Shae

by Mesha Maren

Genres: Coming of Age; Family Life; LGBT Transgender

Synopsis

From one of the most exciting young queer writers on the literary landscape comes the emotional coming-of-age story of Shae, a teenager who falls in love with Cam and must navigate their relationship as Cam decides to transition. 

When sixteen-year-old Shae meets the slightly older Cam, who is new to their rural small town in West Virginia, she thinks she has found someone who is everything she has ever wanted in a companion. The two become fast friends, and then more. But when Shae becomes pregnant, Cam begins a different transition—trying on clothes that Shae can no longer fit into and declaring female pronouns. Shae is unsure of what to think or feel, but Shae tries to be fully supportive as Cam becomes the person she wants and needs to be.
 
After a traumatic C-section and the birth of their daughter, Eva, Shae is given opioids to manage the intense pain. During the first year of Eva’s life, Shae’s dependence shifts from pain management to addiction, and her days begin to revolve around getting more pills. In the heart of rural West Virginia, opioids are dispensed as freely as candy, and Shae is just one of many to fall victim to addiction. Meanwhile, Cam continues to transition. Embracing her true self, new life, and new relationships means she must quickly face the reality of being a trans woman in rural America. 

Shae is as much about these two young women as it is about the place they both love despite its limitations. Following the acclaimed Sugar Run and Perpetual West, this is Mesha Maren’s most emotional and accessible novel yet.

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

We never have agreed on when we first met. Cam always said July, jungle gym, but I only ever saw August, bus hall.

I thought it meant something deeply bad, the fact that we don’t remember it the same way. But sometimes now I picture Cam’s version and it feels more real. I can smell the rain on the concrete and the way it fuzzes up the air, the heat turning the rain into steam. It smells like sulphur, too, out on the football field, sulphur and black powder, the ground charred from last night’s fireworks.

In Cam’s version, I imagine her ride down from Mingo after her mom’s funeral, all the little tiny nothing towns and the twists and turns on Route 52. I can see her grandpa driving slow. At that rate it must’ve taken them all day to get to Greenbrier County. I can see Cam riding past my house before she knew me. I can see her looking at her grandpa’s house, set up on the hill, covered in ivy and with those concrete steps climbing down.

I see her watching the fireworks out the front windows that night, the explosions shaking the thin panes. Or maybe she was standing on the porch.

I can see her coming across the field the next afternoon, the smell of explosives thick in her nose. I see her see me. Only it’s not me yet. It’s just a brown-haired girl on top of the jungle gym.

I went to school almost every day that summer with Mom, who was cooking for the free lunch program, making meals for the kids who were real poor with no food at home. I helped her prep, opening cans of pork and beans bigger than my own head, and then while they served them, I went out and read books on top of the jungle gym.

Cam claims that we talked that day but I can’t see our conversation, not from my memory at least. I can hear our voices, sort of—Cam asking about the old brick high school where she thought she’d be enrolled in a month. Me telling her it was closed, telling her how they bussed us to Fairlea now. I can hear us but I can’t see anything because I can’t believe I could’ve seen Cam before that moment, that August, in bus hall.

I guess what I’m saying is I can’t believe I could’ve seen her and forgotten.

In my version, I remember her walking into the Greenbrier East gym in her Tool T-shirt, head thrown back. Her shirt was long and baggy, almost to her knees, and under it she wore black off-brand JNCO-style jeans. Her blond hair reached her shoulders, and her nose and ears were pierced.

“Hey Mingo!” somebody called from the bleachers.

We were waiting for the evening busses. All of us Render kids on one side and the Frankford ones over on the other.

“Mingo’s a vegetarian. He only ate french fries for lunch,” Troy Baldwin called.

Cam already had a nickname. They were making fun, but even so it seemed special. No one had ever even noticed me enough to give me a nickname. Hey bookworm, somebody might say as they brushed past, knocking my book to the ground, but that was a general category, not really a name for me specifically.

“I know one kind of meat Mingo’ll eat,” Josh McCallister said, and everybody laughed and Cam turned and smiled.

Her teeth were shoved together in the front, but it only made her more beautiful. She shook her hair back from her face—almond-shaped eyes and cupid’s-bow lips. The neck of her T-shirt was stretched and we could all see the delicate bones below her throat.

Maybe I’ve always called this my first memory because that day Cam was so shiny. When she talks about meeting me on the jungle gym, she sounds all wrinkled up, scared and confused. I don’t guess I’ve ever been able to think of Cam that way. Scared and confused was me. I took up all that space. I needed Cam to be shining, always. I used to think that all I ever did was look at her. But maybe that’s not true. Maybe I never did really see.

That day though, I watched Cam close. She got on the bus and kept moving past all the safer seats. She sat farther back than I was brave enough to go, so when Troy and Josh started in on her, I could only hear a few of the words. Faggot. Pussy. Get that out of your ear. When Troy climbed up over the seat, Mr. Kennesaw pulled the bus to a stop. He didn’t call Troy or Josh’s names. He took a clipboard down from his visor, studied it and hollered, “Cameron Burns.”

Troy let Cam go and she stood up.

“Get off my bus,” Kennesaw said.

Cam had a look on her face that was almost a smile. Her head thrown back again. She came up the aisle, bookbag dragging. She looked at me. I saw that her left earring was missing, and in its place, a bright stream of blood flowed down her neck.

In my version, that’s our first look.

Kennesaw left Cam in that empty stretch past Davis Stuart Road, but she was in school again the next day and Josh and Troy were too busy flirting with Chrissie Hughes to bother her. Chrissie refused to sneeze, said it would mess with her makeup. She’d press on the tip of her nose and hold it in. Josh and Troy kept telling her it was gonna come out as a fart instead.

In the evenings I usually got off at the elementary school to help Mom, but she was home with a cold that day, Cam’s second day on the bus. After Dark Hollow Road it was only me and Cam left. I was Kennesaw’s last stop.

“Burns,” he called to Cam. “Get off here and walk up.”

Outside was about ten degrees cooler than on that sweaty bus. The wind moved in the tops of the locust trees. Cam stood there, waiting to cross the road until Kennesaw backed the bus up. I kicked at the edge of the asphalt.

“You just moved here?” I said, looking up and then away, toward my parents’ mailbox.

“Yeah,” Cam said. “I live with my grandpa.” And then she was gone, across the road and up the muddy track.

THAT EVENING I told Mom I didn’t want to ride with her in the morning and help prep school breakfast. I told her I wanted to sleep in and take the bus straight to East.

“With how long that bus ride is, it’ll only give you an extra half hour rest,” she said.

I shrugged.

Later that night, on the phone with Daddy, she said, “Rodney, she’s turning into a teenager.”

I wouldn’t help her in the cafeteria in the evenings anymore either. At first, I’d pictured that once I made Cam my friend, I’d go with her up to her grandpa’s house after we got off the bus and I’d hang out there until Mom got home. But it turned out the other way around.

After the bus dropped us, I had nearly two hours before Mom got home, and I used that time to spy on Cam. We’d split right there where Kennesaw left us, beside my parents’ mailbox. We’d nod at each other but never much more than that. Cam claims I was the one who wouldn’t talk, that she tried to make friends all the way back in July, but I don’t see it like that.

I would stash my backpack in my room and grab some Oreos. Mom always said she wished I would eat something better, but she still bought the junk food I asked for. I think she felt guilty about not cooking regular meals for me. Before I quit helping her prep, we would eat breakfast and supper together in the cafeteria every weekday. Breakfast was usually rushed, bites grabbed between tasks before I headed over to the high school. Supper was leftover lunch and we’d eat it out in the cafeteria after we’d scrubbed the school kitchen. We’d sit across from each other at one of those big long tables, the room echoing around us with the hum of the ventilation system. Mom would talk about which teacher had lost or gained weight and which one was having problems with her husband. Afterward we’d walk laps on the football field if the weather was nice and then drive home listening to the Billboard Hot 100 songs. Sometimes we’d hit the sale aisle at the Dollar General and buy a keychain with a heart-eyed cat or a lavender-scented hairbrush.

My interest in all of that had ended so abruptly it felt like whiplash. I didn’t miss any of it but I almost wished I did. Instead, I had this new loneliness, wild and huge, and an endless desire to be near Cam. Of course, I didn’t even know Cam, so she was whatever I invented in my head. My evenings with Mom in the cafeteria probably sound lonely but they weren’t at all really. What was lonely was not wanting them and having nothing else instead.

It was probably gonna happen that year anyway, with or without Cam. But with Cam, I had something to call the pain wrecking around inside my brain. I listened to the Smiths’ “There Is a Light that Never Goes Out” so many times that fall, it played even inside my dreams. I would put it on as soon as I got home, as I changed into my old sneakers, the ones I didn’t mind wearing in the woods. I’d let it play twice more while I peed and picked at my face, leaning over Mom’s hot roller set on the bathroom counter to get close to the mirror and inspect my pimples. This all gave Cam enough time to get inside her grandpa’s house so she wouldn’t notice me sneaking.

I’d cross the road and head up the embankment into the stand of white pines. When the weather was bad, the animals liked to shelter there, under the thick branches. I saw deer bedded down, and once a fox flashing between the dark trees. It was more than a half mile, but after the first time I knew how to shortcut diagonally and come out behind Cam’s grandpa’s woodshed. It was just pure luck that her bedroom was around back, facing the shed. If it’d been up front I wouldn’t’ve had any cover. Truthfully, I couldn’t see much though, light and shadow, sometimes the yellow of her hair, the shape of her movements as she crossed the room. Sometimes I heard her singing—sort of, maybe. I’d sit there and I’d smell pinesap and old wood and a dog scent, though Cam’s grandpa didn’t keep hounds. Then one day Cam’s window opened and I spooked. I’d never considered that she could just open her window, and even though she couldn’t see me, it changed everything and I didn’t go back again.

Three days later she wore her Neurosis shirt.

“What’s that?” I said, pointing at her chest as we got off the bus.

“A band,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, “but like what?”

“What’s the band like?” She tilted her head so that her hair fell away from her eyes.

I nodded.

“Like Tool if Tool was playing for God instead of for you.”

“You’re religious?” I said.

Cam laughed. “No like God in the bigger sense.”

“Can I hear them?” I asked.

She held her phone up. “I don’t have a plan. My grandpa won’t pay for it,” she said. “I can only use this when it’s connected and my grandpa doesn’t have internet.”

“I do,” I said. Our dial-up service was very very slow but I was desperate for this moment.

Cam followed me up the drive and I saw her see our house. A little brick bunker, gutters overflowing with reddish pine needles. It is so boring anybody would forget it the second they looked away, but Mom still talks about how much she loves it. Solid, snug, no drafts, no critters, no mold. I thought Cam’s grandpa’s house looked cool even with the windows on the second floor boarded over. But that was the kind of house Mom grew up in, a huge, once-fancy dump with wraparound porches and gables and all that. It would never hold the heat. She told me there was a hole in the floorboards of the bedroom she and her sister had shared and she used to stick her head in it and whisper all her sins: filthy thoughts and petty thefts and crushes. After she and Daddy got married, they lived in a trailer in Caldwell, but snakes had made a nest up under it. She’d come into the kitchen in the morning to get Daddy’s breakfast ready and there’d be a black snake sleeping in the sink.

I led Cam in through the front door. I don’t know why. Me and Mom always entered on the side that went straight into the kitchen, but for some reason it felt important to take Cam first through the sitting room with its picture window, china hutch, and cotton-ball lambs. The sun slanted so that it showed off all the dust on everything and it was super quiet inside, nothing but the sound of our feet wiping on the rag rug, the thud of the door closing.

“We’ll have to use my mom’s desktop. All we’ve got is dial-up,” I said.

Cam didn’t say anything.

Mom’s computer was in the corner of the dining room/kitchen, just past the eating table. Myrtle liked to sleep in the desk chair. She must’ve been almost fifteen then and she’d given up on cleaning herself. As I shooed her away, I could smell her old-cat scent and I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time anybody besides me and Mom and Daddy had been inside our house.

I took the doily Mom had draped over the computer screen, and just as I was laying it beside the keyboard, I decided to put it on my head instead. I draped it so that it lay just above my eyes and turned to see what Cam would think. She smirked. I kept it there even when she looked away. We listened to the sound of the computer booting up slowly.

“Where are they from?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Neurosis.”

“West Coast,” Cam said. “Bay Area.” She was looking at Daddy’s framed certificates: Safest Driver 2016, Best Employee.

“How’d you know about them?”

“A forum.”

“Then you went to a concert?”

She turned and looked back at me, eyebrows lifted. I took the doily off my head. “Your shirt,” I said. “Is that where you bought it?”

“I ordered it,” she said. “I’ve never seen them play.”

I wanted her gone then. I’d imagined hanging out with her so many times and in my mind it was never ever this painful. I considered telling her the computer was broken, but I dialed for a connection instead. At least with music . . .