Taylor, my roommate and best friend, was holed up in her bedroom with her girlfriend Caroline. Again. It was Taylor’s twenty-third birthday.
I knocked on her door. “Want a drink?”
Giggles and shushes.
“We’re okey-doke in here,” Taylor said.
Weed.
I poured myself a rye and ginger and fiddled with my playlist, a mix of songs that Taylor and I had loved as teenagers. Heavy on the Radiohead and the Alanis Morissette with a little Salt-N-Pepa thrown in. It was a pointless activity given that Caroline would almost certainly take over DJ duties, which meant we were in for a lot of Bikini Kill.
The doorbell rang and I went downstairs to answer it. A trio of girls wearing Doc Martens and jean jackets crowded inside. I didn’t recognize any of them, so they were probably from the Centre.
“Taylor!” one of them yelled. Another screamed, “Happy birthday, bitch!”
More people arrived. Our mutual friends from high school, in various states of inebriation and bravado, heartbroken or broke or both. My friends from Teachers College with their loud voices and debt. Taylor’s engineering friends, who would inevitably at some point in the evening try to convince me to play Strip Settlers of Catan. Everyone crammed into our small front hallway. The requisite shoe pile was in its infancy.
Once I’d herded the guests upstairs and directed them towards cups and ice, Taylor spilled out of her room. “Nice of you to show up,” I said.
She looked glorious with her cropped curly hair and ripped Joy Division T-shirt. She wrapped herself around me. Her breasts must have been bound because her chest felt completely flat. This was a new development. “Kate, I miss you, babe!” she said in an ethereal voice that could only mean one thing.
“You dropped MDMA,” I said.
“No duh,” Caroline said, weaving around me toward a new group of partiers.
“Any extra?” I was trying not to sound needy.
“Shit.” Taylor raised her hands to her heart in slow motion. “Did you want some?”
“Kind of.” If Taylor and I dropped MDMA together, maybe we’d finally be able to talk. When we were younger, we talked constantly: on our way to school, between classes, after dinner. But I’d barely seen her in the last six months. When she wasn’t diagnosing bridges or testing concrete—or whatever it was she did all day at her civil engineering internship—she was hanging out with Caroline or attending yet another workshop at the Centre.
“I’m such a jackass,” Taylor said.
“It’s cool.” It was probably deluded, and definitely unhealthy to rely on chemicals to fix your problems. Even if it was easier. “I have to work tomorrow anyway.”
Taylor stroked my long red hair, winding it around her finger. “I thought none of the boards were hiring. Wait, tomorrow’s Saturday.”
“It’s at a tutoring place.”
“Did you already tell me that? Shit, that’s awesome. You get to use your degree.”
“It’s more like babysitting. I just watch them while they fill in worksheets. It’s only thirteen an hour.”
“It’s something.” She smiled dopily at me. “That’s just great.”
“I guess,” I said. “How’s the internship? Laying any bridges over troubled waters?”
She looked over my shoulder and waved. “One sec,” she said, guiding me out of the way.
More and more people crowded into the apartment. The windows fogged. I replenished the cheeses and filled a new bowl of oil-slick olives plugged with pimento dildos. I tried to catch Taylor’s eye but she was yell-talking about cantilevered bridges and queer theory to people I didn’t know. My rye disappeared. The shoe pile became a wobbly cairn. Byron, a lanky blond dude and a fellow Teachers College graduate, handed me a plastic cup sloshing with red wine. I had the same three conversations—(1) we’re never going to get teaching jobs, (2) this one time I was so wasted and (3) did you hear about so-and-so hooking up—over and over. When I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I saw that my teeth had been replaced with purple witch’s teeth. My lips were the scabby red surface of Mars.
I was in a we’re-never-going-to-get-teaching-jobs bitchfest with Byron when Caroline tapped me on the shoulder. “Where’s Taylor?” Her gold eyeliner was smudged and she’d lost one of her peacock feather earrings.
“I think she’s in the kitchen,” I said.
“They’re in the kitchen.”
I blinked. “What?”
“They’re in the kitchen.”
“Who is?”
“They. It’s Taylor’s pronoun.”
“I didn’t know that was a thing. She never told me.”
“They. They never told you.”
“Right, they.” I was determined not to be an asshole.
“Okay.” She smirked.
I knew I was only making things worse. “Taylor came out to me when she was thirteen, and I was, like, super supportive.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “Great. I’m going to find them.”
As I stood there trying to process what I’d heard, trying not to feel hurt that Taylor had kept another part of her life separate from me, a dim memory surfaced. I was very young, maybe five, and I was wearing my brother’s hand-me-downs, sailboats on my blue shorts and a shark on my blue T-shirt, my hair cut short like my brother’s, a frizzy mullet. I was running down the hallway at school, and a teacher was yelling, “Slow down, young man.” I didn’t slow down because I wasn’t a young man and the floors were polished and slippery and I was revving up for a nice long glide. “I said slow down, young man.” I could hear footsteps catching up to me. Her hand on my shoulder, the teacher spun me around. Searching my face, she released her grip, practically recoiling, anger draining out of her. “Sorry,” she stammered. “From behind, I thought…” And from her embarrassed expression, her horror, I knew I should feel ashamed. Tears dribbled down my cheeks. A girl being mistaken for a boy, how humiliating. And when I went home, I begged my parents for something pink, begged to grow my hair past my shoulders.
Was I still that little girl desperate to be a girl or had I become the teacher? I didn’t know, but I knew it was three a.m. and I was wasted. I knew I’d forgotten to bring out the birthday pecan pie, Taylor’s traditional birthday treat. Too bad, so sad. Caroline should be in charge of that shit anyway. It wasn’t my job anymore. I drank two glasses of water and slurred goodnight to the people I recognized. Two of the engineers were shirtless, and one of them was lovingly cradling a green wooden house in her hand. When I got to my bedroom, I found a trio gathered around the terrarium. They were tapping Morse code on the glass. The sheet was on the floor.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Stop that!”
“Chill,” a woman with a shaved head and fake blue eyelashes said. “We’re just trying to wake them up. We want to see them eat the crickets.”
“Sorry,” another girl said. She looked about fourteen with her black plastic bracelets, and striped pink and blue T-shirt. “Are we bothering them?”
“Are they Madagascar day geckos?” asked a balding man in a black hoodie. “I don’t recognize these markings.”
I shooed them out of the room and barricaded the door with my desk.
The next morning, after pushing snooze four times, I crawled out of bed and checked on the miniature Greek gods. Their animal instincts were intact! I couldn’t see the crickets anywhere and this small triumph filled me with an extravagant optimism.
I changed into wool trousers and a grey v-neck sweater. I had to leave right away to get to the tutoring place on time. The desk proved a challenge to push aside. The alcohol must have given me super strength.
The apartment was trashed. Of course. There was slushy gunk all over the floor, and empties covered the kitchen counters and the coffee table in the living room. The remaining cheeses were smushed and there were o
lives lolling on the carpet. When I went into the washroom, I found the remains of the pecan pie on the toilet’s water tank; a colony of cigarette butts stood upright in the dark amber filling.
I brushed my teeth and tried to scrape the wine film off my lips, but it didn’t work. Fuchsia lipstick it was. I applied a thick coat and told myself I looked eighties in a good way. It took a few minutes to locate my jacket, scarf and gloves. I was all bundled up when Taylor materialized in front of me. She was wearing boxers and a white T-shirt, through which I could see her nipples. My cheeks felt hot and my throat dry as I recalled last night’s conversation with Caroline. “Where are you going?” Taylor yawned.
“Work,” I said.
“Work?”
I didn’t have time to talk, but I also knew that I would spend the whole shift obsessing and re-obsessing and re-re-obsessing if I didn’t say something. “By the way, I didn’t know you were going by they these days.” Did that come across as casually as I had intended? I wanted her to feel comfortable.
She looked surprised. “It’s just something I’m trying out.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Not the tone I was going for.
“You don’t have to use it. It’s just for, like, people at the Centre.”
“But I want to. I think it’s so great.” And I did think it was great, even if I didn’t fully understand it. Not yet.
“Thanks.” She was staring at the floor.
Even with all my winter gear on, I hugged her. I must have pinned her arms down by accident because she didn’t really hug me back. As I pulled away, I noticed that I’d left a bright lipstick smear on her left cheek. It looked good on her. Them. They. Them. They.
Work did not go well. I was twenty minutes late and they put me in a group with three kids who all needed help with different subjects. One of them was francophone, and although I’d claimed fluency on my CV, that maybe wasn’t 100 percent accurate. Who knew helping people fill in worksheets could be so challenging? It was no surprise when the director called me into the office at the end of the shift and suggested that I was not the best fit. For the first half of my bus ride home I spiralled into self-flagellation about my lack of responsibility, my ineptness as a teacher, my essential incompetence in the realm of basic human abilities, but after a while, I realized the tutoring company was to blame. They’d set me up to fail. Those kids were probably all ADHD or on the spectrum or dyslexic. And thirteen dollars an hour? Was that a joke? How could anyone feel self-worth for that wage?
I’d managed to more or less cheer myself up by the time I got home, but I still wanted an outside source to confirm my innocence and the vileness of for-profit educational institutes. I called out Taylor’s name. No one answered. The place was immaculate, which was unexpected. Taylor hated cleaning. The swept floor shone, the couch cushions looked extra plump and the washroom smelled of bleach.
I dumped my stuff and went to check on the lizards. They were draping themselves regally on the wood like warriors relaxing after battle. It calmed me to see them so content. A creature vaulted from behind a plastic fern frond; the cricket was now marbled, grey with clots of white still clinging to thorax and antennae. Had they eaten one? No; the second cricket leaped off the water bottle like a diver off the high board. I considered punishing the geckos for their lack of ambition. If they had no other food, they’d have to hunt eventually, but in the end, I caved. I mixed some vitamin powder with the apricot baby food and put it in the terrarium. No reason why all creatures great and small had to feel like shit.
A month after being fired I got a job at La Senza, a lingerie store at the mall. It was a fluke, the result of an indiscriminate blitz of applications. No point looking for a teaching job until summer. Now I spent my days surrounded by leopard-print thongs and pink, furry handcuffs, the air thick with glittery vanilla body spray. Teenage girls bought G-strings in bulk. Teenage boys fondled the gel-filled bras embellished with rhinestones. A woman in her seventies came in one afternoon looking for shamrock nipple tassels. She explained that she only had sex with her husband twice a year, on his birthday and on Saint Patrick’s Day, so she wanted to make it count.
If I hadn’t felt low-level shame about the position, it could have been decent. I had very little responsibility and I could come in hungover with zero repercussions: a good thing considering how much I’d been drinking. With university buddies. With co-workers. With high school friends. But never with Taylor. She was a ghost haunting the apartment, showing up erratically with Caroline in tow to pack a bag before heading off to some retreat at the Centre. The last time I saw her she had a patch of mousy down above her lip. I wanted to ask about hormones and to reassure Taylor that even though some people might judge her for not adhering to conventional standards of gender or for marring their gorgeous face, I was not one of them.
On a Friday night in June I went out for goodbye drinks with Byron. He was moving to Abu Dhabi to work as a science teacher at an international high school.
“You should consider it,” he said. “They’re paying for my flight. My rent. Everything.”
I helped myself to more amber beer from the pitcher. “Something will open up here.”
“Are you even applying?”
I resented the implication that I’d given up. Mostly because it was true.
“Seriously,” he said. “Do you want to spend the rest of your life working at La Sadness?”
“At least I get a discount.” I winked. “Besides my babies need me.” The Olympian couple had remained on a steady diet of Gerber. They couldn’t possibly fend for themselves.
He rolled his eyes and I changed the subject to our common friends’ recent drunken escapades and/or hookups. The conversation had made me a little manic and my drinking pace was more frenzied than usual, so I agreed when some of Byron’s friends suggested heading to a club. I was wearing a sweatshirt and slightly saggy jeans, but I figured some eyeliner would be sufficient to glam myself up.
An hour later I was bobbing along to an electro version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and taking sips of my glowing gin and tonic when someone tapped me on the shoulder.
“Thought so,” a girl with a shaved head said loudly.
I scowled.
“Tracy.” She held out her hand. “From the party. You’re the lizard lady.”
I nodded, vaguely remembering kicking her out of my room.
“You’re friends with Taylor.”
“Best friends,” I said. “And roommates. Since we were seven. Friends since seven, not roommates.”
She laughed. “You might be even cuter than them.”
“Are you from,” I used air quotes, “the Centre?”
Then, somehow, we were making out. It was weird, but also kind of great. It had been months since I’d kissed anyone, which suddenly struck me as absurd. I was young and in my prime. I should be out kissing everybody. Hell, I should be fucking everybody. I’d only ever kissed one other girl before. And that was Taylor when we were thirteen after we’d drunk a bottle of Malibu mixed with orange crush. Did that even count?
Two days later I ran into Taylor at the apartment. She was sitting on the couch eating crackers and hummus and reading a comic book. She was wearing a denim shirt with a red bow tie. Their moustache had filled in. I forced myself to give a non-committal nod and then went to my room. Taylor knocked on the door.
“Come in,” I said, arranging myself in a relaxed-looking pose on the bed.
She stood in the doorway. “Did you make out with Tracy?”
“Yup.” I grabbed a four-month-old Vanity Fair off my side table and flipped through it, stale perfume rising off the pages.
“She asked for your number. Should I give it to her?”
“Sure.” I really, really didn’t want her to give Tracy my number. I’d enjoyed kissing Tracy, but it was more a starved-for-human-contact thing than a s
exual-attraction thing. But I wasn’t about to tell Taylor that.
“Since when are you into girls?”
I put the magazine down and looked her in the eye. “Since when do you give a shit?”
She walked further into the room. “Where is that coming from?”
“I haven’t seen you in months.” I sat up straighter. “Just cause I’m not genderqueer or whatever suddenly I’m too uncool to hang out with.”
I’d gone too far. I could see it in her clenched jaw, in the red splotches travelling up her neck.
“That’s bullshit,” Taylor said with quiet ferocity. “Total fucking bullshit.”
“Is it?”
“Thanks for the support,” Taylor said sarcastically. “It’s such a blast with everyone staring at me in public washrooms, with cashiers squinting at my ID. Maybe I don’t want to talk to you about that stuff, consider that?”
“Why not?”
“It’s awkward. You’re so weird about it. Plus, you’re always drunk or hungover.”
“I’m trying.” My lower lip shook, and I blinked hard, trying to stop myself from crying.
“I didn’t wake up one day and decide,” Taylor said.
“How long have you felt this way?”
“I don’t know. Since puberty? Maybe forever.” Taylor’s voice trembled. “I want to see myself in the mirror. I want to live my life.”
“Without me?”
They shrugged, pulling at a loose white thread on their sleeve. “I don’t know.”
We stayed there for a while, in that silence, on that crumbling bridge. I wanted to be happy for Taylor, supportive. I could see they were in pain, so why was I being so awful?
“I can try harder,” I whispered.
Taylor looked at me, their eyes red. “I’m not saying it’s all your fault.”
“It’s implied.”
“I still want to be friends.”
“Aren’t we?”
Difficult People Page 14