Being Emily (14 page)

“Oh thanks.” I opened the drain and let the water start to run out.

“You look cute,” Claire added and closed the door again.

A few times in the past, she’d climbed into the tub with me, and I wondered why she didn’t now. Probably because her mom could come home, but it worried me a little bit. She still kissed me and touched me in that slightly possessive girlfriend way when we hung out together, but she hadn’t tried to initiate anything longer or more intimate.

Before I came out to her, we’d make out at least once a week and if we knew we had an evening to ourselves, go further than that. She seemed to really like kissing and wasn’t that self-conscious about taking her clothes off. Often she’d end up mostly undressed and somehow I’d still have my jeans on. It was easier to be sexual without the constant reminder that my body wasn’t right.

And Claire had rarely pushed me about that even though she usually initiated our times together. I wondered if she’d thought I was pathologically shy about my boy parts or how she’d explained that to herself and now that I thought about
it, that
was a pretty good explanation. In the last few weeks, she hadn’t really tried anything—not since that night she hopped into my lap when I was trying to come out to her.

What would happen to us if she wasn’t attracted to me anymore? I was already cold when I stood up from the bath and toweled off quickly. She never would have just put me in the bath by myself before.

I pulled on my clothes and left the bathroom intending to ask her. She was on the couch with another episode of
NCIS
cued up and a bowl of popcorn. She patted the seat next to her and my momentum dissolved. I didn’t want to have a long emotional talk about our relationship. This was comfortable.

When I sat next to her, she put the popcorn bowl in my lap and leaned against my shoulder. I looked down at the top of her black hair and wondered,
Was our relationship changing as I changed?

***

The first sign of a bad week was that I got my psych paper back on Tuesday with a “C” on it and a note that said “See me.” I thought about bolting for my car again, but this meeting was going to be inevitable. I waited until the end of the day, so there wouldn’t be other students around in case Mr. Cooper was going to say something really embarrassing.

He sat at his desk sorting papers, so I knocked on the open door. He looked up and ran a hand through his hair, which made it messier. Pink windburn still shone on his cheeks and two of the knuckles on his right hand were cracked from dryness. I didn’t know his story, but he was clearly not from Minnesota. If I hadn’t been freaked out about the paper assignment, I’d have recommended he get some Corn Huskers lotion like Dad used.

“Ah, Chris, come on in. I thought you might be avoiding me.”

I stepped up to the front of the desk. “You wanted to see me.”

“About your paper.
I was surprised. It showed a real lack of imagination,” he said. He tapped the paper in front of him with a long, blunt finger even though it wasn’t mine. “That’s not like you. And the end was pretty dark. Do you have a problem with women?”

“No,” I said.

“But you can’t imagine yourself as a woman.” It was a question delivered as a statement.

I shrugged.

He picked up another stack of papers and thumbed through them until he found mine and read a few sentences silently to himself.

“This end here.
It sounds like you think that no one notices you. Do you struggle with low self-esteem?”

I shrugged again.

“Chris,” he said. “You’re one of my smarter students. You have the potential to be really good with people. If there’s something bothering you or you’re in some kind of trouble at home…”

“Mom has me seeing a shrink,” I said. “And I’ve been doing better the last couple of weeks.”

“Good, good. Now, do the paper over again and apply yourself, and let me know if there’s anything else you need.”

He stood up and held out his hand to shake. He was taller than me by a couple inches, which I didn’t notice when I was in my seat. I thought we were the same height.

“Lotion,” I told him.

“What?”

“Your knuckle is bleeding.”

While he was looking at the back of his hand, I backed out the door. Do the paper again? He had to be kidding me. I wasn’t one for cheating, but this was one assignment I was going to hand over to Claire wholesale. She’d swap me for help on her geometry homework.

If I hadn’t been so rattled by the thing with Mr. Cooper on Tuesday I might have checked my psych class schedule and realized that I’d planned to skip Wednesday’s class altogether.

It wasn’t until I was in my seat that I realized I’d screwed up. This was the day we had the guest speakers from the Gay and Lesbian Action Council. As it turned out, we got one gay and one lesbian.

They had guts to drive out into the boonies and talk to a bunch of high school kids about “alternative lifestyles.” Apparently they were also talking to a senior history class and someone’s social studies class. We were right in the middle and our class was combined with a second history class, which was how another twenty students, including Claire, got crammed into our room. Like a secret agent, she winked at me and then sat down across the room and ignored me completely, earning my profound gratitude.

I already knew all sorts of stuff about being gay because a lot of the transgender resource pages I looked at were linked with gay and lesbian sites. Plus I liked girls, which meant I was going to end up as a lesbian at some point in my life. So I listened but practiced my totally bored look.

Most of the kids in the class had pretty boring questions, so the bored look wasn’t hard to come by. “What do you think about the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality?” “Do you plan to have kids?” “Are you scared of getting AIDS?” “When did you know?”
“How did you know?” etc.

The speakers were better than I expected. The woman was a marketing person for a big corporation, and the guy was a carpenter, which I thought was neat. Thank goodness he wasn’t a hairstylist. He was awfully pretty for a carpenter, though; it might have been better if he hadn’t cleaned up so well for this event. He had carefully combed, short shaggy hair that hung over his forehead and big, dark eyes along with a wide nose. He wore khakis and a button-down shirt, but no tie, and the woman wore gray slacks with a burgundy sweater that I wanted to touch to feel if it was as soft as it looked. Her black hair fell past her shoulders. I think someone at the Gay and Lesbian Action Center might have picked out a feminine lesbian and a butch gay man just to say
See
,
we’re not all stereotypes.

I listened more intently to the questions than the answers, because of the crucial importance of knowing my classmates’ various stands on homosexuality, and by association, other variations having to do with gender.

“Don’t you wish you’d just been born a woman?” one of the girls asked the man. I pushed my hands against my desk so I wouldn’t lean forward.

“Not really,” he said. “I have no desire to be a woman. Being attracted to men and being
a woman are
two very different things.”

My face felt like the surface of the sun. I prayed it didn’t look that red.

“I think your teacher has been talking to you about this,” he said as he stood up and went for a piece of chalk. He wrote “sexual orientation” across the board and below it “gender identity.”

“These are two different things and they don’t go together. Sexual orientation is what makes you straight or gay. Gender identity is what has you be a man or a woman. Since I’m a man who is attracted to
men, that makes
me gay. If I was a man who felt he was really a woman that would make me transgender.” He wrote “transgender” across the bottom of the board.

I prayed to die in an abrupt fashion like a heart attack or being hit by a meteor right then. I thought I wanted to know how my classmates felt, but now that it came down to it, I didn’t. I’d take any random act of God to get me out of this class. At any moment I was sure every head in the room was going to turn and look at me, and the only thing that kept me in my seat was knowing that if I bolted for the door it would happen that much sooner.

“What?” some guy near the front asked. “What the hell is that?”

“Jason,” Mr. Cooper said in a warning tone.

“It’s okay,” the gay guy said. “
Transphobia
is one of the last remaining prejudices that many people think is acceptable. While it’s becoming more accepted to be gay and lesbian, and therefore less cool to be homophobic, a lot of people still react badly to transgender people—probably because of their own insecurities about sex and gender. ‘Transgender’ is an umbrella term that includes everything from men who like to dress up as women from time to time to people who actually go through a sex change operation, both male to female and female to male.”

I was in a rictus of death prayer: take me now, take me now. Across the room, Claire’s hand shot up.

“Yes?” Mr. Cooper sounded relieved to have someone to call on who wasn’t a football guy.

“I don’t think it’s fair to put that all in one category,” Claire said. “Do you really think someone who cross-dresses belongs in the same group as a person who is, say, a man trapped in a woman’s body?”

“That’s a great point,” the lesbian said. “And there’s a lot of debate going on in the LGBT—that’s lesbian, gay bisexual and transgender—community about that. Some transsexuals don’t even want to be associated with lesbians and gay men because they’re heterosexual after transition and simply want to live a normal life.”

“Whoa,” said football guy Jason. “You’re saying a guy can turn into a girl and live a normal life? That’s fucked up.”

“It is not!” Claire said too loudly. Everyone was staring at her now and I could only think,
Thank you Lord that isn’t me.
“Transsexual people are just like you and
me,
they just have a much harder life. How would you feel if you knew you were really a girl trapped in that meathead body?”

“Like a pussy,” he said and the class cracked up. Except for me; I couldn’t move.

“Quiet down!” Mr. Cooper shouted. His face was really red now beyond the
windburned
spots and all the way up to his forehead.

“That’s fucked up,” Jason said again into the silence. He continued, “God didn’t make gays, and he sure as hell didn’t make men to wear dresses and want to be chicks. That’s disgusting.”

Mr. Cooper opened his mouth to shut Jason up, but before he could, a hurtling mass of bound paper smacked into the side of Jason’s head and knocked him out of his desk. He was on his feet in a second, Claire’s offending history book in his hand, lunging toward her. Three other football guys grabbed him, while the two kids closest to Claire got hold of her arms.

She looked fantastic, all that dark hair flying around her head.

“You unholy, unwashed, blaspheming, heathen bastard, you think you know the will of God! How dare you!” she was screaming, followed by a string of fairly
unChristian
words.

My body got up without me and walked down to her. I thought I was still sitting in my seat, shaking, but the preprogrammed part that played her boyfriend day-to-day knew what to do at a time like this. My hand reached out for her shoulder. She stopped fighting and threw herself at me crying.
Well, at least one of us gets to cry
, I thought.

“Both of you, principal’s office now!”
Mr. Cooper shouted. He really was a lot taller than me when he stood up straight like that.

He closed his hand around Jason’s arm and propelled him through the door into the hall. Claire followed, and I went with her.

In the hall outside the classroom, Mr. Cooper glanced at me. “You can come too,” he said in a normal tone as he shifted his grip on Jason’s arm and marshaled us all toward the end of the hall.

I ended up in the waiting area outside the principal’s office with Jason while Mr. Cooper dragged Claire in to explain why she’d chucked her book at Jason. His eye was darkening where the corner of the book hit it. Okay, I told myself, time for an Oscar-winning performance playing guy-to-guy conversation so I could make sure Claire would be okay around him and the other football
lunks
.