The Shape of Want

Tiffany was one of the few people who actually saw me.
It was in the aftermath of what happened the night before.

I kept thinking about what she said.
You’re not a man.

Of course I wasn’t.

I told her that.
She looked confused.

“Last night you said I wasn’t a man.”

She stared at me.
Maybe she didn’t remember.

“I’m not a boy either.”

She just said, “Oh!”

“Don’t tell my parents.”

To my knowledge, she never did.

I started hanging out there even more after that.

She had this friend—I think his name was Chris.
He was gay, and I think he sold her drugs.
My mother would always say she didn’t want me over there when Chris was around.
She said Chris looked like a child molester.

Couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Yeah, he probably sold drugs to Tiffany.
But Tiffany let me rummage through her closet and wear anything I wanted.
And Chris would tell me what looked good, what didn’t.

Tiffany even started giving me her old Cosmo magazines
so I could keep up with fashion and what was happening in the world.

Granny found one in my room one afternoon.
It had Michelle Pfeiffer in it—she was wearing the Catwoman costume from Batman Returns.

Granny chased me through the house, yelling.
She was waving the foldout page with Michelle in the catsuit.
Yelling that I was sick for looking at that kind of porn.

She broke a heavy wooden spoon across my face.
Hit me so hard it snapped.

I ran.
Into the woods behind the house.
I disappeared into the camouflage of the trees and brush like I had learned to.

She kept yelling about how sorry I was going to be when my father got home—
how my mother was a failure for not raising me right.

She gave up after about an hour.

I stayed in the woods for several days.
I retreated down to the little ravine that ran through the neighborhood,
on the other side of the hill from our house in the valley.

My friends knew where I was.
Tyler brought me food.
I snuck into the garage in the middle of the night
to steal my old camping gear from Boy Scouts.

When I eventually went home, I was grounded for a month.

Dad made me bend over my bed,
pull my pants down,
and whipped me with his belt.

“Count the lashes,” he said.
“If you lose count, we start over.”

The first strike landed.
It stung—pain radiated from my ass cheeks.

I said nothing.

Another hit.

“If you don’t count, it doesn’t count.”

Still, I stayed silent.

Again and again he hit me.
Each lash leaving a welt on my ass, my back.

I made no sound.

Finally, he seemed beyond frustrated.
The blows got weaker as he tired out.

“Fine,” he said. “We’ll do this again tomorrow.
And the next day.
And every day until you count them out.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

He clocked me in the face with his left hand—
the right still holding the belt.

Sometime around August or September,
a load of boxes showed up at our house.

They all went into the basement.

Of course I snooped.

They were from Sears, I think.
All addressed to Tiffany—but with our address.

So I asked Mom about them.

“Those are the Christmas gifts Tiffany ordered for Tyler and his brother.
Don’t you dare touch them.
And don’t you dare tell those boys.”

Over the next few weeks,
I opened every single one of those gifts.

If it was something I wanted,
I took it.

I resealed the boxes,
re-wrapped everything precisely as it had been.

I got a Sony Discman.
A GPX portable TV/boombox combo.
Some Legos. Other stuff.

I hid it all in plain sight—
just buried in the normal mess of my room.

When Christmas came around,
shit hit the fan.

Of course my mother knew it was me.

To this day,
I still don’t have a good answer for why I did it.

I just wanted the stuff.
I never really got good Christmas gifts.