“why can't emo music turn your daughter into a boy”
                                                —Twitter user @halocorpse

There perhaps existed a creationary force in the world, but with it, Hailey knew from her high school physics class, came an equal and opposite reaction. The universe was finite. It only gave because it also had the ability to rip away. It was like Hailey’s mother always said—I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it. These days, Hailey never knew if she was kidding or not, but that was its own story, one she had embarked on this trip to Wilmington, Delaware to forget about, at least for a few days. The real reason, on paper, had been to surprise her lifelong best friend at her birthday dinner, but Hailey knew better than to deny the subtext of driving five hours south to a small city she’d otherwise never visited.

            Of course, being on a budget, Hailey had gone ahead with booking accommodations slightly outside Wilmington, thinking of Delaware as being basically the size of her native Rhode Island. Wasn’t all of Rhode Island just Providence and its suburbs? Surely Delaware has the same relationship to Wilmington, she had thought. Upon drawing closer to the city, she had expected the GPS to route her around the city a bit, okay—but when, after half an hour, she was still driving down Route 1 toward the ocean, she realized she may have underestimated the scale of things. Arriving at the postage-stamp colonial of a B&B may have reminded her of her New England roots, but the fact of the matter was, she had booked a hotel thirty minutes south of her actual destination.

            All this really meant was that Hailey got to partake in one of her sleeper favorite pastimes, which was highway driving. The drive back up to Wilmington to get to the restaurant had been quietly pleasant, the sort of joy that didn’t quite well over inside Hailey like something really exciting, but still nourished her as its small doses added up.

            Since moving to Providence, she had been trying to seize more of the things in life that made her happy. This often involved hours-long contemplations of what had ultimately led to her becoming so unhappy—again, Hailey’s mother was another story, and one that was still unraveling before her eyes. Prior to the move, Hailey had pulled the first thread when she was involuntarily hospitalized for her mental health, and as she continued sit in the psych ward and tug at it, she realized she would need to get far away from Boston, or at least far enough that she could build a semblance of her own life. She had found a serving job and cheap apartment in Providence and blocked her mother’s number.

            Part of the problem, Hailey mused as she neared the parking garage, was that Beth had ended up in Delaware. They’d grown up together outside of Boston and always been inseparable. Even when most of their school turned against Hailey for coming out as bisexual in eighth grade, Beth had her back. But college came swiftly, and Hailey stuck around Massachusetts while Beth broadened her horizons at the University of Delaware. There, the differences between them had started to surface a bit—Hailey still loved Beth like the sister she never had, but ultimately had only visited a few times because of who Beth surrounded herself with in Hailey’s absence.

            Hailey chose not to think about it as she turned into the garage. Please take your ticket, a robotic voice instructed from the machine at the front gate. She reached forward, pale hand cast almost green in the fluorescent light.

            Slip of paper acquired, Hailey parked her car and slightly turned down the Fall Out Boy guitar riff roaring through the car’s stereo system. She wasn’t a writer—no musical talent to speak of, either. But damn if Pete Wentz hadn’t saved her life a few times with his words, his music. She’d never been able to adequately articulate it to anyone but Beth, who was as much of a superfan as she was. Hailey still vividly remembered going to Borders, buying one of every celebrity gossip magazine marketed toward teens, then excitedly pulling out the Fall Out Boy and Good Charlotte posters to hang on Beth’s bedroom walls.

            A horn blast from another floor of the garage jolted Hailey out of the thoughtful trance she had fallen into. It had been happening a lot since the hospital—she just wasn’t as alert as she would like to be. Pulling the keys from the ignition silenced both the engine and the stereo, and she gave herself a moment with the pure quiet before stepping out of the car and into the orange cast of Wilmington after dark.

When Hailey arrived at the restaurant, she stood at the door and scanned the room for Beth. While none of her features were distinctive enough to spot in a flash, Hailey would still immediately be able to spot her after all these years.

            “Are you looking for someone?”

            A young hostess, maybe just a whisper older than Hailey, appeared behind the stand.

            “Uh,” Hailey started. “Yeah. Yeah, I am. The reservation would be under Whitman?”

            “Let me see,” said the hostess as she scrolled through her reservations on the station’s tablet computer. “Yep, looks like we’ve got a party of four at six-thirty?”

            “Yes. I mean—yes, that’s the reservation, but I’m actually a fifth. I’m surprising the birthday girl,” Hailey explained. The hostess wrinkled her nose a little bit, but started to tap at the tablet screen again.

            “Mmmm,” she said after a minute. “Looks like we are pretty booked up tonight, but I think we can cap the end of that table with another chair.” Hailey nodded and glanced around the space. The packed room’s chatter bounced off its cavernous ceilings, filling the space with its din. She heard the squeal behind her like an alarm bell would cut through the sonic chaos.

            “Oh my god, Hail?”

            Hailey didn’t have to turn around to know Beth was standing behind her—or rather, rushing up behind her to give her a hug. She’d know the lilting voice and embrace of short, skinny arms from anywhere. Beth stood almost a foot shorter than Hailey, and they elsewise appeared even on the surface to have more differences than similarities—hair and eye color, temperament, personal style, among others. Beth was still, despite this, Hailey’s closest thing to a compassionate family member.

            Hailey turned around to greet Beth and noticed her wearing the matching nameplate necklaces they’d bought in New York together the summer before college. They had ultimately decided it a bridge too far to wear each others’ necklaces, but the gold script BETH and blackletter Hailey had become an extension of their bodies over the years—Hailey’s still hung around her neck as well. It wasn’t that Hailey had ever loved Beth as more than a best friend, but even back when they first became friends, it had felt special to be noticed by her. Beth was nothing short of a prism.

            “What are you doing here?” Beth asked.

            “I mean, you only turn 25 once!” Hailey replied. “I couldn’t miss your big day.”

            “Did you drive down from Providence?” Hailey nodded and mhmmed. It was in this moment that she suddenly became aware of everyone else in the restaurant’s waiting area, namely the other three people that had walked in behind Beth. All three of them were blonde girls, two of whom flexed the kind of pin-straight hair Hailey used to ask God for, before everyone from church found out she was a sinner and she stopped believing. Her own short dark mop was probably in need of some attention, but she tried to remedy that in the moment by raking nervous fingers through it and directing her attention to Beth’s friends.

            “Hi, I’m Hailey,” she introduced herself.

            “Shaina,” the first of the trio said.

            “Brielle,” chirped the one with wavy hair standing in the middle.

            “Maggie,” the last girl offered. “It’s crazy that you drove all the way here from Providence. What is that, like six hours?” Hailey detected a slight tone to the way Maggie said crazy, but it was too innocuous on the surface to clock. She was used to being every bit of five foot ten and built like it, broad-shouldered and lanky, and clumsy to boot. She was used to the parallels of the wildly competitive landscape of literature, in which she, like a paperback, received only a cursory glance before a gentle no, thank you. She was not used to Beth being in the room for it all, in lockstep with the confusedly curious stares.

            “I’m so sorry to interrupt,” the hostess cut in. “Are you Ms. Whitman?” Beth nodded.

            “Well, first, happy birthday,” she continued in a lightly singsongy tone. “We’ve got your table all ready for you ladies if you want to follow me.” The inclusion of ladies felt more like a dart to Hailey’s organs than she was expecting. Lately, she had been she in the sense of a sailing yacht, a celestial body, maybe a sports car. She felt less and less like a lady by the day.

            But still, she followed Beth and the blondes as they trailed the hostess through the restaurant, winding around tables until the group arrived at one that Hailey could immediately tell was only supposed to fit four people—it was by the grace of a bit of dead space between some potted plants and the corner of the room that a fifth chair was even able to be pulled up without obstructing the flow of foot traffic. Hailey sheepishly draped her purse on the back of the fifth chair and scooted into the corner, resigned to her apparent role as outsider. She just hoped she could manage to shed that title at some point during the night.

The appetizers had just hit the table and the wine was really flowing when Hailey finally started to let her guard down a bit. Even though she was out of the loop on most of the interpersonal drama the girls were talking about, the conversation had shifted general enough that she was starting to be able to offer more than the occasional oof or yeah.

            “I will never let her touch my hair again,” Maggie insisted. Her recent botched haircut and dye job was the topic of the moment, which was admittedly still not relatable for Hailey, as she just had her girlfriend Anne shave her head every three or four months. But part of the tension between Beth and Hailey that had come up in college was that Beth felt like Hailey didn’t always make an effort to get to know people different than her, and Hailey had pledged to try and do better. As much as she had been judged herself, she could admit that the pendulum sometimes swung the other way.

            “No, yeah, and I heard the salon owner… I mean, come on, guys, you know,” Brielle added, leaning in like she had the juiciest secret known to man rattling around her head, ready to come rolling out of her mouth like a pinball.

            “Know what?” Hailey piped up. Brielle sighed.

            “I mean, look,” she started. “I don’t even know if I should be calling her a she.”

            There it was—the other shoe. Hailey had been waiting for the feeling inside of her to burst open all night, and here came the flood. This stung more than the hostess’ misplaced ladies; at least that had been unintentional, assumptive at best. She hadn’t expected an outdated jab at a trans woman to surface before their entrees were even served.

            “Please, Bri, you’re so bad,” Maggie said with a laugh.

            “What?” The giggles had started to spread around the table, with even Beth curling her lips inward to hide a growing smile. “I mean, come on.”

            “Bri.” Beth’s tone was admonishing, but with no real gumption behind her voice. She raised an eyebrow at Brielle and took a sip of her red wine.

            “Ohhhhhkay, then,” Brielle conceded sarcastically, following suit with a swig of chardonnay. Hailey saw her lips move again just before they touched the glass, but whatever she said was inaudible and went unnoticed.

            The group dove into the array of small plates on the table and didn’t say much for a minute. Shaina slurped the last bit of a chicken wing off its bone. Beth and Maggie took turns dipping fried calamari into marinara. Brielle shoveled truffle fries into her mouth by the handful. All the while, Hailey reached occasionally for the snacks in front of her, sequestering them to her plate while she took the moment to calibrate. She nibbled at a fry and tried hard not to think about what Brielle had just said.

            They were well into the entrees before any more red flags were raised—Hailey had managed to choke down enough of her beet salad to satisfy her stomach’s backflips when the topic of a recent party they’d all gone to came up.

            “You honestly love to see it,” Shaina said of the friend who’d hosted it. “Didn’t she get a job at Herring & Hoffman?”

            “She got an actual lawyer job at Herring & Hoffman. Not just a paralegal,” Brielle clarified. “I’d kill for that apartment. Especially without a roommate.”

            “Ugh, and her old roommate was so weird,” Maggie said. “He was always, like, stealing her clothes and wearing them and stuff.”

            Everyone laughed before Maggie corrected herself, voice dripping in sardonicism: “Oh, right, sorry. They.”

            “Oh my god,” Shaina scoffed like this person had been caught laundering money. “You have got to stop. It’s not even grammatically correct.” Hailey felt their face flush hot, grateful that the darkness of the room coupled with the blanket of a few glasses of wine were enough to let it go unnoticed by the rest of the group.

            “Guys,” Beth chided. “Really?”

            “Oh come on, Beth,” Brielle slurred. “Your SJW days are behind you.” Somehow this felt even more like a dagger to Hailey’s insides—it was obviously a reference to the golden days of Tumblr, when Hailey and Beth, barely teens, had bonded over building their perfect digital havens. Beth’s blog had a soft, pastel feel, where Hailey’s had been all hard grunge vibes and emo music. It was one of those beautiful moments where the two of them managed to be so different and still so alike. They’d both naturally weaned themselves off the site as college obligations picked up over the years, but Hailey still looked at the feeds sometimes, remembering the time when the blue-black sanctuary of the dashboard was her second home.

            The laughter continued around the table, and Hailey realized she needed a moment to herself—anywhere else. She excused herself and followed the only good advice her mother had ever given her: if you need to find the bathroom in a restaurant, find the kitchen. All the plumbing’s in the same spot.

In the bathroom, Hailey considered entering a stall before settling for staring at herself in the mirror. This would only take a few minutes, she hoped. She took a few deep breaths with her eyes closed before the door squeaked open behind her. Involuntarily snapping her eyes open, Hailey saw Beth’s reflection enter the bathroom behind her. Hailey sighed.

            “Are you okay?” Beth asked, voice a hair more exasperated than concerned.

            “Whatever,” Hailey replied. “I’m fine.” Beth offered back a sigh of her own.

            “What?” Hailey asked.

            “I don’t know.” Beth threw up her hands for a second before slamming them back down at her sides. “I tried to get them to stop.”

            “Are you seriously pissed at me for this?”

            “I mean, it feels like you’re pissed at me for this,” Beth replied.

            “I—” Hailey realized she didn’t have an answer. “I don’t know.” She started to cry. “I just came here cause I thought you’d be excited to spend time with me on your fucking birthday and I don’t feel like you are.”

            “Is that seriously what you think? That I’m not excited to spend time with you?”

            “I mean, that’s how it feels.”

            “Well Jesus, then, Hail, I’m sorry you invited yourself to my birthday dinner and didn’t even bother to talk to any of my friends, then decided I wasn’t excited to spend time with you.” The venom in Beth’s voice was unlike anything Hailey had heard from her before, but the intensive therapy had prepared her for moments like these. She breathed deep through her nose, then exhaled.

            “I don’t need this,” Hailey said quietly after a minute, and pushed past Beth and her slackjaw to exit the bathroom.

Hailey had made it back to the garage before she regained consciousness. She’d walked the several blocks back briskly, and in a huff she couldn’t justify with an audience. Her mother always interpreted anger as an attitude—and Hailey did not want to be caught with an attitude.

            In the safety of her car, Hailey turned the key in the ignition and exhaled slowly as the car lulled itself to life—engine growling, air vents humming, seat belt indicator trilling its initial triple beep as Patrick Stump’s voice flooded out of the speakers again. She’d always loved the way he was somewhere between crooning and wailing, as if the line between them were that thin. Egged on by the fanatical bass drum in the middle of “(Coffee’s for Closers),” Hailey threw the car in reverse, backed out of her space, and found her way out of the garage.

            The dregs of rush hour traffic Hailey had fought on her way into Wilmington had dissipated a bit, returning the city streets to what she had to assume was their average level of traffic. The streetlamps couldn’t have possibly been on for more than an hour, and their cones of light picked up the light haze of city smog. Beset by the quieter streets, ambient storefront light, and amber of Wilmington dusk, Hailey was able to believe for a second that she was in a parallel universe, perhaps sailing through the Matrix, or into the future.

            The engine purred as Hailey maneuvered through the city and back to the highway, at which point she turned the knob on the stereo until Patrick couldn’t sing any louder. The frenetic soundscape filled the car with angst and Lip Smacker-kissed high school afternoons in Beth’s basement. They’d found the band well into their hiatus, listening to back catalog hits and b-sides alike all through middle school while they waited for the boys to stop fighting, as Beth always put it. Right now, it felt like a relief to Hailey that even creative differences could be put aside eventually—it was giving her a sliver of hope for her friendship with Beth after walking out on her birthday.

            The open road’s effect on Hailey didn’t take long to set in, with her hands unclenching more and more from the wheel with each passing minute. As she relaxed, she considered it all: the hostess, the blondes, Beth herself. Hailey understood how they could find themselves in a world where they hadn’t encountered trans people before—what she didn’t understand was the acridity, the ignorance. It felt unfair to lump the hostess in, and Beth too, to an extent. But ultimately, blame made no difference in the way Hailey was feeling right now. She was profoundly unsettled, and every player had a role in it.

            Somewhere further south, the song ended and Hailey caught the opening notes of “The (After) Life of the Party,” one of her old favorites. Normally, the ripple of highway air against her ears would hurt, but she was tipsy and emotional and desperately craving the feeling of wind on her face. The stereo couldn’t go any louder, and she needed to feel more alive than she did in this moment, plucked-string synths leading into her favorite line: I’m a stitch away from making it and a scar away from falling apart. Hailey loved all of the band’s albums for their own reasons, but the undertones of Infinity on High had always spoken to her struggles with her own mental health. She considered “Hum Hallelujah,” in which Pete wrote candidly about the experience of attempting suicide, and the way it spoke to her when she herself wanted to be dead more than anything. She had never identified with anyone the way she did with Pete.

            Hailey even thought of the way he flaunted atypical masculinity when queerness was something to discuss privately, with a bunch of no offenses and well… you knows. He flat-out said he wasn’t gay at one point, but still shifted pronouns in his lyrics, wore the same eyeliner and skinny jeans that somehow demarcated whatever Hailey’s gender was turning into. Her gender was as much a seaborne vessel as it was a flannel and a pair of slip-on Vans. She wasn’t sure how ready she was to start really asking these questions of herself, but she knew subconsciously that something inside her was slowly shifting from its original center point. She just didn’t know where it would land.

            The fact of the matter was that she wasn’t a woman. That was why discomfort had tugged at her so heavily tonight when everything had started to go south. Hailey knew that Beth cared deeply for her, but it was hard to see the way her priorities had changed so quickly. Ten years ago, she wouldn’t have been caught dead letting anyone speak of Hailey like this.

            In fairness, Hailey supposed. She doesn’t know. I don’t even know.

            Patrick’s croon shifted more toward the wail at the beginning of the first chorus, evoking the exact emotion of Pete’s words as per usual. Ugh. There was nothing like the combination of music and lyrics to really punch Hailey in the gut. She’d had many a breakdown to this album, including shortly before going away. Time got blurry around then, but she remembered being home alone a few days prior, letting out steam and screaming along to this song in particular. Beth preferred Fall Out Boy at their more glamorous angles, gravitating to songs like “The Take Over, The Breaks Over” and its upbeat guitar funk. Hailey, conversely, always wanted to be doubled over by how a song made her feel, and she had a tendency to lean into it. It was no surprise that she ultimately found herself that afternoon on her knees in front of the fireplace, voice cracking as she sustained the length of the final sca-a-a-a-ar in this one.

            The highway signage flew by as Hailey continued to drive toward the shore. The adrenaline of walking out of the restaurant had mostly worn off, and she drifted purely into the territory of self-analysis. Patrick’s voice and the synths slowly ducked out, transitioning into the next song. Hailey was barely listening, instead pushing thoughts around like chess pieces. It hurt for so many reasons—Beth didn’t have her back. Her Wilmington friends were debatably boring, decisively transphobic. She’d been relegated to a cobwebbed corner.

            But more than any of that, she reiterated: This hurts because I am not a woman. It was the first time Hailey had considered gender in this way, and she wasn’t ready to change anything radically. That didn’t mean, though, that it didn’t make sense to her—her built in role model in femininity had failed her. Her female friends had never been numerous to begin with, the only exception being the person she’d just left alone in the bathroom at a New American restaurant. She didn’t know if being a man made more sense to her just yet, but the softness behind Pete’s words, Patrick’s vocals reminded her that she could very well be looking in the right direction.

            As Hailey drew closer to the bed and breakfast at which she’d rented a room, the hunger pangs started to hit her. Something about diner french toast sounded infinitely more appealing than the few bites of beet salad she’d been able to eat. She rolled up the windows and continued south, eventually spotting the diner’s retro sign and understated façade on her left. As she turned into the parking lot, she turned the music down a bit, and still sat pensive in the car for a moment once it was parked. Now that she had put some time between herself and the incident, she needed to debrief. Normally, this would be when she’d call Beth, but with that off the table for obvious reasons, she shot Anne a text instead.

            Hailey: Are you up?

            ANNE: It’s 9PM

            ANNE: What’s wrong?

            Hailey: Can I call you?

Her phone was vibrating within seconds.

            “Hey,” Hailey mustered.

            “Hey,” Anne replied, sympathy in her voice. “Everything okay?”

            “Eugh,” Hailey mused. “Kind of got into a fight with Beth.”

            “Yikes. What do you mean? I thought you guys were there to celebrate her?” Hailey sighed, tears welling up in her eyes again.

            “I don’t know,” Hailey replied, the sob fully out of her throat by the final word. “Look, that’s not why I called.”

            “I’m listening.” Anne was always direct, but never unkind in her tone. It was reassuring now as Hailey started to explain the tipping point and where it led and the thought process since. All her half-baked, sideways thoughts about gender came spilling out of her. She’d always been comfortable in her queerness, but had never considered it might include transness. Most of all, even knowing that Anne was relatively stable and logical compared to her, they’d only been together for a few months, and Hailey worried this would throw off their budding relationship. Still, she continued to talk, picturing Anne on her velvet futon, nodding along while her cats used the armrest as a scratching post. Despite insisting that wasn’t why she had called, Hailey didn’t leave out a single detail of the evening, feeling it all contextualized what she was about to say. Suddenly she remembered Brielle’s blown-out heart tattoo, Maggie’s rhinestone crucifix necklace. She rambled and rambled until she got to the part about Fall Out Boy, and then her voice started to shake a bit, but she continued through it all.

            “Anyway,” she finished. “That’s it. I guess.”

            “Okay,” Anne said.

            “Okay?” Hailey wasn’t miffed, but she wasn’t sure how to read that.

            “Like, okay.” Anne’s voice had the cadence of a shrug.

            “Is that okay?”

            “Of course that’s okay,” Anne insisted without hesitating. “Look, I questioned my gender in high school. I didn’t end up figuring much out that I didn’t already know, but I’m glad I did, and I get it.”

            “So you’re not mad or anything?” Hailey asked.

            “Of course not.” Hailey’s heart rate started to settle for the first time in close to half an hour. She’d been riding the epiphany and the feeling and the rush for so long, she had temporarily forgotten the feeling of calmness.

            “Is there anything I can do for you now?” Anne continued. Hailey took a moment to consider before she spoke again.

            “Can you call me Peter? I want to hear how it sounds.”