Adam

by Ariel Schrag

  Everyone had also started jobs. Casey was working at a YMCA summer camp and came home each day babbling about how much fun she’d had, demonstrating how a kid named Kelvin had taught all the counselors the Crip Walk, or completely exhausted, tipping like a felled tree, face first onto the futon. “All I want to do is pass out, but I can’t stop hearing their screaming voices in my head.”

  June had had some trouble finding a job, what with her bull nose ring and shaved head and all. “Fucking homophobes,” she would say, coming back from a failed in-face interview.

  “Why don’t you just take the nose ring out?” Adam had suggested.

  “This is my identity,” June answered, tugging hard on the ring, making Adam wince. “I’m not removing my identity for some piece-of-shit job—I’m a fucking lesbian, and they’re gonna have to fucking deal.” Adam hadn’t bothered to point out that plenty of lesbians got by being lesbians just fine without bull nose rings.

  Eventually, June got a job at a crummy comic book shop where all the employees had labret, philtrum, and other previously unknown facial-part piercings and aggressive tattoos, and the owner paid them five dollars an hour “under the table.”

  “Everything about the place is illegal,” June would say, “we make $1.75 under minimum wage—I checked; we never get any breaks—also illegal—and we have to eat while we’re working, but if a customer comes in while we’re eating we have to, like, hide our sandwich in the coat check.” Still, all of this was apparently better than removing the nose ring that made her look like a hog.

  Ethan still had his job at Film Forum—an art house movie theater in Manhattan. One night they were showing Touch of Evil—this movie Ethan was obsessed with—and he’d invited Casey, June, and Adam and let them all in for free. They’d gotten all the popcorn they wanted, and Ethan had made them foamy chocolate egg creams from the soda fountain. The movie was pretty great too—one of those that made you feel cool just for watching it. Adam sat next to Ethan in the theater, and every fifteen minutes or so Ethan would go “uhn” and punch Adam in the shoulder, like it was just so good he couldn’t take it.

  It also turned out that Ethan was totally rich. Adam and Casey’s family was rich too, but Ethan was rich rich. His parents had a trust fund for him that was supposed to be for college, but when Ethan had decided he didn’t want to go to college, they’d just let him use the money to move to New York. He wanted to make movies.

  Because Adam wasn’t eighteen, he needed something that didn’t require a work permit. So far, he’d had one job that Casey found for him on a Columbia listserv. The job was stuffing envelopes for a rich artist woman named Mags Mumford, who needed to “remind people that I fucking exist, god damn it.” The job was at Mags Mumford’s house on the Upper East Side, and the first time Adam went he had gotten completely lost. Casey had told him to take the green number 4 train to Ninety-Sixth Street, but when they got to Ninety-Sixth, the train just zoomed on past the station and then past the next station, and the next, and before Adam knew it, they were stopped at 125th Street. He’d thought maybe he could just walk back to Ninety-Sixth, but when he got out of the station, he was by some river and there were no white people on the street and he was pretty sure this wasn’t anywhere near where Mags Mumford lived. He’d gone back into the station, got on the wrong train again, this time ending up at something called West Farms Square–East Tremont Avenue, finally figured out the right train, and showed up at Mags Mumford’s apartment an hour and a half late. She didn’t even notice. She was on the phone and pointed Adam toward the dining-room table, which was heaped with empty envelopes and shiny cards announcing the words Mags Mumford. He was supposed to sit there for six hours and at first felt assaulted by boredom, but as the first half hour turned to an hour, and then the next, the monotonous stuffing and licking ended up lulling him into a pleasant trance. He went back every day for a week, but then Mags Mumford ran out of people to remind and the job was over. He’d made only $275, but it was something, and he still had his savings (from birthdays, Christmas/Hanukkah) to cull from as needed.

  Mainly, Adam’s favorite thing to do was hang around Ethan, who it turned out did not used to be a girl. That Adam had even considered it just made him laugh now. The first week they were all living there, it had obsessed Adam. He kept trying to figure out how he could tell. Ethan shaved like a guy, had a flat chest like a guy, sounded like a guy . . . but it was apparently possible to be all those things and still be born a girl. Boy Casey had started coming over to the apartment and liked to go on and on about being “trans”—which is what you called it when you were a guy who used to be a girl (and vice versa). Pretty much all Casey and Boy Casey ever talked about was how Boy Casey was trans and how complicated life was because of this. The two of them would lie, intertwined, on the living-room futon, having some variation of this conversation:

  BOY CASEY: “Nobody fucking understands me.”

  CASEY: “I understand you . . .”

  BOY CASEY: “Yeah . . .”

  CASEY: “Nobody fucking understands us.”

  And then they’d make out, right there on the futon. It was kind of fucked up. Casey had the biggest room of everyone, but apparently she and Boy Casey just preferred making out where everyone else had to watch.

  June, of course, had to pretend as if she really liked Boy Casey and was super supportive of the relationship. Casey and June talked about Boy Casey nonstop, barely noticing if Adam was in the room too. Which was weird since they could get pretty personal.

  CASEY: “He let me touch him, you know . . . ‘down’ last night.”

  JUNE: “Really? Has he . . . had bottom surgery, or . . .?”

  CASEY: “No! Most trans guys don’t . . . It’s too expensive and not even really that good. But you know what the T does to his clit . . .”

  JUNE: “Wait, so that’s true?”

  CASEY: “Mmm-hmm.”

  Adam wasn’t sure what they were talking about half the time, but he was totally fascinated and able to piece together different facts. He’d usually pretend to be engrossed in whatever TV show was on so they would forget about him and really get into the details, but sometimes, if it seemed right, he’d ask a casual question or two. “So, like, how did Boy Casey get to grow a beard and stuff?” Whenever he asked a question like this, Casey would leap at the opportunity to launch into some long, show-offy explanation.

  CASEY: “OK, so the hormone that makes you grow hair on your face—or one day grow hair on your face, ha-ha!”

  ADAM: “Eat shit.”

  CASEY: “That hormone is tes-tos-ter-one.”

  ADAM: “Duh.”

  CASEY: “Listen! So you get it naturally in your body, but Boy Casey’s body doesn’t make it, so he injects it into himself with a syringe.”

  ADAM: “Gross.”

  CASEY: “It’s not gross. He’s doing what he needs to do to be himself. So, anyway, the testosterone—T—makes him grow hair on his face and lowers his voice and makes him lose fat, like, around the butt and hips.”

  ADAM: “Sounds like you need to inject some T.”

  Adam didn’t ask too many questions, though—he didn’t want Casey knowing he actually gave a shit. But how could he not? I mean, what the hell—you could actually transform yourself from a girl into a guy. Adam didn’t know what the fuck he’d spent the last few years studying in school when this was going on in the world.

  One night, when Ethan was out, Adam had decided to just up and ask Casey and June about him. I mean, why not? Casey and June were having a typical gabfest about Boy Casey and whether or not Boy Casey had ever dated another trans guy, when Adam, flipping TV channels, asked in his best verging-on-bored voice: “So, is Ethan, like, trans?” and Casey had answered: “Ethan? No.” And that was that. Adam had felt a flood of warmth for Ethan fill his body. They were brothers, in it together.

  Adam tried to hang around the house whenever Ethan was home and would bring up random things—“Do you think this bread is stal
e?”—but really he barely knew him. Ethan spent most of his time locked in his room, and there was an understanding that unless it was urgent, you did not knock on his door.

  Then, one night, it happened.

  Casey, Boy Casey, June, and some ugly girl June had found on the Internet were all out on a double date, and Adam and Ethan were alone in the apartment. Adam was watching TV when Ethan poked his head out of his room.

  “Hey, can I get your opinion on something?”

  “Uh, sure,” said Adam.

  Stepping into Ethan’s room for the first time was like opening the wardrobe into Narnia. Immediately upon entry the air shifted to clean and cold, the colors relaxed into blues, blacks, and grays. Everything was meticulously organized, rows of DVDs in an as-of-now-unknown-but-certain order, the sheets tucked tightly under the bed. It was hard to believe this room even existed in their apartment. Ethan was fussing with a video program on his giant iMac.

  “OK,” said Ethan. “Check out these two sequences and tell me which one you like better.”

  Ethan hit PLAY. A pretty, dark-haired girl with arched eyebrows was standing in a room, her arms wrapped around herself, staring at the ground. After remaining in that position for about a full minute, the girl brushed a strand of hair out of her eye, looked up at the camera, and said, “I don’t want to.” Cut to black.

  “Or . . . this,” said Ethan. He clicked PLAY on a new file. The exact same video played. Girl staring at the ground. Girl brushing away hair. “I don’t want to.” Cut to black.

  “Uh, I don’t get it,” said Adam. “What’s the difference?”

  Ethan smiled. “I’m not gonna tell you,” he said. “That’s the point. It’s not about what’s actually different—it’s about what you feel. The actual difference is a subtle technical change only film nerds will notice. But for regular people, like you, it’s about the feeling you get. Which one gave you a better feeling?”

  Adam was disappointed Ethan thought of him as a “regular person.” But more than that, he was flattered that he wanted his opinion.

  “Uh, the first one,” said Adam. His choice was completely random. They both made him feel exactly the same.

  “Awesome,” said Ethan, nodding his head.

  “So who’s the girl?” asked Adam.

  And then Ethan started talking and didn’t stop for half an hour straight. The girl was Rachel, and she was the love of his life. They had started dating in high school in Greenwich, Connecticut. He knew, was certain, he would never be able to be with anyone else.

  “I know that sounds like dumb kid stuff . . . no offense,” said Ethan, looking at Adam—Adam shook his head, none taken. “But it’s true,” Ethan continued. “I just know. It’s like she was there while my brain was still developing, and she’s part of the way it’s structured now. I loved the way she saw. You know how each person sees the world differently?”

  Adam nodded, even though he wasn’t entirely sure what Ethan was talking about. He just wanted Ethan to keep on talking. Adam was getting this tingly feeling sitting there listening to him, and he didn’t want it to go away. It was almost as if Ethan were talking to himself, the way his eyes sort of glazed over as he spoke. But then he’d turn and look straight at Adam—like he knew Adam was following him—and that Adam got it.

  Ethan went on. “I know it sounds really obvious, like, ‘Oh, people have different personalities, they experience the world in different ways’—but it’s more than that. Imagine how the world actually looks to each person. Visually. Physically. It’s like this: You know how if you’re happy, the street you’re walking down can look full of life? The trees glorious and vibrant? The people good and kind? But if you’re depressed, the exact same street looks ugly, suddenly all you can see is the trash, the sky is menacing, and the people, grotesque. Our visual worlds are a constantly shifting metaphor for our internal moods. But what about person to person? What about all the time? How do I see the world all the time versus how you see it? The things Rachel would point out . . . I don’t wanna repeat them, it doesn’t work . . . but her world was beautiful. Mine just felt so bland in comparison. All I wanted to do was live in hers.”

  Adam nodded again. He wanted to know how Ethan saw the world. He was positive it was better than the way he saw it.

  “That’s what I love about movies,” Ethan went on. “Trying to capture all those different viewpoints. Make a movie that literally re-creates someone else’s visual world. There’s not one world we all live in. There are a billion different worlds overlapping each other. Falling in love is finding the world you want to fuse with your own.”

  “Why did you guys break up?”

  Ethan stared at the blank wall behind his computer and shook his head. “Shit happens, right?”

  Adam nodded, as if he’d been through it, too. He was getting a little self-conscious about all the nodding.

  “So what about you?” asked Ethan. “You got a girlfriend . . . boyfriend?”

  “I was kinda dating this girl at school,” said Adam. (He had been at Kelsey Winslow’s house . . . that counted as dating.) “But, you know, shit didn’t work out.”

  Ethan nodded. “You’re gonna meet a girl here in New York. Bet you anything.”

  Adam looked down and smiled. He considered for a second telling Ethan about the redheaded girl he’d seen in his mind on the plane but decided it sounded too weird. There had been a couple more false alarms. A girl on the subway. A girl at the 99 Cent Store. But he still hadn’t met her.

  “Yeah, I just gotta figure out where to meet them . . .”

  “That was pretty sad watching June leave with that Internet girl and the Caseys,” said Ethan.

  Adam laughed.

  Ethan continued, “I know people who have met online and it’s cool and they’re happy and all, but when someone goes on an Internet date and the person sucks, it’s just so much more depressing.”

  “June is depressing,” said Adam.

  Ethan laughed really loud and Adam beamed. “Oh, man,” said Ethan, “she and your sister have got some weird S & M thing going on. It’s like June likes torturing herself.”

  “I know!” said Adam. He paused for a moment and looked down at his jeans, picked casually at a stray thread. “So, like . . . what do you think of Boy Casey?”

  Ethan snorted.

  Adam gave a tentative smile. “He’s, like, kind of annoying . . .”

  “He’s just young . . .” said Ethan. Which was weird, since Ethan was twenty-one and Boy Casey was twenty-three.

  “He’s always looking at himself in the mirror,” said Adam, “and making me take all these pictures of him and Casey. All he and Casey ever talk about is him.”

  “He’ll grow out of it,” said Ethan. “Now get out of here—I gotta get back to work.” He smiled at Adam and punched him in the shoulder, just like he had done during Touch of Evil. Adam grinned and punched him back.

  ***

  It was around 2:00 A.M. that night, and Adam was cocooned in his bed, having just fallen asleep, when he heard Casey and Boy Casey come home. They were drunk and talking loudly. He didn’t hear June’s voice. She must have gone home with Ugly.

  BOY CASEY: “I’m hungry!”

  CASEY: “Les get some cereal!”

  There was some crashing in the kitchen.

  BOY CASEY: “First I wanna fuck you, you look so fucking hot.”

  CASEY: “Aaah! Not on the futon! Adam an’ Ethan!”

  BOY CASEY: “They’re sleeping! Shhh! Come on . . . I’m pgkjgdkjkf . . .”

  What did he say?

  CASEY: “I love it when you pack.”

  BOY CASEY: “Uhhn, that feels good.”

  CASEY: “Lemme suck on it.”

  BOY CASEY: “Yeah . . . suck it. All of it.”

  CASEY: “C’mon, les go in my room.”

  BOY CASEY: “You gonna let me fuck your ass?”

  *SHUT*

  Silence. Adam looked from side to side in the dark, needing a wit
ness—someone to acknowledge what had just happened. His mind was swimming. What had Casey been sucking on? The rubber dick? Like Sam had? Boy Casey must have one too. He did not want to imagine what was going on in Casey’s room right now. Fuck. He was never going to fall back asleep. Think about something else. Anything. He shifted onto his right side. Then onto his back. His room felt unbearably hot. He needed to splash some water on his face.

  Adam creaked his door open and stepped softly into the front room. He really was going to go to the bathroom, but then heard muffled voices coming from Casey’s closed door. He took a cautious step closer to her room. It was Boy Casey.

  BOY CASEY: “I told you. No.”

  CASEY: “Why not?”

  BOY CASEY: “I’m just not jkrjkll.”

  CASEY: “But I want to lkjlkjslk.”

  Then there was nothing. Adam stayed poised, hovered between Casey’s door and the bathroom. They could burst out at any moment. “What are you doing here??” He would pivot. “I’m going to the bathroom, Jesus.” Then:

  BOY CASEY: “I hate my bkjhjhjk.”

  Another silence.

  CASEY: “But I like it . . . I lhjhkh it . . .”

  “I hate it.” Boy Casey’s voice was icy dark. Adam had never heard him sound like that before. He squeezed his eyes shut and willed his ears to open wider.

  Casey’s door swung open. Boy Casey stared at Adam.