After almost a year of playing regularly in Vegas, the team was working well. We were cautious. We never hit the same casino twice in a month, and most times we never stayed in one place more than a few hours. Because another MIT team had learned it wasn’t safe to stay in the same casino you bet in (in case security got suspicious), we spread ourselves around, and paid for our rooms rather than take advantage of the “high roller” perks our Wizards could have obtained from the casinos. Arun was the consummate card counter, calculating risk at every turn, and he never took risks he didn’t need to.

Arun had been an effective team leader. Over time he overcame most of my reservations about him. I didn’t think I’d ever actually be friends with him, but we had moved on from wanting to scream at one another.

I’d finally gotten a prescription for contacts, but I wasn’t a regular user. No matter how often I tried, there was always something about the act of putting something in my eye that totally squicked me. I got to where I could do it, and play cards for up to 12 hours before the contacts started to irritate, but each and every time I went to put them in was a small challenge. My sister Susan thought I was nuts, especially after the first few weeks. “How hard can this be?” she said. “You wanted contacts, you got contacts. You were expecting LASIK surgery in a can?”

There were times when I thought Susan got all the Jewish genes and I got all the Japanese ones.

There was one additional deterrent to wearing contacts, apart from the squick factor, that I never mentioned to Susan that time, which was that I’d noticed – during the few weeks I’d had them – that whenever I went without glasses there was a possibility, every now and again, that the “Miss” problem I’d had a few years earlier would recur. It wasn’t frequent, but it was enough to send me back to my glasses whenever we weren’t playing the casinos. In fact I felt like investing in a pair of old-school Buddy-Holly glasses, except that it would have seemed too post-ironically hip and I couldn’t have stood the teasing from my friends.

Meanwhile I was no closer to a relationship with Alice. If anything, we’d become firm friends, rather than advancing to boyfriend/girlfriend status as I’d originally hoped. We hung out together a lot, going to movies and having dinner regularly, but I was too cowardly ever to try to turn it into anything more, and Alice never gave any indication of being sexually interested in me. From time to time she hinted at a guy she was seeing, which was a pretty big sign she wasn’t interested in making moves on me, or having me make moves on her, but she kept the identity of the guy secret. She never mentioned him by name, but I got the impression the two of them were very close, and saw each other a couple of times a week. I was mildly curious about who it was, and why she wouldn’t talk about him in detail, but I figured it wasn’t any of my business and she’d tell me when she was ready. In my heart of hearts I clung to the fantasy that she wasn’t talking about him because she didn’t want me to feel jealous, as though there was a possibility I might have some claim on her affections if things didn’t work out with him.

Anyway, the two of us spent a lot of time talking about our respective families, and about the pressure to succeed at our studies, and just generally gossiping about life in Cambridge and the extended social circle of the Harvard and MIT geeks we knew. Looking back on it, it seems like we talked mostly about the kinds of things she talked about with her female friends.

Along the way I’d invested in some stocks, got in on a couple of IPOs. All things considered, I was one of the richest 24 year olds I knew. I had paid off my student loans and credit cards, had about $15,000 in the bank, and more than $35,000 in bundles of cash taped to the back of the refrigerator in my apartment. I owned almost $50,000 in stock investments in companies that had great growth prospects. I even had $10,000 in Microsoft.

I wasn’t as rich a 24 year old as Henry, who had been on the team much longer and was making a spectacle of himself in a red Porsche. One thing about the Harvard community, you can have a lot of money, but showing it around is a faux pas.

Apart from not getting closer to Alice, or any other woman, life was going okay. I'd had to drop the volunteer work at the Shelter because I was out of town so much, but I'd been donating a bit more to charity to try to compensate. I felt vaguely guilty about leaving, but the nature of the Shelter is that it relies on the assistance of volunteers from the student body, and I rationalized to myself that it was time to make way for a new wave now that I was no longer a student. If I gave some money, that was some compensation. It didn't feel like enough, but it was better than just turning my back on the place.

There was something else in the back of my mind that was bothering me, a dissatisfaction that I couldn’t pin down, not related to relationships or the Shelter or work or family, but I was too busy to give myself much time to drill into it. It was the first beginnings of some kind of self-realization, but I shoved it back down in my subconscious in the hope it would go away. Anyway, what with work, blackjack, and my limited social life with Alice, I hardly ever had an hour free, and I was almost never home in Somerville except to hit the mattress, grab some clothes, shower and head out the door again. I barely saw my friend Pete. We still got along okay whenever we did happen to be in the house together, but in earlier times we mostly used to grab a beer and listen to music at some bars on the weekends. Now I wasn't in town on weekends we occasionally crossed paths in the evening during the week, but that was about it.

I hadn’t spoken to my parents in Nebraska in a long time either, on account of spending every weekend at the blackjack tables, but I saw Susan pretty regularly, going across town one night each week for dinner. She and Tom were serious, and I thought there was a real prospect of something long term there, which made me happy. I loved Susan. I liked Tom, and I really liked that he made her happier than she’d ever been.

In order to get to Susan’s more often I had bought myself a car, a modest Volkswagen Jetta. It gave me more mobility, even though parking near my house was a bitch. I began to think of moving out of the shared place we had in Somerville and finding a place of my own, and began to look at listings in nearby Alston.

Arun decided we might be hitting Vegas a little hard, especially since we had expanded the team, so he decided we should spend a month hitting Atlantic City, some New York State and Connecticut casinos and some smaller places in the South.
 

~o~O~o~
 
It was in Lake Charles, Louisiana, that we had our first trouble.

It was never going to be an easy place for us to play. It’s small, and most of the people who play there are middle-aged white people, or guys off the oil plants in Port Arthur across the border. A bunch of Asians and Indians stood out, even when we pretended we didn’t know one another.

But the cards fell well. I called Henry into a +10 hand pretty early in the evening, and even though the table cooled he moved off, to something Alice called soon after, with a healthy profit.

I didn’t see it coming, but after only a couple of hours of play I noticed Lucy run her hands through her hair – the signal to abandon ship, and quickly. We had just finished a round and the dealer was about to offer me the cut, but instead I gathered all my chips together as quickly as I could and made for the door. As arranged, I didn’t look for anyone else, but caught a cab from the casino to our motel in Baton Rouge, some 60 miles away. The cab driver was happy with the enormous fare and the generous tip I gave him.

Dan beat me to the motel. He’d driven one of the rental cars we’d taken to the casino, with Lucy. We sat in one of the motel rooms, waiting for the others. I didn’t need to ask what happened; Dan volunteered the information as soon as the cab driver pulled away. “Four of them,” he said. “They were definitely on to us. You get your chips?”

I nodded, and walked into the motel room. Inside Lucy, Eliza, Alice and Ziyen were watching a Christian news channel. They all looked slightly glazed. I decided to stand by the door with Dan, waiting for Arun and Bob and Henry.

Arun and Bob showed up not long afterward in the other rental, but there was no sign of Henry. After a grilling from Arun, who wanted to be debriefed on everything, I stopped waiting by the door and went and sat on the bed with Alice and Lucy. Eliza sat in the chair near the door. After verifying that everyone had retrieved their chips, Arun said he was going to make some calls to the team’s lawyer, and he, Bob, Ziyen and Dan went into the other motel room.

Lucy, Alice, Eliza and I zoned out for at least a half hour. I took my shoes and socks off and put my legs up on the bed, stretched out. There wasn’t much to say. We were all assuming that Henry had been taken to one of the back rooms, and each of us imagined it vividly enough without talking about it.

“Want to go into Baton Rouge?” Alice asked, during a break in shows on the Christian channel.

“What’s in Baton Rouge?” Lucy asked.

She had a point.

We watched on. In the room next door I could hear Arun and Dan arguing. Lucy began to paint her nails. When she finished she offered to do Alice’s, then Eliza's and when she was done with Eliza she started in on mine. At her first touch I was about to pull away, but I realized any distraction was better than none, and it wasn’t like Susan hadn’t painted my nails at least once when we were kids. I agreed to let her do them, provided we could switch to watching something other than Christian current affairs shows pillorying Bill Clinton. We settled on an old Burt Lancaster film on TBS and I ended up with a nice set of electric blue toenails.

After about two hours of phone calls and arguments Arun came back into our room with Dan. “Well, they have got Henry,” he said, confirming what we all already knew. “Our lawyer Jeff knows someone local who’s making some calls to the Casino. We’ll see.” He looked over at me. “Nice pedicure, Alex.”

A few hours after that, as it was getting closer to dawn, Jeff’s lawyer friend drove up to the motel with Henry, who was badly bruised and swollen from the beating he’d received. Dan and I put Henry to bed. Then Garrett, the lawyer, met with Arun and Dan and outlined what he’d learned.

The Casino knew everyone on the team. They’d figured out four of us before they got Henry, and he gave up the rest. None of us could blame him considering the way he looked.

Dan was incensed about the beating and wanted to file charges against the Casino, but the lawyer advised him against it. “This is Louisiana. Things are different down here. And besides, admit it, y’all were counting, right? No matter what we argue, it’s going to be a bunch of Ivy League smart asses against casino owners who make it their business to know most of the politicians, and all the judges, in this state.”

He paused, for effect. “The problem y’all have isn’t with the casino. Those guys aren’t the sharpest pencils. It’s the security agency they’ve hired to run security for them, Whitwell Investigations. Those guys are connected, and they work all over. If you’re busted here, you’re going to get busted other places.”

Just after dawn the lawyer left and we gathered in the room Henry wasn’t sleeping in, to discuss a way of dealing with the chips we had. There was about ninety thousand in chips. Alice, Lucy and Bob were for writing it off as a loss, and just quitting town. Dan, Ziyen and Arun weren’t keen on that idea.

“I don’t see any way for any of us to go in there and redeem them,” I said, as the last to volunteer an opinion. “It’s not like we didn’t stick out last night.”

“True,” Arun said. “But I don’t like the idea of just leaving all that money. If nothing else, we should give the profit from last night – that’s about thirty thousand – to Henry. He’s going to need some time off.”

“Is there anyone local we can ask?” Henry asked. “What about Garrett?”

“Already asked,” Arun said. “It’s not something he can do. They know him there. He has to live here. Being a lawyer is one thing. Being a bag man is another.”

“Well, what else? Fly someone in? Jeff?” Dan asked.

Arun dismissed it out of hand. “We need to move quickly. The overnighters will have finished. There will be new staff on by now. They won’t know us. There’s a chance, for that kind of money, if they know how much we have, the Casino will change out a set of chips some time today. One of us has to go back, before they change up.” He paused for emphasis. “For Henry.”

I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. “You know,” he said more to Lucy, Eliza and Alice than any of the rest of us, “if one of us looked different enough, it could work.”
 

~o~O~o~
 
Two hours later I was walking through the doors of the Lake Charles Casino in one of Lucy’s casual dresses, my hair loose, my eyebrows thinned, my legs shaved, clopping on Eliza's two inch summer heels I made an annoying sound in. I felt completely ridiculous.

Dan had driven me there, but for obvious reasons had stayed with the car. “You look good, dude,” he said.

He was trying to reassure me, but I wasn’t buying it. When Arun had first suggested it I had thought he was joking. “Why not put a moustache on Lucy instead?” I joked.

But it was no joke. “Luce, what do you think?” Arun said.

Lucy was already circling. I felt Alice take my hand in sympathy.

“Alex is the least foreign-looking,” she said. “He has pale skin. And he’s small. With the right look …”

“It would have to be completely different,” Alice said.

Everyone seemed to be in agreement about that.

The “for Henry” part was what got me. “You’ll really give thirty thousand to Henry for last night if I do this?” I asked Arun.

“Absolutely”.

After the kind of transformation Lou Reed used to sing about, I was looking at myself in the mirror, simultaneously revulsed and curious. A big part of me had always been trying to prove what a man I was. I had always tried to compensate for my size by trying to convince myself I looked at least adequately masculine. As a teenager the times I had been called “Miss” had stung, and I’d been determined, ever since I arrived at college, to put that behind me. I wasn’t really trying to be macho, but I didn’t ever want to endure the kind of ridicule I’d had in high school in Nebraska again.

So I had protested very, very loudly when Lucy had started plucking my eyebrows, because I was sure that it would look ridiculous. But she had merely refined them, made the arch slightly more pronounced. It opened up my eyes. And the really scary part was, I didn’t look all that bad.

I looked a lot more like my sister Susan. Not exactly like her. My nose was just a little bigger, my forehead maybe ever so slightly broader, maybe my mouth ever so slightly different. But I looked a lot more like her than my masculine self-image was comfortable with.

Lucy didn’t help by commenting on how good my skin was. “You have no beard, Alex,” she said. Another sore point with me. My father was hairy as a goat, but none of that had been passed on to me. It can’t just have been my Japanese genes, because a lot of Japanese men have heavy beards. Whatever it was, I had some faint hair on my legs, but almost nothing on my face. Apart from some minor fuzz on my lip, a dozen or so hairs on my chin, and a couple on the sides of my jaw, I had no facial hair at all. I probably had less than a lot of women. I could probably have plucked them out, but I diligently shaved every day, anyway, almost to prove to myself I had to. Like Alice and Lucy, my skin was smooth and evenly toned, if paler than theirs. While I didn’t inherit Asian skin coloring, I did lack the freckles or blemishes that often characterizes Caucasian skin. One of the side effects had been that people always thought I was younger. Now it meant they were going to think I was more female.

My hair had about ten pounds of product in it, and had been teased out to make my face look so much smaller by comparison. While she was drying it Alice made jokes about me fitting right in with the Dolly Parton School of cosmetology. Fortunately Arun had nixed the idea of the girls dying my hair – they had wanted to bleach it – on the grounds there wasn’t enough time. But still – I had big hair, for an Asian chick. Big.

Wearing lipstick was the strangest thing. I could feel it on my lips, every time they touched together. When Lucy first got me to apply it I immediately went to rub it off, because it felt so odd. But she insisted I leave it on, and showed me how to blot it. Then she made me practice reapplying it so it would look okay by the time Dan and I got to Lake Charles.

“I just have to remember not to open my mouth,” I said.

“Why?” Lucy asked.

“My voice will give me away.”

“Your voice isn’t deep at all, Alex. If you’re worried, just try to be a little more musical when you speak. But really, you have a nice tone already. Just talk normally, you’ll be fine.”

Great. One more strike against my ego.

The dress they put me in wasn’t too bad. It was pale blue and white, and came down to my knees. Before we left Dan took a photograph of me with a little disposable cardboard camera he’d picked up at the convenience store while Lucy was getting me ready. I’ve seen that photograph many times since then, and what strikes me most about it is how awkward I look. For some reason the thing that bothered me most about wearing the dress wasn’t that it was a dress – it was that I couldn’t figure out where to put my hands.

As Dan drove I wasn’t sure what to be more nervous about: being beaten by casino thugs, or arrested as a transvestite. God only knew what that could mean in a place like Louisiana. When Dan said “you look good”, the part of me that was worried about being arrested went into overdrive, and I guess that was enough to get me out of the car, away from him, and into the casino.

Walking into the casino I had a different surge of panic – the kind of panic about whether or not I was going to be dragged to the back room. I was sure everyone was looking at me. Sure enough there were several people looking at me, and I looked away to avoid meeting their gaze for more than a moment. Instead I went straight to the window and cashed the chips.

The Cashier was startled – it’s not often, in a small casino, that someone redeems almost one hundred thousand in chips at 10am on a Sunday morning. The Cashier went and fetched her supervisor, who looked me up and down suspiciously from his office door, but okayed the transaction. Then they had to get another, more senior supervisor because the Casino didn’t have that much cash in the cage, and they had to get it from the vault. I watched as two security guys carried some metal tins into the cage. Surely these guys would be suspicious of me? It was only a few hours earlier that a team of Asians had been run out of the joint, and now an Asian “girl” was redeeming a huge pile of chips. It occurred to me that the guys carrying the cash probably weren’t connected to the guys from the security agency who beat on Henry, but it didn’t make me any less nervous.

I stood at the window, nervous, trying to hold myself together without shaking, sure that the delay was actually something they were staging so they could get someone from the security agency back. I took the time to fill out the requisite IRS declaration.

After about eight or nine agonizing minutes that I spent trying to avoid making eye contact, shuffling from one heel to the other, tugging nervously at my purse and twisting my hair with my finger, the cashier handed over the money to me in large stacks. I signed the slip in the name “Alex Jones” with my male driver’s license as ID, but the cashier didn’t seem to read too much of the detail on the license and anyway the photo on it wasn’t all that different than the way I looked, if you ignored the big hair and makeup. I stashed the bills into the oversized purse Alice had lent to me and made for the door as fast as I could without running.

Dan and I were halfway to Lafayette before I stopped shaking.
 

~o~O~o~
 
I can’t remember the very first time I was mistaken for a girl. Maybe I was two or three. I don’t remember. I know from looking at old family photos that Mom used to dress Susan and me pretty much alike when I was very young. Not that she dressed me as a girl, exactly, just that we were often dressed in unisex clothing. There’s one photo, which Mom and Dad still have on the mantelpiece, that shows Susan and me in matching white parkas with fur around the hood, jeans and snow boots, which I think was taken when I was three and she was five. You can’t really tell the sex of either of us, but since both of us had longish hair at that age, and the parkas were white. I guess most people would assume it was a photo of two little girls. And there’s another, taken when I was twelve, when I also had long hair. I’m wearing a pale blue t-shirt – I think it was something I got from school after I aced the AHMSE (American High School Mathematics Examination), because I remember Carl Choi had the same t-shirt – and looking back over my shoulder at the camera, with my hair partially tucked behind one ear. It’s all very soft focus, taken in the back yard by my uncle Aaron on a beautiful summer evening in that golden hour before dusk in late summer, and I do look like a girl in that shot. It’s probably the way I put my hair back like that. And, you know, the fact that my prepubescent face still had that kiddie softness, I guess.

Anyway, notwithstanding the photographic evidence, I did get mistaken for a girl quite a lot when I was a very small kid. At the time, oddly, it didn’t bother me. I remember being with Hal once, when we were walking near his house, and some kids I didn’t know, but who obviously knew him, teased him about having a girlfriend. I think we were both about nine. I think Hal was going to correct them, to spare himself embarrassment, but then he obviously thought about what being seen with a boy who looked like a girl might invite in the way of embarrassment, and he and I just walked on and tried to ignore them.

After we were out of earshot of the other boys, he said to me “Why didn’t you say something?”

All I could do was shrug. “It didn’t seem like such a big deal. They obviously have bad eyesight.”

“I couldn’t bear it,” Hal said.

“What?”

“If someone thought I was a girl.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“I know that, dummy … But … if they did … I would have hit them.”

“You still could, you know,” I said to him, gesturing back behind us to where the boys had been.

“They didn’t think I was a girl,” Hal said.

“I know that, dummy.” I said, and laughed at him. Sometimes my friends were a little out there on the normal-o-meter.

“You don’t mind?”

“Why should I mind if someone else is an idiot?” I said. “If I was the one who made a mistake …”

There were a few other occasions, at the mall, in a cafe with my family, at a Huskers game, where there were mistakes made. But the first really humiliating time had to have been at school.

It was the start of 10th grade, the first week of our sophomore year, and there was a new girl at school, Kelly. I’d seen her in the corridor the previous day, looking slightly lonely, but when I noticed her later in the day she appeared to be in conversation with Anne Sorenson, who I most certainly did not get along with, so I never got around to saying hello to Kelly properly. Not that I did it regularly with other girls at school anyway, but, you know, my mother had raised me to be polite. Anyway, the following day, Fall Sports Picture Day, we all had to get ourselves over to the bleachers on the baseball field. Usually they did the photos in the football stadium, but not that year. I don’t know why.

It was a hot August day. I had tied my hair up under a cap, an Angels baseball cap, but as we were walking over Bob Gatenby stole it right off my head, destroying the elastic that held my hair back in the process. “Can’t wear anything except Huskers, Jones, you know that,” he said. I would have protested except I knew it would lead to worse. Bob Gatenby was even less evolved than your regular high school bully. Pleistocene, maybe.

The result was, I had no hat on, in the hot August sun, and my hair was loose. It was long enough it fell down past my shoulders. I only got my hair cut about once a year, and even then I left it long.

It turned out once they got all of us out to the field, that they were nowhere near ready to take photos of the cross country team. That was my sport. My one gesture toward something physical. I was pretty good at it. Not good enough to be a star, but good enough not to disgrace myself my freshman year in the under 14s. Running doesn’t take a lot of hand-eye co-ordination, so I found it pretty easy. Anything that involved something like natural grace – that was right out of the question. But running I could do.

Because my hair was out, the new girl that year, Kelly Gatzenmeyer, mistook me for a girl. That got the mean girls started on me. “Hey Jones,” Anne Sorenson called across the bleachers. “Don’t you belong on the girls’ team?”

The catcalls started. The noise built to a fair crescendo before Mr. Bartlett got them settled again.

Leaving the field, heading back toward the south entrance after the photos were done, Anne approached me, holding out a crimson ribbon, the kind that all the girls on track wore. “If you still want to put your hair up,” she said, smiling. It was a vicious, cruel smile. Behind her I could see Kelly the new girl and a dozen other people, laughing like it was the funniest thing they’d seen. Standing behind all of them was John Ostermeyer, who until then I had counted as a friend. He wasn’t laughing, but he wasn’t defending me, either. He was looking at me in an odd way, as though he had only just noticed me for the first time.
 

~o~O~o~
 
John was my best friend. Pretty much my only close friend at High School, for that matter. It hadn’t started out that way. For a long time, he kept his distance. He was one of the favored few, a defensive back on the football team, which granted him immunity from everything. Unlike the rest of the football team, he had a brain, and he had good looks on his side as well. It was probably his brain that contributed most to his attitude. Unlike Bob Gatenby, for example, John was quiet, well-mannered, and modest.

We didn’t see much of one another until late in my freshman year. It was the day after Veteran’s Day, and the first really cold day we’d had since school started. At morning break, I tried my usual ‘be invisible’ routine in the corridor, and walked toward the south entrance. I had discovered early that to be noticed was to invite trouble, and I believed I’d perfected some kind of stealth routine that made me invisible to the three species of real bully and twelve lesser bullies that inhabited the school. I knew them all. The first week they had ignored me, but I discovered late that it was because they had assumed I was a girl. I missed out first gym class, so it wasn’t until the second week they discovered the truth. And then, of course, I was fair game.

Bullying is a strange thing. There’s a fine line, somewhere, between the kind of talking back to a bully that destabilizes him, and the kind of talking back that further enrages him. At that stage of high school, I hadn’t learned how to do the former, so every word I uttered made my situation worse.

That day after Veteran’s Day, I was skulking down the corridor toward the south entrance, stealth mode on, when something went wrong and I found myself face to face with Bob Gatenby. The usual exchange of pleasantries took place, culminating in me, in an attempt to disarm him with my cleverness, impugning the size of his manhood. He proceeded to try to stuff me into the trash can positioned just inside the door. He was quite good at it, had my head inside in a flash, but he had some difficulty getting the rest of me to follow. I was making ‘unhpsf unf humnf’ noises when I felt myself being lifted out again. Instinctively I flinched, waiting for the punch to the gut that was Bob’s trademark closer, but it never came.

Instead, it was John Ostermeyer holding me. He had lifted me, completely, into the air by my waist. He moved his hands about as he tried to set me upright, but he got me down to the floor without too much trouble. Beside him was his friend Jim Brauch, someone I didn't know well at the time but always stayed clear of on account of he was a football player and thereby tainted by association. Behind John and Jim I could see Gatenby and two of his confederates, scowling. Instinctively I moved behind John and Jim to shield myself from them. John turned around to face Gatenby again, and said the thirteen sweetest words I ever heard in my whole school life.

“Leave him alone. Anything happens to Alex, anything, I’ll come looking for you.”

They skulked off, mumbling whatever it is that bullies mumble when they’re unhappy.

John turned to me. “You okay?” Man, he was so much taller than me. And massive. Huge. At least twice my weight, but then any football player was. My freshman year I weighed maybe 90lbs.

“Yeah, I’m okay. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He turned to go.

“Uh,” I said, and he turned back.

“Why’d you do that?” I asked.

He didn’t pause to think. “Because it was the right thing to do.”

That was my introduction to John Ostermeyer. He defended me, on and off, for the remainder of my school life. He didn’t make a thing of it, exactly. He never interfered in any verbal exchange I got into. But in anything physical, he always stood for me.

 

~o~O~o~
 
The full impact of what I’d done at Lake Charles didn’t kick in until we got to the airport in Baton Rouge for the flight back. I had scrubbed off the makeup, brushed my hair flatter, removed the polish on my fingers (but not my toes) and changed back into black jeans, a t-shirt and a denim jacket, but at the check-in counter the attendant called me “Miss,” then did a double take when she saw “Jones, Alexander” on the ticket stub.

“Is this your ticket, uh –“ I watched her eyes go to my face, then my chest. An Asian named Jones always seemed strange to people. My complete lack of breasts seemed to confuse her more.

“Yes. Yes, it is.” I sighed. In those pre-911 days it wasn’t always necessary to show photo ID at check-in, but I pulled my wallet from my back pocket, where I always kept it, and waved the ID at her.

Alice and Dan had checked in with me, and they thought this was hilarious. “Dude,” Dan said. “I told you, you looked good.” His laughter subsided when he could see I wasn’t particularly happy. But then at the security checkpoint I got another “Miss”, and a “Ma’am”, which I guess was almost better since at least they weren’t confused about my age, and Alice tucked her arm into mine, giggling, as we walked from the X-Ray point.

Dan thought better of laughing again, and departed for the men's room. Alice dragged me over to some chairs in the lounge and we sat together. She was still smiling. We had another thirty minutes until our flight.

“It’s not funny,” I said. “This hasn’t happened in a long time …”

“In a long time?” Alice looked at me curiously.

“I used to get mistaken for a girl when I was younger.”

“It’s the eyebrows. I’m sorry. I thought Lucy was going overboard. They’ll grow back.”

“How fucking long will that take?” I said. I was going into a deep funk.

She tried another tack. “Alex, you did the right thing. You did a good thing.”

“I’m going to pay for it.”

“It was for Henry,” she said.

“Well I hope he fucking appreciates it.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes. “I need to get these contacts out,” I said. “So I can put my glasses on.” I wondered whether I should go into the restroom to do that. It seemed somehow unhygienic. But there didn’t seem to be an easy way to do it in the departure lounge.

“It’s probably not a consolation,” Alice said, obviously giving up on trying to cheer me up. “But you really do make a very beautiful woman.”

“No,” I retorted. “It’s not a consolation at all.”

“Well, if you were ugly … I’m just saying …”

“What, exactly?”

“You’re a good looking person, Alex. Regardless of which sex you are.”

“Thanks. I think. You win the Jerry Lewis award for backhanded compliments.” I retrieved my glasses from my backpack and put them on. Wearing them while I was still wearing contacts was obviously not going to work – everything looked blurry. I took the glasses off again and tucked them in the top pocket of my jacket.

“I’m just trying to make you feel better.”

“It’s not working.”

On the flight I tried to catch up on some sleep, which was easy. The lack of sleep overnight, combined with the episode at the casino that morning, had drained all the energy out of me. I took off my jacket, placed it in the overhead locker with my backpack, and settled back with a blanket. Next thing I knew we were landing at Logan.

It was very late on a Sunday night when I finally got in the door, and the house was quiet, for which I was grateful. I didn’t want to deal with the whole eyebrow issue with either of my housemates, and especially not with Pete.

It was only as I was readying myself for bed, and had taken my contacts out, that I discovered my glasses were no longer in my jacket pocket. Frantically I searched all my bags, pockets, everything. They must have fallen out of my jacket when I stowed it in the overhead locker. I phoned American Airlines to see if they’d been turned in, but at 11.30pm I didn’t get the world’s most helpful response.

The next day at work was awful. Without glasses, I needed to wear my contacts, so I knew I’d have to try to find some way to make myself look less sexually ambiguous. It was our first really cold Fall day, so I was wearing several layers under my coat, and my clunkiest, manliest boots, but on the T I got lots of looks I’d never noticed before — from men.

When I came into the office Chloe, our receptionist, did a double-take. “Alex, you’re looking so fresh. Did you do something with your hair?” Then Matt, one of my co-workers and probably the biggest asshole in the company, wolf-whistled at me.

I rode it out in silence, but by lunchtime I had a wicked tension headache, and I was cranky as all hell to anyone that came near me. I made a phone call to my ophthalmologist to get the prescription for my glasses so I could get a new pair. The woman who answered the phone told me I’d have to come in to collect it, and that Monday was a huge day of suck because there were some serious issues with one of the servers that proved very difficult to diagnose. So I didn’t get to the ophthalmologist on Monday at all.

The second morning at work, before I picked up the prescription, was about the longest morning of my life. Matt was being conspicuously unpleasant, and in the weekly status meeting he made more than one really stupid joke about the company’s policy on sex changes. He was so bad, in fact, that Justin, our boss, reprimanded him in front of everyone else. “As it happens, Matt, the company does have a policy on gender reassignment. And it’s a policy of tolerance and compassion. So if I hear anything but tolerance and compassion from you it will be referred to HR.” As he said this Justin looked over to me as though he expected me to be grateful for his support. I was, but not in the way he thought. I appreciated that he stuck up for me in front of Matt, but not that he stuck up for me because he thought I was becoming a woman.

At lunchtime I finally managed to make it to the ophthalmologist. Then, prescription in hand, I went to get a pair made. Right from the start I could tell the sales clerk in the store thought I was a woman, because the styles she started suggesting were all very pretty. Sighing, I steered over to some more masculine styles.

I found a heavy-rimmed pair that looked about as butch as a pair of glasses could look, and the sales clerk looked doubtful. I was insistent, and she wrote the order up. “It will take until next Monday.”

“Monday!” I shrieked. “Monday? How can it take that long?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s just what the computer tells me. Maybe it’s the lenses you selected.”

I went back to the office prepared for several days more torment.

I stopped for takeout Chinese on the way home and got “Miss” again. Then, when I got home, Talia was there. That was unusual. Talia was almost never home. Mostly she stayed at her girlfriend Jill’s. When she saw me she raised an eyebrow in a question, like “what the fuck?”, and I sighed, and shrugged, and didn’t say anything except for “Hi Talia. Don’t ask.” I was going to offer to share the Chinese with her but I could see she was already onto Pizza, so I grabbed the takeout cartons and went straight to my room.

After a few minutes of fruitless pre-Google searching on the Web, I phoned Susan. “Susan, is there a way to make eyebrows look thicker?”

“Why do you ask? Do you need to look like a caveman all of a sudden?”

“It’s complicated. Let’s just say I let someone pluck mine, and it’s creating problems for me.”

“You let someone pluck your eyebrows?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Is there something I should know?” Susan asked.

“Huh?”

“Is there something you want to tell me?”

“Like what?” I snapped.

“Well, like why?”

“Can I come over?” I sighed. I needed someone who could help. Or sympathize. Sympathy would help a little.

“Of course. Have you eaten?”

I looked at my Chinese. I’d only taken a few bites. I didn’t really have an appetite. “Yes.”

“Okay. Well, come over anyway. See you soon.”
 

~o~O~o~