Parrotfish

by Ellen Wittlinger

  “But what really bothers me,” Sebastian continued in the same calm voice, “is you telling Grady’s friend here that she can’t talk to him. As if you’re in charge of everybody.”

  Eve had been keeping her eyes carefully focused on the picket fence around her house, but when Sebastian said that about me being her friend, her head twitched and she looked up at Danya. “He’s not . . . she’s not . . . I mean . . . we aren’t friends anymore! We really aren’t!”

  I wasn’t sure if I was saying it to save Eve or to save my own self-respect, but I said it loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear. “She’s right, Danya. We’re not friends. I would never be friends with anybody who hung around with a soul-sucking bitch like you.”

  Right then I wished I had those muscles Sebastian had mentioned earlier, because, pacifist though I’d always been, at that moment I really wanted to bounce Danya Seifert on the sidewalk like a basketball and see if the crap would fall out of her head.

  Sebastian must have realized I’d hit my boiling point. He took me gently by the arm and pulled me away from the girls.

  “Must be going,” he said. “Nice to chat with you.”

  Danya was snorting like a bull, but I was only looking at Eve. Just before I turned around and walked away she looked up at me, and there in her eyes I could see that scared kid lurking, the one who could never stand for anyone to be mad at her, especially me.

  Chapter Nine

  I managed to wait until we’d put a block of houses and a row of tall maple trees between us and them before I lit into Sebastian. “For Christ’s sake, why did you do that? I told you I didn’t want to talk to them!”

  “Well, I did,” Sebastian said. “You can’t just ignore people like Danya. She won’t stop being a creep unless people call her on it.”

  “You think she cares what we think of her? Besides, she probably likes being called a soul-sucking bitch.”

  “Possibly. Still, you can’t let her walk all over you.”

  “Maybe she’s just saying what everybody else is thinking.” I wondered if that was really true; were there other people who thought I should off myself so their world wouldn’t be soiled by my presence? I hunched up my shoulders the way I used to when I first started getting breasts and didn’t want anyone to notice. Eventually my neck and back would start to hurt, but in the meantime, I felt invisible. “I should never have told anybody. There’s no place I can go now and feel good. Feel safe. At home they’re all upset, at school everybody’s freaking out . . . I have to walk half a mile to use a bathroom so no one is offended by me. People stare at me everywhere I go. I can’t stand being a freak anymore.”

  Sebastian was quiet for a minute, while I tensed my jaw and ground my teeth to powder. Then he said. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “Get used to it? What are you talking about?”

  He shrugged. “Look at me. I’m Tiny Tim. You get used to stuff. You don’t really want to keep pretending you’re somebody you aren’t, do you? Although, if you do, I’ll take you to the Winter Carnival dance.”

  I knew he was trying to joke me out of feeling bad, but I didn’t say anything. I could feel Danya’s words eating into my soul. Why hadn’t I realized what a huge deal this was going to turn out to be? I guess I’d just been thinking about it for so long that I forgot changing your gender was not even a question for most people. They just took for granted being a boy or a girl. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be so sure of yourself. To be scornful of anybody who wasn’t just like you.

  We’d walked all the way to the Four Corners strip mall by then, kicking rocks and road trash as we shuffled along.

  “I’m gonna stop into Atkins Pharmacy before I go home,” Sebastian said. “They have this organic peppermint shampoo I like.”

  I stared at him. “You use organic peppermint shampoo?”

  “Yeah. What do you use?”

  “Whatever my mother buys and leaves in the shower.”

  He shook his head. “You should try this stuff. It makes your head tingle.”

  I put my hand up in the stop position. “Tingle? Too much information.” But I followed him into the store anyway, since I had nowhere else to go.

  Sebastian couldn’t immediately find his beloved shampoo on its usual shelf. Then a sales clerk, an overweight, middle-aged woman with a mouthful of gum, came up behind us. “Can I help you boys find something?”

  I was almost afraid to turn around and face her. She’d called me a boy. What if she realized her mistake and got embarrassed and . . . I couldn’t take it. Not today.

  “I’m looking for that organic peppermint shampoo you sell,” Sebastian said. “It’s usually right here.”

  “Follow me,” she said, poking a finger into her breastbone. “Wilma knows where everything is. We moved all the organic stuff into one section.” She walked a few aisles down and stopped in front of a sign that said ALL-NATURAL ORGANIC PRODUCTS.

  “I don’t know what makes some of ’em organic and some of ’em not,” she said. “Is this what you want?” She held up a green bottle.

  “Yes! Thank you! That’s it!” You’d think Sebastian had found gold.

  “How come you like it so much?” Wilma asked.

  “It smells good,” Sebastian said. “And it makes your head tingle.”

  “Yeah? Maybe I’ll try it,” she said. “I bet your girlfriends like it, huh?” She smiled right into my face and winked at me.

  I tried to smile back, but I could feel the corners of my mouth quivering. It appeared that this woman actually thought I was a boy.

  Sebastian took his shampoo up to the counter, and Wilma rang up the sale. I had to know for sure. I looked around the nearby shelves for an item with which to test her. When Sebastian stepped aside, I put a can of shaving cream on the counter. Not that girly stuff Laura uses to shave her legs, but a black can with a big ship on it. Why, I wondered, were ships for men? They should put a lawn mower on it, or, better yet, a jockstrap.

  Wilma chewed her gum nonchalantly as she rang up my sale, took my money, put the shaving cream in a plastic bag, and handed it over. “There you go, sir,” she said, still grinning. “Have a nice day!”

  I followed Sebastian out of the store. “Did she call you sir?” I asked him.

  “Maybe. Can’t remember.” Then his face brightened. “Did she call you sir?”

  I nodded my head, feeling—stupidly—as if I might cry if I tried to speak.

  “Well, my friend, you passed,” he said, putting a hand on my back. “You are now officially a boy.”

  By the time I got back home, it was almost dark. Dad had just switched on two billion megawatts of electricity. Jesus and Rudolph glowed, Barbies skated, and plastic carolers started listing all the crap their true loves gave to them.

  “Hey, kiddo,” he greeted me. “Can you give me a hand carrying in some firewood?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I don’t have to put on a costume though, do I?”

  He laughed. “You kids. I think I enjoy this more than you do!” He thinks? “Just help me stack it by the back door. I have to get my own costume on before I build any fires.”

  We tramped out through the backyard to our property line, where a cord of wood had been stacked to get us through the holidays. “Dad, do you think . . . I mean, how long do we have to . . .” There just wasn’t a good way to ask him. “The thing is, none of us kids believe in Santa Claus anymore, so you don’t have to go to all this trouble for us.”

  He looked back at me, confused. “But it’s fun, isn’t it? You don’t have to believe in Santa Claus to enjoy the decorations! Besides, it’s no trouble for me—I enjoy it.”

  What could I say? The guy liked to wear dumb clothes and make a spectacle of himself. I gave up.

  We piled up enough wood for two or three nights of blazing nineteenth-century fires before Mom called us in for dinner. I was really not anxious to sit across the table from Laura and those accusing eyes with the runny makeup. I g
uess Dad heard my deep sigh.

  “Problems?” he asked, but I knew he didn’t really want to know. Dad always pretended there was nothing wrong with his kids; he called it looking on the bright side. Even if you were barfing on the carpet, he’d say, “She doesn’t look sick to me!” His theory was that if you didn’t dwell on problems, they’d just disappear. Or Mom would take care of them and he could continue to believe we didn’t have any.

  “Not really,” I said. It seemed okay to lie to somebody who didn’t really want to know the truth anyway.

  Dad cleared his throat and surprised me for a change. “If it’s about this name-changing thing . . . well, I want you to know that you’re still my kid, and I love you, no matter what your name is.” He slapped me on the shoulder.

  “Thanks, Dad.” I stood looking at the kitchen door but didn’t open it. “But, you know, it’s not just the name that’s changed. It’s that . . . I’m different than everybody thought.”

  “You’re still my kid, aren’t you?” He laughed uneasily.

  “Yeah, but now I’m your son instead of your daughter.”

  He looked at me, really looked at me, and said, “Truth is, it doesn’t surprise me that much. Not that I was expecting it, you understand. Just that, in a way you’ve always been my son. You know what I mean?”

  I sort of did know. He meant that we liked to do the same kinds of things—“guy” stuff that Mom and Laura didn’t care about. But was that what made me a boy? Charlie was a boy too, and he didn’t give a damn about cars or carpentry projects. I was pretty sure he’d never held a hammer in his hands. So what did it mean that I felt like a boy? If I couldn’t really put it into words myself, was it fair that I was making Laura and Mom and Eve suffer for it?

  And yet, hadn’t I been suffering for a long time now? Every time the swimming teacher had said, “Boys line up here, girls over there,” I’d had to think consciously about which line I should stand in. I’d wanted to play soccer on the boys’ team when I was nine, but I wasn’t allowed to, so I stopped playing altogether. Or, worst, the times Mom had forced me to wear a dress with a lacy collar and a ribbon at the waist to visit Grandma Katz in the nursing home. The dress made me feel like a fool. I didn’t want fancy white ankle socks and Mary Janes. I wanted to wear crew socks and sneakers like Charlie did. Because I knew that that was the kind of person I was: a crew-socks-wearing person, not an ankle-socks-wearing person. And maybe if people didn’t divide everybody up into just two groups—male and female, two lines only—I could have just been a crew-socks-wearing person who played on the boys’ soccer team and it would have been okay. I wouldn’t have had to make a big deal out of being a boy, which seemed to be the part that was making a lot of people crazy.

  Dinner was not fun, but at least it was quiet. We were jammed around the small kitchen table, of course, since the dining room was now a stage, but we did our best not to make physical contact with each other. Charlie was mad at Mom for actually disciplining him for a change; he picked angrily at his stew and only ate the meat out of it. Laura seemed to be eating only vegetables these days; the two of them could have shared one bowl instead of wasting two halves. By the glares Laura was sending across the table, you would have thought I was the one who butchered the cow. Mom and Dad just looked tired.

  I, however, ate everything that was put in front of me, like a good boy, loaded the dishwasher, and disappeared into my room. The phone rang almost immediately, and Mom called upstairs to say it was for me.

  I figured it must be Sebastian, since no one else seemed to be speaking to me. “Hello?” I waited. “Hello? Who is this?” I thought I was being pranked and was about to hang up when I heard the voice, small and frightened.

  “Don’t hang up. It’s me.”

  Eve. I took the phone away from my ear and held the handset over the cradle, as if she could see this empty threat, then put it back to my ear.

  “Are you there, Angela?”

  Angela. She didn’t even intend to try. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t hang up on you,” I said.

  She was quiet for a few seconds. “I don’t have one,” she finally said. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry you heard what Danya said this afternoon, and to tell you that I didn’t really mean it about not being your friend anymore.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No! I had to say that. If I didn’t, Danya wouldn’t have been my friend anymore!”

  I rolled my eyes even though no one was around to see. “Do you honestly think that Danya is your friend, Eve?”

  She sighed. “I know she doesn’t act like she is, but she lets me hang around with her.”

  “Why do you want to hang around with her? She’s the meanest person I’ve ever met!”

  “Yeah, but if she likes you, then she isn’t so mean. Besides, now everybody knows that I’m Danya’s friend. Which kind of makes me somebody.”

  “And if everybody knew you were my friend, what would that make you—nobody?”

  Silence.

  I wished I could reach through the telephone and shake Eve. What was wrong with her? Didn’t our friendship mean anything to her anymore? “Danya thinks I ought to kill myself,” I said. “Is that what everybody else thinks too?”

  “No! Oh, Angela, no! Nobody thinks that. Danya just says crazy stuff like that because . . . I don’t know . . . I guess because everybody pays attention to her. You wouldn’t really do that, would you?”

  “Gee, much as I’d love to get on Danya’s good side, I don’t think I’ll go that far.”

  “Good,” Eve said. “I mean, I didn’t think you would, just . . . well, that would be terrible, Angela.”

  “Grady,” I reminded her. “It would sure piss off Her Highness if she knew you were talking to me on the phone right now, wouldn’t it?”

  “You aren’t going to—you wouldn’t tell her, would you?” I could imagine the tears pooling in the corners of Eve’s eyes, but she wasn’t going to cry her way into my sympathy this time.

  “I just hope it’s worth it, Eve.”

  “Worth what?” she asked, her voice trembling.

  “I hope being Danya’s friend is worth losing my friendship.”

  “But I told you—I am still your friend. I just can’t hang around with you anymore.”

  “See, Eve, the thing is . . . I did mean what I said this afternoon. I’m not your friend anymore—and you aren’t mine. A friend would have stood up for me when Danya called me a sicko and suggested I off myself. You didn’t.”

  I hung up the phone quietly, knowing that Eve was probably bawling her eyes out. I wished I didn’t care.

  Chapter Ten

  For the next week or so the only way I could endure my daily life was to make up scenes in which I imagined all the rotten things people were saying behind my back. For example, in the teachers’ lunchroom:

  MRS. NORMAN: [chowing down on a microwaved veggie burger] I told Angela I’m not changing any names on any permanent records. That’s a decision for the principal to make.

  DR. RIDGEWAY: [delicately squirting canned cheese onto a Wheat Thin] I told her I’d need to talk to her parents first. Pass the buck to them. Whole thing is probably their fault anyway. We had a kid here a few years ago who wanted to be a girl, remember? Turned out his parents were divorced; father lived in another state. Kid was all screwed up.

  MS. MARINO: [sipping her Diet Dew] I’m trying to help Grady become empowered and take pride in him . . . her . . . himself, but I don’t really know how. I mean, I’ve never met a . . . you know . . . one of those . . . a person like that before.

  MS. UNGER: [knocking back a large coffee, black] “Transgendered” is the word you’re looking for. And divorce does not cause gender dysphoria, Dr. Ridgeway. If it did, we’d have a few hundred kids like Grady.

  MRS. MACCAULEY: [pecking at a ginger-snap cookie] Who’s this Grady?

  MS. UNGER: Listen, people. If you want to do the kid a favor, don’t mention this in front of Coach Spe
ranza. What a bigot.

  MRS. MACCAULEY: I don’t believe I know anyone named Jenny Dysphoria, do I?

  COACH SPERANZA: [wolfing down his third wife-made sandwich] Hello? I’m sitting right here, sweetie pie!

  MS. UNGER: Oops. Guess I’m getting pretty good at ignoring you.

  COACH SPERANZA: This about that girl that looks like a boy? What’s wrong with her anyway?

  DR. RIDGEWAY: She’s just a confused lesbian, that’s all.

  COACH SPERANZA: [snorting] Any lesbian is a confused lesbian, dontcha think?

  MRS. NORMAN: [shuddering] If only these children could get their minds on something wholesome. Sex, sex, sex—that’s all they’re interested in.

  MS. UNGER: What were you interested in at their age? Crossword puzzles?

  MRS. NORMAN: [unwrapping a Twinkie] I read lit-er-a-ture.

  MS. MARINO: [scraping the bottom of her yogurt container] I’m a people person. I’ve always wanted to make a difference in the world.

  MS. UNGER: What makes you think Buxton is part of the world?

  I couldn’t stop hearing the voices as I walked down the hallways, slumped at my desk, or sat in the cafeteria. I imagined that everyone was talking about me. More than once I caught Laura picking at her lunch and glaring at me over the tops of her friends’ heads.

  LAURA: I think Angela’s just doing this to hurt me. Because I’m prettier than she is. And I know how to wear makeup.

  MIRA: You think so? Maybe we should do an intervention! Like on TV! We could hold her down and do a makeover on her!

  BRIT: Like on Extreme Makeover!

  SARAH: Yeah, but I can’t help you because I’m not allowed to come over to your house anymore because your sister is a pervert and all.

  BRIT: What’s weird about Extreme Makeover is that all the people end up looking sort of the same.

  MIRA: But Sarah, if we make Angela a real girl, she won’t be a pervert anymore.

  LAURA: [shaking her head, hopelessly] She’ll never let you do it. Besides, who would we get to hold her down? She’s taller than any of us.