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Rose has always been pretty observant. It’s part of her. She observed her parents fight about meaningless things. Did you run the dishwasher? No, you said you would. Are you making things up? Are you saying I’m a liar? You always do this, you’re always like this! Like what? Tuning me out! Are you kidding? All I ever do is listen to you. Oh, so, listening is what you call walking away from me? I need some space! You fucking bitch! Fuck you, and on and on. It’s a well-rehearsed script, a production with two actors and an audience of four.
What came first? The chicken or the egg, did she become observant because of her parents or was she always this way? Hyper-vigilant. Hyper-aware. Replaying memories and taking notes, bookmarking and indexing, keeping record of every interaction in a neat, imaginary journal. It’s a question she’s asked herself a million times.
She thinks it’s a learned thing. When she thinks back to life before the first acting job, it’s a blurry mess. A few moments jump out at her. Cutting her doll’s hair until it was a choppy bob. Pretending to be a masked robber with her brothers’ belongings. Bursting into the kitchen and causing her mother to drop a pan of hot oil on the floor. Lying. Being bad at lying. Crying because she got caught lying. Learning to be better. Never quite getting the hang of it.
Baby her was pathetic. It doesn’t make her wince to think it because it’s true. She cradles what she was and what she is and what she could be in the palm of her hand, and realizes she hasn’t changed, and decides promptly that she must still be pathetic. She’s still an actress, but now she’s good at it, and people like her more than they ever did, but it feels wrong. Odd, because she was rich and famous. What more could she want? How needy was she? Therefore, pathetic.
Her first boyfriend — well, her second, because the real first boy didn’t last a week — was a cute one. It was a small class. Everyone knew each other. Rose had known Evan since the second grade, since his father brought him to Michigan with gaps waiting for adult teeth and a penchant for making magic potions during recess. He also never changed. Stagnation worked well for him. Bad for her.
Evan was extremely awkward. He fumbled pick-up lines. Around her, his hands fluttered like a butterfly with nowhere to land. He made up for it with courtesy. People didn’t always like her and her fame. Through it all, he treated Rose the actress who’s been kidnapped twice the same as Rose who came every Wednesday for a play date. For a long two months, a vision began to formulate, shimmering seductively like a mirage. This was good. This was a relationship. This worked.
And then she observed Evan kissing a boy at junior prom.
Rose walked herself home. A ball of sadness was in her chest. The reasons were wrong. She really liked Evan. She wanted him to be happy. If he couldn’t be happy with her, then that was okay. He deserved happiness.
Why couldn’t she be a boy?
It was the first time she felt it. A dull knife twisting somewhere between her lungs and her heart. A sense of wrongness with no place to go. She shook it off then. She was just jealous, she rationalized. Of course she would think that. She had really liked Evan. But Evan probably wouldn’t stay with her even if she was a boy, and she couldn’t be one, so what difference did it make?
Every few months, the feeling would entrap her, like she had been bitten by something or had her brain hijacked by a parasite. She would go into a feverish daze, thinking and planning and seeing in crystalline clarity what life would be, if she could. About boys in her classes (or, as she aged, on set, or in her friend group, or her family) calling her a dude, a brother, including her properly. About being one of the guys and not one of the girls. About being chivalrous, and saying ‘ladies first,’ and sir and mister and boy and man. About a different body. About a different life.
But she wasn’t in that life. She was in this one. In this life, her name was Rose, and she was a famous actress, and she was too recognizable to run to the mountains and become a lumberjack with a truck. She had a body. It was hers. She wasn’t getting another one. She could be chivalrous without being a man. She could have guy friends without pretending to be one. Come on, Rose. That’s sexist. And heteronormative. She wasn’t a man. She just sometimes wanted to be one. She could be happy like this if she tried.
She didn’t even hate her body. She liked it enough. When she touched it, it responded, and she felt good, and it was fine, but when she was in the afterglow, she wondered what it would have felt like if the chromosomal roll of dice had turned out differently. She didn’t like the way her breasts felt on her, but apparently no one did. Girlhood meant hating yourself, or so everyone said.
She had never told her parents as a toddler that she wasn’t a girl. She hadn’t ‘known’ from then. The opposite. Her mother would recount blissful family stories of Rose in dresses and Rose with hair clips and Rose mispronouncing ‘I’m a girl!’ So, Rose would smile and nod, and stare down the massive feeling. See? I’m normal. This is normal. Leave me alone. I’m not like that. Until she’d half-convinced herself.
She kept it up for a long time. Through three straight ex-boyfriends and five gay ones. Yeah, that’s a lot of gay boyfriends, but that was just because of her taste. Not because of her. (And after every break-up, she couldn’t help but wonder: what if I could be a man?)
Shane Hollander was just like Evan. Cute, quiet, respectful. Maybe this will be it, she thought, sharing her fries across the table. Maybe this will be the man to fix me. Maybe he can turn me into the woman I’m meant to be.
Rose knew the first time they tried to have sex that he was gay. After he kissed her goodbye, she sat on her floor and cried her weak, pathetic little heart out. What was wrong with her? What was it about her that made her attract these lovely, lovely men that she liked so much but would never like her? All of them, gay. And she wasn’t—she couldn’t be that. If she admitted to herself that she was that, she’d want more. And then she’d want to proclaim it for the whole world. And then the whole world, her family, her friends, her fans, would hate her, and then she’d die. This was the pipeline. The end of the tunnel was dark and six feet under.
But the tunnel she was in now felt the same. The light flickered on at random intervals and stayed off most of the time. She kept up the cheerful mask because she was good at acting, but she couldn’t hide from herself.
Was this killing her? Was trying to live as who she was supposed to be hurting her?
She considered it for a second. That second stretched out into minutes as she debated on whether entertaining these urges was a fool’s errand or not.
She stood up and walked to the bathroom and very nearly drew herself a bathtub of tears. In the mirror, her eyes were bloodshot and her face was pale, streaked with shiny remnants of salt trails. Pathetic, she thought again, aimlessly.
She gripped the countertop.
Just try it. That’s what everyone said. How do you know if you like something if you don’t try it?
“This—this is Rose.” She said. Parroting something she felt she read in a story once. “Rose is—oh my god. Rose is a. A twenty-six year old m-man. Um. He likes romcoms a-and dancing with his—his friends. And good food.”
Rose stood there staring at a reflection that didn’t match the inside and sank down, knees to the ground.
“I’m a man,” he whispered, wanting to cry again, as if he hadn’t already cried a river. “My name is Rose and I’m a man.”
It wasn’t as easy as he thought. Thinking of himself in that way when he’d suppressed it for so long and still looked and sounded the way he did. In his own head, he misgendered himself constantly. He hoped it was fine and normal and didn’t mean anything about his validity.
His chest hurt when he asked Shane if he’d rather be kissing Miles. It hurt through Shane admitting things had been better with a man. But this wasn’t about Rose. This was about Shane. And he could be strong for a good friend.
After, he resolved himself to not date for a while. His entire life, he had placed a lot of emphasis on how other people felt about him. Maybe he needed to put himself first. Figure out his life. Get kidnapped for the fifth time on camera.
He could make lots of money and then fuck off to the middle of nowhere. He could come out one day and possibly not lose his career. He could marry a man who was gay and actually romantically liked (loved?) him, and those things didn’t have to be mutually exclusive.
But he had time. Rose wasn’t going anywhere. These days, the light still flickered, but it was brighter when it glowed. There was a bulb. It hadn’t blown. In the grand scheme of things, that was what mattered.