Trans Panic!

CHAPTER ONE

ANGELA

Angela Baker has a headache. The feeling of pressure behind her eyes has been there since she woke up to the sound of her cousin, Rory, dragging his suitcase down the stairs-thud, thud, thud-as she stared at the ceiling, immobilized with dread, knowing what today is set to bring: her first day of summer camp.

They were supposed to have left before noon, but Martha insists on taking both of her kids out to a celebratory brunch, even though Angela feels no desire to celebrate anything. She mostly just sits there, pushing her eggs around her plate while Martha talks at Rory about soon-to-be-senior stuff. Résumé building, college applications. Nothing that concerns Angela.

This camp shouldn't concern her, either, but Angela has given up on that fight. It's a waste of energy. Angela will tell her aunt, I don't want to go, and Martha will say, I know, but it'll be good for you to be around other trans kids your age, and Angela will remind her, I am not a trans kid, and no progress will be made.

The last time they had this argument, Rory cut in and said: You are a trans kid, dipshit. Deal with it. Angela punched them so hard she had bruises on her knuckles for a week.

What little she manages to eat sits badly in her stomach. Nausea joins forces with her headache for the three hours it takes to drive from their little corner of Syracuse to the tiny village of Anchor Grove, New York. Angela quietly reads about it on her phone-population 281, 91.3 percent white people-until she loses service and is left with nothing but the garbled music coming from the car's stereo speakers and the farms flanking the highway.

They pass Anchor Grove's residential streets first, where every third or fourth house is sporting an American or a Trump flag (though most have both hanging along their porch columns). A gas station sits in the relative center of town, surrounded by dark storefronts aged by years under the beating sun. This is where Martha drops them off after kisses and hugs, near a sandwich board that reads:

Camp New Horizons Drop-Off Zone.

Pickup Times 12 pm, 3 pm, 5 pm.

It's four-thirty when Martha drives off. As soon as she does, Rory slips his headphones on and loses himself in his phone. Angela does not. She's hyperaware of how they look: a brown girl and her black, butch cousin lingering in the middle of a town where they don't belong. Just because Rory is willing to let his guard down does not mean that Angela will.

When five o'clock finally rolls around and the cobalt-blue van stops in front of the gas station, the Bakers are still the only ones standing there.

Angela's headache worsens as they drive and Rory talks excitedly with the man behind the wheel as if she were not sitting beside him. She can hear the air-conditioning rattle the dashboard, but none of that cold air reaches her. It's stagnant and humid in the back as they drive and drive. Her bangs stick to her forehead in clumps.

Eventually, she shuts her eyes and rests her head against the window. It's not too late to wake up and discover that the day so far has been nothing more than a heat-fueled nightmare. She repeats this to herself like a wish. It's not too late.

"Angela." Rory's voice thunders in her ear. "Let's go."

Angela jolts upright with a start. She is still inside the van, now parked.

Then she locks eyes with the driver in the rearview mirror. He's a bald, middle-aged white guy who seems to be compensating with a full grizzly-brown beard. His eyes crinkle with a smile. To the right of him, a baseball cap sits on the dashboard. Pinned above the bill is a bright purple pronoun pin. HE/HIM.

Angela quickly unbuckles her seat belt and pushes the door open. She steps out into the hot, wet air and takes her first look at home for the next two weeks.

They parked only a few feet from the paved road on a small patch of gravel, which thins out into a path leading into the camp grounds in the heart of the valley. Angela's first impression is that it's what she expected from rural New York. The trees overhead are thick and sagging under their own weight, while the stink of bug spray and sunscreen is already palpable. A floaty, so-upbeat-it's-gotta-be-from-1974 song plays from unseen speakers.

But the sight of the lake nearly stops Angela's breath.

The path winds all the way downhill through the grass to the sandy shore, where a wooden dock, flanked by two towering lampposts, juts out into the water. The lake is huge, and even in the waning light of dusk, the glare of the sun off the surface is blinding. It takes Angela's eyes a moment to adjust, at which point she notices a cluster of kids standing at the far end of the dock, talking and laughing.

Then one kid shoves another. They go flailing into the water. The others scream and scatter. Angela's heart skips a beat.

She's still staring when Rory suddenly steps in front of her. "Cabins are this way," they say, dropping her bag into her arms and pushing her ahead.

Angela digs her heels into the dirt, eyes locking back onto the lake with steadily rising panic. The kid in the water. They're-

As soon as she thinks it, the kid erupts to the surface. "You guys suck!" they shout.

Safe. Angela exhales with relief.

After that, it's a little easier to pick up her feet. Rory guides her down the trail until it forks, at which point he pushes them down the rightward path, away from the lake and into the thickest of the towering trees.

The cabins are a short, albeit uphill, hike through the foliage. There's at least a dozen of them, laid out in an open parenthesis along a cliff's edge, white and sunbaked, with little lanterns strung between structures. A portion of the lake is visible at the bottom of the cliff, past a cluster of bushes that provides a clear barrier between up here and down there. Angela can't help but wonder how good bushes can be at preventing a kid from attempting a fifty-foot cannonball.

The first cabin in the row is the only one that's different. It doesn't seem to have been painted at all, and the wood almost still has a glimmer of newness to it. A plastic folding table, covered with open cardboard boxes, is set up beside it. A woman digs through one of the boxes. Angela's fingers tighten around her bag strap as Rory takes them right up to her.

The woman's dark hair is pulled back under a purple bandana. Her Camp New Horizons T-shirt has had its sleeves hacked off, revealing firm muscles and a possum tattooed on her inner bicep. When she looks up at the Bakers, her expression morphs with recognition.

"And here I thought you weren't gonna show," she says to Rory, then brings her hand up to her nose. "Your balls are crooked, kid."

Rory grins and straightens his septum ring. "Thanks, Mel."

Then Mel's eyes drift to Angela. Something about the woman's gaze makes Angela's skin prickle with unease. "Sister?" she asks.

"Cousin," Rory says automatically. "Angela. Same last name."

Angela stares at the woman-Mel-as she picks up a clipboard and looks it over. Her transness is obvious, whether you want to pick from the faint rasp of her voice or the tattoos on the central knuckles of her right index, middle, and ring fingers: T4T.

"Perfect," Mel says. "Rory, you're in Cabin One, and Angela Same-Last-Name . . . Cabin Six. What's your size?"

Angela frowns. They're in different cabins?

Before she can do or say anything, though, Rory answers for her. "Medium."

Then a shirt and a metal key are put into Angela's hands. Rory gets a shirt and key of their own and marches on. Angela hurries to keep up.

"Lakefront in ten!" Mel shouts after them. "Nice to meet you and glad to have you back!"

Angela manages to catch up with Rory and grabs his shirt, tugging until he stops and turns around. "What?"

She frowns and signs: We're not in the same cabin?

Rory frowns back at her. They shaved their head on the last day of school, and although only a thin bit of fuzz has grown back over the two weeks since then, they still go to wipe hair from out of their eyes. "Why would we be?"

Angela suddenly feels like she's fallen twelve steps behind. In her silence, Rory rolls his eyes. "Look, you promised Mom you'd be normal-"

I promised her I would make friends, Angela corrects them, hands moving sharply.

"Same difference! Normal people make friends!"

Angela glowers at him.

"You promised Mom you'd make friends, so make a friend," Rory says. "Make two! I don't care, just do something that won't eventually become my problem, okay?"

She doesn't answer.

Rory sighs. "Yes, Rory, I'll play nice with the other kids and stay out of your way." Their voice is pitched high. Like a girl. Then, in their usual testosterone-hardened tone, they continue, "Thanks, Ange. Glad we had this talk. Drop your shit off and I'll meet you at the lake."

With that, he turns and disappears into Cabin One. Angela stares at the door.

This isn't new. For the last year, Rory has been going to great lengths to avoid Angela as much as they can. Ever since last fall, when Angela started going to the same high school as them and her refusal to out herself as trans to all those strangers . . . well, blew up into a series of arguments, some of which they are still having.

It doesn't make his attitude any easier to swallow.

Angela looks back at Mel, whose attention has been taken by a handful of new kids. For a moment, she wonders if she'd be able to beg her way into another cabin. One closer to Rory's, at least. Despite all his flaws, he is still the only safe person here. But it'd be pointless. She can't avoid the misery. Best she can do is choose the direction it's gonna hit her from.

Her first step inside Cabin Six is met with with a wall of stale, muggy air. Two bunk beds sit opposite each other, with a tacky red-and-brown rug between them. There are already suitcases on three of the four beds, which makes Angela's choice easy. She sets her bag on the bottom bunk on the right side of the room before sitting down. She tries to take a breath that doesn't make her nauseous, but her stomach is still twisting with dread.

Finally, she holds her new shirt out in front of her and looks at it. The navy cloth reads Camp New Horizons in a Comic Sans-type white font. Intersecting with its name is the camp logo: the trans symbol, the central circle of which doubles as a blazing sun.

It feels like a brand. Like some kind of cosmic karma. Don't want to tell everyone you've ever met that you're trans? Not to worry, here's something that'll do all that hard work for you.

Angela shoves the shirt into her bag before taking out her phone. While there's no signal out here, Aunt Martha's last text in the family chat remains unread. She sent it after dropping them off, but Angela has ignored it until now. It reads: Have fun and take care of each other!

Angela clicks on her aunt's name and studies all six pixels of her contact picture. Although they are mother and son, Martha and Rory look absolutely nothing alike. Rory is dark-skinned like their dad, built thick with downturned eyes that disappear whenever they laugh. Everyone always thinks that Angela is Martha's biological daughter. They are the ones who share the same long black hair, tawny color, and sharp Iranian features.

In this particular picture, Martha is holding up a platter of dolma she made for Angela's birthday last fall. With the poor quality obscuring the finer details, she nearly looks like Mom.

Thinking about Mom makes being here so much worse than it already is. Six years gone this week, and the wound doesn't feel any closer to healing. And this year, she won't get to curl up in bed and hide from the ugly memories. This year, she'll be stuck here.

Angela takes another look around her prison cell. The walls are devoid of decorations, the ceiling fan above her motionless. Two narrow windows, one on either side of the door, let in a little natural light. The cabin is only a single room, though, so Angela gets up to finish exploring the rest of it.

One corner is taken up by a large empty closet. Opposite that is a bathroom. The door is open, revealing the shower and the toilet squeezed into the remaining space.

It's the broken mirror that gives her pause.

Angela frowns. The sink basin is empty, though a few small pieces of glass crunch underfoot when she steps into the room. Some pieces cling to the edges of the mirror frame, but the rest is just plain gone. What remains is only enough to reflect the top half of her face.

Her disembodied eyes stare back at her, big and brown and sad. Pathetic.

For a moment, Angela deflates. She's not actively angry anymore, but if she reaches for it, she can find it. Anger toward Martha, toward Rory, toward her therapist, Dr. Fenway, and everybody else who agreed that what Angela really needed was to spend her summer in the middle of the woods with a bunch of strangers. Strangers she has nothing in common with despite all the insistence that she does. That she must.

Angela has nothing to do with-wants nothing to do with-these people who don't ever shut up about being trans. Being trans is not a shared experience. Even if it were, this isn't the version of it she wants to share with anybody.

Something in the room trills. Angela frowns and looks around, but she doesn't see anything that looks like it'd be making that noise.

Suddenly, she hears the front door to the cabin swing open. A girl's voice fills the space and Angela goes still, even as it wanders closer to her. "But she's never been late before. I don't understand why she'd- Fuck!"

Angela spins around and comes face to face with a girl who looks like she's just seen a ghost. "What the fuck?" the girl breathes out, holding a hand over her chest.

She's about Rory's age, seventeen or eighteen. Korean. Her hair has been dyed such a light shade of blond that it seems practically white. Her eyebrows are the same near-invisible shade, but the disgruntled arches are unmistakable. Then Rory appears beside her.