Линн Коуди - Best Canadian Stories 2020

When they first touched each other they were eight, sleeping in an old inner room without windows in the basement. They were hyper and laughing hard and then her eyes were close to the freckles on his shoulders.

They talked about gay-ness exactly once, just after Hazel and her mom moved across the province. They were on the phone and about to start high school. Hazel was in a stage of proto-transness, a stage in which she was terrified of herself and had no idea why.

She brought it up this way: “What do you think about gay people? Are they OK or should they be killed? I don’t know.”

“They should probably be killed,” Christopher said.

“OK.”

They talked on the phone a lot after Hazel moved away. She’d always wondered if Christopher remembered that. It would’ve been unusual for two boys. (“Boys.”) Mom let her call him for twenty minutes on the weekend. Long distance. Hazel’d say, “But you talk to your boyfriend every night for hours!” And Hazel’s mom, forever calm, just said, “This’ll make more sense to you as an adult.”

It did make sense to Hazel now, if not in the way her mother probably imagined.

Christopher was always happy to talk. He didn’t have the same emotional needs back then and even as a young teenager, Hazel recognized that. But he always made time for her. He did.

Hazel last saw Christopher when she was twenty. Home from out west, knowing her boy-days were numbered and so were the reasons to come back to this part of the world. She and her mom were at her aunt’s for Christmas and Hazel walked from the other end of town in the snow, the creak of her boots the only sound in the pale afternoon sunset.

She walked in the door of Christopher’s house and no one was on the first floor. She went down to the basement, noticed a bedroom off to the side with power tools everywhere and half-installed hardwood floors. In the rec room, Christopher and a couple other guys were watching The Departed with a two-four of Bud. (There was a particular kind of American, Hazel had learned since, who was bummed to know that Canadians drank Bud.) One of the guys said he wanted more beer, but hated the girl who worked at the vendor.

Hazel had felt herself teetering on an edge then, between a fear of how volatile it might be to continue knowing these boys, and a distant sadness in the knowledge she might never see these stupid fuckers again.

Crazily enough, there had been a trans guy in town, her age, who’d come out around a year prior. He’d announced himself, then right away skipped off to the city. Hazel brought up his name like a test, like hazarding an exhibition round.

“So you guys hear about…?”

“Oh god the dyke !”

And everyone laughed.

“I have no problem with gay people,” Christopher said. “But gender reassignment….” A visible shiver came over him, something real and revulsive. He shook his head like he’d stomped on something crawly and was trying to forget about it.

When the two-four ran out, they all went to a party where they did shots, then played a drinking game, then drank rum out of Solo cups, then shotgunned beers in the garage with their coats on, and when Hazel stumbled into a wall the boys laughed and said incredulously: “Are you drunk ?!” It was 7 p.m. and the moon was shining behind a cloud of blankets and after that they went to the bar.

The main takeaway for her: How did Christopher Penner, in Pilot Mound, Manitoba, years before Chaz Bono would ever grace a magazine, know about the term gender reassignment ? Weeks later, Hazel got on a plane and flew back west, and weeks later she transitioned, then dropped out of school, then fell away from all she’d ever known. And as the following decade churned, in tiny rooms in roiling bright cities, the thought of Christopher would flit down onto her, like a moonbeam startling her awake.

Ten years later Hazel crash-landed back home—untriumphantly, the prairie winter beginning its months-long descent into lightlessness. And among other things, she began to search for him.

She didn’t have any friends left in Pilot Mound. Her aunt wouldn’t talk to her, her mother didn’t know anything, having moved to the city years ago. And Hazel couldn’t even fucking find anything on social media. Last she’d heard of Christopher, years ago, he’d moved to the city, too. Even his parents she couldn’t track down.

Idly and with pleasure, she set up parameters for him on OkCupid, boys of a certain age and height range. She looked for boys with red hair and dustings of freckles around their collarbones. She checked this every week or so. When she heard of anyone with the name Chris, she would ask, “No chance you mean Christopher Penner, do you?”

Hazel really didn’t expect anything to come of any of this. Her searches were like periodically buying a lottery ticket: a nice, dependable, dopamine-filled surge where the come-up of hope somehow always eclipsed the comedown of disappointment.

She wasn’t doing much with her days besides going to AA and volunteering with a nascent sex workers’ rights organization, of whose members Hazel was somehow the only one who’d ever touched boy parts for money. The nights she was home, she made dinner for her mom, but usually Hazel’s mom was at her boyfriend’s place or at work, and usually that suited Hazel just fine.

She had no idea what to do with her life, if she had a future, or if she wanted one. In the absence of the alcohol she’d flooded herself with for half her life, her tired, newly sober body handed her a sense of alertness she hadn’t felt since she was a teenager. At the same time, she also felt herself turning into a slug as that body barely moved. Many days she never left the house. She slept and watched Netflix and cooked.

Hazel figured sooner or later one of three things would happen:

1. Welfare would dump her

2. She’d fall off the wagon

3. Her mom would move in with her boyfriend, who, no matter how much he got along with Hazel, would be unlikely to in tandem take in a 30-year-old transsexual ex-hooker in recovery

Or maybe all of those things would happen at once. Regardless, she didn’t imagine this quiet un-life would last forever.

In the meantime, she hoarded her cash, went to AA and the nascent sex workers’ rights organization and shut off her brain. And one of few bright spots in imagining her future was when she indulged this loving spot of her past and scanned the internet in search of Christopher.

Well, Hazel did do one other unusual thing in this period. She went on a date.

Marina from the nascent sex workers’ rights organization—Marina who was not a sex worker, but who was a grad student—introduced the two of them. Marina knew the guy through lefty something or other. Hazel had seen him around at a couple things. He was cute. Tall, blonde hair, glasses. Good politics, ungregarious. Hazel was into all of this.

“You’re getting dressed up like that?” asked her mom that evening.

Hazel was in the bathroom with the door open, in a flowery blue dress, applying eyeliner.

“I’m going on a date,” said Hazel.

“A date,” said her mom slowly. “Where?”

“Baked Expectations.”

“No shit,” said her mom. “Your dad and I went there once. Long time ago.”

“I haven’t been on a date in years. A real date, anyway. I don’t remember the last time that happened.” Hazel said this awkwardly, still re-learning how to talk to her mother as an adult, a woman, a person commiserating.

Her mother softened at this. “No, huh?”

“Nope.”

“It’d be nice if you met someone,” her mom said quietly.