Both Sides Now

by Peyton Thomas

  A loud swell of applause pulls me out of my daze, back into the moment, the theater. The headmistress is saying my name. The reporters in the front rows are lifting their cameras.

  Jonah’s hand curls into mine. He presses, hard, into my palm. And even as I let go of his hand, the world shrinks to us. Only us. Us, alone. Jonah loves me. He’s willing to throw this round for me because he loves me.

  I only need to find the courage to do the same.

  There it is: the podium, the microphone. I take my first deep breath. I open my mouth.

  “It would be easy to argue against the right of trans people to use the bathroom of their choice.” I lift my head. No less than a dozen cameras are trained on me—broadcasting me live, across the country. I force myself to look down the black barrel of the closest one. “Many lawmakers in this country have made this case. They’ve done it successfully. They’ve done it so well, in fact, that many trans people have been banned from bathrooms. Nothing we discuss on this stage today is hypothetical. It’s real. It’s happening.”

  I’m shocked to find myself short of breath, already, only a few sentences into my speech. And so, here I go: my second deep breath.

  “In many countries, trans people are murdered merely for existing.” I pause; both hands on the podium, holding myself steady. “The United States is one of those countries.”

  A wave of long, low gasps from the audience.

  “We know that the arguments for bathroom bans—the arguments against trans people in public spaces—do what they’re supposed to do,” I say. “They force trans people into closets. They make trans people out to be monsters. They work, and they work effectively. If I repeated those arguments well enough, there’s no question that I would persuade many of you.”

  There’s confusion in the crowd now: He’s supposed to be arguing for the bathroom ban, right? What the hell is this kid doing?

  I turn my head, find Jonah. He meets my eyes; he nods. And that’s all I need to swivel back to the mystified crowd, all I need to pull in my third, my final, deep breath.

  “So I’m not going to make those arguments,” I say. “I won’t participate in this debate, and neither will my partner.”

  Wild commotion in the crowd now. Oh, God. Okay. I wasn’t planning to do this, but now?

  Now, I don’t think I have a choice.

  “I am transgender.”

  The headmistress, who’d been stomping toward the stage on tall heels, stops where she stands. I see her mouth, What?

  “I am a transgender man,” I repeat. My head is beating like a heart. “I will not argue against my own humanity. There are many, many people doing that. They’re enjoying great success doing it. I will not—I cannot—be one of them.”

  I wonder if I’ll burst into tears again. I hope to God I don’t.

  “You can call me a coward if you want. You can accuse me of suppressing free speech.”

  A woman with a camera has moved in, close, to the very lip of the stage, pointing her long lens right at my face, zooming. There are people watching this, watching me, all over the country, at this very moment. I want nothing more than to stop. To shut up. To race off the stage and vomit, again, blank bile. But I can’t. I won’t.

  “But this isn’t the first time I’ve had this debate,” I go on. “I’ve been having this debate all weekend. I have this debate every time I get dressed in the morning. Every time I leave my home. Every time I get thirsty and wonder if I should have a sip of water, because I don’t know when I’ll be able to use a bathroom safely, and I don’t want to risk it.”

  It’s only as I say all this that I realize how true it is. How tired I am. I’m aware, now, that I’m about to cry. And I really, really wish the dam hadn’t burst when it did.

  “I’ve debated this issue enough,” I say, and sniff; it’s hard, harder than I remembered, holding the tears back. “And I’m done. We’re done. My partner and I forfeit this round.” I turn my head, nod at Nasir and a plainly horrified Ari. “Congratulations, Annable. You’re national champions now.”

  I step back, away from the podium, and in the overwhelming flurry of noise around me, one thing comes through, very clear: Ari’s voice, calling out, as she leaps to her feet.

  “Finch!” she yells. “Stop! Don’t! You shouldn’t . . . you don’t have to . . .”

  But I can’t stay, can’t hear whatever she’s going to say. I need to be off this stage. Right now. I pace into the wings, moving so quick Jonah has to jog to catch up. I am—how mortifying—gasping back sobs. The microphone rings out behind me as the headmistress grabs it, urging everyone to stay calm. There are footsteps coming after us, gaining.

  I turn to Jonah. I take his hand. He nods at me. He knows what we have to do.

  Run.

  That’s how we leave: running. We run and run ’til we burst through the doors of the Gray School, into the warm spring air, and we keep running, across the courtyard, as the sun beats down on our backs.

  I stop in the center of the quad, in the shadow of the fountain. Jonah does, too. He lifts me off the ground. He kisses me.

  I don’t feel like I’ve lost a thing.

  * * *

  —

  “You guys sure you don’t wanna go to this award ceremony?”

  “Yeah, Adwoa,” I tell her. “We’re sure.”

  This was Adwoa’s brilliant notion: to track us down after the final and spirit us away to her tiny hotel room, out of the Gray School’s crowded dormitories and, crucially, away from the prying eyes of reporters.

  “We just want to lie low,” says Jonah. “Like, take a nap. Order some takeout. After, you know . . .”

  “After all that,” Adwoa says, and exhales. “Yeah. Can’t say I blame you. This debate’s the number two trending topic in the country right now.”

  “Only number two?” Jonah looks disappointed. “Who beat us?”

  “A new Kardashian baby.” Adwoa leans against the open door of the hotel room, scrolling briskly through her phone. “But Caitlyn Jenner tweeted out how brave you are, Finch, so don’t say the Kardashians never did nothing for you.”

  “Did she really?” I push myself forward, to the edge of the mattress. “I had to turn off my phone. I was getting, like, sixty messages a minute.”

  “Well, stay here and read those texts, then. I’ll go to the banquet alone. Collect awards in your stead.”

  “You honestly think they’ll be giving us awards?” I ask her. “After that stunt we pulled?”

  “You do realize that you could still—no, sorry, will still win awards as individuals, right? Even if you forfeited the team title?”

  “Let’s not jinx it,” Jonah says.

  “Finch, truly,” says Adwoa, ignoring him, “if you don’t win first individual, I’m gonna throw hands.”

  I lift my hands, shrug: Who knows? “We’ll see.”

  Adwoa rolls her eyes, but I can see her smiling. “Okay, I’m ducking out now. You two be good, now,” she says, and winks suggestively.

  Jonah and I both, at once: “Adwoa!”

  She’s out the door with a quicksilver grin, a kiss blown over her shoulder. Great. Now I’m too embarrassed to look Jonah in the eye.

  “So,” I hear him say, behind me, reclining on Adwoa’s mattress. “Do you want to, like . . .”

  He lets the words hang there in the air, tentative.

  Well? Do I want to? Like? I could do what I’ve always done. Deny him. Deny myself. Want as little as possible on purpose.

  But after today, after that speech, I think it might be easier to just say what I mean. Say what I want.

  And so I turn to him. “I want to make out,” I tell him, with way more confidence than I was expecting. I lift my head, and I look him straight—well, not straight, I guess—in the eye. The very enthusiastic eye, suddenly. “But I need to take a
shower first. Or a bath. And brush my teeth. Because I’m reasonably confident that I still smell like puke.”

  “You smell like roses,” he says, and I roll my eyes.

  “Okay, loverboy,” I tell him as I vanish into the bathroom. “Whatever you say.”

  * * *

  —

  As I fill the tub, I peel off my jacket, and then my shirt—which, wow, will need a round of dry-cleaning when we get back to Olympia. Did I really go up onstage in this shirt? I can only hope the cameras didn’t capture the puke-spatter.

  My belt is next, and then my pants, pooling around my ankles. That leaves me staring at myself in the foggy mirror, clad only in binder and boxers. I look at myself and listen to the running of the water in the tub, the rushing of blood in my ears.

  I look like a boy. I know I do. After all this time on testosterone, on Lupron, I’m almost never mistaken for a girl anymore. But still, whenever I see myself in the mirror like this, all the layers peeled away, the hard facts of my body appear. Sometimes, it’s more than I can bear.

  Not today, though. Today, when I remove this last fabric, I look into the mirror and see a boy staring back. A boy who was brave enough to walk away from a national title, a second shot at his dream school, to stand up for himself. To defend the belief—no, the fact—that he is a boy. That he deserves to be a boy. That he doesn’t have to apologize for it.

  I lift my hand to the mirror and look at the body in it. It’s a boy’s body. It belongs to a boy who kissed another boy today. A boy who’s held, treasured, loved by that boy.

  It’s a boy’s body, and it’s all mine.

  * * *

  —

  I emerge from the bathroom warm and sleepy and pruned by hot water. Well, not emerge, not all the way; I stand in the doorway for a second, clad in an enormously fluffy bathrobe culled from the hotel’s closet. In the shower, just now, I’d fantasized about launching myself across the room at Jonah. Just throwing myself at him, tearing off my robe: Take me, I’m yours.

  Now, though, I hesitate. I’m not binding my chest right now. And I have to wonder: Will it be weird for Jonah? A deal-breaker? Is it silly of me, worrying like this, when he’s already made it clear how he feels? He’s already kissed me, yes, but not like this. Not without my binder. What if that changes things? What if . . .

  “Hey,” says a voice I absolutely didn’t expect to hear. “We need to talk.”

  I lift my head, and turn it, and there she is: none other than Ari, standing in the center of the room, wearing, as always, her uniform, shifting anxiously from Mary Jane to Mary Jane.

  “Wh . . . why . . .” I am wearing a bathrobe. And no binder. I do not want Ariadne Schechter to see me like this. “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at the banquet?”

  “She said she needed to talk to you,” Jonah says, in a voice like a hostage, from the armchair by the window. “And it was really important. And it couldn’t wait.”

  “And you couldn’t let me get dressed first? Really?”

  “I’m sorry,” says Ari. “It’s, like, life and death. I wouldn’t have come by if it wasn’t.”

  “Fine,” I say, but only because I’m still thinking about that party the other night. Her aborted confession. “Five minutes.”

  We step out into an empty corridor where everything is beige but the plants, which are rubber. Ari laces her fingers together.

  “The other night, out on the balcony,” she begins, “I heard you tell Jonah that you didn’t get into Georgetown.”

  “Oh, God, that’s what this is about?” And here I was prepared to soothe Ari, to welcome her into the trans community with open arms. “Well, you did get in, and now you have the national title, too. Did you just come here to rub it in?”

  “No! I’m asking if you still want to go to Georgetown!”

  I blink at her, mystified. “How . . . What do you . . .”

  “I only got in because my dad bought a building,” she says. “And everybody knows it. Do you know how stupid that makes me feel? How shitty? Like, he honestly didn’t believe I could do it by myself. He just had to drop a couple dozen mil on a big, fat—”

  “Ari, I’ll be honest. I am not feeling a lot of sympathy for you right now.”

  “Sorry. Fuck. Look.” She takes a step back, tries again. “What I’m trying to say is that my dad has a lot of pull at Georgetown. And if you want him to make a call and put in a good word for you, I can make it happen.”

  “Holy shit.” I need to sit down. I stagger back, all but collapse under one of the rubber plants. It’s hard to move in this bathrobe. I have to pull the long ends of the garment down for modesty’s sake. “Did you just say . . .”

  “I can’t, like, promise you admission,” she says. “But I can promise you a phone call.”

  I peer up at her, suspicious. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because you threw that round and handed me a national title. And because you helped me realize things about myself that I’d kind of been, um . . .” She looks down, bites her lip. “Ignoring, I guess? Because I was afraid of what people would think?”

  “Oh, Ari.” I swallow. There it is: the cracking of the eggshell. “I know what you mean. I’ve been there.”

  “I mean, I’m not ready to, like, pick a label or anything.” She lifts her hand, swipes a stray tear from beneath her eye. “But you made me understand there are things I can do. Like, I don’t have to feel this way for the rest of my life. I have choices. I get to decide for myself.”

  “You do. You get to choose.” I swallow. “And if there’s ever anything I can do for you—”

  “You can let me do this for you,” she cuts in. “Why are you arguing with me? Isn’t this exactly what you’ve always wanted?”

  She’s right. I’ve wanted Georgetown for years. More than I’ve ever wanted anything. But I’m remembering now what Jonah said last night: The thing you want isn’t always the thing that’s best. Is Georgetown really the best thing for me?

  I’ve wondered for a long time what it’s like to live in Ari’s tax bracket. A world where wishing for something is as simple as buying it. She’s inviting me into that world. Right now.

  But I’ve always hated the people in her world, haven’t I? Not for what they have, but how they get it: by cheating, stealing, cutting in line. If I do this—say yes, and sail past all the other desperate kids on the waiting list—how will I sleep at night?

  Would Thomas Piketty ever forgive me?

  I take a step back. I shake my head.

  “I’m sorry, Ari,” I tell her. “But the answer is no.”

  * * *

  —

  It’s a funny feeling—a sad one—to have your wildest dream handed to you on a silver platter, and to say no. My head’s spinning as I return to the hotel room and close the door behind me. Jonah, splayed across the bed, lifts his head, curious.

  “What did Ari want?”

  “She wanted her dad to call Georgetown,” I say, hovering at the edge of the mattress. “On my behalf. To get me in.”

  “And you said yes?” Jonah rises up on one hand. “Please tell me you said yes.”

  I shake my head. “No.”

  “God.” Jonah throws his head back, laughing. “That is so you of you.”

  “Don’t laugh at me!” I protest. “How would you feel if you were on the waiting list and some kid’s dad made a phone call for some other kid, and that kid got in, and you didn’t?”

  “You are such a good person.” He tosses his phone onto the nightstand. “Get over here.”

  I cross my arms over my chest—I’ve got no small amount of anxiety, still, about going binderless—and take a seat on the bed.

  “You know,” he says, with a suggestive wiggling of the brow, “I was hoping you would lie down, not sit.”

  “Lie down?” My hea
rt lurches. “In order to . . .”

  “So I can kiss you,” he says—and then his eyes go wide, apologetic. “But only if you want.”

  “Oh, I definitely want,” I say, and fall back, horizontal. “I just don’t know if I’m ready to do . . . you know, more than that?”

  “Of course,” he says. “We’ve got so much time, Finch. So much time.”

  And then we settle into place: his arms around me, his forehead to mine. His lips on mine. I hesitate, just for a second, before pressing the soft peaks of my chest to the flat plane of his.

  He doesn’t flinch. He only pulls me closer, kisses me longer. I relax, let myself feel everything, all of it. I still can’t believe that he’s here, next to me, in this bed, touching my body. I’m recovering from new shock every second.

  “Whatcha thinking about?” he says, his mouth never leaving mine. “How you feeling?”

  “I don’t know,” I mumble, between kisses. “I just never thought this would happen.”

  “What do you mean?” He pulls away from me, propping himself up on an elbow. “Why?”

  “I just never thought that you would . . . that you could . . . like me,” I tell him. “Because you had Bailey, for one.”

  He lifts his hand, runs a thumb along the curve of my cheek. “But that wasn’t all, was it?”

  I almost don’t want to have this talk with him. It would be so easy to go on without saying any of this, to just pretend it doesn’t matter. But I know we can’t ignore this, the fact of my being who I am. And I’m lucky: I feel safe enough right now, in this bed, with him, to talk about it.

  “I mean, you’re . . . gay,” I begin. “And it wasn’t clear to me if you’d ever—if you’d even be able to—be attracted to me.”

  “I’m into guys,” he says slowly. “And you’re a guy.”

  “It isn’t that simple.”

  “It really, truly is.”