Page 33 of Rock Bottom
“Will you tell me more about your early life, please?” Julian asked.
I looked at the floor. I never told anyone about growing up, but Julian already knew so much about who I am now, telling him how I got here was probably fair. I’d reasoned, before, that he hadn’t shared, so I didn’t have to. That was no longer true.
“My mom is a physicist, heavy on the math and science, but at the levels smaller than atoms. She has all these ideas that…” I sighed. “There’s this saying that all the ancient mystics are meditating on mountains, and that someday, the scientists are going to climb the mountain to find the mystics peacefully meditating. I think that describes my mom, climbing the mountain looking for some science-based truth to reality and all-that-is. At the smallest levels, it’s as if observation itself shapes what’s real. Some branches of physics have proven what the mystics have been saying for centuries. So, my mom is kind of the scientist version of a sixties hippy, but without all the flowers and peace signs.”
“Are you close to her?”
I nodded, but I needed to tell him about my dad before I could talk about our family.
“My dad is an engineer, and again, heavy on the math, and his dad was a medical doctor who specialized in research, rather than having a medical practice. All that to say, when the doctors tried to strong-arm my parents into letting them chop my dick down to a clitoris, my mom said no, and her father–in-law pretty much ordered them to do all the tests that told them exactly what my DNA says about my gender, and then she used those tests to keep arguing that I should stay intact.”
He started to say something, but I kept going before he could. “I had a good childhood. Gender didn’t matter until I started school, and they sent me to a private school that agreed I could be ungendered. They had me listed asI, for intersex, instead of M or F. Mostly, I’d spend a month or two as one gender back then, and then decide I was the other. Some of the kids had a hard time with it, but most of them were cool. I learned early on that what others thought wasn’t important.”
I rolled my eyes. “I got in a lot of trouble in the third grade. One of the mean girls got in my face about it not being rocket science to know what I was. If I had a penis, I was a boy, and if I had a vagina, I was a girl.” I sighed. “I dropped my pants and my boxers, and put one foot up on the ladder of the monkey bars to show her — and most of the class — I had both.”
His eyes got big, and I shrugged. “We both got suspended for three days. My parents grounded me for a week fromeverything— phone, internet, tv. My dad made me write a paper on why what I did was wrong, and my mom made me write a fictional story. She gave me the characters and their backstories, and told me to write them into a story in any time or place. I had to write at least five hundred words a day. She set a laptop up so I could only access a word processor, a dictionary, and a thesaurus. No internet, no browser, no games.”
“Your mom is brilliant. What story did you write?”
“She gave me three characters, and I could choose which was the main character. I chose the changeling, which meant a baby the fairies had traded for one of their own. The parents didn’t know their baby was a changeling, and didn’t understand why their child was neither male nor female, but they loved their child so much, nothing else mattered. There was a best friend and an arch enemy. She gave me ideas of basic tropes, and I ended up going with what I now see as the basic tropeThe Neverending StoryandDunewere based off of — a being in a world he or she doesn’t completely belong to and maybe shouldn’t be in, and they end up changing the world they were inserted into for the better, or saving the world, or whatever.”
I blew out a breath. “Okay, fast forward to the sixth grade, when my parents divorced and my world fell to pieces. I lived with mom for two months until they reached an agreement, so I went back and forth — a week at my mom’s house and then a week at my dad’s. Two years later, they’d both remarried. My mom’s husband didn’t have a problem with me, but my dad’s new wife kept trying to make me stay a girl, which means I decided I’d just be a guy when I was there, because…” I shrugged. “I don’t know why. I was sent to a therapist who had all kinds of bullshit reasons, but really, my stepmom just pissed me off so I was determined to piss her the hell off, too.”
“Sounds completely reasonable,” he said with a smile. “I don’t know much about stepmothers, but I absolutely understand the satisfaction of quiet rebellion.”
“Right.” I said, and it struck me that he truly did understand. “The important thing to note is that she left my dad before they’d been married a year, but one of her sons turned eighteen during that time, and he chose to stay with dad, and my dad was cool with it. I had a huge crush on him, but he never made it weird, you know? He was the big brother I’d always wished I had. He was good with me no matter my gender. I was five years younger than him, but he was never impatient with me. He showed me how to play chess, he taught me how to drive when I was fourteen, he took me mountain climbing and rappelling, he let me work out with him and gave me pointers. During the summer, he let me swim with him and his friends without bitching about it. I mean, I had to not tell Dad they drank beer while he was at work, but he let me have a little, sometimes. Mostly, he didn’t care if I was his little brother or his little sister. I was just Jules to him. One of his friends said something rude about my tits when I was being a boy one day while we swam, and he punched his friend in the nose and broke it.”
“What did his friend say?”
I shrugged. “Basically that I didn’t have tits so I should stop pretending to be a girl.” There was more, but that was the gist of it.
“Good for your brother. What’s his name?”
“Benjamin. His mom never allowed anyone to shorten it, so I called him Benji, just to piss her off.” I grinned. “I had all of his friends calling him Benji, too. Wow, was she pissed.”
I didn’t want to spend too long on that, so I told him, “Mom’s husband had sons, too, but they were younger than me. So, I was the oldest in one household and the youngest in the other, after being an only child until they divorced and remarried. There’s this thing that says the best predictor of whether a marriage will work or not is birth order. So, an oldest child works best with a youngest child, but then no one really knows what to do with an only child, but pretty much everyone agrees two only children shouldn’t go together.”
“I was the third of seven kids when I left,” Julian said. “I figure more came that I didn’t get to meet. The rest of my life was in a dorm environment, without parents. I had teachers who cared for me, it wasn’t a bad life, and as I said, I had fame and adoration, eventually.”
I shrugged. “In the grand scheme, my early life is important only because I learned not to care what others thought. I define myself. I create my own reality.” I heard what I was saying while sitting next to a fucking vampire, and I shook my head. “So why in the hell have I created a reality where vampires exist? I guess it’s an adventure I wanted?”
His face went super-serious. “I truly hope you do. I would be very sad if you no longer wanted me in your life. I’ve grown quite fond of you. I knew we couldn’t bemoreunless I could get permission to tell you what I am. We were kind of paused, until I could.”
“Benji kind of made me an adrenaline junkie. Mountain climbing, the kind you have to do with ropes, and we had a family membership at this climbing place, a big warehouse with tons of different walls to climb. You hook up and it won’t let you fall fast. It doesn’t hold you up — you have to hold on or you’ll fall — but once pressure is put on the rope, you don’t just go splat. He taught me to waterski, too. Oh, and I wanted to SCUBA dive with him, so he got me registered in a class, and I could go with him and his friends when we went to the coast.” I blew out a breath. “And sailing, which isn’t a nice calm ride in a boat, the way he does it. He raced, and I was on his team once I turned sixteen, but I started going out with him almost from the start.”
It was time to stop talking about all of what had made me look for adrenaline-fueled activities and tell him why this was important. “I didn’t speak up soon enough to get to ride a dragon, so I’m speaking up now. I want you to bite me.”
“Okay, one thing at a time, dear Silver. Bear with me just a little longer. We have a little more to talk about. You’ve never told me your birth name. Is it Jules?”
I nodded. “Yes. My parents figured I could go by Julian or Julie, or some other variant, depending on what gender I chose, but they called me Jules all my life, so when they asked me what name I wanted to use when I started kindergarten, I was like ‘Duh. My name is Jules.’”
I blew out a breath and rolled my eyes. “I briefly went byJuliewhen I took ballet, but it just annoyed me to be called Julie. I mean, I had to be a girl at ballet, right? I thought it was a good time to try it out, and maybe I’m glad I did, because I realized I hated having a timeline where I had to be a girl, and I’msonot a Julie.”
“I would be honored to call you by your real name, if you’ll allow it.”
“I mean, I’m kind of Silver, now. Maybe you can call me Jules when it’s just us, but Silver the rest of the time? Mostly, I guess my name is kind of private. Will had to know because he needed all my information before he could pay me, but he hasn’t shared it, and the rest of my bandmates don’t know what it is.”
He nodded. “A private name, then. Second, do you still do any of these adrenaline activities?”
