The XX Club: a memoir by Michelle Berthiaume

Author:Michelle Berthiaume
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Fyrecurl Publishing Group
Published: 2019-11-14T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 28

The Call

A man usually has two reasons for doing a thing, one that sounds good and a real one. – J.P. Morgan

​The telephone rang as soon as Joe and I get through our kitchen door. Joe answered, still lighthearted from the early festivities. His face was ashen before he hung up.

“Kaitlyn?” I asked. Her swollen and bruised face popped into my head, the way I had seen her several weeks ago, when we had received another late-night call.

“Sarah,” Joe said. “If it ain’t one of you, trannies it’s another freak. I don’t know why I get involved with you people. I have my own troubles.” He mumbled as he headed for his bedroom without saying more.

“Joe, what happened?” I followed him into his bedroom. His head was down and Joe was leaning into his closet. He threw aside several outfits that had fallen onto the floor.

“What’s wrong? Who was on the phone?”

“Nothing,” he said, then sighed aloud. “I hope.”

“What?”

“Laura says she is gone.”

“What do you mean, she’s gone.”

“Sarah packed up her things walked out of their apartment and left. They had a fight. He thinks she went to the city to find what’s-her-name.”

“Candy? Sarah went to look for Candy? What on earth for?”

Joe didn’t answer. He picked up a blouse and held it up to his chin in front of his mirror. Sarah knows Candy enough that she thinks she could find her in a city the size of New York? I made a mental note.

“Joe, you are scaring me. Why does Laura think she went to the city to look for Candy?”

“I don’t know. Laura didn’t say.” Joe shouted.

“You’re not telling me everything. What’s going on? Why are you upset?”

I followed him around his bedroom.

He threw another blouse back into his closet without hanging it up. Joe turned quickly and started to say something but stopped.

“What? Joe, tell me what’s wrong? Where are you going?”

“Laura found a lot of blood in the bathroom and a razor in the shower. Sarah’s cutting herself again and some of her clothes were ripped to shreds on the floor of the closet.”

The XX Club lost another regular. It happened all the time. I was one step closer to being that one in six who made it through the process. It was a wicked thought, but survival meant adopting an unemotional posture. Cold, hard to the core, and unforgiving.

Like that day when I left my family, I felt nothing. I was numb. This was not my life. It was someone else’s. Evelyn wasn’t me. She was not real. She or he, whatever a she-male is, didn’t really exist. It was just a vehicle to carry my spirit to somewhere else. There was little time to grieve about someone you barely knew but I was shaking and didn’t understand.

“Why?”

Joe shrugged and pushed past me towards the bathroom.

“She thinks this Rachel is some kind of hero or saint among Ts.”

Joe was pulling on the sleeves of his bathrobe. It was too short to cover up his thick forearms.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.