Eliza Hammond

♫ Shuggie - Foxygen ♫

One thing the liberals across the East River won’t tell you is that humans don’t really need food to survive. It’s actually totally normal for a person to subsist solely on depression, self-loathing, and Youtube reaction videos. After my conversation with Alicia, I forgot to eat for three days, which was fine. The fact that I normally ate one meal a day, constantly measuring myself to see if I was still skinny? Actually kind of awesome. If I died, I’d die knowing I didn’t yield an inch to the capitalist wiles of Big Food.

As September turned to October and the trees lost their leaves, I awoke on the ninth day of what I was calling “Quarantine 2: This Time It’s Personal.” It could’ve been December, for all I knew. I’d sort of existed in a haze for the last week. My dorm room was even dirtier than it normally was. I barely went to class and only met my needs when they screamed out for help. After a couple minutes spent staring at the ceiling I urged myself out of bed, where I nearly collapsed from the dizziness. I had to stand still for a few minutes to keep myself from passing out. No idea what could’ve caused that.

I sat on the edge of the bed and thought for a little bit about just how pathetic I must’ve looked. I was getting sick from being too lazy. I was so used to lying in bed that I’d forgotten how to walk! This can’t continue, I told myself. I’d reached some kind of breaking point. I didn’t know what I was going to do about it, but if something didn’t change, I’d slowly wither away into ashes. Silently vowing to slowly climb up the steep cliff of self-improvement, I used whatever strength I could muster to get to the bathroom. Avoiding the mirror, I did my business, brushed my teeth, and took my pills… or I would have, if my pill bottles weren’t empty. How dare they!

Feeling another wave of dizziness, I went over to a shelf I’d reappropriated as a pantry to see if I had anything to eat. But the shelf was barren, only a single egg and a bottle of unknown fluids to its name. I’d eaten the last of the ramen two days before. No pills and no food meant I had to go... outside. I immediately felt the need to sit down again, but this time it was just because of the anxiety. Progress.

I really, really didn’t want to leave my dorm. In freshman year, they stuck me with this dude who kept getting me sick because he was constantly snogging knobs with the other members of the Young Democrats Club. During a pandemic, no less! But sophomore year was different. I finally had a space of my own, and I didn’t want to leave that sanctuary to enter a world where people could–god forbid–perceive me.

So, donned in my finest of hoodies and most-face-covery of masks, I sleepwalked the three blocks to CVS. CVS is great for college students: they sell sleeping pills AND Coca Cola Vanilla Cherry in the same place! That’s probably why there were three within walking distance of campus, boxing us in with a barricade of self-checkout machines.

Visiting the pharmacy, though a necessary ordeal, was one of my least favorite acts of all time. I absolutely despised being clocked as trans, and anyone who read my prescriptions and saw the vial of Estradiol Valerate next to the big M sex marker on my medical chart would figure things out pretty quickly. I would almost rather have died, smited by a stray lightning bolt, than let the pharmacist making fifteen bucks an hour know about my degeneracy.

Distracting myself with thoughts of suicide by Zeus, I got into then pharmacy line, which was longer than I would’ve liked. I guess lots of people get their prescriptions filled at the start of the month. Either that, or there were a lot of depressed people in Brooklyn. I was snapped out of my daydream–which had turned into smut between me and Zeus (played by Ben Affleck, obviously)–by a familiar voice.

“Sepulveda,” the voice said. “S-E-P-U-L-V-E-D-A.”

“Okay,” the pharmacist grumbled in response. “And your first name?”

“Zoe.” Oh. I didn’t know Zoe very well. The vibes I got from our first meeting... weren’t great. She seemed peppy and optimistic. Not compatible with my general aura. But if Alicia liked her, then I suppose I did too. I just didn’t want her–or anyone, for that matter–to talk to me. I prayed to whatever twisted, Joker-style soul wrote the story of my life for her not to notice me.

Luckily, she marched away from the counter, bag in hand, and didn’t spare me a passing glance. Small victories. But soon enough I approached the counter myself, where I stood face-to-face with a tired, sixty-something pharmacist.

“Good morning,” I mumbled.

“Morning, sir,” the pharmacist grunted. I flinched in response, shrinking even further into my hoodie. “Name?”

“Emmett Hammond.”

“Date of birth?”

“February seventeenth, 2002.” As I gave her my information, I pulled out my ID from my wallet. She checked it over and nodded, then looked at her computer.

“Says here you have a prescription for estradiol and spironolactone,” the pharmacist said. She smirked through her mask, or at least I thought she did. “Jeez. There are a lot of you out today, huh?” Her eyes briefly flicked over to Zoe, who was walking through an adjacent aisle.

“Yeah. I guess so.” I don’t need to burden you with the entire conversation. I got some syringes and needles, paid with my insurance card and trudged away, no less depressed than when I arrived. A part of me just wanted to walk home and go back to sleep, but a larger part wanted–no, needed–a change. Maybe I deserved to hate myself, to be depressed and lonely and tired all the time. But that didn’t mean I liked feeling those feelings. I wanted to be loved, and I wanted to be valued. Some delusional part of me wanted to keep hunting for a place where I could be happy as myself, and I guess that’s what pushed me into Zoe.

I’d been walking around the store in a haze when I slammed into someone. “Mm, sorry,” I mumbled.

“It’s okay,” Zoe said. Oh shit! Zoe! I tried to sneak by unnoticed, but she caught my eye and gave me a withering glance. “Eliza, hi,” she said, her voice deceptively kind. Deceptively, because while she was normally peppier than I could handle, that day she stood completely motionless, her head only moving slightly to address me.

God. I was going to have to do this. “O-oh, hey Zoe. What’s up?”

“Nothing much.” She didn’t say anything more, and silence hung in the air for a little bit. She was a good half foot taller than me, and only seemed more imposing up close. This was one of those rare times I regretted being 5’6”.

“Ah. Well…” I could’ve just ran away, but that delusional part of me wanted my best/only friend’s girlfriend to like me. “Uh, what brings you here? To CVS, I mean.” Oh my god, so fucking awkward.

“Just picking up a couple meds. And some...” She looked down at the shelf next to her and picked some shampoo off the rack. “...hair care products, I guess.”

“Cool, great.” More silence. “Well, I’ll see you around.”

“I guess so.” She turned around to continue her hair care excursion, leaving me to stew in my own awkwardness.

And then I stopped. I was avoiding the elephant in the room, and Zoe knew it. I was pushing away those I cared about, all because I was too pathetic to talk about the nerdiest guy in my middle school. “Zoe, wait!” I called out to her a little too loudly. I’m sure a couple customers were looking at us.

Zoe turned around, and the clouds in her eyes parted. “What’s up?” she chirped, already in a much better mood than she was a minute earlier.

I sighed. “Um. Not much. I’ve actually been doing… really, really bad.” Zoe nodded in understanding. “You know Will, right? Will Robinson?” Despite already knowing the answer, I almost hoped she’d say no.

“I do.” Great. “We’re friends, I talked to him a lot during quarantine.” Awesome.

“Okay. He and I have… a history.” Oh god, that made me sound like either a murderer or a soap opera character, and I didn’t know which option was worse. “I want to fix things. I need to fix things,” I said, a bit more resolutely.

“I was hoping you’d say that.” She pulled out a piece of paper from her pocket which already had an address written down. “Here you go!” I suddenly got a strange, eerie feeling, as if the events in my life were just lines in a crappy novel.

The feeling quickly subsided. “Is this where he lives?”

“No, of course not,” she scoffed. “It’s where he works. Yes, even on Saturdays. Meet him there, and if he wants to talk, he will.” She smiled. “Heh, ‘Will,’ that’s his name.”

“Ha.” A few seconds of awkward silence. “Okay. I guess I’m going over there.” I sighed and gave her a weary smile.

“Good luck,” she said, and I could tell from the sympathetic glint in her eyes that she really meant it.

“Thanks,” I muttered. “I guess,” I added. Couldn’t sound too grateful. You never know what shooters they got in CVS.

Have you ever had something really painful on your schedule that there’s no way to cancel, so you just keep thinking about the impending horror of what you’re about to deal with? When I was ten, one of my teeth got impacted, and I needed to get some minor surgery. It wasn’t an emergency, but it had to be done eventually.

The procedure itself wasn’t that bad. One novocaine injection and some laughing gas, and I was high as a kite. No, it was the days of waiting for the appointment to arrive, the hour-long drive to the dentist's office, and the thirty minutes in the waiting room that were the most terrifying. While my legs slowly walked towards Will’s workplace, my mind was in that dentist’s waiting room, about to have huge holes bored into my incisors.

But if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s distracting myself from crippling anxiety. I decided not to think about Will. Not to think about the incident in eighth grade that caused me to repress my identity for years. Not to think about what I’d do if he was uncomfortable, what I’d do if he called me a tranny.

Instead of thinking about all that, I looked around, absorbing the history present in the cracked facades of Brooklyn’s less trendy neighborhoods. I’m a history major, it’s what I do… I think. Waves and waves of immigrants settled in these buildings, establishing neighborhoods that shifted demographics almost as fast as Kanye West’s fanbase. An ivy-laden Victorian townhouse stood next to an abandoned WWII munitions factory, across the street from a 7-Eleven and a gentrified smoothie place called “Come Get Y’all Juice.” The pace of change here was almost as interesting as it was alarming.

Thoughts of change brought me back to thoughts of Will, and the years we’d spent apart. I hadn’t seen him since I came out to my parents and had to move schools. He looked different. Happier, maybe? I’d say he looked more mature, but I guess that’s obvious considering we were, like, thirteen when we stopped being friends. I told myself to stop complimenting him until I knew for sure that he didn’t hate me. Fuck. This was going to be painful, no matter what we ended up saying to each other. But I had to get it over with. I needed this cavity to be filled. So I walked in double time, wanting nothing more than for him to tell me to fuck off so I could put all this pointless “emotional vulnerability” bullshit behind me.

After a cool twenty minutes of stewing in the thick, black tar that was my subconscious, I found myself about to enter Bushwick. I say that, but it’s not like there was a demarcating line. There was no sign saying “Welcome to Bushwick, population 130,000. We’re sorry!” It’s just another neighborhood in Brooklyn. A neighborhood on the gentrification frontlines, of busy streets and brick-and-plaster brownstones. Of trendy markets and artsy twenty-somethings. I’m not going to act like some fuggedaboutit “I’m walkin’ here''-ass New Yorker. I am, and will always be, a white bitch from suburban Michigan. But while I’d only spent a year and change in New York, I found myself greatly preferring the hectic melting pot to the manicured lawns and HOAs of Wyoming, Michigan.

Brooklyn isn’t like Manhattan; there aren’t many skyscrapers, or big investment firms, or, uh... Anderson Cooper. The buildings might only be four, five stories tall, but the streets still feel just as full as Times Square–not to mention more genuine. Then I saw some “street art” that was really just a highkey ad for Fanta, and I realized New York City might not be so great, after all.

906 Bushwick Avenue. That was the address Zoe gave me. And sure enough, in-between a garish new-age apartment building and a turreted townhouse stood a tiny bodega, “Neighborhood Supply.” The sign above the window said, “We Sell Clothes/Lotto/Cleaning Supplies... and Much More!” I was excited to find out what “much more” was inside... besides what I was actually there for. But the fresh, cool air had done wonders for my mood, and walking around the city made me feel like a part of something bigger than myself. Maybe I could actually do this? So I pushed open the door and walked inside.

The store itself was almost the antithesis of special. It felt like a place you’d visit in a boring dream, one where you’re back in high school, filling out a test. There was a cat, lounging on a turret of paper towels. There were old books leaned up next to even older soda bottles. One of the fluorescent lights was out, casting darkness onto the magazine section.

And standing at the register was Will Robinson. He was wearing casual clothes, a button-up polo shirt and some jeans. Even though his boss didn’t seem to make him wear a uniform, it looked like he took the time to look nice for work. I would not have done the same. Then again, it had always been that way. He was the responsible one, and I was the one who got him in trouble with his parents. Back in middle school, I’d wondered a lot about what Will and I look like as adults. Since I hadn’t seen him in years, I guess I still thought he’d look a lot like he did back in 2016: the short, nerdy kid with a little bit of peach fuzz but not much else. Even during the first few years of high school before I moved away, Will still looked pretty childish.

But, as late as he bloomed, he did bloom. He was easily over six feet tall, and he had facial hair, now. A full, well-trimmed beard and a mustache, with shaved sideburns already growing back with a little stubble. When we were kids, his parents forced him to buzz his hair, but now he’d let it grow to his ears. A messy mop of silky black hair. The only part of his look that had stayed the same were his big, circular glasses, the ones that made him look like a lesbian librarian from the 70s. But even though so much had changed, I could still see the Will I used to love. Er, know. The Will I used to know. If I hadn’t had so many conflicting emotions about him–anger, anxiety, and other such alliteration–I might have found him kind of attractive.

I had to talk to him. My brain couldn’t think of doing anything else. So I grabbed the first thing I saw–an off-brand pack of gum–and zooped over to the register. Luckily, I was the only customer in the store. “Hi.” I wasn’t entirely sure if he recognized me all covered up, so I figured I’d start slow. “Will, right?” I forced myself to smile a little bit.

“Yeah, that’s–” Then we made eye contact. “Emmett…” Will said. I winced. He noticed. “I’m sorry, um… is there another name you’d prefer to be called?”

I gave a genuine smirk, this time. “Huh. I see you’ve gotten better at reading emotions since the last time we talked.”

“Yeah, uh. God, I guess I have. Emm–er, whatever your name is, I’m so, so sorry–”

“It’s Eliza. I ‘prefer to be called’ Eliza.”

He took a deep breath and gave me a piercingly sympathetic gaze. “Eliza, then. I’m sorry, truly sorry, for the things I said back then. I just–”

That’s when I realized something. “It’s okay,” I declared, because it was. He kept trying to butt back in with more sputtered apologies. “Seriously, dude, it’s fine.”

“But it’s not though, is it?” he urged.

“But it is, Will. We were both kids back then, barely thirteen. Neither of us knew what being trans actually was. We didn’t know enough to be better people.”

“But, Em–uh, Eliza, that doesn’t repair the damage I did. I hurt you, and even if I’ve gotten better, didn’t that hurt still happen?”

I shrugged and gave a hollow smile. “Maybe. But that was, like, half our lives ago.” Hey, I’m a history major, not a mathematician. “At a certain point, isn’t it sort of my fault for not moving on?”

“What?” He sounded almost incredulous. “You think it’s your fault for feeling sad about what happened? For being nervous about approaching me?”

“I don’t think it’s my fault, Will, I know. Running away from an innocent person clearly trying to make amends is, under no definition, a brave thing to do.”

“Well, I’m not innocent, and you’re not a coward.”

I sighed. A lot of people sigh for performative effect, but this was a real, legit sigh, the kind that expunges serious exhaustion. “God,” I muttered. “I was afraid this would happen.”

He finally stopped looking apologetic, giving me an uncharacteristically derisive look. “Oh my god. You’re seriously annoyed that I’m apologizing to you?”

The confused, half-angry look on his face only made me even more angry at his babying. “A little bit! You’re trying to convince me that I’m a good person, but you don’t even know me! That’s what everyone around me always does. They pussyfoot around me, because they know I’m too fragile to hear the truth.” My hands started shaking, just a little. “The way you acted back then was why I liked you, Will. You always said what you thought, even if it was cruel. You never sugar-coated your words, because you didn’t know how.” I balled my fist and I raised my voice. “The reason it hurt so much was because I knew you were right. Now you’re trying to convince me of something I know you don’t believe, because you can’t, because you Don’t. Know. Me.”

In retrospect, I’m very glad the store wasn’t busy. Will stayed silent for a minute or two, and I took a couple deep breaths. I was angry not just at him, but at myself for still feeling so strongly about an incident from six years ago. I didn’t deserve his apologies. “Then I want to,” he said, in a quiet but unwavering voice.

“What?”

“I want to know you, Eliza.” A lie. It had to be a lie.

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. I hung out with you for a reason.” Another lie.

“I was your only option. You were lonely.”

“I had an option. You think you’re a coward? Everything I did, I did because my parents told me to do, like some middle school zombie. I was lonely because I took the path of least resistance. Then I met you, and you were this endless font of creativity. You’d tell me stories of space battles and fantasy worlds during recess. You’d force me to be more than I was. I wasn’t the most imaginative person, but I could create vicariously through you. I’m not as boring as I used to be, but I still need someone to inspire me the way you did.”

“And I need someone to bring me down to Earth. I'm falling apart, and everyone around me tells me I’m fine, but I don’t know what to do.” I was breathing frantically now, but then I stared into Will’s sad, brown eyes and slowly calmed myself down. “I’m not the quirky kid you knew in middle school, Will.”

“And I’m not the socially awkward nerd. Neither of us were really ourselves back then. I want to be friends with the real you, even if you’re different now.”

“Even if I’m worse?”

He chuckled. “Even if you’re worse.” At that moment, the bodega bell dinged, and someone walked into the store. “Look. I get off work in an hour. You wanna hang out at my apartment, get to know each other again? I can give you my number.”

“You know what?” I said, genuinely smiling for the first time in nine days. “I’d like that.”