Up into his nostrils came Florida’s eau de parfum: heat, zinc oxide, sweat, mixed with the pesticide-y fumes of tire-flattened lubber grasshoppers. It was only mid-March, but by now the Everglades air was already as vaporous as a Russian bathhouse—Julius felt like a sweaty Fruit Roll-Up, as his skin unpeeled from the leather seat of his mom’s car. He smacked a mosquito against his neck and looked at the star of red across his palm, a blot so big he knew many others had been sucked before him. Like the left-over traces of mosquito saliva on his skin, regret for coming to the swamp tingled.
A week earlier, a middle-aged psychologist attempted to steer Julius into the eye of his crippling worries.
“Anxiety is about the future,” Dr. Arnold said, wrinkling his nose. “It is about anticipating what could go wrong, right?”
Julius nodded, unsure if the comment required his reply. It was atypical of Dr. Arnold to take a more conversational role in their sessions. Often, Julius heard only three words leave the doctor’s lips: “we’re five over.” He was the classically clinical sort, letting the silence hang, letting nervous Julius fill the empty space with the minutiae of the day.
“Remember the girl from your philosophy class?” Dr. Arnold asked.
He did.
That was the night Julius almost went to second base. Under a tree, he chewed gum to settle his nerves as a semester-long infatuation accelerated under a new moon. She kissed him first. The sucking and licking held his attention up until he heard a noise, one he could only describe as a clogged kitchen drain. He peeled an eye open, carefully maneuvering his mouth so as not to break his date’s attention. Just the waves lapping at the water’s edge, he told himself. That was until he heard another resonant plop gurgling in the distance.
“What?” she asked as he peeled away.
He began to speak, but a wide croak smothered his words.
“An unexpected period,” he lied as he waved goodbye shyly, retreating to his dorm.
Sal, his roommate, was splayed along her bed texting when Julius, dampened from trampling the sprinkler-fresh grass, came in. Julius told her the truth. Not about the girl he liked who had been unambiguous about her attraction to him since the moment she sat near him in class, or about the kiss they shared as delicate as a petal, as sweet as a plum, but about the fears he’d more or less managed while living in a state where over a million alligators lurked in backyards, pools, canals—beings who could even perch up on hind legs and ring doorbells.
“You have herpes?” Sal asked.
“No, herpetophobia,” Julius corrected. “Herpe means creeping. Phobia means fear,” he asserted, but as he did, he felt the defeat of saying something that could and would be misconstrued for blistered lips.
Days after the incident, he thought he overheard someone in the cafeteria say something about a shaggy-haired trans kid abandoning a girl near a gator’s nest. Sal, he thought, while pushing his chicken piccata to the side. That same day, his date’s messaging style had changed—turning from punctual, emoji-rich messages to one syllable responses. Twenty-four hours later, she stopped answering his texts. The day after that, he watched her slip away from the campus café line shortly after he arrived.
In class, his thoughts turned stereophonic. In one ear he heard lectures on theories written by mostly dead white men, while in the other he heard self-lacerating comments as loud as the lecturers. What was wrong with him? he wondered. A bona-fide freak. Here was a chance to finally date, not just any girl, but the first girl who had referred to him without strain, doubt, or clumsy pronoun slips, as a boy. But that was all over now, all because of a single imaginary beast stewing near the pond’s edge.
“Julius, it is time to escalate your exposure plan,” Dr. Arnold said.
“But I’m watching my Reptile World videos,” Julius responded, half-telling the truth.
“And do you think they’re helping?”
He recalled the other day when he and Sal deep-cleaned their dormitory room after a gecko had crawled along his bed. “Sort of,” he lied again.
“Ever been to Shark Valley?”
“Not since I was a kid,” he said as he waved his hand at the doctor in disapproval, remembering the basking gators along the bike path of Shark Valley.
“You could go to a gator farm,” Dr. Arnold suggested.
He shivered like a cat shaking the dirt off its back. Congregations huddled along the shores of sand and mulch, like an electrolyte-depleted fumble, was too many scales to stomach.
“Well, how about an airboat ride along the Everglades?”
Julius remained quiet as he feigned interest in the doctor’s bookshelf. Dr. Arnold tapped his notepad pensively. “What do you want, Julius?”
Wasn’t it obvious? I thought you were the expert, Julius thought as he listed off desires in his head. To be less afraid, less neurotic, to be normal and nineteen, to have sex. To be how he was before geckos and gators tap danced on his nervous system.
“I want to be normal.”
“No such thing,” Dr. Arnold reminded him. “But managing your herpetophobia will help you stay present.”
“Present,” he repeated. Was he not? Only then did he start to wonder.
***
Publix parking lots were always jammed with traffic. But the one on 27th had a ventanita he could get to without fighting for parking.
“Café con leche,” he asked. “And please,” he added apologetically, “not sweet.” A moment later, he saw a wrinkled hand tilt an aluminum shaker over his cup, sending a saccharine avalanche cascading over the frothy milk. He stretched his lips at the counter attendant and sipped what tasted like a melted pint of Häagen-Dazs ice cream that had been steamed warm. He grimaced and left the store, chasing each sip of coffee with a swig of water from a plastic gallon jug.
As he passed long strips of guard rail, a Miccosukee-owned gas station, a bait shop, another gas station, rows and rows of royal palms, he thought about the airboat lurching forward. About the people near him if his voice flew higher than expected. What if he made a stray gesture that suggested he wasn’t a man the way the dogged, square-jawed governor said a man should be? He worried about the way he often curled his shoulders in, caving in his chest. Most importantly, what if he needed to pee?
It all came back to his fear of people. When Julius was perceived as a woman, the kind of fear that caused him to turn back, his first curled, ready to knock at the door, was an experience he couldn’t even count on one hand. Three weeks after he started injecting himself with testosterone cypionate, dark bristles awakened across his lip and a new, subtle boom vibrated in his throat. He told Sal it was the best sore throat he’d ever had, a scratchiness that brought with it octaves of confidence.
That was until, well, he hated to remember it, he entered the men’s room a few weeks later—only then did paranoia begin to creep in.
He had been proactive, asking cis male friends about his transition across lavatories:
“Men don’t watch other men pee,” was what they had told him.
It all sounded reasonable enough. Why would men spy on other men? What kind of person held their ear to a bathroom door and listened for whether or not someone stood at, or sat over, the porcelain bowl?
He was sitting on the toilet in a Whole Foods bathroom when he found out he’d been wrong. He’d noticed the man as tall as a doorframe, lingering by the sinks when he entered the stall. It was only as he reached for the toilet paper, he caught two piercing eyes looking down—like a crow mesmerized by a phone left out on a park bench, he leered. Julius dropped the squares, unlatched the door and ran while the remnants of an unwiped stream fell down his leg and blotted his pants.
Two weeks later, the governor passed legislation that gender wasn’t how you looked to the discernable eye, but the shape of one’s chromosomes.
Was Julius afraid of being arrested with these new laws on the books? Was he afraid of on-site chromosomes testing? Dr. Arnold told him citizen arrests weren’t a thing. But after the bathroom peep, he knew better than to take a cis person’s word. What did they know about safety, after all?
Late at night, every concern he held regarding access and safety became inflamed as he pored over news articles and subreddit posts. People emboldened as defenders and contesters of gender. But more than that, he saw the law as inciting suspicion, as planting an idea that something nefarious was hiding in plain sight.
And these posts proved there really was an uptick in incidents since gender-restrictive bills were passed; trans guys harangued and ushered out of campgrounds like wet dogs, and trans girls pelted with lipstick tubes in bathrooms, or much, much worse.
As Julius pulled into the parking lot, he noted “The Best in Florida” hand-painted under Sawgrass Airboat Adventures. He followed the arrow pointing toward the bathrooms, driving his thumbnail into his index finger as he turned a corner toward the facilities. It was exactly as feared—multi-stall men’s and women’s restrooms. He watched kids walk in and out of each like they had dual citizenship to gender.
He remembered what Dr. Arnold told him regarding bathroom usage concerns: “People see what they want to see.” But Dr. Arnold was cis. What did he know about the striptease that was passing as cis for a new-to-hormones trans person?
Julius gritted his teeth while looking around—mowed grass, low-to-the-ground shrubs, a row of airboats, towering cabbage palms—there was nowhere to hide.
He walked to the dock where several rotund white men in balaclava-like masks and iridescent Oakley sunglasses stood in open stances. Their airboats bobbed behind them.
“You coming?” Julius heard to his left—he turned to find a man with sun-damaged skin and a central Florida drawl standing beside the fan cage of his Airboat.
Julius adjusted himself, stood taller and said with a deeper voice, “Yes, sir.”
“Don’t just stand there then. Get in,” the captain said while extending a hand to help him aboard.
Three white people, made whiter by their sunscreen, were seated inside the airboat: a woman in her mid-forties with piercing eyes sat beside a man with a leathery neck and holstered hunting knife. Beside the couple was a woman whose French braids dangled down the middle of her back. The propeller’s prongs stirred slightly from the hot breeze blowing by.
The captain handed each passenger cotton.
“Stuff them here,” he said as he pointed to his ears. “I’m Mike, your captain. Been air boating for twenty years,” he said from his captain’s perch. “I grew up in nearby Florida City. Out there,” he gestured at the glistening horizon, “we’re going to see snapping turtles the size of five-gallon buckets, heron nests, maybe cottonmouths, and what everyone wants to see in these parts: Florida gators.”
He pointed to the hull of the boat. “I need to see your arms in the craft at all times,” he said before switching the propeller on. The hum was loud even with cotton in Julius' ears.
Mike pulled the steering stick forward. Every so often, the boat caught air, skipping across the surface like a flat-faced stone. Julius peeked over the edge of the boat and watched the grassy plants spring back to life as they passed over. The wind hit his face; an egret flew overhead, but still, to him, the landscape wasn’t much to look at. Florida to him was dayglow green lawns, rows of cabbage palms, razor-sharp sedge that sliced you as you walked by. Flat, sameness, mixed with serrated edges. The land was the same as the people, he thought while watching the heart-shaped spatterdocks along the edges of the water.
Mike turned into an inlet, brought the boat to idle and pointed at a heap.
“Directly across from us you’ll see a hay-like pile, but under those fibers are twenty, maybe fifty gator eggs,” Mike explained.
Julius squinted at the mound, surveying for tails and armored spines. Was the mother hiding under the water or fishing for her young? he wondered, growing light-headed over the idea of how close she could be.
Splashing came from behind the heap and there the gator stood—erect on its legs, sedentary, alert. Slick, glossy, nearly black.
Mike laughed. “There she is. Our first gator sighting.”
Throughout the week, Julius had prepared for this moment. In preparation for his descent into the wilderness, he binged videos of snakes opening their mouths as wide as a fist so they could swallow quail eggs. He’d watched juvenile gators held between human legs as pasty baking soda was brushed over their teeth. But now he thought these videos were bullshit—he had tightness in his chest. Just like the first time his phobia had been triggered.
His fear of reptiles had materialized a little before he turned ten, when he and a friend kayaked down a canal along the Deering Channel. At the end of the waterway, the two friends drifted under the canopy overhead. It was quiet, until the friend noticed capillary waves ripple across the glassy surface. “There!” she shouted, pointing towards a sludge-colored dome. But Julius couldn’t see what she was pointing at—he squinted and reasoned it was only a rock. Another capillary wave and another appeared across the water’s surface. He could see it now—ten heads, twenty eyes. The friend shook the boat in excitement, making jokes about dipping her toe in. But Julius found himself unable to speak.
“My dad told me a gator can yank an arm off as easily as pulling apart a piece of baguette,” she said.
It was then he first felt a pain in his stomach, sharp and nausea-inducing.
“Please,” he managed to say. “Let’s go back.”
“You’re boring,” the friend complained as she began to steer them back towards the seawall.
Julius hadn’t kayaked since.
“Anyone know how many gators are in the Everglades?” Mike asked.
“Thirty thousand?” a woman said.
“Wrong. Someone else?”
“One hundred thousand?” another passenger asked.
“Three hundred and seventy-five thousand, actually,” he confirmed. “How about in the state of Florida?”
“Eight hundred thousand?” the man with the holstered knife said.
“Nein. Two million,” he said while playing with his Oakley sunglasses.
It wasn’t until then Julius saw a resemblance. His stepdad wore Oakley’s too. He considered his stepdad the definition of a Florida libertarian: trans son at home, yacht captain with a Make America Great Again flag at the stern of his boat on the sea. Julius could do whatever he wanted, he told Julius’s mother the day he came out to them. Was this proof his stepdad was a man of tolerance? Julius couldn’t be sure. All he knew was that his stepdad kept personal preferences and politics and all contradictions zipped up. Or maybe he just didn’t think so hard about any of it. That, Julius could not relate to.
It was a slow day, Julius assumed—after the gator, besides a few turtles and an otter, they didn’t catch more wildlife. Julius figured this is why Mike tried to shake up morale.
Mike shouted a proposition to the group.
“I don’t always do this, but you’re special,” Mike said with a wink. “Who wants to learn how to pilot an airboat today?”
Julius rolled his eyes when a woman with a ribbed tank top shot her hand up enthusiastically. This is so Florida, he thought as Mike helped her into the captain’s chair. He told her to grip the steering stick like it had superglue attached to it, then he flipped the fans on—he continued to shout over the motor.
“Ease the lever forward,” he shouted. “It should be as easy as driving a Chevy Malibu.”
At first the woman was cautious, easing the boat along the waterway, turning gently to change directions, drifting sideways a bit here and there. But then she began to turn the boat back and forth as though she was driving down switchbacks.
How much longer are we out here for? Julius thought as he checked the time on his phone—the boat jerked forward, and his phone nearly slipped out into the water. He clasped the handrail tight and put his phone back in his bag.
“You’re doing great, baby,” said the passenger with the holstered knife.
The jutting motion was making Julius’s insides swish—his bladder contracted, he tapped his foot, he continued to drive his thumbnail deeper into the pad of his index finger. The boat lurched forward again. Julius crossed his legs.
When being in his body gets to be too much, Julius just leaves it. It was as easy as removing one’s shirt. Julius watched the wakes of their path, watched himself watching the waves, saw the airboat docking, saw himself walking into the bathroom, watched himself through the slit between the door and wall, heard the acoustics of his own stream, saw his dangling legs. He saw a fist; he heard a knock. He saw the boot toes at the door’s threshold. He saw a pinprick of terror mark his face.
The boat tossed him once again, sending him back into his body, back into the present. He tried to stay in the moment by itemizing what was happening; the woman driving the boat; the captain empowering a woman without boating experience to drive out, far from land; his need to pee.
Fuck them, Julius thought, digging his nail deeper into his flesh. It was getting to be too much. How much more could he take?
He decided the next time the woman bullwhipped the boat he’d go headfirst into the water. He’d ball up and sink. Ten seconds. That’s all he’d need to piss himself free.
And that is what he did—she went left, and Julius went right, over into the murky, sweet-tea-tinted water.
Crashing in was as easy as diving into the sea—his mind went blank as the tightness and tension relaxed, as a warmth surrounded his body like a blanket. He was one with his stream, one with the water. He stretched out his leg and planted his foot on the peaty floor. And that is when he felt it—rough, firm. A sharp movement. Only one way to describe it: the feeling of something alive.
He felt nails dig against the back of his neck. His shirt against his underjaw.
“Are you ok?” Mike asked. He was panting as he padded Julius around the arms. “I saw a head by the brush pop down into the water. I thought you’d lose an arm.”
Julius blinked, feeling thumping in his chest. He rubbed the back of his neck, pulled his palm open and saw diluted blood.
“I think I scratched you a little. Are you ok otherwise?” Mike said.
“I’m ok,” Julius said, as his eyes looked overboard at the aerated water.
“Thank God. Looks like only my claws got to you. Thank God gators can’t see underwater. You’re damn lucky for a kid who can’t swim.”
Julius didn’t want to correct him, so instead he looked down at his sandals covered in peat and said: “You could have gotten your arm bit off for plucking me out of the water.”
“This is what they pay me for,” Mike said with a hearty grin.
***
Julius sat in a puddle of his sopping clothes as the boat made its way back to the dock. He recounted the glossy body of the mother over her nest, set amongst the sawgrass marsh. The thumping in his chest continued. The kind of boyish thrill one gets for disregarding consequence. The kind of thrill one gets before learning the rules.
When the airboat settled into its slip, Mike helped each passenger off, then motioned for Julius to come towards him.
“You’re the second passenger in my twenty years of boating to fall overboard,” he said looking Julius in the eyes.
Julius looked down, then remembered the man-code he’d intuited from watching his stepdad interact with other boaters. He looked up at Mike, directly up into his eyes and told him the unrestrained truth, that there was no chance he’d ever end up on an airboat again.
“Not my thing,” Julius said with all the precision he could muster.
“Don’t say that,” Mike said with gentle authority. “Come back any day Friday through Monday and we’ll go out again.”
He heard a note of insistence, picked up on the sounds of male recognition. He didn’t know how to respond—didn’t people like Mike see the small, fruity Julius as the enemy? Why would he want, even urge, him to come back? Money, Julius reasoned. Pride.
“I mean it,” Mike said as he playfully tapped Julius’ shoulder. “Seriously. We’ll go out. I’ll tell the girls at the front your next trip is on me,” he added.
Mike’s eyes glinted with what Julius had seen other men express to other men, but had never experienced himself. Without a trace of suspicion.
Julius said ok, that he would, why not. Then he extended his hand to Mike because it seemed like what a man was expected to do next. Mike gripped his hand readily, shook it as though he were whipping nautical rope.
The sun was still high in the sky as Julius stepped off the boat and began the walk back toward the parking lot. Only then did he notice on the rear of the airboat a bumper sticker of sorts in poppy-red vinyl lettering. He read the label: “Live, Laugh, Love. And if that doesn’t work, Load, Aim, Fire.”
Julius broke into laughter, his voice like a bellow twisting with the vines of the mangroves, rippling along the water’s edge.
