by Amy Briant
As quickly as it had come upon her, the fit of anger seemed to pass. She sagged from her sitting position into a curled-up S-shape on top of her sleeping bag. She wasn’t even crying, or at least not much. I think she was more exhausted, physically and emotionally, than anything else.
I reached over and put a hand on her shoulder. She did not respond.
“We’ll be all right, East. All we have to do is stay sharp and keep walking. We’ll find Segundo. I’m not going to stop until we do.”
We stayed like that for a few moments, she lying there in the fetal position, me with my hand on her shoulder. Finally, she gave a sigh and climbed into her sleeping bag. I did the same. The third sleeping bag stood mute in the corner. I’d have to decide whether to keep it in the morning.
“Goodnight, Kell,” she said quietly, sounding tired.
“Goodnight, East.”
My last thought before sleep took me was: Me? A Messenger?
Holy shit!
Chapter Nine
The Naked Truth
When I awoke, the sun was on the rise and had warmed the tent considerably. I could hear water dripping from the trees, but the rain had stopped. I got up and out of the tent without waking East. It was a glorious morning, temperature in the sixties, little to no wind. The sun sparkled and danced on the creek. Except for a hawk doing circles high above, I saw no other living creature.
I ate an apple for breakfast, then busied myself with spreading out our wet garments on a flat rocky ledge by the creek to dry. At least the rain the night before had washed some of the mud from my hoodie. I buried the no-longer-needed third sleeping bag and the items we had discarded from Mr. Giovanni’s pack. No point in lugging that stuff—it would only slow us down. There had been no sign of man or beast following us so far, but I thought it prudent not to leave obvious markers of where we’d been.
After that, East still wasn’t up, so I decided to take advantage of the sunshine by indulging in a much-needed bath. A few yards downstream, by the rocks on which our clothes were drying, the bank of the creek curved. A sandbar had formed, creating a shallow pool no more than three feet deep, protected from the current by the sandbar’s embrace. With a little luck, I’d be washed, dried and dressed before East arose. I would have preferred the pool to be a little further from our campsite for privacy’s sake. On the other hand, if East woke up and I was nowhere to be found, she would freak for sure. I stripped down to my T-shirt and boxers and stuck a cautious toe in the pool. It was cool, but not too cold. Nothing like a brisk dip al fresco to get your blood going in the morning. I took one last look around and listened hard as well. Nothing from the tent. No critters or people within range, except for the circling hawk and a smart-alecky-looking blue jay who was eyeballing me from across the creek.
I pulled the bar of soap from the pocket of my cargo pants where I’d left it, dropped the rest of my clothes on the bank, gritted my teeth and plunged in. The water temperature encouraged me to move fast and I did, scrubbing and lathering furiously, all the while trying to keep an eye out for anyone watching. Especially East. I’m no prude, but having her see me naked was way down on my list of things to do. I sat down with just my head above the surface for the final rinse. The cool, clear water felt absolutely marvelous on my body. I don’t think I’d even realized how dirty I’d been. I dunked my head to wash the soap out of my hair. It was Settlement soap, so it didn’t smell that great, but it did what soap is supposed to do.
When I came up for air, I saw East standing in front of our tent, staring right at me.
“Don’t look!” I yelped, instinctively ducking back down. I didn’t think she could have seen much, what with the angle and the distance. A part of me wondered why I even cared. Everybody was dead, everything was gone—did it even matter anymore?
But old habits died hard, so I yelped “Don’t look!” When she didn’t budge, I hollered an indignant “Go back in the tent!” She shrugged once, then turned and went back in the tent, zipping the flap up behind her.
I was still sitting hunched over in the pool. Crap. Why had I told her to go back in the tent? Now she had a perfect view if she wanted to spy on me with her eye pressed up against the zipper. I sat there for a moment longer, but there was no way out of it. Either she was going to look or she wasn’t, and there wasn’t a darn thing I could do about it. I took a deep breath, stood and strode out of the creek with as much dignity as I could muster onto the bank where I bent down for my clothes. The blue jay cawed loudly from his perch in a rude avian fashion. I toweled off with my shirt and got dressed. Speedily.
I heard the tent’s zipper being opened in a hurry. East practically ran down to where I stood. I avoided eye contact while I took my time tucking my damp T-shirt into my cargo pants.
“I knew it! I knew it!” she crowed triumphantly.
Crap. I didn’t say anything, just got my hoodie off the rocky ledge, then crouched down to launder it at the water’s edge, my back to her.
East was excited. I was…relieved?
She continued to babble. “I mean, I kind of suspected—a bunch of us did, we all talked about it, but I didn’t know for sure, but I thought I knew and I’m right! I knew it!”
I paused in my scrubbing just long enough to turn my head and say to her wearily, “Knew what, East?”
As if I didn’t know.
“That you’re a girl, Kell Dupont—you’re a girl!”
Chapter Ten
Right Field
So fine, fuck, whatever—I’m a girl. On the outside.
I absolutely hated the idea that they’d been talking about me. Even though I knew all along they probably were. Still, that didn’t prepare me for the pain of hearing her say it. Why? Why should it hurt? Why did I even care what they thought?
I’d always been a tomboy, as Gabriel had put it, even when I was so little I couldn’t remember it. Always ran around, got dirty, climbed trees. Always wanted boys’ clothes, had demanded to wear them as soon as I was old enough to demand. I’d always known I was a boy on the inside, although the world said I was a girl. It’s a damned odd feeling to not have your outsides match your insides. But early on, I understood that I was just me. A boy born in a girl’s body. Felt like a boy, looked like a boy, acted like a boy. Was, in fact, a boy. It wasn’t my fault the factory shipped me with the wrong parts. I was a boy. I had no desire to dress like a girl or be girly. It wasn’t happening. It simply wasn’t in me.
My family loved and accepted me. I was just Kell at home. No big deal. There was Mom and Dad, there was Gran, then Gabriel and me. When I was little, life was just about perfect, I thought.
Then the Bad Times came and with them a storm of violent change and misery for everyone, not just me. But I still had Gran and Gabriel and their unconditional love. But I was only five when those Times started—a lot of it was a blur to me. A period of some stability then followed. Gran continued with our homeschooling for several years and we lived more or less happily in her little cabin in the woods. We made occasional trips to the Settlement, but Gran decided our family was fine on its own. My days were filled with lessons from Gran, chores, more chores and—whenever I could—adventures with Gabriel. Expeditions, she called them.
And it never occurred to me that I was doing anything wrong or even particularly different. I was just being me, being a kid. Being Kell—a boy who hadn’t yet realized what a burden his female body would be.
Gran’s decision that we should attend Settlement school changed all that. I hated that decision at the time, but it eventually dawned on me—as Gran’s health declined from middling to bad to worse—that this was her way of preparing me for the world. It was a painful pushing from the nest, but I came to understand it had to be done. The truth is, the world is a wonderful place. It’s people that make it shitty. It was the people I needed preparation for.
So off I went to Settlement school at age thirteen, in my jeans and sweatshirt and ’49ers baseball cap. I’d always worn my hair sh
ort—that was the way I liked it. I’d always kept my nails short—that was just common sense. Maybe my brows were a little messier and heavier than the Settlement girls. Probably because I never bothered to pluck them. I thought they did a fine job of separating my eyes from my forehead, so why change ’em? Maybe my voice, when I bothered to use it, was a little lower than their voices. Frankly, the teenaged girls were astonishing to me. Astonishingly silly and loud and annoying. I felt much more at home among the boys. My silence didn’t seem to bother them as much. And I was just as agile and athletic as any of them, more so than many. What I lacked in size and strength, I made up for in speed and guts.
Everyone—grownups and kids—seemed to take it for granted that I was a boy. Fine by me. All our classes were coed, many with mixed grade levels to make the best use of the limited teaching resources. We had recess, but no formal physical education classes. There wasn’t enough staff for that. Didn’t matter—I was getting more than enough exercise between my chores at home and my ten-mile round trip walk to school each day. During recess, those first few days of eighth grade, I’d either find a quiet place from which to observe or take part in one of the boys’ games if it appealed to me. I loved baseball—two teams of nine was way better than the two-person version Gabriel had taught me. On rare occasions, we could cajole Gran into pitching for us. That’s how I learned about trash-talking.
Gabriel let me choose my own course at school. She, of course, was making friends left and right. Like I’ve said, she and I were never much alike. I loved my sister, but I never aspired to be like her—certainly not in appearance. At sixteen, she was curvy, feminine, long-haired, outgoing and charming. Everything I wasn’t and never would be. She seemed to easily fit in at school, with the girls liking her and the boys all agog.
At first, I thought I too might make some friends. There was one kid, scrawny and short like me, but a few years older, who was more interested in bugs than baseball. Everyone always called him by his last name—Burroughs. While the other teenaged boys played a quick game of baseball during recess, Burroughs would haunt the edge of the field, looking for caterpillars or butterflies or beetles. On the third day of school, I spotted him from my place in right field, engrossed with something by the foul line. I was secretly burning to make a spectacular play and show them all I deserved to man third base, or at least center field, but no one had hit anything near me all game. And Burroughs made me curious. He seemed like a nice guy. I thought maybe he could be my first new school friend.
“Whatcha got?” I asked, wandering over. I squatted down next to him to see his latest catch-and-release specimen, a gorgeous Monarch butterfly gently resting within his cupped hands. The pitcher struck out the hitter while we admired it.
“Check out the faggots!” came the yell from the next hitter at bat. Hunter Cohen, thirteen years old.
I straightened up, shocked and surprised. Was he yelling at me? At Burroughs?
The rest of the boys laughed, pointing and jeering at us. Burroughs let the butterfly go and quickly walked away from me and the game, disappearing into the trees at the edge of the playing field. The Monarch flew once around my head, then also had the good sense to depart. I was still standing there, looking around like an idiot, not sure what was happening. I wasn’t even sure what a “faggot” was at that point.
Hunter was now making obnoxious kissy noises from home plate.
“Oh, poor little faggot! Your boyfriend left you all alone.”
This led to increased hilarity from the rest of the ball players. I’d seen the feral dogs in the woods circle and then suddenly come together as a snarling pack, so I finally recognized what was going on. Although I still had no idea why.
“Are you talking to me?” I called to him, trying the direct approach. It’s important to not let the dogs know you’re afraid.
“Yeah, I’m talking to you, pretty boy,” he yelled back. “What’s your name again? Smell?”
That knee-slapper brought on a fresh round of sniggering from the pack. So much for making friends in school. The irony was, they all absolutely believed I was a boy. The ridiculous part was, they pegged me for a gay boy. A boy who liked boys.
When the truth was a lot more complicated than that.
Chapter Eleven
Three Questions
East stood there looking at me with a big cake-eating grin on her face. Her words—“you’re a girl”—still rang in my ears. Well, no point in denying it. My body was a girl’s body. I actually felt kind of glad she knew. The older I’d gotten, the more of a hassle it had become to hide my identity from the Settlement. Or what they would call my identity. In my mind, it was crystal clear. I was Kell—boy soul, girl body. Some might have thought I was confused, but I wasn’t. I’m just Kell, I thought. Why can’t other people get that?
Back at the Settlement, they had all kinds of names for me—the kids and some adults too. Faggot. Homo. Freak. Mistake. How can a person be a mistake? That didn’t even make sense. Oddly, the people who called me a “mistake” were the same ones who liked to say their God didn’t make mistakes. Those people were always a little short on logic, but full to the brim with hate.
Gran had told me it used to be different. The San Tomas of the past was famous for its free-wheeling radicalism, its open acceptance of one and all. “Hippie-dippie” was her technical term. But in the years that led up to the Bad Times, something went wrong with the world. Or the wrong that had been there all along grew stronger. Little by little, old ways began to trickle back—ways of fear, distrust and animosity toward those who were simply different. Even the university, formerly a bastion of liberality, found itself transformed by a rising tide of right-wing ideology and so-called conservative thinking.
“But how?” I asked Gran once. “Why did it have to go so wrong?”
She eyed me as if sizing me up, checking to see if I was old enough to hear whatever she was going to say. Finally, she sighed and with no trace of her usual humor said, “You have to understand something, Kell. For most people, it’s all too easy to become the worst versions of themselves.”
I put together more of the story with bits and pieces overheard from the adults through the years, and from what Mr. Giovanni told us—and didn’t tell us—in history class. In those twisted, toxic years preceding the Bad Times, it became fashionable for the Before people to share loathsome messages on their communication networks. An increasingly repressive government fanned those ugly flames with poisoned rhetoric and the abolishment of protections. Cruelty and lies somehow became things to admire and emulate. The punishment for dissent was swift and brutal. It was around then when people started to go missing. And those who were left became afraid to speak the truth.
So after a while, the truth changed.
When I was a little kid, I had a book of stories about magic and princesses kissing frogs and happy endings. I spent countless hours yearning to awaken from my spell one day to find that I was a boy on the outside as well as on the inside. If that had ever happened, I would have welcomed it as a quick and painless fix, and happily lived my life without a single glance backward.
But instead, I grew older and my previously unremarkable child’s body began to change. There was no doubt I was a girl on the outside then. The boys’ clothes I wore easily concealed that from everyone else, but I knew. I didn’t hate my body. It was me—the outside me—just like what I felt on the inside was me. It would have been easier, no doubt, if I’d been born in a boy’s body, but who has an easy life? Anyone? Overall, I felt pretty lucky. I was alive, for starters—not one of the millions who had died during the Bad Times. I had a home with Gran and Gabriel. I had books to read. I knew in my heart it wasn’t weird to be me. Not at all. What was weird was other people’s expectations—if you look one way, you must act one way. No coloring outside the lines. Even though people come in all different shapes and sizes and variations, even the “normal” ones. So why demand that everyone fall into such strict and limited ca
tegories?
Why? I wanted to shout. Who cares? Where did all these rules come from anyway? And why does everyone else automatically know them and I don’t?
One night, after an exceptionally trying day at school, I was upset. In the midst of railing against the world in general, I asked Gran those questions. Being Gran, she had her own special way of explaining it to me. She was enjoying some of her homemade blackberry brandy with dinner that night.
“People are assholes, Kell,” she informed me, gesturing emphatically with the hooch sloshing perilously close to the rim of her blue speckled mug. “They’re hard-wired that way. It’s in their goddamn genes, I’m telling you. High time you found that out. What have they been teaching you at that school anyway? And is there any pie left? You kids better not have eaten all the pie…”
So back in eighth grade, my brief baseball career came to an abrupt and inglorious end. I don’t think Burroughs ever said another word to me. After that, I mostly read at recess. I got a lot of reading done at that damn school.
Tenth grade was even worse than eighth and ninth, which I would not have thought possible if someone had warned me ahead of time. The girls developed, the boys started shaving. Couples formed, split and re-formed with different partners, a process that was as mysterious as it was fascinating to me. Even though I was remote from my classmates and thought most of them were pretty worthless, it nonetheless hurt that no one—no one—showed any interest in me. I knew I was no beauty, but I didn’t think I was so awful-looking. Maybe I wasn’t attractive in their conventional ways, but I wasn’t a total beast either. I was reasonably smart, thanks in no small part to all that reading at recess. I was lean and nimble. But the things I had to offer were nothing anyone there was looking for.
In the end, it was just easier to let them see what they thought they saw. Easier than trying to explain, that was for sure.