“Wow.”
“He was a miracle,” she says. “He was also born a girl.”
I nod.
“He knew from pretty early on that he was different, and so my husband and I . . . Well, Carl wasn’t as on board with it as I was at first, but he came around. We let him live the way he wanted to. He went from Taylor to Tyler. And even though this was some years ago and our town isn’t exactly San Francisco, his elementary school was understanding. He had friends. Played sports with the other boys. It was nice.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then came junior high.”
Another thumping noise from the back of the car. Neither one of us pays attention.
“Junior high is hell under the best of circumstances,” I tell her.
“Exactly. And for Tyler, it was the darkest pit of it. The kids there bullied him, emotionally, physically. He’d come home with bruises, pink paint thrown on his clothes, in his hair. It was relentless.”
“Did you talk to the principal?”
“Oh yeah. Repeatedly. We got a lot of lip service, but no action. She seemed to think Tyler brought it on himself.”
“Seriously?”
Wendy shrugs. “What are you gonna do? It’s a small upstate, redneck town.”
“Did you homeschool?”
“Yep. Which would have been fine. But those assholes kept it up online. I’d go into his room. Catch him looking at his laptop, crying.”
“Did he ever show you what they were saying? Talk to you about it?”
She gives me a side-eyed glance. “You had a teenager. What do you think?”
I swallow hard. Emily’s secret Instagram accounts. The photographs. The poses. No fucks left to give. And we never would have known about any of it. Never . . .
“So this one boy. He was the leader, the douchebag in chief, and one time he followed Tyler home from his piano lesson and he . . . God, all these years, I still can’t say it. . . .” A tear trickles down her cheek. She swipes it away. “He . . . Jesus. I can’t . . .”
She brushes off another tear, takes a shuddering breath, and clears her throat. “He took away Tyler’s innocence. How’s that?”
I open my mouth, but I can’t speak. The things they do to our children. Our babies.
“It wasn’t something that our son could easily recover from. But maybe . . . if we’d been able to get him help. The thing is, he never told anybody.”
“You didn’t know?”
“Not until we read it in his suicide note.”
My breath catches. “Oh my God. Oh, Wendy.”
“The police said there were no witnesses. They said Tyler was deeply troubled. He could have lied in the note. . . .”
“No. Awful.”
“King Douchebag never spent a day in court.”
Several seconds pass. I shake my head. I can’t find anything to say. We drive for a while, the Mercedes’s engine soft as a whisper.
Wendy says, “Douchebag must have felt guilty about it, though. Deep down.”
“What happened?”
“He flung himself off a bridge six months ago. Imagine that. Ten years after the fact, the asshole finally finds his conscience.”
I turn and look at her. She’s beaming.
I feel my face flushing. The collective. “Imagine.”