Bad Boy by Elliot Wake

Author:Elliot Wake [Wake, Elliot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

—6—

THREE YEARS AGO

VLOG #131: ADRIFT

REN: I probably won’t even post this. Melodramatic wallowing, she’d call it.

What’s the word for subtweeting when you’re doing it on YouTube? Subtubing?

Whatever.

This is about her. I don’t care if she knows.

It’s four a.m., and I’m talking to my webcam instead of getting drunk with my BFF on her birthday. Because she hates me. Or at least everything I’ve become.

Friday was my two-year anniversary on T. My friends at Umbra wanted to celebrate, but I said no because it was Best Friend’s birthday. I didn’t pick my start date on purpose—I didn’t pick it at all. The clinic assigned it, and when I saw it was her birthday, I thought it’d bring us closer. Something else we could share.

I’m an idiot.

We’ve spent every birthday together since we were eleven. The past decade. Half my life. Twenty-one is a big one, and lately birthdays are the only time we act like real friends.

She walked in on me while I was getting dressed. I haven’t gotten top yet, and . . . it’s weird. It’s weird when someone looks at a part of you that you can’t stand and says, “You turn me on.” Like they don’t care how much that part hurts you. Or how scared you are of losing it, because maybe it means losing them, too.

But she didn’t put two and two together, because she said, “Hot date?”

I thought she was joking, so I said, “Yeah, with an older woman.”

We bantered until she realized I meant her. Then she said, “I’m going out with people you don’t like. You’ll hate it.”

Idiot me kept joking around. She kept rebuffing.

Finally it clicked.

I said, “You don’t actually want me there.”

“You invited yourself,” she said. “I was trying to be polite and give you an out.”

I said, “Didn’t know I needed an invitation. This is our thing.”

And she said, “It was our thing. But you’re not you anymore.”

[Jump cut.]

My first birthday in college, my natal birthday, was rough. I didn’t want to celebrate but you can’t just turn those feelings off after eighteen years. Each time the day came around I felt this stupid surge of hope, this sense that magic could happen. For twenty-four hours everything was possible and nothing was absurd. Secretly, I hoped I’d wake up as a boy. As a kid I thought if I had all boy things they’d have to let me actually be one. So I asked for a bike, and got a robin’s-egg-blue girl’s bike. Asked for a suit, got a girl’s pantsuit. As a concession to my mother, one year I asked for a Ken doll. I can still see her face crinkling, the way she looked at me like I was some ten-year-old stranger standing in her house, in the place where her eldest daughter should be. She got me the doll, and a Barbie to go with, and Barbie sat unopened in her box while I dressed Ken in the suit I couldn’t have.

Without the faintest inkling of what “transgender” meant, I thought:

This is what I’ll look like someday.

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