If I Was Your Girl

by Meredith Russo

  “Yoo-hoo!” a loud female voice called, high and musical. It took me a moment to realize it was Mom. I looked in her direction and froze when I saw her sitting next to Virginia, both of them waving, Mom in a zip-up purple Windbreaker and sneakers, and Virginia in an oversize cable-knit sweater that came to her knees. My head swam, watching them together.

  “Hi,” I said, putting my bags down and hugging each of them before giving them a confused look. “So, this is weird.”

  “Is it?” Mom said, giving Virginia a look of concern.

  “I don’t think so,” Virginia said, taking my bag for me as we made our way out to the sidewalk where Mom was parked.

  “But you two barely know each other.”

  “Don’t we?” Virginia said, smiling mischievously.

  “I started going to that support group at your therapist’s office,” Mom explained as we got in her old gray SUV. I tried to picture Mom at the meetings and couldn’t. Mom must have known what I was thinking because she shrugged and said, “I got lonely and I wanted to know more about you, so I decided to check it out.” She squeezed my leg and gave me a look that told me everything was going to be okay. I put my hand over hers and smiled, silently thanking her for not mentioning that I had left town with a black eye and came back with one too.

  The house was even cleaner than I remembered, and decked out in decorations for Thanksgiving, which was still a few days away. The living room and kitchen were explosions of orange and brown, with paper turkeys and cornucopias on every surface with any room. I smelled a roast in the oven, and spicy cornbread, and my mouth watered.

  “That smells so good,” I said. “You didn’t have to go to the trouble.”

  “You’re my daughter!” Mom said. “And you’re too skinny. I knew your daddy couldn’t even be trusted to feed you.” She walked into the kitchen and announced that dinner was in half an hour.

  “I need some fresh air after the bus,” I yelled back.

  “I’ll join you,” Virginia said, stepping outside with me.

  “You staying for Thanksgiving?” I said as she put on her jacket.

  “Wish I could,” she said, fiddling with her buttons as she descended the porch steps. “I’m actually moving down to Savannah next week. Got accepted to SCAD.”

  “That’s so cool!” I said. She beamed at me and we walked in silence for a moment. I winced with each step. My ankle still throbbed. “So,” I said eventually, “you wanna know what happened?”

  “Let’s talk about something else,” Virginia said. “Give you a little time. You deleted your Tumblr, didn’t you?” I nodded. “So you still don’t know what everybody’s been up to.” I shook my head, glad she was talking. Virginia and Mom were the only two people who could have been around me right now.

  “Zeke finally got a job with insurance that covers his top surgery,” she said. “You just missed the party; he’s got the surgery scheduled for next month.”

  “That’s great. Is he still dating Rhonda?”

  “Moira’s couch-surfing again,” Virginia said suddenly, as if she hadn’t heard me. “She’s stayed clean so far, but she’s a long way from safe. Your mom’s thinking of putting her up in y’all’s guest room.” She put her hands in her pockets and looked up at the sheet of iron-gray clouds overhead. “Your mom’s a really great person, you know.”

  “I know,” I said, tilting my head and narrowing my eyes. “Virginia. What happened to Rhonda?”

  “Can I tell you later?” Virginia asked, giving me a pleading look. “You’re under enough stress as it is.”

  “I’d like to know,” I said.

  “Okay.” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “She killed herself about a month ago, just after I got back. Didn’t leave a note.”

  “No,” I said, covering my mouth and wrapping my other arm around myself. “Jesus. Why?”

  “You know why,” Virginia said, shaking her head slowly. “We all know why.” She was silent for a moment while I processed that information. “Her parents were monsters about the whole thing, of course. They lopped all her hair off and buried her in a suit and tie.”

  We walked in silence for a while, lost in our thoughts. Rhonda wasn’t the first friend I’d lost; since joining group, I’d been on the other end of that middle-of-the-night phone call too many times. I used to wonder if someone would ever have to make one of those calls for me.

  “So what’s next?” Virginia asked after a while, as we headed back toward home.

  “I don’t know,” I said, letting the wind whip my hair into my eyes as I put one foot achingly in front of the other. “This time, I really don’t know.”

  32

  For most of my life Thanksgiving had been a huge, noisy day full of grandparents, great-aunts and -uncles, cousins, half cousins, and nieces, but ever since coming out and living as a girl full-time, Mom and I had been informally exiled from all family functions. That was fine by me; I much preferred the kind of quiet, cozy meal I was sharing with Mom the Thanksgiving after I came back home.

  She had made too much food like she always did. We were going to be eating leftovers for weeks. We mostly ate in silence, which could have been awkward but was somehow comforting. Mom knew I wasn’t ready to talk about what had happened and I loved her for giving me the space. Halfway through dinner I heard a scratch at the door.

  “Could you let the cat in?” Mom said.

  I opened the front door and the cat trotted through, giving me three loud, terse meows to register her complaint at having been made to wait. The cold, wet air was bracing after the drowsy heat inside. I stepped out to the porch and leaned against the rail with my eyes closed for just a moment, enjoying the chill. My eyes snapped open again when I heard the sound of tires crunching down the driveway. I recognized Dad’s car immediately. I didn’t say anything as he stepped out of the car with a covered casserole dish under his arm.

  When he neared the porch I smelled his sweet-potato casserole with the marshmallow crust on top.

  “Hi,” he said, looking rickety and out of place. He tried to smile and, despite everything in the last few weeks, I couldn’t resist smiling back at him. “Am I late?”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked instead. He stopped just inside the door and looked around quietly, like our living room was a strange foreign country.

  “Amanda?” Mom called from the other room. Her chair squeaked and I heard her feet coming from around the corner. “Is someone—oh.” She froze when she rounded the corner. Dad finished taking off his coat and waved sheepishly.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” he said. I leaned against the back of the couch and looked back and forth between them, waiting for the detonation. I had always wondered what would happen if they ever saw each other in person again, and the most likely outcome seemed to be a full thermonuclear exchange. Instead, Dad said, “Your home is lovely,” and Mom replied, “Thank you. Come join us.”

  The conversation didn’t improve much when Dad joined us, but that was okay. We finished the meal in silence and Mom started to clear away the dishes. Dad got up to help but I touched his forearm to get his attention.

  “Actually,” I said, “could we go for a walk? Rain’s been gone for a few hours.…”

  “Yeah?” Dad said.

  “I just thought,” I said, “there’s a baseball diamond they keep lit at night.” Dad stood there, holding a stack of plates, blinking slowly. “We could, you know, play catch … if you still want to.”

  “Oh,” Dad said. He put the plates down and thought for a moment. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “I’d like that,” Dad said.

  Mom was more than happy to keep us out of the kitchen, since she had her own arcane way of loading the dishwasher that nobody could ever get quite right. The gloves and ball were in an old box, unused and dusty after more than a decade. The squelching and slipping as our boots worked their way through the wet leaves and muck made me glad my ankle had
almost completely healed. Dad was silent for the entire walk, staring from the sky to me and back again.

  “Something on your mind?” he said.

  “A lot.”

  “That’s understandable.” Dad shoved his hands in his pockets and stared up at the streetlamps.

  We arrived at the baseball diamond, the mist making the light from the floodlights weak and pale. He stood where the batter would stand and I stood on the pitcher’s mound, mitt on my left hand and ball in my right.

  “Why do I have to wear the mitt on my left hand?” I said. “Wouldn’t it be easier to catch with my right?”

  “Sure,” Dad said, “but can you throw with your left?”

  “Oh,” I said, nodding. I hauled back, cocked my arm, and threw the baseball to him as hard as I could. It sailed over him and a few feet to the left, clanking into the chain link fence protecting the bleachers. “Oops! Sorry.”

  I saw him smiling as he jogged back into position and couldn’t help laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” he said, tossing the ball in the air absentmindedly.

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s just sometimes I wonder what my past self would think if she saw me, and I wondered what our past selves would think if they saw us right now.” He thought about it for a moment, his smile widening more and more, until we both snorted and the laughter popped out of us. We carried on like that for a little while, him throwing, me failing to catch, me throwing so wildly that he had to duck out of the way or run halfway across the field to retrieve the ball.

  “So when your mother and me talked before you came to live with me,” Dad said, finally breaking the silence, “she told me your therapist said you were real fragile after what happened last summer, at the mall. I wouldn’t—” he started and faltered. “If anything like that ever happened now…”

  “Oh,” I said, shrugging. “I think maybe I’m stronger than that now.”

  Dad nodded, the relief plain on his face. “I think maybe you’re right.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The girl who moved in with me wouldn’t have been okay after that homecoming dustup.” I nodded, thinking of the shocked faces of my classmates in the dim light of the gymnasium, the twisting in my gut when Grant said It’s not true, right?, the horror of racing away from Parker in the darkened woods. “Dustup” seemed like an understatement.

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “I’ve just been thinking,” Dad said. “You know I went in the navy after high school, don’t you?” I nodded and threw the ball so it rolled between his legs. “I thought I was tough. A lot of guys thought they were even tougher.” He threw the ball. I yelped, closed my eyes, and by some miracle actually caught it. “I don’t think we held a candle to you.”

  “I’m not brave,” I said, smiling despite myself. “Bravery implies I had a choice. I’m just me, you know?” I threw the ball into the palm of my glove over and over while I spoke, staring at the floodlight until blotches danced in my eyes. I had sent my application in to NYU, and in a few months I would find out whether I got in. I imagined falling off the face of the earth again, drifting out of Layla, Anna, and Chloe’s lives, being mostly forgotten by my classmates except as an occasional story trotted out at parties. Grant was gone, which hurt but was also kind of a relief—he was one less complication when it came time to pack my things and head up north. Everything about that plan was fine except for one thing: I didn’t want to disappear anymore.

  I looked up at my father. “What if I told you I wanted to go back to Lambertville?” I saw him staring at me. Was his face white from the chill, or from fear? “Would that be a brave thing to do, or would it be stupid?”

  “Both?” Dad said, running a hand over his moist hair and blowing out a long breath. “But that’s what being young is, really. I think I’ve been so afraid for you all this time that I forgot that.”

  “Since I moved in, you mean?” I said, throwing the ball so that he only had to jump a little bit to catch it.

  “Oh no,” he said, “longer than that. Since you were just a baby.”

  “I thought you were embarrassed of me.”

  “I was,” he said, chewing his lip. “I pray the Lord forgives me one day but I was. More than that, though, so much more than that, I was terrified for you.” I looked down and flexed my glove. “I had to drink just to let your mother teach you how to walk; I kept seeing visions of you falling and cracking your head open.”

  “I think I get that from you,” I said, smiling. He chuckled darkly.

  “I couldn’t stand the idea of you hurting. I couldn’t stand the idea of anything taking away your happiness.” He shrugged and sighed. “But everything that made you happy, from the way you wanted to walk to the toys you wanted to the way you wanted to dress … it put you in danger. So what could I do?”

  “You ran away,” I said.

  “I ran away.” He walked over to me, taking his glove off and slipping it under his armpit. “Or I let you run away and chose not to follow. Either way…” He put his hands on my shoulders and looked me straight in the eye. “You are brave,” he said. “You get that from your mother.” He removed his hands and stared off at the dark, empty park. “After homecoming, when you walked in that door—I was furious. So mad I felt like I could kill someone. Mad at you, mad at myself, mad at whoever had done that to you. But then when you were gone and I was all alone in that apartment, thinking about everything you went through … I wanted another chance to get it right.” He took a deep breath and looked back at me. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you want to come back to Lambertville, well, I’d be real happy to have my daughter back.”

  I nodded, a lump in my throat. I had been waiting my whole life for my father to want me, for him to want his daughter. I blinked back tears, but this time, they were tears of joy.

  We walked back to the house, a different kind of silence falling between us. I caught his eye and he put his arm around my shoulder, pulling me in close. When we got to the house he opened the trash-can lid and tossed the baseball mitts inside.

  “Bye, Andrew,” I said softly.

  “Bye, son,” Dad agreed, as we went inside.

  APRIL, TWO YEARS AGO

  “Hardy?” the nurse said. “Andrew Hardy?”

  I stood and took a few steps toward the door. The horrible twisting in my gut that normally accompanied the sound of that name was barely present. I was too excited about what was about to happen.

  “Andr— Amanda?” Mom said. I turned and saw her standing with her hands clasped, a look on her face like she was afraid this was the last time she would ever see me. “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “No, thank you,” I said. I hugged her and backed away again. “I think I need to do this by myself.”

  I turned back to the nurse and followed her into a bright, white hallway. She had me stand on a scale and clucked reproachfully when she saw how underweight I was. Then she had me sit on the paper-covered exam bed and took my blood pressure, which was normal, and asked me the usual questions. Did I have any allergies? No. What medications was I taking? Wellbutrin and Lexapro. Did I have any ongoing medical problems? Not really.

  “So what brings you to us today?” the nurse said finally.

  “My therapist referred me,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. I hesitated in saying the rest. “I have, um, gender identity disorder. I’m … I’m transgender.” I tore absentmindedly at the paper seat cover and took a deep breath. “I need to start hormones.”

  “Okie dokie,” the nurse said, scribbling one last note before smiling and closing my file. “You just sit tight and Dr. Howard will be with you shortly.”

  I fell back on the bed, stared at the ceiling, and crossed my hands over my heart. It was really happening. It was really, finally happening. I wasn’t going to grow hair on my chest and back. My voice wasn’t going to deepen any more than the little bit it already had. My shoulders weren’t going to widen. My jaw and forehead weren’
t going to bulge. I was never going to grow a beard. All because of this moment. I heard the door open and sat up to see an older man with a thick beard and bald head examining my chart.

  “Afternoon, Andrew,” he said, putting down the chart and holding out his hand. I shook it and he smiled. “I’m Dr. Howard. How are you doing today?”

  “Good,” I said, and I felt a sudden, unprecedented surge of courage. “But I would prefer it if you called me Amanda, sir.”

  “I see,” Dr. Howard said, still smiling. “No problem, Amanda. Let me just make a note of that in your chart.” He made the note quickly. “Let them know at the desk if anyone gives you any problems about that in the future.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I’ve looked at your chart and gone through the notes your therapist sent us,” Dr. Howard said, “and this all seems pretty straightforward. We’ll start you on one hundred milligrams of spironolactone to block your testosterone and two milligrams of estradiol to replace it with estrogen. We’re starting at a low dose at first because you’re going to have some mood instability and the estradiol can be hard on your liver. I like to ease in so we can observe you and make sure things don’t get out of hand. We’ll bring you in for a blood test in about a month and stay in touch with your therapist and see how we want to proceed from there.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “There is one other thing I want to go over before I write this prescription though,” he said. “Your therapist doesn’t seem to have any doubts, and I don’t doubt his skill at his job, but I would be remiss if I didn’t make sure you understand a few things.”

  “Okay,” I said, my throat feeling suddenly dry. I was so close, and some small, scared part of me screamed that he was about to take it all away.

  “Not to be crude, but you are going to grow breasts,” Dr. Howard continued. “They’ll shrink if you ever change your mind and go off the hormones, but they’ll never completely go away unless you get reconstructive surgery.” I nodded. “And more importantly, you’re going to be sterile within a few weeks of starting the spironolactone. It might be reversible if you stop the hormones within your first year, but after that point the effect is almost completely permanent.”