Introduction - About my name

I have a confession to make. I love reading the advice columns in the newspaper. You know, the words written by women to comfort other women. Each morning, I grab the morning newspaper section containing the national favorite, “Dear Abby.” and our local “Ask Phoebe.”

Mom and I often talk about some of the advice given the women and girls, most of whom seem worried about relationships with men. I usually find one woman’s question so compelling that I begin to wonder how I would feel if I was that woman. Actually my feelings about being the questioner arises more often when it involves a teenage girl. I confess that I have even been known to cry as my imagination runs off, thinking of myself as that girl in love with a boy who won’t even notice her.

Why should my empathy bother me? Well, you see: I’m a boy.

I often question whether I am a boy, especially when I think I'm a girl. It’s true that I act like a girl and sometimes I even dress like a girl.

I've always been a bit different and that's always bothered me. I have no real friends, except for Cindy, the girl who lives next door and is a year ahead of me in school. But now Cindy has a boyfriend and she's on the high school basketball team, so she's not around much for our friendly get-togethers. Don't get the wrong idea! Cindy and I not lovers at all, just friends.

Mom says not to worry; she says, "You're special, my darling," and hugs me.

Even though I'm now sixteen and about to begin my junior year in high school, I still love being hugged by mom. Besides Cindy, she's my only real friend, and I spend a lot of time with mom, since she’s often lonely. Dad’s gone a lot, usually for several weeks at a time; he works as a setup engineer for a company that builds huge mining and drilling equipment and often is sent to supervise the erection of the huge machines in countries throughout the world. So, mom and I have learned to enjoy each other’s company.

Oh, and I have a sister, too. Mustn’t forget Kelly, since she’s always treated me pretty good, which, I guess, is rare among older sisters who usually seem to make life difficult for little brothers like me. I loved to watch Kelly pretty herself up before her dates, and she used to tease me by threatening to put lipstick on me. “You’d make a pretty little girl, Perry,” she’d tell me. And I would yell “Aaargh,” and run from the room, even though deep down I kind of liked the idea.

And then there's my name: Pernod Pierpont Periwinkle. Was there ever a name more likely to encourage bullies or jokers?

I should hate the name. It's given me some trouble through the years. But, to be truthful, it's also made me feel just a bit special.

When I was a little kid, I got to be called "Perry," and I thought that was pretty cool at the time. I liked the sound of "Perry," but it wasn't long before one the boys in my school teased me for having a girl’s name. “I’m not a girl,” I remember saying and I started to punch him. He easily parried my punch and soon wrestled me to the ground and pinning me flat, yelling, “See you’re a girl.” I was saved by my friend Cindy who pushed the bully off me, emphasizing that Perry was a perfectly good boy’s name.

But the incident bothered me and I began correcting people when they called me Perry. “Just call me Pernod,” I would tell them.

"But calling you Pernod is so weird," complained one girl to me in the 4th Grade.

Whether I liked it or not, my name was henceforth Perry, and I soon became used to it.

I learned eventually that mother, who always had pretensions of being royalty, wanted her son to be "above the crowd" and "something special," as she explained it to me one day when I was twelve. Apparently, she had seen bottles of pernod, which is an absinthe, while she was in France as a teenager and had been enamored with the name. To mom, the name seemed both elegant and different, probably because she first heard it in French (where it’s pronounced “PURR-no,” without the “d” sound; Americans mostly pronounce it more harshly, with the “d”).

The Pierpont, it seemed, came from J. Pierpont Morgan, the great late 19th Century banker, and she must have thought it added greater elegance to her lovely son. Periwinkle, I knew, was my dad's family name and there's not much I can do about that.

So I'm Pernod Pierpont Periwinkle – and please don't laugh.

1 - Our New Venture

Until Cindy got her boyfriend (Josh Harrington was a nice enough boy, I guess, but I didn't like how he was beginning to monopolize her time), she and I just loved to hang around together, talking, listening to music, dabbling online and sometimes riding off on our bikes to loll around in the park.

On one boring summer day, we were clowning around on the computer at my place, looking at some silly websites created for teen girls.

"Seems like all these girls are wired about something?" I queried.

"Yeah, boyfriends or lack of them, how they look and fights with other girlfriends," she agreed.

"I got an idea," I said. "Let's create our own blogsite for teens. We could answer their questions and advise them, right?"

Cindy giggled. She was a pale girl, just now losing her baby fat as she began maturing into a shapely young woman. She had a round face and full cheeks that hardly marked her as being beautiful, but cheerful blue eyes provided an interesting and provocative face. Like most girls, she was a bit self-conscious about her weight (as was I!) and we used to nag each other about taking that extra cookie or ordering a shake to go with our Big Charlie, the oversized hamburger served at Charlie's Dugout.

"You mean we'd be like 'Dear Abby?'"

"Sure, why not?"

And thus, the site, "Ask Perry and Cindy" was born.

*****

To show you how stupid I was, I didn't realize that our readers would think I was a girl; I just thought Perry would be taken for a boy’s name, even though I had seen how sometimes I had been thought to be a girl from my name.

We started off the first two entries in our blogsite by thinking up questions that some kids might ask and then trying to answer them. We had a simple formula: the question would be posed by some reader and then we'd take turns answering, even disagreeing with each other at times. We giggled a lot doing it.

Finally, we got a question from Puzzled in Fargo, North Dakota:

"My boyfriend, I'll call him Jason, is very sweet and is very nice to me. We've been dating since our freshman year and now I'm a junior and even my parents like him. The problem is that I could lose a little weight – not much – but enough to fit into a really hot prom dress. If I don't lose some weight, I'll look so yucky in the dress. But Jason says I shouldn't lose any weight. He likes me as I am so he's got something to hug. I think there's too much of me to hug. What should I do?"

After that, our blog continued in this format:

Cindy: "It depends upon how much overweight you are, Puzzled. If your boyfriend really is as nice as you say he is and you feel you should be thinner, go do your dieting and exercise. He'll probably like the results. If he really cares about you, then he'll still like you. He will be happy that you're happy."

Perry: "Isn't it pretty cold up there in Fargo? Don't you need a little insulation? Keep the weight on."

Cindy: "Now Perry, that's mean."

Perry: “I didn’t want to be mean, just to raise the question about whether Puzzled in Fargo really wants to lose weight, or if she’s doing it because of looks. Maybe she should forget about getting a dress that's fits too snug and find a nice outfit that befits her figure. She should listen to her boyfriend and just be herself. As long as she’s healthy, and not too overweight, I don’t see she should worry about it. I know I could lose a bit of weight, but I’m not sure I’ll be comfortable being any thinner.”

Cindy: “I doubt I’ll ever see you in a Size 6, Perry. But to answer Puzzled’s question: Listen to your own mind. Regardless of your decision, if your boyfriend truly likes you, he’ll like you skinny or chubby. Just don’t let yourself get either too fat or too thin, since both are bad for your longtime health.”

Perry: “I agree with Cindy. Follow your own heart. Best of luck, Puzzled in Fargo.”

And, so the repartee went and soon we were surprised to find that the readers loved it, and our hits grew and grew and we got dozens of questions each week, far too many to use and answer.

One day we got a query that bothered us. "Why don't you two girls show a picture of yourselves? You claim to be high school girls, but how do we know you're not two dirty old men?"

"What? We never said we were both girls?" I said to Cindy.

"No, we didn't, but then Perry really could also be a girl's name, you know.”

"Yeah. I never thought of that, but really, how about Perry Mason and Perry Como? They were both guys."

“I guess, but I never heard of them,” Cindy said.

“Haven’t you ever seen reruns of Perry Mason on TV? He’s an attorney. And Perry Como is a singer from years ago. Mom has some vinyl recordings of him.”

“Never heard of them, but I’ve known several girls named Perry. In my class, there’s Perry Sheridan, and she’s a girl.”

I nodded, realizing I had a girl in my class, also named Perry.

(Research shows that in recent years Perry has been predominantly used to name boys, although it continues to be used for girls as well. An online survey showed that about 30% of respondents thought it a boy’s name; 27% a girl’s name and 33% as either a boy’s or girl’s name, with 10% indicating they didn’t know.)

"But she's got a point," Cindy said. "Maybe, we should show our faces."

I was shocked at the suggestion. How could I show my face? Our readers thought both of us were girls; what would they think?

“Cindy, I can’t show my face. We’re both expected to be girls, I guess. No one has addressed us as anything but two teenage girls. And I’m a boy. Won’t learning I’m a boy when they thought I was a girl would cause them to mistrust us and they’ll quit reading our blog?”

My friend said nothing for a long minute, looking at me carefully.

“You know, Perry, I’ve got an idea,” she said.

Cindy had a strange smile. I wasn’t sure I would like her ‘idea.’

*****

“The answer is simple, Perry,” Cindy said. “You’ll simply have to be a girl in the picture.”

“But I’m not a girl. I’m a guy.”

“Maybe so, but really I can easily see you as a girl, " she said, with a smile.

How could she see that in me? I wondered. I had kept my occasional cross-dressing a secret from everyone but mother. It was humiliating that Cindy might see me as a girl. Would she tell anyone else? Probably not, but perhaps she might inadvertently let the knowledge of my dressing seep out in conversation. Yet, it was also exhilarating to be taken for a girl.

Cindy pressed her point that I should picture myself as a girl on the blogsite.

“I don't want to hurt you, Perry, but you’re very pretty," she said.

I knew I must be blushing. And then she added:

"And you know you really think more like a girl. It’s no wonder our readers like your answers. Virtually all of the people who write in are girls and you seem to understand them as well as I do.”

I nodded. I had tried hard to answer the girls’ questions with full understanding of how they felt. Never would I belittle a girl, or try to make her question sound foolish; for some reason, I felt I understood how they were feeling. I guess I was a bit like many girls, since I was most vain about my weight; I wished I could wear tight jeans, but found the roll of fat on my tummy and my somewhat chubby thighs made that difficult. I wasn’t really fat and actually was in the normal weight range for a boy of my height, but I seemed to have some extra flesh in my tummy area, hips and thighs. I really wasn’t very athletic and not too strong, something I had tried to remedy by joining the cross country team where I usually came in trailing the pack.

Also, I found myself empathizing with their questions about why they didn’t feel they were popular as other girls. I was never popular in school, often alone at playtime in grade school. Once I got to high school, I often sat alone in the cafeteria and I walked without a friend at my side in the hallways. No one gathered at my locker after school, asking me to join them in walking home. I remember crying easily at times, too. Recently, the boys at school began teasing me more than they had before.

Cindy was silent. She looked at me closely: “Really, Perry, you have a pretty face. I wished I was a pretty as you.”

I must have blushed. Cindy laughed. “I guess that’s a yes, then?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, hoping to make it a reluctant “yes.” I’m not sure I convinced her; I loved the thought of being a pretty girl.

She smiled and I could see she was pleased with my answer. I wondered, did Cindy perhaps wish that I was a girl? If so, I reasoned, maybe I could confess that I loved putting on girl’s clothing. It was a gamble.

“Cindy,” I began, talking slowly and deliberately. “Can you keep a secret?”

“For you, anything.”

“I like wearing girl’s stuff,” I said, feeling my face grow flush.

She smiled, and nodded slowly, almost knowingly.

“Is that OK?” I asked, worried about her answer.

“Why not? I like having a pretty girlfriend,” she said. “Besides, I was beginning to wonder about you anyway. Your hair was looking more girlish.”

We hugged and I began crying. When I dried my tears, I told her how mom had caught me in one of my sister Kelly’s nightgowns, and had occasionally let me dress up around the house, even helping me learn how to put on makeup, even though I had picked up the basics through watching her and following some clips on You Tube.

“I’m happy you’re not disgusted with me, Cindy,” I said when I finished my story.

“Why should I be? Now, I’ll be friends with the prettiest girl around,” she said.