Be Myself! - 22. Luce's Aria

Throughout the day our teachers kept reminding us that the school would not tolerate any kind of bullying towards students. They were obviously talking about Charlie in particular, but what had happened to Henry was still fresh in our memories. It was probably because of what our friend went through that the general attitude towards Charlie was one of curiosity and amazement rather than hostility. At lunch time, when we decided to ask Charlie if he would like to be part of our Gay Club, we found him and his blond friend surrounded by a hoard of students, like an impenetrable live wall. We could hear Charlie’s enthusiastic voice answering questions, but we could not get close enough to make sense of his words.

“We’re too late, let’s find a quieter place to eat,” Hannah told us, grabbing Olivia by the arm and turning towards the door. Henry and Edward began to follow, but Jean kept marching towards the barrier of people. He dove into an area with a particularly high concentration of guys, and after some screaming and mild panic, the wall opened for us.

“Are you always like that?” Charlie asked Jean, raising an eyebrow. An instant later, Jean was sitting on his lap with one arm over his shoulders.

“I want to know if you have a cock. You haven’t answered my question yet.” Charlie rolled his eyes.

“And I won’t, at least not until you learn it’s not all about genitals.”

“Can I see it then? If you don’t want to tell, I can make do with a visual demonstration!” By this point everyone around us was either embarrassed or scared by Jean’s blunt questioning. Hannah and Helena seemed to be the only exceptions. In fact, it was the blond girl who put an end to Jean’s antics by grabbing his tie and dragging him off Charlie’s lap rather violently. She could have been trying to choke him.

“Shut up before I take you to the Headmistress and tell her you’ve been sexually harassing the new student,” she threatened, sounding downright terrifying. “Go snog Henry or something.”

“I’ll do it because I think it’s a good idea, not because you told me to,” Jean answered, grabbing Henry by his shoulders and disappearing with him.

“We’re sorry about him. Apparently some really bad stuff happened in his past that turned him into a creepy sex machine. We’ve mostly learned to ignore it by now, but I still think he’s way out of line,” Helena apologised to Charlie once Jean was gone. Hannah stepped in defence of her friend, though.

“Jean’s past is really complicated. Healing from something like this takes time, but some people can’t really understand it.” She looked at Helena menacingly. “Anyway, we though we should introduce ourselves properly. We’re the Gay Club, though not everyone here is gay. So if you want to hang out…”

“If not everyone is gay, why do you call it Gay Club, then?” Charlie’s friend interrupted. Hannah shrugged.

“Because the name stuck.”

“Well, that sucks. Charlie doesn’t feel included in the ‘gay’ label, so unless you go all out and call it LGBTI club, we’re staying away,” Charlie’s friend answered. Hannah was going to reply, but Olivia was faster.

“What does the ‘I’ stand for?” she asked. This time, it was Charlie who answered.

“Intersex. It’s basically what happens when your body is not stereotypically male or female in some way. It’s more proof that there’s a lot more to gender and sex than male and female, and I personally find it awesome.” Charlie and his friend exchanged knowing looks, leaving us wondering what it was supposed to mean.

“Is that even possible?” Edward asked from somewhere behind me.

“Wait for your PSE class and you’ll know.” Charlie winked to Edward, who let out an exasperated sigh. “Other than that, the internet has quite a lot of useful information if you absolutely can’t wait.”

“Fine. How about we call ourselves the LGBTI Club and you join us?” Helena asked the duo. Charlie and his friend exchanged that kind of look that means they are reading each other’s minds and nodded. “Great. I’m Helena Clark and these are my friends, Hannah, Olivia, Oscar, and Edward,” she answered, pointing at each of us in turn. “I assume you know my girlfriend already, because she has been speaking about you for ages,” Helena bear-hugged Ariadne, making the younger girl blush.

“Yes, we met once.” It was not Charlie who answered, but his friend. She waved and smiled at the Headmistress’s daughter, but it only caused Ariadne to blush even more. “Her mum is very cool. Like, one of the coolest mums ever.” There were multiple murmurs of approval and nodding heads following this statement. “My name is Luce, by the way, like the Italian for ‘light’. It’s nice to meet you!”

“Are you Italian or something?” Edward asked, staring at Luce with a general air of confusion.

“No, I just like the name,” Luce smiled. Something about her answer bothered my inner sense of reasoning, but I could not figure it out before she opened her mouth again. “My family is into theme-naming: dad is called Lucian, and mum’s name is Luvinia. My brothers are Lucius and Lugh, so we needed something that started with L-U. But anyway, now that introductions are over, I have some business to settle!” Luce crouched in front of Olivia and whispered something in her ear. My girlfriend’s face burned and Luce patted her shoulders encouragingly. “Sorry, guys, I need to borrow Oli for a bit! See you later!”

Olivia tried to smile at me, but she was too nervous to manage it properly. She told me not to follow them, and disappeared for the rest of lunch break.

“Where are they going?” Hannah asked Charlie. She sounded somewhat threatening, as if she feared Luce was going to do something bad to Olivia.

“For a talk, I guess. It’s not really my business,” Charlie shrugged. Hannah did not look happy, but Helena swiftly changed the topic before she could say anything else.

“I’m having a birthday party on Saturday. Do you want to come? Luce is welcome too.” Until that moment I had no idea Helena was planning a birthday party, or that her birthday was coming up. Judging by everyone else’s lack of reaction, though, I was probably the only one.

“Sure, I guess.”

“Great. Give me your number so I can pass you the details.”

That done, our little group was forced to step aside by the mass of curious students who wanted to know more about Charlie’s life and could not wait one more second to find out. There were no more questions about his genitals, though someone asked about toilets.

“Whichever is closer, I guess,” Charlie grinned. No further questions were raised on the subject.

(...)

After her private talk with Luce, Olivia began acting strangely. For the rest of the week she seemed to either avoid me, or she was distracted when we were together. Instead of hanging out at her house like we normally did, she asked to be left alone for a while. She reassured me that she was not angry with me, that it was something she had to figure out on her own, but it still made me worry about her. Staying at home had been out of question since my father’s latest punishment, so I went to Henry’s instead. Jean was often hanging out there too, which led to some interesting situations.

“So, do you guys think Charlie has a cock?” Jean asked on Saturday afternoon. The three of us had agreed to meet at Henry’s and then go to Helena’s party (she had not given me her address, though Henry and Jean seemed to have had it for ages). Jean was currently lying beside Henry on the bed, propping his head up with one hand and caressing Henry’s chest with the other. I was sitting on a bean bag with a smiley face on it. We were in Henry’s bedroom; the only room on the second floor save for a bathroom. It had orange walls and a considerable number of orange paraphernalia. If anything, the room was a clear statement to Henry’s favourite colour. That it was cosy and welcoming could also be related to Henry’s personality.

“She already told you to stop thinking about it,” Henry answered, trying and failing to scold his companion. It took me a while to associate the pronoun ‘she’ with Charlie, even though he had been coming to school in a skirt for the last three days. While I struggled to use female pronouns on a person I had been introduced to as a guy, Henry seemed to be having no trouble at all switching between the two. As for Jean…

“He’s probably saying it because he hasn’t got one and doesn’t want me to find out because it’ll mean I won’t want sex with him.”

“He’s already told you she doesn’t want to have sex.” Jean and I blinked and sent Henry confused stares because of his technically incongruent use of pronouns, even though what he said theoretically made perfect sense.

“They all say that, even Oscar,” Jean shrugged.

“But is it only genitals that make you like someone?” Henry asked. I felt like I should say something, but a voice that sounded remarkably like my father’s shouted inside my head that I should stay quiet and ignore as much as possible the use of the word ‘genital’. “If it is like Charlie said and genitals don’t decide who we are, is it possible that a girl could have a penis and a boy could have a vagina?”

“Argh, no! I don’t want to imagine that!” Jean exclaimed, jumping on top of Henry. “Boys have penises and I like boys and penises. No penis, no deal.” Jean kissed Henry passionately. I turned away when his hand found a certain spot between Henry’s legs, and sought refuge in the bathroom when articles of clothing began to fly across the room and a sock fell on my head. After a while, a thoroughly embarrassed (and fully dressed) Henry came to rescue me, and the rest of the afternoon passed as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. I might have been put off by the sudden sex acts, if the exact same thing had not happened for the last five days.

(...)

The three of us arrived at Helena’s party and we noticed that most of the people were already there. Her house was somewhere in the suburbs, so Henry’s mother had to drive us there. The house had three floors and a green garden full of tall shrubs that made the atmosphere resemble a creepy horror movie. The walls were not painted, but rather preserved to their original limestone colour.

“Have fun, boys! Call when you want me to pick you up!” Henry’s mum shouted as she expertly reversed her car in the narrow street and drove way.

“Cool, tall bushes! I know exactly what to use them for!” Jean exclaimed, completely ignoring Ms Watson and running straight to the garden.

“Oh, hi,” Helena greeted us with a remarkable lack of enthusiasm. “Here is the deal: mum is singing at the BBC Proms tonight and dad went to watch her. The house is all ours, but if you damage anything I will make sure you pay.”

“Cool. It’s free for-all-fucking, right?” Jean asked, though he sounded like he had not paid attention to Helena at all.

“As long as your partners agree and as long as you don’t break anything.”

“Yeah, yeah, that…” Jean made a dismissive hand gesture. Helena rolled her eyes and let us in, though she kept her gaze fixed on Jean for at least ten minutes.

It seemed that Helena had invited everyone from our school year and above, plus some other people I had never seen. The house was packed full of wild teenagers, most of them making loud noises, snogging in plain view, or laughing at those who did the first two. Thanks to my parent’s beliefs that such parties were nothing more than ‘disgusting dens of damnation’, I had never been to one. On one hand, the fact that I was in a place my parents despised fuelled my rebellious spirit and gave me a sense of accomplishment. On the other hand, the longer I stood in Helena’s living room watching people my age getting lost in drunken lawlessness, the more I felt like running away from this madness. I did not feel comfortable at all, and my instincts screamed that this place was not safe. Thankfully, after a couple of minutes of complete disorientation, we were saved by Hannah, who found us wondering aimlessly between the living room and the dining room.

“There you are. I’ve been looking for you,” she said as a way of greeting, pulling Jean aside. “Helena put a table of free drinks in every room, and they get refilled so quickly I would not be surprised if there was some kind of dark magic involved.” Hannah sounded angry. Surprisingly, Jean suddenly became very concerned.

“Have you drunk any?” he asked, eying the room suspiciously. There were so many drunken teenagers around us we could not see the drink tables Hannah had mentioned.

“No, I know better,” she sighed. “But it’s really hard not to. And the smell of drunkenness doesn’t help either.”

“Let’s go outside, it’s probably better there,” Jean suggested. By that point he had completely let go of Henry and me and put an arm around Hannah’s shoulders.

“It’s full of smokers out there.” Hannah rolled her eyes. Jean’s eyes doubled in size and his jaw distended towards the ground.

“Seriously? And she invited you knowing all this would happen?”

“It’s not like she knows exactly why I don’t drink or smoke anymore. And considering how much she likes you and I, I don’t think she would’ve cared if she knew.”

“It still sucks, though,” Jean sighed. Henry and I exchanged curious glances, wondering since when Jean had become such a considerate and understanding friend. Apparently neither of us had thought it was possible before. “How about we go upstairs and find a quieter place to fuck the time away?”

Jean did not wait for a reply to drag the three of us towards the stairs. We went up to the top floor, which contained three rooms and a small bathroom. All the doors to the rooms were closed, but Jean was not deterred by it. He advanced against the door on the left, banging it open and closing it really quickly when he realised it was being occupied by the birthday girl and her girlfriend. Thankfully they still seemed fully dressed, even if they had been lying on a bed and trying to eat each other’s tongues.

“Go have your dirty business in the garden!” Helena shouted after Jean closed the door. Jean took a couple of seconds to recover from the trauma before answering.

“That’s exactly what I plan to do!” He opened the middle door. Four guys were there, and for a moment Jean seemed really torn between joining whatever they were doing or staying with us. Surprisingly, he reluctantly closed the door, marching towards the last room of the floor.

“Did you just give up an orgy to stay with Hannah?” Henry asked, raising his eyebrows so high they disappeared behind his fringe.

“No, I just postponed it. As soon as we find a quiet place, I’m out of here,” Jean answered, putting our worries at ease. Hannah rolled her eyes. “Here goes our last hope…”

Jean slowly opened the third door. Like in a disastrously amateur movie, the four of us stared expectantly at the interior, hoping against all odds it would be empty and ready for use, only to find that…

“Oscar? What are you doing here?”

Only to find that it was already occupied. By a teary Olivia and a concerned Luce.

“We’re looking for a place to stay away from the intoxicated hoard of people this house is currently sheltering,” Hannah answered in her usual threatening tone, though it seemed directed specifically towards Luce.

“Well, Oli and I are kind of done here, so you can stay if you want,” Luce offered. She and Olivia stood up, indicating that we could come in. The room resembled some kind of office, with a desk, a chair, an armchair and a loveseat. There was one bookshelf and many picture frames holding nature portraits on the walls.

“Actually…” Olivia looked between me and Luce. The blond girl somehow understood what she was trying to say.

“Oscar, could you come with us for a minute? Oli and I want to tell you some things.” Luce finished my girlfriend’s thoughts. I nodded and followed them out of the room and into a very secluded corner of Helena’s gigantic back garden. We were hidden behind a tall tree in a place where not even the smoke from the dozens of cigarettes being simultaneously consumed in the nearby area could get to us.

“What is it?” I asked them once we decided on our safe space. Olivia stood in front of the tree, saying she was too nervous to sit down, but told Luce and I to sit nonetheless.

“Oli wants to talk to you about something, but I’ve agreed to start on the subject,” Luce answered, nodding to my girlfriend. Olivia fidgeted with the hem of her jumper (she was wearing a thick blue jumper despite it being mid-August), and looked away. Her eyes filled with water.

“What is going on?” The girls’ attitude made me worried. I wanted to stand and hug Olivia to make her feel better, but Luce put a hand on my thigh, indicating I should stay there and focus my attention on her instead.

“It’s nothing bad, or at least nothing you should think of as bad,” Luce answered. “I’m going to tell you some stuff, but only because Oli swore I could trust you. You have to promise not to tell anyone else what I’m about to say.”

“Ok, I promise.” Luce looked deep into my eyes, as if evaluating my sincerity. I was not lying; I knew very well the importance of keeping secrets.

“Good. The thing is: remember when Charlie spoke about genitals not having anything to do with one’s gender?” I nodded. It would be hard to forget such a mind-blowing speech. “Do you believe her?”

That was an interesting question. I was still struggling to understand it on a deeper level, or to remember that Charlie was supposed to be a girl every now and then. Charlie did look good in a skirt, and had very convincing female mannerisms when he wanted to. I supposed it could mean he was right. I nodded again, though a bit slower.

“Let’s hope you do.” Luce put my hands in between hers and looked at me eye to eye. Her gaze was stern, though oddly reassuring. “What do you think of me?”

“What?” I was not expecting this kind of question. I was not even sure what she meant by it.

“How do I look? Do I look cool? Cute? Pretty? Ugly? What do you think?” she explained. I looked at her face and her body trying to come up with an answer. She was definitely on the pretty side: her body was not very thin like mine, but seemed overall well-proportioned. Her breasts were small, her face was friendly. She was wearing a lot of make-up, but it did not look over-the-top on her. Her hair was blond, but her eyes were almost as dark as mine.

“I guess you’re pretty. And you like pink.” She was wearing a lot of pink, from her shirt to her armbands and to the accessories in her hair.

“What else?” Luce pushed, encouraging me to keep talking. I still had no clue why I was doing this, or what she was getting at.

“You seem cool, I guess, if Olivia likes you,” I tried. Luce nodded, but her eyes said ‘more, more’ in a kind of scary obsession. I almost said she was scary, but I changed my mind at the last minute. “And you are girly,” I said instead. Hopefully there was no subconscious reason for me to substitute ‘scary’ with ‘girly’. I had no problems with girls; I liked their bodies and everything.

“There! There!” Luce almost shouted, like she had found the winning ticket to the lottery. She really scared me then, but my inner sense of politeness tried not to show it. “So you think I’m girly? Like a proper girl and everything?”

By that point I was weirded out not only by the questions being asked of me, but by Luce’s attitude. I was stunned into silence by the seemingly pointless nature of her questioning. Of course Luce was girly. She was probably the girliest girl I had seen since my old friends deserted me. It was so obviously true that I could not imagine why someone would even question that.

At least until she spoke again.

“So what if I told you I was born with a penis?”

The only sounds around us were the faint drunken shouts from the party; this part of the garden was very still and silent. Luce, Olivia, and I were alone against the darkening sky and the light breeze chilling our skin. It could have been a poetic moment of discovery, or a dramatic epiphany; the most daring revelation was out in the open, and there was probably some artistic pressure to make it the climax of a great epic tale.

Instead, I just blinked. Twice.

“You’re a guy, then?” I asked after realising that blinking would get me nowhere.

“No!” Luce face-palmed so hard the red outline of her hand became very visible in her forehead. “You just told me I’m the girliest girl you’ve ever known! How can I be a guy?”

“But if you have a penis…” Olivia face-palmed too. I felt humiliated because they were acting as if I was not supposed to sound confused, as if this was something I was supposed to take in stride and accept as normal.

“Did you pay attention to what Charlie said on Monday? That’s what she meant,” Luce carried on. She sounded like she was making a great effort to not bury her forehead in her hand permanently. “I was born with a penis and brought up as a boy for most of my life. But even when I was a little kid I knew that I wasn’t a boy. I didn’t like the same things boys did, I didn’t want to play with boy toys. I knew there was something different about me, but I didn’t dare tell anyone, because in my family I was the youngest of three boys and I was afraid I would disappoint everyone by being feminine.” Luce paused to look at Olivia. My girlfriend was leaning against the tree, listening to our conversation with teary eyes. I wondered if she was thinking about Luce’s story or if there was something else troubling her. I wanted to hug her to make her feel better, but Luce was still speaking and her words were blowing my mind more than any amount of gay sex in the school toilet could ever do.

“It was only when I met Charlie that things began to change. I was eleven then, and Charlie moved to the house next to mine. We soon became best friends, and she explained to me many things about gender identity and gender presentation. What she told the school this week was just the very tip of the iceberg. From then on we became best friends. I spent a lot of time in her house, and there I felt I could be truly free. Her parents didn’t say anything when I borrowed Charlie’s dresses and put on make-up to pretend I was a princess. They smiled when Charlie told them he was my prince charming who was going to trick the dragon into letting me free from my tower prison, and hugged us when Charlie explained that that dragon was more like our scary world, and that she was going to set me free to be who I really was, get out of that façade of lies that my life had become. She took me out of my prison and helped find the real me.” Luce smiled proudly. Olivia clenched her fists and looked away, as if Luce’s words were hurting her.

“People like me are called transgender. Everyone is assigned a gender at birth by doctors, and they are brought up according to societal expectations of that gender. Most people never see a problem with it because for them the doctor was right. They are happy being the gender they are and they never stop to consider the possibility that this might not be the case for everyone. But sometimes doctors are wrong, and it happens more frequently than people would like to believe.”

“But how do you know you are a girl?” I asked, hoping Luce would not get angry with me. I felt sorry for her past self and her suffering, even if it was not clear to me how this all related to the here and now.

“How do you know you are a guy? If an accident happened tomorrow and you lost your penis, how would you know you were a guy?” she asked in return. I tried hard to think of an answer, but my silence lasted for too long. “It’s hard to explain, isn’t it? I just know I am a girl, like you know you are a guy and Charlie knows he’s a girl some days and a guy on other days.”

“I guess I never thought about it,” I stated, feeling Luce’s revelations take over my mind little by little.

“I guess not. But now you just did. Does it make sense now?”

“You are saying that our gender is what makes sense for us, what we understand is right for us. Most of the time it matches with what our genitals are, but sometimes it doesn’t.”

“Kind of. There are some little details there that are not quite right, but we can talk about them later.” Luce seemed really happy and accomplished. I was glad I had managed to understand everything and make her happy, and that she had decided to take some time to explain all this to me. “The other thing you need to remember is that when things don’t match you shouldn’t be guided by genitals or official documents to decide how to treat people. My sense of self is much more important than a piece of paper created when all I could do to express myself was cry for food. My identity deserves to be respected just like yours.”

“I understand. And I don’t think I could ever think of you as a guy,” I smiled at Luce and Olivia, and both returned the gesture. Olivia tensed again immediately afterwards, though.

“Good. Now we can get to why the hell we called you here in the first place!” Luce announced, sounding far too cheerful. Olivia blushed intensely and bit her lip. It took her a while to summon the courage to look at me again. “I told you my story because there is something really important that we need to tell you, and we thought it would be much easier if we were sure you were on the same page as us.”

“Ok, what is it?” I asked the girls, looking expectantly from one to the other to see who would answer first. I was expecting Luce to speak, since she had monopolised our conversation from the start, but it was actually Olivia who hesitantly broke the silence.

“Oscar, I think I’m a guy.”