Birthday(5)
“Yes, sir,” I say. I want to talk back, but making Dad angry is a one-way ticket to grounded.
A long, rumbling silence passes, and just when I’ve started to calm down, an ad for Dad’s car dealership, the place every McKinley son is doomed to work if he can’t pay his own way through college, comes on the radio. He turns up the volume.
Dad started the business straight out of high school and it’s his pride and joy. Sometimes I think he loves those stupid cars more than our whole family put together. He turns the volume up with a “whoop!” and sings along to the hokey jingle, and my mom and Peyton join in.
Dad catches my eye in the rearview mirror. I stare back.
I push my lips together and start to hum.
He smiles at me, his mouth spreading wide, almost smug, but I notice his eyes don’t crinkle up. I smile back as long as I can manage and turn my gaze back to the road.
It’s still a long way home from here.
MORGAN
“Think you’ll need to see a doctor?” Dad asks. He cranks his window down and props his elbows on the truck’s steering wheel. I pause my Atreyu song and give him my attention. Even though I don’t want to talk to anyone right now, it’s been so hard getting anything real from him since Mom died that I can’t help noticing when he takes any noticeable interest besides sporadically babying me.
Do I need to see a doctor? I think of the internet searches and forum posts I’ve read about this thing that’s wrong with me, about the surgeries and hormones I might need, or want, or … the whole thing is so confusing. But that’s not what Dad’s asking about. He’s just worried that I threw up. I’m tempted to tell him, to let it explode from me, but then my eyes drift to his face and I see how tired he is all the time, how he almost never sleeps, how he takes odd jobs on top of coaching. I can’t add more to that. I can’t tell him I should be his daughter.
“No,” I say. I rub my stomach and shake my head. “Just too much gas station food, I guess. I feel better now.”
He grunts in acknowledgement. I put one of my headphones back in, watch the road drift by, and try not to think about how Eric couldn’t hear me at the water park, and how my secret is still safe, and how Eric looked cute without a shirt on, and how I wish I didn’t even think that. It had been a mistake to think to tell him. I push the truth down. Bury it. Stick a grave marker on top. What’s one more year of life as a boy?
My thoughts drift to Mom and I wonder if I would have been able to tell her how I felt wrong in my own body, if she would have understood. Mom was sensitive, and soft-spoken, and always kind—even to people I could tell she didn’t like. I think she would have loved me no matter what.
I guess I’ll never know.
But I can hope.
We pass under the highway overpass that marks the entrance to Thebes, to home. Thebes is a sleepy little mountain town nestled between Knoxville and Nashville. It’s the type of place where the only noteworthy things to do are drive through or drive away. We aren’t rich on Dad’s coaching salary, but it feels like we have a fortune compared to some kids at my school.
Dad told me once that there used to be a coal mine and a couple of factories in Thebes, that the highway got enough traffic before I-40 was put in that there were more restaurants and hotels than any local could visit. There were jobs.
Without the mine and the factories, Thebes is just a Walmart and a chicken processing plant and a bunch of big, empty buildings with boards over some windows and shattered glass in the rest. Worse than the cracked pavement and drooping, forgotten telephone poles are the ghosts lurking everywhere I look.
There’s the movie theater Mom took me to every other Sunday as our special ritual. I still remember watching Mulan beside her and feeling a quiet thrill of pleasure. And although I was only five, even then I suspected I wasn’t supposed to say anything about how cool it was that a girl could also be a boy.
We drive past the field where my peewee league played, where other kids’ parents cheered and clapped and made me feel special, where boys my age smiled when they saw me—instead of slapping books out of my hands and kicking my legs when no one was watching like they do now.
There’s Federal Park with the stream running through it, the stream you can’t drink from, shimmering and iridescent with runoff from one of the old mines. Eric’s family and mine would cook out here in the summers, but we haven’t in the past couple of years. It wouldn’t be the same without Mom’s potato salad, and her recipe book has gone missing—not that Dad or I would even know where to start with cooking. We mainly subsist on frozen dinners and takeout.
We pass Burke’s Funeral Home, a converted white plantation house where I sat in the parking lot and, for the first but definitely not the last time, felt so apocalyptically sad and angry that I couldn’t stop crying. There’s Oak County High School, where I’ll have to go next year, every part of it dilapidated and crumbling except the football field, which always looks like someone just went over every inch of the bleachers and lights with a toothbrush.
It’s late afternoon, darkening into evening, when we finally pull into our trailer park. I hop down from the truck without saying anything, shuffle inside, and head straight to the hall closet. I don’t hear Dad come after me. He knows what I’m up to.
After some digging, I find the small cardboard box labeled MORGAN’S BABY TAPES. I crawl under a rack of Dad’s dress shirts, lift the lid, and read the looping, feminine handwriting on the tapes’ spines. Mostly they’re old home movies on VHS, but there are two smaller handycam tapes Mom made just before she passed—she’d wanted to leave a birthday present for me. Her plan was that she’d make a video for every year she would miss. I think she wanted to go all the way from my twelfth up to my eighteenth birthday, but then everything happened so fast. We had less than a year from a diagnosis to the funeral. In the end she only made these two birthday tapes for me.