What if something you had always believed turned out not to be true?

I guess it started on that hiking trip up on Mt. Picacho in the late summer of 1979. Pete and I had wandered off from the Ranger-led group of younger kids being shown bluebells and chipmunks, distracted by a row of stones with peculiar holes in them.

“The Ranger said this is where they ground their acorns to eat, right in these granite bowls they made in the stones,” I said.

“Uh, huh,” said Pete. “Something boring like that.”

“Boring,” I said. “Heh. Yeah.” Well, I thought it was interesting, but Pete was already moving up the mountain along a narrow trail between the boulders. “Where are you going?” I asked.

“Nowhere in particular,” he said. “Just somewhere there isn’t some grown-up telling us what to do.”

We were eleven, or I was, my birthday less than a month ago, but in another month or two, Pete would be twelve. Before that, though, we were due to start the sixth grade back home in Presley, the little desert town where our fathers worked for the same big rancher, Mr. Fordyce.

My dad, Leland Jane, was a bookkeeper but Pete’s dad, Jonas Hunt, was a horsebreaker and rode broncs in the rodeo. Mr. Fordyce sponsored all of us kids to this camping trip, which I guess was pretty nice of him. My older brothers had not come because they both had summer jobs and worked on Saturdays, and besides, it was mostly designed for younger kids. Maybe, really, even younger than Pete and me.

“Audie,” Pete called from where he had disappeared into the greenery. “I found a cave.”

“There might be snakes,” I said already looking on the ground for anything slithering toward me.

“There are no snakes,” Pete insisted. “C’mon, this is a lot more interesting than following a bunch of little kids around.”

Reluctantly, I pushed through the wall of brush, keeping an eye on my feet, the nearly imaginary trail, and any hypothetical snakes.

The cave wasn’t that big, maybe fifteen feet deep and half that wide, but in the afternoon on the north side of the mountain, it was pretty dark inside. A glow near the back seemed to come from a patch moss or fungus or something.

We stared.

“You ever see anything like it?” Pete asked.

“Nuh, uh,” I said. It was a blob about two feet by three feet, halfway back on one wall of the cave and it glowed with a faint yellow-orange light.

Even such a wonder bored Pete quickly, and he wandered deeper into the cave to examine the back wall. I finally got up enough nerve to investigate the glowing mass closer in and even touch one corner of it which felt, not slimy like I expected, but furry.

A bit of it stuck to my finger and I tried to wipe it off on the rock, then my pants, but it left a slightly glowing patch of skin on my fingertip. I stared at it, thinking all sorts of ridiculous and alarming things.

Pete distracted me before I panicked by calling from the entrance of the cave. “The Ranger isn’t looking for us, so we can go back to camp and say we lost him when we stopped to look at the stone bowls.”

“Okay,” I followed him back down the hill toward the campground. I knew why he really wanted to go back early. Daphne Ross was the oldest of us camping trip kids at fifteen. Tall and willowy, she had straight brown hair down to her waist and just about the bluest eyes ever. And Pete had a crush on her.

I grinned. I couldn’t tease Pete about her because you didn’t tease Pete, he might get mad and punch you. But I could laugh privately. Neither Pete nor I are tall, I’m shorter, but Daphne is at least six inches taller than him. It’s ridiculous when he follows her around.

But Daphne had not gone on the Ranger-led tour; she had stayed behind with the grown-ups to help prepare for heading back down the hill to Presley. So Pete had figured out an excuse to come back early. Angie Morales, another older girl who had stayed behind, too, traded winks and grins with me while we watched Pete follow Daphne around like a spaniel with a tennis ball hoping someone might want a game of fetch.

But a few minutes later, I started feeling ill, and by five that afternoon, they had me in an ambulance for a ride to University Hospital Emergency in San Diego. I had a temperature of 104°F, was covered in ice packs, and kept babbling about orange buffalo or something. I don’t remember any of it.

***

I woke up three days later in the middle of the night, hungry, thirsty, and cranky as all get out. They had tubes going in and out in places you don’t want them putting tubes. My mom was there and managed to keep me calm while they unhooked me enough to give me water to drink and gelatin to eat.

I took a nap after a couple of doctors had a look at me and they removed more tubes. After I woke up again, they brought me some oatmeal, and Mom sat beside me while I ate.

“We were so worried about you, Audie,” she said.

I didn’t stop eating, but I managed to say, “I know. I’m sorry.”

She laughed and tousled my hair. My new hair. All the old brown hair had fallen out, and my head was covered in new blond fuzz which fascinated the doctors because it was growing ten times faster than hair usually grew.

I’d lost a layer of skin all over my body too. It just peeled off like snakeskin, leaving tender red skin underneath. Mom told me about that, I hadn’t been awake for the grosser parts. My finger and toenails were growing back just as fast as my hair because I had lost them too, and my skin was back to a normal pink.

I hadn’t been a particularly big kid, average but skinny, and I had lost about ten pounds during what the doctors called “the crisis.” They had to call it that because they had no idea what exactly it was. Some fast-moving infection that didn’t show up on any of their tests and cleared up as quickly as it had appeared. One medical mystery, that’s me.

They asked me a lot of questions, but I didn’t have any answers either. I did tell them about touching the fungus or whatever it was. They seem to dismiss that, but they did say they sent the Rangers up to get a sample of the blob. I didn’t hear anything more about it until much later.

They wanted to keep me another week, but after two more days, my folks signed me out because it was obvious that the only thing wrong with me was that I was hungry all the time.

Everything tasted good, except meat, I ate very little of that. But eggs, milk and cheese with all kinds of fruit and veggies disappeared when I was near them. Not that I ate big meals, not so much at one time, but lots of little snacks. This continued for several weeks and was still going on when it came near to time for school to start.

My hair and nails had slowed down to growing at a reasonable pace, and my new hair had come in curly and dark blond, several shades lighter than it had been. Mom said it looked the same color as it had when I was a little kid, before I started school.

Also, I’d grown nearly two inches in height and put on all the weight I had lost and more by then. Which led to another doctor visit two Fridays before school started on a Tuesday, and my learning a new word.

Dr. Greeter looked like Santa’s skinny brother and had been the family doctor in Presley since before I was born. He had me strip off and put on one of those silly back to front gowns while he examined me all over.

After listening to my heart, he asked, “Is your chest tender, Audie?”

“Huh, yeah, yes, sir,” I said. “It’s like, uh, wearing a shirt irritates my, uh, my nipples.” I blushed.

“Uh, huh,” he nodded. He didn’t seem overly concerned, and I had only noticed this happening in the last week or so. My skin had been more sensitive all over since “the crisis,” which is how I thought of it too, after the doctors in San Diego all calling it that.

Then he reached down and took a sort of soft grip on my crotch. “Cough,” he said.

Talk about embarrassing, my mom was in the room though she had her back turned. I coughed.

“Hmm,” he said. He shifted his grip. “Again?”

I coughed again. He didn’t seem satisfied. He had me sit higher up on the examining table with my legs spread wide while he put his head down there and poked and prodded and pulled things. It didn’t hurt, but it was uncomfortable and embarrassing as all get out.

“Audie,” he said, sounding serious. “You appear to have two undescended testicles.”

“Huh?” I said. “You mean my balls?”

He nodded, the corner of his mouth twitching a bit. “Yes, they aren’t where they’re supposed to be at your age. Normally, a boy’s testicles descend while he’s still a baby or even before birth. Yours haven’t.”

“But,” Mom and I both said something at once. It turned out that we both remembered me having testicles in the regular place and when Dr. Greeter looked back through my chart, he had noted descended testicles in checkups going back to when I was just two years old and even up to my Little League examination earlier in the year.

You want to talk about embarrassing, try to imagine having your mom hunting around your groin, looking for your balls that aren’t there.

It was Mom who finally asked what I was thinking. “Did they shrivel up during the fever?”

“I don’t know, we need x-rays, maybe an ultrasound,” said the doctor.

* * *

It got confusing after that. A week later, at the local hospital after getting x-rays and ultrasound, and watching doctors talk about me in voices too low for me to hear, I sat in an office and looked at backlit images of my groin.

I had a new doctor, Dr. Newhouse, Beth Newhouse, the first lady doctor I had ever had, examine me. I was dressed in my jeans and short-sleeve shirt again, and Dr. Newhouse was showing me the images of the ultrasound I had had.

“That’s your uterus, and those are your ovaries, and this is your vagina,” she said, “though it’s blocked because your labia are fused together. These soft tissues don’t show up on x-rays without some contrast medium.”

“And this?” I pointed at what was clearly my dick, my penis.

But no. “That is your clitoris. It’s a bit overdeveloped, and the urethra extends almost to the very end, so it resembles a small penis.”

I seemed to be sitting down though I knew I had been standing up only a moment before. Of course, only that morning, I had known I was a boy.

“I’m a girl?” I said, a bit squeaky.

“Yes, dear, you are. One with a correctable medical condition called pseudo-hermaphroditism.” There was the new word.

“What about my testicles?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Other than some probably erroneous medical records, there’s no evidence you ever had real testicles. They may have been just some form of fatty nodule that have since disappeared. Didn’t you lose a lot of weight recently?”

I nodded. “But I’ve gotten even more back,” I said.

She shrugged, managing to look sympathetic while at the same time, she dismissed my concern. “They’re not coming back. And from the evidence of your breasts, you are beginning to develop as a young lady.”

“Oh, my God!” I said. It was true. Even just over the few days since my last examination, the growth of my chest was noticeable.

My outburst hadn’t gone unnoticed either. “Audie!” Mom scolded me.

I looked at her sideways. After two older boys, I knew that she had really hoped for a girl when I was born. Well, she had finally gotten her wish, eleven years later.

But she wasn’t gloating. She looked worried. “Can… can she be normal?” she asked.

She!? Meaning me!

Dr. Newhouse nodded. “Surgery can fix appearances down there, serious surgery but not major. And there’s no real hurry; you have time to discuss and plan it. Though I would suggest that sooner is better than later.”

She seemed to consider something before continuing directly to me. “Within six months, more or less, you are going to experience menarche — the beginning of your menstrual periods. Since there is no opening for the discharge, this could present some problems. If you have a heavy flow, the bloating and pressure could be severe before your body can reabsorb the discharge.”

“Huh?” I said. That went by entirely too fast—and too weird!—for me to take it all in.

“We might have to operate to relieve the pressure, better to do it sooner than letting it come to that,” she amplified.

It didn’t sound at all pleasant. I stammered some, trying to ask more questions and the doctor tried to help, explaining that menstruation prepared the uterus for pregnancy and was part of the natural cycle of being female.

The more she said, the more confused and stressed I felt. I didn’t know who I really was anymore. I looked at Mom, hoping for some clarity.

But Mom had found another thing to worry about. “What on earth are we going to say to your father?”

“I don’t know,” I said, annoyed. I said the first thing that came to my mind. “I’m a boy, and I want to stay a boy. Can’t you get rid of the girl bits instead?” I asked the doctor.

Dr. Newhouse looked concerned. “That wouldn’t make you a boy, dear. Not really a boy. You could never be a father, for example. But if you let us help you develop as a girl, you could be a mother. I’m almost sure of that.”

Stunned, I didn’t know what to say. I looked at mom, and she smiled at me. Okay, now maybe she was gloating a little.

***

Someone had called Dad, and he came down to the hospital and went into a conference room with Mom and Doctor Newhouse. I sat at the other end of a long table and let them talk and show Dad the ultrasound evidence without me.

He looked over several times, obviously baffled. His expression reminded me of Grandpa’s story about how amazed everyone was when he was a kid, and one of the family’s cows produced a two-headed calf. “Shoeless, sockless, and mouth open wide enough you could see his gizzard.”

I didn’t know how I felt. Dr. Newhouse had shown me another test they had done on a scraping of tissue from inside my mouth. He explained it, too. If you put a certain stain on female cells, they develop a little black dot in the middle of them called a Barr body. That’s the curled up second X-chromosome that boys don’t have. I was a girl right down to my cells.

If I’m a girl, then it’s all right to cry, I told myself. So I did, a little. Then I got up and found some tissue and blew my nose. What the heck did I know about being a girl? I didn’t even have any sisters, and while Mom and I were closer than she was with my brothers, that was because I was the youngest, not because I was girly or something. Heck, Mom wasn’t that girly herself, she could ride and rope as well as any hand on the ranch ‘cept maybe the very best of them.

I thought of sports and school. I thought of my best friend, Pete. What would Pete say if I told him I had been a girl all along? I felt my face getting red.

They finished talking at the other end of the table. Dad stood and came to my end. He looked down at me. “I’m sorry, punkin,” he said. “We didn’t know.”

He hadn’t called me ‘punkin’ since I started school, but he called Mom that, now and then.

I sighed. At least he hadn’t called me princess. I stood up and let him hug me and I hugged back. We weren’t a terrifically huggy family, but it was nice.

“You think I should…,” I tried to ask.

Dad smiled down at me. “You take the cards you’re dealt and see what you can make out of them, honey. I think you’ll be all right as a girl. Your mom was more of a tomboy when she was little than you are.”

Mom grinned and pulled me into a hug, also. “I was. I had two older brothers, too, just like you,” she said.

I thought of my brothers, Morgan and Lee Jr., and almost said a bad word out loud. They were going to laugh themselves sick, the morons.