Page 10 of Best Woman
“Jenna didn’t want to walk down the aisle with me.”
Kim’s brow knits in confusion. “But you’re Aiden’s sister. You’re the best woman.”
“Yeah, but Iusedto be Aiden’s brother and I wassupposedto be the best man. Jenna is pretty conservative.” That I refer to myself even in the past tense as male is a testament to how the drinks are hitting me. It’s no secret that I’m trans, that I haven’t always identified or presented as a woman, but in thecurrent landscape of trans politics, it’s not exactly thedonething to admit to ever having been a gender other than the one you are now, or always were, or whatever.
What I’msupposedto say and think and believe with every fiber of my being is that I am a girl, have always been a girl, was born in the wrong body, and that my transition was a righteous victory in my lifelong battle against the assignment forced on me against my will at birth. And no matter how true or false orcomplicatedthat may be when applied to my real lived experience, I at the very least should not hand ammunition to the millions of people ready and willing to call me a wolf in women’s clothing.
“What a cunt,” Kim says, leaning back against the vinyl booth. “I’m so sorry. Did Jenna say something to you?”
“No, my brother told me.”
“Damn, that’s shitty. Why did you even need to know that?”
I guess I understand why she’d think that, but she doesn’t know my relationship with Aiden, that our closeness was born out of our willingness to share the ugliest parts of ourselves and our lives. Two children of divorce so used to being lied to by their parents that the only way to survive it was promising to never lie to each other.
But I don’t know how to put that into words Kim will understand. This is a girl who, if I remember the gossip correctly, spent most of her senior year living with her grandmother after her mom found out she was gay and kicked her out. I don’t want to throw in her face that my brother is such a good, ugh,allythat he wouldn’t stand for having a bigot at his wedding.
And the sympathy swelling in Kim’s eyes is a little patronizing, sure, but it’s also kind of nice. It’s the same way she lookedat me when she saw me sitting alone outside the auditorium. That sympathy is the reason she gave me a ride home, and let me get close to her for long enough to set my heart—and hormones—on fire. Maybe…there’s something in that. A chance to get a little more of Kim’s attention.
Not that I’m desperate or attention starved. I have plenty of fulfilling sex with hot people, but this is Kim Cameron, my unattainable first crush suddenly thrust back into my life, the first person I ever wanted so bad I thought I’d die from it. Maybe it’s the mall, or whatever preservatives are in the Cheesecake Factory bread, but that old teenage obsession is roaring through me all over again and I’m as desperate for her as when we were dumb gay teenagers.You have an angle,some reptilian part of my brain hisses.Use it.
I shrug and cast my eyes downward, trying not to oversell it. “I don’t know. I guess they were a little upset about the whole thing.” And they had been, buton my behalf.
“Dealingwith me in the context of their wedding has been, I don’t know, a constant source of tension,” I say, feeling stupid as I say the words but also enjoying the opportunity to ham it up. “Aiden and I aren’t even that close,” I say, surprised my tongue doesn’t trip over the lie. “When he asked me to be his best man it was honestly kind of surprising.”
Kim nods. “I thought it’d be Ben Otsuka.”
I truly cannot deal with the thought of Ben Otsuka right now, so I just let my mouth run. “Well, it was me. And when he asked me, I was just like, figuring the girl stuff out, but I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet, so I just said yes.” That was all true, but once Iwasready to talk about it, Aiden had been kind and supportive. He’d done the work to educate himself, to admit that it mighttake him some time to get everything right while assuring me that he wanted to.
“We’ve all spent the past couple of yearsnotdealing with it.” Also technically true: everyone had been so cool there hadn’t been much to deal with.
“OK, so you’re my bestwoman,” Aiden had said, arm around my shoulders. “Big whoop.”
“Anyway,” I say, attempting to project the deep inner fortitude of someonerising above it,“I just have to make it through this wedding.” I finish off my drink and set it down on the table, and Kim makes the world stop when she puts her hand down on mine. It feels like a live wire.
“You deserve so much better than that, Julia.”
My insides twist like the snakes my cousin Max used to keep in a terrarium, making them fight for dead mice. I’m ecstatic and ashamed all at once. It’sworking.
Our second round of drinks arrives and we order a few small plates to share—I don’t think my stomach could handle an hour-long train ride full of Cheesecake Factory food, no matter how bad I want to see if Evelyn’s Favorite Pasta is as good as I remember. I ask the waiter to make sure there are no carrots in anything—I’m intensely allergic and do not need a swollen face when I’m trying to woo my high school crush into a pity fuck—and he nods without really looking up from his notepad. “Sure, man, no problem.”
Ouch. Not ideal, but whatever. This is the kind of casual misgendering I’d usually brush off. This guy has been checked out the entire time he’s been helping us, probably counting the minutes until his shift ends, and has likely inferred, in that unthinking way most cis people do when hearing my husky voice on thephone or from the back seat of an Uber, that I’m a dude. In the early days of my transition, I would have made a stink and corrected him, maybe even asked the manager to comp us a round of drinks. But almost four years in, I’ve learned that it’s so much less work to just let it go because the only person who is going to be embarrassed in that situation is me. This is a random waiter at the Cheesecake Factory who I’m never going to see again. Who cares if he assumed I wasn’t a woman?
As it turns out, Kim cares.
“It’smiss,dude.” Miss Dude. Good drag name. “Her pronouns are she, her, hers.” She says it with such condescending disdain it causes the waiter to finally break out of his disaffected haze and take us in. He gulps.
“I’m so sorry, uh, ladies.” His cheeks are turning red. Kim corrected him in a way that madehimlook like an idiot, something I’ve never been able to manage. He flees.
“He’s a clueless asswipe, Julia.” Kim is looking at me with concern that I’d find condescending from anyone else, but she rests her hand on mine again, and the electricity of her touch is just as intense the second time. She looks even more open and sympathetic than she was a few minutes ago. “God, that guy, your family…cis people suck. I apologize on our behalf,” she says. It could be a joke but she says it seriously, and I’d love nothing more than to roll my eyes, but they’re too busy looking down her shirt as she leans over the table.
Snap out of it,Daytona’s best Cher voice chides in the back of my mind.
“Don’t worry about it.” I’m doing my best trans martyr drag, a woman struggling to be above the constant cruelty of a cisheteronormative society. This is true, in a way, but I’veconditioned myself as much as possible to be unaffected by it, and insulated by queer people who get it and non-queer people who make an effort to be, ugh,allies.
Kim doesn’t know that, though, and playing it up means more sympathy. More touching. We’re going to walk down the aisle together at Aiden’s wedding, and the more time we spend together, the more protective she feels of me…maybe that hand touching could become something more.
Because that would be the real validation, wouldn’t it? The final confirmation that I’d conquered womanhood: the first girl I’d ever been obsessed with, who I could neverhavebecause she was only into girls, being into me. All the waiters and baristas and customer service representatives in the world could misgender me, but they’d never be able to take that away. I’d at last be the real, actual, best woman.
