MINA: Are you going to marry Tamsin?
REN: [Raises eyebrows.] I don’t know.
MINA: Don’t you want to get married?
REN: I think so. Someday.
MINA: Well, why not her?
REN: She gets a say in it, too.
MINA: She’d marry you.
REN: Why do you say that?
MINA: I just know these things.
REN: [Laughs.] You’re so wise, Mina. I’m not. I’m only twenty-four.
MINA: That is so old. You are ancient.
REN: You’re only saying that because you’re eleven.
MINA: Don’t be ageist.
REN: [Laughs.] You just called me old!
MINA: That means you’re supposed to be wise.
REN: What are you supposed to be?
MINA: [Flips her hair.] A princess.
REN: [Smiling.] Well, lucky for you, you are. Come on, Princess Mina. I miss the other royals.
[He kneels and offers his palm. She takes it and together they walk toward the water, dwindling against the sun, hand in hand.]
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are two stories in each of my novels. The first story is fiction, and it plays out over three hundred or so pages. The second story, the true one, takes place in the acknowledgments. It’s my story—a diary that’s spanned four novels, first as Leah, now as Elliot.
This book is where Leah’s story ends.
In this space I usually address you, my readers. All of you mean the world to me, and I’m beyond humbled and grateful that you’ve followed me on this journey through my books and in my life. Thank you. But there’s someone out there I’ve never thanked properly. Someone who deserves to have her strength and suffering recognized. So this time, I’m doing something different in this space.
This time I’m writing to her.
———
Dear Leah,
The last image I have of you is when you were writing the acknowledgments for your third book, Cam Girl. It’s late on a hot night in August 2015. Your boyfriend has gone to bed and you’re alone on a futon mattress on the floor, a little tipsy on tequila, spilling your heart onto the page. You’ve spent the past year battling the paralysis of depression by writing a book about someone like you: a girl who’s not really a girl.
That book is a step closer to your personal truth. Each novel has been both confession and acceptance: of becoming an adult in Unteachable, then your queerness in Black Iris, then your gender in Cam Girl. But the last one didn’t go far enough, and you know that.
And you’re terrified of the book you’re going to write next.
Because this one will go far enough. It’s going to drag you along, kicking and screaming and crying the whole way.
You already know the name you’ll take. You first heard it as a kid, in the movie E.T. It sounded wise, knowing. Later you discovered a poet with the same name, who spoke to the darkness inside you, and something about his name resonated—a hum in the center of your chest, your rib cage struck like a tuning fork. You’ll know it’s your name, but not why. It’ll come clear in time: Leah is contained inside the name Elliot. El-ee-et. Hear it?
You already know you’ll take testosterone, too. You’re terrified, trying to scare yourself off, but you know that without it, the body in the mirror will never match the one in your head. You’ve known this for years. You remember poring over your mom’s Sears catalogs, staring entranced at boys’ clothes and picturing yourself in that stuff, a self with short hair and straight hips and broad shoulders. You remember how much it hurt the day you beat R in a race, and M sneered, “It doesn’t matter because you’re just a girl,” and you felt no one could see that you were the same as R or any other boy, because of the stupid body you wore. You remember being called “dyke,” “fag,” “queer” (the latter of which you embraced, eventually), and being upset not because they were wrong, but for some other reason you couldn’t articulate. A “dyke” was a girl who liked girls. Only half of that was true for you. It would take years to understand which part of you those words were hurting.
You’re scared of T. Of losing your hair (you won’t), of getting teen-boy acne (you won’t), of losing the ability to feel things as intensely as you do on E (you won’t, but it will change).