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It’s strange that I’m accidentally writing fiction about this school shooting story. I didn’t know I had that in me, that imaginative turn to connect what I know to what they now know. The strange intimacy of suicide or loss or death, the way you want to curl into it. It forms its own nest for you. That’s something I’d want to write about. I wonder if this book, the book that’s been waiting inside me, is about a teenager who witnesses what I almost witnessed, the strange suicide attempt that I almost witnessed. It’s like he’s dead but not dead. Why are you so fucked up? Nothing happened. Nothing happened nothing happened. What’s hard about the story is that there’s resolution. There’s no after. I’m still not /after/. There just isn’t one. 

I think maybe the after is when you figure out that you can love in a way that isn’t about the tragedy. It’s when you loose trauma-love. That’s something that’s really wrong about the Harry Potter series, by the way, the idea that trauma-love is stable. Trauma-love is something else entirely, and it’s so hard to figure that out until later. Those are turning towards relationships. I have something inside me that needs that person. It’s a story. I feel like you DEFINITELY lose your virginity after a school tragedy. Someone dies and you have sex immediately, because all your reasons for waiting seem irrelevant suddenly. Tragedy turns you towards others, towards a mirror for your own pain. It’s looking deep into the mirror. 

When I reach deep inside, I have this meditative experience of connection with who I used to be. The sad kid is still inside, and the only thing that’s changed is that I’m not longer in love in a way that’s only about finding that mirror. I’m no longer just a Sauron’s eye for pain, beaming in on whatever shows me how to be sad. It’s like I don’t know how to be sad alone, because I only know how to be sad for others. I’ve had to cut off a part of me that means sadness, because it’s not tolerable in a single body: it’s only tolerable when it happens together. Maybe this character sleeps with her best friend. Maybe only one of them is really gay. God I have this YA novel just, like, sitting on my heart? It’s so strange. 

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These tables are marketed, by the way, as recreational equipment; they’re meant for playgrounds. Of course this isn’t a playground. Maybe you heard last year that someone got a blowjob here, but it’s hard to imagine that happening: it’s so flat, nowhere to hide. What if you got caught? It’s hard to imagine a blowjob now anyway. It’s weird because suddenly all the people around you are your best friends, like you can’t imagine not knowing them, and you want to stay with them all the time, you want to curl up under their covers and press your forehead against theirs, and you feel a little guilty about this, but it’s not the same as a crush, exactly, not the same as how your friend felt about the dead guy. It’s something else, this sensation of feeling like if you’re alone for a single second then you’ll be dead too. Like if you even blink then everyone will be dead. Nothing feels more important than being as close as possible to everyone, and nothing feels less important than who got a blowjob.

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Animorphs was a Scholastic children’s book property from between 1996 and 2001, sold at countless elementary school book fairs across the United States. The books are striking for their David B. Mattingly covers, which depict the bodies of young teenagers shifting smoothly into animals: a boy’s arms slowly elongate and are covered with feathers, a girl’s smooth brown skin transforms into the rubbery grey form of a dolphin.

 In the text of the books themselves, which ran 125 pages or so per installment and alternated narrator point of view, morphing is neither slow or smooth. It’s grotesque—the “sickening crunch” of bones collapsing or grinding into new forms is, even in a series notable for its repetitive descriptions, mentioned frequently. These transformations, unlike the iconic cover art, are canonically disgusting. The books, after all, are set in adolescence.

 As a proto-trans kid, a kid without language for what it felt like to be entering an alien puberty, Animorphs absorbed me. As an adult, when I’m around trans folks around my age, I’ll try to sneak it into conversation, like a secret handshake for millennial transsexuals. More often than not, there’s recognition: lots of us, it seems, were devotees of these $4.99 trade paperbacks (I used to skip school lunch, save my money, and purchase them, one by one, as they arrived at the end of each month).

 Here’s the deal: it’s not just that these kids can turn into any animal they touch. There’s lots of other children’s literature where kids can change bodies: even Harry Potter, beloved by our straight and cis gay peers, has some “kids can change their bodies” stuff, and I’ve known a few transes who got as obsessed with the transgressive potential of Polyjuice Potion as I did with morphing.

 But in Animorphs, no one knows there’s a war going on. The enemies are parasite slugs who crawl into the minds of humans, control their thoughts, can make their hosts seem normal on the outside. One main character has a beloved older brother controlled by the enemy; another, a mother. In a cutting scene in the second book, a girl bursts into tears when it becomes clear that her parents, whose parasite invaders are distracted by their part in the invasion, no longer love her.

     Whenever I talk to trans people these days, someone wants to talk about Animorphs.

 Spoiler: it’s me. I always want to talk about Animorphs.

 If you don’t know, Animorphs was a Scholastic children’s book property from between 1996 and 2001—essentially, Bill Clinton’s second term, and a few months of W., before 9/11. This is also a period over which I went through puberty for the first time.

 Animorphs is about a group of teenagers who can turn into, in the book’s language, “any animal they touch.” This includes, at times, other humans. They have this ability so that they can fight alien invaders, a group of evil parasites that turn their hosts into facsimiles of their former selves. Despite the frequent scenes of fuck-you-up violence—many, many, many times, author K.A. Applegate will describe a tiger ripping into a giant alien centipede until it bursts, its guts exploding everyone, like you put a bomb in the belly of a whale—this isn’t Goosebumps, an adjacent and more popular Scholastic property, which existed for those kids who were thrilled by fear. By the second or third book of what would become a 60-text franchise, this is basically the story of a group of kids with really bad PTSD.

 And, of course, a group of kids whose bodies can change at will.

 Before we had a word for “trans,” some of us have said to each other, we knew the word “morph.” To morph is to transform into another being. It’s both painless and terrifying. Here’s how one character describes his friend morphing into a wolf:

 ��A tail suddenly shot out from behind. I could hear the grinding of her bones and they rearranged. Her upper arms shortened. Her lower arms grew longer. Fingers shriveled and disappeared, leaving behind only stubby black nails. There was a sickening crunch as her knees changed direction. Her legs shrank and grew fur. Suddenly she fell forward, no longer able to stand erect.”

 I mean, basically that’s what it feels like to be a genderless child transforming into an acutely gendered body, like your whole being is undergoing a sickening crunch, something you can hear and feel and understand, but that isn’t painful, exactly, not something you can fix at the hospital. But imagine, also, being a kid, a tween, really, and reading constantly about changing your body. Into anything you can touch! You don’t have to be sitting at home and growing boobs, quite against your will, and writing fanfiction. You can become a wolf, running miles away, or a hawk, soaring above on thermals. Animorphs is how sad adolescent millennial transes learned what humans have known for millennia: that animal transformation stories are a way to access healing, and power, and escape.

 This isn’t, like, an otherkin thing, I promise.

 But what’s also significant here is that there’s a huge catch to this morphing thing: a two-hour time limit. Any longer than that and you’re trapped in morph. In the wrong body, per se.

 Such a thing happens to Tobias, the tragic male figure. He gets stuck as a red-tailed hawk, feels within him the hawk’s instinct to kill, to be predatory. In one scene, which shocked me upon rereading as an adult, while researching this essay, he tries to kill himself by flying, on purpose, at high speed into a window:

             “I was a brown and gold and red missile […]. Straight ahead, a wall. A blank wall where they were going to put a new shop. I was still moving fast. I could still hit it and wake myself from the nightmare.”

             He dodges the wall at the last second, only to be overcome by a different death drive: the hawk’s desire to break free of the inside of the mall. “The hawk in my head wanted the sky. It knew safety was up in the high blue. The hawk powered straight up. Straight up at the glass that he didn’t understand. The glass that would be like a brick wall.”

           But I couldn’t fight it anymore. The hawk had won. I had killed. I had killed and eaten. And I had loved it. […]

           In a second it would all be over. One more stroke of my powerful wings and the glass…”

 At the last second, his friend throws a baseball—these are young adult novels, after all, and contain inexplicable plot devices, like someone who would carry a baseball into a suburban mall—and shatters the glass just before the impact. But it’s hard to escape, when I read with my adult, transsexual eyes what I’d apparently missed as a not-yet-suicidal fourth-grader: that this is the story of a young man, trapped in a body that he doesn’t recognize, trying his hardest to die.

 Animorphs is, after all, a war story. And the bad guys aren’t out there, they’re in us, they seep into our brains and force us to act normal, to blend into everyday social worlds, all while we’re trapped inside, screaming to be let free.