Every Day (25 page)

I clean myself up some in the bathroom. Then I sit down and wait.

And wait.

And wait.

She doesn’t arrive until a little after six.

She doesn’t apologize. She doesn’t explain why it took her so long. She doesn’t even come to my table right away. She stops at the counter and gets a coffee first.

“I really need this,” she says as she sits down. I know she’s talking about the coffee, not anything else.

I’m on my fourth coffee and second scone.

“Thank you for coming,” I tell her. It sounds too formal.

“I thought about not coming,” she says. “But I didn’t seriously consider it.” She looks at my face, my bruises. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Remind me—what’s your name today?”

“Michael.”

She looks me over again. “Poor Michael.”

“This is not how I imagine he thought the day would go.”

“That makes two of us.”

I feel we’re each standing a good hundred feet from the real subject. I have to move us closer.

“Is it over now? With the two of you?”

“Yes. So I guess you got what you wanted.”

“That’s an awful way to put it,” I say. “Don’t you want it, too?”

“Yes. But not like that. Not in front of everybody like that.”

I reach up to touch her face, but she flinches. I lower my hand.

“You’re free of him,” I tell her.

She shakes her head. I’ve said yet another thing wrong.

“I forget how little you know about these things,” she says. “I forget how inexperienced you are. I’m not free of him, A. Just because you break up with someone, it doesn’t mean you’re free of him. I’m still attached to Justin in a hundred different ways. We’re just not dating anymore. It’s going to take me years to be free of him.”

But at least you’ve started
, I want to say.
At least you’ve cut that one attachment
. I remain silent, though. This might be what she knows, but it’s not what she wants to hear.

“Should I have gone to Hawaii?” I ask.

She softens to me then. It’s such an absurd question, but she knows what I mean.

“No, you shouldn’t have. I want you here.”

“With you?”

“With me. When you can be.”

I want to promise more than that, but I know I can’t.

We both stay there, on our tightrope. Not looking down, but not moving, either.

We use her phone to check the local flights to Hawaii, and when we’re sure there’s no way Michael’s family can get him on a plane, Rhiannon drives me home.

“Tell me more about the girl you were yesterday,” she asks. So I do. And when I’m done, and a sadness fills the car, I decide to tell her about other days, other lives. Happier. I share with her memories of being sung to sleep, memories of meeting elephants at zoos and circuses, memories of first kisses and near first kisses in rec-room closets and at Boy Scout sleepovers and scary movies. It’s my way of telling her that even though I haven’t experienced so many things, I have managed to have a life.

We get closer and closer to Michael’s house.

“I want to see you tomorrow,” I say.

“I want to see you, too,” she says. “But I think we both know it’s not just a matter of want.”

“I’ll hope it, then,” I tell her.

“And I’ll hope it, too.”

I want to kiss her good night, not goodbye. But when we get there, she makes no move to kiss me. I don’t want to push it and make the first move. And I don’t want to ask her, for fear that she’ll say no.

So we leave with me thanking her for the ride, and so much else going unspoken.

I don’t go straight into the house. I walk around to run out the clock more. It’s ten o’clock when I am at the front door. I access Michael to find out where the spare key is kept, but by the time I’ve found it, the door has opened and Michael’s father is there.

At first he doesn’t say a word. I stand there in the lamplight, and he stares.

“I want to beat the crap out of you,” he says, “but it looks like someone else got there first.”

My mother and sisters have been sent ahead to Hawaii. My father has stayed back for me.

In order to apologize, I have to give him some kind of explanation. I come up with one that’s as pathetic as I feel—there was a concert I had to go to, and there was just no way to tell him ahead of time. I feel awful messing up Michael’s life to such a degree, and this awfulness must come through as I speak, because Michael’s father is much less hostile than he has every right to be. I’m in no way off the hook: the change fee for the tickets will be coming out of my allowance for the next year, and when we’re in Hawaii, I may be grounded from doing
anything that isn’t wedding-related. I will be getting guilt for this for the rest of my life. The only saving grace is that there were tickets available for the next day.

That night I create a memory of the best concert Michael will ever go to. It is the only thing I can think to give him to make any of it worth it.

Even before I open my eyes, I like Vic. Biologically female, gendered male. Living within the definition of his own truth, just like me. He knows who he wants to be. Most people our age don’t have to do that. They stay within the realm of the easy. If you want to live within the definition of your own truth, you have to choose to go through the initially painful and ultimately comforting process of finding it.

It’s supposed to be a busy day for Vic. There’s a history test and a math test. There’s band practice, which is the thing he looks forward to the most in the day. There’s a date with a girl named Dawn.

I get up. I get dressed. I get my keys and get in my car.

But when I get to the place where I should turn off for school, I keep driving.

It’s just over a three-hour drive to Rhiannon. I’ve emailed to let her know Vic and I are coming. I didn’t give her time to reply, or to say no.

On the drive, I access pieces of Vic’s history. There are few things harder than being born into the wrong body. I had to deal with it a lot when I was growing up, but only for a day. Before I became so adaptable—so acquiescent to the way my life worked—I would resist some of the transitions. I loved having long hair, and would resent it when I woke up to find my long hair was gone. There were days I felt like a girl and days I felt like a boy, and those days wouldn’t always correspond with the body I was in. I still believed everyone when they said I had to be one or the other. Nobody was telling me a different story, and I was too young to think for myself. I had yet to learn that when it came to gender, I was both and neither.

It is an awful thing to be betrayed by your body. And it’s lonely, because you feel you can’t talk about it. You feel it’s something between you and the body. You feel it’s a battle you will never win … and yet you fight it day after day, and it wears you down. Even if you try to ignore it, the energy it takes to ignore it will exhaust you.

Vic was lucky in the parents he was given. They didn’t care if he wanted to wear jeans instead of skirts, or play with trucks instead of dolls. It was only as he grew older, into his teens, that it gave them some pause. They knew that their daughter liked girls. But it took a while for him to articulate—even to himself—that he liked them as a boy. That he was meant to be a boy, or at least to live as a boy, to live in the blur between a boyish girl and a girlish boy.

His father, a quiet man, understood and supported him in a quiet way. His mother took it harder. She respected Vic’s desire to be who he needed to be, but at the same time had a
difficult time giving up the fact of having a daughter for the fact of having a son. Some of Vic’s friends understood, even at thirteen and fourteen. Others were freaked out—the girls more than the boys. To the boys, Vic had always been the tagalong, the nonsexual friend. This didn’t change that.

Dawn was always there in the background. They’d gone to school together since kindergarten, friendly without ever really becoming friends. When they got to high school, Vic was hanging out with the kids who furiously scribbled poems into their notebooks and let them lie there, while Dawn was with the kids who would submit their poems to the literary magazine the minute they were finished. The public girl, running for class treasurer and joining the debate club, and the private boy, the sidekick on 7-Eleven runs. Vic never would have noticed Dawn, never would have thought it was a possibility, if Dawn hadn’t noticed him first.

But Dawn did notice him. He was the corner that her eye always strayed toward. When she closed her eyes to go to sleep, it was thoughts of him that would lead her into her dreams. She had no idea what she was attracted to—the boyish girl, the girlish boy—and eventually she decided it didn’t really matter. She was attracted to Vic. And Vic had no idea she existed. Not in that way.

Finally, as Dawn would later recount to Vic, it became unbearable. They had plenty of mutual friends who could have done reconnaissance, but Dawn felt that if she was going to risk it, she was going to risk it firsthand. So one day when she saw Vic piling in with some of the other guys for a 7-Eleven run, she jumped into her car and followed them. As she’d hoped,
Vic decided to hang out in front while his friends played in the aisles. Dawn walked over and said hello. Vic didn’t understand at first why Dawn was talking to him, or why she seemed so nervous, but then he slowly realized what was happening, and that he wanted it to happen, too. When the chime of the front door marked his friends’ exit, he waved them off and stayed with Dawn, who didn’t even remember to pretend she needed something from the store. Dawn would have talked there for hours; it was Vic who suggested they go get coffee, and it all went from there.

There had been ups and downs since, but the heart of it remained: When Dawn looked at Vic, she saw Vic exactly as he wanted to be seen. Whereas Vic’s parents couldn’t help seeing who he used to be, and so many friends and strangers couldn’t help seeing who he didn’t want to be anymore, Dawn only saw him. Call it a blur if you want, but Dawn didn’t see a blur. She saw a very distinct, very clear person.

As I sift through these memories, as I put together this story, I feel such gratitude and such longing—not Vic’s, but my own. This is what I want from Rhiannon. This is what I want to give Rhiannon.

But how can I make her look past the blur, if I’m a body she’ll never really see, in a life she’ll never really be able to hold?

I arrive the period before lunch and park in my usual spot.

By now, I know which class Rhiannon is in. So I wait outside the door for the bell to ring. When it does, she’s in the
middle of a crowd, talking to her friend Rebecca. She doesn’t see me; she doesn’t even look up. I have to follow behind her for a ways, not knowing whether I’m the ghost of her past, present, or future. Finally, she and Rebecca head in different directions, and I can talk to her alone.

“Hey,” I say.

And it’s there—a moment’s hesitation before she turns. But then she does, and I see that recognition again.

“Hey,” she says. “You’re here. Why am I not surprised?”

This isn’t exactly the welcome I was hoping for, but it’s a welcome I understand. When we’re alone together, I’m the destination. When I’m here in her life at school, I’m the disruption.

“Lunch?” I ask.

“Sure,” she says. “But I really have to get back after.”

I tell her that’s okay.

We’re silent as we walk. When I’m not focused on Rhiannon, I can sense that people are looking at her differently. Some positive, but more negative.

She sees me noticing.

“Apparently, I’m now a metalhead slut,” she says. “According to some sources, I’ve even slept with members of Metallica. It’s kind of funny, but also kind of not.” She looks me over. “You, however, are something completely different. I don’t even know what I’m dealing with today.”

“My name’s Vic. I’m a biological female, but my gender is male.”

Rhiannon sighs. “I don’t even know what that means.”

I start to explain, but she cuts me off.

“Let’s just wait until we’re off school grounds, okay? Why don’t you walk behind me for a while. I think it’ll just make things easier.”

I have no choice but to follow.

We head to a diner where the average age of the customers is ninety-four, and applesauce seems to be the most popular item on the menu. Not exactly a high school hangout.

Once we’ve sat down and ordered, I ask her more about the aftermath of the previous day.

“I can’t say Justin seems that upset,” she says. “And there’s no shortage of girls who want to comfort him. It’s pathetic. Rebecca’s been awesome. I swear, there should be an occupation called Friendship PR—Rebecca would be ace at that. She’s getting my half of the story out there.”

“Which is?”

“Which is that Justin’s a jerk. And that the metalhead and I weren’t doing anything besides talking.”

The first part is irrefutable, but even to me, the second part sounds weak.

“I’m sorry it had to all go down like that,” I say.

“It could’ve been worse. And we have to stop apologizing to each other. Every sentence can’t start with ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

There’s such resignation in her voice, but I can’t tell what she’s actually resigned herself to.