Chapter 12: Part 12 - Sunday Afternoon

Part 12 — Sunday Afternoon

When we got through the door, I could tell my dad had been pacing. The rug was all scuffed up the way it gets when he walks back and forth on it, rehearsing a closing argument in court. I expected I could guess what he’d been rehearsing here. 

But what I didn’t expect — what there hadn’t been the usual telltale sign of parked out front — was the presence of my grandma, sitting calmly at the table in our lounge, squeezing a smile into a pout like the very memory of happiness offended her. It was she who spoke first. 

“It’s time we had a talk.”

Grampa was nowhere to be seen, and the absence of banging music from Anna’s room told me she wasn’t in either. 

“You called an intervention?!” Mom asked, incredulously. 

“Daddy, what did you do!” I asked. My eyes still hadn’t dried from the doctor’s office before fresh teardrops came on in the car. I didn’t think I had any left in me, but when I saw my father with my grandmother and a bunch of official-looking documents splayed out on the table, I found new depths to the well of tears. 

“This has gone on long enough,” my dad expostulated with a serious wagging of the finger. 

“What has?” Mom asked, slamming her bag down on the couch and throwing the car keys inside of it. 

“This phase, dear,” Grandma chimed in. 

“It’s not a phase!” I choked, trying to scream the words, but finding my throat closed to all pleading. 

“This is your birth certificate!” my dad cried, picking up one of the documents from the table and reading it. “It says Errol! Errol Stevenson!”

“So what?!” Mom countered, rallying to my defense. “Mine says Claudette Jones,” she reminded him of her maiden name. “And yours says Caroline DeSantis,” she accused, waving her finger at her own mother. “People change their names all the time!”

“Surnames, Claudette,” Grandma countered. “People change their surnames. Not their first names. Not who they are!”

“This is who I am!” I cried out a little more forcefully. I was suddenly back in Ms Pike’s office, feeling small and arguing against the hurricane. Or standing in front of Leierna Scott and all her friends, hiding behind my shame from their indicting stares and blasting laughter. 

“Look, it’s fine to do dress-up,” my grandma replied, But who you are is my grandson,” Grandma replied, emphasizing the ‘son’ part. “It was my grandson whom I recorded taking his first steps at our beach house, my grandson who rode his first bike right outside our front porch.”

“That was still me, Grandma!” I protested. I could feel the anger rising in me. She had such a knack for drawing it out. “I wore different clothes and had a different name, but it was still me!”

“But those things are how we judge a person,” she replied. “The way they dress, the name they use. Aren’t those things an important part of who that person is?” She was trying to bait me into making her point for her. 

“Of course they are,” I replied, trying desperately to find a way to explain it to her like Mr Jenkins had explained it to me in Pride Club. “The way I dress and the name I want people to call me are every bit of me.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” she replied. “That’s why—”

I cut her off, “What I’m telling you is that those clothes and that name from back then were the wrong clothes and the wrong name. They didn’t fit who I was then and they don’t fit who I am now!”

“And what about who you’re going to be in a year’s time?” my Dad broke in when it was clear my grandma had no answer to me. “Or five years or ten years? Boys’ bodies change, Errol,” he deadnamed me. 

“Ella’s wasn’t changing!” my mom corrected. “Until they passed that stupid law!”

“And what, Claudette?” my dad hit back. “You just keep our child a child forever?! The puberty blockers prevent Errol from growing up.”

“They stop him from turning into a man,” my grandma interjected. 

“That’s the point!” I screamed. 

“But they don’t make him turn into a woman, either,” my dad added. “So he’s stuck. Forever. As, as what? As a little boy who dresses like a little girl?”

“As our child!” my mom retorted. 

“Children need to grow up!” my grandma interjected, helpfully. 

Then all three of them started speaking at once, and I knew I had to put a stop to this. 

“You're right!” I cried, cutting through the escalating back-and-forth that was bubbling between them. I turned to my one ally in the room. 

“I wanna go on the hormones, Mom.”

Silence smothered the house. 

“I wanna grow—” I sifted through all the things I wanted to grow (hair, boobs, lashes, a uterus), things that were possible and things that were not, before I finally settled on, “—I wanna grow up.”

“You’ll be growing up,” my grandma sneered, “into a fine, young man.”

I ignored her baiting for a second time. 

“Dad?” I asked, looking at the way the tears bent his cobalt-blue irises.

He looked at the table. At the official-looking documents. 

“Don’t lose your nerve now, Gerald,” my grandma directed. Then she turned to me, “We’ve bought you a new uniform and explained it all to the principal in an email,” she went on. “He’s said he’ll move you into a new class, where you can make a new start. He’ll cut through all the red tape and you can start tomorrow as Errol Stevenson.”

Everything melted away. It was there. It was right there in what my grandma had just said. 

“Say that again,” I instructed, turning to her. 

“You can start tomorrow,” she replied. 

“The bit about cutting through—” I steered. 

“He’ll cut through the paperwork. The red tape,” she clarified. 

Red tape. 

That was the phrase the doctor had used. And the phrase that dad had used. Again and again since I first went on the blockers. But I’d never heard him use it before last year. Now I saw where he’d picked it up. 

“This was your idea!” 

I threw the accusation at my grandma like it was fire. 

“It doesn’t matter who came up with the idea!” she replied sternly. 

“It matters to me!” I cried. Then added, “Dad?”

“We got to talking,” he explained. “More than once.”

“We’re of like-mind,” my grandma suggested. 

“How long?” Mom jumped in, her eyes darting between her husband and her mother. “How long ago did you get to talking? Before the new school? The start of the school year? Before that?!”

“When I asked to change my birth certificate?” I interjected. 

My father said nothing. 

“It doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?” my grandma asked. “The law is the law. There’ll be no more injections. It’s over.”

So this was it. This was the extent of their planning and deception. Was Grampa in on it? Or aware, at least? Was Anna? They were both conspicuously absent from this intervention. At that moment, I couldn’t trust anyone anymore. I couldn’t trust at all. But there was still one thing I had to know: one question I had to get an answer to. 

“Why?” I asked quietly. The question was small and it screamed in the silence. 

My grandma looked to my father and went to speak, but he cut her off. He was sweating. His hand was shaking. The tears in his eyes rattled, but wouldn’t shake loose. He walked around to the table with the official-looking document on it. 

“This was Amara,” he said, picking up a newspaper clipping. “Born as ‘Daniel’ and murdered last year in Ohio.” He picked up another one. “This was Chardonnay. Born ‘William’ and shot in Jacksonville.” He picked up another and deadnamed her ‘Sebastian’. Another he deadnamed ‘Eric’. ‘William’. ‘Anthony’. Then he deadnamed me. 

“…The list goes on, Errol. All trans boys,” he muddled. “All killed for who they were. Is your identity worth your life?!”

“They were girls, Dad,” I responded, coldly. “And if you have to ask that question, you wouldn’t understand the answer.”

“We’re trying to protect you, Errol,” my grandma intruded. “There are so many people who want to hurt—” it was her turn to search for the right words, “—people like you.”

They weren’t it. 

“And there is so much hurt in the world, Errol,” my Dad added. “Believe me, I see it every day.”

“Look, I get that you’re trying to protect me from all the hurt in the world,” I rounded, drying the last of my tears. “And it does hurt. It hurts when boys look at me with sideways eyes like they’re deciding whether to spit out some foul-tasting food; it hurts when Leierna Scott or all the Leierna Scotts humiliate me, not because they can but because I’m a threat to them — to all they’ve been told they should spend their lives looking like or being like; it hurts when Ms Pike tells me I can’t play on the girls team, cos I’m not a real girl! All of those things hurt. But that’s the hurt I chose. When I chose to stop pretending to be who you both think I am. I chose that hurt! And what the hell gives you the right to take that choice away from me?!”

My dad looked at me in that way he used to look when I was a little kid and wanted to stay up past bedtime, or eat an entire bag of candies, or get a cell phone. He replied in the absolute: “I’m your father.”

I looked at him in that way I used to look when I woke from a nightmare, still screaming, or when I skinned a knee and more than any band aid I needed to be picked up and hugged by my father. Then I replied, “That’s the part about this that hurts the most.”

*

Nothing was settled by the argument that continued after I left the room, stormed upstairs to my bedroom, and slammed the door shut. I lay on my bed, crying and crying at what felt like the end of everything. I didn’t have the words for what I felt about my father’s betrayal — conspiracy, even, with my grandma!

I heard when Grampa’s car pulled up in the driveway, then leave shortly after. I heard the silence when Anna got back, followed by the raised voices, and the running up the stairs, and the stopping at my mother’s plea to, “Just leave her be…” 

I felt the silence stretch out between my mother and my father downstairs. Stretch out like it might swallow the world and leave behind only emptiness. I felt the floorboards trembling when my parents went to bed — in angry silence — later on. The creaking of a house shifting into a new way of being. The little sounds that, when everything is alright with the world, you don’t notice. 

I know I slept, because at one point it was light outside and the next it was dark. Time unraveled in my room. I couldn’t be sure when things were happening. Between sleep and delirium-dreams, I thought I heard a knocking. Faint and barely intrusive, like a kind arm on the shoulder of someone sleeping, shaking them gently awake. 

The house was dark when I got up. I could hear my father snoring in the bedroom. The door was shut. I was hungry, so I went downstairs to make myself a sandwich. The couch looked warm and inviting and empty. Looks like Mom and Dad worked it out on some level, then. It was when I went to the fridge that I noticed it. The porch light was on. 

We had one of those sensor things by the front porch that only came on after dark, and only if someone was outside. I think I actually noticed when the light flicked back off. The sudden change of something in the corner of my eye. It was then that I remembered the knocking in my dream. It was late. 2:34 in the morning according to the kitchen clock. Had someone been outside?

My first, instinctive thought was to go wake Dad. Then I remembered that that man had sold his right to be called that word when he sold my future down the river of Conservative Family Values. I waited for what seemed like forever, but couldn’t really have been more than 30 seconds. The light didn’t flick back on. It was still outside. Silent. So I went to investigate, myself. 

I kept the light in the lounge off. I didn’t want to risk anyone seeing more than the merest crack of light the refrigerator had flashed when I opened it, before. I crept up to the front door, keeping to the side and out of the view of anyone trying to look through it. Finally, when I was close to the edge of the door, I popped my head quickly round the little window in it to see what I could see. 

Darkness. And the street outside. And nothing else. I once heard someone joke that people in horror movies don’t know they’re in horror movies, and that’s why they make dumb decisions. Well, however horrific my life had become since yesterday, I knew this was no horror movie, something of that reality penetrated. I clicked the latch and opened the door a crack to see what was outside. 

It was sitting there. On the porch. A tiny pink box with a delicate pink ribbon tied into a bow. There was a card at the top. I crouched down to pick it up. There was a single word on it, crafted in beautiful calligraphy script. It read ‘Ella’. 

My heart was hammering in my chest. It felt like the world was falling away at the edge of my vision. A giddy surge swayed in my blood and I fought it to stay upright. Someone had left something for me on the porch. For me! I quickly forgot about the sandwich and headed upstairs with the box wrapped secretively in my shirt. 

It was only when I was in my bed, with the door closed and locked, that I dared to peer inside. It was a necklace. A butterfly on a black cord with the yin-yang symbol on it. Correction: half the yin-yang symbol. It was a friendship necklace. The kind where you keep one half and your friend keeps the other. There was another card too. It looked to be handwritten, like the name card on the outside of the box. As I read it, I clasped the necklace in my other hand. It was an anchor. A lifeline, even. In the stormy seas that my life had become. And when I read it, I knew that things were going to get better, that this hurt — this latest hurt — wasn’t going to last forever. 

The card simply read: ‘I’m here for you…’