Sky's Shadow

“Isn’t he beautiful?” I asked Gran, showing off pictures of Prince. Soon he’d be of adopting age, and I feared my heart would break if he wasn’t mine. We sat at our usual center table for bingo and spaghetti night at her senior living community. As far as I knew, I was the only one who ever came, though she had seven kids, and now a couple dozen grandkids. From what I could see, there were no other non-residents that came regularly. From time to time there would be a family member, but I never saw them more than once. Maybe it was because non-residents had to pay for the cards? I didn’t mind, it wasn’t a terrible cost. The time spent with Gran once a week was worth it.

“He’s a very handsome boy,” Gran said, peering over her readers at the screen of my phone. “How are things with that man of yours?”

I sighed.

She laughed. “That bad? Doesn’t he know what’s good for him?”

“He needs a lot of therapy,” I said, laying out all the boards and getting the markers ready.

“Don’t they all,” Gran said.

I’d never met my grandfather. He’d passed when my mom was young, something my mom often blamed Gran for, though I didn’t know why. “Micah got the sane brother,” I said, not really believing it. Both Alex and Lukas were a duo of unusual psychic abilities, childhood trauma, PTSD, and moodiness. Alex turned his discomforts into sarcasm and snark. Lukas just shut down. Would I have fallen for Alex if I hadn’t met Lukas first? Maybe. I adored Alex. He was the big brother I’d never had, and he was madly in love with my best friend. But it was sad to see them together sometimes and know how badly I wanted that.

“We have to love ourselves first, right?” I said, glancing up toward the massive digital number board. Old people had crappy hearing and eyesight, and this bingo party catered to them. Gran was in her mid-eighties but still got around pretty well, though I feared a stiff wind would blow her over most days. That she had enough money to stay at a condo community with minimal support, and events that gave out designer prizes, had my family fighting over who’d be first on her will. I preferred the memories, since she was the only one of my family who let me be me and never judged me for it.

I’d won bingo twice, Kate Spade handbags both times, which I sold to add to my savings. I preferred Micah’s handmade stuff over the brand names, anyway. Gran had several Coach bags she’d won over the years. Some she passed down to me and never minded when I flipped them for cash.

“Bullshit,” Gran said. “That love yourself first thing is all patriarchy nonsense. Trying to blame women for being unhappy at home. I want you to be happy with who you are and not need a man to find that.”

“Fuck the patriarchy,” a couple of other old ladies muttered next to us, their white hair bobbing in agreement. “Killed my husband to shut that nasty bastard up,” one said.

“Helped my momma bury my uncle after she caught him touching my older brother,” the other said.

I gaped at them. There was no end to the insanity and boldness of old people. “Is any of that true?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” the one closest to me said. “Hanna there tells tales of a lake of many secrets.”

“River,” Gran corrected. “Moving water dissolves organic matter faster.”

I blinked at her in shock.

“We didn’t have divorce in my day,” Gran said. “Not like it is now. You got married at seventeen, had as many kids as you could until you died trying or became infertile and he beat you for it.”

“Was grandpa that bad?” I wondered.

“He had his moments. I didn’t mind one bit when he fell out of a hunting stand and broke his neck. Never been so happy to never have to carve up another deer and spend months trying to feed hungry mouths with it while he went out drinking.”

“So you didn’t murder Grandpa?” I asked suspiciously, making a note that I would do a reading later. Would the cards tell me the truth about grandpa? Did I even want to know?

“Never said I didn’t loosen the stand,” Gran joked.

“Grandma!” I said, shocked.

She cackled as a round began, numbers called off, everyone rushing to stamp their cards. Well, rushing as much as a room full of eighty- and ninety-year-olds could. “Find someone who makes you feel real, loved, and happy when you’re with them. If you have to hide yourself from them, it’s not love. Love doesn’t come from a piece of paper, Sky,” Gran said as we flipped through the cards. “But it’s not like the storybooks either. You can’t change a bad man. You can’t save him. He won’t wake up one day and realize you are more important than himself.”

Was Lukas a bad man? I didn’t think so. He took care of his brother and tried to balance a family that really struggled with toxic relationships. He was terrible at communicating, but a bad man? I didn’t think so.

“Do you think Lukas will ever love me? Should I find someone else?” I asked my cards that a thousand times, but never got an answer that wasn’t a mess of mixed signals, much like Lukas himself. In a lot of ways, he was the savior, the prince, the strong man who always ran first into danger, but that also made him stupid and reckless in a lot of ways. I suspected he did what he did because it was expected of him, not because he actually wanted to do any of it. He was a book nerd, but never talked about what he read. The supernatural fascinated and terrified him all at once. And I’d seen the horror in his eyes when he rescued me from a trafficking ring and had to kill a man to do it. His heart never recovered. Was it the only person he’d ever killed? He’d been a police officer, but I knew the stats. Most of them rarely pulled a weapon. Did he regret saving me? I sucked in a deep breath, wishing he’d talk to me.

“Love is more than an emotion. It’s about fitting your lives together. You tell me all the time about Micah and his man…”

“Alex…” I supplied when she hesitated. Gran met Micah a few times, though he didn’t have the patience for bingo. Alex probably would. All these old biddies would love him and embarrass him instantly as they fawned over his muscles and good looks. Alex didn’t think of himself as handsome, but he was romance cover attractive, even if he wasn’t the sort of tall, dark, and handsome with straight short hair and pale skin required by modern media.

Micah was smaller and more pretty than handsome, but plenty male enough to have the ladies on bingo night making inappropriate comments. I understood how the two fit. They gravitated toward each other like planets around the sun, always pulled in the same direction. I thought Lukas and I had that for a while. Mostly he treated me like I was fragile and it was his duty to protect me, which pissed me off and gave me joy all at once. Was it because he saw me as a woman and thought I was weak? Or a child? I sighed. Fucking patriarchy.

“You have your surgery yet?” The one next to me asked.

“Gloria, that is rude,” Gran lectured.

“What? I watch the clock app and there’s a girl documenting every day she gets to live as a girl. She’s having surgery.”

I knew who she was talking about, but she was having facial surgery to soften her more masculine features. I didn’t have that problem. My features were more delicate, and having been privileged to begin my transition in my teens thanks to my grandmother’s intervention, I had access to hormone blockers and now estrogen. Questions about surgery were never about facial things or easy discussions. They did not mean it to be rude and invasive. These old ladies were curious, and that was okay. Curiosity meant they were open to learn rather than making assumptions. I knew of only one transperson who lived in the entire community, and he wasn’t the social type.

“No surgery for me,” I said. It was a recent decision. A lot of it based on fear, but also a recent discussion with a couple of post-op transfolks. I had so many questions and had gone in starry-eyed. Media brainwashed us all to believe beauty on the outside meant perfection on the inside, too. If I woke up one day with one hundred percent girl parts, would life be easier? Maybe some things. Gran attended with me because she had questions too, hers more of safety than mine. She’d also gone with me to a doctor for a consultation, and neither of us had come out of that meeting happy. Big dreams didn’t always become reality, and that was okay. If there was anything the last year had taught me, it was to advocate for myself, and protect my mental health at all costs.

Surgery was an unknown. Added stress that could go wrong in a thousand ways, or perfectly right, but still leave me feeling inadequate. I decided I needed time.

“Not right now, doesn’t mean forever,” Gran said.

“I know…” It was hard to explain the feeling. Disappointment? Self-resentment? Did it make me weak that I wasn’t ready and might never be?

“Not everyone has surgery,” Gran lectured them. “Sky is a beautiful woman without it.”

“Prettier than I was,” the one on Gran’s other side said. “And I had plenty of boys coming to my yard. Milkshake or not.”

I felt heat rise in my cheeks, and pride. I had to admit I worked hard to feel good in my skin, even if some days I still battled the mirror, most of the time I was happy being me. “Thank you,” I said.

“Bingo!” Gran called. The room erupted in applause and the announcer came over to confirm. The prize was another Coach bag, this one more of a backpack style. Gran handed it to me. “More your style than mine.”

“Gran…” I began.

“It’s fine. And you don’t need to sell it. You don’t need all that money for surgery now.”

That was true, but I also wasn’t about to toss the money out willy-nilly. I’d been homeless in my teens, kicked out by my mother at twelve before finding my way to the shelter and reconnecting with Gran at fourteen. Her senior community didn’t allow those under the age of sixty-five to live long term on-site, which means she could only provide a temporary space. Before meeting Micah and Lukas, I spent years bouncing from Gran’s, to the shelter, to my cousin Steve. Steve was an odd duck and had friends who really enjoyed misgendering me or trying to touch me inappropriately to “prove” I was a boy. I only stayed with him when I had nowhere else to go. Getting my own place hadn’t been an option until I’d turned eighteen, and even then, with no parents to cosign, and my income inconsistent, it hadn’t been possible.

Lukas’s recent refrain was about signing a lease with him for his apartment. He owned the space, a loft above a slew of businesses, and he said putting me on a lease would give me rental history. I already lived there ninety percent of the time and paid Lukas rent on the first of the month, though he never asked for a dime. My payments were one of the first things we argued about. I used what Micah paid for his space, adding half the cost of estimated utilities to calculate the payment, since Lukas wouldn’t give me an amount. But he hadn’t lived there in months. I started off sleeping on the couch, but had recently made his room my own. The space still smelled like him. Even after a dozen washes, the pillows reminded me of him. I didn’t hate it, and slept better in his bed than anywhere else, but wished he were there with me.

Did he even see me? If I never physically transitioned, would he ever see me?

Conversations about living arrangements always devolved into an argument. If Lukas wanted a tenant, so be it. It wouldn’t be me. I didn’t want to be tied to him in that way, giving him another excuse to keep me at a distance. What was the saying, if something was meant to be yours, let it go and it will come back to you? I’d done it the other way for years, clinging to him, throwing myself at him, all for nothing.

“Did you find an apartment you like?” Gran asked as we got a new batch of cards.

“No.” I’d toured a dozen, with Micah offering to cosign. It had been much easier to get approved, but the cost for what I could get was almost double what I was paying now for a quarter of the space. That’s what made me mad at Lukas. Did he want a lease so he could charge me more? Did he know how much he could make? Was he treating me like charity? “I have an appointment with a realtor today,” I whispered, fearing jinxing myself.

Gran raised a brow. “You want to buy a house?”

“Not a house.” I’d have to go a distance outside the Quarter to find anything that wasn’t a giant historic home, and I enjoyed being able to walk most everywhere. Condo’s, like the one Lukas had, were rare. They were almost never sold, and even those, because of the proximity to the Quarter, went for over a half million. I knew Lukas had paid much less for his, but he’d also owned it for almost ten years. There was a unit in Micah’s manor that was for sale, though. Being neighbors with my best friend sounded like a dream. It was an upstairs unit with an enormous section of the balcony, and actually larger than Micah’s. I’d only seen pictures to know they had remodeled it with a more traditional layout and it faced the back of the property. The down payment would whip out most of my savings, but after touring a lot of rentals, I wanted something that was mine.

“A condo like Micah’s,” I said.

“That’s exciting. Will you do one of those virtual tours for me? Phonetime or whatever? I’d love to see it,” Gran said.

“Sure. I’m not sure I’m sold on it yet. It’s a lot of money and more space than I need.” I’d have to work really hard to afford the payments and the utilities, but again Micah promised to cosign for me. With full-time employment at his shop, and the side money from reading cards, I brought in a steady income. And while I didn’t know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, I was pretty happy where I was.

Gran patted my hand. “Let your heart decide. We’ll figure out the rest. Next prize is that gift card for Saks Fifth Avenue? That could buy some pretty clothes for you, right? Let’s win that.” I leaned over to kiss her on the cheek and nodded, working to win because it was what she wanted.