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“How’d that work for you?” Avery asks, letting his voice joke a little.
Ryan mocks up a sigh. “Well…I went out with Tammy Goodwin for almost all of fourth grade. Really serious. I mean, we bought each other stuffed animals on Valentine’s Day. That’s practically marriage, right? By high school, I knew who I was. And by the time I told Caitlin, I wasn’t even surprised by how unsurprised she was. She took me out on this river, in this canoe, and we’d talk about things.She’s not that old—she’s about to turn thirty-three—and she’s had about as much luck with guys as I have. She’s the one who convinced me I shouldn’t try to hide. She said hiding never worked. She told me Dad 1.0 spent so much time hiding that it was impossible for him to be happy here. He isn’t gay—I guess that makes it sound like he’s gay. He isn’t. But he didn’t want to stay here. He never wanted to stay here. He just wasn’t strong enough to tell my mom until it was way too late.”
“Do you have much of a relationship with him now?” Avery asks.
“Nah. Maybe because I was so young when he left, there can be long stretches when I forget he even exists. He’s just not a part of the equation, you know? Sometimes he’ll call on my birthday. And when I started high school, he added me onto this group email where he sends jokes to his friends, and I was like,this is too weird,so I asked him to take me off. He never responded…but he did take me off. I visited him once in California, and it was a disaster. This was a year or two before the joke email—I was twelve, but he planned it out like I was seven. Like, he genuinely thought I’d be excited to meet Mickey and Donald and Pluto, not ride the ‘adult’ rides. I mean, I could tell he was trying hard, but in the wrong ways. He thought Disneyland could make everything better. Like, I’d be able to overlook his basic absence in my life and run back to my mom and tell her what an amazing job he did. We ran out of things to say pretty quick. I emailed him when I was coming out to everyone,and his reaction was actually one of the best ones I got. He told me to do what I wanted to do. But part of me felt like it was easy for him to be okay with it because he’d given up on me a while ago. He wasn’t as invested as everyone else.”
Ryan realizes he hasn’t been looking at Avery, or anything, really. He’s been staring off, his eyes shut to the scenery as his head goes back to Disneyland, goes back to sitting at the computer, reading his father’s email.
“Gosh,” he says, “I’m talking a lot.” He almost adds,What have you done to me? I never talk like this.Because the look Avery’s giving him—the only other person who looks at him with such regular encouragement is Caitlin. And damned if it isn’t encouraging.
“No,” Avery says. “Go on. How did everyone else react?”
This time Ryan almost asks,To what?Then he remembers what he was talking about.
“Oh, you know. Mom cried. A lot. Dad was angry. Not at me, exactly. But at the manufacturer for giving him a defective son. Most of my friends were fine, though. I mean, a couple of them flailed a little in their first reactions—some of the guys were wondering if I was secretly in love with them. Which was only right inonecase…but that went nowhere. The girls were cool, even the churchy ones. Well, with one exception there, too. The inevitable rumors started, and I decided the only thing to do was confirm them, so I dyed my hair and started puttingSteven Universebuttons on my bag. I didn’t resist when the Rainbow Alliance pretty muchrecruited me for their club. The advisor, Mr. Coolidge, is super cool, and has gotten a lot of things done, including the dance last night. That was his idea. The gay prom. He contacted every other alliance in the area. Is that how you heard about it?”
“A friend saw a post about it,” Avery says. “We don’t have a Rainbow Alliance, but we do have a school play. A bunch of us in the play decided to go.”
“Well, whatever got you there, I’m glad you made it. I guess that’s the latest plot twist in my story, isn’t it?”
Avery takes it as a responsibility, to be a part of someone else’s story. He knows Ryan is saying it playfully, not heavily. He knows Ryan is saying it to show that he’s done with his own storytelling, which means it’s time for Avery to start. Avery isn’t sure that Ryan is a part of his own story yet, but that could be because he doesn’t feel anyone can be a true part of his story until they hear it and accept it.
They’re drifting on the water—not much, just a gradual pull. Avery finds himself drifting to a small part of Ryan’s story, an image that’s stayed buoyed in his thoughts. He knows Ryan is watching him, waiting to see what he’ll say next. He goes to the buoy and starts there.
“I was just thinking about you and your aunt in this canoe,” Avery says. “How nice that must have been, to talk here. For me, it was like a kitchen-table war council. Us against the world. Coming up with a plan.”
“That sounds stressful.”
“Yeah, but at least everyone in my house is on the same side. I know how lucky I am about that. And unlucky in other ways.”
“Unlucky how?”
And this is it. This is where Avery must decide how much to tell, how much to let Ryan in. Like everyone else, Avery considers his inner world to be a scary, convoluted, inscrutable place. It is one thing to show someone your best, cleanest version. It’s quite another to make him aware of your deeper, jumbled self.
Here in the daylight, does Ryan already notice? Does he already know? If he does, it doesn’t seem like he cares. Or maybe that’s just more hoping on Avery’s part.
Enough,Avery tells himself.Just talk to him.
“I was born a boy in a body a lot of other people saw as a girl’s,” Avery begins. Then he stops, takes in Ryan’s reaction.
Ryan is surprised. Not by the information Avery is conveying—while there are particulars that are still a mystery to him, the fact that Avery is trans is not. The thing that’s surprised Ryan is that Avery is going there so quickly, that he trusts him so immediately to explain something that no one else needs to know. Ryan is surprised that Avery already feels he’s deserving of this story. And in this way, he, too, feels a responsibility.
Avery notes Ryan’s pause, notes Ryan looking at him, and he feels like a body on display. It’s an extra level of self-consciousness—the difference between the other person having normal vision and an X-ray.
“Go on,” Ryan says. His tone is encouraging.
“I think it was obvious to everyone from the start. And my parents are very…liberal, I guess. Practically hippies. So they actually tried to make it seem like I wasn’t going through anything out of the ordinary. Now I can see the strain, and how much easier it would’ve been for all of us if I hadn’t been born misgendered. But they never made me freak out. It was everyone else. Well, not everyone. There were some people who were great. But there were a lot of people who weren’t as great. I was homeschooled a lot. We lived in a few places, trying to find the right doctors. Eventually we found them, and I found other members of my tribe. Mostly online. But my parents and I go to conferences as well. They put me on hormones early, to sort of stop me from going through the wrong kind of puberty. Is this TMI? I’m sure you don’t want all the details.”
Ryan leans toward Avery, the boat rocking back and forth as he does. Avery grips the side, and Ryan puts his hand on top of Avery’s.
“Tell me whatever you want to tell me,” he says. “It’s cool.”
Avery shudders, and can feel the shudder travel through the boat, through the water, until the water becomes smooth again, until he feels his nerves become smooth enough to continue. It’s too much, too soon, but now that he’s talking, he can’t stop. He’s talking about the treatments that have happened and the treatments that are going to happen, and all along pretty much the only thing that’s filling his head isthe question of whether Ryan is seeing him as a girl or a boy. Now that Ryan knows, is Avery still a boy in his eyes?
Ryan is measuring his next words carefully—in fact, he’s been weighing them, trying them out in his head, even as Avery’s been talking.
Finally, he says, “I like whatever it is that makes you the person you are. And although I’m sure it was really hard, I’m really glad you found a way to be true to the person you are.” It’s like something Aunt Caitlin would have told him, back when he was figuring things out. “Meanwhile…what else? Any siblings?”
