Blue Week #1
There are some things that become a part of who you are so early in your childhood that it’s impossible to imagine the world without them. For Blue, that list included the knowledge that he could kill his true love with a kiss, a deep and abiding love for the outdoors, and a feeling of deep discomfort toward all things related to gender. The first was thanks to the house he grew up in, which was filled to the brim with psychic women. It was a large house, sprawling and cluttered and inhabited by the majority of the clairvoyant population of Henrietta. This meant that there were frequent disagreement as to the meaning of signs and portents, but there was absolute unanimity when it came to Blue’s fortune. He took it in stride. By the time he was sixteen, he had yet to meet anyone he wanted to kiss. His love of the outdoors was largely due to the three women he considered his mothers: Maura, his birth mother, and Persephone and Calla. From an early age, they’d been in the habit of taking him to the backyard at night to look at the stars. Calla took him on long nature walks, pointing out various flora and fauna along the way and giving him a ride on her shoulders when he became too tired to walk. Persephone’s room housed, among other things, a fishtank in front of which Blue would sit as willingly as in front of the battered TV in the basement, watching the fish dart back and forth while Persephone hummed angrily at her laptop. He had been sitting in front of the fish tank when he’d told Persephone, “I don’t think I’m a girl.”
Persephone’s humming broke off. “You know, I always wondered about that.”
Blue turned to look at her. “How do you mean?”
“Well, when Maura was pregnant with you, none of us could agree about whether you were a boy or a girl. Jimi was convinced you were a girl, but Calla swore to heaven and back that you were a boy.”
“What did you think?”
Persephone squinted at him. “I could never decide.”
Blue sighed. “I don’t think I can decide either.”
Persephone shrugged and began typing again. “You don’t have to, you know.”
Now, six years later, Blue has a flat chest, an M on his driver’s license, and a residual discomfort about gender. To anyone who asks, he describes himself as 85% boy, but people don’t usually ask. He’s mostly okay with that. He’s happier with people reading him as a boy than as a girl, and all the women of Fox Way understand the fluidity of his identity. Since most of his time is spent at home, it’s not really an issue.
He is, though, getting a little worried about the question of kissing. It’s not that he’s interested in anyone in particular, but he’s sensible and he likes to plan ahead and he’s getting less and less sure about the idea of a life spent single, travelling around the world and studying marine biology. It’s a plan he’s had since he was eleven, when he had informed his mother that he would just have to keep his head down through puberty and ignore his hormones, and he’d be home free by the age of twenty. She’d smiled and shook her head and told him, “Good luck with that.”
The problem, much to his surprise, is not that he’s lonely or has a crush. It’s an almost insatiable curiosity about what a kiss is like. He thinks if he could just try it once, he’d be set for life, and he could go back to his plan. No more kissing, no more romance, no more curiosity. It’s scientific, he tells himself. A desire to understand what everyone else is talking about. He finds himself thinking about it on his bike ride to school, in the quiet stretches of his shifts at Nino’s, lying in the backyard at night watching the stars. Late at night, watching the branches of a tree outside his window, he drums his fingers over his collarbones and wonders when he became a romantic. He’s always been very reasonable, an odd and oddly practical person in this house, but lately he’s started wanting things that don’t make sense. To know more about his father, to be far enough away from this place to know what homesickness is like, to be kissed. He’s not the type to court danger in general, but he knows that getting any of these things requires a certain amount of risk. Getting out of bed, he crosses to the window and opens it, hanging outside to feel the cool spring breeze. There used to be a safety screen across it but he’d learned how to take it out a few years ago.
He closes his eyes and tilts his head and hums a little. Sixteen seems like a year for change, for new adventures, for getting a little more of what he wants out of life. On his birthday, Blue’s mother had told him that sixteen is a frightful year and that he should be especially careful. But when he says the word sixteen, he doesn’t think it sounds frightful at all. He thinks it sounds like opportunity. He is thinking about stasis and comfort, about potential and fulfillment. He thinks about the tarot card his mother has always compared him to -- the Page of Cups, who symbolizes, among other things, the arrival of the new and the unexpected. If he breathes deeply, he can smell the coming summer. It’s there in the warm tones of dirt and grass and honeysuckle. He can smell, too, the last hints of winter, sharp and cool in his lungs. Blue thinks of things that turn. Seasons, leaves, the earth on its axis. His own heart, temperamental despite his good sense and will to be otherwise. He is the only member of the household who isn’t psychic, and perhaps because of this he makes an effort not to make guesses about the future. Still, he has the feeling that this is the year things will start to change.