My Mistake

My nose was in a book, as always, when Nadia walked over to greet me.

"What'cha reading, Justin?" she asked, fiddling with the edge of her green polo that wrapped snugly around her thin, feminine frame.

"Parrotfish," I replied, tilting the cover towards her, revealing the multicolored scales of the cover's single inhabitant.  "By Ellen Wittlinger."

"What's it about?" She took her usual seat across from me and pulled out her striped lunchbox. I must have totally zoned out, because she was waving her hand in front of my face. "Justin! Earth to Justin! Please come back from the land of teenage boys, because I'm not going to come in there to get you!"

"Sorry," I muttered, slightly put off by her comment. Teenage Boy Land was the one place that I would never be.

"So, what's the book about?" Nadia prompted.

"Okay, so there's this girl named Angela, right? But she's never felt quite right as a girl, and she discovers that she's actually a guy, trapped in the body of a girl. Angela's an FTM, female to male transgender. But, when she comes out to her parents and best friends and Grady, the guy, they all have a really hard time accepting Angela as Grady."

"I've never met somebody as good as you at summarizing books. You should really get a job writing the description of books that goes on the inside cover, or the back cover, you know? You'd be really good at it," she said. I got the feeling she was avoiding the subject, which made me a bit uncomfortable.

"I can lend you this copy if you want," I said, "I've read it thousands of times by now."

"Oh, no, it's fine," she replied awkwardly. "I don't believe in being transgender, anyways," she added, trailing off at the end.

I was taken aback. This was not how I expected her to react. I was totally baffled as to what logic led her to this belief.  As I was doing my best not to let it show, all I managed as a reply was, "Why?"

"Well, God made everybody, and God doesn't make mistakes," she stated simply, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

I wasn't a religious person myself, and I had a hard time understanding the concept of God myself, but I'd tried for Nadia's sake, to respect her beliefs. But this, I didn't understand how this related to whether or not somebody was transgender when it hit me: the mistake of being put in the wrong body, a mismatch between the mind and physical appearance.  At that moment, I desperately wanted to shout to tell her Well, your precious God made a mistake on me, whether or not you believe it. But I couldn't bear to say it, not to my best friend. My only friend.

"How do you know that God doesn't make mistakes? What about terrorists? And Hitler, Lenin and Stalin. They all killed millions of people. Why didn't God stop that from happening?" I was pleading that she wasn't secretly a neo-Nazi, too, but luckily, it turned out that she wasn't.

"Those weren't God's mistakes," she said, "What they did was so incredibly wrong, but they were not God's mistakes. Those people made their own mistakes. We all make them, just not on such a big scale."

I could not believe what I was hearing. Nadia was, without knowing it, telling me that I was making a mistake about my own gender. The thing that only I could possibly know for sure. How could she just tell me that I was wrong?

"Okay, let me put it this way," I said, trying find a way to make her understand, desperate to convince her that I was a mismatched- a boy on the outside and a girl on the inside. "If you were trapped in a glass box with only enough room to stand, no room to sit or move around in at all, for fifteen years, how would you like that?"

"I wouldn't like it. But what does this have to do with anything?" she asked, exasperated.

"What if you were trapped in the wrong body? It's just like the glass box. You can't possibly imagine how it feels, but just try. Imagine if you couldn't stand your body because it simply didn't match up with how you felt inside. You've known you were always a girl, right?"

Nadia nodded, her face blank of all emotion.

"Well image if your body was a boy's body, but you still knew you were a girl on the inside. That's how a transgender person feels." That's how I feel.

"God doesn't make mistakes though. It doesn't happen. It just… doesn't exist."

"Then how do you expect a person who does feel that was to get past being in the wrong body?" I bit my lip, on the brink of tears. I tilted my head down to hide my watering eyes. "How can you prove that God didn't make a mistake on them?"

"They'd just have to get over it," she shrugged, nonchalant, appearing to not notice my emotional state. "I mean, it's just a phase. They'll get over it eventually."

"That's so, incredibly insensitive," I told her in a monotone, the only tone I could manage without bursting into tears.

"Yeah, but it's the truth!" Nadia insisted, "Justin, you need to chill. Even if you don't believe in God, you should be able to accept that He doesn't make mistakes, and that's just that!"

"Well, your precious God made a mistake on me!" I shouted angrily, "Whether you believe it or not, I'm a girl in the body of a boy, trapped forever! I'm a mistake, one that your stupid God made, so stop trying to prove me wrong!"

I stood, grabbed my bag, and ran out of the cafeteria door. I didn't hear her call for me to wait up, but it didn't matter.

It's not like I would have waited anyway.