Cam Girl

I had to get the fuck out of here before I lost my mind. I yanked the knife away from her, looked at the little figures.

“Don’t go,” she said.

don’t go, Blue had said.

I could not process this.

Ellis called my name. The door banged. Cold and snow in my face, soothing. The sting of air in open wounds. My teeth ached. I was grimacing, grinding them as hard as I could. I wished I could break my head open and let the cold inside me. Quench this feverish despair. Like Skylar.

How could Ellis have done this to me? How could she?

She? Was that even the right word?

My mind was on fire.

I stumbled down into the woods, heading toward the shore.

There was only one person who had any idea what this felt like. And I needed to tell him something.

Something I’d been trying to tell him—and myself—for a long time.

—13—

Peaks Island lay quiet and black on the horizon. Snow drifted from a charcoal sky, a billion tiny stars streaking into the ocean. The spray churning up beneath the prow flayed my skin, sharp as pins and brutally cold, and part of me wanted to drop the oars and hurl myself into the water. Let the salt eat away all the parts of me that could feel, leave my skeleton to grow coral and moss.

The shoreline was encrusted with ice and I ran the boat at it heedlessly, heard the hull screech and tear, a sound like two vehicles meeting, shredding each other. I latched the oars and leaped into the shallows, soaking my legs to the thigh.

Everything in my fucking life came down to that night a year ago. When I lost everything.

And it was all my fault.

I crashed through snow-thick woods, ran skidding over black ice on the road. Up the hill to the lonely house, only to sink to my knees in a snowbank, sucking air. I grasped soft white handfuls of oblivion.

Sharp crystals pierced the snow beneath my face. It took a second to recognize my own tears, freezing.

God, Ellis, why.

Not because of what she was. In my heart, I already knew. Her androgyny. Her name. The way I’d never called her a girl except when I thought of our future, or when I wanted to hurt her. It wasn’t so much a shock as it was stepping back from the painting, seeing all the brushstrokes coalesce into a clear image. But she lied. To the one person on earth she should have told. Manipulated me, deceived me to experiment with her identity without my knowledge or consent, made me vulnerable, took advantage of my naivete. Screwed my head up. Put my heart in danger while she stayed safe behind the keyboard.

That was it. I would have loved her no matter what, including this part of her, if only she’d told me the truth.

I got up. Snow rushed from my clothes, the shedding of some old self.

The house was dark and still, same as yesterday. I stood on the porch for a moment and then tried the door. Unlocked.

“Max,” I called.

My shoes left wet prints, staining this dry, dead place. Everything looked different now. Photos of Skylar in her boy costume, standing on a pier with Max, the two of them hoisting a huge striped bass that licked up the sun. Skylar swinging a bat, smashing a baseball like a pale meteor into the aching blue beyond. Stereotypical boy stuff.

Max had always known her as a son. How do you reconcile losing someone twice—as the person you thought you knew, and the person they really were inside?

I called his name as I moved through the house. Too quiet. I peeked upstairs but there was no one. When I glanced out of Skylar’s bedroom window, I noticed something.

The boat was gone.

I raced downstairs and outside into the falling snow.

The yacht floated in the water off a nearby pier. Max’s Jeep sat parked on gravel. I shouted for him and a frigid gust carried my voice away.

My feet burned as I stumbled down the dock. Not good. Burning was a sign of frostbite.

The closer I got to the boat, the clearer it became:

A shadow perched on the pier, in the snow.

A man.

He sat there in nothing but jeans. Shoulders slumped, not even shivering. Snow flocked the hair on his bare chest.

I stopped a few feet away, wondering if I was hallucinating.

“Max,” I said.

He tipped his head back, drained the last of a whiskey bottle, and pitched it into the ocean.

Shit.

I moved closer, careful not to startle him. “What are you doing out here? You’re going to get hypothermia.”

His breath formed coils of steam that laureled his head. I crouched a few feet off, ignoring the burn in my wet feet, the throb in my bleeding hand. Ice flaked off my jeans.

“I saw the photos. All of them.” My breath touched his face. “Skylar was your daughter.”

At last he looked at me.

“I know about denial,” I said. “I’ve been in denial a long time, too.”

“What do you want?”

“Put a shirt on, for one, before you die.”

He looked back at the water. “I don’t feel anything.”

“That’s not good, Max.”

“It’s what I want.”

I knew that desire well.

“I get it,” I said. “What you were trying to show me about Ellis. All these years I saw it without really seeing it. It was right in front of my face, in my drawings, and I just . . . couldn’t name it. Neither could you. You didn’t out her, even though you were worried she’d hurt me.” And she did. And how could I resent her for that, if being Blue made her happy? My chest ached. “When did you know, with Skylar?”

“I always knew.” Muscle twitched in his jaw. “I pushed it away. He asked for dolls and I bought him a baseball glove.”

My mother, buying me dresses instead of paint.

They hadn’t meant to hurt us. They thought we’d get hurt by being our true selves. And they were right, but that didn’t mean we were wrong.

“What finally clicked?” I said.

“I caught him. In makeup. In . . . drag.” Max exhaled through his teeth. “He took pictures, put them online. When I found out I said a lot of things I regret. But he didn’t understand. None of you do. You’re young and think you’re invincible. You don’t realize that you’re branding yourself. Once you show the world you’re different, you can never take it back.”

“I do realize that. That’s why I’ve been terrified of being my real self.” Like Ellis. God, this whole time I’d been so self-righteous, thinking I was the only one struggling with my identity. “But if we’re not true to ourselves, we’ll never be happy.”

“What’s better, being happy or alive?”

“They’re not mutually exclusive.”

“For people like that, they are.”

I reached out and brushed his bicep. His skin was rubbery with cold. “I saw the autopsy. She was on hormone replacement therapy.” I thought of Ellis changing her name as soon as she turned eighteen. “When they start to transition, to become who they feel like inside, it gets better. It’s like pressure letting up. A bomb being defused.”

“I caused that pressure.”

“How?”

Max grimaced. “When he was younger, he asked if he could be a girl when he grew up. And I told him that was wrong. I told him not to think that way. Boys grow up to be men.”

Now he knew better.

Sometimes boys grew up to be women. And girls grew up to be men.

“You still have her boy pictures all over your house,” I said. “Who are those for? You think that’s how she’d want to be remembered?”

“I want to remember him being happy.”

“Max, being her real self made her happy.”

He shook my hand off. Sloppy, uncoordinated. “You want me to put up photos of Skylar? To remember what a failure of a father I was? To remind me why my son committed suicide?”

This is it. This is the moment, Vada. Own it.

I touched him again, firmer. “You’re not the one to blame. If you want to blame someone, it should be me.”

“Why?”