"No," she said. "Get it: I'm dead. I'm a ghost. For real. Can you understand?"

I turned and looked at her. Then, pointing my finger, I slowly and gently poked her in the arm. She was soft to the touch, much softer than I expected, but she was no ghost.

"You're real," I said. "You're not a ghost."

She scoffed and in a scornful tone said, "Oh, and you know all about ghosts, I'm sure!"

I bit my tongue for a moment, then told her, "I will drop you wherever you want to go, but I will not play this game."

Theresa gave a laughing groan. "Clark, you're not going to impress these girls with that corn."

"And what about you?" he asked Theresa in a suggestive tone. "Are you impressed by my corn?"

He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to me,
"My client says, you help him find Lee Sheppard and then he'll talk."

"No," I said. "First he has to release the hostage. In the meantime, he can talk to himself if he wants to talk."

"Oh my God!" Mallory said, and began wringing her hands in desperation.

"What's wrong?" I asked. "Why are you so upset?"

"Because," Mallory said, sniffing, "when Miss Overmore hears about this, I will be expelled."
She looked as if she was about to cry. "They won't let me come back. No one will laugh about this,
and no one will forgive me. My parents will KILL me. This school is supposed to be my last chance.
I don't know where I can go if I get kicked out of here."

"Ugh, Mom, what is that smell?" I shouted, not knowing where in the house she was.
"Is there a skunk outside?"

"Oh, Marcie," Mom scoffed as she entered from the kitchen.
"You can't pretend you can smell anything. And it's not as bad as all that."

"You live alone too," I countered.

"Yeah," she said, "but not the way that you do. You're like that girl in the movie.
You've got a shadow behind you. There's some guy out there in the dark who worries you."

"Do you think he'll be alright?" Tubinger asked. "He argues and objects at every step."

"He signed the release," van Els replied. "As long as he doesn't walk away, or tell us Stop or No, he's deeply committed to the program, as far as I'm concerned."

At that, Tubinger scurried away, wondering how much he could pretend to not know, if the whole thing went sour.

"Well," I said gruffly, blushing, "I'm not sure that I came up with it, but I call it the Kissing Test."

"Everyone seems to think it came from you; you might as well take credit. It's rather elegant... cuts through self-deception, political correctness, through what people believe that they believe..."

"Basically," I said, chiming in and warming to my subject, "it shows whether a person really considers Sammy to be a woman. While they might like to look at her, while they may want to touch her, while they might even want to have... ah... intimate contact with her, the one thing that *really* shows whether they regard her as a woman is if they say *yes* when you ask, Would you kiss her?"
 

People have often told me that I need to think before I act, but who had time to think? What on earth was I supposed to think of? What idea could I possibly have had, if I'd stopped for a moment? Someone was getting hurt! Badly hurt! And no one was there to see, but me.

If I felt uncomfortable before, once we passed the midway point... "Let me put it this way," I said to van Els, "If you look up the word uncomfortable in the dictionary, you'll see my picture next to it."

"I'm sure it would be a lovely picture," one of the doctors told me. It might have been a nice compliment if he hadn't had his hand inside me as he said it.
 

She gave me a suspicious look. "You're not going to enter that goofy pageant, are you?"

I blushed. "Um, sure. Why not?"

Susan huffed loudly. "Why not? In the first place, it's degrading. I can't believe the school even does such a thing, in this day and age. In the second place, you can't win. And in the third place, you are not that kind of girl."

Worst than the inconvenience and the noise, was knowing how easily they could expose me. If they started digging into my life, even just a little, they'd soon find out that only five months ago I was a boy named Mark. And they wouldn't just know it, they'd make it national news.

"Oh, so there is a Mrs. Donaldson?" I said without thinking.

"Bel's been asking that question all day," Dianne teased.

In my head I heard Mrs. Legno's voice: "The day after Halloween you're just going to put your pants back on and go play football?"

and my reply: Not exactly, but something like that.

I could see her, smiling — no, smirking! — holding out that damn cell phone. One click! flash! and I would never hear the end of it.