“Well, whatever got you there, I’m glad you made it. I guess that’s the latest plot twist in my story, isn’t it?”
Avery thinks it feels like a responsibility, to be a part of someone else’s story. He knows Ryan is saying it playfully, not heavily. He knows Ryan is saying it to show that he’s done with his own storytelling, which means it’s time for Avery to start. Avery isn’t sure that Ryan is a part of his own story yet, but that could be because he doesn’t feel anyone can be a true part of his story until he or she hears it and accepts it.
They’re drifting on the water—not much, just a gradual pull. Avery finds his mind drifting to a small part of Ryan’s story, a small point of comparison. When he emerges from that brief thought, he sees that Ryan is watching him, waiting to see what he’ll say next.
“I was just thinking about you and your aunt in this canoe,” Avery explains. “How nice that must have been, to talk here. For me, it’s always a kitchen-table war council. Us against the world. Coming up with a plan.”
“That sounds stressful.”
“Yeah, but at least everyone in my house is on the same side. I know how lucky I am about that. And unlucky in other ways.”
“Unlucky how?” Ryan asks.
And this is it. This is where Avery must decide how much to tell, how much to let Ryan in. Like everyone else, Avery considers his inner world to be a scary, convoluted, inscrutable place. It is one thing to show someone your best, cleanest version. It’s quite another to make him aware of your deeper, jagged self.
Here in the daylight, does Ryan already notice? Does he already know? If he does, it doesn’t seem like he cares. Or maybe that’s just more hoping on Avery’s part.
Enough, Avery tells himself. Just talk to him.
The first sentence of the truth is always the hardest. Each of us had a first sentence, and most of us found the strength to say it out loud to someone who deserved to hear it. What we hoped, and what we found, was that the second sentence of the truth is always easier than the first, and the third sentence is even easier than that. Suddenly you are speaking the truth in paragraphs, in pages. The fear, the nervousness, is still there, but it is joined by a new confidence. All along, you’ve used the first sentence as a lock. But now you find that it’s the key.
“I was born a boy in a girl’s body,” Avery begins. Then he stops, takes in Ryan’s reaction. Which is surprise. His eyes widen a little. Then narrow as he takes a long look at Avery, figures it out. Avery feels like a body on display.
Or maybe Ryan is just waiting for the next sentence. “Go on,” he says. His tone is encouraging.
“I think it was obvious to everyone from the start. And my parents are very … liberal, I guess. Practically hippies. So they actually tried to make it seem like I was normal. Or at least going through something normal. Now I can see the strain, and how much easier it would’ve been for all of us if I hadn’t been born a girl. But they never made me freak out. It was everyone else. Well, not everyone. There were some people who were cool. But there were a lot of people who weren’t cool. I was homeschooled a lot. We lived in a lot of towns, trying to find the right doctors. Eventually we found them, and I found other members of my tribe. Mostly online. But my parents and I go to conferences as well. They put me on hormones early, to sort of stop me from going through the wrong kind of puberty. Is this TMI? I’m sure you don’t want all the details.”
Ryan leans toward Avery, the boat rocking back and forth as he does. Avery grips the side, and Ryan puts his hand on top of Avery’s.
“Tell me whatever you want to tell me,” he says. “It’s cool.”
Avery shudders, and can feel the shudder travel through the boat, through the water, until the water becomes smooth again, until he feels his nerves become smooth enough to continue talking. It’s too much, too soon, but now that he’s talking, he can’t stop. He’s talking about hormones and the surgeries that have happened and the surgeries that are going to happen, and all along pretty much the only thing that’s filling his head is the question of whether Ryan is seeing him as a girl or a boy. Now that Ryan knows, is Avery still a boy in his eyes?
Ryan is measuring his next words carefully—in fact, he’s been weighing them, trying them out in his head, even as Avery’s been talking. We don’t blame him. We know it is sometimes hard to receive someone’s truth. Not as hard as the telling, but still hard if you care about how your response will be taken.
Finally, he says, “I like whatever it is that makes you the person you are.” It’s like something his aunt Caitlin would have told him, back when he was figuring things out. Then, to show that he doesn’t think this is the entirety of Avery’s story, he asks, “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
The conversation continues, and we leave them to have it. We watch from a distance as the boat drifts for nearly a mile, without either of them really noticing.
You can give words, but you can’t take them. And when words are given and received, that is when they are shared. We remember what that was like. Words so real they were almost tangible. There are conversations you remember, for certain. But more than that, there is the sensation of conversation. You will remember that, even when the precise words begin to blur. How you gave, how you received. How close you felt to this other person, how remarkable this closeness was. The sharing of the words becomes as important as the words themselves. The sensation stays with you, attaches you to the world.
It was Craig’s idea to kiss like this. And a half hour into it, he still doesn’t understand what he was thinking.
There are many roots to it. One of them runs deep and connects directly to his childhood, to all those hours he spent poring over the Guinness World Records, dreaming that one day he’d be in it. The odder the record, the better—the world’s largest cherry pie, or the man who could fit the most nails in his mouth. As a kid, he probably skipped over the kissing section. Too gross.