“Thank God!” I exclaimed with relief as I removed the binder compressing my breasts. It felt so good to get out of that thing and those awful boy clothes, let my long blonde hair loose, and get back to being me. I hated the binder almost as much as I hated Hellnavel and the narrow-minded jerks who lived there. Okay so the town is actually called Hillhaven, but I like my version better, it fits.

Mom and I had only been living there a few months, she had gotten offered a new job with better pay and she thought that it would be great for us to start somewhere new where people wouldn’t remember me as Andrew and I could be free to be Andrea without all the baggage of having people know that I was transitioning. The thought was nice, but it didn’t work out that way.

It was a small town with one high school and the administrators and the school board were all a bunch of backwoods bigots. They refused to let me go to school as Andrea because even though it was my legal name and I had been transitioning since I was fourteen my birth certificate still said, male. I sighed and muttered, “Three more months, and I can graduate and get the hell out of this ass-backward shithole.”

At least I could be myself out of school, though it’s not like I had any friends to be myself with. I missed the big city; the anonymity, the freedom to be myself, and especially a half-decent mall. Hellnavel is too small for anything more than a little strip mall and since everybody knows everybody, everybody thinks I’m a pervert or a freak.

I tried to get those dark thoughts out of my head as I got dressed in my favorite bra and panty set and a nice sundress and sandals. Now that it was spring and the weather was getting warm I wanted to try to enjoy it a bit. So once I was dressed I grabbed my purse and headed outside.

I made my way to the In an’ Out, a relatively new convenience store in town for an ice cream sandwich and a cold drink. Mr. Agarwal was nice to me, but then neither of us really fit in in this little patch of hell. He wasn’t white enough and I guess my neck wasn’t red enough, oh and the fact that they all think that I’m a perverted crossdresser could have something to do with that too.

I got a cold bottle of water and my frozen treat and after talking with Mr. Agarwal for a few minutes I left the store and started walking toward the creek. I liked it there, it was relaxing and people didn’t really bother me there. It wasn’t until I was there and enjoying my ice cream that I realized that I’d been followed.

It was a snapping twig that alerted me and I turned to squint as the glare of the afternoon sun hit my eyes. I didn’t need to see his face to recognize Jake, I could recognize his clothes and smell the weed on them. Jake was fourteen and lived across the street and he was one of those white posers who thought it was cool pretending to be a Jamaican gangster or something. News flash, it’s not cool it’s racist. He was standing above me on the bank in his scruffy sneakers, jeans that were like three sizes too big, a tie-dyed t-shirt, and his long hair tucked up into a rastacap in Jamaican colors and said, “Dude, s’up?”

I hadn’t really talked to him before, but then, I hadn’t really talked to much of anyone in town, or rather they never talked to me. I wasn’t surprised by the fake deep voice though. I may not have talked to him but I had heard him in passing, trying to talk up some of the girls at school and I had heard them laughing about his attempts. Everyone knew that his voice hadn’t broke yet despite his attempts to convince the girls that he was cool and manly.

“Dude?!” I said with a groan, narrowing my eyes at him.

“It’s… uhh… gender-neutral, don’t get your panties in a bunch,” he replied, though I thought I could hear him let out a groan of his own as he flinched. “Sooo… I’ve… uhh… been watching you for a while.”

I sighed, rolling my eyes. He must be desperate to hit on me. Had he been turned down by every real girl in school already? “Look, I’m not attracted to guys,” I told him firmly. To tell the truth, I was more interested in his older sister Jenny, we had some classes together and she was hot.

“That’s cool, neither am I,” he replied with a shrug. “If you’re not interested in guys though, why do you dress like a chick, Dude?”

“My name is Andrea, not Dude and certainly not Andy or Andrew like they’ve been calling me in school. I dress like a girl because I identify as a girl, Dipshit. I’ve been transitioning for nearly four years now and I’d be dressing this way at school too if the rednecks in charge weren’t hung up on the stupid ‘M’ on my birth certificate.”

It was hard to tell with the sun in my eyes, but I was pretty sure that he was staring at my chest as he asked, “So, are those real?”

I groaned again, starting to get annoyed with having to explain and justify myself with him and people like him. “Of course they’re real, I’ve been on hormones for two years trying to get my body to start matching who I am inside.”

“Dude! How do you hide those puppies at school?”

“I wear a binder since they’re making me present as a boy at school, and it’s fucking painful,” I snapped.

“Oh God, tell me about it. I don’t know how you manage that every day, I’ve only been doing it like an hour and it’s already killing me.” Gone now was the fake deep voice and I squinted against the light as I stepped up the bank to get a better look.

That wasn’t Jake, she was far too pretty to be Jake. I tried to shake off a mountain of confusion as I asked, “Jenny? Why are you pretending to be your brother?”

Jenny just smiled at me and said, “Well, I had to get the attention of the prettiest girl in school somehow.”