Chapter 10 – What If I Told You...I'm Sorry?

So far as her body, it was kinda weird because, in my head, I still told myself that this was the person I sorta had a crush on and who I enjoyed being around. Her manly aspects were all gone and, while she still had a trace of her cologne from earlier, something about her as a whole smelled different.

She covered her eyes with her hands and sighed. After a time, the nurse got up from her desk and said, “I’ll be right back. I might need to call Dr. Hanlan.”

I knew him. He was a teacher on campus, but he was also a fully-certified doctor with privileges at a local hospital. He managed the medical career classes my blond friend had taken for his first year.

When the nurse was gone, I sat up a little. It was quiet except for Wes’s slow, slight breathing. I sighed softly and told her simply, “I’m so sorry…”

She pressed her lips together and answered in a faint, unfamiliar soprano, “I don’t know what…to say to you. I don’t really want to talk at all.”

I nodded and told her, “No problem. I just wanted you to know that…I didn’t mean to do anything to you. I don’t know what’s going on…”

She scooted up on the cot and gave a quick glance in my direction. After holding onto her words for a long time, she finally noted, “It’s irrelevant now, but I believe your warning. Shame I didn’t before.”

If she had believed it then would this have even happened? Would I have randomly gotten mad? Would I have thought the things I did? Did my thoughts become reality? I kept these questions to myself. Instead, I focused on the little hopes I’d fed myself.

“It’ll be okay. It’s reversed itself each time it’s happened. You’ll be back to normal very soon.”

Wes covered her eyes again and didn’t answer. I left her alone.

I tried to lose myself in the drop ceiling again, but my mind wandered. I couldn’t imagine what it had to be like for him. I only had a vague notion of what it was like to be a boy. Some people said being one sex or the other was just being human, but there was a lot of shit in the details, especially in high school.

I was weird and even I knew if I walked into class one day as a boy, it would mean a heck of a lot. How people saw me would be so different and so would be how I felt around them. Thinking of gym class made me feel flustered.

More than anything, I thought about my body. I thought about all the crap I’d been through with my body and my health growing up. I wondered what it would be like if it had been the other way around. What if I had to give up wheat all of a sudden after a decade and a half or something else which would change my life and lifestyle? Would that be comparable?

That felt like such a small thing but it was something. I felt for her. I hoped so strongly that it would all be undone and become something she’d be able to joke about in a month. I even begged in my head that it didn’t matter if I had to stop talking to her and she would never be my friend again, so long as she could be herself…himself.

My hope hung like intangible words and Wes sat there the same, small girl in loaner clothing. Time passed. Things started to blur together for me.

Dr. Hanlan eventually made it to the nurse’s office. I was called back to Aceves, and I updated him on what happened. My version to him was, “I was just sitting there when I got annoyed by something I remembered from freshman year when Wes made fun of my in-class assignment paper. I fumed to myself and that was it. Then, all this crazy stuff happened. I dunno if my being upset and what happened to him is connected.”

I hoped I was consistent with my bare-bones version from before. He took a few quick notes and nodded at the appropriate points.

His follow-up questions ranged from, “Did you give any substances or medications to Wes Betancourt?” to “Did you notice anything strange going on with…umm…him when you first talked to him today?”

At least those were easy questions to deal with. Soon after I finished, Gladis, the woman who watched me after school, arrived.

She greeted me with a hug and asked, with her thick accent, “Kezzie? What happen?”

I hugged my bag as she signed me out at the front desk. I shook my head and told her, “I dunno. It’s been a really weird day. I think I’m okay to leave.” Standing in the hallway, Aceves folded his hands behind him and nodded, but added, “I do want her parents to call me later so we can have a conference about what happened today and address questions we all likely have.”

Gladis nodded and grimaced as she walked out with me. She muttered to herself, “So strange. They say…you did something…with a boy?”

I blanched and vigorously shook my head. “No no no. It’s umm…just I was in class…and strange stuff happened to this boy and to two boys the class before. I don’t know how to explain it.”

She looked relieved to hear that. Her theory was a behavior problem or someone high from a drug they’d taken. The school and district were knee-deep in anxious, fretful talk about drug use. Our class was supposed to stamp it out by the turn of the millennium but that’s what was always said.

Gladis’s car was cramped with too little leg space, even for me, and saturated by an artificial pine odor. I leaned towards the window, which she had cranked open slightly. She burst out of the parking spot and jetted down the lane with fits and starts behind random cars backing out, likely seniors heading off to lunch early.

Once we were out of the lot, she hurtled her car down the road along bounding bumps and between slower vehicles. We passed a towering Latter-day Saints church and a set of apartments before barreling over a jarring dip. On the other side, the reddish brick of the older, lower-grade school gave way to a planetarium out front which was, even to the current day, never used.

She yanked the car left and past the Baptist church where my blond friend regularly attended youth…stuff. I refer to him as my blond friend because I don’t actually remember his name after all this time. You know what? I’ll just refer to him as ‘Cody’ from now on.

The car blasted and blurred past apartments and housing tracks until it came to the old cemetery, one of the few remaining marks of the city from when it was a tiny, railroad-dependent mining spot named Bachthalen instead of Brookville. The graves, some over a hundred years old, had stone markers in places but most were simple white crosses with carved names like something out of a 19th-century prairie tale. The road curved around in an S before meeting sharply with the light. Gladis’s driving made it hard to cling to my side of the car.

Before long, I was back home. I was so happy to step through those dusty doors. While Gladis tidied up the coffee table in the center of the room, I settled on the smaller couch and dropped my heavy backpack in front of me.

The TV was the old one which barely worked, not to say the one we got later was much better. The one in the front room was mostly wood with a pronounced tube and a tan, fabric-covered speaker box on the side. It was already approaching its second decade of use.

The newer furniture was in this room and the older stuff, with saggy bits, was relegated to the other room. I’d sprawled out on that couch many an evening and fallen asleep like that.

The configuration of the furniture would change a lot but each setup always stuck in my mind and each new one was less comfortable than the last. But the couch wasn’t enough. I headed to bed as Gladis turned on the TV.

Everything in my room was as though it had been frozen at age five. The old teddy bear drapes. The animal decorated poster boards. The Disney posters of movies I’d been excited for in grade school. Birthday cards from before I hit double digits. Three shelves of books pressed against each other. Far too many clothes in an overstuffed closet and two full dressers. Somehow, there were plenty of days when I couldn’t find anything to wear. On the side was the black, soft case for my laptop.

At that time, it was top-of-the-line. Two-hundred million clock operations per second. Multi-megabytes of memory. A freaking internal sound card. A screen which still worked even two decades later. It was like an awkward gray brick with a green eraser for a mouse, but I wasn’t picky then.

I considered booting it up but this was in a dark and foreign age when the Internet meant an awkward dongle in the side of the laptop connected to a heavy yellow cord that came out of the phone line and blocked all calls in or out. The screeching tones of AOL dial-up were not what I wanted right then. Besides, all the stuff I couldn’t do without hadn’t even been thought up yet.

So, I rested. I shut my eyes as the sounds of the TV filtered in from the other room. I wondered what my parents would say and ask when they got home. I tried not to think of Wes and her strange face, but I failed.

I tried to kindle my old daydreams about finding hidden rooms in the house that no one knew about or had ever seen. Those daydreams faded to an old, anxious memory of nightmares where I find myself wandering through a beautiful bookstore. As I go along, I run into people. Some I know but most I don’t.

Because I like to meet new people, I try to say hello and greet everyone warmly, but their faces turn on me with disgust. Some scowl and abandon me without a word. Others yell and accuse me of ridiculous things. A few angrily threaten me and hope I die the most horrible death.

The nightmare never ends without a mob violently turned against me. I always told myself it was just a silly nightmare.

I never imagined it might’ve been a premonition.

Art by Alexis Rillera/Anirhapsodist