Chapter 2
When we were thirteen, Max told me, “I’m a boy,” and then he cried and it was the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever seen.
Some girls are born with Noise. Not many, really not many at all, but some.
Mom doesn’t know why, and before the cure, I guess, their Noise usually faded over time.
But not all of them. And sometimes boys were born without Noise.
Again not all that many, and sometimes their Noise came later and was never as loud as other men, but then sometimes it never started at all.
Max, everyone thought, was a girl born with it.
He was given the cure, but that’s because all of us were, girl or boy.
But then came the day when he said he’d always been a boy, despite what everyone thought.
And to be honest, it wasn’t that much of a surprise when I looked back, because I’d always thought he was a particularly boyish girl.
But I was wrong. Not boyish, but a boy.
There are plenty of boyish girls. Plenty of girlish boys, too. Nothing wrong with that. But sometimes, just sometimes, they’re actually boys and girls, rather than girls and boys, if you see what I mean.
He told me his new name, though he was crying so hard it took a couple tries to understand he was saying “Max” and not “Matt,” but I like the name Max. More importantly–and this is true even though he’s an almighty pain in my ass–Max is my brother. If this is what he was saying, I believed him.
Turns out that belief wasn’t unanimous.
Mom and Pop were all right. Pop had already guessed and said he was waiting for Max to tell him in his own time.
People dismiss Pop as a weird hick farmer with Noise who’s always going on about how bad things used to be, and maybe that’s true to a degree (to a large degree, if you ask me).
But you can be a weird hick farmer and still know and love your kid. No law against that.
Mom was much more surprised. Which in itself was surprising, as I’ve already said how smart she is.
“Are you sure?” she kept asking, and Max had to keep saying he was.
She asked him question after question: Could Max just be a tomboy?
Or a lesbian? Could it be he was nonconformist about what he wanted to wear or how he wanted to style his hair?
Max’s look of horror at that one was so bad, even Mom had to laugh.
Since that day, Max has never been happier. Seriously, like a weight was taken off his shoulders. A literal weight. He walked taller (though he stayed shorter than me, of course), his words were lighter, I swear he just looked . . . bigger. Bigger and better and the right size.
And then we went to a few classes in town.
To be fair, most people our age didn’t even blink.
They know things aren’t as rigid as some older people say, and our classmates picked up the name Max and the new pronouns without much trouble at all.
The ones who didn’t? Well, they were, as a rule, dickheads before who found something new to be dickheads about.
But that only lasted a little while and now even Tara and Taper call Max, Max.
But then there were a few people like their mother, Margery Wingard.
She wasn’t allowed to practice medicine anymore after the attempted genocide, but Burly had long since pardoned her for “good behavior.” Biology teachers were thin enough on the ground that he even roped her in to teach a class or two.
She refused to say Max’s new name and kept calling him “she.” She said she didn’t believe people like Max existed and that Max was actually mentally ill and needed help rather than all this “support.”
Burly didn’t fire her. Said her “opinion” needed to be respected, though she was told to refer to Max as Max.
She responded by basically not talking to or about Max for the rest of the in-town classes.
It wasn’t until she started saying that the Land were dirtier than us and whatever culture they had was clearly inferior to our own that Burly finally had to let her go.
Turns out if you find one prejudice in a person, there are probably lots of others hiding just beneath the surface.
It was all just so stupid. Max became happier than he’d ever been in his whole entire life. You’d have to be a monster to say that wasn’t right.