Born That Way (6 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

The river isn't very deep but there are a lot of big rocks visible under the surface so my horse has to pick its way carefully. So okay, I'm dreaming. We're about half-way across the river when I hear a shout, and it's the girl with the wavy ash-blonde hair coming up beside me on her gray horse. I try to bring her face into clear focus because I need to figure out if this is Kansas or not.

“Whatcha looking at? Do I have mud on my face?”

“Who are you?” I ask. “Do you have a name?”

“That's not a good idea, Sylvia. I know what you're driving at but you don't want to be building bridges from one place to another. That leaves paths for others to follow.”

“Well can I just call you Kansas, for my convenience, because you look like her and remind me so much of her?”

Kansas drops her head and looks at me through her eyebrows. “Oh boy,” she says. “This should take about three seconds.”

She's riding bareback, and suddenly I see tucked in behind her, holding her around the waist, is someone who looks a lot like Taylor. She's wearing a pink ballet leotard and black knit leggings.

“Holy bananarama,” she says.

It's Taylor all right.

“What are you doing here?” I'm not exactly happy about this, having to share not only my dream but also my dream friend. “You don't even like horses.”

Taylor's eyes are the size of tennis balls though not the same shade of yellow-green. “I wouldn't say I didn't like them. More like I'm terrified of them.”

“Kansas, what's she doing here?”

“I warned you about the naming thing—don't build bridges, don't make links. Not yet, not until you know what you're doing.”

“But you've been calling me Sylvia.”

“It's your dream—so there's no bridging.”

“But why Taylor?”

“Oh Sylvia—you've done it again.”

I have disappointed her and it is crushing for me. She sees my crestfallen look and softens. “No, no—it's okay, it's nothing bad, but it quickens things.”

“There!” shouts Taylor. She's pointing to a beach on the far side of the river. “Do you see him? He's coming out of the woods!” She doesn't sound terrified any more. She sounds ecstatic, as though she's found her long-lost best friend—or more than that, as though she's seen some famous singing star, or Jesus. She sounds like I would sound if Ian Miller, Captain of the Canadian Equestrian team, were to leap out of the woods in his red show-jumping jacket, riding Big Ben, who is now dead.

At first I think it is a horse that Taylor is pointing to, a white Morgan maybe, or an Arab-cross, all sleek and shiny and muscley, with a wavy mane that's so glossy it could be made of threads of silver.

Then I see the long horn sticking straight out of its forehead.

“Oh give me a break!” I say. “A unicorn?”

“That's what it looks like, all right,” says Kansas.

“But I don't believe in unicorns.”

That's when the unicorn looks straight at me and laughs—not a whinny, not a nicker; he definitely opens his mouth and laughs at me.

“I believe in unicorns,” says Taylor.

“But it's not your dream. It's my dream.”

“Not any more,” says Kansas. She is checking her watch. “Thank goodness . . . ”

And I hear my alarm buzzing but I'm not ready to wake up. “Wait a minute—you have to tell me what's going on here.”

But Taylor has disappeared, the unicorn has gone and Kansas is smiling at me and waving. “Goodbye! Have a nice day!”

I reach for my clock and switch off the alarm. I lie there for a while, thinking, wondering if I should phone Taylor, but it all seems too dumb. And then I remember that it's Saturday. I never set my alarm for Saturdays. What's going on? I'm almost ready to believe some weird explanation involving powers from my dream world turning on my alarm, when I come up with a more practical possibility which spurs me out of bed and into my clothes in record time.

Mom must have set the alarm after I went to sleep. I need to escape the house before she captures me for another mother-daughter bonding experience. I have a quick drink of juice (okay, I admit it, I drink straight out of the carton, drain it and put it back in the fridge empty. I know I'm not supposed to but I'm in a serious hurry. Besides, Dad does this all the time, so Mom will think it was him.) I leave a note on the table, grab an old pickle jar and ride my bike down to the beach for some replacement water for the barnacle family. Once I'm out of the house I slow down and take my time, so that when I return home Mom has headed off to an aerobics class, and Dad is reading the newspaper at the breakfast table.

“Hey kiddo, I saved you some porridge.”

I lift the lid on the pan and there's a grey shiny lump piled in the middle. I stick my finger in it, and it's not very warm.

“Thanks, Dad. I think I'll make myself an egg. It's a better source of protein anyway.”

Dad doesn't say anything. I see he's deep into the business section which reminds me of what Stephanie told me about self-promotion.

I use a louder voice than usual. “But I better take care of my pet barnacles before I feed myself.”

Dad grunts.

I retrieve the barnacle family from my room and put the Pyrex container on the kitchen counter. I tip it up and pour most of their water into the sink, then add half of the water I got at the beach. The rest I can keep for Sunday, which will give me a day free from biking. I figure I can keep the water in the refrigerator, but the jar has dirt and mud on the outside, so I remember the juice carton, rinse it out, pour in the seawater and tuck it into the back of the top shelf.

I check out the barnacle family, and they are obviously enjoying their breakfast. Their tentacles are out and waving around, picking up bits of food. At least I hope they are tentacles. I hope I haven't got five boy barnacles here, all with long penises looking for someone to mate with. I wonder how to tell the difference between a barnacle tentacle and a barnacle penis, and since I definitely don't want to talk to Mom or Dad about this I decide to check back on Google.

I slip off to the family room. Of course I can't have a computer in my bedroom because Mom and Dad need to monitor my access to make sure I'm not in some chat room hooking up with a seventeen year old boy from out of town who will talk me into running away from home with him and living off the avails of prostitution on the streets in Vancouver.

The news from Google is not good. Apparently barnacles are hermaphrodites, meaning that one barnacle is a girl and a boy at the same time. So my barnacles all have penises, among other things. This is difficult to understand. Actually, it's difficult to believe, and if I wasn't reading it on Google I'd think it was a ridiculous made-up story.

Maybe a hamster would have been simpler.

Which makes me wonder if the same thing can happen with other animals, whether they can be both sexes at the same time. So I Google hermaphrodite. Obviously this is a mistake. I peek into the kitchen to make sure Dad isn't watching, and he isn't. There are some very strange photographs at the top of the screen that I really don't want to know anything about, so I scroll down quickly and then click on a reference to a hermaphrodite pony who made friends with a donkey because none of the horses liked him . . . or her. This happened in England, where Dad says all sorts of strange things happen due to the inbreeding of the European royal families. But this pony had both girl parts and boy parts, like my barnacles. They named him/her Tootsie, the same as a character in a movie with Dustin Hoffman. I have to remember to ask Mom and Dad to rent this one for me, though I won't be able to look too interested or they'll get suspicious.

The pony is pure white with a long silky mane. He reminds me of the stupid unicorn I had in my dream, and I figure this is a good opportunity so I Google unicorns. It's really really boring. Fierce but good, selfless but solitary, mysteriously beautiful, neutralizer of poison, tame-able only by a virgin woman, blah blah blah. Nothing about whether they can jump four-foot fences on a cross-country course, or do
piaffe
or
passage
, or pull plows or work cows, or do anything really practical.

Frankly, I find barnacles way more interesting than unicorns.

I wonder if I can get barnacle curtains and wallpaper.

“Whatcha up to, Sunshine?”

It's Dad. I exit the unicorn site before he can read over my shoulder. I don't want him to think I've gone all flakey. “Oh just doing some research.”

“You almost done? I need to check some commodity prices.”

I slide off the chair and let him take over. It's his chair anyway, a special one he bought at Staples with adjusting levers all over it that I'm not allowed to touch because they're set up perfectly to support his back. Mom says when he sits in it he looks like Captain Kirk at the helm of the Starship Enterprise which I think is a reference from the previous century.

“My barnacle family is thriving under my care,” I advise him.

“Hmm hmm.” He wiggles the computer mouse, trying to get the cursor over the bookmarks tab.

“And I will be starting a part-time job soon.”

“Mmmmm.” He opens his bookmarks. There's a whole line of them that he hasn't organized very well because he can't remember how to manage folders, even though I've shown him at least twelve times. He drags his pen down the screen looking for the site he wants and leaves a snaking ink mark that Mom will not be impressed by.

“Which will be helpful in paying for the upkeep of my horse.”

“Oh yeah hmmm.” He clicks on a site which opens to a whole pile of text and graphs that I know could keep him occupied until next week.

This is getting kind of annoying and I feel a reckless urge that I can't stop. “Dad, do you know what a hermaphrodite is?”

His finger freezes on the scroll button. He turns and peers at me over the top of his reading glasses. “It's the same as bisexual I think. But you'd be better off to ask your mother.” He watches me for a few seconds more, looks back at the computer screen, then with what seems like an incredible effort slides his eyes back over to me. “Why do you want to know, Shorty?”

I shrug. “I dunno.” I better not tell him about the barnacles. He might make me throw them away. So I tell him about the pony, though I make it clear that it's highly unusual for ponies to be hermaphrodites, in case that could become yet another reason why I can't have one.

“Oh. Well,” he says, and he turns back to the computer screen. “Give me a minute here, Munchkin, I won't be long.”

I leave the room.

I retrieve my barnacle family from the kitchen and take them back to my bedroom. I slide them under my desk lamp and watch the tentacles and try to see if one of them gets long and inserts itself in another barnacle. I try to imagine being a girl and a boy at the same time, and whether any of your sperm could get loose inside you and make you pregnant. And whether it was possible to decide what to be for your whole life so that you could marry, or whether you would have to marry another hermaphrodite so you wouldn't have to decide—you could just switch with each other; sometimes one person would take out the garbage and cut the lawn while the other person spent all morning on the telephone, and other times . . . I try to imagine my dad spending an hour on the phone laughing and talking about nothing like he says Mom does with Auntie Sally. I try to imagine Mom pulling the starter cord on the lawnmower until she's red in the face and wet with sweat and yelling at the stupid effing Black and Decker. I think about Dad being pregnant.

I look up bisexual in the dictionary, but it's not much help so I'll have to put off doing more research until I can get back on the computer.

I hear Mom's car coming up the street. The engine has a unique sound, so I always know before she gets home. I haven't had breakfast yet, which Mom won't be very happy about. She'll probably get mad at Dad. If I stay in my room until lunchtime though, she might not notice. I could come out then and act normally hungry.

I pick up the Pony Club manual and after checking that there's no reference to hermaphrodites or bisexuals in the index, I re-read the section on stable management. I hear the kitchen door open and close as Mom comes in. There's quiet down the hall for a minute, then I hear a lot of coughing and gagging and gasping for breath, and I bolt for the kitchen all ready to do the Heimlich maneuver.

Mom is spluttering over the sink. In her hand is the juice carton. She turns to me and there are tears streaming down her face. What have I done?

“Oh Mom. I'm so sorry.”

“You? What did you put in here?”

“Just some ocean water, for my barnacles.”

She swivels and retches into the sink. She rests on her elbows with her head tucked in under the faucet. “She's trying to kill me.”

She says it softly but I hear her anyway. How could she even think such a thing? Then I remember them talking about that Hamlet stuff.