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Erica is a small child, all skinned knees and shy smiles, who stubbornly corrects adults when they call her ‘Eric’ or ‘boy’. They always laugh nervously and dismiss her words as kid’s jokes.
At five years old, Erica hits Jackson on the playground when he breaks her sandcastle, punches him right in his smug face. Erica’s mother laughs, relieved, as she explains to the Whittemore’s nanny that sometimes “boys will be boys”.
Erica tries to protest but the adults never listen to little kids.
Erica grows up a silent child. The years pass and people stop looking condescendingly amused when she corrects them and start looking uncomfortable, disturbed.
Now, when she tries to explain that she is a girl or give her real name to people, her parents shake and shove her, sharply, to shut her up. There is a shame drowning their eyes that she can’t understand.
She buys a Batwoman costume for Halloween. They all compliment her batman costume.
She doesn’t go trick or treating that year.
The next year she asks for Catwoman. Her mother looks at her in horror and buys her the fireman one.
Erica doesn’t do Halloweens anymore.
Erica grows up, like a weed distorted by the weight of their looks.
They trap her in boys’ clothes, boys’ shoes. Inside a boy’s name. They stare at her with expectation in their eyes, waiting for her to suddenly yell, ‘Gottcha!’ and finally start acting like a real boy.
They wait for her to stop ‘joking’.
On the TV, a female journalist does a report on people protesting in the street wearing glittering dresses and painted smiles. She explains what transgender is, talks about people born in the wrong body. Erica’s mother screams at her when she catches Erica watching and shakes her, again.
Erica doesn’t know why her mother worries. Erica has no problem with her body. It’s hers, and she’s a girl, so it’s a girl body.
It’s as easy as that.
She doesn’t understand why adults are able to fix cars or read books in other languages, but can’t comprehend something as simple as that. She’s starting to suspect that adults may be stupider that she thought.
As middle school ends, Erica’s mother gushes to everybody they meet about this new summer school, where Erica will be able to study and learn for a few months.
To her, they say that she’s finally going to be ‘fixed’, and once again there is relief in their eyes. Erica has learned not to trust relief in her parents’ faces.
They send her away, and a smiling adult takes her backpack from her hands in a nice building in the middle of nowhere.
When she comes back, two months later, she has learned. Learned what terror tastes like, learned the way despair can turn your fingers numb, learned to sleep despite the sobs permeating the air.
When she dreams, empty eyes look back at her. Her body is damaged now, breaking to pieces for no reason and without warning, throwing her to the ground like a broken doll.
They call her conversion a success.
She starts high school, and she’s clever enough to understand now that this town is a cancer. Insidious, inexorable. Lethal. They will never, ever, stop trying to grind to dust the bones and organs of the girl living inside her.
But summer school taught her how to protect herself. So she builds a boy for them. Builds him with the sound of a wrong name, sharp and poisonous but droned day after day by teachers. Builds him with the triumphant smile of her father when he shaves her hair. Builds him with her mother’s anger when she finds a stolen dress in the bottom of Erica’s drawer. Builds him with the wrong letters staining her identity card. Builds him with the distrust in strangers’ gaze in the supermarket, when she looks at makeup for too long.
Every morning, she staples him on her face and she lowers her head.
She doesn’t look at them anymore, too afraid to let them see Erica’s incandescence in her eyes, ready to burn this mask to a crisp.
She stops correcting people, stops fighting to buy stuff she really wants, stops trying to go to the right bathroom or locker.
Her parents cry in relief.
That day, she stares at them and finally understands that they will always prefer her as a broken boy than a happy girl.
On the third week of high school, Stiles Stilinski is washing his hands when she enters the bathroom. He frowns at her when he sees her in the mirror.
“Erica? I think the girls’ bathroom is next door. Or… please don’t tell me that I’m in the girls’ bathroom. Please don’t.”
Erica is strangled by Eric and his jail of shaved hair, baggy clothes and ugly shoes, but Stiles doesn’t even hesitate. Never once doubts that she’s still simply Erica from middle school, despite the layers and layers of boy they buried her under in the hope of suffocating her.
Stiles is a weirdo too. A livewire of a boy, too fast, too sharp, too obsessive. Stiles is unable to live in the world without understanding it. He needs to catalogue everything in neat little boxes that make sense to him, because the whole world overwhelms him and he has to just break it a little to handle it.
But Stiles never tried to put her inside a preexisting box. Because Stiles looks at people and crafts boxes just for them, where they can exist comfortably without their edges spilling over.
Once, in middle school, she told him, as she always did to new school partners “I’m Erica. I’m a girl.”
And that was it. Erica’s box had never been mislabeled ever since.
She loved him for that, for years.
She will never stop loving him for that.
When she finally meets Derek, he promises her health. Erica’s body has been broken against her will for too long now and she’s tired of fearing it. She smiles at Derek’s fangs and drags him closer.
When Derek explains that this is a secret to be kept at all costs, she laughs and laughs until she cries.
They could never see the girl living in her skin for sixteen years, even when she shoved her at them with all her forces. How could they see the wolf sleeping inside her?
Derek’s bite is painful, but she embraces it. Anything other than the numbness. And the wolf in her blood brings her strength, wildness.
She’s the predator in this town now.
So she leaves her house without a look back and crashes on Derek’s floor. She buys makeup, beautiful high heels and short, short skirts. She shaves her legs and wraps them in fishnet. She paints her lips in red and smiles at all the mirrors she passes.
Derek never calls her anything other than Erica. He grew up in a world where being a woman means killing to protect, where strength spills from the eyes and where deadly doesn’t have a gender. Derek never asks her to mellow, to change. He looks at her shards and her cutting edges and only nods approvingly.
She’s a girl to him from the beginning. He only respects her strength more for it.
She kisses him once for that.
She follows him forever for it.
Lydia is difficult. She’s stunning, popular and, to her, Erica is an amoeba that grew teeth and came swimming in her shark tank. She sometimes tuts when Erica’s skirts are too short, her heels too high. But she teaches her how to bend her back at this perfect angle to show off the curve of her neck, to flatter and destroy.
Lydia wears her womanhood like others wear guns. Erica laughs in delight every time. Her femininity has never been dangerous to anyone but herself before.
Jackson is stupid. But he calls her Erica anyway, even if he never understands the weight behind it, even if Lydia still sometimes has to pinch him to remind him. For her birthday, he buys her an expensive trashy dress. He wolf-whistles when she tries it on.
Jackson only loves beautiful things, and he’s never ashamed to show that he considers her such. It’s enough.
Allison is surprising. She teaches Erica the less evident stuff. She buys her the cute slippers and ugly but comfy underwear for lazy days. Huge pajamas with stupid, unflattering patterns. They talk in front of stupid movies during movie nights. Allison rants about feminism and the representation of women in Hollywood. In porn. She raves about girls with hair on their legs and none on their head, and no bras or too much makeup, with big boobs or a penis, with stretch marks and big noses and flat butts. Allison grew up a fighter and she loves women.
Day after day, she teaches Erica that the word “woman” should never accept any limitation.
Scott is complicated. He’s trying too hard to be good in a world that is not, and he keeps failing. Sometimes, when they are in public, Erica can see something flicker in Scott’s eyes and the words dry up in his throat. He looks at her helplessly and she knows, just knows, that he is unable to introduce her to these new people. That he cannot steel himself to throw Erica to their incomprehension, to their looks and their unease. Scott is a coward born from kindness.
But when Erica wakes him up, when he’s half asleep and not even really alive, he looks at her and smiles and always calls her Erica. When she gets clawed and he runs toward her as fast as he can, the name he screams is always Erica. When she meets Melissa for the first time, he introduces her as Erica without even thinking about it.
When it counts, Scott always knows who she really is.
Isaac is too familiar. He is the boy that parents shook to shut up. He is the boy that learned to be silent to protect himself, to be ashamed, to avoid the relief in his parent’s eyes. He’s the body they tried to shatter.
He’s the broken little boy she stapled on her face for years and that they praised as such a success when she was younger.
She looks at him and sees invertedpictures. Erica turned herself into a wolf to break the bars they trapped her in, to liberate herself onto the world. Isaac became a wolf to build walls high enough so that nothing can ever hurt him again.
He calls her big sister and she calls him little bro. When they dream of broken people and broken eyes, they cling to each other and don’t let go.
And Boyd.
Boyd is the simplest thing in Erica’s life.
He’s big, silent and strong, and when he looks at her, he always smiles. Boyd is fun and likes to whisper stories about his little sister at night, with a voice worn out by melancholy. He carries Erica on his shoulder when she asks him just to make her giggle, and manhandles her gently to kiss her. He buys her sexy lingerie and a kitten and a Catwoman Halloween costume. They go out to drink milkshakes and watch movies and he always preens when people stare at her on his arm.
His hands are rough and strong on her thighs when she’s naked but his fingers are always tender in her hair. He delights in her body, finds it as perfect as she always did.
When Boyd finds the pictures of Erica’s first days in high school, thin, head down, with dark circles under her eyes and an ugly buzz cut, he caresses it with his big clumsy fingers. He smiles, just a little sadly but a lot moved, and breathes that she was already so pretty as a little girl. He asks to keep it in his wallet to show it to their kids, one day.
Boyd is the easiest.
Boyd, she’s in love with.