Kim

by T Cooper

  Manning the smoking grill was this hunky Latino dude, who had thighs thick as tractor tires and a beefy chest, the kind where the muscles make a valley between them. In the valley he wore several gold chains strung with medallions, which flipped between his pecs like fish every time he leaned forward to turn a veggie burger or a tofu dog. He was dressed in denim cutoffs and a denim shirt with the sleeves ripped off to accommodate his canned-ham shoulders, a bandanna tied around his head to keep the sweat from dripping into the food. When he noticed me staring—busted! I don’t know, something about him reminded me of Chase in Y-2—he grinned and waved me over with the greasy spatula.

  Kris, who was my ride to the party, practically bolted toward the grill, of course assuming it was he whom Mr. Latin Hotness was summoning. So I followed with less urgency.

  “Welcome to the party! You want a burger or a dog?” the guy asked, with the most genuine smile in all of the land. So genuine, I thought, it must be fake.

  “I’m always up for a wiener,” Kris answered. I shot him a side eye. Why did he have to flirt with every dude within a five-mile radius? I mean, I’m fine with that, I guess, but at least get a few benign sentences in before you go for the wiener-shot.

  “What about you, gorgeous thing?”

  . . .

  Kris nudged me. Oh man. Was I the “gorgeous thing”?

  “Uh, burger sounds good. I guess.”

  Grill Guy grinned again, “Vegan or turkey?”

  “Turkey?” I said, so thrown by the welcoming attitude that I reflexively uptalked like I couldn’t even have confidence about what I felt like eating.

  “Okay, five more minutes on those,” Grill Guy said, flipping a turkey burger with my name on it—even though he didn’t know it yet.

  “I’m Kris,” my friend interjected then, extending a hand and (sigh) winking. “And you are?”

  “Paulo. Nice to make your acquaintance, Kris.”

  “Likewise. Charmed.”

  Oh boy. Two minutes in and I was already the third wheel. I kicked at the tufts of grass beneath the grill with the toe of my Doc Martens.

  “And who’s your lovely lady friend?” Paulo asked, waving away the smoke billowing between us.

  “Oh her? Her name is Kim. She has problems.”

  I shot him another death glare, but Paulo just chuckled. “Who ain’t got those, right, bro?” He held up his free hand to fist-bump with Kris, a maneuver Kris responded to as if he were being attacked by a coiled, angry pit viper.

  “Suuure,” Kris said, limply meeting Paulo’s knuckles. “I’m gonna go score some lemonade. Want one?”

  Paulo declined, while I nodded yes, and Kris skipped away (literally—he’s big on skipping), leaving me and Paulo alone, which for some reason made me feel even more anxious than usual.

  “So, you’re friends with Michelle then?” he asked, trying.

  “Yes. Michelle is great. I mean, I only just met her, but she seems great, if first impressions are to be trusted, which in my experience hasn’t proven such a good litmus test, but, ah, she seems awesome and real, so . . .” God. I did have problems. What was wrong with me? What was it about this guy that had me all . . . girly?

  “Real is good,” Paulo commented generously. “We like real.”

  Yes. We like real, I thought. But what was real, really? I sure as shinola wasn’t. Or maybe I was. Maybe Kim Cruz was finally letting me express what I really was inside. Bitter, angry, scared, lonely . . .

  “I should go check on my f-friends,” I stammered.

  Paulo nodded, saluted with his spatula, and returned his attention to the hot coals. “Swing back in five for the burger,” he called as I power walked toward Kris and Michelle, who were sitting hip-to-hip on a giant cooler, drinking organic lemonade out of recyclable boxes.

  “Hey, girl,” Michelle greeted warmly. “I see you met Paulo.”

  “He’s nice.”

  “He’s awesome!” Michelle nearly shouted. “He went through a really rough time a few years back, but he’s on track now and it makes me so happy to see.”

  “Rough time, how?” Kris pressed, never one to miss out on a potentially dramatic narrative.

  “Well, it isn’t really my story to tell, but . . .”

  I could see Michelle calculating in her head, weighing the pros and cons of trusting us with whatever secret she was considering sharing. She waved her fingers to draw us closer. Kris and I leaned in, our heads almost touching, like I was back in a football huddle.

  “He’s cool with anybody knowing,” she started. “So, Paulo’s government name was Paulina.”

  “Government name?” I asked, while a smile broke over Kris’s face.

  “The one he was given at birth,” Michelle said.

  “He’s trans,” Kris interjected, like I was in kindergarten. “He’s a trans-man.”

  A what?

  Okay. So I knew what transgender was. The basics anyhow. But to my knowledge, I’d never met anyone who had actually transitioned. (Besides every Changer ever. But that’s different. Right?)

  “He was designated female at birth, but he transitioned into a male,” Kris droned into my ear, gloating slightly. “Sometimes trans people feel they are born in the wrong body, so to speak. Other times they just evolve naturally from one thing to another.” Kris had certainly done his transgender research. “Everyone is on a spectrum, you see, and where you slide back and forth in terms of gender and/or sexuality is entirely up to you.”

  (Thanks, Kris. But I really don’t need a primer on gender and sexual fluidity from you, or from any other Static for that matter. Changers pretty much have the market cornered on that, yo.)

  “So, Paulo, before he transitioned, was into . . .” Kris turned to Michelle pointedly. “Girls? He used to be a lesbian?”

  Michelle looked over at Paulo.

  “Or—” Kris prodded her.

  “I don’t really know what he’s into. I think girls, yeah,” Michelle said curiously, as though it wasn’t really important and had never occurred to her to ask such a thing.

  “Ah, the outfit threw me,” Kris said, his Trans 101 lecture complete for the moment, an explanation having been provided as to why Paulo seemed more interested in me than him.

  “Maybe don’t say anything to Paulo unless he chooses to tell you,” Michelle added then. “I don’t want him to think I was putting him on blast.” She stood up and peered at me and Kris, seeming to doubt her decision to trust us a little bit.

  “Got it,” I said, like I understood completely.

  “I filled you in only because it seems like you’re kind of in the family yourselves.” Then she spotted somebody with purple hair across the yard. “Oh, Logan! Excuse me,” Michelle said, and ran off.

  At which point Kris turned to me: “I think she thinks you’re like her two mommies.”

  I shrugged. He smiled smugly. But what did he think he knew?

  I had long since given up trying to figure out which label fit me. What I AM. As a girl who used to be a boy, I’d loved Audrey, and then I’d loved her again as a boy who’d been a girl (who used to be a boy). And not for nothing, she’d loved both sides of Kris’s so-called spectrum. She'd loved Drew, and she'd loved Oryon, and so maybe Destiny was right when she said this Changer mission mattered and could make a difference in breaking down all these identity barriers to real intimacy and trust and acceptance between humans—though really, who was changing whom?

  “Well?” Kris pressed. “Are you?” He batted his lashes comically, brows raised in anticipation.

  I surveyed the party. There were women sitting in other women’s laps. Men wearing lipstick and jewelry. Asian folks, black folks, Latinos, whites. Older women with younger girls who looked like boys. Boys who looked like brothers holding hands. Everyone was chill and happy. Everyone was inhabiting the space that made them feel alive and right. No one was apologizing for anything, or trying to cram themselves into a form that curried favor in the eyes of others. These were peo
ple at home in the world, in this backyard, at this barbecue, at least for this moment in their intersecting lifetimes.

  And that counts for something, it has to. Like maybe in life you tried to string together as many moments like this that you possibly could, and if in the end you managed to enjoy more of the good ones like these than the dark ones, then lucky you: you had a good life . . .

  In that moment when Kris asked me “what I was,” I realized I’d never seen anything like the scene at Michelle’s family barbecue. It was the polar opposite of high school, where everyone feels uneasy and off-kilter and threatened by exposure at any given moment. Even the most well-adjusted Changers I knew (Elyse, Chase) were in a constant state of flux and questioning. It wasn’t lost on me as I strolled through the party and soaked in the scene that I was the least transparent person there. The only one still in hiding.

  I decided in that moment to come clean.

  “Honestly, I don’t know what I am,” I confessed to Kris, feeling a small weight lift as I said the words.

  Kris, to his credit, stayed quiet, making soft, accepting eyes at me. He gave a small nod, took a pull of lemonade from his straw.

  “Some days I feel like I’ll never know,” I said, a heavy calm settling over me.

  Kris poked my thigh, flipped his hair back, and smiled. “Plenty of time to decide, Kimmycakes. Plenty of time.”

  And it was because of that exchange, because of Paulo and the party and Michelle Hu and all the other “real” people I met and watched and envied today, that when I got home I did two things:

  1. I took the friendship bracelet Audrey had given me (as Drew) off my desk and dropped it into the memento box I’ve had forever, and tucked the box in the back of my closet. And . . .

  2. I took Dad’s razor and shaved my bobbed hair into a righteous Mohawk.

  I don’t know if it looks good. But I know it looks like me.

  Change 3–Day 15

  Soooooo. Maybe the shaved-head Mohawk wasn’t the best decision I’ve ever made in my lives.

  I hate admitting that.

  I hate that I care about what other people think of my stupid freaking hair, and my relative coolness in the ever-shifting sands of the high school hierarchy. Changers aren’t meant to care about trivial things. We’re meant to show others the futility of caring about trivial things. We’re the cure for the disease, not the disease itself, and that’s all fine and dandy until you’re walking down the hall and you hear yourself called dyke 8,517 times before the lunch bell.

  To be fair, not everyone said the word dyke. But the lesbionic alert patrol was out in full force, whispering and pointing and laughing cruelly at every turn. Because. Hair. Hair is so much more important than you’d ever think. (Find me a more depressing sentence than that.)

  And the worst part was, it wasn’t really even about being tagged as a lesbian. Lesbians—at least the ones with shiny, long, My Little Pony hair, and sparkly lips, and Victoria’s Secret bra and panty twin sets—are considered “hot” these days. I mean, I’ve seen plenty of girls kiss at school parties where everyone watching just hooted like they were ringside at the Sapphic Olympic Games. Nobody was being a phobic a-hole on those occasions. (Except Jason, of course, who is threatened when girls hug, or play sports, or drive, or, you know, talk.)

  But my give-no-effs Mohawk triggered some sort of mass does-not-compute hysteria. I wasn’t a sexy lesbian on display for the entertainment of others. I wasn’t even a sporty, Ellen-style lesbian who could hang with the dudes and crack jokes and wear a mannish-but-still-made-for-women blazer. No, my haircut seemed to communicate to the entire student body that I’d become, essentially overnight, a girl who didn’t care about anybody’s opinions anymore. And as I quickly learned, a high school girl who doesn’t care about your opinions is like a nuclear weapon that must be dismantled immediately, lest it detonate and blow the whole joint and everyone in it to smithereens.

  “Why would she do that?” I heard Chloe whisper to a Chloette when I walked by. “I mean, with so much already working against her?”

  “Excuse me?” I said, stopping short at her locker.

  (Yes, I should have kept on walking. Yes, I should not have taken the bait. But I’d already endured so many smirks and snorts and gasps that I’d reached my limit, and it just happened to coincide with my intersection with Chloe.)

  “Excuse you how?” she snorted back.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I thought maybe you had something to say to me.” I glared right into Chloe’s reality-TV close-up-ready face. It was there in her stunned silence that I noticed something new. Chloe was scared of me. I think I even saw her flinch. And I know I shouldn’t say so, but it felt kind of good to frighten her. To have any power over her, really.

  Chloe looked at the rest of her RBF crew, now flanking her sides, the flicker of fear extinguished.

  “What could I possibly have to say to you?” she snarled, thrusting her lips forward like an angry duck.

  I took a deep breath. “Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounded like you might have an issue with the way I look.”

  The whole posse burst into laughter, Chloe swiveling side to side to bask in their shared derision. “Who are you anyway?” she asked louder than needed, as the giggling subsided. “Or maybe I should ask, what are you?”

  “What do you mean by what?” I could feel my skin growing hot.

  “I don’t know. Seems like someone might have an identity crisis in the haps,” she said slowly, shrugging at the end for emphasis.

  And here is the real paradox. Of all the V’s I’ve had, of all the crappy moments when I have indeed not known who I was, or what I should be, this particular second was not one of them. In this particular second I knew EXACTLY who I was. I was Kim Cruz, a girl with a shaved head and a new attitude. And I had given my last shit.

  I lunged at Chloe, threaded my short but dexterous fingers through her hair, and yanked. It wasn’t a premeditated action. I hadn’t planned it. But once my arm launched itself in the general direction of her $300 extensions, there was no stopping the inevitable.

  Her scream was bloodcurdling. Like a fox in a trap, I imagine. (If that fox had its $300 hair extensions snatched from its furry little head.) Chloe’s palm instantly shot up to the bald spot where I’d done the damage, her mouth simultaneously yawning open in horror.

  “You! Fat! BITCH!” she shrieked.

  I didn’t know what to do next. I stood there in shock, three ropes of “hair” threaded through my fingers like sea kelp. The Chloettes also stood dumbstruck, uncertain of what horror would follow.

  “You’re going to pay for this,” Chloe seethed, her hand still covering the wound.

  “I don’t know what fake-ass hair costs,” I shot back cheekily, and then pointed to my own head. “I mean, obviously.” One of the Chloettes couldn’t help but laugh. “But feel free to send me the bill.”

  Chloe’s eyes collapsed to slits, her chest heaving up and down with untempered rage. “You think you’re a miserable loser now?” she asked, not really asking. “Wait until I’m done with you.”

  “Yeah,” another Chloette chimed in, “just wait!”

  As they stomped down the hall toward Principal Redwine’s office to report my “violent assault,” I realized that a small crowd had gathered around me. No one said a word. You could have heard a weave drop. Or you would have, if I’d dropped it. But I didn’t. Instead I stuffed Chloe’s hair into my pocket like some sort of voodoo queen, something I’m sure would make the gossip rounds along with my propensity to rip hair off other girls’ heads. You know, my secret collection of random girls’ weaves hanging in a framed case in my room.

  Long story short, my parents were called to the office. They couldn’t go, of course, per Changers Council rules, but they did speak on the phone with Principal Redwine (saying they were out of town visiting a sick family member), who apprised them of my misdeeds and erratic behavior. “Not the sort of thing we tolerate
here at Central.” There was speculation that perhaps Kim Cruz wasn’t quite making a seamless transition from her intimate, small-town Quaker school to a large public school, and that even though her grades were okay, “they weren’t nearly as high as expected.” (Which was racist, but I wasn’t really in a position to point it out when my parents confronted me about the incident.)

  So, I’m suspended for two days and sentenced to trash pickup after Friday night’s football game.

  Mom just left my room, where she perched on the side of my bed as I was curled into the proverbial fetal position, trying yet again to block out the rest of the world.

  “Not your best day, huh?” she had said, stroking the side of my newly shorn head.

  I stayed quiet.

  “Your dad is worried about you.”

  “If by worried about, you mean pissed at, okay. Anyway, how can he be? He’s never around,” I argued.

  “Worry isn’t geographically constrained, my love,” she said, her fingers soft and gentle on my head. Her touch felt kind of cool and tingly on the shaved parts. “I know this year is going to be a struggle, for so many reasons. I know you miss Chase. And your relationship with Audrey. And you wish so much of your life were different.”

  I started to cry, the tears rolling onto my sheets.

  “But I also know you can handle whatever happens,” she went on. “You have already made me so proud.”

  Now Mom was crying too. She blotted her eyes with her sleeve, then leaned to hug me. I couldn’t really say anything—there was nothing to say—so we stayed like that for a while, both of us weeping and squeezing each other like we were each other’s rafts at sea. Outside the sun dipped, and the room grew blue with the dusk.

  After what felt like an hour, Mom let me go, and took a deep, hard breath. “Okay then,” she said, standing up. “Now, let’s talk about the hair.”

  I laughed weakly, tried to explain about Michelle Hu’s party, how I was inspired by the people there, all embracing their oddity. No one hiding. No one afraid.