Parrotfish (7 page)

I decided not to bring up the subject with my other teachers. My math teacher, Mrs. MacCauley, was about ninety-eight years old and never remembered anybody’s name anyway. She usually just pointed at us, although she’d called me both Andrea and Andy a few times, so maybe she was smarter than I thought. Mr. Ludlow, my Global History teacher, called us all by our last names. Being Ms. Katz-McNair had always seemed weird, but becoming
Mr
. Katz-McNair somehow seemed even more bizarre. A mister was a grown man, like Dad, and, although I was happy with the identity
of “boy,” I wasn’t at all sure about making the transition to “man.”

Mrs. Norman continued to call me Angela, of course, since no directive had come down from God. Ms. Marino called me Grady, loud and clear, no matter how many groans and giggles issued from the class. And Ms. Unger turned out to be pretty great, or at least as great as somebody who’s basically a grouch can be. Not only did she let me use her shower and bathroom, but she told me I could leave a box of pads in there for whenever I needed them.

Which was a big relief. The whole bathroom issue was a much bigger problem than I’d imagined it would be. Before this I probably never used a school bathroom more than once a day, if that, but now, suddenly, I felt like I had to pee all the time. So even though Ms. Unger’s office was way the hell on one end of the school and most of my classes were on the other end, it was comforting to know that at least there was someplace I could urinate—or hide out—without fear, even if it meant being late to my next class.

I would talk to Mr. Reed in TV Production about all of this sooner or later, for sure. He was a good guy and I didn’t think he’d make a big deal out of it. But of course I wasn’t 100 percent sure,
and the idea of my favorite class being ruined scared me. As a matter of fact, I was surprised at how much general fear and anxiety lurked inside me these days. I’d never been a fearful person, never even understood phobias like fear of heights or water or snakes or any of those things. And while I knew that my coming out as a transgendered person was going to throw certain people for a loop, I somehow hadn’t realized how much it would throw me.

I didn’t meet people’s eyes as I walked down the hall or through the cafeteria. Suddenly, I wasn’t raising my hand in class. My legs were shaky as I changed into my gym clothes in Ms. Unger’s office, and I jumped at every noise, thinking somebody would come in and see me wearing the binder. And worst of all, as much as I hated to admit it, I was afraid of that damn Danya.

On the plus side, however, was Sebastian. He was waiting for me by our lockers first thing Tuesday morning, notebook in hand. He had enough information about parrotfish to publish a book. I looked through the pictures he’d printed from Internet sites and listened to his excited yakking while the snickering hordes walked behind us. Sebastian didn’t even seem to notice them, and having something else to focus on helped me pretend I didn’t either.

It turned out that Sebastian also had lunch the same period I did. I’d never noticed him there before, since he liked to sit at a small table in the corner behind a stack of books. And he wasn’t one of those kids who read at lunch because no one will sit with them—it’s more like no one would sit with him because all he wanted to do was read. I could tell he was making a big sacrifice by asking me to join him.

Sebastian was the only kid I’d ever seen actually eating the hot-lunch choice. He was picking away happily at something called “meatloaf and mashed potatoes” that was drowned in brown goo. I had to move my chair back from the table a little, because the smell of the stuff was enough to make me gag on my hot dog and fries.

“Do you like Stephen Jay Gould?” he asked, picking up the book on the top of his pile.

I shrugged. “Don’t know—never read him.”

Sebastian’s eyes widened. “Really? You have to.”

“I’m not much of a science person. I like writing and filmmaking. That’s what I really want to do, I think. Write screenplays.”

“That would be cool. I want to find a way to use science in my films.”

“You mean, like science fiction?”

“More like science fact. Documentaries. But I
like all kinds of movies.” He pulled a heavy book from the bottom of his pile. “I got this from the library—have you seen it?”

I took it from him.
Movies of the 90s
. Full of color pictures.

“It’s turned me on to some movies I would have missed,” he said. “Like
Groundhog Day
and
Being John Malkovich
.”

“I’ve seen
Groundhog Day
,” I said. “Bill Murray is great.”

Sebastian left his fork standing up in his socalled mashed potatoes and rose off his chair a little bit, stabbing his finger in the air. “I love movies where one little thing is different, and then because of that everything changes. You know what I mean?”

I nodded. Sebastian got more excited about things than anybody else I knew.

“And I also like movies about oddballs. You know, like
Welcome to the Dollhouse
and, oh,
Napoleon Dynamite
! Have you seen that?”

“No.”

“I’ll rent it for us sometime. You
have
to see it.”

All of a sudden a tray smacked me in the back and I felt something cold pouring down my neck. I turned around to see a couple of creeps I didn’t even know standing there, collapsing in hysterics.

“Oh, I’m sorry, sir,” one of them said. “I seem to have spilled my milk!”

The other one was laughing like a maniac.

I reached back to feel my shirt—sopping wet.
Shit
. And everybody in the vicinity was turning around to see what had happened.

“You’re a perfect example of what I was just talking about, Grady,” Sebastian continued. “You change one little thing, like your gender, and suddenly all the idiots in the school are too clumsy to carry a tray across the room. Your change has affected everything.” He smiled up at Dumb and Dumber as though he’d complimented them.

“What?” They looked confused.

“Grady’s shirt is all wet; maybe you could loan him yours?” Sebastian said to one of them.

The guy laughed. “Yeah, right. Like I’d let that pervert wear my clothes.”

“It’s okay,” I mumbled to Sebastian. “Let it go.” I knew he was trying to help, but had it occurred to him what would happen if I had to take off my shirt in public? Just because I wanted to live as a boy didn’t mean my body had morphed overnight. Was I crazy to bring all this on myself? I’d been practically invisible in this school for more than a year, and now suddenly everybody was talking about me. I knew they were. Talking
about private, personal things that were none of their business, imagining what my body looked like, wondering about my sex life. I knew it. I
knew
it. And it was my own fault. I could have kept it a secret longer—until I was out of high school, away from home, where I wouldn’t upset my mother and Laura and Eve. I could have just moved somewhere nobody knew me and started all over as a boy.

And then Sebastian was standing up, all five feet of him. Standing up with his puny arms crossed in front of his chest, glaring at my harassers. “What is wrong with you two?” he said loud enough for many onlookers—and there
were
many—to overhear him. “You’re acting like six-year-olds—dumping food on somebody because he’s different from you!”

One of them laughed. “Hey, that’s no
he
; she’s just a sicko with penis envy. But maybe that’s all you can get, huh, midget?”

Sebastian was red-faced now, and shouting. “I suppose you think
you’re
the standard we should all measure ourselves against!”

“Yeah, Kleinhorst,” a male voice yelled out. “I wanna be just like you! Ignorant and wasted!” A ripple of laughter swelled around us.

A girl’s voice said, “It’ll be a sad day when
Kleinhorst and Whitney are our standards of excellence!”

The audience hooted and laughed in agreement.

The idiots didn’t know what to do—no one was coming to their defense. The one who seemed to be Kleinhorst dropped the tray with the empty milk glass on our table and pushed past the other guy to walk away, muttering something about not wasting his time with creeps. Whitney, I guess he was, followed.

“Go, Sebastian,” the male voice said. “You told those jerks.” This time I turned around in time to locate the voice. It belonged to Russ Gallo, a guy from our TV Production class.

Russ was different from the rest of the crew in TV. On the whole the class seemed to attract the less admired high school kids: the skinny, the flabby, the clumsy, the zitty, and now, obviously, the transgendered. Maybe because we liked hiding out behind the camera, I don’t know. But anyway, Russ Gallo didn’t fit the stereotype. He wasn’t an Adonis, but he was a good-looking, happy guy who seemed to have a million friends. Although apparently not Kleinhorst or Whitney.

He walked over to where Sebastian and I were sitting, pulling a blue denim shirt out of his backpack.

“Hey, I’ve got an extra shirt,” he said. “I brought it yesterday for my cable interview with the band teacher. Mr. Reed said I couldn’t just wear a T-shirt. You can give it back to me in class one of these days.”

“Thanks,” I said, taking the shirt from him.

“Don’t let those idiots get to you, man. They’re brain-dead.”

I didn’t know what to say. Russ Gallo was acting like I was a normal person.

I hadn’t noticed someone else walking up behind him until she said, “I heard you changed your name. What is it now?”

And there stood Kita Charles, Russ Gallo’s amazingly beautiful girlfriend, speaking to me.

“Um, well, I haven’t changed it legally . . . yet. But I’m going by the name of Grady now.”

She nodded. “Grady. I like it. There’s ‘gray’ in it—my favorite color.”

I was amazed. She
got
it. But I didn’t say anything; I couldn’t. Kita Charles was the kind of person you couldn’t stop looking at, and that was distracting my brain from coming up with words. From what I’d heard, Kita’s mother was Japanese and her father was African American. In Kita the combination of racial backgrounds had produced a stunner. Her skin was like polished oak, and she
wore her black hair in long dreads. People who didn’t know her heritage guessed all kinds of things: Egyptian, Italian, Filipino, Israeli. But she wasn’t just one thing. You couldn’t take her apart and say,
Ah yes, that part is Japanese; that part is African
. She was a perfectly mixed combination—her own unique person. And sitting there in the glow of her attention, I was speechless.

Russ looked at her quizzically. “Gray is your favorite color?
Gray?
It’s not even a color!”

Kita sighed and smiled at me. “Oh, Russell,” she said. “Sometimes you are so totally normal, I can’t believe you’re my boyfriend.”

I
asked Sebastian if he wanted to come home with me after school, mostly because I didn’t want to walk home alone. He probably knew that, but he came anyway. I’d forgotten to warn him that we were going to Santa’s Village, and his mouth dropped open when he saw which yard I was turning into.

“Wait,” he said. “You live
here
?”

“Well, somebody has to,” I said.

“Oh my God,” he said, turning in circles to take it all in. “We used to come here. When I was little. I remember that Santa stuffed into the chimney and those teddy bears and that—”

“I know, I know. We’re part of everybody’s magical childhood memories,” I said, waiting for him to laugh at it all with me. He didn’t.

“The Barbies are still here too!” he said, pointing.

Obviously, nobody ever forgets the Barbies. “So were you ever here at night?” I asked. “When the curtains were open?”

I could tell he was sorting through forgotten images. His face lit up. “Yeah! You could see right inside the house! There was a toy train, and a whole bunch of presents, and an old guy in a funny smashed hat who came around and lit the fireplaces!”

“The old guy was my dad.”

He smacked me on the arm. “You are so lucky!”

“You are
so
out of your mind.”

As we walked inside, Sebastian fingered the fake icicles hanging over the back door as if they’d been placed there by Jolly Old St. Nick himself. It was practically unheard of for me to bring any friends home except Eve, so I expected Mom to greet Sebastian with great relief and celebration. I was unaware, however, that there were several crises currently unfolding in the Katz-McNair household which were demanding all her attention.

Before we could see her, we could hear Laura screaming, “Make him stop it!” while Charlie drummed his fists on the kitchen counter and sang in an off-key tenor.

“The dogs crawl in, the dogs crawl out, the dogs play pig knuckles on your snout.”

“It’s ‘pinochle,’ not ‘pig’s knuckles,’” Mom
said as she applied a goopy white cream to Laura’s left knee and elbow. “Pinochle is a card game.”

“Mom!” Laura choked out her words. “He’s saying ‘dogs’ and it’s ‘worms’!
Worms
crawl in,
worms
crawl out—not
dogs
!” It was then that I noticed the purple eye shadow and black mascara dripping down my sister’s face.

“What happened to you?” I asked her.

But Charlie kept up his refrain, getting louder and louder. “They eat your eyes, they eat your nose, they eat the jelly between your toes. A big green dog with rolling eyes, crawls in your stomach and out your eyes.”

“Make him stop!” Laura shrieked, and then she began to sob.

“Your stomach turns a slimy green, and pus pours out like whipping cream—”

“Stop singing that silly song,” Mom said. “Your sister’s going crazy, and I’m not far behind her.”

“I’m going to keep singing until I get a dog!” Charlie said. “I don’t see why I can’t have a dog!”

“First of all, I’m allergic to dogs,” Mom said. She slapped a big piece of gauze on Laura’s arm and began to tape it down. “And secondly, I’m not taking care of a dog now, on top of everything else.”