Some Assembly Required

by Arin Andrews

  The next morning we woke up crazy early to get to the Trisha Goddard show, and it was basically a disaster. If you watch the clips online, you can tell that our body language is drastically different from anything we’d filmed previously. Part of the problem was that our relationship was crumbling, but the other issue—which you can’t tell by the edit—was that one of the very first things the show’s host asked us was how we have sex. We were both startled. I genuinely understand the curiosity, but in front of an audience of strangers, it felt like a sneak attack. Not to mention that I was a minor at the time.

  In the right forum and context, I’m okay now with discussing sex and my own genital dysphoria, but it’s really important to understand that many trans people aren’t. And it sucks when that’s the first thing a stranger asks about. Any topic relating to bodies, sex, and sexuality is going to be different for everyone, and privacy should be respected.

  We dodged the question and ran through all of our normal lines, but I couldn’t wait for the interview to end so we could get out of there.

  The producers provided us with car service to New York City, and we checked into our new hotel in midtown just as the sun was starting to set. Mom suggested we go to the Empire State Building, and Katie jumped up.

  “Yes!” she said. “Let’s get out of here, go see the city!”

  Outside, it was a perfect New York evening. There was a clean, brisk breeze that seemed to sweep all the grime from the city. I inhaled the smell of honey-roasted peanuts wafting from a street vendor standing on the corner. Everything around me felt alive and huge. I buried all my frustrations about the show taping and all my worries about Katie’s friend Todd. I was determined to have a beautiful night out with my girlfriend. I turned to reach for Katie’s hand.

  But she wasn’t there.

  Confused, I looked around and saw her taking off, at least five steps ahead of me. “Hey, wait up,” I called, but she either ignored me or didn’t hear. I started to speed up, but Jazzlyn and Mom were on either side of me, asking me questions about what else I wanted to do for the rest of our trip.

  Fix my relationship, I thought while desperately praying that Katie would turn around, see that we’d fallen behind, and wait for us. But she didn’t, so I ran to catch up with her.

  “Hey,” I said, breathless by the time I reached her side. “Wait up!”

  “Oh, sorry. I just love New York. It makes me excited. I guess I walk faster here.” She laughed and then stopped abruptly as she started texting again, glancing up every few seconds so that she didn’t ram into anyone. Since her hands were occupied, I couldn’t try to hold one. I slowed my pace until I was back in line with Mom and Jazzlyn.

  Turn around, I silently pleaded to Katie’s rapidly disappearing back.

  When we got to the top of the Empire State Building, I hoped that some of its legendary charm would rub off on Katie, but she kept running from one platform to the next while I followed miserably behind. I’d been fantasizing about kissing her with all of Manhattan stretched out before us as a witness. She eventually gave me a little peck, but for the most part the closest I got to her lips was a view of them glowing in the light of her cell phone.

  I pulled out my own and texted Jamie, who was just getting settled into college in Tennessee.

  I think Katie hates me.

  Why, what’s up?

  She’s just acting really weird. Can you look into a guy named Todd for me? She’s friends with him on Facebook, but I can’t access his page for some reason.

  On it.

  Things got a little better once we returned to the hotel. Katie finally put away her phone and climbed between Mom and me on one of the room’s beds, and rested her head on my chest while I flipped through the TV channels, looking for something to watch. Jazzlyn lay on the other bed, dozing. I stroked Katie’s hair, wondering yet again if I was just being paranoid about her.

  My phone started vibrating. It was Jamie calling. I answered quickly so I wouldn’t disturb Katie.

  “What’s up?” I whispered.

  “I didn’t want to text this to you. Arin, I found this guy’s Facebook page. There’s all this stuff on there about how he and Katie are dating. And it goes way back, like since before the summer.”

  I felt the strangest chill run through my entire body, like adrenaline, only a thousand times more intense. It was like there was ice in my veins, and my head started buzzing. I suddenly couldn’t breathe.

  “She’s sleeping on my chest.”

  “She’s playing you,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I gotta go,” I said, and hung up.

  “Hey,” I said, slipping out from under her. She opened her eyes and looked up at me. “Can I talk to you out in the hall for a sec?” I asked, keeping my voice calm.

  “Sure,” she said, stretching her arms above her head and yawning.

  I lit into her the second we got into the hall. And she denied it all.

  “I’ve grown really close to him emotionally,” she said. “That’s it! I’ve never even kissed him! I’m with you!”

  “Why would he say on Facebook that he’s dating you, when it says on our pages that we’re together?” I asked, genuinely confused. I wanted so bad to believe her. “He’s posting about it to all his friends, and has been for months apparently!”

  “How . . . I mean, why were you even looking at his page?” she asked.

  “Because he’s all you talk about!” I yelled.

  “Look at me,” she said, grabbing my head and staring me in the eyes. “There is nothing between us. He is just a friend, and nothing has ever happened. And I’m sorry if I’m distracted, but college is really intense, so much more than high school ever was. I swear that you’re the only one. I hang out with Todd at school a lot, and he’s probably just referring to that.”

  “You need to fix this,” I said. “We just went on national TV and talked about how in love we are!”

  “We are in love!” she said.

  “I know I am,” I said.

  “And I am too. I’ll talk to Todd and tell him to cool it. It’s all going to be fine.”

  But it wasn’t. The rest of the trip was so awkward, and I couldn’t wait to get home. The four of us were all crammed into one tiny hotel room together, and I didn’t get a chance to tell Mom what was going on until we were out sightseeing and Katie and Jazzlyn wandered off for a moment. She was livid but understood that I wanted to give Katie a chance to make things right.

  I kept my head down everywhere we went. I became obsessed with all the weird black dots on the sidewalks, until I realized that they were wads of chewing gum that had been trampled so much that they’d turned black with the filth of the city. That’s how the trip felt to me—I’d shown up all pink and happy and bubbly, and now I’d been spit out and stomped on. New York suddenly seemed cold and impersonal. I went through the motions of a vacation—snapping all the requisite photos, but I was totally numb inside. By the time we left, Katie and I were barely speaking. We didn’t say a word on the plane ride home. I still carried her bags through the airport when we landed, but she didn’t thank me. I went to give her a hug, but she kept her arms by her side.

  Mom drove me to a restaurant where we had arranged to meet Jamie, who had driven back from Tennessee to console me. But I wasn’t hungry, so I told Mom I’d just ride home with Jamie instead. In his car he offered up a bottle of sweet tea and some jerky he’d bought to cheer me up.

  “So, what are you gonna do?” he asked as I took a swig of the drink.

  “She says there’s nothing going on, and I have to trust her. I love her. She told me she’s going to get this Todd guy to stop posting stuff about her and break off the friendship.”

  “Well, I’m here for you. I can always drive to visit on the weekends.”

  Two days later I got a Facebook message:

  Hey, Arin. You don’t know me, but my name is Todd. I’m not sure why your Facebook page says that you’re dating Katie Hill. She
’s my girlfriend.

  18

  I drove straight to Katie’s dorm, even though she begged me not to. “I don’t want to see you. Let’s just do this over the phone,” she pleaded when I called her. But I told her I was coming no matter what, and she was waiting for me outside her building. Her arms were folded tight against her, and she wouldn’t look up.

  I didn’t want to have the conversation we were about to have in public, so I drove us to my dad’s house, since I knew he would be at work. We sat down on his sofa, and I had a memory flash of Wes busting Darian and me making out on it. I smiled sadly. That part of my life felt like it was a million years ago.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked. “Why did you lie?”

  “It’s weird,” she said softly. “I feel like a black widow spider, like I just want to keep drawing all these men into my web.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” I freaked. “Have there been others?”

  She finally turned to face me. “No,” she said. “But Todd makes me feel like a woman. I need a man with a real penis.”

  There was a momentary blackness.

  I was utterly destroyed.

  It was the one tool I didn’t have in my kit to try to fix this. I could profess my undying love for her, promise to change anything about my personality that she didn’t like, even give her more time apart so she could have some breathing room. But I couldn’t grow a cis penis.

  She was the one who was supposed to understand. I had opened my mind and body to her—it was a double betrayal. She was telling me I wasn’t man enough for her. I could never in a trillion years fathom telling her, even before her surgery, that she wasn’t woman enough.

  I tried to take normal breaths as she told me that she had been secretly dating Todd for several months now. She wasn’t physically attracted to me anymore, and hadn’t been for a long time. Now that she had a female body, she wanted to experience it with a cis guy.

  “But I still love you,” I cried.

  “I still love you, too,” she told me. “And I think maybe someday I even want to end up back with you. But I need to experience my life now, on my own terms.”

  That was the cruelest twist. She was dangling a piece of her so-called web to keep me wrapped up in her life. And I was in love, so there was nothing I could do but take the tiny, pathetic piece of hope she had to offer.

  It would have been kinder for her to say that she hated me and never wanted to see me again.

  • • •

  When I got home, I went straight into the woods out back. I walked down to the cabin on the rocks and crawled inside to think, to process that my life as I knew it had just crumbled down around me. But the confining space didn’t feel right. I needed to be out in the air, in the open, to clear my head.

  I needed to build something new.

  There were some old materials left over from the cabin’s construction, so I dragged four beams and a flat piece of compressed wood farther down the hill on the other side of the house, to a small space between two trees with branches that didn’t obscure the view of the sky. I dug holes, hammered nails, and by twilight I had a tall platform that rose about six feet off the ground, affixed to one side of a tree.

  Fall was coming on fast, and I even though I’d just built it, I had to sweep a few leaves off the surface when I climbed up and stretched out on my back.

  As the stars came out one by one, I wondered if this was some sort of karmic revenge for the way I’d handled my breakup with Darian.

  19

  I was numb over the next several weeks. I went to school, worked at the tamale stand in the afternoons, hit the gym in the evenings, and did my homework before bed. Just go through the motions of a normal life, I told myself. I wasn’t purposely trying to bury the pain—I think I was in such a state of shock that my brain automatically did that for me.

  Any efforts to try to break myself out of that haze—like hiking in the woods or going out swing dancing—ended with my sitting and staring off into space. By the time I started feeling emotions again, the dominating one was self-loathing because I didn’t have the equipment Katie wanted. I told myself that, rationally, it made sense for her to feel the way she did, but my heart refused to listen to what my head was trying to tell it. Katie and I still texted and hung out every now and then, but it was so scarily easy to fall back into our old routine of being affectionate that I’d find myself forgetting we’d even broken up, and when we’d say good-bye, I’d come crashing back to reality.

  Jamie drove from college to visit me every weekend and force me out of the house, and little by little I started to feel like myself again. One day, when we had fallen down a YouTube hole of prank videos that had us cracking up, I got a message on Facebook from a casting director asking if I wanted to be in a photo shoot for some store called Barneys. I’d never heard of it. They offered to fly me up to New York for a few days to model a bunch of clothes with other trans people.

  “Who the hell is Bruce Weber?” I asked Jamie when I read the photographer’s name. He shrugged. I did a Google search, and more than ten million hits popped up.

  “Damn,” I said.

  Turned out he was a pretty big deal. There were a lot of black-and-white photos of half-naked people, and he had taken pictures of tons of celebrities for fancy magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair.

  I didn’t want to go, though. I’d grown accustomed to my routine and felt pretty much done with being on camera. I was still wincing over a painful segment Katie and I had ended up shooting. The segment producers had heard that we had broken up and had convinced us that people would want to know. So Katie and I did a series of awkwardly staged interviews where we did ridiculous things like hold hands, but then slowly drift apart as we walked down my street. It was humiliating, especially because I couldn’t say the real reason we’d broken up—that she’d been cheating on me with another guy. Instead it was all about us “being in different places” and “staying friends.” I wanted to scream the truth into the camera, but I didn’t want to make Katie look or feel bad.

  My mom eventually convinced me that the Barneys shoot would be really good for trans visibility. I told Bruce Weber’s people all about Katie, and they ended up hiring her, too. Before I knew it, we were planning yet another trip to New York City. I prayed that this one would go better than the previous one.

  Mom and Aunt Susan came with us as our chaperones. The shoot was . . . I guess the only way to describe it is unreal. I felt like I was living inside a movie. The first day of shooting took place in Central Park, and it seemed like there were hundreds of assistants and hair and makeup people running through the trees. There were giant trailers set up, and inside them we tried on thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes, before heading outside to be photographed and gawked at by tourists. There were fifteen other trans people, and only a few had ever modeled professionally before. It was a whirlwind three-day trip, full of camera flashes and fashion and fancy dinners. On the last afternoon, as we were shooting inside a huge studio with a sick view of the Manhattan skyline and an assistant was applying dirt smears on my face for what I guess was a sort of chimney-sweep/street-urchin look, I wondered how the hell I’d gotten there. How all of us had gotten there. Life was moving so fast.

  Things were cool with Katie during the trip. I was getting more and more used to the idea of us being friends, even though we still cuddled constantly. By the time we flew back home, I felt like I was almost over losing her. My heart didn’t hurt as bad, and I wondered if the lessening pain might have had something to do with being in New York and seeing just how much more there is to life. Hearing all the other models’ stories helped bring me out of my head—I realized once more just how lucky I had it compared to so many others, in terms of my family and support system. Case in point: I hadn’t heard from Dale in a long time, but right after I returned, I received a text from him. He’d attempted suicide and had just been released from a hospital. Just as he’d fe
ared, his family had turned their backs on him when he’d come out as trans. We made plans to meet up, and I was determined to do everything in my power to help him pull through. I wanted—I needed—to do anything I could to try to help people who were going through what I went through, or worse.

  • • •

  Just after New Year’s Day, I was asked to speak on a trans awareness panel at Northeastern State University, about an hour east of Tulsa. Afterward, as I was getting ready to leave, I saw a really tall guy come walking through the crowd toward me. He looked familiar, and when his face suddenly scrunched up into a nervous half smile, I realized it was Austin, the guy whom I’d friend requested on Facebook almost three years before, right before the spring break cruise. The one who had ignored me after I’d told him I was trans. I’d actually seen him in person a few times at OYP, but we’d always avoided each other in that awkward way that you do when you know someone only through the Internet instead of real life.

  “Hi,” he said, playing with his hands and then suddenly shoving them both behind his back and rocking back and forth on his feet. His eyes darted warily up to the ceiling, as if a giant hand might drop down and carry him away. His hair was still blond, but it wasn’t spiky anymore. It was smoothed out. I had a weird urge to reach up and ruffle it to help calm him down. “So, I, uh, came to this.”

  “Yeah, I can see,” I said.

  “Do you want to maybe get some coffee or something?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  We drove in our separate cars to a Starbucks, got drinks, and sat down.

  “So, um, I want to apologize for sort of blowing you off when you first reached out to me. I was a lot younger, and I think it kind of freaked me out.”

  “No problem,” I said. “I don’t really remember what I was doing. I just thought you were cute.”

  “So you’re gay?” he asked.

  The question sort of startled me. No one had asked me that in forever, and I wasn’t even sure how to answer. I was attracted to him, but that was the point—I was attracted to him. Not guys in general. Or girls in general. I think what I feel now is something separate from even bisexual.