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He’s not here.
And with that realization, comes the fear.
Dad came back. He took him.
Mom gives me a gentle smile and reaches over, clasping my hands. “It’s okay. Squirt’s fine. H—” Her mouth opens, but the sound gets lost as she seems to fumble for words. “Squirt’s upstairs. I wanted to talk to you alone.”
I frown. “What is it?”
Wetting her lips, she gives my hands a squeeze, and says, “Do you know what transgender means?”
Brows bunching, I start to shake my head, when I remember something I saw on TV once. “Wait, like someone who gets a sex change?”
Mom tips her head to the side. “Sort of.”
I blink.
“It’s a little more complicated than that.” Sighing, she nods as if psyching herself up for something. “Your…brother…is transgender.”
“Squirt?”
She nods, watching me carefully.
I search her face, and wrinkle my nose. “Squirt wants a sex change? He’s six.”
Mom coughs, quickly covering a laugh. She shakes her head. “No, no, it’s, um…like I said, it’s a little more complicated than that.” She looks down and mutters. “More like a lot.”
“I don’t get it.”
Swallowing with an audible click, Mom pulls back, sitting up straight. “When Squirt was born, the doctors determined, because of, well….anatomy” —she waves a hand—“that Squirt must be a boy.” She pauses pointedly, eyes darting between mine. “But sometimes…the bodies we’re born into, don’t align with how we feel about ourselves.”
Looking down at my lap, I try to process what she’s trying to tell me.
“Squirt’s one of those people. H–She was born in the body of what most people would assume was a boy. But inside—in here”—she points to my chest, over my heart, then taps my temple—“she’s a girl. And she wants to live as a girl, not as a boy. She wants people to see her as the girl she really is.”
“Is that why Squirt flipped out last summer? When we got haircuts…”
My mind flashes back to that day, just before the start of the new school year. Mom had taken us to the barber for a trim for me, and a big chop for my brother, since it looked like he’d never even had a trim. When brushed, it was just past his shoulders.
I thought he rocked it. Especially when he’d wear his favorite beanie—a black one with pink skulls on it that he found at the flea market not long after he came to live with us.
Now that I think about it, I remember telling him that’s a girl’s hat, just in case he didn’t know, and he’d looked up at me with a funny expression on his face. I didn’t think too much about it at the time. I just shrugged, and shoved it on his head, and paid the vendor.
As for his hair…
Well, it had a lot of dead ends. That’s what Mom said. She also just assumed he’d want a cut like mine. We all did, the barber included. Because…
Because he’s a boy.
Because we thought he was a boy.
Up until that moment, I’d never seen Squirt cry. But when they turned him around to see himself in the mirror, his hair cut all the way to his scalp on the sides, and left floppy on top…
I shake my head, a pang blooming in my chest. I rub the spot with my fingers.
I was scared. The way he screamed…
I thought the barber hurt him somehow.
