Chapter 21 – Shattered Dreams
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Sunday is an odd day at Promise. We start off pretty somber, with a memorial for the trans folk who lost their lives to violence over the last year. I’m surprised to hear that a girl had committed suicide here at Promise earlier in the year, before I got here. Her name was Alicia Bowers.

It’s the first time I’ve spent any time near Jay since our embarrassing encounter in my room. She’s still rocking the blonde hair, although now she has a pink streak, which works with the pink sneakers she’s wearing. I don’t have a pink piece of clothing in my entire virtual wardrobe.

I really want to talk to her. What is going on in her head? She seems so, okay, with her situation. I wonder if she had been trans before. It’s the only thing I can think of. I can’t talk to her though. There’s just too much guilt and embarrassment there, and whenever I get close to her, it just gets worse.

The afternoon and evening are mellow. We watch a couple of movies (Ma vie En Rose and Boys Don’t Cry) in the rec room. We order pizza. We play board games.

I feel pretty good.

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Nights get better. Not only do I start teaching myself to draw, and to play guitar, but Harlan opens up the wireless at night for me. He filters it to various educational sites, but that’s fine. I start working my way through some college-level intro biology courses.

Thanksgiving is lower key than the day of remembrance. We have the traditional turkey and stuffing, but we also have nachos and tamales. I stick with those.

Meg brings her husband, and Harlan brings his wife and kids. We go around the tables and say what we were grateful for. Most of the kids are grateful for Promise. Cindy is grateful for estrogen, I’m grateful for family (with a meaningful look around the room). That gets some ‘aw’s. Jay is grateful for ‘second chances.’ She looks me right in the eye when she says it.

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I don’t get to see Valeria that weekend. She’s out of town with her family. We message a lot, though. I have no talk minutes left, so I don’t get to hear her voice.

We make up for it the next weekend. She can’t swing another sleepover just yet, but we do some high quality making out. We’re stuck in her car, because it’s too chilly outside for her. That takes antigravity and rooftop make-outs off the table. We make plans to go to a movie next weekend.

I’m at lunch on Friday, when, for no visible reason, I suddenly get super stressed out. I look around for a threat, but the cafeteria is perfectly normal. No monsters approaching. Nothing. It lasts for five minutes at full strength, then gradually eases off.

The city bus I take home has free wi-fi, so I check my email. There’s a message from Henry to all the Promise kids. It’s just a link to a video, titled ‘Ouch!’. I have a sick feeling in my stomach as I click. He’d sent the video just a little bit after lunch, right after I’d had that weird anxiety attack.

The video starts on Jay. Crap. She’s gone back to her, or his, old ways. That must be the stress I’d felt. The surge of adrenaline that I get whenever a fight is about to start. I put in my headphones so I can hear the sound.

“---ve him alone,” Jay is saying.

The view pulls back to show that Jay is talking to a guy about Parker 1.0’s height, but heavier. There’s something dark and blurrier at the edge of the video, like it’s being shot from behind something. The big guy is standing over a girl, or maybe a guy, that looks sort of familiar to me, holding them by the jacket.

“Go get somebody,” Henry’s voice whispers. He must be the one shooting the video. I can hear someone run away.

The big guy looks at Jay.

“This little girl is pretending to be a man. I’m just gonna show her that she’s not.”

The bully raises a fist, about to bring it down on the girl.

“Do you know who I am?” Jay says.

“I don’t care.”

“I’m Jay Duncan.”

That gets the bully’s attention.

“The fuck you are. Jay’s six feet tall. You’re what? Five feet?”

Jay shrugs.

“Strange, but true. I know how you got that scar on your left ass cheek. It wasn’t climbing over a fence.”

“Oh yeah? How, then?”

“Hey, I swore I’d never tell anyone. Let Steve here go, and I’ll tell you.”

“I didn’t think so.”

He raises his fist again.

“Stop. Now,” Jay orders.

“Or what?”

Jay pulls out her phone and presses something on the screen. Taking a video. I wonder if she knew the scene was already being caught on video.

“Put that thing away.”

“No.”

The big guy releases his grip on the boy and charges at Jay.

The rest of the video is Jay making the guy look like a complete tool. She never lays a hand on him, but he crashes into lockers. He smashes into a trashcan. The best part is when she jumps right over his head as he charges, ending up with him going head first into a wall and collapsing in a heap. That’s right about the time that a couple of teachers and a security guard charge into view.

I watch in disbelief as Jay is led away in handcuffs. That’s where the video ends.

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At dinner, everyone congratulates Jay. The boy in the video was Steve Slater. He’s a sometimes visitor to the public trans-kid support group we hold weekly. Last time I’d seen him, he was going by a different name, and hadn’t been sure if he was going to start transitioning. It looked like he’d made up his mind.

I don’t approach Jay, but I listen from the sidelines. She isn’t in trouble. Henry had stepped forward with the video (after sending it out far and wide first), which shows that Jay didn’t touch the jerk.

When Jay leaves, I’m waiting for her. As soon as she notices me, guilt and embarrassment start building in me, again. Yeah, that’s what it was.

“Stop it,” I say, “You don’t have anything to feel guilty about.”

“What are you talking about?”

I think about what I had seen in the video. How happy I am for her for defending Steve. For taking this new life she’s been thrown into and running with it. Being a good person. I might even be sort of proud of her. Maybe. The feelings of guilt and embarrassment fade.

“What is that?” she asks.

“I don’t know, exactly. We’re just, connected.”

“Because I’m in your old body?”

“And I’m in yours. Sort of.”

She’s confused and relieved and curious. That pretty much sums up my feelings, too.

“I want to talk about this, really I do, but we need to deal with something else.”

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“Let’s vote,” Mark says, “Everyone in favor, raise your hand.”

Eventually, we all raise our hands.

We’re at Rock Island in Zilker Park again. This time it’s the whole gang of thirteen.

So far, the public doesn’t know who we are. We all wore masks of one sort or another during our various fights. And we’d only fought at night. Usually in places that weren’t well lit. And only the last two fights lasted more than a few minutes. By the time anyone showed up with a decent camera, we were long gone.

So sure, there are videos and photos, but none good enough to identify us from. If I had changed clothes before showing up at Promise, odds are no one would have ever made the connection there, and that was one of the best videos.

I can understand the kids at Promise not ratting me out. After all, that would have been outing me. That’s something that is just not done. I’m a little more surprised that no one else who knows has blown the secret.

But it turns out that there really aren’t many others who know. Before the Marshals called us to the meeting, none of the other kids had even told their parents, and probably wouldn’t have if the Marshals hadn’t threatened to tell them themselves. When the impostors had threatened to take away their powers if they were discovered, they had taken that seriously, whatever doubts they may have had about the impostors in general.

We’ve been discussing all this on a Discord Kelly had set up for us. We share links to interesting rumors about us. New videos as they come up. Crazy theories about what had happened in Austin. My favorite was that it was an elaborate hoax set up to distract people during the elections. Nothing that links directly to any of us though.

There are reports out there of other people with powers, too. Some of them are definitely fakes. One of the videos is pretty much a shot for shot remake of the video of my first fight, but with bad special effects. Most of the group thinks they’re all fakes. I’m not so sure. I’m a little bit worried about exactly how my echo chose to “fix” things. Nothing I can do about that now, though.

We knew the secrecy couldn’t last. The U.S. Marshals had tracked us all down easily enough. Reporters would, too, if they tried hard enough. The elections are already fading from the news, so that could happen at any time. With the video from today, it’s probably about to.

“Couldn’t you have just gotten help?” Tim asks.

“You saw how long it took anyone to get there. Steve would have been beaten to a pulp,” I defend Jay.

“Well, it wouldn’t have been so bad, if it weren’t for that leap at the end,” Alan points out, “That looked just like one of Parker’s moves from the minotaur video.”

“That and her giving her name,” Tim grumbles, “Why were you even there? Weren’t you taking your classes remotely?”

“I was just picking up a text book. If I’d–”

“There’s no point in arguing about what’s done,” Valeria interrupts, “We just have to decide what we’re going to do. If they find Jay, they’ll find Parker. If they find Parker, they’ll find the rest of us soon enough.”

We argue for a while. Jay looks really uncomfortable. Her unease washes over me. When Tim goes back to how she should have just stayed out of it, her guilt builds up again. I walk over to her and whisper, “You did the right thing. You should be proud of yourself.”

I know she knows I’m telling the truth.

After an hour or so, we finally bow to the inevitable.We’re going public. Hopefully after the semester is over.

Helen and Will are going to look for a publicist. If we’re going to do this, we want to do it right. Alan points out that we should get agents. And lawyers. This is going to be complicated.

I leave the meeting at ten forty five. Jay hasn’t made the specific promise that I have, and is willing to miss curfew just this once. They’re all still going strong when I start my run home.

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It’s Saturday evening and I declare the subject of going public off limits. Valeria doesn’t argue. I know nothing was finalized last night, anyway. I want to focus on us.

Dinner is nice, but the movie we’d been going to see is sold out. We should have bought tickets online. Or at least checked the schedule. Oh, well, that just means that we’ll have to find something else to do. And her parents are away.

I’ve never seen her room before. I don’t get to see much of it this time either, what with her tearing off my clothes the second we fly in the window. She really takes advantage of the fact that I can just put them back together later.

We’re kissing and moving toward the bed when she brushes my ear with her lips.

“So,” she whispers, “have you and Jay kissed and made up?”

I jerk away.

“What?” she asks.

“Why would you ask that?”

“I saw you whispering to her last night. You two seemed pretty cozy,” she said, “I was just kidding around. I know you wouldn’t do that.”

If she had stopped there, everything would have been fine. Probably.

“After all, that would be gay.”

“Wait. What?”

“It would be gay.”

I gesture helplessly, “But we — us, I mean . . .”

“That’s different. Jay’s a boy, like you.”

“I’m not a boy.”

My voice is flat. The warmth I’d been feeling is gone. Nothing but cold in its place.

“No. I don’t mean it like that. I know you’re a girl. It’s just, since you’re really a boy it’s okay that we, well, you know.”

“You kissed me before you knew.”

“I know. I felt so guilty about that. It was such a relief to find out. I was afraid I was gay.”

What can I say to that? For the moment I’m not even angry. I’m pretty sure that won’t last, but for now I just feel sorry for her.

“What’s wrong with being gay?”

“It’s just wrong. It’s a sin.”

“I’m gay.”

“But you like girls.”

“And I am one.”

“But---”

“I should go.”

“Don’t.”

I slip back into my clothes and out the window.

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Cindy doesn’t knock, she just walks in and sits down next to me on my bed. I lean against her and she hugs me, tight. Part of me wonders how she knew I needed her, but I don’t care. I’m just glad she’s here.

I don’t say a word. I just sob while Cindy strokes my hair and makes comforting noises. I wish so badly I could just go to sleep, right now. Not deal with my emotions, even for a little while.

Curfew eventually rings. Cindy doesn’t move, but I lift my head.“You should go. Thank you.”

“You sure?”

“I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

“They’d understand.”

“Thanks, but I’ll be fine.”

She raises an eyebrow.

“Eventually,” I finish.

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I don’t go to the follow up meeting on Sunday. I don’t check up on the Discord. I send Jay a message telling her whatever she wants to do is fine. She can vote for me if any big decisions need to be made. I block Valeria’s number after the first call.

Cindy checks in with me a few times during the day. The third time I tell her what happened. She almost defends Valeria, but only almost. Good. I don’t need that right now. I just need space. And ice cream.

The ice cream is easy. Space, not so much. I can’t stand to sit in my room any more, and Promise is crawling with people. I end up running to San Antonio and back. It kills three hours, and makes me feel a little better. A little.

After dinner I just keep reminding myself. Just five more days, then I’ll be somewhere else. A long distance relationship wouldn’t have worked. It was going to end, anyway.

That doesn’t exactly cheer me up.

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I want to talk to Jay, but we keep missing each other. Sunday, I’m too busy wallowing. Most of the week, she’s busy studying for finals, along with just about everybody else. Even with half days, Jay is in study groups pretty much from the time she gets home until curfew, only taking time out for dinner. I don’t remember her studying that hard at Heart.

I don’t spend so much time studying. My classes all seemed so easy, especially now that I have time to focus on them. I leave each final confident that I’ve aced it. Which is fine. I don’t need to stay in the middle of the pack anymore.

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Friday, I get a surprise when I walk out of school from my last final.

“Aunt T!”

She drove straight from the airport to pick me up. Our appointment to sign the adoption papers isn’t for a couple of hours, so we go out for lunch. It’s wonderful talking to her in person, being able to touch and hug her. Talking on the phone and sending emails has been great, but it isn’t the same.

At three thirty in the afternoon, we walk out of the courthouse, documents in hand.

“Do you think Jordan’s going to mind sharing her name with me?” I ask.

My legal name is now Parker Jordan Selene. Since I used Parker anyway, I switched it to first while we were making the name change. I didn’t give up the name Jordan completely, though.

“It’s not going to be a problem. For right now she’d share anything with you.”

Awww.

“So, what now . . . Mom?”

I was just joking around by calling her Mom. She looks at me speculatively.

“You can call me that,” she says, “If you want to.”

Okay, not completely joking.

“Thank you Mom.”

I really like the sound of that. She does, too, judging by the happy tears in the corners of her eyes. We hug. A little part of me feels guilty, calling her Mom. Like I’m betraying the mother who gave birth to me. Who raised me for the first six years of my life. Who wanted the best for me. But she wouldn’t be mad, or want me to feel guilty.

I invite her to come hang out at the after-finals party at Promise, but she has a college friend here in Austin that she wants to have dinner with. I should go hang out with my friends. Have some fun. She doesn’t mention the saying good-bye part.

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“Can we talk?”

I have Jay cornered at the party. Maybe she hasn’t been avoiding me, but it’s taken some doing on my part to find a minute when she isn’t busy talking to someone else.

“Sure.”

She doesn’t seem all that sure, but she follows me outside. I notice that the cold doesn’t bother her much, either. She’s wearing a sleeveless t-shirt and jeans. Sometime in the last week she has done something to her hair. Now it hangs straight down to her shoulders. I feel that same twinge I’d felt when she bleached it.

“Your hair looks good.”

I can be a big girl. Besides, it really does look good.

“Thanks. So does yours.”

Then why did she change it? I don’t say that. Big girl.

It takes me a minute to get to the point.

“Are you doing okay?” I finally ask.

“I am.”

Wow, she just won’t shut up.

“You don’t have to answer this---”

“I know,” she interrupts, “and, no, I’m not trans.”

“You mean you weren’t.”

If she wasn’t before, she has to be now. How could she not be?

“I wasn’t and I’m not. I mean, technically sure, I was assigned male at birth and now”, she gestures at herself, “But I was fine being a guy, now I’m fine being a girl.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either. But that doesn’t make it not true. I was a boy. Now I’m a girl.”

She thinks for a minute.

“Look, I was never all that attached to being a guy,” She continues.

“But you did all the standard guy stuff. You were totally a guy.”

She rolls her eyes. “And you weren’t?”

“That’s different. I was trying to fit in.”

She  shrugs.

“Doesn’t it just feel wrong?” I ask.

“Nope. Just different.”

That just can’t be. If she can do that, then what does that say about me?

“Look,” she says, “that doesn’t make your feelings, or Cindy’s or anyone else’s less real.”

I don’t know if that’s our connection, or my overly expressive face. I do know that I hate the idea that what I have gone through, the desperate wrongness of my body, wasn’t real. That I could have just accepted it.

“Maybe it’s all in the brain,” she continues, “You gave yourself a totally girl brain, and passed it along to me.”

“So would you switch back if you could?”

“Into my old body? Hell, no. You can’t do that, can you?”

She actually takes a step away, as if I were threatening her.

“What?”

“Um, have you been having any anger issues, you know, since the switch?”

“No . . . Why?”

The single biggest change for Jay, it turns out, was not changing genders. It was that she isn’t angry all the time any more. Now I felt even more guilty about the way I had treated her back at Heart.

She doesn’t want to go into detail. Not yet. She’s working on it with her therapist, Dawn. But she’ll tell me more some day, she promises.

We spend another half hour talking. I find out that she actually does need to sleep, but only an hour or two a night. She can sleep longer when she feels like it though. Lucky her.

As I could tell from the video, she has a lot of my physical abilities. She can bench almost six hundred pounds. Run a two and a half minute mile. Jump onto a one story roof easily. Her reflexes are also way better than a normal human. Nothing that should seriously piss off the laws of physics, although the laws of biology might have a thing or two to say about her if they’re ever consulted.

She doesn’t have my other abilities, though. No instant wardrobe changes. No tweaking objects into existence. Her hair is the result of bleach and straightener, not a paranormal ability. She isn’t complaining, though. She’s happy with what she got.

We also talked about what it’s like to suddenly be a girl. There are some negatives.

“You could have warned me when our period was about to happen,” She notes.

“Sorry.”

Neither of us are thrilled with the way a lot of boys and some men act like we’re there for their viewing pleasure. We also don’t like that teachers seem to take us less seriously. Even some of the women.

On the other hand, she loves the clothes. She hasn’t gone as overboard as me, what with the limited wardrobe she’s been able to put together so far, but she’s already mastering the art of accessorizing.

And then there’s sex. She is in favor of it. Unlike me, she had actually had some experience before changing. She assures me that in comparison, I’m not missing anything. 

It’s time to go.

“Good luck with the announcement tomorrow,” I tell her.

The others are all holding a press conference on Monday. Miller had actually reached out to let us know that we could expect to be outed soon, so they’re getting out in front of the story.

“Are you sure you don’t want to be here?”

I shrug. They’ll probably track me down in California, but I might as well make them work for it. Or maybe they won’t. Whatever. “I want to be with my new Moms, and my sister.”

“Well, good luck.”

We shift awkwardly.

Screw it. I step in for the hug. It’s nice, if a bit weird. We don’t say anything else as we walk away from each other.

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I spend most of the rest of the evening with Kristen, Henry, Sebastian, Kelly, and Cindy. I am going to miss them so much. We make the usual promises. We’ll keep in touch. Not just over Twitter and Instagram, but really in touch. Messaging, emails, even phone calls. Tears are shed.

An hour before curfew, Cindy and I go to her room. My stuff is already packed and waiting at the front desk. I’ve turned in my key already. I don’t have a room here anymore. I’m crying when I tell Cindy that.

“That’s not true, you know,” she says.

I look at her. She is so beautiful.

“If I have a room, you have a room. Always.”

Clearly, she wants to see just how many tears I can produce.

“What if she’s a horrible Mom?”

“She’s not.”

“What if I’m a horrible daughter and she hates me?”

“Too bad for her. She’ll just have to put up with you like we have.”

“What if Jordan hates me?”

“Just play dress up with her. That’s what did it for me.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too, Parker Jordan Selene.”

We lean on each other, there on the edge of her bed.

“Now get your ass off this bed. You still owe me a fitting.”

For the next forty-five minutes, I’m able to forget that I’m leaving. We chat about school, her tough choice between psychology and fashion design, my plans to help other kids like us with custom built replacement parts, anything but the immediate future. All with me sitting in her comfy chair wearing only my underwear while she rips apart and traces the dress I’d conjured up from her latest design.

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Aunt Tabi--- My Mom is waiting for me by the front gate when I come out. She takes a break from putting my stuff in the trunk to greet me with a hug. She doesn’t even ask if I’m okay. Good Mom.

I’m glad I’d said goodbye to Harlan and Meg earlier in the day. If I had to say it right now, especially to Meg, I might try to call the whole thing off. I almost do anyway, but I restrain myself.

We stay at the hotel right at the airport, so we can catch a flight first thing in the morning. Not that I care about getting up early, but my Mom (my Mom!) does.

Once she falls asleep (I kept her up too late, talking) I’m left to my own devices. I take advantage of wifi that doesn’t turn off at night for a while, but can’t focus. I’m going to my new home!

But there’s something I need to deal with first. I don’t understand exactly what it is, but I know it’s time.

"I'm ready," I whisper.

And there I am, standing across the room from myself. I still look sad. "You sure?"

I nod. The other me waits by the door that should lead to the bathroom. I take the handle and concentrate. Once I can feel the depths swirling on the other side, I open it.

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