Double Take
Chapter 44
“Whoever did those things to you? It’s them it’s wrong with. It’s not your fault.”
—Carola Dibbell, The Only Ones
MOM PICKED ME UP after school Tuesday. It was a big day. Big enough that she’d left work early in order to sign the papers for me. We drove directly to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and after a fifteen-minute wait, I took an eye exam, showed my birth certificate and enrollment paper for Drivers’ Ed, and filled out a form with my address and social security number. I guess that was a leftover from the days that Indiana thought a Social Security Card was identification and were trying to get a uniform ID for the country. It sort of worked. Now everyone who turned eighteen was issued a National Service ID. Then Mom signed a financial responsibility statement and showed her license.
We walked out to the car and I looked at my new license and broke out laughing. When asked my height, I’d proudly stated, “Five-eleven-and-a-half.” The examiner had muttered something about that being almost something and I figured I might get bumped on my license to an even six foot. No such luck. Clearly stated on my license was my height as 5'12".
“Jakey!” I looked up just in time to see Mom’s car keys flying at me. She was going to let me drive? She had already unlocked the door of her Subaru and climbed into the passenger side.
“Is it legal for me to do this?” I asked as I sat in the driver’s seat and automatically began adjusting the seat position and mirrors. “The rules they gave me were pretty specific about only being allowed to drive with a certified driving instructor sitting next to me.” She held out a slip of paper. She was what?
“When Emily learned to drive, we quickly realized how ridiculous it was to assume you could get a driver’s license with thirty hours of classroom training and six hours behind the wheel. Believe me, Emily needed a lot more time than that behind the wheel before she could ever hope to pass the exam. So, I found out that with an eight-hour course and a test, I could become a certified driving instructor. Which means that you may drive as long as I or one of your teachers is in the passenger seat. Now, have you finished adjusting everything? Check all your mirrors again, please.”
How cool was this? My mother was going to be one of my driving instructors. V1 didn’t need driver’s ed or anything when getting a license. I turned sixteen, took a written test, was put behind the wheel of my father’s Studebaker. Fifteen minutes later, I was docked a point for being an inch too far away from the curb when I parallel parked but got my license typed out and handed to me. I was a driver.
And I discovered Mom was a calm instructor. She’d been through this with Emily and I think she was impressed with my competence and care while driving. I’d pretty much quit driving when Renie and I moved into the home. Didn’t have a car anymore so there was no sense in keeping a license current. But I’d always enjoyed driving, sometimes taking the family on long cross-country road trips for vacation.
Mom took back the keys when I’d parked in the driveway.
“Remember. You may only drive with an instructor or with me. The legal repercussions will be nothing compared to the hell I will rain down on you if you violate that rule. Understand?” Wow! Mom was… a little scary.
“Yes ma’am. I promise I will do my best work and will not violate the rules.”
“Once you turn sixteen and can get your probationary license, you will still be limited regarding who can be in the car with you. Your friends’ mothers and I have all agreed that for the first six months of independent driving, you will never be allowed more than one girlfriend in the car with you. You’ll still have to depend on your older girlfriends for group transport.”
“You talked to my girlfriends’ mothers?” I asked in horror.
“There is very little you can get up to that we don’t find out, young man.” My mother left that hanging and I wondered exactly how much of what I’d been up to she knew about.
I got on my computer to look up some of the laws that I was now under. Obviously, things had changed since V1 and there were other things that had changed since the National Service was organized. In V2’s timeline, the law had required a probationary driver’s license until the driver reached the age of twewnty-one. That was no longer the case. Now a driver could apply for a regular license at the time of entering service. In fact, part of Basic Training included advanced driving skills and everyone was expected to be able to operate normal vehicles in the line of their work. The National Service issued the new licenses and they were valid for six years. That meant that when you finally turned in your National Service license, you were an adult at least twenty-four years of age and could be licensed immediately in any state.
There were still restrictions on starting to drive. Even after completing all the requirements in Drivers’ Ed, you still had to wait until you were sixteen to apply for your probationary license and it wasn’t just Mom who had the rule about passengers. A driver had to be licensed for 180 days before they were allowed passengers unless there was a licensed driver over age twenty-five in the passenger seat. No ‘electronic communication devices’ were allowed in use except for 911 calls. And there were restrictions on the hours that you could be out driving. I guess they still wanted to control the lives of teens for as long as possible.
25 May 2019
Help! I’ve hurt my best friend and I don’t know what I’ve done or how to fix it! I don’t know what to do.
We were in the cafeteria Friday and I was griping about my Business Plan project. I’d been marked down for having wasted space in my office specification with men’s and women’s restrooms. The present style was individual ‘unisex’ restrooms that accommodated either a man or a woman unless the facility was massive, like a school or big facility, and then we were supposed to consider the privacy needs of people who did not identify with birth gender.
‘It’s stupid,’ I said. ‘Men are men and women are women. The whole idea of allowing men in a women’s room is stupid beyond belief.’
Beca stood up and slapped me as hard as she could. And it hurt. I was trying to blink the tears out of my eyes when she gathered her bag and stormed off. I don’t get it. I just don’t understand.
Then Rachel and Joan stood up and I kind of cringed away for fear they were going to hit me, too. ‘You need to fix this,’ Rachel said. ‘Fix it or you’ll be sitting by yourself at this table.’ It was the first time since we met that we didn’t walk to class together. When I got to Geometry, Rachel was sitting in a corner of the room and there were no seats near her.
What do I do?
I called Beca a dozen times and her mother finally asked me to just give it a rest for a bit. So, I called Rachel.
“Rachel, please. I don’t know what I did and I don’t know how to fix it. Please don’t shut me out, too.”
“Get your swimming suit on. I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”
“Swimming suit?”
“We’re going to the waterpark. It opened this weekend. It’s Memorial Day, remember?”
“Yeah. I’ll be ready. I love you, Rachel.”
“Mmmhmm.” Disconnect.
Fuck!
“Mostly, we’ve gotten used to you being a bit of a dork and sometimes sounding like you’re a hundred years old and hate the world,” Rachel said. I held my breath. Had I been acting my age? “Sometime you are too clueless to fathom. It’s like you weren’t even born in this century. You got hit harder than you let anyone know, didn’t you. That’s the only explanation I can think of.”
“Maybe I did. But if they started asking questions or I saw a shrink, they’d lock me up.”
“See? That’s the kind of clueless thinking I’m talking about. We don’t lock people up with mental problems.”
“What about you, Rachel. Can you get past my… mental problems?”
“Probably. Eventually.”
“But what did I do?”
“What would you do if I called Jim Robbins a nigger?” Jim was our six-ten varsity center and had led us to a Regional victory in basketball this year. And he was black as coal.
“You’d never do that. I don’t know.”
“But you’d want to keep hanging out with a racist?”
“Well… Probably not.”
“So being a sexist is the same thing.”
I pondered that for a few minutes as we drove toward the waterpark. It was a sunny day but would only reach the mid-70s. That might keep the crowd down a bit. But what did I say that was sexist?
“I must be denser than I thought,” I sighed. “Could you please explain this to me as if you were trying to explain to your clueless great-grandfather or something?”
“Jesus. Yeah. So, you just said, ‘Men are men and women are women. The whole idea of allowing men in a women’s room is stupid beyond belief.’ You totally ignored scientific evidence that humanity is not binary. You say you don’t have a problem with Beca being gay, but you’d avoid a guy who was gay. You believe that the genitals you were born with define your sex and not the psychological makeup of the individual. You’re fine with your girlfriends all being bi-sexual, but you’d ostracize Kent if he made a pass at you. At least you pay lip-service to the LGB community. But in one sentence you marginalized the rest of the acronym. TQIAP. Transgender, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Pansexual. Maybe you can’t see them, but they are as real as race when it comes to discrimination.”
“It’s that serious?”
“Only if you want to be a decent human being and keep your girlfriends beyond today.”
Jesus Fucking Christ! They were all going to break up because I said men were men and women were women? I thought I was being protective—keeping men out of the women’s room. What woman wants that? The very thought of some guy claiming he identified as a female going into the women’s room when little Beca was in there made me so angry I could piss. And what my girlfriends saw—hell, maybe it was the whole world except me—was the equivalent of me saying blacks should have separate restrooms from whites. Shit! Fuck! Damn!
I must have been quiet a long time. We were stopped in the parking lot when I looked up. Rachel turned to me and I saw she’d been crying.
“I love you, Jacob. Show us who you really are. Fix it.”
It took a while to get to where I could talk to Beca. She seemed resigned to the meeting. She was incredibly cute in a little one-piece bathing suit that made her look like one of the schoolgirls in anime. It was even blue. I wondered how many old men were perving out looking at her. We had tubes on the Lazy River ride and I caught hold of hers to hold it with mine. She scowled at me.
“Beca, please listen to me. I’m… I’m begging you. You’re my best friend and I can’t stand that you are mad at me because I was being stupid and insensitive. I thought… I thought I was supporting you and protecting you from pervs. I didn’t mean to sound like I didn’t think… Well, that I didn’t think. Please tell me how I can make it up. I don’t know what to do.” And then I waited. By the time she turned to look at me, I was crying. Damned teenage hormones! This was my best friend and I didn’t want to lose her. There were tears in her eyes, too, and she took a deep breath before she finally answered.
“What would happen if tomorrow at school, I walked into the boys, bathroom?”
“It would be terrible. I mean, that’s what I’m talking about. You’d be vulnerable. Guys are dicks with dicks.”
“Let me be more specific. I’d be raped, beaten, and killed. Not necessarily in that order. I know. It’s happened before.”
“How? Why?”
“By your definition, I’m not a girl, Jacob.”
My head was going to explode. I’d known Beca for eight months. She was my best friend. I’d have known. I…
“But… How…? I mean, you’ve got… um… breasts and you’re pretty and you’re little.”
“I take hormones, you ass.”
“What happened, Kitten? Please tell me what happened.” I used our private pet name reflexively. She looked at me sharply and the tears really started.
“I’m a girl,” she said. “No matter what my birth certificate says, I’m a girl. I’ve always been a girl. In grade school I was teased and called a sissy, but some of the girls protected me. The boys just teased. In junior high, though… The school said I had to use the boys’ restroom and not dress like a girl. They wanted me to cut my hair, but I refused. There was a day when I couldn’t stop my biological functions and had to run to the restroom. I didn’t get out. I was called every name imaginable. Queer, faggot, pansy. They started hitting me. Then they said if I thought I was a girl, they’d treat me like a girl. They tore my clothes off and raped me on that filthy smelly bathroom floor. They kicked me in the testicles and I passed out.
“I was in the hospital for months. See? Like you, I missed school and my mother homeschooled me. We’re not rich, but she saved every penny and took me to Thailand last summer. It’s impossible to get a sex change operation in the US until you are at least eighteen, but I was going to be dead by then.”
“So, you had a sex-change operation?”
“I’m mid-op. Because of my age, they wanted to do it in two phases so I’d have time to adjust to my new identity. They removed my testicles. One was so badly damaged it had to be removed regardless. Removing the other, which had barely descended, and giving me hormones, put a halt to the development of secondary male characteristics, like hair on my face and voice change. As soon as the last final is over, I’m on my way back to Thailand to finish the job.”
“Beca, why didn’t you tell me right away? We could have gotten over this and I wouldn’t be on your shit list now.”
“Really? Or would the only nice guy I’d ever met shut me out and never speak to me again? I thought… Thought that I’d be able to slip away for the summer and when I came back no one would have to know. I’d never tell anyone. Don’t you have secrets, Jacob? Have you told us everything?” she asked.
My secrets wouldn’t be believed by anyone if I revealed them. I’m just trying to operate as an old man in a young body. And for once, I made a conscious decision to kill off the old bastard and live in today’s world. I spun my tube around so I could face her. Yes, her.
“Beca, you are my best friend and I don’t want to lose you because I was stupid and insensitive. Please let me stay your best friend. Please… stay my girlfriend.”
“Really, Jacob? You think you can ignore all this?”
“What’s different?” I asked. “What’s different about you today than Friday morning before I was stupid?”
“You were stupid and now you know about me.”
“You are the same person you were before I knew. I am the same person I was before I turned stupid. Neither stupidity nor knowledge have changed who we are. Or how I feel about you?”
“How can I believe that? How can I even come back here in the fall? I thought I would have my best friend and some girlfriends to come home to. How can I believe you?”
Inspired or insane. I think they have the same root. I pulled my tube farther around until I could reach Beca. I put my hands on her shoulders and turned her toward me. And then I kissed her. She was stiff at first and I was afraid I’d gone too far. She’d already told me she was a lesbian. How did that work? I shut off the old bastard. I just kissed her like my best friend in the world and she relaxed into the kiss, her arms reaching to go around me. I didn’t try to get passionate or ram my tongue down her throat, but I wanted her to know that I accepted her completely as my friend… my girlfriend.
“Hold me?” she pleaded. We splashed around a little getting situated, but then her inner tube floated down the river alone while she cuddled in my lap. I just held her there while we did two more laps.
“I want to apologize to all of you,” I said. “Beca’s forgiven me and I hope you all will, too. Sometimes weird things disconnect in my brain and I say things I wouldn’t have if I’d thought about them first. I made a hurtful sexist remark Friday and was so disconnected I didn’t even know I’d said something awful. I’m just asking you each to forgive me. And help me. I think Rachel identified something had damaged me, maybe a little more than anyone thought, when I had my accident. When I do something stupid, please tell me. And be specific about what it was because I seem to have built up some scar tissue that makes my head thicker than usual. I love all four of you and I desperately want to continue to be your boyfriend.”
Rachel landed on my lap and planted a kiss on me that got things growing, my hands caressing her bare tummy exposed by the two-piece suit. Desi was next. I was sure she was going to pop out of that bikini top but I loved holding her and caressing her. And then Joan. She, too, looked like a model in her bikini and I wondered how she’d managed to blow dry her hair in the waterpark.
“Mmm. I hope this means we can make love again before I have to leave for Chicago.”
“Again and again,” I whispered.
“It’s a little early to give these out,” Brittany said at lunch on Tuesday. I was feeling pretty good about surviving my Geometry final. At least that was over. This afternoon I had the English final and I knew it was going to be a killer essay exam. Ms. Levy must be a glutton for punishment. I took the envelope from Brittany as she passed them around.
“Your quinceañera?” Rachel asked. “What’s that?”
“My grandmother is Cuban and a girl’s fifteenth birthday is a big deal. She’s insisted that I have a full quinceañera celebration. I know you won’t all be here but I wanted you to have invitations before we split for the summer. Not having anyone show up at a birthday party isn’t that unusual for me with an August birthday.”
“It sounds like fun. I’ll have to look at the family travel schedule and see if we’ll be back in town that weekend,” Desi said.
“I’ll try to come back from Chicago a few days early. That’s like the weekend before school starts, isn’t it?” Joan asked.
“Yes. I’d be so happy if you could attend. And… um… Jacob?”
“What is it, Brittany?” I asked. A Cuban birthday celebration. Sounded cool. I looked at Brittany and she was blushing.
“Would you be my date?”
“Your date? Me?” I asked. She nodded.
“I understand you can dance. Dancing is a big part of the quinceañera and my grandmother wants to have me practice with my partner while she watches and teaches the steps. You don’t have to make me one of your girlfriends or anything, but… Besides you and Kent, I really don’t know many boys. Momma has been very strict about that.”
“And I’ll be gone all summer, so I can’t practice with her,” Kent said. “Tough luck for you, old buddy. I don’t know how you’ll put up with having to dance with Brittany.” She slugged her friend in the arm.
“I’m not that bad!” she said. “Maybe not as pretty as Beca. Or Rachel. Or Joan. Or Desi. But I’m not ugly!”
“You’re not even close to ugly, Brittany. I can’t imagine that it would be a hardship to be your date for your birthday celebration. Do any of my girlfriends have an objection?” I asked. Beca, Desi, Joan, and Rachel all giggled and shook their heads.
“Don’t forget the dance lessons, too,” Rachel laughed. “I just knew I wouldn’t have you to myself this summer.”
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