That wakes me up.
Matt is nice and gorgeous and says all the right things. The newness, the novelty of him, was exactly what I needed today. But this, I don’t think I need. Not tonight. This isn’t what I came here for.
Somehow, I make my body get on board with my mind. I take a step back and look down at the ground in front of me while I try to catch my breath.
“What’s wrong?” Matt asks.
I shake my head. “I’m sorry. I … I think we should stop.”
“I’m sorry if I assumed something I shouldn’t have. You just … were so into it.” He seems genuinely confused.
“I am,” I say. “I mean, I was. I just …” How do I explain? Eventually, I just say, “I have a lot going on right now,” and leave it at that.
He nods. “I get it.” I can tell he’s disappointed.
“I guess … we should get some sleep?”
“Good idea.”
He throws some dirt on the fire, and we go inside. I realize I don’t have a room to sleep in. No way am I going to share a bed with either Matt or Sam tonight. I say good night to Matt, then go into the living room and curl up on the couch, pulling the soft cotton throw over me.
The house is silent, still, and very, very dark. There are no streetlights outside, and the moon and stars are blocked by clouds now. I’m the only one downstairs. I can barely see my own hand in front of my face. It’s a little scary.
With nothing to distract me, my thoughts start tumbling down a slide.
Sam hates me.
Matt is probably mad at me.
I have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow.
And Mellie’s considered suicide. She had to take off work this week for mental health reasons. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
I sit up. Hands shaking, I reach into my pocket for my phone. The light from the screen is shockingly bright, like a spotlight has been turned on me.
“Dara?” Mom answers before the first ring is complete. “Are you okay?” She sounds … not herself. But I don’t know if it’s because she’s having a hard time, or if I’m just hearing her voice differently now.
“Yes, I’m okay.”
I can hear her exhale all the way down the line. “Thank goodness. Where are you?”
“In South Carolina.”
“South Carolina? Why?”
“This is where the Pembrokes live now.”
There’s a brief pause. “So you’re with them.”
“Sort of. I’m with Catherine. William and Ruth are coming tomorrow.”
I wait for her disapproval, her protest. It doesn’t come. Instead, she asks, “Is Sam okay?”
Physically, yeah. Emotionally, I think I screwed everything up. Big time. “Yes, he’s fine. Mom, listen. Are you okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“That email you sent today. It scared me.”
“Oh, honey.” Her voice is softer, less frantic now that she knows we’re alive and in no imminent danger. “Don’t worry. I promise you I’ll be okay.”
I exhale. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. Dara?”
I wait.
“I’m sorry.”
The simplicity of the statement, with no buts or ands attached to it, makes me falter. “For what?”
“For everything.”
“Oh.”
“I wish you’d come home.”
A flash of my own bed and a plate of extra-spicy noodles appears in my mind. After everything that’s happened today, it sounds better than I would have imagined. But I can’t. “Not yet,” I say.
She sighs. “I understand.”
“You do?”
“I know I hurt you, Dara. I know none of this is fair to you.”
A lump forms in my throat. I swallow it back. “Thanks for saying that.”
“Thanks for calling.”
“Bye.” I end the call before she can say “I love you.” I’m not ready to say it back.
I awake to the sound of an actual rooster crowing.
I stretch and rub my eyes. I know exactly where I am this morning. The couch wasn’t bad, but I never fell deeply enough asleep to dream. It’s still mostly dark out, with only the tiniest hint of gray beginning to work its way into the sky.
I shuffle into the kitchen.
“Good morning!” Catherine says, way too chipper for this early in the morning, and gives me a side hug. I’m starting to get used to her affinity for physical affection.
“You’re up early,” I say.
“My day to do the breakfast shift.”
I look around the kitchen. “Where?” All I see is coffee. I pour myself a cup and add some almond milk.
“For the animals, silly goose.”
I take a sip. “Oh yeah.”
“My parents texted—they’re on the road,” she says.
My heartbeat stutters. This crazy journey is about to end, and something else is about to start.
After finishing her coffee, Catherine goes to feed the animals, and I head upstairs. All my things are in Sam’s room, and I need to get ready to meet Ruth and William. I might put the dress back on after all.
But when I try the door, I find it’s locked. I knock lightly. “Sam?” I whisper.
The only answer is his snore.
Terrific.
I go to the bathroom downstairs and wash my face. There’s some mouthwash in the cabinet, so I swish with that, and go out front to check my email. There are four new ones from Mellie. And some of them are long.
When did she have time to write these? After we got off the phone last night? She must not have slept at all. That can’t be a good sign. Mentally healthy people don’t take off work and then stay up all night frantically composing emails, do they?
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
June 22 (11:34 PM)
Subject: Thank you
Dear Dara,
Thank you for calling tonight. You have no idea how nice it was to hear your voice. And good luck with the Pembrokes. I truly hope you find what you’re looking for.
I love you.
Love,
Mom
I take a breath. She seemed normal enough in that message. I have to have faith that what she said last night was true. That she’ll really be okay.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
June 23 (2:09 AM)
Subject: Saying good-bye
Dear Dara,
Freshman year of high school, I entered my first regional teen tournament. It was held at a college two hours away. I placed third in the boys’ competition. Kristen placed fifth in the girls’. It was a good day. Until it wasn’t.
“It’s not normal for a teenage boy to only have girl friends,” my mother said as we buckled into the car and waved good-bye to Kristen and her parents.
My parents had muttered similar sentiments many times in the years since Kristen and I had become close, but there was something in her voice this time that made me think she was about to say something more on the subject than usual.
I waited.
“We thought tennis would be good for you …”
“Tennis is good for me.” I held up my trophy as evidence.
“Yes, but you haven’t made friends with any of the other boys. We thought if you were involved in athletics, you’d make friends, take an interest in …”
She trailed off, but I knew what she was getting at. “In what?” I pressed. The lingering endorphins from my last match had me feeling brave.
“I don’t know, Marcus.” Mom sighed heavily, as if I was exhausting her. “Team sports. Video games. Cars. Girls. Normal boy things!”
I had so much to say in response to that, but I knew the only thing that would help my case would be to tell her that I was interested in girls in the way she was talking about. I could have so easily told her I had a crush on Kristen and that was why I liked hanging around her so much. But it wasn’
t the whole truth. I liked hanging around Kristen for lots of reasons. She was my best friend, and it didn’t feel right to use her that way. So I said nothing.
When I didn’t reply, Mom continued. Her voice was quiet, and she kept her eyes pinned to the road. “Your father and I have decided you are not to see that girl anymore.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I retorted, and was met swiftly with a hard slap across the face. The car didn’t even swerve.
I sucked in a breath and cradled my cheek in my hand. Tears raced to my eyes much quicker than even the possibility of a verbal response. I turned my face toward my window, gulping back tears, wishing again I had long hair—this time to hide behind. The car seat, the seat belt strap, the armrest built into the door all felt like they’d sprouted millions of piercing, ruthless daggers, and my body begged me to get as far away from my mother and this suddenly cramped car as possible.
My father was the one who hit me, not my mother. I’d always maintained hope that she was different than he was. That, if she could just be allowed to form her own opinions, she’d be nicer. But it was now startlingly clear that she hated me as much as he did.
For a moment I considered opening the door and jumping out, but we were going too fast.
I was trapped. In this car, in this family, in this body.
Mom spoke first. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to …” She shook her head and squared her jaw. “You are not to speak to me like that. And our decision is final. No more Kristen.”
Over the remainder of the weekend, a yellowish-purplish bruise formed on my left cheekbone, with a scab precisely in the center from where her ring had split the skin. Like the dark, thick hair on my lip and chin, there was no disguising it.
“What happened to your face?” Kristen asked on Monday morning.
She didn’t even know about the time my father had beaten me to the point where I’d had trouble sitting down for days. How could I explain that my mother had taken up the family pastime as well?
But this affected her too. She deserved to know. “I talked back to my mother,” I said simply. “This was her response.”
“Oh my God, Marcus!” Kristen pulled me into a hug. “Are you okay? We have to tell someone!”
Her body was small and soft, but also athletic, strong. Her hair smelled like fruit salad. I pulled away.
“No,” I said, drawing small circles on the hallway tile with my toe. “I don’t want to dwell on it.”
“What were you arguing about?”
“They don’t want me to hang out with you anymore.”
Her face crinkled up. “Did I do something wrong?”
I waved my hands as if to clear her assumed meaning from my last few words. “No, of course not! It’s me. They think I … they think I don’t act right.” Throughout all the years of our friendship, Kristen and I had never spoken directly about it. Me. The non-gender-specific elephant in the room. This was the closest we’d ever come. “They think I shouldn’t hang out with girls so much.”
“That’s so unfair!” She was mad. But her unhappiness made me feel better—she cared about me. “Is it because you’re …” She trailed off. But she didn’t need to say it. I knew she thought I was gay.
“I don’t know,” I said quickly, not wanting to get into it. “But don’t worry; we’ll still see each other at school and tennis. And there’s always the phone.”
She nodded, unsure, chewing the inside of her mouth.
“It’ll be fine.” I tried to sound reassuring, when inside, I was embarrassed and angry that I’d been forced to have this conversation at all. “Basically no difference, okay? I just had to tell you because you can’t call the house anymore unless you know my parents aren’t home, and I won’t be able to go to the mall or things like that.”
She nodded again.
“I’m really sorry,” I said.
“Me too.”
For a little while, things weren’t horrible. I still sat with Kristen at lunch, and next to her in English class. We still saw each other at the tennis club café for a few minutes after our lessons. But it was hard work. My parents hadn’t been kidding about making sure Kristen and I weren’t associating. They started keeping closer tabs on me—picking me up right after school, and staying at the club to watch my lessons from the stands. They roped my siblings in to helping them too, so even if Mom and Dad weren’t home, there was always someone watching to see if I was on the phone, and sneaking onto another receiver mid-conversation to try to catch who was on the other end.
It was exhausting, and unsustainable. Especially for Kristen. Why should she go out of her way to try to keep being friends in secret when she had plenty of other friends to occupy her time, and parents who let her have more freedom than mine?
So, inevitably, we drifted apart. My parents saw the shift—I stopped fighting to get to tennis early in hopes of seeing Kristen, and I stopped using the phone altogether—and they were glad. But they only got half their wish. Just because I’d lost my friendship with Kristen didn’t mean I’d changed personalities. The boys at school and at tennis still didn’t have any interest in being friends with me, nor I them. The result was that I was the same broken, nervous, strange kid, only now I was completely friendless.
High school crept by slowly, like that winter when you were eight and Francis was trapped under six feet of snow. Remember how bored and cranky we were, stuck in the house for weeks, eating a lot of spaghetti and doing the same six puzzles over and over? The difference here was, the sun never came out and melted the ice away.
Love,
Mom
I hate that she lost Kristen. I mean, I knew something must have happened, because Kristen has never been a part of our lives, but still. It hits way too close to home. If Mom grew apart from her best friend, who’s to say the same won’t happen to me?
Before this trip I never would have questioned the stability of Sam’s and my relationship. But a lot of things happened this week that I never would have predicted.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
June 23 (4:33 AM)
Subject: Renée
Dear Dara,
If you wouldn’t mind, could you give Sam a hug from me? I’ve been thinking about Kristen a lot this week, more than I have in years, and it’s made me so grateful that you have Sam, and that he’s on this journey with you. He’s a good friend.
Anyway.
Once my parents were satisfied I wasn’t friends with girls anymore, they stopped Big Brothering me. I could come and go as I pleased and spend my time however I wanted to, as long as it didn’t break their rules.
I spent a lot of time at the tennis club. And I was getting very good. I started collecting first place trophies. Our paths have been similar in that way—tennis was for me, as it is for you, the most important thing. The only thing. Sometimes it pains me, Dara, to think about how much you’ve given to the game. How much you’ve sacrificed. But then I remember that though our situations may resemble each other’s, they are not identical. Your dedication to tennis is a choice you’ve made out of love and passion. Mine was a reflex, a desperation.
Sometimes I saw Kristen at the club; we’d smile and wave, or exchange small talk, but it wasn’t the same. She stopped competing in tournaments in eleventh grade, and in twelfth she stopped coming to the club altogether. She started dating Mike Fallon, one of the big, muscle-bound guys from the football team. Maybe those were her kind of people all along.
I began to read a lot. Books became my friends. I took out several from the library each week and read in bed at night and during downtimes at the club. It was one of these library books that completely changed my life.
I’d picked up a book about tennis in the 1970s, in an effort to learn as much about the history of the game as I could, and there was a long chapter about a player named Renée Richards. I’d never heard of her before. But I quickly saw myself in those pages.
She’d been bor
n Richard Raskind. Unlike me, she’d been good at all sports, and had played for the football and baseball teams in high school. She’d even been invited to play for the New York Yankees. But, like me, she loved tennis best, and stopped playing everything else. Soon she was one of the top college tennis players in the United States, and she continued on to the pros. The problem was, she was playing in the men’s circuit, and despite what the world assumed, she wasn’t a man. So, not knowing what it would mean for her career, she began to transition. Publicly.
The tennis community flipped out. They refused to let her play as a woman, saying that regardless of the hormonal and physical changes she’d gone through, she had still been “born male” and therefore would be at an advantage over the other women players. She was prevented from playing in all the major tournaments, and eventually she sued the United States Tennis Association. And she won.
Can you imagine my seventeen-year-old self reading this? Barely breathing, my eyes unable to take the words in fast enough, my fingers slippery with sweat as they tried to turn the pages.
Transgender. Transsexual. It was the first time I’d seen those words, but they instantly filled a long-vacant part in my heart. There was a name for what I was. And there were more possibilities than just name changes and being “a man in a dress.” There were medical treatments, options. There was at least one famous person—a tennis player, no less—who had gone through what I was going through. And the government validated her.
The tennis community didn’t embrace her as easily as the law did, nor did the media or the public, but the courts said she was allowed to compete, so she did. She went on to win more titles. She became Martina Navratilova’s coach. I watched as she was inducted into the USTA Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame, and later the National Gay & Lesbian Sports Hall of Fame.
She was a trailblazer. Pro sports—and the world, really—have so much to thank her for. I have so much to thank her for. Not the least of which is the basic fact that if it weren’t for her, I have no idea how much longer I would have gone on thinking I was the only one.
Love,
Mom
Catherine joins me on the porch. She has a book with her. “My parents just called. They’re only a few minutes away.”
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