Being Emily (Anniversary Edition) Read online

  When the kiss was over, she smiled up at me and said, “Besides, I’ve always wanted to give lesbianism a real go.”

  I rolled my eyes at her and picked up the sandwich plates. “Couch?”

  “There’s a Law & Order: Criminal Intent on the DVR. Let’s do it.”

  Chapter Eight

  I slept for about eleven hours, which I’m certain shored up Mom’s hypothesis that I was depressed, but to me it felt great. Then I spent about a year in the shower letting the water run over me. I shaved my arms and legs again, even though the swim season was over. If anyone asked I’d tell them that the new hair itched and it was easier to keep it shaved. I would not mention that I loved the feel of smooth legs under my jeans.

  Mom was cleaning up the kitchen when I made it downstairs. Mikey lay across the living room floor watching TV. He wasn’t old enough to skip cartoons yet. I hoped that lasted another year because I enjoyed my Saturday mornings without him flying around the house like a pinball.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Great,” I said.

  I poured a glass of milk and grabbed two of the cinnamon rolls she’d made. Mom seemed trapped between being a career woman and being a stay-at-home mom. Either one would be great, but she wavered back and forth between the two, telling us to make our own dinner one night and then taking over the cooking for the next three or four days.

  “I’ve been up too late studying,” I added around a bite of cinnamon, sugar and dough.

  “Is school hard?” she asked, fishing for problems.

  “Nah, I just want to do good for college aps.” Which was trueish. I had no intention of going to college near Liberty and I knew Mom and Dad couldn’t afford to send me anywhere fancy.

  “Chris!” Dad yelled from the garage door. “Chris, come see this!”

  I flashed Mom a grin and grabbed my old jacket from the closet, wishing I hadn’t left the good one at school.

  Some fool had driven a junker of an old Bronco the fifty-odd miles from the Cities, his girlfriend following in her dilapidated Chevy. The Bronco was in terrible shape and looked about ready to drop parts into the street.

  Dad and the scruffy man who’d driven it in walked around it, looked under the hood, and then exchanged information and money. I was supposed to be in that circle with them, admiring the car and haggling over its value, but I didn’t feel like it. I smelled the guy from where I stood, a thick mix of burnt rubber and acrid sweat. And his lanky brown hair hadn’t been washed in about a week.

  In the rusty Chevy, his girlfriend smoked a cigarette, blowing long streams of light gray smoke through a one-inch opening at the top of her window, leaving enough smoke inside the car to make it hazy. I couldn’t see her face, only her dishwater blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. What did she like about her boyfriend? Did she like the way he smelled and those skinny legs inside his faded jeans?

  Dad motioned me over. “This is my son Chris,” he said. “He’s going to work on it with me.”

  “Chris,” the man said. “You’ll make your dad proud.”

  “Sure,” I replied, beginning to feel like that was the only useful word in my vocabulary.

  Then he was gone in the smoky car with his girlfriend and Dad drove the Bronco into our oversized garage. We may not have had the biggest house on the block, but we definitely had the biggest garage. Ironic, since I always had to park at the curb to make room for the cars Dad fixed up. The garage was two spaces wide and a little over two deep and had enough heaters to keep it at least in the fifties during the worst of winter. Dad had installed four spotlights and there were times when the garage seemed brighter and warmer than the house.

  Despite the fact that I was one hundred percent clean, I capitulated and helped Dad with the car. I had the feeling I was going to need a good stash of parental brownie points in the near future, so I pushed up my sleeves and got to work.

  At noon I cut out, had a quick lunch, showered again, put on my second favorite sweater and went to pick up Claire. She slipped into the warm car and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

  “Claire, what do you like about having a boyfriend?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I’m not dating you because you’re a guy. I like you because you’re funny and smart and a total geek. And sure, I like that you’re tall and strong and all that.”

  “But what is it about guys that girls like?”

  “I think strength, for sure, and guys tend to be easier than girls, you know, less complicated…well, except for you. Guys make girls feel safe,” she said and pushed on my shoulder with the palm of her hand. “I wonder if I’m going to miss that,” she added quietly.

  “I’ll always be tall,” I offered.

  “Who’s this Natalie?” she asked.

  “She’s from a forum online, a support site. She knows me by my girl name ‘Emily.’ Is that going to be weird?”

  “Girl name?”

  “I’ll change my name legally when I can,” I said. It was hard to remember that Claire didn’t know that much about being transgender, despite her long nights of study on the subject. She could sound so cool with it one moment and then completely clueless the next.

  “To Emily?” she asked.

  “Emily Christine Hesse.”

  Because I was driving, I couldn’t see the full expression on her face when I said my name, but I stole and peek and caught her nodding.

  “Is that why your mage in game is Amalia?” she asked.

  “Someone already took the name Emily, and anyway, I like the game to be a little different from reality. But yes, I wanted a name that was like Emily.”

  She turned half sideways in her seat to look at me more fully. “I played a male character for a few months,” she said. “Like a year ago when I was really into player-versus-player combat. It felt like people listened to me more in the game when I was a seven-foot-tall guy. But that always felt more like wearing a costume to me. I thought you played girl characters so you could look at their butts.”

  I laughed. That was what other guys in our guild said who played female characters. I was often surprised at how many of the female characters in the game turned out to be played by men in real life. I had no idea how many were trans or gay or really did prefer looking at a female character on the screen while they played.

  “I love that there’s at least one world where I can show up and be female,” I told Claire. “It feels like magic to me.”

  “Like the Wizard of Oz,” she said.

  “Yes!”

  After a few quiet minutes, Claire asked, “Am I supposed to call you Emily?”

  “If no one’s around, I’d like that.”

  “Huh,” she said and went silent again.

  We drove past snowy fields and trees decked in white and more and more houses until we came into the western suburbs of the Cities. Southdale was in Edina, a suburb and not Minneapolis proper, but close enough that my parents didn’t make a distinction. Anytime I wanted to go to the Cities, they figured I was trying to score drugs or drink or something. Of course, Dad did a lot of drinking when he was a kid, so he didn’t exactly disapprove.

  This was one of those funny times when it worked out that people saw me as a guy. Mom and Dad didn’t worry about me, like Claire’s mom did about her, that I was going to get kidnapped or raped or sold into slavery. It must’ve been the crime shows they watched, because Claire’s mom could fret for days about something catastrophic happening to her daughter but she never seemed to worry about where Claire actually was on any given day.

  I pulled into Southdale and ended up driving around the mall twice before figuring out how to get into the parking lot in front of the theater.

  “Man, don’t you wish we lived closer,” Claire said. She paused and grinned, “And by ‘man,’ I mean ‘person’ of course.”

  I smacked her shoulder. “Goof. Come on.”

  The theater had sixteen screens and a cavernous lobby filled with what
seemed like two hundred people. I was scanning the crowd, saying to myself “black skirt, boots, flower” when Claire grabbed my hand and dragged me over toward a girl. I thought Claire was going to ask for directions. Then I realized the girl was wearing a black skirt and boots, and carrying a dyed-purple carnation.

  I couldn’t stop beaming. She grinned back at me.

  “Natalie,” she said holding out her hand.

  I took it, wondering at how soft it felt. “Emily,” I said, introducing myself for the first time out loud. “But you should probably call me Chris. This is Claire.”

  “Hey,” Claire said.

  I looked Natalie up and down. She looked like a girl. She was a girl. She looked great. She wasn’t quite as tall as my six feet, but she was a lot taller than Claire. Of course everyone was taller than Claire, even in her boots. Natalie had shoulder-length dark brown hair with red highlights and big, dark eyes that she emphasized with makeup.

  “Come on,” she said, taking my right hand and Claire’s left. She pulled us away from the theater and down the mall to California Pizza Kitchen.

  I tried to stop staring, but I kept watching Natalie out of the corner of my eye. She walked gracefully and if her hips were narrow and her shoulders broad and solid, they weren’t more so than some of the members of the girls’ swim team at my school. Natalie was so lucky to already be on hormones at seventeen. She could expect her body to pad her hips over the next few years. Her pelvic bones would always be narrow, but now her body knew that fat was supposed to go to the hips. We had to be the only two girls in the whole mall who wanted fatter hips.

  At the restaurant, I took a chair across from her and Claire sat next to me. We ordered pizza to share, and the waiter called Natalie “miss” without a second thought. In addition to the long, styled hair and the pretty makeup, Natalie wore a tight-fitting tan sweater that made her breasts obvious. She looked like a solid B-cup to me, and I wanted to ask her if that was all from hormones or if she was augmenting with a padded bra.

  If I looked hard, I could see how Natalie’s chin was thicker than most girls, but the dark copper and brown hair falling around her face masked the effect and drew my eye away. She already had great lips, not the thin lips I’d been stuck with, and her makeup on them was a very subtle pale pink. Her cheeks fell in the mid-range; I had a little surge of guilty optimism because my cheeks weren’t as wide as hers and hers didn’t read male because her eyes dominated that part of her face.

  I had obsessed night after night over any pictures I found online of women who had transitioned. I scoured them for signs of maleness and tried to prove to myself that it was possible that I could someday live a normal life as a woman. But two-dimensional photos and even videos were nothing like the experience of sitting across from a girl who’d had to deal with a body like mine! I wanted to touch her to make sure she was solid and not just a dream.

  I had so many questions that I couldn’t figure out where to start, so Claire took over.

  “Look, tell me if I’m being rude at any point here, okay? We’re the country mice, you know, and I think we have a lot of questions,” Claire said, glancing at me. I nodded and she went on. “Can we ask ’em?”

  “Sure,” Natalie said.

  Even that one word had a slight breathiness and lilt to it, putting it firmly on the feminine side of the line. Her voice wasn’t high-pitched, but my English teacher’s voice was a smokier, deeper woman’s voice than Natalie’s.

  “Start with ‘I was born a boy’ and tell the whole story,” Claire said.

  Natalie gave a short huff of a laugh. “Well, it was the usual. You’ll start hearing this a lot if you hang around us types. And, so you know, I wasn’t born a boy. I was assigned male at birth; that’s how to say it so you don’t erase gender diversity.”

  “Oh I read about that. Because people get born all sorts of ways and then dumped into either the boy or girl bucket based on what the doctor thinks they see,” Claire said. “But what do you call yourself? Is ‘transsexual’ gauche?”

  “It’s not great, at least in the sense that it objectifies us and narrows us to that one thing. And transsexual is a very clinical term. My whole life isn’t about my gender identity, you know. I prefer to be called a girl.”

  “But then how do you talk about it?” Claire asked.

  “Some people say transgender or trans girl, trans woman. And some people still say transsexual. If it’s necessary I guess I like trans girl, but otherwise, girl.”

  “That’s cool, thanks. Go on with the story?”

  “When I was young I played with other girls, and I got upset when my sister got dresses for her birthday and I didn’t. I played with her dolls, and by the time I was about six I wouldn’t play with boys. Mom and Dad took me to two psychologists and one of them was smart and said not to push me about my gender, just to make sure I had lots of all kinds of toys and watch how I developed. I told Mom I was a girl a few different times. She tried to explain that I was a boy, but I wouldn’t believe her. When puberty hit, I started getting more and more upset. I mean really confused and sad and depressed. Some days I wouldn’t get out of bed at all unless my mom made me. We went back to the psychologist, and Mom explained that I could choose to have a girl’s body if that’s what I really, really wanted.”

  Natalie paused, watching the server bring our pizzas. He set them out and checked to see if we needed anything else. I think Claire was almost as eager for Natalie to go on as I was.

  “I’ve read all your posts,” Natalie told me. “And you sound like me, like you knew since you were a kid. But, Claire, it’s not the same for everyone. People come out at different ages in different ways. I have a friend who says it wasn’t that she felt she was a girl, but when she looked to the future, she saw the woman she could become. There are a lot of different ways to know you’re trans.”

  “Wait, she didn’t feel like a girl, but she wanted to be one?” Claire asked.

  “I guess some people think it’s so impossible that they don’t feel it in themselves,” Natalie told her. “But they dream of a future where they’re a woman, or they have to see other people before they realize, ‘I’m like that; I want that.’ Or they have a lot of identities to work out as a kid and the trans one gets shoved to the back.”

  “When did you start being a girl all the time?” Claire asked.

  Natalie pulled a slice of pizza onto her plate and said, “They put me on hormones a couple years ago and then we moved here a year and a half ago so I could go to school as a girl. It’s been going super well. This summer I get my last surgery and then we’re all done.”

  “What surgery?” Claire asked.

  Natalie raised an eyebrow and pointed under the table toward her lap.

  Claire stood up. “Okay, I’m going to the bathroom,” she said. “I don’t want to know this part. Back in a bit.”

  Natalie watched Claire weave between the tables, then turned to me. “She’ll be okay,” she said, though I think she was trying to reassure both of us.

  “Yeah. So, wow, that’s really cool about your parents. What’s it like taking the hormones?”

  “It’s great. I don’t feel so angry all the time, and it’s easier to cry when I’m upset, and all my hair got finer and softer and my skin.”

  She moved her hand toward me and I touched the soft skin across the back of it. “It didn’t used to be like that?” I asked.

  “No, not that soft. It was like yours.” She ran her fingertips down my forearm. “You shave your arms?”

  “Swimmer,” I said. “It’s a good excuse to shave just about everything.”

  She laughed. “That’s smart.”

  “Are you scared about the surgery?”

  “A little,” she admitted. “I want it to go really well.”

  Claire came out of the bathroom and regarded us warily. I waved her back to the table. “We’re done talking about that part,” I said.

  She forced a smile. “So, do you like boy
s or girls or both?” she asked Natalie.

  “Boys,” Natalie answered. “But there are all kinds of sexual orientations in the trans community. I think sometimes it’s harder for trans girls who like boys to figure it out, because we can think we’re gay. But then if you like girls it’s hard because you’re going to end up a lesbian and some therapists don’t like to recommend a sex change that’s going to make another lesbian. They think if you like girls you should just try to be a boy. And for trans girls who are bi, mostly they have to hide that from therapists and doctors until after they transition, which is its own kind of yuck because you’re hiding one part of yourself so another part can get seen.”

  I’d finished one slice of pizza and Claire had about nibbled hers to death. I stole her crust so she could eat another and I’d have something to fiddle with. I’d already had lunch before the drive and anyway, I was too curious to be hungry.

  “Were you always this pretty?” Claire asked. “I mean, were you a really pretty boy?”

  Natalie cocked one eyebrow at Claire. “I was never a boy,” she said. Claire blushed, but Natalie went on talking. “I look like my baby pictures. When I hit puberty, I started looking like a guy. You might not recognize a picture of me if you didn’t know.”

  “Your makeup is amazing,” I said because it was true, but also to give Claire a moment to recover.

  “Years of practice,” Natalie replied, flashing me a grin.

  “I’m sorry,” Claire started, but Natalie waved a hand to stop her.

  “You’re going to slip up, it’s natural. You’ve been really cool to Emily, and I know your heart’s in the right place, so don’t worry about it. Do you want to catch a movie? Cloverfield is starting in about twenty minutes.”

  “Oh I totally want to see that,” Claire said and I agreed.

  Natalie paid for the pizza, though I tried to protest, and we were off. I watched her walk and smiled more. Sure her hips were narrow, but she looked great. There might be hope for me after all—the faint flickering glimmer of hope that lay on the far side of having to talk to my parents. Could I get on hormones without their permission? A bitter taste flooded my mouth. The answer was as close as Natalie walking two steps in front of me and still impossibly far away.