I swallowed a laugh. ‘If you’re about to ask if I need to come out of the closet – the answer is no. I’d have done that a long time ago.’ That question was, weirdly, a lot easier to answer than the other.
‘I figured you would have. I mean, you kind of don’t mind being controversial.’
I quirked an eyebrow. ‘Because of the lip ring?’
She nodded. ‘And the tattoos.’ Her eyes widened as she realized what she’d just said. ‘I mean – obviously, you have your reasons for those. Most of them …’ She shut her eyes. ‘God, I’m so stupid. I’m sorry –’
‘It’s okay, Carlie. No worries.’ My teeth scraped over the sliver of metal threaded through my lower lip, while I fought to keep my eyes from skimming over the tattoos wrapping my wrists. ‘Thanks for the cookies.’
She huffed out a sigh. ‘Yeah. No problem. Good night, Lucas.’
Girlfriend question averted, I sighed, too. ‘Good night.’
Carlie was the only Heller who never had a problem remembering to call me Lucas. When I left home for college three years ago, I wanted to change everything, starting with my name. My mother had given me her maiden name – Lucas – as my middle name. I supposed lots of people went by their middle names, and bonus – no legal proceeding was required to use it.
My dad refused to call me Lucas, but what he chose to call me hardly mattered. I didn’t live with him any more, and when I went home, we barely spoke. Carlie’s parents and both of her brothers remembered sporadically – but they tried. I’d gone by Landon for over eighteen years, after all, so I usually let it slide without correcting them. Old habits, blah, blah.
From that point on, though, I was Lucas to anyone new. I wanted to make Landon disappear for good. Nonexist.
I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.
2
Landon
Since kindergarten, I’d attended a small private school just outside DC. We wore uniforms: girls in white blouses with pearl buttons, pleated plaid skirts and cardigans, boys in starched white oxfords, pressed slacks and blazers. Our favourite teachers turned a blind eye to unauthorized scarves and coloured shoelaces and ignored ditched cardigans and jackets. The stricter instructors took up contraband items and rolled their eyes when we argued that hemp bracelets and glitter-coated headbands were expressions of individual freedom.
Victor Evans got suspended last spring when he refused to take off a Bottega Veneta dog collar, claiming that wearing it was his right under the First Amendment and wasn’t technically against the rules. Administration cracked down after that.
We all looked the same on the surface, but during the two weeks I was out of school I had altered completely beneath the skin – where changes count. I’d been tested and I had failed. I had made a promise that I didn’t keep. It didn’t matter if I was still outwardly identical. I was no longer one of them.
I was allowed to make up the work I’d missed, as though I’d been out with a severe case of flu, but the special considerations didn’t stop there. Teachers who’d challenged me before patted my shoulder and told me to take my time on new classwork. They granted unearned passing grades on crappily written essays, extra time on incomplete lab assignments, automatic do-over offers on bombed exams.
Then there were my peers – some who’d known me since we were five. All of them mumbled condolences, but they had no idea what to say after. No one asked for help on algebra homework or invited me over to play video games. The other guys didn’t shove my books off my desk when I wasn’t looking or hassle me when my favourite football team got their asses handed to them by the Redskins. Sex jokes cut off mid-sentence when I walked up.
Everyone watched me – in class, in the hallway, during assemblies, at lunch. They gossiped behind their hands, shook their heads, stared like I couldn’t see them doing it. As though I was a wax figure of my former self – lifelike, but creepy.
No one looked me in the eye. Like maybe having a dead mother was contagious.
One overly warm day, I rolled up my sleeves in Mr Ferguson’s US history class without thinking. I heard the telltale whispering, moving person to person, too late.
‘His wrists?’ Susie Gamin hissed before someone shushed her.
Tugging the sleeves back down and re-buttoning the cuffs made no difference. The words, unleashed, were an avalanche of tumbling boulders. Unstoppable.
The following day, I wore a watch with a thick band on my left wrist, even though it chafed my still-raw skin. I stacked silicone wristbands on my right, banned unconditionally by the principal the previous spring. These became part of my daily uniform.
No one made me take them off. No one mentioned them. But everybody stared, eager to catch a glimpse of what was underneath.
Things I stopped doing:
Hockey. I started playing when I was six, shortly after attending my first Capitals game with Dad. Mom wasn’t thrilled, but she tolerated it – maybe because it was a bonding point for Dad and me. Maybe because I loved playing so much. Though right-handed in every other situation, something happened when I laced my skates and took my left-wing position. Powering a puck to the goal, I was ambidextrous. Between breaths, I shifted positions to dig a puck from the corner or freaked out opponents by switching hands in the middle of a play, sinking goals before they could catch up. My select team didn’t win every time, but we’d made the finals last year. I began eighth grade certain this would be the year we’d take home the championship trophy. Like that was the most significant thing that could ever happen to me.