Mescal and dessert flew out of my mouth, landing all over my chest.
My inability to vomit until then always felt poignant. Eleven was the age I sensed a shift from boy to girl without my consent. As an adult, I would say, “I just want to be a ten-year-old boy,” whenever dysphoria belted out its annoying song, a pop hit that you know the words to and don’t know why. It’s hard to explain gender dysphoria to people who don’t experience it. It’s an awful voice in the back of your head, you assume everyone else hears it, but they don’t.
Eleven was when I last felt present in my flesh, not suspended above, transient and frantic to return. It was a departure of sorts, a path to a false identity in a shell of a disguise, entering witness protection. He’d seen too much.
I broke it apart slowly, cracking the nuanced layers to rebuild, only to shatter it all again. That pop song remained on loop for more than two decades. Now I hear it seldomly, startling me on shuffle. I’ve forgotten most of the words, thank God.
My inability to vomit did not mean that I didn’t get sick. When I was fourteen I became severely ill with food poisoning the day before a Nova Scotia Provincial Soccer practice. I rushed to the toilet at my father’s house. Shitting my brains out, I rested my head on a small, decorative hand towel that dangled on the wall. Fading in and out of reality, as if I could be sucked right out of it, flushed away. E. coli had recently been in the news, mass recalls of produce and meat, and I wondered if I had it.
Eventually my body stopped expelling excrement, and I placed my hand on the counter and lifted myself to standing. One step. Two steps. In the mirror was another face, empty and pale, barely a person. My vision blurred. Light-headed, I left the bathroom, turning off the light as the world went sideways, complete darkness and then, SLAM! I fainted, collapsing hard, my jaw and chin taking the bulk of the impact, jolting my brain. Only a few feet from Dennis and Linda’s room. I didn’t ask for help, I didn’t call for my dad. I did not want to be reprimanded for having disturbed their slumber, or eating whatever I shouldn’t have eaten.
My head pounding, I crawled back to my room, and as I was pulling myself up into the bed, Linda came to the door. She must have heard the thump. She was alone.
“What are you doing?” she said with a cold laugh. She left to get me a cool cloth and a bucket when I sputtered in response.
The next morning my mother insisted I still go to soccer. When you play for the provincial team, every practice is a tryout. They overstack the team with the best players in Nova Scotia, and you can be booted at any time. Attendance crucial, soccer was more important than anything. Perhaps my mother exhaled a sigh of relief seeing me run with all the girls.
Sixteen was my soccer number. My favorite number. Only in adulthood have I realized its connection to the date I returned to my mother’s for the second half of every month. At first, going over to Linda’s had been, between Nintendo and playing with my stepbrother, for the most part fun. But that was different from living together, where her antipathy toward me seemed to grow. I felt her annoyance at this burden from her husband’s first marriage. She could get away with it. I never actually talked to my father about how she treated me until I was an adult and I never, not once, stood up to her. I suppose I felt I deserved it, and why the hell wouldn’t I? My father knew and did nothing about it.
“Ninety percent of our fights were about you,” my father told me many years later, claiming that he did protect me and I just wasn’t privy to it.
My guess is Linda was not the only one who resented me. I felt that my father did, too. It seems like he was annoyed he had made a baby in the eleventh hour with someone he didn’t desire to be with, a puny human, relentlessly keeping the cord strong and taut.
I didn’t like growing up in that house. Anything that forced me back home as an adult caused my anxiety to spread like a brushfire, chest aflame. I’d try and surround it with large rocks, like the ring around the bonfire at my father’s cabin, firm and solid, unflinching. Instead, my body betrayed me, energy abuzzin’. Pulse rate rising, I’d overcompensate, sparing no effort to buoy up, to hide the hiding, cutting a rug three centimeters above the floor, eggshells everywhere.
The scent of my childhood home, hitting me on the way in, made me nauseated. Taking off my shoes, yelling “hi!” up the stairs, wanting to turn around, no desire to linger long enough to know the why of it all.
They’d all tease me together. “Skid mark” was a nickname Linda coined. We were all at the cabin my dad’s father built along Sable River in the early 1980s. It was in a small clearing, nearly a kilometer into the middle of the woods. There is no other structure in sight, aside from the outhouse. No running water or electricity, you collect water from a well with a silver bucket attached to a thin yellow piece of rope that echoes loudly when it meets the surface down below.
The cabin sits close to a family of beavers, their impressive lodge constructed of mud and sticks. The old winding river swerves and snakes its way through a massive meadow until morphing into a narrow, straight stretch. The current accelerates, small rapids muscle through the dam assembled by the family of beavers. Playing in the forest, I’d stumble upon evidence, their teeth having gnawed through a yellow birch.
Only once did I see a beaver fully out of the water. Sitting on the “swimming rock,” my siblings and I looked across the river as the beaver climbed onto the shore. The body, taller and thicker than I imagined, held up by its short back legs and webbed, wide feet that resembled the hands of the Babadook. Beavers can weigh up to seventy pounds, reaching about four feet in length, the largest rodents in North America. It would have been bigger than me at that point.
I observed them for my entire childhood, their bodies appearing at dusk, smooth in the river. Their large, powerful, flat tails slapped the water. An echoing force. The beavers claiming their place. Swimming in the river, the color a dark brown with a tint of yellow, like English breakfast tea … THWACK! Panicking, I’d dog-paddle to shore, frightened my leg would suddenly snap. Their strong, chiseling teeth clamping, snapping my femur like the birch. They can munch through an eight-foot tree in five minutes.
The cabin is tiny, two stories, everything wood. The kitchen had a little chrome table. The woodstove stood in the center of the cabin between the kitchen and the small couch and two chairs that sat in front of the windows that look out toward the meadow. Knees on the couch, elbows on the windowsill, I would watch deer trot through the grass. And one time only, off in the far distance …
“Bear!” Dennis and Linda yelled from the little upstairs balcony off their room.
I raced to the glass with Scott and Ashley, and there it was, running and bouncing, almost a dance. A reminder that we are the scary ones.
Chilling together in the living room, my stepmom would get a look, picking out things I did wrong or embarrassing, and flinging it on a canvas to show. Sort of like all the abstract art she made when I got older and gave to us as gifts.
“Skid Mark,” Linda would say, and they would laugh. Calling me the name together, like bullies. The nickname was obvious: birthed from skid marks in my underwear. I’d disassociate, go quiet, just let it happen.
I remember this particular instance because I removed myself and quietly slunk up the pull-down ladder. The piercing sounds from the hinges that needed WD-40 humiliated me further, as if my fault, all that noise. My ears filled with their giggles, causing my shoulders to slump more.
I lay down on the futon where I slept. Crawling into my sleeping bag, I turned to face where the slanted roof met the floor. I closed my eyes and started to cry, soft enough so they could not hear. I never watched this happen to my stepbrother or stepsister—they never had the entire family, all of us, focused in and picking on them, making them feel ashamed to the extent that their little body rose and exited the room. A tiny parade of hurt.
Thunks and squeaks from the ladder, I cringed as my dad came and sat next to me on the floor. He put his hand on my spine, I felt my insides retreat.
“We are just kidding around,” he said, whispering, rubbing my back. “It’s just a joke.”
No sorry. Never a sorry. No stop. Never an “Are you okay?”
“I know,” I said, masking my sniffles, making the words sound like a smile.
As I got older, I did not want to go to Dennis and Linda when I was in pain or afraid, any negative or disruptive emotion that veered from my usual “happy” self, a performance in its own.
I would shove it back down. As I held my breath, it would leak into my stomach, finding a place to rest.
* * *
In the late 1990s, I loved to Rollerblade around Regatta Point.
“What’s the hardest part of Rollerblading?”