I’d never really had to think about being a man before. It was always something I’d been able to take as default. When I was on Earth, it was the obvious truth: I didn’t have to choose it, I’d just been born that way. When I was on Selene, it suddenly didn’t matter any more, because being a “man” wasn’t something that existed there; it was a weird disconnect between past and present, the same as the disconnect between Marcus and Emma, or between being five-eleven and five-nothing. Nobody had ever asked me about my opinion on the subject.
I’d never even considered the question. As far as I had been concerned for the first twenty-four years of my life, that wasn’t a question that it was possible to ask. But the moment the question was asked, the moment I could even consider whether or not I had enjoyed being a man, something clicked inside my head and I was able to figure out the answer.
No. The answer was no.
In a matter of moments, my memory struck out across the entirety of my life: drinking at parties in undergrad, my continual failures in the dating scene, growing up with Abby and Devin. I’d never taken much pride in being the boyfriend, the brother. I’d always been closer to my sister than to my brother anyway, even though he was only four years older than me and she eleven years older. Being a guy, being male, it was never a source of self-identity or self-definition, to the point where I’d generally avoided male-exclusive activities like sports or fraternities. I’d always preferred to define myself in other ways, by my academic status, by being funny, by my ADHD-addled brain.
But if I’d never taken much stock in masculinity, then what did it mean that I’d spent the last few months going by ‘Emma’? And…
“Emma? Is, erm. Is something. Wrong? Is something wrong? You look sort of spaced out and I don’t think you’ve blinked for like ten seconds.”
I was still in the Crystal Ball pub, sitting right across from Laura, my girlfriend, who was completely wasted. How long I had been sitting there in total silence after her question, I’ll never know.
“Um,” I said. “Uhh. What did…”
“I asked if you enjoyed it,” she said. “Being a… whatever you said. Was it fun?”
“Uhhhh… no? I dunno, it wasn’t much of anything, really. It was just. A thing. Like being tall instead of short, or having light hair instead of dark hair, like I don’t really have much of an opinion about it either way.”
Laura nodded sagely, leaning back on the barstool and staring at an unremarkable patch of ceiling as though it were the setting sun on a warm summer’s day. It was a beautiful expression on her, even if she was very drunk. For a moment I thought about kissing her again, just for the hell of it.
But I had no time for that. I needed somewhere I could be alone, somewhere I could think. My heart was beating slow, but so heavy that every thump felt like an impact on my sternum, and if I didn’t sort out my thoughts I was surely going to go insane. I stood up and approached the group of students on the other side, the ones I was fairly sure were friends of Laura’s.
“Hey, I need to go get some fresh air. Laura is, well, a few cups deep. Can you keep watch on her?”
There were a few vague noises of friendly agreement, as well as some chuckles. One of the women moved over a spot to throw an arm around Laura. I watched her reaction, and when I was confident that they knew each other, I made a break for it.
The only place I could find that wasn’t loud, crowded, and full of smoke, was the dark alley outside of the building, accessed via a side door by the bar. It smelled like old garbage and stale piss, and I could hear the wet sound of two people finding some private time a little ways away, but it was the best I was going to find. I found a spot which wasn’t going to put any stains on my clothes and collapsed to the ground.
More pieces of the puzzle were starting to fall into place. The sex, obviously, was a big one. The moment I’d had the chance to do so I’d thoroughly explored my new, female body, and the two sexual encounters I’d had with Laura were by far the best I’d had in my entire life. None of my girlfriends on Earth had ever held me in the way that Laura did, not that a girlfriend was supposed to hold her boyfriend like that anyway. She made me feel small and wanted, and I enjoyed that.
I remembered the ways that women sometimes looked at me with distinct interest, and the way my stomach fluttered when I realized that I was being checked out. No matter how long I thought about it, I couldn’t remember any time on Earth, any time as a man, when I had given a damn about other people’s interest in me or lack thereof. Even I had gotten caught up with it, staring long and lingering into my own reflection, caught in the unfamiliar and yet somehow entrancing body I saw there. I’d spent twenty-four years never really giving a rat’s ass about my own appearance until I’d come to Selene. Just thinking about the last few months, I must have spent more time on picking out clothes, thinking about makeup and jewelry, worrying about my hair, than I had spent thinking about my appearance in the three years before that.
Then a moment of doubt hit me. What about before the ballroom blitz, when I’d lost myself in my own reflection, unsure of what I was looking for? What about after I’d first woken up in bed with Laura and nearly panicked on the spot? Could it be that I hated myself regardless of what body I had or what gender I was, and I was deliberately ignoring the signs out of a desperate hope that turning into a woman had somehow fixed me?
I sat with that thought for about five seconds before I burst out laughing. The people fucking a ways down the alley even stopped for a moment, confused or weirded out by my shrill cackling. No, I said to myself, those were not moments of self-hate. Those were moments where my own dumbassery had become too obvious. The cognitive dissonance between my internal insistence that I was a man and how good I was feeling about my new body was so strong that, even without consciously recognizing it, it hurt.
My head sank into my hands in a double facepalm, my lips grinning uncontrollably as I tried to suppress my laughter. I was a woman. Thank fuck, I was a woman.
I stayed there for a while, soaking in the cold night air, seated firmly on the line between laughter and tears. How fucking stupid was I, that it had taken me three, nearly four months of living as a woman to realize that maybe I wasn’t actually as male as I might have thought? I hated it, I laughed about it, I cursed myself and I thought about how amazing it would feel to be able to tell Laura that everything was going to be alright between us.
What made it even more ridiculous was that I’d met a transgender person before—his name was Dylan and we’d been lab partners for a year—who had told me what it felt like to have to exist as the “wrong” gender. I’d never felt like this body was anything but mine, it had never felt wrong to be called “Emma,” I had never wished to be back to my old self. Just to prove it, I gave my chest a squeeze with both hands. For the first time, I was fully able to admit to myself that I liked having breasts.
Another thought occurred to me while I lurched to my feet. What did this all actually mean? That I was trans, for one thing. Emma was almost certainly my actual name; even though I’d had to come up with it on the spot, I’d been using it for way too long and ended up getting used to it.
But more than that, there was the question of how much it actually mattered. While it had also been a massive excuse to not think about how much I was enjoying this, it was still true that there was no such thing as “male” in this world for me to return to, and no concept of “transgender” for me to explain. I had already been living my best life. It didn’t matter that I’d had this massive revelation when I was going to keep on going by Emma, keep on wearing mostly the same clothes and having the same partner as I had before.
The only difference was that I knew, then, that I wasn’t lying to Laura. That I was exactly who she thought I was. I was Emma, and that wasn’t going to change any time soon.
I went back into the Crystal Ball a changed person, ready to tell Laura about everything. She wasn’t at the bar where I’d left her. This would normally have induced instant panic, except that she was plenty visible in her new position standing atop one of the tables, reading from a newspaper at the top of her lungs.
“And let’s look at who’s caused this upset,” she said, in her most pompous accent. “This riot was not the fault of the common workers, the salt of the soil, who you might have expected to make up a rabble. No, this disturbance was the result of our own University students, a group of cloud-headed intellectuals with too much time on their hands, who—”
“Cloud-headed intellectuals!” came a jeer from another part of the room.
Laura wheeled around to face the source of the yell, waving the newspaper around as though it were a signal flag. “Cloud-headed, ’s what it says right here. Come an’ grab it if you wanna read it. Courtesy of the Alderburg Weekly, amazing writing they’ve got there, eh?”
There was a round of laughter, during which period Laura mugged like she was a bad stand-up comic. I was frozen in place, vaguely terrified that she’d lose her footing and manage to break her other arm as well.
“I’d love to see what they think of this!” yelled someone else, from a different part of the bar.
Laura chuckled drunkenly. “Yeah, real smarts going on here. Might as well be a debate club, sipping tea and arguing Kelmner agains Potts!”
That was apparently a very topical reference, as it got another round of laughter. I slipped over to the table where Laura was standing and cleared my throat loudly enough to get her attention. As soon as she figured out who I was, a process which took several seconds, her expression dropped.
“I would like to remind you that, unlike me, falling off that table right now could absolutely kill you,” I said. “And it would be a shame for you to die before I could tell you that I loved you again.”
That definitely got her attention. With a wrinkled expression of intense focus, Laura dropped down, first into a squat, then onto her rear end, and then slipped off of the table. As soon as she was in front of me, I put my hands on her hips and pulled her in as close as her cast would allow.
“Did you want to say something to me?”
“Yeah. I love you.”
“As do I.” Laura squinted at me. “You look diff’rent. What’s going on with you? Did you finally get drunk too?”
That made me laugh. To tell the truth, I did feel a little bit drunk, drunk on a heady mix of potential, uncertainty, relief, and various other human intoxicants.
“No, I did not get drunk. I… had a bit of a moment of revelation in the back alley.”
“Are you a prophet now, Shortcake? Are you about to found the next great world religion?”
“Not that kind. Personal revelation. Something you said, it… really resonated with me, made me realize some things about myself, get over some things. Um. I’m sorry for treating you the way I’ve been treating you.”
Laura blinked about a million times, momentarily forgetting how to balance herself on two legs. “Is that… is that it? It’s just, done, over, like that?”
I shrugged. “Pretty much, yeah. Oh, how do I even explain this… I was dealing with a lot of doubt about myself, and about who I was, that was making me believe that I was inevitably going to hurt you by being in a relationship with you. But I realized that that was bullshit, I wasn’t hurting you at all. If anything I feel like we kind of bring out the best in each other, in some ways. I’ve never had anything like this with anyone, what I have with you, and—”
I had momentarily forgotten to take into account the fact that Laura was drunk as hell. The blank stare of incomprehension reminded me of that.
“You didn’t understand any of that, did you?”
Laura shook her head. “You were saying a lot of very beautiful things, but to be honest I was just staring at your mouth the whole time.”
“Fuck, do I not understand why I find you so attractive. And yet…”
My first instinct was that I really, really wanted to have sex with her, preferably soon. I wasn’t going to do anything until she was sober; but the thought knocked down some dominos, and before I knew it I had a plan that would hopefully work out for both of us.
“I think it’s about time we got out of here,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because I want you to have enough time to be sober in the morning. So that when you wake up in my bed, at my apartment…”
Laura’s eyes went wide and her mouth fell open slightly. “Is this about sex?”
“Yes you big idiot, it’s about sex. Now come on, let’s put as much water in you as you can swallow, and then we get the hell out of here.”
Laura clung to my side like a lost puppy the entire time. She giggled and told me how cute I was when I handed her a glass of be-less-hungover tap water. She kept trying to kiss me and nibble on my ear while we took the streetcar to my neighborhood in the dead of night. Even once we got there, she spent the entire walk back mangling a repetitive and dirty drinking song.
Maybe if I’d gotten her to stop singing, that night could have had a good ending. Or at least a better one than the one it had. But at the time, I thought it better to let her have her fun.
As it was, we stumbled down the street, Laura’s good arm around my shoulder, her three sheets to the wind and me doing everything I could to make sure that we stopped at the right building number. It was a slightly cloudy night, but the moon was full, meaning that most of the time there was just enough light to read the street numbers by. Still, it wasn’t easy, and I ended up having to stop several times in order to determine whether I was looking at a 1 or a 7, a 4 or a 9.
At one of those stops, one number away from my apartment, I saw movement. No sound, no idea of what was moving, just a vague shape in the dark. But it was enough to set me on edge.
“Hello? Who was that?”
Laura stopped singing. “Who was what?”
“I don’t know. There hasn’t been anyone out on this street, but I swear I saw someone moving. Maybe it was a rathound.”
“Maybe, yeah,” said Laura. She started walking again, dragging me after her. The instant I turned to follow her, I felt a rush of air at my back, and a quiet sound like metal being briskly tapped against stone directly behind me.
I whipped around, but it was already too late. There was a shape in the dark behind me, tall and thin and pale, but before I could take in any more detail than that, an unbreakable grip settled around my shoulder.
“Storm-child. Sleep now, like death.”
“No,” I whined. “Not now. Not tonig—”
Hurray! Gender revelations for Emma!
I was kinda hoping that her introspection might have made her more resistant to WiW’s trigger phrase, but alas, Emma’s not ready to wield her newfound self-knowledge yet.
Oh no!!! Also it's crazy it's only been a few months since she arrived in the world.