Being Emily (10 page)

I pulled into
Southdale
and ended up driving around the mall twice before figuring out how to get into the parking lot in front of the theater.

“Man, don’t you wish we lived closer,” Claire said. She paused and grinned, “And by ‘man,’ I mean ‘person’ of course.”

I smacked her shoulder.
“Goof.
Come on.”

There were about two hundred people in the theater lobby. I was scanning, saying to myself “black skirt, boots, flower” when Claire grabbed my hand and dragged me over toward a girl. I thought Claire was going to ask for directions, until I realized the girl was wearing a black skirt and boots.

I couldn’t stop beaming. She grinned back at me.

“Natalie,” she said holding out her hand.

I took it, wondering at how soft it felt. “Emily,” I said for the first time out loud. “But you should probably call me Chris. This is Claire.”

“Hey,” Claire said.

I looked Natalie up and down. She looked like a girl. She was a girl. She looked great. She wasn’t quite as tall as my six feet, but she was a lot taller than Claire. Of course everyone was taller than Claire, even in her boots. Natalie had shoulder-length dark brown hair with red highlights and big, dark eyes that she emphasized with makeup.

“Come on,” she said, taking my right hand and Claire’s left. She pulled us away from the theater and down the mall to California Pizza Kitchen.

I tried to stop staring, but I couldn’t stop watching Natalie out of the corner of my eye. She walked gracefully and if her hips were narrow and her shoulders broad and solid, they weren’t more so than some of the members of the girls’
swim
team at my school. Natalie was so lucky to already be on hormones at seventeen, she could expect her body to pad her hips over the next few years. Her pelvic bones would always be narrow, but now her body knew that fat was supposed to go to the hips. We were probably the only two girls in the whole mall who wanted fatter hips.

At the restaurant, I took a chair across from her and Claire sat next to me. We ordered pizza to share, and the waiter called Natalie “miss” without a second thought. In addition to the long, styled hair and the pretty makeup, Natalie wore a tight-fitting tan sweater that made her breasts obvious. She looked like a solid B-cup to me, and I wanted to ask her if that was all from hormones or if she was augmenting with a padded bra.

If I looked hard, I could see how Natalie’s chin was thicker than most girls, but the dark copper and brown hair falling around her face masked the effect and drew my eye away. She already had great lips, not the thin lips I’d been stuck with, and her makeup on them was a very subtle pale pink. Her cheeks fell in the mid-range; I felt a little surge of guilty optimism because my cheeks weren’t as wide as hers and hers didn’t read male because her eyes dominated that part of her face.

I had obsessed night after night over the pictures I could find online of women who transitioned. I scoured them for signs of maleness and tried to prove to myself that it was possible that I could someday live a normal life as a woman. But two-dimensional photos and even videos were nothing like the experience of sitting across from a real girl who’d been born into a male body. I wanted to touch her to make sure she was solid and not just a dream.

I had so many questions that I couldn’t figure out where to start, so Claire took over.

“Look, tell me if I’m being rude at any point here, okay? We’re the country mice, you know, and I think we have a lot of questions,” she said. I nodded and Claire went on. “Can we ask ’
em
?”

“Sure,” Natalie said.

Even that one word had a slight breathiness and lilt to it, putting it firmly on the feminine side of the line. Her voice wasn’t high-pitched, but my English teacher’s voice was a smokier, deeper woman’s voice than Natalie’s.

“Start with ‘I was born a boy’ and tell the whole story,” Claire said.

Natalie laughed. “Well, it was the usual. You’ll start hearing this a lot if you hang around us types.”

“Wait,” Claire said. “What do you call yourself? Is ‘transsexual’ gauche?”

“It’s not great, at least in the sense that it kind of objectifies us and narrows us to that one thing. My whole life isn’t about my gender identity, you know. I prefer to just be called a girl.”

“But then how do you talk about it?” Claire asked.

“Some people call themselves ‘survivors of
transsexualism
’ or ‘survivors’ and some just abbreviate it and say T-girls, or TS, and some say transsexual, trans or
transwoman
. It depends on where you come from. I like ‘girl’ or ‘T-girl’ if necessary.”

“That’s cool, okay, go on with the story.”

“When I was young I played with other girls, and I got upset when my sister got dresses for her birthday and I didn’t. I played with her dolls, and by the time I was about six I wouldn’t play with boys. Mom and Dad took me to two psychologists and one of them was really smart and said not to push me about my gender, just to make sure I had lots of all kinds of toys and watch how I developed. I told Mom I was a girl a few different times. She tried to explain that I was a boy, but I just wouldn’t believe her. When puberty hit, I started getting more and more upset. I mean really confused and sad and depressed. Some days I wouldn’t get out of bed at all unless my mom made me. We went back to the psychologist, and Mom explained that I could choose to have a girl’s body if that’s what I really, really wanted. They put me on hormones a couple years ago and then we moved here a year and a half ago so I could go to school as a girl. It’s been going really well and so this summer I get my last surgery and then we’re all done.”

“What surgery?” Claire asked.

Natalie raised an eyebrow and pointed under the table toward her lap.

Claire stood up. “Okay, I’m going to the bathroom,” she said. “I don’t want to know this part.
Back in a bit.”

Natalie looked at me. “She’ll be okay,” she said, though I think she was trying to reassure both of us.

“Yeah,” I said. “So, wow, that’s really cool about your parents. What’s it like taking the hormones?”

“It’s great. I don’t feel so angry all the time, and it’s easier to cry when I’m upset, and all my hair got finer and softer and my skin.”

I reached across the table and touched the back of her hand. “It didn’t used to be like that?” I asked.

“No, not that soft.
It was like yours.” She ran her fingertips down my forearm. “You shave your arms?”

“Swimmer,” I said. “It’s a good excuse to shave just about everything.”

She laughed. “That’s smart.”

“Are you scared about the surgery?” I asked.

“A little,” she admitted. “I just want it to go really well.”

Claire came out of the bathroom and regarded us warily. I waved her back to the table. “We’re done talking about that part,” I said.

She looked a little sad but forced a smile. “So, do you like boys or girls or both?” she asked Natalie.

“Boys,” she said. “But there are all kinds of sexual orientations in the T-community. I think sometimes it’s harder for us who like boys to figure it out, because we can think we’re just gay. But then if you like girls it’s hard because you’re going to end up a lesbian and some therapists don’t like to recommend a sex change that’s going to make another lesbian. They think if you like girls you should just try to be a boy.”

The pizza had long since arrived and been more or less nibbled to death. I took another piece and put it on my plate, though I was too curious to be hungry.

“Were you always this pretty?”
Claire asked. “I mean, were you a really pretty boy?”

Natalie cocked one eyebrow at Claire. “I was never a boy,” she said. Claire blushed, but Natalie went on talking. “I look like my baby pictures. When I hit puberty, I really started looking like a guy. You might not recognize a picture of me if you didn’t know.”

“Your makeup is amazing,” I said because it was true, but also to give Claire a moment to recover.

“Years of practice,” Natalie said with a grin.

“I’m sorry,” Claire started, but Natalie waved a hand to stop her.

“You’re going to slip up, it’s natural. You’ve been really cool to Emily, and I know your
heart’s
in the right place, so don’t worry about it. Do you want to catch a movie?
Cloverfield
is starting in about twenty minutes.”

“Oh I totally want to see that,” Claire said and I agreed.

Natalie paid for the pizza, though I tried to protest, and we were off. I watched her walk and smiled more. Sure her hips were a little narrow, but she looked great. There might be hope for me after all—the faint flickering glimmer of hope that lay on the far side of having to talk to my parents. Could I get on hormones without their permission? A bitter taste flooded my mouth. The answer was as close as Natalie walking two steps in front of me and still impossibly far away.

CLAIRE

She was glad of the darkness in the theater so she could collect her thoughts. She didn’t want it to bother her, but there was something about the way Natalie sounded so cavalier about surgeries and sex changes. There were only a few things in her life that Claire hadn’t gotten around to questioning, but sex and how bodies were made was one of them.

And she liked Chris’s body. He was a cute guy.
Except for the girl-brain part.
He looked great in sweaters because of his swimmer’s shoulders, and she loved the feel of his hard chest and strong arms. Now he wanted to go and change everything. Was he going to grow breasts and have long hair and paint his nails? Wouldn’t he just look like her boyfriend in drag?

Probably not, she had to admit after looking at Natalie for most of lunch. She might not know all the details, but she could see that the medical stuff they did to Natalie had worked. She had kind of a big jaw, but not bigger than a few of the girls at school. Claire knew plenty of girls who were taller than Natalie, and a few that were taller than Chris.

When she and Chris started going out last summer, she always assumed he would dump her someday for a prettier girl, not that he would want to
become
a prettier girl. The thought made her giggle and she put her hands over her mouth.

They’d met in a two-day poetry workshop offered by a visiting teacher from the Cities over a weekend. After the first day he came up and told her he really liked what she wrote, and how could she resist him after that? Besides, they liked a lot of the same things: music, computers, computer games, books, each other, and Chris even admitted to talking to God from time to time, but not in some weird super-religious way, which Claire thought was an adorable footnote to add to every other good quality about him. They’d been dating almost eight months. Chris was already her best friend and she felt like she’d known him most of her life—only to find she didn’t know him that well at all.

She felt a little jealous of Natalie. Not that Chris was going to run off with her or something, just that she so clearly had what he needed right now.

And then there was that dizzy feeling, like the seat was going to fall away from under her at any moment. Men didn’t just turn into women, and yet here in the theater, two seats away, was very distinctly a girl who had been born a boy.
And, if Claire understood correctly, had at least one very boy part on her still.
She couldn’t help but think about it. What would it be like to go to school and have to hide that? Natalie couldn’t change in the locker
room, that
was for sure. What happened if someone found out? She didn’t know about Minneapolis, but out in Liberty lesser infractions than that sent people to the hospital. Some of the Neanderthals at school still thought it was sporting to “roll fags.”

Off balance as she felt, she also had a strong wave of protectiveness welling up in her. Chris had stepped in and stopped other kids at school from calling her “death freak” or worse for wearing all black. Just dating
him
improved her social standing immensely, which meant almost no taunting anymore and occasionally an invite to a cool party. Not that she cared about those and she’d lose all of that if anyone found out about this transsexual stuff, but he’d lose a lot more. No matter what happened, she wouldn’t let any harm come to Chris if she could stop it.