Will Robinson

♫ The Visitor - Kadhja Bonet ♫

I wasn’t expecting company that night, but I silently thanked *insert generic deity here* that I’d cleaned my apartment two days earlier. Sure, there were some dirty clothes on the floor, a bit of cat shit in the litter box. But other than that, I kept my living space sufficiently livable. Of course, it wasn’t particularly hard to clean a one bedroom with no furniture. All I had was an air mattress (with a bedframe, because I wasn’t a troglodyte) and some autographed memorabilia that I was socially obligated to cherish. Bushwick rent wasn’t terribly expensive, but I was still lucky to find a one-bedroom for such low rent, even if it was a third-floor walkup on sleepy Kosciuszko Street. And even if that rent cost 70% of my paycheck. I ushered Eliza into my place, cordially apologizing for the slight clutter.

“Oh please,” she assuaged. “You should see my dorm, it’s atrocious.”

“Maybe I’ll take you up on that offer,” I responded with a wry smile. Eliza turned away from me, and I realized she was flustered. Hah! Only a couple hours since we reunited and I was already out-snarking her.

Instead of clapping back epic style, she excitedly darted to my “kitty-corner,” a part of the living room where I kept a litter box, some food bowls, and a cat perch. “Who’s this for?” she asked, and I could’ve sworn she was bouncing on her feet.

“That’s all for Wilbur. He’s probably hiding around here somewhere.” I’d adopted him at the behest of one of my coworkers after she saw a shelter cat that was “soooo cute” but couldn’t take in. I was nervous he’d be a black hole for my paychecks, but I found taking care of him surprisingly rewarding, especially during quarantine. “I love him,” I added.

She practically purred. “I don’t know him, but I love him too.” Almost on cue, Wilbur poked his little grey-white head out from his favorite hiding spot, a kitchen cabinet he’d somehow figured out how to open. He bounded over to his water bowl and gave Eliza a wary sniff. She was silent but giddy.

Wilbur started rubbing his head against Eliza’s open hand, and I heard a squeal. “Eeeeeee! He’s so cute!” He really was. He was tiny–nine pounds at most–and he had soft fur and this adorably multicolored, pink and black nose.

“Hello, sir,” I said to Wilbur, slightly annoyed. “Nice of you to finally come out and play.” He hadn’t approached me all day, so the fact that he’d warmed up to Eliza so quickly said something about her as an individual. I don’t know what that something meant, since I doubted Wilbur was a good judge of character, but it definitely meant something. “Anyway, uh. I’m gonna be in the living zone. Come over when you’re ready.”

I walked over to my living zone, which was too small to legally qualify as a living room. I had two beanbags and a lamp on the floor, where I sat to do my homework. Eliza followed after me a minute later, Wilbur close behind. “Fuckin’ cat whisperer,” I mumbled. She plopped down on one of the beanbags, wrestled her hoodie off her body, and shut her bagged eyes for a moment. Without the hoodie, I was given the first close-up view of her I’d had in five years.

She looked good, though her clothing didn’t do her any favors. Her pants were ripped but not in a cool way, and the Daft Punk T-shirt she wore made her body look like it was drowning. She was always short and slight growing up, and despite being shorted slightly by male puberty, she still kept those childhood traits. Sure, she had slightly broad shoulders and a strong brow, but that didn’t stop my brain from screaming “girl.” Maybe it was her freckles, which peppered her reddened cheeks like… flecks of red pepper. Or maybe it was her skin, impeccable and soft. Or her lips, with the same traits as her skin. Part of me was going “cute girl in my apartment!!” while another was going “ah, old friend,” and both were yelling at me not to fuck it up. But all the part of me that controlled my mouth said was “m-make yourself at home!”

“I already have,” Eliza responded, deliberately laying back as far as she could while manspreading as wide as humanly possible.

“Yeah, wow. That’s… advanced relaxation.”

“Well, my bones hurt, and it’s a comfy bean bag. Might need to go to the bathroom in a minute, though. Where’d you get it?”

“The bathroom? It came with the apartment.” I laughed, though Eliza didn’t join in. I quickly cleared my throat. Maybe things were still a little awkward. “Uh, my coworker Natalie took me to this thrift shop in Bed-Stuy that sells really cool, really old second-hand furniture. I got the bean bags there. Then again, the tag did have a ‘May Contain Nests’ disclaimer, so maybe it wasn’t the best way to spend seven dollars.”

Eliza jumped out of the beanbag so quick I thought she was animated on twos. “Don’t worry, I disinfected it!” I added. She started walking, then grabbed her head, stumbled around for a few seconds, and sat abruptly back down. What just happened? “Are you okay?” I asked, worriedly.

“‘S fine,” she mumbled, still holding herself as if to keep the room from spinning. “Happens all the time.”

“Why? Are you okay?” Was she sick? Oh god, did I give her coronavirus?

“It happens when I don’t eat for a bit. Nothing to worry about.” We both knew the latter sentence was a lie.

“Eliza, when was the last time you ate?”

“You don’t want to know,” she muttered.

“Eliza…” my voice grew more stern. I sounded like a disappointed parent.

She put her hands up in surrender. “Yesterday morning, okay? I had some, uh, Drake’s® brand Devil Dogs™ for breakfast.”

“Okay.” I stood up from my seat. “That’s not a meal. I’m making you dinner.”

“What? Why would you do that?”

“Because you’re starving yourself.”

“No, I mean… why do you care?”

“Because I’d like to think I’m a decent person. Also, you’re my friend, and I don’t let friends hurt themselves.”

“Friend,” Eliza whispered under her breath, like an alien hearing the word for the first time. Totally hamming things up. Then she cleared her throat. “Uh, speaking of food, you got a scale in here? For weights and... such?”

I took a pause from pulling ingredients out of my pantry to gape at Eliza’s neuroses. “Oh my god, how many eating disorders do you have?” She desperately needed to give herself some kindness, and if that wasn’t going to happen, I’d do it for her. “You’re going to sit on that couch, watch season four of Netflix’s The Crown, and pet Wilbur while I make you a sandwich.”

“But–”

“No. Whatever you’re going to say, no.”

“I still need to use the bathroom,” she whimpered.

I rolled my eyes at the 19-year-old asking permission to go to the bathroom. “Try not to fall over this time.”

While Eliza did whatever it is women do in the bathroom, I started preparing a sandwich for her. I decided to go for a Monte Cristo, which is a ham and cheese sandwich pan-fried with beaten eggs. Really just a croque monsieur with extra fat, perfect for the starving transgender. As I finished prepping the pan, Eliza walked back into the room. She stood in front of the bean bag like it was going to attack her, then shook her head and sat down anyway. “That smells really good,” she said.

“Thanks,” I answered back, focusing more on toasting the bread than the conversation.

“When did you learn how to cook?”

“Had to,” is all I said in response. Eliza was always good at telling when I zoned out, because she stopped talking and let me cook. A few minutes later, she was nibbling on the greasy, savory delight of a sandwich with an enraptured look on her face. I leaned against the living zone wall in satisfaction.

“Holy shit. You’re a genius.” She jumped out of the bean bag to wrap me in a hug. After letting go, she stepped back, centered herself, then said, “Hey, I didn’t get dizzy that time!”

“Incredible. Turns out eating makes you healthy.”

Slowly, we started to fall into the sort of chill conversation I’d missed having. We just talked about whatever came into our heads, from the classes we took to our thoughts on the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And as the hours flew by, Eliza started opening up more about her own life. I noticed that she still avoided discussing her remaining high school years, but she did tell a couple stories about her freshman year of college. “I met Alicia at a mixer during Welcome Week,” she said. Welcome Week was a week of events for incoming freshmen to make friends. “I don’t know why she was there, since she’s definitely two years older than me.”

“But I’m talking to her, right? And I’m presenting completely masc: sports bra, hair pulled back in a low ponytail. I introduce myself as Emmett, because, duh, and out of the blue she just asks me ‘what are your preferred pronouns?’ And I was like, okay, this is New York, not Wyoming, Michigan. People ask that sometimes, right? ‘He/him,’ I say, but then she goes, ‘Are you sure?’ like she knew something about me. So I ask her what she means by that, and she’s like, ‘It’s okay if you want to try out something different.’ Normally, that’d really piss me off. There I was, trying really hard to not be spotted, and she clocks me anyway! But somehow, I could tell she meant well. And, once she told me how she sussed it out, I couldn’t help but respect her.”

The way she told her stories always managed to pull me in. I was on the metaphorical edge of my fully spherical bean bag. “Okay, how’d she know?”

“The smell,” she announced.

“What?”

“She said I smelled like a girl.”

“Seriously?” I didn’t even realize girls stank a certain way.

“100% serious. Aswedagahd.”

“Aswedagahd?”

“It’s New Yorker for ‘I swear to god.’” Ah. I nodded. “Anyway, once Alicia said that to me, I was just like, ‘Well, you got me. Well played.’”

“And you’ve been friends ever since.”

“And we’ve been…” a small sigh, “friends ever since.” I wondered what that meant, but we were interrupted before I could ask. Eliza’s phone started to blare Vengabus’ “We Like to Party!” at top volume. “Oh shit,” she muttered, frantically reaching to shut off the ringtone. “What day is it?”

“Saturday,” I replied.

“Fuck! I gotta inject my estrogen,” she whined.

“Well, if you have to get home, then–”

She shook her head vigorously. “No, I just went to the pharmacy this morning. Check it out,” she said, dangling her CVS bag. “God, I hate getting my meds. It’s always so awkward.”

“You know they do delivery, now? And you can order needles and shit on Amazon.”

“Ugh, seriously?! Why don’t they teach you this shit in high school? And how did you know that?”

“Dad has diabetes.”

“Nice,” she said. I watched as Eliza carefully took out a small vial of yellowish-clear liquid, along with a syringe, needle, and two alcohol swabs. She used the first swab to sterilize the top of the vial, then prepared the needle by slowly loading it up with 2mL of Estradiol. She did this in a completely clinical, almost hypnotizing way. Before I could comprehend what she was about to do, she rubbed the side of her thigh with the other swab, then plunged the needle deep into her muscle.

My eyes widened in surprise. How had she managed to inject herself without even the slightest twitch? “How good is your pain tolerance?” I gawped.

“Oh, terrible,” she chuckled, somehow still holding her poker face. “I’m just used to this.” She emptied the syringe, pulled the needle out of her leg, and popped the cap back on. Then, like the coolest person of all time, she threw the covered needle ten feet into the trash can with nothing but a swish.

“You did it!” I exclaimed.

“I did it,” she said, smiling at me. “Should hold me over until next Saturday.”

“As a reward for your strength,” I said, as she rolled her eyes, “I think you deserve a bit of the... devil’s fruit.”

“What do you m–oh my god. Are you talking about Mary’s Secret?”

“You know it!” As we listed more joke names for marijuana, I pulled out a little bong I got from Ashton, along with some cheap weed I scored off one of his friends.

“I’m honestly shocked that you have weed in your apartment,” Eliza said. I didn’t tell her that the reason I bought it at all was that a random guy approached me in the park, and I didn’t know how to turn him down.

Once we started getting high, we both began to open up even more. Eliza got the bright idea to bring up the years we’d spent apart. I was skirting around the issue, but she wasn’t having it. “Come on,” she said, “I want to know more about Shrill Will’s high school escapades.” Shrill Will! It wasn’t even a good nickname, but she insisted on using it, probably because she knew how annoyed it made me. It wasn’t even accurate! I was one of the quietest kids in class and–

“Oh,” I responded. “High school really wasn’t anything special. I’ve been enjoying college way more, honestly.”

“Preach it, dude. High school was not fun for me.” I remembered Eliza’s blank, resigned face during those two years we shared in high school and felt a sharp pang of sadness.

“Yeah, I can imagine.” A question popped into my head; one I was scared to ask but felt compelled to all the same. “What, uh, caused you to move, anyway?”

Eliza’s nostalgic expression immediately vanished from her face. “Ugh, Will,” she muttered, her voice deliberately trying to disguise some underlying discomfort. “To be honest, I’d rather not get into it.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, putting my hands up in mock surrender. “I’ll back off.”

“Good to know you can take a hint,” she said, the smirk back on her face. “So, tell me a funny story from after I moved away!”

“I’m telling you, those years were super boring! Wait, actually...” And we were off to the races. I was being honest with her; the three years that passed in her absence were some of the least interesting of my life. But three years brings experience, regardless of the quality. So I talked about Talia, a prom date who got so drunk at the afterparty we couldn’t take her home. Her parents would’ve killed her, so we wandered the streets together, only getting to her house after the smell of beer had vanished from her breath. The following Monday, she texted to tell me she had gotten yelled at that night; her parents thought her late arrival meant we’d… you know. Done The Dark Deed.

“That… sounds nice,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it.

“Um? Are you okay?”

“Not really.” She barked out a laugh. “I went stag to my senior prom. I wanted to go with Rohan, this cute boy from my physics class, but everyone knew me as a straight guy, and he got asked out by the hottest girl on the softball team, and I had to wear a suit, and… and…” She started crying, and I moved to comfort her. She didn’t shrink away.

“I just wanted to be a normal girl going to prom with a cute guy–a guy like you,” she muttered. “But it wasn’t meant to be, I guess.”

Wait. “Did you just say ‘a guy like me?’”

She sniffed in her tears and collected herself. “No. Did I? No, I totally didn’t.”

I smiled a little bit, and she sheepishly smiled back. “You totally did.”

“Oh. Well…” she said wistfully, a sing-songy tone underlying her voice. “Surely you noticed at some point?”

“Noticed? Noticed what?”

“That I had a crush on you in middle school?”

“Um! I! Uh? What???”

She laughed at what I’m sure was an absolutely ludicrous facial expression. “You seriously don’t remember everyone bothering us for being gay, even though that wasn’t true by any definition of the word?”

“A little bit, but I… uh. I remember telling people that you were probably gay, but I was definitely not.” I was hit with a wave of guilt. “God, I really threw you under the bus, back then. Why would you have a crush on that?”

“Maybe I’m a masochist,” she smirked. “Nah. You were my only friend, Will. I know you probably didn’t care, but I was annoying in middle school. I was loud and I talked too much, and I always got in trouble with my teachers. It wasn’t hard to forgive you when you were mean, because I knew you stayed with me for a reason.”

That brought another question to the forefront of my mind. “I know we talked about this a little in the store, but... I have to ask. Why did you forgive me so quickly?”

“We were just kids, I can’t blame you for what you did back then.”

“Nah, nah. There’s something more. I’m high, I know these things.”

She stayed silent for a minute or two, clearly deep in thought. The silence dragged on long past awkward territory, but I decided to sit back and let her collect herself. Finally, she spoke. “Ugh, it’s just… you were right?”

I responded much faster. Immediately, in fact. “Bullshit, I was right.”

“I mean, maybe not objectively! But still, I have a hard time thinking of what you did as wrong because I… I agree with a lot of the things you implied. I feel like a freak. All the time. I feel like an imposter. God, you think you treated me badly? After my sister caught me wearing her dress, she didn’t talk to me for six months! How am I supposed to feel like anything but a monster?”

“None of that’s your fault, Eliza.”

“I don’t care who’s fault it is! I just have this constant voice in my head telling me that I was born wrong. No matter what I do, I just can’t escape that simple fact. Even if I woke up a perfect woman tomorrow, which I won’t, I’d still bear the memories of a childhood in the wrong body. I’ll always live knowing I was a weird, creepy pervert who wore his sister’s dresses because it made him feel better.”

I didn’t have anything to say, and I told her as much. “I’m sorry, I really am. I can’t fix this, but… I swear to god, I’m here for you.” Maybe it was just because I was high, but I hugged her. And she hugged me back. She smelled a little bit like cucumbers.

She muttered into the hug. “You know, I’m kind of glad you didn’t try to spin it as some kind of positive.” It was almost freeing to talk to her again, because she didn’t tolerate walking on eggshells. I could just talk to her, and she’d accept my accidental awkwardness, even if I was a little abrasive. Then again, if I called her ‘the worst thing since Hitler,’ she probably would’ve told me to be more critical. So maybe it was just unhealthy in a different way. She let go and gazed deep into my eyes. “I’m serious when I say it wasn’t your fault. Yeah, you were an asshole, but you were nicer to me than my own family. My mom hurt me a lot more than you did.” I thought about asking what happened, but I decided against it. She shook her head, sadly. “God, I just remember thinking, ‘is anyone I come out to actually going to sympathize with me?’ That was part of the reason I shut down so hard. I just didn’t think talking would help.”

“I’m sorry I–”

“Stop apologizing. I’m not trying to guilt you into an apology, and I don’t think I particularly deserve one.” She sighed. “I think I should probably get going.” I checked my phone to see that we’d been talking for four hours. I didn’t want to end things on such a sad note, but I knew I should let her get home before it was too late. So, she gathered her hoodie and CVS bag together while I sat on my crappy bean bag, not knowing what to do with my hands. “Um. Anyway, see ya. We should do this again, sometime.”

“We really should,” I agreed. I waved goodbye, shut the door, and smiled to myself.

For a little while, it was like Eliza and I had slipped back into the effortless relationship we had in middle school. I saw the smile I hadn’t seen in years; not during the GSA meeting, or the history lecture the following day. The joy on her face made me want to make her smile again and again, as much as I possibly could. The realization that I was a small part of why she’d lost that smile in the first place… well, it only made the situation that much more bittersweet.