Keating

I remember the day I met the Keating twins, and I remember what I was writing: So…this is invigorating, sitting in the last class of the day writing in a notebook because I have no friends. Maybe if I weren’t such a tranny fag I’d have some friends. It’s not my fault nobody in this town knows what “transgender” means. God, I’m really bored. Oh, the blonde boy looked up. Ghost. The talkative twin. They’re really weird.
“Hey. Whatcha writing?” He’s got green eyes, like mine, but with a little grey in them, too. He’s leaning over with one hand on the table, hips cocked.
“Stuff.” I pulled the notebook closer, noting how she glanced over, glanced up from rummaging through her bag.
He stared straight into my eyes. “You need friends. We’ll be friends with you, if you want. But you do need to want it,” he said, gesturing at his sister behind him, dark dishwater blonde.
“What the hell? Do you want to be friends with me?”
She leaned forward then. “Of course we do, Hadyn, but you have to try, too. We’re not going to do all of the work.” I didn’t even know they knew my name. I wondered if they knew I was biologically female.
“What the hell?? I try! I try all the damn time and nobody cares! Who the fuck are you to tell me to make friends, you fucking loner freaks??” And then, like a light fading, I watched them turn off, give up.
She sighed, “Okay, Hadyn Connelly, but”
“Don’t forget”
“We reached out to you first”
“And you pushed us away.”
I realized with a start that they were absolutely right. They had dropped, temporarily, the weird speech pattern, the one-mind-in-two-bodies mindset. Sure, they were strange and a little rude about it, but I was the one who had pushed them away. As she pulled out a gameboy and he reached out and turned it on, I realized that they had tried. I responded to this realization by forgetting we were in Study Hall and panicking;
“Wait, wait, Clutch, Ghost, can I try again?”
Clutch hummed and played the Gameboy, while Ghost scribbled something on a piece of paper and tossed it to me. A phone number. “Call us later,” he replied, already turning away, “we have no time for you now.” Clutch tugged impatiently at his sleeve.
“Ghost, Ghost! Brock killed my Pikachu!”
He held out his hand, and beckoned with his fingers, just a twitch. “Give it here. We’ll just have to take it to a PokéCenter after Brock annihilates us.”
She held the Gameboy more tightly and wailed “We can’t! We lose hella bank every time we lose a trainer battle! We’re not financially stable enough for that!”
I gaped at her. Sure, she was quiet and weird, but I couldn’t picture her doing something as outright nerdy as playing a version of Pokémon that came out in 1999. I opened my mouth to say something, and realized that it was useless. Maybe they had reached out to me, but they were totally focused on the game, on each other, filled with some unknown centripetal force.
After school, I wasted half an hour staring at the phone, with the phone in one hand and their number (scrawled, I noticed, in black ink on college-ruled notebook paper) in the other. I eventually gave up and stared indecisively into the mirror instead. I saw the same black t-shirt, the same dragon pendant, the same short, dyed-red hair, the same two eyebrow piercings I’d had for two years, since I was 16, when I still thought I was just a butch lesbian. My eyes, however, were not the same. I mean, they were still green and the same shape and size and everything, but I just looked so sad. Sad and alone. Unhappy with who I was. I picked up the phone and dialed, listening nervously while it rung. What if it was a joke, a pizza parlor? I haven't had friends in over two years, though, not since I came out as transgender. Apparently my friends could handle the lesbian me, but not the male me. Click. “Hello?” Ghost.
“Y- Hi, umm, it’s me. It’s Hadyn Connelly.”
“Oh, hi Hadyn, what’s up?” I could hear, dimly, the Sex Pistols in the background. And then Ghost, over his shoulder, annoyed, “Jesus Clutch, turn it down, Hadyn’s on the phone, the poor kid sounds scared shitless,” and then back to me, “Hi Hadyn. You want to come over, we’re free now, if you are.”
“Yeah, sure. Let me just, uhh, put some shoes on. Where do you live?” I scribbled their address frantically onto the same scrap of paper that had their number. “Umm, alright, bye then.”
“WAIT! HADYN, WAIT!” Clutch, off to the side, sounded frantic. The sounds of a phone being passed around, and then: “Hello? Hadyn, are you there?”
I coughed. “Yeah. What’s up?”
“It’s okay, Hadyn. You’re trying, so are we. It’s okay, you have friends now.” Click. She hung up. I smiled.