Being Emily (2 page)

I looked pointedly at the clock on the microwave.
“
Gotta
run.”
I grabbed the lunch bag and stuffed it in my backpack, kissed Mom’s cheek, and made for the front entryway.

Winter in Minnesota is its own creature. Like a wild animal, you have to treat it with respect, which includes wearing a down coat and huge
boots
from November through March. I toed the line on those items because I refused to wear a hat if the temperature was above zero Fahrenheit. With a little bit of gel, my hair naturally curled into loose brown waves, which I loved. Thanks to the popularity of Orlando Bloom and all of the long hairstyles in the
Pirates of the Caribbean
movies, I’d persuaded Dad that it was okay for me to keep it a couple inches long and for it to touch my collar in the back. A hat inevitably crushed the cute little curls, and so the hat spent most of winter on the closet shelf.

I looped a scarf around my neck twice and tucked the ends down into my jacket. Then I threw my backpack over my right shoulder and pushed out into the wind.

February is bleak the whole month. The days are short and cold, the nights are long and frigid, the snow is feet deep and the wind has a razor’s edge. I’d turned sixteen last
spring
and Dad insisted on getting me a car. His passion in life is restoring classic cars. He offered me a Mustang, which I managed to dodge by pointing out a ’56 Chrysler 300B in bad shape that we could restore together. Granted I had to spend the summer working on a car with my dad while he called me “son” every five minutes, but on the bright side, I got to drive a tri-toned, candy apple red, chromed-out car that looked classy, rather than the dirt-ball Mustang I-watch-pro-wrestling-mobile.

The car definitely helped my reputation around school as a cool kid, and Claire reminded me weekly how lucky I was. I was a good-sized kid for my
age,
a little above average for the guys in my class and much too above average for the girls, while Claire described herself as “a runt.” She’s 5’4” and skinny. I tried to tell her that if she’d just stop dyeing her hair
goth
-black, she might have better social standing, but she just accused me of not understanding girls. Girls, she explained, are mean. If it wasn’t her hair that stood out, the rest of the girls would find another reason to pick on her.

“I’m just an outcast,” she said. “They’re like wolves; they can smell it on me.”

My car was an ice block when I started it, and I sat in the driveway for about five minutes, freezing my butt off while it warmed up. I could have gone back in the house, but Mom would try to have a conversation with me about school or Claire. She and
Mikey
would be out in a few minutes so she could drop him at the elementary school on her way to work; she’s the secretary for a financial planning office. Most days she works from nine to three, but once or twice a week they keep her later.

When the car was warm enough, I pulled out of the driveway and pointed it toward school. Like a well-trained horse, it knew the way and drove itself while I listened to the radio. In Liberty we get four stations, two from the Cities and two Christian stations. That meant my choices were “Top 50” and “Hip Hop/Dance.” I chose the latter.

Liberty-Mayer High School served parts of three counties west of the Twin Cities and had about five hundred students in a long, low, tan brick building. Being in Minnesota we had about twelve students of color and the classes were, for the most part, equally colorless. I pulled into the student lot and slogged across three hundred feet of trampled snow to get to the front doors. A blast of hot air hit and made me peel off the scarf as I headed for my locker.

A couple of the guys on the swim team shouted greetings and I yelled back with the automated voice program that takes over as soon as I get to school. I hardly have to think about it anymore. My larynx is programmed with all the appropriate responses, and I don’t even pay attention. It’s like I wrote all the code years ago and now my brain just reads it:

/run: greet teammate

1.
speak
: “Hey man, how’s it going?”

2.
joke
about: a) sports, b) cars, c) weather, d) class

3.
make
inarticulate sound of agreement

4.
run
line 2 again

5.
make
gesture: a) grin, b) shrug, c) playful hit

6.
repeat
3–5 until bell rings

My mornings are drab. I start with science, a scheduling glitch that is an offense against all night owls, and then go to American history. Between history and study hall, I usually pass Claire in the hall and she tucks a note into my pocket.

That day the note said: “Hey boo, are we on after the meet? Mom’s working late. I’ll see you after school.” It was just a small piece of notebook paper, but my heart started racing again.

Sitting in the library for my study hall, I tried to concentrate on schoolwork, but I really wanted to figure out how the hell I was going to talk to Claire. I had plenty of “friends” from the guys on swim team to various kids I had class with, but Claire was the only person I felt excited to see on a regular basis. With the other kids it was just too hard to keep up the pretense of being Chris all the time. My life could be worse, and if I lost my relationship with Claire, it would be. I didn’t know how much worse I could handle, but if I didn’t talk to someone soon there wouldn’t be any of
me
left at all.

Claire breezily described herself as bisexual and she was the weirdest person other than me that I knew, but at times I thought the bi thing was just her attempt to be unique. She’d never had a relationship with a girl…well, other than me, but I didn’t really count because I looked like a boy to everyone.

I stared at the distant sky outside the gray library window. What was the worst that could happen? She could dump me and tell everyone at school and my parents. Then I’d either have to lie and say I made it all up as a joke, or run away. Or I could kill myself. I know that’s a really morbid thought to have, but somehow it always comforted me. If it didn’t work out, I could just opt out. Knowing there was a way out of even the worst situation made it possible for me to have a lot more courage. I didn’t want to die, but I certainly didn’t want to go around pretending all the time for the rest of my life either.

There was no way I could use the library computers to look up anything to help me come out. I’m sure the school monitored our computer use, and some other kid would probably walk by. All I needed was for one of the swim team guys to see COMING OUT AS TRANSSEXUAL in huge letters over my shoulder.

I opened my math book and made my eyes focus on the hardest problems I could find. That distracted me until the bell, and then math class itself kept me occupied until lunch. Unfortunately, Claire pulled fourth period lunch this year, so I usually sat with the swim guys or did homework at the table.

After lunch I felt pretty tired and I was trying to figure out if I could sleep through my sixth-period psych elective. The teacher was cool, but we’d been talking about schizophrenia for most of the week and I was over it. I leaned back in my chair and was preparing for an eyes-open doze when Mr. Cooper wrote two alarming words on the board: “Sex” and “Gender.”

“Can anyone tell me the difference between these two?” he asked.

Mr. Cooper was a tall man with messy red-brown hair that my Dad would call much too long, even though it only covered his ears and the back of his neck. He had that super pale Irish coloring and a case of ruddy windburn on his cheeks, so I couldn’t tell if this subject was making him blush as much as it made me. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, which made his small gut stand out, and he shifted his weight from left to right and back again, but his eyes swept over the class calmly.

I could answer his question, but no way was I opening my mouth. A football kid in the front row volunteered, “Sex is what you do,
gender
is who you’re doing it with.”

Laughter all around.

Jessica, the blond girl who sat next to me and I think had a crush on me, rolled her eyes. “What a jerk,” she whispered.

“For the next two weeks we’re going to look at different aspects of sex and gender,” Mr. Cooper said. “I’m going to hand out permission slips you need to fill out in case any of your parents don’t want you to hear about sex, as if that will stop you. We will be talking about normal and abnormal sexuality, and we’ll have someone coming from the Gay and Lesbian Action Center.”

I thought about putting my head down on my desk and crying, but then that would probably give me away as being the wrong gender. I pushed the permission slip into the front of my psych book. I’d forge the signature in study hall tomorrow. That was one conversation I didn’t want to encourage with my folks.

Mr. Cooper spent the rest of the hour explaining how sex often referred to a person’s physiological characteristics, while gender pointed to the psychological, cultural and learned aspects. I could have taught the class. Instead I sat very still and felt like someone wrapped one hand around my heart and with the other hand crushed my throat.

English saved me. I had a chance to recover while Ms. Judson lectured on 19
^th
Century British writers. Claire met me outside the classroom door when we were done and gave me a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek. I must have held her too close because she looked at me searchingly.

“You okay?”

“Long day,” I evaded.

“I’ll see you at the meet,” Claire said. “I’m driving over with the yearbook staff so we can have our meeting on the way.”

Despite her protests about being unpopular, Claire was on the yearbook committee, in the drama club and in a poetry workshop that I sometimes attended. She said she got in the habit in junior high when her mom wouldn’t let her come home early and now she was hooked.

Liberty-Mayer High School didn’t have an indoor pool, so we swam at the city pool after school most days until 5:30 or 6:00 p.m. It was a great way to avoid being stuck at home with my family. I could get home in time for dinner, eat, and then go up to my room for homework until it was time to sleep.

Tonight was the last of the boys’ swim team’s regular competitions, and our last chance to qualify for sectionals. I wasn’t the only one on the team convinced that we didn’t stand a chance. We competed against a lot of bigger high schools with their own pools and a larger student base to draw from. Plus our team wasn’t particularly competitive, which was another reason I stayed on it. Our coach always emphasized beating our own personal times over beating another team, though that may have been a tactic to keep us from getting too depressed when we didn’t stand a chance against most of the other teams.

I didn’t mind being in the boys’ locker room any more than I minded using the boys’ restroom at school. Actually the locker room was better because it didn’t have the same level of disgusting graffiti. I don’t know why guys are so obsessed with their junk that they have to draw it all over the stalls. Plus, I lucked out in not being attracted to guys, so the only part that embarrassed me in the locker room was changing into my swim trunks. I just turned into my locker and did it quickly.

Our team trunks looked like black biker shorts with the school symbol on the front of the right thigh and our colors up the sides. I pulled them on fast and shoved my clothes into the locker. Then I turned and smacked my shin into the low bench between the rows of lockers.

“Shit!”

Blake turned around a few lockers up and shook his head.
“Again,
Hesse
?”

I had a reputation for knocking into things or tripping over my own feet just about every practice session. I did it at home too. My shins, knees and feet always had two or three bruises on them.

“It’s for luck,” I told him.
“Part of the ritual.”

He laughed. Blake was a senior and the team captain. He took an immediate liking to me last year when I said I’d swim the 500 freestyle because it was the event no one else on the team ever wanted to swim. He had wild, curly dark hair that stood out from his head in all directions, naturally tan skin and the best muscles on the team. At least a dozen girls at school had crushes on him, according to Claire.

I put on my cap and my goggles so that they rested up on my forehead. Then I wrapped the big towel with our school emblem on it around my shoulders like a shawl and followed Blake out to the pool.

There were a lot of reasons to love swimming and the format of the meets was one. Unlike football or basketball where most of the team is on the field the whole time, we spent most of the time sitting by the pool stretching and bullshitting. There were twenty guys on the team but at most we had four competing at a time. Those of us out of the water only fell silent during the races, which usually took a minute or two. Each guy could swim two to four events. I only swam two: one leg of a relay and then the 500.