June 3, 2016

  Chloe

  I’m sitting in my mom’s passenger seat, pig at my fingernails. Paper Bag is pying on the radio, and it’s kind of hard to hear over the air ditioner. I know I o stop pig at them, and that I’m about two seds away from her either gently swatting one of my hands away from the other, or her saying “stop” or something, but it’s habit, and I’m zoning out, thinking about how I’m zoning out. My luggage is irunk, she just picked me up from the airport, I feel like normal people probably don’t just immediately zo a moody when they’re moving to a new pce.

  “Are you hungry?” she asks.

  I’m trying to remember if her hair was this gray st Thanksgiving, the st time she came to Raleigh, trying to avoid the subject of her girlfriend, and the divorce that followed Dad finding out she had a girlfriend.

  She looks like an English teacher, which she is. Gsses, and slightly wavy hair, graying a little more than normal for her mid 30s, usually put up. Sometimes her and Dad would bring out old pictures, and we’d find some of Mom when she was whatever age I was then, and everyone would always ent on how I looked exactly like her.

  “Yeah, sure” I reply idly, not really thinking about how my words e out.

  I feel awkward and anxious. No one’s here to talk over me or jump in with something else like they normally would. Every time she’s said anything to me since I got off the pne, she’s looked at me and… perceived me.

  “There’s a really good pizza pce right by the house that I thought you’d like. Do you want to go?”

  She knows the answer and she’s being chirpy enough that I’m immediately gd, again, that I’m here instead of home. Or, I guess, with everyone else. I never know what to call it.

  “Yeah, that sounds great… thanks!”

  I hear an ued and sort of awkward amount of gratefulness in my own voice. She hears it too, and sideways g me.

  Fortunately she lets it go and we keep driving. It’s incredibly awkward. She didn’t expect me to want to e live with her. No one did.

  “What’s on your mind?” she asks.

  “Nothing” I reflexively reply. It feels like what I’m supposed to say. I kind of wish she’d press further. She won’t.

  “Are you tired from the pne?” She has a pitying tone now.

  “I guess. The drive there wasn’t great either. Sylvan wouldn’t get off my back.”

  I don’t know where that came from, but it’s true enough. He kept calling me a girl and saying that’s why I wao go live with Mom. He doesn’t know that he knows, and that’s why life is so awesome.

  My rambling is enough to leave her relutly satisfied, for now. But she’s listening, and she tell I’m holding something back. She’s too much of an English teacher to fall for it.

  I’m gd to be here. It’s better than Raleigh. I’m less gd about the nightmare of things I want to tell her, that are part of the reason I wao e live with her, and definitely not gd about how I have no idea how she’s going to react when I tell her that I want to be a girl, that every day, I’m afraid that a bunch of testosterone will get shot through my body and I’ll start male puberty. It almost feels like my life is already over, even at fourteen. Any sed now, my hormones could shift and they could fuck up my body.

  I want to grab the earphones from my pocket and plug them into my phone and bst all the thoughts out of my head, but it hasn’t even been an hour yet.

  But Mom’s music hurts. Lyrics about how difficult it is to be a woman. It makes me feel bad for wanting to be a girl— like it’s this… burden.

  I look out the window, at all the traffic, at the new city I’ve never eveo before, that I now live in.

  ***

  The waiter sets the pizza down, goes bad gets Mom’s sad gives it to her, asks if we need anything, walks away, and then five seds pass.

  “So. What’s wrong?” Mom asks, tongue in cheek, as if she told me not to sneak out and then caught me climbing out of my bedroom window fifteen mier.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, you never spend time thinking about exactly how you’re feeling and why. And definitely not while staring out the window, moodily on a long car ride.”

  I’m unwillingly smiling. After eight months of only living with… other people, I fot how well she knows me, how actually predictable I am.

  “I don’t know, it’s kind of embarrassing.”

  “I already know you listen to Fall Out Boy. What could be more embarrassing than that?”

  I roll my eyes, but I feel myself ughing.

  “It’s just… weird finally being here, is all. I guess we didn’t talk too much since you left, but it was just really weird. Me, and I look like this,” I gesture to myself, wearing a bck sweater in June, with shoulder length hair— “and then Dad, and Sylvan and Casey. After Thanksgiving, when they knew I was going to move with you, they just… didn’t care. They were weird.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know. I think they were bugged with me for betraying The Guys or something. God forbid I still care about my mom even though she’s gay.”

  It feels weird when I say it. Like I’m crossing a boundary or something. It’s true— Sylvan and Dad couldn’t uand, even after months, that this Fiona Apple loving English professor was gay, but it feels unfortable t up. She never really went into anything— her girlfriend, if she’d always known she was gay, how she knew.

  “I’m sorry— I didn’t mean to…” I start.

  “Oh, honey, you’re fine” she says, matter of factly. She ughs bitterly, and stabs lettud a small tomato with her fork. “I had a feeling.”

  “But look, Ross,” She says, gentle again, though hearing my guy name feels like getting hit on the h a neer. “I love you, and I’m really gd to have you back.”

  It’s been so long since I’ve been talked to like this. For a sed, I feel like she see me. Like she knows I’m not like her sons. Is this how a mom would talk to her daughter? Does she see me that way? Does she know? Like how Sylva know that he knows ?

  “Thanks. I missed you a lot.” It es out in a softer tohan I normally use.

  She smiles at me, and it’s quiet for a little bit.

  “So” she says, re-orienting the versation.

  “Your stuff is going to be here soon?”

  “It should be. We dropped everything off at the post office a couple days ago— shipment trag says tomorrow.”

  “That’s good. I thought maybe we could go shopping and you could pick out your furniture. I want you to feel at home, have a space that’s yours, all that stuff.”

  “You mean it’s important for someoo have A Room Of One’s Own?”

  She ughs a little bit.

  “Precisely.”

  “I’d love to. I kind of got tired of living in The Increasingly Male Living Space.”

  She quirks a little bit, but lets it go.

  I feel myself opening up more. I’m gd I came here.

  We eat, and the pizza is delicious, with a slightly buttery taste otom of the crust. She asks me if I’ve been reading anything tely, and I tell her not really, that I’ve fallen behind but now that I have time, I’d like to read more. I tell her about the music I’ve been listening to, though we don’t have mu on.

  I feel a relief, like my life had been careening toward a dead end in North Carolina, and I’ve been rescued from it. I look at Mom, and it kind of hurts, because I look like her, I look up to her, I want to be like her, but I feel like I ’t be. She’s smart, and elegant, and she loves me, and I’m afraid of what she’ll think if she finds out that I desperately wish I were a girl. This always es over me in these situations— it gets quiet and I get dragged bader, bato my head. It quiets down, and I’m sure she’s thinking about me, but I’m still tired and disbobuted from the pne and from all of this thinking, all of this ay. Like I’m falling down aor shaft inside of my head.

  I have a little bit left over like I always do, and I ask for a box and take the food with me, which I never eat.

  In the car, I think some more. All the feelings turn over and cut the opposite way, almost.

  I feel tainted, having spent so much time in the South and having been born a boy. The small town we lived in for a little bit before Mom finally got Dad to move closer to the college she taught at. Generic southern guys and the things the adults say to me, trying to make versation when women e up, because they see me as a boy. And their weird disappoi and brushing it off when I don’t respond or awkwardly stumble my way through it, or the weird look on the occasion that I’ve gone “Actually, I don’t think bitches are crazy”. I feel gross for having spent time around it, for being born in it. I’ll always have been something else.

  I look through the window at everyone else, in their cars, ing along. Couples talking to each other, families, moody people by themselves. I wonder if any of them feel the same way, and I imagine myself from a vantage point hundreds of feet in the sky, standing on the highway, pletely alone.