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When Frank kisses me, it’s like something inside heals.
I’m not sure what broken part of me it is. There’s many possibilities. I’m like shattered glass in that respect.
It could be the shard that never understood why, when at some indecipherable point of growing up, I was suddenly so different from the rest of them. The other boys. The part that couldn’t understand why we wouldn’t play knights and princesses together anymore. Why it was such a problem when I wanted to be the princess, even though I was always the princess, I had always been the princess. It has to be a girl, they’d say, and maybe the part of me that heals is the part of me that would stand there, stammering and struggling to explain to them that I was a girl. That I could be the princess. Please.
Or maybe it’s the part of me that had to sit in two weeks of after school detentions, all because I wore a skirt to school. Not even a skirt, actually, it was a kilt. Which is what men wear (I found out, to a massive attack of frustration) except at my school, where there’s these stupid uniforms and these stupid expectations, the kilt is part of the girls uniform. So I wasn’t allowed. It’ll save me from bullying, they told me, like I wasn’t already the school punching bag. Like they gave a shit about me being bullied before. Before I dared to make it their problem as well.
Anyway. Something heals. A part he had zero hand in breaking. Frank was never like the others. Like anyone, really.
The first time he came around my house, he didn’t say a word about the jacket I kept hung over my dresser mirror. Or about the nail polish bottles he accidentally dug out while looking for my book full of Gamecube discs. He’d only looked at me a little, eyebrows scrunched and lips sucked in, when instead of digging out the Watchmen comic I’d wanted to show him from my stack of magazines, I’d slipped out a ladies hair and make up issue.
The second time he came around my house, he did kind of ask about it. About the jacket. But he didn’t press when I just said that it was because the mirror was smashed.
The third time, when he’d brought me a spare mirror his mom kept in the garage and said I could have it, and I’d had to come clean that I’d lied. That my dresser mirror was fine, that it was my reflection that was the problem, he just sat there and listened. Arms hugging the bubble wrapped oval he’d brought for me, lamp-lit eyes soft and understanding.
“I just don’t… like to, like, see myself.” I couldn’t look at him in that moment. The same way I couldn’t look at myself. Something I didn’t want to see was looking back.
“Why not?”
“Because… because I don’t like how I look. I don’t…”
If I had had any self-esteem back then, I may have been able to see the shock on his face.
“But you’re like. What?! You’re like a model. You’re so— how can you not—“
“No I’m not. It’s— I— It doesn’t look like me. I can’t— it’s just— I just need the jacket, okay?”
“Okay… Gee?”
“Mm?”
“You can just tell me, next time. You don’t need to like, say normal things. Around me. Give me normal answers. You can just tell me whatever, next time. I’m never gonna judge you. Just tell me the truth.”
And so I did, from then on. It was hard. He’d be so abrupt, so authentic with his curiosity about me. No one had ever been that interested in me before. The more he asked, the more I realised I didn’t know, that there was so much more to say than I could ever imagine I’d be able to put into words. But I answered him always as best as I could, as truthfully as I could. Plucking out these feelings swimming inside of me like I was fishing. Sometimes the reel would unlatch, and I wouldn’t be able to explain. Sometimes I’d make a catch, and I’d sit there sharing something with him at the same time as it shared itself with me. Sometimes, very rarely, I just knew the answers.
-
“Do you wear nail polish outside? Or just in the house?”
“Outside sometimes, I guess? I don’t want anyone to see, though. So only, like, when it’s dark.”
“Have you tried that make-up? What was it like?”
“The lipstick. Kind of. And like, that eyeshadow I guess. I liked it. I looked… I almost liked how it looked. How I looked, y’know?”
“So, the hair… is that like… do you have it long so like…”
“It covers my face more— I know, you don’t… I know you don’t think I should cover it but… anyway. That’s why.”
Or that one time we’d gone to the mall, and, like, I guess I’d looked a little too long at that one pretty dress in the Hollister window display. He’d circled back around, slurping at his pot of blackberry sorbet with sprinkles (sprinkles. With sorbet. He was one of a kind, truly.), looking from it to me, waiting. He knew to wait for me, and how to do it. He’d always known, somehow.
“Do you like it?” He asked.
“…mhm”
“Do you like it because you wanna try it on?”
“…Maybe. I mean, yeah. Maybe.”
“Buy it.”
“What?”
“You’re short as fuck. They’ll have your size.”
“Fuck you! Calling me short.”
“Fuck you too. Buy it.”
And then there was that moment, unprompted as far as I could tell, where we’d just been playing my gamecube, laying on top of eachother in my bed, leaning our shoulders together when he’d shifted, and put his pizza crust back on the plate and looked at me for a really, really long time.
“Do you like guys?”
“Oh.”
“I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”
“I… Frank… I don’t know.” I like you. I like you so much. “Maybe. I mean. Probably. I mean— yeah. Yeah?”
“Okay. Gee? That’s okay.”
“But I’m not gay. I don’t…”
“Okay. I think I get it. I get it. You like girls too.”
I nodded, but no, that wasn’t it. I didn’t know what it was. Something in me just kind of, didn’t like that label. Gay. I felt like it didn’t fit, or fit a part of me that wasn’t really supposed to be there. Like a skin tag on my identity.
“What about you?” I asked him, looking at the back of his hand. It was sitting on the sheets between us, closer to my leg than it was to his.
“I don’t know.”
“You can tell me, too. Who am I gonna tell?”
He looked at me for a long time, eyes up and down and all around, like he was trying to figure out something going on behind them.
“I don’t know.”
It had gotten easier. Each time he’d asked, I’d forget that there was anything wrong with the answers I was giving, because he just didn’t care. He just listened, and if he didn’t understand, he’d ask another question to clarify. And I think that might have been what caused it. I think it made me too comfortable. His acceptance was a strong, unyielding Winter that frosted the window to the outside world, made me forget what everything was like beyond our private panes of glass. What everyone else was like. And so when I’d gone into school, hair grown longer than I’d ever let it get before, eye shadow smudged into my lashes and nails painted red, I should have known to expect it. I should have seen the sniggering, and the staring, and the steady trail of eyes latching onto me and following me as I approached my locker. But I didn’t. Frank had wrapped his arms around my world and squeezed so tight it had narrowed my vision. Put the blinders on me, I guess, and I just hadn’t noticed any of it. Not until hindsight, not until it was too late.
I don’t know where they got the photographs from. Someone had seen me, I guess. It’s unfair, because I was still really careful about it. I only wore the dress to the woods, alone or with Frank, that was it. And I’d bring a longer jacket with me in case anyone walked past. I was really careful. And it wasn’t fair. But I guess I’d just been so lost looking at him that I hadn’t seen the other person. I hadn’t even heard the camera.
They stuck it to the front of my locker, along with a page of crumpled note paper telling me I was a ‘Fagot!!!’. It was written in red felt tip and underlined multiple times, like whoever had written it had been trying to slice the paper in two. There was violence in it. Violence that reverberated off of the page and against my own nervous system. It felt like a punch. A full fist straight to the gut. Wham.
It felt like getting told I couldn’t be the princess anymore.
I’d torn it down. Stared at it. Felt some respite at the fact that at least Frank wasn’t pictured. There was the tip of an unidentifiable shoe, but that was it. He escaped by being obscured by a tree trunk.
But I was there, clear as fucking glass. Clunky and too big in the pretty Hollister birthday gift that Frank had gotten me. My first thought, aside from anything about how everyone knew now, was how horrible I looked. I looked like a guy wearing a dress. I looked like a boy. Because that’s what I was. That’s what I’ll always be. And what was worse than knowing that, was not understanding why I hated knowing it.
I’d ran straight home after the final bell had rung, yanked the jacket off of my dresser and stood in front of my mirror pulling and pinching my big face, pressing just above my waist until it dug in and clenched my lungs, digging my fingernails into my flat chest hard enough to leave pink marks. Staring at myself so intimately and for so long that every decipherable feature of my face merged into one conglomeration, until all I could see was the monster underneath my skin. It must be what they saw, those little boys from a decade ago, when they decided I couldn’t be the princess anymore. It must be what they all saw now.
Mom got so mad at me for smashing the mirror, but I couldn’t care. It was my fucking mirror, why couldn’t I break it? I hated it. I hated it. I hated what was in it. I hated what was always looking back at me and, worst of all, I hated that it had ripped open a wound too big for even Frank to heal.
I’d avoided him, at least for as long as I could. It’d taken four days for him to catch me at my bedroom window, whisper shouting my name while he threw fucking beer bottle lids and guitar picks at the glass panes, a couple pebbles too, just for traditions sake I guess. When I’d opened it, hair flattened purposefully to obscure my face, and told him to leave me alone, he’d just asked if I was hungry. If I wanted pizza, a soggy looking Papa Johns box raised over his head with half a smile on his stupid, beautiful face.
The magherita pizza had gotten cold by the time I’d finished telling him what had happened. And even colder after he had told me what had been happening to him, too. That he’d been getting notes, names shouted at him, shoved in the corridors and on one stomach-churning time, squeezed inside his own locker and trapped inside for over an hour until a janitor had walked by. The pizza was stone fucking cold by the time we’d finished crying and laughing and fucking lamenting into each other's shoulders, by the time I’d finished apologising and he’d finished telling me I had nothing to apologise for. That everyone’s just fucked and school is too, and that we just had to wait it out. That it’s two-thousand-and-fucking-five and the world is catching up, changing. That it’d get better. That I had nothing to feel bad about, nothing at all, and would I please come back to school now because he kinda had no other friends and lunchtimes were getting really lonely and really boring.
He’d also promised to bring me that replacement mirror, the one I’d turned down before.
It was at lunchtime a week later, when I’d sat him down on the perimeter wall and made him promise that he’d stay my friend no matter what. No matter what I was about to tell him.
And when I had told him my name was Illi, that I wanted to go by Illi now, and I’d like to be a girl. That, no, I was a girl. I knew I was. And could he act like I was? Please? And he’d sat back, straight and smiling, looking from one of my eyes to the other. I’d been almost close to telling him to just forget it, forget I said anything when he grinned at me, using his lips and teeth and big round cheeks to tell me wordlessly that he was with irrefutable certainty, still my friend. My best friend. Like he’d promised he would be.
“Finally.” He’d said. “God, I’ve been wanting to ask you to like— but I didn’t know— because I knew you struggled with like… and I— well— so it’s Illi? So I wanted to ask, like, well, at first it was boyfriend, but then you— and so I—“ He’d covered his mouth, giggling, tucking his head down a little inside his blazer. “So it’s girlfriend?”
Oh my god. I smiled, not being able to help it despite feeling the sharp tug of that fish hook in my gut. “What is? Is what girlfriend?”
“Oh. I mean. Fuck. I’ve fucked this up. I meant, you, Illi. Will you be my girlfriend?” He was chewing on his lip ring. I could hear it clinking against his teeth. It almost sounded like he might snap it.
“Frank…”
“Yes? Please fuck, say that’s a yes.”
His hair was hard with hairspray. It bent as in half like plastic when I’d tried to push it behind his pierced ear, making me laugh. “Yes.”
And now we’re here, him kissing me, whispering my name against my mouth, my actual name, not Gee, not Gerard. Not that jacket of a label obscuring the real me underneath. He knows me. Because I’ve told him, because he asked. He knows that girl in the mirror, and he’s kissing her and she’s kissing back. I’m kissing back. She is me. And I’ve known that. I’ve known that. But he helped me find her. He helped me look. And he made it easier, because she was looking for him too.
He pulls away a little, holding my face gently in his hands. I can see the slight red hue his nails out of the corner of my eye, I recall the night before, where we’d stayed up till way too fucking late painting them and talking and whispering and laying against each other, his hand resting closer to my leg than to his. And now it just feels inevitable. Him calling me pretty, calling me his girlfriend. His lips on my lips again, ankle hooking through my ankles and almost knocking our precarious balance out of lock, sending us falling backwards over the wall. I think his sandwich, still wrapped tight in tinfoil, goes plummeting into the long grass below at some point, but neither of us really care to notice. We’re too busy. Me being healed, and him healing.
When he pulls away for the second time, cheeks flush and legs definitely more entwined in mine, we just look at each other for a long time. So long, in fact, that I’m surprised the lunch bell doesn’t ring.
“Thank you.” He says, holding just the ends of my fingers, squeezing them.
“For what?”
“For telling me.”
“Oh. Well. It’s the truth.” I say, because that’s what we tell each other. That’s what he asked me to always tell him.
I press my forehead against his, catching my hair before it can fall in between our faces. I want him to see me. To see me how he’s always seen me.
“Frank— thank you. Thank you too. For wanting to know. Thank you for that.” I reply.
“And, uh,” I continue, pecking him quick and hard. His hand moves from the ledge of brick between our legs, to resting atop my thigh. “Thank you for the new mirror.”