wordwhacker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wordwhacker) wrote2006-02-25 01:16 am
wordwhacker) wrote2006-02-25 01:16 am
Fiction post - You in the Mirror
I've been working on this story just about every spare moment I've had for the past two or three weeks. Sadly, it hasn't been enough for me to actually finish it. I like how it's coming, though, and I'm eager to wrap it up, because I'm finally getting to a point at which I can have the characters interact for a long-ish, (hopefully) engaging scene. So far the prose is exposition-heavy with very little dialogue (VERY out of the ordinary for me), and has a lot of musing by the narrator (VERY typical for me.)
Once it's finished I'll edit this post and make a new one linking to it. I'd love to hear what you think so far, though.
EDIT: 03/02/06: Done! I'll separate the LJ-cut into two parts, so if you've read Part I you can just skip straight to Part II.
I would really appreciate some feedback on this one. I'm really happy with it for a first draft, but I need to know whether or not people other than me are following this. I think I'm going to sit on it for a bit (maybe until after exams) and then see if I can improve it, weave in some threads of ideas that I vaguely mention in this round but wanted to go into more detail with, if possible.
Oh, and the rating on this has gone up since I last posted it. It now contains at least a mildly/moderately erotic scene. No sex, though. Just as an FYI. I doubt it would even trip many text scanners.
I'm also changing the title. Was "Little Girl Who Wasn't".
You in the Mirror (short story, 4,700 words, first draft)
We called her Tommy. It wasn’t her real name - wait, strike that. It was her real name, still is when I’m feeling playful. But it wasn’t on her birth certificate, and year after year, on the first day of classes, the inevitable battle began.
“Samantha Bryers?”
“Here.” That was me, haunting the start of roll-call.
“Jonathan Colpitts?”
“Here.”
“Daniel Davidson?”
“Here.”
“Tammy Earheart?”
“Tommy.”
The teacher - Ms. Freedman, one of the faceless names I only remember thanks to my mother’s obsession with scrapbooks - looked up from the fourth-grade class list to identify the owner of the voice among the erupting giggles. They all knew what was coming. Freedman cleared her throat and directed her glassy stare back to the list - obviously she hadn’t had much luck. “I’m sorry, Tommy, there must be a mistake.”
“No, ma’am,” Tommy said, and the teacher suddenly realized that the matter-of-fact little voice had come from a girl. “I go by ‘Tommy’, that’s all.”
“Oh.” She made a note on her list and kept going. I turned around in my seat to catch Tommy’s eye. She looked bewildered, and a little disappointed. We’d been expecting some mighty fireworks after what had happened the year before.
My memory is a little sketchy; I’m starting to think I filled in a lot of that time in later years. Tommy’s mother was like a character out of Alice in Wonderland, big and bold and completely off her rocker. When she’d heard about what had happened on the first day of Grade Three, when the teacher had forbidden Tommy to call herself by ‘a boy’s name’, she had stormed into the principal’s office the next morning and screamed up a storm. She was using her ‘scary feminist voice’, as we’d come to call it later. When she used it she was making a statement; if you were smart you would reply with one of two things: “yes,” or “yes, ma’am.”
Tommy and I had waited outside, listening, and I wasn’t quite sure if I should be laughing or crying. Neither felt quite right. Instead we sat in silence and watched the shadow of that scraggly tree in the pasty white glass of the hall window, shivering back and forth.
Her mother left the room about a year later. The door came open with a nervous-sounding squeak and admitted her into the empty hall. She had a few words with Tommy, not loud enough for me to hear, like the open space she’d been taking up with her screaming was sucking all sound into a vacuum. Then she went away, clack-clacking down the hall.
Tommy grinned back at me, that foolish grin she had that showed off the dimples she still gets when she smiles, and I knew everything was okay.
I hope I’m not fabricating the image I have of her from back then - that tufty haircut that looked like my brother’s when it grew out after the summer, the t-shirts hanging flat over her chest, beat-up jeans and flat sneakers, red ones, dusty and muddy and soft. She had a plain little face, round, smattered with freckles, not quite innocent but far from a devil. There was something about her walk that I first noticed that day as we were going back to class; something confident, something I wanted, but I didn’t really know how.
She was just Tommy, and I loved that about her.
We met before clothes and boys and girls really mattered. I loved skirts, how they’d fan out behind me when I ran and flare out when I spun around in circles. I did a lot of that, until I started school and got the impression that it was unfashionable. I still wore them, though; I could never get the hang of pants. I was happy to wear whatever my mother put me in. To her credit at least half of it was a colour other than pink.
I didn’t notice Tommy right away. I had some friends from kindergarten that were sticking pretty close; one of them got wind of this boy-girl first. It wasn’t really an insult yet, just a label to try to explain the little girl that wasn’t. She was more interested in worms and trucks than skipping rope, not that that stopped her. And she never wore pink - not a scrap of it. Slacks and t-shirts right from day one.
I never did mind getting my knees dirty. We were always digging for something, I remember: gold, dinosaur bones, or maybe to China. Our conversations sometimes took us through all three over the course of lunch. It must have had an impression on me; when I think about Tommy it’s still in greens and browns and slate greys, the colours that filled my vision while her matter-of-fact tone of voice floated over to me from her own little plot of land.
“Were you supposed to be a boy?”
She looked up at me with her face scrunched up. “Why?”
I shrugged, carefully tucking some of my hair back behind my ear. “You’re just more like a boy.”
For a minute she looked like she was going to say something, but she just pressed her lips together and went back to digging.
By that afternoon I’d forgotten I’d asked. We walked home together, like we’d started to do every day now that our parents had found out we were friends, and we probably talked about something exciting like catching grasshoppers. The thought secretly terrified me. But I wasn’t letting on.
It was about grade five when kids really started to come down on her. Usually girls, and always in groups, they liked to call her “he-she” or “she-he”, though they could never decide which one was better. Sometimes Tommy would yell something back, sometimes she’d just ignore them. She never really lost it, though - unlike me. Every year of Junior High I got more and more pissed off. Coming back to school after summer was like opening up a fresh new can of worms, which I would subsequently hook and cast. I wasn’t afraid to play their game, though I got the feeling Tommy wished I wouldn’t.
“Hey Sammy,” Brett said once in Grade Seven - I’d been trying to go by just ‘Sam’ ever since the third grade, but the old nickname stuck out of habit and rhyme - “If you like Tommy so much, why don’t you marry her?”
“Okay,” I shot back, “she’d be a better man than you.”
He didn’t even say anything - just dropped his jaw and ran back to his cronies on the other side of the school yard to debrief them. He wasn’t the only one I’d shocked, though.
“Why’d you say that?” Tommy hissed.
I shrugged. “I dunno. Why not?”
“They’re totally going to think we’re dykes now, stupid.”
“Oh, whatever.” I was careful to hide my chagrin - I’d developed a quick tongue over the last couple of years. “It’s not like they don’t already,” I added, realizing yet again that I probably wasn’t helping much.
She didn’t say anything else. I didn’t know what to do, so neither did I. For maybe twenty minutes things were a little tense, an eternity for a pubescent girl on a strict lunch-hour schedule, but by the time they were rounding us up for the afternoon classes things were back to normal, at least on the surface. Had I hit a nerve? I didn’t have the first idea what, or how, or whether or not to ask.
So I pretended it never happened, though I did my best to act like not-a-lesbian, just in case. For a while it feels like that was all I ever thought about. Would a lesbian say that? Would a lesbian do that? What if I am a lesbian?
I don’t remember when it died out, but it must have, since I started dating boys a year or so later. For some reason I thought Tommy would be jealous, but she wasn’t; she’d just reply with a dry, “Oh,” when I told her why we couldn’t hang out on Thursday night.
She did ask why I sounded out of breath one time, though.
“Are you okay?”
“Huh?” My boyfriend was across the room examining one of my band posters. He was probably getting as far away from me as he could get under the circumstances; I could tell he was red in the face. My door had to stay open - Mom’s orders, which she enforced until I was 16 - so I’d been making clandestine use of my walk-in closet.
“You sound sorta winded.”
“Oh. Uh. Just ran up the stairs. To my room.”
“Oh.” A chuckle. “Oh. Is your mom home?”
“Yeah. Watching TV.”
“Okay. Careful on those stairs.”
“Fuck off,” I said, cheerfully, and hung up the phone.
“Who was that?” Asked the boyfriend, whose name I can’t remember. It started with P.
“A friend.”
If I’d said, ‘Tommy,’ he would have known who I meant. I never talked about Tommy to my boyfriends. Most of them never met her, not formally, anyway. I wasn’t ashamed of her; I would have been the first person to stand up for her, had a hundred times. But I didn’t want to drag all that into my bedroom. I needed my space, my bedroom, my body. I needed to be about me, me, me for a change.
Besides, what they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them.
Sometime around Grade Nine, Tommy had grown up. I distinctly remember thinking that one day when we were waiting for the bus. It was our first year in High School, sometime in late September. She was smoking, a habit she couldn’t really get the hang of that mysteriously disappeared a few months down the road. If only I could have been so lucky. She was wearing that pair of jeans that hugged her hips just the right way. I liked how she hooked her smoking hand on a fraying belt loop when she wasn’t taking a drag.
At that moment she wasn’t talking, not that that was all that out of the ordinary. She liked to do that, stand there and smoke or chew gum, spit on the sidewalk. There were no strings between us; we could stand around like that for hours, looking cool, never saying a word. Could, but usually didn’t. I always found myself with something to say.
She unhooked her smoking hand from the belt loop and flipped a bit of hair out of her eyes, that shaggy cut she’d grown into over the past couple of summers. She’d definitely grown up; out of the buzz cuts and tunnels to China and into hips and concealed curves.
“You goin’ to visit your dad this weekend?”
“Yeah,” she said, though it sounded like she wasn’t quite decided yet. She’d only known her dad for a year or so. Tommy looked away, to her thinking spot that was at the moment somewhere down the street. “D’you wanna come?”
That was a new one. “Really?”
Tommy shrugged. “Better than going alone.”
I didn’t know how much I really wanted to spend my weekend being awkward-by-proxy, but I said yes. I’d need to stop at home for a change of clothes.
“And what, your makeup kit?” She teased.
“Yeah, why not? Maybe I can give you a makeover,” I said, reaching over to apply some invisible blush to her cheek with my thumb. She wiped at the spot as though she’d been smeared with soot.
“Maybe,” she said.
I forgot my smokes at home, so I kept having to bum them off Tommy that whole Saturday. I sat pressed up against the window of the pickup, which was cracked open a little to clear out the fumes. Tommy was crushed in between me and her dad, a hefty guy with long, curly blonde arm hair. I remember looking over at his hands on the steering wheel, noticing how he had those sort of gangly fingers like Tommy did, only they looked too thin on him. He wore a wedding band, supposedly from a wife who had died just the other year. Why he’d waited for her to croak before he got in touch with Tommy was something everybody seemed to want to know, but nobody asked.
He was a nice enough guy, loaned me a pack of smokes once we got to his place. He had that kind of awkward, boyish way of looking at us and talking to us, like he wasn’t sure yet whether or not we were poisonous. His house was in Moncton, just a two hour drive away, and he lived there with a son and a daughter, both of whom were older than Tommy. I asked her what the deal with that was one time, but Tommy just shrugged. “Mom got lucky,” she’d said, with that not-quite-a-grin.
Most of the time he was asking her questions, trying to find out who she was - not the kind of thing to ask a fifteen-year-old and expect a straight answer. I stuck close to Tommy, trying to lend some wordless emotional support, a link back to the real world. I could tell she appreciated it, probably all the more because I was being quiet for once. A definition for the word “tact” was still a long ways off for me, so keeping my mouth entirely shut was the only safe way to go.
For some reason I remember those Sloppy Joes the most, the ones Tommy’s half-sister made. She hadn’t talked to us much, didn’t seem to like us, but not in a vicious sort of way, and I was willing to forgive just about anything after that meal. Tommy wasn’t so impressed; spicy foods weren’t her thing. She didn’t complain, but I could see it in her posture, the way she was being forcibly casual about holding her fork. When she’s in her element there’s a certain tautness about her, like she’s wound up and ready to spring.
We started going down once or twice every couple of months. Mostly we took the bus, now that we knew how to get there. That’s what it was all about, really; getting away from home, together in that private, adventurous way we’d had when we were kids. Like Sunday afternoons after church, when we’d sneak off into the sparse collection of trees we’d called “the woods” and used to pretend we were pirates, soldiers, cast-away sailors or lost explorers who had taken a wrong turn in the frozen North. But there was something grown-up about it, too; for a long time there was that tug of war between holding onto the past and wanting to forget it.
That was where I got stuck - I never knew if I should be fighting the world or forcing it to accept me. I could scream and fight on Tommy’s behalf all I wanted, but deep down there was a part of me that just wanted to be liked, to be wanted, to be looked at and admired. I wanted the makeup, the clothes, the rake-thin body. I wanted perky boobs and perfect skin. But I didn’t want it all at Tommy’s expense - at the expense of anybody other than that far-flung ideal. I wanted my cake, and there would have been hell to pay if I hadn’t been able to eat it, too.
So I took it. I wore the high-heels, the makeup and cute flouncy skirts. I told myself that I wasn’t just earning respect - I was commanding it.
But I was jealous of Tommy. She did it without the world’s approval, casually owning herself and the world around her like a Roman Emperor. That was what I wanted, not this thankless debt I was in. I could “earn” or “command” all I wanted, but every day would be a fight to be taken seriously.
Sometimes I talked to Tommy about it, told her how god damn frustrating it was, how I sometimes wanted to just cut my hair and try it the way she does. And she’d laugh, that one chuckle from deep in her belly, and it was worth a thousand words. You’re not strong enough for that, that laugh had said. You don’t want what I put up with. And you don’t want to be just a carbon copy of me.
She was right, of course. I would have to go a different road, one that was really mine.
He got us to house-sit once, the last weekend of Mach Break while he was going skiing with his family. Things had started to unravel a little. Before long he’d start making excuses and seeing Tommy less and less; eventually he just dropped off the map, and Tommy didn’t really seem to care. For that weekend, though, we were thrilled with the prospect of playing house - not to mention in a house that was full of frozen foods and, as luck would have it, a stash of porn.
We saved it for later that evening, once we’d heated up more TV dinners than two teenage girls should have needed to consume. We laughed and giggled through the whole thing. My voice was sped up, high-pitched and not doing a great job of hiding how embarrassed I was. Mostly I complained about the blow-jobs. Loudly. I gravitated to the topic even as I realized how forced I sounded. Tommy never really asked me about my boyfriends, so I felt like I had something to prove to her, like she’d think I was cool and sophisticated.
I kept turning around to look at her. She was always wearing this funny smirk, like this whole thing was a joke that wasn’t really funny but you had to pretend anyway. Later - years later - I asked her whether she’d been smirking at the porn or at me. She shrugged - she didn’t really remember it all that well. “Probably you, though,” she said. I have to agree.
“What’s it like?”
It was one of those questions that you know right away what it’s about, but for some stupid reason you still have to ask, “What?”
She flushed a little, a nervous smirk on her face. She knew I’d be at least as embarrassed as she was. “Giving someone a blow-job.”
I tried to shrug it off, secretly hoping she’d press me for more. “I can’t really explain it.”
“But is it ... what? Fun, boring, what? What do you even do? Like are you actually blowing on the thing?”
Now she’d gotten me laughing. “If you want to try it so bad, why don’t you, like, get a boyfriend or something?”
“Yeah, right.” She sounded a little more disappointed than I would have thought.
“What? It’s not like you couldn’t, you know.”
She just shook her head. Tommy wasn’t just being modest, she was making a proclamation. Shaking her head was like that Roman Emperor giving the thumb’s down to a slave in the ring. For the first time I understood what she was saying when she shrugged off talk about boyfriends, about having crushes and breaking up.
She was saying, Nobody wants me.
And I couldn’t believe her. I couldn’t believe that anyone wouldn’t want her, wouldn’t find her attractive, wouldn’t see that smirk and those dimples and that walk, hear that understated, fiendishly sensible voice, and not... want.
“Do you want me to show you?” For once I was glad I hadn’t learned how to bite my tongue. The words came out unbridled, determined to make a statement. I needed to prove her wrong.
Tommy didn’t have a clue what I was talking about, of course. “Huh?”
“Here,” I said, and held out my hand. Once she caught my meaning she put her own in mine, giving me a weird look from under her eyebrows. I readjusted myself on the couch to face her and pulled her hand toward me. “The most important thing,” I said, just looking to fill the void with some words as I extended her index and middle fingers and balled the rest into a loose fist, “is knowing good timing.”
I didn’t slide her fingers into my mouth right away; I kissed them, let my lips linger there for a minute, slightly pursed, and letting just a little breath through my nose. I watched her face, almost expressionless, but there was that forced casualness about her. My heart was thumping but I smirked and pulled her hand forward, letting my tongue slide down the underside of her fingers as they slid into my mouth. Her eyes went wide - just a little. She tried to avert her gaze but I did my best to hold onto it, grounding her there.
With my tongue I traced along the space where her fingers met, imagining that it was a hot spot, a little physical niche that deserved some long overdue affection. And as though the motion evolved out of that idea I started to move, rhythmically, sucking them in and allowing them to slide back out, tasting the pads of her fingers and feeling her nails rub up against the roof of my mouth at the back, as though all I had to do was swallow them.
She was stiff now, the facade had broken down and there she was - Tommy, watching me, completely mine. Her breath came shallow enough that her chest barely rose and fell. I was breathing hard through my nose, a little self-conscious of the sound. It was so quiet, like any noise would have been a blasphemy. I wanted to break the silence but I didn’t dare. Would she stop me? What would she think? I was starting to lose my nerve so I closed my eyes, retreated into myself for a minute, tried to focus on what I was doing.
I was giving Tommy a blow-job.
I couldn’t help it - a little sound came out, like a tiny tug at my vocal chords. It surprised me, and apparently Tommy, who let out a restrained little gasp. That sent me over the edge. I latched onto Tommy’s wrist with both my hands and started bearing down on it, pulling her fingers deep into my mouth with each tug, a sound almost like a snarl coming out of me. I didn’t stop.
“Sam,” she said, like she’d had to fish for the word at the bottom of a well. My feet touched ground again. I opened my eyes and let go of her hand, almost by accident. Tommy was flushed red and for a second I couldn’t read her expression. My stomach lurched.
“Oh my god,” I said, wiping off my mouth. Then I started laughing. I didn’t dare look at her.
“Shit.” Tommy laughed, too, and I felt the knot in my stomach start to unwind. She cleared her throat as though she was going to say something else, but after a minute she just repeated herself.
“So,” I said, trying to keep my voice even, though the temptation to just fall back on the cushion of giggles was strong. “What did you think?”
Tommy let out a long breath, and I could tell she was trying to hide a tired-looking grin. “I need a smoke.”
So did I.
The next few minutes were the weirdest of my life up to that point. Not necessarily bad, but definitely awkward, and I only had five cigarettes left. So we shared one.
Out of nowhere, Tommy started laughing again.
“What?” I stole the smoke from her, since she obviously wasn’t using it.
“You,” she said. “You were totally going to town.”
“What can I say? You have sexy fingers.”
She smiled and stuffed her hands in her pockets. I took that to mean that she didn’t want to smoke anymore, and set to work finishing it off. After a minute she said, “It was kinda nice.”
It was my turn to laugh. “What, a finger blow-job?”
Tommy shook her head. I saw what she meant, though. There was something in the way she was holding her shoulders, something about being wanted.
“Look, I wasn’t kidding, okay?” I took a drag, then went on. “You could totally find somebody.”
“They don’t look at me that way.”
“What way?”
“How they look at you.”
“What, are you kidding? I have to dress up like this every goddamn day to look as cool as you do.” I’d always hated that word, “cool”, but nothing else seemed to fit.
“It’s not the same, though.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re a girl.” She gestured at me. “You dress like a girl. You talk like a girl. They get you. They just... they don’t know what the hell I am.”
“So.. what, you don’t like how you look?”
“Nobody else does.”
So that was it. All this time I’d though I was the only one pretending, looking up to a friend and wishing, sometimes, that I was looking in a mirror.
“C’mon,” I said, and put out my cigarette. “Let me try something.”
“No,” she said. “No way.”
“Oh, come on, you’ve gotta at least be curious.” I had avoided telling her what my plan was until we were upstairs. Now I had my makeup kit out, and Tommy was hanging around near the door like she was afraid I was going to cage her in.
“I can’t just...” She chewed on the inside of her cheek, like she was thinking about something. “I can’t just change overnight like that.”
“You could if you wanted to.” Something about this felt like old times, when we were kids about to go exploring. Tommy could do anything. And if she wanted to, she could do this. Even if I had to be the one to get us on the road this time.
“That’s the thing.” She sat down next to me on the spare bed. “I don’t really want to. I’m just... I’m sick of fighting all the time.”
I let out a laugh. “Tell me about it.”
She gave me a look. “I don’t see you fighting - unless you’re talking about fighting off guys.”
“We might be wearing different colours, but we’re on the same side, here. And I don’t give a shit what your mom has to say about it.”
“Yes ma’am!” Tommy saluted. “So what are you, part of the Pink Pixie brigade?”
I got back at her by holding her scrawny ass down and smearing blush on her cheeks. She wound up looking like one of those drawings of little boys from the fifties.
She did let me make her up a little, but not much - she balked at my concealer and wouldn’t let me get within a foot of her with a stick of eyeliner. In the end she looked kind of cute, like I’d just subjected my little brother to the same cruel treatment.
“Am I off the hook now?” Tommy called over the running tap in the bathroom as she washed the ‘crud’ off her face.
“Fine,” I said, trying to sound more testy than I really was as I put everything away. When she was done I followed suit. It wasn’t as though Tommy had never seen me without makeup on before, but I felt like I owed her.
We didn’t really talk much for the rest of the night; we tuned around on the TV for a while, caught part of a James Bond marathon and sang along with the cheesy theme for Goldfinger. Finally around three in the morning we went to bed, having stayed up more because we could than for any particular need. And there was still that suspended thread of conversation between us, waiting to be picked up again.
“Someone will get it eventually,” I said, a minute or two after we’d turned out the lights. I wasn’t sure if I was talking to Tommy or myself, but either way, the words were comforting.
Tommy didn’t say anything, though if she hadn’t been smiling I would have been surprised.
---
Once it's finished I'll edit this post and make a new one linking to it. I'd love to hear what you think so far, though.
EDIT: 03/02/06: Done! I'll separate the LJ-cut into two parts, so if you've read Part I you can just skip straight to Part II.
I would really appreciate some feedback on this one. I'm really happy with it for a first draft, but I need to know whether or not people other than me are following this. I think I'm going to sit on it for a bit (maybe until after exams) and then see if I can improve it, weave in some threads of ideas that I vaguely mention in this round but wanted to go into more detail with, if possible.
Oh, and the rating on this has gone up since I last posted it. It now contains at least a mildly/moderately erotic scene. No sex, though. Just as an FYI. I doubt it would even trip many text scanners.
I'm also changing the title. Was "Little Girl Who Wasn't".
You in the Mirror (short story, 4,700 words, first draft)
We called her Tommy. It wasn’t her real name - wait, strike that. It was her real name, still is when I’m feeling playful. But it wasn’t on her birth certificate, and year after year, on the first day of classes, the inevitable battle began.
“Samantha Bryers?”
“Here.” That was me, haunting the start of roll-call.
“Jonathan Colpitts?”
“Here.”
“Daniel Davidson?”
“Here.”
“Tammy Earheart?”
“Tommy.”
The teacher - Ms. Freedman, one of the faceless names I only remember thanks to my mother’s obsession with scrapbooks - looked up from the fourth-grade class list to identify the owner of the voice among the erupting giggles. They all knew what was coming. Freedman cleared her throat and directed her glassy stare back to the list - obviously she hadn’t had much luck. “I’m sorry, Tommy, there must be a mistake.”
“No, ma’am,” Tommy said, and the teacher suddenly realized that the matter-of-fact little voice had come from a girl. “I go by ‘Tommy’, that’s all.”
“Oh.” She made a note on her list and kept going. I turned around in my seat to catch Tommy’s eye. She looked bewildered, and a little disappointed. We’d been expecting some mighty fireworks after what had happened the year before.
My memory is a little sketchy; I’m starting to think I filled in a lot of that time in later years. Tommy’s mother was like a character out of Alice in Wonderland, big and bold and completely off her rocker. When she’d heard about what had happened on the first day of Grade Three, when the teacher had forbidden Tommy to call herself by ‘a boy’s name’, she had stormed into the principal’s office the next morning and screamed up a storm. She was using her ‘scary feminist voice’, as we’d come to call it later. When she used it she was making a statement; if you were smart you would reply with one of two things: “yes,” or “yes, ma’am.”
Tommy and I had waited outside, listening, and I wasn’t quite sure if I should be laughing or crying. Neither felt quite right. Instead we sat in silence and watched the shadow of that scraggly tree in the pasty white glass of the hall window, shivering back and forth.
Her mother left the room about a year later. The door came open with a nervous-sounding squeak and admitted her into the empty hall. She had a few words with Tommy, not loud enough for me to hear, like the open space she’d been taking up with her screaming was sucking all sound into a vacuum. Then she went away, clack-clacking down the hall.
Tommy grinned back at me, that foolish grin she had that showed off the dimples she still gets when she smiles, and I knew everything was okay.
I hope I’m not fabricating the image I have of her from back then - that tufty haircut that looked like my brother’s when it grew out after the summer, the t-shirts hanging flat over her chest, beat-up jeans and flat sneakers, red ones, dusty and muddy and soft. She had a plain little face, round, smattered with freckles, not quite innocent but far from a devil. There was something about her walk that I first noticed that day as we were going back to class; something confident, something I wanted, but I didn’t really know how.
She was just Tommy, and I loved that about her.
We met before clothes and boys and girls really mattered. I loved skirts, how they’d fan out behind me when I ran and flare out when I spun around in circles. I did a lot of that, until I started school and got the impression that it was unfashionable. I still wore them, though; I could never get the hang of pants. I was happy to wear whatever my mother put me in. To her credit at least half of it was a colour other than pink.
I didn’t notice Tommy right away. I had some friends from kindergarten that were sticking pretty close; one of them got wind of this boy-girl first. It wasn’t really an insult yet, just a label to try to explain the little girl that wasn’t. She was more interested in worms and trucks than skipping rope, not that that stopped her. And she never wore pink - not a scrap of it. Slacks and t-shirts right from day one.
I never did mind getting my knees dirty. We were always digging for something, I remember: gold, dinosaur bones, or maybe to China. Our conversations sometimes took us through all three over the course of lunch. It must have had an impression on me; when I think about Tommy it’s still in greens and browns and slate greys, the colours that filled my vision while her matter-of-fact tone of voice floated over to me from her own little plot of land.
“Were you supposed to be a boy?”
She looked up at me with her face scrunched up. “Why?”
I shrugged, carefully tucking some of my hair back behind my ear. “You’re just more like a boy.”
For a minute she looked like she was going to say something, but she just pressed her lips together and went back to digging.
By that afternoon I’d forgotten I’d asked. We walked home together, like we’d started to do every day now that our parents had found out we were friends, and we probably talked about something exciting like catching grasshoppers. The thought secretly terrified me. But I wasn’t letting on.
It was about grade five when kids really started to come down on her. Usually girls, and always in groups, they liked to call her “he-she” or “she-he”, though they could never decide which one was better. Sometimes Tommy would yell something back, sometimes she’d just ignore them. She never really lost it, though - unlike me. Every year of Junior High I got more and more pissed off. Coming back to school after summer was like opening up a fresh new can of worms, which I would subsequently hook and cast. I wasn’t afraid to play their game, though I got the feeling Tommy wished I wouldn’t.
“Hey Sammy,” Brett said once in Grade Seven - I’d been trying to go by just ‘Sam’ ever since the third grade, but the old nickname stuck out of habit and rhyme - “If you like Tommy so much, why don’t you marry her?”
“Okay,” I shot back, “she’d be a better man than you.”
He didn’t even say anything - just dropped his jaw and ran back to his cronies on the other side of the school yard to debrief them. He wasn’t the only one I’d shocked, though.
“Why’d you say that?” Tommy hissed.
I shrugged. “I dunno. Why not?”
“They’re totally going to think we’re dykes now, stupid.”
“Oh, whatever.” I was careful to hide my chagrin - I’d developed a quick tongue over the last couple of years. “It’s not like they don’t already,” I added, realizing yet again that I probably wasn’t helping much.
She didn’t say anything else. I didn’t know what to do, so neither did I. For maybe twenty minutes things were a little tense, an eternity for a pubescent girl on a strict lunch-hour schedule, but by the time they were rounding us up for the afternoon classes things were back to normal, at least on the surface. Had I hit a nerve? I didn’t have the first idea what, or how, or whether or not to ask.
So I pretended it never happened, though I did my best to act like not-a-lesbian, just in case. For a while it feels like that was all I ever thought about. Would a lesbian say that? Would a lesbian do that? What if I am a lesbian?
I don’t remember when it died out, but it must have, since I started dating boys a year or so later. For some reason I thought Tommy would be jealous, but she wasn’t; she’d just reply with a dry, “Oh,” when I told her why we couldn’t hang out on Thursday night.
She did ask why I sounded out of breath one time, though.
“Are you okay?”
“Huh?” My boyfriend was across the room examining one of my band posters. He was probably getting as far away from me as he could get under the circumstances; I could tell he was red in the face. My door had to stay open - Mom’s orders, which she enforced until I was 16 - so I’d been making clandestine use of my walk-in closet.
“You sound sorta winded.”
“Oh. Uh. Just ran up the stairs. To my room.”
“Oh.” A chuckle. “Oh. Is your mom home?”
“Yeah. Watching TV.”
“Okay. Careful on those stairs.”
“Fuck off,” I said, cheerfully, and hung up the phone.
“Who was that?” Asked the boyfriend, whose name I can’t remember. It started with P.
“A friend.”
If I’d said, ‘Tommy,’ he would have known who I meant. I never talked about Tommy to my boyfriends. Most of them never met her, not formally, anyway. I wasn’t ashamed of her; I would have been the first person to stand up for her, had a hundred times. But I didn’t want to drag all that into my bedroom. I needed my space, my bedroom, my body. I needed to be about me, me, me for a change.
Besides, what they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them.
Sometime around Grade Nine, Tommy had grown up. I distinctly remember thinking that one day when we were waiting for the bus. It was our first year in High School, sometime in late September. She was smoking, a habit she couldn’t really get the hang of that mysteriously disappeared a few months down the road. If only I could have been so lucky. She was wearing that pair of jeans that hugged her hips just the right way. I liked how she hooked her smoking hand on a fraying belt loop when she wasn’t taking a drag.
At that moment she wasn’t talking, not that that was all that out of the ordinary. She liked to do that, stand there and smoke or chew gum, spit on the sidewalk. There were no strings between us; we could stand around like that for hours, looking cool, never saying a word. Could, but usually didn’t. I always found myself with something to say.
She unhooked her smoking hand from the belt loop and flipped a bit of hair out of her eyes, that shaggy cut she’d grown into over the past couple of summers. She’d definitely grown up; out of the buzz cuts and tunnels to China and into hips and concealed curves.
“You goin’ to visit your dad this weekend?”
“Yeah,” she said, though it sounded like she wasn’t quite decided yet. She’d only known her dad for a year or so. Tommy looked away, to her thinking spot that was at the moment somewhere down the street. “D’you wanna come?”
That was a new one. “Really?”
Tommy shrugged. “Better than going alone.”
I didn’t know how much I really wanted to spend my weekend being awkward-by-proxy, but I said yes. I’d need to stop at home for a change of clothes.
“And what, your makeup kit?” She teased.
“Yeah, why not? Maybe I can give you a makeover,” I said, reaching over to apply some invisible blush to her cheek with my thumb. She wiped at the spot as though she’d been smeared with soot.
“Maybe,” she said.
I forgot my smokes at home, so I kept having to bum them off Tommy that whole Saturday. I sat pressed up against the window of the pickup, which was cracked open a little to clear out the fumes. Tommy was crushed in between me and her dad, a hefty guy with long, curly blonde arm hair. I remember looking over at his hands on the steering wheel, noticing how he had those sort of gangly fingers like Tommy did, only they looked too thin on him. He wore a wedding band, supposedly from a wife who had died just the other year. Why he’d waited for her to croak before he got in touch with Tommy was something everybody seemed to want to know, but nobody asked.
He was a nice enough guy, loaned me a pack of smokes once we got to his place. He had that kind of awkward, boyish way of looking at us and talking to us, like he wasn’t sure yet whether or not we were poisonous. His house was in Moncton, just a two hour drive away, and he lived there with a son and a daughter, both of whom were older than Tommy. I asked her what the deal with that was one time, but Tommy just shrugged. “Mom got lucky,” she’d said, with that not-quite-a-grin.
Most of the time he was asking her questions, trying to find out who she was - not the kind of thing to ask a fifteen-year-old and expect a straight answer. I stuck close to Tommy, trying to lend some wordless emotional support, a link back to the real world. I could tell she appreciated it, probably all the more because I was being quiet for once. A definition for the word “tact” was still a long ways off for me, so keeping my mouth entirely shut was the only safe way to go.
For some reason I remember those Sloppy Joes the most, the ones Tommy’s half-sister made. She hadn’t talked to us much, didn’t seem to like us, but not in a vicious sort of way, and I was willing to forgive just about anything after that meal. Tommy wasn’t so impressed; spicy foods weren’t her thing. She didn’t complain, but I could see it in her posture, the way she was being forcibly casual about holding her fork. When she’s in her element there’s a certain tautness about her, like she’s wound up and ready to spring.
We started going down once or twice every couple of months. Mostly we took the bus, now that we knew how to get there. That’s what it was all about, really; getting away from home, together in that private, adventurous way we’d had when we were kids. Like Sunday afternoons after church, when we’d sneak off into the sparse collection of trees we’d called “the woods” and used to pretend we were pirates, soldiers, cast-away sailors or lost explorers who had taken a wrong turn in the frozen North. But there was something grown-up about it, too; for a long time there was that tug of war between holding onto the past and wanting to forget it.
That was where I got stuck - I never knew if I should be fighting the world or forcing it to accept me. I could scream and fight on Tommy’s behalf all I wanted, but deep down there was a part of me that just wanted to be liked, to be wanted, to be looked at and admired. I wanted the makeup, the clothes, the rake-thin body. I wanted perky boobs and perfect skin. But I didn’t want it all at Tommy’s expense - at the expense of anybody other than that far-flung ideal. I wanted my cake, and there would have been hell to pay if I hadn’t been able to eat it, too.
So I took it. I wore the high-heels, the makeup and cute flouncy skirts. I told myself that I wasn’t just earning respect - I was commanding it.
But I was jealous of Tommy. She did it without the world’s approval, casually owning herself and the world around her like a Roman Emperor. That was what I wanted, not this thankless debt I was in. I could “earn” or “command” all I wanted, but every day would be a fight to be taken seriously.
Sometimes I talked to Tommy about it, told her how god damn frustrating it was, how I sometimes wanted to just cut my hair and try it the way she does. And she’d laugh, that one chuckle from deep in her belly, and it was worth a thousand words. You’re not strong enough for that, that laugh had said. You don’t want what I put up with. And you don’t want to be just a carbon copy of me.
She was right, of course. I would have to go a different road, one that was really mine.
He got us to house-sit once, the last weekend of Mach Break while he was going skiing with his family. Things had started to unravel a little. Before long he’d start making excuses and seeing Tommy less and less; eventually he just dropped off the map, and Tommy didn’t really seem to care. For that weekend, though, we were thrilled with the prospect of playing house - not to mention in a house that was full of frozen foods and, as luck would have it, a stash of porn.
We saved it for later that evening, once we’d heated up more TV dinners than two teenage girls should have needed to consume. We laughed and giggled through the whole thing. My voice was sped up, high-pitched and not doing a great job of hiding how embarrassed I was. Mostly I complained about the blow-jobs. Loudly. I gravitated to the topic even as I realized how forced I sounded. Tommy never really asked me about my boyfriends, so I felt like I had something to prove to her, like she’d think I was cool and sophisticated.
I kept turning around to look at her. She was always wearing this funny smirk, like this whole thing was a joke that wasn’t really funny but you had to pretend anyway. Later - years later - I asked her whether she’d been smirking at the porn or at me. She shrugged - she didn’t really remember it all that well. “Probably you, though,” she said. I have to agree.
“What’s it like?”
It was one of those questions that you know right away what it’s about, but for some stupid reason you still have to ask, “What?”
She flushed a little, a nervous smirk on her face. She knew I’d be at least as embarrassed as she was. “Giving someone a blow-job.”
I tried to shrug it off, secretly hoping she’d press me for more. “I can’t really explain it.”
“But is it ... what? Fun, boring, what? What do you even do? Like are you actually blowing on the thing?”
Now she’d gotten me laughing. “If you want to try it so bad, why don’t you, like, get a boyfriend or something?”
“Yeah, right.” She sounded a little more disappointed than I would have thought.
“What? It’s not like you couldn’t, you know.”
She just shook her head. Tommy wasn’t just being modest, she was making a proclamation. Shaking her head was like that Roman Emperor giving the thumb’s down to a slave in the ring. For the first time I understood what she was saying when she shrugged off talk about boyfriends, about having crushes and breaking up.
She was saying, Nobody wants me.
And I couldn’t believe her. I couldn’t believe that anyone wouldn’t want her, wouldn’t find her attractive, wouldn’t see that smirk and those dimples and that walk, hear that understated, fiendishly sensible voice, and not... want.
“Do you want me to show you?” For once I was glad I hadn’t learned how to bite my tongue. The words came out unbridled, determined to make a statement. I needed to prove her wrong.
Tommy didn’t have a clue what I was talking about, of course. “Huh?”
“Here,” I said, and held out my hand. Once she caught my meaning she put her own in mine, giving me a weird look from under her eyebrows. I readjusted myself on the couch to face her and pulled her hand toward me. “The most important thing,” I said, just looking to fill the void with some words as I extended her index and middle fingers and balled the rest into a loose fist, “is knowing good timing.”
I didn’t slide her fingers into my mouth right away; I kissed them, let my lips linger there for a minute, slightly pursed, and letting just a little breath through my nose. I watched her face, almost expressionless, but there was that forced casualness about her. My heart was thumping but I smirked and pulled her hand forward, letting my tongue slide down the underside of her fingers as they slid into my mouth. Her eyes went wide - just a little. She tried to avert her gaze but I did my best to hold onto it, grounding her there.
With my tongue I traced along the space where her fingers met, imagining that it was a hot spot, a little physical niche that deserved some long overdue affection. And as though the motion evolved out of that idea I started to move, rhythmically, sucking them in and allowing them to slide back out, tasting the pads of her fingers and feeling her nails rub up against the roof of my mouth at the back, as though all I had to do was swallow them.
She was stiff now, the facade had broken down and there she was - Tommy, watching me, completely mine. Her breath came shallow enough that her chest barely rose and fell. I was breathing hard through my nose, a little self-conscious of the sound. It was so quiet, like any noise would have been a blasphemy. I wanted to break the silence but I didn’t dare. Would she stop me? What would she think? I was starting to lose my nerve so I closed my eyes, retreated into myself for a minute, tried to focus on what I was doing.
I was giving Tommy a blow-job.
I couldn’t help it - a little sound came out, like a tiny tug at my vocal chords. It surprised me, and apparently Tommy, who let out a restrained little gasp. That sent me over the edge. I latched onto Tommy’s wrist with both my hands and started bearing down on it, pulling her fingers deep into my mouth with each tug, a sound almost like a snarl coming out of me. I didn’t stop.
“Sam,” she said, like she’d had to fish for the word at the bottom of a well. My feet touched ground again. I opened my eyes and let go of her hand, almost by accident. Tommy was flushed red and for a second I couldn’t read her expression. My stomach lurched.
“Oh my god,” I said, wiping off my mouth. Then I started laughing. I didn’t dare look at her.
“Shit.” Tommy laughed, too, and I felt the knot in my stomach start to unwind. She cleared her throat as though she was going to say something else, but after a minute she just repeated herself.
“So,” I said, trying to keep my voice even, though the temptation to just fall back on the cushion of giggles was strong. “What did you think?”
Tommy let out a long breath, and I could tell she was trying to hide a tired-looking grin. “I need a smoke.”
So did I.
The next few minutes were the weirdest of my life up to that point. Not necessarily bad, but definitely awkward, and I only had five cigarettes left. So we shared one.
Out of nowhere, Tommy started laughing again.
“What?” I stole the smoke from her, since she obviously wasn’t using it.
“You,” she said. “You were totally going to town.”
“What can I say? You have sexy fingers.”
She smiled and stuffed her hands in her pockets. I took that to mean that she didn’t want to smoke anymore, and set to work finishing it off. After a minute she said, “It was kinda nice.”
It was my turn to laugh. “What, a finger blow-job?”
Tommy shook her head. I saw what she meant, though. There was something in the way she was holding her shoulders, something about being wanted.
“Look, I wasn’t kidding, okay?” I took a drag, then went on. “You could totally find somebody.”
“They don’t look at me that way.”
“What way?”
“How they look at you.”
“What, are you kidding? I have to dress up like this every goddamn day to look as cool as you do.” I’d always hated that word, “cool”, but nothing else seemed to fit.
“It’s not the same, though.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re a girl.” She gestured at me. “You dress like a girl. You talk like a girl. They get you. They just... they don’t know what the hell I am.”
“So.. what, you don’t like how you look?”
“Nobody else does.”
So that was it. All this time I’d though I was the only one pretending, looking up to a friend and wishing, sometimes, that I was looking in a mirror.
“C’mon,” I said, and put out my cigarette. “Let me try something.”
“No,” she said. “No way.”
“Oh, come on, you’ve gotta at least be curious.” I had avoided telling her what my plan was until we were upstairs. Now I had my makeup kit out, and Tommy was hanging around near the door like she was afraid I was going to cage her in.
“I can’t just...” She chewed on the inside of her cheek, like she was thinking about something. “I can’t just change overnight like that.”
“You could if you wanted to.” Something about this felt like old times, when we were kids about to go exploring. Tommy could do anything. And if she wanted to, she could do this. Even if I had to be the one to get us on the road this time.
“That’s the thing.” She sat down next to me on the spare bed. “I don’t really want to. I’m just... I’m sick of fighting all the time.”
I let out a laugh. “Tell me about it.”
She gave me a look. “I don’t see you fighting - unless you’re talking about fighting off guys.”
“We might be wearing different colours, but we’re on the same side, here. And I don’t give a shit what your mom has to say about it.”
“Yes ma’am!” Tommy saluted. “So what are you, part of the Pink Pixie brigade?”
I got back at her by holding her scrawny ass down and smearing blush on her cheeks. She wound up looking like one of those drawings of little boys from the fifties.
She did let me make her up a little, but not much - she balked at my concealer and wouldn’t let me get within a foot of her with a stick of eyeliner. In the end she looked kind of cute, like I’d just subjected my little brother to the same cruel treatment.
“Am I off the hook now?” Tommy called over the running tap in the bathroom as she washed the ‘crud’ off her face.
“Fine,” I said, trying to sound more testy than I really was as I put everything away. When she was done I followed suit. It wasn’t as though Tommy had never seen me without makeup on before, but I felt like I owed her.
We didn’t really talk much for the rest of the night; we tuned around on the TV for a while, caught part of a James Bond marathon and sang along with the cheesy theme for Goldfinger. Finally around three in the morning we went to bed, having stayed up more because we could than for any particular need. And there was still that suspended thread of conversation between us, waiting to be picked up again.
“Someone will get it eventually,” I said, a minute or two after we’d turned out the lights. I wasn’t sure if I was talking to Tommy or myself, but either way, the words were comforting.
Tommy didn’t say anything, though if she hadn’t been smiling I would have been surprised.
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