Synopsis:

"I can show you what you'd look like as a girl," Anna promised.

Story:

Thirty

Million

Reasons

 
by Erin Halfelven

 
Chapter 10

 
I spent a lot of time looking at what AnnaMaria had done with my hair. It was a loose, almost shaggy style, still touching my shoulders, but it no longer looked like a boy's haircut run wild. She had shown me how I could comb it back and either part it on the side or tie it up in a low-set man's ponytail. With it done either way I merely looked--well, gay. Especially with the ponytail, I'd never worn my hair in a ponytail before.

Undo the pony tail, brush the hair forward from the nape of my neck, then shake my head to get it off my face and it looked like one of the shag cuts lots of girls were wearing. Except it had my face under it. Anna had me practice that a few times; pointless I thought but I did it because she asked me to.

She gave me more instructions. "You want to wash it at least twice a week, Kit." She didn't say Keet, like a lot of Hispanics; she had no more accent than I did unless she wanted to. "You can use the curling irons to make it look more full; spritz to hold and you're beautiful."

"Uh. I'll probably just..." I was going to say that I would just get a regular boy haircut tomorrow but she started putting things out for me and describing them. "Herbal shampoo, not too much scent if you want to go home and see your family. Creme rinse, use it every time. Spritz hold, use just a little." She sat them on the counter. "This is good expensive stuff like I use here in my shop, but Hey! Ed is paying for it, ah?"

"I don't really need that stuff," I said.

"Sure you do!" she said emphatically. "I give you more stuff before you leave. Come." She motioned toward another chair in front of the mirrors.

I sat and she worked on my nails. "You know, I'd show you how to do this too," she meant the manicure, I suppose, "but you've got a rich boyfriend, you can just go to the salon once a week." She laughed as I blushed.

"He's not my boyfriend," I protested.

"He's your sugar daddy," she suggested with another grin.

"I don't think so," I said, weakly.

"People are going to think that," she pointed out. "Pretty young thing like you, living and traveling with an old Methuseleh like Ed."

"I'm not pretty...and...and it's not like that."

"Yet," she said with an evil chuckle.

"Anna," I said, "I know you're teasing but you're scaring the...poop, out of me."

"Scaring the shit out of you, you mean. You can say shit, there's nobody here but us girls."

I laughed finally. Anna walked around the edges of being outrageous and offensive, laughing and making fun of both the conventional and the weird at the same time. Her obvious good nature made her teasing easier to take. If she'd just stop calling me chica, girl, and mija, daughter. But she did make me laugh.

She looked up at me and grinned. "You've got a cute giggle, I bet it drives old Ed nuts."

"I don't giggle!"

"Sure you do. That little snigger that's like a laugh that's too shy and girly to be impolite? That's a giggle." She laughed out loud again. "And now you're pouting! How in the world did you ever make anyone think you were a boy?"

I almost stood up to run. "You're mixing me all up?"

She shook her head. "I know the names they must have called you in school; someone looks like you and doesn't talk dirty or all macho or nothing. It probably hurt worse coming from the girls, didn't it?" I didn't say anything to that and she kept working.

But she was right. The boys had been cruel sometimes. It had been terrible to be laughed at and almost worse to have to be rescued back in grade school by my big sister, Alison, two years older than me. Or Jay. Sometimes there was Jay, standing there, defending me. I'd known Jay since the third grade. I tried to sort through the memories but I only got more confused.

"You gonna learn how to do this so you can take my job?" Anna teased. But she did give me a short lesson in what she was doing with my nails. "This is an orange stick, we use it to push the cuticle back so your nails look nice and neat. And sometimes we use these tiny scissors, cuticle scissors, to cut the cuticle back when it's just too ragged and long. It's just dead skin, so if you're careful it won't hurt at all. But it's almost impossible to do this part for yourself."

I nodded, trying to picture how I would ever be able to hold the scissors in the wrong hand and cut anything on the other hand without stabbing myself. Not that I intended to even try. But she had succeeded in distracting me from the glooms.

Anna kept talking, "Then we got to make the nail all smooth, after clipping and shaping it and pushing the cuticles back, which we got to do again after using the emery board to get things smooth. Notice when I clipped it, I made almost square corners that I'm going to round them off a little with the board? That keeps the nail strong and helps prevent splitting and breaking. If I were in a hurry with all this, I'd use the little electric wheel thingie, but you're getting the deluxe personal stuff. We can't talk with that noise anyway. This is alll stuff you would probably know if you'd been smart like me and started living as a chick back in junior high."

I shook my head. "That must have been hard to do..." I began.

She interrupted, "Harder than what you did? I don't think so. I didn't mean for you to think I'm better than you because I did something you didn't do. We're all different and things were different for all of us. You're next to eldest in a big family and the eldest boy, I'm next to youngest in a family almost as big. My brothers are six and eight years older than me with two sisters almost my age. Made it easy for me."

I nodded. We had talked about our families, but she still had completely the wrong idea about me. It embarrassed me too much, trying to think of how to tell her I didn't want to be a girl.

She grinned. "Best would be to pick out the right wriggler from your dad so you got born with the right equipment to begin with, huh? But then, you wouldn't be you, you'd be someone else and who knows what kind of mess the bitch would make of her life?" She did the eye-rolling and face-making to indicate just how messed up things could have gotten.

Okay, that I had to laugh at, again.

"I'm going to put a little color on your nails, see? This is called 'Coral Blush', it's almost the color of your skin, a little lighter and pinker. Then I'll put two coats of clear over it and you're done with your nails. Probably no one will notice the color if you're trying to pass as a boy or you can just use polish remover and take it off."

"Um," I managed to say. She was wrong that no one would notice the nail color. It looked decidedly odd on my hands. I made some sort of noise. Whatever noise I made, Anna broke up and I laughed, too, even though I must have been blushing with embarrassment at the same time.

She finished my nails, still giggling. "You're a trip, Kitten. Now, don't touch nothng till those dry," she told me.

I held my fingers out stiffly and stared at them. I sighed. "I can't help it. I can't believe this is happening?"

"It's happening all right. Have you thought of a name to use? I just called you Kitten and that's sort of obvious from your name--Kit Prentiss?"

"Uh, it's actually Keith," I explained about my sister's problem with pronouncing my real name. "I've been called Kit all my life. Um, tho, you aren't the first to call me Kitten. How long do these take to dry?"

She laughed again. "Well it sort of fits, though you are kind of tall for a person called Kitten? About ten more minutes, you can wave your hands around to speed things up. It doesn't work but lots of ladies do it." She sniggered when I stopped myself from waving.

"Kitten," I said. "Until just lately, um, only people who were trying to tease me or make me mad called me that. Or Kitty or--worse things?" She cleaned up her work table while I sat there and thought about names. Why would I tell her something like that? I guess I somehow felt I had to ante up a confession or two since she had told me so much about herself.

"Kids can be cruel. I bet I know what they called you when they really wanted it to hurt," she observed.

I nodded. There was one whole summer that I was called Pussy Prentiss by the older boys in our neighborhood and then by almost all the kids. It mostly stopped when my Dad found out about it, looked up the fathers of the two worst offenders and laughingly promised to call them Douchebag and Cumwad in public. They got the message without getting mad; Dad was like that.

Thinking and talking about Dad in the past tense made me feel gloomy, too. He wasn't dead, and the doctors keep saying there is no real reason they can find for why he hasn't woke up. I sure missed him, though, for lots of reasons. The nasty nickname incident wasn't the only time he had rescued me.

Why did such things keep happening to me, though? Was it some sort of vibe I gave off? For a while, in high school and when I played baseball, it seemed to be getting better. But starting with Jay last spring and now Ed Hardiman.... I surprised myself by suddenly bursting into tears. More accurate to say I shocked myself.

Anna came around the table and held me while I tried not to sob. "It's okay to cry, chica. It's okay, we going to make you all pretty and no one will laugh at you. Don't smoosh up your nails." She gave me a kiss on the forehead and held my hands without touching my fingertips.

I tried to explain things. To myself as much as to Anna. I wasn't making much sense, even to me and my nails kept distracting me. Anna used a tissue to wipe my eyes again. I wanted to blow my nose too but I couldn't figure out how without messing up my nails. I felt ridiculous.

But Anna had been a mom. Gently, she held the tissue against my nose and told me to blow then carefully wiped my face with a clean tissue. I still felt ridiculous but whatever emotional storm had caused the tears seemed to have passed and I smiled at her.

I finally asked Anna something I had been wondering. "What did Ed tell you about me?"

She sat still for a moment then made a face. "He said you were a boy who probably wished that you were a girl." I began shaking my head. "But that maybe you didn't even know it yourself?"

"He got it wrong." My voice had a catch in it.

She didn't say anything.

I waved at my hands and my hair. "Anna, I didn't want to do this. Ed talked me into it. Like you said, he's-he's got lots of money...and...." I didn't want to make Ed sound like some sort of molester so I couldn't finish what I had intended to say.

"You want a Coke?" she asked. I nodded and she fetched two cans of Diet Coke from a small refrigerator. She used a key to pry up the pop-tops and passed mine over. I usually drank regular Coke but accepted the drink without comment. I did feel very dry.

"When I was about ten," she began, "I decided I would try to be like the other boys." I'd almost forgotten her earlier story. "I played baseball and football, soccer, with the boys. I learned how to spit." She grinned at me. "I got beat up a few times but I kept trying for most of a year."

"It's not the same thing," I protested. "Look at you, I can't imagine you as a boy." She had a very womanly figure and not a trace of any masculine mannerisms.

"Hormones, surgery, cosmetics," she said. "but you're right. I wasn't a boy; I was a girl in a boy's body and I didn't know what I was or what I wanted. Sometimes I wanted to be a boy, sometimes I wanted to be a girl. I was pretty damned unhappy that whole year."

"I'm a boy," I said firmly.

"Coulda fooled me," she said with a grin.

I looked over at the mirror and saw my reflection with a girl's haircut and painted nails. I looked alarmingly like one of my sisters. "Okay," I admitted. "Right at the moment things are a bit...mixed up. But this is all Ed's idea."

"He paying you to dress as a girl?" she asked. "I wondered about that?"

"Uh, no. He offered at first but then, uh, he said he'd pay me--and put up money to send my sisters and brothers to college--whether I did it or not?"

She nodded. "So...you don't really have to do this if you don't want to?"

I thought about it. "I guess not?"

She shrugged and rolled her eyes.

I sighed. "Okay. So, I am a bit curious. People have been telling me...not just Ed and you...uh. So maybe I want to see how I would look as a girl too?" I squirmed a bit. Was that even the truth? I couldn't be sure anymore.

She smiled. "Show you what you'd look like as a girl? That I can do for you."

Notes:

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I'd really like to see some discussion of this. - Erin