Harmonious Hearts 2018--Stories from the Young Author Challenge, page 15
CHARLIE WAS thirteen when he first got sent to therapy. He sat on a beanbag chair with his legs drawn to his chest, twisting the fibers of the carpet under his fingers because it was something to do, and also because Dr. Pembrook was not an easy woman to look in the eye. The only word he could think of to describe her was hawkish, cheekbones jutting out beneath a pair of cat-eye glasses that did no favors for her sharp face, eyes sympathetic in a way that made Charlie’s stomach hurt. She sat crisscross applesauce on a beanbag chair across from him, which he appreciated.
“We could sit here in silence some more,” she said finally, “but I do charge sixty dollars per session, so you might as well talk about something. Whatever you want. I’m your captive listener.”
Charlie paused in his carpet-twisting for a moment. His best pair of shoes cost six dollars at Goodwill, and his father once drove him and his brother around grocery stores after hours looking for thrown-out loaves of just-stale-enough bread, but sure, okay. Sixty dollars a session.
“Twenty-two percent of the world’s population sees ghosts,” he said, without entirely meaning to. “That’s over a billion people. I’m not special.”
He peered up at her, just for a second, and Dr. Pembrook gave him a little smile. “Not unique, perhaps, but special—”
“Oh God, no, please not that,” Charlie blurted out. “I don’t need to be told I’m special. Like, I’ll pay you sixty dollars a session to not tell me I’m special. That’s not what this is.”
“Then what is it?”
Charlie scowled. “I know what you’re trying to do. Can we just be upfront here? My dad called you because his thirteen-year-old kid has a dead mom, and that dead mom believed in ghosts, and now his kid says she’s seeing ghosts, and for some reason that’s the line for therapy, not, oh, I don’t know, the fucking grief one experiences when their mom dies, and—” He exhaled sharply. “I don’t need you to do the whole gentle listener thing, okay? Just… be upfront with me.”
Dr. Pembrook was still meeting his gaze levelly.
“Okay,” she said. “So, twenty-two percent of the population sees ghosts. You’re right on that. Did you know that six percent of the world experiences a psychotic episode in their lifetime? Not quite as many, but still a significant amount.”
Charlie’s heart did something strange and unpleasant in his chest. “You think I’m having a psychotic episode?”
“There have been studies done. Psychotic episodes are quite possibly a coping mechanism for existential distress.” She leaned forward on her beanbag chair, so fucking earnestly that Charlie ached with it. He felt himself softening against his will. “But no, Charlie. I don’t think you’re having a psychotic episode.”
“Then what is this?”
That, maybe, was what she was waiting for, because she sat back and clicked her pen.
“That’s what we’re going to try to figure out.”
HE USUALLY runs home, a five-mile jog that barely leaves him out of breath anymore, but today he walks, painfully aware of how he feels in his own body. His chest is wrong. His arms are wrong. His hips are wrong. Everything is too soft, too curvy, too tender. His hair—shit, his hair, which swings well past his waist when it’s not in the tight coil at the back of his neck he perfected at age ten. He suddenly feels like he weighs a thousand pounds, and a cramp shoots through him, dull and aching and wrong wrong wrong. He starts to run.
See, when Mom was alive, she was the kind of mom who had snacks prepared when school let out, who asked about their days and put report cards on refrigerators and gave them kisses on the tops of their heads. Dad would get home whenever he got home, and she would ask him about his day, give him notes on his sermons, coax him into slipping off his suit coat and joining the family at the dinner table. Mom was the only person Charlie ever saw make Dad smile.
When she died, their dad never came home, really, not at first, didn’t even notice that Cal stopped going to school. It got even worse when he decided to take his sermons on the road, as he put it, stopped being John Waters, Father Of Two, and became John Waters, Traveling Evangelist of Moderate Daytime Televangelism Fame. All that’s on their refrigerator right now is a printout of Isaiah 11:4, And with the breath of His lips He will slay the wicked.
The point is, nobody’s home when Charlie bursts through the front door, so the first thing he does is boot up the wheezing laptop that lives in their kitchen, a gigantic, hulking Dell that weighs at least ten pounds, shooing away the ghost that wisps out of the back of the monitor, drumming his fingers impatiently as it boots up, and brings up a search engine. He’s not very good at research when he can’t hold it in his hands, but he’s learning.
folk tales gender swap
supernatural being wrong body
girl to boy mythology
monsters that cause wrong gender
Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t find much. It’s maybe a little sad that he was hoping this was something he could exorcise, could reason with through a Ouija board.
girl wants to be a boy more than anything in the world
my whole body hurts and my skin doesn’t belong to me
how to get rid of breasts
why do i want to be a boy so much it hurts
He doesn’t know how long he sits there, reading through pages and pages of articles about plastic surgery and women with breast cancer and people born with both ovaries and testes before he pushes away from the desk, breathing hard. His fucking stomach hurts. He wonders if this is like alien hand syndrome, where sometimes people’s hands just stop listening to their brains and do whatever they want. He clears the browser history and slams the laptop shut. His body doesn’t belong to him. He storms into his bedroom, trembling, and drags his backpack over to his bed, throws back the cover and crawls under them, dragging the hefty dictionary he keeps beside the bed onto his lap, and God, if he doesn’t hate the way he compulsively checks the salt lines he keeps in front of his bedroom door first, gives one more cursory glance at the typically vague note his father left—Unexpected trip for work, Cal has money for pizza—checks the salt lines, checks the salt lines.
Girl (n). 1. A female child. Synonyms: female, child, daughter.
Boy (n). 1. A male child or young man. Synonyms: lad, schoolboy, male child, youth, young man, laddie, stripling; 2. Exclamation, informal. Used to express strong feelings, especially of excitement or admiration.
Charlie doesn’t know what he was expecting.
He runs out of ideas then, and he’s flipping through the Ts for testosterone or testes or he doesn’t fucking know, okay, he’s just looking, and he comes across transgender.
Transgender (adj). 1. Denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex. See entry for “dysphoria.”
Well.
He feels like he’s choking, like his lungs aren’t working. He flips to the Ds.
Dysphoria (n). 1. A state of unease or generalized dissatisfaction with life. See also: gender dysphoria (n): the condition of feeling one’s emotional and psychological identity as male or female to be opposite to one’s biological sex. Origin (Greek)—from dusphoros (‘hard to bear’).
Charlie thinks of skirts, of how they used to use to dress him up for church on Christmas, how Cal would tie his curly hair into braids so, so carefully, tongue caught between his teeth in concentration, thinks about how his favorite part was getting home and wriggling out of the skirt and into one of Cal’s hand-me-down pairs of jeans that hung loose on his hips. He thinks about how he’s too sinewy for the girls, too soft for the guys, how he cried and cried and cried when he started his period, scaring the shit out of Cal and their father and trying to explain through hitching sobs that no, he was fine, yes it hurt but no he wasn’t dying, he just wanted to and he didn’t understand why, and before he realizes it he’s throwing the dictionary at the wall, doesn’t feel any better when it slumps spine-first onto the filthy carpet, balls himself up as tightly as he can underneath the comforter, and resolutely does not cry.
THE THING is, it’s not like Charlie existed in a vacuum. It’s not like he didn’t know that most people don’t line their thresholds with salt to ward off evil spirits, that most people don’t ask for Ouija boards and holy water for Christmas. It’s not like he didn’t know he was objectively crazy.
“Let’s not say crazy,” Dr. Pembrook said.
“Then what? Alternately sane? Don’t bullshit me, Caroline.” When they hit the year mark, Dr. Pembrook told Charlie he could call her by her first name. He did, sometimes, but in his head she was still Dr. Pembrook.
“Well, no.” She took off her glasses, which Charlie had come to know meant business.
“Think of hypochondriacs, for example. I had a patient who began drinking hand sanitizer because she was convinced she had C. diff. Did you know that bacteria cells outnumber our body cells ten to one? I didn’t either, until I met this patient. She was a functional, average person in her daily life, but she got fixated on the idea that the bacteria was taking over. She knew everything there was to know about bacteria and about every obscure bacterial infection you could imagine, but she was still a person. She knew when she was being irrational. She just couldn’t stop it.” She took a breath. “The point is, ghosts are your bacteria, Charlie. But I think it’s different for you.”
The thing is, Charlie’s mother had a journal, a little leather-bound thing with a Celtic cross on the front. It was one of the gifts the church gave her when she first got diagnosed, and giving it to Charlie was the last thing she ever definitively did, and what was he going to do, not read it? Some passages:
A person with poor eyesight is susceptible to spiritual sight.
Charlie had 20/20 vision, but Dr. Pembrook with her glasses looked at him like she understood him.
To thwart evil spirits, line the threshold with salt.
Charlie did this. Every night.
Ghosts never touch the ground and you can never be too careful.
Charlie was still trying to figure that one out.
The ghost is with you.
This, Charlie didn’t fully understand either, but he believed.
He apparently said some of this out loud, because Dr. Pembrook made a humming sound and said, “Yes, the journal,” in that voice Charlie dreaded.
“Charlie, do you think it is at all possible that you cling to this belief as a way of connecting with your mom? It’s the last thing she gave you.”
“Of course I think it’s possible,” he said. Like he said before, it’s not like Charlie existed in a vacuum. “But… but it’s different. It’s… hard to explain.”
“Because you see them?”
“Well, no. I don’t, even.”
Dr. Pembrook looked up from her notepad. “What?”
“I mean….” Charlie stared up at the popcorn ceiling like it was going to tell him how to explain this, but it held no answers, just the same water stain that looked vaguely like a rabbit if he stared hard enough. “I believe in them. But I don’t see them, necessarily. I just… know they’re there.”
“I see,” Dr. Pembrook said. Charlie could hear the frown in her voice.
“God, no, okay, don’t put on the therapist voice with me.”
“I am literally your therapist,” she said, which would probably have made Charlie laugh some other time, but he was starting to think he was on the verge of something here, and he bit his lip.
“No, okay, it’s just that… it’s just that I don’t believe in them the way you believe in Santa Claus. I believe in them the way you believe in gravity. It’s there, and I can’t see it for sure, but it has an impact on my life anyway. It’s… it’s the way my dad believes in God, this nebulous thing that you can’t describe even if you want to. And it’s like… okay, with gravity, astronauts can’t see it, but they float, right? And for all we know they float for some other, weirder reason, but no, we all believe in this thing called gravity, so that must be the explanation, but it doesn’t make any difference. It could be gravity or it could be… God, I don’t know, invisible rubber bands or something, and it wouldn’t make any fucking difference. And my dad, he prays anyway, just in case this God he can’t see is listening, and he has no reason to think anything that happens is the result of that prayer, but he believes hard enough that he goes around preaching about it anyway. God is real to him, and gravity is real to… to most people, I assume, and ghosts are real to me. I don’t have to see them.”
Dr. Pembrook was quiet for a long time, long enough for Charlie to grind out a desperate attempt at a joke—“I believe in gravity, by the way”—and finally she looked up at him.
“So all this time, when you’ve said you see them, you mean you feel them?”
Charlie thought about it. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.”
Dr. Pembrook took a long breath. “When do you feel them, Charlie?”
He told her about feeling them at his mother’s funeral. About the dance recital. About the dresses. About how they pooled in his chest in gym class, when he thought about his mother, when he dressed up for church on the rare occasion his father made him come to the sermons.
“Okay,” Dr. Pembrook said finally. Her glasses, which she had put back on to scrawl some notes on her notepad, came off again. “Okay, I think we’ve been going about this all wrong.”
BY THE time Cal gets home, mouth pinched in a way that says headache and eyes hard in a way that says don’t ask, smelling like engine oil and tobacco, Charlie has tucked this all away where it belongs. He’s at the little table in the middle of his room memorizing the Latin rite of exorcism.
Here is what you need to know about Cal: he does not believe in ghosts, but he believes that Charlie believes.
“Heya, Charlie,” Cal says, smiling a little. He throws his leather jacket onto the floor the way Charlie hates, throws himself down on the chair next to him. A ghost whispers out of the jacket, hovers above the dictionary Charlie cast aside.
“Hey.” He knows he’s being too quiet, Cal’s going to notice something’s wrong, but he’s hoping he can put it off to a headache, which is not so much a lie as it is a glaring omission.
“Head hurt?” Charlie’s hair is loose around his shoulders, and he guesses he’s not surprised that Cal’s noticed—the back-of-the-neck knot is efficient but pulls too hard at his head sometimes, makes the headaches worse and the migraines unbearable.
He nods. “Yeah. It’s fine, though. Livable.” Cal puts his head on Charlie’s shoulder, starts doing the one-handed braid he became a pro at when he was fourteen and Charlie was ten. Cal does this sometimes.
“Why are you all clingy?”
“I had a shit day. There was a girl, and she was pretty, and I’m the guy whose dad is a traveling evangelist….”
“Duuuuuude.”
“I know, I know, it’s all very exciting. How do we even talk to normal people?”
“How the fuck would I know? You’re literally my only friend, Cal.” It’s as simple and immensely fucked up as that.
“I don’t know, I just saw her and felt like I was supposed to talk to her, you know? It was okay at first, but my last name came up, and the inevitable ‘Are you related to that John Waters?’ conversation happened. I guess her grandma watches his sermons religiously, pun fully intended. Obviously she wasn’t into it. Apparently John Waters isn’t for everyone, which is fair.”
Charlie pauses. “Supposed to talk to her. That’s really weird, Cal.”
“Read: how do we even talk to normal people?”
The thing is, Cal does not believe in ghosts, but if he spills salt he throws a little over his shoulder, and when they go hiking he avoids fairy rings like he’ll die if he doesn’t, and sometimes when he’s not trying so hard to be whatever he thinks he’s supposed to be, he throws around words like fate, like destiny.
Charlie has his ghosts, and Cal has fate.
Cal reads over his shoulder for a while, ties the braid neatly at the end (Cal always keeps hair ties on his wrist because he is a ridiculous man), lets it fall over Charlie’s right shoulder, and Charlie wrenches himself up to go to the bathroom.
“Hey, I’m ordering pizza. You want?”
“Veggie?” Charlie bats his eyelashes.
“What the fuck ever, dude. That shit’s the reason you’re wasting away. I’m making it half meat lover’s.”
Charlie smiles a little and shuts the door.
The smile drops off his face as he stands in front of the mirror and palms his chest, wrong wrong wrong, and he feels something strange and horrible welling up in him, feels the ghost in his room juddering in alarm. He guesses nothing was going to keep this at bay for long, but he needs to change his pad (he was right about his period, fuck his fucking life), and he hastily wipes his stinging eyes because he doesn’t have time for this. He takes a deep breath, clenching his teeth against another debilitating cramp, and does what he has to. The trash can in here is overflowing, so he rolls up the old one in its wrapper and brings it outside, chucks it in the tiny wastebasket next to the table.
“Ohhhhh,” Cal says then, all fucking knowingly, and fuck him. Honestly, Charlie can’t hide anything from him. “That explains it, grumpy. Heating pad?”
For some reason this, of all things, is what makes the tears spill over. Charlie clutches his stomach, curls up on his bed, and trembles with suppressed sobs.
“Shit. That bad? Okay, kid, okay, hold on,” Cal is saying somewhere, distant and soft, and Charlie squeezes his eyes shut so, so tightly. His skin feels hot, like it should be melting right off him. He aches. Charlie is prone to the kinds of period cramps that have, on more than one occasion, induced vomiting or fainting, so this is not exactly unexpected, but once Cal gets a good look at him, it’s all going to be over. “Okayokayokay,” Cal is saying as he putters around. The fact that he knows exactly what to do almost makes this worse.
He hands him the heating pad. “Charlie. Talk to me. What hurts?”
