The Practical Uses of Aliens, Sorcery, and Time Travel

My name is Cassidy. I chose this name because it is the name of my favorite mermaid in one of my sister’s old books. I am what many would call “unusual.”

***

When I was three, I would come parading down the steps of my parents’ old townhouse in dresses made of toilet paper. My parents would laugh and smile. There is a torn-up picture in a garbage dump somewhere of me beaming like the full moon in a pair of sparkly, oversized heels.

My parents don’t smile so much anymore.

***

I don’t remember exactly when I went from the “goofy child” to the “problem child.” I was a bumble bee, preoccupied with my fuzziness, visiting all the tulips in sight. I did not notice the smiles turning into frowns.

Suddenly, I was a box. My mother started locking up her make-up. My inability to understand sarcasm was linked with my desire to go by Cassidy: it was all put in one category that adults could only whisper: autism. To me, it didn’t mean much—yet.

***

I think I was in fifth grade when I looked to outer space for the solution. A long time ago, people thought the earth, moon, and sun were the whole universe. Then, some pretty cool people came along and showed us there was more. We amended our beliefs; the earth was not the whole universe, but it was the center of it all.

Inevitably, some more people came along and shook up that explanation, and now, every day, we find out something new. Space is an endless vacuum and we are either alone or we aren’t.

I think it would be neat if we weren’t alone.

This is how I see it going:

Humans meet up with aliens. We are fascinated by each other. The leader of the aliens agrees to meet with some Earth leaders, including the President. I understand aliens really well, so I find out where they’re camping out (New Mexico, since it’s the most like their home planet, and The X-Files says so) and I go there to meet the alien leader.

I say to the alien, “Are you a boy or a girl?”

The alien says, “What?”

I say, “Do you guys have boys and girls?”

The alien says, “No.”

I ask, “Do some of you play with dolls and some of you with monster trucks?”

The alien says, “What? No. That’s stupid. I see no reason to link subtle genetic variations within a species to social behaviors.”

“Hey, Alien?” I ask.

“Yes?” the alien responds. “Also, my name is Zongwar.”

“Zongwar,” I amend, “do you think you could tell the President all that when you meet him?”

“Sure,” Zongwar says.

Then Zongwar talks to the President, and the President goes, “oh, geeze, guys, I didn’t know,” and he tells everyone, and everyone goes, “oh, shoot,” and they talk to my parents, and my parents stop taking away my dolls.

“Isaac,” Mrs. Gershwin says, in that voice that makes me look up immediately and pretend I have been paying attention. “Were you paying attention?”

“Yes,” I say, but Mrs. Gershwin does that thing with her upper lip that means “I don’t believe you.”

The other kids in class look at me. I shrink down in my desk. It’s like they’re all wearing 3-D glasses, seeing me in blues and reds, while I am curled up and trembling in all my shades of purple.

***

After a while, I stopped correcting people on names and things like that. I had grown accustomed to the fact that everyone was wearing 3-D glasses all the time and didn’t know how to take them off.

I gave up on the aliens, too. Things were getting kind of awful everywhere, and I assumed they were keeping clear of Earth. If I were them, I’d do the same, like that one exit my parents refuse to take on I-96.

I was thirteen when I found the solution in sorcery.

I was desperate to find a secret train to a magical world and happily ignore reality. My body was changing, and I couldn’t control it. I had strange feelings and dreams, and my parents were happy about the whole situation, saying it was about time I was “growing out” of this or that.

If anything, I was growing inward. My body was betraying me, warping bits and pieces of myself, turning every mirror into one from a dizzying circus attraction. I kept expecting my fingers to contort into gnarled claws, my nose to grow bulbous and green.

I learned about The Boy Who Lived, and I thought, maybe I could do that, too.

The part that excited me the most was the Polyjuice Potion. People could change their bodies completely. Like magic.

After school, while my parents believed I was fervently attending “band practice,” I would run into the woods between the school and Hewitt Road. I collected beetles, mushrooms, leaves, roots, and bark. I fashioned a wand out of a particularly spiral-shaped strangle fig that had been climbing its way up a bald cypress.

I made my own Polyjuice Potion, admittedly altered from the version I read about—I didn’t want to be someone else, I wanted to be my actual self, the one being swallowed up by a neurochemical adolescent process I didn’t sign up for.

I drew a picture of the real me, dress, shoes, make-up and all, and chugged the whole jam jar of potion in one go. It tasted terrible, but so did Polyjuice Potion, so I felt like I was heading in the right direction.

I began to feel a change. I began to feel warmer, and I lost my balance. My head ballooned to triple its usual size. I looked down at my body to see if anything had changed. The ground spun under me like a wet marble.

I puked on my shoes.

My parents took me to therapy.

***

It didn’t really get much better after that. I was dragged through puberty and locked up in Residential without my consent. My sister, who used to sneak me Lip Smackers, even the really great soda-flavored ones, went to college, leaving me alone with my parents and their quiet disappointment.

In high school, I kept to myself. Cargo shorts and big hoodies swamped my figure and made me fade into the background. I ate lunch alone. I doodled in a notebook enough to garner some malicious curiosity, but my silent nature was boring enough that bullies saw no profit.

That was okay with me.

I was beginning to think there was no solution to my problems. This was reality. I was alone in it. Maybe I was crazy. Maybe the whispered words my parents traded, shutting up and staring at me as I passed, were words of truth.

Maybe my brain was broken, and the “spectrum” I was on was a cage suspended far above everyone else.

Everything changed when I took APUSH (Advanced Placement United States History).

My teacher’s name was Mr. Snyder. I was reluctant to go to the first class, because the name “Mr. Snyder” implied a greying, combed-out mustache, a balding head, a beer belly, and a perpetual frown.

Mr. Snyder could not have been less snide. He was thirty at best, with a full head of a hair, a baby face, a lanky body, and a near-perpetual awkward smile.

He was weird. He was wonderful.

He cared enormously about two things, and spoke about them with capitalized intensity: History of the Common People and Windbreakers.

Mr. Snyder had a windbreaker in every color of the rainbow. Some had racing stripes. One was covered in a psychedelic pattern of tropical birds.

He also had an encyclopedic knowledge and passion about the Common People.

Mr. Snyder didn’t care about steel barons, automotive manufacturers, or bankers. For an APUSH teacher, he cared remarkably little about the Founding Fathers or the Presidents.

Instead, he taught us about freed slaves, unlikely poets, suffragettes, and civil rights leaders. We spent a whole week pretending to be Triangle Shirtwaist Factory workers before he revealed the disastrous truth of our situation to us. We watched about forty-seven hours of PBS specials.

It was amazing.

Mr. Snyder saw something in me. My essays came back with notes scribbled in the margins about additional sources to check out. I found myself reading nonfiction.

He loaned me a book from the library about halfway through the year that changed my entire world. With one simple action, he turned the sky green and the grass pink.

The book was about social movements from the 1920s to the 1970s, but one throwaway line in it blindsided me.

I learned about the Stonewall Riots and a woman named Marsha P. Johnson. The book called her a “transsexual.” I spent the weekend in the library picking up threads. I learned about AIDS, drag, and the Gay Liberation Movement.

I couldn’t tell why it tied my stomach up in knots. I looked at Marsha’s smiling face and my whole throat locked up. I felt weirder than when I drank the Polyjuice Potion.

When I came back to school on Monday, Mr. Snyder asked me what I thought of the book. I didn’t know what to say. I’d read the whole weekend away—I was a dog who ate too much and didn’t know when to stop.

And, like that dog’s kibble, it all eventually spilled out of me. I told Mr. Snyder about Marsha and Stonewall. Something in Mr. Snyder’s face went very serious. He told me he would have another book for me tomorrow.

The book was about the 1920s. It talked about the Pansy Craze, about Harlem lounge singers, Detroit speakeasies, and loads of other things.

Something that stuck out to me was that scientists did not think women experienced pleasure like men did, and not only that, that women could never feel something like that with other women. Two women living together in a “domestic partnership” was not questioned. And because of the Pansy Craze, anyone who dressed the part and played the lady could join them without arousing suspicion.

I immediately began exploring the possibility of time travel.

Here is how I saw it going: I would sneak out, buy some old-fashioned fancy dresses and hoop skirts. I would dress up and look “slapper.” I’d jump into my time machine, find two successful lesbians living in a mansion in New York City, and say, “Hello, would you please take me in?”

They’d spy a kindred spirit in me, grab at their chests, and say, “Why yes, of course!” And I’d get to wear whatever I wanted and I’d dance in masquerade balls and go on thrilling adventures and no one would ever call me by the wrong name or look at me in a weird way.

Unfortunately, I learned that time travel is impossible, Mr. Snyder was fired, and I got into college.

***

My parents packed me and my things up, put me on a plane, and plopped me down in a city far away. I lived in a dorm. I had a roommate. His name was Karl. “Like Karl Marx,” he said.

By now, my body had betrayed me so thoroughly that we were no longer on speaking terms. Mirrors were annoying reminders of my failure to find a solution and so I avoided them whenever possible.

College was weird. Suddenly people were speaking to me, and they were doing it a whole lot. I was so used to being ignored that I shrank away from introductions and curious questions.

After a while, people started leaving me alone. The glamor of Opening Weekend faded, assignments started piling up, and people turned to their work and formed friend groups.

The only person who didn’t leave me alone was Karl.

Karl was a Chatty Cathy. Or a Conversationalist Karl, rather. We were both home a lot, and our room was just two beds, two desks, and a closet, so Karl started chatting with me every day when I got home from Politics and Our Future.

Karl was from Evanston, Illinois, so he was a Local. He’d spent a lot of his life in big cities and had used public transportation. He’d gone to summer programs, so college was an easy adjustment.

Karl found me hilarious.

I couldn’t really place it. My answers to questions resulted in a snorty chuckle that reminded me of my grandfather’s French Bulldog, Rosie. He called me an E.T., who is an alien, so I took it as a compliment.

One day, Karl asked me what book I was reading. I told him it was about Speakeasies. He perked up. He asked if it took place in Brooklyn. Suspicious of Karl’s mind reading capabilities, I hesitantly said yes.

“Are you gay?” Karl asked me.

I didn’t know how to answer. I must have been quiet for too long because Karl spoke up again. “I am, too, obviously,” he said, and laughed. “Do you want to go to QUAD?”

***

QUAD stood for Queer Union, Assembly, and Discussion. It was a group on campus for Queer youth, which were students at our university that were LGBTQ, which stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer.

This blew my mind.

I felt like I was in Mr. Snyder’s class all over again.

The strangest thing to me about living is that you can live your whole life staring at the whole world around you, learning about it. You can see a mountain and go, “that’s a mountain.” You can watch a river flow and the rain pour. You can look at every little thing around you and ask a lot of questions and read a lot of books.

You can do all that, you can know exactly what your world looks like, and still be completely blind. You can still do all of that and forget to open your eyes.

Sitting in a circle in QUAD, I felt like I had led my whole life wearing a blindfold, stumbling around aimlessly, using my hands to form definitions for things.

There was so much I didn’t know, and there was even more I didn’t know that I didn’t know.

I listened to real-life, modern lesbians talk about living together and no one gave them strange looks or whispered about them. I heard someone make a rant about Heteronormativity. I am still looking for a book on that subject, otherwise I would be telling you more about it now.

People there did not feel bad about being Chrissys and Marcuses and Alexes. They did not feel bad about being he or she or they or zhe. Everyone was nice. People spoke to me and I did not feel like they were holding up a microscope or sniffing at a scent I didn’t know I had.

But there was one moment at QUAD that stood out to me above all the rest.

Sitting across from me, criss-cross applesauce, was The Most Beautiful Girl In All Of Existence.

She had a very long skirt on that looked like a pink quilt, and a very poufy button down that reminded me of the Count of Monte Cristo. Her hair was long in one big brown braid over her shoulder, and she wore loads of chokers, necklaces, and bracelets. She had big cork sandals on, librarian-style cat’s eye glasses, a little bit of makeup, a big nose, and the biggest smile.

She cackled like a witch at everyone’s jokes. She spoke up a lot and swore every other word. She had hairy wrists and yawning dimples that framed her mouth like the Mona Lisa.

She terrified me.

My dresses had been taken from me, my shoes sold, make-up hidden, names ignored, pronouns butchered. My weird ticks and awkwardness were used against me and it all solidified into a formidable Illness my parents hated and tried to remove from me like a parasite. I was kept at home and squirreled away in an attic, brought out at family reunions but otherwise silenced.

Everyone in my whole universe told me I was weird and wrong and strange, and since they were Everyone, I believed them.

Then, I came here, met Karl, went to QUAD, and saw Her (Angie). And in her face, I saw a history of someone who was allowed to keep her dresses and wear her shoes and put on her makeup and choose her name and pronouns. I saw someone who could be weird but also maybe not, but it didn’t matter because she was Angie, and Angie was cool. In her laugh I heard music, real music, like a bird in a sprawling, euphoric jungle, not in a cage.

I was overwhelmed. Voices overlapped like waves, and the tide was coming in. Every time someone looked at me it was like static hissed and crackled under my teeth. I felt on fire, and the temperature went up about a hundred degrees every time Angie and I made eye contact.

I didn’t notice when the circle broke. I was too busy fighting to continue existing and keep breathing, while my brain tried to dissolve into nebulae. A hand tapped me on my shoulder.

I looked up into Angie’s eyes. She said something but I couldn’t hear it. I stood up. Angie asked me again.

The waves broke. I blinked. “Sorry, what?”

“Your name,” Angie repeated, still smiling, even though I must have made her say that about twelve thousand times by now. “What’s your name?”

I looked at her and I saw kindness. I saw patience. I saw someone looking past my body and my burdens and ignoring the shameful truth of the veneer I wore. I saw someone looking at me, finally seeing through the cracks down to the curled-up form that had waited in darkness for so long, believing no light was ever going to shine again.

I swallowed. My heart pounded, but I was no longer afraid. I was exhilarated. I smiled at her.

I didn’t need aliens anymore. I didn’t need sorcery. I didn’t need time travel.

I just needed to be me.

“I’m Cassie,” I said.

Theo Poling is a transgender and non-binary screenwriting student at the School of Cinematic Arts. Theo specializes in science fiction and realistic fiction about queer protagonists. In his free time, Theo enjoys gaining the affection of stray cats and going on hikes.