Here is a list of everything that is wrong with you, Harry typed.
He reached up and scratched his ear. His ear was always itchy lately. He thought there might be something wrong with it, like scabies or mites, or something even worse. He Googled “scabies.” Again. He was pretty convinced that was it: tiny little bugs burrowing through his skin. He scratched his ear harder. Maybe he picked them up at the library when he leaned his head down on the sofa. Or maybe on the bus to the stupid day camp he had to go to while his parents were at work.
The day camp was terrible in more ways than that. It was particularly terrible because it was a camp for girls.
Thinking about it gave him the elevator-stomach feeling he hated, where it felt like your body separated from your head somehow when an elevator went too fast. The elevator in the building at his dad’s old job in Victoria, where they used to live, did that.
Harry scratched his ear again, so hard it was probably bleeding. It was just a coincidence that it was the same ear that got hurt the year before when a group of boys in his class decided it would be funny to beat him up.
They beat him up because they hated him for knowing who he was.
That is, they beat him up because even though some dumb doctor said he was a girl when he was born, he was really a boy.
The boys who beat him up were not the kind of kids who understood things like that.
No one in that town was.
Maybe no one anywhere was.
Only on the Internet did people get it.
So moving was a good idea, for sure. The trouble was that his dad moved with them. Obviously.
And so did Harry’s “issue.” That’s what his dad called it.
Harry deleted everything that he’d typed and started a new list. He wrote the day at the top of it, which was Tuesday. A list of all the things that were wrong with him would take too long. He’d stick to all the things that were wrong with Tuesday. It was easier.
Harry scratched his ear.
Tuesday:
1. Everything
2. Itchy ear
3. Day camp
4. School starts back next week
5. GENDER—having to explain
6. Shut up shut up shut up shut up shutup shutupshutupshutuppppppp
Harry stopped typing. The day-of-the-week list was a dumb idea. Everything was wrong, every day, and mostly the same things were wrong, and the same things were itchy.
Harry was suddenly too bored of the topic of himself to try writing another list.
He wanted to scream.
Lists put things in order and made him feel like he had a handle on things, but he didn’t actually have a handle on anything at all except for pretty much every Mario game ever. Maybe he’d have a handle on everything else the next day.
Maybe nothing would be itchy.
Probably not, though.
A good list always made him feel better. But a bad list, not so much.
He deleted the whole list and shut off the laptop and turned on the PlayStation instead.
This is better, he thought. Video games never hurt your feelings. Video games never looked at you funny when your dad called you Harriet, loudly, at pickup time or when you were the only boy at a girls’ day camp. Video games never had so darn much to explain.
The game beeped and played a song. Harry leaned forward to see it better. “Yes!” he said.
His character ran across a tightrope and swung down a tunnel. “Gotcha!”