When I was older and the boys at school were no longer interested in being friends and the girls had distanced themselves or, worse, turned mean, she focused her teasing on my lack of a social life. “Why aren’t you more social? Do you just have no friends?” she’d say. There was something in her that liquidated any confidence I had left. My system would malfunction, an invisible force pressing on my limbs. Less a freeze, more a flop.
Scott was assistant captain of his hockey team, which was the best in the league. He was handsome, a ruling jock of the halls. It’s difficult to imagine he was not a bully at times, but he did grow up to be a very sensitive man. I have a lot of love for my brother. He bawled his eyes out after the premiere of my film Freeheld. Ashley was pretty, smart, and feminine. The ideal popular 1990s girl. Scott and Ashley were social butterflies. Always in and out, always on the phone, making this plan and that plan.
When they were not home I would answer the phone and write down messages for them. Ashley, Tom called at 4:15 says give him a call back or Scott, Kelly called and says she will meet you at Nick’s later. I’d leave the Post-it notes stuck on the side of the island, they’d be waiting for them when they entered the kitchen. Yellow dance cards on display.
Linda’s subtext echoed louder than the gulls. Pounding her fists on the evidence, hammering in my loneliness. Why aren’t you like them?
6
JUMP SCARE
The first time the voice said to me that can’t go in your body I was sixteen, in an Italian restaurant on Queen West in Toronto. A friend, Wiebke, was letting me live with her just around the corner on Claremont Street. She had taken me to dinner to cheer me up after a difficult day.
I met Wiebke not long before I turned fifteen. She’d cast me in her first full-length film, Marion Bridge. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2002, where Wiebke was awarded Best First Feature. It was a brilliant film that was originally a play by the legendary Cape Bretoner Daniel MacIvor.
Agnes, played by Molly Parker, returns to her hometown to care for her dying mother, having fled a decade earlier to escape a household that was shrouded in vicious abuse. She reunites with her sisters, Theresa and Louise, their wounds half scabbed, the blood seeping out in their own unique ways—that mysterious little goblin named trauma, scuttling through the flesh. I played the object of Agnes’s perplexing obsession, a teenager named Joanie working at a gift shop in Marion Bridge, a rural community just twenty minutes from Sydney.
Sitting behind the steering wheel in the gravel parking lot, Agnes sits and stares, eventually mustering up the courage to go inside. Joanie is her biological child, whom she gave away for adoption when she was a teenager. Joanie knows nothing of this. Suspicion grows as Agnes makes recurring visits. Worlds collide, secrets surface, truth laid bare.
The waiter placed our food on the table, snapping me out of a stupor. I stared down at my margherita pizza. Wiebke sat opposite me, lifting the knife provided to cut hers, it had pears and ham. I zoomed out, departing from my body.
Nope. The voice spoke with a sinister tone. That can’t go inside of you.
I’d had to call the police hours before. I had my first stalker.
It did not begin like that. At first, he became a friend, albeit a secret one. A covert pen pal for the previous two years or so. He had seen me on the CBC family drama Pit Pony, which first aired in early February 1999, when I was eleven years old and he was in his early twenties.
Pit Pony was my first professional acting job. My work up until that point was comprised of a couple plays with the drama club in elementary school. For the first role, I was a dove, and I screwed up my one line, leaving a short pause before saying “oops.” The audience laughed. The following year, I landed Charlie in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and had a more successful run. The thrill of playing a character so iconic to me, the thrill of playing a boy, organic and free. My bunk bed fort but onstage. Perhaps people would see me?
In 1996, a local actor and casting director named John Dunsworth came to my school. I was nine years old. He was looking to cast the CBC movie of the week, Pit Pony, which was based on a young adult book of the same name. I remember him interrupting music class with my favorite teacher, Mr. Ellis, who had once jokingly said I needed to stop “roughing up the boys at recess” to my delight.
We all stood in the class while Mr. Dunsworth had us do little exercises, testing us. I was selected to audition.
I showed up on the day, excited yet not old enough to fully understand the significance. “Could you act like you are lost in the forest?” the casting director prompted. I turned my head swiftly, abruptly from the left to the right, spinning my body around, terrified at the night creeping in, abandoned in the cold dark. A game of imagination.
“That was great. Now could we try it with you being still? Can you show me that feeling with just your emotions?”
I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant, but I played along. I must have done something right because I got the part. I couldn’t believe it. Another chance to get lost in a pretend world that felt more like reality than my own. It was assumed to be an anomaly, a delightful little surprise. But then the movie of the week turned into a television show, and my acting career began.
I played the little sister, Maggie MacLean. She wore dresses with long sleeves that hung below the knee. Over them, a smock. I was puzzled by the dress over the dress. Black tights covered my legs. My hair had grown out from when we shot the movie of the week, in which I wore a wig. Relentlessly itchy, it resembled a dead raccoon. I didn’t want long hair, but I didn’t want to wear that wig again. Around my shoulders, sometimes in braids, potentially a small bow. I can only imagine my mother’s relief.
Becoming a professional actor coincided with the end of me getting the “thanks, bud” at the mall. Growing my hair out for roles, body on the precipice of change, I would stare at the cis boys on set. Collared shirts, suspenders, knickers, and no tights. Instead of bows, newsboy hats.
How is that not me? I move like them; I play like them.
A gnawing feeling from toddlerhood, stored in the spine, like shingles, striking at a moment’s notice, spreading across my body, nerves exposed.
While making Pit Pony, my gender dysphoria was rife. The way the tights glued to my body, the way my dresses flowed. Those fucking bows, like the barrettes my mom would snap in my hair, provoking an unresolved, internalized tantrum.
Getting ready for school, solo in the bathroom, I’d smash my head with my hairbrush. Who is that in the mirror? Squinting my eyes shut, bracing for it, slam slam slam. My mother’s queen bed had a frame that included tall wooden posts on the corners, the tops of them resembling upside-down ice-cream cones. When I was alone, able to keep my secret, I would climb up onto the bed. I’d stare at the post, aligning my torso so the spike would drill directly into my stomach. I’d hoist my body up, conspiring with gravity to impale myself. It hurt but also didn’t hurt. I loved having an outlet for my self-disdain, the nausea, I wanted it scooped out.
Sitting in the den at my father’s, I’d turn on the family computer, looking for an escape, another pretend world. I had made a silly website in junior high school when we were learning about HTML in computer science class. The man who had seen me on CBC found the website and reached out through it. Over the course of a few emails, a connection began to grow, a companionship. We wrote of our grievances, our loneliness, our incongruence with our surroundings and with ourselves. Kid drama for me, something else for him.
Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, my heart palpitated upon hearing that Apple start-up sound. I’d close my eyes, visualizing a new email, jonesing for the serotonin bump. The dial-up internet screeched and scratched and hissed, those irksome noises.
As he started to express deeper feelings for me, my stomach churned. Repressing the gurgles, I stayed on track, I didn’t want to lose this, an actual connection with weight, with promise. Even around my friends my panic fluttered. I could not speak to my parents about my emotions, not the true ones at least. Lost in the desert, the barren landscape abundant with life, I just couldn’t see it. It felt like he was all I had.