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Charlie didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t know why he was so terrified. Anxiety was coursing through his veins, the fear of being found out threatening to make him sick.
He shouldn’t even be here. He should be back at Welton with the rest of his classmates, pretending to work on homework. Instead, he had run off into town. His official excuse to the Poets was that he wanted chocolate, but after getting his candy, he couldn’t find it in himself to leave the store. Something was nagging at him from the back of his mind, leading him down the aisles aimlessly.
Well, that was a lie. He pretended he was simply browsing, but as much as he tried to convince himself otherwise, he knew where he was going. It was why he even left in the first place, unable to think of a better excuse than being a bit peckish.
The bright lighting of the makeup section felt like a spotlight, drawing all eyes to him. Like an alarm was blaring, letting everyone in the world know Charles Dalton wanted to feel pretty.
It wasn’t illegal for a man to be in the makeup section. Sure, crossdressing was highly frowned upon, and could very well get him into trouble, but no one had to know the makeup was for him. He could lie and say he was picking something up for his nonexistent girlfriend and no one would bat an eye.
Still, he felt paralyzed. He wasn’t sure how long he had been standing there, but it was probably long enough to raise questions from anyone paying attention. What he was doing was wrong; boys should not even think about wearing makeup. He should just get up, pay for his chocolate (optional), and leave without ever looking back.
Charlie shoved an eyeliner pencil into his hoodie pocket. He hung his head in shame and walked swiftly to the register, unable to make eye contact with the cashier.
***
The guilt didn’t wear off for the rest of the day. Luckily for Charlie though, he had mastered the art of faking a long time ago. He knew just how to get people’s attention to shift, and if any of his friends had thought something was off, an annoying bongo solo or obnoxious complaint made them quickly forget.
He waited until he heard Cameron start to snore that night before allowing himself to even think about the eyeliner he had hidden away. He waited several more minutes before sneaking off into the bathrooms.
This felt many times more dangerous than sneaking off to Dead Poets Society meetings in the middle of the night. Those meetings were carefully arranged, calculated down to the minute they arrived at the cave. If they were to get caught despite all their meticulous planning, they would deal with the repercussions together.
This was just plain stupid and reckless, which Charlie supposed could be said about just about everything else he did. He didn’t have a plan; he wasn’t even entirely sure what he was doing, let alone why. If Nolan or even a fellow student were to find him, their reactions were sure to be angry and disgusted, likely violent. This was worse than even his stunt with the article he slipped into the school paper.
Charlie ripped open the cardboard packaging, not thinking about how he was unable to dispose of it without leaving evidence. He expected the pencil to burn him as if splashing holy water on a sinner, but it didn’t. It was small, and without its cap, it hardly looked any different from a regular colored pencil. It was in no physical way monumental or special, yet it made Charlie’s heart stop. Or perhaps it was just beating so fast it felt like it wasn’t pumping at all. Either way, it was crawling out of his chest and up his throat, threatening to make him sick.
Why am I doing this? Charlie wondered to himself as he leaned closer to the sink mirror and brought the pencil up to his eye.
I can still stop, he thought as shaky hands made the first line, just a small mark along his bottom eyelid as he had seen girls wear sometimes.
I can wipe it off right now and no one will have to know, he reasoned as he copied the motion on the other eye.
He straightened his back to get a proper look at his face. He felt… the same. About as monumental as the pencil had looked in his hand.
It didn’t work, I should just go back to my room, he thought as he leaned towards the mirror again. He drew a line on his top eyelid, dragging it a bit past his eye. His hands were unused to fine motions like these- his handwriting was mediocre at best and he had always preferred music over drawing. The winged liner on his eyes was uneven and messy, yet as he stared into the mirror, the face that stared back felt different than it always did. For what may be the first time in Charlie’s life, he felt as if his face somewhat matched what it should look like. He felt pretty.
***
It took Charlie a long time to make himself wipe the makeup off and go to bed. He didn’t want to go back to being himself, but a creak down the hall that sounded vaguely like footsteps scared him out of the moment. He had spent at least an hour on the bathroom floor, probably longer.
He wasn’t sure if this was meant to be a one and done thing, but he wasn’t actively planning on doing it again. The next night however, the nagging feeling from the back of his head returned. He tried to ignore it and sleep, but once he heard Cameron’s snores, he reached into his pillow case to retrieve the eyeliner and snuck off to the bathroom.
Charlie kept it up the following nights as well, and then the ones after those, until eventually weeks passed and Charlie only ever broke his routine to go to Dead Poets Society meetings. It became his own private ritual. He didn’t think about why it mattered so much to him, writing it off as the addicting act of rebellion. He pretended he didn’t know that wasn’t true, that if it really was just a rebellion, he wouldn’t be keeping it a secret.
As Charlie finished up his eyeliner tonight, he realized how noticeably better he had gotten at applying it. His hands were more confident and no longer shaky, and both eyes looked even. He smiled at his reflection, somewhat proud of himself, when the bathroom door opened.
Charlie froze as Neil walked in. Had he heard the boy coming down the hall, he would have locked himself in one of the stalls until he left, but Neil was light on his feet and knew which floorboards creaked.
“Hey, Charlie,” Neil yawned before pausing. “Are you wearing makeup?”
“Yeah,” Charlie laughed, putting on his usual persona and hoping his panic wasn’t obvious. “I was gonna use it for a joke on the Poets.”
He saw the cogs turning in Neil’s head, his assessment of the scene in front of him visible on his face. Charlie should have guessed his best friend could see right through his facade. The most Charlie could do was act normal and hope Neil didn’t care enough to acknowledge the flaws in his excuse.
“Right,” Neil said. “Well, y’know, if you change your mind about the joke, you don’t have to go through with it.”
The boys stood in tense silence as Charlie tried to figure out what Neil was saying. “Yeah?”
Neil nodded. “I’m the only one who’s seen it, they won’t even know you tried.”
Charlie swallowed the lump in his throat. Neil was giving him an out.
“I guess you’re right,” he said. “‘S not that funny.”
Charlie turned back to the sink to wash the makeup off, but Neil’s voice made him pause,
“You make a really pretty girl, by the way.”
***
Charlie stopped wearing makeup after that. He stayed in his room every night the Dead Poets weren’t meeting instead of sneaking off down the hall. Now, he spent most of the night staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep. All he was able to do was think- the one thing he had been avoiding these past few weeks.
He thought about how his self-deprecating thoughts had shifted from hatred towards his appearance to yearning to look a different way. Thought about why he had asked the Poets to call him Nuwanda. He thought about why this was all so important to him, and why he avoided mirrors now that he knew what it felt like to enjoy the reflection that smiled back.
He thought about ‘You make a really pretty girl.’
***
Charlie was miserable and everybody could tell. Either the Poets were too polite to say anything or they just didn’t care enough, but the worry on their faces was apparent. They probably assumed he and Neil had gotten into a fight, and were wordlessly siding with Neil.
He was sure that if he had any more energy to care, he would have noticed whispering from the Poets when they thought he was out of hearing range, debating what he had done wrong this time. Surely they had to be gossiping about everything wrong with him. Maybe Neil even told them what he’d seen, and they were too disgusted to say anything.
Charlie knew it was bullshit. Neil would never go behind his back like that. It was nice to feel something though, even if that something was misguided anger at his best friend who had been nothing but kind to him when he deserved the exact opposite.
Tonight offered Charlie no more grace than any others lately. The feeling of his own body kept his eyes squeezed tight in fear of catching a glimpse of himself. He could feel exactly the ways skin laid on his bones, his mind highlighting all the things he hated most. He wasn’t fit like Pitts or particularly thin like Todd. With Welton’s food and required sports, there was hardly any way he could be fat, but he hated his body regardless. His jaw wasn’t sharp in the effortlessly handsome way Neil’s was, but he wasn’t even sure he wanted it to be. He wanted it to be soft in the way a girl’s was. He was trapped as a boy.
Old habits are unfairly easy to fall back into. Charlie almost felt as if his body was moving on its own, reaching into his pillowcase and carrying him silently to the bathrooms, and he simply didn’t have the will to fight it.
Staring into the mirror, Charlie felt hysteria bubble up inside him. He couldn’t help but let out a laugh at himself. Here, hiding in the bathroom with drugstore makeup on his face, he felt more like a living being than he had in days. Since the last time he was in this situation. A sob wedged itself between laughs, and again until Charlie was hunched over the sink with tears and snot streaming down his face.
***
A knock at the door startled Neil awake. A glance over at Todd and the clock on his desk showed both that his roommate was still a far heavier sleeper than Neil was himself, and that it was an obscene hour in the night. It was closer to morning really.
At another frantic bout of knocks, Neil hurried to the door to shut up whoever was outside before they woke Todd. He was annoyed as he opened the door, but the feeling quickly morphed into concern as he assessed the state Charlie was in. His eyes were bloodshot, and eyeliner ran all down his face– as if he had been crying for quite some time, but the tears had run dry.
Before Neil could even ask what was wrong, Charlie blurted out the answer.
“I think I’m a girl.”
***
Sometimes, when the Poets couldn’t go to the Cave during the day due to weather or time, they met here, in the storage room. Neil and Charlie’s walk to the hideaway had given Neil time to think, and the late hour of the night gave him a reason not to talk. He had hoped to have his thoughts together by the time they arrived, to have any idea at all what to say, but the silence stretched on between them. It was palpable, so thick you could cut it with a knife.
Charlie was seated on a stack of suitcases, occasionally glancing at Neil on the other side of the room, but mostly keeping his vision trained to the floor. Or… rather her, Neil supposed. He assumed that would be what Charlie would want him to call her, if she was a girl now.
The concept wasn’t entirely foreign to Neil, but enough so that he had no idea how to approach the situation. When he walked in on Charlie wearing makeup before, he thought the best way to make her feel comfortable was to give her an out. He hadn’t wanted her to worry that he was alarmed or not accepting, so he said what he thought– that she made a pretty girl. It seemed to have worked at first, but in the following days, Charlie’s misery was obvious. Neil assumed it was because he got his response wrong. He was terrified of that happening again.
“So…” Neil said in an attempt to ease the tension without having much of anything to say. Or rather, he had many half-thoughts, but no idea where to start. Charlie’s silence prolonged– it seemed to get more tense, if anything. “...you’re a girl.”
Charlie nodded. She opened her mouth to say something, only to shut it when tears began to well up in her eyes again.
“That’s- y’know, it’s fine!” Neil rushed to say. He mentally kicked himself for making his friend think he might not have been okay with it. “I meant it. You make a pretty girl.”
Apparently, that was the wrong thing to say as well, as a sob broke out from Charlie’s chest. Neil rushed to her side, muttering frantic apologies. It took Charlie a moment to calm down enough to choke out a proper sentence.
“Stop apologizing, you didn’t do anything.” The remnants of what makeup she hadn’t already cried off stained her sleeve as she rubbed at her eyes. Neil felt utterly helpless, unable to even offer her a tissue to wipe her tears.
“Then why are you crying?” he asked.
“I don’t know!” Charlie laughed out through the sobs. “I feel better than I have in… I don’t know– but that's the problem! I shouldn’t be bawling my eyes out because I feel a little bit less wrong with this shit on my face. You should hate me– at least then you’d be normal.”
“Who cares about normal?” Neil said. “We’re Dead Poets, we don’t care about normal. We suck the marrow out of life. If this is what makes you feel alive, then live!”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Charlie protested. “It isn’t okay just because you say it is.”
“Says who?” Neil asked. Charlie rolled her eyes dismissively, but Neil waited for a response.
“Says… I don’t know. Everybody.”
“Who is everybody? I don’t,” Neil countered.
“Yeah but… do you really think other people will be okay with it?” Her tone was sarcastic, like the idea wasn’t even worth entertaining. “Can I just walk into Nolan’s office and ask him to call me a girl? Hell, maybe he and my parents can even get me transferred to an all girls school.”
“Would Nolan and your parents be okay with you being in a club that sneaks out in the middle of the night to run off school grounds and read poetry?”
Charlie tried to think of a response. When she couldn’t, she leaned against the wall behind her and scoffed.
“Carpe diem, Charlie,” Neil said. “Does being a girl make you happy?”
“...yes.”
“Then as far as you and I are concerned, that’s all that matters. It’s your life. No one else’s.”
They fell back into silence again. It wasn’t entirely comfortable, but it was less tense than before. Charlie was clearly deep in her own head; there was no pressure to fill the silence and disrupt her. They simply sat together, with Neil eventually resting his head on Charlie’s shoulder. They had to go back to their rooms at some point– Charlie would probably like to make sure all the tears and makeup were wiped off her face before being seen again– but for now, they were still in their own safe little world.
***
Charlie was noticeably happier in the days following. They wouldn’t confess it on their deathbeds, but the Poets had grown to miss her obnoxious presence and the way she filled every room she was in to the brim. It was uncomfortably quiet without her banging on bongos or harassing Knox. They were glad to see her acting like her annoying self again.
She was singing some pop song wildly off key as all the boys in their dorm were getting ready for bed. The non-Poets were far less pleased to have to deal with her noise again.
“Charlie!” Neil called out from the doorway. Charlie perked up, and at Neil’s nod to the hall, spat her toothpaste out and followed.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“You gonna wear your…” Neil gestured vaguely to his own face, not wanting the topic of conversation to be picked up on by one of the other boys, “to the meeting tonight?”
Charlie glanced around to make sure no one was listening and lowered her voice. “No, of course not.”
“I think you should!” Neil said. “I know you can’t wear it around here, but the whole point of the club is to be ourselves, not who anyone else wants us to be. None of the Poets will judge, I promise.”
“You can’t promise that,” Charlie protested. “If even one of them is a little less than okay with it, it could ruin me. As soon as it gets out, my life is over.”
“And how would they fink? ‘Hey Nolan, while I was sneaking out with my friends in the middle of the night, I found out one of them is a little different. Can you expel him?’” He winced at the realization of his pronoun choice. “Sorry. But you know what I mean– what happens in the cave stays in the cave.”
“If one of them decides to run their mouth…”
“Then the rest of us will deny it and frame them as a liar,” Neil promised.
Charlie thought it over for a moment. “...Maybe.”
That was a good enough answer for Neil. He beamed and patted his friend on the shoulder before heading off to bed.
***
The Poets hooted and hollered as they made their way to the cave, bouncing with the energy that always came from these nights. Charlie joined in, but her energy had a far different source. She had given in to Neil’s insistence, and was wearing her beloved eyeliner. She was terrified, but none of the Poets had so much as given her an odd look so far, aside from Neil’s smile of approval. That could also be because it was too dark for anyone to really see, but Charlie dared to be optimistic. Really, even more than she was terrified, she was excited. She felt like herself, and for once, it didn’t have to be a secret.
They fell naturally into their unspokenly designated spots in the cave, giggling at each of their own side conversations. They all lit their smokes (tonight’s poison was a box of fancy cigars Knox had stolen) and coughed at the smoke filling the cave. Charlie blew out smoke rings with an easygoing presence she didn’t really feel.
“So are we gonna talk about it?” Meeks asked.
Charlie looked at him with confusion. She was the only one to do so; the rest of the Poets’ eyes were trained on her.
“Your makeup,” Meeks specified.
“Yeah, are you a girl or something?” Pitts snickered. If looks could kill, the one Neil shot at him would have put him six feet under.
“Maybe,” Charlie shrugged. She took another puff from her cigar, ignoring the silence that fell over the club.
“Wait, are you serious?” Knox asked. He didn’t sound upset, much to Charlie’s relief, just surprised.
“Maybe,” Charlie repeated. She knew she would probably have to let her nonchalant personality go at some point and actually answer their questions, but the vulnerability of the idea made all of the walls Neil tried to take down build right back up.
“I… don’t follow,” Meeks said. “We’ve seen you in the showers before. We know you’re not a girl.”
Charlie glanced at Neil in a silent plea for help, but he didn’t offer any answers aside from a curt nod of encouragement. He better have been right about the Poets being okay with it, or else Charlie swore to haunt him after it inevitably killed her.
“I am a boy…” Charlie answered, picking her words more carefully than she felt like she ever had in her life, “at least physically. Maybe I don’t wanna be.”
“Maybe?” Neil pressed. Damn him and his ability to get people to talk about feelings.
“I know I don’t wanna be,” Charlie confessed. It was quieter, had a shyness to it that felt foreign in her mouth. The few seconds of silence as she studied the Poets’ shocked faces felt like torture.
“Oh,” Knox finally said. “Nice.”
The rest of the Poets nodded, mumbling their agreements. Charlie felt like throwing up now that the lump had been removed from her throat.
“Sorry for… y’know,” Pitts winced.
“Is that why you keep sneaking out?!” Cameron asked. The rest of the Poets burst into laughter as Charlie gaped in embarrassment.
“I thought you were asleep!” Charlie protested. “I always waited until you started snoring!”
“I don’t snore, I wear sleep strips,” Cameron said. “You were hearing Pitts on the other side of my wall.”
Charlie groaned, letting out a weak ‘fuck you.’ The laughter didn’t subside– rather, it split off into more sub-conversations. Cameron and Pitts were arguing about how loud Pitts’s snoring really was, and Neil and Todd were giggling about some secret they always seem to be sharing.
“How about we get this party started!” Meeks cheered out, followed by hoots from the rest of the boys. They recited the opening lines as almost a second nature.
Charlie waited for the other shoe to drop, but it never came. The Poets continued on, reciting their rhymes and stories like nothing ever happened. Like Charlie’s confession was just… okay. She was unsure of what reaction she was hoping for, but nonchalance was surely not it. Yet, as she found herself laughing along to one of her friends’ bad jokes, she realized this was all she could ask for and more. She was surrounded by people who didn’t care. They loved her, and they didn’t care. There were no twists, no conditions. She was only Charlie, and whatever else came with that was okay with them.