by Robin Talley
After an hour I get bold enough to take some shirts into the men’s dressing room at Diesel. I’m hyperparanoid, looking around for the British equivalent of Marjorie, the angry-at-life sales associate at the Target back home who once kicked me out of the men’s room there the one time I dared to sneak in, but no one stops me. No one even looks at me.
I buy two shirts and go down the street to Next. There I buy two more.
I’m addicted. I buy so many men’s clothes I can’t carry them all. I have to take a taxi back to the hotel and leave my bags with the front desk. Then I put on one of my new outfits with a brand-new binder underneath and go to a pub I spotted that morning.
I don’t even have to pee, but I go into the men’s bathroom anyway. I stand at the tap with a smile on my face, letting the water run over my hands until my fingertips turn pink. Then I go back into the pub, sit at the bar and order a Guinness, because that seems appropriately British.
I text Audrey and ask her to meet me there. I feel better than I have in a long time. Definitely the best I’ve felt since Thanksgiving. But I don’t want to think about Thanksgiving. So I sip my Guinness and drum my fingers on the bar like I’m impatient. As though there is anywhere else I’d rather be than where I am right now.
I stand up to stretch. A guy bumps into me from behind, sloshing beer on my hand.
“Sorry, there, love,” he says.
“Love.” Great. “Love” is what people say to girls here. Dr. Raavi can call me “young man” all he wants, but I still haven’t fooled Random British Pub Dude.
I order a second pint.
Audrey shows up at the same time as my beer. With her is a girl carrying the same purse Joanna bought last month at Neiman Marcus for five hundred dollars. I wonder how much it costs in British pounds.
“This is Emily,” Audrey says. “Emily, this is my brother, Tony.”
I can’t tell if Audrey’s joking. Didn’t she tell Emily the truth?
Audrey’s grinning, but Emily looks completely serious. She holds out her hand.
“Pleased to meet you, Tony,” she says, in an accent that people here would probably describe as “posh.”
“Hi.” I shake her hand.
“Emily goes to the London School of Economics,” Audrey says.
I wince. It sounds very uncool to spell out the full name of LSE. I wouldn’t have cared a year ago, but Harvard’s made me a snob about these things.
“Emily’s friends are having a Christmas party tonight,” Audrey goes on, oblivious. “Can we please go?”
“Absolutely,” I say.
The girls find us a table and we order food. I ask them about their day. Audrey’s positive the cute French guy who was on the tour with them is in love with her, but Emily looks dubious.
“Are you in an accelerated course at university?” Emily asks me as our food arrives.
“Accelerated?” I ask. “No. I don’t think there are any accelerated programs at Harvard. I’m just a regular freshman.”
“Oh. Did you leave school early, then?”
“No.” Where’s she going with this?
“I think Emily’s just saying you look kind of young,” Audrey says.
Oh. Right. If I’m going to keep this up, I’m going to have to get used to people noticing that I’m short for a guy.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to suggest—” Emily starts to say.
“It’s okay.” I interrupt her before she can make a bigger deal about it. “I know I’m short. I figure if I put enough product in my hair that adds a couple of inches, right?”
Emily doesn’t smile.
To change the subject, I tell them about my interview. Emily finds it hilarious that Oxford is taking on an American freshman as a research assistant. I find Emily annoying.
When we finish eating, Audrey and I go back to our hotel so she can change before the party.
“Did you tell her about me?” I ask Audrey once we’re alone.
“What? You mean about your secret identity?” Audrey laughs. “I told her I was in town with my brother, and that was it. That’s what you wanted me to say, right?”
I give Audrey a hug. She laughs and hugs me back.
“I like the new you,” she says. “The one who gives hugs and talks like a normal person instead of saying everyone’s names over and over.”
Audrey doesn’t know what’s going on with Gretchen and me. If she did, she’d probably like the new me a lot less.
She worships Gretchen. I guess it runs in the family.
We take our time getting ready. I decide to change again, so I iron another of the new shirts I bought today. It’s a little too big, so I roll up the sleeves. Audrey’s mascara was confiscated by airport security, so she spends twenty minutes with the hotel concierge trying to determine the British equivalent of her brand. She goes to two different drugstores until she finds it. I’d have accused her of acting especially girlie to cancel me out, except Audrey’s always been this way. Besides, if security had confiscated my binders, I’d have threatened another lawsuit.
We meet Emily at the Angel tube station and walk to her friends’ house. It’s a smaller party than I expected—only about fifteen people, hanging out on the first floor of a group house, wearing droopy reindeer antlers and paper hats. Emily introduces Audrey and me as “my new American brother and sister friends,” and no one seems to think anything of it.
Everyone’s pretty mellow and relatively friendly considering they’re British. They’re especially interested when they find out I go to Harvard. They all want to ask me if I know their friends at Harvard, and talk to me about their plans to go to Harvard for business school, and ask if I saw Reese Witherspoon on campus when they filmed Legally Blonde?
That’s the first icebreaker of the night. The second comes when Audrey starts making out with a British guy named Harvey.
I probably should be keeping a better eye on my sister. Make sure she isn’t invalidating any treaties or picking up any STDs.
I can’t focus on Audrey, though. Because for the first time in my life, I’m surrounded by people I’ve never met before, and they all think my name is Tony.
The guys ask me about football, by which I’m pretty sure they mean soccer. Sadly, I know nothing about sports. The guys mostly ignore me after they figure that out.
The girls, though. The girls smile at me the same way they smile at the guys. They bat their eyelashes the way my high school friends used to do at the guys on the lacrosse team. Two of the girls even invite me to visit them in London while I’m here for the summer. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced.
These people think I’m a guy. A real guy.
When the girls start yawning, I pry Audrey away from her new friend Harvey. We have to be at the airport early tomorrow, and it’s hard enough getting Audrey out of bed in her own time zone.
In the taxi back to the hotel, Audrey slumps onto my shoulder and closes her eyes. I wonder if she’s drunk. I didn’t see her drink after we left the pub, though. She wakes up when we get to the hotel, but she looks gloomy.
“Are you feeling guilty about Kevin?” I ask as I sort through the rest of my bags in our room.
“Kevin won’t care.” Audrey flops onto the couch and turns on the TV. “We have an open relationship.”
“Oh, right. How’s that working out?”
“It’s okay. I think it was the right call. No offense, but I think it’s too limiting to be a hundred percent monogamous all the time. I mean, what’s the point, right? Look at Mom and Dad. They’re in the most stable monogamous relationship ever, but it only works because they never speak to each other.”
Wow. I try to meet Audrey’s eyes, but she’s staring at some terrible Adam Sandler movie. “Is everything going okay at home?” I ask her.
She shrugs, her gaze still fixed on the screen. “Same as ever, I guess. Just quieter with you gone.”
I swallow. I don’t know what to say. So I sit on the couch and watch the movie with her in silence. Before long, though, the jet lag catches up with me, and I fall asleep.
I don’t know if Audrey sleeps, too, but I know she’s awake at 3:18 a.m. That’s what time the clock says when I wake up to the sound of my sister crying on the couch next to me.
My glasses are bent against the couch cushion. I straighten them out, put them on and blink hard until I wake up all the way.
“Hey,” I say. “What’s wrong?”
Audrey shakes her head at me. Then she gets up, goes into the bathroom and closes the door behind her. I can still hear her crying as the knob clicks into place.
“Hey.” I sit down on the floor on the other side of the closed door. “You don’t have to hide in there. Just tell me. What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” Her voice is so clear through the thin, cheap hotel wood, we might as well be in the same room.
“Please?” I say.
“You’ll get mad.”
“Why? Did you break something of mine?”
She laughs, then sniffles loudly. “No.”
“Then I won’t get mad.”
“It’s dumb.”
“Just tell me.”
I hear her sliding down to sit on the floor. We’re right next to each other now, with only the door between us.
“It’s harder than I thought it would be,” she says.
“What is?”
“This thing with you. The new you.”
Oh. I should’ve known.
“I thought you liked the new me,” I say.
“I do.” She sniffs again. “It’s still hard. It’s fun having a brother, I guess, but I miss my sister, you know?”
Oh, God.
“Say something,” Audrey says. “Or I’ll think you’re mad.”
“I’m not mad,” I say slowly.
Am I really Audrey’s brother?
Today was amazing. Having people call me he. Shopping in the guys’ sections without anyone looking at me funny. Having straight girls flirt with me.
Maybe I’m not gender variant. Maybe I’m, well. A guy.
It’s just—does it have to be an either/or thing? Having people look at me for a weekend and think I’m a guy is awesome, but these are people I’m never going to see again. Do I really want my own sister to think of me as a guy all the time? For the rest of our lives?
Am I still going to want to be a guy when I’m thirty? When I’m ninety? How the hell am I supposed to know?
Derek knows. He’s getting surgery this summer. He’s positive he’s never going to look back.
God, I envy that.
I can try out pronouns and labels as much as I want, but it’s not going to make me any more certain.
What if I never figure this out? What if I spend the rest of my life going back and forth? Is there a test I can take that will just tell me the answer? Like the personality test that told me I’m introverted and judgmental? (Not that I needed to take a test for that one.)
I guess it all goes back to what Nance said. Trying out labels, putting everyone I meet into little boxes—the way I did with all my Harvard friends, the way I did with all the British people I met today—it’s all a part of figuring myself out. Trying new ways to define myself. As a Harvard student. As gender variant, or gender nonconforming, or whatever else feels right on any given day. As part of my awesome group of friends.
For two years, I defined myself through my relationship with Gretchen. Now that that’s on hold, I’m adrift, wandering freely. Too freely.
It feels more important than ever that I come up with the right label to plaster on myself. A way for people to see me. People who aren’t Gretchen.
Because when Gretchen looks at me, she just sees me. It’s like she said—she really doesn’t care about all my gender stuff. She likes me for me. Loves me, I guess.
God, that’s true. She really loves me.
God, I’m an asshole.
I climb to my feet and rest my palm on the door handle. “Can I come in?”
Audrey sniffs, and for a second I think she’s going to say no. Then I hear her sliding back from the door. “I guess.”
I push open the door. The bathroom is tiny compared to the rest of the suite—just a toilet, a sink, a shower and a few square feet of cold floor tile. When I sit down next to Audrey, my not-very-long legs fold against the door awkwardly, my feet planted flat on the wall next to hers. She’s turned away, facing the shower curtain. I can’t see if she’s still crying.
I miss my sister, you know?
I want to be the sister Audrey wants me to be. No, not the sister. The sibling.
I need to stop defining myself according to other people’s expectations. I need to figure out who I am. Not just whether I’m a guy, either.
What do I actually want for myself? Outside what my friends see, or my girlfriend sees, or my family sees?
Maybe things will never be the way they were before between me and Audrey. Because I’m not the same.
Maybe that’s okay.
“Can I, uh, hug you?” I’m still not really sure how to initiate hugs.
“I thought you don’t do hugs,” Audrey says with a sniff.
“I’m trying to start.”
Audrey turns, and I get a glimpse of her red eyes before she tips her head onto my shoulder. Wow, hugging feels nice, especially when you’re upset. I don’t know why I stayed away from it for so long.
“Anyway, I’ll deal.” Audrey pulls back and sniffs again. “Seriously, I’m happy for you. You can be a boy or a girl or a dolphin or anything you want and I’ll be happy for you.”
I smile. “A dolphin?”
“I saw it on South Park.”
“Thanks for being happy for me. I’m sorry I made you cry.”
“It’s not like you did it on purpose.” Her voice sounds more normal now. “I know it’s really uncool of me to be upset about this. Sorry.”
“Uncool?” I laugh again. “Where’d you get that from?”
“I just mean, if I were more hip and modern and in college and stuff, I’d just go with it and not start crying randomly or whatever. The way Gretchen is.”
“Gretchen?” I swallow.
“Yeah. I mean, when you told her she was just, like, ‘That’s cool,’ right?”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess.” Gretchen never cried or anything. At least, as far as I know.
“So listen, don’t be offended, but I just want to sit by myself for a while.” Audrey taps my bare foot with her own. “I just need to, you know, think.”
“All right.” I stand up again. “How about you take the bed and I’ll sleep on the sofa in the other room?”
“Okay.” I hold out my hand to pull Audrey up. She climbs to her feet, smiling. “Wow, you seem stronger than before. Is this being-a-guy thing making you more buff?”
I laugh. “No. You have to take hormones for that. Or just go to the gym and not eat cheeseburgers for every meal. None of which I’ve been doing this semester.”
“Better watch out or you’ll gain the freshman fifteen.” Audrey chuckles and goes into the bedroom, closing the door behind her.
“Don’t forget,” I say through the door, “our flight’s at—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Hey, now that you’re getting a sex change, could you also be less anal?”
“No chance. Night.”
“Night.”
I change and climb onto the couch, pulling a pillow behind my head. I’m exhausted, but I can’t stop thinking.
Do I really want to leave behind everything from my
life before?
This weekend was fun. It’s such a rush, having everyone think I’m a guy.
Roller coasters are a rush, too, but I don’t want to ride one every day until I die.
This is a big deal. Everyone keeps telling me it’s the biggest decision I’ll ever make.
If I really do it, I’ll have to tell my mother someday.
No way. I’m not ready for that. I won’t ever be ready for that.
Then what the hell am I doing? What was this weekend even about? Why am I torturing my little sister? Why did I lie to my new boss about my name? Why do I keep switching my labels around? Why didn’t I correct Chris when he assumed I was transitioning?
When will I figure this all out? Why does it have to take so long? Why can’t it be over and done with?
I need to talk this through with someone.
I pick up my phone. It’s 7:00 p.m. in New York. I could call. I could—
No. I stop myself before I push the button.
I can’t. Gretchen hates me after what I did at Thanksgiving. The last thing she wants is for me to call her out of the blue to whine about my new thing. I’ve got to figure this out on my own.
I can do this. I want to—
Oh, who am I kidding? I don’t know what the hell I want.
I fall asleep just as my alarm goes off.
16
DECEMBER
FRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE
2 WEEKS APART
GRETCHEN
I check my phone again.
It’s on. It’s charged.
No one’s called me. No one’s texted.
This sucks. Everything sucks.
I go back to sleep.
* * *
I can’t sleep.
I’ve been lying in bed, thinking, for hours. There’s nothing I hate more than thinking about myself.
Well, no. Getting dumped and left alone to deal with the dumb stuff I do is a lot worse, actually.
Dumb stuff, for example, that may or may not have messed up the one good thing I had here. And just generally demonstrated my vast stupidity.