CW: implied transphobia

We were driving up Route 75 with the windows down on a hot day, the wind playing your hair like a violin. The car's AC handed in a two-week notice three months ago, and then walked off the job the day after, but you pretended you didn't mind the thick, heavy air that offered no relief even with the speedometer pushing ninety-five. You had your hand out the side to feel the miles go by, your nails coated in the glittery polish that always left your eyes smarting and your lungs aching while it dried. I didn't notice until we stopped at a McDonald's just past Fort Meyers, your fingers curling around the cardboard cup I passed across the console. When I asked why you still wore it, you only laughed and said beauty is pain. There was relief in your eyes when I dropped the subject. Later, you told me the tiny glass jar of glitter and acetate had been a gift from your mother.

It was a Thursday when we left the oranges behind us for the peaches ahead, all to visit my dying uncle who was too proud to call me by my name. We'd barely blown through the border before hellfire and brimstone rose up along the highway like an omen. I didn't say a word, but you sensed my unease and made light of the darkness by reading each sign with a booming voice. You turned to me with a smile like the sun, saying they were so afraid of damnation because they lived so close to hell; we had nothing to fear. That's where we'd just come from.

I reminded you home is where people go for theme parks and beaches. You reminded me hell looks an awful lot like heaven.

A sign flew past bearing an evangelical call line and a promise to burn. When you screamed and writhed in your seat, I smiled, and you laughed. It made me think back to when we were kids, back when your hair was short and mine was long, before we knew how terrible the nice old lady down the street would treat us when we turned into teenagers. You scaled that stunted tree in the backyard, chasing a lizard, but you started screaming halfway up, too far into the branches for me to follow. Ants as red as blood swarmed through your clothes and brought wrath upon your skin. You were crying when you made it back to solid ground, but you held a tiny lizard in your hands and swept the ants off of him before you even considered getting them away from yourself.

There was a time I would smuggle my mom's old makeup in my new lunchbox to pass to you in secret by the crumbling brick wall behind the school at recess. I never learned how to use it, but you convinced me to try because surely I'd seen my mother do it a million times. You cried when I showed you my handiwork. It melted off with wet wipes, my mistakes wrapped up in a towel and tossed in a tin trash can. Then you took the lipstick and blush from my apologetic fingers, put your YouTube watch history to use, and to my twelve-year-old eyes you looked flawless. We hid your masterpiece in the same place as my failure and slipped back to class when the teacher called. 

In exchange for the makeup I stole and gifted, you gave me a worn blue hoodie two sizes too big. I never wanted to take it off. Then I got heatstroke in the summer, and m freaked-out father confiscated it until the weather was a few degrees cooler. It was strange to be growing. It was better with a friend. 

We were never closer than when we concluded our hair was ours to decide. I cut mine off with kitchen scissors in a bathroom. You let yours grow until your mother drove you to the barbershop, and you stayed in the car, saying no. She cried when you told her why. That evening, we ran down to the gas station and got red and blue slushies for a dollar. As the sun went down over the park that night and we sat sweating in the dismal light hanging from a nearby pole, you whispered that I looked handsome. I leaned in and whispered that you had the potential to be beautiful. You punched my arm; I deserved the splash of cherry that fell on my new white shoes.

Despite all your complaints, I know you loved this wretched place, even when our skin peeled away. It was in the set of your jaw when you were nine, staring back at a snake in the grass with brazen intent. It weaved its way through my fingers when we were fifteen, walking down cracked sidewalks hand in hand, staring at the sun streaming through Spanish moss. It lit up in your eyes every night we went downtown, as if the fog in your glasses was making it hard for you to remember that this is where people went to burn. No matter how often you spoke of packing up and leaving town a thousand miles behind, we both knew you never meant it. You loved this place so dearly. If you had the time, you'd patch sidewalks with glittery cement, hold crumbling bridges together with tape and resolve, tame even the sharpest of teeth, and grow gardens in swamps. Given long enough, you would have transformed this town with color and love.

Time was never on our side. The devil draped across shoulders and murmured into man's mind, bringing shadows to rival your shining. Humankind ripped feathers out of wings and blamed the angels for falling, believing that if they built a mountain high enough with bodies torn and ravaged, God would see the halos they stole and lift them out of this sunburnt hell.

We believed we were untouchable. We were on the way back from Georgia laughing at billboards. We were twenty-one, bathed in neon light and drinking alcohol for the first time. I was a young man with small shoes trying on my first suit and tie. You were a young woman with purple hair and passion, picking out nail polish to gift to a little girl whose mother you'd met at Pride.

Now I'm left reminiscing on Route 75, sun-bleached bones in the backseat, a pretty phantom in the passenger side.