Birthday(60)
There’s a long pause between us before Eric starts to speak again, his voice soft, like he’s telling me a fairy tale. “We’re thirty,” he says. “We’ve got an apartment in Los Angeles, maybe a duplex. Three bedrooms so your dad can retire and come live with us. The third is, I don’t know, maybe an office, maybe it’s got a race car bed in it.”
I hold in a laugh and let him spin a fantasy, like I’ve done so many times on my own.
“I’m in a band, maybe doing some session recording on the side. You’ve got a job freelancing, some arcane video editing thing I’ll never understand. We’ve got a lot of books. Maybe a dog.”
“Blue pointer,” I say sleepily. “I want a blue pointer.”
“We’ve got a blue pointer,” he says, stretching and nodding slowly. “Named Elvis. And we’re married.”
“What?”
“I’m being stupid,” Eric says. “I’m sorry. I’m rushing things.”
“No,” I say. “No. No, it’s nice.”
“Something to think about,” he says.
“Mm-hmm,” I say. And I do think about it as I drift down to sleep.
Eventually, he wakes me up, and we shuffle back to the car together, arm in arm, our birthday hours long behind us.
eighteen
MORGAN
My new iPhone chirps out the sound I’ve set for my work email. I hold a dress to my face and groan. Jasmine looks up from rummaging in my closet, all part of her self-appointed duty as birthday outfit coordinator, and rolls her eyes.
“Don’t check it,” she says.
“I won’t,” I say. I nod and stuff what I think is the best of my five black dresses into the open suitcase on my bed and then stand there, jiggling my hands, staring at the little black rectangle on my nightstand. “But I should.”
“You shouldn’t,” Jasmine replies. She throws me a pair of sandals I’d thought I wouldn’t need until spring, but considering I’m headed to Miami, it makes sense. I’m surprising Eric for his eighteenth birthday—our eighteenth birthday—with a trip down to Florida.
After the fight with Carson, we both knew Eric couldn’t stay in Thebes. His mom, Peyton, and Chelsea rented a house together in Miami with a spare room for Eric. Then, over Christmas break, Jenny came to our trailer in her minivan to pick up Eric. Instead of it being awkward, like I’d feared, Jenny said that she was happy for me, that I looked so much like my mom it hurt her heart. Eric left with only a suitcase and his guitar. Watching him climb into the van and disappear down the highway was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
Since then, we’ve had phone calls, Skype chats that have lasted late into the night, and even care packages, full of everything from baked goods to T-shirts, so we don’t forget how the person we love smells.
Sometimes I like to dance through the house when I’m alone, wearing Eric’s oversized Joy Division shirt, while one of his playlists blares through the trailer. Being apart from him this long has been agony, like one of my own limbs has fallen asleep and won’t wake up, but I try to focus on how much better our reunion will be because of this.
Dad and I decided together over the summer, after a kind of awkward acknowledgement of the damage I did to my grades sophomore and junior years and of our own place in the economic scheme of things, that heading straight to an expensive, out-of-state school wasn’t the best option. Better to get the basic academic courses finished cheaply in-state while figuring out what I want to do next, which might mean applying to film school in Los Angeles and living off-campus with friends I’ve made online. I’m not sure if a college will let me live in the girls’ dorm and Tennessee won’t let me change my gender on my birth certificate. I can’t even get the marker on my license changed without getting a surgery I’m not sure I want.
Roane State Community College offered online classes for everything I needed, and the looser schedule left me plenty of time to work on video editing and vlogging. The vlogging started as a personal video journal to record the first days and years of my life lived fully as a girl, or now a woman I guess, but then someone randomly found the first few vlogs I’d uploaded, liked them, shared them, and now I have five thousand subscribers and around a million views each time I upload a Sunday video. Who knew audiences were so hungry for the life of a trans girl from Nowhere, Tennessee?
Between ad revenue and editing work, I’m making a little money—enough to pay for hormones, clothes, and this trip, and I’m proud of that. The thing is, though, it’s about more than the work, and it’s about more than money, which is why I’m still tempted to check my phone. Every so often, I get a message from a trans kid my age or younger. Sometimes they try to hide how desperate and afraid they are, sometimes they’re open about how they can’t imagine a way out of their lives. Some of them live as close as Georgia, others as far away as Argentina or Korea. Almost universally they live in small towns, like Thebes. They don’t have dads like mine, still uncomfortable at times, but glad I’m alive, and they don’t have friends like Jasmine, and they don’t have anything close to Eric.
“You ready?” Dad asks as he emerges from his bedroom. I nod, hug Jasmine good-bye, and we load into the car in silence as tendrils of fog drag down from the mountains, chilling my bare arms and legs until the first licks of sunlight infuse me with warmth. Jasmine waves from her car as we pull away from the trailer.