Being Emily (8 page)

Twenty minutes into the episode, one of the suspects was revealed to be a pre-operative transsexual. A bolt of electricity jagged through Claire. She looked upward and asked God silently,
Are
you hinting?
Seemingly random coincidences like this were usually the divine trying to get her attention. There would be some message for her either in this show or the one right after it.

Of course the story was overblown, with the character having accidentally killed a man to protect her secret and then being sent to men’s prison where she was severely beaten. At the end of the episode, she was shown being wheeled into the emergency room, bloodied and covered in bruises.

What was God trying to tell her? That there were enough people in the world who wanted to beat up Chris that she didn’t need to be one of them? Or that the path he’d chosen was a dangerous one and he shouldn’t take it?

As the credits rolled, she picked up her glass of water and took a long drink, and when she looked up again the image on the screen made her jump so hard she spilled half the water in her lap. The face speaking into the camera had no nose and only part of a mouth and the eyes were surrounded by what looked like a mass of melted skin fused into place. Claire’s breath froze in her throat.

“I’m sorry, honey,” her mom said. “I didn’t mean to scare you I just wanted to show you this while it was on. It’s amazing. This man was terribly burned as a kid, and now he makes films to help families of burn victims.”

Claire stared at the man’s ruined face as he spoke. He had a deep voice that didn’t fit his hairless features. He was talking about how hard it was for his siblings to deal with the aftereffects of the fire in their home that had scarred him, and how he wanted to help kids with these kinds of burns just feel like normal kids. The longer he talked, the more Claire could see the person he was, the kind soul, rather than the terrifying face.

This was an imperfect world, one in which children could be burned and hurt, or even born into a body that was wrong for them. In this man’s case his own tragedy became his life’s work. Hardship was a way in which people could really connect with each other and could show their greatness. Maybe Chris would turn out to be like this man, someone who taught others how to deal with hard situations with grace and compassion. Or maybe his journey would take him somewhere else, but as she wouldn’t blame this man for his scars, she wasn’t going to blame Chris just because she felt afraid about
transsexualism
.

And that was the basis of it. Her reaction to the burned man’s face showed her this clearly. She had been startled, and while her startled reaction to Chris’s news had been slower, it was similar. A piece of her solid world fell away when he said he was a woman. The belief that men were men and women were women was a foundational part of her world—until it was gone and she found herself teetering at the edge of the unknown.

Underneath her initial disgust, and all that questioning and discomfort
lay
simple fear. Well, she could handle fear.

She went into her bedroom and pulled out her journal. She spent so much time on the computer she knew her mom would look for a journal there, so she kept hers in physical form and hid it among her books.

She opened it to a clean page and wrote out her fears:

What if Chris goes through all of this and he’s wrong but he can never go back again?

What if I can’t be attracted to him through this and we split up?

What if the rest of the school finds out?

What if tonight was a warning and God doesn’t accept transsexuals?

If I
keep loving
him, what am I?

Though I generally liked the man, I avoided Dad as often as I could, because the older I got, the more likely he was to clap me on the shoulder and start a sentence with “Son.” Anything that started that way wasn’t going to end well. Nevertheless, he caught up with me on Friday morning, clapped me on the shoulder of sweater number three and said, “Son, I’ve got something you’re going to like.”

“What, Dad?” I asked, feeling like a
poorly
cast character in
Leave it to Beaver.

“It’s a beauty,” he said, which meant either a car or truck.
“A 1976 Ford Bronco.
The seller’s driving it out from the Cities Saturday morning. I thought you’d work on it with me.”

Okay, guilty confession, I do think cars are cool. I’m willing to give that up if it prevents my entry into the world of official girlhood, but for the time being it’s saved my butt with my Dad more often than I can count.

“Sweet,” I said, letting some actual emotion into my voice. “I’m taking Claire to the city at one, but I’m around all morning.”

He beamed and smacked my shoulder a couple more times, then sauntered off to work. When my dad was working, he was generally a happy man. The few times in life he’d been out of work were miserable for all of us.

I grabbed a few slices of bread and
hightailed
it out the door before Mom could appear and grill me about Dr. No again. I cruised through the school day, buoyed up by the thought of Saturday afternoon. Claire and I missed each other in the halls, but this was the time of year she started to get busy with all the clubs so I didn’t worry about it.

I ran aground abruptly in psych class. Mr. Cooper handed out our assignments. The guys booed, and I forgot to join in because my mouth was hanging open while my heart threatened to leap up my throat in a mixture of excitement and panic. The assignment said, “Pretend you wake up tomorrow morning the opposite sex. Write a four hundred word essay about your experiences.”

“Gross,” the guy in front of me said.

“Neanderthal,” Jessica said back to him. She turned to me and batted her eyelashes. “You wouldn’t be a jerk about being a girl, would you?”

/run: emergency avoidance procedure

System Failure

I stared at her blankly. “Uh,” I said.

“If I were a guy, I’d show some of the guys around here how to dress,” she said, clinching the fact that she’d make a terrible guy.

“Yeah,” I said. “Funny.” There was no emotion in my voice and I could hear that it was missing, but I couldn’t do a thing about it.

“It’s not bad being a girl,” she said, putting her hand on my forearm. She was flirting, of all things.

“Sure,” I said and stood up as the bell rang.

“Jeez,” she said. “You guys are all alike. You’re afraid of anything the least bit feminine.”

“Sure,” I said again and bolted. The walls were a blur closing in around my head.

An assignment to pretend we were the opposite sex, who comes up with something like that? And how was I supposed to do it? My body was fading rapidly from a solid to an invisible membrane so thin that if anything brushed against me I’d split open. I would have to write about waking up as a girl for the assignment even though every morning, just for those few minutes between waking and having to move, I was a girl with no stupid physiology to contradict me.

I had to get out of the school building without looking like I had to get out. By force of will I kept my feet steady, past my locker, past the lobby, into the biting cold, my car, the key in the ignition. Wait for it to warm up. Forget English class.

Up until I was about nine or ten years old, I still held out hope that I would grow up to be a woman, even though the evidence was mounting against that idea. When the other girls started to speculate about what it would be like to get their period, I imagined that a period was the end of childhood, like the end of a sentence, and after that I’d get the right body parts. I was old enough to have given up on a magical solution, but somehow I convinced myself that my problem would be sorted out through puberty, that I would start to grow breasts and that thing between my legs would recede and I would become like the other girls.

It didn’t help that my best friend at the time, Jessie, started to grow her breasts just before her tenth birthday. For years we’d both been flat-chested and then a few weeks before her birthday she snuck me into her room to show me the tiny bumps her breasts had become. We’d been comparing bodies on and off for a couple years, ever since she’d talked me into peeing in the woods with her on a park outing with our families.

“I want my breasts to start growing too,” I told her. She looked at me like I wasn’t a real person. I slammed out of her bedroom and didn’t talk to her for a couple of weeks.

I thought about that incident over a year later when I woke up to find that my nipples ached and felt swollen. For days I floated on clouds. I was going to show her and everyone. But the happy feeling just dissipated. I didn’t grow breasts. Instead I grew a couple inches in the space of a summer, my shoulders widened, and I started sprouting hair on my chest.

I drove over to Claire’s. I couldn’t go home. I didn’t have swim practice and soon Dad and
Mikey
would be home. I couldn’t let myself cry with them in the house. And I needed to know where I stood with Claire. 

When I got out of the car I realized I’d left my coat at school. Fumbling the key into her front door, I pushed into the house shaking with cold. I planned to have a little cry and then wash my face and wait for her to come home so we could talk, but that planning part of my brain wasn’t running the show.

I walked through the living room and into her room feeling like someone was crushing my chest, like I’d gone underwater and couldn’t get to the surface. My eyes swung from side to side looking for anything that would stop this feeling. Without thinking about it, I opened her closet door and curled myself into the bottom. Ever since I was a kid hiding in my mom’s closet, I’ve found comfort in dark, enclosed places. The small part of my mind that was still thinking told me I was being an idiot, a baby, a
wuss
, a fool and a dozen other sneers.

I leaned against the back wall of the little space and finally managed to cry a few of the thousand tears I’d been saving up from the past months. Wiping my face, I looked at my hands.
My freakishly huge hands.
I hated them. I hated this stupid body. Whose bright idea was it to make me a boy? Was it so hard to put a girl together? Did they just run out of girl bodies that day? Did I do something miserable in a past life? Maybe I’d been Hitler or Stalin.

“Chris?” Claire called from the living room, and then a little closer. “
Chrissy
?”

God bless her.

I cracked the door and crawled out to see her looking down at me with wide eyes.

“Sorry,” I managed, hating my deep voice.

She knelt down on the carpet and grabbed my hands. “What happened?”

“Weird stuff,” I said. I cleared my throat and wiped a hand across my face again, managing to smear snot across the back of it.
“Tissue?”

She grabbed a box off her desk and handed it to me. “You look terrible.”

“Cooper gave us this crazy assignment, to pretend we wake up tomorrow the opposite sex.”

She laughed. “Oh, that’s rich.”

“And then this girl in my class was…she was just joking about it, but I couldn’t deal because I just—” My voice broke and tears started again. “I just want to be a girl so bad. Am I completely messed up?”

Claire put an arm around my shoulders and dragged me to her chest. After all the times she’d curled into me, it felt so weird to lean my monstrously huge body against her, but it was also wonderful to feel held.

“You’re okay,” she said. “You just have a girl brain in a boy’s body. Which I think makes me a lesbian trapped in a straight girl’s body.”

I laughed and she laughed, and then I cried some more. When I finally sat up and blew my nose, I felt a lot more peaceful. That was when I saw that Claire looked worse than me. Her eyes were bloodshot and creased with tiredness.

“You look like you were up all night,” I said.

“Pretty much.
I think I fell asleep for an hour in the middle.”

“Of what?”

She pushed up from the floor and I stood with her. Her bed was made, like usual, but with big wrinkles in the middle of the comforter and four books open on it.

“Binge reading,” she said and grinned. “Come on, make me a sandwich.”

We went into the kitchen together. Claire was a much better cook than me, but I had one specialty dish: the grilled cheese sandwich. I think it only tasted better when I made it because she didn’t have to do any work, but she insisted I had a special knack.