I Know the Robin’s Brain
1
A month before we lost him, I remember Bram said, “I wish bees were immortal.”
It was a sigh from the bed, a sign Bram “Bird Boy” Ramirez was waking from his noontime gloom. Lunch always made his stomach hurt, as he had a million dietary restrictions and was careless about following them.
I was sitting at Bram’s mother’s vanity, in one of his mother’s old hippy dresses with the leather fringe, spreading foundation over my acne and sucking on his mom’s billiard pipe like a stagecoach driver from a cowboy film. In the mirror I could see Bram curled around a hot water bottle like a bird in a nest, a mirror balanced on his pillow, lipstick and a lip-brush in either hand.
“Why’s that?” I prodded. “What’s with bees all of a sudden?”
“I was just thinking…” he said and paused to rub his lips together, then touch up the cupid’s bow. He had shiny black lips, shiny black-lined eyes. Even lying sideways, he was the best fourteen-year-old makeup artist I knew who wasn’t a Youtube star. “Oh God, stomach! Stop.”
“Maybe you should take the binder off.”
“Nooooo.”
“You said it’s hard to breathe with the binder on.”
“Oh my God, shut up and stop being logical, Melissa.”
“Okay. Tell me something stupid then, Bird Boy. Tell me about the bees.”
“The bees…” he said, and sat up, crispy fried hair sticking in odd directions. His eyes were bright with the start of a classic Bram rant (“Brant”).
“Nectar,” Bram said, spreading his arms like a diminutive professor. “Nectar of the gods. It’s a food that grants immortality. In the Greek legends, if you eat ambrosia or drink nectar, you become immortal like a god.”
“I follow, I follow,” I said. I took the pipe out of my mouth and bared my teeth at my reflection, touching the place I’d chipped my incisor with the tip of my tongue. Skateboarding screw up.
Bram snickered. He pulled his chest-binder down around his tummy like a belly warmer, stuck the hot water bottle in the elastic, and hopped out of bed. He started pacing back and forth. He looked like some kind of deranged pregnant teen—his small brown breasts, barely more than pecs even without the binder, drooping above the band like two surly eyes.
“Okay, so there are three kinds of immortality: there’s godlike immortality, attained by drinking nectar and eating ambrosia. There’s immortality through legend, having people remember your story. And last of all there’s biological immortality, having kids and descendants.” He patted the hot water bottle, making it slosh.
“How’s your stomach?”
“Better every second. So you have these three kinds of immortality. And every single living thing craves immortality and wants to flee death. Or they should, anyway. It’s the natural order. You either want to be a god, you want to be a legend, or you want to have babies so that some piece of you remains.” He held up a finger. “Except bees.”
“What about bees?”
“They have the shittiest lives. They get cheated out of everything. They drink nectar, the same nectar as gods, but they aren’t immortal. 99.9999% of them are sterile, they’re basically slaves, they live like one week and then they die. Or, if they ever have a moment of heroism and go ‘bzzzz! Defend the hive! Defend the hive!’ then their butts break off and they die.”
“Warrior’s death?”
“That’s a stupid way to go, having your butt break off. Death by butt!” He made an attempt at twerking with his small posterior while I chuckled. No one was going to be slain by that butt.
“You get the idea,” he huffed. “So bees don’t have the immortality of the gods. They don’t have the immortality of offspring. They don’t have the immortality of legend after they’re dead—I mean, no one goes around telling the tale of ‘heroic Bee Number 36624;’ they’re completely anonymous. Even a fly—even a mosquito—has more richness and reward for its life than a bee does. And all that from these holy fucking bees that eat the food of the gods.”
The hot water bottle slipped out of his chest-binder and thumped on the floor. I watched him for a moment, his slight frame and bony shoulders. He looked so small and sticklike without the bottle.
“By the way, you should try cat-eye makeup,” he said.
“I’m not the makeup type,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I barely understand foundation. Plus my eyelid folds aren’t the right type. Eyeliner never looks good.”
“I can get them looking right—just let me try something.”
“It’s not going to work,” I said.
“Please let me try,” he insisted.
I agreed and sat very still while he came close and rested one hand on my cheek, pen etching a trail along my eyelashes. It was incredibly—shockingly—intimate to have another person do my makeup. I could feel his breath tickle my face; he could feel mine. I could see the vellus hairs on his skin—his healthy, living skin, with all this microscopic capillaries of oxygenated blood pushing through it—the sleepy smudges under his eyes, the faint crow’s feet even a kid gets. We were almost halfway through our freshman year, but his face had already started shedding its baby fat.
“Please don’t stab my eye,” I begged as he went back over the line to thicken it.
“Just keep your eyes open,” he said. “It’s the key with hooded eyelids. If you close your eyes when drawing, the line will be too thick. I don’t want to… I don’t want to fill up… your crease-space… thin line… then I draw the wing—like this—and you can see it makes a little barb shape above the crease. That’s perfect.”
On to the other eye. The pen tickled. I fought the urge to sneeze.
“So bees.”
“I just think bees are sad,” he sighed, his Brant running out of steam. “Their lives are short, and their lives are sad. By human standards, anyway. I guess, from a bee’s perspective, they’re a part of a collective. Oh, but what I was also meaning to say—why I started thinking about bees—Melissa means ‘bee’. It comes from a Greek word. You were a nymph who fed Zeus honey, and all the Olympian gods honored bees ever after. I thought that was dope. Bees have sucky lives, but they have a special god looking after them.”
He dropped the eyeliner pen and spun me around, until we were both looking in his mother’s mirror. I peered closely. My eyes looked elongated and bold and slightly cynical. Tiger eyes. Probably the most elegant and femme I’d ever looked, and ever would look.
He sighed. “Bad girls have to have proper eye makeup.”
“I’m not a real ‘bad girl,’ I’m a sad lump on too many antidepressants.” I’d been on them since I was nine.
“You’re a fabulous skateboarding chain-smoking vampire chick brought to life in a lab, and once you fix your tooth you’re going to have all the cute boys bringing you blood sacrifices, Bee.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Bird Boy.” I stuck the pipe between my lips and fluffed my hair. “I look like Nina Hagen.”
“You look fucking gorgeous,” Bram said, pulling his binder back up and digging a tie-dye tank top from his closet. “Now I have to make myself look as good as you. It’s impossible. You’re too pretty.”
“I am not,” I said. “My nose is too big. And my acne’s shit.”
“Well, I look like a Christmas elf and I’ll never be tall enough to get a date. Fetch me my platform boots.”
I laughed. Bram always looked stupid clomping around in those cinderblock shoes. High school was its own mini ecosystem of fashions and fashion shows, and we had to be perfect. We were going to be ready.
That was how we spent every Saturday and Sunday that fall semester. Cartoons in the mornings, horror movies at night. Bram sick in bed. This was the pattern; this was the way. Bram would be Bram—multi-faceted, rainbow, chameleon. And Melissa would be Melissa—tomboy, plain-faced, cracked-tooth Melissa.
Every day we’d take English, Spanish, and math. We’d fall in love with their PE teacher, the “dyke queen,” over and over again. We’d suffer through health class, make dirty jokes behind our books in social studies, lounge around the steps of the library. I’d master the kick flip and the dark slide, imagining myself a young ‘Antoinette’ Hawke pro-skater. Bram would be consumed with school politics, petitions to use the boys’ locker room. Things would change, little by little: freshman year would end, sophomore begin, we’d get older, we’d be upperclassmen, we’d go to prom, we’d be king and queen in our own heads, we’d go to college. We’d be friends forever and ever, and our lives would stretch out endlessly like a never-ending sitcom, weekends and weekdays and before schools and after schools. Me and Bram and our crew, always making plans for a weekend for which we just couldn’t wait.
2
Bram killed himself on the fourth day of February. It was a Monday, and he was tired of waiting for the weekend.
By Tuesday, we knew. My mom told me—I was one of the lucky ones that way. She rushed in with the landline held to her shoulder and said, “Honey, Bram passed away,” and I put my head down on my desk and cried. And then I started calling other people—whose parents weren’t on the phone tree—to tell them too.
“Don’t post anything online yet,” I said every time, but of course the feed was full of it by evening.
We talked. We talked so much. We messaged and texted and called and emailed. At some point I awoke with someone crying in my ear, and in a lull between sobs I whispered, “Who is this?”
We were in homeroom when the announcement came on the intercom; it was Spanish class, and our teacher was sitting tense and stone-faced at the front of the room while we all wept wordlessly, waiting for the band aid to come off so we could poke in a little salt and alcohol. The intercom crackled to life and she flinched. Bram’s counselor came on, reported the loss, called him “Sarah,” and urged us all to see the Friends for Health.
Big Brother or whomever was watching us—probably the teachers—had compiled a list of all of Bram’s close friends, and in second period the half dozen or so of us were sent to the principal’s office, where we continued the wordless weeping.
“We just want you to know,” said one of the counselors, looking concerned and matronly, “that Sarah’s death was not anyone’s fault. You were all good friends to her and—”
Brain static. Would anyone like to go home? Our parents were on standby. We could leave. It was all right. We wouldn’t get in trouble. One by one they trickled out, till only I was left.
Did I want to call home? Was there anyone to pick me up?
I shook my head. I always kind of liked school. Bram didn’t; Bram would milk an illness as long as he possibly could. But I liked it here. I liked the quiet somberness of class time, the squeak of markers on the board, the distractions of history quizzes and integer sets. I could keep to myself at school in a way that I couldn’t anywhere else. I could stay in my mind at school.
Then I was back in my second period, then in my third period, then sitting on the steps for lunch. Then fourth period, fifth period, sixth, my eyes red and overflowing. I guess I moved, but I don’t remember it—everything around me changed. All I remember is sitting at different times and in different places, and the world whirring around me. My friends were gone. The cold cement ate into my bottom. I was alone.
3
There was a time, when I was very, very little—still little enough to sit on my grandfather’s lap—that I thought dying was something that happened only to the old or sick, or possibly from accidents. I thought children were bulletproof and fireproof. Since then I’ve learned how very lucky any of us are to live to be parents or grandparents—how lucky to make it out of childhood even, with all its secret sadnesses and pains. I thought of my grandparents and elderly relatives who were gone, their private histories fading. My own brain was my greatest escape, a seemingly endless world where I could dive when reality was too harsh or too boring. Shocking to think of that vastness in each and every one of us, inevitably winking out.
I knew a bit of Bram’s interiority as his closest friend. I knew he was depressed—I saw it day to day chewing him up. Everything can go great in your life and it’ll still be there; everything can go to shit and there it’ll be, but bigger, stronger, with sharper teeth. I caught a glimpse of Bram’s gnawer every now and then.
But mostly, time with Bram was joy. He poured joy from every fiber. Even when apart, we had conversations that spanned days. We’d watch a movie and analyze every scene, drill holes with the intensity of our scrutiny, psychoanalyze lines of dialogue. We could have filled novels with our chats and emails and phone calls. We talked and we talked and we talked, and now there was silence.
There was a whole panel of our lives that Bram and I had built together, and that was now closed. And I thought, When I die, that all goes too. All the moments we had, all the talks, all the laughs. They’re sealed and they’re taped, and when I’m gone, they’ll be erased. I wondered when I would go, too.
Every place in our town held those secret memories.
I’d go into a Peet’s, and remember how he’d cupped his steaming coffee with the sleeves of his sweater. How he wore a beanie and round owl-glasses, and how the coffee fogged them up.
I’d go to the shore of the lake, and recall how on a hot day we’d all gone there and he’d spent the whole time playing guitar softly to himself, while we ran in the water and made angels in the pebbly wet sand.
At the lunch tables at our old middle school, I’d been harassed by a bug flying around my head all recess.
“Oh, it’s okay,” I preened. “It probably mistakes my head for a flower.”
“Well, it’s a fly,” he said, “so it probably mistakes your head for a piece of shit.”
School in particular was full of memories. They were so fresh, so new, only days or hours old. Sitting on the steps where we always ate lunch, I felt like I could reach back in time only forty-eight hours and touch him. Save him.
You never really think you’ll lose a person—not even your grandparents. Bram was depressed, and anxious, and terribly, terribly unhappy—we all knew that—but he was always that way, and the alarm bells just stopped going off. He would erupt on social media, begging, apologizing, raging, furious that his stepmother had used his dead name, that his dad was making him miserable, that the state of the world meant that a brown trans kid like him could never, ever, feel for one minute like the fighting would end, that he was ever truly safe or accepted.
And we were always rushing in, like tidal waves of soothing bath water, comforting, caressing, easing. We loved him so much and he loved us back with everything he had. I could only hope… truly… that his life wasn’t always so terrible.
In spite of it all, his last fall caught us unawares. He was always dancing on the edge and had never fallen over. He was a tight-rope walker, and he played the part so well we forgot about gravity. We thought his bones were hollow, that he would just float like a bird onto his perch again, laughing and happy once more. I wish we’d known.
His mother had been the gravity well. It was only later I realized Bram killed himself just a few days after the anniversary of his mom’s death. The change in month had thrown me, but later I realized how obviously, inextricably linked the two were. He’d missed his mother very, very much. She had been his safe haven, his warm, beatnik north. I’d like to think, when the moment came, she spread her arms and he came running.
4
“Are you all right, Melissa?”
I blinked. It was my teacher asking.
It was a sunny day. English class. Crime and Punishment, the punishment being we had to read that book. I thought for a moment she was telling me off for spacing, but my book was open like everyone else’s. She said it again, and I realized her voice was quite low and quiet, and her brow furrowed.
“If you ever want to stay after class,” she barely breathed. “My door is always open, you know.” I shrugged and nodded, and she touched my arm and gave my shoulder a squeeze and moved on. I tried refocusing on the page, dredging up where in the story we were again. There was a crisp, cold waft of air radiating from the window nearby, and I wondered how much colder it was in Russia.
Outside, dewy autumn lawn. Patchy white, silver, and tan like vitiligo, or how I imagined vitiligo to be. A bird hopping up and down, bouncing farther and farther from the grass’s edge. Bounce bounce. Head down. A worm comes up. Almost a perfect sphere—a ball-bird.
I turned my head and watched it more intently, the cheeky and self-assured way its head flicked from side to side. Drab feathers, but its chest was orange and red like a coal popped out of the fire. And that made me think of Bram’s chest binder, and how proud he was of that bright red half-binder he’d bought and how he used to strut around with it. It hit me like a brick in the head, and it broke the funk I’d sealed myself in.
I stood up and gasped, “Bird Boy!” and went tearing out of the room to chase down the holy ghost which had come to find me. The robin took off the moment the door opened and I ran after it.
I chased it and I chased it, and finally I climbed twenty-five feet up a pine tree while the stupid bird bopped from branch to branch, glancing back as if to say, “Ah, how tragic.” Finally I got to the point where my body simply refused to budge any further, and clung like a scared cat to the tree boughs.
The bird—just a foot above me—gave me a sharp up-and-down look, chirped like a jackass, and shot into the clear blue sky. Then I knew—I knew—that fucker was my Bird Boy, always getting me into all sorts of scrapes and then zipping away and leave me in the lurch, all alone; I knew that was Bram coming to pick on me one last time.
“Fuck you, Bird Boy!” I screamed, and the sassy fuck shat a glob on the lawn and disappeared over the school roof. It was so like him.
A firetruck had to come to get me down—by then I was sobbing and laughing , from vertigo or shock or the hilarity of it all. The fireman carried me down the ladder in his arms like I was The Princess Bride or some fainting damsel.
We all got up to weird shit in the month after he died. Mine wasn’t the only crazy breakthrough story. Someone spoke to a psychic who told her Bram had reincarnated as a peanut. We all smoked a joint of weed and found that hilarious. In the days following, we swung wildly between grief and hilarity. Sometimes we cried. Sometimes we laughed.
There was a part of us that wanted to stay sad, to keep it all fresh and our loved one close. But the world outside kept calling, and it was a fantastic and ridiculous place. People are strange and wonderful. There are days when I think, “God, I’m so glad I chose to stay. I wish you had too.”
5
It took a while, but Bram’s friends, family, and step mom finally managed to pull it together and plan a memorial for the guy. They set the date for March 10th, a few days after the start of spring break, because it seemed fitting to remember him when everything else was waking up from winter.
There were over two hundred people there to send off my Bird Boy. You wouldn’t have thought a fourteen-year-old would know so many people. My friends were there, and we squeezed hands and cried a little in the foyer and I thought, “We’re all a little older now.”
I was on a healthy cocktail of antidepressants—I mean, I’m always on antidepressants, but they’d upped the dose by a few milligrams—and I could feel the drugs propelling my spirits, as if a little ball of helium was stirring in me, making me jittery, nervous, excited, a little anxious. But I would be well-behaved. I would be well-combed, pure, simple, like a child in Sunday school. Nervous but happy to be there.
The local lodge was a pleasant, airy building with knotty pine and bright lighting—a kind of contemporary craftsman style that was sure to offend no one, but also left much to be desired personality-wise. Oh well. That was what we were here for. The weird squad. Our band of brothers.
The crowds were settling in the rows of folding white chairs, middle school and high school acquaintances of Bram’s. The weirdo cohort took up its own little spot in the very middle of the room. There were huge bouquets of flowers all around the room, and a large sandwich board at the front with an old photo of Bram sitting in his backyard with light shining through his fried hair like honey and butter, a t-shirt that said “BE GAY DO CRIME” half-cropped from the frame. Smiling more openly than I’d seen in almost a year.
Bram’s family’s priest stood first, and began his speech, “Sarah was a bright spark in our community—,”
Oh God, I thought. We all slumped in our seats and rolled our eyes to heaven. The poor priest stopped, squinted at a note he must have scribbled on the page, and began again. “Sarah—or Abraham as some here knew them—was a bright spark in our community, and a beloved child to their family.”
Bram’s dad, Mr. Ramirez, didn’t go up. He looked inconsolable on the far side of the room. But Bram’s cousin went up and talked about knowing him from diapers and knowing his mom. Bram’s life to her was like an accordion—a series of snapshots from the Christmases and other holidays when their families met. She’d seen him grow up in rapid time.
“We love you, Sarah-Bram,” she said, combining his names. “Thank you for being my cousin, my dress-up playmate, my sous chef. My friend.”
Another friend went up to the mic. “Thank you for making me feel like part of the group. I never felt awkward, because I knew you were awkward too. Thank you for making me weirder, for making me laugh every day.”
They all went up, one by one.
“Thank you for telling me I sang all right and teaching me to play the recorder.”
“Thank you for sitting next to me in geometry and algebra and drawing a dick and balls on my test.”
“Thank you for eating lunch with me every day, and walking me to school.”
“Thank you for the random trivia. For being the most studious slacker in school.”
Thank you, thank you. I loved you so much. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you more, but I’ll tell you now. We’ve built a secret world together. I’ll keep it as long as I can.
I stood.
“Thank you for being my Bird Boy,” I said. “Thank you for calling me your Bee.”
The memorial ended.
We ended up milling around in the foyer again, just like we had before the memorial began. But our voices were louder—before we had spoken so quietly, as if we were afraid our throats would break, or Bram would hear how sad we all were. Now our throats were looser.
People were trickling away, and soon we were dispersing all at once, like a bell had rung and someone said, “Okay, it’s time for you all to leave and go back to pretending to be children again.”
“A few of us are going to the lake,” someone said. “To the beach with the rusty boat. Just to sit around and listen to music I guess. Do you want to come?”
No, not yet, I said. I needed more time.
They nodded, and we all exchanged hugs. Next time then. I love you. I love you too. I’ll meet you to cram for the history final.
God, the history final. I forgot about mundane, shallow things like tests and finals.
At some point I was just standing in the parking lot, waving at the last knot of friends as they trotted down the sidewalk like escaped convicts. There were a few adults here and there speaking in soft voices, and the chairs and flowers were getting taken down.
The parking lot was all dappled in shadow with the white-black birch trees wafting overhead, cold and wispy and somewhat otherworldly. Orange pine needles and brown leaves on the blacktop, soft yellow grass shooting up in the cracks, and I thought of Bram and his fried blonde hair.
“Melissa? Hey there. Thank you for coming.” It was his dad. I was surprised to still see him around and to see him alone. He came over and we hugged—something that would have made me feel awkward normally, but I’d already hugged so many people that day my arms were practically shoulder-shaped.
All of us considered ourselves Bram’s family. But Mr. Ramirez was the family within the family, the middle of the middle, the one who must have known and loved Bram in ways we could not yet know. I looked at him and I thought, damn, but we were lucky to have had Bram in our lives. And I felt as though a finger had touched my head and told me, you’re special. You’re loved. And I almost wanted to tell that sagging middle-aged man this revelation, that we’d have that one, wonderful thing to share between us. I might have, too, if I’d known Mr. Ramirez better. If I wasn’t so shy.
“I remember you coming to the house a lot last summer. I know he appreciated you.”
“Bram was really special. Everyone loved him.”
“It means a lot,” he said, and then: “I have something to give you. It belonged to Sarah. I was meaning to give it to one of you as a keepsake, but I guess you’re the only one left so… well, you seemed to know him better than the others anyway.”
He reached into his man-bag and pulled out Bram’s chest binder. A rush of old memories went through me: Bram lounging around on the bed, looking at the shape of his pecs in the mirror, Bram sticking a dildo in his shorts and running around the house trying to bone me, Bram stuffing valentines down his shirt in the middle of class, until the teacher sent him to the principal’s office, Bram laughing, dancing, twisting his hips, nerding it up and drawing flowers on his forehead and cheeks.
I took the stretchy and slightly sweat-smelling piece of red clothing, and raised a hand while Mr. Ramirez drove away. I peeked around a little—barely anyone was left, mostly staff cleaning the building. I slipped a hand up my shirt and undid my bra, wiggling around until I could fish it out through my arm hole. Then I hooked the binder around my midriff, just like I’d seen Bram do a thousand times, and with difficulty pulled it up around my chest.
I’d never worn a binder before. It felt awful. Bram was such a tiny thing and the binder had to be size XXS. I could barely breathe with it pulling my chest tight, molding it, making me feel smooth and compact. But then—oh, I closed my eyes and I felt like his arms were around me, squeezing me tight just like he used to, as though he hadn’t seen me in years even if it had only been a day.
I wondered if Bram ever imagined that—that it was his mother’s flaming wings wrapped tight around him. That someone was hugging him too.
I spun around on the lawn, feeling vaguely light-headed, my chest burning like fire, like burning love. I ran around and around, my arms stretched out, an airplane wheeling and spinning, and suddenly I felt that I must know how he had felt all those years, that I could see into his little brain and all its clicking gears and brightly jeweled facets, that we really weren’t so different, him and me: the boy who became a bird, and the bee who stayed among the mortals. I was wrapped, swaddled, enveloped by the knowledge that Bram had been, and that I had known him. Bram had existed, he was—exquisitely, strangely, heartbreakingly. I’d had a friend, and his name was Bram.
Kat Joplin (they/them) is a Vietnamese American writer and journalist based in Tokyo, Japan. Their work explores queer sexuality and gender, as well as themes of foreignness and belonging. They have written articles for platforms such as Gay Times and The Japan Times; have published creative pieces with The Wise Owl, Bloodletter Magazine, and The Examined Life Journal; and are contributing author to Quarto Publishing’s Planet Drag. As a drag queen, they can be found performing throughout Japan under the stage name Le Horla.
