And She Was by Jessica Verdi

Author:Jessica Verdi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

After Catherine leaves to go get some more work done, I open my email. One more letter from Mellie.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

June 22 (11:20 AM)

Subject: “I am.”

Dear Dara,

I often think I should write to Stephen King and suggest he write a book about a transgender kid going through puberty. Because, at that point in my life, I couldn’t imagine anything scarier.

The body that I already had such a complicated relationship with was betraying me, propelling me forward into something I desperately did not want. Something irreversible.

Things were happening all over me, all at once. My voice was changing, my body was becoming taller and broader, and the hair growth kept on coming. The mirror told me “man” more and more each day. And, in direct response, my brain screamed, No.

I watched the girls at school turning into women. They were experiencing things I wished I could. They were turning into someone I’d never be, while I was turning into something I hated.

My mustache seemed to grow in overnight. I don’t know why it was the mustache that did it; maybe because it was unhideable. I could choose to not speak, and no one would hear my voice. I could keep my body covered under clothing, and no one would see what was happening there. But facial hair was plain as day, on display for the whole world. I couldn’t go through life wearing a mask, though in many ways it did feel like I already was. Regardless of the reason, it was that morning, when I looked into the mirror and saw that dusting of dark hair above my lip, that the sentence passed my lips for the first time. “I am a girl.” Not “I want to be a girl,” or “I wish I were a girl.” I am a girl.

I didn’t know how I knew it. All the evidence was to the contrary. But I was certain. And I was the only one who knew.

Another stepping-stone.

You’re probably thinking how ironic it is that it took me until that moment, when I looked the least like a woman than I ever had, to define it. But it was like a door in my brain had finally been unlocked, and all the feelings and ideas that for years had been leaking out piecemeal through the crack under the door came rushing out in their glorious, honest entirety. It made me understand why people have faith—I now knew what it was like to be so sure of something you can’t see, something that should make no sense at all.

I slid to the bathroom floor and whispered it to myself over and over. “I am a girl, I am a girl, I am a girl.” I tried a variation: “I am a woman.”

I’d known it for a long, long time. When I was three and telling my mother something had gone wrong while I was being baked and I needed to go back into the oven to be fixed, this was what I’d been trying to say.

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