This Is How It Always Is(20)

“Let’s go home, baby,” Rosie said to Claude.

“Bye-bye, Claude,” said Miss Appleton. “It was nice to meet you today. I am so excited for our year ahead.”

Claude did not raise his gaze from the ground.

“Oh, one more thing Mrs. AdamsImeanWalsh. We generally discourage accessories at school, especially at this age.”

“Accessories?”

“Jewelry, headgear, shiny shirts. Purses.”

“Shiny shirts?”

“Anything distracting. We like students to be able to concentrate during class.”

“Sure, but—”

“If they’re fiddling, it’s hard for them to learn.”

“Was Claude fiddling?”

“No. He was not. But other children found his purse distracting.”

“Was he doing anything distracting with it?”

“Just the presence of the purse was distracting.”

“Like the peanuts?”

“How do you mean?”

“You are prophylactically ruling out purses and peanuts,” said Rosie.

Miss Appleton blushed from head to toe. “Prophylactically? Like,” she whispered the next word, “condoms?”

“Prophylactically like preventatively and defensively. Anticipatorially, if you will.”

“Um, sure.”

“It means you are banning peanuts and purses just in case they might cause problems even though they’ve caused none yet and despite the fact that doing so may infringe on the rights and well-being of your student citizens.”

“We-ell, I guess we hope you’ll just make something else for lunch? And we don’t really think boys, uh, children, um, need purses. For school.”

“It’s not a purse,” Claude interrupted. Rosie was relieved to hear his voice. “It’s a lunch tote.”

“Come on, sweetie,” Rosie said. “It’s been a long day. Let’s go home.”

Rigel and Orion were waiting for them on the playground, Orion hanging upside down from the little-kid monkey bars so that his hair brushed the ground and his face looked like a (three-eyed) strawberry, Rigel climbing up the sliding board then sliding down the stairs on his butt. They headed toward the car and home to see whether Roo and Ben had fared any better at middle school. Orion put his ten-year-old arm around his baby brother. “Kindergarten’s tough, kid. But we still love you.”

“Yeah, we love you,” Rigel echoed, “and your purse.”

“It’s a lunch tote.”

“And your lunch tote.”

*

The next day Rosie made cheese sandwiches all around. As Penn was packing them into a variety of lunch bags, boxes, and the patent-leather tote, Claude came downstairs and slid into his breakfast seat without a word. His already short hair was clipped back anyway with four rainbow barrettes, and he was wearing a dress made by pulling his own T-shirt—light-blue with a silk-screened unicorn eating a hot dog on a bicycle—over a longer shirt of Penn’s so that it flared into a skirt just below his waist.

“Nice dress, dude.” Roo’s mouth was full of Cheerios, so it was hard to guess his tone.

“Thanks.” Claude gave a small smile to his own cereal bowl.

Rigel looked up from the webbed foot he was knitting. “You’re not wearing that to school, are you?” and Rosie held her breath, waiting for the answer.

“Some of it,” said Claude.

“You’ll get your butt kicked,” said Rigel.

“Butt, butt, butt.” Orion giggled, wiggling his toes into the done-already other webbed foot.

“It’s not that it’s not a nice outfit,” Ben tried gently. “It’s just not very manly, is it?”

“He’s not a man,” said Penn. “He’s five. He’s a little boy.”

“He may not even be that,” said Roo.

“Roo!” Rosie’s voice sounded like warning, but was what he said unfair? Untrue? Unkind? She had no idea. Of course Claude was a little boy because if he wasn’t a little boy, what was he? This seemed like such a simple question, but it was one she’d never encountered before as a parent, and that was saying something. It seemed like such a simple question, but somehow it was terrifying. What you were if you weren’t a little boy ranked as maybe Rosie’s fourth concern of the morning. She tabled it. “No one’s kicking Claude’s anything. If anyone tries to kick Claude’s anything, I’ll kick their anything.”

Penn knew in his heart that Claude should be who he was. But he also knew that Claude would be happier if neither his clothes nor his sandwich nor the bag it came out of attracted anyone’s attention because another thing his heart knew was this: it was more complicated than that. Five years of Orion wearing all manner of weird stuff to school had occasioned not so much as a raised third eyebrow from anyone. “What an imaginative boy Orion is,” his teachers said. “His spirit brightens everyone’s day.” If an eyeball sticker was creative self-expression, surely Claude should wear what he wanted to school. How could you say yes to webbed feet but no to a dress, yes to being who you were but no to dressing like him? How did you teach your small human that it’s what’s inside that counts when the truth was everyone was pretty preoccupied with what you put on over the outside too?