Published: June 13th 2017, 5:01:18 pm
Being a weirdo didn’t bother me much until I was 12. I had watched a lot of movies and I knew that unpopular kids were the ones you made movies about. Winona Rider in Heathers, Ricki Lake in Hairspray, Johnny Depp in Crybaby, those were the kids you wanted to be in high school. I assumed that middle school was close enough to being like high school and I was keen to get my Ricky lake on so I went to my first day of school in best dress I’d bought for back to school, sporting meticulously applied makeup and an elaborate braid that my mom did for me.
“Why are you dressed like that?” A girl asked me haughtily. She was dressed in raggedy overalls and too-cool-to-care stick-straight hair. It was 1994 but I hadn’t heard about grunge yet. She already worshiped Kurt Cobain.
“Are you wearing makeup?” She asked before I could stutter an answer to her first question.
“I…yeah.” I didn’t know what else to say. Her face screwed up like a cat’s ass and I wondered what I had done so wrong. Was there some kind of dress code I didn’t know about? She seemed to soften, like she was giving me one more chance.
“What kind of music do you listen to?” Ok, I had to get this right but I didn’t know what was cool. I liked the music my mom liked, mostly. Peter Gabriel and David Bowie, Kate Busch and Sondheim musicals. I’d never heard anyone else talk about those people though so I didn’t know if they were cool. But everyone liked the Beatles, right? That was a rule. So I said The Beatles and everyone around me alternated between scornful laughter and honest to god puking noises. Maybe I’d have faired better with David Bowie, but it was 1994, so probably not. I wasn’t in Heathers, I was in Welcome to the Dollhouse. I wasn’t fighting racism or riding on the back of a hot guy’s motorcycle, I was just being laughed at. The word weird had become weaponized and that barrel was pointed straight at me.
Gay was another word that had suddenly become vicious. In fact, the word gay sounded quaint once faggot started getting thrown around. Sure, I’d heard the word before but only said with love. Two gay guys throwing playful shade backstage can make anything sound cute. But that word grows teeth when there’s malice behind it. And middle school was rife with malice.
If people could spit that word at boys for masculinity infractions so small I couldn’t even see them, what would they call my dad if they found out? My dad was something worse than gay, something so dark and secret they didn’t have words for it. They didn’t talk about this on TV. This was not in any well known Very Serious Adult Movies that Tom Hanks won an Oscar for. I may have known all there was to know about The Crying Game, by my classmates certainly didn’t. The closest thing I could point to was Mrs. Doubtfire and he wasn’t allowed to see his kids anymore.
I knew the word transsexual before any of my class mates did and I was very afraid of what would happen if they found out.
They did find out. Faster than I expected them to. One day a horde of students, most of whom had never spoken to me, cornered me during lunch. Their ringleader said, in the snottiest voice she could muster
“Jessica told me your dad’s a transsexual.”
I wish that I’d stood up for myself, or better yet, my dad. I wish I’d had that Ricki Lake/Johnny Depp/Winona Rider fearlessness to say “Yeah, so what?” Or even “I’m surprised Jessica knows what a transsexual is.”
But I was too busy trying not to cry. Because of course she knew what a transsexual was. She knew because I told her. Because I had to tell someone.
Instead I just denied it. And I walked away. And that horde of kids just looked around peevishly because I hadn’t cried or confessed or done anything very Degrassi at all.
I didn’t tell my parents what happened but my come came home and found me crying.
“I’m always going to be the weird girl, aren’t I mom?” I said between sobs. My mother never lied to me so she just said “yes.”
“I’m sorry you’re so much like me,”she said. That year we went to Disneyland for my father’s 40th birthday. Disneyland was an impossible idea that opened the same year my dad was born. My father has always felt a connection to impossible ideas. There’s a reason my mom said he was a cartoon. My dad's 40th birthday present was a week in Disneyland as a woman. We went as a family. She wore dresses and make up and we called her Denise. Our present to her was that she could be herself. It seemed reasonable at the time. It seemed nice. I am disgusted now to think that was a privilege we granted to her as a gift. "You've lived 40 years of lies, here's one whole week to be yourself. Go wild." It seems like something from a dystopian novel, being granted one week in which to be yourself.
I'm disgusted now by the embarrassment I felt. The shame. The fear that someone would find out exactly how weird we were. I don’t really know what I was so scared of. Did I think people would point and laugh? Maybe. But that had happened to me at school before. How much worse could it be at Disneyland? Did I think we’d get thrown out? Probably not. We were paying customers, what we wore certainly wasn’t any business of Disney’s. My dad wasn’t even conspicuous. She passed really well. I don’t think even I knew what I was afraid of. I think, when you live a long time with a secret, you’re afraid of being caught, even if you have no idea what the consequences would be. We’d all been living with a secret and now it was out there, in broad daylight. Our secret shame on display at Disneyland.
And then something amazing happened; No one cared. Not only did no one care, no one noticed. We were just another family at Disneyland. No one gave us a second glance. We were free to do normal family things like take our picture with Goofy and enjoy the haunted house and give wrong directions to French tourists. I got to be embarrassed by normal things like my mom saying that goofy was flirting with me. Or when my dad screamed her head off on the Chip and Dale rollercoaster. I got to lose myself in the magic of Disney, in the newly opened Toontown. Toontown (both in the park and in the movie) was the world I wanted to live in. It was like the real world, but more magical. Manhole covers talked, buildings were made to be played on. The cartoon characters around me looked as weird as I felt. It didn’t take long for all of us to forget that we were supposed be scared or ashamed. In Toontown we were normal.
The last day came and we didn’t want to go back. No one wants to leave Disneyland, but more than that, we really didn’t want to go back. My dad’s man costume settled heavily onto her shoulders as she climbed into the driver’s seat. I got into the car and I put on my headphones. I listened to Aerosmith (a failed attempt to start listening to cool bands) and I retreated into myself.
What I didn’t hear was my parents talking.
What I didn’t hear was my dad saying she couldn’t go back, she couldn’t keep pretending, she couldn’t be a man anymore.
What I didn’t hear was the sound of our lives changing.
When my told me I’d be changing schools, I was furious. This meeting I do remember. My parents sat me down in the living room, the bright light of spring blasting through the windows. Summer was coming, they said. I was leaving my school and I wouldn’t go back. My dad would transition over the summer, and I’d go to a new school where no one knew that Hilary used to be my dad. I wasn’t changing schools just because my dad was changing genders, but I definitely blamed her. The truth was I was failing out of that school. I’d just been diagnosed with ADHD and it was recommended that I go to a private school; somewhere smaller, better suited to my needs. At my public school I couldn’t keep up. I was miserable every day. I barely had friends. I don’t know what I was clinging to. The devil I knew, I guess.
But a school where no one knew me would be a great place for me to blend in as someone who just happened to live with two women. We would tell people that Hilary was my aunt and my dad was dead. I think it hurt her, a little, that I wanted to say she was dead. But everyone I knew had divorced parents and I was worried they’d want to talk about it; where was my dad now? What was the custody arrangement? When did my parent’s marriage start to go downhill? It was too many questions and too many lies to keep straight. Death was the cleanest break I could think of. The one time I said it at my new school it stopped all questions in an instant.
I prepared for my first day at school like it was D-Day. I drafted different outfits and the attitude that would go with them. I planned out what I would say if someone was mean to me. I practiced not caring and looking cool.
And then something amazing happened; I had a good day. I walked into a school where everyone looked different from each other. There was the guy with the liberty spikes mohawk, with whom I immediately fell in love, the girl with pink bangs and winged eyeliner that I really wanted to be friends with, the guy with long hair and a JTHM t-shirt who instantly annoyed me but soon became my first boyfriend. Someone actually complimented me on my x-files binder. I made friends quickly, something that had seemed impossible just a year before. I wore whatever I wanted. No one cared what music I listened to. And everyone knew the same words I knew. Well, mostly.
One day my friend’s mom drove me home. Both my parents worked so I would try to bum rides off of other parents whose kids lived near me. One of my favorite moms was Jessa’s mom. Jessa was a goth kid, so we became fast friends. Her mom was disabled, like mine, and had the same no-bullshit attitude, tempered by kindness, that my mom had. One day she drove me home and when she got to my house she stopped the car and meaningfully turned to me in the back seat.
“Now, this is none of my business,” she began “And you can tell me to go fuck myself if you want…”
I was a little shocked to hear someone else’ mom swear in front of me, but I got the sense that this was done to convey just how serious she was, and that she was speaking to me as an equal, and I really was free to tell her such a thing in this instance.
“Your aunt Hilary isn’t really your mother’s sister, is she?” This was not an accusation, merely a request to cut the crap. I have always hated lying and had a strong respect for the cutting of all crap. I wasn’t sure what to expect next but I told the truth anyway.
“No,” I said and I didn’t breathe until she spoke again.
“They’re…special together, aren’t they?” She said special in a kind way, a ways that said she remembered that she was speaking to a child who might want at least a small verbal figleaf for an adult conversation. She also said special in the way that my godmother had told me that her girlfriend was not just a friend. The expression was so quaint that I almost laughed.
She thought my parents were lesbians. OF COURSE she thought they were lesbians! We lived in a two bedroom house! How had I been naive enough to thing that anyone would buy our bullshit “aunt” story? And how had it not occurred to us to just say that my parents were lesbians? I longed for a situation as normal as Heather Has Two Mommies.
I think I did laugh, just a little. And then I said
“Yes. But not the way you’re thinking…” And I told her everything. Her and Jessa and maybe even John. I don’t remember if he was there but she usually gave him a ride home, too. And then…nothing happened. I think she gave a little ‘you learn something new every day’ kind of shrug, thanked me for my honesty, and dropped me off at home.
I soon learned that everyone at my school had been the weird kid at their old school. Everyone had a reason for being there, they had ADD, or a drug problem, or they’d been in a gang, or they were just too gay to function. So no one cared that I had two moms. Or a mom who used to be a dad. Or whatever I had going on at home. If it wasn’t an issue to me, it wasn’t an issue to them. I got to be normal because no one was normal. I got to be myself without being penalized for it. Everyone felt just as weird as I did. It was like my whole school was Toontown.