by Arin Andrews
“Fine,” I yelled. “I kissed her!”
“I know you did,” she yelled back. “It’s on paper. I saw the letter! I don’t know why you think you could keep lying to me! Is that really what you want people to think of you?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
She sighed. “I just don’t understand why you had to go and do that there. The place we’ve been going all of our lives.”
“Where else was I supposed to?” I asked. “She doesn’t drive, and you’ve made it clear that you don’t like her.”
“She’s too old for you,” she said. “And she’s taking advantage of you. Listen, I get it. I think girls are pretty too. But I don’t kiss them.”
“Well, I do.” I mumbled.
“You’re not gay,” she said.
“I never said I was,” I yelled. “I don’t know. I guess I’m bi. I like Darian. That’s it.”
“No,” she said, in this calm and infuriating way, like she was the only one who could know the truth about these things. “You’ve just never been in a relationship before, and Darian is showering you with all of this attention. She’s making you feel this way.”
I ran out of the kitchen before I could say something that would really get me in trouble. When I was halfway up the stairs, she shouted, “You are not allowed to see her outside of class, ever!”
• • •
Andi finally texted me an actual question, instead of hiding what she wanted to know behind the Bible.
Just tell me exactly. What is going on?
I think I’m bi, I wrote.
This is too much, she wrote back. I can’t deal with you anymore.
I had known it was coming, but that didn’t make the end of our friendship sting any less. It killed me that Andi couldn’t use her incredible imagination to see a world beyond the hateful religious one she lived in.
Except for my cousins, I now officially had no friends.
Darian and I still managed to pass letters off to each other at the studio, and that’s how I found out that Mom had gotten Darian’s mother’s number and invited her to lunch.
She took my mom out for soup, Darian wrote. And basically told her that she needed to keep me away from you.
I was mortified, but I couldn’t confront Mom about it. If I did that, then she would know that I was still secretly keeping in touch with Darian. I became more determined than ever to figure out a way to see her.
One day Wes and I were helping Dad run some errands near his house in Catoosa, and he asked me about Darian.
“Your mom says you have this new friend that she isn’t so into,” he said.
“What else did she say?” I asked, bracing myself.
“Nothing really, just mentioned that she didn’t like her much.”
I realized that he had no idea what was actually going on. Like always, Mom was keeping the ins and outs of raising us on her own shoulders. And now that Dad was away from the house, she had even less of a reason to keep him informed about the drama of our daily lives. He had settled comfortably into his role of the casual father—happy to hang around for holidays, mall trips, and outdoor fun, but that was about it. She had no reason—or incentive—to start involving him more in our lives now.
“Darian’s not bad at all,” I said. “In fact, she’s really cool. I think you’d like her. I don’t know why Mom is being so weird about it.”
“She’s got really big boobs,” Wes piped up from the backseat.
“Think I can stay at your house this weekend?” I asked. “I feel like I need a break from home.”
“I wanna come too!” Wes said.
Dad was surprised. We never asked to stay over—the woods and backyard around Mom’s house were just way more fun to be at on the weekends. He immediately said yes, as long as Mom was okay with it. And she was—I think she needed a break from me, too.
As soon as we got there that Friday, I asked him if Darian could come and spend the night. “Sure,” he said, shrugging.
I called Darian and told her what was going on. “I don’t know,” she said. “My mom was pretty freaked out by all the stuff your mom said about keeping me away from you. I don’t think she’ll let me.”
“Tell her to call my dad,” I said. “He’ll give her permission.”
Darian had a dance show that night, and we picked her up right after. From the second she arrived, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other whenever we had a second alone, but we had to be diligent and make sure that we could always hear Dad and Wes in some other part of the house. It was after midnight before they finally said good night, and we stayed up watching a movie for a while, waiting for the house to settle and grow quiet before we headed off to the bedroom.
I wanted to do everything with her, but I was so self-conscious about my body that I refused to take my underwear and sports bra off. She kept trying to peel them away, but I resisted until she gave up and let me explore her. As new and wild as it all was, I couldn’t shake the weirdness I felt about my own body. There were movements I felt I was supposed to be making, but there was no equipment to do it with.
I’d recently started having dreams that I was screwing girls with my very own dick. The dreams weren’t happening every night, but at least twice a week. The dreams were sort of like the ones you have when you remember that you can fly, and it’s always this wonderful surprise. Oh, right, you think. How could I have forgotten that I have this ability?
But now that I was with someone in reality, I felt more strongly than ever the absence of something between my legs. Thanks to the dreams, I knew what I was missing out on, how this was supposed to all feel.
But with the armor of my underwear still cloaking me, I could at least pretend. I got her naked and did everything to her that I’d been dreaming about doing to a girl for so long.
Well, almost everything.
• • •
We spent the next day catching up, watching movies, raiding the fridge, and fending off Wesley. At one point he finally left the house to help my dad outside with some yard work, and we immediately grabbed each other and started making out on the couch.
“What are you doing?”
We leapt apart, and saw Wes standing in the doorway, looking confused.
“We were just wrestling,” I said as Darian covered her face.
“No you weren’t,” he said.
“Yes, we were,” I said. “Get out of here. Go back outside.”
“Didn’t look like wrestling to me,” he grumbled as he wandered off.
After that we didn’t dare try anything else. Dad drove her home later that day, and I spent the rest of the weekend in a daze. Finally doing so many of the things to a girl that I had dreamed about had given me some semblance of power over my body. Even if I felt like my body wasn’t the one I was supposed to have, I was at least learning that there were things I could do with it.
I knew it was pointless to try to hide from Mom that Darian had stayed the night. When she picked me up Monday morning, she asked how my weekend had been.
“Darian slept over,” I said casually, as if it were no big deal.
I watched with a mix of awe and dread as her face got redder and her eyes grew wider. I was scared of her reaction, but at the same time I just didn’t really care anymore. She could do whatever she wanted to punish me. It wasn’t going to stop me from loving Darian.
She exploded. “YOU ARE GROUNDED! How DARE you go behind my back like this! I told you, you are not allowed to see that girl EVER!”
I stared at the passing houses and tuned her rant out. A small smile danced on my face as I recalled every single detail of our night together.
When Dad found out that I’d been busted kissing Darian at the dance studio and I’d manipulated his trust, he was pissed, but since Mom yelled at him about it as much as she had yelled at me, he went easy. He told Mom that I was probably just going through a lesbian phase and that I didn’t even know what I was doing. I considered tryin
g to talk with him seriously about what was going on, but then he told me that I was “too pretty to be a lesbian.” I pretty much shut him out after that. He clearly wasn’t ready to understand anything I was going through.
Mom took away my phone when she grounded me, so I was completely cut off from the world except for school and dance. I started to get seriously depressed, pining for Darian. I had no appetite and began to lose a ton of weight. We were back to slipping notes to each other if we had a chance between dance classes, and enlisting the help of her friends as go-betweens if everyone’s eyes were on us. We spoke in code—we’d write the phrase “three words” instead of “I love you,” in case anyone ever got their hands on one of our letters. And whenever we saw each other, we’d subtly hold up three fingers to each other to mean the same, so that we could talk without speaking.
Out of nowhere, Susan came to my rescue after picking me up from school when Mom had a meeting that she couldn’t get out of.
“Listen,” she told me. “I know that things are bad between you and your mom right now, and I just want you to know that I am on your side. She will come around eventually, I promise. And in the meantime, if you ever need to get away, my house is always open to you. And to Darian, too.”
I was grateful but shocked. She and Mom were really close, and for Susan to go behind Mom’s back like that was huge. Especially after I saw Mom’s reaction toward Dad after he had let me spend the night with Darian. But more important, her support reinforced in my mind that I was the one in the right. There was nothing wrong with my feelings for Darian.
I thanked her and immediately took her up on the offer. Whenever Darian and I came over, Susan would cook all my favorite foods, such as steak, or spaghetti with chicken, to try to help me get my weight back up.
We’d always wait until the house was asleep before fooling around. While Susan was cool with us being together, she expected that under her roof everything would stay respectfully PG.
But come on! I mean, we were horny teenagers in love who were being forcibly kept apart! We were going to take advantage of every second of alone time we could get.
This went on for a couple of months before Cheyenne eventually walked in on us one night and told on me. Susan was pissed that I’d taken advantage of her hospitality, and the invitations stopped after that.
Darian and I were back to square one. I’d gotten my phone back, but Darian knew that Mom checked it, so she bought me a prepaid cell so I could make calls in secret. But I was too scared that Mom would find it, so Darian used it instead, to communicate with me. That way I could get texts from a number that Mom wouldn’t recognize.
Still, texts weren’t enough. Those little electronic shots in the dark, messages telling me that I was loved and needed, would help me temporarily, but after the initial thrill of getting one, the coldness in my life would start to creep back in. I had to delete the ones that were too obvious, in case Mom checked my phone, so I didn’t even have words to look back at for comfort. Being with Darian had woken up a part of me that had always been there under the surface, slumbering. Getting such a small taste of what I wanted from my life, and then having it ripped away from me almost immediately, was such a cruel punishment for doing nothing except being born the way I was. It all started to take a horrible psychic toll on me. My depression grew worse every day, and I withdrew so much—to the point where I wasn’t even talking whenever I was at home—that Mom took me to the doctor.
“Are you depressed?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“About what?”
As if I’d tell you. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. Or a non-feeling. I don’t care about anything.”
He put me on Prozac, which helped for about a week in that it gave me a buzzy sort of energy. But it faded quickly, and soon Mom started having to drag me from bed in the morning. I had no interest in facing a world that didn’t want to face me—because it wasn’t just my own mother who was telling me that my feelings were wrong. I got it every day in school, too. The brief confidence boost I’d gotten from Susan’s support was long gone, and the Bible classes at Lincoln seemed to be making more and more references about what a huge sin being gay was. I wondered if some edict had come down from the administration that the teachers needed to be more active in spewing that hate. Or maybe it had always been there that much, and I was just beginning to tune in to it more.
• • •
One day a teacher went on a tirade about gay marriage, repeating all the same old Bible quotes I’d heard a million times before, the same ones Andi had texted me. I raised my hand.
“But aren’t we supposed to be preaching love?”
“We do preach love,” he said. “The love of Jesus.”
“I know, but didn’t Jesus make a big deal about not discriminating against people? He loved everyone equally.”
“Ah HA!” the teacher exclaimed, as if I’d just answered some big mystery. “Yes! But Jesus loved the sinner, not the sin.”
Not that tired old crap again, I thought. I was actually disappointed in him. I wished that just once my teachers would engage in a topic without simply using as the basis of their argument something someone else had once written down ages ago.
In the past I’d always focused my frustration on the students at Lincoln as the problem; I thought they were the ones who didn’t represent what true Christianity was. But it was the institution itself that was a perverted version of the essential point of the Bible—love thy neighbor. Of course the students here were jerks—they were being taught to discriminate.
I know it sounds like such an obvious realization to have, but I had only just turned fourteen.
When I left school that day, I took a good look at all the buildings around me, and the mega church that stood up on the slight hill above us. There was so much money being pumped into this place—money that could actually help those who needed it. Instead they used it to employ people who created more people who believed that being gay was going to send me straight to the devil.
But the thing is, I knew that what I was feeling was beyond being gay. The label still didn’t feel right, which made the whole mess even more confusing and scary. I was still regularly having dreams that I had a penis. There were times in them when I’d look down and see it there between my legs and feel such an incredible wave of relief. Oh, that’s right, I’d think. It was there all along. And then I’d wake up. I had no idea what was wrong with me, and I felt like I had no place in the world.
I decided to do some research, hoping to find someone—anyone—who had the same sorts of dreams and feelings as me. The only time I had unsupervised access to the Internet was when I was at Papa and Gigi’s house. I stopped playing outside with my cousins and started holing up in my grandparents’ back office, searching YouTube for videos from gay people. I knew that “LGBT” was the phrase to search for to find the smart, personal stories, as opposed to just typing in “gay” and getting hundreds of videos of pretty boys lip-synching to pop songs in their bedrooms.
And I knew that the T stood for “trans,” but I didn’t have any clue what the word even meant.
One day a recommended video popped up along the side, a video journal by someone named Skylarkeleven. Something about the guy’s face felt familiar, like I’d seen him somewhere before, so I clicked on it.
That was when everything changed.
The video was called “One year on testosterone comparison.” It had been made by a guy with short, tousled blond hair and a Peter Pan kind of vibe—very animated and self-confident, but not in a jerk sort of way. He was bouncy and excited, and I soon saw why. He began showing clips of videos he’d posted in the past, just before and after starting something called hormone therapy. He was getting regular injections of testosterone, prescribed by a doctor in order to help his body become more masculine. The video tracked his evolution over a year into a progressively deeper-voiced boy.
He was what I wanted to be.
&nb
sp; He was who I was.
He even had the same haircut I fantasized about.
I blew Google up that night, researching everything I could about being transgender, and with everything I read, I clicked a mental check mark next to every question I’d ever had about myself.
Did I feel that I was something other than just gay? Yes.
Did I have a feeling that I’d been born into the wrong body? Yup.
Did I relate strongly to a gender identity that wasn’t the one I was born with? Hell yeah.
I saw countless photos of trans men who had gotten their breasts removed by having what they called “top surgery.” I thought my eyes were going to pop out of my head. It had never even occurred to me that I could just get rid of them. It seemed so obvious, and I was almost mad at myself for never before realizing that was an option. But really, how could I have known?
I seethed with jealousy at every photo of flat pecs. Even the ones who had large surgery scars looked better than anything I had ever thought possible for myself. I learned the word “cisgender,” or “cis,” as the proper way to define a person whose gender identity matches the gender of the body they were born with. I loved knowing there was actually a specific vocabulary word that described people who weren’t like me, as opposed to me being the “other.”
It’s hard to describe what it all actually felt like. I imagine it’s sort of similar to having some horrible disease for years, and then one day your doctor calls you and says, “We found the cure!” Or if an amnesiac suddenly recovers all his memories. Or like playing a video game where you spend forever trying to solve the right puzzle, and then when you do, a hidden gate you hadn’t noticed before suddenly swings open. That feeling—only times a trillion.
When I finally emerged from Papa and Gigi’s back office, I felt like I was floating. I was bursting with new information, priceless information that finally explained everything that was wrong with me. I wanted to know more and more and more—everything I possibly could about being transgender. But at least I was already brimming with enough knowledge to understand that there was suddenly a path laid out before me, where there had been none before. I now had a clear set of steps that could help guide me to becoming the person I knew I was.