Adam (34 page)

“All people have had different experiences growing up.”

“But it's just one music festival! I totally support trans women; just let me have my one music festival! I wanna see Le Tigre!”

Gillian's voice had moved into a shrill singsong. She was really getting into her character. She was having
so much fun
, while completely ignoring Adam, squished in the back next to a “fairy” whose hairy, rotting-vegetables-at-the-bottom-of-a-garbage-bin armpits were now shoved in Adam's face as Riverrun expanded all his limbs across the back seat. For the first time, Adam felt hate toward Gillian.

***

Camp Trans was a sparse affair. A handful of mismatched tents lay scattered across a clearing of dry, yellowed grass. Campers in jean shorts and patchy, mohawked hair milled around.

Adam, Gillian, Jackie, Lionel, and Riverrun, sleeping bags and two tents strapped to their backs, headed toward the makeshift Welcome Tent. An attractive girl wearing a halter top and a cowboy hat jumped up to greet them, quickly launching into the rules and regulations of the camp.

“You can set your tents up anywhere you like. Camping spaces are designated as Non-sober with Sex, Non-sober with No Sex, Sober with Sex, and Sober with No Sex.”

“A lot of people in the Sober with No Sex section?” joked Jackie.

“I don't know,” said Cowboy Hat, “I'm in Non-sober with Sex,” and her eyes swung over to Adam. Adam looked at Gillian, but she couldn't care less, was engrossed in a pamphlet about Lyme disease on the counter.
I'm gonna fucking cheat on you
, he thought. But he didn't even want to. All he wanted was Gillian.

Cowboy Hat trumpeted on. “Everyone needs to sign up for a work shift on the schedule. Welcome Tent slots are filled, but we could really, really use Waste Disposal.” The way she said it, everyone pretty much had to put their name down under Waste Disposal, which was empty. Everyone except Jackie, who wrote her name in large capital letters under Medic Tent. Adam noticed “Casey Freedman” scrawled under Cooking. He knew she would be here. Casey had been chattering about Camp Trans for weeks, and when Adam had told her he was going as well with Gillian and her crew, Casey had balked.

“
You're
going to Camp Trans?”

“You know Gillian's bi, and she has a lot of trans friends; it's important to her.”

“I know, it just feels like you're appropriating my entire life. . . . Well, at least I'll finally get to meet her.”

Adam had been anxious, charged with adrenaline to negotiate this inevitable encounter. But now, here, he didn't even care. If Casey met Gillian and blurted something out, or Gillian said something or whatever, so be it. At least it would all be fucking over, and he could finally give up.

“What's this?” said Lionel. He was looking at a piece of paper tacked to the post of the Welcome Tent. Cowboy Hat laughed.

“That's just a little running contest between our lead organizer Hazel and her sub, Blaise, on who can bed more campers. Hazel's winning.”

Casey was off in her own world of turmoil, anyway. No longer the special siblings that good things happen to, but the rejected ones, trailing pathetically after the objects of their desires, each following some sinister bread-crumb trail into the deep woods of Michigan, only to be told:
“No, I'm sorry. I just don't want you. What are you even doing here?”

The gang trudged in the direction of the campsites to set up.

“Why are you being so weird and quiet?” Gillian said to Adam in that same cold, flat tone.

“I'm not,” said Adam, staring ahead.

Fuck you. Fuck. You.

***

Everyone at Camp Trans, around twenty people, stood in a circle at the center of the clearing, holding hands.

“Jordan, ‘he.'”

“Alyssa, ‘she.'”

“Deirdre, ‘she.'”

You were supposed to state your name and preferred gender pronoun. Clarification on gender was indeed necessary. Looking around at the group, it was as if a hatful of pronouns written on scraps of paper had been thrown into the air, each scrap, sometimes two, landing randomly on a person, regardless of what he or she looked like. Adam had gotten used to boyish girls turning out to be trans, the general rule that masculine = he and feminine = she, but here at Camp Trans it was a free-for­-all. You couldn't be sure of anything, except that you were most likely wrong.

“Blaise, ‘he or she.'”

“Jackie, ‘she.'”

“Riverrun, ‘ze.'”

“Adam, ‘he.'”

Casey, who was three people in the circle down from Adam, looked at him with a stifled smirk. He stuck his tongue out at her (would've given the finger but didn't want to break the hand-holding circle), and then they both had to look at the ground to keep from laughing.

After the pronoun circle, Casey walked up to Adam and Gillian. Adam felt himself tense up.
Just let it happen. Just get it all fucking out there.

“This is my sister, Casey,” he said.

“Cool, great to meet you,” said Gillian. She seemed barely interested. All those times:
“When do I get to meet your sister? When do I get to meet your sister?”
And now it was happening, and she didn't even give a shit.

“Fucking Camp Trans,” said Casey, as if she'd been coming for years and was totally over the place.

“You look kind of familiar,” said Gillian.

Yeah, you watched her get fucked on a cross at Bound, bitch
, thought Adam. Bound. The night they first. A crashing sadness.

“Carlisle's party,” said Casey. “Isn't that where you met Adam?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Gillian.

“Casey,” shouted Hazel. She was standing a few feet away, dressed in a black tank top and cut-off cargo pants, holding a bullhorn, looking impatient.

Casey's jaded affect instantly transformed into eager desire to please. She ran toward Hazel, shouting over her shoulder, “See you guys later.” Hazel had already begun walking away before Casey reached her.

“The fat-phobia caucus is now taking place in zone four,” Hazel shouted into her bullhorn. “Fat phobia. Zone four.”

The great climactic moment of his sister and Gillian meeting had come and gone like nothing. Adam had a vision of himself on his hospital deathbed, a disgusting old man, his whole life having come and gone like nothing.

“Everyone's headed down to the swimmin' hole!” It was Lionel, running toward them in swim trunks and a T-shirt, carrying a towel.

“What about the fat-phobia caucus?” said Jackie. “I thought we were going to that?”

Jackie was kind of overweight, and Adam felt a flush of embarrassment for her.

“Yeah, that's happening,” said Lionel. He glanced over at a group of about four fat people and one skinny person sitting in a circle in the grass. “But if we don't go now, it'll get too cold for swimmin'. Don't you guys wanna go swimmin'?”

“Yeah, fuck it, let's go swimming,” said Jackie.

They followed a group of Camp Transers carrying towels and inner tubes. The group walked along the dusty shoulder of the road, butted up next to a hill of forest and against the traffic of occasional cars driving through.

A girl carrying a long fluorescent orange noodle sidled up to Gillian. “There's room on this noodle for two,” she said.

Who the fuck was this bitch?

Gillian laughed. “That is a nice-looking noodle.”

“
Mi
noodle
es su
noodle.”

Was that supposed to be clever?

The girl ran her fingers through her choppy brown hair and adjusted the noodle over her shoulders like it was one of those wooden planks with heavy pails of water on either end. She projected her chest out and flexed her arm muscles as if she were actually carrying some great heavy weight.

“I'm Erica, by the way.”

“Gillian,” said Gillian.

Erica didn't ask who Adam was, and Gillian didn't introduce him.

They got to “the Swimmin' Hole,” which was a small, craggy cove inside the forest, leading out into a sprawling still lake. It had been sunny when they first arrived at the camp, but now the day had turned overcast, the horizon of the lake meshing seamlessly into the gray sky. Everyone acted like it was still the brightest, sun-shiniest day, though, and began tearing off their clothes and running into the water, whooping and hollering.

Adam sat down on a rock, and Gillian sat next to him. Piece-of-shit-I-hope-you-burn-in-hell-Erica took off her tank top, sports bra, shorts, and underwear, with overly cavalier action. She stood, presenting her nakedness, as in,
Yeah, I'm straight-up naked now, you like?
She smiled at Gillian.

“You coming?”

Erica had tits. She had a vagina. And as Adam stared at her with seething hatred, he simultaneously imagined his penis inside her and the unconditional exquisite pleasure he would feel.

“In a bit,” said Gillian.

It was just him and Gillian on the rock. The first time they'd (sort of) been alone since that night in his room. Neither of them spoke. The campers frolicked and splashed in the lake. Hit one another with noodles and jumped, four at a time, onto sinking inner tubes. The only other person not in the water was a man in a dress sitting higher up on the rocks, strumming a duct-taped acoustic guitar. The way he was sitting with the dress hiked up, you could see his full dick and balls hanging out, splayed across the rock like some reptile trying to warm its cold-blooded body.

“It's not my fault you don't like that I'm wearing a dress,”
the man in the dress sang.

She's the one that's being a bitch
, thought Adam.
She should speak first, not me.

More silence passed.

“Well, this is awkward,” said Gillian, and Adam wanted to strangle her and slam her head on the rock, because she said it coldly, not in a way he could actually respond to, not a sweet, “Hey? What's going on with us?,” just a flat, toneless, “This is awkward,” and it wasn't fair—how was he supposed to respond?

“Yeah,” he said.

“I think I'm gonna go in,” she said.

Most everyone in the water was naked. A few people were still wearing underwear or swim bottoms, but everyone was topless. Loose-hanging surgery scars on the trans guys, buds of breasts on girls you could tell used to be boys, low-hanging udders on lesbians who were probably, like June, politically opposed to wearing bras. All these fucked-up bodies that most people in the world would call repulsive but here were celebrated. The bodies were bodies, and they were made to have fun.

“Think I'm just gonna stay here,” said Adam. If he didn't take his shirt off, it might be conspicuous.
“What's that trans guy's problem? Why's he being so precious? Just take it off, man. We're all brothers and sisters here.”

“Well, I'm going in,” said Gillian. She stood up and, with her back facing Adam, took her clothes off.

He stared at the ground. It hurt too much to watch. He wanted her so badly. He loved her so helplessly. He looked up and she was already in the water. She'd kept her bra and underwear on.
Good
, he thought. As if that made a difference, as if it were a sign she was still his. Erica was making her way over. Doing that labored, wide-legged gait everyone's forced to do when trying to walk fast through water.

Gillian's slim, pale body, a will-o'-the-wisp in the midst of everything. Adam felt a pang of desire. Hers was the body the world at large wanted—whether it was to fuck or possess, they all wanted it. That was what she owned.

Gillian and Erica were now talking. Erica was clearly checking out Gillian's body, and Gillian was doing the same. He wondered if she was getting wet looking at Erica. If her clit was swelling up and getting hard the way it did.

Fucking dykes
, Adam thought.

Maybe Gillian really was just gay. Just wanted to shove her mouth on another girl's cunt, and nothing else could really compare.

Erica put her hands around Gillian's waist.

How could she just fucking let that happen? He was sitting right fucking there, watching it like a goddamn movie. Did she just not give a fucking shit?

She was gay. She liked girls. She had experimented with Adam and decided,
“Eh, not for me.”

“I just think I actually really need to be with a girl,”
she would finally tell him.

He thought about the stuffed folders she had shown him full of all the letters from all the gay teens across the world who had written her and e-mailed her after her prom story in the AP article came out.
“Thank you for literally saving my life”
and
“I know I don't know you, but I have a huge crush on you”
and
“I didn't know how to tell my parents, but I showed them the article and you told them for me. Thank you.”
“Thank you!”
They were all signed
“Thank you.”
And he imagined Gillian and Erica, falling onto her bed, all the letters spread out across the sheets, like the million dollars cash in
Indecent Proposal
, and Gillian and Erica fucking, the letters flying around them like all those hundred-dollar bills.

He looked down. His white Adidas were caked in mud. The feeling that he wanted to cry but knew he couldn't—a dull butter knife trying to puncture the back of his throat. He looked up, expecting the worst, and was grateful to see they were separated now. Gillian was talking to Jackie, and Erica was floating on her noodle, off somewhere else.

I just want you back
, he tried to beam from his brain into hers.

***

Someone had started up the campfire, and its leaping flames and heavy smoke smell against the cooling twilight in the woods gave Adam a cozy feeling, despite the sadness like an anvil on his chest.

Gillian was on her Waste Disposal shift, and not knowing what to do with himself, Adam sat on a log and watched the fire. He was that guy, the weirdo staring into the fire, probably coming to terms with all his past mistakes and making silent vows for a stronger, braver future. He felt self-conscious but also kind of didn't care. Everyone here was already so weird, it almost made sense to just stare into the fire, a creepy force field of “private moment” around you.