Being Emily (4 page)

“You’re sure you’re not gay?” she asked while I struggled. “I mean, it’s okay if you are, though I’ll be a little upset ’cause I like fooling around with you.”

“I like girls,” I said through my constricted throat.

“And me in particular?” she asked. “Did you screw around on me?”

“No, again no, give me a minute.” I couldn’t really breathe, but now that I’d gone this far, I had to keep going.

“Chris, you’re kind of creeping me out here,” she said, but then stared up at the ceiling. “I’m shutting up.”

Time stretched into an infinite plane. I thought about just running, standing up and going for the car, driving until I got to Minneapolis and never coming back. Then I considered telling her I was gay after all, but then I’d lose her and gain nothing. It wasn’t too late, I told myself, just jump her,
she’ll
eventually forget the whole thing. But she wouldn’t. Claire was not only smart, but she remembered entire conversations weeks after they happened. You could not get anything by her.

Claire sat up straight again and opened her mouth. I didn’t want to have to bat down another false guess.

“I’m a girl,” I blurted. It wasn’t the elegant explanation I’d intended, but I had to start somewhere. As soon as I said it, I blushed and couldn’t look her in the eye, so I stared at the left side of her jaw.

Claire cocked her head to one side and blinked, her eyebrows drawing close to each other. Her mouth opened and closed and opened again.

“What?” she said with a sideways shake of her head.

The iron fist in my throat eased now that I’d started. “Ever since I was a kid I’ve known I was a girl,” I said. “But I got stuck with this body. I thought God made a mistake, and I kept waiting for Him to fix it.” I ran my hands down the front of my chest. “This isn’t who I am.”

Her face was white enough that I worried she was going to faint or something, but she reached toward me with one hand and laid it alongside my cheek. Then she traced her thumb down the line of my nose and across my lips. She put her fingertips between my collarbones and ran them down to my sternum.

“How?” she asked.

I didn’t know if she was asking how I knew or how I planned to fix it, but I wanted to answer that first question, so I did.

“When I was about seven, Grandma
Em
sent me a set of books for Christmas,” I began.

I told her how the set included
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
,
The Marvelous Land of Oz
, and especially
Ozma
of Oz
. The first book was cool, Mom rented the movie and we watched it, but the second and third were a revelation. In them a young boy, Tip, escapes a wicked witch and goes off on an adventure to find the missing Princess
Ozma
. At the end of
The Marvelous Land of Oz
it’s revealed that Tip is
Ozma
—that the princess had been bewitched into a boy’s body and now would be restored to her rightful self.

I remembered how the first time I read that scene an electric shock traveled from the hair at the very top of my head down to the soles of my feet. In the scene,
Glinda
asked the witch, “What did you do with the girl?”

And the witch said, “I enchanted her…I transformed her—into—into a boy!”

At first Tip protests but
Glinda
says very gently, “But you were born a girl, and also a Princess; so you must resume your proper
form, that
you may become Queen of Emerald City.”

I told Claire how I’d read the scene over and over again.
How I searched everywhere in my life for the magic to turn me back into my rightful self.
I knew I was born a girl, and I wanted so badly to resume my proper form as
Ozma
had. Claire closed her mouth and her eyes turned down at the corners.

“How old were you again?” she asked.

“Seven or eight,” I said. “I knew even before that, though. I mean, I knew I was a girl. In kindergarten, I kept lining up with the girls when it was time to come in from recess and the teacher would make me go over and get in line with the boys. Before I was about five it didn’t really matter if you were a boy or a girl, but as soon as we started getting divided up, I knew I should be with the girls.”

“So what…what happened next?” she asked.

“I tried harder to be a boy,” I said. “I thought maybe I’d just missed something, that maybe everyone has to work at it, so I had Dad teach me about cars, and I went out for the swim team, and I hung out with guys and did what they did. And after about six years of that I started to think that I’d become a very good fake.”

“But you’re one of the sweetest guys I know,” she said. “I always thought you might be gay. You’re so…” She trailed off.

“What?”

“…different from the other guys,” she finished. “I mean,
there’s
the cars and the swimming and stuff, and you look like a really cute guy, and your parts work—” She gestured at my crotch, causing me to reflexively cross my legs. “But you don’t talk like a guy.
At least not when we’re alone.”

“Talk like a guy?” I asked.

“I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s just different. The only time you really talk like a guy is when you’re
mad,
otherwise it’s a little like talking to my girlfriends.” She pressed the heel of one hand to her temple. “I think my brain is scrambling.”

She stood up from the bed and stepped back a few feet across the room and stared. I watched her eyes travel up and down my body a few times.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t understand how you can be that way.”

“There are some good websites that explain it,” I said and wrote a few on the pad of paper by her computer.

“How are you going to be able to live like that?” she asked.

“What?”

“It’s not like you can turn into a girl or anything.”

Her voice sounded distant and she was still standing across the room, away from me. I couldn’t tell how upset she was just by looking at her. Was she in shock or was she taking this relatively well? I couldn’t afford to let myself hope yet and so my answer came out harsher than I intended. “I can get a sex change,” I said, the words hanging in the air like icicles.

“You’re kind of tall for a girl.”

I stood up. “I should probably go.” I wanted her to contradict me and tell me to stay. I needed to know she was going to be okay with this revelation.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

My heart clenched, and I went into the living room and put on my boots and coat. She followed and watched me.

“Does this mean we’re going to split up?” I asked before I could stop myself.

Claire’s face was still paler than usual and at first she only stared, as if I hadn’t been speaking in English. “What?” she asked.

“Are we going to split up?”

“Chris, don’t ask me that. I don’t know.” She sounded angry, each word bitten short.

“Well tell me when you make up your mind,” I said and stepped through the door into the freezing air.

By the time I’d started the car and driven halfway to my house I wanted to turn around and take that back, but I was afraid I’d find her still standing in the living room and staring after me in shock.

When I got home I had no appetite, so I told Mom I didn’t feel well and I was going to bed early. Up in my room I set my alarm for four a.m. and then lay down and stared at the ceiling. The conversation with Claire played over again in my head until I finally fell asleep.

CLAIRE

After she did the dinner dishes, Claire wandered around the house twice before settling into her room. She lay down on her bed and stared at the blank ceiling.
Chris thinks he’s a girl
, sounded in her brain like a gong that rang and echoed and rang again.
Chris thinks he’s a girl.
She didn’t know what to feel. When he’d told her, she felt angry, and then sad for herself. But as he talked about it, Chris looked so relieved that all her own feelings kept turning into guilt.

Most of the time he was so sad or angry or under a dark cloud, and this afternoon as he talked to her, his eyes lit up from deep within, and then he’d relaxed with her in a way she’d never seen in him before. She couldn’t begrudge him those feelings, but the whole situation was so awfully bizarre.

Could she ever stop thinking of him as “him,” she wondered?
That made her brain ache
and tilt sickeningly sideways, so she sat upright on her bed and put one hand on either side of her face to try to hold her mind still. There had to be answers. Chris had left the address of some websites on the pad next to her computer. It was risky because Mom would probably wonder what she was doing looking at those sites, but she already visited gay and lesbian teen sites, and Mom would never suspect Chris was… whatever Chris was. She could say it was for a school project or something.

Her mom knocked on her door, waited for Claire to say “Yeah?” and opened it. “Want to watch
CSI
?” she asked.

Claire made herself smile. “I’ve got a lot of homework.”

Her mom nodded and went back into the living room and Claire figured she was feeling lonely again. Mom’s last boyfriend had been a dud and they’d split up before the holidays.

Claire called up the websites and read until her eyes burned and all the little optical muscles around them felt sore. When she closed her eyelids, her eyeballs wanted to drop backward into her skull.

The science was hard to understand, and she’d seen a lot of information about genetics and gametes that she couldn’t wrap her brain around. What stood out to her was the fact that female bodies were the default setting for human beings. In the absence of the right amount of testosterone, a fetus in the womb would develop female. Also genetics weren’t the final story, at least not the way they’d been taught during those two weeks of sex
ed
in junior high school. She thought everyone with XX chromosomes automatically turned out with a female body, but because of the impact that hormones and other factors had on fetal development, they could actually turn out male or somewhere in between, and the same was true for XY. Some people were even born with XXY chromosomes or XYY and in very rare cases XXYY.

The cause of
transsexualism
and the broader category of “transgender”
wasn’t
known. “Transsexual” meant people who felt they were the other sex from how their bodies were born and “transgender” was a broader category that included all sorts of gender varieties. The words made her think of the singer and drag queen
RuPaul
. She liked some of
RuPaul’s
dance songs, but she couldn’t picture Chris having that kind of big hair and wearing low-cut outfits with heels. 

Being transsexual was rare, but not as rare as she first thought. A summary of ten studies over eight countries found that one in about 11,900 to 45,000 people were male-to-female like Chris said he was.
But then other sources taking data from the U.S., U.K. and India found numbers closer to one in 1,000 to 3,000.
That meant there were well over a million people like Chris in the world.

Some people online said that thinking you were transsexual was all psychological, but others pointed toward a physical cause. Two studies performed on the brains of transgender and non-transgender people who’d donated their bodies to science had really interesting results. There was an area of the brain about the size of a grain of rice called the
BSTc
. When they examined the brains of the transgender women—those born with male bodies who identified as women—they found the
BSTc
was the same size as women born with female bodies. Men who weren’t transgender had bigger
BSTcs
.

The study size wasn’t very big. After all, how many people donated their bodies to science in the first place? But if the
studies pointed to a physical truth, then it was
possible that Chris had been born with a girl’s brain but his body developed male. All this time he’d been thinking of himself as female when everyone else naturally assumed he was a guy. How weird would that feel?

Claire put her fingers to her temples and rubbed her sore head.