The school psychologist, Ms. Tollefson, visits Sasha and gives him a test.

Returning to the desk in my room, I sat down to study. French would be first, then History. I could deal with English, Algebra, and then Chemistry after Ms. Tollefson left.

As I’d found learning languages to be quite easy for me, the French lesson was simple enough to get through. History was even less challenging given the way it was taught. All that was necessary was simply reading the assigned text. No written assignment was required for the course this week.

Sitting at the desk, I chanced to notice my reflection in the mirror of my closet door. I saw myself as a girl again.

I looked down to see the black silk turtleneck, the red denim miniskirt, smooth white pantyhose on my legs, and the pair of cute maryjanes with the strap over the instep. I reached up and felt the ribbon in my hair holding up my ponytail at the crown. Another look in the mirror confirmed how nicely Tina had tied the bow. The carefully applied makeup blended subtly into the image. It seemed barely there.

Wow!

The girl in the mirror looked very pretty. Now I knew why both Tina and Sis wanted me to dress up. I really did look nice as a girl. I still felt embarassed, but I was also feeling good.

Sonia was a beauty queen and it only made sense that we would share genes. Then I remembered Mom’s words:

“You share many of Sonia’s features. Maybe you will look very pretty as girl.”

For now, though, I was dressed more in Tina’s style. She also wants me to look as beautiful as she does.

Then I saw something on the desk I hadn’t noticed before. It looked like a wedding photograph. In it I recognized Sonia and Debbie as bridesmaids, and Tom and Bill as groomsmen. Certainly I would have picked Tom as my best man and both he and Bill would’ve flown back for my wedding. But instead of a bridegroom, there were two brides in beautiful white wedding gowns. Tina was one and the other was—myself! Was this a digitally altered photograph? Somehow, I was thinking that it was not.

So then, I was a bride in a wedding? In front of other people? In a dress? With my best friends there?

This was a bit much for me and I started to feel a little dizzy and light-headed.

For the first time I inspected my fingernails quite closely. The French manicure is so elegant and suddenly, I knew it must have been my idea. I never liked red nail polish on anyone—it’s too garish for my taste. Tina and Sonia both wear various shades of red. Did they go with the white French manicure just to match the white dresses, or was it a concession to my own taste and style?

I had helped plan the wedding, too? Did I want to do this? In front of everyone?

Now I was more than just a little dizzy and light headed. In fact, I was beginning to feel—.

*****************************

I awoke startled to see Mom and Ms. Tollefson kneeling over me. Then I glanced down at myself to see a black tee-shirt and no wedding rings or manicures. Relieved, I took a deep breath and exhaled.

“That’s right, Sasha,” Ms. Tollefson said quietly. “Relax. You’re alright, now.”

“Would you like some tea, мой Саша?” Mom asked me.

«Да, моя Мама!» I answered.

“Mis’ Tollefson, would you like tea, also—Russian style?” Mom asked the psychologist.

“Yes, I would, thank you.”

Mom and Ms. Tollefson helped me to my feet. Slowly. I must have fainted to escape the hallucination. Mom lead me downstairs by the hand, the school psychologist behind me, since I was still somewhat dizzy. We went into the kitchen, where I noticed a briefcase on the table.

Mom turned to the samovar and ran hot water into two glasses of tea leaves. She then set our glasses of tea and spoons on the table and place the covered dish of strawberry jam between us. Then taking her own glass of tea, she left Ms. Tollefson and me alone in the kitchen. Sitting down at table, I spooned some jam into my tea. The psychologist, observing me, did the same.

“The Russian tradition is to sweeten tea with jam or fruit preserves. We also serve it with the whole leaves in the glass. Tina just learned this yesterday morning.”

“So, Sasha, how are you and Tina? I hear you’ve been dating?” Ms. Tollefson asked.

“Yes. She and my sister Sonia are best friends. Sis set us up for our first date.”

“When was that?”

“Only two weeks ago.”

“Did you like Sonia getting involved in your personal life that way?”

“Yeah. It was the nicest thing she’s ever done for me,” I replied then sipped my tea.

Ms. Tollefson had these penetrating, crystal blue eyes. The kind that could see right into me. Taking a sip of her own tea, she looked right at me. “Nurse Banner copied me her notes from your meeting with her yesterday morning. I’m very concerned about what’s happening to you. There’s something very wrong, I think it’s safe to say, but I can’t begin to guess what. Hallucinations are usually a symptom of schizophrenia or some similar disorder, but there’s usually more than just that. And from what I can tell, you’ve had the full range of sensory hallucinations: visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory. You’ve had all those?”

“Yeah. And all at once, too.”

“How real do they seem to you?”

Nervously, I adjusted the hem of my miniskirt and crossed my ankles. As I did, I noticed how nice the texture of nylons rubbing across my legs felt.

“As real as we are here. But I know that they can’t be for real. That’s why I went in to see Nurse Banner yesterday morning,” I replied, feeling the texture of my red denim jeans.

“Well, at least your reality-testing sounds intact, Sasha,” she remarked.

“Huh?” I wondered aloud.

“Reality-testing is how you recognize what is and isn’t real. In this case you know when you’re hallucinating because what you see and hear doesn’t make sense to you. The content of what you perceive is so far from what you’d expect, you question if your perception is true.”

“I guess that’s why the content of my hallucinations bothers me so much?” I queried. “Things shouldn’t be happening the way I’m seeing them?”

I glanced down at my French manicure. Again.

“Correct. And it justifiably upsets you when you see it,” she offered as a conclusion, sipping some tea again. The psychologist continued, “Now, I’d like you to tell me about the content of your hallucinations.”

I hated this.

Maybe I could start with something more innocuous than my fully envisioned episodes of Crossdressing at DeGrassi Senior High.

“It began when I woke up yesterday. The L-E-D’s in my digital clock’s display were green. Normally they’re red.”

“Have you ever been told you might have a color vision deficiency?”

“No, but wouldn’t that affect my perception of other colors as well? Only the L-E-D’s changed color. And the bathroom. Our bathroom is pink things on a white background. But yesterday it looked more like white things on a pink background.”

“You reported to Nurse Banner that you saw yourself crossdressed in these hallucinations?” Ms. Tollefson asked.

I blushed.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” she noted, flexing a very slight grin at me.

“You could say it’s a persistent theme,” I admitted.

“Sasha, you wouldn’t be the first boy who imagined himself wearing girls’ clothing,” Ms. Tollefson tried to assure me with a smile.

I looked at my shoes. Maryjanes. Why was this happening to me?

“But I don’t even want to imagine it. I’ve always been small for a boy and I get pushed around for it. I’m supposed to grow into manhood but I’ve always been afraid that I’ll never measure up,” I confessed to her.

“I have noticed in your records that you’ve gone out for soccer, hockey, and baseball. And you’ve had quite a reputation for being a real scrapper at hockey and soccer,” Ms. Tollefson remarked, having opened her briefcase for some documents.

“The truth is that in soccer, I’m a clutz. I cause other players to trip and collide all the time. But I like it when I’m yellow-carded because it makes me look bad-assed! It’s good for my image off the field.”

“Is it the same way in hockey?” she followed up.

“Oh no! In hockey, I really do get mad. We all do and tempers flare sometimes. Even though I spend some time in the penalty box, you should see how much more I do get away with on the ice. Nothing’s for show there. For me, baseball and soccer are just games. But ice hockey is serious business.”

Ms. Tollefson raised an eyebrow. “I see! So you have established your claim to manhood in the hockey rink?”

“You’d better believe it!” I declared smugly to her. “Papa and I bonded on the ice. He was a very good hockey player before he came to America.”

“What does he do now?” Ms. Tollefson asked.

“He’s an engineer. After Christmas he went to New Orleans to work. He got a six-month project there. But he did get to come home for Holy Week and Easter, though.”

“So he’s not residing here right now?”

“No. He’s had to travel for work since the metallurgical plant closed. We really miss him. I wish he could have seen me play hockey this year. But he makes so much more money because he’s willing to work in different places.”

Ms. Tollefson continued to take notes on her pad, now and then pausing to look at a document in her briefcase.

“There’s another theme in your hallucinations that concerns me greatly,” she continued.

You’d’ve thought that the crossdressing were weird enough as a theme. Apparently, she needed more.

“And what’s that?” I asked, not certain where she might be going with this.

“You mentioned to Nurse Banner that you and Tina were apparently married in your hallucinations.”

“Yeah. She would call me her ‘husband’ and we wore matching wedding rings. In one today, I saw a picture of our wedding. We were both wearing wedding dresses in it.”

Looking at my left hand, there were neither wedding rings nor white tipped fingernails.

“The crossdressing theme again?” Ms. Tollefson probed further.

“It seems to be connected with our marriage. It must be supposed to bring us closer, somehow,” I speculated.

“But you’ve only been dating two weeks. Isn’t that early even to be thinking about marriage?” she asked rhetorically.

“That’s why I knew it was a hallucination. We couldn’t’ve been married yet. But in the hallucinations we seem to have married two weeks ago instead of beginning to date then.”

“Sasha, you’re talking about your hallucinations almost like they’re a different history,” Ms. Tollefson observed.

“I didn’t think about them that way. Besides, they don’t seem like a different past, but another present. My clothes when I’m crossdressed in the hallucinations seem to be related to what I’m actually wearing.”

“What do you mean?” she pressed further.

“Well, if I’m wearing a black tee-shirt, the hallucination has a black turtleneck. Denim jeans appear as a denim skirt. Things like that.”

“That’s interesting,” she noted. “So your hallucinations distort rather than contravene reality.”

“What?”

“The content of your hallucinations is not impossible. It’s only different from what you know. You could crossdress, but you don’t. You could be married to Tina, but you aren’t. Your clock could have green L-E-D’s, but it has red. Think about it. Is anything you’ve hallucinated actually impossible? Or is it just not likely?”

Nothing that I had seen in these visions was impossible. It was only confusing, disturbing, or embarassing.

“They’re just unlikely. But someone would prob’ly object to them before they could happen. Like, I’m sure Tina and I are too young to get married. Even if we wanted to, I think we’d still plan it after graduation. My parents would object for sure. Hers would, too.”

“So then, who’d object to you crossdressing?”

“I would!”

“Anyone else?”

“My Papa, certainly.”

“Just your father, then?”

“Almost everyone else I know. Tom and Bill, although they’ve moved away. My coaches and teammates would give me no end of grief. And Mis’ Muldoon would find it in violation of some kind of policy and require me to fill out an endless stack of forms. And whatever classmates weren’t avoiding me would be looking to beat me up!”

“How would your Mom, sister, and Tina feel about it?”

She just had to go there.

“Mom thinks I’d look pretty, Sis constantly teases me and schemes to get me into her clothes, and yesterday Tina had me wearing her pink cardigan and today,” I said, reaching back and pulling it from my hair, “this white hair ribbon.”

“Oh!” Ms. Tollefson exclaimed, cupping her hands over her mouth to muffle a sustained, whining laugh-tone and to conceal a naughty grin.

“It’s not funny!” I objected.

“I’m sorry. It was so unexpected,” she apologized. “So, how does your sister tease you?”

“She’s always remarking about how I’d look in a dress or skirt she has or something like that. Tina talked to me and said that Sonia has this fantasy of dressing me up.”

“She wouldn’t be the first girl to dress up her little brother. I did mine when we were kids. He looked so cute!”

I sensed a screw loosening just then.

“So how did he like it?” I probed.

“Not too well, but he had to do it for a school assignment,” she answered. “It was that or flunk.”

“That’s not fair!” I responded.

“Our mother agreed,” Ms. Tollefson continued. “But he did ask me, though, to make him look as much like a girl as possible. He thought it would be worse to look like a boy wearing a dress.”

Somehow that was a logical, even if a perverse, conclusion. They had attempted to minimize any embarassment ensuing her brother’s experience.

“Sasha, I have a test I’d like to give you,” she said, getting some documents from her briefcase. “This won’t take too long and it might help me understand where you’re coming from. It’s called the ‘Bem Sex Role Inventory,’ or the ‘B-S-R-I.’ It’s an attempt to measure your response to traditional masculine and feminine values.”

Somehow, I knew another screw had just loosened.

*****************************

On this BSRI test I was required to rank if a word or phrase given described me on a scale of one (if never) to seven (if always). There were sixty words or phrases and it took me longer than it was supposed to. This was because I was worried about wrong answers.

There weren’t supposed to be wrong answers on these tests. But for me there were, because the test, if I understood Ms. Tollefson correctly, was going to tell if I were more comfortable with masculine or feminine thinking. But that’s not such an easy thing to tell from the words or phrases I had to mark. For example, the terms conceited, dominant, and soft-spoken all appear, but how can you know which is masculine or feminine? I know both males and females who are all of those and others who are none of them.

It took Ms. Tollefson only a few minutes to score my test and announce the results.

“Sasha, your score on the M-scale is six-point-one and on the F-scale it’s six-point-four, which classifies you as Androgynous.”

“Well, I don’t wanna be androgynous,” I proclaimed. “I’m a boy and I wanna stay one.”

“That’s not quite what the test means,” Ms. Tollefson tried to allay my fears. “It means that you would be good at both traditional masculine and feminine roles.”

“You gave the score on my M-scale as six-point-one and on the F-scale as six-point-four. Am I right in guessing the M-scale is for ’masculine’ and the F for ’feminine’?”

“That’s correct,” she answered.

“Then I scored higher on the feminine than on the masculine scale,” I observed, very anxiously. “That’s not something I needed to hear today.”

“It’s alright, Sasha,” she said, still trying to reassure me. “Maybe we could just say for you, that androgynous means your masculine and feminine traits show a healthy balance. You’re neither macho nor sissy. You would find both equally distasteful. Am I right?”

In truth, that did sound like me. Machismo required doing some unbelievably stupid things just to show that you were—well—macho! Of course, I didn’t care to dress up like my sister, either.

“Yes. You nailed that one,” I conceded.

“And the point-three difference,” she said, smiling and stretching the white hair ribbon between thumb and index finger of each hand, “is why Tina got you to wear this!”

Ms. Tollefson began giggling like a schoolgirl. Even the school psychologist was teasing me.

Yet another screw had loosened.

*****************************

Before Ms. Tollefson left, she decided to refer me to a psychiatrist for further evaluation and diagnosis. She said something about gender identity disorder not usually being associated with hallucinations. Then she said that I may also be referred to a neurologist to look for a possible brain injury.

After the school psychologist had left, Mom and I sat down at the kitchen table with fresh tea.

“Mom, I don’t really have much confidence in her,” I said. “Everyone at school thinks she’s flaky. Now, I have to agree. She even teased me about my hair ribbon. Imagine that! The school psychologist was teasing me!”

I sweetened my tea with some strawberry jam and sipped it.

“Yes. That is strange for woman with her responsibility. What you think that she really mean by it?”

“I don’t have a clue, Mom.” I sipped some more tea.

“I think you worry about Sonia’s teasing too much,” she said to me.

“Tina mentioned yesterday that Sis told her that she’s had a fantasy of dressing me up for a long time.”

“Yes. She speaks to me of it sometimes.”

“But what surprised me is what Tina said was Sonia’s reason.”

“Oh?”

“She said that Sis didn’t want to embarass me, but that she wanted me to enjoy it with her. Tina said she had never actually tried because she was afraid to risk humiliating me.”

“Son, that is true,” Mom affirmed. “But there may be more to it than she even knows, herself.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I tell you this. She enjoys dressing up in beautiful dresses and elegant gowns. Sonia enjoys being girl. To your sister, that is most magnificent state of being possible. But there is one tradition of being girl that she has not done and, as things are, she cannot do. But you may help her come close to it.”

“What would that be?” I tried to probe more deeply.

“I may already tell you too much, Sasha,” Mom said. “Any more should come not from me, but from Sonia. You are my son and I am very proud of you. You are highly intelligent, uncommonly wise, and more sensitive than most other boys. So, use your heart and mind to figure it out.”

With that, Mom smiled and left me alone in the kitchen.