I hated my school uniforms, which were always shorts and polo shirts. In my first year of school I took a pleated skirt out of the lost property box and put it on. My teacher made me take it off and told me that boys and girls had to have separate uniforms, like players on different teams.
When I was in year three, I was taken out of class by Mrs Barnes, the school counsellor. She took me to her office. She had sandy grey hair and was really thin and looked at me without blinking. I thought I was in trouble. She asked questions about my long hair, about why I had no friends, about my mum, about my dad, about things I liked and didn’t like. Then she asked if I was a boy or a girl.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m just myself.’
She asked me again. It was a question other kids always asked when they were teasing me. I knew that being a girl was something weird and wrong and shameful.
I told her I was a boy.
She went out of the room for a while, and she came back with an envelope. She told me to give it to my mum when I got home. I opened it as soon as school ended. It said that I should see a psychologist. I ripped it into little pieces and threw it away.
I tried harder to fit in, but there wasn’t a space for me. I didn’t know how I was supposed to be. It was like I was born speaking a language that nobody else could understand, but I couldn’t talk any other way. So I stopped speaking, and I learned how to be invisible.
One night a couple of months after speaking to Mrs Barnes, I was watching cartoons on the iPad I stole from Gabby. Bugs Bunny was being chased by a little bald man with a gun. To trick him, Bugs disguised himself as a woman in a green jumpsuit and red lipstick, and he danced and sang a little song. It gave me a strange queasiness in my stomach and I got tingles all down my neck. I watched it over and over.
My mum was out, so I went into her room and found a green summer dress. I had never put on a dress before. Then I went into the bathroom and tried on her red lipstick. I pressed my lips together with a tissue between them, just like she always did. I stared at myself. I had never felt pretty before, and I liked it.
I put on a pair of low black heels and spent the next few hours swooshing and dancing and singing that little song: ‘Can’t you see that I’m much sweeter? I’m your little senorita.’
My mum came home around midnight and caught me. She was really angry. She said she could hear me singing from the bottom steps of the apartment block. She grabbed me hard by the arm and marched me towards the bathroom. She smelled like licorice and cigarettes and perfume. When her heels fell off my feet she dragged me the rest of the way. She scrubbed at my lips and told me that if I ever wore her clothes or her make-up again she would leave me out on the street. Then she pulled the dress up over my head so fast that my arm got caught and the seam ripped. She yelled at me for a long time about how she had no privacy and nothing for herself and that I made everything difficult and I didn’t respect the sacrifices she made.
I didn’t dress up again for a few months after that, not even in my mum’s t-shirts. I thought about it every day, though. I wanted to feel that way again, but I didn’t want her to abandon me.
Then I found a communal laundry room in the apartment block. People would run a dryer cycle overnight and pick up their clothes in the morning. When my mum was out at night, I went down there and opened the dryer and stole anything that was small and looked nice. I took them back and put them on. Then I coloured my lips with red crayon and used an old watercolour set for eyeshadow. I played for a couple of hours, then I would hide the clothes in a garbage bag and wash my face.
I felt ashamed, because I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t stop. It was addictive. I started looking forward to my mum going out and leaving me by myself. When I dressed up, I felt relaxed and happy. It was like unclenching my fist. I didn’t have to be Sam anymore. I liked looking at this new person in the mirror.
The more I enjoyed it, the worse I felt afterwards. I thought I was the only person in the world who did it. When I stuffed the clothes back in the garbage bag, I always told myself it was the last time, but the next chance I got, I dressed up again.
Then everything got really hard.
We had been living in an apartment block in Midland for about six months. A week after my eleventh birthday, I got home from school and my mum was stuffing all her clothes into suitcases and black plastic bags. She told me to hurry up and do the same, because our landlord was coming back with the police to evict us. I only had a few minutes. We threw all our clothes and anything valuable into my mum’s Hyundai and drove away just as the police came around the corner. I was really upset that we had to leave all my kitchen utensils behind. Then I remembered that I left the shoebox full of tissue kisses under the bed. Then I remembered the most precious thing of all.
‘Did you bring the honeybee?’ I asked.
‘What? No, I don’t think so. Be quiet, I have to think.’
I begged her to go back, but she wouldn’t. I was devastated. The honeybee was gone. I tried to cry as silently as I could.
We didn’t have any money or anywhere to go. All her credit cards had been cancelled. We couldn’t find a place to rent because we had been blacklisted. She was too proud to stay with her friends or at a refuge, so we lived in the car.
She told me we were on a camping trip, a real one this time. In the evenings we went to the beach and used the showers in the change rooms. Then we drove to the closest supermarket and crept around the back to go on a treasure hunt, which meant looking through the skip bins for food. A lot of it was still in plastic packaging and okay to eat.
Late at night we parked in quiet neighbourhoods near ovals or parks and locked the doors. We slept on the back seat and kept each other warm. My mum hummed songs and I pretended to fall asleep. I felt safe with her. We got caught a few times by security guards and had to move. It was cosy and fun at first, but I missed having a kitchen, and I really missed dressing up.
After a few days my mum started going to pubs at night. She left me in the car and told me she would be back in an hour. I would sit there until the pub closed and she came out.
Some nights she took me in with her. I sat on my own and watched horseracing on the television or rolled balls on the pool table. Sometimes someone who worked behind the bar would bring me a basket of chips or a side salad or a glass of Coke. At one pub I found a ten-dollar note under a table. I gave it to my mum at the bar. She was talking to a man in a pink collared shirt. When he saw me, he said he had to make a call and left. My mum put the ten-dollar note on the beer mat, and later I saw the barman take it. The man in the pink shirt never came back, but she was already talking to somebody else.
My mum was really beautiful. She had long blonde hair and a nice figure and high cheekbones. Wherever we went men looked at her. Sometimes they called out rude things, or they walked up and flirted. She was always gossiping or complaining about men on the phone with her friends, but she never introduced me to any of them.
We had been living in the car for almost three months and we both knew we couldn’t do it for much longer. Then my mum met Steve, and everything changed really quickly.
I met Steve on the day we moved into his house in Scarborough. He had a square jaw and a big chest and a round gut and he was tall. He had faded tattoos down his left arm. He was ten years older than my mum.
My mum told me he was her friend, but I knew they were together. He grabbed her waist a lot, and he liked to put his arm around her shoulder and pull her close. She would smile and lean into him. They had only known each other for a few days.