Chapter 2 #2
It’s not. At least, not to me. Maybe I’m more invested than other people are, but the club has made a real difference at our school, and that’s not nothing.
Right now, it feels like the world is closing in on us, on marginalized people, on queer people, on trans people.
Yeah, Washington State is safe enough, but for how long?
And how much of that safety is just in Seattle?
It doesn’t take that long of a drive outside the city to see something fucked-up.
Sometimes there are fucked-up things inside the city itself, like last year when my friends and I found anti-trans stickers all over a telephone pole in Capitol Hill.
Right in the middle of what used to be, and still is in some ways, the gay neighborhood, where we should feel safest. I worry about my friends, about my mom, about Shar every time she goes to work at the job site.
She’s there now, lit up golden in the afternoon sun, drilling a wall into place, and suddenly she slumps forward, blood pouring out of her hair, down her tanned temples; behind her is a coworker, his face set in a glare and hammer upraised, yelling a slur as she falls to the floor, and nobody helps her, they just laugh—
I shake my head to clear it, taking deep breaths, refocusing on the math worksheet.
That’s not real. It’s not happening.
That’s not real. It’s not happening.
That’s not real. It’s not happening.
Shar’s face, bloody and lifeless, flashes in my mind again and I grab my phone. I need to text her, make sure she’s OK. I know she is. But what if she’s not?
What’s for dinner tonight? I ask. I don’t want her to know I was worried about her; if she knows that, then she’ll ask why, and I can’t tell her I was just picturing her getting attacked by one of her coworkers.
I’m making salmon and wild rice, she texts back a few seconds later. On my way home now, she adds, and my shoulders relax.
Brekky jumps up on the table, distracting me from my phone. I grab him and hold him close. “You’re not supposed to be up here,” I whisper in his ear, and he flicks it, then wiggles, trying to get out of my arms. I set him down on the floor and stare at the worksheet.
I can’t share the club. I can’t risk it becoming just another social hour, where people come to hang out and nothing ever gets done. I have to do something about this.
I spend all evening at the table. Homework blurs into Shar’s arrival and then Mom’s, at the same time as Shar pulls the salmon out of the oven.
They join me as I push my school-work aside, Mom still in her corporate professional clothes: navy slacks and a floral-patterned blouse, her long, wavy brown hair sleeker and shinier than mine will ever be.
Next to her, Shar is carpenter-casual in battered Carhartt pants, her graying hair in a buzzcut, the smile lines deep around her eyes.
She has 20/20 vision, unlike us. Mom’s glasses are black and horn-rimmed, and my frames are round, pink-tinted clear plastic.
Technically, the color was called “champagne.” I picked it because it sounded grown-up, like glasses that someone who had their shit together would wear.
Someone who was Queer Alliance president. But instead, I’m just the co-president.
“How was your day, kiddo?” Shar asks.
I shrug. “Fine.”
“It was Queer Alliance elections today, right?” Mom asks, focusing on me. “How did it go?”
“I got it,” I say, forcing a smile. “I tied with someone else, though, and Mr. Harrison is making us share the presidency.”
“Honey!” She smiles warmly. “I’m so proud of you. Sharing is caring, right?”
“Oh my god.” I roll my eyes.
“It’ll be good for you,” she says. “Keep us posted, OK? I know you’re going to do some cool stuff.”
“Thanks,” I say, wishing I could feel excited the way I thought I would tonight.
“How’s the homework going?” she asks lightly, too lightly.
“Good.”
“Care to say more?”
“Math is almost done and I’m going to finish at lunch tomorrow. Essay outline assigned today and not due ’til next week; I’ll start it this weekend. History reading I haven’t done yet, but I’ll do it on the bus ride to school.”
She eyes me, and I brace for her assessment of my homework management. “I’m glad you have a plan. Just make sure you keep it up.”
“Mom.” I sigh. It is too soon for this.
“That’s all I’m going to say.” She puts up her hands, still smiling. “I want you to do well in all areas, not just what you love.”
I give her a thumbs-up. Enough has gone wrong already today, and I don’t want to add a fight about my grades to the list. We did plenty of that last year.
I don’t know exactly when my anxiety got worse, but by last January, it was so bad I could hardly focus in class.
When I went to do assignments, I didn’t know how because I hadn’t learned the material.
So I just . . . stopped. I went to class and took home the assignments, but they sat in my folders untouched.
“What is this?” Mom said to me the night grades came in. I was curled on the couch, watching cartoons, and she grabbed the remote to pause them.
She held up her phone, and when I squinted, she came closer so I could see. My grades, right there on her parent account in the school’s online learning management system. I’d forgotten she could access them too. All those D’s and F’s, one after another, hit me in the chest like fists.
“What happened, Sidney?” she asked.
I stared blankly at the scene frozen on the TV.
I didn’t know where to start: the thoughts I was having about terrible things happening to her or Shar or Dad, the ones that felt so real they left me with my heart pounding, afraid I was losing my mind?
Or the drunken texts Dad had been sending me, late at night, apologizing for what a shitty father he was, raging about Mom and what a bitch she was for keeping him from me, even though he had visitation rights but just never used them?
My thoughts felt too heavy, too complicated, too much to describe, much less do anything about, and I didn’t want to make things worse between her and Dad by telling her how he was acting. So I didn’t say anything.
“You’ll have to work hard to avoid repeating the year,” she’d said at the time, and I nodded my head.
The next week, I’d started with my tutor, and Mom checked in with me every night about my homework until the end of the year, when my report card came in again. B’s and C’s. Crisis averted.
But not the one in my head, because even though Dad’s texts stopped, my thoughts didn’t. Some days it feels like I’m standing at a dam in my mind, rushing from one spewing leak to another, trying to stop the images as they firehose out. I haven’t drowned yet, but sometimes I’m afraid I might.