When I was young I had a reoccurring dream that I was a boy. The dream was
so sweet. It was like licking sugar off a spoon. Becoming a boy seemed like
a stretch. Looking like one didn’t. I already looked like one. My hair was
shaped like a bowl, sometimes parted down the middle to approximate the
shaggy cool of JTT and Devan Sawa. Those boys had the kind of hair a girl
could only dream of having. My body was as flat as a skateboard. My legs
were in a perpetual state of mosquito itch. My neighbor accidentally called
me “he” and I loved him forever.

In my dream, I was Aladdin and I was on a magic carpet ride with Jasmine.
Jasmine was hugging my arm as we zipped through the swirling meringue of
clouds. We giggled and Jasmine gazed at me with her enormous eyes. She
would only ever look like that at a boy. I knew it right away. When I woke
up from the dream, sadness was sitting on my chest. It felt like my
serotonin had slipped down my spine and skittered out the bottom of my
feet. Maybe you’ve done MDMA. Maybe you felt so sad afterward you just
wanted to put your head inside a blanket. I’ll call it a gender comedown.
That’s the feeling I had when I woke up and wasn’t Aladdin. There was no
Jasmine. There was no magic carpet. I was just a girl in my bed.

Catherine Elizabeth was my best friend. Most people called her Cat Liz, but I
called her the Lizard and she called me the Snake. The Lizard and the Snake
were the stars of our own adventures. We twisted plots in our favor. The
Lizard wore dresses but she still knew how to climb a tree and cross a
creek. She seemed really comfortable in her dresses. They gave her more
room to move. I cut a deal with my mom that I only had to wear a dress one
Sunday a month to church. I could wear jeans all other Sundays. I already
had this strange sensation that the clothes I wore could change my life.
For instance, during the dress days I only ate one donut during coffee hour.
But during my jean-wearing days I could eat two. Maybe more. I could eat
everything.

By accident I discovered that if I laid on my back and put my feet in the
air I could make my vagina fart. I wanted to see if the Lizard could do it,
too. Turns out she could. We spent an entire afternoon farting from our
vaginas. This same afternoon, the Lizard’s mom came in to see if we wanted
a snack of fruit leather and Pecan Sandies. Admittedly, it was the wrong
time for the mother to enter the scene. The Lizard and I had our vaginas
against each other and were farting into each other. We thought it was
hilarious. A joke that we could tell the other with our bodies. We were 8.
It seemed harmless. But looking back now, I can see why the Lizard’s mom
freaked her shit.

After the farting incident, the Lizard stopped being available to hang out.
Her mom was still nice to me, but she rarely let me stay for dinner anymore
and the Lizard was suddenly enrolled in Ballet Saturday, which was during
our normal hang time. The Lizard dropped the Liz at school and started
going by Katie. There were already so many Katies at our school. She became
lost in a chorus of Katies. If I called her name, ten heads would turn. I
couldn’t find her anymore. Maybe she liked it: feeling that she was just
one of the girls.

The Lizard’s place was not vacant for long. I needed someone to fill the
friendship-sized hole in my heart, and that’s when I met Mason. Mason
looked like an angel, which was lucky for him because he acted like the
devil so the two just about evened themselves out. Mason’s eyes were
blue as rainwater. His dove-white curls literally flounced. This is how
Mason got away with it. It being everything.

When I met Mason, he told me he had figured out how to build a bomb from
a AA battery and skateboard bearings. The bomb did not work. But it’s the
thought that counts. Mason had a rifle under his bed that he swore
wasn’t loaded, but when he pointed it in my face, I almost puked on my
Ninja Turtles tee shirt. His dad would take him hunting the one weekend out
of the year they saw each other. Mason had the smooth buck antlers to
prove it. A picture on his wall showed him smeared in dark blood holding
the head of an animal to his chest. The jet-black eyes of the deer had gone
glassy. Its pink tongue was the only thing that looked alive.

My mom thought Mason was a delight. He said yes ma’am and ate her
steamed broccoli and more than anything he had the aura of a lost puppy
that needed his ears scratched. Mason was exactly what a boy should be.
I tried to laugh like him: that silent guffaw that shook his shoulders so
cutely. We already dressed similarly, but I was taking notes. He wore white
undershirts with the necks stretched and subtle dirt stains down the front.
A fishhook was pierced through the bill of his ball cap. My heart went
swollen when I looked at him. We were the same height, same weight, same
shape. When we wrestled I could pin him down. His body wriggled beneath me.
He hated to be beat by a girl. I hated it, too.

Mason stole a pack of his mother’s cigarettes, and that’s how I smoked
my first Marlboro. We went behind his house and walked down through the
gulley littered with teenage trash from teenage parties. He hated his
mother smoking, which is why he took them from her, but Mason said as
long as we had them, we might as well use them. The most exciting part
about smoking was the wet filter. It never got more intimate than that: our
spit touching on the same cottony tube. It was like kissing him with
something in between. We shared the soggy cigarette until I coughed
something yellow onto my shoes. We arm wrestled on a tree stump and I
thought about letting him win. The light had gone weak pink at the sky’s
edge and the sun was poised just above the maples, ready to sink under the
Earth. At the last ah-ha second, I used the full force of my bicep to level
his arm down on my winning side. When he shook his hand out, his knuckles
were flecked blood and bark.

During my friendship with Mason, my dreams got even more confusing. I
wanted Mason to be my Jasmine, but only if Jasmine could be a boy and I
could be a boy, too. I wanted to wear Mason’s undershirts with their
subtle stains down the front. I wanted him to hug my arm while he wore the
same shirt. I wanted boyish perfection, and I wanted that boyish perfection
to love me. Mason was sent away to military camp before we turned 13. I
saw him during the summers after that. His body continued to grow and so
did mine. We no longer had the same height, same weight, same shape. He
stayed a lanky, boyish thing; just a bigger version of it. His voice
deepened until it sounded like he was growling when he spoke. He carried
pistols on his belt and an Army crew cut replaced his flouncy curls. My
body had started a deceit that it never stopped. I left those skateboard
lines behind and filled out in places I wanted to hide under baggy jeans
and tough black tee shirts. When Mason was 19 he died in a hotel room
after being released from rehab. A needle was stuck deep in his elbow. His
boyish body was put in a casket, and we buried it in the softest dirt. I
still dream about him. He is on our magic carpet. He is riding it forever.

The part of the story I haven’t told you yet is that Mason and the
Lizard fell in love. It happened one summer when he was home from military
school. There was something they found in each other they could never find
in me. I was not enough boy for the Lizard. Not enough girl for Mason. I
was something in between them. I was both too much and not enough. Mason
and the Lizard now called Katie would drop acid on the shores of a dirty
dammed up lake just outside of town and escape their minds together. I will
resist the magic carpet metaphor here and instead tell you that they really
liked each other. I never spent time with the two of them together, which
looking back seems strange. But I heard about their summer. They each said
I reminded them of the other. I was there, even when I was not.

When I think of my childhood now, I don’t remember myself as a girl or even
as Aladdin. I think of myself as Mason, who is actually a dead boy.
There is something sick about that. About imagining yourself as a dead boy.
What is a dead boy if not a boy that never dies? I imagine Mason as the
man I never could be, but also as the man he never could be. Because he
never was. When I picture him now, he is always laughing. He is laughing
silently under those curls that were supposed to help us get away with
everything but never actually helped us get away with anything at all.