Parrotfish

by Ellen Wittlinger

  JENNIFER: Well, that’s not what I heard, sweetie. I’m at the end—you’re second.

  PARIS: [smirking] I don’t think so. I’m blond.

  JENNIFER: And flat as a board. You’re about a thirty-two double A, aren’t you?

  DANYA: [pushing her way to the goalpost] Get out of my way, you two. My father is a policeman!

  PARIS: Who are you?

  JENNIFER: You’re not famous!

  DANYA: Are you kidding? Everybody in Buxton knows who I am!

  THE GREAT SCIENTIST WHO KNOWS EVERYTHING (no body; only a sweet, genderless voice): Danya, my dear, you don’t belong at the end with Paris and Jennifer.

  DANYA: The hell I don’t.

  THE GREAT SCIENTIST WHO KNOWS EVERYTHING: See? With that mouth, I’m putting you down by Stallone.

  DANYA: [as she disappears into thin air] No-o-o-o-o!

  PARIS: Wasn’t she on What Not to Wear?

  JENNIFER: [slipping past Paris and handcuffing herself to the goalpost] Entirely possible.

  I pulled my hat tight around my head to walk home—it had gotten colder since yesterday, and the wind was whipping into my face. Mom probably would have picked me up if I’d called, and Sebastian would have happily followed me home again, but I really wanted to be alone for a while to think about all this stuff. Like, where would I be on the gender football field? Obviously not on the Jennifer Lopez end, but not close to the Sylvester Stallone goal either. On the fifty-yard line? And if I was in the middle, what did that mean? That I was both male and female, or neither? Or something else altogether?

  What made a person male or female, anyway? The way they looked? The way they acted? The way they thought? Their hormones? Their genitals? What if some of those attributes pointed in one direction and some in the other?

  And some of this stuff had to do with the way you were raised, right? It’s not as if we’d managed to stamp out stereotypes in this culture. In many places sugar and spice were still considered the opposite of snails and puppy-dog tails. When I decided I was a boy, I realized that if I wanted to pass, I’d have to learn to walk differently, talk differently, dress differently, basically act differently than I did as a girl. But why did we need to act at all? A quick look around Buxton High provided numerous cases of girls acting like girls and boys acting like boys—and very few people acting like themselves. Eve was a perfect example: She’d been a great girl until she hit Buxton, but now she was a high-pitched, low-self-esteem, capital-G Girl who couldn’t relax and be Eve anymore.

  So maybe it was silly for me to try to be somebody else’s idea of a boy. I didn’t need to swagger around and punch guys in the shoulder—that wasn’t going to prove anything. There were still people who didn’t succumb to the stereotypes. Sebastian certainly didn’t punch or swagger, and he was a boy, although one who couldn’t get a date to the Winter Carnival dance.

  And why was changing your gender such a big honking deal anyway? People changed lots of other personal things all the time. They dyed their hair and dieted themselves to near death. They took steroids to build muscles and got breast implants and nose jobs so they’d resemble their favorite movie stars. They changed names and majors and jobs and husbands and wives. They changed religions and political parties. They moved across the country or the world—even changed nationalities. Why was gender the one sacred thing we weren’t supposed to change? Who made that rule?

  While I was marching along the sidewalk thinking about all this stuff, even though I was angry about a lot of it, I also felt pretty good, better than I had in a while. It was that hug from Kita that had done it. Just the fact that someone as fabulous as Kita Charles understood me and was on my side made me feel strong again. And Sebastian helped too, I had to admit. Maybe, eventually, everything would be okay again. There were still people who liked me, no matter what gender I claimed to be.

  I was just about to open the kitchen door when Mom threw it open and came barreling out.

  “Oh! I just left a note on the table for you and Laura,” she said. “I’m going to the hospital. Gail called—Michael is sick.”

  “Really? He’s so little,” I said, following her to the car.

  “I know. Gail’s scared to death. He has a fever, and he’s been vomiting all day.”

  “She’s a nurse, though. Shouldn’t she know what to do?”

  “When it’s your own child, you’re too flustered. You can’t think clearly.” She climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “Can I . . . can I come with you?” I said. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to go, but I did.

  “Well, I guess,” she said. “Here, you drive. I’m feeling pretty jumpy myself.” She climbed back out of the car and tossed me the keys.

  As I backed down the driveway, I noticed two red gift boxes lying on the lawn, obviously blown off the roof sled. I pointed them out to Mom.

  “I wish the whole damn sled would blow down,” she said. “I wish Rudolph would blow a fuse and his legs would break off at the knee.”

  “Mom!”

  “Sorry. I’m not really in the Christmas spirit this year.” She stared out her side window.

  “How come Dad still puts this stuff up every year? I mean, we’re all pretty sick of it. Couldn’t you tell him . . .”

  She sighed. “Apparently, I can’t. Even when my poor mother was alive and horrified that her Jewish daughter was living in the Christmas House, even then I couldn’t ask him to cut back on the extravagance, the decking of every possible hall with the biggest boughs available. He loves doing it so much—entertaining the whole town. Everybody but us.”

  I had the feeling that Dad’s decorations were only a small part of Mom’s current lack of cheer. It was mostly about me and the ripple effect I seemed to be having on everyone around me. Since I couldn’t think of anything to say to make her feel better, we drove the rest of the way in silence.

  As soon as we got to the hospital we saw Joanne, Gail’s friend who’s an ER nurse. She told us Michael had been admitted to the Newborn Pediatrics Unit and pointed us in the right direction.

  “It’s probably just a virus,” Joanne said. “But they’re going to keep him overnight and hydrate him. You can’t be too careful with a baby.”

  When we got to the room, Gail was bent over a hospital bassinet in which Michael seemed to be whimpering himself to sleep. Lying in that big crib with an IV taped to his tiny hand, Michael appeared even smaller than I remembered. Gail looked up when we walked in, and tears started pouring down her face in what were obviously well-worn trails.

  Mom gave her a hug, and then I did too because I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” Gail said, her voice a wail. “After all the kids I’ve treated in this hospital, I still never imagined my own child in here.”

  “We saw Joanne downstairs,” Mom said. “She said it looked like a virus. He’s only staying overnight as a precaution.”

  Gail shook her head wildly. “You don’t know. I’ve worked here for sixteen years. I can’t tell you how often it looks like something simple, but then suddenly the fever spikes, or the white blood count drops, or—”

  Mom put her arm around Gail and led her to the one comfortable chair in the room. “Sit down and take a deep breath, honey. You know too much for your own good. Most of the time, if it looks like a virus, it is a virus. You’ve said that to me a million times since my kids were born. When I was scared to death about a swollen throat or a weird rash, you’d tell me, ‘Don’t panic!’”

  Gail looked up at Mom warily through the glaze of tears. “Yeah, but you usually panicked anyway.”

  “I know, but I was always the high-strung sister—you were the cool, calm one.”

  “That’s because I never understood what it was like when the sick child was your own. I’ve never been this frightened, Judy. I feel like I’m losing my mind!”

  Mom leaned down and held her hand. “I know.”

  Gail stared mournfully at the tiny bod
y sleeping behind the bars. “I never understood before how overwhelming it is—the love a parent has for a child.”

  Mom nodded. “You can’t explain it beforehand.”

  “If I lost Michael, I couldn’t bear it. I think I would lose myself!”

  “You aren’t going to lose him,” Mom told her sternly. “He’s going to be fine.” But when she straightened up again and turned to me, she was crying too.

  “He’s going to be okay, isn’t he?” I whispered.

  She nodded, brushing at her cheeks. “Yes, yes, he will. Maybe you could find us some coffee somewhere, in a machine or at the cafeteria. That would be a big help.”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  “Get yourself something too. We might be here for a while.” She dug some quarters out of her purse, and as she pressed the change and a few dollar bills into my hand, she squeezed it lightly, then leaned in to circle my back with her arms. “Thank you, honey. Thank you . . . Grady.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Michael got out of the hospital the next day, and by the weekend he was fine again. Mom wasn’t crying anymore or giving me spontaneous hugs, but she actually called me Grady two more times. The name didn’t flow from her lips—it sort of stuck in her throat and she coughed it up—but I wasn’t complaining.

  Sebastian’s mother picked us up after school on Friday, because we had to take the video camera home to tape the chorus concert that evening. As we were loading the stuff into her trunk, Sebastian asked her if I could stay for dinner.

  “It’ll be easier,” he said, as if he needed an excuse. “We have to be back at the theater by six to get set up.”

  Mrs. Shipley was so tiny, she had to sit on a big pillow in order to see over the steering wheel. When she spoke, I was surprised to hear that her voice matched her stature.

  “It’s fine with me if Grady wants to stay for dinner,” she said, the teeny sound floating from her mouth like bubbles from a glass of champagne. “Of course, I don’t cook, Grady,” she said, turning her pointy chin in my direction. “Never bothered to learn how.”

  “I can make an omelet,” Sebastian said. “Or grilled cheese sandwiches, if you’d rather.”

  “And salad, honey. You can make me a salad,” she said as she peeked at the oncoming traffic and pulled out.

  “Okay,” Sebastian agreed.

  When we got to Sebastian’s house, an enormous place with more bookshelves than a bookstore and enough bedrooms for half a dozen kids, his mother curled herself into an easy chair in the living room, clicked on the gas fireplace with a remote control, and dove into a large book that had obviously been waiting for her return.

  “That’s all she ever does is read,” Sebastian said as we poked through the refrigerator. “She’s not much good at anything else, especially people.”

  “She seems nice, though,” I said, thinking how every family is bizarre in its own way.

  “Oh, she’s nice,” he said. “Kind of useless, but very nice.”

  “Did you tell her about me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Really? And she’s okay with it?”

  “Why wouldn’t she be?”

  “Well, some mothers wouldn’t be that happy to hear their son was hanging around with somebody like me.”

  He shrugged. “She checked some books out of the library about transgendered people and read up on the subject. Anything is okay by her as long as it’s in a book. Besides, I’m sure she’s amazed that anybody is hanging out with me.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that Sebastian didn’t have friends—he certainly had a lot of acquaintances, and people seemed to like him. He was probably a little too odd, though, for anybody to want to hang with him all the time. Which made him the perfect friend for me, the complete oddball. Next to me Sebastian’s idiosyncrasies seemed barely noticeable.

  As promised, Sebastian had rented a DVD of Napoleon Dynamite, and we went into the den to watch it so we wouldn’t bother his mother. At first I wasn’t getting into it too much. The main character, Napoleon, was the epitome of dorkiness, wearing moon boots and badly fitting clothes, his curly hair surrounding his head like a matted fur hat. He mumbled and slumped and seemed barely able to keep his eyes open. He told completely unbelievable lies and carried Tater Tots out of the cafeteria in the cargo pocket of his pants.

  But before long the bizarre humor of the film began to get to me. Napoleon was surrounded by people more wacko than he was, and the poor guy was just searching for the same things most teenage boys are: a best friend, a girlfriend, and a little respect. Before long I was hooting as loudly as Sebastian. When the film ended, we applauded.

  “It’s great, isn’t it?” Sebastian asked. “I told you.”

  “Yeah, it’s really funny and sort of heartbreaking at the same time.”

  Sebastian bounced on the couch. “That’s another category of films I love: simultaneously funny and heartbreaking.”

  “You know what?” I said. “You’re just like Napoleon.”

  Sebastian stopped bouncing and looked at me quizzically, obviously not sure how to take my comment.

  “Ah . . . thanks, I guess. I don’t dress that badly, do I?”

  I laughed. “No, you don’t look like him, although your nerd genes do sometimes show through your clever disguise.”

  “Admittedly.”

  “I mean, the way Napoleon just naturally takes up with the odd kids—the shy girl and then Pedro, the new kid with the mustache and the Spanish accent. He doesn’t think about it—he just does it. And he kind of becomes their savior.”

  Sebastian looked a little embarrassed. “Maybe he just needed some friends.”

  “Still,” I insisted, “most people wouldn’t have chosen the oddballs for their friends.”

  “Well, they’re crazy, then. The oddballs are always the most interesting people. Don’t you think?”

  I shrugged. “Who am I to disagree? I believe I’ve been crowned King of the Oddballs.”

  “King and Queen,” he said as I followed him out to the kitchen. “How about if I just order us a pizza for dinner? That’s what I do half the time anyway. It contains all the food groups, you know.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” I said. “I don’t want to discriminate against any food groups.”

  Sebastian called for pizza delivery, then got some vegetables from the fridge and began to cut up a red pepper and a few green onions.

  “Your mother really doesn’t ever cook?” I asked.

  “Nope, never has. She’s a very picky eater, too. She doesn’t really like food much.”

  “So you make her a salad every night?”

  “Not every night. Sometimes I make scrambled eggs and toast.”

  I paused a moment, then said, in my best imitation of the goofy drawl of Napoleon Dynamite, “Do the chickens have large talons?”

  It was a line from the movie, and Sebastian got it immediately. He answered as the old Idaho farmer in the movie does: “I don’t understand a word you just said.”

  We both grinned stupidly, as if this little exchange had been made in our own newly invented language. Which in a way was true.

  Sebastian paid the pizza guy when he showed up, then delivered a pretty good-looking spinach salad to his mother in the chair by the fire.

  “Did you start the coffee for me, sweetie?” she asked in her tinkly little voice.

  “Just turned it on,” he replied.

  She thanked him without raising her eyes from the book. We took our pizza upstairs to Sebastian’s room. Which was also huge, and also full of books.

  “Have you actually read all these books?” I asked him.

  “Not all of them, but lots of them. It’s what we Shipleys do.”

  I nodded. “So, if I wasn’t here, would you be eating with your mother?” I asked, trying to make some kind of sense out of this household.

  “Well, I might eat in the same room with her, but she’d still be reading. And I probably would too.”

&nb
sp; “And if your dad was here, would he be reading too?”

  “Oh, he’s never here for dinner. Why come home for salad and take-out pizza? He eats in restaurants most of the time with his clients or his partners.”

  I thought of the usual Katz-McNair dinner-table routine—all three of us kids trying to broadcast our news louder than the others, Mom and Dad jumping up and down to get stuff we forgot to bring into the dining room and attempting to jam a few words of their own into the conversation. It was usually pandemonium, unless the whole thing was scripted, as on Christmas Eve.

  “So,” Sebastian said, “Russ Gallo and Kita Charles will probably be breaking up pretty soon. Then you can make your move.”

  I choked on a mushroom. “What are you talking about?”

  He continued to calmly separate pepperoni rounds from mozzarella strings in order to eat the pepperoni first. “Anybody can see that Russ is not up to handling a woman like Kita. She’s got places to go, things to do. She’s not your run-of-the-mill Buxton High girl.”

  “No, she’s not, but that has nothing to do with me. I don’t know why you think I’m interested in K-Kita,” I said, cheese tangling around my tongue like rope. Obviously, it didn’t take a genius to see that I could barely even say the girl’s name without falling apart. But Sebastian was kind enough to not point that out.

  He chewed his slice carefully. “I’m just saying, the time may soon be approaching when you could make a move on Kita, if you were so inclined.”

  I had to laugh—the idea of me making a move on anybody at this point in my life was too ridiculous to contemplate.

  “If Kita is as special and amazing as you say she is, why would she be interested in the school mutant?”

  “Duh, Grady. That’s exactly why she would be interested. You’re both special. Didn’t you learn anything from Mr. Rogers?”

  Ridiculous. I was hardly special the way Kita was special. Nobody was. “Didn’t you learn anything from Napoleon Dynamite?” I said. “Even he had the sense not to go after the best-looking girl in the school. Besides, Kita and Russ make a good couple—I don’t see them splitting up.”