When I was nine, I made a friend. Alex was my friend, not my mom’s friend’s son who’d one day become a Mountie and stay for an extra week after my bachelor party in New Orleans reasons unknown, not the boy who happened to live next door who we called Cat Food because of his breath who’d one day become a very respectable arms dealer in Orlando according to his social media. Out of everyone at the Woody Acres Ultimit Kristmas Kidz Kamp, I chose Alex.
They sealed me in an ice tunnel once, those Ultimit Kidz. Alex burrowed into my cold, bright grave, nestled in tight, invented a new story about two apprentice Jedi on Hoth, two best friends, and from then on that’s what we were, bonded by the egg roll bubbles of frostbite on the unarmored gap between glove and parka, bonded by the sharing of rare air.
Alex: slight and bluish-white with mappable veins, hair cropped like Spock, cooler than me because he wore an earring and my mom wouldn’t even let me get dreads. He didn’t care that I was one third of the black guys in town, wasn’t bothered by what the other kids called us, didn’t even mind doing girly stuff. Jump rope with the Van den Bosch sisters, click-clack feet on fire, as though the Van den Bosch sisters weren’t even there. Elaborate scenarios with his sister’s Barbies instead of his brother’s Hot Wheels because he understood what I knew to be true: a Hot Wheel story would always end the same way, with the wheels spinning in the air.
Saturdays at the West End Skateway, me in black garage sale roller skates, Alex in hand-me-down big sister white skates but nothing mattered when we rolled on hardwood like a train, powered by Lite Brite strobes and Supertramp.
Nothing mattered until I watched him emerge from the fog of dry ice like the underdog in the main event, except he made his entrance out of the opponent’s corner, the girls bathroom! Too good! I pointed and laughed and expected Alex to laugh and then stopped because he wasn’t laughing. The white skates. The earring. Alex? And she hadn’t even lied.
I rolled away, because I’m a girl on repeat like an unshakeable Abba hook. I was skating blind, hit someone’s knee, caught an edge and spun out. I called my mom who picked me up and asked where’s Alex, and I said Alex is gone and it was true.
I would tell a version of the story sometimes at birthday parties—“Because I’m a girl” and the boys would laugh and I’d laugh as though the punchline had shifted, as though the joke was no longer on me. The story was edited, some details—the lightning flash of the disco strobe reflecting her tears, say—were omitted for length and clarity.
Now, as I interpret the sonographer’s Polaroid, all chalky lines and shadows, a scrotal formation—labial!—I think of Alex, wonder how she would tell it. I doubt her story would be this short, a story all upside down, wheels spinning in air. Or maybe to her there’s no story in me. Maybe I’m not worth the words. The tech hands me the Polaroid to keep. I hold it and stare at it like a thing I'm already misreading, afraid I’ll get it all wrong.
