by Ariel Schrag
The opening credits began with a crooning ’70s song. Kids in bell-bottoms and puffy down vests ran through backyards and jumped up and down on rooftops, water towers in the background.
Adam picked up the DVD sleeve and scanned it: 104 minutes. Almost two hours. How was he going to get through this? His heart still knocked away inside him, though less aggressively now (no violent escape plan, just a mentally ill inmate compulsively rapping on his cell wall, “Excuse me? May I please leave? I’d like to leave now”). His stomach twitched and twisted with the awful pains as well. His body was falling apart and just fucking telling her was the only thing that could restore it to normal—102 minutes to go.
“Hey, are you Gillian?”
June was standing before them.
“Yeah, hi,” said Gillian. She reached out to shake June’s hand.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” said June. “I mean, only good stuff. It’s great to finally meet you.”
“Oh, yeah, you too.”
June smiled. It was the smile of a depressed person. The way Adam’s aunt Susan always smiled. Like congratulating someone on getting engaged after you’ve just been diagnosed with brain cancer. But it was a kind smile. June really did seem sort of excited to meet Gillian. Adam felt a surprising brief glow inside himself. June cared about his life. He felt unbelievably sad for her. I’m sorry, he said inside his head.
“I just wanted to say,” June continued, turning to Adam and lowering her voice. “That I’m sorry about the thing with Ethan . . .”
He wasn’t sure why she was talking so soft, since Ethan wasn’t even home.
“I mean, I think it was right to respect what he wanted . . . but it just sucked for you to find out like that, like we all shared some secret you couldn’t know. It shouldn’t have been like that.”
“Thanks . . .” said Adam.
June nodded her head. “Really cool to meet you,” she said again to Gillian, and walked back into her room. Music started playing.
“June’s cool,” said Gillian.
Adam could tell she felt guilty too, for all the times they’d trashed June just to have something to laugh about together.
“What was she talking about?” Gillian asked.
And Adam realized this was his in. It had to be. He would tell her about Ethan being trans, which would lead to: “Speaking of being trans . . .” A prickling sensation scattered over his skin as his intestines expertly formed a fisherman’s knot. He pressed pause on the DVD, and Mark Wahlberg froze mid-sprint across the football tryouts field.
“Do you wanna go in my room?” said Adam. His voice cracked, nervously. God, he was so fucking obvious.
“Um, sure,” said Gillian. “Is everything OK?”
“Yeah,” he said. He tried to regain control of his voice and steady it. “Just better to tell you in private.”
They walked into his room, and Adam turned on the swivel-head office lamp on the floor. Gillian slipped off her sandals and sat on the mattress. Adam shut the door and joined her.
“Well . . . ?” she said.
It occurred to Adam that maybe he should kiss her a little bit first. Something seemed off between them, and that wasn’t the way it was supposed to be when he told her. Before he had been relying on the happy, inspiring end of the movie to set the mood, but now they had fast-forwarded to the moment of it happening, and it needed to feel right, but something about now just didn’t feel right.
“I missed you,” he said. He leaned over and put his hands on her bare knees, his lips on hers, but she didn’t respond. He inched back and smiled, but Gillian’s face stayed impassive.
“So what was June talking about?” said Gillian. Her voice was cold.
Could it be possible she already knew?
“Well, like, you know the night of Nelly Chua . . . ?”
Gillian nodded, her face now exhibiting the appropriate mixed emotion of sorrow and righteous anger. Why had he brought up Nelly Chua? That was not the mood he wanted to set. He tried to start over.
“Ethan and I were hella tight, and then I found out everyone knew he was trans except me; he was lying to me the whole time.”
Gillian gave Adam a confused look. “Did he know you were?”
Adam paused. He stared down at his sheets. He could still see come stains in various spots where he’d been lazy cleaning up. Each of them, at the moment of ejaculation, in his imagination, had gone inside Gillian. She was going to despise him.
“It’s not that I care that he is. Obviously. I’m just mad about how I found out. Like, he just announced it in front of all these other people who already knew, and it made me feel stupid.”
A lie. Adam did care that Ethan used to be a girl. The truth was it changed everything.
“But did he know you were?”
That accusatory tone again. She knew. Did she?
“I mean, I understand if he had his reasons for not telling me at first. I think that completely makes sense, if someone—”
“So he didn’t know you were trans?”
“No, um, he knew all about me.”
Gillian wrapped her arms around her knees, the way she had on the futon. “So why would he care? That’s weird.”
“I know.”
Adam needed to get this out. It was getting too convoluted.
“Well, you know,” he continued, “I think everyone has their own reasons for waiting to tell someone something like that, you know? Like, sometimes when you first meet someone, you know they think of you a certain way, and so you let them keep on thinking that, because you want them to like you, you know?”
“Yeah . . .” Gillian picked at her toenail. Every part of her body was gorgeous, but she picked her toenails, and they were always a jagged, blood-crusty mess.
“And you want to tell them, but then it just feels like the right moment never comes . . .”
“And it’s kind of like, ‘What’s the point, maybe I should just keep it how it is,’” she said.
“Yeah, exactly!”
“Even though it feels superficial . . .”
“Yeah.”
“Or sometimes it’s like you don’t want to have to tell the person, like you want them to know, you want them to just ask.”
“Yes!” said Adam.
The front door to the apartment slammed shut. Footsteps toward Ethan’s room. He and Rachel were home.
“Is that how you think Ethan felt about telling you?” said Gillian.
What were they talking about?
“Yeah, I think he was, you know, scared to tell me.”
“Have you guys talked about it since you found out?”
“Not really.”
“You should go talk to him.”
“What?”
“Was that him coming home?”
“Uh, yeah, I think so.”
“You should talk to him.”
So the next thing Adam knew, instead of telling Gillian, he was walking out of his room and knocking on Ethan’s closed door.
No response.
Faint music. Adam knocked a little harder.
Still no response. Adam knocked harder.
Ethan opened the door. “Fuck. Off.” Then he closed it.
Adam stared at the closed door for a moment, then turned around and walked back to his room.
Gillian was sitting in the same position, picking at her toe. “What happened?” she said.
“Oh, it was fine. He was just in the middle of something.”
Gillian didn’t respond.
Adam needed to get back on the subject. He needed to do this and fucking do it tonight. But not with her cold like this. Why was she being like this? She had never been like this. He thought about Gillian laughing, Gillian with her rosy dimples, Gillian grabbing his T-shirt and opening her mouth as she kissed him. Why wasn’t she like that? What was going on?
Adam scooted close to her and put his hand gently over her foot.
“You’re gonna give yourself gangrene
.”
She didn’t laugh.
He leaned in to kiss her, and she sort of kissed him back. But something was still wrong. He put his hands over her arms and pulled her down onto the bed, opened his mouth wider, tried to push his tongue deep in her mouth, the way she liked. She let him do it, but she just lay there. He put his hands under her shirt, tried to start breathing heavy, put his hand under her bra, his knee between her legs—she let him do all of it, but she didn’t do it back: she was a rag doll, a corpse bride; she was dead.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, barely above a whisper. He didn’t want to know.
“I think I want to go home,” she said. And she sat up, put her sandals on, and walked out of his room.
Chapter 15
ADAM WOKE UP to bright sun, girl music, and Gillian and Jackie talking in the front seat. He was squeezed in the back of Jackie’s car with Lionel and someone named Riverrun, and they had been driving all night, headed to the woods of Michigan for “Camp Trans.”
The night Gillian had gotten up and left, Adam had lain on his mattress, staring into space, trying to figure out what was going on. Why was she acting like this? What had changed? What was Gillian thinking? The way he saw it, there were three possible explanations.
One: She knew he was lying about being trans and was furious, but wanted him to admit it before she brought it up.
Two: She had decided she was really gay and didn’t want to be with a boy, trans or otherwise, but didn’t know how to tell him.
Three: She just plain didn’t like him anymore.
Adam had stayed up that night until 4:00 A.M. looking up information on the Internet about every college in New York City, how hard they were to get into and when their applications were due. Acting as if, despite everything, this was still the plan—and all he had to do was put it into action—was the only thing that made him feel better.
The next morning he had called Gillian and pretended the weirdness had never happened. He rambled, “Did you know Hunter only counts math and critical reading SATs, and their average is only 1197? They have two deadlines for application—February 1st and September 15th—so I could conceivably start this spring! There’s also Eugene Lang, but it’s a little harder to get into, but not like NYU or anything. Brooklyn College is easier, but . . .” It was the first time he’d said anything about returning to New York not in the safe, jokey tone. And Gillian had said, “Yeah, that sounds great, cool; Lauren’s friend Jessamine goes to Eugene Lang,” and Adam had tried to make a joke about “What kind of name is Jessamine?” but Gillian ignored it and her voice was distant, off, still cold.
He’d clutched his phone and wished she would scream at him and tell him she hated him, but just tell him why. But instead she also acted as if everything was normal, even though it obviously wasn’t, and she said she knew they didn’t have much time before he had to leave New York, but Jackie and Lionel were going to Camp Trans for the weekend and it sounded fun and maybe they should go too? And because Adam was the North American authority on all things trans, he knew that Camp Trans was an annual grass-roots demonstration in the woods coinciding with the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, protesting their policy, which doesn’t allow trans women into the festival, and he said, “Yeah, of course, Camp Trans is really important,” and had hung up more confused than ever.
Riverrun smelled god-awful. He was a shrimpy guy (trans, duh), dressed in rags held together by string, with feathers sticking out of his hair and dangling from his ears. He also had giant combat boots, which he’d taken off, and his raw feet soaked pungently in the sun, planted on the divider between the two front seats. Adam didn’t know how Jackie or Gillian knew him, just that Jackie and Nadia had broken up, so there was a free seat in Jackie’s car and Riverrun had taken it.
“But what they don’t understand is that I’m just a little nelly boy, a fairy, like them,” said Riverrun.
“Let’s play the festie game,” said Gillian.
“No . . .” said Lionel, emerging from sleep and putting his pillow over his head. “The festie game is triggering for me.”
“But we have to play the festie game! It’s part of it! And people might really ask us,” said Gillian.
“What’s the festie game?” said Adam.
Gillian turned around to look at him. “Oh. You’re awake.” Then she turned back.
Adam had thought once Gillian and Jackie picked him up in the car last night, everything would be fun and filled with the spirit of a road trip, and he and Gillian would be in the back together, cuddling and kissing. But he felt as if he were drowning, and now there were, like, a million other people there too. He wondered if they could feel the weirdness between him and Gillian.
“OK, you be the Camp Trans person, and I’ll be the festie,” Gillian said to Jackie.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Jackie.
“Um, this is a festival for women-born-women, why can’t you just accept that? Start your own festival if you want to.” Gillian put on a high, whiny voice for the part.
“It’s a festival for women,” answered Jackie, who sounded bored. “By excluding trans women you’re making a statement that trans women aren’t women, which affects the policies of other women-only spaces like shelters and clinics, which are imperative to trans women’s safety and health.”
“It’s just a music festival. God. And besides, I was raped—can’t I have at least one safe space for one week out of the year where I know I won’t have to see a penis? If I saw a trans woman in the shower, it could be really triggering for me.”
“Trans women are not interested in flaunting themselves,” Jackie droned on, “and plenty of women at the festival use very realistic strap-ons. This is about your own fear that trans women are really men. It’s a harmless body part.”
“I’m not saying they’re men, but can’t there be a place just for women-born-women? There is a difference; we’ve had different experiences growing up.”
“All people have had different experiences growing up.”
“But it’s just one music festival! I totally support trans women; just let me have my one music festival! I wanna see Le Tigre!”
Gillian’s voice had moved into a shrill singsong. She was really getting into her character. She was having so much fun, while completely ignoring Adam, squished in the back next to a “fairy” whose hairy, rotting-vegetables-at-the-bottom-of-a-garbage-bin armpits were now shoved in Adam’s face as Riverrun expanded all his limbs across the back seat. For the first time, Adam felt hate toward Gillian.
***
Camp Trans was a sparse affair. A handful of mismatched tents lay scattered across a clearing of dry, yellowed grass. Campers in jean shorts and patchy, mohawked hair milled around.
Adam, Gillian, Jackie, Lionel, and Riverrun, sleeping bags and two tents strapped to their backs, headed toward the makeshift Welcome Tent. An attractive girl wearing a halter top and a cowboy hat jumped up to greet them, quickly launching into the rules and regulations of the camp.
“You can set your tents up anywhere you like. Camping spaces are designated as Non-sober with Sex, Non-sober with No Sex, Sober with Sex, and Sober with No Sex.”
“A lot of people in the Sober with No Sex section?” joked Jackie.
“I don’t know,” said Cowboy Hat, “I’m in Non-sober with Sex,” and her eyes swung over to Adam. Adam looked at Gillian, but she couldn’t care less, was engrossed in a pamphlet about Lyme disease on the counter. I’m gonna fucking cheat on you, he thought. But he didn’t even want to. All he wanted was Gillian.
Cowboy Hat trumpeted on. “Everyone needs to sign up for a work shift on the schedule. Welcome Tent slots are filled, but we could really, really use Waste Disposal.” The way she said it, everyone pretty much had to put their name down under Waste Disposal, which was empty. Everyone except Jackie, who wrote her name in large capital letters under Medic Tent. Adam noticed “Casey Freedman” scrawled under Cooking. He knew she would be here. Casey had been chatterin
g about Camp Trans for weeks, and when Adam had told her he was going as well with Gillian and her crew, Casey had balked.
“You’re going to Camp Trans?”
“You know Gillian’s bi, and she has a lot of trans friends; it’s important to her.”
“I know, it just feels like you’re appropriating my entire life. . . . Well, at least I’ll finally get to meet her.”
Adam had been anxious, charged with adrenaline to negotiate this inevitable encounter. But now, here, he didn’t even care. If Casey met Gillian and blurted something out, or Gillian said something or whatever, so be it. At least it would all be fucking over, and he could finally give up.
“What’s this?” said Lionel. He was looking at a piece of paper tacked to the post of the Welcome Tent. Cowboy Hat laughed.
“That’s just a little running contest between our lead organizer Hazel and her sub, Blaise, on who can bed more campers. Hazel’s winning.”
Casey was off in her own world of turmoil, anyway. No longer the special siblings that good things happen to, but the rejected ones, trailing pathetically after the objects of their desires, each following some sinister bread-crumb trail into the deep woods of Michigan, only to be told: “No, I’m sorry. I just don’t want you. What are you even doing here?”
The gang trudged in the direction of the campsites to set up.
“Why are you being so weird and quiet?” Gillian said to Adam in that same cold, flat tone.
“I’m not,” said Adam, staring ahead.
Fuck you. Fuck. You.
***
Everyone at Camp Trans, around twenty people, stood in a circle at the center of the clearing, holding hands.
“Jordan, ‘he.’”
“Alyssa, ‘she.’”
“Deirdre, ‘she.’”
You were supposed to state your name and preferred gender pronoun. Clarification on gender was indeed necessary. Looking around at the group, it was as if a hatful of pronouns written on scraps of paper had been thrown into the air, each scrap, sometimes two, landing randomly on a person, regardless of what he or she looked like. Adam had gotten used to boyish girls turning out to be trans, the general rule that masculine = he and feminine = she, but here at Camp Trans it was a free-for-all. You couldn’t be sure of anything, except that you were most likely wrong.