The little boy loved the clothes his older sister wore; his mother spent long hours at the sewing machine making dresses while he played at her side or watched cartoons. She gave him bits of fabric, useless scraps whose texture and variety of hues fascinated him; he fetched dolls from the bedroom and held the cotton swatches against them just as his mother did with her daughter, adjusting for size before starting to sew.

He didn’t understand why he couldn’t wear the same bright colours that his mother’s hands fashioned into gorgeous outfits for his sister. Of course, she outfitted him too: with suits, a jacket and pants, a plain coat, striped overalls, nothing special, nothing really pretty, no ruffles, ribbons, lace, nothing flowery, nothing sparkly. One day as his mother was packing away the clothes the children had outgrown, he grabbed a dress from the pile and said, “Me want this!”

She smiled, “You’re a boy, honey, boys don’t wear dresses!”

He cried, “Me want, me too!”

Tears pearled below his eyelids, his blue eyes steely; his mother sighed, removed his sweater and shorts and pulled on the dress with its tiny pink-and-yellow butterflies and a bow at the back. He walked over to the freestanding mirror in his parents’ room and exclaimed, “Pretty! Me pretty!”

His mother’s laughter troubled him, something hurtful in her mirth; she turned him away from the mirror and, looking into his eyes, corrected him, “You’re handsome, sweetheart, handsome … My little boy is handsome!”

He wore the dress all day and through his afternoon nap and forgot what he was wearing until his sister came home from school. Her anger: “That’s my dress, take it off right now! Maman, he’s wearing my dress!”

She knew the dress was too small for her, but they had a habit of bickering over every last little thing; their mother nipped the argument in the bud giving each of them a vanilla ice cream cone. Her daughter giggled, circling her brother and licking her treat, “Huh! I didn’t know I had a sister, you look so funny!”

Her brother ignored her and kept his outfit on; when his father came home from work, he smiled, amused, and picked up his son just as he did every night without saying a word, only a wink to his wife. Later, after dinner, Uncle Jean-Paul dropped by, his booming, mean-spirited voice cutting the young boy’s heart to the quick; slimy contempt trickled over his body from the gaze of a man so tall the boy had to tilt his head back to see his face.

“Lookee here, you a little girl now, m’boy? Not fixin’ to be a homo, are you?”

This time the child blushed; ashamed, he turned to his mother, “No more play, Mamma, dress off.”