Parrotfish (2 page)

“I hope that’s a video game and not a new hobby.”

I nodded. “His favorite.”

Dad sighed and looked away from me. “I don’t know why we let that kid get away with loafing around all the time. He needs to start taking some responsibility around here.”

Right, like someday Charlie would just decide
on his own
to stop being a spoiled brat. Dad acted like it was all a big puzzle, but he knew why the kid got away with murder as well as the rest of us did. Charlie was the baby, and apparently he would always be the baby, because he’d been born prematurely. Eleven years ago Mom and Dad had been scared to death that their tiny three-pound son would never make it out of the incubator. But he wasn’t under the grow lights anymore—now he was a lazy, lumpy kid who spent his whole life parked in front of one kind of screen or another. Like me, he’d been born one particular way, and people thought that was who he’d always be, all evidence to the contrary.

So instead of positioning Donder and Vixen, we hoisted the fake chimney and one of the Santas—there were seven in all—onto the roof. They weren’t as big as the reindeer, so it was only a two-man job.

Some of the packages that got piled into the sleigh had blown away last year, so I got out the shiny red-and-gold paper Dad likes and covered a bunch of empty boxes. Meanwhile, he set up the nativity scene down near the corner of the lot. You might think seven Santas
and
a nativity set
and
reindeer on the roof is holiday overkill. Ha! We were just getting started.

When the whole thing was set up—by Sunday evening, with any luck—there would be fake castle turrets clinging to the roof just above the gutters, outlined, as the rest of the house would be, by hundreds and hundreds of white lights. The roof scene would be in place: nine teetering reindeer statues (one with an electric nose) and a large sleigh piled high with “presents” next to the Santa with the perfectly arranged beard. Santas Two and Three (also plugged into the heavy-duty wiring system so they could wink every seven seconds) would be standing next to the pine trees on each side of the house, which would themselves be encased in strands of colored lights, tinfoil stars, and sixty-eight angel ornaments—unless we’d lost some since my last count.

Santas Four through Seven would be in place on the front lawn, attempting to play leapfrog with each other, although none of them actually
move, so they would have to stay in their bent-over positions for an uncomfortable six weeks, after which we would pack them off to the chiropractor. To the left of the leapfrogging Santas would be Barbies on Ice, an addition Laura insisted upon when she was seven, which couldn’t now be eliminated because the little-girl visitors loved it so much and huddled around it each year, worshipping Mattel. There used to be an even dozen Barbies in skates, but over the years a few were either stolen or eaten by wildlife, so we were down to eight identical long-legged sisters twirling in circles on a piece of magnetized plastic lit from below and controlled from inside the garage—Dad’s finest electronic achievement. They were all dressed in white faux fur coats and hats, which took Mom and Laura an entire summer to sew. From a distance they looked like miniature dancing polar bears.

To the right of the lawn Santas would be the giant teddy bears having a picnic in the (fake) snow. Real snow had done a job on these guys, though—especially last year when we had three feet land on us in a two-day blizzard that buried them until early March. Their fur looked like old, matted shag rugs now and smelled like a cat box—probably because it was being used for that purpose.
I was hoping to get Dad to retire them, but I wasn’t counting on it.

What am I forgetting? Plastic angels on the turrets . . . plastic poinsettias lining the sidewalk . . . plastic icicles on the windows. Oh, and the caroler statues near the front door who had speakers in their heads and were connected to the sound system in the living room so we could torture the neighbors with “The Little Drummer Boy” and “The Twelve Days of Christmas” every evening from six to ten. And not just for twelve days, either.

Dad and I were laying out all the wires that had to be hooked up, when I saw Eve coming down the street, obviously headed for our house. A good time for me to disappear into the garage and make sure all the cords were long enough to reach the main electrical box.

       EVE: Hi, Angie. I’m lonesome. My snotty new friends aren’t around today, so I thought I’d cut you a break. Let’s just pretend like I haven’t ruined our twelve-year friendship in my ridiculous quest for popularity, okay?

       ME: Sure, Eve. Just throw me whatever scraps of your time are left over.

       EVE: Great! I figured since I’m the only real friend
you have, you’d be willing to take what you could get.

       ME: Yep, I’m begging!

       EVE: But please don’t tell anybody I was over here, okay? I wouldn’t want my pretentious new friends to know I still talk to you.

       ME: No problemo, Eve. If I see you at school, you’re a stranger to me. Wouldn’t want to jeopardize your social standing among the
important
kids.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay in the garage making up my own scenarios for the rest of the afternoon, especially not after Dad called out, “Angela, Eve is here!” Obviously, it was going to take awhile to get my new name to stick.

I stood outside on the driveway but didn’t go up to the two of them. I knew Eve would be making happy talk with Dad, giving him some lame excuse for why he hadn’t seen her in weeks. I wasn’t going to interrupt the performance. I pretended to be fiddling with one of the leaping Santas until she walked over to me.

“Hey, Angie,” she said timidly.

“Hey.”

“You guys putting your Christmas stuff out again?”

I just looked at her. Her twitchy little smile melted.

“You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” she asked.

“I don’t see any reason to answer these obvious questions,” I said. Eve could never stand to have anybody mad at her, even when she was really little. I’d taken advantage of it more than once over the years, making her apologize to me for stuff that wasn’t really her fault. But this time she deserved my anger.

“Come on, Angie. Don’t be mad at me. You’re still my friend too!”

“Oh,
thank
you, Eve. I’m so relieved! Where am I on the list again? After Danya and Melanie and Zoe and—”

“That’s not how it is!” She kicked her shoe into the nearest Santa, and it left a black mark. “Oops, sorry.” She knelt down to try to wipe the mark off with a glove. “Why can’t I have more than just one friend? I mean, they’re my school friends and you’re my home friend. What’s wrong with that?”

“You mean I’m your runner-up friend. When Miss America, Miss Universe, and Miss Queen of the frigging World cannot fulfill their obligations. then I’m good enough to be seen with. Or rather,
not
seen with.”

“Angie,” she whined, “I need friends in my
own class. You remember how it was when you went to the high school for the first time and didn’t know anybody. It’s scary! I need more friends than just
one
!”

“Especially when that one is transgendered, right?”

Eve opened her mouth to respond, but no words came out, so she shut it again.

“You kids want some cocoa or something?” Dad said as he passed us on the way into the house. “I’m gonna take a break and make myself some tea.”

Eve’s face came to life again for Dad—they’ve always been pals. “No thanks, Mr. McNair. I can’t stay too long.” As soon as Dad was inside the house, her smile disintegrated.

The reason Eve and I hardly knew anybody when we arrived at Buxton Central High School is that we were homeschooled from first grade through our freshman years by our mothers. Mom met Eve’s mother, Susan, soon after their family moved into the neighborhood. They were both schoolteachers who had decided to stay home with their kids, and when they realized how close in age we all were, they decided to do a joint homeschooling thing, first with just us girls and then later with our younger brothers. My mom
did the reading, social studies, and arts parts; Susan did the math and science. We all loved it, I have to admit. There were two “classes”: Laura, Eve, and me in one and Daniel and Charlie in the other. Since we only lived a few houses apart, we’d walk back and forth when our “classes” changed. We all played soccer and took swimming lessons with kids from town, and when we listened to their stories about public school, it didn’t sound like we were missing much. Crowded classrooms, too many worksheets, and lots of homework. We felt lucky.

I went off to Buxton last year, as a sophomore. The moms decided they weren’t prepared to do higher math, and besides, I needed more “socialization.” I think they hoped that being around boys would make me act like more of a girl. But it worked the opposite way. Seeing all that rampant girl-on-boy flirtation and boy-on-girl lust freaked the hell out of me. I couldn’t figure out where I belonged in that picture. By the end of last year I came out as a lesbian, which, as I mentioned, was just a pit stop on the queer and confused highway. Over the last six months I started reading some books and going online to GLBT sites, and my feelings started making more sense to me.

I realized it wasn’t just that I became
interested in girls when I hit puberty and started figuring out sex. I was a boy way before that, from the age of four or five, before I knew anything about sex. On one of the websites it said that gender identity—whether you feel like a boy or a girl—starts long before sexual identity—whether you’re gay or straight. In my dreams at night, I was a boy, but every morning I woke to the big mistake again. Everyone thought I was a girl because that’s the way my body looked, and it was crystal clear to me that I was expected to pretend to
be
a girl whether I liked it or not.

But you can only lie about who you are for so long without going crazy. So the week before Thanksgiving I cut my hair (not entirely successfully), bought some boys’ clothes and shoes (easy), wrapped a large Ace bandage around my chest to flatten my fortunately-not-large breasts (much more painful than you might think), and began looking for a new name. I didn’t expect it to be easy, but I figured that if I acted like this was a more or less normal transformation, maybe other people would too. The process was nerve-wracking, but it was a huge relief to know that my appearance was finally going to match my sense of who I really was.

Eve and Laura both arrived at Buxton High
this year, Eve as a sophomore and Laura as a freshman. (Laura didn’t want to be the only one left in our “class,” so the moms let her out early.) Laura had always had other girls her age from her dance classes that she hung around with, but Eve and I never needed anybody else—we’d been inseparable one-and-only friends since we were toddlers. When I came out as a lesbian last spring, it was the beginning of an uncomfortable distance between us that we tried to ignore. But it got worse when I announced the real truth.

Eve was looking at me sadly. “Oh, Angela!” She seemed to be begging for something, but I wasn’t sure what.

“I’m not Angela anymore. My new name is Grady.”

“Your new . . . what?”

“I told you I was going to find myself a new name. It’s Grady. I’d like you to start calling me that. If you plan on speaking to me at all, that is.”

“Angie . . .”

“Grady!”

“Whatever!” I could see tears in Eve’s eyes, which is how I knew she was angry; anger and sorrow were always all mixed together for her. “Why are you doing this? So people notice you? I mean, everybody already thinks you’re really weird!”

I took a deep breath and tried to stay calm. I knew I was going to have to figure out how to explain it to people. “You know, in Native American cultures people like me were honored. Before the Europeans arrived and screwed everything up, we were called Two-Spirit.”

“Since when are you Native American?”

“I’m not, but—”

Eve shook her head. “I don’t know what you want from me, Angie.”

“Grady,” I reminded her. “All I want is for you to use my new name.”

She pressed her gloves into the corners of her eyes. “You act like that’s a little thing! People are already talking about you since you cut your hair like that and started wearing men’s shirts and stuff. Now I’m supposed to tell them that my friend Angela Katz-McNair isn’t a
girl
anymore? That we should call her Grady and pretend she’s a boy, or a
Two-Spirit
, or something halfway between one sex and another? They’ll think I’m crazy too.”

“Between two genders, not two sexes. I’m fairly sure my sexuality is just plain old heterosexual male.”

Eve stared at me. “Angie, this is too confusing. I’m not like you. I need to have friends—I don’t want people to think I’m a weirdo.”

“You think I enjoy it?”

She thought about my question. “Maybe you do. At least you don’t really
mind
it. If you did, you wouldn’t put yourself out there like this. You’re just asking for trouble.”

“I’m just asking to be myself, that’s all.”

She shook her head. “Well, Angela was my friend, but I don’t know who Grady is! I’m sorry, but I can’t call you that in front of other people. I can’t be part of this whole thing. It’s too bizarre.”

That fast I was back to being pissed off. “So I guess it’s lucky you barely speak to me in school. My name change won’t be a problem for you.”

“I’m sorry, Angela. I hope we can still be friends—”

“When nobody is looking? Sorry, I don’t call that
friends
.” My voice careened into a shout. “And my name is Grady!”

Eve pulled her coat tightly around her body, as though she thought something inside might fall out. She scooted down the driveway and left me standing there, my biggest secret loose in the atmosphere between us. I’d been thinking of it as a clean rain, but obviously Eve thought it was air pollution.

I walked inside, shaking. Dad was sitting at the kitchen table, looking over the newspaper.