Crooked Words Read online

never explain in a way that makes sense—that makes the listener understand.

  This time it doesn’t matter.

  “M-my name. I’m Chris.”

  Melissa just blinks. “You told me you preferred Christine.” She shakes her head, scrunches up her eyes. “I hate that we don’t call people by their birth names just because we’re too lazy to say the whole word. Why? Did your boss go on about it again? You don’t have to change your name for his sake! You’ve been Christine for years.”

  For a moment they’re just speechless—they just stare, gape, blink. When did Chris say that? Did Chris ever say that? Why would Melissa think that?

  It takes a moment for the comment to settle in Chris’s head, for the realisation to occur—that this is the same thing, the same damn thing, as the comments on the haircut and their clothes. No, it makes no more sense than the rest of it does, but there it is: what good is this conversation ever going to be?

  It doesn’t matter that they’ve both been friends since high-school—no, that’s why it matters, because Melissa sees Chris as the quiet, mousy girl tagging along behind her more vivacious friend, and she has no idea about the changes going on inside Chris’s head. Oh, Melissa knows about the psychologist and the meds, knows about Chris’s diagnoses, but she doesn’t understand the most important thing about either: they’re not supposed to make Chris a slightly-less neurotic version of their old self. Rather, a psychologist is supposed to help them become the person they were supposed to be—the person who buys waistcoats and hair gel and uses the rainbow-coloured eye-shadow stashed in their desk.

  A person Melissa can’t comprehend without packing them into the small, shallow boxes that are her only way of making sense of the world—a person she might not even be able to see.

  “Well, I’m … I’m going to change it,” they say. The words fall from their lips in a blurring rush. “I’ll change it. And until then, I want you to call me Chris anyway.”

  “Okay.” Melissa strings the word out into one long, tri-syllabic drawl. “Is something wrong with you, Christine? You’re acting really weird. You’ve been acting weird ever since—well.” She stops and looks down at the remote in her hands, and while Chris’s heart pounds in their chest, it strikes them as amusing that the one thing that stops Melissa, the one thing that activates the check in her brain, is the fact she shouldn’t be commenting on Chris’s mental health. She can remember that, but she can’t remember to use Chris’s preferred name five seconds after being told?

  “It’s Chris.” This time they don’t hesitate—this time they’re too appalled to be anything but direct.

  Melissa’s lips twist into a scowl. “I’m not perfect, you know. I’m going to make mistakes. Chris.”

  The words don’t differ from the speech Chris rehearsed, yet, coming from Melissa’s lips, they sound ugly and cruel. It’s not that she made the mistake, Chris realises, because it’s easy to make the mistake, easy to slip over the words one has spent years using. It’s that her first instinct isn’t to apologise—just justify. When told she is wrong, when asked to use other words, when making a mistake, shouldn’t it just be a matter of apologising? Why this defensiveness?

  Could it be, Chris wonders, that they were anxious for a reason that has nothing to do with serotonin and noradrenaline, nothing to do with the chemicals in their brain?

  “I know that.” Chris wraps their arms around their shoulders. “I just w-wanted you to call me by the name I like.”

  “Fine.” Melissa sighs and tosses her head back against the couch. “Is there anything else? I’ve missed half my show.”

  Chris shakes their head, so Melissa points the remote at the TV. The image clicks on, the sound of the presenter providing commentary about an on-screen romance almost unbearably loud: Melissa’s thumb presses away at the volume buttons until they can almost see the speakers throbbing. Chris almost asks her to turn it down, but stops: do they really want to sit here on the couch and pretend that everything is okay? Isn’t that what the old Chris has done—isn’t that, in point of fact, the kind of thing that tells Melissa it’s right and okay to say the things she has?

  Instead, they stand and walk to the lounge room door. Melissa doesn’t so much as turn her head from the TV as Chris closes the lounge door behind them; this time it barely registers as an annoyance. The lounge room door, a heavy, crooked, creaking thing, doesn’t drown out the noise, so Chris closes their own bedroom door until the presenter is nothing but an incomprehensible mutter on the edge of their hearing—just like Melissa.

  They sigh and, for a moment, stand against the door, look out across the too-small, cluttered room. A single bed with a sinking mattress and a broken-legged desk propped up with a year-old edition of the Yellow Pages; a too-small bookshelf and the wicker laundry hamper overflowing with blouses and bras and dresses; the cupboard with the broken door and the suit they found at the op shop hanging off the front of it because there was no space anywhere else. It all seems as ill-fitting as the dresses in the laundry hamper, and Chris finds themself wondering why it is they’re living there in the first place. Perhaps it’s time to find somewhere else to live, somewhere bigger? They could get a better bed. Get rid of the clothes they’re never going to wear again. Get the kind of housemate who doesn’t make a conversation about names and clothes so difficult—the kind of housemate who doesn’t expect anything of or about Chris save rent and a certain amount of cleanliness.

  Is there any reason, besides fear, they shouldn’t?

  It’s a decision, and yet it still feels empty. They could, perhaps should, pull out their netbook and start searching property listings. Logical, yes, but it still feels like they’re the kind of person who runs away to hide in their room until this mess blows over. Isn’t that also the sort of thing Melissa expects from the shy and mousy Chris?

  They don’t want to curl up on their bed with their netbook—they can do that any time. No, what do they want right this moment? Chris sighs and tips their head down to look at their shirt and waistcoat, and breaks into a little, twisted smile. Shallow as it might be, they want to be somewhere they don’t have to hide anything, somewhere people have an appropriate appreciation for a killer waistcoat, somewhere people don’t see Ellen—just Chris, a queer, pansexual, colourful Chris who looks fucking fabulous. Even if, or especially if, it corresponds to nobody else’s definition of fabulous.

  Shaking hands make opening the desk drawer difficult; they make tiny make-up brushes and the application of bright-coloured pigment—green and pink and silver—even more difficult. They take many careful breaths, erase many skewed lines and bright-coloured smears. By the end, however, someone strange stares back at them from the mirror.

  No, Chris doesn’t know this person, this person who slides the suit jacket off the coat hanger and tosses it over one shoulder, this person who snatches up their wallet and keys and steps out of the bedroom with their face a glorious riot of unnatural colour. They don’t know the person who opens the lounge room door and pokes their head in: “I’m g-going out. I’ve got my phone and keys. Don’t … don’t wait up.”

  Melissa sits hunched before the TV, a remote in one hand and a phone in the other, her thumbs tapping at both. “Whatever. Don’t make too much—Christine?” She jerks her head up and stares. “Where the hell are you going like that?”

  Chris shrugs. “Ah—gay bar.”

  Melissa’s jaw drops. “Chris?”

  They could explain. They could have another awkward conversation that will get them exactly nowhere.

  Chris waves, turns and heads to the front door; they don’t trouble themself to keep the door from slamming after them.

  No, they don’t know this person who walks out to the car with cropped hair, Barbie-pink eye-shadow and a suit jacket, but they just might enjoy the process of getting to know them.

  The Differently Animated and Queer Society

  The pub was rather out of the way, jammed up between a dinky supermarket and an abando
ned house just behind the red light district. It wasn’t too surprising, given how hard it had apparently been for the chairfolk of the Differently Animated and Queer Society to find a venue that had gender-neutral facilities as well as a willingness to serve the undead, and Pat couldn’t help a slight frown as ze got out of hir car. It wasn’t likely that someone was going to try and mug a zombie, but even so, the neighbourhood didn’t seem all that prosperous. There weren’t even too many cars around, just one down the other end of the street and a rusty bike chained to a light post.

  Maybe ze shouldn’t have waited until ze’d be the last to arrive. What if everyone had come, decided that nobody was coming, and gone home already? What if ze was the only one to come at all?

  Pat had almost backed out of the idea altogether. Joining DAAQS was a great way to meet new, like-minded folk in theory (it was hard enough finding undead folk to meet, never mind queer undead folk, never mind queer undead folk who were accepting and didn’t spend thirty seconds staring at Pat’s crotch before saying hello), and ze’s psychologist had been quite insistent on Pat’s attendance, but finding the courage to get out of the house and go outside was another thing again. The city wasn’t always a kind place for the undead; Pat spent too much time standing in the dole queue at