“Looks like we need to take you to the mall for some runners,” she surmised.
I waved away her suggestion. “Nah,” I said, scuffing my toe in embarrassment. With Jillian having paid for my plane ticket already because my mom didn’t make that much money, I didn’t want her to feel I was taking advantage of her generosity. She was always getting me stuff, little things like music on iTunes and cute notebooks and pens and T-shirts, and I couldn’t say no if I wanted to. So I didn’t. When I’d gotten to Edmonton, she’d taken me shopping, and now, for the first time in my life, I had a wardrobe of clothes that wasn’t just soulless gray uniforms, and that I actually liked. A pair of sneakers would be just one more thing she got me, but I didn’t want to ask for them. Looking at my watch, I thought again of how Cynthia never gave me gifts for no reason. It made me feel a squishy discomfort in my belly when I thought of the contrast.
“Could you call them sneakers like a normal person, please?” I begged Jillian with my hands clasped, like it was a really huge deal that she was using a Canadian word. It was a tactic to change the subject. She didn’t bite, only watched me cut eye and sucked her teeth with a steups. I folded my arms sulkily. “Yeah, maybe I do need new sneakers. But I’m not going to call them runners.”
Jillian rolled her eyes. “Whatever, doux doux. We were going to go out to dinner anyway; we could stop at the mall on the way there.” I didn’t have time to react to the ominous feeling in my stomach at the mention of the mall. She took a sip of her juice and broke into a grin, shouting, “Guess what!”
“What?”
“We got our first contract to publish an ebook!”
“Yay, I gather?” I half-smiled.
“Yay, definitely,” she confirmed. “It’s just one, but it’s a start. A writer in California saw our ad on an #ownvoices publishing Facebook page and messaged us. She said she was glad to give her business to a fellow lesbian.”
I squirmed a little bit when she said that word. I had been living with her and Julie for a couple of months and obviously I knew that they were gay, but it wasn’t something I was comfortable talking about with them. They were amused and sometimes exasperated by my attitude but didn’t let it change the way they behaved, either toward each other or toward me. They were active members of the #ownvoices and LGBTQ communities, and I did realize enough to know LGBTQ meant “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer,” which, if you think about it, is a bunch of very different kinds of people, but still people who think they have more in common with each other than they have with the rest of the world.
At home home, I’d never given much thought at all to that community, especially as my mother never once said anything about it to me, not even while describing her own sister. Nothing prepared me to consider this topic. Or talk about it.
Frankly, unless you were personally acquainted with someone who identified in that way, odds were you didn’t know anything about their world. We didn’t have TV shows that showed how Trini LGBTQ people lived their lives, or cute Facebook videos about their families. Aside from Aunt Jillian, there was only one other person everyone knew. She was a trans woman famous for having her surgery because she was the first Trini to do it, I guess. She was on the news a lot and even ran for a city council seat in San Fernando, which she lost. But her visibility was the exception. Where I was from, anybody on the street who looked even a little bit less than straight could get harassed and threatened. The priest at home once stood on the pulpit and preached about the perils of “the sinful LGBTQ lifestyle.” Even my school principal brought in police officers to a special assembly to tell us that being gay, lesbian, or anywhere on the spectrum that wasn’t heterosexual was against the law, after a boy got beat up because the kids said he was a bullerman. I knew that was a nasty word, like if I were to be called nigger. It actually was technically against the law in Trinidad to be gay.
I was straight. At least, I thought I was straight. I had never tested the hypothesis, never having had a boyfriend, but I figured I’d never wanted to have a girlfriend either, so that settled that. Or to be somebody else’s boyfriend, come to think of it. The trans woman everybody knew about in Trinidad used to be a guy, obviously. To be honest, that was pretty weird to me. But I didn’t know what it was like to be trapped inside the wrong body, which is how some of these people said they felt when they talked about it on their Insta or whatever. Or maybe I did, in a way. Maybe I was not who I was supposed to be and that was why I was so sad all the time.
One day, I would talk to Aunt Jillian about what it was like to be a lesbian. I promised myself. Maybe. But for now, it was okay for us to just sip cranberry juice in the kitchen and look at the bright evening outside the window.
Julie came upstairs and gave me a belly noogie through my T-shirt. I didn’t care about wrinkling this shirt. I had on a white one with a frog wearing a crown. There was a speech bubble above him that said “Any day now, princess.” I knew it was really a guy’s T-shirt, but I thought it was so funny at the time that Julie bought it for me at the freakishly ginormous mall on my first mall trip, when she and Jillian took me on a shopping spree for new clothes. Guy clothes and girl clothes didn’t mean that much to me, mostly. I wasn’t really into fashion—not the look of an average teenage girl, anyway—especially since I’d cut off all my hair. I just wore whatever I wanted. People said I dressed like Jaden Smith. Needless to say, that just pissed my mother off even more; Jaden Smith is a boy.
“Why don’t you at least try to look normal?” my mother used to ask me.
There really wasn’t an answer to that, was there? And if we were to go to the mall again, I wasn’t going to be changing my habits. Maybe I’d find another frog T-shirt, this time with a prince.
Julie mussed my cropped hair and pecked Jillian on the cheek as she came into the room. “What’s happening?”
“I think this one needs new runners,” Jillian said, throwing me a teasing look; I faked a shudder and rolled my eyes, mouthing out the word “sneakers” with gusto. After my panic attacks I was often exhausted, but sometimes I acted goofy instead, wired and jittery, like now. Maybe it was another form of nerves. She talked over my head. “I was thinking we could stop at the mall on the way to dinner.”
Julie nodded, wiping imaginary dirt from the kitchen counter.
“By the way, Mexican or Italian for dinner?” Jillian asked her.
“I don’t care. What do you think, kid?” Julie looked to me.
As usual, I had no idea. “Mexican is nice. But Italian is nice, too. And, come to think of it, so is steak,” I stumbled.
“Steak is another option,” Jillian agreed. “Mmm…red meat.” She literally licked her lips. We all laughed.