Adam (35 page)

“Excuse me, would you like some dinner?”

Adam looked up. A short boy—or girl—with a bandanna around his neck was standing a few feet away holding out a bowl. He was respecting Adam's “space.”

“Um, sure,” said Adam. He stood up and took the bowl and spoon. “Thanks.” The boy smiled and nodded, then turned around, leaving Adam to his moment.

Adam sat back down and looked into the bowl. It was so dark out by now, he had no idea what was in there. He tilted the bowl toward the fire and caught flickers of something gray and grainy. He stuck the spoon in and brought a little toward his tongue.

“It's millet,” said Casey, plunking down beside him, almost knocking Adam over, like she was drunk, but he knew it was just that she was clumsy and often not aware of where her body was actually going. She didn't care about giving him “space.” His space was her space, and he felt a pulse of love for her. They had both rattled around in their mom's uterus. Disgusting really, but they both had been there. And no one else in the world had.

“What the fuck is millet?” he said.

“It's good for you,” said Casey, heaping a large spoonful into her mouth. “Just imagine you're lost out here, have been wandering for days, and came upon some natives brewing a special ‘of the land' porridge in their cauldron, and they're offering it to you, and it's the first food you've eaten in a week and the most glorious thing you've ever tasted. That's what I'm doing.”

Adam ran the fantasy quickly through his head and took a bite. Not bad.

Hazel's voice rang out from a cluster of campers. “The word got out and what I'm hearing from my people inside is that the Camp Trans dance party tonight is
the
event at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival.”

A skinny trans guy with large round glasses ran in front of Adam and Casey toward the group.

“Oh, no. Are you telling me that upward of
one thousand people
are going to be coming here tonight?!” said Round Glasses.

Adam had gathered that along with Hazel, Round Glasses was “in charge.”

“What we need to focus on right now is how to make this a safe space for trans women,” said Hazel. “I think the campfire and zones one and two should be ‘No Wristband.'”

“That's not very welcoming to festies,” said another girl. “It's supposed to be about inclusion. We're not setting an example if—”

“All I care about right now is protecting my girls,” said Hazel, and she stormed off. Her face glowed in the campfire light for a flash, and it looked like she was crying. The girl named Blaise ran after her.

“You want to go?” Adam said to Casey, nodding after Hazel.

“No . . . We had a ‘talk' in her tent,” said Casey. “We're, like, officially unofficial.”

“Oh. Sorry . . .”

“It's OK,” said Casey. “After what I did to June, I probably deserve it.”

They were quiet for a moment. Adam thought about June. What was she doing right now? Home alone in her room? Taking one of her baths? Staring in the mirror in the same position as Adam always did? He kind of wished she were here. He thought about Ethan and then put the thought away. He stared out across the campsite, trying to see if he could find Gillian. He couldn't. Only the scarce, crookedly constructed tents and dark dapples of people moving. The sky had gone completely dark. If you looked up, you could see stars. He'd forgotten all about them—like, as a thing that existed. In New York the stars were the lights on cars and buildings, the mysterious sparkles on some of the sidewalks. He thought about him and Gillian, running down the sidewalk, escaping Bound, and how they'd kissed on the street corner and how for that moment, their bodies pressed together, it had felt like they were standing on the exact center of the world. He kept looking out at the camp but still couldn't find any shape that might be her. Hopelessness descended.

“I'm going to tell Mom and Dad,” said Casey.

“What?”

“That I'm gay.”

“I thought you were ‘queer'?”

“Shut up.”

“You're the one that said it!”

“Whatever . . . I'm going to tell them I like girls. Women.”

“Why?”

“Because lying is stupid. And lonely.”

They were silent for a while more. Adam saw a future in which he never told Gillian. He just returned to Piedmont and they never spoke again. No one would ever know what he had done. He would die with it. Alone.

“I never should have let Mom talk about Sam the way she did,” said Casey. “I should have told her we were girlfriends. That Sam was butch, not ‘confused.' That that's what I like.”

“Why do you like boyish girls?” Adam asked.

“I just do,” Casey said. “I can't explain it, and I know a lot of people don't get it, but I just think masculine women are the sexiest people on earth.”

Adam thought Casey might ask him something about Gillian then. What their plans were. If they were going to keep dating after the summer. If he was going to have to tell her his real age. But she didn't.

“I can't believe I ate this entire bowl of millet,” Casey said. She stared into her empty bowl. Adam hadn't touched his after that one bite.

“I'm going to go throw up in the woods now,” she said. She smiled at Adam, and stood up and walked away.

***

The rally had begun, soon to be followed by the dance party. Upward of one thousand people from the Womyn's Festival across the road had not shown up. Maybe about fifteen festies were there, and they trailed in a line with Hazel leading, shouting, “One word! One word! That word is INCLUSION!” Someone was beating a drum.

The festies and the Camp Transers formed a circle, and Adam, Gillian, Jackie, and Lionel, who had been standing and watching, joined. Hazel walked into the center.

“We're gonna win this thing!” Hazel shouted. She wasn't using the bullhorn, probably because there were only about thirty people. “Maybe not next year, and maybe not the year after that, but we are GOING TO WIN!”

Everyone cheered.

Jackie stood next to Adam, then some person named Pirate, then Gillian. Gillian hadn't even tried to stand next to him. They'd barely spoken three words since the swimming hole.

“They're never gonna win,” Jackie said to Adam in a low voice.

“What?”

“Lisa Vogel is never going to change the policy. She's said, ‘Over my dead body will the policy be changed.' Or something like that. But I guess it's important to make a statement.”

“Yeah,” said Adam.

“Think you'll come back next year?”

“I'm not sure.”

He was finding it difficult to talk. The pain in his body was so loud, it drowned out any noise coming from his mouth. He felt acutely aware of how his mouth had to move in specific positions in order to make different words. The glowing green bulb of the subway had meant that anything was possible.

A group of people in the middle of the circle was performing a skit. Adam couldn't really follow it, something about various kinds of people being turned away from Man Land and Woman-Born-Woman Land. And a trans woman being turned away from both. Everyone started clapping before the punch line came, and it was awkward when the group had to tack on the last couple lines after the applause quieted down.

“Portrait of the man as a young girl.”

It was the boy with the bandanna who had given Adam the bowl of millet. Now he was standing in the center, holding a piece of paper and reading from it. His body had a jaunty swagger, but Adam could see that his hands holding the paper were trembling.

“When I told my parents I was a boy, they said it felt like someone had died . . . which is kind of funny because I felt like I had finally been born.”

Adam wondered how old the boy was. How long he'd had to wait to finally be born. For the first time, it occurred to Adam how alienating it must be to grow up in a body you don't recognize as your own. Like people with brain injuries who can't recognize their mother's face. In all Adam's research and cramming of trans facts, he'd never thought about how that singular experience actually felt. And here was this boy, with his shaking hands, trying to explain to you, and probably himself, what it was like.

The boy finished his poem and left the circle to more applause. He had a huge sheepish smile on his face.

Next, a short girl with a blond ponytail entered the circle.

“Julia Serano!” Hazel called out.

“This one's for Nelly Chua,” the girl named Julia said. And everyone roared and stamped their feet.

“We are often told that we are living in a man's world,” she shouted in a bold voice, “and in this culture no image represents power more than the phallic symbol, and if the penis equals power, then I am illegally armed.”

Julia was also reading from a piece of paper, but no part of her was trembling. She stood with her feet planted square and looked around the circle, her gaze seeming to cast light on each person she turned her head toward.

“They say it's not the size of the wand but the magic that it does. Well, after months on estrogen, my penis is pretty darn small, but she has supernatural powers, she's like some pissed-off ancient Greek goddess, and she can make the most entitled cat-callers and womanizers scurry away with their tails between their legs all because of six small words: ‘I used to be a man.' And that may make me an object of ridicule, but I am not the butt of anyone's jokes because I know people make fun of trannies because we are the one thing they fear the most. I am more bad-ass than any gangster, more dangerous than an entire Marine Corps; my penis is more powerful than the cocks of a million alpha males all put together.”

The circle grew tighter and stronger. Through the flickering dark, Adam could see people beating their chests. Their eyes fixed on Julia, riveted, like she was finally explaining to them everything they'd ever wanted to know.

“See, my penis can be deadly, especially to me, and I've heard almost every true crime story about what frightened macho boys do to trannies, every bludgeoning and mutilation, bodies beaten beyond recognition—”

“We love you, Nelly!” someone shouted.

“—and I've imagined it all happening to me first person. I can feel myself morph into a slow-moving target, and when I walk to my car alone in the dark, I'll be holding my breath, half expecting that inevitable blow to the back of my head, and sometimes I wonder why it hasn't happened yet, and sometimes I wonder why they don't just get it over with—”

Adam felt something huge rushing through him, taking over his body.

“—See, I never wanted to be dangerous, and I spent most of my life wishing that I didn't have a penis, and some mornings I can barely get out of bed because my body is so weighed down with ugly meanings that my culture has dumped all over me—see, I've been made to feel shame and self-loathing so that everyone else can take comfort in what their bodies mean. And if I seem a bit cocky, well, it's because I refuse to make apologies for my body anymore.”

And the people were cheering and throwing their fists in the air, and before he knew it, Adam found himself screaming,
“Whooo!”
and stomping his feet and clapping as hard as he could because he felt it, he really did, and he knew he was sad, and he knew he had thought his life was over, but in that moment, with Julia in front of him, shouting out at the crowd and everyone in the circle cheering as one, saying,
“Fuck you”
to the haters,
“we are all different and that is fucking awesome,”
he felt happy and lucky—lucky to be part of this.

“Some women have a penis, some men don't, and the rest of the world is just going to have to get the fuck over it!” yelled Julia, and she marched out of the circle as everyone went wild.

Adam looked over and saw Gillian. She was looking at him too, and he knew, he just knew, she was thinking what he was. With his heart thudding, he walked toward her.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she said.

She was still hiding something, there was still a thing
wrong
, but her face was softer, something had changed, and he knew there was a chance. They just needed to talk.

“Do you want to go back out to the lake?” Adam asked.

“OK,” said Gillian.

They began walking away from the campsite just as the music started blasting.

“Now let's have a fucking DANCE PARTY!!” someone shouted into the bullhorn.

They walked along the same path on the shoulder of the road as they had this afternoon. Now there were no cars driving by, and everything was dark and still. Just the forest sounds and music and yells from back at the camp.

“Did you eat the millet?” said Adam.

“Tried,” said Gillian. “Someone gave Jackie a peanut butter and Nutella sandwich they'd brought, and she gave me half.”

They kept walking, moments of silence interspersed with random comments—“I wonder if more people from the festival are actually coming”—and even though it was stilted and definitely weird, Adam could feel hope all around them, pushing them along, urging them toward the lake, where for some reason he felt they needed to go.

When they got to the rocky cove, Adam could only make out hints of how it had looked earlier. Most of the land was mottled gray and indecipherable, but the lake spread out before them under the moon, an endless glistening black.

“Let's go in,” said Gillian. She took off her shorts but kept her shirt on, and walked toward the water. Adam did the same. He folded his jeans and put them on a rock. He'd been wearing the ACE bandage for over twenty-four hours, and it hung loose but still functional around his hips, under his boxers.

“Eek!” Gillian said, her customary exclamation, as she stepped her foot into the water. And for that moment, her voice sounded normal again. Just her. Adam's heart squeezed at the sound.