Chapter 16 – Her-ever Alone

Before I went to bed that night, my mom told me to lay out my best clothes for the morning. I didn’t really see why.

I felt more anonymous with my regular clothes, but I went along with it. I picked out a pressed white blouse then a black cardigan with a long, green ruffled skirt and near-black pantyhose.

Maybe the power was feminizing me as well?

I tried everything on before I went to bed. It all fit well enough, but I doubted the top, which was still stiff after its first few washes, would feel comfortable for any portion of the day.

Perhaps it was better to think of the clothes as some sort of armor, or military outfit, to strengthen myself against the potential, unknown onslaught.

I still didn’t like them.

It also would’ve been nice to clean my bed, take off the spread (fresh from JCPenney with its dark-brown motif), and run it through the washing machine. Since our washer was small, it was an hours-on-end ordeal to go from stripping it to when the last thing came out moist but tolerable after its second tumble. And it always seemed to come out with little white soap spots that looked like bird plops.

For this deep into the fall, it was a pretty warm night, so I decided to sleep on the covers. My pillows were still the old ones from the big bed, discolored and probably full of plenty of allergens I didn’t need under the cases. But they were tolerable. You find plenty of things are tolerable. From a sore tooth to waves of sinus pressure. Even the knowledge that you’ve destroyed someone else’s life…

Wes’s words still weighed on me and I felt them like pressing needles, sharp ones.

‘Kill me’ especially. Blunted a little because I ignored words like them from the most bitter and depressed of my elder relatives.

But I tolerated that knowledge. What else could I do? Lose myself in tears? Crawl up into a fetal shape and wish to disappear? There’d be time for all that later.

I also didn’t dwell on Wes’s forgiveness, lost in a forest of other words.

The words kept me up longer than I wanted but eventually there’s nothing one can do but sleep. It was a dreamless sleep even though I had a faint impression of the little girl dressed up as Abby Longbloom. I felt like I’d had some forgotten chat with her while my unconscious was active.

The relief and bitterness of sleep is waking up with a sense of freedom that soon falls away as consciousness returns and you relearn the right things to be happy and scared about.

I teased my little journal with a fingernail. Small, bound in a metal spiral with a sturdy cardboard back and a glossy-blue cover with small, lined pages between, I always kept it near. More often for some thought or feeling from reading, sometimes for some fledgling nonsense that might be useful someday.

There were plenty of days I imagined myself a writer. I had a teacher in junior high who fostered it with my first English classes. But then my parents were always big readers, around and to me.

Maybe it went back to that grandfather, who made a possible spiritual appearance to my mom. He was big on telling stories. Of course, he needed that skill to placate a variety of mistresses and ex and future wives.

I’d only ever written a book at age six where I described a happy train steaming along a page. Mom provided the simple but necessary commentary to my rough drawings. The basic plot was the train puffed and puffed and puffed along. Car by car until it was out of sight and then it was gone. Complicated plots came later.

I had no desire to write about what was happening to me then. Who would want to read a story with seemingly-impossible gender-changing anyway?

Still, I liked the thought of being a writer. Maybe put together a little following. Headline one of those AOL topic forums. Be talked about a bit for fun reasons. See speculation about what I had written and curiosity from what was coming next. More the commentary of others than my own between the occasional, pity sentence or two. AOL and the world wide web could be so eerily indifferent but also liberating.

The world on a screen with the power of just some words put one after the other.

That was the kind of crap I thought about over and over as I actually tried to sleep that night and it returned easily to me like the aftertaste of last night’s meal in the morning. It didn’t take long before my parents were calling me to get up. I didn’t linger or pretend I hadn’t heard them. There was no point in delaying.

For all the cleaning and preparing of my face and body, I did equal parts scratching and rubbing at my hands until they were nearly sun-burnt red. I washed them four times, each time for a good reason but more out of finding something to do so I didn’t have to think too much. I took a moment to scan the little paperbacks lining my room on the side wall. I’d eventually have to add another case and a plastic cart on rollers. And even then there was a shelf by the TV in the main room, an entire wall of old shelves in the front room and a wobbly metal shelf on the opposite side.

And that was still only less than half of the books I’d stowed away somewhere. A few found homes beside film strips of vacations my parents had taken before I was born and gray mounds of dust in an area originally intended for storing hard drinks and snacks.

Mountains of now-useless papers piled on top of each other beside old floppies and CDs for software on our (even then) defunct Packard Bell “Multimedia” computer. It was used to prop up the trash bin. I never understood that room even though I knew it was a small office.

But it had a green chalkboard the size of a portrait beside a sunflower-covered poster board with a handful of photos from decades ago of some school event my dad attended when his mustache had been especially ridiculous.

I hated the room for the dust but it was by the phone, so it became the computer room.

I could never remember what I ate for breakfast at that age but it was probably terrible for me and best never mentioned again. Let’s say I had eggs and hash browns and leave it at that.

I felt starchy and awkward in those clothes with their unusual smells but the day itself still seemed surprisingly normal.

Nerves didn’t even begin to set in until I had my backpack on and was buckled up in my dad’s car.

We were a little early, so the cluster of cars bottlenecking in front of the towering, spiked black fence on that side of campus was just a creeping clot rather than a full-on jam. I’d leaned away from dad on the trip over and didn’t notice anything changed in him yet when he gave me a hug and a few words.

“Don’t take any nonsense from anyone. Do well. Go to the office if anything happens.”

I just nodded and put up the visor on my side with a sigh.

Clinging to my backpack, my goal for the trek to gym was not to get recognized.

My formal clothes caught a few quick looks, even from teachers who squinted like they were trying to remember if some special event they’d forgotten about was supposed to take place.

I took the most direct route to the gym, which led me past the bathroom where I’d followed the girl and two boys I’d changed, near my biology class, through an empty stretch of grass and under a twisting, covered walkway. The boy’s side was a little more covert because it opened out onto a path behind the stadium bleachers. But this was the best way I could go. I braced myself.

If anyone recognized me, they didn’t call out. I kept my head down step by step. Rounding the corner, I slipped into the gym past some girls who had obviously arrived during zero period for sports stuff.

The coach’s office was up a small flight of stairs before the restrooms and showers. I hustled. Coach Coleman, a stocky woman with blond hair cropped close, (how I really wanted mine cut) was in charge of the varsity girls’ volleyball team, so she was always here early.

I avoided coach offices when I could. Sports were never my thing and even to look in one of them felt like a strange sort of trespassing. Then there was the strange incident when my hands were sore and clenched on a cold day and I came in with a question and one of the coaches thought I was about to punch her in the face.

Coach Coleman was paging through the most recent issue of the school newspaper when I found her. She leaned back in her chair and raised her eyebrows as she asked, “Yes?...”

I scratched a little at my hair, swallowed, and told her, “Vice Principal Aceves told me he passed along…information…about what I’m supposed to do today…I think?”

She folded her paper and set it down on her cluttered desk. Coleman rubbed her elbows and said casually, “…Okay. Is it about some health issue?”

I was about to shake my head but that technically wasn’t wrong. I took a long breath and told her clearly, “Any boys I’m around turn into girls and other girls become…girlier…”

Coleman gave me exactly the sort of expression I would’ve given any random teenage girl who’d just told me that. She drew her golden eyebrows higher as she quietly assessed my words.

After a long pause, she picked up the phone on her desk and instructed me, “Just wait here a minute…”

Art by Alexis Rillera/Anirhapsodist