This Is How It Always Is(59)
Penn looked giddy. Frank and Marginny looked like they were waiting for the punch line, so Rosie supplied it.
“Poppy will probably go on the same drugs—”
“Probably?” Penn broke in.
“—when she’s eleven or twelve or so. They would prevent her male puberty. They’d shut down the whole system so she would stay a little girl.”
Frank fake-gasped. “You can do a sex change on a minor?”
“Hormone blockers just pause the system.” Rosie didn’t like having to dip into her reserves of patience for patients on the weekend. “The effects of these drugs are reversible. It’s puberty that’s not. That’s why the clock is ticking. We have to stop Poppy’s—well, really Claude’s—puberty before it starts. If we wait until Poppy’s no longer a minor, she’ll be six feet tall with whiskers and a broad, hairy chest and big hands and men’s size-twelve feet, and those never go away. At that point, we could load her up with all the estrogen we like, and she’d grow breasts and get rounder and her voice would soften, but she’d still be taller than every girlfriend she ever had. She’d still have to order all her heels online. She’d have to get electrolysis for the remnants left behind by every single chest hair, every mustache whisker, every bit of beard. She’d have to have surgery to shave down her Adam’s apple. The blockers put a stop to what can’t be undone later. Then, when she’s older and ready for estrogen, it’ll work better because it’ll have less to overcome. Or if she changes her mind, we’ve done nothing that’s not reversible—”
“Changes her mind?” Penn interrupted.
“—because as soon as you take them off the hormone blockers, patients’ bodies proceed normally through their natal puberty.”
“But.” Marginny’s brow wrinkled. It was a sentence, not a preamble to one. It was entire. Later, Rosie was struck by how Marginny understood instinctively worries she could not explain to Penn, no matter which ways she tried.
“Yes,” said Rosie. “But. But Aggie will turn into a young woman, and Poppy will still be a little girl. But everyone else in their class will become teenagers, and Poppy won’t quite. But kids with Precocious Puberty eventually mature physically and emotionally with everyone else at the normal age, but Poppy will stay prepubescent while everyone around her grows into young adults.”
“Then … why?” Marginny asked.
“It beats the shit out of the alternative,” said Penn. Even once he’d mastered the hows of secret keeping, he’d stayed on the listservs, the blogs and Instagram accounts and Twitter feeds, the YouTube channels with their pages and pages of comments. The kids who weren’t on blockers, puberty was killing them. The affirmed boys’ breasts were tumors, poisoning their bodies, growing malignantly as cancer. The affirmed girls studied their faces like maps for hints of hair, of bone spread beyond flesh. They could feel disloyal hormones blooming inside them, scattering indissoluble toxins like pollen into ill winds. They had, they harbored, such hatred, such revulsion for change as inevitable as seas, like their lives would be over if the tide came in, as it did, as it always did. The Internet was full of broken, breaking kids who spent their lives hiding beneath too many layers of too baggy clothes, beneath binders and tape and pads and straps. And those were the lucky ones because there were also the ones who tried simply to cut off the offending body parts. And there were the ones whose cuts did not stop there. There were not just a few. There were hundreds. There were thousands.
“So these kids just get to pick who they are?” Frank searched for an apt metaphor and finally settled on, “It’s like a video game.”
“No, it’s like a fairy tale,” said Penn. Rosie rolled her eyes at him. “Maybe you look like a filthy scullery maid, but inside, you’re really a princess, and if you’re good, you find the right grave to cry on or the right lamp to rub, and you become a princess on the outside too. You look like a frog, but kiss the right lips and you magically transform into the prince you’ve known yourself to be inside all along. If you’re good and worthy, you always get an outside to match your inside. Virtue leads straight to transformation; transformation leads instantly to happily ever after.”
“It’s a long way off,” Rosie added. “A long, long, long way off.”
“And no one,” Penn continued, as if Rosie hadn’t spoken at all, “is more good and worthy and virtuous than Poppy.”
*
Next door, Poppy was torturing the dogs. Orion, dressed as a yachtsman zombie himself, had also brought over his costume stash for the occasion, and Poppy and Aggie were trying to make the dogs do a play. Poppy had Jupiter in a vest Rigel had knit years earlier for ’80s day at school (so he could look like someone named Duckie from a movie called Pretty in Pink, though the vest looked neither pink nor ducklike to her) and Roverella girdled in six knit sweatbands, striping her middle like a zebra. She and Aggie were writing a play about neither ducks nor dogs nor zebras but rather Venus and Serena Williams teamed up to battle little green ball-shaped aliens. The dogs were doing great with the tennis balls but otherwise phoning it in.
Ben was making popcorn for the third time in three hours. They went through a lot of popcorn in the kid house. Rigel and Orion were choosing a movie for everyone to watch, a process of weight-and-measure evaluation akin to managing the debt crisis of a small nation. Roo and Cayenne were in the Grandersons’ basement waiting for everyone else to come back.