Alice asked, "How will you handle tomorrow? What are you going to do? How are you going to explain to everybody?"

They all looked at me, and I looked back at them. A slow smile came to my lips, and Alice said, "No! You're not! You... you can't! You're not going to pretend to be a girl, are you!?"

We followed Denise outside. She was across the street, talking to a girl who looked about my age. I froze for a moment, then quickly turned to go back in the house.

Aunt Jane frowned, puzzled, and stopped me by putting her hand on my arm. "What's wrong?"

"That girl!" I hissed. "I don't want her to see me!"

"What girl?" Jane's head swiveled, scanning the empty street. "Where? Someone you know?" Jane asked, puzzled.

"The girl Denise is talking to! I don't know her, but if she goes to my school, and she sees me, it's going to make it hard to change back to Mark."

Aunt Jane gave a small smile. "You've got it all wrong," she said. "That woman isn't your age. She's my age. That's Alice. She, Denise, and I went to high school together. We used to call her Tiny Alice because she was always the smallest girl in our class."

Jane glanced across the street. "You can see she hasn't grown any since then."

"She really went to school with you?" I asked, full of doubt. I was beginning to wonder whether I could believe a single word that my aunt said.

"Yes," Jane replied, surprised by my disbelief. "Why wouldn't she?"

"You might say that just to trick me, and get me stuck wearing a dress."

Aunt Jane scoffed and said, "No, I swear. And you're not going to be stuck wearing a dress. Alice is an old friend, and she needs some support right now. Come on, you'll like her. She's great."

As we crossed the street and got closer, I could see that Alice didn't exactly look like a girl. The way she dressed and acted was more adult, more like Denise.

But the thing that really struck me about her was how tired and sad she looked. Well... not sad exactly... but definitely not happy.

"Hi, Alice!" Aunt Jane called. "How are you holding up? How is Donny doing?"

Alice sighed and said, "I guess he's going to be all right. His doctor said it wasn't really a stroke. It was a transchemic something attack..."

"Transient Ischemic Attack," Jane offered. "It's like a mini-stroke. So his symptoms cleared up?"

"Yes," she said. "Pretty much. After a couple hours he kind of came to, and started talking and acting normally. Now he's worn out, and they want to keep him for a couple days to do some tests." She sighed again. "They said it was a warning sign."

"Will he be back at school?" I asked.

Alice gave me a kind of blank stare for a moment. "No, hon, I'm not going to let him. It's time for him to retire. Past time." She kept on looking at me, but there was no expression on her face. It was a little unnerving. She glanced back and forth between me and Jane, and said, "Who are you? Are you two related?"

"Yes," Jane said. "This is my niece, Marcie."

"I'm her nephew, Mark," I countered.

"Niece."

"Nephew."

"Stop," Denise said, gently but firmly. "Alice, we'll let you go. I guess you need to rest."

"No, no, don't go!" Alice cried. "Can't you come in the house with me? I don't want to be alone right now. It'll be too weird without Donny."

"All of us?" Denise asked.

"Yes," said Alice. "All of you! If you don't stay... if you don't come in, it'll just be me and my thoughts. I'll go crazy! Come on, I'll cook you dinner. Please?"

The three women went back and forth for a tiny while longer, but I tuned them out. Something else was happening, something more important... for me, anyway. I had a moment, an unusual, eye-opening moment, and it changed the course of the rest of my life.

As we stood there on that suburban street, the sun sank behind the houses. Everything — houses, cars, trees, people — took on a warm, liquid, golden glow. A soft wind unrolled itself and filled the street, its soft feathery fingers rustling my skirt and rippling its tiers and ruffles.

I'd been outside with bare legs plenty of times, but there was a world of difference between wearing shorts and wearing a skirt. A gentle wave of wind quietly slipped under and slid all the way up my legs, brushing my light cotton underwear, reminding me that every stitch and thread I wore said girl.

A thrill of gooseflesh rushed over my back and arms. Its electric tingle spread up my neck into my scalp.

I drew a deep, smiling breath and saw my little fake breasts rise, then fall.

In a strange and indescribable way I felt right and good. It was a new sensation for me. After a whole day of fighting and fearing what I was wearing, I suddenly relaxed, and when I relaxed, I saw that I belonged right there, that I was part and parcel of the whole scene, and something secret part inside of me said, Oh, God! It's good to be a girl! and then it said, I can do this. I want to do this. I want to be a girl!

And when that secret part of me said those things, the rest of me agreed.

I could have stood there longer, drinking in the magic of that transforming moment, but it ended abruptly when Aunt Jane shook my arm and called out, "Earth to Mark! Earth to Marcie! Come on, boy! Come on, girl! We're going to be with Alice. We can talk more inside."

The warm golden moment ended, but I knew what I'd felt and seen, and I knew what I wanted to do.

I followed the others. We trooped into Alice's house and sat down around her kitchen table.

I drank soda; the women drank white wine. Alice tied an apron around her waist, and got busy washing and chopping vegetables. She put water on to boil and poured some oil into a pan.

All of us offered to help, but she refused. "No," Alice said, "I need to be busy. What you can do is talk to me. Distract me. Tell me anything, everything." She looked me in the face, and said, "You — Tell me the niece/nephew story." Then she pointed at Jane and said, "You — Don't interrupt her."

Jane shrugged and sipped her wine.

I took a deep breath and began, "I might have been one of the last people to see Mr. Bruce before his stroke–"

Jane open her mouth to correct me, but Alice wagged her finger. "Go on," she said.

I told her the story of how I missed the first two days of school, and how I didn't have my gym suit. As I talked, her face betrayed a series of silent reactions. I didn't know what her reactions meant, but each time I paused, she said, "Go on."

When I got to the part where I was in the girls' gym class, Alice asked me to describe the outfit I had to wear. I had some trouble, so I ran across the street to Denise's house and pulled it out of my bag. Alice spread it on the table.

"Oh, my God. These ugly old things. I wonder where on earth he got them! No girl would ever be caught dead wearing one of these." She balled it up and shoved it into the kitchen trash.

"Donny is just insane about gym clothes," Alice went on. "He used to talk about it for hours. Literal hours. I asked him to stop, but I could see it was eating him up. I got tired of asking him to give up on it, to drop it. Once he got on it, he was like a runaway train."

"It's a big deal to him," I said.

She nodded. "I finally realized what it was. He felt that people looked down on him for being a gym teacher, and when the boys forgot their outfits he felt like they looked down on him too. He took it as an insult, like they didn't care, like it didn't matter." She paused. "Like he didn't matter." She looked at the floor and sighed.

I wasn't sure what to say.

After a moment, she collected herself and asked, "Okay: I understand how you ended up in gym class with the girls, but how on earth did you end up in those clothes you've got on? My husband didn't have anything to do with that, did he?"

"No," I said, and told her the rest of the story. Again, I carefully left Jerry out of it. A few times I had to pause because the three of them were laughing so much. Alice stopped me twice because her sides were hurting, and Denise jumped in at one point to paint a short, unflattering portrait of Mrs. Zeff, the woman who hauled me into the office.

"Okay. So that was today." Alice concluded. "How will you handle tomorrow? What are you going to do? How are you going to explain to everybody?"

They all looked at me, and I looked back at them. A slow smile came to my lips, and Alice said, "No! You're not! You... you can't! You're not going to pretend to be a girl, are you!?"

I kept smiling and looking at the three women, but I didn't answer right away.

Denise gently told me, "Come on now, Mark. You know we were only teasing you before, don't you? No one ever wanted you to wear a dress."

"Unless you want to...," Jane prompted, chuckling to herself. But I knew she didn't mean it.

Jane was busy laughing, but Denise and Alice gaped in surprise, because they saw what I wanted. It was written all over my face.

"I want to try it," I said. "I want to try it to be a girl. If I can, I mean. If that's okay."

© 2006, 2007 by Kaleigh Way