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Christine Anderson is born in New York to a mother who tries, and a father who leaves.
She’ll wonder, later, if these two things became some innate part of her that she’ll never be able to escape. (We’re all built of other people- sometimes in the way they love us, and sometimes in the way they hurt us. Chris never stops trying, but she also never stops leaving.)
(She thinks she might be searching for something).
She grows up angry, with bruised knuckles and scraped knees, and knowing how to hold her own. She has everything she needs in her backpack, and builds her home outwards from there. (Chris lives in lots of places in her life, but mostly in her shoes.) She covers her insecurities with brash honestly, hoping nobody will look closely enough to see how much of a fraud she truly is.
Chris is born left-handed, but all through school her teachers try to get her to use her right hand. Just give it a try, they say. You’ll pick it up in no time. Chris doesn’t want to pick it up. (She refuses to sacrifice her comfort for the sake of others’ ego.) In the beginning she tells them she’ll try, seven years old and not understanding why their comments made anger curl in her stomach. By the time she’s in middle school she clenches her hand around the pen and glares until the teachers leave. She learns to hold her own.
(Chris does not like stupid rules).
She’s jittery all through high school, half wanting to learn, half desperate to be somewhere, anywhere else. She wants to do something useful, not sit in a classroom all day. She wants to be outdoors, doing something. (Most of all Chris wants to matter).
She keeps her head low through the shitstorm that’s senior year, determined to just get through it and get out, and applies for every college she thinks she could feasibly get into.
(Her father calls on her eighteenth birthday asking for blood. She tells him where he can stick it). She seethes for the next three days at the audacity, to show up out of nowhere after years of complete radio silence to-
It’s easy to hate Michael Waters. (Chris’ mom never talked about her dad, but Chris is sure she hates him too.)
She plays screaming loud music at the highest volume she can and yells along with it until they start to get noise complaints.
Chris feels like a wave. She crashes and crashes and crashes. (She Leaves).
She goes away to uni. Drops out. Tries to find something interesting enough to warrant actually studying it. She shaves her head when it all starts getting too much and curls up in bed running her fingers over the buzzed ends. It’s cathartic, somehow. She tries pre-med, then majors in graphic design, in ecology, in tourism, in women’s studies, in film and television. (Chris tries, and she leaves. She never once feels good enough).
(She goes to a party at seventeen and a girl she doesn’t know dies. Chris leaves, and doesn’t think she’ll ever escape that guilt.)
She repeats year after year at college, stuck in a cycle she can’t get out of and feeling like she’s drowning. There’s kids in her building with brightly dyed hair, and piercings and tattoos, and they’re so alive. They invite her out clubbing, and, surprisingly, she goes. They take turns holding each other’s hair back and throwing up in the bathroom. (One of them appears at her door one night, drunk or high, and tearfully comes out, crying about unsupportive parents and friends. Chris sits with them until morning, and helps them make a counsellor’s appointment. She promises to listen.)
(She doesn’t let herself wonder about similarities and quantifiability of gender, and shoves those thoughts aside as she walks back to her dorm.)
She doesn’t go looking for words to describe herself – Chris has spent a lifetime being shoved into categories and has no desire to box herself in like that.
She kisses a boy from her biology class behind the library and thinks, No, that’s not it. She kisses a girl she barely knows at a club and thinks, Not that, either. The realisation is enough to keep her sitting in a bathroom stall for the rest of the night, not quite crying, but not quite calm either. (She doesn’t go looking for a word. She doesn’t want to.)
She gets a phone call, when her dad dies. A voice on the other end of the line who introduces himself as Nicholas. Chris doesn’t know what to say. (She tells a friend, when they ask what’s bothering her, “My dad’s died,”. “Oh,” they say. “I’m so sorry, Chris.” Chris nods, and thinks, But I’m not. She wonders if that makes her a bad person). She goes to the funeral, out of politeness, more than anything else. Her father’s lawyers are there to stop her going in. (Chris wonders if there’s a rule about getting into a fistfight at a funeral. There probably is. She doesn’t kick their shins in.)
She meets Nick “Call Me Nicholas, Please” Waters properly for the first time. She’s not sure she likes him at first, this pedantic, insufferably stiff guy who looks just a bit too much like their shared father.
They find old tapes full of rituals on a shelf against the back wall. Chris says, “Are you shitting me?”, but Nick is staring at the tapes like they’re sacred. Somehow, they fall into orbit around each other, fall into step, fall into a world of magic that Chris doesn’t understand.
They start checking into motel rooms. Nick comes out to her quietly the first evening. Chris says, “Oh. Cool, no worries dude. He/Him?” and Nick says, “Yes, thank you,” and they turn off the lights. Chris lies awake thinking about the kid who came to her room crying in college, about how they tried to explain and quantify their own gender to her. (She banishes the thought and rolls over, squeezing her eyes shut tight.)
Nick is good at the rituals. Nick is very good at the rituals. Nick is, in fact, very good at most things except chilling the hell out, but Chris is partially faking her own nonchalance, so she can’t really have a go at him for that. She has to keep reminding herself not to feel inferior to this kid who went to college, actually achieved his goal, and was good enough to get a TA position. (She tries not to hate him for it. She tries to be proud.)
They sleep in motel room after motel room; they run from a cult. Chris goes on a dream journey, and wakes up taller, older, and with long white hair. (She can’t make herself cut it off).
She doesn’t remember any of it, but from the weight in her chest know that it was more than five minutes that she was out. (She looks at the length her hair has grown to in the mirror, and thinks; years. I was somewhere else for years, and I don’t remember any of it.)
Her hair is long. She never liked it long before – it irked at her in a way she’s never understood. (“It just tangles,” she used to tell her mom. “It takes too long to dry; it’s too hard to care for.”) This, though. White tangles part way down her back, little braids woven in. Chris doesn’t know how to braid. She never learnt. Somebody, somewhere, she has trusted enough to plait back bits of her hair. She desperately wants to know what memories she is missing.
Rituals continue, and Nick is driven by a hunger that almost scares her. She doesn’t know whether or not to bring it up. She knows what it’s like to fixate on something you care about. (She also knows how easy it is to forget about things that are important while you do so.)
There’s a final tape, from their father, hidden in part of his desk. It’s addressed only to Nicholas. Chris tries not to feel that, even in death, her father has abandoned her. She says “We can just go,” and thinks, We can leave, like he did. We can leave his last wishes unfulfilled. We can put all of this behind us.
Nick doesn’t want to leave. He’s not the type to. (Michael Waters abandoned both of them, but Nick didn’t abandon him back the way Chris did.)
They play the tape, and Chris catches snatches of a half-familiar song, of waves, of the smell of the ocean, of something familiar. The cult catches up with them.
For the record, Chris is afraid of bees. Not that she’d tell anybody that, but it doesn’t really come up that much. Also on record, she appreciates what they do for the ecosystem (she did try to pay attention during that stint in the college ecology course, she just doesn’t want the fuckers anywhere near her. Y’know, because of all the imminent death if she gets stung.
Chris wakes up on a beach to a guy who claims to know her. Something in her chest twists and she knows that she knows him somehow, but it’s like trying to snatch back the last few wisps of a dream. He gifts her some kind of taser, and says, “Come back.” He says, “You’re a part of the ship and I love you.” He says, “You were happy here,” and she wakes up back with Nicholas, and a father who looks significantly less dead than she remembers. She tasers him – and doesn’t it feel good to make him hurt the way he hurt them - and waits for Nick to explain.
Nicholas kills their father with his own obsidian bust in some kind of sick irony that’s probably going to be really funny later. (Chris isn’t sure if murder counts if the guy was already legally dead and also a major asshole. She thinks it probably also counts as self-defence if your dad was going to try to steal your body with spooky magic.) Nick’s hands shake. Chris reaches out to hold them.
(“How did you get the thing you used?” he asks. Chris laughs. “Some British dude is in love with me,” she tells him.)
They finally meet Dan, the guy who’s been sending them tapes, who knows about Lou and her lost memories. He tells her she was happy there. Tells Nick he’s more powerful now, that they can go wherever they want.
There’s an itching in Chris’ bones. Go on, it says. Don’t you want to be important? Don’t you want to mean something?
Her hair still smells like the ocean. Someone she doesn’t remember has twisted parts of it into braids. Chris spent years growing, but she doesn’t remember them. (That doesn’t mean she didn’t grow, though.)
“I think I need to go,” she says. (Nick says, “I don’t want that! I want my sister.”)
(She leaves.)
Chris stands on a beach. There’s a ship anchored just offshore, a rowboat pushed up above the high tide line, and a man standing next to it, smiling.
“You came back,” says Lou.
There are two suns in the sky, and the air is warm.
They do introductions back on the ship, and Lou shows her to a room that should feel familiar. Chris runs fingers over old books, sea glass and knickknacks. There’s an old leather jacket thrown over the back of the chair, the weight of it familiar. She bundles up underneath it that night, runs her fingers through her hair the way she did in college right after she’d buzzed it. All of this is familiar; it’s a homecoming, but it doesn’t make her remember.
She gets snippets – almost-memories in the feel of warm decking beneath bare feet, in the way a breeze from the north smells, in Lou’s laugh. (She catches sight of the braids twisted into Sonder’s hair, and her chest constricts. I have connections here, she thinks, and there’s weight to the thought now.)
Lou pulls out a stringed instrument Chris doesn’t recognise on quiet evenings, and sings something akin to sea shanties into still air. Chris lies back against the deck of the Irons and looks up at unfamiliar stars.
Sonder pulls her up onto the rigging in the first few days, teaching her where to hold, how to climb most effectively, as well as how to twist ropes into knots, into patterns, into braids. Lou shows Chris how to hang over the edge of the Irons, feet pressed against the smooth wood of the handrailing, clutching a rope for counterbalance. She stretches fingers out to reach sea spray, and the wind tugs white hair loose from its knot. Chris breathes in ocean mist, and it’s familiar.
It takes less than a week for her to pick up on a pattern, and a couple more days to work up to asking Lou about it.
“Is there a reason,” she says finally, staring up at stars she’s just learning to navigate as Lou strums something quietly. “That everyone keeps referring to me as ‘they’?”
The strumming stops. “Oh,” says Lou. “Er. Well – hm. Actually, this is a weird conversation to have in retrospect.”
Chris sits up, turning to face him. “Dude, what?”
“So,” says Lou haltingly. “Er. The last time that you were here, you asked to be referred to with they/them pronouns.”
“I – what?”
“I think you ended up going with the term nonbinary?” says Lou, uncertain.
“But I’m not trans,” Chris tells him blankly.
“Oh,” says Lou. “I mean, not to sound like a dick, but are you sure?”
Chris stares at him for a long moment. “What the fuck, dude,” she finally decides upon.
Later, tucked into her hammock, she’ll finally let herself consider the feelings she’s been shoving down since before college. She thinks about the kid in her dorm room at 2am, crying because they felt broken, because they didn’t fit, because they weren’t a girl or a boy, they were something else. She thinks about the way she pulled them close, and said, Hey, I’ve got you, you’re okay.
She thinks about how that conversation rattled her, about how it got her thinking about gender, and quantifiability, and what makes someone a woman or a man anyway? She thinks about going to LGBT events with friends, and how easy the conversation came.
(She watched that kid graduate, in the end. Green hair and smiling, cheered on by their family of twenty-something-year-olds with matching bright hair in the stands.)
Chris looks at that part of herself, the bit that scares her, the bit that she doesn’t understand, and thinks, Okay. If it wasn’t me, what would I say?
Chris lets the twist that’s been in her stomach as long as she can remember unfold, looks at the reasons she’s different, and says, Okay. I’ve got you, you’re okay. She lets herself look, and tries to understand.
“Hi,” says Lou in the morning as Chris sits down for breakfast. “Er. How’re you feeling?”
“Good, I think,” says Chris. “Listen, I thought about what you said-“
“I’m sorry, I really shouldn’t have sprung that on you.”
“I think I would like to use they/them,” says Chris, with some kind of finality.
“Yeah?” says Lou, a smile twisting the corner of his mouth.
“Yeah,” says Chris.
The Irons feel like coming home. Chris plants their feet against warm decking, twists ropes into knots. The ship breathes beneath them and Chris breathes with it. The crew stop at different ports, Chris shadowing someone different each time. Teddy shows them; this is which foods will last, this is how you can tell they’re good. Xkryxx shows them; this is what materials we need to keep the irons in tact, this is the good kind of nails. Sonder shows them places to get the ropes that don’t fray as much and thread to patch up sails, and Lou shows them how to barter.
Six weeks in, Chris talks to Nick, tells him he’s causing trouble, that he needs to be careful. (Chris doesn’t tell him about the pronoun change – they’re not sure they’re ready for that yet. Chris loves their brother, and misses him, is aching to ask for his help. They don’t, though. There are more important things they need to talk about, and there isn’t a lot of time).
“So, um, this is going to sound weird,” Chris says one evening, just them and Lou above deck. “But, were we, like, a thing, last time I was here?”
(Feelings are weird, and Chris has even less of an idea of how to quantify them than gender, but they like Lou, more than they think they’ve liked anyone before. It’s not quite romantic, and it’s definitely not sexual, but they like him.)
“I don’t really know,” says Lou. “Not in any official sense, I suppose.”
“You said you loved me,” says Chris, small. “When you wanted me to come back.”
“Well, yeah,” says Lou. “I did. I do.”
Chris hmms quietly and takes a moment to think.
“I-“ they start. “I don’t know if I like people the way other people like people.”
“Okay,” says Lou, as easy going and genuine as ever. “I’m not here to pressure you, Chris. Me having feelings for you isn’t your problem if you don’t want it to be. If you wanted, nothing has to come of this.”
“I am,” says Chris. “Open to the idea.”
Lou smiles.
Chris lies curled under the weight of a leather jacket that night, and thinks about the things we call ourselves, about gender, about kissing the boy behind the library and the girl in the club and feeling nothing. They think about Nick, somewhere on another continent changing the world. They think about college, and the way they’ve changed. They think about their family, here on the Irons.
There is no waking up at the end of this story. The Irons breathe beneath Chris, and it feels like home.
Chris will spend years growing, and they’ll get to keep them this time.