by Ami Polonsky
Three days a week? That would definitely interfere with at least some of my weekly after-school GLOW meetings and private meetings with Ms. Rose. Ms. Wigg continued talking, but I didn’t pay attention to what she was saying. I couldn’t ditch GLOW meetings. Obviously. I was the president of the club.
But a stage combat performance? How could I pass that up?
By the time I got to the gym, it was already bustling. I tried to push the scheduling conflict out of my mind. Maria’s family had towed their flatbed trailer to the side yard earlier that day and parked it right next to the outside door for easy access. The T-shirts were on a table, ready to be passed out. It was an amazing scene.
We split up into pairs and got to work decorating the float. Essie and I made loops of duct tape and attached them to the backs of the posters we’d created in the months before, and Lucy and Savannah ran them out to the flatbed trailer. At four thirty, we took a break. I smiled at Essie, who was sitting against the wall next to me, a loop of duct tape stuck to her hair.
“Hey,” I said. “You have duct tape in your hair.” I reached for it. Everyone else disappeared. It was just me and Essie, my hand in her hair. She smiled her perfect smile.
“Rabbit tape?” she asked, not moving.
In sixteen days, she’d be gone.
DAY 96
“Ollie,” Mom called through my closed bedroom door, “can I come in?”
“Yup,” I said, pulling my GLOW T-shirt over my thermal.
“What do you think?” Mom smiled as she joined me in front of my mirror in a GLOW T-shirt of her own.
I turned to her. “Where’d you get that?”
“Ms. Rose brought a few to my office yesterday. For the Sociology Department. A thank-you for sponsoring the event.”
I nodded. It made sense. Nothing about what Mom was telling me seemed bad, or wrong, but seeing her there, smiling so proudly, wearing the same GLOW T-shirt as me made me furious.
“You okay, hon?” Mom asked.
“Yeah,” I said, checking the time. “I’m fine. I’m going to meet Ms. Rose on campus to make sure the float is good to go. That way we’ll have an hour if there’s any last-minute stuff to do.”
“Great! Dad will be home any minute and we’ll come straight to campus to meet you.”
“Mom, you can get there at six. I’ve got this.”
“Ol, this is a huge deal! Dad and I are so proud. We’ll be there as early as possible. We can help out if you and Ms. Rose need anything.”
“Mom!” I hadn’t meant to yell, and I didn’t know exactly why I felt like crying, but it had something to do with the fact that Mom and Dad definitely weren’t anywhere to be seen in my daydream of me and Essie at the march. I wiped my eyes. “Please. Come at six.”
She nodded, stunned, as I pulled on my Sox cap—backward, obviously—wiped my eyes again, and walked out the door.
I crossed the street and made my way toward campus. The setting sun was low in the sky, turning the cobbled path that led to our meeting spot golden and magical-looking. Up ahead, Ms. Rose stood beside a wagon that was full of laminated signs.
“Hi, Ollie!” she called out. “Thanks for coming early!” Just behind her, our float, draped in posters and rainbow streamers, was parked on the street. “You excited?” she asked as I approached.
“Definitely!” And I was—excited for the rally, excited to see whose art was on the posters, excited to see Essie.
I picked up a cardboard sign from the wagon and looked it over. The world shifted. The two trees—Annabella’s and Damien’s trees, their hammock, Essie, me.
“Is this Essie’s?” I asked.
Ms. Rose nodded, smiling. Of course it was. I looked around for her, feeling like someone else and exactly like myself at the same time. But Ms. Rose and I were still the only ones from GLOW on campus.
Ms. Rose darted off to reattach a streamer that had untaped itself from the float, and I sat down on a bench with the poster. The heart made of dangling branches and the curve of the hammock; Essie and me, side by side. What did it mean? I mean, did it mean what I thought it might mean? What was I going to say to her? My mind buzzed.
By five fifteen, most GLOW members were on campus. Lucy and Savannah were handing out posters. Joey and his Campus Press crew were setting up cameras. Even a reporter named Kiesha from ABC News was here.
But no Essie.
Mom and Dad waited until 5:45 to come, which, I guess, was impressive. For Mom. I gave them a little wave and they stayed on the periphery of the crowd, along with some other parents.
It was six o’clock. Maria’s dad got into the minivan that was attached to the float and pulled out into the street.
Seven o’clock. We’d made our loop around campus, our rainbow messages illuminated by the streetlights.
By ten o’clock I was in my bed, looking up at the stars.
Essie hadn’t come at all.
DAY 97
The next morning, I woke up super early and sent a text to Mom and Dad (who I’d avoided talking to talking to the night before) so they wouldn’t worry about me. Their phones chimed from the kitchen, and I left the house. Outside, I passed Annabella and Damien’s and arrived at the park just as the sun was starting to break over the trees.
Standing in the sand, I spun the spinny-spin and thought about when I was little, back when being a girl was fine. There were two groups in the world as far as I knew: girl and boy. I was a girl who was like a boy. And it was cool. You need a dad for your game of “house”? I’m in! We’re going swimming at the lake? See ya, shirt. You want to call me a tomboy? Go for it.
Something had changed in fourth grade. I’d needed a better, more accurate label. “Not a girl” had felt right, and I’d told Addison this. When I’d gotten home, Annabella had been the one who had sketched out the gender spectrum on a napkin at their kitchen table: Girl on the left. Boy on the right. A wide expanse in between. I’d always known that Annabella wasn’t a woman or a man, but seeing that visual clarified something for me; as soon as I saw the area in the middle, I knew that that was where I fit. Specifically, just to the left of boy.
Being with Essie felt like those days of playing house, being the dad, swimming in my swim trunks. Because back then, gender wasn’t a thing that I’d had to think about all the time. I just was.
Figuring out that my label was “nonbinary” had brought an end to those days, and that didn’t seem fair, because why couldn’t I be nonbinary and also just be? After the Rumble Peak trip, I’d had to just shrug when Ronny Francis had asked me how I could be nonbinary if the Bible said there were only girls and boys. I’d had to stand there stupidly—until Lucy had come to my rescue—when a group of girls from my class, led by Debra Marley, had surrounded me to ask me what kind of underwear I wore. And now, three years later, I had to feel bad about myself whenever I passed Ronny or Debra in the halls, even though I knew that I was awesome and they were losers.
And because Lucy had been the one to come to my rescue at Rumble Peak, and then so many times after that, understanding my label had also brought an end to the days when things between the two of us had felt equal.
I left the park and walked to Essie’s house, where I stood on her front porch for eight minutes until seven o’clock. Then I rang the doorbell.
After a minute, the door opened. Essie stood there, bleary-eyed, in pajama pants and a sweatshirt. I felt so mad at her for ditching me at the rally. And I felt so many other things. Seeing her made me want to cry again, and without really thinking about what I was saying, words spilled from my mouth. “You won,” I told her. “How could you have just ditched me like that? Was your poster why you didn’t … I mean, you knew how important the march was to me. We worked so hard on everything. How could you have just not come? I texted you, like, a thousand times. Was it because of the poster?” I asked. “It was good. Was it us? It was us, wasn’t it?”
She locked her eyes on mine, and it looked like she was going to cry, too. Th
en she held her hand out for mine. I let her take it.
Inside, Essie led me to her inmate wall, where, in addition to way more tally marks than she’d had on it last time I’d been there, she’d drawn a massive mural. It was the poster: the hammock, the stars, the moon, our arms, held together by the magnetic force. I wondered if this was why she hadn’t invited me over in months. And I wondered what else I might never know about her.
All I could say was, “In two weeks, you’ll be gone.”
DAY 98
“I’m sorry,” Essie said for the millionth time as we lay on her carpeted floor, looking at the mural.
“I get it,” I told her. “I get why you were worried about me seeing this.”
“It’s like Ms. VanVoorhees’s optical illusions. Like you’re seeing things one way, and I’m seeing the same things in a different way.”
I nodded. “Yeah, like we each have our own lens.”
“Ollie?” Essie asked, staring up at her mural nervously. “Was it totally obvious?”
I turned to her. “Was what obvious?” I joked. Because too-much-Ollie told me to.
She laughed. “Shut up.”
“Sorry. No, just to Luciana and Savannah. They know everything, anyway. You’ve got guts,” I went on.
“The idea to submit it to Ms. Rose just came to me. I can’t believe I actually did it.”
“I’m really glad that you actually did it,” I said, getting up, running my hand over the mural.
“Sharpie on drywall,” Essie joked, imitating Ms. VanVoorhees, who loved to give the specs of each painting she presented in class. Then she took a breath. “I ditched the rally because I couldn’t bear to see your reaction. To my…”
“To your heart?” Did I really just say that?
But Essie didn’t seem to mind. I lay back down next to her. “The march was everything to you,” she said.
“Part of everything,” I corrected.
“You know, I came up with this theory recently,” Essie went on, “that there are different layers to everyone. You know those Russian dolls that fit one inside the other?”
“Yeah?”
“My theory is that people are like that. Like, take me, for example. My outer layer is Essie. But the smallest doll inside is just-Essie. The core of Essie.”
“Does your core have a gender?” I wondered.
Essie thought for a second. “No,” she said. “It’s like … an essence.”
“Essence of Essie?” I asked. “Wait, your core is a perfume?”
She laughed as I pulled up the video clip of ABC’s march coverage that Joey had forwarded to me, and rested her head against mine as I pressed play.
Thirteen more days.
* * *
Later that day, Mom sat down on my bed where I was “doing homework,” aka thinking about Essie.
“Ol?” she said. “It’s been two days. We should talk, yes?”
“Yeah, okay,” I told her, closing my laptop.
“I’m sorry if I’ve been … overbearing. I want to admit something to you, which is that ever since you were little, and it became obvious that you were unique from a gender standpoint, I’ve been on a steadfast mission to make sure that you’re confident in yourself. Gender-wise. It’s possible that, as you’ve gotten older, I’ve stayed slightly too involved.”
I tried not to smile. “Yeah,” I told her. “Maybe slightly.”
“A lot of what I’ve gone by was Annabella’s experience. What I should say is, making your experience the opposite of what Annabella’s was when they were a kid. Annabella has been coaching me since you were tiny, you know,” she went on. “Ever since you started picking out your own clothes.”
“I guess I always figured that.”
“Did you? I just wanted your experience to be drastically drastically different from theirs. The thought of Annabella feeling like they couldn’t come out until they were an adult always broke my heart.”
“Mom,” I said. “Can I tell you how I see things? Like, through my lens?”
She looked impressed.
“You did a good job. Like, a great job. I’m so happy with my gender-weirdness. Seriously. But I’m not only nonbinary. The past three years, everything has been about my gender—about making me proud and cool with it. And now that I’m thirteen? I feel like I’ve got this.”
Mom nodded and ran her fingers through the longer part of my hair. “I know,” she told me. “I believe you.”
DAY 99
When Essie, Savannah, Lucy, and I got out of school at three o’clock, it was freezing. We’d heard murmurings all day that it was supposed to snow throughout the night, which was awesome, because in North Carolina, if it snows a centimeter, the whole state freaks out and shuts down.
Savannah pulled out her phone, screamed, and showed me, Lucy, and Essie this app she’d found that listed our “Snow Day Probability” at 82 percent.
“It’s starting!” Essie said, looking up at big, wet flakes that were beginning to drop from the sky. We all shrieked and ran to my house. By the time we arrived, there was a thin coating of slushy snow on the lawn.
“I’ll start the stockpile of snowballs!” Savannah announced, rolling a pea-size ball of wet snow between her fingers, laughing.
“Let me help you!” Lucy told her, and the two of them started a pile of melty snow-pebbles on the front steps.
“Come here,” Essie said to me, her magnet-arm pulling toward my magnet-arm. She took my hand. We clicked together and she led me to the indentation in the lawn where slightly more snow had accumulated. “Make a snow angel with me.”
DAY 100
Sure enough, I woke up the next morning to a text, voicemail, and email from school, all announcing that we had a snow day. A thin layer of ice covered the street, and according to the news, two inches of wet snow was blanketing the grass. I texted Essie.
I wandered out to the living room, opened Froggy’s cage, and lifted her into my lap. She twitched her nose as I fed her some alfalfa. I felt bad about all the time I’d spent wishing she were a dog. It wasn’t her fault that she brought up all kinds of bad memories. And hanging out in this little cage for so many hours each day? That had to suck.
An idea came to me and I texted Damien, whose classes at the university had been canceled, too. Half an hour later, I braved the tundra between our houses and met him down in his basement.
“This doesn’t look hard,” he confirmed, scrolling through the plans for the rabbit hutch that I’d found on my phone.
I leaned over his arm. “How are we supposed to attach this chicken wire?” I asked.
“Scroll down,” he demanded.
“Yes, sir. Oh, here we go. Anyway, why is chicken wire called chicken wire? Why not rooster wire? Hey! I just got the best idea.”
“Deep breaths? Yoga?” he joked.
“No! So since my butterfly-hands is coming along nicely, and since it totally sucks that I can’t do stage combat next semester, and it’s basically the coolest thing in the world, and there are so many weapons that Ms. Wigg doesn’t have, you and I could make some new weapons for Stage Combat Club!”
“All right, I have to admit,” Damien said, “that would be awesome!”
“Right? I’ll research it. We could do shields, swords, daggers…”
“Polearms!” he added. “Maces! Axes! Flails! Wait, you did say we, right?’”
I wiggled my eyebrows at him.
“I’m so in,” he said. “If I get fired from my teaching position for being unprepared for my classes, I’ll blame it on you. Wait—” He cut himself off. “Why can’t you do stage combat anymore?”
“No time,” I told him, looking down at my shoes. “GLOW Club meetings.”
* * *
By one o’clock, when I went home to meet Essie, I had a callus on my palm from sawing and splinters in my thumb. I liked my “new” hands: proof I was doing things, creating things. Things that were all mine.
I waited for her on the front st
eps. The snow was already starting to melt, but I managed to make one miniature snowball to hide on the porch before she arrived. By the time she walked up the front path, it was turning to a pile of slush. I held it out to her. “I was going to throw this at you,” I admitted as it dripped between my fingers.
“North Carolina is so pathetic,” she said, scooping up a handful of slush and tossing it at me.
I was just about to get her back when Annabella and Damien came out their front door. I waved at them.
“Is it safe to venture out?” Annabella joked, kicking a clump of slushy snow off their front steps.
“Use extreme caution,” I warned. Then I turned to Essie. “I haven’t introduced you to Annabella and Damien yet, have I?”
“Nope,” she said.
“Let’s go say ‘hi.’ I’m Annabella’s mini me. Annabella is nonbinary, pan…” Essie looked confused. “It means you could be attracted to anyone on the gender spectrum.”
And the look on her face when I said that? Total relief. Which got me thinking about the fact that I’d never put myself into Essie’s shoes in that way. I mean, being aware of all the labels? That was old news for me. But for Essie? It was clearly news.
DAY 101
That night, Dad, Essie, and I went to Satter’s Platters for dinner. Despite the fact that I totally loved Dad, I kind of wished he weren’t there; I wanted to be alone with Essie. I still had so many things to say to her, and in ten days she’d be back in Saint Louis. The thought made me feel nauseous.
“Lady and gentlemen, your menus,” our waiter said, clearly mistaking me for a boy. Like that, for example. I wanted to talk to her about being misgendered most of the time that I wasn’t at home or school, usually depending upon whether I was wearing a loose-fitting sweatshirt. I wanted to talk to her about how I used to like it, but now I wasn’t so sure. But I also didn’t want to talk to her about that, because I wanted to talk to her about her.