Chapter 14: Part 14 - Monday

Part 14 — Monday 

I didn’t tell anyone about my half-yin-yang pendant of hope, but I wore it underneath my school uniform on Monday morning. My pleated skirt uniform, not the oh-so-male-enacting pants that Grandma had bought me. She’d taken her best shot to persuade me. Now it was my turn to return fire. This wasn’t a conversation. This was all-out war, fought with pleats and braids and pantyhose. 

“Hey sis,” Anna greeted from behind her cereal as I entered the kitchen, fully showered and dressed and ready for a fight with Dad. “Rough night?” she followed her greeting up with. 

“I got through,” I replied. I wasn’t dismissing her. But I’d already rehearsed in my head what I was going to say to Dad when he tried to make me go change into pants, and I didn’t want my affection for my sister getting in the way of my anger for my father. 

“Where’s Dad?” I asked, looking around the kitchen. 

My mom sighed. 

“He left for work early,” she replied. He was always doing this. Skipping out on arguments. He did it to her all the time. He’d return later with flowers or tickets to a show or — in my case — maybe a soccer match, and hope that all would be forgiven. Well not this time, Gerald. 

The car ride to school passed mostly in silence. Anna didn’t ask me any follow up questions about what had happened yesterday. But it was the absence of questions that screamed out she knew all about what had happened. 

It was only when I got to school that my mom broke the tense silence between us. 

“Did you mean what you said yesterday?” she asked, pulling the car over just short of the school stop. 

“Wha— Which part?” I asked, still a little stunned. 

“About going on the hormones?” she clarified. 

“Oh. Well. Yeah, I think I did.”

“Cos, you know,” she went on, “once you start, it would be difficult to go back to being just Errol again? Ever.”

“I don’t wanna go back to being just Errol again,” I replied. “Ever.”

“Alright,” she replied heavily, and unlocked the car doors. 

“Wait, does that mean—?” I began, allowing the tiniest butterfly of hope to flutter inside me. 

“—Let’s talk about it when you get back,” she said, and nodded off in the direction of the school entrance. 

*

School was a bit of a blur, to be honest. My head was still trying to swim against the current of anger and anxiety sweeping through my heart. If you’ve never really experienced anxiety before, it’s like this long, spindly spider that wraps itself around your chest and makes everything tight. It digs its legs into all the uncomfortable parts of your body — neck, shoulder-blades, lower back — and just squeezes them so that even the slightest movement makes you worry that you’ll break something permanently. It sinks its teeth into your lungs and leeches off your breath. It’s like a vampire, controlling you, making you act weird and talk weird and feel weirder. And that’s how Monday was for me. 

The first stab of anxiety was about my party at the weekend. Did it go okay? Nobody I saw in the halls or in class mentioned it. Did that mean it was just kind of mediocre? Instantly forgettable? Or did it really go super badly and everyone was just too polite to say anything. I should have known a dress-up party was too babyish for 15. I’m a big girl now. 

The second prick of anxiety came to me after school when I went to get changed for soccer practice. Jessie had seemed kind of distant all day — pleasant and still taking part in class — just not really inside of her head. Which was in stark contrast to me, who had set up a small condo in my own head and was in the process of furnishing it with self-doubt and worry. 

I was sure it was Jessie who had given me that yin-yang necklace — the one I was wearing under my school shirt. I couldn’t just come out and ask her about it, but — if she was wearing hers — I know I’d see it when we changed for soccer practice. I had to know who had sent me that gift and message. What I didn’t know was that Ms Pike had other ideas. 

“Not you, Stevenson!” she yelled as I tried to file through the door to the girls changing rooms like I always had. She was standing outside the door. A clipboard in her hands and a whistle half hanging in her mouth like a clingy cigarette. 

I stopped in my tracks and forced eye contact with the teacher. She was only about an inch or two taller than I was, so it wasn’t hard. 

“What do you mean?” I asked, my anxiety rising.

A couple of the other girls filed past into the changing room, but most of them didn’t. There’s something about drama that just captivates people. Especially when it’s someone else’s drama. It’s like a drug that we’re all told we shouldn’t have, but we all secretly crave. It’s like sugar. Or caffeine. 

“In light of ‘your little email’ to the principal over the weekend, we’ve made a few changes for you,” Ms Pike replied, cryptically. 

‘My little email’? She meant my Dad and my Grandma’s little email. Ms Pike nodded off in the direction of an old closet the janitor sometimes used for wringing his mops out in. 

“The door locks and there’s a toilet and running water in there in case you need to wash anything,” the teacher informed, looking me up and down. 

“Wha—?” Jessie cried, looking between me and what I can only assume was the school’s grudging attempt at a gender-neutral change room. 

“Why does she get her own change room!” Natalie asked. 

“Would you like to tell them,” Ms Pike asked. “Or should I?”

I tried to weigh up in my head which would be the least-worst option. I’m not sure how ‘choke Ms Pike on her own whistle’ made it into my mental list, but it did. 

“Fine,” I said coldly. “I’ll change in there.”

A triumphant grin spread itself across Ms Pike’s face, peeling back her lips and revealing her shiny, crooked, coffee-stained teeth. I traipsed off to my seclusion as she ushered the other girls inside the female changing room and strode victorious off in the direction of the indoor gym. 

I didn’t cry. I wouldn’t. I’d done entirely too much crying these last few days and it hadn’t helped. I wasn’t going to get mad. I was going to get even. And then I was going to get everything I ever wanted. I just wasn’t sure how, right now. 

It was as I was seething and plotting that I heard it. A knock on the door to the janitor’s room. It was faint, and I couldn’t be sure I heard it. But then it came again and was followed quickly by a hushed-but-urgent voice. 

“Let me in quick, before she catches me!”

It was Jessie. 

I opened the door and she rushed inside before closing it and locking it behind her. 

“What was that all about?” she asked. 

I’d never felt so trapped. Literally and emotionally. Locked in a room with someone who had this incomplete idea of me. 

That was piece of anxiety number three. It was more than the fact I hadn’t told my closest friend yet my closest secret. I’d had a lot of time to think back over the last few days. Of how worried I’d been Jessie wasn’t going to show up to my birthday; of the rebellion by my body at her soccer trials; of the way that yin-yang pendant had made me feel about her when I found it. It was like my feelings for Jessie were this big, tangled mess of pendant-rope. And here she was. Locked in a room with me. I’d never felt so scared of anything in my life. 

I was scared I’d say the wrong thing and ruin our friendship. I was scared Jessie would find out about me and cry out for help; that Ms Pike would come running and that would be all she needed to TERF me out of the school for good. I was scared of what my relationship with Jessie might turn into. If we both let it. I was scared about how I was going to answer her question. 

I’d never really been in a situation like this before, but I knew I had a choice. I could come clean. Tell her why Pike wanted me separate. Tell her my whole story, from Errol to Ella to now. Hope she’d find it in her heart to forgive me for all the times I’d let her think I was a biological girl. Or I could double-down on the lie. Make up something that would explain this latest move of Ms Pike’s and silence any follow-up questions. 

“I cut myself!” I said suddenly. 

I still don’t know why I did it. I mean, I know why I’d lied. It was better than losing whatever this was with Jessie, of losing all my friends and being an outcast at school. Again. But what I don’t know is why I chose something so utterly personal to Jessie to lie about. 

“Yeah,” I went on, not knowing where the words were coming from, nor how to stop the torrent of untruths slipping from my lips. “That was why I was on my way to the clinic on Sunday. To have one of my cuts cleaned out. It got inf—”

I stopped when I saw the emotion wash across Jessie’s face. There was a thin current of relief pulling at her forehead and eyes, but something deeper steered the ship. 

“My parents didn’t want me changing with the other girls,” I said, amazed at how I was keeping my head up, maintaining eye contact. “In case they see my cuts. Please don’t tell anyone!” I demanded, rushing forward and taking Jessie’s hands. 

She held my hands in her own and moved her thumbs gently against the backs of them. It was a soothing, massaging kind of motion, probably designed to be reassuring. But all I could think about was Jessie’s dad, the massage therapist.

“You can talk to me about this stuff, you know El?” she offered. “You can talk to me about anything. I’m a good listener and I don’t judge people.”

I nodded, suddenly aware of the enormity of the lie I’d talked myself into.

I didn’t know how long this lie would hold for. How long it could be before luck or circumstance or Ms Pike outed my deception and outed me to the entire school. That’s the thing with a lie. It’s like a single tangleweed growing in a beautiful garden of flowers. You can trim it and prune it and dress it up all you want. But it’s still a weed, and like a weed it has a life of its own. Eventually it will grow wild and choke your beauty out with its coiled sin. 

It was then that she said it. I was still holding onto her hands; still looking pleadingly in her eyes; still trying to sell her on the best version of my worst friendship. 

“It’s okay,” she reassured me, pulling me closer and into a full hug. She squeezed me tightly.

“I do it too,” she admitted. 

And then: the kicker. The thing I could never have expected in a thousand Sundays. She looked me squarely in the eyes, squeezed my hands with her fingers and whispered, “Maybe we can do it together sometime?”