the deck, but the clouds were thick, the moon bright and hazy, drowning out the stars. I went back inside and turned off all the lights before I finished undressing. I had to fumble through the dark for my pajamas. I couldn’t risk catching a glimpse of my body in the mirror—not tonight, not when I was already hating everyone and everything, not when Coleton was clueless and the stars were hiding and Aunt Isobel was not the one person I really wished I could talk to, though sometimes, at the right angles, she looks a lot like her.
I lay down in bed and stared at the ceiling. I pulled the covers over me, then threw them off again. I sat up and repositioned my pillow, lay back down, closed my eyes, opened them. I had messed everything up with Maia, just when it had seemed like maybe things were going somewhere with her. But I couldn’t even think about that. This whole night had scrambled my brain—pushing things around, rearranging my thoughts like furniture, making my mind a maze of old memories bumping up against the new ones, confusing me. I closed my eyes and there it was, the inevitable, moving forward from the place in the back of my mind: That day. Everything that happened next.
• • •
My parents had pressed charges against all three of the boys who beat me up. They were expelled from school for the rest of the year. Their parents had to pay my medical bills. They’d be on probation until they each turned eighteen. But big fucking deal—they had already finished with their stupid community service while I was still laid up in bed.
My two broken ribs were pretty much better by then, though those first weeks of breathing exercises with Isobel had been excruciating—I’d have just as soon stopped breathing altogether if that had been an option. The surgery for my broken nose and the orbital fracture of my right eye socket had gone well, and I had recovered from my bruised liver and sprained left ankle all within a few weeks. But I’d still had to wear that back brace for the spinal fracture and go through weeks and weeks of physical therapy before it fully healed.
Coleton was the one who kept me from going over the edge. He was my only real connection to the outside world, especially after Isobel left to go back home. Most days were spent sitting or lying in bed, finishing my online classes in no time at all because they were so fucking easy. After my eye was better, I read like a fiend. A book a day, sometimes more.
Then at night, after my parents were in bed, I watched all the videos on the Internet—every last one I could find. About being trans. About transitioning. I didn’t need to watch them all, though, because within the first thirty seconds of the first video, this guy was sitting there already telling my whole life story. Someone on the other side of the world, whom I didn’t know and whom I would never meet, knew me at my core. I always believed there was an infinite universe out there, and somehow, I was supposed to be a part of it. At least, I tried very hard to believe that. And for maybe the first time in my entire life, I was finally beginning to see a way to make that happen.
The voice in my head started changing then—no longer telling me I was unacceptable. It was a different voice, but one I’d heard before. It was the voice that had told me to run that day in the woods, the one that had been whispering to me in a million different languages every day, telling me all the ways that this was not the life I was supposed to be living. The only thing that was right was my mind. My mind wasn’t confused. It had always known itself. All alone in my bedroom, day in, day out, that voice got louder and stronger, until I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
Isobel was the first person I told. She didn’t even pause a beat before she let me know she was behind me forever, no matter what—those were her exact words: Forever, she told me. No matter what.
The day I finally told Coleton, he had come over after school as he did most afternoons. He dropped off my new library books and talked about how much everything sucked at school without me, which I appreciated hearing, even if I knew he was the only one who felt that way. We played video games like we always did.
But after hours of running through the same battle and losing horribly, he finally said, “I probably really need to get home after this try.”
I knew it had to be now or I’d never work up the courage again. I paused the game. I took a deep breath—I’d gotten so good at breathing deep that it barely hurt anymore. He looked over at me like he knew it was something big.
“What?” he asked.
“I just—I wanna talk to you about something.”
He set the controller down on the floor and turned toward me. “Okay.”
“So you know how there are some people who are born one way and then, they like, change their bodies?” I began.
“Okay,” he repeated, squinting at me.
“Well, it’s like their bodies don’t match their minds.”
“Oh-kay,” he said again, less certain this time.
I paused, took another full, deep breath. I wasn’t explaining it right, I knew that—I was just having trouble saying the word, like getting the actual word out of my mouth: transgender. It felt like a forbidden word, a word from a language nobody ever spoke out loud, or at least nobody I’d ever known.
“Like someone who has the body of a boy when they’re supposed to be a girl. Or you have the body of a girl when everything else about you is like a boy—I mean, not like a boy, is a boy. You are a boy. And these people, they end up changing their bodies.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding again, understanding, getting it, at last. “And?”
“Well, that’s—me,” I said.
He stared at the carpet, in the space between us, for what felt like forever. “That seems pretty extreme, don’t you think?”
My heart started pounding. I couldn’t tell if it was out of anger or sadness or fear. This was not the reaction I’d been expecting from him. “Why are you saying that?” I asked, hearing the edge in my voice.
“Listen, you already look like a guy. I mean, no offense or anything, but most people wouldn’t even know. You remember those girls we met at the mall that one time?” he asked, in that tone he often used back then, like he was trying to cheer me up.
“Yeah, that one time. That one time I got a girl’s number.” He was always bringing that up whenever I needed a boost, except it wasn’t going to cut it this time. “But then I was too afraid to ever call her, because what would be the point? God, it’s not about girls, Coleton!”
“Well, I don’t know!” He threw his hands up. “I don’t know what to say, okay?”
“And besides, I don’t look like a guy. When we were kids, maybe I used to, but—it’s not about just looking like a guy, anyway.”
“Well, what’s it about, then?”
“It’s not about looking like anything. It’s about . . . being. Being who I really am, a whole person. Not just someone who confuses people and gets weird looks all the time.”
He considered this for a moment before responding. “You know I’ve never thought of you as, like, a girl-girl, right?” Three months earlier I might’ve believed him. Then again, three months earlier he might’ve meant it.
He looked down at the spot on the carpet again. “Is that what this is about?” he asked. “Because you can’t let them—”
“No!” I interrupted. “That, and all of this”—I gestured around my room, at my back brace, my books, our game, at everything my life had become—“it just made me realize I can’t wait any longer to start living or my world is just going to keep getting smaller and smaller. I can’t be afraid anymore. This is who I’ve always been. I can’t keep lying to myself and everyone else.”
He sat there, quietly, for what felt like minutes but had to have only been seconds. “I’m not trying to argue with you. I just want to make sure you’ve really thought about it.”
“Believe me, I pretty much think about nothing else.”
“All right,” he concluded with a shrug.
“All right,” I repeated. “Is it, though?”
“Yeah, of course it is,” he said, picking his controller up off the floor and nodding toward mine, still held tight between my hands. “Come on, one more?” he asked.
As we sat there playing, I was surprised things felt a lot like they always did, except a lot lighter. A few minutes in, he started laughing and paused the game again, turned to look at me with wide eyes. “Holy shit, what are Joe and Sheila gonna say?”
And even though my parents’ reaction to what I’d just told him was definitely not going to be a laughing matter, I laughed so hard that my lungs and ribs and back ached. If things could’ve stayed like that between me and Coleton, then I think we’d have been fine.
So, at 2:43 in the morning I sat up, the smell of woodsmoke still stuck to my skin and hair, and I picked my phone up off the nightstand. I tapped out the only response that felt possible, even if it was a lie: It was awesome.