Boy's Toys

Jesse is a boy’s name. It’s a girl’s name too, he knows that intimately, from every poke and tease as a child for being too small, too skinny, too pretty for his own good. He knew it for the way it felt in his gut sometimes, when he was called by name and couldn’t tell if he was being called Jesse like a boy or a girl. When his mom used to coo his name, holding his face in her hands, it felt like he was a girl. Now, when she sighs his name with tears and anger on her face, he feels like a man.



Jesse is a boy's name, and he is a boy, a man even. He owns guns, his own home (at least he did, sort of), he makes his own money selling meth and that's, like, one of the manliest jobs he can think of. He knows he is a man because a man is all he’d ever been, painfully so. A man is strong, he doesn’t cry, he takes care of his loved ones. A man is violent and loud, he hurts the ones he loves in place of the rest of the world. A man hurts and hurts and hurts and it never stops. That’s what a man is, it’s what he is, what he tries to be at least.



He’d spent so long trying to be good, trying to be okay, then not trying at all. Being a man isn’t easy, but it’s what he had to be, what he knew. He didn’t have to try if trying was all he did.



When Mr. White called him Jesse, it was only ever for boy-Jesse, man-Jesse, the Jesse he needed for cooking and fighting and dissolving bodies, the Jesse who cried and screamed and broke apart over and over and over again. The Jesse he wanted, needed, the Jesse he screamed and cursed at, was the little boy that was teased and poked and hit and screamed at and the man who he became. He was made to take it, all the hurt and anger that could be thrown at him, and to keep moving anyway because if he didn't he would stop and die like a shark that didn't fit into this metaphor.



For a while, the times he heard ‘Jesse’ and felt like a girl were forced down into hazy dreams and 3AM taco stops, never in the light of day. He felt like his life was going as good as it could, he may not be making his parents proud, but he was living, fighting, fucking, all the things a man was meant to do. It was like that for a while, yeah, but it never stuck.



When Jane called him Jesse, he couldn’t tell who she was calling for. Did she mean the boy-Jesse, the one who fought and bit and clawed to be seen and respected no matter what? Or did she want the girl-Jesse, the child, too thin and too small, swaddled in too big hoodies and jeans, the one who wanted and needed and was just too weak. She called his name and Jesse never knew what to expect, coddling and mocking and kisses or needles and hands on his hips and in his hair and all the hard, ugly words he’d ever gotten from a woman.



She made him doubt, a little bit, every time someone else called him. When Mr. White said his name, it took him a second of soft eyes and smiles to realize there is violence coming, that he is in danger and Mr. White had never ever wanted girl-Jesse. When Jane nurses his bruises and kisses him softly and cuts him lines, he feels like she is pulling that little girl into the modern age- showing her all the pain boy-Jesse feels and holds onto so hard it calcifies inside him like a pearl or a kidney stone or a cancer.



It hurts, not just because she hurts, the little girl inside him, but because when she grows to match the man his little boy has become, he doesn't know if he has space for her. It was one thing to hold close to the little girl he maybe once was, in the small, sweet moments, but another to be the woman she would have become, in a world where every woman he knew was hurting and real and afraid. It's confusing and painful and he doesn’t know how to walk in a world that hurts that little girl who never learned how to be hurt.



Jane saw that girl in his quiet touches and looks, the way he curled into her and stared at her without saying a word, seeing her not just as a woman he... loved, but as a woman he could be. With every kiss and touch and quiet word in the middle of the night, Jane pulled that girl up and made her a woman, taught her to be hard when she’d only known how to be soft, to take the shit the world threw and throw it right back. She told girl-Jesse that she didn’t need to stop where boy-Jesse did, she didn’t have to be violence and bruises and bad fucks, and that maybe, boy-Jesse didn’t need to be either.



But Jane died. Jane was gone and Jesse was left in a freefall that neither side of him knew how to stop, this was a different pain from any knife or fist or his head hitting concrete. It was a pain that would never go away, tucked inside of his chest one moment and spilling out all over him the next. He was drowning in it. He’s lost friends, Badger and Skinny Pete are gone somewhere, and family, all of them, they’d be fine if he never saw them again, but this was a special kind of hurt. Maybe if he straightened out, his mom would take him back, maybe he could find Skinny Pete, ask him to help find a job and get out of this for good, either way he had a choice. There was no choice to bring Jane back.

He killed her, she did, and Jane would never come back.

Jesse went to rehab, and felt the sky falling over his head.

He got out, eventually, bought back his old house, and tried to learn how to live again, at least for now. Maybe at some point, what felt like a long time ago, he felt immortal, invincible, like he could never really die. Now, he knows he’s the bad buy in this story, the villain, and the villain always lives on borrowed time. People are dead because of him and those lives, not just Jane’s, lay heavy on his shoulders. He thinks about what he wants, how he wants to live with the time he has.

He doesn’t think, for a long time, about the difference between girl-Jesse and boy-Jesse. They both just feel like Jesse, burnt and scarred and melted together beside a too hot campfire and on a too thin regulation mattress and too hard chairs. Maybe boy-Jesse didn’t have to be violence and pain and numbing the world with whatever he could get his hands on and maybe girl-Jesse wasn’t just soft touches and warm memories and quiet nights, but what was the point in thinking about it? He didn’t feel like either really, or even just Jesse. He felt like a nothing, a void.

Nothing-Jesse picked him up, checked him out, looked anywhere but in another person’s eyes when he was forced to talk to someone else. Nothing-Jesse slept on Mr. White’s couch and burned wherever he touched him.

Mr. White. He drove him back from rehab, touched his shoulder and looked him in the eye and when he said Jesse, it didn’t sound like boy-Jesse. He didn’t know how that made him feel, so he didn’t feel anything at all.

Nothing-Jesse talks to his dad, marble countertops and new tiles and little smiles that he’s not sure if he means, but it makes him feel something at least. He tries, and he offers but he’s turned away, like he always is. Maybe he can tell that boy-Jesse isn’t there, that he isn’t any Jesse he would recognize.

Nothing Jesse sits through his lawyers wheedling and prodding, like boy-Jesse sat through the poking and teasing, and didn’t give him a moment to think about what he was offering and pushing in his face. He just wanted his house back. When he gets inside, watching his parent’s faces disappear behind the closing door, he feels some kind of anger, sadness, vindication. But it never stuck.

Some of Jane’s things were mixed with his own when he moved back into the house. He cried and he screamed and held them, the last scraps of paper and clothes and little things he could never throw away because everything else he could never get back. He listens to her answering machine again and again and again. After he broke apart, he pulled himself back together with duct tape and bandaids and school glue.

In the end, he tucks the papers away and folds the clothes into a box and doesn’t look at them or think about them until it's 3AM and he is shaking and sweating and all he wants are sweet touches and soft hands and someone else to pull him back together again.

He cooks again. He gets his money. He gets angry, he makes mistakes. Nothing-Jesse is filled with violence and sadness and stupid, stupid ideas that get him hurt in the end. He almost can’t be mad, she’s so used to being hurt. The lines between the places he called boy and girl are gone, melted away when his mind is clear and he realizes they're both just him. She isn’t fractured inside, not like that at least. The broken bits of him are tinted pink, blue, purple and yellow, and he feels so fucking stupid. And kinda gay. Mostly stupid.

While he’s in the hospital, Jesse has a lot of time to think, but doesn’t do much of it. Mostly he’s angry and hurt. He’s spent a lot of time angry and hurt. Still, in the quiet moments when the nurse comes in to check on him, he thinks about the little mark that must be on his chart, a little M he had associated with everything painful in his life. But it was never because of that little M, not in a way that mattered. There was something in him, her, them, whatever, that was broken and leaking and attracted every predator he passed by with the smell of blood and sadness and weakness. It didn’t matter what it said on his chart.

Let Mr. White have his fancy lab and find a new fucking assistance and take his stupid soft looks and hard hands and lies. Fuck every time he said Jesse and it sounded like girl-Jesse’s name, like he fucking cared about her in any way beyond what she could do for his paycheck and fuck any part of Jesse that ever wanted him to. He’s done. She’s tired. They’re so fucking alone.

Jesse looks at that pearl of pain, the kidney stone, the cancer, and breaks it in his hand. The pieces crumble, fractured like glitter or cement or glass all over the inside of him and they hurt, but at least now he can start cleaning them out. She is full of so much pain and broken bits, it takes a long time to process them all, turning over every shard, cutting himself on the edges, and having to decide what to throw away and what to keep.

When he’s home, he buys a bed, a proper one, and sleeps on a decent mattress for the first time in a long time. She feels like she doesn’t deserve it. Over time, she’ll buy mismatched furniture and clothes and a TV, but for now he’s fine with just a bed. He sleeps for too long, doesn’t wake up until well in the afternoon, and it feels worth it.

He ignores Saul’s calls, stays in his room in his house and thinks about too much all at once.

At night, he goes out for tacos and groceries and thinks maybe he won't eat chicken for awhile. He wears a face mask, the cloth kind, to try and hide some of the bruises left on his face and maybe his identity, in case anyone is looking for him and when he sees his reflection in the milk aisle, he doesn’t know who he’s looking at. Who is she? A girl he never was, curled in on herself in clothes that never fit her. He wondered how she would look in a skirt. It’s not gay if he’s a girl when he wears it.

He comes home, and it's his home in the end. His bed, his food, his clothes. He doesn't drink anything harder than a Corona, doesn't trust himself not to fuck it all up. He looks at the box full of Jane's clothes, and knows they won't fit him. Even if they did, he wouldn't want to mess them up, wear out the smell of her shampoo and beer and static that clung to them. He lies awake and thinks about his name.

Jesse. It’s a boy's name and a girl’s name, but more importantly it’s his. Hers. Theirs. Jane would be proud of them, after she was angry and sad and hurt that they were in this mess in the first place. She would be proud because even if he’s not happy yet, he could be someday. He could be sober, like she was before he came in and ruined it. She could get a real job, live a real life, spend her borrowed time on something worth doing.

When she was a kid, she played with action figures and toy planes and all the boy toys her parents could buy her. When he grew up and learned that toys were for kids and he was a man, whether he liked it or not, he played with girls and knives and lighters instead. Are these boy’s toys too? Are sex and violence just for boys and men? Jane carried a knife and was never shy about fucking. A girl he was seeing in high school had a gun and could smoke him under the table.

When he got into art, people called it girly. He’s not sure why, most comic book artists were men, right? If he was given a chance, would he have played with girls toys, dolls and princesses and easy bake ovens? To be fair, those ovens always seemed pretty cool. Did it matter in the end, what they would have done as a kid? Wasn't that what people said about these things “I always knew I was a girl,” “I played in my moms heels,” “I always felt safer with other girls”?

Did he feel safer with girls? As a kid, he didn’t hang out with girls, as a teenager she just fucked them, and now a days, most of the women he’d been around for the past few years were hookers and strippers. It felt safer, kind of, to be with them, but not because they felt any sort of kinship. They were afraid of him, a strange man with strange drugs and the law on his side if he hurt them. Maybe she did relate to that, somehow.

When Mr. White yelled and manipulated and lashed out, when he had him doing his dirty work, who would he have turned to? Who would have believed him, a strung out meth cook, over a nerdy science teacher with a baby on the way? Him and those women, they all knew that men meant violence and hurt a much as they meant power and protection. He could relate to that.

Jesse looked out the window, at the kids playing in the street, the middle aged women pruning tomato plants and men talking over fences to their neighbors. Could he relate to them the same way?

She meets the neighbors, outside working on their gardens and picket fences, introduces herself even to the ones that knew her before. She’s better now, she tells them, clean and hoping to start over again. Some of them are polite, give her smiles and handshakes and well wishes. Some aren’t so nice. He can’t make them be, so he ignores them.

Mr. White shows up at his door a couple times, but she doesn’t drop the charges and she doesn’t start cooking again. The guy can shove his 50/50 up his ass for all Jesse cares.

A neighbor has a yard sale and Jesse goes to buy a chair and ends up with a handful of flowy skirts and dresses, dark reds and blues and floral patterns. He puts one on, standing in front of the first mirror he sees and doesn’t know if he’s a girl or a boy in a dress or something else entirely. He likes it, either way. It feels familiar, like his name being called.

So he wears his dresses around the house, mostly, and some nights he’ll layer a skirt under his hoodies and beanie and a mask to get dinner and groceries. Sometimes he gets a “have a good night, mam” and sometimes he gets called a fag on the street. He doesn’t know if either of those is wrong, though he does punch the guy who called him a fag.

For a few months, Jesse is so busy getting back to baseline and sweeping up the shards of hurt he forgets he’s a person, attached to other people. He’s in line at a taco truck when he hears his name and for the first time in a long time, he realizes he doesn’t have to think about who’s being called, the boy or the girl.

He turns, expecting fists and blood and his head on concrete, but it’s just Badger. Badger, who it feels like he hasn’t seen in years, and who’s seeing him for the first time since he’s been sober, since Jane died. Since he started wearing skirts. Jesse is suddenly afraid, but he doesn’t know what he’s afraid of.

Badger says his name again, confused, like he’s not sure he’s got the right guy. Jesse realizes his hair is longer, poking out of his beanie and he must hold himself different now. Like his dad before might not have recognized Nothing-Jesse, maybe Badger doesn’t recognize this Jesse.

They get their food, Jesse takes off his mask and is suddenly too aware of the stubble on his face, the way it must look like he’d been hiding it, like he was faking or in costume. Badger asks him if he’s undercover or hiding from someone and Jesse says she's not, but doesn’t know if that’s true.

Are they hiding? When they go out in the dark, in masks and thick hoodies, are they hiding? Pretending to be something they’re not? She doesn’t talk much at night, but is it because she’s tired and can’t bother interacting or is she hiding her deep voice? Is his mask hiding his stubble and jaw line? Layers hiding a lack of curves? They don’t know.

Badger seems... okay with it all. The skirts, that is, Jesse doesn’t mention girl-Jesse and boy-Jesse. He asks if she’s gay or something and Jesse laughs because they don’t have an answer. If he was gay, Badger would be the kinda guy he wanted to be with, that he’d be good with. No hidden meanings and half truths and, if he was being honest (and ignoring the red flashing lights calling him a fucking homo in his head), he had a nice smile. Hair Jesse could run her hands through.

Badger is rambling, awkward and stupid like he always kind of is and he says “you’d make a cute girl, anyway,” in the way that says he said the words without thinking them all the way through. He apologizes, then backtrack his apology when he sees Jesse is smiling, and he stammers around saying he looks nice is all. Girl, boy, whatever. She feels light.

They part ways when they finish eating, they both have to get home, but they promise to call and meet up again. The feeling in Jesse’s chest is not the feeling he got with Jane or any of his girlfriends from high school. He doesn’t have a crush or something stupid like that, he’s just happy. He’s glad he still has a friend.