Birthday(41)

My only option is to run to the side and hope I’m fast enough to juke back toward the end zone before I step out of bounds. For the first time in a long time panic melts the barrier between my body and myself and I’m whole again, a desperate animal scrambling. I pump my legs, scream wordlessly, try to will the defenders away from me. And when I turn, my toes just grazing the OB line, I think I might have made it.

But then two hundred pounds of angry teenage boy spears me in the side and I’m driven to the dirt. The clock ticks down. The game ends. They win.

Their side cheers, and I feel someone kick me in the side. It feels like every other time I’ve been kicked while I was down. Nothing’s changed.

I don’t really register things for a while. There’s a red haze, a pulsing in the glands at my throat, a tightness in the back of my skull. There are flashes as I stand, cross the field, stumble into the locker room. I stand there for a moment, teeth grinding, breath coming in deep gulps. The locker room hums with an industrial fan and the distant, profane sound of cheering. Two ideas tear at each other in my head like caged, hungry tigers.

Idea one: souls are real, or boy and girl brains are real, and I am a girl with shitty enough luck to have been born in a boy’s body, and now that I’ve really given this the old college try, it’s clear I never had any choices from the start.

Idea two: I’m a pathetic, self-pitying pervert who couldn’t even do this right.

I crouch, cover my ears, and close my eyes. A sound erupts from me and the groan crescendos into a scream. I stand, crank my arm back, and whip my helmet through the air. It slams into a locker and bounces away, leaving a dent, the bars over the face warped and broken. I don’t feel good, but I feel better, so I decide to cut loose.

I kick over benches and tear down posters. My fist clips a locker and the pain blooms crimson, pushing away every other feeling, so I punch it on purpose and feel even better. I punch, and punch, and punch, ignoring as my hand first goes numb and then begins to glow with pain. All I see are the dents I make in the metal and the red smears I leave.

“Morgan!” Dad says.

I don’t stop. The door busts off its hinges and bends out from the lock but I keep going, punching the wall behind it, happy to be a feral animal because it’s a reprieve from being me. Anything would be better than being me, because what has all of this been for? I have slowly strangled the real me with all of this—with alcohol, and weights, and football. The locker room talk, the stupid score, the endless, mindless strategies. And for what? For what?

Someone grabs me around the waist and throws me to the ground. I look up, panting and dazed, to see Eric staring down at me, still in his pads, his hair plastered to his head. He’s saying something, but there’s a ringing in my ears and I can’t catch my breath. For a moment I’m ashamed for him to see me like this, ashamed that even when I’m trying to be normal I can’t be normal, but then another plume of rage rises up from somewhere deep. He reaches down to help me up and I slap his hand away.

In this moment, I hate him for being a part of my life. Him and Dad—if I didn’t love them, if I didn’t care what they thought about me, if I weren’t so desperately afraid of losing them, I’d be that much closer to freedom. I wish they would disappear.

I wish I would disappear.

Dad leans into my field of vision. “Clear out for a minute, boys,” he says. He pulls me up and helps me to a bench, wraps an arm around my shoulders. I don’t fight him. In a fuzzy post-rage way, I think about how much more he’s hugged me this last year. Why didn’t he hug me before? I’m sure in my right mind I could come up with a dozen excuses, but why should I? Or maybe this is my right mind, finally, and the truth is this: for him, just like for every other guy in this dying, dilapidated, dogshit town, whatever’s wrong with me is catching, and he wasn’t even willing to risk it for his own child.

We sit there, shoulders touching for a while. He doesn’t say anything yet. My breath steadies.

“You’re taking this pretty hard, yeah?” he finally says.

“I guess.”

“Let you in on a little secret?” I don’t respond. “It’s just a game.”

“You know it isn’t,” I say. “It’s everything at this school.” I swallow and raw pain needles at my throat.

“Listen. Just because something’s serious doesn’t mean you have to take it seriously. I know you’re passionate, and I’m glad you’re passionate, but … it’s also supposed to be fun.”

I shrug.

“How about we head into Knoxville next weekend?” he says. “Just you and me, a guys’ weekend. We’ll catch a Vols game and just relax, remind you why you liked football in the first place.”

I shrug again, lighter this time. The more the rage fades, the more confused I feel. Everything bleeds out into the same uniform gray.

“And listen,” he says, and rubs my arm. “I’m being serious here. You should be proud. You’ve done so well. Helped get us this close to making history after, what, five years off the field? You’re a goddamn prodigy, Morgan. And there’s always next year, right? We’ll get ’em next year.”

Next year. I blink. My eyes feel dry. Next year. I make the mistake of thinking about the future in a moment when the veil is down, when I’m weak and can’t force dangerous thoughts to go somewhere else. I imagine keeping this up for another year. I imagine graduating high school like this, going to college like this. I imagine my body hairy. My muscles thick. Then more time passes. Legs get skinny, belly pooches out, hair recedes at the temple, beard grows in and turns gray. I imagine marrying a woman I don’t like so I don’t feel guilty when she realizes I can’t love her. I try imagining past thirty and it’s just a wall of static. I might as well be dead.