Squatter’s Rights by Ryen Nielsen

So, I’m reclined in this dentist meets serial killer torture chair, knees pressed to chest, heels in stirrups, with a probe so far up my vagina I’m expecting a plumber to pop out and say, ‘there’s the clog!’ A gynecologist I’ve just met five minutes ago presses an ultrasound wand to my belly. I jolt slightly from the cold jelly that she so politely did not warn me about. She keeps her gaze locked on the fuzzy black-and-white blob shown on the monitor next to me. She moves the wand this way and that, pressing hard enough on my stomach that I worry I’m gonna pee myself. This wouldn’t be an entirely awful thing. An unplanned golden shower would certainly be just the thing to get the resident who snaked the probe up inside me to finally stop staring at my vagina.

I try to keep my eyes on the monitor, though the images remain clear as mud. I’m uncomfortable. Sixteen-year-olds are never really comfortable in their bodies, or their lives, but I’m always uncomfortable. I have been uncomfortable since I emerged from the tenth circle of hell that is puberty and became a square peg in a round hole. This body, for it is not mine, remains an empty flooded apartment that I only haunt at night with the lights off, so I can at least imagine there are no holes in the drywall.

Now, this body that I hide behind XXL T-shirts, a XXXL hoodie, one-size-too-big pants, and closed-toed shoes is exposed to air. I can feel a draft from under the door randomly rush across my vagina. I wonder if I should have shaved there before this. I’ve never done that before, and I’m not really sure how I’d complete the contortion required. But maybe that’s why the resident is still staring at my vagina. My pubes are the event horizon of bad gynecology etiquette, and she’s just being drawn in.

“Yup, it’s what I thought,” the gynecologist says. She points at the screen, where thousands of tiny bumps are now visible in the previously untranslatable mass that is allegedly my ovaries. “Those are cysts.”

“Um, okay,” I reply. I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to say. There are cysts. Good for me? Bad for me? I don’t really know. I didn’t even want to be here, at this office, with this strange doctor and this judgmental resident who are being paid to poke around the one part of me that I still classify as a mystery.

I haven’t gotten a period in six months. So what? I’m not sexually active, so I can’t be pregnant. Maybe this is just another one of God’s miracles. Instead of immaculate conception, it’s immaculate tube tying. Lord knows, he’s heard me pray enough times to take this monthly blood sacrifice away that I thought he’d just granted my wish. Apparently, it’s a problem, though, so my mother dragged me here, kicking and screaming, to have my depths plumbed and apparently my depths are actually clogged with cysts.

The doctor shuts off the machine and the resident yanks the probe out of me so fast I worry she’s gonna catch my uterus and drag it out too. Not that that would be an awful thing. I figure it would save me a whole lot of money on the future hysterectomy I’ve been planning since I was twelve and first spotted blood in my underwear in the bathroom of a Marriott hotel in Eugene, Oregon.

“Put your underwear back on and join me in the exam room. I’ll start telling your mom what I found,” the gynecologist says while I struggle to unstirrup myself. The resident has disappeared, probably because my vagina is now covered by my hospital gown, so she has been freed of the gravitational pull of my pubic hair. I can barely get a word out before the gynecologist disappears, too. I staunch the familiar flair of anger that builds in my gut, an endless cavern of rage and magma that will explode on a day that is not today, and pull up my underwear and my too-large jeans from where they were folded on a chair.

I make my way to the exam room, cracking open the door, and slipping inside.

“Your daughter has Polycystic Ovary Syndrome,” the gynecologist is telling my mother. My mother, shrunk small and anxious in the blue plastic chair, begins to tear up. The gynecologist ignores these tears and gestures for me to jump up on the exam table. She doesn’t look at me. Her gaze remains fixed on my mother’s.

“Polycystic Ovary Syndrome is treatable. It’s probably why your daughter is overweight. I also noticed she has a bit of hair on her upper lip. That’s also from PCOS. Women with PCOS have higher levels of testosterone, so they might exhibit some more masculine characteristics.”

This whole time, the gynecologist doesn’t look at me. All words, diagnoses, and treatment options are directed to my mother. The bubbling pit of rage within me burns brighter and I bite my tongue, shred my nails into my palms, and keep my gaze locked on the ground. My body has not felt like my body in so long, but I still reside here. I’ve squatted in its abandoned shell long enough to get rights to it. It’s humiliating to not be included in discussions regarding its renovations.

“You know,” my mother starts to say, through choked tears. “She’s been very insistent that she’s not a girl. I thought it was just a phase, you know. I’m not humoring her or anything, but if we fix this, could we fix that?”

“It’s quite possible,” the gynecologist responds. “When someone’s hormones are incorrect, they often don’t act like themselves.”

All the air leaves the room. A drop of blood from where my nail has cut into my palm drips onto the tissue paper thin sheeting of the exam table. The red of it spreads out, staining the surrounding white. So, we’re not talking about renovations. We’re talking about demolition.

I should be used to this gradual removal of support at this point. My mother carries sledgehammers around my body, smashing holes in the wall like she might pluck the me from before out of the insulation. These days, I am more frame than finished. Fiberglass frustrations float through the air and infect my lungs. I do not know how much of this load I can continue to bear when almost all my walls have collapsed.

I cannot imagine that this minimal elevation of testosterone is making me not act like myself. I don’t know who myself even is. How does she act? What does her voice sound like? Do her bones creak in windstorms? Does her heart get south-facing light? Does she too get excited when she’s called sir in the grocery store, in the mall, or in the doctor’s office before it is revealed that she is the patient?

“Why can’t I just not have a period?” I ask. The gynecologist jolts her gaze to me. She rolls her eyes. Apparently, despite us discussing my body, I wasn’t supposed to speak.

“Not having a period can hurt you. It puts you at a higher risk of cervical and uterine cancer. You could become infertile. You have to go on either birth control or Metformin. Those are your safest options.”

“Oh, we don’t even need to consider birth control,” My mother cuts in. “She doesn’t need that.”

The gynecologist nods, “Well, I can get a prescription written up for Metformin. It’ll help her lose weight too –”

“I don’t want that.” For a moment, I don’t know why both the gynecologist and my mother are staring at me. I didn’t realize I’d spoken. The voice didn’t sound like mine. It was confident, clear, without a hint of anxious shake. I swallow and straighten my back from the submissive curve it’s used to bending into. I repeat myself, “I don’t want that.”

“You have to have a period every month,” the gynecologist says to me again, like I’m stupid, like I don’t know this body. It may not be mine, but I’ve paced every inch of it, looking for a way out. No one knows it better than me.

“Yeah, I get that. I’ll take the birth control, though. Not Metformin,” I say. The gynecologist sighs and shakes her head but leans over to start writing the prescription. If she won’t allow me to go infertile naturally, I suppose I’ll take the chemical option.

“She doesn’t need that,” my mother interrupts shrilly. “She’s not even having sex!”

For the first time, the gynecologist gives me a sympathetic look. It lasts a millisecond, but I do see it. So, this is where the line of controlling my body ends. She’s fine with putting me on a diabetic drug, saying my off-level hormones are making me trans, but I guess my non-existent sex life is the line.

The gynecologist explains that putting me on birth control won’t make me suddenly start having sex. My mother argues, of course. Doesn’t she know that Jesus Christ told her himself that if I have sex I’ll die? It’s a tired conversation. I’ve heard it a million times. I tune them out until the gynecologist says my name.

“Yes?” I ask. I keep my eyes fixed on the bottle of tongue depressors just over her left shoulder. I’m not used to standing up for myself. My foundation remains cracked and unstable. I don’t know if I have the strength left in me to do it again today.

“Do you still want to go on birth control?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“Then, that’s settled,” she says. I do not look at my mother. I watch the gynecologist’s right hand carefully fill out the prescription form. I do not look at my mother. I can hear the tornado sirens in my head going off. I cannot survive another hit of her storm. The bare wiring of my anxiety tingles in response to her electric anger. I do not look at my mother.

The gynecologist hands my mother the prescription and says something about a follow-up to her, nor me. I don’t care. I’m already halfway out the door.

“Did it go well?” I’m snapped out of my stupor by a calm, quiet voice addressing me. It’s the resident. Her kind brown eyes are fixed directly on mine. I look behind me to see if she’s talking to someone else. She laughs and smiles at me, bright, and white, and kind, so impossibly kind, how did I miss that? “I’m talking to you,” she says.

“Fine,” I manage to choke out in response. I clear my throat. “It went fine.”

“Good to hear,” she says. “Come on back if you have any issues, okay? It’s always so sad to see young girls like you going through stuff like this.”

I nod, voice lost again. This is not a new line. I’ve heard it before, from therapists, and my mother, and youth pastors, and my mother. Poor Girl doesn’t know what’s good for her. Poor Girl is just confused. Poor Girl, can you imagine how upset her parents are? Poor Girl, what about grandchildren? I look into her eyes again. They haven’t magically changed from kind to cruel. To her, I really am Poor Girl, and not an empty house haunted by the ghost that Poor Girl tried to kill in the Marriott bathroom when I was twelve.

My mother comes out of the exam room. She still looks upset. I avoid her eyes.

“Come on,” she says. She grips my arm tight like she can hold the frame of me together with will and duct tape. “We’re going to go pick up your prescription.”

I nod again. I nod all the way to the car. I keep nodding, and nodding, and nodding until my attic skull rocks right off its supports and dives into the depths of despair, or depression, or denial, or forced femininity. I resurrect the ghost of Poor Girl, place her gently in my mother’s hands, and my mother shoves me into the wall. She plasters over me without a second thought.

Every month, Poor Girl takes white pills, and the basement floods with blood. My mother looks at Poor Girl and says it’s worth it for the view. I claw at the wall, slowly digging my way out, and they place rat traps, poison, hire an exterminator, and put up new wallpaper.

I keep digging. I dig and dig until my nails are short, my fingers are bone, and my teeth are stumps from how much I’ve gritted them against the pain. When I finally emerge, years later, Poor Girl is standing in the living room. Mother is nowhere to be seen. There is dust on the ceiling fan. Mold on the carpets. The pink roses of the wallpaper are peeling.

Poor Girl turns to me. She screams, “Who are you? How long have you been living in my house?” She reaches for a phone whose line has been long cut and attempts to dial police that will never come.

I smile and gently caress her cheek. The blood of my labor is stark against her porcelain skin. I ask her, “Who told you this was your house?”