“And where do you get off acting like it’s any different here than where my family came from?” Sam asked. “You think girls can do whatever they want here? You think Miel can? How do think girls here would do if they got to be boys growing up and then had to be girls again?”
“But that’s what you’re counting on, right?” Aracely asked. “That one day you’ll wake up and wanna put on a dress?”
“Fuck you,” Sam said. It had never been about a dress. It had been about the clothes his grandmother would have wanted to see him in for family photos. Not a boy’s kurta, but the sunrise colors and scrolled patterns of a girl’s salwar kameez. A dupatta draped over hair longer than he ever wanted to grow it.
He looked for any cringe in Aracely’s face. Some sign that she knew she’d gone too far.
Instead there was just the trace of a smile, curving one side of her mouth.
She’d baited him. She’d wanted him angry.
“So you’ve got that in you,” Aracely said. “Good. You’re gonna need it.”
Sam gritted his teeth, hard enough to feel it in the back of his jaw. “For what?”
“To be this.” She took in his clothes again, and again he felt like they were pinching him. “To live like this.”
“I’m not living like anything,” he said. “I do this for my mother. This country’s no different than anywhere else. It’s better for a woman if there’s a man in her house, even if that man’s her son.”
“Stop pretending this is for anybody but you.”
Sam turned around.
Aracely didn’t know anything about him, or his family. Once his grandmother was gone, it had just been him and his mother. His mother had no sons, only him, born a daughter, and Sam had wanted, as badly as he wanted his grandmother back, not only to be a boy but to be a son to his mother. Years ago, when he’d first thought of living as a bacha posh, he’d felt the same shiver of triumph every time he was, in jeans and hair shorter than most girls, mistaken for a boy. He’d thought of having that all the time. How he could have something he wanted and at the same time do something for his mother.
He would be the man in their house, taking care of her. If he became a son to her, he’d thought, she wouldn’t cast a nervous glance toward the windows when she locked the door at night. If he was a son, she would have let him paint over the letters sprayed onto the side of their house, instead of her doing it herself, having to look at it. She hadn’t let him near that wall until she could get it covered over, and it wasn’t until he was thirteen that he got her to tell him what slur those letters had spelled.
“Sam,” Aracely said.
He left the indigo room and went for the front door.
“Sam,” Aracely said, a whispered yell. He could tell she wanted to raise her voice but didn’t want to wake Miel. “Get back here.”
He looked over his shoulder.
Aracely still had a basket of eggs in her hands. She’d forgotten to put it down.
“Miel may think you know everything,” he said. “But you don’t know anything about me.”
“I know more than you do.”
“Oh really?” He turned around. “How?”
“Because I used to be where you are.”
The lie of her words made him lonelier than if she’d said nothing. The fiction that anyone in this town had ever been where he was, caught between feeling bound by the clothes he wore and being so desperate to keep them he wanted to hold on to them with his teeth, made the slide toward resenting her quiet and fast.
“No, you don’t,” he said, and it wasn’t until he heard the tremble in his own voice that he noticed the prickling damp at the edges of his eyelashes. How much tears irritated his eyes when he tried to stay still, how they refused to be forgotten until he blinked and let them go. “How could you?”
“Because you were right,” Aracely said. “I am Miel’s family. And not just because that’s what we’ve become to each other. I always have been.”
This was the thing he’d wanted to know so badly a few minutes ago. But now, how much he didn’t want to talk cast a heavy shadow over how much he cared.
“What does that have to do with anything?” he asked.
Aracely crossed her arms, and her thin elbows turned pointed and sharp. “Because Miel remembers me as her brother.”
sea of waves
At first, Sam could not understand why Aracely was telling him the truth. He felt the caution of wondering whether it was a trick, another lie. He didn’t understand why she didn’t say those words—Miel remembers me as her brother—and then order him out of the wisteria-colored house. But then he noticed in her face a tension that was half-hesitation and half-relief, a look that he knew because he’d worn it himself.
He knew it from that day Miel had caught him changing, seen him naked enough to know there was distance between his body and what he let everyone believe it was. He knew it from that moment of sitting down next to Miel on the back steps of his house, and telling her everything.