The three girls stood there in front of me, each in her own pose, as if they were all fashion models. Maybe they would be someday. They were pretty, even beautiful, really. And each had that quality everyone expected a fashion model to have.

Attitude.

Each of them looked at me with a very controlling look.

“We want you, Danny,” said Caitlin with a self-assured non-chalant smile. “We want you to join us Saturday mornin’. Over at Chelsea’s house, since she lives closest to you.” Chelsea nodded when I glanced at her.

“What for?” I asked.

“Like you don’t know?” Melanie quipped at me, having the sourest attitude of the three.

“No, I don’t,” I answered, looking right in her eyes. “Care to enlighten me?”

Melanie rolled her eyes before looking over to Chelsea and Caitlin for her next cue.

“We can’t tell ’im now,” said Chelsea.

“No, not here,” added Caitlin. “We’ll tell ’im somewhere else.”

“Uh, guys, that’s rude,” I couldn’t help but complain. ”I’m right here with you.”

Talking in the third person about someone present, as if I weren’t even there, was simply rude. I wasn’t surprised that they talked that way. Just disappointed with them—and annoyed!

“Goodbye,” I said turning away from them.

“No, wait!” I heard Chelsea’s voice calling from behind me, “Please listen to us!”

“Why should I?” I demanded of them, becoming angrier. “You don’t treat me like a person. You don’t treat anyone like a person. Not one of you. You never have.”

Chelsea, whose face was not in any of her friend’s immediate line of sight, looked down, almost as if what I had said hurt her. I didn’t feel good about that, because I had always liked Chelsea, even if she used to be nicer. But her new friends were snobs, and she was trying to be too much like them. Yet she and I had been friends before, and it must’ve hurt when I called her on it.

“I’m sorry, Danny. I wanted—”

“Don’t apologize to the pipsqueak, Chelsea!” commanded Caitlin. “We gotta git to class, anyway.”

Chelsea ceased any further apology. I knew she would try again later if she could talk to me alone. Then maybe she’d tell me why her circle of prime donne had deemed me worthy of their attention.

I would usually sleep-in Saturday mornings and this one was no different. But I remember Mom yelling to me up the stairs that I had a telephone call—from a girl!

“Hello?…” I asked.

“This is Chelsea,…” she said. ”You do remember you promised to come for breakfast, Danny?… Caitlin and Melanie are already here.”

“Yes,” I lied. “I’m almost ready. I’ll be there in twenty minutes… Okay?”

“Okay, we’ll see you then!…” I hung up the receiver and began to dash up stairs.

“Who was that?” Mom asked.

“Chelsea’s invited me for breakfast and was just confirming with me,” I confessed. “I’m just gonna shower and pull on my jeans and go.”

Of course, I had forgotten that I had promised to join Chelsea at her place for breakfast. I knew that Caitlin and Melanie would be there, too, but I’d also limit my honest attention to Chelsea. Yes, I liked her. But I was still curious about the invitation. She hadn’t told me the reason for coming to her house. Why did they want me there today?

I was in the shower and soaped up before Mom could even respond. Just a basic shower. There was no time really for shampoo, either. My hair was wet, though, and I attempted a quick towel-drying of it. But my curly black hair was so frizzy then. And long, too. When dry, it would always curl into these tight ringlets. I hated it. But my sister, Dawn, told me that every girl in school was jealous of my hair. I did not know just how right she was.

Chelsea’s house was only two blocks from mine, so even though I had overslept, I could still get there in two minutes by bicycle when I needed to.

When I arrived at Chelsea’s house, she opened the door and came out to meet me. I still sat astride my bicycle when she greeted me. She wore a pink sweater over a white camisole, a denim skirt, and pink-trimmed white sneakers with pink shoelaces. I also saw her friends Melanie and Caitlin watching from the doorway behind her, both dressed more than just casually, but this did not surprise me.

“G’mornin’, Danny!” she said to me. “You can park your bike in the garage and come right into the kitchen.”

So I parked my bicycle next to hers in a corner of her family’s garage. Of course, a door led directly from the garage to the kitchen, so I went right in. The aroma of freshly grilled waffles reminded me that I had come for breakfast. Yes, Chelsea had invited me here just so that she could cook for me. I could be certain of it, now, that she had a crush on me. So I might allow what I felt for her to grow.

Maybe this would be a good day after all.

“What toppings would you like for your waffle, Danny?” she asked me, smiling. The available toppings were clearly visible and I anticipated that she may assign some significance to my choice.

“Strawberries and whipped cream, please,” I replied.

”Whoa!” Caitlin and Melanie voiced in unison.

Well, perhaps her friends may have assigned some significance to my choice. I was so focused on Chelsea when I entered that I hadn’t even noticed them sitting at the table, their waffles already served.

“Don’t go a-teasin’ him, now!” Chelsea objected. “Let’s at least have a friendlier breakfast.”

Friendlier? Than what? Grammar and language I understood well, and I noted her use of the comparative degree without any prior spoken context. Did she mean friendlier than Caitlin and Melanie were to me at our previous encounters? Or perhaps friendlier than at a prior breakfast that they’d shared? Maybe, she meant friendlier than they had just demonstrated by teasing me? Or had she meant friendlier than in some new circumstance yet to occur?

There I went again, parsing off-hand remarks for any secret, hidden meanings! Even then, I was in a bad habit of constantly mind-reading, seeking to extract complex information from casual verbal data.

So we all ate our breakfast, not too quickly. The girls were busily chatting about where they (we?) were going today. The conversation was mostly pleasant, but then it began to get too technical.

Yes, their talk became too technical for me to follow. Girls might not think of their conversations as technical, but they are. Girls get caught up in all the details of clothing, shoes, accessories, cosmetics, and hairstyles. They discuss the styles of pleats and hemlines and the merits of various brushes and applicators for makeup. Girls have a vocabulary for a much more extensive color palette than what guys use. To the uninitiated, their technical jargon of shampoos, conditioners, body washes, and loofas was just as overwhelming as my talking about the electronic components in a radio or the mechanical, hydraulic, and electrical systems in an automobile. Chelsea could see that I was clueless to most of their conversation and tried to ease my confusion.

“Danny, I’m bettin’ all this talk of shoes and clothes is jus’ kind of overwhelmin’ for you?” she asked me.

“Uh, you could say that.”

“I’m sorry about that,” she apologized. Chelsea then glanced up at Caitlin. “Should we initiate Danny, now?”

“It’s about time, I would think,” Melanie remarked.

”Then let’s go for it!” commanded Caitlin.

Chelsea took me by the hand and led me out of the kitchen, through the salon and up the stairs, Caitlin and Melanie following behind. Chelsea opened the door to her bedroom and we stepped inside. Laid out on her bed were a variety of feminine garments: a royal blue dress trimmed in white, a frilly white blouse, a short, pleated gray skirt, a plaid jumper with a wide black belt, and a white turtleneck. There were also a few sets of matching bras and panties, slips, and three garments I didn’t know, although I learned later that they were a corset, a girdle, and a body-shaper. A few packages of pantyhose in different colors were spread across the bed and I noticed a variety of high-heeled shoes lined up on the floor.

“Chelsea, what’s going on?” I asked her.

Caitlin spoke up. “We want you—we need you—to dress up like us today.”

“What? Are you kidding?”

“Not at all! We’re quite serious about this,” confirmed Melanie. “We’ve decided you’re the best person to do this for us.”

I had a bad feeling about this. I noticed that Caitlin and Melanie stood blocking the door. All this had been a trap. I didn’t want to do this and they knew that I wouldn’t.

Or so I thought.

What I never expected was a betrayal by my own subconscious. She had been lurking there, in the back of my mind, for a long while, and now she saw what she wanted, an array of beautiful girl’s clothing to fawn over, to try on and to model. Now she spoke to me again.

“You have to do this,” the voice said to me. “They’ll help you with your hair and makeup.”

I don’t know why, but I reached out and took a matching set of bra and panties and held them against my cheek, enjoying the soft, silky feel of the luxurious fabric.

“Don’t they feel exquisite?” the voice asserted rather than asked. “Don’t you want to know what clothes like these feel like to wear? You’ll love them!”

“Do you want to try them on?” Chelsea asked me. “You seem to want to to. I’ve seen that look in your eyes before. That longin’, like you want to be one of us.”

A tingle went through me, and I felt myself flushed and light-headed, even dizzy. I broke into a cold sweat.

“Why do you want me to do this?” I asked Chelsea. “I don’t understand.”

“Liza and her friends got a guy to dress up with them,” Caitlin replied. “We gotta show we can, too.”

“And why me?” I pressed.

“That’s easy!” interjected Melanie. “Because you want to! Chelsea is right. You want to be one of us, don’t you?”

I was bewildered at the question. It was not something that I had thought about, not consciously anyway. “Yes, we do,” said the voice in my head. I sat down precariously on the edge of the bed. “Go with it!” she whispered in the back of my mind. “Be one of them! You can be a girl with them today.”

“No!” I denied. “You’re girls. I can’t be one of you. Why would I want to? I’m a guy.”

“Look, Danny,” Chelsea began her argument. “First, we can make you look really cute. You’re small and it won’t be hard for us to find clothes to fit you. Your skin is softer than most guys’ and your nose is just right. The shape of your face works for a girl as well as a boy. And then there’s your hair. Don’t you know that just about every girl in the school is so jealous of your beautiful, long, black curls?”

“You wouldn’t be the first guy to dress up like a girl,” Caitlin reminded me. “We just hope you trust us enough to let us help you do it. We can make you look so like a girl that nobody’ll know but us.”

“Please, Danny!” implored the inner voice. She was pleading with me to do it. How I wanted to! But I couldn’t. I couldn’t give in to the urge because I knew even then something about myself that has always been a personal foible. I’m an obsessive, addictive personality. If I were ever to cross that line between male and female, I would not be able to stop. And I knew also that somehow, it was more than just clothing. Suddenly, I could see myself in my own apartment, years away, living as an adult female, as a woman. I did not wish to go down that road.

But trust? I had to remember that these girls, Melanie and Caitlin were mean to me. And even Chelsea tended to follow their lead when she was with them. For all I knew this was just another setup for these girls to humiliate me.

Glancing out the corner of my eye, I could see that Caitlin and Melanie had slowly moved out of position, leaving a clear and unobstructed path to the door of Chelsea’s room.

“G’bye!” I yelled, darting through the bedroom door, bounding down the stairs, and out the front door of Chelsea’s house.

So I ran. As far and as fast as I could, I ran. I was never that great an athlete, but when I came to the hill, I didn’t even break stride. I just kept running, never looking back at Chelsea’s house. I was too afraid. Much too afraid.

I was afraid that if I looked behind me, I’d see Chelsea, Caitlin, and Melanie chasing me with their makeup kits, shoes, and clothes. I didn’t want that. I didn’t need that. Being a guy was hard enough already. Even the rumor that they had tried, that they thought me a candidate, just that they wanted to do this to me, would be devastating enough.

I continued running until I had arrived at the small deciduous woods just off the top of the hill. Without even being aware of where I was going I had penetrated to a small clearing in the middle of the woods. I had found it again. My special place. I sat down right there, leaning my back up against my favorite tree. Pulling my knees up to my chest and wrapping my arms around my legs, I cried. In fear and disappointment, I cried.

From my very first memories as a boy, I’ve loved the autumn. The colors, the scents. In first grade, I would pick up a choice leaf from the ground, maple, oak, or elm, to give Mom when I got home. She would take the leaf and place it between pages of her large Bible. Some of the leaves, already fragile when they were chosen, are still there, their color over the years having slowly imprinted their illustrated silhouettes of Life between the pages of Holy Scripture.

I drank in the sights and smells of my special place in the clearing. It had its special sounds, too, like the squawks from migrating flocks of birds overhead. I noticed a squirrel or two, here and there, peeking out at me from the trees and rustling through the leaves on the ground. They had to be wondering who this pathetic guy invading their domain might be. The distraction of sight, sound, and smell had quelled my anxiety some, and I had stopped crying. Not until then did I remember that I had left my bicycle in Chelsea’s garage.

Then I heard her voice again.

“Danny, why did you run?” the voice in my head asked me. “You know you wanted to do it.”

I looked around and saw no one else. Yet I had heard someone speaking. This frightened me.

“Do what?” I said aloud to myself. I knew fully well that the voice that I had heard was in my own mind. It was Danielle.

“She had laid out very nice clothes for you,” I heard her voice speaking again. “They were right. You would look like such a pretty girl if you let them dress you up!”

“No!” I yelled back at the voice, jumping to my feet. “I’m not doing it!”

“But why, Danny? Are you afraid?” she asked. Then the voice accused me, “Are you ashamed of me?”

“Girl!” I screamed. “Get out of my head!”