Free Luna by Julie Anne Peters Page A

wipe all the tears away.
    He beats me to it and swipes his eye with a knuckle. Then sniffles, and heaves.
    I gather the jersey and shoulder pads and cleats off the floor. “I’ll take care of it,” I tell him. “You
don’t
have to do this.” I’m mad, seething mad.
    At the bottom of the stairs, I stop. I drop the bundle of gear. There’s something else I want to say.
    “Lia Marie?” I stand in the doorway. “You can wear my new nightgown to bed. You can have it. And you can use my room to dress in from now on, whenever you want.”
    Liam glances over his shoulder and meets my eyes. Slowly, the color in his face returns. He comes to life. I see him physically morph into Lia Marie. “Okay.” She smiles. “Thanks, Re.”
    I breathe a sigh of relief.
    Liam’s door swung open in my face and Dana International assaulted me. “Hey, Re. Come here, look at this.” Liam motioned me inside.
    I breathed a sigh of relief — the same one I’ve breathed every day since that Liam’s been too chicken to do it.
    If he’d considered suicide again, Liam hadn’t discussed it with me. Not that he’d give me the date and time. But I watched him pretty close. I think he’d gotten to a new place, a better place. Having the freedom to dress in my room had cured him — I thought.
    His room still creeped me out. It was stark. Cold. Abandoned. He never used sheets on his bed, or even a comforter. Just this scratchy wool blanket he’d bought at army surplus or something. During the day he kept it wadded up at the top of the mattress where most people have pillows. The walls were bare, too, except for the books and paperbacks and notebooks and computer manuals that were stacked to the ceiling. The room always felt vacant to me, unoccupied.
    Liam was speaking, but I could barely hear him. I deamped the volume on Dana.
    “. . . and I found all kinds of history on TG’s. For instance, did you know in ancient Greece and Rome, Philo writes about men transforming into women?”
    TG’s. Transgenders. “Well, yeah. Everyone reads Philo.”
    He ignored the sarcasm. He was sitting on the floor, surrounded by all these piles of printouts. “And King Henry the Third of France was referred to as
sa majesté. Her
majesty. Abbé de Choisy in the seventeenth century actually wrote, ‘I thought myself really and truly a woman.’ Then there’s Joan of Arc.”
    “Joan of Arc was a man?” My eyes bulged.
    Liam tilted his head. “In her mind,” he said. “There’s enough evidence to suggest it.”
    Wow. I never considered that girls could be transgender. I dropped my backpack on his bed and slid down beside him. I wondered, too, what his sudden interest in history was all about. “Why are you researching TG’s?” I asked. “I mean, why now?”
    “Why not now? One day I’m going to be a part of history.”
    My heart sped up. Did he mean he was going to
be
history?
    “Lots of Native American tribes pass down stories about trans people,” Liam babbled on, “the Mohave, Navaho, Pueblo. They accept, even embrace, females who are men, and vice versa. ‘Two-spirit’ people, they call them. Did you know in the Yuman Indians there were groups of people called Elxa who actually underwent a ‘change of spirit’? Isn’t that cool?”
    My mind was reeling. I glanced at the page of text Liam was reciting from. He’d highlighted sections, starred names of famous people. Dana International. Oh. She was trans. I never understood why he liked her so much.
    “Mick Jagger says he cross-dresses at home.”
    I frowned at Liam. “Does that make him trans?”
    Liam shrugged. “You never know. It’s not either or. There are shades of gray to people’s gender.”
    “I know that.”
    “Ru Paul,” he said.
    “Ru Paul? I thought he was a drag queen.”
    “Maybe. Probably. But she is beautiful.”
    “Is that what you want to be, a drag queen?” God, was Luna going to be on stage? Performing?
    Liam said, “We’re not all so gifted. I just