“I shouldn’t have said ‘as friends,’” I tell them. “I want to go as more than friends.”
“You do?”
I nod. “But don’t, like, feel like you have to dress as a girl if you don’t feel it. I still want to be your date if you’re, you know, in a suit. Or something guy-ish or whatever.” The words feel jumbled and clumsy.
“I think I’m past the point of dressing to meet other people’s expectations.” Ash smiles. “I’ll wear what feels right that day.”
“Good. I guess what I’m saying is it doesn’t matter what you dress like because it’s you I like. Your smile, your laugh, your music, your dog, your—um, your everything.”
Ash is trying not to smile. “I like your everything too.”
We reach a bench by the playground. Ash sits and picks Booper up. They rub his ears and press their forehead to his and tell him what a good doggo he is. Booper laps it up, wagging and ramming Ash’s chest. Then he climbs into my lap and rams me with his head.
Ash smiles. “I took Booper to the zoo once,” they say. “I wanted to show him all the other animals. But they only had two cats and one small dog.”
I tilt my head.
“Yeah, it was a real shih tzu.”
It takes me a second. Then I burst out laughing.
Ash scratches Booper’s ears. I can’t stop watching that beautiful one-dimple smile.
33
Liberated
Ash
The minute we drop Daniel off at his house, Mom asks if he and I are a thing now.
“It’s complicated. I have no idea. But at least he knows why I’m Ash now, and doesn’t assume I’m a girl all the time.” I rub at a smudge on the car window that’s blocking my view of the excellent sunset. “I just don’t know if . . . you know. If he’ll wind up liking boys too.”
She gives me a sideways smile. “Pretty sure it’s not gonna be an issue. Based on how he was looking at you when we brought the dog to Iris, and tonight at dinner.”
I’m glad it’s dim in the car, because I can feel my ears going pink. “I think I don’t wanna talk about this.”
“Fair enough. I didn’t want my mom involved in my love life when I was a teenager either. Or still. Even though my love life is currently nonexistent.”
“I don’t think I wanna talk about yours either.”
“Let’s play favorite random crap.”
I relax into the seat. “You first.”
We come up with categories, like roller coasters and Jolly Rancher flavors and daydreams and dog breeds and sunset colors, and tell each other our favorites. It’s nice, because we can go as deep or as basic into any answer as we want. “I’m glad you’re my kid,” Mom says after telling me her favorite band is Green Day, which I know ’cause she listens to them all the time like it’s still 1995.
“I am pretty great,” I say.
“Don’t get a big head about it.”
“Too late.”
She smacks my arm and tells me I’m lucky I’m cute.
I look out at the sunset. “Can we talk about Dad?”
“Whoa!” She glances at me. “Where’d that come from?”
“I just . . . need to.”
She gets a faraway look for a minute, then says, “Okay, shoot.”
“Why is he so . . . so Dad?”
She smiles ruefully. “I’d ask you to narrow it down, but I think I can guess.” She takes a moment to gather her thoughts. “You know how your grandma Rose and grandpa Roger, my parents, went to college? And I did too?”
I nod. “And Dad’s parents didn’t, and he just went to medical technician training.”
“Right. Your dad’s always been self-conscious about not having a degree. Notice how he uses bigger words than he needs to? He does not like it when people think his lack of education makes him less than them somehow. He’s very sensitive about that.”
“I . . . did not know that.” Though it makes sense, now that I think about it.
“I used to tell him I valued who he was and never thought less of him because of where he came from. But it seemed to rub salt in the wound. He said it was like a rich person telling a poor person, ‘You still have value even though you’re poor.’” Regret passes over her face. “It hurt him to hear that from me. I didn’t understand why then, but I do now, and I wish I’d handled it differently.”
Kinda like how Bella and I butted heads over the dog, but now we might be friends. “Seems like a lot of arguments are like that. You don’t get where the other person is coming from until you’ve had time to cool your jets.”
Mom nods. “When you were little, Dad thought you were just experimenting. Trying things on, seeing what fit. He kept waiting for you to ‘figure it out.’ He comes from a family that tends toward reductive thinking. Know what that means?” She stops at a red light.
“Like stripping out complexities? Because it’s easier to slap a label on something. So you don’t have to think about the whole complicated everything of it.”
“Look at you coming in with the big brain.” She ruffles my hair. “He rejected his parents’ beliefs—that trans folks are looking for attention, that it’s wrong to be gay, et cetera. But he didn’t go deeper to reject the way they thought.” The light turns green and she hits the gas.
“Meaning . . . he seems liberal on the surface, but when you scratch that away, you get a conservative?”
“Eh, it’s not that cut-and-dried. It can be hard to change the way you learn to think when you’re young. The content of your thoughts, you can change by learning new facts. The structure of thoughts is a different ball game. Make sense?”
I nod. “Do you still love him?”
She sigh-laughs. “Ask a harder question next time, will you?”
“Sorry not sorry.” I want to know. And I trust her to be honest with me.
“He’s a stubborn cuss who’s too attached to being right. But also . . . his parents weren’t affectionate. Ever. They taught him
