Chapter Text
When I was about four years old, I found out I was a girl. I didn’t realize then that finding out your gender wasn’t something that happened to everybody. Most kids just knew. And I thought I did too, but I was wrong. I wasn’t just a boy with a mom who dressed him in pink, frilly dresses. I wasn’t just a boy with a girl’s name. Or a boy with long hair, or a boy that had thoughtless grandparents who bought him Barbies every Christmas.
I was a girl, apparently.
By the time I started school, I had learned how to be one. This too, wasn’t something the other kids had to do. All the other girls knew innately they were supposed to draw hearts, and play house and only play on the monkey bars or swings during recess because anything that involved grass or pavement was a boy thing. They actually liked dressing up in wigs and glittery, itchy, Velcro-ish, princess dresses.
As I got older I was weighed down each day by the weight of what a girl was supposed to act like. Even more than my parents, I went to church and prayed. I wasn’t sure what drove me to do it, because nothing ever came of it, but still I went. My parents were those religious people who went to church on Sunday because they feared hell, or because they somehow thought it absolved them of their fuckeduppedness. But I didn’t. I went because I knew there had to be a reason God made me the way I was, and I couldn’t stand waiting years and years to figure it out.
Years later, I discovered what I was on the internet in different chat rooms with complete strangers. Or at least, I discovered that there were others like me and they had all adopted a term to describe the feeling I had inside me that I was a man. I wasn’t ready to adopt that label yet. It didn’t feel right. I’d heard too many times in my life that God didn’t make mistakes, and I believed it.
But then something happened that forced me to reevaluate everything in my life that made me believe in God. My dad died. He died crossing the street on his way to pick up some cigarettes. He could have gone the next morning, or earlier that day, or quit a few days earlier like he had threatened to do or could have smoked one or two less in the last week. He could have never left the house to go grab cigarettes at all, but he did. Then he crossed the street, and a woman hit him in her car. This woman that hit him in her car could have gotten out of work ten minutes earlier or later, could have taken a route with less traffic home, could have stopped at a different place on her way, could have filled her tank earlier that day so she didn’t need to go to a gas station or ran out of gas earlier and stalled on the streets. But she didn’t. She hit my dad in her car.
Now, the woman could have called 911 two minutes earlier, or the 911 operator could have said ten less words, or the ambulance could have driven five miles per an hour faster, or the paramedics in the ambulance could have had five more years of experience under their belts. But none of those people did, and my dad died before he even got to the hospital.
He never even knew me. The real me. The one I had fought so hard all my life to keep hidden from him. My dad died without ever knowing he had a son.
And the worst part was, it was better that way. He wouldn’t have wanted to know.
It was at the funeral that I really started to think about everything I had believed in without ever even doubting. I had assumed that God had a plan for me, that I had some sort of destiny. Fate had played a role in my life from the beginning, hadn’t it? I had been born with brown skin and Mexican blood to a mother who was in no position to take care of me. I had been born with a certain body part and had been declared a certain gender with a specific letter. I had been adopted by my mom and dad who brought me to church on Sundays and made sure I stayed in school.
And I had been born with this feeling in my gut that something had gotten mixed up. Like my body was still trying to untangle it but with age and puberty and everyone around me the knot kept getting tighter and tighter. Eventually, all that I could do was cut it.
And I did.
When I was eighteen I moved out of the house. My mom knew only that I was going to school, not that I was going to therapy. Not that I was starting to take testosterone injections. And several months later, she wouldn’t know that I was scheduling my double-mastectomy or legally changing my name. God and I weren’t on such great terms during that time, but sometimes at night – early morning actually, after hours of being unable to sleep – I’d pray.
I’d ask Him why He killed my dad. I’d ask Him if He ever did something just because He could, if fucking with people’s lives was His way of avoiding boredom. I’d ask Him if this wasn’t part of His plan for me after all.
Eventually I compromised. You took my dad, so I’m becoming a man. We’re even.
But that was when I was eighteen and still bothered keeping in touch with Him at all.
Only now, at twenty one years old, was I starting to think about God, and destiny, and fate and whether or not life meant anything or if we were all just wandering around trying to stamp the earth in some way before we died so that hundreds of years from now whatever life was still around could say Look, this person existed, and he was trans.
I was in the hallway outside my basic fiction studio class on the first day of my junior year in college. The class wasn’t starting for another fifteen minutes, and the door was still locked because the teacher hadn’t arrived yet. A few other students had arrived early. We were all loitering in the hall, some leaning against the walls, others on benches, and a couple sitting like I was.
One of them sat right across from me. She sat cross-legged with her laptop perched on her knees. Her fingers were tapping away on the keyboard almost drowning out the sounds of nearby chatter. Her feet were tapping too, and the hems of the capris she wore rode up on her legs. She had fuzzy ankles. Not fuzzy ankles like she hadn’t gotten around to shaving in a few days, but fuzzy ankles like mine. I smiled. Her headphones snaked up under her long blond hair. Her eyebrows knitted together in concentration. She bit her bottom lip. Every few seconds her hazel eyes flitted up to glance at the clock on the wall, which turned my smile into a grin, because her screen must have had a digital clock on it.
Every once in a while I got to experience a deeply intimate moment between someone and themselves in plain day. I supposed everyone did, but I didn’t know if anyone paid attention to it like I did. Maybe it was the whole I’m-a-writer-thing, I didn’t know.
But right now, I realized this was one of those moments. This girl was existing in this world as if she were the only one here. She was so lost in her thoughts – whatever she was typing about on her laptop – that she had forgotten the world around her. She was not changing her behavior to be appropriate for school. She was not wearing a mask to hide how she felt about surrounding students. She wasn’t acting. I knew in my heart that this was exactly the person she was when no one else was around. She existed solely for herself, being who she was without considering what others were seeing. And I was seeing her the way God saw everyone all the time. That was a rare, and beautiful phenomenon that I cherished like I did breath.
I had this theory, about fate and destiny and what-was-meant-to-be and he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not-shit and all that other cosmic, intangible stuff, that love wasn’t as complicated as anyone liked to think. I knew in my soul that within a minute of meeting another human being I knew everything I needed to know about them. Of course I knew that humans were much more complicated than anything that could fit into a minute. But within in a minute, there was an energy, a spark, a sort of understanding on a cellular level between me and the person I just met that we had something worth spending more time on than one minute…or we didn’t. It was like that. Sometimes it was hate at first sight. Oh yes, I believed in hate at first sight.
And so it only made sense that if I could know within a minute that if I had to nominate a person on earth to die next it wouldn’t bother me that much to choose that one specific person, certainly then, I should believe in love at first sight too.
Not in the Romeo-and-Juliette way. Not like the hypnotizing-get-married-in-secret-after-three-days-or-whatever-and-die-for-each-other way. But in the you-know-what?-there-is-something-about-you-that-I-would-never-get-sick-of-and-I’d-probably-actually-only-love-more-and-more-and-always-want-to-be-around-for-as-long-as-I-live kind of way.
Because all love was, when it came right down to it, was this:
Love happens when you can face the rest of your life knowing there will never be a moment when you are happier alone than with that person.
That was all it took. Both simple, and extraordinarily complex. Not even I knew everything that would happen in my life, all the experiences I would have to confront that would reshape my mind and my beliefs and my purpose. Only God knew all that.
But it didn’t matter, because I could not fathom any future that I would ever mind waking up knowing that she was in my life.
I was about to introduce myself. Say hi. Ask her what she was typing. But then the sound of high-heels clacking against the tiling approached and keys jangled and a doorknob clicked and students herded into the class and so did she.
After we all shuffled around the desks and found a place to sit, my teacher introduced herself. I didn’t pay much attention to her as she discussed the syllabus, our assignments for the year and the grading rubric. Instead I looked at the desks. They were organized in a circle like writing classes often were, and like most writing classes there weren’t many students. Fifteen at most. Throughout the year a few would drop out and a few others would just skip a lot. Somewhere during the time that I was trying to decide who would stick around and who was probably a good writer based on literally nothing at all, I realized that the girl I was low-key in love with had sat directly across from me on the other side of the room.
She leaned back far in her chair with her arms crossed and her legs stretching out underneath the table. Her gaze focused on the teacher, in a detached sort of way, like her head had ended up looking that way by chance and not because she actually cared to pay attention.
Our teacher stood and clapped her hands. “Okay! Now that we’ve covered all that boring stuff, we’re gonna move on to our first assignment!”
A couple of kids groaned and glanced at the door like they might make their escape. Most of them just blinked and exhaled slowly because they were juniors like me or seniors and by now they knew better than to expect a teacher to be merciful. The love of my life looked like a garbage truck could plow through the window and she might not notice.
The teacher trotted around the desks sticking a Post-it note to the edge of each one while explaining what we were going to do. “I want each of you to write down your deepest secret. One only you know, or that very few people know. One you wouldn’t want strangers to know. Don’t write your name on it.”
Like me, most kids just picked up the damn Post-it note and wrote down their deepest secret. Really, if they wanted to, they could lie. Who would know?
I didn’t lie. I wrote:
I’m a trans man.
Then I stuck my Post-it note on the desk again and waited for my teacher to continue.
In that time, I watched the love of my life pick up her Post-it note and stroke it with her thumb like she might my cheekbone on a Saturday morning we’d both slept in too late. Her eyebrows knitted like they had in the hall and her shoulders hunched up like someone had stuffed something down the back of her shirt or maybe like one of the clasps on her bra had come undone. I didn’t know, but she looked like something inside of her was being tugged by a string that lead out the door. She wasn’t going to lie on that paper, I knew, and there was something she definitely had never said out loud before. She finally wrote down whatever it was.
Oh, if only I could be that Post-it note.
When everyone had written their deepest secret down, the teacher instructed us to close our eyes and cover our heads. We did. She walked around the room, her shoes brushing across the carpeting as she got closer and closer to me, one by one collecting our secrets. I wondered if she wasn’t looking at whose was whose. It didn’t matter for me; I had emailed her before school even started to double-check that the school had finally gotten my new name right. They hadn’t of course, so I had to send another email explaining to her what my name was and why.
She told us to lift up our heads, and all our secrets were on display stuck to the whiteboard behind her. None of them had names, only handwriting to mark any signature and they were all clustered in the center.
“Each of you will get one that is not your own,” she explained, “And you will write a story from that person’s perspective. We’ll read them in class next Monday.”
“Are we supposed to find out whose secret it is?” someone asked.
Hazel eyes widened across from me, pupils narrowing, as she whipped her head toward the whiteboard to eye her Post-it.
“No, no one is sharing their secrets. No one is going to know whose Post-it note is whose. It’s just a writing exercise.”
A few kids nodded, others looked relieved, and the girl looked like she had been brought back from the dead. I was thankful to God on her behalf.
The teacher started gathering up the Post-it notes. She looked like she was about to read them out loud, but then her phone rang. She sighed.
“You,” she said, pointing at me, “Could you pass these out? Give someone else yours.”
She handed me the crumpled up pile of notes, and I began sorting through them.
Secret number 1) I cheated on my girlfriend.
Secret number 2) I hit someone’s parked car and drove away.
Secret number 3) I stole five hundred dollars from my aunt.
I kept sorting through them. At that point, I wasn’t looking for my own, I was looking for one that would stimulate the synapses in my head enough to write about. Most of them, despite being pretty big secrets in real life, would be boring ones to write about.
Secret number 6) I fake every orgasm.
Secret number 7) I told my boyfriend that my baby is his.
As I carded through the notes, I felt like I had the power of God in my hands. At the same time I felt the urge to set these notes on fire. This was theirs to know, after all.
While I debated if I might go to hell while searching through these notes, I found the one I wanted. My fingers clutched so tightly onto it that my nail tore it.
Secret number 11) I feel like I’m a man on the inside.
My head jerked up to scan the class. Some of them had noticed me judging their secrets. The teacher hadn’t, she was still chatting on the phone with what sounded like another teacher having a printer crisis in another part of the building.
I looked for the signs. Adam’s apples? Check. Beards or stubble? Check. Size ten shoes or up? Check.
All the men in the room that I could tell were probably born with dicks.
Then I looked at the note again and realized…
I hadn’t said I “feel” like a man on the inside since I still thought I was a woman on the outside.
I looked over the class again. There was no way to tell which one of the women wasn’t actually a woman. All of them wore something feminine, a skirt or blouse or headband or makeup or whatever it was…but so had I up until my dad died. That didn’t mean anything. My fingers carded through the other Post-it notes still trying to find my own, and I did it as slowly as possible deciding that it couldn’t be a coincidence that my teacher had chosen me to pass out the Post-it notes. It was up to me to help the other man in the room like myself. He needed me, and more importantly I couldn’t stand the thought of someone else getting this man’s Post-it note. I could handle what hate and hurt came my way from ignorant strangers, but this man still wasn’t past the stage when he hated and hurt himself.
There were seven women in the room. Five wore make up. Three sat with their legs crossed. Two wore a wedding band. One was pregnant. I was nearly positive the pregnant married one wasn’t him. The thought of becoming pregnant literally gave me nightmares sometimes, and honestly even being married while in the closet would be so intolerable I couldn’t imagine comfortably sitting in this room and casually writing my secret down on a paper that others would see before the person I married even did. I crossed them off my mental list. I decided that leg-crossing was somehow an indicator that they weren’t trans too. Obviously trans men could cross their legs…but even when “I was a girl” (sounded funny in my head now) I never picked up on those mannerisms that society had deemed feminine. I never did them without thinking.
And I especially never wore makeup. Once in a while my mom had done my makeup for a wedding or something, and she had to damn near pry my arms away from my face to put that crap on my eyelids. Then I’d end up messing it up the whole day every time I itched my face or rubbed it or tried to hide it from people looking at me. But even that didn’t mean much…that was just me, not all trans men.
Just when I thought there would be no way to distinguish him I remembered her.
Oh my God. How had I already forgotten the love of my life?
My gaze wondered over to her and thought really hard about everything I had observed about her so far. The way she sat. The unapologetic expressions she wore. Her fuzzy ankles. More than anything, the terror in her eyes when she thought for a moment someone might learn her secret.
I’d seen all the secrets in the pile. I could think of no secret that would be more horrifying for strangers to find out than secretly being trans. All the secrets were something that made a person look bad, but the most that would happen to the person if a stranger found out would be receiving a look with a judgmental arched eyebrow and a tsk, tsk.
But being trans, people were murdered for that.
I sent a prayer to God that I had guessed right. That the love of my life originally thought to be a woman was actually the trans man, and I had unwittingly bumped into my eyebrow-knitted, blond destiny today.
I placed my Post-it note across from him. He barely glanced at it, until he realized I wasn’t stepping away just yet. He looked at me, then at the Post-it note. He squinted. I could tell that whether he actually was trans or not, he wasn’t familiar with the term. But something must have sunk in because he lurched forward in his seat and his jaw dropped. He looked up at me again, and his eyebrows quirked upward. I answered his silent questions by nodding. Yes, it’s my Post-it note. Yes, that’s what it’s called. Yes, I’m just like you.
I held up his torn Post-it note, and his eyes followed my hand as I tucked it into my pocket.
“Are you gonna pass those out today?” the person next to him asked, and I strode around the room pressing a secret onto the desk of every other student. Once I sat down, his eyes flicked toward me. I smiled at him, trying to reassure him. He didn’t return it, but I didn’t blame him. He still had that terror in his pupils and hunch in his shoulders. His knuckles tapped against the desk.
A couple minutes later the teacher got off her phone. She went over a few cursory details regarding our assignment. It was to be five pages long. 12 font, Times New Roman. Page number had to be in the upper right corner. Stories had to have titles. Anything written with dialogue punctuated improperly wouldn’t be accepted. If we were absent we could email it to her, but we’d miss peer-editing. The usual writing class debrief.
Then she told us she would see us next week, and let us out an hour early.
The students stood, stuffing notebooks and textbooks into their backpacks and hitching purses over their shoulders as they shuffled toward the door. The teacher was busy looking over the attendance sheet. I collected my things before I strode past the love of my life. I didn’t want to confront him, and make him uncomfortable, so I left the classroom and decided to wait outside the door. That way he could walk past me if he wanted to.
He didn’t. With my Post-it note still pinched between his thumb and knuckles, he stepped toward me in the hall. Since we were surrounded by students passing and talking on their phones or to each other, if we spoke quietly no one would pay any attention to us.
He glanced away from me, staring at the brick wall right behind me as if he could drill a hole into it with his eyes. “You aren’t going to…to tell anyone are you?”
I shook my head. “No way in hell.”
“This doesn’t mean we’re – I don’t even know if I’m –” He cut himself off, and glanced at my note again. His hair fell in front of his face, and I wished I could tuck it behind his ears. The ends of it reached his ribs. His eyes met mine again. The way they pinched at the corners, the way his brows furrowed and he clenched his jaw, it was hard to believe anyone looked at him and thought he was a girl. “I don’t even know if I’m like you.”
“I didn’t say you were,” I said, trying not to be defensive. If someone had done this to me three years ago, I probably would have acted the same way. Hell, I might have been worse.
“But you’re a…? I mean you…” he said, gripping on to his arm like he was shielding himself as he tried to find the words. I fought a smile. He might not have known what the word trans meant or whether or not he was like me, but he knew better than to say that I “used to be a girl”.
“I was assigned female at birth,” I said.
His eyes widened and his eyes flitted toward a nearby group of art students wearing aprons and holding paint brushes too big for their canvases. They crouched on newspapers and spread plastic as they painted quick hash marks across the stiff canvas fabric. He turned his head to face me again.
“But you’re a man,” he said.
“I am.”
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Eren.” He squinted at me for a second, probably trying to figure out if that was my birth name or not. If he was, he decided not to ask. “What’s yours?”
“Jeanice.” His grip tightened on his arm. His knuckles turned white as they tightened on my note.
“Is that what you want to be called?”
He hesitated, but shook his head. “It’s what everyone calls me.”
“I’m not going to call you that.”
He sighed, clenching his jaw again. “Are you going to call me by my last name then?”
I shrugged. “Is that what you want? I’ll call you whatever you want.”
He shook his head. His hands shifted to clutch on to his backpack straps. He looked away from me again, down the hall, eyeing everyone near us. No one was paying any attention, but I could understand the paranoia. I didn’t fear anymore that anyone would look at me and suspect. Ever since growing facial hair, even when I was clean shaven no one questioned me. My face always had stubble, or at the very least just wasn’t smooth or soft enough to be a woman’s according to popular opinion. But he wasn’t used to this, and I knew how loud my words must have been to him. I could remember days that I had researched “I feel like a man on the inside”, and somehow I had been certain that the words on the site were scrolling in front of my mom’s eyes too, even when she was in a completely different room.
“Whatever,” he said, tucking his hands into his jean pockets. “Just call me…call me Jean.”
I smiled. As he said these words, his stammering, his inability to look me in the eyes, and the way he tried to say “whatever” like it didn’t matter told me he didn’t come up with that just now. He’d been trying out the taste of that name on his tongue for a long time.
“Jean,” I repeated, trying out the soft ‘J’ as well.
“I mean,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck and blushing in a way that kind of made my heart sing, “that’s the guy version, right?”
“I guess. I wouldn’t really know.”
He nodded. “Jean, then.”
We were both quiet for a moment. I was trying to figure out a way to ask him out without asking him out. Of course I’d love to take him on a date, but it was too early for that and in any case I knew he’d turn me down. I didn’t even know if he liked men. But just the same, I wanted to talk to him some more. I wanted to introduce him to my world, the post-transition world and everything it could offer him all at once. I wanted me to be the person that gave him everything that I knew he had been craving since he was a kid.
He looked like he was thinking about something else. A crease between his eyebrows deepened as his eyebrows stitched together. “You aren’t going to – just, how are you going to write the story?’
“Haven’t thought about it yet,” I lied.
“Just don’t – I don’t even know you, okay. Don’t act like you know me. Just because you’re – doesn’t mean we –”
“How about,” I started, cutting him off, “you just tell me how you want it to be written?”
“But it’s due next class.”
“Give me my Post-it.” I gestured toward the orange slip of paper still pinched between his knuckles. It was crinkled and torn now.
He handed it to me. I held it in one hand while the other reached around behind me to slide my backpack off. It thudded against the tile floor and I unzipped one of its pockets to pull out a pen. I scribbled my phone number across the orange paper under my confession. Then I handed it back to him as I stood back up and slid the straps over my shoulders again.
His eyes narrowed at it, and then at me. “You want me to call you?”
“Or text me,” I replied. “Whatever works. That way I can write the story how you want it.”
He bit his lip, but nodded. He swiveled on his feet to step away, but I tugged on his sleeve.
He glared at my hand, but I didn’t let go just yet.
“Hey, if you – it doesn’t have to be just about writing, okay? If you have any other questions about – about your situation, you can just ask.”
Jean didn’t respond. He jerked his arm once and my hand released him. Then he strode away.
At first I thought I had taken it a step too far; he probably wouldn’t call me. But then he looked over his shoulder at me, and for the second time since first laying eyes on him, he wasn’t faking any emotion or trying to hide. And he looked –
He looked scared, and hurt, and broken, and betrayed, and hostile and –
And hopeful and grateful and relieved.
I didn’t know a face could carry so many expressions as his at once. I smiled again so he would know that he really could text me. He didn’t have to feel all those things. Hope was enough. Maybe some trust too.
His head turned to face the exit. And as he walked away from me, I watched him stroke the handwriting on my Post-it note with his thumb, cradling my deepest secret in his palm.