Parrotfish Read online

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  About Ellen Wittlinger

  References

  Resources and Websites

  For Toby Davis

  with gratitude and admiration

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful thanks also to my editor, David Gale; his assistant, Alexandra Cooper; my agent, Ginger Knowlton; and Pat Lowery Collins, Anita Riggio, Nancy Werlin, and Kate Pritchard for their help and advice on the manuscript.

  Special thanks to Toby Davis, without whom this book would not have been written.

  Chapter One

  I could hear Mom on the phone in the kitchen gleefully shrieking to her younger sister, my aunt Gail. I was in the garage, as always on the day after Thanksgiving, dragging out carton after carton of Christmas crap, helping Dad turn our house into a local tourist attraction and us, once again, into the laughingstock of Buxton, Massachusetts.

  Dad handed me down another box from the highest shelf. “Sounds like Gail had the baby,” he said. “You guys finally got a cousin.”

  “A little late for me to enjoy,” I said.

  “I’m sure she’ll let you babysit sometime,” Dad said, grinning. He knows how I feel about that job. But then his eyes met mine and his smile faded a little, as if he’d just remembered something important. No doubt he had.

  I was separating forty strands of lights into two piles—white and multicolored—when Mom came flying through the screen door, her eyes all watery and glistening. “It’s a boy!” she said. “A healthy baby boy!”

  I dropped the lights I was holding and glared at her. Goddamn it, hadn’t she learned anything from me?

  “Healthy,” Dad said quickly. “That’s the main thing.” Thank you, Dad. At least he was making an effort to understand.

  “Of course it is,” Mom said, trying clumsily to plaster over her mistake. “That’s what I said. A healthy boy.”

  A chill ran down my back, and I turned away from them, imagining in my head the conversation between Mom and Aunt Gail. I do that sometimes to keep my mind off reality.

  GAIL: Oh Judy, I’m finally holding my own baby in my arms!

  MOM: So, tell me the important stuff! Is it a boy or a girl?

  GAIL: A boy! A beautiful boy!

  MOM: That’s wonderful, Gail! A real boy!

  GAIL: Do you have any advice for me, Judy? Since you always do everything perfectly, and I just struggle through life without a plan?

  MOM: Glad you asked. You need to get yourself two more kids and a husband—so you’ll be just like me! Of course, if you couldn’t find a man before, having a squalling infant with a loaded diaper connected to your hip isn’t going to help much.

  GAIL: Oh, Judy, you know how much I hate you when you’re right.

  MOM: Well, don’t worry—I’m hardly ever right in my own house anymore.

  Okay, my mother isn’t really that obnoxious to her sister. But when I imagine my little scenes in my head, I make people speak as if they weren’t afraid of what other people thought. What they would say if they were suddenly turned inside out and everybody knew all their secrets anyway, so lying was beside the point.

  But I knew the first question Mom asked Gail was, Is it a boy or a girl? Because, for some reason, that is the first thing everybody wants to know the minute you’re born. Should we label it with pink or blue? Wouldn’t want anyone to mistake the gender of an infant! Why is that so important? It’s a baby! And why does it have to be a simple answer? One or the other? Not all of us fit so neatly into the category we get saddled with on Day One when the doctor glances down and makes a quick assessment of the available equipment. What’s the big rush, anyway?

  “She’s naming him Michael. Michael Eli Katz. I’m so happy for her.” Mom brushed away a stray tear, and I wondered who it was for.

  Everybody would have been happy for Aunt Gail whether her baby was a boy or a girl. I knew that. As long as it’s healthy—that’s what they always say about babies. Why don’t they say that when you’re older? I was perfectly healthy, but nobody was applauding it anymore.

  Dad got off the ladder and gave Mom a hug. “And now you’re going to tell me you’re off to the hospital this minute, aren’t you?”

  She smiled. “Sorry, Joe. I’m so anxious to see the baby. But I promise to help you set up the yard the rest of the weekend.”

  “Go on,” he said. “The kids will help me.”

  “Actually, Laura wants to come with me,” Mom said a little sheepishly, just as my younger sister slammed through the door, lips eggplant purple to match her thick eye shadow. Mom calls Laura’s adventures with makeup “experimentation.” I call them brainwashing by Maybelline.

  “I’ve never been to a maternity ward before,” Laura said, twitching her shoulders with excitement. “I want to see all the babies lined up in those little beds.”

  “Howling like Siamese cats,” I said wistfully. Laura gave me an evil look.

  “Charlie’s staying here, though,” Mom said, as if Charlie were ever any help to anybody.

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” I said. “I’ll help you.”

  “Angie, you should come with us,” Laura said. “This is our first cousin.”

  “If you want to go, Angela, it’s fine,” Dad said. “We’ll just work extra hard tomorrow.”

  “Nah,” I said, “babies aren’t my thing. I’d rather get Rudolph to balance on the roof ridge, and you know how much fun that is. Tell Aunt Gail I said congratulations. I’ll be eager to see the kid once he can talk and tie his own shoes.” Was it wrong to enjoy annoying my sister so much?

  Laura smacked me on the shoulder. “Angie, you suck!” She generally found me exasperating, and I generally didn’t care.

  “Angela doesn’t have to come along if she doesn’t want to,” Mom said, pointedly not looking at me. Disappointing her had become my fulltime job.

  “By the way, I’ve decided on my new name,” I said. “So you can stop calling me Angela.”

  Laura huffed in disgust. “You aren’t really doing that, are you?”

  “I said I was. Didn’t you believe me?”

  “You can’t just change your name overnight!”

  “Sure I can. People do it all the time.”

  “So, what are we supposed to call you now?” Mom asked impatiently, the car keys jingling in her hand.

  “Grady.” I liked the way it sounded when I said it out loud. Yeah, it was good.

  “‘Grady’? What kind of a name is that?” Laura wanted to know. “Is that even a boy’s name?”

  “It’s a name that could belong to either gender,” I said. “Also, I like the gray part of it—you know, not black, not white. Somewhere in the middle.”

  “Grady,” Mom said quietly, her eyes sweeping my newly short haircut.

  “Nice name,” Dad said as he climbed back up the ladder. He’d been amazingly calm about my recent declaration, but he didn’t seem to want to discuss it much.

  “It’s a stupid name,” Laura said. “What if we all decided to go and change our names? What if I decided I’d
rather be called Cinderella or something?”

  I shrugged. “Then I’d call you Cinderella.”

  “Or, what if I changed it to Madonna? Or, or . . . Corned Beef Sandwich!”

  Mom gave her a push toward the driveway. “Let’s get going now. We can talk about this later.”

  “Bye now, Corned Beef!” I called. It looked to me as if Mom was having a hard time keeping a little smile off her face. I always could make her laugh.

  I watched them slide into the car and pull away. No doubt they were complaining about me before they were out of the driveway.

  LAURA: God, it was bad enough when Angie thought she was a lesbian. Now she wants us to call her by that dumb name. Why can’t she just act like a girl?

  MOM: [heavy sigh] Your sister never did act like a girl.

  LAURA: And that horrible haircut she gave herself—ugh. It looks like somebody ran over her with a lawn mower. I’m so embarrassed when people find out she’s my sister.

  MOM: I always loved the name Angela. It was my first choice for a girl.

  LAURA: [grumbling] You should have given it to me. It’s better than Laura.

  MOM: Another satisfied customer.

  LAURA: You know, Mira’s cousin is a lesbian, and she still wears makeup and dresses like a regular person. She’s pretty, too!

  MOM: [eyes glued to the road] Angela isn’t a lesbian anymore, or so she says. She could still be pretty, though, if she’d wear decent clothing instead of those secondhand leftovers from the Goodwill.

  LAURA: Are you kidding? Ma, Angie looks like Woody Allen dressed as a hobbit.

  MOM: Oh, Laura, that’s not fair. Angela is taller than Woody Allen.

  I guess I don’t really look like Woody Allen, especially since I got my contacts. But what do I look like? Kind of skinny. Kind of tall. Brown hair, shaved at the neck, floppy in the front. I look like everybody and nobody. Am I invisible? Probably not, because people sometimes stare. But I don’t trust the mirror for this kind of information. Girl? Boy? The mirror can’t even tell me that.

  Why can’t I act like a girl? I used to ask myself that question all the time. When the swimming teacher said, “Boys in this line; girls in the other,” why did I want so badly to stand with those rowdy, pushy boys, even though my nonexistent six-year-old boobettes were already hidden behind shiny pink fabric, making it clear which line I was supposed to stand in? I wondered, even then, why I couldn’t be a boy if I wanted to. I wasn’t unhappy exactly; I was just puzzled. Why did everybody think I was a girl? And after that: Why was it such a big freaking deal what I looked like or acted like? I looked like myself. I acted like myself. But everybody wanted me to fit into a category, so I let them call me a tomboy, though I knew that only girls were tomboys, and I was not a girl. By high school I said I was a lesbian, because it seemed closer to the truth than giving everyone hope that someday I’d turn into a regular hairdo-and-high-heels female. I was just getting us all ready for the truth. I was crawling toward the truth on my hands and knees.

  I came out once, but that was just a rehearsal—now it was time for the real thing. Because I was tired of lying. And the truth was, inside the body of this strange, never-quite-right girl hid the soul of a typical, average, ordinary boy.

  Chapter Two

  Dad and I dragged about fifty containers of junk out onto the front lawn, not to mention a dozen big standing figures. Fortunately it was a mild day, probably fifty degrees, so we didn’t freeze our butts off like some years. It’s always Dad and me who do most of the work anyway. Mom and Laura help, but they wear out fast, or they get cold, or they drop something on their toes, and that’s the end of that.

  “Should we do the hardest part first?” Dad asked. Which meant lashing a sleigh and nine enormous reindeer (counting Rudolph) onto the roof of the house.

  “Can we do it with just the two of us?” I asked.

  “Get Charlie to come outside. He can hold them in place while we run the guy wires.”

  Oh, there’s an idea. “You want me to ask Charlie to work?” I asked. “He’s playing Grand Theft Auto.” As usual.

  “I hope that’s a video game and not a new hobby.”

  I nodded. “His favorite.”

  Dad sighed and looked away from me. “I don’t know why we let that kid get away with loafing around all the time. He needs to start taking some responsibility around here.”

  Right, like someday Charlie would just decide on his own to stop being a spoiled brat. Dad acted like it was all a big puzzle, but he knew why the kid got away with murder as well as the rest of us did. Charlie was the baby, and apparently he would always be the baby, because he’d been born prematurely. Eleven years ago Mom and Dad had been scared to death that their tiny three-pound son would never make it out of the incubator. But he wasn’t under the grow lights anymore—now he was a lazy, lumpy kid who spent his whole life parked in front of one kind of screen or another. Like me, he’d been born one particular way, and people thought that was who he’d always be, all evidence to the contrary.

  So instead of positioning Donder and Vixen, we hoisted the fake chimney and one of the Santas—there were seven in all—onto the roof. They weren’t as big as the reindeer, so it was only a two-man job.

  Some of the packages that got piled into the sleigh had blown away last year, so I got out the shiny red-and-gold paper Dad likes and covered a bunch of empty boxes. Meanwhile, he set up the nativity scene down near the corner of the lot. You might think seven Santas and a nativity set and reindeer on the roof is holiday overkill. Ha! We were just getting started.

  When the whole thing was set up—by Sunday evening, with any luck—there would be fake castle turrets clinging to the roof just above the gutters, outlined, as the rest of the house would be, by hundreds and hundreds of white lights. The roof scene would be in place: nine teetering reindeer statues (one with an electric nose) and a large sleigh piled high with “presents” next to the Santa with the perfectly arranged beard. Santas Two and Three (also plugged into the heavy-duty wiring system so they could wink every seven seconds) would be standing next to the pine trees on each side of the house, which would themselves be encased in strands of colored lights, tinfoil stars, and sixty-eight angel ornaments—unless we’d lost some since my last count.

  Santas Four through Seven would be in place on the front lawn, attempting to play leapfrog with each other, although none of them actually move, so they would have to stay in their bent-over positions for an uncomfortable six weeks, after which we would pack them off to the chiropractor. To the left of the leapfrogging Santas would be Barbies on Ice, an addition Laura insisted upon when she was seven, which couldn’t now be eliminated because the little-girl visitors loved it so much and huddled around it each year, worshipping Mattel. There used to be an even dozen Barbies in skates, but over the years a few were either stolen or eaten by wildlife, so we were down to eight identical long-legged sisters twirling in circles on a piece of magnetized plastic lit from below and controlled from inside the garage—Dad’s finest electronic achievement. They were all dressed in white faux fur coats and hats, which took Mom and Laura an entire summer to sew. From a distance they looked like miniature dancing polar bears.

  To the right of the lawn Santas would be the giant teddy bears having a picnic in the (fake) snow. Real snow had done a job on these guys, though—especially last year when we had three feet land on us in a two-day blizzard that buried them until early March. Their fur looked like old, matted shag rugs now and smelled like a cat box—probably because it was being used for that purpose. I was hoping to get Dad to retire them, but I wasn’t counting on it.

  What am I forgetting? Plastic angels on the turrets . . . plastic poinsettias lining the sidewalk . . . plastic icicles on the windows. Oh, and the caroler statues near the front door who had speakers in their heads and were connected to the sound system in the living room so we could torture the neighbors with “The Little Drummer Boy” and “The Twelve Days of Christmas” e
very evening from six to ten. And not just for twelve days, either.

  Dad and I were laying out all the wires that had to be hooked up, when I saw Eve coming down the street, obviously headed for our house. A good time for me to disappear into the garage and make sure all the cords were long enough to reach the main electrical box.

  EVE: Hi, Angie. I’m lonesome. My snotty new friends aren’t around today, so I thought I’d cut you a break. Let’s just pretend like I haven’t ruined our twelve-year friendship in my ridiculous quest for popularity, okay?

  ME: Sure, Eve. Just throw me whatever scraps of your time are left over.

  EVE: Great! I figured since I’m the only real friend you have, you’d be willing to take what you could get.

  ME: Yep, I’m begging!

  EVE: But please don’t tell anybody I was over here, okay? I wouldn’t want my pretentious new friends to know I still talk to you.

  ME: No problemo, Eve. If I see you at school, you’re a stranger to me. Wouldn’t want to jeopardize your social standing among the important kids.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay in the garage making up my own scenarios for the rest of the afternoon, especially not after Dad called out, “Angela, Eve is here!” Obviously, it was going to take awhile to get my new name to stick.

  I stood outside on the driveway but didn’t go up to the two of them. I knew Eve would be making happy talk with Dad, giving him some lame excuse for why he hadn’t seen her in weeks. I wasn’t going to interrupt the performance. I pretended to be fiddling with one of the leaping Santas until she walked over to me.

  “Hey, Angie,” she said timidly.

  “Hey.”

  “You guys putting your Christmas stuff out again?”

  I just looked at her. Her twitchy little smile melted.

  “You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “I don’t see any reason to answer these obvious questions,” I said. Eve could never stand to have anybody mad at her, even when she was really little. I’d taken advantage of it more than once over the years, making her apologize to me for stuff that wasn’t really her fault. But this time she deserved my anger.