On the Edge of Tomorrow, page 7
Though they talked and worked and talked some more, Charlie never brought up the girl Billy had hurt and his name was never mentioned again, except for Jason’s admission that he’d personally escorted the creep out of Timbisha. Even though he believed Jason, Billy’s threat still lingered. Charlie still had a lot to lose. He could see that now that he’d let go of his anger. Maybe someday he would tell Julie about the rape, but not until he was positive she would be safe. Besides, he still had no proof.
Julie stood in the dining room, while the rest of the Kings spoke with the social worker.
“I swear you’ve gotten taller,” Julie said, her eyes misted with unshed tears.
“Have I?” He looked down at himself. He didn’t feel taller, but he did feel clear-headed. He sucked in a deep breath. “I’m sorry I hurt you, Julie. I promise I won’t ever do that again.”
She smiled sadly. “I know. And I promise to pay better attention to you.” She took a step forward and this time she wrapped him in a hug. “You’re the only family I’ve got, Charlie. I love you so much. You know that, right?”
Feeling uncomfortable, and wanting desperately to get out of that hug, he murmured, “Yeah, I love you too, Sis.” He released her and saw her smile. “Can I come home now?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out,” she whispered, as the rest of the group took their seats.
“Charlie, I’ve been instructed to evaluate your past week. Having read Deputy King’s report, I feel that you can return to your home with your sister. But you’re not out the woods yet. Though your behavior at school has been questionable, your saving grace is that your grades haven’t slipped. Your principal also reported that your fighting had been in defense of a fellow classmate who’d been bullied. Though your reasons were admirable, your actions were not. So, no more fighting. Understand?” The sternness of her voice didn’t match the twinkle in her eyes.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Then you are free to go home with your sister tonight. I’ll be seeing you next week.”
Charlie sighed with relief while Jason used the universal signal that he’d be keeping his eyes on Charlie by pointing to his own green ones and then pointing at Charlie. The gesture made him laugh but he nodded in understanding.
After thanking everyone for their help and receiving lots of pats on the back and promises to come visit, Charlie finally made it to Julie’s little SUV.
He had a long way to go but he no longer felt the rage that had plagued him for so long. His sister was smiling while she talked non-stop about how well Café Armstrong was doing and Charlie couldn’t help but feel a little excited himself. His sister’s love for him would keep his rage in check. He was going home and, for the first time in weeks, he felt his parents smiling down upon him.
ONE PHOTOGRAPH LYING on the table in the library shows what looks like a boy. The cheeks are round and pink, flushed with a smile that spreads wide across the cherubic face—a little too forced, a little too bright. This smile does not reach his eyes, those large blue orbs that always took in the surroundings without hinting at what was inside. Studying everything…revealing nothing.
The second photograph lying on the table shows what looks like a teenage girl. Her face—older, wise now—has a tentative yet genuine smile as she stares into a mirror and snaps a selfie. This face has the same rounded cheeks, enhanced by a swipe of blush; the same blue eyes that everyone in the family inherited; the same guarded expression underneath the lightness that is wholly unique to that of a sufferer.
I stare at these two faces of this one person I used to know, know still. Someone wholly familiar and completely strange, someone within my grasp one instant, and then, like a puff of smoke, slips away the next.
Beside the pictures sits a bottle, stolen in the early morning chaos from my mother’s medicine cabinet. She won’t miss it. She has several others able to do her bidding.
No, she will not miss this bottle, but she will miss me.
I don’t think even a mother’s love is enough to keep me grounded in this life, rooted to this existence, though. I think, I very much think, that it is not.
I sigh. The large clock, hanging at a slightly crooked angle above the doorway of the entrance to my school’s library, reads four o’clock. The final bell rang an hour ago, and the halls have quieted from the rowdiness of the day to the subdued patter of the after-hours.
Four o’clock.
Is it a good time to die?
Is any time a good time?
Maybe there is one particular hour that is better than another, as if the veil between the worlds eases to allow in lost souls like mine. Maybe there is an alternate universe where I can be who I truly am and not be ridiculed, abused, tormented.
I twist the lid off the bottle.
The library is empty, and I find it validation that this is the right time. Even the librarian has slipped away into one office or another. Or maybe she went home unable to tolerate this school a second longer.
I understand her need.
There is a bottle of water sitting to my left, easily accessible with lid already off. Ready and waiting. I pour a handful of the white pills into my palm, a palm that was always smaller and daintier than my peers. Of course, my peers’ hands are large and growing—boys’ hands, wielding footballs, bats or crumbled into flying fists. I had been the recipient of those fists on more than one occasion.
The clock reads four-oh-two.
I count the pills, the picture settled in my peripheral vision, and then I stop. The number is inconsequential as long as it’s enough. To be safe, I pour more into my hand.
I lift my palm, smelling the rose-scented soap I stole from my aunt wafting off my skin, mixing with the slightly chalky smell of the medicine.
After a long inhale, I open my mouth and fill that cavernous space with as many of the little white pills as I can push in.
And I close my mouth.
“WHAT ARE YOU doing?” Someone slaps my hand aggressively, violently, then grabs my cheeks, forcing my mouth open before I gather my wits. Then someone’s fingers—a girl’s fingers—are in my mouth, gagging me with their invasion.
The pills spill onto the table, slimy now, and I’m choking from the fingers as they march through my mouth toward my throat to retrieve everything she can. I think she will rip my tongue out if she’s not careful.
She clamps my jaws in one iron fist—her fingers like steel claws—and peers inside my mouth.
“Get off me!” I yank away and she straightens, seemingly satisfied she has done an accurate job of saving my life.
It is Julianne Santana, the most beautiful girl in school, towering above me with arms crossed over her chest. She is also the newest student, having moved from somewhere out west at the beginning of the year, and not yet privy to the inside knowledge that only losers enter the library. Losers like me.
“Open your mouth and let me see inside,” she commands.
I do without objection. Why, I’m not sure.
“Now drink some water.”
Again, I do her bidding.
With a dramatic huff, she falls into the chair across from me, swiping the bottle from the table and shoving it into her cross-body purse.
She stares at me for a long moment until I grow uncomfortable under her gaze. I do not like to be stared at. It’s as if whoever is doing the staring is also doing the judging, and it is too much for me to handle. Especially after all these years.
“What?” I demand. “Never seen anyone try to kill themselves before?”
Her large brown eyes, rimmed in a shimmering silver shadow, narrow, and she glares at me. “In fact, I have.”
Silenced, I cross my arms over my scrawny chest. “Don’t you know the populars don’t come into the library?”
“The populars?” One arched, pencil-thickened eyebrow raises spectacularly high.
I roll my eyes. If she doesn’t know the pecking order around here, she’ll find out soon enough. The populars will make sure of it.
“Just give me the pills,” I say.
When she doesn’t respond, I continue.
“I have to put them back in my mom’s medicine cabinet.”
Still ignoring me, she glances at the pictures lying on the table. “Who are these people?”
Before I can snatch the pictures away, she has them in her hands, staring at them with far more interest than I care for.
She looks up, meets my eyes for a second before my own cut downward.
I study the grainy, distressed wood of the table, long past its pristine sheen of newness. I wonder what she is thinking as she looks at those pictures. Will she guess who it is?
“This is you.”
And there it is. The statement. The truth.
“Both of these pictures are you.”
A truth I do not want.
I jump to my feet and the chair falls against the carpet with a dull thud. Quick as a lightning strike, I snatch the photos from her, crumbling them in my palm.
Several long, drawn-out minutes pass. Or at least it seems that way. Finally, I whisper, my voice catching in my throat, “Neither are me. I don’t actually know who I am.”
JUDGMENT. IT IS there, filling the room like an acrid odor.
I know that scent, foul and deadly. How do I know? Because I have experienced it my entire life.
“Stop staring at me.” I spit at her like a viper.
She shrugs as if it is of no consequence, then hunches at the shoulders to pilfer around in her purse. It’s one of those trendy bags I saw in the department store last weekend, with a dozen zippers and pockets and a distressed leather finish. I’m jealous, but I don’t tell her that.
Instead, I wait for surely what will be some humiliation or another. What she doesn’t know, though, is that I have another bottle of pills—and another and another—at home waiting stoically in my mom’s medicine cabinet.
Knowing this emboldens me and I meet her gaze, unblinking and confrontational.
Bring it on, Barbie. Bring it on.
She glances at me, unfazed. She is so beautiful with her long black hair, naturally curled at the ends; her big brown eyes with perfectly applied makeup—mascara that doesn’t flake, shadow that doesn’t fade, perfectly drawn liner over her top lids. She is the kind of girl every other girl envies. She is the kind of girl I envy. But I am not a girl, am I?
Finally, after a full five minutes, she slaps something down on the table in front of me. I’m afraid to look at it, though, this thing lying on the table, but when I do, I am just confused.
“Who’s that?” I flick the photo across the table. It looks like the second-grade picture of a little nerdy boy, not unlike my own picture, though this kid is ethnic and doesn’t even try to stare at the camera. Instead, he is squinting as if he is in pain as he focuses off in the distance, his sweater vest and bowtie a kinda-cute-yet-really-awful outfit. At least I smiled in my picture, even if I didn’t mean it.
“Is this your cousin or something? Little brother? Friend? You going to tell me some story about how he tried to kill himself?” I offer an exaggerated eye roll. “Whatever,” I huff. “Save your breath. There is nothing you can tell me I haven’t already heard. And not only that, nothing I’ve heard has helped. Nothing. So, again, save your breath.”
She didn’t respond for the longest time, glancing between me and the photo on the table. Without a word, she slides the picture back into her designer bag. I want to ask her how much it cost and if she paid for it herself, or if her parents are rich and bought it for her, but then her mouth is opening and I’m studying her perfect face, and she’s speaking words I never dreamed I’d hear coming from her perfect mouth.
“THAT’S ME.”
My mouth falls open.
“First grade,” she continues. “School picture day.”
Still I don’t respond as my mind struggles to emerge from the dense fog it was just thrown into.
“That’s me.” She says this with such finality, I shake my head because the two images—of her then and now—don’t merge. She must be lying.
I take several long moments to scour this girl in front of me, from her commercial-esque hair to her Cleopatra-esque face, down over her teen-girl chest pushing against her pink t-shirt, to her chipped glitter nail polish. Then I study the picture and there, finally, I see it. The eyes, the eyes are the same—brown and almond-shaped like the curve of a nut. Beautiful eyes. Troubled eyes.
What does she see when she looks at me? Someone with a little too much pudge around the middle. A little short. Hair a little greasy no matter how often I shampoo or change products. Face free of acne—thank God—but nothing interesting about it either.
I can’t stand the scrutiny, or the uncertainty.
“What’s going on?” I whisper, vaguely aware of the ticking clock on the wall.
For the first time, I see her confidence waiver. Just a quiver, a wrinkle in her fearless façade. But it is there, telling me more than her words ever could.
Will she persist? Change course and redirect? Bust into a side-splitting guffaw and call me out, like so many others have done over the years?
When she remains quiet, a storm obvious behind those dark eyes, I am the one who speaks.
“You’re telling me this picture is you?”
The storm turns violent, and I watch it play out as if her irises are a movie screen. Her secret is out. Her shame. Someone else knows and yet she isn’t sure if this someone is trustworthy or not.
She glances at her purse, and I wonder what she is thinking.
Finally, her gaze lifts. “I was born James Santana. That is my first-grade picture.”
My brain ceases functioning. If she is telling me what I think she’s telling me, then this is the world’s most colossal joke, and I’m the butt of it. Did the populars pay her to play this trick on me? Was it her own idea in an attempt to get in good with those who run the school?
“That’s not you,” I say finally.
“If you sit down, I’ll tell you my story.”
“Why?” I am immediately on guard, mistrustful. Is she luring me into a confession that will be written all over the school within an hour? Is she tempting me with her secrets so I’ll spill my own, making us, in effect, accomplices, co-conspirators, liars and pretenders?
“Because.” She releases a heavy breath of air. “I vowed to never sit by and watch someone suffer. Not when I can be a friend. A friend who understands.”
“Have you watched someone suffer before?”
Her eyes lock on my face, and I couldn’t avert my own if I tried.
“Yes,” she says. “I watched a friend kill themselves because they felt so alone and hopeless.”
I nod, knowing on a gut level that she is telling me her truth; knowing, too, that I will tell her mine.
“THREE SCHOOLS, FOUR psychiatrists, two pediatricians, countless school counselors—you name them, I’ve seen them,” Julianne says. “Then I took a stand and told my parents the truth—that I was a girl in a boy’s body.”
With these last words, the volume of her voice dips, and she glances around the library.
“It took some convincing, but my parents ultimately accepted what I assume they suspected since I was two—that I was born the wrong gender.”
Since I can’t form words yet, I nod, encouraging her to continue. I am enraptured like she’s hooked me with a wire and is luring me to her. Never have I heard someone speak so frankly.
“When I turned thirteen, we talked about our options, and I started attending a support group at a church in the city where I’m from. That was a huge help. I doubt you have something like that—this town is a lot smaller than where I come from. But this group was amazing. We were all struggling with some identity crisis or another, in one stage or another, and the leader was even trans. I felt like I’d finally found my people.”
I hang on her every word, secure in the knowledge that we are one hundred percent alone in this library.
“Then, after endless discussion, we decided to move me to a new area, a new school, and let me try out living as a girl. I Skype into the group now. They’re too important to me to leave.”
She offers me a smile that is full of brightness and light, and a tenderness I have never seen in another human being.
“How is it so far?” I manage.
“Being here?”
“As a girl?” I whisper.
She closes her dark eyes and inhales through her nose before exhaling slowly. “It’s like coming home after a long journey through the barren dessert. It’s like water and cake and sunlight and a warm bed with clean sheets.”
Her eyes open, and she pierces me with her gaze. “No, it’s more than that. It’s like finally being me. That plain and that simple. When I look in the mirror now, I see me. I’d never seen that before. No one can understand how that feels unless they’re living it.”
She tucks back into her cross-body again and pulls out a lip gloss. I watch as she deftly unscrews the little cap and swipes the pink glaze over her plump lips. Envy, and admiration, rip through me like a volatile gust of wind.
“I suspect,” she continues after returning the tube to its little zippered pocket, “that you understand exactly how it feels.”
Her lips, they are like shining jewels, bobbles of iridescent loveliness—female loveliness. There is nothing about her that screams boy! In fact, she is the most feminine girl I’ve ever seen. And no one in this school, save for me now, knows she had been born a boy.
Her cell phone rings. She glances at the caller ID then stands and walks around the table to stand by my side. She puts her thin, cool hand on my shoulder.
“I won’t ever tell you that this point you are in isn’t hard; that the past wasn’t hard, and that the future probably won’t be harder. But it can get better. There are ways to live life as your true self. And there are people out there who you can surround yourself with who understand.”
