Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (18 page)

O
n the first day of seventh grade, the twins walked the half mile to King Middle School under a chilly, overcast sky, saying little to each other. The school, a sprawling two-story brick and concrete building, sat at the bottom of a hill in a working-class neighborhood. Two years earlier King had made the news when it became the first middle school in Maine (and one of the first in the nation) to offer birth control to students as young as eleven years old. The decision was made after Portland’s three middle schools reported seventeen pregnancies over a four-year span.

When Nicole and Jonas arrived at King that September morning, they were told they had to wait in the parking lot with about five hundred other students before the first bell signaling the start of the school day. This would be a daily ritual. To Jonas, the other students looked much older and, for some reason, unhappy. Many were children of recent immigrants—Africans, East Asians, Muslims, and Sikhs. In fact, there were more minorities in their middle school than Jonas and Nicole had ever seen in Orono. It was hard not to feel both intimidated and terrified, and all the twins wanted to do was blend into the background. The seventh graders were split into two sections and assembled on opposite sides of the parking lot. They also ate lunch and had recess at different times. So from the second day of school, Jonas and Nicole actually saw very little of each other.

Nothing about King Middle School felt right. It was large and unfriendly, especially if you didn’t belong to one of the many cliques. Having to hide who they were, and why they were there, only added to the twins’ sense of not belonging.

Nicole was always acutely aware of leading a kind of double life, never more so than the time, only two months into the seventh grade, when a boy in one of her classes asked her out on a date as they stood talking in the hallway. The boy was lean and lanky with short hair and braces. And he was the first boy to ever ask her out on a real date, to go to a concert. It took her aback. She knew she couldn’t say yes, and yet she also didn’t want to hurt the boy.

“I’m sorry, I can’t,” she said as gently and politely as she could.

No explanations were asked for. “Can’t” was better—or at least easier—to say than “won’t,” and it had the added benefit of being true. There was no way she could go out on any dates for the next two years, a source of both sadness and frustration. But it was more than that. It hurt deeply because it confirmed for Nicole the reason she’d never been asked out on a date in Orono, where all her schoolmates knew who she was: It was because she was transgender. The word, the identity—she had already fought long and hard for them. And yet, it was precisely that identity that seemed to prevent any boy who really knew her from getting too close. It was that distance she dreaded she’d never overcome, and, ironically, this boy had just reminded her of it.

There was an edginess to the school that made it hard for the twins to let their guard down. Several times during the seventh grade, brawls broke out. Neither Jonas nor Nicole had ever seen someone their age in a fistfight, much less partaken in one, but that soon changed. Jonas had developed a crush on a girl and, trying to fit in, had made it known to some of the other boys in his class that he was interested in her. Unfortunately, one of the other boys decided he liked this girl, too, and asked her out. Jonas felt betrayed and quietly seethed. Not long afterward, when his class was playing a vigorous game of floor hockey, Jonas singled out the student he was angry at, and was a bit more physical with him than he should have been. Arms and elbows flew, shoulders crunched. Finally Jonas called the other boy a “bitch” and the other boy retaliated. Before he knew what he was doing, Jonas turned around and punched the kid in the face. Immediately he realized he’d done something very wrong. Fighting was something he generally didn’t do, but his anger had gotten the best of him.

Maybe that’s why Jonas withdrew into music and playing the guitar—things he could do on his own. At Asa Adams he’d played the drums in the school band and orchestra. Maybe he’d try that again. He signed up for band class, but on the first day, when he walked into the room, he immediately felt out of place, as if everyone was looking at him. When Jonas began drumming, another student mocked him loudly. Wounded, Jonas simply stood up and walked out.

As attuned as they were to what was happening with Nicole on a day-to-day basis, Kelly and Wayne both knew they needed to be more aware of what was going on with Jonas. He had a tendency to be passive, to step aside and let the world—or Nicole—not only rush by him, but overwhelm him. Their whole lives, Kelly had made sure each child had the same opportunities. What one received the other received, and most of the time the twins were in sync, not only sharing toys and games but most of their friends as well. But where Nicole was impulsive, explosive, and domineering, Jonas was reflective and intellectual. Sometimes indolent, he let others make decisions for him. What worries he had, he usually buried, but every now and then they came surging to the fore, sometimes with disastrous results.

Toward the end of April 2010, almost eight months after Wayne and Kelly and the kids started living apart, Wayne lingered on the phone with his son a bit longer than usual. That’s when Jonas admitted to his father that some kids at school had punched him.

“Why didn’t you say something earlier to your mother?” Wayne asked.

“Because Mom would have gotten upset and she would want to do something.”

“Do something” meant calling the school or the parents of the boy who punched Jonas, and that was the last thing he wanted. What he did want, just like Nicole, was to fit in, to be a normal kid, not the brother of a transgender sister, and especially not the identical twin of a transgender sister. Jonas understood that at King Middle School you didn’t tell anyone anything or you’d be labeled for life. But Jonas’s sense of justice was acute. He told his father that when he heard another student refer to someone as a fag, he couldn’t just stand there, even if it wasn’t directed at his sister. So he’d confronted the kid and the kid threw a punch.

Wayne told him he understood, but he still needed to deal with things differently.

“I don’t want you to fight. You need to look the kid in the eye and tell him not to do it again and if he does, then walk away and tell someone. There are better ways to deal with things.”

Nicole knew this, too. And while she never wanted to respond physically to someone, there were many times she wanted to say exactly how she felt but couldn’t for fear that it would inevitably lead to being outed. Being true to her beliefs, and not just about being transgender, had never felt this dangerous. The hardest times were keeping her mouth shut when she’d hear someone say “Oh, that’s so gay,” which kids often did. She knew if she tried to object, the other person would only say, “Why do you care? Are
you
gay?” And then she’d be stuck. She had good reason to challenge others’ prejudices, but she couldn’t because they hit too close to home. So she kept her mouth shut, buttoned down her anger, and sealed off her sense of self-righteousness.

Jonas, like Nicole, walked to school every day, and nearly every day walked home right afterward and watched TV or played video games. He had a couple of friends, who were also Nicole’s, but neither twin hung out with them much after the school day was over. No one could get too close for fear they’d find out too much. It was strange and stressful, trying to be “half friends” with certain classmates. As for classwork, Jonas found it hard to motivate himself. He was extraordinarily bright, but being around so many other disinterested kids sapped him of his normal curiosity and love of knowledge. King was an expeditionary learning school, modeled on the reforms of Kurt Hahn, the German educator who also founded Outward Bound. The central idea was project-based learning, which involved multidiscipline group activities. The theme that year was invasive species, but as far as Jonas could tell, neither the students nor the teachers seemed all that excited about the project. There was very little joy in learning, on either side of the desk, Jonas thought. By the end of the year he’d sunk into a deep depression and admitted to his mother he felt like cutting himself. Kelly immediately called Wayne. What could he do two hundred miles away? He would talk to Jonas on the phone, but Kelly would have to handle it with the school. She sat down and sent an email to school officials:

Yesterday, Jonas came home and said he felt like cutting himself. My husband and I have decided to pursue counseling for him and I will arrange that today. Meanwhile, we would appreciate all of you keeping a close eye on him while he is in school. I will be giving him a ride to school and walking with him after school until we are sure he is not truly going to hurt himself. Thanks for your help, and any insight you may have would be greatly appreciated.

Wayne and Kelly both realized that hormones were likely playing a big part in Jonas’s life at that moment. Jonas was also a thinker, and sometimes he was just too far inside his head for his own good. Kelly set him up with a therapist, and he appeared to benefit from having someone to talk to outside the family. But Jonas also liked figuring things out for himself, turning them over in his mind until he’d explored every nook and cranny and felt satisfied he understood the issue. It was a tool he had to use frequently at King Middle School because nearly every day something got under his skin. He couldn’t abide meanness in others, or stupidity, but he also knew it was pointless and self-defeating to expend the energy to lash out every time something bothered him.

Jonas knew this acutely because he had that same strange ability his mother had, the capacity to look at himself as if he were floating outside his own body, and when he did, he came to the conclusion that it was unreasonable to respond to every single thing that irritated him. Instead, he needed to keep things at a low simmer, to suppress his frustrations and let them out slowly. It was all about self-control, and Jonas saw himself as immensely self-controlled. So he examined the slights as they came his way, first figuring out why others felt the need to act the way they did. Next he examined how those acts or words made him feel. Then he put them away. Puzzles solved, frustrations defused. It was all very neat and clean—until it wasn’t.

Nicole isolated herself in her own thoughts as well. She read, played video games, and talked online with former classmates in Orono. But the house in Portland was almost too quiet when the kids were home.

Jonas stayed in his room, Nicole in hers. Concentrating on homework was hard for both of them. Jonas, an excellent science and math student, had let his grades slip, and Nicole was flunking Spanish. She brooded about her future, convinced she’d never be loved and never find someone who’d marry her. Nicole was not only afraid of getting close to a person, she was afraid of getting close to the “wrong” person and the secret suddenly becoming very public.

It almost happened twice. The first time it came from outside the school, just after Nicole had joined a club called A Company of Girls, or ACOG, an organization that seeks to empower teenage girls primarily through theater and the arts. Nicole, who already enjoyed drawing, also wanted to explore acting. At one of the meetings, out of the blue, another student asked her if she was transgender.

“What?” Nicole responded.

Her heart was pounding so loud she was certain everyone in the room could hear it, but she tried to remain low-key and reacted as if she didn’t understand what the girl was talking about. How had she found out? Nicole tried to be as blasé as possible, and prayed the other girl would drop the subject, which she did, but not before Nicole had spent a few anxious moments worrying her cover had been blown. Another time, in the girls’ locker room, a girl asked Nicole why she always dressed and undressed for gym in a stall, not out in the open like the others. Before she could answer, though, another student distracted the girl and she wandered off without waiting for Nicole’s reply.

Eighth grade was not much better than seventh. The twins had each other, and that was about it. Jonas watched TV. Nicole played video games. Sometimes she closed the door at the bottom of the staircase to the attic and curled up on one of the lower steps to read a book. Her favorites were
Luna
and
Almost Perfect,
two young adult novels about transgender youth her father had given her.

Nicole had been miserable her final two years at Asa Adams when she was out of the closet, and she was miserable her first two years at King when she was in it. It was all so bewildering and depressing, like never having a sense of balance. How could she, when she and Jonas felt as isolated as they did and were actively hiding a part of their lives from people who might otherwise have become their friends? Friendships, in fact, were more tease than reality. Just when Nicole seemed on the verge of making a good connection with someone, she’d ask her mother, “Can’t I tell anyone?” And every time her mother said, “No.” When Nicole balked once and asked why she couldn’t at least tell just one person, since it was
her
life after all, Kelly answered her in no uncertain terms.

“It’s not just about you. It’s about the whole family, Nicole. If you tell someone and it all goes downhill, we’ll all have to move again.”

After the ACOG incident, there was really only one other close call, and it came on one of those rare occasions when Nicole invited someone over to the house after school. On the stairway leading up to her bedroom, Nicole had lined the walls with drawings and photos. One of the photographs was a still from
The Wizard of Oz,
autographed by one of the Munchkins. The twins’ uncle Andy had gotten it for Nicole years earlier, and it was inscribed “To Wyatt.”

“Who’s Wyatt?” the friend from King asked Nicole as she passed the photo on the staircase.

“Oh, that’s my uncle Wyatt. He gave me the picture because he didn’t want it anymore.”