Compound Fracture

There's a whole spectrum of reactions to coming out. Getting kicked out is one extreme–being accepted wholeheartedly is the other. But in the middle, there's this. The awkwardness, the refusals to acknowledge, the uncomfortable weirdness of turning away.

If I promise this book has a happy ending, does that make it better? Does that make any of it easier to swallow?

But while you’re here, officer, why don’t you hold this railroad spike for me? Hold it in your hand and tell me how heavy it is. Tell me which one of us you’d use it on. See what happens if you try.

There are a lot of things to have feelings about when your kid is trans! But don't have them at me.

Deer don't do hunting season, rats don't do traps, and I don't do parties.

I've been mad at the world for a long time. It’s hard not to be mad at the world when you're eleven years old and everyone you know is suffering, when your mother cries herself to sleep and you can recognize your father's hospital room by the smell of his blood. But the summer before my sophomore year, I learned my great-great-grandfather was a socialist, and suddenly I had the words for why I wanted to bum it all down. Because none of this is real. It's real but it ain't real, it ain't real the way mountains or the rings inside a tree are real. You can't open a book on the laws of physics and find a chapter labeled "Exploiting Workers for Profit and Killing Them When They Ask You to Stop." It's fake! Someone made it up! Workers are exploited, rent is astro-nomical, the cost of healthcare is life-destroying not because they are the path a river carves through a canyon, but because some capitalist fuckers decided they wanted it this way.

You ain't gotta makeyourself do something that sucks. You can do it the way that sucks less.

I'm not autistic. I'm weird and socially inept and a picky eater and had to be taught how to smile and made to stop chewing my hair and can't spend more than a few minutes around people before I want to crawl out of my skin and can't take shower without losing my shit over it and I don't understand people at all.

We've already killed one of them. What's a few more?

What do you mean, it was that easy? No pushing back, no telling me how hard this will be for him. Just my new name, easy as that.

She don’t need to get it; she needs to be kind.

There’s a whole spectrum of reactions to coming out. Getting kicked out is one extreme—being accepted wholeheartedly is the other. But in the middle, there’s this. The awkwardness, the refusals to acknowledge, the uncomfortable weirdness of turning away. In the stories I’ve read online, parents seem obsessed with performing their grief about a child’s transition. Don’t you know how hard this is for us? And you know what, fine! Have feelings about it! There are a lot of things to have feelings about when your kid is trans! But don’t have them at me.

It's all so far back that the only response becomes "Because that's how it is." I ain't mad at Paul; I'm mad at the world that put us here.

I thought it'd be gratifying for a Davies to call me a monster, even in a roundabout way. But it's not. Monsters don't get to be innocent. Monsters don't get to beg for mercy. They don't deserve it.