“Waitaminnit, you’ve been in my room?”
“What can I do?” She throws her arms up. “You’re not talking to me; you gave me no choice. I have to look out for you.”
“What the hell, Mom?”
“Well, you’ve officially shed your cocoon, unfurled your wings, and had one helluva time,” she says. “There’s beer in my kitchen, enough hair all over the bathroom to make a yak a wig, and you just had sex with a girl who has a penis. What else am I to think?”
Dear god, make me a bird, so I can fly far. Far, far away.
“We never drank the beer.” It’s the best I can do. Jamie and I didn’t drink one drop.
“You and I are going to be proactive.” Mom clasps her hands. “This isn’t how I pictured it, but I guess we’ll pick up a carton of condoms now. Maybe they have cases at Costco.”
“We didn’t have sex,” I say.
“You didn’t?”
“No.”
“Oh thank goodness.” She heaves. “I don’t mean that in a bad way, I mean it in a you’re-still-fifteen-years-old way.”
What we did was different. Nothing worse than a hundred million stories I’ve ever had to listen to at lunch. And I wasn’t a hundred percent thinking about it while we were doing it last night, but in the glaring light of day and underneath my mom’s microscope, it’s starting to shift. Maybe it was wrong. Through my memory, I see Jamie’s face in the darkness. In the sunlight, it begins to fade.
My dad. The blue ceiling above us the whole time.
She starts pacing again. “Sweetheart, I love you. Talk to me.”
I…can’t make words.
“I stopped communicating with JP; I’m doing my best to respect your wishes.” Leaning against the counter, she looks down at me. It’s a strange rarity. “I wish you’d do me a favor and confide in me.”
But I don’t know what to say. I’m already guilty, I’m only here for sentencing, but Mom is dragging this out and it’s making my skin crawl.
“Well.” Mom inhales and exhales way slow. “Jamie is really good at doing makeup, you look great the morning after. That’s how you know someone has skills.”
Oh my god, the makeup. I grab a fistful of napkins and rake them across my eyes.
Mom gets a dishcloth, runs it under the tap, and drips a few drops of soap from the dispenser on the sink. Buffing it together until little bubbles rise, she hands it to me. “Here. You need real soap and water to take off that stuff. Just shut your eyes tight so it doesn’t sting.”
I don’t want to take the dishcloth down. I rub and rub and when I do pull it away, I stare at the black tar ground into the cotton. My eyes burn and I blink. Wiping with the dry side, I don’t want to look up. Mom reaches for her bag on the floor and pulls out a book filled with colored stickies and flags. I read the title and want to run, no, fucking swim to the bottom of the ocean and drown.
In bright neon orange letters on a slick electric blue background the title screams, Be Their Greatest Ally: Navigating Your Child’s Sexual Identity. “So I have this new book that was recommended to me after I found you two at the mall,” she starts.
“I’m leaving,” I say, and get up from the chair.
“Dylan, wait!” she commands, and stops me from charging out of the kitchen on one leg. “All I want to do is help you.”
“You read that on the plane?” What if someone I know saw her reading that?
“I read it everywhere. It’s how I knew what ‘cisgender’ meant, I feel so with it now.”
“Oh jeezus.”
“Talk to me. Please. I love you for who you are. Always have, always will,” she says. “What are we working with here? Are you genderqueer? Bisexual? Is this situational sexual behavior? Are you feeling”—she flips to a giant yellow sticky and the book flops open—“?‘the pressures and constraints from heteronormative gender roles’?”
“I…yes? I don’t know? I’m a fucking big huge man and no one lets me forget it, so maybe?”
“First of all, language. Second of all, you are not a man. Not yet.”
“Tell that to the world.”
“Okay. Let’s try this angle: has possessing these physical attributes made you turn to trans girls?” Mom grips this stupid book like the Bible and won’t let me leave.
“That doesn’t even make sense.” Why can’t I just like Jamie? “How long am I grounded?”
“We’ll get to that.”
“How long am I grounded!” I yell.
“Sweetheart,” she says softly.
“Mom. Please.” I don’t want to talk about this. Definitely not now and after last night, probably not ever.
The metal clang of the mail slot yanks our heads toward the hallway. It’s something we’re both anxious about, and the rubber nubs of my crutches squeal in a race to get there first. An assortment of envelopes huddles in the box and I snatch them all. Bill, bill, junk mail, letter from the hospital addressed to me. “It’s here,” I say.
“Open it!”
My results. The answer to all my problems. All this mindless psychobabble from Mom’s book can rot in hell; all I want to know is when’s the date of my MRI and subsequent surgery. I want to put being the fucking Beast behind me forever.