A/N: Updates won't normally be so quick, but I'm a bit impatient to get this story started. Warning in this chapter for a verbally abusive home life, internalized transphobia, alcoholism, queer/transphobic language, and a traumatic coming out/being outed experience.
Chapter 2 Theme Song: Grinnin' In Your Face by Son House
The walk home was definitely suited for the soundtrack by the blues. The raw simplicity of a person, their guitar, and feeling awful resonated with me deeply, especially given the fact that half my face was swollen and bruised. Nick McArthur and his posse of fellow neanderthals could go rot. The rest of the school could join them, as far as I was concerned.
Don't you mind people grinnin' in your face.
Don't mind people grinnin' in your face.
Just bear this in mind, a true friend is hard to find.
Don't you mind people grinnin' in your face.
I trekked the mile back to our small, two-story brick house. It'd been in the family for a few generations, otherwise there was no way we could have afforded it despite it not being all that large. It looked rather squished to be honest, as if whoever had built it wasn't entirely sure of the measurements beforehand.
It did at least look homey on the outside, with a small yard surrounded by coniferous trees and vegetation. It even had a fence up to the sidewalk with a mailbox at the end of a short driveway. A matching brick walkway extended from the sidewalk to the front door.
That homey feeling lasted up until you made it through said door.
After doing so I looked to my left into the living room to see my mother sitting on her grey recliner watching the television. Evidently, she wasn't working late today. The rest of the room looked as dull as humanly possible with bland white walls (I'm not sure how you'd find a bland shade of white, but it was), a glass coffee table (complete with coffee mug stains), scuffed hardwood floors, and a quarter-filled bookshelf. I wasn't sure if my mother had even read any of them. In short, it almost perfectly matched her personality, at least when she wasn't angry.
She looked over at the noise of my entry and gave a sigh. "What the hell did you do to your face?". My mother sure had a way with words. "W-what do you think happened?" I shot back, already feeling my temper rise especially given the stutter. She scoffed and turned back to her television show, returning to her usual habit of ignoring me if at all possible.
You know they'll jump you up and down.
They'll carry you all round and round.
Just as soon as your back is turned,
They'll try and crush you down.
On some level I did feel sorry for my mother, or at least I had tried to for a while. She had grown up here as a daughter of the local preacher and Sunday School leader (now both deceased), met my father in her freshmen year of high school, and got pregnant with me out of wedlock at 19. Whatever dreams she may have had more or less ended at that point. They got married only a few months after she found out about me.
Between having to raise me and my father's (often drunken) bitterness towards his own job at the local auto shop she couldn't have been happy. Even less so when he suddenly died in a drunk driving accident where he veered off the road into a ravine. It certainly didn't help the already stressful money situation. I was 9 at the time. I think I cried a bit, but by that point he had regularly scared the hell out of me with his booze-breath-fueled ravings. Lest we forget and all that, the key word being "forget".
I highly doubt she ever anticipated having to raise a child who would one day come out to her as trans, at the tender age of 12 no less. I used to have the smallest shred of sympathy given that she likely had never been given the tools to handle a situation like that. That sympathy didn't last long. Looking back the now 5-year old memory, unfortunately, was still ingrained in my mind.
I looked back and forth at my mother nervously as I tried to get my thoughts straight. She had come home late the night before after a double shift at the diner and despite it being dinner time the next day she was still tired.
"What?" she said, barely looking at me. I flinched slightly at her tone. Clearly my fidgeting had not been subtle, but I took a deep breath. "Um...mom I was wondering…about something?" Every few words I had to pause to clamp down on my building anxiety.
After no more than 5 seconds she replied with "Well are you going to tell me or just keep rambling? I'm exhausted and you aren't helping." I fought back tears. I knew that I had trouble finding my words and I knew that it frustrated her. Sometimes, especially when I was anxious, I just couldn't put the right words together smoothly. I wished I was smarter.
"Um…I mean…I was, uh, wondering what it feels like…what does it feel like to be a girl? Could I be a girl?". There. I'd somehow blurted it out. The thing that I had been fixating on for months now, ever since I had started to notice how "off" I felt relative to my peers.
I remembered being at lunch and seeing Julie Mason in a pretty dress. My first thought had not been "Wow, she's pretty." She had been of course, but my first thought was "Wow, I wish I were that pretty. I wish I had that dress".
I hadn't slept well that night, tossing and turning trying to figure out just what the hell was wrong with me. For the next 9 weeks I was stuck on these feelings and eventually came to realize, in a very rough sense, what I was feeling.
My mother stopped eating. There were a few moments of silence where I felt my anxiety reach a fever pitch. She turned to me slowly, looked me dead in the eyes, and said "Don't you ever even think of being a fucking queer. The second you start wearing makeup or God forbid some dress you better believe your ass is out of this house". She got up, brought her plate to the sink, paused, and then decided just to angrily chuck the whole thing in the trash bin. Walking away with her fists clenched she slammed her bedroom door behind her down the hallway.
The sound of a plate shattering nicely summed up how I felt at that moment.
After that we never discussed it again. Not having quite learned my lesson though I later made the mistake of trying to talk to one of my teachers about it. Between their loud exclamation that I "not talk about that sort of thing", gossiping in the teachers' lounge, and being overheard by a few students pretty soon the whole school knew.
It unfortunately didn't stop there, and I went from being seen as a socially awkward loser to being outright harassed in both school and in public. My mother never did a damn thing, preferring to avoid any and all conversations about it with me or anyone else.
You know your mother will talk about you.
Your sisters and your brothers too.
They don't care how you're just tryin' to live.
They'll talk about you still.
With each passing day I wished more and more that some natural disaster would decimate this town and everyone who lived in it. Preferably slowly and painfully. I was more than willing to pay the cost of being included in the list of victims if it meant wiping this place off the map.
Back in the present, after leaving my mother I walked up the stairs to my room. Locking the door behind me I laid down on the bed. I didn't have much else other than a dresser, old electronic clock (the classic rectangular one with the faux wood and red numbers), old CD player boombox, and bookshelf that was mainly filled with CDs I had either found at the thrift store or stolen. Although long past fashionable, I liked having a physical copy of my music.
I took my delta blues collection CD out of my CD Walkman, I put it in the larger player and got to work barely trying on my homework. Although I had a decent grasp of most of the subjects, I was too depressed most of the time to even care.
If I felt especially interested in something I could do quite well, even to the point of excelling. Sophomore year I got a 100% on a paper analyzing the themes of one of my favorite albums, specifically looking at the importance of individuality as explored on Rush's "2112". I'm pretty sure I got as high a grade as I did because I went 3 full pages beyond the recommended limit and my teacher didn't want to deal with reading it any longer.
Again, though, I tended to not care. It wasn't like I had much worth aspiring to at this point. I barely felt any hope at all trying to think of a way to get out of this place.
Yes, but bear this in mind.
A true friend is hard to find.
Don't you mind peo-
Wait a minute.
Forgetting about Son House for a moment (something I'd normally consider tantamount to blasphemy) I went to where I'd tossed my backpack. Digging through it I grabbed the pamphlet that I had had to pick up from the office before school let out. It was from the travel agency and seeing it I remembered the strange interaction I had after gym.
Looking through it I saw that it was an all-expenses paid trip to Stockholm, Sweden that would be awarded to 15 seniors. I couldn't care less who on earth decided to not only fund this but extend the offer to this town of all places. All that mattered was that Stockholm wasn't anywhere near western Oregon, or this entire country for that matter. Good enough for me.
Looking through the requirements I just needed to write an essay on why I wanted to go. There wasn't even a word limit. I outright snorted when I read the stupid-simple prompt. "Seriously, who the hell thought up this thing?" I muttered to myself. If there hadn't been a whole presentation at school I'd have assumed that it was a joke.
Whatever. I didn't care how odd it seemed that so little effort was needed to apply for an opportunity like this. All I cared about was doing my best to win one of those spots. Sitting there I had no idea what to write though. I certainly couldn't point to my grades or any sort of extracurricular activities that might make me a good candidate. The thought of asking for any sort of endorsement from anyone, peer or teacher, made me snort again.
After deliberating for a few minutes I blurted out "To hell with it" and started writing about my experience being trans in this awful town. How I felt this deep disconnect between my body and who I was inside, how I wanted to cry whenever I saw someone in a gorgeous dress because I wanted so badly to be that person, how no one respected me enough to even get my name or gender right, how I'd get the shit kicked out of me for accidentally walking too close to the wrong student, how I wanted to burn down this town and salt the earth under it, everything.
It was cathartic to the point that I started crying at a few points trying to write it. I put it all down there. Every lonely, angry, fucked up thing I'd felt but had been unable to talk about with anyone for years poured out onto paper. If I had been in a clearer state of mind I might have been concerned as to how dark some of what I wrote down had gotten. Compartmentalizing away my feelings was a survival instinct at this point, to such an extent that I didn't know how deep it all went.
Looking at the clock after finishing it I saw that it was 7:30. I'd missed dinner entirely, not that my mother bothered to remind me, and I was too exhausted to care about eating. My already borderline underweight figure wouldn't appreciate missing a meal, but sleep was more important to me at this point. After brushing my teeth and using the bathroom, I came back and turned down the volume on my CD player to a near-whisper.
The "repeat CD" button had been pressed down for so long that I was pretty sure it was stuck like that, so I never worried about silence. Throwing on some sweatpants and nothing else for pajamas I turned out the lights, crawled into bed, and fell asleep surprisingly fast.
Yes, but bear this in mind.
A true friend is hard to find.
Don't you mind people grinnin' in your face.
Chapter Theme Songs Used So Far:
The Passenger - Iggy Pop
Grinnin' In Your Face - Son House