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Dodge Mason knows he’s a boy before he’s five years old.
For a long time, a lot of other people do, too. His parents dress him in hand-me-downs from his cousins, ripped jeans and rodeo tees and flannel shirts filling up his wardrobe, burying the white lace and soft pink ribbons his grandmothers try so hard to get him to wear. He’s four the first time he can remember wearing a dress, a gift from one of them, his dad’s mom, and he stands there at his sister’s birthday party, itchy and sticky and hot and just all wrong as all of the older women fawn over how pretty he looks.
That dress had lasted fifteen minutes, tops, before it was covered in sweat and dirt and blood stains from scraped knees and abandoned in favor of running around in the shorts he’d worn underneath, topless, just like his cousins.
“Andrea Mason,” his mother chides, in a tone he still can’t forget. “That’s not ladylike.”
“But all the other boys do it, mama,” he whines.
“It’s okay for the boys to do it, but you’re not a boy,” she replies, and her words sting more than the peroxide she’d poured over his knees.
He’s five, in kindergarten, when he decides he wants to be a cowboy when he grows up. He runs around the playground with the other boys at recess and after school and, when all of them give answers like famous baseball player or famous rock star when their teacher asks them to draw what they want to be when they grow up, Dodge writes that he wants to be a cowboy.
I think you mean a cowgirl! His teacher had written on his assignment, crossing out cowboy and writing cowgirl in thick, red pen that imprinted on his eyelids and flashed in neon every time he closed his eyes.
Around his sixth birthday, his parents stop taking clothes from his cousins. Instead, his mom takes him to thrift store after thrift store, picking up shirts that are pink and frilly and sparkly. Every single one looks like it would be at home in Dayna’s closet, not Dodge’s. She beams at him each time she holds a shirt up to his chest.
“This would look good on you, Andy baby,” she says about each one.
“I hate it,” is his reply each time as he pushes the shirt away and steps back, looking towards the boy’s section with a longing he doesn’t think he should feel but doesn’t think he can stop.
“You’re not a boy,” his mom hisses when she catches his wandering gaze.
His mom puts the shirt in the cart almost every time, and makes him parade around the house in his new, cute, all-wrong clothes for his dad and older sister after each trip.
He’s six and a half when his dad tries to get him to grow out his hair.
“Come on, Andrea. You’d look so pretty with long hair,” his dad tells him, reaching out to touch the fringe that’s long enough to fall in his eyes. “You look like a boy like this.”
He considers it, because he’s still at that age where a little boy’s hero is his dad. All he wants is to make his daddy proud, because maybe if he’s proud then he won’t fight so much with his mama, maybe he’ll stop leaving so much. So he does it, stops cutting his hair even though every half-inch of growth feels heavier than a mountain pulling on his head and, by the time it reaches his shoulders, he can barely look at himself in the mirror without feeling like he’s going to go up in flames.
His dad still leaves all the time.
He’s seven when he really rides for the first time, and he swears he’s never been happier in his whole life. His daddy rides, and he still wants to make his daddy proud, so he knows he would’ve done it anyway, even if he didn’t like it for how it makes him feel. But it makes him feel like he’s free, like he’s flying, like maybe he can escape all the things he knows but can’t say. If the rodeo was his father’s church, it’s Dodge’s lifeline, the very breath in his lungs and blood in his veins.
He starts with barrel racing, just like his big sister, and gets to compete against other boys his own age. A cowboy hat covers the long hair he tucks up under the brim and people call him Andy, just like he likes, and he feels so, so right that it feels even better than winning, which he does, and the pride in his chest as he cradles his trophy against it on the car ride home isn’t from coming in first in the fastest time ever but from other people finally seeing him the way he sees himself.
Until it squeaks out, like a deflating balloon, when his dad starts talking, five minutes out from their house.
“You’ll make a great cowgirl, Andy baby. You’ll give your sister a run for her money someday,” he says from the driver’s seat, glancing back to wink at Dodge in the rearview mirror. His mother hums in agreement. The only person who seems to share Dodge’s disgust with the idea is Dayna herself, who just rolls her eyes and scoffs at him.
Cowgirl. The word just feels wrong to Dodge. He whispers it again and again to himself until it’s on a loop in his mind. It bounces off of other words and phrases, too, like ladylike and pretty little girl and but you’re not a boy.
He’s eight when he’s called a dyke for the first time.
He doesn’t even recognize the word when it’s shouted at him from across the playground. He doesn’t know what it means so he doesn’t bother to yell anything back, but later that night, he asks his mom.
Mama, he said quietly, pushing his homework to the side of the table and shifting in his chair to face his mother. “What’s a dyke?”
“Where did you hear that word, Andrea?” She asks, seemingly more concerned about her son’s profane mouth than answering his question.
“Someone yelled it at me today on the playground,” he mutters, dropping his eyes to his hands, crossed on the table in front of him.
“It doesn’t matter,” his mom said, “because it’s not a nice word. It’s not the kind of work we use. Okay?”
He nods his head even though he doesn’t understand, but it’s okay.
He’s nine when he wants to die for the first time.
Because nine is when he’s not a Little Wrangler anymore. Nine is when he has to sign up to ride in the junior league, and the junior league isn’t coed.
Because nine is the first time he gets beaten up for being a boy in boy’s clothes who other people see as a girl in boy’s clothes. The teacher calls his name on the first day and he tells her he goes by Andy, but still, the boys in his class hear the name Andrea and see long hair tied up unconvincingly under a hat and sneakers that are worn and faded but still sparkle in the right light and pink lace from his shirt sticking out under the hem of his baggy black hoodie, and every fist that makes contact with his body at recess is a hammer driving the words that dance around his head home onto the anvil of his skin.
Ladylike not a boy pretty girl not a boy Andrea you’re not a boy.
The bruises fade but the words never do.
Because nine is when the girlness sinks in. It’s weighed down with wrongness and discomfort and painfulness, and when he looks in the mirror, he no longer feels like he’s going to go up in flames but like he’ll be the one holding the match to start it all.
Because nine is when his dad leaves, mostly for good. He wanders back into their lives from time to time, giving Dodge the same kind of hope he gets when the weather guy on the TV says cold weather is in store for the night: hope against hope for a positive outcome, when all he should expect is to be left standing out in the cold.
And even though he still wins competitions that year, he feels no pride at his success every time he sees Andrea Mason has come in first place, just anger and pain and confusion at it all. No cowboy hat, no amount of tucking his hair up, no nicknames can take away those six tiny letters of his first name, printed in the darkest black ink against the whitest of white paper; nothing can change it, and he swears he’s never felt more hopeless in his whole life.
He’s ten and a half when his body starts changing.
It’s slight at first, barely noticeable unless you’re looking for it, but most of the time it feels like everyone is looking for it. He shoots up a few inches in a few months, outgrowing the thrifted clothes his mom buys him so often the clerks at all the thrift stores in town know them both by name before he slows down. Soon, he’s wearing hand-me-downs from his sister.
But the curve of his chest seems to pop out overnight and Dodge recoils from his reflection in the mirror that morning. It’s foreign, an alien mass on his body, and tears of resentment and frustration well up in his eyes and splash down onto his cheeks.
His mother’s excitement when he walks into the kitchen ten minutes later, with the baggiest sweatshirt he owns thrown over his chest, makes his stomach clench.
If ten and a half is when he first hates his body for everything it isn’t, eleven is when it betrays him entirely.
Because he’s eleven when he gets his first period.
It comes after a long day of riding horses and even though he knows what it is, he still thinks he’s dying. Or maybe he thinks that because he truly feels like he is dying.
His mom hears him crying and runs into the bathroom. She finds him sitting on the toilet, staring at the brownish-red stain in his underwear with a mix of fear and revulsion, like it’s his very future being written away in the ink from his veins.
“Oh, my Andy baby, you’re becoming a woman,” his mother says, with a smile that makes him sick to his stomach.
Ladylike not a boy pretty girl you’re not a boy a woman not a boy not a boy not a boy.
And he feels a piece of his soul go into the trashcan, too.
He’s twelve before it comes regularly, and he’s twelve the first time he hears the word transgender.
It’s on the bus on the way home from school one March afternoon. Dodge is sitting next to some guy he doesn’t know, curled down into the seat to make himself as small as possible. He hears the words, full of hate and disgust, from the older kids in the seats behind him.
“My mom was watching this show last night and it had one’a those fuckin’ trannies in it.”
“What the fuck’s a tranny?”
“You know. A transgender. A guy who thinks he’s a girl.”
Something in Dodge’s chest catches at the description and, even though the words are uttered with a contempt he can’t yet understand at the age of twelve, the word feels like home. That night, under the cover of darkness, he whispers it to his bedroom ceiling, again and again, as though giving a name to who he was could make him into all he wanted to be.
Transgender.
He’s still twelve, but two weeks older, when he finally gets up the courage to type ‘transgender’ into a Google search bar in the library at school. Even though he’s covered his tracks as best he can, picking a computer in the far corner of the library so he’ll know if anyone is coming and going Incognito to ensure the search history wouldn’t be saved, his eyes skim over the definition just once, quickly, before he closes out the browser.
transgender: a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex.
He’s twelve when he finally finds himself, and he’s almost thirteen when he tells his sister she’s always had a little brother.
He tells her a few weeks before his thirteenth birthday, on a Friday night when their mom is working and she’s supposed to be watching him to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid, like blow up the house or break a bone or something. He’s wearing two sports bras by now, to flatten his chest to a barely-noticeable bump, and he’s still hiding his girly clothes under baggy, faded, thread-worn sweatshirts. There’s something on the TV that he’s been pretending to watch without processing for at least half an hour, but he stares at his hands in his lap as he talks to his sister, sitting at the other end of the wraparound sectional sofa.
“Hey, Dayna?” His voice shakes with the weight of what he’s about to say.
“Hey, Andy?” Comes her response. She’s the only one who uses his nickname more than his given name.
“If I tell you something…will you promise not to tell mom? And dad?” He looks up from his hands to find his sister staring back at him. There’s a mix of curiosity and concern in her eyes and when she nods, Dodge takes a shaky breath and continues. “I…I don’t think I’m a girl.”
She sits up straighter on the couch now and turns to face him. “What do you mean? Of course you are.” Her words are confident, certain, in a way Dodge has never been.
“I think I’m…I think I’m transgender,” he explains, staring at his hands again. “I was born a girl, but I’m a boy.”
She pauses for a moment, frowning slightly as she turns the information over in her mind. A smile slowly spreads across her face.
“So…I guess you won’t give me a run for my money then, will you, cowboy?”
Dodge cries as his sister wraps him up in her arms and tells him that she’ll always love him, no matter what, that this makes sense, that he’ll be okay.
So he turns thirteen, and he starts cutting his hair again.
When his mom asks him why, he tells her that it’s just easier that way, that long hair is too much in the Texas heat and that it’s simpler for riding. Nothing he tells her is quite a lie, but he doesn’t tell her that he hasn’t been able to look at himself in a mirror without wanting to crawl out of his own skin since he was six years old, or that looking at his reflection with short hair was like coming up for air after three minutes under water.
Dodge still has a few months left of his thirteenth year when his dad comes home again, smelling like rubbing alcohol and sweat and slurring his speech, entire sentences coming out like a single word. All he can do when the man tells him he looks like a dyke with short hair is laugh. His dad is gone before that laughter fades in his mind.
He tells his mom that she has a son on his fourteenth birthday.
It comes out stuttering, uncertain, nervous, over fourteen blown-out candles and the words Happy Birthday! scrawled, without a name, in electric blue icing atop chocolate frosting. He talks into the still-fading smoke from the candles he’d blown out seconds earlier, like the depth of his secret could do a better job of extinguishing the candles than breath alone.
His mother is patient and kind as he talks and Dodge wonders if maybe Dayna already told her it was coming.
“You never were a girly girl,” she says, staring at him over the cake. Her eyes are warm but he can see something else in them, a fear that wasn’t there before, and he’s scared that fear is because of him.
“Because I was never really a girl, mom,” he says with a shrug.
“No, I suppose you weren’t,” she replies, reaching over to ruffle his hair. “But I have always loved you.”
Later that night, Dayna knocks softly on his door. She walks into his room slowly, like she’s trying not to disturb the air around her. Her hands are clasped behind her back as she listens for the click of the latch.
“Happy birthday, Andy,” she says, bringing her hands forward to reveal a small gift bag. “I wanted to give this to you when you were alone.”
There’s a card in the bag and he opens it first. The front is a cheesy cartoon of a cowboy, emblazoned with a big number 4, but Dayna had added a 1 to make it read 14. Inside, he reads, To my little brother,
Not many people can say they look up to a little brother, but your bravery gives me strength every day.
Love,
Dayna
He looks up at her, smiling, but she gestures for him to keep going. He reaches into the bag and pulls out a package, wrapped in a plastic shipping envelope address to her. She nods again and he tears into it. What looks like a stretchy tank top falls into his lap.
“It’s called a binder,” she explains, crossing the room to sit on his bed. “It should be better than the double sports bra situation you have going on.”
He didn’t need the explanation but happiness wells up in his chest anyway. Dayna encourages him to try it and he does, slipping it over his head with shaking hands, then putting his shirt back on.
When he looks in the mirror afterwards, he doesn’t see himself engulfed in flames. Instead, he just sees himself looking back at him.
He starts wearing his binder to school, where he’s already known as Andy and where new people stumble over how to refer to him if they’re not looking at official school records. He slips into a bathroom stall to change for gym, like he always has, and emerges from the girls’ locker room to run across the gym to line up with the boys for class. His teachers call him Andy and his friends use he and him and, despite the glares and threats of violence, he feels himself.
Somehow, by the time he turns fifteen, his dad knows, too. The man never says it, but only calls him Andy from that point on. His mom calls him her son and his sister calls him her brother, and that’s enough to make up for the fact that his father never uses those words. He uses Andy, and that’s okay.
Sixteen starts out with a dream Dodge never thinks he’ll see, because sixteen starts out with Dodge himself. For his sixteenth birthday, his mom finally lets him change his name and gender. Officially. Legally. Andrea Mason is gone, as though she never existed, and really, she didn’t. Because he’s always been Andrew Dodge Mason, even if he had to take a detour to get there.
Because starting sixteen out by introducing Andrew Dodge Mason to the world means that he can be Andrew Dodge Mason in everything that he does. He’s officially Andrew in class, and suddenly he doesn’t need to defensively gasp Andy at the beginning of every year or with every substitute teacher. He’s a boy, and he can use the boy’s locker room without having to race across the gym to line up where he belongs.
Being sixteen, being Andrew, being a boy, means he can compete against other boys. It means he doesn’t have to barrel race anymore; it means he can participate in the competitions he’d been longing for since he was eight years old. Saddle bronc.
And when he does, despite his legs like twigs, he wins.
The rest of sixteen doesn’t go as smoothly.
He’s sixteen when he beats his dad’s record. He doesn’t expect to see his dad standing there waiting for him when he walks out of the pit, because he’d given up waiting on his dad for anything a long time ago. So he’s shocked to see him standing there, swaying slightly like he’s caught up in a strong wind that threatened to knock him off his feet, he’s shocked.
“Can’t believe I just got beat by a girl,” his dad mutters, oblivious to Dodge’s presence. “A fuckin’ girl.”
So he’s Andy, but he’s still his father’s daughter, and tears of anger sting in his eyes again. He can’t bring himself to talk to the man standing there, drunk by 11:00 AM, held up by spite and sheer luck and the fact that his left hand is wrapped around the fence.
He’s sixteen and a half when he finds his dad swinging from the rafters, and even though he knows they aren’t, he can’t help but connect the two events in his mind.
Maybe, if he wasn’t this way, none of this would have happened. Maybe, if he could have just been a good girl, done what was expected of him no matter the cost, his daddy would have stayed. But he is this way, and this has happened, and he isn’t a good girl and he can’t do what’s expected of him.
His daddy is gone and Dodge isn’t yet seventeen when he watches his sister’s future taken from her too, when he swears revenge, a resolution, closure, anything.
He’s seventeen when he goes on hormone therapy. He thinks he can fly the night of his first shot, swears wings are about to erupt out of his back despite the soreness in his arm. For the first time in a long time, Dodge knows the risks but the rewards are worth it.
He can’t tell which changes come first over the next few weeks and months. His voice drops until people around him hear the real Dodge for the first time. The reflection he sees in the mirror changes, little by little, first facial hair, then the way he carries himself, to be closer to the man he wants to see staring back at him. His feelings change, as if they’re shifting to align with the things he’s always wanted but never let himself long for in nearly two decades.
He’s almost eighteen when he reenrolls in high school, putting himself on a path to destruction that was laid out before him and wouldn’t be completed until he was long gone from the place. He lets himself be steered in this, giving up control and following the current even when it made him dizzy and uncertain.
He’s nineteen when he realizes, later on that summer, that there’s more to life than hate and revenge, and he’s nineteen when he learns just what more can be. These aren’t lessons he expected to learn when his family moved to Carp for his second senior year and his chance at not only the Panic title but closure, but playing the game had taught him more than he’d learned in a year in the town about who he was and who other people were.
He’s nineteen when he whispers the words I’m a trans man into a heavy silence for the first time, waiting for rejection like an animal waits for its food at the zoo – it won’t come without a show, but his show is questions about what that means, what it makes her, what he can still do for her. But he’s nineteen when he makes love to a girl for the first time and she treats him like the man he is. He’s nineteen when Natalie’s fingers run lightly over the scars across his chest first, then when she plants tender kisses along the lines that he swears cut straight through to his soul. His manhood, despite being purchased from a store in the bigger town a half an hour to the west, is enough for her, and she cries out for him in the middle of everything. When it’s over, she holds him close in a way he’s never been held by anyone and he swears he could combust on the spot. He finds a second home in her eyes and, in that moment, he knows a piece of him will always be in Carp, Texas, no matter how far he strays.
He’s nineteen when he doesn’t compete to come in second in Joust, when he learns to let go of his own false assumptions and blind hatred. And even as he watches his chances at closure go up in smoke, Dodge has peace.
He’s almost twenty when he stands in front of his father’s grave, eyes dry but throat tight. He has no flowers or decorations for the pitiful grave, little more than a slab of stone chucked at the top of the plot with his father’s name engraved in the surface.
“I hope you’re proud of me, dad, and the man I’ve become,” he murmurs into the silence of the graveyard. “Because I am.”