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one-chicago-fanfiction · 5 years

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Trans Connor Rhodes

((Full disclosure, I am trans. Thankfully my father is way better than Cornelius Rhodes))

Looking back, you don’t even know how it happened. One day you were quiet, because silence was safety. Only speak when spoken too. Don’t say anything he wouldn’t like. If you didn’t say anything wrong, he couldn’t make you pay for it. Sometimes he punished your silences. You were sullen and rude, weren’t the kind of daughter he’d ever wanted. Girls were supposed to be easy to raise. Girls were supposed to take dance classes and blush around boys and dote on their fathers. Girls were supposed to wear makeup and dresses and have their soft, safe rebellions. Why couldn’t you be more like Claire? You couldn’t even blame it on your mother’s death, he told you. Your sister was still vibrant and loving—why weren’t you? After your mother died, after that terrible night with the roof, with your mother’s body in a pool of blood below—you were alone. You grew up stranded in the shadow of your twin, your father using his money to play at being a king. Sometimes he ignored your existence. Other times he made it hell.

You were never really meant for a quiet life.

You were seventeen when it happened, when you stopped being quiet.

Happened. As if it were a single event, and not the culmination of every thought you’d ever had, every moment your heart had spent beating. You had spent years moving through the world knowing who you really were, keeping it buried beneath all the masks your father handed you with his cruelty. Smile more. Wear makeup. Dance at his parties. The doting, dutiful daughter. Beneath the fancy clothes he bought you, beneath the makeup Claire did for you before parties, you weren’t the kind of daughter he’d wanted because you weren’t a daughter at all.

You were a son. That fact was laced through your blood, electricity that came from your very bones. You knew it every second. You’d never doubted it once. You just didn’t have the words to say it aloud.

You were so used to the dull ache of your heart, the way you’d never truly been happy—not even when your mother was alive. It was just life, you thought. You looked like a girl, so people treated you like one. It was just the way you were always going to be. Fine, but not happy. A secret boy who’d never get the chance to live the way you were meant to. How were you supposed to find the words to unearth all of that—to show it to the world? How were you supposed to be happy?

Connor. You chose your name on a Saturday night, pale moonlight streaming in through your open curtains. It was late, so late your father was asleep, but not late enough that your sister was back from her night out. She’d asked you to go, and the invitation had sat like a stone in your gut for the rest of the night. It was the first olive branch Claire had extended in a while, and you turned it down. Things had been weird between you lately, and you just couldn’t face a night on the town with her friends. They all thought you were weird anyway. You and Claire weren’t so identical anymore—her with her long hair and short dresses, you with your oversized hoodies, you with your hair cut short.

You came out slowly, over time, until you came out all at once.

Years ago, you thought you might tell Claire first. If you ever told anyone, you thought it would be her, but the secret language you shared as children was gone, forgotten in a lost corner of your mind. You couldn’t have conversations just by glancing at each other. You didn’t spend evenings and weekends hiding from your father together. She hid with her friends, on nights out, at slumber parties. Night after night on couches across Chicago while you stayed quiet at home. You hid behind the locked door of your ensuite bathroom, headphones in, medical textbooks on the ground before you. Whatever you and Claire had shared, whatever tether the two of you had been born with—it was gone now.

In the attic, a few months back, you’d found a dusty notebook filled with your mother’s scrawl. You ‘d studied it as closely as you studied your textbooks, studied it until the passage that cracked your chest right open, that made you realise things didn’t have to be this way. In the passage, your mother was pregnant. Twins, they’d just discovered. According to this account, your parents were terrified but thrilled. You could barely remember your mother. You clung to thoughts of her smile, the memory of her sweet perfume as she leaned down to kiss you goodnight. You didn’t like to think of her terrified, but you could picture it. You’d seen it before. You’d seen her real life terror, moments before her death. But you couldn’t imagine your father being thrilled about anything. And in your mind, even though it was impossible, you knew that Claire was the baby they’d planned and you were the twin. You were the one they’d never expected.

Your mother had lists of names in the back of her journal, most of them starting with C, and you trawled through the boys names that summer. Cameron, Caleb, Christopher.

Connor.

In the end, you told them both at once. As soon as the words were out, you wondered if Claire would ever forgive you for the way you did it. As soon as the words were out, none of that mattered. Coming out wasn’t a closet for you. It was like crawling out of your own grave.

This is how it happened.

Your father could be truly vile. It was something about a business deal, something about manipulating a potential investor at a party. Your father bought new dresses for the pair of you, low cut things that came halfway down Claire’s thighs. She pressed yours into your hands, your dress teal and her’s black, telling you how great you’d look together. She’d do your makeup. It would be like old times. You could see in her eyes that she was trying to claw back the person you’d never truly been, the sister who didn’t exist. Your father made a comment about the investor’s sons, barely out of their teens, about how much they would enjoy the sight of a pair of stunning girls. If you’ve got it, your father said, flaunt it.

“What if I don’t want it?” You asked. “What if I don’t want any of this?”

“Come on,” your father laughed. “I’ve given you everything. What could you possibly want that I haven’t already bought for you?” You steeled yourself, bit your tongue against the first response that hit you. I want my mom back.

“A suit,” you said, as if you weren’t afraid, as if your hands weren’t shaking at your sides. “If you want me at your parties, I want to wear a suit. And I want you to call me Connor.” A long silence passed. The walls closed in around you. Your father looked from you to Claire, then back again. You caught the silent conversation they’d shared in their look, but you couldn’t decipher any of it. Your palms were wet, your heart pounding, legs on the verge of giving way beneath you. You could barely remember how to breathe.

“That’s what you want?” Your father said, his voice slick with sarcasm. As if you’d asked for something unattainable.

“It’s a start,” you said, your voice trembling with the words. But you didn’t break eye contact. You stared your father down until he pulled his gaze away, until he swallowed hard and held Claire’s gaze a moment longer.

“Very well,” he said, and for one stupid, naive moment your heart actually leapt. You felt it, felt the world get lighter suddenly, your shoulders a little less heavy. Your father met your eye, and brought the world crashing down once more. “Claire, be ready at eight. Connor—get out of my sight. I’ll deal with you, and your delusions, in the morning.”

You can only imagine what would have happened if you’d stuck around, the things your father might have tried to get you to see sense. Conversion therapy, handsomely paid anti-trans therapists. You had no idea. Locking you in your room and denying you access to the things you needed? He would poison Claire’s mind. He was only a person, but he was your father and he could ruin you. He’d been doing it slowly for years.

So you left. One duffel bag full of thrift store boys clothes, a couple books, some cash procured from your father’s study. It wasn’t fancy, but it got you out of there. Three buses later you showed up on your grandfather’s doorstep in the middle of the night, and that was the end of living with your father.

Now all this time has passed, and here you are with him again. Your father, the play-pretend-king, pasty and sick and barking orders from hospital beds. He looks at you a little kinder now. You’re a healer. You’re part of the team that saved his life twice over. Your father shouts at everyone in that room who isn’t you, and when they all slope out, he doesn’t tell you to go with them. You see his mask slip a little bit, the sigh of relief that comes when it’s just you and him. The door clicks shut and the room is too quiet.

“You’re kind of an ass,” you tell him, but your voice is soft. “Do you know that?” Your father’s laugh hacks through the silence, descends into coughing.

“It got me—this far—didn’t it?” He said, but his smile slips away quickly. He isn’t fooling anyone. He isn’t fooling you. You’re sure he can see it in your eyes.

“Listen,” you say, and it’s almost like you’re that frightened seventeen year old again. I want you to call me Connor. “You’re sick. You’re doing okay for now, but we both know how this ends.”

“Are you reminding me—that I’m going to die someday?” Your father asks, this tiny smile on his face, so forced and humourless that he almost looks afraid. Of you.

“I’m telling you,” you start, “that you know what we have to do here.”

“Do I?” Your father’s voice is barely more than a whisper. You can see it on him, how he wants to look commanding, how desperately he wishes this hospital bed were his throne. You give him a look, an almost-smile. Something sympathetic. You see his hands shaking softly on the bed, and it turns your stomach. You lower yourself into the chair at his bedside.

“We have to talk about this,” you tell him. “About everything.”

The silence stretched so long between you it felt like miles rather than seconds. “Yeah,” he admits at last. “I suppose you’re right, Connor.”

#Connor Rhodes #One Chicago #Chicago Fanfic #Cornelius Rhodes #Connor is trans #Trans Connor Rhodes #fanfiction #Chicago med

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gordonwilliamsweb · 4 years

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California GOP Consultant Rues ‘Big Mistake’ That Led to Family’s COVID Infections

SACRAMENTO — The tweet Richard Costigan posted July 23 was bluntly honest: “We tried our best to limit exposure to #COVID19 but we slipped up somewhere.”

Costigan tweeted while waiting anxiously in the parking lot of a hospital outside Sacramento. The veteran Republican political consultant had just dropped his wife, Gloria, off at the emergency room. He wasn’t allowed to go in with her.

🙏 needed 🚨! My wife is in the #ER as she can’t catch her breath. She has been having severe coughing fits that won’t stop. We tried our best to limit exposure to #COVID19 but we slipped up somewhere. I am coughing as well. This🦠 is nasty. I am waiting in parking lot.

— Richard Costigan (@richardcostigan) July 24, 2020

His thoughts traveled back to the small family gathering they had attended in Georgia nearly two weeks before with their 23-year-old daughter, Emma, and 17-year-old son, Andrew. They had planned it so carefully. Nobody wanted to get Gloria’s 88-year-old mother sick.

But here they were, Costigan’s wife battling for breath in the ER, and Costigan sitting in his car coughing.

The family’s journey since then has been one of sleeplessness, pain and worry about the future. And it’s one that Costigan, who worked as deputy chief of staff for Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, is taking to social media and his 4,400 Twitter followers.

And our night continues to get worse – now I can’t stop coughing. I am going to need to leave Andrew in the room. #COVIDー19 is insidious – it’s like it knows you are stressed and scared and then decides what can it do to pile on. When we got here – I was fine.

— Richard Costigan (@richardcostigan) July 26, 2020

Looking back, Costigan, 54, doesn’t think he and Gloria, 53, contracted the virus on their separate flights to Georgia, where the family owns a home. The flights were nearly empty and the passengers and crew wore masks, he said.

In Georgia, the family continued its regimen of social distancing and wore masks whenever they left the house — protocols they had followed for months at home in California. And when they gathered with their relatives on that sunny Saturday in July, they were careful to space the chairs 6 feet apart in the backyard.

But they didn’t wear masks, he said, and family members went in and out of the house to grab drinks and use the restroom. “We thought we’d done everything right, and we screwed up,” Costigan said in a July 29 phone interview. “We made a big mistake.”

Now seven of the 10 family members who attended that backyard gathering are sick. Emma and Andrew don’t have any symptoms but haven’t been tested. Exactly who introduced COVID-19 to the group is unclear. No one showed signs of sickness at the time. The first person to become sick was Gloria’s sister, then her niece — then her mom.

Gloria Costigan became sick after they returned to Sacramento, spent a night in the hospital, needed an oxygen machine at home and developed COVID-related pneumonia. By Saturday, however, she no longer needed supplemental oxygen.

Folks please #MaskUp #practicesocialdistancing #StayHome – you cannot get complacent. This 🦠 just needs one small opening and 💥- as of right now half of our family has it. It is scary. Every time I cough now I worry. I can’t see my wife in the hospital.

— Richard Costigan (@richardcostigan) July 24, 2020

Costigan’s reputation as a straight shooter, respected and liked by both Democrats and Republicans, could help change minds about the virus, said Barbara O’Connor, emeritus director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media at California State University-Sacramento.

“I think that Richard is being very honest about what’s going on,” said O’Connor, who has known Costigan for decades. “It’s not political. It’s really human.”

Lawmakers who have responded on Twitter with messages of support include state Controller Betty Yee, and state Sens. Richard Bloom and Steve Glazer, all Democrats. Sen. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento), a physician who chairs the Senate Health Committee, has texted well wishes to Costigan.

For his followers, Costigan’s chronicles of the virus remain grim.

“I can’t go very far without needing to lay down,” he wrote in a July 25 tweet. “Been sleeping constantly last two days and the joint pain is intense.”

In another tweet two days later, the symptoms were the same:

#Coughing continues, joints ache. All I want to do is lay on the floor and sleep. I have a complete lack of energy. Every time I try to take a deep breath, I start coughing. I just don’t want to move. My wife’s O2 levels are still low even with machine.

— Richard Costigan (@richardcostigan) July 27, 2020

Gloria’s 88-year-old mom is at home with a cough, he said.

Costigan talked to California Healthline about his family’s disease odyssey and what he hopes people will take away from his COVID-19 Twitter chronicles. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: You have tweeted in such detail about the horrible symptoms you experienced. How do you feel now?

My ribs just hurt with the coughing and the fatigue, and my joints hurt. I have the sweats and vivid dreams. I sleep on the floor because it’s more comfortable than the bed.

This thing just hits like a ton of bricks. It’s also the nervousness of it. How long is it going to last? Who are we going to expose to it? I just don’t know what the end game is.

Q: What is it like at your house now?

I wear a mask inside, Gloria wears a mask inside, and Andrew wears a mask. Gloria is sleeping in Emma’s old bedroom, I’m in our bedroom, and Andrew stays upstairs. When I’m hacking, you can see the spit come out. I’m worried about getting pneumonia. That’s something I’m worried about giving to my kid. It’s not just COVID.

Our daughter can only stand on our front porch. She delivers food to us. She puts it by the door, rings the bell and stands 6 feet back.

Q: You suspect you got COVID from the family gathering in Georgia. How do you trace it to that event?

When we looked at everybody that was at the gathering, we were trying to figure it out. It started with my sister-in-law getting sick. Out of 10 of us, seven of us are sick.

We never thought of our family being the one to harm us. Sometimes, you can’t control your anger. You want to be mad at someone. Gloria and I just decided we’re not going to blame anyone. We just don’t know who had it.

Q: How has this experience been so far for you and your family?

It’s been a bizarre week. I went to Kaiser Thursday night. You drop your significant other off. You can’t go in. Off they go to the tented area and I wait in the parking lot. She is admitted. Her oxygen levels are low. She gets a CT, she gets a shot in her stomach for possible blood clots. She gets out Friday and they send oxygen tanks to your house. … She’s in her early 50s and doesn’t have any health issues [otherwise].

Saturday, my son is doubling over in pain. I end up in the ER with my son, and I start coughing. I’m getting the side eye from everyone. Thankfully, he had a kidney stone.

Q: What kind of precautions have you and your family taken these past few months?

We hadn’t been anywhere for months. It was: Stay home. Work from home. No school.

Going to the store was extremely stressful. You go to the store, mask up, glove up, you bleach your shoes when you come home, spray down your car, wash your hands, use a towel to dry your hands, the towel goes straight into the washing machine.

Our son got frustrated with us because we wouldn’t let him see his friends. He saw photos of friends of his partying at Folsom Lake. We were the hardcore parents.

Q: In posts on social media, you are asking people to wear a mask. Why do you think it’s become a political issue?

I’ve been taking flak from friends of mine because I’ve been posting “wear a mask.” Wearing a mask — somehow it has become a freedom issue. It’s not a grand conspiracy. Wearing a mask is a simple thing to do to prevent someone else from getting sick. I do not understand how this has turned into a political issue. The government has a role to play. This is a health care crisis.

It’s been a tough 48 hours – two trips the ER. First my wife, Gloria who is now home, and now Andrew who just was taken for a CT scan. Folks – this 🦠 is bad. Please Please Please take precautions. #mask #maskup #practicesocialdistancing — Our medical professionals are amazing! pic.twitter.com/nW0GZHwpji

— Richard Costigan (@richardcostigan) July 26, 2020

Q: How do you move forward in this pandemic?

We’re locking down. Nobody is coming into our circle. I don’t want it again. To see my wife this way is hard.

I want folks to realize this thing is non-discriminatory. It doesn’t matter who you are.

This KHN story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

California GOP Consultant Rues ‘Big Mistake’ That Led to Family’s COVID Infections published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

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dinafbrownil · 4 years