Symptoms of Being Human (5 page)

I DREAM ABOUT CHOOSING THE
Bratz doll and awake with a nearly irresistible compulsion to put a purple streak in my hair. I'm feeling absurdly feminine—like the compass needle is all the way on F—so pulling on my neutral/ambiguous jeans-and-tee combination feels particularly wrong, because what I really want to do is put on a dress.

The dysphoria is going to be rough this morning; I can already feel the buzz in the back of my head. Crossing the quad feels like one of those dreams where you go to school naked—I keep imagining that the people around me can
see
how wrong I feel in these neutral clothes. I get to Miss Crane's classroom early and apply a coat of lip balm, a trick I learned from another gender fluid blogger. It feels enough like gloss to give me a small sense of outward femininity without spoiling my neutral look—and no one else can tell. It helps, a little. That
buzz—anxiety or dysphoria, I'm not sure which—recedes slightly, but it doesn't quite disappear.

I feel Solo's eyes on me as he walks into AP English, but I don't meet them. Why did he bother pretending to be nice to me yesterday, only to ignore me in front of his friends? I avoid looking at him for the duration of the class—and when the bell rings, I'm the first one out the door.

Ten minutes into AP Government, the buzzing sensation starts to intensify. My arms feel particularly wrong—too skinny and angular for how feminine I'm feeling—so I pull my hoodie out of my bag and put it on, tugging down the sleeves. It doesn't make much difference. I cross my legs at the knee—sometimes a shift in posture helps—but today, it's not bringing any relief.

French passes in a blur. All I can think about is trying to cross the quad feeling like this—or worse, walking the Gauntlet. My heart is beating in my throat now, and a numb tingling blossoms in my cheeks and the tips of my fingers.

It's starting.

But I know what I'm supposed to do. I'm supposed to close my eyes and picture the whiteboard. I'm supposed to paint it black with my mind until there's nothing left but a calm, quiet void.

I close my eyes. I dip my imaginary paintbrush into the surrounding blackness and begin to paint the board with long, slow strokes. Long, slow strokes. I'm three-quarters of the way to the right edge, almost done, when a patch of white appears on the left border. The black is dripping away, revealing more and more of the whiteboard beneath.

This always happens; I've never once succeeded in painting the whole board black. Sometimes the exercise manages to calm me anyway—but this time, it's not working.

My face is completely numb now, and the tingling has spread through my hands all the way up to the wrists. My shortness of breath must be audible, because the pretty girl with long blond hair who sits in front of me, Casey Reese, keeps looking over her shoulder at me.

As I pass her on my way out of class, she asks,
“Ça va?”

“Yeah, thanks,” I reply.

But I'm not okay.

My vision is starting to tunnel. I'm not thinking, just putting one foot in front of the other—and before I know it, I'm halfway down the stairs to the cafeteria. When I realize where I am, ten yards from the Gauntlet, part of me wants to turn and run; but I don't. I continue forward, eyes on the ground, drawing my shoulders up toward my ears as if I'm bracing for impact.

I've covered most of the distance to the cafeteria line, and there have been no taunts yet, nothing thrown; maybe the novelty of harassing the new kid has worn off. As I pass Solo's table, I'm tempted to glance over and see if he's watching, but I keep my head down instead; it's not much farther. My heart thuds against my rib cage.

And then I'm through. I make it to the outdoor hallway and break into a run. The concrete wall of the auditorium blurs past as I round the corner. Just ahead, there's a wheelchair ramp by the side stage door. It's protected by a low wall about two feet high—just enough to conceal me if I lie flat on my back.

Finally, I make it, Doc Martens squeaking as I come to a stop on the smooth concrete. I bend over, chest heaving, hands gripping the aluminum safety rail. I try to slow my breathing.

But then a hand touches my shoulder, and I flinch hard.

“Take it easy,” a voice says.

My eyes are blurred with tears, and I draw one still-numb hand across them to clear my vision: the figure standing before me is the pale boy from Government I saw sitting with the Hardcores yesterday—the one with the long nose and the lip ring. He's standing on the ramp, hands up in a gesture of surrender. Despite the heat, he's wearing that same black coat. Circular sunglasses with mirrored lenses obscure the blue eyes I remember from yesterday, and I can't tell if the look on his face is more surprised or amused. There's something soft about the curve of his jaw, and the neck of his T-shirt is cut low to reveal—

And that's when I realize: He's not a boy. He's a girl.

“I'm sorry,” she says, lowering her hands slowly, “but you've discovered my secret lair.” She gestures at the ramp. “And now, I'm afraid, you'll have to pay the toll.”

I stare at her, speechless, gasping for breath.

“I accept juice boxes, Amazon gift cards, and narcotics,” she says. Then, in response to my blank look, she adds, “For the toll.”

I recognize that it's a joke, but I don't manage to laugh. My face is still numb, and my heart is beating a frantic tattoo against my breastbone.

The girl seems to realize something is wrong, because her expression softens. “Hey,” she says, pulling down her sunglasses
to regard me with those bright-blue eyes. “Hey, sit down.” She moves to help me sit on the ramp—well, it's more like I fall and she catches me—and then she pulls off her backpack and produces a juice box. “Here, drink this.” She punches in the straw and hands it to me, and I drink. My heartbeat slows. The tingling recedes a little.

She sits there, watching me patiently. I expect to find her gaze invasive—but there's no threat in her eyes, just curiosity, and . . . something else. Something strangely comforting.

Her voice is high-pitched and doesn't match her punk-boy wardrobe, but despite my initial mistake, I'm certain she identifies as a girl. Maybe it's the confident way she wears her low-cut shirt, or the angle of her neck as she cocks her head at me—but beneath these superficial observations, there's just a strong intuition.

What I'm not certain about is how she views me. When a girl sees me as a guy, I usually feel dismissed as unworthy or, at best, as nonthreatening. When a girl thinks I'm a
girl
, I get the feeling she's comparing and judging me. But
this
girl isn't doing any of those things. Her posture is open, her body relaxed. And even though her eyes are hidden behind mirrored lenses, there's an intimacy about her expression that penetrates my wall of anxiety and sends a shiver through me—but a shiver of what? I don't know.

“Are you diabetic?” she says.

I shake my head. She frowns.

“Are you having a psychic vision?”

I shake my head again, feeling the hint of a smile curl the corners of my mouth. “I can wait,” she says, glancing at her
wrist in a gesture of feigned impatience.

A slurping sound informs me that I have finished this juice box, which is odd, because I don't remember tasting it at all. The girl pulls another out of her backpack and offers it to me. I reach for it, but she pulls it back.

“I require a name,” she says.

I smile. “Your parents didn't give you one?”

She opens her mouth in mock surprise and leaps to her feet.

“The creature speaks!” she says, standing and shouting down at the parking lot below. “I hath revived it with mine purple potion!”

I glance up nervously, checking to see if anyone's looking at us. Is this girl making fun of me? I can't tell. But the last thing I want, the last thing I can
handle
right now, is more attention.

“Listen,” I say. “Please don't—”

But Lip Ring Girl is now making a four-point bow, blowing kisses to an imaginary audience. “I'd like to thank the Academy, my fans, my team at Minute Maid who—”

At this point I reach up, grab her by the sleeve, and yank her back down onto the ramp. “Riley,” I say, exasperated. “My name is Riley. Please, just don't attract any more attention.”

“Right,” she says, straightening her collar. “Riley Cavanaugh.”

She
knows my name, too?

At the look on my face, the girl puts up her hands again. “I'm not a stalker. Brennan said your name in Government yesterday.” She leans in. “He called on you, and I tried to bail you out, remember?”

I nod. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“Then you pulled that obscure factoid out of thin air. Maybe I ought to make you tutor me, as partial payment.” She tilts her head and squints like she's examining me. After a moment, she nods. “I'm Bec.”

I blink at her. “Short for Rebecca?”

She closes her eyes for a moment and lets out an exasperated sigh. “
Le bec
,” she says, “is French for ‘beak.'” She gestures to her face. “I have a large nose. Beak-like, one might say. Therefore,
Bec.
”

I frown. “Who could've possibly given you that name? Some mean French kid?”

“Absolutely not,” she says. “I gave it to myself.”

I shake my head, incredulous.

“Not everyone is born a
Riley
,” she says. And then her thin lips form a delightfully crooked smile. It's contagious. She offers me the second juice box, and I take it.

“Did you . . . follow me behind the building?”

“Yes, I did,” she says, sounding completely unperturbed.

I take a long sip through the straw. “Why?”

“After yesterday, I didn't think you'd come anywhere near the caf again. I told myself that, if you did, then you were the kind of person I wanted to meet.” She inclines her head like a Renaissance courtier. “Well met, Riley Cavanaugh.”

She noticed me? Two days in a row? I gape at her, then realize what I'm doing and clamp my jaw shut.

“So,” she says, glossing over my awkwardness as though this sort of thing happens to her all the time. “You're a transfer?”

“Yeah.”

“Where from?”

I hesitate, then say, “Immaculate Heart.”

Bec starts to laugh, something between a giggle and a chuckle. I feel myself blush. I start to get up, but she grabs my hand. Her fingers are cold, her palm smooth, and her touch sends goose bumps up my arm.

“I wasn't laughing at you, I promise. Look.” She pulls open her peacoat, revealing the graphic on her T-shirt: a large black cross inside a red circle with a diagonal line running through it. Above that, the caption reads: BAD RELIGION. “I was laughing at the irony,” she says, “that I'm welcoming your defection from Catholic school wearing a Bad Religion shirt.”

“Oh, right,” I say, relieved, “the band.” When she lets go of my hand, I feel a pang of disappointment. She pats the ground next to her, and I sit. “I thought maybe you were referring to my school's unfortunate nickname.”

Bec leans in. “You realize you're going to tell me, right?”

I sigh. Of course I am. “Instead of Immaculate Heart, they called it ‘I Masturbate Hard.'”

Bec laughs. It starts out as that low chuckle, but quickly becomes a full-on guffaw. Now, I start laughing, too.

“Sounds like my kind of place,” Bec says, finally regaining her breath. When I realize what she's implying, I feel myself blush for the nine thousandth time in two days. Our laughter fades, and I notice that, though my heart is still beating harder than usual, the tingling in my hands and face is almost gone.

“What's your real name?” I ask.

But Bec speaks right on the heels of my last word, as if she didn't hear me.

“So, you're not diabetic,” she says. “Were you, like, about to have a seizure? Is it epilepsy?”

I open my mouth to reply, and then the bell rings, a long, ugly wail. It's how I imagine the lights-out buzzer sounds at Folsom Prison.

Bec gets to her feet and offers me a hand. I take it. She pulls me up and we just stand there, looking at each other. Finally, I can't take the silence anymore. “Saved by the bell,” I say.

She blinks. “You're better than a cliché.”

My stomach does a flip. I almost ask her,
How do you know?
But at the thought of saying the words, my face goes hot as a match head. Unable to meet her gaze any longer, I glance down at the unopened juice box in my hand, and offer it back to her.

“Keep it,” she says, then turns and walks down the ramp.

MOM'S SCHOOL HAD AN EARLY-OUT
day, so I'm not surprised to find her minivan already in the driveway when I get home, but what I don't expect to see is the unfamiliar red Mercedes that's parked next it to it. If Mom's having some kind of campaign-related meeting, I don't want to get drawn into it, so I enter the house as quietly as I can. I hear voices drifting up from the kitchen; she's definitely not alone. I turn to head upstairs to my room—and then the door to the downstairs bathroom opens.

A short girl about my age with long brown hair steps out. She looks up, and my mouth drops open slightly in surprise—it's the girl who called me
it
. Hastily, she tugs down her sleeves and folds her arms—and then she appears to recognize me, too.

“Hi,” she says, but it sounds more like a threat than a greeting.

“Hi,” I reply.

I'm about to ask what she's doing in my house when a voice calls from the kitchen, “Sierra, come in here. I want you to show Mrs. Cavanaugh how the tea tree oil cleared up those blemishes.”

The girl—Sierra—closes her eyes, shakes her head, then turns and walks back toward the kitchen. I'm already heading for the stairs when my mom calls me.

“Riley? Did I hear you come in?”

I grip the banister. I don't want to go in there—but now I don't really have a choice. “Yeah, Mom.”

“Come in and say hello.”

Cautiously, I approach and peek around the corner.

With her tight red dress and long, shiny hair, Sierra's mom looks more like an older sister. She's seated across from my mother at the table with a case of little glass bottles between them. The kitchen smells like a potpourri factory.

“Look at the size of these blemishes,” she says, swiping through photos on her phone. Mom is trying to be polite, but I can see that she's embarrassed. Sierra's mom continues enthusiastically. “You know teenagers, they eat junk all day and refuse to take care of their skin. But this stuff works like a miracle. Sierra, turn around, show her what it looks like now.”

“Mom—” Sierra starts to protest, but her mother flaps an impatient hand at her. Reluctantly, Sierra turns and her mother lifts up the back of her shirt. Now
I'm
embarrassed, and I start to retreat into the hallway, but it's too late—Sierra makes eye contact with me. I expect her to shoot me a dirty look, but she just grits her teeth and looks away. When her mother finally lets
her sit down, I take a half step into the room, trying to act as if I haven't been watching the whole time.

My mom makes the introductions, which I acknowledge from the archway.

“Sierra runs the peer tutoring program,” my mother says. “Maybe you could join.”

I try to hide my revulsion at the thought of working alongside this girl who so obviously loathes me—but Mom seems to read my thoughts, because she shoots me an apologetic look. I glance at Sierra to gauge her reaction, but she's too busy glaring at her mother.

Sierra's mom—Mrs. Wells—ignores her, turning her attention to me. “Riley,” she says, “you have such fair skin. Are you using a chemical-free sunscreen?” She reaches for one of the bottles. I open my mouth to say something, I'm not sure what—but my mother intervenes.

“I know you'd love to stay and socialize, honey,” she says, “but you still have a month's worth of homework to catch up on. Better get to it.”

And then, I swear to God, she winks at me. I suppress a smile. My mother just came to my rescue. I forgive the “honey” immediately. In fact, I kind of want to run into the room and hug her, but instead, I turn and head upstairs.

I know I should feel bad for Sierra—clearly her mom makes her life a nightmare—but I can't forget how she treated me yesterday, and it's obvious she doesn't feel bad for me. I pull my copy of
The Crucible
out my bag, flop on my bed, and read until dinner.

Mom excuses me from dish duty so I can log more time catching up on homework—but my brain is already fried from two hours of Arthur Miller, so I decide to click around Bloglr instead. When my dash comes up, I frown at the numbers.

MESSAGES: 1

FOLLOWERS: 58

That can't be right; when I wrote my first post yesterday, I had precisely one follower. How could that jump to almost sixty overnight?

I click on the activity icon. My original post, “Both and Neither,” which I put up only yesterday, has been liked, commented on, or reblogged over a hundred times. Beneath the hashtags is a stream of comments:

BPButtercup: Wow. Just Wow.

IrishPaulie: ^^This.

phoebe98: I feel u Alix!!

I have to scroll down to read them all.

I click on Followers, and a list appears. There's QueerBoi1996, MiMi_Q, gowestyounglady, and more than fifty others. All of them are Bloglr users who read my first post and decided to follow me.

I sit back and stare at the screen as my skepticism gives way to surprised acceptance. I know how they found me—the same way I discovered there was a name for what I was feeling—by searching the internet. Browsing hashtags. And honestly, it
wouldn't have surprised me if a few dozen people had found my first post at random and liked it—but over a
hundred
? In one day?

I lean in and move my pointer down to my second-ever Bloglr message. I consider clicking Delete without opening it; I don't want to spoil my good mood with a repeat of “your a fag.” But, after a moment, I can't stand not knowing what it says, and I click the message.

yell0wbedwetter: You are #@%^& hilarious and super helpful. Please post more!!

I want to reply, but I don't know what to say. Finally, I just type “thanks ☺” and click Send.

I'm oddly touched that some random stranger wrote to me. The idea that my writing actually helped someone else makes me want to do more—so I decide to take yell0wbedwetter's advice. I open a new post and start to write.

NEW POST: MY RAGING HYPOCRISY. ALSO, LIGHTSABERS.

OCTOBER 2, 9:47 PM

Today, I met a boy.

Well . . . I thought I met a boy. Actually, I met a girl. That's right: I got all prematurely gender-assigny . . . and I was WRONG.

In my defense, I was in the middle of a fairly epic anxiety episode, and she—whom I thought was a he—has these unsettlingly gorgeous blue eyes. NO ONE could be
expected to maintain objectivity while under the gaze of those eyes. They were, like, lightsaber blue. My guts have turned to Jell-O just replaying the scene in my head.

Oh, and did I mention the lip ring? HOT.

NOW PLAYING: “There She Goes” by the La's

Okay. Given the fact that even I am capable of making premature assumptions about someone's gender, I will attempt to explain this with less than my usual dose of Gender Fluid Rage™. (Which, by the way, is the name of my new punk band.) The point here is that somebody's gender expression—in this case, Lip Ring Girl's goth-boy vibe—doesn't necessarily indicate their gender identity. There are dudes who like to cross-dress (expression), but are still 100% comfortable being dudes (identity), and vice versa. So, even if you had X-ray vision and could see through my jeans, what you'd see there—or not see—does not determine my gender identity. Gender identity is not external. It isn't dictated by your anatomy. It's internal. It's something you feel, not something you see—and it can be way more complicated than just male or female. Some people, like me, slide on a continuum between the two. Others, as I've learned via my pathological blog-reading obsession, feel like neither, or like a third, unnamed gender.

I can't blame you for trying to categorize me. It's a human instinct. It's why scientists are, to this day, completely flabbergasted by the duck-billed platypus: it's furry like a mammal, but lays eggs like a bird. It defies conventional classification.

I AM THE PLATYPUS. (Coo coo ka-choo.)

We're all taught from a young age that there are only two choices: pink or blue, Bratz or Power Rangers, cheerleading or football. We see gender in two dimensions because that's what society has taught us from birth. But, are you ready for a shocking revelation?

SOCIETY NEEDS TO CHANGE.

#genderfluid #crushinghard #lightsaberblue

When I'm done, I obsessively reread, tweak, delete, and rewrite. I want it to be funny—but more than that, I want it to be true
.
By the time I click Post, it's well past midnight. I ought to be exhausted from staying up so late last night, but I'm not. Reliving my encounter with Bec has my mind awake and racing. So instead of going to sleep, I click around Bloglr for more than three hours. At first, I intend to do some heavy reading on gender issues—but that rapidly devolves into watching funny cat videos and reblogging Harry Potter gifs. By quarter to two, my eyes start to droop—and then, at some point later, still curled up with my laptop, I fall asleep.

When I wake up on Wednesday morning, I'm certain it's going to be a girl day. But then, halfway through English, I feel a pang of dysphoria—a sort of plasticky sensation, this time in my hips—and I start to squirm in my chair. I've been sitting up straight with my legs crossed, but now I put both feet on the floor and slump down in my desk a little. I even let my left foot stick out into the aisle. It feels better.

Solo pretty much ignores me the whole period. I'm still pissed at him, definitely—but underneath, I think I'm more
disappointed. He glances up at me once, but I can't read his expression; and when class ends, he slips out before I do.

On my way to Government, I notice I'm feeling edgy; that low-grade anxiety is starting to buzz in my head. The plasticky feeling comes back, and suddenly my walk feels artificial and stiff. It takes me a second to realize what's happening: I'm fluctuating. The needle on my internal compass is inching away from feminine toward the opposite pole—and I've been struggling to compensate with the way I move. Rather than try to fight it with deep breaths or Dr. Ann's whiteboard exercise, I decide to “go with the flow.” I reach into my bag and pull out the beanie I keep in case of bad hair days. I put it on, hook my thumbs into the pockets of my jeans, and lean into my walk a little. I start to feel better on the inside—but I wonder what the people around me think, or whether they even notice.

And then I walk into Brennan's class and see Bec, and all my concerns are obliterated by her bright-blue eyes, cryptic and curious as a cat's as they flick up to meet mine. A hint of that crooked smile plays across her lips, and I feel a flutter in my chest. It's a pleasant feeling, but totally disconcerting. I try to smile back, but I'm afraid it comes out wrong on my face.

I drop my bag and slide into the plastic chair behind her. I want to lean forward, to say something to her, but before I can, she turns to face me instead.

“Riley Cavanaugh,” she says.

It's like a purr, the way she wraps her voice around my name, and suddenly I can't catch my breath.

“B-Hi,” I reply, and feel my face turn purple. I started to say her name, but changed my mind too late and ended up
sounding like a complete idiot; but Bec goes on as if she didn't even notice.

“Thursday,” she says. “Seven o'clock.”

I blink. “What?”

“Come to my house at seven o'clock on Thursday,” she says.

I feel the blood slowly draining from my face. Is she asking me out?

Without breaking eye contact, Bec gestures over her shoulder at the whiteboard. Written in red dry-erase marker are the words “QUIZ FRIDAY.”

“You help me ace this quiz,” Bec says, “and maybe we can forget about your toll.”

The pleasant fluttering stops abruptly. Bec doesn't want a date; she wants a study partner. A pet nerd.

“I can't,” I say, suddenly remembering Dad's fund-raiser. “I have a thing on Thursday.”

“Oh,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “Okay.” For a second, I detect genuine disappointment—like “I just got turned down for a date” disappointment, not like “I'm going to fail this quiz” disappointment. And now I wonder if I've made a mistake. I open my mouth to say something—but at that moment, Brennan clears his throat and calls for quiet. As Bec turns to face the front of the classroom again, I catch the scent of something sweet—vanilla shampoo?—and all my neurons seem to fire at once, obliterating any further rational thoughts. Brennan begins his lecture, but I'm far, far away. I'm at Bec's house on Thursday night, trying to figure out if I'm her date or her tutor, and discovering that I wouldn't mind being either.

Right before class ends, while Brennan is gesturing emphatically at a diagram of the three branches of government, Bec reaches behind her and drops a folded piece of notebook paper onto my desk. Just as I'm about to unfold it, the bell rings.