rooibos_chai

Brief content warning: this chapter touches on some heavier content, including depression, dysphoria, bullying, and a brief, indirect mention of suicidal ideation

The irony was, it wasn’t as if I hated Mason Verhoeven. If anything, I probably had it pretty easy, at least as it came to bullies—though I didn’t have much to compare with, other than maybe movies and tv shows. It was just… weird.

I can’t even remember how it started, exactly. Part of that was simply due to the fact that my junior high years were all kind of blurry to me… That was about when puberty started, for me and everyone else, it seemed like. Overnight it seemed like I went from a weird, goofy kid with lots of friends to a depressed mess of a teenager. The more things changed, the more wrong it all felt, and the more I withdrew into myself, suddenly afraid to be around other people, like I was catching some deadly disease that I couldn’t risk spreading to anyone else. And somehow they realized that, too, and had no desire to be around me, either.

So many situations that used to be fun and breezy suddenly felt dense with fraught meanings. Before, sometimes I would hang out with the girls, laughing and talking about nonsense as they braided each others’ hair or stuck colorful barrettes in mine as a joke. Now, it was like a chasm had opened up between us, and I was viewed with deep suspicion. That sudden distance only made me feel more awkward and uncertain, second-guessing myself and draining me of the easy confidence that had once seemed endearing and nonthreatening to them.

On the other hand, when I spent time with guys, it was just as bad. That was maybe the most ironic: it wasn’t like ‘oh all my friends were girls until they weren’t.’ I had plenty of guy friends as a kid, and puberty somehow fucked that up, too. Everyone was changing, just like me, everything somehow similar but impossibly different. Like it seemed like everyone felt like they had something to prove, all of a sudden. Every lighthearted competition—whether racing across a playground or flicking a paper football or playing cards in a corner of the classroom when the teacher wasn’t looking—for some reason, it all now had stakes. Falling short wasn’t a chance to laugh it off and try harder next time. It was a failure that said something about you, that you were weak, that you didn’t fit in, that you weren’t enough of a man.

And trust me, I never felt like enough of a man.

Or, take for instance when other guys talked about girls, which they started doing more and more—and yes, while I think other kids suspected otherwise, trust me: I like girls. That was one thing that had always been easy and obvious to me. Yet, I found that I didn’t like them in the right way, somehow. I couldn’t explain why, but it just wasn’t the same as everyone else. It was different. Anything I thought or said about girls was somehow wrong, the precise kind of thing that everyone else could immediately pick up on. It was like I was giving off some kind of invisible radiation that everyone besides me could sense. 

I don’t know how to explain how crushing and weirdly isolating it was, but just imagine screwing up your courage to try and chime in on a conversation in gym class about what girls in your grade are hot. Imagine feeling a little nervous and guilty as you try to explain the crush you have on one particular girl: she finally made the track team late last year and then did a lot of training over the summer, coming back two inches taller, with a healthy tan and new muscles that make your head feel all fuzzy. Then, imagine what it’s like to get a profoundly awkward silence in response, before one of the guys finally does a fake cough as he says “gay” under his breath.

I just didn’t get it.

Eventually I talked to my father about… well about everything. He told me that was just the way life went. He explained that everyone felt weird during puberty, that it was a natural part of the process of growing up. In time, I would get used to the changes—I would even like them. Everything would make sense in the end. Even if I felt different from all of my friends right now, even if I drifted apart from the people I used to know, that would be okay. I would be happy when it was all over. Eventually, I would make new friends, and my new friends would see me for the man I was.

I still remember the look of complete and utter disappointment he gave me when I haltingly tried to express that I wasn’t sure if I ever wanted to be a man at all.

Thank god for Ben, who was one of the few kids in junior high who didn’t act like he was suddenly replaced by a moody doppelganger. As I found it harder and harder to get along with the people I once considered friends, I started keeping to myself. Most of my classmates were more than willing to back off. He was one of the few people who insisted on pushing his way in. He refused to let our friendship wither away. 

I don’t even think he was doing it consciously, but somewhere along the way, I realized why he mattered so much to me: he accepted me for who I was, not who everyone else expected me to be. When he looked at me, he didn’t see a creepy guy trying to weasel into hanging out with the girls, or a wussy oddball who constantly failed to fit in with the guys. He just saw me. Which was weird, because not even I saw me.

I spent a long time thinking about what that meant, thinking about who I was and who I wanted to be. Thank god for the internet, at least. That’s where I finally stumbled into something that helped: reading about other people’s experiences. I thought I was all alone, but I wasn’t the only one struggling like this. Not by a long shot. There were people who described the exact feelings I was dealing with to such a level of detail that it was scary. And there was a word that came up basically each and every time: ‘transgender.’

If you had asked me if I wanted to be a girl at age seven, I honestly don’t know what I would have said. It’s weird to admit this but I don’t think I would have had much of an opinion at all. I hadn’t ever stopped to think about it, and why would I? I was too busy being a silly kid to worry about it. It was only when I started to feel masculinity closing around me like a vice that I started to realize that something was wrong. One one side, my body was twisting, changing in ways that horrified me. On the other side, gendered expectations kept choking off anything and everything I had once enjoyed. Stuck in the middle, I kept grasping for an answer, casting around to try and find a way out.

I kept finding the same one. ‘Transgender.’

I read so many wish-fulfillment stories, looked at so many transition timelines, torn between deep desire and sick shame. I spent nights lying in bed, telling myself that I was just desperate for an easy way out—that wasn’t really me, it was just a simple explanation I was latching onto rather than confronting my deeper issues. I made a list of the reasons that I couldn’t be trans, and then I started a list of the reasons I coudn’t be cis, just for fairness’s sake. When the second of those lists got twice as long as the first, I threw them both away, refusing to let myself consider what that could mean.

Did I want to be a girl? I mean, obviously. Duh. Easy. But I felt way too fucked up to believe that alone would fix me. Plus I was scared. I didn’t know how to be a girl. How could I? 

But, then, I didn’t know how to be a boy either, no matter how hard I tried.

In the fall semester of ninth grade, it all came to a breaking point. You could call it hatching, I guess, but it wasn’t some huge crowning moment of euphoria, like you read about in a good story. It was just that one day, something crystalized in my head with a simple and ruthless logic: I could be either a girl, and plunge headfirst into a deeply uncertain future. Or I could finally give up on that dream, and not have a future at all.

Maybe that’s kind of dark? At the time, it didn’t seem like it, weirdly enough. When I had that thought and made that decision, I just felt relief. For one brief moment the weight constantly crushing me lightened, ever so slightly. 

Like I said, it was a really rough few years. I don’t want to act like every part of my experience was nothing but dissociation and trauma, either, but for so long, I was so terrified of the consequences of that big decision that I had difficulty seeing the happy side of it.

Though eventually, I did. I really did. At first it felt like I had made my choice out of necessity, just to survive—I think that was the only way I could actually convince myself to go through with it. But once I had made that decision, I started getting these moments where it was like the everpresent clouds would break and the sun would suddenly shine through. 

Like, when, terrified beyond belief, I clumsily explained myself to Ben and got his immediate enthusiastic acceptance. Or when I made a new online account and logged into a Minecraft server for the first time, only for people to immediately welcome Allie the catgirl, casually calling her by her name and referring to her as ‘she’ and ‘her.’ Or when a few months into hormones—and sorting that out was a whole story in itself, trust me—I realized what the soreness in my chest actually meant. Even if that last one had spurred a mini crisis when I realized that I would have to wear a sports bra and be careful about how I dressed if I wanted to keep things quiet, I have a hard time remembering being that worried about it, because all of my memories are instead filled with the absurd, giddy happiness that had bubbled up inside me.

Those moments are the ones that made me realize this wasn’t just something that I had to do, but something I wanted to do. Those moments helped me feel like a real person. No: a real girl, with thoughts and dreams and feelings and a future ahead of her that, yes, was still uncertain, but seemed a whole lot brighter than she had first thought.

So yeah. I had a lot on my mind during junior high—and high school too, for that matter.

But the original topic at hand here wasn’t me and my identity crisis. It was Mason Verhoeven. Somehow, somewhere along the way, along with everything else in my life seemingly collapsing into disaster, I managed to pick up a bully.

I guess thinking about it in the full context, it should have made sense: here I was, suddenly adrift, no longer fitting in, marked in some invisible way as the ‘queer’ kid, even if I hadn’t realized it yet myself. Obviously, I was an easy target for a big kid with his own raging hormones and a chip on his shoulder.

I still don’t know exactly what Mason felt like he had to prove, but he certainly had something out for me. At first it wasn’t anything serious… just, like, roughhousing in the halls. Our lockers used to be down the same hallway, and it seemed like every morning, no matter how early or late I showed up, he found a way to be walking by just in time to shoulder me into the lockers with a clang.

“Sorry,” he would say, the smirk on his face anything but. “Didn’t see you there, short stuff.”

It wasn’t like it hurt that much—it wasn’t even ever hard enough to leave a bruise or anything. I don’t think he was trying to cause me pain so much as just put on some kind of display of dominance. It was exactly the kind of guys-being-guys thing that I found inscrutable and a little bit scary. So, after a few months of banging into lockers each and every morning, I started just carrying all my books in my backpack at once, never going to that particular hall at all.

That was a mistake.

I think it must have come across to him as a challenge somehow, because after that he doubled down. For one, he started bothering me at lunch, too. Ben had a different lunch period than me that semester, so I’d always try to find a quiet place to eat, but no matter where I picked, suddenly Mason would sit down right next to me. Every day, without saying a single word, he’d take my lunch bag right out of my hands, and then rummage through it until he found something he wanted. Then he’d make some stupid smarmy comment, like “Compliments to the chef,” or “Your mother really should do better than PB&J, no wonder you’re so scrawny,” before eating a good half of my sandwich or my entire bag of chips. 

And then, in what was definitely the weirdest part of all, he’d take something from his own lunch and make me eat it. Sometimes it was disgusting, like the rest of his bologna sandwich with clear teeth marks where he had taken a bite. Sometimes it was not bad, or better even than what he had taken from my lunch, like replacing an oatmeal creme pie with a pudding cup or something. I chalked it up to some sort of twisted psychological thing, once more him demonstrating that he could control me.

Though… I just let it happen. I didn’t really complain or say much of anything, really. That was around when I had already started shutting down around most people, and so that was how I dealt with Mason, too. I don’t know that it helped. He took it as a challenge, I think: sometimes in our unwelcome lunch hangouts, he would do the strangest things to try and provoke me into showing any emotion whatsoever. Like one time he literally started telling these incredibly stupid jokes until I actually smiled at one, at which point he grinned super big in triumph, then abruptly stood up and walked off, leaving his lunch behind.

The most I ever did to fight back was one time when I somehow mustered the courage to sit down at a different lunch table than usual, one of the busy ones with all the other seats already filled with people. That time, Mason still showed up, and he literally growled, like a dog, until everyone else decided they had better places to be. Then, as if nothing abnormal had happened at all, he plopped down in the seat next to me, throwing one arm across my shoulders as he reached over to grab my apple and took a bite out of it.

Oh, or, there was also the time he cornered me in the library and forced me to help him study. Like not to do his homework, or to help him cheat on an upcoming test or something. He literally forced me to teach him algebra, even though he was surly and rude the whole time. I didn’t get it then, and I still don’t get it now: he was the one who insisted on my help, so I don’t know why he acted so frustrated and vaguely embarrassed at not knowing everything already. Eventually, I just tried to say as little as possible, doing my best to guide him into realizing his own mistakes because I was way too scared to directly say any particular problem was wrong. And I guess he also found my help to be worthless, because though he’d occasionally catch me in the library again and stare at me with this brooding expression, he never forced me to try and study with him again.

So, yeah. Weird. I think because he hung around me so often, it only made it even harder for me to fit in with anyone else. I think a lot of people thought that if they were friends with me, Mason would pick on them, too. But he didn’t really pick on Ben—I think Mason definitely didn’t like him, and if Ben and I were hanging out or something, occasionally I would see Mason lurking nearby, glaring at Ben like he was plotting his murder. But when it came down to it, I was the only one he’d ever actually touch.

Honestly, I was fine with that. It wasn’t like I thought particularly highly of myself, and if I actually had somehow gotten Ben beaten up, it would have completely crushed me. So better me than anyone else.

And that was what things were like for several full years. In junior high, Mason was constantly bothering me. For all that I was embroiled in a drawn-out ugly internal crisis, having a clear external crisis wound up being strangely familiar and reassuring in contrast. Like I can’t say that I enjoyed being Mason’s personal plaything, but at least dealing with him forced me out of my own head. I could focus on whatever way he was trying to mess with me, rather than freaking out about the way my voice had started to crack or how gross hair started showing up in places on my body that made me feel disgusting.

But in high school, Mason’s constant presence in my life started to lessen. I can probably pinpoint the moment, too: late in our freshman year, after I had made my big decision, and when I was slowly starting to become more of a person again. This had led to Mason not knowing exactly how to deal with me, because he was used to saying whatever he wanted to me without any response. Having me now occasionally throw some quip back at him would throw him for a loop. …Which is why I started doing it more, once I realized that, even if I recognized that I was totally playing with fire.

But on one particular day, he had caught me in the hall when I was running late to class, grabbing ahold of my backpack handle and practically yanking me off my feet. He kept me there, grinning maliciously while everyone else vanished into classes. Eventually, it was just the two of us, and he swung me around up against a locker, using his height to lean over me. I don’t even remember what he was saying—some kind of stupid macho nonsense probably meant to terrify me, even though I was more than used to it and doubted that he would ever actually make good on his threats to beat me up.

That’s where we were when some football-player senior rounded the corner and stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of the two of us.

“Damn,” the senior said coolly. “If y’all’re gonna make out, use the janitor’s closet or something. The rest of us don’t want to see that shit.”

Mason practically flung me into the locker, he backed up so quickly. He squared his shoulders and faced the other guy, drawing himself up to his full height as a stormy expression darkened his face.

“Fuck off,” he spat. “I’m not— We’re not—”

The senior just raised an eyebrow, standing his ground. For all that Mason was big and imposing, he was still a freshman, and both of them knew it.

“Go fuck yourself,” Mason muttered, his face flashing red as he spun on his heels and stormed off.

I was left alone in the hall with the other guy, completely baffled by this whole turn of events. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was supposed to do or say now. “Um, thanks?” I tried.

The senior looked over at me, and then he did a doubletake. “Damn,” he said. “Thought you were a girl.” 

I felt a weird swarm of butterflies in my stomach at that. He… he did? For real? Even if it was just for a moment, a handful of extremely bad impulses flitted through my head, ranging from happily giggling to just announcing “Oh, I am!” With heroic restraint, I resisted those urges, and tried to school the sudden smile on my face back into a blank expression.

But the guy was glancing down the hall after Mason again. “Huh,” he said to himself.

I felt a weird duty to explain, for some reason. “He just does that sometimes,” I said. “It’s whatever. I’m used to it.”

The guy glanced back at me one more time, his eyes narrowing. Then he shrugged. “A’ight,” he said, and kept walking, no doubt used to slipping into class ten minutes late without so much as a word from the teacher.

That wasn’t the last time that Mason messed with me. But after that point, his heart wasn’t quite in it any more. Or maybe his head was too much into it. Eventually, after one particularly quiet month had passed by, I realized he was actually avoiding me. Though that was fine by me. After I had my realization and started to actually embrace the idea that maybe I could be transgender, I had plenty on my mind already. Mason increasingly felt like a distraction that I was glad to leave behind.

Every now and again, I would still feel a prickle on the back of my neck, and look up to see him across the cafeteria, or on the other side of the library, or something, just quietly watching me. But from that point onwards, he left me alone.

And to be honest, without him constantly shoving his way into my life, eventually I started to forget about him entirely. By the time I started playing on the Minecraft server, I hardly thought about him at all, and once I met Ashleigh… well, I spent most of my free time thinking about her instead.

At least until today.