If I Was Your Girl(39)

“You okay?” one of the guys said. He had whiskers and a cat nose painted on his face.

“Yeah,” I said, deepening my voice. I was glad to hear the helmet muffled my words.

“You were walking like you shit your pants,” Kitten Face said, wearing a look of genuine concern.

“I know what it is,” the other guy said. He had fake stitching painted from the corners of his mouth up to his cheekbones so he looked like a rag doll. He leaned over and punched me hard in the arm. I tried not to make a sound. “I saw you go in the bathroom with that chick.”

“She’s so hot, dude,” rag-doll guy said. “What’d you guys do in there?”

“Yeah,” Kitten Face said, leaning close. “She finally put out?” I saw Parker trying to pretend he wasn’t watching us. He snorted and rolled his eyes.

When I didn’t answer, Rag Doll leaned close. “She at least let you see her tits?”

I punched him in the arm harder than I meant to and headed back toward the keg. “I’m gonna grab another beer.”

“What crawled up his ass?” I heard Kitten Face say behind me as I walked away from them and through the crush of bodies in the living room.

Outside, I got in Dad’s car and turned the radio to the classical station that just barely came in. With the helmet off and the window rolled down I could breathe again. My stomach felt like it was on a gyroscope, spinning and twirling. I pressed my forehead to the steering wheel and groaned, trying to center myself. I knew how guys talked about girls when they weren’t around, of course. I shouldn’t have been surprised. But those two reminded me of the guys who tormented me when I was younger, and it still struck a nerve with me, no matter how much had changed. A knock at the window made me jump.

“Give up already?” Grant said. His hair was plastered to his scalp. He panted as he sat in the passenger seat.

“Yeah,” I said, turning just enough that I could keep my forehead on the cool steering wheel while also making eye contact with him. “Your friends are creeps, by the way.”

“What friends?” Grant said.

“The guy with the cat paint and the one with the rag-doll paint.”

He thought about that for a moment. “Oh, those guys are *s. They’re not my friends, they’re just on the team.”

“Good,” I said, squeezing his hand and smiling. “How did you do?”

“I’m not sure,” Grant said. “Chloe hugged me and thanked me for ‘that corn thing the other day.’” I laughed. “And, uh, I kind of…” He mumbled something I couldn’t make out.

“What was that?” I said.

“I got flirted with a bunch!” he said, his cheeks glowing bright pink.

“By guys?” I said, sitting up straight.

“They thought I was you!” he said, crossing his arms.

“Did you flirt back?” I said, leaning forward and grinning.

“No!” he said. “Jesus.”

“You liked it!” I said. He rolled his eyes but the pink on his cheeks didn’t go away. “Come on, admit you had fun. It’s okay. The whole point of Halloween is pretending.”

“Yeah,” he said, looking thoughtful. “It’s weird to be someone else for a little while.”

“Yeah,” I said, shifting closer to him and resting my head on his chest. The bass, still audible out here, formed a steady rhythm, with happy shrieks of partiers rising above the din.

“You know when I was a kid, the first time I watched Star Wars, it was like, I don’t know, like my whole world opening up,” Grant said suddenly. I left my head where it was, enjoying the rise and fall of his chest. “It sounds stupid now but seeing those characters with their crazy outfits, those badass spaceships, I started to think that maybe there was more out there than football and playin’ in dirt.”

I nodded, thinking of the first time I had watched the movie too. I had loved to escape into science fiction and fantasy for as long as I could remember, loved anything where the main characters didn’t look like the people I saw around me, and especially anything with themes of acceptance and social injustice. But my relationship with sci-fi was a little more complicated than Grant’s, because it was one of the things about me that was typically male. I knew that some girls had grown up reading comic books, and since my transition, I wasn’t sure whether it was something I should hide, like my encyclopedic knowledge of every episode of Deep Space Nine might somehow out me. I loved that I didn’t have to hide it from Grant.

“I don’t know what I’m really tryin’ to say,” Grant continued. “It helps to think about things other’n yourself, imagine that there’s a different way to be I guess.”

I sat up and kissed him long and hard, to tell him everything I couldn’t articulate—that for a guy who’d rarely received better than a C in school, for someone who thought the most value he brought was knocking guys over on a football field, he was one of the smartest people I had ever met.

I lay back down against him and we listened to the party go on without us, our breaths syncing. As I felt Grant’s heart beat in his chest, a thought that both thrilled and terrified me snaked its way from my stomach to the tips of my fingers: I was falling in love with him.