Being Emily (11 page)

When the movie ended, Claire realized she’d paid scant attention to it. It was only six and they had another hour to play with before they had to drive back and assure their parents that the big city hadn’t corrupted them.

“Come on,” Natalie said. “Let’s go shopping. What’ve you got for girl clothes?”

Chris blinked a couple times, looked over at her and then said, “Two sweaters, a pair of jeans and a skirt.”

“What?” Claire asked before she could stop herself. “You have girl clothes? Do your parents know?”

He blushed. “They’re in
a duffel
in my car with your name on it.”

She laughed. “Oh.
Cute.
They’re like ten sizes too big.”

“They’ll never notice.”

“No pants?” Natalie cut in. “You need a good pair of dress pants. Come on.”

She dragged them into
Banana Republic
and in a matter of minutes collected an armful of pants. Then she dragged the three of them into the large, handicap dressing room stall. “I need my boyfriend’s opinion,” she told the startled attendant and shut the door firmly, pushing the pants at Chris. “Brown first,” she whispered.

 Claire sat on the chair in the dressing room and watched with amazement. Natalie had plastered herself across the door and after a moment’s pause, Chris pulled off his jeans and stepped into the pants, turning away momentarily to tuck
himself
so he’d fit into girls’ pants. Claire forced herself not to look at Natalie and wonder what she did with her…Don’t think of that, she told herself.

It wasn’t the fit of the pants Claire saw when she turned her eyes from Natalie back to Chris, it was Chris’s face. As the pants were zipped and buttoned and he turned to show them off, his face lightened. Most of the time his eyes were dark, haunted, and looked as if he was staring out of them from far away inside himself. Now they sparkled. It was like sitting in a dark room for months and then suddenly having the sun fall through an open window.

“Wow,” she said.

“Do they look good?” Natalie asked because Chris couldn’t voice the question. If the attendant was lurking outside, they needed it to sound like Natalie was showing off the pants, not Chris.

Claire stood up and touched Chris’s cheek. “You look really happy,” she said almost in a whisper. “I never saw how very sad you look all the time. I just thought that was how you looked, but this…this is you, happy.”

Chris
smiled,
eyes bright with joy.

“I think I should get these pants,” Natalie said loudly enough for the attendant to hear and winked at Chris.

Chris tried on the next pair, while Natalie talked quietly to Claire. “My mom said something similar when I started going to school like this. She said she’d been really worried about me and suddenly I was full of confidence and optimism. I told her I’d always been like
that,
I’d just spent so much energy fighting against that other thing that I had nothing left over.”

None of the other pairs of pants worked as well as that first chocolate brown pair. When Chris was back in jeans, Natalie took the brown pants and went to the register. Chris offered to pay her back when they left the store, but she insisted it was a gift.

They said goodbye in the theater lobby with hugs all around. Claire tried not to pay attention to Natalie’s breasts during the hug, but she couldn’t help it. They felt very real, and she smelled like clover and oranges. It felt like hugging any other girl.

All the way back to Liberty, Claire watched Chris’s face. It was like the sun coming out from behind clouds. She wanted to find a more unusual metaphor, but none came to mind. She just knew she’d never seen anything like it in her life. The closest was her mom the year after Dad left. She’d turned dark for a while, but mostly that was because she literally never opened the shades of the house to try and lift her mood. And then slowly, day by day, she went from being shadowed to the life-giving color Claire remembered. Even that wasn’t as dramatic a change as she’d seen in Chris.

“You look good happy,” she said.

“Is it really that obvious?”

“More than obvious.”

She kissed Chris in the car and held tight to that newly alien, newly bright body for a few minutes. Then back through the snow to her living room where Mom was watching TV as usual.

“How was the city?” Mom asked as she
paused
the episode of
Bones
that she’d recorded.

“Great.
Really fun.”
Claire dropped onto the couch. “We went to a big mall for pizza and a movie. What about your day? I thought you had a dinner date tonight.”

“Are you trying to get me out of the house?”

Claire laughed. “If I wanted to see more of Chris, I’d just have him sneak in the window,” she said.

“You’re kidding, right? I hope you’re kidding.”

“Mom.
Really.”

“My date turned out to be a typical Aquarius,” Mom said with a sigh.

“I told you those air signs are trouble for you.”

Mom shook her head but she was smiling. She hit play and they watched to the next commercial. While her mom was fast forwarding through it, Claire asked, “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Cleaning and I hope you are too, why?”

“Can we go shopping for non-black makeup? I think it’s time for me to learn how to wear it.”

Her mom grinned. She’d been trying to get Claire interested in cosmetics for the last year, especially since the lesbian jokes had started.

“Sure honey.”

Claire smiled and settled back into the couch. If her mom knew what she was really going to use the cosmetics for it would probably fry her brain, but let her be happy about it instead. Everyone deserved to be happy.

Saturday night I watched a stupid kids’ movie with
Mikey
, but I wasn’t really watching the movie. I just took the opportunity of sitting still on the couch to replay the afternoon with Natalie and Claire over and over again. I fell asleep later still thinking about what Claire said about me looking happy. I hadn’t known it was that obvious, but I did change that afternoon. No, “change” wasn’t the right word. That would mean I’d become something else. It was more like I relaxed into me.

There had been so many years of pretense that I guess I didn’t realize how different it made me to always be pretending. The trappings of boyhood were wrapped around me in layers, like wearing all my winter clothes, one sweater on top of another and then the jacket and scarf, in the middle of summer. Everyone was so used to seeing me as a
mummy,
they didn’t know I could be any other way.

I’d learned to disconnect my ears and mouth from the rest of me so that I could hear all those words “son,” “boy,” “he/him” without them taking a chunk out of my soul every time. But what did that make me?

I wanted to live a real life. If magic didn’t turn me into a real girl, the way I’d wanted as a kid, there were other ways. Natalie had done it, and now she went to school every day like I did, but she got to be herself, fully herself. I fell asleep wondering what that might be like.

In the morning, still in the T-shirt and boxers I slept in, I silently locked my door and then sat down at the computer to start my next phase of research. I’d seen a lot of these sites in the last couple years as I was still figuring things out, but now I looked in earnest, read deeply and made cryptic notes in my science notebook. There was one site that had a list called “Things you can do before your parents know.” A few of those I was already doing, like performing well in school, saving money and researching my options. I already had my name picked out, but I hadn’t started working on my voice. I resolved to start that next.

This summer would be the perfect time to practice my voice. I could download a few tracks to my iPod and rename them as exercises from a drama class I took last year. The iPod was another device my parents had no idea how to use, but even if they did snoop, they’d see the names and never give it a second thought. Then I could take it with me and practice in my car when I was alone.   

The list also said I should take care of my skin, though there was no way with Dad and
Mikey
in the house that that was going to happen. They’d spot an
exfoliant
in the “men’s bathroom” in a hot second. Mom had long ago taken over the master bathroom as her sanctuary and I could sometimes sneak in there, but not often enough. Maybe Claire would let me keep some skin products at her house.

Next I had to figure out how to get hormones. My mom was too young to start menopause, so I wasn’t going to be able to sneak any estrogen replacement therapy from her assuming she even used it. I laughed. How many teenage kids sat around thinking about their mom’s menopause? It was possible to illegally order hormones from an overseas pharmacy. But first there was that whole illegal issue, and I’d have to be sure of the quality and safety of them, plus where could I have them sent? I’d have to work on that. Plus there was electrolysis…I was going to need to make a lot more money.

Okay, that was the plan. This summer I would work on my voice and skin, while making as much money as humanly possible. The tip sheet also said it would be good to talk to a therapist, but I still thought Dr. Webber was not my guy. I’d try some hints in the next session because you never know. Speaking of hints, I wondered what my parents were doing today. Maybe I could start to see if Mom was at all receptive to the idea of having a daughter.

I unlocked my door, showered and threw on a weekend outfit: jeans, T-shirt, sweatshirt. Mom was in the living room reading the Sunday paper, and I could hear clattering sounds from the garage.

“You’re finally up,” Mom said, talking across the hall to me while I poured a bowl of cereal.

I glanced at the clock. It was almost eleven. “Yeah, I guess I’m catching up on my sleep.”

“Do you really have that much homework?” she asked.

I took my bowl of cereal into the living room and sat on the other end of the couch from her, stretching my huge feet out on the coffee table. In Claire’s house, no one ever rested their feet on the coffee table, but here it was impossible to keep Dad from doing it, and generally if Dad did it,
Mikey
and I could get away with it.

I shrugged while I swallowed a few bites. “It’s not that much,” I said. “I do some extra stuff, you know, for college and that. And sometimes I just get interested in something and stay up.”

She smiled. “I used to stay up half the night reading when I was your age.” That only enforced my belief that Mom was a lot smarter than she let on. She never went to college because she got pregnant in the last year of high school and married my dad. Sometimes I joked that she and I could go to college together, but she ignored that. I think she’d given up. At best she said she’d take some classes after she retired.

It was easy to forget how young my mom was. In another year, I’d be the same age she was when she had me. She actually looked youngest when she dressed up for work and blew her hair dry so that it feathered back in waves from her face. When she wasn’t bustling around the house with her hair rough and her face scrunched in a look of disapproval, she was actually prettier than Claire’s mom.

“Mom, do you ever wish you had a daughter?”

She put down her book. “Sometimes,” she said. “I thought about getting pregnant again after
Mikey
. I love both of you, you know that right?”

“Sure, yeah.”

“What are you worried about?” she asked. “I know you’re not as masculine as your father, but you’ve become a wonderful young man.”

“It’s not that. I’m not worried about not being masculine,” I said.

Her face hardened and she sat up. “Chris, I know your father and I don’t take you to church every weekend, but we are good Christians and we don’t support alternative lifestyles. You do understand that, don’t you? If you have questions, you should talk to the doctor about that and get help.”

My heart shriveled into a small, dark mass and then crumbled. If she was going to freak like that at the idea that I could be gay, there was no way I was getting anywhere with the “I’m really a girl” conversation.

“
It’s
fine, Mom, it’s not that. I like girls, really.”