Chapter Text
Andy isn’t expecting the blood.
It’s been a long time since they were caught off guard like this, over a toilet, peeling back undies to a slick of thick blood. They’ve bled straight through to their jeans, something that hasn’t happened since junior high. It sounds stupid, at 22, but Andy forgot about periods. Their stomach hurt all afternoon, but they just assumed it was from the dodgy vegan tacos. They haven’t menstruated in months. It just stopped being something they thought about. It was like the universe acknowledging I made a mistake when I made you a girl. It was like cosmic reparations.
It was like Andy was too depressed to eat for several months. That’s what it was like. Now their body is storing fat again. Now their body is flexing its biology.
How fitting that it’s blood; it certainly feels like fucking violence.
Blood, dark and staining, thick with the reminder of life. Blood you can’t escape from. Biology that finds you, taunting you with chromosomes more permanent than any Sharpie. The signs and signals everyone else seems to think are so important. Blood that tells Andy, no matter where you to run, I will be here to remind you. Their body will always remind them.
Andy moved out of their parents’ house like this:
There was nothing to pack, really. Andy had this whole scheme, a black garbage bag, a way to get things out to the car while pretending to take out the trash. Only, when they got to their bedroom and pulled the bag out from under their shirt? There was nothing they wanted to put into it. Some action figures, the few Star Wars toys they’d been allowed to have (‘How about a nice Barbie, hon? She can ride in your little spaceship’), some comics. Papers from school and birthday cards. Family photos with a girl in them. The books on their shelves, once the only portals Andy had to escape through. Andy picked things up and put them down again. There was nothing worth taking. Nothing they wanted to carry over into their new life. After all, most of important things had already been ferreted away to their dorm room and then to Pete’s apartment—the best of the books, their CDs and tapes, their journal, the Patty Schemel drumsticks Pat got them for Christmas. (Jo got them a binder and demanded they surrender their Ace bandages. Pete filled the entire freezer at the apartment with vegan ice cream, saying, ‘It’s ready for you to move in now. We’ll figure rent out later.’ It is impossible to choose which of these gifts is best.) The other important things had already been thrown away by their mom. Most of the remainder was girl stuff . Nail polishes, clothes Andy didn’t choose for themself, a Hanson poster, sensible business pumps. Even the hairbrushes had pink and purple jelly handles.
None of it could be saved. Andy alone was the salvage from this room. This someone-else’s-life that they had tried so fucking hard to live. Andy stood there, in the bedroom they grew up in—the place they acted out scenes from an ill-fitting girlhood—with an empty garbage bag and nothing, nothing they could carry with them. Nothing that would mean anything. Nothing that would fill this particular void.
Andy wanted to cry. But in this, their body betrayed them again: though they screwed up their face and choked on their breath, willing the bead of sadness to burst its surface tension and overflow, no tears came. Even at the last, there was no significant event with which to mark this moment. This goodbye.
Then their mother appeared in the doorway, as if the universe wanted to say: if there couldn’t be closure, there would damn well be a scar.
“Andy, honey?” their mom said, her brow furrowed in concern. “What are you up to?” Andy looked at their mother’s face, really tried to look at the woman herself and not the years of hurt and resentment and antipathy that usually obscured her. That usually built a wall between Andy and the woman who made them.
Looking at their mother is like looking in a mirror—almost. The same high, lined forehead; the eyebrows that she assures Andy they would have too, if they bothered with a tweezer; the same smooth jaw. The same plush lips. The only thing Andy got from their father was the color brown: his thick chestnut hair, his serious eyes.
A mirror to who they were supposed to be. A mirror to who they might have been. The living visage of the woman Andy would have been, if Andy was a woman.
It raised questions. Could they could just—go on living the life they’d been born into? If they grew their hair, accepted the jarring violence of she, she, she , let their tits and ass get groped and gaped at? If they wore the lipstick and skirts and pantyhose their mother wanted, the soft cream-colored cashmere sweater their mother bought them, if they pierced their ears and flirted shyly and dated Matt—
How hard could it be, really? They’d accepted the yoke of it for years, hadn’t they? Not undamaged, no. Not whole. But they’d borne it.
Until it become unbearable.
Andy saw themself in their mother’s face, and Andy did not like to look.
Andy didn’t plan on telling their mother they were leaving. Andy knows two versions of their mother: the dangerous version, they one they’re scared of, the one who gave away their drum kit and really believed this was a kindness, and the one standing before them, the one who made them soup when they were sick and read them bedtime stories, the one whose skirt Andy buried their face in and wept when they were bullied, the one who rubbed Andy’s back and put them together again when they fell apart. It is impossible to reconcile these two mothers. It is impossible to reconcile the person their mother sees and the person they really are. The person they’ve always been.
Andy blurted out, “I’m throwing some things away for you.” And Andy marched to the closet and started ripping down the blouses, the camisoles, the slacks, the dresses their mother had filled it with. The things that were meant to replace what she had taken, what she had thrown away. The things that were meant to corral Andy back into a shape she recognized, a shape Andy had never been. Handful by handful, Andy shoved these articles of coercion into the garbage bag. They were gifts, of course. Gifts for the daughter Andy is not. Gifts for the daughter Andy cannot, will not, be.
With a cry like the textiles were the things precious to her in this situation, Andy’s mother put herself between Andy and the open closet. She tried to wrest the bag away, started pulling sweaters and leggings back out of it again. “Andrea! These are nice things! What on earth is this about?”
Andy hadn’t spent Thanksgiving here. They hadn’t spent Christmas vacation here, either. They’d come on Christmas morning and then left again, retreating to the Trohman household, surfing the couches of friends with kinder families til the clock wound down, til there was no delaying the reality that they hadn’t registered for spring classes, that the new year started tomorrow, that Andy would be a new person in it. That Andy wasn’t coming back to this house or this room, maybe not ever.
“I don’t understand what’s gotten into you!” Andy’s mom scolded, tugging so hard on the garbage bag that it began to tear between them, splitting like poetic justice, spilling garments that didn’t properly belong to either of them onto the bedroom floor. “First you won’t stay in your own house, and I try to be patient with you. Then I get a letter from your university about how dropping below full-time status will affect your financial aid, and meanwhile you’re not saying a word about what’s going on. Now you’re ransacking your closet of all the nice things I got you? Young lady, you are going to tell me what is going on !”
Andy’s mom had slapped them before, but nothing ever hit them like the words young lady do. Andy dropped the bag like it burned them and stepped back. Always, always moving away from the conflict, away from the danger. Always making themself quiet and small and trying to be easy, trying to avoid the attention, doing themself this small constant damage to avoid the risk of some larger, less controllable pain. “I don’t want this stuff,” Andy said. “Any of it. The clothes, the room, the house, you . I don’t belong to you. I’m not coming back.”
“You act like we’re such monsters!” Andy’s mom cried. Unlike Andy, she could produce tears on command. She didn’t have to feel a thing to make her face show it. Andy knew this. Andy had known this for years. Still, it curved into their belly like a hot blade, seeing their mother’s tears. There is no defense against the pain of the person who made you. There never is. “What have we ever done but help you? Twenty-one years of food and shelter—”
“Those are the bare minimum!” Andy yelped back, temper suddenly splashing hot. “You don’t see me, you only see the daughter you want, and when I try to say I’m different you just—you just find new ways to control me! New ways to hurt me . I cut my hair, you trash my drum kit. I get a tattoo, you replace all my clothes. Well, you don’t own me anymore!”
Andy’s mom’s face emptied of blood. She stood quivering with shock and anger. Andy saw her hands fist on the lip of the garbage bag, but Andy wasn’t afraid anymore. Andy knew there were worse things than physical blows. Perversely, they felt that it would be better if their mother would just hit them. If there were just bruises they could show to other people, broken bones they could explain— my parents hurt me because of who I am. They do not understand me, and so they have created wounds . Stitches and shattered glass, these are types of inviolable damage you can show others. But that was never the kind of violence Andy’s mother had done.
“I have tried and tried with you,” Andy’s mother hissed through thin, livid lips. “I have given you everything . Darrell has taken you in like his own blood, and you have never done a damn thing to respect or repay us. We are not bad parents, Andrea. You are a bad daughter. ”
“I am not a daughter,” Andy said. “Yours or anyone’s. I’m not a girl and I’m not a boy. This is who I am, Mom.” Andy gestured to their whole self: the shaved head, the muscular tattooed arms, the sports bra-compressed chest, the Fugazi shirt and cozy flannel, the loose-fitting athletic pants. “Can you accept this? Me, as I am? Can you love me?”
It was a last chance. A gunslinger’s standoff at sundown, tumbleweeds at their feet, their palms sweating and their bullets glinting. Who would draw first? Who would commute this moment of suspended tension into sudden, irreversible violence?
“If you want to go, no one’s stopping you,” Andy’s mom spat. “The world’s not like you think, Andrea. You won’t make it alone. You’ll be back.”
Andy should have felt heavy, buckling under the weight of all this. Should have felt crushed by loss. Should have felt the cold bone-dread of fear. But instead, somehow, Andy felt lighter. Andy felt the weight of their girlhood burning off, like fog at sunrise. Andy felt grim, but free. A wild laugh rose in their chest. Out of kindness—and how strange, to feel that they could afford that—they swallowed it.
The last thing Andy said to their mother was, “I won’t be alone.”
And those words are prophecy, because just then, they hear the front door to the apartment open. They hear Pete’s familiar, leaping voice. “I’m hoooome! An? You here?”
Andy, paralyzed, stares at the blood like they can divine their future from it. They don’t even have any fucking tampons. Pete probably does, but Andy doesn’t know where. They can’t look; they can’t even get off the toilet, let alone turn to the problem of their underwear, their jeans, their gender, their whole fucking life.
They feel so fucking helpless.
“Hello hello? Anybody home?” Pete calls again, from somewhere nearer the door than last time. A knife of pain throbs through Andy’s cramped guts and they emit a small sound of pain. They could just call out, tell Pete they’re here, ask her for help. But their tongue freezes in their mouth. Red swims before their eyes. They stare into their macabre briefs and feel—scared.
The first time Andy got their period was like this:
They were sleeping over at a friend’s house. They were 13 years old. They woke up early in the morning, before the other girls, and their guts were seized up tight and stabbing. Their belly ached and ached. It felt hot and cool between their legs at once. They crawled out of their sleeping bag and discovered their nightgown matted down, slicked to their legs with dark brown blood.
The world warped on its axis. Andy entered a state halfway between panic and surrealism, like they’d been sucked into a Salvador Dalí painting. They crab-walked up the stairs, hunched protectively over their burning belly. They overflowed the sink in the bathroom, trying to wash their nightgown while still wearing it, not understanding that bright, gummy, fresh blood was still coming out of the traitorous slit between their legs. Andy knew about periods, abstractly: somehow it had never been made totally clear to them that this trial would last days, maybe even a full week. They thought of it as kind of a drive-by horrorshow event, like the egging of a house. One monthly, sticky burst, a Halloween prank, and then they could hose off and go back to regularly scheduled programming.
In the end, it was their friend’s mother who explained to them. Investigating the small flood of tap water and diluted blood seeping out from under the bathroom door, she came upon Andy. “Oh, sweetie, is this the first time?” she asked. “That nightgown is just ruined. Let’s throw that away, I’ll get some of Lucie’s pajamas for you to borrow.”
Andy hated the nightgown anyway, was glad to see the last of it. Their mother would be upset, but for god’s sake, waterfalls of blood were wrenching out of Andy’s private parts—they had bigger worries. Lucie’s mom gave Andy a menstrual pad and clean underwear, explained how to pair the two and how often the pad would need changing.
Andy was a little amazed by the grotesquerie of it all, that women shouldered so stoically: a monthly bloodbath , gore in such quantity it had to be soaked up at speed, blood that would bleed til it had emptied itself and not stop a moment sooner. A violent birth of the materials of life. Their hands looked like Hannibal Lecter’s when they was done. They were amazed, and outraged: what a lengthy ordeal this womanhood thing was turning out to be! One monthly reminder they thought they could endure, but days of blood? Of bloating and tenderness and confrontational, in-your-face femininity? The breast buds were bad enough. They didn’t know how to deal with this , this ruinous red fertility slip’n’slide. They assumed all girls must feel this way, the first time. They assumed they’d get used to it with time. Lucie’s mom made chocolate chip pancakes for all the girls after that, and Andy started to feel a little better.
Bleeding was easy. The hard part was waiting at home. Lucie’s dad dropped them off. They knocked on their own front door like a stranger, waited on the stoop in pajamas that weren’t theirs with their backpack hugged over their belly like a shield. How would they explain this to their mother? Would they get in trouble? And how, without their mother, would they get more pads? She had to be told. God, the thing felt awful between Andy’s legs: foreign and unwanted. It was the first bloom not of Andy’s womanhood, but of their dysphoria, the wrongness and violence of their own, unchosen skin.
Andy’s mother opened the door to admit her daughter to the home. Andy’s courage quailed in their chest, as it traditionally did at the sight of her. “Whose sweatpants are those?” their mother asked immediately, zeroing in like a hawk on any weakness. “Did something happen to your pretty nightgown?”
It was another four months before Andy finally got caught with bloodstains on their sheets. They’d been stealing pads from friends’ houses, stocking up at school vending machines, once even shoplifting a box of tampons from a Walgreens, using wads of toilet paper, throwing out many pairs of soiled panties. They’d been making it work. But the sheets busted them. Andy’s mom assumed it was their first, and Andy let her. “Looks like we’ve got a late bloomer on our hands! I was wondering when this would finally happen,” she said with an air of annoyance, like Andy had timed it deliberately to inconvenience her. Like Andy had chosen their gender assignment out of a specific grudge against bed linens.
Cut to here, now. Cut to Andy with blood in their underpants and Pete outside the door, knocking softly. “An? Are you in there?”
It’s not so hard, after all. Andy opens their mouth and says, “I need help.”
Pete doesn’t stop at tampons. She also produces ibuprofen, a heating pad, ginger-magnesium tea, and Attack of the Clones on DVD. She sets Andy up on the couch and forbids them from moving. Ominous sounds emit from the kitchen; Pete returns in time to watch Obi-Wan and Anakin chase a bounty hunter through Coruscant’s nightlife, bearing a bowl of vegan brownie batter. “Vegan means no salmonella eggs,” she announces. “AKA: cooking optional.” There’s so much flour on her clothes, Andy doesn’t want to imagine the state of the kitchen. Pete flops on the sliver of couch not occupied by Andy and pulls Andy’s legs onto her lap. “Want me to rub your feet, babe?” she asks, and that’s it, it’s too much. Andy starts crying like a dam breaking. All their numbness and shock gives way at once, folded up into ugly, messy gratitude.
Pete freezes with a spoon of batter halfway to her mouth. “Oh god,” she says. “I broke you. You never cry.”
Andy laughs in spite of themself, palming tears off their cheeks even as they’re weeping. “You really care about me.”
Pete licks her spoon cautiously. “Nah,” she says brightly. “Just wanted an excuse to watch Star Wars and eat chocolate.”
Andy shoves Pete with their feet. Pete being her usual glib self is helping to stem the flow of tears, just a little. Andy’s crying for the kid they were, the daughter they weren’t, the family they lost, the family they found instead. And because their abdomen fucking hurts , and the sudden influx of hormones after months of semi-starvation and arrested fertility is wringing them fucking ragged.
“Just—thanks, Pete,” they say. For once, instead of a void in their chest, their heart is full.
Pete pokes Andy in the butt with her spoon. “Of course, dude. Whenever you need me, I’m here.”
“Do you ever feel like you don’t fit in your own skin? That having a body at all is some kind of fundamental betrayal of your spirit?” Andy blurts the question out around a mouthful of brownie. It’s easier to speak, for having cried.
“Oh yeah,” Pete says, nodding with vigor. “I’m like, trying to move through the world and be the best version of me I know how to be, and grow and learn and have a kick-ass band, to love my friends and live to see the future and not be a shitty girlfriend, you know? And everywhere I go, I’m like, slapped in the face instead by the shape of my body or the makeup I’m wearing or what’s on my chest or the color of my skin or whether I’ve decided to straighten my hair. Everybody else’s bullshit turns my whole identity into a—barrier. A limit.” Pete cracks her knuckles one by one. “I feel so limitless, you know? It’s hard not to resent other people, the whole fucking world, for putting limits on me.”
Andy feels this down to the thinnest muscle fibers of their thrumming heart. “You always seem so sure of yourself,” they say.
“You, too,” says Pete.
The silence settles comfortably between them. They’re getting good at being roommates. Hard to fight over 500 square feet when they’ve lived in a van with two other people for weeks on end. They watch lightsaber battles and overacted angst in companionable silence. Bit by bit, Andy experiences a great loosening, the suffering they’ve been holding tight to since the first sight of blood (and maybe much longer than that) starting to flow out of them, the poison moving for the first time away from their heart.
Pete says, “Hey, I know what will cheer you up, Mx. Menarche.”
“You never calling me that again?”
“I found an apartment,” she says.
Andy looks around pointedly, gesturing to the walls around them. “Eureka,” they say.
“No, our next apartment. A three-bed in Roscoe Village.”
“Should I point out that I can’t even pay my half of rent on this one-bed?”
“You’ll get a job,” says Pete, flapping her hand at the problem of money dismissively. Her chipped silver nail polish catches the light. “And in April we’ll get our advance, and by June Jo and Pat will be ready to move in—”
“Advance? What advance?”
Pete grins slow and Cheshire. “Why, the advance for our album,” she announces, clearly savoring each word. “I talked to the people from Fueled by Ramen today. They liked our demos, An. Really liked them. We’re getting signed.”
The pain in their abdomen, their life, is, for the moment, forgotten. Andy springs to their feet, hale and spry and not caring that they nearly topple Pete off the couch as they go. “SIGNED TO A LABEL ?” they holler. “PETE! NEXT TIME, LEAD WITH THAT!”
Pete throws her arms around Andy’s neck and they jump up and down, making enemies of their downstairs neighbor now that they’ll be moving away. They shriek and dance and laugh, and if maybe there are some tears thrown into the fray too, well, who’s counting? Together they glow, a closed circuit of excited starlight, and after a while Pete hands Andy her cell phone. “I haven’t told Jo or Pat yet,” Pete says. “I thought you could do the honors?”
And it’s a good day in the life of Andy Hurley, overall. Bloody or not. Here, with these girls, in this city, Andy has a future. For the first time, Andy has a home.