The Ridiculous Destiny of Amy Komori

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Book One
Amy Meets World

Chapter One:
Something Happens

I had the absolute coolest fucking girlfriend in the world and everything about her excited me and jazzed my nerve endings: Emily Komori.

For one thing, Emily was almost as tall as I was when we started dating, which I immediately dug about her. Maybe because I had this thing for Liv Tyler at the time; they were about the same height. Only Emily was a lot more angular and waifish than the lusciously curvy Liv. Small breasts, long limbs, slender, with bony hips. For another, she was also Japanese. Not very commonplace in the town where we lived. She had long black hair and the most beautiful dark eyes. I could gaze into her eyes for days, and when she smiled, they became little crescent moons that twinkled like black glass.

Mostly what made her intriguing to me back then were the things she was into. She was an artist and she usually painted people, but in this deformed, colorful style, with very visible brushstrokes. Sort of like if Joseph Singer Sargent saw some of Van Gogh's work and it blew his mind. She got paint all over her clothes when she worked over a canvas. Super-gestural art girl.

She was also liked the coolest music. I mean, she liked some standard stuff for girls her age- Beck, Jane's Addiction, Porno for Pyros, the Pixies, Cibo Matto, Liz Phair, Tori Amos. She’d recently gone through a very superficial riot grrl phase and still liked to sing along to Bratmobile, more for the energy and curse words than anything having to do with second or third wave feminism (I knew more about that than she did, yet I barely knew anything at all). Like most of us knocking around, she was into a few of the local bands in our semi-famous musical town, but she was just as likely to insult them to their fans. She liked mostly girl groups, but there were various guys musicians (Dave Navarro, Frank Black) she had crushes on and tortured me with. She also cherished these ancient cassettes from her childhood: Madonna, Prince and Michael Jackson. She'd sing along to the King of Pop without a trace of irony. She just didn't give a fuck what anyone thought.

But beyond all that, she was also into Japanese rock like Shonen Knife, Boredoms, Melt-Banana and-- best of all-- Happy Monkey Do. I really came to love me some Happy Monkey Do. How did she know all these bands? Well, most people around us knew Shonen Knife. But the others came from having some very distant cousins back in the Motherland (as she called Japan), and from having the investigative intuitions of an ace musical detective and the willingness to pursue them.

She did origami and talked about taking martial arts, but she was actually way to lazy to exercise. She loved bad movies. The stupider the movie, the more she laughed and memorized to perfection the worst lines, which she then used at inappropriate moments.

Grease 2, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, those John Cusack teen comedies from the 80s? She had all of them on tape. You wouldn't believe how many times we watched Better Off Dead. But she was also obsessed with things like Brain Donors, and Desire and Hell at the Sunset Motel. She would turn herself into Bridey from Desire and Hell if she could. She would turn everybody into Bridey, probably.

And she had about a hundred silly voices (she thought her regular voice is too deep, but actually, it was very smoky and very sexy at times) and talking to her was sometimes like talking to several people at once. She could be so demure and shy, batting her eyelashes in this melodramatic way, then suddenly start cussing a blue streak like one of the guys and dominating the room.

So Emily was a freak, and she would tell you as much. If you weren’t too chickenshit to ask. And you would have been.

We met at a party at a friend's apartment. I was a guy named Martin then, 21 living on my own, working at a video store and taking the occasional class at the university. Emily was a senior in high school, and she came in with two girl friends- I knew them both from around town, but I had never seen her before.

Of course, every guy in the apartment couldn't stop staring at her. Who's this abnormally tall, skinny Asian chick wearing a white, wide-collared shirt and a black velvet jacket? She wore a small, fake pearl necklace I thought was a choker because it clung to her long neck. Later, I found out it was a dress-up toy necklace for little girls.

If I had known where all this would lead, maybe I wouldn't have gone up to her and started talking.

Then again, maybe I would have.

She told me was there to meet this guy she had just started dating, but, incredibly, she fell for me that night. Instant attraction, with a touch of lust. Nothing wrong with that.

Emily's man never showed up, but she and I hit it off so well, we ended up going with the other two girls to IHOP. We didn’t stay long enough to even get our orders because we acted up so much, they kicked us out. The IHOPers weren't too happy when we started pouring syrup on the table.

Not long after that, Emily and I had our first date. She was extremely quiet and reserved that first time at the movies, which surprised me because she had been very animated and funny at the party. Later, she told me it was because she really liked me and didn't want to scare me away with her "dorky" behavior. After the movie, I drove her back to her mom's house.

When we pulled up, there was a car parked by the curb, someone sitting in it.

"Shit, Martin- just drive away. Go… go," Emily hissed, and I did. As we passed the car, out came the guy who stood her up at the party, Toby. He just stared helplessly as we drove around the corner.

After that, she told me the story about him, which made me feel strange at first, but she couldn't stop talking, a flood of words. She really thought of Toby as just a friend (my heart stopped on that dreaded phrase... would she describe me that way to someone else in a month?), but they'd gone out for about a few weeks and now he was getting sort of flaky and she’d caught him out in a few lies. It wasn’t so much she believed lying was a mortal sin against a person’s relationship; it was more the quality of the lies and what they were about that put her off. That little bit of info turned the conversation very personal and we really got to know each other.

I dropped her off later that night, late enough that she would be in trouble with her mom. We didn't kiss. I was scared to, because I was really starting to fall for her. If we kiss, I thought, my heart's going to explode and I'll die right here in my car.

In fact, it was several dates later before we kissed, but once we did, I quickly found out she wasn't shy about doing other things. One afternoon, we had her house to ourselves and she had my shirt off and started unbuttoning my pants before I could even tell her she was a great kisser. She had this very serious look on her face, a frown (it looked so cute). Maybe my being so reluctant to kiss her all those nights put the idea in her head I didn't find her attractive, and she was determined to change my mind. She never really explained all that to me, but she did tell me she had decided that morning she would sleep with me that day, and if I wasn't going to start it, she was.

And that's how it was for months. We spent a lot of time together in bed, watched 80s sitcoms in syndication for mocking purposes and our joint collection of VHS movies for culture, went to silly places like the Toys-R-Us, or the IHOP. And to parties and coffee houses with her friends.

I had to get to know them all, too. The girls she hung around hen were an artsy bunch, and one of them was this rich bisexual chick (and consequently, the hero of all the others) who had run away from home and lived for a year in Costa Rica with a group of hardcore American surfers. They liked to think they were wild, and they kind of were, but they got most of their ideas from magazines—Rolling Stone or Raygun, sometimes Spin. ‘Zines their friends made and traded. They were not a Marie Claire or Cosmo crowd. If an independent film about lesbians or junkies or lesbian junkies came out, they saw it as soon as it hit town.

Emily liked them all but privately, when we were together, she said the rudest things about them; sometimes, she did it to their faces. For their part, maybe because of her strong persona, they seemed to think of her as something of a leader. At least they called her constantly to get her opinions on events in their lives and help them make decisions, which cut into our "alone" time.

One girl in particular, Darla, had been Emily's best friend before we started dating. Toby hadn't been much competition for Darla, but now, Emily was pushing her to the side in favor of me. And the more Emily did, the more Darla called and came over and hung out and wouldn't leave until late at night, which caused Emily and me not to do quite as much a certain thing we both loved to do, although we were doing it an insane amount by that time.

And then, things got really strange. It started with an innocent-seeming comment. One morning, while I was flopped on the couch and Emily was about to leave my apartment, she narrowed her eyes and asked, "Did you dye your hair?"

"No," I replied. Emily kissed me and shrugged.

After she left, I went to the bathroom to shower, and looked in the mirror. Yes, my hair was darker, as if I'd dyed it, only without the flatness that comes from cheap color jobs. Weird, I thought, but at least it's not gray. It felt a little different in the shower as I shampooed it. Stronger, but softer. It reminded me of Emily's hair, her thick hair that sometimes whipped me in the face when she was lying on top of me. Fine, very silky, but also unbelievably healthy and lustrous, like you could knot a battleship rope from it. Emily had the best head of hair I'd ever seen or felt until I washed mine that morning.

Well, there were worse things that could happen than to wake up with better hair. Like shrinking, which is what I started doing next. Getting shorter and losing weight. Not just weight, but mass. Size. This played out over several days. With Emily's height, I never had to lean over much to kiss her, but now I wasn't leaning over at all.

One afternoon, I actually had to tilt my head back to kiss her.

"Jeez, man," Emily told me, "You're wasting away!"

I tightened my belt a few more notches to keep my increasingly baggy pants from falling down, but Emily pulled them down anyway and backed me onto the bed as I stepped out of them. She undressed me and then herself, and all the while our tongues wrestled. Emily’s hands moved all over my body, her beautiful Japanese eyes wide in wonder. She sat up, straddled my hips.

"Are you feeling okay?" she asked.

“Never better,” I said from underneath. Of course, my penis (which I called Little Martin and Emily sometimes called Emily, Jr.) was throbbingly erect and probably wondering why he wasn't inside Emily.

"Well, something's going on with you, Martin," Emily replied. "You're growing in reverse a-and all skinny..."

Emily hopped off the bed and led me to the mirror. I was shocked at how much I'd changed over the past week or so. I was apparently a couple of inches shorter than Emily now, and rail-thin (not that I'd been huge to begin with). To my eyes, my arms and legs were incredibly stick-like. My hair was definitely black now, just like Emily's: the same luster, the same thickness, same consistency, still in my shaggy, sloppy guy's cut, or lack thereof. But below, on my body, the hair looked very sparse. Only Little Martin was familiar, winding down as he was from his recent near-miss.

"Oh man, this is fucked up," I said. But I didn't feel sick. I hadn’t lied to Emily; I felt great, better, in fact, than I had in months. We sat on the bed, didn't bother to even put our clothes back on. Little Martin kept softening, probably sulking.

"What have you been eating?" Emily asked.

“Nothing different,” I told her.

“Have- have you slept with anyone other than me?”

“What?”

“I wanna know if you’ve cheated on me. If you have like an STD or something…”

“I don’t have an STD! Unless I got it from you!”

She’d pissed me off and hurt my feelings, and now I’d done the same to her. Emily flushed and she started to say something to defend herself or attack me.

I put my little arm around her shoulders. Then I told her something I’d been keeping secret: “Emily… I-I’ve actually… I’ve actually never slept with anyone besides you.”

I'd told her I'd slept with at least three girls before we met. But no, I'd been a virgin. So now she knew that, and we started this crazy, confused argument through tears, because by now, we were both crying and I was feeling thoroughly humiliated. Of course, we ended up fucking and as soon as I shot my hot jet onto Emily's thigh (she bore it stoically as she always did, but she wouldn't let me come inside her, even though she was on the pill), she sort of mumbled about my vanished chest hair for a bit, then faded out on me, because it was late and she was emotionally wrung-out. I could only get murmurs from her.

Then she was completely asleep.

I lay there beside her, my body pressed against hers. It felt warm and womblike under the covers, but there was definitely a newness there, smooth skin against smooth skin. I felt a creepiness in my guts, a sickly, syrupy feeling. I'm shorter than Emily now, and my arms and legs are like twigs, I thought.

What was happening to me? Was I reverting to my teen years somehow? But if that were the case, why did my hair turn Japanese on me? That song "I think I'm turning Japanese, I really think so" kept running through my mind.

Chapter Two:
Terror in the Club

I became very self-conscious of how short I was and kept imagining everyone looming over me like fairy tale giants. And my clothes were loose and obviously not fitting me. They must've been at least two sizes too large. I felt jumpy and out of sorts, with my sleeves flapping over my little hands and the way I started constantly stepping on my pants cuffs.

As if I wasn't paranoid enough, at work, the other guys started to crack jokes about me behind my back, racist jokes about my having caught some sort of Asian STD they called "Yellow Fever." Some of the customers started asking me where that nice Martin was who always recommended such good movies to rent. After a couple of days of that, I quit. I didn't bother to write a letter of resignation or phone or email, I just didn't show up anymore.

I called my parents and told them I got fired and after a long lecture, they sent me some money to live on while I looked for another job. They also wanted me to get serious about school and had been after me about it for some time, so I agreed to that to buy some time to sort out what was happening to me.

Emily and I went out with her friends, Darla would barely speak, which was great because I knew she hated me, and usually the things she said would be breathless and stupid. But I could tell she was studying me. I would glance in her direction and she’d look away, which meant she’d been watching. Of course, that made me suspicious.

One night after I'd been feeling particularly uncomfortable and embarrassed at the coffee house (one of Emily's friends wanted us to all dress up in freaky dresses and go to this party at a friend's house-- all of us in dresses, which I might have done under any other circumstances), I had another talk with Emily about the whole thing. I knew Darla was into Wicca and paganism, and had a lot of books on magic, all of which both Emily and I thought was complete bullshit. But as long as it made her happy. Now, however, I had this silly suspicion. It first crossed my mind when my hair changed... but I made myself forget it. Lately, though, it was increasingly starting to nag me.

"I know this is going to sound crazy, but you don't think Darla might've slipped something into my drink sometime, do you?" I asked. I was standing in the bedroom in my underwear, which I now had to roll down a couple of times, or else they'd fit like a big, white diaper. I was about to slip on a T-shirt when Emily stormed into the room.

"What are you saying?" she demanded.

"Well, I know she hates me," I said. "She's got all those fucked up books."

"Oh, fuck, Martin, you're talking about magic," Emily protested. “Darla reads that stuff but I don’t think she really believes in it. That’s stupid.”

"Yeah, well, I was just asking," I said hotly, my face flushed. "This shit that's happening to me is real, anyways."

Suddenly, Emily grinned devilishly and she pushed me down onto the bed and started kissing my face all over. Then she stopped. "You are a girl!" she exclaimed.

Well, I could feel my penis making a statement to the contrary, but I knew what she was getting at. My face was completely smooth, and my body was mostly the same way. I still had some dark arm hair, but it had become very fine, almost invisible.

Emily ran her palms down my chest. "God, your skin is so soft."

"This is most definitely some weird, fucked up… weirdness," I said in a little voice that barely sounded like me at all.

I watched her hands move all over my chest and torso and it was like watching her touching someone else, like some kind of fucked up first person porno with nothing of myself in it except the tactile sensations she was giving me. It felt different from all the other times, like my nerve endings were so much more delicate and the surface of my skin gave her hand so much less resistance. Smooth on smooth, so very little friction. Our bodies gleamed the same way in the light from the hallway.

People like to think girls are hairless, but they're not; they have very fine body hair all over, and in the sunlight sometimes it glints like silver. Emily had the same kind of dark hair on her arms that I had now. But we definitely looked like two girls in the half-light and the thought suddenly got me very excited. Not my being a girl, but the whole two girls thing. Emily settled back onto my thighs and gave lie to the illusion by revealing my penis, completely erect and pointing straight at my face.

"You can do anything you want with it," I told her.

"Can I have it in me?"

I smiled in reply. She lifted up and lowered herself down onto my dick and we moved together. I certainly didn't feel girlish anymore, but as our hands worked all over each other it was hard to tell where she ended and I began, and vice versa. It was like we were one and the same in a way mere physical contact couldn’t account for. Her tremors and feelings communicated blended with mine as if our nervous systems were inexplicably linked and I felt her come at least twice, and then she pulled off as I pumped hot semen all over my belly and thigh.

Emily settled down on top of me, gluing us together with my come, which I ran in warm streams down my stomach and thighs towards the bed. I felt drowsy and peaceful-- if I woke up tomorrow with a vagina, I'd deal with it then.

I still had my penis the next day, but another factor came into play. We could no longer deny that I looked Asian. Like a very skinny, extremely androgynous Japanese kid of about fifteen or so. My skin tone had gone from pale pink to pale tan, and my eyes were dark brown and almond-shaped, and I could see I'd soon have the epicanthic fold that gives some Asian eyes their distinct appearance. Actually, I looked more part-Asian or even Hispanic, but given the way things had been going, full Asianhood no doubt awaited.

"We have got to get you to a doctor," Emily said.

"With what money?" I asked.

"Call your parents."

"And tell them what- that I'm turning Japanese so I need to see a doctor? Yeah, they'll love that, right after I told them I quit my job."

"Don’t tell them that. Just tell them you're sick."

Emily was right. I did think for a moment it would even be a relief to turn over my existence to some scientifically-interested third party to maybe find out why this was happening to my body, but another part of me, the willful part, wanted me to just deny the whole thing. After all, there was always a chance it was just a dream. A very detailed and exacting dream that seemed to be lasting a whole month, but a dream nevertheless.

But as scared as I was of this transformation, I was absolutely petrified of prying eyes and poking needles. And what if the doctor confirmed I was turning into an Asian girl? My mind conjured up images of myself imprisoned behind Plexiglas, costumed as Patient Zero in a white dressing gown, the body-changing process continuing but with a whole new layer of torture on top of that. Wires up my asshole, little doors cut in my skull and all kinds of metal probes and monitors shoved into my brain, EKGs, body scans, blood tests, interviews, therapies, experimentation.

And after that phantasmagorical stint as Alice at the mad surgery party in Medical Wonderland, maybe some kind of “Oprah Winfrey Show” infamy, with doctors getting rich off books all about the dumb guy who changed race and sex like some kind of human chameleon. I’d become less than a person. I’d become some kind of cultural metaphor.

“No,” I said, making my choice. “I do not want to go to a doctor over this. What if it’s like testicular cancer? I’m so different now it’d probably be in the terminal stage-“

“And you’ll die if you don’t see someone about it!”

“I’ll die anyways! But before dying, I’d get the joy of spending my last months getting cut into little pieces or puking my guts out on chemo. Right now, I feel pretty damned good, so no thanks.”

“But you’ll die, Martin.”

Yeah, all those things and even Emily’s insistent words were screaming at me inside, scaring the shit out of me, to be honest. But there was no way I was going to spend my remaining time like a lab monkey or a victim in a torture flick-slash-snuff film. Because despite the fear-rush and frequent panic attacks, despite the fact I might be dying, what I’d said about feeling pretty damned good was only half the truth. Actually, I felt incredible. Energetic, feisty, giddy. My metabolism was sped up like a hummingbird’s heart.

Finally, something happened that sent me over the edge. Emily and I went to a show with her friends (by now, I had stopped even talking to my friends on the phone because my voice was so different and embarrassingly high, and I wasn't about to let them see me in my new altered state). A local alternative band called the Enemies was opening for some up-and-coming-group called Seven Brothers that actually had a recording contract.

The show was at the world-famous Lava Lamp club downtown, and as much as I wanted to see the bands, I really did not want to go and make my public debut as a teenage Japanese girly-boy. I’d thought it over for approximately ten seconds, then opted out, but Emily talked me into it by making some outrageous promise or other about some insanely desired physical activity we'd do when we got back. I still had sex going for me, even if it was becoming more problematic too.

Emily drove that night, because I'd sworn off now that I no longer matched my driver's license in any way. She had a battered Ford Bronco II with plastic Mardi Gras beads hanging from the rearview mirror. I slumped as low as I could in my seat, hardly talked. Emily played her Pixies tapes and sang along, occasionally giving me these funny, soulful looks as she wailed her favorite parts. Once she even punched me on the arm and asked me to sing with her instead of moping. I gave her a nasty look that shut her down until we got to Darla's house, and then the Bronco was full of giggling girls breathlessly talking a mile a minute about nothing in particular.

So there we were, outside the club, everyone pretending I was still my old self. Emily got in with no problem; she didn't have to even show her fake ID and got stamped as if she were legal. I was concerned about getting turned down, but they did the same for me-- passed me by and stamped my hand. Through the doors we went, and the whole smoky place opened up before us. The Enemies still hadn't taken the stage, so we mingled with the sparse pre-show crowd.

And then it happened.

Some guy, some tiny little guy with wire-rimmed glasses and the start of a goatee came up to me. At first he just stood near us, listening to the conversation, to which I certainly wasn't adding much.

Then, he said something to me.

"What?" I asked, from surprise and because I could barely hear him over the loud music blaring on the club's PA.

"I said, `How are you?'" he said, smiling and nodding his head. I immediately recognized the look on his face, because it'd been on mine plenty of times. The "I'm trying to pick you up" face. From his twiggy looks I couldn't be sure he wasn't just gay, but for some reason, the vibe I got from him was hetero.

"I'm... um... I'm okay," I stammered, then I grabbed Emily's arm and walked her to a secluded corner of the club.

"Did you see that?" I said, fighting the noise so she could hear me, but no one else could.

I glanced over at the guy, and sure enough, he had his eyes on me. He saw us no doubt talking about him, smiled and held up big Grolsch in salute, just as I'm sure I'd done to girls dozens of times before I met Emily. I thought, Shit, he thinks we’re talking over my attraction to him, or the possibility of me catching a ride with him after the show.

"What, that guy?" Emily asked.

"Yeah, that guy," I said.

"What about him?"

"He hit on me."

"He didn't."

"He did."

"He did?"

"Yeah," I said. I was mortified. I was probably blushing like crazy.

Emily told me not to worry about it. I told her I couldn't help but worry about it. I mean, I was a skinny Asian boy-type kid and some guy was trying to get with me and I was pretty sure it was because he thought I was a skinny Asian girl-type kid and that’s what had me freaking out. If I thought in any way he was gay, it wouldn’t have bothered me in the least. But there was a distinct guy-meets-girl going on, and the boy clothes I wore wouldn't have put anyone off; we lived in a pretty liberal college town where people tended to dress eccentrically to make a name for themselves. I told myself Emily was right, to forget it and that maybe if my hair had been shorter he would have realized that I was male.

But even that fact was increasingly coming into doubt.

The rest of the night, I avoided twig boy. Thankfully, he got the message I wasn't interested and found someone else to mack on. I couldn't help but think he'd found some "other girl." But as the Enemies began their set, there was blood in the water now, and the sharks started circling. A guy with a shaved head asked me if I skated. A hippie-type stoner dude wanted to know if I got high. Of course, guys were also hitting on Emily at the same time. Then, this guy I knew from work, Bob (who I always thought was a dork) asked me point blank what I was doing the next weekend. I definitely knew Bob wasn't gay, because I'd met his girlfriend.

"Bob," I said, then stopped. What next? Would he even believe me? "It's me, Martin."

"Martin?" Bob asked, a weird look on his face, half-grin, half-shock. He looked me over and I guess he believed me due to the fact I had been so visibly different the last few days I worked at the video store, because he asked me what I was doing and what had happened to me.

"I wish I knew," I said, truthfully.

So Bob started apologizing profusely (and sweating that way, too), and I decided to get the hell out of there. He didn’t even stay for the show, just bolted out the front door and into the night. I told Emily I was ready to go, too, but Darla protested.

"I wanna see Seven Brothers," she whined. She was quite the whiner.

"Can you get a ride?" Emily asked her. Darla pouted, but said it was possible. There were a few guys from some of her classes there. Emily and I left, along with one of Emily's more wallflower-type friends, Beth.

We drove in silence, with the light in the cab shifting constantly from the streetlamps as we passed. I kept my eyes on the reflected dash lights on the windshield.

"Well, that was fun," Beth said from the backseat.

"Uh huh," Emily and I replied, simultaneously, obviously not believing it. But the atmosphere in the Bronco was deadly. I was grateful when we dropped Beth off and got back to my apartment. Emily was in a foul mood now, and when I tried to get her to make good on her promise, she shook her head and we just lay there, side by side in bed, but feeling a million miles apart.

Chapter Three:
Cornflake Girl

Emily was more understanding the next day. We talked the whole morning through as we ate Lucky Charms and watched cartoons on TV with the sound off.

"I'm getting kind of scared," I said. Well, we already knew that. What I meant was, the manageable fear from before was now stark terror. Ghostly images of doctors in masks hovering over my bed, blinking machines… get your metamorphosing ass to a hospital, sucka. No, no, no!

I wasn’t sure if it was from inhaling smoke at the club or from shouting so much there, but I’d woken up with a changed voice. Higher, reedier. I tried to hide it by pitching it lower. Fucking puberty in reverse.

I dabbed at my increasingly mushy cereal with my spoon, not even wanting to look at Emily as I voiced for the first time what exactly about the body changes had me scared: "Everybody in there thought I was a girl. Is that what's happening to me? Am I turning into a girl?"

"I don't know," Emily said. "But I'm getting scared, too."

We were both in t-shirts and sweatpants (all mine). Impulsively, I put my cereal bowl down on the carpet, jumped off the sofa and went to the full length mirror on my closet door, took off my shirt, and slid down my sweats and boxers.

Just as I’d feared, whatever was happening to me was now affecting Little Martin, or, I should say, Littler Martin. My penis was teensy now, practically buried in my black pubic hair, with just the nub of the head protruding, like the face of an animal in deep grass.

"Emily, come in here!" I shouted in my new, higher, uber-stupid sounding voice.

She came running and by the shocked look on her face, I could tell she knew it too. "Oh my god! Emily Jr.'s so... so tiny..."

"Oh man, oh man," I moaned. "If this keeps up, I'm the one who’s going to be Emily, Jr."

I felt like vomiting, but instead, I started crying. I threw myself down on the messy, unmade bed and wept like a little girl. Which was fitting, I guess. Emily sat beside me and rubbed my back. Incredibly, my tiny dumb penis got erect. We started kissing, Emily and I, but when I tried to enter her, she pushed me away.

"I can't," she said, softly. She held me for a while, and my bitsy erection slowly subsided. I felt hollowed out and let down, emotionally wrecked. Being hit on by guys and finding out your penis is shrinking is certainly a blow to any preconceived notions of your own manhood you might harbor. My sense of self was shifting, and no longer under my control.

Over the next few days, I barely ate or spoke, and I didn't bathe beyond quick sponge baths in the bathroom sink; I couldn't take seeing myself totally naked. Emily stayed with me the whole time, but after a while, cabin fever set in and I was starting to get pretty ripe. She talked me into going over to her mom's house to stay. I agreed in a daze and soon we found ourselves explaining everything to Emily's mother.
When I first met her over a month before, I was amazed at how All-American Mrs. Komori was; then, I found out she'd been born in California. Their house was the typical suburban ranch, except for the family photos with Japanese locations in the background, and a few touches here and there, such as Japanese dolls. They both owned kimonos, too (courtesy of Emily's grandmother, who spoke accented English because she was from Kawasaki, Japan), but never wore them. And we did take our shoes off (Emily insisted, not her mom), although by the time I moved in, I had quit wearing them except when absolutely necessary because they had become like giant clown shoes.

And yeah, that was the week my body went all the way. Over the next few days, my already impossibly miniscule and increasingly strange-looking dick got smaller and smaller, and my testicles seemed to retract or vanish up inside me or whatever. It's not as if I sat there and watched, and it certainly didn't make me happy. I didn't look down there much, and when I did, each new configuration sent my heart pounding.

Towards the weekend, it was as though an invisible master had completed a flesh origami artwork and my Martin junk had been folded into a lotus or something and stuffed up inside me. Which meant… I had all the stuff in there I’d seen in medical books. Ovaries. Fallopian tubes. A womb. When I dressed or undressed, I could tell I no longer had that comforting bulge and heft in my drawers, but there was no physical sense of “something’s missing.” My body didn’t feel it as an absence of a penis and testicles. It wasn’t as if I’d become some kind of amputee. No phantom tackle or beans-n-frank because there was nothing gone from this body; it was 100% complete.

But talk about losing your best friend. I pined for my man stuff the way a sea captain’s wife would have for her husband drowned in the North Atlantic. I missed feeling it throb and start cocking itself into sex-position whenever Emily looked at me a certain way, or touched me just right. I still felt something, but it wasn't the same (mostly, it just made me feel like I had to pee), and it was like a muffled, murmuring conversation compared to the shout-out a good erection is.

Apart from developing a perfectly formed little vagina and all the wonders that come with it, I wasn’t just smaller. My shoulders were narrower, and my hips were only just a touch wider, but with my smooth skin, tiny size and lack of boobs, I in no way could have been mistaken for a teenage girl (or much of any kind of boy)-- nope, I had become a prepubescent. I looked like I was about eleven or twelve, but the shadow of the woman I’d one day grow into was already upon me.

Still, having a girl’s body wasn’t quite the same as being gendered as a girl. I wasn’t about to surrender to biology. And I kept wearing my grotesquely oversized boy's clothes as a way to deny my physical gender and maintain at least one area of continuity from who I’d been most of my life. In the bathroom, I stared at my reflection and mouthing the words, “You’re still a guy. You’re still a guy,” thinking my Martin thoughts from inside a female shell, peering out from these eyes like a shut-in from the windows of a house.

“Are you okay in there?” Mrs. Komori asked, all worried.

“Uh… yeah!” I shouted back, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Okay. Supper’s almost ready.”

I frowned at myself in the mirror and watched my face turn almost purple. I put one of my little fingers under my nose to simulate a mustache but gave up. I sat on the floor with my chin on my knees, hugging my legs, just trying not to think of anything. An empty brain is a happy one, I told myself. But I found trying not to think only increased the likelihood of thought, so I gave up, got to my feet and went to supper.

While I could tell myself I was still a guy, I was powerless to stop my most important relationship from changing. Emily looked at me now in a sort of maternal way. Or sisterly. Whichever, I hated it. We talked a lot, though. Every time I tried to bring up our immediate past, though, she'd go off on some painting she was working on, or a band Darla wanted her to see. I felt miserable. Those longings were still there, only my physical equipment would or could scarcely acknowledge them. Although Emily sometimes called me her "cute little lesbian."

My social life was pretty much over. Emily still went out with her friends, but I had to stay home. Not that I could've gotten into any of the clubs this way. Not too many clubs will allow in a twelve-year-old girl, no matter how empty the place is. Emily would tell me all about all about their nocturnal adventures, and sometimes, she'd slip in that some old guy friend of hers had hugged her, or asked her out. She even started talking to Toby again in a cautious sort of way. She still turned them all down, but it had to be just a matter of time before she'd give in. I couldn't blame her, but still I fumed in impotent jealousy. How could I compete with all those guys now? And there had been plenty of them swarming around her even when I was still a guy.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized just how huge Asian chicks go over huge in this town, especially in the crowd we ran with. They were like every indie rock guy’s dream girl, every shoe-gazer’s wet dream. I thought of it as the “El Scorcho Factor.”

By the time spring rolled around, I had already developed a new status in the world. I was Emily's surrogate little sister. Now that everyone was about to graduate from Delacroix High and all their sentimental, nostalgic love emotions raged in their pounding hearts, Darla and company started coming around again after having written us off after the Seven Brothers Incident (as I named it). I was just an insignificant presence at their gatherings, but I would, every once in a while, catch Darla giving me the strangest looks. My old suspicions returned, but I had little to go on. Just because someone hates and resents you, would that be motivation enough for them to turn your body into a little girl’s?
With my personal identity in flux, we had to do invent a new one for matters of convenience. Emily and her mother told people I was a cousin of Emily's from California. They introduced me as Amy (Emily's idea; she didn't even ask my opinion!), which made me a little nauseated at first, but I went along with it, even smiled and said, "Nice to meet you," when introduced with that name. Invariably, someone would call me "adorable," or there'd be a joke about my clothes.

I must've looked ridiculous, like a short, dark-headed parody of my former self, a real tomboy, my clothes hanging off me, my black hair uncombed, my smooth, shiny face and pretty, narrow eyes.
Those stupid clothes! I didn’t really have much of a choice about what to wear. For lack of a better plan, Martin had become a deadbeat runaway. There was nothing I could do, except mail a couple of letters to my parents telling them I'd taken a sabbatical to Mexico. They called Emily once, and she helped convince them; I'd hitchhiked across the U.S. once or twice during summer breaks. As a result, all I owned in the world were a couple changes of clothes, and I clung to them as desperately as I clung to my brain ID.

I started rolling up my pants cuffs, but now, instead of getting hit on by college age alterna-geeks in clubs, I was getting looks from junior high skater punks at the mall. The mall wasn’t a place I hung out very often, but I couldn’t live without new music, so I still wanted to check out Sam Goody’s there. Usually, when my friends or I wanted CDs, we had choices downtown, but they didn’t have everything. This led to infrequent trips out the highway to retail hell. I dreaded walking past the fountain where the snotty skater dudes hung out, all rude and carrying on like a telephone line full of jays or crows or whatever the hell kind of birds hung out on lines in noisy groups, taking their little shits on our heads. And there was no way to avoid it because it was right outside Sam Goody’s, and even if I didn’t walk past it, they’d see me coming from the other direction. I couldn’t win, even with Emily there. As soon as I appeared—no doubt looking as scared as I felt-- the kids would start throwing skater slang at me, or saying the dirtiest shit when there were no adults around. Sometimes, I'd get really scared one of them might grow balls big enough actually to try something. I planned just to knee whatever jerk did right in those stupid nads and run like hell.

Which brought up something else- how completely weak and helpless I felt. I felt reduced, diminished. I had become this tiny, petite thing, although I looked like a little toughie in my baggy slacks and my shaggy, boyish hair. I hadn't been the biggest, strongest guy ever, but I had known how to handle myself. Now everything had been reset almost to zero. Little skater shits I'd never have thought twice about before were a danger now. I could run pretty fast, but if I couldn't run, what could I do with these pathetic doll arms and tiny hands if they really tried to carry out one of their crude come-ons? Not a whole hell of a lot, that's for sure. It was a constant source of stress and I learned very quickly to be cautious and aware of my surroundings.

But for now, I was still me inside, and I planned to fight to the last to protect the last bit of maleness I had, my mind. The night before Emily’s high school graduation—which I planned to skip, although I’d truly wanted to be present-- I tried to drink beer, but two bottles got me so drunk I spent the rest of the night throwing up in the bathroom.

“I-I’m all right,” I groaned.

“No, you’re not,” Emily said. “But you will be. Do it and you’ll feel better.”

“I’m such a lightweight now…”

Then I had to lean back over the toilet. As I heaved and cried and Emily held my trembling shoulders, I conceived of this really radical personal imperative-- if I ever went fully girl inside to match my outside, I was still determined to grow up to be the manliest Japanese dyke ever.

Book Two
Amy at the Gulf

Chapter Four:
Dr. Strangeshop or, How I Learned to Hate the Mall

Full-on summer came around. Temps rose, mosquitoes snacked on precious bodily fluids, faces went shiny from the humidity. Emily was no longer a senior at Delacroix High, and I was still trapped in a tiny female body. But at least I’d found a home with the Komoris. They gave me the run of the house and put up with generally black moods.

I hated having a girl’s body, I hated being short (out of curiosity, Emily measured me against the wall one afternoon and I came out just under 5'; I prayed for a growth spurt) and I hated being a little weakling; no more opening peanut butter jars with a mighty, manly twist. Being weak made me feel diminished and puny, and it was the worst part of the whole thing. Well, that and being called "cute" all the time.
About the only thing I didn't hate about it was being Japanese, or at least Asian. I mean, both Emily and her mom were, too. In the aftermath of the transformation, that was one thing I took some comfort from, such as it was. I was more like Emily now.

By now, I thought changing from Mr. Average White Guy into Emily's tomboy cousin Amy from California put me on the city square in downtown Weirdsville, population: me. I figured life couldn't show me anything more bizarre, couldn’t possibly fuck me over any more than it had by robbing me of my Y chromosome and substituting an X—yeah, as if no one would notice. But I discovered I was only at the outermost bus stop in Weirdsville's suburbs, and there was a lot more to see on the journey to the true center of strange.

It started with the preparations for our summer vacation.

Emily and her mother had planned this beach trip for over a year now, their first real vacation together since Emily's dad died. They insisted I come with them, and they weren't about to let me hole up in the rented house and hermitize myself the week we were on the Florida coast along Gulf of Mexico.

"It's not healthy," Mrs. Komori said by way of convincing me.

And my mental health was definitely an issue at this point, since I mostly sat around and did nothing. I stewed in my own estrogenic juices, I guess. Watched TV, barely spoke.
“Yeah,” I said with a shrug. “I guess it’s not.”

“Well, here’s the deal. Emily and I would like to get you out of the house, maybe… if you’re willing… buy you a few things for the trip. Those clothes you’ve been wearing are getting moldy.”

I sighed. I thought about it for a few moments. Thanks to those obnoxious skater punks, the mall and I were totally quits on our already strained friendship and I’d barely left the house in weeks. My initial inclination was just to say no and disappoint and hurt Mrs. Komori. Surprisingly, as I searched my mind for an excuse to beg off, I found deep in my tummy this dull ache to go outside, to get off the sofa and face the world again, or at least do something just a little different that day. But I didn’t want to agree out loud. I nodded instead.

Mrs. Komori smiled. “Good! I’m so glad, Martin. You’ll see. We’ll have a great time and it’ll make you feel so much better.” She jingled her car keys and the three of us set off for the mall to prepare me for our beach blast and sort of re-initiate me into the world of the living.

Before we could even deal with the clothes, we had to walk past the stupid skaters who had humiliated and intimidated me. Mrs. Komori’s adult presence acted as a kind of authoritarian shield from any verbal taunts, but they certainly stared me down as we came through. The skaters sat slouched in their circus-tent clothes. One guy was stretched out on his back, staring up at the ceiling. They had their skateboards leaning against the painted concrete walls of the fountain—which was turned off to conserve water, there being a drought—and I felt jealous. I seethed with envy at how they could roll along and do tricks and still pee standing up and live in a world where they were who they said they were. The fierceness of this whole jealousy-storm took me by surprise

How they looked at us made me angry, too. Under their intense, sulky skater punk gaze-- so uber-boyish and childishly surly and I could imagine their nasty thoughts because they had once been my own—my cheeks and even my ears glowed as if they’d been painted with radioactive substances and then we were out of the Skater Hot Zone. I felt my rage subside in waves.

And there we were, at the Gap, of all stupid places. We stood outside its youth-oriented corporate blandness and the pretty and vacuous models in navy blue and khaki stared down at us from the windows, waiting for us to step inside where it was white and blonde wood all over.

“Do I have to get… you know… girl clothes?” I asked, dubiously.

I'd never dressed up like a girl even as a joke, or for Halloween. It wasn’t that I had been afraid of it or felt it challenged my manhood; it just hadn’t come up, or really crossed my mind before that one time with Emily’s friends back when I was still semi-male. Now, facing the choice, I just didn’t want to wear girly stuff.

“Why not?” Emily asked. “They’re just clothes.”

“If that’s the case, let’s go to the guy section.”

“Amy can wear anything she… uh… he wants,” Mrs. Komori said. “Sorry.”

“Look, I just think girl clothes are better than guy clothes—“

“But you wear guy clothes!”

“Shut up, dude. I’d really like to see you embrace your sassy, girly-chic side.”

“I don’t have one of those… sassy…” I started to protest, and let my voice trail off. Emily’s face was undergoing an alarming contortion. Mrs. Komori and I stared at her as Emily clamped her lips tightly together and her cheeks quivered and darkened.

Then she couldn’t help herself and started giggling. “I’m just messing with you!”

I flushed hotly. “That wasn’t funny.”

“Don’t be mad,” Emily told me. “It was a joke, for God’s sake.”

“Okay, okay.” Still a little angry about it all, I told Mrs. Komori I didn’t want Gap clothes anyways.

She shrugged and we all walked down towards the Macy’s. At malls, especially ours, there weren’t many choices outside the mainstream, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted anyways. I’d always bought my clothes on the cheap at Target or factory outlets. Once inside the department store, I nervously led us to the boy’s department. There weren’t many shoppers, which was definitely a good thing. We got just a few funny looks. Granted, I must have made a vision of intense strangeness: a tiny, black haired girl wearing her would-be hipster father’s clothes. Pre-pubescent androgyny.
“I-I want like some t-shirts,” I said softly, looking down at my big stupid shoes.

“Anything you want,” Mrs. Komori told me reassuringly.

We did a safari through the racks, and I chose a few things here and there, avoided the expensive name brand stuff and anything with Batman or sports team logos on it. I didn’t care about any of that anyways. It was hot out and I needed light tees and some shorts for knocking about on the beach. By the time we hit the underwear section, we had a small audience of mostly older women craning their necks to see what this weird kid was doing with the seeming support of her sister and mother. Breaking some kind of unwritten gender code, I suppose. I frowned fiercely, feeling ashamed, but not because I was doing anything wrong. It was as if they were projecting the feeling they thought I should be having into me, marking me as a freak by their surreptitious scrutiny.

“Excuse me,” a guy in business attire said to Mrs. Komori. “May I help you ladies?”

“My… um… niece is just picking out a few things. She’s visiting us for the summer and for some reason, her luggage ended up in Italy.”

“Would she be more comfortable in our girl’s section?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

I shook my head no, too, and sent special psychic waves of “go away, go away” at the guy, but obviously his receiver was out of service. Or I was doing it wrong. Had X-Men comics let me down? I felt as though I’d flunked out of Professor X’s School for Gifted Youngsters. I’d never get my superhero uniform or my code name: Vagina Girl. Boy-Girl. Girl-Man. Weak Sister. The Lightweight. Once started, it was difficult to stop and I must have come up with about one hundred self-deprecating handles for my hypothetical comic book self, as quickly disdained as she had emerged from my imagination.
“Well, if you need any help, just let me know,” the sales guy said, conceding the point. After all, what did he care?

Then it hit me. “I don’t even know what size I am.”

Mrs. Komori playfully smacked her forehead. “That’s right. I didn’t think to measure you before we left.”

“Probably a small,” Emily suggested.

“She’ll just have to try these on,” Mrs. Komori said. She turned to the sales guy. “Where’s the dressing room?”

“Well, the fitting room is right over here, but she’ll have to use the girl’s rooms.”

“And where are they?”

“In the girl’s department. But… uh… I’m afraid I can’t let you take the merchandise with you from this section.”

“Why not?”

The sales guy gave us an apologetic smile.

“Well, I’m not paying money for something that doesn’t fit her,” Mrs. Komori said. She looked deadly serious.

“Why can’t she just use the boy’s fitting room?” Emily asked. She emphasized the phrase “fitting room” in an almost British-sounding snarky way I would have enjoyed under other circumstances.

“We just… we… It’s store policy.”

I kind of ducked my head down into my chest and raised my shoulders. I thought, Jesus, motherfucker, why are we even discussing this? Now the other shoppers were watching us openly. Live entertainment, and for free. I wanted to run away.

“Are there any boys in the dre-- fitting room now?” Mrs. Komori asked.

“No.”

“Then why can’t she use it?”

The sales guy’s brain must have jumped a track, because his face froze in this rictus of goofy, mannequin-like politeness. “I guess there’s no reason why not. You’re completely right.”

That settled, I began the trying-on process. I wasn’t exactly stoked about wearing kid clothes, but at least they were for boys. As I took off my faded, worn Martin crap and stood there in my oversized old cotton briefs that had gone from smart white to a kind of crusty off-gray, looking at my insipid face and vulnerable little body, I felt as though I were stripping away something else. I wasn’t sure what it was. I found myself trembling a little under the fluorescent lights, maybe from the Macy’s A/C which seemed to be turned down to the “New Ice Age” setting, maybe from something inside.

We’d guessed my size correctly, so everything fit for the most part. I was officially a pre-teen boy’s small, although medium fit me in certain things. It took forever to do the deed, too. Having conceded the use of the fitting rooms, the sales guy was adamant about sticking to the “two items at a time” policy. That added time and increased my frustration. I’d never particularly enjoyed shopping and hadn’t gone through this process in years, since my old mom had last bought my fall school clothes. As an adult guy, I’d just walked in and grabbed what I liked and paid for it, no sweat.

After buying all of that regular-wear stuff, we got into a discussion about swimwear. Boy’s tighty-whiteys were fine, tees and shorts were fine for our newly-minted Amy-girl as she encountered the great, big world all around her. But we were going to be at the beach and that meant swimming and sunning. I couldn’t wear a guy’s swimsuit for that, because society apparently disapproved of chest displays by young females.

“Maybe if you were younger,” Mrs. Komori said, thoughtfully.

“Why can’t I just wear like a t-shirt and some shorts?” I asked.

“Well… no reason, I guess,” Mrs. Komori said.

Emily shut one eye and frowned. I could see her mighty brain working. “Why don’t you just try one on and see if you like it?” She meant a girl’s swimsuit.

Chapter Five:
The Grand Epiphany of the Brightly-Lit Department Store

After all, what really was the big deal? It was all just cloth.

But if so, why had those women noticeably reacted to the sight of a girl getting an exclusively boy wardrobe? I had to smile ruefully when I thought about the opposite, too. What if I’d been a boy who wanted to wear girl’s clothes? The biddy brigade was bemused by the tomboy, but the sissy would have been almost completely unacceptable.

Emily could wear guy jeans or one of my old shirts and no one would think anything of it. As long as Emily kept her long hair and wore some mascara and remained kind of lanky and sleek, she was within acceptable parameters and had quite a bit of leeway within them. Let her little cousin have a semi-short haircut and wear y-fronts and they thought it a little odd.

Let her grow up and shave her head and dress like a construction worker, or have someone with a dick wear a skirt, and those concepts were way too fucked up for them to process.

I felt confused by it all, almost dizzy and headachey. Here I was sticking to guy stuff, somehow resistant to the idea of putting on anything made for a girl, despite cotton threads in the cloth being molecularly identical no matter for whom the clothing manufacturers wove it. Therefore, I was full of the same prejudices.

If I did without said prejudices, what was my objection to wearing a girl’s swimsuit after all? And was going the t-shirt and shorts route any escape? Boy or girl or whatever, people wanted you to conform to their expectations. I concluded people’s minds were full of shitty, mean ideas and this simple stupid shopping trip was forcing me to confront things I’d never before considered. Received gender notions accepted without contemplation. Traditions. Mores. Yuck, I thought.

While I thought about that, the three of us drifted with our bags full of inadvertent gender rebelliousness into the girl’s section. Now I saw all this fashion stuff with a field observer’s objectivity.
On first blush, the girl clothes weren’t that different from the ones over in pre-teen boys. T-shirts, button-up shirts, twill and denim shorts. Jeans. On second, almost all of the tees were colors I’d always associated with femininity without even thinking about it. Pinks and purples and pale pastels. The prints, too. Florals. Animaniacs (I kinda wanted that one, until Emily cracked that I already looked enough like Dot as it was). Scooby Doo. Rugrats. Tamogatchi. Disney’s Doug. Minnie Mouse. “Surfer Girl.” “Princess.”

And it struck me that most girls must actually this stuff. But was it because society taught them to, or was it because of their biology? I had this feeling I was going to find out firsthand, that I was some kind of test case in spite of myself.

For a while, anyways. Then boredom set in. It was still shopping no matter what kind of philosophical nonsense I brought to it. It was time to get it over with.

“I guess I’ll… you know,” I said and gave the swimsuit section—a riot of flowers, ruffles and neon colors—a glance. “But I want something one-piece. And not too frilly.”

Apparently, despite my epiphany, I wasn’t about to start a gender revolution right then and there. And after all, there were plenty of girls and women who hated the stuff marketed towards them. Which made me for a split second wonder if maybe I was reacting to this stuff as a girl, not as a guy after all.

Once again, confusion.

“Whatever, dude,” Emily said.

I found this orange one-piece suit. Smart-ass Emily jokingly held up a day-glo pink one I crinkled my nose at in disgust, and I waved my find at her.

“I’m gonna try this one,” I said.

“Cute,” Mrs. Komori said, and her eyes darted away.

The sales woman let me into the fitting room without so much as a protest, and I discovered the suit was a bit too small. The shoulder straps kind of compressed me a little and made me not want to stand up straight for fear of bursting a seam. Then I was worried we wouldn’t find another orange one. Green would’ve been okay, and I might have accepted one with maybe an embroidered sailboat or sun on the front. Maybe a frolicking dolphin. Anything but that bright pink travesty.

“I’m sorry, we don’t seem to have another one in that color,” the sales woman told me.

Luckily, there was a green one.

“Kinda plain,” Emily said, disappointed.

“I like plain,” I told her.

“Just try this,” she said, holding up a blue two-piece. It had a little ruffle trim.

I winced.

“Just try it, Amy,” she said. “It’s not really so different than what you’re used to. That one-piece might feel a little confining. Kinda.”

“It’s a bikini.”

“Technically. Think of it as… um… trunks and a top.”

Back into the fitting room, where I tried on the bikini and found it was actually a lot more comfortable than the one-piece. Only it felt bizarre to have to cover up something I didn’t even really have. It suddenly struck me as unfair that guys got to go topless if they wanted. Especially when so many had larger breasts than a lot of the women I knew. And so what?
Why were breasts so bad they had to be covered?

Then I got a little thrill of fear and discomfort. I didn’t want anyone staring at my breasts. When I had them. They would be mine, not someone else’s to own through his eyes. I couldn’t even conceive of one day showing them to a lover. Fuck that. Fuck it with a lit stick of dynamite.

A minute or so later, I was bopping out of the changing booth to show Emily and Mrs. Komori. Emily had this look of narrow-eyed interest, somewhat sardonic. But Mrs. Komori beamed happily.
On the way to the cashier’s station, we passed a long rack of dresses. I wasn’t planning to give them so much as a glance, but curiosity got the better of me and I peeked. Nothing, nothing… and then, something. Stainless steel rack. A hanger. There were these little string bows, like the ones you tie in your shoelaces, the topmost part of the thin straps of this sundress with teensy flowers all over it in blues, greens and yellows. My breath stopped for a beat. Within the space of that beat, I thought about how I’d looked in the mirror before and how that dress would look on me. My breath resumed its normal cycle.

And Emily saw it happen. She smiled at me and I tried to act like it was no big deal.

When we put the two swimsuits on the cashier’s station and the saleswoman rang it up for us, I couldn’t believe how expensive this trip was. With my cooperation, we’d gotten carried away, bought much more than I’d need for three weeks at the beach, much less just one. Mrs. Komori pulled out her credit card and paid for it all without a complaint, but I knew she was almost as shocked as I was. How had this happened?

“You need shoes,” Mrs. Komori said. This, instead of complaining about the money she’d blown.

“Okay,” I grunted. I genuinely couldn’t believe after all she’d spent already she was still willing to go that extra mile for me.

On the way out of the pre-teen girl’s department, I tried to steal a glance back at the sundress, with this surprisingly poignant ache. I wasn’t so much surprised to find myself wanting a dress for the first time in my life, but at the wanting, the desiring any piece of clothing. What the fuck was happening to me all of a sudden?

Again, Emily spotted me. She’d evidently been watching me intently ever since she caught me out looking kind of—I had to admit it—longingly at that dress. I looked away and put it out of my mind, just banished it like a god-king would a failed general or something in some Arnold Schwarzenegger movie or an episode of “Xena, Warrior Princess.”

I saw Emily mouth, “You want it?” at me. I shook my head. Negative, sister. No way. Not me. Despite all my recent insights, I savagely thought only dumb girls and fags wore dresses, anything to shock some sense back into me. Instantly pegging me for the liar I was, Emily nodded. Then we were in the shoe section.

Shoe were easiest. We got me some black Vans, smaller versions of the ones I’d treasured in another life. I wore them out of Macy’s, with my Martin clodhoppers shoved into the box under my arm. And my feet rejoiced. The lightness in my legs served to inform me just how difficult it had been walking around in big-ass sneakers.

On the way through the mall, with our load of bags, I thought about all I’d seen and learned about the world and even myself. I especially thought about that weird moment of transitory desire after seeing that stupid dress, which I was now in the process of convincing myself I hated. What was that? Why would I even think I wanted something like that? And Emily. She was going to be on top of me from then on. I could feel the beginning of a fascination; it shimmered off my former girlfriend like the white mist that rose from hot asphalt streets after a summer rain.

I was officially under investigation.

“Who wants a Great American Cookie?” Mrs. Komori asked, as if to lighten the mood.

“No thanks,” I grumbled.

“No? Okay, then.” Mrs. Komori sounded a little disappointed. Maybe she’d wanted a cookie for herself and needed one of us to act as enabler. Oh well…

The skater punks had vanished like ghosts, and outside was like a sauna. I practically danced with delight at being blasted by hot, moist air after the goosebumps-inducing fast freeze of Macy’s and the rest of the mall. We found our car and threw all the bags in the trunk and I flung my little body into the backseat as soon as Mrs. Komori popped the door locks. I slumped down as my elation faded and reaction set in. I was exhausted, physically, emotionally, intellectually. It was so hard to hold onto my new insights, if insights they were. Already I could feel them jumbling, bumping against each other and becoming even more garbled than they’d been in Macy’s.

What had I left in there? What had I found?

“Hey, Amy,” Emily said. “When we come back from the beach, maybe we can go to Moldy Oldies.” Moldy Oldies was a local vintage clothing store. Emily and I both knew they didn’t sell guy clothes.

"Maybe," I muttered. Amy?

After a supper where I’d barely talked, I went to my room, threw myself on the bed and buried my face in the pillow. I missed being a guy so badly it hurt, and I was bewildered by all the things I’d suddenly felt and thought during the shopping trip. I felt buffeted by forces beyond the farthest limits of my ability to comprehend. Is this what it’s like to be a girl? I thought. Or is this what it’s like to be a girl who wants to be a boy? What am I now? What have I become?

I heard the door open and Emily peeked in.

"Can I come in?" she asked softly.

I grunted, or tried to. It sounded like some kind of little girl noise. Emily shut the door behind her and sat by me on the bed. She was so close, I could feel her radiant body heat. No so long before things like that led to freaky sex until we fell asleep sometime after midnight. Now it just made my stomach feel sickly-sweet, like I'd drunk a bottle of Log Cabin maple syrup.

"Shopping sucks, dude,” I said finally, my voice muffled by the pillow. “And those old bitches in the boy’s section were staring at me like I’m some kind of freak. I dunno, maybe I am. Oh, and those fucking skater kids…”

"Amy--"

"Martin. When we're alone, I'm Martin."

That set her off, and led to a long discussion about "you've changed, probably for good" and "making the best of a bad situation until we figure something out." So I asked Emily if she wanted a tube to better blow smoke up my ass, and also reiterated my position that inside, I was all guy, the same Martin I'd always been and always would be.

I guess I wanted to fight with Emily, or make her cry so I could convince myself the guy thing was still true. If she screamed at me, we'd go to war. And not a month before, that's what would've happened; Emily would've torn me a new one. Instead, she took it serenely. I couldn't stay angry with a calm Emily. She was too rational, her voice was too assured and I was too much in love with her. I cooled, calmed.
With persistence and quiet determination, she soothed and comforted me. We even talked a little about the gender thing and some of the thoughts I’d had at Macy’s, but neither of us contemplated it too much before today. Well, Emily had a little, but only on a case-by-case basis. The beginnings of an earnest back-and-forth on the matter sputtered and died. Mostly, Emily just held forth that people were stupid about almost everything and their opinions counted for little. And that somehow, I’d figure it all out in time. But before that happened, I had to find some kind of personal peace.

"It's not your old life, I know," Emily pleaded. "But you're going to have to get your shit together sometime. Be a boy, be a girl, be something in between, or something new. It doesn’t matter. Just, please, I don't want to lose you."

"Okay," I said with a sigh. "But no vintage clothes. At least not now. I wanna think this over some more.”

"Deal."

Chapter Six:
Might Be Thinkin' 'Bout Goin' Down to the Shore

That weekend, we got up before light, loaded up the Mountaineer (Emily always made cracks about how her tiny mother loved to drive this massive tank) and moved to the sea. Actually, not the sea- to a little resort town on the Gulf of Mexico. I wasn't much help packing the SUV; my skinny arms were so weak, I couldn't carry even my own suitcase without setting it down once between the door and the Komori Family Truckster.

“You need help?” Emily asked as she passed me with her own suitcase.

“No,” I squeaked and hefted the bag again.

“It has wheels. Why don’t you just roll it?”

“I want to do it my way. Now shut up!”

Emily squinted her eyes at me and went back inside to get more stuff. I barely managed to get the suitcase up high enough to throw it in the back. Stupid wheels. Why hadn’t I noticed them?
We hit the road in the dewy early morning, just after sunrise. It took seven hours down twisty country roads and along the interstate to get there, but it was worth it to come around the final curve, break free of the pines and see the gulf shining in the afternoon sun.

As we drove slowly along the beach highway, I took note of the older girls down by the water. I could still look, although the expression on this face probably would've creeped out anyone who saw me. My mood had been better that morning, but the thought struck me that I'd be on that beach in that blue two-piece, slopping sunscreen on this tiny body and generally being a beach girl, too. None of those girls down there on the sand would see me as a potential mate by any means; they’d see me as some stupid Asian girl-kid, Emily’s tagalong.

"What's wrong, Amy?" Emily asked, and I cringed. "I mean, Martin."

"Nothing," I lied. Nothing at all. Just getting with the program.

We checked in, unpacked and settled into a very nice older house right between the highway and the beach. We ate sandwiches that night because we were too tired to cook or go out. Then Emily wanted to go onto the beach and walk down to the pier.

I hadn't planned on going, but Emily insisted, so I had to get dressed for my gulf-side debut as little Amy Komori. I’d worn my Martin clothes for the drive with the idea of using this moment as a sort of chrysalis-opening thing. Spinning a web of silk (or frayed cotton as the case may be), I’d wrapped myself up and it was time to come out metamorphosed into…

Me.

Just like I had in the fitting room a few days before, I dropped my sagging slacks and my rolled-down BVDs and tossed off my t-shirt and took out of my suitcase what was essentially a smaller version of my usual summer outfit, with underwear that actually fit (although the y-front pee slot was useless to me now), a gray-green Alien Workshop tee and khaki shorts. Free from the outer wrappings of the past, I no longer looked like the Littlest Hobo. I gazed regretfully at my Martin clothes in heap on the floor; they were going into the big plastic garbage can outside our beach house.

I sighed. I was rapidly becoming a sigher.

"Oh, you look adorable!" Mrs. Komori exclaimed as I sheepishly entered the living room. I turned about as red as the sun going down outside over the pier. She must have noticed my extreme blushing, because she quickly added, “Oh… is that… is that okay for me to say, Martin? Handsome?”

I felt a little bad, so I told her adorable was fine. I even managed a fake smile.

"Martin, let me do something with your hair, okay?" Emily asked. I let her.

By then, my hair was pretty out of control. I kept it combed to prevent tangles, and being basic Asian hair, it was mostly straight, with just this little bit of a wave now that it was longer than when I’d had a dick. Still very boyish, but like a sloppy, haircut-phobic boy's. Emily parted it down the middle, brushed it to each side and put a couple of hairpins in, then took the rest and made two short ponytails held in place with elastic bands behind my ears. I didn't dare look in the mirror.

“Lemme grab something,” Emily said, hit her bedroom and came back. She had her sketchpad and a pencil. “You never know when you might see something worth commemorating in fine graphite.”
“Have fun, you two,” Mrs. Komori said as we slammed the door behind us.

I was barefoot, Emily wore flip-flops. Emily also had on a funky muscle-tee with neat kanji on the front, right on top of those teeny boobs I used to love putting my mouth all over. I couldn't help but wonder how my new girly lips would feel on them. But then I felt that disgusting sugary-sickly feeling again, teamed up this time with a painful wave of nostalgia, so I tried to concentrate on the other scenery. We stopped once for Emily to draw a quick gestural drawing of a stinky dead fish while I held my nose.

I have to admit, if I'd still been a guy and I'd seen the two of us walking along in the orange sunset, I'd have had to look twice. I mean, Emily was all long and lanky, all legs but with this slouchy grace as she walked the shoreline. And I'm sure little Amy in her boy clothes was just as cute as a bug, trying to keep up as best she could. Bouncy ponytails. I felt them softly batting my head and snorted.
We made it to the pier and before too long, they came: horny guys. It was like Emily sent out some sort of signal they caught on the stiff gulf breeze. Shirtless tourist guys, locals in jeans, the Abercrombie & Fitch crowd, Tommy Hilfigers, the JCrew Crew, Gappers, Old Navy sailors, Plaid Dorks, grunge diehards, suburban hip-hoppers, none of them seemingly her type-- no pale artists or solipsistic indie rockers here on the beach. Emily basked in their attention, but she cut her eyes at me constantly. I set my mouth in a tight, lipless frown.

"Uh, hey," one of the braver guys ventured. Emily had her sketchbook open and pencil ready, but she smiled at him, which, for reasons obvious to anyone who's ever met her, encouraged him to stop and lean against the wooden railing. "Cool sunset, huh?"

"Um, sure," Emily said. Quick glance at me, sketchbook shut.

"Hey, uh, my name's Todd," the interloper said. No interest in her drawings.

"Emily. And this is Amy." Grrr...

Todd Interloper offered us both his hand to shake. Emily took it, I looked away, like he'd tried to hand me a fresh turd.

"Oh, is that sand down there?" I said, as if I'd seen the beach for the first time. Todd's turd-hand slowly dropped.

"So, where you staying?" he wanted to know.

"Over that way."

"Cool. Nice places there. Staying long?"

"We're leaving tomorrow," I said, sharply.

Emily put her arms around me from behind and started rocking me. I sent mental "go away" signals to Todd, but failed just as I had in Macy’s. Had Professor X taught me nothing? Powerless Girl. Failure Bitch. Kid Useless.

"Actually, we're staying a week," Emily said.

Was she interested in this guy? He looked like a lame-o to me, the complete Mr. Jackass package, not at all the type of guy she'd go for back home. And his attempts at conversation? Please. Come on, Emily, ditch this sack of shit, I thought. You're ten times smarter than he is!

"Cool. Maybe we can… uh… you know, hang out, and stuff."

"Maybe." No, not maybe. Definitely not! Not ever! And absolutely no "stuff."

Emily and I made our way back to the house not long after that, and if anybody had heard our conversation on the way, they would've felt severely confused. Schizophrenic, even, as hallucinatory as it must have been. Because I really let Emily have it, and loudly, which was the completely wrong thing to do, looking back. But I wasn't feeling too understanding at the time. No, this time, I wanted to fight, to draw blood.

“That stupid fucker!” I said. “And you were like flirting with him and everything.”

“I was not. It’s called being friendly.”

“That’s how friendly you were with me the first time we met. Yeah.”

“Dude, being social is my normal state of being. If you want to hate everyone and everything, that’s your business. I’m down her trying to have fun.”

“That guy was hitting on you.”

“So what? Like I can control stupid shit other people do?”

“You didn’t have to flirt back. You could’ve been like, ‘I’m here with my cousin, and it’s a family vacation, so see ya, Todd McMotherfucker.’”

"Well, yeah, I thought he was... you know… attractive," she said. The pause before "attractive" meant he got her motor going. Really got it going, or she would've said something cruder, and made it out to be a joke.

Devastation. An emotional Hiroshima, a Nagasaki. A Bikini Atoll. She’d blown my ass completely away, taken my love and annihilated it, spreading it like fallout across the stratosphere where it would join the chattering background radiation of every romantic failure ever. Hurt replaced anger and now my heart was booming.

"Emily, I'm still your boyfriend in here!" A desperation ploy. High-pitched, a little too whiny.

"Just give me time to figure this out," she said. Then, quietly, "I just don't know. I'm still just... weirded out by this whole thing..."

"Are you saying you want to break up with me?"

"Break up? Are we even together anymore? I mean, look at us-- we're both girls. And not only that, you're a little girl. It's wrong, that's all. Wrong."

"How can it be wrong when I'm still the same person inside? I love you."

"And I love you. Just not in that way... anymore."

“But…”

“A-and… I haven’t. Not for a while now.” Her voice broke as she said it. Then, very quietly, “And now you know.”

Emily went silently over the dunes and through the sea oats towards our house and I plopped my skinny little girl ass on the sand and prayed the tide would roll right over me and carry me off to faraway Mexico or around the Keys into the Atlantic where I could sink forever into the deep. The Pixies's "Wave of Mutilation" started playing itself in my mind. I was riding a real wave of that nature- my life was completely mutilated. I'd just lost my greatest heart's desire and I was going to be an observer of her love life from now on, instead of a participant. But realistically, what was I asking Emily to do-- molest me?

Even if she were gay or bi, how could I expect her to want to do that?

And from somewhere in the darkness, that crappy "beach baby, beach baby, give me your hand" song came wafting on the wind. It was like this falsetto-singing Brian Wilson wannabe was talking directly to me.

I got up, found a young couple making out on a towel with a boombox nearby. I got a little glow from their befuddled facial expressions as they watched this tiny cross-dressed Japanese girl stalk out of the darkness and, with a fierce look (and a wimpy grunt), take their radio and throw it into the water where it promptly shorted out completely. Of all the-- ! This is an outrage! We demand to speak to the management! Their eyes went round and their mouths gaped, but they didn't dare say a word; I vanished as quickly as I had appeared.
Finally, I had my X-Men code name: Anti-Oldies Avenger of the Night.

Chapter Seven:
Drowned Rat-Girl

The next morning, despite all the tension and silence between Emily and me, we went down to the beach and set up our little Komori family play area. Mrs. Komori tried to talk to us, but gave up after a while. Probably tired of one-word answers or indecipherable sounds. She sat in a beach chair and tried to read, her eyes hidden behind large, dark sunglasses, her body slumping like someone near defeat.
“You want some sunscreen?” she asked me.

“Uh huh,” I answered, totally uninterested. She coated me in it and I sat on my towel watching the clouds. I tried not to think of anything at all. A cloud for my brain. Nothing in it. A cloud in my chest. Nothing there, either. Not a heart. Nope.

Emily stirred beside me, a Rolling Stone magazine occupying her attention.

When I got bored, I went down to the water and played in the surf. I quickly found my new, practically bird-weight form was a bit more vulnerable while body-surfing than my old one had been. Storms out over the Gulf had stirred up its usual placid, mirror-like surface and turned the water into Chop City. Several times, the merciless waves did me like a cigarette and stubbed me out on the sandy bottom. Not fair.

One time, I came up sputtering, salt water burning my eyes, snot running out of my nose, my knees sore and bleeding a little from the vicious sandpapering they’d received. I couldn’t see much, just dazzling lights everywhere and then I got blindsided by another wave and tumbled ass-over-teakettle in the white foam. Underwater, I saw green and a froth of bubbles, brine gagging me as sea water went down my esophagus into my lungs. I might have even been yelling, but my ears were also full of sea water and all I could hear was Neptune’s roar.
Then someone was splashing near me and pulling me close. It was Emily. She kicked until we were out of the breakers and bobbing up and down where the bottom dropped away. I coughed until I felt I was about to puke. More mucus poured from my nose.

“You okay?” Emily asked.

I was afraid to open my eyes because of the burning and I couldn’t speak, so I nodded.

“You don’t look it.”

“I’m fine,” I croaked. I wanted to add, “Since when do you care?” but obviously she did or she wouldn’t have been holding me up, her legs thrumming down below to generate buoyancy. I pushed away from her and started kicking, my arms outstretched on the water’s surface. “Thanks.”

“I thought you were going to fuckin’ drown, dude,” Emily said.

Wiping my face did nothing but rub more salt and sand into my already overloaded eyes, but I opened them against the pain and looked at her as best I could. Her own dark eyes were wide, her black hair smeared across her face like thick ink. She looked crazed. I knew she was scared, maybe more scared than I had been.

“I didn’t drown, so don’t sweat it.”

“You almost did! Don’t try to play it off like you didn’t.”

I swept my own heavy bangs out of my eyes and smiled at her. “It’s casual,” I said.

Emily recognized the line instantly. It was from the stoner flick “The Wild Life,” one of her childhood favorites, one we’d watched a few times back when I was her boyfriend. She grinned, stuck out her tongue at me and ducked me underwater, as if to complete the job the Gulf had started.

“What the fuck, dude?” I gasped when I bobbed back up.

“Don’t you ever fucking die on me,” Emily said and we swam back to shore where we plopped ourselves down on our towels and trembled despite the scorching heat. The rawness was still there between us, but now we could talk again and be around each other without dwelling on it.

I sat with my legs pretzel style and Emily stretched out and put on her sunglasses. On the table next to us, her little CD stereo played one of her special mix disks, some Pixies, some Bratmobile, some Jane’s Addiction and a couple of songs by Frente. “Accidentally Kelly Street” just happened to be on, a jaunty little song that kept me from feeling overly sad while I watched the waves pounding other swimmers.

So this is what a Komori beach trip is like, I thought.

A whole week far from home and the miserable past. I wore the green one-piece at first, but gave it up because it just felt too awkward and I couldn’t get used to it. I switched to the blue two-piece and found I could just kind of ignore the top. My high, chubby Japanese cheeks got rosy from the sun. My body darkened, especially my elbows and knees. As Martin, I'd been one of those instant burn-and-peelers.
Emily wore several tantalizing suits that showed off her long, slim Emily-self, and she got beautifully brown. I had a few emotional moments when we rubbed sunblock on each other. One day, Emily got sand down her bikini bottom and when she pulled the waist out to brush out the grit, I caught a glimpse of her pale tan line and what I thought were a few dark, curly hairs. I had to go back to the house to use the bathroom and I tried doing something I'd read about girls doing, but I must've been too young for it to really work. Or maybe I was just doing it wrong; it's not as though I could ask anyone.

There were a couple of more close calls with that Todd character and some guys-- and once, this chubby kid who looked like a hairless pink seal let me try his skimboard, but when he asked me to come to the pier with him that night, I took off running-- but for some reason, Emily held back. It may have been to avoid hurting me anymore than she already had, and I suspected it was just killing her inside. I think I mentioned before, Emily really liked to do it. During our time together, I’d come to the conclusion Emily was just sort of like a guy about sexual matters. Now I imagined that was making my transition difficult for her. Not just end of our emotional closeness, but the lack of It, the withdrawal of the physical.

My little family got into a sleepy rhythm at the beach, no more arguments. I dealt with the vacuum inside where my love for Emily used to fill me and just pretended to be her cousin, or sister. It wasn’t that difficult as long as I went with that beachy rhythm. Some nights, we'd come in with our skin hot from all the sun and just collapse in a heap, exhausted. Mrs. Komori cooked for us and we relaxed in the air-conditioned coolness and watched "Nick at Night." We loved “The Adventures of Pete and Pete,” and “Are You Afraid of the Dark,” plus all the cartoons. “Ren and Stimpy,” “Aaahh!!! Real Monsters.” Fun stuff that prevented troubling thoughts. Emily would braid my hair and I'd let her. Sometimes, she'd make a couple of short pigtails, and sometimes, she'd go crazy and braid it all up as many times as she could.

"You should get it cut so when it grows out more, it'll be cute," Emily said. "You know, bangs and sort of a pixie cut."

"Uh huh," I said absently, just enjoying the feeling of her hands in my hair. We both sat cross-legged on the couch, me in front, Emily behind. She would play with my hair endlessly, but not endlessly enough for my taste.

We dined out. I got children's plates wherever we went. And we shopped, which was still stultifying as fuck, but when Mrs. Komori found out I wasn’t enjoying it at all, I was able to guilt her into buying me a skimboard. Then I managed to skin my ass on the wet sand- it felt just like concrete. I would've been uninjured if I'd been wearing sensible swim trunks instead of that stupid blue bathing suit. I made a mental note to ask for board shorts or something.

Embarrassment time: tan lines. Sure, I turned a nice rosy brown, but I stayed pale around my chest and groin. I had this irrational fear people would know I'd been wearing a bikini. Of fucking course I'd been wearing a bikini; those women in Macy’s were right, after all, I decided. I was a black haired, dark-eyed, broad-faced, chubby cheeked skinny little shorty girl. Bikinis-R-Me. A million bikinis for Amy Komori. Dresses—especially that stupid Macy’s sundress. Bring them to me.

Before and after showers, I practiced looking mean in the mirror, but could only look silly. I had to remember to wrap the towel around my chest, not that I had anything to hide. Yet.
And so it went. Up at dawn, breakfast, into our swimsuits, down to the beach, back for lunch, down to the beach, showers, supper, twilight walk along the water's edge, then back to bed. Emily and I spent the week half naked, and got incredibly dark all over.

Friday night, Emily and I sat out on the beach in lawn chairs and watched the sun set. I felt something touch my hand, and then we were holding hands, just like we did in the old days, before my change. I squeezed and she squeezed back as the sun dipped below the horizon, half over water, half over land. The stars came out. The next day, we packed it up and went home.

Book Three
Little Orphan Amy!


Chapter Eight:
Liz Phair’s Second Album

I still had no real identity, but once we got back from Florida, Mrs. Komori started building a fake one for me. The idea was that as soon as Mrs. Komori could swing it, Amy Komori would become a real live girl, with a Social Security number, a school record and a past. Mr. Komori had been a lawyer, and Mrs. Komori had connections, so she knew what records were needed and what wheels to grease.
The initial discussion—“This is what I’m going to do.”—ended with a debate on whether or not I should go to school in the fall. I was against it; after all, I'd already been and graduated. But Mrs. Komori insisted it'd enable me to create a life. Maybe becoming socialized would help me forge some kind of compromise between my body and my mind. After that, I left it to her.

"Hey, think of the grades you'll make," Emily told me later that night. "You already know all that shit."

“Think of all the stupid things I’ll have to put up with,” I said. “Getting up early, obeying rules, passing tests, eating crappy cafeteria food, making friends, figuring out social cliques.”

“You did all that when you were in school?”

“I tried to. Kinda, I guess.”

“You must’ve been a little kiss-ass. A total brown-noser.”

“I wasn’t. I got in trouble a lot, too.”

“I didn’t. I got away with everything. Therefore, you must also have been stupid.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it, Bullshitter. You did not get away with everything. You told me about the time you and that girl whatshername got caught leaving school grounds—“
“It’s like when you lost your rod, you totally lost your sense of humor, too.”

“I—“ Damn, it was always so easy for Emily to put me on. I was helpless against her.

Mrs. Komori worked all day, then made dinner for us and spent her evenings doing paperwork at the dining room table. I burned with curiosity as to where she came up with all this information. As far as the system goes, a person is information. Without that, you weren’t a person. I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and asked her.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she told me. “In order to do this, I’m having to call in a lot of favors from people and it’s difficult keeping everything straight. So what I’m doing is, I’m using a lot of my own little biographical details. It’s easier for me to remember my own life than make up one up for you. Is… is that okay?”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

What did it matter? I was just shocked an upstanding citizen like Mrs. Komori would do something for my sake that was what you might call "somewhat dodgy." As in "totally fucking illegal in all fifty states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands." A big ass federal crime. Not that we were going to use it for outright fraud. Well, I suppose someone could argue that point in criminal court, but we weren’t out to scam little old ladies. Just the United States as a whole. For all intents and purposes, Martin was as dead as Kurt Cobain. Deader, even, because at least Cobain left a musical legacy. All Martin left was a broken lease. So why did Amy Komori have to be his corpse?

I looked over Mrs. Komori’s shoulder at the piles of paper. Reading her neat handwriting, I learned I’d just turned twelve years old and was whip-smart, as Liz Phair might have it. Mrs. Komori apparently started first grade at 5 years old, the little nerd; this meant Amy did, too, and was also a nerd. Based on transposed details from Mrs. Komori’s childhood, I discovered that at Amy's previous school, she took advanced placement classes, was active in both the Glee and Science clubs and the Gifted Program. The only thing Amy’s biography gleaned from my own was her ability to play guitar somewhat as evidenced by her short stint in the school’s mariachi band. That last bit was my singular contribution.

As I read the notes and letters, tragedy entered into it— Amy Komori wasn’t exactly Mrs. Komori’s niece: she was the daughter of some distant relatives, orphaned at a young age. Traffic accident. She’d lived with a series of foster parents until Mrs. Komori learned of her pitiful existence and enfolded her back into the loving embrace of family. What a lucky child.

“What are you gonna tell like your real relatives, Mrs. Komori?” I asked. “I mean, they’ll kinda know you didn’t adopt me from any other branch of Komoris. And even if you did, it went through pretty fu—uh—freakin’ fast.”

“Oh, I’ll figure something out,” she said. “Um… the less you know about this part of it, the better.”

“You want me to…”

“A little privacy, yeah.”

I left the dining room and went back to my room. Somewhere down the hallway, Mrs. Komori was creating me. A girl of paper was forming on that dining room table, and she was me and I was her, and I’d be her flesh and that was that. I'd start back to school in the fall. But first, there was the last month or so of summer, and a lot of things to work out in my head.

Emily knocked and came in. She sat on the corner of my bed and said, “Mom’s pretty busy, huh?”

“Yeah, she’s giving birth to me.”

We both laughed a little at that.

“I’m an orphan, apparently. I’m not sure if I’m adopted or just living with you guys.”

“Well, that makes sense. I mean, no one’s ever going to believe you’re my natural sister. You don’t look anything like me.”

“Well, she’s still gonna have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do, mang,” I said, aping Al Pacino in “Scarface,” which had been on TV the night before.

“Jou don’ worry jour leetle head about that, mang,” Emily teased. She ruffled my hair. “Oh fuck me, what a mop.”

“Lemme introduce jou to… I kinda… wish I did look more like you.”

“Really? Why?”

“I dunno. I don’t wanna open up a whole can of dead worms or anything, but I didn’t date you ‘cause of your brilliant mind.”

“Oh, fuck you. You did so.”

“Okay, that was part of it.”

“’Cause I am a fuckin’ genius. I can do all kinds of maths and scientifical junk.”

I smiled mysteriously and said no more. But it was true. I did kind of wish I looked more like Emily. Maybe we truly could be sisters, then. I couldn’t remember a time in my life when I wished I looked like any girl, but there it was.

“You look…” Emily said, and she searched for a suitable adjective. “Well, I don’t want to insult you by saying cute. You’re a really good looking kid, Marty-boy.”

“I look half starved.”

“You’re an orphan. All the coolest orphans look that way. Oliver Twist, Annie… um… that… other one…”

“There is no other one.”

“Yeah, that one!”

The phone was ringing and Emily hopped off the bed to answer it. It was Darla or someone and then I was alone to fend for myself during the long hot dog days before fall and school.

Chapter Nine:
Amy Goes Rolling

With Mrs. Komori creating me from thin air and her own childhood, and Emily gone with her friends so much, I learned to amuse myself. How I chose to do that was with a pair of inline skates I found in Emily's closet. If I wore three pairs of socks, I could wear the skates and stumble around in them out on our driveway to my heart's content. Mrs. Komori saw me one morning, and took me to the mall (those punks again!) and bought me a pair my size, plus some pads and a helmet and I took to skating right away, as if I’d been born with wheels on my feet.

Since I weighed about as much as if I'd been carved from balsa wood, flat surface skating came easy for me. Looking for a challenge one afternoon, I tossed on the last remaining pair of my humungous boy's pants and a tee, my helmet and knee pads (they go under the pants, by the way) and headed the empty parking lot that passed for the local skate park.

Where those same skater punks who harassed me hung out when they weren’t propping up the dry fountain at the mall or huffing glue.

When I first got to the skate park and saw them there, I almost turned around and went home. I could feel fear, palpable and strong, like a clammy hand around my chest and stomach, squeezing. I trembled with adrenaline, ready for fight or flight. Somehow, I forced myself to stay. I just made sure I kept as far from them as possible without rolling on the sidewalk. It wasn’t long before they noticed me gliding around by myself at the far end of the lot.

First came giggles, then coughs. After that didn’t work, they started upping the ante with nasty sexual remarks that got louder and more pornographically detailed until they caused my face to burn. But they directed their most vicious remarks at my inline skates.

Scared to the point of almost peeing in my pants by them, I still showed up day after day, just to prove something to them and myself. I skated through a shitstorm of verbal abuse.

“Look at that stupid bitch,” one kid would say and I’d fume and try a 360—or even a 180-- crack up and land with a loud, “OOF!” and a clatter of plastic, narrowly avoiding the shattered beer bottles glittering diamond-like on the lumpy asphalt. If I hadn’t had that helmet, I would have scrambled my brains.

The umpteenth time I destroyed myself in one of my spectacular, sprawling, incredibly painful falls, one of the kids ironically called me “Maki,” after an aggressive skater who had recently been on ESPN. His buddies had no idea who she was, so he explained it like this: “She looks like that fuckin’ Maki off that rollerblading shit. Did you see that the other day?”

“Fuckin’ rollerbladers, dude. Get that weak shit outta here.”

“I’d fuck that Brazilian chick, though, dude.”

“Why don’t you fuckin’ go home and play with your precious little Barbie dolls, Maki?” another one said.

“Why don’t you go home and play with your precious little dick?” I told him. I got up with my head turned away from them so they wouldn’t see my shameful tears, wiped them away on my shoulder. I looked down at my bony brown forearms, my dumb arms with little pills of rubbed-off skin and shiny red blood droplets starting to bead up among them, then over at him with narrowed eyes and the boys all reacted with mock fright, trying to embarrass me more.

But as the days went by, I learned a lot of the intimidation they’d aimed at me was from their own internal insecurities. They could glide around on their skateboards and do ollies and kick flips and 540s, and curse and spit and call me a stupid girl and a rollerblader, but they weren’t actually going to do anything physically. They were too scared of each other and their opinions to risk humiliation if I proved to be a little wildcat or something. They weren’t even trying to break me, I realized.

They were trying to break me in. Finally, one of them actually talked to me like a human being.

“Hey, Maki,” he said from under his blond hair, his eyes squinting at me, his head at an angle. He held his skate deck under his arm, and I could see blood running down from his elbow in bright rivulets, a startling crimsom against his pale skin.

“What?” I said with an exasperated snort.

“Where you from?”

“Cali,” I lied. “My name’s not Maki.”

“Oh? What is it?”

“Ma—my name is Amy.”

“How come you do rollerblading?”

“It’s not rollerblading. Roller Blades is a brand name. These are…” Actually, I didn’t know what brand my skates were. El Cheapo Grandos from Toys-R-Us or something.

“Whatever. How come you do it? You’re like the only kid I know who does it.”

I decided to play it tough, with a thundering in my chest making me feel anything but. “What makes you think you know me?”

He kind of smiled, his upper lip rising to show perfect white teeth, the results of his parents’ belief in high-priced orthodontia. About an hour later, he’d broken out all the front ones and his mouth was a huge red smear that made everyone forget about his damaged elbow. He cried like a baby and I threw up twice before his parents came to take him to the ER or dentist or wherever. But by the time that happened, I was grudgingly accepted as part of the tribe. The girl who was into the lamest, most weak-ass shit anyone could be into, but with her own little niche nevertheless.

Later that summer, someone built a wooden vert and I set about learning how to do what I learned the aggressive skaters called “pumping it,” which sounded nasty but was anything but. Since everyone around me was a skateboarder, I had to figure it out for myself from skating videos and magazines. Starting in the middle, I rode up, back down, up, back and forth like a timid old lady re-learning how to walk after rehabbing a broken hip, trying to go higher and higher while everyone waited, their impatient energy making me push myself. It was scary as hell at first, but once I gave into gravity and started tucking into the drop, I found myself going high and higher up the vert walls. Pumping on a vert. Now I was almost skating for real.

My breakthrough was when I managed to do a 180 without falling to my knees and sliding down amid the same mocking, egalitarian laughter that greeted the boys’ crashes. With that figured out, I got higher and higher up the vert walls with every run until one spectacular afternoon I reached the coping… and went above it.

I shrieked with joy!

And because I was so light, I could throw my bird-weight body up until I felt almost as if I were flying and not care if I broke my neck. I’d explode upward into the sun, these crazy high-pitched sounds coming out of my lungs and throat in a completely involuntary reaction. It felt so good, I almost wet my pants. I was reusable like the space shuttle, launching myself over and over, rising ever upward. Total fucking rapture!

As soon as everyone saw how massive my airs were, they re-nicknamed me Ayumi, after another Japanese professional skater-- not that I was anywhere near her class—because it was closer to my real name.

This time I didn’t mind having a nickname because I was actually becoming better at riding the vert—and everyone enjoyed my sliding, crashing failures at doing anything more than a 180, although I tried and tried to do 360s and once even a flatspin-- than most of the local posers on their skateboards. There were a few hardcore guys who were miles better than the rest, of course. But fear of bodily harm kept the rank and file somewhat in check, whereas vert rash made me feel strong again.

Badass in a way I'd never even felt when I had XY chromosomes. Kinda. To an extent...

Once I’d proven I could skate with the woodpushers and take their shit, the boys started getting other ideas about me, and that was definitely not something I wanted or needed. I had just about reached a point where, when I skated, I could almost forget I was girl; suddenly, I ran into a reminder of it, as big as a billboard and as brightly lit.

"Hey, Ayumi," my new friend Patrick, he of the newly-repaired grillwork (his smile still wasn't quite the same as it had been the day he first dared talk to me), said as I painted flowers on his skate deck with a paint marker, my tongue sticking out from concentration. I could feel his hot breath on my bare neck and I was vaguely considering brushing him away as if he were a fly or gnat. He was leaning way over, getting a little closer with every breath.

"I'm doing this, dude," I told him softly. I intently formed a petal.

"I finally got a fuckin’ Playstation for my birthday. Wanna come over?"

I was about to say, “Sure,” when Patrick did something that made me shy away like a skittish kitten. He reached out and started stroking a tuft of my hair behind my ear in this flirtatious way, with the backs of his fingers against my neck. As I squirmed, I looked up at him and he had this sex-creep expression in his eyes that set me off in a major way.

"Fuck you!" I snarled. I threw the marker at him, pushed him on his ass. As I skated away, I could feel his and everyone else’s admiring looks all over me as they poked loud, braying fun at Patrick for liking boyish Ayumi the way guys like girls, and at me for getting so freaked out about it. All I could think was, Don't look at me like that! Don't think those things about me!

I stopped, wheeled around, balled my fists on my hips and jeered, "Fuck all you little Playstation-playing pussies!"

Immediately, everyone shut up. They looked so stupid, like a bunch of dressed-up chimps, I started laughing my ass off. I felt like Emily all of a sudden.

Patrick wasn't quite so friendly the rest of the day, and there weren't so many one-of-the-gang put-downs directed at me. I got a wide berth.

A few girls had just started coming around the vert, so the next day, I hung with them when I wasn't up. We chatted about skating and general topics like school and music. It lasted until that afternoon.
The Patrick incident had flamed out one of my engines, but the next thing sent Amyplane right into the mountain. I was just blabbing about some general topic and this one girl flat out told me, "Geez, Amy, I wish you were a guy-- you'd make a cool boyfriend."

I grinned like an idiot and just about melted into the gutter and down the storm drain. It was flattering but as I chewed my lower lip trying to think of something to say back, I fractured. Apparently, I was more brittle than Patrick’s teeth.

“I-I better go,” I said.

“Why?”

“I just have to.”

Rolling back home was a blur. I just wanted to be away from everyone and in a neutral space. Not black, not white, not gray. Beige. A beige zone.

“You’re back early,” Emily called from her bedroom when she heard me come in.

Finding her home perked me up a little. I thought, Yeah! It's about damn time I got her to myself! I quickly threw my skates and helmet on the floor in my room, pulled off my knee pads and pants, changed to shorts and went to talk to her about everything that had been happening lately.

She and Darla were sitting on the floor, their backs against the bed, both of them holding scissors, colored construction paper scattered around them. Darla gave me a look, a jack-o-lantern stare, a mysterious flickering behind her eyes. A scary look.

I backed out quickly, alone with my troubles. I took a shower, wrapped myself in a towel and plopped myself on my bed with my hair wet. I could hear Darla and Emily murmuring to each other right through the wall. I tried to force some tears, hoping I could squeeze out the hurt the way I would a big ol’ turd, but nothing happened except a few dry sobs. That ended my first stint as an aggressive inline skater. I just didn’t have the heart to go back to the skate park and face those kids. I couldn’t be anyone’s girlfriend. I couldn’t be anyone’s boyfriend. I couldn’t be anyone’s anything.

Chapter Ten:
The Loneliest Fairy Princess

At home, not wanting to do anything and mired in this sludge-like personal inertia, I moped for a day or two, rarely getting out of bed at all except to pee or poop. My inline skates, helmet and pads lay where’d I’d dropped them on the floor. Sometimes I rolled over in bed and stared at them through the black foliage of my hair, blinking because the strands tickled my eyelashes. Disinterested. The ceiling light reflected dully on the plastic skates, the bland wall beyond.

“You wanna go somewhere?” Emily asked through the door. I thought to myself, You’re just asking because you feel guilty about abandoning me. As soon as one of your friends calls, you’ll ditch me.
“Go away,” I told her. And she did.

It was like being in limbo. Male soul, female body. No one could possibly understand how it felt. Well, maybe a few people could, but they had been born with it; mine happened while I was conscious of every little development. Ugh… so fucking complicated! Skating had been a release until the kids started rubbing my condition in my face, however inadvertently. Skating sucks, I thought. The whole world sucks.

But I could feel myself coming to a decision. While Emily had been this huge “Grease 2” fan, I knew “Grease” to be the superior movie and I’d forced her to watch it with me once (although afterwards she told me she hated it, simply out of spite). Yeah, “Grease.” For some reason, I started thinking about how, towards the end, Sandy realizes she can’t go on living as this sweetie-pie girl next door and keep Danny Zucco. So she gets Pinky to trick her out head to toe in bad-ass black and tease up her hair. At the school fair, she blows Danny’s brains out with her smoldering sexiness and they sing and dance and fly away in a fantasy version of Greased Lightning, their pet hot rod, probably to some castle in the sky where they fuck like crazed monkeys. Okay, that last part was my own story innovation but it was at least hinted at, right? I felt dumb framing my dilemma in terms of Sandy’s choice, but maybe genderless freak wasn’t what I was meant to be anymore than she was meant to be a naïve young virgin. A wild sex kitten had been living inside Sandy all the time.

What lived inside me?

Maybe some kind of girl. Yeah, I should just fucking go all the way and be a girl, I thought, and my mood-clouds parted with a hint of a sun reluctant to show itself for fear it was all just a joke. I imagined it as looking a little like the Raisins Bran sun, with a face and everything. No, Mr. Sun, it’s definitely no joke. I’m totally serious about this.

Then I lectured myself: I mean, maybe that’s the message you received from your secret heart when you fell in love with that sundress at Macy’s, and you can’t deny it ‘cuz you know you wanted it. You wanted it at the store, you wanted it at the beach. That was your heart saying, “You are a girl now. Go ahead and be one!”

It felt good to admit it. Yeah, I agreed with myself, I could just try being a girl. I mean, that’s what Patrick wants me to be. That must be what God or Satan or Darla or a virus or bacteria or whoever or whatever turned me into this wanted as well, or why else would I be lying there feeling so tiny and helpless? That’s what that Macy’s asshole sales guy and those little old ladies want. Everyone wants me to be a girl, so why shouldn’t I get with the program and be happy for once?

The sun was out and smiling and showering me in raisins while I danced in the vineyard. I sat up, got dressed and went into the kitchen where Mrs. Komori was enjoying a Saturday morning off.

“Um, I have an announcement to make,” I said.

“Okay…” Mrs. Komori said, looking a little confused.

“I-I kinda… I want to get some girl clothes and try… you know…”

“Try them on?”

“Well, that, too. But I mean more like try on… gender. I want to try on a new gender. I mean, the way I see it, I may be a guy inside and stuff but maybe I could try being a girl. Just to see if I can do it. Like it. See if I like it. Or something.”

“And you feel you need girl’s clothes to do that?”

“Yeah. I mean, don’t I?”

“If you want them, I guess. I mean, personally, I don’t feel clothes make any difference. I mean, if you’re happy dressing like a boy…”

“But I’m not. That’s the point. I’m miserable like this. I don’t know what I am.”

“You’re you. You’re Martin.”

“Yeah, but that’s just it. I don’t know if I am anymore. Inside, yeah. But like when I was skating I was free but then the… Patrick? He he like… like-liked me. A-and this one girl… It was like I couldn’t escape. But it’s like why did they have to treat me like that? Why couldn’t I be just a person with them? When I did things before, as a guy, I was Martin. Now when I do things, I’m Amy to everyone else no matter how I think about myself. It’s like everyone wants me to do this. So I’m ready. I wanna do it.”

“Slow down. You’re really not making any sense at all.”

She was right. I’d been babbling and waving my hands around like a crazy person. But I was thinking on the fly, working out things out loud instead of in my internal dialogue. It was a jumble but what I was trying to explain to her was this feeling that Martin-soul in Martin-body equaled one person, Martin-soul in Amy-body equaled another person. I’d tried just being the old me wearing a new skin, but it led me to ennui, to malaise, defeat, depression, gloom and bizarre fixations on Olivia Newton-John and the Kellogg’s Raisin Bran cereal mascot. I had to be a new me. The one people expected when they saw this bony girl.

So I cajoled Mrs. Komori into dragging me right back to that Macy’s store—I was so impatient to get out to the mall I was actually squirming and grinning like an idiot in the car-- and buying some tops, dresses and skirts for me. Since school was coming up, we needed to be practical and mostly bought items for fall, but they were all intensely feminine in a wannabe teeny-bopper way. This time, when I tried clothes on, everyone seemed to approve; I was being rewarded for doing things in the right way. If Mrs. Komori evinced any doubt, she was careful not to voice any misgivings.

“You look great, Amy,” she said, but I thought I heard something off in her tone.

I was too busy, too focused to care.

“I wanna check one more thing,” I said. My eye brows up, I looked questioningly at the clearance rack. End of season sales, big mark downs and discounts. Would it be there? What if it wasn’t? I bounced over to check…

And it was. That little sundress, like pure love made of cotton and summery colors. It had waited for me, and this had to be a sign from the gender gods. We’re well pleased with you, Daughter of Eve. I beamed happily as I took it off the rack, but turned to Mrs. Komori with this hesitant, embarrassed feeling in my stomach. Oh shit, what was Emily going to say or think? She knew I wanted this stupid thing since way back and she was gonna give me so much shit about it! But the wanting was strong and overrode all other desires and fears.

“That’s soo cute,” the sales woman told me. Mrs. Komori came over, felt the material, and checked the price tag, which was marked in red. It was super cheap.

She said, “Go. Go try it on. I’ll wait.”

I practically ran to the dressing room. I couldn’t remember being this excited about a piece of clothing in my life. I pictured myself skating in my old Martin pants hurling skyward off the vert into an impossibly vivid sky, a kind of shaky-cam mind-video of the butch little monster I’d been less than a week before. As I slipped out of my clothes for the billionth time that day and into the sundress-- the pale lines on my shoulders sharply contrasted with the darkness of my tanned skin-- I saw that aggressive skater girl take a huge tumble and come up changed. There she was in the mirror, farmer tan and all, but much softer now, frail and pretty. Black hair, ridiculous. Black eyes, glittering. High cheeks, long nose, a couple of black freckles like lonely stars in an empty galaxy, waif-thin body in a floral dress that came down to just past my almost chocolate knees.

Oh fuck yeah, I sighed to myself. This is what I was craving all along. Despite the misgivings in her eyes, Mrs. Komori took it all so bravely. She even greeted me with a supportive hug, helped me pick out a sweet pair of brown Teva sandals to complete my sundress outfit, plus enough undies to last two weeks and put all my discoveries on her credit card to boot. I felt warm all over as I wore the sundress and sandals home, the cashier cutting the plastic tags for me while I stood there smiling.

My cheeks hurt!

Emily was in the kitchen drinking a Dr. Pepper when we came in. She did a spit take, spewing soda and foam all over the kitchen counter, which pissed off Mrs. Komori and led to a short little argument between them while I put the bags in my bedroom. I checked myself in the mirror. Still a girl, I thought.

“Marty-marts!” Emily called. “Come lemme see your new look!”

I bit my lip. Oh fuck, here we go, I thought, and walked down the hall, my arms stiff at my sides. I stepped into the kitchen and Emily was still wiping up her mess with a paper towel. She stopped and looked me all over.

“Turn around,” she said.

I folded my lips back and mashed them firmly with my teeth as I slowly rotated.

“Wow,” Emily said. “I mean, just wow!”

“Wow good or wow bad?” I asked.

“I don’t know. How does it feel?”

“Pretty good. I didn’t tell you before, but I’ve decided I’m gonna try to be a girl now.”

“Okay… Don’t know why you need a dress to—“

“Emily,” Mrs. Komori said, a warning in her voice. “This is what she wants.”

“She?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And you don’t have to call me Martin anymore. Just Amy.”

“I was already doing that half the time anyways, in case you didn’t notice.”

“I noticed.”

“Well… okay. I mean, good for you. I just think you should be who you are—“

“This is who I am. Now.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.”

Emily was really scrutinizing me. I could tell her bullshit detectors were working overtime and she usually had them set to high-gain or ultra-sensitive frequencies anyways. I had no idea what she detected there in the kitchen, or what she thought she was detecting.

Mrs. Komori left us alone to go put up her bag and car keys. Emily came over to me and flicked the little string bow over my left shoulder. She circled me, just looking down at me. It made me feel pretty dumb, almost naked. She appraised me with her artist’s eye and that cunning, evil genius mind of hers.

“Yeah, I knew you wanted this dress the first time you saw it,” she said quietly, her voice almost conspiratorial. “I just never expected to actually see you in it.”

“Yeah. I dunno why I wanted it. Something just clicked.”

“That’s cool. You look really good in it. Remember when I suggested getting a haircut? You should let me take you to the place I get mine done. If you want.”

“Yeah, cool.”

“I’ve kinda been neglecting you, but there’s all this shit I have to do before school starts back.”

“Yeah, I remember what it was like. I guess I’m on track to start… I don’t know what grade. Seventh?”

“Um… Amy?”

“Yeah?”

“You really know… like dresses and stuff? I mean, yeah, I like them too and all but it’s not really necessary or anything. If you really do want to be a girl, just be one in your own way.”

“This is my own way.”

“I hope so.” Then she added, softly, “Or you’re in for a wicked surprise.”

The following Monday, wearing my awesome, freshly laundered sundress, I took Emily up on the haircut thing. She had her hairdresser—this muscular cool dude in a tight tee and jeans—give me a bob with short bangs and little points curling below my tiny ears, the back practically shaved. We hit Moldy Oldies for a vintage dress, long and in ice blue velvet. Seemed like the thing to do. I felt so adorable, it was sickening.

Little Amy Girly-girl. I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was doing, but I worked at it with more diligence than I’d ever approached anything before, other than aggressive inline skating. In a way, it was like learning to pump on the vert all over again. It was certainly very physical. I tried walking like a girl, talking like a girl. And while it caused me pain at first, I fake-giggled a lot.

But whenever we drove past the skatepark on some Komori family errand, I ducked down in the car so Patrick and the others wouldn’t see what I’d become. They probably don’t even miss me, I thought. Fuck ‘em. I’m a girl now. Girls don’t do that stuff. Well, Maki, Fabiola, Ayumi and some others do. And the girls on skateboards tearing it up on the vert without me—there were more now. But most girls don’t. And I’m like them. The acceptable majority, acceptably girly in the most acceptable of ways. I will play with my precious Barbies. Except for being too old for dolls and not even interested in them in the least.

I can do this, I thought confidently. Bravada. Soon school would start and I’d be pretty well versed in this being a chick business. So I thought. Then I overheard Emily and her mom discussing how concerned they were about ridiculously exaggerated my act was becoming. Not long after that, Emily took me aside.

"Knock it off with the fucking drag queen act, okay?" she whispered.

"What?"

"You're flitting around like a-a little flamer. I liked you better when you were a butch little skater."

I flushed with anger instantaneously. She'd poked me hard, right in the spot most sore. "What am I supposed to do? I'm a girl now!"

"Act like a girl, then. Not... I don't know. This is exactly what I tried to tell you! I don't know what you're acting like, but it's scary!"

"Yeah, and nobody’s teaching me how!”

“Amy, I have my own life, too.”

“But I don't! I don’t have any life at all! And I’m doing this all alone!”

“Do you honestly believe that? I mean do you really and truly think no one is doing anything to help poor little you?”

“I don’t know! Probably! The only thing I do know is I used to have this thing between my legs I'd stick in you... remember that?"

Emily slapped me. She instantly looked more shocked and hurt than I did. “Oh shit, Amy… Martin! I’m sorry!” So distressed, the situation so twisted, she didn’t even know what to call me anymore.
But I was already running to the bathroom. I took off my dress and climbed into the bathtub in my underwear and turned on the water, hot and steaming. Emily came in to apologize, and I screamed at her, my face red, my eyes streaming, “Go away!”

“Martin, I’m so sorry! I-I didn’t mean—“

"Get out! Get out!"

She did. I cried in the tub for hours and no one came to check on me. My fingers turned all prune-like and I compulsively gnawed the fingernails down to the quick. They itched and bled.

This was worse than breaking up with Emily at the beach. It was breaking up with myself. I’d failed at staying me, I’d failed at being a girl. What did that leave me?

Nothing is what. Even Emily and Mrs. Komori started freezing me out. Their patience had limits, and I'd trampled all over them with rage and ingratitude, scared the only two people I had left in the world right out of my life. I had food on the table, but we all ate in silence and I retreated back to a room that wasn’t really mine and where the closet was stuffed with both boy and girl clothes and my inline skating stuff lay ignored.


Chapter Eleven:
I Don’t Meet Mayim Bialik

Now I was alone, trapped in a girl’s body with no one to turn to, a stranger in the Komori house, a stranger to myself. To really stick an ice pick in my heart, Emily started dating Toby again, and I learned that the only kind of pain as luscious as having an ulcer on your tongue you could flick against your teeth was the hurt I derived from stealing “Playboy” and other glossy sex magazines from convenience stores. Most of the stores put the porno behind the cash register where you couldn’t get at it, but I found the ones that did and looted them at will.

It wasn’t that difficult. If I had on a dress, I found I was really adept at putting the magazines behind my back, hiking up my skirt and slipping them down into the waistband of my panties. If I had on pants, they went down the front. Then I could slip sideways out the door, duck around the corner of the store, pull the magazines out and run like hell in case anyone followed.

Sometimes I’d even be laughing or maybe crying as I ran, but I couldn’t tell the difference.

I’d usually just stick them under my dress or shirt when I got back to the Komoris' house and walk to my room quickly with my arms folded across my stomach, hopefully hiding my contraband. Then I’d lock myself in my room and sit cross-legged on the floor and flip to the centerfold and just stare.

Why did I even want these magazines? When I was around this age as a boy, the answer was pretty simple. Naked woman, any naked women, made me excited and I’d jack it like millions of other kids my age. As I got older, I also developed a kind of ironic detachment from the imagery versus the reality, plus a vague unease about objectification I really never examined because—you know-- it sure felt good to jack it looking at hot chicks. But now, under these circumstances? I really didn’t have clue.

Because mostly the women in them made me feel a new kind of strangeness, kind of uncomfortable. After all, we were the same general species or family now, sisters or cousins or something. Well, we had the same junk; after that we diverged wildly. I’m not even sure what it was they were saying to me or about me. What comment on womanhood does a surgically-altered sex object who’s about twenty percent post-consumer recyclable plastics make to a thin, vaguely genderless person with a skinny little kid-girl body? I was hardly more likely to look or be like any of them than I had been when I’d worn a guy’s flesh. Huh, I thought, maybe even less likely now. And I didn’t even want to look or be like them.

The magazine women, the centerfolds or whatever, were usually blonde, obviously enhanced and heavily airbrushed. This one posed falling out of her clothes in a garage, that one pretended to masturbate in a fake French villa. I never tried to match their poses or figure out what was the big deal about it by touching myself down there, but staring at these seemingly impossible bodies made me feel a wimpy kind of warmth inside that might have been all I had left of a libido or the first inklings of the one I’d have when my new body passed through puberty. I wondered sometimes if I’d still like women, or would I be into men. Or both. Or neither. Eventually, I'd get the urge to pee and shove the magazines under my bed.

The twelve-year-old pervo. Or perva.

I also bought cigarettes out of vending machines and smoked while I gazed at the world through eyes like black slits. I’d rarely smoked when I was alive but I decided it didn’t matter much if I did now that I was dead. And I kind of liked the way it made me feel. Nauseated.

But the end of summer wasn’t all theft, the joys of light literature and addicting myself to nicotine. Now that I officially no longer gave a shit about myself or anything else, I started skating again. I found I couldn’t keep way any longer; the call was too strong. It was so mighty, in fact, it completely overrode all other considerations at the park, like Patrick’s crush or sexual desires or whatever it was little skating deviants had in their brains, hearts or nether regions for girls. My illicit activies brought me little joy, but I skated with fierceness now.

It was exhilarating. Already an invulnerable thief, I decided I wasn't a girl, I wasn't a guy, that I was something new, something both and bad-ass and dangerous (in a humiliatingly cute and tiny way). I felt full of this wired energy, a runaway robot shaking itself apart, shooting out sparks, streaming acrid white smoke, catching the dry leaves on fire. On the vert, I gave my new philosophy its fullest expression. If I'd been reckless on the vert before, now I was downright suicidal. Damn those stupid consequences to hell! My airs became larger, I kept going higher and higher. And when you do that, you have to fall back to earth sometime. Gravity demands it.

Gravity, my friend. Gravity brought me sliding down the curved side of the vert on my face, on my shoulder, on my knees. Gravity dumped me off the side of the vert onto the asphalt one time when I lost my balance while I was screaming my head off at some slight by Patrick, real or imaginary.

Patrick and the other guys and girls at the skate park were actually scared of me. I showed up every day, climbed to the top of the vert, stuck a cigarette in my mouth and waited my turn, barely saying a word. When and if I did, it was usually something biting and mean. I made people cry. They still called me Ayumi, but now it was usually in the context of a quick, "Here comes that crazy Ayumi bitch" and they'd scatter before me like the gulls had at the beach and stand as far away from me as possible. The new Ayumi lived in an unhappy world all her own, with gravity frequently her only companion.
And boom, just like that, gravity really nailed me. Just when you think you’ve hit bottom, gravity, like a true bosom pal with your best interests in mind, shows you there’s a whole lower level and it’s covered with rusty nails and broken glass. Gravity tosses you there and rubs your face all over, slicing you deeply. Causing tetanus of the soul. I got caught stealing. Busted. Imagine the surprise on that fat cashier's face when she stopped me going out the door and made me come back in, only to reveal my booty-- a men's magazine.

"What would a little girl be doing with smut like this?" she asked. She barely had any teeth.

"I like chicks," I said casually, with a harsh edge that sounded strange in my little girl voice; Emily could've pulled it off better, though, with her deeper pitch. I pulled out my cigarettes and slipped one into my mouth. I immediately thought of Winona Ryder in "Heathers," right before Christian Slater blew up. Yeah.

The cashier took my cigarettes away from me and my lighter. In a really unfair trade, what she gave me back was a long lecture about Jesus and sin and Hell.

“Don’t they believe in Jesus in your country?” she asked. “Don’t they pray?”

“First off, I’m as American as you. And second, the only thing I’m praying for is for the police to come and throw me in jail before I have to listen to anymore of your bullshit,” I told her mildly, with my eyebrows raised.

She looked angry for a moment, then shook her head. “You are just about the rudest little girl it has ever been my sorry luck to meet. I feel sorry for your parents.”

“They’re dead. I live with my aunt.”

She sputtered a little. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. It explains a lot, but I am truly sorry to hear that. I’m gonna pray for you, I honestly am.”

“Yeah, well…”

Just then two cops came in and I started to get nervous. They acted officiously and efficiently, asking direct questions with little or no trace of warmth, took down my name and Mrs. Komori’s phone number and address. Everyone talked, and the cops took notes. I hoped the cashier wouldn’t notice the slight quaver in my voice as I explained my point of view, which was I was guilty as could be and I had no excuse. I stared at my feet as the cops escorted me to the car (they didn’t cuff me), and I overheard a couple of racist comments from other people in the store. I wanted to punch everyone in the face. I was so full of anger and self-loathing. My skin crawled, my clothes disgusted me.

So this is how it ends, I thought at the police station while another cop, this time a sergeant with white chevrons on his blue-gray sleeve, looked me over. I was sitting in a thinly-padded metal chair beside his desk and other cops were busy typing or running their mouths all around us. It was a lot like any office, only kind of dirty and everyone had a gun except me. I was slouched down, trying not to meet the sergeant’s gaze, looking down at my knees, which were shaking a little. I pressed them together to try to stop the trembling.

“Need to use the little ladies’ room?” the sergeant asked.

“No.”

“Wanna tell me what you thought you were doing?”

“No.”

“You realize stealing is wrong, right?”

“No. Uh… yes? Yes.”

“Uh huh. You think stealing is cool, huh?”

“No. Uh… yes?”

“Well, I guess you’re learning otherwise now, huh? Not too happy, huh?”

“Not very.”

“Okay, kid. Don’t you think your parents are going to be pretty disappointed?”

“Mrs. Komori will, yeah.”

“Tell me your full name.”

“My full name?” I thought about it for a second. Again with the names. I had at least two I could give him. Then I told him in the squeakiest voice possible, my throat very raw, “My name is Amy Komori.”

“No middle name?”

“Not that I know of, no.”

I was kind of tired of having to say “Amy Komori.” The cop sergeant made me tell him my address again, too, and asked me a lot of questions about right and wrong in between more practical bits of info about what I was being charged with—some kind of misdemeanor-- and how I’d get a juvie court date for a hearing plus many other things I barely heard. I nodded my head as if I understood. While we were doing that, Mrs. Komori showed up at the door and one of the cops who’d arrested or whatever they’d done to me met her there and took her away someplace for what I guessed would be a very interesting talk that would seal my fate. The bestest, most wonderfullest moment of this special “Blossom” episode-- guest starring me as Blossom’s irresponsible friend who learns her lesson that stealing is a cry for attention but never appears on the show again-- came when the cops decided it was time for the heartwarming, climactic reunion between adopted parent and juvenile delinquent. While the cop sergeant repeated to Mrs. Komori a lot of the information he’d already told me, I stared at the tile floor and then I was released into my “caregiver’s custody,” he called it.

Driving me home from the police station (now Amy Komori had a police record-- cool!), Mrs. Komori had a long talk with me, the first time she'd spoken to me in days. She started lamely, just stuff about how she’d had some trouble enrolling me in school because of the late start she’d gotten with the paperwork.

“Apparently, they set the rolls months in advance,” she explained. “I guess that makes sense. They need to know who’s in what class and blah blah, whatever. But I was able to talk to someone at your school and with the administration. Anyways, you squeaked by and we’re good to go come September. Which isn’t that far away.”

“Uh…” I said. Why was she telling me all this at this specific juncture in time? Didn’t we have a more pressing issue? Actually, I was more than a little afraid-- “more than” as in “extremely”-- she was dancing around her real topic, namely the kicking of my narrow ass out of her house for good. I’d be in school and living with a foster family for real.

She said she knew I was going though something very difficult, something no one had probably ever gone through before. No shit. But I let her talk without any sarcastic comments, because I wasn't feeling so tough at the moment; Patrick and the gang probably would have been embarrassed for me if they’d seen me. The hammer was about to drop, smashing me flat.

"I know Emily and you slept together, Martin," she said. My first thought was to deny it, but I kept my mouth shut instead. Here it comes, the first bit of recrimination to justify her decision to cut me loose, as if she needed it; I’d done more than enough. "And I resigned myself to that, because I knew you loved her, and I knew that she'd slept with other boys who probably never loved her as much as you did."

"Yeah, I did," I said softly as I sunk into the seat. For some reason, I wished, really wished I didn't have butterfly-shaped barrettes in my hair.

“I’m telling you this because I want you to know I care very much for you,” she said. “And I know Emily does, too.”

“I—“

“No, let me finish. Like I said, I know it's difficult but beyond that, I really can't even begin to fully understand what you're going through. Sometimes even I can’t believe it, and yet there you are. Um… not really sure why you thought being more like a girl was what you ended up doing. Because it was a little... bizarre. I really, really wish I’d handled that better, too. I just—Well, whatever. Water and bridges. And here we are."

“But—“

“Uh uh. Please. Were you really happy doing all that giggly, dress-up stuff?”

“No. I thought I was at first. Well, not doing it exactly. More like because I thought I was finally doing what I was supposed to be… doing. Obeying the rules or playing the game or something. Although, yeah, I do really like that one dress. I don’t really know why. I just do, I guess.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought,” Mrs. Komori said. She told me there were all kinds of ways to be a girl, and while choosing a few stereotypical behaviors and playing them up to the nth degree might be one of them, I'd probably be happier finding some other method. If that was what I truly wanted.

“But I don’t know how to… do anything.”

“Who does?”

“Yeah! That’s right. I know it is. I thought everyone wanted me to be a girl, but that was a disaster. I just wish I knew who I was supposed to be.”

And then she told me, “You’re so freaked out about figuring out who you’re supposed to be or what stupid people want for you that you’re forgetting just to be. You know how we learn who we are? By being.”

“Yeah? What about doing?”

"Doing, being. What’s the diff?" she told me, smiling. “And you know what? You may not like hearing this, but eventually, you might find having a woman’s body, or being a woman isn’t so bad after all. You might even come to like it. We can do some amazing things.”

I really wanted her to explain all about those “amazing things” because it definitely would've made me feel happier, but instead she told me how being a woman in the United States was still a difficult proposition at times. She said she tried not to focus on it too much, but if I was ever interested she could tell me a lot of what she claimed were real horror stories, or just minor incidents that added up over time. At the same time, she talked up a lot of progress that had been through the efforts of so many incredible women down through the years—and some men, she went out of her way to mention—and that she enjoyed so many more opportunities than her grandmother had, or even her mom. She said she hoped Emily—“And you, too, depending”—would have an even easier time of it.

“There’s still a long way to go, though. Life isn’t fair,” she said.

“Is that supposed to be encouraging or discouraging?”

“I’m really not sure. But it’s up to you. Be a woman, be a man, be anything at all your heart desires. Just to throw this out there, there are other paths you might take. I have no idea what they might be, but they may not involve you being a woman at all. Emily told me you didn’t want to go to the hospital when this started. Well, you may want to go to a therapist at some point.”

“I probably could use some kind of therapy.”

“I’m talking about a-a gender therapist person or something. Who knows? For now, just don’t get so hung up on what you think others expect of you. You just might become something no one’s ever seen before. And now for my next point, and this one is going to be a little more difficult for you to hear.”

"Shoot." Here it comes, I thought. The ol' don't let the door hit your fanny speech.

Mrs. Komori explained all the things she and Emily had done trying to help me, no matter what fool ideas otherwise I’d gotten in what she called my “messed-up little head.” She let me know in no uncertain terms she considered my responding shitty attitude inappropriate and insulting. My stomach clenched; I was listening to the perfect lead-in to her final self-justification for fobbing me off on the state.

As a little hail mary ploy, I quickly interrupted: “I know you’re doing all that work for me and stuff, and I’m so grateful I have a place to stay. God, I can’t even begin to tell you how grateful I am for all that. I mean, no matter how stupid I’ve been acting. I’m so, so sorry.”

Place to stay. I hoped she realized this was my way of begging for a home without actually getting on my knees. Although if I'd had my skate pads on, I might have been tempted.

Then she went on to tell me a lot of other things, about how Mr. Komori died, and how painful that was for her, and how Emily just took it quietly, then cried alone at night and became a very different person afterwards. But eventually, even though the pain never went away completely, they got on with their life together. Everything, Mrs. Komori said, depended on our ability to do that. Otherwise the sorrow of simply living would overwhelm us all and we’d do stupid things like kill ourselves. Or simply steal. Or smoke.

“Y-you know about that?” I asked.

“I do wash your clothes. Or haven’t you noticed? You smell like a fire in a tobacco barn.”

“Oh…” Wow, I knew I had been a complete little bastard around the house. Or bitch. But I’d never even considered that during all the silent phase and awkwardness following that massive break with Emily, someone had continued to see not only that I was fed, but that I had clean clothes, as well. I’d never even for a second thought about why my smelly, sweaty, smoky clothes were vanishing from heaps on the floor and coming back fresh and folded and carefully placed on my made-up bed. Food was a necessity; laundry, however, was an expression of…

Of…

Then, Mrs. Komori said, "I don’t know if it’s even my place to stop you from doing that. I guess I’ll figure that out as we go along, too. I’ll be just being right there alongside you. But what’s most important is, I want you to know I will be here for you through all of this. I love you. I see this hurt child and I can’t help it. I love you whatever or whoever you decide to become."

Love! It was love! I was right! I couldn’t stop myself from smiling at her from the first real happiness I’d felt in months and months. When I met Emily, I loved her so much, I thought I'd die. And I thought I'd die again when I changed into a girl and lost myself and her simultaneously and forever. But I didn't die. Thanks to Mrs. Komori, I lived.

Book Four
Amilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Ephraim’s Daughter Komoristocking

Chapter Twelve:
I Love You, Pumpkin

No more skating, no more stealing, no more smoking. That was the deal Mrs. Komori and I struck on the way home from the police station. Giving up skating hurt the most, but Mrs. Komori was adamant about keeping an eye on me and we agreed I needed a tight leash and “just being” mostly where she could supervise me was the way for me to go. She would see I got out and did some healthy activities, and if Emily had time—which she seldom did—she could take me places, too. The main thing was to slow me down and ease back into it at a pace where maybe my brain would function in a way less scary for me and those around me.

“It” being life.

“I’m still concerned because I really think being home stewing in your own juices was so much was part of your problem,” Mrs. Komori said. “But I’m also worried about how fragile you seem to be when you take social knocks, so hanging out with those kids? I just don’t know about that. For now, anyways.”

“Yeah. I just really like skating, though. I-I don’t wanna give that up.”

“It’s just until you settle down, build up your emotional strength. Get into a routine at school, we’ll see how your grades are and you’ll be knocking your brains out on the—the rampy thing before you know it. And maybe, just maybe, to sort of sweeten the deal or bribe you a little, I’ll help you out with a better pair of skates.”

“Really? Because that would be sweet!”

“Sure.”

“Lemme have a look at Honey Bunny,” Emily said when we came walked in the door. “Hey, could you get Pumpkin to give me back my wallet?”

“Which one is it?” I asked, knowing exactly where this was heading, hoping Emily would take it all the way despite her mother’s presence in the room.

“It’s the one that says ‘Bad Motherfu—‘“

“Emily!” Mrs. Komori snapped, shutting Emily up but not wiping the sardonic grin off her face. Mrs. Komori liked that movie, too.

“Fuckin’ Honey Bunny,” Emily said with a snicker after we were alone. “I’m gonna call you that from now on.”

“And I’m gonna call you Butch, but I’ll say it like, ‘Bootch.’ What ees your name? Bootch. What does eet mean?”

“I’m American, honey. Our names don’t mean shit,” Emily said. Then she started singing the second verse from Jane’s A’s “Been Caught Stealing:” “My girl, she’s one too. She’ll go and get her a shirt, stick it under her skirt,” and doing a little shoulder-shaking move, her hand clenched near her mouth as if she were holding a mic.

I squinted at her, my head tilted as I waited for her to finish entertaining herself.

Emily stopped singing and beeped my nose like a button. “You’re a little hardcore JD, dude. You’re like the only person I know who’s been arrested. What was it like?”

While I could scarcely believe that info tidbit, I told her all about my arrest and booking while she poured us both some Dr. Pepper in a couple of jelly glasses. I made it out like it was some kind of comedic adventure for her benefit, but inside I was deeply ashamed. Partially for what it said about me, a little bit simply because I got caught and the rest for having put Mrs. Komori through all that public humiliation.

When I finished, Emily shook her head. “I feel like it’s kinda my fault.”

“Why’s that? You didn’t do anything. I’m the dumbass who thought it was a great idea to steal a porn magazine.”

“I-I slapped you. I am really sorry about that, Honey Bunny. Seriously. I mean, I know I just called you Honey Bunny, and I swear I’m going to keep doing it, but I know I suck for slapping you that time.”

“Well, you do suck, but it’s casual.”

“It sent you off the deep end, didn’t it?”

“I was already coming apart.”

“Well, I really regret it more than I can even say. No one should lay a hand on anyone else. At least unless the other person does it first.”

“Oh yeah, then it’s total retaliatory effort.”

“To the maximum, yeah. Dude, that’s our family motto. If you’re going to be a true Komori, you need to learn it. Know it. Live it.”

“She’s the full hot orator. Oh yeah…”

“What?”

“If you’re so set on calling me Honey Bunny, could you at least change it to Yolanda and call me that instead?”

Emily smiled, pretended to think it over and said, “No.”

Mrs. Komori had changed into sweats, and about the time Emily and I finished making up, she came into the kitchen, told me to get my ass in gear and marched me back to my bedroom. She followed me with a big, white garbage bag and made me turn everything out until I uncovered all my contraband, consisting mostly of a big-ass pile of “Playboys,” “Penthouses” and whatnot, plus my cigarettes.

"Good lord, Amy," Mrs. Komori said when she saw the extent of my special magazine collection.

"I know," I replied. Taken individually, each magazine wasn’t such a horror. But now that I realized just how many I had, they made me kind of sick. Fake lips, fake boobs, fake people. The disenchantment became complete.

Mrs. Komori held the bag, and I loaded it up, razor-edged magazines cutting right through the plastic; we had to double-bag everything and it became almost too heavy for either of us to carry. You’d be surprised how heavy magazines can be. They seem so flimsy and light, but the ounces become pounds pretty quickly, and the pounds add up. Add in the floppy factor and the danger of paper cuts and I started thinking how maybe instead of gun control we needed periodical control.

I was doing my part, though. So long, airbrushed goddesses and future “Baywatch” castmembers. Oh yeah, and those informative articles that taught little Amy Komori the best sunglasses to wear in the Caribbean, how to sneak back into her ex-girlfriend's life, win bar bets and make her lady happy in the sack.

Together, Mrs. Komori and I dragged it all out to the garbage can. Now I was running clean and light again. Mrs. Komori put her arm around me, and we went back towards the house. I didn't look back, but I guess it was for the best. Those magazines really had lots of information useful to men. Except how to grow your dick and nads back when life suddenly demands you become a Japanese girl-child.

“Did you check under her bed, Mom?” Emily asked, on her way to her Bronco with her keys in one hand, a North Face backpack in the other.

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“No, I mean, like thoroughly,” Emily said, opening the door, sliding into the driver’s seat.

“Why?”

“’Cause Honey Bunny here probably has like half a dozen unregistered firearms hidden under there. She and her boyfriend have been knocking over liquor stores all summer. Isn’t that right—“ Keys in the ignition.

“I don’t really…”

“—Honey Bunny?” And then Emily drove away laughing before I could say anything in return.

Anyways, that was how I racked up my third nickname that summer and my old name fell out of use in favor of my newly-legalized girl handle. I was starting to be a magnet for nicknames. Maki, Ayumi and Honey Bunny. Mrs. Komori called me Amy all the time, and Emily, good as her word, called me Honey Bunny almost exclusively, made me redden with anger—when we were alone-- or embarrassment—around other people.

But not as often as I might have liked, because she was still running around doing older girl stuff, hanging with Darla, Beth the shrinking violet, Hanna the rich bi-chick hippie with herpes and the rest. If they were the cast of a sitcom, it might have been a little like everyone’s favorite Thursday night laugh-fest “Friends,” but I had no way of knowing. I made it a point never to watch “Friends” because it sucked shit through a straw from a donkey’s ass as far as I was concerned, and because Emily’s life was blacked out in my viewing area.

The person she spent the most time with, though, was Toby. Toby. Before-Martin Toby. Still-has-his-dick Toby.

I hated, hated, hated Toby. I was dealing fine with not being Emily’s boyfriend anymore, but I couldn’t stand that she’d gone back with that fucking asshole instead of finding someone new at least. And I knew he was an asshole, because she was always calling him “That Fucking Asshole” right up until the moment his name became Toby again.

God, I had to meet him face to face, too. The first time Emily brought him by the house, she introduced me as Honey Bunny and Toby gave me a wan smile and promptly lost interest. I gave him his own secret nickname: Hair Boy. Now that I’d finally seen him up close, I couldn’t help but notice how he was covered with dark black hair, all up and down his arms. His apparent dedication to a life of Sasquatch impersonation made me sick for some reason; I couldn’t remember things like that having bothered me before.

Hair Boy even ate supper with us almost every night. I don't know if he knew I used to be a guy or not. I don't know if it mattered; it’s not as if he spent any of his time on me or trying to win me over as a favor to his girlfriend. I just know what little enjoyment I got out of remembering the time Emily and I left him standing by the curb with a stupid look on his face didn't balance out the fact I knew he, of all people, was doing to her all the things I used to do.

It was obvious. They didn’t try all that hard to hide it, even from me. I can't tell you how many times I'd come bouncing into the den and catch Toby pushing his tongue down Emily's throat. Way too often. I pictured his tongue as hairy, too. Like a gross, fat, pink leech furred with some kind of ice age mutation. I watched with expectation when Emily and I were together alone while Hair Boy was in the kitchen fixing us all Dr. Peppers, but she never coughed up a hairball or anything, so maybe I was wrong about that.

Some nights, Emily called and told her mom she was sleeping over at a friend's house and would be home in the morning. Yeah, right, a friend.

Yeah, right, sleeping.

And then, just a day or two before school started, something unexpected happened. Emily came home early. Early for her.

I was sitting on the couch in some old sweats and a t-shirt, looking as butch as possible, for a preteen with bobbed haircut and 5 earrings. I glanced at Emily, looked away, because I expected her to pretty much walk on through and ignore me. But by the set of her lips, I could tell at once it was over with Hair Boy.

Emily flopped down beside me and slouched down with her knees together, her feet apart. Kind of a collapsed rockabilly pose. I chewed my lip, pretended to watch TV and didn't say anything. I could feel her near me, feel her weight pushing down on the couch cushion. She hadn't stayed in the same room alone with me for five consecutive minutes since even before I got arrested. Finally, Emily couldn't stand the silence anymore.

"I fucking hate all guys," she growled. Her dark eyes teared up—it was obvious the way the glow from the TV glinted in them, even viewed from the side and slightly below, my angle-- but she was too Emily Komori to let it flow. She blinked and wiped her eyes with the back of her hands and when that didn’t work, tried her sleeves.

"What happened?" I asked, and turned down the TV.

What happened was, Toby flaked in a way that went beyond your everyday, casual level of boyfriend-girlfriend flakery. Not returning a call was normal. So was bailing on a planned date to get shitfaced with friends when the togetherness of young love turned all smothering. Or forgetting a one-month anniversary because, honestly, you just weren’t that sentimental about dates. But this was flakery to the extreme…

And it actually affected little ol’ me.

Emily told me the specific events of that night, and the rest I knew from casually eavesdropping on her half of many of the phone conversations leading up to it. And the tale went a little like this:

They were supposed to go see the Enemies (in fact, by the time Emily told me this narrative of romantic woe, the Enemies were no doubt packing up their gear after their set, or backstage smoking pot or snorting lines or something). There was some controversy because Darla wanted to go and Emily really wanted some boyfriend-girlfriend time rather than some kind of sick-o triad thing. Emily pulled rank; relationship over friendship. Darla threw some kind a childish fit about never getting any girl time with her best friend and pissed off Emily. For his part, Toby tried to stay out of it. After a day or so, Darla had caved and everything was cool again between the three of them.

The night of, Emily drove herself downtown and joined the big crowd standing in line outside the Lava Lamp. When Toby didn’t show, Emily found herself slipping from worried to pissed. Finally, she was pissed enough to go stalk the guy; after all, she couldn’t even get into the show because he had the tickets. She drove by Toby’s apartment, and the lights were out. The shades were up and when she looked in, nose against the window glass and her hands as a shield against the parking lot security light, the living room was completely empty…

For some reason, that detail was like a cold fingertip delicately stroking my spine. I broke out in goosebumps and didn’t even know why.

“You okay?” Emily asked. That’s how obvious it was; Emily had noticed it through the veil of her own self-concern.

“Yeah…” I said.

“Because your eyes went super-wide and you looked kinda like you wanted to hurl for a second there.”

“I just… I was just thinking of the last time I went to the Lava Lamp when those guys were… hitting on me.”

“Wow. You’re like a total homophobe.”

“They thought I was a girl. Jeez, you were there and everything.”

“No, I was just thinking what a homophobe you’ve always been. It didn’t have anything to do with that time at the Lava Lamp. Totally unrelated thought.”

“Finish your story!”

So Emily did. Those bare walls, the dents in the carpet where furniture once stood in a pattern she had practically memorized morphed Emily’s scorned anger into girlfriendish concern, so she went to a pay phone and called Toby’s parents. Where is he? What’s happening? Is he okay? I’m so worried about him. All his stuff is gone. Toby’s folks didn’t really know. He’d been acting strange for the last couple of days, looking kind of haggard and worried. Then he suddenly told them he and some buddies were moving to Portland, Oregon, of all places. They were just surprised it had been that same day.

Now Emily didn’t know what to feel. Worried, scared, hurt, a thread of anger running through it all, like the river in that Brad Pitt movie about trout fishing. You know, “12 Monkeys.” Deeply confused, troubled. Two boyfriends in one year, one turned into a tiny girl-thing and the other… Who knew?

That last question was why I was now riding a queasy, uneasy feeling of impending...

What? Impending what? I didn’t dare allow my verbal forebrain to voice what my lizard-brain was burbling about in my hypothalamus or something, where whatever atavistic, fear-sensing part of our brain acts as some kind of evolutionary third eye or sixth sense. Emily apparently had no such secret suspicions, or really, just some mundane ones. She was just a jilted lover, like in a song. All hurt and confusion, raw and new like an open wound. But for me, the whole world outside our little Komori house had darkened just a bit, as if a frightened octopus jetted its ink into a deepwater ocean of a night sky, stirring the black, cooling it by degrees despite the residual heat and humidity of the day.

I shivered a little and in response, without knowing why I was shaking, my hurt Emily put her arms around me and pulled me close. She squeezed me tightly, those long arms against my chest and tummy, and she gently rocked us both, her chin buried in my hair. I may as well have been a big, warm pillow, but it made me feel a little soft and secure.

“Honey Bunny?"

"Yeah?" At the moment, I didn’t care what she called me; I just wanted to feel her warmth all around me.

"I'm still sorry for slapping you that time. I didn't-"

I stopped her. "It's casual.”

We watched TV with the lights out, big sister and little sister.

Chapter Thirteen:
See Emily Paint

For me, school was just a couple of days away. Finally, this whole horrible summer would end and I would start a horrible fall to work on Mrs. Komori’s Just Being Program and earn back my skating privileges and independence. The latter filled me with happy anticipation, but the thought of having my scrawny body and damaged psyche tossed back into the volatile sea of hormones and social anxiety we call eighth grade terrified me almost beyond reason.

And this was coming from a person who witnessed her Johnson turn into a Virginia.

“It’s not that bad,” Emily told me. “It’s really not bad at all.”

She was painting. With a few weeks left before her first year of college and a hole in her life formerly occupied by Toby (we weren’t allowed to talk about him yet), Emily turned to art, which thrilled me. It had been so long since she had done anything more than a sketch or a napkin doodle. She started sweating her ass off in the Venus-like atmosphere of our garage making incredible paintings while I watched perched like a bird on a tall, round kitchen stool. I loved to see her face turn red and her lower lip push out from creative exertion, her arms moving, the tip of the black paint brush stretching out from her fingers nothing more than a colorful smear. She got all shiny, her face and arms gleaming with perspiration. Her shirt stuck to her, so I could tell whether or not she wore a patterned bra underneath.

Or nothing at all, which was the case today because she’d been home all morning and hadn’t even showered yet.

“It’s pretty bad,” I groused, not feeling it because I was so enthralled in Emily’s creative dance. Even her feet seemed artistic as they shuffled. I kind of wanted to be her.

“I lied. It’s exactly that bad. No, it’s worse. I wouldn’t do junior high again for all the… many… valuable things in that place where things of value are kept.”

“The bank.”

“I was thinking more like a museum. Anyways, good luck at school, dude. Are you ready?”

“If by ‘ready’ you mean I have like pens and pencils and notebooks, yeah.”

“Clothes?”

“Been all set with those.” Actually, despite having bought all those girly-girl school outfits and dresses for me during my Princess Phase (as I called it—strictly to myself for fear of what Emily would say in response), Mrs. Komori graciously and patiently allowed me to change my mind once more. Now I had some things I felt more comfortable about wearing. A few pairs of sensible jeans, for example, and slacks. The slacks were from the pre-teen girl’s department, but the jeans were boy’s jeans because I really didn’t want to wear the flares that were so popular. And while I didn’t have any dresses I loved as much as I did that sundress—which I was actually wearing at the moment (and barefoot)—I found I wasn’t completely opposed to the wearing them. They didn’t particularly interest me, but I didn’t hate them, and I supposed if I again happened to fall in love with one, I could probably talk Mrs. Komori into buying it.

Delacroix Junior High, my school, had a dress code but it wasn’t super strict. Mrs. Komori and I read it the night before our final back-to-school shopping trip, just to be on the safe side before shelling out more plastic. The rules mostly dealt with skirt length for girls and prohibited certain hair colors and styles—I couldn’t get a Mohawk, for instance, although I kind of wanted one just to see how I’d look with it now that I was a girl and had so much black hair on my head—plus facial piercings other than in the ears. The school also outlawed any t-shirt with alcohol or drug-related imagery and, of course, profanity or obscenities of any kind.

Anyways, Mrs. Komori and I decided as long as I dressed neatly, I could get away with quite a lot of unisex mixing-and-matching. In fact, since the code didn’t specifically mention anything about it, I further assumed boys were free to wear dresses if they wanted, too.

“If you mean am I mentally ready,” I said, “I’m not so sure about that.”

“Good luck,” Emily said and put down her plastic palette. “Some people dream of going back and starting over knowing what they know now. But I think that’s stupid. I’d fucking hate that. Being all small and whatever. Maybe if I could go back at my same age and size so I could kick everyone’s ass--”

“I’m doing it. I’m doing it tiny, too. I never wanted to but here we are.”

“Yeah. Well, I didn’t mean you, Honey Bunny.”

She stepped back from the canvas and walked around in front of it, studying it, planning. The sunlight outside the garage gave her a haloed highlight outlining her body, glinting on her collarbones and the outside edges of her long, slender arms.

She made me really miss my guy parts at times like that. When she decided the painting was finished and even one more brushstroke would ruin it, Emily smiled at me, her eyes glittering like black glass, droplets of sweat along her nose and above her mouth glinting. She tore a long sheet of clear plastic wrap from a roll and carefully covered the palette with it, preserving the paint in case she needed it the next day. After that, she helped me off the stool (not that I needed it) and led me into the kitchen. She fixed us both bowls of Ben & Jerry's chocolate ice cream for lunch and sat at the dining table and talked and laughed while we spooned up the frosty deliciousness and fought off brain freeze.

“Maybe school won’t be so bad,” Emily said, a drop of chocolate ice cream on the tip of her nose. I decided not to tell her. “You’ll probably have a lot of the same teachers I did, and some of them were cool. Not really. None of them were cool, actually. But not all of them sucked, I guess. And your classes will be super-easy and you should just breeze right through them.”

“Yeah, you said that one time before.”

“No, I didn’t. You’re not only a card cheat and a scoundrel, but also a liar, Honey Bunny, and possibly a cattle rustler and horse thief. But maybe you’ll make some friends, too. Try, anyways.”

That’s what I was afraid of. I ate my ice cream and thought about trying to make friends. My attempts at re-socializing myself that summer hadn’t gone very well to say the least, and I had no idea how to relate to anyone other than Emily and Mrs. Komori now. And I still wasn’t anyone. No longer Martin, not quite Amy. Maybe I really was Honey Bunny after all. I told myself to “just be,” that part of the reason for returning to school was to help me become again. Positive self-help mantras have a way of losing their power in the face of all-encompassing terror.

While I figuratively messed my undies mulling that over, the phone rang and it was for Emily, a call from Darla.

Darla. Lots of curly red hair and freckles, a giant mouth with big, glossy white teeth. Very curvy, womanly body. She had what even Emily called “birthin’ hips.” By comparison, the proportions of my girl body weren’t all that different than they had been when I was a guy; my shoulders might have been narrower, but I barely had any hips at all. Lots of people thought Darla was gorgeous in a pre-Raphaelite sort of way. But I never had. Especially now.

Maybe it was Darla's whiny, possessive and completely helpless personality that made me not find her attractive. She was the total opposite of Emily, who usually exuded this crazy, brash confidence, but they shared the same capacity for extreme silliness. Only with Darla, there was this childishness, this helplessness. Like Toby, she usually ignored me when she came over, although she knew full well I’d once been Emily’s boyfriend and her own rival for Emily’s loving attention. But I couldn’t help but notice after she left there’d be boxes of crackers laying on our coffee table and crumbs on the sofa, or bowls of half-eaten cereal in the sink.

Anyways, with me doing my house arrest thing and being so much younger and essentially out of the picture for good and Toby mysteriously decamped for places unknown, Darla was calling almost constantly. Shows, parties, hanging out, plans for fall classes, maybe getting an apartment together their sophomore year.

Emily hung up the phone. “Darla’s coming over to look at my new painting. I think she kinda wants it for her bedroom.”

“Kinda wants you for her bedroom, you mean,” I muttered. Not that I seriously thought that.

When Darla showed up, though, she looked off, noticeably more haggard than before the whole Toby Disappearance Weekend. Dark, almost green rings under her eyes. And she looked a little drawn, her cheeks hollow. I couldn’t be sure. Fluorescent lights tended to lighten shadows, so I could have been mistaken. Easily, even.

“What’s up, Darla?” I said, just trying to act friendly around her so Emily wouldn’t feel weird about having her over. “You’re looking really pretty today.”

Wrong move. Darla’s nostrils flared and her face flashed a dark pink. "I'm not trying to lose weight," she said in a huff. “I mean, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

I raised my eyebrows and looked away, pretending to have lost interest in the conversation. Do dee doo, I don’t care… But inwardly, I was terrified she was going to pull a knife out of her bag and come at me across the kitchen, with some sort of savage, high-pitched squealing that wasn’t quite human. I saw Emily give her a look and then the moment passed and they were bopping out to the garage. I went back to my room and hid under the bed until the fear went away. I felt really dumb, though. What was I afraid of? And how exactly would being underneath my bed protect me from it? I told myself Darla was nothing more than a needy, insecure person whose parents had fucked up raising her and who had absorbed a lot of stupid ideas from books, movies and TV shows.

You know, like me.

I crawled out from under the bed feeling very young and silly. I knelt on the floor, put my chin on the mattress and stretched out my slim, brown arms; even on my best days, aspects of my body seemed alien to me. How could I ever lift even a tissue with arms like these, much less tote around ten tons of school books all day? Who is going to like me? Who is going to hate me? Why is that girl here? Why couldn’t Emily have someone else for a best friend? No, everything was cool. But I didn’t feel completely normal—or what passed for it these uncertain days—until after Emily and Darla left together and Mrs. Komori came back from work.

Feeling skittish, I crept into the kitchen where she was bumping around, putting away some groceries she’d picked up on the way home. I stood there blinking and looking at her, not knowing what to say.

“Amy,” Mrs. Komori said. “You look like someone walked over your grave.”

“Maybe someone did.”

Mrs. Komori peered at me, no doubt looking for the return of Crazy Amy. I smiled to reassure her, a fake smile I was working on for school.

“Worried about school?”

“Always.” Among other things, increasingly.

“Don’t sweat it. You’ll be fine. A little younger than some of the other kids, yeah, but you’ll make up for it with your higher level of maturity. And grades.”

I thought about how recent events contradicted Mrs. Komori’s sunshiny optimism, and wondered if I had even the slightest chance of redeeming myself or proving her right after all. I’m totally petrified, I admitted to myself, blinking back sudden tears. I am so, so scared.

Chapter Fourteen:
I Don’t Wanna Be Learned

Unavoidably, mercilessly unconcerned with my feelings of terror and helplessness in the face of it, hungry for my blood, it came. Not Darla. The dreaded first day of school. I barely slept the night before, just tossed and rolled over and over trying to get comfortable and failing. Sometime before first light, I must have fallen asleep because my room went from dark to light without transition and I felt fatigued. My eyes ached. I curled up on my side and just stayed in bed chewing my fingernails and feeling kind of punk. Not as in punk rock. I was sure I had a bit of a fever and a stomach ache, but when Mrs. Komori knocked on my door to get me up and I told her, she pooh-poohed my symptoms as nerves.

“I guess so,” I said. Out of it, my brain swimming, I padded to the kitchen. Mrs. Komori flipped on the lights, which hurt my eyes and I sat at the counter squinting and hating Thomas Edison.

Then Emily came slouching in.

“She doesn’t feel well,” Mrs. Komori told Emily in a baby voice.

Emily stopped in her tracks, sort of swayed, turned from her mom towards me and I saw she herself looked like hell, her long black hair in her face and her eyes half-shut, puffy and red. She shuffled around the kitchen in her pajamas and pink fuzzy slippers that used to be bunnies until she cut off their ears after they lost their plastic googly eyes and blinded anthropomorphic footwear reminded her way too much of a documentary she once saw on cave-dwelling monstrosities complete with horror music, an early childhood trauma that still chilled her enough no one was supposed to ever mention it in her presence.

“You don’t look so well yourself,” Mrs. Komori said.

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

“Neither am I,” I added.

Mrs. Komori shrugged and poured herself some coffee, then padded off with her steaming mug to go shower and get dressed.

“What did you do last night?” I asked Emily, my voice nearly a whisper.

“If you have to know, I got home pretty early this morning and couldn’t sleep. So I’ve basically been up for a full day. Or more. I dunno… you fuck off.”

“I didn’t hear you come in and I was up all night.”

“You were asleep when I came in. Don’t deny. I saw you. Also, fuck off.”

“Oh.” She’d looked in on me? Why?

“Talk later. Coffee now. You school go. Fuck off now.”

“Amy!” Mrs. Komori called out from her bathroom. “Get ready for school.” Then I heard the faint sound of water running and decided I needed to get myself cleaned up, too.

All scrubbed and wrapped in a towel inside twenty minutes, I stood at my closet looking for something to wear and Emily knocked. I told her to come in. She still looked ragged, but her eyes were actually open now and there was a little smile on her face. She had something in her hand. Three things, in fact. Three bracelets of large, almost translucent red, purple and pink beads. She held them out in her hand.

“Choose one.”

I bit my lip and thought about it. Pink didn’t interest me and red seemed too blood-like. But purple, kind of like pale, ghostly grapes, really appealed to me. I took the bracelet and looked at Emily.

“One for you and one for me,” she said. She slipped the red one on her wrist, then took back the purple one and, holding my arm, slipped it onto mine. “These are power beads. I know this may sound weird, but lately, I’ve kinda been thinking of you more and more as my little sister. I want you to wear this bracelet so when you look at it, no matter where you are, you’ll know you have a big sister who loves you very much. And you’ll know I’m wearing one, too, thinking the exact same thing. Well, not the big sister part.”

I did this little sniffing laugh from down in my chest and looked down at the floor. Little sister.

“And maybe you won’t be so scared all the time,” she said.

There was nothing I could say. I just stood there in my towel, with my wet hair, feeling really happy. And she was right about the not feeling so scared part. Kind of, anyways. As soon as she left the room, while I was putting on my underwear, I found myself shaking all over and wanting to cry. I looked down at my purple beaded bracelet and it calmed me. It was as though Emily herself were holding me by the wrist, or holding me tightly the same way she had the other night on the sofa after the weirdness with Toby. The body trembling went into my stomach before dying out completely and now I was completely famished, much too late for breakfast. Oh well, I’ll just go to school starving, I thought.

“Amy, hurry up!” Mrs. Komori called. “We need to get there early so I can talk to your principal.”

I put on some boy’s jeans and rolled the cuffs up so I wouldn’t walk on them all day and trip myself up. Even though it was still going to be a hot, humid day, I pulled on a t-shirt and topped it off with a new black sweater. As a last-second flourish, I clipped a couple of butterfly barrettes in my hair. I looked in the mirror. Skinny Asian girl power… ACTIVATE!

I grabbed my new backpack and ran out of the room only to have Mrs. Komori send me back immediately to put on socks, which I’d forgotten. I had some black oxfords and my Teva sandals in my closet, but I decided to wear my black Vans, which were near the door where Emily had taught me to leave them months before.

“Did you leave your wet towel on the floor?” Mrs. Komori asked as we went to her car.

“Yesssss!”

“Good.”

Emily waved from the back door. Right after I got into the car, she suddenly ran out and kissed me on the forehead, a wet one. I blushed and suddenly had to pee.

“Remember what I told you this morning,” she said.

I held up my wrist with the bracelet plainly visible.

While the drive there was all too short, the walk into the school was excruciating, just like I imagined the walk to the electric chair or gas chamber probably was for condemned women, even with Mrs. Komori by my side. My empty stomach rioted with anticipation, fear, and embarrassment. For the first time as stupid little Amy Komori, I had to run the gauntlet of my fellow kids, all there early to get a jump on the school year. It felt as if all eyes were on me, but I'm sure every other kid was thinking the same thing, too—everyone’s staring at me. Not many Asian faces. I chewed the insides of my mouth, gnashed those little nubs on each side just behind the corners of my mouth until they hurt in that pretty sweet way.

“Why are you making those faces?” Mrs. Komori asked.

I swallowed. No more mouth-biting.

Then I saw my skate park boyfriend Patrick and some of the skater guys and girls, who knew me as Little Miss Hell-On-Wheels. With the power of sisterly love emanating from my wrist, I had one thought: Please don't let them recognize me like this, please, please, please!

"Hey, Ayumi," this one kid drawled. Busted before I even got in the door. I did my best to appear calm and composed. Emily, hear my prayer.

“I’m going on in,” Mrs. Komori said, and suddenly ditched me. I think she thought she was helping me somehow, but I felt frantic. Don’t leave me with these monsters!

The first kid’s name was Mike, he and Patrick were pretty tight, and he had long hair down in his eyes and this way of looking at you that made you want to slap him. "Look at you! You look weird!"

"I do?" I said, and looked down at myself in mock surprise. I caught sight of my purple power beads. I stared at them and said, "Asshole."

"What’s that in your hair? Like plastic bugs or something?” his midget friend Josh said. This was something new to him, my first girlish flourish as far as the skaters knew; I’d never worn barrettes or hair clips skating because I thought they might snag the helmet lining. Josh had short man syndrome. I knew the feeling well. “You actually look like a girl.”

"And you look like a boy. Almost," I replied and walked away. “Hey, keep trying. There’s always next year.”

Behind me, I heard some boyish voice shout, “Dude!” and with the scent of blood in the air, the pack turned on their wounded member like the dogs they were. They started completely abusing little Josh, possibly adding to feelings of inadequacy for which he’d spend the rest of his life compensating.

The meeting with the principal had something to do with how late I’d enrolled. Mrs. Komori had to talk with the guy, who was this really short fat dude with a baby-smooth face that looked as if he never shaved. He had almost purple cheeks with a few fine veins, little red tracings, showing here and there. He also smelled heavily of cologne. Mrs. Komori smiled politely when he said he was sure, judging from my transcripts, I’d be a fine addition to the Delacroix Junior High student body.

“Maybe we can get her to run for class treasurer, huh?” he said.

“I’m not sure she’s trustworthy enough,” Mrs. Komori said, her eyes cutting over at me. Our private joke. They concluded their little business pretty quickly after that and the secretary gave me all the info I needed and told me what homeroom to report to. Then Mrs. Komori was gone; she wisely refrained from giving me a hug, although I sure could have used one and I suspected she felt the same way.

I was a student now. I took a deep breath, looked back at the secretary and left the relative security of the main office for the hallway, which was now bustling with confused kids and teachers trying to keep order and direct traffic. It was pretty much your standard-issue madhouse.

Homeroom continued the general theme of self-consciousness. The first person I saw was Mike. His eyes went wide when he saw me come in the door slowly and shyly and he mouthed, “Bitch” at me. The other kids just smiled at me, sizing me up. I would've felt just as comfortable completely naked.

Ms. Klein, the teacher, made me stand and introduce myself while she smiled with false benevolence, the old sadist. Okay, she wasn't old at all; a bit of a fox, actually. She looked like one of those actors who graduate from playing high school parts directly to playing teachers, but still look inhumanly pretty. Compared to the rest of us, though, she was an ancient old hag. It's funny how easily being back in school made me fall into that mindset again.

"Um... my name's Amy," I began. At that point, I'd just about used up my "A" material. Thank you and goodnight, I'll be appearing as the sole Japanese girl in your homeroom for a
180-day stand. Please do your best not to murder me. My big sister’s best friend may want to challenge you for that honor. And you won’t win if she does.

"Ayumi," Mike muttered, to a few snickers. Just my luck to have that jackass in my homeroom. All year, too.

I scrunched up my face trying to think of something to say. Mike was murmuring to a boy on his left. More titters and giggles.

I took a deep breath through my nostrils, my eyes went narrow and I was just about to wade in with my fists when Ms. Klein gave Mike and his pal their walking papers. They sauntered out of the room, instant legends. First to get sent to the principal's office that year. I'm not sure, but there may have even been a cash award.

"Okay, everyone. Settle down, people. This is Amy Komori," Ms. Klein said. Pause to let it sink in, look over the class with a commanding gaze in a modern, New Age, Pop Psychology sort of way. "And those two... gentlemen will apologize in writing when they return. Please continue."

Forty-eight eyes on me, starting eighth grade again, already with a couple of enemies. Fingering my power beads, Mike-free, I felt inspired enough to make a whole little speech. Some of it I knew from going over my biography with Mrs. Komori. Some of it I just came up with on the spot because I felt like it. Born in Cali, parents gone, adopted, into inline skating. Ms. Klein seemed to dig it, and finally let me sit down.

The only other new kid was a hopeless basket case, blatant bugger-eater and obvious masturbator. After his performance, by comparison, I looked like the Queen of the Known Universe, and a couple of the girls seemed to take to me. As far as the boys went, I stayed Ayumi all through homeroom period, and they just didn’t seem to like me at all. But that was fine by me. Then the bell rang. I froze.

All the other kids started filing out, chattering and laughing. I sat at my desk as if glued there.

“First period, Amy,” Ms. Klein said in a friendly voice. I stared at her stupidly. Her pretty smiled broadened. “You—Trust me, I know you’re nervous, but you don’t want to be late to your first class.”

I blinked at her, just not feeling right at all. I really wanted to leave. Only I had no idea where I was supposed to go. The way I figured it, I had been doing pretty well just to find my homeroom.

Chapter Fifteen:
Suck Suck Suck/Suck’n’Roll Junior High School…

Mrs. Komori picked me up a little before 4pm. My backpack was full of books now, and course syllabi, notebooks, pencils, pens and a pink rubber eraser already worn and black along one edge. Big yellow school buses were passing, some empty on their way in, some full on their way out. Kids milled around, craning their necks, looking for their rides home. So many cars looked the same, I didn’t recognize our car until I saw Mrs. Komori leaning halfway out, waving her hand frantically, her face all bright and excited.

I got into the passenger seat, buckled myself in, put the bag on my lap and sank down in the seat. My lower lip was set to pout. I ground into it with my upper teeth.

“Was it really that terrible?” Mrs. Komori asked me in a sympathetic voice. Delacroix Junior High fell away behind us among the oak and pine trees.

“Pretty much everyone there hates me.”

“Really? Everyone? What makes you say that?”

I took a deep breath, frowned. I didn’t want to tell her.

The day had gone a little like this, short version: A kid came from the office a few minutes after the homeroom bell, bringing my class schedule which someone, somewhere, had neglected to give me. My first class was something called pre-AP English, but I had no idea where it was, just that it was upstairs somewhere because the room number started with a 2. I found it ten minutes late, but the teacher cut me some slack because I was new, then someone called me a retard and got away with it because the teacher hadn’t heard. In third period Science 1, this girl with braces asked me if it was true I’d made out with some skater dude whose name she couldn’t remember but knew started with a P. I ate lunch at a table full of kids who were best friends from the previous year and didn’t so much as look at me.

In Spanish 1, the kid who had called me a retard earlier sat behind me and called me “el retardo,” but when the teacher told him not only didn’t that mean what he thought but also he had an appointment in the vice-principal’s office-- dean of boy students and enforcer of rules-- he gave me a long murderous look that I took as a promise of future retribution. Finally, in Art, someone else repeated the story about P—obviously Patrick—only now they were saying I had given him a handjob behind the vert at the skatepark. When the last bell rang, I threw my things in my backpack and ran as fast as I could to the bus area where parents also came to pick up their kids.

Thrown into this seething mosh pit of surging hormones and petty cruelty, of sudden growth spurts and Magic Marker tattoos, where did Amy Komori fit in? I didn’t believe she would. When we got home, I put my backpack in my bedroom and was surprised at how relieved I felt. The physical weight from my textbooks was gone, at least.

Emily came home around suppertime, and as we ate, I answered questions from Mrs. Komori until the whole shitty tale came out. I felt like shrinking under the table. Mrs. Komori said a few supportive things in a motherly way and, still a little pale and puffy-eyed, Emily held up her wrist where dark red beads glistened. Then she told me I was pretty lucky; she’d had her first period her first day of junior high and had messed up her pants.

“It might be worse tomorrow,” Emily told me.

“So I’ve been told. But no worries, ‘cuz I’m all prepared.” I tapped my own power beads on the table and Mrs. Komori looked at us both as if we were talking in code and she was the head of the CIA.

They’d already given me about fifty pages of homework, so I went back to my room to start on it. I spread out on the floor, lying on my belly with my knees bent, my sock feet pointing towards the ceiling as I worked. Emily had been right—so far it was all phenomenally easy. It wasn’t so much that it came back to me; it had never really left. If the other kids were so determined to hate me, it might as well be for a good reason, like wrecking the grading curve. That is, if teachers at Delacroix Junior High graded on curves.

I was almost finished when there came a soft rapping at my door. Emily stuck her head in and surprised me, because I thought she was going out as usual. Unlike me, she didn’t have to be up in the morning, at least not yet. And she’d been out so often lately.

“Do you need a hug?” she asked. “‘Cause I kinda need to hug someone. I’ve been having a shitty couple of days, too, and I find cuddling my little sister to be therapeutic.”

I nodded, and she came in, sat down, pulled me onto her lap and wrapped one arm around me. I hugged it to my chest and leaned my head back onto her shoulder while she stroked my hair, her warm breath stirring it faintly. If using me like a stuffed toy was therapeutic for her, it was for me, too. I felt worries ease, and a connectedness, as if our heartbeats had synchronized. God, we’d come so far in such a few short months. I’d accepted the role of little sister gladly that morning, before everything went so wrong. Little sister. Baby sister. I’d accepted it along with--

“Did the beads help you today?”

“They kinda did, I guess. I thought about you a lot and tried to think about what you would do,” I said. Then I sighed, my eyelashes fluttered. I felt all wrung out, a discarded washcloth. I looked down at my frighteningly thin and bony wrist. There were my sister’s beads again, shining.

“Well, maybe you should think about what you would do. I mean, Amy Komori. Or maybe just try not to think so much at all. It must be beyond weird for you, living like this. Were the all the kids really that shitty, or were you exaggerating?”

“Not all of them. The ones that didn’t talk to me were fine.”

“Fuck ‘em.”

“Yeah, yeah. Fuck ‘em all and let Satan sort ‘em out. I don’t wanna talk about it. Tell me about your shitty couple of days.”

I could feel her take a deep breath. Her stomach expanded, touching my back. I took her hand in mine and played with her fingers, held my bracelet against hers, compared our wrists. Mine looked a lot more breakable than hers, but then she was a good six or so years older. Would I be as tall as her when I’m eighteen again?

Emily just said, “I had a kind of… fight… with someone last night. Not a fight. I don’t know. I’m not sure I really want to talk about it right this minute.”

“Can I guess? Darla.”

A long silence.

“Maybe. We kinda…” Emily took another deep breath, even deeper, and didn’t let it out. Her arms went limp, so I climbed out of her lap. Her face was pale; I wasn’t the only one terrified over this. She fought it off as I watched, and then she was just Emily again. She got up, smiling a bit thinly.

“Promise me you’ll make tomorrow a better day,” she said.

“I promise I’ll try.” I felt for her, a mix of complex emotions, water colors dumped in a clear glass and stirred until they were all one color. While I was fighting the battle of Delacroix Junior High, she was undergoing some trial of her own. Would they connect in the end?

“Don’t let those kids get you down, all right?”

I shrugged.

“Wear your beads.”

I held up my arm to show her. The beads weren’t going anywhere.

“Those are our power beads. Yours and mine. As long as we both wear them, you’re safe from any little junior high assholes.”

Emily bailed, but before she did, she leaped back in my room and said, “I love you, Honey Bunny.” I blinked in surprise. Then she was gone, off to her bedroom to keep her own terrible secret a little longer.

My mind raced, but any thoughts I had of finishing my first homework assignments were cast aside in favor of other concerns. I put my pencil in my mouth and rolled over on my back, stared at my beads. The ceiling light shone through them, causing them to dimly glow. Power beads? Plastic bracelet. It only had whatever power I assigned it. My eighth grade year was off to a glorious start.

Chapter Sixteen:
A Moody Blessing

I felt a bit better the next day and decided my symptoms had been just nerves after all. I reminded myself to rely on Mrs. Komori’s opinions more; after all, she was smarter than I was. I even felt well enough to eat some Lucky Charms cereal for breakfast. I sat hunched over my bowl, spooning the sweet crunchy stars, moons, clovers and diamonds into my mouth, the occasional line of milk dribbling down my chin while Emily sat across from me with her own bowl. She didn’t say much but I kept my eye on her for any sign she might suddenly spill all.

Just before I went to dress, she did say, “Hang in there, Honey Bunny.”

“You, too.”

I did what she told me: I hung in there like a toughie each day. The first month of school was like a fever dream, haunting me in a pre-dawn delirium. Some of the guys in my classes developed little crushes on me, but they didn’t know how to act on them because I was already developing a reputation as the strangest girl in school. Some of the girls tried to befriend me but found me off-putting because I didn’t have any interest in Britney Spears or the Spice Girls, and they had no clue about the music I did like.

At lunch a couple of weeks into it, Ashleigh Bodine—you had to say her last name to differentiate her from the sixteen other Ashleys and Ashleighs at our school-- from my science class invited me to sit with her and some friends at their regular little section of one of the big tables.

“Come on, dude,” Ashleigh Bodine said. “Everyone’s like really curious about you.”

“That’s cool. I guess.”

“Denise thinks you’re like super-scary.”

“Uh… then maybe I shouldn’t—“

“Come on. You can prove to her she’s wrong.”

So I sat and listened to this whole confusing conversation mostly about all the other kids in school. Which ones were cool, which ones sucked. Asshole things other kids said, things most people would ignore or chalk up as no big deal, were apparently world-shaking declarations of intent and purpose or else clues to major character flaws barely hidden. The girl introduced to me as Denise seemed a little quiet, but the others were loud and talked without even taking breaths, so at the end of these incredibly long run-on speeches, they’d suddenly gasp in all the oxygen they needed. And they pretty much ignored me until one girl said something about visiting her dad in Los Angeles.

Before I could stop myself I was singing Bratmobile to them: “Burn to the fucking ground LA/Whitey’s gonna pay/Whitey’s gonna pay.”

Oops.

They got really upset about the f-word, and I also had to explain it was just a song and I wasn’t racist against white people. I thought I was about two seconds away from having my ass kicked by a bunch of well-dressed girls or being jerked out of my seat by a teacher and marched off for some kind of political re-education or sensitivity class or something.

“Amy’s kinda into angry girl stuff,” Ashleigh Bodine explained, trying to help me.

“Like Alanis Morissette,” someone else chimed in, and looked at me for confirmation.

I sank lower in my chair, my face clouded. “Yeah. Like Alanis Morissette,” I said quietly.

The look of sudden understanding brightening their faces made me want to cry. Even Denise suddenly perked up. They all loved Alanis! She was so cool. Usually, they weren’t all into like being angry and stuff and they were a little concerned that she had sex and maybe was a lesbian or something but that was okay as long as she wasn’t like all in everyone’s face about it and didn’t I think her boyfriend must have been really freaked out when he heard that song and maybe she like doesn’t believe in God or something because she’s kinda sacrilegious a little, don’t you think?

They were killing my soul, bit by bit. I knew they’d be clueless about my more esoteric music loves, so I offered a couple I thought they’d recognize and they could more accurately categorize me from them. “I-I dunno. I like the Pixies… I like Weezer, too.”

“Oh my God, Weezer! That one song… they played it way too much.”

“I don’t really like punk rock.”

Would I have to start holding classes? “Well, they’re not really p—“

“I’ll bet she likes Green Day!”

“Amy, do you like Jewel?”

“Oh, yeah! You gotta love Jewel, right, Amy? I love Jewel, too, dude!”

“Joan Osborne. But she’s really anti-God, so I dunno. I kinda hate her, but if you like her, that’s okay.”

“Why do you dress kinda like a boy?”

“Dude, that was so rude!”

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way!”

“I heard you’re like a skater or something. Do you really skate? Do you know that guy Patrick? Is he like your boyfriend? My friend Kathleen, you probably don’t know her, she has second lunch, she has him in her Algebra class and she’s so in love with him. All she ever talks about is how she wants to rape him. Please don’t get mad if he’s your boyfriend. She thinks skater guys are—“

“She doesn’t wanna hear about your stupid friend! We’re talking about music.”

I bit my lip and tried not to slip out of my chair as I looked from face to face, all of them happy and asking me questions I didn’t know how to answer in any way that wouldn’t just confuse them more. I mean, at least they didn’t think I was a racist anymore, so at least that was progress. But I knew for a fact I was sitting at the wrong table.

The next day, they taught me how quickly girls could turn on each other. When Ashleigh Bodine asked me to sit with them again and I declined, the entire group got extremely pissed and snotty, then started telling people how stuck up and full of myself I was, that I didn’t like good music and that my haircut was weird. Especially Denise. Oh, and that I actually was the slut I was rumored to be. Supposedly, I had tried to impress them by bragging all about the amazing feeling of giving Patrick and the other skater punks handjobs behind the vert, which was apparently the place for those kinds of things. In fact, that was the real reason any of us hung around down there at the skate park, because I was the handjob queen of Delacroix Junior High.

Preps, jocks, skaters, nerds, geeks, weirdos, comic book fans, band kids, music fans, video game players, losers, glamour girls, tomboys, rich kids, poor kids, proto-bohemians, future-hippies; it all seemed so confusing. Sometimes I’d get a surprise, like when some girl I’d pegged as a total bitch would show someone an act of kindness, like picking up a dropped book and handing it back. Or when some guy who seemed to do nothing but crack lame jokes would say something really insightful in my first period pre-AP English. And there was some flow between groups, because most of the kids had multiple interests. Like a guy who was always reading sci-fi books before the last late bell rang would also be really in tight with the Playstation kids, or one of the skater punks would be really good at art and sports.

As for me, I kept my sharp tongue honed, but I was careful not to use it too much. After all, I had certain advantages over these kids, and it wasn't their fault they were dumb. I'd been just as dumb passing through here the first time; I was just as dumb in other ways now.

That was just the social stuff. Classes bored me almost to tears. As we’d assumed at home, I already knew all of this stuff. I blew quizzes away, became the go-to girl for teachers desperate for someone who knew the answers to participate in class discussions.

For me, the single most important event happened on the exact last day of the month. I spent that school day cramming my head with a second helping of knowledge and generally trying to hold things together and avoid Ashleigh Bodine and her clique and my long-rumored ass beating from Mike or Josh—who had picked up the nickname Little Josh, blamed me for it, and was seething with resentment at everyone-- with the help of my trusty power beads, and having more of those little aches and pains down in my belly.

The night before I’d been very blah, and all through classes, I’d been feeling kind of dumpy, as if I’d eaten too much breakfast. I wondered if I’d actually pulled something getting out of bed. The minute Mrs. Komori got me home, I went to pee and found out why. I hadn’t noticed on any of my many trips to the toilet that day—ever since my transformation, I’d proven to have the approximate bladder capacity of a baby sparrow-- but this time for no reason whatsoever, I just happened to look down…

And there were a couple of dark, wet drops soaking into the toilet paper I’d used to blot.

“Ohhhhh nooooooo,” I moaned. I tossed the paper into the toilet, shuffled forward with my jeans falling down around my ankles. I nearly tripped, so I stepped out of them completely and kicked them against the wall. A little freer, I pulled out the waistband of my underwear, already pretty sure of what I’d find there.

Sure enough, there were some dried spots of blood, almost rusty brown, right in the center of the thin cotton panel of my undies. Not a shadow, a sign. Yeah, now it hit home fully, the logical outcome of what had happened to me back in the spring—I was no different than millions upon millions of other women on this planet. Potentially fertile. Potentially someone’s mom. An egg a month until I dried up and turned into one of the Golden Girls. You know, if I lived that long. I wondered idly if I’d had my first period during first period. Then I wondered how long a flow I was in for.

What did I know about menstruation?

I went to my room, changed undies, then put the bloody ones in the clothes hamper. I checked my jeans; they were unstained, so I put them back on. Very relieved. I imagined what Ashleigh Bodine might have said if she’d seen me walking around with a dark circle down there. Or Mike. Or Patrick. Then I went and told Mrs. Komori the news.

"Today, I am a woman," I said as soberly as I could, like Connie Chung reporting on a flood. Mrs. Komori asked me what I was talking about, but I couldn’t tell her at first because I got the giggles the same way someone might in a church or at a funeral and no matter how hard I tried to stop laughing so I could explain I’d achieved the magic of menarche, I couldn’t get the words out. It was just too hilarious to think about my having to say this particular statement to an adult woman. The end result? Worst cramps of the day.

Mrs. Komori made me write it down on a notepad: “I’m having my period!!!!”

“Ohhhh,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You seem pretty happy about it.”

“I’m not really,” I said, gasping for breath, holding my side. “It’s just been one of those days.”

“I can imagine. Well, we’d better go to Target.”

“What for?”

“I’ll explain on the way.”

But it came to me before we even got to the car.

Book Five
Komori Sisters United Against Evil!

Chapter Seventeen:
The (Stupid) People’s Court

I still did not skate, not even on weekends. Not because I was afraid of Patrick or Mike or Little Josh. I was. People just had other plans for me. And by “people,” I mean the people of our home state, as well as Mrs. Komori.

The first Tuesday in October, while I was still pondering the infinite mysteries of my newly awakened female reproductive cycle, Mrs. Komori took a half day off work and came and got me out of class. I knew it was coming because we’d been duly informed a while back, and so I spent all morning with a stomach ache. A nervous looking girl with impossibly lush red hair came to third period Science and gave the teacher a blue slip then hauled ass like she’d left something on fire back in the office.

“Amy,” the teacher said.

This is it, I told myself. My stomach griped as I took the slip and read that my guardian was there and I should come immediately to the office and sign out for the afternoon. I went back to my desk, gathered up my books, saw Ashleigh Bodine giving me the evil eye, shot her a bird (shielded by my body so our teacher couldn’t see) and walked double-time downstairs.

Mrs. Komori was sitting in the outer office and she smiled when she saw me, a sympathy smile meant to cheer me up.

“Leaving us so soon, Amy?” the older secretary asked. It was a stupid thing to say, but she meant well. I mean, of course I was leaving. But she was one of those cheerful cherubic-type women, the short dumpling kind who wore Santa Claus stick pins in December—she was wearing an orange pumpkin one, actually—and always tried to joke with you when you looked down. I’m pretty sure my usual tan skin was looking a bit sallow so she took pity on me. Still, I couldn’t help but think the only reason she knew my name was because she’d filled out the blue slip.

“I guess,” I breathed as I signed out.

“Hope you feel better, babe,” the secretary said as Mrs. Komori held the door open for me. Behind us, the red-haired girl was sitting on her hands, trying not to let anyone see her face.

“I’m sure she will,” Mrs. Komori replied.

“She thought I was—“ I said.

“Sick. I know. Let’s get this over with.”

“I was thinking the exact same thing. This is worse than any doctor appointment.” I couldn’t believe how whiny that had come out. I was in worse shape than I thought.

“Which reminds me,” Mrs. Komori said. “In light of your recent… um… development, I wonder if I should make one of those for you. What do you think?”

“Um… maybe they do that stuff for you in prison?”

“Crazy! You’re not going to prison.”

“That was a joke. I thought I’d bank some good humor now, because I probably won’t feel like joking later.”

“That’s a fantastic idea. Maybe we can use this kind of thinking-ahead-ness in your character defense. You know, at your trial.”

We drove downtown to the courthouse—this big stone building with a domed clock turret, the whole thing super-historical and locally famous, built in the late 19th century-- and couldn’t find a parking spot for the longest time. Mrs. Komori and I both started to get nervous now; the last thing either of us wanted to do was be late for my court date. Finally, a guy in a huge shiny black pick-up waved to us to let us know he was leaving. Mr. Chivalrous, helping out the damsels-in-distress, I guess. We took his spot, went up the concrete steps towards the building. Just before we went in the double doors, I stopped, looked around at the sunny fall afternoon, still warm but no longer humid.

I took a huge, deep breath. My last taste of freedom, I told myself melodramatically.

“In you go, Honey Bunny,” Mrs. Komori said, using my outlaw handle to put me in my place.

In the lobby the receptionist told us where to go. Upstairs, to the juvenile court room. We rode an elevator up, sat around with a lot of other parents and kids, went in after someone said, “Komori,” and in we went, into this small courtroom.

The judge shuffled some papers and read for a few moments while I fidgeted. Then there was a discussion between the judge and some of the other adults present, who I thought were probably court officers or something. I had trouble following the conversation because some of it was in legalese between the judge and Mrs. Komori, who seemed pretty fluent in it. And I couldn’t figure out the judge’s deal. Sometimes he seemed on the verge of making a joke and I’d start to relax, and then he’d look at me all pissed and make my heart stop with fear I was going to end up in YDC.

Finally, the judge asked, “Ms. Komori, do you admit or deny the charge against you?”

I didn’t know who he was talking to at first. Ms. Komori? Mrs. Komori? Then I realized everyone was staring at me.

“I… admit the charge?”

“You sound a little unsure.”

“Yeah… yes sir. I’m sure. I admit.”

“All right, your plea is so entered. Since we’re all here today, we’ll move to the disposition phase.”

The judge told us he had leeway in sentencing, and that our state’s juvenile court wasn’t based on punishment but on changing behavior. Therefore, he decided I needed three months’ probation, plus I was banned indefinitely from that particular convenience store by owner’s request.

He added, “Contingent on the successful completion of your probation, your record will be expunged on your 18th birthday. Do you understand what ‘expunged’ means, Amy?”

“I think so.”

“You either do or you don’t.”

“Then I do… sir?”

In practical terms, all of this meant once a month until after Christmas, Mrs. Komori would have to drive me to the courthouse downtown and we’d meet with my probation officer and discuss what I’d done. So if I wanted to steal any more porno mags, I’d have to do it at Waldenbooks at the mall. And then when I was finally legally an adult, I wouldn’t have a record.

“Do you think I’m being a little harsh?” the judge asked me.

I looked at Mrs. Komori. Why was he asking me my opinion about the sentence? What was I supposed to do? Review it? Thumbs down, dude. That wouldn’t fly, so I fudged it with the classic three-word response so popular at Delacroix Junior: “I don’t know.”

“Well, you should know. Your guardian is trying her best to teach you right from wrong. I think you’re basically a good kid who has gotten some mixed-up ideas in her head. I want you to be a little scared here. It’ll do you good. Three months and hopefully you’ll understand that what you did was serious business.”

He looked at me and I knew he expected a polite reply. “Yes, sir,” I croaked.

On the way home, Mrs. Komori said, “We got pretty lucky in there, Amy.”

“How so?”

“If they had done a complete background check on you?”

“Oh…”

Mrs. Komori meant there were still some loose ends. If I had done something serious enough, the whole paper house she’d built for me would’ve come down around my ears and there was no telling what would have happened. A non-person? Deportation? Experimentation? I had no factual basis for these horror movie fantasies but my imagination went apeshit on me. I needed to toe the line, or walk it or draw it. Whatever you did to the line to show you were a proper young citizen and had learned your lesson.

“I think we’d better extend your house arrest, too,” Mrs. Komori said. “School and back, no skating. Anything else, you ask special permission. I want to make sure we get you clear of all of this before you get any more opportunities for trouble.”

And that’s why I had to sit out. Weekends were strictly for studying and doing things with Mrs. Komori. Running errands, cleaning house, doing laundry, working in the yard. I was a junior high student and a personal assistant and I dreamed of flying off the vert and punching Patrick, Mike and Little Josh in their stupid faces and reclaiming my spot above the coping. One day, I promised myself…

Meanwhile, my big sister was going to classes at the huge university just off downtown, not too far from where we lived. While she was carrying a full load to start her freshman year, she could have been home in plenty of time for dinner each night. Frequently, she wasn’t.

Sometimes Emily was off doing social stuff, but recently—in fact, since right around the time I started school—Darla had been conspicuously missing. No more three phone calls an hour, no more cereal bowls and messes I had to clean up as if I were her stupid mother. No more scary presence and menacing eyes. Mrs. Komori, with her ace detective-like skills of observation, noticed almost the same time I did.

“Where’s Darla these days? Are you two taking any of the same classes?” Mrs. Komori asked one rare night when Emily joined us for dinner.

Emily stopped eating and her fluid mind came up with a story quickly. “She’s been kinda sick.”

Among her many skills, Emily was an almost professional-level liar (and she worked at it), but this time I don’t think her mom believed her. I sure as fuck didn’t. Mrs. Komori let it drop because she probably thought Emily and Darla had a falling out and they’d mend it eventually, so the less said the better. I wasn’t so sure.

Emily studied, went to shows, painted portraits of me for her studio painting class, ran around looking frazzled. She seemed like a biology-based perpetual motion engine. All black hair and long limbs, darting in and out of our lives at will. If my own metabolism hadn’t been amped up into a state a hummingbird would envy, Emily would have exhausted me. Instead, she fascinated.

But there was this undercurrent of darkness to her energy. More than once she came in with extra books in her arms and a secretive air. One evening she left a pile of them on the kitchen counter near the phone. Being a nosy little bitch and wondering what I might be missing out on, I peeked at their spines.

Holy shit, I thought. What are they teaching college freshmen these days? I mean, I was all for a liberal education, but she had “The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion” by some guy named Sir James George Frazer, plus some broken-backed soft covers with words like “Rituals,” “Spells” and “Ceremonies” in their titles.

I shuddered.

“What are you doing?”

I almost jumped out of my pants. Emily brushed past me and picked up her books.

“Why are you reading this stuff?” I asked.

“Nothing you need to worry about, Honey Bunny. Don’t you have like some algebra homework to do or something?” She quick-stepped out of the kitchen.

I half-expected to open her bedroom door one night and find her surrounded by flickering candles, an evil tome bound in human flesh open on her lap. And I wondered if that spooky someone who had been in our house a billion times happened to own just such a book. But that was stupid, right? Despite how consumed I was with my daily performance in the twin roles of “Pariah Schoolgirl” and “Delinquent on Probation,” I couldn’t stop thinking about those books and how close Emily was playing things now.

Chapter Eighteen:
She Said Doe

With the leaves changing from green to yellow and red, showering our yard and scuttling along the street gutters like dry little goblin skeletons, it was hard not to revisit the intense fear I’d felt in the immediate aftermath of Toby’s disappearance; not all of it had been school-related, and Emily’s reading material reminded me of that constantly. Halloween was in the air, “X-Files” and “Milennium” were on TV and magical undercurrents were in play all around us. I could feel them in tiny nerve signals making me jumpy. Jumpier than usual.

One night, Emily slipped into my room. She'd been out with friends, a weeknight show with the Enemies, Seven Brothers and this new band which didn’t even have an official name. They just called themselves Project A, and Emily knew the drummer.

"Amy?"

I rubbed my eyes. She smelled like smoke and alcohol. I breathed it in deeply. Is this a dream? I swam upward through sleep, tried to find the surface, wakefulness.

"Can we talk?"

"Sure..." Okay, talk. I could at least pretend to listen while I dozed. I was barely conscious, but what Emily told me definitely woke me the hell up.

“Remember back when you were a guy?”

“I vaguely remember something about that, yeah…”

“When you first started, you know, changing? You said something about Darla then. Do you remember what it was?”

“Kinda. I’m not sure I’m completely awake, dude. And that was like somewhere between my hair turning black and my junk going up inside me and turning into flowers. I think I’m supposed to skate today so how am I—“

“Okay, you’re totally babbling, so I’ll let you go back to sleep.”

By the time Emily shut the door, I was fully awake. What I said about Darla that time… As a result, I didn’t sleep at all the rest of the night. And furthermore, because of that, school was complete hell the next day. I had a dull headache and kept nodding off in my classes, so the teachers called on me even more than usual with questions I barely had any trouble answering, which meant even more resentment building among my peers.

I couldn’t eat lunch. We were having hamburgers, which were nasty; I wasn’t too sure the soggy patties were even made of meat. Ashleigh Bodine had shoved me hard against the wall outside our science class and her little group had tittered as they passed. Payback for shooting her that bird. But I was used to foul food and equally foul bitches by now. My appetite was gone because of Emily’s midnight visit to my room.

Only a complete idiot would have failed to put this stuff together. My slow burning sex change. The Toby thing. The person who seemed to have it in for us both was also known for her interest in the paranormal and magical esoterica. Emily’s metaphysical reading list. The question she’d asked. Emily was on the case and she wanted me left out of it. At least for now.

I went outside and sat by myself on this low brick wall that ran between the main class complex and the P.E. building. If we finished our disgusting food quickly enough, we usually got a little bit of free time. Most of us spent it playing out our various rinky-dinky social dramas against the backdrop of these weathered red bricks, remnants of the original school that had been torn down to make way for our more modern one. Even with most of the first lunchers still eating in the cafeteria, there were a few kids out. Some were studying, some were frantically finishing the fourth period homework they should have done the night before, others were idly chatting.

Just sitting there, thinking about how weird Emily had become, worried for her, trying to decide what to do. Should I demand she tell me everything? Tattle like a baby to Mrs. Komori?

Then I heard this little sound, a barely-audible human noise kind of like the one Cindy Lou Who made in the Grinch cartoon. I was pretty sure it wasn’t someone talking to me. Couldn’t be. Hardly anyone talked to me these days unless they had something disparaging to say. Well, not the teachers. They were generally happy with my performance, if not my anti-social tendencies. So they usually said supportive things, which went in one ear and out the other.

‘Um.”

Now I was getting annoyed. Someone was deliberately interrupting my thoughts. I turned, squinting against the mid-afternoon sun. This dark figure with a fiery halo all around her stepped up and sat down beside me, right on my left hand. I jerked it out from under her ass. Actually, she didn’t so much sit as fall serendipitously into a sitting position. You know, rather than eat asphalt below the wall.

“I-I was… trying to step off,” she said.

It was the same girl who had brought the blue slip from the office. Her deep red hair, a mess of soft coils, was unmistakable. She wore a puckered peasant top and a long skirt and stuck me as intensely girly in an oddball way, nothing like Ashleigh Bodine and her ilk. In fact, she kind of reminded me a bit of Darla. But this kid was so gawky and awkward and it was kind of endearing the way she’d managed to sit down perfectly on the brick wall while trying to do something else, apparently. Plus, she hadn’t hurt my hand, which was definitely in her favor.

“Are you okay?” I asked. Not that I really cared all that much.

“Uh huh. Um… Someone told me you like the Breeders.”

“Huh?”

“You don’t? Like the Breeders?” She looked a genuinely distressed. A rumor turns out to be false? At Delacroix Junior High? How could the administrators let this happen?

“Actually, I do, but who—“

The girl opened the five-ring binder she held and inside were pages of dense blue ink, shaped like verses or poems. She quickly paged past them, too fast for me to read. Then she found what she was looking for: the CD booklet for “Pod,” by, you know, the Breeders. If it had been “Last Splash,” I wouldn’t have been as impressed, but it was “Pod.” Their first one. I considered “Last Splash” a fun listen, full of awesome tunes, but “Pod” was something special and had more of my favorites. It was Emily’s number one album as well.

The girl smiled happily, her face turning dark pink, a whole constellation of freckles beaming at me. “I like the Breeders, too.”

“That’s really great and all, but I was kinda thinking about some important—“

She frowned and looked a little lost. Her eyes darted as she looked for an out, or something more pleasant than my scowling face. “I’m sorry. I’ll leave you alone if you—“

“No, no. That’s cool. What’s your favorite song?”

“I like ‘When I Was a Painter.’”

“Rad. I like ‘Doe.’”

“I love Kim Deal. She’s my hero. I like to write poems and stuff and when I heard you liked the Breeders, I wanted to see if it was true ‘cause I thought I was like the only kid in school who liked them.”

“What do poems have to do with anything?”

“I wanna… It’s stupid. Nevermind. I better go.”

“Stay. I wanna know about the poems now. You write poems? Can I read them?”

“No!”

Her green eyes went so wide I almost fell off the wall and her inadvertent shout rang across the campus. I started laughing and this weird ass girl blushed until I finally apologized.

“I-I’m Sarah McAvoy,” she said.

“I’m—“

“Everyone knows who you are. You’re Amy. Amy Komori.”

An exaggeration. Our school was way too large for many people to know me by sight. Reputation might be another matter, but there were a few other fucked up guys and girls in the mix, too. I wasn’t even the only one who was considered sexually transgressive. In other words, a slut. Or a whore. There were jock whores and all-purpose whores. I was a skater whore. Oh, one more thing might have differentiated me from the other outcasts—apparently, I was the only Asian kid who was openly racist against whites. Ashleigh Bodine and Denise confirmed it with various recreations of my Bratmobile performance. These kids didn’t miss a trick!

But flattery aside, Sarah McAvoy’s garden path way of talking was really starting to intrigue me despite myself. “You were gonna tell me what you do with your poems. I mean, other than not let me read them.”

She looked hesitant, afraid to tell me. She said, almost too softly for me to hear, ”I wanna write songs.”

Then we were surrounded by all the other first lunch kids and Sarah hopped off the wall and practically ran away, leaving me sitting there wondering what the fuck was her deal. The rest of the day I kind of drifted through my classes, present in body but not in spirit. I didn’t see Sarah again for a while.

Chapter Nineteen:
The Legend of Komori Hollow

I went home that afternoon on the school bus because Mrs. Komori had to work late. Lurching along, bouncing without seatbelts, my ears filled with the roar of the other kids and the driver threatening to call our parents if we didn’t behave. The best part was none of these kids seemed to know me, so I could just be anonymous and think. But I stupidly got off two stops early—bad guess—and hiked it home, crunching leaves with my Vans and wondering about Sarah McAvoy and her red hair. As I approached our neighborhood, she changed to Darla in my thoughts. I mean, they did look at least superficially similar.

And once transposed with Sarah McAvoy in my brain, Darla took hold of my imagination and began shaping it towards fear.

Maybe it was a Halloween feeling, strengthened by the golden sun sitting so much lower in the sky than it had when I first started school while summer died. Long tree shadows reached for me as I passed under them. I missed the chaos on the bus. Surrounded by churning, almost mindless monkey house energy. At least there I was physically in my element. Here I was a lonely wanderer through a suburban waste. The Last Girl on Earth.

Darla. Creepy crawly Darla, gooseflesh and that someone-is-watching-you feeling. I mean, intellectually, I knew Darla wasn’t responsible, that I was only freaking myself out. Even so, I couldn’t seem to stop doing it.

I kept imaging what would happen if she suddenly stepped out from behind the purple-gray trunk of a pine tree as I approached it. Or was simply sitting in one of the metal chairs on our patio when I came down the driveway. What if…

What if I turned around and saw her following me one or two yard-lengths behind, just plodding along, matching my foot speed, neither falling back nor drawing nearer because she knew in the end I wouldn’t escape?

I made myself turn around. No one was there. A car zipped by in the distance. Then I froze in place. This was just like one of those movies! So of course she wasn’t there, because when I turned around in relief, she’d be looming over me like a psycho killer. I swallowed and felt my heart going doom-doom-doom-doom so loudly I was sure Darla would hear it. Would she reach into my chest and rip it out, silence it forever?

Or could I just not turn around, just start walking back the way I’d come?

That would totally neutralize her; no one did that shit in movies. They always just smiled as if safe and turned around and died. No, don’t be stupid. She’s not behind you. That’s not her hot breath you feel stirring those buzzed hairs—prickling now—on the back of your neck.

I twirled and jumped back, almost losing my balance and falling on my ass.

No Darla. Just a long suburban street with mailboxes. I felt so very stupid, a refreshing stupid. Feeling stupid at that point was better than a whole roll of Mentos. Amy’s Dumbness: the Fresh Maker.

I turned down our alley. Now there were so many places for Darla to hide. Small utility sheds, detached garages, privacy fences, large garbage cans with the recycle logo printed on them. I barely swung my arms as I walked stiffly along, my eyes scanning. Then our driveway. No car, no Bronco II. No one on the patio, empty chairs.

Nobody home. I let myself in and as soon as I was in the inky kitchen, I started slipping into total panic mode. I tried to walk softly, silently. Nerves warned me someone in the house, or some subtle difference in the air. Maybe I detected breathing so low I felt it rather than heard it. Or a heartbeat. Someone who wasn’t supposed to be in there, like the Shape from “Halloween,” or some horrible revenant would present itself as something or someone totally ordinary at first, only to become twisted and horrific in the shadows and snatch me away to Hell forever.

I was going to die. Death in the afternoon.

The light. I had to find the light. Every time I blinked, I saw afterimages, dancing squares, the sunlit windows dancing in front of deep shadows. I stood in the living room doorway and felt around the wall, trying my best not to actually step into the room. My hand slid along the wall, feeling every little bump. I was on the verge of hyperventilating when my fingers finally found the wall switch. I flipped it up, the lights came on.

Emily was sitting huddled on the sofa. I screamed, loudly. It felt like I’d been hit right on top of my heart with a sledgehammer.

“You scared the shit out of me,” Emily said. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“W-why were you sitting in the dark? W-where’s your truck thingy?”

Emily frowned. “Sit by me.”

I dropped my book bag and climbed onto the sofa next to Emily.

"Everything we talk about stays in this room, okay?” she said. A conspiracy.

“Who would I tell?” Seriously. Who? Sarah McAvoy?

“First. Do you want to be a guy again?”

I startled. “Oh fuck yeah. More than anything. I mean, I fucking had a period, Emily. And knowing me, I’ll probably do it again.”

“Okay, if that’s what you want, cool. But there’s something I want, too. You may not like it, but I really need you to work with me.”

My breath came in stitches. A guy again, if that’s what I want. So it was possible. To no longer have to put up with being teensy and weak, flimsy with bones apparently made out of cardboard tubes from the center of paper towel rolls. No more Ashleigh Bodine and Denise and their whole vicious tribe. No more Patrick, Mike and Little Josh. No more school. More importantly, my old life back. Or at least a close semblance.

“Fuck yeah, Emily. I’ll fucking do anything you want, anything you ask!”

So true, even in circumstances where getting back my guy junk and XY chromosomes weren’t at stake. After all she’d done for me since this craziness began, I would gladly obey Emily. Without question, without hesitation. Well, without much question or much hesitation. Our love might have changed into something different than before, and might never become what it had been again, but it was still our love. We still wore our sisterly power beads and would, somehow, inside like forvever-memories long after the cheap plastic they were made of clogged some foul-smelling landfill.

Emily took my head in both hands and looked straight into my eyes. “I want to save you. Because I love you more than almost anything.”

“A-and I—“

“But I also love Darla. And so I really need your help saving her, too.”

Chapter Twenty:
Can I Play With Darla-ness

“Darla. That’s why you’ve been reading all those fucked up books. They’re the same ones she has.”

“Had. But mostly, yeah. She had like--”

“She did something to Toby, too, didn’t she?”

“Maybe. Probably. I don’t know. He may have gotten away.”

“But you totally believe she did this to me, right? Or-or at the very least, had something major to do with it?”

“Yeah. And if it is true, we have to… I don’t know what we have to do. Convince her to change you back.”

“And I’ll be Martin again?”

“Kinda. Maybe. But maybe not. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, Honey Bunny.”

Emily told me the night Toby vanished, she thought about what I’d said back when my changes were just starting. Two boyfriends erased in one year, one by a sex and race change and the other simply gone. What they had in common besides impeccable taste in women was Darla’s hate and jealousy. Emily kept hanging out with Darla because she loved her like a sister, but things had changed. The trust was dead and Darla had become furtive, frightening in a way.

“And you saw her the last time she came over, right?”

“She looked kinda sick, like she’d had the flu or something.”

“Amy, she’s wasting away. It’s beyond weird. The last time I saw her she looked like total death.”

“The last time you saw her?”

“A couple weeks after you started school, maybe. Right after Toby disappeared, things started changing. And I think she knew I was eyeballing her for signs. All those weird books she used to have and all the incense and candles and shit? One day, that stuff was all gone from her room. Nothing but bare shelves. It was just so weird, as if she’d just moved in or something and hadn’t unpacked her stuff.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyways, she hasn’t been returning my calls forever now. Her mom says nothing’s wrong, everything’s fine. But there’s no way, Amy. No fucking way. She’s not even taking classes. You can feel it, can’t you?”

“Yeah, I’ve been really freaked out lately. I mean, more so than usual.” I told her all about my feelings walking home, coming into the house, turning on the light. “But I just thought it was like the power of suggestion or something.”

“Oh shit, Amy. What if… what if she was following you?”

I glanced around the room, out the window. Nothing but the sunlit yard and the shadows crawling across the dry grass. Emily held up her power beads, grabbed my arm and held it against hers. Our sister bracelets, colorful orbs around our wrists. I breathed deeply, tried to slow my racing pulse, the thoughts running wild in my mind. Almost simultaneously, Emily and I stopped breathing and just listened.

A whirring of cars somewhere in the distance, like the tide at the Gulf, something so constant we usually didn’t hear it at all. I couldn’t hold my breath anymore, so I breathed super shallowly, trying to make no noise. A clock ticked somewhere in the kitchen. Stillness, ambience, a feeling that any possibility could be real. The fantastic was somehow more real than the sofa, more real than my discarded inline skates, more real than Sarah McAvoy’s binder full of shy girl creativity. Then Emily took a loud breath through her nose. The moment had passed. No one had followed me, no one was listening outside. We were two sisters, alone.

“Another thing,” Emily said, whispering, her dark eyes shining. “And this is pretty fucking scary, too.”

“What?”

“Well, I’m thinking we need to figure this out and figure it out quick. Because, Amy, I don’t think we have much time.”

With all the same melodramatic emphasis as if she was been telling me a campfire ghost story, Emily explained it this way: There was a belief within magic systems that whatever you did came back to you, three-fold. It was like some kind of pumped-up karma. But Emily didn’t chalk it up so much to anything mystical. She said the three-fold thing was just mumbo-jumbo, New Age, Wiccan stuff to explain things that actually had a basis in quantum physics or some non-Newtonian something or other we were still decades away from defining in mathematical terms and teaching in university classes. It was kind of like how people said they found babies in cabbage patches, or the stork brought them before they learned about the sperm and the egg and all that. We couldn’t call it superstition, Emily said, but belief, and it was a pre-scientific explanation whatever else we called it.

To her, it was a simple matter of cause-and-effect. You couldn’t get something without giving something. The bigger the thing you received, the more it cost you. That’s why we lived in a world where someone could turn a Caucasian guy in his 20s into an Asian girl in her early teens and not, say, turn the sky green or reverse the poles or declare herself Empress of the Known Universe with wholesale powers to bend and shape all of reality. Even magic, as fucked up as it seemed, was bound by certain universal laws. It couldn’t completely defy physics. It could make the improbable probable—inevitable even-- but not the impossible. The cost was too high.

“So basically, what Darla’s done is costing her. It’s eating her up,” Emily said. Her voice quavered a little. And to be honest, it pissed me off. Sympathy for Darla. I tried not to dwell on it for now. After all, they were friends long before I entered the picture.

“What do we do?”

“I think… we need to confront her. Try to make her see the light again. Together.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

Chapter Twenty-One:
Spy Girls Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things

Spy Girls. That’s what we’d become, the two of us. Two Fox Mulders, only with ovaries. No Dana Scullies here. We were secret agents locked into a life-or-death struggle with the forces of darkness. Literally. Waking life seemed banal by comparison. I felt more, saw colors deeper and with more vividness.

Dinner that night was yakisoba, one of Mrs. Komori’s family recipes, gleaned from a magazine in the years before Emily’s birth. Ordinarily, I loved yakisoba. Noodles, pork, cabbage—and Mrs. Komori’s special innovation, sliced bell peppers. I’d even pitched in to help make it before. But neither Emily nor I had any appetite. Mrs. Komori took it gracefully and didn’t show any disappointment at our poor showing in the eating department.

“Where’s your Bronco?” she asked at one point.

I looked at Emily, Emily looked at me. “Uh… I left it at school.”

“Isn’t that expensive? I mean, the parking decks?”

“No, you paid for my semester parking pass. I can park there whenever.”

“Weekends, too?”

“Yeah, whenever.”

“That might come in handy sometime.”

“Yeah, like today.”

Then Emily was up from the table. She put her dishes in the sink and jerked me up by my armpit, her fingers really digging into my shoulders. It hurt.

“I need Amy to help me with a drawing for class.”

After dumping my dishes in the sink, too, I followed Emily to her room. The seat of the Big Mystery, as far as I was concerned. I hadn’t been in her room since she started doing her magic research. It was hardly changed. A floral yukata hanging on the wall, a poster of Klimt’s “The Kiss” all gold and sensual on the other, some little kimono-wearing dolls on the bookshelf among the novels—stuff like “Fight Club” by Chuck Palahniuk and everything Tom Robbins had written up to that point. A CD player on top of her small TV, CD cases—Breeders, Pixies, Jane’s A, Frente, They Might Be Giants-- strewn around, clothes on the floor. And all those books, those freaky books. Actually, they were under her bed, but she dragged them out.

“Look, these were really helpful, but to be honest, most of these only hint at the truth. It would be pretty dumb of them to actually publish the real stuff. It’s mostly handwritten and passed around from person to person, or coven to coven. A lot of people who actually self-describe as witches? They don’t even have a clue. They think it’s like all glamours or whatnot, love spells and luck spells and shit like that,” Emily told me.

“So what are we gonna do when we confront Darla?” I asked in a squeaky little voice that made me blush as soon as I heard it.

“That’s the one weak part in my whole scheme.”

“Oh fuck. ‘One,’ she says”

“Yeah, that’s kinda my opinion, too.”

Emily sat on the floor, thumbing through one book after another while I sat on her bed and chewed my fingernails, trying to think. I was scared, but also excited. What if we did pull this off? I could be peeing standing up again by morning’s light. I’d have a couple of testicles full of sperm instead of ovaries packed with eggs. Speaking of, I might even wake up with wood. That would be so fucking sweet; it had been so long I’d almost forgotten about wood. And I wouldn’t have to go to Delacroix Junior High. I’d have the status of a college town dumbass again, only unemployed. But even that was vastly superior to being a junior high kid.

On the other hand, if we failed, Emily and I might both be turtles or salamanders or something, living out the rest of our too short lives on the pebbly bottom of a terrarium in Darla’s house. I almost laughed.

“We’ll wait until Mom goes to bed, then sneak out and do this motherfucker,” Emily said.

“I want this to be over,” I said. “I want to be a guy again.”

“You really hate being a girl that much?”

“It’s not a matter of whether or not I hate it. I hate the way people treat me because I’m a girl. Especially because I’m not like this little miss… I dunno… whatever they think a girl is supposed to be. It wasn’t like I was even the most macho ass-kicker dude before, but being small totally fucking sucks. Even if I were still a guy, this would suck. But really it’s a matter of what I’m supposed to be.”

“Yeah, but you couldn’t skate before. I mean, like you do now. I mean, if Mom let you. You know what I mean.”

“I’m not saying it doesn’t have its good points. You seem to enjoy it.”

“Kinda. I definitely don’t hate it, but it’s not as if I haven’t wondered what it’d be like to have a dick. Sometimes I think it’d be pretty rad to be a guy. I think a lot of girls think about it.”

“I dunno.”

“I mean, yeah, sometimes I wish I were a guy. I don’t know. Being a girl is pretty… well, it’s good and it’s bad. It’s hard. And it’s easy.”

“Shut up. I don’t really care. I was born a guy. Inside, I still am. So I think it’d be a good idea for the book to match the cover or whatever. Do you really wish you were a guy?”

“Just sometimes. Did you ever wish you were a girl when you were a boy?”

“Not really. I was curious, I guess. I kinda thought if there was like a way to do it for a day, I probably would. Just to understand girls better.”

“Just to play with yourself.”

“No, nothing like that. Okay, I probably would have at least tried.”

“So you did wanna be a girl.”

“No, I didn’t. I was pretty content. Really, I never gave it that much thought. I think this conversation has lasted longer than the sum total time I spent thinking about gender or whatever in the entirety of my life before... Darla.”

“Well, I think having a dick would be kinda neat. At least for a day. I’m still super-curious about how they work and how it feels for guys and shit like that. But it’s not like I really wanna be a guy. I still think guys suck, but I don’t really think girls are any better. Our suckage is different but it’s suckage all the same.”

“I didn’t realize girls were so fucking mean.”

“You didn’t know that? Holy fuckin’ shit, Honey Bunny. You’re so naïve.”

“What about ‘girl power’ and all that shit?”

“Marketing campaign.”

Emily kind of looked at me thoughtfully. At times like that I could never read what she was thinking about, but I’m sure she always saw right through me. Her dark eyes got a little wider and she started singing-- softly at first, then a little louder-- that song from “Annie:” “It’s the hard knock life for us, it’s the hard knock life for us. No one cares for you a smidge… when you’re in an orphanage..” while she mimed scrubbing the floor.

She rolled over on her back, kicked the air in mock frustration, sat up and did these frantic, robotic arm movements that I think were supposed to be something the kids did in the movie version. The whole time she did all this crazy choreography, she sang what must have been half the “Hard Knock” song; while her speaking voice was pretty sexy, her singing left a lot to be desired apart from enthusiasm. I’m pretty sure she didn’t even remotely have the lyrics right. Except for one thing.

The hard knock life. Yeah.

I didn’t want to laugh, so I clamped my lips shut as tightly as possible. A real struggle, but I won.

Finally, Emily just stopped and said, “Be whatever, Honey Bunny.”

She’d half exhausted herself and was breathing hard. She leaned back against her bed, her legs out and crossed, long as railroad tracks, long as the interstate. Her feet were bare and her toes stroked the low TV cabinet.

We sat like together quietly for a while, then nerves and boredom went to war with each other and we watched TV so we wouldn’t have to think. “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” was on. Outside the sky went from deep indigo to black as we watched Linus suffer his umpteenth disappointment in the pumpkin patch. After that, the Garfield special, with pirate ghosts. Time just seemed to stretch into infinity.

By this time tomorrow maybe I won’t have to worry about these particular hard knocks anymore, I thought. People’s opinions about what girls do and don’t do, or any of that shit. The more I thought, the more I realized just how inadequate that Tom Petty song was. Fuck Tom Petty. That amused me. Somehow the orphans from “Annie” seemed wiser to me now than a classic rock star. In fact, he seemed kind of like an asshole by comparison, part of the whole problem.

I looked at my big sister. Her face seemed impassive, but every so often one of her dark eyebrows would flicker. Troubled. Behind those eye her powerful brain was working, no doubt seeking the solution to Darla and me both. But there were all those other thoughts in there, distinctly girl thoughts.

What made her the way she was? Nature or nurture or both? If I stayed Amy, would I become more like her? Had I already?

And if I became male again? I didn’t think I’d be Martin anymore, at least not the Martin I’d been before. I might look and sound just like him but I’d know the difference, and so would Emily and her mom. I’d found new levels of emotion and depths of feeling I’d never known before. I’d discovered a slight affinity for things like sundresses and beaded bracelets and barrettes in my hair. I’d been talked down to. Been arrested. Learned to skate.

I’d fought a Cold War with other girls. A boy had tried to kiss me. I’d been objectified, belittled, admired. People had responded to me, reacted to me, listened to me as a girl. And through all of that, symbolized by my gift of blood, I had the potential to become a woman. Or not.

For all the negative things Emily had told me tonight, I had to admit she made the prospect of staying a girl seem pretty goddamn attractive. It’s like she didn’t even appreciate what a bad ass she was not only for putting up with all of it, but also for carving out her own way of being in the face of it. Mrs. Komori, too. Even that bitch Ashleigh Bodine had her own circle of power, even if she misused it.

So whatever else happened, whether I came back from Darla’s the rod or the water, I’d be someone new. I could no more become the old Martin as that Martin could become child-Martin or baby-Martin again. We grew up, or—in my case-- we grew down. But we never stayed the same person. Experiences molded us along with our abilities and our limitations. People and their bullshit received ideas defined us, but like Emily and her mom, we further defined ourselves in relation to that. We accepted it or rejected it, we accommodated it and found our power in whatever way we could. Emily painted, Mrs. Komori was super-competent at her job and really wise, Amy skated. If I had Martin’s soul in this Amy-body, I’d have at least a bit of Amy’s soul in my Martin-body as a result.

Super Spy-Girls always get their woman in the end. Mrs. Komori finally went off to bed and we waited another hour just to make sure she was asleep. After that, Emily and I put on jackets—she wore a fairly new hoodie and I ended up in this old plaid flannel button-up coat Emily had worn four or five years before when she was around my size and everyone was dressing like Nirvana. We went out the back door as quietly as we could and set off on foot for Darla’s house, a few blocks away.

“This would be a lot faster if you hadn’t left your Bronco at school,” I said.

“No shit, Sheila Sleuth. I didn’t really feel… like competent to drive at the time, though. You think I could drive now?” Emily showed me her hands. They were shaking.

“Maybe not. I could have, though. I still remember how.”

“If you could reach the pedals, maybe.”

“Ouch. Shouldn’t you have brought some of those books?”

“None of them were the actual book of magic or whatever she used.”

“So all that stuff you told me earlier? You just figured that out on your own?”

“It’s in the books, Honey Bunny. Just not the actual formulas or whatnot. You can’t get those… other books in bookstores and libraries.”

“But Darla got them.”

“Fuck if I know how. Anyways, she’s the one who knows how to work this stuff. I only know about… how to work it.”

“We are gonna die.”

“Probably.”

It was close to midnight, and there weren’t very many cars out. We passed under streetlights, listened to the wind rustling. A dog barked. And then we were close. Emily knew the area intimately, and I got my first clue just how near we were to the mystery’s heart when I heard her breathing pattern change. More nasal, harder. Now I started to dread the inevitable moment when Emily would identify Darla’s house and we’d have to go through with this whole insane thing.

“Down the alley,” Emily said. We slipped between the houses, a typical suburban alleyway turned graveyard by our bizarre errand. When we got to Darla’s house, Emily carefully opened the gate in the chainlink fence, both of us holding our breath. A light was on in a back room as we entered the yard and tried to stay in the shadows.

“That’s her room,” Emily whispered.

I nodded, but I doubt Emily saw me. I wasn’t looking at her; I had my eyes fixed on that square of red light, curtains drawn. We reached the house, pressed ourselves against the rough brick. A large A/C unit was next to my leg. I could feel the cool metal even through my jeans. Our sneakers crunched on dead leaves and pinestraw.

The curtains were almost sheer, so we could actually see into the room, through a red haze as if we were squinting. No one was in there, the door was shut (a big picture of Tori Amos on it).

“Now what?” Emily asked.

“Why are you asking me?”

Then Emily let out a little peep as the bedroom door opened.

And there she was: the Elusive One. Our Darla, through the red curtains. Freaking hideous, a hairless scarecrow, and she wore this ratty bathrobe draped like a shroud. I looked at Emily, and she had this stricken expression that scared me almost as much as the sight of Darla did. And when I looked back at Darla, she was staring right at us, her eyes lit like twin beacons of cold fire.

"Oh fuck," Emily gasped.

Darla took a step towards us. She hesitated, as if struggling with herself. Then she was at the window. She tore down her red curtains and they fluttered to the floor behind her, danced briefly on an air current and settled there like a bloodstain. She raised the window and pushed out the screen. Her face looked angry, but just for a moment, I thought I saw something trapped and sad in her eyes.

“What are you doing here?” she hissed.

“We-we want to talk to you,” Emily said.

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“What you did to me—“ I started.

“Oh fuck, what I did. What I did, what I did, what I did. Well, guess what, Marty-girl. When they tell you to be careful what you wish for, they don’t know the fucking half of it. Not a tenth of it.”

“What did you do to Toby?” Emily asked.

I looked at her, shocked. I wanted to keep this about me for now. If we presented a united front, Darla might crack, might reverse my sex change or tell us how to do it ourselves. Toby could go fuck himself as far as I was concerned.

“You both better go. If you really know what’s good for you, you’ll go.”

“What did you do to Toby?”

“I didn’t do anything to him! I started to… But I didn’t have enough… enough… They wanted too much!”

“You tried to turn him into a girl or—“

“No, no. That was a special. There’s a reason I did what I did to Martin, okay? I-I knew it would cost a lot, but I didn’t know how much.”

“You can undo this, right?” I’d found my voice. I had to know.

“I could have…”

“Could have? You can! You did it so you can undo it. Emily read in the books—“

Darla was already falling back, looking past us. Her eyes widened and her face paled. Emily and I turned together, afraid something or someone was coming up behind us, all violent intentions, something horrible beyond horror. Nothing but the night. Black trees, a security light giving off an ugly pinkish glow, a halo of light on the alley, the flickering blue glow of a television coming through the window of the house across the way.

Emily grabbed my arm, her fingers digging into my little bicep, painfully, through my coat sleeve. I tried to unclamp her fingers, but she was pulling me around, making me look.

Darla’s room was empty. There was only her robe settling in the center of the floor, on top of the red gauze shade, her furniture poised as if in silent contemplation of something it had witnessed that we had not. Or waiting, as if the old Darla might walk into the room, be the same curvy, whiny bitch I’d met when I first started dating Emily.

I looked up at Emily. Tears were running down her cheeks.

All the light bulbs in Darla’s room burst at once-- then the security light behind us-- with a photographic pop-flash and this overwhelming sense of sadness swept over us from the open window, like air rushing out, melancholy like the sound of a piano playing minor chords in an echoing concert hall. It just seemed to flow over and through us both. I ached, disappointed, cheated somehow, regretful beyond measure.

And then something intensely malevolent came from without, from another space, a sense of something alien and other, its victory tattoo drummed on our nerve endings like a billion tapping fingertips.

We broke, running, Emily pulling me along, and I felt this spreading warmth down the insides of my thighs as we sprinted for the fence. Sneaky Spy Girls no more, we reached the fence, Emily landing low on the links with a springy clang, then her hands on top, vaulting over, landing heavily and tumbling, rolling with a loud wheeze and girly gasp of dismay and pain. I thought for a second she’d broken her neck but she was up almost as fast as she’d fallen. I was a half step or so behind, but thanks to all my time on the half-pipe vert, I hit the fence top in mid-leap— it bent under my weight then rebounded, catapulting me upward, my arms and legs churning the air. By now my airborne instincts were well-honed, so I landed gracefully in the alley, spending my accumulated kinetic energy not in an ankle-shattering impact but almost delicately, kind of like a dancer, in a few light steps—only I didn’t have time to admire my balletic artistry.

“Go go go!” Emily said, her voice a rasp. She was doing that low-volume yelling thing.

We flew headlong down the alley. I was trying to catch my breath, running as in one of those dreams where your legs get heavier and heavier and there’s something on your tail. Like a deer Emily ran, leaving me far behind. I might have more grace now, but she had stride-length.

Then… she came for me. Realizing I couldn’t catch her, Emily turned and ran back, stopped in front of me. She bent over, her hair a black veil with grass in it, hiding her face and she was breathing hard. We were together again, in someone’s yard, near the curb. Under street lights that made everything brighter than that haunted alley. Some cars were parked along the street. Normal houses. Normal night. Normal world.

“Oh… fuck… Amy,” she said between breaths. “I almost… peed… in… my pants!”

I looked down at my jeans. “Not… almost… for me.”

I don't clearly remember much about the walk home, other than how funky my wet pants felt. I walked with my legs a little wider than usual, which gave me this kind of lumbering gait for someone so small, no longer the Ballerina of the Back Alley. I kept waiting for it to rain in my socks and shoes. Emily kind of sniffled a lot. And we held hands.

The next day, Darla's mom called Mrs. Komori. Darla had vanished. I overheard the conversation in snatches. Cancer? Wasting away. Was it cancer? Gone. Run away. Sick with fear. I quickly left the room.

Emily shut down, and we didn’t see her all day. Her door stayed shut. Soft sobbing sounds from inside. Emily had been Darla's best friend, her leader, her better self in so many ways. And her obsession. Just before supper time, Emily's door opened and she joined us at the table. Mrs. Komori and I stopped eating, our forks poised halfway to our mouths.

"Welcome back," Mrs. Komori said, finally. Emily half smiled, leaned over in her chair and hugged her mom with one arm.

Book Six
Hard Knock Life

Chapter Twenty-Two:
Aftermath

Some people are born, some people are made, some people are a combination. I was apparently a combo meal of some kind. And now I was who I was—the person the world thought I was—for the duration. Amy Komori. A girl who hadn’t even existed at Halloween time the year before.

Speaking of Halloween, it came and went in the aftermath of Darla’s disappearance. I’m not sure how deeply her loss affected anyone else beyond Emily and me. They just seemed to get on with whatever it was they had going on, as if Darla had OD’d or run away with eco-terrorists or joined the Unification Church. Emily’s friends—who were all ignorant of the real reason she’d vaporized out of our lives—went ahead and planned and put together fun costumes like Austin Powers and the “Scream” killer and partied to celebrate all the morbid things we usually avoided thinking about. Like mortality and rotting away in the ground, the end of summer, the end of youth, and the coming of the season of cold death, the whole mortal cyclical thing. Emily and I had confronted all this directly. While we weren’t exactly sure what we’d seen and experienced in Darla’s backyard, neither of us felt the appeal of ghosts and demons and witches and international men of mystery.

Even in her absence, Darla lived in the spaces between us, in the places where Emily and I overlapped now. We talked about it one morning not long after, just before I left for my daily seven and a half hour torture session. Emily looked pretty glum at breakfast, so I stopped by her bedroom while Mrs. Komori got herself ready for work. Just a few minutes to kill, just enough time to cheer up my big sister. Maybe.

I knocked on her door and I heard her voice from inside: “Go away.”

“No,” I said flatly.

“Fine.” I eased open the door and peeked in.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed, still in her tank and pajama bottoms, her knees together and overall, she was looking deflated and forlorn. She peered up at me through the black foliage of her insanely thick hair, her mouth kind of slack. I padded into the room and sat next to her. We sank a little into the mattress and reached up to put my arm around her shoulders.

“I’m so very sorry, Hon—Amy,” Emily said.

“Weirdly, I’m kinda starting to like it when you call me Honey Bunny,” I told her.

“I failed, dude. I totally failed both of you guys.”

“Don’t sweat it,” I said. I pretended to wash dishes and softly sang, “It’s the hard knock life for us…”

She clucked once, a sardonic little laugh. “I gots me a stupid little sister now.”

I grinned.

“I miss Martin,” Emily said. “And Darla.”

“Well, I miss Martin, too. But not… you know.”

Emily nodded.

“On the plus side, all that hard work your mom did for me isn’t going to waste,” I said. “And being a girl isn’t exactly a bad thing. You’re one.”

“Plus, I hear they’re making great strides in medical science,” Emily said. She meant it as half-a-joke. The next thing was more than a whole one: “Maybe one day, they’ll find a way to graft an elephant’s shlong onto people. Then when you grow up, you can do pornos.”

“Fucking sick, dude. I could’ve done without that mental image.”

“You wanted your junk back, though. You were pretty excited about it. Were you like planning your first pee and everything?”

“Yeah.” I sighed. Wistful feelings of days gone by. “Fuck, dude, we’ll figure something out. I mean, I may not ever go back to being a guy or whatever, but I’ll be something. In the meantime, I gots me a stupid big sister. Also, I’ve got this really rad, totally fucked up new life.”

“Yeah, think of all the things you can ruin this time around.”

“And at least I didn’t bleed this month.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know. I didn’t get my thing.”

“You didn’t?”

“Not yet, anyways.”

“Well, at your age, girls tend to skip a few.”

News to me. Should I go put a pad in just in case? And then Mrs. Komori was calling me. The train was leaving the station and I while she couldn’t force me to ride it, she was pretty sure I was going to wish I had.

“Are you gonna be okay?” I asked Emily as I got up to leave.

She nodded, looking little cheerier, like a bowl of Cheerios. “How about you, Honey Bunny?”

I made a crazy face with my tongue sticking out, gave her two thumbs up and left her laughing. How was I supposed to know if I’d be okay? I ran to my room, grabbed my backpack and followed Mrs. Komori out to her car.

A chilly November morning, with dew on the grass and gray skies above. The trees were still full of leaves, most of which were dead by now. This was going to be my life, just the way Mrs. Komori had it planned out. If all went according to that plan, I’d be back out on my own in about nine to ten years. I’d be a woman, at least in body. What I’d be in spirit or mind was still up in the air.

Chapter Twenty-Three:
My Lunches with Sarah

All that day, I daydreamed my way through classes, sorting through my life up to that point. It had been a wild ride—to make an understatement. I'd met Emily, and we'd had a blast, the two of us. I gave her my virginity. Then I turned into a girl. Sometimes it all seemed unreal, sometimes it seemed more real than the things I did that day at school. And, more and more, my life as Martin seemed like a dream, too.

What did Alice say when her looking glass adventure ended? Something like, "He was part of my dream, but then, I was part of his dream, too." One morning I woke up as girl who had dreamed she was a guy. Crazy.

"Are you awake, Amy Komori?"

"Am I... huh?"

The kids laughed. Mr. Kintner, third period Science 1 teacher, famous for his comb-over and his plaid button-up short-sleeved shirts, tapped his chalk on the board. He had a half-smile. Some of the teachers were more tolerant of my Amy ways. Making mostly A's can do that for you. A few desks behind me, Ashleigh Bodine said something I couldn’t quite hear. I put my hand behind my head as if I was scratching. Scratching with my middle finger.

The bell rang for first period lunch and I hauled ass out of there before Ashleigh Bodine could retaliate. I mean, she would eventually and I’d deal with it then. For now, I had a plan.

If I ran quickly enough I thought I’d be able to catch Sarah McAvoy coming out of the office on her way to lunch.

I dodged my way though the thronging kids on the central stairs, pushing when I couldn’t find daylight. In elementary school, I remembered, they’d made us go to lunch by class, in single file lines and everything was orderly. But here at Delacroix Junior High, they relied on our maturity as young teens to provide self-discipline. We saw how well that worked Monday through Friday. Imagine the chaos if they didn’t have two lunch periods, just the one.

Anyways, I was right. Sarah was standing in the office, looking out at all the kids streaming by. She had her hands on the glass and a bored look on her face. I was a little disappointed; in my pre-visualization of how this would go down, she had been frightened.

She turned, spoke to the cherubim secretary (who I also kind of thought of a being a dumpling, like with pork inside it maybe), ended up waving at her for some reason, then came out with her backpack over one shoulder. Again, she wore a long skirt and some kind of weird-looking brown flats. Craftily, like a ninja, I dropped into the crowd just far enough back to tail her without being spotted. Being a head or so shorter than most of the other kids finally came in handy for something.

As we got closer to the lunchroom and the disorderly flow of hungry little dumbasses filtered down into a single file line—helped immensely by the teacher doing lunch room duty at the entrance—I started passing people. I had to time it just right, because if I violated the “no cuts” law, there would have been trouble. I would have to be like the girl with the biggest balls on earth to pull that shit off. Even Ashleigh Bodine would have found herself in a world of hurt. You just didn’t cut in a line, no way, no how.

Perfection. I joined the line right behind Sarah. Yeah, some of the other kids weren’t too happy about it, but all they could do was grumble a little because technically, I’d was crime-free and totally in the right. Could I help it if I happened to be small and swift and able to shoot through holes their clumsy asses were too big to fill?

I tapped Sarah on the shoulder and when she turned, I said, “Do you have a beau?”

“Huh?” She blinked rapidly, her brain unable to process the question.

“Forget it. It’s a song.”

“Oh!” She smiled happily now, confusion subsiding. “I-I haven’t seen you in… like a really long time.”

I burst out laughing and then stopped because I’d erased her smile and made her cheeks redden. Nice one, Amy. Feeling a teensy bit shitty, I bit my lip and shuffled along behind her to the tray station and we both got our trays. Quietly; we didn’t chatter our way through the lunch line. By the time we had all our state-sponsored food—meat and vegetable soup, peanut butter sandwich, collard greens and an icebox cookie, plus skim milk for Sarah and lemonade for me—and finished paying, we’d silently acquiesced to having lunch together, which was what I wanted all along. I hummed happily to myself and kind of adopted this bouncing walk. Rising off my toes, doing a little hip shake. I couldn’t help it. I wanted to dance, but didn’t dare.

Sarah McAvoy made me happy.

That was good to know. Since I was pretty well stuck like this for the duration—meaning, my entire life—I would need at least one good friend. Emily had Darla, and we all knew how well that turned out. Sarah was kind of like Darla Light, light as in sunshine and goodness, not as in “less calories.” I didn’t think it was a crush, although it could have been. It was one thing I didn’t want to analyze. Once I realized Sarah McAvoy’s very presence caused joy, I just wanted to bask in it.

We ate lunch together every day after that. I found myself actually looking forward to third period, because once I’d endured the boredom and Ashleigh Bodine’s presence, I’d get to rush down and see Sarah. My regular lunch date. Many confusing conversations later, we decided to sign up for art class together the next semester.

“Actually, we probably could take a lot of classes together,” she told me one day, while eating a gooey peanut butter finger that stuck in her big, white front teeth and kind of grossed me out.

“Hmm?”

“I… looked at your file.”

“You’re a spy!”

She shook her head no and reddened again. She chewed her peanut butter finger and smiled, crumbs on her lips.

“Hey, Ayumi,” someone said.

It was none other than my skatey-skater Mike, who I knew didn’t have first lunch. I’d never seen him in the cafeteria. His hair was in his eyes as always, but he’d sprouted a few pimples this fall. The pores on his shiny nose were pretty clogged too and looked like someone had stippled it all over with a black felt-tip pen. The awkward age.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, my good mood instantly wrecked.

“Word is you broke up with Patrick.”

“Word is wrong,” I said, but I thought, Word is you’re gonna have an Adam’s apple as big as a golf ball by this time next year.

“You didn’t break up?”

“I was never WITH HIM!” I said, the last part coming out as a shriek. I lowered my head and whispered, “Leave me the fuck alone, dude. What are you even doing here?”

“I got a hall pass,” he said, and held up the laminated yellow card that said simply, “HALL PASS” in all caps. Someone had tried to use a blue ball-point pen to turn the “a” in “hall” into an “e.”

“You better get ready to haul ass.”

“Damn Ayumi. You kiss your mom with that mouth?”

“No, I kiss yours, fucker. Go away.”

“I just want you to know that since you’re not Patrick’s girlfriend anymore—“

“Not only am I not, I never was. Why does everyone keep saying I was? Go away.”

“—that you’re in for a major beatdown.”

Sarah gasped audibly. I tensed up, but I wasn’t really surprised at the news. Everyone knew by now Mike was a mean fucker who did things that put my five finger discounts to shame, and he’d pretty much been the opposite of nice to me in particular since he got sent to the office that time. What surprised me was how he’d been holding back, and why. Patrick? Patrick had somehow been protecting me?

Just as I was figuring that out and starting to steam about it, Mike gave me a playful slap. His eyes went wide as if he’d surprised himself with this uber-ballsy move, but he was already making for the exit under the careful scrutiny of the teacher on duty. Just before he ducked out the door, he looked back at me and mouthed, “You’re dead.”

“A-aren’t you… scared?” Sarah asked. She was visibly shaken.

“Of that stupid asshole? Not hardly,” I said.

But to be honest, I was. I felt the sudden absence of protection, the protection I hadn’t even known about, like I had kicked a blanket off in my sleep and woke up in a bed like an ice tray. It left me naked and vulnerable. A beatdown. I had a date for a beatdown. Well, an indefinite date for one. We hadn’t shaken on it or written it down in or day planners or anything. But at some point in the near future, I’d leave my guard down or find myself in some unsupervised corner of the school and if Mike was there at the same time he was going to beat my ass.

“W-why does he want to fight you?” Sarah asked.

“I dunno,” I replied. “He got in trouble the first day of school, so maybe he blames me?”

“Maybe he’s jealous of you?”

“Oh yeah, there’s so much to be jealous of. Maybe he’s just a bully.”

Sarah and I lapsed into silence and I looked around at the other students. I wondered if they were already buzzing with the news. Skater Mike vs. the Racist Blowjob Queen.

“Do you play an instrument?” Sarah asked.

“Who on the what now? Do I do what? Sorry, I wasn’t listening…”

“Do you play an instrument?”

“Oh. Kinda. I used to play guitar, but I don’t have one now. I wasn’t all that good…”

“I sorta knew that, actually. I saw you were in a mariachi club, so I was hoping you were like awesome at it. I play piano.”

“Rad. Are you like awesome at it?”

Sarah just smiled and shrugged. Sarah McAvoy is love, I decided.

When the last bell ended my sixth period class, I ran again, bumping people in my escape. On the way to the bus stop, I made sure teachers were always within eyesight. Mrs. Komori came pretty quickly and I was safe. For the day.

Chapter Twenty-Four:
The Great Amy Hype

My homeroom was the epicenter of the struggle, and the kids there were loving it. It was better than the pre-fight hype on HBO for Tyson versus Holyfield or something and they were our studio audience. Having Mike there meant we faced off every morning. Not that he could do anything to me in front of Ms. Klein except mouth threats and flip me birds under his desktop. For my part, I pretended to ignore him and when the first class bell rang, I walked out like a little robot, not daring to look to the side or back. He got me one time with a massive head thump, though. It sounded like a baseball bat clocked my skull, and I ducked and grabbed the back of my head as he and his posse bounded past me. I couldn’t believe a kid could cause so much pain with just a finger.

But Mike had miscalculated like the dumbass he was. While not every single kid in school knew me, and I wasn’t particularly well-liked even by those who did, I was a girl and Mike was a guy. People reacted pretty strongly and not in the way he intended when he started telling people I was soon to die by his hands. He was also guy who was universally loathed; all he really had going for him was that hood-ish rep. As word spread outside our immediate social circles that the school’s shittiest, meanest boy was planning on beating up some girl, public opinion largely went my way. A few kids who I didn’t even know stopped me between classes and told me they thought Mike was a dick. Or an ass. Or a dickass. An asshole, a tool, a turd in the bowl, a fuck-knocker, a homo, a dork and a loser.

It was like doing ESPN interviews. Yeah, I’ma kill that muthafucka. I’ma eat that muthafucka’s children. Not that I actually said anything like that. Each time I just acted like I didn’t care. It’s casual, dude. I don’t think he’s going to do anything.

And the more people took my side, the more of a walking wreck Mike became, the more desperate. It was put up or shut up time for him and even if he put up, he wouldn’t win. I mean, yeah, he’d definitely win the actual fight. I was absolutely convinced he’d make Cream O’ Wheat out of me, pour me into cans and sell me at lunch. He was going to stomp me like T-Rex did that car in “Jurassic Park.” But I would win the moral victory, and maybe that would speed up my healing from within the oxygen tent and all during my long rehabilitation.

One afternoon when anticipation was at its most fevered, Patrick showed up at my locker.

“’Sup, Ayumi?” he asked.

I didn’t want to talk to him. Sarah was standing behind me and she sort of shrank away. We’d never really discussed my history with Patrick, so she no doubt believed he really was my ex-boyfriend. She may have even believed some of the sick rumors about stuff I did at the skate park with him and his friends.

“Talk to me, Ayumi.”

I slammed my locker shut and gave Patrick a narrow-eyed “eat shit and die” look, but he just stood there, with that dumb smile on his face.

“Come on, Sarah,” I said, slinging my backpack over one shoulder.

“Ayumi, wait up!”

Fuck, Patrick was following us. In frustration, I threw down my backpack, setting off some tittering laughter from a few of the passersby. Stupid kids.

“What?” I demanded.

“Look, if you want me to kick Mike’s ass, I will.”

“No, I don’t want you to kick Mike’s ass. I want you out of my life.”

“Look, he may be a pussy tryin’ to live large and shit, but he’s gonna murder you, Ayumi. You don’t even stand a chance.”

“So I’m supposed to let you fight for me? You’ve been telling everyone I did… did… stuff with you.” I couldn’t even bring myself to say it, at least not to him. The whole thing was so maddening and humiliating.

“Okay, yeah, but that’s just because… I like you.”

“Oh, that’s totally cool then. Because you know how many friends I have because of you? None. Well, one. I have one because she’s nice. But everyone else thinks I’m some kind of… like… promiscuous freak or something.”

“Not everyone. Lots of people think you’re a dyke.”

“You know what? Fuck you, Patrick. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. But whatever I am, I will never, ever get with you. Dude, I’m not even old enough to even talk about that stuff. And I sure as fuck won’t ask you to protect me from some stupid little bullying asshole. Just let me get my ass beat and leave me alone. Like forever.”

“Fine.”

“You fucking bet it’s fine. It’s more than fine. It’s awesome.”

“Yeah, well, I think so too.”

“Think that shit walking, dude.”

He slowly turned, kept looking back at me.

“There you go,” I jeered. “Think that shit walking away.”

Patrick’s eyes went visibly glossy and he walked a little faster now, turned his head away.

“Keep walking, dude. That’s great! You’re totally doing it! You’re totally walking away!” I shouted at his back.

Then Patrick was elbowing his way through the kids and gone. I’d finally gotten through to him. I picked up my backpack, grabbed Sarah by the arm—hurting her from the sound she made—and led her down the steps to the bus stop. Our plan was to take the bus—Mrs. Komori was so excited for me when I asked if I could, she grinned widely enough I got to see the metal dental work on her molars-- and then go to her house and she’d show me how she could play the piano and I’d get to meet her mom. It was kind of a big step in our friendship as far as I was concerned. Pull this one off, charm her mom, and BOOM! My first friend since my little transition.

At the bottom of the steps? None other than Mike and Little Josh. They were waiting for us and Sarah poked me in the ribs.

“I-it’s those guys,” she whispered.

“I know,” I said. I frowned. And it hit me.

A total set-up. Mike couldn’t take the strain of his declining reputation, so he’d forced the issue. Patrick’s job had been to hold us up long enough for my enemies to get into place. I took a deep breath and led Sarah past them; Mike and Little Josh fell in behind us. Sarah and I got onto her bus. Just before it pulled out, Mike and Little Josh got on. They sat together near the front while Sarah and I were in a seat near the back. That way, we’d have to walk past them at the right stop. Trapped.

I mean, I could have stayed on the bus until the end of the route, but whatever I did, Mike and Little Josh would be right there. I could tell the bus driver, but that would only delay the inevitable and make me look like the Queen of Wusses. Instead of a fun afternoon with Sarah McAvoy, I was now on something like a funeral ride, with the bus as my hearse.

“What are you gonna do?” Sarah asked.

“Get off at your stop and go to your house.”

“B-but they’ll…”

“Yeah, probably.” I was breathing hard and couldn’t hide it. Thin lipped, squirming in my seat, I stared down at my feet. The same Vans I’d worn when Emily and I had run from whatever darkness had struck at Darla’s. The same Vans I’d been wearing all summer, the first pair of shoes I’d received in my new life.

“This is my stop,” Sarah told me after what seemed like a very short ride.

My mouth dry, I got up with her. Half the kids on the bus got off with us, and of course, Mike and Little Josh. The bus driver, completely oblivious, smiled at us as he closed the doors and drove off, my last chance at telling someone in authority gone in a cloud of diesel exhaust.

I looked around at all the faces, girls and boys. Most of them seemed sympathetic, but all of them were expectant. They were the lucky lottery winners, the ones who won a chance for ringside seats at the fight of the decade.

“Come on, Sarah,” I said for the second time that afternoon. That fucker Patrick, telling me he liked me when all the time he knew this shit was going to happen. My eyes narrowed to slits; if I survived today, I was going to make him eat his skate deck. I wondered if it still had the silver flowers I’d painted on it.

“Hey, tough girl,” Little Josh said from behind me. “Got something smartass to say now?”

I blinked rapidly and raked my lower lip with my teeth. We moved along in a three-part mass like a big ugly insect, with Sarah and me as the head, Mike and Little Josh the thorax and the other kids-- dropping back to give us room—as the abdomen. Just an ant crawling along, about to murder itself. The abdo-kids no doubt thought they’d stifle the violence if they squeezed in too close. Sarah and I led, then Mike and Little Josh, then the fight fans.

Then, someone shoved me from behind and I stumbled. Through my peripheral vision, I saw Sarah looking back, her eyes wide.

“Come on, Ayumi,” Mike said. “She thinks she’s so fuckin’ bad.”

I kept walking. Maybe we’d make the McAvoy’s house before he got worked up enough to hit me. He’d shove me a few times, then realize I wasn’t going to turn around and do something stupid like let him destroy me. His violent energy would dissipate in a cloud of futility. At least, I was hoping for something like that.

Mike or Little Josh shoved me again. Harder this time. I took a couple of staggering steps, barely staying on my feet.

“Goddamn!” I heard someone say from behind us, a boy’s voice high with excitement.

A knot in my stomach. I was in a constant state of flinch—any second now I expected a sucker punch to come flying over my left shoulder, exploding my head with stars, moons and clovers.

“Come on, fucker!” Little Josh shouted, his voice shrill.

Movement behind me. This was it. Instead of a fist arcing over my shoulder, I felt a grip on my backpack and it was pulled down, bending me back from the knees. The bag slipped off down my arms and I popped back up. Fight or flight? Flight, flight, and more flight. My adrenal glands told me to run but it was too late. A heavy weight—you know, boy-sized-- crashed into me and then I was tumbling over in the grass underneath Mike, his body crushing me, mashing my face into the ground, then our momentum rolled us over and I came out on top. The other kids were running, forming a ring around us.

I closed my eyes and started swinging for all I was worth. I connected a couple of times, felt electric shocks of pain in my finger joints and knuckles as my soft hand bones met Mike’s hard skull. I can win this shit, I thought excitedly, crazily. I hadn’t been in a fight in years; even as a guy I’d avoided them. I was in one now, though.

“Fucking kill her chinky ass!” Little Josh shrieked.

I was screaming, too, my whole body rattling like a maraca with all the adrenaline being pumped into my system. Shake me for music. Mike got his right leg into my side somehow and abruptly leveraged me sideways. Fuck being tiny! Fuck this weighing as much as a sparrow shit! Scissored, I landed on my side and Mike’s much heavier body came over the top. If he mounted me, I was going to suffer. I twisted my hips and lashed out with my foot, kicking wildly and one lucky sneaker plunged into Mike’s soft belly. He let out a long groan, his face went white and he fell over on his side.

And immediately yakked his lunch.

Covered with grass and sweat—mine and Mike’s—and tears in my eyes, my nose blossoming red, salty hot copper streaming into my mouth, I jumped to my feet with that skating-infused dancer’s grace I’d recently discovered. Mike was hurt. I’d fucking hurt him. My lucky Vans! I’d kicked him so hard, I’d torn the sole of the guilty shoe and it opened like a dog’s mouth as I stomped on his hand and kicked him in the arms and legs.

“Motherfucker!” I squealed. “MotherFUCKER!” I kicked him I don’t know how many times and he rolled over and over in the grass vomiting on himself, his face turning purple.

I kept kicking and stomping and screaming obscenities and then hands were on me pulling me away.

“Calm down, kid,” someone said. “Dude, this fight is over!” I struggled vainly against all the octopus arms wrapped around me and through my tears saw Little Josh helping Mike to his feet. I shook everyone off and stood there panting and sobbing.

Mike was doubled up on his knees, clutching his stomach, dead grass in his hair. I wiped my face and saw a smear of red the back of my hand. Little Josh was trying to say something, his face pale. Then I realized how badly I had to pee and felt pretty scared I was going to go in my pants again just like I had at Darla’s house. I held it tightly and pointed at Mike and Little Josh.

“You little assholes think you’re such hot shit!” I said in a much higher pitch than I’d intended. Plus, it was an incredibly childish insult. Someone tried to put an arm around me but I shrugged it off and slapped the hand away.

I stood up straight, feeling the blood running in a thin drizzle down my face, onto my chin, dripping onto my shirt now.

“She’s crazy,” someone said. Awe and fear.

Honey Bunny. The name came to me in Emily’s voice and I let out a shaky little laugh.

“Give me all your money or I’ll execute every motherfucking last one of ya!” I shouted, trying to sound as bad and bossy as possible, given the circumstances and my spazzed out state. “Or… just you two little pricks!”

And amazingly, Little Josh reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled five dollar bill and threw it on the grass.

“Is that all you got?” someone behind me said, helpfully.

“That’s all I got, you fuckin’ little chinky-ass bitch,” Little Josh said, looking straight at me.

He helped Mike to his feet. I was really gratified to see Mike still couldn’t stand up straight. They walked off together, not bothering to look back. People patted me on my shoulders, asked if I was all right. I sniffled blood, then picked up the money and stuck it in my own pocket. I walked with a herky-jerky way over to where my backpack had fallen. The flap had come undone and the books, pencils and papers had spilled out. Sarah helped me gather them up while I fumbled with my now useless hands.

“Here, I’ll do it,” Sarah said. She finished up for me and I felt so grateful. She even picked it up and slung it over her shoulder and walked off towards her house carrying it.

I followed her, shivering, hugging myself, wiping my nose. Staring down at my wounded shoe.

Mrs. McAvoy, who looked like a larger version of her daughter, freaked out when she saw me. My clothes were all disheveled and I had little bloopery droplets of blood all down the front of my shirt. Well, on the collar and chest part, anyways. I had blades of grass sticking to me which itched like crazy and grass and dirt down my pants, in my undies (I could feel it gritting away down there), under my stripey socks—black and white—and my shoe was ruined. Sarah’s mom brushed me off and made me lie on the sofa with my feet elevated. She removed my shoes for me and tossed them aside, and had Sarah run and bring a damp washcloth.

“Kids can be so crazy,” Mrs. McAvoy said sadly as she wiped my face. She gave me the washcloth and told me to hold it under my nose.

The embarrassing part is, while I lay there being ministered to by this woman I didn’t even know, hovered over by her daughter who was still pretty much a mystery as well, I totally lost it. I started wailing, tears pouring suddenly from my eyes and down my cheeks and the two McAvoys, large and small, started dithering over what to do. Call her mom, call the police, those kids, what if they arrest Amy instead, she won the fight and stole their money.

“Don’t call the police!” I blubbered. “Don’t! Please don’t!”

“I-I guess that’s out, then,” Mrs. McAvoy said, confused. “Can I call your mom?”

I could only nod. My squall had quieted down to gentle rain instead. I sniffled, one nostril still clogged with rapidly clotting gore. Mrs. McAvoy got my phone number and went to make the call.

“I-I’m not sure she-she’s home,” I said, my voice still all quaky.

“I’ll try anyway,” Mrs. McAvoy replied.

I was breathing rapidly and irregularly, feeling tatters of pain and whatnot from the fight and the crying, which I was thoroughly mortified about now.

“That stupid Patrick,” I told Sarah. I had to cover for all that weeping. I still didn’t sound so tough. “I’m gonna fuck his shit up for what he did.”

“What did he do?”

“You don’t know? He set me up, Sarah. He kept us talking in the hallway while—“

But she was shaking her head no.

“He did,” I protested. “Mike and Little Josh were in with him and they-they—“

“I don’t think so,” Sarah said softly, looking away from me. “I mean… how would he know we were going on the bus?”

“Because… he… they…”

Holy shit, she was right! We hadn’t told anyone, as far as I knew. And who would have eavesdropped? It wasn’t something anyone could really coordinate unless they had two-way radios or something. Only a total raging paranoid would think otherwise. But that meant…

“Patrick really does still like me,” I concluded gloomily.

“A-and he really wanted to fight Mike for you,” Sarah said. Her voice sounded inadvertently chipper so she clamped her hands over her mouth.

Stupid Patrick. He really had been trying to apologize. Oh well, I didn’t care. He was still responsible for all kinds of vile rumors about me. At least I’d finally put an end to whatever it was between us. Unrequited love or some stupid boy crush. He’ll meet someone else, I thought. Maybe that Kathleen girl or whatever her name was that dumbass friend of Ashleigh Bodine told me about.

Ashleigh Bodine. Wow, she popped right into my head and it made me wonder just what my reputation was going to be with her the next day. I felt a delicious chill of excitement. I’d kicked Mike’s ass. A lucky boot to the belly, yeah. Without that, I’d probably still be lying down the street, Sarah cradling my head—looking like a chewed-out piece of Hubba Bubba—and weeping softly to herself. No one would ever really know how random an event the fight turned on. What would Ashleigh Bodine, Denise and all those others think about me as an ace fighter-girl? I wondered if they’d be so flippant about drawing my ire for a while.

I kicked Mike’s ass! I told myself that over and over, tasting it, testing it, turning it around in my mind. I kicked Mike’s ass. He probably outweighed me by thirty or forty pounds. My fists would never have been able to do it. My arms were way too weak, my wrists too narrow. But my feet? They were the great equalizers. It was worth a new pair of shoes to learn that.

“Your mother’s on her way over here,” Mrs. McAvoy said when she came back into the room. “You just lie still and try to calm down, okay?”

“Okay. Thanks so much, Mrs. McAvoy.”

She smiled and left me alone with her daughter.

Sarah and I just stared at each other. Then this look of wonder slowly dawned on her face. She smiled.

“You stole that kid’s money,” she said.

I did my best to look innocent. I batted my eyelashes. Then I sniffed really hard because my stopped-up nose was driving me crazy.

When I could talk, I said in a little baby voice, “Sarah McAvoy, will you be my friend?”

Epilogue:
I’m the Last Splash

Mrs. Komori came as soon as she could get away from her office. I told her the whole story in front of Sarah and her mother and while she wasn’t convinced at first, Sarah’s help had her on my side by the time I finished explaining. On the way back to our house, we stopped at a CVS and bought some SuperGlue to fix the sole on my shoe.

“You’re just gonna have to make do, Amy,” she told me.

I shrugged. No new shoes for thumping Mike. Might’ve been nice, though. Maybe something with steel toes.

That night, Emily declared me the Champion of Delacroix Junior High, heavyweight division, and gave me this crown she’d made out of construction paper and glitter.

“I think real champions get belts,” I told her.

“Who said you were a real champion?” she replied, and cracked herself up.

Instead of on my head, the crown went on my dresser.

The next day I had a little lit cherrybomb of nerves down in my stomach going into school. It wasn’t like I’d turned into Miss Popularity. I was way too weird for that. Kids didn’t greet me and tell me how great they thought I was or anything like that. But what would’ve set off my belly-buster was that impulsive Honey Bunny flourish I’d added. I still had five bucks I’d essentially robbed from Little Josh in my pocket. I wasn’t sure if he could make a case of it or get me suspended. I mean, it took place way off campus but I wasn’t sure how far the long arm of the vice-principal reached. Plus, I was due to make my first probation appointment pretty soon. I could see myself standing in front of that judge again.

Mike was there in homeroom, no worse for wear, but he didn’t even look at me. I don’t think he dared. That by itself was a pretty sweet victory. One thing, though—I wasn’t about to press my advantage and do anything to re-piss him off. I didn’t have any phony ideas about getting lucky a second time. Let it slide, Amy. If he leaves you alone, you leave him alone.

The story was circulating and I reaped a few benefits in the immediate flush of semi-fame. A few more people, guys and girls, talked to me in the hallway between classes. After Science 1, Ashleigh Bodine and her little crew asked me to sit with them at lunch. So Sarah and I bent my principles. The only dissenter was Denise; she sat in a mixed group at another table. You couldn’t win over everyone, I concluded.

Ashleigh Bodine and her friends didn’t apologize for all the rude shit they’d said about me behind my back, but I wasn’t about to hold grudges. With that in mind, I genuinely tried at first to be on my best behavior and smile a lot and agree with everyone.

But like most good intentions, it didn’t last. Towards the end of lunch, just when we were all getting along so well, for some pixie reason I offended them again by launching into this rant about how much I hated the Spice Girls and Alanis Morissette. I think I went a little overboard, but I really felt I was onto something. The other girls seemed to think I was merely on something. In the face of overwhelming disagreement, I thought I’d better become invisible and quick. No one looked especially disappointed when I pushed back my chair and stood.

“Come on, Sarah,” I said, and realized I was quietly pleased with myself.

“Um… I…” Sarah said, caught between my bitchiness and Ashleigh Bodine’s. She must have been wondering what she’d gotten herself into. But she stood and we picked up our trays.

“See ya,” I said to everyone at the table in this total Pollyannaliciously sweet voice, smiling broadly, crinkling my nose.

The look on Ashleigh Bodine’s face was one of pure disgust, way more nourishing that the foodlike stuff we’d eaten.

“Those girls are really gonna hate you now,” Sarah whispered, genuinely concerned.

“It’s casual,” I said.

We threw our drink cartons into the recycling bins and dumped our trays at the kitchen window. Then I took Sarah McAvoy’s hand and led her on a snaking path through the lunchroom tables, out the doors and into the bright November sunshine. Not a cloud, just a dry blue sky stretching up forever.

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Turning Japanese

By The Vapours. You DO know what that song is actually about?

Haha!

But of course! The real girl who inspired Emily used to love that song, btw!