Choir Boy

by Unknown Author

  Mrs. Gartner looked at Berry as if he’d spoken in tongues.

  “Sorry,” Berry said. “Bad day.”

  “We all have dark times and doubts,” Mrs. Gartner said. Then she talked about her personal relationship with Jesus.

  Back in the Gartners’ car, Lisa and Berry sat in back. “Can we go home, mom?” Lisa asked. “Berry and I want to try on clothes.”

  Berry watched city surrender to freeway, and freeway to grass and gas stations. But his eyes saw only Teddy screaming at him for deserting choirboys and boys in general. Then his dad howling. Lisa talked to Berry softly about the clothes they would try on. Berry had brought the stuff his mom had bought him. Lisa murmured about the bottle of perfume hidden under her dresser, the teen fashion mags, the Barbie dolls, and the dolls’ clothes.

  When Lisa mentioned magazines, Berry told about Anna

  Conventional working for Teeneurosis, and more about their night out.

  “Wow. Do you remember what they used on your hair?” “Sorry. My head is full of music I’ll never sing again. No room for hairspray.”

  When they got to Lisa’s house, they ran upstairs without stopping to talk to Mr. Gartner, who was building a spice rack in the kitchen. “Hi dad,” Lisa called from the top of the stairs. Then they went into Lisa’s room.

  Lisa’s room had a big mirror with light bulbs around it and a Barbie house with a dog-sized plastic corvette parked out front. Posters of boy bands and bubblegum girl singers hung where Berry’s wall celebrated choirs. A few school books sat in the corner, but no bookcase supported heaps of literature like the ones in Berry’s and Wilson’s bedrooms. Lisa’s bedspread was pink with white hearts. A heart-shaped throw pillow nestled against her real pillow. She kept her room neat.

  Berry pulled out the plastic remainder store bag from his knapsack. He dumped the contents on Lisa’s bed and she went through them. “This one’s not bad. I don’t think peach is your color. This one you could get away with if you had the absolute perfect skirt. Hang on.”

  Lisa abruptly pulled her frilly pink church dress over her head. “Let me see this on you,” the cloth hump said to Berry. She yanked it all the way off and handed it over. Her bra and panties sported butterflies. Berry obediently took off his clothes, including his bra but not his panties, and pulled the dress over his head. “We’re about the same size, but your hips are like negative space to the max. Turn around.”

  Berry obeyed and Lisa zipped. Then she gestured for him to spin, which he did. “Not bad,” she said. “Maybe a touch too pink for you.”

  She tried another fancy formal dress on Berry, with gathered skirts and a low-cut front and a big ruffly collar and sleeves that started puffy and got skinny. “Too ‘Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman’,” Lisa considered. Berry giggled.

  Lisa found a cute stretchy top that said “Power Fem” on it, and Berry tried it on still with no bra. “Wow, like stare-o-rama. Man.” She found another top, a plainer black shirt with a scoopy neck. “Not bad.” Lisa took off her own bra and tried on the Power Fem shirt, which stretched, but not as much as when Berry wore it. “See, I can’t do that Britney tits thing.”

  They tried on clothes for an hour. Berry started to cheer up and relax despite everything. Lisa found some outfits he looked ridiculous in, but others he looked thrill-hot in, even to himself.

  “Okay. Now swimwear. It’s only about six months until summer, you know.” Lisa, who never swam, found four bathing suits in her closet. She shucked her panties. Berry stared at her thatch of light brown pubic hair. Lisa covered it with a navy blue one piece with low-cut back.

  “Wow,” Berry said.

  Berry didn’t think he could wear a swimsuit without people seeing his privates. But Lisa made him try on a black and white striped bikini. He hesitated, then shimmied out of his briefs. He started to pull on the bikini bottoms.

  Lisa looked at Berry’s pubes. “Hey wow. Maura told me the pills might make it. . . you know. Does it still, like, work?”

  “I think so,” Berry said. He nudged his dick, and it nudged back.

  “Can I?” Lisa asked. Berry nodded. She reached out one finger and stroked ever so lightly. It responded. It got longer and gained heft. Berry’s heart arpeggioed. “Wow. Weird. No offense. First one I’ve touched.”

  “I thought you had lots of boyfriends.”

  “At school. But my parents won’t let—”

  The door swept open. Mr. Gartner stomped, even before he saw into the room. His daughter knelt naked before a hermaphrodite and touched its erection with her delicate hands. The hermaphrodite’s eyes rolled back in its bruised face. Lisa smiled eerily.

  Mr. Gartner sucked in breath, but didn’t let it out. His face turned the color of communion wafers.

  “Dad, I—” Lisa said.

  “The reptile nests and controls the host,” Mr. Gartner said in a choking tone once he could breathe. “The aquatic brain is in ascent.”

  He bent and grabbed Lisa’s ankle, as if afraid to get any closer to her. He dragged her out of the room by her leg. She yelped as her body bounced down the stairs.

  Berry hesitated a second. He saw himself naked in the mirror, nipples and cock erect. This wasn’t his family. He’d done enough harm today.

  He pulled on jeans and ran downstairs. Mrs. Gartner sipped cocoa in the kitchen. She saw Berry and offered him some. He ignored her. He ran to the sliding glass doors in back. It took a moment to find the unlocked door. The late October air lashed Berry’s bare chest.

  Out back, Mr. Gartner stood over the pool, where Lisa’s head protruded. Her nakedness shimmered under the water. “You’ll stay here until after sundown. Until natural selection reasserts itself over the evils under your skin.”

  Berry ran and threw himself at Mr. Gartner. Lisa’s dad fell forward into the pool, a belly flop sonic boom that scattered water a few feet from the pool’s edge. Berry fell on top of him, then pushed him away and found Lisa with his other hand. He shook his head to get the water out of his eyes and ears.

  “Come on,” Berry said. “Get out! This isn’t right.”

  Lisa didn’t move. She let him tow her to the edge of the pool and haul her out. By then, Mr. Gartner swam to the edge as well.

  “Bring her back here! The primitive cortex owns you both!”

  Berry pulled Lisa all the way out and found the huge lid just as Mr. Gartner reached the side. He swung the lid down. He heard a cracking sound as the lid hit something solid. Berry held the lid down. Lisa stared at him.

  Berry laughed. Once he started, he couldn’t stop. He quaked. “It’s okay,” he said. “We’re free. We’re free. They can’t hurt us.”

  Lisa didn’t laugh with him.

  “Come on,” Berry said. “Let’s leave this loser and go try on some more clothes.”

  “Get away from the pool,” Lisa said.

  Berry let go of the lid. She lifted it off the pool. Her father floated face down in the sickly blue water. Blood dripped from a gash in the back of his head where the pool’s lid had struck. His suit jacket flared like a magician’s cape.

  15.

  After the ambulance came, Berry started to wonder how he’d get home. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the paramedics struggling to revive Mr. Gartner with every gadget they had. Lisa didn’t talk to Berry. She disappeared inside with her mom for a while. If Mr. Gartner the atheist died, Berry wondered, what did Mrs. Gartner believe would happen to his soul? High Episcopalians like Mrs. Gartner didn’t stress Hellfire, but there were some hymns about wailing and gnashing. Mostly, the mainstream Episcopalians took comfort in a fluffy Heaven that let in anyone who dressed well and acted friendly.

  Berry felt super calm except that his thoughts wouldn’t stop spinning and churning. He never quite zeroed in on the thought I’ve just killed a man but it turned up as a sideways half-thought at the fringes of the picture. Like when Berry thought, Maybe the choirboys will think I’m cool again now that I’ve popped someone.

  Berry tried to r
emember the anthem from the day’s service but couldn’t. It had been beautisplendicool, he was sure, but nothing about the actual music came back to him. Would Mrs. Gartner want the choir to perform at her husband’s funeral? It was always kind of cool to sing for funerals, because you got to wear all black and no robes and sing extra solemnly. Weddings or funerals often meant an extra tip for the choir. Berry wished he’d be able to sing at Mr.

  Gartner’s funeral. He could do that no more pain, no more tears solo from that Bainton piece that always sounded really cool and moving and it would be a perfect funeral piece. Of course, Berry and Mr. Gartner hadn’t really gotten along when he was alive, but that didn’t mean Berry couldn’t sing at his last rites now that Berry had . . .

  Berry wondered what you did with a swimming pool where someone drowned. You’d let out all the water and put a good extra batch of chlorine in the water the next time you filled it. But how did you get the lichen of someone-died-here out of the walls and the water, the chill no heater could dispel? Maybe there was a special exorcism for swimming pools. Maybe you just left the pool alone for a while until everyone forgot. Maybe you filled the pool with dirt and made it a memorial garden.

  Berry felt the air freeze. He realized he still stood in the Gartners’ back yard wearing just a pair of jeans. It had stayed warm until the past few days, but now it was definitely too cold for sunbathing. Berry’s nipples sparked. Maybe it would soon be too cold to wear the kinds of outfits Maura wore, too. Did she still wear short skirts but thicker tights? Did she just shiver in summer wear and find “friends” to warm her up? And what would people expect Berry to wear in cold weather, assuming this “trans” thing went ahead? Berry didn’t even let himself think about prison uniforms.

  He finally tried the back door to the Gartners’ house. It was locked. All the sliding glass doors in back were locked. Berry sneaked around to the front and tried that door. Locked. He finally found an open kitchen window. Barefoot, it was a chore to climb up and into the raised kitchen. He tumbled off the counter and onto the linoleum with a thwack. Then he hopped upstairs as quick as he could and found the rest of the clothes he’d worn earlier. He put on his top and socks and shoes. He didn’t bother with underwear. Then he scooped up all the clothes his mom had bought him at the remainder store and put them all in his knapsack. He saw the Power Fem shirt still on the floor and grabbed it too. Lisa wouldn’t mind if he borrowed it, and having to ask for it back would ensure she called him soon. Then Berry ran downstairs. He wasn’t sure how he’d get home.

  “Oh, there you are.” A woman stood in the front room, holding a pair of keys on a little ring. She looked about the same age as Mrs. Gartner and wore a puffy gray sweater with a long black skirt. “You’re Lisa’s friend, right? Pm here to take you home.” Berry gathered from snatches of the woman’s talk that Mrs. Gartner had called her. Berry never learned her name. Berry got in the passenger seat of her Lexus sedan and thanked her for the ride. She asked where he lived and he told her.

  They drove silently for a while. The suburbs pulled their disappearing trick and soon industrial detritus washed past. Berry finally asked the woman if she knew what had happened to Mr. Gartner. “Pm not sure. It sounded bad,” was all she said. She gave him sympathetic glances at stop lights and exit ramps.

  The woman asked several times if it was safe to leave Berry in his neighborhood. Then she let him out by his building and drove off at an illegal speed before he reached the door to his building.

  It never occurred to Berry to tell his parents what had happened. Judy wras cooking dinner, glad he was home in time. “What did you do with your friend?” she asked.

  “Tried on clothes. Swam.”

  “That’s good. Your father’s gone to some strip joint to prove his masculinity. I made sure he took only a little cash and no cards.”

  Berry still remembered the strip bar Marco had dragged him to. “Boring. Not as fun as the mall.”

  “You really aren’t cut out to be male,” Judy reveled.

  Judy had the TV working. After dinner, they watched mostly sitcoms, plus one police drama about dogged investigators who find the culprit through a mist of intrigue. Berry shivered and his shivers became tremors. His teeth clattered like window's in a storm in a movie he’d seen. Judy noticed after a while. “You okay?” she asked, putting one hand on Berry’s shoulder. He nodded.

  “Just cold.”

  Judy wrapped Berry in a blanket.

  Berry imagined himself dragged away in wrist and ankle chains. He saw himself in prison shoveling a black tar that made him cough dirty phlegm and coated his hands. Maybe he would start a prison choir, teach all the murderers and rapists the work of Wesley, Stanford, and Byrd. He’d teach all the convicts to sing like angels and become famous, the Songbird of Cell Block A. Word of his musical exploits would reach Mr. Allen, who’d shed a tear at all that could have been and the horrendous wonder of redemption. Berry let himself dwell on the rows of men in striped suits singing Vivaldi’s Gloria for a moment, then snapped back to reality.

  Berry said he wasn’t feeling well and went to bed. He still wasn’t going to school while his parents figured out which sex he should be, so being sick would get him nothing but sympathy. He lay in bed staring at flickers from street lights and passing cars.

  At some point, Marco came home with a loud plan. He’d found out about an exchange scheme where you could send an American to live with a host family in Burma for a year, and the Burmese would send one of their kids in return. “Just think, we could ship Berry to Myanmar, or whatever they’re calling it, and get a normal healthy kid in place of our mysterious whatever-it-is.”

  “Can I send you to Burma instead?” Judy demanded.

  Berry finally slept and saw singing inmates again, but this time they sang off key. The most gorgeous Vivaldi passages shredded to dissonance. Berry stopped them again and again, pleaded with them to sing in tune, to listen to the recording, to run through their parts. But the inmates wouldn’t listen, they jeered at Berry. One of them crunched his music score into a paper ball and hurled it at Berry’s head. Another one bashed someone with a metal music stand. Soon the rehearsal became a riot. Berry’s dream ended when an mmate dropped a piano on him.

  Then Berry dreamed he was underwater, trying to sing. The music came out like the whale song Marco sometimes played for his spiritual clients. Bubbles of failed song floated around his head. He couldn’t breathe in and he tried to rise to the water’s surface, but something held him down. The musical bubbles—they had quarter notes, half notes, and triplets in them—turned into a huge cloud over Berry’s head. He swatted at them but couldn’t disperse any. Finally, everything faded to chlorine.

  Berry wasn’t sure how much he slept, but he felt exhausted the next morning. Judy came into his room and dumped brochures for day schools and boarding schools onto his legs. “This is a great opportunity. You can finally become the achiever you were always meant to be. That stupid school always wanted to keep you out of the Swans. We’re going to get you into a select school as a girl. Did you know girls do better than boys academically? That’s because teachers like girls better and girls are less rambunctious. You’ll be trading up from Bart Simpson to Ophelia.”

  “Can we afford any of these places?” Berry asked without caring.

  “That’s the hard part. Your father isn’t working a lot lately and I’m still in school. But we can get you a scholarship if we tell a good enough story. You did badly in some classes, sure, but that was because you were the wrong sex. Or you can get some kind of singing scholarship.”

  Berry didn’t really believe anything Judy said, but it didn’t matter. It comforted him to know he’d soon be locked up. It made the scary future go away.

  There was a brochure for a performance school out-ofstate which accepted kids only a little older than Berry. “Don’t get your hopes up,” Judy said. “But they might take you early and let you enter in your new sex. I’ll make brunch, you fill out form
s.” She’d printed out some of the forms from the Web using her daisy wheel printer. Others, she’d picked up somewhere. Berry’s hand cramped after a couple hours.

  The phone rang at noon. They let the answering machine pick up. “Hey, Berry. Gray Redman. I’ve been doing some heartstorming, that’s like brainstorming only you use your heart, and I think I have some ideas. Buzz me.”

  Judy wanted Berry to call Gray Redman back, but Berry felt too weary. He promised to call later. “Sounds like you have everything figured out anyway.”

  Another message a while later: “Hey, why aren’t you at school, fairy? I was looking forward to showing everybody your jugs.” Berry recognized Randy’s voice. The background noise sounded raucous enough for the school cafeteria at lunchtime. Either Randy had coaxed the payphone to accept coins, or one of the Swans had lent a cell phone. Berry deleted that message too.

  “So many calls,” Judy said. For lunch they were eating couscous with leftover salami and salad mixed in. “You obviously have a lot of people who care about you, Berry. How come you’re playing Garbo?”

  Berry didn’t get the reference. “Whatever they’re all expecting from me, they’re all going to be disappointed.” “You’re being really ungrateful. More couscous? Well, your loss. It’s really good this way. A lot of kids your age starve for attention.”

  “I’d kill to be left alone.” I already did, Berry thought. “Getting left alone is easy. Getting people to stop leaving you alone once they start is hard.”

  Berry put his hands over his ears, like he did when he wanted to block all other singers and hear only how his voice sounded inside the echo chamber of his head. The danger of pressing against the bones that meet your eardrums is that you distort the sound of your own voice with skull harmonics. You drive yourself sharp that way.