New week, new challenge, this time being the : MELANIE EZELL'S BIG CLOSET ULTIMATE WRITER'S CHALLENGE, the fourth week challenge:

4. Reunion

idea: Write a story concerning the first meeting between an openly TG individual and a friend or relative they have not seen in a long time, focusing on the difficulties of reestablishing relationships after a long break, with the addition of overcoming any shock caused by the one character's gender expression.

length: 1500 words or less.

I shouldn’t read Drea’s stories before finishing writing my own. Gives me such a feeling of inadequacy…

The stand in

Nineteen years. Will he even remember me? I wondered as I removed my third wrecked try at make up this morning with hands that wouldn’t have been able to keep more than a fraction of the contents of my mug if I had tried to take a sip of the now cold coffee. For the last three months I had tried to track him down, after his lawyer had turned up at the will reading for our aunt Margaret. She had not been cooperative when I had asked to please tell me how to get in contact with my brother. I had pleaded on my knees for her, but she had told me she had strict orders to keep her client’s whereabouts secret.

At the age of seven, one day a social services woman came to our house. Our parents were dead. Their camp in Chad had been raided, and some of the stray bullets had caught them as they were trying to shield the patients. None of our relatives wanted two more kids on their food and clothing bills, so we were taken to foster homes. I never heard from him for all these years, till his lawyer turned up. An old wound, but still enough to get me in tears.

Three months of searching for him, using whatever clues his lawyer’s speech and stray comments had given me, eventually I met a woman who claimed to know him, who had been in his class in middle school. And so now, eight hundred miles from home, I was finally going to meet him again. What would he think of me now? I had asked his lawyer to tell him about me, and that I was asking to meet him. I had told his former class mate the same thing. Last week I found a letter in the hall, actually stuck under the door instead of in my mail box, containing tickets here and the name of a restaurant and a time and date.

Despite my nervousness and emotional state, I eventually finished make up and dressing. You can do this. You can do this. You can do this. For every repeat of my mantra, I felt even more sure it was a lie. I checked my watch. Fifteen minutes to get downstairs and walk two blocks. I knew I was cutting it short with only giving myself three hours of preparation. I quickly left my hotel room and walked towards the stairs, knowing that if I stayed any longer my insecurities would rise to be insurmountable and I would flee back into day dreaming about my brother being nice and supportive and all cuddly instead of going out to meet him in reality and get all my hopes dashed. And not just my hopes, either. Every step of the way of my transformation, at any time life turned miserable or tough or sad, if was my fantasy brother, the imaginary friend I had made based on my memory of him, that egged me on and made me go out and fight for my right to be who I really am inside. What would I become if he turned out to not be like that? It was my very self confidence I had painted into my image of him. If that image was ripped from me, what would I have left?

I reached the stairwell and walked down, counting every step. I always do. Even if it’s on the twentieth floor. I have trouble with elevators since I was first stuck in one for seventeen hours, back in my teens. It was in an office block and Friday night and Saturday morning. Eventually a janitor came to use it, saw me bleeding and broken on the floor of it and called the ambulance. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Across the street, across another street, and there I was. Hand shaking as I was reaching for the door of the restaurant. My whole body trembling, in fact. It took me a minute or two to compose myself and enter. A waiter came by, and I asked if anybody had made a reservation in my name. Nobody had. My brother’s name? No. The old classmate of his? No. I was searching through the tables in the part of the restaurant visible from where we were standing as I saw somebody I recognised. My brother’s lawyer. Racking my brain for her name, I finally got confirmation that I was expected.

As I came closer to the booth with the table I saw the old classmate was seated there, too. But not my brother. The lawyer smiled at me and asked me to sit down.

“Nice to see you made it. I was afraid you might not turn up and we might be waiting for you in vain.”

“And miss the chance to meet my brother again, after nearly two decades of forced separation?” I said, her comment hitting a little too close to home for my comfort.

“You must understand, you are asking to meet a person who you have not known for the major part of both your lives. Only a few years of childhood. Family ties may be weaker than you consider them, for all my client knows of you, remembering a childhood brother and not ever meeting any sister, you can see why it is only by your insistence that we arranged this meeting for you.”

The word doing nothing but enhance my feeling of dread at maybe losing the imaginary friend that had stood by me and helped my get through my life to be who I was today, replaced by a brother who cares not for me as his sister at all, I felt tears of despair just at the threshold of bursting out.

“I… I… appreciate … that you have given me this… this chance to meet my brother again. And I don’t want to sound too impatient, but… I notice he’s not here at the table. He is coming, isn’t he?” I think all my insecurity and feeling of distress was seeping into my voice.

“Your brother couldn’t make it today” a woman’s voice told me as a figure stepped out from behind the screen shielding this booth from seeing into the next booth. “…but I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, I could stand in his place today?”

I looked up at her, my wet eyes not seeing her very clearly. No, she looked more like I was looking at myself in one of those funny mirrors in the house of mirrors in the theme park. As I rose from my seat, she threw her arms around me and hugged me. The dam I had been building burst, and tears ran down to drop onto the shoulders of my identical twin sister. But the feeling behind them was quite different from my expectations.

Comments of any form welcome. Particularly, don’t hold back on language and editing issues. I want to be told about it!