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You check yourself nervously in your phone’s selfie camera as your plane is preparing to land, trying for at least the third time to fix your hair. You know you’re not going to be able to fix your hair. For one, you’re pretty sure you were born with messy hair, or at the very least you’ve had it so long there aren’t very many pictures of you that exist without it. For two, you would need to take scissors to it to fix the real problem.
You’ve been dreading going home a little bit, and you feel awful for dreading it. You already skipped Christmas, and Dad sounded so devastated over the phone, even if he’d put on a brave face about how you were getting older and it made sense that you wouldn’t be able to come home every year. But winter break was only three weeks, and summer is three months.
The captain is talking over the plane’s speaker about what a beautiful day it is in Seattle, and you snort. You can see out the window that it’s raining. It’s just the sort of rain that people trick themselves into believing is nice weather because they can still see the sun and they live in a rain shadow where they have to hold onto the hope that there can be nice weather when it’s raining.
It’s fine. Dad lives out in the suburbs where the weather is less affected by the mountains, and maybe if you get rained on, he’ll think that’s why your hair looks so long.
It takes twenty minutes for you to get off the plane after it lands. To be fair, you’re not exactly in a rush. Not like the people who stand up the second the seatbelt lights are turned off and try to grab their stuff and bolt. You’re comfortable waiting for the crowd to clear a little.
You tug at your hoodie a little uncomfortably when you stand up. You hate the way it bulks up in all the wrong places when you’ve been sitting down for a while. You feel like it makes you look huge and gross—almost as huge and gross as you feel when you’re not wearing it.
When you get into the airport proper, you scan the crowd for Dad. It’s not usually that hard to spot him. He’s always wearing that stupid hat, and combined with the fact that he’s just a little bit taller than average, his head sort of sticks out of most crowds. You inherited your mother’s height, or so Dad says. Thank goodness.
Dad spots you before you spot him, somehow. “John! Over here, son!”
You cringe, your eyes flitting around the crowd like everyone is going to know he’s talking about you and start staring at you. Nobody does look at you. It’s a silly anxiety to have. “Hey, Dad,” you mumble when you get close enough that you don’t have to raise your voice to be heard. You hate your voice. How does it manage to be so nasally and so low?
Dad wraps you up in a hug so tight you’re pretty sure it threatens to crack a rib, and that, at least, makes you smile. You do love your dad. You just have no idea how to talk to him anymore.
He insists on putting your suitcase in the trunk for you, and you find you have a hard time really arguing with him about it. You guess it’s the gentlemanly thing to do, although you still open your own car door and climb inside while he’s taking care of it.
When Dad starts the car, the radio kicks on to the classical music station, and you smile to yourself. You’re pretty sure that Dad only started you on piano lessons as a kid in the first place because he liked classical music. It was a lucky coincidence that you happened to like playing piano. After this summer, you’ll start your last year of your degree in music, and then it’s onto grad school for composition. You’re aiming to be a real Wendy Carlos. You even have the same alma mater, although you only chose it because Rose was going and you thought college would feel better if you were going with one of your friends. Somehow, it wasn’t until after you and Rose moved in together that you really thought about why you expected college to be hard in the first place.
“So,” Dad starts, and it’s a small relief that he at least doesn’t tack on a son as he so loves to casually address you. “I haven’t seen you in almost a year! You need to catch me up on all of the Ivy League gossip I’ve missed.”
You roll your eyes. “Dad, I call you every week—you’re not missing any gossip,” you say, but you can’t help smiling. You know that your dad is just doing his best to connect with you, and in this way at least, that feels nice.
Dad shrugs, wearing his own fond smile. “Well, how’s Rose then? Is she still seeing that girl?”
You have to try not to cringe again. Rose and her girlfriend were the ones who helped you realize, and they gently encouraged you to talk to Dad on this trip. It’s not like you don’t want to. You just… don’t know how.
“Yeah, I think they’re gonna move in together next year,” you say, staring out the window.
“That’s great! Have you found a new roommate yet?”
“Uh, no. Not yet.” You don’t mention that you’re not sure what the right safe spaces are to look for roommates for people like you.
Dad looks over at you for a second, and you can’t entirely read his face. Then he says, “Well, maybe you could consider moving back out here?”
You freeze. Your immediate reaction to that is just to say No to get out of the conversation, but you’re maybe five minutes into a 45-minute car ride, so you don’t really have the luxury of getting out of the conversation. “Dad, I’ve still got grad school, remember?” you say instead, which feels a little less argumentative.
“I read that the Seattle Film Institute has a really good master’s program in Film Composition. And it’s cheaper than Columbia.”
You grimace. You were offered several very good scholarships when you started applying for music programs, which was why you were able to go to an Ivy League in the first place, but you didn’t get a full ride or anything. You know Dad built up a college fund for you while you were growing up, but you’re not sure that college fund accommodated for grad school.
“I’ll think about it,” you mumble, because you don’t have a whole lot of fight in you.
“Well, do whatever you think is best,” Dad says. You know it’s not passive aggressive because that’s just not your dad’s style, but that only makes it feel worse. The fact that he’s always been so supportive makes you feel insane for being so scared to tell him.
The two of you settle into a silence that you wouldn’t quite call comfortable, but you think the tension is mostly one-sided. Dad is humming along to the piece playing over the radio. You can recognize it as Beethoven, but you can’t identify the specific piece off the top of your head.
When the older man starts speaking between songs, Dad turns the volume down and starts talking again. “It’ll be really nice to get in some father-son bonding time this summer before you’re a big-shot college graduate.” Again, you cringe. Dad notices this time. “What?”
“Nothing, Dad,” you say, but you can tell from the furrow of his eyebrows that he’s not entirely convinced. “There’s just a lot of stuff to think about before graduation. It’s stressful,” you lie. Well, it’s not quite a lie. There is a lot of stuff to think about before graduation—like the fact that if you don’t change your name soon, it’s going to be wrong on your degree just like it’s wrong on your high school diploma.
“I remember how stressful it was,” Dad says, nodding. “You know you can always talk to me if you need help, right son?”
Again with the son. You wish he would stop calling you that all of the time. You can’t entirely keep the resentment from your voice when you say, “I’m sure I’ll figure it out.”
“John,” Dad says, somehow managing to sound both stern and worried.
“Dad,” you say back, only managing to sound annoyed. You cross your arms over your chest and slouch in the seat, and you feel like you’re 16 again.
Dad stops the car, and you immediately sit up, looking nervously around the highway. Dad is in the far right lane, and people are already passing him and honking their horns. If you had a horn, you’d probably be honking it, too. “John, tell me what’s wrong.”
You stare at him like he’s a crazy person, which it kind of feels like he is right now. “Dad, you have to start moving again,” you say.
“Not until you talk to me.”
“Dad,” you repeat, a little more insistently, turning to peer nervously out the back window. Somebody is going to call the cops on you or something, you’re pretty sure.
“Son,” he says back, and now it’s all stern.
“Will you stop calling me that,” you finally snap, raising your voice loud enough that it completely covers the low volume of the radio. You stare at Dad with wide eyes, and your chest feels unbearably tight. Dad is just looking at you with his eyebrows furrowed in confusion, like he has no idea what’s wrong.
“Are you… embarrassed?” he asks, clearly making his best guess, and you manage a single startled laugh.
“Oh jeez, Dad,” you say, pushing a hand up into your hair to tangle your fingers there. It’s a habit you’ve always had when you were stressed out, but you’ve been doing it more often since you started growing your hair out. “Embarrassed doesn’t even begin to cover it. I think embarrassed stopped being the right word when I was 13 years old. Maybe before that! I don’t even remember anymore, I didn’t even really wanna think about it, I—”
You cut yourself off with a sharp breath. You’ve already said too much, you think. There’s something a lot like hurt on Dad’s face, and it makes you want to crawl out of your skin even more than the thought of people looking at you in the airport did.
Dad doesn’t say anything before he starts moving the car again. You stare at him for a while in the hopes that he will, guilt making your chest feel like it’s going to cave in on itself. “Dad, c’mon,” you say softly. He doesn’t respond, and you shrink into yourself a little bit. “Dad, I’m sorry,” you say, a little louder.
You see Dad’s knuckles go white as he squeezes the steering wheel, and then he takes a slow breath and slowly loosens his grip. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” he eventually says, and you still can’t completely read his tone. What does he think just happened? “I just wish you would’ve talked to me sooner, sweetheart.”
Your dad hasn’t called you sweetheart since you were a kindergartener, and you have to swallow hard around the urge to cry. “I thought you were going to be mad.”
“Why would I be mad?”
You realize that you don’t really have an answer to that question. It just felt like he should be mad, you guess. “We never talked about this stuff,” you eventually answer with a small shrug, since that’s the best thing you can come up with. “I had no idea what you would think about it. I didn’t even know what to think about it.”
“I’m sorry, John—” He cringes before you’re even able to, which makes you feel a little bit better about it. He takes another slow breath. “Is there something else I should call you?”
“Rose has been calling me June as a placeholder until I can come up with something better,” you offer. Then, with a shrug, you add, “I think I might just stick with June, though. It kind of feels right.” Dad nods. After a moment of hesitation, you ask, “What would you have named me, if I was a girl?”
Dad looks over at you for as long as it’s really safe to while driving on the I-405, but you still can’t really read his face. You feel a little bad. You feel like you should know your dad better after more than two decades. When he looks back at the road, he says, “You are a girl.” It makes your chest squeeze, but it’s less painful than the guilt was.
You manage to roll your eyes fondly. “What if I had been born a girl?”
Dad gets an amused sort of smile at that and shrugs his shoulders. “I’m not really sure. I chose your name when they had me fill out the paperwork for your birth certificate. I didn’t really think about anything else to name you.”
You pull a face. “Dad, what? You procrastinated naming me until I was born?”
Dad laughs, the same full, boisterous laugh he’s been filling the car with as long as you can remember. “You’re procrastinating naming yourself right now and you’ve had 21 years to think about it! Give me a break!”
You laugh, and you realize suddenly how much your laugh sounds like your dad’s, which makes you hate it a little less. “So when were you going to tell me I need a haircut?”
“I was never going to tell you that,” Dad snips, looking haughty in a way you know is entirely exaggerated. “You should enjoy your hair while you have it. One day you could end up old and bald like me.”
As much as the idea of being bald horrifies you, you can’t help but laugh anyway. “Dad! You’re not that old!”
Dad grins at you. “Can I get you to say that again on tape?”
“Hmm, nope!” You grin back at him, and he merges onto the state highway that will take him from Seattle to the suburb you grew up in.
You lean your head against the window, watching the familiar scenery pass. It’s been a year since the last time you were back in Washington, and you feel really silly for it now. Of course Dad wasn’t going to be mad. You don’t even know why you thought that. You should have come for Christmas—but at least now you can enjoy a summer of father-daughter bonding time before you’re a big-shot college graduate.