Some Assembly Required Read online

  I was going through a preppy phase, so that night I slipped on a pair of white cargo shorts, a white button-down shirt, and some Sperrys. Mom dropped me off, and when I walked inside, I immediately spotted my friend Dale, another trans guy, sitting across the room.

  “Hey! How was your prom?” he asked. “Get lucky?”

  “Hardly,” I said, and flopped down onto the couch beside him.

  I was in the middle of filling him in on my awful night when I noticed the front door open. I glanced over and saw a girl walk in. I caught only a quick glimpse of her profile before she turned away from me. But I could tell that she was stunning. Tall, with long dark hair, and wearing a black shirt with a few sequins that caught the light, making her sparkle. She was wearing skinny jeans that hugged her butt perfectly.

  I nudged Dale. “What’s a gorgeous girl like that doing in a dive like this?” I joked.

  At that moment she turned in my direction, and I got a look at her face. My mouth dropped open.

  “Oh my God, that’s Katie Hill.”

  Déjà vu washed over me, and I started to sweat a little.

  I felt like I was hurtling back in time, to the day when I’d first read her name in the paper and learned that she was transgender, like me. Memories of when suicide had felt like my only option came creeping back in, reminding me of just how far I’d come since I’d been a little kid trying to pee standing up behind my grandparents’ barn.

  I had to talk to her. It felt like I’d been waiting my whole life to.

  2

  The handful of skyscrapers that make up Tulsa, Oklahoma, jut up erratically against a horizon that stretches out, smooth and wide, on both sides. It looks like someone’s final heartbeat on a hospital monitor, a last-gasp attempt at life after having flatlined. The city’s streets and sidewalks are often eerily quiet and empty.

  But just twenty minutes away is the countryside. That’s where real life begins in Oklahoma.

  One of my earliest memories is of staring up into the enormous brown eyes of a cow while my arm disappeared farther and farther into her mouth. I’d been given a green protein pellet to feed her and had put it in the palm of my purple-gloved hand, instead of holding it out with my fingers like I’d been taught.

  The cow’s mouth had closed around my wrist, and I’d been sucked forward and up onto my toes. I was half-aware of Papa, my grandfather, yelling and running toward me, but I wasn’t scared. I felt warm. Streams of clear snot ran down the cow’s nose and onto my shoulder, but I wasn’t grossed out. We held eye contact, and I dimly started to wonder if she was going to swallow me whole, when I suddenly felt my whole body jerk backward. As if in slow motion, I watched my arm glide out of the animal’s mouth.

  My hand was bare. The cow had swallowed my girly purple glove. I think on some primal level the cow and I had both known that it didn’t belong there to begin with.

  The farm belongs to Papa and my grandmother Gigi. It’s about half an hour away from our home in Broken Arrow and sits on approximately eighty acres, with two ponds, a creek, pastures full of hay bales for jumping on, and trees that beg to be climbed. It’s where Mom and her sister, my aunt Susan, grew up. Susan has six adopted children, and three of them—Dewayne, Cheyenne, and Amanda—are roughly the same age as me. We were raised like siblings, so I always had other kids to play with when I was over there. Mom was adopted as well, and I grew up implicitly understanding my grandparents’ mantra: Blood doesn’t make you kin. It’s the value of the relationship that determines family.

  My biological dad, a marine, took off when he found out my mom was pregnant. I’ve never met him, and even though we share DNA, he is in no way my father. If you have someone else who raises you and treats you as their own, like I do with my stepfather, there’s no reason to think he’s not your father. I don’t even consider him a stepfather—he is my dad. The same goes with my half brother, Wesley, who’s four years younger than me. I forged childhood bonds with him and my adopted cousins that make them all my full brothers and sisters.

  On the farm we’d play haystack tag, where each mound represented either a hiding spot or home base. Sometimes Papa would tie a flat piece of sheet metal to the back of his pickup truck and drive us through the pastures, whipping us around as if we were in an inner tube on a lake. We’d cling on for as long as possible, until we got thrown off, tangled in one another’s limbs. A yellow-brick salt lick for the cows sat in a tire in the middle of one of the fields. We’d take turns lapping at the smooth craters made by the animals’ enormous, catlike tongues, and get a jolt from the delicious, sharp tang. The farm was an entire world unto itself, and it was all ours.

  Sometimes there’d be a sudden shift in the wind, and the cows would take off for the cover of the trees; we’d look up and see clouds swirling and turning green. We’d run for the tornado bunker, a hunk of concrete with a hatch door rising from the ground next to the house. But even though we live smack in the heart of tornado alley, Papa and Gigi’s property and the surrounding town has never been hit. Legend has it that the Cherokee blessed the land to protect it from twisters, and so far it has worked.

  The only thing that ever got in the way of my outdoor life was asthma. When I have an attack, my throat rattles and makes choking sounds. I had to teach myself early on not to panic, and I carry an inhaler with me everywhere. I have bad allergies, too, which sucks for someone who loves being outside as much as I do. But a runny nose is a small price to pay for an open sky.

  Though I much preferred playing outside with my cousins, my mom insisted on enrolling me at age three in dance classes at a place called Moore’s Dance Studio. My first performance at a recital was a tap routine to a song called “A Baby Duck.” Imagine fourteen preschoolers in canary-yellow leotards, with feathers sticking out of their hair and shoulders, all attempting a coordinated kick routine but failing miserably. We looked like tiny drunken Vegas showgirls, stumbling all over the stage. My tap movements were more like stomps, and I’d halt every few seconds to search for Mom in the audience and wave.

  Dance became a huge part of my life. I took jazz, ballet, Irish step, hip-hop, and tap. But my favorite was clogging—we wore tap shoes with double clickers on the heels and toes, so the sound was extra loud. I loved learning the controlled movements, teaching my body to behave exactly the way I commanded it to.

  The costumes were an entirely different story. There were white tutus with pink bunny ears, teal kimonos with silver sequined trim on the arms and layers of flouncy cotton erupting from beneath the shortened hemlines, pink-and-black-striped leotards with fishnet stockings, candy-cane-colored pants that flared at the heel.

  I loathed them all.

  The second we’d get home from a recital, I’d rip off the costume and slap on a pair of camo shorts and a T-shirt. I’d wrestle anyone, and none of my cousins were scared of hurting me, because they knew I could kick their butt. We’d play army, and I was always the commander, bossing everyone around and barking orders, mapping out the plans of attack against our unseen enemy.

  Papa and Gigi built a big shed in their side yard for us to play in, and hung a red sign above the front door: BUNKHOUSE. In smaller letters under that it read NO SPITTIN’ NO CUSSIN’ NO FIGHTIN’. We didn’t cuss, but there was plenty of the other two going on, especially when my cousins wanted to play house and I insisted on being the father. I had three names for myself that I’d rotate out each time we played—Hunter, Gunner, and Jake.

  Mom wasn’t really fazed by any of this. Since I was going to dance class regularly too, she considered me “well rounded.” Everyone else just called me a tomboy, which I loved, because it had the word “boy” in it.

  One day when I was in third grade, Papa took me out to lunch. I looked him square in the eye and announced that even though I had a father, I was old enough to be the real man of the house, and that I needed a gun to protect my family. I had no interest in hunting with one, though, because I love animals too much. Mom was always adopting stra
y dogs, and the woods behind our house were filled with kittens that would play among the trees. A baby skunk that had gotten lost in an ice storm lived in our kitchen for a while, and once, Mom even rescued a fawn that our neighbors’ dog had carried into their yard. The doe’s mother had been killed, and the wobbly little orphan stayed with us for a month while Mom nursed her back to health.

  Papa listened quietly to my request and, after checking with Mom, bought me a Daisy air rifle that afternoon. We walked deep into the fields of the farm, and he hung paper targets up on an old fence. We carefully measured twenty steps back, turned, and aimed. I wasn’t too bad a shot, but I definitely missed a lot. I got better over time, and he made sure to teach me every safety precaution possible. Learning how to make a precise shot gave me a sense of peace. It made me feel like I was in control, which I needed, because it was becoming increasingly clear to me that something in my life was unbalanced.

  That strange feeling was always exacerbated during the holidays, when the distinction between boys and girls becomes much more obvious. When I was five, Mom dressed me as a pink poodle for Halloween. I hated the way I looked in the costume, and I couldn’t understand why all the grown-ups were making such a fuss over me. It was basically no different from any of my dance costumes. But the night was saved when I came home from trick-or-treating and spent the rest of the evening playing with an animatronic zombie hand that wiggled and made screaming sounds. Every year after that, I dressed in blood and guts, while the girls around me donned princess gowns and steered clear of me so I wouldn’t get gore on their costumes.

  Easter was much scarier than Halloween for me. The day before, Mom would always take me to the mall to pick out a new dress to wear to church. For whatever reason, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus goes hand in hand with pastel shades, and those softly hued frocks and matching hair ribbons were murder on my eyes. The one time I was allowed to pick out my own outfit, I chose the simplest, plainest white shift I could find. But even that was too much—I couldn’t wait to smear it with grass stains during the egg hunt. Our Easter baskets loudly and proudly reflected the culturally accepted gender norms—pink for girls, blue for boys. Despite my protests I always got stuck with one of the pink baskets, but Gigi would sneak special little gifts into mine, like a pocketknife or a compass.

  Christmas became the big yearly reminder that I was different. Take, for example, my letter to Santa from when I was ten:

  Dear Santa Clause, thank you for your presents. Can I please have a bell off your sleigh? My presents I want are listed below Merry Christmas!

  portabel mattress

  backpack

  freeze dried food

  swiss army pocket knife

  pots and pans (camping)

  hiking boots

  tent that I can hook onto my backpack

  air soft gun

  camoflodge pants

  camoflodge shirt

  20 mile range walkie talkies

  canteen

  hiking stick

  anything else that is camping or army or whatever you prefer

  Love Emerald

  Come the morning of December 25, I’d tear the wrapping off a box, hoping for something from my wish list, only to find a frilly skirt. I’d flip out, convinced that Santa had gone to the wrong house. I couldn’t understand why I was supposed to automatically like anything that was pink, a disgusting color that oozed weakness and frailty. The shockingly bright primary reds and blues that leapt off the boxes of toy trucks, LEGOs, and action figures that Wesley and my male cousins would receive were like magnets to me. Entire colonies of Barbie dolls went untouched over the years. The only time I did try to remove one from the box, I gave up after failing to untangle the plastic ties that bound her arms and legs to the cardboard backing. The restraints were twisted on with a tightness that bordered on the obscene. I shoved the doll back into the carton and headed outside to play, leaving her creepy smile and dead eyes to gaze permanently out of the display cage.

  3

  Papa and Gigi are religious, but not in any sort of pious, holier-than-thou way. They’ve been going to the same church since Mom and Susan were kids, and even though I was baptized as a Methodist, my first few years of education were spent at a Catholic school called Monte Cassino that was run by nuns.

  Since I come from such a loud and boisterous family, I was fascinated by the nuns’ solitary life. One day during recess I asked one of them why they didn’t have families of their own.

  “We’re married to God,” she answered.

  I thought about this for a minute. If they were already married to God, that meant they didn’t have to be married to a man. So I decided for a while to become a nun, because that meant I’d never have to marry a man either, something I definitely didn’t want to do, even though I enjoyed playing outside with the boys.

  I developed my first crush on a girl when I was seven. Her name was Laurie, and she was athletic and tomboyish like me. We quickly became buddies.

  One day our class took a field trip to Big Splash, a local water park that’s been open since my parents were kids. Most of the other girls were too scared to climb up the rickety wood tower to the top of the tallest water slide, but Laurie and I couldn’t wait to whoosh down. We spent the entire afternoon hitting the pool as hard as we could, seeing who could make the water froth the most, while the rest of the girls prissily tiptoed around in a nearby wading pool, squealing if even the slightest bit of water touched their hair.

  At one point Laurie got out of the pool to run to the bathroom. She was wearing a black bathing suit, and I distinctly remember watching her run away and wondering, Can I marry a girl? She was the most fun person to be around, and therefore it only made sense to me that she was the kind of person I’d want to marry someday. But I knew somehow it was a question I couldn’t ask out loud. It wasn’t that I had been consciously exposed to any sort of homophobia at that point in my life; it was just that any other concept besides a man and a woman marrying hadn’t been introduced. I felt that my question about being able to marry Laurie was probably as absurd as asking my mom if I could marry one of our pet dogs. It just wasn’t done.

  That’s not to say that I didn’t have the occasional mild crush on a boy, but it was only when I found one who could fully match my enthusiasm for all things outdoors—an equal. I remember one little guy named Billy from a few years later who would sometimes come over after school. My family would tease that he was my boyfriend. I’d ignore them and take him down to the rocks behind our house to shoot BB guns.

  One day in the middle of target practice, he turned to me and asked, “So, should we kiss?”

  “Um, no,” I said. “Why don’t you concentrate a little harder on hitting that center stump?”

  We didn’t last much longer after that.

  I had met Billy at Lincoln Christian School, which my mom transferred me to in the second grade. I was too young to really care where I went, so it didn’t have much of an impact on me at first. Lincoln is a nondenominational private kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade institution that costs close to ten thousand dollars a year. They’re known for their high graduation rate, sports programs, and excellent state test scores. Mom wasn’t a fanatical Christian or anything, but the school was supposed to be one of the best in the area, and Mom wanted the best for me. She worked hard for it too, at the family business Papa and Gigi had started in 1986 called Danco. It makes custom machine parts for oil pumps, and the offices are attached to a warehouse full of industrial machinery that I loved to watch in action. The forklifts were my favorite—I couldn’t wait to be old enough to drive one and have all that strength right at my fingertips. Dad worked at Danco too, and he promised he’d have one of the workers teach me how to operate the machines someday. That was the sort of stuff he was great for—Dad was the good-time guy, always ready to play with me and Wes and our cousins. But Mom was the one who was immersed in the real daily grind of raising us and making sure we got a go
od education.

  Lincoln Christian School is massive. It looks like it could be a college campus, with different buildings for the elementary and high school kids. The school has its own church that students and their families were required to attend, unless you got a letter from the pastor of another church, saying that you showed up at his or her church regularly. Since sports were so strongly encouraged, I joined the basketball and softball teams and ran track and cross-country. We had Bible study class every day as part of the regular curriculum, and attended chapel on Wednesdays. “Biblical truths” were also incorporated into regular classes such as social studies and English. Almost any historical event that happened would get related back to a specific Bible quote, and while the teachers didn’t shy away from real literature in English classes as I got older, any book that contained a swear had the word meticulously blacked out with a Sharpie in each and every copy.

  Lincoln was required by law to teach us Darwin’s theory of evolution, but the teachers made sure that we knew it was against their will. Any talk of apes evolving into men was accompanied by huge eye rolls and constant reminders that it was just an idea some people had. But they knew the actual truth—it was Adam and Eve all the way. One teacher even expressed his disdain for evolution through the utterly bizarre comparison of placing a bunch of paper clips inside a small box and telling us, “These aren’t going to turn into a rocket ship inside here just because some scientist says so. So how can monkeys turn into men?”