Crooked Words Read online

ground, falling too fast to throw out eir hands. Where was Misstery Man—weren’t they supposed to come and save em? “I’m not a woman or a man. I … I prefer gender-neutral pronouns. Ey and eir. Please. You don’t call us ‘it’.”

  Tim gave a long, slow whistle, one piercing enough to draw the attention of anybody who had somehow not been watching the discussion. Others stared, their eyes fixed on Darcy like a flock of crows startled from their roadside carrion by something in the distance, pondering if they should take to air—or resume stripping the flesh from the corpse before them.

  Everyone had long stopped the pretence of being caught up in work. Hannah had yet to even turn on her computer: she just sat in her chair, her chin resting on her arms, looking Darcy up and down. “You look like … you dress like … well.”

  Did she think Darcy didn’t realise? Did she think Darcy didn’t know every minute of every working day that ey didn’t look like whom ey was?

  “I’m safer this way.” Ey hunched eir shoulders, wished ey could fold in on emself, hide—no, ey wished that Misstery Man had had never created a mystery to discuss, had never given Darcy cause to try and speak. Misstery Man wasn’t a non-binary, genderqueer superhero making a point by not disclosing their gender. That was just Darcy’s fantasy. Misstery Man was just some cisgender man or woman keeping their identity a secret, and didn’t care that city referred to them as it because they knew it wasn’t true. That word had never been used as a weapon against Misstery Man, so why would it hurt?

  The silence lingered as if nobody quite knew what to say for all that questions burned in each and every eye cast Darcy’s way; the words spilled out of Darcy’s mouth in a desperate attempt to fill it. “Some people don’t always understand. They think I’m lying or joking or making things up, or I’m wrong. It’s easier to pretend.” Ey swallowed, but there was no escaping the predatory crow-eyes. “Please. Don’t use ‘it’.”

  Tim spoke first. He leaned forward in his chair, his lips creeping into the kind of pretty, too-confident smile that reminded Darcy far too much of Adam Richfield and his ilk. “We weren’t talking about you. Just Misstery Man.”

  Was agreeing to use another word too hard? Was it easier to dive from the top of a building or to leap into a burning car?

  “What do you mean, anyway?” Hannah shook her head, seemed to take Tim’s question as an opportunity to voice her own questions. “Look at you! Are you transsexual? Because that makes more sense. Why didn’t you say anything, anyway? Don’t you trust us?”

  Don’t you trust us? Darcy just shook eir head, not sure how to explain this—how can ey, when it was obvious that these people knew nothing of it what it meant to live in fear of others?

  They didn’t seem to want an answer as much as they wanted to ask questions, however, for Tim broke in before Darcy could even begin to answer: “Do you really mean we should use … made up words, to refer to you? How are supposed to remember that?”

  Darcy glanced back towards eir computer, wished there were some kind of magical cure for anxiety. What good was anything when ey still had to stay here and listen to all this? The questions weren’t extreme, true, but how did ey answer someone who placed em in a wrongly-labelled box? How did ey answer somebody whose very ignorance felt like a slap across eir face?

  “Yes,” ey whispered. “Please try and remember.”

  From Tim’s stare, ey might as well have been speaking Swedish—and the stare, if not the questions, decided em. Enough. Darcy stood up, tried to will eir knees and lower legs to some kind of stillness. Maybe ey would figure out how to come back and explain what ey meant, what ey was … and accept that the office was going to find em confronting. But right now ey would escape from the stares, just for a moment, until Darcy felt a little less like ey were going to burst into tears. “Excuse me, I need to go … um, to the toilet.”

  Tim blinked. “How do you know which one?”

  The ridiculousness of this—the obvious fact that neither he nor anybody else had stopped to think about what it felt like to not even have the correct toilet to use—made it easier for Darcy to ignore him. They just tucked eir hands up underneath eir elbows to try and hide their shaking and walked away from eir desk. Would they now question eir right to go anywhere—even if there were nowhere else for em to go?

  The room fell silent behind eir back; Darcy walked to the bathrooms with quick, frantic steps, not caring that ey must look as though ey were running.

  At least right now ey could, unquestioned, lock emself in a stall and try to calm eir breathing, wipe the sweat away from eir palms, collect emself enough for the ordeal that would be returning to eir desk. It wasn’t just coming out once, of course, but having to explain over and over, and never quite belonging or fitting in as a consequence: this was just the beginning of the horror. Eir co-workers would ask questions and tell em what they thought about eir answers, and ey would have to endure them all somehow … and wonder if eir words would be worth everything that came afterwards.

  Why the hell did the world venerate Misstery Man as a hero? A figure with overblown superpowers who thought that saving a few children from a car wreck meant saving the world? How did that make any kind of difference—how was that the kind of heroism that meant anything?

  No: the difference, perhaps, lay in the folded piece of paper found resting on Darcy’s keyboard after ey found the courage to drag eir shaking legs back out into the office—and pretend that eir co-workers weren’t staring at em while they attempted to work, weren’t just waiting for the next coffee break to launch a new barrage of questions.

  Someone had written with hands that shook as badly as eir own, leaving ink smudged across the sheet and blurring the words.

  Thank you for making me think someone might listen if I say who I am.

  Ey just stared down at a sheet that turned ever more blurry with unshed tears.

  It took em a moment to figure out what to do, how to handle that precious sheet of paper: Darcy scooted back into eir chair, making sure that the room saw em fold the note and tuck it inside eir pants pocket. With any luck, the right person would see, the right person would find em at lunch, and then neither of them would have to be alone. Ey smiled and turned to eir computer, flicked through er emails: with any luck, ey might have enough time to answer a few before ey had to deal with a whole new life of being open and out—questions, notes and all.

  In any case … Darcy drew in a last steeling breath and leant towards Hannah’s desk. If ey’d risked everything, what did this last question matter? “Hey, Hanners,” ey whispered. “Would you mind if, tomorrow, you … you wore a little less perfume?”

  Absent a Consonant

  You stare at the mirror and mouth the word, trying it on for fit. Your reflection’s hands shake, and even though you know that someone—Mum, Dad, your sister—entering the bedroom will only see you move your lips, you can’t suppress the fear that you’ll be caught in the act. That there will be words, tears, those awkward family conversations held around the dinner table. Perhaps confusion, but perhaps the kind of horror stories that pave the internet, with children estranged from families who refuse to understand. How are you to know which reaction you’ll get?

  You’re not sure which is worse: the irrational terror that someone will look at you and know, before you know how to put the words together and risk them for yourself; or the rational dread that someone will look at you, and never know at all.

  Why would they see an anxious young man mouthing that forbidden word, when all they ever see is a girl called Susan?

  You mouth the word again, wonder if you dare speak it and make it real. If you speak, you can’t pretend the realisation has never happened, can’t go on being this shadow of a person beating against the windows of your outer skin. Your reflection stares back at you, twisted-faced and wavering, because the word does not match the pink singlet top and the floral-print belt, or the small, hairless-seeming face with too-full lips. It doesn’t match your chest or flat
groin, or even your peach-and-vanilla bedroom.

  The word doesn’t match anything you are or possess, but feels more right, more real, than the word others use. It touches the self buried deep underneath a mask of every desperate attempt to be what the world thinks you are, but that mask only leaves you scratching and rubbing, chafed by your own unreal skin. That change in word, the erasure of a single consonant, makes all the difference. You don’t look right yet, but you could, and it isn’t so hard to imagine your reflection shifting and changing to that of a man. One day, when you are brave, when you’ve said the words to all the gatekeepers between you and transition, your outer and inner faces will match.

  You can’t start that journey, however, until you’ve said the first words to yourself.

  You swallow, and then stare at the mirror, watch your lips move to frame those heavy, terrifying, wondrous words.

  “He,” you whisper, and then again, in a small, cautious voice: “I’m he. I’m a … I’m a man.”

  The words are such a small thing to make what you know real, but now said, you can’t take them back. There it is, that feeling you’ve had of not being quite right in your skin, the kind of feeling that is supposed to be improbable and at the very least abnormal, and you’ve gone and spoken it aloud. How