by Cathy Lamb
I’ve felt fake my whole life. Like I’m a fake. A lie. A girl who has to pretend she’s a boy so I don’t get bullied, don’t upset my parents, don’t have to deal with everyone else. I’m tired of pretending, though.
Sorry. I don’t mean to cry. But, I do sometimes, cry. Actually, I cry a lot. It was hard for me to tell my parents. I mean, they were cool about it. They cried, too. They’re both struggling. It’s like they’re grieving or something, but I didn’t die. Well, the boy me died.
I know they were shocked. They thought I was gay. I’m not really gay. I’m a girl, inside my head, so I like guys. I’m not a guy in my head, so that doesn’t make me gay.
Pretty soon here, I’m going to start dressing like a girl in the dresses and skirts that I like and tell all the kids at school what’s going on. I’m going to write an article for the school newspaper, because I’m the features editor. It’s pretty scary, but what I’m sick of is lying. I’m sick of dressing like a boy, like a gay boy. I’m sick of not being me, a girl named Holly.
I’m a person. I’m not better than anyone, I’m not less than anyone. I should be able to be myself. I live in America, right? So I think I owe it to myself to be who I am: a girl.
I have a lot of hopes and dreams. I hope to marry a man and have kids. I know I won’t get pregnant the normal way, but maybe we can adopt. I hope to be a mom. I hope to be a designer.
I do a lot of hoping.
18
I took a shower at six the next morning, dried off, and studied my hair.
I hadn’t cut it in over a year. I picked up the ends. Dried and fried.
“Damn,” I muttered. I pulled the whole, wet blond tail over my right shoulder and cut about six inches off. I then pulled it over my left shoulder and trimmed things up. I brushed my bangs down. They came to my chin. I cut straight across with the scissors about eyebrow level.
I put in a little cream rinse, a handful of mousse, brushed it out, then scrunched up my curls. I turned around and used a hand mirror to look in the mirror behind me. My curls were a lot tighter now without the weight. My head felt much lighter, too.
I peeked at Blake’s house on my way out to work. His lights were on. I put my foot on the accelerator. I did not want to run into him.
Yes, I did.
No, I didn’t.
Yes, I did.
I was so mad at him I hurt.
Later that week a chastened Tato and Larissa came into my office, where I sat with Tory. We held up their designs.
“Not bad for you two,” Tory said. “Glad you’re not screaming at each other anymore. You gave me a headache in my face.”
“Excellent,” I told them. Thunder and Lightning grinned at each other. “Original. Zippy. New. Modern. Young. Seductive.”
“Good girl and confident slinky girl mixed,” Tory said.
I whipped through a few more. “Ah, you put in Hayden’s tassels, too.”
“Yeah, we love ’em.”
They hurried out. Peace had prevailed.
I winked at Tory as we reviewed their work.
Priceless. Amazing what primal bonding can do for your employees.
On my way out to my dull gray car that night, I saw a man with black curls turn the corner. I knew it wasn’t Aaron. I knew it. I dropped my keys. I picked them up, dropped them again. I could smell smoke from one of his joints. I could feel his sharp whiskers against my face. I heard his laugh. It wasn’t a humorous laugh. It was the laugh of someone who was beating someone else down into abject defeat.
That laugh trickled down my spine and wrapped around my body. It pitched up high, then low again. Aaron.
I ran around the corner. I ran up to the man with the black curls. I grabbed his elbow.
It wasn’t Aaron. Of course it wasn’t.
“I am s-s-s-o sorry,” I stuttered, the smell of pot smoke, of creepy laughter, fading. “I thought you were someone else.”
He grinned and game me a peace sign. “No problem.”
I leaned against a brick building and tried to breathe.
A police car drove by, and my knees became weak.
It wasn’t Aaron. It wasn’t Blake.
I was still alone.
I was pregnant.
Aaron and I had used condoms. One time, one time, it had slipped off. I dreaded having sex with him, but it made my life easier if I acquiesced. I didn’t want to set him off. I wanted him stable so I could leave. If I denied him sex, he raged. Bringing a baby into the equation was not something I wanted to do. And yet.
I was ecstatic.
I was depressed.
I was grateful to be pregnant.
I felt trapped.
I couldn’t wait to see the baby.
I worried she would have her father’s mental health problems.
I worried that her father would make me have permanent mental health problems.
I started crying each morning in the shower. If I divorced Aaron, would he get joint custody? I couldn’t trust him alone with a child, so how would this work? Would I have to stay with him to protect the child until she left for college at eighteen? Would he manipulate and criticize the child as he did me? How could I take care of one more person? Our marriage was not healthy enough for a child.
I started cleaning way too much, as if I could control my dust, I could control my life. I started having anxiety attacks. I couldn’t sleep. Insomnia tracked me down night after night.
We received a grant to make another film, something we’d applied for well over a year ago, before I decided I could not work with him again. We both plunged into it even though I was three months pregnant and had morning sickness that forced me to lean my head over the toilet every morning while Aaron told me to “hurry the fuck up.”
Aaron’s depression lifted when he found out about the pregnancy, as if a switch flipped. He was thrilled. “This is the best time of my life, Meggie, the best time!” Before we went to bed, and when we woke up, he talked to the baby. “Good morning, baby. . . . Good night, baby. . . . You made your mother sick this morning, now quiet on down in there.... Are you growing, baby? We can’t wait to see you. We love you. You want a brother? And a sister? Okay, I’ll talk to Mommy about it.”
For the baby, he made an effort to take his medication and he started talking honestly to me about the cycles of his depression.
“It feels like I’m spiraling downward, My Meggie, as if I have no control over my own self, this inescapable weight bearing down on me like a tidal wave. I have no hope, I can’t sleep, I have headaches, my brain won’t shut off. I can’t keep up with my own thoughts. I’m all scattered, like someone has popped a balloon, the pieces flying everywhere. Then, all of the sudden, weeks later, I’ll be happy, soaring like a freakin’ eagle and I’m powerful again, and people need to get out of my way so I can create something brilliant.
“My stupid bitch mother had this, too. God, I hate her, but we called it the rabid dog. Her mother killed herself over the rabid dog. I wish a live rabid dog would have eaten my mother before I was eight. Then I wouldn’t know the secrets about her that I know.”
That chilled me to the bone and back. Would my baby have the rabid dog, too?
We laughed over my stomach, and cried.
I kept crying in the shower, too, my head against the tiles, water sluicing away the tears.
As the baby grew, a teeny tiny bump, our problems grew exponentially, too.
I went to get Pop Pop out of doggy day care. I was told his behavior was “improving.”
He grinned at me, that odd thing. His tongue fell out. Maybe I wasn’t completely alone.
That night I sat in the orange Adirondack chair and studied the stars, the maple trees swaying around me, whispering gently. Their leaves were falling off, filling my deck with orange, yellow, green, red, and brown. Pop Pop hopped up on my lap. Who knew one of my best friends would have fur?
“Glad you haven’t gotten in any more fights, buddy,” I told him. “Good job.”
>
He licked my chin. His tongue fell out again.
I met him on Friday night.
It was partially Grandma’s fault.
Grandma, unbelievably, wanted to dance on a bar. It was on her Bust Out and Shake It Adventure Club list.
“We’re putting spice back in my life,” Grandma said. “You three, too. You need it. You all work too much. Lacey’s run by her hormones, Tory’s stalking Scotty, and Meggie wears beige bras—a disgrace—and is living a beige life, also a disgrace. You’re all joining me on the bar.”
“No, I’m not,” I said.
“You want a knocked-up mother to dance on a bar?” Lacey asked.
“I’ll do it,” Tory snorted. “Maybe I’ll invite Farmer Scotty to watch. He wouldn’t come. What’s the point? I hate him. I sounded pathetic there, didn’t I? I hate pathetic people. Pretend I didn’t say that.”
“Oh, blah, blah, blah. Pick me up at seven o’clock,” Grandma commanded. “Don’t be late. I want to be back by eleven for my cigar and whiskey.”
I pleaded a headache when Lacey and Tory arrived at my tree house that night. As I had been at work since six in the morning and had, between Sunday and Friday, worked eighty hours, I was in no mood to dance on a bar. I was in no mood to leave my tree house. I wanted to eat pretzels dipped in vanilla ice cream while mentally lusting after the chief, then get some sleep before my rat nightmares ripped me apart.
“Come on, Meggie,” Lacey said. She was wearing a navy blue maternity dress. “If you don’t come, you’ll have to deal with Grandma’s fire-and-brimstone temper.”
“You definitely need to get out,” Tory said. She was wearing a shimmery silver sheath dress that clung here and there and shiny silver pumps. “You are the most socially dead, intense, non-smiling person I know. Work, work, work.”
“Thank you, Tory.”
“You’re welcome. You need to change your clothes before we leave. I don’t think they’ll even let you in with those rags on. You look like a hillbilly. Don’t worry. I brought dresses.”
“I’m not going.”
“Yes, you are,” they both said at once.
“I have . . . I have . . . gas.”
“Then fart,” Tory said. “By the way, that’s a lousy hair cut. One side longer than the other.”
“I don’t think so,” Lacey said. “Her hair is so much thicker now, all those blond curls are tighter. Who did it?”
“I did.”
Their mouths gaped.
“You cut your own hair?” Tory gasped, as if I’d performed an operation on my heart.
“Yes. It was in my way. I couldn’t even see.”
“That’s why we have salons, Mrs. Einstein,” Tory said.
Lacey patted my head. “Don’t worry. It’s only hair. It can be fixed. Don’t do it again, though. Make it a one-time thing.”
“Strip, Meggie.” Tory reached for my T-shirt and yanked, and Lacey grabbed my pants and did the same. When I stood in front of them, in bra and underwear, they both stopped, jaws hanging open like they were trying to catch birds with their teeth.
“This is the saddest part of all,” Lacey said, putting her hands to her cheeks. “We own a lingerie business and this . . . this . . . secret disgrace . . .”
“Your bra and underwear are clear signs of a broken and diseased mind,” Tory said. “They’ll have to do, though. I didn’t bring bras and panties. Even if your dress catches on fire, don’t take it off, Meggie. We can’t have anyone seeing those . . . those things. Arms in the air, here’s the first dress.”
Tory had brought three dresses with heels to match. She is curvier than I am, looks far better, but she wears her dresses tight, so they fit. After trying on all three, I told them I would wear the blue dress with the square neckline.
Lacey and Tory said to each other, “No. The burgundy one.”
I held onto the blue dress, with both hands, as they wrestled it off me.
Lacey said to me, face flushed, “Stop it, Meggie! We know better.”
Tory said, slapping my hands, “Acknowledge you are the black plague on style and give in.”
They dropped the burgundy dress over my head. It fell to midthigh and had a low neckline. “Too much boob, too much leg,” I protested.
“No one asked for your opinion, Meggie,” Tory said, putting two handfuls of mousse in my hair and scrunching the curls up.
“You used to dress like this all the time. Sit down.” Lacey did my makeup. “Gorgeous,” she breathed when she was done. “You are a naturally gorgeous woman.”
“All the men are going to be looking at you and I’ll never get laid and make Scotty jealous,” Tory muttered. “I should have left you in that stained T-shirt, scraggly bra, beat-up underwear, and jeans.”
The bar was on the top floor of a building downtown with a view of the sparkling lights of Portland. It was lit by candlelight, classy, and crowded. In the corner of the large dance floor a band banged it out. On the other side of the bar was the restaurant, expensive and gourmet, and much quieter. When Grandma, Lacey, Tory, and I walked in, all of our employees stood up and cheered for Grandma.
Grandma, in a couture turquoise wrap dress and bone-colored heels, was her usual gracious self when she found out Tory had invited Lace, Satin, and Baubles’ employees. She said to everyone, “I see you all are here to observe the dance. Like hyenas. Cackling hyenas. Well, you can’t chew on my corpse yet.”
The hyenas raised their drinks up and cheered her.
Grandma waved her hands in a gesture of “Oh, stop it!” Then said, “I won’t tolerate any silliness tonight. I’m dancing on the bar, then we’re all going home.”
The hyenas cheered her again. Clearly there would be silliness tonight.
“My treat,” Grandma announced to everyone as she ordered a whole slew of appetizers and bought us all drinks. “For you hyenas, and because Meggie is finally dressed like a woman.”
They raised their glasses to my womanhood. I rubbed my forehead. It would be a long night.
I ordered lemon cream pie, then I had wine, which made me überemotional, which is why I rarely drink it, same with hard alcohol.
Lacey put her arm around me on one side, Abigail on the other. Later I scrambled out of the booth to go to the bathroom. On my way back to the bar I met Tay.
That was his name, Tay.
He was trouble, but not because he was Tay. Friendly, open, funny, Tay.
Tay smiled and said hello, introduced himself. He was about my age, had black, short, wavy hair and a wide smile. He was cheerful. Like a black Labrador. That’s how I thought of him. A cheerful black lab.
We chatted and he invited me to dinner. I declined. He grabbed a table in the bar, asked to buy me a drink, I said yes, I don’t know why, then he bought crab and shrimp appetizers. When we were talking, my grandma sent over two pieces of chocolate cake. Tay seemed surprised when they arrived.
I wasn’t. Chocolate cake is what my mother says women should eat before sex so they are “more moist, like melted chocolate, not dry like a desert.” I have no idea how or why she believes that.
So, through the fuzz of chocolate, crab, and shrimp, and more wine, we chatted. I tried to forget about Blake. My heart ached for Blake. He was the one I wanted to be there with, not Tay, although the black Lab was darling.
Fifteen minutes later Tory and Lacey came over and introduced themselves. Lacey said, “Well, aren’t you a handsome fellow,” and Tory glared at me, swirled her martini with her purple-painted nails, and said, “I thought you agreed not to compete, Meggie. Hello.” She nodded at Tay. “I’m her sister. She’s frigid and has a bad past. She also works all the time and has a stick up her butt. Part of it is that she’s a Leo. I’m a Pisces. Much better, more cerebral, seductive. When you want to move on, I’m here for you.”
I rolled my eyes.
They sat down with us. Grandma sat down, too.
Tay was eager to chat.
Bark, bark.
It h
appened a half hour later.
I was dancing with Tay on the dance floor. I was truly shocked that I was dancing at all. I knew I could blame it on the alcohol, which had slipped through my body like liquid gold.
Lacey, Tory, and almost all of the employees were dancing, too, most of them with each other. The Petrelli sisters got down and rocked it. So did Lance and his wife, Maritza and her sisters, and the Latrouelle sisters—well, they brought down the house. Abigail proved she could, in her words, “bust a move and a roll and a cartwheel.” She was a little drunk, but funny.
Grandma was in the middle. Tory had gone into the bathroom to cry, and had come out with a blotchy face. I knew she was thinking of Scotty because she’d said, “Scotty is such a jerk, and I don’t want him anymore. He still hasn’t called me, and I was remembering how lucky lucky lucky I am to be rid of him.”
Tay was smiling at me, making me laugh, and told me I had the prettiest hair he’d ever seen. He wrapped his fingers around a curl.
I was thinking of Blake. I wanted Tay to be Blake. I squished my eyes shut and dropped my forehead to Tay’s shoulder. I was almost seeing Blake in my arms....
And then . . . strangely enough—boom—when I lifted my head, Blake came out of the mist wearing a gray suit and tie.
No, no mist, I corrected myself. He came out of the steam. No, no steam, I corrected myself again.
I shook my head.
He came out of the fuzziness.
Not that, either.
But there he was.
I was drunk. I had to be. Maybe it was the beer after the wine, Tory’s screwdriver, some sips of Grandma’s frilly drink . . .
I blinked.
Blake was walking toward me on the dance floor, and he was one ticked-off dude.
I looked up at Tay. “Do you see a blond giant walking toward us, ho ho ho?”
He nodded. “Yeah, he’s right there. Do you know him?”
“Hello, Meggie.”