And I wasn’t like them. I wasn’t.
That’s the advantage I had over cis men: I fought for this. Put my body through hell to get here. I cherished and respected every moment of it: every needle plunging into a vein, every pimple, every razor nick, every unwanted hard-on, every crack in my new voice.
I was a self-made man.
And I would live and die a better man than the assholes who tried to unmake me.
But all she said was “You’re not the person I knew.”
Then she left. And I’ve been here, alone, wishing us both a happy birthday. Her twenty-first. My second.
The first one we’ve spent apart.
[Jump cut.]
I’ve lost the map to myself. I don’t know where I am, if I’ve really wandered that far from the path and am stumbling blindly into a dark, thorned wood, or if I’m okay and she’s the one off course. There’s nothing to gauge it by. She’s the only person who ever really knew me, pre-transition. No one else can tell me if I’m straying, if I should turn back.
She’s my north star. The shining light I look to when I don’t know where I am.
And I’m losing her.
I’m losing you, and I don’t know how to let you go.
———
Tamsin found me at the train yard. I’d climbed off the bridge onto a Metra car, kicked the snow clear, sat on the roof. No coat, but I couldn’t tell if my shivering was cold or emotion. All I felt inside was charred. Burned out.
I watched her hop the rail and trace my footsteps. Her scarf snapped, rich carmine, a thread of blood spilling stainlessly into the air. A messenger bag jutted from her hip.
Tam sat beside me, boots propped up next to mine. We stared east toward the Sears Tower. No real Chicagoan called it the new name. Clouds tore themselves apart on the needle antennae, fraying into shreds of fog.
“How’d you find me?” I said.
“Expert tracking skills. Katniss level.”
Despite the numbness in my chest, I felt a glimmer of warmth. “No, but really.”
“Cheated.” She opened the messenger bag. “Ellis told me you come here sometimes. Something about your Instagram, urban fashion photos . . .”
“That traitor.”
“She’s worried. They’re all worried. They—”
“Don’t.”
Tamsin shrugged. “Shan’t.”
Inside the bag were two paper coffee cups, lids securely shut. She passed me one.
For a while we sipped peppermint lattes and watched the trains come and go. My thoughts had the substance of dust bunnies. Caffeine only made them skitter.
“It’s not true,” I said. “That video. I didn’t . . . do those things.”
“I know.”
“How?”
“Because I know you. I’ve tried to bait you into hurting me, taking advantage of me. Not once have you faltered. Not in the slightest.”
A knit hat crushed her curls, but one had sprung free and hung jauntily. I fought the urge to tuck it behind her ear. To touch. Human contact seemed impossibly precious right now, and impossibly faraway.
She might be sure I was innocent, but when it really came down to it . . .
Was I?
Over and over I’d replayed that night. Norah’s nails gouging into my back, pulling me closer. Baby, don’t stop. But I had never asked her point-blank, Is this okay? Before transition, consent was mostly nonverbal—kissing a girl and feeling her mouth melt against mine, her hands undoing my fly. We didn’t ask each other explicitly because we mutually assumed that we would never force it. That we couldn’t. Because we were female. Our anatomy, our sex drive, our socialization were all so different from boys’. We knew about rape culture. We weren’t seething with the hormone that fueled sex and violence.
But maybe that was the very thing that blinded me: my female history.
Had Norah at any point told me no, in some implicit, pleading way? Had I ignored it? Like Ingrid said, if you shifted the period, the whole meaning changed: Baby, don’t stop. Baby, don’t. Stop.
Had I heard what she said, or what I wanted to hear?
“Even without that,” Tamsin said, interrupting my thoughts, “I’d still know.”
“How?”
She cradled the cup in her lap. “Forgive me if this comes across the wrong way, but you’re different. You touch me differently than other men do. There’s an underlying presumption when they put their hands on me. As if I’m a possession, an object. As if permission to use is assumed until I say no. But when you touch me, I sense you asking how I feel. What I want. When you touch me it feels like a conversation.”
Wind hurled little meteors of ice at our faces.
“No one has ever touched me like you have,” she said. “No other boy is like you.”
Heat shimmered through me, collecting in my fingertips, my lips. She reversed it. Made me the paragon, the standard to measure other boys by.
I thought of Armin saying, I was comparing myself to you.
How could these things coexist in the world:
A girl who said I touched her with respect.
A girl who said I raped her.