Chapter 17: 17. One Does Not Love Breathing

I'm absolutely bursting to gush about the events of yesterday to the Girls at school, but when I meet Jessie and Kiah at the gate there are just too many others about. Boys and girls I don't know. I don't want to risk any of them accidentally hearing things and spreading the word around school before I can get ahead of the story, so I just tell Jessie and Kiah that I have some exciting things to say at lunch, then listen as Kiah talks about the album she discovered yesterday.

When the bell rings, I reluctantly bid the Girls farewell and make my way to form. Tom is sat in his usual place when I enter, and beckons me to sit beside him. Recently I haven't. Not out of conscious choice, I must add—I've just come to enjoy my own company when I can't be with my friends. Tom was always just a friend of convenience. Not speaking to him hasn't really hurt me too much.

Entering form, I realise that maybe my sudden distance has been hurting Tom. He's done nothing wrong. As far as he can see, his friend has started hanging out with a group of girls every lunch, and now won't even sit next to him in form time. If our friendship meant anything to Tom—if he is as lonely as I was before I found Jessie and the girls—then he's probably feeling quite abandoned. A lump forms in my throat. I feel suddenly guilty. I've been so caught up in myself that I've not had a spare thought for Tom.

I sit beside him and give him a sheepish smile. "Hi."

"What gives, Harry?" Tom's voice cracks as he speaks. "Why don't you want to hang with me any more, bro?"

I study the knots in the wood of the desk in front of us. "I'm sorry," I say. "It's just... I've had a lot going on lately, and... I thought you were trying to bag a girlfriend?"

Tom shakes his head bitterly. "I have no idea how to talk to girls. All I've been doing is circling the edge of friend groups like a lost puppy. I can't remember the last time I actually spoke to anyone at lunch."

I feel even more guilty now. I've been where he is, felt the brick wall of social periphery; now he's facing it alone, while I've stumbled into all the things he's been trying for without even asking for them.

The worst part is I can't even tell him the reason for my distance—that I'm trans, I'm a girl, and on top of that I'm figuring out my sexual identity. I have a girlfriend. Also I'm scared because I don't know who to trust with this knowledge beyond a small circle of girls, and I don't mean to disregard Tom because I think he's likely to be a bigot but the more people know the harder it is to keep a secret, and—

"Harry?"

I look up. Tom's watching me with concern, and I realise I must have zoned out.

"Are you alright? I must have said your name like four times. You completely blanked me."

"I'm fine," I tell him. "Sorry. Didn't sleep very well last night."

"How did you do it?" He asks the question with an earnest voice. "I just don't get it. Shit, Harry, you've basically hit my jackpot. I've seen you hanging out with Jessie Porter and her friends, and like... wow. You'll have to spill your secrets."

"No secrets to spill," I tell him. And that's the truth of it, really. I didn't befriend Jessie and the Girls through the clever use of some nefarious trickery. I didn't bewitch them or befuddle them. I didn't even approach them. Our friendship, my gender identity, my relationship with Jessie—the entire chain of events really started because Jessie approached me. She initiated. I spent the last four years in the role of the lonely, socially isolated boy. I know what Tom's feeling. I know that he's going to find scant consolation in my telling him that the secret to talking to girls is to just do absolutely nothing and hope one decides to start talking to you.

Also, it helps if you're actually a girl yourself, even if nobody would have any way of knowing that at the moment they initiated conversation. But Tom isn't a girl. He'd not benefit in any way from me telling him that, and I can't anyway. I can't just say that I'm trans.

Can I?

I'm glad when the bell finally rings to herald the end of form. It gives me the chance to get away from Tom. For the last few minutes of that form period I could feel by tongue slipping steadily looser; much longer and I'd probably have given the game away. Told him I'm trans. Introduced myself as Hannah. Blow everything wide open, my secrets exposed, and let the chips fall where they may. And then what?

*

By the time I get to Miss Jorgensen's English class—today the lesson immediately before lunch—I'm starting to come towards a resolution. The question that like an insidious seed sprouted in morning form—why can't I tell Tom the truth? Why do I have to hide who I am?—has blossomed into a frankly indignant flower. Tom is a casual acquaintance, whose absence from my life wouldn't be noticed. The rest of my peers, the Girls excluded, are less than nothing to me. Not in an arrogant way, of course. I just couldn't care less what happens to them. All the important people in my life know me for who I am. So who am I hiding from?

And why is my happiness beholden to their perceived approval?

So when I sit down beside Jessie, and give her a quick kiss, I already know exactly what the first words out of my mouth are going to be. "I'm ready to go public."

Jessie—who, bless her, is still unpacking her bag—does a double-take. "Are you sure?" she asks.

I nod. Why not, after all? "I don't want to waste any more of my school days in the wrong gender."

"Some people won't be cool about it," she says. "Once you tell the school you're trans, you can't un-tell them. There's a reason Olivia's gone stealth. What if Eddie and Joel and the rest of the blockheads decide to start shit?"

"Let them," I shrug. "A year's time, I'm out of here. I won't have to see them again. In ten years' time, I'm not going to remember what a couple of thick-necked rugby players said to me, but I'm going to remember whether I was able to be myself or whether I had to keep up the lie."

"Lie?"

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I gesture down at myself. "This. This mask. I'm a woman on the inside, we both know that, but I need to be a woman on the outside too."

Jessie swallows, then nods. "You're right. Go, Hannah, scream to the world who you are." She squeezes my arm; our position sat on adjacent chairs makes hugging a difficult prospect. "I'm happy for you, girl."

"But?" I'm not blind. There's a shadow on Jessie's face. She might keep it hidden, might be saying the words I want to hear, but she can't hide it.

She frowns. "But what?"

"You're not happy."

Jessie shakes her head. "No, Hannah, I am. Honestly." Then she sighs. "I'm just worried about what it'll mean for us."

"Us? Jessie, why does anything have to change?"

She looks at me, and I can see the first tears beginning to bubble in her eyes. "I don't want it to," she says. "But Hannah, I'm not brave like you. The moment you come out, you'll be announcing for the whole school to hear that you are a girl—and that is fantastic, believe me. I think it's wonderful that you have the courage to face the world as yourself, your unashamed self. Fuck anyone who says otherwise, and you have my back all the way. But the next time we kiss in class, it'll be two girls kissing. I'm not ready for that. I'm not ready to be out. Maybe the world's moved on a little bit, and got a little more tolerant, and for most people now it's fine to be gay, but it only takes one person to have a problem..."

"You'd have my back," I tell her. "And Olivia's, too. And Kiah, and Emma. None of us would let you suffer."

"Maybe one day," Jessie says. "But not yet. Don't let that change your mind, though. We don't have to stop dating just because you're out. We'll just have to stop kissing in school, at least until I'm ready. Would that be okay with you?"

"Jessie, you're a miracle," I say. "The best person in my life. Being able to call you girlfriend—shit, even being able to call you friend—is a dream come true. If keeping that means we can only kiss on weekends, then we'll only kiss on weekends." I smile. "Anyway, we'll be out of here in a year. Then we can kiss all the time."

A few tears fall down Jessie's cheek, drawing a concerned glance from Miss Jorgensen. She approaches our desk. "Is everything alright with you, Jessie?"

Jessie nods, wiping her face. "I'm fine, Miss Jorgensen. Just... that time of the month."

Miss Jorgensen nods, then heads back to the front of the class. I redden; in fifteen years' living as a boy, I never once had somebody directly or indirectly refer to their period when I was within earshot. It's a reminder that I'm perceived as a girl now, by Jessie at least, which means I'm going to be treated exactly the same as any other girl. Warts and all.

Of course, I also get the girlfriend shit on top of the 'any other girl' treatment, but I won't complain about that. I enjoy it too much.

*

For the first time this academic year, me and Jessie don't really talk much during English. I rationalise that, in part, as due to the fact that we actually have a significant chunk of work to do today. Rather than just reading a passage of the book, or drawing pictures of the main characters, Miss Jorgensen tasks us with actually analysing some of the text. I find this difficult, to be honest—funnily, it turns out that undergoing a crisis of gender leaves you with very little mental energy left for twentieth century literature from the other side of the Atlantic—and I tell myself that the only reason we're not talking is because we're so focused on turning in good pieces of work. And not without reason. I'd be trying hard even if I had no academic aspirations whatsoever; even if I held an active disdain for academia. Miss Jorgensen has past form for moving people if they talk too much to the point that it interferes with their work, and I'm rather enjoying sitting next to Jessie.

But there's an undercurrent to the silence. A heaviness. We'd had our first disagreement as girlfriend and girlfriend, even if we agreed on the pertinent fundamentals—and I think Jessie was wrestling with her pride for me and her guilt at preferring things the way they are. My mind, as I write my hamfisted attempt at an essay, fluctuates between Jessie and Scout Finch. It makes it hard, to be honest. I keep drifting off topic, first visualising Scout as Jessie as I read, and then attributing to the fictional character actions which I know to have been Jessie's. And when I realise what I've done, I have to refocus, and make sure I'm writing about what's actually happening.

I catch on a line from the book. "Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing." Poor Scout Finch, a voracious reader, has been told she must learn to read properly, and abandon her bedtime readings with her father. It's a demand of society. To fit in, to do things the right way, she must forfeit a part of her most valued relationship. Jessie has her finger on this passage in her own copy of the book, and I notice that she's stifling sniffles. Could it be that she sees herself in Scout?

One does not love breathing.

No more than one loves the freedom to live their life without society poking its nose in. My mind wanders to the receptionist at the doctor's, the one who incurred my mother's wrath. Would she have dared say anything like that in the first fifteen years of my life? No, I'm certain she wouldn't—and I know that Beth's never been yelled at by a doctor's office receptionist, so that's not just one of those instances where the hegemony of institutional sexism allows women to be treated worse than men. It's because I'm trans. Because I have the gall to deviate from society's prescribed straight-and-narrow. If it wasn't for the fact that I so desperately need to be me, I might repress my femininity, or belay it for a year or so, just to avoid drawing the ire of society.

What about Jessie?

On the outside she conforms. You can't look at her and immediately see that she's not your bog-standard cishet; there's a comfort in being straight-passing, one I myself enjoyed until lately—and in fact am still enjoying, outwardly at least, for as long as I present to the school as 'Harry'. It's easy to see how Jessie has grown accustomed to this safety. I don't know what slurs she's been exposed to in her time. I know only that she's had her own plan—to stay in the closet, except to her best friends, until she's free of school and the writhing pit of bigots that inevitably forms amidst the dregs of any comprehensive; to avoid being a target for bigotry, by virtue of holding her tongue and pretending by omission to be something else—and here I am, threatening to torpedo it.

She's right, of course. If I'm out as trans, and we continue our public displays of affection, then we become—in the eyes of the student body—two girls in love with one another. Jessie, ergo, becomes not straight.

And while I've found pretending to be something I'm not intolerable, I'm also not Jessie. It's not my place to judge her life. Maybe she's carved out a comfort zone where she can be happy, and maybe that comfort zone is incompatible to my public transition.

Maybe, no matter what happens, one of us is destined to be the loser.