I laughed in spite of myself, but to my horror, it wasn’t my usual laugh. It was higher pitched. A girl’s laugh.
“Ha! I knew it! You ARE a girl.”
I felt something twinge inside me when she said that.

~~~~~~~~~~
I few things I didn’t realize:
First, not many people at school knew me all that well. Aside from Bobby, Mike, and perhaps a few of the teachers, no one at school could point me out in a picture. This was one of the things that made me vulnerable to curses. As far as most people were concerned, I could be a girl just as easily as I could be a boy. I had no history with most of them.
Second, I had made a number of bad moves. Basically pretending to be a girl as I turned down requests for a date, followed by my pretending to be a girl while I went crazy and saying I was on my period, caused the rumor mill to churn out many stories about “this girl Ashley” and not so many about a boy of the same name. Someone might have even said, “I thought that kid was a boy?” and then someone else would say “Boy’s don’t get periods, dumbass,” or something else to that effect.
Finally, while I had recently learned that curses tend to get mitigated by reality attempting to assert itself, I didn’t properly appreciate how reality works. If 100 people thought I was a girl and 5 people thought I was a boy, and I was currently something impossible (a sexless former boy with a snake instead of a penis) reality would pressure me toward the more popular supposition.
After pre-calculus, when the teacher had referred to me as female and I did nothing to correct him, it was enough of a nudge to push me significantly into girl territory.
That is why I was able to watch my Adam’s apple disappear before my eyes as I stared at my reflection in the mirror of the boy’s restroom.
I ran out of there. I rushed as quickly as I could through the clogged artery of the hallways between periods. I needed to get someplace where I could think, someplace where there wouldn’t be anybody to bother me.

The library.
I was thoroughly freaking out on the way over there. I was never claustrophobic before, but just then I felt like if I didn’t get some space I was going to go insane. If I wasn’t insane already.
I got to the library and set about trying to find some obscure corner that had not seen a human presence since the Carter administration.
“Hey, Ashley, what are you doing here?” It was Rebecca, all sunshine and good feelings. She had a book in front of her on the table next to her hot pink backpack.

“I’m... playing hooky.” I whispered.
“In the school library? You’re a real rebel aren’t you?” Rebecca laughed
I laughed in spite of myself, but to my horror, it wasn’t my usual laugh. It was higher pitched. A girl’s laugh.
“Ha! I knew it! You ARE a girl.”
I felt something twinge inside me when she said that. I couldn’t tell if it was something changing or just my nerves. “Aren’t you supposed to be quiet in the library?” I asked, no longer bothering to whisper.
Rebecca looked around and I followed her gaze. There was nobody else in the library. Rebecca shrugged. “I’m in charge of the library this period. I say we can be as loud as we want.”
“You’re a rebel too, then.” I smiled.
Rebecca held out her thin wrists “You’ve found me out, officer, arrest me, if you must.”
I shifted to a male cop voice, “There’s no need for that, little lady, I’ll just let you off with a warning this time.”
“How are you able to do that?”
“Do what?”
“Sound like a guy. I’ve been trying all day, and I can’t even get close.”
That was when I realized that I had done the voice without any problem.
“I, uh practiced a lot. With a tape recorder.” That was true enough. I had practiced the cop voice almost as much as I had practiced talking like a girl. That wasn’t so bad. But in the bathroom I couldn’t do the Texan voice. I tried it again, “Ah come from a long line of straight talkers.” It worked! But…it also hurt a great deal more than it used to. I swallowed a few times against the soreness.
“That’s amazing! I could only do that if I had a bad sore throat or something. So are you going to tryouts next week?”
“Tryouts?”
“For the play. You know, Twelfth Night? “
“I didn’t know about it,” I said, flabbergasted. I didn’t even know the junior high had plays.
“There are flyers posted pretty much everywhere,” Rebecca pointed out.
“I didn’t see any of them.”
“What are you, the kangaroo from Horton Hears a Who? Just because you haven’t seen them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
I looked around and, sure enough, there was a flyer next to the door leading out of the library. “Huh, I guess even if you don’t see them or sense them at all, a flyer’s a flyer no matter how small.”
“So you think you’ll try out?”
“Yes. Absolutely. I think.” Because I wasn’t entirely sure if having a snake attached to my crotch was going permit me to do that sort of thing.
“Well, I’m trying out too. I’m trying to read through it now. It’s kind of hard to follow what they’re saying sometimes, but it’s interesting.”
“Cool,” I said simply. I was a bit embarrassed that I’d never much cared for Shakespeare. I’d seen the Kenneth Branaugh version of Hamlet a two or three years before, and I kind of found it a bit boring. Of course three years earlier I had been ten. That might have had something to do with it.
“So, what made you cut your hair like that?” Rebecca asked “You really do look like a boy. Are you a lesbian or something?”
I fought back the urge to say I was a lesbian trapped in a man’s body, because I wasn’t exactly in a man’s body and seeing as Rebecca thought I was a girl, saying I was a lesbian wouldn’t be funny. Not that it was funny to begin with, but anyway. “I, uh, grew up as a boy?” I tried, “So I’m kind of used to it?”
“Huh. You must have a strange family.”
“Not particularly.” I scratched the back of my neck. I decided to go for broke. “What do you know about curses?”

“Which kind of curse? Four-letter words? Menstrual cycles? Jusenkyou?”
“More like the kind caused by voodoo dolls.”
“Oh those don’t work. Just a bunch of hogwash perpetrated by ignorance and the tourism department.”
“Who’s the kangaroo now?” I challenged. “I was cursed. That’s why I’m like this right now.”
“Someone cursed you to have short hair and dress in your brother’s clothes?”
“No! I was a… I am a…” Well here was an interesting conundrum. I wanted to tell Rebecca the truth, but I also wanted my penis back and if she believed I was a guy it might happen, so should I say I was a boy, or that I am a boy? And then there was the issue of my penis having been turned into a snake that would be a little difficult to get across without seeming perverted. Frankly, it was perverted, the whole idea seemed like something some sexually repressed closet transsexual would come up with after reading Lovecraft or watching some screwed up anime. “You know what? Screw it. I’m just a major tomboy okay?”
I felt that twinge again. I remembered what Karen had said:“You have to be careful around people who don’t believe in magic, they can be very convincing, and if you start believing them, it’s all over”. I wasn’t quite believing Rebecca, but it was so much easier to agree with her than to try to correct her. I could almost see believing it. And that was scary.
“That’s fine. I was just curious. Us social pariahs have to stick together, you know.”
I looked at Rebecca’s perfect hair, perfect posture, and sharp clothes, “You’re a pariah?”
Rebecca shrugged. “Principal’s daughter. It works for some people. Not for me. Sometimes I think I should be more of a bitch.”
“Heh. Sometimes I think I should be nicer to people.”
“Maybe we could help each other out, huh?”
“You bet,” I said. I sat next to her. “So that’s the play?” I gesture to the book she was reading. She nodded. “Could I read with you?”
“Sure.” She said. We took turns reading, and I did different voices for each of the characters. It was a lot of fun, and It didn’t feel weird. I didn’t feel any kind of physical attraction to Rebecca, but that was okay. I had an excuse now. I wasn’t a boy.