Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

I heard myself say, “Audrey Hepburn.”

The circus student touched ground. Eileen let out a long stream of smoke. “We can do that.”

I walked home with John and Eileen through the Portuguese district. A warm, meaty smell came from the small restaurants and bakeries. “Want to have dinner at our place again?” John asked. “It would be good for me. You can criticize my cooking.”

Before I could answer, something in the near distance caught John’s eye and he ran ahead without us. He rounded the corner and disappeared. “Peter! Come here! I want to show you something!”

When we caught up to him, he was standing on an unremarkable street. The road curved downhill, bordered by a row of faded, matching condo buildings that had once been painted in different bright colors. John had his hand on the wall of the yellow one.

“This again?” Eileen said.

“Peter hasn’t seen it,” John said. “My mom is a real estate agent. She showed me this.” He patted the wall. “Put your hand here.”

I did.

“Push. Really hard.”

The stucco wall responded like it was a sponge. The belly of an animal inhaling and then exhaling, shrinking back and then expanding.

“Isn’t that cool?” John asked.

“That’s terrible,” I said. “It’s going to collapse.” I pictured the rubble rolling downhill with the floods of the spring thaw. I rubbed the wall gently, as though I could encourage it to stay in place.

John whacked the building with his palm and it shuddered in response. “It’s also sinking, see? The whole complex is. But you look at it from far away and it’s this solid thing, like it’s been here forever and it’s going to be here forever.”

I felt like I was missing something. “Somebody lives here,” I said. “It’s their home.”

Eileen laughed suddenly and tossed her arm around John’s neck. “Leave Peter alone. You’re so fucking high.”

We walked back to their apartment. John beelined for the bathroom. Alone with Eileen in the living room, I could hear John singing through the walls as he pissed. I started scanning the spines on their giant bookshelf.

“You want to borrow a book, Peter?” Eileen said.

“Like what?”

“Whatever you need.” She glanced at me sideways. “You okay with being called Peter?”

“What else would you call me?”

“John hated his old name.” Eileen said. “Sometimes his parents slip up and call him by it, or use female pronouns. Even after all these years.”

“Did he pick his own name?”

“Of course.”

I shook my head at that. Of course.

She let me stare into their bookshelf for a long time without comment. Textbooks and college-course packs on queer theory and gender theory, books of memoir and poetry with heady, academic subtitles, political tracts — they were defined by these things, it was their hobby, their subject of scholarly study, their political fight. They had no other books.

John reappeared at Eileen’s side, and she fed her hands into his. They beamed at me like proud parents. They’d made me into a project. Out of nowhere, I missed Claire — our ecstatic confessions on the couch. Mired in self-hatred up to our knees, trudging toward the approval of her God and my father. It had been easier to detail explicit dreams to Claire than it would be to say I should have been a woman to these kids. As soon as I said it, as soon as I said what they wanted me to say, everything would change. And I still didn’t believe them — you couldn’t just rename yourself, you couldn’t tear down the skyline and rebuild and think there wouldn’t be consequences.

The day of the party, Eileen led us through the Village des Valeurs. She ran her hand along the dress rack without looking, seeking out satin by feel. She picked a violet strapless gown and a fake pearl necklace, four rows deep. We went to a costume store that was nearly cleaned out, but John found a brown wig in a high bouffant, a twenty-five-cent tiara to slip into it, opera gloves, and a long-stemmed cigarette holder.

We got dressed at their apartment. They had to explain to me that Eileen was supposed to be Michael Jackson and John was supposed to be Justin Timberlake, as their costumes were a lot less elaborate than mine. Eileen just had a white suit jacket and John dressed the way he always did, in a hoodie and his red skate shoes.

Eileen did my makeup first. She wouldn’t let me look in the mirror while she worked. “For effect,” she said. I’d never seen her anything other than bare-faced. She curled my eyelashes, filled in my eyebrows with a pencil, and applied mascara, blue-gray eye shadow, and maroon lipstick. She zipped the dress as far as she could up my back, then closed the top with a series of safety pins. John arranged the wig and tiara on my head. I put on the gloves and necklace. I borrowed some clunky, too-big shoes of Eileen’s. I didn’t tell them I already had my own collection of heels.

I almost didn’t want to look. Nothing would be as good as how it felt: the sweet constraint around my hips from the dress, tight as a sausage casing, squeezing joy into my skull, making it swell. The satin on my hands, my spidery eyelashes, the weight of the hair and the jewelry. I loved the sound of the gown’s train swishing behind me. It felt like something restored: a tail cut off and regrown.

They each held one of my arms and guided me to the full-length mirror in their bedroom. There she stood, at last: the iconic Audrey, only with Adele’s almond eyes, her sloping cheekbones. The face a little more drawn, a little harder, but undeniably her.

“Let’s take this on the road,” John said.

I panicked at the threshold, after Eileen had already opened the door. “I can’t go outside.”

“Why not?” John said. Eileen went to the kitchen.

I thought about walking on the street, riding the Métro. I shook my head.

“It’s Halloween,” John insisted. “Everybody’s dressed up.” I kept shaking my head. I was trembling, the outside world blowing in, so close I could trip and tumble into it.

Eileen reappeared with a water bottle of what looked like orange juice. She held my head and brought the bottle to my mouth as though coaxing a baby to drink. The alcohol stung my nostrils. “Drink,” she said.

I pulled away. “I don’t like—”

“This is exactly why God invented vodka,” Eileen said.

I stared down into the bottle. “You look beautiful,” John said.

Eileen had filled up three large bottles with her orange-juice mixture. I supposed she meant for us to sip on them all night. I took the one she was offering. I tilted the bottle up so the liquid ran straight down my throat. I swallowed. I inhaled. I swallowed. I had some memory of doing this before.

They watched me chug the whole bottle. Eileen said, “Ready to go now?”

We stepped out. They stayed on either side of me, arms looped through mine, so I couldn’t turn back. The Métro was crammed with other people in costumes. I watched my reflection racing past in the windows, blackened by the underground tunnels. Audrey looked back in flashes, moving jerkily, like a filmstrip. I winked.

The party in Parc-Ex was partially in a warehouse loft and partially on the street. Two sets of speakers played two different pop songs in the same key and time signature, melding them together. “Inside,” Eileen yelled. A firecracker skidded along the pavement and popped in agreement.

People were dressed outlandishly, but no one seemed to be wearing a costume. Kids went by in garbage bags cut to fringes, cling wrap that showed through, homemade medieval armor, latex suits, corsets, wigs. From a distance, I couldn’t tell the humans from the art and the furniture. Studio lights and a backdrop were set up in one corner, and someone took pictures with a blinding flashbulb. The teenagers in front of the camera struck dramatic, sexual poses. More and more, I liked the feeling of Eileen’s and John’s elbows against my ribs, dragging me as they greeted people, drifted away again.