1.

The rest of the trip (about three more minutes, honestly) until we got to school was silent. His words had cut me pretty deep. I really didn’t feelany different. I mean, I acted a little bit more feminine, but how could I really help that? I’m sure Steve would have acted more feminine if this was happening to him, seeing as Stephanie probably would have done her damnedest to make him act that way.

My problem was that Melanie wasn’t explicitly making me act this way. She wasn’t helping in any way, especially after that phone call I overheard half of last night, but she wasn’t trying to turn me into her little sister, she was just enjoying having a little sister.

As I made my way to my locker, I heard laughter echoing down the halls. I looked around and nearly burst into laughter myself as Dean turned a corner. I wouldn’t actually have recognized him, if not for the fact that his absolute cleavage dress showed absolutely no cleavage. He didn’t seem uncomfortable in those high heels he was wearing, either. He did however, look very angry.

He went up to his locker, quickly grabbed his stuff, then silently made his way into homeroom. He was thinner than he had been the day before, a lot more… Well, to be honest, he looked girlier than I did, except that I had boobs. What the hell? How far was Ms. Malski going to go with him?

“He’s shaping up quite well,” the bitch said, right behind me. I nearly jumped out of my skin. She was standing there, smiling, arms folded under her breasts. “He’ll be finished tomorrow, just like you and Steve.”

“Tomorrow? I thought you said Friday?”

“I said you’d be Amanda by Friday, and you are, really, you’ll just be finished physically tomorrow.” She nodded toward Dean. “So will he.”

“Are you getting a kick out of this? Do you enjoy screwing with our lives the way you are?”

She shook her head. “I’m not screwing with you, Amy. There’s more than one reason why you are the way you are.”

I had to know. “What’s my challenge?”

She smiled again. “Bell’s about to ring, Ms. Richards, you’d better get to homeroom.” With that, she walked away, and I was alone in the hallway as the bell rang.

2.

Homeroom was boring, as always. Homeroom was used pretty much for homework, but I rarely had homework. Every class had a period of time for doing whatever work there was at the end of the class, and most of the time, I finished my work in class. As such, I spent most of my homeroom time drawing, something I’d been doing since I was little.

I didn’t know if it was my state of mind, my current situation, or just because, but I drew a picture that showed a small boy growing into a young woman - in other words, me - and the boy started out happy, then as he grew he got sadder, and sadder, and then finally when he was somewhat female, he was a little happier, then sad again.

“That looks like you,” someone said. I looked up to see Dean standing there, a strange look on his face. “Can I talk to you in the hallway?” I nodded, then followed him out into the hallway, where we stood by the lockers. We didn’t say anything for the longest time, then he finally said, “Did that bitch do this to you, too?”

“Huh?”

“You weren’t a closet girl last week, and now you’re suddenly so feminine that I thought you were a different person. When I saw you at the game on Sunday, I could tell that something was up with you. You had longer hair, and you were wearing girl’s clothes, which I knew was something you never did before.”

“Um… Girl’s jeans. I was still wearing one of my old boy’s shirts.”

“Whatever,” he said, sounding ridiculously valley girl. He cleared his throat. “Sorry. That just pops out every now and again. I’m starting to sound like my cousin.” He rubbed at his exposed - and hairless - arms. “Adam, just because I’m a jock doesn’t mean I’m an idiot. Up until this happened, I was on my way to being the valedictorian this year. Why were you involved in this?”

“Amanda.”

“What?”

“My name’s Amanda. And I’m involved because I was in your room, getting all those panties you stole in that panty raid.” I sat down on the floor, against the lockers. “She caught me.”

“And, what, decided that you should be wearing the panties instead of getting them back for everybody?”

“I don’t know. She just… She cursed me, and you, and Steve, and I - “

He cut me off. “That dipshit Steve is involved, too?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“And now the bitch is gonna be our principal? That’s not a coincidence.”

“Actually, it is.”

He shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”

I looked up at him. “So, none of this has affected you at all? You’re still as much of hard ass as you were before? All this has happened to you, and you don’t think it has anything to do with how you acted before this?”

He shrugged. “I’m still me, whether I’m the way I used to be or a pansy.”

I hugged my knees to my chest and sighed.

3.

The lunch lady dumped a pile of what looked like peas down on my tray. I looked up from the tray and asked, “Do you have anything that doesn’tlook like prison food?”

She glared at me and said, “Look, tranny, if they didn’t want prison food here, they wouldn’t have hired me. Now, get the rest of your grub and sit down.”

Tranny had become a common nickname for me among people who weren’t particularly happy with what I’d become. I didn’t like it, but at least nobody was calling me shemale, like Melanie said. That just sucked. After all, I wasn’t a girl with boy parts between my legs.

I finished getting my food and then promptly scraped it off my tray and left the tray on the conveyor to get washed. I could see I wasn’t the only person who’d done that. Looked like I was gonna be eating vending machine food again. Wednesday and Friday lunch ladies were the worst. They served the worst food, and they were the rudest.

I walked over to the table I normally sat at and laid my head down. Lunch was gonna be boring if I didn’t eat cafeteria food. Nobody I knew was in my lunch period, for whatever reason. It made lunch boring, but I only had to sit there for a half an hour, so that wasn’t too bad.

I thought about what Dean had said. He clearly hadn’t changed personality-wise, and neither had Steve, so why had I? Did people who go from one gender to the other do that, or was there some funky magic sorceress thing going on? Was this a part of my challenge, whatever the hell that was? And why wouldn’t that bitch answer me when I asked her about my challenge? Why is she so adamant about keeping it from me, when she’d tell me Steve and Dean’s?

Nothing seemed to be making much sense.

4.

“Now, remember,” Mr. Pendergast said as he did a quick freehand drawing on the whiteboard, “the human face is neither easy nor hard to draw, the difficulty lies purely in the way you interpret your subject.”

Steve sat beside me, grinning like an idiot while Kimberly Shale sketched his face. I just sat there with a neutral expression on my face while Johnny… um… I forget his last name, drew my face. Every so often, I’d catch a glimpse of his drawing and saw that he either was shit at art class or had some odd outlook on everything. I appeared to be a cartoon poodle. No joke. My drawing of him was practically a black and white photograph, but no, he draws me as a cartoon poodle!

“Why do I look like a dog?” I asked.

He smiled. “It builds character.”

“Being drawn as a dog?”

“It makes you look cute.”

Steve said, “She already looks cute.”

Urghguggleurgh, why’d he have to say that? Doesn’t he know I’m conflicted about everything? Stupid, stupid Steve.

Kimberly chuckled. “Yeah, she looks cute for a crossdressing boy.”

I folded my arms under my breasts. “I’m not a boy, and I’m not crossdressing.”

She poked her pencil tip in my direction. “Show me what’s under that top, and maybe I’ll believe you. I’ve seen more convincing trannies than you, Richards.”

“I’m seriously not crossdressing. I made my choice and chose to be a girl, is that really so hard to understand?”

“And made the transition in a weekend?”

More people caught on to that than I thought. “My mom knows a really good surgeon,” was the closest thing to a reply I could give. Clearly I haven’t thought this through.

Johnny said, “She’s hotter than a couple of the skanks I dated last year, just leave her alone.”

Wow, the class casanova was sticking up for me. He probably wanted in my pants. Either that, or I was turning more into a stereotypical girl than I thought. I was seriously starting to sound like Melanie now, and not just because our voices sound similar.

“So why’d you choose to be a girl?” Kimberly asked.

I gave it a second, then said, “Because I never felt right as a boy.” That was pretty much exactly what Shanna had told me. That I wasn’t right, whatever the hell that meant. Was there a “right” or “wrong” when it came to who you were? Was it really that black and white? It couldn’t be. It really couldn’t be. “Because… Something about me felt wrong when I was a boy.”

“And you thought that being a girl would solve all your problems? Be lucky you can’t have periods, then.”

Oh, how wrong you are! Come to think of it, I should probably change my pad when class is over, these things start to feel weird after awhile. Not to mention, I’m pretty sure there’s a medical warning on the box that says you should change them after a certain amount of time.

Johnny set his sketch pad down and said, “Okay, ignoring this talk of female bodily functions, if my drawing of you is so bad, what’s your drawing of me look like?”

“Like this,” I said, flipping my sketch pad over to show him what he looked like. “Which is a lot better than your drawing.”

He took a long look at the sketch pad and finally said, “Yeah, but you’re a girl. Girls are better artists.”

For a brief second I wondered if that was true, then I remembered that I was just as good an artist when I was a boy, so it really didn’t matter.

5.

“Open your books to page forty-nine, children!” Mr. Greene shouted. He had a habit of doing that. He also had a habit of carrying around the handle of an axe without the axe part on it anymore. He used it to hit people when they said something stupid. Never hard, always lightly, and never girls, only boys. I prayed that I qualified as a girl to him, because even if he didn’t hurt anybody with that axe handle, it was still annoying as hell to get hit in the head with that thing.

I opened my textbook to the page he told us to go to and found, plastered in big red, white and blue letters, The American Civil War. I raised my hand. “Didn’t we learn about this already? Like, in elementary school?” Somebody chuckled.

Mr. Greene nodded. “There’s not much about the Civil War I can teach you that you don’t already know, but I’d like to take this time to have a discussion about why we do or do not leave things in the past.”

Why did I have this odd feeling that this lesson for some reason had to do with me, whether anybody other than me knew it or not? Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap.

"The Confederate flag, the symbol of the South, is still flown in many places today, either in tribute of the past, or by those who still believe in its ideals, misguided though they may be. This flag is one hundred and fifty years old, and it lost the last domestic war ever fought in this nation, but it is still flown today."

"Why?" Somebody asked.

Mr. Greene nodded. "Why indeed? What values does it still hold? We don't condone slavery, or racism, or any sort of segregation any more, so why is this flag still flown? Is it flown because of a need to remember the past, because it's still a viable symbol, or simply because of the pretty colors?" More than a few people giggled at that.

I raised my hand. "Does it really matter?"

"Why do you say that, Ms. Richards?"

"It's a flag, people put their own meanings behind it. I mean... Does it matter what the reasons are?"

Somebody else just stated, "It's a dead flag, whether the reasons matter or not, what reasons really are there for keeping it around? Nobody flies the Nazi flag anymore."

A girl on the other side of the room said, "Except for Neo Nazis. They kinda do."

I asked, "But, who cares if they keep flying an old flag? Even if it was just the pretty colors, it's not like anybody needs to explain to anybody else why they fly a flag."

"If they've got a good enough reason to fly a dead flag, why can't they explain it to everybody else? People are less likely to question somebody's motivations if the person flying the flag is willing to tell everyone."

Somebody else asked, "And what if people like the looks of a dead flag, or even a flag that isn't dead? Fly a Nazi flag in Germany, you get arrested. Fly an ISIS flag here, and the FBI raids your house. Is it okay for people to fly these flags just because they like them?"

Mr. Greene was smiling at the front of the room. "So, what have we figured out? Is the flag more important than the ideals placed behind it, or are the ideals more important than the flag? We seem to be pretty divided on this issue, and it raises another important point, whether the ideals aremore important or not, do others need to know them to understand why you're flying that flag?

"Your final assignment of this year is to perform a speech to this class on Friday. It can't be long, so we can get through all of you, but you need to choose a flag, and present for us the ideals behind why you chose that flag." As if on cue, the bell rang. "That'll be all, children!"

I just sat there for a moment while everybody else around me got up and left, eager to get back home and out of the building.

Great. I just knew what most people were probably expecting. Amanda, why did you choose to be a girl? Dammit, dammit, dammit.