Chapter Text
Polla Corta Senior High—or ‘Polly’—ranks 25# in the Best Public High Schools of America. Polla Corta Unified School District ranks number one. They produce the most engineers, technologists, and scientists in the county. Their Speech and Debate Program goes to nationals almost annually.
I’ve been debating since I was ten. I speak three languages. I skipped a grade in math and I may as well for every other subject. I play three instruments. When my parents refer to my future, it’s “when you go to law school…” or “when you take the LSAT.”
That’s why I’m here—kind of. The official story is that I needed treatment for a rare alveolar disease and I couldn’t get treatment in the country so my family relocated to Palo Alto for hospitalisation reasons. Don’t get any alternative ideas.
I need this more than anybody. I’ve bled, I’ve bargained, and I’ve begged. I need this to become a partner to some firm in Boston or Washington or Chicago; to leave this cheap imitation of Dante’s Purgatorio in Bay Area California; to find a wife and settle down; and then burn the entire world with this body.
…which is why I am taking possibly the most useless elective class Polly has to offer; Premier Choir.
“For the easy A,” I told my parents and everybody else. “For the VAPA credits,” I retaliated when they called me undisciplined. As you can probably infer, neither of those were the reasons I decided to subject myself to… this.
Adeline’s this theatre-adjacent girl—not the weird, LGBTQ+ kind, though—with about her height and weight in curly, red hair. Her eyes are brown but not as bright as Kingsley’s—I’ll elaborate on him later. She has a pinched, embryo-ish (incest baby?) face like some creature out of Marcel the Shell. Her clothes are all from Lululemon or some other à la mode, expensive brands I’m proud to not know the names of. She tends to gossip in this whiny, vocal-fried girl voice.
You might call me homophobic or something for that first comment. I have no defence against that. You’d be homophobic too if you were actually trans and living in this Californian cesspool. Or if you had the displeasure of meeting Kingsley Selbity, but I digress.
After like, the year 2020, a bunch of girls with coloured hair and borderline Munchausen’s decided they wanted to become gay. Anybody with functioning brain cells can tell that they’re doing it for attention, but we know better than to call them out on it—at least to their faces. So the line in the sand is essentially drawn between ‘freak’ and ‘normal.’ Guess which side transsexual is forced into. Even normal ones like me and Alex.
Alex is this boy who I’m quite sure has never had a prolonged moment of unhappiness in his life. He’s run cross country for three years—probably a literal track star, if I’m being honest. I have the records to back it up if you couldn’t tell just by looking at him. Some people quite literally look fast, and Alex is one of those. He’s Swedish or some other Scandinavian breed; beanpole-thin, blue-eyed, platinum blond (seriously, he’s really blond). Alex has such endearing tendencies as heel-clicking in moments of excitement, greeting his peers with a two-fingered Polish salute, and touching the palm of his hand to the tops of door frames. Alex has good hands… look, I’m just gonna get it out of the way before you inevitably ask. Yes, I would… you know with him if he asked.
What I like about Adeline is the fact that she cares a lot about what other people think. She’s the type of girl I can bring home to my parents. She’d probably know her way around the Ritz or Dorchester if I ever brought her back to my country. She’d never embarrass me, never make me feel in any way that could turn out messy or inconvenient.
I guess it makes me look better, too, if I’m taking this class for a girl. I’m trying to make the whole “for VAPA” excuse the same way guys like Roman do—with the same puerile, gentlemanly futility of trying to get out of saying “Yeah I’m only taking this class so I can get into somebody’s pants.”
The choir room is probably the purest form of beige you can imagine, and not very tidy. Two practice sectors towards the back are anything but soundproofed, and a grand piano takes up a good ninety per cent of the space. It shrank even more when the ‘tenor-basses’ congregated in a semi-circle and began singing scale progressions.
I’m debating whether it’d be worse to be the faggot that chickens out or to sing and risk my voice going high. Maybe if Bill or Alex drop out of it, I might too. Then it wouldn’t be weird.
Mrs. Nahard is a tall, thick-browed woman who I’m quite sure likes to hear the sound of her own voice and little else. She began today’s lesson by meowing aggressively on a chair under the guise of ‘vocal warm-ups.’ I’m visually assaulted by her massive, bulbous knockers wobbling in my face as she gives me the most predatory, bared-fang smile I’ve ever seen.
“Evan,” she says, her breath hot and sour. I’m still getting used to the whole ‘first name’ thing in America—not to mention, I’m still getting used to my first name myself.
I sing what is given to me; like two scales, because any higher and the resonance drops. And Mrs. Nahard nods contemplatively like there actually might be some movement of neurons in that cranium of hers.
“Tenor.”
Oh fuck no.
There’s a ringing in my ears and my mouth falls open but anything I have to say disappears. Lovely. May as well climb on top of a chair and yell “tranny!”
I don’t care if the majority of the time it’s only Alex and my mates. I don’t care if it’s still an all-male section. It’s fucking gay. It’s all the choir faggots and the only other transgender kid in the room. It’s enough to convince people that I’m a fucking freak just like they probably already believed.
I fucked up. I fucked up grossly. Because now people are looking at me and they’re thinking things about me without my consent.
Adeline is giving me a sidelong glance from across the room, and it lingers just a split second too long. Roman and Bill are making eye contact and laughing at something I was not made aware of.
“Nah, my voice is lower.” I decide that the best thing I could do to remedy the situation is to act with only an appropriate amount of defiance. Act as just a pissy teenage boy who wishes his voice had dropped. Curse and stomp and throw the barest of tantrums. I can do that. I can do anything.
Roman and Bill don’t look like they care but I know they do. Reasonably, I know I could just talk my way out—make up some deficit of puberty or a speech impediment—but these things stick. I should know better than anybody.
In year nine, fucking Kingsley Selbity had the grand idea to tell everybody that I was a transgender.
Kingsley is Middle Eastern—which should tell you all you need to know. He’s this larger-than-life character who’s infuriatingly good at everything he does and somehow manages to get everybody to like him. “He’s so nice!” They tell me. Do you know what he called me in secondary school? I made the mistake of wearing a red sweater around him and he thought it fitting to call me “Satan, if he were a red delicious apple with toothpicks stuck in it.” ‘So nice’ my arse.
It was going to be my second year in the States, and already that prick had decided to ruin things for me. I’m still firmly under the belief that had it not been for him, I wouldn’t have to worry about shit like choir.
I didn’t think it was serious at first—just a few mates, right? But then it was a couple dozen, and then people were starting to suspect things.
So I got the school on his sorry arse and then his parents—they wouldn’t’ve cared, so I just said that he was a homosexual, the animals. My mum and dad offered to sue Kingsley to hell and back, but that would’ve been excessive. I’d made my point and he’d got what he was due; a few months on the streets, near suspension, and my undying hatred.
But people remembered. There are still rumours. Fucking Kingsley can still tell people what he wants. I can’t gag him—even though, honestly, I’d like to. He’s got a very wide, pink mouth, and he smiles too much.
Kingsley’s very broad-built, too. Like Hephaestion or some other S.P.Q.R character. His hair is a light brown shade and sticks up on top of his head. His eyes are animated, even behind glasses, and looking into them while he recites some joke he probably thought of preemptively somehow gets you to laugh anyway. He could probably beat me in a fight—that is before some jet-ski accident rendered him wheelchair-bound over the summer. I could probably push him and get away with it, and he wouldn’t be able to chase me after. No, I shan’t—
But what I can do is lie. I can make up some shitty excuse on the spot and defend it to my last breath; I can remember petty little things about others to whittle their credibility; I can keep my head down and my voice deep and remind everybody that I am not afraid of them and I never fucking will be. You can call me paranoid, insecure, shallow. You can call me a monster, heartless, or amoral.
But I am going to survive.
And no way in hell am I doing that by being a fucking tenor.