To all outward appearances Walter Stymis is a conventional upper-middle class American male. Fairly successful, a devoted husband and father.

But at any given moment he is likely to be lost in colorful daydreams, the nature of which would probably surprise the people around him...

The Secret Existence of
Misty Walters
by . Laika Pupkino

.

THE TRANSIT OF VENUS

I picked my honey up at the Lufthansa terminal at a little before midnight. After not seeing each other for over a month our reunion was passionate and intense, and I guess a bit more intoxicated than we'd intended because we wound up sleeping until after ten a.m. But since V. was currently between projects---her next film somewhere in the pile of scripts and treatments her agent had been dropping off with me in her absence---for once there was nowhere that either of us needed to be this morning. Today was entirely ours.

We had macadamia pancakes out on the deck, gazing out at the four story tall H of the HOLLYWOOD sign that stood on the next hilltop over from us, while overhead a beautiful red hawk hung on an updraft like a kite, scanning the scrubby dry ravines for his own breakfast. Then we loaded up the Jag with beach blankets, an ice chest full of goodies, and the half dozen scripts I'd set aside as ones she might like, and headed down the #5 into Orange County, trying to make it to our favorite South Laguna cove by noon. It was promising to be just a perfect summer day...

Until I noticed the lumbering gray Humvee that was following us.

"Oh god damn it, not again!" I groaned.

Venus nodded, grinning tightly. "I see them. Not to worry, Baby Girl."

We were in the fast lane on the Laguna Canyon Freeway, doing about eighty. Without signalling, she yanked the wheel hard, taking us across the three lanes to the Greeter Avenue exit at the last possible instant. We slalomed down the offramp at a dangerous gait.

"Did that lose them?"

I looked back, "Nope. And they're gaining on us."

"In that case we'll just have to-"

I let out a yelp as we left the asphalt and were suddenly bounding across the iceplant-covered field in the center of freeway's cloverleaf headed for the adjacent onramp; circumventing all the obstacles we might have faced down on the avenue; the stoplights and the NO U-TURN signs. It was a shameful thing to do to a sweet machine like this but the little 1950 Jaguar convertible took to what may have been its first experience with offroading like a champ.

"Wow! It's like we're in one of your movies," I laughed.

"Hey, we don't need no stunt doubles," she growled in her 'tough guy' voice---the rough terrain and tight suspension giving her laughter a stacatto quality---and with another hard left we were back on smooth asphalt, headed up the southbound onramp, the same way we'd originally been going, having lost less than a minute.

The Humvee could have followed us easily, but for some reason they were stopped back on the offramp. And then I saw why. "Oh my God..."

"Oh .... sweet!"

A California Highway Patrol car had them pulled over. I grabbed my little digital Nikon, zoomed in and snapped a picture. Duval, I think his name was, standing alongside the gray beast, gesticulating, combatative, rapidly losing points with the scowling patrolman. Venus asked, "Can I post that on my website?"

"That was the idea," I said. It was some small payback for the hell they put us through. I took exposures until they were out of sight. "Dirty bastards."

"Relax. We won this round," said Venus, and took a sip from her pineapple Hansen's, "And really, you can't blame them for trying to make a living."

"Sure I can, V. They're parasites! I just can't laugh it off the way you seem to."

"I'll admit it does bug me sometimes. But the way I figure it, me and those paparazzi back there are both cogs in the same machine. If it wasn't for their end of it, all the hype, I wouldn't be making twenty million a picture. That's an obscene amount of money when you think about it."

Three young surfer-looking guys in a van noticed us, and became excited at the sight of two shapely bikini clad women in an exotic sports car. And then the whole level of their interest changed as they recognized Venus. They paced alongside of us, the chubby Phillip Seymore Hoffmanish one mouthing with exaggerated fervor: "I love you Venus!"

She blew him a kiss. Now they were all punching each other on the biceps for some reason. They could have become jerks about it, but after a bit more waving and such they contented themselves to just look at and talk about us, and at the next offramp they went their way. The green sign hanging over the freeway said BEACH CITIES NEXT 3 EXITS.

I pointed in the direction of our departing admirers. "Now that there I don't mind so much. But those tabloid jerks could be real trouble for us. For you. It's like the Sword of Damoclese over our relationship. And if they should somehow get into my own past, I don't even want to think about that!"

"That would suck," frowned Venus. She hunched forward and gyrated her shoulders, "You know, after shooting in Stockholm for a month I think I might be overdoing it with the sun here. Could you be a sweetie and do my back?"

"It would seriously suck!" I said as I grabbed the suntan lotion, squirted some into my palm and smeared it across her back. "It's already been a weird year for me. Hell, I'm still not totally used to this body."

"I know, Misty. You scream in my ear when you wake up."

I bore down with my fingers, working the coconut scented goo into her shoulders, her beautiful soft skin. "Scream? I don't scream. When do I scream?"

"Well you squeal. You go 'Oooohh!'"

Her Betty Boop imitation of me had got me giggling. "Like hell I do! Okay, maybe sometimes I startle."

"Oh you startle all right," she chuckled nastily. "You squeal, and then you start playing with your cunny."

I lifted her hair out of the way, got her neck. "You are such a liar."

"You do. Every morning when you're waking up."

"If I do---and I'm not playing with it---it's that I just like to know it's all real. I mean sometimes it's hard to believe any of this is happening. Like some morning it's going to turn out to have all been a dream. After sixty years of waking up as a guy, ten months like this is still kind of unbelievable to me."

"Sixty years. And not a grey hair on your head. I keep forgetting that you're actually older than me. Hard to believe that a gorgeous girl like you is the product of science gone wrong," smiled Venus. It was the same smile that graced the covers of magazines the world over, but it was all for me.

"I know. You'd think I'd be all deformed or something. I must be the luckiest woman alive."

She cupped her hand over her mouth and droned flatly, as if her voice was echoing from speakers all over a baseball stadium, "Today-today-today ........ I consider myself-self-self ......... the luckiest woman-oman ........ on the face of the Earth-Earth-Earth..."

.
You may have read the various accounts of a fellow being transformed into a girl one third his age by means of an accident involving a million or so microbe-sized robots. Those are all based on a true story, my story, thanks to some indiscretions on the internet early in my new life.

They say the trangendered only account for about one percent of the population. And it was estimated that the mishap with nanomachines that had turned me into a girl had only about a one-in-a-million chance of doing so. I don't know if you'd add these two stats or multiply them or what to come up with the chances of such a freak accident happening to someone who would have WANTED it to happen, but that's what happened. And when you factor in that the swarm of 'bots---which never should have been in "active" mode in the first place---hadn't been programmed with my own body's specifics, so that their primitive hive mind had had to make hundreds of blind and potentially disasterous guesses about how to arrive at their target schema, well then if it wasn't a miracle from God it was the statistical equivalent of one.

Prior to my transformation I had been Walter Stymis, a lonely bookish janitor and a depressed crypto-transsexual in the employ of the Nanodyne Corporation. I was just a few months short of my retirement when I knocked over that beaker and tried to sweep up the contents (a special order for a decrepit old dowager who had been one of the company's earliest backers), which went scuttling up my broom's handle like a sentient mass of titanium dust to cover and then enter my body.

In the aftermath, the corporate suits were horrified. Or maybe they just wanted me to stop thanking and hugging and smooching them whenever they showed up in my hospital room, out of a fear of contagion. I think if I had played that part a little cooler, pretending to be completely devastated, the settlement would've been for far more. A million was nothing compared to what they stood to lose if I had blabbed. The Feds could have closed the whole damn company down.

But what I did insist they provide me with---maybe just to see if they could do it---was a meeting with Venus Morningstar, the famous actress I had been daydreaming about when I entered that RESTRICTED AREA and began cleaning where I shouldn't.

Somehow they actually managed to bring her to my bedside, where she became one of the few people who knew what had happened to me. And perhaps out of a sense of reciprocity, V. let me in on her well-guarded secret. This talented bombshell who the tabloids had linked romantically to all the hottest male stars was in fact a lesbian (She told me she planned to come out publicly after she got her first "mom" role, but that it would be financial suicide to do so now, while she was still a viable action hero and subject of so many horny fanboys' fantasies...). This revelation of hers had sure led to some intense fantasies on my part; but even then I'd never dared hope that she and I might-

.
Suddenly the air was filled by a loud noise---Ka-fukkita Ka-fukkita Ka-fukkita Ka-fukkita!!!----as from behind the dry chaparall covered hills to our right a sleek gray helicopter rose up. When they spotted us, the unmistakeable form of the vintage Jag, they fell in behind us.

Ka-fukkita Ka-fukkita Ka-fukkita Ka-fukkita- They tracked along with us, hovering in close enough for me to see the obnoxious floral tie on the pilot. The photographer, brandishing a camera with a lens like a chunk of stovepipe on it, stuck his tongue out at me and wagged it around in a disgusting fashion.

I shuddered. "Is it even legal for them to do that?"

"Flying that low over a freeway? Hell no! Take a picture. Try to get their serial number so we can turn them in to the FAA."

"I wish we had a friggin' grenade launcher. We shouldn't have to put up with this crap!"

"Well maybe we don't. I'll see if I can lose them in this tunnel," she said, pointing at the dark opening in the hillside ahead of us. (Odd, I don't remember there being any tunnels on this freeway...)

I said, "But they'll just be waiting on the other side."

"They will. But I have a totally bodacious idea," she said and floored it, grinning evilly as we rocketed faster and faster toward the entrance of the-

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)=======================================>
.

"Whoah! Slow down," hollared a woman's voice.

Snapping out of his reverie, Walter Stymis transferred his foot from the accelerator to the brakes. The elderly guard in the glass sentry booth scowled as they zipped past him into the parking garage at thirty-five miles an hour.

Slowing to a reasonable pace for indoor motoring, Walt began searching for a parking space.

"I guess we're here, huh?" he said sheepishly, and added cryptically, "I wonder what her bodacious idea was..."

Okay that was bad, he admonished himself. It was one thing to daydream, it was quite another to do it while driving. Especially when he had his whole family in the car with him. Or most of it. His son Jack was at the high school, practicing and planning with his coach and teammates for the game against Sunland Hills tonight. But his youngest two Michelle and Timmy were here, his wife Marybeth. Stupid to let his concentration drift like that!

Marybeth shook her head. "I swear, sometimes you seem like you're a million miles away."

"Sorry I was ............ it's this Dairy Council spot. I have to have something for them by Monday. I want to get away from that whole smirky Cows-talking-like-Seinfeld-characters thing. That's been run into the ground..."

She pretended to peer into his ear, "The gears never stop in there, do they? Oh well, I knew what I was getting into when I married a writer."

They circled the first floor without finding a space, started up the ramp to the second. Tim, their eighth grader said, "Advertising. That's not really writing though, is it?"

"Hold your tongue," said Marybeth Stymis, "Your father makes good money writing ad copy. Enough for the house, the food on the table, and to underwrite this little spending spree of ours. Unless, uh, you don't want your gift today."

"I never said that!" whined Timmy. He and his sister had each been promised a present---independent of birthdays or Christmas or anything---if they maintained a B+ average at school, and they each had. Probably would have anyway. The couple was proud of their bright kids.

They found a spot on the next level, a few spaces from the giant red stylized 3 on the wall beside the elevators. As they all climbed out of the SUV Walter shrugged, "Tim's right though. Advertising is hardly literature. Ads can be clever, they can even be moving, but they still have less in common with Joyce or Shakespeare than they do with some guy pushing a wheelbarrow down the street yelling, 'FISH ......... GET YOUR FISH HERE!'"

Michelle cringed, "God Dad, don't hollar like that! People are staring."

He looked around. There was nobody even in sight. "I know, but I have so much fun embarrassing you."

"You must. That shirt! Where's the volume control for that?"

"I like Hawaiian shirts," said Walt defensively.

"Don't sell yourself short Honey," said Marybeth. "You did win a Mobius Award."

"My team did."

"But it was your idea. Your direction, your final draft."

"I guess it was. But that just proves I can yell 'fish' better than anybody," grinned Walt. As they stepped into the elevator he shouted out across the echoing concrete space of the car park, "FRESSSH FI-I-I-I-I-I-ISH!!"
.

Inside the mall Walter bought a newspaper and sprung for beverages for everyone. Dr. Pepper for Timmy, Jamba Juice for Michelle, house blend for Marybeth and a low-fat white mocha latte for himself. He pointed at the benches next to a large indoor fountain, "I'll be sitting over here. Have fun kids. Don't be more than an hour, I want to be at Jack's game in time for the kickoff."

"You're just going to sit there?" asked Michelle incredulously. Mall shopping was something close to a religious experience for her, and she couldn't believe that this infidel just wanted to read the paper.

"Your father doesn't like shopping. It's all I can do to get him to buy a new pair of slacks now and then. Isn't that right Dear?"

"Er, yes..."
.

)=======================================>

Which wasn't really true, he thought as he watched them wander off in the direction of the May Company. Walter loved shopping. Or rather Misty did. He had been to this mall twice now as Misty, building her wardrobe up from those first few items he'd bought online from Travesti Jones. And though it had been terrifying---he was older now, jowlier; and it seemed as if surely some observant soul would make him---those had been two wonderful excursions.

For a while in his twenties Walt had wondered if he was a transsexual. But after a lot of self-reflection and soul searching he decided that he was just a male crossdresser. Which is to say that when he was presenting as Walter it wasn't a lie, but it wasn't the whole of him either. The realization that he wasn't being drawn toward surgically altering his body and embarking on a full time female existence had been both a disappointment and a relief to him.

He'd given up dressing years ago, a few days shy of their wedding, and had confined himself to manifesting his female side through small symbolic acts that only he knew the meaning of (a Wonder Woman tie, writing in fonts that Misty might use, or his collection of Aloha shirts- the prettiest garment a guy could safely wear); and through the vast body of stories he had written in secret.

Or not entirely in secret, since he found his way to certain fiction sites on the net a few years back, where he discovered that the stuff he'd been scribbling for over a decade belonged to this whole literary genre, most of it written by other "girls" like him, who he could chat with in his Misty persona. Sites like HyperGraphia provided a virtual playground where his alter-ego could frolic, expressing herself without fear of censure, and peppering her comments with femmy turns of phrase that Walt would never dare utter. It was a place where it felt normal to be transgender. So while the stories weren't strictly secret these days, they existed in a world separate from and unknown to Walter's real life friends and family.

It was after a cancer biopsy six months earlier---the anxious few days between the sample being snipped from him and his receiving the news that the growth was benign---that he was forced to take a good hard look at the eventuality of his death, and decided that he could not live half a life. Being Misty wasn't just some hobby to him. It was a need. She was a very real part of his dual-gendered soul.

Misty was resurrected as someone who could live and act in the four dimensional physical world. He was amazed that it had all come back to him. She truly had never left. It rather astonished him that he could still pass, albiet as a more matronly and demure woman. Misty Walters wore her height well, regally, like Angelica Houston.

Walt knew he would have to tell Marybeth. It would be hard, but now that his female self was no longer something "in his past, that he had given up" or a bunch of substanceless zeros and ones in some computer file, he knew he couldn't keep this from her. He just had to trust that their love would survive such a disclosure.

While she had said some things early in their marriage that had convinced him she would never understand---offhand comments about "perverts" that kept replaying in his head long after she herself had forgotten them---recent signs had been encouraging. There was more factual information out there about transgender folk in the last few years, and his wife was not narrow minded or judgemental by nature ............ Something of a Desperate Housewives/Felicity Huffman fan, she had picked up the film TRANSAMERICA on their last trip to Blockbuster. And as they watched it Marybeth had used female pronouns in regards to the transsexual heroine consistently, as if these terms were a given, and had spoken of her as brave.

It was time to be brave...
.

.

SPELLS R US: ROBOT TROUBLE

It's funny, that with as bizarre and dangerous as my life has been, during the intervals when it was normal I would tend to forget all the crazy stuff. Like all the bad that had happened was just some nightmare I'd had. An easy thing to convince yourself of when it's all so unbelievable.

My mother had taken me to the mall for some shopping. I needed school supplies for my upcoming junior year in high school, and she had to buy shoes. She was trying on style after style, looking for just the perfect pair of boots, while I sat in the chair beside hers thinking that there was nothing worse than going shopping with my mom...

But as I heard the gunshots, the screams of panic and the sound of breaking glass, I remembered that there was in fact something worse than this: killer robots from the future!

When the salesman's head exploded in a spray of blood, Mom decided that these calf-high paratroop boots she had just laced up would be good enough. She screamed, "Run, John!"

As we darted behind the tall rows of shelves I managed to catch a glimpse of the machine standing in the shattered storefront window. It was a T-800 series, its flesh and blood exterior in the form of a huge man with hard Prussian features, the same model with the same exact face as the robot I'd befreinded a few years earlier. But it would be a mistake to think I could be anything but prey to this one.

Shells from its automatic tore through the shelving and boxes of merchandise directly behind us as we ran. We had left our own weapons in our truck, handguns weren't much more effective than a flyswatter against these things anyway.

In the second it took the Terminator to stop and reload we ran through the entrance and out into the mall. We darted past the fountain, and when we got to the escalators we jumped onto the raised slick metal platform between the up escalator and the down one and slid down to the Mall's lower level.

The air reverberated with the heavy footfalls of the killer machine chasing us! We darted left, down a hallway that somehow seemed dimmer and less prosperous than the rest of the mall. If we could make it to the truck, the missile launcher that we had bought from those militia guys, we might have a chance.

As we ran past a particularly weird and crummy-looking little shop, a bald old man with a long beard who for some reason was dressed in a bathrobe called out from the doorway, "Come with me if you want to live."

We followed him into his shop, called SPELLS R US, where a cute girl in her twenties was dusting a brightly painted and very fake-looking Egyptian sarcophagus. He yelled at her, "This looks like trouble Dani, go in back. Move!"

She went EEEP! and skedaddled through a door into the store's back room. The old man turned to us, "So you're, wait don't tell me ........ Sarah and John Connor. This wasn't on my to-do list for today but I think I can help. What's that thing chasing you? Some kind of android?"

"A Terminator robot," said my mom, "Sent back in time to kill my son here, who will lead a revolt against the machines that have enslaved what's left of the human race after the nuclear holocaust..."

"Doesn't sound like any of the futures I've been to, glad I missed that one. So it's after the boy here? How does it identify him?"

"Visual recognition software mostly. Look, we can't stay! Is there a back way out of here?"

"Relax, I've got just what you need. Put these on."

My mom looked at the two nondescript metal rings he had placed in her hand and laughed, "Rings? Mister, you don't understand. That thing out there could take on an M-1 tank!"

"Just do it!" barked the old coot.

Mom handed me one and we each slipped ours on. Suddenly I felt very strange. I was dizzy, and my whole body seemed to be buzzing. But this was the least of my worries. The T-800 had entered the shop with his Kalishnikov raised, and was staring at me pitilessly. I knew I was going to die.

Then without a word it turned and walked out, heading back toward the center of the mall.

"What the hell?" Asked a thirty-five year old man who had appeared next to me. Who was this guy? Where was my mother?

"Mom? Where are you?" I called out, then stopped. I had the high-pitched piping voice of a little girl.

The old man went over to a big cheval mirror that was showing an old X FILES episode and thumped on it with his fist. Its glass surface went black for an instant, and now showed the image of the man standing beside me and .......... me?

I was a freckle-faced young girl with long brown hair. I grabbed my hair and pulled it out to where I could see it, and the girl in the mirror did the same. I looked down at myself. Skirt, sweater, dumb little pink tennis shoes with turquois maned baby unicorns on them. And so if this really was me, then this man here...

"Mom?"

"Yes John. I think we're safe now," He held his hand up and inspected the ring on his finger, "I guess they're technology from the far future. What year were or will these things be made in; Mister..."

"They just call me the Wizard. And, er, I forget which century they're from. It's way the hell up there, one of those ones with all the zeros."

The man's assistant came out from the back room, smiling, and had a seat on a- I'm not sure what it was. She was very pretty and I knew that just minutes ago I would have been attracted to her, but the matter was purely abstract to me now. I looked at myself, this weak little girl child I had become, with these puny little arms, and said, "Yeah, but how will I lead the resistance when I'm like this? I was just starting to get kind of buff..."

"Simple, you just take the rings off. You'll become your old selves, plus however many years it's been since- DON'T DO IT NOW! These are only good for one shot. Until then, you'll be Sam Walters and his daughter Misty from Sunland Hills," he said, pulling a driver's license and two birth certificates out of the box the rings had come from, and handing them to my now-unrecognizeable mother. To me he handed two colorful laminated cards, "And for you, young lady, your own Antelope Valley public library card, and a lifetime membership in the Hannah Montana Fan Club."

"Don't rub it in," I groaned.

Mom---or whatever I was supposed to call this person---looked doubtfully at the documents in his hand, "These are the worst fake ID's I've ever seen."

"Well they come with the rings, and no they're not great. But I have a friend in Philly who does excellent forgeries, cheap. Do you have two thousand in cash? Do you feel like going for a little ride?"

We said yes to both questions. He looked at his wrist hourglass and shook his head, "Looks like I'll be missing my seven o'clock. Penelope---poor kid!---is just gonna have to stay a guy for another few days. This seems important."

He pushed a button, and the section of counter the antique cash register was on flipped over, revealling a computer screen and a weird looking set of controls. He stuck a key into a slot, like the ignition on a car, and finessed it. A harsh grinding noise seemed to come from everywhere: Ka-fukkita! Ka-fukkita! Ka-fukkita! Ka-fukkita-

Then---with a sound like a cross between a jet engine and a giant harmonica---the mall outside the window was replaced by a swirl of blue and white streaks. When he moved the joystick the pitch of the whining changed and the motion of streaks took on a clear direction. They spiralled past, like we were falling down the inside of a haphazard barber pole made of streaming energy. It was really quite beautiful.

"Should take about ten minutes-" he started to say, when there was a loud BANG!

We all nearly fell over from the impact. He shut the shop's engine off, went over to the window and peered out. We clearly weren't moving now. And slowly into our field of view drifted what looked like a blue outhouse lying on its side, if "on its side" has any meaning in hyperspace. I was surprised to see that this was what had struck us, from the way we'd been clobbered I would have guessed something much more massive. A battleship, maybe. On the two facets that we could see were written the words POLICE BOX...

"Oh no," yelped Dani, "You hit a cop car!"

The Wizard opened the shop's front door and then walked out across the swirling vagueness toward the strange craft. Meanwhile the overturned commode's door opened, and a man much younger than the Wizard crawled out and stood up in the void.

He shouted in a British accent, "Why don't you look where you're going, you stupid prat!"

"Hey, jackass. You hit me!"

They yelled a while. A blonde teenage girl with a peaches-and-cream complexion and a big beautiful smile---a real English rose---raised the door of the craft and watched. She and Dani smiled and waved at each before she disappeared back inside.

The old wizard came back, in a terrible mood. He tried to start the store's engine- Ka-fukkita fukkita fukkita, fukkita fukkita!!

"Damn!"

Ka-fukkita fukkita fukkita fukkita fukkita fukkita fukkita-

He sighed mightily, "Flooded! God, what kind of nerd is writing this story anyway? The Terminator and Doctor Who?! Fanfic, FEH!! I swear, this whole SPELLS R US franchise is going straight to hell..."

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)=======================================>
.

"What was that?" asked a familiar voice, "Who's going to hell?"

Walter blinked and looked up and saw his family standing there, laden down with shopping bags. He scanned the front of his newspaper, looking for a likely candidate. "Oh. This uh ........... the economy."

They made it to the high school in plenty of time for Jack's game, parking in the gravel lot between the school's day care center and the Coyote Creek flood control channel. The small stadium was scooped out of the terrain itself, tiers of benches built into the pair of concrete rectangles that climbed the grassy slopes on either side of the playing field. Behind the glaring banks of floodlights the sunset was a gorgeous composition of red and orange and lavender streaks and tufts, the temp was a balmy 77.

The Coyote Creek High School Coyotes were playing the Sunland Hills Sun Devils. The Coyotes rolled right over the visiting team. Michelle was off talking to some friends. She was okay, Walt and Marybeth could see them from where they sat...

)=======================================>

There were fifty seconds left of the second quarter. The score was 48-4, and a lot of people were leaving.

"So we're gonna stay?" asked Tim.

The kid was bored. Walt shrugged sympathetically, "Well yeah, for Jack. I mean we are doing pizza afterwards. No sense going home and then coming right back. Besides, things might get interesting."

Timmy made a sputtering noise, "Not against these guys."

"No, you're probably right."

"They have no defense. They're not even trying! What a bunch of pus-" Tim managed to catch himself at the last instant, "sissies."

This made Walt self-conscious. Don't be a pussy ....... don't be soft ....... What would Timmy think if he knew his father loved to luxuriate in feelings of softness and femininity? Uncharacteristically for someone so closeted, Walt found himself asking, "With all the bloodshed and tyranny going on in the world, is being a 'pus-sissy' really the worst thing a male can do?"

"It is when you're playing football."

"Okay, excellent point," laughed Walt. He wasn't about to press it farther.

Marybeth patted his leg in a comforting way, and Walt felt a sudden surge of panic. Comforting? Comforting about what?! That she knows about Misty somehow?

Then he realized that she was just saying she was proud of him for his attempt to teach their child tolerance for sissies. All this jumping-at-nothing he was doing was not good! He'd have to tell her. Maybe Saturday, when the kids were at-

"Alright, cheerleaders! There's Jeannie Taylor," grinned Tim. He was enamored of the stunning young redhead, who was old enough to be his baby sitter.

"See? I knew you'd find something that would hold your interest..."

.
)=======================================>
.

I remember when I was about seven and my dad took me to see a Rams game. When his friend Bob bailed on going with him he got the crazy idea of taking me. Just us guys, he had said. I was bored to tears. I kind of knew what the men in the funny overstuffed outfits were doing. I just couldn't figure out WHY. I tried to fake an interest but failed miserably...

And then the cheerleaders came out. To me what they were doing seemed like the absolute funnest thing in the world! It had the kind of frisky energy that welled up inside me sometimes (like when I was watching JEM on Saturday morning) and made me want to jump and twirl and dance around. And I loved those neat fluffy things they were shaking. I thought maybe this would be a kind of dancing my father would let me do. Football dancing.

But when I started jumping in my seat and waving my arms around in imitation of the pretty ladies he gave me a bug-eyed look of pure disbelief then heaved that disgusted sigh of his---which I'd been hearing a lot lately---that announced that everything about me that was ME was an embarrassment to him.

I found myself totally at odds with the body that fate had stuck me with, and all the expectations regarding my behavior as a male, which I found so baffling. And what made my situation such a double whammy was how I was unable to mention these issues that were tearing me up to anyone; since this "thing" that I was was too weird and awful to even talk about!

I was pretty sure that Mom knew, but her love and approval of the girl inside me had to be carefully coded, and mostly reserved for those times when HE wasn't around. It wasn't the happiest of childhoods.

But things can change. Less than a decade later I would get my chance to be a cheerleader. And a GIRL too!

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BECOMING MISTY (Conclusion/Reprise...)

As the clock wound down on the end of the second quarter the Coyote Creek cheerleaders went into a huddle. Daisy ran us through our routine one final time, "Okay you guys, just like we practiced. We start out with 'Firecracker', Carol and Luanne on the ends. They come around front, to lead us in 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'. We skip the last beat of that, and the second the light changes we go into 'Koo Koo For Cocoa Puffs'. When you see me stop, we line up and do 'Bite Em!'. And if the band is where they're supposed to be, we lead them in the processional. And I want to see some spectacular tosses from you two majorettes."

"We know, we know," snapped rail-skinny Linda Rolfman, "We've only practiced this a hundred times!"

"Maybe I do get a little carried away," admitted Daisy, "But their Devil Girls are the one thing in the region that stands between us and the state cheer competition in Sac next month. If their players were that good our guys would be under serious pressure out there. And I want to show them what we've got. So are we ready to do this?"

We all let out loud coyote yips.

"And how you feeling, Misty?"

I had been attacked and beaten up pretty bad the previous week by the psycho Grigory Valkinov and his brother Mikhail the even bigger psycho. I grinned, "I feel great! And I know I'm doing better than the Jackinoff Brothers. Thanks for coming to my rescue, Katie."

Kate 'Katie Kaboom' Weintraub, the little Jewish Vietnamese Texan (it's a long story) cheerleader and Tae quon do champion gave me a smile as big as her home state and drawled, "My pleasure, Darlin'."

"You did seem to enjoy doing that to them, Katie," giggled Goo Swensen, who had seen the incident.

Katie shrugged, "Yeah, well. It was bad enough what they was doin' to Misty, but then them two Borat-talkin' idjits made the mistake of calling me a foreigner and a heathen. Me! I was born here. They'd be funny if they warn't so got-damn evil!"

As the last players were straggling off the field we yip-yip-yipped and scampered out onto it, launching into the classic Firecracker routine. Siss Boom Bah!

Linda Rolfman kept shooting an evil glance my way. Yes, she had been mean to me at the start, but I thought she was getting over it. It was sad to think that after all this time she still had a problem with me, despite the way we'd bared our souls to each other when I visited her in rehab.

Or---come to think of it---maybe it was because of that visit; That she'd let her guard down with me and now felt vulnerable because of it. From as snippy as she had been with everyone recently I knew she was back into the bulimia, feeling hopeless over her failure to quit and scared that someone would find out. My heart went out to her. Despite the humor we all find in someone puking, it's a miserable and even possibly deadly illness. As I had confessed to Linda, I'd had my own battle with that demon, back when I was still Walter. On some level I had been delighted to find myself in the clutches of a girl's behavioral disorder. Like this helped prove that I was really female.

But after the divorce Mom was finally able to take me to "one of those damn headshrinkers" who "mess you up, put weird ideas in your head". After one session with her I was referred to an adolescent gender identity specialist, where I apparently scored 100 on the Girl Test (Dad would have had loved that, but he really had no say in anything since he'd removed himself from the equation; to go start off with a new family that he hoped might live up to his expectations.).

When it was decided that I could go on testosterone blockers and actually start living as Misty, my bulimia---that bogus connection to some pathetic concept of femininity---lost its romance for me. I now had reasons to be better than that, to face my compulsions. I realized that I might be the only transsexual some people met, and for better or worse I represented my trans brothers and sisters. I owed it to the two scared, closeted girls and one FtM who had approached me here in my Senior year---telling me that I gave them hope---to be the happiest, most capable new woman I could. And yes, most of all I owed it to myself...

The coyote cheer segued seamlessly into the Tai Chi inspired Crouching Tiger routine, and then into Koo Koo For Cocoa Puffs, which wasn't a cheer but this weird dance we did at home games, where we all waddled around like Charlie Chaplin under the big strobe light, rattling our pompoms right in next to us, moving in a complicated circular pattern that made us seem to be always on the verge of running into each other. This silly routine always brought us laughs and cheers.

And then came our school's signature routine, waving our pompoms in the familiar patterns that went with-

"Bite 'em Coyotes, bite 'em good! Bite 'em! Bite 'em!
Bite 'em 'til it's understood! Bite 'em! Bite 'em!
That we're the top dogs in the state,
From the border fence to the Golden Gate-"

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Some parents didn't like this reference to the border fence being in our chant. But it was there wasn't it? As good a landmark as any to indicate the southernmost point of our state. People must be hard pressed for something to do if they could find objectionable political material in a football cheer. Nor to my knowledge did we actually advocate biting anyone.

But several of these same adults had been among my allies during the huge fuss that followed that newspaper article about me (my name being left out hadn't really provided me any anonymity), so I guess not all their issues are trivial. They stood their ground against those religious and political types who opposed me, a group comprised of a few very loud and hysterical people, screaming that my becoming a girl would bring about the end of civilization. Or something. I was pleasantly amazed that despite all their flyers and canvassing, my foes never gained the numbers or the support they expected.

Maybe in some other part of the country things would have gone differently. Or maybe if the loudest among this bunch hadn't been the Jackinoff brothers' parents, and all their uncles and cousins, who belonged to this weird Russian skinhead church (I guess you could call it...) known as the Watchmen on the Wall, whose policy on what should be done with gays, transsexuals and such was ............. extreme. People just didn't want to be associated with that kind of talk.

And among the students---that world I had to face five days a week, in the halls, the quad, all those places where a teacher couldn't always be watching---my acceptance wasn't exactly 100%. I still got shoved, called names, and some bitch kept christening all the handicapped stalls in the girl's bathrooms the FREaK tOLIeT, like I was expected to use that one and none of the others, which brought protests from the grumpy parapelegic Mona Lott Wheeler who didn't see why I should be allowed to use her stall either...

And yet psychologically these bullies didn't hold the majority. They didn't set the tone. If someone tried to trip me he was as likely to be called a jerk, sneered at as a loser, as he was to be cheered on. This helped to dissuade the ones who weren't actually hard core bigots, but would have done it as an easy way to gain the approval of the pack, if that's what the pack was about.

My more cynical friends like to claim that people can't change, that the human race is pretty much a lost cause. But over this past year I have noticed real change. And I think that can be traced back to the assembly Principal King had called, and the speech he gave there. His "It All Starts With A Joke" speech. He spoke of growing up in the rural South, the things that he'd seen and had suffered, and---tearing up in a very dignified way once or twice---how it had felt. He never brought up slavery, or anything he had never known personally, except for relatives' accounts of lynchings they'd had the misfortune to witness, and the fear these tales had inspired in him as a boy. He talked about the attitudes that had allowed this culture of terror to exist, that had made it seem natural, and he utterly ripped apart the logic behind these attitudes.

The parallels to the culture at Coyote Hills High were not lost on the students. He talked about how dehumanizing a fellow child of God (but boy he sure avoided THAT word!) to a point where the unspeakable seems reasonable, can start with the most innocent of pasttimes- a joke. Specifically a joke at someone else's expense. Someone you considered different.

This was the theme and I suppose the title of Principal King's speech, and he worked it into the text on a periodic basis. There was a cadence to it, which seemed to mimick the oratorical style of his famous martyred namesake. After a time or two you knew when it was coming. He would build toward it, then hit you with it: "It all starts with a joke."

What about free speech, a boy hollared, which someone seconded with a moronic shriek of- ANARCHY!!

Our principal smiled. "Free speech? The limits of free speech are defined by the highest court of this country, each time they hear a case involving the First Amendment. While it's important to defend what we can say, it is every individual's responsibility to look to his or her conscience---that innate human desire to not be an asshole---to help them decide what they should say..."

Somehow, despite the average high-schooler's resistance to anything an authority figure has to say, the truth and sincerity of our principal's words actually got to a lot of the students. When he was done it seemed like he had even surprised himself. And if he caught any flak for saying the word asshole I never heard about it...

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With the conclusion of the 'Bite Em' cheer we commenced the processional, marching around the track that circled the football field to a disco Souza medley, our two majorettes out in front, the marching band behind us, the drummers pounding out that Ka-fukkita ka-fukkita ka-fukkita beat with exuberance and precision!

So here I was, a cheerleader. Up in the stands were my fans, friends, acquaintanceships and enemies. I thought I heard my little sister shouting 'Go Misty!' And it probably was her. I knew she was up there, with my mom, and that they were proud of me. And Dad? Well...

Dad?

Dad?
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)=======================================>
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"Dad?" prompted Walt's son for the third time, rousing him from his daydream.

"Oh, sorry. What is it, Timmy?"

"The game's started."

"Yes. I see."

The Sun Devils' kickoff was unusual. The ball went straight up somehow, and hung spinning in the floodlights for what seemed like an impossible number of seconds before starting back toward Earth. Instinctively one of their own players caught it, and he was immediately tackled by a huge Coyote.

"And so. Resumes. The Massacre..." growled Timmy in a comically low-pitched and self-important voice. He was imitating an announcer of some sort---probably that old guy who did the voiceovers for all the movie trailers---and was looking at his dad, hoping for approval of his jest. Walt looked at his son's adorable face, and his heart swelled with an almost unbearable tenderness.

He said, "I love you..."

"Dad!" whined Tim in embarrassment. He hadn't expected that much approval. And Walter himself had planned to come up with something a bit more blasé. But he was glad he said it.

Walt reflected on his fantasy. That business with the transsexual cheerleader's father, while an exaggeration, was the closest of any of his recent daydreams to being autobiographical. George Stymis---living out in Leisure World now---had been and still was a hard-assed bastard, with an extremely narrow view of acceptable male emotions. Just about any maternal affection on his mom's part had been derided as "babying the boy"- a potential catalyst for unmanly tendancies; which he had seemed to regard as these pernicious entities, hanging around in the air like demons, or communism, just waiting to find some inroad into a lad's developing psyche.

And remembering his grandfather, it was clear where his Dad's attitudes had come from. Walt swore that when he became a parent he would be different. And despite his father's dire warnings, his striving to be emotionally accessible to his sons---to not shame them if they should cry---hadn't caused any major damage that he could see. All three of his children were great kids.

The Sun Devils gained eight points during the second half of the game. The Coyotes another twenty. Michelle came back during the final quarter and the family talked. About what colleges she and Timmy might want to attend ("It's not too early to have some kind of idea.") and about the latest batch of contestants on American Idol, and what a jerk that Simon was.

)=======================================>

Jack was drying his hair with a shirt when he met them at the family's Dodge Caravan. They headed for Party Time Pizza, the team's traditional after-the-game meeting place.

These little fetes weren't mandatory on any level, whoever felt like it showed up, plus whatever family members, pals, girlfriends they brought along. Tonight there were six players here and four of their friends, plus coach Phillips and a science teacher named Miss Kellerman (their relationship an open secret, tolerated as long as they didn't dry hump in front of the students...). Walt thought the pizza here was barely tolerable, but everyone else raved about it, and it was cheaper than Round Table.

The highlight of the gathering for him was the friendly but very heated argument between the coach and his girlfriend about something called the Cambrian Explosion, a short interval a little over 500,000,000 years ago when all these crazy species---thousands and thousands of them---sprang up overnight. All Walt knew about the Cambrian Era boiled down to a single image, probably from an old TIME LIFE book- trilobites scuttling around in a swamp under monstrous ferns where big iridescent dragonflies were buzzing about. Or were the dragonflies later? He wished he had more knowledge of science. Palaentology, biochemistry, physics...

Or take computers. As much as he used one, for anything past simple word processing and layout work he was forever beholden to Travis, the agency's geek, for things none of his kids would have any problem with. Walt admired geeks. He had the nerdy and awkward part down, but the other half of being a geek---the part about actually knowing stuff---was where he found himself lacking.

Oh well, he was good at what he did. The computers would all be sitting in warehouses without people like him reminding folks that their current PC was hopelessly antiquated. And---he reflected as he watched the harried looking waitress try to do some quick vacuuming between orders---at least he wasn't working in a place like this...
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DUPLICITY'S DUPE

I hauled three extra large pepperoni out to the rowdy highschool kids at tables six and seven. The construction workers at table four were signalling with an empty pitcher. MORE BEER. NOW! I was three hours into my shift and the hands of the St. Pauli Girl clock up behind the pool tables didn't seem to be moving...

For the umpteenth time that night I reflected on how I had come to this. A month earlier I had been a millionaire businessman---a billionaire by some reckoning---with my picture on the cover of Forbes magazine. Now I was a waitress at Party Time Pizza.

"Life isn't fair", the old saying goes. But it sure does have a sense of humor sometimes...

#1.)

I had been dreading who the temp agency would send when my secretary Dolores took sick, but I was very pleased with Misty. She was bright, caught on quick, and knew when to take the initiative with something. Plus a little crazy, obnoxious in a comical way, lettting me know she was unimpressed with my being Jack Donovan, the genius behind Moon Computers. Our day together seemed to fly by. And then.

Leaning in the doorway like she owned the place. Asking me out for a drink.

I said I don't go out with people who work for me. A man in my position.

Yes that could be complicated, she conceded.

Besides. This company has become so much bigger than I ever dreamed. I've hardly had time to think of anything else. Especially now, with these new Mycroft Infras about to hit the market.

All work and no play, Jack. What good is money if you can't have fun? Besides I'm just a temp. As of eight minutes ago I don't actually work for you...

Cavalier, confident, wryly cynical, just a bit butch, with her sexuality right there on the surface as she stared me right in the eye. Irresistable.

We had drinks. Wound up at her place, in bed. Ten seconds before I came, it happened:

I was her and she was me. On my back, my legs around his thighs. That glorious pistoning sensation, my body consumed by a wild hunger for what was being done to it.

I climaxed---a gigantic explosion of ecstacy---and with a dizzying whoooosh I snapped back into me!

WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!

Oh, just a little something I can do, she said naughtily.

I said: NOBODY CAN DO THAT!

Then why are we talking about it?

Okay I guess you can do that. And that ..... that was just incredible!

You liked it, huh?

Well yes, I've always been curious, what it would be like to be a woman. An interest in different persectives helps in the computers game. The creative end of things.

She smiled like a cat. I would say it's more than idle curiousity.

So you could tell, I said quietly. Uncomfortable discussing my deepest secret.

I suspected when we were working together. But also. Pure unalloyed males never like my little swap trick. It freaks them the hell out. I can do more, you know.

What do you mean?

Just what I said. We can make love like that. Switched. Taking our time, maybe start out by taking a bath together. Or go out on the town. I love a change of perspective too. Would you like to do stuff like that?

I nodded, excited and scared.

Then all you have to do is relax, she said, listen to the sound of my voice. She guided me through it, how to open myself to the longer lasting transfer. Repeating: Just trust me...

And so we did. It was a wild, wild night after that. Though I kind of wished it wasn't my own former body I was in bed with. It seemed weirdly onanistic. It was glorious, better than I'd ever imagined, and I had imagined this sort of thing plenty.

And then she really screwed me!
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#2.)

You don't get in to see the president of Moon Computers without an appointment. I didn't even get past the front gate. I stood out there ranting and raving, and nearly went to jail. All my legendary genius had gone right out the window, if I expected anyone to believe my crazy claims about having my identity stolen in such a huge and impossible way.

Look, I asked Bill, the guard gate. How did Donovan know to have a restraining order issued before I even showed up? Doesn't that strike you as weird?

All that tells me is that he knew you were bad news just from working with you yesterday. He's a smart one, that Jack Donovan. It's hard to pull anything over on him!

I really must have looked crazy after that. Laughing until the tears came...

It wasn't enough that he had taken my body, my money, my life. The next morning while I was sleeping off the knockout drops he had slipped me, he was calling the temp service he had worked for as Misty---and using my voice, and the phone in my office---told them that Misty Walters was the worst secretary he had ever had. She was lazy, inefficient, stole supplies and smelled bad. He wasn't even going to let me keep that crappy temp job. The harder things were for me, the less of a threat I was to him.

Which is how I came to be waitressing at Party Time Pizza six nights a week. Hard work at minimum wage. Because of my low distraction threshhold, I think the noise was the worst part of it for me. The jukebox was set at a rediculously high volume---the place was called Party Time after all---which made everyone shout to be heard over it, especially this one "industrial" number that every teenager wanted to hear constantly, Armageddon Rag by the Nine Inch Nihilists; with its harsh mechanical "Ka-fukkita! Ka-fukkita! Ka-fukkita! Ka-fukkita!" pounding in my brain. It was really all too much!

The business press had always described me with words like "friendly", "laid-back", and even "compassionate". But one thing I had never been called was a patsy. And though I was seriously outgunned here, I was not going to just throw my hands up and quit, accepting what had been done to me. I had a strategy for getting my life back, but it depended on getting my hands on money. Lots of money.

A few days into my ordeal I submitted a bundle of patents, which I knew I could sell for a decent price. But the U.S. Patent Office did not share my sense of urgency about this, and would get to my applications when they got to them. My patents for a PC that would make laptops obsolete for anyone who could touchtype (a pocket sized mainframe, a pair of glasses for the monitor, and a wire-thin ring for each finger) were right behind the one for the toilet paper roller that played 'The Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head' when it spun.

Until then I did this, and looked for a better job, and did such sleuthing as I could regarding the counterfeit Jack Donovan.
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#3.)

Raymond Chandler once said: Whenever I don't know what to do next in one of my stories I have someone walk into the room with a gun in their hand.

For some reason I thought of this as I looked down the barrel of the pistol the old man had pointed at my face. I don't know anything about guns, so I can't tell you what make or model it was, but it was a big one. With a big hole for a big bullet to come out of.

He was waiting around the corner when I got to the top of the stairs leading to the hallway where my apartment was. He was looking at me with pure hatred. He seemed crazy and very angry! Laughing wildly- YA DIDN'T EXPECT TO SEE ME AGAIN, DIDJA?!

Something was telling me this wasn't a septegenarian mugger, but I said look, I'm just a waitress. You can have all my money, but it won't be much. A couple of twenties and thirty bucks in tips.

A WAITRESS, he screamed. YOU CRAZY OLD BUM! YOU STOLE MY BODY SO YOU COULD BE A WAITRESS?! I WAS TRYING TO DO YOU A KINDNESS, TAKING YOU IN OFF THE STREET. AND THIS IS HOW YOU REPAY ME?!

Which is how I met the real Misty Walters. My new partner in my search for the creep who had stolen my life.

Whoever that person was, they seemed to be working their way up. He or she had some definite plan in mind. Who was next? The President? Jack Donovan had access to just about anyone he wanted to meet. He had to be stopped!

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)=======================================>

"Eureka!" cried Walter.

Everybody at the table looked at him.

"Oh, I was just ................ trying to remember the name of that city. You know, up near the Oregon border. It's Eureka, heh heh," he said as he casually took a sip from his beer. The taste of Pepsi startled him. He put the heavy glass mug down and slid it over, closer to a point in front of his son. Picked up his own mug. "Oh, this one's mine."

He was excited. Finally a daydream, a flight of fancy that might become something. That wasn't completely derivative or too esoteric for its own good. His new story project. Oh thank thee, blessed Muse!

He jotted down a few snatches of dialogue and key phrases on a napkin and pocketed it. And on the drive home tried to keep the details fresh in his mind while not completely tuning out his loved ones or the realities of operating a motor vehicle...
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UNTITLED AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PIECE...

When we got home the kids all headed off for bed without protest. I hugged each, congratulating Jack on playing well and my other two on their grades this semester (Jack's grades were just as good but somehow he didn't like us fussing about them. His "present" had been quietly deposited into his Stanford University fund...). Our fourth child Mongo wasn't ready for bed, he had been sleeping all day. He brought me his favorite squeeky and I threw it for him until it got too disgustingly slobbered up.

Marybeth was yawning. I told her I would be up just a bit longer, then fired up the computer out in the garage- my "study". I liked writing with the garage door open, and was glad it was still warm enough to do this. Mongo would hang out with me, lying on his chunk of carpet right next to me, getting up to bark at any joggers or dog-walkers who went past.

Typing fast, I wrote down what I could remember of the tale, expanding on it here and there as ideas came to me. Forty-five minutes later I leaned back, satisfied that I had gotten all the important stuff. I didn't like the title I had for it though. Too wacky for the tone of the story. I shortened it to Duplicity, which was better, but that still didn't seem like it...

And now another chunk of the plot was coming to me. The person who had stolen Donovan's identity would be disliked by everyone at Moon Computers. He would say things that made it obvious something wasn't right about the normally easy-going Jack, and maybe make some bonehead decisions. But since I'd already committed myself to the first person format, Misty wouldn't be aware that these things were going on.

Maybe she could befriend a woman who worked there, say on an information-gathering mission at a bar she knew a lot of them frequented. Yes, that could work. I pictured the woman as a real character, a big loud brash bottled blonde---the name Josie seemed to fit---who Misty wouldn't tell the truth too (at least not at first), but who would become a good friend, a sort of a tutor about female life...

Marybeth entered the garage. "Are you coming to bed, Honey?"

"Another half hour or so. I got a few ideas for the novel today, I want to get them written down."

"For the western," said Marybeth in an oddly skeptical tone of voice, "I wish you would let me read one of these chapters."

"I told you, I don't think my stuff is good enough to show anyone," I said. I wanted to turn the screen away from her as she approached, but this might have seemed suspicious.

She said slowly, deliberately, "Well your online friends seem to like them a lot .......... Misty."

Oh God. The jig was up.

"You know?"

She nodded, "I've been meaning to talk to you about this. I guess now's as good a time as any."

"You've been on my computer?" I asked, trying not to sound too harshly accusing. All my evasions, my lies about what I'd been writing didn't put me in a good position to play the self-righteousness card.

"I have. I confess. But you left it running that day Mongo wandered off and you went to find him. I was walking by it, the colors on the screen caught my eye. All those pinks and lavenders and little butterflies seemed kind of odd for a western fiction site. It wasn't like I was snooping, but before I knew what I was doing I was scrolling around, clicking onto blogs and stories and things, where everyone had names like Miss Fifi le Pouffe or Big Bad Brenda. And then later I found the site again on the upstairs computer, read a bunch of the stories. I was ............. surprised. Transgender fiction? I had no idea there even was such a thing, let alone how much of it there was. I really liked the one you wrote about the high school reunion."

"But how did you figure out which stories were mine? My non de plume..."

"Was a pretty transparent one. I know how much you love anagrams, and it wasn't too hard to figure out. Misty Walters? Walter Stymis? Give me a little credit! And certain things about the way you wrote were a dead giveaway. Only you seem to think our washing machine goes: 'Kafukkita-kafukkita-kafukkita!'"

I stared at her perky little azure toenails. I had 'borrowed' the color, but it hadn't looked good on me. And my own toes .......... well it's best not to draw attention to them. I said, "Oh Lord. You must think I'm awful damned strange."

"Strange, yes. But awful? Not at all. To tell you the truth I always suspected you weren't writing a western. It just didn't seem like you. And I was afraid you were in here looking at God knows what kind of pornography. Which didn't seem very likely either but you were sure being secretive about something. But these stories you and your friends write. They're not anything like I would've thought. I mean a few of them seemed kind of perverted, having six-inch stiletto heels with locks on them locked onto both your feet and your hands? Somebody sure likes wearing heels! And the gag, and that uh, plug thing. But most of them, well I don't understand it, but it all seems pretty harmless. Almost like me, when I was a kid. Dreaming about what it would be like to be a grown up woman. But at least I knew for me it was attainable. It must be sad when it isn't."

"There are writers on there who have become women and are doing quite nicely," I said.

She pondered this. "You mean like that movie we watched. Your friends are transsexuals."

"Some are. I know post op transsexuals, pre-ops, some who can only live it in fantasy. There's also what's called sissies, that's kind of hard to explain. And there's a few intersex women-"

"Hermaphrodites?"

"That's a very specific type of intersexed. I've never gotten personal enough about it to know if they could ...... do both; and that's not really a term anyone uses. But they're just regular people."

"Regular? That's like a one-in-a-million genetic abnormality!"

"And that's all it is. But when it comes to who they are, it's like- Well like your friend Carol from work. She's just like you and me, isn't she? Or does she act 'dwarfy' somehow?"

"Of course not! Okay, I see your point. People are people. But still, I didn't know anything about this club of yours. It came as quite a shock to me. And being on the net, they're scattered all over America, these transsexuals and what have you?"

"All over the world," I said, "And there's also a bunch that are transvestites like me. Our feminine self is there and needs expression, but we have a male side."

"Well that's good," she said, then burst out laughing.

"What? What's funny?"

"My husband just told me he's a transvestite and I'm relieved! It's just so-" her laughter died abruptly as she gulped, and said in a voice hoarse with emotion, "I mean I've got nothing against transsexuals, but if you said you were one I would be so scared. I wouldn't want to lose you."

"You wouldn't lose me unless you decided to. And I think that would destroy me, I love you so much! Or not having Jack or Timmy or Michelle in my life..."

"Don't even think that. That would never happen. Not for what you're doing. I can tell you've found some good friends there. So all these different kinds of people just get together online, and write, and pretend to be women, and what else? Share recipes?"

Her 'pretend to be women' remark showed a certain gap in her understanding of these matters, but I was nonetheless relieved by how this was going. She wasn't screaming or talking about lawyers. I said, "It's pretty much what you saw. We write. We share stories, and occasionally, yes, recipes. We discuss music, religion and politics- all persuasions there. And so many of them are so smart, you'd be amazed! We have ridiculous arguments over punctuation, to a point where a site moderator has to step in and calm things down. We commiserate when life is bad and celebrate when it's good..."

"I know. I read your two blogs about your cancer scare. The things other people wrote back showed how much they care about you, although it was strange them all calling you 'girlfriend' and making jokes about knickers and hormone shots. And you apparently love that kind of talk..."

My face---already flush with embarrassment---turned a shade or two redder, "I do. That is a big part of it. We talk a lot about the transgendered part of our lives, our feelings, maybe problems that come up because of it. A lot of us because where else can we talk about it?"

"You frustrate the hell out of me sometimes, you know that? It hurts that you wouldn't come to me about this. I wish you would trust me more."

"Okay, maybe I'm just a coward. But to take a gamble like that, the stakes just seem astronomical. I could tell you about marraiges that completely blew up, the whole marriage ending suddenly over finding the husbands stash of women's clothes."

"There must have been something else wrong with those marriages before that. Or their religious priorities were out of whack, or ........ Oh, and speaking of stashes of women's clothes, is that what's in that toolbox stuck behind the snow tires over there? The one with the lock, that seems kind of light for a toolbox?"

I nodded.

"I was curious about that," Marybeth said, and chuckled. "Well now I'm starting to see why you're so good at helping me pick out my outfits."

"Would you believe me if I said I was just about to tell you about this?"

Her eyes met mine, "Sure I would. I'm sure it bothered you to be hiding this. You're a good man. And probably a very nice woman."

"Would you like to meet Misty?"

"I think I have to. But not tonight. To start with, you can read me one of your stories. Pick one that means a lot to you. And as we go through it well talk about it, what different things in it are based on, your feelings about them, why you put this part or that part in. Stuff like that. I really want to talk about this a lot. To understand. And then," she nodded toward my hidden cache of skirts and bras and breast forms, "we'll see."

"Wow," was all I could say.

She yawned, "But right now, I'm going to bed. You coming?"

And so I knew I wouldn't be on the couch tonight, or worse at some motel, gazing in numb horror at the train wreck my life had suddenly become. I looked away as the tears started flowing. She still loves me...

"Oh hell yes!" I said, "Just let me do this."

I saved what I had on my screen. Exited my MS Word file, then my folder with all my stories in it, my four dozen fictitious alter egos.

Sometimes real life will fool you.

.

THE END

WITH APOLOGIES TO MR. THURBER

(AND TO: Julie O., Arecee,
Alys, and anyone else I
ripped off for Misty's
fantasy segments...)