Stephanie’s Deal by Jennifer Brock By foolishly deciding to peek at his Christmas presents, Steven earned the punishment of living as a girl. Stephanie’s been doing a fairly decent job emulating a well-mannered young lady, while still making some unusual choices. She’ll be an older boy’s date to a New Year’s Eve party, and most recently she agreed to serve as a junior bridesmaid in her cousin’s wedding next June. It’s now Christmas, and Stephanie learns a little more about herself.

Episode 4

It was Steven’s fourth morning waking up in a nightgown, and he was almost used to it. Stephanie sat up, gathered her skirt and got out of bed the way she’d been taught. She didn’t remember anything after falling asleep in the car on the way home from her grandmother’s. Someone must have undressed her and put her to bed. The nightgown she was wearing was one she hadn’t seen before. It was sleeveless, which made it look kind of like a slip with really wide straps. It was a pale pink with “Merry Christmas” written all over it in red cursive letters.

The family Christmas tradition was for everyone to keep their pajamas on all day, so Stephanie put on her robe and slippers and crept down to the kitchen. The clock on the wall told her it was 6:30. She’d gotten up early like an excited little kid who couldn’t wait to see her presents. Everyone else was still in bed.

She figured she might as well do a nice thing and make breakfast for the family. She started by figuring out how to use the coffee maker. Steven had seen his mother make a pot hundreds of times, so she knew the steps involved but just wasn’t sure of the measurements. The pot had marks on it so you knew how many cups worth of water to put in, but she didn’t know how many cups Mom usually made. She figured the safest bet would be to fill it to the highest mark. Then the question was how much coffee to put in the filter. She tried to follow the instructions on the back of the can, but she didn’t know how many ounces were in the cups the marks on the pot referred to, so she went with her best guess.

There was a can or tube or whatever you call it package of dough for making cinnamon rolls in the fridge. The directions spelled out the steps specifically, and Stephanie thought it looked like something she could handle. She turned on the oven to preheat and got out a baking pan. She went to wash her hands, and the sleeves of her robe were getting in the way, so she took it off and hung it over a kitchen chair. She found the apron her mother had made her wear the day before and tied it on.

Making the rolls was pretty easy! The package even had little pictures showing what to do at each step. It was fun rolling up the little pieces of dough. She hoped they came out okay. Once they were in the oven, she set about finding something else to serve for breakfast. She settled on trying to make scrambled eggs, but she had no idea where to start.

She smacked herself in the forehead and looked in the big plaid cookbook that Mom always uses when she needs to look up the cooking time for a roast or something. Sure enough, it had a recipe for scrambled eggs. She didn’t want to do too many things at once, so she waited until the rolls came out of the oven before she poured her egg mixture into the frying pan.

Her big sister Michelle came into the kitchen and asked what smelled so yummy. Stephanie told her the rolls were still cooling but she could help herself to a cup of coffee. Michelle was really impressed by how domestic she had become. Stephanie set a plate of eggs in front of her sister and had started frosting the rolls when their sleepy parents shuffled in.

Mom was pleased. “Thanks for making breakfast, girls! This is a nice Christmas surprise.”

Michelle shook her head. “Don’t thank me. This is all her doing. I just got here. Her eggs are pretty good — you’ve got to try them!”

“You did this all yourself? That’s very sweet of you.” Steven had never shown any initiative in the kitchen before, so his mother was very confused.

Stephanie set a plate of cinnamon rolls on the table and ran her hands down to smooth her apron. “Well, I realized that even though I accepted my punishment, I never actually apologized. So I just thought I’d make some breakfast as a way to let you know I really am sorry.” She hung her head. “I’m not trying to get you to shorten my sentence or anything; I just wanted to let you know I regret my mistake, and didn’t want that getting in the way of any celebrating.” She wiped her nose and smiled honestly. “So, merry Christmas! And I hope you like my breakfast.”

Everybody liked her breakfast. The cinnamon rolls were particularly tasty, but even there were enough for everyone to have two of them Dad had seconds on eggs instead. The best part was when Mom said that Michelle had to clean up. Stephanie swapped back her apron for her robe and went with the folks into the living room while her sister dealt with the dishes.

She settled into a seat on the couch and watched her father turn on the lights on the tree. It was then that Stephanie noticed that there were five stockings hanging from the mantel instead of their usual four. It took her a while to figure out that the extra one hanging between Steven’s and Michelle’s was for her. It was purple with a silver angel patch sewn on it. When Michelle was finished and came into the living room, Mom took down the stockings and passed them out.

When she got to the end, she took Steven’s stocking off its hook. “Since he’s not here, let’s see what he got.” She flipped it over and a small black rock fell in her hand. “A lump of coal — I guess Santa put Steven on his ‘Naughty’ list.” She put the coal on the mantel and went back to her seat. “Why don’t you go first, Stephanie? Maybe Santa put you down for ‘Nice.’”

Stephanie didn’t really like Mom’s “joke,” if that’s what it was. She dumped out her new stocking and saw a pile of reasonable presents for a girl. There was the usual Christmas orange, a roll of wild cherry Life-Savers, a pretty bookmark made from a pressed flower laminated in plastic, a pair of silver barrettes with little flowers on them, a glittery tube of lipgloss, a bottle of mascara, and some perfume of her very own. She thanked “Santa,” and gave her perfume a little sniff. She thought it would make her smell really grown up.

When they went on to the actual presents, Stephanie got some more really girly things. The first thing she opened turned out to be a doll. She was almost twelve, which she was pretty sure was too old for dolls, so it confused her. But Mom explained that this porcelain doll wasn’t for playing with; she was just supposed to sit on your bureau and look pretty. Sometimes girls had some really stupid stuff. Stephanie took the doll out of the box and looked at her. She had blonde curls in her hair almost the same color as Stephanie’s, and she wore a blue dress with a big poofy skirt.

Mom said Stephanie needed to give her doll a name, which seemed even more stupid. But she went ahead and did it anyway. “Well, since I got her on Christmas, I’ll call her ‘Chrissy’ to mark the occasion.” Mom didn’t quite seem satisfied, so Stephanie addressed the doll, “Does that sound like a good name to you, Chrissy?” She held the doll’s head to her ear and frowned. “She said I should have known by her blue dress that she was Jewish. She’d rather be called ‘Hannah’ in honor of Hannukah.” Mom looked a little more content with that answer, and Dad was just cracking up. Stephanie sat Hannah on the couch next to her, and showed her each of her other presents as they were opened.

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without receiving an embarrassing gift of underwear. It was extra embarrassing for Stephanie to get a four-pack of panties in pretty colors and prints. They somehow seemed worse that the white ones she’d been wearing so far. It got even more embarrassing when her next package was two more pairs of panties in pretty colors, and these had matching training bras. When Michelle made her show what she’d gotten, even Dad was embarrassed to be looking.

Michelle’s gift to Stephanie was a pair of small gold hoop earrings. She said they were more comfortable to sleep in that the ones they pierced her with. That reminded her that she was going to show Stephanie how to change her earrings, so she dragged Stephanie up to her room. She went into the attic space behind her closet and pulled out her fishing tackle box. Then she went into the bathroom and came out with a bottle of rubbing alcohol.

Michelle started by cutting a couple three-inch lengths of heavy fishing line. Then she cleaned them off using the alcohol and some cotton balls from her makeup table. She had Stephanie sit in front of the mirror so she could see what she was doing. She warned Stephanie that the next part might be a little uncomfortable, but since she’d been spinning her earrings as ordered it shouldn’t be too bad. She threaded the fishing line through the holes in her ears, next to the earrings. With the strings still in her ears, Michelle then took her earrings out. Then she used the fishing line to guide Stephanie’s new earrings through the holes, and latched them closed behind her ears. Finally, she pulled the strings out, leaving the earrings in place.

Stephanie thanked her sister and said that they probably would be more comfortable to sleep in than the others. Michelle cleaned up her earlobes with the alcohol-soaked cotton, and she saw a little blood. It was kind of scary, but Michelle seemed to know what she was doing. She put the pieces of fishing line in Stephanie’s room, and told her she could use them any time she wanted to change her earrings, since her holes wouldn’t be finished healing before her week was up. Then the sisters went back down to finish opening presents.

Stephanie’s other presents were an assortment of plastic bracelets, a set of colored pencils (which was the only present she got that Steven would also like), a new pair of shoes so she wouldn’t have to wear her shiny Mary Janes all the time, and a nice watch that used to be her mother’s but was a lot prettier than the one she’d borrowed from her sister.

The presents that Stephanie gave everyone got very positive reactions. Stephanie got her sister a nice looking hair band. Back on the first day when they were getting Steven girls’ underwear for the Christmas play, Michelle had lent her little brother a headband to help him pretend to be Stephanie. So she wanted to return the favor and get her big sister something to remember that moment. Michelle thought it was very sweet and thanked her even more than she did for her other present, a gift card for getting music for her iPod that she’d bought back when she was still a boy.

Steven had originally gotten his mother a red scarf that was nice, but really didn’t mean anything. Stephanie’s additional present for her was a gift certificate to the beauty salon that had created her own new look. She said that when they’d been there before, Stephanie got all kinds of things done and Michelle had gotten her fingernails done, but their mother had just sat and watched; she deserved to feel pretty, too. Mom got a little weepy and gave her little girl a big hug.

Stephanie’s present for her Dad was a bigger deal. She said that it wasn’t fair that he had to go stand in line at midnight in the cold to get Steven a Nintendo Wii and have nothing to show for it. Stephanie said that the video console should belong to the whole family to share, and so she got her father a Tiger Woods game that he could play on it. She told him that the guy in the store said that it’s supposed to be a good enough simulation that it could help his actual golf game. She made sure that he knew this definitely wasn’t a trick to get him to hook up the game early; she wouldn’t be playing it until she was Steven again. It was a much better present than a tie. Dad stood up and tried to give his son a manly handshake of appreciation, but his daughter gave him a girlish embrace instead.

When all the presents had been opened, Stephanie worked on gathering the torn wrapping paper and empty boxes to put them in the recycle bin, Mom got Michelle to help her get lunch (a light selection of cold cuts and salads) ready, and Dad worked on assembling the magazine rack that Mom had given him for his study. Picking up the trash almost felt normal, like something Steven would have had to do anyway.

After lunch, Stephanie had some free time to herself for the first time since she became a girl. She wasn’t sure if any of Steven’s hobbies were appropriate for a proper young lady. Video games were right out, since they’d be too strong a reminder. He liked to take model airplane kits and put them together wrong to change the designs into cool spaceships, but that was a little too boyish and she didn’t have one anyway. He spent a lot of time drawing secret comic books, but Stephanie didn’t feel right working on them dressed as a girl. She didn’t want to draw anything else so she could save her new pencils for Steven. When Mom turned her room all girly, the bookshelves were removed, so she didn’t have anything to read.

She went down the hall and asked Michelle if she had any books from when she was younger that would be good for a girl her age to read. She said she thought she might have some and went scrounging through her attic. She pulled out an old box full of paperbacks, and got a nostalgic smile as she remembered the stories she used to love. At first she handed Stephanie four books about the “Baby-sitters Club,” but then something else made her start to giggle.

With a weird expression on her face Michelle handed a book titled Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret to her. She said, “This one is perfect for you. It’s all about becoming a teenage girl. It will let you know what to expect.” Stephanie took the book and thanked her, but something in Michelle’s face seemed off. She recognized the author as having written some books that Steven liked, so she thought she’d probably like it as well, and didn’t get why her sister was acting funny.

But since she didn’t have anything better to do, she went into her room, kicked her slippers off and lay on top of her bed to read the book. It caught her interest quickly —like Stephanie, Margaret’s age was eleven going on twelve, so she found her easy to relate to. But then she started talking about bras and periods and it got kind of embarrassing.

The part where Margaret went shopping for her first bra was scarily similar to Stephanie’s own experience getting one. For a brief moment, she considered putting one on under her nightgown to look more girlish, but she was sure that Michelle would notice and tease her for it.

The period stuff was just gross. There was a day in the fall at school when the girls all stayed in class while the boys got taken outside to play basketball, and Tommy Peters said it was because the girls were in there learning about getting their periods. He said that his brother told him to expect it. Girls around Stephanie’s age started getting ready to make babies, which seemed way too early, but their bodies wanted babies in them, so every month they didn’t have a baby in them their wombs would melt and run out their girl parts. It was pretty disgusting if you thought about it.

And then there was some stuff in the story about kissing boys, something Stephanie was not looking forward to. Ever since Michelle found out Stephanie was going over to Brian Somers’ house for New Year’s, she’d been telling her she’d have to kiss him at midnight. The story’s “happy ending” was even about more periods!

Stephanie marched into her sister’s room and dropped the book on her bed. “Why do you hate me so much?”

Michelle looked up from her magazine and saw a pouty face. “I don’t hate you. You’re my little sister.”

“No, I’m not. And that’s the point! You’ve just been pushing this girl stuff way too hard — like this book, it’s all about growing boobs and kissing boys and periods! You were laughing because you like torturing me. It’s like the shoe store. You hate the real me, so you pretend to like Stephanie-me.” Steven tried to keep from crying.

Michelle stood up and tried to give her baby sibling a hug. “Please sit down, and I’ll try to understand what’s bothering you. I’m sorry if that book was a little too feminine for you.”

Stephanie reluctantly sat on the edge of the bed. “Why are you so pushy about this girl stuff?”

Michelle sat on the other end of the bed to give her enough space. “Okay, I’ve only had one semester of Psych, but I think that should be enough to understand myself. You have to keep in mind that I spent the first six years of my life as an only child, so by the time my personality formed I was pretty used to being the star of the show. And to make it worse, whenever we’d go on vacation with Aunt Jean and Uncle Frank, the only kids around would be the boys. So if I wanted to go explore the woods with Jack and Matt and Danny, I had to be a boy, too. They called me ‘Mickey.’ Sometimes Danny still does.”

She checked to make sure Stephanie was still following, and saw that she’d gotten a little more comfortable on the bed. “So there I am at six and Mommy tells me she’s going to have a baby. She was so sure it was going to be a girl. We still had all my girly baby clothes that didn’t get handed down to Danny, and I’d used some of them on my baby dolls, but this was going to be a real baby sister. I was so excited! I wouldn’t be the only girl in the family anymore. And then you came out and you were a boy and I was so mad! I threw a fit and they made me stay at Grandma’s for the first couple weeks you were home. Eventually I got to the point where a baby was at least a baby, so I tried thinking of you as sort of a living version of a doll. If you’ve ever been around a real baby for a while, you know they’re a whole lot smellier and louder and more annoying than dolls.”

Stephanie was kind of nodding, so she kept going. “So, I didn’t have a baby sister, I didn’t have anywhere near the attention I used to get from Mommy and Daddy, and there was this smelly screamy boy in my house. I wouldn’t say I hated you, but I didn’t really like you much. Then you got older and started walking and talking and stuff and suddenly it was ‘Michelle, watch your brother’ all the time. There was this incident when you were like three and you were running and you broke a vase, and I was the one who got in trouble for it, because I should have stopped you. It wasn’t long after that when I started dressing you in my old clothes and made you play ‘Little Sister Stephanie.’ “

“So is that when you started hating me?”

“I don’t hate you. We just have nothing in common. And once you got in school it was all over for me. When you were in second grade, they had your class take a test and the teacher called Mom and Dad in and they told them that you’d scored some amazing genius numbers on the test. So they started imagining you with some fancy future as a doctor or lawyer or scientist or something, while poor average me will be lucky if I get to be a faceless cubicle dweller.”

“They said that about me?”

“Yeah, do you remember they tried to put you in the smart kids’ class, but you wouldn’t do the work so they bounced you back. But you still have way more aptitude than I’ll ever have. The one thing an older sibling is supposed to be able to do is show the younger one how to do stuff, but schoolwise there’s nothing I can teach you. Like that book you just read in a couple hours — it took me about a week when I was your age. Or how you stopped playing Scrabble with me because you can’t stand my spelling, and I still haven’t got a clue about math. There’s nothing we can relate on.”

Michelle pointed at the tackle box she’d forgotten to put away. “Or like how I made Dad take me with him to go fishing. It’s really pretty cool out there matching wits with a force of nature, and we kind of bonded over it, but he’d always say he couldn’t wait until you were old enough to come with us. He really wanted to do some father-son stuff with you. But then when you were old enough you said the worms were gross and you wouldn’t touch them, and even when we baited your hook for you, you thought the hook was too cruel on the fish, and when I caught this awesome bass and it was flopping around you freaked out! You tried to get as far away from the fish as you could, and you were screaming and we nearly tipped over. I had to throw the fish back, and Dad turned the boat around and we went home, and he said he’s been waiting for you to ask to come along when we go fishing, but you never have since. So even though that’s a boy thing, I can’t give you any advice.”

Stephanie shuddered at the memory of the icky fish, and Michelle put her arm around her. “So I’ve just been sort of waiting for us both to be adults when the age difference won’t matter, and maybe we’d have something in common, but then this cross-dressed Christmas pageant comes along, and when we were in that changing booth and I helped you look like a girl to be less embarrassed, I realized something.”

“What?”

“That being a girl was something that I could give you advice about, that maybe it would be the one thing that we’d finally have in common.”

“But then why did you try to trick me at the shoe store?”

“Huh?”

“You made me look like a girl to go buy shoes, but the shoe store man already knew that the angel shoes were for boys, so we weren’t fooling anyone and it was humiliating!”

“Um, you’re the super-genius, not me. I never would have expected the shoe salesman to know that those shoes were only being bought by boys. I was legitimately trying to spare you some embarrassment. Sure, I was teasing you with the whole ‘Stephanie’ thing because little brothers are made for teasing, but I never wanted to humiliate you publicly.”

“Really?”

“Really.” Michelle gave her little sister a hug. “Are we friends now?”

“I guess.”

“Well in that case, I have an idea. That plain white pearl nail polish they made you wear to be an angel is so boring! Would you like me to do them in a different color?” Stephanie agreed and picked out a color from the array of bottles on her sister’s vanity. Michelle smiled when she saw that it was close to the red she had on her fingers. She showed her little sister that when you had acrylic nails like theirs you needed to use an acetone-free nail polish remover.

Michelle continued the conversation as she painted her sister’s fingernails. “So that’s why I suggested the whole ‘girl’ thing when Mom and Dad were so pissed off at you for opening your presents early. So we could do stuff like this. Why did you do it anyway?”

Stephanie looked down. “To see if they’d been listening to what I asked for. So I’d know they cared. I don’t know really know why. It was kind of a stupid thing to do.”

“Kind of? It was very stupid. And it’s like night and day how well you’re behaving as a girl. If you’d only have put half as much effort into being Steven that you do to be Stephanie, this never would have happened.”

“But there’s really no comparison. Everything I do now I have to stop and think ‘how would a girl handle this?’ But when I go back to being me I don’t have to do that, because I already know how a boy would handle whatever.”

Michelle sighed. “You really don’t get it, do you? That’s the whole point. You’re selling Stephanie short. What you’re really asking yourself is ‘how would a mature, responsible girl handle this,’ and what Steven needs to learn is to ask himself ‘how would a mature, responsible boy handle this.’ And if he’d learn to take that moment to think before acting, he wouldn’t end up in messes like this, and pretty soon it could become second nature like the way you instinctively knew how to spread your fingers and blow on them to make the polish dry.”

Stephanie would have to let that percolate for a while, to see if maybe she agreed with her sister’s idea. It was also more than a little scary how easy this girl stuff was coming to her.

“You know, I think we’re going to have a lot of fun tomorrow at Bobby Perrone’s tea party.”

“First, when she’s a girl her name is Robin. Second, I didn’t think it was right for you to accept her invitation for me without giving me a chance to answer. I thought you were just being mean again.”

“I saw how sweet you were being with him, or her or whatever, and so I was sure you were going to accept. But I thought it would be a fun thing for us to do together as sisters. I’m sorry if I was too pushy.”

Stephanie just shrugged. Michelle had moved on to painting Stephanie’s toenails, so she couldn’t go anywhere. “I guess that’s okay, then.” When all her nails were finally dry, she gave her sister a big hug and felt closer to her than ever. This whole girl thing was totally changing the way she knew the world to be. She hoped that she’d get through the next week without too many more mind-blowing experiences.