Manifest

by Alden Lila Reedy

  As for the cosplay, I worked hard on it over winter break, but there was still work to be done during the summer. I was going to be a sorceress who wore an elaborate dress propped up by a hoop and detailed with yards and yards of ruffles and lots of embroidery. The hoop skirt had been easy to make after a trip to the hardware store for tubing to make the hoops. The ruffles were boring to make, but it was really just a matter of doing them.

  No, what almost killed me on this costume was the embroidery. I had never done embroidery before. Mom tried to get Sarah into it once a long time ago, but she hadn't paid any attention to it, and Mom didn't know how to do it herself. So there was no one to tell me just how long it took to decorate something with tiny little stitches. If I had started the costume a month before the first con of the summer, I would have been up day and night and ruining my eyes just to finish it in time. As it was, I spent a lot of time at night with my laptop playing documentaries and movies while I stitched away in my room.

  It was actually kind of fun, even if it took so long, and I did start to get faster as I went along and filled it more of the pattern. There were so many kinds of stitches to use, and I wanted to try them all. Stem stitch, back stitch, satin stitch, long-and-short stitch, fern stitch... Some of them were more particular than others, and of course they varied with what thread you used—not that I had the time to do any sort of experiments with that.

  By the end of it, though, I was glad I hadn't decided to take a shortcut and just paint all the details onto the fabric. The raised stitches against my fingers felt nice when my hands brushed the skirt. It just looked better, too, perhaps more authentic.

  It was a struggle to pack it all away, but I managed it, somehow, and I didn't even crush my wig to make it all fit in my suitcase. Everyone in the hotel room looked on in astonishment as I just kept pulling more things out of it, since I didn't want anything to start getting wrinkled from being so squished in there. Two dresses, two wigs, a hoop skirt and matching petticoat in eyelet fabric that had been on sale, the organza petticoat...

  "The key is to put the petticoats on top," I told everyone. "They squish really well if you make them."

  I was getting better at makeup, but Amelia wanted to do it for me again, so I let her. On Saturday she did something really fancy for the sorceress costume, with lots of colored eye shadow and glitter on my cheekbones and little rhinestones glued around the outsides of my eyes. "We look great, don't we?" she said as we stood together in the bathroom, the sorceress and the woman warrior with 'tattoos' on her cheeks.

  "Let's go fight some evil," I said, laughing, and we went out.

  We got stopped for pictures multiple times whenever we went between places. Amelia growled and readied her sword; I smiled and held up my hands as if I were casting a spell. It was fun. One sharp-eyed girl noticed the embroidery and squealed over it for several moments. "I always do hand-embroidery on my costumes when I can," she told me. "It adds a really great touch, don't you think?"

  "Even though it takes forever," I agreed.

  She waved a hand about, the long sleeve of her kimono swinging back and forth in the air. "But the effort comes through. It's the little touches, you know. The reason to make a costume instead of buying it from someone else. The thing that makes your costume different from that of everybody else who chooses that character."

  "Yeah, I think I get what you mean."

  She smiled at me and waved as she headed off again. Amelia laughed and grabbed my arm. "Come on, at this rate we're not going to get in line in time!"

  It was late when we started to walk back to our hotel, but we stopped halfway through to sit by a fountain because our feet hurt and it was pretty to look at. The light from the nearby lanterns sparkled off the water as it fell endlessly into the waiting pool below. It was cool and breezy, and we commented on how we would have to detangle the wigs when we got back, but neither of us made a move to stand and continue walking yet. We just sat there in a comfortable silence, watching the water.

  "I'm glad I ended up with you as my cosplay-partner-in-crime," Amelia said all of a sudden.

  "Really? Some of the others are pretty good at sewing too."

  "It's not just the sewing," she sighed. "You're really consistent about getting things done ahead of time, not backing out on me last minute, that kind of things. Except for that freak-out last year. Good thing you got over that, or I would've been so mad at you." She laughed. I didn't. "Hey, is something wrong? Your parents didn't find out or something, did they? They didn't seem the kind to accept cross-playing..."

  "No! No, nothing like that. If they had, I wouldn't be dressed like this." I'd been planning on telling Amelia for a while; I hadn't yet told anyone else, and she seemed a better person to start with than anyone else. I was struggling not to breathe too hard, and my heart pounded in my chest, and butterflies were flipping in my stomach. My mouth was dry, so I swallowed a couple of times, and as Amelia started to ask if I was okay again, I just got it out: "I think I'm transgender."

  I couldn't look at her. I stared at my clasped hands where they shook in my lap. She sighed and put a tentative hand on my shoulder. "You mean, like, you're actually a girl?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well. Um. That's okay. It's okay, you know. Should I, uh, start calling you by a different name or something?"

  "I—I don't have one picked out yet."

  "That's okay. You can tell me when you do." She coughed. "I, uh, don't really know what I should be saying right now. But I'm here, if you need me." I looked up at her. "Hey, I'm your friend, aren't I?"

  I smiled, although it felt very weak, and nodded. She gave me a hug, and then we stood together and started walking back toward the hotel.

  "Can I—do you mind if I ask some questions?"

  "Go ahead." I tucked a strand of the wig's hair behind my ear. "I mean, I might not know the answer, but I can try."

  "Like, did you always know?"

  I shook my head.

  "Oh. 'Cause that's how they always put it in the news. Then again, my psych teacher says we shouldn't trust the news when it comes to science, so maybe we just shouldn't trust them on anything. Anyway, so is cosplay, like, the only way you can be yourself, or...?"

  I told her anything she wanted to know. My heartbeat calmed as I gave her more and more of the story, until by the time we reached our room, I felt better about myself than I had in months.

  "Thanks for telling me all that," she said as she fumbled for the room key. "It must have been really hard. And to have a secret like that, I'm glad you trust me enough to let me know." The door beeped when she swiped the card, and as we entered the room, she whispered, "Next time, I guess I'll have to tell you some of my secrets, huh?"

  In the fall, we didn't actually do much of our usual cosplay planning, since Amelia's sewing machine broke and her textbooks were so expensive she couldn't afford to replace it for a few months. Instead, when I looked at patterns, they were for things to sew for myself: blouses and pants and cute hair accessories. I already had the fabric for some of them; I just had to wait to make them until I went back home for the winter.

  There was the one night where I did gather up every single one of my girl clothes I had in the dorms and didn't just throw them in a bag, but actually took that bag and threw it in the dumpster. Then I stormed back into my single, sat down on the bed, and cried my eyes out. What was wrong with me? What was I doing? At some point, I cried out all my tears and lay in an exhausted, thoughtless daze until I fell asleep.

  But little by little, I started to wonder if it was wrong. The turning point was probably when I found an article that said that transgender people didn't have brains typical for their birth sex—their brains usually looked more like that of the gender they felt they were. And I thought, maybe it's like a birth defect?

  "And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesu
s answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him."

  Maybe there was a purpose for this in me, too? God didn't make mistakes, and perhaps the fact that seeing myself as a woman felt right was a sign that I was one? Maybe?

  I wrestled with the problem every few days, at least, but as I did so, I bought new girl clothes from a thrift store. Halfway through the semester, I put them in my backpack, changed in a single-stall bathroom, and went to the weekly meeting of my school's LGBT student group. I didn't say a word to anyone that first week, but writing my new name on the nametags gave me a small bit of joy.

  I continued to go. I didn't know anyone there, and I didn't think I passed at all, but it was a bit of freedom, some breathing space in the middle of the week to stop worrying. It took until the third week that I said anything, when the person sitting next me with pronouns written on the bottom of the nametag smiled and asked how my week was going. We complained about exams together as we waited for the meeting to begin, and when we left afterward and said good-bye to one another, it was the first time someone had ever used my new name. It felt completely natural.

  Winter break came slower than I would have liked. Amelia had her new sewing machine, though, and we were thinking of doing something in a steampunk vein. We had the accessories decided on, and I'd gone a little overboard ordering little gears, colorful feathers, and antique keys to make them. Designing the costumes from scratch wound up being a lot more difficult than I had anticipated, though, and I ended up going over to her house so we could collaborate more easily.

  What part of the Victorian era should we draw our inspiration from? The early part, with tiers of ruffled flounces over wide hoopskirts? Later, when they had moved onto bustles? Perhaps something more Edwardian, with narrower skirts. What kind of sleeves should we have? What decorations? Pinstripes, ruffles, lace... What fabric, in what color? Brown or olive seemed traditional for steampunk, but Amelia was adamant that we should wear some actual colors. "Copper looks good with blue. Or arsenic green!"

  "Or we could get stripes, or a pattern on white," I replied, about a million tabs with pictures of Victorian and Edwardian dresses open on my laptop. "We have a lot of choices."

  We ended up deciding to do different ends of the time range, me with the 1850s-style hoops and Amelia making an Edwardian-style dress, although she wanted a top hat instead of the big hats that women of that era actually wore. It wasn't historical costuming, after all, so we could have fun with it, she told me.

  There were pages and pages of paper spread out on the floor by the time we were finished, some of them filled with lists, others with half-finished sketches or full out drawings. I helped pick out the ones we wanted to keep and clean up the rest. "Make sure they go in the recycle bin, not the trash bin," Amelia told me, still gathering up papers and pencils.

  "And which is which?"

  "The boring one is the recycling."

  One trash bin was blue with rainbow-colored stars. The other was brown. I put the papers in that one and stood up to stretch the kinks out of my back. I hadn't quite realized how long we had been working on this project, bending over our laptops and the sketches we were making. "Aaah," I sighed.

  Amelia bounced right up. "Feel okay?"

  "Yeah, just a few kinks."

  "Here, let me." She ducked behind me and set her hands on my shoulders before digging her thumbs and palms into the shoulder blades. As she rubbed her thumbs in circles, she hummed. "How is that?"

  "Oh, that's just great." I let my head drop forward. Her hands crept up my neck a little, forcing the stiff muscles there to relax. "You should be charging for this." I smiled at her laughter.

  After a few moments, her hands stilled. "Better?"

  "Definitely. Thanks."

  But she didn't move her hands. "Hey," she said. Her voice was much quieter than it usually was. "Do you remember what I said at that last con, when you told me that you're a girl?"

  I started to stiffen again. "I think so? That you'd tell me a secret of yours."

  "Mm-hm. Would you like to hear it?"

  "If you want to tell me, then sure."

  She was silent for a moment. "I really like you. I really like you." As I became rigid, she dug her thumbs back into my shoulder blades.

  "Amelia, I'm not..."

  "I like girls and I like guys," she declared over my shoulder. "And I really, really like androgynous people, and people who cross-dress, and break rules like that. So I don't care. If you're a girl I like you, and if next year you decide you were wrong and you're something different, I'll still like you. So if you don't like me like that, that's one thing, but don't just say no because of something stupid."

  I couldn't help but laugh. A few seconds later, she joined me. "I, um, I do like girls. So there's that," I said.

  "And?"

  "I've never had a girlfriend."

  "What? A guy—I mean girl, like you?"

  I shrugged and pushed her hands off as gently as I could before I turned around. "I guess I could try it."

  "Yeah?" She smiled up at me, a lopsided grin.

  We bumped our noses on the first kiss. The second went somewhat better. I decided that I liked kissing Amelia, and when I told her this, she told me to shut up and then shut me up herself.

  "Have fun with your friend?" Dad asked when I got back home late.

  "Oh, yes."

  I bought the fabric for the cosplay, but there would be plenty of time during the summer to make it. I took my time deciding on the final details of the design and went to visit friends—and Amelia, of course—instead of cooping myself up in the sewing room. The gears and everything could come back with me to school, where I could put the accessories together in my spare time.

  The last day before we went back to school, I came back from visiting friends. This break Sarah could usually be found in the living room, reading horror novels, but for once she wasn't there. I turned to head upstairs to give her the book I had borrowed for her and saw my parents sitting at the kitchen table. "Chris, we need to talk," said my mom. She had been crying; the tears were still drying on her face.

  I clutched the book to my chest and went.

  My mom had thought that she would do me a favor and clean the sewing room for me. I kept all the costumes in there—the female ones, too. Dad's crossed arms said it all. I shrunk into my seat and tried to come up with something to say as Mom asked, "Why are you doing this? What happened to you?"

  When she ran out of words and questions, I closed my eyes and just said, "I'm transgender. I have a male body, but my heart is female." I forced myself to open my eyes and look at my parents. "I think you don't understand it, and you may not think it's right, but it's who I am."

  I was expecting an argument. It was, in a sense. The family Bible got passed around a lot. My mom pointed out that I hadn't tried to play with dolls when I was a little kid, and my dad thought it was something I needed to see a therapist for. "They'll set you right," he insisted.

  "I've been trying to set me right, and it hasn't worked yet," I replied. I recalled how every time I bought clothes, how I had to give up on seeing them on me in a mirror because it never looked right. My proportions were always off, somehow, in a way I couldn't define with words I didn't have yet. Wasn't that worth more than the fact that I knew better than to ask for my sister's dolls?

  It could have been a different story. But after hours of discussion, it was getting late, and it was clear to all of us that no one was about to just change their mind, and I still had a bed to sleep in. Mom hugged me very tightly before I went upstairs. "We'll get through this somehow," she promised.

  Right?

  Sarah came into my room just after I did. "I was listening," she said, turning a little red and hovering by the door. "The entire time." I raised an eyebrow. "Chris." She threw her arms around me. "Why?"

  I showed her the pictures Amelia and I had taken of each other, the one our friends ha
d taken for us in the mornings, before the long day of the convention could ruin our makeup and disorder our wigs. Some of them were just silly, random photo shoots taken by the prettiest spot in the hotel. Sarah was silent as she scrolled through them. There was one she stopped at for several moments, just looking at it. "You seem happy," she whispered. "You're really smiling."

  "I was happy. Being like that, it makes me happy."

  "I don't get it."

  "It's okay." I slid an arm around her shoulders. "Sometimes I don't either."

  I didn't sleep much that night. I texted Amelia back and forth for ages until I fell asleep waiting for her reply. A knock on my door awoke me only a couple hours later. "Time to get ready," Mom said, her lips thin. "Breakfast will be done in ten minutes."

  It was an uncomfortable drive, but I got more hugs at the end of it. "Make sure to keep your grades up," Dad said, leaning against the car with his hands in his pockets.

  "But take some time for your friends," Mom said, her arms crossed in front of her stomach.

  I could hear the unspoken admonitions well enough. "I'll see you soon," I said, and then added, "I love you."

  There were going to be so many phone calls during this semester, I was sure of it. At least my dorm was one of the few that could actually get reception. And I had a single.

  Earlier in the week, I had emailed my RA, but he hadn't yet bothered to change the name on my door. I frowned at it as I entered again. There were a couple other things I had to do first, and then that would definitely have to change. I guess I could have kept my name as Chris to make things easier, say it was short for Christine or something instead of Christopher, but I wanted more of a change.

  As soon as I had unpacked, I sat down at my computer and clicked past the tabs and tabs of patterns to open up my email. I had the list of professors whose classes I was taking that semester sitting on my desktop.

  I rephrased it several times. Dear Dr. X, I am taking your course XX this semester. I had to tell them that my name wasn't Chris, that I was a she and not a he. I told them that I wouldn't respond to Chris any longer, though I wasn't sure if I actually had the courage to do so. It would have been easier if our school let us change all this in the system, but there wasn't any way to do so. Another transgender student told me that he usually had good results emailing faculty, though, so as I clicked 'send' and closed out of my mail, I just hoped I had his luck.