AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I swallow.
“Or do you think that Tina and Blake won’t be together then?”
“If we’re all babies, why would they be together?”
He shrugs. “Blake’s twenty-five. That’s old enough to know.”
“How on earth would you know anything about relationships?” Between the hangover and the nerves, the words slip out.
He looks over at me, and for a long moment, I get the feeling that he’s considering his next words. His fingers tap on the counter.
It’s at this moment—with the hammer-like pain of a headache pulsing through my head—that I realize the truth.
I love Tina.
I hate living with Tina and Blake. It’s not that they’re inconsiderate. It’s not that they’re coupled off and I’m not. But they’re here, doing couply-things, inviting Blake’s terrible father over and not warning me about it. None of this is wrong. They live here. I just don’t like it.
I hate not feeling secure in my own space. I hate feeling like I can’t complain. It reminds me of living with Anj. It reminds me of…
No. Not going there. All my complaints swell in my chest, a tight bubble of irrational need.
“Good point.” Adam Reynolds shakes his head, and I’m reminded of that lion, scenting a wildebeest. “How the fuck would I know dick about interpersonal relationships?”
Great. I’ve offended him. I gather up my bag and retreat to my room with a whispered excuse.
I hate everything.
* * *
JAY
* * *
It’s almost eleven at night.
Today has been ridiculous, packed with faculty meetings, a university committee that was never supposed to take up so much time but which will end up being the primary university service component of my tenure application, an unexpected conference call with a colleague…and Em’s messages, which I haven’t known how to answer.
Your inconsistent boundaries are hurting me. I felt that one. Felt it deep in me.
But tomorrow promises to be equally terrible. The final committee report is due. A faculty candidate is coming through, and I’ve been drafted as the New Guy/Representative College of Chemistry Minority to be in the group that takes her to lunch. Gabe is giving a seminar up the hill in the evening, so everything I put off today has to be shoved into my nonexistent spare time tomorrow.
And I can’t imagine what Em must be feeling. I haven’t been able to condense my response into my available time. I’m staring at my screen, trying to figure out what to say. How to say it. What I’m feeling.
Then I see she’s writing. A message pops up a moment later.
So the only thing worse than repeated late-night profanity-laced messages would probably be repeated apologies. I’m mortified. I’m sorry. Your friendship is really important to me.
My lip curls, and I manage to condense my complicated, fucked-up feelings into one single word.
Don’t, I type.
She doesn’t respond. And now that I’ve broken through that barrier, I can’t stop.
Don’t apologize. Don’t stop having expectations for me.
Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.
She responds with her own tentative single syllable.
A.?
I’ve read her messages a dozen times in the last day. I know them by heart, every last excoriating word.
And maybe that’s why I tell her the thing I didn’t realize until it’s sliding out of my fingers.
Let me lay this shit out on the table.
I know you’re interested in me. You want to know what my name is. What I look like. You want to maybe meet up sometime and see if our real-life chemistry is as good as it is online.
I don’t wait for a response.
On my part…
I stare at my phone. Thinking, trying to figure out how to tell her what she means to me. I don’t know how to put it in words. And then I do.
Imagine me drawing Maslow’s pyramid of needs, I write. At the base are the fundamental requirements: food, shelter, wifi.
This gets a response from her. Ha.
On the tiers above are things like social acceptance. Basic scientific research. Baklava.
Of course, Em says. The well-known baklava tier.
I take a breath, and put it out there. You do not show up in the drawing.
While I’m writing my next line, her response comes through. Gee. Thanks.
I shut my eyes and hit send. You are the table the drawing rests on. Em, I’m pretty much in love with you.
Fuck. That’s out there, then. She doesn’t say anything, and I can imagine her shock reverberating back through my phone.
I shoved you away pretty hard in December. It was the anniversary of my little brother’s death. I should be over it. I’m not.
I don’t think I’ll ever be over it. She doesn’t say anything in response. I only know Em is there and listening because my messages change from delivered to read, one by one.
In high school I was… Popular is the wrong word, but maybe respected? I was in all Honors classes. On the tennis team etc etc. I was a workaholic then, too.
I’m typing more slowly now.
My little brother was a freshman when I was a senior. I knew he wasn’t popular. I knew kids teased him. But I thought he’d figure it all out. Kids do. I was busy. When shit was really bad, I let him eat lunch with me and my friends.
I don’t want to finish the story, but now I have to.
My parents were busy. My mom is a software engineer, and she had a project on deadline. My dad is an author, and he was also on deadline. And I was busy, dammit, because I’m always busy.
Received, the message status says. Then: read.
I go on.
I didn’t know how bad it was. Typing those words hurts, because they sound like an excuse. I don’t give myself excuses. I don’t deserve excuses. I should have known. I was at tennis practice the day my brother posted on his LiveJournal that he wouldn’t kill himself as long as one person smiled at him on the way home.
He got one response: “Go ahead. No one cares.” By the time I got home, it was too late.
Oh, A., she finally writes. I’m sorry.
Yeah. So am I. I should have been there. But it was worse than that.
The girl who wrote it… We were dating. She was sick of Chase eating with us at lunch.
Oh, Em says. No.
She didn’t think he would do it, I respond. I’ll give her that much. But of all the things my parents ever asked me to do, “Look after your brother” was the big one. And I fucked it up. I’m kind of a mess. I’m freaked out at the idea of people relying on me. I’m freaked out at the idea of them not. I feel like I’m a failure no matter what I do, and I’m afraid of failing you.
A., she writes. It’s okay.
It isn’t. I don’t want to hurt you, I tell her. That was all. I didn’t want to hurt you, and I did.
There’s a whole tangle of other emotions. I’m not sure how to explain to her that I want her to expect things of me. That I’m afraid I’ll mess it up anyway. I basically said everything with I’m pretty much in love with you.
It’s late as it is.
Hey, she writes. So. I have some issues, too. I get it.
Yeah.
When I was twelve, she says, my parents kicked me out of the house. It’s more complicated than that. I went back for some summers to try therapy with them. It never worked out.
While I’m trying to digest the scope of that, she continues.
My mom’s mother got divorced, and people looked down on them. Or maybe mom looked down on herself. She didn’t want her kids to deal with any kind of stigma. She had everything planned out for us. Then she got me.
I squint at the phone.
And I was not a boy, Em writes. Even though that’s the gender they assigned me at birth.
It takes a moment for the clue to sink in. For me to understand that she’s telling me that she’s transgender. To remember mon
ths ago, when she sent me that picture of those shoes and told me that she wore them to remind herself that she deserved to feel pretty and feminine.
It all makes sense. I want to gather her up and tell her that she deserves her shoes. That she never deserved what happened to her.
Em’s been typing as I try to align my thoughts. So she’d scold and complain and threaten. I have this thing I do where I just keep quiet, and keep quiet, until I cross some line and suddenly—well, I guess you know now.
Yeah, I do.
We had a huge fight when I was twelve, Em says. Mom and Dad and me, and they told me I’d either go to the military boys’ school they’d picked out or I’d have to leave.
Shit, I type. That sucks.
My older brother gave me a hundred bucks, she writes, and I took a bus up to my grandmother’s. I had no idea what she would do. I was scared the whole way, but she was my best hope. Even though she was an observant Catholic. When I visited her, she always used to go to mass and take us with her. She prayed to the Virgin Mary for miracles. She had a portrait of Thomas More in her office.
Shit, I write. I’m not going to like the way this turns out, am I?
But she’d always been… Nice, I guess. I arrived on her doorstep at 11 at night and told her everything. I asked her if she thought God could make me into a girl. If that was the kind of miracle he did.
