You can fool most of the people some of the time, but how long can you fool yourself?

 
There's a salad bar place in the mall, and that's where we ended up. They had a bacon, cheese, and potato soup that I liked, plus a plate of greens and crusty bread made a good lunch.

"Your appetite seems healthy," Mom remarked when I came back from the dessert table with a piece of chocolate cake covered in soft-serve ice cream.

I didn't feel that hungry, but the cake and ice cream were tempting. I shrugged, content to dig in and enjoy the treat. It would have been even better if Mom had quit looking at me as if she were planning something.

"What?" I finally asked as I finished scraping the plate for bits of frosting.

She shook her head. "I guess I had better tell you." She didn't look happy about it.

I felt a bit of ice in my middle like I had eaten the ice cream too quickly.

"It's something I know, and your father, the doctor and anyone else in his office who have looked at your records closely. Some people in the hospital, the surgeon…." She kind of trailed off.

"Mom," I said, "you're scaring me."

"I don't mean to." She took a deep breath. "Most of those people don't know you or have any real reason to remember a baby that needed a small operation."

The ice had grown.

She went on. "You see, honey, when you were born, there was some confusion."

"No," I said.

"The doctors, at first, couldn't tell if you were a boy or a girl."

I looked around quickly, but no one was near enough to hear. She was speaking very quietly, in fact, and I kind of wished that I couldn't hear her either.

"But they looked very closely at your, um, your little business," she paused, maybe watching me blush. "And they found your testicles, so they told us you were a boy."

There was a glass of water on the table, and I pulled it toward me to take a small sip. Not that I needed liquid, but it's a trick to keep yourself from hyperventilating.

Mom didn't stop. "They fixed things for you. Down there." She waved a hand vaguely. "They closed up a hole and made it so you could pee through your, uh, your penis."

I shook my head. This explained maybe why I dribbled. Other guys shot it out like a hose. Mine came out like a leaky faucet. Mom wasn't lying or playing a joke on me. It was all true.

She looked at me thoughtfully. "We did what we thought was right. If we made a mistake back then, I'm sorry, honey."

"Are you saying it's possible I'm—I'm not a boy?" I almost swallowed another sip of water the wrong way.

"I don't know, honey." She made a gesture with one hand. "And it seems like the doctors aren't sure either." She reached out and patted my hand.

"No one told me till now?" I asked, almost strangling on the words.

She shook her head. "You were just a baby at the time, not a month old. And since we had made the decision, we, your father and I and the doctors, decided not to tell you until you needed to know."

I made a noise. I don't know if I was trying to say something.

She patted my hand again. "I'm so sorry, honey."

I nodded. I felt confused, and there may have been a little anger there. I didn't want to be angry at my parents, but what had happened didn't seem to be anyone's fault. And if they could get things straightened out, what would it matter? Maybe they could figure out why I hadn't got any taller in the last year or so at the same time.

*

We spent some time in the mall, just walking the halls and looking in shop windows. It struck me how many stores aimed their marketing, inventory and displays at women. The skew for young women vs. young men had to be 3-to-1 or more. There were ten shoe stores in the mall, and five of them were women only, with only one that kind of, sort of, catered to men: a men's boot shop that still had a few styles for women.

"Why do women need so many shoes?" I asked Mom, but she only laughed.

She asked if I wanted to buy or look at anything, but I couldn't think of anything except maybe some books. So we spent a while in Walden's, and I came out with a couple of paperback science fiction. Normally, I'd have to use my allowance to pay for books, but Mom bought two books herself and included mine when she paid.

We wandered the mall a bit more, and Mom seemed to enjoy this. I wouldn't say I liked it but said nothing, lost in a depressing chain of thought.

Was it possible that I was a girl and the doctors would find that out? They hadn't made that decision when I was a baby, but now they had other evidence. I cringed to think about it, but almost a year of developing breasts made a powerful argument. I didn't like having breasts because I was a boy, and boys don't have breasts.

But what if…?

What would my friends say? Not that I had many close friends, especially since I had been avoiding people over the last year or so. What would they say if they found out I was a boy with breasts? Or that I was turning into a girl.

They talked about sex change cases in the news sometimes. Most of them were people who wanted to be something they were not. I wanted to stay who I was.

I'd read a few stories, some in medical books I looked up in the library, about people who had been misidentified at birth and got reassigned when they started puberty. Those were the ones I worried about. Would they reassign me if I didn't want to be reassigned?

"Jon," Mom called my name.

I realized I had been just standing in front of a shop window, leaking tears. Worse, it was a teen girls' shop with mannikins that looked like kids my age, all dressed in colorful outfits and looking like they were having fun. I made a noise, wiped my face and moved to catch up with Mom. "Can we go now?" I asked.

We headed home without saying much. After the talk in the food court, I was reluctant to start any conversation, but the silence in the car gave me too much chance to think. I started down the same spiral of dread that had sucked me into tears in the mall.

"Jon," Mom said again. "There's no point in worrying about things until we know something."

I nodded. "I wish it were Thursday."

She showed me a crooked smile. "Don't count on them being decisive. Medical types always want more tests. Now, do you want to go home, or should I drop you somewhere you can meet your friends?" It was a quarter after three, and school would let out in ten minutes.

I shook my head. "Let's just go home. Everyone will be on the bus." I didn't mention that I didn't have any friends.

Mom looked dubious but agreed. "Home it is, but I think you need some distraction."

"Books, television, Oscar," I said. The last made Mom smile. Oscar is our twelve-year-old Labrador who does a lot of sleeping. Maybe I would take the old dog for a walk, it's been a long while, and we used to walk for miles. I doubted Oscar was up for a long walk now, but it could be pleasant to cover a few blocks with him. I smiled back at Mom. It didn't look scary because she smiled back.

"Go easy on the old guy," Mom warned.

I nodded, sort of looking forward to it now. Oscar had been the new puppy when I was three, and for a time, we might as well have been brothers. Anticipating a quiet walk with my old friend through the autumn leaves, I completely forgot whose house a walk to the park would pass.

*

We made it home before the bus (and my sister Donna) arrived. Just as well, I didn't want to answer all the questions she would have asked. Linda, the five-year-old, was at the neighbor's house. She stayed afternoons there when Mom worked. The Pattinsons had a little girl, too, Annabelle.

The two seemed to create a battery of little-kid energy together, energizing each other to greater levels of creative mischief. If they hadn't mastered the weaponization of their cuteness, they might not have survived long enough to start school. Mrs. Pattinson claimed to enjoy the challenge of dealing with them, but any sane person would have to doubt that.

But for a few minutes, with Mom in the kitchen, I had the rest of the house to myself. I did a quick change of clothes to something less at risk from dirt, leaves, dog drool and possible sudden San Diego showers. My old jeans fit tight across my seat, but they were comfortable and adding a long-sleeved flannel shirt would ward off any chill coming off the mountains.

I found Oscar dozing in his bed behind the living room couch, but he perked right up when I suggested a walk. "Who's the Best Boy?" I asked him as I clipped his leash to his collar and called to Mom that I was taking Fooler to the park. Oscar wagged with some enthusiasm and started eagerly toward the door when I had gotten his leash sorted.

The old dog had acquired Fooler as a nickname years before, earned by his well-developed talent of staring off into the distance at some imaginary point of interest while he sneaked up on whatever you were eating. His black coat had grayed significantly on his head and tail, and he had lost some teeth, hearing, and energy, but he was still my Best Pup.

The local park surrounded a small pond with both white and mallard ducks that seemed to live there year-round. In the fall, tourist waterbirds might visit it on their way to winter vacations in Mexico, and I anticipated seeing a few of the magnificent Canada geese. Fooler feared the geese due to an incident years ago, but he seemed to enjoy watching the ducks.

So did I, and I looked forward to the calm pleasure.

I didn't remember whose house I would be walking past until I was almost on top of it. Rodney Pick and I had been friends at one time, but when we started junior high three years before, he'd had a growth spurt and a personality change. Since then, he had nominated me as a favorite of the crowd of bullies he ran with, both in junior high and now in high school.

It wasn't steal-your-lunch-money or stuff-you-in-a-locker bullying, more the trip-you-in-P.E. or random-elbow-to-the-head sort. Casual bullying, almost like it was just ordinary behavior.

I never hit a real growth spurt, so I'm small, short even, and up until last year, I thought that was the main reason I was a target. But now I don't know. A few people had seen the changes in my chest before I started making an effort to cover them up.

The last few weeks of freshman year in the spring had been tough. I missed some school and even forged a note from my parents to be excused from gym class. That had only worked for a three-day reprieve. Longer than that, you needed a note from a doctor on his office stationery.

Which I now had. If I could stay out of gym class, I might survive my sophomore year—if nothing else changed, like my unwanted ornaments getting too big to conceal.

Oscar paused to sniff at a rock, and I saw the Pick house three doors down. Until I got near the place, I had honestly forgotten that it would be on this route. But the bus still hadn't run yet, delivering kids from the schools. Rod probably wasn't home.

I tried to hurry Oscar along toward the park because the bus could show up at any minute, but the old dog wasn't eager to join me in a trot. At nothing more than a medium walk, we headed toward the corner where I could turn left and be out of sight of the Pick front door.

I resolved that when we left the park, we would take a different route home. But before we got past Rod's house, the bus appeared as if from a trap door, and kids were being let out at the very corner I was trying to reach.

And one of them was Rodney. We were the same age. Both our birthdays were between Halloween and Thanksgiving within a few days, but he was six or seven inches taller and at least thirty pounds heavier.

I felt something beating against my leg and looked down. Oscar had recognized Rod, who was now walking directly toward us.

"Woof!" said the old dog, remembering only the friendship we used to share.

Rod laughed and smiled at us. "Woof yourself, Fooler," he said, raising a hand.

I raised my hand back, confused. At school, Rod did not smile at me, though he sometimes grimaced.

"Hey, Jonnie," he called at me, only yards away. "You weren't in school today, watcha doing taking the Best Pup for a stroll?"

Oscar pulled on the leash, and Rodney bent down to ruffle the graying ears. "Best dog ever," he crooned. I remembered that Rod's family had never had pets because of allergies, and he had always been one of Fooler's favorite beings and vice versa.

"Doctor's appointment. Took nearly all day," I managed to mumble.

Rod straightened up. "You don't look sick," he commented, still smiling.

Then we both turned at a voice calling, “Hey, guys. Hey, Fooler.” My sister Donna had seen us from the bus and had made the driver wait while she got off a stop early.

Oscar, of course, went nuts to hear and see her in an unexpected place, and dragged me toward her. She bent down, crooning at him and ruffling his old ears.

Rod grinned at her, too, and if he’d had a tail, he’d have been wagging it. But why did I feel a stab of something painful in my chest?