A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. It’s a familiar theme in the TG literature, but this time with an unfamiliar twist. In the last chapter, Kirk was enlightened about US politics and Blair about the long-term effects of hormones and Maggie's plans for him. And now they want him to play on a girls' team in front of a hometown crowd!

Choices, Chapter 12 A Na’vi choice

It was now mid-May. Miss Umbridge had returned to the class more than two weeks ago. Yet life for Blair went on much as usual at Lewis A. Clark Charter School, because either the sanitarium had chilled her out or because she was still on powerful tranquillizers. Whichever the case, discipline was becoming lax in Blair’s homeroom as the growing excitement and waning attentiveness of his classmates signaled that the countdown to summer and to the end of Blair’s days as a schoolboy had begun.

Ironically, Miss Umbridge had returned to teaching on the same day that a pimply-faced, bespectacled teenager named Josh had come by the house to collect two Mighty Mouse comic books from the 1950s that Blair, to his chagrin, had been required to find on-line for Maggie to buy. (She hadn’t truthfully explained why she needed them, as he fully realized.) For Blair, it would have been upsetting to have his birthright identity sold for the price of a rare Spiderman comic, as had happened to Angela, but for two stories about a flying mouse? That was galling indeed. As was catching his mother in an outright lie.

Maggie said nothing after Josh’s visit about the change in Blair’s legal and education status, but Blair knew enough to appreciate that he was increasingly becoming entangled in the web that Maggie had been weaving. He reckoned that he’d have to say he was a girl even to get a driver’s license. And no boys’ school would take him now!

But the best evidence that the “commedia e finita” for Blair’s boyhood — that the comedy was ending with Blair being unable to take off the Columbine mask he had lightheartedly begun wearing the preceding January — could be found on his chest.

(I know, I know — there is no possible way that Blair, still six weeks shy of his eleventh birthday, thought about I Pagliacci and a female character from the medieval commedia del arte when he looked at his chest. Still, I felt a sudden compulsion to expose my erudition, hidden thus far in my tale like Waldo’s private parts in a crowd scene, and I trust that anyone who has stayed with Blair’s story through several chapters won’t be so unkind as to observe that references to the death scene of I Pagliacci have become about as fresh as references to the ‘writing on the wall’. As Popeye the Sailor, one of my two favorite philosophers (the other being Chairman Mao), profoundly opined, don’t expect more of me, “I am’s what I am.”)

It wasn’t the writing on the wall that disturbed Blair (he’d simply blame the scribbled phone number on Kirk) but rather the condition of his chest: It now sported two small, female breasts. Yes, knockers, the real thingees. They had a puffy, red, angry appearance (as though rebuking him for fooling around with ho-mones); the boobs resembled two crocuses that had dared to poke their way through the spring snow. Big Al was, of course, thrilled with the first shoots of Blair’s womanhood, but soon realized — to their mutual frustration — that she’d have to go easy on her attentions until Blair’s “love cups” had become less enflamed.

As Blair believed Angela when she told him that breasts, once grown, could never be lost without major, dangerous surgery, he understood that physically as well as legally his options had narrowed to making the best of being a girl. Overall, he reflected, a permanent change of sex might even be an improvement over life as a sissy male; yet he still wished that he’d waited until he’d tested the waters as a teenager to make such a major choice in life. “Who knows?” he wondered, “Maybe teenagers are kinder than tweens to boys who are a bit different, even a bit ‘queer’?”

Blair’s life was now rushing out of his control: Even soccer, a sport that had hitherto proved a blessing, bestowing on him his first lesbian relationship as well as plenty of time for slowly walking about, thinking deep thoughts like Stuart Smalley and communing with nature, was now threatening to make him such a pariah in his own school and community that he’d need to find a boarding school much farther away than Yoni Punani if he were to escape the pitchforks of his neighbors.

His problem was simple: There were rumors that that his team would have to forfeit if he missed the second game of the home-and-away series that would determine which team of girls, aged 10 to 12, were the “Best in the Valley”. Several teams had already been knocked out, and the trophy and the honors would go either to the best team from the Washington side of the Columbia, the Breakers, or to the best team from the Oregon side, the Smiters.

True, the Oregon contingent weren’t from Bybee Lake, Blair’s home town; he wasn’t that unlucky. But the Smiters did hail from the adjoining community of Smith Lake, and that town’s multi-purpose field had been torn up by rampaging fans of the losing team in the Oregon State Croquet Championships.

The Smiters consequently chose the best pitch in Bybee Lake for its home game and grudge match against the Breakers, who had won 1-0 in front of their home crowd in Rose Villa, Washington. The close score scarcely reflected the balance of play, which had been almost entirely in the Smiters’ half of the field, but the Smiters had in Christine Ronaldo an awesome goalkeeper (6 foot 2 inches tall with lightning-fast reflexes) who had kept them in the game until a penalty kick in added time.

Naturally, given Blair’s luck, the best pitch in Bybee Lake formed part of the campus of D. B. Cooper High School, which in turn was less than three full blocks away from the Lewis A. Clark Charter School. There were bound to be a lot of kids (well some at least) from Blair’s school cheering on the Smiters against the Breakers. Not only were the Breakers interlopers from another State, but the Smiters had been the only team in the tournament not to run up the score against the Bi-girls, the woeful team representing Bybee Lake.

At first, only Big Al had been upset when Blair missed his team’s home game against the Smiters “on account of illness”. Frantic with concern, Big Al showed up at the Finlayson house at midnight with flowers for Blair. When she learnt that he had been feigning illness, her relief gave away to anger, probably with him, but understandably transfered by her to her father and teammates, whom she accused at a team meeting of being “delighted” that Blair had reported in sick.

She blasted her father: “You’re the one who’s sick, not Blair, ‘cause winning the damn trophy is more important to you than her well-being. Dad, you told us that there’s no “i” in team; I guess there isn’t a “b” either — “b” as in Blair.”

The speech had little effect on her fellow Breakers, who still did not regard Blair as a “real” member of their team, but it did reach the ears of four rival coaches and Ms. Beverly Bolton, president of the Girls’ Friendship League. Assuming not unreasonably that Blair had sat out the championship game in Rose Villa at the request or insistence of her coach, Gus Anderson, in defiance of the league’s mandate to “give every girl a chance to reveal what she’s got”, Bolton deliberately stirred the normally placid waters of interstate girls’ soccer by informing the coach of the Smiters that it was more than an outside theoretical possibility that the Breakers were forcing one of their players to feign illness in order to strengthen their team effort. Bolton couldn’t “prove” anything, she admitted, but she hoped that the Smiters could find a way to “compel” the male coach of the Breakers to play fair: “Perhaps we shouldn’t even allow men to coach girls’ soccer. Male coaches are so problematic. Either they have a Lolita complex or they’re much too competitive. They play soccer like it’s a war. Aren’t men beastly?”

Eda Petrie, coach of the Smiters, not only agreed that the worst player on the Breakers had a god-given right to play soccer, but she was determined to force the issue. She told the media (the news appearing in several free papers and on local cable) that she believed that the Breakers were so eager to win the championship that they were benching their worst player (fortunately, Petrie didn’t know Blair’s name), even though this meant that they no longer had the requisite eleven girls on the field.

Citing a technicality of a technicality, Petrie argued that the Breakers should be disqualified, the trophy going to the Smiters by default, if the Washington team did not have eleven girls on the pitch at the starting whistle. After the Bybee Bi-Weekly filled its op-ed page with two letters strongly siding with Coach Petrie and the Breakers and the Rose Villa Shoppers’ Guide couldn’t find a single rejoinder to print, it was clear that public opinion was massively behind the Smiters.

Coach Anderson crumbled like a New Orleans dike: without consulting Blair, he announced in the Smith Lake Seniors’ Times that all eleven of his girls were now healthy and ready for the big game in Bybee Lake.

However, Blair wouldn’t play ball. Despite two visits by the coach to his house to plead with Blair and his parents, Blair refused to disgrace himself by playing for an all-girl’s team in his home community. To be recognized publicly as a crossdresser was really, really bad; but much, much worse was the near certainty that Blair would leave the game with the reputation of being “the sissy kid who plays soccer worse than any girl.”

As Coach Anderson didn’t know that the “little prick” had an eenie-weenie secret between his legs, he personally lacked the necessary leverage to get Blair to budge. After all, Blair needn’t ever cross the Columbia River again.

But Big Al had the knowledge needed to induce Blair to change his mind about showing up for the big game; and, out of team loyalty, she used it to compel Blair to agree to play. No, she loved Blair far too much to threaten to use her knowledge of his primary sexual characteristics to punish a no-show. Instead, she used her intimate knowledge of Blair’s erogenous zones to persuade him that he’d do almost anything to please Big Al. After she made it clear to Blair that there was only one way for him to secure relief him from the intense sensitivity wrought by her tireless ministrations to his “zones”, he gasped that “yes, “yes, anything you want. I’ll do anything for the team.”

As Blair couldn’t renege on a promise made in the act of love, it was settled: he’d be rejoining the Breakers for their final game and that he’d need to find a disguise that would prevent anyone’s connecting the dots between “Blair Fines,” his name on the Breakers’ team roster, and Blair Finlayson, the suspiciously fey boy who attended the Lewis A. Clark Charter School.

Maggie advised Blair to trust his fate to Pierre, his hairdresser: “He will be able to change your appearance so that one no will know you are really are.” So off they went to the mall. As it was his tenth visit to the salon, Blair knew what to expect — Suzanne would give him a manicure, pedicure and makeup hints while Pierre cut and shaped his “hairs”, with Blair’s hairstyle becoming more daringly feminine as his hair grew down to his shoulders. Of course, Pierre kept in mind the need for plausible deniability, which meant that Blair’s still had to look somewhat “masculine” when brushed against the grain and commonsense. This time Pierre took Selena Gomez (from Wizards of Waverly Place) as his inspiration, which meant that Blair’s bangs now swept down to his left eye, exposing his right forehead, while his thick, layered hair now had dark-blonde highlights and, thanks to a curling iron, curled around his chin.

As Blair admired his new look in the mirror, Maggie asked Pierre if he knew of a way to disguise Blair so that none of his schoolmates would recognize “him” as “she” played for an out-of-state girls’ soccer team. It was a tall order, and in Pierre’s judgment, a wig was “outside of the question” because it would be difficult to explain to the Breakers and could be inadvertently torn from Blair’s head, exposing his blond locks to ridicule. “It is necessary to tint the hairs,” Pierre said. “To have the hairs become jet black will render unrecognizable the look of the pretty Blair, especially when Suzanne applies to her the makeup appropriate for the young girl with hairs so foncés — so dark.”

While a dye job had obvious short-term appeal, it was problematic in the mid-term: Blair risked obvious exposure if he still had black hair when he returned to school. Someone was bound to connect Blair Finlayson to Blair Fines if they had the same hair color. It would be difficult, though not impossible, to find a temporary black hair dye that could survive a rain shower (a not unlikely event in Bybee Lake), yet wash out after two or three shampooings. Black was, Pierre explained, the most permanent of the temporary tints. Blair came up with a daring solution:

Why not dye my hair blue? Wouldn’t that wash out better? I’ve always wanted to be one of the cool kids who dyes her hair a wild color. Next we could buy a Na’vi nose and ears for me at a costume store; I could even get some amber-tinted contact lenses so that I could disguise myself like a Na’vi in the movie Avatar. And of course, I’d smear my face, arms and legs — whatever shows — with blue theatrical makeup. If you braid my hair to look like a queue, no one will recognize me! I guess I’ll have to do without a tail, which Na’vis should have, ‘cause the other team will be pulling on it all day.

Maggie knew there had to be several problems with her daughter’s scheme, but she could see only one: How would Blair justify to her teammates her decision to show up in a Na’vi costume for the big game? “Won’t they think you a bit tetched?”

“Don’t worry, mommy. My teammates already think I’m skxawng. That means a ‘moron’ in Na’Vi. Already they don’t think my insanity is curable. And they don’t even know about my ding-a-ling. I’ll tell ‘em that my Avatar outfit will give me a ‘neural contact’ with Eyewa, goddess of nature, which will enable me to move about the soccer pitch as fast as the wind in July. I’ll tell them that the plan is to borrow me some energy, that way becoming the baddest cat on the pitch. After all, Na’vis are four times as strong as humans. Looking like a Na’vi, I am going to take my game to a whole new level. That’s what I’ll tell ‘em.’

Maggie was impressed: “By golly, Blair is really using his little gray rock. His plan might actually work. I know where we can buy the Na’vi prosthetics, but, Pierre, what about the blue costume makeup and hair tint? Do you have something that will last as long as the game, even if it rains, but can be washed out easily with body lotion and shampoo? I don’t want my baby’s skin to look as rough as a Hammerhead Titanothere’s when she returns to school the Monday after.”

Pierre, after reflected for a moment, advised:

It’s is difficile to find the hair dyes and the make-up that are temporary enough for the goals of Blair, and yet impermeable to the rain that the télé has just come to forecast for the day of the match. After all, we cannot have Blair resemble the zebra with the blue and white stripes; nor, let us perish the idea, can we permit his blonde hair to reveal itself. And so, it is necessary that one utilize products that are truly color-fast. And these are not facile to find if one also wants them to vanish themselves after one or two shampooings. But, we have the good chance! Samples of “Tree of Souls,” a new line of products from the Corporation Acme, have just arrived in my salon, and while one must wear a breathing mask while they are being applied, Monsieur Wile E. Kyotay, the responsible for the corporation, maintains that they are both permanent and temporary — tout at the same time. It’s magnificent, isn’t it?”

And so it was arranged that Maggie would bring Blair to Pierre’s salon ninety minutes before the game, with Pierre promising “with the speed of the Fan Lizard to transform the pretty and young Blair, the ordinary Homo sapiens, into the Na’vi extraordinaire.”

Surprisingly, all went well at the salon on game day. Granted, the toxic fumes from Acme’s “Tree of Souls” products did cause Blair’s eyes to fill with so many tears that his amber-tinted contact lenses went swimming about, and fifteen minutes were lost until they could be relocated at the top of his eyes. In general, the contacts may have been a bad idea since they irritated Blair’s eyes, making it difficult for him to see clearly during the game.

Even so, he got to the Breakers’ dressing room in plenty of time to hear Coach Anderson’s pep talk to his girls:

Girls, I know you’re aware that we almost forfeited this game and the championship. The Smiters were pissing on us and not even giving us the courtesy of calling it rain. They had dreams of flying away with the trophy without even having to play for it, but eventually they had to wake up when Blair, our pintsized … er … Na’vi, finally came to her senses with Alicia’s help, and now we are ready to ANNIHILATE the Smiters! Show what you've got! Oh yeah, who's bad? You, you’re awesomely bad. That's right. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about bitches. There are some punk girls from the pukey state of Oregon who want to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes. Well, kill them back! They’re sitting on shit that you want. So that makes them your enemy. So kick him hard, kick ‘em often, kick them in the place where the eye does not see. Now wheel your meat outta here!

As the girls, still shell-shocked stumbled onto the playing field, Coach Anderson grabbed Blair by his queue, pulling him back into the locker room and down onto his knees. The Coach snarled:

You little blue bitch, did you find yourself some local tail, and just completely forget what team you're playin' for? Your team is the Breakers, and not some bunch of tree-hugging Oregonians. If you intentionally screw the team today, I’ll shit you out dead with zero warning. No, don’t say anything. Shut your pie-hole and listen: Just stay away from the play. Yeah, you've got nothing to offer this team but a warm body. But keep running around the field, got it? That way you’ll fool everybody into thinking you’re trying to help. After the game, get your punk ass back to mommy because you’ve got no future with any team of mine. Try not to trip over your shoelaces when you run onto the field. That shouldn't be too hard even for you.

With tears blurring his eyesight, Blair misjudged the step out onto the field, and tumbled headfirst on to the grass, ending up at the feet of Big Al, who had tarried to help lift her girlfriend’s spirits after the Coach’s pep talk. Lovingly, Big Al helped Blair onto “her” feet, held her Na’vi girlfriend close, and assured “her” that the team was happy to have “her” back.

“But, Alicia, the coach doesn’t trust me,” Blair said. “He suspects me of being a turn-color turncoat like Jake Sully in Avatar. He believes I’ve fallen in love with a girl from Smith Lake. I know I shouldn’t say this about your dad, but he’s stupid — ignorant like a child. By now he should know that we’re like a mated pair. I’d never betray you or your team.” The two “girls” embraced, and would have kissed right then and there had they been brazen Canadians, but they held back for fear of hearing the L-word.

Big Al stared deep into her lover’s eyes as she gave her pep talk:

Blair darling, you don’t have to tell me or your teammates why you’re dressed like a Na’vi. We all know it’s to prevent your homies from knowing that you played a big role in Washington whipping Oregon’s butt today. That’s one bow we don’t blame you for wanting to take in a mask of sorts. If you were fixing to hurt the Breakers, you’d want your entire school to know that it was you whose “mistakes” helped the Smiters to win. You’d be flaunting your pretty blond locks like Lady Godiva, the candy maker, so the whole school could get a peep at you delivering the goodies for ‘Whoregon’. So, no more worrying about my dad, just think of them Smiters as scared little insects. Let’s scatter them roaches!

As Big Al dragged Blair onto the field, one hoped, and the other dreaded, that Blair’s game would become the stuff of legends. As expected, it was raining buckets. Had Blair looked down, she would have seen that her blue make-up was already dripping down her kit all the way to her socks and sneakers.

As the two teams headed to their dressing rooms to dry themselves at half-time, the two-game composite score stood tied at one apiece after an “own goal” by the Breakers. Although Blair, having never budged from the perimeter of the penalty area of the Smiters, couldn’t have been farther from the play, Coach Anderson was convinced that Blair had deliberately bumped into one of the Breaker strikers, thereby setting in motion a chain of events that ended with Susie Haggerty forgetting which net she was attacking. Big Al was yellow-carded for trying to pull her down before she got off her killer strike.

Despite this unlucky break, the Breakers should have been leading by a runaway score because the game had been played almost entirely in the Smiters’ half of the field. Yet, as in game one, Christine Ronaldo, whom even Big Al reckoned to be “one big damn goalkeeper,” was able to stop every Breaker shot on net, whether it came high or low.

Given the flow of the play, the Breakers had surprisingly few scoring opportunities even though, or possibly because, Big Al had been transferred to the offence after the low-scoring first game. Determined to have her girlfriend score the winning goal, Big Al kept passing the ball in Blair’s direction rather than going for the goal herself. Each time that she hit the ball in Blair’s direction the little Na’vi had half the net wide open; all he had to do was to make contact with the ball, but that proved impossible time and time again. Unable to time his kick to trap or redirect the ball, Blair ended up each time lying face down in the mud or sitting on the wet grass on his pretty little derriá¨re as the ball went wide or (if Big Al slowed the pace of her pass to give Blair a fighting chance) into Christine’s big paws. At the half, there wasn’t a muddier player than Blair on either team. Ominously, the mud had a deep-blue tint.

Blair expected to lose the mud when Coach Anderson tore a strip off “her” at half-time. Instead, the Coach, on his knees tearfully implored “her to forgive his harsh, pre-game remarks:

Dear girl, I know you don’t hold a grudge. You wouldn’t throw the game, would you, just to spite me? Think of your teammates’ dreams and hopes! Think of Alicia! You can’t let her down, not after she told me that you’re ‘the bestest girlfriend in the whole wide world’. We can’t let Alicia down, can we? Darling, darling Blair, will you forgive me?

Blair, confused by the Coach’s tears — Of affection? Contrition? Exasperation? — didn’t know what to answer. Interpreting Blair’s silence as rejection, the Coach next knelt in front of his own daughter:

Alicia, I ask you in turn to forgive me for yelling at your friend. You say there are no hard feelings. If there aren’t, then will you promise not to pass the ball again to Blair? You know that she [he paused to bite his lip] tries too hard to kick the ball. Don’t you realize that Blair is going to hurt herself if you keep passing the ball to her? Either she’ll pull a muscle kicking the air or she’ll fracture her tailbone or nose on one of those hard landings. Alicia honey, think of what’s best for Blair and the team.

Alicia still thought that Blair’s contributing something to the victory was “best” for both girlfriend and team, but she solemnly promised her coach and dad — to loud, spontaneous applause from her teammates — that she wouldn’t pass the ball again to Blair.

After the noisy celebration, Alicia’s teammates came over individually or in small groups to say that there were no hard feelings, for they too hoped that Blair could one day be a winner — it just wasn’t going to occur in a soccer game. Olivia suggested that Alicia find something “less physically challenging” for Blair to attempt.

“Yeah, like dominos,” said Jessica.

“No way,” said Branwyn, “Blair would get blood-poisoning from a splinter or be inconsolable after breaking a nail. She should stick to reading — but she should use an iPad so that she doesn’t get a fatal paper cut.”

Not understanding that Blair considered these barbs to be closer to Cupid’s arrows than to the poison-tipped, verbal spears hurled “her” way each day at Lewis A. Clark Charter School, Big Al charged into the second half of the game still determined to make a star out of her girlfriend. Even so, she kept her promise no longer to pass — or rather to attempt to pass — the ball to Blair.

Now, drawing deep on her knowledge as a pool hustler, Big Al endeavored to carom the soccer ball off of Blair’s shoulder, shin or seat past Christine into the net pocket. That meant, of course, striking the ball much harder at Blair than during the first half, and Blair, having little comprehension of the finer points of either soccer or billiards, concluded, as the ball banged against elbow, knee or shoulder blade, that Big Al was punishing him for his first-half ineptitude.

Blair bore his “punishment” with the fortitude that had enabled his heroic forebears, the whisky-befuddled Scots, to “pict” up their kilts during the first hootenanny to show their bucknaked blue McDuffs to the invading Romans, who, apparently stunned by the sight of male nudity, ran in terror back to their own camp. It was a brave thing for the Scotch to do, thought Blair as he rubbed his sore left cheek, to turn their naked backside on a Mediterranean male. So he vowed to absorb his chastisement with a smile — like a young schoolboy fagging for a senior.

Unable to understand the half-wit smile now permanently on Blair’s face, Big Al kept blasting away, but as Blair had an unwitting knack of ruining the angle at the last second with a clumsy pirouette or failed leap, the ricochet always went in the wrong direction.

Finally, the pain ceased: Big Al no longer had anything to bank off Blair’s shins because the Breakers had wordlessly, but unanimously resolved to keep the ball away from Big Al, who now ran around the pitch almost as aimlessly as Blair. Effectively two players down, at the seventy-third minute mark the Breaker attack looked set to smash itself to pieces on the adamantine, Smiter defense.

Then came Blair’s moment of soccer glory — a triumph even greater than his memorable terpsichorean turn as a “male” in Giselle: As he wandered around aimlessly, occasionally pausing to rub an “Alician” bruise, Blair accidentally bumped into Christine Ronaldo, who, seriously off-balance after a spectacular catch, fell heavily to the ground, badly spraining her ankle.

As Christine was helped off the field (with two of her shorter teammates serving as underarm crutches) to go to the emergency room of the general hospital (where, lacking adequate insurance, she waited twelve hours before finally having her lower left arm set in a cast), the Smiters demanded that Blair be red-carded — sent off the field — for “unsafe play” — that is, for deliberately, and with malice aforethought, injuring the opposition goalkeeper.

While the referee by now knew enough about Blair’s athletic ability (especially in the pouring rain) to realize that the “bump” might have been accidental, she had no choice in the circumstances but to hold up a red card, expelling Blair not only from the match, but also from the facility, as Big Alice, as team captain, had to inform her girlfriend.

Blair left the high school campus with her parents, the three of them more perplexed than embarrassed. Kirk, however, stayed behind to report back on the game’s final moments and to look for Blair’s left soccer shoe, which had flown off — to where no one yet knew — when Blair petulantly expressed his frustration at not being allowed to finish the game.

As the Smiters actually had more than eleven girls on their roster, they rearranged their squad to put Nancy Paderewski between the posts. At five-foot-four, she was not, however, as formidable as Christine when it came to shots heading for the upper corners, for the simple fact that she could not angle a jump that high.

Meanwhile, the Breakers were discovering that having to play with one girl short was better than playing with a short girl in net. Indeed, with Christine gone from the game and Big Al no longer trying to make Blair an unlikely heroine, the Breakers were able to loft four unanswered goals, winning the trophy 5 to 1 on aggregate.

The Smiters were not gracious losers. Believing that someone with Blair’s minimal soccer skills could only have suited up for the sole purpose of hurting their star goalkeeper, they refused to shake hands with the Breakers in the post-game ritual, an unladylike decision that shifted the hometown boos, until now directed at “the goon’s team”, sufficiently toward the Breakers for them to head for the locker room, their mud-caked heads held high.

Once there, realizing to whom they owed their victory, they voted to give the game ball to Blair. There was a lone holdout, who thought her three goals merited the honor, but even she was won over by Big Al’s point that, “Without Blair’s absence, we could not have carried the day.” Big Al and her father were deputed to bring the ball to Blair with the team’s signatures and congratulations, but not significantly, with a request to play for the Breakers again next year. Not that Blair would have agreed to return: Having won the Columbia Valley Girls’ Championship his first time out, Blair decided there was no further glory to seek in organized soccer.

It was fortunate that the Breakers won, or else it would have been a truly dreadful day for Blair, who suddenly realized after they had all clambered into the family’s SUV that he was oozing a toxic, odiferous mixture of blue dye and chemicals from every exposed pore of skin, as a consequence of his hair dye’s streaming in rivulets through his makeup all down his torso towards the tips of his fingers and toes as a consequence of the endless downpour. And yet his hair looked only slightly less blue.

The realization that he now looked more like Xavier University’s mascot Blue Blob than like a Na’vi came upon Blair quickly when Maggie shrieked at him for staining the front seat of the SUV a cyan blue (a color which never quite washed out). Mortified, Blair lay prostrate on the backseat floor, hoping never to be seen by another living person until he had spent an hour, two hours — whatever it took — under a shower head retrieving his normal looks.

Blair was so desperate to de-blue himself that he even begged for Maggie’s help with the scrubbing (especially of his back half), and for the first time ever Maggie got to see one of Laird’s modest children without a stitch of clothes, stark naked other than for the dye-makeup mixture that caked every inch that Maggie could see — which included Blair’s budding breasts. This was the moment that Maggie had been longing for — actual, physical proof that Blair so wanted to become a girl that he had been taking “ho-mones” like clockwork. And thanks to the blue dye, Maggie didn’t even realize that Blair’s juvenile breasts were still an angry red color, and highly sensitive to the touch.

Though she couldn’t be certain which was Blair and which, merely a blotch of blue goop, Maggie decided that the aureoles around Blair’s nipples had become larger, darker and much more feminine than those of a preteen, either a girl or boy. Maggie was so elated that she would have wet herself while hugging her daughter in the shower, had not she been fearful of ending up as blue as Blair.

After three hours of scrubbing, only the wrinkled skin disguised the obvious: that the best Blair could do was rid himself of the stench and to eliminate the discolored patches in his now uniformly blue skin. Miraculously, even his hair matched his cheeks, which matched his arms, which matched his eyes, returned to their familiar blue by the removal of his amber contacts. Both the make-up and dye had been experimental, Pierre had said. Some experiment! Blair felt like an experimental rabbit in a cosmetics lab. It’s not easy being blue.

It’s probably just as well that Blair didn’t know that “she” had in thirteen-year-old Cody Akins a fervent, new admirer, who having found “her” sneaker at the soccer pitch, decided that Fate had decreed that the “bitching blue Breaker” was his Cinderella to shoe one day.

There is no really no way to explain “love at first sight”: Perhaps it was the glistening blue skin that made Cody decide that Blair was “gorgeous,” for Cody had been looking for his own Na’vi to love since he’d seen Avatar for the ninth time.

Or perhaps it was Blair’s youthful spirit and preteen body, for girls Cody’s own age found the teen immature — and short.

Perhaps it was Blair’s sheer ineptitude; there was something endearing about a girl who literally took it on the chin and got back up smiling. Or perhaps it was the daringly casual “bump” that had won the game for the Breakers. Though Cody was convinced that Blair had done it deliberately, and though Cody came from Bybee Lake (indeed, he was Kirk’s best male friend at Lewis A. Clark), he admired the girl’s chutzpah. Cody would never have dared to foul a star player in front of enemy fans.

Or perhaps, in the final analysis, it was Blair’s innate “boyishness” that appealed to Cody who, though he spent most of his time frantically girl-watching, gave himself away with the music stored on his omnipresent iPod. Songs by Elton John, Freddy Mercury, Adam Lambert, Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, Rufus Wainwright, the Petshop Boys and Frank Sinatra should have been a giveaway. (He was possibly protected by the fact that few of his age group had ever heard of these “golden oldies”.) Naturally, Cody loved show tunes.

Kirk, seeing his “best bud” scoping out the soccer chicks, had come over several times during the game to chat. They had also taken shelter from the rain together at half-time. At first, Kirk found it amusing that Cody was talking so much about Blair, and so he contented himself with “cruddies” (sardonic remarks) about the “Washington” girl’s inferiority compared to the local hotties, but as the extent of Cody’s sudden infatuation with Blair — Blair, of all people! — became apparent, Kirk wanted to upchuck. And when Cody, having been the one to find the sneaker, refused to give it to Kirk because Cody was determined to present it in person to the “Na’vi princess”, Kirk actually “tossed his cookies” — the remnants of two soggy hot dogs — behind a lamp post.

There is no telling what Kirk would have done the following Monday had he the slightest inkling that Cody might be gay, inasmuch as Kirk later blamed his own rash actions on his concern that word was bound to get out at school that Cody, having had his pick of twenty-four real girls on two soccer teams (plus dozens more in the audience) had become smitten with a cross-dressing boy, and Kirk’s younger brother at that! Neither Cody nor his friends would thereafter be able to escape the unfair suspicion that they were all “homos”.

Kirk vowed to protect Cody’s reputation come what may; that’s what besties did for each other.