by Elliot Wake
I rubbed my knuckles in the snow. Still tender, pink. A little harder and the wound would reopen. “My levels were low, so I raised them.”
“Under a doctor’s care, or your own?”
“I can’t afford a blood test every time I get sad, Armin. Besides, I have five years of experience with this stuff. I know what I’m doing.”
“That’s what worries me. I think you’re trying to boost your levels as high as possible, beyond a healthy range.”
“What’s healthier: anger or depression?”
“They’re not mutually exclusive,” he began, and then his phone rang. “It’s Laney. One moment.”
His face transformed as he listened to her. A frown first, dubious. Then his forehead furrowed, deep worry settling in. When he hung up he paused, ruminating.
“What is it?” I said.
“Do you know someone named Norah?”
I’d never forget those nails scoring my back, that girlish voice gasping Fuck me with this. I flushed. “Yeah, from Umbra. Why?”
Armin grimaced. “It’s better if we show you.”
———
They were all there in his apartment, their faces hooded with shadow. On the horizon the last light strained through snow, a pale gold mist. Tamsin moved toward me and gripped my coat. Her scent suffused the space between us: almond oil, leather, girl. She gave me a strangely intent look.
“I don’t believe it,” she whispered.
“Believe what?”
Laney called her name. Tam stepped back obediently.
“Why does this look like a funeral?” I said, my voice cracking.
Ellis broke from the group and took my arm. “Let’s sit down together, okay? All of us.”
Everyone clustered around me at the dining table. In the center lay an iPad with a video loaded. The thumbnail showed a pretty face I knew, mascara streaking her skin like black watercolor paint. Dark hair hung over that face, disheveled. The video title read MESSAGE TO R’S FANS (TW: RAPE).
A hand fitted over my shoulder. I wasn’t sure whose. My body was beginning to go numb.
Laney tapped PLAY.
———
NORAH: [Crying.] I hate this. I don’t want to do it. I wish I could just disappear. But I have to make this video, I have to. Not for me. For other girls out there. Girls who might be hurt by . . . him.
[Blows her nose.]
I can’t say his name, or he could sue me. But I can give you hints. He’s popular. Like, one million subs popular. And he’s smart, and attractive, and honestly, before this happened? I thought he was so brave. I mean, being transgender is really hard. People hate him just for existing. It’s horrible, and maybe . . . I don’t know, maybe that’s what made him do this.
I hate him now, too. But not because of who he is. Because of what he did to me.
He lives in the same city I do. Hangs out at this club all the time, and his fans go there to meet him. He’s a local celeb. I was one of his biggest fangirls. I thought it was really cool of him to be there for us. Talk to fans, give us advice, all that.
But here’s the part no one mentions: He uses us. It’s all a front. He pretends to be this guru helping others, but the whole time he’s sweet-talking girls, seducing them. If you want his attention you have to be pretty. And you have to be willing to do whatever. He. Wants.
Don’t believe me? Just look.
[Images flash on-screen: Ren, his face blurred out, photographed with various girls at Umbra. In several pics, he appears to be groping their bodies.]
I have the originals, if anyone doubts me. With his face.
But like I said, I looked up to him. Admired him. I didn’t mind that he’s kind of a manwhore. Or that he’s trans. To me, he’s the same as any other guy. Exactly the same. Brain chemistry, personality, everything. He is a guy.
It’s important you understand that, because I didn’t. Not really. Because I thought he was also . . . different. Special. That being raised as a girl meant he wouldn’t hurt me.
[Cries.]
I’m sorry. This is—this is so hard.
[Looks off camera, composes herself.]
I kept trying to get his attention. He always talked to the prettier girls, but finally, one night, it was my turn. We danced, and he was so sweet at first. So charming. He gave me compliments, made me feel amazing. Like we had an actual connection. I was so fucking naive. Then he wanted to talk somewhere quieter, so I said yes, and he took me to this broken-down place that was under construction. Nobody else was around. He pushed me against a wall, started kissing me. I told him to stop. I just wanted to talk. But he’s so much stronger than I am, and I couldn’t get away.
[Cries.]
I—oh, God, I can’t say it. He—he forced me. He just did it while I cried and begged him to stop. And the most fucked-up part is there’s no DNA. Because of what he used. This—this thing. Not his own—because he’s—God, I can’t say this. I want to die. I want to fucking die.
I’m scared. So scared, so lost. I can’t prove anything. All he left behind were bruises. But something is wrong inside me, something is broken. Because of him.
I’m speaking out for others. Not myself.
There’s nothing I can do now but warn you.
He did it to me.
He’ll do it to you, too.
[Reaches to turn the camera off.]
———
The room was utterly still. All that moved was the slow sequence of city lights blinking on and off, a glowing code printed on the floor.
I pushed my chair back. The others parted.
I looked at their faces but didn’t see them.
Ren was not here anymore. She was.
She saw Adam (kill him), Adam (kill him), over and over.
Square chin. Broad shoulders. Cock in hand as he said, I’m gonna fuck you with this.
Sometimes an emotion is so intense, so much bigger than what a human brain can hold, that it no longer registers as feeling. It’s just the way your hands are shaking, uncontrollably. The way your lungs are crushing your heart. The way your skin writhes so hard you would tear it off if you could open your fists.
People said things to me, things I didn’t hear because I was walking away. A hand touched me. I kept going. Trotted down granite steps, hurtled against a fire door and slipped in the snow and threw myself into a flat-out run. As hard as I’d ever run, completely desynced from myself. All body, no mind.
If I stopped, the thought would put itself into words.
No. Feel this, instead. Raw rage. Let it rise and burn off like gasoline. Let it evaporate in a trail of fire.
Let me run until I stop wanting to get my gun, and an address.
If I stopped, the words would come back. And now they were slightly different.
Now they went:
Kill her. Kill her.
—6—
THREE YEARS AGO
VLOG #131: ADRIFT
REN: I probably won’t even post this. Melodramatic wallowing, she’d call it.
What’s the word for subtweeting when you’re doing it on YouTube? Subtubing?
Whatever.
This is about her. I don’t care if she knows.
It’s four a.m., and I’m talking to my webcam instead of getting drunk with my BFF on her birthday. Because she hates me. Or at least everything I’ve become.
Friday was my two-year anniversary on T. My friends at Umbra wanted to celebrate, but I said no because it was Best Friend’s birthday. I didn’t pick my start date on purpose—I didn’t pick it at all. The clinic assigned it, and when I saw it was her birthday, I thought it’d bring us closer. Something else we could share.
I’m an idiot.
We’ve spent every birthday together since we were eleven. The past decade. Half my life. Twenty-one is a big one, and lately birthdays are the only time we act like real friends.
She walked in on me while I was getting dressed. I haven’t gotten top yet, and . . . it’s weird. It’s wei
rd when someone looks at a part of you that you can’t stand and says, “You turn me on.” Like they don’t care how much that part hurts you. Or how scared you are of losing it, because maybe it means losing them, too.
But she didn’t put two and two together, because she said, “Hot date?”
I thought she was joking, so I said, “Yeah, with an older woman.”
We bantered until she realized I meant her. Then she said, “I’m going out with people you don’t like. You’ll hate it.”
Idiot me kept joking around. She kept rebuffing.
Finally it clicked.
I said, “You don’t actually want me there.”
“You invited yourself,” she said. “I was trying to be polite and give you an out.”
I said, “Didn’t know I needed an invitation. This is our thing.”
And she said, “It was our thing. But you’re not you anymore.”
[Jump cut.]
My first birthday in college, my natal birthday, was rough. I didn’t want to celebrate but you can’t just turn those feelings off after eighteen years. Each time the day came around I felt this stupid surge of hope, this sense that magic could happen. For twenty-four hours everything was possible and nothing was absurd. Secretly, I hoped I’d wake up as a boy. As a kid I thought if I had all boy things they’d have to let me actually be one. So I asked for a bike, and got a robin’s-egg-blue girl’s bike. Asked for a suit, got a girl’s pantsuit. As a concession to my mother, one year I asked for a Ken doll. I can still see her face crinkling, the way she looked at me like I was some ten-year-old stranger standing in her house, in the place where her eldest daughter should be. She got me the doll, and a Barbie to go with, and Barbie sat unopened in her box while I dressed Ken in the suit I couldn’t have.
Without the faintest inkling of what “transgender” meant, I thought:
This is what I’ll look like someday. If I’m good, I’ll grow up to be him.
But I got older, and wiser, and stopped asking for boy stuff. I let Mom buy what made her happy, and gave it to my little sisters.
This is how the world beats you. It wears you down. It wins through attrition.
That first college birthday I hadn’t started T yet, but I was transitioning socially. I was Ren to most people. He/him/his. When strangers said “sir” I could’ve kissed them. They saw me. Not the girl mask I’d been forced to wear.
But part of me felt this weird grief. The struggle was ending—no more girl bikes, no more girl clothes, no more constant battle to prove myself. Even though I hated it, that struggle shaped me. My whole life I’d waged a war against being seen as female. I’d put my back to a brick wall I never thought I’d topple. When it collapsed, I didn’t know who I was without that not-me-ness to push against.
People tried to label me. They said, “Are you a man?” And all I could say for sure was “I’m not a girl.” I was masculine, but what the hell did “being a man” really mean? If it meant renouncing my past, fuck that, because my past, for better or worse, made me who I am. Surviving in the wrong body made me strong. Staying true to myself despite my parents taking away everything I loved—that made me strong. I’d been tested, tempered. My body would always be an alloy, and that was its strength.
But I wasn’t totally sure yet. Before I took T, I took a hard look at myself, and I felt . . . grief.
I was going to lose things I loved. My singing voice, the softness of my skin. My queerness. My visibility, period, if I ended up passing well. I’d look like any other cis straight guy. No one would look at me and see my history, the battles I’d fought. The sexism I’d endured, the homophobia, transphobia. Someday all I’d have left would be the scars on my chest.
And I’d lose her. My best friend. Who loved me, as a girl.
I knew I’d lose you. I knew I would.
Anyway, that first birthday night she found me curled up in the tub, crying. She said, “Be right back,” and a minute later climbed in with pillows and blankets and ice cream. We talked till dawn. I told her how scared I was of transition, of loss. How it felt like starting over in the world. She said, “We start over all the time. Every seven years, our bodies replace every cell except our neurons.” I thought that was beautiful—I’d already lived through three bodies, and now my fourth body, my male one, was taking shape. I hadn’t lost myself the first three times, and I wouldn’t now.
You were there for me that night. I will always love you for that.
[Jump cut.]
But tonight she told me I’m a stranger. That she doesn’t know me anymore.
It was pathetic. I did exactly what every rejected loser does: demand explanations.
I asked if her friends hated me. No, she said. Was she dating someone, would they be there, would it be awkward? No. Then why couldn’t I go to her party?
Finally she said, “Because I can’t look at you like this. This gross half guy, with fucking tits, and a beard.”
Just shoot me in the motherfucking heart.
She started crying. Said it was like watching me die. Seeing the girl in me wither and fade, and this rough, loud stranger take her place.
I said, “I’m the same person inside. Neurons don’t change, remember?”
The look she gave me was just like Mom’s. As if I was a stranger standing in someone else’s shoes.
She said, “You are different. T changed you. You let it happen.”
I told her what the brochures say: It’s a second puberty. What every teenage boy goes through. It wasn’t as bad, for me—I was a feminist, I was socialized female, I wasn’t born into the world with a silver spoon of male privilege in my mouth. Men had hurt me, I reminded her.
And I wasn’t like them. I wasn’t.
That’s the advantage I had over cis men: I fought for this. Put my body through hell to get here. I cherished and respected every moment of it: every needle plunging into a vein, every pimple, every razor nick, every unwanted hard-on, every crack in my new voice.
I was a self-made man.
And I would live and die a better man than the assholes who tried to unmake me.
But all she said was “You’re not the person I knew.”
Then she left. And I’ve been here, alone, wishing us both a happy birthday. Her twenty-first. My second.
The first one we’ve spent apart.
[Jump cut.]
I’ve lost the map to myself. I don’t know where I am, if I’ve really wandered that far from the path and am stumbling blindly into a dark, thorned wood, or if I’m okay and she’s the one off course. There’s nothing to gauge it by. She’s the only person who ever really knew me, pre-transition. No one else can tell me if I’m straying, if I should turn back.
She’s my north star. The shining light I look to when I don’t know where I am.
And I’m losing her.
I’m losing you, and I don’t know how to let you go.
———
Tamsin found me at the train yard. I’d climbed off the bridge onto a Metra car, kicked the snow clear, sat on the roof. No coat, but I couldn’t tell if my shivering was cold or emotion. All I felt inside was charred. Burned out.
I watched her hop the rail and trace my footsteps. Her scarf snapped, rich carmine, a thread of blood spilling stainlessly into the air. A messenger bag jutted from her hip.
Tam sat beside me, boots propped up next to mine. We stared east toward the Sears Tower. No real Chicagoan called it the new name. Clouds tore themselves apart on the needle antennae, fraying into shreds of fog.
“How’d you find me?” I said.
“Expert tracking skills. Katniss level.”
Despite the numbness in my chest, I felt a glimmer of warmth. “No, but really.”
“Cheated.” She opened the messenger bag. “Ellis told me you come here sometimes. Something about your Instagram, urban fashion photos . . .”
“That traitor.”
“She’s worried. They’re all worried. They—”
“Don’t.”
Tamsin shrugged. “Shan’t.”
Inside the bag were two paper coffee cups, lids securely shut. She passed me one.
For a while we sipped peppermint lattes and watched the trains come and go. My thoughts had the substance of dust bunnies. Caffeine only made them skitter.
“It’s not true,” I said. “That video. I didn’t . . . do those things.”
“I know.”
“How?”
“Because I know you. I’ve tried to bait you into hurting me, taking advantage of me. Not once have you faltered. Not in the slightest.”
A knit hat crushed her curls, but one had sprung free and hung jauntily. I fought the urge to tuck it behind her ear. To touch. Human contact seemed impossibly precious right now, and impossibly faraway.
She might be sure I was innocent, but when it really came down to it . . .
Was I?
Over and over I’d replayed that night. Norah’s nails gouging into my back, pulling me closer. Baby, don’t stop. But I had never asked her point-blank, Is this okay? Before transition, consent was mostly nonverbal—kissing a girl and feeling her mouth melt against mine, her hands undoing my fly. We didn’t ask each other explicitly because we mutually assumed that we would never force it. That we couldn’t. Because we were female. Our anatomy, our sex drive, our socialization were all so different from boys’. We knew about rape culture. We weren’t seething with the hormone that fueled sex and violence.
But maybe that was the very thing that blinded me: my female history.
Had Norah at any point told me no, in some implicit, pleading way? Had I ignored it? Like Ingrid said, if you shifted the period, the whole meaning changed: Baby, don’t stop. Baby, don’t. Stop.
Had I heard what she said, or what I wanted to hear?
“Even without that,” Tamsin said, interrupting my thoughts, “I’d still know.”
“How?”
She cradled the cup in her lap. “Forgive me if this comes across the wrong way, but you’re different. You touch me differently than other men do. There’s an underlying presumption when they put their hands on me. As if I’m a possession, an object. As if permission to use is assumed until I say no. But when you touch me, I sense you asking how I feel. What I want. When you touch me it feels like a conversation.”