Adam (32 page)

Adam's phone dinged again, and Casey picked up hers, then set it down, disappointed.

Adam looked at Gillian's text:
so fucked
. He texted back:
seriously. hope they get lethal injection
. She texted back:
wish u were in my bed
. Adam texted back:
me too
.

“Alex Marquez, John Hibbings, and Cesar Padilla have been taken into custody. Marquez and Hibbings are said to have engaged in sexual activity with Ricardo Chua, who dressed in women's clothes and went by the name Nelly.”

“God, can they get anything fucking right?” said Casey. Her nose was running again, and she rubbed at it with the collar of her T-shirt.

“It's OK,” said June. “We'll go to the vigil tomorrow.” She started to put her hand on Casey's shoulder, but Casey whipped away.

“Would you stop
fucking
touching me!”

June retracted her hand and stared at Casey with a smile that looked like a skeleton's.

Ethan turned the volume on the television up.

The three guys were shown with their hands cuffed behind their backs, shuffling down a corridor. The screen then cut to a younger school photo of Nelly with short hair, looking like a boy, and then back to the happy-girl photo.

“He tricked those guys into thinking he was a girl?” said Brad.

“She didn't
trick
anybody,” said Casey.

Adam saw silent tears making their way down June's still creepily smiling face. He was pretty sure she wished she could go into her room and cry for real but didn't because that would seem disrespectful to Nelly. Her smile addressed the television.

“But they did it because they thought they were having sex with a girl,” said Brad. “I mean, I'm not saying they should have killed her, just . . .”

Oh god, shut up
, thought Adam.

Casey's eyes narrowed in on Brad. “They had sex with her because they wanted to. No one forced them. There's no reason she had to tell them she was trans.”

Brad gave Casey a weirded-out look. “What kind of sex did they even have?”

“Oral and anal,” said June softly.

“Look, if I let a girl blow me and then it turned out she had a dick—” said Brad.

“Adam, get your friend the fuck out of here,” said Casey.

“Dude, just chill,” said Adam.

“What? I'm serious. How'd she even hide that with anal? I'm not saying they should have killed her—”

“I'm
so
happy to hear you don't think she should have been brutally murdered,” said Casey. “That's really noble of you.”

“Look, all I'm saying,” said Brad, “is you shouldn't pretend to be a girl and have sex with guys if you're a dude—you wouldn't understand, it's a straight-guy thing. That can really fuck you up.”

“What, because it makes you scared you might be gay?” said Casey.

“Because a straight guy doesn't want to have sex with a man!” said Brad.

“Dude, just shut up,” said Adam.

“What? You don't agree? You wouldn't care if a girl blew you and then it turned out she was a
guy?
”

“SHE WASN'T A FUCKING GUY!” screamed Casey.

“She had a PENIS!” Brad shouted back. “I don't care what she called herself. Adam, that would freak you out, right?”

“Just drop it,” said Adam.

“I'm just saying, it's messed up to trick a straight guy like that, right, Adam? Come on, back me up, man!”

The truth was Adam knew it would totally freak him out. “Yeah, I guess she could have told them before—”

“I don't tell people before I hook up with them,” said Ethan.

Everyone turned toward Ethan. His face was unreadable, blank. A moment of silence passed, and all they could hear was the television.

“What do you mean?” said Adam.

“That I'm trans. I've hooked up with people without telling them.”

The first thing Adam felt was a hot wash of shame. Then an acute awareness of Brad sitting next to him. He looked away from Ethan, focused on the floor beneath the futon. There were layers of dust balls down there. He could feel his face burning. Adam looked up at Casey and June, but they were just watching him, curious. They already knew.

Brad started snickering nervously.

Adam looked back at Ethan. All he could see was Ethan as a girl. Naked, sitting in that chair.

“What?” said Ethan.

“Nothing,” said Adam. He turned to watch the TV but comprehended nothing, only his brain rewinding back to the first day he met Ethan, all of them sitting around the empty apartment drinking beers, and re-envisioning that moment with the knowledge that Ethan was really a girl. His brain fast-forwarded to him and Ethan in the bathroom, Ethan loaning him his electric razor, but now in the memory Ethan was really a girl. Every interaction, every conversation he'd ever had with Ethan, raced through his brain, memories doubling up on top of other memories, but now with Ethan as trans, Ethan as a girl, Ethan with a vagina.

Ethan stood up, walked into his room, and shut the door.

“So glad you came to visit,” Casey said to Brad.

“I asked you,” Adam said to Casey.

She knew what he was talking about.

“He asked us not to tell you,” she said.

June stood up and walked into her bedroom.

Casey stood up and walked into hers.

Adam went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet just in time as liquid shit poured out of his ass.

Outside, Brad changed the channel.

***

Adam lay on top of his sleeping bag, eyes pressed up against the solid hot black. He was coated in sweat. His phone lay on the mattress next to him. Gillian's last text:
wish u were in my bed
. He kept looking at it, thinking it would make him feel better, but instead it made him feel sick, made the nausea well up. And every time he closed his eyes, as hard as he tried not to, he saw Nelly, someone grabbing at her penis, hitting her over the head with a shovel—Ethan standing naked; Nelly in the grave, bloody face bashed in; Ethan with his legs spread, revealing a vagina. “There's all these weird folds,” Adam had said to him, and his body jerked in humiliation, and he punched at the mattress and saw Nelly being fucked in the ass by one of the guys, her own penis getting hard, and then the shovel.

Adam opened his eyes and was back, trapped inside the thick black substance molded to every surface of his body. He thrashed around, wiping his sweat on the sheets.

Just get some water and chill out, just get some water and chill out.

He opened his door and walked into the living room toward the bathroom. The lump of Brad was on the futon. Sound asleep. Not a care in the world.

Adam softly padded past him. He opened the door to the bathroom and was about to walk in when he heard Brad chuckle behind him. Adam turned and looked at the dark, amorphous lump.

“So tell me, does Gillian have a dick or something, too? Is that what's going on?” said Brad. Then he chuckled again, shifted, and rolled onto his other side.

THE REST OF
Brad's visit—five days—was something Adam forced himself to get through. They watched movies at the apartment. They ate pizza at Danny's Pizzeria. They took a tour of the Statue of Liberty because it was something to do, even though neither of them wanted to. They slept late. Till noon, sometimes 1:00
P.M.
Both of them just waited for it to be over.

Brad tried to bring up Ethan a few times in a jokey way like, “Dude, so he actually has a pussy down there? That is so fucking weird!” but Adam ignored him and eventually Brad dropped it.

Adam and Ethan barely spoke. They'd see each other around the apartment and each turn the other way. Over and over Adam's brain kept replaying that moment:

 

“What do you mean?”

“That I'm trans.”

“What do you mean?”

“That I'm trans.”

“What do you mean?”

“That I'm trans.”

 

All the things Adam had said to him, and what Ethan must have really been thinking. He had no idea who Ethan even was. He wished he had never met him.

A few days later, Rachel arrived.

The first time Adam saw her, she emerged from Ethan's room as if she had crawled out of his computer screen. The living, breathing flesh version of someone Adam realized up until now he hadn't really believed existed. She nodded at Adam, brushed a lock of dark hair out of her eyes, and went straight into the bathroom, head down. After that, she and Ethan were always either locked in his room or out. Why she was here, who had contacted who, what had happened, Adam didn't know. Only that something about their reunion had the haunted air of someone having given up.

The morning after the Nelly Chua night, Adam told Gillian he was going to hang with Brad for the rest of his trip. He couldn't be with the two of them together again. He just couldn't. And the thing was, when he thought about seeing Gillian, even just the two of them, the awful pains in his stomach returned. He had to bend over and clutch it, the cramps were so bad. He couldn't let her know he felt this way though. He had to pretend everything was normal, that Brad was just being a needy brat, so he texted her steadily every day—dumb stuff, like the weirdness of Caesar salad pizza or whether
Reversal of Fortune
was a movie worth watching. The occasional
i miss u
.

When Brad left, Adam knew their best friendship was over. That when Adam returned to EBP, they probably wouldn't be friends at all. Not with Brad, not with any of them. Eats Big Penis. Enjoys Black Pussy. In one and a half weeks, Adam's summer in New York would be over.

The idea. The precious little idea like an illegal firecracker, buried inside his body, waiting to be lit. That he could just get through the last year in Piedmont and then come back to New York, back to Gillian. This idea itched inside him, demanded to be paid attention to, to be thought out with actual reason and actual determination, rather than the vague, unrealistic generalized hope it had been given until now.

But if he was actually going to do this, if he was going to give this a chance as a possible future, a future where they were really, truly together—he knew he would have to tell her.

***

The minute Adam closed the door behind Brad, he pulled out his phone and called Gillian. His heart felt like a separate being from the rest of his body, the way it banged up against his chest, trying to break free and run somewhere, anywhere else,
Get me the fuck out of here!
He was going to do it. He was going to tell her tonight.

“Hey! Brad's gone! Wanna hang out?”

“Sure.”

Adam suggested they hang at her place and watch a movie, but Gillian said Claire and Lauren were having Lauren's cousin and his girlfriend over for dinner, and she kind of wanted to get out of there.

“Why don't we hang at yours?” she said.

There was something slightly accusatory in the way she said it. Or maybe Adam was just paranoid.

“Let's hang at yours,” she said again.

Adam paused. “Sure.”

They hung up and Adam walked promptly into the bathroom to stare at himself in the mirror.

In three hours she would know, and his life would either be over or a version of bliss he couldn't yet comprehend.

By the time Gillian was supposed to arrive, it was dark out and Adam was posed on the futon by the table lamp's faint glow, reading and rereading page 61 of Casey's copy of
Grapes of Wrath.
It was kind of pointless to pretend to be reading since he was going to get up to buzz Gillian in and open the door anyway, but the act made him feel calm and serious, and fit the tone of what was about to happen more than some cracked-out reality TV show blasting in his face. Casey was at Hazel's (they were back together, sort of); June was in her room, probably writing the pros and cons of various suicide methods; and Ethan and Rachel were out.

The doorbell buzzed, and Adam's heart lurched into action, attempting its panicked escape again.

You don't have to tell her immediately
, he told himself.
Wait till the moment is right.

“Hi!” he said, opening the door.

“Hey.”

Adam leaned in to kiss Gillian and she kissed him back, but there was something stiff about her body. Or was there? Maybe she was always like that. It had been five days. The longest they'd been apart since they'd met. He'd grown used to imagining her face, and this real face, in its hyper-detail and space-filling three-dimensionality, looked alien.

“I brought this,” she said, handing him a DVD of the Mark Wahlberg movie
Invincible
that was out in theaters. “It looks dumb, but Claire bought a bootleg copy in the subway, so.”

“Cool!” said Adam.

He would tell her after the movie. They would get cozy and comfortable, and he would tell her when the movie was over. He hoped the movie had a happy, inspiring, man-who-beats-all-odds ending and
not
a bummed-out “life is sorrowful but we persevere regardless, I guess” ending. He needed to tell her while they were feeling happy and inspired and like anything in this crazy life was possible. Of course, the movie
was
called
Invincible
and starred Mark Wahlberg, so he was pretty sure things were on his side.

They settled onto the futon, and Adam waited for Gillian to snuggle up close to him, the way she usually did. But she stayed on her side, knees pulled up to her chin. He hadn't planned on them making out until he told her, but he'd thought they would at least cuddle. He was strapped up with the ACE bandage because even cuddling made him hard, and when he did tell her, it needed to come from his mouth and not some
Surprise!
penis poking out of his jeans.