by Ariel Schrag
“Blaise, ‘he or she.’”
“Jackie, ‘she.’”
“Riverrun, ‘ze.’”
“Adam, ‘he.’”
Casey, who was three people in the circle down from Adam, looked at him with a stifled smirk. He stuck his tongue out at her (would’ve given the finger but didn’t want to break the hand-holding circle), and then they both had to look at the ground to keep from laughing.
After the pronoun circle, Casey walked up to Adam and Gillian. Adam felt himself tense up. Just let it happen. Just get it all fucking out there.
“This is my sister, Casey,” he said.
“Cool, great to meet you,” said Gillian. She seemed barely interested. All those times: “When do I get to meet your sister? When do I get to meet your sister?” And now it was happening, and she didn’t even give a shit.
“Fucking Camp Trans,” said Casey, as if she’d been coming for years and was totally over the place.
“You look kind of familiar,” said Gillian.
Yeah, you watched her get fucked on a cross at Bound, bitch, thought Adam. Bound. The night they first. A crashing sadness.
“Carlisle’s party,” said Casey. “Isn’t that where you met Adam?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Gillian.
“Casey,” shouted Hazel. She was standing a few feet away, dressed in a black tank top and cut-off cargo pants, holding a bullhorn, looking impatient.
Casey’s jaded affect instantly transformed into eager desire to please. She ran toward Hazel, shouting over her shoulder, “See you guys later.” Hazel had already begun walking away before Casey reached her.
“The fat-phobia caucus is now taking place in zone four,” Hazel shouted into her bullhorn. “Fat phobia. Zone four.”
The great climactic moment of his sister and Gillian meeting had come and gone like nothing. Adam had a vision of himself on his hospital deathbed, a disgusting old man, his whole life having come and gone like nothing.
“Everyone’s headed down to the swimmin’ hole!” It was Lionel, running toward them in swim trunks and a T-shirt, carrying a towel.
“What about the fat-phobia caucus?” said Jackie. “I thought we were going to that?”
Jackie was kind of overweight, and Adam felt a flush of embarrassment for her.
“Yeah, that’s happening,” said Lionel. He glanced over at a group of about four fat people and one skinny person sitting in a circle in the grass. “But if we don’t go now, it’ll get too cold for swimmin’. Don’t you guys wanna go swimmin’?”
“Yeah, fuck it, let’s go swimming,” said Jackie.
They followed a group of Camp Transers carrying towels and inner tubes. The group walked along the dusty shoulder of the road, butted up next to a hill of forest and against the traffic of occasional cars driving through.
A girl carrying a long fluorescent orange noodle sidled up to Gillian. “There’s room on this noodle for two,” she said.
Who the fuck was this bitch?
Gillian laughed. “That is a nice-looking noodle.”
“Mi noodle es su noodle.”
Was that supposed to be clever?
The girl ran her fingers through her choppy brown hair and adjusted the noodle over her shoulders like it was one of those wooden planks with heavy pails of water on either end. She projected her chest out and flexed her arm muscles as if she were actually carrying some great heavy weight.
“I’m Erica, by the way.”
“Gillian,” said Gillian.
Erica didn’t ask who Adam was, and Gillian didn’t introduce him.
They got to “the Swimmin’ Hole,” which was a small, craggy cove inside the forest, leading out into a sprawling still lake. It had been sunny when they first arrived at the camp, but now the day had turned overcast, the horizon of the lake meshing seamlessly into the gray sky. Everyone acted like it was still the brightest, sun-shiniest day, though, and began tearing off their clothes and running into the water, whooping and hollering.
Adam sat down on a rock, and Gillian sat next to him. Piece-of-shit-I-hope-you-burn-in-hell-Erica took off her tank top, sports bra, shorts, and underwear, with overly cavalier action. She stood, presenting her nakedness, as in, Yeah, I’m straight-up naked now, you like? She smiled at Gillian.
“You coming?”
Erica had tits. She had a vagina. And as Adam stared at her with seething hatred, he simultaneously imagined his penis inside her and the unconditional exquisite pleasure he would feel.
“In a bit,” said Gillian.
It was just him and Gillian on the rock. The first time they’d (sort of) been alone since that night in his room. Neither of them spoke. The campers frolicked and splashed in the lake. Hit one another with noodles and jumped, four at a time, onto sinking inner tubes. The only other person not in the water was a man in a dress sitting higher up on the rocks, strumming a duct-taped acoustic guitar. The way he was sitting with the dress hiked up, you could see his full dick and balls hanging out, splayed across the rock like some reptile trying to warm its cold-blooded body.
“It’s not my fault you don’t like that I’m wearing a dress,” the man in the dress sang.
She’s the one that’s being a bitch, thought Adam. She should speak first, not me.
More silence passed.
“Well, this is awkward,” said Gillian, and Adam wanted to strangle her and slam her head on the rock, because she said it coldly, not in a way he could actually respond to, not a sweet, “Hey? What’s going on with us?,” just a flat, toneless, “This is awkward,” and it wasn’t fair—how was he supposed to respond?
“Yeah,” he said.
“I think I’m gonna go in,” she said.
Most everyone in the water was naked. A few people were still wearing underwear or swim bottoms, but everyone was topless. Loose-hanging surgery scars on the trans guys, buds of breasts on girls you could tell used to be boys, low-hanging udders on lesbians who were probably, like June, politically opposed to wearing bras. All these fucked-up bodies that most people in the world would call repulsive but here were celebrated. The bodies were bodies, and they were made to have fun.
“Think I’m just gonna stay here,” said Adam. If he didn’t take his shirt off, it might be conspicuous. “What’s that trans guy’s problem? Why’s he being so precious? Just take it off, man. We’re all brothers and sisters here.”
“Well, I’m going in,” said Gillian. She stood up and, with her back facing Adam, took her clothes off.
He stared at the ground. It hurt too much to watch. He wanted her so badly. He loved her so helplessly. He looked up and she was already in the water. She’d kept her bra and underwear on. Good, he thought. As if that made a difference, as if it were a sign she was still his. Erica was making her way over. Doing that labored, wide-legged gait everyone’s forced to do when trying to walk fast through water.
Gillian’s slim, pale body, a will-o’-the-wisp in the midst of everything. Adam felt a pang of desire. Hers was the body the world at large wanted—whether it was to fuck or possess, they all wanted it. That was what she owned.
Gillian and Erica were now talking. Erica was clearly checking out Gillian’s body, and Gillian was doing the same. He wondered if she was getting wet looking at Erica. If her clit was swelling up and getting hard the way it did.
Fucking dykes, Adam thought.
Maybe Gillian really was just gay. Just wanted to shove her mouth on another girl’s cunt, and nothing else could really compare.
Erica put her hands around Gillian’s waist.
How could she just fucking let that happen? He was sitting right fucking there, watching it like a goddamn movie. Did she just not give a fucking shit?
She was gay. She liked girls. She had experimented with Adam and decided, “Eh, not for me.”
“I just think I actually really need to be with a girl,” she would finally tell him.
He thought about the stuffed folders she had shown him full of all the let
ters from all the gay teens across the world who had written her and e-mailed her after her prom story in the AP article came out. “Thank you for literally saving my life” and “I know I don’t know you, but I have a huge crush on you” and “I didn’t know how to tell my parents, but I showed them the article and you told them for me. Thank you.” “Thank you!” They were all signed “Thank you.” And he imagined Gillian and Erica, falling onto her bed, all the letters spread out across the sheets, like the million dollars cash in Indecent Proposal, and Gillian and Erica fucking, the letters flying around them like all those hundred-dollar bills.
He looked down. His white Adidas were caked in mud. The feeling that he wanted to cry but knew he couldn’t—a dull butter knife trying to puncture the back of his throat. He looked up, expecting the worst, and was grateful to see they were separated now. Gillian was talking to Jackie, and Erica was floating on her noodle, off somewhere else.
I just want you back, he tried to beam from his brain into hers.
***
Someone had started up the campfire, and its leaping flames and heavy smoke smell against the cooling twilight in the woods gave Adam a cozy feeling, despite the sadness like an anvil on his chest.
Gillian was on her Waste Disposal shift, and not knowing what to do with himself, Adam sat on a log and watched the fire. He was that guy, the weirdo staring into the fire, probably coming to terms with all his past mistakes and making silent vows for a stronger, braver future. He felt self-conscious but also kind of didn’t care. Everyone here was already so weird, it almost made sense to just stare into the fire, a creepy force field of “private moment” around you.
“Excuse me, would you like some dinner?”
Adam looked up. A short boy—or girl—with a bandanna around his neck was standing a few feet away holding out a bowl. He was respecting Adam’s “space.”
“Um, sure,” said Adam. He stood up and took the bowl and spoon. “Thanks.” The boy smiled and nodded, then turned around, leaving Adam to his moment.
Adam sat back down and looked into the bowl. It was so dark out by now, he had no idea what was in there. He tilted the bowl toward the fire and caught flickers of something gray and grainy. He stuck the spoon in and brought a little toward his tongue.
“It’s millet,” said Casey, plunking down beside him, almost knocking Adam over, like she was drunk, but he knew it was just that she was clumsy and often not aware of where her body was actually going. She didn’t care about giving him “space.” His space was her space, and he felt a pulse of love for her. They had both rattled around in their mom’s uterus. Disgusting really, but they both had been there. And no one else in the world had.
“What the fuck is millet?” he said.
“It’s good for you,” said Casey, heaping a large spoonful into her mouth. “Just imagine you’re lost out here, have been wandering for days, and came upon some natives brewing a special ‘of the land’ porridge in their cauldron, and they’re offering it to you, and it’s the first food you’ve eaten in a week and the most glorious thing you’ve ever tasted. That’s what I’m doing.”
Adam ran the fantasy quickly through his head and took a bite. Not bad.
Hazel’s voice rang out from a cluster of campers. “The word got out and what I’m hearing from my people inside is that the Camp Trans dance party tonight is the event at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.”
A skinny trans guy with large round glasses ran in front of Adam and Casey toward the group.
“Oh, no. Are you telling me that upward of one thousand people are going to be coming here tonight?!” said Round Glasses.
Adam had gathered that along with Hazel, Round Glasses was “in charge.”
“What we need to focus on right now is how to make this a safe space for trans women,” said Hazel. “I think the campfire and zones one and two should be ‘No Wristband.’”
“That’s not very welcoming to festies,” said another girl. “It’s supposed to be about inclusion. We’re not setting an example if—”
“All I care about right now is protecting my girls,” said Hazel, and she stormed off. Her face glowed in the campfire light for a flash, and it looked like she was crying. The girl named Blaise ran after her.
“You want to go?” Adam said to Casey, nodding after Hazel.
“No . . . We had a ‘talk’ in her tent,” said Casey. “We’re, like, officially unofficial.”
“Oh. Sorry . . .”
“It’s OK,” said Casey. “After what I did to June, I probably deserve it.”
They were quiet for a moment. Adam thought about June. What was she doing right now? Home alone in her room? Taking one of her baths? Staring in the mirror in the same position as Adam always did? He kind of wished she were here. He thought about Ethan and then put the thought away. He stared out across the campsite, trying to see if he could find Gillian. He couldn’t. Only the scarce, crookedly constructed tents and dark dapples of people moving. The sky had gone completely dark. If you looked up, you could see stars. He’d forgotten all about them—like, as a thing that existed. In New York the stars were the lights on cars and buildings, the mysterious sparkles on some of the sidewalks. He thought about him and Gillian, running down the sidewalk, escaping Bound, and how they’d kissed on the street corner and how for that moment, their bodies pressed together, it had felt like they were standing on the exact center of the world. He kept looking out at the camp but still couldn’t find any shape that might be her. Hopelessness descended.
“I’m going to tell Mom and Dad,” said Casey.
“What?”
“That I’m gay.”
“I thought you were ‘queer’?”
“Shut up.”
“You’re the one that said it!”
“Whatever . . . I’m going to tell them I like girls. Women.”
“Why?”
“Because lying is stupid. And lonely.”
They were silent for a while more. Adam saw a future in which he never told Gillian. He just returned to Piedmont and they never spoke again. No one would ever know what he had done. He would die with it. Alone.
“I never should have let Mom talk about Sam the way she did,” said Casey. “I should have told her we were girlfriends. That Sam was butch, not ‘confused.’ That that’s what I like.”
“Why do you like boyish girls?” Adam asked.
“I just do,” Casey said. “I can’t explain it, and I know a lot of people don’t get it, but I just think masculine women are the sexiest people on earth.”
Adam thought Casey might ask him something about Gillian then. What their plans were. If they were going to keep dating after the summer. If he was going to have to tell her his real age. But she didn’t.
“I can’t believe I ate this entire bowl of millet,” Casey said. She stared into her empty bowl. Adam hadn’t touched his after that one bite.
“I’m going to go throw up in the woods now,” she said. She smiled at Adam, and stood up and walked away.
***
The rally had begun, soon to be followed by the dance party. Upward of one thousand people from the Womyn’s Festival across the road had not shown up. Maybe about fifteen festies were there, and they trailed in a line with Hazel leading, shouting, “One word! One word! That word is INCLUSION!” Someone was beating a drum.
The festies and the Camp Transers formed a circle, and Adam, Gillian, Jackie, and Lionel, who had been standing and watching, joined. Hazel walked into the center.
“We’re gonna win this thing!” Hazel shouted. She wasn’t using the bullhorn, probably because there were only about thirty people. “Maybe not next year, and maybe not the year after that, but we are GOING TO WIN!”
Everyone cheered.
Jackie stood next to Adam, then some person named Pirate, then Gillian. Gillian hadn’t even tried to stand next to him. They’d barely spoken three words since the swimming hole.
“They’re never gonna win,” Jackie said
to Adam in a low voice.
“What?”
“Lisa Vogel is never going to change the policy. She’s said, ‘Over my dead body will the policy be changed.’ Or something like that. But I guess it’s important to make a statement.”
“Yeah,” said Adam.
“Think you’ll come back next year?”
“I’m not sure.”
He was finding it difficult to talk. The pain in his body was so loud, it drowned out any noise coming from his mouth. He felt acutely aware of how his mouth had to move in specific positions in order to make different words. The glowing green bulb of the subway had meant that anything was possible.
A group of people in the middle of the circle was performing a skit. Adam couldn’t really follow it, something about various kinds of people being turned away from Man Land and Woman-Born-Woman Land. And a trans woman being turned away from both. Everyone started clapping before the punch line came, and it was awkward when the group had to tack on the last couple lines after the applause quieted down.
“Portrait of the man as a young girl.”
It was the boy with the bandanna who had given Adam the bowl of millet. Now he was standing in the center, holding a piece of paper and reading from it. His body had a jaunty swagger, but Adam could see that his hands holding the paper were trembling.
“When I told my parents I was a boy, they said it felt like someone had died . . . which is kind of funny because I felt like I had finally been born.”
Adam wondered how old the boy was. How long he’d had to wait to finally be born. For the first time, it occurred to Adam how alienating it must be to grow up in a body you don’t recognize as your own. Like people with brain injuries who can’t recognize their mother’s face. In all Adam’s research and cramming of trans facts, he’d never thought about how that singular experience actually felt. And here was this boy, with his shaking hands, trying to explain to you, and probably himself, what it was like.