Being Emily (20 page)

“Boy
do
we,” Natalie said.

Claire’s mouth hung open. “Oh yeah,” she managed. “I guess that is how it is for you. Everything inside you says one thing, but no one believes you. Wow, I never thought about it that clearly. It is just like how I’d feel if I were hit with the ‘boy gun.’”

Natalie’s mom came back in and Natalie started clearing the dishes. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s the plan. We have two showers, so Nat and Emily you’re first. Then, Nat, you’re doing Emily’s makeup. Claire and I will sit in the living room and talk about politics.” She grinned so we knew she was joking, though I suspected that was how it would go. “Then we are going to
Southdale
Mall to get Emily a decent pair of shoes and whatever else strikes our fancy. Natalie says you’re not great with your voice, so I think you can just fake laryngitis. Anything you want to say, just whisper to one of us. We’ll provide the cover story. Sound good?”

I nodded, thinking that heaven was probably populated with people like this.

Natalie gave me the upstairs shower and took the one in the basement, a generous gesture that I understood when I got into that shower. It had all sorts of fancy shampoos and soaps and scrubs. Except for the lure of shopping, I could have spent an hour in there.

Natalie knocked on the door as I was drying off. When I cracked it open, she pushed in and looked at me. “Nice legs,” she said.

I kept the towel around my waist and tried not to blush.

“Here,” she said, and set down two fist-sized packets of an indeterminate nature. “Use these in your bra.”

“What are they?”

“Birdseed mostly, they’re the best because they’re pretty close to the feel and shape of real breasts. You can keep ’
em
.”

“Thanks!”

She slipped out and I dressed quickly in case she was going to barge in again. I wanted to wear the brown pants, so I used the control-top hose that I’d cut off mid-thigh to tuck up between my legs and brace the parts that didn’t really fit in girls’ pants. Then I put on my bra and fit the falsies into the cups. Natalie had a
point,
they filled out the bra so much better than cotton balls. I pulled on my sweater and looked at myself in the mirror.

I looked weird. My body actually looked like an athletic girl’s body, but with no waist. My face looked half-boy and half-girl. “Jeez, I’m an alien,” I said, and pushed out the door in search of Natalie and makeup.

Half an hour later I was back in the bathroom and I looked a lot better this time. Natalie’s mom had pinned the wig on in a way that gave me short bangs and long brown hair. I wasn’t sure I’d wear my hair like that if I had a choice, but I was not going to argue right now. The wispy bangs covered my typically male sloping brow and the ridge over my eyes. Natalie’s makeup job partly hid the other masculine planes of my face. I didn’t exactly look pretty, but I could pass if I didn’t talk.

When we got close to the mall, I started to feel extremely nervous, almost panicky. All I could think about was the stupid attempt I’d made by myself and that jackass security guard. I reached over and took Claire’s hand and she squeezed my fingers.

“You look good,” she said.

I couldn’t tell how much of that was true and how much she was just trying to make me feel better, but I was pretty sure that no one we would run into at the mall would want to go toe-to-toe with Natalie’s mom. She wore jeans but she’d put on a silk T-shirt and a navy blazer, along with thick gold hoop earrings, and I could see a hint of how tough and capable she must look in court. She parked a few hundred feet from the doors because the lot was almost full, and we had to carefully avoid the frozen-over slush puddles that were the land mines of a Minnesota spring. With a light dusting of snow on the ground, you’d think you were going to step on solid land until your foot broke through the paper-thin sheet of ice and a couple inches of freezing water soaked your shoe.

Inside the mall, it was hot so we took off our scarves and jackets right away. I carried mine under my right arm with my purse looped over my left shoulder. Natalie said the purse looked good for a thirty-second
Walmart
purchase. I hoped that was a compliment.

“I can’t believe you tried this alone,” she said. “I wouldn’t have had the guts.”

“I figured if I screwed it up, no one would know,” I said quietly, and indeed they didn’t know the horrible details.

Natalie’s mom
beelined
for a shoe store.
“What’s your size?” she asked.

I shrugged, “Eleven maybe?”

Three minutes later I was sitting on the shoe bench with four pairs of boots around me, a salesman running to the back room for more, and Natalie and Claire arguing over styles. Boot in hand, I stopped to take a deep breath of shoe leather and polish. If I kept a photo album of life’s central moments, I’d put this in. I wanted to be able to remember everything: the crazy fluorescent lights shining harshly on the red highlights of Natalie’s hair, the way Claire bit her lip when she was listening to something she disagreed with, Natalie’s mom calling all three of us “the girls,” the way the salesman called me “miss” without even thinking about it.

Everything around me seemed so real, as if it had more weight and density than my former everyday life. I must have spent a lot of time not really looking at things until now. That made sense because I spent so much of it looking at myself and making sure I wasn’t going to screw up.

I dropped right into the bit about laryngitis and figured out how to laugh soundlessly so I could join in the jokes Claire was making about women’s shoe styles.

“Not the pointed toe,” she said about one pair, and I leaned in to whisper to her, “Too witchy?” She cracked up and repeated it to Natalie and her mom.

The sales guy caught it and grinned. “Sorry about your voice,” he said as he dropped off another load of boxes.

I smiled and shrugged.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

I held up my thumb and forefinger with a small gap between them to signify “a little.”

He laughed. “Girls, nothing keeps you from shopping, does it?”

I shook my head, but I couldn’t stop grinning.

I felt like my heart had expanded to fill the whole store. It might sound silly, but I’d been crushed inside myself for so long that now that the binding was off, I wasn’t sure if I wouldn’t just keep on expanding until I encompassed everything.

“Earth to Emily,” Claire said. “Bring the Moon landing home.”

“Sorry,” I mouthed.

She patted my shoulder, “Don’t worry about it, you look like a kid at Christmas. I think you should get the brown pair. They’ll go with the pants you love.”

I did, along with a pair of black flats that Natalie recommended: my first girl shoes. I wore the brown pair out of the store, putting my guy boots in the bag.

We strolled down the mall, looking in windows and talking about
who
needed what. Natalie was interested in a new scarf, but she didn’t really need one, and her mother was giving her the “you’re over your limit” look. Claire suggested we hunt for a sweater sale. The end of winter was always a good time to pick up half-price finds.

After we looked in a few stores, Natalie’s mom proposed lunch and we all filed into P.F. Chang’s for tea and shared appetizers.

“Where are you girls from?” the waiter asked. He was a thick guy, probably a wrestler for his school, I thought.

“We’re from down the street,” Natalie said. “And these are our country mouse cousins from Liberty in to the see the big city.”

“Do you like it?” he asked Claire and me.

I nodded.

“She has laryngitis,” Claire said. “The cold, you know. We love it. We want to come to school here.”

“Let me bring you some hot tea,” he said to me. I smiled and nodded. He added, “Put a little honey in it, that’ll help.”

He went off for the tea and Claire poked me in the ribs. “I think he’s flirting.”

“Oh right,” I whispered.

But he behaved in a totally different way than if he thought I was a boy. He’d probably have left me to think of the tea myself, or expect that the women around me would take care of me.
Strange.

After lunch we figured we’d see a movie, a “chick flick.” There was a new romantic comedy that Natalie and her mom both wanted to see, and they agreed that Natalie’s dad would never care about having missed it, so we ended up with popcorn and Junior Mints in the dark theater.

“Hey,” Claire said. “Scrunch down, I want to try something.”

I scooted down in my seat, propping my feet against the seat in front of me and bending my knees. She sat up tall in her seat and put her arm over my shoulders. I rested my head back on her arm.

“This is cool,” I whispered.

“I’m just checking it out,” she said.

“You’re great.”

She shrugged. “I’m just me.”

After the movie, we wandered, blinking, into the afternoon sunlight of the lobby. “Okay girls,” Natalie’s mom said, “time to go and put our secret agent back into deep cover so I can get you back to your parents before my credibility slips.”

CLAIRE

She couldn’t help but steal a look at Chris from time to time on the drive back to Liberty. The transformation to Emily had been surprisingly effective. She was big for a girl, but as they walked through the mall and Claire looked around at other women, she realized that there was a heck of a lot of variety among women. She saw a few who were at least six feet tall, one who was well over two hundred pounds, another with eyebrows like caterpillars, women with huge butts, women with flat chests, women with chests bigger than Claire’s butt, women who looked like models, women who looked like adolescent boys on purpose. There were women with big hands and feet, women with tiny hands, one woman in a wheelchair whose legs didn’t work at all. Claire was glad that she got to date someone with all the right working limbs, and better yet, who actually looked good as either a boy or a girl. How many kids at her school could say that about their date?          

She put her forehead against the cold window and let herself doze, feeling exhausted. In her dreams her own body shifted and changed, getting bigger and more spacious. When she woke with the car pulling into her own driveway, she felt bigger than usual, as if she extended outside her own skin.

She kissed Chris, who was still grinning, and scooped her bag out of the trunk. There was a lot more mystery in the world than she’d thought.

Her own bedroom looked different to her, as if she’d walked into a stranger’s house. She spent a few minutes looking around. She didn’t feel as solid as usual and instead of being alarmed, she thought that she could choose which pieces of this life she wanted back and which she wanted to let go. How many people got that opportunity?

She got out the T-shirt and sleeping shorts she wore to bed, but then paused in front of the full mirror by her closed door. She pulled off her shirt, bra, jeans and underpants and stood naked in front of the mirror. This was her. Maybe she wanted slightly larger breasts and worried that she’d put on weight on her butt when she was older, like her mom was starting to do, but there was no question in her mind that this body was right for her. She touched her arms, her belly and then her thighs.

What was the opposite of gender
dysphoric
?
Gender euphoric?

Claire grinned at herself in the mirror. Yes, she was gender euphoric. She’d have to remember to tell Emily.

I dropped Claire off at her house and drove home. Mom was helping
Mikey
with homework in the dining room, or rather standing over him and making sure he was actually doing it, and Dad was watching TV, so I sat down with him.

“How was the city?” he asked.

“Great,” I said.

“Who’s this other girl?” he asked.

“Just someone I met online who turned out to be cool. She’s in my same grade.” I added that last bit so he wouldn’t think she was some kind of Internet pervert.

“You like her?” he asked.