Taylor Mullins

When It Is The Baby’s Fault

There are no redemption arcs for people like me, I realise, aged seventeen. I started using they/them pronouns last Spring, just casually. No one uses them on me but myself and my girlfriend when I ask her to. She/her makes me flinch and he/him can go either way but in my chest, I feel a little twinge of joy whenever I am referred to with neutrality.

I am rarely, if ever, referred to with neutrality.

Milo in religion thinks my pronouns are stupid. ‘Not grammatically correct,’ he tells me, blond hair falling over his eyebrows, obscuring them from my sight but I don’t need them to know he is scowling at me- it’s all in his arms, crossed loose at the waist, and his feet, lazing parallel before me. I don’t look at his lips, don’t like what comes out of them, just sigh heavy in my chest and pull my rucksack closer to my chin.

‘What would you call a substitute then?’ I ask, knowing that if Deidrie had come in today, she would have shot me a thousand yard glare, brought up some influencer drama or a new story about the new boyfriend, chastised me and saved me in equal measure, knowing all too well what happens when someone like us answers someone like him.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, you wouldn’t know who we’re gonna get, so what would you call a substitute?’

Milo scoffs and pulls his arms up to cross tight over his chest. ‘He,’ he answers and I should leave it at that but I don’t.

‘But then what if she went by she?’ I ask, picturing Deidrie in my head as I say it- the scrunch of her nose, the jerk of her neck, the eyes that snap like mouse traps. Shut up.

Just shut the fuck up. I put my hand into the big pocket and move around like the claw machine at an arcade, not looking inside- its better if I don’t take my eyes off of him.

Milo scoffs again and this time, moves with the foot traffic those two short steps between his desk and mine. ‘Whatever, I’m just guessing,’ he shrugs, pulling his chair out so that the backrest bumps off of a neat row of copies lined on the desk behind. Audrey lets out a mild chuckle, pushing them back into place, but fails to cover the frown that bows her cheeks in time. Pulling his phone from the confines of his sinking pockets, Milo slumps down into his chair and starts scrolling. For a moment, I think that’s the end of it and blink at the pencil case held tight in my hand.

‘Statistically, though,’ Milo says, staring force-nonchalantly at his screen, ‘men are smarter than women so there probably are more male teachers.’

The sigh that escapes me sounds more like West-blowing winds, more like storm on an open sea, more like gas escaping from the mouth of a dormant volcano than that which is possible to be made from human lips. I know he is trying to rise me but the magma in my veins has already reached boiling point and is slowly making its way up into my eyes. I don’t know what I’m going to say to him when I open my mouth, and I don’t know whether I’m relieved or disgruntled when, ‘so you think it’s easier to just go through life guessing peoples’ pronouns, guessing wrong more often than not, than just using they/them in the singular form?’ is all that falls out.

Rattling like shaken bones atop the table, my loose pencils announce Mr. Murphy’s arrival. The round man ambles over to his own desk, popping open his briefcase as Milo’s eyes slowly travel up from his phone.

‘No, I wouldn’t guess wrong’ he tells me, smugness written so cleanly across his face that it bores down into its contours, its wrinkles, the very pores of his skin. ‘Because I know a boy when I see one and I know a girl when I see one too, so whatever made-up word you try and call yourself won’t be able to change what’s hiding between your legs.’

I blink in horror as my classmates erupt in laughter around me. Milo turns this way and that like it has just been announced that the Oscar goes to him, congratulatory grins on all sides, a victory worn across his face.

‘Quiet down,’ Mr. Murphy scolds, refusing to meet my eyes. He doesn’t for the rest of the day.

Milo doesn’t call me a faggot from the top story windows when I walk into school, nor a lesbo in the corridors as I make my way to and from classes. He isn’t a lost face in the crowds with a well-known voice, nor a hit and run slap to the back of the head. Instead, he waits for religion, for Mr. Murphy’s forty minute period, usually for the class debates on gender politics and abortion, for his opportunity to play devil’s advocate, for the time-designated public hanging of all marginalised students in what is supposedly a classroom of God; towards the end of the year, however, he does not. In fact, the closer we get to graduation, the farther out the door his harassment seems to start.

‘If women don’t want babies, they shouldn’t have sex at all,’ he announces like a rehearsed speech at the beginning of a football game. The passage between Mr. Murphy’s classroom and the hallway is short but thin with tall ceilings and stout windows way up at the top, so high that I have never seen out of them and know that I likely never will.

Deidrie has been explaining how two YouTube celebrities started dating in secret since the passageway before business and is totally unbothered by the interruption, cutting through Milo’s voice as if he were a loud intrusive thought and not something to be paid any heed to at all. And at first, I try to do the same, keeping my eyes fixed to Deidrie’s face, nodding when the timing feels right, twisting the go-go on my wrist tighter whenever I allow my ears to wander off unleashed.

‘If you aren’t responsible enough to have a child then you aren’t responsible enough to have sex.’

I twist the go-go, feeling the small strip of metal press cold against my pulse.

‘If you can’t keep your knickers up then it’s nobody’s fault but your own.’

I pull it tight.

‘A baby doesn’t know any better. It’s just a case of women causing problems like they always do.’

I pull it tight enough for my pulse to thrum mad against the ruthless metal. I try to remember the names of the celebrities Deidrie has been telling me about, what kind of content she said they were making. I try to remember what it is that she has just said, and then, I try to hear what she’s saying right now… but it’s gone like white noise humming in your ears as you stand beneath the speakers at a concert.

‘I mean, it’s not like it’s the baby’s fault the mother’s such a slag,’ Milo says, the hollers and jeers of his schoolboy cohorts sticking to the walls like spit balls, and I am spinning around before Deirdrie has the chance to stop me, fluorescence lights catching on my bared fangs and venom dripping from my lips when, all of a sudden, the door at the other end of the passageway swings open.

Briefcase in hand and eyes on the adjacent door, Mr. Murphy shuffles his way along the passage, bumping off of schoolbags and squeezing through slivers between students.

I have no time to think about biting down on my own tongue because as soon as he gets to our part of the passage, the decision is made for me. In the blink of an eye, Milo steps forward, pressing me back against the wall to allow Mr. Murphy to stumble past.

The water bottle in my back pocket crunches pathetically as I shuffle my feet further and further back, unsatisfied when their heels bump the wall and refuse to melt into it. My fangs pierce my tongue, the venom mixing with blood as it coats the inside of my straining throat. The heat from his body feels like its cooking me, my skin prickling like the first sign of a rash. Milo looms a full foot taller above me, grinning like a hyena about to bite down into an antelope’s neck.

‘Rape isn’t an excuse either,’ he tells me, not bothering to lower his voice- he’s never been chastised when caught before, to the point where he has long stopped trying to avoid it. ‘Like I said, it’s not the baby’s fault.’

Mr. Murphy unlocks the door and steps inside without a word. When Milo has gone,

Deidrie just sighs and leads me along to our desk by a piece of wool that’s been hanging from my jumper. I pull it tight across my chest.

I remember the first time a man made me feel uncomfortable. My family had thrown a grand New Year’s Eve party in my great aunt’s house in the countryside and, after invitations had been sent and booze secured, the entire surrounding neighbourhood and three neighbourhoods after that had made a last minute appearance.

The house was alive, or so I recall, when the older cousins grew tired of babysitting and sent us youngsters on our merry way. A ToysRUs miniature disco ball sat atop the dining table, streaking colour wild across the magnolia walls, while a pink IPod Touch pumped out tunes that throbbed and breathed. Goosebumps raise high upon my calves, even now, remembering the bitter cold that lay outside as I shut the double doors behind me and took purchase on a stool that stood level with my head.

‘Too loud for ya?’ a voice said from somewhere behind me.

A man emerged from the shadows, green beer bottle clasped in hand and skin grey and protruding like warm oatmeal. He thumped down into a wooden dining chair across from me and knocked back another drop before I had even managed my quiet reply. ‘No, too cold.’

The man blinked at me, stretched his neck high above my head to see out of the window as if to verify the temperature purely from sight, and then, seeming satisfied with his findings, slumped back into his chair and nodded at me.

‘It is. It is. Too cold for a pretty, little thing like you.’

‘Thank you,’ I said out of instinct. It’s what I was taught to do.

A gleam caught in the man’s eyes. ‘Much too cold for something as gorgeous as yourself, little miss,’ he grinned, draining the bottle. I repeated my mannerlies from before, folding my fingers into themselves as a gust caught in the swinging doors.

The man glanced down quickly, then smiled over his shoulder at the person moving in from the back garden. When they had gone, he looked down at me again.

‘You’re not like other little girls your age. You’ve got manners on ya.’

‘Thank you,’ I repeated, shivering under his intense stare as another gust of wind came rushing in through the doors. His eyes darted down again, just for a millisecond, as he waited for a woman to pass through to the sitting room.

‘Aye, you’re a good, little thing, you,’ he told me when she’d disappeared out of sight, leaning forward in his chair to raise a lumpy, grey hand into the space between us. I watched, frozen in place, as he made to drop the hand down onto my bare knee.

‘Would you be a good girl for me?’ he whispered and as if it were an amputated limb from a recent plague victim, the mere ghost of that hand’s touch had me screaming bloody murder.

My great aunt was inside within a second.

‘What on Earth?!’ she screeched, rushing in through the doors as icy and as swift as the wind that followed her. She was met with the sight of the man, hands clasped over his ears like a frightened child, and me, pudgy, little legs dangling over the corners of the stool and bottom lip quivering involuntarily.

‘Where’s your cop, girl?’ my aunt snapped, shutting the doors behind her.

‘I… I… I…’ I tried to reply but the man was in there before me.

‘Got a fine set of lungs on her, that’s for sure,’ he chuckled. My aunt’s face flickered over with momentary surprise before blooming into a wide smile as she turned to face him.

‘No manners is what she has, I’m afraid.’

‘Ah, that’s alright, love. She’s only small.’

‘The size of her? Small? If you say so,’ my aunt laughed, rolling her eyes.

‘I… I… I…’ I whimpered, throat feeling the aching swell of on-coming tears.

‘Oh, what’s wrong with ya now?’ my aunt groaned, whipping around to face me…

and perhaps it was the angle with which she then stood or the timing of the disco ball’s blue beam but as she did, her eyes fell just below my clasped hands and her face turned a shade of red I had never before seen. With my aunt’s back now turned, the man’s eyes glanced down once more at his unwrapped prize and my little heart sunk in my chest.

The wind had been blowing up my dress.

Before I’d had a chance to finish a blink, my aunt was in front of me, snatching me up by the crook of my elbow and hauling me onto my feet.

‘I am so sorry, Damien! I can’t believe what’s gotten into her,’ she said, dangling me on my tiptoes like the worm on the end of a hook.

‘That’s alright. That’s alright,’ the man chuckled in a way that one could mistake for being good-naturedly but I could tell, even then, was nervousness from a close call. He ran a finger along the rim of his bottle, staring down into it as if it could tell him all about the wonders of the universe as my aunt half-dragged, half-carried me out of the room.

‘I don’t know who you think you are but you will not act like such a self-centred, little diva in my house,’ she barked, storming her way down the hall. ‘I just don’t know who you think you are. I really don’t. I mean, screaming into Damien’s face like a fecking opera singer. Do you think that’s funny, do you? That man’s got a heart condition, you know, and three beautiful boys at home. You could have scared him to death.’

We made our way to the stairs, my socked toes thumping gracelessly atop each step.

‘You don’t once think of anybody else in your attention-seeking nonsense. You just go and spoil the fun for everybody else, ruining New Years. Well, I won’t let ya.’

The door to my cousin’s bedroom was swung open with the same intensity as I was swung by the arm and deposited down onto the carpet like a bag of dirty laundry. My cousin lay on her stomach at the foot of the bed, her portable D.V.D. player open in front of her as a dozen girls dripped slowly down from the sides like paint running off of canvas.

Eyes wide and sympathetic, they stared down at me but made no sign of movement, obeying the unspoken order to deal with me only after my aunt was done. But something about the burning on my knees and the eyes of those girls- knowing, fearful, tired eyes-untangled my tongue.

‘It’s not my fault,’ I started to protest, tears finally breaking and falling down my cheeks. ‘I didn’t know what he was doing.’

My aunt just scoffed, gripped the doorhandle tight in her fist and rolled her eyes at me. ‘You are old enough to know better,’ she told me. That August, I had just turned three.

Milo surrounds himself with girls and sometimes I wonder where they came from, but others, I remember as soon as the thought comes into my head. They come from magazines and tv shows and movies, from whispers in changing rooms, from gossip in school toilets and comments in the court yards. They come from parties- attendances young and old-, from concerts, from back allies and dim pubs but most of all, they come from these classrooms.

They are girls who want to be cool, to be easy, to be normal but outgoing, likeable but sassy, pretty but not fake, smart but not nerdy, fun but not sporty, engaging but not confrontational, the most perfectly imperfect perfect girl that they can be. They want to be the exact opposite of me and it hurts. It hurts to be the blueprint of what not to do but, over time, I learn to stop blaming them. I stop blaming them when a girl as radiant as sunflowers wilts blue at a boy’s cold words, and when straight shoulders dip. I stop blaming them when a girl wipes smudged mascara from her eyes with the back of a wet tissue and smears gloss on swollen lips. I stop blaming them when my aunt grows jowls as solid as marbles from decades fixed with the same tight smile. I stop blaming them all together when I see a closeted lesbian walk with Milo to lunch, her girlfriend miles and miles away in another school, in another county.

Milo is young and he will get to be for a long, long time, until his late twenties, when he has his first child, when he gets his first job, he will be but a young man finding his way through the trials and tribulations of this world. And I, with my long hair and pitched voice, with the body I was born in and the appearance I can only go so far as to change, will not only never have that chance but never did. If you are presumed female in this world, you were never born a baby at all but a criminal already fined by the universe for your brazen existence.