Chapter 3: Part 3 — Monday Evening

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Part 3: Monday Evening

After my grandma had deadnamed me, my mom came and found me crying in my room.

“She doesn’t mean to upset you,” my mom opened.

“I’m just so tired of having the same conversation with Grandma, mom!” I sniffed through sobs. “I thought that, maybe when I went on the blockers, maybe she’d see that this is who I really am.”

My mom hugged me. She meant well, but she wasn’t great with what I was going through, either.

“Just focus on the positives,” she said, deflecting. “You had a great day at school and you made a new friend.”

“Yeah,” I laughed through a sniffle. “We played soccer and I set up two goals. I think they want me to join the team.”

“Now honey,” my mom replied. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You’ve just joined the school. Why don’t you get settled there first before you…”

If there was a perfect way to end the sentence she had just started, I don’t think my mom knew what it was.

“…before you take on more commitments?”

“…before you upset the running of things?”

“…before you start trying to join a girls’ team you boy-Boy-BOY!”

She’d never say it, of course. But she was thinking it. Not in the way that my grandma was thinking it – Grandmaactually believed it. No, mom was thinking it because she knew other moms would be thinking it. The moms of the other girls on my team would just be the start. It would be the moms of the girls on other teams where things would really get caustic.

“It’s not fair…”

“It gives an unequal advantage…”

“Boys should stick to boys’ sports…”

“…before you join something you might not like,” my mom finally finished.

“But I do like it, Mom,” I replied.

“You liked your last school, too,” she reminded me.

Pearl Grove High School had been my second school this calendar year. And I had liked it. At first. Before Leierna Scott and The Sweatpants Incident. But I didn’t want to think about my second school right now. I was too busy focusing on my third.

“I wasn’t really right for there,” I dismissed, using my best I-don’t-really-want-to-talk-about-it tone of voice.

“It wasn’t really right for you,” Mom replied in an oddly neutral tone.

“This won’t be like Pearl Grove,” I reassured her, and laid my hand on her arm.

She smiled, but I don’t think she was convinced. In fact, the more I thought about it, the less sure I was that we were talking about schools at all.

When it was clear that my grandparents were not going to leave without at least seeing me, I dragged myself out of my room and downstairs for dinner. It was meatloaf. My dad had done me a veganloaf, but the smell of processed meat flushed in from the kitchen, bleaching everything else away. Then it hung. Over the dinner table. Like a cloud.

“Would you like some meatloaf, Erro…” my grandma began. My mom shot her a sharp look. “Would you like some meatloaf, dear?” my grandma finished.

“Can I have the veganloaf?” I asked, looking at my dad.

“Are you sure you don’t want to try the meatlo…?” Grandma tried again. I could feel my temperature rising. It was my grampa who came coolly to the rescue.

“Oh, let her have whatever she wants,” Grampa replied, dismissively, yet gently.

“Well, I really don’t see what’s wrong with offering the child some proper nutrition,” my grandma replied to no one at all. There had been a pause before she’d said ‘the child’. I was sure everyone caught it; I was sure no one was going to say anything about it. I cracked my neck a little in that way that I knew annoyed Grandma.

“Would you like to go for a walk in the hills on Sunday?” Grampa asked. I used to love to walk with Grampa. When I was younger and still mostly going by Errol, I’d build forts with him. ‘Dens’ he called them. He’d grown up in Britain. I guess they have different names for things over there.

He used to take me walking every year for my birthday when I was much younger. My birthday was this weekend too, but it was on the Saturday. Grampa and Grandma weren’t coming to that, of course, because — frankly — who has their grandparents to their 15th birthday? I would have loved to go with him on the Sunday, but I knew I couldn’t, even before my grandma barged in there.

“Yes, we can all go,” my grandma interjected. “You can maybe build a house like you used to and decorate it with all sorts of pretty things…”

I couldn’t tell if this was an overcompensation thing or just a grandma thing: boys build forts; girls keep houses. This might have been her best effort at trying to engage with my identity. All it succeeded in doing was making my heart race and my blood boil.

“I can’t this Sunday,” I informed them as casually as I could manage. “I have to get my shot.”

My grandma stopped what she was chewing as if she had discovered a beetle -– half-a-beetle — on her fork.

“The clinic,” my mom clarified. “The blockers.”

“Well, I don’t see why you need to go mutilating the poor child,” my grandma commented. That was it. I’d heard enough out of Wrinkles the Bigot.

“For a start,” I weighed in, “they’re puberty blockers, not surgery. They’re once a month and they’re an injection. Secondly, I’m not some poor child who doesn’t know what she’s doing. This is my choice, Grandma. My choice! And I’m sorry if you don’t see why I need to make it, or why I choose not to eat meat, or why deadnaming people is wrong. But those are your problems!”

My father and mother had stopped chewing. Dad wore a tired expression on his face and rubbed the graying collar of his once-white shirt; mom flushed rouge at the cheeks and reached for the rather large glass of red wine she had poured for herself. Only my sister Anna sat there, happily chewing her food with a satisfied grin on her face that seemed to shout, ‘Right on, sis!’

I’m not sure if what my grandma did next was done with malice or ignorance or some other thing, but it was enough to send me running again for my room and for my dad (of all people) to stand up and ask her to leave.

Right at the peak of my righteous indignation, my grandma pawed at her throat innocently and said, “Well that looks like a perfectly masculine response to me…”

I have never

hated my life more

than in that instant.

Submitted: January 01, 2025

Young Adult teen drama ya lgbtq trans