Kyle is a reckless teenager, despite early panty-training. When he asks for a moped, his mother decides he has to change his behavior before he kills himself on it. She proposes a deal: He gets the moped if he agrees to wear girls' clothes for a month, clothes that he can choose for himself. It seems like bet he cannot lose, but Kyle's life soon begins to spin completely out of control.

Anything for a Moped? – Part 1 By: Dawn De Winter
Chapter One: The Deal

He was at it again. But this time he had unexpected company. His mother wasn’t supposed to be at home. She was supposed to be out. The house should have been empty. It was usually empty, for Kyle was a single child, and half an orphan, his father having died in a car crash three months after his birth.

Kyle thought he had the freedom of the house, the freedom to lie on the living room sofa with the lingerie pages spread open from the Sunday supplement.

As always, the sight of those teen models in their panties and bras had brought down his pants and his boxers. Half naked, he lay on the sofa stroking his hardness. His eyes were shut, his mind light years away in a fantasyland of satin, lace and willing women.

A cough brought him back to reality. Without even taking the time to open his eyes — or possibly he was hoping that the intruder could see no more than he -- Kyle pulled up his pants and boxers with a frantic tug.
Only when he had covered his drooping shaft did he dare to open his eyes. Now that he could no longer see his erection, he could desperately hope that no one ever had.

Who was there? His mother! What could be worse for a fourteen-year-old? His mother had seen him almost naked jerking off! He could have died on the spot had his body not been so tingly with sexual vitality.

Barb spoke first: "Kyle, the lingerie advertisements are there to inform me, not to amuse you. Why don’t you put them away now?"

She had let him off lightly. The oblique reference was her style. Nothing more would have been said had Kyle let the subject drop. But embarrassment loosened his tongue. He blurted out that he too had been seeking information.

Had he stopped there, Barb would have assumed that he meant that he, a young teen, was simply trying to figure out the mechanics of the bra, so that one day he would be able to extricate his girlfriend from one. But Kyle did not stop while ahead. He blundered onward.

"I was doing research on gender," he loftily said.

"On gender? How so?"

"Well, we have a social science teacher who said last Thursday that we now live in a unisexual world thanks to feminism. According to Mr. Barnes, feminists are mostly lesbians, and so they naturally want women to be as much like men as possible."

"I can’t believe Mr. Barnes said anything like that," interrupted Barb. "I know he’s close to retirement age, but I am sure he wouldn’t say anything that foolish."

"Yes, he did too say it," rebutted Kyle. "And why shouldn’t he? Isn’t it true that most feminists are dykes? And don’t dykes really want to be men? That’s true, isn’t it?"

"I can’t believe you’re repeating such garbage to me, Kyle, or using that sort of language. I taught you to be a lot wiser than to believe that homosexuals want to be the other sex. Some homosexuals may want that, but they are far from a majority. You know full well that homosexuals are different from transsexuals, who in turn are different from transvestites and cross-dressers. It’s a complex world, Kyle, and I will not have you stereotype people. I can’t believe that you’ve forgotten all that I have taught you on this subject. What about the books you read last year? And now some teacher tells you bunk and you believe him?"

Her remarks were calmer than her thoughts, which were in turmoil. Barb was a feminist and a political liberal. She even liked to think of herself as politically correct, a label she wore as a badge of honor. She had tried to raise Kyle as a feminist and had done her best to combat gender stereotyping.

As a baby, he had worn both pink and blue so that he would get to know how adults reacted to both sexes. However, as a toddler, he had worn only boys’ clothes, for she wanted no teasing, no humiliation.

Yet she had deferred his first haircut hair to the last possible moment. By then he had grown to take pride in its luxuriance. Until about a year ago, he had kept it unusually long and well conditioned. A cooperative hairstylist had even agreed with her that his hair should be cut in a unisex fashion. That is, lots of the local girls had a similar cut, but no one would have said he had a girl’s hairdo -- so long as he dressed as a boy.

Unisex, not humiliation — that had been Barb’s goal. Thus, she made no attempt to put Kyle into dresses, even when the opportunity arose. One such missed opportunity came on his eighth Halloween when Kyle had asked to go trick or treating dressed as a witch.

While Barb had briefly fantasized about putting Kyle into a witch’s mini-skirt and with teaching him how to apply his own witch’s make-up, including the blood-red lipstick and black eyeshade, she had finally vetoed his going out in public in a witch’s dress because of her Wicca friends. She knew what a real witch looked like — and it was nothing like a Halloween hag.

So what he worn instead? Why, a darling Peter Pan outfit. It resembled all the other Halloween outfits Barb encouraged or permitted: it required tights. If there was one thing Kyle was used to wearing by the age of twelve, it was tights. He had worn them as Batman’s Robin, as Super Boy, as Spiderman, as a Three Musketeer, and as Robin Hood. Kyle was always a superhero in tights.

It tickled Barb’s fancy to channel his boyish enthusiasm for comic book heroes into nonchalance toward at least one item of girls’ clothing — namely tights. He even knew that his tights came from the girls’ department; but could care less, Barb was glad to see, because they enabled him to be a macho superhero, at least in his own mind.
She got a kick out of seeing him run around in green, black, white and red tights, and for about a month each year they’d engage in mock sword fights in the kitchen or challenge each other to an archery contest in the backyard — or at least they did until Kyle became strong enough to project his arrows into Mr. Mitchell’s yard, one time scoring a perfect bulls-eye on the towering sunflower under which their elderly neighbor was bent over gardening. So comfortable and macho did Kyle feel in tights, that he even wore them as "long johns" on cold winter days. At least, he did until his thirteenth year.

The tights were the only "girls’ clothes" that young Kyle knowingly wore. But they were far from the only girls’ clothes he did wear. In dressing her son, Barb had tried to get him to wear at least one item of girls’ wear. As she hadn’t wanted to embarrass him, she had found unisex items like socks, tee shirts and sweaters.

Though purchased in the girls’ department, the clothes were neutral enough in color and design that Kyle never realized he was cross-dressing. If anyone else did, they never admitted it to either Kyle or Barb. They contented themselves with raised eyebrows, a suppressed giggle, or a covert sneer.

Until Kyle was nine, the boy had unwittingly worn girls’ panties most of the time. Why panties? Because Barb believed that clothes made the boy. If his outfit were a mix of genders, so too would be his personality, or so she hoped. She endowed the panties with almost mystical significance: they would make the boy a more sensitive, more caring male -- even if he didn’t know he was wearing anything unusual. Or so Barb hoped.

To avoid a confrontation with her son, Barb deliberately purchased plain cotton panties, with a minimum of trim or special stitching. Some had solid colors — sometimes a vivid green or red, sometimes a pastel blue or yellow. Many were white, and four were pink, thanks to Kyle’s botched first attempt to help his mother out with her laundering.

He hadn’t known about separating the whites from the colors. As he agreed, "Money doesn’t grow on trees," Kyle manfully wore the pink underpants from time to time — in other words, when the rest of his panties were dirty and piled up in the corner of his bedroom. To be candid, the pink underwear did bother him; every time he had to put on his pink-dyed briefs he openly cursed his folly in making his "boys’ underwear" look … like panties.

Barb also dressed Kyle in print panties — that is, in prints that Barb believed would appeal to the little boy. As Kyle loved animals, he had, as a little boy, liked wearing panties with teddy bears, Dalmatians, or kittens frolicking on them. Several of his panties had a Disney theme, for Barb had made a ritual out of their movie nights: for all animated features, they’d start the evening by going to his favorite burger restaurant, then they’d see the film, and the evening would end with a theme gift: a pair of print underpants and, whenever available, the matching undershirt — or should we say, the matching cami?

While Aladdin and the dinosaurs were definitely boys’ wear, Pocahontas, Mulan, the Littlest Mermaid and the Lion King were definitely adorning girls’ panties. When Kyle was seven or eight, he loved to race around the house clothed only in his underwear, pretending as he did, that he was the superhero whose face and form clung to his bottom or his nipples. More often than not the superhero was female, simply because Kyle’s underwear drawer contained more girls’ panties than boys’ briefs.

Kyle found that his mother seemed to lose track of the time whenever he played at being Mulan or Pocahontas, and he’d sometimes wear their underwear — and nothing else -- in a conscious bid to stay up late. His mother had never believed that little boys should stay up past midnight; that was a teenage perk, she said. But Kyle did finally break through that temporal barrier when he was nine.

He and his mother had been watching a video she’d rented about Joan of Ark, the medieval French heroine. Kyle had gotten so excited by the battle scenes that he insisted that he be able to dress just like Joan.

They stopped watching the video long enough to dress him in his Halloween tights, in one of his mother’s peasant blouses, her Gucci belt, and her patent leather shoes (because of their outsized buckle). His unisex hairstyle already looked like Joan’s boyish cut, and so needed a few brush strokes to be pronounced "perfect for a French knight." As he was already wearing his Pocahontas panties and cami, Kyle had not a single item of male clothing -- unless you counted the aluminum foil that Barb wrapped around his torso as Joan’s body armor.

Even the "armor" didn’t look masculine, for Barb applied several extra layers of the foil to the boy’s pectorals, saying as she did that the armor wouldn’t otherwise look like Joan of Ark’s. She didn’t make the breasts too perky or prominent, but he clearly had a "rack" when viewed from the side. Thus attired, and thrusting a wooden sword skyward in a militant pose, Kyle beamed as Barb took several photographs, including some profiles.

The pictures with a side view she kept for herself; Kyle could see them when there was no risk of his panicking over the first photos of his bust line. Those taken head on she gave to Kyle, who thought them a hoot; for half a year they had pride of place on his bedroom bulletin board.

The photos taken, they watched the Maid of Orleans go into battle several times, for Kyle insisted on seeing it the video twice through that night. He thus got to stay up to one a.m. — an achievement that he thought of as a significant milestone in his coming-of-age.

After midnight, Barb, bored by the movie’s second run, silently studied "Joan of Ark," her macho son. She noted that the parts he liked best were the battle scenes and the burning of Joan at the stake.

She wondered why he wanted to watch the movie twice. Barb, reflecting on his decision that morning to wear his "I want to stay up late" Pocahontas panties, concluded that Kyle was simply determined to breach the midnight barrier, and that he would have found some way or another to do it. Still, it was interesting that he chose to close a chapter in his boyhood by opening a new one in his "girlhood."

For the first time Kyle had actually consciously dressed as a female — and as a female heroine, to boot. Barb was thrilled by Kyle’s androgyny. She now believed he was going to grow up into a man who’d admire strong women and possibly marry one.

If all went as she hoped, Kyle would always see himself as male, but would be able to share everything with his wife — cooking, childcare, lingerie, and make-up. There would be no artificial gender barriers in her son’s home. Or that was the plan at least.

The plan went awry. Kyle had never again dressed as a female, and as his tastes in clothing "matured," he had gradually refused to wear girls’ underclothes. He still didn’t realize that his mother had put him into panties; indeed, the suspicion never surfaced. Rather he decided that only a sissy wore — in succession -- underpants with teddy bears or cartoon lions on them, next any sort of undershirt, then any underpants without a y-front, and finally, any sort of brief. He had begun to rebel against his mother’s taste in underwear when he was ten, and by the time he was thirteen he wore only boxer shorts.

The boxer rebellion had by the age of fourteen produced a teenage boy whom his mother still admired, yet found profoundly disappointing. What did she admire? His great sense of adventure. Kyle was willing to try anything at least once. And he laughed at danger. Indeed, it seemed that the fatherless boy was constantly trying to prove that he was no mommy’s boy, that he’d accept any dare and take any risk.

There seemed to be no sport too extreme for Kyle, who loved to rock climb, snowboard and ski — on snow, water, on soapy water in a hallway. At school his favorite sport was platform diving because it involved the most risk, especially for a boy who always insisted on being the first to try a twist or a flip, even though most of his friends had more natural ability at diving.

Kyle had also been inseparable from his skateboard since he received it on his twelfth birthday, and he liked to weave his way through traffic on his way to the skateboard park where he always seemed about to launch himself into free falling space.

Barb had to admire Kyle’s raw courage, but she disapproved of the risks he took. She thought him foolhardy at times, and she sometimes wondered whether he’d survive his teen years. He had had several accidents, and in three short years had broken a collarbone, a leg, and an arm. Barb simply didn’t buy his excuse that he was, each time, simply unlucky. She saw a pattern of recklessness, and wondered if she somehow were to blame for it.

Had he somehow known or understood that she had been trying to feminize him? Is that why he had become so cock-of-the-walk? Or had his boxer rebellion been the inevitable, logical assertion of puberty by a boy who had no father to guide him into manhood more safely? As she observed what Kyle had become by age fourteen, Barb rued not having asked for a Big Brother to help her son adjust to puberty before he had himself turned it into a game of survivor.

If things didn’t change, Barb feared for her son’s life. He seemed determined to go higher and faster until he broke more than his leg. For the past two months he had been pleading with her for a moped, a motorized bike that fourteen-year-olds could drive on Iowa’s public roads, including the city streets of their native Des Moines. After that, he’d want a motorcycle, Barb knew. He’d keep upping the bet on his life, until he crashed into a wall doing 100 miles an hour.

Of course, a moped couldn’t go more than thirty miles per hour, and it in theory it had to stick close to the curb; but Barb knew that Kyle would somehow find a way to get into danger — for example, by running red lights and by weaving between cars at full speed to execute a left turn.

"Execute?" Why had she thought of that dreadful word? Actually, Kyle had just used it, and by doing so had brought her back from her reverie to their real time argument. "Execution" is what he thought should be done to all sorts of people these days. He had become so terribly judgmental — just like the average teen. So who was it that should be executed this time?

Why it was Calvin Klein, according to Kyle.

Her son didn’t care how many women Klein dated, he must be a fag, for didn’t he design men’s underwear that flaunted their sexuality and women’s underwear that obscured theirs? Kyle was back on the warpath about girls’ underwear, still trying, in effect, to deny that he could possibly have been masturbating over the underwear ads in the Sunday newspaper when his mother had interrupted his "reading."

"So let me understand. Your basic point, Kyle, is that gay and lesbian fashion designers have tricked women into wearing men’s clothes?"

"Yup," he vigorously nodded. "Girls these days go around looking just like guys. It’s one big homo plot."

"Kyle, don’t use that sort of language. One more bigoted remark out of you, young man, and you’ll have to go to your room."

Then, before he had an opportunity to exile himself, Barb set her trap. "You’re simply wrong in any case. Even if girls are now wearing gray cotton underwear and blue jeans, they are, I assure you, definitely wearing girls’ clothes. Are you saying that girls’ clothes are so masculine these days that a boy could wear them and that no one, not even his friends, would know he was dressed like a girl?"

"He wouldn’t be dressed like a girl. That’s the point," Kyle objected. "That boy could find all sorts of boys’ clothes in any girls’ store. There’d be sweatshirts or sweaters, blue jeans, sports socks and sneakers. All boys’ stuff. A boy could easily do all his shopping in the girls’ department and no one would know he was doing it. And that’s the problem. Girls these days are un-sexed."

"Let me get this straight, Kyle, if such screwy thinking could be considered ‘straight.’ You’re telling me that a boy — you, for example, could find several different outfits — say, four or five outfits — that you could wear to school, and no one would suspect that you’re dressing like a girl?"

"You don’t get it. I would be dressing like a boy. No one would know I had bought the clothes in the girls’ department of the stores."

It was time to spring the trap. "That being the case, Kyle, I assume you would not object to an experiment."

"What experiment?" he warily asked.

"This experiment — that you wear girls’ clothes every day for one month, including to school. You’d get to pick the clothes. They can be as masculine-looking as you want, as you can find, as long as you find them in the girls’ department of Macy’s."

Kyle’s mouth gaped open. He couldn’t figure out his mother. Sometimes she was really strange. "Jeez, adults!" he sighed. "Why would I agree to wearing girls’ clothes for a month? Why would I bother? Sure, I could get away with it. It’d be no big deal. But what’s in it for me?"

"A moped, the best Des Moines has on offer," Barb quietly replied.

"A moped? You’re saying if I dress in girls’ clothes for a month I get a moped? And what if I don’t want to do that? Are you saying I don’t get the moped if I don’t dress up like a dumb girl?"

Barb, her arms folded across her breasts, nodded, "Yes, Kyle, no dress-up, no moped."

"But why?" he whined.

"Because," Barb said, "I don’t like your attitude of late. It’s sexist. I think your disdain for the way we women dress is just the tip of the iceberg. If you don’t change your ways, young man, you’re going to end up being either a crummy husband or dead, or both. This foolish conversation sums up the problem. You’re so old-fashioned in your thinking about women that you won’t even allow their clothes to evolve. Well, Kyle, it’s like this: if lesbians have conned girls and women into wearing men’s clothes, then you shouldn’t have any problem wearing the clothes yourself. And if you do it for one month, you get a moped at the end of the month."

"But why do I have to wear girls’ clothes to get a moped? Why? Why?"

"Because," Barb explained, "I think you might become less sexist if you live one month of your life in girls’ clothes, and because I hope that if you become less sexist, then the moped might not kill you. It’s your life we’re talking about saving."

Kyle thought for a moment. He picked up the newspaper and closely scrutinized the lingerie advertisements. Barb patiently waited. Then Kyle spoke: "Okay, I’ll do it, but I have conditions."

"And what might they be, young man?"

"First, that no one else ever knows about this deal. Second, that I choose the clothes, but you actually buy them. And I definitely don’t try anything on in the store. Third, I get to wear pants everyday. No sissy skirts or dresses. And fourth, I choose the moped. It will cost you."

"Agreed. But I too have conditions. First, as I’m not going to have my son wear the same clothes to school day after day, and so you’ll have to agree to our buying at least five different outfits for you. And they can’t all be blue denim."

"How about khaki or black denim?"

"No problem, Kyle. You can even get two pairs of blue jeans if you want, provided they’re different brands. You’ll also need some leather shoes. Not every day can be sneaker day. I have a second condition: I expect you to wear a bra every day."

"A bra?!" Kyle almost shouted. "Whatever for? Why do you want me to wear a bra? That is girls’ clothes, definitely."

"Precisely. I want you to wear the bra so that you’ll never forget, no matter how masculine looking your clothes are, that you are indeed dressed in girls’ clothes. No bra, no deal."

"But everyone will see the bra. Jeez, some guy will be flicking my bra strap!"

"No, they won’t see it, Kyle, because you’ll be wearing a sweatshirt or sweater, something bulky. Only you and I will know about the bra. Besides, pick up the newspaper and you’ll see a type of bra there that will scarcely show. Look. It’s called a sports bra," she said as she pointed to the newspaper ads.

Kyle examined the sports bras carefully, and he decided that they weren’t much different from a sleeveless tee shirt. They seemed designed to hide rather than to reveal a woman’s breasts. The "Cooper Sport" bra seemed especially safe for a boy to wear. "Cooper," he sneered, "I bet it’s another one of those lesbo-homo designers. Yeh, they make bras for boys, not for girls." That image made him giggle.

Giggling, he extended his hand. Kyle and Barb shook on it. They agreed that he would play hooky the next day so that they could have more privacy as they shopped for him in the girls’ department at Macy’s.

As soon as they got home from the store, the experiment would start. One month later Kyle would be allowed to switch back to his boys’ clothes — "if you still want to wear them" Barb joshed — and they’d go shopping for the flashiest, fastest moped the town had on offer.

That night both Kyle and Barb were too excited to sleep. Barb kept asking herself, "Do clothes really make the boy? Was I ever right about that? Why did all those panties and tights not have more effect on the boy? Why is he so sexist and macho? Is it because he never knew he was wearing girls’ clothes?

This time he would know that he was cross-dressing. The bra would constantly remind him, even if the lack of space at his crotch did not. What the boy knew could help him. Girls’ clothes might feminize Kyle enough to save his life, even if he spent the entire month boasting of how masculine he still looked.

As for Kyle, the fourteen-year-old was too sexually excited to sleep. Several times his right hand slipped into his boxers, as his left hand pinched his nipples. Several times he came in great spurts, as he fantasized, over and over, about mounting his moped.

As he mounted it, buck-naked, the moped changed into a raven-haired girl, into the lingerie model who had so aroused and distracted him earlier that day that he had been caught masturbating by his own mother. Confusingly, he came each time prematurely — just as he was unhooking her bra, and not as he hoped, deep inside the raven-haired vixen.

His dreams, half-recalled, were even more perplexing — in them he would cover his nakedness with the panty and bra that he’d taken from the model. He would then roar off into battle. This dream would end with Kyle triumphant, one foot on the chest of a fallen soldier, dressed in chain-mail and — now this was odd — boxer shorts. Kyle had his sword raised high over his head, as the soldiers chanted, "All hail, Joan of Ark."

In Part One, Barb caught Kyle masturbating to a lingerie advertisement. Out of embarrassment, he began to rant against girls’ clothing, with the implication that it was so boyish, so unisex, that there was no way he could have been aroused by it. Barb is disturbed by his sexist language and arguments, and has difficulty figuring out how a mother who had once dressed her son in panties and tights could have produced such a male chauvinist. She fears for his life, so reckless has the fourteen-year-old become. And so, she capitalizes on his desire for a moped (a type of motor scooter) to propose a deal: if he wears girls’ clothes for a month, then he can get the moped. He makes the deal on the understanding that he can choose the clothes. He figures he will be able to find a masculine look, just as long as he wears sweatshirts bulky enough to hide the bras his mother adds to the deal. Kyle sees an easy win; his mother hopes that somehow the knowledge that he is wearing girls’ clothes will tame her boy.

Anything for a Moped? — Part 2 by: Dawn De Winter
Chapter Two: Who Knew at the Mall?

"Take it off. You’ll have to take it off."

"Do I have to, mom? This is so embarrassing. Can’t you just measure me with it on?"

"No, you’re going to have to take your shirt off if I’m going to get an accurate measurement for your bra. If you don’t want to do it now, you’ll just have to do it in the store. Your tee shirt is much too loose. Off it goes."

Kyle started pulling his Black Sabbath tee shirt over his head. He couldn’t believe that he was doing it. This was unreal. His mother had a tape measure in her hand and she was about to measure him for a bra!

Yesterday he’d thought that the most embarrassing thing that could possibly happen to a young teen was to have his mom catch him masturbating. But jeez, this had to be worse. Could anything be worse for a guy than to be measured by his own mother for a bra?

If there was, he couldn’t think of it — that is, until he realized, a drop of sweat forming on his brow, that it might be even worse to have your mother see you wearing a bra. Or worst of all, to have the guys catch you in one at school!

He gulped: "What have I got myself into? Is a moped worth it? Is it worth having to go around in a bra for a month? And what about the panties? Sure, they’ll be no different from boys’ underwear. I’ll see to that. But what if there is some telltale sign? Nah, there won’t be any problem. They’ll never see the panties. So they’re not going to be a problem for me — not unless I get lucky with a girl. Then I’ll have a problem."

Kyle sighed: "I should have such a problem. I’ve never gotten lucky with a girl." And then the oddest notions came unbidden into his head: "If I could get into a girl’s panties, I’d even let her see me wearing panties. If I could unhook her bra, I’d let her unhook mine too."

"What crap," he thought. What kind of girl would want to see a boy in a bra or panties? Something like that would gross out any girl worthy of tongue-kissing."

Kyle was so absorbed in these strange speculations that he had absent-mindedly obeyed his mother’s request that he kick off his sneakers so that she could verify their size. And he was slow to react when she turned over the waistband of his boxers to check his waist size. As usual, the waistband stood proudly on display above his belt.

But he responded quickly to his mother’s comment: "Just as I thought, Kyle, the boxers are much too big for you. Your panties will have to be a size smaller if they’re going to fit you snugly."

"Your panties? You mean my panties? Mom, you just talked about your son wearing panties. That is so incredibly gross. I’m never going to wear panties. I’m never going to wear a bra. You can keep your moped. The deal is off. It is," he loftily said, "extinct."

"In that case, young man, you’d better start hoofing it to school. You’ve already missed your first class. I don’t envy your arriving late, yet again, without a valid excuse. I imagine that you’ve earned some major detention time."

"What do you mean without a valid excuse? Mom, you told me," he whined, "that you’d tell them that I had to stay home today with a high temperature, with a fever."

"But you’re not staying home today, Kyle. You’re going to school because you cancelled our shopping expedition. Do you take me for a fool? Do you Kyle? You don’t think I see through your scheme? First, you make all sorts of outrageous statements about girls’ clothing being something that any boy could safely wear, if he chose, and then when you figure you’ve gotten my goat, then you propose a phony deal: that you’ll wear girls’ clothes secretly for a month to prove how unisex they are."

"And I promised you a moped if you kept the deal. Well, I don’t think there ever was an honest deal. You were just having some fun with your old Mom, gullible Mom, and trying to dupe her into allowing you to play hooky. Well, the jig is up, young man. Off to school you go — and without an explanatory note. I’ll not play your game any longer. Let us see how clever your vice-principal thinks you are."

"But Mom," Kyle pleaded, "I have to have a note. You’ve got to give me some sort of reason for being late or I’ll be put on the truancy list. If I get on that list, I could get switched to the losers’ class for homeroom. I need to give the school a reason for being late."

"All right, Kyle, I’ll write the note. And, since you don’t think you have to keep your word about going shopping, I’m not going to lie for you. We’ll tell them the truth: to wit, that you and I were going to go shopping because you wanted to stock up on girls’ lingerie, but that you subsequently changed your mind. How’s that for a story? It’s the truth, right?"

"You can’t be serious! If I had to give the vice-principal a note like that, I might as well kill myself. My life at high school would be over!" he wailed.

"Come on now. You’re over-dramatizing," Barb said. "You’d be a one-day wonder. They’d probably stop talking about your being a sissy the moment you risked your life on another fool stunt."

Kyle doubted it: once a boy became known as a sissy, his social life was defunct. The computer nerds and the fat girls might befriend him; but no one else would even eat with him.

His own gang would, moreover, be the first to turn against him. They were hypersensitive to sissies; his buddies could smell a fairy one hundred yards away. It was amazing, Kyle reflected, how many sissies his buddies had already detected at the school.

He weighed his options: he could go to school with a note from his Mother saying that he liked to wear girls’ clothing. Non-option! Second, he could go without any sort of note. But that would get him into a heap of trouble, and a lot more than his mother appreciated.

During the past year, her record as a stalwart of the Parent-Teacher Association had slipped, as she had become distracted by her campaign to save the prairie dog from extinction.

She had, as a result, not had the opportunity to learn that Kyle had been intercepting and forging her name onto several advisories about his recent performance and behavior in school. Kyle knew that he was very close to being relegated to the "social promotion" homeroom. He could not risk another suspicious absence.

Obviously, his third option was to forge his mother’s note. But he had never done more than fake her signature. He wasn’t sure that he could write an entire note, especially as his mother was known to be an educated woman who could both spell immaculately and compose a grammatically correct sentence. Kyle wished he could do either.

No, the second and third options were non-options. He needed his mother’s cooperation. He needed her to write that he had been ill, or that he had seen the doctor that day, or anything sensible — anything that did not mention that he had changed his mind about wearing panties to school.

Wearing panties to school — that was his fourth option. And the more he thought about it, the girls’ clothes looked more and more like his only realistic option. Sure, he’d be taking a risk in wearing them. But Kyle relished risky business.

"It will be a cool joke on everyone," he thought. "There I’ll be dressed entirely in girls’ clothes, and no one will know. I’ll fool them all." With a moped waiting for him at the end of the yellow brick road, he was willing to dress like Dorothy. Or rather, he was willing to dress like a modern-day Dorothy — one in drab, unisex clothes. No ruby slippers or pinafores for this boy!

The Wizard of Oz was practically his favorite movie of all time. Images of its characters in drag now tickled his fancy — of Dorothy cross-dressed as the scarecrow, of the Tin Man as the wicked witch, of the Grand Wizard as a munchkin baby in pink nightie and bonnet, of the lollipop guild strutting about in the pink tutus of the lullaby league, and of Dorothy, once again, this time as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North.

"How odd to think just now of Dorothy dressing up as Glinda," the boy muttered. "What’s so funny about that? A girl dressed like a woman? Where’s the joke? Big Deal!"

Kyle might have thought it a big deal had he been able to retrace his train of thought. It had begun with his conceit of himself as a modern Dorothy, one dressed as a boy, on the way to Oz to ask for a moped. The fantasy had ended, however, with Dorothy dressed as a beautiful redhead, garbed in a six-foot wide dress of pink sequined chiffon, with diaphanous puff sleeves, in a towering glass crown on her head, and a fairy wand in her hand. Where did Kyle end, and Glinda commence?

It won’t do, thought Kyle, to finish my fantasy with Dorothy wrapped in lace and satin; and so he tried to imagine the Cowardly Lion as a man. But he couldn’t do it. "There’s no way," sneered the boy, "that sissy could ever become a man."

Just then Barb returned. She had gone to find her purse. If he were going to attend school today, he’d need his lunch money. She offered a five-dollar bill to Kyle. No fool, he took it before asking, "What’s the bill for? I don’t need any lunch money today."

"What do you mean, Kyle? You are not going to stay home. That’s a non-starter. You must go to school today."

"Can’t I go shopping with you instead?"

"Shopping? What sort of shopping? In what part of the store?" Barb asked, as she interpreted Kyle’s smirk as a sign that they were indeed headed to the girls’ department.

"Well, you know, to the girls’ part."

"And what will be buying for you, Kyle, in the girls’ part of the store? I’d like a short list."

"Well, you know — tee shirts, socks, jeans …"

"And?" Barb pressed.

"And underwear."

"By underwear, you mean your bras and panties, right, Kyle?"

"Yeh, I guess."

"Kyle, just so we don’t waste our time and my money today, I want you to promise me right now that you will wear all the girls’ clothes we buy, including panties and bras, for an entire month, starting the moment we get back from the store. Agreed? Do I have your word?"

"I swear it. It’s cool."

Barb hustled Kyle out of the house, into the car, and into the girls’ department of Sears before he could change his mind, yet again. Their first stop would, in theory, be their easiest — jeans and pants. Its salesclerk was a gum-chewing, flirtatious teen. "Chelsea’s my name," she breezily said, "and what’s yours?" she unexpectedly asked Kyle.

He hesitated, then prevaricated: "Uh, Dirk. My name is Dirk."

"And is this your mom, Dirk? Is she helping you to shop?" Chelsea giggled.

Kyle’s cheeks reddened like a cheap tart’s. Both the women noticed, Chelsea’s eyebrows rising in surprise. Barb came to her son’s rescue: "My son … Kirk always gets embarrassed when I drag him along shopping, this time on behalf of his twin sister … Kyla. She needs some clothes, and he’s helping me to pick them out. Isn’t that sweet of him?"

"Kirk, or is it Dirk? I didn’t quite catch your name. Is Kyla an identical twin of yours, the same in every respect?"

The teasing upset Kyle sufficiently that he blurted out: "My name’s Dirk. Duh, we’re not identical twins. That should be obvious to anyone. We were just born at the same time."

This explanation might have sufficed, had not Barb been saying simultaneously that her son’s name was Kirk.

With a huge smile, Chelsea turned to Kyle and in a voice dripping with honey and venom asked, "Well, Kirkdirk, should we start with some jeans? We’ve got some boot cut Levis here that would, I dare say, look good on either you or your born-at-the-same-time, not-quite-identical twin Kyla."

Chelsea looked him over, rather archly, then added, "Judging from you, Kirkdirk, your sister has a 26-inch waist. Here, why don’t you try these on? The change room is over there?"

"Mo-o-o-m!"

"Chelsea, it’s Chelsea, right? We’re not buying clothes for my son. They’re for my daughter. Do you understand? As for you, Kirk, stop fooling around. Why on earth did you tell Chelsea that your name is Dirk?"

He shook his head, then mumbled, "Just joking, I guess."

Chelsea was unfazed. She told Barb, "Of course, madam. I was just thinking that we’d have better luck getting the size right if Kirkdirk — oh sorry — if Kirk tried the jeans on for his sister. The change room is over there."

Barb turned to Kyle: "Son, would you be willing to try the jeans on to help out?"

"No way. Ask me that one more time and I’m out of here."

"That’s okay, madam. Boys are shy in this department. They’re terrified someone will think the clothes are being bought for them. Isn’t that silly?" She whipped out her tape measure, and before Kyle could react, had lassoed him with it.

"Yep, Kyla must have a 26-inch waist, and since she’s unlikely to be very hippy, these 14G jeans will suit her best. If she were a bit more mature, we’d need a 16G to handle her hips. But then she doesn’t appear to have much in the way of hips."

Chelsea kept up this patter as Kyle bought two pairs of Levi jeans, two pairs of tan-colored, cotton cargo jeans, and a pair of charcoal-gray carpenter pants, and finally, a pair of khaki tan corduroys, with five pockets and a slight flare on the leg.

All six were, as Kyle hoped, passably male, as were seven pairs of cotton socks. The hooded fleece outwear also seemed male enough. The color — light blue — wasn’t cool, Kyle sadly noted, but at least its front zipper, neutrally placed, did not take the side of one gender in the fashion game.

Despite Chelsea’s ribbing, Kyle was gaining confidence that he could pass as a male in girls’ clothes. When he discovered that there were plenty of tee shirts, short- and long-sleeved, in white, in black and in earth tones, he cracked a big smile. Several fleece shirts, crewneck, with jersey knit sleeves and a zip front completed his "look."

As she surveyed the growing pile of clothes, Barb decided that Kyle was going to look like a tomboy. She made a mental note to herself to remove any telltale labels, but she had to admit that Kyle was right: There were lots of unisex tee shirts and jeans.

As Chelsea observed the exchange of signals between mother and son, she had no remaining doubt that Kirkdirk was going to be wearing these clothes. "How odd?" she thought. "I always thought that cross-dressers went around looking like Vegas showgirls. I never imagined they might buy this kind of unisex stuff."

She decided that she’d have to look more closely at the labels on clothes worn by the men she met, to make sure that she didn’t accidentally date a cross-dresser.

"But would that be so bad?" she wondered. "Wouldn’t it be kinky to have sex with a boy who looked 100% male, even though he’d bought everything in this very department?"

With a malicious chuckle, she decided she’d buy her kid brother some girls’ jeans for his next birthday. "Would he be able to tell?" she asked. "Wow, what if he couldn’t? What a hoot if he actually wore them to school!"

"Back to business — I have to close the sale with this sissy first." As she rang up the clothes, she joked about their unisex look: "Madam, is it wise to go shopping with your son? Kirk seems to have talked you into buying some really masculine-looking clothes for your … daughter … Dyla. Oh well, a bit of perfume and the right lipstick and makeup will do wonders. Kirk, I’m sure, will help you pick out some suitable scents and shades. Won’t you, Kirk?"

He grunted. In fact, Kyle had nothing to say to Chelsea. He hoped never to talk to her again. As they headed off to footwear, Kyle grimaced as he heard, faintly, a whispered goodbye from Chelsea: "Farewell, sweet Kirkdirk. I do hope you like your new clothes."

Barb and Kyle did not spend long in the shoe department, for he made it clear that he could easily find the same $150 sneakers on the girls’ display tables, as on the boys’. To save money, she agreed that he could wear his own shoes to school. That put a sock on the deal.

Lingerie was quite another matter, especially as Chelsea had found an opportunity to whisper her suspicions to its clerk, Melanie, while Barb and Kyle were browsing through shoes. Melanie also had a playful streak: Advised that Kirkdirk was, inexplicably, selecting the drabbest clothes he could find, she was determined to help, as she later told her girlfriends, "the little fairy to grow his gossamer wings."

Melanie figured that a boy, any boy, even a boy who secretly craved to cross-dress, would be anxious to spend as little time as possible wandering in public through girls’ lingerie. He’d think everyone was looking at him, and that everyone considered him a pervert.

So Melanie decided to take her time, as act as though Kirkdirk wanted to spend his entire morning browsing through girls’ underclothes. Her plan was to steer him through the areas with the most lavender, baby blue and pink, with the most silk, lace and satin.

As though deaf, she would act as though the twin sister actually wanted to be ultra-feminine, and to wear slips, half-slips, garter belts and nylons. She would even make sure they’d linger at the breast prosthetics for women who had surgery. "By God, he’ll see it all. I bet the little sissy gets an erection."

The plan went off without a hitch, especially after Melanie began to act merely confused — she lamented that they had changed the location of everything during her vacation. She was certain that the plain, full-cut cotton briefs were somewhere around here. Maybe over there, you know, on the other side of the teddies and sheer sleepwear.

At each stop, Melanie insisted that Kirk feel the material: "Now Kirk, if you’re going to help your mom shop for your twin sister, then you’re going to have to be less shy about touching the fabric. Your twin sister is going to want her slips to be silky smooth. Isn’t that soft? Good, you agree. Do you think she’d like it?"

No, Kirk didn’t think that his sister Kyla would like any of the slips or stockings, and had no interest in any of the pastel colors, and especially not in shades of pink.

And yet Kirkdirk seemed to like the clothes. To her amusement, Melanie noted that his fingers lingered longer and longer each time she asked him to test an undergarment for softness; and the fingers were even beginning to caress the material. To her dismay, Melanie couldn’t discern whether he was getting sexually aroused, for his pants were simply too baggy.

"It’s too bad that Kyla doesn’t like pink satin," Melanie reflected, "for Kirkdirk seems quite drawn to that bra."

"That satin bra is part of a bra-and-panty set. It’s just $25 a set, a bargain really. Should I put aside a couple of pairs for Kyla?" Melanie coyly asked.

Kyle dropped the bra as though his fingers had been stung by a wasp. Both women tsked-tsked as it fell onto the floor. Embarrassed, he went on the attack: "Mom, I’m fed up with shopping for clothes for Kyla. I want to eat."

Barb knew she’d never get Kyle back into the lingerie department, and so she insisted that they finish their shopping first. However, she knew they’d have to speed up: "Kyla, I’m afraid, only wears cotton, and only drab colors. It’s a pity, isn’t it, that modern young girls don’t like to dress up in frills, satin and pink? Alas, they want to look so masculine."

They found their way to the section where Kyle could buy a mix of high-stretch white, black and gray sports bras by Hanes, Jockey and Klein, as well as matching cotton panties.

As Kyle was in quite a hurry, he didn’t pay a lot of attention to the cut of the panties: some were high-cut, others bikinis, still others boy-leg. As all of the panties had a male counterpart, he considered them masculine enough, though perhaps he should have taken the time to throw out the two panties whose waistbands proclaimed them as being designed "for girls."

Melanie stalled. She wasn’t going to ring up this sale until Kirkdirk had bought some brightly-colored panties. He became increasingly agitated as she made small talk with Barb. He wanted out of there! When Melanie saw that he’d agree to almost anything just to get out of girls’ lingerie, she sprang her trap.

Blocking Kyle’s path to the exit, she said, "These Jockey briefs are especially popular these days. They’re very masculine-looking, for as you know, blues and the greens are men’s colors. Still, when one puts two shades of blue stripes together or two shades of green stripes together, I suppose they’re feminine enough — or at least they’d look feminine on a girl with the right hips. Given her rather masculine taste, I bet Kyla would love these briefs. Do you agree, Kirk? The blue and the green would, I think, cap off your shopping."

Desperate to leave (his bladder was now adding to his woes), Kirk nodded yes, and uttered not a peep as Melanie added the companion bras to the pile, as well as, without really asking, a two-toned orange panty-and-bra combination.

Kyle would have rejected it. Indeed, he was rethinking the purchase of any color that wasn’t black, white or gray, but he was sidetracked by Melanie’s next suggestion, this time to Barb: "Madam, as you know, panties cannot be returned. It would be a shame to buy all these nice outfits and then not have them fit your daughter. Now you say that Kirk and Kyla are about the same size. Why not, then, have him try on one of the Jockey-brand bras and panties for fit?"

Melanie then shoved the black Jockey combo at Kyle and motioned towards a curtained room — "You can change over there. Give me a call when you’ve put on the bra and the panty, and I’ll be right over to check the fit."

"NO way!" he rasped to Barb, "There’s no way I’m not going to let some saleslady see me in a bra!"

Barb knew he wouldn’t change his mind, but she did worry about the cost of the lingerie he’d selected. Sure, they’d measured him that morning for a bra, but she’d forgotten her notes at home. And besides, he had seemed then to come between two sizes — between a size 14 and 16.

She had been unnerved to see the bills mount. There was too much money at risk to be thrown away if he couldn’t wear any of the bras, if none of them fit. It really would be best, she thought, if he could actually try on a bra before they bought the lot.

"Melanie, given Kirk’s attitude, I think I’m going to have to take one of the bras home to fit his sister. She’s been growing a lot of late, and I am no longer sure what fits her. So why don’t you ring up one of the bra-and-panty combos and I’ll take it home for her to try on. Meanwhile, could you set aside the bras and the panties that we’ve selected? I assure you we’ll be back for them before the day is out."

"Yes, I’m sure," jeered Melanie silently. "Just as soon as Kirkdirk can try the bra on for fit — and probably for his jollies as well."

She then said to Kyle and Barb, "The orange combo is the most in demand. I’m sure you’ll be taking that, as it’s too popular for me to set aside. I’ll ring it up immediately for you." And so she did.

It was, therefore, a two-toned orange bra-and-panty set that Kyle took with him into the men’s washroom at the adjoining mall. His mother was waiting nearby with their many purchases.

He was embarrassed to be carrying girls’ underwear with him — never mind wearing it! — and he was still smarting over his most recent embarrassment: A woman had glared at him after overhearing his mother’s whispered instructions on how to put on the bra. Kyle heard not a word of instructions after he noticed the woman’s glare.

Locked in a toilet stall, Kyle first emptied his bladder. He then kicked off his shoes, and dropped his jeans and boxers onto the ground. Half naked, he rushed to put on the panties. In his haste he tangled his left leg in the wrong opening and fell with a thud against the adjoining partition. More haste, more waist-adjustment as he put the panties on backwards. Finally, he got it right with the help of the label.

Downward he looked, anxious to see if the panties looked manly enough. Yes and no. Yes, aside from the sissy color, there wasn’t anything about the panties that yelled out "girl’s underwear."

Yet there was something not quite masculine about them. For one thing, their high cut showed off a lot of leg — a lot more skin than a hairless fourteen-year-old boy would normally expose.

A man, Kyle reflected, wanted to show off his hairy legs, but the legs of a young teen — about as hairy as an eggshell — were best kept under wraps. After all, hairless thighs were — Kyle had to admit as he stared at them — rather feminine.

Even more unnerving was the sight of his pubes — the cut of the panties seemed to accentuate how little pubic hair he had yet grown. Indeed, his whole groin was dismayingly feminine-looking, for the tight knit of the panties compressed rather than displayed his male genitalia.

"Jeez, I can hardly see my dick," Kyle confessed, as he hurriedly rearranged himself to give it more prominence. Even then, the panties didn’t look quite male. He tried to figure what made them look so feminine. And that day he couldn’t puzzle it out.

Only later did he realize that none of his friends and none of the jocks wore bikini briefs. They all wore boxers. His body therefore looked very odd, even abnormal, because his underwear seemed designed to cover as little as possible. Fourteen-year-old boys normally tried to lose their scrawny physiques and unwelcome erections in loose-fitting clothes.

Off went two layers of boys’ shirts. Then came the sports bra. As he struggled with it, Kyle wished he had listened more to his mother’s instructions. It took a while to figure out which of the three holes was designed for his head, and then he wasn’t sure whether he should step into the bra, pulling it up the length of his body, or pull it down over his head.

After a couple of false starts, Kyle finally had wiggled into the bra. And then for the first time in his life the boy looked down at his bra. For the first time he felt a bra strap on his shoulders. He twisted and turned, trying to see how the bra and panties looked from behind. He wished he had a mirror.

He was astonished by how feminine his body now looked, even though the unpadded sports bra added no more than half an inch to his bust. As he gazed at his orange lingerie, his white athletic socks suddenly seemed impossibly incongruous. With the toes of one foot, he stripped the other of its boyish cover; and then, vice-versa.

As he removed his socks, he had a Proustian rush: Into his mind surged an image of a much younger Kyle refusing to wear his boys’ slippers whenever he was wearing his superheroine underwear. Briefly, he wondered: "Did I actually want to wear that Pocahontas, Catwoman stuff?"

Before he could summon an answer from either the child’s past or the teen’s present, he inadvertently caught sight — for the first time — of the hole bored through the metal partition. It was an eye-width in diameter. It permitted, he now noted, the occupant of one toilet stall to spy on his neighbor.

"Gosh, I’m the neighbor and I’m standing here in this sissy gear. Has anyone been watching? Gosh, I hope not. I’ll die of frigging shame."
Kyle bent down to look more closely at the spy hole. As his eye neared it, it made unmistakable, unblinking contact with another eye. Kyle had eyeballed enough girls to know that the eye was doing more than merely staring at him. Yes, it was definitely leering.

Kyle blinked. Then he heard a disembodied voice whisper, "You’re real pretty, sweetheart, in your panties and bra. Did you shoplift them? I bet you did. Can I come over to your stall? You’ll love it. I know how to make you feel like a real woman."

Kyle was speechless in horror.

"You know you want it, honey. There’s no risk if we’re careful, if we’re real quiet. You’re so pretty in that outfit, my little sweetie. Just blow me a kiss, and I’ll come right over to treat you like a woman."

"Buzz off, you disgusting pervert, or I’ll call for the cops."

Kyle didn’t have much more to say, as he was concentrating mightily on getting his sweatshirt, tee shirt, pants, boxers and sneakers back on, and his bra and panties back underneath and out of sight. The faster he tried to get dressed, the more he fumbled with the clothes.

The man spoke: "You’re right, honey. It’s too risky here. But I know a private place. I’ll meet you just outside the washroom. You’ll know me, little girl, by my eyes."

Then Kyle heard the stall door bang open. Then the door of the washroom banged shut. The boy seemed to be alone.

Kyle didn’t know what to do. Was this creep really waiting for him just outside the washroom door? Kyle blocked the spy hole with a wad of toilet paper, and then sat on the toilet, not knowing what to do next. He waited and he waited.

He waited for what? He wasn’t quite sure; but he did know that there was no way he was going to leave either the stall or the washroom until he knew for sure that the creep was no longer lurking about.

Barb became alarmed as the minutes clicked by. Alarming questions began to plague her: "What’s keeping Kyle? Where is he? Why hasn’t he returned from the men’s washroom? How long can it take a boy, even a clumsy one, to try on a bra? What if he met someone, someone who isn’t nice?"

Worried, she sought out Hank, a security guard, and asked him to check out the men’s washroom. "My son Kyle has been in there a really long time. Maybe he’s been sick or …. Please tell me he’s all right."

Hank headed over to the men’s washroom, taking time only to shoo a middle-aged man in tennis shoes away from its entrance. "If I see that weirdo one more time near the washroom, he’s history," the guard muttered. Inside, he found the room empty, but one of the stalls was suspiciously locked.

Why suspiciously? Because there were no feet to be seen. Nor was there any sign or sound of movement.

Hank banged noisily on the stall door, scaring Kyle half to death. "Come on out of there, Kyle. Your mom’s really worried about you. It’s time we got you back to her. I think we both know why you’re lurking in there, don’t we son? And I’m going to have to tell your mom some of the truth — for your own good."

The guard continued as they exited the washroom: "Look, son, I know what goes down in public washrooms, ‘specially this one. Let me tell you–there are lots of better, safer ways to make some money. Why don’t you try flipping burgers? It’ll pay less, but son, it’s honest, decent work. Don’t sell your body and soul for a play station."

They soon found Barb. Hank didn’t take long to wipe the joy from her countenance. "Lady, did you know that your son — Kyle’s his name, right? — that your son Kyle has been loitering in the men’s room? I didn’t find him standing, innocent-like, at the sink or a urinal. He was hiding in a toilet stall. You understand what I am saying, lady?"

Barb wasn’t sure: "Hiding? Do you mean he was in danger?" Then she turned to Kyle to ask, "Were you hiding from some rough boys? Was someone after you?" And then to Hank: "Did you see the ruffians? Were you the one to chase them away?"

Kyle shook his head dumbly. There was no way he was going to talk about his experience until Hank had gone away.

And so, Hank had the next word: "Lady, the only one I saw, other than Kyle here, was one of the lowlifes who loiter in the public washroom in order to pick up men and boys for …. Well, I can’t bring myself to say the word, lady, in front of a female personage such as yourself. But you must know about what I’m speaking, ‘specially on account of what your son likes to do."

"My son likes to do?"

"Lady, I don’t presume to tell you how to raise your son. But it’s my job to stop men and boys like Kyle from loitering in the washroom. I’ve got to observe the decencies."

"Yes, but what has that to do with Kyle?"

"A lot, lady. I suggest you get him one of them hippotherapists, and maybe Kyle can be saved. Maybe it’s not too late. After all, his wrist seems straight to me. If the therapy don’t work, then you’d better get him into one of them queer groups. Then he can find another boy like himself, someone he can date. That way he’ll stay out of trouble."

"A boy Kyle can date?"

"A boy I can date?"

"Yes, lady. Look, Kyle, you’re going to get into a heap of trouble hanging out at the toilets. Lady, I’m not saying Kyle’s doing it yet, but you should know that teenage hustlers hang out at that washroom. Men like the creep I found hanging out at the doorway would pay Kyle twenty, fifty bucks for a blowjob."

"Now, I’m certainly not suggesting that Kyle has done anything improper. I’m sure if you checked his pockets, you’d find them empty. But lady, given the sort of boy he is, you know — the queer sort — he should avoid temptations."

"Are you intimating that my son is gay and that he sells his body for sex?"

"Lady, I don’t know what "intimading" means. I’m just inferring a few things to you. There are facts of life, and it never pays to bury your head in the sand like an Australian when there’s danger near. I’m just saying your son should look for girly boys at one of them places reserved for his kind of folk. That’s all I’m saying."

And with that, Hank tipped his hat and walked away, puffed with pride that he’d tried to help the little queer. "He’s lucky I found him. Jack would’ve demanded half the money he’s making, as well as free sex." Yep, some security guards were more virtuous than others.

As Hank strutted off, Kyle finally deemed it safe to talk: "Mom, I’ve got to tell you what really happened."

"Hush, Kyle. Not here. It’s time for lunch. Let’s find a quiet corner of a restaurant, one with a bit of privacy." (With a lot of privacy," Barb gloomily thought.) "Then we can have a heart-to-heart, son-to-mother talk. I can see we have lots to talk about. Lots."

As they walked to the least popular of the mall’s restaurants, Kyle was unusually silent. Indeed, he was too mortified to speak. He could not fathom the morning’s events.

All he had done was to put on panties and a bra for the first time — just to determine what size they should be. It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal. But what happened then? Everyone started acting like he wanted to dress as a girl! "Talk about stupid people!"

"Those girls’ clothes must be cursed," he decided. "The very instant I got that bra around my chest, a pervert magically appears in the next stall. It was like some genie was out to get me."

"The creep actually thought I wanted to be treated like a girl and that I was dying to have sex with him! With him! With another guy! Aargh!"
"Next that rent-a-cop shows up and he has the nerve to accuse me of being a prostitute! And he didn’t even see the bra and panties! He must have smelt them! What must mom be thinking?"

Kyle looked every so often warily in her direction, each time using just the corner of his eye. He was so embarrassed he didn’t want to look into anyone’s eyes, least of all his mom’s.

What was Barb thinking? She was rehearsing, over and over, the speech she intended to make as soon as they had settled into the restaurant.
"Should I just come right out with it? Should I just say, right out, ‘Son, if you’re gay, that’s fine by me. You’re my pride and joy. You’ll always be. Your boyfriends will always be as welcome in our home as your girlfriends would have been, had you had any." No, that last line didn’t come out right. She’d have to work on it.

She wished that their chat could stop at the subject of gay pride. But there was obviously a lot more to talk about: "How am I going to ask if he’s been hustling? How do I ask my teenaged son if he’s been selling his body to dirty old men?"

And there were even tougher questions to ask, for it appeared that her son might not only be gay, not only hustling, but also be a transvestite. Or at least he was a cross-dressing wannabe. After all, he had already tricked her into buying him his first girls’ outfits! And at this very moment he was wearing both a bra and panties — and in the most feminine colors he had selected, to boot!

"Oh My God," Barb fretted, "As soon as he got into girls’ lingerie, he started peddling his body to strange men in a public washroom! What kind of future will he have?"

Barb had to wipe her brow, as she heavily perspired at that thought that Kyle’s future might be even worse than the dread present: "What if Kyle’s a transsexual? Don’t tell me he’s a transsexual too!"

Visions of samba-dancing Brazilian she-males flooded into her head. Naked but for their tutti-frutti hats, they were advertising their wares for the "gentlemen" prowling for sex in the Bois de Boulonge. "Oh my God, is Kyle destined to dance in Paris?"

Barb shuddered at the prospect. She was being shaken to her liberal core by these nightmares. How much was she going to have to accept? Did she have the strength to accept Kyle for whatever he really was?

As she looked guardedly at her son, she thought, "Is it possible that a boy who looks so macho will end up a homosexual, transvestite, transsexual prostitute? Can you be both homosexual and transsexual? Can a transsexual truly cross-dress? Doesn’t it all cancel out?"

"I’m raving, absolutely raving," Barb concluded. "How can I help Kyle if I don’t calm down? I’ve got to keep telling myself that he’s probably just a gay boy who wants to put on a dress. I can handle that. I’m not a castrating mother. I’m sure he’ll never want to cut anything off."

If Kyle had known all the thoughts that were whirring through his mother’s head, he probably would have thrown himself in front of the first moped he saw — in an attempt to be run over by it, putting an end to his misery.

Fortunately, Barb was so overcome with emotion when they finally sat down at the restaurant that it was Kyle who spoke first. Barb never got a chance to perturb them both by voicing her darkest fears.

"Mom, you’ve been looking at me strangely ever since that dumb security guard told you I was gay. You didn’t believe him, did you? How could you? No one is straighter than me. No one. I’m a 100% American boy. There’s nothing queer about me. I like girls — a lot."

"Don’t use that word, Kyle. You know I don’t like it." But she was secretly relieved that he had used it. "Maybe my boy’s not gay after all, and if he isn’t gay, well then …."

The dancing Brazilians turned into marching Marines.

Barb had to know for sure: "Kyle, if you’re not gay, then why did that man say you are?"

"Because he found me hiding in a toilet stall, mom!"

"Isn’t that a bit suspicious, Kyle?

"Only if you have a dirty mind, mom," he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. "I was hiding from a pervert who was watching me through a hole in the wall as I changed into the, er, the new clothes. He thought I was a sissy just like him. And he told me he was going to wait for me outside the washroom. I didn’t dare go out there, mom. You understand why, don’t you?"

"If that’s true, Kyle, then why did the security guard not only say you were gay but that you were hustling? You’ve got to tell me the truth, Kyle. The truth I can always handle, but never a lie. The truth, young man."

"I guess he thought I was hustling because men pick up boys in that washroom. Jeez, mom, if I had known that sort of thing happened there, I would never have used the cruddy place. Do you think I’d have taken off all my clothes and then gotten into panties if I knew a creep was watching me? I thought the washroom was empty. And safe."

"Why didn’t you tell the guard about the man who watched you undress?"

"I didn’t get a chance. He judged me guilty without even asking me for my story."

That sort of prejudgment really upset Barb, as Kyle well knew. He now had her back on his side, and after a bit more explanation, she finally capitulated: "Okay, okay, Kyle I believe you’re straight as an arrow. And I am sure you’d never prostitute yourself."

"You seem more certain, mom, that I wasn’t trying to sell my body than that I’m not queer."

"Kyle, stop using that word. It’s just too early to know for certain what your sexuality is. You’re only fourteen, after all."

Barb was just trying to say that it wouldn’t matter to her whether Kyle was gay or not. After all, gay didn’t seem very exotic when compared to the "Brazilian" scenario.

But Kyle understood her to be challenging his masculinity. So he practically shouted — certainly loud enough for the passing waitress to hear — "What possible evidence could you offer even to raise the slightest, remotest possibility that I might be queer?"

That word again. He was asking for trouble.

"Well, Kyle, most "queers" wouldn’t have a girlfriend, would they? You don’t have a girlfriend, right? And a queer, Kyle, would probably find a way to get into girls’ underwear. And there you are. Kyle, I’m sure you’re very straight, but be careful: Someone might call you a ‘queer’."

Kyle was taken aback. He wasn’t sure which was worse — the creep thinking he wanted to get a blowjob, the security guard thinking he was selling blowjobs, or his mother implying that he might want to give a blowjob for free!

When threatened, he always counterattacked, starting with a blatant lie: "It’s not true that I don’t have a girlfriend. I’ve got one at school. It’s not cool to bring your girlfriend home. If you do that, everyone calls you a momma’s boy. But I’ve a girlfriend, all right, and she’s phat."

"She’s fat? That’s not a nice thing to say. Young man, stop insulting people."

"Aw, mom, my girlfriend’s not fat, she’s cool. She’s phat, spelled with a ‘p’."

"So when do I get to see this phat friend, spelled with a ‘p’?"

Kyle needed time to produce a girlfriend for his mother, and so he gave himself a solid month: "You’ll see her as soon as I get my moped."

"Which brings us, Kyle, to the subject of your undergarments and of the several shopping bags of clothes waiting for us in the girls’ department. What’s the real deal with the panties and bras? You do know me well enough, Kyle, to realize that if you want to wear lipstick, makeup and skirts, then it’s all right by me. You’ll still be my son even if you look like a girl."

Kyle saw the waitress straining to hear them talk. Then she winked at him. Yes, she definitely winked at him! This conversation had to cease.

"Mom, I am not trying to look like a girl," he whispered. It’s the exact opposite. I want to look like a boy, no matter what I’m wearing."

"Sure, sure, even when you’re in a dress," he thought he heard the waitress murmur. There — it happened again. She had definitely winked at him!

Kyle played his trump card: "Promise to buy me a moped, and then you can return almost all the clothes we bought today. You’ll come out ahead in money, and you’ll then know for certain that I have no desire, none whatsoever, to wear this" — and then he tugged at his bra strap.

"No, we’ll stick to our original deal. If you want the moped, you’ll have to wear the clothes we’ve already bought, and the underclothes we’re about to buy. That’s the deal. Now stick to it."

There wasn’t much point in letting Kyle off the hook, Barb decided. Whether he loathed, or loved his bra and panties, they still had the potential to tame him. "In any case," Barb reflected, "it will be fun to see Kyle in panties again."

"Does the bra fit? How about the panties?" Barb now asked. The waitress sniggered as Kyle sullenly muttered, "They’re fine. Can we change the topic?"

They could, but not for long, for soon, after a quiet, almost sullen lunch, they were back in the girls’ department, to Melanie’s immense amusement. Chelsea was there too, apparently on her break. She gave Kyle an exaggerated wink. At his insistence, they rushed through the purchase of his lingerie.

As mother and son headed off with two bags filled with his panties and bras, Kyle cringed as he heard both salesgirls blow him an exaggerated kiss, as Melanie called after him, "Do come back, sweet Kyla. Next time we’ll get you into white lace and pink satin."

"This store will never get my business again. Never, never, never again," growled Kyle.

Barb told him to calm down. As she hadn’t heard Melanie’s last remark, she wondered whether he was protesting too much. "What’s the story with that boy? What is it?" There wasn’t much conversation on the way home from the mall. Kyle pouted. Barb mused.

When they got home, it was Barb who broke the silence, for as she took his new clothes out of the shopping bags, she noticed that they were not quite as unisex as they had first seemed. The cargo pants, for example, zippered on the wrong side, the girl’s side, and one of the jeans had, she noted, a plaid hem on each pant leg.

"Now how did he miss that," Barb wondered. "I guess he’ll be able to cover up the zippered fly with his shirttail. And I think I have some cowboy boots that could hide the plaid. But these panties are going to be a problem for him."

"Kyle, the waistband of this panty announces that it’s ‘Jockeys for girls’, and this one says it’s ‘Hanes Her Way’. Didn’t you notice the waist bands?" The last question revealed her newfound suspicion — that Kyle somehow had maneuvered her into enabling him to cross-dress; whereas, she had originally thought she was the grand manipulator. And always had been.

His reaction persuaded her that the purchase had been made in haste: "What!! The waistband tells people they’re panties! I can’t possibly wear them. No way!"

"Relax, Kyle. The stitching is subtle. I noticed it because I had your underwear actually in my hand. No one else will notice it. You didn’t notice it, right?" Again, the suspicion had surfaced — the one that had been gnawing at her ever since the security guard had made his allegations.

Kyle finally calmed down when she reminded him that he normally wore his shirts long, down to his crotch, and could continue to do so. No one would see his telltale waistbands. When he finally calmed down, she risked and got another tantrum by telling about the giveaway zipper and the plaid hems. This time it took him a full half hour to stop venting and hyper-ventilating.

They spent an odd evening. Kyle did some homework in front of the television. Every so often he looked over at his mother, busily removing labels from his girls’ clothes. "Thank God, mom noticed them," Kyle thought. "That was almost a disaster. And those brand names on the panties, and that damn zipper — I’m going to have to remember to wear my shirts long and my jeans high, even if does make me look dorky."

Barb meanwhile was enjoying the evening. The world was unfolding as it should. She could scarcely credit her eyes: A few feet away sat her son dressed, as she knew, entirely in girls’ clothing, from his socks to his bra. Sure, he didn’t look very ultra-feminine in his jeans, black socks and black tee shirt. But everything had been purchased in girls’ wear, and Kyle knew it.

Barb noticed, as Kyle fidgeted, that his bra strap occasionally came into view at his neckline. He’d definitely have to wear an additional layer of clothing, Barb reflected; and even then, he’d have to take care not to move about so vigorously that his bra shifted.

"Kyle, I can see your bra strap. You’re bound to expose it if you don’t learn to move about less boisterously."

"What? The strap is showing??"

"Yes, and it’s bound to show if you move violently back and forth. You’ll have to move more slowly, more gently, and more calmly."

"Do you mean I’ll have to move like a girl?"

"Well, if you want to put it that way — why yes. You’ll have to get used to moving your body more fluidly, with fewer sudden starts and stops. I’d also advise you against tossing a ball around, for the bra is bound to ride up, and then to show, one way or another."

It secretly delighted Barb to be giving this advice. Kyle had a stark choice: to move his body more femininely or to be exposed as wearing feminine underwear. The bra, she decided, had been her masterstroke: It was probably sufficient by itself to suppress Kyle’s animal spirits for a month. But for insurance, and for Kyle’s own security, she thought it best to remind him that he had to keep his trousers hoisted too.

"Kyle," she continued, "not only are you going to have to turning your upper body too quickly, but you’d also better avoid running about too much."

"What’s the reason now?" he moaned. "Are you trying to turn me into a sissy. Not run about? What should I do? Sit around the computer room like a nerd?"

"It wouldn’t hurt you to become more computer savvy. However, suit yourself. But if you run at the school, your girls’ jeans may — like the ones you normally wear — start falling down those narrow hips of yours. If that happens, the other kids might get quite an eyeful of your panties."

"I recommend slow, graceful movements, Kyle, if you want to get through this bet with your macho reputation intact."

He didn’t immediately reply because he was now standing at a wall mirror anxiously studying his appearance. Yes, there was the bra strap showing. And to his alarm, it didn’t take much of a tug to get his jeans down to his ankles. And then, you could see a flash of orange panty. With a shudder, he yanked up his jeans — so tightly to his body that his testicles hurt.

The rest of the evening went quickly, much too quickly for Kyle, as he began to dread the morrow. He now wondered if he had been a wee bit hasty in saying that no one could notice the difference between boys’ and girls’ clothes.

"Could they?" he asked himself over and over again. Though each time he replied in the negative, a knot in his stomach gradually tightened. He went to bed that night feeling mildly feverish.

Barb, overall, had enjoyed the evening. Just before she drifted off to sleep, she recalled the many pleasant occasions when she and Kyle had played together all evening, as the little boy pretended to be a superhero — a superman or a superwoman. Reveries of Joan of Ark, Mulan and Pocahontas flooded over as she began to dream.

Meanwhile, Kyle was lying in bed masturbating — as he had done almost every night since he had hit puberty. Out came the box of Kleenex. His mother, Kyle believed, had bought his story that a teenage boy needed a constant supply of facial tissue in order to clean his pores.

This time his fantasies focused on the girlfriend he now desperately needed to woo. It didn’t take him long to come: A girl on a moped was a powerfully erotic combination.

Once again, he had a troubling, recurring dream. This one began with his fantasy girl speeding by him on a Harley. As she roared past, he caught only a glimpse of her. All he could see was her raven black hair and her deerskin jacket. He had to see her face! So he jumped on his moped and put pedal to the metal. The moped was marvellously fast. Cheetah-like, it steadily overtook the motorcycle.

Eventually he got close enough to his girlfriend to see her face. How odd! It was Pocahontas, the Indian maiden, who was driving the Harley. Whoa! He was now overtaking her too quickly! He tried to brake, but the brakes failed. The moped rammed into Pocahontas.

All then blurred. He seemed to be dying because of the accident. There was a blinding, white light at the end of the high school corridor, and then a heavenly voice. It was the voice of God! And God sounded just like his mother! And what did God say?

"Go toward the light, sweet Pocahontas. There you will find peace."

Each time Kyle awoke with a start. "How strange," he thought after the third awakening, "to be frightened by Pocahontas."

To be continued — in part 3, "Who Knew at School?", Kyle will wear his new clothes to school.

In Parts One and Two, Barb capitalizes on her son Kyle’s desire for a moped (a motor scooter) to propose a deal: If he wears girls’ clothes for a month, then he can get one. He makes the deal on the understanding that he can choose the clothes. He figures he will be able to find a masculine look, just as long as he wears sweatshirts bulky enough to hide the bras his mother adds to the deal. Kyle sees an easy win; his mother hopes that somehow the knowledge that he is wearing girls’ clothes will tame her reckless son. While shopping at the mall for his new clothes, Kyle finds it more difficult than he had expected to keep his cross-dressing a secret: He is teased in the girls’ department and humiliated in the men’s toilets. Barb starts to wonder whose idea it really was for her teenage son to wear a bra and panties. Hers? His? This chapter begins with an account of Kyle’s first day at school in girls’ clothes.

Anything for a Moped? -- Part 3 by: Dawn De Winter
Chapter Three: Who Knew at School?

"So how did the day go? Eventful … uneventful? Did you fool them all, Kyle?"

Barb bubbled with the questions that had been brewing since morning. Though she loved her work as a legal secretary, rarely had the workday seemed so endless. All day long she had counted the seconds until she could learn the initial outcome of their experiment.

As a mother, she wanted to hear good news — which to Barb, would mean that while no one guessed that Kyle was cross-dressing, that he was somehow being "improved" by the experience. Improved in what way? She would have had difficulty putting it in words. But she was looking for any sign that Kyle was no longer on a fast track to trouble.

She had found Kyle moping in front of the television. He was sullen and uncommunicative — not a good sign, though not unusual for a teenager. She pressed him for an answer: "How did it go, Kyle? If it went badly, you’ve got to tell me. This is not something you want to handle alone."

"It went all right, I suppose," Kyle mumbled.

"What’s that supposed to mean?"

"It means that nothing happened. Nothing. No one noticed and no one suspected, just as I told you would happen. How could anyone have known? I was, after all, wearing boys’ clothes, no matter where I bought them."

"So you’re declaring victory after one day, are you, Kyle?"

"Yeh, I guess so. It’s easy to fool them."

"Then why, dear boy, are you not more excited? You usually like to be proven right. Why are you not dancing around me boasting of your wisdom and insight? Why so sombre?"

"Nothing happened, I tell you. Nothing. I’ve rarely had a day that was so boring. Nothing happened," Kyle muttered. And then he sighed.

"Something’s bothering the boy," Barb thought, as he stalked off to his bedroom. She expected him, as usual, to test the limits of her tolerance for loud music. But, remarkably, there was silence. He was clearly brooding about something. But what? What could have happened at school to upset him so?

"Someone must have figured it out — that he was wearing girls’ clothes. Gosh, I hope he had a good explanation for them," fretted Barb. "He’s a clever kid. He must have come up with something. He’s glib enough when he needs an excuse for not doing his chores."

Had something happened? No, nothing much had happened, just as Kyle said. And that was the problem, and for him, a very big problem indeed. His day had been uneventful because virtually everyone had ignored him, including his friends.

There was no way they could have seen through his disguise, for he had carefully picked out the most masculine of the clothes he had bought. Indeed, the Levis he was wearing could have been bought in the boys’ department. And a few years ago the style had even been popular with boys. But it hadn’t been popular lately, at least not with his set. The Levis were far too tight. Only a nerd or a girl wore tight-fitting clothes to the ninth grade at Herbert Hoover High. The boys hid their scrawny physiques under layers of clothes or gigantic tee shirts that would have covered the seat of their pants, had the seat not been sagging halfway down their legs.

Kyle had made a fatal miscalculation: While it was true that the clothes were unisex, Kyle was not dressed like one of the Hoover boys. Nor was he dressed like one of the girls. His look wasn’t so much unisex as asexual.

It didn’t help that Kyle hadn’t noticed whether his panties had a telltale waistband limiting their wear to girls. Hence he had to play it safe all day: To keep his waistband from inadvertently showing, he had hiked his pants tightly into his crotch, and had tightly cinched his belt to keep them riding high. As a result, he was showing too much sock.

But worse, the tight weave of his cotton panties flattened and hid his genitals. Worst, as he normally wore loose-fitting clothes, he hadn’t thought of arranging himself for maximum display. Indeed, he had inadvertently tucked away his penis. His crotch did not, therefore, show ‘too much sock.’ Quite the opposite — he had the basket of a ten-year-old boy — or girl! Kyle looked like a eunuch.

There were a handful of students, girls and boys, who dressed like the new Kyle, but they were loners and losers. All the kids that Kyle respected, all the kids worth knowing, carefully obeyed a dress code — a different one, mind you, for each group of friends or set, but a dress code nonetheless.

Kyle’s outfit flouted all these dress codes. Ominously, the one boy he most resembled was president of the chess club; the one girl, a self-proclaimed lesbian. In a word, Kyle was decidedly un-cool.

As his friends were the most self-consciously cool students in the ninth grade, they were the first to note and to deride Kyle’s new look. A couple of the guys said he must have been toking up when he got dressed that morning. No, he must have been hung over, proffered another. A fourth friend asked him whether he had lost a bet. Yet another wondered, dangerously, whether he had borrowed his clothes from a girlfriend with whom he had been — wink, wink — spending the night.

Fortunately for Kyle, a sixth friend interjected, "No girl would be caught dead in those clothes unless she was a dyke. Did you bed a dyke, Kyle?"

"If he did, that may explain why he looks like someone cut off his dick. At least, I can’t see one," joshed Rob, who resented Kyle’s popularity with the guys.

With that remark, Kyle’s friends all glanced down to check out his crotch. No one was impressed. As their bulky clothing guarded their own secrets, they privately wondered why Kyle wanted to expose his own shortcoming.

Rob made another ‘joke’: "Maybe he’s hidden his dick so that he can attract a dyke. Is that it, Kyle, are you trying to get into a girl’s bra and panties before she figures out that you’re a guy?"

Desperate to end the banter, Kyle snarled, "I don’t think Rob has any idea of how to get into a girl’s panties, unless it’s by wearing them himself." There were a couple of snickers, but the joke fell flat.

"Now why did I say that?" Kyle asked himself. "The last thing I want is for the guys to start wondering about whether one of us is wearing panties. Jeez, if I’m not careful they’re going to start pantsing each other to see who’s wearing what."

Indeed, at that very moment, Derek tried to yank Rob’s pants down, and half-succeeded: Before the boy rescued his drooping trousers, it became clear that he was wearing Harley Davidson boxer shorts. Rob then lunged for Derek’s cargo pants, and his boxers also came briefly into view.

Kyle couldn’t wait around to see who would be targeted next. "This is juvenile," he said. "I’ve got homework to do. I’ll see you in class." He beat a hasty retreat.

"Kyle doing homework? Wow, that dude has become super weird," commented Derek as he adjusted his clothing. "Yeh weird," agreed Rob. There were several heads sadly nodding.

"Come on, guys, we’re talking about Kyle. He’s a player. I don’t know why he’s dressing like a geek today, but I promise you he’ll be back to normal tomorrow," said Kyle’s best friend, Jason, hopefully.

At lunchtime, Kyle found the cafeteria a less welcoming place. He actually had to warn one of the smaller boys away from his place at the table beside Jason, Derek, Rob and the gang. Unaccountably, they had allowed the kid to usurp his place.

When he did finally take his rightful seat, Kyle found it difficult to get into the conversation. No one seemed very interested in the topics he raised, even when he tried to talk about heavy metal bands. He was getting the cold shoulder for some reason.

Even so, Jason challenged him to a friendly game of one-on-one basketball after school. Kyle immediately accepted; Jason was easy to beat, and his sound thrashing should prove to everyone that Kyle was one of the guys, no matter how oddly he dressed.

Yet Kyle fretted all afternoon about the basketball match. Had it been wise for him to agree to a game in which he would be constantly raising his arms above his head? Would he be showing off the top of his panties, as his fleece top rose and his jeans slipped? Even if they weren’t recognized as girls’ wear, what would his friends think of his wearing cotton briefs? None of them did anymore.

Kyle worried even more about his bra. Indeed, it had been bothering him all day. It was always there. He could not forget for a moment that he was wearing it. Always he could feel its presence, as the sports bra hugged his chest. As he moved, it moved.

Kyle became obsessed with the bra, and by the fact that he was sitting in a classroom dressed like a girl. Sure, the clothes looked masculine, but that damn bra kept reminding him that he had acquired them all in the girl’s department. It was the bra that told him that his crotch looked sex-less because he was wearing panties.

As he looked downward, he could swear he could see the bra every time he moved, despite the two layers of clothing encasing it. He also thought he saw a panty line. By two thirty, all he could see were the outline of the bra and panties. His mind had developed x-ray eyes. "Can everyone see them?" he feverishly wondered, as he nervously looked about. Mostly, however, he slouched, hoping to bunch up the material on his tee shirt and fleece top to bury the bra further.

Kyle’s spirits were still slouching as school let out. To be sure, they brightened somewhat when Jason showed up in the corridor with a basketball, but Kyle wondered where the rest of the gang had gone.

"Oh, they’ve all gone over to Rob’s house to shoot pool. His dad just got a new table." Jason replied.

"I didn’t know anything about that," Kyle complained. "No one told me. Did they ask you along?"

"Oh sure, but I’d already promised to shoot hoops with ya, and so here I am," Jason said, as he steered Kyle towards the exit and the basketball courts outside. Of these there were four, three of which were hogged by older students.

The fourth court was, however, being used by three thirteen-year-olds. They looked small enough to move. Kyle reached them first, and so he tried first to get them to see the wisdom of ending their game, but they, having sized him up by his nondescript clothes, refused to budge. Kyle was totally unprepared for such effrontery, for his "heavy metal" look had in the past year allowed him to intimidate younger boys. Stunned, he deliberated his next move.

As he did, Jason took charge. He told the kids to scram. They hastily did, as no one in the eighth grade was willing to rumble with a muscular, older teen wearing black sneakers, sloppy black denim jeans, a massive key chain, and a black, death’s head, armless tee shirt from the national tour of the "Rotting Corpses" heavy-metal band.

Kyle’s game thus started badly — with a withering look of disgust from Jason. And it got steadily worse, as Kyle played like a dork. He blamed the girls’ clothes. Every time he tried to run past Jason, he’d suddenly worried about his pants drooping enough to expose his panties. And he had good reason to fret, for after ten minutes, Jason did mutter, "I can’t believe you’re not wearing boxers. Briefs? Who wears briefs anymore?"

A few minutes later, Jason, having just gone ahead 8 to 2, asked Kyle whether his mother had picked out his underwear that morning. "Cooper Sport? I’ve never heard of that brand, never seen it in a store. Where did your mom buy them for ya?"

"I don’t know where she got them," Kyle answered, as he flubbed yet another shot. "I wore them today to please her. She thinks guys look best in cotton briefs — you know, sexy-looking."

"Well, they don’t help your game any," Jason sneered. "You’re throwing like a girl today. You tell your mom that only geezers and fags wear Jockey briefs these days. You can also inform her," Jason said as he won their first game 11-2, "that her son’s game is only as good as the clothes he wears. And what you’re wearing today is crap."

"Thanks for nothing. A lot you know," Kyle rebutted, as he started their second game. Yet again he undershot the basket.

"Creampuff! You shoot like a sissy girl," razzed Jason.

It was true: Kyle was playing like a sissy. Not only was he running daintily, so as to minimize the chances of his pants falling yet another notch, but he was also panicking each time Jason clutched or grabbed him as Kyle drove for the basket. Early in the game Jason had unwittingly yanked on the back of Kyle’s bra. He had yelped with pain when the bra snapped back into position.

Thereafter, Kyle avoided close contact, for he was terrified that Jason would figure out his most dangerous secret if the boy got his hands on it a second or third time. As Jason realized that Kyle was avoiding the rough-and-tumble they usually enjoyed, he became openly disdainful of Kyle’s game. Abandoning finesse, Jason began to run at Kyle, who failing to hold his ground, allowed one easy basket after another.

The second game was another rout. This time Kyle failed to make a single basket. To avoid giving Jason an opportunity to grab his bra, he was throwing from outside the key; at such a distance, he would have missed most of his shots even on a good day. But today was far a good one, for each time that Kyle raised his arms to toss the ball, he was instantly reminded of his bra, as it shifted ever so slightly upward.

Terrified that Jason would see the bra move, Kyle invariably failed to extend his arms enough to put any power into his throw. It often fell short of the rim, occasioning each time a comment from Jason about his limp wrist or girlish form.

The three games were such a fiasco — 33 to 3 — that Kyle could count only one blessing: None of his other friends had been witness to it. Indeed, there had been only two kids watching the game. He knew the name of neither, though he had often seen them around; they were in his year at school, though in none of his classes. They both had a bad reputation: the boy, it was said, had propositioned a male classmate; and the girl, a cross-dresser, was assumed to be a lesbian.

Apparently they didn’t know each other, or if they did, were on the outs, for they sat far apart. Even so, boy and girl were staring at Kyle for most of the game. He found their attention unnerving and distracting. Had they figured out that he was wearing girls’ clothes? Is that why they were watching him? Or — and this question so shook Kyle that he not only lost the ball but tripped over his own feet — were they attracted to his new look? Did the boy see a fellow sissy? Did the girl mistake him for a dyke?

Eventually every ordeal must end, if only because of darkness. Yet it wasn’t only nightfall that cast a shadow over the basketball court, it was also Jason’s frowning countenance. He was disgusted with Kyle’s performance, and beginning to agree with Rob that, unlikely as it might seem, their friend had turned from a player into a wuss in a single day.

The scowl on Jason’s face, as they split, haunted Kyle’s evening. Several times he decided to renege on the deal and to revert to his regular clothes. About ten o’clock, he even broached the subject with his mother: "Mom, I don’t think the bet was a good idea. Maybe we should call it a draw."

"A draw? How is it a draw, Kyle, if you back out of the deal after a single day? Are you ready to admit defeat? Are you now willing to agree that girls and boys dress very differently, and that anyone can tell which is which, Calvin Klein be damned?"

"No, I’m not ready to say that. No one thought I looked like a girl today. That wasn’t the problem. I was right about the clothes. They’re boy’s clothes, sure enough."

"Then, what’s the problem, Kyle? Why do you want to end the experiment?"

"Because, mom, everyone thought I looked like a nerd."

"I don’t think you look like a nerd. You look good to me. And I bet that all the girls preferred the new Kyle. You’re more neatly dressed; you look less like a hood. I bet your girlfriend praised your new clothes. What did she say?"

"My girlfriend?"

"Yes, your girlfriend. What did she think of your new look?"

Oh yeh, the girlfriend. He was supposed to have one. The only girl who had paid him any attention had been the black-haired girl at the ball court, the ‘lesbian.’ Did she like his new look? Apparently yes, for she had been following his every move.

So Kyle answered: "My girlfriend thought I looked okay."

"So why change, son? Let’s give the experiment another couple of days. All right?" Barb wanted him to stay in the bra and panties for a while longer. They had not yet had time to tame him. Maybe they never would. But they needed more than a single day to work their magic.

Later, at bedtime when she got to see her son in his bra and panties after brushing his teeth, she realized that she definitely wanted to keep the experiment alive. Not only did his hairless torso look very feminine, albeit immature, but he also seemed to be moving like a woman. He had glided rather than clomped down the hall.

Later she realized he was probably just trying to avoid being seen by her, but at the time he looked like a lingerie model on a catwalk. That night in bed she puzzled at her joy in seeing her son in a bra and panties. Was she trying to turn him into a girl? Or was she simply hoping that a more feminine Kyle would enjoy a longer, better life?

She wasn’t sure about her motives. All she knew for certain was that she hoped Kyle would continue to wear girls’ clothes occasionally even after he had won his moped. That night she dreamt several times about Kyle; each time he was wearing a different dress.

Kyle’s dreams did not awaken him, and the next morning he was sure of only one thing: that he had an erotic dream about a girl on a moped. He couldn’t remember much about her, save that her hair had been blond — like his.

Chapter Four: Who Knew on the Second Day?

As Kyle wasn’t keen on testing the school’s reaction for a second time, he not surprisingly slept through his alarm. He had to dress in such a hurry that he had to put on the first things he found. Unfortunately for Kyle, they were a two-toned, green-striped bra and panties, a white tee shirt, a dark blue pullover, and the girl’s jeans with the zipper flap on the ‘wrong,’ right-hand side of the crotch.

It was a small thing, a detail that most kids were unlikely to notice. Girls, for example, were far more likely to be checking out a guy’s eyes or buttocks. As for the boys, they weren’t supposed to be checking out a guy’s fly; and they rarely did.

The grand exception that day was Steve, who had become obsessed with Kyle’s body since Steve had, thanks to the new, tighter clothes, finally gotten to see it. Something about Kyle’s look had struck Steve as fey, and for the first time in months Steve had a faint hope that Kyle might be gay too. He had been watching Kyle for more than a year, but had sadly written him off as a possible date when Kyle began to dress like a bad boy and to hang out with a tough crowd.

But Kyle had dramatically changed his look, and Steve had begun to hope again. His spirits had soared after watching Kyle shoot hoops. "Gosh, he throws like a girl," Steve thought. "But he’s butch enough for me." He began to fixate on Kyle.

The next morning Steve hung around Kyle’s homeroom trying to get a glimpse of him heading into class. As it was dangerous to look a boy in the eye, Steve’s eyes dropped as he saw Kyle walk toward him. Soon they were staring at Kyle’s groin.

Steve was delighted to see that the jeans were even tighter than yesterday’s pair, though he was disappointed to see that Kyle (tightly contained by his panties) seemed to have little to flaunt. Just before Kyle walked past him and into the classroom, Steve suddenly realized that there was something odd about the jeans: The zipper seemed to be designed for the left hand to open, instead of the right hand, as was the case with all the pants that Steve had worn.

Fascinated by this exception, Steve began checking out the zipper flap of each student he passed, both boys and girls. That day he gained a reputation for being a creep, as well as a homosexual. But his research paid off. By noon he became the first student at Herbert Hoover to know that Kyle was wearing girls’ jeans.

Steve was ecstatic. He was definitely going to ask Kyle out on a date. "He’s going to be my boyfriend, my very first boyfriend," was the mantra he hummed to himself all morning. He would make his first play for Kyle, he decided, in the cafeteria at noontime.

In the old days — that is, two days ago — he couldn’t have gotten close to Kyle at lunch, for Kyle ate with his gang, with Jason, Derek, Rob and the other boys in black. But none of them had liked the way he was dressing, and to teach him a lesson they had invited Harvie, a ‘four-eyed’ computer nerd, to occupy his place at the table. They hoped Kyle would get the message that,if he didn’t change his attire, they’d rather eat with a dweeb.

And so Kyle was eating alone when Steve asked if he could sit across from him. Kyle, brooding, didn’t even look up as he waved his hand in casual assent. Thus, Steve was well seated before Kyle realized that he had just agreed to eat with the school’s ‘fag’. Kyle groaned; then buried himself in his food. "Maybe if I finish real fast, no one will notice us," Kyle hoped.

"Hi, my name is Steve. And you’re Kyle, right?" Steve proffered his hand in friendship.

Kyle felt he had no choice but to accept it, for looking around, he saw that many eyes were watching, and there were many tongues about to wag. If he spurned Steve too visibly, somehow Barb would find out and he’d catch hell for his ‘bigotry.’ Without looking up, Kyle brushed his hand against Steve’s.

"Yeh, I’m Kyle. But I’m in no mood for chitchat. It’s been a rough day, you understand."

"Oh sure. I just wanted to say hello, and to tell you that I really admire your courage."

"My courage?" puzzled Kyle, for the first time looking at his table companion.

"You know — your jeans. It really takes guts to wear girls’ jeans to school. I don’t think I could do it."

Had anyone heard? Kyle looked nervously around. No one nearby seemed to be eavesdropping, and the bedlam in the cafeteria meant that Steve’s voice hadn’t carried far. Even so, Kyle admonished Steve to lower his voice, and then said, "What are you talking about? I’m not wearing girl’s clothes. I’d heard that playing with yourself makes you go blind. I guess you’re the proof."

Steve was too anxious to ingratiate himself to take offense, and so he replied, "I know the truth, Kyle, but I won’t tell anyone. I swear, I really won’t. But if you don’t want anyone else to know, you’d better pull down your shirt so that it covers your zipper."

"My zipper?" Kyle then looked down, and forewarned, immediately grasped the truth: These jeans could not have been bought in the boys’ department. "Cripes," muttered Kyle. He pulled out his tee shirt, as it was longer than his pullover; it did manage to cover his pant zipper, if he made sure that he was wearing his jeans high — you know, like a nerd.

Rearranged, Kyle started to make a lame excuse, but Steve cut him off: "You don’t have to explain. I like the jeans. They look real good on you, especially in the rear."

Kyle didn’t like hearing a gay boy praise his butt, but he was not in a position to rank him out. Kyle needed to ensure that the boy would keep his secret, and so he said, "I’ve got to wear girls’ pants for a month in order to win a bet, to win a moped. You keep this a secret, and I’ll give you a ride on it."

"Don’t worry," responded Steve. "I don’t give away my friend’s secrets; and we’re friends, right?"

"Yeh, we’re friends. I’ve got to go now."

"Kyle, will you give me a real handshake to confirm our friendship?"

Kyle offered his hand, and Steve grasped it, refusing to let go for — in the eyes of those who were watching — a suspiciously long time. As the audience had included most of his friends, Kyle’s reputation sank a notch. While none of his friends really thought he was dressed like a girl — that had just been joshing — they were now wondering, for real, whether he was dressed like a ‘sissy’. Certainly, he seemed to have a ‘fairy’ for a friend.

Kyle felt hostile eyes boring into his back as he left the cafeteria. "Did they see my bra?" he wondered. "If they did, they’ll think I’m Steve’s girlfriend! Groan."

Kyle decided that he’d have to do something dramatic to regain his friends’ respect. But what? "A skateboard stunt. That’s it. That’ll impress them. And then they’ll want to eat with Kyle the Man again. If I’m back to sitting with the guys, that sissy will give me a wide berth. He won’t ask to sit with Jason and Rob. That’d be quick suicide for the little queer."

Kyle spread the word that he was going to skateboard down Suicide Hill, a feat achieved only by a few brave souls, and not yet by any of his crowd. To trump everyone, Kyle announced that he would skateboard blindfolded down the hill. As it was a one-way city street, he could count on his buddies to block traffic long enough for him to make the descent. To stay alive, all he had to do was cleave to the middle of the road, as it took two unseen curves, and then to brake quickly before he collided with traffic crossing at the T-junction or impaled himself on the picket fence guarding the bottom of the hill.

Kyle was confident that he could pull off the stunt because he had been practising for months. While he had never done the hill in one long swoop, and never with his eyes covered, he figured he knew where the curves were and could negotiate them safely. His erstwhile friends tried to talk sense to him, and he might have relented had not Steve publicly implored him not to take the risk. It was so embarrassing to have Steve openly worry about his safety that Kyle had no choice but to attempt his fool stunt.

He probably would have killed himself, for he misjudged the first curve, and was heading for oblivion until unseen hands shoved him completely off-course and sprawling into some plastic garbage pails. They absorbed his momentum, breaking his fall, but not without some injury. A used mop almost put out his right eye. Fortunately for Kyle, he got off with a haematoma. Within an hour, he’d have the blackest ‘black eye’ of his accident-prone life.

Kyle was furious at the intervention, especially as it had left him covered with rotting garbage. He wouldn’t calm down even after being told that the girl had saved his life.

Now that was too much! Not only had he mucked up his stunt, but also his friends and rivals had all seen a girl push him off the road in order, they agreed, to rescue him. A girl! It was humiliating.

"Which girl?" he asked, without any idea of what answer could conceivably salve his wounded pride.

The answer was not comforting: "It was the dyke," Derek said. "You know — the girl who’s always wearing guy clothes. She must really like you. She took quite a risk."

Then Rob insinuated: "I didn’t realize you knew her, but then I didn’t know until today that you’re a close buddy of precious little Stevie."

More sadly, Jason summed up the situation: "It looks to me, Kyle, that you’ve finally found your true friends. I guess birds of a feather do flock together."

"Yeh, and to think how many times I showered in front of Kyle. It sure makes you shudder," said Jerry, another of his fast-fading friends. "Let’s go, guys. Let’s shoot some pool at Rob’s place."

When they stalked off, Kyle was alone. There was no sign of the girl. She had apparently fled the moment his friends had come to investigate his collision with the garbage pails.

He noticed as he straggled homeward that his jeans were ripped. "Good," he snarled. "At least I won’t accidentally wear them again." When he got home, the mirror proved he had a whopper of a shiner. "Jeez," he lamented, "it’s going to remind everyone of my accident. It will get everyone talking about the dyke who saved poor little Kyle."

He decided he had to hide the black eye. But how? There was only one way: his mother’s makeup. He’d have to wear it. He deliberated waiting until she got home to have her show him how to apply it, but decided she’d go ballistic if she found out about his blindfolded stunt.

She had a way of worming such information out of him, and if she did it this time, then she’d definitely not give him the moped. If she killed their deal, then he would have gone through two days of Hell for nothing. Nope, she couldn’t know about the shiner.

To learn about makeup, Kyle did what any modern boy would do — he went onto the Internet, where he soon found some hints at the website of a magazine for teenage girls. He learned about foundation, about cleansers, and about applying his makeup evenly. He even added some blue eyeshade to darken the veins under his eyes to their original worried hue. He had hoped to limit the makeup to the impacted area, but soon realized that it would show too much unless he did his entire face.

He was delighted with himself when he looked in the mirror: "Yep, no one will ever know I got a black eye." And then, because he had read that girls had to touch up their makeup during the day to keep it looking natural, he ‘borrowed’ one of his mother’s compacts. He felt distinctly odd as he did; somehow, he had crossed another boundary, but he wasn’t sure which.

When Barb got home, they had another desultory conversation about his day. He was not going to give out much information. However, she got him talking after she discovered that her compact was missing.

"Have you seen it, Kyle? You know it’s one of my favorites. I’ve had the case since I was a teenager. Do you know where it is?"

"Er, I’ve got it."

"You? And why would you want it?" She then came over to where he was slouching in a chair, and hand on his chin, turned his face toward her. "You’re wearing makeup, aren’t you?"

"Yeh," Kyle whispered.

"Well, I’d like an explanation."

Kyle mulled over his options: If he told the truth, he’d surely lose the moped. Yet if he lied, his mother would conclude that he wanted to be a girl. She’d think he was a transvestite! What to do, what to do? He decided that honesty was not the best policy, for his mother might still believe that he wanted to wear makeup, thinking him a sissy, even as she vetoed the moped.

And so Kyle prevaricated: "Well, you know that everything’s unisex these days. Girls wear boys’ clothes, and the guys are wearing earrings and makeup. A lot of the rock bands wear makeup. You’ve seen Kiss, right?" He had named a band of geezers, hoping she’d recognize the name from her youth. And she did.

"Kyle, you don’t exactly look like one of the musicians in Kiss. Your makeup is far too tame. Are you really telling me that you’re going to wear makeup to school?"

"Well sure, as an experiment. I’ll try it a few times, but I’m sure I won’t be wearing any after I get my moped." Did she get the hint? If she wanted to keep her son out of makeup, she’d better give him a moped pronto.

Barb didn’t seize the hint. Instead, she said, "It’s your life, Kyle. If you want to wear makeup to school, that’s your privilege. But I want my compact back. I’m going out this evening for a meeting and I’ll buy something for you at Walgreen’s."

Kyle didn’t know what to say. Obviously, he had to give back the compact. And just as obviously, it seemed he had no choice now but to wait for his mother to return with his very own makeup. He wasn’t pleased with the way the evening was going.

Nor was Barb. The meeting of the Society for the Preservation of the Prairie Dog had become, thanks to Mrs. Lancer, a crushing bore. She barely knew the lady, yet she refused to leave Barb alone. And why? Because of Kyle.

Kyle, it seemed, had become her son Steve’s best friend. All he could talk about for the past two evenings was Kyle. "You know, Barb, I think it’s wonderful that Kyle has befriended Steve, for my son has been so terribly lonely. It’s tough being the only gay kid in a high school, I can assure you. Thank God, he has at last found a true friend."

"What, the only gay kid at Hoover? Your son is gay?" interrogated Barb, suddenly anxious to learn more.

"Why yes, I thought you knew that. All the students know about him, at least after he asked Gerry Farwell for a date in eighth grade. The boy had a big mouth and he announced to the entire school that Steve was as bent as the antenna on that lavender teletubbie. Since then, poor Steve has been a total pariah. It’s been so hard on him."

"And Kyle, my Kyle, is now his buddy? That doesn’t sound like Kyle. I must confess to you, Elvira, that Kyle sometimes makes some awfully bigoted remarks — not about your son, mind you, but about gays in general."

"Barb, you should forgive him those comments. They were probably a defense mechanism. Kyle didn’t want to admit his true nature."

"His tr.tr.true nature?" Barb stuttered.

"Why yes, your son is gay, isn’t he? Steve certainly believes he is. Why else would Kyle risk the school’s scorn by eating with Steve?"

"Kyle is eating with Steve? Kyle told me he hangs out at lunch with his buddies in the black shirts," Barb rebutted.

"Barb, I didn’t mean to disturb you. I thought you knew about Kyle. You always struck me as the kind of mother in whom a homosexual son would confide. But I guess that’s difficult for Kyle, for he’s just now coming out. Steve has known he’s gay since he was a toddler."

"I guess that’s so," mumbled Barb dejectedly. Had their happy family come to this: that Kyle was gay and afraid to tell her that he was dating Steve? What a sorry mess. She had hoped Kyle would feel free to tell her anything. "Well, I guess I now know why he wants to wear makeup," sighed Barb.

The bombshell exploded, she thereafter avoided Mrs. Lancer, who in any case no longer seemed anxious to talk now that she had confided her "good news."

On the way home, a dazed Barb shopped at the all-night pharmacy. There she bought a starter makeup kit for Kyle — the sort of thing one bought a twelve-year-old girl. And then she made an impulse purchase: a package of three panties for Kyle. They were cheap cotton panties, but she bought them because they were three shades of pink.

"I’ve got to know what game Kyle is playing," she told herself, "and these panties will help me to know. If he starts wearing pink, then I’ll know that the whole ‘bet’ has been a charade, a ruse to gull me into letting him cross-dress."

But cross-dressing didn’t make any sense, she thought as she drove the last leg of her journey homeward. If Kyle and Steve were both gay and ‘dating,’ was it likely that Steve would want Kyle to cross-dress?

"I thought gays liked leather," she thought. "Do some of them look for transvestites? I guess so. Oh my, if they start dating, I may have to accept my son going out as the ‘girlfriend.’"

She then chided herself. "What’s wrong with you? Just last night you were saying to yourself that you hoped Kyle would continue to wear girls’ clothing even after he got his moped. And now that it looks like he’s a budding transvestite, you panic. Shape up, girl."

What was wrong? There was clearly something wrong, and Barb finally had to admit that while she hoped there’d be a little pink in Kyle’s life, that she was far from thrilled at the possibility of lavender.

"I want grandchildren," she wailed. "Maybe, it’s not too late. I’ve got to find him a big brother to straighten him out. I’ve just got to."

Kyle was surprised to see her so distraught. He was surprised that his makeup had bothered her so much. Could she actually believe that he intended to wear it ever after? He’d get rid of it, he knew, the moment his shiner faded away. In the meantime, he was quite pleased to have his own makeup kit. It made life simpler.

The package of panties he liked much less. Indeed, he loathed it. Pink! What was his mother thinking? He told her in no uncertain terms that he’d never wear anything pink, even on a dare. He stomped off to his bedroom without the package. But Barb added the three pink panties to his lingerie the following morning after he had left for school.

That night Barb’s nightmares took her back to the Bois de Boulonge in Paris and to the world of Brazilian transsexuals. She wasn’t sure whether Kyle was one of them, but the most outrageous tart, a mere youngster with 40-inch tits, seemed to be wearing a two-toned orange bra-and-panty set.

As for Kyle, it took so much effort to remove his makeup for the first time — that he, quite remarkably, fell asleep without first playing with himself. "I’m too tired," he murmured, "and I’ve got to get up real early to put that makeup back on." The following morning there were no dreams he remembered.

Continued in Part 4

In the first three parts, Barb capitalizes on her son Kyle’s desire for a moped (a motor scooter) to propose a deal: If he wears girls’ clothes for a month, then he can get one. He makes the deal on the understanding that he can choose the clothes. He figures he will be able to find a masculine look, just as long as he wears sweatshirts bulky enough to hide the bras his mother adds to the deal. Kyle sees an easy win; his mother hopes that somehow the knowledge that he is wearing girls’ clothes will tame her boy. After a humiliating visit to the mall to acquire his new wardrobe, Kyle finds that his friendships are only cloth deep. His ‘buddies’ reject Kyle and his new look. He reluctantly socializes with the school’s pariah — with Steve, the ‘gay kid’. A mysterious dark-haired girl also enters Kyle’s life by rescuing Kyle from a foolhardy stunt. With Kyle wearing makeup to mask a black eye, Barb becomes ever more fearful that her son not only wants to cross-dress, but is gay as well. The story resumes with Kyle’s third day at school.

Anything for a Moped? —Part 4 by: Dawn De Winter
Chapter Five: What the Girlfriend Knew

Kyle’s third full day as a cross-dresser started off promisingly. He got up early enough to do a passable job with his makeup, and still have time left over to make a more careful selection of clothing. As he scrutinized the outerwear for telltale signs of femininity, he reluctantly concluded he couldn’t wear the jeans with the two-inch plaid hem: "Not today, anyway. Too risky," he thought.

Yet he lingered over the decision because he had to admit that he really liked the plaid. The jeans appealed to him even more when he discovered a half-inch of plaid trim on each of the back pockets. He hadn’t seen any of the plaid when he had made his purchase. Would he have bought the jeans had he seen it? Probably not at the time, yet he was happy to have his plaid jeans now. He decided he’d wear them on the weekend.

The cargo pants, he decided, had nothing to give away their origin in the girls’ department. And he put them on over the most non-descript panties in his dresser drawer. Kyle would have told you that he had been extra careful, that he was playing it extra safe.

Yet he had made two miscalculations: First, the cargo pants had been designed with a teenage girl’s body in mind, and so were narrowly cinched at the waist and wide in the hips. Made of sailcloth, a material that Kyle had found reassuringly masculine, they kept their shape, and billowed out at his hips. Thus, they definitely made Kyle look more feminine: He had, as it were, a full half-hour of an hourglass figure.

The cargo pants were bound to cause unease amongst his ‘friends,’ and while only one of them actually figured out that day that Kyle was wearing girls’ clothes, it was an easy, unspoken decision to exclude him yet again from their lunch table.

The decision would have been even easier, and the rejection even nastier, had any of them caught a glimpse of the waistband of his panties. Kyle had messed up again, even though — actually because — he had carefully chosen the most masculine-cut of his entire panty collection. "Now, I won’t have to worry so much about anyone seeing my underwear," Kyle thought, as he imagined himself challenging Brad to a rematch. "I could parade around the school in these briefs and no one would know where I got them."

Oh really? The manufacturer had worried that girls might consider the panties too masculine in cut to wear. To reassure them, it had threaded "Hanes Her Way" into the waistband. Kyle had spent so much time posing in front of the mirror, checking out their appearance at a distance, that he hadn’t remembered to check out the waistband. Or at least that is what he would always believe happened that day.

Thus dressed, Kyle had an uneventful morning at school. Once again, his ‘friends’ spurned him at lunch. Indeed, they had given his place at their table to Tristin, a Kyle wannabe. Once again, Kyle found himself eating alone.

He heard that voice again: "Can I join you?"

Kyle looked up. Sure enough, it was Steve again. With his reputation already shot, Kyle didn’t see any reason to tell the boy to get lost: "Sure, why not? There seems to be lots of room."

Once seated, Steve came right to the point: "I was wondering if you’d like to go to a college basketball game this Saturday night? I’ve got two courtside tickets for the Iowa State game. What do you say? You interested?"

Interested? Kyle would have bellowed out a ‘yes’ had anyone else been asking. But Steve? Kyle didn’t want to commit himself until he had all the facts: "How come you have basketball tickets?" he explored.

"My dad arranged them for me."

"Your dad? Whose your dad?"

"He’s a basketball player. He used to play for Iowa; so he’s still got some connections here."

"My god, your last name — it’s Lancer, right? You’re not, you couldn’t be, there’s no way you could be the son of ..."

"Yep, my dad’s Mike Lancer."
"I can’t believe it. Your dad plays guard for the Knicks, and you’re, well you’re …"

"Gay?"

"Yeh, queer. How could you be so different from your dad?"

"Well, I’m not," replied Steve. "I’m a lot like my dad, except I don’t play basketball as well."

"You mean?"

"Yeh, that’s why my parents divorced. But you won’t tell anyone, huh, Kyle? I’ve kept your secret. You’ll keep my dad’s, right?"

"Sure, sure. So you really have two tickets at courtside?" Kyle asked. When he saw Steve nod his head, Kyle in a very low voice said, "I’ll go, but on one condition." As he saw Steve waiting for him to declare it, Kyle softly finished: "That condition is that just you and me know about our going to the game together. You don’t tell anyone. Got it?"

"Well, I have to tell my mom because she has to drive us to Ames. Is it okay if she knows?"

"Obviously she has to know," grunted Kyle. "Boy, you can be pretty dumb."

"So we’re going to the game together? Let’s shake on that okay?"

Reluctantly, Kyle extended his hand. Once again, Steve clung to it. As Kyle anticipated that Steve would try to prolong the handshake, Kyle had attempted to sneak his hand in and out of Steve’s grasp before the gay boy had had a chance to close his hand. Instead, he found Steve not only faster, but also stronger.

As he surveyed his own imprisoned hand, Kyle realized for the first time that Steve had baseball mitts for hands. "Wow, maybe he really is Mike Lancer’s son," Kyle thought as he finally extracted himself from Steve’s squeezing embrace. The boy had once again embarrassed him.

Kyle was about to make a putdown, but was interrupted by someone asking if he could join them. The voice was familiar, but not one he’d heard lately. As Kyle looked up, he realized it was Tim Rush, his best friend until grade seven. That year their friendship had faded, as Kyle discovered heavy metal music and a new set of friends, who openly mocked Tim for listening to rockabilly.

Kyle gradually got too busy to see Tim, and their friendship had ended the day that Tom made the mistake of trying to join the black-shirt crowd for lunch. The target of a "friendly" food fight, Tim had thereafter given Kyle a wide berth.

Yet Tim had never forgotten the good times with Kyle, and seeing his erstwhile friend so isolated that he’d even eat with Steve Lancer, Tim impulsively decided to join them. He knew he was taking a risk with his own reputation, but what the heck? Tim could care less what people said about him. Even so, Tim at first spoke only to Kyle; Steve, he hoped, would get the hint and leave.

Kyle was delighted to see his old friend: "Can you sit down? You’re darn right. Tim, you’re always welcome at my table."

"That hasn’t always been true," Tim replied with an edge.

"Yeh, well, I can be a jerk at times," admitted Kyle. "But I know who my true friends are; and you’ll always be one of them." He extended his hand and they shook on it. And then, Kyle surprised himself by making an introduction, "Do you two know each other?"

When they both nodded warily, Kyle said the one thing most likely to put them at ease: "Did you know, Tim, that Steve’s dad plays for the Knicks?"

Steve beamed: This was the introduction that always worked best for him. Tim was happy too. They could talk basketball, a very safe topic in case anyone was eavesdropping. And the three of them talked a lot of basketball, so much that Tim suggested the three of them grab one of the school’s courts when Hoover let out for the day. "I’ve got a basketball in my locker. We’ll take on all challengers," he loftily promised.

There were to be three challengers: Jason, Derek and Brad. They were determined to humiliate "the pansies." While unsure whether they wanted Kyle back in the fold, they wanted him to know that he now played on a team of losers.

They were two-thirds right about his team: Tim didn’t have the basic skills, and Kyle, obsessed with his bra, had difficulty stretching. His shots generally came up short.

The game would, therefore, have given the black-shirts the easy victory they craved, had it not been for Steve. A natural athlete, he kept his side close enough in baskets to infuriate Derek, who made his displeasure known by pushing, shoving and charging.

As Jason and Brad followed his lead, the game became rough enough to draw a crowd. Most of the watching students delighted in the mayhem, but one spectator was getting increasingly anxious for Kyle’s safety. It was her nature to fret about Kyle.

Joannie Smith had been his guardian angel for more than a month, even though he scarcely knew her. To Kyle, she was "the dyke." This wasn’t a label that she would have rejected, even though she was quite smitten with Kyle. Indeed, he occupied half her fantasy life.

Kyle would have been absolutely mortified had he known how many times she had brought herself to climax by quickly alternating memories of Kyle, with images of girls taken from the movies or the teen magazines.

What, did she think Kyle a girl? No, quite the contrary. It was macho Kyle, the foolhardy boy on the skateboard, the BMX bike, and the power skis that she found orgasmic.

Joannie Smith is a bundle of contradictions. Yet we have to try to understand her, for she is to play a crucial role in Kyle’s life. To comprehend Kyle’s destiny, it is as important to know why Joannie Smith considered herself a lesbian, as it was to learn that Kyle spent his childhood pretending to be assorted super heroines, or that his mother used a moped as bait to lure him back into girls’ clothes for a month.

Joannie has thought of herself as a lesbian ever since summer camp. There she lost her virginity to another girl in her cabin, to Monique, an exchange student from France. They had hit it off from their first meeting, when Joannie found delightful Monique’s pronunciation of her name. Thanks to Monique, the entire camp ended up calling her "Johnny," a nickname she grew to cherish.

Sexual exploration began a week later. Both novices, they were been chary of nudity. Only once was there direct, genital contact, and only twice did Monique’s hands cup Joannie’s exposed breast.

Yet there was considerable sex play, as each girl learned what the other felt like under a layer of cotton, nylon, Lycra and satin. Monique wanted ‘Johnny’ to play the ‘butch’ role, and even bought her two pairs of boys’ white jockey briefs to wear. Monique purchased a new wardrobe for herself of white lace, pink satin and red velvet.

As Joannie got to know Monique’s body through its thin coat of nylon, silk and lace, Joannie came to love fine, feminine lingerie as much as Monique did. Indeed, by summer’s end she had developed a fetish: Joannie would for the rest of her life want her lovers to wear white satin and red lace.

Their parting was sorrowful as Monique returned to France. Even more tragic was the "Cher Johnny" letter that arrived less than three weeks later. In it, Monique explained that their summertime romance had emboldened her to seduce her best friend Bernadette. The two girls were now madly in love, and making love at every opportunity.

Monique ended with, "The stars are against us, Johnny. You and I — it is not possible. There is too grand a sea between us. I forget you never, mon cheri, you will always be my americain. But now, I am crazy for mon Berni."

Joannie started the school year at Hoover determined to find another "Monique." In her inexperience, Joannie believed that the right sort of girl would be attracted to a "butch" lesbian, and so she dressed in as masculine a way as possible.

To the consternation of Virginia, her grandmother and guardian, Joannie was buying her clothes in the boys’ department from the summer onward, and on most days wore not a single item of feminine clothing. Indeed, she wore boys’ boxer shorts when nature permitted. She had a single earring, a dangling crucifix that the salesgirl advised her was in vogue amongst the tougher sort of Catholic boys. As her breasts ruined the illusion she sought, Joannie bound them tightly with an athletic bandage.

She would have shaved her head, but yielded to her grandmother’s entreaties not to throw away the one thing — her raven black hair —- that most reminded Virginia of her daughter, and Joannie’s mother, dead for two years from breast cancer. And so, Joannie wore her hair in an unkempt ponytail, a rubber band its clasp.

Thus cross-dressed, Joannie kept her eyes out for girls who wore dresses or skirts to school. When she found one, she spent almost as much time trying to look up the girl’s thighs as did her male classmates.
Joannie had no doubt in her own mind that she was a lesbian. The taped breasts and boxer shorts affirmed this identity, as did her reaction to girls’ lingerie advertisements — which was similar to Kyle’s.

Yet her "lesbianism" was based on a single sexual relationship, and while that made her more experienced than Kyle, Joannie couldn’t deny that there was definite evidence that she was, at the very least, bisexual.
Kyle was the evidence. Joannie hadn’t been able to take her eyes off him since she had first caught sight of him in late August. Unknown to his mother, he had borrowed a BMX bike and had been racing it around a makeshift track of ramps and culverts.

Blushingly, Joannie remembered the first moment she had noticed him: He had been standing on his pedals, as he labored up a particularly steep incline on his way to "suicide ridge," and for some reason — possibly gravity — his jeans, halfway down his thighs at the best of times, had plummeted earthward. Joannie had witnessed almost a full moon before Kyle had been able to adjust himself.

His orbs had fascinated her, even though his narrow hips and flat buttocks yelled out "boy" to the self-announced lesbian. She had kept her eye on him during the next two heats, being rewarded with two half-moons and two sightings of a washboard stomach. As she followed Kyle’s rolling striptease, Joannie became aware for the first time of the beauty — in its own way — of the male physique.

And just as Monique had embodied the feminine mystique for Joannie, Kyle had become the quintessential male. Even so, he might easily have forfeited that title the next time Joannie went to a high school swim meet, for Kyle was a rather scrawny specimen of ‘Man.’ Fortunately for Kyle, his BMX race ended the way his daredevil stunts usually did — in disaster.

Racing along a raised wooden plank, Kyle suddenly lost his balance. He would probably have broken his arm for a third time had not a spotter taken the brunt of the fall. Kyle bounced off him towards the audience, finishing sprawled, his clothes in inviting disarray, in front of Joannie. Stunned, speechless, he did not move.

Joannie, frantic that the boy had been badly hurt, knelt to help him. Her hands had minds of their own: One felt his brow, as though testing for a fever, the other rested on his exposed lower abdomen. What it was checking for, no one knew. For the first time, Joannie looked as intensely at Kyle’s face as she had at his body. And she liked what she saw.

Indeed she loved what she saw: the boyish good looks, the wild eyes, and the pained vulnerability. He was, in her eyes, man and child, hero and victim. He had excited her lust; now he also had aroused her maternal instincts. This was the boy she wanted for sex. This was the boy she wanted to mother. This was the boy she wanted.

As he came around, Kyle groggily noticed a ‘boy’ — certainly, he was dressed like a boy — hovering over him. In a high-pitched voice, the ‘boy’ asked: "Are you all right? You’re not hurt, are you? That would be awful."

"I’m fine," Kyle finally answered, as his eyes began to focus on the ‘boy’ who was crowding him. "I’d even get up," he muttered, "if you gave me some breathing room." And then, that strange boy had kissed Kyle — on the cheek! Before Kyle could rank him out, the ‘boy’ had disappeared into the crowd.

With a grunt, Kyle rubbed some dirt on his cheek to cleanse it. He never told anyone about the kiss — it was an embarrassment. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as falling off a ramp and bending the front wheel of a friend’s BMX, but it was pretty bad.

The ‘boy’ hadn’t heard Kyle snarl, mainly to himself, but also to anyone with a two-foot perimeter: "What a day. First I fall off the ramp. Then some queer sneaks a kiss."

And now that ‘boy’ was watching Kyle’s every move in a basketball game, just as she had his stunt on Suicide Hill. It didn’t look like he’d need rescuing again, but one never knew with Kyle.

The brawl started when Derek viciously tripped Steve, sending him sprawling painfully onto the concrete. Kyle, seeing Jason smile approvingly, pushed his former ‘best friend’ into a chain link fence. Before he had even risen to his full height, Jason was tackling Kyle’s midriff. His momentum toppled them both, and they grappled for advantage as they thrashed about on the ground.

Friends, foes and spectators agreed to let the two boys fight to a decisive outcome. Even so, both Steve and Joannie tensed for possible intervention.

At first, Kyle was winning. But he began to lose concentration and his advantage when Jason shoved a hand in his face, smearing his makeup. Even then, they were fighting to a draw — that is, until Jason found the bra strap. His tugging, accidental at first, became increasingly vigorous and deliberate, as Jason, realizing what he had in hand, strove to strip Kyle of his image.

At first, Jason hoped to rip the bra off Kyle, but its resilience led to a second strategy of slipping the bra straps off Kyle’s shoulders, and then an inch or two down each arm. He hoped in this way to immobilize Kyle’s arms, in order to drag the bra into full view somewhere around the sissy’s navel.

Kyle fought ever more desperately, yet ineffectually, as he devoted all his efforts to bra defense rather than to boy defeat. As Kyle focused on his upper body, he left undefended his private parts. Normally, these would have been safe when wrestling with a buddy; but Jason, enraged by finding Kyle wearing makeup and a bra, suddenly, viciously, kneed Kyle in the groin.

As Kyle jackknifed in pain, Jason lost hold of the bra. Abandoning his trophy hunt, he used Kyle’s pant seat to wipe off the makeup on his hand. He then scrambled to his feet, taking care to give Kyle a kick in the buttocks as he did. With that, Kyle’s cargo pants slipped sufficiently to uncover the "Hanes Her Way" waistband.

Fortunately, only three students were close enough to read the script: Jason, naturally, and Steve and Joannie, who had both come rushing to Kyle’s aid, now that he was down and helpless.

Briefly, Jason contemplated denouncing Kyle to all who’d listen. But, as he watched Kyle, still writhing in pain, gasp for his breath, his anger abated. As he calmed, Jason began to reflect on the implications for his own reputation at Hoover to have a ‘best friend’ — even an ex-friend — publicly exposed as a cross-dressing sissy.

Wouldn’t students and teachers assume that Kyle had been wearing a bra and panties for weeks or months? And if they did, then what would they suspect of Jason, who had shared both a tent and a bedroom with a notorious ‘sissy’?

Suddenly, it hit Jason like a blow to the solar plexus: He had as much stake in preserving Kyle’s secret, as did the panty-loving sissy himself. Once they had been linked in friendship; they now were linked in fear — a mutual fear that the entire school would learn that Kyle had taken to wearing girls’ clothes.

"I know your dirty little secret now," Jason snarled. "And I’ll tell it to everyone if you don’t leave me and the gang alone. If I see you anywhere near a real boy, you’ll end up tied to a school desk in your underwear. You get my meaning, right?"

And then seeing Steve and Joannie waiting nearby, Jason added, "Keep to your own kind. But don’t you dare start wearing anything, Kyla," he muttered as he shook the shoulders of the still-dazed boy, "that’d allow anyone to guess what a disgusting pervert you are. Got it? If I see you in a frigging dress, I’ll kill you myself."

He stomped off, taking his friends with them. They could be seen begging him for news; but he said not a word.

As Kyle finally recovered from the shocks to his body and self-respect, the first face he saw was a disturbingly familiar one. No, not Steve, whose attentions at this point would just about complete the job of destroying Kyle’s reputation as a regular guy. Steve fortunately was hanging back. So whose face was this hovering so closely to his own? Whose breath did he feel on his cheek? Who was endeavoring to help him to his feet?

"Jeez, it’s the queer who kissed me at the BMX race" was Kyle’s first thought. But then, taking a second, better look, he realized it was a girl. She might be dressed like a boy, but no boy had lips as full and inviting as hers. And no boy — at least no teenage boy — had such a delicate little nose. And that chin! Kyle loved her chin. Indeed, the more he examined her face, the more attractions he discovered.

Yet who was she? "Oh no, it’s the dyke!" Kyle exclaimed, almost out loud. Indeed, he had to bite his tongue to stop himself from using that word. Instead, he asked, "Did you kiss me at the BMX race? And were you the one who pushed me at Suicide Hill?"

"Guilty as charged," Joannie quietly replied.

"But why? Why did you kiss me? Why did you help me? Why are you here now? Do you follow me around to see me mess up?"

Kyle needed a lift, Joannie decided, and so she chanced the truth: "I think you’re cute. That’s why you’ve seen me around. I like you, Kyle — a lot." She looked away hurriedly and abashedly.

Her timing was perfect. Kyle was beginning to wonder himself about his motives. Had he really been willing to do anything for a moped? Or was the moped merely an excuse for buying girls’ clothes? Was he, as everyone — the bathroom creep, the security guard, the department store clerks, his former best friend, and his own mother Barb — seemed to suspect, a gay transvestite?

Kyle needed some reassurance. He needed a girlfriend. And here was a girl at hand. And she seemed to adore him! Not only that, but she had a cute face. And then, when she suddenly brushed something off his bottom, Kyle absolutely knew that he wasn’t going to let this opportunity for intimacy pass: "Can I, can I walk you home," he bashfully asked.

"Do you know where I live?" she teased.

"It doesn’t matter," he said.

"Silly, don’t you know that we live on the same street?"

"We do?"

"Yes, I sometimes see you when you walk to school." Such sightings were not, of course, mere accident. Indeed, they were one good reason why the self-declared ‘lesbian’ had gotten hung up on a boy named Kyle.

At this point, Steve’s timing was less than perfect. He asked if he could walk Kyle home. All he got in response was a grunt. Steve hurriedly said he hoped Kyle wasn’t hurt, and that they’d see each other at school tomorrow. "Don’t forget our date on Saturday," he exclaimed before trotting off.

"Your date?" queried Joannie.

"What a stupid word to use. Sometimes, he’s as bright as Homer Simpson," mumbled Kyle. "We’re going to a basketball game with his mother. Some date, huh?" Anyway, I only date girls. Only cute ones, like you." He then inspected his sneakers.

They traded so many compliments on their way to Joannie’s house that she inevitably invited him in for milk and apple pie. As he chomped away, Kyle kept sneaking looks at her face. Finally, he asked, "Why do you wear your hair that way? You’ve got long black hair, right? Can I see it?"

As Joannie took off the elastic band, and as she shook her hair loose, Kyle became aware for their first time that her hair wasn’t just black. It was raven black. Joannie had hair like the girl in his dreams. "Wow, you’ve beautiful hair," he gurgled. "It reminds me of Pocahontas’s hair — you know, her hair in the Disney movie."

"That shouldn’t surprise you," replied Joannie. "I am, after all, part Kiowa."

"So you’re my Indian maiden," marveled Kyle.

"I’m not ‘your’ anything yet, Kyle James, you’ll have to earn the right to call me yours."

"And how would I do that?" he asked, leadingly.

"Well, a boy has to make a girl feel good about herself. And he has to be there when she needs him."

"Done. That’s easy. I’ll do whatever it takes to be your boyfriend. But you’ve got to do something if you want to be my girlfriend."

"And what’s that? It had better not be what I think it is. You boys are all alike. All you think about noon and night is … well, you know."

"No, no. Not that. Well, maybe some day, when you’re ready," he winked. "What I need is for you to dress more like a girl." He scrutinized her closely enough to realize for the first time that she was dressed entirely as a boy: "Jeez, you’re even wearing boxer shorts. Why do you dress like a boy?"

"And why do you dress like a girl, Kyle?"

"I do not."

"Who do you think you’re kidding, Kyle? I saw Jason pulling on your bra. I saw your "Hanes for girls" label, and I brushed the makeup off your fanny so that no one else would see it there. And now that I look more closely, I know for certain, Kyle, that you’re not wearing a single item of boys’ clothing, unless it’s the shoes. So why are you dressed like a girl, Kyle?"

He explained the deal with his mother. While Joannie pretended not to believe him — to get his goat — she sadly concluded that he must be telling the truth. The facts fitted. Yet she’d rather believe that he was getting some sexual thrill out of wearing girls’ clothes. Why? Because, as she contemplated losing her virginity, so-to-speak, one day to Kyle, she already knew that the sex would be better, and the entire experience more erotically charged, if Kyle were dressed like Monique. He was already halfway there — he was already wearing girls’ clothes.

"If I can persuade him to dress just once like Monique — like a super-feminine girl, French girl — then I know that my first time with a boy is going to be one of the high points of my life," she decided.

Joannie was definitely not going to tell Kyle to limit his experiment in cross-dressing. Quite the opposite! She was going to urge him to extend and prolong it. Kyle could not look to his girlfriend to keep him out of skirts. Indeed, she was already mentally sizing him for them.

Kyle broke through her thoughts: "And why do you wear boys’ clothes? Did you also make a bet?"

"Nope. I just prefer to dress like a boy. It’s my constitutional right, after all, to wear whatever I please. You boys have it so unlucky, Kyle. Look what happens if you change your clothes the slightest way. They start beating you up, and they don’t even know your clothes are girls’ clothes, do they?"

"Well, Jason knows," Kyle moaned.

"But he didn’t know before the fight, did he? And he was already treating you like a leper. No, boys are slaves of fashion. We girls can wear whatever we like. And I like boy’s dungarees, tees and boxers. So there! You’ll have to accept me as you find me."

"You’d look a lot sexier if you dressed like a girl," Kyle responded; but then he let the subject drop — for the moment. But he was determined to get her to dress in a more feminine way. He wanted her to wear sexy French lingerie, high heels and a tight dress.

For a moment there was a mind meld — they were both arousing themselves sexually by visualizing the other in high heels and a tight dress. When they opened their eyes again, they both saw to their dismay that their new ‘friend’ was dressed like a tomboy. Each sighed. There was a lot of work to be done, and not a lot of time in which to do it.

Joannie had to worry about the one-month deadline. After he started riding his moped, Kyle might be more difficult to lure into satin or silk.

As for Kyle, he was almost desperate to get Joannie dressing as a girl, so that he could stifle the rumors of her lesbianism. To recover his damaged reputation he needed a real, highly visible girlfriend — one in makeup, a pointy bra, and skirts. She had to look as much like a sex kitten as possible. His reputation required there to be no doubt about her sexual interest in males.

Time being of the essence, Joannie decided they needed more privacy. She suggested, and Kyle readily agreed, that they should go up to her bedroom to listen to her personal CD collection, which seemed to have been chosen more for sexual orientation than for quality of voice. Since they were fourteen years old, they were still behaving innocently enough an hour later, when suddenly they heard a door opening below, and then, a shout: "Joannie, are you home? It’s me, it’s Gran."

"I’ll be down in a few minutes, Gran. I just want to finish listening to my Sinead O’Connor CD."

Joannie then turned to Kyle with a worried look on her face and a tremor in her voice: "She can’t find you here. She says I’m too young to be dating boys. She won’t let me date anyone until I’m sixteen. If she finds you on the second floor, never mind in my bedroom, she’ll throw you out of the house. And I’ll never be allowed to see you again. Never!"

"Is there a place for me to hide?" asked Kyle frantically. He was panic-stricken: He had no sooner found a girlfriend, than he was going to lose her.

"Shhh, not too loud. There’s no point in hiding. She’ll eventually find you, and then hate you even more. What to do? What to do?" Her brow furrowed, and then she announced: "There’s only one way out of this trap. There is only one way for us to continue seeing each other."

"What’s that? You name it. I’m ready for anything," responded Kyle. Through his mind flashed various outlandish schemes for escaping from the house through the second-story window. Sure, there was a sheer drop onto asphalt, but he figured he could fashion a parachute or kite of some sort from the bed sheets and float to safety.

Fortunately for Kyle’s life and limbs, Joannie had another plan in mind: "I could introduce you as my girlfriend. My grandmother’s really old, positively ancient, and she’s so near-sighted I bet we could pass you off as my girlfriend. Then she’d never suspect I had a boy in my room."

"I don’t like the plan," said Kyle, his arms defiantly crossed. "Why don’t you create a diversion and then I’ll make a run for it."

"And if she sees you? And she’s likely to. Then we’ll never be able to see each other again. You do want to see me again, don’t you, Kyle?" she asked as she gave his hand an affectionate squeeze.

Kyle couldn’t ever remember anyone looking at him that way. He crumbled. His objections were now the sort that a strong-minded girl could overrule: "I don’t look like a girl, even in these clothes. Your grandmother would never be fooled by me, no matter how blind she is."

"It’s true, Kyle, that you don’t look like a girl right now, but you could, if you really tried."

"What do you mean? Really tried? What do you have in mind?" Kyle warily asked.

"Well, first you’d have to fix your makeup. Then all it would take is some lipstick, some eyeshade and mascara, and before you know it, you’d look just like my girlfriend Demi."

"Demi? Who’s Demi? Do I know her?"

"Of course, you know her, silly. You’re Demi. That’s what we’ll call you when we introduce you to Gran."

"Why Demi? Why that name? Do you think I look like Demi Moore?"

"No, not really. Demi is the perfect name for you because you’re going to be half-boy, half-girl. You’ll look like a girl, but underneath you’ll still be a boy. Half and half. See?"

"I intend to remain all boy where it counts," replied Kyle. "I guess Demi’s a better name than most girl’s names. At least, it’s not a sissy name like Kyla or Chrissie," growled Kyle.

"You’re such a grouch," replied Joannie. "We’ve got to get to work. Do you have your own makeup? Good, you can apply some more, while I find some lipstick, mascara and whatever in my gran’s room."

"What? You don’t have any lipstick of your own?"

"Nope, not a tube. Haven’t you noticed, Kyle? I don’t wear any makeup. I never have; I never will."

By the time she had returned with a makeup kit from Virginia’s room, Kyle had decided on a deal, another deal. The first one was going to get him a moped; the second was going to get him a girlfriend he could show off to Hoover High.

What kind of deal? Well let’s hear Kyle pitch it: "I’m not going to put anything on my face that you won’t put on yours," he announced defiantly. "If you want me to wear lipstick, then you’ll have to wear it. That’s the deal."

"Let me get this," replied Joannie. "You’re proposing a deal that I have to dress as femininely as you do. Is that right?"

"Yep, that’s the deal. If you want me to paint my face, well you’re going to have to do a self-portrait too."

"That’s not fair, Kyle. You’re trying to force me to dress like a woman. It’s not fair. I have a right to look as much like a boy as possible."

"And so do I," trumped Kyle. "If you want me to pass myself as a girl, then you’re going to have to be passable too. What’s good for the gander is good for the goose."

After much hesitation, Joannie finally shook on the deal: Both would try to look more feminine. Ironically, Kyle had a headstart. First of all, he knew more than she did about applying makeup. He showed her how to do it; and she learned about lipstick, mascara and eyeshade by watching him bungle — several times — putting them on himself. When the two kids were done, they had a good laugh at each other’s expense.

Kyle agreed he looked more clown-like than feminine, and that he’d need extra work to look like a girl. And so, Joannie worked on his hair to give him bangs and, with the help of pink hair band, the semblance of a ponytail in back. At his insistence, she agreed to a turquoise band for her own hair.

They posed together in front of the mirror. No, they did not yet look female. Or at least, they didn’t look like a fourteen-year-old female, for their chests were as flat as the Iowa prairie.

"You’re never going to fool Gran if you don’t put something into your bra," said Joannie, brandishing a fistful of tissue paper. But Kyle refused to have his bra stuffed, for he insisted on ‘tit for tat.’ Or perhaps he said, ‘Tit for tit.’

Kyle finally summoned up his courage to ask the question that had been haunting him since he’d gotten his first good look at Joannie’s chest: "Er, Joannie, what is it about your breasts? Are the women in your family slow developers? You’ll catch up in time, right?"

"I’ve already more than caught up," Joannie answered. "You are so silly, Kyle. Didn’t you know that I strap down my breasts? I thought everyone knew that. I think breasts are gross. I wish I had a nice flat chest like yours."

"Breasts are great. That is, they look great on a girl. They don’t look so good on a boy — at least not on fat boys," fumbled Kyle. "You know our deal: If you want me to stuff my bra, then you have to stuff yours as well."

"Turn around, Kyle James. Don’t peek." She then took off her top so that she could unwrap her breasts. They sprang perkily forward. She didn’t bother with a bra. As a result, the outline of her nipples could be seen straining for release from her San Jose Sharks sweatshirt. When Kyle finally turned around, he had visual proof that Joannie was very much a female.

As it was now his turn to give such ‘proof,’ he began to fill his bra with tissue paper. Yet Joannie didn’t think his ‘breasts’ were realistic enough, and so she went hunting for some assistance. She returned with two breast forms that had belonged to her mother, who had endured two radical mastectomies before succumbing to breast cancer. They were exceptionally life-like, with magnificent aureoles. Kyle noticed that the breasts warmed up quickly when he held them, and that they were slightly different in shape — just as human breasts would be.

"They can be attached with adhesive," Joannie said. "You can even wear them in the shower. We won’t bother with the adhesive this time. Just put them in your bra, and let me see how you look."

Kyle got them upside down the first time. But, all too quickly, they were in place, and Kyle was fretting: "Gulp, I look like I have breasts. Jeez, they even jiggle when I move." Their weight disconcerted him. It was really like having women’s breasts. He looked at himself in the mirror. Did he look female? No, to his own eyes, he looked like a boy with a fatty-tissue problem.

He sought reassurance from Joannie: "Are you sure that I look feminine enough? I don’t know. It’s going to take a lot more than some lipstick and fake boobs to make me look female. I’m just too macho. I think it’s impossible to make me look like a girl."

"If you say so, Kyle. But remember that my grandmother is as blind as a baseball umpire. Even you can fool her."

He wasn’t so sure. He continued to frown at himself in the mirror. "That grandmother must be legally blind, certifiable," he thought, "for there’s no way that Kyle James could ever look like a girl — even if I wore a dress. A boy’s a boy, and a girl’s a girl, and never shall the two intertwine."

Joannie thought he looked feminine enough — well, feminine enough to fool a nearsighted woman who was used to seeing her own granddaughter dress in boys’ clothes. Compared to Joannie, Kyle was a picture of femininity. "Kyle thinks he could never be taken for a girl, but he’s wrong. He’s cute enough to be a girl. The lipstick really looks good on him, and those eyelashes are to die for." Mentally, she blew him a kiss.

"It’s time, Demi, to make our grand appearance. Do you think Virginia, my gran, is ready for us? Is the world ready for us?"

Kyle didn’t think so. But what the heck? If they didn’t fool Joannie’s grandmother, everyone would consider his outfit a big joke. No one would think he was seriously trying to cross-dress. At least, not with lipstick and makeup that made him look like Crusty the Clown! Besides, Kyle secretly wanted to be found out — it suited his male ego to think that he couldn’t pass as a girl no matter how much he tried.

They were giggling as they left Joannie’s bedroom, but they were sober enough as they entered the kitchen where Virginia was busily cooking dinner. Joannie announced, "Hi Gran, I want you to meet my new, best girlfriend, Demi. Demi, this is my grandmother."

Virginia studied the two ‘girls’ coming into her kitchen. She looked at Demi. She squinted at Joannie. Then, with a puzzled look, at Demi again. Then, for a second time, at Joannie. Virginia gasped. A measuring cup fell out of her hand. It shattered on the tiled floor. But Virginia did not see it, for her eyes had turned skyward. Then she swooned. Something, or someone, had caused her to faint!

To be continued in Chapter Six -- Yes, Virginia, There Are Such ‘Girls’

In the first four parts, Barb capitalizes on her son Kyle’s desire for a moped (a motor scooter) to propose a deal: If he wears girls’ clothes for a month, then he can get the moped. He makes the deal on the understanding that he can choose the clothes. He figures he will be able to find a masculine look, just as long as he wears sweatshirts bulky enough to hide the bras his mother adds to the deal. Kyle sees an easy win; his mother hopes that somehow the knowledge that he is wearing girls’ clothes will tame her son. After a humiliating visit to the mall, Kyle finds that his friendships are only cloth deep. His ‘buddies’ reject Kyle and his new look. He reluctantly socializes with the school’s pariah, Steve, the ‘gay kid’. But he is far more interested in Joannie, a ‘lesbian’ infatuated with Kyle since he first mooned her. They both plan on changing the way the other dresses. As chapter 5 ends, she has just introduced Kyle as Demi, her new girlfriend, to her grandmother Virginia . For some reason, Virginia faints.

Anything for a Moped? - Part 5 by: Dawn De Winter
Chapter Six: Yes, Virginia, There Are Such ‘Girls’

The two teens were hovering over Virginia as she recovered her senses. Her eyes flickering open, she registered the faces of two smiling teens. She quickly closed her eyes to avoid a second swoon.

As she lay there, her head cradled by Joannie’s hands, Virginia mentally chided herself, "What’s got into me? I’ve never acted like a delicate virgin before. Why suddenly do I have the vapors?"

The answer resonated through her mind: "Why now? Because of the lipstick! The mascara and eyeshade! The feminine hairdo! And most of all, because of the ample bosom!" Virginia had lived more than six decades but she’d never seen anything as shocking as … Joannie trying to look like a girl!!"

"No it’s not fair," Virginia decided, "to blame my swoon entirely on Joannie. That Demi gave me quite a jolt as well."

"Gran, are you all right? Oh, please, please, open your eyes," Joannie wailed. She was crying; Demi was sniffling.

Virginia would have preferred a few more moments to collect her thoughts, to deconstruct the reasons for her collapse, but her daughter was not going to give her the opportunity.

Joannie needed immediate reassurance. She was terrified that her little joke on Virginia and Kyle had backfired: "God’s punishing me for telling that fib," she was telling herself. "I should never have lied to Kyle about my Gran not approving of my dating boys. Not approve? Now there’s the falsehood of the century."

Meanwhile, Kyle was getting hysterical. He was well nigh positive that their masquerade had almost killed his girlfriend’s ancient grandmother. He was thinking: "It shocked her. The sight of a boy in lipstick and fake tits pretending to be a girl — it was too much for her. We should never have done it. There’s no way we could have fooled her. I, Kyle James, am too masculine ever to be mistaken for a girl. Jeez, I could dress up like Madonna, false tits and all, and everyone would still come over to me and say, ‘Hey, man, why are you dressed like a chick?’"

The worst of their silent, unspoken fears Virginia put to rest by rising, albeit unsteadily, to her feet. Teetering, she collapsed into a kitchen chair. "Would you be a dear and make us a pot of coffee, Joannie? I’m sure some caffeine will jolt me back to normalcy. I can’t imagine whatever came over me. It must be a touch of the twenty-four-hour flu."

Kyle wanted to beat a hasty retreat, but no, Virginia would have none of that — she wanted very much, she said, to meet Joannie’s new friend. "Come sit by me, dear," she said, patting the chair next to her, "and tell me all about yourself. I’m eager to know where you two met. It’s Demi, right?"

Kyle nodded in confusion.

"Demi," she repeated. "The name is perfect for you: a pretty name for a pretty girl. Do all the boys tell you that you look like Demi Moore?"

"Not exactly," Kyle mumbled.

"Well, they will. Give them time. Now, you must call me Gran, just as Joannie does. You will do that, won’t you Demi?"

"Yeh, why not," replied Kyle in his best rendition of the uncommunicative,teenage male. Joannie glared at him as she discretely rolled her right hand in front of her to signal that he should be more polite and less laconic.

He got the hint: "I’d like to thank you for letting me call you Gran. It makes me feel like one of the family."

"That’s the idea, Demi honey," Gran replied. "If you’re a girlfriend of Joannie’s, then you are indeed part of the family. You’re always welcome here. Do you understand, honey? Always welcome." She then gave him a peck on his cheek.

Joannie was beaming. The first encounter was proceeding splendidly. As she knew that Virginia would insist on getting Demi’s life story, Joannie started spinning a yarn: "I bet you’re wondering how we know each other. Well, we met at summer camp. Don’t you remember my talking about the girl in the next cabin who was already Monique’s good friend when I arrived at camp?"

Virginia had no such recollection; yet she nodded anyway.

Joannie resumed: "Even though you bunked in different cabins, you were Monique’s special friend, weren’t you Demi?"

Virginia’s eyebrows started rising.

Kyle had no idea what she was talking about. Summer camp? Monique? What was all that about? But he appreciated the need to explain the origins of Demi — even if the story struck him as half-ass — and so he obligingly mimicked, "That’s right. I was Monique’s special friend before you got to camp."

The eyebrows inched higher.

"You used to go hiking together, right?" Joannie led the witness. Weren’t you two always wandering off, looking for a trail less taken?"

At this point, Virginia’s eyebrows appeared to reach their apogee.

Kyle recognized the reference — it was from a poem by Robert Frost, one that they had studied two weeks earlier in English class; and so he proudly responded, "Yes, and that made all the difference."

No, Virginia’s eyebrows still had some lift.

"I’ll say," chortled Joannie. "You two were inseparable until I got to camp." She then turned to Virginia: "Gran, I’m afraid I hurt their friendship at first. But we were bosom pals, all three of us, weren’t we by the end of the summer? Demi, isn’t that so, weren’t we bosom pals by August?"

Virginia’s eyebrows could go no higher. They looked unnatural, like Humpty Dumpty with a high brow. Briefly, it looked like she was about to fall again, especially after she heard Kyle’s reply.

"Yeh, bosom pals. We did everything as a trio." He realized he was being too laconic. He was getting the ‘drag it out’ sign from Joannie, and so he added, "Gran, we often took that path less traveled by as a threesome." He’d heard that word, threesome, used by some of the older students at school, and liked the sound of it, even though he didn’t know its normal usage.

Virginia coughed, then looked away. Her eyebrows sagged. To divert the conversation, she interrupted: "And do you now attend Hoover High?"

This was an easy question, thought Kyle, and before Joannie could prompt him, he replied, "Yes, ma’am, we take almost all the same classes."

"So you must live in this district? Do you live nearby?"

Joannie knew that the answer should be, had to be ‘no,’ but Kyle, believing ‘honesty’ the best strategy in deception, decided to keep his story as true to life as possible, and so replied, "Why yes, I live just down the block. Alone, with my mom. She’s a legal secretary," he added.

Joannie couldn’t fathom why he was offering all this unnecessary information, but Kyle, just wanting to be friendly, couldn’t see the harm in telling his story — that is, until Virginia, with a quizzical look on her face, interjected, "Why, you must be Barb James’s child. I’d heard she had a teenager. But a daughter? I was sure it was a son."

"Now, how did I get that strange notion?" Virginia wondered to herself. Then, taking a look at Demi’s clothes, she knew the answer: There were lots of people who thought that Virginia had a son because of Joannie’s masculine garb and ways. "It must be the same for Barb," she thought. "Demi’s a tomboy too. Look at the way she crosses her legs. You can tell she’s never worn skirts in her life. And her clothes are only marginally more feminine than Joannie’s. Some jerk must have seen Demi at Barb’s and never bothered to ask her name, never mind to ascertain her true gender. Poor Barb, she has to put up with same tomfoolery as I do!"

As these thoughts whizzed through Virginia’s mind. Kyle, unusually, was at a loss for words. He didn’t know what to reply. A lie seemed his best recourse, yet he knew that he now depended on the two women never meeting on the street. Looking away, unable to face the grandmother, he fibbed: "Yes, I’m Barb’s daughter. But there’s no son. I’d be the first to know if there was one." Then, mirthlessly, he giggled.

Staring at him, Barb silently commiserated, "I fear, dear girl, that you’d be the last to know." As Kyle anxiously shuffled his feet awaiting a reply, her thoughts dwelt on Demi’s unfortunate masculinity: "Poor Demi, your mother must have been the first to know that you somehow got a ‘Y’ chromosome tacked on somewhere. She must have known in the maternity hospital. I guess that’s why she called you Demi. She knew from the start that you’d be only half the girl of a mother’s dreams."

As Kyle’s face nervously twitched, Barb continued to be lost in thought. Scrutinizing ‘Demi’ with care, she inwardly sighed: "I do wish that what I’d said about your being pretty was true, but you poor soul, you’re as homely as any boy. I guess you were fated to be one of those sorts of girls. It was in your genes."

The prolonged silence became unbearable to Kyle. Convinced that Virginia had seen through his thin disguise, and believing in his heart of hearts that no amount of artifice could ever disguise his true gender, he whined: "Please don’t tell my mother that …"

"Tell your mother what, dear?" Virginia interrupted.

Joannie brusquely intervened: "That we’re seeing each other. That’s what you can’t tell Demi’s mother. Her mother must not know that Demi comes over here. That would ruin everything."

Kyle was speechless with confusion: As he had no idea where Joannie was going with this story, he leaned back against a chair, waiting for his cue to affirm whatever whopper she was about to tell.

As for Virginia, she interpreted Joannie’s comment as a slight on her household: "What are you suggesting, Joannie? Are you saying that Barb James doesn’t approve of us? Has Demi been told not to consort with you? Are you not good enough to be a friend of Barb’s daughter?"

"Gran, Mrs. James doesn’t want Demi to have any girlfriends. I’m not the problem. All girls are the problem, so far as Mrs. James is concerned. She actually prefers Demi to hang out with boys. They’re always welcome in the James household. But girls? No way! I don’t have to spell things out for you, do I, Gran, as to why Mrs. James dislikes every girl that Demi brings home."

Joannie then turned to Kyle for corroboration: "Isn’t it true, Demi, that your mother won’t allow you to bring girls to your room. And if you tried to have an overnight with a girlfriend, wouldn’t she go ballistic?"

Kyle wasn’t sure how his mother would react if he tried to bring a girl to his room, for he’d never tried. But, as he thought about it, he was sure there would be lots of grief if he told his mother that he was going to spend the night with Joannie for his mom would probably worry about his getting Joannie pregnant.

And so, he decided he wasn’t being unfair to his mother in agreeing: "Yeh, she’d go apeshit if she thought I was planning to bed one of my girlfriends."

Joannie glared at him. She thought his language far too ‘crude.’ "It will become," she told herself, "more refined, more suitable to a teen named Demi, if I have anything to do about it." The phrase more ‘ladylike’ came to mind, but she immediately dismissed it, for she knew she’d never be able to make a ‘lady’ out of Kyle. Maybe a teen Miss, but never a lady.

To Virginia, Joannie recapped: "Demi is an unusual girl. Her mother knows it, and so her mother doesn’t approve of any of her female friends. I’ll be very upset with you if you destroy my friendship with Demi by telling her mother that she’s dating me."

"There," Joannie thought, "that should ensure no contact between the families! TOUCHDOWN for Joannie after picking up the ball fumbled by Demi and then stickhandling my way past the outstretched arm of the shortstop to slam dunk one for the gipper."

Virginia’s mind fixated on the one word — dating. "Joannie, are you two girls dating?"

"Don’t be silly, Gran, we’re too young to date. You’ll be the first to know when we’re old enough to start doing it. Isn’t that right, Demi, we’re not really dating, are we? At least not yet."

Kyle nodded, as he knew he must. However, he had finally grasped that Joannie wanted her grandmother to think they were lesbians. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out how that would help. Wouldn’t Gran be just as leery of her granddaughter dating girls as dating boys?

Yet then, having posed the question in his mind, Kyle believed he’d found the answer there too: "Ah, I get it. Joannie’s giving me cover. She knows I look much too masculine ever to be mistaken for a normal girl. No way that could happen," he proudly declared to his super Ego. "But if her gran thinks I’m a lesbian — a real butch one — she might, she just might believe I’m a girl after all."

He then beamed at Joannie. She’s really clever, he decided. Infatuation wormed its way a little bit deeper into his marrow. And then, to help her out, he broke into the conversation that Joannie had initiated to kill further discussion of their sexual orientation: "Yes," he announced. "I’m too young to be dating. But when I get old enough, I intend to date only girls."

"That’s nice, dear" is all Virginia could think to say. Or dared to say.

Even if Kyle didn’t know when to leave well enough alone, Joannie did; and so she quickly changed the subject by asking if her friend could come over for dinner the following evening.

Or had she in fact changed the subject at all? Not in Virginia’s mind. In fact, she perceived a direct connection between the discussion of girls’ dating each other and Joannie’s suggestion that her girlfriend be invited to dinner. "It’s their first date," Virginia believed; "and I’m being asked to cook for them."

She thought of her options. She couldn’t really see but one, if she wanted to remain emotionally close to her granddaughter: "Yes, do come over for dinner tomorrow night," she told them. "We’ll make it a special occasion. I’ll cook up something really nice for the two of you."

And then to herself — "But I’ll make up some excuse so that you too can eat it alone." Once again, Virginia’s thoughts wandered: "I don’t think I want to spend the evening watching too girls flirt with each other. I didn’t approve of their doing it at Sakakawea College, and I just know that it will make my flesh crawl if I have to see it now. But what choice do I have? It’s Joannie we’re talking about. Whatever she wants, my little darling gets. I’ll make sure that her first date with Demi is a memorable one, but I’m going to spend the evening in the kitchen — somehow."

Meanwhile, Kyle was appalled and thrilled by the offer of dinner -- appalled, because he’d presumably have to masquerade as Demi a second time; and thrilled, because he’d be having a second date with Joannie. "She really does like me," he said, "I’ve got a girlfriend. I’ve got a girlfriend," he quietly sang, as his mind joyfully inverted the schoolyard taunt.

If there was any doubt in his mind about his status with Joannie, she erased it with a kiss at the door, away from Virginia’s prying eyes. It was the first time anyone other than his mother — and she didn’t count — had kissed him on the lips. Anyone! He didn’t even have memories of foul-smelling great aunts to sully this moment. The kiss was purest ambrosia. So unexpected, so freely given, it would be his rosebud — a memory to take with him to that last, bittersweet moment when life’s cares slipped from his grasp. He’d always recollect the warmth and moisture of her lips that day. Most of all, he’d remember her tongue. He’d never understood until then that the tongue could give soul to a kiss.

It was a magic moment. He almost ruined it, however, by complaining about her calling him a ‘lesbian’: "My mom thinks I’m gay, and now your gran thinks I’m a lesbian. Why did you go and imply I liked girls?"

"Well, you do, don’t you, Kyle? Your mother’s not right about your being gay, is she?"

Every time Joannie mentioned his name, she whispered. She decided right then and there that she’d train him to use the name Demi when there was even the slightest chance of her Gran overhearing them.

Kyle was taking no guff about being gay. He scoffed: "How can you even ask me that question after we kissed? I’m sure that my kiss, my ardor, left you in no doubt, none I am sure, about whether Kyle James likes girls and whether he likes one particular girl a lot."

"You’re right, my sweet," she purred as she stroked his cheek. "You do seem to like me." Then she giggled as she explained that she her grandmother was less likely to contact his mother if she thought that Barb was homophobic and opposed to her daughter’s dating another girl. "And besides," she added, "if she thinks you’re a lesbian, then my grandmother will understand why you talk, walk and sit like a boy. She’ll think you’re trying to act like a boy. Get it?"

He thought he did. Yet Kyle never considered that Joannie might have some deeper, ulterior motive for wanting him to enter her family’s life as her lesbian friend. And if anyone had warned him that Joannie might be intending to make him her lesbian lover one day, Kyle wouldn’t have bothered to scoff. He simply wouldn’t have known what the person was talking about.

Not once in his own mind had he ever been anything less than 100% male. He had not been a tiny bit female even for an instant. True, he recognized that he had just crossed an important threshold: For the first time, he had both posed and been accepted as a female. Until now, he had endured a few taunts for being a sissy boy, but no one had thought him an actual female.

Gran was the first person on the planet — nay, in the entire frigging universe -- to think he was a girl. It was an odd feeling to realize that there was now one person who’d be surprised to learn he was a guy. But it didn’t tarnish his masculine self-image, or didn’t tarnish it much, or more than he could handle, at least at the time, to have one blind woman think he was a bull dyke. "It’s funny," he mused, "but even when I dress up like a girl I look like a girl trying to look like a boy. Now, there’s macho for you!"

"A dollar for your thoughts, Kyle," intruded Joannie’s voice.

His response was unfortunate. Certainly, Joannie never entirely forgave him for it. His response was to lay a trap for her. Kyle thought he saw an opportunity to tweak their ‘deal’ to accelerate her feminization. To ensnare her, he said that he was just wondering whether she wanted him to return tomorrow as ‘Demi.’

"Well, duh," she replied. "You have to be Demi or there’s no way you can come for dinner. Gran won’t permit me to have boyfriends, and if you suddenly became a boy, she’d throw you out of the house. She’d certainly not feed you. You have to come back as Demi. You can change on your way home from school."

"And our deal means," Kyle rejoindered, "that you’ll have to dress like Demi too. You’ll have to wear full makeup and a bra. Right?"

Again, that seemed like a no-brainer, and Joannie briskly nodded with a touch of exasperation. However, the questions then became more difficult, and Joannie more wary.

"Do you want me to wear my most feminine-looking jeans?" Kyle asked.

"Which are those?" she wondered.

"They’ve got a wide plaid hem. I wouldn’t dare wear them to school. But I’ll wear them to your house, if you like. And my mom bought me some pink cotton panties. I’ll wear them too, if you want me to."

"Sure, I’d love that, Kyle. I want to see you in both the jeans and the pink panties. Well, you only need to show me the waistband of the panties. But definitely wear them, and the jeans too. They’ll be cool."

Kyle started to spring the trap: "According to our deal, if I dress in something as feminine as pink panties and jeans with a sissy trim, then you have to do it too. We dress alike — you agreed."

"I’ve had a growth spurt, Kyle. I literally don’t have any girls’ clothes that still fit me. So I can’t wear the same things as you. I’ve only got boys’ clothes to wear."

"Not good enough. If you want to see me in girls’ clothes, then you have to wear them too. Neither of us wears panties or both of us do." He then he sprang the trap: "And I don’t just mean when I’m pretending to be Demi. I wear girls’ clothes to school, and so you must too. That’s our deal."

"Who said anything about school? You’re wearing a bra to school because of your deal with your mother. It’s got nothing to do with me. I won’t wear sissy clothes to school," insisted Joannie.

"I’m fed up with the deal I made with my mother. I’m not willing to wear a bra for one more day just to get a moped. I’d only wear it because you wanted me to. And if I wear a bra, then you have to wear one too."

Kyle wasn’t being entirely honest when he said he was ready to forfeit his deal with his mother. Indeed, he wasn’t even being half honest. He was, in fact, still willing to do almost anything for a moped. There were lots more embarrassing things he’d do to win his dream steed than wear girls’ jeans with a masculine cut for a month. But Joannie couldn’t know he was fibbing.

Besides, he was being truthful, more or less, when he said that he was willing to wear a bra to school simply to please her. Mind you, it would have been the more-and-more truth had he said that he’d wear whatever it took to get Joannie herself to strike a more feminine pose at Hoover High.

But all’s fair when it comes to fighting the first wars of adolescent love, and Kyle was willing to traduce his girlfriend into — in her mind — sissy wear like a bra and panties. He was determined to get his girlfriend into a dress, even if he had to lie to her. Hence he made an empty threat: "The only way I’m wearing girls’ clothes to school tomorrow is if you do."

"That’s not fair, Kyle. You were already wearing girls’ clothes to school before you met me, and you don’t need me as an excuse to continue wearing them."

"Oh yes I do. Joannie, if you don’t wear girls’ clothes tomorrow, then I won’t do it either. In fact, I’ll never put on anything feminine again. Never! The moped isn’t worth everyone thinking I’m a sissy."

It was another lie. Since the damage was already done, the only way he could retrieve his reputation at school, Kyle realized, was to roar into its parking lot one day on his moped. Then, his bet won, he could explain why he’d been dressing so weirdly. He couldn’t give up his bra and panties before the end of the month, regardless of what Joannie now said.

But she couldn’t know that. Or at least, she appeared not to realize how few were his options. One can’t say for certain what she did or did not know, girls being inscrutable to Kyle. What is known is this — Joannie capitulated rather than call his bluff. She said she’d show up at Hoover High the next day in, shudder, girls’ clothes. She’d get them somehow.

She made it clear that she was acting under duress: "You’re being quite unfair, Kyle James. You’re changing our deal. Thanks to you, I’m going to have boys ogling my tits all day. I’m surprised that you don’t want me to keep them wrapped away, like in sandy Arabia. I’ll feel like a freak dressed in girls’ clothes. I just know that everyone is going to be talking about me all day."

"And they don’t already talk about me?" Kyle asked sardonically.

"Why would they talk about you, Kyle? Only a couple of us know you’re wearing girls’ clothes and we’ve kept our tongue — so far," she teased. "You’ll have to wear something a lot more feminine to school than you’ve done so far for them to talk about you the way they’re going to talk about me when I show up in a bra and panties. So there."

As she finished, she realized that simple justice required that Kyle experience at least once the sort of day at school that he was insisting she endure tomorrow. So much did she loathe the idea of going to school in any sort of ‘girls clothes’ she figured that Kyle would have to wear pink sneakers, embroidered jeans (with a flower motif — what else), a super tight pink tank top, and beneath it his breast forms, attached for maximum bounce, before he’d have as miserable a day of teasing as she expected to happen tomorrow. After all, he was forcing her to wear ‘breasts’ to school; he should have to wear them too — and soon.

In the meantime, she derived some pleasure in knowing that Kyle had no option but to wear the makeup, the lipstick and his breast forms down the back alley between their two homes. It was already dark, and no one was likely to notice that Kyle was going out in public as a girl, but it gave her some solace to think that he’d be keeping low like a mare in a field of stallions.

To give him something extra to think about the following day, Joannie said she’d be wearing pink panties and plaid-hemmed jeans the entire day, and she expected him to do so too.

Feeling guilty about the trap he’d set, Kyle easily fell into this one: Yes, he’d wear the pink panties and plaid jeans to school. It didn’t seem like a major concession at the time, for he’d already promised to wear them to dinner at Joannie’s.

It wasn’t until later, as he lay in bed thinking, that he appreciated the extent to which he had given Joannie the whip hand. He was supposed to be in charge. He was the deal master, the boy who never lost a bet — well, almost never, if one discounted all those times that the bet had been called off on account of a wound or injury. Joannie was supposed to emulate him; and yet he had at the last minute agreed to copycat her. Who was now the dominated and who the dominatrix?

Kyle had neither the time nor the wits to ask or answer this question, for he was as jumpy as a cat in heat as he prowled the back alley. He was terrified of being found there, at least part of the terror arising from uncertainty as to which would be the more dreadful — to be recognized as Kyle James in lipstick, mascara and boobs; or to be mistaken for a girl, a stranger in the neighborhood.

Upon further reflection, he concluded that he’d be immediately recognized as the James boy for he didn’t believe that anyone with normal vision would think he was female — even in the alley’s dim light.

If Joannie’s grandmother was fooled by his masquerade, then it just proved how blind and senile she was. After all, she’d fainted. "Gosh," he thought, "I wonder how many times a day she poops out like that? I hope I never grow that old — so ancient that I couldn’t tell the difference between a boy and a girl."

Safely into his own home, Kyle rushed upstairs to his room. The slammed door alterting Barb to his arrival, she called out, "Are you finally home? Where have you been? What kept you?" As he didn’t answer, she went up to find him.

Meanwhile, Kyle had taken out his breast forms and had stowed them under his pillow. (His mother insisted that he make his own bed, which meant, naturally, that it never got made.) He then raced into the main bathroom to find a mirror to help him to remove his lipstick, mascara and eyeshade. However, the sight of himself in the mirror caused him to pause. Why the hesitation? Did he suddenly realize that the makeup did make him resemble a pretty girl? Was he mesmerized by his new, feminine image?

Hardly. In Kyle’s eyes, he looked as masculine as ever. The makeup, he thought, simply gave him the appearance of a stage actor. He knew that actors wore a lot of makeup. He’d even heard that Presidents dabbed on a bit of lipstick and rouge before they went on camera.

So it would take a lot more than makeup to convince Kyle that there was anything feminine looking about him. Indeed, had you asked him, he would have answered, "Yes, everyone would know I was a boy even if I was wearing a dress. After all," he’d add, "Alexander the Great wore a skirt and no one thought he looked like a lady."

And so, it was not some blinding insight into his own creeping feminization that caused Kyle to pause and then to purse his lips in front of the mirror. He was remembering the kiss! His first kiss! If he washed his lips, he’d be removing the moisture deposited there by her lips. She’d kissed his lipstick. It now contained her essence. To remove the lipstick would betray his passion for her.

Like a teenage girl who refused to wash a rock star’s autograph from her wrist or palm, Kyle resisted eradicating the physical evidence of his first infatuation. So instead of removing the lipstick, he leant forward and kissed the mirror. It was the next best thing to kissing Joannie! When he saw his lip imprint on the mirror, he started to get aroused, and he was trying to French kiss the mirror as his mother gave a warning cough at the open bathroom door.

Kyle whirled around to face her. As he did, Barb realized that he’d done something with his hair to make it look more feminine. There could be not doubt about it — her son was trying to look like a girl. And generally he had succeeded, although he definitely needed some lessons on how to make up his face.

Barb sighed to herself: "It’s true. He wants to be a girl. The moped was only an excuse." She wasn’t sure what to make of the revelation: Should she greet it with despair or with delight? As always, she was ambivalent when it came to Kyle’s gender. "If only," she thought, "he could be all girl one day, and all boy the next." She feared his becoming neither one nor the other.

Kyle spoke first: "Oh mom, I didn’t hear you come up the stairs. How long have you been standing there?" When Barb didn’t answer, he continued, "You’ll never believe what a day I had. I met a girl."

Then he remembered he was supposed to have a girlfriend already. It seemed simpler to change the intro to his story rather than to try to explain how and why he’d come to have two girlfriends at once; and so, he resumed, "Or rather, I got a lot closer to the girl that I was telling you about — you know, with my girlfriend." Then, as he saw his mother staring at the red lipstick and spittle on the mirror, he added, "I kissed the mirror because I was reliving our kiss. She kissed me."

Barb groaned inside: "She? That’s not very likely, is it Kyle? Would a girl want her boyfriend to wear lipstick and dress up like another girl? I doubt it. Who was the boy, Kyle? Oh Ky…y…y…y…yle!" her mind keened.

His mother was silent, her look distracted. And so, Kyle continued to do the talking: "She’s invited me over for dinner, with her grandmother, tomorrow night. Is it all right if I go? Please say yes. I’ll do my homework right after school. I’ll get it done. I promise."

Naturally, she said yes. And then, speaking of dinner, she announced that theirs was on the table. "Do you want me, dear, to put it into a warming oven while you get ready for dinner?"

Kyle asked himself: "Do I want to take off the lipstick? No way! Let the memory linger just a little bit longer! What about the rest of the stuff? Jeez, it can wait. Mom has already seen me wearing it. I’m starving. I’ll take it off after dinner." So he said, "I’m ready now. Let’s eat!"

At dinner, Barb could scarcely take her eyes off Kyle’s face and hair. At first their femininized aspect unnerved her, but as the shock wore off, she realized that she was having a lot of fun eating with her ‘daughter.’ Barb didn’t want this moment to end too soon, and so when Kyle had polished off the petite portion of pumpkin pie she’d cut for him, she suggested that he might like some lessons in applying and removing his makeup.

Kyle was at first offended that she thought for one moment that he, or any all-American boy, wanted to spend his evening learning how do apply lipstick and eyeshade. But he got no further than, "Aww Mom, how could you?" before he had second thoughts. These were about Joannie. She didn’t know anything about makeup, as her face had made abundantly apparent this evening.

Even with his help, she’d done a poor job with her makeup and mascara. And her hand on the eyebrow pencil had been much shakier than his. Who was Joannie to learn from him, if not from him? Certainly not from her grandmother! Joannie’s gran would probably teach her stuff that went out with Queen Victoria. What about his mother? Did she know the contemporary styles? "Yeh," he thought, "she usually looks pretty cool. I’m sure that Joannie could learn a lot from her."

Whatever his mother taught him, he could teach Joannie! This decided, he finished his sentence, "Aww Mom, how could you have known that I do want to learn more about makeup."

"And why is that, honey?"

"Like I told you — so that I can go to a dance or" — and he added this to tease her — "a rave dressed like one of the Kiss band. Guys in makeup meet a lot of girls at raves. Makeup means the guy’s cool, not a geek."

Barb might have bought this line, had it made any sense at all. But he’d been telling her all through dinner about his new girlfriend, and now he said he needed makeup to go prowling for her replacement. Furthermore, she didn’t think the guys who wore makeup to raves asked their mothers to make their look as feminine as possible — that is, not unless they were sissy boys at heart.

As they worked together on Kyle’s face, there were three difficult moments. The first came when Barb had him remove his existing facial powder. He had resisted her, and she soon saw why, as a multi-hued bruise came into view. Barb was furious. First she accused him of wearing makeup merely to conceal the black eye from her. "That’s dishonest, Kyle James. I raised you to be honest. Your mother shouldn’t be the last to know that you’ve got a black eye."

With the moped possibly at stake, Kyle feverishly lied. "I’ve been telling you the truth about the makeup. Lots of boys wear it these days, and I wanted try it out. Why not? Anything goes these days. Unisex reigns. Anyway, I got the shiner a day after I started wearing the makeup. So there."

Barb suspected it was a lie, but she could not refute it. Hence she altered her line of attack: "How did you get that shiner, Kyle? You had better not have been fighting or, I’ll …."

She didn’t complete the threat, but Kyle assumed the sentence rhymed with dead, as in moped. The scooter required another artful dodge: "I haven’t been fighting. My girlfriend accidentally gave me the black eye. It was an accident, I swear."

Barb understandably wanted to know how his girlfriend happened to hit him in the face: "She poked you one? Are you sure she’s really your girlfriend?"

"Of course she is. She was using a broom to sweep up, and I guess she was getting too vigorous with it, because she caught my face on the back swing. The black eye was worth getting because she kissed my cheek to make it feel better."

Barb was about to ask Kyle how he could have two first kisses from the same girl, but then recognizing that adolescents make fine distinctions between degrees of amorous activity, she decided not to chance learning more than she wanted to know about Kyle’s love life.

Barb instead challenged him on the girlfriend: "Kyle, honey, you keep talking about your ‘girlfriend.’ Doesn’t she have a name? What’s her name?" Barb suspected it was Ken or Steve.

"Her name?" Kyle hesitated. He’d already revealed too much to Joannie’s grandmother. And while the ‘lesbian’ ruse might kill the curiosity of Joannie’s gran, what was there to stop his mother from seeking her out if she knew that Kyle was dating a girl who lived on his very own street? If the two women made contact, then Virginia would learn that Demi was a he. And then, according to Joannie, his short-lived dating career would be kaput. He’d also probably be grounded and lose all hope of ever owning a moped if his mother learned that he’d been deceiving Joannie’s half-dead grandmother.

And yet he had an immediate problem to solve: His mother didn’t seem to believe that he actually had a girlfriend. She’d be even more sceptical if he failed to come up with a name for her. There had to be a girlfriend, but it was too soon and too risky for her name to be Joannie Smith. And so, he fibbed a little: "Her name? My girlfriend’s name is Demi. It’s Italian or something Mediterranean. I think it’s short for Demetria. I guess her mother called her that."

"Why yes, Kyle, I do imagine that it was her mother who named Demi."

Barb might have said more. She was tempted to add, "Unless it was you who named Demi," for Barb was now very suspicious. She’d detected the hesitation. Kyle had taken so much time to reply that he seemed to be inventing a name. Why Demi? It must be the movie star. Maybe, it was a case of free association: First, Kyle thought of a boy named Bruce, then of Bruce Willis, and finally of his wife Demi Moore.

Just as Barb was about to ask Kyle whether he knew a boy named Bruce, the phone rang. She took the call in the kitchen. It was Elvira Lancer, bubbling over with ‘good tidings.’

"Oh, Barb, I’m absolutely thrilled with the news. Steve is so happy. Indeed, he’s been dancing around the house with joy."

"Er, what news is that?" Barb asked with dread.

"Well, I would have thought that Kyle would have told you by now. You know, the news about their date. I think they agreed on it today, when they saw each other after school. Surely, Kyle asked you for permission to go out on a boy-boy date with Steve? He does have it, I hope? Steve would be crushed, absolutely crushed, if you don’t give your permission. This is, after all, the first time he has dated anyone. And Kyle was, Steve tells me, really keen himself about the date."

Barb was in shock: It had been Steve that Kyle had been seeing after school! It had been Steve, a boy as she had feared, who had persuaded Kyle to wear lipstick and mascara. Steve was Kyle’s girlfriend! But who was kidding whom? Steve wasn’t the girlfriend, Kyle was. After all, he was the one in girl’s clothes and makeup.

The knowledge hit her in the stomach: Kyle was Demi!! Barb was sure of that now: Her son had already chosen his drag name. What choice did she have, under the circumstances, but to accede to his dating another boy, one probably more of a male these days than he?

Inwardly groaning, Barb cheerily said, "Of course, Kyle has my permission to … er … date Steve."

"Now don’t you worry about their getting into any sort of trouble, as if two boys really could, Barb, for I’ll be chaperoning them."

"What a silly cow you are," Barb thought. "Is chaperoning what you call cooking a meal for them?"

That’s what she thought, but what she said was — "Well, they’re fourteen years old. I don’t suppose they need too much supervision."

"Fine, fine. Now, there’s something else I should say in all fairness to Steve. My boy naturally thinks that Kyle is very brave to be wearing girls’ clothes to school. Indeed, he thinks it remarkable that any boy would have the courage to wear a bra and panties to Hoover High. And it’s okay with him if Kyle wants to dress more femininely for their date. However, Barb, I don’t want my son to get into a fistfight by having to defend Kyle from the sort of verbal abuse that inept transvestites inspire."

Barb tried to interrupt, but Elvira persisted: "Please hear me out. I just wanted to say that Kyle may wear full makeup, a linen blouse, a pleated skirt and pumps so far as Steve and I are concerned. Indeed, I think we’re both curious to see what sort of butterfly Kyla will be once she emerges from her boyish cocoon. But Kyle has to choose — either to dress and act like a boy, as best he can, or else to go on the date as Kyla, the girl he apparently wants to be. I don’t want there to be trouble. He must be one thing or the other. Definitely a he, or definitely a she."

Barb wondered how there could be ‘trouble’ at a private dinner at the Lancer’s home if Kyle showed up looking like a boy in drag. She supposed there were other children invited. "I guess they would prefer Kyle to be one thing, or the other — to be either a boy or a transsexual. There’s not much tolerance these days for midway states. Children especially want there to be absolutes. If they see that Kyle is becoming a female, they’ll want him to go all the way."

A vision of Kyle’s head on a nude woman’s body then flashed through Barb’s mind. Oddly, it wasn’t until she got to the vagina that the daydream disturbed her. Until then, she was secretly pleased that her son was so curvaceous.

Barb reassured Elvira Lancer that Kyle would be unmistakably male on his date with Steve. "I don’t know where you get the idea, Elvira, that my boy wants to wear a dress. He’s always been a very masculine boy, and I’m surprised, frankly, that he agreed to a date with another boy. He does, after all, have a girlfriend."

"Oh really? Steve hasn’t said anything about there being competition. She must keep herself pretty scarce. Anyway, let’s be realistic, Barb: The so-called girlfriends of boys like Steve and Kyle are actually what they call ‘fag flies’ — or some such expression. There are girls who hang around gay boys because they know they won’t get pawed. Sissy boys like Kyle end up with lots of close female friends, with whom they talk about menus, fashion and male movie stars, but they don’t have a girlfriend in the romantic sense of the word. I reckon that Kyle was telling you, Barb, that he has found a new friend who happens to be female."

"If that much," moaned Barb to herself. Her thoughts ran wild: "For all I know Kyle is his own girlfriend, a split personality named Demi."

She brought the phone conversation to a rapid close by promising Mrs. Lancer that she’d ensure that no one would be confused by Kyle’s gender during his date with Steve. As she hung up, Barb realized she’d have to go shopping tomorrow for Kyle so that he’d have the option of going to his date as Demi, if that was his earnest desire.

Barb was none too pleased with Kyle. He shouldn’t have lied to her about the girlfriend, about Demi, and about his date with Steve. "He also probably lied about the black eye. I suppose that Steve gave it to him in an overly enthusiastic embrace. Or more likely, one of the other boys thought it macho to strike a queer."

Barb heard more ‘lies’ when she told Kyle that it had been Mrs. Lancer on the phone, and that the dear lady had told her about Kyle’s ‘date’ with Steve. "Why didn’t you tell me your date was with Steve? I would have understood, Kyle. I’m your mother. You can and should tell me the truth about your personal life."

Kyle seethed to himself: "She’s doing it again — hinting that I’m queer. Where does she get that rot? Jeez, mothers are strange. It must have something to do with their men-o-pause." Or that’s what Kyle thought.

To Barb he made it clear, he hoped, that there was nothing ‘between’ Steve and him: "For the last time, mom, I’m not going out on a date with Steve. I’m not queer, er gay, and the only reason we’re going to see each other is I don’t get an opportunity like this every day — well, in fact, never before."

Kyle of course assumed that his mother had been told about the offer of free basketball tickets. He had no idea that she interpreted his ‘opportunity’ as a romantic evening with a gay boy. As Barb watched Kyle gesticulate, her anger abated, for she now knew that most of Kyle’s lies were to himself. The boy wasn’t able to admit to himself that he was as gay as Quentin Crisp. "And it’s my fault," Barb thought, "that he’s gay. Why didn’t I smack his hand the first time he played as Pocahontas?"

It might have been guilt, and an attempt to make amends. It might have been residual anger over his lies, and an attempt to punish. It might even have been an attempt to demonstrate — in as concrete and liberal a way as she could — that she’d love her son even if he did become a gay transvestite hooker. Whatever the motive, some demon possessed her as she spent the rest of the evening trying to make her son’s makeup and hairstyle look as feminine as possible.

With incessant repetition, Kyle became reasonably adept at making and unmaking his face. He was an avid student because, as he kept telling himself, "It’s for Joannie. If I can look feminine, then I can teach her to look feminine. When I finish with her, she’ll look super cute."

With each experiment, Kyle looked less and less like a boy in makeup, and more and more like a big-boned, fourteen-year-old girl. True, ‘she’ was no beauty; nevertheless, ‘she’ definitely looked female. Or at least would as soon as Kyle had the right hairstyle.

As she saw Kyle revel in the remaking of his face, Barb lost any illusions she had held about his quintessential masculinity. Her son, she decided, wanted to look as feminine as possible, apparently to impress — or seduce? — a boy named Steve.

So when it came to wielding the scissors, she was determined to make his hair look as girlish as she could, within the obvious constraint that he had to be able to comb his hair into a semblance of a boy’s haircut in order to go to school.

However, for whatever reason — anger, guilt, compassion — Barb’s idea of what constituted a ‘masculine-enough’ cut departed radically from the Iowa norm. Possibly boys were coiffed like him in San Francisco, West Hollywood, Times Square and Mayberry — but certainly not in Des Moines. His hair now looked like Demi Moore’s in the movie Ghost.

Kyle marveled at the way he looked. Once again, he thought of Joannie — of how feminine she’d look with this rad haircut. And for one brief moment he preened like a peahen while Barb captured his new look on film.

But he almost immediately sobered up: "Mom," he wailed, "I can’t go to school with my hair looking like this. I’ll be laughed out of school or end up fighting all the guys at once."

"Don’t fret, Kyle," a quick combing and it’s as masculine as ever." And with a few deft strokes she combed his hair into a more boyish look. "See, good as new," she said. But even as she spoke, his hair relapsed into girlishness. Kyle started to get hysterical as it became increasingly obvious that his hair no longer considered masculinity its natural condition of rest.

Finally, she calmed him down by using hairspray to force his locks to stand rigidly at attention. Any time they wilted, he looked like a girl. Until his hair grew out, Kyle was going to be wed to his newly acquired can of hairspray. Only Demi could thereafter let her hair run free. Though he thanked his mother for her help, Kyle did not retire for the night a happy boy.

That night four people lay awake fretting about Kyle’s future. Naturally they included his mother: She could not get his ‘homosexuality’ out of her mind. And the date with Steve obsessed her. The boys were only fourteen-years-old, and yet she was already contemplating their wedding ceremony.

Kyle, she now ‘knew’, would be the one wearing a wedding dress. Could it be white? Well, not if they had been having sex for years. I should say not." Barb, a traditionalist, thought only virgins should wear white. She concluded after great deliberation that she couldn’t decide on the color of Kyle’s dress.

But she was determined that whatever the color of his wedding gown that he’d be wearing it to a church ceremony. She’d start shopping around for a church, she decided, tolerant enough to marry two boys, and one of them dressed in lace.

Would he actually be, physiologically, a woman by the time he wed? Was Kyle a transsexual? Barb thought this one over, but couldn’t decide. "I’ll do some snooping in his room tomorrow," she told herself. Looking for what? "Well, for some sign that he wants to have breasts. So far he’s made no attempt to stuff his bra. If he were to start doing that, well then there’d be no question that Kyle was a transsexual."

She next wondered whether a gay boy named Kyle or a new woman named Demi would be better able to persuade the State to permit the adoption of the grandchildren that Barb so craved. She couldn’t come to a conclusion.

Her mind then returned to Kyle’s first date. It should be a memorable, she decided, even if it’s with a boy named Steve. She wanted her son to have wonderful memories, regardless of what sexuality he ultimately declared.

She didn’t think Kyle should wear his everyday, school clothes on his first date. He needed something special. And she didn’t have much time to find it for him. Certainly, there would be no opportunity for Kyle to do his own shopping before tomorrow evening.

Barb resolved to hustle over to Macy’s where she’d buy Kyle the most beautiful, most delicate lingerie available — just in case the boys took their street clothes off. She’d heard that gays normally had sex on their first date.

Men were carnal; they lived for sex, Barb believed. They didn’t have to worry about being too experienced, or bleeding too little, on their wedding night. And they didn’t have to fear pregnancy.

"But they do have to fear AIDS," Barb moaned. She decided to put some condoms in the shoulder bag she was going to present to Kyle on the morrow. He’d need a purse because the fashion tops, skirts and slacks she was going to buy him were unlikely to have pockets.

As she worked through Demi’s wardrobe options for ‘her’ first big date, Barb finally became fatigued enough to welcome sleep. That night she had only pleasant dreams — of love, weddings, marriage, and grandchildren. Only a snippet from one dream did she really remember: In it a small boy dressed as an Indian maiden was being cradled in the arms of his father Steve.

It probably took Virginia even longer to get to sleep that night. She tossed and turned for hours as she contemplated the implications of Demi. It had been the shock of seeing the two girls together that had caused her swoon. They had looked so much like a couple that she’d immediately lost hope that she had been wrong about her beloved granddaughter.

Demi’s appearance clarified, alas, that Joannie was indeed a lesbian. Virginia had feared for weeks that she was. Joannie had been, she’d recognized, much too enthusiastic about her summer with Monique. At first Virgnia had dismissed the endless chatter as an adolescent crush, but Joannie’s recent taste in clothing had alarmed her, especially when the girl started wearing boy’s underwear.

Demi was the last piece in the puzzle. Demi made the big picture impossible to ignore. What a sorry excuse Demi was for a female! Virginia didn’t think she had ever seen a more masculine-acting or —looking girl. It was almost as though the girl had been raised as a boy. Virginia had read of such things — of parents who didn’t like the hand that God had dealt them, and so tried to add a joker to the deck. It made sense in a sexist world that parents might try to raise a daughter as a son.

Or possibly, Demi had simply insisted on being treated as a boy. At any rate, it was difficult to imagine Demi’s ever having played with dolls. Or if she had, it was to have Ken preside over the marriage of Barbie and Theresa.

No, there could be no denying it: Demi was a dyke. She was, Virginia decided, a "butch" — just like her own granddaughter. The two girls seemed to be vying to see who could look and act the more masculine. At the moment Joannie seemed to be winning, for her friend was apparently having second thoughts about dressing like a boy.

Indeed, possibly they both were. After all, both girls had been wearing lipstick. Not unexpectedly, Joannie had done a pathetic job in applying her makeup, for she had never tried, so far as Virginia knew, to put it on before. First Joannie had been too young to be allowed to wear it, and then she been too macho to want to wear it. As for Demi, she seemed as much a novice as Joannie at trying to look feminine.

Two butches trying to look feminine — there was only one thing that could explain such a remarkable transformation. They must be trying to impress each other. They must be, dare she use the words, ‘in love.’ Certainly, it had to be a strong sentiment to get Joannie to unbind her breasts. "I had so many fights with the girl about her refusal to accept the outthrust of puberty, I’m absolutely amazed to see her flaunt her breasts. I wasn’t even sure she had them!"

Even more remarkably, Joannie had badgered her all evening to let her go shopping for girls’ clothes. Imagine that! The girl was even asking to play hooky to acquire them. Virginia, pleased to see Joannie making a stab at femininity, consented. They were scheduled to visit Macy’s the following morning. Why Macy’s? Because, said Joannie, that’s where Demi did her shopping.

Demi — it was all about Demi, the butch who had bewitched her granddaughter. Demi was, Virginia observed, unusually busty for a fourteen-year-old.

"She probably thinks her breasts a curse," reflected Virginia, "She probably wishes she was flat-chested like a boy. Well, at least she’s got the hips of a boy. That must be some consolation to the poor, mixed-up little girl."

Somewhere in Demi was the key to understanding Joannie: "If I can discover what makes Demi tick, then maybe I can finally figure out my granddaughter. They’re so alike those two. It’s going to be rough having a lesbian affair happening under my own roof. What am I going to do? Can I handle it?"

Certainly she hoped she could. In the meantime, she was going to do nothing to discourage their romance. It would probably be short-lived, and if it were, it might have a positive outcome: "If the two girls feminize each other enough," she hoped, "they both might attract some male attention. And then, they might find that their ‘lesbianism’ was a passing phase."

At least, she still had hopes for Joannie’s heterosexuality; but Demi seemed pre-destined, even by her name, to be half a boy all her life: "The poor soul," I must welcome her into my home. She does not need more rejection in her life."

Her strategy resolved, Virginia finally nodded off to asleep. Towards dawn she had a long complicated dream about the women’s tennis tour.

Joannie, by contrast, was thrilled by her day: She had finally met Kyle and discovered to her delight that he wasn’t only handsome, and daring, and sweet, but also malleable. She could hardly believe that he had agreed to wear the breast forms on their very first date. He had looked so sexy as a woman that it had been impossible not to kiss him. The remnants of their conjoined lipsticks she had kissed onto a hanky, and locked away in her chest of treasures. Before this night she probably could have predicted, but now knew for certain, that the more feminine Kyle looked, the more he turned her on.

"If I ever saw him in a dress, I’d probably tear off my jeans and boxer shorts and hurl my naked body at him. We’d make mad, passionate love in the middle of the living room floor with everyone watching." It then occurred to her that she’d also be probably be wearing a dress, for it was the likely price for getting Kyle to forsake trousers. "Oh well, it would be worth dressing like a Barbie doll to get Kyle into a slinky sequined dress and satin lingerie." She resolved that she’d make the necessary concessions to get Kyle properly attired for taking her ‘virginity.’

Despite these warm and arousing thoughts about Kyle, Joannie was not entirely pleased with his behavior that day. She hadn’t appreciated his tricking her into wearing girls’ clothes to school.

"He needs to treat me with more respect. With maximum respect," she determined.

To teach him to tread warily around her, she was going to replicate his girls’ wardrobe as best she could. He’d wonder, as he took some ribbing at school about their dressing like identical twins, whether it had been wise to force her to wear girls’ clothes to school. Eventually, he’d see the wisdom of keeping their matched dressing an after-school affair. But if not, she had plans to match him chip for chip, bra for bra, and even bid up the ante with a nylon stocking or two until he had folded his cards. From then on she could name the game.

She’d have her grandmother take her to Macy’s, where she knew Kyle had done his shopping, and the first thing she’d buy were jeans with a plaid hem. Joannie figured there might be a salesgirl who remembered Kyle’s shopping expedition, and who could help her pick out the right items. After all, how many boys went shopping in girls’ wear? And Kyle was too cute not to have been noticed, even had he hung back and let his mom do all the talking.

"Kyle is super cute. I bet all the salesgirls remember him … vividly … vivid …," Joannie murmured to herself as she faded off to sleep.

That night, her dreams started, as they had every night since her summertime romance, with Monique. As usual, Monique was wearing the world’s reddest lipstick and pinkest, softest bra and panties. They embraced. They kissed. They began to make love.

As they did, Monique gradually morphed into Kyle. No one in any of her dreams had ever looked sexier in women’s lingerie. No fantasy had ever been so erotic. Her orgasm so shook her body that Joannie awakened just long enough to know that Kyle had been her wet dream that night. As she drifted back to sleep, she was mewing, "I’ve got to get Kyle into satin and …."

Kyle meanwhile was having a restless night. He lay in bed for at least an hour replaying his last conversation with Joannie — the one in which he had agreed to wear the pink panties and plaid-trimmed jeans to school. The more he thought about it, the more he perceived that somehow Joannie had transposed the terms of their deal. He was supposed to determine how femininely they’d both be dressing, and yet she had been the one to decide that they would be wearing pink and plaid to school.

"I’ve got to tell her tomorrow that she got the deal all wrong. She copies me. I don’t copy her. She’d better get it right or else I’ll …." He wasn’t sure how the threat should end.

Yet his subconscious knew. That night, his dreams featured a superhero, a cross between Cat woman and Spiderman, who fought valiantly, yet hopelessly, against a super villain, who each time celebrated her triumph by stripping the superhero of his tights. Kyle would awake just as Spidercat covered his nakedness by putting on a pink denim skirt. At three o’clock in the morning, Kyle was pondering the big question: Can denim be pink? He never did come up with an answer.

To be continued in chapter 7 — ‘What Does Kyle Know About Dating?’

In the first five parts, Kyle finds it more difficult than he expected to keep a deal he made with his mother: That if he wears girls’ clothes for a month that she will buy him a moped (a motor scooter). He’s not quite sure how it happened, but in rapid succession he has lost his friends, convinced his mother that he’s gay and dating a boy named Steve, posed as a lesbian named Demi in order to charm the grandmother of his new girlfriend Joannie, who’d prefer that Kyle wore the panties in the family, and panicked his mother into looking for evidence that he’s a transsexual. At the end of part 5, Kyle has two lives — a public one in which he still tries to look as masculine as possible in his girls’ clothes, and a private one where only he thinks he still looks all-boy.

Anything for a Moped? - Part 6 by: Dawn De Winter
Chapter Seven: Dressing Up is Hard to Do

Her right arm shook uncontrollably. In an attempt to steady it, Barb grasped her right wrist with her left hand. The tremor then passed through both arms into the inner recesses of her body — into her heart, her lungs, her brain, and her soul. Her entire being quaked with emotion.

Inevitably she dropped it: The breast form slipped from her trembling fingers onto the floor. As she saw it lying there quivering, Barb’s legs buckled and she slumped onto Kyle’s bed.

Earlier, she had gone looking for some evidence that Kyle was using a prosthetic breast of some sort. She had never really expected to find it. Indeed, she had assumed, as she started searching Kyle’s room, that she’d find no evidence at all that her son’s interest in cross-dressing went beyond the absolute minimum necessary to gain a moped.

His ‘lingerie’ drawer was therefore the first shocker. She had rummaged through it several times before she’d accept the fact that it contained only two pairs of pink cotton panties. "There should be three," she kept telling herself. "I bought him a pack of three pink panties."

Eventually, she could not avoid the truth: One of the panties was missing; and Kyle must be wearing it. He had, therefore, failed the test she had set for him. She had believed pink to be anathema to her macho son. Apparently it wasn’t. At this very moment he was wearing the most feminine clothes at his disposal. He could have been wearing black, white or gray. His underwear could have had at least the color, if not the cut, of masculinity. Instead, he had chosen the pink panties. They screamed: "I want to look like a woman."

Was it true? Did Kyle want to look like a woman? Was he wearing girls’ jeans only because his mother had not yet bought him a dress?

As an answer, Barb sought to read her son’s mind: "What are you thinking this very moment, Kyle? Are you reveling in your pink panties? Do you wish you had breasts to fill out your bra? What is your real motive for dressing as a girl? A moped, as you claim? Or is it some deep-seated compulsion?"

And then Barb thought of Kyle’s childhood, of all those occasions on which he’d pretended to be Pocahontas, Mulan or Joan of Ark. Had he done it to please Barb? Or had he conned her into thinking that she was in charge? Had Kyle always wanted to be a girl? Or was this some newfound fantasy? Or was there some more innocent, more boyish explanation for his wearing pink?"

She desperately needed to know. Her mind went traveling for a signal from Kyle. "Give me a sign, my beloved son. Some sort of sign. I need to know what you want from me. PLEASE -- so I can help you."

Her right hand soon found the answer. She had been sitting on Kyle’s unmade bed as she anguished over the panties, and her hand had nervously been wandering. After a while, distractedly, it started smoothing his bedding.

With so much disorder in her life it wasn’t surprising that she began to arrange Kyle’s bed. And yet, Barb would always believe that her hand started fluffing Kyle’s pillows because her son had sent her a telepathic message. She was certain for the rest of her life that his mind had told her to look under his spare pillow, so that she could find there the breast forms — the two smoking guns that proved that Kyle was having a shootout with his own masculinity.

She had grabbed one of the forms, and had run for the door as though she were trying to dispose of the ‘evidence,’ but her legs had crumpled before she could make the hallway. She dragged herself back to Kyle’s bed where she now sat weeping.

For an hour she sobbed hysterically. Later she would have been hard-pressed to have told anyone what was going through her mind as the tears erupted. Though no one, not even Kyle, ever asked her what went through her mind during that first hour after she found the tell-tale evidence of her son’s ‘transsexuality,’ Barb would probably have answered: "At first I lamented the death of my son, and then I wept for joy at the birth of my daughter."

This was far from being the last occasion on which Barb tearfully mourned Kyle or welcomed Demi. Over the next few months she frequently wept over the great transition in her family’s life, but Kyle rarely saw those tears, for his mother was a resolute woman. She was not going to weigh him down with a mother’s cares.

And she was not going to waste this vital morning in weeping!

"Shape up, Barb!" she told herself. "Kyle needs your strength. Kyle needs you to shop for him. Kyle needs his mother."

She shouldn’t have said his name three times. That was a mistake. It took another half hour before she could stop crying.

But then, dry-eyed, she hurriedly dressed and rushed off to Macy’s. As she drove, she thought about the cost of the breast forms. Their quality meant they had to be very expensive. How then, she wondered, did Kyle acquire them? Briefly she worried that Kyle somehow had shoplifted them, but she quickly set that apprehension aside, when she realized that no women’s store would allow a fourteen-year-old boy anywhere near such an intimately feminine item. She also dismissed the evanescent fear that Kyle had bought the forms with stolen money, for she knew her son well enough to appreciate that he could never have summoned the courage to buy ‘boobs.’

No, they had to be a gift; and Barb just ‘knew’ who had given her son his very own breasts: Elvira Lancer. Who else could it be? The woman owned a Mercedes, and reportedly had done very well out of her divorce. She must have given Kyle the forms to please her son. Barb was beginning to wonder whether Steve actually was gay, for he seemed to be so enamored with females that he wanted Kyle to become one.

While she didn’t know what to make of Steve, Barb had a definite opinion of Elvira Lancer — namely, that she was a meddling busybody who had no right to put breasts on Kyle.

"What gall!" steamed Barb. "She deprived me of an important moment with my son. I should have been the one to buy him the breast forms, so that I could prove that I accepted him whoever he was, whatever he was." She resolved to tell Elvira off at the first opportunity.

Meanwhile Barb had shopping to do. While she had lost the opportunity to demonstrate her support by supplying Kyle with his first female prosthetic, she could still prove she loved him by buying all the clothes, shoes and jewelry that he would need if he really, really wanted to proclaim to the world, "Look at me, I am woman!"

At Macy’s she started in girls’ lingerie, starting with practical cotton goods, for an Iowa winter was looming. Even so, the bras, the panties, and the two nightgowns had as feminine a cut and look as possible. She emphasized pastels, especially pinks, as well as flowered prints. The cotton nightgowns were extremely short with plenty of pink or yellow ribbons and lace to announce their femininity. When wearing them, he would be continually flashing his panties.

Then she moved on to the slinkier lingerie. She was lost in thought, pondering whether black lace was too mature a look for a fourteen-year-old when suddenly she felt a tap on her shoulder. It was, she recognized, the salesgirl who had helped them to outfit Kyle in lingerie the first time.

"Welcome back," chirped Melanie. "You’ve been here before, right? You were with your son, right? What was his name? Ah yes, I remember. It was Kirkdirk, wasn’t it? How could I ever forget that name?"

Barb had forgotten Kyle’s pseudonym, and so she corrected Melanie: "I was here with my son, but his name isn’t anything as preposterous as Kirkdirk. It’s Kyle. He helped me shop for ...," she paused while she struggled to recollect their lies, "... his sister."

"But ma’am, I thought his sister is named Kyla. Kyle? Kyla? That’s cute. They’re twins, right? I remember now that Kyle really enjoyed picking out clothes for his sister. Being a boy, he didn’t want us to know he was having fun in girls’ wear. But he did have fun, didn’t he?" She then winked at Barb.

"She knows," Barb thought. "She’s a lot wiser than I am. She knew from the start that Kyle was buying clothes for himself. She also realized that Kyle probably would have preferred this — and she held up the black lace panties — to the unisex underwear we bought him."

Barb decided she had to talk to someone about Kyle’s cross-dressing. It was a secret too big to keep to herself. It was crushing her. And since Melanie already seemed to understand as much about Kyle’s hidden desires as did his own mother, Barb opened up to her. Haltingly, shyly, Barb said: "The clothes were for Kyle, but you knew that already, didn’t you?"

"Of course, I did, ma’am. May I use your first name so you’ll feel more comfortable talking with me?"

"Yes, by all means. I’m Barb, and you’re Melanie, right? That’s what your name tag says."

"Barb, your son is far from the first boy to be shopping in this department. Granted he’s younger than most, but few teens are lucky enough to have an understanding, compassionate mother."

"Is that what you think I am, Melanie? Understanding, compassionate?"

"Of course, you are, Barb. I remember that you wouldn’t let us tease Kyle. I noticed. I couldn’t help but notice. You love him a lot, don’t you? And you’ll do anything for him, won’t you?"

"Yes," she sighed. "Am I so wrong in helping him become whatever he wants to be, that he needs to be, even something that the world ... scorns?"

"Not at all, Barb. Everyone should have a mother like you. You’re not forcing Kyle to wear girls’ clothes, are you? It’s his choice, right?"

When Barb nodded twice, Melanie said, "Then let’s go shopping. I see that Kyle has reached stage two. I noticed last time that he wanted a unisex look -- in other words, girls’ clothes that, if you didn’t look too closely, might be mistaken for boys’ wear. But, judging from those pretty panties you’re holding, things have changed. He now wants to look as feminine as possible. Is that true?"

"Not yet at school, Melanie. When he goes to school, Kyle still wants to look as masculine as possible in his girls’ clothes. But I think it’s going to be different from now on after school. He’s got a big date tonight, and I just know that he’s going to want to look as pretty as possible."

"Do you think there is any chance that Kyle’s date is going to get a peek at his undergarments?"

Barb thought to herself: "We’re talking about hormone-crazed teenage boys. Can there be any doubt that Steve will be trying to get into Kyle’s panties?" The answer could only be yes, and so Barb affirmed, "Yes, it could happen. This is an important date for Kyle. I want to buy my son something special to wear. What do you recommend?"

"Well, I know from his last visit to the lingerie department that this is what he wants to wear. He couldn’t take his hands off it. I thought he’d leave permanent fingerprints." She then held up a bright pink satin bra-and-panty combination that she said cost only $25. "Why not buy two of them?" she asked, as she assured Barb that Kyle craved a touch of satin.

"Are you sure this is what my son wants?"

"Barb, trust me. I know just what your son really wants. I was watching him carefully when he pretended to want to dress in as drab and as masculine colors as possible. And I can tell you that the more feminine colors, especially pink, turned his crank. His eyes, his hands, even his nerves -- they gave him away."

Was Melanie being entirely honest? Did she truly believe that Kyle wanted to dress in feminine finery? Possibly. But she probably had mixed motives. As Melanie figured it, she couldn’t lose by talking Barb into buying expensive lingerie for her son. It didn’t matter whether Kyle hated it or loved it, wore it, or rejected it, for Barb would score points with her son for caring, and both mother and son would learn the limits, if any, to Kyle’s fetishism.

So long as the clothes never came back to the store, Melanie was a big winner. Her manager would be thrilled to see some of the silk and satin items finally sold. They had been gathering dust now that teenage girls favored the unisex look. And so, Melanie did what salesclerks do: She sold Barb on as many and as expensive outfits as she could.

Barb spent forty-five expensive minutes buying lingerie for Kyle. As Melanie toted up the impressive bill, she confided: "It’s fun to outfit Kyle. Please tell him that if he wants to do his own shopping that I won’t tease him again. I’ll make sure that everything fits his -- how shall I say it? -- his unusual physique."

Barb gave the salesgirl an exuberant hug, and then went off to look at tops, pants, shoes and dresses. In girls’ outerwear she found Chelsea, another familiar face, at work. Thanks to a call from Melanie, Chelsea already knew that ‘Kirkdirk’ was getting outfitted for a big date.

She and Barb readily agreed that he should have a choice of fashion jeans or dresses -- whichever best suited his mood. For pants, Barb bought black velvet bootlegs; red Spandex, stretch red moleskin flares; and a pair of dark blue Capris with a white tropical border at the leg hem, She thought Kyle might like the Capri pants best because they didn’t have a ‘boyish’ zipper in front.

The tops she kept simple. She decided against blouses, for young teenage girls didn’t seem to be wearing them these days. And so, she selected several striped, acrylic, vee-necked tops with three-quarter length sleeves. One or two of them were short enough, she noted, to give Kyle a chance to show off his navel. Certainly, they were tight enough to show off his breast forms to advantage.

In addition to two plain skirts, she also bought two dresses. She figured that Kyle was, at present, unlikely to wear any dress if it struck him as too ‘feminine,’ and so she adopted ‘masculine’ blue as her fashion motif. One was, therefore, in royal blue cotton batik, with a white hem; and the other, a more formal, square-neck dress in poly-mesh, with silvered floral embroidery. It had an empress waist.

"When he’s wearing that dress on his date with Steve," Barb reflected, "my son will feel like a queen."

Certainly, he’d be feeling half-naked, for the skirts and dresses all revealed a lot of thigh. And if he weren’t careful, he’d be showing off his boyhood when he spread his legs too wide.

Kyle also gained three new pairs of shoes: first, for everyday use, burgundy-colored sneakers in faux snakeskin and padded heels; plus sueded, black Maryjanes, with a t-strap, two-inch heels, and three floral appliques at each toe; and finally, black slip-on shoe boots with red and white floral insets at each toe and outside heel. The heel was the highest yet, by one quarter of an inch. There would be nothing higher, for Barb didn’t want her son to embarrass himself by falling flat on his ankles.

And then the shopping expedition abruptly ended. Her watch demanded that Barb go to work. She had spent so much money on new clothes for Kyle that she couldn’t afford to take the full day off. Indeed, she’d have to find an excuse for paid overtime.

Weighed down by her bags, Barb exited the girls’ department with a bowed head. Hence she did not see Joannie and Virginia as they passed her. Joannie noticed her first. Excitedly, she tugged on Virginia’s sleeve and whispered, "Did you just see Demi’s mother? She’s been shopping in the girls’ department. That’s super! That means that Demi is going to have some great new outfits!"

"That’s nice, dear."

"Gran, we don’t have much time, do we?"

"No, Joannie, I do think we should have gotten an earlier start on the day. But you did insist on going to a pancake house for breakfast. It took so long you’d have thought they had to thresh and grind the buckwheat themselves. And now, I reckon we have only about an hour before we have to head home and get you ready for school."

"I’m not sure we even have that much time, Gran, for I want to make sure that Demi and her friends see my new outfits at lunch, so that there can be maximum buzz."

"What a strange girl," Virginia thought, "first she won’t wear girls’ clothes, and now she wants the whole world to know she’ll be doing it."

It then occurred to Virginia that her granddaughter mainly craved attention. After all, she was an orphan, and one grandmother could not replace two parents. Maybe the girl felt neglected.

"Is it possible," Virginia wondered, "that Joannie has been wearing boys’ clothes to school merely to get noticed? Maybe, she figured it was better to be notorious than to be a nonentity. It’s so easy to get ignored at High School if you’re not limber enough to be a cheerleader, or conniving enough to run for the booster club or student government."

"Are the boxer shorts merely an attention-grabber? And if they’re no more than that, then how genuine is Joannie’s ‘lesbianism’? Heaven knows that she’s shown interest in boys in the past, and as recently as two weeks ago she was talking a fair amount about one of the boys at school."

"Now, what was his name? It starts with a K, doesn’t it? He’s one of the K generation. Let me see: Is it Kirk? No, not Kirk. How about Ken or Kevin? No, too old-fashioned. What about Kyle? That’s got to be it. I’ll have to ask Joannie what became of Kyle. Maybe, I can arrange some sort of date between Kyle and Joannie. But first, I’m going to have to learn his last name."

"Gran, you just agreed we’ve got to rush, and there you are lost in thought. What were you thinking about?" queried Joannie.

"About you, dear. I was thinking about how much I love you, and how I want to do what’s right by you."

Virginia then realized she needed some time for reflection: "I’ve got to think this through. Is Joannie a lesbian? Or is that a façade? Demi’s a lesbian and she’s so much more masculine than Joannie. They’re scarcely the same gender. What’s really going through my daughter’s mind? What is the true nature of Joannie’s relationship with that Demi? I need a few moments to myself to think."

She then told a white lie to Joannie: "There’s something I need at the drugstore. Can you start your shopping while I go pick it up?"

"This is perfect," thought Joannie. "I won’t have to know what Kyle’s mom said to the salesgirls, whether she said she was shopping for Demi, for me, for Kyle, or for his girlfriend Pocahontas. I won’t need a name. I can get the information from the girls before Gran gets back from the drugstore."

Needless to say, she told her grandmother to take her time, that there would be no problem picking out a few clothes in her absence. As they parted, Joannie headed off in a rush to the jeans department. The one item she just knew she had to have was a pair of boot-cut jeans with plaid pockets and a plaid hem -- just like Kyle’s.

As Joannie hunted for the jeans, she encountered Chelsea. They got talking, and it did not take long for Chelsea to admit that cross-dressers did occasionally shop at Macy’s.

"Why," Chelsea confided, "we even get mothers buying for their sissy sons. There was one this morning. Believe it or not: She purchased four skirts and dresses for him. Can you imagine that? What a strange world we live in!"

Joannie claimed to be intrigued: "What sort of dresses would a mother buy for her son?"

Soon enough all the clothes that Barb had bought that morning from Chelsea were on display. They agreed that Barb had good taste. Chelsea then exclaimed, "If I were younger, I wouldn’t mind that batik-print dress myself."

"Nor would I," Joannie enthused, as she thought about going out on a date with Demi in identical outfits. Could she ever get Kyle into a dress? "Just watch me," she answered to herself. And then, to Chelsea, she said, "I want that dress. In fact, I want to buy everything that lady bought for her son."

"You want to dress like a transvestite boy?" Chelsea asked dubiously. Yet, looking more closely at Joannie, she realized it was a stupid question. "My god," Chelsea told herself, "this girl is dressed in boys’ clothes. She’s even wearing boxer shorts. She must be a lesbian. This beats everything. I never thought I’d be selling the exact same clothes to a bull dyke and to a sissy queer. I guess it’s true what they say: All extremes eventually meet at a common point. A messed-up girl and a screwed-up boy -- I guess they would want to wear the same things!"

Once Chelsea decided that she approved of Joannie’s dressing like a girl, she threw herself into the project of duplicating Kyle’s wardrobe. She was even willing to call up his earlier purchases on her computer terminal, so that Joannie could buy his ‘drabwear,’ including his khakis and plaid jeans.

Saying that Chelsea should put the clothes to one side until she could come back with her grandmother’s credit card, Joannie headed off to girls’ shoes and lingerie. By the time, she reached both, Chelsea had been on the phone to Melanie, who eagerly helped Joannie to replicate Kyle’s lingerie collection.

Melanie didn’t buy Joannie’s story. She judged it ludicrous. To Melanie it was obvious that this girl had to be Kyle’s big date. She was surprised, for she had inferred from Barb’s comments that Kyle was gay. Perhaps Kyle’s mother had never met the girl; perhaps they had only waved at each other from a distance. In that case, given the way this girl dressed, Barb may have mistaken her for a boy.

Melanie chuckled: "Wow, will Barb ever be surprised when Kyle knocks up his ‘boyfriend’! When that happens, I wonder which one of them will wear the dress at the shotgun wedding? I guess it will be both of them, since this girl seems to want to dress just like Kyle. These kids are weird enough to be on the Jerry Springer show."

Yes they were, weren’t they? That afternoon Melanie was too ‘sick’ to work, as she went home to call the Jerry Springer, Sally Jesse Raphael, Rickie Lake, Montel Williams, Rosie O’Donnell and Vera Smuttee shows to pitch the idea of a show on teenage boys who dressed exactly like their girlfriends. The sundry producers were, as she expected, exceedingly interested -- that is, until they found out that she was representing a fourteen-year-old boy.

"That was too young, there’d be too many legal complications," all but one of them said. The lone exception, Ima Wilde, said that there might be a place for Kyle and his girlfriend on the low-rated Vera Smuttee show, but only if one or both of the teens was prepared to have a sex change.

"I tell you what," said Ima. "We can promise you a finder’s fee of $1000 if the teens are so keen on looking alike that the boy is willing to get breast implants. You tell him that we’re ready to pay for the entire procedure provided that he and his girlfriend agree to appear on the show twice, once dressed as boys, and the second time dressed as girls. You tell this Kyle that we’ll pay him extra if he bares his chest on the first show, and lets us see a lot of cleavage on the second. It goes without saying that the girl will have to show our viewers enough décolletage to convince the audience that she’s for real."

"Can you set this up?" Ima asked. "There’s a thousand dollars for you if you can."

"Can I? You bet I can. I guarantee their appearance."

As she got off the phone, Melanie had a huge smile as she thought of the $1000 and of the fame she’d get for arranging for Kyle to become the first teenage boy in America to get his new tits on a national TV program.

"One or both of them will be back again to shop. And when they do, Plan A will go into action. Kyle, honey, I pledge that you’ll soon not only have the best bust line of any school boy in Iowa, but you’ll be the most famous teenager in the country."

How was Melanie going to persuade him to change his sex? She wasn’t yet sure herself how she’d manage it, but she was going to work on a plan. Where there was a will, there had to be a way. Besides, the boy was obviously a transsexual and simple charity required her to help him to acquire a body worthy of the girls’ clothes he was rapidly accumulating.

Even as Melanie hatched her plot to bring Kyle and Joannie closer -- so close, in fact, that they’d be wearing the same bra cup, Virginia was trying to think of ways to break them apart. She’d decided earlier that day at Starbucks, where she’d gone after leaving Joannie to shop for herself, that she had a duty to end their affair.

After all, why should she allow a lesbian to date her daughter, when Demi’s own mother wouldn’t permit them to be together under her own roof! Joannie had said that Barb James was totally opposed to her daughter dating another girl. This news Virginia had found profoundly unsettling, for Barb was the most tolerant person she had ever met.

She remembered the first time she had ever seen Barb James. It had been at a public meeting, and Barb couldn’t have been a day older than eleven years old. But she bravely came to the microphone to appeal for a compromise in the town’s acrimonious dispute over whether public buildings could have Christmas crá¨ches with the baby Jesus in the manger surrounded by his mother and a host of special invitees.

Barb had suggested that every religion could have a place in the manger scene: "The Wise Men could, you know, carry signs saying they were Jewish, Muslim and Hindu. And the shepherds could be, you know, Buddhist, Confucian, Shinto, and whatever you want. And feminists could be satisfied, you know, by the Virgin Mary having a label sewn onto her robe saying she’s a Wiccan."

The speech was unforgettable, if only because of the ensuing riot. As Virginia dodged flying chairs, she realized she’d never forget little Barb James. And since then, Barb had never let her down -- until now. As an adult, Barb had fought for the right of Shriners to march through Arab-American neighborhoods, for the right of Catholic women to wear priestly dresses, and for the absolute right of free speech, even for those who talked during film-showings. Barb had even sought a court order to require the zoo to release its caged animals on their own recognizance.

And if a woman with this record could not tolerate having her daughter date another girl, then why should Virginia? Why indeed? It especially galled Virginia that Barb might think she was protecting Demi if she kept the two girls apart.

"Demi? What a laugh," Virginia thought, "that girl is as gay as Dame Edna. She’s quite clearly the hunter, and Joannie the hunted. I doubt very much that Joannie is in fact a lesbian. She’s merely confused." If that were the case, then Virginia had a duty to kill this romance with Demi before it became too serious and changed the course of Joannie’s life.

Certainly their affair had to end before it climaxed. Judging from the hints that Joannie had been heavily dropping since summer camp, her granddaughter had fooled around sexually with Demi as well as Monique, the French girl. Even so, the three of them apparently had been too callow to know either that they should, or could, bring each other to orgasm. In that sense, Joannie was still a virgin. Possibly she had never truly soared, even in solo flight.

Had Demi ever experienced an orgasm? Virginia wasn’t sure. The girl was too homely to have had many dates with either sex. And yet, Demi struck Virginia as the type who’d ‘put out’ on her first date. Given enough practise, it was likely that Demi had learned, if only by trial and error, that she had an ‘O’ spot. Certainly, the girl’s hands had once or twice wandered -- or so Virginia had noticed -- towards her own crotch, as though she were a teenage boy bent on playing pocket pool. It seemed unlikely that Demi had never had an orgasm.

By the time she had finished her coffee, Virginia had come close to deciding that she would do her utmost to keep Demi away from her granddaughter. She wanted Joannie to date boys first. Let one of them give Joannie her first orgasm -- before the butch lesbian did.

"Why not that Kyle she talked about?" mused Virginia. "Better Kyle than Demi."

Virginia’s resentment against Demi increased fourfold when, having returned to Macy’s, she saw the size of the bill she was being asked to pay so that Joannie could dress ‘just like Demi’. Virginia decided that she could no more afford this affair financially than could Joannie handle it emotionally.

Virginia decided, even so, to pay for the several shopping bags of clothes that Joannie had selected, so that her granddaughter would not suspect that Virginia was now intent on scuttling the relationship with Demi.

Joannie must never know, of course, that Virginia had sabotaged Demi’s chances. Accordingly, Virginia spent the rest of the afternoon alternately cooking a chicken for Joannie’s date with Demi, and hatching a scheme to cook Demi’s goose.

Joannie was meanwhile enjoying the turmoil at Hoover High. She had predicted to Kyle that her attending school in girls’ clothes would unleash considerably more gossip than had his cross-dressing, and was she ever right! And she was right despite the fact that Kyle’s clothes had finally sparked speculation in some quarters as to whether he was, in fact, dressing like a girl.

The plaid jeans had been his undoing, despite his best efforts to hide their telltale hem in stylish cowboy boots that he’d borrowed from his mother. He’d endeavored to hide the plaid lining of his front pockets by keeping his hands in them, and despite some dirty looks from his English teacher, who suspected Kyle -- with some cause -- of playing with himself during Cynthia Parker’s recitation of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, Kyle had managed to keep the plaid a secret until lunchtime.

Lunch had started off well, as two more students had joined Kyle, Steve and Tim at their table. He was beginning to feel popular again, and as the five joked around, Kyle had forgotten his plaid predicament. As he waved around his hands, demonstrating the jump shot that Michael Jordan had taken to win Chicago its last NBA championship, Amana Bormann happened to notice the plaid.

It was unfortunate for Kyle that Amana had a keen eye for fashion, for she not only resented any boy who wore her favorite jeans, but she was also romantically interested in Tristin, the boy who had replaced Kyle in the black-shirt gang. As Tristin so far had been more interested in hanging out with boys than in dating girls, Amana figured she’d finally get his attention by teasing him with the news that Kyle James, a one-time associate of his new crowd, was a sissy who cross-dressed.

All but one of the gang scoffed at her news. Only Jason took her seriously, and he was, to her surprise, utterly hostile to Kyle. Until then, she’d thought him Kyle’s best friend. Yet Jason now announced that he was going to ‘beat the living crap’ out of Kyle as soon as school let out for the day. In the meantime, he glared in Kyle’s direction, all the while muttering about betrayal and humiliation. Amana even thought she heard him say, "What are they going to say about me?"

That comment got her wondering. It also got her gossiping: In minutes, word surged around the cafeteria that Kyle and Jason had been lovers. The news overshadowed the speculation as to whether Kyle was wearing girls’ clothes, for the ninth grade found it more fascinating to speculate about who was taking his clothes off, than who was putting them on. When the gossip reached Jason, he had one more reason ‘to pound the pansy to a pulp’.

Just as gossip reached a fevered pitch as to whether Kyle was gay and going out with one of the male students — ‘with Jason’ some said; ‘with Steve’ said others — Joannie threw everyone for a loop. She made it clear to the entire cafeteria that she had her hooks into Kyle.

Everyone saw or heard Joannie make her grand entrance into the school cafeteria. She had heralded her arrival by casually knocking two food trays onto the floor. As they clattered, heads rose to witness Joannie stomping down the aisle towards Kyle and his friends. Her walk was even more exaggeratedly male than usual, and the first impulse of the student flock was to cluck sympathetically about the sad case of the "girl who wants to be a boy."

But then, suddenly, the ninth-grade boys became silent, as their lower jaw sagged. Their mouth agape, their tongue feverishly moistening their lips, they watched in amazement as Joannie’s ample breasts passed near their tables. Even some of the senior students became slack-jawed in stupefaction. Could it be? Could Joannie, hitherto, the girl with the flattest chest in the ninth grade have overnight become buxom?

Males fell to chattering: The question on every lip was, "Are they real?"

Meanwhile, the ninth-grade girls had fallen silent, as they puzzled over Joannie’s new look. It was less masculine than usual, they agreed, and might even -- incredibly -- include an item or two of girls’ clothing.

It was, however, when she sat down heavily, and somehow noisily, beside Kyle that the tongues of Hoover’s girls began wagging: "They’re dressed alike! And they’re wearing the same jeans! They’re obviously a couple. But if that’s true, are they both straight? Didn’t Joannie say she’s a lesbian? Didn’t we just hear that Kyle is dating Jason? Or was it Steve he’s dating?"

Well, if he had ever been dating boys, he apparently wasn’t doing it any longer, as Joannie made abundantly clear, for she ostentatiously put her arm around Kyle’s shoulders. She then beamed triumphantly to the room: "This boy is mine."

Steve looked dismayed.

The buzz then switched to the meaning of plaid. A boy and a girl were wearing the very same jeans. One of them was cross-dressing. That was the logical conclusion. But which ? Joannie or Kyle?

The consensus was not unanimous, for a few of the guys believed Jason’s story, now going the rounds, that Kyle had been in drag for days; but nine out of ten Hooverites believed that Joannie was the cross-dresser, as before. Apparently she and Kyle had agreed to wear the same boys’ clothes to announce they were going steady.

How cute! How drole! In fact, so convinced was Hoover High that Joannie was still dressing like a boy, that any girl who admitted to owning plaid-hemmed jeans was being ridiculed for having been conned into buying something that must have started off as winter wear for effete Scottish males.

"What’s next?" they were asked, "Will you be buying a man’s kilt and calling it a skirt?"

Not everyone took the joshing in good humor, least of all Jason. He tried to convince the black-shirt gang, indeed anyone who’d listen, that they should strip Kyle of his outer clothes and leave him in the girls’ locker room wearing only his underwear. "If you do that," Jason promised, "you’ll find out that Kyle’s a sissy wearing a bra and panties."

Temporarily, it seemed that Jason would be able to assemble his posse. However, Derek broke the mood by saying that it was up to Jason to settle his own accounts — if he were man enough. "We’ll watch you whup Kyle, but we’re not going to help. You can beat up a sissy by yourself, can’t you, Jason?"

"Sure," said Jason. He expected, as before, an easy victory. And this time he’d get his trophy: Kyle’s bra. If all went according to plan, Jason would wrest the bra from Kyle’s prostrate body, and then, by waving it about in the air, establish his own veracity and Kyle’s duplicity.

By publicly humiliating the cross-dressing boy, Jason would dispel the foul rumors about his own sexuality. Then everyone would know that Jason despised, rather than loved, Kyle; and that it hadn’t been Joannie, a girl, who had come between the erstwhile friends, but rather Kyle’s freakish perversions.

Kyle realized he had no choice but to fight Jason, and he came to the schoolyard ready to rumble. He had the backing of his newfound friends, including Steve, Tim and Joannie. They were numerous enough to persuade the black shirts that no one would interfere in the fight. It would be up to Kyle and Jason to prove which one of them was the better man.

Kyle held out his arms in front, motioning towards Jason to begin grappling. Jason was only too pleased to wrestle, for close-in fighting would him to tear off the sissy’s bra. Jason extended his arms and grabbed Kyle. Jason looked smug. Kyle looked terrified.

Briefly they danced, and then Kyle, absolutely without warning, kneed Jason viciously in the groin. Jason crumpled to the ground, a shocked grimace replacing his smug grin. As he lay writhing on the ground, Kyle kicked him hard in the butt. "Take that, creep. What goes around comes around, you stupid jerk."

Heads nodded, and Derek spoke for all: "It’s true. Jason was the first to fight dirty. He did it to Kyle the last time. Jason got what was coming to him."

There was, therefore, no thought of avenging the stricken boy. Any notion of stripping Kyle of his clothes and dignity had vanished as he stood glowering, his fists clenched, and his body tensed for battle.

Kyle was safe. No one was going to mess with him today. His friends were duly impressed; and Joannie was downright awestruck: "Super cool. My boyfriend’s got to be the toughest dude in the whole world to wear a bra."

When he saw that he controlled the field of battle, Kyle relaxed. He signaled to Joannie that should leave (before the black shirts changed their mind), and they headed off in a quick step. After a couple of blocks, however, they stopped to catch their breath.

Joannie then grabbed Kyle, pulled him to her, and gave him a big wet kiss. "You were fantastic, Kyle James," she gushed. "You’re all man even in a bra and panties. I just know you could whip everyone of those boys even if you were wearing a dress, even a blue batik dress."

Kyle looked at her quizzically: "How come you mentioned a blue dress? Why blue? And why does it have to come from a boutique?"

"Because I know you own two blue dresses, silly. I saw your mother buying them for you this morning."

This was not news that Kyle wanted to hear. Their moment of pastoral tenderness gave way to a storm of wrath: "What’s come over her?" he thundered. "My mother is crazy! All you women are crazy!"

The sparks flew, as he demanded that Joannie affirm that she knew full well that Kyle never had, and never would, want to wear either a skirt or a dress.

She answered with lightning speed: "Of course, I know that. But your mother does care for you. She thinks you want a dress. She paid a lot of money for it. You’ll make her cry if you throw a tantrum when she shows you the two dresses she’s bought you. You don’t want your mother to cry, do you, Kyle?"

"Of course not. She’s everything to me. She’s the only family I’ve got."

"Do you love her enough to wear a dress when it’s just the two of you at home, when there’s no one else about, when there’s no one else to see you?"

When Joannie put it that way, Kyle had no choice but to affirm: "I’ll wear the damn dress once, just once, if that’s the only way to stop her from bawling."

Joannie kissed him again, as she purred, "Kyle, you’re the sweetest boy in the whole world. I know you’re going to keep your promise. You’ll wear that dress if she asks you to. Right?"

Glumly, Kyle nodded. Then he said: "I’d much rather wear pants, even these sissy jeans with the plaid hem and pockets." Then he looked down to confirm that she was wearing the exact same jeans. Kyle asked, "Did you get those today? What else did you get?"

"I got all the same clothes as you, Kyle. I saw your mother shopping at Macy’s and I had Melanie and Chelsea, the salesgirls, find me exactly the same clothes as your mom bought for you."

He pondered the implications of what she’d just said. He then asked: "Are you saying that you bought some dresses, that you now own a blue boutique dress, just like me?"

"Yes, isn’t that great, Kyle? When Demi comes to my house, we’ll look like twins. Isn’t that cool?"

"You’re not hinting that I should wear the dress tonight, are you? Because there is no way in the world that I’ll do that. If my mother insists, I’ll wear a dress around the house. But outside it? No way! Not even in the back alley. If someone saw me in a dress, I’d have to leave town -- in a big hurry."

"I don’t want you to wear a dress tonight, Kyle, because I’m definitely not ready to wear one myself. But I do think I’m ready to wear the black pants I bought today. I will wear them, if you wear yours. Is it a deal?"

Black? That didn’t sound so bad. How feminine could they be? And, in the dark of the alley, who’d even notice them? Kyle agreed to wear his new black pants, as well as a complementary striped top. However, he specified that he wouldn’t be coming over until the sheen of the pants faded into the lengthening shadows of twilight.

They parted. Joannie blew Kyle a kiss. He caught it with his right hand, and then released it like a prayer skyward. He skipped homeward.

Half an hour after his arrival, Barb came staggering through the doorway. Joannie had been right about the shopping expedition. He had never seen so many bags. His mother had bought enough to outfit a harem. And were they all for him?

"Cripes," Kyle gulped. His mouth began working like a guppy’s in a dirty fishbowl. Suddenly, and desperately, he needed a drink -- of water. He began to wonder what those black pants looked like. Had he been tricked? However, the fear soon fled, for he fully realized that black pants would be much easier to explain away than a blue dress. He hoped he’d never have to wear it. After all, blue didn’t really go with his complexion.

To Barb’s surprise, Kyle was keen to see the pants she’d bought him. He went rummaging through the bags, casting bras, stockings, slips, and panties about, as he looked for them. And then, when he’d found the black velvet pants, and to his immense relief, found no sissy flowers or teddy bears on their back pocket or legs, he insisted on trying them on -- right there in the middle of the living room.

Barb had her earlier suspicions confirmed as he flashed his pink cotton panties as he changed trousers.

He actually seemed to like the fact that they had no back pockets, as he attempted to twist around sufficiently to see his right hand caress his buttocks. As he preened, Barb noticed that some of his postures and hand motions were quite ‘feminine’.

"Deliberately? Subconsciously? Accidentally?" She wondered. She was dumbfounded by his apparent eagerness to wear black velvet: "It’s not yet a skirt or a dress," Barb thought, "But I never thought I’d again see Kyle actually want to wear girls’ pants. I thought those days were long behind us, a passing pleasure of his childhood."

Keen surprised her again by excitedly asking to see the tops she’d bought him, and to her amazement he delighted in one with three-quarter length sleeves and an especially audacious plunge to its vee neck. All that Kyle noticed was its color complementarity with the pants he planned to wear on his big date with Joannie. But Barb noticed that he was wearing a white sports bra, and that even after he’d put on the top that she could tell that her son had not an ounce of fat on his lower abdomen, and an ‘out’ belly button.

"Do you really want to wear that top on your date, Kyle? Don’t you think it’s a bit revealing?" As she spoke, Barb reflected that she never thought she’d be worried about her son going out on a date looking ‘too easy’.

Mentally Barb slapped herself: "What are you worrying about? Kyle may be signally that he’s a rather ‘loose girl’ by wearing that top with that bottom, but he’s not in any danger of getting pregnant." Then she thought of AIDS -- boys could get that, couldn’t they? -- and later, before he left for his date, she slipped two condoms into the leather bag he was taking with him on his date.

Kyle thought the top would do. After all, it didn’t reveal his bra or its straps. As for showing off his navel, many of the guys were cutting off the bottoms of tee shirts that had shrunk in the wash (perhaps during the first time they’d been coerced into doing their own laundry), and wearing them almost like sports bras as they played sports. He’d thought it a super look -- very macho -- and saw nothing wrong with showing off his navel to Joannie.

To Joannie, mind you, but not to Steve. If Joannie got ideas about Kyle’s sexual availability, that was all right with him. However, he’d feel uncomfortable if Steve were to have a chance to stare at his navel, and so Kyle made a mental note not to wear this top, or any others like it, in front of Steve. After all, it was one thing to invite a girl to marvel at his taut, narrow waist, it was quite another to have a gay boy ‘ogle’ him.

Yet Kyle then surprised himself with this wayward thought: "I’ll have to be careful where and when I wear this outfit, for it won’t be just Steve who will be eating me up with their eyes, it will be all the boys."

This thought perturbed him: "Jeez, why did I say ‘all the boys’? I meant all the gay boys, right? Didn’t I? Could any regular guy find me a turn-on in girls’ clothes? What a bogus idea!"

Kyle realized that some part of him -- in his own mind, an infinitesimally small part -- considered cross-dressing to be a high-risk adventure. To go out in public looking like a girl hot for action would, he recognized, be as risky as hurtling through rush-hour traffic on a moped.

"It would be an adrenalin rush," he realized. "But it will never happen. Never. For if I crash and burn on my moped, maybe I end up in the hospital with a broken leg, but I’ll still have a reputation for being a regular dude, and my friends will drop by with video games to play. But if I were to flirt with a hetero guy, and if he got a hard for me, then when he found out the truth about my real sex, he’d be so mad that he’d round up a gang who’d break both my legs. And I probably couldn’t get into hospital because none of doctors would be willing to help a sissy queer in a bloody blue dress. Then there’d be no hospital, no reputation, no friends, no video games!"

Kyle accordingly dismissed the temptation to see cross-dressing as another high-risk sport like rock climbing, motorcycling, or para-sailing. He put temptation on the back burner.

Having found the red and black, striped top and the velvet pants a remarkably easy sale to make, Barb found Kyle a difficult ‘customer’ when it came to the rest of his proposed wardrobe. The skirts and dresses he could not put down fast enough, consenting to no more than a cursory inspection to see if the dresses fitted his shoulders. As he promised Joannie, he said not a negative word about either the skirts or the dresses. When asked for a direct comment, he ventured that all of them were "It’s okay."

Slips and nylon stockings he also treated like hot coals, dropping them back into their bag, almost as soon as he had recognized their true nature. Tights, on the other hand, he treated with tender respect, his eyes getting a misty, faraway look as he handled them, as though he were reliving fond memories.

Indeed, he decided the tights would come in handy when winter came and the mercury dropped below freezing. By then, the bet would be over, and he wouldn’t be wearing girls’ clothes, of course, but the tights, well hidden by his Levis, would help shield him against the Alberta Clipper as he raced through Des Moines on his moped. It was so important to be snugly dressed in January that he realized he’d even wear the pink tights, if the others were in the wash.

At first, Kyle gave the panties and bras a casual dismissal. But Barb insisted that he couldn’t go out on a big date with a mismatched bra and panty. She therefore had him look carefully at everything she’d bought him. Barb also demanded that that he say something about each, either negative or positive, so that she could get some idea of his taste.

"There’s no point in my buying satin and silk, which are expensive, unless you prefer it," she advised.

Kyle replied with a variety of grunted remarks that Barb learned to decode: "I guess so" was, she decided, more approving than "I suppose", and both were superior to "okay". The highest praise he could offer, it seemed, was "it could be worse."

The secret of the cipher was the length of the sentence, Barb calculated; the more words he used the better he liked the undergarment. With the code broken, it then became possible to tell that Kyle liked bright colors -- even the pinks, if bold enough, but especially the reds -- as well as satiny-soft fabrics. Indeed, he commented as he held up a pink satin panty, "This isn’t as bad as some."

Six words! A gain of fifty percent! The pink satin panties were clearly Kyle’s favorite, just as Melanie foresaw. The salesgirl seemed to be able to read Kyle like a TG story, and Barb resolved to rely more heavily on Melanie in future for advice as to what Kyle should wear.

Why stop at clothes suggestions? Henceforth, she’d rely on Melanie for basic advice on whether Barb should respond to Kyle’s feminization with the brakes or the accelerator. There weren’t too many people you’d ask whether they approved of a teenager changing his gender. But Melanie, wise beyond her years, seemed like someone whose opinion Barb could trust.

It didn’t take much effort to coax Kyle into wearing the pink satin underwear for his big date. However, the black slip-on shoe boots with red and white flowers on the toes took a major sales job. Yet Kyle’s resistance eventually cracked.

He ‘bought’ three of her arguments: first, that these weren’t the first women’s shoes he’d be putting on, since he had that very day worn his mother’s cowboy boots to school; second, that the shoes weren’t going to make him look any more feminine than did the rest of his outfit; and third, that the shoes went perfectly with both his top and his velvet pants.

Ninety minutes later Kyle was ready for his date. It was definitely with Joannie, even if his mother thought it was with Steve. And for Joannie he was dressed as femininely as possible. He wanted to provide a feminine ideal to inspire her to feminize as well. Thus he had spent most of the intervening time doing his make-up and combing out his hair. This evening there would be no hairspray to de-feminize his look.

Nor would a sweatshirt hide his striped, vee-neck top. And it in turn would do a poor job of concealing his bra strap in back. As the pink satin bra had been lightly padded (as were most of his new bras), Kyle looked a bit like a pre-teen girl in her training bra. His bra forms would, of course, change his shape dramatically. They’d give him a very mature look, but not one he was yet ready for his mother to see.

As he had lots to carry -- a small bottle of perfume, a tube of lipstick, a make-up compact, paper tissues, a hairbrush, a can of hairspray and his breast forms -- Kyle had little choice but to accept the leather shoulder bag from his mother as a "special present for his first date," even though he scorned it as a ‘purse.’

"It’s a pity," Barb mused, "that he doesn’t know that I found the breast prosthetics. But how I could tell him? He’d know that I was snooping." Yet Barb considered it stupid that he was going to have to sneak into the alley before he could put on his breasts. "He’ll probably show up at the Lancers with his breasts inserted upside down. He’ll look like a hapless slob. That will be a real pity. I want Kyle to look as pretty as possible when he’s going out as Demi. He shouldn’t look like a slovenly tart."

Slovenly we can understand, but why ‘tart’? It would seem that the bare midriff rankled. Barb would have preferred a more lady-like look for her son.

But did he look like a girl? Yes, a homely girl, to be sure, but definitely a girl, as everyone who subsequently viewed the video footage she took that night, readily agreed. Kyle, in high spirits, hadn’t even objected when she asked him to "pretend he was a girl" for the camera. Instead, he had camped it up like a small-town transvestite.

As Kyle left the house, Barb called out, "Give my regards to Mrs. Lancer!"

Kyle was non-plussed: "Mrs. Lancer? Steve’s mom? Jeez, my mother just won’t listen. She must think I’m going to Steve’s for dinner." He thought of turning around to yell out a correction, to tell her he wouldn’t be seeing either of the Lancers, but decided not to bother. After all, he had better things to do in life than straighten out his mother.

As Barb saw Kyle head down the back alley for parts unknown, it struck her hard in the gut that her son was, for the first time, leaving the house looking definitely, indisputably, and remarkably like a girl. She cried for almost an hour after he left. Then, dry-eyed, a smile occasionally on her lips, she watched the video she’d just taken, over and over again, of her daughter’s first date.

To be continued in Part 7 (which will be, yes, finally, about Kyle’s dates with Joannie and Steve)

In the first six parts, Kyle finds it difficult to keep a deal he made with his mother: That if he wears girls’ clothes for a month that she will buy him a moped (a motor scooter). He’s not quite sure how it happened, but in rapid succession he has lost his friends, convinced his mother that he’s gay and dating a boy named Steve, posed as a lesbian named Demi in order to charm the grandmother of his new girlfriend Joannie, who’d prefer that Kyle wore the panties in the family, and convinced his mother that he’s a transsexual. At the end of part 6, we saw Kyle head off for his first date with Joannie.

Anything for a Moped? -Part 7 by: Dawn De Winter
Chapter Eight: What Does Kyle Know About Dating Girls?

Deep inside the alley, deep within its darkest recess, Kyle paused to insert his breast forms. As he was loath to expose his bra, even for a moment, he tried inserting the forms without taking off his striped top. Though he did his best in the circumstances, he apparently didn’t get the forms fitted just right, for Joannie greeted his appearance at her door with hysterical giggles.

"You look so funny, Demi. Let’s hurry upstairs before my grandmother sees you. Even she’s not so blind that she wouldn’t notice that both of your tits are on the left side of your body. You look like an alien creature from some primeval swamp." Laughing all the while, she hustled Demi (as she insisted on calling Kyle within Virginia’s earshot) up to her room.

There she insisted he take off both his top and his bra so that they could get Demi looking less like a mutant. As Kyle disrobed, Joannie clapped her hands with glee: "Oh, you’re wearing the pink satin. That’s so cool. Pink satin is perfect for you. It’s the sexiest lingerie your mother bought for you."

"Are you wearing it too?" Kyle asked hopefully.

"Me? Why would I wear satin? I’ve got pink cotton panties on, just as we pledged each other. And I can assure you, Demi, that if we hadn’t made that deal, I’d be luxuriating right now in my boxer shorts, as in the good old days. You’re the one who wants to wear smooth satins and silks. Me, I prefer rough cotton."

"But I’m wearing the pink satin tonight, and so should you," protested Kyle. "That was our deal: You wear what I wear."

"You’re not being fair, Demi James, for a deal has to be made in advance. If you wanted me to wear pink satin panties tonight, you should have said, ‘I’ll wear satin if you do.’ If you had offered me that deal, I might have said yes, just to see how you looked in pink satin. And you do look darling, Demi, in that bra. It’s your first real bra, isn’t it? After all, those sports bras are little more than giant, elastic bandages."

Kyle was blushing as he replied: "Do you have to call me Demi all the time? Why can’t you use my real name when we’re alone together?"

"Because, silly, you don’t want me to call you Kyle in front of my grandmother. I might if I don’t get in the habit of always calling you Demi. If you’re ‘Kyle,’ you’re out of here as quickly as my grandmother can escort you to the door; but if you’re Demi, she’s got a great meal waiting for you."

Kyle liked the idea of dinner, but it still bothered him, for some reason, that the lingerie he’d be wearing to it would be more feminine than his girlfriend’s. So he tried another tack: "What would it take to convince you to wear your pink satin bra and panties tonight? I was hoping we’d be dressed exactly alike, shoes and all. If I gave you a big kiss, would you agree to dress exactly like me tonight?"

"You can’t bribe me with a kiss, Demi. You must know how much I dislike satin. It’s too feminine. I’d feel like a sissy girl if I wore it."

"Precisely!" thought Kyle. "That’s the whole idea." Then he fatefully asked, "With what can I bribe you? What would it take to get you into pink satin?"

"Two days," she quickly replied.

"Two days?" he repeated, before saying, "Are you telling me that you’ll wear the pink satin two days from now? You know I want you to do it tonight."

"What I’m saying, Demi, is that I’ll wear the pink satin lingerie tonight, just as you ask, but only if you agree to wear girls’ clothes for an extra two days -- you know, for two days more than your bet with your mother requires."

He thought for a moment. She was asking him to wear girls’ clothes until the twenty-third of October instead of the twenty-first. It seemed a minor concession, a promise that he might never have to keep. In exchange for a minor aggravation more than three weeks away, he’d get a chance this very night to see his girlfriend strip out of her underwear in order to change into a bra-and-panty combination that Joannie herself had called ‘sexy-looking.’

And so, Kyle agreed to wear girls’ clothes for two days more than his mother demanded. It didn’t dawn on him for some time that he had made an enormous concession that night. Only later did he appreciate that he was no longer dressing in girls’ clothes merely to win a moped. He would be dressed in feminine attire even after he’d won his speedy steed.

Indeed, unless he waited for two days -- which would be unlikely, given Kyle’s impulsiveness -- he’d be dressed as a girl the first time he rode his moped. Shades of Pocahontas!

Yet the prospect of seeing his girlfriend stripped down to her bra and panties so blinded him to the full implication of their new round of deal-making that he agreed to yet another two days of cross-dressing — this time until the twenty-fifth of October -- so that she’d agree to wear the same black shoes that he had on. Joannie then informed him that any time he wanted to get some favor from her that all he had to do was to add two or three more days to his cross-dressing experiment.

What’s more, as she made him sign a note promising to abide by the four-day extension, she announced that she was determined to go out with him as a boy-girl couple on Halloween.

"You’ll be the girl, of course," she asserted.

"Not likely," countered Kyle. "You know I’ll never allow anyone else to see me dressed like a girl. This is just between you, me, my mother, and your grandmother."

"We’ll see," whispered Joannie. Then, more loudly, she said, "Now, off with your bra. I’ve got something here that’ll ensure that your tits never slip again." She then produced some double-sided adhesive tape, which she stuck to Kyle’s chest wall.

"You’re very lucky, Demi, to have no chest hair. Otherwise, we’d have to shave it off, because the tape doesn’t work at well when there’s hair in the way. But you do have one or two hairs in your armpits. How gross! Let me shave them off for you."

"Wait a second," Kyle gasped. He was thinking, "One or two hairs won’t matter. None of the guys will notice their disappearance. But I can’t make any concession without getting something back. Otherwise, I’ll always be playing catch-up in my game with Joannie."

And so he pitched yet another deal to Joannie: "I won’t shave my armpits unless you do. That’s my final answer."

"That’s not fair, Demi James, for I’ve got a lot more hair under my underarms than you do. It’s important to my self-image to keep it. I don’t want people to think that I’m one of those prissy girls who shaves every hair off her body in a desperate attempt to look ‘ultra-femme’ for the boys."

But Kyle this time stood firm. And a new deal was struck, first with a handshake, and then more intimately, with a Lady Gillette razor, that neither would be the first to stop shaving his armpits.

Joannie tried to strike a similar deal for their legs, but Kyle had more hair there (even if it was too light-colored and wispy to be seen from more than a foot away), and he asked for time to mull her offer over. However, at her insistence, he did promise to use the bottle she gave him at least once on his legs, hips and buttocks. It was an open-ended promise, with no set date, and so he didn’t think it much of a concession to agree to take the depilatory cream home with him. Joannie, however, expected him to lather up eventually out of curiosity.

Their deals struck, she finished the task of attaching Kyle’s breast to his tape. She then stood back to watch them move with convincing femininity. They were top of the line, and looked real even without a bra. Kyle, fascinated with his breasts, was playing with a fake nipple, trying to get it aroused. Then he cupped his right breast and pushed it upward and outward. As it sprang back into position, he exulted, "Hey, they’re like real breasts! They’re even warming up. I’d swear they were me if I didn’t know better."

Joannie beamed. Kyle’s reaction to the attachments couldn’t be more heartening. He wasn’t even asking how he could get the breasts off. If he didn’t remember to inquire before he left for home, Joannie was going to have some fun with him, for the tape container expressly said that the tape would hold for 10-14 days during which time no amount of water or body perspiration would cause the adhesive to fail.

"How much of a panic will he be when he phones me? I wonder?" she chortled to herself.

After Kyle had modestly covered his breasts with a bra and striped top, it was time for Joannie to get ready for their date. "Va-va-voom," thought Kyle. "It’s time for the striptease."

And Joannie did obligingly remove her striped top, exposing her pink cotton bra. However, she certainly was not going to remove it while Kyle was ogling her, and at her insistence he had to turn his back. For a brief instant, he knew, just knew, that a girl was standing behind him topless; but he was too much of a gentleman to sneak a glimpse.

His Lady Godiva didn’t have to worry about a Peeping Demi: "I wouldn’t peep," Kyle declared to himself, "even if I knew she was standing naked behind me. I’m sure I wouldn’t." Then, as he heard the belt on Joannie’s trousers clatter to the floor, he was sorely tempted to turn around to see if "she was all right. Maybe she has fallen and can’t get up." The thought of her sprawled helpless, topless, and bottomless on the floor disturbed him. He wondered if he should play the gallant and come to her rescue. He turned a quarter of the way to get a better sense of the situation.

"Demi, don’t you dare turn around. I’m practically naked, and you know it," Joannie declared. "Just stare at my poster of the Spice Girls. They should keep your nipples erect."

There came a knock on the door. "Girls, ten minutes to dinner," announced Virginia.

Had she heard Joannie’s last remarks? Definitely.

Virginia muttered under her breath: "My granddaughter is a sweet chick being hunted by a fox. That Demi is a vixen determined to pluck my granddaughter’s virtue. And Joannie knows and fears it -- that’s why she’s behaving as though she had a boy in the room."

Virginia was convinced that she had to break up this unhealthy relationship.

Soon after she had left, Joannie informed Kyle that he could finally look. She stood before him fully clothed. He had missed everything. When he demanded proof that she was wearing the pink satin outfit, she widened her vee to reveal a bra strap, and she pushed her pants down sufficiently for Kyle to catch a glimpse of pink satin at her waist. But that was it. He realized that she’d seen a lot more of him than he had of her.

"Jeez, I was the one giving the strip show," he wryly noted. "Why me? It was supposed to be her!"

But he didn’t have time to work through the implications of his repeated failure to impose his will on Joannie. Nor was there time for him to reflect on the fact that his love life seemed to be as accident-prone as his skateboarding and cycling. Instead, there was just enough time for the two girls to scurry downstairs so that they could make a timely entrance into the dining room dressed like twins.

Or they would have looked like twins, had Kyle had an opportunity to do something about Joannie's make-up. To his regret, she wasn’t even wearing lipstick. As for her hair, she obviously hadn’t brushed it since morning. Thus, even though the two girls wore the same top, pants and shoes, Joannie looked like the ‘butch,’ and Demi, the ‘femme’ in their lesbian relationship.

As Virginia entered, and as Joannie shoved his chair out so that he could sit down, Kyle was startled to realize that his hair, makeup and ample bosom made him the most feminine-looking person in the room.

"Why?" he wondered, "Do I keep making bad deals that feminize me twice as fast as Joannie?" He’d have to be cleverer, he decided. "From now on I won’t do anything that makes me look more like a girl unless Joannie not only does the same thing, but something extra."

"Jeez," he thought, "if I don’t start managing Joannie better, I’m going to be the one wearing the dress to our date at the junior prom."

As these speculations wandered through Kyle’s mind, Virginia was sizing up the situation in her dining room. Demi continued to amaze her, for the girl had become even more feminine-looking, yet no more feminine-acting. Her tread and gait were almost as exaggeratedly masculine as Joannie’s, and she had looked decidedly unladylike when she sprawled into her chair. Virginia realized then why Demi didn’t wear skirts — she’d be constantly rewarding teenaged beaver hunters.

Virginia lost herself in thought: "Maybe she doesn’t have to worry about boys looking below her waist, for they are likely to be transfixed by her bosom. That girl is certainly mature for her age. I wonder if its Demi’s breasts that Joannie finds attractive. It’s difficult otherwise to see the attraction. Gosh, Demi is homely for a girl. And that makeup! It’s much too mature for her age. I’m surprised that Barb permits it."

As Virginia had decided to chaperone the girls, she sat with them through their soup course, doing her best to channel the conversation to a discussion of Demi. Virginia had several ulterior motives. First, she hoped that Joannie, who liked to be the center of attention, would grow resentful of the attention given to the talkative lesbian. Second, Virginia hoped to gain information that she might be able to use against Demi — for example, proof of infidelity or amorality. And third, she was looking for evidence that this girl was in any way worthy of her granddaughter’s affections.

And so, Joannie fidgeted as Virginia pumped Demi for information and opinions. Much of what Demi had to say was eminently forgettable. After all, how many pearls of wisdom issue from the mouth of a fourteen-year-old boy?

Indeed, at first, it seemed that Demi could only talk about sports and the weather, and the discussion even of these sometimes reduced her to incoherence. For example, when asked why swimming, diving, track and gymnastics were her favorite women’s sports, Demi started to say, "Because of the bods," but then, catching herself, mumbled something about "the high level of competition." Similarly, she turned crimson red and tongue-tied after admitting that she subscribed to Sports Illustrated magazine for the special swimsuit Issue.

As far as Virginia was concerned, Demi was crass, her fascination with the female body excessive even for a lesbian. It suited her purposes, however, to encourage Demi to talk like a hormone-crazed teenaged boy, as such talk was clearly upsetting Joannie.

And so, Virginia asked Demi to name her favorite actresses. Joannie could scarcely hide her disgust when Demi named a bunch of starlets who had appeared briefly and scantily on "The Man Show."

"How does Kyle even know their names?" seethed Joannie. "And to think that he’s been watching such a sexist show! Doesn’t he know that he’s talking just like a boy — and a vulgar one at that! He’s ruining everything!"

Joannie would try to change the subject, but Virginia would steer it back to the topic of ‘hot babes’ that Demi had seen on television or on the streets of Des Moines. Each time she succeeded, Virginia would give Joannie a sympathetic look, as if to say, "I guess you didn’t know that Demi was a sex-starved slut, did you, my poor, sweet dear?"

Demi so enjoyed talking about babes, starlets and supermodels that he didn’t realize that Joannie was finding dinner less than savory. Indeed, he didn’t realize how peeved she was getting — even after she dumped the casserole of Stifado, a tomato-rich beef stew, into his lap.

Joannie had acted intemperately, and expected to be bawled out. But Demi and Virginia had been so engrossed in their discussion of "the best looking girls in the sitcoms" that neither saw her make the toss. Demi didn’t suspect that he had been ‘stiff-adoed’ on purpose, and while Virginia had her suspicions, she didn’t have time to voice them, for she had to leap into action to save her chair, floor and above all — Demi’s black pants. Virginia knew they were brand new. They’d have to be cleaned immediately, she calculated, or they might be ruined forever.

"It’s true," she thought, "that black can handle a lot of stains, but stewed tomato is a killer." And so, she barked at Demi, "Dear, you’ve got to take those pants off. Immediately. We must get them into the wash immediately before that stain sets."

Stunned, his mouth stupidly agape, Kyle sat immobile, the stew oozing down his legs towards the floor. He couldn’t believe his ears. He was thinking: "Cripes, I barely know Mrs. Smith. She can’t really be insisting that I take off my clothes in front of her? Could she? What kind of dirty old lady is she that she wants to see a boy in his underwear?"

"Oh, but she doesn’t know I’m a boy, does she?"

"Demi!" — the word broke through his deliberations. "This is no time for modesty. We’re all girls here, aren’t we? Now, take off those pants so that we can save them and make a reasonable start on saving the chairs and floor. Now do it pronto! Tomato stains are a serious business!"

Then, seeing that Demi still sat dumbstruck, Victoria told Joannie to help Demi to undress. This order stirred Kyle to action. There was only one thing worse for an all-American boy, he figured, than having to drop his trousers in the middle of a dinner party to reveal his pretty panties, and that was for his girlfriend to strip him of trousers as her grandmother watched. And so, Kyle ‘dropped trou.’

Naturally, he hadn’t first kicked off his shoes. And, as he struggled to free himself of his pants, Virginia got an eyeful of his pink satin panties. Her first thought was: "My, what attractive lingerie you’re wearing — and more feminine than I would have predicted."

Her second thought was: "Oh, my gosh!" Her mind then went numb. Mechanically, she threw Demi’s pants into the washing machine. Mechanically, she mopped the hardwood dining-room floor. Mechanically, she used paper towels to clean Demi’s chair.

Finally, her mind defogged enough to ask, "Where’s Demi?" and Joannie answered, "I sent her upstairs to see if she can fit into any of my jeans so that we can continue dinner. We can’t really expect her to eat in her underwear."

"I definitely agree. We certainly don’t want Demi to be an exhibitionist. You go and help her to find something. I’ll warm up the stew — what’s left of it — while you’re doing that."

Upstairs, in Joannie’s room, Kyle was rummaging through her jeans and shorts trying to find something that would fit, but none did it. He was simply too big a boy. As Virginia was even smaller than Joannie, it was soon abundantly clear that he wouldn’t be able to find any pants for dinner.

And what were the alternatives? Joannie laid them out: He could wear a bath towel, a sheet, a blanket, or a skirt. The first three he immediately rejected, as he said, somewhat shyly, "I wanted to look sharp for you, Joannie. In any one of those I’d look like a super nerd." As for the skirt, it was clearly impractical. As he couldn’t fit into Joannie’s jeans, how could he possibly fit into one of her skirts?

Joannie, pleased that he hadn’t dismissed the skirt as too ‘nerdy’ to wear on their date, replied: "It wouldn’t be my skirt, Demi. It’s gran’s, and you could fit into it because it’s a wrap-around — you know, like, a hula skirt."

"I’m not going to wear grass!" objected Kyle. His scowl made it clear that this point was non-negotiable.

"Don’t be silly, Demi, the skirt’s not made of grass. It’s a cloth print, and its colors will go nicely with the top you’ve got on. She bought it in one of those import stores. I think it comes from Africa. Will you try it on? I’m sure it will fit you."

As Kyle couldn’t imagine that anything worn by Joannie’s grandmother could fit him, he believed he was making a meaningless concession when he nodded affirmatively. Joannie was thrilled. She hugged Kyle and gave him a quick kiss on his lips. She then rushed out to find the wrap-around skirt.

As she excitedly rummaged in the back recesses of Virginia’s closet, Joannie reflected on how dramatically the date had turned around. At first, it seemed to be going horribly, as Kyle, a male chauvinist, mostly interested, it seemed, in chatting crudely with her grandmother about ‘hot babes,’ had totally ignored her.

As Joannie stewed, she eventually got angry enough to ‘pot’ him one. She hadn’t realized at the time that she was creating an opportunity for sexist Kyle to be taken to the cleaners, and for lovable Demi to re-emerge in time to salvage the date. But now, she knew that some unseen hand — possibly of Rhea, the Earth goddess — had stripped Kyle of his trousers. The skirt would transform him genuinely into Demi, Joannie hoped, and salvage the evening.

The skirt fit. And it was long enough that Kyle could even imagine himself as one of those he-men he’d seen in skirts — like the King of Siam.
"Joannie is my ‘Anna’," he decided.

Kyle agreed, therefore, that it was ‘no big deal’ to wear the ‘mannish-looking’ skirt. To Joannie’s delight, he needed no coaxing to wear it to dinner. Indeed, he seemed eager to show it off to Virginia, its rightful owner.

Yet Joannie would not allow him to descend to dinner until they had talked about his manners. She started: "Demi, you’re my girlfriend, and so you cannot talk about either the bodies or the sex appeal of other girls in front of me — ever! When you do, you sound like a slut, and I come across as a fool. You know — as a girl who’s such a dip that she doesn’t know her girlfriend is openly cheating on her. You do understand, don’t you, that you can’t talk like a sex-starved teenage boy when you’re Demi?"

He grinned sheepishly. "I acted like a moron," he said, "Can you forgive me? I’ll never talk about other girls in front of you again. Okay?"

"I want more than that, Demi. I suppose you have to talk like a boy when you’re at school or other guys will start razzing you. But when we’re alone, or when we’re with my Gran, or when we’re out on a date, I want you to talk as much as you can like a girl. Do you agree?"

"I don’t know what you mean by talking like a girl. Do you want me to giggle a lot?"

"Certainly not! If you intend to become a silly sissy, you can go find yourself another girlfriend. I want you to act like a modern woman, a serious woman. For example, if we talk about Condoleezza Rice, we girls are going to be naturally excited to have a female National Security Adviser. That means she’s responsible for protecting the world. But I don’t want to talk about the way she dresses, and you are forbidden to talk about her breasts. Do you understand now?"

"Yeh, I’m supposed to be proud that ‘us girls’ are getting ahead, but I’m not supposed to talk about the way successful girls look."

"Precisely," she said with finality.

Kyle wondered if it was possible to talk about women without talking about their faces and bodies. However, always ready for a new challenge, he accepted this one in order to please Joannie. Nevertheless, he believed she had sent them both on a fool’s quest. Could a teenage boy really refrain from commenting on the looks of females? For that matter, could a teenage girl?

Both Joannie and Kyle had hoped to have Virginia for an audience for Demi’s first attempt to ‘talk like a modern girl," but, inexplicably, their host had changed her mind about eating with them. She said that the date would go better if they had some privacy. She’d even put the cherry pie on the sideboard so that she wouldn’t have to return to serve it. After saying they should feel free to raid the refrigerator for milk or soda pop, she went to watch television by herself.

As she hunted for the TV remote, Virginia mumbled, "I don’t want to think tonight. I don’t want to have another thought for the rest of the evening." And nor did she, for she found a cable channel that was broadcasting a "Gilligan’s Island" marathon.

Deprived of their audience, Kyle and Joannie struggled to find a subject where Demi could demonstrate her ‘girlish’ knowledge and sensibilities. Their first big score came in women’s tennis, about which both teens knew quite a bit. They also began to stare lovingly into each other’s eyes, as they realized they could both talk about Kournikova and the two Williams sisters for twenty minutes without once mentioning their sex appeal. When Kyle ventured that he if he had legs as muscular as Vanessa Williams that he too would be willing to wear a short skirt to show them off, Joannie positively beamed.

It was Kyle, or rather Demi, who initiated the next subject: skirts. Joannie owned two of them, said Demi. When would she start wearing them? "Am I the only one in this relationship willing to wear a skirt?"
"Yes. You look great in a skirt, Demi. It really suits you. It makes you look sexy."

With that word, Kyle’s ears perked up. He slowly asked, "Are you saying that you find me sexy-looking in this skirt?"

"Do I ever! Demi, you look hot in a skirt — a lot sexier than when you’re wearing pants, even velvet ones. I just wish your skirt were shorter — you know, that it showed more leg. Because if you were wearing a mini-skirt, well … things would happen."

"Really?" explored Kyle.

"Definitely," she answered.

"If you find skirts so sexy on me, why won’t you wear one yourself," he asked. "I bet I’d think it looked sexy on you."

"No, I would look like a ditz in a dress or skirt. I’m going to stick to pants, boys’ jeans if you let me."

"No way!" Kyle replied. "We have a deal. If I wore a skirt in public, would you? Wouldn’t you have to? Isn’t that our deal?"

"Not exactly, Demi. Each deal is one we negotiate. If you were to say to me, ‘I’ll wear a skirt to school tomorrow, if you do,’ then I’d probably agree. Or I might say, ‘If I see you wearing a skirt or dress too Hoover on a Monday, then I’ll wear the same outfit on Tuesday. But we’re always going to have to make the deal first."

"So I can’t expect you to wear a skirt just because I’ve got one on now? Kyle investigated.

"No way!" she averred. "You could have worn the sheet or towel. You preferred the skirt. And you made the right decision — for you, but not for me — because you look really sexy in it."

Kyle heard that ‘s’ word again. It was time to resume operation ‘S’. With his original goal — the goal of most teenage boys — in mind, he proposed a new deal: "I’ll wear one of the skirts my mother bought for me to our next date, if … you … wear your most feminine lingerie …"

"Agreed," she eagerly interrupted.

"And you model it for me," he continued. "You know, model it with nothing else on — not even socks and shoes."

Joannie thought about the proposed deal. It seemed all right, so she replied, "Okay, it’s a deal, provided you promise to dress and to act as much like a girl as possible when we’re on the date. After all, I’d feel comfortable letting Demi, a girl, watch me undress in my bedroom. I’d even let Demi hug me when I was wearing only my bra and panties. We might even exchange girlish kisses. But Kyle, a boy, leering at me in my underwear, in my own bedroom? I don’t think so. He’ll have to wait in the hallway, no matter how he’s dressed."

"Is my date going to be with Kyle, a boy in girls’ clothes, or with Demi, my special girlfriend?"

‘Demi’ would be allowed to kiss and hold a half-naked Joannie? Whereas ‘Kyle’ wouldn’t be allowed to? This was an easy decision for Kyle, especially as he was finding the conversation arousing. "And so he replied, "Your next date, Joannie, will definitely be with Demi. You won’t even know I’m a boy unless… well, you know …"

"Demi, if you’re wearing a skirt, I’ll never forget you’re a boy."

"How come?" asked Kyle.

"Because of your hairy legs," Joannie replied. "Will you use the hair-remover on your legs before the date?"

He paused to reflect. He didn’t have much body hair, nor did the guys expect Kyle, a blond, to have much on his legs. They’d never notice the loss of what little he had. He accordingly agreed to make his legs look as feminine as possible for the date.

The terms of their second date were set, but not its timing. As Joannie was going out to a restaurant with Virginia the following evening, and as Kyle had a ‘basketball date’ with Steve on Saturday, they agreed to see each other on Sunday. Virginia agreed, without once taking her eyes off the mindless sitcom she was watching, to invite Demi over for Sunday dinner. So wrapped up in the plot of Gilligan’s Island did Virginia become, as she wondered, apparently, whether Gilligan would mess up yet again, that she was unable to come to the door to see Demi depart.

When asked about Demi’s velvet pants, she mumbled something about forgetting to take them out of the washing machine. "They’re still wet, I guess. Joannie will have to bring them to you at school tomorrow. Sorry. Oh, you can keep the skirt. The style’s too young for me now."

Thus Kyle had no choice but to wear his newfound skirt home. Peeved, he said, "Your grandmother is sure acting strange."

"Yes, Gran’s behavior is odd," Joannie agreed. "But then she’s very old. And you never know what old people will do next. I do hope, however, that she won’t get hooked on Gilligan’s Island, for I don’t like the way the women are depicted in that show. And none of the guys wear clothes that I’d be caught dead in!"

The teens weren’t entirely unhappy that Virginia was too engrossed in her sitcom to witness Demi’s departure. It meant that they could have a private farewell kiss. Joannie, who’d immensely enjoyed the second half of their date, was anxious for Demi to return. In gratitude and pledge, she hugged Demi tightly, as they kissed amorously for a full five minutes.

As Kyle headed into the alley, his body was still tingling. He had never felt more alive, even during a dangerous BMX or skateboard stunt. He hailed his skirt: "If you can get me a kiss like that every time, then I promise to wear you every time. Wow! Double wow!" He was so excited he forgot to hide in the dark, and the occasional garage light illuminated his progress.

A wolf whistle brought him back to his senses. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from. But a second, much closer whistle alerted him to the fact that his admirer was fast approaching. Kyle ran home as fast as his two-inch heels permitted. Briefly he heard someone running behind him, but his pursuer apparently tired of the chase, for soon only the clop-clop of Kyle’s own shoes could be heard.

Even so, Kyle kept running, and he hit his own house at such high speed that there was no chance, as he had intended, to sneak into it so quietly that his mother wouldn’t know he had returned. That is, she wouldn’t know he was home until he had removed his breast forms and skirt. However, as he burst through their front door, Barb saw that he had affixed the breasts. No surprise there.

The skirt did surprise her, but only because she didn’t realize that he had acquired a wrap-around skirt with a black and red floral design. "I guess he’s now shopping on his own," she mused.

She stopped Kyle in his tracks and then shunted him into the living room for a chat, as she wanted to ensure that he would never again do his cross-dressing behind her back. After getting him seated and relaxed, they had a heart-to-heart. In it, Kyle explained that his girlfriend Demi had given him the breasts; they had belonged to a deceased relative. He acknowledged that he was expected to wear the forms on his dates with ‘Demi.’

He was surprised that his mother liked the way he looked with ‘breasts,’ but agreed to wear his forms around the house whenever he wore girls’ clothes — "so the clothes would hang right."

He reminded Barb, however, that he’d be giving up all things feminine ‘soon after’ he had his moped. Barb wondered at the indeterminacy of this vow — or threat — but did not challenge it.

Kyle was more resistant to the idea of wearing skirts around the house, as he said he preferred jeans, even girls’ jeans. Indeed, he claimed that the plaid jeans were now his favorite pants. He declared: "They could be boys’ pants, you know, and I’m going to wear them even after I win my moped."

When asked about the missing velvet pants, he explained how they’d ended up in the wash, while adding, "I really like the feel of the velvet and the way the pants look on me, especially in the back. I’m going to wear them on really special occasions," Kyle said. "You know, like when you and I go out to Red Lobster."

When Barb steered the conversation back to the subject of skirts, he agreed to wear them around the house on days on which he was dating Joannie. Beyond that, he made no promises. He killed off discussion of dresses with two words — ‘no way.’

They spent part of the evening discussing skirts — how to select and wear them, and most important, how to sit in them without exposing one’s privates. Mostly, however, they talked about dating, as Kyle wanted her advice on how to ‘woo Demi’, and Barb responded by telling him how to ‘be Demi’ on a date with a boy.

True, she pretended to believe he was dating a girl when he loudly objected to her first use of the male pronoun to describe Kyle’s special friend, but she remained convinced he was dating Steve, and that for some reason, Kyle could admit to cross-dressing but not to homosexuality. She couldn’t figure out why Kyle dreaded homosexualty more than he did transgenderism, but he self-evidently did; and Barb resigned herself to coping with her son’s sexual confusion — as confusing as it seemed to her.

Later that night, after she had retired, she heard her son run the shower. She heard some cursing. And then she heard him make a frantic phone call. She wasn’t quite sure what it was about at the time, but the next morning she figured out what had happened when Kyle sheepishly came to her, still wearing his breast forms, and begged for help in getting ready for school.

"How do I get them off?" he shouted. "I can’t go to school looking like this!" he wailed. He started crying: "They won’t come loose in hot or cold water, and … Demi told me that there’s no solvent for them. She told me that the tape can hold for two weeks. Does that mean I can’t go to school for two weeks?"

"Stop sniffling, Kyle. Did you ever try simply pulling on them? Did you determine whether they came off with a good yank?"

"No," he replied. "I didn’t want to damage them. Anyway there has to be a solvent. I figured water just had to be the solvent. Water dissolves almost everything! What if it’s super glue on these breast forms? I’ll look like a girl for the rest of my life!"

He started sobbing.

At her command, he came close enough for Barb to grab her son’s tits. As she did, she couldn’t help but wonder whether one of them would one day need to talk to a therapist about this mother-son moment. Well, any psychological damage was already done, she figured, and so she yanked on her son’s tits. He yowled. But the breasts came off, as they were supposed to. There was tape, she saw, on both the forms and Kyle’s chest that together provided enough grip to keep the breasts attached unless someone treated the breasts like a champagne cork to be popped.

Greatly relieved, Kyle went off to his last day of school that week in plaid jeans, a black sports bra and matching cotton panty, and — his only new gesture toward cross-dressing — his new burgundy, snakeskin sneakers. He was relieved when the sneakers only marginally changed the betting on whether it was boys’ clothes that he and Joannie were wearing, or girls’ clothes. Because of Joannie’s reputation for cross-dressing, the odds had started at 9 to 1 male. Kyle’s burgundy sneakers lowered them to 3 to 1. Once again, Joannie was the more masculine dresser of the two.

Kyle should have been bleary-eyed as he headed off to school, considering that he had been forced to sleep with ample breasts. It took him, however, surprisingly little time to find comfortable positions on his back and side, and he slept like a babe.

That night he dreamt about Hawaii: He was a mighty, fearsome warrior in ancient times. And to his satisfaction, he fought many winning battles in his eventful dream. But the part of the dream he remembered best the following morning was his victory dance.

The dance came after each battle, and always took the same shape: In it, Kyle, wearing nothing but a necklace of pearl-shaped shark’s teeth and a grass skirt, would whirl about in ever-increasing frenzy, as he ritually broke the spears of his captives. As his victory dance gained speed, the virgin daughter of the vanquished chief would join in it. They would then spin at the speed of light. Eventually — at the dream’s climax — he and the virgin would become one — not just metaphorically, but physically — as his tribe hailed the rebirth of their hermaphrodite god.

Joannie and Barb also slept soundly, their minds and hearts at ease. So too did Elvira Lancer and Melanie, due no doubt to their easy conscience.
Virginia, on the other hand, slept not a wink. Her insomnia was so bad that she quit her bed at three a.m. and spent the rest of the night sitting in front of the television, its light flickering, its sound off, as she contemplated Joannie’s relationship with Demi.

She had been genuinely shocked when Demi dropped her pants and revealed herself to be a BOY! In those tight pink panties, there could be no question of Demi’s true sex. That much she knew: Demi is a boy! But that is all she knew for certain.

What kept her awake was her inability to answer these questions: Does Joannie know that Demi is a male? Have the two ‘girls’ ever actually seen each other in the buff? Is Joannie pretending to believe that Demi is a girl simply to make it easier for her to sneak a boy into her bedroom?

Are the two ‘girls’ merely friends or is there a sexual and romantic tie between them? If the latter, is it of a heterosexual or lesbian nature? Is Demi dressing as a girl as a ruse to seduce Joannie and dupe her guardian? Or is Demi a transsexual?

Who is Demi? Is she, as claimed, the child of Barb James? If so, is Barb aware that her son is posing as a girl? Has she accepted her son as a transsexual?

These were just half of the questions that besieged Virginia. She couldn’t answer any of them. She didn’t know which were the ones she should even try to answer. Obviously, she would have to speak with Joannie. But how even to broach the topic? She couldn’t just say, "Do you know that Demi has testicles?" That wouldn’t do as a first line.

Virginia was in a quandary. She’d rather not talk to Joannie about Demi. She wished the ‘girl’ would simply disappear. And yet, Demi had been invited to Sunday dinner.

Something would have to be said to Joannie, but Virginia found that she could not say it on either Friday or Saturday, two days that dragged on endlessly. Nor did it help matters on Saturday that Joannie spent the entire evening fretting about Demi’s date with Steve.

Joannie’s obsession with Demi was disturbingly obvious. But instead of having a heart-to-heart with her granddaughter, Virginia was paralyzed by new questions about Demi’s true nature brought on by her — his — date with a homosexual youth. It really, really bothered Virginia that she couldn’t figure Demi out.

Is he a devious heterosexual male? Or is he a lesbian transsexual? Is Demi a bisexual attracted to anyone wearing pants, whatever their gender? Or is he a chameleon who wears panties and skirts to seduce girls and boxer shorts and blue jeans to seduce boys?

Just who is Demi? What is Demi? Virginia Smith had no answer after three sleepless nights. In fact, by the third night, she was asking herself whether Demi, this wolf in girl’s clothing, had something for everyone, including sheep — if they were in the mood.

Steve Lancer was not the sort to bedevil himself with so many unanswerable questions. There was just one question that interfered with his sleep on Thursday and Friday night: "Will Kyle agree to become my boyfriend?" For Steve, that was the same as asking, "When will I have sex with Kyle?" Steve hoped that their date on Saturday would provide an answer.

Chapter Nine: What Does Kyle Know About Dating Boys?

"Mother," he shouted, "You can’t expect me to go out in public looking like a girl! I’ll get creamed!"

Barb couldn’t fathom this response. This date was obviously an important one: Kyle was going out to dinner with Steve and then to a basketball game. From Barb’s perspective, this was a big night for her son. To be sure, it was not, technically speaking, his ‘first date,’ but it would be the first time that he was ‘going out on the town’ with a boyfriend, and Barb therefore urged Kyle to ‘dress to the hilt’ for the occasion.

"This is a night you’ll always remember — your first time on a ‘true date.’ You should dress for it. Please, honey, reconsider your decision. You’ll be a knockout in your black skirt. You won’t even have to shave your legs, for you can wear the black tights I got you."

"Mother, I refuse to dress like a girl in public. I’m going to wear my school clothes — you know, unisex, except for the bra and panties. I will not wear anything that makes me look like a female. My hair is going to be as masculine as I can comb it. My makeup will be too subtle to detect. Do you understand?"

"But Kyle," she retorted, "you wore a skirt home from a date this very week. That evening you couldn’t have tried to look more feminine. You’ve already dressed like a girl on the streets of Des Moines. Why won’t you tonight? I was so hoping to see what you’d look like in a short skirt." ("Or a dress," she thought, "but that would be hoping for too much too soon.")

Kyle didn’t dare explain that he had never walked the streets of Des Moines dressed like a girl, only one of its back alleys, and then for little more than a block. If he told the truth, his mother would figure out that he was dating the granddaughter of Virginia Smith. Inevitably, the two women would have a chat, and when they did, his mother would learn that Kyle was posing as a female when he visited the Smith household.
And then he would be in unbelievable trouble. His mother punished lying severely. She considered it a cardinal sin. She’d be furious if she discovered that he’d been duping Mrs. Smith. Probably she’d conclude, with some accuracy, that the masquerade had been concocted to sneak Kyle into Joannie’s bed.

If she believed that Kyle had been making a fool of Virginia Smith just so that he could violate her ground rules about teenage sex and dating, Barb was guaranteed to ground him for weeks and — needless to say — deny him his moped. She might not even let him date Joannie ever again. A future without his moped and girlfriend was too painful to contemplate.
Kyle had to lie. What choice did he have?

But which lie? The one that came first to mind made use of Barb’s fixed conviction that Steve was, regardless of what Kyle might claim, the only person her son was dating. This particular lie had two advantages: It easily explained why he had yet to go out in ‘public’ dressed as a girl; and, if believed, would throw his mother permanently off Joannie’s scent.

Did his mother have difficulty believing he was dating a girl? Well, let her believe that his willingness to wear a skirt depended on whether he was dating ‘in’ or ‘out’ with Steve. He plotted: "She’ll come to accept that on ‘indoor’ dates, Steve wants me to look as much like a girl as possible, but that on ‘outdoor’ dates, that Steve is worried about our safety if I dress like a sissy."

"Mom," his tale commenced, "I didn’t actually go out in public dressed like a girl on Thursday. I didn’t have to because Mrs. Lancer drove me to Steve’s house. They both like having me dress like a girl at Steve’s house, but they agree that I don’t make a convincing enough of a girl to pretend to be one in public. Tonight we’re going to a basketball game. So I’ve got to look as macho as possible. Surely you understand?"

"I suppose so. But you’re wrong, Kyle, about not making a convincing girl when you’re fully dressed up. If you wanted everyone tonight to think you were a girl, we could make that happen. But it’s definitely your choice to make."

He nodded vigorously: "And yes, I’m going to look as much like a boy tonight as I can, even if I do have to wear girl’s clothes to keep our deal."

"Whatever you want, honey…." She bit her tongue. There would be no further terms of endearment until he’d answered a searching question: "Kyle, are you finally admitting there is no girlfriend named Demi? There’s just been Steve all along?"

"I don’t have a girlfriend named Demi," Kyle admitted.

"Then who is Demi? Are you Demi? Is Demi the name you use when you’re with Steve? Tell me the truth, Kyle. You know how much I detest lies and liars."

Kyle contemplated his options. There were no good ones. He realized his mother would be more forgiving if he admitted that he had been Demi than if he now said there never had been a Demi. "She’d say that I had been at least half-truthful," he said ruefully to himself.

So he added to his lies: "Yeh, Steve calls me Demi when we’re alone."

"Another piece in the jigsaw puzzle put into place," thought Barb. "Demi’s his drag name." To Kyle she said, "Son, I don’t know why you find it so difficult to admit to being gay. It’s no disgrace for a boy to be dating a boy. It’s done all the time these days."

She overrode his efforts to interrupt with — "And if you like being called Demi, then we can all call you that — at least, when you’re trying your utmost to look like a girl. Do you want me to call you Demi whenever I see you in lipstick, your breast forms, or a skirt?"

Kyle didn’t know where to start first. "Mother, I’m not gay. Just because I’m going out with Steve doesn’t mean I want to have sex with him. You adults are sex-obsessed. Do you know what a Platinum relationship is? That’s what Steve and I have. Only you adults would try to make something dirty out of it."

Was his mother on the defensive now? That was the idea. His mother didn’t like being called ‘an adult.’ She knew it was an accusatory word that meant she was ‘un-cool’ and almost ready for the old folks home. As Kyle hoped, Barb now mumbled an apology for intimating that two gay boys would necessarily have to hop into bed with each other: ‘I’m sorry, Kyle. It was wrong of me to stereotype your relationship with Steve. I’m sure that gay people relate to each other in many different ways. Why shouldn’t you have a Platonic relationship with Steve? Why not indeed?"

"If only it were true!" Barb said to herself as she thought about all the diseases and disorders associated with precocious teen sexual activity. She then told Kyle, who didn’t want to hear it, "Kyle, since gay relationships aren’t always sexual, perhaps you should admit that there is a teeny-weeny possibility that you are indeed a homosexual, even though you’ve never touched another boy. It would be healthier to admit the possibility than to be so fervently in denial."

"Okay, you win. If you need to believe your son is gay, then your son is gay. But there is no way that your son is ever going to have sex with a guy, including Steve. Understood?"

Kyle hoped that this ‘admission’ would kill this topic of conversation. In his mind, it was just another lie to add to the whoppers that he’d been telling since she began badgering him to wear a skirt on his ‘second’ date with Steve.

Barb felt she had to ask one last time about Demi: "Honey, do you want me to call you Demi when you’re dressed as a girl? Would that please you?"

Kyle was fed up with the whole topic of his sexual identity. So he brusquely replied: "Call me whatever you want, mother. I’ve got to get dressed." He then ran upstairs to get dressed. As promised, there was no makeup other than that needed to hide his shiner. His hair he spray-canned into a semblance of masculinity. And he chose his most masculine looking tops. However, as he didn’t want to look entirely drab on his ‘date’ with Steve, he put on his plaid-trimmed jeans and burgundy sneakers.

And, just for the heck of it, he wore his pink satin bra-and-panty combination. He liked the way it looked and felt, even if the straps and underwiring made its bra slightly more noticeable than the gray sports bra he originally intended to wear.

"No one will see the bra under two layers of clothing," he said to himself, "and I do like the feel of satin on my butt."

It took Kyle quite a while to get ready as he had to touch up his makeup and brush his hair out several times before it looked right. Moreover, he had to shave his underarms, as he promised Joannie he’d do. He had started shaving on Friday, using his mother’s razor, but feeling guilty about sneaking into her bathroom, he had that very day bought his own safety razor.

Its purchase was an important milestone, for it was the first razor he had ever owned or needed. A boy’s first razor is an important rite of passage. As he didn’t know what other brand to buy, and as he was fearful that a regular man’s razor might be too rough on his underarm skin, Kyle had bought a Lady Gillette.

Its addition to his routine so slowed him down that Kyle was still getting ready for his date as the appointed hour chimed — "Late! Just like a girl," he would have said of any other boy who was still primping when his date pulled up in the car outside.

Meanwhile, the Lancers’ Mercedes was idling its engine in front of the James homestead. Elvira was giving her son one last pep talk before he rang the doorbell of his first ‘date’. She reminded him that Kyle was different from other boys — not only because he was gay but also because he liked to wear girls’ clothes.

"Those clothes are a signal, Steve, that you cannot ignore. They speak more loudly than words. They say, "I want to be treated like a girl." Do you understand what I’m saying? If you treat Kyle exactly as you would any girl you were dating, then the date will be a smashing success. And then he’ll be calling you, probably every evening, tying up our phone line for hours."

"But Mom! I get your point about a gay date being no different from a boy-girl date. I can see that it might follow the same rules. But the rules have changed since you dated. A lot’s changed since Kennedy got killed, you know. Cripes, I bet you didn’t even have CD’s or PC’s then. Everything’s different now. We’re much more casual, I think."

"Yes, a lot has happened since President Kennedy died in Dallas, including your mother’s own birth. I wish you’d stop implying that I walked among the dinosaurs."

"Sorry," he mumbled. "I was just saying that dates aren’t a big a deal these days. I don’t think anyone shows up with flowers and candy anymore," he moaned as he shook the box of Belgian truffles. He then put his nose in the pink carnations and, pretending to be allergic to them, noisily sneezed.

"I am certain that you’re right, Steve, that most boys these days are thoroughly lacking in manners and good sense. They do nothing to show a girl -- or a boy -- that they consider their date a big, important occasion. And since it’s treated as a minor event, it’s easy for the date to lead nowhere. Even in the 1980s -- in the distant, Jurassic past -- it was rare, I admit, for a boy to show up at his date’s house with a bouquet of flowers and a pound of chocolates."

"That’s what I was saying. So don’t you think?" interrupted Steve.

Elvira raised her voice to override his objection: "But your father brought me flowers and candy -- I think they were NECCO mints -- on our first date. And in doing so, he really impressed my parents, your gram and grampa. They were always on his side from then on. Every time I wondered whether he was the right boy for me, they’d say, ‘Elvie, he’s perfect for you. Where else are you going to find an athlete who is such a gentleman? Just imagine it,’ they’d continue, ‘He’s a first-round draft pick by the NBA, yet still considerate enough to woo you with flowers. You’d be crazy not to date a talented boy with such fine manners.’ That’s what they kept telling me about your father, Steve."

"You want Kyle’s mother to like you, don’t you? Well, she’s the one who’ll be admiring the flowers and eating the candy. She’ll be your ally from this night onward; and if the mother is won over, her child will soon follow. So, you’ll definitely give Kyle the candy and flowers, right?"

"Yeh, I guess so." Steve still wasn’t sure the gifts were a good idea, but he had to admit that his father hadn’t done badly. His mother was, he thought, a kick-ass parent. The divorce wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, as Steve saw it, because his father hadn’t any idea he was gay until he got to New York City. According to gossip, it had been Mick Jagger -- or was it David Bowie? -- who had taught Mike Lancer his true sexual orientation in a private room at a disco club.

Steve admired his superstar father, and had been eager to learn the secrets of his courting. Elvira had been very obliging: She led Steve to believe that his father had been the type to hold open every door, to pick up every check, and to pull back every chair. Had Mike Lancer really been that old-fashioned? Possibly, for he had been raised in Venice Beach, California before he won a basketball scholarship to Iowa State University. Steve had never left Iowa, and so didn’t know much about the Los Angeles suburb; but he speculated that it might have the manners as well as the gondolas of Europe’s most medieval city.

However, it was more likely that Elvira wanted -- for reasons best known to herself -- for her son to make Kyle feel as feminine as possible on their date.

What game was she playing? Steve couldn’t have told you, for he believed that his mother was doing her utmost to ensure that he and Kyle lived together happily ever after. And so, he set aside his own gut instinct that Kyle didn’t want to be treated like a girl, never mind like a lady, and accepted his mother’s advice. Tonight, Kyle would feel like a princess. That was the Lancer game plan.

Steve began to see the wisdom of the plan when Barb answered the doorbell. She was speechless -- was it with delight? -- when he bashfully pushed the candy and flowers toward her, and announced that they were Kyle’s. She seemed so surprised by his unexpected manners that she dropped the box of chocolates onto the floor, accidentally crushing two strawberry creams into the broadloom carpet before recovering her balance.

As she and Steve knelt by the front door to extract the pieces of dark chocolate from the carpet, Barb finally found her tongue: "The gifts were quite unnecessary, Steve, as I’m sure that Kyle is delighted just to be able to go to a basketball game. You are going to a game, right?"

"Oh sure. My mom’s waiting in the car outside. See." And then he pointed to Elvira, who, in fact was now standing halfway up the front walk. She had an enormous camera in her hand, with the longest telephoto lens Barb had ever seen. As Barb saw the camera, she realized, "Elvira’s been photographing us. I guess she wants a photo of Steve presenting his gifts to Kyle. Instead, she’s got a picture of Steve’s rump as he scrambled after a truffle."

Actually, Elvira had already taken several shots. She was determined to have a total photographic record of Steve’s first date. And when Barb made the mistake of looking in her direction, Elvira invited herself into the house where she, rebuffing all attempts at small talk, positioned herself to capture Kyle’s descent down the family’s stairway.

Kyle, startled by the camera and half-blinded by its repeated flash, fell down the stairs. He might have ended up in the hospital, or worse, had Steve not caught him before he hit the ground. A dramatic photo it made, for Kyle appeared to have swooned in Steve’s arms. Steve quite forgot himself with the unanticipated opportunity, and he squeezed Kyle tightly enough to get him swearing out loud — for the first, but certainly not for the last time in the evening.

While it was disturbing to Kyle to be hugged like a girl, what unnerved him most was Steve’s strength. As Kyle struggled to free himself from his date’s embrace, he appreciated that Steve was a lot stronger than he was. Until then, Kyle hadn’t realized he was going out on a ‘date’ with a guy who could impose his kisses and caresses, if he so chose.

Kyle thought, "Mrs. Lancer may be a fool with all that picture-taking, but I’m glad she’s coming along to make sure that Steve behaves like a gentleman."

As Kyle finally clambered to his feet, Elvira Lancer loudly complained: "Oh Kyle, I’m so disappointed in the way you’re dressed. Steve and I were so hoping that you’d be wearing something really special — you know, like a dress. We expected at least a skirt, didn’t we, Steve?"

Steve said nothing, but inside his head spun: "A skirt? A dress? Why did she go and say that? Kyle’s dressed exactly as I thought he’d be -- in his school duds. He’s not loco enough to go to a college basketball game looking like a girl. Someone would kill him."

Kyle was speechless with rage: "How could that woman suggest to my own mother that I want to wear a dress?"

He thought of hitting Elvira. No, that wouldn’t do. His mother would ground him for a year. Then how about clobbering her son? That would teach the witch not to challenge Kyle’s manhood.

No, if he hit Steve, he wouldn’t get to see his first college basketball game. Instead, the evening would dissolve in recriminations and tears. And they’d probably be his own tears, for Kyle was still fretting over Steve’s unexpected strength. How did the guy get so strong at fourteen? Unable to lash out, Kyle gave Mrs. Lancer the evil eye. He imagined burning her at the stake.

Barb felt she had to defend her son’s honor: "Elvira Lancer," she spluttered unconvincingly, "how dare you suggest that my son wants to wear a dress? Kyle may be gay, but he’s just as masculine as your son."

"I’m not gay!" Kyle roared. Everyone looked at him in amazement. In unison, the two mothers sighed.

Steve, taking their cue, gathered up the candy and flowers and presented them to Kyle, who then flung them onto the carpet -- to his mother’s outrage. She said just two words, "Kyle James," and made but one motion -- her right arm, hand and index finger pointed rigidly to the kitchen. Kyle understood and he followed there.

Alone in the kitchen he got his worst scolding in months. His freedom for many weekends to come was on the line, as Barb sternly informed him. He was to behave for the rest of the evening, and if she heard of any more rudeness, he could forget about the moped. Indeed, he’d be walking, so far as she was concerned, for the rest of his life. Kyle was furious in turn: "You have no right," he snarled, "to renege on the moped deal, as long as I wear girls’ clothes for a month. You have no right."

"Yes, you’re perfectly right, Kyle James. You’ll get the moped if you keep your side of the deal. But it may be a year or two before I let you actually ride it if you don’t stop acting like a spoiled child. You will not misbehave tonight. Is that understood?"

Barb then marched Kyle back to the entrance hallway where he abjectly apologized for "accidentally dropping Steve’s considerate gifts."

With a smile marred only by his clenched teeth and a twitching jaw, Kyle posed with Steve, the flowers, and the candy as Elvira Lancer took a half-dozen close-ups for ‘their family albums.’ It took another six snapshots before Elvira could get a photo of Kyle in which he did not grimace while Steve affixed a carnation onto the buttonhole of Kyle’s powder blue, girls’ jacket.

As he walked down the front walkway, Kyle surreptitiously lost the boutonniere. He soon regretted lagging behind, however, when he realized that he had given Steve enough time to open the rear door of the Lancer’s Mercedes and there to wait like a love-sick swain for his arrival.

When Kyle reluctantly got into the back seat (he’d have preferred the security of the bucket seat in front), he found half of it already occupied by an inverted armchair. It had been purchased that day, Mrs. Lancer truthfully told him when he complained about the lack of space in back; less truthfully she denied having had the time to move it into the house.

Steve didn’t seem to mind the cramped quarters; indeed, he sat as close as physically possible to Kyle. Every attempt by Kyle that evening to escape the incessant contact by escaping to the front seat was rebuffed, as Mrs. Lancer icily explained that it was customary for a young couple to sit together on a ‘date’. She and Steve merely exchanged supercilious looks when Kyle protested yet again that he’d never ‘dated’ a boy, and never would.

Kyle only calmed down when Mrs. Lancer told him that they’d be eating at the Café Stia Attento before going to the game. The thought of a pepperoni pizza did much to improve his spirits; indeed, he didn’t even grimace -- or not very much -- when Steve grandly announced that he’d be buying Kyle’s meal as part of their ‘date.’ Kyle was in such a good mood that he even forgave Steve for making a fuss out of ‘helping’ him to get out of car.

However, Kyle realized that dinner was going to be trial, pizza or not, when Steve’s mom told him that she was going to eat at another table: "I’ll just be a fifth wheel," she said, "I’m sure you two boys would rather sit alone together. That way you can talk privately. I know, Kyle, that there are things Steve wants to say to you that he’d be too embarrassed to say in front of his mother."

This said, she positioned herself at a table across the room, where she began using her telephoto lens to capture Steve’s smiles and Kyle’s glares. It wasn’t that Kyle was being rude to his ‘date,’ but he was far from pleased to be on ‘candid camera.’

Even more upseting was Steve’s peremptory approach to ordering dinner. Kyle never even got a chance to open his menu, as Steve told the waiter that they’d share a ‘Pizza l’inverno.’ It was cheaper, he noted, than a ‘Four Seasons’ pizza, and probably just as good. After all, winter was one of his favorite seasons as it meant non-stop basketball on television.

Kyle, however, was outraged by the high-handed order, especially when the plain cheese pizza arrived: "How could anyone order a pizza without pepperoni?" he asked incredulously. "Jeez, it doesn’t have any meat at all!" He lashed out at Steve: "How come," he demanded, "I didn’t get a say in what we eat? Don’t I count around here?"

"Of course, you do," Steve purred. "But it’s a big, complicated menu, and I was worried that it might confuse you. My mom told me that the guy paying for a date should do the ordering. That way his date doesn’t have to do anything but sit back, enjoy the scene, and look cute. And you do look really cute tonight, Kyle."

Kyle couldn’t decide what to object to most -- to being treated like a dumb blond, to being reminded yet again that Steve thought they were on a date, or to having another boy call him ‘cute,’ not just once, but twice in rapid succession. As Kyle weighed his best response, Steve outdid himself by sticking two straws into the single, jumbo-sized Coke he’d ordered and suggesting it would be ‘cool’ to sip it together.

Kyle contemplated throwing the Coke at Steve, but, remembering his mother’s warnings, he sullenly began slurping away instead. He had revenge in mind: "I’ll drink more than half, and then he’ll be sorry that he asked to share a drink."

Their heads occasionally touched as they drank, which made it easier for Elvira to convince Irving Shapiro, the ‘gypsy’ accordionist, that the two boys were in fact out on a date. She’d lassoed him the moment he arrived to do a musical tour of the restaurant.

When she told Irving that she wanted him to serenade the two boys, he vigorously refused: "I wasn’t even going to sing for them. It’s just not done in Des Moines. I sing only for couples -- you know for a man and his wife, or for a guy and his woman."

"But the boys are a couple," Elvira replied. "Whether you like it or not, gays do live in Iowa and they deserve the same treatment as any heterosexual couple. If you don’t sing for my son and his boyfriend, I’ll go to the Civil Rights Commission and accuse you of discrimination. I’ll sue the ass of you and your employer. Do you understand?"

"I don’t have an employer," Irving complained. "I free lance. I pay Mr. Corleone, the owner of this joint, twenty bucks for letting me sing for his customers."

"Then I guess you won’t be able to afford the lawsuit, and I guess it will be real easy for Mr. Corleone and every other restaurant owner in this city to say, ‘He now sleeps with the fish.’ Or," and her tone changed dramatically, her snarl being replaced with a purr, "you can sing love songs to the boys for $50." She then waved five tens enticingly.

For the ‘gypsy’ violinist the choice had suddenly become an easy one, or at least would have been, had there not been one last problem to surmount: In the Stia Attento, Irving sang Italian songs (as opposed to the polkas and jigs he played for Le Ris de Spermophile, the classiest French restaurant in town), and as he objected to Elvira, there had to be a ‘bella donna’ to whom he sang.

It made no sense, he said, to croon ‘Solo Senza Te’ or ‘Amore Mio’ to both of the two boys. "One of them," he pronounced, "will have to be the ‘amore,’ the beloved girl, to whom I sing. But which one? All I see are two boys. To whom do I sing? Your request makes no sense." Or so he maintained, as he eyed the $50 hungrily. He waited for what he hoped would be a persuasive reply.

Elvira did have an answer. She always had an answer. "Can’t you see that one of the boys is dressed like a girl? Are you blind? Look at the blond. Look at his sissy pants with the plaid trim. That’s girls’ wear, and I swear to you that he’s wearing a bra and panties at this very moment. His name is Kyla and he’s my son’s date. I’m not happy that my son’s gay, but at least he doesn’t call himself Kyla and wear girls’ clothes. If you need a girl to sing to, you’ve got Kyla. She wants to be a girl. You make her feel beautiful. You make her feel loved, and I’ll give you sixty dollars. Deal?"

It was a deal. And Kyle had seen none of the negotiations, for his head was either buried in the Coke or looking in every direction but towards the camera he assumed Mrs. Lancer was still pointing at him. Kyle was, therefore, floored when the ‘gypsy’ accordionist began singing to him in Italian.

At first, he couldn’t figure out what was going on, but gradually it dawned on him that -- and this was so bogus it was almost impossible to believe -- the guy was belting out love songs to two boys. To boys! Go figure! They had to be love songs, because it seemed that ‘amore’ was every second word; and wasn’t that Italian lingo for ‘love’? Having deciphered the general intent of the songs, Kyle was shocked to hear his own name. The guy seemed to be singing about him!

Or was it to him? The guy was singing to ‘Kyla’! That had to be a feminized version of Kyle!

It then struck Kyle that the guy was treating him like a girl! When the ‘gypsy’ finished his set with one song in English to "Kyla, the most beautiful girl in the world," Kyle slumped in his chair, hoping that no one could see him. Ironically, as he slumped, one bra strap came briefly into view.

Irving, greatly relieved that the woman had been giving him the straight goods about the gay boys, whispered into Kyle’s ear: "That’s a lovely bra, you’re wearing, Kyla honey. It’s pink satin, right? No matter, I wish you the best of luck. Oh, you should try some lipstick. It will make you even prettier, sweet cakes?" Then, before Kyle could respond, Irving went to the next table.

"Lord, that boy’s not pretty at all," Irving was thinking as he tuned his accordion for the next couple, "but Kyla will love the compliment, and I’ll love the extra ten bucks."

Who knows what Kyle would have said had Irving not indicated that his bra was showing? Instead of suspecting foul play on the part of one of the two Lancers, he blamed himself for his embarrassment and exposure.

As he looked around the room, and thought he saw everyone, just everyone, either staring at him or talking about him, he surrendered to self-contempt. "I blew it," he said to himself. "I allowed my bra strap to show, and the guy concluded I wanted to be a girl. It’s all my fault." He then sunk into despond.

The long-stemmed rose did not raise his spirits. Elvira had negotiated its arrival at their table, though it was Steve who ostentatiously bought it for his ‘date.’ Steve hoped the romantic gesture would impress Kyle and get him talking again. Instead it got the entire room gossiping, for while few had paid attention to Irving’s love songs or cared who ‘Kyla’ might be, the single rose sitting lovingly atop a table shared by two boys signaled to everyone that these teens were more than buddies.

One table could be overheard saying that they made a cute couple, but, as the Stia Attento was located in Des Moines rather than in one of the more socially tolerant American cities like Greenville, South Carolina or Port Arthur, Texas, most of the talk around them was distinctly hostile to the ‘little fags.’

The boys and Elvira beat a hasty retreat. The rose they left behind. Or rather, Kyle abandoned it. Steve later said that he’d have guarded the rose with his life, had he been given the chance.

Outside, Kyle sullenly didn’t deign to comment when Steve made a fuss over opening the car door for him, and he made no effort to remove the gay boy’s hand when it came to rest on his lower right thigh. Kyle was tuning out; he didn’t want to interact with either Steve or his mother, for he intended never to speak to either of them again.

"This is the worst night of my life," Kyle kept repeating to himself. "That creep is history, and if his hand moves any closer to my crotch, I’m going to pop him one. I don’t care what my mother will say."

Fortunately for peace in both the Mercedes and the James household, Steve removed rather than moved his hand. He had finally comprehended that Kyle was too angry for romancing. Steve wasn’t sure why Kyle was in such a foul mood, considering that he’d been treated like a princess all evening, but he figured Kyle was probably upset by the snide remarks at the restaurant. If true, Kyle had to toughen up, for as Steve saw it, "A gay boy who likes to wear women’s clothing had better get used to fielding an insult or two."

As the two boys sat wordless in the Mercedes, Steve had ample opportunity to reflect on Kyle’s cross-dressing. He had to admit that it bothered him, for Steve originally had been attracted to Kyle because the adventurous, accident-prone skateboarder had seemed so normal. He was a regular guy. Like so many gays, Steve was attracted to males who were straight acting. And Kyle seemed quintessentially straight, that is, until he started wearing girls’ clothes.

Steve had discussed the new, more feminine Kyle with his mother at length, and had asked her whether she believed that Kyle, or any boy, would wear a bra and panties for a month just to win a bet. Was it likely, he asked, that Kyle wanted a moped so desperately that he’d risk his reputation at school for being a masculine, regular guy?

Steve hadn’t liked Elvira’s answer but he had accepted it: Namely, that the moped was merely an excuse. "Kyle," she maintained, "is a transvestite. He may even be a transsexual. Whatever he is," she warned, "you’re going to have to accept that his cross-dressing is unlikely to stop at simply wearing girls’ jeans. You can be sure that he will soon be mincing about in a dress."

That word — mincing — stung like a slap in the face.

And then she asked, "Will you still be his friend when he’s in a halter top and skirt?"

After some thought, Steve affirmed that his passion for Kyle was more than cloth deep. "In fact, I want to spend the rest of my life with Kyle. He could grow boobs and I’d still love him, because he’d still be Kyle, my Kyle."

For Steve the conversation had been an eye-opener: It made him realize that he’d accept, almost welcome, Kyle’s feminization as a test of his love. Every adolescent wants to believe that he is attracted to the inner being, the soul, the quintessence of the beautiful people he dates (or lusts after), and in Steve’s case the more feminine Kyle looked or acted the more opportunity it gave Steve to prove that he was attracted to the inner being of the first male he had truly loved, rather than to his pecs, genitals or buttocks.

Elvira had advised Steve that his love was not strong enough to survive, as an example, a decision by Kyle to get breast implants. Well, she’d learn that her gay son was capable of true love. As he looked over at Kyle, Steve thought, "You’d look pretty pathetic in a dress, but if you put one on, I’ll prove how much I love the real you."

His hand then squeezed Kyle’s hand. Kyle reacted as if stung by a wasp.
That was the low point of the evening. From then on, the ‘date’ went a lot better, for Kyle had the time of his life at the basketball game. He had never been to either a college or pro game, despite his passion for hoops, And now he had courtside seats.

"This is super rad!" Kyle kept telling himself for two hours straight. Naturally, he didn’t want to take his eyes of the game for even a minute, and so he started to see Steve’s attentiveness as more virtue than vice.

"This is cool," Kyle thought to himself, as Steve hustled about to keep him supplied with candy, chips and soda pop. Kyle recognized that Steve was treating him like a girlfriend, but as he munched away on all the free goodies that were coming his way, he thought to himself, "There are a lot worse things than being treated like a girl." For the rest of the evening, he made no attempt to correct Steve when he talked about their dating in the future.

It was not that Kyle intended to accept a second date with Steve. That was out of the question, if for no other reason than his infuriating mother: Elvira from her seat across the arena had been constantly taking his picture, and he just knew that some of them would be embarrassing, for Steve did occasionally touch him or holler in his ear -- as even regular guys did.

Yet even Elvira could not ruin the evening for Kyle. During the game, he came to recognize that the hassles and embarrassment at the restaurant were minor irritations when compared to the thrill of watching big-time college basketball live, and the pleasure of having a boy at his beck and call. It had been a good evening, and not one that he regretted, all things considered.

Hence Kyle agreed, after some hesitation, to a second ‘date’ with Steve: One week later Iowa State would be playing another home game, and the two boys would once again have, thanks to Steve’s dad, courtside seats.

However, Kyle did impose two conditions: On the second date, Steve was neither to buy him a rose nor to treat him like a dumb blond when it came to, for example, ordering dinner.

There could have been a third condition: namely, that Steve not "treat him like a girl" when they went out together. Kyle could have insisted on his right to pay his own way and to run about doing favors for Steve. But Kyle had liked having a servant during the game, and for the first time he could see some advantage to being a girl. If Steve wanted to dote on him, why discourage him? Kyle wasn’t going to insist on being treated like a boy 100 percent of the time, not if it meant he’d have to risk being the one trapped in a line at the concession stand when the ball game was on the line.

By the end of the evening, it was apparent to Steve that Kyle was willing, to some degree, to be treated like a girl. Did that extend to kissing? A girl would be expected to thank a boy for such an expensive date with, at the very least, a peck on the lips. Was Kyle willing to kiss Steve? How much of a ‘girl’ was he willing to become?

Steve himself wondered how far Kyle was willing to go, as the two of them stood awkwardly under the porch light at front door of the James home. Steve shuffled his feet as Kyle awkwardly thanked him for a ‘super evening.’

There was a long silence. And then, Steve pounced. He went for the goodnight kiss. He went for Kyle’s lips. Kyle moved as quickly as he could to avoid being "kissed like a girl".

Did his evasive action succeed? According to Kyle, it did. He believed that Steve’s lips had done no more than graze his cheek. As for Steve, he was quite uncertain as to what had happened. He had been leading with his tongue. It had found some part of Kyle’s anatomy. But had it found its way into Kyle’s mouth?

Only Elvira claimed to know for sure. She had been clicking photos non-stop from the car, as she had been taking them all evening. She had about a dozen pictures of ‘the kiss,’ but only one of them did she show to either Steve or Kyle, or reprint to mail to Barb James the following day.

The photo had been taken at a distance, and at a strange angle. It was blurred. Yet it seemed to show two boys kissing each other on the lips. Moreover, Kyle seemed to be taking the initiative. According to the photo, it had been Kyle who had kissed Steve! Steve first swore that Kyle had made no effort to kiss him, but Elvira eventually convinced him otherwise.

"Photos don’t lie," she said, "and this picture proves that Kyle was pretending that he didn’t want a kiss. He was acting like a girl should on a first date — demurely. He wanted you, as the boy, to make the first move; but as soon your head moved towards his, he lunged to kiss you."

"Had it really been like that?" Steve wondered. "If mom says so, I guess it was. I just have to treat Kyle like a girl, and soon enough I’ll know what it’s like to make it with a boy."

Barb also came under Elvira’s spell. When she opened her letter and saw its photo enclosure, Barb concluded: "It’s true. Kyle is gay. And he is, as Elvira says here in the first line of her note, actively pursuing her son."

The letter hectored Barb for not facing up to facts, and therefore for failing her son: "You’re going to have to admit, Barb, that your son desperately wants to be a girl, and that he wants to be my son’s girlfriend, and not his boyfriend. Quite frankly, I think the relationship between our children would be much healthier if Kyle were permitted to liberate his inner woman."

"Barb, you do your son no favors when you allow your prejudice against transgendered people to get in the way of Kyle’s timely transformation into the girl of his dreams. You know, Barb, that Kyle is not far launched into puberty and if you act quickly, he could still make a passable female when he reaches adulthood."

The letter ended with a ringing declaration that Kyle had the "right to be all that he can be," and that Barb had "no right to let her old-fashioned prejudices" stunt her son’s life.

After Barb had finally stopped ranting about the interference of that ‘Lancer woman’ in her family’s life, she asked herself several questions to which she did not yet know the answers: "What game is Elvira Lancer playing? Does she really believe my Kyle is a transsexual? And if she doesn’t, why does she insist he is one?"

These were, of course, the easy questions. The toughest two had been tormenting her since she had found the breast forms: "Is my son a transsexual? Is he more Demi than Kyle? And if he is, what should I do about it?"

The answers to these questions would determine the future course of Kyle’s life. It never occurred to Barb James that she could get the answers wrong.

To be continued in Chapter 10 (Part 8), "Who Gave Kyle the Hormones?"

In the first 7 parts, Kyle finds it more difficult than he expected to keep a deal he made with his mother: That if he wears girls’ clothes for a month that she will buy him a moped (a motor scooter). He’s not quite sure how it happened, but in rapid succession he lost his friends, convinced his mother that he’s gay and dating Steve, posed as a lesbian named Demi in order to charm the grandmother of his new girlfriend Joannie, who’d prefer that Kyle wore the panties in the family, and convinced his mother that he’s a transsexual. In part 7, Kyle’s first dates with Joannie and Steve had their ups and downs — notably, of his black velvet pants — but he welcomed a second date with both teens. The last chapter ended with Virginia no longer ‘charmed’ by Demi, who she now knows to be a boy.

Anything for a Moped? by: Dawn De Winter
Part 8
Chapter Ten: Who Gave Kyle the Hormones?

"Sunday morning has sucked big time," thought Joannie as she returned to the Internet. The disturbing news had begun with a phone call from Kyle around ten. For the first five minutes Joannie could not get in a single word as he excitedly told her about his first college basketball game.

He must have said at least dozen times that the game had been ‘awesome,’ and in once sentence, he used the word ‘cool’ five times to describe his experience. He said that he’d be going with Steve to another game in less than a week.

"Just think! I’ll be seeing my second college basketball game in just six days time. Wow, it took me fourteen years to get to my first one. And I only have to wait six days — just think of it, six days — before the next one. That’s so cool."

Finally he slowed down enough for Joannie to ask, "Wasn’t it creepy to know that Steve takes you to ball games because he wants to ball you? Are you going to put out in order to keep the tickets coming?"

"Of course not! You know I’m not gay. I like girls — a lot."

"Girls, plural, or girl, singular?" she challenged.

"Don’t be silly. I like you and no one else," he replied soothingly.

"Did he try to kiss you after the game? I bet he did. Tell me the truth, Demi, for I know I can learn it from Steve. He’s the kind of boy who kisses and tells."

Kyle didn’t like the question — not at all — but decided he’d better get his version of ‘the kiss’ on the record before Steve started gossiping about it: "Yeh, he tried to kiss me. He’s gay after all. He wants to kiss every boy he meets."

"Well, did he succeed, Demi? Did you two kiss?" She needed to know.

"Sort of, I guess. It wasn’t my fault. He lunged at me. He caught me unawares. I wanted to wash my lips with soap afterwards."

"Well, did you?"

"Did I what?" Kyle replied. "Why can’t she let the whole subject drop?" he wondered.

"After Steve kissed you on the lips, did you wash them afterwards? How much soap did you use?"

"None," he admitted.

"Just as I thought! You weren’t upset to have a boy kiss you, Demi. I bet you even liked it. You’re such a slut. I bet you’ll be tongue dancing next time out."

"We will not! I only do that with you!"

"You’d better behave on your next date with Steve. I warn you, Demi, that if you let a boy get into your panties, you’ll never get into mine. Understood?"

"Yeh, I understand. But you don’t have to worry about me. I’m not the kind of slut who’d sell her bod for basketball tickets."

Unnervingly, Joannie said nothing.

"Really?" she was thinking. "Basketball gives Steve an enormous advantage. It’s dangerously seductive, so far as Demi is concerned. I bet she’d be willing to have Steve’s baby if he offered her first-row tickets to an NBA game."

To Kyle she said, "I know that you’re not that kind of girl. But Steve may have illusions. He may think you can be bought. And if you disappoint him, well … Demi, just be sure that he’s not got you cornered. You do remember what the social studies teacher said could happen to us girls on a date?"

Kyle found the intimation that he couldn’t take care of himself downright insulting: "I’m not worried about Steve. I can handle him. I can handle any boy."

But could he? Despite his bluster, Kyle knew that he could not fight Steve off in a clinch. But it would never come to that, would it?

After their telephone call ended in sweet terms of endearment, Joannie had only a few minutes to reflect on her competition with Steve for Demi’s heart and body: "Steve has one big round advantage," she thought, "A basketball. I’ve got two round advantages," she chuckled, "and I am wearing them every time Demi sees me. Demi is attracted to girls, not boys. At least, I think she prefers girls to boys."

"In a fair fight, I’ll win. But it’s not a fair fight. Demi loves basketball, and I can’t get courtside tickets. I don’t have the clout — not like Steve’s dad. And sooner or later, Steve is going to ask Demi to a NBA game in New York of Chicago. You know there’ll be just one bed. It’s not fair!"

Joannie decided to fight back in two ways. First, Demi was going to be well rewarded for wearing a skirt to their date that evening: "Not only will we strip down to our underwear, as I promised, but I’m going to let her hands roam freely — so long as they don’t try to get inside my bra and panties."

True intimacy would come in time. But for the next couple of weeks Joannie wanted to train Demi to associate sexual touching with satin and silk. If all went well, Demi would develop a lingerie fetish so strong that she would herself insist on wearing a satiny soft bra and panty on the night that they first had intercourse.

While she hoped that the initiation of active petting would give her a strategic advantage over Steve, Joannie also appreciated the importance of battlefield tactics. She realized she needed something to offset the basketball games, and she found it in a newspaper advertisement for an upcoming concert — in Des Moines, of all places — featuring an all-male, glam rock, Goth band known as ‘Hell’s Vixens.’

Kyle loved their music, and she figured that he’s leap at the opportunity to go to the concert, especially if they had prime tickets in the zone immediately in front of the stage where everyone would be frenetically dancing. An added bonus to this date was the fact that teens in the dance area were expected to mimic the clothing and antics of the band — which meant that Kyle would almost be forced to wear a unisex outfit as well as black lipstick and Gothic makeup. This would be the ideal opportunity to persuade Kyle to make his public debut as a ‘girl.’

"I’ll make sure," she schemed, "that every ‘unisex’ item he wears screams out just one sex — and that will be female! I’ll tell everyone we’re girlfriends."

"Joannie, I want to talk with you!"

"What?" Virginia’s voice awoke Joannie from her reverie.

"How many times do I have to call you? Come to the kitchen, now! We have a lot to talk about."

The peremptory tone announced that Joannie’s morning was not going to improve. Indeed, for a while, it sucked worse than homework on the first day of class, for Virginia had finally decided that she could no longer defer talking to her granddaughter about Demi. Virginia was going to use shock tactics to stun Joannie into honesty about Demi’s true sex and identity.

No sooner was Joannie seated in a kitchen chair than Virginia launched her attack: "Joannie, I know that Demi is a boy. I saw him, after all, with his pants down. Who is he? And why are you both pretending that he’s a girl? I want some answers and I want them now!"

The shock treatment worked, all too well. Most unusually, words failed Joannie. After all, what could she say to mitigate the damage she had done? Would her grandmother ever forgive the deception?

What would become of Demi? If she ceased to exist, what would be left of Joannie’s friendship with Kyle? And would the two teens ever be allowed to see each other again? Star-crossed lovers, would they be kept apart like Romeo and Juliet?

"I don’t want to lose my Juliet!" Joannie’s inwardly wailed. "I love Demi! Oh, my god, I’m about to lose her."

Virginia couldn’t abide any more silence: "Speak up, Joannie! Tell me right now why you lied to me about Demi. Why is he pretending to be a girl? Let’s start with his real name. I feel stupid calling a boy by a girl’s name. His name, young lady!"

"It’s Kyle," whimpered Joannie.

"Kyle?" Virginia thought. "So this is the boy she was telling me about? My granddaughter has been sneaking her boyfriend into the house! She may not be a lesbian after all!"

This was good news to Virginia, and it took much of the bite out of her bark. Her tone became less harsh: "Good. I’m glad we’re no longer pretending that Kyle is a girl. Now, I want to know his true identity. Is Kyle the son of Barb James or is that also a lie?"

"It’s not a lie. Kyle is Mrs. James’s son. That’s why it was so important that you and she not talk about our dating."

"And why not?" Virginia queried. "You told me that Barb James was opposed to her daughter’s dating a lesbian. It profoundly upset me to think that Barb was being intolerant for the first time in her life. Why did you let me believe that? How could she possibly oppose your dating her son? You’re not trying to tell me that Barb has a problem with heterosexuality, are you?"

"Of course not. But she does have …" And then came to mind and tongue the big lie that Joannie felt was necessary to ensure her continued access to Demi: "But Mrs. James does have a problem, a big one, with transsexuality."

"What are you saying, Joannie?" Virginia could scarcely believe her ears. "Transsexuality?" That was something you read about in the National Enquirer. It didn’t sneak into you own home. And it wasn’t something that happened to a friend’s son.

"I’m simply saying that Kyle is a transsexual. He’s really Demi and he has been almost all his life. He told me that he’s always known that he’s really a girl. His boy’s body is just a colossal mistake, some sort of bad joke by God. I call Kyle ‘Demi’ because that’s who he is really is — a girl named Demi. We both pray that Barb will accept that reality. But she won’t!"

"Are you saying that Barb James won’t permit Kyle to dress as Demi?"

"That’s right. Mrs. James is absolutely opposed to it because she believes that boys who cross-dress are making fun of women. She told Demi that cross-dressers are a travesty of womanhood. She absolutely refuses to let Demi wear anything feminine — not even panties and stockings that no one will see."

Virginia pondered: "Is it possible that Barb considers cross-dressing to be politically incorrect? It’s plausible. A gay son she’d have no trouble accepting. She’d go on television to announce how proud she was of her son Kyle and his fiancé Dennis, and she’d call anyone who opposed their church wedding to be a bigot. ‘Worse than a John Ashcroft,’ she’d say."

"But Kyle’s wanting to dress up like a girl? That might be difficult for Barb to accept. Some of her lesbian friends might be offended. Others might deem her son a freak. I confess that I do. Yes, Barb would consider a gay son a ‘cool’ thing to have. But a transsexual child? She’d fear being mocked and pitied."

Even so, there were some gaping holes in Joannie’s story, starting with, "If Kyle’s mother won’t let him dress as Demi, then how did he get here wearing velvet pants, lipstick, fake breasts, and a girl’s hairstyle? And didn’t he wear a skirt home?"

"Duh, Demi is obviously not wearing her skirt and breast forms at home," replied Joannie sarcastically. "I told you that Demi doesn’t wear any girl’s clothes — none at all — when she’s at home. She has to be Kyle there or Mrs. James will beat her mercilessly."

"You’re not trying to tell me that Barb James hits her child? I can’t believe that! It’s inconceivable!"

"It’s true," said Joannie defiantly. "Tonight when Demi comes over, get her to remove her makeup. I know you can think up some excuse. You’ll see that she has a black eye. It’s fading, but it’s still obscene. Who do you think gave Demi her shiner? It was her mother. Demi got clobbered when her mother found out she was shaving her body."

"A black eye? Can it really be possible? I thought I knew that woman. She seems the soul of tolerance, and now I find out that she’s been beating her son to keep him out of dresses. Can you fathom that?"

But wait a second. Just where did Demi change into her clothes?

Virginia persisted with her question, and Joannie, having had an opportunity to search for a plausible lie, seized on, "Kyle changes into Demi at the Lancers. You know that Mrs. Lancer makes no effort to hide the fact that her son Steve is gay. But I bet you didn’t know that Steve feels sorry for Demi — they’re both outcasts at school, you know — and that he persuaded his mother to let Demi keep her girls’ clothes at their house. He’s got a big closet."

"You’re saying that Demi will be changing clothes at Elvira Lancer’s before she comes here for dinner?"

"Yep. Sad, isn’t it? Prejudice is so evil. You’re not prejudiced against Demi are you, Gran? You’ll let her date me, right? And you won’t rat on her to her mother, right?"

"Hold on one second. If Kyle is Demi, a transsexual, why does he want to date you? Shouldn’t Demi be going out with boys? Doesn’t a girl, even a make-believe one, want to date boys?"

"Grandmother, don’t be so last millennium! Demi is not a make-believe girl. She’s a real one — in her own mind, at least. And not every girl dates boys. I don’t, for one."

Virginia’s head spun. "But you are dating a boy," she feebly rebutted. Then, seeing Joannie scowl, she asked, "Are you trying to tell me that you and Demi are both lesbians even though Demi is, technically speaking, a boy?"

"Right! That’s it exactly. Demi is my girlfriend, and I want her to be my lesbian lover. You’re not going to forbid me to sleep with her, are you? That would be bogus, and you know it."

"You’ll take precautions?"

"Of course, I don’t want to get any germs or surprises from Demi. Trust me. Anyway, I imagine we’ll stick to cunnilingus, like most lesbians."

"Joannie! Don’t talk like a tramp! My, but you do have a gutter mouth at times. I don’t want to know what you two do in bed. But I must know that you’ll be fully protected if you have any sort of sex. That means Demi has to wear a condom on her …"

"Clitoris?" offered Joannie.

"On her clitoris," sighed Virginia. And you must start taking those pills we got you. I don’t want to hear another word of complaint about the estrogen in the pills ‘feminizing’ you too much. If you’re going to be sexually active, it’s a pill once a day for you. Agreed? Otherwise, you can no longer date Demi."

Joannie wanted to clinch the deal: "So, it’s agreed: If I take the pills, and if Demi practices ‘hygiene,’ then we can continue dating? And you’ll let Demi visit me in my room, as before? And you’ll let Demi stay overnight?"

After catching her breath, Joannie added three more terms to the proposed deal: "And you’ll keep Demi’s secret from her mother? And you’ll help Demi to become the girl of her dreams? And finally, you won’t let Demi know that you’ve guessed her secret, will you? It would crush her spirits to realize that it’s so easy to ‘read’ her as a boy."

"Well, Joannie, a lot of people are going to figure out that Demi is really a boy if she doesn’t wear a gaff to conceal her genitals."

"A gaffe? What’s that?" asked Joannie eagerly.

"Demi probably knows. As for you, I’m sure that you can find out by looking up the word in a dictionary. I’d rather we talked about your future relationship with this … girl."

"Frankly," Virginia continued, "I do have reservations about keeping this affair a secret from Barb. You’re asking me to assume a heavy responsibility. I can make no promises about secrecy. If I have to talk to Barb about her son — or her daughter — I will. You can’t bind me not to. However, if you’re right about the black eye, then I will approach her very warily. As for allowing Demi into your bedroom, we’ll see."

"Oh, Gran! You’re super. You must be the coolest grandmother in the whole world. I love you so much. I’m so lucky to have you for a parent." Then, thinking of her mother, Joannie collapsed into Virginia’s arms. The teenager’s body shook with her sobs.

"There, there, Joannie. You know I love you more than life itself. I’ll never hurt you and I’ll never hurt the friends you cherish. We’ll do our best to make this a home for Demi, a place where he, or she, can develop into a confident, loving teenage girl. You know, sweetheart, Demi isn’t the most feminine of girls. We’re going to have to work on her if she is always going to pass for female."

"I know." Joannie sniffled. "Demi picked up some unfortunate mannerisms when Mrs, James forced her to attend a boy’s military academy for three years. She was trying to ‘make a man’ out of Demi. But Demi is only a boy on the surface. Deep down no one is more feminine than Demi. You’ll see. Do you promise to help me to turn Demi into the world’s most perfect girlfriend? Will you, huh?"

Still holding Joannie tightly, Virginia agreed: "Yes, together we’ll transform Demi into Cinderella. We can start by giving her some closet space here."

Then, out of curiosity, Virginia asked, "If Demi is a transsexual, I suppose she’s taking hormones to soften her beard and to flesh out her breasts and hips."

"No, how could she? How could Demi get hormones if her mother won’t cooperate?" Joannie replied with a touch of sarcasm.

Briefly, an errant thought flashed through Virginia’s mind that she might perhaps help Demi to acquire the hormones she probably craved. "What if I gave them to the boy?" she asked herself.

The answer came rapidly enough: "Sooner or later you’d be facing lawsuits, prison, and disgrace for abusing a minor." Virginia might be indulgent when it came to her beloved Joannie, but she wasn’t foolhardy. No, if Barb wouldn’t help the boy to feminize, then he would have to wait until he was old enough to become mistress of his own destiny. Virginia would not be giving hormones to Kyle.

To Joannie, Virginia said, "We both feel sorry for Demi, but there’s nothing we can do about the hormones. Only her doctor can prescribe those, and only with the consent of Demi’s mother. We have no legal or moral right to interfere between a mother and her daughter, or son, or whatever. Do you understand me, Joannie?"

Joannie gave a demi-nod of agreement, then made her pitch: "It’s true that there’s not much we can do for Demi, considering the attitude of her mother, but we could try to make her a little bit happier. It must be so sad being a girl trapped in a boy’s body. We owe her some fun in life. And I know just how to give it to her."

"How is that, dear?"

"A rock band we both love is coming to Des Moines in two weeks time. They’re giving a teen dance concert. Could we get tickets? Could we?"

By the time Virginia gave her answer, morning had turned into afternoon and Joannie had got her way. Not only did Virginia buy her two prime tickets, but, upon finding that the concert was sold out, actually went onto the Internet to buy them from a scalper.

Joannie congratulated herself on her cleverness. She had transformed a potentially disastrous revelation into two tickets for Hell’s Vixens. Instead of being grounded for life, she was primed for a super date with Demi.

Possibly, her victory that morning had been too easy. Possibly it was arrogance that caused Joannie to return to the Internet to shop after her grandmother had returned to the kitchen to bake a chocolate cake for their dinner party. Or possibly it was simply sexual excitement. In any case, Joannie started using her grandmother’s credit card — without her knowledge or permission — to outfit Demi for their upcoming dates.

She began with a search for ‘gaffes,’ and after reading far too much about television outtakes, she finally got the spelling right. Even then, there weren’t many hits, which meant that she quickly found herself at the site of a store in Los Angeles that outfitted the TG community. Its offerings were an eye opener for an Iowan teenager, even for one as self-confidently worldly as Joannie Smith.

The v-string gaff, which hid a boy’s sexual apparatus inside a fake vagina, she quickly rejected as too expensive. Yet she bookmarked the page, just in case she ever changed her mind about the price. As she tucked it away in "Joannie’s Folder", she made a mental note of one of the v-string’s promised features: That a boy wouldn’t have to remove it to urinate, provided he sat down to pee.

"Gosh," she thought to herself, ‘I’ve got to convince Demi to sit down to pee or else one day she’ll give herself away as only a pretend-girl."

Two cotton gaffs she found more reasonably priced, and they immediately went into her electronic shopping cart. Next she added a body shaper to help Demi to put ‘flesh’ on her hips and buttocks while narrowing her waist.

A pink satin bra next struck her fancy because it resembled the one that she and Demi already owned. Yet it was different in two vital respects from any lingerie that either teen possessed: first, it was designed to massage the breasts and to arouse the nipples of anyone wearing it; and second, it created the illusion of ample cleavage without the need for breast attachments. Fearful of making Demi look too busty, Joannie selected a ‘B’ cup. Into the shopping cart it also went.

Her search next uncovered an offer of femininizing hormones — pills and creams promised to change a man into a woman in record time. One even half-promised he’d have breast milk. At the thought of milking Demi’s breasts as they made love, Joannie got so sexually excited that she ignored her grandmother’s advice: Into the cart went several jars of feminizing and emasculating pills and ointments. Buying female hormones for Demi was a wet dream.

With the cost of her expedition rapidly rising, Joannie reluctantly decided to finalize her order and to pay with the pilfered Visa card.

"This is so exciting," she thought. "All I have to do is to click my mouse and the order will be sent. The hormones will be here in a week, and I just know I can find a way to get Demi to take them. I could talk her into taking one-a-day ‘vitamins,’ or I could persuade her that it’s the new birth control pill for guys. Or maybe she’ll take the pills, even knowing that they’ll give her a girl’s body, just to please me! Soon she’ll have the perfect figure to love!"

The order was all set to go. It required one last click. Her finger several times touched the entry key, and yet she could not force it downward. In the end, she ordered only the gaffs, body shaper and bra, as she recognized, after much agonizing, that she had no right to coerce, seduce, or trick Kyle into permanently altering his body.

"He’s so young and naíve," she thought. "I need to protect him, even from himself."

She recognized that Kyle would do almost anything to please her. He’d even transform himself into a girl: "He loves me that much!" she sighed. His passion for her gave her power: She held not only his heart, but also his body and soul in her hands. She was convinced that Kyle would ingest anything she gave him, so great were his love and trust.

Yet did she have the right to play goddess? Just because she could remold Adam into Eve, did she have any right to do it? As her finger wavered uncertainly on the key that would lead to Kyle’s physical feminization, Joannie finally concluded that Kyle alone could decide whether Demi would ever be more than cloth deep.

Joannie decided: "I’ll tell Demi about this site. I’ll let her know that she can buy hormones from it any time she wants. I’ll even offer to pay for them with Gran’s Visa card. But Demi will have to order them."

Would she ever? Joannie certainly hoped so. Joannie knew what she wanted for Kyle: "A boy’s mind in a girl’s body."

One day she wanted to ride behind Demi on a motorcycle. Demi would be as adventuresome and risk-taking as any teenage boy. She’d always be as crazy as the boy who’d tried to skateboard blind down Suicide Hill. And Demi would have perfect, pearl-shaped breasts for Joannie to hold onto as they both leaned into a curve as they raced through an exciting life together.

On the afternoon of her second date with Demi, Joannie certainly contemplated giving hormones to Kyle. Yet she was not the one to give him hormones. Indeed, they had started to course through his body long before Joannie had worked up the courage even to broach the subject with him.

After all, it is one thing to tell yourself that you should have a heart-to-heart with your boyfriend about his getting breasts, it is quite another to actually do it. No, it wouldn’t be Joannie who’d give hormones to Kyle. She’d never get around to it.

If not Joannie, then who? It certainly wasn’t Melanie, the busybody at Macy’s. Yet she spent most of that day thinking about Kyle’s taking female hormones, as though she and Joannie had a mind meld. In fact, a nightmare had awakened Melanie that self-same morning — a nightmare in which Kyle had started eating estrogen pills like jujubes in order to sabotage her plans to make him a star of the Vera Smuttee show.

Vera had — in the dream — demanded $1000 from Melanie because Kyle’s breasts had become so enormous that he was no longer useful to her show. "He’s supposed to look like a boy when he first comes on the show." Vera ranted. "He’s not supposed to have breasts like Pamela Anderson! Where’s the fun for the audience in making his 40-inch breasts one-inch bigger?"

Melanie woke up in a cold sweat just as Vera suggested in the dream that the salesgirl work off the money she owed the show by undergoing a sex change herself, the entire process to be shown in pornographic detail on the Smuttee show.

"I’ve got to do everything I can to stop that fool kid from taking hormones before I can sign him up for breast implants," Melanie kept telling herself as she prowled Macy’s looking for some sign of ‘Kirkdirk.’

When she wasn’t scouting for Kyle, she kept running through a list of possible villains, of people who might ruin her plans by feeding the boy hormones, with or without his knowledge.

One person kept coming to mind: "His mother. It’s going to be his mother. She’s the one who’s going to sprinkle powdered estrogen on his breakfast cereal. I just know her type. She’s a ball-breaker. She wants a daughter and she’ll do anything to get one!"

Was it true? Was Barb James about to sneak female hormones into her son’s Quaker Oats? Was he going to be put on a regimen of ‘twice-a-day’ vitamins from an unlabelled bottle? Such thoughts did occur to Kyle’s mother. Indeed, hormones were raging through her mind, even as the thought of them tantalized Joannie and appalled Melanie.

Barb was convinced that her son was a transsexual, and that he’d be calling himself Demi and floating around in a dress before the middle of October if she gave him the opportunity to spread his fairy wings. After all, Kyle had run with the knitting ball each time she’d had tossed it to him.

The attachable breast forms were especially evocative. To Barb they said, "I want to be as much like a woman as possible. I wish I had breasts of my own."

Barb recognized that she was responsible for each halting step Kyle had yet taken toward womanhood, whether it was the Moped deal that gave him an excuse to wear girls’ clothes, the packet of pink panties that had allowed him to break free of black-and-white gender roles, or the burgundy shoes and black velvet pants he had worn to his first date with Steve. For his next date, Kyle would be wearing a short skirt that Barb had bought for him. Each time she had opened the door to femininity her son had sidled through it.

Was it her maternal duty to recognize that the logical next step was the feminization of his body? She realized that male puberty might soon make it impossible for Kyle ever to pass successfully as a woman. If he was determined to become Demi, shouldn’t Barb give him the hormones he needed?

Could a mother really wait until her child messed up his life? Didn’t she have an obligation to intercede on his behalf, whether it was to get him to wear girls’ clothes for a month to quell his boyish bravado or to feed him estrogen and progesterone to ensure that he’d always look right in the girls’ clothes that he appeared destined to wear for the rest of his life?

Barb answered yes: "I’m the adult. I can’t let a child make such an important decision. I have to be the one who decides whether Kyle takes feminine hormones."

But then she thought some more, and she realized that she had no right to make such a life-transforming decision by herself. She’d have to consult a doctor and psychiatrist. And they’d have to interview Kyle.

To feminize or not to feminize? There could be no immediate answer. Barb decided that the experts would know best. And so, she fought her mother’s instinct to administer hormones to her child the way she would cough medicine to an ailing child, and elected instead to ask the advice of their family physician, Dr. Olds.

As she was far from eager to discuss Kyle’s sexuality with the good doctor, Barb put off phoning him — for several weeks. In the meantime, she watched Kyle closely, hoping to find in his words and actions the evidence she needed to judge whether her son should begin hormone treatment in his early teens.

That afternoon, as Kyle readied himself for his second date with Joannie, he noticed her surveillance. He thought: "Mom is looking at me very oddly. It’s like she’s studying every move I make. What gives?"

It wasn’t as though she was hostile, or anything like that. Indeed, she seemed pleased when he not only agreed to wear his short black skirt around the house for almost three hours before his date, but also without prompting proposed that he use a hair-remover on his legs. Afterwards, Barb admitted that he had attractive legs — or at least, they would have been had they not looked sunburned. Poor Kyle, he had a chemical burn from the depilatory.

The depilatory and skirt were two important steps towards girlhood. Barb urged him to take several others. Mother and son must have spent a solid hour before his second date with Joannie — or as Barb saw it, his ‘third date with Steve’ — discussing shoes. Barb wanted him to wear the Mary Janes, but Kyle considered them too ‘sissy-looking’.

Yet he did agree to wear his black shoes with the flower appliqués. He had come to believe that they were boys’ wear.

Pierced ears and earrings also came up for discussion. At first, Kyle was adamantly opposed to both. But then she reminded him that many boys wore earrings, and he had to agree that some of the more interesting ‘dudes’ at school wore several of them on one or both ears. It was clear to both mother and ‘daughter’ that Kyle’s ears would soon be sporting some gold. However, he rejected a quick trip to the mall to get his ears pierced.

"It can wait," he growled.

Fingernails were her biggest victory that Sunday. Kyle, a nail-biter, had to admit that his were a mess.

"No girl has nails like those," Barb told him. "Anyone who looks at your nails will know you’re a boy. Some day those stubby, ragged ends could get you into a heap of trouble, Demi."

"Mom, I told you already. I don’t like it when you call me Demi. It’s a gross-out. Kyle’s my name!"

"Even when you’re sitting there in makeup, lipstick and a short skirt, plus a tight-fitting top that you apparently put on to show off your breasts to maximum advantage? Demi, I just find it too weird to discuss earrings and nail polish with a boy named Kyle. If we’re going to engage in girl talk, then you must let me call you Demi. Not all the time, son. You’ll be Demi only half the time — when you’re most dressed up like a girl. So what should I call you while we talk about making your fingernails look more feminine?"

"Demi, I guess. But I have no need to make my nails look more like a girl’s. You know, mom, that I have no intention of ever going out in public looking like Demi. I only look like a girl when I’m in … Steve’s house or … his mother’s car. They’ll be the only other people who’ll ever see my nails. They won’t notice or care whether they’re chewed or broken."

"You never know, Kyle, when you might suddenly find yourself being Demi in public. What if the Lancers’ house caught on fire? Then you’d be standing on the sidewalk looking like a girl — except to those who looked at your gnawed fingernails. And what if someone came to our door right now, someone we had to admit? You know — someone like the guy who reads the gas meter? Would you want him to figure out, just by looking at your nails, that you’re a boy in girl’s clothing?"

This argument Kyle found disturbing enough for him to agree that they had to find a way to stop him from chewing his nails. Barb suggested that he use a clear nail polish. "Demi, we’ll find one so foul-tasting," she promised, "that you’ll never want to bite your nails again."

It was a deal: Kyle agreed to wear a clear nail polish until he had kicked his bad habit. As he learned to paint his nails, they both recognized that another milestone had been reached: Kyle wouldn’t be allowed to give up using nail polish just because he’d won his moped. He’d have to keep wearing it until his nails could pass for a female’s.

As Demi headed off on her date, Barb reflected on how rapidly her son had feminized in just one week. Indeed, his transformation was coming too fast for comfort. Admittedly, she’d kept opening wardrobe doors for Kyle. She had facilitated his metamorphosis into Demi. Even so, she wished everything wasn’t happening so quickly.

"It’s so typical of the boy," she mused. "He rushes into everything, even — it appears — into girlhood. Why can’t he just for once check out the depth of the pool before he dives headfirst into the shallow end?"

Joannie, by contrast, had no reservations about Kyle’s plunge into femininity. Demi never ceased to delight her. As she opened the door to Demi, she remarked to herself: "He’s really beginning to look like a girl." He was doing a better job, she proudly noted, with his makeup and hair, and his pink-and-red striped top and red skirt were nicely color-coordinated.

Yet it was his red legs that excited her most: "You did it!" she exulted. "Your legs are baby smooth" — a fact her right hand deftly verified. "You have legs to die for!" And it was true: when judged as a girl, Demi’s legs were her best feature. She was developing into a leggy woman.

"I agree, Demi, you have stunning legs," pronounced Virginia. She too had come to the door — to Kyle’s dismay. If her grandmother hadn’t showed up, he figured that Joannie would have rewarded him for his skirt and hairless legs with her most erotic kiss yet. Instead, they had to buss like sisters.

Kyle suggested to Joannie that there must be a new teen magazine for them to read before dinner. "Right!" she replied. "I’ve got one upstairs in my room. I’ve definitely got something I want to show you." She then turned to Virginia and announced, "Gran, we’re going upstairs for a while before dinner, if it’s okay with you?"

Both teens were eager to play. If they could make it to Joannie’s room, it would take them only a couple of minutes to strip to their bras and panties, and then they’d be — if all went well — discovering what another person’s body felt like to fingers touching and probing soft satin. They both expected to make some significant discoveries.

Yet not all went well. Far from it, for Virginia insisted that Demi join her at the kitchen table before dinner: "It is time we had a heart-to-heart, young lady, for it’s important for me to know something about Joannie’s best friends."

As soon as the two teens were sitting dolefully around the kitchen table, Virginia asked the question that had been preying on her mind since the morning’s revelations: "Demi, do tell me something about your mother. Do you and she get along well? I suppose you and she go everywhere together."

Confused, Kyle looked over at Joannie for some sort of signal. What should he say? Joannie was frowning. The more intensely Kyle looked at her, the more the frown intensified.

"She wants me to badmouth my mother," Kyle thought, "but why?"

Kyle started hesitantly: "Well, we don’t spend much time together." He paused to gauge Joannie’s reaction. She was nodding vigorously. "I guess you could say that we don’t get along very well."

He looked over again at Joannie. She nodded approval. So he added, "I guess you might say we get along badly." Joannie positively beamed.

"Demi, I’m so sorry to hear that." The next question was a ticklish one to word inoffensively: "Does she scold you a lot?"

Kyle looked over at Joannie for instruction. He was shocked to see herself pretending to slap herself in the face. It took several slaps and punches to various parts of her body before he realized what she wanted him to say.

"But why that?" he wondered. "I can’t tell Joannie’s grandmother that my mother beats me. What if she tells the police or a social worker?"

He shook his head: "No, I won’t say it! Joannie’s mouth pursed. She stared him down: "Yes, you will say it!"

Kyle folded: "Mrs. Smith, my mother scolds me a lot and she … sometimes hits me when I’ve been bad."

He looked toward Joannie and she was blowing kisses at him!

Virginia would have been deeply shocked had she not been forewarned. She decided she must know whether Joannie had been telling the truth about the black eye, and so she leant over to, she said, "pick a speck of lint" from Demi’s cheek.

Unfortunately, she smudged Demi’s makeup, and before Demi could offer to head upstairs with Joannie to repair it, Virginia was herself rubbing his cheek with a handkerchief.

As the shiner appeared, Virginia whispered, "Oh you poor dear." And then more loudly, she declared, "Demi, you’ll always have a home here. Doesn’t she, Joannie?"

Kyle began to clue in: "Joannie must have told her Gran that my mother beats me. I bet she said that to keep my mom and her grandmother apart."

And so, he said to Virginia, "My mom doesn’t like me being with other girls. She gets real angry. You won’t tell her that I come over here, will you?"

"There, there, Demi," Virginia replied as she patted Kyle’s hand, "your secrets are safe with me. You have a friend in me."

A week ago Kyle would have probably found the conversation ‘hokey.’ He might have pretended to gag on the sentimentality. At the very least, the old Kyle would have cracked a bad joke to show his unease.

But some part of him had become Demi, or had finally surfaced as Demi, and tears welled up in his eyes. Demi was crying softly as she hugged Joannie’s grandmother. It was a moment of intense bonding: Virginia was not going to betray Demi: There would be no phone call to Barb James.

Yet Virginia was not comfortable with the idea of a boy in her daughter’s bedroom, no matter how femininely that boy behaved. When Joannie brazenly had asked whether she could have sex with Demi, Virginia had been non-committal.

But now that an actual boy was asking to go upstairs with her granddaughter, Virginia balked: "Joannie is only fourteen. She should wait until she’s more mature and can cope with the intense emotions that come with intercourse."

To the teens’ deep frustration, Virginia refused to allow them a moment alone together until the date had ended and they had reached the outer doorstep. Kyle was visibly upset as they said goodnight: "You didn’t keep your promise," he hissed. "You promised that you’d pose for me in your bra and panties if I wore a skirt and shaved my legs. I kept my end of the bargain. Why didn’t you?"

"I would have, Demi. I swear I would have if Gran had left us alone even for five minutes. And I was going to let you do more than look. I swear it’s true."

"You always get your way with your grandmother," Kyle barked. "Why not this time? How come she wouldn’t leave us alone? Does she know," he whispered very softly, "that I’m … a boy?"

"Of course not, Demi. How could she know that? You make a perfect girl. No one, but no one, would ever guess the truth. Gran thinks we’re lesbians, and maybe that was the problem tonight. Usually, she’s cool about two girls dating. I told you that she’d rather see me date a girl than a boy until I get a lot older. But sometimes she has second thoughts even about girls. After all, Demi, there were no lesbians when she was a girl. She’s bound to be mixed-up."

"It’s true," thought Kyle. "Lesbians only started showing up after they started broadcasting ‘Ellen’ on TV. Until then, girls were just friends like Mary and Rhoda."

"How long will it take," Kyle asked Joannie, "for your grandmother to forget that I’m a … lesbian? You owe me big time for the skirt! And look at my legs! I look like a lobster."

He was becoming more quarrelsome. Joannie thought it best to stop talking and to start kissing. His complaints dissolved in a kiss as erotic as it was prolonged. Taking advantage of his skirt, Joannie’s hands roamed high up his bare thighs. As he shivered and quaked, Joannie came up for air long enough to whisper, "Are you sorry now, Demi, that you wore a skirt?"

"No," he sighed at the time. But, in the alley on the way home, he amended his answer to, "No way that the goodnight kiss was enough." Intensely frustrated by their date, he kept muttering, "She promised me a lot more."

As he suspected that Joannie had encouraged Virginia to chaperone them, the further he got away from their kiss the angrier he got. By the time he had stormed past Barb to lock himself in his room, Kyle had concluded that he’d been played for a sucker, and that Joannie had never intended to keep her side of the bargain.

"Demi is going on vacation," he decided. "Joannie won’t get to see Demi again until Joannie keeps her word. She’s found lots of ways to tease me, but there won’t be any more Demi until she’s found a way to please me."

That week Joannie saw a lot of Kyle, but nothing of Demi. Kyle said it was too much of a hassle to transform himself into Joannie’s ‘girlfriend’ s for a brief, chaperoned visit after school. Joannie tried to invite him for dinner — even before she had cleared the idea with her grandmother — but Barb refused to allow him to accept. He had homework to do, she said.

Besides, she thought he was imposing too much on the Lancers: "You can’t expect them to feed you every second day," she admonished. "It’s our turn to feed Steve, don’t you think?" His mumbled answer was non-committal.

And so, Demi stayed in her closet. After a week of frantic feminization, Kyle relapsed into the boy who hoped that no one would notice that he was wearing girls’ clothes to school. Yet he did not return to the starting point of his journey to femininity, for he continued to wear makeup — to cover up the blemishes, he said — even after the shiner faded. And, as he promised Barb, he kept his fingernails lacquered so that he wouldn’t gnaw at them.

Moreover, his definition of passable girls’ clothes had expanded to include jeans with a plaid hem, black velvet pants, snakeskin sneakers, a couple of the striped tops, and underwired bras.

Halfway through the second week, the bets on whether Kyle and Joannie were wearing boys’ or girls’ clothes were paid off. After several confirmed sightings of his bra, Hoover’s student body had concluded that Kyle was the cross-dresser.

There was surprisingly little negative fallout. His newfound friends stuck by him, and the rest of the student body limited themselves to muttered slurs or a shoulder block in the school corridor. Kyle was surprised that his bad reputation was not bringing him more grief: "It will be easy," he thought, "to keep wearing these clothes for another three weeks."

Possibly it would — provided that Kyle’s guardian angel stood by him. Neither Kyle nor Joannie had any idea that one of his classmates was protecting him from the wrath of the ninth grade. Threats had been uttered; deals had been made. Kyle didn’t worry about the revenge of the fourteen-year-olds.

But what about the senior grades? And what about the Jets and the Sharks, the two gangs whose members sporadically attended Hoover High? They were, they told Kyle’s ‘protector,’ willing to "protect the girly boy" from his fellow students — for a price. Originally they had settled for the protector’s lunch money, but their expectations were about to soar beyond his ability to pay. They would be soon confronting Kyle and his friends with the choice between feeding their greed and feeling their fists.

In the meantime, Kyle would have to deal with officialdom: By Thursday, the gossip had reached the attention of Mr. Cudmore, Hoover’s vice principal, and Kyle was hauled out of class to stand on the carpet.

Mr. Cudmore began: "Let’s not beat around the bush, Mr. James, everyone in this school — the students, the teachers, hall monitors, the caterers, the janitors — knows that you’re pretending to be a transvestite. What’s your game? What are you up to? Well, answer me boy!"

Kyle realized that he couldn’t admit that he was breaking the school’s dress code merely to win a bet with his mother. They’d both get into trouble. But if he couldn’t mention the moped, then he didn’t have a lot of options.

He could perhaps declare that he was wearing girls’ clothes as a declaration of war on sexism and stereotyping. He could say, "These aren’t girls’ clothes. Clothes have no gender. You’re wrong for insisting they have. In the twenty-first century, we should be able to wear whatever we want to school. Why not boys in dresses and girls in jock straps?"

But he knew from past confrontations with Mr. Cudmore that the vice-principal would consider such posturing to be a direct challenge to his own authority. Mr. Cudmore had in fact told the student assembly on several different occasions that he was unimpressed by "juvie crusaders." If Kyle claimed he was prepared to suffer for his principles, the vice principal would joyfully find ways to make him suffer.

Consequently, Kyle believed his only safe move was to say, "I don’t have any choice. Something compels me to wear girls’ clothes. I’m only truly happy when I’m dressed like a girl."

Mr. Cudmore abruptly demanded, "Are you a transsexist? Speak up, boy! I insist on an answer."

Kyle admitted, "Maybe I am. All I know is that I don’t have free will when it comes to wearing girls’ clothes. It’s not my choice, and I intend no disrespect to you or the school in wearing them."

"So that’s how it is? Well, Kyle — or is it Kyla? — you’ll find that Hoover High is a progressive institution. We’re not going to suspend or expel you. Schools that have expelled transvestites have garnered terrible publicity. If we did it here in Des Moines, the snobs in the Eastern media would have a field day with us ‘small town hicks.’ They’ll put you on television in a dress, and I’ll suddenly have to deal with a school full of boys wearing skirts to show solidarity with you."

"You can continue to wear those clothes to school until the school psychologist has talked to you. The first available appointment is, I’m afraid, a week Friday. I fervently wish it could be sooner, but there are, incredible as it may seem, kids at this school even more screwed up than you, and Dr. Loupi has to see them first. It’s a question of priorities: Bullies, bullets, and bombs beat out bras."

"While you’re waiting for your appointment with Dr. Loupi, I insist that you show restraint. There will be no garish makeup or lipstick, do you hear, Kyla? No skirts or dresses, and no padding of your bra. Do you understand?"

Kyle eagerly nodded assent. He couldn’t believe he was getting off so lightly. He wasn’t being asked to give up a single thing. Indeed, implicit in the vice principal’s admonitions was permission to wear the halter top, Capri pants and Mary Jane shoes that his mother bought him — not that Kyle ever would.

Mr. Cudmore continued: "If Dr. Loupi affirms that you are a genuine transsexist and not just dressing like a girl to get attention, then you’ll be able to continue dressing as you are. Indeed, since he is a medical doctor as well as a psychologist, he should be able to put you on a hormone treatment to feminize you as quickly as possible."

Mr. Cudmore was laying a trap, which he now sprang: "You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Kyla? You’d like Dr. Loupi to give you big breasts, wouldn’t you?"

The vice principal waited for the panicky denial that would prove that Kyle was no ‘transsexist’. Once the boy admitted he was terrified of being physically feminized, he could be ordered out of his girls’ togs and into several months of after-school detention.

Kyle understood: "I’ve got to want," he realized, "to be a girl — a real girl with monster tits — or else he’ll order me to stop wearing these clothes. Yikes, what a choice! Either I say I want big boobs or I lose the moped bet and make Joannie furious at me."

Kyle gulped several times before he replied, "I do want to be a girl. If Dr. Loupi could give me breasts, I’d be forever thankful."

Mr. Cudmore didn’t like the reply. He tried one more time to smoke the boy out from under his girl’s cover: "Dr. Loupi could also arrange for you to get a vagina. Is that what you want, Kyla, do you want to have your dick cut off? Because it could be done as early as next week — if that’s what you truly want."

Kyle couldn’t see an escape route. The tales he had already told were proving taller than he was. What difference did it make if he added another five inches to his funeral pyre?

And so, he mumbled, "Yeh, I want to be a girl, even here" — and then he pointed to his groin. "But I know that operations are really expensive. I guess my sex change will have to wait for quite a few years while my mother saves enough money from taking in washing."

"Oh I don’t know about that, Miss James. The families and students of this school are very generous and I think we may be able to raise the money for your gelding through a public appeal or bake sale."

Kyle winced. Yet he knew the vice principal had to be bluffing. He reassured himself: "I’m a minor. They can’t cut anything off me or stuff anything into me without my mother’s consent. She’d never give it."

He hoped he was right, but it did make him nervous to know that his mother believed that he enjoyed being Demi. And of course, that wasn’t true — not in the slightest. How could it be true? He was, after all, an All-American, corn-fed, Iowa boy.

Kyle schemed: "I’ll make it clear to Dr. Loopy that my cross-dressing is a temporary sickness — like a cold or the flu. I bet I can talk him into prescribing vigorous exercise on a moped as a cure for what ails me. I’ll be riding along so fast on my moped that the wind will blow the girls’ clothes right off me, leaving me …."

Well, ‘naked’ would have been the next word. Perhaps it was just as well that Mr. Cudmore interrupted Kyle’s plotting by ordering "Kyla" back to class.

Kyle flared at being mocked once again as ‘Kyla’: "That’s not my name," he told the vice principal. "I’m either Kyle or …." He hesitated, after realizing that this was a sentence he should never have launched.

"Well?" demanded Mr. Cudmore. "What’s your drag name? Let’s have it for the records."

"D..d…demi," Kyle stuttered before fleeing from the room.

Kyle would have been fortunate had Mr. Cudmore done no more than add the name ‘Demi’ as an alias to Kyle’s student file. But Mr. Cudmore was indiscreet, malicious and unprincipled.

That very day he confided in every teacher he met that Kyle was a ‘transsexist’ named Demi, and during the following week the ‘official diagnosis’ and nickname spread through the school.

Kyle didn’t yet know that he’d be notorious by the third week of his bet with his mother. Nor did he know that it might suit Dr. Loupi’s career plans for him to believe that a genuine transsexual was attending Hoover High. Had he been able to see even one week into the future, Kyle would have had a miserable weekend.

He might even have gotten into such a blue funk that he cancelled his second basketball date with Steve. But he kept the fateful date. During it, Kyle started taking the hormones that would feminize his body.

As Kyle had no desire to grow breasts, it’s difficult to fathom how anyone could have talked him into taking the hormones. True, Kyle was often heedless and reckless, but would he have agreed to pop pills from an unmarked bottle given to him by a stranger? Not very likely!

If it wasn’t a stranger, then who was rash enough to give hormones to Kyle? If not Joannie, Virginia, Melanie or his mother, then who? To whom would Kyle owe his B cup?

To be continued in Chapter 11, "How Could He Have Been So Stupid?"

To date, Kyle finds it difficult to keep a deal he made with his mother: That if he wears girls’ clothes for a month that she will buy him a moped (a motor scooter). He’s not quite sure how it happened, but in rapid succession he lost his friends, convinced his mother that he’s a transgendered gay and dating a boy named Steve, and posed as a lesbian named Demi in order to charm the grandmother of his new girlfriend Joannie, who’d prefer that Kyle wore the panties in the family. In part 8, it becomes common knowledge at Hoover High and in the Smith household that Kyle is a "transsexual," and several of his intimates believe he should take hormones. Even so, as this chapter commences, Kyle has yet to take them. That should not surprise us, since the cross-dressing boy remains as ‘macho’ in his own mind as ever. How, then, will it come to pass in this chapter that Kyle will start feminizing his body?

Anything for a Moped - Part 9 By: Dawn DeWinter
Chapter Eleven: How Could He Have Been So Stupid?

There was mud everywhere. Although it had not rained in more than a week, Steve’s driveway appeared to be an asphalt island in a sea of gumbo. As the two of them played basketball, one-on-one, Kyle’s feet would occasionally slide off the pavement onto the muddy turf. Gradually, the burgundy of his sneakers and the plaid hem of his jeans darkened into chocolate brown.

Kyle, however, paid no heed to the mess, for he was concentrating mightily on beating Steve at least once before they had to stop acting like ‘guy’ friends and, with their ‘date’ formally underway, begin behaving like ‘boyfriends’ — with the one aggressively courting, the other shyly demurring.

As Kyle enjoyed hanging out with Steve, he wished that they didn’t have to treat the dinner and basketball game that evening as a ‘date,’ but he already knew that Mrs. Lancer would insist on the formalities, including a goodnight kiss.

As he thought about the dreaded kiss, Kyle lost concentration. He was, therefore, unable to recollect just how it happened — just how he went sprawling into a pool of muddy water at the foot of the Lancers’ driveway. When he surfaced, he was covered in muck from his nose to his toes. He looked like he had been wrestling in a pigsty.

Steve was extremely apologetic: "I slipped," he lied. "I got mud on my shoes and I lost my footing. Can you forgive me?" And then before Kyle could answer, Steve said, "There’s no way you can go to dinner or the game looking like that. We’d better ask my mother what to do."

Elvira showed no surprise when the two boys trailed mud into her kitchen. It was almost as though she had expected that her zealous efforts that week to water her lawn might produce some ‘unfortunate’ results.

She took one look at Kyle and knew immediately what had to be done: "Kyle, you’re going to have to get out of those muddy clothes so that I can wash them. There should be enough time to wash and dry them before your date. In the meantime, go on upstairs and have a shower to clean yourself."

To Steve she said, "Your clothes are also a sight. At the very least, change your jeans. You also need to shower."

Then, to both boys, she announced, "There won’t be enough hot water for two showers and for a washing-machine load. So you boys share a shower, do you hear?"

Steve then placed his arm around Kyle’s shoulders and started dragging him to the door, saying as they went, "We’d better do as she says. We’ve got a big shower stall, so there’ll be lots of room for the two of us to soap each other off."

As he crossed the doorsill, Steve briefly turned to wink at his mother, who was giving him the thumbs-up.

As for Kyle, he had scarcely said a word since he’d fallen into the mudhole, for he was benumbed and befuddled by the obviousness of the Lancer family’s plot. True, he hadn’t been completely sure of it at first, but as soon as Mrs. Lancer suggested he shower with Steve, he knew that his muddy state was no accident. They were conspiring against him!

In other words, his ‘date’ had already begun. And now he had a lot more to worry about than Steve’s slipping him some tongue when next they kissed. Kyle had seen the remake of ‘Psycho’. He knew that deadly things could happen when one stood naked and vulnerable in a shower. If he weren’t extremely cautious, his virginity, his ‘straight’ identity, and his future with Joannie would be soon spiraling down the drain.

Naturally, he thought of tearing himself free from Steve’s bear hug and announcing that the ‘date’ was off: He’d wear his filthy clothes home instead. But then there’d be no basketball game. Consequently, Kyle decided to rely on obduracy rather than flight.

As they got into the bathroom and Steve started to disrobe, Kyle looked around frantically for some cover. There it was on the back of the bathroom door — Elvira’s pink silk bathrobe. Kyle decided it would be enough to protect his modesty and chastity while his own clothes were being laundered.

To get a chance to put it on, he announced to Steve: "You know that I’m wearing a bra and panty, in order to win the moped, right? I feel really shy, real awkward, about your seeing me in girls’ lingerie. I can’t strip in front of you."

"If it embarrasses you for me to see you in girls’ underwear, there’s an easy solution," replied Steve. "I’ll turn around and you can strip off all your clothes while I’m not looking. Then you can get into the shower and I’ll join you."

Believing that Kyle had bought into the plan, Steve turned his back. Assuming, not unreasonably, that Kyle would be easier to seduce if they both were naked, Steve tore off his own clothes. Then, stark naked, he turned around to eyeball Kyle.

To Steve’s dismay, Kyle had replaced his muddy outerwear with Elvira’s bathrobe. Kyle’s hair looked more feminine than usual, for in pulling the sweatshirt over his head, he’d undone his boyish coiffure. His makeup also showed up under the harsh glare of the small bulbs ringing the mirror; and with his bra poking through his women’s bathrobe, Kyle looked disturbingly feminine.

Steve stood there gaping: Until now he’d never thought that Kyle could actually look like a girl. Dress like a girl, yes certainly. But look at all like a girl? Steve would have said ‘no way’ until now.

Steve became almost numb with confusion when he realized that it didn’t turn him off to see Kyle looking like a girl: "But does it turn me on? What do I want? A boy? A boy-girl? A girl?"

Steve didn’t realize that this was the question that his mother had been desperately hoping he’d ask ever since he’d announced to her that he was ‘gay for life.’ As she’d fervently hoped, the feminization of Kyle was reopening the question of Steve’s sexuality. If she got her way, Kyle would become so feminine — ideally through hormones and surgery — that Steve could be led through his infatuation with Kyle to the love of women.

Elvira had told her son that Kyle was a transsexual and that they had a duty to help him to find the feminine hormones essential to his transformation.

She’d even asked, "If I procure the estrogen, will you help to ensure that Kyle actually takes it? You see him every day at school, and we can have him over on weekends. If we act as a team, we can make sure that he takes the hormones regularly enough to develop in a few months time some breasts to fill those bras he bravely wears. What do you think? Do I have your support, kiddo?"

No she did not. Steve was attracted to boys. He wanted Kyle to look as masculine as possible. He adamantly refused to help to feminize his boyfriend. Without Steve’s help, there was no way that Elvira could lace Kyle’s milk with female hormones, and so she settled on trying to make sure that the great love of her son’s life would at least acquire ‘falsies.’

Steve was not the only one staring slack-jawed at another boy. Kyle’s mouth also gaped in adolescent amazement at the spectacle of Steve’s body. It had been a couple of years since he’d last seen Steve in the nude, and he remembered a skinny youth — one with less-than-average muscular development. But Steve now had rippling muscles wherever Kyle dared to look.

Did all those muscles turn on Kyle sexually? Sexually? No, he would have denied that fervently. But turned on? Yes, definitely. In his mind, he wasn’t lusting after Steve’s physique; he was coveting it.

He was dying to know Steve’s secret: "Jeez, he’s got to be best built guy in the ninth grade. No wonder he’s so strong. How did he get so darn muscular?"

Steve broke into Kyle’s thoughts: "I’m freezing," he said. "Let’s get into the shower." This he did. Then, with the hot water streaming over his body, he beckoned to Kyle: "Come on. The water’s great."

Kyle declined: "I’d rather shower alone. I’ll wait until you’re done."
"There is enough hot water for two showers. The water will be cold. Come on — don’t be a sissy. I’ve seen guys with no clothes on before, and so have you. What’s the big deal?"

But Kyle was adamant: "The big deal is that we’re dating, and I don’t hop into the shower with anyone, guy or girl, on the second date. I’m not that kind of guy."

"Looking at the way you’re dressed, I’d say you’re not that kind of girl."

Kyle didn’t laugh. In fact, he scowled.

Talk wasn’t working; and so Steve turned to seduction: "Well, if you’re not going to get into the shower, at the very least you can soap my back. You can do that while you’re standing outside the stall."

Kyle bit the lure. He did start to apply soap to Steve’s back. As his hand headed toward Steve’s buttocks, Kyle became sexually aroused. Both boys knew it was happening: His hand and breathing were giving him away. Kyle would have denied then, and subsequently, that he was being turned on by the thought of sex with a male. No, it wasn’t sex he wanted. Rather he was aching to have a body "just like Steve’s."

Kyle resisted temptation. To avoid losing control, Kyle handed the soap back to Steve: "Here, your back is done. Let me know when the shower is free." He then retreated to Steve’s room to compose himself.

As he saw Kyle retreat, Steve sighed, "Mother was right. She said he’d never go for the shared shower idea."

In that case, why had Kyle’s clothes been muddied and taken away from him? The answer is fairly obvious, if you’re Elvira and you’re bent on Kyle’s feminization: She wanted to force him to change into something even more ‘feminine’ than the girls’ clothes he had worn to the Lancers.

The "power blackout" that darkened the house while Kyle was showering suited Elvira’s plans so perfectly you’d have thought she had deliberately overloaded the house’s electrical circuits herself. The power outage ensured that Kyle would get the cold water he’d been promised if he didn’t share a shower, and it helped to explain why his own clothes had ended up a soggy mess in the clothes dryer.

Indeed, the outage even made sense of Elvira’s failure to dry Kyle’s bra and panties after Steve had obeyed her instructions to bring them to her to handwash while Kyle was showering.

It was unnerving to shower in total darkness. With the water getting ever colder, Kyle finally fled the shower to find that his underwear and Elvira’s bathrobe had gone missing. A bath towel was all he could find to wear. Worried that Steve and Elvira had sinister designs on his body, he covered up as best he could.

As Kyle wrapped the towel around his torso ‘like a girl’ so that he shielded his nipples and navel as well as his groin, his mind filled with warm childhood memories of being bathed by his mother: "She always used to wrap the towel around my whole body. It made me feel so loved and protected." And then he asked himself, "Why did I ever stop wearing my towel this way? It’s so warm and comfy."

Steve suddenly appeared in the doorway with a candle in each hand. They revealed white bikini briefs and a bare chest. In the chiaroscuro of the flickering light, Steve’s body looked like Caravaggio had painted it.

Once again, Kyle marveled that a boy so young could be so well developed. Yet flight, not sex, was foremost in Kyle’s thoughts. In the bathroom he felt cornered. He made good his escape by grabbing one of the candles.

He trotted off to Steve’s room, hoping there to find his clothes. Instead, he found more darkness. The only light came from two, small devotion candles framing the bed.

"Kyle," Steve hesitantly asked as he vaguely pointed to the bed, "What do ya say? I figure we’ve got time. There’s always enough time to have fun."

Kyle spurned the offer: "Where are my clothes?" he demanded. "I want my clothes and I want ‘em now."

"They’re in the clothes dryer," Steve explained. "But they’re still a soggy mess thanks to the power’s being out. I’m sure they’re not going to be dry in time for you to wear to the game."

"What!" Kyle screamed. "Do you mean that I’m going to miss the game? After all I’ve had to put up with! What the hell!"

"Now, don’t be a hysterical female. You’ll go to the game. My mom has the solution to the clothes problem. She’s always has a solution."

"Which is what?" Kyle demanded.

"Well, she shops for Christmas months ahead. In fact, she’s always finished her shopping by the first of November. She bought you some new clothes. I was supposed to give them to you as a Christmas present. But I could give them to you now. You could wear them to the game. Everything would work out fine."

Kyle was skeptical: "What kind of clothes? What are they like?"

"I don’t know. I’ve not seen them," Steve replied. "They’re already in gift wrap. And I wasn’t with her when she bought them."

It was true: Steve didn’t know what the packages contained. Yet he figured they had to be boys’ clothes, for his mother knew that the Moped bet would be long gone by Christmastime. His mother had mentioned jeans. Steve hoped they’d have the cowboy cut that he liked to see on boys.

He headed off eagerly to his mother’s bedroom to find the shopping bag in which she’d stowed Kyle’s gifts. In the hallway, he stumbled into Elvira, who had the bag ready for him. At her insistence, Steve surrendered his candle to Elvira, who blew it out. So dark was it then in the hallway that Steve had to feel the walls to find his room again. Once there, he followed her instructions to snuff out the brightest of the three remaining candles so that Kyle would have to examine his new clothes in the flickering shadow of two devotion candles.

Kyle didn’t object to the darkness. He took comfort in the protection it gave to him from Steve’s leering eyes as Kyle hunted for some underclothes to wear. As he tore into the gift-wrapping, Kyle failed to note either its dominant colors — pink and baby blue — or its themes of young girls playing various sports.

Unlike Steve, he wasn’t unhappy to discover that Mrs. Lancer apparently had bought him girls’ clothes. Indeed, he was quite relieved, for they’d permit him to attend the game without jeopardizing his bet for the moped. And so, when his fingers located the bra and panties, he immediately resolved to put them on.

He was peeved when Steve refused to look away as Kyle changed into his new underwear. However, Kyle decided that the ill-lit room had given his friend little to see. Even so, Kyle felt vulnerable to be standing in his bra and panties in Steve’s bedroom, considering that the boy, clad only in his cotton briefs, obviously was still hoping for some action. Thus, Kyle paused not a second to examine himself in his new lingerie. Instead, he scrambled to put on the outerwear that Elvira had bought — the jeans, the socks, and the top before he took any time to get a sense of his new outfit.

In the candlelit room, Kyle was in any case not likely to see anything amiss. His jeans, for example, had the exact same fit as his jeans with the plaid hem and pockets. Indeed, they had the same designer. Similarly, his top had the general look and fit of the jerseys he had been wearing for a week. Nor was there anything untoward about the socks. "A boy could wear these," he thought. That was true as well of the red sneakers: Their two-inch heel he now found normal.

Elvira had purchased wisely: The outfit differed only in the details from the girls’ clothes Kyle had been wearing for days. In poor light, one was not likely to pick out the subtle differences that made these clothes more feminine looking than anything he had yet worn in public. And poor light was all Kyle had to work with. As soon as he’d put on the new outfit, Elvira had bustled into the room without knocking to tell Kyle that he should sit with her downstairs so that Steve, no longer distracted, could finally get dressed.

"We’re running out of time," she said. "Even if Steve gets ready almost immediately, we won’t have time for a real meal. We’ll have to eat in my car at the Indian Territory, the new fast food restaurant. Kyle, you’ll love it, for the restaurant has a brand new concept: car service. Can you imagine? They take your order right at the car."

When Kyle learned that Indian Territory served buffalo burgers, he was eager to learn more, and together they found their way downstairs, Elvira thanks to a small candle, Kyle thanks to his tight grip on the banister as he groped his way downstairs.

Once they were in the kitchen, he asked for a mirror. There was none to be found. Even had there been one, it would have been difficult to see what he looked like, given that the window shades were drawn and one small candle provided the room with its only light.

Kyle thought of using his sense of touch to get some idea of what he wearing, but Elvira sternly reproved him: "Young man, I’ll not have you feeling yourself up in front of me. That’s something for the privacy of your own room. I’ll ask you to keep your hands on the table where I can see that they’re fully at rest."

Elvira then used the light to examine Kyle’s hair. As expected, it was unruly. Kyle wasn’t surprised: His hair had gotten wet during his shower, and would need a brush and hairspray to get it looking manly again.

Elvira was all apologies: "Oh Kyle, neither Steve nor I use hairspray. All I can offer is some European hair gel. It’s tricky to use. Why don’t I see what I can do with it? On which side do you part your hair?"

"The part’s not important," he advised. "Just make sure I don’t look like a girl. You’ll see there’s a particular way to brush my hair that makes me look real macho."

Yes, there was. But that’s not what he got. Elvira deliberately gave him a girl’s styling — which was, in any case, the easiest thing to do, given the original haircut from his mother and his hair’s subsequent growth. When Kyle tried to pat his hair to see if all was in order, Elvira playfully slapped his hand, while telling him that he’d ruin the macho look if he messed with his hair again.

She completed Kyle’s makeover by redoing his makeup. It certainly needed work, as even he admitted, for most of it had gone with the mud he’d dissolved in the shower. When she told him that some of the makeup survived in streaks down his cheek, Kyle agreed she could re-do his face, provided, he said, "that no one can tell I’m wearing makeup."

Elvira didn’t follow his instructions closely. The eyeshade, eyeliner, and mascara were definitely noticeable, even if the hint of color in his cheeks could only be seen in a bright light. Kyle hadn’t noticed her lightly use the eyebrow pencil, but he couldn’t help but see the lipstick tube: "Don’t you dare use that," he said. "There is no way I’m wearing lipstick to a basketball game." And that was that — for the moment.

Elvira finished getting Kyle ready for his date by offering him some ‘cologne’ to wear. As he recognized the bottle as something being marketed to guys, he agreed to splash himself with ‘Obsexion’ perfume. He didn’t realize that there was any difference between an eau de cologne and a perfume or that this particular perfume was, despite its unisex cachet, being worn almost exclusively by women.

Did Kyle now look as well as smell like a female? Most definitely.

Everything about him said ‘teenage girl.’ His clothes spoke the most eloquently. His jeans, for example, were loose enough to add width at the hips while revealing nothing at the crotch. There wouldn’t have been much to show in any case for the Playtex control panties flattened Kyle in front while spreading his rear.

However, it was not so much the new curves or the pocket-free rear that announced ‘girl’ but rather the embroidered daisies climbing two feet up both legs from their root at the boot hem. The socks, it turned out, were daisy-colored, as was Kyle’s jersey: Its back announced a tour by Backroom Sink, a ‘boy band,’ while its front sported stylized photos of the four pubertal singers looking their sexiest. Elvira had bought it with Steve in mind: She wanted him to gaze at the pictures of four cute guys every time he gawked at Kyle’s chest.

And would he be gawking at Kyle’s chest? Almost inevitably, considering that Kyle was wearing a padded bra that gave him the semblance of an A cup. His bust was, as hoped, sufficiently protruding to be seen, especially from the side, but not so obvious that Kyle would be automatically aware of the padding as he dressed in the dark.

Afraid to touch any part of his body while Elvira was monitoring his every move, Kyle had no idea that he appeared to have female breasts. Nor did he realize that his outfit, makeup, perfume and hair pronounced him to be a young teenage girl set to go out on a date with her boyfriend.

Elvira made sure that he did not see the light before they got to the arena. In the car, he was mainly preoccupied with fending off Steve’s roving hands. Whenever he had Steve temporarily subdued, Kyle would check out the passing lights, marveling as he did that the power outage had affected such a tiny portion of the city.

As the car pulled into the drive-in restaurant, Elvira chose the worst lit parking spot so that Kyle would still have trouble figuring out exactly how he looked. The boy was in any case not checking out his clothes, for he was much more interested in taking in the spectacle known as the Indian Territory restaurant.

It was a wonder to behold: a gigantic teepee said to be tallest in Iowa housed the food preparation area. Two giant, concrete totem poles stood guard beside, while a Cherokee kayak hung above its front portal. Inside could be seen a huge, painted mural on black velvet that vividly depicted aboriginal life: Mohawk warriors harpooning beavers from the back of their Clydesdale ponies; Apache squaws paddling furiously in birch bark canoes laden with buffalo pelts; Shawnee families sharing their Thanksgiving turkey with gaily-dressed Puritan settlers at Jamestown, Virginia; and — most impressive of all, given its massive size — a battle scene showing General Custer, in full revolutionary war regalia, triumphing over the last of the Mohicans at the Battle of Big Little Horn.
Kyle was almost as impressed by the plastic saguaro cacti placed strategically between the parking spaces. Their many arms could hold the food and drink trays of an entire carload of Indian-food lovers.

Everything about the décor announced this to be an "Indian" restaurant — and appropriately so, since Iowa been part of Indian Territory before the Civil War.

Kyle was not as happy with the food as he was with the decor. There seemed to be nothing for an Iowa boy to eat on the menu that Indira, their waitress, rapidly rhymed off to them after she arrived in her "Indian maiden" outfit of fringed deerskin and an eagle headdress. Though Kyle couldn’t see them, Indira was especially proud of her in-line skates, as they had been done up to resemble moccasins.

Indira’s dark complexion suggested, thrillingly, to both Kyle and Steve that she might be an actual descendant of one of the Indians who had once roamed the Great Plains in search of walleye perch.

A lot of the proposed dishes Kyle spurned because they featured chickpeas or lentils. "Rabbit food," he sneered. The Ghee Whiz Burger he rejected when he found out that is came swimming in butter. Besides, it was made out of lamb.

"Where’s the beef?" he asked. To his amazement, the restaurant served no beef or pork. Kyle, a carnivore, wanted meat: "What do you have that a real man could eat? What kind of meat do you actually serve?"

Given how femininely Kyle was dressed, Indira assumed that he was asking on Steve’s behalf, and so she said to Steve in her high-pitched, singsong voice: "We’ve got chicken, lamb, goat and buffalo. That gives you lots of choice."

As she named the dishes, Kyle, Steve and Elvira became more and more confused. Most of the dishes on the menu had unfathomable names like Tandoori, korma, chappati, bhoona and chutney. Steve ventured they were Indian names, possibly Sioux or Kiowa, but this insight didn’t really help them very much, for neither the Lancers nor Kyle had ever been to an Indian restaurant before. All three ended up choosing the Water Buffalo Burger. Half fearful that their dinner would arrive swimming in water, they were pleased to see that it sort of resembled an American burger, except that its brownish-yellow sauce was -- in their unanimous opinion — far too spicy.

Kyle joked: "I guess they call it a water buffalo burger because it makes you beg for water." He hadn’t noticed the restaurant’s proud boast that their buffalo came from the Mekong River region of the "Great Southeast."

As they pulled away, Mrs. Lancer apologized for the food: "I’d heard the place had gourmet burgers — just like McDonald’s. But obviously I was misinformed. This place can’t even get their bread to rise."

Steve seconded: "It’s a good thing we didn’t live in Iowa in the olden days. We would have starved to death if we’d been captured by the Indians."

Kyle had to agree, for he had never heard of there being a lot of wild sheep or goats roaming Iowa before the white man arrived, and yet half of the authentically ‘Indian’ dishes seemed to be built around lamb or goat. He supposed the local Indians could have hunted mountain goats and Rocky Mountain sheep a thousand miles to the west. But he readily agreed with Steve that it must have been pretty rough being an Indian if one had to go all the way to the Rockies to bag a lamb chop.

"Maybe that’s why Indian food is so spicy," Steve hypothesized — "so their meat wouldn’t rot while they hauled it back from the mountains on burros."

"Yes, that had to be it," Kyle replied. "But, if the Indians are going to make a go of it in modern times, they should get some hints from Taco Bell or KFC on how to cook their food."

Time flew as the two boys conversed about the mysteries of Indian culture, and as Elvira followed a route of poorly lit back streets to reach the arena, both of them were as oblivious to Kyle’s girlish appearance when they arrived at the game as they had been when Kyle had left Steve’s darkened room.

Sure, they knew that Kyle was wearing girls’ clothes. Yet they had no idea that he actually ‘looked like a girl’ until they tumbled out of the car at the floodlit parking lot near the arena.

Steve literally staggered when he got his first good look at Kyle under bright lighting: "Kyle!" he shouted. "What have you done to yourself? You’ve made yourself look so much like a girl that someone is going to take a shot at you! Cripes, I thought" — and he lowered his voice to a hiss — "you didn’t want anyone to know you were wearing girls’ clothes. God, you look like a sissy!"

"Huh? What are you talking about?" Kyle blustered. He then looked carefully at his boy-band jersey and flowered jeans for the first time. He had to admit that they didn’t look very masculine. Indeed, the padded bra made him look like a girl — or worse, like a girl wannabee. Tears welled in his eyes.

"I can’t go to the game dressed like a sissy. We’ve got to go home." Kyle then turned accusingly to Elvira: "You bought these clothes. You wanted me to look like a sissy. Why did you want that?"

His body shook with emotion — with humiliation, self-pity and rage.

Elvira tearfully replied: "Kyle, you’re not being fair. Look carefully at your clothes and you’ll see that they’re very similar to what you wore to your date. I wanted to get you a present you’d really like, and so I deliberately bought clothes in a store where I knew you shopped. The salesgirls at Macy’s assured me that you’d love what I was buying for you. They marveled at how well I knew your taste in clothing. I’m sorry you don’t like your present. I was trying to please you, honest."

Kyle hadn’t meant to make Steve’s mother cry. He reassured her: "Please don’t be sad. I like the clothes you bought me. They’re … gr…great. I just wish they didn’t make me look like a girl."

"You don’t look like a real girl," objected Steve. "You look like a painted sissy." Steve was upset; he wasn’t being kind.

"I’m afraid, Kyle, that it’s true. You’re not quite convincing as a girl," advised Elvira.

"But I don’t want to convince people that I’m a girl!" Kyle objected. "I want people to believe I’m a boy, dressed in boys’ clothes, no matter how I’m dressed!"

"I’m afraid, Kyle, that you are hoping for the impossible. With your delicate looks, your slender, almost girlish build, and soft, hairless skin, it doesn’t take much to make you look female. Now, Steve here, if he were wearing your outfit, he’d still look very much the male. No one would think he looked like a sissy. Isn’t that true, Steve?"

Flattered, Steve nodded. He also puffed up his chest so that he’d look as muscular as possible.

Absolutely deflated, Kyle mumbled, "Then you don’t think there is any way you could alter my appearance so that I looked like a normal boy in normal boys’ clothes, and not like a sissy?"

Elvira sighed heavily, then said: "Kyle, somehow those clothes draw out the feminine in you. Honestly, I believe that you have only two options: Either we call off the game and take you home now or else we make you look more feminine, so feminine in fact that no one, but no one, will guess you’re a boy."

Steve concurred: "Yeh, you’d better look a lot more like a girl before I’ll be caught dead sitting beside you at a basketball game."

Kyle briefly mulled over his options, and then capitulated. He actually begged Elvira to make him look as much like a real girl as possible so that he and Steve could go to the game. He even seemed pleased as she handed him a shoulder bag, a teddy-bear pendant, two clip-on earrings, a tube of red lipstick, and two yellow hair ribbons. At her insistence, he also tucked in his jersey so that it strained more at his apparently budding breasts.

Steve was astonished that such small changes could achieve such a complete transformation: "Wow, if I didn’t know you, I’d swear you were a girl — a pretty girl. You look like one sexy babe."

Kyle blushed. Bashfully, his long eyelids fluttering, he asked, "Is it true? Will no one will know that I’m really a boy?"

"Definitely not," replied Elvira. "Just as I told you, it’s easy to transform you into a totally credible teenage girl. You’ve got the body for it. And so, are we ready to go to the game?"

Kyle, his eyes staring at his red sneakers, shyly nodded.

Elvira then said, "We can’t be calling you Kyle, as that will quickly give you away. You’ll need a girl’s name. What should we call you? How about Bambi or Priscilla? They’ve always been two of my favorite girls’ names."

"Call me Demi," Kyle said.

"Demi — a pretty name for a pretty girl," crowed Elvira.

"Yes, you are pretty," agreed Steve, who grabbed Kyle’s left hand. Kyle stopped trying to free it when Elvira warned him, "Demi, don’t be silly. Let Steve hold your hand, dear. If you show the world you’re a couple, they’ll be far more likely to believe that you’re a genuine girl."

From then on the date resembled, more or less, their first one. As before, Elvira sat apart from the youthful couple, but close enough to capture their date on film. Once again, Steve was generous and dutiful. As the game was both exciting and closely fought, Kyle might have actually enjoyed the date, had it not been for Steve’s nerves and Bernie’s nerve.

As Steve was terrified that someone would guess that he was attending the game with a transvestite, he made sure that everyone ‘knew’ that he was dating a girl named Demi. Steve wore the name out, and was well on his way to wearing his welcome out until he had a chance to play the chivalrous knight to Demi’s damsel in distress.

For Demi, Bernie had been a problem right from the start. An obese, balding, middle-aged man, he made his sweaty presence known every time Steve went to fetch their food and drinks. At first Bernie seemed merely friendly, and Kyle, new to the ways of girlhood, did not get suspicious when he first struck up a conversation. After all, Bernie was clearly alone and lonely, and he knew his basketball.

However, Demi began to suspect his intentions on Steve’s second errand for hot dogs when Bernie commented on Demi’s apparent interest in "wieners" while adding that his own nickname in college had been "Foot Long."

During Steve’s third trip for hot dogs, Bernie bluntly propositioned the teenage ‘girl’, and when told to "take a hike," stayed put. Indeed, his fingers began to play furtively with Demi’s hair.

Kyle thought about turning around and punching the man. The man didn’t look tough. Kyle figured he could have easily decked the slob. But fisticuffs risked blowing Demi’s cover, and so Demi felt she had no choice but to seek Steve’s protection.

"That man sitting behind me has been making obscene comments, and he’s been touching my hair. Can you tell him to bug off?" Demi demurely said.

Steve gallantly rose to the occasion, literally. Standing so that he could intimidate the ‘slob’, Steve snarled, "My girlfriend tells me you’ve been bothering her. Leave her alone, you creep, or you’ll be eating only liquid foods from now on!

"What are you talking about?" Bernie blustered. "I aint touched her once. And nor have you! I don’t think she’s your girlfriend, kid. You’ve not put your arm around her since the two of you got here."

To establish possession, Steve dramatically put his arm around Demi’s shoulders and pulled her close. They sat like that for the rest of the game, Steve because he found it thrilling to hold his beloved Kyle, and Demi, because she didn’t want Bernie to think that she was unattached and available.

Bernie refused, however, to believe that Demi preferred Steve. How could she? The youth was a wimp. Bernie would have to be told to get lost more than once before he actually did so. He still had his eyes on the young girl in daisy yellow. And so, when Demi finally headed off alone, Bernie was quick to follow.

Kyle desperately needed to take a leak: He’d drunk too much cola at the Indian restaurant. Naturally he headed for the men’s toilets, but Demi never got past the door.

A bemused security guard insisted she use the lady’s washroom: "I know there’s usually a long line at the ladies’, but we’ve got to observe the proprieties, young girl, and I’m not going to start a riot by letting you into the men’s room. Besides, you’re such a pretty young thing; I would have thought your mama would have warned you against flaunting yourself in front of a lot of college men. They’re ravenous wolves when it comes to you a sweet young lamb like yourself. Now, you head over to the ladies’ room, you hear."

Kyle didn’t know what to do. He certainly wasn’t going to use the ladies’ room. The suggestion appalled him. Yet he was desperate to pee. If he waited another minute, it would begin to pour down his leg. So he went looking for a secluded spot, unaware that Bernie was close behind.

In a deserted corner in a stairwell, Kyle unzipped and relieved himself. As he joyfully drew a happy face on the wall, he heard an audible gasp behind him. Kyle, suddenly aware that a ‘girl’ shouldn’t have the ‘artistic’ ability that he was now demonstrating, frantically zipped his pants, doing it so recklessly that he wet himself.

As he wheeled about shame-facedly, he stared into the gaping mouth of Bernie. The oaf looked stunned — as though clobbered with a billy club. Bernie spoke first: "You sure had me fooled, Demi. I thought you were a real girl. Gosh, everyone in the arena thinks you’re a pretty girl. And half the guys are probably lusting after you."

"That’s not …" Kyle started, but Bernie interrupted: "I know from the way you’ve been eyeing me, Demi, that you groove on men. I mean real men, adults, not the sort of scrawny kid who’s been bothering you. I could see that you’d prefer that he kept his hands to himself. As for me, your mouth said ‘no,’ but your eyes sure as hell said ‘yes.’ You’ve been looking at me like a bitch in heat."

"Are you cra…." Kyle began, but once again Bernie broke in: "But I’ve got to turn you down, kid. You can’t talk me into having sex with you. There’s no way. I want my girls to be the real thing. However, my brother would dig you. He really grooves on boys your age."

"Your brother can go to …" Kyle commenced, but Bernie cut him off: "You can find my brother almost any day at Macy’s mall. He hangs out at the public washroom nearest to the department store. I tell him he spends too much time there, but he’s frigging obsessed with looking for a particular boy — he’d be about your age — who did a striptease for him in the washroom a couple of weeks ago."

"What a tease that kid was!" Bernie exclaimed. "He knew that Arnie — that’s my brother — was looking at him through a peephole, yet he stripped down to his orange bikini underwear and bra and then waggled his ass like a table dancer. Arnie tells me that kid was so desperate for some hot homo sex that he wouldn’t leave the bathroom. Arnie was about to risk going back into to screw the kid when the girly boy’s mother showed up to ruin the party."

Kyle was speechless. His mouth could not form a word.

Bernie continued his pitch for Arnie: "My brother will be at the Macy’s washroom tomorrow and the next day looking for that kid in the orange bra and panties. But Demi, I just know, he’ll like you even better because you’re the perfect girly boy. I promise he’ll make you feel like a woman. He’s really well hung."

Oblivious to Kyle’s shock and disgust, Bernie advised: "But, if you want to make it with my brother, you’re going to have to look enough like a male to get into the men’s washroom. I suggest you borrow somebody’s motorcycle jacket to wear, because if you wear normal boy’s clothes, someone’s bound to think you’re a girl in drag."

"Incredible!" was all Kyle had time to say before Bernie added, "Demi, I can sure see why you’ve decided to dress as a female. Did you have any real choice in the matter? With a body like yours, with moves like yours, there’s no way you’ll ever make a convincing male."

As Kyle spluttered, unable to find even one coherent epithet, Bernie concluded: "Demi, I wish you were a real girl because you’re such an incredible dish. Your body really looks feminine. My brother digs trannies, if they’re young enough. Be sure to ask him for money. He’ll definitely pay to get into your panties."

Kyle finally collected his senses sufficiently to make it quite clear that he had no blankety-blank interest in "dirty old men," regardless of their sexual orientation, and that he was more likely to call the cops on Arnie than to rendezvous with the "ped."

Kyle watched the last thirty minutes of the game in profound discomfort. His inner thighs damp with urine, he kept checking his crotch to see if the pee was seeping through in a telltale pattern that only a boy could make. Meanwhile, Steve was holding him in a bear hug. Kyle, to his intense humiliation and frustration, lacked the strength to free himself.

And, while Bernie did not resume his seat, he remained a constant presence, as Kyle fought unsuccessfully to clear his mind of the man’s insinuations and insults. Bernie had struck one devastating blow at Kyle’s masculine ego after another as he suggested that the boy had such a feminine physique that he’d have more trouble passing for male than female.

"He said I have a girl’s body and that everybody in the entire place thinks I’m a female."

Was it true? Did Kyle have a ‘feminine’ body? The boy had to know, and so, against his better judgment, he asked Steve, "Do you think my body looks feminine … er, even when I’ve got no clothes on, even when …I’m not trying to look like a girl?"

The question came out of the blue. Steve had no idea what occasioned it. He wasn’t sure what answer Kyle wanted to hear. But given that Steve was being asked by a boy wearing eyeshade, lipstick, nail polish, a teddy-bear pendant, earrings, and a noticeable bra whether he looked at all ‘female,’ Steve thought the reasonable answer to be, "Yeh, Demi, you look pretty feminine even when you’re wearing nothing but your panties. After all, you don’t have any body hair. You’ve got great legs that most girls would kill for, and you don’t have much in the way of muscles to give away your true sex. You know that the girl cheerleaders do a lot of lifting. So I bet they’ve got bigger biceps than you’ve got."
Steve then whispered, "You don’t have to worry about anyone guessing you’re a boy -- not with your body, you don’t. I think you’re as pretty as any girl at school."

Then Steve, smiling, kissed Demi’s cheek. He hoped she liked being told how feminine she looked. If she did, Steve might one day be in a position to tell her on the basis of very close inspection that, "there’s no doubt in my mind that your body is definitely that of a potent male."

Kyle sulked for the rest of the game. One could hardly blame him. It’s difficult to be cheery when one has a poor body image. Kyle had always known that he was no hulk, but he had never suspected, until this evening, that anyone thought his body — as opposed to his clothes — to be ‘feminine.’

As Kyle became ever more preoccupied with his gloomy thoughts, Steve’s hands became ever bolder. Kyle didn’t much notice them at the time, and so was shocked when he received his copies of Elvira’s photos to archive that he definitely looked like Steve’s compliant girlfriend.

Kyle hadn’t, for example, realized that Steve’s hand had been glued to his buttocks for most of the time it had taken them to exit the arena and return to the car. He had simply been too deeply lost in self-pity to notice — or to care.

Just before they got to the cut-off for Kyle’s house, he asked whether he could go to their place to pick up his clothes. Elvira nixed the idea. She pointed out that they’d be damp, and that she wanted to dry and iron them first. "Demi, I don’t want your mother to think," she said, "that I shirk my housework. You got your clothes muddy at our house, and it’s my responsibility to clean them for you. It’s late. So why don’t we just drive you home? Your mother will start to get worried about you if you stay out much longer. And besides, don’t you want her to see your new outfit?"

Kyle then surprised both of the Lancers by saying he wanted to check the pockets of his plaid jeans to see if he left anything valuable in them. Elvira had checked the pockets, as Kyle must have known she would, and they had been empty except for two five dollar bills which she had put into his purse — as Kyle knew she had, for he’d used the money to treat Steve to a monster box of popcorn.

Her eyebrows went up: "Is Kyle trying to find an excuse for coming back to the house with Steve?" she wondered. In the rearview mirror, she saw that her son was smiling broadly. "Steve thinks the same thing I do — that Kyle is plotting to get laid."

In silent confirmation, Steve gave her a big wink as he nuzzled closer to his date. From Elvira’s perspective, the timing wasn’t perfect. In an ideal world, Steve and Demi would be on their third or fourth ‘heterosexual’ date before they connected sexually. Even so, if they had sex tonight, Steve would be making love to a boy named Demi — to a boy who had done his utmost to look and to act feminine for more than two hours.

So she agreed to take Kyle to her place to check out the contents of his original jeans. Not a light was burning in the Lancer homestead as they pulled into the driveway, but soon after they had fumbled their way to candles and a flashlight, Elvira was able — supposedly through a phone call to the power company — to get the electricity turned back on. And so, the lights were blazing when Steve learned to his regret that Kyle had actually gone to his bedroom to talk.

And to talk about what? About Steve’s body, it seemed. At first, Steve found the topic tremendously encouraging: After all, when one boy says to another, "Your body is super," it usually means, "Let’s get it on together!"

But not this time. Kyle wasn’t making a pass at Steve. Instead, he was trying to learn how his friend had become so muscular, so quickly. Kyle was determined to get the kind of manly physique that would make it impossible for anyone ever again to say, "You’re built like a pre-pubescent girl."

Kyle was in a hurry: He wasn’t willing to work out with weights for years. The problem with his self-image had to be solved immediately. His body needed a quick fix, he had decided. His goal was straightforward: perfect pecs tomorrow, and absolute abs the day after.

Could Steve help? Yes, he said he could, as he credited his own muscle development to the synthetic hormones that he’d been taking for the past two years.

Steve explained: "Testosterone is what makes you manly. It gives you powerful muscles. It’s the big advantage we men have over girls. It’s the essence of virility. If you take a capsule filled with testosterone or with one of the other hormones that guys require, then you get what’s called an androgenic or anabolic effect. That means, Kyle, that the pill makes you more macho and more muscular."

"Anabolic? As in anabolic steroids?" Kyle asked.

"Yeh, steroids, hormones, they’re pretty much the same thing. I get the steroids from a guy who coaches high school basketball. He knew my dad. And so, he’s been helping me to bulk up. I just know he’d be willing to help you too, as you are my excellent friend."

Kyle wanted clarification: "Are you saying that steroids are the same thing as synthetic guy hormones?"

Steve nodded. "Yeh, but I like to call them roids. Hormones sound like something a guy would take to become a girl. You aren’t planning on doing that, are you, Kyle? You aren’t going to become Demi permanently, are you? You can if you want to. It’s your life. But I prefer you as a boy."

"There is no way I’m going to take hormones to turn me into a girl. I’ve told you many times — once I’ve got the moped, no more Demi! Now about these steroids, those I could see taking. But aren’t they dangerous?"

"Nah," Steve replied. "I’ve been fine. I do have to warn you that there can be side effects to taking steroids. But they almost never happen. Anyway, here’s the list of what could happen to you."

Kyle barely glanced at the government health advisory. Some of the problems seemed so unlikely — heart disease and liver cancer — that he could scarcely take the warnings seriously. "I’m just a kid," he thought, "and there’s no way a kid gets a heart attack. It’s just the usual government bull."

There were also some supposed side effects with big names. The first of these was ‘gynecomastia.’ As he had no idea of what that might be, he looked for something more familiar.

And he found it. The list contained a particularly dire warning: steroids could give you acne! The thought of acne was genuinely dismaying: "What will Joannie say," he fretted, "if I become a pimple face?"

Briefly, fear of acne put him off the idea of taking steroids, or ‘male mones’ as he’d be calling them, but he decided to take the risk when Steve assured him that the worst case scenario would be some acne on his back.

"No one will notice the pimples, if you get any," Steve advised. "Do you think I’d recommend anything that would make you look less sexy to me?" His leer commanded a ‘no.’

Indeed, Steve so clearly wanted Kyle always to look and feel his best that Kyle felt quite safe in letting Dr. Steve prescribe to him. So he asked how he should take the steroids, and was told about ‘stacking’ different types.

Dr. Steve set a definite limit on how much Kyle should take each day, in order to make sure that nothing went wrong with his health, but Kyle was now in a hurry to get muscular, and he had already decided to double whatever dose his friend recommended.

It turned out that Steve had an enormous cache of capsules because, as he explained, the coach wanted to keep their drug contacts to a minimum. "You can have two month’s supply right now," Steve offered, "provided you thank me properly."

And what was that? Was Steve suggesting that Kyle should, like some pathetic junkie, prostitute himself for a drug fix? Hardly, for Steve was a middle-class, fourteen-year-old living in Des Moines. All he wanted was a thank-you kiss from Kyle.

"If you give me a real kiss, a wet kiss, then all these capsules are yours. And I’ll make sure you’ve always got the roids you need."

Kyle was touched. Steve was offering to provide him with ‘male mones’ that were probably worth a million dollars, and all that the silly, lovestruck boy wanted was a kiss!

Kyle took the initiative. As they embraced, for the first time in his life Kyle actively kissed another male. Was it a wet kiss? Yes indeed. In truth, it was downright slobbery. It was also sufficiently erotic that there is no telling what might have ensued had a door not slammed violently on the floor beneath.

Startled, they unlocked their mouths. Steve freed himself from Kyle’s grasp so that he could scramble to his bedroom door. As he flung it open, both boys were shocked to hear Steve’s mom swearing a blue streak about a telephone call she had just made.

"Demi, I want you. Come downstairs immediately!" hollered Elvira.

Steve looked worried: "When she gets in that mood, you’d better obey." They did, however, take the time to stuff Kyle’s shoulder bag to the brim with bottles of synthetic hormones. And Steve sheepishly gave Kyle a quick hug.

Once downstairs, it didn’t take Kyle long to figure out who had put Elvira into such a vile mood: It was his own mother!

Elvira sulked: "Your mother insists that you go home immediately. I tried to explain that we were more than pleased to have you stay overnight, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She declared that it’s a school night and that you know the rules. I gather you are already going to get into trouble, despite my pleading for leniency, for staying out past 11 pm."

Kyle was confused. He hadn’t asked to stay the night. As for the eleven o’clock curfew, it had never come up before. He was surprised to discover that he even had a curfew. He had always been careful to get advance approval for late nights, and his mother had always said something like, "fine just as long as I know when to expect you."

"Something has really put her into a bad mood," Kyle mused. "But what it could be?"

He clued in from Elvira’s rant: "Demi, your mother is not as open-minded as she pretends. When I told her about your date with Steve, about the new clothes, and about your courageous decision to go out as a girl, your mother got quite snippy. Indeed, she refused to believe me when I informed her that you practically begged Steve to treat you as his girlfriend at the game. Her next comments were very odd, Kyle. She said that I shouldn’t try to control her son. She even accused me of putting you into skirts. Well, I’ve certainly not done that, have I Demi?"

"Skirts? Where did my mom ever get that idea from?" Kyle prevaricated. "I know you have my best interests at heart, Mrs. Lancer. After all, you came up with the lipstick, and the pendant and the purse when I worried that some people might think I was a sissy boy in drag. Thanks to you, no one tried to pick a fight with me at the game."

Kyle elaborated: "It wasn’t your fault that the clothes made me look too feminine. They were, as you said, almost exactly like the stuff I was already wearing. The clothes should have been masculine enough for no one to wonder about my sex, but for some reason I looked like a sissy in them. Then you came to the rescue. You saved my ass. Oh, can you excuse me for using that word?"

As he finished, Kyle glumly thought: "I know why I looked like a girly boy in those clothes. It’s because my body is all wrong. It’s not masculine enough. But that will change."

Elvira, ever gracious, forgave Kyle his mild profanity. She then hustled the two boys into her car. Throughout the drive, as they held hands in the back, she lectured Demi on the importance of tolerance. "You must get your mother to appreciate," she kept saying, "that you are not a homosexual. She must understand that you are sexually attracted to boys because you’re a transsexual. You love boys because it’s natural for a girl to love boys. Can’t you get your mother to accept the truth?"

"As for you, Steve, you should realize that it’s Demi’s essential femininity that attracts you to her. Demi is a beautiful woman. That’s why you like her so much."

Steve was silent — and unnerved. It was true: He had been marveling all evening at how feminine Kyle looked when dressed as Demi. Demi was definitely a pretty girl. Yet every time Steve had fantasized that evening about having sex with Kyle — which was once or twice a minute — Kyle was most definitely a handsome boy each time.

As for Kyle, he paid Elvira scarcely any heed. Whenever he heard any word starting with "trans," he simply shut his ears. Let people babble on about his transsexuality. He knew it wasn’t true. When adults became silly, it was best to ignore them. Or so Kyle thought.

On the front stoop of Kyle’s home, the two boys put on quite a show for Elvira, who waited at the car with her camera, and Barb, who could be seen peeking through the drapes. The boys hoped to embarrass their mothers into ceasing their ‘spying’ on them, and the boys’ amorous hugs and kisses might have compelled the two women to avert their eyes had they in fact looked like two males necking.

Instead, both women watched transfixed — Elvira because it looked like her son was finally interested in kissing someone who looked like a girl; and Barb, because that girl was her son.

Once he got inside, Kyle was anxious to reach the privacy of his own room. He didn’t want to talk about his date with Steve. So he picked a fight with his mother for ‘spying’ on him, and as they argued, he soon became angry enough to stalk off to his inner sanctum, banging a door or two on route.

He was, of course, in a hurry to start his transformation. As he greedily gobbled down twice the recommended dose of synthetic male hormones, Kyle exulted: "I am soon going to have a perfect body."

It’s possible the steroids would have built a macho physique for Kyle, had he been willing to work out. But he did no extra exercise during the months that he took them, and the steroids had only a minor anabolic effect. He didn’t, as hoped, grow big muscles. What he did grow was breasts — mammaries, the real thing.

Kyle should have paid more heed to the medical warnings. At the very least he should have learned the meaning of the word ‘gynecomastia.’ Had he asked a doctor or a Latin professor, he would have been told that it meant "breasts like a woman’s." Kyle didn’t know it yet, but he would eventually become aware of a fairly common side effect of steroid abuse: the growing of women’s breasts.

It is one of life’s great ironies that the abuse of sexual hormones can totally backfire. By giving the body false signals, male hormones can actually feminize. Thus, it was Kyle’s decision to take steroids that led his breasts to grow, his testicles to atrophy, and his growth spurt to end.

There were a lot of scheming people in his life, but it was his own scheming that most shaped his fate.

Who gave Kyle the feminizing hormones? The answer is obvious: The foolish boy gave them to himself.

To be continued in Part 10, which presents a week during which Kyle gets his ears pierced, his wallet lightened, his mind shrunk, and his girlfriend energized.

In the first nine parts, Kyle found it more difficult than he expected to keep a deal he made with his mother: That if he wears girls’ clothes for a month that she would buy him a moped (a motor scooter). He’s not quite sure how it happened, but in rapid succession he lost his friends, convinced his mother that he’s gay transsexual and dating a boy named Steve, posed as a lesbian named Demi in order to charm the grandmother of his girlfriend Joannie, who preferred that she wore the pants, and he, the panties, in their relationship. In part 9, Kyle was trapped by Elvira Lancer into appearing as a female for the first time in public, and started taking the male hormones (steroids) that will inadvertently feminize his body.

Anything for a Moped? -Part 10 by: Dawn De Winter
Chapter Twelve: Was It a Memorable Sunday?

"You slut!" she screamed. Kyle had just finished getting off the phone, and Joannie was ranting.

Once again Kyle had kissed and told. Yes, he bashfully admitted, he had been tongue-dancing with Steve; and worse, there was no talk now of wanting to wash his mouth with soap.

"Did Steve force his kisses on you?" Joannie had asked.

"No, not exactly," Kyle had answered. "I wanted to kiss him to thank him for a great evening. You know — for the game and other stuff."

"You can’t mean to say that you actually kissed him?"

"Yeh, but don’t worry. I like kissing you a lot better," said Kyle, hoping to placate her.

Joannie was implacable: "You shouldn’t be kissing anyone but me, and I can’t believe that you let him put his arm around you at the game. How could you, Demi James?"

She was unimpressed by Kyle’s story about a fat man who thought he was a girl. She doubted it had happened. And in any case, a real woman didn’t seek the protection of the nearest male when danger threatened. She stood her ground and fought. "If you’re going to be my girlfriend," she told Demi, "you’re going to have to stand up for yourself. You should have cracked the s.o.b.’s nuts with your handbag," she declared.

"If I’d hit the slob, people might have figured out that I was really a guy. I would have been lynched!" Kyle tried to explain.

Joannie wouldn’t accept his excuses, for she was furious that Kyle had made his public debut as Demi while dating Steve. She had been attempting for more than a week to persuade Demi to go out in public with her — for example, to window-shop at the mall.

"But no dice," Kyle had said. He had been adamantly opposed to going out as a girl, and now he had actually done it — with another boy! Joannie’s emotions upon hearing this revelation ran the gamut from A to F — from anger through envy to fear of losing her ‘girlfriend’.

"Do you want to have sex with Steve?" she asked abruptly.

Joannie didn’t like the pause, not one bit, as Kyle briefly envisaged Demi and Steve in sexual union. His "of course not" answer did not, therefore, reassure her, especially as he said it without heat or conviction.

"Demi’s about to lose her virginity," Joannie silently concluded. "And she’s going to lose it to Steve if I don’t act fast."

And fast she acted. She invited Kyle over to the house. It was late Sunday morning, and Kyle hadn’t yet had breakfast, but he promised to come around at two thirty. And yes, he would be dressed as femininely possible, though Joannie wouldn’t know that for sure, Kyle warned, until he’d taken off hat, sunglasses and trenchcoat.

"You’ll look like a spy," she said. "Someone will call the cops on you."

"Better the neighbors think that I’m a spy," replied Kyle, "than recognize me as the sissy, transvestite son of Barb James. I’ve got to live on this street, you know, and once I’ve got the moped, I’m definitely putting away all this drag. Jeez, the girls’ clothes have taken over my room. It’s like they reproduce themselves. Yesterday evening, while I was at the game, my mom packed away more than half of my boys’ clothes to make room for all female stuff I’m accumulating. She said there wasn’t enough room for my guy clothes."

"I can’t believe it — all my regular jeans and every pair of underwear I own has been shipped off to the cellar. She says it can come back when I stop wearing girls’ clothes, but I wonder whether she really means it."

"Can I have your boxer shorts?" Joannie asked hopefully.

"Certainly not. I’ll need them when I start riding my moped. Anyway, you’re supposed to wear sexy panties — like you promised."

"Demi, I only promised to wear girls’ clothes on the days that you did. If you start dressing up like a guy, then I will too. So there."

Kyle didn’t like that answer, not one bit. But he brightened up at the thought that he could get her into a bra and panties for their make out sessions simply by wearing lingerie himself to them. And he wouldn’t have to wear a bra to school — not after the moped deal was won — for he would be able to change into something sexy on his way over to Joannie’s.

"I’ll have space for all my underwear, including the frilly stuff," Kyle silently calculated, "if I get rid of most of the girls’ street clothes — like the Capri pants."

The Capri pants? Why did he think of them? Why? Because Joannie was talking about them. "I just know we’ll have a super afternoon if we both wear our Capri pants," she was gushing. "And our Mary Janes." And then before, he could object, she added, "And your sexiest black lace because, sweet Demi, we’re going to have the place completely to ourselves this afternoon. Gran will be playing bridge."

At that point, Kyle ended the phone call by saying, "Joannie, I’ve got to go. My mother now knows I’m awake and I hear her hollering. But don’t worry: If she tries to ground me for coming home late, I’ll find a way to sneak out. And then you’ll be able to find out for yourself whether I’m wearing black lace. Wish me luck!"

And she did, just before she hung up the phone and called Demi a slut.

Did Joannie have her grandmother’s permission to invite Kyle over that afternoon? Definitely not! In fact, Joannie had been expressly forbidden to "entertain either boys or Demi" — that was how Virginia said it — when there was no adult in the house.

Thus Joannie was disobeying a direct order, which she rarely did, but she felt she had no choice: She just had to prove to Demi that a girl could kiss more erotically than any boy could, before Demi foolishly traded her virtue for basketball tickets.

Demi’s fate hung into the balance: It up was up to Joannie to make sure that she continued to love women, first and foremost, even as she journeyed to womanhood.

Since Joannie was liable to get into trouble anyway, she decided to go for broke — or at least to make her grandmother broke. Once again she stole into her grandmother’s purse, and then onto the Internet, where she used Virginia’s credit card to do some shopping for Demi. Joannie resented the fact that the Lancers had dressed up Demi like a paper doll. She resolved to be the one who’d choose the clothes for Demi’s next date, and so she went surfing for something so ‘excellent’ that she and Demi would remember the outfit for the rest of their lives.

Joannie eventually found the perfect site. Oddly enough, it was a clothing store that catered to guys. Or maybe it was to gays. In any case, The Fantasy Male Shoppe, had exactly what she wanted; and they promised delivery in time for Demi to wear it to their Saturday night rock concert and dance.

After she got off the phone, Joannie sat for several minutes near the phone smiling like a Cheshire cat. She hadn’t cracked a smile since she had first learned that Demi, ‘that slut’, had been probing Steve’s back molars with her tongue.

Yet Joannie was almost mirthful as she drew a mental picture of Demi at the dance: Joannie had never seen Demi attempt to cross-dress as a male. What a sight it would be to behold!

And if Demi pulled it off? What if Demi managed to look like a girl even when she was dressed in clothes bought at a clothing store for guys? Well, then Demi would be allowed to go a lot more than halfway when they next got some privacy. All the way? A home run? Maybe not a four-bagger, but at least a triple.

And how would this all happen, given Virginia’s reservations about boy-girl sex under her own roof? Joannie thought she’d be able to get her way once she’d thrown the biggest tantrum since she was toddling around in her ‘terrible twos’. She planned the scene for Wednesday.

As for getting Mrs. James to agree to give Kyle one night’s furlough from girldom, she would leave that up to Kyle to arrange. Joannie assumed that Barb would agree to a four-to-one trade — one evening dressed as a ‘boy’ in exchange for a four day’s prolongation of his moped bet. "That’s a good deal for Barb," Joannie thought. "I’d sure leap at it."

"I’ve thought of everything," Joannie decided. "Next Saturday will be best fun that I’ve ever had. What a gas! Demi’s masquerading as a boy! The entire evening will be awesome, simply awesome."

As the net-shopping had wound her up, Joannie was too excited to wait around the house until Demi’s arrival, and so, she headed off alone to Macy’s mall to look for more clothes. A fib was necessary: She told her grandmother that she was going to the mall with several other girls; but the fib was a mild transgression, thought Joannie, compared to credit card fraud. Joannie actually felt quite virtuous, for she was going to actually use her own money if she saw anything fit for Demi to wear.

Aside from the balding fat guy on the bus who kept leering at her, Joannie’s trip to the mall was uneventful. Nor did anything untoward happen in the boys’ department of Macy’s where she found several pairs of cotton boxers that would have looked perfect on her, but she virtuously decided to hoard her money for Demi. Still, there was a plaid pair that she just knew she’d have to buy for herself one day, for it had the same tartan as the pockets of Demi’s favorite jeans.

It was in the girl’s department that her visit to Macy’s became noteworthy. It’s not that she went on a spending spree. In fact, she bought only a single pair of pink silk panties for Demi (with white lace trim at the legs and waist), but that purchase did introduce her to Melanie.

Joannie, in a playful mood, had tried to shock Melanie: "Do you think?" she’d ask the salesgirl, "that these would appeal to a boy who has just begun to cross-dress? You don’t think the panties are too pink, do you?"

Melanie, always eager for the sale, hurriedly said, "Of course not, any boy who likes to dress in girls’ finery would just adore those panties."

And then she paused, as she gave Joannie a hard look: "Hmm, this girl is definitely the right age. I wonder if she knows Kirkdirk? She looks like a dyke. If she is, then she’d be the perfect girlfriend for a sissy like Kirkdirk. Well, there’s no harm in finding out if she knows the little pansy."

"I know," Melanie began, "a boy who’d cream in his jeans every time he put those panties on. He and his mother shop in this department. We call him Kirkdirk, but I’m sure he’d prefer to be called Kyla. He’s a blond boy about your age, and he’s got a slender build, and the sweetest button of a nose. Kyla wouldn’t by chance be the boy for whom you’re buying those beautiful panties?"

"You mean Kyle? Is his mother named Barb?" quizzed Joannie.

"Barb? Yes, I believe that was her name. And Kyle was his. So you are Kyle’s girlfriend? I can see why. He has excellent taste."

Joannie blushed: "He’s my girlfriend too! We’ve got all the same clothes, and he even goes to school dressed as a girl. But I shouldn’t talk about him, I should talk about her — about Demi. Demi’s the name you should use. There is no Kyla."

Melanie probed: "So you dress alike? That’s marvelous. I bet you wish you were twins — you know, with even your bodies the same. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Demi had … breasts just like yours? Then you could trade bras."

"Well, Demi sort of has breasts like mine. They’re very realistic."

"But realistic isn’t as good as real, is it, Joannie? You do know, honey, that Demi could get saline implants that would give her real breasts? Just think of it — with the help of breast implants, Demi could become the perfect girlfriend, the girl of your dreams."

"Implants! They’re far too expensive. Only movie stars can afford them," Joannie protested, after she had briefly contemplated, then rejected, the idea of charging an extra fifty thousand dollars to her grandmother’s charge card.

It was then that Joannie learned that the Vera Smuttee show would pay for Demi’s implants, provided she was willing to appear twice on the show with Joannie — once as flat-chested boy, the second time as a voluptuous girl.

While Joannie wasn’t thrilled with Melanie’s suggestion that both teens might need some breast enlargement to create the right dramatic effect on television, she was definitely interested in surgically enhancing Demi. Indeed, she eagerly took the consent forms from Melanie. There were four forms and four signatures needed — one each from Kyle and Joannie and their two guardians.

When Joannie asked whether a doctor’s consent wasn’t also necessary for ‘surgery’, Melanie reassured her that the Vera Smuttee show had medical staff who’d readily verify that Demi’s mental health was at grave risk unless she immediately got a more feminine body.

"If the breast implant is a ratings success," Melanie advised, "then the show will probably be willing to pay for sexual reassignment surgery as well — you know, for giving Demi a vagina."

Staring unnervingly into Joannie’s eyes, she added: "And you’d like that, wouldn’t you, honey? I just know you’ll want your girlfriend to have the sex organs of a woman."

Joannie’s eyes gave her away: They said yes — Demi should become as much like a woman as physically possible. But Joannie’s voice said no: "Big, beautiful, huggable breasts are all I want for Demi. I don’t want her to become more than half a girl. I want," and she blushed as she said this, "Demi to be able to please a girl in the way that boys do."

At least, Joannie still thought she wanted to have normal sexual intercourse, missionary position, with Kyle. But oddly, it was becoming more difficult with each passing day to conceive of having ‘that kind of sex’ with Demi.

Melanie said they didn’t have to make a decision that day about Demi’s ultimate body, for breast implants were all the show was willing to pay for at the moment. Then she asked, "Are you sure you can persuade Demi not only to agree to the implants but also to appear on national television? Not many boys would do such a thing."

"Demi will do it. I guarantee it." Then, with the documents firmly in hand, she marched off to do battle.

"I bet you will get Kyle to do it. I can see that you’re the type of a girl that a boy like Kyle was born to obey."

Melanie decided she admired Joannie, but she wasn’t sure she liked her: "I’m glad that I’m not the one who is sexually attracted to Joannie. I’d just as soon not be talked by her into getting a penis implant!"

Melanie and Joannie were not the only ones to wonder that day whether Kyle might be interested in making his body as well as his clothes more feminine. Barb had put the question directly to him once he heeded her summons just before noon that same day.

As he was dressed entirely in girls clothes — in the panties that he had worn to bed, as well as a pink bathrobe and slippers — and had not bothered to remove his makeup from his date with Steve, Barb addressed herself to Demi: "Sweetie, I don’t want to start fighting again. I admit that I had no right to spy on your kiss with Steve. I apologize for doing that, and I accept your own apology for staying out so late. You know that I was worried about you."

"As for the idea that you should stay out overnight on a school night, I assume that it was Steve’s suggestion. Wasn’t it his, Demi?" When Kyle shook his head, Barb then surmised that the idea had been Mrs. Lancer’s.

Barb muttered to herself: "That witch! She’s been pimping for her son. One of these days I’m going to give her a piece of my mind, but I guess that day will have to wait until Demi stops dating Steve Lancer. I don’t want to get in the way of first love."

To Kyle, Barb said: "Well, I knew that you wouldn’t ask to stay out all night on a weekday. Rather than rehash the argument, I’d rather talk about your date with Steve. I especially want to know why you decided to make last night your public debut as Demi in front of several thousand people. You told me you didn’t dare appear in public as Demi, and now you’ve gone ahead and done it in a grandstand. Why did you change your mind so suddenly? Please tell me, dear, for I’m trying to understand you. And lately that has been very hard to do."

Kyle then explained how he needed a change of clothes after his own were muddied, and that everyone realized at the last minute that his outfit looked too feminine for him to pass as a boy. Thus, he had no choice but to pose as a girl.

Barb found the explanation unpersuasive. She figured that Kyle must have realized how feminine he looked long before he got to the parking lot of the basketball arena. He wanted to go to the game as Demi — at least, that was her opinion. Yet her son was as yet unable to admit his deepest desires. He kept telling himself that he didn’t like dressing up as a girl. Yet clearly he reveled in it. "He always did," she thought. "He was always in his glory when he was pretending to be Joan of Ark or Pocahontas."

Kyle was in denial about so many things. Did these include his basic sexual identity? Was, Barb wondered, Demi a budding transsexual? Did she want to change her body as well as her clothes?

Determined to prepare herself mentally and emotionally for Demi’s further steps, if any, towards girlhood, Barb posed the one question whose answer worried her the most: "Demi, do you want a girl’s body as well as girl’s clothes? Are you going to be looking for breast implants or feminizing hormones? My gosh, you wouldn’t take female hormones without first seeking my advice and permission, would you, Demi? If you did, it would crush me. You mustn’t take such a dramatic step, sweetie, without our talking about it first."

Female hormones? No, Kyle wasn’t on those, and so he felt quite virtuous in bellowing: "No mom, I’m not taking female hormones! Nor will I ever take them! I love being a boy. Boys have all the fun. Why would I want to become a girl? The idea is totally bogus! So stop worrying about breast implants and hormones. And don’t worry about Demi’s being around forever. I’m leaving her behind in my dust the first time I speed off in my moped."

"If you say so, son; but don’t make any rash promises. You might want to be Demi from time to time even after you’ve won the moped. I think it would be fun for both of us if you occasionally got in touch with your feminine side. One day it will make you a better husband."

Kyle merely grunted. He certainly wasn’t going to admit that there was any possibility that he might want to cross-dress after he got the moped. Yet he couldn’t call the idea "totally bogus," for he suspected that Joannie would be able to entice him into women’s lingerie any time she really wanted. "Joannie can be so darn persuasive," he thought, as his body tingled with fond memory.

And besides, he had to admit that he liked the feel and the cut of women’s underwear, even some of the bras. The sports bras, he’d noticed, felt like a friendly hug. Lately, he had felt half-naked, almost indecent, whenever he could see his chest. Just the other day he’d made a mental note to ask his mother for one of the full-body swimsuits — like the Olympic athletes of both sexes used — so that he’d strike a more modest pose at the beach.

As the tight fit of the sports bras had also made him keenly aware of his nipples as an erogenous zone, he’d begun tweaking them whenever he masturbated, which was — at age fourteen — several times a day.

Kyle hoped to continue to wear some of his girls’ jeans and tops after the experiment had ended. He figured he could get away with wearing flowers or plaid on his jeans if he told everyone that he was a ‘hippie’. So that people would believe he was what he said, he intended to talk a lot about the need for world peace. .

For the moment, Barb accepted his grunt. She interpreted it to mean that there was some chance that he might occasionally be willing to dress like her ‘daughter’ around the house or in controlled situations, but that he had no desire to be her daughter permanently. And yet she had to wonder whether she was getting ‘straight information’ from Kyle when she saw the way he dressed for his Sunday afternoon date with Joannie (though Barb assumed her son was trysting again with Steve).

Whatever Kyle reservations had about cross-dressing, Demi seemed to revel in looking as ravishingly female as possible. Indeed, she had never looked more feminine — or, paradoxically, more masculine.

Her face, hands and hair were impeccably done, her flaming red lipstick matching her nail polish and a hair band. Her white halter top with blue trim and three-quarter length sleeves complemented her dark blue Capri pants, with their white tropical border at the leg hem. Her bare midriff exposed her navel, which she had dusted with some blue sparkles. A shoulder bag, white ankle socks, and sueded, black Maryjane shoes with a t-strap, two- inch heels, and floral appliqués on the toes completed the outfit.

So far, so feminine. How could anyone deny that Demi was a pretty young girl? Why, anyone could, if they looked at her crotch! There could be seen, thanks to the tightest-fitting pants Kyle had worn since childhood, protruding evidence that he was an adolescent male. He hadn’t noticed the small bulge in the short, bathroom mirror he had been using, but his mother did, as she scanned him from head to toe.

"Demi, you’re popping out in a most unladylike way," Barb laughed. Kyle probably could have found a way to tuck away his genitals, given enough time and contemplation, but he was in a rush to see Joannie — and so he agreed to the embarrassment and the physical torture of wearing his mother’s panty girdle on top of his black lace frillies (which, alas, hadn’t done much of a job of containing or concealing his boyhood). The girdle made him look much more feminine, not only at the groin, but also at the waist and rear.

He looked as feminine and as buxom as Barb imagined her son ever could. To her astonishment, however, Demi did not revel in her femininity, but rather hid it with a trench coat and a floppy, wide-brimmed hat. Barb had assumed that Kyle would be less uptight about dressing as a girl in public now that he’d worn a daisy outfit to a college basketball game. Instead, she saw him stealing furtively down the back alley. Barb wondered whether he was going to hide in the alleyways all the way to Steve’s. Her heart went out to her troubled, confused son.

She even shed a tear for Demi, her fledgling daughter, who was having so much difficulty shedding the dowdy plumage of her childhood: "She so desperately wants to fly. God, if you exist, protect Demi and do not let her plummet to the earth!"

Joannie, by contrast, whooped with delight when Demi stripped off her trench coat. Both girls had on identical shoes and pants, but otherwise Joannie was the less femininely attired. Even so, she was wearing, as promised, the same black lace underwear. The teens scarcely said a word after they reached the safety of Joannie’s bedroom as they feverishly stripped down to their bras and panties.

Once they were lying together in their underwear atop her bed, Joannie took control of their lovemaking: She determined what they’d do and the limits they’d observe. She had the situation well in hand.

As they were clumsy and inexperienced, there seems little point in dwelling on their lovemaking. Besides, the experience was more formative than definitive, for they never even removed their underwear. Why not? Because both teens were shy about nudity, and because Joannie wanted Kyle to associate sex with the caress of fine lace. If all went accordingly to plan, he’d develop such a powerful fetish for lingerie that he’d be soon pleading for the privilege of wearing his panty and bra — or better yet, his negligee — to bed.

Demi would outlive the moped bet, Joannie reasoned, if Demi, not Kyle, learned the mysteries of the orgasm.

Throughout their lovemaking, Joannie made much of Demi’s breast attachments. Indeed, Joannie had clung to them tightly as her own body shook with her first orgasm in the presence of a ‘boy’. She had been fantasizing the entire time about Demi’s forms being live flesh.

"Your breasts turned me on the most," Joannie gasped. "If they had been real, I’d still be writhing about in ecstasy. Oh, Demi, don’t you wish you had real breasts so that I could love them? Say it — say you wish you had real breasts, just like me."

After she asked him the third time, Kyle, who was in a very good mood, gave her what she wanted: squeezing the right nipple of his prosthesis, he agreed, "I wish I had real breasts just like Joannie’s wonderful breasts.’

By bribing him with kisses, she got him to reconfirm not once, but three times, that he wished he had real bosoms. Then she sprang up and came back with a souvenir from Russia that looked like a helmeted goldfish clasping a small marble ball. "Rub this," she urged Kyle, "and say three times, ‘By all the powers in the universe I would give anything — even my soul — to get women’s breasts."

Kyle balked. He didn’t like this talk of selling his soul — not one bit. It was not that he was a religious boy. His mother had taught him to be a freethinker and agnostic. Yet he had seen enough movies about Satan and the afterlife to worry about casual deals with the Devil. As Barb disapproved of Kyle’s viewing anything she judged "superstitious," he had been doing his Devil-watching on the sly — at other people’s houses or on television when she was out.

By sneaking the Devil into the family home, Kyle had, ironically, come to associate the Prince of Darkness with sin and deceit in a very personal, concrete fashion, despite Barb’s best efforts to persuade her son that neither Hell nor Heaven existed in any known Universe.

And so, the part of Kyle molded by Barb thought Joannie’s request to be childish and moronic; but the part shaped by Hollywood deemed it dangerous — hence alluring. Kyle loved to take risks. And to dare Satan to change you into a girl — that was quite a gamble for a normal, All-American boy to take. It was even more daring than going down Suicide Hill on a skateboard while blindfolded.

And so, while he said, "No way. I’m not going to touch that idol. It’s stupid," his words so lacked conviction that Joannie knew it wouldn’t be difficult to persuade him to "sell his soul." And the price wouldn’t even have to be very high — not when you considered how much joy Kyle took in tempting the fates. Indeed, less than ten minutes later, he was stroking the marble ball and intoning three times, "By all the powers in the universe I will give anything — even my soul — to get real breasts just like Joannie’s. Let it be done before this year be done."

What had changed his mind? It was yet another deal. Kyle loved to make deals, as he assumed he was clever enough always to benefit from them. This time he indulged Joannie’s superstititions so that she would bare her breasts to him for the very first time.

He wasn’t allowed to touch them, but he saw more than enough to make him think that he had definitely gotten the better of the deal: "I came once already, I saw Joannie’s boobs, and eventually I will conquer," Kyle chuckled to himself.

As Joannie wanted to induce Kyle to agree to implants, she got him to "sell his soul" for "real breasts just like Joannie’s" every time they subsequently made out. The phrase not only became a "sweet nothing" that he could whisper into her ear for maximum erotic effect, but it also became the centerpiece of two more attempts to enlist the help of the spirit world to make Kyle into a demi-woman — or female from the waist up. One time they used black candles, the next time, an effigy of a buxom Demi.

Within a month, both teens had lost count of the number of times that Kyle had begged the netherworld to give him breasts. It was a game they played — a variant of spin-the-bottle that always rewarded Demi with sexual favors from her girlfriend.

Joannie played the game straightforwardly. She had but one objective: to mesmerize Demi into believing that she must indeed covet the free breast implants on offer from the Vera Smuttee show since she had repeatedly prayed for a female body. In a moment of weakness, Demi would sign away her lingering maleness — that was Joannie’s game plan.

Kyle played the game in a complicated way, always with mixed emotions. One part of him scoffed at the entire premise — that the two teens lived in a world of magic where incantations could transform a frog prince into a beautiful princess.

Another part of Kyle played the game with dread, for Hollywood had taught the boy to believe that a man could be turned into a fly, or fly through outer space as a beam of light. He had even seen a couple of movies where man had become woman as punishment for being too cocky about his own sex. Could that happen to Kyle? Had he said once too often that, "any boy had it better than any girl"?

And what about the Devil? One had to fear the Devil. One part of Kyle feared that he had made a Faustian bargain -- that somehow he’d be turned briefly into a girl so that the Devil would be able ever afterwards to roast Kyle, the boy, like a wiener on a stick in the fires of Hell.

And there was a third part of Kyle — this one definitely went by the name of Demi. She actually hoped the spells would work. She wanted total fulfilment, if only for a day. While Kyle knew that he was lucky to be a boy, Demi longed to make love just once to Joannie as a woman. Demi wanted real breasts. She even craved a vagina. She aspired to the body that would delight her beloved Joannie the most.

Demi normally finished last in the game, behind Joannie and Kyle’s more masculine alter egos — the rational skeptic, the male chauvinist, and the reckless daredevil. Yet she did win the game at least once. Kyle had to recognize that on at least one occasion that the prayer for breasts had emanated from his very soul — that, at that moment he longed for there to be some force in the Universe capable of remaking him as a woman.

"I had that fool idea only once," Kyle assured himself.

Yet once was more than enough to unnerve the boy: It meant he was taking a far greater risk than he ever intended when he first started playing the game of gender. It also meant that when the steroids started visibly to transform his body in late November, Kyle would suspect his mind, or Fate, but never the drugs, of compromising his masculinity.

Masculinity. Ironically, on the very day that Kyle first asked the helmeted fish to make him a demi-girl, Joannie was pressuring him to return to boys’ clothes before that very week was done.

As part of her campaign to remold Kyle into Demi, Joannie wanted to dress him for their upcoming dance date. By dictating what he would wear, Joannie hoped to bend him further to her will. Now, as she explained to Kyle as they huddled atop her bed, she was anxious for him to wear boys’ clothes on their date that coming Saturday. These would be clothes that she was obtaining for him via the Internet from an ultra-trendy store for males.

Kyle was definitely intrigued at the thought of being outfitted by The Fantasy Male after he found out it was located in West Hollywood, California. "Wow, Hollywood!" he thought. "I’ll be the ultimate cool dude!"

But alas, he couldn’t take a chance on his mom’s finding out that he was cheating on their deal. So he told Joannie: "It’s a bogus idea. I can’t wear boys’ clothes to the dance, as much as I’d like to, as I’ll just be finishing my third week of the moped bet. I’m so close to winning my bike that I can’t take the chance of someone ratting me out to my mom."

"Demi, you’ll be the one to tell your mom — in advance. Then no one will get the chance to tell tales. You’ll wear boys’ clothes to the dance with her permission," Joannie said. And then she explained how Kyle should make another deal with his mom whereby he agreed to wear girls’ clothes for another five days in exchange for being allowed to wear boys’ clothes for a single night, and — and this was the prospect that lured Kyle into another dubious bargain — permission to spend the night at ‘Steve’s.’

Joannie promised to let Demi see her in the nude if Barb "allowed her daughter to go to the dance disguised as a boy."

After Demi and Joannie had once again proved to themselves that it was highly erotic to bring each other to climax while wearing black lace lingerie, Demi got out of bed to change into the pink silk panties that Joannie had bought her earlier that day. Bashfully, Demi changed in a closet. There she not only put on the panties but also the bodyshaper that had arrived by mail order. Joannie thought that Demi would look better in it than in a panty girdle — and she did, as it reshaped her angles into curves.

Then, garbed in Capri pants, a halter-top, Maryjane shoes and a trench coat, Kyle scurried back through the back alley to his own home and to Barb’s heartfelt greeting.

As they hugged, Barb noted: "Demi’s quite flushed, and I doubt very much it was just from running home." She probed: "Did you have a good time with Steve, Demi? You sure look like a girl who’s had a memorable afternoon."

Kyle thought about objecting to his mother calling him a ‘girl,’ but he didn’t want anything to break the magic spell that Joannie had cast over him, and so he replied: "I had an absolutely super afternoon. It was rad. I know I’m in love. I’m in love, I’m in love…"

"With a wonderful guy," interjected Barb helpfully.

"Yeh, with a wonderful guy," repeated Kyle. He wished he could be honest about the true love of his life, but he feared being undone by all his lies. He was terrified of losing Joannie if Barb and Virginia should ever exchange notes and learn how many tricks that the two children had been playing on them.

And so Kyle pretended he had been, and would always be dating Steve as he made his pitch for liberation from girls’ wear while he attended the Hell’s Vixens concert. Steve, he said, wanted him to dress like a boy that night so that they could ‘watch the concert in peace,’ without Steve’s constantly having to fight off guys who were making passes at his ‘rad girlfriend.’

"I know it’s cheating on the moped bet," Kyle admitted, as he offered to cross-dress for another five days in penance. Barb would probably have given him dispensation without any extension of their bet, had not Kyle seemed so determined to dress like a girl for the better part of another week.

As Barb figured that Kyle was looking for ways to prolong Demi’s existence, she decided to raise the stakes to a whole week. She was not surprised when Kyle readily agreed to her terms. She then decided, "Steve must actually prefer Demi to Kyle. That would explain almost everything. Maybe this cross-dressing will end when the two of them have their first lover’s quarrel."

In the meantime, she took heart from Kyle’s desire to revert to male attire, if only for an evening: "Maybe he’ll settle down into a recreational cross-dresser. With luck, I can gain a part-time daughter without losing my son entirely. I’ve been foolish to worry about his being a transsexual. He’s not. He’s just my wild and crazy son, always rushing heedlessly into everything, even into a fling with transgenderism. He’ll tire of dressing like a girl, just as he tired of being Joan of Ark."

She was in such a good mood that she assented to Kyle’s returning to the Lancers to spend the night after the dance. She even thought it amusing that Kyle stressed he’d be using the guest room, for she assumed that the two boys had just spent the afternoon in Steve’s bed.

To make it clear yet again that she wanted Kyle always to be frank with her, she handed him a condom: "You have a healthy libido, Demi, and I’m sure you’re about to become sexually active, if you are not so already. There are a lot of germs that are sexually transmitted, as I’m sure you’re aware, so please, whatever you do, have Steve wear this if you have intercourse."

While it floored Kyle that his mother took it for granted that he would be ‘the girl’ if Steve and he ever made love, he had to admit to himself that there was no point in insisting on his own virility — not at least, while he was wearing lipstick, nail polish, a halter-top, and Capri pants.

In any case, Kyle was far more disturbed by his mother’s next pronouncement: "Demi, I don’t want you to go out alone on Saturday night. Mrs. Lancer will have to pick you up here so that I know you’ll have a ride to and from the concert. Do you understand? I’m expecting her to ring our doorbell and to tell me that she’s come for you and that she will be responsible for your safety until your return the next morning."

Kyle tried to talk her into an alternate plan — indeed, into any other plan — but she was adamant. If Mrs. Lancer did not herself come to the door, there would be no date.

That night both Kyle and his mother slept fitfully. For the first time in a week the dancing Brazilian transsexuals returned to Barb’s dreams. As she had become used to their rhythms, they had lost the power to awaken her, even when they began to do the ‘forbidden dance,’ the lambada, with her son and his muscular friend Steve.

The two youths looked so much alike they could have been clones. They both had mustaches and shaven heads, white tee shirts and ragged Levis, and lots of black leather — boots, jacket, cap and chaps. "They both look like Nazis," she fretted, as she began to stir.

It was, however, the back of Kyle’s outfit that awoke her in a cold sweat: There was none. He was butt-naked to the world and Steve was closing in from the rear. Haunted by this specter, she couldn’t get back to sleep.

As for Kyle, he never really did get to sleep that night, as he spent the night vainly scheming. He kept looking for, but could not find, some way to avoid begging Steve to "ask his mom to lie to Kyle’s mom about Kyle’s whereabouts Saturday night so that Kyle could spend a night in the sack with Joannie, Steve’s rival in their love triangle."

It was difficult to think of the right inducement. At least, Kyle couldn’t come up with anything — hence his sleepless night.

Elvira, however, was more imaginative. Or at least she would be once Steve had told her that Kyle was pleading for her help so that he could, as she saw it, "cheat on my beloved son."

Chapter Thirteen: What Happened When Demi Started School?

There was a marked contrast between the ways that Kyle dressed for school on the first and third days of the third week of his moped bet. On the Monday, he dressed as conservatively as possible. Systematically, he chose the most unisex of the girls’ clothes at his disposal in order to look more appealingly ‘boyish’ for Steve.

Charming Steve was his first priority. To have any hope of persuading Steve and his mother to mask his date with Joannie, Kyle knew that he’d have to flirt with his friend, and he sensed that Steve preferred his boyfriends to look as masculine as possible. To be sure, Mrs. Lancer seemed to think that her son was searching for a sissy to love, but Kyle instinctively knew otherwise. He figured he should apply minimal mascara if he were going to bat his eyelashes winningly at Steve.

At Kyle’s suggestion, they ate their lunch outside. As a biting wind had driven most of the students and teachers inside, the two friends found in the shelter of a hedge the privacy that Kyle needed. There Steve snuck a kiss, with Kyle responding amorously enough to ensure that he’d have a sympathetic hearing for his odd request. "You know how much I love the music of Hell’s Vixens," Kyle began. "They’re playing Des Moines this coming Saturday, you know, and thanks to Joannie, I’ve got a super ticket."

"Yeh, I know. So?" Steve asked rather sourly. He envied Kyle his ticket, and Joannie her date.

"Well, I’ve got a small problem," Kyle continued. "My mom doesn’t know that Joannie exists and I don’t want to risk getting grounded by telling her about Joannie just now. So I told my mom that I was going out with you. Is that all right?"

"Sure, why not? Do I get a kiss for helping out?"

"There’s something else. My mom insists that I be picked up at the door — you know, picked up by your mom. If your mom doesn’t pretend to be driving the two of us to the concert, then I simply won’t be able to go to it. Do you think you could talk her into helping out?"

"Sure, why not? My mom doesn’t have much to do on Saturday nights anyway. She’s too old to date, you know. She could even drive you and Joannie to the concert. I bet I can even talk her into picking you up after the concert and giving you both a drive home. You can now show your appreciation with a big wet kiss."

"Uh, I’ll only be needing a lift to Joannie’s house. Her grandmother will drive us to and from the concert."

"But I don’t understand," puzzled Steve. "How can old Mrs. Smith drive you home? Won’t that give you away? Won’t your mom then realize that you’re dating Joannie?"

Kyle mumbled in a vain hope that Steve wouldn’t entirely grasp his meaning: "It will be really late when the show is over, so I’ll be bunking down at the Smiths — in their guest room, I imagine. So I’ll be able to walk home in broad daylight. I won’t need a lift."

Steve clued in: "Let me get this straight. You’re asking my mother to tell a lie to your mother so that you can spend the night with Joannie? I’m supposed to help you to cheat on me? Do I really seem that big a geek?

"Of course not, silly. But you’re my boyfriend, aren’t you?" said Kyle with a silky voice, "You shouldn’t worry about Joannie. She’s just a girl. You know I like boys the best and you’re the best of the boys." He then gave Steve the "big wet kiss" he sought.

Steve was an easy conquest: He said he’d find some way to talk his mother into aiding Kyle’s plot. "I don’t think our mothers like each other," opined Steve. "So maybe my mom will think it a hoot to fool your mom."

"Fool my mom?" For some reason, the idea made Kyle feel guilty. But the show had to go on, and so he gave Steve a big, appreciative hug.

Steve left with mixed emotions: joyous that Kyle claimed to prefer boys, but dismayed that his friend was, even so, going to be losing his virginity to a girl. "But," Steve told himself, "he can’t really lose his cherry to a girl. That I’ll be plucking."

And it wouldn’t take much longer, he told himself, now that he knew that Kyle’s mother was willing to have her son "spend the night at Steve’s."

"Will my own mom agree to an overnight? You’d better believe she will — so long as Kyle is wearing a dress." He chuckled. Steve then wondered how he’d react to his boyfriend’s showing up for their big date in a dress. To his own surprise, he was curious about how Kyle would look in a slinky dress and sheer stockings. "This I’ve got to see," Steve decided.

"But once he’s had sex with me, I’ll have much more influence with him. I’m sure I can get him to dress like a boy again. He’ll look rad in a leather jock strap!" For the rest of the day Steve daydreamed in class, doodling various leather and denim outfits for Kyle.

As for Kyle, he spent the day pretending to be deaf. Everywhere around him, people were talking about him. His classrooms were abuzz with gossip, which instantly ceased the moment he drew near. Yet they pointed at him when they thought he wasn’t looking. They stared at him even when they knew he was looking. They didn’t want him to hear what they were saying — not yet, not until they had formed a consensus. Even so, he knew they were talking about Demi. It got so he could read lips — first widening, as though with astonishment, as they said the "de", and then pursing — almost as they were kissing him off — as they said "mi."

After school, less than two blocks away from the milling crowd of students, Kyle and Joannie found their way blocked by two of the black shirts: Jason and Rob. Their fists clenched, they both had a look of pure malevolence.

Jason, the boy who’d vowed to pulverize Kyle if his cross-dressing ever became public knowledge, spoke for them both: "So it’s Demi, is it? The whole damn school is wondering what you and I did together in the shower in the days when I was stupid enough to call you my best friend. Rob’s been getting picked on almost as much. The guys — and the girls -- have been asking if we wear panties too."

"Joannie, get lost!" barked Rob. "We don’t want to see you cry. A weepy dyke — that’s a pathetic sight if there ever was one. You get out of here so we can start demolishing Demi."

"When we’re finished with you," he snarled at Kyle, "you’ll be so battered and ugly that you’ll stop fantasizing about being a girl."

"Yeh, there won’t be much point in dressing up like a girl, Demi, if you’ve got a broken nose, cauliflower ears, and bloody big scars on both cheeks," spat out Jason, who pulled out a switchblade. It sprang open.

Rob pushed Joannie to the ground, as Jason advanced toward Kyle with the knife. The situation looked desperate, for the only other person in sight was Derek, the leader of the black shirts, who was running towards them.

Kyle’s heart sank: "These guys will do anything Derek says, maybe even kill me."

And what did Derek say? To Kyle’s immense surprise, Derek was telling them to stop!

"Hey, you guys," he panted. "I told you to leave the little pervert alone. He’s none of your business. He belongs to the gangs now. You know that. They’ll decide the little sissy’s fate. You touch him now, and the Sharks will be parading you around the campus in a miniskirt! As for you, Jason, the gangs told me that if you carve up Demi, they’ll cut off your dong. They want prissy little missy to flounce around the school in all her glory. I don’t know why, and I don’t ask why. I just obey."

"Christ!" yelled Jason. "When do I get a chance to show the school what I think of sissies who like to dress up in mommy’s clothes? I’ve got a reputation to protect. First, you told me that we couldn’t jump him because that would just make the freak into a martyr and get them speculating about our hang-ups. And now that everyone is speculating about whether we’re freaks too, you tell me I can’t cut him up because the gangs are protecting him. When do I get a chance to crucify the little turd? When?" he shouted.

"Never, if you know what’s good for you," Derek menaced, very, very quietly.

Jason spat the ground in disgust. Rob briefly contemplated kicking Joannie. Then, without saying a word, the two black shirts stalked off. As for Derek, he lingered for a moment in order to say very, very quietly: "Kyle, be careful where you walk now that everyone knows about Demi. I can’t always be around to protect you."

So amazed were both Kyle and Joannie that neither said a word before Derek had hurried off to catch up to the black shirts who were loitering at the corner.

"I don’t understand," Joannie said.

"Me neither," said Kyle. "But I don’t like what he said about the gangs." Both teens shuddered. Their parting kiss was especially heartfelt, as though one of them was going off to war.

Surprisingly, Kyle had a spring in his step as he walked home. That evening he was agitated and restless. At one point, Barb remarked that she hadn’t seen him "so antsy" since the night before his BMX tournament. He’d replied enigmatically, "That’s just it, mom. I can’t really explain it, but this being Demi has become a big challenge — like winning at sports. It’s really weird, but I’m beginning to find wearing girls’ clothes a little bit exciting."

"That’s nice, dear," Barb replied. She wasn’t surprised. She’d assumed for some time now that Kyle found girls’ clothes sexually exciting. She wasn’t wrong about that, of course, not entirely. Thanks to the sessions with Joannie, he did now find it arousing to wear a bra and panties.

Yet Kyle wasn’t talking about sexual excitement, at least not directly. No, he was talking about the thrill in living his life like a video game, always having to be on the lookout for the bad guys, who lurked around each corner, as he sought the fruits of victory — his girl, his machine, and friends who didn’t turn on you just because the entire school erroneously believed that you were a transsexual.

Later, snuggling in his nightie in bed, he wondered whether Derek still numbered among those friends. "Nah, it can’t be possible. He called me a pervert. He’s just protecting his own butt, and yet …." Kyle fell asleep before he could decide whether Derek was friend or foe.

That night, in his dreams, Kyle fought and won every battle. Some of them he fought as King Arthur, the Anglo-Saxon boy who’d pulled a magic sword out of a stone. In the rest, he triumphed as Joan of Ark, the cross-dressing heroine of France. He woke up with a smile on his face, confident that he was the hero of his own life.

No one was ever going to intimidate Kyle. And Demi was a fighter too! So he’d wear whatever she wanted -- on the outside, at least. As Kyle thought there was an excellent chance they’d strip him down to his bra and panties as a prank, he decided to wear his cotton, boy-cut, jockeys for girls — their color a drab gray. If he ended up running down the school corridor wearing nothing but his panties, he wanted the sight of him to confuse his tormenters. With luck, some of them would be wearing nearly identical jockeys for boys.

If that happened, "Then the bullies will start wondering about their own gender identity," chuckled Kyle.

Kyle chose the underwear that Tuesday, but Demi got her pick of the rest of his clothes. She was determined not to back down. They all wanted her to go away? Well, not this week! Not before Kyle got his moped! And so, Demi defiantly dressed a little more obviously than usual: her makeup, lipstick and nail polish, (still clear, but high gloss), and her hair all quietly announced her femininity.

The hair wasn’t supposed to be quite so feminine-looking. Kyle struggled with it for some time, as he hoped to spray into place its one masculine aspect. But, as his hair had grown since Barb’s cut, it had grown more unruly. Today, it simply insisted on looking feminine. Kyle, saying "what the heck," finally yielded to it. His hairstyle that day was bound to draw remarks, even if Demi were not already a public scandal.

Determined to look good, Demi put on her favorite jeans: the pair that Mrs. Lancer had bought for her, the ones with the flowery tendrils stalking the legs. They went well, she thought, with the appliquéd flowers on her shoes, and color-wise, with her lime green, three-quarter sleeve jersey. As it had shrunk in the wash, it fit snugly, with an inch and a half of skin showing at the navel.

Did Demi look feminine? Yes and no. It depended on how closely you looked at her. If you believed her minimal bust and slender hips to be totems of her youth rather than her gender, you might think Demi a young girl. However, if you saw Kyle swagger through the hallways, you’d know that Demi was really a boy.

You were most likely to think of Demi as a girl if you saw her seated at a school desk, her scrawny hips hidden, her shoes and flowered hems in full view. In other words, it was Kyle’s teachers who found Demi most disconcerting, as they got to look at her all day.

Even so, Coach Bryant’s behavior was inexcusable. Since he taught civics, religion, and ethics when he wasn’t coaching Hoover’s football teams, he should have set a good example. No matter what the provocation from Demi, no matter how upset the coach was by the arrest of his youngest brother for propositioning boys in the men’s room of Macy’s Mall, he shouldn’t have ridiculed a student.

If he had been more mature, the coach should even have been able to handle the news that his brother had overstayed his welcome at the Mall because he had been obsessively searching for one particular teen, a pantywaist cut from the same twisted mold as this Demi-creature now lounging — immodestly and invitingly, in the eyes of the coach — in his very own classroom. The coach desperately wanted to exorcise his classroom of the demi-urge that seemed now to dominate it.

Ridicule were his weapons, banishment his goal. He started by making sure that everyone knew and despised Kyle’s femme name: "Class, I want you to meet Demi. That’s Demi sitting in the second row amongst the real boys. Demi is occupying a space where there used to be a boy named Kyle. Kyle was a smart aleck kid, but we used to think he was, nevertheless, a boy. We all once thought that Kyle belonged in the boys’ half of the class."

"Demi is quite another matter. Demi does not belong in the boy’s half of the class, because Demi is a sissy pervert. Demi is a head case who belongs in a psycho ward."

"That’s where Demi is going to end up — in a state mental hospital or prison — but for the moment I strongly suggest that Demi move her queer little ass out of the boys’ section of the room. Demi, you go sit with the girls in back. We don’t want trash like Demi to sit anywhere near the he-men in front."

Kyle, in shock, froze just long enough for the coach to repeat his order: "Demi, you little pervert, go sit amongst the girls in back. That’s where a little loser-sissy like Demi belongs."

This tirade did not impress the girls in the class, for it reminded them of the real reason why the coach segregated the girls from the boys in his classes, and insisted on the girls sitting in the rear of the room. He claimed he wanted the boys in front because they were the more likely to get into trouble if they weren’t under close surveillance. But the girls suspected that the coach simply preferred the company of males. He had been overheard telling a male teacher that he pitied the girls the tragedy of their birth because it meant none of them could ever be a high-school quarterback.

The closer a student sat to Brad Mitty, the star quarterback, in Coach Bryant’s class, the more honored the student was supposed to feel. Only boys could get really close to Brad and therefore to front row center where the tousle-haired, blue-eyed, muscular blond was forced to sit under the coach’s watchful eye. On more than one occasion, Brad had pleaded with his coach and teacher to let him sit near Vicky Andrews, his main squeeze, but the coach had insisted that "his star"

Kyle was, accordingly, envied by the guys and welcomed by the girls when the coach exiled him to the back of the room. Demi’s seat beside Vicky Andrews honored rather than degraded her in the eyes of everyone but the coach. Moreover, everyone howled with laughter — at the coach’s expense — when Demi had mocked him by parading like a stripper on a catwalk as she sashayed to the back of the room. Several of the students, led by Joannie, had provided suitable sound effects.

As the coach shouted abuse at Demi, the class rallied around her. He kept up a stream of insults throughout the class, which brought either embarrassed laughter or pained silence. Only once did the class rebel outright. Unexpectedly, it was the teacher’s pet, Brad Mitty, the star quarterback, who forced the coach to apologize for calling Demi a "faggot who’d soon be selling blowjobs at the bus terminal."

The coach had hoped to drive Kyle and Demi from the school. But his harassment had backfired. His class learned the wrong lesson. Had a more popular teacher belittled Demi, then Kyle might indeed have been forced into permanent exile or home schooling, but it actually improved his reputation to be targeted by Coach Bryant, who had the reputation of being the school’s creepiest teacher. His attitude towards both sexes was suspect, and everyone mocked his orange fright wig of a toupee. To have an enemy like Coach Bryant was even better than having friends. In his animosity could be found the bonds of many a great friendship.

For example, Tim and Joannie were so appalled by the coach’s treatment of Kyle that they lodged a formal complaint with Vice Principal Cudmore. He promised to say something to the coach, and he did say this: "Ernie," he said, "I hear you’ve been giving the school sissy a hard time. I even heard you called him a ‘faggot’. That’s not wise thing to do in this era in which the state Civil Rights Commission has been getting teachers fired for not being ‘politically correct’ enough. So be careful what you say to the sissy. I don’t want to lose this school’s most valuable asset, its football coach, just because some student accuses you of being biased against queers. So you’ll be real careful about what you say to that kid, right?"

"Right," mumbled Coach Bryant.

"And I don’t want you to hit the little brat either. Understood? Demi is not worth losing your career over. God, I wish it were different. I know that you’d love to pound the piss out of that sissy. So would I! But we live in a time of moral turpitude, when real men have to stand by like eunuchs, wringing their hands in futility, while vile creatures like Demi propagate. You and I know that Demi is a virus. Her vice will spread. Pretty soon there will be so many boys prancing around in skirts and skintight jeans at Hoover High that we won’t be able to field a football team, Christ, without allowing the bull dykes to play for it. So you certainly have my backing if you can come up with some clever way of ridding this school of Demi. But clever, mind you. You were too heavy-handed today. I don’t want ever to have to fire you, and especially not over the supposed civil rights of a sexual deviate."

"Now what’s your take on what Kyle is really up to?" Mr. Cudmore asked, "I can’t quite figure it out myself. But I’ve known Kyle James long enough to suspect his motives. I just don’t buy this ‘I want to be a girly-with-a-dolly crap’ of his. What do you think? Do you believe Kyle James really wants to be a girl?"

"I don’t know," replied the coach. "There’s a heap of freaks in the world right now. If I had to put money on it, I’d bet that the kid is a cross-dresser. I used to teach about her sort when I taught sex education. You know — she’s one of them that wants to cut off her dick so that she can get pregnant. The way that Demi was staring at me in class you’d think she was sizing me up to be the daddy of her baby!"

The vice-principal was mildly appalled by the coach’s ignorance of a subject he occasionally taught, but he wasn’t about to pick a fight with a winning football coach, and so he replied: "Well, I don’t think she, he is a transsexual. The James kid is trying to make fools of us. I just know that the James kid is mocking us. He’s no more transgendered than you are!"

"Mr. Cudmore, I don’t like being compared with that sissy — we are like two different species. I’m a real man and Demi is, well, she’s one of them demons that captures a boy’s body and drains him of his vital fluids. What do you call them demons? Yeh, I remember now: a suck and buss. That Demi is definitely a suck and buss. We’ve got to get her out of my classroom before she turns all the boys in it into fairies. You know what four of the boys told me after class? They said that if I didn’t leave Demi alone, that they’d show up to class in skirts! Can you imagine that? And I wasn’t being told this by four losers. No sirree. These were strappin’ fine youth, the best we’ve got. They’re very masculine, very muscular, handsome, and in peak condition. I’m sure they could have any girl they wanted."

Mr. Cudmore, unable to convince the coach that Demi was just another boy acting up, rather than a succubus from the netherworld, ended the conversation by telling him to make life difficult for the James kid — but not so difficult that the other students felt they had to rally around him.

"Her," the coach corrected. "That’s no boy — not any more."

"Whatever," sighed the vice-principal. "The little game being played by Kyle and Demi will be ending Friday. As soon as Dr. Loupi confirms that Kyle is just another teenage boy trying to grab attention, and not, as Demi claims, a transsexual, then I’ll be giving the boy a choice between attending Hoover in his own Levis or the industrial school in overalls supplied by the state of Iowa. Now don’t you go telling Kyle, or Demi, my plans."

Coach Bryant promised he’d be as close-mouthed as a clam. Instead he was an oyster: On Wednesday he released this pearl of wisdom to Demi: "The vice-principal and I disagree about what you’re up to. You’re such a hopeless sissy that I don’t think there’s any boy left in you. I just know you’d like to wear a dress to school so that you could seduce and pollute the real men of Hoover. But Mr. Cudmore — he thinks you’re a fake. He thinks you’re just pretending that you want to be a girl. Well, I hope he’s right, ‘cause if you’re not want of them Trans sexuals — that’s what he calls ‘em — then he’s going to expel your sweet little ass. And then, the only school that will take you will be the state industrial school in Sioux City. If you cross-dress there, lots of real men will be happy to make a girl out of you."

Demi got the message: If she didn’t show up for the interview with Dr. Loupi, poor Kyle would be expelled from Hoover High. Thus, Kyle would have been dressed as femininely on Friday, even had the Jets and the Sharks not decided to pay him a visit in the school ground after Tuesday classes let out. They had, as intended, a large audience, amongst whom could be seen Joannie, Steve, Tim and Derek — none of whom could protect Kyle or Demi against the fearsome gangs.

Both the Sharks and the Jets had inherited their names from earlier, less ruthless gangs. All they knew about the names is that they came from a gang movie that had played Des Moines in the late 1970s — a movie like Colors. Whatever their origin, the names suited the two gangs. Thus the Jets were recent immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe, where the despair and poverty produced by the collapse of Communism had spawned some of the most ruthless thugs of modern times.

The Jets drew their leadership and the bulk of their members from the most violent, most hot-blooded, most emotional of all the Europeans: the Finns. It was said that Finns would cut your throat without a second thought if they didn’t like the way you tangoed with them. Kyle himself doubted there could be anyone more bloodthirsty or volatile than the Finns who led the Jets.

Unless it was the Sharks. The name suited them, for they too were rumored to kill without remorse. They were an African-American gang, who had in common this with the Jets — they too were newcomers to Des Moines. The Sharks were drawn from some of the most dysfunctional, unstable ‘hoods in the entire country — places where it was rare to find an intact family or a father who had the dignity of a nine-to-five job.

Kyle didn’t know all the ‘hoods that had produced the Sharks, but the names that chilled his flesh the most were Scarsdale, Scottsdale, Shaker Heights, Beverly Hills and especially Grosse Pointe, which he associated with contract killers, and the ‘Main Line’ of Philadelphia because it sounded like a place where heroin was king. If you came from ‘hoods like these, you were likely, Kyle figured, to be dangerously screwed up.

Markko Hakkinen spoke for both gangs: "Hey punk! Yeh, I’m speaking to you, Demi, you little fairy. You listen and you listen good. Some of my guys thought we should beat the crap out of you. And some others thought we should simply feed you to the Sharks. But I said ‘No, let’s wait and see how the brass react to the little sissy.’ When Derek told me that Demi made that ped, Coach Bryant, totally blow his cool, then I knew we’d made the right decision — you know, the one where we let you live."

Sherm, the dreaded leader of the Sharks, then spoke: "Of course, it wasn’t just us who disputed the possibility of a drag queen attending our school. Every righteous dude at Hoover has been worrying about our school persona. So we’ve had to warn off all the scrawny little dudes who wanted to beat you up. That service has been costing your friends, whom I’m astonished you’ve still got."

"My friends?" asked Kyle. He was confused: No one had told him about having to protect him from the Sharks and the Jets. How could Joannie and Steve have managed that?

"Yes," Derek hurriedly interjected. "Joannie Smith, Steve Lancer, and Tim Rush have been handing over their lunch money to the gangs so that you’d be left alone." He could have, and should have, added his own name, for Derek had been paying the most tribute. He’d even hawked his gameboy to raise money for his friend. He’d been Kyle’s friend all along, but couldn’t let anyone in his class know it. And why not? Because Derek was terrified that people would think he was gay if they learned he was befriending a cross-dresser. Derek hoped that by naming Kyle’s benefactors he could keep secret his own role in Demi’s survival.

Sherm glared at Derek, as he made a mental note to teach the fourteen-year-old to hold his tongue in the presence of his elders and betters. He then jabbed a finger into Kyle’s chest and snarled, "But it seems your friends don’t have enough money to protect you the way you’re dressed today. Demi, it’s time you started paying up too."

Then Markko announced their terms: "It’s only fair Demi, that you pay us your lunch money, starting from the first day you dressed like a sissy at school. That’s what you call retro-ac-tive-ly. Your lunch money — and that of your wimpy friends — buys you basic protection."

"Yeh, consider it basic collision insurance," interrupted Mika Kostinen, the sub-boss of the Jets.

Markko then grabbed Kyle by the arm and pulled him so closely that Kyle briefly feared that the fearsome Finn wanted a kiss. "You do agree to the need for insurance, right, little girl?" The gang boss then squeezed Kyle’s left bicep hard enough to him yelp with pain.

Kyle feverishly contemplated his options. He was understandably perturbed to learn that his friends had been paying protection money. How, he wonder, could he ever repay them? The question made him glum indeed. He cheered, however, when he realized he could reward his friends "with rides on the moped." When they too got to feel the wind on their cheeks, they’d realize that it had all been worthwhile. He could even let them take it out for spins at five bucks a ride. That way, he could be square with everybody in a couple of months.

He wished now that he hadn’t extended the moped bet by a full week. At the end of the current week, he’d still have ten days of lunch money to hand over to these bullies. But he decided that a moped was worth the extra cost, and so he said, "I understand. I give you my lunch money anytime I wear girls’ jeans. I’ve got no problem with that. It’s the least I could do to thank you for your help. Besides, I should be the one paying you — not my friends."

"No, you don’t quite understand, little dude," Sherm responded. "The cost of your basic protection has been going up. Your lunch money doesn’t come close to paying for it. Your four friends will still be paying us — assuming they want everybody to stay healthy."

Kyle gulped. He realized he might have to lend the moped out indefinitely to pay back his friends. He yearned for that moped more desperately than ever. It seemed his only feasible escape from the hole he had been digging for himself since he had foolishly boasted to his mother that he could wear girls’ clothes to school undetected.

Suddenly, fear punched him savagely in the gut: "What if the gangs demand our money, but won’t allow me to wear girls’ clothes to school. Then I lose the moped! Then I lose everything!"

To his own amazement, Kyle found himself begging for the right to attend school dressed as a girl: "Yeh, I understand completely. I get the right to dress as I’ve been doing, so long as everyone gives you their lunch money. I need to keep wearing these clothes. So it’s a deal."

He extended his free arm, but there were no takers. The gangs would set the terms of the deal, not Kyle. Sherm replied, "What pathetic little you wants is not our concern. Demi, you’ll wear what we tell you to wear. Comprendo?"

Forlornly, Kyle nodded. He now feared the worst: the demise of Demi, his dreams of a moped, and of all his newfound friendships. If he couldn’t wear a bra to school, he might as well kill himself.

It was, therefore, with very mixed emotions that Kyle received their edict: "Demi, we don’t like the way you look," Sherm snarled. "You’re going to humiliate this school if you don’t start dressing proper."

"Do you mean like a boy again?"

"No, you lamebrain. We are suggesting, real serious like, that you stop looking so much like a boy."

"Yeh," added Markko, "we figure that you’re less likely to humiliate this school if no one from the outside figures it that you’re a guy in drag. So stop screwing around with this half-boy, half-girl crap. It’s bad for the school. Tomorrow you look real feminine. We mean with big tits and a wide ass, earrings, red lipstick — all of it. You’d better be a totally convincing girl, or one of us just might get the notion to make you look more female between your legs. You get my meaning, little dude?"

"Definitely." Though Kyle cringed at the prospect of attending school as a girl, he considered an outright refusal to be taking an unacceptable risk. So he tried to limit the term of his confinement: "It’s cool. At school, I’ll do my best to look as much like a girl as possible for the rest of this week and for the ten days after that. But then I’ve got to switch back to boys’ clothes. My mom will insist."

His "mom" was the only excuse he could think of for his fixing a deadline, but this wasn’t his stellar moment at Hoover High: "My mom will insist" entered the school’s permanent lexicon. Thereafter, it was the standard excuse for feigning reluctance when asked to do something especially risky or risqué. It always brought laughter, but never more uproariously than the day that Kyle seemed to be admitting that his ‘mommy’ had conceived Demi as her dress-up doll.

"His mommy will insist!" guffawed Sherm. "Well, little Demi, you’re just going to have to explain to your mommy that you’re here to stay. You’re in, Kyle’s out for the rest of the school year. Just so that there’s no confusion about this — the sort of confusion that might lead the students at Central High to induce that we’ve got a boy here at Hoover who’s dressing up part-time as a girl — we do insist that Kyle go away, entirely."

"Yeh," Markko said menacingly: "as long as you attend Hoover High, you’ve got to be Demi all the time -- 24/7. If we hear that Demi’s been seen at the Mall or at the flicks trying to pass herself off as a boy named Kyle, or if Demi’s breasts should deflate at any time, then both gangs will be coming after you."

"So, sweet Demi," Sherm leered, "repeat after me: ‘I’m a girl, I’m a girl, I’ll always be a girl as long as I go to Hoover High."

Glumly, Kyle did — not just once, but a dozen times, at the gangs’ insistence. The superstitious part of him knew that he was tempting the fates with such an utterance.

And being a girl at Hoover High was certainly going to be expensive proposition, as Sherm explained: "There’s one last thing we got to tell you, Demi, and you’d better listen good to what I’ve got to say. Now that you’re determined to be a girl full time, you’ll be needing some more insurance. After all, there’ll be some dudes at Hoover High who won’t want to call you Demi and treat you like a lady. They might even rag on you. But, we won’t let that happen, Demi. But insurance costs. So we’ll be expecting five bucks a day from you — in addition to your lunch money. Do you want the extra insurance protection, Demi?"

Kyle, wincing with pain from Markko’s tightened grip, nodded.

Then Markko addressed the assemblage: "Take a good look at the pain on Demi’s face. If you don’t want to see it on yours, then you will treat Demi with maximum respect. You will never call her by any other name, no matter who you’re talking to — the teachers, the principal, even Demi’s mother. Got it?

Everyone nodded.

"And," Sherm’s voice boomed out: "since we don’t want Central High to learn we’ve got a sissy at this school, I want all of youse to yell out the answer you’ll be giving if anyone asks youse about Demi’s true sex. What sex is Demi?" he shouted.

"Female!" the crowd roared. It then dispersed. Some of the students were appalled, but most were amused. Almost everyone was curious to see how Demi would be dressing on her first full day at school.

After they’d emptied her pockets of cash, the gangs released Demi. As she left with Joannie, they made rude comments about her scrawny butt and flat chest, and then, to her horror, started wagering among themselves as to whether Demi would look feminine enough the following day to merit the gangs’ continuing protection.

When they were out of earshot, Kyle suddenly stopped, as though he were a deer caught in the headlights. He gasped: "Joannie, I’m in real trouble. If I don’t look enough like a girl tomorrow, they’re going to make it impossible for me to be a boy ever again. They threatened to cut off my balls!"

"Don’t worry," Joannie replied. "We can make you look so much like a girl that the gangs will have to admit that you really are Demi, the best looking girl at Hoover and my girlfriend." The teens then embraced — to the horror of a passing construction worker who muttered something about "dykes everywhere these days."

Joannie then suggested they go shopping for Demi — to complete her look, so there would be no further doubts about her essential femininity. To get Kyle into the right shape for an expedition to the mall, they stopped off at the James’ house where he put on two items that would become a second skin for the most infamous ‘girl’ at Hoover High — the breast forms and bodyshaper. Kyle then brushed his hair to eliminate its lingering boyishness, and changed his makeup and lipstick to make both more obvious.

They decided that Kyle now looked feminine enough to risk their going to the Mall. They took a detour on their way, so that Joannie could break into her piggy bank — as she told Kyle — and filch her grandmother’s bankcard, which she used to take out one hundred dollars at an ATM. Kyle, to his credit, had no idea they were going shopping on stolen money.

First stop at the Mall was a small stand that pierced ears for free for anyone who bought two or more sets of earrings. Kyle had only mild reservations about the piercing, since he had been thinking about having it done for several months. After all, most of the older skateboarders wore at least one ring in each ear, sometimes several.

Kyle even approved of the two-inch gold hoops that Joannie picked out for the Saturday night dance concert by Hell’s Vixen. For the first time, he learned that they’d be going to the dance in Goth mode — Joannie dressed as a foppish, eighteenth-century pirate, and Demi as the pallid ghost of the pirate. The thought of going as a ‘dead man walking’ tickled Kyle’s fancy. He would mock the grim reaper.

The ‘pirate’ hoops he liked. The dangling cut glass he could easily have lived without. First of all, he was less convinced than Joannie that the glass looked at all like diamonds, and second, the dangling ‘stones’ kept hitting his cheek, making it impossible to forget that he was wearing girls’ earrings. But Joannie got her way, as she also did when she convinced Kyle that Demi’s everyday earrings would have to be not only larger than most boys dared wear, but also have to sport a small red stone that some might confuse with a ruby.

As the earrings had punched big holes in her hundred dollars, Joannie reluctantly agreed that they couldn’t afford a perm for Demi. Indeed, Kyle would have to get his hair trimmed at a discount chain. He was pleased that none of its harried staff had the time or energy to worry about Demi’s gender.

At Joannie’s instructions, the stylist gave Demi little more than a trim, taking pains all the while to make her cut as feminine-looking as possible. Demi liked her new look — it would help protect her from the wrath of the gangs — but Kyle was distressed that a few snips of the scissors could make him look so feminine.

He also didn’t like Joannie’s plans for his hair — that it would get a lot longer, and as it did, he would have to spend much more time taking care of it. Split ends? He’d never heard of them. And now he was being told that they would become the bane of Demi’s existence.

Over Kyle’s vociferous objections, they finished their shopping at Macy’s. She had finally won him over when she pointed out that shoppers got less personal service in a Department Store, and that they would accordingly be freer to browse.

As Kyle feared, the salesclerk who had mocked his virility -- Melanie was working the cash. Even worse, she remembered him vividly: "Oh, Kirkdirk, you’re back at long last!" she gushed. "You look fabulous. You must be so proud of finally accepting yourself for … the little sissy that you truly are."

She had whispered the insult. Even Joannie hadn’t heard it. To both teens, she said, "And this must be one of your girlfriends. How sweet of her to join your shopping expedition to the mall."

Joannie piped up: "Miss, there’s no one named Kirkdirk here. That would be a foolish name indeed for a girl to have. I’m Joannie," she winked, "and this is Demi. She wasn’t born with that name, but the whole school now knows her as Demi. She’ll soon be the most popular girl at our school, but I just know that she’ll always be my special girlfriend. She still is you know," Joannie reassured Melanie.

Melanie then told Kyle that she was "thrilled, absolutely thrilled" that Demi was shopping at Macy’s. She then pointed to a rack of knit jerseys and suggested that Demi check those out while Melanie showed Joannie a pair of jeans that she just knew would fit her perfectly. As Kyle was anxious to be rid of Melanie, he gladly wandered off, leaving the other two girls alone for a moment.

Melanie got immediately to the point: "What’s with the breasts, Joannie? Demi’s breasts are so life-like! Don’t tell me they’re real! You haven’t let the little minx ruin your chances of getting on the Smuttee show, have you? Please tell me they’re falsies and that Demi hasn’t yet had implants."

Joannie was not entirely able to reassure her. True, the teen convinced Melanie that Kyle had not yet had implants. However, Melanie was alarmed by Kyle’s rapid feminization. "He seems to have no defenses against it," she said. "He must have been yearning to be a girl all his life. I’m worried, Joannie, that he’ll not wait for the Smuttee show. And if he gets any more feminine looking, they won’t want him. Are you sure you can make Demi look enough like a boy for the first show? You do know that the audience will want a real boy to be feminized on television, not a Demi boy."

"Don’t worry," Joannie giggled. "Demi is still able to pass as a boy when she has to."

"Well, I should hope so!" replied Melanie. But, looking at Demi in profile, she did wonder how much longer Demi would be able to persuade the TV viewers that she was a normal enough boy to be an intriguing candidate for a sex change. And so, she wrung from Joannie a promise to get Kyle’s signature that very week on the consent form for his implant operation.

"Demi’s signature won’t hold up in court," Melanie advised. "So we’d better get your girlfriend to sign while she’s still willing to admit that she’s actually a boy named Kyle."

They then joined Kyle, and very quickly Joannie had chosen a new outfit for Demi. As Joannie didn’t have sufficient money, Melanie agreed to buy the clothes on her own account, after Joannie had whispered that the salesclerk could have the revenue from any interviews that Joannie might give about Kyle’s decision "to get breast implants so that he could look as much as possible like his girlfriend." Or at least that’s what he’d be coached to say to any tabloids that featured ‘news’ from the Vera Smuttee show.

Demi’s new outfit came literally off the back of a mannequin. As Melanie disrobed the dummy, she said to Kyle, "Don’t you wish you had breasts, real breasts, just like Susie’s here? It’s amazing what they can do with saline solution. And the operation is so straightforward, they can have you in and out during a single day. Or so I’ve been told."

Joannie replied for Demi: "I’m just positive that some day soon Demi will be asking for transplants. But not today. Besides, she doesn’t want to be as flat-chested as that mannequin. You prefer my breasts, don’t you, Demi?"

And how! Kyle loved Joannie’s breasts — on Joannie. To be polite, he told Melanie that he didn’t really need implants, as Joannie had lent him "some great boobs." He then shook them salaciously.

Since the store was fairly quiet, Kyle eventually consented to use a changing room to try on the mannequin’s outfit. As he emerged to check himself out in the mirrors, Melanie applauded: "Wow, Demi, you look a lot more feminine and a lot sexier than that mannequin. The clothes fit you perfectly. Can I hire you to be the store dummy?"

She was just joshing, for she knew that Demi had already agreed to be Joannie’s dress-up doll. And Joannie was now dressing Demi in lavender. Or was it purple or lilac? Kyle couldn’t tell the difference. All he knew for sure was that the color sure didn’t look very masculine.

It could be found on the stitching and four-inch wide hem of the stretch, blue denim clam diggers. And it was virtually the only color in the sleeveless, poly-spandex ‘shell’ (with a handkerchief-shaped hem) that Demi would be wearing the next day as her top. Even its paisley and floral design was done in shades of lavender or purple.

To complete her mannequin look, Demi would be wearing purple sunglasses, a bangled bracelet formed from purple plastic and aluminum, as well as two six-inch lilac hairpieces. There was purple everywhere. Only the three-inch-high platform sandals (with a wooden base and star-studded denim straps) didn’t reek of lavender.

As Kyle saw himself in the mirror, he marveled at how much Demi looked like the mannequin. The color scheme he found appalling. Never in his wildest nightmare had he found herself trapped before in lavender, lilac, or purple.

Whatever this was, whatever you called it, the color was all-wrong for an all-American boy. And yet, as he shamefacedly had to admit, the outfit was perfect for a boy who would have to convince the entire school that he could pass as girl named Demi or end up as shark bait.

As he teetered about on the three-inch heels, Kyle noted that the sandals made him shorten his stride: "I even walk like a girl," he mumbled to himself. Somehow that observation didn’t upset him as much as it would have three weeks ago. He now saw it as an advantage to "walk like a girl," and he practised taking small, mincing steps when he was alone in his room later than evening.

Barb had no inkling of how much her son’s life had changed until the following morning when she got her first glimpse of the purple outfit.

"Kyle, you’re not going to school dressed like that, are you? In purple hair, purple eyeshade, purple nail polish, purple lipstick, purple clothes? You’d look like a grape Popsicle if you weren’t so … so buxom, and so … so round in the hips. Kyle, I’ve never seen you look so … feminine. If you go to school like that, everyone will know you’re wearing girls’ clothes. My lord, with those curves, they’d think you’re actually a girl if they didn’t already know better. You can’t fool them into thinking you’re a girl, Kyle. They know you already as a boy. Sweetie, aren’t you taking this dress-up game too far? I don’t want you to get beaten up."

What could Kyle say? He couldn’t tell her the truth. Could he tell her that he’d be expelled if he couldn’t persuade the school psychologist that he was a transsexual desperate for a sex change? Could he tell her that two youth gangs were extorting money from his friends and him, and that they were threatening to castrate him if he couldn’t transform himself into a convincing female? Could he tell her that he did in fact have a girlfriend, who was pressuring him to become her lesbian lover, and that the girl’s grandmother believed that Barb was trying to beat the transsexuality out of her son? Could he tell her any of these things?

Perhaps. Barb was a forgiving, lenient mother. She would have forgiven him his lies. Even so, he dared not tell her about the demands of the gangs. If he told her about the protection racket at school, she would, he feared, respond by immediately contacting his principal, the school board, and the police. Then word would get out that he had squealed on the gangs. If that happened, Kyle figured he’d have to change his sex for real and join the witness protection program — that is, if the gangs didn’t kill his mother and him first.

So what could Kyle tell his mother? He could tell her yet another lie. This time he definitely had her best interests at heart as he prevaricated. "Mom," he started. "You should always call me Demi. Everyone else does — or will, after today. I should tell you that I was dead wrong about being able to wear girls’ clothes to school without anyone knowing I was doing it. Everyone now knows. So it was getting real embarrassing to be pretending that I was still dressing like a boy."

"People started calling me a dweeb. I’d be passing by two guys and I’d overhear one of them say, ‘Isn’t Kyle pathetic? He actually thinks he’s dressed like a boy.’ Well, if I dress like this, and wear my boobs, they’ll know that I have no illusions about how I look. I’m going to do my darndest to look like a girl named Demi as long as we have the moped bet. And then, as soon as I’ve won it, I’ll show up in blue jeans and leather, and then they’ll know it was all a big game for me — that I was always playing make-believe. They’ll know I never actually thought I was putting one over on my classmates or my teachers. I was just trying to win a bet."

Barb couldn’t follow the logic. She doubted that anyone could. Naturally she concluded that Kyle had taken another step — a giant one this time — on his path to becoming Demi. He was now ready to be Demi in the most public way possible — in front of his classmates.

Barb held back her tears as she wished Demi the best possible day at school. "Take good care of yourself today, Demi. I want my daughter back in one piece."

"Yes, I guess I am your daughter right now. But don’t worry, mom, you’ll have your son back soon enough. Kyle’s not gone forever. As for Demi, she’s awfully proud to have a mom like you." And then, Kyle tottered out of the house and down the front path on his platform shoes.

As Barb watched him take his little baby steps, his bottom swaying from side to side like Sugar’s in Some Like It Hot, she fought back her tears as she reflected, "It’s finally happened — he has become she, and Kyle has become Demi."

She resolved to tell people from then on that she had but one child, a daughter named Demi. To prove to Demi that she had full acceptance, Barb took a few minutes to sort through Demi’s clothes before heading off to work. All of the boys’ clothes went into boxes. Only the girls’ clothes, Demi’s clothes, remained in what had been Kyle’s room.

As Barb anticipated, when Kyle returned from school, he didn’t even remark on the exile of the boys’ clothes to the cellar. He may not even have noticed that Demi’s wardrobe had displaced his own, for he was eager to talk about Demi’s remarkable day. He was, Barb saw, enormously ‘pumped’ by Demi’s debut at Hoover High. Indeed, so quickly did the story of her debut gush forth, you’d have thought that Kyle had forgotten the teenager’s oath to tell adults as little as possible.

"Mom, it was totally awesome! What a super day I had! I am so stoked! It was awesome, I tell you, totally awesome!"

When I started off to school, I figured it would be the worst day of my life. I figured they’d rag on me so much that I’d be gone by lunchtime. You wouldn’t believe it, mom, but I even had a map in my shoulder bag to show me where the railway yards are, just in case I had to hop a freight to get out of town real quick."

Barb chuckled at the specter of a purple, cross-dressing hobo.

"Mom, it’s not funny. I really expected to be creamed if I went to school with these." He caressed his right breast.

"But mom, it wasn’t like that! Not at all! About a block from school I found my best friends waiting for me. It was awesome! There was Steve, and Tim, Adrian and Alex, and Joannie. They were all waiting for me, they said, so that I wouldn’t have to enter the school campus alone."

"Who’s Joannie, dear?"

"She’s a real special friend, mom …, and then we got to the campus. You’d never believe it, but Derek was there. You know — he’s one of the guys I used to hang out with. He actually gave me the thumbs up! Can you imagine that? And then I saw the crowd!"

"What crowd, Demi?"

"All the kids. It looked like the entire school — including lots of the teachers — was waiting for me to arrive. There were hundreds of them, mom! Maybe thousands! And they were all waiting for me! For Demi!"

"My gosh, you must have been frightened, dear."

"Me? Never! I may look like a girl, mom, but I’m all man. I got my handbag ready. I’d put something heavy in it." (It was small barbell, but Kyle understandably didn’t tell his mother everything.) "If necessary, I was ready to start swinging. I wasn’t going to run. I was ready to rumble if they were."

He had now thoroughly alarmed his mother. All she could say was a mumbled ‘oh my, oh my, oh my."

"And at first it looked bad. A couple of guys started jeering, but Derek got them to stop. There were lots of wolf whistles — you know like guys do when a pretty girl walks by. But mostly it was real quiet, like no one knew what to do. Then I saw one of the older students — his name is Mika — hand over some money to Markko. He’s another one of the older students."

"Demi, are you saying that students were betting for and against you? That’s outrageous. I’m going to be calling your Principal first thing tomorrow."

"You can’t do that, mom. You’d get me into too much trouble. Anyway, why would you phone up to complain about gambling, when it was your very own son — I mean, your daughter — who WON the bet? Demi won! Don’t you understand? Demi was the big winner."

"Demi, what are you saying?"

"I’m saying that Mika was paying Markko because I really did, do, look like a real girl. And then — you’d never believe how totally awesome it was! — Markko started applauding me. You know the way they do at basketball games when they want the game to start — real rhythmic-like. Then a black dude named Sherm started doing it. Then the clapping spread! Soon it seemed like everyone was clapping! I know there was some booing. I know that. But most of the people were welcoming Demi to the school! Tons of people patted me on the back as I walked past them into the school! It was so rad."

Barb was duly impressed. And much relieved. What her reaction would have been if Demi had admitted to having her bottom repeatedly patted and pinched, and her breasts groped, as she passed through the throng will never be known, for Kyle was wise enough to know that Demi’s mother didn’t really want to be told that her daughter was treated during her first week at Hoover like a sex object by quite a few of the boys, who out of curiosity or lust, were interested in finding out which parts of Demi were genuine.

Nor did Barb really want to learn that the ninth-grade boys had decided already that "copping a feel of Demi’s breasts" was yet another of the many rites of passage by which they marked the arrival of their manhood. No, they hadn’t taken a vote. But when some of the more adventurous guys boasted about "touching Demi’s titties," it became a cool thing to do — if you were a fourteen-year-old boy. While Demi didn’t relish being pawed, Kyle thought the game harmless because the breasts, after all, weren’t real.

Kyle did, however, tell Barb that the vice-principal had yanked him from his first class. "This time you must have been afraid," she told him. Even if Demi wasn’t afraid of how the school administration might respond to a cross-dresser, Barb suddenly was. Her stomach dropped as she realized for the first time that she should have consulted the school principal before allowing her son to go to school as a girl named Demi.

"But it all happened so gradually," Barb silently consoled herself. "I certainly wasn’t going to ask the school administration if they’d allow my son to cross-dress in such a way that no one would ever realize he was doing it. It would have been folly to have asked for such a dispensation, and even more foolish to admit that we had a deal over a motor scooter. No, there was never a good time for informing the school that my son was miraculously turning into my daughter. Is Demi now paying a price for my mistakes?"

These self-recriminations might have lasted for hours, but Kyle interrupted Barb’s thoughts with an excited, "Mr. Cudmore, the vice-principal, he was furious, real red-faced, and he accused me of not keeping my promise to dress conservatively until after I had seen Dr. Loupi."

"Who’s Dr. Loupi and why were you supposed to see him?" Barb asked anxiously. Was Demi in poor health? She had to know.

"He’s the school shrink. He was just supposed to ask me some questions."

Barb had to ask several times before Kyle finally admitted that Dr. Loupi was supposed to determine whether he, actually Demi, was a transsexual.

"Oh, is that all it’s about? You had me worried for a moment. Now don’t fret, sweetie. It will be only one man’s opinion. But what do you want him to determine? If he says that you are a transsexual, will you be coming out of his office with a smile or a frown?"

"My life will be a lot easier," Kyle replied, "if he says I’m a transsexual."

"So you want him to say that Demi is the real you, that deep down you are really a girl?"

"Yeh, I guess," said Kyle. Yes, the doctor should be fool enough to believe whatever lies Demi fed him. But did Kyle actually want the doctor to be right in diagnosing Demi as a transsexual? Of course not.

Just because you dressed like a girl, just because your school accepted you as a girl, just because you’d told your own mother that she should think of you as her daughter, just because your gay boyfriend was beginning to wonder whether you were ‘male enough’ for him, and just because you were having a lesbian relationship with your girlfriend, that doesn’t mean that you’re anything other than an all-American boy from the heartland. At least that’s how Kyle saw it. In his own mind, he was still just a regular guy trying to get the moped that would ensure that he would be a hit with the girls, and a star among the boys.

"So what did Mr. Cudmore say next?"

"Well, I told him that I wasn’t breaking my word to him because all I’d promised was that I wouldn’t wear a skirt or dress to school. And I never would, mom! There are only two girls in my year who wear either on a regular basis. They both wear horn-rimmed glasses. Need I say more?"

"So Demi is much too cool to be caught dead at school in a dress?"

"Yeh, you’ve got it. Demi’s cool. After all, look at the way I dressed today! This outfit is so phat. I should, however, have bought some purple earrings. These hoops clash with the purple. A couple of the other girls commented on them. Do you think we could go shopping for some more earrings?"

Barb wasn’t ready for a fashion detour: "Demi, please tell me how your meeting with the vice-principal ended. I can’t bear not knowing."

"Well, he thought he could threaten me. He said something like, ‘So you want to be a girl. Well, Dehhhhh….mi’ — that’s how he said it, like he was trying to get me to despise my own name, he said, ‘we can definitely do something to give you your wish. Do you see this computer screen here? It’s got the file of a student named Kyle James on it. But I don’t see no Kyle in front of me.’"

"Now Demi, I’m sure the vice-principal has better grammar than that."

"He doesn’t. Anyway, Mr. Cudmore then told me that if I didn’t agree that very moment to go home to change into something more appropriate for a boy that he’d change the name and sex on my school records. When I called his bluff, he went ahead and did it. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is. I counted just five keystrokes. And then he showed me my file — ‘Demi James, sex female.’ It was awesome. Suddenly I’m officially a girl."

"My word! But Demi, don’t worry — it’s just as easy to turn you back into a boy."

"I’m not dumb, mom. I realize that! But the next thing he did — that was a bit more permanent."

"What did he do?" Barb had a sudden, stomach-churning vision of Mr. Cudmore’s computer changing her child’s genitalia with a single stroke.

"Mr. Cudmore said he’d announce over the public address system that a new girl had just enrolled in the school. He threatened to publicly tell the teachers and students to call me Demi from now on, if I didn’t go home to change into boys’ jeans. Well, I called his bluff."

"Was he bluffing?"

"Not exactly, he did make the announcement on the P.A. I’m glad he did, because all the other students were already calling me Demi, and it would have been really confusing — and embarrassing -- had some of the teachers called me Kyle."

"So let me get this — the vice-principal is insisting that everyone call you Demi and treat you like a real girl, and that doesn’t bother you?"

"No, it’s sort of cool. Naturally, when I change back into my regular boys’ clothes, I’ll get everyone to call me Kyle again. I’ll force Mr. Cudmore to change my file back to the way it was."

To herself, Barb mused, "Demi, I seriously doubt it will be that easy for you to go away. You’re here to stay, whatever Kyle might think. Of all people, Kyle should know that actions speak louder than words. After all, he was always racing around on his skateboard trying to impress."

Kyle was displeased with the vice-principal’s next decision: "After he told the whole school about Demi, Cudmore told me that he wouldn’t allow me to use the boy’s bathrooms or locker room, seeing as how I had become a girl."

"Are you saying, Demi, that you are now using the girls’ washroom at school?" Barb wasn’t sure she approved of that. Her son could get into trouble with the law if any of the girls complained about there being a ‘boy’ in their washroom violating their privacy. And one or two surely would.

"No way! Mr. Cudmore said he’d have me arrested if I tried to use either the girls’ toilets or their locker room. He said that there was a bathroom on the third floor that no one was using, because we’ve lost so many students since the school was originally built. He told he was going to unlock it, and that it would be my private washroom and change room — at least, until some other ‘demi-girls’ needed it too."

"How thoughtful of him. I’m surprised, Demi, to be told that Mr. Cudmore has a heart after all. Until now, you’ve not been describing a very nice man."

"Well, he still isn’t! Do you know what he did, mom? He put on a hand-painted sign on the washroom door. The sign didn’t say ‘men’s toilet’ or anything sensible. It said ‘The Demijohn’! Can you imagine! And it had one of those biological sex symbols — you know, the circle with the arrow or the cross."

"Yes, dear. Which symbol did Mr. Cudmore put on the sign of the … demi-john?" She just knew she wouldn’t like the answer.

"The circle had a question mark pointing downward. Everyone’s been laughing about it. But I don’t care. You know, mom, the more Mr. Cudmore picks on me, the more the other students like me. When I went back to class after the announcement, the other kids actually chanted my name, "Demi" several times. I think they’d still be doing it if the teacher hadn’t made them stop."

Kyle could have added that Demi had become even more popular after Coach Bryan had tried to throw her out of sex education class. For no reason at all, other than her gender, he ordered her to the vice-principal’s office. However, Demi was the very last person the vice-principal wanted to see back in his office. He was furious at the coach, as the entire class could tell from the scene that they overheard in the hallway just outside their classroom door. Once they realized that Demi had the power to get the coach into trouble, once they realized that she profoundly disturbed him, the entire class looked on the ‘new girl at school’ more fondly.

And so, for Demi it had been an upbeat day. No wonder she seemed to be on cloud nine. She had started the day afraid of total rejection, and she had found instead acceptance. Most girls who debuted at a high school in October found a far frostier welcome than she had. It had been a surprisingly wonderful day, the greatest surprise being after school let out.

"Gran is tied up at a women’s club meeting," Joannie told him. "If we go to my house, I’ll be able to show you how pleased I am that you’ve finally become Demi. You’re so sexy now. When we get to my room, I’ll show you how much I love Demi."

How much? Enough, it turned out, for Joannie to let Demi to hold her bare breasts for the first time. Demi, stripped down to her bra and panties, had, as planned, a body-shaking orgasm as she was asking for "real breasts just like Joannie’s."

It was a near-perfect day. Even the "demijohn" seemed like a blessing to Kyle as he drifted off to sleep later that night. The demijohn would, he now appreciated, protect Demi from the seniors who snuck occasionally into the boys’ washrooms to smoke a cigaret or to blow some weed.

"Joannie’s right," he admitted. "Demi is a hot chick. There’s no way I could safely use the same john as a bunch of guys getting stoned."

After such a sweet day, Kyle expected sweet dreams. And maybe he had them. But all he remembered the following morning was that he had awakened in a cold sweat with but one thought on his mind: "I’m going to get killed. I don’t mean the equivalent of being killed. I mean really killed, as in knifed, shot and beaten with a pipe. What am I going to do? I promised Joannie that I would go with her to the dance dressed as a boy. But if I do that, the gangs said that I’d be lucky to get off with being merely castrated." .

Kyle shuddered, for he was still very attached to his gonads. The last thought he could remember having before falling back to sleep was this: "Will they know that Demi’s a girl even when she dresses like a boy?"

That coming Saturday, Demi would look either like a sissy boy or like a girl in drag. As the girl had a more promising future than the boy, Kyle spent the intervening three days praying that Demi could pull it off — that she was such a hot chick that she’d look like a girl no matter what she wore. His future seemed to depend on everyone at the dance concert agreeing that, "Hey babe, the pirate drag is fooling no one. We all know you’re really a girl."

Continued in Part 11 where Demi will have to convince the doctor on Friday that she is a transsexual, and the raving crowd on Saturday, that she is, despite her male clothes and moustache, a "real chick."

So far Kyle has found it difficult to keep a deal he made with his mother: That if he wears girls’ clothes for a month that she would buy him a moped (a motor scooter). Hehas lost his friends, convinced his mother that he’s gay transsexual and dating a boy named Steve, posed as a lesbian named Demi in order to charm the grandmother of his girlfriend Joannie, who preferred that she wore the pants, and he, the panties, in their relationship, been tricked into appearing as a girl in front of thousands of people, and inadvertently started feminizing his body. In part 10, Demi started to take over Kyle’s life full time, willingly, in response to Joannie’s enticements, and unwillingly, in response to an ultimatum from the gangs at his high school.

Anything for a Moped? - Part 11 by: Dawn De Winter
Chapter Fourteen: Who’s the Most Feminine Boy at Hoover High?

"Well, well, well. I can see that you don’t do things halfway. That’s a fetchingly feminine outfit you’re wearing. You call that pink thing a halter top, don’t you? And those red slacks — what are they called?"

"They’re stretch red moleskin flares. They’re made out of Spandex."

"Well, they’re most becoming on you, as are those high-heeled sandals. To be totally frank, I had no idea that you’d look so … well rounded. Those breasts — are they real?"

"No, they’re breast forms. They were a gift from my girlfriend."

"What a truly odd gift for a boy to get from his girlfriend. Did she also give you the padding that gives you such a full figure?"

"Joannie gave me a bodyshaper, but my mom also helped out with a panty girdle that I can put pads into. You said it was odd to give boobs to a boy. Yeh, you’re right about that. But Dr. Loupi, I’m not really a boy. I’m a girl."

"But Demi, you have the body of a boy. You were born a boy, weren’t you?"

"Yeh, but something went wrong. I should have been born a girl."

"Now why is that, Demi?"

"Because if I had been born with a girl’s body, then I’d have real boobs, and a … well, you know what I’d also have."

"Would you like to have real breasts, Demi?"

"You bet I would. I would like to have breasts just like Joannie."

That last part slipped out. Kyle hadn’t meant to say it. "Joannie’s got me bewitched," he thought. "Every time I hear the word breasts, I end up asking for breasts just like hers. But you up there. If you’re listening, cancel the last order. I definitely want to keep my boy’s chest. Do you hear me? It’s a deal, okay?"

"Well, Demi, as I’m sure you know, there are ways for a boy to acquire breasts. Through implants, for example, or by taking hormones. What would you say if I were to tell you that we could start you on feminizing hormones this very day?

It was pure bluff. No one could treat Kyle without his mother’s consent, and Dr. Loupi was a PhD, not an M.D. They kept him well away from drugs. But Demi wouldn’t know what kind of degree Dr. Loupi had, and so was bound to take the suggestion as a real and present danger. Dr. Loupi expected Demi to show a lot less interest in becoming a girl if there were any real risk of it actually happening. He was acting on the vice-principal orders, Cudmore having told him, "Kyle James is no more of a transsexual than you are. He’s a fake. Prove it."

Kyle knew that there was only one safe answer for Demi: He couldn’t reject hormones out of hand. The doctor might then decide he wasn’t really a transsexual. And if that were the doctor’s diagnosis, the gangs might keep their promise to make Demi into a real woman. Suddenly, the perfect lie occurred to Kyle. He marveled at his own cleverness.

Demi carefully replied to Dr. Loupi: "I’m already taking hormones. There’s no need for any more. I’m already on my way to changing my body forever."

"Yeh," Kyle smirked — "like I’m soon going to have such big muscles and such a heavy beard that no one will ever again confuse me with a girl."

"Ah, you’re already taking hormones! And which doctor is supervising your gender reassignment? I will need his name for my records."

Who could it be? It had to be Dr. Olds, his family physician. There was no one else whose name Kyle could remember.

Dr. Loupi was genuinely impressed that Dr. Olds had agreed to help Demi to feminize: "I always thought he was so old-school. I wouldn’t have thought he knew the meaning of ‘transsexual,’ never mind diagnosing and treating you as one. Truly, truly remarkable."

The hormones were, for Dr. Loupi, definitive. By prescribing them, Dr. Olds had confirmed that Demi was so obvious a transsexual that even a senile dolt could recognize her core identity as female. But to be absolutely sure, and to create a file big enough to impress Vice Principal Cudmore, Dr. Loupi decided to give Demi a ‘gender identity’ test.

"I do hope that Demi passes the test," Dr. Loupi said to himself. "If she’s really a boy in her own head, then there will be no academic paper for Dr. Loupi, and no escape from Iowa."

A graduate of the most important Hungarian-language university in France, Dr. Loupi could never fully fathom the misfortunes that had stranded him in Des Moines. But he intended to get back to the big time. Demi would be his ticket.

But first she had to prove she was really a girl, despite her male body. Demi understood that she had to pass the gender test. Otherwise, she’d be soon gone and Kyle would be a goner.

Dr. Loupi’s test was not, however, an easy one to pass. It was, for a start, profoundly idiosyncratic. The doctor had created his own test by lifting questions from the questionnaires developed by various psychiatrists, clinics, HMO’s, and government agencies. He omitted most of the questions whose answers would be, in his opinion, "too obvious" to anyone trying to fool the tester. For example, someone who wanted to prove that he was "all male" would definitely know that he had to prefer football to soccer.

No, there weren’t going to be any obvious questions or answers on Dr. Loupi’s test. No indeed. As a result, Demi was often hard-pressed to pick out the answer that would prove that she was a transsexual. Her quandary started with the Rorschach ‘inkblot’ test. As Dr. Loupi thought it a waste of his own time to show his patients the more innocuous inkblots — you know, the ones where the only sane answers are "I see a man on a bicycle" or "I see a spider about to devour a housefly with a screaming human head," he had winnowed his stock of inkblots down to, in his opinion, the five most revealing.

Dr. Loupi figured that all five inkblots showed two lesbians having sex. But would Demi see them that way? Well, she did, but she dared not tell her interrogator that all of the inkblots appeared to be sexual in nature. So she told Dr. Loupi that she thought that all five of them featured two women.

"What are the two women doing?" Dr. Loupi asked rather breathlessly.

Demi figured that only a boy as crude as Kyle would think the two women were having sex with each other. So she said, "I think the two women are probably the same woman. She has … a split personality."

"Like you, Demi?" Dr. Loupi wondered. He wasn’t sure how to score this one. He’d never heard this particular answer before. He decided that it was consistent with Demi’s being a transsexual, but a rather frigid one who’d need hours and hours of therapy before she’d be able to have a ‘normal’ sex life.

The inkblots out of the way, Demi had a multiple-choice exam to write. She found it an extremely difficult one to ‘ace.’ To her, the correct answer — the answer that would keep her in lipstick and panties — was far from obvious. It was all very frustrating, for Demi expected to be asked such questions as whether she preferred gossiping to doing calculus, or window shopping for new clothes to playing war games on a playstation. Instead, Dr. Loupi wanted her to pick the correct ‘transsexual’ answer, the "I-really-am-a-girl" answer, from questions such as these:

1. Which of these gems is the most beautiful? (a) emerald; (b) diamond; (c) ruby; (d) sapphire.
2. Which of these is your favorite color? (a) pink; (b) lavender; (c) fuchsia; (d) magenta.
3. Which of these would make the best centerpiece on a dining room table? (a) African violets; (b) American beauty roses; (c) green carnations; (d) orchids.
4. Which of these would be the most embarrassing to be wearing if you were run over by a car? (a) torn, soiled underwear; (b) pink satin panties; (c) nerdy sneakers; (d) a British schoolboy uniform.
5. When I am happy, I (a) smile; (b) laugh; (c) giggle; (d) chuckle.
6. Which of these is the best reason for a boy to dress up like a girl? (a) to sneak into the girl’s locker room; (b) to become a cheerleader; (d) to get a seat on a lifeboat; (c) to please a strict, lesbian aunt.
7. The most fashionable clothes come from (a) Rome; (b) Paris; (c) Fifth Avenue; (d) a boutique.
8. Which desert is the best place to get a suntan? (a) Gobi; (b) Sonoran (c) Sahara; (d) Arabian.
9. What would a genie have to offer you to persuade you to change into the other sex? (a) the most sex ever; (b) a billion dollars; (c) Hollywood stardom; (e) a longer life.
10. If you were a girl for a day, which would you do? (a) flirt with boys at the mall; (b) tidy your room; (c) go dancing; (d) hang out in the girls’ shower room.
11. Which statement couldn’t possibly be true? (a) Every boy fantasizes about being a girl; (b) Most boys have tried on panties; (c) Some boys look good in a dress; (d) Most boys would wear a skirt to school if it improved their chances of having sex with the "best looking girl" in their class.
12. Which of these should a girl on a diet most avoid? (a) eating chocolates with the girls; (b) drinking brewskis with the boys; (c) being fed by her grandmother from the ‘Old Country’; (d) a bikini.
13. Romance stories teach us (a) what is chic; (b) the etiquette of dating; (c) the rewards of chastity; (d) beauty tips.
14. I am most likely to look at a boy’s (a) eyes; (b) clothes; (c) muscles; (d) girlfriend.
15. Which is most beautiful? (a) gold; (b) a rainbow; (c) a butterfly; (d) a wedding dress.
16. Which would be the most fun to wear? (a) a grass skirt; (b) earrings; (c) strawberry lipstick; (d) bracelets.
17. I most like the smell of (a) lilac; (b) perfume; (c) clean laundry; (d) dinner.
18. If you changed your sex, would you be (a) taller; (b) cuter; (c) more popular; (d) a better dancer.
19. Which best describes you? (a) love machine; (b) teacher’s pet; (c) sex pistol; (d) afraid of spiders.
20. Which birthday present would you prefer? (a) a DVD of the "Little Mermaid"; (b) a ticket to the ice follies; (c) silk pajamas; (d) roller skates.
21. Which of these is the most fashionable? (a) bell bottom pants; (b) a beehive hairdo; (c) a pony tail; (d) K-Mart.
22. Which is the most erotic? (a) being spanked by a woman dressed in leather; (c) wearing four-inch spiked heels; (c) dressing up like Alice in Wonderland; (d) riding a stallion bareback.
23. If a boy told you he thought you were "real pretty," would you (a) hit him; (b) cry; (c) smile bashfully; (d) correct his grammar.
24. Who is the most heroic? (a) a Zulu warrior charging a machine gun ; (b) a Roman gladiator fighting a lion; (c) a single mom raising six kids on her own; (d) a cross-dressing virgin burned at the stake.
25. In a car, which is the most essential? (a) gas pedal; (b) brakes; (c) carburetor; (d) vanity mirror.
26. Which statement is least true of teenage boys? (a) they always think about sex; (b) they are rude; (c) they are reckless; (d) they think girls are stupid.
27. What would a genie have to offer you to persuade you to change into the other sex? (a) great sex; (b) a billion dollars; (c) Hollywood stardom; (d) a longer life.
28. Which would be most fun to do with your mother? (a) shop for clothes; (b) talk about boys; (c) attend a ballet; (d) tan in the sun at the beach.
29. Which feels best? (a) silk; (b) satin; (c) denim; (d) hand cream.
30. Girls have more fun than boys because (a) boys flatter them; (b) they have pajama parties; (c) they get more attention; (d) they have more choice in what to wear.

Overall, there were precisely sixty-nine questions. Demi did her best to think like a woman, but she was far from confident about the outcome. Indeed, she became more and more anxious about her fate as Dr. Loupi laboriously checked and rechecked her answers. She really thought she was in trouble when he went over the test for a third time. It was obvious he couldn’t believe the results.

Finally the doctor spoke: "Demi, I don’t know if this is good news or not, but there is no question that you are a transsexual. Or, to be precise, you scored like a female. In fact, and this is definitely a first, you gave the most "feminine" answer to every question. Sixty-nine out of sixty-nine! It’s remarkable. None of the actual, anatomically correct girls to take the test ever got 100%. For starters, no else got both the gem and the desert questions right. You’re the first person, Demi, to be so complete a woman that you knew the best place to get a suntan and the most beautiful gem for a woman to wear. This is really, really exciting! Demi, you’re the most feminine person I’ve ever met!"

Demi was, to put it mildly, non-plussed. While she had wanted to score like a girl, it was profoundly unsettling to be told that she had unerringly chosen the feminine answer. Half the time she had been guessing wildly. Which gem was most beautiful? How could Demi know? So she had just picked the one with the glitteriest name — and she had gotten the answer right! Every time! Now what did that suggest to Demi? The same thing it said to Dr. Loupi — that maybe, just maybe, Kyle wasn’t the all-American boy that he claimed to be.

The test results shook Kyle to his very foundations. They said he thought more like a true female than most of the girls he knew. The rest of the session with Dr. Loupi was a total blur, as though it were happening to someone else. Kyle nodded vacantly as he was asked whether he had ever considered ‘sex with another girl,’ and as a follow-up, whether Demi was likely to be a lesbian after her sex change.

Kyle’s nodding acquiescence became even more mechanical and mindless as he was congratulated on making the right choice in feminizing his body to suit his mind; as he was told that Dr. Loupi would insist on the school administration’s accepting Demi as a girl; and as he was asked to sign a consent form to allow Dr. Loupi to write up Demi’s ‘remarkable story’ for a medical journal.

Kyle was in such a daze that he even thanked Dr. Loupi for promising to help Demi to lobby the state medical association and attorney general’s office for permission to have ‘the operation’ while she was still a minor. Befuddled, Kyle even nodded vacantly as the doctor thought to flatter him by saying, "If there was ever a pubertal boy who was the ideal candidate for sexual reassignment surgery, it must be you, Demi. Sixty-nine out of sixty-nine! Extraordinary, simply extraordinary!

Kyle didn’t even utter a peep when the doctor promised to write the various authorities that very afternoon. "If Dr. Loupi, the esteemed graduate of Gabor University has anything to say about it, you, Demi, will have a perfect female body in time for you and your pretty girlfriends to really celebrate your sixteenth birthday. Ah, sweet sixteen …."

As the doctor seemed then to sink into a reverie, Kyle took his leave. The boy came away from the session with a deep sense of failure, even as Demi delighted in having passed with flying colors — namely, pink, lavender, fuchsia and magenta. Yet Kyle was in such a blue funk that Demi didn’t get her way this time. While Demi was anxious to tell Joannie the ‘good news,’ Kyle decided instead to play hooky from the next class. He needed some time to think, and so he retreated to the most private place in the entire school — to the Demijohn. Once there, he secreted himself into a stall to brood.

Within minutes he heard someone sneak into the room. Fear was Kyle’s first response. Since no other student had permission to use the Demijohn, Kyle figured that the newcomer was up to no good: "Jeez, it could be Jason or Rob. Maybe they have knives. Maybe they’re here to finish me off now that Derek and Steve aren’t around to help me. Or maybe it’s one of the gang members who doesn’t agree with Markko and Sherm about letting me live a while longer."

Anxiously he peered through a crack in the door. He saw someone standing at the urinal, peeing. It should have been a guy. Considering what was going down, it had to be a guy. But it didn’t look like a guy! Those were definitely girls’ clothes. And that hair sure had a feminine cut.

And then the person at the urinal turned to face the stalls, and Kyle could see that it was Vicky Andrews. Totally awesome! The quarterback’s girlfriend for the last year and a half was a GUY!

Curiosity demanded that Kyle emerge from the stall and that Demi find out how Vicky Andrews had the nerve to use a space that had been reserved for Demi’s exclusive use.

"What are you doing here?" Demi asked. "This is the demijohn. I’m the only one allowed to use it because I’m the only one who is …" Demi stopped before she said something really stupid. Instead, she spluttered, "You’re actually a guy! Is that why you’re using the Demijohn?"

"How brilliant of you, Kyle, to figure out that I’m a guy after you spied on me at the urinal. You’re such a mental giant. God, how I hate you! You think dressing up as a girl is some big game. Ha! Ha! Ha! But for some of us it’s dead serious. I really hate you. You’re the reason why I’m being forced to use the Demijohn."

"Huh? You’ve always been a girl for as long as I’ve known you. That’s got to be at least two years. Where have you been taking a leak before now? Not in the girl’s bathroom?"

"Of course, I was using the girls’ washroom, and their locker room. As far as this school was concerned, I was a girl, plain and simple. My records said so. Miss Cranston, the gym teacher, accidentally discovered my secret, but she didn’t give it away. She made sure I had privacy whenever I showered or dressed — even after I joined the cheerleading squad. Everything was going great … until Kyle James got it into his stupid boy’s head that it would be a lark to dress up like a girly. Oh, I hate you so. You’re so selfish, Kyle James. You’ve ruined everything!" She began to cry.

"I don’t understand, Vicky. Everyone thinks you’re a girl, so why did you stop using the girls’ washroom? I didn’t tell you to stop going there."

"But Miss Cranston did!" Vicky wailed. "She told me that the principal himself sent out a memo stating that if any teachers knew of any other cross-dressing males at the school, that their names had to be given to him, and that ‘said transvestites would henceforth have to use the lavatory facility known as the demijohn.’ Miss Cranston told me she’d lose her job if she continued to protect me now that she had express orders to send ‘my kind’ here. So you see, Kyle, it’s all your fault." Then she bawled some more.

So Vicky Andrews was really a boy, a boy who had successfully passed as a girl for two years at Hoover High? A girl who had been dating Brad Mitty, the quarterback, for eighteen months? And he was a boy who had frequently boasted about ‘screwing the head cheerleader’? These questions led to another, which Kyle was indelicate enough to ask: "Won’t Brad go ballistic when he finds out that he’s been having sex with a boy?"

Vicky Andrews stopped crying long enough to study Kyle with amazement: "What are you?" she asked, "a demi wit? Brad is very aware and very grateful that I’m a boy."

"You’re not saying the high school quarterback, Coach Bryant’s pet, is gay? You can’t be saying that! No way!"

"Kyle, you’d better stick to being a boy, ‘cause you’re much too thick-headed to be a successful girl! Not only is Brad gay, but he’s infuriatingly passive. Just once I wish he’d agreed to be on top."

"No way!"

"Yes, way! In fact, though nobody else knows it yet, we sort of broke up on Wednesday night after I told him he was undermining my femininity by always insisting that I do it to him. There I was, pumping away, Brad with his legs high in the air, and I said to myself, ‘Girl, this has got to stop. You are not acting like a lady.’ So I told him I’d no longer go steady with him. He cried a lot but he understood in the end why I need to look around for a real man. And Kyle, that’s man clearly won’t be you."

"A lot you’d know," he blustered. "I can be a real man anytime I want to, but right now I’m getting off on being a girl. And I don’t want you to call me Kyle. When I’m dressed like this, especially when you’re in my space, you’d better call me Demi — just like everyone else does."

"Well, De….mi, thanks to you, the whole school is soon going to know that I’m a boy and that Brad Mitty is as ‘queer as folk’. I hope you’re pleased with yourself, Demi James, for if you’re weren’t so selfish Brad and I wouldn’t be on the verge of becoming even bigger jokes around here than you are!"

As Demi glared, Vicky suddenly realized how stupid it was to pick a fight with the only other cross-dressing boy in the school. "I can’t believe he takes his cross-dressing seriously. Everything is always a joke with Kyle. But he is, I have to admit, forcing a lot of people to confront their prejudices about transgendered folk. I’ve heard more people talking about whether it’s ‘okay’ for a person to ‘change their sex’ in the past three days than I’ve heard in my entire life. Whatever his motive, Kyle has not been entirely bad for the cause."

Yet she had to know whether any part of ‘Kyle’s act’ was sincere. So she asked Demi straight out: "A lot of the people around here think you really are a transsexual. I don’t think you are. That’s why I’m so angry at you. I don’t like frauds. Admit it, Demi. Admit to me that you have no real desire to be female. Come on. I’ve told you about Brad and me. You owe me the truth: what’s your game? What’s the real reason Kyle’s been mincing around the school pretending to be Demi?"

Was Kyle tempted to confess all? Did he contemplate telling Vicky about the moped? Now, those really are, if you think about it, two dumb questions. Who would be foolish enough to spill the beans to Vicky Andrews, a ‘girl’ who’d just related the intimate details of her sex life? Not Kyle! If Vicky talked spitefully about a boy she had dated, what would she say about a boy that she hated?

And so, Kyle chose the safest course, yet another lie. Or he believed it to be a lie: "I’ve become Demi for the same reason that you — is it Victor? — became Vicky. According to Dr. Loupi, the school’s shrink, I am definitely a transsexual. He told me that he’d never met anyone, boy or girl, with a more female personality than mine. So there!"

In the demijohn, it was a useful lie. It immediately transformed Vicky from foe to friend. She started weeping again. "I can’t believe it. At last there’s someone here who’s just like me! I thought I was the only one. Oh Demi, I love you so much!"

Then she put a bear hug on Kyle. To his horror, she gave him a big kiss on the lips. As the cheerleading had put some muscle on Vicky, for a few seconds Kyle was unable to pull away. As he struggled for air, Kyle’s life rushed before him: It ended sordidly in the demijohn, kissed to death by another boy. No, that wasn’t quite right — his obituary would actually say, "Demi had been kissed to death by another girl!"

"This can’t be happening to me," Demi thought. "I am not a lesbian!"

No, that wasn’t right either. "I am a lesbian. That’s what Joannie says I am." If Demi wasn’t a lesbian, then she was a compulsive liar, for there had already been many occasions when she had pulled away from Joannie’s lips just long enough to agree, breathlessly, that, "Yes indeed, there’s nothing in the whole world as good as kissing another girl."

But not this girl! Demi was a ‘one-woman’ girl. There was no way she was going to cheat on Joannie with the quarterback’s boyfriend, even if she was his ex-girlfriend! So, Demi kept squirming until she was free of Vicky’s bear hug.

"Vicky, I don’t know what kind of girl you think I am. But I’m not the type who cheats on her girlfriend. I’m Joannie’s chick, and no one else’s."

"Don’t be silly, Demi. I don’t want to be your girl. I just want us to be sisters. If you hadn’t noticed, I go for the dreamy quarterback type. I’d much rather sex it up with your friend Steve than with you. Now do tell me: What does Steve like to do in bed? Brad is positive you’d be the one to know. Both Brad and I have been real curious about you two. Brad thinks you must have trouble sitting down after a night with Steve. But I doubt that’s true. I bet Steve’s the one who rolls over. What about it, Demi? Who gets to play ‘the boy’ when you two tumble?"

"What kind of girl do you think I am?" Demi spluttered. "I just told you that Joannie’s my sweetie. I don’t cheat on her. I’ve kissed Steve, just like I kissed you. But I’ve never had sex with him, and I never will!"

"And why wouldn’t you? He’s such a hunk. Don’t tell me you’re a lesbian, Demi?" As Demi’s blushed brightly, Vicky giggled, "You are, aren’t you? Wow, you’re the first dyke I’ve ever met who has a penis — you know, a real one. You do have a penis, right, Demi? Don’t tell me you’ve had the operation. I’d die with envy if you were the first to get rid of your willie."

Whatever Demi thought of the question, Kyle didn’t like it one bit. "That’s a stupid question to ask, Vicky. Just look at me. Of course, I’m all male still. Don’t be fooled by the makeup. If you look real close, you’ll easily see that I’ve got more guy hormones churning away inside me than nine-tenths of the boys do. I just know that it’s going to be real hard for me to cover up my beard in a month or so."

"Your beard? I don’t see one. And you’ve got about as much fuzz on your upper lip as a peeled peach. You may still have your willie, Demi, but it doesn’t take much makeup for you to look like a girl."

To herself, Vicky said, "You’re even rather cute as a girl. I heard several guys say that you looked ‘cute’ in purple. You’ll never be a beauty, Demi, but I can see why boys could think you were really ‘cute’. If I were a lesbian, I could go for you myself."

But handsome, virile Steve was more Vicky’s type, and so she asked, while Demi was still searching her mind for a more fitting metaphor for her ‘beard’: "If you’re not Steve’s girlfriend, do you think I could be? I’m dumping Brad. He’s yours if you want him. Do you think you could introduce me to Steve Lancer? That would be a very sisterly thing for you to do."

"Yeh, I suppose."

Demi to her own amazement was jealous. She wanted Steve for herself. It’s not that she wanted to have sex with Steve; after all, Demi ruled out ‘sex with boys’. It’s just that Demi delighted in Steve’s courting. He made her feel special. He made her feel pretty. She even liked the way he kissed. Thus Demi, even though she was Joannie’s girl, was very reluctant to see another girl move in on Steve. But what could she say to Vicky? There was only one thing she could say, "If you join our table at lunch on Monday I’ll introduce you to Steve."

"Thanks. But I’ll wait until word spreads, as I’m sure it will, about my being a guy."

"Do you still have your original male equipment?"

"Yeh, so far. If Steve knows I’ve got a boy’s body, then he’ll be more likely to pay attention to me when I sit at your table."

"Vicky, I could tell Steve today about you and Brad, and then you’ll be able to join us on Monday. How about that?"

"You’d do that for me? What a sweetheart you are! But do be discrete. It’s maybe possible that we can keep my sex a secret from the rest of the school. Brad won’t talk. He won’t want anyone to know he’s gay. Maybe we can keep everything a secret."

With a chaste kiss, they bade each other adieu — until their next shared class.

Outside the demijohn, both girls soon regretted their indiscretion. They were natural born gossips, as was Steve. Before school let out for the weekend, most of Hoover High, including the entire ninth grade, knew about the gay quarterback and the cross-dressing cheerleader, as well as the results of Demi’s gender test. Kyle was far from pleased that the news that he was "the most female person ever tested by Dr. Loupi" elicited far less surprise than did the news that the star quarterback was a "practising homosexual."

Demi also didn’t like the speculative look that flickered on Steve’s face whenever Vicky strolled by, which she seemed to be doing a lot. As Demi watched Steve obsessively, Joannie got jealous, and Brad Mitty got angry.

Brad Mitty? What’s he got to do with the love triangle that Demi, Joannie and Steve had been devising? Well, Brad didn’t understand triangulation. A sweet and simple boy, who had flunked two grades before he’d been identified as a ‘star quarterback too smart to fail’, he believed in love as a straight line.

And the line that he proposed to draw — now that virtually the entire school had learned that "Brad Mitty is queer," was one that would bind him to ‘gay’ Steve.

Less than a month ago, Steve had been friendless — apparently the only boy at Hoover to be ‘bent’ from the straight and narrow. Or so it seemed. Now, he was about to acquire two ardent suitors, Brad and Vicky, both of them eager to rebound higher than the other from their smashed love affair.

Steve was also about to receive the full-time attention of a matchmaker. From now on, Joannie was going to do her utmost to make sure that Steve settled for the cheerleader or the quarterback, and left her beloved Demi alone.

Yet would Demi leave Steve alone? As Joannie watched Demi watch Brad watch Vicky watch Steve, Joannie knew that she’d have to use all of her feminine wiles to make sure that Demi stayed true to her destiny — which was to become, and always to remain, ‘Joannie’s girl.’

Chapter Fifteen: Did Everyone Rave About Demi?

Elvira had never been more unctuous. It was late Saturday afternoon and she was praising Barb with faint damns: "My dear, I’m so pleased you’ve finally accepted Demi’s true nature. It took you quite a while, mind you, but didn’t you come through like a trooper in the end? Kyle was such an effeminate boy, it’s a bit surprising that he persisted as long as he did with boys’ clothes."

"Effeminate? Why Kyle was never that. Until recently he was, if anything, too macho for my liking."

"Oh yes, I’m sure Demi’s moods were always a puzzle to you. Your mistakes many mothers would have made. I’m sure you were trying to help Demi when you encouraged her to deny for so many long and fruitless years that she was, deep down, a girl as real as any other — maybe not in her body, but definitely in her spirit. Sometimes we mothers are deaf to the entreaties of our children, as we simply don’t want to admit that they are in pain. We don’t want to accept that somehow we have reared a transsexual."

"Elvira, you’re not being fair. It’s only in this past month that I had any inkling that Kyle wanted to dress up like a female, never mind be one."

"And yet, you once told me that Demi spent a huge portion of her childhood pretending to be Joan or Ark."

"Elvira, you’re exaggerating. Occasionally, Kyle pretended that he was a comic book heroine, but neither of us placed much importance in the gender of the heroes he emulated. To have done so would have been sexist, as I explained to him more than once when he was a small boy."

"Well, Barb, it is possible that you planted the seeds of Demi’s transsexualism, but I wouldn’t want to blame you for one of Nature’s mistakes."

"Don’t call my child a mistake!"

"Now, now. Barb you know I meant no harm. I was just trying to say that one out of a thousand girls is going to be special — like Demi is. They’re going to be born with the wrong genitalia. It happens. Statistically it’s bound to happen. I’m sure that Demi is a biological accident rather than the unfortunate product of a home with a dominant mother, and no father."

"Is that why your son is gay, Elvira?" Barb asked icily.

"Now Barb, I should tell you that I’ve concluded that Steve isn’t gay after all. He’s just a little confused. After all, any boy dating Demi is bound to get a mite confused."

"That’s not how I see it. My son, Elvira, was quite normal until your son started courting him. You and your son seem to be doing your utmost to turn my Kyle into a drag queen!"

Elvira patted Barb’s hand: "Now, now, I know you’re upset, and I forgive you. But be honest, Barb, you know full well that you gave birth to a daughter. Demi was conceived in the womb."

Suddenly, Barb burst into tears. "It’s true, it’s all true," she wept. "I’ve been so blind to my baby’s needs. Yesterday I got a call from the school psychologist, a Dr. Loupi, and he told me straight out — ‘Demi,’ he said, ‘is a transsexual. She thinks like a girl. She sees herself as a girl. She has always been a girl in her own mind." He then told me that he gave Demi a gender identity test and that she scored more ‘female’ than any of the biological girls who’ve taken the test!"

"So what did the good doctor recommend?"

"He advised me to ask the state health department for special permission to have Demi ‘sexually reassigned’ — you know, to have her body made as feminine as possible. He said it was normally impossible to find a surgeon willing to do the operation on such a young teen, but that he could convince the authorities that there was no doubt that Demi would benefit from immediate reassignment."

"Well, are you going to take the doctor’s advice? I think you should, Barb, for Demi has now started dating boys in earnest. And she, and the boys, would be a lot happier if Demi had the body of a normal girl. Steve told me that Demi has said on numerous occasions that she wished she had a vagina so that they could make love the normal way."

"A vagina? Really? But Elvira, what are you implying? Have they already had intercourse in an abnormal way?"

Elvira got huffy: "Well, I wouldn’t know that! There are some things that a boy doesn’t tell his mother, no matter how close they are."

"Thank goodness for small mercies."

"However, he has told me — and this proves how straight and normal my son is becoming — that he grooves on Demi’s femininity. We both know our two children are infatuated with each other, Barb, and it’s only natural, for your child is a girl and my son loves girls."

Barb crossed her arms: "I’m not sure that I should, in the circumstances, be agreeing to overnight dates. Shouldn’t I be trying to protect my daughter’s virtue from your son?"

"Barb, you cannot protect what already has been lost. Our children shouldn’t have to hide their sexuality from us. They have become, whether we like it or not, sexually active. We both are modern mothers. We should help rather than hinder the maturing process. And never fear, Barb, I’ve instructed my son in the use of condoms. As there is virtually no risk of pregnancy or disease, we should lighten up and let our children experience the unadulterated joy of first love."

Just at that moment, Elvira saw Demi descending the stairway of the James home. "Oh Demi, you look marvelous. I just adore Capri pants, and that halter top shows off your navel divinely."

To Barb, Elvira whispered, "She’s a very pretty girl. Now promise me you’ll immediately look into the operation that the doctor recommended. You don’t want to let Demi down again."

Barb rasped: "I’m giving the doctor’s advice strong consideration. But everything is happening much too fast. I’m not going to do anything until Demi gives me the signal that she wants the surgery. I’m not going to impose anything on my daughter."

"And who was saying that you should?" whispered Elvira. "Barb, you do get the oddest notions."

The whispering had to stop: Demi was well within earshot. And so, Elvira addressed both daughter and mother: "Demi, Steve didn’t come with me. He’s waiting for you at home with the boys’ clothes he, or should I say we, bought for you to wear to the dance tonight. Just think, Demi, how much fun it will be to fool some of the boys at the dance into thinking you’re one of them."

Demi gulped in panic, as she thought, "Some of the boys? Some of the boys will think I’m one of them? Cripes, if that happens, the gangs will murder me!"

To the two adults she said, "Oh, I don’t think I’ll fool any of the boys. They’ll all see through my disguise. Everyone will know I’m a girl no matter how I dress tonight."

It was false bravado. Demi was whistling past the cemetery. Yet Barb was impressed: "I can’t believe it," she thought, "but Demi is now so convinced of her essential femininity that she thinks it would shine through even if she dressed again as Kyle. It’s so obvious to me now that Dr. Loupi is right about Demi’s true gender. How could I have been so blind to reality?"

Even Elvira was impressed. For the first time since she had begun her campaign ‘to cure’ her son of his homosexuality, she wondered whether she had been inadvertently telling the truth about Demi. Maybe her son had indeed fallen in love with a transsexual! If so, she wanted them to consummate their relationship as quickly as possible. She assumed that once Steve had lost his virginity to someone who dressed and acted like a girl, that he would lose interest in boys. At least that had been the game plan from the moment she had learned that Kyle James was, for some reason, cross-dressing at school.

As Demi and Elvira headed down the path to the car, doors could be heard slamming in the house behind them. "I do hope your mother’s not cracking up," Elvira said virtuously, "she does seem to be under a lot of strain lately. She probably hasn’t told you, but we’ve been losing quite a few battles lately in our noble fight to save the prairie dog. Why, just last week, our Congressman refused to introduce a resolution to declare the prairie dog the national rodent."

"I didn’t know that," said Demi.

"There are many things that you don’t know, dear Demi. For starters, I’m sure you have no idea — unless you’ve been eavesdropping — that your mother has just agreed to your going to an NBA game with Steve. Isn’t that fabulous news! Now get in the car and I’ll tell you all about the date that we’ve planned for you, as I drive you to your girlfriend’s house."

"Did you say that Steve is going to take me to an NBA game? That’s too cool to be real. Is there going to be a exhibition game in Des Moines? I didn’t hear about one."

"Don’t be silly, Demi. Steve wants to take you to a real game, a league game. He wants to take you to Chicago so that you can see the Bulls play the Knickerbockers, his dad’s team."

The Bulls versus the Knicks? Whatever Demi thought of the idea, Kyle believed he had just died and gone to heaven. This was the most totally awesome news he’d ever heard.

Or at least that was Kyle’s reaction. Demi, however, wondered about the sleeping accommodations in Chicago. She didn’t want to be forced to share the bed of a boy who, she knew, lusted after Kyle’s body. So Demi asked, "Will you be going with us — you know, as a chaperone? And will we have two rooms?"

"Yes to both your questions. I’ll be the one to take the two of you to Chicago. And we’ll be booking two rooms at the Parker House. That’s quite an exclusive hotel, you know. Just think, Demi, you’ll have courtside seats to an NBA game and you’ll be meeting Steve’s father, and I’m sure he’ll be introducing you to some of the other Knickerbockers. Your mother has already agreed to the trip, provided that you spend only one night, a Saturday, away from home. May I tell Steve that he has a date with you in Chicago?"

"You bet! I can’t believe it! I’m going to a professional basketball game and I’m going to meet all the Knicks!"

This was such great news that Demi suddenly wondered why Steve hadn’t been there to tell it to her himself. "Where’s Steve?" she asked. "It’s hard to imagine that he didn’t want to be the first one to tell me that we’re going to a pro game."

"Dear, I decided it would be much too upsetting for him to be along for this ride. After all, he is fully cognizant that you are planning to cheat on him tonight with Joannie Smith. My son must be a true gentleman of the old school. That’s the only possible explanation that I can find for his imploring me to help his girlfriend to shack up tonight with a little tart like Joannie Smith!"

Demi pouted: "Joannie is not a tart! You have no right to talk about her that way!"

"Now, now, Demi, don’t get your panties in a knot. I’m sure you’re both good girls and that you personally are not into lesbianism, which, in my humble opinion, is a revolting practise. I expect you to keep your hands to yourself tonight, both of you, as good girls should."

"I can’t make promises for Joannie, and I’m not going to let you tell me what to do."

"Oh, aren’t you a feisty little girl! Well, Demi, you should heed my wishes. I’m sure you don’t want your mother to know what you’ve been up to."

"What are you talking about?" Demi worried.

"Well, for starters, that your date tonight is not with my son, as your mother believes, but with a lesbian to whom she has never been introduced."

"I tried to tell my mom about Joannie. She wouldn’t listen. Anyway, my mom would probably prefer me to date a girl than a boy. So you can’t threaten me!"

"Of course you may be right, dear Demi, about your mother forgiving your lies to her about Joannie. But what about your lies about me to Mrs. Smith? Your mother is a proud lady and she won’t be pleased, not one bit, that your lies had been damaging her reputation."

"I didn’t lie to Joannie’s gran about you," Demi blustered.

"Oh yes you did! When Joannie told her that two gangs of ruffians were threatening you with bodily harm, Virginia Smith got sufficiently concerned about your well being to telephone me. The call was very interesting, especially after she thanked me for allowing you to change into girls’ clothes at my house, so that your mother wouldn’t beat you. I’m sure your mother would love to have that conversation repeated to her."

"You … you … didn’t tell Mrs. Smith that I’ve been lying to her, did you? Please tell me you didn’t!"

"Of course not. Steve and I are your true blue friends, Demi. We’re the people you should never lie to. We truly have your best interests at heart. So naturally I backed up your lie. Virginia Smith is more convinced than ever that I’m a saint, and your mother, a brute."

Greatly relieved, Demi stupidly asked, "How can I ever thank you enough?"

Elvira told her in no uncertain terms: first, Demi and Joannie would behave themselves tonight; second, that Demi would in future dress in a more ladylike fashion when she was around Elvira’s son. "I want to see more skirts and fewer jeans," Elvira admonished. "And when we’re in Chicago, you’re to wear dresses, only dresses. Do you hear? This may be the most important date of my son’s life, and I want him always to remember you in a tight dress that showed off your curves."

"And third …"

There was a third condition? Demi had a good idea of what it might be. She was, however, perplexed by her reaction to what she heard next: "And third, Demi, I insist that you stop being such a cock tease. If you’re not prepared to give him what he wants, what any red-blooded boy needs, then you should stop dating Steve entirely. That would mean, of course, no more basketball games. And I must warn you that I am definitely not prepared to lie to my friends and your mother in order to protect my son’s ex-girlfriend."

"Does Steve know we’re having this conversation?"

"My dear Demi, he doesn’t yet know he’s going with you to Chicago. But I have arranged for everything and I’m sure he will be as delighted as you are to see an NBA game and his father. You mustn’t spoil this date for Steve. And so if you give me a kiss right now on this cheek, then I’ll know that you agree that Steve should never be told anything that would distress him. As a rule, Demi, never forget that women are tougher than men. We have, therefore, a duty not too burden men with too much information about what’s going on around them. We girls must keep our girlish secrets. Agreed?"

After a brief deliberation, Demi kissed Elvira on the cheek. Malevolently, Demi applied maximum suction, but failed to give the ‘wicked witch’ a hickey. For the rest of the trip to Joannie’s, they were both silent, as Elvira gloated and Demi pondered the implications of the sexual thrill she had gotten out of being ordered, more or less, to spread her legs for Steve.

As Kyle had no intention of ever having sex with another boy, he planned to trick the Lancers into leaving Demi in peace when they all reached Chicago. He wasn’t sure just how he’d manage to sleep alone, but he did know one thing — it wasn’t at all helpful that his body, unlike his mind, did seem to be interested in making it with Steve.

"It’s Demi’s fault," Kyle reflected, "She’s a girl, so she’s interested in boys that way."

Joannie was not pleased with the timid peck she received from Demi at her front door, but once inside, away from Elvira’s prying eyes, Demi made it lustily clear that Kyle had told another lie. Since Demi could count on Joannie to keep their lovemaking a secret from the Lancers, Demi couldn’t think of a single reason in the whole wide world for keeping her hands, and her lips, to herself.

Joannie, however, was anxious to get Demi into her ‘boys’ outfit,’ and so after some eager fumbling, she whispered, "We can’t do that sort of thing in the front hall. We’ve got to go up to my room. Wait till you see the clothes I’ve got waiting for you."

When they got to Joannie’s room, the two girls stripped to their underwear. Joannie even removed her bra. Once again, Joannie made sure that Demi associated sexual release with the feel of her own satin panties and her own breathless request to "have breasts just like Joannie’s."

As Demi took her shower, Joannie laid out their clothes for the "Hell’s Vixens" concert. As promised, everything had been designed for a man to wear. Even so, Demi needn’t have worried about looking too ‘masculine’ in the clothes that Joannie had ordered from "The Fantasy Male," a shop that catered to the clubbing gays of West Hollywood.

Thus the store’s ‘pirate clothes’ were inspired by those historians who argued that the women they held for ransom were far more likely to leave their ships with their virginity intact than were their cabin boys. While Joannie had no idea that a pirate ship was a gay sauna with sails, she had been thrilled to discover that the store carried ‘guy clothes" that would accentuate, rather than challenge, Demi’s intrinsic femininity.

Normally, Kyle would have found the outfit appalling. It would have required a promise of actual intercourse to have coaxed him into it. But, under gang orders never to dress as a male in public, Demi broke into a huge smile when she saw the ‘boys’ clothes’ that Joannie had selected for her to wear. Shyly, Demi tried to put on the first item, a silver gaff, while still wearing her towel like a dress. However, she couldn’t figure how it worked, and in her confusion, the towel slipped to the ground. For the first time, Demi stood nude before Joannie.

As Demi’s face became as red as the apple in the Garden of Eden, Joannie gruffly asked, "Why should you be embarrassed, Demi? We girls see each other naked all the time. Now, come over here and I’ll show you how to put on your gaff. If you haven’t already guessed, it’s designed to tuck away your boy parts so that you’ll look totally feminine down there even when you’re wearing only your panties. I’ve got a couple of gaffs for you, and I think you should always wear one of them, so that if rude boys try to look up your skirt or yank down your slacks, they’ll never guess that once upon a time you were one of them." She tucked Kyle into place.

"Are you sure you got this thing at The Fantasy Male?" Demi asked. "It doesn’t look like the sort of thing a guy would wear."

"I did get the gaffs at another store," Joannie confessed. "But Demi, sometimes you say really foolish things. Why would a girl wear a gaff? It’s obviously an item of boys’ clothing."

"Yeh, I guess you’re right: only a guy would wear a gaff. So it must be boys’ clothes. You’re real clever, Joannie." Naturally, he kissed her.

Next came the tights. Black-and-white stripes, they definitely resembled the sort of stockings that pirates used to wear. Of course, the pirate stockings normally disappeared into knee britches. Demi would be showing off a lot more leg than the usual pirate, since she’d be wearing black vinyl shorts — zipper-less, pocket-less, and so short that they covered not a speck of leg. Indeed, they didn’t completely cover her butt cheeks. Demi was, therefore, grateful for the tights.

The combination of the gaff and the skimpy shorts fascinated Demi. As Kyle had always worn loose-fitting clothes, it never had been possible to know his sex simply by looking between his legs. His own tastes, and the need for discretion, had meant that Demi’s clothes hadn’t revealed much either. In these shorts, everyone would be able to check out Demi’s sex at a glance. And everyone would know she was a female.

To ensure that the tail of Demi’s pirate shirt wouldn’t be so long that it bunched up in her shorts, marring her feminine lines, Joannie had bought the smallest size that she thought Demi could squeeze into. As Demi was going to the concert dressed as a boy, there was no question of her wearing a bra. Her breast forms accordingly strained against the white linen shirt. Both teens noticed that the nipples, permanently erect, could be seen through the thin fabric.

Given her mature bustline, Demi was bound to look feminine in a white linen shirt, but this particular one accentuated her femininity since it had lots of ruffles and big puff sleeves. The gold chain with an ankh, a fertility charm, helped to feminize Demi’s look, even though it was, as Joannie pointed out, "something that boys wear."

The pirate shoes were perfect — they had the big brass buckle that you’d find on the shoes of Captain Hook, but their three-inch heels guaranteed that Demi wouldn’t have to work too hard at ‘walking like a lady." In fact, Demi usually remembered to keep her stride gracefully feminine, for all her friends had agreed to tell her, for her own protection, when she walking "like Kyle."

As Demi was going — for Goth reasons — as a pirate ghost, Joannie spent a lot of time on her makeup, using a lot of white, back, gray and vermillion, and eyebrow plucking, to make her look like a female ghoul. Her hair, teased to look as feminine as possible, got a heavy dusting of silver powder.

To make it clear that Demi was going to the dance as a "male" pirate, Joannie drew on a big moustache with an eyebrow brush, and toppied his head off with a wide-brimmed pirate hat, made out of black velvet, save for a fearsome looking skull and crossbones devised from red rhinestones.

Kyle was upset when he got a chance to see how he looked, fully dressed, in the mirror: "Yikes," he thought. "I don’t look at all like a boy. Yet everything I’ve got on is boys’ clothes. I’ve even got a fake moustache. Still, I look like a girl. Jeez, what’s happening to me? I told my mother that I’d look like a boy no matter what I wore, even girls’ jeans. Cripes, I used to think that I’d look like a boy even in a girl’s swimsuit. And now, I look like a girl no matter what I wear!"

Kyle, resentful that Joannie had somehow ‘bewitched’ him, grew sullen. His mood became even more somber when he saw that she looked more masculine in pirate garb than he did. Her hair she had stuffed into the pirate hat. Her makeup she had applied to harden her appearance. Instead of a moustache, she had given herself a two days’ growth of beard, using the "Unshaven Look" kit sold by The Fantasy Male. Her breasts she had tightly bound, and her pirate shirt, severely cut, did not have a single inch of unnecessary cloth. Around her waist she had added some padding, eliminating her own curves, while adding just a hint of beer belly. Beneath her tight-fitting, sailcloth breeches she was wearing a man’s sheath, a type of thong in which she had stuffed a sock and — into the sheath for the penis — three handkerchiefs. She was convincingly ‘well-hung.’

That evening no two people could agree on the true sex of the raver who told everyone "my name is Jo," although the consensus was "it must be a guy." As for Demi, if there was anyone at the dance fooled by her pirate outfit into thinking that Demi was a male, that person kept his gullibility a secret. One or two of the Hoover students risked the wrath of the Jets and the Sharks by joking with students from other schools that the girl in the pirate ‘drag’ was, deep down, actually a boy. But none of the teens was willing to buy such a tall story, for Demi just had to be a female. And she was both friendly and enticing.

Demi and Jo were well-placed to be watched. They had standing room immediately in front of the Hell’s Vixen band. There amid a throng of kids high on weed, beer and ecstasy, they surrendered to the driving beat. Though sober themselves, they danced like the possessed. High on Kyle’s favorite music, Demi wouldn’t stop dancing even after Jo had tired.

On and on Demi danced, at first by herself, and then with a succession of male partners. Though Hell’s Vixen had no slow, romantic music in their repertoire, the boys who flocked to Demi found ways to maximize physical contact. They’d pull her close enough to dance cheek-to-cheek, pelvis-to-pelvis, no matter how jungle-like the beat, with their hands roaming freely down and past her back.

Finally, Jo cut in, and her hands, the busiest yet, seemed to confirm the rumor going around the dance that Demi was "an easy lay." Who had started the rumor? Why, Markko and Mika of the Jets! They had been spreading the word in the hope that it would eventually reach the Greeks, the most deadly gang at Central High. The two Jets had seen several of the Greeks in the vicinity of Demi, and had decided it would be great fun to con their gang rivals into dancing with Demi as they were photographed, if all went to plan, by a ‘spy’ camera that Mika had purchased on the Internet.

Demi would have run for her life had she known she was flirting with four Greeks. They were truly a gang to be feared, for they were even more blade-happy than the Jets. As were many of the students at Central High, the Greeks were Hispanics, their actual name being "Los Grecos," a name that commemorated the most famous dude ever to live in their home town of Toledo. "El Greco" they’d called him — the Greek. It was the sort of name you got when people were too intimidated to call you Pancho, Tio Pepe, or Joselito.

These guys were as tough as Toledo, a town that made swords that could cut your head off in the blink of an eye, a town that told General Franco to ‘go shove it’ during the Spanish Civil War. This heritage was bound to make the tall, angular Greeks a vicious crew, but they also bitterly resented how their parents had been forced by unfair immigration laws to sneak into the United States as wetbacks, with all their worldly possessions stuffed into a picnic hamper as they jumped off Spanish yachts at sordid ports of call like Provincetown and Fort Lauderdale. The families of the Greeks found poverty and constant insinuations that they spoke Spanish like a girl — with a lisp — and it didn’t take much of a red flag to induce their sons to gore you like a bull.

And Demi had danced with four of them! She had been oblivious. Sure, it had seemed odd that four of her dancing partners were so much taller and older than the others, but she hadn’t realized that she was setting them up for pictures so incriminating that the Greeks would screw almost anyone to get them back — including Demi.

Nor did she know that the Greeks had tossed a coin, with the result that Paco Rabin, the brawniest of the four, had won the right to bed Demi first that night. Nor, in all the excitement, did she see that Paco was hovering nearby to claim his prize.

Demi only started to get clued in after Joannie had a brief conversation with Derek, who seemed to have been driven to a frenzy by the music. At least, his facial features looked so contorted that it looked like the Devil himself had taken charge of his head. Derek was shouting, but Demi heard not a word, as the lights and the music overwhelmed her. Transported, she didn’t even notice that the boy dancing with her had the busiest hands yet.

Suddenly, Joannie pulled Demi away: "I’ve got to pee. I need you to help me to scare off the druggies hanging about the toilets. We’ve got to go right now! Come on, hurry!"

"Coke? The only coke that Demi had ever had was made by the Coca-Cola company, and even that he wasn’t sure was the ‘real thing’. But he obediently followed Joannie, who was running like a fullback through the dancing throng. As Joannie cleared the way, Demi weaved her way through the grasping hands of boys who remembered the way she danced. Once in the girls’ room, she manhandled Demi into a stall while other girls laughed about "dykes who are so horny that they can’t wait until they get home to make out."

"What gives?" gasped Demi. "What was all that about?"

"What was that about?" repeated Joannie incredulously. "Do you have any idea, Demi, of what’s going down? Do you know who those tall guys are — you know the ones who’ve been getting to know your inner thigh?"

"Nah, never seen them before. You’re not jealous, are you? You know I’m only interested in sex with you. I’m not into guys."

"Well, they may soon be into you, Demi. Those guys you’ve been leading on are Greeks, the gang at Central High. And Derek just told me he overheard them planning a gangbang. Guess who’s got the starring role?"

"Me? No way!"

"Yes, way. Demi. They’ve been told that you’ll spread your legs for anyone. So why not them too? After all, you gave every one of them a woody. But I’ve just started to tell you the bad news."

"How could it get any worse?" Demi begged to know.

"Derek told me that the reason he was loitering around the Greeks is that he wanted to find out whether they thought you were a girl or a boy. He said he had to know once two of the Jets told him that you’ve been helping them to make fools of the Greeks."

"How?" Demi asked, but her sinking heart meant that she was beginning to figure out what had been going down."

"Derek said that Mika Koistinen has been photographing you each time you danced with a Greek. Each time, Demi, you danced like a slut. Once word gets back to the Greeks that they all made a pass at the same cross-dressing boy, well, Demi, it may be time to get out of town."

"I’m a dead man walking," was all Demi could say.

"Not necessarily," Joannie replied. "Derek says he’ll run interference, making it look like an accident so they won’t kill him, if we bolt for freedom. But we’ve got to do it now before they discover, one way or the other, that Demi hasn’t got the right body parts. Demi, I do wish you had breast implants, so that there’d be less risk of guys figuring out that you were born with a boy’s body. Will you do something about getting the implants?"

"Sure, sure, if we get out of here alive," Demi said carelessly.

Joannie gave Demi a lingering kiss — for fear that this might be the last time; out of gratitude for being her lover; and to seal the deal they had just made. As Demi had promised to get implants if they survived the dance, Joannie no longer had any qualms about tricking her girlfriend into signing the release form that would grant them both fifteen minutes of fame on the Vera Smuttee show.

As Derek ‘accidentally’ tripped Paco Rabin, their closest shadow (a service for which Derek got a black eye), Joannie and Demi fled for an emergency exit through the closely packed crowd. Since they were smaller and faster than the Greeks, the two teens were able, despite Demi’s detours around the more lecherous-looking boys, to make good their escape. They kept running as they hit the fresh air, afraid to look back to see if the footsteps receding behind them were those of the Greeks or of the rent-a-cops who hadn’t understood how appropriate the emergency exit had been for Demi.

They ran so far and so fast that they arrived at the Smith house on foot just as Virginia was about to drive to the arena to enforce their 11 p.m. curfew. For half an hour the two teens excitedly told Joannie’s gran everything about their evening, except for the fact that the Jets and the Sharks had been using Demi as a Trojan horse to fool the Greeks. They talked so rapidly that both Demi and Joannie kept losing their breath.

Perhaps, giddiness was the reason why Joannie had to correct Demi three times before Demi realized that her girlfriend had decided on a name change. As Joannie explained, "I really liked being called Jo by everyone at the dance. It’s the perfect name for me."

When Demi asked whether Jo came with or without an ‘e,’ Jo answered, "Without an ‘e’, of course! But I think it would be sort of cute if you used the ‘e’ whenever you wanted to write me a really special letter — you know, like a Valentine. If I saw a letter addressed to ‘Joe,’ I’d know it was from you," Jo sighed.

Demi wasn’t so sure about the spelling, but she did like the sound of Jo’s new name, and so used it thereafter. "It’s an efficient name," thought Demi. "I’ll be able to say it twice as often as I tell Jo how much I love her."

That evening, the two teens showed each other how much they loved each other, as they slept in the same bed for the first time. To Demi’s delight, Jo wore no clothing, while Demi wore a satiny nightgown. By the morning, they had consummated their relationship, as much as they would ever would, considering that Jo was interested only in ‘lesbian’ sex, and Demi was interested only in pleasing Jo.

Kyle at one point intruded in the lovemaking of the two girls, but retreated quickly when Jo testily insisted on reciprocity: "If you insist on sticking something into me, then I’ll have to stick something into you. Do you want that?"

"No," said Demi; and Kyle went back to sleep.

It was the logical night for Demi to lose her virginity. Not only had Jo planned the occasion, but the dance concert had left both teens tingling with excitement and, in Jo’s case, some unease. Yet again Demi had shown too much interest in boys, and so Jo had decided that, "Yes, indeed, this has to be the night. Once Demi has made love to another woman, she will never again be interested in straight sex with a mere boy."

That was Jo’s firm conviction, and fondest hope. And she remained more hopeful than ever when she awoke to find this message scrawled across the bathroom mirror in red lipstick: "Demi loves Joe."

Demi was flying high, especially after they celebrated Sunday morning with another round of lovemaking. She gave not a first glance or a second thought when Jo asked her to sign a consent form so that they could go on the Vera Smuttee show. After all, Demi agreed with Jo that they loved each other more than any other teens in history — even more than Romeo and Juliet. It made sense to tell the world how much they loved each other — just as Jo said.

But Jo said nothing about the implants. Nor did she encourage Demi to read either the form she had signed or the one she was taking to her mother to endorse. Jo figured she could count on Demi not to bother reading the forms that shaped her life.

The two ‘girls’ chatted for a while about the implications of Demi’s being on the ‘shit list’ of the Greeks. While they were unlikely to go hunting for her on the home turf of the Jets and Sharks, they might jump her if they saw her at the mall — either because they still wanted a gangbang or because they’d been told that she had made fools of them all. And how long, both Demi and Jo wondered, would the Jets and the Sharks keep their mouths shut? Weren’t Hoover’s gangs liable to post Demi’s dance photos on the Internet sooner rather than later? Demi agreed with Jo that it might be a good idea for them both to "get out of Dodge City" for a while.

"Tell you what," Jo promised, "I’ll do some research and find a school outside of Des Moines for us to transfer to. If I start looking now, I bet I can find us a new school before Christmas."

Demi said, "Sure, go ahead and look for a school. It can’t be very expensive, though, ‘cause my mom doesn’t have a lot of money. Okay?"

"My gran’s not rich either. Don’t worry. I’ll keep cost in mind." And she thought to herself: "And distance from Steve will matter too. Demi, if I can get you to leave Hoover High, I just know you’ll be my true love for the rest of our lives. You’ll be my girlfriend, my most excellent girlfriend, with a perfect body." Jo’s eyes misted at the thought of spending the rest of her life with a boy who had remade himself as a girl — out of love for her!

A couple of hours later Demi charged into her home. In her exuberance she forgot to be a lady. Kicking off her shoes, she ran up to her mother and gave Barb a big smack on the lips. "Mom, I just had the most totally awesome night of my life. I’m so stoked! The show was super. I had an awesome time at … the Lancers. Wow! I feel really grotty, so I’m going to shower, all right? Be right back! Oh mom, can you sign this form? If you do, then Jo and I can go on national television. Isn’t that cool?" Then Demi bounded up the stairs like a teenage boy.

"Who’s Joe?" Barb wondered as she unfolded the consent form. As she read it, everything became blindingly unclear.

To be continued in Part 12 where the star of this story finally makes an appearance. Put on your seatbelts for you’re in for a wild ride!

So far Kyle has found it difficult to keep a deal he made with his mother: That if he wears girls’ clothes for a month that she would buy him a moped (a motor scooter). He’s not quite sure how it happened, but somehow he has become Demi, a full-time cross-dresser with a gay boyfriend and a lesbian lover. Everyone believes that Demi’s a transsexual, including her mother, who ‘knows’ that Demi has passed a gender test with a perfect score (for a transsexual) and is so keen on having breasts that she’s willing to go on TV to get implants. Only Kyle knows he’s taking sex hormones in a stupid attempt to masculinize himself, and only Kyle knows that he’d still rather be a boy. And yet, he is feminizing so rapidly that it’s unclear which he’ll get first — a moped or a training bra.

Anything for a Moped - Part 12 By: Dawn DeWinter
Chapter Sixteen: Wow, Was That a Moped?

"Your son wants to get breast implants on a nationally-syndicated television show notorious for tasteless sexploitation. What do you do?" That wasn’t a question that Barb could remember in Dr. Spock’s primer on childrearing. Nor could she recall the question being answered by an advice columnist like Dear Abby or Miss Manners.

Barb realized that there were mothers who’d sign the consent form for the Vera Smuttee show. She couldn’t quite comprehend their motives, but she had seen these she-wolves and their brood whenever she’d ‘accidentally’ tuned into the Jenny Jones or Jerry Springer shows. The mothers were fascinating to watch as they mugged for the television camera while their children fondled each other or soul-kissed the family dog. These shows had taught Barb that there were mothers who so craved notoriety that they’d definitely agree to their son’s exposing his new "jugs" on television, "so long as it was tastefully done."

Barb was not that kind of mother. She would never consent to her child’s humiliation. Kyle could count on her for protection. He apparently wanted to ‘star’ on trash television. Would Barb let him? Would Barb let her foolhardy teen become a sideshow freak? Thus posed, the question answered itself: Barb tore up the Smuttee form into a thousand pieces. "My child," Barb declaimed to the walls, the foundation, and the roof, "is not for sale — at any price!"

Yet Barb could not entirely ignore the document that Kyle had signed. It constituted further proof that she was raising a daughter, not a son, and that Demi was, like so many fourteen-year-old girls, over-anxious to get an adult bust. Barb resolved to open a special bank account for Demi, a ‘hope chest,’ into which would flow half the family’s savings until they could afford whatever surgery, hormones or prosthetics that Demi needed to become the girl of her dreams.

That savings account Barb opened the very next day. She was putting her money where her heart was. She even started searching the Internet for information on how to "help your son become your daughter in six short weeks." Barb read and read, and cried and cried, but mostly she chatted.

"Laura from Texas" looked for anyone with whom she could anonymously discuss ‘Josie’, her becoming daughter. ‘Laura’ got lots of conflicting advice, depending mainly, it seems, on whether her newfound friends believed that her son ‘Jonas’ truly wanted to become ‘Josie’. While some thought ‘Jonas’ should get an immediate sex change, others thought he’d give up wearing skirts the moment he had a moped to ride.

Barb chatted rather than acted. She didn’t quite know what to do, beyond giving Demi whatever moral support she could. Barb did, however, make a mental notation to make Christmas a memorable one. "I’ve got to buy something special for Demi’s first Christmas."

Feminine hormones were one possible present, but Barb decided that it was just too complicated, legally, to give them to a minor. A legal secretary, she knew the hassles and the risks. What she didn’t know, because Dr. Loupi had forgotten to tell her, or possibly assumed she already knew, was the fact that Demi had admitted to taking hormones.

These ‘male mones’ were having an insidious effect on Demi’s temperament. She was turning out to be more ill tempered than Kyle had ever been. Her friends and mother blamed the flare-ups on the stress of transition, as they had no idea that she was playing around with her body’s chemistry. Besides, Steve was the only one who knew that Demi had steroids in her possession, and given her rapid feminization, he assumed she had lost interest in taking them.

Certainly, he didn’t realize that Demi had reacted to her close call with the Greeks by increasing her dose, in hopes of making Kyle muscular enough to protect her. If you’d asked Demi why she was so cranky, she might have blamed her breast forms. Now that she was wearing them every day, they seemed to be making the fat tissue on her chest tender, even painful to the touch. Her nipples had become — because of friction, Demi assumed — especially sensitive, with the result that Demi became as convinced as Jo that there was nothing quite so erotic as one girl fondling the breasts of another.

And they did a lot of fondling. During the fourth week of the moped bet, Jo got to see Demi’s room — from dusk to dawn. Demi had finally admitted to having a girlfriend after her mother asked her point blank to "tell me something about your girlfriend, you know, the one you want to present to the entire nation on television."

When Demi hesitated, Barb said, "I saw from the consent forms that your girlfriend is named Joanne, and that she’s a neighbor of ours. Is that where you met Virginia Smith’s granddaughter — while you were playing on our street? Or is Joanna a classmate?"

"I didn’t know her name was Joanna. Mom, I call her Jo. I met her at school. We’ve got lots of classes together."

Barb then asked, "How long has … Jo been your girlfriend? How often do you see her?"

These were dangerous questions, since they could easily lead to another — "Are you telling me that you were lying to me about seeing Steve so that you could spend the night with a girl?" There was, Kyle thought, no answer to that question that would not lead to his grounding. And he had to worry about his mother blaming Jo for leading him astray. Mothers sometimes didn’t want to believe that their "little darlings" were responsible for their own deceits and conceits. Indulgent parents preferred to punish the "bad influence."

Kyle chose the easy way out, another lie: "Jo’s been in my class since September, but it’s only in the last few days that we’ve started seeing each other as … (he hesitated on the wording) … as girlfriends. It was like lightning struck us, mom. One day we were just friends, and Steve was my one and only, and then zap! Jo and I became best girlfriends. We’re super tight."

"Are you saying that you’ve become sexually active with this girl?"

"No way, mom. I was waiting for your permission."

"I think it more likely that you were waiting for her permission. Do you think you and Jo will be having sex?"

"Mom! That’s a very personal question!"

"Well, you’re going to have to answer it, Demi, if you’re going to ask for the same sort of freedom in seeing Jo that you’ve had in dating Steve. It is, for example, one thing for me to agree to your having an overnight visit with Steve, but quite another with Jo. I don’t want you to ruin her life by getting her pregnant at fifteen."

"Mom, you don’t have to worry about my getting Jo pregnant, because she’s not looking for a boyfriend. She wants a girlfriend! Jo’s says she’s a lesbian. There’s lots more of them now than when you were a girl, and I think … that Demi’s one of them too." His face blushed at the confession.

"Demi, are you telling me that you’re a lesbian? I can’t fathom how a boy can be a lesbian."

"But mom, Demi’s not a boy. She’s a girl and if she and Jo have sex, they’ll do it like two girls. They will, I swear! Anyway, there’s no way that Jo will let me act like a boy. She wants me to be a girl."

"How much like a girl, Demi? She’d like you to have breasts, right? And possibly even a vagina? Am I right?"

"Yeh, she’d love me to have breasts," Demi said to her mom, while under her breath she added, "but Kyle will never ‘em."

"Ah, I see. So it was Jo that wanted the two of you to be on television?"

Demi was confused by the sudden shift in focus. One moment they were talking about her feminization, the next moment they were talking about the Vera Smuttee show. She couldn’t see the connection. So Demi answered, "Yeh, Jo thought we should go on television as ‘the world’s most loving teens,’ but I can’t see how I can go on TV looking like this. I’m going to have to do something about these first." She then tugged on her breasts.

Demi was trying to say that she wasn’t willing to go on television until she was rid of her female breasts and clothes; but Barb misunderstood. She thought her daughter was saying she wouldn’t go on television without first getting breast implants. So she answered, "Demi, there’s no reason for hasty decisions. If you want to tell the world about yourself, we’ll find the suitable program on public television (without, Barb hoped, any viewers). But I don’t approve of your going on the Smuttee show. They’ll try to humiliate you, Demi. If you go on that show to proclaim your undying love for Joanna — for Jo — they’ll blindside you with six other girlfriends that she’s been dating on the sly. No, sweetheart, the Smuttee show is definitely out."

Demi’s face fell. She had been warming to the prospect of being on television as part of "Kyle and Jo, the greatest lovers since Romeo and Juliet."

Barb rushed to salve her disappointment: "Please don’t be unhappy, Demi. Your message came through loud and clear," she hoped; "and I promise you that we’ll have enough money a year from now for you to get your breast implants."

"Breast implants?? Mom, why would I want breast implants? Mom, you can’t be serious! Jeez, I hope you’re not getting Alzheimer’s. I’m Kyle. Remember? And as soon as I get that moped, well, you’ll probably never see Demi again. Adults, you’ve got to wonder about them." Demi then stomped off as boyishly as she could in her panty girdle, gaf, and three-inch heels.

Demi left Barb scratching her head: "Well, I’ll never be able to figure out that child of mine. They warned me about teenagers, but I had no idea they were talking about anything as schizoid as Demi! My child’s self-image seems as changeable as the weather."

Barb searched for a clue to Demi’s behavior: "Which is the real Demi — the one who wanted breasts so badly that she was willing to make a fool of herself on television to get them, or the one who mocks me whenever I suggest that Demi is here to stay? Which is it?"

A smile replaced the look of puzzlement on Barb’s face as she thought of the photo collection on her dresser. Two days ago she had removed the pictures of Kyle, and had replaced them with several photos of Demi, as well as two androgynous photos of Kyle as a toddler, and her favorite photo of all time — young Kyle as a buxom Joan of Ark. When Demi had seen the new record of her childhood, her only comment had been, "Jeez, I can’t believe I was ever that young."

At the time, Barb had thought: "Were you ever young, Demi? Were you always part of my family or were you born less than a month ago? I wish I knew."

Demi had seemed pleased with the new photographic record of her life. Or at least, she had not been displeased. Demi also seemed to be happy, or happy enough, with the new I.D. that Barb was generating for her — a membership in two video stores, in three music stores, the community recreation center, a bus pass, and the public library. Demi thought the library card "a hoot", for as she said, "Even the government thinks I’m a girl. Demi’s official."

And so, until Demi asked Barb to change the photographs, or until she retrieved Kyle’s clothes, wallet and I.D. from storage, Barb would not be deceived by Demi’s protestations of masculinity. What Kyle said did not seem as instructive as what Demi did.

To develop into a credible female, Demi needed female company. She should be hanging out, Barb realized, with girls her own age. Yet Demi seemed to have only two girlfriends. Or, at least, there were just two who dropped by the house after Barb threw it open to "Demi’s new friends."

One of the girls struck Barb as the ideal tutor for Demi in the feminine arts. Vicky was, Barb decided, the quintessential teenage girl. After all, who could be more feminine than a cheerleader? But Vicky was boy crazy. She was, Barb observed, far more interested in chasing Steve than in educating Demi.

Indeed, the only thing that Vicky seemed to be teaching Demi was jealousy. One time when all three teens were visiting the James house after school, Barb noted once again the discrepancy between her daughter’s words and actions: Demi said she was a ‘lesbian,’ but she didn’t act like one around Steve. Demi had staked out clear possession of her ‘boyfriend’; indeed, she had allowed him so many liberties in front of Vicky that Barb later chewed Demi out for "not acting like a lady."

Demi was definitely competing with Vicky for Steve’s affection. On Thursday, Demi had come home ranting about Vicky’s asking Steve to a kung fu movie. The following evening Demi had lured Steve into her bedroom for the first time. Barb erroneously concluded they were having intercourse, but they were in fact merely petting. Both teens had stripped down to their underwear, and for the first time Demi allowed a boy to touch her "there." But, fearful of Kyle’s turning into a homosexual, she hadn’t let Steve into her black-lace panties. As a result, both teens had a lesson in fetishism.

Barb’s child was getting hooked on lingerie. The laundry basket told the tale: Demi had stopped wearing her unisex panties. Indeed, she clearly preferred the daintiest, most feminine underwear in her drawer, and was even willing to hand wash her satiny favorites (both with a high French cut) so that she could wear them more often.

Though smitten with panties, Demi no longer insisted on Jo’s always wearing them. Barb on a couple of occasions noticed the waistband of men’s boxer shorts riding high above Jo’s belt. And while Jo did seem to be wearing girls’ clothes to school (it was impossible to be certain, as Kyle had once maintained), she arrived for her first sleepover at the Jameses indisputably dressed in male clothes. Though Barb found it disconcerting that her ‘son’ looked much more feminine than ‘his girlfriend," she did find it reassuring that Jo seemed to be uninterested in having "sexual intercourse with a mere boy." Indeed, Jo affirmed to Barb that she was a lesbian and interested in "Demi only because she’s the sexiest girl I’ve ever met."

Since Jo was clearly the most important girl in Demi’s life, Barb thought it unfortunate that the girl was not herself more feminine. Not only did she have an affinity for male clothing, but she also had little clothes sense, and needed more help with her makeup than did Demi. It was ironic, Barb also thought, that Jo was so intent on teaching Demi to walk in a more ladylike fashion, when Jo herself marched around like Puss n’ Boots, the cat with the seven-league stride.

Fortunately, as Barb saw it, Jo was not encouraging Demi to dress like a lesbian ‘butch.’ For Demi to pass as a woman, she’d have to use a lot of artifice, for Kyle was not one of those boys you read about — you know, the ones who look more beautiful than their girlfriends the moment they put on a dress. No, Demi would have to work at looking feminine, and "God forbid," Barb thought, "that she try to pass as a female while wearing boys’ clothes."

Worried that there was some risk of Demi’s trying to ape Jo’s butch look, Barb found ways to lure Demi into skirts. If Demi wanted a special meal, an R-rated video, or an overnight with Jo, then Demi learned to ask for the treat while wearing a skirt. Since Jo loved to see Demi in skirts, Demi wore them for at least a few hours on seven of the last ten days of her moped bet. Jo made sure that Demi associated skirts with sex, which is why Steve was rather foolish when he refused to go to a movie with Demi if she wore a skirt.

Even as Demi became more comfortable in skirts, she adamantly refused to wear one to school. As she explained to Jo, "The only girl in the entire ninth grade who wears a skirt to school is Liana Mumford, and she’s the biggest nerd at Hoover. Jeez, she’d told everyone she wants to become a librarian — at a Catholic convent, no less! I think that proves she’s a total duffus, when you consider that her dad is the pastor at Gopher Flats Baptist church." Jo reluctantly agreed: If Demi wore a skirt to school, she’d become un-cool, a social outcast.

But Jo couldn’t understand why Demi was so dead set against wearing a dress outside of school. Nor could Barb, who discovered that there wasn’t enough junk food in the entire world to get Demi into a dress. That was a gender line that Demi refused to cross. Yes, she knew that she had orders to wear a dress in Chicago. That she might, just might, be willing to do, because Chicago wasn’t her hometown. But wear a dress in Des Moines? You had to be kidding!

Why skirts and not dresses? Because guys, real heroes, had worn skirts or kilts. When Kyle was wearing a skirt, he didn’t look all that different, he felt, from the warriors of ancient Rome, Egypt and Greece. A plain skirt even looked like an Irish kilt. Guys wore skirts. It was a proven fact.

But dresses? Only girls wore dresses. Kyle feared that if he put one on, especially if he wore one on the streets of Des Moines, that the boy in him would disappear forever. Only Demi would be left. To make sure that he always had an escape hatch from his life as Demi, Kyle stayed out of dresses. Indeed, the two dresses his mother had bought for Demi he banished to a hall closet.

So there were limits to Kyle’s willingness to explore his feminine side. And as far as he was concerned, there were some definite drawbacks to being a girl — or at least to being a demi-girl. For one thing, both Demi and Vicky were getting mauled by the ninth grade boys, who were determined, each and every one of them, to determine whether the breasts of the two ‘girls’ were ‘real’. It was a bit much, thought Demi, to have some boy ‘accidentally bump into you" virtually every time you walked down a school corridor.

Demi also wasn’t thrilled with her rations at home — especially on those evenings when she wore jeans. From Kyle’s perspective, his mother had put Demi on a "starvation diet." When Demi complained about the vast empty spaces on her dinner plate, her mother explained that she didn’t want Demi to grow out of her clothes. "Don’t have a growth spurt," Barb would say, "until you’ve definitely decided whether the next batch of clothes are for a girl or for a boy. I can’t afford to keep buying you duplicate wardrobes."

The first time that Barb asked Demi to ‘stop growing for a while," Kyle thought to himself, "Mom, you’re out of luck. I’m soon going to be putting on so much muscle that I’ll be needing a shirt two sizes larger. Arnold Schwarznegger, look out for Kyle James, ‘cause here I come!"

Demi also didn’t like the way that Coach Bryant treated Vicky and her. He clearly despised the transgendered, and did his best to humiliate both girls in every class they took with him. While Demi stood up to the coach, openly daring him to expel her from class, Vicky was crumbling before his assault. She was reduced to tears when he asked her to comment on each element of his lecture on ‘sexual deviance.’ Demi, on the other hand, temporarily silenced the coach by replying, "What would I know about sexual deviance? You should ask the dirty old men who hang out at the mall to pick up kids what it is."

But Demi’s day was ruined if Vicky cried — even though the two girls were competing for Steve’s affection. Demi thought it ‘unconstitutional’ that the coach had persuaded Miss Cranston to demote Vicky from head cheerleader on the grounds that this honor was liable to get Vicky interviewed by the local press — to the embarrassment of both Vicky and Hoover High.

Most of all, Demi couldn’t accept what the coach had done to Brad. The day after word got out that the quarterback had been dating a cross-dressing boy, the coach had informed Brad that he wasn’t, despite the team’s perfect record, playing well enough to remain in the starting line-up.

"In fact," said Coach Bryant, "I don’t think you’ll be able to get off the bench for the rest of the season, seeing as how I’ve got two quarterbacks and a halfback who throw better than youse. I’ll understand if youse decides that it’s not worth your while to sit on the bench, and leave the team. Your type of boy isn’t really cut out for a man’s sport like football." And yet Brad had been a star, the coach’s pet, until news got out that Vicky was a boy.

Brad made Demi’s flesh creep. Not only was he profoundly depressed by his benching, but he acted very strangely once he and Vicky had joined Demi’s table in the cafeteria for their lunches. Vicky was easy to figure — she sat as close to Steve as possible. But Brad was impossible to decipher. It was almost as though he deliberately sat as far away as possible from Steve. Yet he spent his entire lunchtime gazing at Steve. And to Demi’s dismay, Steve often stared back, his eyes searching for Brad over Vicky’s shoulder.

After three days, Demi understood: While there was some danger of Vicky’s luring Steve into a one-night stand, it was Brad, the ruggedly handsome, muscular quarterback, who was Demi’s ultimate rival for Steve’s affection. Steve liked boys, which was problematic for Demi, who was looking and acting more girlish with each passing day.

For example, Steve didn’t like her newest pair of jeans. Ultra-soft, brushed blue denim, they sported shooting stars on each leg. They were also the tightest jeans that either Kyle or Demi had ever worn. Indeed, Demi had bought them because she loved the snug fit at the crotch — a fit that made her appear ultra-feminine thanks to her gaff. When Steve chided her for looking like a neutered tomcat, Demi replied, "As long as I’m dressing like a girl, I want to look hot. Do you want people to say that you’re dating a dog?" Steve had been stumped for an answer.

Maybe it was Steve’s wandering eye. Maybe it was Jo’s reversion to boy’s jeans and boxer shorts. Maybe it was the whining from Vicky and Brad. Maybe it was the crap she was getting from Coach Bryant. Maybe it was the sexual harassment from other students. Maybe it was the anger in the vice-principal’s eyes. Maybe it was the protection money she had to pay to the gangs. Maybe it was foreboding about the reaction of the Greeks to the revelation, when it came, that they had danced with a cross-dressing boy. Maybe it was the session with Dr. Loupi on Wednesday at which Demi had to discover in every incident of her childhood the origins of her transsexuality. Or maybe it was the steroids. Whatever it was, as the fourth week of the moped bet drew to a close, Demi was alternating between surliness and depression.

Barb didn’t know all the maybes. She focused on the biggest maybe of all — maybe Kyle didn’t want to be Demi. Barb decided to find out, sooner rather than later. She therefore forgave the week’s penalty that she had tacked on for Demi’s ‘dressing like a boy’ at the dance. Kyle was going to get his moped exactly one month to the day that he’d foolishly said that girls dressed so much like boys these days that he could wear girls’ clothes to school without anyone’s being the wiser.

Since then, Demi had taken over Kyle’s life so completely that he no longer paused when he signed her name, even though it appalled him that Demi used circles to dot her i’s. Since Demi was always around, and Kyle almost always absent, it was Demi who was muttering about ‘mothers’ after being told she had to ‘immediately,’ as in ‘right now,’ collect the kitchen waste and throw it into their compost heap in their backyard.

It was Demi, therefore, who stumbled upon the most beautiful machine ever invented. Leaning against the house beside the back door she espied an object that justified every lie, every hassle, and every humiliation since the third week in September — a MOPED!!!

Tears welled in Demi’s eyes. She had never seen anything more beautiful in her entire life. She had expected the moped to look clunky, to resemble a three-speed bicycle. Most mopeds do. But Demi’s moped looked like a MOTORCYLE! Its gleaming chrome, its vibrant red, its black leather seat, its boss exhaust pipe — they all proclaimed, "Look at me! I’m totally awesome, and my owner is super cool!"

Demi felt like the luckiest kid in the entire country. She knew that only two states would even allow her to ride a moped at age fourteen. Never had she felt happier to be an Iowan. Des Moines was, in her opinion, ‘rad city’, the center of cool.

She mounted the moped. With her denim skirt spread, the black leather felt cold against her inner thighs. She turned the key to the ignition. The moped started vibrating against Demi’s privates, tucked into her gaff. Throbbing, throbbing, she felt the moped between her legs. Demi had an orgasmic rush, as she whooped with sheer delight. So violently did her body shake that she lost her balance, falling heavily off the moped, to land at the feet of her mother Barb, whose fast hands saved the bike from falling.

"I see that you like the moped," Barb dryly remarked.

Demi, sprawled on the ground, her paisley panties on full display, was at a loss for words. After all, what does a girl say to her mother when she has been caught in the act of humping a moped? What for that matter does a boy say to his mother when she finds him in soiled panties? As this was not a propitious moment for the re-emergence of Kyle, it was Demi who gushed, "Mom! You’re the greatest mother in the whole wide world! The moped is awesome! It’s so phat! The color is so new millennium! But how come …? I didn’t expect …. Weren’t there another seven days to go?"

As Demi got shakily to her feet, Barb started explaining that she didn’t think it fair to tack on the extra week, inasmuch as Kyle had worn the breast forms to the dance. "You went to the dance as Demi," Barb said; "no one mistook you for a boy. So why should I make you wait for your moped? I wanted to surprise you, and it looks very much like I did."

"Oh mom, I love you so much," Demi said with a strangled voice. Then, hugging her mother tightly, she began to bawl. "I’m so lucky to have you. You’re the bestest mother a …a girl could have."

"But are you a girl, Demi? My bet was with Kyle. Does he want you to win it? Who’ll be taking the moped out for a spin? Demi or Kyle? The bet is over. You won. If you like, you can change into your boys’ clothes right now. It’s your choice — denim or lace?"

A shadow came over Demi’s face. It wasn’t her choice, or Kyle’s, to wear girl’s clothes — not any more. Two gangs threatened Kyle’s annihilation if he didn’t dress and behave like a girl at all times. A third gang was likely to freak completely if they realized that Demi was a boy. His mother had given Kyle a sentence of one month in girls’ wear, but the Sharks were determined to keep him in satin and silk until school let out for the summer. They even hinted that Demi would make an excellent prom queen in three years’ time.

Kyle lacked freedom of choice. Until he could figure out a way to sweet talk the gangs into allowing him to return to Hoover High, Demi would have to take his place. Kyle felt profoundly trapped, not only by the gangs, but also by Demi.

It disturbed him that he was, generally speaking, having more fun as Demi than he had enjoyed as Kyle. Certainly Demi had more admirers and a better sex life. She also had more fun playing sports, for she wasn’t expected to sink every basket; and guys actually applauded Demi for being "a girl cool enough to skateboard," whereas they had always derided Kyle for wiping out. Being Demi wasn’t all that bad, Kyle decided, and in an ideal world he would have liked being her half the time.

But life is not ideal, and a high schooler cannot change his gender by the day. He cannot say, "It’s pouring rain and I’ll ruin my hair if I go to school as Demi. So today I’ll go as Kyle." Nor can he go to school as Demi simply to improve his chances of winning the tryouts for the Greco-Roman wrestling team. No, as unfair as it might seem, a high school student must choose one gender and generally stick to it.

If told he had a free choice between his male and female personas, Kyle was still inclined to select the boy. It would make life simpler.

But Kyle lacked that choice. Yet he could not admit to his mother that he dared not dress as a boy. Not only was such an admission likely to embroil him with the school administration and the police — and then later with the gangs in a dark alley — but what boy wants to confess to his own mother that’s he afraid to be a guy?

Kyle preferred to lie: "Mom, I know I don’t have to wear girls’ clothes anymore. I’ve got the moped. But I told myself a couple of weeks ago that you were right — you know, when you said that dressing like a girl for a while might make me more sensitive to girls’ needs and feelings. You know — more aware of the mushy stuff. You told me that I’d maybe make a better husband for some girl some day if I’d walked a mile in a girl’s moccasins. Well, I now realize you were right. But I’ve walked only half a mile so far. I want to finish the trip. So I think I’ll be Demi for a while longer. Is that OK with you?"

Barb’s face shone with a huge smile. His announcement seemed to please her. She gave her child a hug, and said, "Demi, you’re the best daughter any mother could have. Now, you run along. I’m not going to keep you here jawing with your mother. I just know you’re ‘totally’ keen on showing off your moped to Jo and Steve. You be extra careful because you don’t have your license yet. I’ve scheduled your test for a week Saturday, so you’ll have time to learn the rules of the road."

"Oh, mom, I learned those a year ago, when I first started dreaming mopeds. Gosh, I can’t believe it! I own a moped, a beautiful red one, the best one in Iowa." Demi started to cry again.

"Demi, you must be the only girl I know who’s head over heels in love with mopeds. Aren’t you the strange one?"

Demi nodded tearfully. Barb then told her to get changed into some jeans, as these would give her legs some added protection when she rode her bike. "No skirts or dresses on the moped," Barb decreed. "And it’s not only the law, but your mother as well, who insists on your wearing a helmet at all times."

Demi didn’t intend to wear a helmet very often, if at all. If you wore a helmet, you couldn’t feel the wind go through your hair. But she drove off on the moped wearing one because her mother was watching her departure. And this time it was Barb who had the tears in her eyes. As Demi drove off on her moped for the first time, she reflected on her mother’s choice for the helmet: purple, with turquoise stripes, it was definitely more suitable for a girl than for a boy.

"How did she know," Demi wondered as her motorbike chugged away, "that I’d be dressing like a girl even after I won my moped? Has someone told her about the gangs?"

Demi didn’t know the answer, and after a while lost interest in the question, as the feel of a moped between her legs turned her mind to sex. That was the day that Jo also learned to love mopeds, for the effect they had on Demi’s sex drive. The following day Steve also got some mileage out of the moped with Demi, as he made some progress in his campaign of seduction. Still, there were many miles to go before Demi would actually agree to sleep with a boy.

Within days, Demi’s friends had ridden her moped — as a matter of fact, but not metaphorically as had her two closest friends. And rumors about her little red beauty were circulating at Hoover High. Even so, Demi refused to bring it to school for a show-and-tell. Partly, she was afraid the gangs might demand it in payment for their ‘protection.’ But mostly, it was Kyle’s judgment call: He simply refused to allow Demi to ride the moped to his school, at least until he, Kyle, had first shown it off to the admiring multitude.

His fantasy had always been to roar up to the school in his coolest dude outfit, looking as macho as possible. He was not yet willing to surrender that fantasy. Were Demi to have the final say, she would insist on a grand entrance — with her clothes and hair as red as a moped. "Wouldn’t that be a gas!" she thought. But Kyle was adamant: "I will not ride my moped to school for the first time looking like a girl! That’s final!"

Yet he did ride his moped to school dressed like a girl. Indeed, he was a girl in a dress on that fateful day. How could such a disaster come to pass? Jason was to blame. It was his fault, Demi, quickly realized.

It was Jason, Kyle’s best friend in his days as a black shirt, and now his worst enemy, who relayed the moped rumors to the Jets with his own suggestion that they give Demi a command performance: "Let the silly bitch know who’s boss," Jason had said.

"Tell her that she’s got two days to find herself a decent dress, and that on the third day you want her to show up wearing it while she’s straddling her moped. Why should that sissy be allowed to wear jeans? If Demi wants to make fools of everyone, she should at least have to wear dresses. And I say she should do it until the little faggot leaves Des Moines. What do you say?"

The Jets hadn’t liked Jason’s tone. They thought he was diss-ing them. So Jason got a broken rib. But Markko found his proposal ‘amusing.’ Markko liked to control people. So he told Demi that he expected her to start taking her moped to school, starting that Thursday. "And you should dress real proper for the occasion," he added. "We think definitely you should be wearing a dress. You comprende?"

Demi’s jaw sagged.

"And we recommends that you’ll keep wearing a dress to school until the Jets tell you to stop. I figure that might be right after your senior prom. Or maybe after you get married in a frou-frou wedding dress," he said, to guffaws from his entourage.

"Do the Sharks also want me to wear dresses?" Demi desperately asked, hoping that dissension in gangdom might give her a reprieve.

"Yeh, why not?" Markko had replied. "Sherm says you’re lucky we’re not insisting on mini-skirts. We’re reasonable people, Demi, and you can wear any dress you want, so long as it shows you and the moped off. You’ve got a nice ass. Make sure your dresses amply display it."

"Please don’t make me wear dresses," Demi wailed. "No one else wears them. They’re so totally eighties. They’re for disco queens. I’ll kill myself rather than wear one to school."

Markko was unimpressed: "Be sure to leave the moped to us in your will. That’s Jets and it’s spelled J..E...T…T…S. Got it?"

There wouldn’t be any moped to leave, not if Demi could help it. That afternoon she seriously contemplated driving the moped at top speed into the back of the ‘Jetmobile,’ Markko’s SUV. With any luck, she’d hit their gas tank and they’d all go up in flames.

"It would serve them all right," Demi thought. "I’d be the most famous girl in the whole country after I leave a suicide note saying I’d rather die than show up at high school dressed like a nerd."

Demi even fantasized about Jo and Steve’s talking about her spectacular death on the Vera Smuttee show. It was an appealing way to exit Des Moines. Or was it? Did Kyle really want to go out in a blaze of glory as a girl? No, it might be better to live as a boy.

Ironically, it was the one person who most wanted to see Demi in dresses that found a way for her to avoid wearing them to school, without having to kill herself or so ‘pissing off’ the gangs that she’d have to flee for her life.

If there was ever any doubt in anyone’s mind that she truly loved Demi, Jo laid it to rest when she came up with a plan calculated to keep Kyle out of dresses, and in girls’ jeans, for as long as he attended Hoover High. Of course, considering how hare-brained her plan was, that might not be for very much longer.

Demi liked the idea of simultaneously obeying and mocking the gangs. Sure, it was risky. The two fourteen-year-olds could be creamed for disrespecting their elders. Or the gangs might admire her for being ‘a stand-up guy.’ If she acted audaciously enough, they’d have to respect her. And if they respected her, she might not only avoid dresses, she might even have the option of becoming Kyle once again.

"Not that you’re likely to go back to boys’ clothes," said Jo anxiously. "But you’d be happier knowing that Demi is your own idea, and not someone else’s."

Was Demi his own idea? Kyle wasn’t so sure of that. But he was sure that Jo’s plan alone held out any hope that Demi wouldn’t turn into a dweeb in dresses.

Demi did, however, think that Jo’s plan entailed a lot of risk — a lot even for "the blindfolded skateboarder of Suicide Hill" to contemplate. Demi needed, therefore, considerable handholding, kissing, and reassuring.

"Don’t worry," Jo cooed. "The plan will work. The gangs won’t be able to say that you didn’t wear a dress to school, but you won’t lose any face when you do wear one. You’ll be standing taller than ever. In fact, I just know that everyone will be so impressed by your stunt that the gangs will lay off you forever afterwards. You’ll be mistress of your own fate once again."

"Jo, are you sure that we can get away with it? Won’t people know it’s me?"

"Not if you wear a mask, like we talked about. Demi, the Principal will suspect it’s you. But you’ll be in disguise. He won’t be able to prove anything. As for Cudmore, I promise to make sure that he doesn’t lay a hand on you."

"Did Tim and Steve agree to help with the school doors? It’s a lot to ask of them, and of you. We all risk expulsion, don’t we?"

"Demi, don’t worry. No one is going to be expelled from school. There will be so much confusion the brass will have no idea who was helping you out. Anyway, Tim will make sure that the back entrance to the south wing is open, and Steve will be waiting for you at the front exit. It will go like clockwork. Trust me."

"Are you sure that three o’clock is the best time?"

"You know it is, Demi. Coach Bryant is almost always hanging out in the south hallway at three o ‘clock inspecting the sophomore teams wandering in from the ball fields. He says he’s scouting for talent."

"Yeh, not that he’s found any that way. Are you sure the kids will be able to scatter in time?"

"Sure, that’s why the stunt is timed for 3 p.m., so that the only students in the corridor will be jocks. They’ll all get out of the way in time; they’ve got fast reflexes."

Demi sure hoped so. She wasn’t keen on learning what life was like for a cross-dressing teen in a maximum-security prison. But Jo was correct — only the coach would be stupid enough to stand his ground. And that was the idea — to get close enough to the coach to score the coup that would make Demi and her band legendary in their own time. Once she became famous, the gangs would have to treat Demi with respect. She would no longer be a sissy in either their eyes or those of the general student body. She would become "the Man," as in "you’re the Man!"

Ironically, the first step in proving her manhood to Hoover High entailed Demi’s wearing a dress to school for the first time, just as the gangs demanded. But it wasn’t just any old dress. It wasn’t the sort of dress that announced to Hoover High that Demi was a weakling, so easy to push around that she’d next be showing up at school in a baby bonnet, pacifier, and diapers at gang command. No, this dress would announce that Demi had spunk — that she had the courage of the country’s Founding Mothers.

Where could such a dress be found? In a costume store, that’s where. Jo had come across it as she was scouting for outfits for she and Demi to wear to the school’s Halloween dance. She had found the armor first, and remembering the stories that Kyle had told about his childhood, decided that one of them should go as "Joan of Ark."

"That should be me," Jo next decided. "We’ve got the same name. Besides, Demi’s got too sexy a body to hide behind armor. I want something that will show off her curves."

Jo’s decision to wear the armor became firm when she learned that the body armor and helmet were actually English, dating in style, though not antiquity, from the early seventeenth century. "I’ll go as two characters — one male, one female," Jo exulted. "When people ask, I’ll say I am Joan of Ark or I’ll say that I’m Captain John Smith, the explorer who fought the Ottoman Turks and founded Virginia. It all will depend on my whimsy. Either way I plan on looking as macho as possible." Jo twirled an imaginary moustache.

As Demi’s costume had to be complementary, Jo almost picked out a harem girl outfit for her to wear, but decided that a see-through outfit was too risqué for Hoover High. Vice-Principal Cudmore was not likely to allow any student, girl or boy, to attend a school dance wearing little more than a gaff. Instead, Jo went with a more modest North American ensemble. Jo’s decision made, she reserved the armor and Demi’s dress for use on Halloween night.

When it became clear that Demi would have to wear a dress to school or face ‘annihilation,’ Jo rushed back to the costume store to hire Demi’s dress for a few extra days. When Demi saw the outfit, she agreed that it was ideal for her first trip down a fashion runway in a dress. If she were fated to spend her last hour on this planet in a dress, let it be this one.

And what was Demi wearing as she stood just outside the door to Hoover’s south wing at 2:58 p.m.? Well, she had on her most conservative cotton underwear just in case the plan miscarried and she ended up in juvenile detention. Otherwise, she looked exactly like Pocahontas — or at least as Disney’s animators envisaged her. Not only was Demi outfitted in the tight-fitting doeskin dress, the blue beaded necklace, the leather moccasins, and the long black hair of the cartoon heroine, but she was also wearing a Pocahontas mask.

And she was sitting astride her noble steed. The moped gleamed like the setting sun, its engine rumbling — or roaring, as Demi imagined it did. The door opened. Tim gave the signal. The engine revved. Then Pocahontas and her mount charged up the wheelchair ramp into the school hallway. Down the corridor she went, whooping as she did, "Here I come, Coach Bryant! Everyone else, out of the way!"

The soccer sophomores scattered. The footballers fled. The coach cowered. He tried to make himself invisible, but Pocahontas saw him. She urged the moped forward into battle. As she reached the coach, he was swinging wildly, striving to knock her off her mount. But nothing could deter Pocahontas from driving home her attack.

The coach feared she wanted to run him over, but that was never her intent. As she closed for hand-to-head combat, her right fist left the moped’s handlebars just long enough to score the greatest coup in the school’s long history. As she left him trailing behind, howling with rage, shouting for revenge, Pocahontas waved her trophy for all to see — it was the coach’s ‘fright wig,’ his red toupee. Pocahontas had scalped the coach!

Would she make good her escape? Not if Mr. Cudmore could block it. He had suddenly appeared in the hallway, as though summoned from the nether world by the coach’s curses and imprecations. The Vice-Principal was going to stand his ground. Mr. Cudmore made it clear that the moped would not pass. Pocahontas had a choice: surrender or death, that letter being quite possibly the Vice-Principal’s if the moped did not relent in its onward rush.

Momentarily, Pocahontas contemplated surrender, but she regained her confidence in victory when she saw her faithful ally charge into the fray. It was ‘John Smith’ fully outfitted in armor and a huge moustache and waving a Jedi light sword. Cudmore retreated before its menacing glow, and Pocahontas and the moped charged through the gap.

Ahead they could see light — daylight in the great world of nature beyond the school, for Steve had thrown open the exit door, through which Pocahontas rode, down the ramp, and into school history. She left behind John Smith, who briefly looked cornered by the Vice Principal and two arriving hall monitors; but in the nick of time, a boy in a black shirt bowled them over like ninepins, and all made good their escape.

Demi’s ride had taken just three minutes, but its reverberations lasted years. She had worn a disguise, but the moped betrayed her identity. After all, it was the most beautiful bike in Des Moines. Many would recognize it, and some would talk. Consequently, the telephone at the James residence began to ring even before Demi reached home. Once there, she dared not answer it. So it rang, and rang, and rang — until Barb got home to find her ‘daughter’ sitting in a sweatshirt and jeans staring numbly at the weather channel.

Demi watched in terror as her mother’s face became tornado green. Then broke the storm: "Kyle James, this time you’ve gone and done it. You’re not to go to school tomorrow until twelve noon. Then you’re to go directly to the Principal’s office. I’m to come with you. They told me that I’d be wise to bring a lawyer, a criminal lawyer!"

"Kyle, I fear they’re going to arrest you! Your Principal advised me that your coach is going to ask the police to charge you with attempted murder! Oh Kyle, I did so hope that wearing girls’ clothes for a month would calm your reckless spirit. But this is the stupidest stunt you’ve ever pulled. Did you really try to run over the Vice-Principal? Oh Kyle!" she wailed.

Kyle shrugged. He said not a word. What could he say?

So Barb raged some more: "As it’s pointless for a boy as silly as you to be Demi any longer, I want you to go down into the basement and find some of your old clothes to wear tomorrow. And you’d better root out some clean boys’ underwear, for god knows who’s going to be seeing you in them if you get arrested. Oh, Kyle, I can’t believe how much you’ve messed up! Do you ever think things through?"

Barb wept. Kyle was determined not to. He was determined to be a man, and a man did not cry. He took action. So Kyle extracted an embroidered, perfumed handkerchief from the purse beside him, and vigorously began to remove his red lipstick. Soon the handkerchief appeared to be smeared with blood — with Demi’s blood.

"I guess Demi is dead," Kyle confirmed, his eyes empty and emotionless.

"I fear she really is dead," Barb replied. "I’ll miss my sweet daughter." Her body heaved with emotion.

Only a mother’s sobs and a son’s stoic silence could be heard as, suddenly, the telephone rang. Kyle answered it. He said ‘huh,huh’ more than a dozen times, and then hung up. For the first time since the tempest began he had tears in his eyes.

"Mom," he said, "that was Dr. Loupi, the school’s shrink. He says he can help me. Or rather he can help Demi. He says he can talk them into letting me stay in school. He can get the cops off my back. He can do that for Demi, he says. But Kyle? He’s a cooked goose."

"But Kyle, if there’s any chance you’ll be arrested by the police, you’ve got to go to school in boys’ clothes. You have no choice. You can’t go to the boys’ lock-up wearing a bra and panties. You just can’t. And you know why. I don’t have to spell it out for you."

"Mom, I trust Dr. Loupi. He says Demi’s got better odds than Kyle. I’ve got to play the odds, mom. That’s how I win at videogames."

"Demi, you’re gambling with your entire future! With your life! The clothes were supposed to change you! You were supposed to stop being so reckless!"

"Mom, whatever I’m wearing, I’ll always be me. I’m Kyle. I’m Demi. I’m a boy. I’m a girl. I’m not one fixed address. I am what I am. The only thing I really know for sure, mom, is that I’m not a loser. I’m a winner, and I will beat the coach and anyone else who tries to put me down. Tomorrow may be the worst day of my life, or maybe, just maybe the best. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. But I do know who’s going to live through it. Tomorrow has gotta be Demi’s day."

To be continued in Part 13 — It starts with Demi on the hot seat. Does it end with Kyle ‘chilling out’ in ‘juvie prison’?

So far, Kyle has found it more difficult than he expected to keep a deal he made with his mother: That if he wears girls’ clothes for a month that she would buy him a moped (a motor scooter). Somehow he has become Demi, a full-time cross-dresser with a gay boyfriend and a lesbian lover. Everyone believes that Demi’s a transsexual, including her mother. Only Kyle knows he’s taking sex hormones, and only Kyle knows that he’d still rather be a boy. If the original deal was supposed to ‘feminize’ Kyle’s behavior as well as his clothes, it seems to have failed, unless it was the ‘woman’ in Kyle that caused him to "scalp" his school's coach. As this chapter starts, Demi has good reason to fear arrest and expulsion from school.

Anything for a Moped? - Part 13 By: Dawn De Winter
Chapter Seventeen: Jail Time for Demi?

Gulp. There it was. A police car! It was parked across the front entrance of Hoover High. As well as across the front exit. Indeed, to Demi’s eyes it appeared to block all the school’s exits. Empty, it had lots of room for her broken body. Where were the police? Demi knew: "They’re waiting to nab me at the Principal’s office. That’s how they always arrest you. When and where you least expect it."

She shivered at the thought of the cold steel of a policeman’s automatic pistol pressed up against the base of her skull as she lay prostrate and helpless on the ground, her arms painfully twisted and her wrists already reddening with welts from her manacles. And that was the best possible scenario, feared Demi.

For what would happen if she weren’t gutsy? What if she tried to make a run for it? Would they shoot her in the back? The cops often shot first, and asked questions later, when it was a matter of apprehending someone wanted for ‘attempted murder.’ And that crime bulletin described Demi, didn’t it? That’s what the Vice-Principal had told her mother Barb: That the police were looking for because she tried to kill the coach!

Demi definitely needed a good lawyer. However, she was far from confident about the one she had. Robert Taft Dinkins was, her mother reassured her, one of the best lawyers in Des Moines. But Demi wasn’t so sure about his credentials — former lawyer for the city and chairperson of the state’s Law Reform Commission. And she’d have to take her mother’s word and accept that he was a senior partner in the city’s most prestigious law firm, whatever that was good for.

Demi was underwhelmed by these so-called ‘credentials.’ She focused instead on his negatives, starting with his lack of experience. She had asked Mr. Dinkins whether he’d ever defended someone accused of murder. His reply had been evasive: He’d said something about having pleaded several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Demi continued her cross-examination until she’d forced him to admit that not one of his cases had involved a murder or attempted murder. So he was a rank amateur.

Which perhaps explained his price. Lawyer Dinkins was taking her case for free, "as a favor", he said, "to a fellow activist in Iowa’s environmental movement." However, Demi could see through the man’s pretenses. He obviously needed to get a start somewhere, if he were ever going to become as crafty as the attorneys on Law & Order. He was working for free just to get the experience — that’s how she saw it.

If so, why did he have to start with Demi’s case? Wasn’t Mr. Dinkins liable to lose his first time out? With such a tyro for a lawyer, the odds worsened that Demi would end up a lifer, picking cotton at the Angola prison farm.

With a lawyer so green that he dared not charge a fee, Demi felt she had a right to be nervous, even had ‘Taft’ not also been the father of Sherman Stokes Dinkins, or ‘Sherm’ for short. Yes, incredible as it seemed, Demi’s lawyer was the father of the gang leader.

Did Taft know that his son was a Shark? Did the son know that his father was a professional barracuda? Demi had no real idea of the answers, but she would have run for her life, nevertheless, the moment that Taft had informed her that his son Sherman had told him about "Demi, the brand new girl at school," had Taft’s chauffeur not been speeding at the time. When the 7-series BMW screeched to a halt in front of the high school, it was too late for Demi to run. And so, she asked, fearing the worst, "What did Sherm say about me, Mr. Dinkins?"

"Well, Demi, he didn’t know what to make of you at first. I would be less than candid if I didn’t admit that his first reaction was … negative. Indeed, he feared for your safety."

Demi gulped.

"But Demi, he’s come around. I think he even admires you now. But then, why shouldn’t he? Demi is quite a girl, isn’t that right, Barb? In any case, Sherman was delighted to hear that I’m representing you. He told me that Coach Bryant deserved what you did to him, and that the whole school is pulling for you."

"Sherm wants his father to defend me?" Demi silently fretted. "Jeez, that proves I’m being set up. Sherm knows I’ll get the chair if I’ve got an incompetent lawyer. He wants me to fry."

As she thought through the implications of having a newbie plead her case, Demi wished she had dressed less flamboyantly. Her first instinct had been to dress with prison in mind. Her gray cotton panties by Calvin Klein were so unisex in appearance that they were the natural first choice for the men’s hoosegow. But once she put them on, they didn’t look right on her, not at all. Besides, they weren’t likely to fool anyone about the gender of the clothes she was wearing, not if she wore the companion bra. And almost no one was going to accept her as just another guy in the lock-up if Demi wore her breast forms.

So Demi decided to dress as femininely as possible in the hope that she might distract or seduce one of the men who was about to decide her fate. They weren’t supposed to see her gaff or lilac satin lingerie, with its white lace trim, a push-up bra and high, French cut panties. But they would, with luck, remark on her snug, shooting-star jeans, her burgundy platform sneakers, and her pink-strapped, burgundy halter top, which showed off some three inches of her abs. She’d wanted to plaster on the makeup, but Barb had insisted on her looking her age, inasmuch as a fourteen-year-old was bound to be punished less harshly than an older, more jaded teen.

The more Demi thought about her novice lawyer, the more she wished she’d gone to her showdown as Kyle. While he might have no future at Hoover High, he’d at least survive his first half-hour in juvenile detention.

As Demi contemplated her future prospects, her flash wardrobe, and the gold ring in her navel, she gradually became aware that her mother was also expressing some dissatisfaction with their charity lawyer. Barb was saying, "Taft, you mustn’t tell Demi that her actions yesterday were in any way heroic or admirable, for they certainly were not. She behaved childishly, and today’s she going to face the consequences."

Taft patted Demi’s hand: "Now don’t you fret, child, your mother and I will make sure that you don’t pay an unduly high price for your youthful high spirits."

When they arrived at the Principal’s office at high noon, Demi liked its color scheme: There was an absence of blue. Not a police officer was in sight, either at the office itself or in its antechamber. Indeed, there was only one person whom Demi didn’t recognize. It was Chuck Jones, attorney for the school board. Also representing Hoover High were the Principal, Vice-Principal Cudmore, and Dr. Loupi.

The entry of Taft Dinkins into the office made quite an impression. Chuck Jones immediately rushed up to him, and started frantically pumping his hand, as he kept saying what an honor it was to meet, at long last, the man rumored to be the next appointment to the State Supreme Court.

Though Demi was still unimpressed with her attorney — after all, she needed a superior criminal lawyer, not a supreme type judge — the Principal surprised her by becoming quite deferential. She had never seen him in any role but High and Mighty Potentate. She didn’t know he could cringe with the least of them. She would have been even more surprised had she known that the Principal was at that very moment revising drastically downward the punishment he had in mind for "the school lunatic."

Vice-Principal Cudmore seemed to be lost in thought — or was it in panic? Demi had no idea that Cudmore regarded Taft Dinkins not as an eminent attorney, but as a messenger sent to him by the real masters of Hoover High, the Sharks and the Jets.

For years Cudmore had kept the peace at Hoover by allowing the two gangs to operate unmolested. He knew they were extorting money from younger students, but he deemed their lunch money a small price for them to pay for the privilege of attending a safe school, which Hoover definitely was, thanks to the rough justice meted out by the gangs to anyone else who disturbed the peace.

When the Vice-Principal saw that Sherm’s father was Demi’s advocate, he appreciated that he must classify Demi as a harmless prankster who deserved little more than a slap on the wrist.

Demi should have relaxed. She had the perfect lawyer.

It was Taft Dinkins who started the negotiations, once the pleasantries had ended: "May I ask where is Coach Bryant? I expected the coach to be here inasmuch as I have been led to believe that he has been threatening to have my client arrested for aggravated assault."

The Principal coughed nervously. He answered, "Coach Bryant is no longer a member of the school staff. It’s a personal affair. There is sickness in his family, and he and I agreed that he should take an indefinite leave of absence until his two brothers get better. We’ve known for a while that his brother Arnie was ill, but it wasn’t until yesterday evening that the coach learned that his brother Bernie also required … er, hospitalization, and the coach agreed that he will be too preoccupied with the illness rampant in his family to be able to give full attention to his duties at Hoover for some time to come. We wish him well."

Turning to Demi, the Principal said sternly, "Young … lady, the coach has told me that he all he wants from you is his hairpiece back. He told me that he doesn’t want to give ‘yet another little sh… er, teenager, a public forum for attacking his family.’ He is uninterested in learning the reasons for your … trying to humiliate him."

"Well, I can tell you my reasons, can’t I?" Demi protested. She shot a disapproving look at her lawyer. He hadn’t made a single objection to the principal’s testimony. And it was full of ‘heresay’ evidence! A girl with a novice lawyer has to conduct her own defense, which Demi now did.

"The coach has been picking on people who are at all different. He’s been acting unconstitutionally toward Brad Mitty, and he’s been ridiculing Vicky and me for wearing a bra. What’s it to him? Why should he care what young girls wear?"

Cudmore’s eyes were ordering her to stop. He didn’t like that allusion to the ‘unconstitutional" treatment of a gay, underage youth known to have been the coach’s ‘pet’. The school didn’t need a scandal. That was the reason the coach had been asked to leave, so that parents, hearing about the arrest of the second Bryant brother, wouldn’t demand an investigation of the third.

Demi pressed onward: "The coach gives all the boys the creeps. It’s the way he stares at you, I mean, at them. He’s always hanging around the …."

"That’s quite enough out of you, Miss James," interrupted the Vice-Principal. "It’s not the coach who is trial here. It’s you."

"This is not a trial," responded Demi’s lawyer. "You’re not suggesting anything like that for Demi, I’m quite sure."

"No, of course not. It’s not in the interest of the school for anyone to go on trial. Do you understand that, Demi? No one, I repeat, no one is going to air the dirty linen of this school in public. We don’t need the police and courts to get involved. Is that agreed?"

A knowing smile came over Taft’s face. He said: "Under the circumstances, there can’t be any question of Demi’s expulsion, nor that of any of her confederates, can there?"

"She has to be punished," grumbled the Vice Principal. "We can’t have our students driving their motorcycles through our hallways. We cannot have them assaulting the staff. Her ‘girlfriend’ even threatened me with a sword. There have to be repercussions. Er, what do you recommend we do, Taft?"

Taft looked at Barb who nodded her assent, then authoritatively replied, "A two-week suspension strikes me as being in order — that’s two weeks for Demi, since she was riding the scooter, and a maximum of a week for each of her co-conspirators."

Vice-Principal Cudmore reluctantly agreed. He had been planning to expel Demi, but everyone had let him down. The Coach had been the first to ‘bugger off." Then the police he had summoned to the school to intimidate Demi and her mother had wandered off instead to scrutinize the Coach’s files as he packed them away. Next, Demi had shown up with her ‘gang lawyer’ in a blatant attempt to intimidate the school administration.

And finally, Dr. Loupi had refused to co-operate. When asked earlier to certify that Demi was a menace to her fellow students, he’d threatened to resign rather than "harm that sweet girl." Indeed, Loupi warned Cudmore that anything more than a token punishment would do irreparable psychological harm to Demi at a critical moment in her transition from male to female.

"If Demi subsequently launches a lawsuit against the school board for damages," Dr. Loupi had warned its lawyer, "I am prepared to testify on her behalf. This school should be progressive enough to recognize that any transsexual is under enormous pressure at the moment she makes the decision to change her sexual identity. We should count ourselves fortunate indeed that Demi expressed herself with a moped rather than with a gun. Now that she has vented, I confidently predict, that she will become a model student — indeed, a far better one than Kyle, the boy, ever was."

Beleaguered and abandoned, Cudmore crumbled. Demi would get the token punishment recommended by her psychologist and lawyer. She had, of course, no idea how close she’d come to exiting the school and entering a holding cell. She only knew that her lawyer had let her down badly. .

Demi exploded: "I’m being framed! I thought Mr. Dinkins was supposed to protect my rights. He’s been selling me down the river!"

Taft glared at Demi. Apparently he didn’t find amusing her allusion to the slave auctions in New Orleans. Barb hissed, "Hush, Demi. We’re trying to work out what’s best for you. Please be silent and let the adults decide what’s right."

Vice-Principal Cudmore saw his opening: "The motorcycle has to be part of the punishment, or Demi will have learnt nothing from her mistake. She has clearly proved herself too young and immature to be in charge of a motor. If we were to report her escapade to the police, she’d be banned from driving her cycle for several years. So I propose an indefinite suspension of her driving privileges on an informal basis. I’m sure you’ll agree, Mrs. James, that your son … er, daughter is not ready for the responsibility of motor-vehicle operation."

Barb answered, "I am inclined to agree with you Mr. Cudmore, but I will remind you that teens grow up remarkably quickly these days. I’m confident that Demi will soon develop the necessary maturity to operate a moped safely and responsibly."

"I understand that Demi is going to be 15 years old in May," Taft interjected. "Why don’t we agree that she can get back her driving privileges on her fifteenth birthday if she has behaved in a mature and ladylike fashion in the interim."

Demi was too shocked to speak. She’d heard you could end up doing some serious time if you didn’t have a smart enough lawyer. But six months without her moped? That was cruel and unusual punishment!

How could her mother be so foolish, how could the James family be so destitute, that they had to depend on a ‘charity’ lawyer so incompetent that he thought that it was his responsibility to recommend her punishment! Jeez, talk about hopeless! Didn’t he realize that it was the prosecution that said, "Fry the bastard"? Demi resolved to look for a part-time job, any job, so that she and her mother would never again be so poor that they had to rely on a ‘no-fee’ lawyer.

And so it was agreed: Demi was suspended for two weeks, and Jo, Steve, and Tim for one week each. As well, the moped, so dearly purchased, was to be padlocked for six months. As Taft and the James family left the school, Demi could not remotely fathom why her mother seemed pleased with the verdict. Her mother was actually giving Taft a hug! Could you beat that? Adults! Who can figure them out?

Demi’s punishment did not end at the school gate. Barb also cancelled the expedition with the Lancers to Chicago, and grounded Demi for three weeks. She wouldn’t get, therefore, a second chance to wear her Pocahontas outfit. She was, however, permitted to stay in touch with her friends electronically.

As a result, Demi discovered the joys of phone sex with Jo, who’d insist on their describing every inch of their bodies in pornographic detail. When Demi realized that Jo became most aroused at the thought of making love to a ‘genetic girl’, she became one on the telephone. These chats did nothing for Kyle’s male self-image, but they sure made Demi feel hot. "Lesbian sex is," she thought after one such call, "sure a turn-on."

One call upset Demi "to the max". In it, Jo admitted that her grandmother no longer approved of her seeing ‘Kyle-slash-Demi’: "She thinks you’re a bad influence on me," Jo explained. "Gran says I never got into trouble before I started seeing you; and now I’ve been suspended from school for threatening to stab the Vice Principal. She blames you for that."

"That’s no big deal," Demi replied. "She’ll soon forgive and forget."

"Well, Gran did laugh out loud when she heard about your ride through the school, and she’d probably be willing to forgive you for getting me into trouble at school, if it weren’t for the … credit card."

"Credit card? What credit card," Kyle asked.

"Demi, I did something really bogus. I was so anxious to see you dressed right that I used my grandmother’s Visa card without her permission. She actually accused me of forgery; she said I’ve been acting like a juvenile delinquent. Isn’t that unfair for her to say?"

"Yeh, it sure is. But did you really forge her signature?"

"Once or twice — but it was for you, Demi! I had to help you. How do you think I paid for the gaffs, for the earrings, and the Pocahontas stuff? You needn’t them, didn’t you?" Jo then shocked Demi by starting to sob noisily at the other end of the telephone line.

"Of course I needed them. You did the right thing. Don’t worry, Jo. I’ll find you the money. Once she gets her money back, your Gran will forgive you."

"But how are we going to get any money, Demi, when everything we have goes to the Jets and the Sharks?"

"I don’t know. I was counting on selling rides on the moped. I’ll look for an after-school job, but you know as well as I do that it’s not easy to find work when you’re our age. The deck is stacked against you when you’re not fifteen."

"It’s so unfair," agreed Jo. "But there actually is a way we could earn one hundred bucks. Each of us! One hundred bucks! Are you interested?"

Of course, Demi was interested, but also skeptical: How could a kid earn a hundred dollars? Jo then explained that Melanie had freaked when she’d first heard from Jo that Barb had vetoed Demi’s guest appearance on the Vera Smuttee show. However, Melanie had been in much better spirits three days later when she’d phone back to say that the Smuttee producer had recommended she get into touch with an independent Des Moines filmmaker who was making a documentary about ‘special teens.’

Jo had then phoned Edwina Wood, the one-person production team, who promised each of the kids $100 (and, unbeknownst to them, $500 as well to Melanie) if "Demi" and Jo agreed to her filming a brief interview and then using it in her documentary for a cable channel.

"You mean that … Demi would end up in a movie? I’d prefer it was Kyle," Demi replied, her voice crackling with tension.

"Don’t be silly," replied Jo. "Demi’s really cute and sexy. And she’s an excellent dresser. She’ll look great on TV, ‘specially if she wears a dress."

"No dress!"

"Okay, okay. But you’re going to help me out, aren’t you? We need the two hundred dollars. Oh, Demi, if we don’t pay back my Gran, she may never let me see you again. She said you weren’t welcome at the house, until she was ‘no longer tempted to give Demi and Kyle the spanking that they both so richly deserve.’ Demi, if you really love me, you’ll agree to make the film."

Did Demi love Jo? How could Jo even ask? Demi agreed to be interviewed by Edwina Wood. As she’d need her mother’s permission, Demi outlined a campaign to guilt Barb into agreeing to the filming and to a rescheduling of her NBA weekend with Steve. While Jo was far from pleased to learn that Demi still intended to trade her virtue for basketball tickets, she had to admit that Demi’s plan would probably bear fruit, even in the barren month of November.

Demi said she would play on her mother’s guilt for relying on an inept lawyer and for reneging on their moped deal. While Demi had little hope of getting the moped back before her fifteenth birthday — an eternity away — she did believe that if she whined often enough about losing her wheels, that her mother would soon be asking the price for her silence — which would be, of course, the filming with Jo and the weekend with Steve.

Steve was Jo’s great rival. There were several nights recently in which he’d haunted her dreams. In these, always he seemed to be threatening Demi’s life. In one dream, he hit her over the head with a club to drag her back to his cave where he planned to eat her. In another, he was an archer in a medieval battle whose errant arrow struck Lady Demi in her heel as she watched her champion, Joan of Ark, charge into the fray. In the most frightening dream, Steve was half-man, half-goat. He was galloping after both Demi and Jo like a ravenous werewolf, and just as they were about to escape the beast, he turned into a bat. Jo would awake in a cold sweat just as the great horned bat sank his fangs into Demi’s throat of alabaster white. In the moonlight, Demi’s blue blood had the color of lavender as it streamed down her neck.

As Jo feared that Demi might be bisexual, she figured it was just a matter of time before Demi betrayed her with Steve or some other boy, that is, unless Jo could isolate Demi somehow from male company. A girls’ boarding school in rural Iowa was the obvious solution, and Jo had been spending most of her Internet time searching for a suitable prep school — that is, one that their guardians could afford and that the two teens would enjoy. The school also had to be one with a fairly liberal definition of who or what was a ‘girl’. Judging from its website, a school in Ottumwa, Iowa might fit the bill.

Could Demi be talked into attending an all-girls’ school? Given enough time, Jo felt the answer was definitely ‘yes.’ Jo was convinced that Demi’s destiny was the company of women. But could Demi be persuaded to bury the remaining shards of her boyhood in less than three months time? Probably not, alas.

Even though she would have been living as a girl for several months by then, Demi might still believe that she was taking only a temporary leave of absence from being Kyle. Therefore, Jo concluded that there was only one sure way to get Demi into an all-girls’ school by January: trickery. For her own good, Demi would have to be duped into thinking that she and Jo were going to be attending a co-educational school.

Did Jo feel at all guilty about her plan to trick Demi into attending a girls’ school? No, not really, for Jo believed in her heart of hearts that everything she was going to do, or had ever done, was in Demi’s best interests. After all, Demi must surely prefer to be her own woman at a girls’ prep school than be a browbeaten boy at a public school.

Demi could stand tall at The Amazonian School of Ottumwa, Iowa, whereas Kyle would have to crawl cravenly on his knees at Hoover High until he was old enough and tough enough to stand up to the gangs. The other fourteen-year-old boys at Hoover didn’t face such a stark choice, for no one of else was under gang orders to dress as a girl until he graduated.

Jo was certain that Demi would love The Amazonian School once she got used to the fact that it had no place in it for Kyle. It was, for starters, sports crazy. Not only was every girl expected to belong to several intra-mural teams, but it also had a record number of varsity sports.

Whenever possible, the Amazonians played in boys’ or mixed leagues. In addition to such obvious sports for girls as synchronized swimming, weight lifting, boxing, wrestling and rugby, the school also boasted winning teams in skateboarding and BMX racing. While their website did not mention mopeds, these might be covered by the pledge of the headmistress "to provide whatever sports facilities our students need to develop into self-confident, physically fit adults."

The Amazonian School promised an extraordinary amount of physical activity — rock climbing at Devil’s Peak, shooting the rapids of the Colorado River, cross-country running in the South Dakota badlands, hang-gliding in the High Rockies, and winter camping near Nome, Alaska. The cost of these excursions would be fully covered, it promised, by donations from the school’s graduates, and by the students themselves through bake sales, car washes, and auto repair work.

The school was not all fun and games. It also promised to get its graduates into the nation’s elite colleges, and to teach them the social and political skills to develop into "the leaders of tomorrow." To ensure that its students did not buy into gender stereotypes, the school uniform had optional trousers. And in any case, it only had to be worn on formal occasions, as the Amazonians normally wore jeans and sweats, so that they’d have no excuse to avoid the many physical challenges of their normal day.

The school seemed ideal to Jo. So she phoned up its admissions officer to see if they accepted transsexuals. The answer had been guarded and convoluted, but it basically boiled down to this: The school had no use for cross-dressers, that is for boys who got a sexual thrill out of dressing or acting like girls. It would, however, admit a genuine transsexual, that is one who was keen on transitioning as quickly as possible to the female sex, so long as he had the right attitude towards femininity. In other words, the school would expel any transsexual who deemed women the ‘weaker sex’ or ‘femininity’ as an excuse to mince.

To prove his bona fides, the boy would have to initiate his hormone treatments and show some breast development before he arrived. He was expected to complete his transition — that is, to have ‘the operation’ — within two years of his arrival. Any male student who refused to complete his sexual reassignment in a timely fashion would be asked to leave The Amazonian School.

"Had any transsexual ever attended The Amazonian School?" Jo asked, but the admissions officer refused to comment. Nevertheless, she left the distinct impression that the school had some experience in helping boys to become girls.

Jo came away from the telephone call really pumped. This was the perfect school for Demi and her. Confident that she’d find some way to enroll Demi at The Amazonian School when the time came, Jo badgered her grandmother to send her off to Ottumwa.

Virginia was at first leery of the idea, for she thought an all-girls’ school the last place she should send her ‘lesbian’ ward. But Jo wore her down with the argument that the Amazonians regularly came into contact with boys — especially in sports like football and basketball — and held frequent dances to which they invited the cadets from the nearby O’Reilly Military Academy. Besides, if Jo went to school in Ottumwa, she’d have little or no contact with Demi, whose baleful influence would be left behind in Des Moines.

"A girls’ school is the one place for you to put me if you’re determined to keep me away from Kyle," Jo lied.

While Jo was chipping away at Virginia’s resolve, Dr. Loupi was chiseling away at Demi’s self-image. At his insistence, they met daily, even during Demi’s two-week suspension, at the doctor’s home in an effort to eliminate any lingering doubts Demi might have about the wisdom of completing her transition to girlhood. When she learned that the doctor had supported her in the showdown with the Vice Principal, Demi became eager to please him. So she pretended that Kyle was making progress towards accepting his innate femininity.

But Kyle didn’t really feel that there was a girl inside him desperate to get out. Rather there was a boy inside Demi anxious to get back into his regular clothes — at least part of the time. Kyle had to admit that his favorite underwear and jeans all belonged to Demi. Still, he thought he should have as much freedom to dress in guy clothes as Jo had.

Dr. Loupi inquired as to how Demi’s hormone treatments were progressing. At first, Kyle was stumped for an answer, inasmuch as his steroid intake was not being monitored by a physician. Was he growing breasts? Well, he’d better not be! He was supposed to be building muscle. And was he? Kyle wasn’t sure, but he did think he’d detected the beginning of "something happening" when he’d checked out his chest two days previously.

He’d actually taken his breast forms off, something he rarely did even to sleep. His pectoral muscles, he could see, were definitely larger, especially when viewed from the side. He wasn’t pleased, however, with his muscle tone. His pecs might be bigger, but they were flabby. Kyle blamed himself for not exercising more often.

"Jeez," he’d said to himself, "If I don’t start lifting some weights, I’m going to end up with saggy tits — just like an old woman!"

As Dr. Loupi pressed him for feedback about the hormones, Kyle, remembering that one time recently that he’d checked out his chest, felt that it wasn’t much of a fib to say, "I’m beginning to see a change in my body. I’m growing something that looks like tits." ("But are actually muscles," Kyle chuckled to himself.)

"How do you feel about your changing bust line, Demi? Does it please you to look more and more like a woman?"

"Sure, why not?"

"Demi, could you stand up? Yes, that’s the girl. I want to see how you’re shaping up. Hmm, very nice. Now turn around. Yes, even better. Demi, you’re developing an hourglass figure. You’d best be wary from now on whenever an older woman offers you a candy bar or invites you to her apartment to see her collection of ballerina etchings. A girl with your figure has to watch out for lesbians. They’re everywhere you look."

Kyle smiled. He was constantly watching out for one particular lesbian, Jo, the love of Demi’s life.

"Now, Demi, do tell me. How much padding are you using to create your figure? Are any of those curves actually yours?"

"I’m wearing a body shaper right now. I wear it or a panty girdle every day. They’re the reason I look like a girl."

"But Demi," asked Dr. Loupi thinking of the feminine hormones she was taking, "surely your waist and hips have changed a bit? After all, I remember the first time I saw you in those jeans — because of the plaid hem and pockets — and I’m sure they used to hang on you more loosely than they do now."

"It’s possible I’ve been eating too many French fries. What you say is true, Dr. Loupi, all my jeans are tighter. It’s the fault of the body shaper — it squeezes my waist, and my bod has to pop out somewhere."

It was true: the inch and a half subtracted from his waist seemed to have been added to his hips. As Kyle assumed that the rearrangement was temporary, he wasn’t much bothered by it. He figured that his body would, like an elastic band, snap back into its regular shape once he took the constant tension off his waist. In the meantime, he appreciated that the extra width in his hips made it less likely that he’d be ‘read’ as a boy when he sallied forth in public.

Dr. Loupi was thrilled with Demi’s replies. She seemed extraordinarily nonchalant about her sex change. Nowhere in the half-dozen abstracts that he’d read about transsexualism had he encountered anyone quite like Demi. She’d make his career!

What made Demi unique — to Dr. Loupi — was her uncomplicated transition between genders. Sure, she’d tried to kill the school’s football coach and vice principal, but Dr. Loupi didn’t blame Pocahontas’s ride on ‘Demi’s transsexualism. No. Jo Smith was at fault. She was a "bad influence," and possibly even a "lesbian". So far as Dr. Loupi was concerned, the ride had nothing to do with Demi’s gender dysphoria, or the doctor just knew that Kyle had fewer doubts about the wisdom of changing his sex than any other Iowan in U.S. history.

Dr. Loupi figured that the lingering bit of ‘boy’ in Demi would disappear even more rapidly if Demi were hypnotized and told to explore her essential femininity. He’d learned the art of hypnosis from a correspondence school, but had never had the opportunity to put anyone under — until now. But try as he might, Dr. Loupi was unable to hypnotize Demi, for she was wary of being given a post-hypnotic suggestion that might induce Kyle to have a sex change.

Ironically, Demi hypnotized herself one day. She became mesmerized by the hands of the wall clock that she was watching as Dr. Loupi droned on about lesbians. Fortunately, she came out of the trance when their hour was up, for the doctor had already made "this session is over" her cue for coming out of a trance. Otherwise, Demi might have ended up a zombie. Unfortunately, two of the doctor’s statements had already entered Demi’s sub-consciousness as post-hypnotic suggestions.

As a result of this foul-up, Demi soon had to give up one of Kyle’s favorite pastimes since he’d reached puberty, namely the ritual inspection of centerfolds of ‘naked ladies’ in the company of other pubescent males. Why was that? Well, it seems that every time a boy commented on "those boobs," Demi would mechanically answer, "Yes, wouldn’t you like to be a lesbian so that you could make love to a girl?" Naturally, the boys didn’t warm to the suggestion that they’d have to change their sex to have any hope of getting a date — even if it were true for one or two of them. So Demi found herself excluded from their picture-swapping sessions.

Demi, or perhaps it was Kyle, also found it difficult for several years to stay friends with the politically correct because of a compulsion (eventually mastered) to blurt out, whenever anyone spoke within earshot of a ‘pretty girl" — "All pretty girls are dykes."

To some extent, the doctor’s obsession became Demi’s. Even though Steve made her ‘hot,’ she agreed with the doctor that she must indeed be a lesbian since she was primarily attracted to girls. Indeed, she was quite turned on by the magazines that Dr. Loupi lent her as part of her sex education. Demi decided that the sight of two women having sex was far more erotic than the lingerie ads in the Sunday supplement. Gradually, Demi’s sexual orientation changed to conform to the expectations of her psychologist and girlfriend.

Nevertheless, it upset Kyle to think of himself as a lesbian. It also bothered him that Demi dominated his dreams. Several mornings in a row he’d awakened with a start, after he realized that he’d been female in his dream. When he dreamt about riding his moped, there was always some telltale sign — his long, black hair, or his moccasins, or his buckskin jacket — which told him that Pocahontas was in charge of the bike and of his life. Even more disconcerting was his masturbatory life. After one orgasm unleashed by the thought of being the sexiest, most desired inmate in a prison for girls, Kyle was disturbed to realize that he’d been a female in every one of his eighty-nine sexual fantasies during the preceding twenty-four hours.

It was time for Kyle to take back his life from Demi. He had a feeling that if he didn’t soon resume dressing like a boy, he might never be able to do it again. Demi would be too much in control. Kyle steeled himself, therefore, for a showdown with the gangs. They’d waste little time, he knew, in demanding an explanation from Demi for her continued refusal to wear a skirt or dress to school. And when they did, he intended to ask for "his life back" — that is, for the right to attend school as whatever sex pleased him. Kyle wasn’t positive that he’d ever give up being Demi, but he wanted the freedom to choose.

Kyle was pumped for his showdown with the gang, for Demi had been treated like a hero on her first day back at class after her suspension. Almost everyone at the school knew about Pocahontas’s ride and about its outcome — the disappearance of the reviled coach and the return of the school’s star quarterback to the starting line-up.

They’d also heard (through rumors started by Cudmore himself) that she’d showed up with a mob lawyer who had intimidated the administration into giving the ‘Pocahontas Gang’ an extraordinarily light punishment for so grievous an offense. Demi had become, consequently, a Woman of Respect.

Derek could, therefore, finally admit to liking her. Indeed, he trooped up to her table at lunchtime with the black shirts to tell her, "Demi, we think you’re one hell of a cool chick. You’re welcome to hang out with us anytime you like."

"That invitation is for you, Demi, not for that sissy fag Kyle," snarled Jason. "If I ever see his face around this school again, I promise to smash my fist into it. But Derek’s right — Demi is a righteous chick, and she’s welcome to hang out with the black shirts."

Under his breath, Jason hissed to Demi, "One sex change we can handle, but don’t you dare change back!"

Then Tristin, the newest black shirt, came forward with a shopping bag: "Look inside, Demi. We got you a present to show how much we respect you for sacrificing your moped for the good of the school."

With some trepidation, Demi put her hand into the bag to pull out … a black cotton halter top across the front of which was scrolled in pink sequins one word, "Demi". The message was unmistakable: Demi had just become the first ‘female’ ever to be admitted to the black shirts!

Overcome with emotion, she started to cry. Steve wrapped his arms around her to comfort her. As he did so, Jo was startled to realize that she was not the only one with jealousy burning in her eyes as the couple embraced. Vicky and Brad did not surprise her, for Jo had never seen anyone more lovestruck than Brad was about Steve, and Vicky had been outrageously flirting with Steve during the week she didn’t have to compete with Demi for his attention. No, it wasn’t Brad or Vicky who surprised her. It was Derek! He had a hungry look in his eyes as he watched Demi nestle into Steve. Just what did he crave? Jo hoped it wasn’t Demi.

Demi’s membership in the black shirts didn’t seem to have any downside, although it did occasionally bother her that Derek, Rob and Jason seemed even more intent on feminizing her than did Jo and Dr. Loupi. When she asked Tristin why the black shirts were constantly pressing her to have ‘the operation,’ he said that the gang felt uncomfortable hanging out with a ‘demi-girl’. They wanted her to become the real thing as soon as possible.

Tristin thought his friends had mixed motives: "I think Jason regards all girls as inferior to boys, and so he believes that the more feminine you become, the more he’ll be able to sneer at you. As for Rob, he simply goes along with whatever Derek wants, and Derek definitely believes you’d be happier as a real girl. I once heard him joke about dating you if you ever got your own hooters."

Demi’s historic ride also impressed the Jets enough to make her a candidate for membership in their gang. She had met with the leadership of the Jets and the Sharks at their ‘request’ immediately after her first day back at school. She had gone alone, as she definitely did not want any of her friends to witness any disrespect she might show the gangs. She hoped the gangs might be more magnanimous if there were no outsiders to hear her demand her right to dress as she chose.

Her meeting with the leaders of the two gangs started with Markko demanding an explanation for her shooting-star jeans: "While I do admit you look hot in those jeans, Demi, why aren’t you wearing a dress? You know that’s what the gangs want you to wear."

"You asked me to wear a dress a school. And I did it once — to show my deep respect for the Sharks and the Jets. I almost got thrown out of school. Jeez, I almost got thrown into juvie jail, but I did as you asked. I also scalped the coach while wearing a dress. And here are two photos I took of myself wearing my leather dress and the coach’s red mop. They’re my offering to the gangs. They prove how much respect I have for you. But, if you have any respect for me, you will not insist on my wearing a dress or skirt to school. I am not a nerd, and I won’t dress like one!"

She had raised her voice. How would the gangs react? Sherm spoke first: "You are the most amazing little dude I’ve ever seen. Or should that be dudette? Us Sharks think you’ve earned your right to wear long pants. You’re definitely not the little sissy we thought you was."

"Does that mean I can be Kyle again? That I can go to school dressed like a boy again?"

"No, Demi, it doesn’t mean that," replied Markko. "Demi, we like you. You’re an okay chick. But we didn’t like that little wuss Kyle. The school’s better off without him. We talked this over with the Sharks, and we agreed that Demi is too cool to wear a dress to school. In fact, we like those tight jeans you’re wearing. They make you look real sexy. You should definitely get some more of them. Understood?"

Demi nodded glumly.

The Sherm spoke: "I do hope youse understand your position, Demi. You’ve got our protection — for the current price — for as long as you go to Hoover. We’re even going to make you famous as the first girl in the history of this high school to be elected as queen of both the junior and senior proms. It will be a great joke on Cudmore and the Principal, and the gangs will make sure that the students see the wisdom of voting for you."

"But I want to be Kyle again!" Demi wailed.

"Sure you can be Kyle, if you so choose," replied Markko menacingly, "but you should ‘preciate that Kyle might not survive his first visit to the boys’ washroom. The demijohn is the place for you. Bitch, never forget that you’re now the sweetheart of Hoover High. Shit, we don’t want to see that little puke Kyle ever again — even at the class reunions."

"So, Demi, do you want the gangs’ protection or what?" asked Sherm.

Demi nodded glumly.

"Now, don’t look so gloomy," said Markko with his oiliest voice yet. "You should be happy that the gangs like you. In fact, the Jets think you’re such a hot bitch that we’ve gone and elected you a candidate member of the gang. You even get to wear our colors. With winter coming, we decided you’d look good in a blue and white silk scarf. We want to see it on you at all times."

Sherm then said an odd thing: "I want you to know, Demi, that the Sharks persuaded the Jets that you were still too young for full membership in their gang. You remember that. Us Sharks have been looking after your scrawny little white ass."

And so, Demi left her showdown with the gangs with two new rights — first, the right to wear jeans, so long as they were tight; and the right to wear the blue-and-white colors of the Jets. At first, she believed that a candidate membership in the Jets must be, like her membership in the black shirts, a blessing. But Derek disabused her the following morning when he saw her for the first time in gang colors (as well as her ‘Demi’. halter top)

"My god, Demi, tell me they haven’t made you a member of the Jets! Tell me it isn’t so!"

"No, I’m only a candidate member thanks to the interference of Sherm Dinkins. He seems to have it really out for me. First, he got his father to give away my moped for six months — for no good reason! And then he talked the Jets out of making me a full member in their gang. I don’t know why he hates me so much. He said something about my ‘skinny white ass,’ so I guess it’s something racial."

"Demi, you’re such a little fool," Derek riposted, while shaking her shoulders to get her full attention. "Sherm’s not your enemy. He must be your friend if he prevented your becoming a member of the Jets."

"How so?" asked Demi suspiciously.

"You’re a girl, right? So you’d be a female gang member, right?"

Demi had to agree — she’d be joining the Jets as a girl. Indeed, she’d be their first female member in more than a year. Dawn DeWitt had belonged to their gang for several months before having to leave school in disgrace. Pregnant, she had confessed that she had no idea who the father of her quints might be.

"So, Demi, do you have any idea, any at all, what the duties of a female member of the Jets just happen to be?"

No, she hadn’t, but the tension in his voice raised some dire possibilities.

"If they make you a full member, you’ll be the gang’s bitch. You’ll have to keep them all … happy. I mean real happy. They’ll make you soiled goods in the eyes of all the other boys. No one will want to date you once you’ve begun servicing the Jets."

There had been a lot of shocks for Kyle’s system to absorb since he’d started cross-dressing, not least was the emergence of Demi. But nothing shook him more to his roots than the prospect of becoming a gang’s whore. He fervently nodded when Derek recommended that Demi needed to change schools ‘pronto.’

Hadn’t Jo been talking up the idea of their going away to boarding school? Never had the idea been more appealing to Demi. That very afternoon, she raised the issue with Jo (shortly after they had enjoyed their first sex in more than two weeks). To Demi’s delight, Jo had "good news": Her grandmother had submitted her application to The Amazonian School of Ottumwa. Jo didn’t add, of course, that Virginia hoped to send her granddaughter to a place where Demi, still a boy in the eyes of the law and most educators, could not follow.

Over the next three days, Demi’s reputation plummeted. No longer was she the school’s heroine. Her blue-and-white scarf announced her new identity as the Jets’ bitch. Though she tried to tell her friends that she was merely a ‘candidate’ member, fine distinctions were lost on her schoolmates, most of whom assumed she was ‘putting out’ for the Jets.

Vicky certainly believed her rival for Steve’s affections had become a ‘slut’. In the privacy of the demijohn, she whined, "Leave Steve alone. You know I want him. Surely the Jets give you enough sex. You can’t do everyone in the school!"

Vicky simply refused to credit Demi’s denials. After all, who would believe anything a girl said if she had so little self-respect that she agreed to become a gang’s bitch? In fact, Steve and Jo did believe Demi, as did most of the black shirts, when she protested her innocence of all insinuations, but Tim merely said, "When I joined your table, Demi, I told you that you were my friend whether you were straight or gay, a cross-dresser or a leather fetishist. It’s none of my business how often you have sex or with whom. It’s got to be expected that there will be a bit of tomcat in any boy, even if she dresses like a French poodle."

As for Jason, he was thrilled that Demi was becoming known as the school’s biggest slut. It served her right! Jason even fabricated some stories to ensure that her legend would grow. "No," he’d say, "I’m not sure that it was actually one of the Jets, but I definitely saw her lead a big blond dude by the hand into the demijohn. It’s her own private brothel, you know."

As Jason’s stories spread, it became obvious to Demi and her friends that her reputation had plummeted to such depths that the gang colors had become, ironically, her best protection. All the guys who believed her an easy lay would have to leave her alone as long as she wore the blue-and-white. None of them dared to pick a fight with the Jets by molesting their bitch. The hyenas knew they would have to wait until the lions were finished with Demi.

As the predators circled, Demi became increasingly desperate to get out of town. There was, consequently, no question of her turning down a second chance to go away with Steve and Elvira — this time to see a NBA game in New York City. Elvira, who had no inkling of Demi’s bad reputation, still deemed her the ideal ‘girl’ to seduce her son into heterosexuality. Or at least, Demi was the most feminine-looking and -acting sex partner he was likely to choose at any time in the near future.

Barb had put up little resistance to the rescheduling of the basketball weekend. There were, she felt, lots of reasons to agree to Demi’s trip. First, Barb hoped that her child would stop moping about her moped. With luck, she’d also become less irritable. In recent weeks, Demi had developed a temper, mainly around the house, but also whenever she went shopping with her mother.

Barb also hoped that a weekend in New York would draw Demi and Steve closer, while giving Demi’s a respite from Jo’s machinations. Barb had learned from Demi that Jo had been the first to suggest Pocahontas’s reckless ride through the school, and had concluded, naturally enough, that Jo was a ‘bad influence’ on her daughter.

Steve, on the other hand, had been rising in Barb’s esteem as she became more used to the idea that her son had become her daughter. Originally, Barb had been opposed to Kyle’s friendship with Steve, for she did not want her son to become a homosexual. But the emergence of Demi had changed everything, except Barb’s conviction that her child would be better off a heterosexual.

If Demi were truly a transsexual, and her ultimate fate to live life as a woman, then she should be, Barb now reasoned, dating boys. Barb even thought Demi should get as much sexual experience as possible with boys before Jo persuaded her that she was a lesbian-born. To make it clear that Demi had her mother’s permission to ‘have fun’ in New York, Barb sent her off with a brand new, see-through, red negligee and half a box of condoms.

It wasn’t that Demi was asking for permission to ‘fool around’ with Steve. Although they had petted a couple of times, and knew each other’s mouth intimately, she knew that Kyle was still opposed to her going ‘all the way’ with a boy. While Demi was eager to learn more about her sexuality — that is, to discover whether she was bisexual — she knew that Kyle would have difficulty looking at himself in the mirror the morning after sex with Steve, even if it was Demi’s face that stared back. So she was less certain than Elvira and Steve that she was heading off to New York City to ‘lose her cherry.’

She was as tense as a cat the night before her trip to New York. Her nerves always seemed to be on edge, but then what would you expect? After all, not many girls have decisions as tough as Demi’s to make. She had to decide whether to have sexual intercourse with Steve. She had to decide whether she could finish out the term without being ‘promoted’ to full gang membership, or demoted to the status of used goods available to every boy at Hoover High for the taking. She also fretted about the boarding school. Would Jo find one in time? Would her mother be able to afford it on a secretary’s salary?

And finally, there was the question of the infernal itching under her breast forms. They had become so uncomfortable, the tissue under them so tender and swollen, that it seemed just a matter of days before she’d have to stop wearing the forms. Then what would Demi do to keep her figure? She was a girl with a lot on her mind.

She therefore jumped when the telephone rang at 9:30 p.m. Almost no one called that late in the evening, least of all for her. Barb did not approve of her daughter chatting late into the night. So Demi didn’t even answer the phone, until Barb yelled out, "It’s Jo. Now don’t talk too long on the phone. Remember we have to head off to the airport at six o’clock in the morning, and you’ve not finished packing."

It was true — Demi had been unable to decide what to take. Her two dresses went into her suitcase; then they came out. They went in, they came out. It had been like that for a couple of hours, though she had made some headway when she finally decided to take just one pair of jeans — the pair she’d be wearing to the airport. She hoped she’d be allowed to wear skirts while in New York, but she knew that Elvira insisted on dresses. So into the suitcase they went, and then out again.

The phone call allowed Demi to defer her decision just a little bit longer. At the other end Jo was talking so excitedly that Demi at first had difficulty making out her meaning. But gradually it dawned on her: Two students had just been expelled from The Amazonian School ‘for excessive timidity," and Jo, as a consequence, had been admitted to the school as of the January term.

"You said that two students were expelled. Does that mean there might be room for me too?" asked Demi, fearing the worst. She didn’t want to have to face her fate in Des Moines without Jo at her side.

"Definitely. But you’re going to have to hurry because the school told me they had just one place still open for the winter term. It’s the most wonderful school in the whole world, Demi. You wouldn’t believe their sports program. It’s totally awesome. And they even send you off on trips to the Rockies and sometimes to the Amazon."

"That’s probably where they got their name from," speculated Demi. "You know — the Amazonians take school trips to the Amazon."

"Could be," agreed Jo, though she knew better.

"How far is the school from Des Moines?" Demi suddenly asked. She was hoping it was far enough away for her to leave the Jets far behind.

"Oh, it’s a zillion miles from Des Moines. It’s in Ottumwa, and that’s practically in the next state. The Jets will never find you there, Demi."

"You mean they’ll never find Kyle at The Amazonian School. I’m going to be Kyle at the new school, because I don’t think I can handle being Demi any longer. Jeez, she seems to get into more trouble than Kyle ever did."

"You can be whatever you want to be at The Amazonian School," Jo said soothingly. "That’s in their brochure. They’ll ‘make you be the best you can be’. They promise to help you to achieve any ambition, whether it’s army general or United States President."

"Wow, that’s super. It sounds like a totally awesome school to attend. I definitely want to go to it."

The phone call ended with Jo promising to bring over the application forms for Demi and her mother to sign, as well as some selected literature on the school. In other words, she wouldn’t be showing Demi anything that indicated that The Amazonian School was for girls only.

Would Demi be naive enough to sign yet another form without reading it first? And would Barb agree to her child’s giving up all pretense of being a boy? Jo wouldn’t know the answers until after, as she wrote in her diary, "Demi, that tramp, has finished shacking up with Stevie Lancer in a New York hotel that probably rents by the hour."

To be continued in Part 14, where Demi finds out whether she is bisexual.

So far Kyle has found it difficult to keep a deal he made with his mother: That if he wears girls’ clothes for a month that she would buy him a moped (a motor scooter). Somehow he has become Demi, a full-time cross-dresser with a gay boyfriend and a lesbian lover. Everyone believes that Demi’s a transsexual, including her mother. Only Kyle knows he’s taking sex hormones, and only Kyle knows that he’d still rather be a boy. Soon after getting her moped, Demi loses it as a consequence of riding it through the school dressed as Pocahontas. This ride wins back the respect and friendship of the black shirts, while making her a candidate member of a school gang. Part 13 ended with Demi’s fearful of becoming a gang bitch, about to go to New York with Steve, and agreeing that they both should leave town for The Amazonian School, which Demi doesn’t realize is for girls only.

Anything for a Moped? - Part 14 by: Dawn De Winter
Chapter Eighteen: Do Coffee Beans Grow in Ireland?

"Young lady, you’re inappropriately dressed! I expected you to be wearing a skirt or, better yet, a dress."

Elvira was furious. She might have slapped Demi, had Steve not been watching. They were at the airport waiting for the plane that would take them to Chicago, and from thence to New York.

Steve was puzzled by his mother’s show of temper. He preferred his boyfriend in tight jeans, even girls’ jeans. While Steve found Kyle’s crotch to be unnervingly feminine, his rear, so pleasingly plump, was well nigh perfect. In tight jeans, Kyle’s buttocks looked so incredibly inviting.

Why then did Elvira insist on skirts and dresses? Steve didn’t have the answer, but then he had never been able to comprehend why his mother was so eager for Kyle to become as much like a girl as possible. Steve guessed it was because she didn’t like ‘sissies’. She was always putting them down, and so it was possible she didn’t want Kyle to be one.

"Maybe," Steve thought, "that’s why she hopes that Kyle really is Demi, a transsexual. I hope she’s wrong. I don’t want him to be a girl. This weekend I’m going to get Kyle back. There will be no gangs to use as an excuse for dressing like a girl. He says he’ll burn his bra the moment he’s free of the Jets. Well, we’ll see, won’t we?"

"Mrs. Lancer," said Demi, her countenance downcast. "I packed two dresses. I’ll change into one of them when we get to New York. Steve knows why I won’t wear a dress in Des Moines. I’ve got an image to uphold."

"What image, young lady? As a slob? You really should get rid of that scarf. Have you no clothes sense? A blue and white scarf does not complement a pink jersey. And those jeans look like they have been sprayed onto you."

"Oh mom, leave Demi alone. She won’t be wearing the scarf in New York. It’s an Iowa thing."

"Well, I sincerely hope so. When we get to the hotel in New York, Demi, the first thing we’re going to do is take a look at your outfits. I do want you to look your best tonight, and if necessary we’ll buy you some clothes — at my expense — so that you can look like you actually belong in New York."

And to Steve, Elvira said, "This is an important night for the two of you, and I want your girlfriend to look … awesome."

Steve blushed. Demi muttered something under her breath. She wished Elvira would stop putting ideas into Steve’s head. But Elvira had a one-track mind, even though they were flying on an airplane: Not an hour went by without her hinting that Demi should doll herself up in order to seduce Steve.

Elvira was giving Demi a green light to have sex with her son. Indeed, she was virtually insisting on their coupling. But Elvira lacked finesse. The more she talked about sex, the more embarrassed the two teens became about it. Steve found himself having to whisper to Demi that, "I don’t know what my mother is talking about. I have no intention of making a pass at you tonight. You have my word on it."

Demi hadn’t sought this pledge. She had, in fact, been looking forward to necking with Steve. She had even decided, sort of, to allow him to steal another base, although she was determined to protect home plate. There was no way she was going to have intercourse with Steve or any other boy, for she didn’t think Kyle could cope with being both a bisexual transsexual. Yet Demi knew that she didn’t want any cloth to be in the way the next time she touched Steve ‘there’.

Would she allow him to take off her bra and panties? Maybe. She wasn’t yet sure how much she’d let Steve see. But she did know how much she’d let him do — and it would not include allowing him "to use her like a girl." Whatever Jo might fear or the school assume, Demi was no slut. Indeed, she reacted to Elvira’s not-so-subtle efforts to put sex on the teens’ weekend agenda by resolving to keep her legs crossed and her back to the wall to the entire time she was in New York.

Demi blamed Steve for his mother’s sexual innuendos. By the time the three of them had reached LaGuardia airport in New York, Demi had become as frigid as a cold front in November. She even refused to hold Steve’s hand as they waited for their baggage. On the way to their hotel near Times Square, both teens hugged the car doors. A moped could have driven through the gap they had left in the back seat.

At the hotel, Demi complained that Elvira had not kept her promise about room accommodations. She had been promised, she said, her own room. Not only did she not have her own room, she didn’t even have own bed. The room she shared with Steve had just one bed — a queen-sized bed in the shape of a heart beneath a towering, curtained canopy.

While Demi was muttering about the ‘trap’ that Elvira had set, Steve was ranting about her ‘bad taste.’ The femininity of the room appalled him. Never before in his life had he ever spent more than minute in a room with so much brocaded silk, satin and lace, and with so many variants of pink, his least favorite color. Even the sheets were, to his disgust, made of pink satin. He’d asked his mother for flannel sheets, and as macho a décor as possible to get his boyfriend Kyle up for hot, raunchy, gay sex.

When he finally stopped venting, Steve had time to reflect, "It’s going to be extra hard to get Kyle to lose Demi in this crappy room. Cripes, all that pink is such a turn-off that I’m going to have trouble getting hard myself!"

Both teens were upset. They could not have started this tryst farther apart in spirit. And the situation only worsened when Elvira barged into their room without knocking in order to inspect "Demi’s trousseau." As Demi laid her clothes out on the dress, she heard moans from Steve and sighs from Elvira. Nothing in her suitcase was ‘masculine’ enough for Steve, nor ‘pretty’ enough for his mother. The two dresses, Elvira said, were a dreary blue unworthy of a fashion-conscious city like New York.

"Demi, we’re now in the Big Apple. We can’t have you dress as though you’re going apple-picking in Iowa. My, my, we do have our work cut out for us."

Steve spoke up: "Mom, I agree. Demi brought the wrong clothes. She should have packed some clothes for Kyle, because he’s the one I want to attend the game with me tonight."

He then spoke directly to his boyfriend: "I realize, Kyle, that you didn’t have any choice when you were in Des Moines. You had to be Demi and you had to dress like a girl. But we’re in New York now. So let’s go and buy a denim shirt for you, as well as some Levi 501 jeans, some kick-ass boots, a black Stetson, and — if you insist on wearing underwear — a jock strap. What do you say, mom? I bet there’s a western gear store near here. New York’s got everything."

"Steve, you really don’t understand Demi, do you? Demi, it’s time to tell my son the unvarnished truth. As you know, you’ve told quite a few whoppers to people that you definitely don’t want repeated to anyone, least of all to your mother. Isn’t that right, child? It’s time for you to tell Steve that you love being a girl, and it’s definitely time for Steve to realize that he not only can love girls, but that he actually is in love with one at this very moment. So, Demi make all of us proud. Make your own mother proud. Tell Steve that you were profoundly unhappy as a boy, and that you’re ecstatic being a girl."

The threats were obvious enough to Demi. Unless she denied all desire for Kyle’s return, Mrs. Lancer would expose her most damaging lies to her mother, the school, and Jo’s grandmother. To be sure, Demi wasn’t sure how much fallout there would be if Steve’s mother tried to ‘nuke’ her, as she was beginning to forget which lies she’d told, and to whom.

But there was one lie that haunted her, a lie she did not want revealed to her mother — and that was the story she’d told about being beaten by Barb on account of her cross-dressing.

It was the one lie that made Demi ashamed. It was the one lie that would make Barb ashamed of her child. It was the one lie that would make Barb James ashamed to see her liberal friends. It was the one lie that might bring about the worst shame of all — the loss of the moped forever. It was the one lie that could only be covered up with a dress.

It was a lie with many progeny. As Demi watched it give birth to yet another whopper — this time a lie about her sexual identity — she reflected that the new lie at least had the virtue of protecting her virtue. Steve was less likely to jump Demi’s bones than Kyle’s, and Demi knew that Kyle was still too weak, despite the steroids he’d been gobbling, to fend off an overly amorous Steve. All things considered, the best defense for Kyle was another lie about Demi.

"It’s tr…true," Demi haltingly started. "I would rather be Demi than Kyle. I like wearing girls’ clothes. I’m not wearing them because of the gangs, whatever they might claim. I’ve even been looking forward to … wearing dresses in New York. It’s been bugging me that Iowa’s so full of slobs that I can’t wear them to school."

She looked at Elvira for approval, and mostly got it. From Steve, she got a look of total bewilderment. Elvira wanted her to say more: "Demi dear, don’t be shy. Now’s not the time to be shy. I want you to tell my son what sex you truly are, as well as something about your plans for your body in future."

"I’m … a … girl," Demi said quietly, so quietly that Steve had to strain to hear her. "So I want to have a girl’s body."

Elvira was pleased, but her lips were mouthing the word "more," and so Demi took the final plunge: "I want a total sex change," she said. Elvira beamed. Demi had finally given her the cue she’d been waiting for since they first alighted the airplane.

Elvira whipped out a pink envelope. "It’s a card, Demi. Do open it. I’m sure you and Steve are dying to know what it says." Demi ripped into it: A greeting card, its cover sported a photograph of a shirtless, muscular and barefooted youth in faded blue jeans being sprinkled with ‘pixie dust’ by a cartoon fairy with flapping gossamer wings and a sheer, linen tunic-like dress that revealed every curve of her body. One word arced, multi-hued, like a rainbow around the boy’s head — "Poof!"

Inside could be seen the legend, "Congratulations On Your Sex Change," surrounding a doctored photograph of the same boy, beautifully made-up and coiffed, with a voluptuous female body scantily clad by the same fairy tunic. The fairy still hovered above the youth’s head, but was clearly shocked at having been transformed into a limp-wristed, male dandy in a white ruffled shirt, red Mary Jane shoes, and a plum-colored velvet suit, with knee britches and white tights, with white ribbons at the knee.

Demi was a bit shocked by the insensitivity of the card. Didn’t Mrs. Lancer know that she had a gay son? Did she think him a ‘poof’? But far more shocking was the message Elvira had penned: "Steve and I want you to accept these two checks as tokens of our affection for you. They’re to pay for the operations to give you a woman’s body. Steve and I can’t wait to see the new, improved Demi."

Most shocking of all were the sums on the two checks. Demi was amazed to see that her new body would cost her more than a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. As she knew there was no point in asking for the bike instead of for the promised breast implants and vagina, she didn’t quite know what to say. Nor did Steve, who had no idea before now that his mother intended to spend a small fortune on remaking Demi.

Elvira was the first to speak after the opening of the card: "Steve, you didn’t get an opportunity to sign the card, and I know you want to. Here, you can sign it now. You’re definitely as thrilled as I am that our family has been able to find the money to ensure that your girlfriend will become a real girl in a matter of months. Isn’t that wonderful?"

Steve looked over to Demi for a cue. He couldn’t read her face. It was blank. He couldn’t tell whether she was speechless with joy or stunned into silence. As he didn’t want to ruin the moment for his mother and Demi, he lightly kissed his girlfriend on the lips, bade her "congratulations, I guess," and then signed the card. He had tears in his eyes.

Demi could not decipher the meaning of the tears. She could not tell whether they bespoke joy or sorrow. Whichever, she felt estranged from Steve. He had always been Kyle’s main defender, the one person determined to keep the boy in Demi alive. With his signature, Steve had embraced Demi and betrayed Kyle.

There was so much money involved that Demi assumed that the two Lancers must have discussed and agreed upon her future. Later that day Steve heatedly denied having any advance knowledge of either the card or the checks, but Demi found his denials unconvincing. He must have known!

Kyle was furious over his friend’s betrayal, and Steve immediately realized that something had changed in their relationship, possibly forever. In Demi, mixed emotions raged. The possibility of a sex change had definitely aroused her, and to Kyle’s horror, the two checks — especially the larger one for reconstructing his sex organs — were causing his penis to strain against the gaff’s confinement.

"Jeez, I’m getting turned on by the thought of having my dick cut off! What’s happening to me?" Kyle wailed inside, the question reverberating like an echo deep inside the well of his being.

Kyle’s hand shook, but it did not drop the checks. He was terrified of being lost forever. Demi was almost as frightened by the choices that Elvira had handed her. She felt like a fetus being pulled by a doctor’s forceps through the birth canal. Was she really willing to enter the world crying like a newborn baby? Maybe.

"No, definitely no," objected Kyle to himself. "It’s all been a gag. I’m supposed to return to normal, any day now. I don’t want to be Demi forever!"

"And why not?" a voice cooed from deep inside. "Demi’s beautiful. Everyone loves Demi. Even Steve prefers Demi."

"Demi, are you going to thank us?" Elvira loudly asked. "I bet Steve wouldn’t mind being told with a kiss and a hug how much you love his present."

Steve didn’t look like he was seeking a kiss, but Demi took the plunge. Or her tongue did. She amazed herself by soul-kissing Steve right in front of his mother. So passionate was her kiss that Steve quite lost himself in it.

As their mouths locked and their bodies embraced, Elvira took their picture. She had a photo for virtually every moment of their trip so far, including one of Demi’s shocked look when she opened her card. But this was the photo that had the most lasting effect on Barb when she received it in the mail from Elvira with the caption, "Demi thanks Steve for his present of a sex change."

When Demi reluctantly admitted that the photo had indeed been taken almost immediately after she’d received her gift, Barb concluded yet again that Demi’s actions spoke louder than Kyle’s words. He claimed to be "revolted by the idea of a sex change," but Demi appeared to be enraptured by the very same "idea," as Steve confirmed when Barb quizzed him about the photograph and kiss.

Demi and Kyle also gave Barb mixed signals when she’d asked whether they should keep Elvira’s checks. While Kyle urged his mother to tear them up, Demi prevailed on Barb to deposit the checks "for safekeeping."

It had taken some persuasion from Demi, for Barb had not wanted to become "beholden" to a woman she detested. But Demi had argued that Mrs. Lancer’s vileness was all the more reason to keep her money. In time, Steve’s mom might even forget that she’d given Demi the money, or might not care whether it bought a Harley-Davidson instead of a sex change.

"Or it could pay off the mortgage," Demi hastened to add when she saw from her mother’s exasperated look that her "trial balloon" hadn’t flown. Indeed, it had crashed and burned, like a Harley hitting the great gender divide.

Whatever uses the money might have in Demi’s imagination, it had only one legitimate use, so far as her mother was concerned — to make her daughter whole. Barb had banked the money because she realized that she could never afford to pay for Demi’s sex change out of the wages of a legal secretary.

Elvira’s money had a powerful purchase on Barb’s imagination: Without it, Demi could be no more than a boy in fake breasts. Barb had, as a result, always assumed that Kyle would eventually reassert himself, with Demi becoming a minor player in his life. Though Barb was now determined to keep her daughter around as much as possible, she believed that her child would want to be male most of the time, in accord with his body.

Thanks to Elvira’s money, that body could change in a matter of months. Demi had become a full-time viability. Is that what Barb wanted — for her son to disappear entirely? The answer at a conscious level was definitely ‘no’, as Barb repeated to herself, "The best possible outcome is for Demi and Kyle to have joint custody of my child."

Yet her subconscious told another story: Demi seized hold of Barb’s dreams and fantasies from the moment they deposited Elvira’s checks. After a couple of weeks of vivid, memorable dreams about her daughter Demi, Barb awoke one morning with the sudden realization that she couldn’t remember the last time that her son had appeared in her dreams. Indeed, he had disappeared even from her dream womb. In that morning’s reverie, the doctor had said, "The ultrasound shows that you’re going to have a girl. She’s in perfect shape. What do you plan on calling her?"

"Demi," she heard herself say just as she awakened. Barb had been talking in her sleep.

So Elvira’s checks mattered a lot to Barb, as did Demi’s reported joy at receiving them. But Demi hadn’t taken them very seriously as long as she was in New York. For one thing, she expected the checks to bounce higher than a basketball, certainly higher than the breast implants that they would never buy.

"Mrs. Lancer’s just trying to impress Steve," she’d concluded. "No one is going to spend that many eggs on a kid, who’s not even her own. I bet she doesn’t even have her money in that bank." Demi was wrong, of course, but her skepticism was understandable, for she had no idea of the costs Elvira Lancer was willing to bear to keep her son from following in the "tragic footsteps of his father."

Elvira would have been willing to pay for three boys to have sex changes had she been guaranteed that these would help to return her son to the path of the straight and narrow. As it was, she was prepared to splurge on the sexual transformation of the one boy she knew her son loved most.

Elvira hoped that her son would gradually learn to love women as the love of his life turned into one. At first she had felt twinges of guilt about manipulating Kyle, but these had disappeared the moment she’d heard that Kyle was still dressing as Demi despite having earned his moped.

On the plane Elvira had said to herself, "In New York, Steve and Demi will finally become aware of their true natures — that she is a transsexual and that he loves Demi because of, and not in spite of her intrinsic femininity. If all goes to plan, they’ll still be dating when it’s time for Demi to give up her newfound virginity. Once Steve has plucked a girl’s cherry, he’ll lose all interest in all other ‘fruits.’ He’ll then be the perfect son, just as I knew he was destined to be."

As there wasn’t time for Demi to change her sex before she went to bed with Steve that evening, Elvira hoped to make ‘the girl’ look more feminine through the right combination of body adornments. To get Steve out of the way, so that she and Demi could go shopping, Elvira dropped him off at a Times Square cinema to see a first-run movie called "Aliens Get the Munchies on Independence Day."

Demi had been as eager as Steve to see the movie because it was rumored to have a "totally awesome" climax in which an incoming meteor fortuitously destroyed the alien mother ship before it could finish transforming the people of Los Angeles into narcissi, the primary food of the aliens’ flower-loving, vegan gods. Neither teen knew what happened after the meteor demolished the alien spacecraft, and the suspense was killing them. They had to know whether the Earth survived, or whether, as rumored, it had to be repopulated from another planet by people with tiny bodies and big heads — like Bart Simpson.

It definitely was going to be a super movie, and so Demi was furious and uncommunicative for a full half-hour after being told by Mrs. Lancer that the movie was "suitable for boys only as it was too violent for a girl to watch."

Steve, at first miffed at being left to his own devices, spent an extraordinary two-and-a-half-hours at the theater. Though he kept to himself, he could not help but notice that there were a lot of gays in New York. In fact, there were so many that he vowed to return to the Big Apple as soon as he’d "grown up."

Elvira would have been devastated to learn how much her shopping trip with Demi had backfired. As they bought one expensive item after another to make Demi look more feminine, Steve was for the price of a movie ticket getting constant reminders of how much he loved to look at the masculine. True, the ticket was incredibly overpriced by Des Moines standards, but it was still a lot cheaper than the Vagi-Gaff that Steve’s mother insisted on buying for Demi.

They had found the Vagi-Gaff at "Transformations," a second-story walk-up on Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village. Elvira had located it in the Yellow Pages as a shop catering to "New York’s Cross-Dressing, Transsexual, and Transgendered Community." She hoped to find there some help in making Demi look more feminine regardless of what she was wearing — even nothing at all.

Demi had no inkling they were going to a shop for T* girls until they had actually passed through its door. Possibly Elvira would have told her had Demi actually asked instead of sulked, but probably not, judging from the way that Elvira was carefully blocking Demi’s escape route to the door. Elvira wasn’t sure how Demi would react to finding herself surrounded by "her own kind" for the first time in her life, but she wanted to ensure that she didn’t flee the store.

Demi took a while to realize that most of the ‘women’ in the store were as male as Kyle. In fact, she hadn’t noticed the women at first, because two teenaged males had caught her attention instead. She was surprised to see them. Most teenaged boys would rather die than be seen shopping in a women’s wear store, even if they were buying something for their mother or girlfriend. So she watched them closely enough to see that they were measuring everything against their own body — whether it was a pair of panties, a bra, or a slip. Could two boys be openly defying the American dress code? Yep, to Demi’s gaping amazement one of the boys carried a dress with him into a changing room.

She was awaiting his return when Elvira nudged her: "Demi, I do declare you’ve become quite the daydreamer. Young lady, it’s impolite not to acknowledge a saleslady when she addresses you."

"Saleslady? Yes, there she is right in front of me. Jeez, she’s got to be about almost seven feet tall. She must play pro basketball. Or she could."

"Demi, my name is Roberta, and like you, I’m not a genetic girl. However, I’ve had both of the operations that you’ve got planned, honey, and I promise you that you’ll never regret your decision to get yourself a clitoris and vagina. I do envy you, honey, as my only regret is that I didn’t have the right body to get the most fun out of my teenage years."

"Huh?" Demi thought. "She knows I’m not a girl? She knows about the operation? How? Jeez, that boy is back from the change room, and he’s actually wearing a dress in front of everyone! Look at the way he’s admiring himself in the mirrors — just like a girl!"

"Demi, do listen to Roberta. She wants to know your size for the Vagi-Gaff."

"Don’t worry, Elvira. I’m used to dealing with first-timers," Marilyn whispered. "They’re all like Demi. They’re so excited at finally being among friends that they become literally speechless. See the way Demi is staring at that boy trying on his dress. I’m sure she’s wishing that she could be twirling her own blue dress in front of all those mirrors. I bet she’s never primped in front of a store mirror. Much too shy, I imagine."

To Demi, Roberta said more loudly and plainly, "Honey, you’re such a tiny little thing I can’t imagine you’ll need anything larger than a ‘small’. Now, you be a dear and go over to the change room and strip off everything from your belly button on downward, and when you’re nice and naked, give me a holler and I’ll come over and give you a fitting."

"Huh? Naked?" That word got Demi’s attention, and for the first time she forgot about the boy in the dress and started listening very closely to the giant in the dress. "Roberta, was that her name? Does she really expect me to go into a room and take off all my clothes? What gives?"

"Don’t just stand there, Demi. You can’t be fitted for a new gaff if you don’t strip off whatever you’re wearing right now. I’m sure Roberta has seen a boy in panties before, haven’t you?"

"Well, we all are boys in panties, aren’t we?" Roberta laughed.

"I hope you’re not including me in that ‘all’," Elvira said testily. "I assure you that I look exactly as Mother Nature intended."

"Alas, Mother isn’t perfect," Roberta said under her breath. Out loud she said to Demi, "Now do run along, honey, and strip off your panties and gaff so that we can fit you with the Vagi-Gaff. I predict that you’ll love it so much that you’ll never take if off until your final operation. You know, honey, you’ve got quite a generous aunt in Elvira. There aren’t too many women who’d buy their nephews a $200 gaff. She must love you a lot."

"Elvira, my aunt? Elvira love me? Wow, lady, do you have things wrong." That’s what Kyle thought, but he was too polite to actually say it.

Curiosity seized Demi. A $200 gaff? What could it possibly look like? She had to see it on herself. Demi then surprised herself by stripping off her dress (with some help from Roberta with the zipper and hooks), her white nylon slip, her white nylon bra and panties, and her favorite gaff. As she undressed, an erection loomed, but she beat it back just before Roberta swept back into the changing room.

Roberta was holding something flesh-toned, something that looked … a lot like a vagina! Demi then realized where the Vagi-Gaff got its name.

Roberta showed Demi how to tuck her genitals away. "See," she said, "You’ll won’t have to take the Vagi-Gaff off to relieve yourself, so long as you pee sitting down like a proper lady."

"Demi, honey, put your finger on your clitoris. Notice how it massages the base of your penis when you stroke it? You like that, don’t you? You can touch yourself directly if you put your finger through the labia. Isn’t it wonderful, Demi? You’ve finally got a vagina, but not as good, of course, as you’re eventually going to have. The vagina goes clear through to your rear, so that — how can I put this delicately? — you can have sexual intercourse. One reason the Vagi-Gaff is the most expensive and the best artificial vagina available is the quality of its sheath. It will feel, Honey, just like the real thing to the boys you … entertain. And you’ll get some pleasure too."

Demi had put on the Vagi-Gaff as nonchalantly as she would have any other item of girl’s underwear at this point in her evolution. But, as she looked at herself for the first time in the changing-room mirror, she became anything but indifferent. Her whole body tensed as she saw herself standing stark naked in front of the mirror (or so she appeared) and looking exactly like a girl! It was a disturbing, alluring vision.

Kyle scoffed: "This isn’t real. It’s the poor light in the change room. Or it’s a trick done with mirrors. Jeez, I once looked like I weighed a hundred tons when I looked at myself in a funhouse mirror. It must be the mirror that makes me look so much like a girl. It’s an optical delusion."

But Demi knew better. Once again, her actions spoke more eloquently than Kyle’s words. Even as he claimed that there was no way that he could ever look both naked and feminine, Demi marveled at her new body. So self-absorbed that she forgot Roberta’s presence, she turned around to see, as best she could, how her vagina looked from the rear. Then she touched her toes, looking backward through her legs, once again at her vagina in the mirror.

As she turned to get a good view of herself from the front, Demi’s right hand searched out her ‘clitoris,’ and for the first time in her life, Demi began masturbating like a girl. She stopped when a chuckle reminded her she was not alone.

Demi could have died of embarrassment until Roberta reassured her, "Don’t worry, honey, when I first saw myself in a vagina gaff — and it wasn’t half as realistic-looking as yours — I too immediately wanted to play with myself. But you don’t want to get your Vagi-Gaff sticky before you’ve even worn it home, so I recommend a bit of self-restraint."

"Honey, let me show you how to use makeup to make it impossible for any but the most knowing eye to tell where your original body stops and your new body starts."

The make-up worked such wonders that Demi refused to be seen by Elvira without first putting on her bra and panties. "I won’t let Steve’s mother see me naked," she explained. Roberta didn’t even try to argue that Demi was hardly naked if her real nipples and genitals were covered in silicon, plastic and rubber, for she understood what Demi meant: Naked for her now meant standing before someone with either her breasts or female genitalia in full view. The boy’s body underneath was, like her internal organs and her bones, the stuff of x-rays, and in theory not really nudity at all.

Kyle, of course, had his own, more traditional definition of nudity, but as long as Demi wore her Vagi-Gaff — that is, most of the time — she would consider herself naked until she had covered it. Even then, most of her panties contoured around and so displayed, rather than hid her female organs.

Certainly, that was the case of the nylon panties (and bra) she was wearing when Elvira took the snapshots that appeared to prove that Demi wasn’t a boy who tucked; rather, she was a girl with a vagina. Demi ended up with her own copy of the photograph.

Kyle found it the most erotic picture of a girl he’d ever seen. However, Kyle didn’t have much opportunity to masturbate over it. With Demi wearing the Vagi-Gaff to bed almost every night, she usually did the masturbating for the both of them. She tried to keep her hand movements and sexual fantasies as realistically feminine as possible.

Though the Vagi-Gaff was an instant hit with Demi, she refused at first to wear it out of the store. She was pretty sure that Steve wouldn’t like it. Indeed, she expected him to hate it. Ever since that kiss to thank Steve for the two checks, she had realized that she wanted to be naked with him, and she figured that Steve would want his bedmate to look as much like a boy as possible. He might even insist on Demi’s taking off her breast forms.

Steve was definitely not going to consider a vagina either normal or desirable in a boy. So Demi didn’t want to wear the Vagi-Gaff while in New York, even though she already knew she’d be wearing it a lot in Des Moines.

It took hard cash to overcome Demi’s resistance. Elvira had learned from her on the plane that Jo desperately needed money to get back in her grandmother’s good books, and so she offered Demi seventy-five dollars if she’d wear the Vagi-Gaff every minute she was in New York.

It was too good an offer to refuse, as Demi decided that Jo’s happiness was more important to her than a romp with Steve. Yes, he’d be frustrated to discover the Vagi-Gaff — if she let his hands explore that far. He’d probably not want to have sexual intercourse with Demi if she were wearing the Vagi-Gaff, which was fine with Kyle.

Though Kyle had enjoyed ‘fooling around’ with Steve, he still didn’t want to "go all the way," for he wanted to preserve his self-image as a "lover of women," even if his entire experience with women was ‘lesbian sex’ with Jo. Thus the decision was made: If Steve were going to get laid that weekend, he’d have to get over the fact that his boyfriend had a vagina.

And wore a dress. It too came from Transformations, as there was insufficient time to go to another store before Steve’s movie let out. It proved exceptionally difficult to choose a dress, for Demi showed little enthusiasm for any of them, and Elvira had no idea how a New York teen should dress.

Yet it was important to Elvira for Demi to look ‘hip,’ as Steve might lose interest in his ‘hick’ girlfriend if she looked out of place in sophisticated New York. To seduce Steve, Demi would have to look as "groovy as possible," Elvira decided.

Unsure of her own taste, and fearful of Demi’s looking too "Ioway" at the game, Elvira asked Roberta to pick a stylish dress for Demi. Roberta replied, "Honey, in New York, style is very personal, but I think I know the right style for Demi. The Ozark look is all the rage in New York right now."

"That’s what I’m wearing right now; it’s called a Joplin dress, and we brought it in from one of the most fashionable stores in Hollywood. Don’t you just love the blue denim, the deep plunge at the neck, and the pearl buttons in two parallel rows up from my hem to my décolletage? And I do love the way this dress shows off my legs."

"Denim, huh?" Demi came to life when she realized there was a possibility that Elvira might buy her a legless pair of blue jeans. Steve might even like her in a dress that almost looked like coveralls. But Demi didn’t like the pearl buttons or the neckline that would have Demi showing cleavage for the first time.

Demi wasn’t sure she was ready to have guys staring at her breasts, especially as she wasn’t sure she had mastered (in one lesson) the art of hiding the seams where they met her chest. Demi also considered the dress to be much too short: Roberta was showing off as much leg as an ostrich.

While intrigued by the Ozark look, Elvira wanted a choice, and so Roberta pulled out an "Ellie May" dress, which she also declared to be another "high fashion import from Hollywood." Made from red and white gingham, it had spaghetti straps, white lace trim at v-neck, a white lettuce hem, and an empire waist that accentuated the bust line, without exposing it. It was modest, yet immodest.

Elvira decided that the Ellie May dress was the big city look she was seeking for Demi, and she insisted on seeing it modeled. So Demi found herself taking a dress into the fitting room — just like the boys she’d just been watching. She felt very awkward about it, for she realized that her true sex was as obvious to everyone in a store for the transgendered as was that of the two boys who’d been trying on dresses. Demi felt like a sissy.

As dresses went, Demi considered the gingham dress "all right, I guess." She’d have preferred the denim, especially as it had an extra inch on the leg. The Ellie May dress was a true mini, not much longer than a cheerleader’s skirt. Any girl wearing it would have to move very carefully indeed, if she didn’t want to give a "free show" to the men around her.

Elvira loved the dress. It had the sophisticated, cosmopolitan feel she was looking for, and she liked the fact that there would be next to nothing in the way of fabric to impede Steve’s ascent of the mound of Venus.

To go with the dress, Roberta proposed — and Elvira chose — red leather thigh boots (with a three-inch heel) and a "sassy necklace." How was it sassy? Because that’s what the alternating red, blue and silver letters spelled out. The outfit bought, Elvira and Demi bade Roberta a fond farewell. Her own last words were, "Send me a post card, Demi honey, when you get back to Iowa. I’ll be dying to hear how your big night with Steve came out."

Demi’s purchases they took back to the hotel before meeting Steve who was waiting in front of the movie theater. He was in a surprisingly good mood — but surprising if one didn’t realize how many boys and men he’d caught giving him the eye as he waited for Demi and his mother. A couple of boys close to his own age had even flashed him big smiles; he knew they would have stopped to talk if they hadn’t been with their mothers or friends.

The only two boys in Des Moines who’d ever looked him that way were Brad and Vicky, and she didn’t really count. Steve didn’t know what to make of Brad. If the high school quarterback really wanted to sex it up with Steve, why didn’t he just ask? Didn’t Brad realize that it was as difficult for boys as it was for girls to ask the school’s star athlete for a date? He’d have to take the initiative.

Demi was a hard one to figure. She must like him, because she’d twice stripped down to her underwear to pet with him. And she’d blush furiously whenever he caught her sneaking a peak at him. She’d also told Steve that he had "the most excellent body" of any boy at Hoover High. So Demi was definitely sexually attracted to Steve, despite Kyle’s denials.

She’d also said that she wanted Steve to be her "friend for life." Yet he wasn’t sure whether that meant as Demi’s platonic, gay friend or as her lover. Steve was also unsure of his own feelings: He knew that Kyle was "the love of his life," but Demi? She might be only a one-night stand, for Steve wasn’t sure that he actually wanted to have intercourse with "a girl."

Des Moines seemed such a complicated place in comparison to New York City, for Steve had in ten minutes received more looks of unabashed approval and lust than he’d received in an Iowa year. It was no wonder that he was in such a good mood when he saw Demi and his mother, that he didn’t object — or not too loudly — when Elvira insisted on their going to the Disney store.

Elvira had learned, to her horror, that Demi had not redone Kyle’s room in a more feminine style. To Steve’s horror, his mother now bought a complete bed set — sheets, pillowcases, bedspread and bed skirt — featuring Pocahontas and some of the cuddlier creatures of the forest, and Demi actually seemed pleased to get it, as well as a Pocahontas rag doll to go on top of the pillows. She even kissed Steve’s mother in gratitude.

When Steve asked Demi why she wanted "that sissy kid stuff," he actually liked her answer, or at least part of it. Though he wasn’t keen on her explanation that she’d grown up pretending to be Pocahontas, he did think it worth a kiss on her lips when she said, "I mainly wanted the Pocahontas bed clothes to remind myself of my ride through Hoover High. That was the day I stood up to the gangs and showed them that I was a …"

She paused. She was struggling to find the right last words.

"Real man," said Steve, supplying them.

"Yeh, something like that." replied Demi, who hadn’t known what to say. "Real man" didn’t sound right. But what was then? She giggled as the words "one hell of a tough broad" came to mind. She refused to explain the giggle to Steve, nor any of the others that came along for the rest of the day as she came up with new endings to her sentence, all of which assumed that it had been a female who had been declaring independence from the gangs.

To make amends for his "sissy" comment, Steve bought Demi a doll, this time of Mulan. His mother provided the money for it, but both teens appreciated the symbolism of Steve’s giving a doll to Demi. Elvira beamed with happiness. She rewarded them both with a visit to a huge video arcade, where she paid for them to play a virtual reality game, her only condition being that Demi play a female character.

Both Steve and Demi thought it hilarious that Drac the Impaler was getting beaten up so badly in their first virtual bout by Space Kitty, who was only half his size, that he finally had to pull out his gun and shoot her ‘dead’ in order to win.

Too clever to be shot a second time, Space Kitty seduced Drac in the second game (who would have thought that a video arcade for kids would have such a salacious game?) and shot him with his own gun, while his trousers were down, again to uproarious laughter.

The two teens had never been closer, the ‘inevitable’ between Demi and Steve ever more likely. And they remained in an excellent mood during an evening meal of burgers, fries, Mountain Dew, and chocolate cake which room service brought to them, while Elvira fasted in her own room. Steve’s mood, however, soured when he learned that Demi was going to the game in a gingham dress.

It was not that he disapproved of the dress. It looked really stylish, on some other girl. But he’d definitely hoped to go to the game with Kyle, and failing that, with the Demi who dressed as much like a boy as possible. Steve wanted her in jeans, sneakers, and a unisex top. Instead, she wore a dress, a sassy necklace, and the sort of boots that Jane Fonda or Nancy Sinatra would have worn in the early days of Hollywood — you know, back in the days when people watched films outdoors and popcorn came with real butter.

"Why do you let my mother treat you like a Barbie doll?" Steve complained when Demi explained, somewhat disingenuously, that she had to wear the dress to the game because "your mom spent so money on it, and she wants me to look sharp tonight."

Ironically, Steve became less hostile to the dress when he noticed that it didn’t always cover Demi’s panties. Rather than tell her that she was occasionally showing off her underwear, he decided "to enjoy the view." Besides, he figured he’d be able to persuade Demi to give up dresses entirely if he told her after the game that her gingham mini-dress had done little to preserve either her dignity or her modesty.

Even Elvira was impressed by Madison Square Garden. The two teens approached with wide-eyed, slack-jawed awe. Devotees of the basketball cult, they knew they were about to enter the holy of holies. Inside, their awe became even more intense: Demi later admitted that she almost wet her panties with excitement when the usher escorted the three of them to a second row seat from where she could see, just feet away, both the Knicks and the Celtics. Steve never admitted that he had an erection most of the evening, even when Demi quizzed him about his standing so rarely to give an ovation.

The noise in Madison Square Garden was delightfully deafening. "These New Yorkers sure know how to party," Demi exclaimed to Steve. He was intent on holding her hand, but rarely got a chance to do it, as Demi leapt from her seat in excitement whenever the Knicks sank a basket. She was so engrossed in the game that she didn’t notice that her gingham mini-dress quite often didn’t move with her own alacrity.

In fact, it frequently ended up clinging to her waist, exposing her lace-trimmed, beribboned, pink satin panties to the seventeen thousand males assembled in the Garden. Did all seventeen thousand see Demi’s panties? No, of course not. No more than twenty percent of the males — tops — at the game actually noticed her panties; and only three of them were crude enough to tell her they approved of "her taste in lingerie."

However, there were several million males who got to see Demi’s panties on television, as a cable network boosted its ratings by focusing its camera on the ‘dancing doll’ in the second row, not once, not twice, but five times. Thanks to freeze-frame technology, there were thousands of American adolescents who believed they had for the first time seen a girl’s ‘snatch’ — obscured by her panties, admittedly, but still visible to the discerning teenage eye.

To her intense embarrassment, the most ‘joyful’ images of Demi had found a home on the Internet even before the end of the post-game show. Thanks to the miracle of mass media, the ‘she-must-have-gone-to-New-York-to-get-a-sex-change" photos reached Hoover High well before Demi did (as she was, with Barb’s permission, playing hooky on the Monday so that she could spend two full days in New York).

Though Vice Principal Cudmore tore them up whenever he found them gracing a student locker or bulletin board, Demi’s ‘pink-panty photos" stayed up long enough for most of Hoover High to see. Overall, they harmed her reputation, especially with the teachers and girls of the school, who thought her shameless.

Indeed, there was only one group on campus with which her stock soared — and that was the Jets. Convinced that she’d somehow turned herself into a ‘genuine girl’ when they weren’t looking, they voted her an associate membership in the Jets.

While she didn’t yet have the privileges and duties — mostly duties — of a full member, Demi’s first appearance on live television brought her a step closer to being the gang’s bitch. The Jets also made it clear that they would never again take ‘no’ as an answer if, as Markko put it, "we should ask you to wear a dress or skirt when we authorize you to hang out with us after school."

Were Demi fifteen or sixteen, she’d already have qualified for full gang membership. However, a third of the Jets still thought her too young "to mess with." Yet even they were beginning to see Demi in a different, more lurid light after she’d repeatedly flashed her panties on national television.

At the game itself, neither Steve nor Elvira were among those who were watching the ‘Jill-in-the-box with the pink panties." Indeed, Steve had largely tuned her out, in part because Demi wouldn’t sit still and let him hold her hand, and in part because the sight of his father playing basketball was "awesome to the max."

It was the first time he’d attended one of his father’s games since the divorce. His eyes were on his father, even when he trailed the play. Even staring as much as he did, Steve missed a lot of his father’s moves, because tears kept welling up in his eyes, clouding his vision.

As for Elvira, she had her eyes dead set on her son. She watched every emotion as it flickered on his face or shone in his eyes. She didn’t like what she saw: Steve’s admiration and love for his father.

"How can Steve look at Mike that way?" Elvira wondered. "Sure, it’s his father, the big shot basketball player. But how can any boy admire a queer, a man who cheated on his wife with … another man? Why isn’t Steve ashamed to have such a man for a father?"

A little later in the game, Elvira pondered: "I hope I haven’t made a mistake letting Steve see his father. I’ve managed to keep them apart for more than a year now. And now I’ve had to agree to Steve’s spending most of Sunday with Mike. Have I made a big mistake?"

Possibly she had. Yet she decided that the gamble was worth taking, since an NBA game had been the only lure powerful enough to entice Demi into spending an entire weekend with her son, including two nights in the same bed.

What would the two teens experience there? Elvira was beginning to wonder, for the auguries were inauspicious: Neither Steve nor Demi was paying much attention to the other at the game. Manifestly, they both loved basketball; but did they also love each other? To her own surprise, Elvira was less sure of the answer than she had been in Des Moines. Perhaps she’d picked the wrong town in New York State for her son’s honeymoon with Demi.

Even more unnerving was Steve’s rant when he couldn’t see his father in the Knicks’ locker room after their winning game. Sure, his name was on the approved list, as was Kyle’s. And had Kyle attended the game dressed as a boy, they would have had no problem getting into the locker room and hanging out with the half-dressed Knicks — a dream that Kyle and Steve had long cherished.

But Kyle was dressed as Demi, and there was no way that the security guards were going to let a teenaged girl into the Knicks’ inner sanctum. As Elvira wouldn’t hear of Steve’s leaving Demi behind while he "went off gallivanting with the Knicks," Steve whined: "Why don’t I ever get to do what I want to do? Demi, why can’t you be Kyle? I had a lot more fun with Kyle. Only a boob would wear boobs to a b-game."

Steve glared at Demi. Demi glared back. She was just as upset as Steve that they didn’t get into the dressing room. But why did he blame her? He should blame his mother for forcing her to wear a dress!

Their date was not going well. As it was dangerous to return directly to the hotel (there being too much risk that Steve would end up sleeping on two chairs in Elvira’s room), Elvira played for time. She wanted to give both kids time to simmer down, and for Steve to remember that he’d come to New York with sex as well as basketball on his mind.

So Elvira herded them into a half-empty café mid-way between the Garden and their hotel. Once they’d found a private corner, and she’d maneuvered Steve and Demi onto a shared bench, she asked them whether they’d like to sample some of the exotic coffees on the menu.

"I’m not allowed to drink coffee, Mrs. Lancer," Demi hesitantly replied. "My mom says I’m not allowed to do drugs as long as I’m living at home."

"You’ve never had coffee?" Elvira asked with genuine astonishment.

Demi nodded.

"Why on earth, dear, does your mother think coffee is a drug?"

"Because it has loads of caffeine and that’s a drug. My mom says caffeine is a lot like cocaine and speed."

"What about Coke and Pepsi? They’ve got caffeine. I bet you drink them."

"Nope. I only drink the caffeine-free, sugarless stuff. Sugar’s a drug too, you know."

"Well, I never! Your mother does have some strange notions. Well, I have no desire for you to defy your mother’s wishes, and so we’ll order you a decaffeinated coffee. That’s coffee without the caffeine. Is that okay?"

With a smile on her face, Demi agreed. She’d never had a decaf coffee either, and she was eager to find out what a coffee tasted like. She hoped it would be better than the cigaret that Rob had persuaded her to smoke about six months ago. It had made her barf. She sure hoped coffee didn’t affect her the same way.

"We need a coffee to loosen these kids up, or they’ll still be virgins in the morning," Elvira had told herself, before she ordered a Colombian coffee for herself and two Irish coffees for Steve and Demi. The waiter had given her a supercilious look when she placed the order, but since he was a New Yorker who minded his own business, he duly returned with three coffees — one with caffeine, and two with a shot of Irish whiskey.

Steve and Demi eagerly slurped up the whipped cream, and then started guzzling the coffee. Steve pronounced the coffee the best he’d ever had, while Demi marveled that a drink that looked like watery mud could warm her body in so many different ways.

Elvira, the gracious host, quickly ordered Demi a second coffee, this time from Mexico (including the shot of Kahlua), but switched Steve to a high-caffeine, alcohol-free blend of East African coffees on the pretext that she didn’t have enough money for them all to drink Irish coffee at New York City prices, and that Demi was, as their guest, entitled to nothing but the best her first time out sampling coffee.

As Elvira sipped and the youngsters guzzled their coffees, they talked ever more excitedly and loudly about the game they’d just seen and the drinks they were imbibing. Demi was fascinated that coffee came from so many different places — from Latin America, Africa, and Arabia — but what impressed her most, once she heard that coffee beans generally grew at high altitude in the tropics, was that Ireland was able to grow them as well.

"It must be awesomely difficult to grow the beans for an Irish coffee," she said. "I’ve heard that it’s such a cold, rainy place that even its potatoes once rotted and turned green. Jeez, they can’t even keep the rot out of their beer. I saw some Irish beer on St. Patrick’s Day and it was a yucky green color."

Neither Lancer contradicted her. What was the point? Demi wasn’t really listening any longer.

So impressed was Demi with the courage and tenacity of Ireland’s coffee growers that she demanded and received a second Irish coffee so that she could toast the pluck and guts of the Irish in growing brown coffee beans on the Emerald Isle.

By the time, Demi had finished her long-winded toast to the Irish, complete with a slurred voice, false sentiment, and a fake brogue, Elvira sincerely regretted having bought her more than one coffee. Since Demi had downed her three coffees like Gatorade after a workout, no one — least of all Demi — was aware she was getting drunk, until she was stinking, incoherently drunk.

The evening was not working out quite as Elvira hoped. True, the first coffee had helped Steve and Demi to relax once again with each other. Indeed, before they had guzzled its last drop, Steve had an arm around Demi’s shoulder and a hand on her leg playing with the inside hem of her mini-dress.

During their second coffee, Steve deliberately embarrassed his mother by soul-kissing Demi, who enthusiastically responded, even though she was no longer able to deliberate about much of anything. The second coffee had also given Steve a chance to verify that Demi was wearing satin panties. His fingertips had found something unexpected, which they were eager to explore during the third round of coffees.

But Steve had to back away from her instead, for fear of accidentally having his eye poked out by Demi as she thrashed about, one moment demonstrating the "awesome dunk" of Mike Lancer’s that had tied the game at half-time, the next moment (while still seated) an Irish jig, and the next moment, how hard Juan Valdez would have to push to get a balky burro to climb a Colombian mountain.

"Children, I think it’s well past your bedtime," Elvira announced, just after she had failed to stop Demi from licking up the last drop of her spiked coffee. As Demi’s legs were failing her, Steve had to help her to stand up and to stagger to the exit. Meanwhile, Elvira was leaving a ‘generous’ tip to blind the café’s staff to Demi’s indisposition.

Mother and son finally got Demi to her bed. As Elvira didn’t want Steve to see the Vagi-Gaff until he was sexually aroused and game for anything, she told her son, "It’s not proper for you to undress Demi for bed. Why don’t you go into the bathroom and get ready for your big night. Be sure to use the mouthwash and it’s always advisable for a boy your age to apply an underarm deodorant before he embraces a lady."

Steve hurried off to hide the effect of his mother’s words. It was exciting to think that his mother was actually encouraging him to have sex with a boy. He had always wondered whether she truly accepted his homosexuality. As he thought of his mother’s preparing Kyle for bed, he wondered no longer: "My mom’s really cool. She actually wants Kyle and me to get it on."

It was Demi, not Kyle, whom Elvira was preparing for bed. And Demi wasn’t proving very cooperative. She was far more interested in jabbering about the glories of Ireland and its coffee than she was in getting undressed. To be sure, she was willing enough to roll over on command, one way, then the other, so that Elvira could strip her of her dress.

Yet she was much too limp to raise her arms over her head, which made it a challenge to remove her slip and bra. Her panties she kept on, as she instinctively grabbed them whenever Elvira tugged on them. As the room was chilly, Demi actually kissed Elvira to thank her for the welcome warmth from the red negligee so sheer that it highlighted rather than hid her breasts.

Seductively dressed, invitingly waiting atop the pink satin sheets of the heart-shaped bed, Demi was as ready as she’d ever be for a night of sexual passion with her first, and so far, only boyfriend. Elvira gave Steve a green light: "She’s waiting for you, sweetheart. Demi told me that she wants this to be your night — whatever you want is all right with her."

As Steve kissed his mother goodnight, she whispered in his ear, "Don’t forget — Demi wants you to be as manly as possible. You’re the only one who needs a condom tonight, understood?" Her last words as she left the room shared by Steve and Demi were these — "Demi is such a sexy girl. She’s the kind of girl who makes boys glad that there are two, very different sexes. Vive la différence!"

After removing the condoms from his wallet, and carefully setting them down on the night table, Steve quickly stripped down to his boxers. He lay down on the satin sheets beside Demi. Aroused by the warmth of her body, he kissed her chastely on her lips.

The fog cleared long enough for Demi to realize that someone was kissing her. Generously, she tried to return the kiss…

The next morning when Demi awoke she was naked and lying spread-eagled on her stomach. She was also alone. There was no sign of Steve. As her head was pounding and she was deliriously thirsty, Demi stumbled to the washroom, where she verified that she was still wearing her breast forms and Vagi-Gaff .

Had Steve seen her in them? Had he even slept with her? She couldn’t remember whether she had seen him since the café. He wasn’t the one, she recalled, who’d undressed her. It had been some woman. A chambermaid? Elvira? Demi wasn’t sure, but she was certain that Steve hadn’t been the one to remove her clothes.

Had the woman removed all Demi’s clothes? No, Demi didn’t think that had happened. She could swear she had gone to bed in the red negligee that now lay in a heap on the floor beside her bed. What had happened? Had someone taken it off her? Had Steve stripped off her panties when she wasn’t looking?

Had she and Steve had sex? Had she — and Demi trembled at the thought -- lost her virginity to him the night before? Is that why she had awakened on her stomach? Is that why she was now so wobbly on her feet?

She shuddered at the possibility that she had, by not heeding her mother’s warnings about drugs, become so high on coffee that she’d put up no defense when Steve came cherry picking.

And where was Steve anyhow? Was he all right? She hoped that he was safe and sound. But was he? He wasn’t the type to "love ‘em and leave ‘em," was he? Where the heck was Steve?

There were so many questions, and so few answers. Demi only knew one thing for certain: She was swearing off coffee.

Continued in chapter nineteen: "Did Demi Have Sex in New York?"

So far Kyle has found difficult to keep a deal he made with his mother: That if he wears girls’ clothes for a month that she would buy him a moped. Somehow he has become Demi, a full-time cross-dresser with a gay boyfriend and a lesbian lover. Everyone believes that Demi’s a transsexual, including her mother. Only Kyle knows he’s taking sex hormones, and only Kyle knows that he’d still rather be a boy. Part 14 ended with Demi’s awakening in a hotel room, with a hangover and a lot of unanswered questions about the night before — for example, whether she had ‘lost her cherry’ to her gay boyfriend Steve, who was nowhere to be seen.

Anything for a Moped? - Part 15 By: Dawn De Winter
Chapter Nineteen: "Anything for a Pink Harley-Davidson?"

"It’s a disgrace. An absolute disgrace. A hussy like you does not belong in a respectable hotel."

Fatima, the chambermaid for the fourteenth floor, was muttering under her breath, but loudly enough for Demi to overhear as she headed down the hotel corridor to Elvira’s room.

Demi panicked: Did the maid somehow know about Kyle? Was she scorning Demi for not dressing like a boy? No, that wasn’t it, for the maid also said something about "girls who lacked Christian modesty."

Fatima, the maid, was an Afghan fundamentalist who strongly disapproved of pre-marital sex. She had been shocked to see Demi and Steve check into the honeymoon room, as their youthful appearance and names on the register made it highly unlikely that they were married. In Fatima’s eyes, Demi was little better than a whore for spending the night in a boy’s bed, especially in the sheer red negligee that Fatima had discovered the previous evening as she turned down the teens’ bed.

When Demi gave her the finger, Fatima openly cursed her: "You’re a Jezebel and there is no place in heaven for an unrepentant sinner like you. You’re very proud of your breasts, I’m sure. They are very big and ripe. But they will rot off you. God will see to that. When you have breasts like a boy, then you will realize that the flesh is weak and that only the Lord Jesus is strong. Repent, repent, before it’s too late!"

"Eat me," was all that Demi could think to say. She wasn’t used to matching wits with a lay missionary.

Or to outwitting Steve Lancer’s mother. Elvira seized the upper hand the moment Demi knocked on the door of her hotel room, and she kept it for more than twelve hours — that is, until the moment the white swan died.

It was a remarkable performance from Elvira, considering how shocked she was to find Demi standing alone at her door with Steve nowhere to be seen. Even though Elvira had no idea of Steve’s whereabouts, she simply decided that he must have gone outside, as she assured Demi, for a smoke.

"But Steve doesn’t smoke," Demi objected.

"Perhaps he didn’t before he came to New York," Elvira replied. "But you and he were virgins then. It’s quite common for males to light up a cigaret after they have had sex. When you consider that he took your maidenhead last night, I’m sure he’s standing in front of the hotel at this very moment puffing away on a big fat cigar."

"Yesterday I tipped the concierge to pass out cigars the moment he’d heard that Steve had plucked his first cherry. So I imagine that the concierge, the doorman, and several of the male guests are at this very moment singing your praises in between puffs on their cigars."

Though Demi had already suspected that she was no longer a virgin, she was genuinely shocked to hear Elvira speak so flippantly about her son’s sex life. Could it really be true that the entire hotel knew that Demi had lost her cherry? Did that explain the hostility of the maid? Were dozens of men at this very moment listening to Steve boast about his sexual prowess? Was Demi’s private life now a public spectacle?

Demi demanded clarification: "Did Steve actually tell you that he … well, you know, put his thing in me?"

"Well, not in so many words. But he did tell me before he went rushing out to make sure I gave you a pillow to sit on, as he said you’d probably have an awfully tender derriere."

Derriere? That didn’t sound like Steve talking. But possibly Elvira was too lady-like to say "ass." As Demi couldn’t believe that either Lancer would lie about such a thing, she had to accept that she’d probably been cornholed.

If so, Demi had let Kyle down badly, for he believed it the queerest act imaginable. Sure, there were lots of schoolyard insults for boys who put their tongue in the wrong place, but these boys had at least been sexually active as they did it — they hadn’t simply lain still while someone had his way with them.

Yes, a cornholed boy had definitely been treated like a girl. As Kyle would never have agreed to spread his legs for any boy, Demi felt a bit guilty that she had apparently, as Elvira now informed her, actually begged Steve to "make her feel like a real woman."

"Jo and that maid are right," Demi thought. "I really am a slut." She must be one, for she had given herself to Steve so wantonly and casually that she couldn’t even remember having done it.

"A decent girl wouldn’t forget that she’d lost her virginity," Demi decided. "But did I behave like a girl last night? Was Steve making love to a girl or to a sissy boy?"

As though she could read Demi’s thoughts, Elvira answered, "Steve told me quite a bit about last night. He even said he no longer has any doubt about your sexual identity. You’re definitely a girl, and he’s glad of it. So, Demi, as I already know all the juicy details, I just want to get your take on last night. What was it like, Demi, to make love to a boy for the first time?"

How about "forgettable"? That was definitely the word that occurred to Demi first. She wondered now why she’d worried for weeks about ‘turning gay’ if she were to have sex with Steve. What had she been worried about?

She now reflected, "If sex with a guy is no more meaningful than that, there’s no danger of Kyle’s ever going queer. As for me, I’m definitely a dyke. Jo’s right — nothing beats sex between two women. At least, you can remember it the next morning."

Demi should have been furious with Steve for taking advantage of her; instead, she was thankful to him for his forgettable lovemaking, for it had simplified her life. She now knew that she could have sex with a boy without emotional complications. Indeed, she felt less guilt about actual intercourse with Steve than she did about their petting sessions. For a girl with a pounding headache, she felt curiously light-headed.

And why not? After all, the homophobia she had learned from her classmates and mother no longer weighed as heavily upon her spirit. She’d once thought that homosexuality was something that could be transmitted from one male to another by the slightest wayward touch. Indeed, she’d refused to be naked with Steve for fear that their sex organs might touch. She feared that his ‘gay force’ might then pass to her — as the life force passed between the index fingers of Adam and God in the Sistine Chapel.

Yet Steve hadn’t just touched her; he’d actually explored her inner recesses. And was Demi, in consequence, now desperate to become a gay male? Hardly! And because she no longer feared ‘conversion’ to the cult of Priapus, Demi was actually looking forward to another night of meaningless, forgettable sex with Steve. This time she’d teach him some tricks she had picked up from Jo, so that there’d be something to remember the next morning.

As for satisfying Mrs. Lancer’s curiosity, Demi told her what she apparently needed to hear: Yes, Steve had treated her like a girl the entire time. Yes, the Vagi-Gaff had featured in their lovemaking. And no, they hadn’t done anything to compromise Steve’s own masculinity. Demi didn’t know whether she was lying or telling the truth. But did it matter? Mrs. Lancer seemed happy enough with her story.

Indeed, Elvira bubbled with delight after confirming, then reconfirming, that her son had treated Demi "as a woman" when they had made love. She was so pleased, in fact, that she immediately paid Demi the seventy-five dollars promised for wearing the Vagi-Gaff while in New York.

"I’ll pay you now, so I don’t forget. I want you to know that Elvira Lancer always keeps her word. And so must you. I’m counting on you, Demi, to earn your money honestly. The vagina is never to come off while you’re in this city. Understood?"

Demi nodded. She didn’t need to be bribed to wear the Vagi-Gaff. In fact, after she had gotten over the initial discomfort, it had become a fun thing to wear. Partly, she found it sexually exciting. Any boy, she thought, would enjoy being a girl at least once in his life, so long as he could do it out of town, with confidence that no one would be able to divine his true identity. Thanks to Elvira’s generosity, Demi was having that experience, for the Vagi-Gaff made it easier for her to forget that she had ever been a boy. It obscured Kyle entirely.

Mainly, however, Demi found the Vagi-Gaff relaxing. It made her less afraid of being "read" as a male, and therefore less fearful of wearing skirts and dresses in public. Indeed, she never would have agreed to wear a mini dress to the game had it not been for her security gaff. And she would have felt humiliated, rather than merely embarrassed, to be told by three creeps afterwards that they liked the look of her panties had she not been wearing her Vagi-Gaff protective sheath.

Despite her affection for her new gaff, Demi wished she didn’t have to wear it to bed with Steve. She even wondered if it were the reason their sex had been so unmemorable. Would she have found the sex more pleasurable, she wondered, if she had been completely free to enjoy it. Had Steve taken both her cherries? Possibly there was one left to pluck. Had she actually had vaginal intercourse?

She didn’t know the answers. What she did know was that she needed the money to help Jo get out of the doghouse. Still, nothing in this world came without a price tag, and Demi realized that Mrs. Lancer had bought a chunk of her freedom, a piece of her identity. For seventy-five dollars, Demi was agreeing to hide her maleness from Steve.

Was the deal a fair exchange? Demi thought so. That meant that she intended to honor it, for Demi was, like Kyle, a lot more scrupulous about the deals she made than the stories she told.

And possibly this deal wasn’t costing her much at all, for Steve had apparently enjoyed their first night of sex even though — or was it ‘because’? — she’d never taken off her Vagi-Gaff.

Suddenly, the telephone shattered the silence. It was Mike Lancer calling. As she talked to her ex-husband, Mrs. Lancer lost her good humor. Anger seized and contorted her limbs. She was furious to learn that Steve had run off to his father without informing her first. How dare the boy! She spluttered with impotent rage when Mike told her that Steve wanted to spend the entire day with his dad.

She became livid when Mike next said, "I’ll bring him to the ballet concert you’ve got planned for them. Steve says he’d rather have his teeth pulled than have to see a bunch of girls dressed in tutus hopping about pretending to be swans, but I told him it wouldn’t kill him to get a bit of culture. He then asked me if I’d ever heard the phrase ‘he died from boredom,’ but I reassured him, Elvira, that no one his age had yet died of boredom. Granted, that statistic may be due to the fact that most mothers don’t try to force a boy his age to go to a sissy ballet."

The blood began to return to her head, indeed surged into it, when Mike continued the call by telling her to put a cot in Steve’s hotel room so that he wouldn’t be "forced to sleep with Demi." According to Mike, his son wanted his own bed and should have it, even if his mother had to pay a surcharge.

Elvira was incensed that her ex-husband would dare to interfere with her sleeping arrangements for Steve and Demi. Didn’t he realize that it was none of his business where Steve slept? Or for that matter, with whom he slept?

The court had given her sole custody of their child, hadn’t it? Elvira swore to herself that she’d freeze Mike out of Steve’s life entirely if he didn’t back off. There was no question of Steve’s sleeping alone when a girl, even a demi-girl, was ready and willing to lie with him.

Finally, her face swelled up like a tomato about to explode from over-ripeness when her ex basically ordered her to meet him at the ballet during the intermission.

"How can I do that?" she’d sneered. "You won’t have a ticket. How will you possibly be able to see me?"

"Oh, I’ll get a ticket. Don’t worry about that. I’ve got contacts. I’ll get it. And I insist on talking to you before you do any more damage to Steve and Kyle. Steve has already told me more than enough for me to wonder whether his mother has gone stark raving mad, and I …"

"Well, I never!" Elvira exclaimed as she slammed down the receiver. "The nerve of the man! Tonight we’ll see who’s the boss tonight." Briefly she thought of throwing a scene at the ballet and having him arrested for "assault," but then decided that Steve might lose interest in sex with Demi if he started worrying about his father’s being forced to have sex with Rocky or Bruno in the city lock-up. No, an arrest was probably a bad idea. However, Elvira would find some way to make it clear to Mike that he’d lose his son for good if he continued to interfere with her efforts to salvage Steve for the world of women.

"He’d better not meddle with my plans for Demi either!" Elvira quietly muttered to herself "I’ll not have him put strange notions in her head. My son must — and soon will — have a real girlfriend who will never again need a gaff."

Elvira was convinced she was still on "top of things." Even so, the phone call had unnerved her. Steve, she had to recognize, was fighting her plans to turn him into a heterosexual. To her it was incredible — he’d actually decided to hang out with his ‘faggot’ father than spend the day touring New York with a pretty girl.

That ‘girl’ was Elvira’s sole companion for the day. Deprived of the opportunity to work that day on Steve’s ‘heterosexuality," Elvira decided to dedicate her day to dominating Demi. Steve might have temporarily slipped from her grasp, but Demi was — to the girl’s obvious dismay — going to be tightly in her grip for the next twelve hours.

Elvira would use the day to impress on Demi that she was a transsexual who wanted a complete sex change as soon as the doctors and the government would permit it. As Demi was a minor, it would take a lot of doctors’ signatures to convince a hospital to do the requisite surgery, and so Elvira arranged for a visit to Dr. Sven Johansson, an eminent New York psychiatrist, to be part of Demi’s Sunday in New York. Elvira’s high school sweetheart, he was still so smitten with her that he actually agreed to see Demi on a Sunday, and he’d been planning for months to attend a Star Trek convention in Yonkers that day dressed as Lieutenant Uhura.

Demi naturally wanted to be with Steve. She didn’t come to New York to ‘hang’ with someone’s mother! When Elvira told her — this time correctly — that Steve insisted on being alone with his father until the concert, Demi sulkily replied, "In that case, I just want to watch TV in my room. I brought some money with me, and I’ll use that to buy a movie, and maybe to order room service. Is that all right with you? I promise not to leave the hotel. So you can do whatever you want to do in New York."

Not leave the hotel? It was not a promise that Demi intended to keep. She was anxious to prowl the famous avenues of midtown Manhattan, but not in the company of Mrs. Lancer, who was bound to be a drag. As soon as her friend’s mother was out of sight, Demi hoped to hit the sidewalks of New York. Already her mouth was watering at the thought of eating a giant pretzel oozing with mustard. That would be so excellent!

As Elvira was impatient to begin Demi’s day of feminization and beautification, she decided not to waste any time persuading the girl that she had no choice but to tag along behind the adult charged with her care. Hence she decided to buy the girl’s compliance: "Demi, I don’t have the energy to argue with you today. I promise you that you’ll have a great day. I’ll treat you like my own daughter. You’re going to be spoiled rotten."

"But just in case I no longer know what young girls like to do these days, and you don’t have a good time, how about my giving you fifty dollars for being my companion today? You’ll get it at the ballet if you’ve been an obedient and dutiful girl all day. You won’t get the money if you talk back to me, even once, but if you behave yourself and respect your elders, you’ll have another fifty dollars to give to your friend Joanne. That should get her out of debt and out of trouble. So what do you say?"

She extended a limp hand. "Is it a deal?"

Demi bargained. "The money’s for Jo. What about something for me? If I’m real nice, could you buy me a CD Walkman? You know — a sports model that I could wear when I ride my moped."

"Aren’t you the greedy little girl! I tell you what. If you convince me today that you are absolutely thrilled with being a girl, that you can’t wait to have the plastic surgery to make you even more beautiful, and that you can no longer fathom why you ever wanted to be a boy — if you convince me, in other words, that you’re desperate to be Demi for the rest of your life, then I’ll give you the money and the Walkman. A deal?"

"Sure, it’s a deal." It was a surprisingly easy one to make, for it changed very little. Demi knew that Mrs. Lancer "would go ballistic" if she didn’t act like a girl all day. She’d made that clear since their first conversation at the airport. Thus, Demi was actually giving up very little to get the money and the Walkman."

As Demi figured it, "I’ve been asking for ‘breasts just like Joannie’s’ for weeks now, and I haven’t got ‘em yet! All that black magic has added up to a big goose egg — thank God. Mrs. Lancer may sometimes act like a witch, but she’s not one, not really, and so she can’t put a spell on me. If she wants me to beg for a frigging vagina every hour on the hour, I’ll do it. Why not? What difference can it make? Words don’t matter. No one can force me to have a sex change. It’s a free country, and it’s been that way ever since we kicked some Nazi butt. So if Mrs. Lancer needs me to lie, I’ll be a nice little girl and do it."

"Demi, just so I know that you understand the spirit of this deal, I’d like us to seal it by both curtseying to each other."

Demi paused, and then broke into a big smile. "Sure thing, Mrs. Lancer." Though it took her several tries to get it right, Demi soon proved she could spread her blue dress and curtsey like an Iowa debutante. Her day of feminization and beautification had formally gotten underway.

To ensure Demi wouldn’t forget their deal, their first stop was an electronics store where Elvira found a ‘bargain’ — a sports model Walkman for half of what she would have paid for it in Des Moines. Demi loved using it, but had to give it up to Elvira when they arrived at their second stop of the day, since Elvira said, "It’s not really yours, Demi. Not yet. Indeed, I’ll be giving it to Steve’s cousin as a birthday present unless you convince me today that you really do want to complete your transition to full femininity. You do want a real girl’s body as soon as possible, isn’t that right, Demi?"

Demi eyed the Walkman as she dutifully confirmed, "Yes, Mrs. Lancer, I wish I had real hooters and … a hole between my legs."

"Not a hole, silly Demi, a vagina! And a lady says ‘breasts’ or ‘bosom," never anything crass like ‘hooters’."

"Yeh, a vagina … and bosom."

They had now arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see its collection of antiquities. The choice of museums had been Demi’s; for almost any art museum would have served Elvira’s purpose that day. But Demi had been keen on seeing "a real live Egyptian mummy" ever since she had seen the "kick-ass movie".

When she finally found herself face to face with one of the bandaged dead, Demi defied its curse: "I dare you to come after me. I’m not afraid of you. The name is Demi. I’m waiting for you in Des Moines with a box of matches and sharp scissors if you’ve got the guts to show your ugly mug in Iowa. Guts? That’s really funny. You’ve got no guts, do you?"

And then, Demi had a belly laugh at the mummy’s expense. Elvira was unimpressed by Demi’s bravado: "You’re such a tomboy at times," she said. "A lady does not use words like ‘guts.’ Nor does she threaten anyone, including the dead, with being burned alive. Now that you’ve told the mummy off, I think it’s time for you to learn something about Greek and Roman statuary."

It was only the nudes that Elvira wanted Demi to see. To Demi’s mortification, Elvira insisted that she closely inspect every inch of each of the youthful figures they came across, and then to imagine, out loud, what it would be like to make love to the males and to have the body of the females. As Demi began to describe the most sexually appealing features of her tenth Apollo, she suddenly realized that she preferred her men to be muscular — just like Steve.

After she blurted out that a statute of Ganymede reminded her of Steve, Elvira hugged her excitedly. From then on, Elvira had Demi address each of the male statues as "Steve" before describing in loving detail which part of his maleness she wished most to explore.

Just as Demi became comfortable with publicly discussing the sexual appeal of the classical male, Elvira had her switch her attention to the statues of Venus, Aphrodite, Leda and Diana. Now, Demi had to decide which of the female bodies she most coveted for herself. Elvira actually handed her a sketchpad, and had Demi draw the curves that most appealed to her eye and spirit.

This part of their visit to the Met counted as one of the high points of Demi’s trip to New York. All the while they talked about the female statuary, Demi marveled at her good fortune. "Imagine," she thought. "I’m actually being ordered to look at naked women." She so loved looking at them that she didn’t think twice about playing Elvira’s game — that is, to discuss each body in terms of her upcoming sex change.

"Those are the breasts I most want for myself," Demi was expected to say out loud, even though at first she was really thinking, "Those are the breasts I’d most like to fondle." After a while, however, Demi got into the spirit of the game. She actually started asking herself which breast, which arm, which thigh, which leg she most coveted for her own body. With Elvira’s help, she drew a composite figure that Elvira insisted she label as "Demi James at age 16."

She also had to sign it as she was the "artist". Elvira, claiming it showed genuine artistry, paid to have it framed at a nearby shop. She paid enough to ensure prompt service, even from a New Yorker, and Demi for the rest of their day together lugged around a drawing of herself as the ideal female. It had to make an impression on her as she stole the occasional glance at it that afternoon and morning, and later as it graced her bedroom wall.

After a morning spent fantasizing about herself as the ideal woman making love to the perfect man, Demi had lunch at a club for professional women affiliated with the Quilting Society of Iowa, the most prestigious women’s organization in the entire Midwest willing to admit Elvira as a member.

While Demi found it flattering to have so many "women in suits" feign interest in her future, she did find it genuinely "weird" that so many of them were anxious to impress on her the importance of putting career ahead of men and babies. Indeed, she found it almost as odd to think of herself as a single, childless career woman as she had earlier to fantasize about herself as Leda having sex with a trumpeter swan. Even so, lunch had its desired effect — Demi had spent yet another hour being told her future as a woman.

Immediately after lunch, they kept Demi’s appointment with Dr. Johansson. When Elvira saw that he still looked like a Viking, she temporarily lost focus. Afterwards, she told Demi that she was simply trying to give her pointers on how to seduce a man, but it sure seemed at the time that she had forgotten that she and Sven had company.

Indeed, she only seemed to remember Demi’s presence after she’d already been French-kissing the doctor for a good ten minutes, and had encouraged the doctor to hike her skirt high to reveal her garter belt and the bottom of her matching black lace panties.

Demi was being as quiet and as unobtrusive as possible, for she was getting off on being a voyeur, but Elvira finally noticed her, or perhaps heard her labored breathing, and so cooled the doctor’s ardor by reminding him that there was a child watching. She also gave him her hotel room number for later.

Dr. Johansson had no apologies for his behavior. Indeed, he told Demi that apartments were so small in his homeland that children often saw their parents having sex. "Indeed," he said, "to make maximum use of space, many children sleep in comfortable boxes that are pulled out at night from under their parents’ bed."

"Naturally, they see and hear everything, which is as it should be. Americans tend to infantilize their children. They treat them like simpletons long after they have become wise in the ways of the world. I hold that children are simply short adults and should be treated as such from the moment they are old enough to make their own decisions."

"What age is that?" Demi asked.

"Why, at their seventh birthday, of course. I am a firm believer that a child of seven knows better than any adult what is best for her. And when a girl is as old and mature as you, then adults have absolutely no right to second-guess any of her decisions."

"Wow! I wish my mother agreed with you."

"She will soon enough. My ideas — those of child liberation — are sweeping the world, young Demi. Already the courts have ruled that an eleven-year-old can sue his parents to force them to give him up for adoption. It’s just a matter of time before those same courts recognize that a girl your age shouldn’t have to ask either her parents or a doctor for permission to have a sex change. That should be her decision, and hers alone."

"In a just society, the government would pay for the sexual reassignment of anyone over the age of six who asks for it. I also believe that we’ll never get rid of sexism until we recognize that every citizen should be encouraged to change sexes — to find out how the other half lives — at least once before she or he has finished high school."

The whole idea boggled Demi’s mind. "Do you think I should change my sex?" she asked.

"Of course, you should. You were a boy for fourteen years. That’s a long time. Why not be a girl for the next fourteen years? It’s important not to get into a rut. However, what I think you should do is of no consequence, for the whole meaning of child liberation is that it’s up to you, the child, to make the decision. You and no one else. I have three questions to ask you, and it’s crucial that you answer them as forthrightly as you can. Agreed?"

"Sure," Demi nodded.

"First, are you happier as a girl than you were as a boy? Second, do you want your body to be as much like a girl’s as possible? Third, how anxious are you to have your sex change right now? Can you wait for a few months?"

Demi looked toward Elvira Lancer to see how she should answer. Elvira was nodding her head so vigorously that Demi knew the money and the Walkman were on the line. So she affirmed that she was far happier as a girl, and that she was eager to have a sex change operation as soon as possible. "It’s too bad it can’t be done this weekend," Demi said to win a huge grin of approval from Elvira.

"Demi, your answers don’t surprise me. It’s obvious that you’re a transsexual. However, I have to give you a gender-identity test to confirm my diagnosis. As I’ve found that most of the questions on these tests are a sheer waste of time, I’ve boiled the test down to three questions. Once I have your answers to them, I’ll know for certain whether or not you’re a transsexual. Are you ready for the questions?"

Demi nodded, but the test worried her. If she failed it, she probably wouldn’t get her Walkman and Jo’s money. She was so tense that she had to ask Dr. Johansson to repeat his questions. As he did, Demi relaxed entirely. This was a test she could not fail, for it asked her the best desert in which to get a suntan, the most beautiful gem, and the most essential part of a car — all questions from Dr. Loupi’s test!

She rattled off the answers, but to her dismay got only two out of three correct. While that was good enough for Dr. Johansson to confirm that she was a transsexual, Demi was miffed that he’d marked one question differently from Dr. Loupi. She had been cheated out of her perfect score. It wasn’t fair.

Dr. Johansson, unaware that she was upset, congratulated Demi on knowing her own mind, and with a flourish filled out the form in quadruplicate authorizing sexual reassignment surgery for Demi "at the first opportunity." He said he’d send three of the forms to Demi’s mother, who’d be one step closer, the doctor said, to having official sanction for Demi’s operation. He asked if anyone else had recommended an immediate sex change for her, and Demi answered that her high school psychologist had written several people on her behalf.

"Great," replied Dr. Johansson. "Just find two more doctors to vouch for you, and your mother will be able to give you a new, feminine body as a present for your fifteenth birthday."

He then said he had to rush off to catch the last hour of a ‘convention.’ There was time left only for one last embrace with Elvira that became so hot and heavy that Elvira from then on showed up occasionally in Demi’s erotic dreams — always as a lesbian, and usually as a dominatrix.

Their next stop was a bridal shop, where Elvira hoped to persuade the management of the wisdom of allowing a fourteen-year-old to try on a $12,000 dress. To Demi’s relief, the store refused to let her teenage sweat and grime soil any of its creations in linen and lace. Even so, she had to endure a tedious discussion of her future wedding, and to grit her teeth as she thanked Elvira for being "generous" enough to pay for her to receive the store’s catalogs twice a year until her twenty-first birthday.

Much to her surprise, Demi did study the catalogs when they arrived. Though she claimed she was interested solely in the models, she soon developed strong opinions on which dress she would want to wear to her wedding, assuming that she were actually a female and heterosexual. However, truth be told, once or twice she fantasized about walking down a Gothic church aisle in a long, flowing gown to embrace a tuxedoed Jo in front of the altar.

Though Demi did not get to wear a wedding dress while in New York, she certainly had lots of opportunity to try on clothes, for Elvira was determined to buy her "something to dazzle Steve." They went to Floweringvale’s Department Store where Demi received, with minimal reluctance, a manicure and pedicure, as well as a professional opinion on the shades of makeup and eyeshade that would make an apple-cheeked blond from Iowa look "simply ravishing" to all the men she met.

To her own surprise, Demi was nonchalant about two other "firsts" at Floweringvale’s: her first visit (in the company of Elvira) to a ladies’ powder room and changing room. In both, her fears about being "found out" quickly gave way to the pleasure of being able to watch females in various stages of undress.

After watching several young women strip to their bras and panties, Demi knew from the pressures in her Vagi-Gaff that she "was definitely a lesbian." The women who saw her hungry eyes were also convinced they had just disrobed in front of a lesbian. Though one or two of the women at Bloomingdale’s were flattered to be thought attractive by such a stripling of a girl, there were three others who vowed to shop thereafter in the New Jersey suburbs in order to avoid "the moral degenerates of New York City."

Demi, unaware that she was giving the Big Apple a bad reputation, had great fun trying on the most expensive dresses that the store had to offer. As she experimented, Demi discovered that some styles flattered her more than others. Indeed, she came to the startling conclusion that she looked sexier in two of the dresses than she ever had in jeans — either hers or Kyle’s.

As Elvira would pay for just one of them, she finally settled on a red dress, with a black floral pattern, and a high empire waist above which black velvet snuggled her breasts. Convinced that the dress was "way cool," Demi surprised Elvira Lancer with a kiss on the lips. Elvira was so pleased she rewarded Demi with a new black leather purse and matching shoes with three-inch heels — the spikiest that the girl had worn yet.

Elvira, leaving no card unplayed, next summoned the occult to assist her in feminizing Demi. Interceding on Demi’s behalf with the underworld was Madam Zeta, proprietor, waitress, and seer at "The Brazilian Tearoom" near Carnegie Hall.

As business was slow, Madam Zeta had time for a Tarot reading for Demi, who refused to give out any information other than her name, age, and hometown. Demi wanted Madam Zeta to think her a girl, and to know nothing at all about Kyle, for in that way Demi would be able to tell whether the fortuneteller was a fraud.

Demi’s reasoned, "If she can’t figure out I’m really a boy, then I’ll know that she’s making everything else up."

Zeta was eyeing Demi carefully, looking for some insight into her nature and character. Apparently she found it, for Zeta suddenly announced that the Tarot reading "will now commence." Once Demi and Zeta were seated across from each other at a small table, Zeta picked out a card to signify Demi. Since she was a blond-haired youth, Zeta picked out the page of wands.

It was a disconcerting way to start, for the cards already seemed to be hinting at Demi’s ambiguous gender. Demi was only partially mollified by being told that any girl her age would have a page as a signifier, for the cards seemed to be confirming that the gender of a fourteen-year-old was every bit as malleable as Dr. Loupi and Elvira Lancer claimed.

Demi then shuffled the Tarot deck, concentrating on her ‘question’ as she did. She was told to keep the question to herself, for Zeta said, "I see doubt in your mind. You will put more trust in the cards if you keep your question a secret, even from the mother of your friend."

"How does Madam Zeta know that Mrs. Lancer’s not related to me? Jeez, I guess we must have let that slip. Now what question should I ask?"

The question was obvious, even if Demi had trouble reducing it to a few words: "Who am I? Am I a boy or am I a girl? Am I Kyle or am I Demi? Are my fake breasts and vagina going to be real one day?’

Did the cards have an answer? And which question would they answer? The actual reading began with Zeta laying out ten more cards, six of them in the form of a Celtic cross, and four more in a line beside it. The first card to be turned over pleased Zeta immensely, though Demi frankly thought it an insult: labeled "The Fool" it showed a gaily-dressed youth about to walk blithely off a mountain precipice, with his left hand holding a white rose, "like a sissy," thought Demi.

Zeta explained that, "The Fool should be understood as someone pure of soul and unsullied by the world. He is, like Demi, a youth setting off in search of true wisdom. He will not fall off the cliff if he chooses the path of truth and righteousness. But he is about to make the most important decision in his life. I now know that your question is not a trivial one. Indeed, it is vital to your future."

Demi, slack-jawed, nodded agreement. Yes, she did not want to fall into an abyss.

The next card, Zeta explained, identified the ‘opposing forces’ — those that would get in the way of Demi’s making the right choice. "Ah," Zeta sighed. "Exactly what I expected: the Hierophant. Some also call it Jupiter or the Pope. He represents organized religion and the conventions of society. Your need to conform and your yearning for social approval will be the barriers to your finding the right path — the one in which you find true wisdom, especially about yourself."

Demi understood what the card was saying — namely, that she shouldn’t let the kids in her class tell her what to do, or who to be. She was keen on finding out what the third card would say about her childhood, for she was getting hooked on Tarot. "Temperance" — that’s what the card said.

Demi thought, "What a dumb card to show up! Of course, I practiced temperance when I was a little kid. No one was going to give me a beer when I was five. Jeez, that was a waste of a card."

However, Zeta had another take on the card: She pointed out that the winged angel depicted by the card was neither male nor female. "It represents," she said, "the union of spirit and matter, and of the male and female principle. I can see, Demi, that you were a bit of a tomboy when you were younger. That may explain why I sense in you, even now, a combination of the male and female that is praiseworthy in a girl your age. Too often, teenagers are intent on putting the opposite sex down."

"My suspicion that you were a tomboy as a child is confirmed, Demi, by the fourth card, the one that represents the recent past. It’s called The Chariot, and you’re the charioteer trying to keep the two sphinxes that are pulling it from going off in two directions, thereby tearing you and the chariot in two. The card is a very good one, Demi, for it suggests you will achieve greatness so long as you have the willpower to pursue your destiny. I conclude that there must be a vehicle of some sort — the modern day equivalent of a chariot — that has played a role in bringing you to this point in your life — to the moment when you must choose the one course of action that will make you whole."

"Wow!" exclaimed Demi. "Those cards know everything. That’s my moped. It’s sort of a motorbike, and it definitely has had me pulling in two directions. How did the cards know about my moped?"

"Demi, the cards know all. Now let us look at the current influences on you and your question. "The Wheel of Fortune — just what I expected. It reminds us that you are about to make an immense change in your life. Moreover, something recently happened — possibly it was that moped you just talked about — to change your luck for the better. This card tells you, Demi, that all things must change, and so must you. It also says: Complete the transition, which incredible good fortune has brought your way."

Elvira spoke for the first time: "Don’t you see, Demi? The more you change, the happier you’ll be."

"Please, Elvira, I’m the one who interprets the cards. Let us now see what the near future holds for Demi."

It was death! The "Death" card — the one card that Demi most feared in the Tarot deck had showed up. Demi started to snivel. She didn’t want to die!

Zeta patted her hand: "There, there, Demi. Don’t carry on so. This card doesn’t say you’re going to die. Rather it represents the death of the old self, and the birth of a new, better person. It is a card of transformation and renewal. It tells us, Demi, that you are going to complete your change. You will become a new, superior person."

"This next card is what you fear most, Demi. Before I turn it over, I want you to realize that you will only be happy if you overcome this fear. It prevents you from remaking yourself as a happier, more successful person."

Demi now believed in the cards. She leaned forward to see the next card, which was, to Zeta’s astonishment, yet another card of the major arcana, one of the twenty-two face cards of the seventy-eight card deck. "Demi, you’re getting so many strong cards," Zeta now said. "And none of them have been reversed."

"That means, Demi, that whatever the cards tell us, they could not be saying it more loudly. And they’re telling us something that is far from surprising. "The Tower" card shows, as you see, someone — that would be your old self — falling out of a tall, thin building that has just been struck by lighting."

"Or a surgeon’s scalpel," thought Demi. The decapitated phallus on the card definitely summed up her worst fear — namely that someone was going to cut off Kyle’s privates.

Zeta interrupted Demi’s thoughts to say that the card revealed, understandably, that Demi feared the transition between her old and new self. "There is no question that the change you are about to make will be painful in the short run, Demi, but it’s definitely in your best interests. So say the cards thus far."

Thus far. There was still hope that the cards would change their mind and Demi’s fate. Maybe Kyle would be able to catch a ‘Hail Mary’ pass after the two minute warning and stay in the football game.

"Is there one card that can overrule all the other cards?" Demi asked.

"Yes, it’s the tenth and last card," Zeta replied.

So Demi barely noticed as Zeta told her that the "Judgment" card meant that her family and friends would be soon encouraging her to make her transition, or that "The Lovers" card indicated that Demi apparently hoped she could, by changing herself, win the love of the most important person in her life.

"Is that my mother?" Demi asked.

"No, dear, the card refers to someone your own age — to someone you want to love you until you die of old age."

Finally, Zeta turned over the last card — the one that would confirm or undercut the reading that Demi had heard so far, the reading that seemed to be writing Kyle’s obituary. Zeta could not hide her astonishment. Not only was it another major arcana, there also could not be a stronger answer to Demi’s question. It was the "World" card.

Demi looked at the card as a mongoose would a cobra, for the card showed a buxom, naked woman wreathed in leaves, a magic wand in each hand. It was the counterpart of "The Fool." A card connoting total triumph, completion, and cosmic bliss, it confirmed that Demi would overcome her fears, complete her transition, and finish up a much happier and wiser person than she had been, as Zeta put it, before she began "her journey on the moped."

The reading stunned Demi. She was speechless. For her the last card had an indisputable meaning for it, like the "The Fool," had just one figure on it. But where "The Fool" card depicted a youthful male about to set out blithely on a hazardous journey, "The World" showed a naked, buxom female as the journey’s end.

Madam Zeta could say whatever she wanted about the occult meaning of the cards, but to Demi their literal meaning could not have been more obvious: They said that Kyle would become Demi forever — or at least long enough to acquire the body of an adult female. To a fourteen-year-old boy, that was the same as forever.

The reading also floored Elvira. True, she had quietly asked Zeta to "tell Demi to welcome change" when she had paid the fortune-teller her fee, as demanded in advance (as Zeta could never predict which clients were going to stiff her). Yet Elvira had never expected the cards to insist on Demi’s completing her sex change. She now was wondering whether there was something to this fortune-telling business.

Beckoning Elvira to one side, Zeta whispered, "That was an honest reading. There weren’t any tricks with the cards. I’ve rarely seen the cards be so definite in their advice. I didn’t want to say it out loud just in case it would upset the child. But the message of the cards is unmistakable: She should have the sex change she’s been thinking about. Demi should definitely become a boy."

Elvira almost laughed in Madam Zeta’s face. However, she was delighted to tell Demi, once they were outside on the sidewalk, that, "Zeta just told me that she didn’t want to upset you by saying that the cards literally advise you to ‘have the sex change’ you’ve been thinking about. But why would that advice upset you? It must be a great relief for you to know for sure, Demi, that you should have the operation as soon as possible."

Kyle was glum: Everything pointed to his being a transsexual. Not only had he passed two psychological tests, one of them with a perfect score, but also the Tarot cards had practically ordered him to become a female. Everyone, it seemed, wanted him to at least dress like a girl, and lots of people wanted him to acquire a girl’s body as well.

"There’s Mrs. Lancer, Dr. Johansson, Dr. Loupi, Madam Zeta, the black shirts, the Jets, and Jo — they all wish I had a vagina. Even Steve now wants me to buy one."

Was there anyone who definitely wanted Kyle to remain a boy — other than Kyle himself? He couldn’t think of anyone. Even his own mother preferred him in skirts.

For a few moments he felt trapped. But his mood brightened as he realized that he lived in America, a free country, and that no one could force him to have breast implants or to cut off his dick.

"I’m master of my own destiny. Or at least its mistress," he giggled to himself.

Why then was he walking down Fifth Avenue in a blue dress? Because he wanted to, that’s why. And he was ready to punch out anyone who’d deny him the right to dress like a girl, or to be a girl for that matter — not that he actually wanted to be a girl. But if he did, nothing and nobody would stop him from getting the operations he needed. Nothing and nobody!

Kyle’s thoughts had run away from him. He didn’t want to be a girl. No sirree! But Dr. Johansson was right: Every red-blooded American boy had the god-given right to become a girl — if he so desired.

He also had the right to look pretty. Or rather, Demi had that right, and Elvira was intent on her exercising it at the last stop of their "girls’ day out," a hairstylist. Ever since Elvira had put the salon appointment on their busy schedule, Demi had been fretting about "a permanent" — something she definitely didn’t want, but was afraid that she’d have to accept in order to get her Walkman. When she learned that Elvira simply wanted the stylist to reshape Demi’s hair into something "more suitable for a night at the ballet," Demi relaxed — for the first time in days — and simply melted into the practiced, reassuring hands of her male stylist. Anything he wanted to do was fine with her, just so long as it was "impermanent" and reversible. I turned out that he loved the German ‘maedchen" look, and Demi ended up with her hair braided into two giant "meatballs".

It wasn’t the sort of thing a girl wore in Iowa unless her name was Heidi or Gretchen, but Demi and Elvira both agreed that her new hairstyle made Demi look like she’d been living in New York City all her life, or at least it would in combination with her new dress, purse, and shoes.

As they left the salon, Elvira announced, "Demi dearest, I’m sorry to say that we’ve run out of time. There were so many more things I wanted to buy you; but we’re now have to rush to get to the concert on time. You’ve been such a sweetheart today — the ideal daughter. I don’t want you to wait a single minute longer for your Walkman. Here it is, and here’s the money I promised you for your girlfriend Jo. She’s lucky to have a friend like you."

Then she surprised Demi by leaning forward to kiss her forward. Her eyes were damp and a teardrop was trickling down her cheek, muddying her makeup. Elvira’s emotion was infectious: Demi also teared up as she returned the kiss.

Demi decided she liked Mrs. Lancer — which wasn’t all that surprising since she was the mother of Steve, a super friend. For an entire day Mrs. Lancer had pampered and flattered her. Repeatedly she had complimented Demi on her beauty or pointed to boys who were watching her every move.

"Don’t you see," Elvira said, "They find you sexy. You like the attention, don’t you? I feel sorry for teenaged boys. They’re always being ignored. But a pretty teenaged girl is the center of the universe. Ah, Demi, I wish I were your age again."

Elvira commented on more than Demi’s body and sex appeal. She even praised her mind. True, it was a backhanded sort of compliment, but Demi appreciated it nonetheless: "Demi, I do realize that you have misgivings about your transition to womanhood, but I know that you’re doing the right thing, because you’re very intelligent, so intelligent that you couldn’t possibly have been put on this earth merely to be a cloddish boy. Anyone as smart as you must be a transsexual."

Demi felt important in the presence of Mrs. Lancer. Having to pretend that she was one day going to have a sex-change operation was a small price to pay for such lavish attention and praise. Hence, she was sad to see their shopping trip end. When Elvira offered her hand, Demi clasped it, and as they stood waiting by the curb as Elvira hailed a cab, they looked like mother and daughter.

Over a steak dinner in Elvira’s hotel room, Elvira elicited a kiss from Demi when she said, "Demi dearest, after a rocky start, this has turned into a wonderful day. Steve’s insistence on hanging out with his father gave us a chance to get to know each other so much better. And the better I know you, the better I like you. Demi, you are a truly exceptional girl."

Elvira lent forward expectantly and Demi, blushing furiously, kissed her cheek. Elvira continued: "I’m starting to love you, Demi, the way an aunt loves her niece. I’ve always wanted a niece, as well as a daughter. Will you do me the great honor of agreeing to be my niece? Will you call me Auntie Elvie?"

Auntie Elvie? Demi would have had difficulty being so familiar with the formidable Mrs. Lancer, but Kyle found it almost unthinkable. Her "niece"? He thought not. So Kyle figured it was time to speak up, and to remind Steve’s mother that he was, despite surface appearances, still very much a boy; and a boy couldn’t be anyone’s "niece," could he?

As he had the fifty dollars safely pocketed and the Walkman stowed away in his room, Kyle thought it timely to remind Mrs. Lancer of Demi’s true nature: a cross-dressing boy who was going to give up girls’ clothes forever as soon as the Jets grew tired of their game or he was able to find, with Jo’s help, a new school where no one had ever heard of Demi.

So Kyle diffidently said, "Mrs. Lancer, I’d feel awkward calling you by your first name. Jeez, you’re Steve’s mother! I wish I could be your niece, but I can’t be because I’m a boy. How’s about my being your nephew, Mrs. Lancer?"

"I don’t need a nephew, Demi. I already have two dirty little urchins who claim that title. I need a niece, and in you I have one — if you’d just call me Auntie Elvie and let me pamper and help you through life. Oh Demi, I have so many plans for you! You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve planned your "sweet sixteen" party. The presents you’ll get! I know you like motorcycles and so I’ve already looked into buying you a Harley Davidson for your sixteenth birthday."

A Harley? Kyle could scarcely believe his ears. He could barely think, so loud was the engine revving in his head.

"I’ve even identified a garage that does custom work. I’ll get them to repaint the Harley in a more feminine color — I would think you’d want a vibrant shade of pink — and to accessorize it with a vanity mirror, special pouches for your make-up and sanitary napkins, and whatever else a hip, modern girl needs to make her bike roadworthy."

"Mrs. Lancer, a motorcycle is much too expensive. I couldn’t let you buy me one." ("Especially if it’s pink," he thought)

"Don’t be silly. It’s the least I could do for my niece on her sixteenth birthday. Demi dearest, I want only the best for you, including your college. I’ve already contacted Smith, Wellesley and Mount Holyoke on your behalf — three of the best women’s colleges in the country — and I’ve told each of them that I’m willing to make a very sizeable donation to whichever college is wise enough to admit my niece. How does that sound?"

A boy at a girls’ school? The idea was either terrible or wonderful. It all depended on whether the boy could be himself or not. Kyle had seen a television show about guys who attended girls’ colleges. Outnumbered seven to one, they never lacked for dates. They were the satisfied rooster in a barnyard full of frustrated hens.

Kyle was willing to be one of those roosters — if Jo agreed to it. He wasn’t sure how she’d react if he suggested they attend a girls’ school together. She might be jealous. Heck, he might be jealous of Jo if they went to one.

Did he really want to surround Jo with so many potential lesbians? And wasn’t Demi also a lesbian? What if she resurfaced and started misbehaving at college? Jo would have a fit if her girlfriend started acting like a bitch in heat.

So many emotions were flickering across Kyle’s face that Elvira couldn’t capture any of them long enough to read his thoughts. Even so, she was relieved that Demi hadn’t actually rejected the idea of a New England women’s college. When the time came to separate Demi and Steve so that he could start dating a "girl able to give him a baby," Elvira would be free of all guilt, for she’d be packing Demi off to one of the best educations possible.

By attending an elite college like Wellesley, Demi would meet some of America’s most eligible bachelors at mixers, and one of them she’d marry. But she wouldn’t become a homemaker. Nor would she become a mother, even of adopted children.

No, she’d be a DINK — part of a high-powered couple with "a double income and no kids" — and therefore able to afford a spacious apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to which she’d regularly invite her cherished Auntie Elvie. In the future that Elvira had planned for Demi, the girl would grow into a doting aunt to Steve’s daughters, who’d of course never be told about their aunt’s odd start in life.

It was a beguiling future that Elvira had in mind for Demi. Indeed, Elvira envied it. She therefore could not understand why Demi had any hesitation about embracing her destiny as beloved daughter, niece, wife, and aunt. "Everything will work out perfectly," Elvira thought, "if Demi will simply stop being so stubborn. Frankly, her mulishness is quite unbecoming in a girl."

Kyle had thought up another deal: "Mrs. Lancer," he began, but then seeing her stricken look, he switched to "Auntie Elvie." Her face shone with happiness, so he plunged onward: "I really like you a lot. You’ve been very kind to me. And I’d love to be your nephew. I’ve just got to become a boy again. Don’t you understand that?"

Even though Auntie Elvie was frowning, Kyle thought the time right to make his pitch: "How about my being your nephew in Iowa and your niece elsewhere? For example, if you wanted to take me to a basketball game in Chicago or maybe to Disney World, I’d be your perfect niece. We’d go shopping and you could buy me some really sexy outfits."

"Let me understand this, Demi. You want to travel with me as my niece?"

Kyle nodded enthusiastically.

"And you’re promising to be the perfect niece? So if I thought your upper lip was getting too much peach fuzz to look attractive on a girl, you’d agree to electrolysis to remove it?"

Kyle had no idea what "lectrosis" was, but was, like any boy his age, eager to start shaving. So was he willing to use a lectrosis to remain clean-shaven? Sure, why not? "Auntie Elvie, I promise to faithfully lectrosis whenever we’re on a trip together. Whatever you want, just so that you agree that I can dress in boys’ clothes when I’m in Iowa. And you’ll call me Kyle. Is it a deal, Auntie Elvie?"

"Auntie Elvie" mulled over her options. She decided that she liked the deal, with a twist: "Demi, my dear niece, anything you want, I want. That’s why I’ve done so much to facilitate your transition to womanhood. And so, I promise to call you ‘Kyle’ and pretend you’re a boy if I ever see you dressed as one."

"I’ve always believed in fostering a child’s imagination, and it’s a shame when children lose their zest for play-acting. So, I’ll call you Kyle, or Michael Jordan, or Tiger Woods, or whatever other role you’ve chosen for yourself that day. You’ll have to make sure that you’re in costume, however, if you expect me to call you by a make-believe name. If you’re wearing your own clothes, I’ll certainly be calling you Demi, especially when we’re in Des Moines."

"So if I’m dressed like a boy, you’ll call me Kyle and treat me like your nephew?"

"Of course, Demi dearest. How many times do I have to say it — if you’re dressing up like a boy, I’ll have no problem calling you Kyle, just as I will be delighted to call you Pocahontas any time I see you in a deerskin dress. Is that okay with you? Is that what you want?"

Kyle hadn’t liked the way she worded the deal. It wasn’t quite what he had in mind, but it was good enough, and so he extended his hand to shake on it.

"Not so fast, young lady. I want to make sure that we both agree on what our deal entails when you’re on the road with me. For example, right now we’re in New York, and you’re saying that you’ll be the perfect niece so long as we’re here. Right?"

"Right" Kyle agreed, though he had no idea where the conversation was now heading, for he’d been acting like a girl all day. What more could Auntie Elvie want?

"Demi, sweetie, tonight you’re having another date with your kissing cousin. As you two have already become sexually intimate, then you’ll be definitely having sex again tonight — probably all night long. Teenagers have so much energy! This time you’ll enjoy the sex a lot more, because you won’t be worrying about losing your virginity, and Steve will have a better idea of what turns on a woman."

Demi blushed and looked away.

"Demi, I want you to promise that you’ll never forget that you’re a girl when you’re holding hands with Steve at the ballet or embracing him later in bed. Also, you’re to promise that you’ll never forget you’re a lady. Any niece of mine will always act like a proper lady. That means she will not let her beau kiss her below her waist, and she will refuse to have sex ‘doggy-style’."

"God insists," Elvira continued, "that a man and a woman look into each other’s eyes, in to each other’s souls, as they have sex. The church and good taste also forbid a lady to permit a man to treat her like a catamite, in other words, like a male prostitute. A lady would rather die than commit such an unclean act. Is that understood?"

Demi, somewhat bewildered, nodded.

"Demi dearest, I’ve seen you tell quite a few whoppers. You’ve not always been the most truthful of children. So I need some assurance that this is a promise you’ll keep — namely, that you will never forget that you’re both a lady and a girl whenever we’re on a trip together or, if we’re in Des Moines, you’re not pretending to be a boy. There is only one way I can get that assurance — you must give me your most solemn oath. Tell me how you do that."

After a brief, whispered explanation, Demi and Auntie Elvie placed their right hand on their heart, swore on their mother’s grave to keep their word, then spit in each other’s right hand, and finally sealed their deal by mingling their spit with a handshake.

Demi had promised her Auntie Elvie that she’d never forget that she was a girl for a single moment while she was in New York. She’d also promised always to have sex "like a lady." Were these promises she could keep? And if she did, would she one day be roaring around the campus of an elite women’s college on a bright pink Harley?

Is that the future Steve envisaged for Kyle?

As Demi excitedly dressed for the ballet, she temporarily forgot who she really was, and what Steve really was. Had she paused to reflect, she would have realized that her strategy for the evening — to look and to smell as feminine as possible — wasn’t the best one for endearing herself to a gay boy who liked his "men" as masculine as possible.

And she should also have thought twice, if sex were truly on her mind, about becoming his "first cousin." After all, it was staid, puritanical Iowa that had bred Steve, and not one of those remote, incestuous, and libidinous islands off the coast of New York and southern New England.

Yet it probably didn’t matter how Demi dressed for her ballet date with Steve, because he could think of only one thing as he dressed for the concert — "Do I have the guts to tell Kyle what I did to him? And if I do tell him, will he still be my friend?"

Continued in chapter 20, which will see Demi’s trip to New York end with a shocking revelation.

So far Kyle has found it difficult to keep a deal he made with his mother: That if he wears girls’ clothes for a month that she would buy him a moped. He’s not quite sure how it happened, but somehow he has become Demi, a full-time cross-dresser with a gay boyfriend and a lesbian lover. Everyone believes that Demi’s a transsexual, including her mother. Only Kyle knows he’s taking sex hormones, and only Kyle knows that he’d still rather be a boy. Part 15 ended with Demi’s getting ready for her date with Steve at the ballet. She’s just agreed to become Elvira’s niece. Meanwhile, Steve has a secret that he thinks will turn Demi against him forever.

Anything for a Moped? - Part 16 by: Dawn De Winter
Chapter Twenty: "Will Steve Die a Virgin?"

"Demi, you look … like a girl."

"Well, I should hope so. It sure took me long enough to get dressed up as one."

"No, I mean you look so much like a girl that you don’t look at all like Kyle. No matter what you were wearing, you always reminded me of Kyle. But now you don’t, not really. Maybe it’s the way you did your make-up or your hair. Maybe it’s that dress. It’s new, right? Anyway, you sure look like a girl."

"That’s okay, isn’t it, Steve? I wanted to dress up for you tonight, you know, considering what happened last night."

"What do you mean ‘happened last night’? Is that why you’re wearing that velvet dress? Is that the reason you drowned yourself in perfume? You’re punishing me for last night, right?"

"Punishing you? Why would I want to punish you?"

"Demi, how much do you remember about last night?"

"Not much at all," she admitted. "I woke up this morning, and you were gone. I had to spend the entire day alone with your mother," she said half-accusingly. It couldn’t be more than half, since she’d enjoyed her time with Auntie Elvie.

"I’m sorry about leaving you with my mother, but I just had to see my dad. I had to talk to him about … last night."

"Why? What do you mean? What happened last night?"

"We can’t talk about it here, Demi — not with all these people around."

"Why not?"

"Because we don’t want them to know about Kyle, do we?" That’s what Steve said, for he knew it would silence Demi for the moment. His confession would have to wait until they were alone. A crowded lobby at Lincoln Center was not the place to talk about date rape.

That’s what Steve believed had happened last night. That’s what he was loath to discuss with Demi. His father had spent several hours that morning trying to convince Steve that he hadn’t molested Demi, but Steve was inconsolable. Indeed, he’d even asked his father whether he should turn himself into the police.

"Of course not," his father had replied. "You barely touched her. Come on, Steve, did you do anything to her after she’d passed out that you hadn’t already done with her permission when you were petting?"

"Past history doesn’t matter, dad," Steve had replied testily. "That’s what we learned at school. Officer Dunlop told us kids that it’s a crime to take advantage of a girl or boy who’s too drunk or high to give true consent." If Steve sounded like a lawyer, it was because he was already composing in his own mind the district attorney’s closing argument in the case of The State of Iowa versus Mike Lancer’s Rotten Kid.

Repeatedly Mike had attempted to convince Steve that he had not "raped" Demi. Granted, his fingers had strayed where they should not have gone, but Mile insisted, "no one’s going to convict you of rape, Steve. Christ, you never even took your own underpants off, and Demi always had on her fake boobs and vagina. Steve, be realistic — you would have seen more of her real body if she’d been wearing a bikini swimsuit."

Yet Steve knew what he’d done — he’d stripped off Demi’s negligee and panties after she’d fallen asleep. He’d told himself that he wouldn’t do anything more than look at her in the nude. He’d been desperate to see her naked ever since she’d showered in his house. No, it wasn’t Demi he wanted to see stark naked. It was Kyle.

But it was definitely Demi who lay naked in his bed. It had been dark in the room, its only light coming from the street lamps, and Steve wasn’t thinking too clearly after his spiked coffee. So when he saw the Vagi-Gaff, he’d mistaken it for the real thing! After all, his mother had offered to buy Demi a vagina. In his befuddled, agitated state, he concluded that the deal had already gone down, and that Demi had gotten her new genitals sometime that afternoon.

At first appalled that Kyle had agreed to his own castration, Steve had become steadily more curious as he had stared at Demi’s groin. Eventually, curiosity had overcome his better judgment, and he had gingerly inserted a finger into Demi’s "vagina". He had become excited, and briefly he’d contemplated "vaginal" intercourse. Fortunately for Demi, and fortunately for Steve, just as he was poised to betray their friendship, he suddenly came to his senses.

Possibly, it was his strong moral upbringing, the countless hours spent in church that cooled his ardor. More likely, it was the price tag still attached to the Vagi-Gaff. As his questing fingers came across it, Steve realized that Demi’s vagina was a fake. He broke into a paroxysm of laughter, which soon turned to sobbing heaves.

No longer interested in sex, he’d retreated to a chair in the corner, and there he’d sat, sniffling or crying, for more than three hours. The situation seemed tragic, and he held himself to blame: Having failed at protecting Kyle, he’d almost raped his best friend, the boy he claimed to love. Had Steve actually broken the law? He didn’t know and wasn’t sure it mattered. After all, rape had been in his heart. He was unworthy to be Kyle’s lover.

With that conclusion, he’d run out into the night, and after an hour of wandering amongst New York’s walking wounded, he had sought the sanctuary of his father’s brownstone in Chelsea. There he’d arrived at 5:30 in the morning. It had taken his father more than half an hour to get a coherent sentence out of him.

Understandably, Mike Lancer was upset, but not at his son. His son had, admittedly, behaved badly. He should never have undressed Demi or invaded her privacy. But there had been mitigating circumstances, all of which Mike blamed on his ex-wife.

In his opinion, Elvira had been pimping for her son, and had set up a crime scene by getting two underage children drunk and then telling one of them, her own son, that he had carte blanche to whatever he wanted with a "girlfriend" Elvira knew to be on the verge of passing out.

It was time for Mike to have a showdown with his ex-wife. Ever since she had caught him in bed with a tight end for the New York Giants, she’d called the shots: For fear of losing his career, he’d given her an uncontested divorce and sole custody of their son. Two weeks a year with Steve — that’s all she’d deigned to give him since the divorce.

It had been a tough decision for Mike to make — after all, he was Steve’s father! — and he’d regretted it every day, especially as he’d long known that his son was gay. He’d recognized his son as a chip off the old block ever since Steve had visited the Knicks’ dressing room for the first time at age eight.

Mike would never forget his panic when Steve went missing. There were, as usual, strangers in the dressing room, and Mike had feared the worst. However, the team trainer soon alleviated one fear while raising another: "Your son? I just saw him. He’s in the showers with three or four of the players."

It was true: Steve had stripped off all his clothes and was wandering around the shower room staring intently at the players’ genitalia and buttocks, which were, conveniently, at his eye level. Three of the players, all African American, reacted good-humoredly to Steve’s visit, as they joked that Steve was just showing the natural curiosity of a white boy in the presence of "ebony magnificence," but the fourth, an Eastern European, told Mike to keep his son away from the dressing room: "The kid needs counseling. He should see a priest," Jako said, "He had an erection the entire time he was in the showers. You’d better take steps now or he’ll never give you a grandchild."

Mike hadn’t taken any steps then, nor when Steve had started using his allowance at age ten to buy teen magazines, whose shirtless male centerfolds he’d begun taping to his bedroom wall. Mike had even remained silent a year later when one of his own gay porn magazines disappeared, and he’d found it, after two hours of frantically searching the house (starting with Elvira’s lingerie drawer) hidden in Steve’s duffel bag. So as neither to alert nor to alarm his son, Mike hadn’t taken the magazine away.

Nor did he say anything as the rest of his stash of porn "mysteriously" disappeared. Indeed, Mike began buying with his son’s education in mind, so that a gay sex manual, a box of condoms, five copies of a glossy magazine for gay teens, a book on gay rights, and a book about the "dos" and "don’ts" of dating for gay teens all found their way into Steve’s duffel bag.

Oddly, they never discussed Steve’s sexuality, not even after Elvira had caught Mike fondling the beanstalk of a New York Giant. True, Steve had "come out" to his mother the first time he’d heard her denounce his father as "a queer" after their divorce, but he and his father never discussed the one thing they most had in common — their sexual attraction to muscular males — until Steve had arrived in tears, his defenses entirely down, at his father’s brownstone.

To Steve’s relief, his father had been alone (as he usually was, given his abiding fear of scandal), and finally ready to talk about being a gay man who had raised a gay son. As Steve reported on his mother’s unceasing efforts to interest him in girls, even a demi-girl like Kyle, Mike’s guilt began to ease enough to talk about his own sexual past and his son’s sexual future.

When Steve told him that he still looked almost every day "at the stuff about gay teens you left for me to find," Mike broke down and sobbed. His body shook as Steve hugged him, and, his voice broken with emotion, said, "Thank you, dad, you’ve always been there for me — even when you’re two thousand miles away. Because of you, I’ve never been ashamed to be gay. I just want to grow up as big and as strong as you."

That morning Mike resolved to fight for his gay son and his best friend Kyle. He’d cut their puppet strings, so that Elvira would no longer be able to manipulate either boy. He’d not back down, even if Elvira threatened a media campaign to reveal his homosexuality, and thus shorten his days in the NBA. Hell, he let his ex-wife slam dunk his career, if she’d promise to end her full-court press against their son’s sexual identity and sense of self-worth.

That afternoon Mike tracked down the waiters, taxi drivers and hotel staff who could corroborate Steve’s statement that his mother had deliberately gotten an unsuspecting fourteen-year-old drunk. While no one could verify that Steve’s mother had urged him to break the law by having intercourse with a "girl" without her consent, a couple of the maids said they were eager to tell a court that Mrs. Lancer had booked two teens into a room for honeymooners and then plied them with liquor.

Even Fatima took Demi’s side (or at least stopped calling her "a whore") when she learned that the girl was such an innocent that she’d hadn’t even known she was boozing at the café. As Mike assembled the case with the help of his lawyer in the late afternoon, it became obvious to Mike that Elvira was guilty of corrupting a minor, two minors in fact.

He didn’t want to see Elvira in jail. Not only was she his son’s mother, but he also held himself partially to blame for her recent excesses. She hadn’t been noticeably homophobic when they’d first met. Otherwise, he would never have cared or dared to marry her.

If she now seemed infernally afraid of her son’s homosexuality, "then it has something to do with me," Mike felt. "If I hadn’t cheated on her with a man, she mightn’t be so hostile to gay people. She might even be ready to accept that Kyle doesn’t have to become Demi in order to make love to Steve."

No, Mike had no desire to involve the law; but he’d threaten to unleash its full fury if Elvira didn’t see the wisdom of allowing their son and Kyle to follow their own stars. From all that he’d heard about Kyle, the boy was probably happy being a girl. Even so, Mike felt that Demi had a right to develop at her own pace. She shouldn’t be pushed into changing her sex permanently simply to suit the temporary needs of her boyfriend’s mother. All this, and more, Mike intended to tell Elvira at the ballet while the two teens were distracted by a story of a swan-loving prince.

Elvira was far from keen about spending the first act of the ballet talking to her ex-husband about Steve and Demi, for she’d read in The Des Moines Arts Review and Shoppers’ Bargain Guide that the Bolshoi Ballet of St. Petersburg (formerly the Tampa Bay Modern Dance Collective) had devised "a revolutionary new version of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake," which they were presenting to "refined audiences in America and abroad." How refined? Well, it seemed that the only American cities sophisticated enough to appreciate the St. Petersburg company were Orlando, Miami, Pensacola, Tallahassee, and New York.

How did New York get onto this list? Well, it may have been by accident: An impresario may have confused the company with the better-known Bolshoi Ballet of Moscow, Russia. However, he bridled at any suggestion that he’d ever made a mistake.

"You say that nobody has ever heard of these dancers from Florida?" Rudi Comokoch had rhetorically asked in inquiring reporter. "Precisely. And why has no one heard of them? Because they’ve not played in New York! Everyone is an unknown until he, or they, have performed in the Big Apple. The world is divided into two parts," he lectured, "the vast horde of pathetic nobodies who’ve never been booked into a major New York hall, and the fabulous somebodies like the Bolshoi Ballet of St. Petersburg who’ve had this honor."

To ensure that the Bolshoi Ballet filled a hall at Lincoln Center, Rudi took advantage of New York’s premier position in the world of media hype to spread word of its "revolutionary" new version of Swan Lake. As word spread, and interest mounted, he finally convinced the company’s part-time choreographer to realize Rudi’s dream Swan Lake: an all-female version. True, a one-sex ballet was not genuinely revolutionary: The men of the Ballet Trocadero de Monte Carlo had been doing Swan Lake for decades, and the male swans of a British ballet company had recently been the toast of Broadway.

Even so, no one, so far as Rudi knew, had presented an all-female version of Swan Lake to a New York audience. And if anyone had, he was sure they hadn’t come up with his idea for the swan costumes. Rather than wear tutus, the girls were going to be garbed entirely in feathers, which would be glued to their bodies in small enough clumps to leave little to the imagination.

As the dancers had performed nude several times in Florida (according to their arrest records), they would have been willing to dance without feathers, but Rudi insisted on the proprieties. Besides, the company was so small that two of its male dancers would have to masquerade as females, and they would need the feathers as well as some bad lighting towards the rear of the stage.

Elvira had bought tickets to the Bolshoi when she read about its presenting an all-female version. She figured that a stage full of beautiful women would get Steve thinking about sex with Demi, while giving Demi a feminine ideal to strive for. With luck, she’d come away from the performance with dreams of becoming a ballerina.

Never entirely trusting to luck, Elvira had in fact already arranged for a ballet school in Des Moines to offer Demi "a year of free lessons as a sales promotion" as soon as they returned from New York. Elvira considered their expense "trivial" if they further feminized Demi. And wouldn’t they? Would Kyle be willing to show his face again in Des Moines after Demi had performed on television in a pink leotard, matching tights and ballet shoes, and a white tutu? Elvira thought it unlikely.

Elvira always protested her innocence when she was later accused of knowingly taking her son to a burlesque show: "I had no idea, none whatsoever, that the girls would be wearing almost nothing. And how was I to know that they were going to glue their feathers on with the same weak-bond stuff that goes onto the back of Post-it Notes? No one would have predicted that all the swans would molt!"

How could she have known? How indeed? She always thought it totally unfair that Mike amended his "bill of indictment" after the performance to include the stark naked swans — especially the two male swans who accidentally got stuck together — when he accused Elvira of corrupting two minors.

The swan striptease did not figure in Mike’s first assault on Elvira’s self-righteousness. Instead, he besieged her with sworn statements, Steve’s among them, about her misbehavior the preceding day. Mike also said that Steve suspected her of blackmailing Kyle into dressing and behaving more femininely.

To spare her feelings, Mike didn’t tell her that Steve also suspected her of practising voodoo to turn Kyle into a cross-dressing zombie. Any mother, Mike reasoned, would be upset to learn that her son had painstakingly searched their house for the magic potion or doll that she had used to transform Kyle into Demi.

Mike stuck to the provable, while intimating that he was going to quiz Demi at the intermission. "I’m sure the courts will find very interesting what she has to say about your dealings with her over the past few weeks. Have you been threatening her? Bribing her? It doesn’t matter which tactic you’ve been using, Elvira, for I’m sure that the judge will frown on your efforts to pressure a mere child into becoming a transsexual."

"I’m not pressuring Demi into anything," Elvira spluttered. "She’s happy that Kyle is gone, never to return, for she’s anxious to complete her transition to girlhood. I’m just trying to help her," Elvira whined.

She then caved, for she dared not have Demi talk to the authorities. There was no telling what stories the girl, a known liar, might tell!

"What do you want from me?" she resignedly asked Mike.

"Not much, considering how many laws you’ve broken."

"First, I want you to promise to leave Demi alone from now on. If it’s her destiny to become a woman, she’ll thank you one day for the money you set aside for her operation. In the meantime, leave her alone! She’s not your child, and she’s never going to be your daughter. Hands off of Demi! Understood?"

When Elvira nodded, Mike demanded that she sign a petition asking the Iowa courts to award him joint custody of Steve. She resisted briefly, but signed when he warned her that her only alternative was to lose Steve entirely. Once the courts knew about the seduction scenes she’d set up — not just at the hotel but also in a darkened home in Des Moines — they were likely to strip her of parental rights. That at least was the opinion of Mike and his lawyer, and Elvira reluctantly agreed to share her son: Steve would spend his school holidays and summer with his father, and the rest of the year (when Mike would be constantly traveling with his team) with his mother.

There were two last conditions: Elvira was finally to accept that her son was irredeemably gay and to permit him to date boys who refused to wear dresses.

"If I ever hear," menaced Mike, "that you’ve tried to impose another girl or demi-girl on Steve, I swear I’ll turn you into the police, Elvira. I’ll give them everything I’ve got on your attempts to corrupt Steve and Demi. You’re finally to accept that you raised a gay son. Got it?"

Once again Elvira saw no choice but to agree — a gay son was preferable to no son at all.

And the last condition? It was an apology. Mike told Elvira, "You’re going to have to apologize to your son for the harm you’ve done to him. Because of you, he thinks he’s a rapist. Do you understand that, Elvira? Last night you made your son the unhappiest kid in this city. He’ll probably never forget the trauma you put him through, and he’ll certainly never forgive you unless … unless you tell him you messed up big time, and beg for his forgiveness."

She was still mulling over this last condition when the audience, Steve and Demi leading the way, burst into the lobby for intermission. Surprisingly, considering that Swan Lake was a tragic love story, the room resounded with giggles and guffaws as the audience discussed and re-enacted the spills and thrills of the first act.

Only Steve seemed disconsolate. Indeed, he sourly asked if they could go. "There’s not a guy in the whole freaking show," he complained, as he shot a withering look at his mother.

"But dear," Elvira replied. "Tchaikovsky’s music is so beautiful. If you don’t like the dancers, just lean back in your chair, close your eyes, and listen, really listen."

"Who could listen? I could barely hear the music," Steve complained. "Everyone was laughing. I thought you told me this was a really sad story." He eyed her suspiciously, as though he’d caught her in yet another falsehood.

"Laughing? How can that be?" Elvira asked. She and Mike had been so engrossed in their conversation that neither had heard the gales of laughter rocking the theater.

Mike, who had been eavesdropping on conversations in the lobby, explained: "Elvira, it seems that this is a comic spoof of Swan Lake. The people beside me were having fits of laughter as they talked about four swans dancing wing-in-wing together. I gather it’s a famous duet. Anyway, the swans played it for maximum laughs, for one of them pretended to trip and they all went over like bowling pins. The woman beside me said it was the most inspired comedy she’d seen in New York since Mayor Guiliani last performed in drag."

Steve was unimpressed. He’d much rather have seen a sports event. Even Elvira could tell that he was, this night, in a dark and stormy mood. Demi, by contrast, was bubbling with joy. This was her first ballet, and to her surprise she loved it.

"But who wouldn’t?" Demi thought. "There are so many beautiful girls. They move so … so elegantly, and they’ve got almost nothing on!" (And would soon have even less.)

While most of the audience had focused on the company’s miscues, Demi had been fantasizing about making love to the dancers. In her mind’s eye, she was a swan making love, as she danced, to the most beautiful ballerina of them all, the princess who’d been turned into a white swan by an evil sorcerer. Even when Demi suddenly realized that her fantasy required that she be a ballerina, she clung to it. Love and romance were definitely worth a tutu.

As Demi gushed over the White Swan, Elvira got an inspiration. Or maybe she had planned the purchase all along. In any case, she persuaded the two teens (with some difficulty in the case of Steve) to accompany her to a stand in the lobby where the Bolshoi Ballet was hawking its wares in order to pay for its return bus fare to Florida.

Steve’s eye immediately locked on a large poster of two men in an affectionate pas de deux. Their bare chests rippling with muscles, they were wearing sheer dance tights and dance belts that exposed rather than hid their virility.

The poster advertised the company’s most innovative ballet (at least, until they reached New York) — "Romeo and Julius," their take on the Shakespearean classic done to the music of Ad Hominem, the rapper. Steve was staring so intently at the poster that he didn’t realize his mother had bought it for him — not until the staff rolled it up and handed it to him.

Elvira nodded when Steve looked her way. He almost smiled. For the first time that day, Steve’s anger toward his mother abated. While it would take more than a poster for him to forgive her, it was, he recognized, a step in the right direction.

What about Demi? Was there nothing for her? She would have settled for a poster of "Brytnya Spyrzia", the "White Swan" in that night’s performance. Instead, she got something much more exciting, certainly more fetishistic: Brytnya’s used ballet shoes. If purchased as an ensemble, her leotards and tights would cost just fifteen dollars extra. Pink and frayed, like the shoes, they revealed the history of Brytnya’s frantic practising, her seat and knees being especially worn thanks to her many trips and falls. So Demi found herself the new owner of a ballerina’s used clothes.

Elvira’s purchases were as suggestive as the Bolshoi’s costumes. Yet they would have confused Mike had he been there to observe them. Steve’s poster revealed that Elvira had declared a truce — maybe even a permanent end to hostilities — in her war on Steve’s homosexuality. So why did she buy Demi a ballerina’s outfit? Hadn’t Elvira promised Mike that she’d stopped pushing Demi towards a final sex change?

Yes she had. And she took her promise seriously. Never again would she bribe or blackmail Demi. Nor would Elvira try to convince Demi to become her ‘daughter’. Not for a moment had she forgotten that Demi had a mother already, and a pretty good one, as even Elvira had to admit.

Yet Elvira was unwilling to give up her newfound role as Auntie Elvie. She wanted to remain part of Demi’s life, especially as gaps had just opened up in her own. Demi had promised Elvira that she’d dress as a girl whenever they vacationed together out of town, even if Kyle took Demi’s place in Des Moines. As Elvira contemplated the loneliness of her first Christmas and school breaks without Steve, she clung to Demi. With luck, her "niece" would agree to accompany her to amusement parks in California and Florida when her son was visiting his father.

Elvira also expected to see a lot of Demi in Des Moines once the girl, having finally decided on her sex change, came to appreciate what a positive force her Auntie Elvie had been in her life. Even Demi’s mother Barb would become a friend, a real friend, of Elvira’s once she realized that it was Elvira’s money that was making possible the transformation of her son, who seemed destined to sell motorcycles for a living, into Demi, a Smith graduate and society matron. At least, that was the plan, or rather Elvira’s vision for Demi’s future.

In pursuit of that vision, she was determined to shower presents on Demi. Elvira had been right: Demi did indeed covet the ballet outfit, just as she did the panties or night wear of all the girls she found sexually exciting.

And, in the privacy of her own room, Demi would wear Brytnya’s leotard and tights almost every night for the next two weeks — that is, until Steve let slip to Jo that Demi had acquired another girl’s tights, and Demi had sheepishly admitted to Jo that she’d worn them to bed.

Jo, no dummy, recognized she had competition in Florida. To squelch it, she got Demi to promise that she’d never again wear Brytnya’s outfit in private until she had worn it in public. This pledge, plus Elvira’s offer of free ballet lessons, had Demi seriously contemplating taking up the ballet, despite Kyle’s admonitions to her that he’d "rather die than be seen by anyone frolicking about in a tutu."

Indeed, Kyle was unable to prevent her signing up for the winter session, starting in January. However, he did arrange their life in such a way that Demi was never able to show up for those lessons.

As one part of Demi definitely wanted to become a ballerina (or at least to hang out with ballerinas), Elvira’s present had been welcome, even if an embarrassing one to receive in a crowded lobby in the presence of Steve. Demi even kissed Elvira — which was more than Steve was yet willing to do — and readily agreed to keep the outfit a secret from Mike, who might, according to Elvira, begrudge her its cost.

Not every secret did Demi keep. During the remainder of the intermission, she got quite gossipy about her life since September, as Mike wrote down her answer to one leading question after another. Elvira overheard just enough to realize that Demi would be a damning witness if Mike ever went to court to demand either full custody of Steve or the State’s custody of his ex-wife, and she resolved to keep her promises about giving Steve the space to grow into a self-confident and proud gay man with the help of his gay father.

Yet the more that Steve threatened to slip away, the more important it became to Elvira to keep Demi close by. Elvira was, therefore, even indulgent about Demi’s gossiping. It just proved how remarkably feminine the girl really was. Elvira thought to herself about "all those years in which Demi pretended to be a boy named Kyle." She had played the role of "all-American boy" so convincingly that Demi obviously had innate talent as an actress.

"Wouldn’t it be great," Elvira mused, "if one day Demi played an ingénue on Broadway? If she takes dance lessons, she could even do that "tits and ass" number in Chorus Line!"

Elvira made a mental note to add acting lessons to Demi’s winter schedule. "If she kisses a few boys — lusty heterosexual boys, not gay boys like Steve — at her acting school, then she may discover how much she likes men. Then there’ll be no more foolish talk from her of being a lesbian."

Steve frostily intruded into her warm thoughts about Demi: "Mom, I wanna leave. Ballet sucks. Can’t I go somewhere with Dad? Maybe he could take me to a movie." (Steve was wondering whether every New York’s cinema was crammed to the rafters with gay males.)

Mike had overheard. Before Elvira could reply, he interjected, "Since you don’t like ballet, this might be the perfect time and place for you to talk with your mother about last night. I want you to spend some time with your mother in the lobby. Maybe she can find you some eats. Meanwhile, I’ll watch the second half with Demi so that you can have a heart-to-heart talk with your mother. I think you both need it."

And so it happened that it was Mike who had to cope with Demi’s wild mood swings during the last act of Swan Lake. At first, it was the giggles as Demi responded to the swan striptease like a fourteen-year-old boy — in other words, like most of the males in the audience. So hysterically funny did Demi find the first three or four molts that Mike briefly feared she’d hyperventilate.

But then, suddenly, Demi became deadly quiet and serious as she realized that entrancing Brytnya was — thanks to close contact with her "Prince" — losing feathers in all the right places. The White Swan was fast becoming a plucked chick. As Demi gazed at only the second female, and the first adult, to appear before her naked, she understood why so many women loved going to the ballet — it was a lesbian’s playground!

Soon lust gave way to passion. As Demi followed the White Swan’s every move, she became aware, as so few teens ever did, of the ballet’s poignancy. "It’s about someone like me," she thought. "I’m just like the White Swan. Someone’s bewitched me. Someone’s changed me into a swan. Here I am looking for love, just like her. But my time is running short, just like hers."

Demi began to cry — so silently that only her tears and the occasional shudder in her shoulders gave her emotion away. She was hoping that the White Swan would escape her fate, and become once again a real woman who could live happily ever after with the Prince (who had wider hips and a fuller bosom than most of the cast).

Instead, the most haunting notes in the ballet repertoire impelled the White Swan to rejoin the swans and then to fly off, leaving behind an inconsolable "Prince". As "he" drowned himself in Swan Lake, Demi began to wail.

Almost everyone else was laughing hysterically, for the departing swans, mistiming their exit, had all ended up in a heap which looked — considering their loss of feathers — a lot like an orgy. As Demi became aware of the laughter, she got even more upset.

Between sobs, she challenged Mike: "How can they laugh? Don’t they know that the White Swan will never be a girl again and that her one chance to have a boyfriend is gone forever?"

As Mike didn’t really have an answer, he simply held Demi and let her weep on his shoulder over the tragic fate of the enchanted swan who simply wanted to be a girl again.

It was not only Demi and Mike who were discovering how emotional an experience Swan Lake can be. Steve and Elvira could hear its haunting chords through an open door as they sat in an alcove off the lobby and rehashed the events of the last twenty-four hours, and then for good measure, of the last fourteen years.

Steve did graciously accept her apology for interfering in his romance with "Demi", even though he resented his mother for not calling his boyfriend "Kyle". They even hugged a little when Elvira professed her desire to be in future "the best mother any homosexual ever had." And Elvira shed the desired tears when Steve accused her of turning him "into a rapist." Indeed, it was a wonder that she didn’t cry out in terror, for Steve never clarified that he hadn’t done much more than molest a Vagi-Gaff.

If words alone mattered, then the reconciliation went well. But words are not everything, especially when it comes to mother and child. And Elvira could tell from Steve’s body language that he hadn’t really forgiven her. Indeed, as they locked eyes just as the music of Swan Lake reached its last crescendo, Elvira realized, "I’ve never seen that look before. Something is gone."

Suddenly she realized what it was: "Das Kind war tod — the child was dead." She recalled the phrase from one of her favorite movies, one she cherished because it had so much resonance with her own life. The Burning Secret — that was its name — told the story of a woman, emotionally abandoned but desperate for love, who had taken her young son to an Austrian sanatorium for a cure.

The story line suggested he had a lung condition, but Elvira knew what his real problem was — rarely had she seen such a fey and delicate boy on the big screen. He was obviously gay. Could a sanatorium cure a boy of being sexually attracted to war veterans, as this child seemed to be? Elvira thought not.

Yet she loved the film because the mother was able to have a night of romance and passion, and her son had successfully fought the temptation to tell his "burning secret" — his knowledge of the affair — to his cuckold father. His mother’s affair killed the child in him; but he emerged stronger from the crisis. His mother had made a man out of him.

Had her own son kept his burning secret? No, he’d told his father everything. He had acted like a child. So why then did his eyes tell her "the child was dead"? As she met his cold and efficient stare, Elvira suddenly realized that she’d been misinterpreting the movie. Only now did she comprehend that the giant step taken by the boy in the film toward becoming a man had taken him far away from his mother emotionally.

Elvira’s fledgling had taken flight, and she’d never felt so completely alone. She was so disconsolate that she even stopped scheming — for the rest of the evening.

Demi and Steve were, therefore, stone cold sober when they faced each other alone in their hotel room. To Steve’s relief, it now contained a cot ready for his use. There was an awkward silence, which Steve finally broke by suggesting that Demi try on the ballet costume — "to see if it fits you. I just know you’re dying of curiosity."

The suggestion surprised Demi: "Steve usually wants me to look as much like a guy as possible. A pink leotard and tights? I would have thought that would be the last thing he’d like to see me wear."

And she was right. Steve had proposed that she put on the ballet costume for the same reason boys took cold showers: to cool his ardor. Aware of his own raging, adolescent hormones, Steve feared that he might "jump Kyle’s bones" if Kyle looked at all boyish in their love nest. After his disgraceful behavior last night, Steve vowed to control himself. It would help him to resist temptation if Demi dressed in pink and pranced around the room "like a silly girl."

And so, after Demi had changed into her ballet costume (modestly in the bathroom), Steve encouraged her to stand in front of the full-length mirror and do her best "to dance like Brytnya."

At first, all went well from Steve’s perspective, for Demi was losing all semblance of masculinity as she tossed up her arms and attempted to force her feet to assume the various ballet positions. Steve even thought to himself, "I can’t believe I’ve been wasting my time trying to get Demi into the sack. I should be going after a real man — someone who’s macho like my dad. Someone like Brad."

Had Brad’s image lingered for long in Steve’s imagination, Steve probably would have spent the night, as planned, on the cot masturbating. However, that image shattered the moment a heart-shaped side table and lamp did. Demi had been trying to stand on point, without the advantage of a wooden block, or training, or talent.

Just as she reached her maximum stretch, just as she was about to cry out, "Look at me!", she toppled over onto the table, whose legs crumpled as it broke her fall. As she lay amidst the wreckage, the table legs apparently stuck into her side, the lamp flickering on her belly, she looked seriously hurt.

As Steve kneeled to help her, electricity raced through the two teens as they touched. Steve might have been able to resist its impulse had his hands been resting on the more artificial, more feminine parts of Demi’s body; but his right hand had found her biceps, and there the reminder that Demi had the muscles of a boy. Steve’s affinity for the cot weakened, especially after Demi surprised him with a kiss.

Briefly their tongues tangoed, but then Steve brusquely pulled away. "I can’t," he said. "We shouldn’t. It wouldn’t be right, not after what happened last night."

"After what happened last night?" Demi repeated. "After what we did last night, kissing is nothing." Then, blushing furiously, she added, "This time let’s do it more slowly so that I remember it better."

"What are you talking about?" Steve demanded. "What do you think happened last night?"

"Well you know," said Demi sheepishly. She then formed a circle with a finger and her right thumb, which she penetrated several times with the index finger of her left hand.

"We didn’t do that," Steve barked. "Who told you we had sex, ‘cause we didn’t. Not really. Not the way you’re suggesting."

Confused, Demi replied, "Your mother told me. She said you did … almost everything to me that a guy can do to a girl. She said that you took my virginity — by any definition."

"I can’t believe she told you that, Demi. We didn’t have sex, not really. She lied to you. My mother is always lying to people," he bitterly replied.

Was Demi relieved or disappointed to find out that she was, technically, still a virgin? She wasn’t sure. But she was certainly curious about Steve’s "not really". So she asked, "What did we do last night after we got back to the room? Did we neck or pet? What did we do? Who took off all my clothes?" She shamefacedly admitted, "I don’t remember anything."

Haltingly Steve told her what happened. As he expected either to be slapped by Demi or slugged by Kyle, Steve deliberately ended his sorry tale with his face within easy reach. Stoically, he was ready for whatever punishment his best friend (if Kyle still wanted that designation) meted out.

But Demi was more impressed than angered by Steve’s revelation. "You’re such a gentleman," she blurted out. "You really are a sweetheart."

She wondered if she would have behaved so chivalrously had their positions been reversed.

Since she had already lost her virginity in her mind, Demi was now anxious to lose it in the flesh. She also figured that Steve wouldn’t feel as bad about "the night before" if she now proved to him that she had arrived in New York ready and willing to lose her virginity. Actually, she hadn’t been, but a lot had changed in twenty-four hours.

So finally, at long last, Demi was anxious to get laid — provided that Steve treated her like a lady. She had made a promise to Auntie Elvie that she intended to keep: intercourse would be vaginal only, and Steve wouldn’t be allowed to treat her "like a boy".

The seduction proved easy. All Demi had to say was, "I don’t care about last night. All I care about is tonight." And all she had to do was to caress Steve between his legs for about four seconds. Testosterone-soaked adolescence then won out.

To their mutual surprise, their long-anticipated intercourse began with Demi wearing the pink ballet costume to bed. But it took less than five minutes for both teens to get naked (which in Demi’s case meant stripping down to her breast forms and gaff).

Steve, still guilty over the "night before," at first deferred to Demi’s every whim, which meant he had exploded twice inside her Vagi-Gaff before he started calling her Kyle and asking for her to let him love her "like the boy you really are."

As Steve’s roaming hands made Demi hot, she feverishly reconsidered her promise to Elvira: "She lied to me, didn’t she? That’s what Steve said. So I can do anything I want with Steve. I’m a free woman."

And what did she want? Shockingly, she wanted to have Steve enter her body for real. The Vagi-Gaff wasn’t good enough, for it gave only superficial pleasure. Briefly, she wished the plastic tube were real. "If only I had a real vagina," Demi thought, "I’d soon be in seventh heaven." But she wasn’t in heaven, and this wasn’t going to be fantasy sex. It was going to be earthy, sweaty, and carnal. With her own hands Demi guided Steve to the closest thing to a vagina that each boy has.

As their bodies locked together, Steve did his best to free Kyle from Demi’s grasp. He talked up a storm. "It’s you I love, Kyle — not Demi. It’s Kyle, a boy, who’s making love to me. Kyle, you’re turned on because you’re a boy having great sex with another boy. Kyle, we’re two gay boys getting our rocks off. Come on, Kyle, tell me you’re a boy. Tell me you’re going to be a boy from now on. Tell me you like having me deep inside you, inside the real you, and that you’ll be wanting boy-on-boy sex from now on."

The strangest thoughts were going through Kyle’s head. Here was another boy "using him like a girl," yet he hadn’t felt so much like a boy in three months.

Demi’s defenses were down. The girl was in retreat. She didn’t even resist Steve when he yanked on her breast forms to free Kyle from their constraint.

"Kyle, do you enjoy being a boy? Kyle, do you like having your boy’s belly caressed by another boy?"

"Yes, yes," Kyle sighed.

Steve smiled. It was working out just as he’d planned. As he saw it, Jo had used sex to seduce Kyle into becoming Demi, and he was now using it to return Kyle to the world of men.

Out loud Steve said, "I just know you really want to be a boy, Kyle. You’re as anxious as I am to see the last of Demi. After you’ve sexed it up with me, I promise you that you’ll never allow anyone to call you Demi, ever again. From this moment forward, it will always be Kyle, Steve’s macho boyfriend Kyle."

Steve then moved his hands upward towards Kyle’s nipples to prove to him that he’d have more fun in bed, and in life, if he didn’t cover them up with "fake tits."

"Kyle, it’s sure good being a boy. Isn’t it Kyle? How about it, Kyle?"

Kyle moaned in apparent agreement.

As Steve’s hands finally found Kyle’s chest, a look of panic came over Steve’s face. At first, he couldn’t find any words. But finally he blurted out, "Demi, you’ve got lumps. Demi, you’ve got breast cancer!"

A terrified Demi had never felt more like a girl.

To be continued in Chapter 21, where we will learn what the doctor told Demi.

SO far Kyle has found it complicated to keep a deal he made with his mother: That if he wears girls’ clothes for a month that she would buy him a moped. Somehow he has become Demi, a full-time cross-dresser with a gay boyfriend and a lesbian lover. Everyone believes that Demi’s a transsexual, including her mother. Only Kyle knows he’s taking sex hormones, and only Kyle knows that he’d still rather be a boy. Part 16 ended with Demi finally in bed with Steve. Everything is going well. He is even convinced that he can convince Demi to become Kyle again, until Steve discovers the "lumps" that convince him that Demi has breast cancer.

Anything for a Moped? - Part 17 by: Dawn De Winter
Chapter Twenty-One: What Did the Doctor Say?

It was definitely a case of good news, bad news. First Dr. Olds gave Demi the good news: "Demi, you’re perfectly healthy. You definitely don’t have breast cancer." And then came the bad: "You don’t have lumps, you silly girl; you’ve got breasts."

As Demi was speechless, it was left to Barb to ask the obvious question: "But how can that be, Dr. Olds? However she may now appear, Demi is still very much a boy. How could a boy grow women’s breasts?"

"Before I answer you, let me pose a question to Demi."

He fixed her with his stern gaze: "It’s important, Demi, that you give us an honest answer, for your entire future may depend on it. Have you been taking female hormones, Demi? There are pills and ointments being hawked on the Internet — quite irresponsibly in my opinion — to help boys … like you to grow breasts, to put flesh on their hips, and to shrink their testes." (Dr. Olds had added the latter because Demi’s genitals showed signs of atrophy.)

"Now, Demi, your mother and I need to know whether you’ve been taking any pills or using any creams to make yourself more feminine. Now tell us — have you?"

"Jeez, what a dumb question!" thought Demi. "I’ve been gobbling down male mones to make myself more masculine, not less."

To Dr. Olds she said, "There’s no way I’d take hormones to give me a girl’s body. I’m happy being a boy."

"Oh really?" asked the doctor, his eyebrows arching so high on his never-ending forehead that they looked like McDonald’s golden arches towering above the Iowa plain. Demi seemed, on the contrary, quite happy being a girl in another new outfit wheedled from her indulgent mother: a pink (shading to lavender) sleeveless cotton sweatshirt, with one word "ANGEL" in white block letters across her bust, that showed off her navel; matching eyeshade and lipstick (and matching nylon underwear underneath); dangling, pink and black earrings; and dangerously low across her hips, black side-lace bell bottom jeans with a back zip. Only the platform sneakers in burgundy-colored leather weren’t brand new.

"Demi’s a confused girl right now," Barb explained. "But we’ve got to expect that, for it’s got to be tough for anyone to change their sex, and doubly tough for a kid who’s still in grade nine. There’s no question that Demi would like to have breasts. She even tried to go on a television show in order to "win" them. But I’m positive she’s not taking hormones, for it’s breast implants she really wants, and they’re also what I want her to have as soon as (she now turned toward Demi and smiled) … as soon as her school year ends."

Demi tried to protest, but Barb held up her hand in pacifying benediction as she explained to a nodding Dr. Olds that an implant operation had the virtue of being easily reversible, in case Kyle ever changed his mind about becoming a girl for the rest of his life.

"Doctor, you can be confident," she summed up, "that Demi is not taking female hormones. If she’s growing breasts, there has to be some other explanation. What might it be?"

"Statistical probability," was the doctor’s answer. "Demi has a common condition known as gynecomastia — which is a fancy word for ‘female breast tissue’. Between forty and sixty percent of all boys Demi’s age — that is to say, about half of all fourteen-year-old boys — grow some breast tissue as a result of a temporary hormonal imbalance brought on by puberty. In most teens, the breast growth ends after a few months as the imbalance ends, and within a year the boy’s own pectoral development will hide any evidence that he’s ever had gynecomastia."

"So Demi’s breasts are bound to disappear in a few months?" Barb asked hopefully.

"Almost always that is the prognosis. However, surgery is sometimes indicated if the breast development has been too extensive. That does occasionally happen. My own theory is that it’s most likely to happen to the sons of women with large breasts of their own."

Dr. Olds, Barb and Demi all blushed when their quick glance downward established that there was a distinct possibility of Demi’s being amongst the two percent or so of boys with gynecomastia who’d eventually need a mastectomy — assuming that they weren’t thrilled to have noticeable breasts.

"I’m sure that Demi will never need an operation to correct her gynecomastia," Dr. Olds said soothingly. "It’s almost always a self-limiting condition, a short-lived accident of puberty. Therefore, I definitely prescribe a policy of ‘wait and see.’ That’s the usual recommendation, and in this case the only logical one, given Demi’s transvestitism. Indeed, I would have thought that the two of you would be overjoyed to learn that there is some possibility of her acquiring female breasts without the cost of an implant operation or the side effects of hormone treatment."

"The doctor’s right, Demi," Barb trilled. "Your guynamassia is a wonderful blessing. It solves so many problems. It almost makes one believe there is a God who actually looks out for the Demis of the world."

"Or there’s a devil who’s screwing with my life," thought Demi. "I’m the victim of black magic! I’m growing breasts ‘cause I stupidly asked that friggin’ fish with the helmet for ‘breasts just like Joannie’s.’ And now I’m getting ‘em! I’ve been a fool! I’m cursed."

She tugged at her budding breasts.

"Bothering you, are they?" the doctor asked. "It’s no wonder. They’re enflamed because of friction from your breast forms. You’re going to have to stop wearing them immediately."

"But Dr. Olds," Barb replied, "Demi’s likely to become a butt of jokes at school if her breast size dramatically shrinks overnight. She doesn’t need anything more than an AA cup bra for her own breasts now, but everyone knows her with a rather ample bosom."

"Well, Barb, I’m sure you women can find a way to amplify her breasts until they’ve grown to more ... er, impressive proportions, assuming that they ever do. A little bit of padding goes a long way."

That was the doctor’s last piece of advice, as he suggested that Demi come back every three months so that he could check on her breast development.

As there was no way, none whatsoever, that Demi was willing to go to school looking like a popped balloon, she and her mother spent the rest of the morning shopping for padded bras. As they included Macy’s lingerie department in their expedition, Melanie became one of the first people in Des Moines to learn that Demi was growing breasts. Naturally, she was disappointed. The Vera Smuttee show would have no use for Kyle now.

However, after Demi and Barb had left the store, Melanie had another bright idea: she phoned "Ripley’s Believe It or Not". Fortunately for Demi, the show never called Melanie back. They must have known how common gynecomastia was in fourteen-year-old boys.

The students of Hoover High, however, claimed never to have heard of it. Indeed, no one was willing to admit that a boy could ‘accidentally’ grow breasts. There were different theories, of course, about the origins of Demi’s ‘hooters’, but all of them assumed her uniqueness. Such a thing could only happen to her — that was the opinion of the entire school, from the principal on downward.

Everyone at Hoover knew about Demi’s new breasts. She wondered who’d started the gossip. At first, she suspected Steve had done the talking. He had, of course, been the first she’d confided in at school. After all, he needed to know that she didn’t have breast cancer.

Yet Steve had kept her secret. After all, he didn’t want anyone to know that the boy he’d been avidly courting had breasts. If word of that got out, it wouldn’t be only his mother who’d start trying to hitch him up with girls. As Steve had his reputation as a ‘gay male’ to protect, he tried to scotch all talk of Demi’s ‘boobs’.

So who talked first? Why it had been Jo, naturally. Demi had told her about the breasts to calm her hysterics. Jo had been shaken badly by Demi’s failure on Monday night to return her calls, and by her unscheduled absence the following morning. Jo had feared the worst — that Demi was dead or had run off with a ballerina. Steve’s lugubrious looks and refusal to discuss his trip to New York had heightened Jo’s anxiety to a fever pitch. Only the truth could calm her down.

To say that Jo was delighted with the news would be an understatement. Indeed, no single word could capture her excitement. She insisted that Demi take her to the demi-john so that Jo could see her breasts. Once there, Jo did her utmost to convince Demi that her breasts were now her prime erogenous zone.

Afterwards, Jo couldn’t wait to tell everyone about Demi’s breasts, for they were proof positive in Jo’s mind of Demi’s love. "Demi loves me so much," she told anyone who’d listen, "that she willed herself to develop breasts. She grew them to please me. She willed it to happen, just like some people use their willpower to conquer cancer. Demi ordered her body to become more feminine, and it did. Isn’t that incredible?"

Four of the ninth-grade girls agreed that Jo was incredibly lucky to have Demi. They wished their boyfriends loved them enough to change their bodies — to become, for example, more muscular or taller — but they had to admit that Demi was truly exceptional: She was the only person they’d ever met who could by sheer willpower change her sex.

Surprisingly, Jason bought into this argument, though he made it sound less noble — to him, Demi’s new breasts proved that the body of Iowa’s biggest sissy had finally given up all hope of making a man out of him.

However, most of Hoover High thought Jo as balmy as Kyle was strange. No guy, they held, could simply decide to become female. Then how had it happened? Some of the guys agreed with Demi that she was being punished for tempting fate.

She’d asked the nether world for breasts, and Satan had arranged for her to get them. Of course, he’d make her life on earth a living hell, before tormenting her for all eternity. And what would be a suitable punishment for Demi’s fatal wish to "have breasts just like Joannie’s"?

"To spend eternity as a woman," said some of the guys to annoyed looks from their girlfriends and a quizzical one from Demi. She could see no punishment in spending eternity as a female, just as long as she could live the next few decades as a male.

Indeed, it would be a fair trade in her opinion, especially as she knew from Christmas ornaments and television movies that angels were basically female anyway. Sure, there was the occasional cigar-toting rebel, but he was clearly destined to spend eternity puffing away in the bitter cold outside of Heaven’s pearly gates, on which there was certain to be hung a "No Smoking" sign. As far as Demi was concerned, being a female angel was something to look forward to, especially if lesbians made it to, and in, heaven.

Most of Hoover High considered Demi’s explanation as outlandish as Jo’s. They couldn’t believe that Demi’s body had changed because her mind or Satan had willed it. Opinion therefore generally divided between those — Vicky, Tim and Derek among them — who believed that Demi had been taking female hormones, and those, notably the Sharks and the Jets, who maintained that the boobs confirmed what everyone already knew from the TV broadcast of Demi’s snatch: She’d gone to New York City for a sex change.

Reaction to the news that Demi had gone at least halfway to becoming "a real girl" was definitely mixed. Vicky was so envious that she burst into tears upon being allowed to see Demi’s new breasts in their shared sanctuary. Demi tried to stop the flow of tears by offering to use some of her aunt’s money to buy breast implants for Vicky, but the cheerleader, touched by Demi’s generosity, became even more lachrymose.

Vicky did her best to explain in between sobs: "I can’t have the operation. I don’t know for sure that I want to live my life as a woman. I think I do, but I’m not sure. After all, I’m just a kid, and what do kids know? I’m going to wait until I’m much older before I do anything drastic. I envy you, Demi, for knowing what you really want and then going for it like a fullback at the opposition’s one-yard line." (Vicky still talked like she was dating the quarterback.) "By having your sex change at fourteen, you’ll end up with a much better body than I’ll ever have."

"I’m not going to have a sex change, ever. I’m happy being a boy," Demi protested.

"Then why are you taking female hormones to grow breasts?"

"I’m not!" blustered Demi.

"Sure, sure. I believe you, Demi, when you blame your breasts on magical incantations. But it never hurts to consume a few magic potions as well, does it, Demi?"

Despite her skepticism, Vicky felt much closer to Demi after seeing her budding breasts. Sure, she wished that Demi had confided in her about taking hormones, but she concluded that her girlfriend was simply trying to protect her source, who was probably providing them illicitly (given her tender age) under-the-counter or over-the-Internet.

Yet the important thing, as Vicky saw it, was that Demi’s breasts proved that she was a genuine transsexual, and not just Kyle playing a game of dress-up. She now forgave Demi for her own inadvertent ‘outing’. In fact, Vicky became as committed as Jo to Demi’s rapid transition to full womanhood. In Vicky’s eyes, Demi would be the trailblazer. If she did get a sex change for her fifteenth birthday (one of the rumors going around the school), then Vicky would have a year or two to assess the implications of sexual reassignment surgery for her friend before her own body had betrayed too much of its inherent masculinity to the world.

Demi’s breasts also drew her closer to Derek. A couple of days after "they" made the debut at Hoover High, Derek intercepted Demi on her way home from school. Apparently he had waited till the last moment, until she was a few steps from her own yard, so that he could talk to her alone.

"It’s super that you’re wearing your black tee shirt today," Derek began. "I love to read that pink ‘Demi’ on your … chest."

Demi and Derek both blushed.

"I just wish you didn’t have to wear that blue-and-white scarf. Demi, I want you to know that you’ll never have to become a full member of the Jets. You’ve got a lot of friends in the ninth grade who’ll protect you from them."

"Thanks," Demi quietly said. "I know I can count on you, De…rek."

She said his name as though she were blowing a kiss. But having said it, she became so flustered that it was obvious that Demi had, for the first time ever, consciously flirted with Derek.

Emboldened, Derek next told her, "It’s super news, Demi, that you’ve got real breasts. I bet they look totally awesome on you."

Derek, realizing that he’d perhaps gone too far in his praise, began blushing like a red light in a California rolling blackout.

"Thank you, Derek," Demi demurely replied. To her own surprise, she meant what she said. It had actually thrilled her to have Derek comment on her breasts. Normally, Demi didn’t appreciate having her breasts mentioned or praised.

Jo had been the grand exception to this rule, for Jo’s praise took the form (first in the demi-john, and later the same day in Demi’s bedroom) of focusing on the breasts in their lovemaking. During sex with Jo, Demi was thankful to have breasts.

Derek was acting strangely. Demi suddenly realized that he wanted to kiss her. He was leaning towards her, his lips within striking distance of hers. She froze, her only movement being a slight parting of her lips. Derek was saying something about "digging how feminine she was becoming," and he was looking about, apparently to see whether they were truly alone.

They were not: A familiar voice could be heard calling to them.

"I’ve got to run," Derek hurriedly said. "I just wanted to tell you how foxy you look, now that you’ve got real knockers. You’re changing into a girl is the best thing that ever happened." He then scrambled off before Demi had a chance to reply.

What would she have said? Probably not much more than stuttering. Demi found Derek’s flattery exciting, but also confusing and alarming. While Derek’s attentions were sexually stimulating, it was definitely confusing and alarming to have an old friend suddenly develop an interest in her. She could tell that Derek preferred Demi to Kyle. Understandably, Derek made Demi’s breasts perk up; whereas, Steve made them droop.

Even so, Demi didn’t see much of a future for Derek and herself, since she expected to have left for The Amazonian School before her friend ever got around to asking her out on a date. Besides, Demi wondered if it was fair for a lesbian to date boys.

"Hi Demi," said Steve to end her deliberations about Derek. "I was wondering whether you want to shoot some hoops?"

In mid-November? It was beginning to get too cold for outdoor basketball, and the occasional icy patch made the game more dangerous than its founder intended, but Demi agreed in order to prove to Steve that she wanted them to remain best buddies, even if their romance had died in New York.

There were so many possible explanations for its demise that it would be almost impossible to identify the "one thing that went wrong." True, Elvira’s machinations had done a lot of damage. Certainly, Steve would always remember his first night in the hotel room with Demi more vividly than his second.

Yet it would be unfair to heap all the blame on "Auntie Elvie," for Steve and Demi weren’t particularly compatible sexually. After all, Steve preferred "real men", and Demi, "real women." Mike may also have a hand in killing the romance, as he advised his son to look "for a real male," and not to settle for a "demi-sexual" just to please his mother.

And one must recognize that both teens, their sexual curiosity about each other satisfied ‘by a one night stand’, would have moved on eventually to new partners. There aren’t too many fourteen-year-olds who mate for life, especially when both are technically boys.

Finally, neither teen could forget Steve’s response to the discovery that Demi had breasts. He had shown horror rather than joy. He had mistaken wellness for illness, and in birth, he had seen death. Both teens knew that every time Steve touched Demi’s breast they’d both be thinking of the "Big C". For their own mental health, it was time they found new lovers or, in Demi’s case, stuck to one, her girlfriend Jo.

As Demi felt sorry for Steve, she used their game of one-on-one to chat about Hoover’s dating pool. First she mentioned Vicky, in Demi’s mind her own logical replacement.

Yet Steve wasn’t interested in Vicky: "Don’t you understand, even now, Demi, that I want to go out with a real guy — you know, with a dude who’s so proud of having a dick that he wants to wear tight pants to flaunt it? Anyway, I think Vicky’s going after Tim these days. He’s the one she sits beside now."

"Are you sure? I think she sees you as the ideal replacement for Brad. You’re a lot alike."

"Well, I used to catch her staring at me. It really bothered me because I’ve never been interested in her. But she’s not looked my way even once since our trip to New York. No, Tim’s the one, thank God."

Demi found that hard to believe, for as she told Vicky in the demi-john the next day, "I don’t think Tim is interested in sex. I’ve been trying to figure out whether he’s gay or straight, and as far I can see, he’s neither. He’s a sweet kid, but I don’t think he’s decided which sex he wants to date when he grows up. In fact, he may never date."

"Precisely," Vicky replied, "unless I help him. I think you’re right about Tim. He doesn’t seem to have much of a sex drive, does he? I’ve also been watching him, and I’ve never caught his eyes wandering to a girl’s bosom or a boy’s crotch. I think that’s super!"

"Huh, what’s so super about it?" wondered Demi out loud. Now that she was sexually active she pitied the virgins of the world.

"Because it means, Demi, that he may be the one for me! If he’s not especially interested in either boys or girls, then I’m perfect for him. I’ve got the best features of both sexes!"

Yes, yes," she said as she saw a frown flicker across Demi’s face, "I know I’ve got to move very slowly. If the thought of sex hasn’t yet entered Tim’s head, he might run home to mommy if I make a pass or try to kiss him."

"So how are you going to get Tim interested in having sex with you if you can never let him know you’re available?" asked Demi.

"That’s what figure skating is for!" proclaimed Vicky. "I found out that Tim is as good an ice skater as I am. He’s agreed to be my partner in the pairs competition. We’re going to be spending a lot of time together this winter, practising cheek-to-cheek, and body-to-body, and I’m certain that Tim will know by Spring thaw that he is indeed interested in sex, but only if his partner is TG."

Demi expected Vicky’s plan to succeed. She had, after all, become head cheerleader and the quarterback’s girlfriend. Why not now the skating and sex partner of Tim, whom Demi’s friends thought the "nicest boy in high school"?

Knowing Vicky, she and Tim would become so good a skating team that the International Olympic Committee would one day have to rule on whether a TG girl could, along with Tim, represent her country in the pairs competition. Would the IOC dare say "no" to a determined Vicky? Demi didn’t think so.

If Vicky was determined to teach Tim the joys of the Triple Axel (including its horizontal , bedtime version), then who was there for Steve to date? As there hadn’t been that many choices to begin with, the answer was obvious to Demi as soon as the question had been posed: why Brad, of course! He was the ideal boyfriend for Steve.

"So what… do you… think of… Brad Mitty?" Demi asked Steve between gasps for air, as she tried to catch her breath after being beaten badly, as usual, in a game of one-on-on. "He’s really cute, isn’t he?" she added, so that Steve would know she was hunting for something positive.

"Yeh, Brad’s one of the best looking guys in the whole school. I think he’s … sexy," Steve said rather bashfully. He wasn’t used to talking this openly about guys, even with Demi.

"Then why don’t you ask him out for a date?" Demi urged.

"He’d say no, and then I’d be too embarrassed to continue sitting at his table. Jeez, guys like me don’t ask the quarterback out for date. What do I have to offer him?"

"How about a great body and a sweet personality? And you’re awfully good in bed. You must be blind, Steve Lancer, if you don’t know that Brad Mitty can’t take his eyes off of you. Everyone’s been laughing at the way he moons over you, laughing because he’s too shy you ask you out."

"What? You mean Brad wants to go out with me?"

"Heck yes! And I’d be willing to bet a whole chunk of change that he also wants to stay in with you. Come on, Steve, see what happens. I promise you that Brad won’t say no to a movie."

Nor to much else, as it turned out. Brad and Steve ended their first date at the flicks (where they guffawed their way through a touching fable about a college football coach beloved by his players) with an hour of wild passion at Brad’s house.

Once the two boys discovered, to their mutual surprise, that they were sexually compatible, they became inseparable friends. Indeed, Steve even joined the football team as a wide receiver so he could spend more time with his lover. He and Brad both thought it a marvelous joke on Hoover High that the quarterback and his favorite, on-field receiver switched roles whenever they hit the sack.

As four of her best friends became preoccupied with sports, and with each other, Demi found life at Hoover High a bit lonely at times. True, Derek positively beamed whenever she sat amongst the black shirts, but he rarely talked to her when anyone else was about, and Jason’s glares made it difficult to relax with her old gang.

Inevitably, Demi became even more dependent on Jo for solace and company, and more receptive to her arguments in favor of their going away together to The Amazonian School. As they dreamed, Jo was careful not to disabuse Demi of the notion that she’d be able to attend the new school as Kyle, a boy, so long as she bound her breasts tightly.

And when Jo showed Demi’s some of the school’s publicity, copied from its homepage, she excised any reference to its being a school for "girls only." Surprisingly, there weren’t all that many gendered references to remove, for The Amazonian School, determined to get its girls "to rise above the limitations imposed on them by a sexist society," did its utmost to avoid pronouns, considering them inherently sexist and limiting.

Consequently, entire pages would scroll by without a single ‘she or ‘her’, as the school’s website talked about "our students" or "the Amazonians" rather than about "our girls" or "our women." In fact, if a prospective student didn’t see the preamble at the top of the first page — and Demi never did — she’d never know that the only boys attending The Amazonian School were pre-op transsexuals.

Photographs from the website were just as ambiguous as its text, because these almost always featured the Amazonians in competition against other schools. To build up its students’ self-esteem, The Amazonian School preferred to compete against — and to soundly beat — boys’ teams.

Through a series of aggressive, equal-rights lawsuits, it had forced its way into every male league, organization, and association in its district. No male bastion had remained intact. As a result the photos of famous Amazonian victories, whether they came in a contact sport or in debating, contained lots of boys, though most of them were lying facedown in the mud.

As Demi glanced over the photos that Jo had provided her, she delighted in the fact that her new school encouraged girls to play against boys. She knew that Kyle would take great pleasure in tackling or wrestling the most ‘stacked’ of the school’s young women.

There was no doubt in Demi’s mind that The Amazonian School was the solution to all of Kyle’s needs. It had incredible sports facilities; indeed, the school even encouraged Amazonians to skateboard and to race bikes competitively.

Daily Demi badgered her mother to enroll her as an Amazonian starting in January. But Barb knew they’d have difficulty affording the tuition, and so she put off a decision. She deferred it until Demi finally admitted to Dr. Olds that she had been taking female hormones for weeks. This revelation shook Barb to the quick. Not only did it prove that Demi’s addiction to femininity had become powerful enough to compel her to lie about her ‘drug’ dependency, but it also suggested that her mental health was becoming fragile.

"Demi’s right," Barb concluded; "she does need to change schools. How can she become a well adjusted female at a school where everyone remembers Kyle?"

Demi’s momentous admission to Dr. Olds had its genesis in her first meeting with Dr. Loupi after he’d learned of her breast development. Naturally, he was thrilled. He’d known for weeks that Demi was taking female hormones, and was pleased for her that these were finally bearing fruit. The breasts were, of course, further proof of his basic hypothesis: Namely, that Demi, the psychologically perfect transsexual, would experience an unproblematic transition to full womanhood.

Dr. Loupi’s mood positively soared when he learned from Demi that the eminent Dr. Johansson of New York City had confirmed his diagnosis. As Demi’s own physician was already prescribing female hormones to her — or so Dr. Loupi had been led to believe — it would take only a few more signatures, including those of Demi and her mother, to schedule her sexual reassignment surgery. With luck, it could be timed for late summer to coincide with one of Dr. Loupi’s conference papers.

Dr. Loupi’s mood soured quickly, however, when Demi openly contradicted his thesis that she was the world’s best-adjusted transsexual teen. He couldn’t believe it: Despite what she had told him and the evidence jutting in front of his own eyes, Demi was now denying that she was taking female hormones.

"Female hormones? I’d never take them. I couldn’t possibly have told you that I was on female hormones." (It was, after all, male steroids that Demi was gobbling down, now more than ever, as she desperately sought to counteract her breast development.)

"Well, young lady, how do you account for those breasts of yours? If they’re not the result of female hormones, then to what do you attribute their sudden efflorescence?"

"Dr. Olds thinks they’re something every fourteen-year-old boy gets," Demi replied. "But I suspect he’s wrong. I think I got them because I’m cursed by a fish that works for the Devil."

Satanic fish? Oh, oh, this did not sound good. Demi was supposed to be the one kid in a thousand who could change her sex as easily as most people change a shirt after they’ve found that it’s lacking a couple of buttons. The thirty-second draft of Dr. Loupi’s paper said she was unusually healthy psychologically, and now she was sitting in his office babbling like a schizo!

A demented Demi was not going to boost Dr. Loupi’s career. "They’ll blame me," he glumly thought, "for not realizing that she was always wacko. They’ll even say I misdiagnosed her. They’ll say she wasn’t ever a transsexual! They’ll say she’s delusional — that she only thinks she’s a transsexual! Oh my, oh my!"

Dr. Loupi became even more fretful when he suddenly remembered what Demi had said about Dr. Olds -- that her family doctor thought her breast development a fluke of nature.

"But how could Olds think that," Dr. Loupi wondered, "if he’s been prescribing female hormones to Demi?"

The truth was sickening, but Dr. Loupi could not avoid it: Demi was giving the hormones to herself, which would explain why she was so coy about taking them.

"It’s that damn Internet," Dr. Loupi muttered under his breath; "she’s been buying pills or creams from some quack who’s not bothered to verify her true age or circumstances. There are so many people out there who are totally lacking in professionalism. Sometimes I think I’m the only true professional working in America. It’s such a land of amateurs!"

He confronted Demi directly: "Now, I want the truth. If I don’t get it, I’ll tell Mr. Cudmore that he’s been right all along, and that you are, as he says, a hopeless liar. He will then expel you from Hoover High. Your only choice then will be an industrial school, which will train you to flip burgers. Now, we don’t want that to happen, do we? And it won’t have to happen if you tell me the truth. Will you at long last tell me the truth?"

After those sorts of threat, Demi was going to tell Dr. Loupi whatever he wanted to hear, even the truth. "What do you want to know?" she warily asked.

"The answer to three questions: First, have you ever taken hormones? Now let’s not quibble about the details. Have you have taken any sort of hormones at any time? Second, are you currently taking hormones? And third, did Dr. Olds or any other licensed physician prescribe them to you?

Demi took refuge in monosyllables: yes, yes and no.

"Just as I thought! Well, young Demi, there is no way that I can allow you to continue medicating yourself. How would that look to my fellow psychologists! I want us to resume our daily explorations of your femininity, but only after I’ve heard from your family physician. He’s Dr. Olds, right? I’m also going to be talking to your mother. We’re going to have to put your hormone treatment on a more regular basis. Now off you go. I’m sure you’re anxious to do whatever it is you girls do after school."

Dr. Olds was furious to learn he’d been duped. He agreed, however, in his phone call with Dr. Loupi that Demi’s lies and deceit proved how desperate she was for a sex change. In other words, he bought into Dr. Loupi’s analysis that Demi had kept the hormones a secret from her mother and doctor because she was afraid that either or both would insist she wait until she at least eighteen years old before taking such a major step in her life.

Dr. Olds had to agree with Hoover’s eminent psychologist that Demi was an exceptional case of transsexualism. While he thought that Demi’s feminization shouldn’t be pushed too rapidly (for fear of negative side effects), he concurred with Dr. Loupi that he should take control of her hormone treatment. There would be no more self-dosing. Instead, Dr. Olds would regulate her hormone intake so as to give Demi appropriate-sized breasts by the time she’d reached sweet sixteen. He also said he’d sign the necessary forms for Demi’s sexual reassignment surgery.

"I’ll leave it to the real experts to decide when she should have it, but I’ll give Barb James the consent forms that Demi needs," Dr Olds told the psychologist.

"Your concurrence with the diagnosis of Dr. Johansson and myself — namely, that Demi should have her sex change some time within the next year — will go a long way to convincing any hospital to perform the operation. After all, you’re the physician who knows her best."

With the James’s family physician firmly on board, Dr. Loupi finally met with Demi’s mother. As Barb was having to take time off in the middle of her workday, the meeting was necessarily a rushed one. Indeed, Dr. Loupi saw it solely as an opportunity to impress on Barb the inevitability of Demi’s sexual reassignment surgery, and thus the desirability of having it as soon as possible, while Kyle, still a young teen, remained androgynous enough in his appearance to make a pretty, convincing woman.

Dr. Loupi decided to shock her into seeing the wisdom of his advice. So he immediately informed her, as soon as they’d agreed that she alone would be on a first-name basis, about her child’s duplicity: "Barb, I want you to take a deep breath before I reveal something to you that I believe may upset you."

In panic, Barb’s breathing became so shallow and rapid that she was feeling a bit light-headed when Dr. Loupi gave her the ‘bad news’: "It’s my duty to inform you, Barb, that Demi has been lying to you for weeks about a very serious matter. I’m sure that must bother you."

"A very serious matter? What could it be?" Barb almost passed out from all the possibilities, many of which would entail jail time. It was with tremendous relief, therefore, that she heard Dr. Loupi explain, "Demi lied to Dr. Olds and you, her loving mother, about her breasts. They’re not a fluke of nature. They have been growing by Demi’s own design. She lied to you about the hormones. She’s been taking them for weeks, apparently after getting them from some sleazy company on the Internet."

Relief that Demi was not about to go to jail or to the hospital may have been Barb’s first emotion, but it soon gave way to a mixture of anger and sorrow that Demi hadn’t confided such a momentous decision in her.

"I don’t understand why she felt she couldn’t tell me about the hormones," Barb lamented. "I would have agreed to her taking them, though naturally I would have insisted that a doctor be involved."

"Well, Barb, I don’t always know what’s going through Demi’s mind, but I’m fairly certain that she was afraid that your family doctor would refuse to prescribe the hormones, in view of her tender age."

"That’s possibly true," agreed Barb.

"Well, Barb, Demi shouldn’t have worried about Dr. Olds. I’ve been talking to him, and he not only is ready to oversee Demi’s hormone treatment, but he’s also signed a consent form for her sexual reassignment surgery, which you’ll be able to pick up when you take Demi in for her next appointment. Do you know when that will be? It should be as soon as possible."

"So that’s why Dr. Olds insisted on seeing Demi this afternoon! She has an appointment to see him right after I get off work."

"That’s fantastic, Barb. That means Demi will no longer have to play foolish games with her health. A competent medical practitioner will now be taking charge of her feminization. My advice to you, Barb, is to proceed with her feminization as rapidly as possible so that she can start the next school year off as a girl at another school where there’ll be no ghost of Kyle to haunt her."

"Dr. Loupi, Demi has been begging to go to a private girls’ school this coming January. I’ve been putting her off, as it would cost us a lot of money, and I do feel that it’s too early for us to give up entirely on Kyle. I still wouldn’t be surprised to see my son come downstairs in a grubby sweatshirt and boxer shorts to see what’s been left for him under the Christmas Tree."

"Barb, I can understand why you’re resisting the remarkable change that is taking place in Kyle’s life. But I assure you he is definitely gone, and will never return. It is the considered opinion of doctors Johansson and Olds, and myself, that the only responsible course of action at this point is to schedule Demi’s operations so that she can be done with them before next autumn." "

Barb, it’s time for you prove how much you love Demi. Find the money somehow for the private school and the surgical procedures. Mortgage your house if you have to, Barb, but you must get over what we psychologists call ‘denial’. I know you’ll do the right thing. I’d appreciate knowing the date of the last operation, as I’ve grown fond of Demi and would like to visit her in the hospital to congratulate her."

He then looked at his watch, and dismissively said, "I’m sorry, Barb, but that’s all the time we have. There’s a student I have to see. He’s been seeing me about ‘anger management,’ and I’m sure you agree that it’s important in this day and age to make sure that students learn to control their tempers."

Bewildered by his peremptory dismissal, Barb stumbled out of the office in such confusion that she accidentally bumped into the waiting student. To her amazement, she recognized Kyle’s friend Jason.

"He’s always been such a quiet, considerate boy," she thought. "It’s a sad commentary on today’s youth that Jason, of all people, feels he needs help in controlling his anger!"

Curious, Barb lingered outside the door just long enough to learn that Jason was having "girl trouble," for she heard him admit, "It’s true. I still want to slug her every time I see her. I can’t help myself. I want to hit her so bad. But, like you suggested, I’m trying to find ways to get even with her without getting violent."

"So have you found a way?" Dr. Loupi probed.

As Barb had to rush off to work, she didn’t hear Jason’s reply: "Yeh, I talked one of the computer geeks — he owes me a favor — into hacking all the government data bases we could find Kyle’s name in. We got a good laugh changing his official name to Ima Asshole, but we finally decided to give him the frigging name he’s so frigging desperate to have."

Jason elaborated, cackling as he did, "According to vital statistics, my ex-friend was born a girl, with the name of Demi Sissy James. Do you like the middle name? That was the geek’s idea. Isn’t it perfect for Iowa’s biggest sissy?" His grin became especially malevolent.

"Jason, how do you feel now? Are you beginning to see there are non-violent ways to deal with your emotions?"

"You’re right, doc. I feel a lot better. When I saw Demi this morning, for the first time in weeks I didn’t get the urge to hit her. I actually found myself chuckling about her official name, you know, the one that will take her years to talk the government into changing. Also, you know, it felt good to take charge: I’m the one who made Demi officially a female. Isn’t that prime?" His face had a pretend smile.

"So Jason, am I to conclude that you no longer want to strike Demi?"

"I still get the urge. So I’m going to work on ‘managing my anger’ — as you call it — by signing Demi up for every beauty contest I can find. I’ve got some friends ("unfortunately, none of them black shirts," he muttered under his breath) who’ve been helping me fill out the forms. It’s a hoot: Demi’s officially entered in the Miss Teen Iowa contest as well as two or three dozen local contests to be Miss Buttermilk, Miss Tractor Pull, the Corn Princess, or The Snow Queen — whatever we could find. Some of the towns are so small that she may be the only entrant. That’s going to be so choice — when the ugliest, dumbest ‘girl’ in Iowa becomes Miss Hicksville!"

Dr. Loupi was alarmed: "You haven’t been forging Demi’s signature, have you? I certainly hope not, for forgery is a felony."

"Forgery? Heck no. We didn’t try to duplicate her scribbling. Instead, we signed her name each time with block letters, as though she were a moron. But she is, isn’t she?" Jason cackled once again.

That was pretty much the end of their substantive discussion. As Dr. Loupi reflected on his session with Jason, he gave himself a mental pat on the back. Thanks to his counseling, Jason was making more constructive use of his anger. For a while, Dr. Loupi had worried that Jason might show up to school with a firearm. That fear he could now put aside, for Jason in his own way had finally made his peace with Demi.

Jason didn’t fool Dr. Loupi: His actions were more eloquent than his words. Jason had stopped resisting Kyle’s transition to girlhood, Dr. Loupi decided, and was now trying to facilitate it. Thanks to Jason, Demi would never have to go through the legal hassle of formally changing her sex and name.

"Just imagine how much good I could do," Dr. Loupi declared to his desk lamp, "if I could counsel the entire nation on anger management!"

He decided that he would persuade Demi to keep the commitments being made in her name. "Yes, yes, I know that you have no desire to be beauty queen, but somehow your name got entered — probably by one of your admirers — and the organizers are counting on you to show. If you don’t there will be a lot of people upset with you."

If Demi won any of the contests, which wouldn’t be too difficult in some of the small town events, where all the other girls would weigh in at 180 pounds or more, then Dr. Loupi would have the ideal grand finale to his academic paper and, in time, the perfect cover photo for his book. He could envisage it now: Demi S. James, Apple Blossom Princess of Madison County.

Tears filled Dr. Loupi’s eyes as he thought about the fun Demi would have competing for titles that would attract lesbians to her like bees to … well, to apple blossoms.

Alas, this was not to be. As long as Barb was in position to intercept Demi’s mail, Dr. Loupi never got a chance to talk his favorite teen into entering a swimsuit contest. Stunned, yet again, by her daughter’s desperate craving for attention and validation, Barb decided there would be no beauty contests until after Demi’s sex change. Barb saw no point in going to court to force Iowa’s beauty pageants to admit a cross-dressing boy, when the fight that really mattered to Demi involved her rights as a transsexual.

As Barb anticipated that some people, and some events, would have trouble in accepting Demi as a female even after her operations and hormonal treatments had removed all but her chromosomal vestiges of maleness, Barb decided to conserve her resources for the future..

Once Demi had completed her transition, Barb was prepared to fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to force the Miss Teen pageants of Iowa to accept Demi as a contestant. Though her daughter was unlikely, as Barb saw it, to win any of the major beauty competitions, she did have good odds of becoming Miss Congeniality, a title that might do wonders for Demi’s morale.

But first things first. If Demi were going to be entering beauty contests, she’d have to develop beyond an AA cup. On the same day as she finally saw Dr. Loupi, Barb took her daughter to Dr. Olds to be put on a regimen of female hormones (and at the doctor’s suggestion, a mix of testosterone suppressants).

Dr. Olds indicated to Barb that he wanted to talk to Demi alone — well sort of alone, for given Demi’s age and "sex", he asked his nurse to remain in order to observe the proprieties. The doctor wanted to find out whether Demi would be more truthful in her mother’s absence. He certainly hoped she’d be, for it was important to Dr. Olds to have his patient’s full confidence.

"So Demi," he began, "let’s start by finding out who’s been providing you with your hormones. The company’s name, please?" Dr. Olds thought this the best approach: to catch Demi off-guard by treating her hormone consumption as a given.

And the stratagem worked: "I don’t get them from a company. A friend gives them to me," Demi replied. Naturally, there was no way she was going to rat on Steve, and so she refused to divulge the name of her source.

"I think you should tell your friend that he can get into big trouble peddling hormones without a medical license," Dr. Olds sternly said. "You tell him that he should stop doing it immediately. As for you Demi, you are never again to administer hormones to yourself. From now, you will be taking them under my supervision."

At this point, Demi was a bit confused. Since her doctor had never mentioned Dr. Loupi, she wasn’t sure where he’d heard about her hormones. Possibly there had been a bust, and Steve’s source was now behind bars. She wasn’t quite sure what was going down, but she did know enough to make sure that Dr. Olds understood that she had no desire to take anything that would make her more feminine.

She still hoped that her male mones could reverse the curse of the helmeted fish, though she was losing faith in them, for her breasts seemed to be growing daily. "Maybe," she thought, "the doctor can at least stop my breasts from growing any bigger while I hunt for a book of spells, which will tell me how to reverse the fish’s curse."

It was worth a try: "Dr. Olds, I can’t believe how fast my breasts are growing. Are there any hormones that can slow things down?"

"Certainly, Demi. That’s in fact my plan. Like most teens you’ve been too impatient. We’re definitely going to slow things down, so there are fewer side effects. After all, we don’t want you to become an emotional wreck. Slowly, slowly, that’s my philosophy."

"So if I take mones from you, my breasts won’t grow as fast?" Demi asked.

"That’s right, Demi. Nor will your hips. So it is a deal? Will you throw away your own stash of drugs and trust me to do what’s right for you?"

Their deal was sealed with a handshake, by the supervised destruction of her stash at home, and by Demi’s dutiful ingestion of hormones he prescribed in the weeks that followed. She had no idea that she had switched to female hormones, or that the testosterone inhibitors she was now taking would ensure that her body would continue to feminize as rapidly as it ever had (indeed, even more rapidly around her nipples, whose growth had hitherto lagged behind her breast development).

No, Demi didn’t know she was now taking female hormones; all she knew, or really cared about, was that Dr. Olds had told her — in all sincerity, since he didn’t know the true score — that her body would feminize less rapidly if she put herself in his care.

After their handshake, Dr. Olds asked Demi if she’d wait in his anteroom while he talked to her mother. Barb now learned that her daughter had definitely been taking female hormones, but was now concerned that she might have overdone things. "So, I’ve slowed her transition down. My plan is for her body to catch up to the other girls her age by her next birthday. By then, she’ll be needing a B-cup and some new jeans, for I doubt her hips will still fit in those she’s wearing today."

"Barb, I had long talk with Dr. Loupi, the mental health expert at Demi’s high school, and he is as convinced as I am that Demi should have early surgery. I’ve been told that Demi has been asking to transfer to an all-girls’ school. That’s quite understandable, and desirable, for I’m sure that it’s awkward for Demi to attend an institution where the students once knew her as Kyle. I’m sure you recognize that she’d be happier at a school where she can start anew."

"You’re obviously right, doctor. Until now I had my doubts because Demi is always talking about becoming Kyle once again. But she couldn’t have intended to be a boy again, if she’s been deliberately giving herself female breasts."

"Elvira Lancer has been telling me, over and over again, to pay more attention to what Demi does, and less attention to what Kyle says. So from now on I’m going to ignore the blather. Dr. Loupi will be pleased to know that I’m no longer in denial. From now on, I’m going to do whatever it takes to ensure that Demi gets her sex change as soon as possible, so that she’ll make a convincing female as an adult."

Later that evening, as Barb tucked Demi into her perfumed Pocahontas sheets, Barb took a long careful look at her daughter, her hair in curlers for the first time, her breasts poking ever so slightly out of her pink nylon nightie, and she wondered why it had taken so long for her to accept the obvious: that Demi was as permanent as the prairie wind.

Barb finally made her decision. Taking Demi’s hand into hers, she announced, "Sweetie, I can see that you’ve got to change schools. So I’ve enrolling you in The Amazonian School. I know that they have space for one more student. Until today, I wasn’t hopeful that I could convince them that you belonged in their school. But, it now appears that I was worrying needlessly. I’m sure they’ll take you."

"After all," Barb thought, "two medical doctors and your school psychologist have signed the necessary forms for your sex change, and you’ve started your hormone treatment. That should convince the school that you’re serious about becoming a true Amazonian."

To Demi she said, "Wait just a second. I’ll be right back. As you’re always rushing about in the mornings, this is probably the best moment for you to add your own John Hancock to the admission request form."

"Hurry back, mom. Wow, I’m going to become an Amazonian! This is awesome news, the most totally awesome news I’ve had in weeks. In little more than a month, I’ll be making way for Kyle. He’ll get his life back, for it will be goodbye Demi, hello Kyle!"

Demi was so excited to be changing schools that she scarcely read a word of the two forms she was signing, even though Barb twice warned her never to sign anything without carefully reading it first. There was not much to concern or inform Demi in the first form: It was a standard school admission form, save for clause 37, which specified that the school could ask her to leave at any time "if she failed to pass a physical inspection within one year of admission."

The second form Demi should have read, as the two signatures on it — hers and Barb’s — authorized the medical staff of the Amazonian school, including its resident psychiatrist, to oversee Demi’s feminization in order to ensure that it was complete by January of her second year — or earlier, if at all possible.

The second form, entitled "An Agreement to Come into Conformity with the Amazonian Norm," committed Demi to surgery. True, it was not ironclad, even though Barb in a third form would be giving prior approval to any procedure the school thought necessary for Demi’s successful feminization. But American kids have rights, and no one was going to castrate Demi against her will.

Nevertheless, by signing this agreement, Demi had created the legal presumption that she yearned to be feminized as quickly as possible. This presumption would affect every medical decision being made for her from then on. Once she got to the Amazonian School, she’d have to be very wary about signing medical consent forms, for the school’s medical staff were famous for piggy-backing procedures, in order to keep down the cost of medical care, especially for those — like Demi — who could barely afford the school’s tuition.

Thus, if Demi required a tonsillectomy, they’d consider it the logical time to ask her to consent to having her Adam’s apple reduced in size or her vocal chords restrung to give her voice a higher pitch. Similarly, if needed an appendectomy, the might ask Demi and her mother if they could move ahead the operation to eliminate her need for a gaff.

At every step, the surgeons would ask Demi for her informed, written consent, and so she’d have no difficulty keeping her current body (including its breasts) intact — provided she really listened and insisted on carefully reading everything she signed.

Was there any hope of Demi learning to read the big print on the forms she signed? (As far as the small print was concerned, she was a hopeless cause.) Possibly, if she remembered the third form that Bard had sheepishly offered to her that evening for signature.

Demi should have read it. Demi should have torn it up. Demi should have done anything but sign it. It was the bill of sale for her beloved (yet padlocked) moped!

Demi hurriedly signed the bill of sale without pausing to read it, for she was in a great rush: Jo had just phoned to say that her Gran had unexpectedly gone shopping for a couple of hours, which would give them enough time for Jo to prove, yet again, how lucky Demi was to have real breasts.

Afterwards, Barb could only hope that Demi had actually read the bill of sale, for Barb was acutely aware of how much the bike once meant to Kyle. As she watched Demi’s back recede down the lane, Barb thought to herself: "My child, you have changed mightily if you no longer care about that moped. Your mind must have feminized as much as your chest."

Upon second reflection the following morning, Barb decided that Demi had been relaxed about selling the moped because its new owner was going to be Elvira Lancer, who would give it to Steve, who’d allow Demi to ride it whenever she pleased.

In any case, Barb was pleased that Demi realized that they had no choice but to sell her bike if they were to find the tuition for her first semester at The Amazonian School. It was going to be an expensive school for her to attend, given its frequent field trips, sports junkets, and Demi’s medical treatments.

Elvira had been hinting for a couple of weeks that she was willing to buy the bike (at a small discount), if Barb needed extra money for Demi’s transition. The two women had struck the deal over coffee that afternoon. Oddly, it was the first time that Barb had ever visited Elvira’s house. Even more oddly, Elvira listened rather than lectured.

Elvira also made no attempt to hide her mixed emotions at hearing the latest news about Demi: "I’m thrilled to hear that she’s going ahead with her sex change," she told Barb as she poured herself a her third cream sherry, "but I wish she weren’t going away to school. I’ll miss her. I hope you don’t mind my saying this, Barb, but I’ve begun thinking of Demi as my … niece."

"And you’ll probably be thrilled to know that she now calls you Auntie Elvie."

"Yes, I do love that name. That’s why I’m pleased to help you out by taking the bike off your hands. You can always get Demi another moped in a couple of years if she still wants one. In the meantime, it’s a distraction. She’ll be a happier girl if she puts away her boys’ toys."

"I suppose you’re right, Elvira," Barb sighed. "Anything, I have little choice in the matter. I need to raise the money for her schooling, and it’s either the moped or the car. I just hope that Demi will forgive me for selling her pride and joy."

"You shouldn’t fret, Barb. Demi’s far more interested in clothes now than she is in motor scooters. Like most girls her age, she always looking for novelty; and the moped is yesterday’s news."

At first, there was no way of knowing whether Elvira was right, for the moped stayed in Demi’s garage until two weeks before Christmas, to hide it from Steve. Worrisomely, Demi behaved as though she still owned it, for she dusted it every second day, and polished its chrome once a week. Barb dreaded the day when Elvira Lancer would come calling for Kyle’s moped.

In the meantime, life for Demi finally settled down to a routine. Virtually everyone had gotten used to her, although the younger boys still copped the occasional feel to keep track of her breast development. Most of her time away from school she spent with Jo, though rarely at Jo’s house since Virginia still refused to forgive Demi for leading her granddaughter astray. Most of the lovemaking between the two teens accordingly took place between the Pocahontas sheets.

Jo did her utmost to make Demi thankful to have breasts, while trying to persuade her to ask for a vagina as well. However, Demi had learned her lesson, and she insisted on putting a time limit on all her requests, especially to the helmeted fish, which had migrated to her room to be close to their lovemaking.

Thus, no matter how sexually aroused Demi became, whenever she asked "for a body just like Jo’s," she’d add "but just for a week," or "just for two weeks." Jo didn’t like the time constraints, and so worked to ease them. By mid-December, she had skillfully used a vibrator — added to their sexual activity soon after Demi’s return from New York — to persuade Demi to ask the helmeted fish to give her a girl’s body "for at least two weeks."

As Demi became addicted to the vibrator, she became even more convinced that Jo was right about their both being lesbians. And yet, she craved Derek’s attention -- which she continued to enjoy. True, he was still terrified of being seen with her; but he was watching her so closely that he was the first to notice in early December, as he sheepishly admitted, that Demi was no longer padding her bra.

It was fortunate that Derek was such a stalker, for it was Derek who sounded the alarum the afternoon of December 10th when the Greeks, the gang from Central High, grabbed her from the front lawn of Hoover High.

While it’s unlikely that the Greeks set out that day to kidnap Demi, they were definitely up to no good. After all, their orange and yellow Kia was cruising so slowly as they passed the home turf of their arch rivals, the Sharks and the Jets, that that they just had to be looking for trouble. And they found it the moment the Greeks espied Demi heading home from school.

Paco Rabin, their leader, yelled out — "It’s her, the cock-tease from the Hell’s Vixens rave," and at his command, three of the Greeks tumbled out of the car like crash test dummies. Manuel got to Demi first. She flailed away at him, but he was too strong for her. Her only hope was Derek, who was shouting for help. Would it come in time? Terrified, she realized she was already within three feet of the Kia.

Soon, Demi’s head and shoulders were inside the car. She was kicking and screaming and holding onto the doorposts for dear life, but her capture seemed imminent, for Manuel was prying loose her arms while Paco yanked on her hair.

Demi feared for her life more than her chastity. She realized they were intent on rape, but how would they react to the revelation that she was actually a boy. Wouldn’t they be enraged by their own humiliation? After all, her forcible abduction would ‘prove’ the rumor, spread by their foes, that their name celebrated their sexual tastes more than it did their supposed origins in Toledo, Spain.

What would the Greeks do when they discovered Demi’s gonads? They were infamous for carving up people with their knives. As they finally forced her into the Kia’s backseat, Demi totally freaked: She’d figured out what they’d do after they’d decided that she’d played them for fools. They’d give her an operation!

To be continued in Chapter 22, where we will learn whether Demi was skewered by the Greeks.

In the first seventeen parts, Kyle found it more difficult than he expected to keep a deal he made with his mother: That if he wears girls’ clothes for a month that she would buy him a moped. He’s not quite sure how it happened, but somehow he has become Demi, a full-time cross-dresser with a lesbian lover. She has even unwittingly begun to take female hormones, and has convinced her mother to send her to all-girls’ school in the mistaken belief it is co-ed. Part 17 ended with the Greeks of Central High poised to kidnap Demi. This is the grand finale.

Anything for a Moped? - Part 18 by: Dawn De Winter
Chapter Twenty-Two: Who Won?

There was hope. Just as it was about to lurch off with Demi a prisoner in its backseat, the Kia stalled. As it struggled to turn over its engine, the car found itself surrounded by a crowd of Hoover students. Derek, Tim and Steve were pounding with their fists on its rear doors, while four Sharks and three Jets were threatening its windshield and hood with hockey sticks and baseball bats.

The armed assault on the Kia would already have commenced had not Sherm been in charge. He had seen Pablo pull out a knife, and so feared for Demi’s safety if the Sharks and Jets didn’t negotiate her release. He figured the Greeks would be willing to trade Demi in exchange for their lives; but only if he had assured them that they’d be able to make good their escape.

Sherm motioned to the Greeks to roll down a window for a parlay: "What the f..k do you think you’re doing! How dare you invade our turf! Give us the girl immediately, if you want to get out of here alive!"

Paco yelled, "What’s she to you? She’s ours, for we made her a member of the Greeks weeks ago. Today she’s going to be initiated by all of us. So back off. She’s our bitch now."

Sherm then hurt Demi’s feelings by saying, "Christ, you’re a sorry lot if you’ve got to start kidnapping girls as worthless as Demi in order to get laid. I don’t give a rat’s ass what’s she promised you. You’re not going to use a Hoover girl, even this one, to lose your virginity. We’re not going to let anybody come into our turf and start messing with our women. Hand her over if you want to leave here alive!"

Sherm smashed out a headlight for emphasis.

Surrounded, outnumber, outgunned, the Greeks capitulated. Not only did they release Demi, they agreed to hand over their money as well as the shirts off their back in order to compensate the Sharks and the Jets for their ‘time and effort’.

The two Hoover gangs laughed as the shirtless, penniless Greeks vowed revenge, but Demi didn’t think their threats a laughing matter. As they finally got the Kia’s engine to turn over, Paco shouted to her, "There’s no place to hide, bitch! We were going to treat you like a lady. But not now, bitch! You’ve cost us money, and you’ll pay it back to us! But don’t worry, bitch, we’ll teach you how to satisfy several guys at a time before we have you peddle your ass."

The Kia then carried them off.

"Never mind them," Sherm laughed, as he waved Paco’s shirt in victory. "They’re nothing but talk. Nothing’s going to happen to you, as long as you’re protected by the Sharks and the Jets."

Demi was worried. She didn’t see how Hoover’s gangs could guard her twenty-four hours a day. She found even more alarming Sherm’s next comment: "Demi, you should be aware that everything has a cost, especially protection. As we know you don’t have any spare cash, we Sharks will be expecting you to keep us sexually satisfied. But we’re not a bunch of fags like the Greeks, and so we should like you to become as much like a real girl as possible. We’ll make you a member of the Sharks in mid-January. By then, you’d better have lost your dick."

"That goes for the Jets too," Markko growled. True, the Jets until now had been intrigued by the idea of having a demi-girl as their bitch, but they’d lose face if they demanded less from Demi than the Sharks did.

Demi and her friends were glum when the gangs and the crowd had finally dispersed. Tim spoke first: "Thank God, you’re leaving town, Demi. Otherwise, the Jets and Sharks will be cutting off your dong in January." Steve advised Demi to seek police protection, but she refused. It had never been Kyle’s style to rat to the authorities, and Demi feared a vendetta from all three gangs if she squealed on any of them.

Yet she was terrified of a second kidnapping. What if the Greeks learned where she lived? Was she in danger of being kidnapped from her own front porch?

Demi decided to be too sick to attend school until it was time to change schools and towns. Had Barb known what really ailed her daughter, she would probably have sent her off to The Amazonian School immediately. Instead, she allowed herself to be conned into thinking that Demi had the flu.

To keep herself looking a sickly green, all Demi had to do was look at the prairie oysters that Steve had suggested she buy. To gag or vomit, all she had to do was think about eating them.

She wondered if the bull had been upset to lose his testicles. Maybe he hadn’t been. Maybe he’d been a "cow stuck in a bull’s body," but she winced every time she thought of the pain he must have felt when the knife fell.

Although Demi’s plan — to be ‘sick’ for three weeks — wasn’t a practical one, it did explain why she was alone at home on the afternoon of December 15th when the E-Z Moving and Storage Company came for her moped. Until then, Demi had no idea that the bike had been sold to Elvira Lancer. Even when Arthur and Leonard showed her the bill of sale, Demi refused to let them take her moped. "My moped’s locked away in the garage and that’s where it will stay."

"I don’t think so, sweetheart," Leonard responded. "Your mother told us where to find the keys for the garage door and for the bike’s padlock. We’re taking the bike, and there’s nothing you can do about it."

"Besides," said Arthur, "a pretty girl such as you doesn’t belong on a motorbike. If you want some excitement, I’m sure there are lots of guys who’d be happy to give you a ride … in the bedroom." His leer said he was one of them.

Demi slammed the front door on them, and then raced through the house to the connecting door to the garage. She hoped there was some way to lug the moped into the house. To her dismay, it was padlocked to the ductwork.

When the garage door opened, she briefly interposed her body. She hoped they’d leave rather than strike her. If they hit a kid, they could get into trouble with their employer or the law. They’d know that and back off is she physically blocked their way to the moped.

Yet Arthur didn’t see his only options as being combat or retreat: "Didn’t I tell you, Leonard? She may be young, but that bitch is definitely in heat. She wants to ride me right here in the garage! Honey, come to papa; I’ll make a woman out of you."

As Arthur wasn’t about to wait for Demi to come to him, she beat a hasty retreat into the house. From behind a locked door she heard Arthur laugh, "It works every time. Whenever one of them bitches tries to stop me from doing my job, I come on to them, and they get out of my way."

Then Leonard guffawed: "That bitch is so stupid she didn’t realize you’re gay! That was rich when you offered to give her a ride! If she had a brain one half as big as her hooters, she’d realize that you wouldn’t give her a ride if you was a bus driver!"

Furious, Demi charged back into the garage, just in time to see the truck door being closed on her moped. Leonard and Arthur had a huge smile on their face as they drove away. Demi had not only lost her moped, but also some pride as well.

Demi had to blame someone for the loss of the moped. Should it be Elvira who’d bought it? No, it should never have been for sale in the first place!

Demi was thankful that Auntie Elvie had been the buyer, for she’d undoubtedly give it to Steve — probably for Christmas — and he’d definitely let Demi ride it from time to time. Indeed, with the moped garaged at the Lancers, it would no longer be padlocked and inaccessible. Demi would be able to race it well before her fifteenth birthday! After all, neither Steve nor Auntie Elvie was going to squeal on her to Mr. Cudmore or her mother if Demi took the bike out for a spin.

So who was responsible for stabbing Demi in the back on the Ides of December? Her own mother, who else? Demi was not, therefore, in a good mood when Barb came home. Indeed, she greeted Barb with, "I hate you and I’m going to run away from home," and then locked herself in her room where she alternated between sobbing and shouting insults.

Eventually, Demi emerged, either because Barb’s words of love and empathy, uttered through the closed door, had calmed her down, or more likely, because the smell of a simmering beef stew reminded her she was hungry.

Over supper, Barb explained yet again to a sullen Demi that the moped had been sold to raise her school tuition. "There was no other way to raise the money. We’ve got such a big mortgage on this house that the banks weren’t willing to lend us money for your schooling. I thought your realized that the only way we could get cash quickly was to sell the moped? After all, you signed the bill of sale. I was proud of you. I told myself, ‘My baby is no longer a young girl. She’s becoming a woman.’"

"I didn’t know I was selling the moped," Demi cried. "I never would have agreed to sell it! There must have been another way to raise the money. Why didn’t we sell the house? A mobile home has got to be a lot cheaper. Couldn’t you have sold the car? You could have ridden the moped to work, ‘cause I don’t need it when I’m at school. Or why didn’t you enter law school and become a lawyer? If you did that, we wouldn’t have to sell the moped."

Demi was grasping at straws, as she knew herself. Maybe there had been no real alternative to selling the moped, but her mother still had no business selling it. Didn’t her mother realize how much Kyle had given up for the moped? (Some people would say it was everything.) How could she sell it? Wasn’t Demi’s mom reneging on a deal? Didn’t she appreciate that the kids of moped-selling mothers were likely to become runaways?

Demi had thought of running away. It would have served her mom right to come home to an empty house and a note that said, "The moped is gone and so am I." Yet Demi didn’t want to end up on the street, selling sex to ugly old men or giving it away to an abusive pimp.

So she was going to run away to a place that would feed her three times a day — The Amazonian School. Once she got there, her mom would definitely miss her. Her mom would wish she hadn’t driven Demi away by allowing the E-Z movers to drive off with her moped.

By mid-December, Demi was desperate to go away to school. Not only would it teach her mother a lesson, but also it would extricate her from the ever-tightening grip of the gangs. They were determined, she recognized, to bleed her dry — of all the money she and her friends could raise, and then of real thing, real blood, as they forced her to submit to the knife. Afterwards, the gangs would want even more money from her, and the Greeks had already given her some inkling of how she’d be expected to raise it. For her own sake, and that of her friends, Demi had to leave town.

And The Amazonian School was the only logical place to go. First, and most important, the love of her life would be there. Wherever Jo led, Demi wanted to follow. Second, it had a great program. It would definitely be a fun school to attend. And third, there was no alternative to it, at least in the short run. It was the only school that had admitted her for January. Demi could either be an Amazonian in January or she could be dead meat. That’s how she saw it.

It was crucial, therefore, that Kyle not be allowed to screw up her life — and his. He mustn’t hear anything that would turn him against The Amazonian School. To keep him content with the decision to attend it in January, Demi played hooky as often as her mother would allow.

Worried that her daughter was missing so many days of school that she risked being suspended or expelled, Barb telephoned Dr. Loupi for advice. He had a ready explanation for Demi’s school avoidance: "She wants to forget," he said, "that she was ever a boy. It must be quite an ordeal for her to attend a school that knew her as Kyle."

"Barb, don’t you worry. I’ll square it with the Principal," Dr. Loupi promised. "He’ll understand Demi’s situation and we’ll keep her in good standing." (In fact, the Principal told Dr. Loupi that Demi should be encouraged to stay away from school as much as possible, as he didn’t want a gang fight to break out on campus.)

Demi had to show up for some exams, on which she did passably. If she’d kept her ears open to the buzz in the corridors, she’d have heard that the entire school knew that The Amazonian School was an all-girls’ school. She’d also have learned that most of her schoolmates assumed that Demi would lose her testicles on her second day at the new school. She’d be too busy unpacking and familiarizing herself with her new surroundings, they figured, to have time for the operation on the day she arrived.

Since everyone was too embarrassed to discuss her coming surgery with Demi directly, she would have had to eavesdrop on one of the many conversations about her. Even so, it wouldn’t have taken much effort to learn that she’d be attending The Amazonian School as a pre-op transsexual, or not at all.

Yet she put no effort into finding out the truth of her situation. She remained blissfully ignorant, for she was determined to attend it. Too much knowledge would definitely be a bad thing.

It suited Jo for Demi to live in denial. Jo planned to tell the Demi the truth about The Amazonian School just as their car was passing through its gate. Then it would be too late for Demi to change her mind. She’d be stuck. She’d probably pout for a day, but she’d soon agree to hang around for another six months, especially as her nights would be spent in Jo’s bed. The two of them were going to be roommates!

It was a good plan. So why did Jo abandon it in the wee hours of the New Year? Why did she tell Demi the truth when there was still time for Kyle to escape the fate Jo had prepared for him? Why did she inform Demi less than a week before they were scheduled to leave for Ottumwa that Kyle was excess baggage who was going to be left behind?

It was a conversation Jo had overheard at Demi’s New Year’s Eve Party that impelled her to tell Demi that she had enrolled at an all-girls’ school that would soon expel her if she didn’t have sexual reassignment surgery.

Everyone was at Demi’s house to celebrate the beginning of her new life in Ottumwa, and more poignantly, to say goodbye to a friend they had grown to cherish in the three months since Kyle had made his deal for the moped.

All of the black shirts had accepted Barb’s invitation, save for Jason, who was at home working on his anger management by pretending to be Demi in the Internet chat rooms. That night, "Demi" had virtual sex with so many guys on-line that two or three of them were bound to look her up in Ottumwa.

Though Steve was in New York, he phoned at midnight, to the delight first of Demi, and then of Brad, who spent the next forty minutes whispering to Steve on the phone in Barb’s bedroom.

Brad spent the rest of the evening chatting with Vicky and Tim. They were starting to act like a couple, Brad decided, though he was positive they’d never even kissed.

"Still, it’s just a matter of time," Brad thought, "before she’s got him begging for sex. He knows I’m her ex-boyfriend. So I expect he’ll be asking me what she’s like in bed. I suppose I’ll tell him the truth — that he’ll never have a happier night than his first one with Vicky. She’s a frigging sex machine."

"Jo must be one as well," Brad decided, "for Demi will do anything for a night with Jo."

And this would be one of those nights, for all of the kids were staying overnight, so that their parents wouldn’t be tempted to drink and drive. Jo and Demi would be the only ones, however, with any privacy (which was okay with Brad since he’d get to see Derek, Tristin, Adrian and Rob without their black shirts).

Virginia wouldn’t have approved of Jo’s spending the night in Demi’s bed. Indeed, she didn’t want her granddaughter even to speak to "that messed-up kid." However, she had reluctantly agreed to Jo’s attending the party when Jo pointed out it was her last chance to say goodbye to her friends before she left town. "There’ll be lots of kids at the party," she advised Virginia. "And Demi will be so busy playing hostess that we won’t have much time to talk."

Jo didn’t, of course, tell her grandmother that she and Demi were more interested in action these days than in talk. Jo dealt with her grandmother on a "need-to-know" basis. For example, Virginia didn’t need to know that Jo and Demi would be attending the same school come January, for Virginia would be unnecessarily upset to learn that the money she was spending to separate Jo from Demi, was actually going to put them into the same bed every night for the next six months.

Jo had been honest with her grandmother when she’d said that Demi would be preoccupied with being the perfect hostess. Consequently, Jo was left alone for long stretches of the evening, at which time she watched the other guests.

Mentally, she gave Vicky and Tim another two months before their pairs act moved into the bedroom. Rob and Adrian were, she decided, hopelessly juvenile, for they spent much of the evening playing with a Gameboy. Tristin, she noticed, was smitten with Derek. Was Tristin gay? Probably not. He was simply a puppy dog eager for his master’s attention.

And how about Derek? With whom or what did he want to play? The answer was dismayingly obvious, for Jo saw that his eyes followed Demi’s every move. "Damn it," thought Jo, "He’s openly lusting after her." The more that Derek stared at Demi’s breasts, the more that Jo stared at him. As everyone was acting a little ‘drunk’ after their two ounces of champagne at 11 o’clock, Jo became worried that Derek might steal a kiss from Demi. To ensure that didn’t happen, Jo followed him whenever he left the room.

Thus, when Derek snuck off with Vicky, she followed close behind. Jo hoped they were heading off to neck, for then she’d have a story to tell that would turn Demi against Derek. However, it wasn’t Vicky that Derek had on his mind. It was Demi! He had drawn Vicky aside to talk about Demi.

"Vicky," Derek said, "you’re not to tell another living soul what I’m about to say. I’ve got a secret I’ve got to share. But only with you. Only with you, understood?"

She nodded. It was an easy promise to keep because Vicky was no dummy. She knew that Derek was going to confide in her that he was head over heels in love with Demi.

"I’m not gay. Vicky, you know that’s true, right? I’m a normal guy. I want to ball chicks. But damn it, Kyle’s always had an effect on me. Even before he started dressing like a girl, I’d have dreams about him…."

"So, what’s gay about your friends being in your dreams?" asked Vicky.

"They were wet dreams, Vicky. Christ, I can’t believe I’m telling you this. At night, I wanted to have sex with Kyle, but in the morning I’d realize it was impossible. We were both guys, for chrissake, and I don’t have sex with guys. No way, no how."

"I understand how you felt, Derek. But then Kyle began to change into Demi, and everything changed, right?"

"Yeh, Demi really turns my crank. One look at her hooters and I get an instant woody. God, she’s hot! And she’s going to get even sexier. Don’t tell anyone this, promise? But I want to be the first one inside her vagina, as soon as she has one. Do you understand? Not a day goes by without me thinking about the day that Demi and I make love as a man does a woman."

"And then what?" probed Vicky.

"And then we get married. I want Demi to become my wife and the mother of my kids — well, you know, the mother of the orphans we adopt from Sweden or Denmark or one of those other messed-up countries where the mothers are so frigging poor that they abandon their babies in the street."

Vicky thought Derek needed a shot of reality: "Derek, I understand why you’re attracted to Demi, but you’re not being very realistic if you expect her one day to marry you. After all, she tells everyone she’s a lesbian, and she’s going away to school with Jo, leaving you and me behind in Des Moines. I don’t see how you’re going to seduce a lesbian who’s perfectly content with her girlfriend and living two hundred miles away."

Jo liked Vicky’s speech. Vicky was a true friend.

"But she won’t be two hundred miles away," Derek countered. "She’ll be no more than a mile away, because I’ll be going to the O’Reilly Military Academy in the same town."

Neither Vicky nor Jo could believe their ears, but it was Vicky who asked, "What, how did that happen? How come you’re going to a military school?"

"For discipline, what else?" Derek replied. "My dad’s never approved of me being a black shirt, and he’s been worrying about me joining the Sharks, ‘cause they’re also black. He kept threatening me with military school — to make a man out of me, he said — but he didn’t do anything drastic until a police officer came by the house to tell him that I’d been seen hanging with ‘known gang members’ — you know, with the Jets and the Sharks. The very next day he signed me up for O’Reilly."

"That’s dreadful," Vicky replied. "Did you tell him you wouldn’t go — that you’d rather die than spend the best years of your life in Ottumwa?"

"Hell no. It really will be the best years of my life if I’m in Ottumwa with Demi. Sure, we’ll be attending different schools, but the Amazonians invite us Radarians to all their dances. They want their girls to learn how to behave around guys. Even the lesbians are expected to date us so that they can figure out, as near as I can tell, how to wrap guys around their pinky finger. So I expect to have lots of opportunity to see Demi. We’ll start by dancing together, real formal-like, at the school mixers, but it won’t be long before we’ll be grinding our hips and making love on the dance floor."

"And what do you expect Jo to do while you’re seducing her girlfriend?" Vicky asked.

"Accept defeat gracefully. Christ, Jo is going to be surrounded by beautiful girls. She’ll easily find a replacement for Demi, once she accepts the inevitable — that Demi’s destiny is to marry Derek. It has to be true, for both of our names start with the letter "D".

While Jo was pleased that Vicky, carefully neutral, didn’t wish Derek ‘good luck’ in his efforts to poach Demi, she was understandably alarmed to learn that she’d have a rival in Ottumwa. And he would be a very dangerous rival if Steve had told him that Demi was a slut who’d sell her body for basketball tickets. Demi, she could see, was attracted to Derek. Possibly she believed he could get tickets for Iowa State games.

In her struggle with Derek for Demi’s heart and mind and body, Jo recognized that there would be a dangerous window of vulnerability during the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours after Demi learned that Jo had not been entirely honest about Kyle’s prospects at The Amazonian School.

If Derek were hovering, looking for an opening, he might realize that Demi needed comforting. He’d provide her with a shoulder to cry on, but the rest of his body would soon follow. Demi might agree to sex just to spite Jo. She might even pretend she was ‘straight’, just to get back at Jo.

Jo decided she’d have to modify her plan, for she couldn’t afford to have Demi go ballistic in Ottumwa — not with Derek ready to launch everything he had. Demi would have to be told the truth about The Amazonian School while she still had time to change her mind. If she decided to attend the school anyway, then she wouldn’t be able to blame Jo for her predicament. The threat from Derek would be defused.

Jo figured the best time to break the news to Demi about The Amazonian School was right after they’d had sex, when Demi would be most thankful for being a girl. After the party, as soon as they hit the Pocahontas sheets, Jo devoted herself to Demi’s pleasure. An hour later, as Demi lay satiated and exhausted, Jo finally told her that there was no need to pack any of Kyle’s clothes, for Demi alone would be attending The Amazonian School.

Demi was confused. She wasn’t used to hearing the truth; and she found it difficult to concentrate on much of anything with Jo’s fingers still playing with her nipples. So she simply moaned, "Kyle … Kyle’s … the one who’s going away … to school."

"Demi, don’t you ever listen? Your mother and I both told you weeks ago that The Amazonian School doesn’t admit boys. It’s for girls only. They admitted you, not Kyle."

Jo then suckled Demi’s breasts to give her something else to think about. Demi might have gotten cross at this point if Jo weren’t doing such wonderful things to her body. She langorously replied, "But … I don’t … understand. If the school … is really … for girls only, how come … how come … they want me?"

She moaned as Jo nibbled her nipples.

"Because you are a girl, silly! Would you feel this good if you were a boy? Hardly! Demi, you’ve got breasts! More than that, you’ve got a sexy hourglass figure. Since you gave up on Kyle, you’ve taken two inches off your waist and added them to your hips. Demi, you’re quite a sexpot, a lesbian’s dream date."

Demi was gasping with pleasure as she asked, "But … I’m … a boy … from … the waist … down. How … did I … get into … an ... all-girls’ … school?"

In the midst of her orgasm, Demi learned that she had been admitted to The Amazonian School because its administration believed she was a transsexual intent on completing her sex change within the next year.

"Sex change?" sighed Demi. "I’ll never … have that. I’m happy … the way … I am." She became even happier as Jo started building to another next orgasm.

"But Demi, you must never tell the school that you don’t want a sex change. Only a handful of boys are ever allowed to attend The Amazonian School, and all of them are transsexuals who’ve asked the school to help them to make their transition — to have all their operations — with a year, maybe less."

"But I didn’t … tell them … I was a … transsexual," Demi protested — but not too loudly, for Jo was making her body tingle. "And I … definitely, ah, didn’t tell them, ah, that I … wanted … someone … to cut off … my dick."

"Don’t worry, Demi, no one’s going to do that to you — not unless you ask them to." The vibrator started up. "Demi, you’ve been telling people for weeks that you’re a transsexual, just keep saying it. That’s all you have to do to get treated like this every night for the next six months. Just tell people you want to have a sex change eventually, and I’ll make you super happy every night to be a girl. What do you say?"

Not much, for Demi’s mind had turned to mush. She could sigh. She could moan. She could even utter one or two words of endearment. But think? Really think? No, that would have to wait until Jo had gone home after the communal breakfast, and Demi was able, at long last, to reflect on the real choices in her life.

As she did, she couldn’t come up with a scenario in which Kyle replaced her any time in the immediate future. First of all, there was no way he could attend Hoover High as a boy with breasts. He’d be ragged unmercifully by most of the students and teachers, and the Jets and Sharks would be tempted to kill him for disobeying their orders to go to school in girls’ clothes. As for the Greeks, they were bound to find out that they’d made fools of themselves with a cross-dressing boy, and react violently.

There was no way that Kyle could resurface at Hoover High. Indeed, he’d have to hide out until his mother could find an out-of-town school willing to take a boy with a severe case of ‘gynecomastia’.

For Demi, the situation in Des Moines was just as bleak, for sooner or later the gangs would catch up to her. She’d become a gang bitch, giving away or selling sexual favors — it scarcely mattered which — while living in mortal dread that they’d make good their threat to cut off her balls. It was clear that Demi would have to leave town.

That meant The Amazonian School, which meant in turn that she’d have to pretend that she wanted a sex change. On her past record, she was confident of her ability to gull the school’s administration into thinking she was cooperating. She realized the stakes were higher now, and that she might have to show her good faith by agreeing to one or two procedures to make her look more feminine. Though she’d refuse any changes that were permanent, she’d agree to any surgery that she knew to be reversible.

For example, she’d probably agree to have her testicles and most of her penile shaft temporarily tucked away in the body cavity that Jo had told her about. Jo had even demonstrated how easy it would be to hide Demi’s ‘boyish’ parts in her own body. Demi realized she’d be a lot less self-conscious about her body while attending a girl’s school if she had this procedure done. It would enable her to dispense with her gaffs, while still looking super in a bikini swimsuit or thong.

If they did the procedure right, she might even look like a girl when she had nothing on at all. A temporary tuck held no terrors for her. She’d agree to that sort of thing to make sure that nothing more drastic happened during the six months or so that she planned to attend The Amazonian School.

And if everything went smoothly, Kyle would resurface, good as new, in June or July after six months of making love every night to Jo and showering every day in the buff with dozens of beautiful girls. He would have wrestled or tackled nearly all of them in one sport or another. Unquestionably, Kyle would come away from his brief stint as an Amazonian with enough memories and fantasies to keep his right hand busy for a lifetime.

Once Demi had made up her mind to attend The Amazonian School as a pre-op transsexual, her packing became much easier. It had been difficult to pack for Kyle because she couldn’t decide which of her own pants, tops and panties were sufficiently unisex for a boy to take to boarding school. Packing for herself was easy — she wanted to bring everything, well, everything except for the boy’s clothes.

These were, in any case, beginning to disappear as Barb decided that many of Kyle’s clothes would never again fit him, no matter how his adventure as Demi turned out. To spare Demi the trauma of seeing Kyle’s wardrobe disappear, Barb had Jo help her with the sorting. Consequently, it was Jo who decided that all of Kyle’s boxer shorts should go into the boxes earmarked for the Goodwill, a local charity.

Not that all of the boxes actually got to the Goodwill, for Jo kept the best of Kyle’s jeans, tops and boxer shorts for herself. While she never again would try to hide her breasts, Jo preferred to dress as much like a boy as possible, and now with Kyle’s unwitting help, she’d have lots of boy’s clothes to work with. As she didn’t want to shortchange a charity, Jo replaced every item of Kyle’s clothing that she took for herself with something particularly feminine of her own.

On the day of the big move, there were two cars heading for Ottumwa. Jo would rather have gone with Demi, but she realized she had to maintain the fiction of heading off to boarding school alone, all alone, and so she went with her grandmother, who was — to Jo’s astonishment — incredibly weepy throughout the drive.

Jo had coordinated her departure time with Demi, so that Jo would arrive first, and her grandmother could be sent on her way back to Des Moines with no idea that Demi was also becoming an Amazonian that day. Jo wanted no scenes from her grandmother, and she figured Virginia would freak if she saw the kiss that Jo intended to plant on Demi at the moment of her arrival. Jo intended to kiss Demi so shamelessly that all the Amazonians would know that they were both lesbians, and that Demi was definitely taken.

Barb was almost as tearful as Virginia as she drove Demi to school slowly along a congested State highway (chosen instead of the Interstate so that Barb could defer the inevitable — the moment when she had to leave her only child at a boarding school). She’d look over frequently at her daughter, marveling at how pretty she’d become (especially her long blond hair), and how impractical she remained.

She was wearing her Christmas present from Barb — a red, sleeveless cotton top, a woolen, red-and-yellow plaid mini-skirt, and red knee socks (and underneath, a red cotton bikini and bra). "She’s going to freeze to death," Barb thought. "I didn’t think she’d wear that outfit until March."

Jo had been the one to talk Demi into wearing her new outfit to school, along with an engraved watch from Jo. Demi had resisted: She’d have preferred to show up in Kyle’s clothes. Yet she eventually saw reason when Jo pointed out that the last thing Demi needed on her first day of school was speculation about her gender. "You’ve need to dress femininely," Jo insisted, "so that none of the girls will suspect you were once a boy."

Even though Demi hadn’t liked the insertion of "once" in front of "a boy", she reluctantly agreed to show up at school in her new outfit. This decision turned out to be a mistake, for everyone else — both students and staff — was wearing pants. Her skirt, therefore, drew a lot of attention — of the wrong sort. Indeed, it took several daredevil stunts to rid herself of her nickname, "Little Missy."

Barb never knew that the red outfit was a mistake; otherwise she might have been even more teary-eyed that day. Any more tears and Barb would have been driving blind. She had difficulty seeing the road through the film, and she was so misty-eyed that she didn’t realize that Virginia Smith had almost driven into the ditch after she caught a glimpse of Demi being driven in the direction of her granddaughter’s new school.

Demi, in contrast, knew that it was Jo’s grandmother whose car had kicked up the cloud of dust; it saddened her to see that Gran was becoming too old to drive in safety.

Before Demi could comment on Mrs. Smith’s driving, her mother earnestly made "the speech" she had been planning to deliver at some point in their trip: "Demi, I want you to know that I love having a daughter. But I also loved having a son. Kyle was just as special to me as you are. If you decide that you want to be Kyle again, don’t hesitate to tell me. We’ll find a way to get him back. I’ll pay for whatever surgery or treatment is necessary to make your body as masculine as possible."

"But mom, you must know that The Amazonian School has very different plans for me. They want me to have a girl’s body — all over."

"Don’t worry, Demi. You’ll get a women’s body if you want one. Mrs. Lancer’s money has been set aside for whatever surgery you need. You and I have signed all the consent forms, as have three doctors. Your new school will provide two more signatures —- from a psychiatrist and from the surgeon who’ll do the work — and after that it won’t take much time at all to complete your physical transformation. It could happen as early as next summer, if that’s what you want."

"That’s too soon. I don’t want things to happen that fast."

"I understand, sweetie. There’s no need to rush. I certainly don’t want you to do anything … irreversible, without giving it lots of thought. You’re going to be meeting the psychiatrist every week, and she’ll help you decide whether you want to take the next big step. My own advice is to put off your decision as long as you can."

"Don’t worry, mom. That’s the idea."

"That’s good, sweetie. Take your time. You’ve been in such a hurry since September to become a girl that you’ve scarcely had time to catch your breath. I think it’s a good idea for you to pause for a while before taking your next big step toward womanhood."

A pause? That was fine with Demi. She was content with the way she was. And yet she knew that it wouldn’t be easy resisting the immense pressure she’d be under to complete her sexual transformation.

It would come, she realized, from both Jo and Auntie Elvie. Both of them could hardly wait for her to become a complete girl. She didn’t yet realize it would also come from Derek, for he hadn’t even told her that he too would be going to school in Ottumwa.

The school would also be constantly pressing Demi to complete her sex change. If she resisted, it would start to threaten her with expulsion. It would tell her that it had no place for cross-dressing boys. If she weren’t willing to make her transition as rapidly as the school’s medical staff recommended, she’d be asked to leave.

Demi knew that she would be able to withstand the pressure to feminize, whatever its source or intensity. She’d agree to a nip here, a tuck there, in order to delude everyone into thinking they were getting their way with her; but Demi would always be in control of her own fate. About that she had no doubt, whatever others might think.

These thoughts preoccupied Demi as her car neared her new school. Suddenly, unannounced, its playing fields surrounded both sides of the road. Everywhere Demi looked there were girls playing sports — on skates as they played hockey; on skis as they soared from a ski jump, as they ran around an oval track, and chased the ball on a frozen soccer pitch.

Demi marveled at the beauty of the Amazonians, as well as their toughness, especially of the girls playing soccer, who were wearing shorts and tee shirts on a blustery January day. As Demi watched their bodies in motion, she decided that the Amazonians were several times more athletic and attractive than the girls of Hoover High. They were a joy for any lesbian, or boy, to behold. Though it was a winter day in Iowa, the Amazonians made Demi hot.

As did their sports facilities. The baseball diamond; the soccer and rugby pitches; the basketball, volleyball and tennis courts, the — she could scarcely believe her eyes — the skateboard ramps and BMX dirt track — they all said, siren-like, "Welcome Demi. This is your real home. You’ll do whatever it takes to stay here as long as possible among Iowa’s sexiest girls."

When she saw girls scrambling up a rock face, while hang-gliders landed among them, as she looked up to see girls her age handling hot-air balloons, Demi wondered whether she was entering paradise.

Yes, she must be, for there was her angel! Jo was beckoning her. And so, to Demi’s astonishment, was Derek. He was standing thirty feet away from Jo with one of the most endearing smiles Demi had ever seen. Mentally, she blew him a kiss.

The most incredible sight of all was her moped. There it was in front of the school’s administration building. It had a big pink ribbon, and beside it stood Steve and his mother. They were holding up a sign, "FOR DEMI — from Steve and Elvie!"

Demi suddenly realized that her Auntie Elvie had bought the moped in order to help her mother pay for Demi’s schooling. That’s why Steve had never ridden it! And now, Elvira and Steve were showing how much they loved Demi by making a present of it.

Did any other girl have such generous friends? Demi was afraid that the answer would make her start to bawl. Even Barb had a lump in her throat, for she hadn’t known till now that Elvira intended to return the moped to Demi as a gift.

Elvira’s hand painted sign made it clear to Barb that the moped, once Kyle’s, was now Demi’s. It wasn’t on loan to her from Kyle; it was truly hers. Kyle’s hard-earned moped he had witlessly sold. This moped was a gift to Demi from her ‘aunt’. Demi had wheels because she was a pleasing girl, and not because Kyle had won a foolish bet.

Though Demi never quite understood the symbolism of the moped’s return, even after her mother had explained it twice, she did recognize that she owed a lot to Auntie Elvie.

Demi wept that day as she thought of the friends she had made since September, and of the friends she’d be making this winter, and of the total, absolute, awesome thrill she’d have the first time that she rode her own moped into the wind, with Jo clinging to her on the tiny seat as they leant into a curve, their bodies merging with the moped’s frame into a cosmic threesome.

Demi knew that she was going to have a super time at The Amazonian School. How long a time would that be? Would it be long enough for her to complete her transition to womanhood? Demi wouldn’t know the answer until she understood herself a whole lot better.

The first step on Demi’s belated journey to self-awareness came three months later, after a particularly bracing ride on her moped. She had driven for miles, and was now standing by the side of a deserted road, her moped leaning against an oak tree while it recuperated for the homeward journey. Demi could see for miles across the snow-covered cornfields. In the distance she saw a falcon soar. She knew it had to be a female.

Alone with her thoughts, on a day so silent that Demi could hear her inner voice, Demi suddenly understood, "I once thought Kyle would do anything for a moped, but I now know that Kyle would do anything for a woman."

The million-dollar question was this — For how long had Demi been one of those women that Kyle instinctively obeyed? For a few weeks or for his entire life? Neither Kyle nor Demi knew the answer.

Do you?

An epilog: What did Madam Zeta Tell Dawn?

Dawn DeWinter felt she had to know the answer. Or else she’d have to stop telling the story of Demi’s life. Dawn, hoping to quiz Demi about her plans, had trekked out to Ottumwa to greet her arrival at The Amazonian School. She’d actually been standing beside Elvira and Steve when Demi arrived with Barb. Dawn, ever helpful, had even offered to guard the moped while the two Lancers embraced Demi.

However, Steve had been so suspicious of Dawn’s looks that he’d entrusted the bike to Edwina Wood instead. Edwina was there with her video camera and with Melanie, her new assistant, to shoot some footage of Demi’s arrival at school for her documentary on ‘Special Teens’. It amazed Dawn that Steve thought Edwina less likely than she to steal the moped, since Edwina was an obvious ‘drag queen’ who looked like she hadn’t been able to afford new clothes in decades.

"Who, after all," thought Dawn huffily, "still wears Angora sweaters?" Edwina was, in Dawn’s opinion, hopelessly frumpy.

Dawn, by contrast, wore the latest teen fashions. At that very moment she was wearing a polka dot Ellie May mini-dress, just like Demi’s. As it was a January day, Dawn wished she’d worn tights. "It would be nice," she thought, "if I could learn from other people’s mistakes. I should have bought some new panties to go with this dress! Heaven knows everyone’s getting a good look at them!"

Maybe Steve was leery of Dawn because of her frayed, yellowed panties. Or maybe he was an ageist who scorned her for trying to dress like a teen when she was, as the French so delicately put it, "a woman of a certain age."

Or maybe it was her male pattern baldness. She planned to do something about covering up her bald spot (which made her look like a Franciscan monk) as soon as she’d sold her first story. She also hoped to start electrolysis to get rid of her telltale beard (which not even pancake makeup could hide).

As Dawn realized that no one was going to buy Demi’s story from her until she’d figured out how it would end, she’d asked Steve to inform Demi that, "Dawn, your biographer is here, and would like an audience." Dawn wasn’t sure what Steve actually said to Demi after her arrival, for the girl gave her one hurried look — "my word," Dawn thought, "that girl always looks like a scared rabbit" — before jumping on her moped and speeding off on it to her dormitory.

School life then took over, for Demi sent word that she was much too busy settling in to be interviewed by anyone. Well, that’s what Demi claimed, though Dawn was miffed to see that both Demi and Jo had time for an interview with Edwina Wood and Melanie.

"It’s the lure of being on TV," Dawn guessed. "Demi wants her fifteen minutes of fame. The silly girl, doesn’t she know that my biography of her will make her immortal?"

But that would only be true if Dawn could figure out how Demi’s story ended. After several days of waiting at the school gate for a glimpse of Demi, Dawn finally agreed with the school’s security chief that it was time to move on. And so, she hopped on a bus and a week later returned to her apartment in Newark, New Jersey (a one-room charmer with an excellent view of the road to the airport).

Dawn was going to type up a storm on her Smith-Corona just as soon as she knew about Demi’s fate. Suddenly, it occurred to her that there was somebody who could tell her about the future not just of Demi, but of all the people whose lives had crossed Demi’s: Madam Zeta, whose else?

Once Dawn decided to do something, she wasn’t going to let a little thing like bad weather deter her. Sure, there was a blizzard raging outside, and drifting into the lobby of her building. But she was determined to get into central Manhattan, come what may.

Two feet of snow may deter non-writers, but Dawn recognized that it might give her a captive audience if she could get through to the Brazilian Tea Room. Once there, after she’d dug out the front door of the restaurant, Dawn found to her delight that it was completely empty, save for Madam Zeta whom she found sound asleep on a pool table. Madam Zeta would have, Dawn reckoned, oodles of time to tell her about the future of Demi and her friends.

After some negotiations about money, and after Dawn agreed to stop drinking out of her own hip flask, Madam Zeta dusted off her crystal ball. She was still a bit drowsy, and so the ball (actually Madam Zeta as its medium) rather foolishly started describing everything it saw in the future — the Dow Jones stock market average in a year’s time, the century the Red Sox would next win the World Series, the next winning number in the Power Ball lottery, as well as the answer to the question "what would Bedford Falls be like if Dawn had never been born."

Dawn was uninterested in the answers to these trifling questions. She was focusing on the really important question: What’s to become of Demi? Eventually, Madam Zeta awoke to Dawn’s needs, and she coaxed the crystal ball into revealing the future for Demi and her friends.

The first scene showed that Virginia’s, Jo’s grandmother, would become a consumer activist. She’d fill her hours after Jo went away to boarding school by fighting against credit card abuse on the Internet. She’d eventually become so prominent in this cause that Virginia was appointed to a Presidential commission to find ways to prevent Internet fraud. Whenever reporters would ask Virginia to identify the taproot of her activism, she’d allude to "girls getting into trouble." The reporters then would nod knowingly: There was nothing like a teen’s unplanned pregnancy to upset a grandmother.

Next, the crystal ball revealed that Sherm Dinkins was destined to remain a shark his entire life, for he would work hard enough in college to get a law degree and to establish himself as a Hollywood divorce lawyer. He would be by far the luckiest of his gang, for the rest of the Sharks would end up doing time, either in a penitentiary, or in a call-center.

Markko, the most dynamic of the Jets, would go, said the ball, into English teaching. He’d eventually replace Vice Principal Cudmore, who’d be fired for taking a bribe from Hoover’s first Asian or ‘thong’ gang, the Yeshivas.

As Markko had a soft spot in his heart for Coach Bryant, the coach would be finally able to end his extended leave of absence and resume his efforts to separate the boys from the girls. He would be, however, no longer openly homophobic. Indeed, thanks to several years of sensitivity training, he’d be bending over backwards to accommodate the gay males on his teams and in his classes.

According to the crystal ball, the coach’s two brothers, Ernie and Arnie, would be less fortunate. Trouble would follow them, even to a desert ranch in New Mexico, where they would move to be as far away from shopping malls, sports complexes, and teenagers as possible. They’d hoped to keep their noses clean by taking up sheep ranching together, but would eventually go on trial for bestiality.

Ernie and Arnie seemed to live under a curse, as did Dr. Loupi, who would never be able, despite his best efforts, to escape Des Moines. His paper to the prestigious Mental Health Conference of South Central Iowa on ‘Kelly X’ effectively would destroy his career.

His audience would scoff at the results of the gender test, as they’d point out that Loupi had omitted the sole correct answer from the ‘best-desert-for-a-tan’ question. And they’d be amazed that he’d scored as correct — that is, as the transsexual answer — Kelly’s selection of "to please a strict, lesbian aunt" as the best reason for a boy to wear a dress. Indeed, there’d be general agreement that only half of Kelly’s answers had revealed a transsexual.

Loupi’s reputation and career would be shot, his days as a school counselor effectively over. The following summer would see him start a second career in selling ladies’ shoes for a certain Mr. Bundy, who had bought a chain of women’s shoe stores after winning the Power Ball lottery.

Loupi would love his new job, as it would bring him into intimate contact with so many ‘lesbians’. True, women would tell him they were looking for spiked heels in order to awe their husband or boyfriend, but Loupi would know better. He’d long ago concluded that Des Moines was a hotbed of lesbianism. And that knowledge would make him a very contented shoe salesman, even if it meant that he would never find a suitable woman to date.

While there were many in Des Moines who had long believed Elvira to be one of Loupi’s beloved sisterhood, New Yorkers would know better. The crystal ball revealed that she and Steve were going to move to New York the summer after Demi went away to school, so that Steve could be closer to his father, and Elvira to Dr. Johansson.

Sven and she had fallen in love during a night of wild passionate sex after Demi’s fateful visit to the ballet, and she would soon decide to move in with him. Demi would have, as a result, two places to stay whenever she visited New York, which would be fairly often.

In fact, there would be three places to choose from once Steve had graduated from high school and had moved in with Brad, who like Steve, would win a basketball scholarship at St. John’s University. They would live on the top floor of a six-story walk-up in Greenwich Village, but Steve would believe, the ball promised, that he was in gay heaven.

Indeed, he would chase so many ‘angels’ down Christopher Street that he and Brad would stay together only because Brad would be too shy to ask him to leave. The crystal ball cut out just as it was about to tell Dawn whether Steve would ever calm down long enough to realize that there wasn’t anyone in New York as desirable as the boy he’d lure from Iowa.

Brad would develop, all his friends would agree, into a real sweetheart. For example, he’d help Tim and Vicky out financially as best he could while they established themselves as an ice-dancing team. Success wouldn’t come easily to them because blind prejudice would keep them out of both the Olympics and the Gay Games. They’d have to turn pro, as a result, without ever really having established their credentials as amateurs.

However, they’d skate with such brilliance, such panache, that they’d eventually become headliners in the Ice Follies. Though it would take her seven years, Vicky would finally take Tim’s virginity, and having taken it, she would never give it back. They’d get married — the crystal ball was sure of that. But it lost count of the number of children they’d adopt.

That was Derek’s ambition as well — to adopt two or three children from war-torn Scandinavia. Did he ever get to do it? "Definitely," said the crystal ball. And he would have lots of room for them after he made a fortune in his early twenties by speculating on Energy futures. He’d even guess correctly that Californians would agree to sell San Francisco to three Persian Gulf sheikhs in order to pay their air-conditioning bill.

Naturally, Dawn wanted to know something about Derek’s wife. If it were Demi, then she’d know enough about Demi’s future to write the next chapter of the biography. But no, it wasn’t going to be Demi. His wife would be the spitting image of Demi, mind you, but she’d be Jason’s only sister. And she wouldn’t be a virgin when she married Derek — thanks to Jason’s early attentiveness.

And what would become of Jason, Demi’s erstwhile friend and nemesis? According to the crystal ball, he was going to keep track of Demi wherever she moved, and so he would probably have the best idea of her ultimate fate. Certainly, he’d always know where to send a dozen boxes of extra-large pizza, each with a triple order of anchovies.

"And where will I find Jason after he leaves Hoover High?" Dawn asked the crystal ball (well, Madam Zeta).

It replied: "He’ll be working as a waiter in a gay restaurant. He’ll be the one with the biggest income from tips, the tightest pants, and the most attitude. He’ll tell you he’s not gay, and maybe he isn’t. Even a crystal ball can’t figure out Jason."

Despite its garrulousness, the crystal ball had still not told Dawn much about Demi. True, the girl was not going to be the mother of Derek’s children, and she was apparently going to stay friendly with the Lancers, but the crystal ball for some reason refused to show Demi’s body or face. Perversely, it even called her Kyle at times.

Dawn decided that the spirits were toying with her. So she demanded that the crystal ball tell her about the two people closest to Demi — about Barb and Jo. Once she knew their fates, Demi’s biography would almost write itself. Dawn would be able to write an epic!

Barb, it turned out, would have a great future. Upset at first when Demi told her to go to law school so that the moped wouldn’t have to be sold, she would in fact take the advice. She would study law at night after work in the many hours left empty by Demi’s departure for Ottumwa.

Barb would become an environmental lawyer and a partner in Taft’s firm. With his help, she’d be elected to the State Assembly exactly six years to the day after Demi had left home. This was great news, Dawn decided, though it didn’t tell her much about Demi.

So what about Jo? Dawn knew that the crystal ball couldn’t talk about Jo without divulging Demi’s future. "Jo," the ball said, "definitely will be a lesbian."

"Well, I could have told you that!" answered Dawn intemperately. "Tell me something I don’t already know, you cheap hunk of plastic!"

The crystal ball went dark.

"You shouldn’t have yelled at it," Madam Zeta said. "The spirits have feelings too, you know. I’m afraid they’ll never speak to you again."

And Madam Zeta was right. Poor Dawn never did learn how Demi’s story ended. She wasn’t able, therefore, to finish her epic biography of Demi. She couldn’t even fake another chapter.

So Dawn went back to her true calling — unemployment — while she waited for Demi’s life to unfold. Dawn had no idea of how it would all turn out. Yet she figured that Demi’s life would be an interesting one to watch from afar, especially as Dawn no longer could afford cable.

Acknowledgements: This story could never have been written without the kind words, encouragement and advice of the many people who wrote me. Everyone who wrote me or posted a comment influenced the story, as it was definitely a work in progress. So I did notice when I was told there was too much ‘reminiscing’. The pace improved after that. Particularly influential and helpful were Crystal, John, Sapphire, Amber Palmer, Britney, Kelly Ann Rogers, Sissy Demi, and Josie.

Kelly Ann helped me to understand my characters better, and has been gently improving my style. There would have been no Moped without Sissy Demi, for my first posting of Part 1 at Crystal’s Storysite had only nine readers after three days. She found me an audience. As I was determined to thank her by using her name for Kyle’s alter ego, I’m thankful Demi’s name was one I could play with. What if it had been Henrietta? Josie’s name appeared only once in this story, but her playful, optimistic spirit suffused it.

Choices, Chapter 1

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. It’s a familiar theme in the TG literature, but this time with an unfamiliar twist.

Choices, Chapter 1, Part 1 -- Laird’s Choice

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 01 Laird’s choice
Chapter 02 A hairstylist’s choice
Chapter 03 Amber’s choice
Chapter 04 A preacher’s choice
Chapter 05 A teacher’s choice
Chapter 06 A psychologist’s choice
Chapter 07 A coach’s choice
Chapter 08 A lesbian’s choice
Chapter 09 A ballet school's choice
Chapter 10 Choice at McDonald's
Chapter 11 A choice of tea parties
Chapter 12 A Na’vi choice
Chapter 13 Kirk’s choice
Chapter 14 A Shakespearean choice
Chapter 15 Mandy’s choice
Chapter 16 Maggie’s choice
Chapter 17 Blair’s choice
Chapter 18 A wedding choice

The letter came from the most prestigious doctor in the Pacific Northwest. Yet she let it drop to the floor. Tears furrowed her makeup. Maggie looked old and crumpled, her life’s struggle ended at age thirty-nine.

Sagging into an armchair, her head lowered in defeat, her hands pressed against throbbing temples, Maggie couldn’t get the word out of her brain. It seized her mind like the devil’s mantra: infertile, infertile, infertile, infertile … INFERTILE! So there it was: she would never have a daughter. She couldn’t conceive and the government had already callously informed her that she was too old to adopt an American baby.

As for foreign orphans, Maggie had decided long ago that these should stay in their own village and culture; for the past eighteen years she had been a foster parent to a succession of Ethiopian girls. There had been Adina, Gabra Aisha, Yenee and Tenagne — the children of dirt farmers or herders. Try, try as she might, she had never connected with them emotionally; their stunted lives were simply too alien and their choices too constricted to require the insights or empathy of a “coupon clipper” living in the suburban Pacific Northwest. (She had divorced a Microsoft insider.)

Besides, and maybe this made her less than a perfect human being in the eyes of the intolerant folk who preached tolerance and diversity, she had always wanted a daughter that looked like herself — a flaxen-haired Scots-Irish American minx with emerald eyes and a flush in her ivory cheeks.

Life’s greatest irony, Maggie bitterly thought, was the recent arrival in her life of a near-perfect child, one who looked amazingly like the daughter in her dreams — a slight, faun-like creature with naturally fleshy, blood-rich lips; pale, wispy eyebrows; luxuriant eyelashes fluttering like butterflies around sparkling eyes of emerald green above a button nose. The child moved with an ethereal, feminine grace (even though it lacked even the most basic of athletic skills). It had the voice of an angel, a treble soloist in the school chorus.

Blair, age ten, would have been the ideal daughter for any mother if he weren’t a boy.

Maggie often wondered: Did Laird, her passionate, attentive lover these past seven months and Blair’s natural father, recognize the girl in a son who loved to gossip and to cook, whose taste in popular music ran the gamut in teen idols from David Archuleta to the Jonas Brothers, and who dressed with precious impeccability, his palate of colors composed of dramatic reds, yellows, greens, pinks and purples. Blair especially treasured a pink “1842” tee shirt from Abercrombie and Fitch that he’d seen Justin Bieber, his absolute fave, sporting in a candid photo. Any mention of the fifteen-year-old Bieber gave Blair the vapors.

How could the father not see the girl in the son who sat, feline-like, almost purring, for an hour while Maggie brushed, combed and teased his long, golden locks? How many ten-year-old boys fretted over “split ends”?

Once, emboldened by strong spirits and ardent lovemaking, Maggie, as she lay naked with Laird in the dark, finally dared to ask not only about Blair, but also about Blair’s brother Kirk. Aged thirteen, red-haired, freckled, wide-eared, big-boned, pug-nosed Kirk so differed from his younger brother, both emotionally and physically, that it was difficult to believe that they had the same parents. Kirk, family friends declared to be “all boy”; Blair, they’d rather not discuss. Kirk lived for sports and harsh, raucous music, his bedroom wall festooned with posters of female rockers and jocks.

Where Blair came across as sweet-natured, docile and malleable, Kirk struck almost everyone as aggressive, angry, and obdurate. Driven by inner demons or raging hormones, he wouldn’t take the time to comb his hair or to allow Maggie to untangle it. So Kirk had opted for a buzz cut on his twelfth birthday when he announced that he’d probably shave his head when he got to high school. “Just like Britney Spears and Ani DiFranco.”

It was Kirk, therefore, that Maggie asked about first as the two lovers spooned: “Laird honey, Kirk worries me. I don’t know why, but he’s a very angry kid. Today he got sent home from school for hitting a girl — Stephanie Hawkins — you know, she’s the daughter of Bill and Helen, who live on Oak Street. A black eye, he gave her a black eye. He actually punched her, can you believe it?”

Laird’s neck muscles visibly tightened. He replied slowly, each word carefully chosen: “From what I understand, Maggie, the girl deserved a good hiding. Kirk said she had been spreading lies about him, and that she couldn’t be trusted to keep a secret — despite a blood oath.”

“Gruesome, no?” Maggie responded:

While there weren’t any details, Principal Archer said that he didn’t blame Kirk for hitting the girl, given her foul mouth and depraved imagination. But still, the school has a zero tolerance policy for violence, which is why he had to suspend Kirk for a day and a half. Don’t worry; I’ll make sure Kirk doesn’t get to treat tomorrow like a holiday. But, Laird, we can’t ignore the violence. He actually hit a girl as hard as he could! What should we do about it?

“Hire her a boxing coach?”

When he felt Maggie stiffen, Laird hoarsely whispered: “Are you suggesting a child psychiatrist?” Wordlessly she caressed his shoulders. So Laird continued:

Well, maybe, but there is no need for haste. The boy’s only thirteen. He’s still a young kid who has yet to develop an appropriate reverence for the fairer sex. I’ll wager he still thinks girls are yucky because they’re afraid of spiders and toads. But he will soon enough become an admirer of femininity — or at least of a special girl’s feminine charms. I give him a year at most. In any case, I’ll have a frank talk with Kirk tomorrow.

After a pause, Laird sighed: “Now, I suspect you’ll want to talk about Blair.” As he spoke, Laird’s muscles relaxed. Oddly, he didn’t seem concerned that Maggie, taking her cue, would once again question Blair’s sexuality. It had been her favorite topic for more than a month.

While most fathers would have been outraged to have a woman challenge their son’s “masculinity,” Laird, no fool, was well aware that Blair’s teachers and principal judged him to be the male pupil most likely to end up as a ballet dancer, hair stylist or interior decorator. Schoolyard scuffles had made clear the like opinion of his male classmates, who, after displaying their own masculinity with a shove or a fist, had largely left him to find friends, as best he could, amongst the “other girls”.

“I know, Maggie, that you share the common belief that Blair is gay. I think you’re wrong — virtually every boy is a bit fey at ten. It’s tough to be hyper-masculine when you’re still prettier than most adult women. I wasn’t the world’s butchest preteen either, and I certainly didn’t end up gay. Now did I?” And with that he lowered one of Maggie’s hands to find his sex rampant.

“Nobody could be a better lover for a woman than you, honey; but we’re talking about Blair. And I think you’re entirely right. The boy’s not gay and never will be.” As she spoke, she squeezed but did not stroke Laird’s maleness; she wanted her lover’s rapt attention for what she was about to say next.

Laird interjected:

Now I am truly confused. All this time I’ve thought you considered Blair to be a sissy boy. In fact, I was afraid that you were leading up to a suggestion that we throw a house party for him so that he could invite his first boyfriend to a dance. I must say I’m relieved that you don’t want me to ask him at dinner if he’s hot after the body of that mop-haired boy singer that he likes so much.

Maggie giggled. “I’d like to be a fly on the wall if you ever had to have that heart-to-heart with your son. But don’t worry — Blair isn’t gay. I’ve concluded he’s something … very … different. You might not want to hear it, which is why I’ve only been hinting so far that he’s a very atypical boy, sexually that is.”

“But what, if not gay?”

“Laird, do you know what a transsexual is?”

His body stiffened, even as part of it shrank from her caress.

“Yes, I believe I know. Are you suggesting that Blair wants to be a girl? Or, worse, that he already sees himself to be a girl, a girl who’s — how does the cliché go? — trapped in a boy’s body?”

“Yes … and yes. I am positive that Blair would rather be a girl than a boy and I’m almost certain that he’ll confirm, if properly asked, that he is emotionally and mentally a girl, and he hates the genitals that God errantly gave him.”

Laird muttered inaudibly. Maggie hesitated, considering her options, and then plunged to the goal line, her left hand gripped firmly on the balls while her right feverishly worked to ensure that her lover man, when he finally answered, would be receiving advice from both of his heads. Just as he arched in pleasure, Maggie spiked in the end zone: “I know where to find the hormones and surgeon he’ll need. I even know where to find a geek who can hack into vital records to change the M to F. I can help you to give Blair the life she truly wants and needs. You’ve always known the truth about Blair; after all, you named her Blair Lindsay, not Kirk Alexander.”

“Maggie,” he sighed, “Don’t go reading too much into the names. It was my wife, bless her soul, who chose them for the boys. All four names are traditional for the males in her family. I was hoping that one of them could be named Laird Jr., but no such luck.”

Maggie kept pushing:

But you do have to admit that Blair could — look at his face, his physique, and most of all, his hair — easily attend school, a different one, as a girl. I could take Blair shopping for suitable makeup and clothes. Meanwhile, my geek could hack into Blair’s school records (it’s a piece of cake, he says) and after that there’ll be no question that Blair is a she — especially if we propel her rapidly through puberty with a maximum of estrogen and a minimum of testosterone. Let’s face it: Blair is probably already as light on male hormones as he is on his feet. Blair Lindsay could never be “all boy” like Kirk Angus, but with our help she can be “all girl” before she starts dating for keeps in her senior year of high school.

Maggie had made her pitch. Would she get permission to start raising a daughter ... her daughter? Laird was the only obstacle to Blair’s transformation, she figured, for no one else much cared what happened to the effeminate boy. His handful of “friends”, more acquaintances and all of them female, only saw him at school. Moreover, Kirk didn’t seem to like his brother; they rarely played together. Blair’s school and church would probably be happy to have one less “problem,” and his only living relatives lived far away in Scotland. As they came from his mother’s side, they had gradually lost touch with the two boys and their father since her excruciating death from breast cancer five years previously. It was doubtful they’d care if one of their “American cousins” changed genders, so long as “she” stayed away from the ancestral hearth.

As for Blair himself, Maggie didn’t believe he would put up much of a fight to preserve what little “masculinity” he had been allotted. She’d have to go slowly, always with his assent, one short, feminizing step at a time, but she was nevertheless confident that it would take less than a year or two to transform Blair into a girl in every way that counted, save for the final surgeon’s cut.

Easy-going, docile Blair was, she’d decided, infinitely malleable. He’d put on a dress or a diaper, leather harness or a clown suit — almost any costume that would charm and please the adults in his life, in the desperate hope that they, unlike his birth mother, never would desert him.

Blair was especially anxious to keep Maggie, his father’s first and so far only girlfriend since the funeral, inside the family fold. Blair loved her so fiercely, so openly, so absolutely that Maggie knew that the boy would do almost anything to keep her as a surrogate mother, even if it meant giving up an arm, a leg, or his gender. Dress like a girl for her? Why not? It beat the alternatives.

Maggie had no doubt Blair would dress up like Little Bo Peep if she asked sweetly and menacingly enough. True, he probably couldn’t be rushed into stockings and skirts, but she was pretty sure that Blair could be persuaded to pretend to be a girl for months or years — at least until his upper lip grew enough fuzz to demand a shave -- if he realized that she was far less likely to abandon a daughter than a son. A choice between happiness and loneliness — Was Blair prepared to skirt the difference?

Maybe he had already gotten an inkling of her bias, for Blair had been behaving more effeminately in recent weeks. Just two days ago Laird had asked him “to stop prancing around like Adam Lambert” (the flamboyant, sequined successor to the bejeweled Liberace). “You don’t always have to be on stage,” Laird had said. “Take off the party mask. We want to see the true you.”

Maggie agreed: She didn’t want Blair to act like a female; she wanted him to be a female. She wanted a real daughter, a daughter for life, and “realism” advised her that Blair’s inevitable teen rebellion would probably put him back into boys’ pants and, with much noisy recrimination, effectively out of her life … unless … unless Blair had already become a girl in mind and body, his original genitalia either gone or forgotten. Thus, Maggie wanted Blair to have an actual sex change, achieved as quickly and as irreversibly as Maggie could arrange, with due deference to nature’s rhythms and disdain for Man’s laws. She was even willing to risk jail to assure that Blair would become and remain her daughter for life. If Blair felt the need as a teenager to dismay her parents, let her bring home a foul-mouthed, lesbian lover for dinner.

“We want to see the true you” — Laird had actually said it to Blair. But did he mean it? As she and Laird lay together, nude bodies entwined, her hands, hips and lips erotically reminding her lover that his own happiness was now as much on the line as Blair’s, Laird mentally submitted. Yet he wanted her to know that he was still calling the shots, at least when it came to his own kids, and so, rolling over, he mounted her. As he repeatedly thrust ever deeper, he lay down his conditions:

First, don’t try to feminize Blair more rapidly than the boy can handle. If Blair complains even once to me, or if there is any hint that Blair feels that he is being ‘panty-trained’ as a form of punishment,” then the experiment ends immediately.

Second, Blair must never be paraded about as a girl in front of people — classmates, neighbors, postal carriers, whoever — who’ve known him as a boy. To ensure against humiliation, all outings as a girl have to be far from home, preferably in another state.

Third, no attempt should be made to alter the boy’s body or chemistry until he’s attained the age of consent. No hormones, no implants, no injections, and certainly no cutting. You’ll have to fake his curves so it will be easy for him to revert to his original gender.

Fourth, Kirk should be told about the “experiment” before it starts and be advised that he can demand an end to it if he “feels creeped out”.

Fifth, and last, Blair should feel as good being a girl as I do having sex with you. Hell, I’m about to become the father of a bouncing tween girl! It feels right!

With those words, Laird erupted inside Maggie. Her body fiercely gripped him as she murmured over and over in Laird’s ear:

Lover, you’ll never regret this decision. Blair will be a lot happier as a girl. He’ll fit in a lot better. And we’ll have the perfect family — a boy for you and a girl for me — and we’ll be the happiest people on earth. That feeling you now have, that feeling I guarantee you for a lifetime. You can have it all, Laird — great sex exactly as you like it, as well as a loving wife to help you raise contented, well-adjusted and drug free kids.

Kids, plural. That forced Laird to catch his breath. “How will Kirk react to his brother’s dressing and behaving like a girl?” the father openly wondered. “I don’t want Kirk to go bad — to become a tough guy to prove he’s not a sissy too.”

Maggie advised:

Don’t fret. I’ve already discussed Blair’s feminization with Kirk. He said that he isn’t surprised — that something has to change. Blair, it seems, has become a real burden for Kirk at school: ‘I’m always having to stand up for the little dude,’ he said; ‘I’ve actually had to pull guys off of him; and whenever I did that, they’d curse me and then tell everyone that I was a fag — just like my sissy brother. Blair and I would both be better off if Blair stopped pretending he was a boy. I’ll even help you get him into panties — you just know that he wants to wear pink satin and bows — if you promise me that you’ll get him out of my life by sending him to a school far from here.’

“So you see, Laird, Blair’s metamorphosis might be the best thing that will ever happen to Kirk and this family.”

Laird then rolled off his lover. He fixed his eyes on the ceiling fixture: “Are you telling me that Kirk actually offered to help turn his brother into a girl?”

“He said he’ll do whatever it takes to get Blair so comfortable with being a girl that ‘she’ll insist on changing schools’. Kirk says he’ll even lie if necessary — by telling Blair how everyone will like him better as a girl and that’s he real pretty in a dress. I actually think that Kirk would model girls’ underwear for Blair if it would entice Blair permanently out of his jockey briefs.”

Laird groaned disapproval. Maggie was exposing a facet of Kirk’s personality — the devious and manipulative side — that he had long noted, but never liked.

Maggie next whispered: “Kirk even said that he knows a boy his own age who’s ‘dumb enough’ to date and kiss Blair without figuring out his true sex. Kirk figures, and I tend to agree, that if Blair has his first romantic and sexual encounters ‘as a girl’ that he’ll never want to act like a boy again. Don’t worry …”

Laird interjected: “Sexual encounters? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Blair’s only ten. He’s much too young to want sex — with girls or boys, with or without panties and briefs.”

Maggie reminded him about the facts of life in the twenty-first century:

The boys are growing up faster than you think. I’m responsible for the laundry around here and I can assure you that there are more than enough telltale stains on the sheets, pillowcases, and underpants of both boys to prove that they’ve discovered the joy of solo sex. Even more telling are the ‘spotted’ magazines that I found under their mattresses — a Virginia’s Secret catalog under Kirk’s and a Tween Beat under Blair’s. Before you ask, Blair especially treasures the photos of a shirtless Justin Bieber and a leather-clad Miley Cyrus.

While Laird absorbed these revelations about his sons’ diverging sexuality, Maggie quickened her pitch:

I truly believe that Blair’s rapid feminization will reduce, if not entirely eliminate the tensions in this family, especially between your two children, and also between us. You know how sad it makes me not to have a daughter. And I’ve seen your muscles tighten and teeth clench whenever we’ve met a single father with a pretty daughter. You’re worried that I’ll leave you for them, that I’m capable of setting up house with another man just so that I can mother his daughter. Well, you can stop worrying about losing me. Blair is, or rather can be, all the daughter I’ve ever wanted or could ever want. Teaching Blair to become a complete woman will enable me to become the complete wife for you and mother for your children.

Laird replied slowly and evenly: “I didn’t realize that Kirk dislikes his brother so much that he’d do almost anything, even parade around in panties, to get rid of him. That’s a real bummer.” Maggie’s kisses gave him some consolation. Laird continued:

I’m afraid you’re right: Kirk for some reason despises “sissies,” and he will never accept, even less love, an effeminate, gay brother. Tragically, once you and I have passed away, my two children will end up kinless on this side of the Atlantic and thus alone in a heartless world. The boys will need each other, but are destined to grow ever farther apart — unless, as you say, Blair fundamentally changes. A sister, Kirk might grow to love, at least when the last vestiges of her maleness have been sloughed off like milk teeth.

He pressed on:

So you’re right, Maggie. You always seem to be right, my love. As the head of this family, the final choice is mine and I now make it. This well-being of this family does seem to depend on Blair’s spending the next few months or years as a girl. After that, he can decide which gender best suits him. If he’s wise, he’ll realize by then that the world is much kinder to a pretty girl than it is to an effeminate boy.

Laird then tapped the bedpost with his fist, wielding it like a judge’s gavel.

Maggie purred:

You’re right, Laird. Blair will never give up his skirts once he’s started wearing them. We’ll start his transformation with some jewelry tomorrow. I’ll take the children shopping at the Pacific Mall downtown. No one is likely to know us there. Kirk’s been asking me to buy him a gold stud for his left ear — to look cool, he says — and I am sure that he’ll regard a second pierced ear as a small price to pay for getting his brother launched towards sisterhood.

“And wear panties too — like Blair?” Laird slowly shook his head: it was impossible to picture his freckle-faced son in anything but boxers or y-fronts.

“Kirk in panties? Not very likely. But then he really does want to see the back of his sissy brother,” said Maggie. “Time will tell.”

Exhausted, yet contented, Maggie and Laird slept like they didn’t have a care in the world.

Continued in Part 2 (Chapter 2, A hairstylist's choice)

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. In Chapter 1, Maggie used her sexual wiles to "persuade" her husband Laird to let her transform Blair, his effeminate younger son, into the daughter she craves.

Part 2, Chapter 2 Pierre’s Choice

“Boys, let’s get you ‘with it’ and in the zone. Let’s get your ears pierced — like male rock stars.” Maggie and the boys had been ambling down the mall’s central promenade supposedly on their way to the Sears store, when she spotted a stand selling budget jewelry — of the sort that kids wore — and offering free ear piercing. “Kirk, you go first. Both ears, please,” she said to the sales girl; “these boys want to impress their classmates with their courage and coolness.”

Blair looked like someone had just pulled down his pants in public. Yet his hands flew upward, as he instinctively protected his ears.

As for brother Kirk, while he had told Maggie that he’d prefer to have only one ear, the left, pierced, so that there would be no questions at school about his virility, he appreciated that the family’s grand plan for Blair depended on Kirk’s establishing that the youngster could give in to his feminine urges without fear of mockery — within the household at least. Indeed, it had taken only few minutes whispering together in the kitchen for Maggie to persuade Kirk to flirt with the feminine during their Mall visit.

As the piercing gun punched a gold stud into his ear, Kirk winced. Blair winced in empathy, then said: “It looks like it hurts. I don’t …”

Maggie cut him off: “Don’t be a baby. It’s only a pin prick. See — Kirk is already admiring himself in the mirror. He’s not in pain.” She then pushed Blair toward the gun-slinging girl at the counter. “This one next. He doesn’t want to look exactly like his brother, so let’s … hmm … start him off with this.” She pointed to a heart-shaped zirconium crystal with a post made from white gold.

“I’m not sure it’s entirely appropriate …” — The salesgirl didn’t get to complete her thought because Kirk had interrupted: “Blair, it’s perfect for you. A diamond stud is the sort of thing that James Bond would wear. You’ll look like an international man of mystery.” When Blair still hesitated, Kirk turned to Maggie: “You said I could have more than one set of studs; well, I want both of us guys to have a crystal pair — and also one of those and this one here.” He was pointing to a hoop and a heart-shaped amethyst earring.

If his macho brother was willing to wear a jewel on his ear, then Blair decided that he could too. But which one? Kirk bullied him into starting with the amethyst, which meant that he’d have little choice but to wear it for several weeks while his ear healed. Blair had to admit that he fancied the way the amethyst glittered under the fluorescent light. The two boys both got hoop earrings, but where Kirk’s were small in diameter, and scarcely large enough to hang below his earlobe, Blair’s would hang down almost to his shoulders, giving him a girlish look. He whined about the difference in size, but noticeably brightened when Maggie told him that the hoops made him look like a pirate.

Blair burbled: “Yes, pirate is in my blood. I’ll look just like Captain Jack Sparrow. Mommy, let’s look for more pirate gear, okay?

“Sure, honey, but first you both need a haircut.”

Kirk was pleased at the news — he liked his hair to be as closely shaved to his head as permissible — but Blair, as usual, fretted that his parents were plotting to clip his magnificent flowing locks. “Stop whining, Blair, you’ll still look like a rock star when the stylist is through with you. We’ll cut almost nothing off, but I do want a more versatile cut, one that gives us more options for ‘your look’. You love me to brush your hair, right?” Blair eagerly nodded. “Well, it will be more fun for both of us if, for example, your hair still looked good with bangs, or curled, or tied into the sort of ponytail that pirates have.”

As there wasn’t a barber shop in the Mall, the boys had little objection to their first visit to a unisex hair salon. Kirk’s buzz cut took only a few minutes, after which he browsed through the salon’s hoard of teen magazines (Maggie noticed several tell-tale pauses at lingerie photos), as Pierre, the salon’s owner, followed Maggie’s instructions to feminize Blair’s hairstyle.

A kind, decent man, Pierre had at first refused to make Blair look feminine. He suspected that the boy was being punished by being made to look like a “sissy”. While such a thing was inconceivable in his native France where males grew quickly into giant, insensitive brutes, he had read that “the British” (of whom Maggie Maguire might easily be one) liked to petticoat “bad little boys” as an occasional relief from beating them with a cane.

While a delicate boy like Blair might well prefer having his head curled to having his bottom thrashed, Pierre wanted to have nothing to do with the jeux interdits, the forbidden games that “the Anglo-Saxons” played on their children. “These games learn the infants,” Pierre believed, “to be the Marquis de Sade when they make the so-called English love, while we, the French, we utilize the tongue both to make l’amour and to speak the most beautiful language in the world. Enfin, the Anglo-Saxons are tongue-tied, so to speak, because they have the habit to tie their lover in some ropes before they make the sexy spanking.”

Fortunately for Maggie, while she didn’t speak la belle langue, she had an Irish gift of the gab (having once been held by her big toes as she was suspended headfirst from a castle turret to kiss the Blarney Stone) and so she decided to use four tried-and-true Scots-Irish methods to win Pierre’s cooperation. Each of them had proven remarkably successful during the millennia during which the world’s Celts had fought for their place in the Rain.

First, however, Maggie’s suggested that Pierre join her in a rear closet in order to move beyond the children’s hearing and gaze. Once ensconced, Maggie started with an Irish poem (presented in a singsong manner) for she agreed with Seamus Heaney who wrote, “I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.” In other words, Maggie sought to change Pierre’s mind by speaking intelligently to his emotions — for such was the Celtic way. Modifying its words ever so slightly, Maggie recited an Irish poem originally about a dear mother:

God made a wonderful daughter,
A daughter who looks like a boy
He made her smile of the sunshine,
And He molded her heart of pure joy;
In her eyes He placed bright shining stars,
In her cheeks the fair roses you see;
God made a male-looking daughter,
And He gave that dear daughter to me.

“You may think my daughter the devil’s work because she was born with a boy’s genitals,” Maggie next said, “but you must not forget the words of the hymn by Cecil Alexander; they might easily have been written about a boy such as Blair”:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful:
The Lord God made them all.

Pierre, stunned by the Celtic logic of Maggie’s poem and hymn, had to admit that he did have an obligation to do his utmost to help Blair look like a girl — provided, that is, that Blair actually was Maggie’s daughter-born and not a normal boy suborned. Maggie made one last resort to Irish poetry; its third line urged Pierre to take a chance on Blair’s actually being a transsexual as she claimed. However, she should have looked ahead to the fourth line. Even as she uttered it, Maggie wondered how a Frenchman might react to it:

May the light always find you on a dreary day.
When you need to be home, may you find your way.
May you always have courage to take a chance
And never find frogs in your underpants.

Pierre, in fact, deemed the allusion to “frogs” gratuitously insulting to a son of French Republic because he didn’t believe that the poem was meant to be taken literally. After all, how could real frogs might end up in anyone’s underpants? It wasn’t at all logical. “Can it be,” he asked Maggie,

That the poem is allegorical, and that it counsels the Irish woman not to have sex with the Frenchmen? But why is this counsel given, may I ask? Is it because a troubled child like Blair is always the sad result? Is the poem wanting to say that cognac and whiskey they cannot mix, even though they each pretend themselves to be the eau de vie, the water of life? In any case, I am desolated to tell to you, Madame Maguire, that your Celtic logic eludes me. Pfui, I deliver the Scottish verdict on your case: It is ‘not proven’. I am not convinced by these poems that I must consider Blair to be a young girl when I go to cut his hairs.

The poems having escaped the Frenchman’s logic, Maggie, still huddled with Pierre in the closet, extracted the second stratagem from her Celtic bag of tricks: This time she related a Scottish folktale. It concerned the Silkies, shape-shfiting sea fairies who usually took the form of a bright-eyed seal. They often came, however, onto dry land as beautiful damsels to dance to the light of the full moon. To keep a Silkie for a wife, Scottish men had to steal their sealskin, but the Silkie, always longing for the sea, would look far and wide for her skin in order to return to the sea as a seal again.

Pierre, his psychic vision occluded by Gallic rationalism, at first didn’t grasp the point of the tale: namely, that Blair was a shape-shifting fairy whose long-time pelt — or hair — had to be removed so that he might be a girl for the rest of his life. “Certainly,” Maggie admonished Pierre, “we don’t want Blair to remain a seal, now do we?”

Yet Pierre, hobbled by his Cartesian rationalism, still had trouble grasping what is, to a mystical Celt, the most obvious of points — that Blair, his hair the luxuriant color of the mythical Golden Seal (star of the namesake 1983 movie) was without doubt a Silkie, for did not the child insist that his pelt be stroked and brushed by Maggie for hours at a time? And did not Blair have a supernatural ability to swim underwater for long periods of time? And did he not wear fairy earrings? And then the clincher — “And is it not highly significant,” Maggie said, “that tomorrow will see a full moon. That’s when the Silkie is transformed into a human female. So don’t you see, it’s your duty to help Blair shed his male pelt and thus to look like the girl he is deep down. Isn’t that obvious to you?”

Alas, nothing was obvious to Pierre. He simply could not grasp the mystical, Maggie concluded with deep sympathy for his woeful condition. “No wonder,” Maggie thought, “that he does a job where everything is so matter-of-fact and clear cut. After all, hairstyling is more like accounting or bookkeeping than like a true art, such as computer-aided animation.”

Unable to reach the French man’s soul, Maggie had to resort to the third Celtic artifice, this time targeting his hyper-rational Gallic mind. She pulled a pint of “Tá¡ sé Cailá­n”, an Irish whiskey, out of her purse and poured him several ounces of the wet nectar. With the Irish now in him, Pierre was better able to see the mystical necessity of Blair’s having “his hairs” shaped to reflect the child’s “cailá­n” soul (the whiskey’s name roughly translating as “He is a girl”). And yet Pierre still had doubts whether Blair was indeed a Silkie. The child did not, for example, have a Silkie’s tell-tale webbed fingers. (The sneakers made it impossible to check for webbed feet.)

While Maggie knew from experience that the third element in the Celtic bag of tricks almost always worked — that the whiskey would eventually dissolve Pierre’s reservations about feminizing Blair’s haircut — she dared not refill the stylist’s highball glass, for fear that he would, if he became as inebriated as an Irish playwright, leave Blair looking like a shorn lamb.

Maggie, accordingly, resorted to her last and most effective stratagem in her bag of Celtic tricks. It had worked for the Irish princess Isolde (or Iseult) with the Cornish knight Tristan and for many a Scottish or Irish lass who had wielded it since those legendary times. After all, how could a heterosexual Frenchman, as Maggie had known Pierre to be since their first exchanged glance, turn down an opportunity to experience a langue (a word meaning both tongue and language in his stunted lexicon) even more wondrous than his?

Easily persuaded that he was the seducer, Pierre was soon having passionate, adulterous sex (it certainly was not love) with Maggie, who closed her eyes and thought of … removing Blair’s sealskin. After two steamy minutes, the two of them emerged from the closet, both attempting to be the soul of discretion, and largely succeeding, save for the contented smile on Pierre’s face and smudges of red lipstick around his zipper. An expert at lovemaking, Pierre had even found twenty seconds, a second glass of whiskey in hand, to make it clear to Maggie that he now saw the world her way, the Celtic way: “Yes, there must be are lucky stars above Blair, and the wings of the butterfly have kissed the sun, for I now see clearly enough that Blair is most definitely a silken transsexual. Maggie, you must bring your daughter to this salon more often.”

As Maggie and Pierre emerged from the closet, both children asked what had detained them. At first at a loss for words, Maggie eventually explained that she and Pierre had been leafing through his catalogues to pick the ideal haircut for Blair. Though the younger child definitely “bought” the story, Maggie was less certain of Kirk, who signaled that her makeup needed attention. Just before she headed off to find a lady’s powder room, Pierre whispered in her ear (with a flicker of tongue),

Do not inquiet yourself, Maggie, I will do precisely as you have asked: I will give Blair the beautiful girls’ hairstyle, but one that, quand máªme, can be combed each morning before school to give him the appearance of the little boy until you and your daughter have decided that she is ready to go to a new school as a young girl. Maggie, you have reason when you say that the little Blair must have a haircut that permits him to live as both the boy and the girl for many weeks. I will cherish each time that Blair comes to the salon with you to make his style ever more beautiful.

Since Pierre’s was a full-service salon, while its owner worked on Blair’s hair, his assistant Suzanne manicured the boy’s nails, which she declared to be in remarkably fine condition for a preteen. When Blair complained that Kirk’s nails weren’t getting similar attention, Suzanne, at Maggie’s request, asked to see Kirk’s; however, she declared, “It’s pointless to work on Kirk’s nails as long as he gnaws them down to the cuticle. Please regard this, Madame, the skin is torn and bleeding around several of his nails. The boy is a nervous wreck, it appears.”

The two women agreed on some foul-tasting, clear nail varnish to deter Kirk’s nibbles. Although Kirk objected, he had his nails painted ahead of Blair’s. Sullenly Kirk agreed that, as no one could guess from their color that he was “doing his nails”, he would continue varnishing them until he’d mastered his bad habit.

After this concession, Blair easily bought Maggie’s assurances that most teen boys used polish to protect their nails from painful breakage and hungry teeth. When Maggie reminded Blair of the emo boys he’d seen with jet black or brightly colored nails, he finally agreed it “was no big deal” for him to wear a subtle shade of pink to make his nails look healthier. Maggie promised him that no one would suspect that he was using nail polish. This promise was kept.

Pierre was proud of his accomplishment: “Enfin! The hairs they are well coiffed! Is not Blair’s new hairstyle truly remarkable, if not incroyable? Am I not the veritable master of the haircutting?” In fact, Pierre had done little to warrant his self-congratulation, for almost any hairstylist could have given Blair the chin-length bob and bangs (straight down to his eyebrows) that the boy now sported. Pierre had merely copied a style that Dakota Fanning had worn at age eleven.

Handed a mirror so that he could “admire” his new hair-do, Bair yelped in panic: “I look like a girl! No, it’s worse than that, much worse than that. I still look like a boy, but I also look like I’m trying to look like a girl! How can I show my face in public? Mommy, please ask the man to make my hair look the way it was!” He started to cry.

Pierre looked shocked. Had he chosen the wrong hairstyle? No, certainly not! The bangs and bob were perfect for a boy, as they softened his features. They made him look totally mignon … trá¨s cute indeed. Even so, Blair had a right to be upset, for the boy and his mother apparently expected too much from a simple change in hairstyle. It would take more than a hair bob to eliminate all doubt about Blair’s gender. So Pierre turned to Suzanne for help: “Finish the job, my little cabbage, turn this one into Cinderella with your artistry.”

Meanwhile Maggie was reassuring Blair: “Don’t worry, sweetie, that’s just one of the looks you can have with this haircut. In a few moments, Pierre will show how you to comb your hair so that you look just like your hero, Justin Bieber. He has bangs too. Isn’t that right, sweetie? Now, let Suzanne — she’s the one who did your nails — touch up your face. When she’s done, I assure you that you won’t look like a boy trying to pass himself off as a girl.”

Blair stopped sniveling long enough for Suzanne to shape his eyebrows and to apply concealer, blush, eyeliner, mascara, eye shadow (purple to compliment his green eyes and amethyst earrings), and a clear lip gloss (so that the dark red lips bestowed by Nature shone more brightly). Suzanne went easy on the applications, for Blair was still a preteen, and girls of that age shouldn’t try to look too mature. Each step of the way Suzanne gave Blair a quick primer on the use and application of makeup, while assuring him that his mother would be able to help him to perfect his skills.

Blair wasn’t stupid. He knew that the makeup would make him look even more like a girl, but he had become curious whether Pierre and Suzanne could totally hide his boyishness. As he wasn’t going to leave the salon with his hair bobbed, it didn’t much matter if there was some makeup to remove as well. Besides, both Kirk and Maggie were watching his transformation closely, and both were telling him, over and over again, that he had never looked more handsome (Maggie) or beautiful (Kirk). Kirk, boldly lying, said he wanted a makeover like Blair’s himself — only next time.

It was the moment of truth: mirror in hand, Blair saw that no one would now suspect from his head and shoulders that he was a boy. But what was he to say when Maggie squeezed his hand, saying, “I told you, sweetie, that Pierre and Suzanne could make you look like the prettiest girl in the entire Pacific Northwest; of course, they had a lot to work with because you’ve always been too beautiful to be a boy.”

“You like the way I look? You actually want me to look like a girl?”

Maggie hugged him close to her while she whispered in his ear, “Blair, sweetie, just for today. Can you do it for me, sweetie? Just for today. You know how much it means to me — and to Kirk and your dad. You’re so beautiful; you’re so much like the daughter I’ve always dreamt about. You can’t deny me this one chance to see what you’d look like a girl. Please, sweetie, just this once, for me.”

Blair looked over toward Kirk — “But what about him? Won’t he tease me? What’s to stop him from telling everyone we meet that his brother is a sissy dressed like a girl?”

“Because he’s promised me that he won’t. In fact, Kirk, appreciating how much I want you to be my little girl until tomorrow morning, has told me that he is willing to run interference for you.”

“Interference for me? What does he mean by that?”

Maggie replied:

It means, sweetie, that Kirk is willing to walk with us right into a girls’ clothing store, looking very much like the boy he is, to ask to try on “some threads”. The sales staff will be in such a tizzy over a boy’s request to use the change room that they’ll scarcely notice you and me as we find suitable girls’ clothes for you to wear while you’re doing me this little favor. Afterwards, with you wearing some of your new clothes — perhaps a halter top and low-slung jeans, the three of us — me Maggie, her son and her daughter — will go to Applebee’s restaurant and then to a movie. We’ll let you pick the flick. If you don’t fill yourself up with movie popcorn, we can finish our visit to the Mall with ice cream sundaes. If you like, we’ll bring home a pizza for the family dinner. How’s that menu strike you?

Blair had to admit that it sounded pretty good. He did ask, however, whether he could have jujubes as well.

Maggie’s voice quavered:

Of course, Blair, anything you want. The idea is for you to have such an excellent day being my daughter that you may even ask to do it again. I promise you that no one will be staring oddly or quizzically at you. No one will be sniggering about your “sissy” walk. Instead, they’ll all be smiling at you because you’ll be the prettiest girl in the Mall. What do you say? Will you make me the happiest mom in the entire world by being my little girl today?

Maggie then began to cry, her shoulders quaking with true, unaffected emotion.

“But what will dad say?” It was the best defense left to Blair. Surely his dad wouldn’t approve of his going around looking like a girl? Guys should stick together on something as fundamental as a boy’s gender, even if Kirk didn’t seem to care.

“Darling Blair, your dad already knows that I’m asking you to be our daughter for a day. He knows how much it means to me. He thinks it’s a great idea. He really does. He’s the one who suggested we celebrate with pizza and cokes tonight.”

Blair groaned. “Just one day?” he asked. Maggie nodded. “And Kirk will draw all the attention away from me at the store?” Kirk nodded. “Okay,” said Blair, “I guess I can do it for you, mommy. I want you to be happy. I don’t want you ever be so sad that you want to leave us.”

Blair and Maggie wept in each other’s arms. As Blair smothered Maggie’s cheek with kisses, Pierre reflected: “In the end we made the right decision for the boy; and the style itself is superb.” He turned to Suzanne: “The makeup is divine, ma chérie, simply divine. If it pleases you, now take the photos of Blair for his dossier with us.”

Blair scowled for the first photo, but he was smiles a-plenty after being tickled in the ribs by Kirk. As Suzanne moved around him with the camera, calling for an arched eyebrow, or fluttering eyelashes, or moistened lips, Blair in all his innocence eventually gave Maggie exactly what she wanted — a portrait suitable for framing of her beautiful daughter, already a bit of a vamp at age ten. Thanks to the digital age, Blair’s first portrait as a girl, mounted in an 8 by 11 inch silver frame, was occupying the center of the fireplace mantel in the family’s finished basement before lights out that evening.

After sending Blair’s photos to the Mall’s camera store and arranging for them to be printed and put in a small album and for Maggie’s favorite to be framed, Pierre turned to his assistant: “Suzanne, it if pleases you, write down the makeup selections you made and ensure that they are found in the starter kit that Madame has requested.”

As Pierre brandished the kit, Blair noticed that it contained a dozen different shades of eye shadow, nail polish and lipstick, as well as enough eyeliner for a face on Mount Rushmore. There was definitely far more makeup, he decided, than he could possibly use in a single day. “What gives?”

When he complained, Maggie explained that there many uses for makeup that didn’t require Blair to look like a girl. “You could use it, for example, to look like Captain Jack Sparrow. He wears eyeliner, doesn’t he?” Seeing that Blair still looked doubtful, that he needed further assurance that she wasn’t plotting to make him into a girl permanently, Maggie gestured to Suzanne: “Both of the boys will need a starter kit so that one can make himself up as a pirate captain, while the other dolls up as his lady captive.”

Suzanne smirked. She knew which role would go to which boy. Kirk, less certain, pouted for the first time that evening. Blair, seeing his brother’s discomfort, beamed with Schadenfreude. Maggie, however, made sure that Kirk would stick with the game plan for a day or two, which required him to pretend that it was no big deal for a boy to use feminine beauty products.

As Maggie handed Kirk his makeup kit, she loudly said for Blair’s benefit: “This is yours, Kirk dear. I am sure that you’ll have many occasions to use it.” However, she added in a whisper, “that is, occasions to use it on your new sister.” She and Kirk exchanged winks.

Blair bleated: “Mom, you said my hair wouldn’t look girly when I go to school. Can you have him show me how to make it look right? Please.” Blair was pointing his finger at Pierre.

Pierre came to Blair’s chair: “So you want encore to have the air of a boy? Well, ma petite, that is a thing accomplished easily.” Pierre then used his hand to muss Blair’s bob, after which the stylist brushed the sides and back of Blair’s head against the grain. Pierre then said: “Enfin, you then comb the bangs up like the spikes many boys like so much in this time and lock the spikes into place with hairspray.”

Maggie had to admit the effect worked: Even if an earthquake hit, no girl would leave the house with her hair looking that disheveled. Blair looked like he’d been startled awake by a poltergeist after hours of tossing and turning, his hair matted and tangled by night chills and fever. Blair, shocked into silence by the apparition in his mirror, nodded numbly when Maggie asked whether Pierre brush his bob and bangs back into place. It took the stylist almost a quarter hour to undo the damage, but he loftily reassured Maggie that she would be able, with enough practice, to help Blair transform the gender of his hairstyle in “thirty or forty minutes.”

It was time to bid the stylist a temporary adieu. Pierre insisted on a kiss from “both the young girls,” causing Blair to giggle.

Kirk left the salon much as he had entered it: True, he now owned a makeup starter kit but it was hidden away in a white plastic bag. Although no one but an eagle-eyed manicurist was likely to notice his lacquered fingernails, he endeavored to hide them by sticking the fingers of his left hand stuck deep into a jeans pocket, and the fingers of his right hand into the plastic folds of the bag he was carrying. Each time they walked around a mirrored window, he’d turn his head from side to side so that his golden studs could catch the light. “I look awesome,” Kirk decided.

Blair, by contrast, tried not to see his reflection in the store windows. He was worried and upset — worried that he still didn’t look enough like a girl to fool everyone (what if someone openly mocked him?) and upset with his hairstyle options. His long, flowing hair had always been his special pride, the one thing that other boys envied. Now he faced a choice between either looking like a boy who had no pride in his appearance, his head resembling a Chia pet … or else looking like a “little girl”, and a precious one at that.

The choice made him angry — angry enough to confront Maggie in the corridor a few feet beyond Pierre’s door: “I don’t like my haircut. I hate it. Mommy, I won’t go to school looking like a girl or a mangy dog. I won’t, I won’t. You can’t make me. I’ll run away and join a circus.”

Surprisingly there were no tears, though Blair shook with emotion. He was too angry to cry.

Maggie kneeled to hug him, “There, there, sweetie, calm yourself. Take a deep breath. You know how much I love you. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you.” She looked over to Kirk: “Kirk, tell your brother what you really think of Blair’s new haircut.” (“Be positive” her lips silently uttered.)

Kirk did his duty: “Blair, you look a lot better with your hair spiked and messed up than you did before you went to the hair salon. I’ve been telling you, bro, that your long hair made you look like a fag … [Kirk caught Maggie’s disapproving eye] … er, made you look like a sissy. You’ll get hassled a lot less at school if you wear your hair a little wild. The teachers might not like it, but the guys will ease up on you.”

Blair looked doubtful, but his body relaxed a mite.

“What about Blair’s bob?” Maggie prompted.

Kirk went back into service:

A bob, is that what it’s called? Blair, your hair looks awesome right now. Never better. The bangs are really cute and the bob gives you a fuller face. You look less skinny with your hair swept around your face that way. Of course, you shouldn’t wear your hair that way to school, not for a while anyway, because there are a lot of ignorant guys at our school. All they do is play sports and computer games. They’ve never even googled their own names, and they don’t read historical novels and comic books like you do; so they don’t know that knights in the days of dungeons and dragons had haircuts that looked just like your bob. Bob — that’s a guy’s name, right? It’s a dude’s name, nothing sissy about it. Well, from now on your bobbed hair will make you look like a knight of the Round Table. I dub thee Sir Bob.

Blair asked: “Is it true? Does my hair make me look like a medieval knight or page boy?”

Kirk nodded. This was the worst moment for Blair yet, for his brother seemed to be affirming that Blair now looked like a boy wearing girls’ makeup. Instinctively, Blair buried his face under Maggie’s right arm so that no one could see his blush, the cosmetic he has wearing and his reaction to it. He didn’t want anyone to be able to identify him later.

Maggie was reassuring:

Blair, sweetie, don’t fret. Kirk’s right when he says that men and boys used to wear a bob and with the right kind of makeup, I do think yours would make the ideal look for a medieval knight, but times have changed and boys don’t wear bobs and bangs anymore. Only girls do. So I solemnly swear — on a stack of Bibles, if you like — that with that hair-do you don’t look like a boy in the slightest. No one is going to guess your secret or embarrass you while we’re at the Mall.”

“Pinky swear?”

“Pinky swear.” As their pinkies intertwined, she kissed and caressed the back of his hand. Blair’s face shone beatifically; he had never loved his mommy more. She would never do him wrong. Blair hugged Maggie as hard as his little muscles could manage, as though his very existence depended on her loving him too.

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. So far Maggie has convinced her husband to let her transform his younger son Blair into a girl, and Pierre, her hairstylist, to give Blair the works. Brother Kirk may be getting hit by the fallout from Operation TG.

Choices, Chapter 3 (Part 3)

While still within spitting distance of Pierre’s salon, Blair whispered in Maggie’s ear, “Mommy, I don’t think my sneakers are right for a girl. I don’t know any girls who wear black Nikes.” He pointed to a shoe store: “Can we go there?”

After he had tried on his sixth pair of shoes, the salesgirl commented, “A typical tween, she simply can’t decide, can she? Madame, if you don’t make the choice for her, you’ll never get out of here. And I do have other girls to serve.”

So Maggie selected two styles that she deemed undeniably feminine, but reasonably inoffensive to the boy who’d have to wear them: first, pink Ked sneakers with white laces; second, brown suede Mary Janes, with pink stitching and a pink appliqué heart and daisy on the left front.

When Blair complained about her selections, Maggie agreed to buy a third pair of shoes — this time of his choosing — if he promised to wear them to school the following Monday. “I’m sure you can find a pair of girls’ sneakers,” she said, “that any boy could wear. Sweetie, we do live in a unisex world.”

It took a while — too long a while from the clerk’s perspective — but Blair eventually selected another pair of Keds, this time “hopscotch” sneakers, with white stitching and a thick pink line separating their (suitably masculine) black canvas top and white rubber soles. Each side had a profusion of small hearts, stitched in yellow, blue, pink and lavender. Two metal charms dangling from silvery lacets — a lavender-trimmed peace sign and two intertwined hearts, one blue, the other pink.

They were an amazing choice for a boy. Maggie had to ask, “Why these, Blair? Do you really think they’re appropriate for school?”

“They’ll look great, and sound great, especially when I’m playing hopscotch with Caitlin and Alison. Don’t worry — I’ll put the charms in my pocket when I’m at school. See, they come off like keys on my key ring.”

While not entirely reassured, Maggie intuitively grasped Blair’s objective when he explained what he liked best about his new shoes: the five multi-colored canvas straps between the lacets. Arrayed in descending order from scarlet and fuchsia to lavender, the straps resembled a gay-liberation banner. The shoes might get him beat up at school, but not “for dressing like a girl”. Still, with the charms attached and jangling, she agreed with Blair that they definitely looked (and sounded) “girly” enough for him to wear until they got home.

Meanwhile, Kirk had plenty of time to grow restive over the attention being paid to Blair’s feet, and Maggie, taking pity on him, agreed at last to buy him a pair of sneakers. However, in an attempt to dissuade him from making a fuss at every shop stop, she decreed that he’d have to find a pair of girls’ sneakers that didn’t “embarrass him too much.” As before, she pointed out that many of the girls’ shoes on display were downright drab compared to the turquoise sneakers favored by his friend Glenn (the only friend of Kirk’s to come by the house since Christmas). Kirk soon opted for black Puma trainers — with red laces and red vinyl trim around a large swoosh. As nothing about them screamed out “for girls only,” he’d be able to wear them to school, while having to deal with the knowledge that he was playing footsy with his gender.

As they were leaving the store, Maggie couldn’t restrain herself — impulsively she bought a pair of girls’ ballet shoes for Blair in flamingo pink and honeysuckle trim. He fussed about the purchase until she explained that she didn’t expect him to wear them outside the home. “They’re slippers, sweetie. You can wear them to keep your white socks clean or you can wear them when you’re dancing around the house. Blair, sweetie, will you wear them a slippers when we get home?”

“Yes, mommy.” He squeezed her hand. “Blair, since they’re expensive, I’d also like you to wear them as your slippers until you grow out of them. Is that okay with you?” Then, taking his little hands in hers, she looked deep into Blair’s eyes. As their eyes locked together, he saw the deep yearning in hers. He couldn’t disappoint her: “Yes, mommy, I’ll wear my pink slippers from now on.” He snuggled in her arms as she rewarded him with kisses.

Blair still wasn’t yet ready for the big shop at J. C. Penney’s department store (but is anyone?). Nervous even now about being “outed”, he wanted to look “so girly” that everyone would be “fooled” when they finally went shopping for girls’ underwear.

His concern Maggie found understandable, yet amusing since it was relatively easy for most ten-year-old boys to pass a girl if suitably attired; as for Blair, who looked effeminate in a hockey helmet and uniform, with makeup and bobbed hair, he could probably wear little more than a jockstrap and still be taken for female. However, to humor Blair, she took the children to a shopping island selling trinkets for tween girls.

Blair and she agreed that the following purchases would definitely make him look “feminine” enough to fool Penney’s sales staff: first, heart-shaped, mirrored sunglasses with lavender, green and blue frames; second, a purple hair band (to compliment his eye shade and amethyst studs); third, a silver and amethyst butterfly pendant; and finally, a “High School Musical” backpack, featuring photos of six actors, surrounded by their names, stars and hearts in pink or blue. In his new ensemble, Blair definitely looked like a pampered tween girl.

As before, Kirk demanded to be let in on the shopping trip. Once again, he was given no choice but to find something suitably masculine at a store for young girls. He quickly selected a lime green and black backpack and an eighteen-inch silver chain with a round silver medal, on which was engraved a buxom and muscular female soccer player about to kick a ball.

“Are you sure you want to have a picture of a girl hanging around your neck?” asked Maggie, who added, I’ve seen more masculine pendants in my time.”

“Well, there wasn’t much choice here for a real boy, was there? Besides, I’m going to tell the guys that the medal is my version of a crucifix or Jewish star — that I’m carrying about my symbol of faith, the ultimate female, my idea of paradise. Do you see those leg muscles? Whenever I get bored in class, I’ll study the girl on my new pendant. I’m definitely going to wear it to school. I bet it grosses out my English teacher ‘cause she’s got a dirty mind.”

Trooping through the mall, her two sons festooned in girls’ wear, Maggie couldn’t help but notice the wide range in choices for girls. They could either look like a princess or like a prince; it was their choice to make. Or was it? Mentally, she transposed the haircuts, earrings, shoes and backpacks. Would Kirk look as feminine as Blair if Kirk wore makeup and a bob and wore pink? “No,” she decided, “No matter how much she dressed him up, Kirk would at best look like a boy in drag.”

Reversing the thought experiment, she also concluded that it wouldn’t take much more than ear studs and a soccer-girl pendant to make Blair look 100% female. There hadn’t been any real need to buy him so many “girly” things, but heck, it was great fun to treat her daughter. Thanks to her divorce settlement, it was kids’ stuff for her to buy presents for her children at this downscale Mall.

Kirk interrupted her thoughts: “Is that right, Maggie? You really think that I’d look like a boy no matter what I wore?”

“Oops, sorry, I must have been thinking out loud. Do you think your new sister also heard me?”

“Blair? No he’s walking around in a daze as usual. You know him: He’s always staring off into space. It’s a miracle that he never bumps into people or bangs his head on a post.”

She whispered to Kirk: “Well, be kind and don’t tell him what I said about him. It’s true, Kirk, you’re the lucky one — you’re a boy through and through. God didn’t get your body wrong, like he did with Blair.”

Kirk frowned. “Yeah, I’d look like a dude even if I wore a dress — just like Brad Pitt did.”

“Like Brad Pitt, the actor? When did you ever see him in a dress?”

“On the Internet. Blair found it. He showed me the picture just to spite me. I was supposed to be upset to see one of my faves dressed like a sissy; but Brad Pitt didn’t look like a sissy, no way, Maggie, no way. He is a tough-looking dude even wearing a frigging silver dress! So you really think that I look as totally male as Brad Pitt?”

The question seemed to ask for an affirmative answer. And yet why was Kirk’s face fill with tension as he awaited the reply?

Maggie replied: “Of course, honey. But there’s no time now for idle chatter, for here we are at Penney’s.”

She turned now to Blair: “Are you ready, Blair, for a whirlwind of shopping? We’re running late if we’re still going to see a movie before going home. So let me do most of the choosing. That way things will go a lot faster. But don’t wander around; I’ll need to send you frequently to the fitting room.”

“Frequently?” Blair blanched at the word. It was yet more evidence that Maggie expected him to dress like a girl for more than a single day. “It’s all right,” he said to himself. “I can do it. Just like an actor who wears just about anything to get a laugh or smile, I’ll dress at home like a silly girl, if that what it takes to keep mommy happy.”

Blair had no objection to his mother doing most of the shopping, but there were some items Blair definitely wanted her to buy; they included a ruffled blouse and tights. Was it possible, Maggie wondered, that Blair was already settling into his new life as her daughter?

Given how Kirk was now behaving, she silently wished that she had two daughters instead of a thirteen-year-old son determined to over-compensate that he was, gasp, being required to enter the innermost sanctum of the opposite sex: the girl’s department at J. C. Penney’s.

“Maggie!” Kirk called out, “Watch me! I’m going to make a commando raid. The salesgirls won’t know what hit ‘em. They’ll be paying so much attention to me that you and Blair won’t even be noticed as you stock up on girly clothes. Did you hear that, Blair? I’m going to run interference for you! Nobody’s going to have any time to wonder if you’re a sissy boy.”

Kirk, looking at Blair and finding a grateful smile, next nimbly evaded Maggie’s desperation tackle to run towards the two salesgirls in order to block their lunge toward the lone adult, the only one of the three whom they considered capable of reaching pay dirt. Scowl as they might, Kirk would not let them by: “I’m here to buy a dress, a dress with frilly lace — the frilliest, sissiest you sell,” he bellowed. “Isn’t that right, ma? Aren’t I here to buy my first dress?” With Maggie still lagging fifteen feet behind, his voice crackled through the entire girls’ department.

Blair giggled. Otherwise, silence. It was difficult to say who looked the most perturbed — Maggie, because her boy doll was running amok, or the salesgirls, because they had never seen a boy publicly announce that he crossdressed. Oh sure, they knew that not all the clothes (especially the panties) that they sold actually ended up on sisters, girlfriends and daughters, but they expected furtive skulking and discrete fibs — not brazen, almost macho indifference to the world’s good opinion.

Maggie, with Blair skipping to catch up, finally reached the sales station, breathless from exertion and mental shock. Kirk fairly shouted in her blood-filled face: “Don’t worry, ma. I won’t need your help. These girls will help me find a dress, stockings and …” (he winked slyly at Judith, the fiercely blushing blond clerk) “… satin bra and panties with ribbons and bows for ‘Gender Reversal Day’ at school. I intend to win this year, you all; so give me something really girly to wear. Ma, I know you don’t need their help to find some rags for Sis.” He bowed to the two salesgirls, both of them now giggling, “Ladies, my name is Kirk and I am at your disposal. Do your worst.”

And “worst” the senior clerk, Amber, a brunette, decided he’d get. The brat might think it a great lark to noisily shop for bras and panties with none of his mates around, but she resolved that he would, with her “help”, end up looking like someone who enjoyed Gender Reversal Day a ‘bit too much’ to be trusted in the boys’ shower.

Amber, her voice dripping with sarcasm, now said: “Judy, you heard the little … gen…tle…man. He’s here to show off what he’s really made him. Madam, your son insists that both of us serve him first. I trust you and your daughter won’t mind a small wait. You’ll find some exceptional bargains in white dresses in the “Easter Parade” section to your right.”

Maggie, at a loss for words, took Blair in hand to check out the Easter specials. Blair blew a kiss in his brother’s general direction, for this was the first time in memory that he could recall Kirk actually helping him out. Thanks to big brother, there would be no telltale witnesses while Maggie explained the basic what, why and when of girls’ wear to a ‘daughter’ who looked too old for lessons from the nursery. Blair believed it almost as bad “to be treated like a retard as like a transvestye”. He didn’t want to stand out in any way. Today he would be Zorro, an action hero whom no once noticed because he only dressed and acted tough when it was time to carve a “Z” onto (Blair giggled) … onto the villain’s ass. Blair resolved to find a black blouse and slacks — just like Zorro wore in sword fights.

“Well, Queerk, we’ll start with foundation garments,” said Amber. “Without them, you’ll look like a scrawny nine-year-old kid, no matter what else you wear.”

“I’m thirteen. I’m not a kid. I’ll show you who’s scrawny.” Kirk flexed his biceps.

Amber said, “Oh, I’m so impressed. With macho muscles like those to hide, you’ll need a dress with puff sleeves. Judith, please take his vital measurements. Then go over to the Women’s Department to find an appropriate extra-firm, high-waist brief with a padded seat and hips. Queerk will also require a padded bra — definitely a “B” cup for a big boy like him. He’ll want a maximum of lace trim.”

“As much pink lace as possible!” Kirk shouted to Judith as she scurried off. “I can handle it.”

“My, my, aren’t we the rowdy lad. Let’s see if choosing a dress can soothe you. You really should have picked a more grown-up department in which to shop, but there is one dress that I believe perfect for a big … show-off like you.”

“Make sure it’s got lots of ribbons and bows. That’s the only way that a he-man like me can win Gender Reversal Day.” Kirk snapped his fingers: “Let’s get down … to it.”

“That’s it, buddy. Let’s see how you can handle bare shoulders,” Amber thought. She’d have to find it in the Junior Girls’ department, but couldn’t leave her station until Judith returned with the shapewear. “Well,” she said to herself. “I know just the way to call the brat’s bluff.”

Out loud, Amber said. “Queerk, the perfect dress is in another Department, but I can’t go for it until my assistant returns. So let’s find panties for you — the sissier the better, right?”

“Yeah, sure.” Kirk ostentatiously scratched his crotch.

Determined not to let the boy off with a single set, Amber picked a seven-pack of satiny “Days of the Week”, high-cut panties (in suitably “feminine” pastels) with ribbons at the waist and leg openings. “Be sure to wear the appropriate day of the week,” she advised Kirk, “Or you’ll likely to look like the biggest fool on Gender Reversal Day when some idiot flips up your dress. And you’ll also need this Hanes five-pack; I’m sure your mother won’t object to paying a buck a panty for you, and the trim is sufficiently feminine to soothe your inner girl.”

Kirk, having quickly acquired eleven more panties than a boy could possibly need for one dress-up day, loudly objected: “What are you up to? I NEED ONLY ONE PAIR OF GIRL’S PANTIES!”

Amber grabbed both of his collars, tightening them on his neck: “Keep your voice down, Queerk; you’re not at home. You’re in the girls department and so, damn it, you’re going to speak softly … like a good little girl. Got it!” She poked him sharply several times in the ribs. “And, little man, you’ll buy what I choose. Did you really think that there wasn’t going to be a price to be paid for acting like a boor?”

“Okay, okay. Whatever you say. Stop poking me … please.”

“That’s more like it. Now I see that Judith has returned with your shapewear. Use that changing room to put it on, while I’m finding the perfect dress for you in Junior Miss.” Amber bustled off, while Judith pushed Kirk into a change room with a busted lock.

Kirk was “shocked and appalled” by the way he looked in an extra-firm girdle (that’s what it looked like to him) and a B-cup bra, both of them padded to define him as a young teen girl. There was no way he was going to let anyone see him like this — but Judith, on orders from Amber, had decided otherwise. She charged into the room, grabbed the boy, and pulled him out into an antechamber filled with mirrors. When Amber returned with a dress, the two girls insisted that he put it on in front of them. Meanwhile they teased him mercilessly about his “girlish curves”.

Kirk wasn’t going to let them beat him: “I’ll show them. Try to humiliate me? I’ll embarrass the hell out of them!” With that resolve, Kirk scampered to the middle of the Girl’s Department to announce with dress still in hand, “Come one, come all, watch a boy put on a dress!” Somewhere close he could hear Maggie groan. However, it was too late not to go for broke, and Kirk, loudly humming “Let Me Entertain You”, pretended to be a stripper as he first put on, then took off a Baby Doll mesh dress in yellow-green matte chiffon, with a gathered bust, beaded empire waist, tie back and spaghetti straps.

Maggie intervened:”That will be quite enough from you, Kirk Alexander. The show is over. I’m sorry, ladies, but my son is going to behave himself from now on. Kirk, get back into your own clothes … right now!” Maggie then told Amber, “It has been very wrong for him to waste your time; and so wrap up whatever he’s selected. I’ll pay for it. I really don’t know what got into him. He’s never acted like such a jerk in public before.”

Amber figured she knew what got into Kirk (was not the lad enjoying the rampage a wee too much?) and to ensure that Kirk got maximum hell when he got home, she added a pink Maidenform A-cup bra (“with a pinned note saying it was “for everyday use”) a five-pack of Maidenform rainbow bikinis (giving him seventeen pairs of panties, a total likely to alarm any mother), a pair of stockings, two pairs of pantyhose, two halter tops, a three-pack of girls’ tanks, patent leather Mary Jane shoes, black polyester-spandex gaucho pants with a shirred waist, a jean skirt with rhinestone detailing and pink leggings and a nine-pack of Bobbie socks (the colors including lavender, pink and fuchsia), a two-pack of polyester nightgowns (one short-sleeve, one tank style) and, finally, a floral two-piece bathing suit.

When Kirk returned from the changing room, he loudly announced that none of the clothes were good enough for “a boy of my sensitivity”. “I will have to buy my girls’ clothes in a better establishment — like Wal-Mart. Here, lady, take back these rags,” he loftily and loudly said as he roughly pushed his C-cup bra, girdle and Baby Doll dress in the general direction of Amber. Take them she did, so that she could pack them away in the two, large shopping bags already dedicated to his new wardrobe.

“My, my, your daughter looks absolutely adorable,” said Judith to Maggie as she arrived at the cash registers to find Blair already adorned in his new purchases from Penney’s. (“Feminine yes, adorable no,” thought Maggie; “I’m not sure that any girl could look adorable garbed in that much polyester. Maybe Kirk’s right and we should have gone to Wal-Mart.)

As Blair had insisted on looking as “girly” as possible (so that no one could guess his true sex while they were at the Mall) he was now wearing a peach-colored “Hello Kitty” screen tee shirt; a classic, tan-colored, pleated skirt (with a confusing, for him, side zipper); peach-colored knee highs (to hide his boyish bruises and scrapes), as well as his hopscotch sneakers, amethyst pendant and earrings, and underneath it all, a white training bra and pink cotton panties with small multi-colored hearts and a green bow.

Overall, the clothes being totaled at the cash register were an eclectic mix of the classically feminine in bright colors, so that no one would question Blair’s femininity while wearing them, and of the drab unisex, since Maggie picked out for him because she wanted to send him to school dressed entirely in girls’ wear, without anyone’s being the wiser. She hoped to get Blair in the habit of always dressing “like a girl,” without getting him sent home with a black eye or principal’s note. Ideally, Blair would still be able “to pass as a boy” until the end of the Spring term, even as he got used to the idea that he would, as Maggie’s daughter, never again wear clothes that had actually been marketed to boys.

Oddly, as Maggie saw it, Blair had insisted on some purchases of his own: These included black gaucho pants (like Kirk’s); a polyester black top with a sequined neckline; a white, belted ruffle shirt with a poplin top and empire waist; and a wide, black patent-leather belt with a large buckle. These items didn’t match anything else in Blair’s wardrobe and were, she felt, much too mature-looking for a ten-year-old girl. She couldn’t fathom why Blair desired them.

Blair ran over to hug Kirk: “You were wonderful. Mum and me were able to shop all by our lonesomes. She kept sending me to the change room to try on clothes, and the sales clerks never noticed me once. I was afraid they’d want to see me in my undies. And then, they see ‘it’. Thanks, Kirk, I owe you one.”

“And I will collect,” Kirk said, the words muffled by clenched teeth.

Amber did her best to hide Kirk’s “purchases” underneath Blair’s. Meanwhile, Judith rang up the bill. The total didn’t surprise Maggie, who normally shopped at more expensive stores; so she had no idea that Kirk had unintentionally cost her as much as Blair. She in fact believed Kirk was leaving the store purchase-free. Indeed, she was relieved that this time he wasn’t demanding, as he had before, a tat for each of Blair’s new tits because, upset with Kirk’s antics, already she had resolved to buy nothing for him at Penney’s.

Maggie distractedly signed the credit card bill: “I can’t believe I bought so many clothes for Blair. Four shopping bags full!” She turned to her two kids: “You’ll each have to carry a shopping bag, and I want no complaints from you, Kirk. You are skating on thin ice.”

As they left Penney’s, Kirk, a middle finger stuck out, bellowed to Amber and Judith, “Guys rule! Yo, babes, I hoped you enjoyed looking at me in my underwear. That’s as close as you’re ever going to get to paradise.”

Amber called out: “Queerk, you belong here. Admit it, you little fairy, you love the way you look in a bra. You’ll come crawling back when you’re mommy’s back is turned to beg us to put you into a black lace nightie. You’re pathetic!”

“Amber, get a grip.” Judith was attempting to calm her supervisor, who was beginning to hyperventilate; “The little coward has already run out of the department. He didn’t hear more, you know, than a few words of what you shouted. You’ve got to quiet down, you know, and take it easier. You don’t want management to learn, you know, that you lost your cool with a customer, even a little brat like him. That a-hole is not worth your job, right?”

When Amber finally caught her breath enough to nod, Judith asked, “Do you think Queerk will actually wear any of those clothes he ‘bought’ (her fingers signing the apostrophes) with our help? The panties, maybe? Or is his mother going to come back tomorrow, you know, like spitting fire, to demand a refund?”

“His mother return Queerk’s clothes? I don’t think so. The money doesn’t seem to matter to her. I suspect she’ll give his clothes to his sister, to grow into, or simply pass them on to a charity. She didn’t seem very impressed by Penney’s quality. I wonder why Ms. Moneybags took her daughter shopping here. Slumming?”

Judith shrugged. Not knowing that Blair’s dress-up day was an experiment, its costs therefore to be contained, she couldn’t hazard a guess. Instead she asked, “But, Amber, you inferred to Queerk that he was set to be a tranny even if he didn’t yet realize it himself — you know, that he’d be back soon enough looking for lingerie. Don’t you truly believe that? I do. I can see through him. He struts, you know, like a rooster so no one will see that he’s a hen.”

“Queerk a budding tranny?” Amber reflected: “No, I don’t think so. Wouldn’t he have been more interested in the clothes if he were? And more eager to pose in front of a mirror? Judith, I kept my eyes on him and I didn’t see any sign of sexual excitement or gratification. I don’t think he likes either girls or their clothes. Maybe he’s gay. That may explain his hostility and anger. And yet, and yet … there was one moment when Queerk let down his guard. I caught his eyes when he didn’t think anyone was looking. It seemed like I was looking deep into his soul. There I saw so much pain that I almost felt sorry for him.”

“Almost?”

“Well, not enough that I don’t want to kick his butt around the block a few times. I’d like to give Queerk the spanking he so richly deserves. Maybe that would smarten him up.”

Judith chuckled: “Amber, you know you’re hopeless. You always want to mother every boy you meet. I think Queerk’s mother is fortunate, you know, to have only one son. You just know that she couldn’t handle two boys like Queerk. His sister is the exact opposite, you know; she’s a genuine sweetheart. I’d love to have a daughter like her one day.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Amber. “The sister didn’t strike me as truly genuine either. I felt like she was doing a lot of play-acting. Anyway, she’s much too eager to please. You can’t trust a child like that.”

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. In the last chapter, Kirk openly and noisily shopped as a boy for clothes in the girls' department in order to distract the clerks from Blair's more furtive shopping expedition.

Chapter 4, Part 4 --- A Preacher’s Choice

“We’re home! Come and see your beautiful daughter!” Maggie pushed Blair across the family threshold. Alas, his feet already wet from the rain, Blair slipped on the entryway tile right into and over his own shopping bags. In consequence, he went sprawling: With his feet up in the air and his skirt bunched up at the waist, Blair presented his father with a full view of his panties.

“Good lord,” Laird sighed to himself, “she’s already gotten Blair into a skirt and pink floral undies. It’s hard to believe he’s a boy. There’s not even a telltale bump in his, gulp, panties.” (Blair had followed Maggie’s advice to put his “little thingee” between his legs.) “Maggie’s right. From the look of him now Blair definitely wants to be a girl. Sweet Lord, help me to get through this. Help me be a loving father for Blair.”

Laird extended a hand to Blair to pull him up.

Then Laird tightly hugged his youngest son, daughter, son, daughter as though for the first time ever. “Blair, you look … beautiful. You’re as pretty as any girl your age. The new hairstyle looks good on you. What do you call it?”

“It’s a bob. Do you really think it looks good? Do you still love me? asked Blair. As his father’s fingers playing with Blair’s new hair-do, Blair tightened his own grip around his father’s hips.

“Still love you? Honey, I’ll always love you — forever and a day. And I’m very, very proud of you. It takes a lot of courage, doesn’t it, Maggie, for a boy Blair’s age to decide that he wants to be a girl from now on?”

Blair squeaked: “From now on? Mommy, you said it was for one day only. You promised that I wouldn’t have to go to school looking like a girl!” Blair, pulling away from his father’s arms, confronted Maggie, his arms folded in a “show me” freeze.

Maggie was, as always, reassuring: “Blair, sweetie, no one is going to force you to go to school looking like a girl. That’s why, remember, we bought so many unisex clothes that could be worn by either sex. You and I will be the only ones, I swear, to know that you’re dressed in girls’ clothes. Your new jeans could be boys’ jeans, right?”

Blair nodded. Maggie finished off: “We’ll start you in a new school next September, but until then, we don’t want you to get into fights. So, no skirts, dresses or halter tops at school. Agreed?” She struck a pose as the soul of compromise and discretion.

Blair grasped at the concession: “Mommy, don’t worry. I promise not to wear anything that makes me look like a girl to school. Daddy, let me show me what Mommy bought for me.”

Blair scampered into the living room with two of the shopping bags, where he started laying out his haul on the sofa.

Meanwhile, Kirk, last through the doorway, finally caught his father’s eye. “Kirk, what’s that on your ears?” Laird demanded. “Earrings, what gives? Am I going to end up with two daughters?” Angry, Laird jabbed Kirk’s right shoulder hard enough to push the boy backward.

“Dad, I’m not wearing earrings. They’re studs. All the cool dudes wear them. You don’t want me to be a dweeb, do you?”

“Well, no.” Laird seized Kirk’s right hand: “But do the cool dudes polish their nails too?”

“Yeah, a lot of them do. And some of them wear eyeliner, but that’s not for me. The only reason I’m wearing clear, you know, clear polish is to stop me from biting my nails.”

“Kirk, the solution is far worse than the problem. Most boys your age bite their nails. You’ll grow out of it. In the meantime, no nail polish or eyeliner, got it?”

Then Laird, seeing Kirk tear up, embraced his son, “There, there. I’m not mad at you. I just need one of my boys to look like the genuine article. You understand that, don’t you? I love you just as you are — all boy, through and through. Please God, don’t ever change.” He kissed Kirk on the forehead: “Great haircut, son. The military look really suits you.”

Kirk cheered up quickly: “You won’t ever see me again in polish. And eyeliner? Never! However, can I keep the studs? Even Steve Cowell — you know him, he’s our quarterback — even he wears ‘em.” Laird nodded assent. What else could he do? He realized that studs were popular with pro athletes, including even a super dude like Dennis Rodman, the former basketball star.

Maggie stayed silent until Kirk had gone to the kitchen for a glass of milk (or more likely, a swig from the carton); and then she turned on her man: “Laird, you surprise me. I didn’t think it mattered to you what the boys wore. You’ve always said that you wanted them to do their ‘own thing’, even if it meant, in Blair’s case, wearing a skirt.”

“Well, that was before I actually saw Blair in a skirt and pink panties! I’m sorry, Maggie, theory’s one thing, reality quite another. When I agreed to let you Blair vent his “feminine side,” I had no idea that it would take you less than a day to get him completely dolled up. Forgive me for being thick-headed, but I actually believed that there was part of Blair that wanted to be a boy. A sissy boy definitely, maybe even a gay boy, but a boy nonetheless. Yet obviously I was wrong. You’ve won a daughter, Maggie, and I have lost a son. I suppose Blair’s already wearing a bra.” When Maggie nodded, Laird’s face did its utmost to express his dismay, but failed by a grimace and a half.

Laird pleaded for a deal:

Maggie, if you leave Kirk alone, I’ll let you have a free hand with Blair. You and he, or should I say ‘she’, will determine how quickly or slowly he changes sex. You’ve got enough money of your own to pay for a private girls’ school, hormones, even surgery eventually. So you handle it. I won’t interfere; I even promise to tell Blair each day how pretty she is. You see — I can even change pronouns, when I have to. Just advise me what’s best for Blair and you’ve got my full cooperation. However, never — and I do mean never -- again try to turn Kirk into a sissy. I promise to help Kirk to accept his new sister, but you in turn must pledge to help Kirk to grow into a manly man, Blair’s total opposite. Agreed?

They embraced in forgiveness and accord, their deal sealed.

Fortunately or unfortunately, it’s difficult to know which word applied, for Blair was surely, after all, much too young know which was the best sex for him, Blair hadn’t heard his parents’ negotiations because he was avidly sorting through his purchases in the living room. Suddenly he wailed, “What gives? I’ve got the wrong clothes! This green dress isn’t mine. I could neverwear this green dress, ‘cause it’s too big. And it clashes with my eyes!”

In the kitchen a “manly” boy gasped — somehow his green dress had come home to haunt him. Did a bra and extra-firm panties accompany it? Spluttering milk onto his tee shirt, Kirk raced toward the living room in a desperate attempt to head off his parents. However, they reached Blair and the tell-tale green dress first.

“You’re right, sweetie. We didn’t buy this dress,” Maggie was saying. As she said it, Blair, unable to stop in time, crashed into the coffee table. He first yelped with pain, and then started blubbering. Maybe tears would distract them from the dress.

Laird was distressed for his older son: “I told you, Maggie, that it’s foolhardy to mess with Kirk’s gender identity and self-confidence. Now, you’ve got him crying, crying like a little girl.”

“I remember this dress,” Maggie announced to them all. “Kirk, put a cork in it. I’m not impressed by phony tears, especially coming from you. This is your dress, isn’t it? I saw you wearing it at Penney’s. Laird, honey, I swear to you that I never asked Kirk to put on this dress or any other dress. It was his idea to do it, and I was so upset with his boorish behavior at Penney’s that I made him go without ice cream and popcorn. I wouldn’t even let Blair share his extra-sprinkles double-scoop cone.”

“Kirk, in a dress?” Laird moaned. Then more angrily he spoke directly to Kirk: “What got into you? Do you want to be a girl too? Tell me now, and we’ll let you wear your dress to school tomorrow. Better yet, we will insist on your wearing it. After all, you’re better with your fists than poor Blair, and if you’re looking like an even bigger sissy than Blair, the kids are more likely to leave him alone.”

“Dad,” Kirk wailed, “I don’t want to dress like a girl. Never, never. You can’t make me. I’ll run away from home if you try to dress me like Blair.”

Kirk then explained that he’d worn the dress to distract the sales clerks while Blair did his shopping: “Blair was scared shi …., was really scared that the salesgirls would catch him in his undies, with his pecker somehow showing. Not that he has much to show! Even so, he was terrified. So I did what any big brother would do — I made myself as obnoxious as possible so that Blair could flit about under the radar.”

When Maggie confirmed Kirk’s story, Laird supposed that one of the clerks must have stuffed the dress into a shopping bag to “get even” with an obstreperous youth. He began to have serious doubts, however, about his theory as Blair, with ever-increasing concern and confusion, pronounced almost half of the clothes to be someone else’s: “They’re not mine. I’ve got better taste than that!”

While Kirk admitted to having tried on the bra and shapewear (Laird could scarcely think of anything worse for his elder son to have done in public), the boy noisily denied having ever seen the rest of the clothes that Blair had discovered and rejected. Yet Laird wasn’t buying Kirk’s protestations: “Son, we need you to tell the truth. If you tricked Maggie into buying girls’ clothes for you — if you actually want to wear them — well I guess it’s just as easy to raise two girls as one.”

Laird sighed like Sisyphus. Was he really going to have to roll this burden up hill more than? Unable to look Kirk in the eye, he smiled benevolently at Blair, who turned away in confusion.

Blair simply couldn’t believe that his big brother wanted to dress like a girl, even in play. Blair’s day had already had more upsets than a child can bear — at least without a hot dog and a hug. First, he had learned that that his ‘mother’ wanted him to act and to dress like a girl. Second, he had discovered that he didn’t mind — maybe even enjoyed — masquerading as a girl in public, so long as no one saw through his disguise. Blair also had no problem with being a girl around the house if it kept his mom happy. He even thought it a bit of a giggle to wear girls’ clothes to school, provided that no one there suspected. And why would they if he had the same sloppy appearance as most of the boys in the school?

His mom had her harmless whims, which Blair felt obliged to serve in order to lift her sagging spirits. And he did think it “harmless” to pretend to be Maggie’s daughter, for Blair believed he was in no more danger of turning into a “real” girl through acting and dressing like one than Corey Haim had in the TG movie, Anything for Love. It was all make-believe, wasn’t it? In the movies the crossdressed dude always revealed his true self in the final reel, didn’t he? Blair was sure that everything would work out right for Maggie and him in the end, for he was certain that he would always be able to distinguish the player from the play, and the actor from the role. Blair was old enough to know that they weren’t the same: After all, it was stupid to think that Robert Downey Jr. took drugs just because he played Sherlock Holmes, a coke fiend, or that Charlie Sheen was a “bad boy” just because he pretended to be one in the sitcom Two and a Half Men.

However, the third piece of news — that his big brother might want to dress and to act like a girl — menaced Blair’s sense of security. It was no big deal for Blair to flirt with a skirt, for he couldn’t remember a time when someone wasn’t calling him a sissy. He had been told so often that he looked, walked and quacked like a queer duck, that the sudden realization that he could actually pass for a female was for Blair, as they say, like water off a duck’s back. It wasn’t something to fret over.

Yet Kirk was somehow different. Blair had always considered his brother to be pure drake, more eagle than duck, as macho as a bird could get. If Kirk could be a transvesty, it meant that nothing was what it seemed. It meant that Blair was living in a world full of smoke and mirrors, where everyone was stumbling about, perpetually lost, even Kirk.

It was important to Blair’s security that Kirk remain what he had always appeared to be — an average heterosexual kid, with nothing much in the way of looks, talent or skills to suggest that he was anything out of the ordinary. Kirk was solid; he was the adamantine rock upon which Blair, motherless for most of the life that he could remember, had built his sense of place, self and safety. Kirk was not supposed to crumble like talc. Blair therefore begged Kirk to clarify that none of the “dainties” in the shopping bags were things that Kirk actually wanted to wear.

All three — Blair, Laird and Maggie — had in the end little choice but to accept the “clerks’ revenge” story being peddled by Kirk. Maggie, showing everyone the cash register receipt, admitted that she had somehow bought the extra clothes unwittingly. Kirk had never asked for them. So how had they gotten into the bags? “I guess the sales clerks were, as Kirk says, out to punish him for disturbing the tranquility of their empty department; they must have snuck the clothes into the bags to get us wondering about Kirk’s manliness.

And it did get Laird wondering about Kirk’s virility. While Blair’s childish concerns were easily soothed, Laird realized that if son were a sissy, then both might be. Weren’t limp wrists, lisps and a passion for pink hereditary? Weren’t there entire families in which everyone sought to change gender? What if his XY chromosome was just potent enough to inseminate his deceased wife with boys, but not strong enough to ensure that her XX chromosome didn’t eventually prevail, making them girls at puberty?

Laird also appreciated that Blair and Kirk were the product of nurture as much as nature. Naturally it bothered him — Was he not a man and a father? If pricked from behind, did he not bleed? — that Maggie was determined to turn one of his sons into her daughter. Could he trust her to leave the other alone?

He definitely found it disconcerting when Maggie declared herself to be too busy to return Kirk’s share of the girls’ wear:

Laird honey, the clothes didn’t cost enough to bother to go to the bother to take them back. Blair will eventually grow into them. In the meantime, as punishment for his bad behavior, Kirk can stow them away in his bedroom. The sight of a blue dress hanging in his closet for the next one or two years should remind Kirk to behave like a gentleman the next time he accompanies Blair and me shopping.

“But mom, the bitches …” Kirk began before Maggie warned him, “Kirk, wash your mouth!”

Kirk resumed: “Those bit…ter salesgirls added twelve — twelve, you counted ‘em — pairs of panties. I don’t have that many underpants. Where am I going to put all those panties?”

Maggie replied:

Well, Kirk, I’m sure you’ll find some place in your room to hide your dainties. The best place for the panties, girdle and bras might be in the back of your underwear drawer, behind your undies. You can make room for them by throwing out any of your undies with holes in them. As for the socks, the white ones go to the front of the drawer, the pink and lavender ones, to the back. That should work unless you dress in the dark.

Laird scowled: “Kirk, understand, you’re just storing the girls’ clothes for Blair. Hand them over to Blair when he, she’s old enough to wear them. Under no circumstances, are you to wear any of them yourself — even as a joke, no matter who might ask you too. You’re a boy and I insist that you dress like a boy.”

Kirk, his head hung low, sort of nodded.

“What about me, daddy?” Blair asked. “I’m a boy too. Don’t you want me to dress like a boy?”

“Blair, honey, you’re different from Kirk,” replied Laird:

You’ve always been more delicate, more sensitive, more like your dear departed mother. You do so remind me of her. Kirk should stick to boys’ clothes because he’d make a really ugly girl. You, in contrast, look absolutely adorable as a girl. You’re exceptionally pretty, far too pretty to be a boy. Maggie’s right: You were born to be a girl, just as Kirk was born to be a boy.

Since Blair still looked doubtful, Maggie jumped in:

Blair, sweetie, boys have always treated you badly because you looked and acted like “a sissy” in their eyes. As a girl, you’ll be treated much, much better. Instead of trying to diss you, they will be trying to kiss you. Even that Justin Bibber kid will want to kiss you. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?

Blair’s face went beet-red. “Yes,” Maggie thought, “you’d love to mess around with a mop-haired, pimple-free, teenaged boy. I’ll have to watch my daughter closely once she’s sufficiently altered for her to permit boys to reach home base.”

The rest of the evening had the appearance of tranquility, with Blair, who changed into a pale blue nightie after dinner, snuggling under Maggie’s arm, and Kirk, in denim shirt, Levi jeans, and black Converse sneakers, sitting by himself on the far side of the room. The kids had insisted on watching Mrs. Doubtfire.

The last thing Laird wanted to watch was a movie about a father who dressed as a “mature” woman to stay close to his children, but he appreciated that both Blair and Kirk had just gone through a lot that day. So the kids got their way, and Laird squirmed as his son and “daughter” laughed uproariously at the thought that their dad might end up in skirts. He looked over toward Maggie: “She’s not heard a word of the film,” he thought. “Blair has her rapt attention.”

Laird suddenly realized that he was jealous of the attention Maggie was giving to Blair: “The sooner that kid ends the suspense and admits that he’s a girl and has always been a girl, the sooner we can pump him full of estrogen, cut off his willy, and pack him off to a girls’ boarding school. Then and only then can Maggie and me get back to full-time loving.”

There’s no telling what Laird would have thought had he realized that there was no way legally to “cut off Blair’s willy” for another six years, even in Denmark and Zimbabwe. Laird expected Blair’s total transformation to take less than a year, for he was a firm believer in Maggie’s ability to get whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted it. She wouldn’t let American law or physicians’ ethics get in any plans she had for Blair.

That night, after they had gone to bed, both kids were awakened by a loud argument emanating from the bedroom shared by Maggie and Laird. It was frightening: Never had their “parents” been so angry with each other. After forty anxious minutes of eavesdropping and sleeplessness, Blair finally divined that they weren’t fighting about him. Indeed, he heard his daddy yell, “You know that Blair’s not the issue. We both agree that he’ll be happier as a girl, but Kirk’s an entirely different matter.”

Now convinced that he only had to dress like a girl to keep his parents happy and their “marriage” intact, Blair drifted off to the land of the sleep fairy. Kirk, however, was still tossing and turning a full hour after the argument stopped. He had been forcefully reminded that his father wouldn’t permit the slightest deviation by Kirk from gender “normalcy”.

“My life’s a straightjacket,” Kirk muttered, “while Blair’s is Joseph’s multi-colored coat. One minute he’s a boy, the next, a little girl. He’ll probably be a boy again tomorrow. Life’s not fair.” All too true, and Kirk was unable to fall asleep until he’d yanked his new studs from his ears. Two drops of blood stained his pillow case.

Maggie made sure that Blair dressed as a girl the following morning. It was Sunday and, to get him into an actual dress, she insisted that the whole family go to church for the first time in their irreligious lives.

Maggie had to accept Blair’s word that he was wearing his fanciest satin panties, since neither child was willing to let a “woman” see them in their underwear. Maggie tried to explain to Blair that it was common for “we females” to see each other undressed, even naked. “It’s different for us girls,” she explained. “If you really want to be my daughter, you’ll let me give you a bubble bath, dry you off, and then dress you, starting with your bra and panties.”

Blair did agree to stand bare-chested, wearing nothing but a towel around his midriff, while Maggie affixed his training bra, but only because he couldn’t figure out how to close the clasps by himself. But there was no way that he was going to drop the towel in front of his mommy. Maggie had come into his life at an age, ten years and counting, that he had already become shy about his body. She had never seen his boy parts, and that wasn’t about to change now, no matter what she said “us girls” did together. They all sounded like lesbians.

It was embarrassing enough for Blair to have to tell Maggie that, yes, he had taped his balls into his body and his dick between his legs, so that, as Maggie had explained, nothing could possibly show if he ever forgot to sit demurely like a girl. (She also intended the tape remind him that if needed to pee when they were away from home, that he must do it while seated in a stall in the girl’s toilet. He was never to chance standing.

Although Blair didn’t think he could ever find the nerve to enter a women’s washroom, sitting down to pee had in recent months become second nature. Even Kirk claimed to have been sitting down to pee for the past three months — ever since Maggie had berated the two boys for missing the bowl “most of the time”. Blair, an obedient child, hadn’t once stood to urinate since the harangue. He even squatted when he peed outdoors. Kirk, by contrast, always used an available urinal, and at home he left the toilet seat up more often than not. Blair had gotten into the habit of closing toilet seats to cover for his brother.

This Sunday morning Blair had largely dressed himself, although he’d turned to Maggie for help with his bra, dress zipper, makeup and hair. He looked spectacular in his white tights and “Cinderella” taffeta dress in soft peach polyester with pearl accents. His white “Rachel” sandals (with embroidered flowers and beads) would have been the perfect finish to his “look,” had Blair been able to cope with their two-inch heels. He tottered about like a drunk.

Kirk stopped laughing long enough to suggest that Maggie teach Blair “how to walk like a girl”.

“No can do,” Maggie replied, “We don’t have time for lessons. We’ll be late for church. After all, we’re not even sure where to find it. No, we have to leave right now. Kirk, hang close to your sister and make sure that she doesn’t fall flat on her face.”

It wasn’t surprising that Maggie and the family had only a vague idea where the church might be located, for neither she nor Laird had ever paid the slightest attention to organized religion. Laird was so ignorant of Christianity that he surmised that Jesus of Nazareth must have been, given his name, a Mexican Indian.

Why then did Maggie insist on a church? Because she wanted an excuse to dress Blair up in his Sunday best. In America in the early twenty-first century there weren’t many opportunities for a young girl to wear her finery.

In the single, yet empty, church in their post-Christian suburb there was little or no chance of meeting a friend or neighbor who knew Blair as a boy. However, Maggie refused to attend it because she had no intention of letting her son Kirk come anywhere near a Catholic priest; thus the family drove to Paradise, a nearby college town to find an alternative to Our Lady of the Lustrous Child.

Despite a population of 92,000 souls, Paradise’s sole “religious institution” (the non-committal designation on the Fraternal Sorority of Sea Otters’ sign listing the town’s facilities) also had difficulty filling the pews, and to attract a critical mass of paying customers, St. Wicca of the Sacred Crescent, Cross, Mushroom and Menorah had not only dispensed with pews in favor of prayer rugs but also offered a religious mish-mash that it hoped would exclude nobody. (Even atheists could buy a certificate, suitable for framing, signed by St. Wicca’s Board of Directors affirming that “…. [the atheist’s name goes here] is too intelligent and rational to believe in God.”)

After hanging their soggy rainwear on wall pegs just inside the entryway, Laird’s family nervously entered the place of worship. Although St. Wicca sold postcards of a haloed President Barack Obama for five dollars each in its outer lobby, the walls inside its main hall were as unadorned and devoid of religious symbolism as a US government office. Indeed, the only hint that St. Wicca was a place of devotion was the twelve-foot-tall statue of गणेश (or "Ganesh", for the handful of readers whose Sanskrit is rusty), the elephant-headed deity revered by Hindus as “The Remover of Obstacles” (as a prominent plaque explained).

Although Maggie wasn’t sure which book of the Bible related the story of Ganesha, she considered “The Remover of Obstacles” to be an auspicious omen for Blair because Ganesha, originally as human in form as an American boy, had had his head cut off by omnipotent Shiva. Shiva (pronounced Shee-vah, according to the plaque — could one get more female than that?) had then replaced the original with an elephant’s head. Thus transformed, Ganesha had become a true immortal — like Lillian Gish, Katherine Hepburn, Meryl Streep or Paris Hilton. If only Blair could be so fortunate! And it was only his littlest head that Maggie hoped to have cut off.

On entering the church, the entire family had been immediately drawn, as intended by St. Wicca’s preacher-facilitator, Dr. Bryce Frederick Mercury-Wilde, to the statue of Ganesha. Mercury-Wilde had also arranged their second stop: in full, enticing view to whoever stood directly in front of Ganesha, it was a wall plaque containing “The Ten Commandments.” As none of the family had been able to read the original Hebrew when they had seen Charlton Heston bring the Ten Commandments down from a desert mount, they were naturally curious to see if any of the (translated) Commandments applied to them. (Kirk, having heard some schoolyard jokes, wondered, for example, what exactly it meant about “not coveting your neighbor’s ass.” Did it apply only to neighbors of the same sex?)

Somewhat disappointingly, there was nothing Mosaic about the so-called Commandments; they were instead a list of “Rules for proper comportment within the religious edifice”, as follows:

1) No running, skipping or frolicking
2) No spitting, belching or tooting your own horn
3) No smoking (except Holy Weed)
4) No drinking (except Fair Trade coffee)
5) No eating (except organically-grown, local fruits & veggies)
6) No use of electronics (phones, games, iPods, stoves, etc.)
7) No displays of emotion or religious fanaticism
8) No sandals, swimsuits, bare feet or visible nipples
9) No snoring or frequent yawning
10) Absolutely no cross-dressing!

Maggie was appalled at Number 10. The elephant god seemed bent on trampling her most cherished desires. “I am beginning to think,” she announced to the family, “that this is not the right church for us. Perhaps we should leave now, before the service gets underway.”

Blair, giggling too hard to have read past Number 2, protested: “But mommy, I went to a lot of trouble to dress up for this place. It seems like a fun church. Can’t we stay for a while?” Kirk, having read Number 10, but seeing an opportunity to please his “sister” while teasing their mother, backed up Blair: “Yeah, Maggie, Blair should have a chance to show off her new threads.” (To Maggie, he whispered: “Don’t worry, Blair’s looks too much like a real babe to get busted.”)

So, despite Laird’s misgivings, the family seated themselves on four prayer rugs, each with its own colorful Zen Buddhist motif, in the middle third of the “religious edifice,” mingling there with the other twenty or so worshippers present. One of them was a bearded man wearing a crucifix, keffiyeh and kippah (a Palestinian shawl and Jewish skullcap respectively). Immediately he clambered to his feet and hustled over to them: “Salmus, newcomers! May peace be with and upon you; but you can’t all sit together. Here we keep the sexes strictly separated for propriety’s sake. Look around and see that it is so.” And so, it was: Blair and Maggie were the only “females” on the left side of the hall.

Maggie, a true-pink feminist through and through, would normally have objected and stood — well, actually squatted — her ground, but she couldn’t risk bringing undue attention to Blair. So, muttering all the while about Abigail Adams, Susan B. Anthony and Sara Palin (Maggie blaming the ex-governor for the church’s sexist rule), she shepherded her “daughter” to the women’s fold. Once there, a college girl offered them skullcaps to wear, its being unacceptable for a female to worship at St. Wicca’s with her hair uncovered. (Maggie noted only one female without a kippah: a teen girl with a shaved head and nose piercings.)

Finally the service began as Dr. Mercury-Wilde emerged from behind the elephant god. He was dressed in a colorful, embroidered kaftan in violet and velvet. At first, Laird’s family couldn’t understand a word he said. (Laird later learned from the officious, bearded man that the good doctor, believed that Catholicism and Islam were, or had been, wise to use Latin and Classical Arabic, “dead” languages learned by rote “because these conveyed the absolute inscrutability of God.” Likewise, he used Old Church Slavonic for the liturgy. He had originally tried Akkadian, the language of ancient Babylon, after deciding that it was “truly as dead as a Norwegian parrot”, but he tended to slur his Akkadian, causing the congregation’s Marxists to fret that he was trying to put something over on them in Hebrew. In memory of the original, failed experiment, many congregants still greeted each other with Salmus, the Akkadian for ‘peace’).

The only thing that kept the family awake (although Laird once violated Rule 9 loudly enough to attract a stern look from Dr. Mercury-Wilde) was the two-boy choir, who manfully attempted the mixture of medieval plainsong, Wiccan chant and Tantric mantra required by the liturgy. Maggie couldn’t quite decode the language being used; it might even have been English, but no one had taught the boys not to mumble.

After the ritual sharing of a marijuana bong (Laird wasn’t pleased to see that Kirk handled it with familiarity), it was time for the sermon by Dr. Mercury-Wilde. Although none of the family stayed awake through it all, later in the car, with each one contributing a piece of the puzzle, they concluded it had been a discussion of “how to address God”. That was a very difficult thing to do, said the preacher, because no one knew what God was like or whether “he” even existed.

Dr. Mercury-Wilde immediately apologized to the congregation for the use of the word “he” because it was next-to-impossible for God to be anything like a human, and God was definitely not an elderly male with a flowing white beard. If not human, then what? Well, God wasn’t an animal, thing, spirit, sprite, animus, angel, force, light, essence, entity, first mover, big banger, clockmaker, space alien, Egyptian potentate, sun or star, black hole or nebula, planet or comet, Nature or Earth mother. What then was God? The preacher admitted that he hadn’t the faintest idea; “I only know what God is not. Does God even exist? You’ve got me — that’s a question above my pay grade. But I do know this: It’s impossible to find the words to address God. Don’t even try.”

Dr. Mercury-Wilde then uttered some imprecations in an unknown language, ending with, “Klaatu barata nikto,” his standard way of saying “Amen”. The two-boy choir repeatedly chanted a Zoroastrian prayer, “Righteousness is the best. It is happiness,” as their preacher sashayed to the lone exit, which he intended to block long enough to thank his flock as each of its “lambs” stumbled out of the darkened hall toward the gloom of the noonday rain.

When Laird’s family, having despaired of finding an alternate route out, finally reached him, Dr. Mercury-Wilde warmly embraced each of them in turn, giving each what he called “the kiss of peace” firmly and moistly on their lips. He lingered longest with Laird, who later swore that he had been ‘Soul-kissed’. Whatever actually happened, Laird was rendered speechless, spluttering and spitting. That left Maggie to speak for the family.

After welcoming them to the St. Wicca community and inquiring about the family’s home coordinates, Dr. Mercury-Wilde asked whether “one of the children” might wish to join the church choir. “They’re both of the right age, after all, and as you have seen, the choir could use some extra bodies.”

As Maggie had “read his beads” even before she had caught a glimpse of Mercury-Wilde’s hand flickering across her husband’s buttocks, she got downright mean: “Are you sure you’re interested in both of my children? Judging from what I’ve witnessed so far, it is my thirteen-year-old son who alone would interest you.”

“Madam!” the preacher said in injured rage. “Are you a homophobe? Yes, you’ve guessed correctly: I am indeed a gay man. But I am not a pedophile and it’s outrageous, simply outrageous, for you to suggest that I am sexually attracted to young boys simply because I am looking for another adult male with whom to share my life. Your brats don’t attract me; however, Laird does. He’s definitely my type.”

The good doctor leered at Laird, who turned away in confusion. “If you hadn’t such a narrow, bigoted view of the world,” Mercury-Wilde continued, “I was going to pay the two of you the high compliment of, first, asking whether you had an open marriage, and second, if I heard a mature answer, then whether Laird was willing to come with me this afternoon to meet my lover Bruno. Laird, you’re an obvious bisexual; don’t limit your affections to a blatant homophobe. I’m a loving man with slow hands, and Bruno is hung like a Kazakh stallion.”

It took both Kirk and Blair to hold Laird back, to stop him from slugging the preacher.

Taken aback, Maggie stammered, “I … I’m n…n…not a b….b…bigot. You’ve only g…g…got young b…b…boys in the choir. I figured you wanted another one — to chant, I mean. I meant no more than that.”

“Madam, why do you mention boys, given that you have only girls to offer the choir?”

“What the f…k!” Kirk and Laird immediately hurled themselves at Mercury-Wilde, Kirk kicking frantically, and Laird punching away. “I’d strangle you, you sick bastard,” Laird yelled, “but it would give you too much of a thrill to feel a real man’s hands around your throat.” Laird then joined Kirk in kicking Dr. Mercury-Wilde, who had fallen to the floor.

With each kick, Kirk shouted, “Can’t you see that I’m a boy, you sick fuck? Does that feel like a girl’s kick?”

In self-protection, hapless Mercury-Wilde assumed a fey version of the fetal position. His ears could still hear, however, and it gradually dawned on him, as Blair and Maggie begged with their “menfolk” to stop hurting him, that maybe he’d been mistaken about the gender of Laird’s two children. It was so difficult these days, he moaned, to tell the sexes apart. Yet he knew he had to apologize.

“I beg your forgiveness,” the preacher sobbed. “I truly beg forgiveness from you all, but especially from you, dear, dear Kirk. You’re obviously a boy. It’s now obvious.”

“Then why did you say I look like an effing girl? Does a girl wear a tie and blazer? (Earlier he had protested at having to wearing them, preferring his standard jeans and a tee; but it now suited him to take shelter in their mystical masculinity.)

“Why? Why did I get things so wrong? Because … of the … damn … Ouija board,” Mercury-Wilde gasped.

“What the …!” All four of Laird’s family simultaneously uttered a profanity, each starting with a different letter.

The preacher, now risen to his knees, explained: “You all heard the sermon. You heard me say that I don’t know how to address God. Well that’s true, tragically true. I don’t know how to talk to God. What sort of preacher is that — someone who can’t talk to God?”

Not much of one, Laird’s family concurred.

“But I have found a way to interact with God. God’s in the Ouija board. Last night I was sort of depressed about the size of the congregation and choir. So I asked the Board if either was going to grow. The planchette started moving ‘round the board like a soul possessed, spelling out words so frantically that Bruno scarcely had time to write them down. What do you think they said?”

“Well what? Laird’s family chimed in unison.

“First, that I had a chance to enroll a new family in the congregation — for the first time in months! Well, that was truly encouraging! I would have gotten down on my knees to thank God if I thought there was anybody listening. But I panicked, truly panicked today, because the Ouija lied to me about your children. True, it did say that I would know I had the right family because it had two children. It even got their ages right. Ten and thirteen, right? But the Ouija hopelessly faked me out when it indicated -- quite specifically, there being no equivocation — that the two children were of the same sex. Which sex it didn’t say; I wish it had been clearer about their both being boys or both, girls.”

His abusers had grown silent. None of them liked where this story was headed.

“I saw you worshipping Ganesha. As usual, I had secreted myself behind his statue in order to get a first look at my audience. Then, as I intended, you went over to read The Ten Commandments. I saw your back and neck muscles tense, Laird, when you reached Rule 10. Even your firm buttocks clenched — delightfully I might add. As for Maggie, she almost jumped out of her skin. I could tell that Rule 10 had triggered a discussion about leaving. I can’t tell you how joyous, and unsettled, I was when you all decided to stay for the service.’

‘Unsettled? What do you mean by that?” Maggie, now quite subdued, quietly asked.

‘Unsettled because everything — the Ouija board’s prediction, the family’s reaction to Rule 10 — just about everything told me that one of your children, Maggie, is crossdressing.”

Laird intervened: “Are you, a man of God, actually saying that you would actually enforce that ignorant rule?”

“Against a mere child? Never! Rule 10 is only intended to chase away the drag queens from “Cleopatra’s Clones”. You may have noticed its neon lights; it’s a gay bar only half a block away. I used to go there myself — that’s where I met my fashionista Bruno — until its drag queens, who all want the entire world to know that they’re guys, started standing around the back third of this hall, loudly gossiping and bickering. They were driving away all the paying customers,” the preacher wailed.

“So, despite what the sign says, you’d have no problem with a crossdresser in your children’s choir?” Maggie looked significantly, but furtively, at Blair.

“None at all. I was trying to find a way to tell you so, but then — it’s all my fault — I became distracted by Laird. I do apologize, Laird, for coming on to you so strongly. I’m usually more subtle than that. Normally I would have invited you first to join our Board of Directors; it generally meets for late suppers at my place. There is always more wine than food when we supp. After a while, in vino veritas, as the good book says.”

“It wouldn’t have worked, buddy. I don’t drink alcohol. But I wouldn’t have punched you out if you had moved more carefully. I’ve got nothing against gays, unless they get unduly aggressive. Why in hell did you grope me at the entry to a church? Why did you insult my boy Kirk?”

The questions triggered another bout of weeping: “I’m a woeful sinner. A stupid sinner,” Mercury-Wilde sobbed.

Only after Blair, taking pity, helped him to his feet could the preacher finish his tale:

When the four of you finally got to the door, I knew — absolutely knew -- that one of your children is a crossdresser. But God help me, I couldn’t tell whether it was Kirk or Blair. Both seemed so natural. So I basically spun the roulette wheel in my foolish, wicked brain and it came up ‘Kirk’. Now, don’t take this the wrong way, Kirk; and please don’t kick me again. But there does seem to be slightly more of the feminine in you than of the masculine in Blair. Now, I know you don’t want to hear that, Kirk, but a boy your age must have learned by now that half of you comes from your mother and that part of every male is, therefore, intrinsically feminine. If that weren’t the case, men would be heartless beasts, incapable of enjoying music, the arts, or the beauty of women. To detect the feminine in you, lad, was no insult. But I do humbly apologize, with all my being, for concluding that you’re a girl pretending to be a boy. It just couldn’t be, and still can’t be, the other case — that sweet, darling Blair is actually a boy. The Ouija board must have lied to me! But why?

The preacher averted his face, protected his crotch with both hands, and tried to use the door jam to shield his shins. He expected Kirk to lash out at him again. Instead, Kirk, an odd, indecipherable look on his face, actually relaxed for the first time since the preacher had begun to speak as crazily as a Mad Hatter. Even more surprisingly, Kirk now thanked the preacher for an eye-opening church service. Kirk even seemed sincere.

What more was there to say? It seemed unnecessarily risky to tell the truth about Blair to such an unbalanced individual as Dr. Mercury-Wilde, and so the family, without further ado, took polite leave of his despondency.

After they had gotten into the car, Maggie turned to Blair: “See, I told you, sweetie. You’re definitely not a boy. You never really were. As the preacher said, there’s nothing masculine about you. What does my pretty daughter have to say about that?”

Blair beamed: “Say? Only this — that I’m as good an actor as Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams. Now will you believe that one day I’ll be able to buy a house for you in Hollywood?”

Maggie was speechless until they reached the pancake house they had chosen for brunch. And even there she seemed distracted, lost in her doubts.

As the family drove to the restaurant in the drizzle, there was no need to discuss the obvious: They would never return to St. Wicca of the Sacred Crescent, Cross, Mushroom and Menorah. Despite the lingering buzz from the bong, they had learnt that formal religion was not their cup of tea.

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. So far we have learned that Blair likes dressing up as a girl and that Kirk doesn't like having a New Age preacher mistake him for one.

A Teacher’s Choice

“Mommy, can I change into my play clothes?”

“Of course, we don’t want you to get your dress dirty. Both you and Kirk should change into your everyday clothes. Blair, sweetie, do you want me to help you find something suitable from the clothes you bought at Penney’s?”

“No, it’s okay; I don’t need your help. I know what I want to wear,” Blair called out as he scrambled upstairs.

“Don’t forget,” she called after him, “I don’t want my daughter to wear boys’ clothes. No boy’s clothes on a Sunday!”

“No worries, mommy, you’re going to love the way I’ll look. Kirk, beat you to the upstairs bathroom!”

Kirk shouted: “No way that’ll happen. Blair, sissy girls like you put more energy into flapping your wrists than you do into moving your legs.”

And sure enough, Kirk reached the upstairs bathroom (albeit thanks to a last-second body block). Blair didn’t have to wait long, however, for Kirk literally raced into and out of the little room, leaving behind a tell-tale puddle as evidence that he was, once again, disobeying house rules. He had not sat to pee. As usual, Blair tidied up after his brother.

After a whirlwind tour through his clothes closet, Blair soon appeared at the top of the first-floor landing dressed in black from toe to head: black Mary Janes; black socks, panties and bra; black gaucho pants; a black top with a sequined neckline; black lipstick, eye shadow and mascara; and a black silk neckerchief around his forehead. Although every individual item came from the girls’ or women’s department (he had filched the neckerchief and lingerie from Maggie’s dresser), he looked more Goth than female. Indeed, though entirely dressed in women’s wear, Blair looked disconcertingly male to Maggie because of the plastic, medieval broadsword he was furiously waving around his head. After proclaiming loudly that he was “Zorro,” Blair slid down the banister in a most unladylike way, bottom first.

“So that’s why Blair insisted on buying the gaucho pants!” Maggie realized. “It was to dress up like Zorro.”

Maggie spent a miserable afternoon watching the two children play “Zorro”, the self-proclaimed “Fox” whose swordplay foiled the would-be tyrants of Old California while rescuing damsels in distress. It was bad enough to have to watch her “daughter” dashing about boisterously like a little boy on a sugar high, but worse was Blair’s adamant refusal to play any other character: He was Zorro and only Zorro. Which meant, horrors, that Kirk played all the other roles — whether the commandante, a friar, a dimwitted soldier, a damsel in distress, even the governor’s elegant wife. True, Kirk didn’t wear a dress for any of his roles, but that was small consolation for his parents.

Laird could barely contain himself: “Maggie, what the hell? If Blair is to become our daughter, then why is Kirk the one speaking in falsetto and running around the house wearing a bra around his face like an Easter bonnet?”

Maggie, lacking an answer, corralled Kirk: “What do you think you’re doing, young man? Don’t you realize that you’re upsetting your father? He doesn’t want two daughters. Why don’t you go outside to play? Maybe there are some kids at the sandlot.”

“Are you kidding? Maggie, it’s pouring rain. My friends will all be inside. Why can’t I play with my … sister?”

Kirk had hesitated before he said “sister”, but he had of course come up with the perfect word to bring a smile to Maggie’s face. “Yes, you can play with Blair,” Maggie said. “Just don’t let her get so wrapped up in her role as Zorro that she forgets she’s a girl. You haven’t changed your mind, have you? You do still want Blair to go away as soon as possible to a girls’ boarding school, don’t you?”

“More than ever. I never let Blair forget she’s a girl. I even told her that I wouldn’t let her play Zorro unless she agreed that Zorro is actually a woman in disguise.”

“And Blair agreed to that?” When Kirk nodded with a wink and a smile, Maggie said: “Okay, have fun with Senorita Zorro, but do take that bra off your head. It does not amuse your father.”

Kirk, dispensing with the brassiere, thereafter wore a skirt over his jeans whenever he played a female role in the game of Zorro, which seemed to Laird to be most of the time. Senorita Zorro seemed so be so intent on rescuing damsels in distress that a neutral observer might have suspected her of lesbianism. The skirt bothered Laird even more than the bra because he recognized it as one of Kirk’s “punishment purchases”. Why had the boy dug it out? It was supposed to be lost in the back of his closet.

For dinner, Blair put on a dress — enthusiastically, and at his own suggestion, much to Maggie’s relief. He looked so pretty in it that even Laird showered his “daughter” with compliments. After dinner, Blair sat through a manicure and one hundred brush strokes; as Maggie toiled, Blair not only quizzed her (like a method actor doing research) about how to think, act, dress, and move like a girl, but he also requested a subscription to Discovery Girls Magazine.

By the time that she tucked Blair in for the night, Maggie was in Seventh Heaven — not only had Blair asked to wear a nightie, but “she” also had also asked to wear Kirk’s most satiny “punishment panties” underneath. “I love the way they feel on my skin,” Blair purred after modestly asking mommy to turn her back until Blair had veiled the “undies” with the nightie. It was only day two of the experiment, but already Blair had sleepily said, “It’s fun being a girl. Mommy, is it all right if we keep playing this game?”

“Sweetie, there is no reason why we can’t play the game for the rest of your life.”

Blair was smiling as “she” fell asleep.

The next morning, a school day, Blair, still dressed in his girl’s nightie, warmed Maggie’s heart by declaring, without prompting, that he wanted to go to school that day in “girls’ clothes”. When Maggie started to say that he’d have to wear the most unisex and nondescript items in his new wardrobe, Blair interrupted:

Mommy, what do you think I am? Stupid? I’d rather die than have the kids at school realize that I’m dressing like a girl. There’s no way that I’m going to wear anything that makes me look like a girl; but we bought lots of clothes at Penney’s that a boy can wear without looking like a sissy; most of my cotton panties, for instance, don’t look much different from boys’ undies. Boys can wear pale blue and yellow.

Maggie wasn’t convinced that Blair, of all kids, could pass as a boy while dressed entirely in girls’ clothes. However, after thoroughly messing up his hair, she sent him upstairs to get dressed for school. He came back dressed entirely in his Saturday purchases, and while Maggie inspected his “new look,” he deliberately scratched the crotch of his jeans, while slouching like a slob. Afraid that Blair might start spitting on the floor if she delayed his departure much longer, Maggie quickly noted that Blair was wearing his hopscotch sneakers (minus their charms and half their straps undone); low-cut, white socks (with blue trim); Levi straight-leg jeans (with five-pocket styling and reinforcing studs); a blue Nike tee shirt with a “I ♥ my team” graphic; and a gray hoodie with smocked cuffs and hem. For the first time in his life, Blair had tucked only part of the tee shirt into his jeans. By his normal, fastidious standards, Blair looked sloppy enough to be a boy. He’d even dabbed some dirt behind his ears to divert attention from his amethyst ear studs.

Maggie gulped: “Blair isn’t wearing a stitch of male clothing; yet the kid has never looked more masculine.” Even so, she wanted confirmation that Blair could “pass as a boy” in his new duds before she’d allow “her” to set off for school. So she asked, “Kirk, does your sister look enough like a boy to risk going to school.”

“Huh, huh. I guess so. At least, Blair doesn’t look as much like a sissy like ‘she’ usually does.”

Blair’s face beamed, as he declared: “I’ve done it! I’ve got the perfect costume to fool the entire school. One day I’ll tell them I psyched them out by acting like a boy while dressing like a girl. Won’t that be fun? I’m going to be a famous actor. Don’t you think I’m already quite a Tootsie?”

“Huh, huh. Children, be sure to grab an umbrella; it’s raining outside. Oh Kirk, it’s vital that you help Blair come across as a boy today. So spend more time with her than you usually do.”

“Ah, Maggie, do I have to?” Kirk whined.

“Yes, you heard me. If you want Blair to feel comfortable as a girl, comfortable enough to attend a girls’ school in September, then you will, young man, need to cooperate now. With our help and Blair’s clothes sense there is no reason why Blair need ever dress in male attire again. So do help the family, Kirk, by running interference for your sister as she starts her touchdown run.”

“Gotcha,” Kirk shouted, as he and Blair scampered out into the heavy rain, their hoodies up, their umbrellas left behind. Normally, Blair carried a royal blue umbrella to school, but it did not fit into hi “tomboy look”. Real boys got wet.

The school day went tolerably well by the kids’ usual standards. The rain let up sufficiently for them to eat outside with hoodies up and for Kirk to kick around a soccer ball. For the first time in memory, Blair actually asked to join their impromptu, pick-up game after lunch. Kirk used some choice expletives to evaluate Blair’s performance: “!!@#%@$!&%!!, Blair, you’re an utter spazz! I’ve never seen anyone as hopeless at frigging soccer as you. You play worse than a frigging girl. Give it up — go back to your frigging books before you frigging humiliate your entire frigging family.”

Thus, while word spread about Blair’s extraordinary ineptness at sports, no one thought he played “like a girl”. That’s because he played much worse than a girl, so much worse that Blair remained what he’d always been — a sissy to some, a “spazz” to the rest. While his amethyst studs and hopscotch sneakers drew some sniggers, only two kids called him a queer or fag, which made it a fairly normal day for a “boy” as precious and pretty as Blair.

Thus, Blair might have counted the day a success had it not been for his teacher, Miss Lucretia Umbridge, a terror in starched pink. It was common knowledge amongst the schoolchildren that the only fun that Miss Umbridge (heaven help anyone, who called her Ms.) had in life came from making life miserable for them. It wasn’t just that she was overly strict, but she also deliberately humiliated the fat kids, the skinny kids, the slow-witted kids, the awkward kids, the shy kids, the tall girls and the short boys in front of the entire class. She seemed to have a special animus towards boys who exhibited any animal spirits, and any boy who failed to do his homework risked being hit with her ruler in defiance of Board regulations and school policy.

She also openly played favorites, a vice which had been a mixed blessing for Blair. True, she had rescued him from bullying on several occasions, but he would have been bullied less had he not been widely regarded as “her special pet.” While there may have been one or two girls that Ms. Umbridge liked better, Blair deserved his dubious reputation as “the boy who makes Umbridge cream her panties” because the teacher frequently lauded him as a student to emulate. Her standard rap went something like this:

Rufus [or Jack or Bill — all the boys had heard it], if you’re going to get ahead in life, if you’re ever going to find a girlfriend, you should dress more like Blair. Look at how neat and natty he looks. He’s immaculate. He didn’t throw on the first clothes that he found lying on his closet floor; he’s actually colored-coordinated. And he has combed, straightened and sprayed his hair. Despite its length, there’s not a hair out of place. Would it kill you, Peter [or Rufus, Bill etc.] to use a hairbrush?

Most of all, Miss Umbridge openly lauded Blair’s gentle manner, obedience and bookishness. It’s a wonder, then, that he survived the year at all. With a teacher like her in his corner it didn’t much matter what he wore — matter to his “fellow” students that is. However, what he wore seemed to matter a lot to Miss Umbridge. She was not at all pleased that Monday morning to see her pet poodle looking like a scruffy cur.

Blair’s unkempt hair, dirty ears and untucked tee shirt drew her immediate wrath. Even before the first bell rang, she ordered him to the boys’ washroom to make himself “presentable”. She was, therefore, downright splenetic when he returned with his hair still snarled like a bramble thicket. For the rest of the day Miss Umbridge figuratively bit off his head every time he raised his hand or looked her way. She even got downright abusive after he returned from lunchtime with grass stains on his knees and hands. She definitely did not approve of her favorite boy looking like an urchin.

At day’s end, Miss Umbridge required him to stay behind. She then tossed a barrage of questions his way:

Blair, why the sudden interest in sports? Don’t you know they’re not for boys like you? Look at your knees. It’s a wonder that you’ve not torn your jeans. And why are you dressed so queerly? Those clothes don’t suit you; they make you look like tomboy wearing hand-me-downs from her brother. Worst of all is your haircut! It’s truly tragic. You used to be my little Samson, with the most beautiful hair of anyone in the fifth grade. And now look at you — your hair looks like … like … tangled weeds. What do you have to say for yourself? Come now, speak up!

At a loss for words, Blair merely stammered. So Miss Umbridge cut him off:

I appreciate that there may be problems at home, but [she quickly said to avoid a response] I don’t want you bring them into my class. Now, now, don’t say another word. I want us to remain on a strictly professional, teacher-pupil relationship, which means I shouldn’t know your secrets or anything else that might bias my evaluation of your academic progress. If you need someone to talk to about, for example, a physically abusive father, a drunken mother or a lecherous uncle, then you should make an appointment with Mr. La Ronde, the school psychologist. He may be able to help you. However, no matter what the problem is, I promise you major grief if you don’t come to school tomorrow looking like the good little boy I’ve come to know and actually [it was hard for her to say] ... like. Blair, may I count on your strict obedience?

Blair stood glumly mute. So his teacher said:

Excellent. I knew that you would see the wisdom of dressing appropriately for school. You’re dismissed. I do hope that you will refrain from playing soccer before you go home. Grass stains do not become a boy like you. I simply don’t know what’s got into you; until now you’ve always been more fastidious in your appearance than all but one or two of the girls.”

When Blair reached home, sopping wet after a second attempt at soccer, the grass- stained knees at first alarmed Maggie, who feared that “some rough boys” had roughed up her daughter. But Maggie noticeably relaxed, indeed laughed, when Blair explained that he’d “tried to act like one of the boys” in order to divert attention from his “girls’ clothes”. (Later, after hearing from Kirk about Blair’s embarrassing inability to kick a soccer ball without falling down, Maggie decided to enroll Blair in a girls’ soccer league. It would, after all, be a way for her daughter to find her first girlfriends.)

“Off you go, then,” Maggie said to Blair; “Get out of those wet clothes immediately, then warm yourself up with a bath. Be sure to use bath oil. We girls do love it so.”

Afterwards, Blair, freshly bathed and smelling of strawberry, with his bob-and-bangs restored by Maggie, made a dramatic entrance at the top of the stairs now dressed as a “pirate”. Once again he slid down the banister in “girls’ clothes” from Penney’s: a white, belted ruffle shirt with a poplin top and empire waist; a wide, black patent-leather belt with a large buckle; red pantyhose; and shiny black, Mary Jane shoes. A red bandana, “Pirate” makeup (including a bold mascara moustache), hoop earrings (taped to the studs) and Zorro’s plastic sword completed Blair’s costume. With time out for dinner, Blair spent the evening — to Laird’s distress and Maggie’s dismay — playing pirate to a bevy of Kirk’s supporting characters, half of them ladies or whores, and one of them, the most disconcerting of all to the adults, a nelly cabin boy (a role that reduced both children to helpless giggles).

Even though Blair was attired in girls’ wear from the skin out, the game was not playing out as Maggie intended. “My daughter is acting like a tomboy,” she eventually decided,

"because I didn’t think to buy her any girls’ toys to play with. After all, she’s still a child, scarcely ten-years-old, who must give vent to her active imagination. Laird wouldn’t let me buy a G.I. Joe doll for Blair last Christmas, despite the child’s pleading, but the house rules have changed. Dolls, plural, my daughter shall now have. What sort of mother doesn’t give her daughter a Barbie doll? Its ample bosom should get Blair dreaming about growing her own."

She resolved to take both children shopping for toys after school tomorrow. Why include Kirk? So that he could, if necessary, talk his sister into loading up on female dolls. Moreover, if a doll as macho as G. I. Joe did have to come home to placate Blair, then it would be carried by Kirk for it would be Kirk’s doll, not Blair’s. Ironically, to feminize Blair Maggie was going to impose a doll, his first, on Kirk. Maggie did not want her daughter to have any male dolls of her own, so that she would, when playing dolls with Kirk, have to adopt a female role, as her dolls were rescued or ravished by Kirk’s soldier doll.

The dolls could not be bought until the morrow. In the meantime, Blair once again played the ideal daughter at bedtime, eager to lose herself in perfumed scents, satin underclothes, and a borrowed Baby Doll nightie.

The following morning, without saying a word to Kirk or his parents about Ms. Umbridge’s decree, Blair set off for school in the rain, his hair a riot of knots, his outfit once again composed of girls’ clothes selected for their dowdy, unisex look. At the last moment, he artfully smeared some dirt on his jeans to give the appearance of having been engaged in boyish pursuits.

Miss Lucretia Umbridge was not pleased. That day the entire class felt her wrath, but Blair naturally fared the worst, as repeatedly she informed the room that her erstwhile favorite now looked as “retarded” as his answers.

At lunchtime, Blair escaped the incessant pounding from his teacher and the rain by sitting under a bus shelter (its forty-minute service schedule guaranteeing him plenty of solitude), with a pulp biography of actress Julie Andrews. It was slow going for a ten-year-old but Blair was keen for the author’s insights into his “all-time, most favorite, most awesome musical”, The Sound of Music. The interlude soon ended, and Blair took a circuitous route back to class and to his inevitable, after-school detention.

The detention passed in silence. At its end, Miss Umbridge was still too angry for more than a few words. She passed a sealed letter to Blair, saying, “Take this home to your parents — unopened. Now be off with you.”

Naturally, Blair tore open the letter as soon as he had left the school ground; and equally naturally, he shredded it into small pieces, which he then tossed into a storm drain. There was no way, no how, that Blair was going to bring home a summons to his parents to meet with his teacher to discuss “his disobedience and self-neglect.” Blair figured that his teacher would stop worrying about the way he dressed, or the way his hair looked, if he defied her for a third time. After realizing that he could be stubborn too, Miss Umbridge would learn to mind her own business.

Blair was, therefore, in reasonably good spirits when Maggie took the two kids out for a quick meal at McDonald’s (is there any other type of meal there?) and then to Toys “R” Us to buy their first dolls. Laird stayed home, saying there was no way he was going to help buy Kirk a doll, even one armed to the teeth and wearing a military uniform: “Remember, Maggie, you’ve now got your ‘daughter’; can I be left with at least one normal, heterosexual son to raise? Is that too much to ask?”

When Kirk balked at buying even a so-called “action figure,”, Maggie sought to reassure him by pointing out that “lots of regular boys” played with G.I. Joe. Symbolically, he was no more than an oversized toy soldier. And didn’t future generals and ex-corporals who thought they were generals play with toy soldiers as young boys? “Kirk,” she said, “one day, as you’re receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery on the battlefield you’ll publicly thank me for once having bought you a G. I. Joe.”

Even so, Kirk had to be bribed with a hot fudge sundae (with an extra scoop) before he, a regular guy, would consent to be the official owner of a doll named G.I. Joe “Heavy Duty”. The doll came with considerable plastic firepower, but it was a doll nonetheless. Heavy Duty appeared to be an African-American doll, which Maggie considered a plus: Not only would the doll display her family’s liberal sentiments, but she also hoped that its race might make it more difficult for daughter Blair to regard the male doll as her avatar. As for Kirk, she thought there was little or no risk of his, at age thirteen, of bonding with any doll unless it was a life-sized female, big-mouthed and inflatable.

When informed that Heavy Duty was to be Kirk’s doll, Blair begged for dolls of his own. Naturally, Maggie insisted on Barbie, the long-legged, voluptuous blonde. Blair’s resistance to owning a Barbie, feeble from the start, collapsed entirely when Maggie proved willing to spend a small fortune on clothing, accessories, home settings, and friends for Barbie. In addition to the doll itself in a white wedding gown, Maggie sprang for a second Barbie (dressed as a fashionista in halter top and miniskirt) to be a twin sister (and spare in case of breakage) as well as a wide range of clothing (in style, but certainly not in color): a floor-length gown; a ballerina’s outfit; hot pants; “award show” dresses and glamour designs; gymnast outfit; special birthday clothes and strawberry-print leggings. Whether clothes or accessories (including a three-story dollhouse, a glam pool, Vespa moped, and Beach Party jeep), two colors — pink and hot pink — predominated.

Kirk, grossed out by the sea of pink, started to wander away. To keep him involved (since she wanted Kirk to “play dolls” with Blair until the latter acquired a “little friend” with whom to play), she told Kirk: “Why don’t you help me choose some dolls for Blair. Barbie Blair will need some girlfriends, don’t you think? Do you approve of these?” she asked, pointing to a Barbie “fairytopia” doll with pink hair, a brunette ballerina (refreshingly dressed in purple) and Sharpay from the High School Musical Club.

“I guess so,” moaned Kirk. “Blair looks pleased enough. But Maggie,” he whispered in her ear, “Don’t ya think you should buy some male dolls for Blair? You don’t want her to become a lesbian, do you? That’s what will happen if her dolls live in a world with no guys.”

“You may be right. We can’t have Wedding Barbie marrying Sharpay, can we? Let us find Barbie a suitable groom,” and soon enough they had added a Ken doll, dressed in a pink tuxedo, to Blair’s stock of toys. Still working on this theme, Maggie next said, “Hmm, we can’t have Ken permanently dressed for his wedding with Blair, oops Barbie” — a deliberate blooper that caused Blair’s entire body to flush. (“Did she read my thoughts?” Blair wondered; “how did she know that I find Ken dreamy?”)

“Here are a couple of outfits for Ken to change into after the wedding,” said Maggie as she first picked out a sleeveless tank top in Teal with a stylized mermaid and purple trim at the neck and waistline to compliment his purple board shorts; and for a second outfit, squeaky-clean white sneakers, black fedora, skin-tight jeans, and a turquoise tee with a Rorschach test on his right shoulder in lavender and dark blue.

Kirk vented his disgust: “I’m surprised Ken’s outfits don’t all come with pink satin undies. Do you think it’s possible for Ken to look gayer?”

“Honey,” Maggie replied, “it’s impossible for Ken not to look gay. He always does. Young girls like Blair find him less threatening that way.”

“Well, I think Blair should have at least one male doll of his … er, her own that might, just might be interested in the opposite sex.”

“If you insist, Kirk, you pick him out. But be quick about it. Your sister is evidently satisfied with her existing haul because she’s lost interest in shopping. Hold on, sweetie,” she said to Blair, now distracted by the squeal of children in another aisle, “we’ll go for ice cream as soon as Kirk selects a special doll for you. Then, every time you play with it, you’ll be reminded of your brother’s commitment to your transformation into the most beautiful girl in the entire world.”

“Beautiful?” This was a word that Kirk despised. It really “pissed him off” that “beauty” was so cavalierly and unfairly distributed by Nature, or God, or whatever. In a fair world,” Kirk believed, a sissy male like Blair” wouldn’t be more beautiful than most girls. While girls had to be beautiful to have a full life, Kirk would argue that good looks were wasted on a boy.

Did Kirk therefore regard homeliness to be a virtue in boys? Unfortunately not, for his own looks filled him with self-loathing. Understandably, Kirk resented Blair for hogging the family’s allotment of good looks. However, if Blair changed sex or were exposed as a freak, Kirk reckoned that he’d no longer have to hear people loudly whispering, “It’s extraordinary, truly extraordinary, that both boys have the same parents. One is so handsome as to be downright pretty; the other, well ….”

“I may be pig ugly,” Kirk thought to himself far more times than was healthy, “but at least I don’t flit around like a fairy.”

Since Kirk had promised to “play dolls” with Blair (a promise he intended to honor mainly in the breach), big brother picked two dolls from the “Barbie Collection” that he hoped might add some “bite” to their games: Twilight Edward and Twilight Bella, the sexy teen vampire and his sexy belle, both adorned in denim and gray.

Kirk chuckled to himself as the sale went down: “I can’t wait to see Blair’s reaction when Twilight Edward turns Wedding Barbie into a bloodsucking creature of the night.” Kirk had a broad smile all the way home.

So too did Blair. Although he considered himself a trifle old to play with Barbie dolls, he was grateful for all the attention and money being showered on him. At the store’s cash register, he impulsively hugged Maggie: “Mommy, you spent so much money. You must really love me. I ... [Blair choked up] … love you too. You know I’d give my life for you.”

“Isn’t your daughter sweet,” remarked the clerk, a plump teen girl. “Honey, you’re a very lucky girl. You obviously love pink” (the color of Blair’s entire outfit —sneakers, socks, underwear, skirt, halter top and hair ribbon) “and your mother has bought you a big chunk of Barbie’s world of pink. Has anyone told you, cutie pie, that you look just like Barbie? Are you ever lucky to have naturally blonde hair.”

Blair blushed (while secretly pleased that he’d fooled a teenager about his real gender), Maggie beamed, and Kirk scowled.

That evening after dinner Blair and Kirk (after a brief scolding to “get with the program”) played dolls for the first time ever, or at least since they were toddlers. Kirk immediately disappointed her expectations (while bolstering Laird’s) by refusing at first to play with any doll other than G. I. Joe. Blair, on the other hand, warmed Maggie’s heart by systematically trying out every dressing combination on the female dolls. Ken and Twilight Edward ended up, however, hanging out together in the nude as Blair, having stripped them of their clothes, made no attempt to find replacements.

Finally Kirk, bored with exploring Joe’s weaponry, suggested after prudishly covering Twilight Edward’s nakedness that they pretend that the dolls were trapped in a vampire’s castle. “It will be cool,” Kirk explained, “for Edward to bite their necks.”

“The necks of Ken and G. I. Joe too?” Blair asked a bit breathlessly.

“No way! That’s far too gay. Edward is way straight — he only bites the necks of babes.”

“What if Edward didn’t know Ken and G.I. Joe were boys? If they were dressed like girls, then he’d bite them too, isn’t that so?”

“Blair, you’re effing amazing. Even dressed as mommy’s darling daughter, you still think like a sissy queer. Okay, put a skirt on Ken if you gotta; I’d rather you dressed him like a sissy than leave him naked. It’s not proper to have a dude doll be starkers in front of girl dolls.”

Twilight Edward spent the last forty minutes before bedtime noisily chomping on the necks of the other dolls. Some resisted, kicking and screaming, while others merely feigned resistance. At Blair’s insistence, transvestite Ken was the most supine of all the dolls in his response; he clearly welcomed Edward’s bite.

As their play became ever more mired in Hollywood violence (the last straw was Twilight Bella’s judo kick to Edward’s groin that sent him halfway across the room), Maggie, who had been watching their play in mounting confusion and concern, finally couldn’t take any more mayhem. So she found some chores to do in the kitchen. When she returned, all the dolls were asleep in makeshift coffins, which the two kids had fashioned from sheets of stationery.

As the kids started putting the dolls away in Barbie’s three-story townhouse (at her insistence), she noticed that even G. I. Joe was now dressed in drag. Oddly, this would be the last time that Maggie would see G. I. Joe until the momentous day when Maggie insisted that Blair make an irreversible commitment to lifelong femininity. On that day the action figure reappeared, still wearing a dress.

After the disappointingly boyish exploration of vampirism, Maggie found some relief when Blair, given a choice of dolls, took Wedding Barbie to bed. Did Blair do it merely to please “her” mother or because, as Maggie hoped, that Blair was genuinely eager to embrace femininity? Or was it a combination of both motives? Maggie wasn’t sure, but it was definitely better to have Blair acting like a girl than acting like a vampire.

The next day saw Blair set out for school this time umbrella in hand (because Maggie insisted) and dressed for the third straight day in unisex clothes from the girls’ department of Penney’s. Maggie marveled at her daughter’s ingenuity, yet wondered how long it would take for someone at school to wise up to Blair’s change of gender.

It actually didn’t take more than half an hour. Miss Lucretia Umbridge, peeved that Blair’s parents hadn’t responded to her summons, and furious that her one-time pet had again flaunted an unkempt mane, grabbed hold of Blair in the schoolyard and hauled him into the empty teachers’ lunchroom. Blair tried to run away from her hairbrush, but Miss Umbridge was too strong for the ten-year-old, and slowly, but ineluctably she wielded it to restore a semblance of order to his hair and to her life. Gradually, the bob and bangs reappeared.

Miss Umbridge spluttered: “What the …. You’ve got a girl’s haircut! No,” she brusquely cut him off, don’t even pretend it’s not. Hold still! I insist on looking at the label on your tee shirt. ‘Junior Miss’ — I can’t believe it! How could you do this to me?”

Then shoving Blair away, she said in a fevered pitch: “Show me your underwear! No, don’t start unbuckling your jeans. I don’t want a striptease. Just grab hold of your underpants and pull the waist band above your belt for me to see.”

And so, Blair gave himself a wedgie — for the first time at a teacher’s insistence. Unfortunately, he had chosen that morning to wear lace-trimmed, pastel blue panties to school.

The teacher gasped for breath. Briefly she contemplated fainting. Then, pulling herself together, Miss Umbridge announced in the most menacing voice she could manage:

"So that’s it — you’re a disgusting pervert! I don’t know whether you’re pretending to be a girl or are sick enough to believe you actually are one. It doesn’t matter which, ‘cause I don’t buy into that ‘born in the wrong body’ crap. You’re a virus, a sickness, a potentially fatal disease. You represent everything that’s wrong with modern society. I want you to leave this school before it becomes impossible for me to safeguard the health of the student body. Freaks like you are as dangerous to society as AIDS. Wait right here, missy. Do your parents know that you’re a sexual deviate?"

Blair, eyes downcast, said in a voice little louder than a whisper: “My mommy knows I’m dressing like a girl; she wants me to become one.”

“You’re lying. But if you’re telling the truth, then she’s an even bigger deviate than you. I’ll have her arrested for turning you into a pervert.”

Blair, solicitous for Maggie’s safety, immediately confessed to lying. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have blamed my mother. I’m the only one who wants me to be a girl. And why can’t I be one if that’s what I want? It’s a free society, isn’t it? Who elected you God?”

“Watch your mouth, little miss. Just because you’re wearing panties doesn’t mean you can lip off to a teacher. You wait right here! Don’t move an inch. Not one inch! I’m going to call your mother to have her remove you from this school immediately! If I have my way — and I almost always do — you’ll never have an opportunity to pollute this school again.”

Rushing off, she left Blair sobbing and close to retching from anguish. He frantically looked around to see if there were bullies to flee. But mercifully the room was empty. While Blair found temporary consolation from the absence of witnesses to his humiliation and exposure, he was old enough, and perceptive enough, to realize that his world was about to change decidedly for the worse now that he was definitely no longer his teacher’s pet.

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. Having discovered Blair’s crossdressing, Miss Umbridge, his dragon of a teacher, has summoned Maggie to a showdown at the school.

Choices Chapter 6
A psychologist’s choice

“Ms. Maguire, why have you permitted this boy to defile the body that God and Nature gave him? Why have you permitted him to come to school dressed like a girl? Is this your doing?” Miss Lucretia Umbridge demanded as she exposed Blair’s bra strap.

Maggie was speechless. As requested, she had left her volunteer work at a women’s shelter to rush to Blair’s school, where, with no more than a “Follow me” and a rude crook of a finger she’d been ordered by Blair’s teacher to join him in a classroom, temporarily emptied by a leaky roof. There had been no words of greeting, no small talk, before the inquisition began. It was only then that she realized that she hadn’t been summoned for the usual reason — a schoolyard brawl (which Blair occasionally had to fight, and inevitably lose, for being judged a “sissy”). When it was a question of bullying, Ms. Umbridge had always ridden (“on her broom”, joked the fifth grade) to Blair’s defense. But there was no mistaking that she had turned against both child and mother. Miss Umbridge’s ugly tone and menacing manner left no doubt of her intention do them harm.

Before Maggie could formulate either a strategy or an answer, Blair leapt to the rescue, quite literally, of “mommy”. Bounding out of the chair, where Ms. Umbridge had decreed he “stay put and shut up”, Blair did his best, given his frail frame, to block the teacher’s view of his mother. Thus interposed, he manfully assumed the entire blame for his crossdressing:

It’s unfair to blame my mother for the way I’m dressed or for my haircut. She had no idea till now that I’ve started wearing girls’ clothes to school. After all, I was able to fool even you, Miss Umbridge, for a couple of days. Anyhow, I’m the only one who’s ever wanted me to be a girl. No, I didn’t say that right. It’s not that I want to become a girl; it’s that I was one from the moment I was born. But I didn’t have the balls to take my girls’ clothes out of the closet until now. Yes, Ms. Umbridge, I am a transsexist, a girl born in a boy’s body. So it’s not fair to blame my mother for God’s fuck-up.

“Blair,” Maggie said sharply, “don’t you ever use the F-word! It’s especially out of place at a parent-teacher meeting. Apologize to your teacher for swearing.”

“Yes, mommy. Miss Umbridge, I’m sorry for the bad language, but I was severely aggravated when you seemed to blame my mom for something that she didn’t know anything about.”

“Well! I find it hard to believe that your mother didn’t have a say in your hairstyle. Am I to believe, Ms. Maguire, that you thought bobbed hair and bangs suitable for a boy?”

“She didn’t think so at first,” Blair interjected before Maggie could answer. “Isn’t that right mom? You were upset with my haircut until I told you that it was a pageboy, and that lots of the guys are getting their hair trimmed this way because of the movies and video games about the awesome knights of yore. All the ‘prentice knights used to cut their hair like mine — that’s what I told my mom. And she believed me, ‘cause I don’t lie.”

The last sentence genuinely shocked his teacher::

You don’t lie? That’s rich coming from a little pervert whose mind is so twisted that he can’t accept the truth about his own gender. You’re a boy, got it! I don’t buy any of that mumbo-jumbo about ‘boys born in a girl’s body’ being peddled by the Jerry Springer and Morey Povich shows. There is no such thing as transsexuals; they’re no more real than the Martian babies supposedly conceived by desperate housewives. Blair, it’s a genuine tragedy that you and your mother have not had the courage to face the truth about you.

“And what’s that?” Blair and Maggie asked almost simultaneously, he nervously, she icily.

That Blair is a fairy, a sissy queer, an effeminate gay, a limp-wristed homosexual. Oh please, don’t either of you insult my intelligence by denying the obvious. Blair can’t even stand straight. The only reason he’s deluded himself into thinking that he’s really a girl is that he can’t handle his sexual attraction to other boys.

Maggie finally got in a word: “Blair is much too young to be sexually attracted to anyone. He’s not even humping his pillow. How dare you tell me — right in front of the child — that he’s a homosexual?! Sure, Blair is more delicate than other boys, but that doesn’t mean he’s gay. You’re stereotyping, and you should be ashamed of yourself.”

Blair looked like he wanted to crawl under a rock. His mind was wandering, as he considered the phrase “humping his pillow”. What, he wondered, did it mean and how could his mother be certain that he wasn’t doing it? Was it like spanking the monkey? Some kids boasted about doing that, but he hadn’t dared to ask them how it was done. There was simply too great a risk of being told that he would have to sneak into a monkey’s cage to spank the bottom of an angry chimpanzee to prove he wasn’t “a fag”.

His teacher, bristling at Maggie’s challenge, became more graphic in her exposition: “There’s nothing wrong, Blair, for a sissy boy like you to fantasize about — let’s be blunt — being fuc … er … skewered by the hunkiest boy in the school, which, of course, would be Alex Shirazi. When I’ve done hall duty, I’ve caught you more than once staring at Alex’s crotch.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use such language,” Maggie said. “Blair is too refined to look at anyone’s crotch.”

“Blair,” the teacher resumed, “has long had an obvious crush on Alex, who is, from what I can see, the best-developed boy in the school. Of Iranian persuasion, he wears tight pants like the rest of his tribe. Inevitably, a boy with Blair’s proclivities seeks to ‘figure out’ Alex’s religion.”

“So, Blair,” Miss Umbridge asked, “why didn’t you simply approach Alex in the hallway, flash that winsome smile of yours, bat those long, luxuriant eyelashes, and try to seduce him? Even if the two of you had then started openly dating, prancing around hand-in-hand, making asses out of yourselves, you’d still have more of a future at Lewis A. Clark Charter School than you have now.”

“How is that?” Maggie queried.

“Because, Ms. Maguire, this school has a liberal-minded staff who do our utmost to protect gay students from bullying. You haven’t been told, there being no need before now for you to know, that I personally initiated the suspension and eventual expulsion of two boys who were picking on Blair. Of course, I knew from the first time that he lisped his name that Blair is as gay as a San Francisco hairdresser, but I thought him, nonetheless, a sweet, innocent child of innate nobility who needed and merited a woman’s concern and protection. But I definitely don’t feel that way now. Blair, you must go away for the good of the school. I will not permit you to expose Lewis A. Clark to your mental disease and moral corruption.”

“And where should Blair go?” asked Maggie tersely, coldly.

“Why not to Amsterdam or, better yet, Denmark? Either place will cut off his testicles and penis for free. Then your kid can have a body as freakish as his mind.”

“I don’t like your attitude one iota. A bigot like you has no place in a school.”

“A pervert like your son has no place in a public school. Take him home and never bring him back. If you contact the queer community, I imagine that one of them is suffering from the same mental illness as Blair; he-she-it may be able to recommend a tutor to home-school your child. Blair shouldn’t be allowed to infect other children by attending another school.”

Maggie was by now so angry that, paradoxically, she began to calm down. Slowly and deliberately, carefully enunciating every syllable, she said: “Your views are not only abhorrent, they are also irrelevant. You lack the authority to expel my child! You’re just a teacher.”

“You’re right. I do lack the authority to expel even a child as repugnant as Blair. Yet I do have considerable influence with the principal, and your deviate son will soon be thrown out on his panty-clad bottom.”

Maggie asked: “Are you saying that it’s exclusively the principal’s decision to make? That the principal will have to accept exclusive responsibility for discriminating against a transgendered boy with an excellent record for academics and attendance?”

“The principal doesn’t have to take full responsibility for the expulsion of a child by reason of mental defect, because he relies on the expertise of Mr. La Ronde, the school psychologist. If Mr. La Ronde decides that Blair threatens to spread the virus of gender dysphoria — yes, I know both the word and the disease — to the rest of the student body, then the principal will have no choice but to expel the pervert.”

Maggie, thoughtful, with her chin in her hands, replied: “And I suppose the opposite is also true — that the principal wouldn’t dare to expel a student whom Mr. La Ronde judges not to be a threat to the school?”

Miss Umbridge nodded. She also reluctantly admitted that Mr. La Ronde was still in the building.

“So why wait?” said Maggie. “Let’s get this over with. If the school psychologist endorses my child’s right to attend this school dressed discretely as a girl, then you will keep her crossdressing a secret from the other staff and students or risk disciplinary action. If, on the other hand, the psychologist shares your antipathy to my daughter and to her constitutional rights, then I can promise you a lawsuit that will bankrupt this school district and cost you your job.”

“You can’t threaten me. The union will stick by me. As for suing the school or the district, I don’t think you want your son’s sexual deviancy to become the subject of international gossip. Do you really want Blair to tell the media that he’s a she? How do you think Blair’s going to react to seeing doctored ”before and after” photos of himself … and herself … on the cover of every supermarket tabloid in the country? No, I don’t believe you are foolish enough to sue.”

“I wouldn’t bet your career on that belief. In any case, I’ve wasted enough time talking to a nobody with no real authority. I want you to take my daughter and me to see Mr. La Ronde … right now!”

“Your daughter? I can’t believe you’re calling him your daughter! Come on, Blair, you can’t yet be sick enough yet to see yourself as this madwoman’s daughter. Insist that she acknowledge you as her son.”

“I don’t want my mom to call me ‘son’, ‘cause I am her daughter. I’m a girl, aren’t I?” (Blair wished he had a photograph of Maggie’s smile at the moment to treasure for the rest of his life. She had never loved him more!)

“No, a girl you are not!” shouted the teacher. “You’re nothing more than a seriously messed-up gay boy, a sissy boy to be sure, but a boy nevertheless. You’ve got male genitals. That’s all that matters.”

“I won’t have them for long,” Blair countered. He was enjoying her discomfort. He wanted to get back at her for all the insults; so he decided to tell her something so shocking that it would ruin her day, and hopefully her week: “I want to find someone who’ll cut off my cock and balls while I am still in your class. Then, if you beg, I’ll let you see my vig — vigina. It will look brand new, not old and whorey like yours.”

Ms. Umbridge spluttered: “Ms. Maguire, if somehow Blair does evade a well-deserved expulsion, I can promise you that he-she-or-it will live to regret talking to me like that. Imagine, calling his teacher a whore!”

“I did not!”

“Blair, she continued, “If the psychologist and principal do permit you to continue your studies at Lewis A. Clark, you can consider yourself on after-school detention for the rest of your stay here. It’s hard for me to believe that I ever liked you. You’re a brat in addition to being a pervert.”

Tears of self-pity were welling up in the teacher’s eyes. At age fifty-nine, she was tired of being called names like “nobody” and “whore” simply for doing her duty. It had taken her less than three days to discover Blair’s masquerade. Why did the brat’s mother not understand that Blair’s mental disease had reached the stage where he could no longer cover it up like a melanoma on his lower back? “The two of them have insulted me simply because I’m realistic enough to realize that a boy can’t become a girl without having the other students hand him his gonads on a stainless-steel platter.”

With Miss Umbridge briskly setting the pace, it didn’t take them long to reach a door plaque declaring this to be the office of the “Guidance Counselor and Psychologist.” With only the pretense of a knock, the teacher charged into the office, followed closely by Maggie, determined not to miss a word “the old bat” had to say.

Staring at them was the ample rump of Mr. La Ronde, who was on his knees, his back to the door, trying to retrieve something under his desk. When Miss Umbridge noisily cleared her throat to announce their arrival, the psychologist gave such a start that he banged his head against the desk’s interior with sufficient force for the “crack” to be heard by Blair, lagging behind in the hallway.

Slowly and laboriously, La Ronde, a half-eaten donut in his left hand, extricated himself from the desk’s confines. After a quick dusting of the confection, he plaintively asked the ladies for a hand to help him back onto his feet. Seriously unfit, morbidly obese and permanently short-of-breath, the psychologist knew that Miss Umbridge, who had a habit of storming unannounced into his office, wasn’t going to wait while he crawled on his knees around the desk to his sturdy office chair, which he normally used, by pushing hard on the seat with both arms, to pull himself up to a sitting position. The two women helped him huffing and puffing to his feet. He noticed that the stranger was better-mannered and more helpful than his least favorite member of the teaching staff. At least she didn’t mutter insults about his weight problem.

As he wedged himself into his chair, La Ronde further noticed that the stranger had a smile almost as broad as the teacher’s scowl. So, violating protocol, he addressed the stranger first. By then Blair was lurking behind his mother, trying to be the invisible kid. The psychologist, concluding that Blair was the reason for the rude interruption of his working day, commenced with, “Madam, may I have your name and that of your … [after a hard look] …er… your son? Now don’t interrupt, Miss Umbridge! There will be time for you to have your say, but fairness requires me to hear first from … [he paused long enough to get their names] Ms. Maguire and her delightful son Blair.” (Blair was turning on the charm full-blast.)

“Darling!” Miss Umbridge spluttered. “Just wait ….”

He cut her off: “Please Miss Umbridge, we will be still here at nine o’clock this evening if you keep interrupting. There are procedures to follow. Now, Mrs. Maguire, what seems to be the problem?”

To intermittent “tsk, tsks” and “oh mys” from Mr. La Ronde, Maggie explained that Blair’s teacher, having discovered that her son was a transsexual, “a protected category in this State,” Maggie emphasized, was now bent on breaking the law by denying him a public education. “I’ve never met a greater bigot than that woman,” Maggie concluded.

“Now, now, one shouldn’t stoop to insults. I am certain that Miss Umbridge is not a bigot; she always has the best interests of the school and the child at heart. Am I not right, Lucretia?”

“That’s Miss Umbridge to you, Jean-Pierre! Now can I have my say?”

“Not just yet. I need additional information. You say, Ms. Maguire, that Blair, who is certainly pretty enough to be a girl, is a practicing transsexual. Except possibly for that haircut, he doesn’t seem to be dressing as a girl right now. When does he dress up?”

After Maggie explained, at some length, her arrangement with Blair, Mr. La Ronde gave a brief summary: “So you’re telling me that Blair only dresses as a girl when he’s either at home or somewhere, like St. Wicca’s, so far away that he is highly unlikely to meet anyone from his school or neighborhood. In other words, he has no desire to be exposed as either a transsexual or a transvestite. That’s a wise precaution for one so young to take. Maggie — may I call you that? — what then is the problem? Why have you all come to my office if the child is willing to hide his gender change while at school?”

“Because — can’t you see the evidence before your very eyes? — The boy is not trying to hide his gender change! You can see that. Tell the truth to the man, Blair. Tell him that everything you’re wearing the good Lord and the owners of the Penney Department Store intended to be worn only by females. Hence, you’re dressed as a girl, and you have no right to impose your mental sickness on your fellow ten-year-olds.”

“Is it true, Blair? Are you dressed entirely as a girl?”

Blair nodded: “Yes and no. Yes, these clothes are often worn by girls, but they’re unisex, so boys wear ‘em too.” He blushed at what he had to say next: “It makes me feel good to know that I’m dressing in girls’ clothes — it makes me feel like I’m being honest with myself and it pleases my mom big time — but I don’t want anyone to know at school. So I wear jeans and tops like those I’ve seen on other boys.”

“I see. But your teacher found out your secret. How do you explain that?”

“Because she grabbed me by the arms and wouldn’t let go. She held on so tight that I’ve got bruises — look at them [which everyone did.]! She did that so she could brush my hair to make me look girly.”

Visibly shocked, the psychologist asked, “Miss Umbridge, you were the one who combed his hair into a bob? You manhandled him too? Oh my, oh my, this is not good, not good at all.”

Maggie got the knife in first: “My son has been messing up his hair before coming to school. As you can see, he has delicate features, and the only way he could be sure of looking like a boy in unisex clothes was to look like a slob. And that’s what he looked like until this woman took it upon herself to fuss with his hair, something that she had no right to do.”

“May I at least have a chance to say my piece?” Miss Umbridge could wait no longer. “I merely exposed the bob; his mother probably created it. There is no denying that Blair has been coming to school in a girl’s hairstyle and clothes. Given his effeminacy, he won’t fool anyone for long. He should take his sickness elsewhere; I do not want him to infect my class.”

“I see,” said the psychologist, now perspiring profusely. “You maintain that this boy has a mental disease, your proof being that he wants to become a girl. But boys his age dream about growing up to be all sorts of things — fire fighters, police officers, football players, astronauts, and President. How, then, is it all that different for Blair to dream about becoming a woman? Is it up to us to crush a child’s aspirations?”

Miss Umbridge picked up two books and slammed them on the psychologist’s desk. Startled, he might have jumped out of his chair had he not been weighed down by inertia. Instead, he mopped his brow with a handkerchief, saying, “My, but it’s hot in here. Do you all find it as hot as I do?”

“No, I don’t find it hot, you pile of blubber!” yelled Miss Lucretia Umbridge, now thoroughly enraged. “But I can make it too hot for you to stay at this school if you dare to permit a child with a disease to infect the student body!”

She had La Rond quaking like a bowl of jelly. To calm her, he threw her a bone: “Miss Umbridge, you are, as usual, correct when you aver that one cannot, and must not permit a child with a disease to infect others. If a child does have a disease, then that child must quit the school until it is cured.”

Now it was Maggie’s time to object and to be shushed. “My dear Maggie, please let me finish my thought. Now, to come directly to the point: While I agree with you, Miss Umbridge, on the necessity of quarantining diseased students, I am not sure that I agree with you that this particular student has in fact a disease. Let me finish first, and then you may reply. I have a question to put to you, Ms. Umbridge, is transgenderism the disease that you fear and the reason that you insist that Blair be sent home until he be cured of it?”

“Finally, we’re getting somewhere,” she replied. “Yes, that’s it precisely: because he is transgendered, Blair is mentally ill and therefore must leave this school until there is a miracle — and it would take Jesus Christ himself to make it happen — until there is a miracle cure.”

“Yes, as you say, we have isolated the key question.” Everyone then waited while he again mopped his brow. “They do overheat this building. Now, as I was saying, the key question is whether Blair has a mental disease that requires him to be sent home. Just look at this sweet child [Blair was now grinning broadly like a Cheshire cat or American Idol’s Tim Urban]; does he look mentally ill? Not in my opinion.”

“For whatever that’s worth,” said Miss Umbridge.

La Rond pontificated:

You’re right as always. My opinion is no more valid than anyone else’s — even yours. My professional expertise is, however, quite another matter; and I will not allow a teacher to question it. So here is my decision, and all of you must pay heed to it, or there will be hell to pay with me, the principal and the school board: Since Blair is a transgender, he must leave the school if — and it’s a big if — transgenderism is in fact a disease. I am uncertain as to whether it is a disease or not as it is a fairly recent phenomenon, one that has arisen since I studied for my Masters at Western Washington Polytechnic during the Ford, Carter and Reagan presidencies. Therefore, I must consult higher authority before rendering a decision. In the meantime, since the child requires an education, Blair should stay in his present class until further notice — provided that he does not draw attention to himself as a girl. I see no reason why he can’t continue to dress in unisex clothes and I have no problem with his current haircut, so long as it’s suitably mussed.”

Miss Umbridge’s jaw dropped: “You’re going to consult higher authority? What kind of decision is that? And you’re telling me that I must in the meantime allow a pervert remain in my class?”

“Yes,” Mr. La Ronde replied. “Moreover, not only must that child remain in your class until I have ascertained whether he does have, professionally-speaking, a mental defect, but if I learn that you are harassing this dear, sweet child because of his transgenderism or in any way alerting his fellow students to his crossdressing, then I will do my utmost to have your teaching certificate revoked. Do I make my understood?”

“Understood. I understand that you are incapable of making a decision.”

“It doesn’t help our relations with the public, Ms. Umbridge, for you to behave like a petulant teenager. Or is it a grumpy old lady? In any case, you have been warned: Leave this child alone until I have rendered my decision or your career will soon be as vanished as your looks. Now, it’s time for my late afternoon snack, and I wish to be left alone to enjoy it. Maggie, it was a delight to meet you and Blair.” He then waved them goodbye.

As they left, Miss Umbridge muttered something about an “ignorant, lazy pig who’ll “never get around to making a decision.” She then turned to Maggie and Blair: “This is only the beginning, my pretties. While I may not be able to expose your crossdressing, Blair, there are other ways, many, many other ways for me to make your stay in my class so miserable that you’ll be soon begging your mother to take you home for good. Just you wait!”

She then turned sharply on her heels (like an SS officer, thought Maggie) and marched back to her classroom. Maggie took Blair to an ice cream parlor four blocks away to celebrate.

Aside from the school custodian, only one person now remained in the school: In a dimly-lit office, working the computer keyboard with the index finger of his right hand, while his left hand nourished him with sugary treats, Mr. La Ronde was keeping his promise to consult a higher authority. As he slowly read out loud what Wikipedia had to say about “transgenderism”, he became increasingly weary — it had, after all, been a fatiguing session with that “hag of a teacher” — and his eyelids were growing ever heavier until he fell fast asleep.

After a few hours spent snoring, snorting and dreaming of himself in the Land of Oz, La Ronde awoke sufficiently refreshed to realize with crystal clarity that he should take his time — indeed, lots and lots of time — to study the phenomenon of transgenderism because as said out loud , “Blair’s a sweet kid; let him be.”

La Ronde thus chose procrastination and deferral. True to his pattern, he then chose to reward himself for his non-decision with an extra-large, four-cheese pizza and three cans of Classic Coke.

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. With the help of a rotund school psychologist, Blair still attends Lewis A. Clark School despite the fierce objections of his teacher to having a transsexual in the class.

A league’s choice

“Oh, Maggie,” Laird fretted. “Do you think it was wise to quarrel with Blair’s teacher? There are so many ways that she can get back at you by punishing him.”

“Her! Punish her. Didn’t we agree always to use female pronouns when speaking of our daughter? How else will Blair be able to adapt successfully to her new gender? She’s doing her level best to adapt by wearing girls’ clothes twenty-four hours a day. And that’s the reason why Blair got into trouble and why I had to tell off her teacher — that nosey parker grabbed hold of Blair, bruising her arms, in order to brush Blair’s hair into a bob against her will and then forced your daughter to show the label of her tee shirt. If you ask me, that teacher could be sued for assault!”

“No one’s going to sue anyone, Maggie; Blair doesn’t need the publicity. Besides, are you positive that a court would approve of Blair’s complete transformation while he … she’s still a child? So let’s leave well enough alone. From what you tell me, Blair won’t be hassled by the school so long as she keeps her gender sufficiently ambiguous for her classmates to view her as a boy. Have I got it right?”

“Yes, that seems to be the attitude of Mr. La Ronde, the school psychologist, and he’s the one who appears to have the final say, provided that Blair doesn’t make a public spectacle of herself.”

“Good, so far, but will this Ms. Umbridge leave our … daughter alone? You make her sound like quite the virago and bigot. We don’t want Blair coming home in tears every day. Even more important — will this woman condescend to keep Blair’s secret?”

“The psychologist and I, we told her in plain language that she could lose her job, even her teaching certificate, if she mistreats Blair. However, since I don’t trust that bitch to behave in a professional manner, I will be quizzing Blair each day after school about how she’s being treated. And if Umbridge gives me any reason to take umbrage, I’ll have her empty head as a wall trophy.”

“I fear it will be a lot harder to protect Blair from a hostile teacher than you think,” said Laird. “She can make life very difficult for our daughter without having to say a thing about crossdressing or transgenderism.”

“You mean try to fail Blair? She wouldn’t dare do that to a student with Blair’s scholastic record. Besides, I intend to look over and keep a copy of every one of our daughter’s assignments; and if that harpy doesn’t grade the work fairly, I’ll have more than enough evidence to prove to the school board that Umbridge is an unprincipled, unprofessional bigot.”

“I wasn’t thinking of an unfair evaluation. There are many other ways she can harm a child, especially a girl as delicate and sensitive as Blair. Oh well, time will tell. What is the object of our loving concern doing right now?”

“Blair’s in her room playing dolls with Kirk. I told Kirk in no uncertain terms to get with the program. After getting Kirk to say that he wanted Blair’s gender change to be as quick and painless as possible, I wrung a promise out of him both to play dolls with Blair and to play like they were two girls. That promise, by the way, will cost you another dollar a week for Kirk’s allowance.”

A storm cloud came over Laird’s face: “Reward Kirk for playing like a girl? Not on your life! This time you’ve gone too far, Maggie. I should have put my foot down yesterday but better a day late than never — I’m going right now to tell him that I’ll deduct a dollar from his allowance every time I see him playing dolls, with or without Blair.”

He reached the two kids before Maggie caught up. However, he didn’t say anything at first. He instead watched them at play, fearful yet hopeful about Kirk’s reaction to “dollies”.

“Hey daddy,” Blair’s high voice piped, “Watch my girls catch and bash Kirk’s two villains.”

More violence! Maggie had to ask, “Why on earth, Blair, would your pretty Barbie dolls want to bash another doll? Why can’t your dolls behave in a feminine way — you know, by getting married, setting up house, and throwing tea parties?”

“Because they’re Charlie’s Angels, mommy! It’s their job to punish the bad guys! And Kirk’s two dolls have been acting really, really badly. One of them is a vampire, and you said yesterday that there were far too many vampires in this house. So the Angels are going to put a wooden stake through Edward’s heart. See — I sharpened this China stick for them to use. As for Ken, he’s been stealing panties from the girls; so the Angels are going to force him to wear them. He won’t do it unless they beat him up first because he doesn’t want to be a girl.”

“Yeah,” muttered Kirk, “Sweet Kenny likes being a boy and being naked with boys.” Kirk punctuated his comment by having the Ken doll give a big smooch to Twilight Edward. Thus distracted, Kirk’s dolls were swiftly overwhelmed by Blair’s Angels. Before they could pound the chopstick through Edward’s chest (for real, not pretend), Maggie called an end to their play. She sent them upstairs to bathe.

“Separately,” she shouted after them, “since it’s inappropriate for a ten-year-old girl to be seen in the nude by her older brother.” Maggie then turned to Laird: “Honey, you were right — and how! It was a big mistake for me to ask Kirk to play dolls with Blair. I abhor all that violence.’

“I wouldn’t blame the violence on Kirk. His dolls were about to be killed or neutered by Blair’s. Wow, I didn’t know that tween girls did that sort of thing with their dolls. But I guess we shouldn’t stereotype how boys and girls play.”

“It’s obvious that Blair is going to behave like a tomboy as long as she apes her older brother. She needs to be around girls, not like at school where she has to behave like a boy, but in other places where she has to behave in a ladylike way or be exposed as a crossdresser.”

“Where are you thinking of?” asked Laird.

“Tomorrow morning I am going to enroll Blair in an all-girl’s soccer league. I found the perfect one for her, across the Columbia in Washington. Over there, well away from our community, her secret will be safe, indeed, super safe because the league uses a soccer pitch that has neither showers nor change room. The girls come and go in their kit. I’ll even make sure Blair applies a scented deodorizer just in case her perspiration smells differently.”

“Do you really think there is any risk of our Blair working up a sweat? She’s never shown any interest in, or ability for, athletics,” Laird noted.

“That, my love, is precisely why Blair needs to learn to play soccer. She needs to develop as a well-rounded girl and become less of a woos. In addition, since soccer can get rough, Blair will learn how push and shove (“And trip and hold,” added Laird) like a female athlete rather than like a limp-wristed boy. Soccer will teach her to move with grace.”

“Maggie, I’m surprised that you’d see sports as the best way to get Blair thinking and behaving like a female. I’m surprised, but pleased, that you don’t want our daughter to grow up to be la prissy stereotype like Butterfly McQueen in Gone with the Wind or Cordelia in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Laird an expert on Buffy? Yes, he had developed an innocent “thing” for Sarah Michelle Geller.)

“Laird, I don’t regard soccer to be the best way to educate Blair in the manners of modern girlhood. It’s just one way for her to meet other girls and I wouldn’t expose her to the rough ways of female athletes if I didn’t have the perfect antidote — a place where she still will be interacting with other girls and where she will be taught to move with classical feminine grace.”

“Classical? You don’t mean …”

“Yes, love, I have enrolled Blair in the Dame Margot Pavlova Ballet School. As it’s downtown, it’s not hitherto attracted any girls from Bybee Lake; thus, Blair can totally be a girl without fear of meeting anyone she knows.”

Laird turned around to veil his emotions. Maggie saw his shoulders sag, as he said, his voice as obscured by sadness as the nearby mountains were by rain and mist, “I’ve feared for years that Blair would end up a male dancer — like one of those queens in a tux and top hat in Blazing Saddles, but until now, I never thought that one of my kids would end up as a ballerina in a tutu. There are limits to what a man can stand; and so, don’t count on me to drive Blair to ballet class or, heaven forbid, to see the kid in a public spectacle. No, there are limits.”

Maggie embraced him, holding him tight, kissing his neck, as his body began to quiver with deeply suppressed emotion: “Laird, honey, listen to your language — “queens in a tux”. That tells you what you really fear — not that Blair might become your daughter for keeps, but that he’ll end up a prissy sissy called “Miss Thing”, living in San Francisco or West Hollywood.”

“I’m no bigot, Maggie. I’ve got no problem with gays who behave like men; it’s the queens I can’t stand. You’re right, as always, my love, I would indeed prefer Blair to be a female than an effeminate male. The funny thing is that Blair has been flitting about the house less since he became a she. Blair seems to appreciate that real females don’t mince around like drag queens. Thank God for small mercies.”

“Laird, I hadn’t thought about it until you mentioned it, but Blair does seem have her feet more solidly on the ground since she started wearing panties and skirts. And I know that I’ll be able to convince her to play girls’ soccer, whereas the old Blair would rather have gone to school painted blue than try out for boys’ soccer. Blair may well be the most inept girl on her soccer team, but at least she won’t face taunts from the sideline about running or kicking like a girl.”

Laird chuckled: “So that’s the plan, is it? To ‘butch’ Blair up by transforming him into a girl.”

“Well, that’s one way of looking at it,” Maggie laughed. They embraced, then headed off to the bedroom together, in love, and agreed (for a time at least) that they were definitely doing the right thing by their daughter Blair.

Around two o’clock in the morning, Maggie stole out of bed and into Blair’s bedroom, where she briefly watched her daughter fast asleep, the blankets lowered just enough to show off her pink brocaded nightie. “Naughty girl,” thought Maggie. “She didn’t remove the makeup she put on after dinner. I don’t want her to ruin that peaches-and-cream complexion.”

Then, after kissing Blair on the forehead, Maggie rummaged through the back of Blair’s dresser to find two white tee shirts, never yet worn, left over from her daughter’s boyish childhood. These Maggie took to her sewing room, where with the help of cloth shears, a sewing machine, and raw talent, she shortened the sleeves on both tees to mid-length, thus giving them a slightly more feminine cut. That way she hoped to convince Blair that the tee shirts had been recently bought in a girls’ department, with the hope that Blair would consent to wear them to school. For all her bluster, Maggie was determined not to have another confrontation with Miss Umbridge, and to that end she wanted her daughter to dress as conservatively as possible even while continuing — at least in Blair’s own mind — to be clothed “in girls’ clothes” from head to toe.

The plot seemed to work: Blair wore a white tee and unisex jeans for the next two days, and her first week of attending school as a girl in unisex clothes passed without further incident. True, Blair had to endure two after-school detentions, and admitted, when pressed by Maggie, that, “My teacher really hates me. She’s always picking on me.” Even so, Umbridge hadn’t made any attempt to draw attention to Blair’s change of gender, and Blair had to admit that, “Miss Umbridge treats most kids badly, most of the time. She’s very difficult to please.”

“So maybe, just maybe,” Maggie thought, “The harpy won’t try to harm my daughter.” Somehow, Maggie realized that she was hoping for more than flawed human nature could deliver.

Miracles weren’t always possible: For example, it had been foolhardy for Maggie to expect Kirk to “play nicely” with Blair’s dolls. On Thursday evening, she’d had to order Kirk never again to go near them after he had almost set fire to Blair’s bedroom. Maggie, her curiosity pricked by the silence (save for the occasional giggle) that had befallen their play, had peaked into the bedroom where she discovered them about to set fire to a “funeral pyre” built from wooden pencils, on which were arrayed Twilight Edward and every doll that he’d “bitten” — which was all of them, save for Ken (because Edward wasn’t, as Kirk explained, “a homo”). The only reason that Maggie was able to avert a veritable Barbiecue was Kirk’s failure to set fire to a mechanical pencil.

Maggie concluded that Blair was either too young or too old or not yet girl enough to be trusted with dolls. Maggie was relatively relieved, then, when the children reverted to dress-up and role-play after Kirk was banished from the doll harem. As before, she marveled at the many ways that female clothing could masquerade as male — at least as the sort that almost all males wore before the invention of the zipper, and still wore (at least on festive and ceremonial occasions) in most of the Eastern Hemisphere. Maggie was surprised to see how easily a petticoat could function as the skirt of a Greek sentry, her linen nightie as a “Pharaoh outfit” for Ramses the Great, or a black blouse and skirt to emulate a priest’s cassock (“like they wear in Italian movies”). Maggie was less than pleased that Kirk wore an extra-large white tee shirt over a black dress for their game of “the priest and the altar boy,” which mainly consisted of Blair clumsily chasing a giggling, more agile Kirk around the house. The game usually ended in a tickle fight.

On the first Saturday after Blair’s first visit to the school psychologist, Maggie took her daughter to a sportswear store to buy her soccer kit, all from Addidas: black soccer shoes (with three pink stripes); diva pink and white helios (armless) jersey; and diva pink training shorts with a darling white draw string and side stripes. After Blair changed into her soccer togs in a women’s bathroom (with Maggie standing guard), they drove in the pouring rain across the Columbia River to Rose Villa, a flowery suburb of Vancouver, Washington where, with the help of GPS, they found the soccer pitch that played host to the teams of the Girls’ Friendship League.

Soon enough they had met the League secretary, Mrs. Beverly Bolton, standing under a large golf umbrella. Her first remarks — she simply couldn’t help herself —addressed Blair’s gear. “So this is Blair. Aren’t you the little cutie! How darling and unusual for you to dress in pink for a practice session. With all the sliding about on the west grass and mud, most girls wear such drab colors for practice — mostly browns, blacks and grays. So you will certainly stand out like a rose among the thorns. Let’s hope your game is equally noteworthy.”

Bolton then explained to Maggie and Blair that the league had “An Every Girl Must Get Her Fair Share” policy, which they found easiest to enforce (given kids’ natural resistance to standing on the sidelines watching everyone else have fun) by restricting team size to a maximum of fifteen players. Five of the eight teams, alas, had already reached their full complement, but three were still looking for girls, two (Gold Pride and Sky Blue) their fifteenth and last, and one (Breakers), its eleventh.

“All three teams will be practicing on one third of the pitch over the next ninety minutes,” Mrs. Bolton explained, “and the idea is to have Blair join each team to determine on which one she fits in best. We’ll trust the three coaches to decide, as they have decades of experience and will, given Blair’s personality and skill level, find the right place for her for the remainder of the League season. There aren’t many regular games left, but the playoffs and invitationals should, however, guarantee her a healthy amount of exercise before the summer holidays. So, Blair, why don’t you run over to that team?” Mrs. Bolton pointed to the Gold Pride squad.

Mrs. Bolton gasped:

Oh dear, Blair has already tripped and fallen down — before she reached her first team. Maybe she slipped on the wet grass. Or it may be her shoes. They looked brand new before her fall. That’s right. They’re new today, you say? Well that must be the problem; she still has to break them in. Still, it’s a genuine pity that she fell into that muddy pool of water. Almost no one got to see her pink outfit. Ah, well, maybe it’s for the best. As you see, Ms. Maguire, in this climate girls generally don’t wear pastels and whites to practice. And I do recommend you add rain gear to her kit; soccer football, unlike baseball, tennis and golf, is a sport played rain or shine — and around here, that means mostly in the rain. However, the skies generally clear for the playoffs.

Anxious to change the subject away from her faux pas in picking Blair’s clothes for the tryout, Maggie exclaimed: “Oh, look, Blair is already taking — I think you call it — a penalty shot. Does that mean she was tripped or tackled or hooked from behind? My girl has always been a fast runner; she must have left one or two players so far behind they had to cheat.”

“Not exactly,” Ms. Maguire.”

“Oh do call me Maggie.”

Mrs. Bolton, with an obvious sigh of relief, replied,

Likewise, I’m Beverly to my friends as I am sure you soon will be. I think you will find that Blair probably hasn’t run more than few yards yet. It’s customary to start by watching her kick a few balls at the net. In that way, we get a feeling for her strength, stamina and accuracy. After the Gold Pride coach gets a feel for the range at which Blair can hit the net — you know, the range at which she can consistently “score” on an empty net with a kick hard enough to get by the goalkeeper, then we’ll know whether Blair should play one of the attacking positions.

As they watched, Blair mostly missed the ball entire entirely, about half the time ending up flat on her back, as though someone was yanking the ball away at the last second. The Gold Pride coach, deciding that Blair was trying too hard because the goal looked too far away for the kid’s best-struck ball to reach, kept spotting the ball ever closer to the goal line. Finally, at three yards out, the Gold Pride Coach concluded that there was literally no distance from which Blair could sink the ball into the net more than one time out of every seven tries. And that was on an empty net. There seemed no point in seeing whether Blair could shoot or run the ball past a live goalkeeper. Even a deceased, expired, defunct goalkeeper nailed to a perch could probably prevent the girl from scoring even once during an entire season.

The coach, despairing of ever seeing Blair’s foot make solid contact with the ball, next tried the girl on headers. After about a dozen tries, with Blair demonstrating a near total inability to judge the path of a flying object, the ball finally hit her head by sheer accident. Well, the League had probably never heard anyone wail as loudly as poor Blair. Oh the pain! Oh the agony! She was inconsolable until the Coach promised that she could play soccer without having to use her head. No, she couldn’t wear a helmet, but the coach did instruct her how to “duck and cover” if the ball seemed about to bonk her.

The Gold Pride coach, noticing a lull in the play of the Sky Blue, currently occupying the midfield, suggested that since Blair was not really suited for an attacking role, that maybe she should join the Sky Blue in their game of ball chase. “You’ll catch on quickly,” the coach assured her, the game’s a simple one: each player is trying to use her feet to gain possession of the soccer ball, and then to keep it away from everyone else for as long as possible. That generally means a general melee when your age group — the ten-to-twelves-- play. It’s great fun, though your ankle might take a beating. Sharon, would you lend the new kid your shin guards? We don’t want her to go home black and blue from her tryout.”

Now wearing Sharon’s shin guards — sort of — Blair was passed off to her second team whose coach’s instructions were simple enough: “See if you can strip the ball from whoever’s got it and then run around with it until someone takes it away from you. Have fun — that’s what soccer’s all about.”

Though simple, the instructions were impossible to follow, inasmuch as Blair didn’t once catch up to the “whoever’s got it”, in part because she did not, as Maggie boasted, run like the wind, but for the most part because she always got the worst of the scrums that occurred whenever two girls or more attempted a tackle at the wrong time. Blair, it turned out, might have been trying out roller blades for the first time — she was that easy to tip over.

Even so, she did have fun because she spent so much time on her knees, bottom or back in the mud (there being an inverse correlation between the intensity of play and the density of the grass) that her time with the Sky Blue reminded her of the time, two years ago, that she had tried to build the Great Wall of China on a tidal flat near Long Beach, Washington.

As Maggie watched her hapless child, she was pleased to see that Blair seemed to be enjoying herself, although it might be more a case of the pleasure she got from stamping her feet in the puddles being formed by the downpour in every recess of the pitch than of actually playing soccer. Maggie was making a mental note to remind Blair that it wasn’t “ladylike” to cover her shoes, socks and legs with muddy spray when she noticed that Blair wasn’t the only girl playing in the puddles; the activity seemed to appeal to several other girls, who like Blair were younger, smaller and less athletic than the giants actually able to maneuver a soccer ball through, around or above a water puddle.

Even so, Blair was easily the muddiest girl on the field when her coach handed her off to the third team on the pitch, the Breakers (named, like the others, after a team in Women’s Professional Soccer). The military demeanor, shrill whistle, rippling muscles and close-cropped blonde hair of the Breakers’ coach made Gus Anderson a standout on a field filled with females — that and the fact that Gus was the only male involved in an official capacity with the Girls’ Friendship League.

Having already assessed Blair’s athletic potential (Gus was said to have watchful eyes on all four sides of his square head), Gus told Blair, “You’re here to have fun. Since you’re just starting out, you’re more likely to twist an ankle or crack your funny bone than the girls who are more familiar with running around a wet field, so I don’t want you attempting any tackles or charging after the ball. I want you instead to position yourself a foot or so in front of the goal line about ten feet wide of our net. There, if you stay put, you will be ideally positioned to make it almost impossible for an attacker to run around the last defender on her way to the goal.”

Although her new station took her almost entirely out of the play (even in practice session it focused on defending the penalty area directly in front of the goal), Blair had fun chasing down and carrying back soccer balls shot wide of the net and past the goal-line; she could now envisage a role for herself in girls’ soccer! She also enjoyed chatting with the Breakers’ goalkeeper, who had little to do, given the prowess of the Breaker fullbacks, who were easily the League’s elite.

When an occasional ball came her way, Alicia, the Breaker goalkeeper, nonchalantly, almost disdainfully, caught or stopped it; she then kicked it over everyone’s head to give herself some time to talk to the “new girl”. Being a gifted athlete and coach’s daughter (and sole reason for his interest in girls’ soccer), Alicia could pretty much take the practice for granted. As Blair moved ever closer to the net, the conversation became ever more personal, and soon Alicia was regularly kicking the ball high into the sky gray, halfway down the field to the annoyance of Sky Blue, whose turf it invaded.

Alicia quickly made it clear that no one called her by her birth name: “Hey blue eyes, everyone calls me Big Al. You should too.” The nickname was a natural for Big Al, who, at age 13 (an age she had attained five weeks after the start of the League season, making her its second oldest girl) stood five foot ten and weighed 180 pounds with an a body mass index of 20.3. Built like the proverbial brick outhouse, Big Al looked awesome — especially to paper-thin Blair.

Big Al took an immediate liking to Blair, whom she showered with endearments like “Blondie, Apple Cheeks, Honeybunch, Rose Lips, Bubble Butt, Button Nose, Pinky and Sweetie pie. However, “Blue Eyes” had become her favorite before practice ended. Had Blair been older and worldlier, she might have been alarmed by Big Al’s language and attentiveness. (Big Al at one point was so engrossed in slowly tucking Blair’s tee shirt into her shorts — “for neatness sake” — that Big Al missed a breakaway on goal.) And a child more perceptive than Blair might have wondered at having a girl who had started the day as a total stranger buy her a veggie dog and diet drink. (“We must protect your little girl figure, mustn’t we,” Big Al had said to Blair, who would have preferred more calories and amino acids.) The biggest clue, save for the clueless, who included Maggie as well as Blair, was Big Al’s offer to come by the house the following day to teach Blair “the fundamentals” — in soccer, that is. When told that Blair lived in another State, Big Al said, “No worries, my dad lets me take public transit alone. He knows I can handle myself.”

Despite Big Al’s impulsive “friendship” for Blair, it wasn’t clear for a while whether Blair would even be allowed to play for any of the teams, even less the formidable Breakers, of the Girls’ Friendship League. Since she didn’t live in Rose Villa, she had no automatic claim to a spot on a roster. And unsurprisingly, none of the coaches wanted Blair for a player. The coach of the Gold Pride voiced the firm opinion that Blair didn’t have sufficient coordination or natural ability to be a team gofer, as in go for water, towels or snacks: “She’d definitely trip over own feet and end up hitting one of my girl’s face with a head butt, an elbow or a bottle of ketchup.”

The consensus, to advise Blair to take up chess instead (albeit, with someone else moving her pieces for her), was first challenged by Big Al. She had been listening in on the conversation, and didn’t like it one bit. Determined to keep “Blue Eyes” around, she demanded that her father add Blair to his roster “Because, after all, the Breakers don’t even have eleven players. We’re always a girl short.”

Gus wouldn’t budge: “There is no way I’m going to add a girl from another town who plays so badly that she’ll weaken my team. The Breakers are a much better team playing a girl short than they would be trying to avoid inadvertently hurting that girly girl. If one of you feels sorry for Little Tangle Foot, then you take her! Don’t impose her on the Breakers.”

But that was exactly what Mrs. Beverly Bolton and the other two coaches insisted on doing. They were anxious to bring the Breakers down a notch, because the team hadn’t lost a game, which was bad enough for morale on other teams, but it was winning while playing a girl short, which was downright embarrassing for the League. To be sure, everyone agreed (with varying degrees of reluctance) that the Breakers were better coached than the competition, but the team’s remarkable success was also attributed to Coach Anderson’s “unsportsmanlike” refusal to permit tyros and tykes to stay on his team. He had used, they said, a Drill Sergeant manner to drive away every ten-or-eleven-year-old, which allowed him to put together a “packed team” aged twelve and thirteen, in contravention of the rules of the league and the spirit of the Pacific Northwest.

Everyone, including his own daughter, thought it was finally time — indeed, past time — to impose a “green girly girl” on Coach Anderson and the Breakers. He relented, agreeing to add Blair to his team after the phrase “otherwise forfeit the season” started getting banded about.

Big Al excitedly hugged her father: “Coach, you don’t know what it means to me to have little Blair added to the team.”

Gus sighed: “Alicia, I think I do know what it means. That’s one reason I wanted to keep that girl off of our team. You need to keep your mind on the game, which you can’t do if you’re obsessed with whether Blair is having fun, getting wet, or looking tired. You tend to smother your “favorite” girls with so much attention and affection that you scare them away, after which you become so depressed that your soccer and schoolwork suffer. We can’t have that happen again, can we?”

“Don’t worry, Coach. I’ve learned my lessons well. While I do intend to become the best friend, the most loving friend, that Blair has in the entire world, I’ll take my time. I won’t rush things. But Coach, you understand: I’ve just got to stick close to Blair, ‘cause she’s easily the cutest, sexiest girl I’ve ever met. She’s dreamy.”

Blair dreamy? It was difficult for Coach Anderson to see the mud-splattered, clumsy girl as anything but a nightmare. For one thing, he considered her much too young for anyone, even a newly minted thirteen-year-old, to be swooning over. So he repeated the warning: “Just don’t get hurt, Alicia. Blair seems awfully young and naíve. She’s probably not knowingly met a girl like you before or ever aspired to the kind of romance that you seek. So, honey, be cautious; don’t do anything that might force us, once again, to move to a new city. I sort of like it here.”

What befell Blair during her stint with the Breakers is quickly told; her relationship with Big Al was, in contrast, extremely complicated and, as the Coach feared, kind of messy.

The first thing that Blair had to do as a Breaker was to foreswear pink on the soccer pitch, for the Breakers dressed in menacing black: black shorts, headband and socks (of whatever make), black sports shoes (obliging Blair to hide her pink stripes with electrical tape), and a black, team tee shirt with the name of the team’s sponsor, J. Hoffa Wrecking and Salvage, in block letters on the back, and the team’s name and logo — a giant wrecking ball smashing into a soccer player’s knee — on the front.

Thus attired, Blair had only one responsibility on the field — and that was to stay out of the way of her teammates. “Ferdinand the Bull” was the name that Coach Anderson gave to her role on the pitch. She was to wander at will, playing her hunches, always as close as feasible to the enemy net and far from Big Al in her own goal. However, she was always to move away from the flow of play so that if her teammates were being totally stymied, they had the option of lofting a pass to her. If by some fluke, she were able to trap it with her body or foot, Blair would be ideally placed to score.

It didn’t bother Blair that no one ever took the pass option and that her foot touched the ball only once in three games (by sheer accident — the opposition were trying to kick it out of bounds to slow the Breaker attack). Blair was happy not to tackle or be tackled because her highest priority was to avoid getting dirty or sweaty, as she knew that her friendship with Big Al somehow depended on always looking her best. She even wore a shower cap during the game— much to the derision of fans and players — because Big Al didn’t like the look of her bangs and bob when they became soggy from the incessant rain.

Even though it was heartwarming to know that Big Al was watching her from a distance more closely than the goalkeeper was watching the ball, it was also discomfiting. So Blair generally kept her own gaze low, looking for ladybugs and four-leaf clovers, or high, gazing at nimbus clouds or branches buckling in the wind.

Despite, or possibly because the Breakers continued effectively to play with a ten-girl roster, the team won the League championship with a perfect record. Consequently, Blair won her first athletic trophy, as girl or boy. That was the good news. The bad news was that teams as successful as the Breakers played in tournaments, not all of which were in Washington State. Indeed, the Breakers were destined to play for the Valley Championship against the Smith Lake Smiters on a soccer pitch less than a quarter-mile from Blair’s own school. Needless to say, that game would be life-changer for Blair.

As would Blair’s friendship with Big Al. For a girl who lived in another State, it was extraordinary how much time she found to spend with Blair: after practice, after games, after any excuse at all. The pretense of helping Blair learn “soccer fundamentals” she soon gave up — it was simply too difficult for anyone to imagine Blair’s ever connecting with the ball more than randomly.

However, Big Al did persuade Blair to wear her pink soccer kit often, her look topped off with a pink hair band and a sterling silver necklace with a diamond-like pink amethyst, a gift from Big Al selected with the help of an Avon Lady who came to the Finlayson-Maguire home. As it was a good excuse to get Blair into the pink soccer outfit, easily Big Al’s favorite, the two girls frequently kneeled on Blair’s bedroom carpet, using her dolls to play soccer with a ping pong ball supplied by Big Al, who had used a black felt marker to color it like the real thing.

Somewhat sheepishly, yet proudly, Big Al added a new doll to Blair’s collection: it was Skipper, whom Big Al said was Barbie’s “little sidekick.” Short, blonde and wearing a pink soccer outfit concocted by Big Al out of an assortment of Barbie’s cast-offs, Skipper represented Blair whenever they played with dolls. Big Al chose Twilight Bella as her own avatar so that Al could pretend that the doll had been bitten by a vampire, thereby giving Bella an excuse to bite Skipper, and Big Al, in mock emulation, to nibble on Blair’s neck.

Kirk also attempted a few nibbles of his own — on Big Al’s neck as well as Blair’s. Somewhat surprisingly, he started to hang out with the two girls, not only helping them to play doll soccer, typically as the last line of defense for Blair’s hopelessly inept team, but also crowding with them around the computer as Big Al introduced Blair to all “the” Internet sites that would help her to develop into a cool, yet ultra-feminine teen. When asked by Big Al, Maggie, Laird and Blair what he could possibly find interesting in these sites, Kirk blushed fiercely, first saying that he wanted to learn what made girls tick, then later admitting that he just liked to hang out with Big Al.

Although Maggie and Laird would have chosen a different girl for Kirk’s first crush, she was pleased and Laird was thrilled that Kirk was finally showing some interest in the opposite sex. True, Big Al did seem infatuated with Blair; but both parents hoped — for Kirk’s sake — that, being a coach’s daughter, Big Al had been raised a tomboy. “I know,” Laird said to Maggie one night in bed, “that Alicia comes across as a lesbian, but she’s still young enough to be in the pre-adolescent stage of development that Freud called the latent homosexual.”

“But,” Maggie asked, “Why have you never thought the same of Blair, who is even younger? That she too is merely going through a phase that she will soon grow out of?”

“Because Maggie, Blair is never going to be attracted to women. Even though the kid enjoys the presents and attention from Alicia, I don’t think it’s ever occurred to Blair that Alicia could possibly have sexual designs on her “little sister”; and if Big Al does ever make a pass, I predict that Blair’s reaction will be — ‘Ugh, gag me with a spoon’.”

“Maybe, but I believe that Alicia could successfully seduce Blair. Not only that, but I wish I could find a way for it to happen, because don’t you see, if Blair’s first sexual experiences are with a female, then Blair will be much less likely to end up a male homosexual.”

“That would be a relief. But,” Laird asked, “Isn’t there some risk of Blair’s ending up a lesbian if our … daughter associates sexual gratification with female-on-female sex?

“Yes,” Maggie replied. “There is indeed some risk of that; yet it’s one well worth taking, honey, because if Alicia introduces Blair to the world of amour, then Blair will definitely want to remain my beautiful, sweet daughter forever. You’ve seen how Alicia encourages Blair to be a girly girl — and Laird, I do think you’d prefer to have a lesbian daughter than a gay son to introduce to your men friends.”

He nodded.

“Then we must find a way for Alicia to initiate Blair in the mysteries of Venus and Aphrodite.”

“Easier said than done,” Laird said. “Remember: There is a small snake, no more than three or four inches in length, that is likely to expel Blair from Alicia’s garden of delights long before he … she has tasted the forbidden fruit.”

“Yes,” Maggie sighed. “Why does a small thing like gender have to matter so much to people? Alicia clearly loves, indeed lusts after Blair. Should it matter, then, what Blair has between her legs just as long as Blair looks and acts like a beautiful, sexy girl?”

“It’s just a thought, Maggie, but maybe gender isn’t as easy to manipulate as you believe. Indeed, is it possible that there is something indefinably male about Blair? I know, I know, it’s hard for us to see, and yet it may be there and just possibly it enables Alicia to know subconsciously that Blair is a male. Is it possible, Maggie, that Alicia isn’t even a lesbian? A tomboy for sure, but maybe not a lesbian. After all, what kind of lesbian is it that mistakes a boy for a girl?”

“Let me get this straight: You’re saying that Alicia may realize deep down that Blair is a boy and that she’s after his body because she’s, unbeknownst to herself, heterosexual and domineering enough to want a boyfriend who wears dresses?”

“Sure, why not? I’ve read of stranger things on the Internet.”

Maggie was lost for words. She even felt a low wave of panic, for she regarded a domineering girlfriend (heaven forbid, a bossy wife!) to be the worst possible outcome for either Blair or Kirk. She wanted Kirk to grow up to be a Mensch, an Alpha Male, and she wanted Blair to be the Alpha bitch in the pack.

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. It’s a familiar theme in the TG literature, but this time with an unfamiliar twist. Blair’s life has become more complicated now that he’s joined the Breakers, a girl’s soccer team and Big Al, the coach’s daughter, has decided that he’s the girl she wants to marry. Big Al also turns out to be Kirk’s ideal female (and mate?).

Chapter 8 A lesbian’s choice

For a month the tension had been tightening like a corset on a fifty-year-old drag queen. At school, Miss Umbridge was taking increasing umbrage at the failure of sarcasm, ridicule, petty punishments and after-school detentions to drive Blair to distraction or, better yet, from the school. Moreover, the kid’s grades refused to fall; “the pervert” was heading towards success. After three weeks, she wised up to the fact that the detentions actually protected Blair from its (the pronoun Umbridge used) fellow students.

So the teacher, after making a grand gesture of “forgiveness” one day by ending the detention regime, tried to ruin Blair’s life the next. Her excuse was the Amethyst and silver pinky ring that Blair wore to class for the first time. It had been a gift from Big Al, a token of their “going steady,” and enough of Blair’s classmates believed his story that he had found a girlfriend on a mixed-gender soccer team in Washington State that the ring at first did his reputation more good than harm. Though cynics and skeptics wondered why Blair had gone across the Columbia to find a soccer team when there were plenty nearby, the credulous bought his explanation that, “I had to go to another State to find a team bad enough for me. Everyone knows I’ve got two left and right feet.”

It was the ring that convinced a furious Miss Lucretia Umbridge to switch from a policy of slow attrition to one of open insinuation. Believing that Blair had violated their modus vivendi by “flaunting its deviancy” with girl’s jewelry, she was determined to find a way to “out the little bastard” in such a way that the school would become too hot for Blair to stay, yet remain cool enough for her to stay. She had no intention of losing her job because of the “brat”.

Thus, she dared not finger “the brat” as a crossdresser, a topic that the school psychologist had declared verboten until he had a chance in the (never-never) future to rule on whether or not Blair had a mental disease. She therefore decided to lecture to her charges on the subject of homosexuality. She knew where she stood with “the fags”: They had to be treated as sacrosanct. If she dared to criticize them, then she’d be the one suspended or discharged for being infected with homophobia. Consequently, she schemed to draw attention to Blair as a probable homosexual while condemning gays with faint praise.

She started by making a plea for tolerance for gays and lesbians “as for all God’s creatures.” Sure, the four-percenters made sex in a different way than the ninety-six percent who constituted the “vast majority of Americans”, but deviations from the norm were to be expected in any group of animals, among whom she placed the primate apes.

She then explained in graphic, almost pornographic detail the sexual practices of gays and lesbians. Ten- and eleven-year-olds, who couldn’t even handle a frank discussion of their own body parts, never mind masturbation, were grossed out (it was like eating live, wriggling worms!) to be told that “fellatio” was the act of one male “submissively receiving fluid directly from the pee-hole of another male”.

As for lesbian sex, the boys were mightily upset to learn that “dykes” liked to hump each other with “dildos” (a new word for about half of them) about four times as wide and four times as long as their own manstick. This information called into question their own capacity to please any woman.

One boy timidly asked why lesbians were called “dykes”. Did the name have anything to do with Holland? Possibly with wooden shoes? Were they the original dildos? (Any girl with any imagination shivered at that image.) Miss Umbridge put few minds at ease by saying that the word “dyke” probably derived from “hermaphrodite”. By the time she had explained what that was, most of the kids had concluded that dykes had dicks. Sally Hamwich knew that wasn’t true, but she kept silent.

If they weren’t unsettled enough (the detailed discussion of anal sex had already sent two pupils to the washroom to avoid upchucking on their desk), the children were further rattled by being told that homosexuals were exactly like other males and females in their dating and mating patterns: Thus, lesbians waited to be asked out on a date, which made it difficult for them ever to connect; and gay males, being just as randy as heterosexual males, played a more aggressive role — indeed, they would make a pass at any male (hide away your pets, kids) they thought might be available, and even some males who were not.

But don’t worry, Miss Umbridge explained to the boys in order to ease their alarm, gays are just as likely to accept “no” as an answer from a naked boy who doesn’t like being propositioned in the shower as heterosexual males are to accept “no” from a naked girl standing beside them in the shower.

“Boys and girls, don’t believe those prison movies,” she advised, “Gay rape is uncommon; it certainly doesn’t happen every day. And lesbians know that it’s just as illegal to invade the private, vulnerable parts of an unwilling girl with a painfully enormous dildo as it is with their hands or tongue.”

A frail, pretty little boy then asked, his voice quavering: “You say that homosexuals act a lot like regular girls and guys. Do they somehow look different? Does a gay male have, for example, slanty eyes like an Oriental dude?”

“Stephen, you shouldn’t use that term,” lectured Miss Umbridge; “only bigots use that word now. The correct word is Asian. And no, it’s a sign of prejudice to believe that gays and lesbians look different than you and me. Homosexual males don’t necessarily look effeminate; nor do lesbians necessarily look masculine. It’s an Old Husband’s Tale to believe that they always do.”

“So how do they find each other,” asked Rachel, “if they don’t look at all different from normal people? I mean they’re going to get their faces slapped a lot of times if they can’t tell the difference between a girl like me and a lesbian.” Rachel then smiled at several males in rapid succession to alert them that she, at least, was available.

“Rachel, homosexuals find each other through something called gaydar.”

Several called out for an explanation. She had their rapt attention now. Jason Harper was even taking notes. “If you meet someone of the same sex in the school corridor and they gaze into your eyes long enough to force you to avert your eyes in discomfort, that person is gay and is sending out the gaydar waves — just like radar does. If you look away, then the homosexual knows you’re not gay and then stares into the eyes of the person behind you. However, if you don’t lower your eyes or if you detect the stare faster than you should, then you’ve bounced back the gaydar like radar waves from a military target. Word quickly goes around the community, and from then on all the gays or lesbians know that you’re one of them, and one after another they’ll attempt a “bombing run” on you until you’ve become a “mission accomplished.”

Blair finally took the bait: “Are you saying that it’s somehow dangerous for boys to look other boys in the eyes; and girls, other girls? How are we supposed to make any friends? If a kid doesn’t look me straight in the eye, he’s shifty-eyed and I don’t trust him.”

The teacher pounced:

Of course boys can look each other in the eyes and girls can do the same. But if you exchange lingering glances, then you’re sending out and bouncing back the gaydar. Blair, you’re going to find that gay males will be constantly trying to pick you up because, as I have noticed, you tend to stare into the eyes of males long enough for them to look away in confusion or disgust. Your staring is an innocent habit, I’m sure, in one so young, but you should turn down the gaydar when you look at other boys, unless you are gay and want to advertise your sexual availability. Of course, I have no right to ask you whether you are gay or whether you’re lusting after any or all of the other boys here. After all, this school has a policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. But if you are gay, I am sure that it wouldn’t matter to anyone in this class, for we honor diversity in this community. There are no bigots here. If Blair were to tell us that he’s gay, we’d all applaud his honesty and courage. Right, class?”

Everyone looked in his direction. Blair shook his head: “I’m not gay,” he mumbled.

“Of course you’re not, Blair. Not that it matters to any of us. If you’re not gay, I do advise changing the way you look at boys. You should look at them in the same indifferent way that you look at girls.”

Jason asked, with pen poised: “I’ve heard that it’s gay to wear for a dude to wear an earring on his right ear. Is that always true? And what about hankies in the back pocket?”

After briefly explaining how some gay males advertised their sexual preferences by putting a colored handkerchief or teddy bear in the rear pocket of their jeans, Miss Umbridge confirmed that it was “very gay indeed” to wear studs or earrings on the right ear or on both ears.”

At this, Blair and several other boys hid their ears in their hands — to no avail, of course. With the coffin lid already being nailed shut around Blair’s reputation, Miss Umbridge finished her little chat on the need to identify and befriend lesbians and gays by saying, “Of course, I’ve found that there is, among gay males at least, the jewelry equivalent of the cross for Christians or the Star of David for Jews. A gay male will wear this as the ultimate form of gaydar.”

“What is it, Miss?” begged Linda Haskins.

“It’s a pinky ring, of course; especially one with a gemstone.”

Miss Umbridge waited ten minutes to calm the ensuing uproar. Everyone was pointing at, jeering at, laughing at, shouting at, snarling at … Blair. His teacher made no attempt to control their language. Openly reviled as a “homo” and “fairy” (the boy-girl was in Umbridge’s opinion something far worse), Blair would, she hoped, run tearfully out of the classroom. As soon as “it” made that mistake, Miss Umbridge planned to take “the creature” directly to the Principal and to insist that “it” be transferred to another school since “its” homosexuality had somehow become common knowledge” and, despite her best efforts to preach tolerance, the classroom had become too hostile an environment for Blair to continue useful studies.

The scheme might have worked; but Blair refused to budge. He figured the only hope that he had to convince anyone that he wasn’t gay was to “take the crap like a man”. When things had calmed down, he planned to ask, “If I’m a fairy, then why didn’t I run when Bob Oates threatened to punch me out — right there in Umbridge’s class?”

For some other boy, an exchange of fisticuffs with Bob Oates might have sufficed to salvage his reputation, but Blair had long been considered the biggest sissy in the fifth grade. He wasn’t going to get off lightly with a bloodied nose. A lot of students had sensed there was something “queer” about Blair well before he started wearing panties to school. Now they “knew” he wasn’t one of them. From that class onward Blair dared not use the boys’ washroom or walk on the school campus whenever there were other students about. He headed off to school earlier and earlier, and returned later and later with each passing day. And he learned to avoid liquids.

Naturally, Blair looked to Kirk to protect him in the schoolyard. (There was nothing that Kirk could do about the verbal insults and lewd pictures in the boys’ washroom.) As Kirk got into one fight after another trying to force someone to take back his insults or to stop pummeling Blair, Kirk became as tightly wound as a training bra wrapped around D-cup breasts. The girls in grade seven were especially unsettling to Kirk’s equipoise, since they enjoyed seeing him react to their observation that “gayness runs in families”.

To unwind, Kirk walloped Blair. As usual, the two siblings were squabbling over Big Al. Blair keenly resented that Kirk and Big Al seemed to have more in common than either teen had with him. Even though Big Al was still smitten with Blair, she spent almost as much time with Kirk who shared Al’s enthusiasm for performance automobiles, contact sports, new technologies, heavy metal bands and rock climbing. Blair, feeling excluded, accused Kirk of “trying to steal my friend. Big Al was my friend first. You have no right to take her away from me.”

Usually Kirk simply ignored Blair’s whining, but this time it got to him: “Blair, you need to get real. Big Al isn’t a friend of the real you. The only reason Alicia likes you is that she thinks you’re a girl. She’d never be your friend if she knew about your ding-a-ling. In fact, she’d despise you.”

That did it! Blair threw himself at Kirk, slapping Kirk’s cheeks, scratching Kirk’s face with his lacquered nails, and pulling his hair out. (Blair found a brush cut didn’t yield easily.)

“Fighting like a girl, are you? Well, I fight like a guy,” shouted Kirk as he threw two punches, first a left jab that split Blair’s lip and then a right hook that blackened Blair’s eye. As angry as a wet cat, Blair went for Kirk’s eyes. Fortunately, Maggie broke up the fight before any permanent damage had been done. Both children were punished — Kirk more than Blair because a boy should never hit a girl, even his sister.

Seeing the futility of riposting that Blair wasn’t in fact a girl, Kirk stoically accepted exile to his room while Blair endured no more than a tongue-lashing as Maggie soothed his wounds with salve. Kirk, lying atop his bed, eyes riveted to a crack in the ceiling, benefited from his extended timeout: It gave him some time alone, away from his bratty sister, to come up with a plan to avoid total annihilation by Big Al, who was bound to come looking for him once the big bruiser had seen Blair’s black eye.

When Maggie came to his room to end his punishment, Kirk vented:

Maggie, all you think about is Blair. You don’t care about me. You don’t want to know what a hell school has become for me because of ‘little sister’. While no one seems to know about the crossdressing, the whole effin’ place believes Blair is a homo. Some of the kids think I must be one too — like it's contagious. I’m in one fight after another because of Blair. You promised to get Blair out of Lewis A. Clark if I helped you transform the sissy into my sister. Well, it’s been weeks since Blair has worn boys’ clothes. So when is she going to transfer to another school like you promised?”

“Soon, honey, as soon as I’m sure that Blair actually wants to be a girl. Until then I can’t administer your sister the female hormones that she will need in order to pass daily inspection as a schoolgirl.”

“Why don’t you start Blair on the feminine hormones now? They don’t work overnight, do they? Yeah, that’s what I thought. So Blair could take the hormones for a while, couldn’t she, without growing giant boobs or something else that she couldn’t hide under a loose sweatshirt?”

“Well, yes …”

“Don’t you think, Maggie, that if Blair’s body gets filled up with female atoms and mol’cules, then Blair’s brain will start telling her that she’s a real girl? Then she’ll be thrilled to lose her balls and dick.”

“It’s not quite as easy as that. Yet you’ve given me food for thought. I bet the Internet could tell us where to find a mild, slow-acting hormonal treatment for Blair that will render her mind so female that she actually will insist on the body modification she needs to pass muster in a girls’ shower room.”

“No worries, Maggie. I can find the right website, ‘cause Blair taught me how to surf the Net. But before I start hunting I want your promise that if I can find some hormones that will totally fem’nize Blair’s brain without her growing giant tits, that you’ll ‘mediately start feeding ‘em to her.”

It took a little more wheedling, but Kirk eventually got the assurances he sought. He then began surfing with so much zeal you’d think he was a teenaged boy looking for a nude image of Hannah Montana.

The day after this victory, Kirk suffered a painful setback when Big Al gave him two black eyes as punishment for hitting Blair. However, Kirk staved off complete disaster by reminding Big Al of their many interests in common. Kirk thus remained inside Big Al’s friendship circle, albeit farther from its center. It was fortunate that these two lugs were able to repair their relationship, for otherwise Big Al might have stormed out of Blair’s life forever a week later.

The storm that threatened to uproot Blair’s friendship with Big Al and bring it crashing down like an exposed elm on a coastal bluff had its origins in Big Al’s understandable curiosity about the finer, more naked, less visible parts of the body that had so captured her fancy. While it was obvious that Blair still had the boyish physique of a young girl, Big Al wondered whether Blair’s bosom had begun to blossom and whether her darling’s groin remained as hairless as her armpits.

Big Al was no longer willing to wait to discover how far Blair had journeyed towards puberty and menarche. Deep down, she hoped that the younger girl hadn’t even begun the transition, for Big Al could then share and record every moment of her beloved’s passage to womanhood. That hope probably underlay Alicia’s initial attraction to a girl who looked prepubescent.

It wasn’t going to be easy, Big Al discovered, to see Blair in the buff, because Blair was abnormally shy around other females. Far from being willing to strip out of her bra and down to her panties in front of Big Al, as most of her girlfriends did when they were trying on or exchanging clothes or seeking an appraisal of their breast development, Blair behaved as modestly as a girl forced to change into a bathing suit in a men’s locker room. Only once had Big Al even caught a glimpse of Blair’s belly (delightfully flat with an innie).

Big Al finally surrendered to curiosity — or was it plain lust? — when she noticed that Blair had accidentally left the bathroom door ajar while showering. Half-inch by half-inch Al widened the gap until she could see Blair standing at one end of the bathtub below the showerhead. There wasn’t much to see, other than flesh tones, as long as Blair stood behind the shower curtain; but Big Al could hope to see more, as the curtain had been drawn only halfway along the tub. In fact, as Blair soaped “herself”, “she” occasionally backed away from the steam and rain of water, at which time the back half of her pink bubble butt came into full, intoxicating view.

Surrendering to Blair’s allure, Big Al thrust her right hand inside her own jeans, and then inside her gray cotton boy-leg panties. Just as Al’s fingers had gained their objective, Blair, “her” back turned towards the wall and away from the door, stepped out from behind the shower curtain and completely into view. The sight of Blair naked from the back nape of the neck to the back heels of the feet had an instantaneous effect: The entire body of Big Al shook as she moaned in ecstasy from the first genuine orgasm of her life.

Big Al was still shaking, still moaning, still orgasmic when Blair, still not realizing (thanks to the shower’s roar) that he was being observed, did a 180-degree turn to examine himself in a mirror as he soaped his privates. There wasn’t however, anywhere near enough soap to hide the self-evident: that Big Al, a self-identified lesbian, had just experienced her first orgasm by ogling a boy. Shocked, angry and confused, Big Al noisily stamped down the stairs, her right fist occasionally punching the wall, as she headed for the front door exit muttering, “I gotta get far away from that little turd or I’ll be hung for killing him.”

Kirk caught up with Big Al as the girl briefly stopped to pull up her hoodie for protection against the pelting rain: “Al, what’s wrong? Why the rush? Aren’t you friend enough to say goodbye?”

Big Al turned on him: “Some friend you are! Would a friend let me make a fool of myself by chasin’ after Blair? Come on, Kirk, you know I’m a dyke; so why didn’t yah tell me not to waste my time on a phony girl like Blair.”

“A phony girl? Blair? What makes you say something so retarded?”

“Still playing me for a fool, are you? Look, Kirk the jerk, I just saw Blair stark nekkid in the shower — from the front! I saw everything the kid has on offer and I’m not buyin’. So don’t try tellin’ me that Blair’s a girl with an extra big clitoris and two tumors. In fact, don’t bother tellin’ me nothing. I’m outta here. I never want to see neither of you dickheads ever again. Tell that little bastard that he better never come near the Breakers again. If he does, I’ll tell his ex-teammates the revoltin’ truth about him, meaning that they’ll be wantin’ to break his arms and legs.”

Kirk grabbed hold of her: “You don’t understand. If you knew the truth about Blair, then you’d still be her friend.”

“Let me go, I tell yah. You can’t fool me by usin’ the female pronoun. I know the truth about Blair and the truth has set me free.” Then, with an almost casual shift of her shoulders she threw Kirk to the ground. She’d almost reached the street before he next caught up to her. This time he tackled her from the rear, his momentum bringing her down; lying on top of her back, short of breath, Kirk gasped, “You’ve … got to hear … me out.”

Big Al would have none of it. She escaped from Kirk’s hold with lightning ease. He ended up supine, arms pinned, Big Al sitting on his groin. Her physical superiority proven easily, almost disdainfully, there didn’t seem to be anything to bar her departure. However, indecision overcame her; she made not a move. Then, a decision made, her knees eased their grip on his torso; her hands, on his wrists. Her weight subtly shifted and Kirk, sensing an unexpected opening, overthrew Big Al with a sudden, upward, almost erotic thrust of his pelvis. Now Kirk sat triumphantly atop her abdomen, his arms pinning hers, his head lowered so that his face was in her face.

“Now, you’ll listen.” And Big Al did. She made no attempt to free herself as Kirk explained that Blair was a transsexual who hadn’t worn a stitch of boys’ wear in several weeks:

She’s not been trying to trick you. Blair really is a girl in her own head and Maggie wants her to have a girl’s body before Christmas — that means everything but a womb inside. Her not having one of those shouldn’t bother you, not if you’re really a dyke. Blair is head over heals in love with you; the little fool even tried to scratch my eyes out because she’s hung up on you. If you love Blair, you’ll stand by her and help her transition to womanhood. If the only feeling you ever had for Blair was lust, then she’d be better off without you. You can go; I’m not keeping you.”

Kirk then rolled off her, and sat on his haunches to await Big Al’s next move.

Still lying flat on her back, but with her head turned so that she could gauge Kirk’s reply, Big Al asked, “Is it true? Blair really loves me?”

Kirk nodded, gulped, and confessed:

I love you too. I’ve never met a girl like you before. You have opened my eyes to the full range of choices that girls have in life. There’s no such thing as a typical girl. Girls don’t have to be little princesses who always wear pink. They don’t have to spend most of their time worrying about their appearance. I love the way you look, the way you dress, everything about you. You even showed me that a real girl can love sports and enjoy the same things as boys. I’ll be forever grateful to you, as I suppose I should be to Blair, for teaching me that boys and girls come in every color and shape — Blair in pink satin and you in blue denim.”

“How about you, Kirk? What’s your favorite color and material? Is it ….” She bit her tongue.

“Me? The same as you. I go for blue denim and black leather. You know -- we even wear the same color of cotton underwear.”

Big Al said in mock outrage:

You pervert! You know the color of my underwear? Boy, are you wasting your time looking down my jeans. I’ll never, never sex it up with a guy like you. Until I saw Blair in the nude, I’d have said I was 100 percent lesbian. I guess in reality I’m only 98 percent lesbian ‘cause I’ve fallen in love with a dyke with a dick. But you better have told the truth — Blair better get rid of those ugly ‘pendages within a few months. Funny thing, Blair’s still being a hairless little boy means that I’ll be able to see every change her body makes on its way through puberty to being an adult woman.

Kirk bridled:

I’m not a pervert! How wouldn’t I know the color of your underwear? Your jeans droop low enough for anyone to know it. Heck, sometimes your undies are halfway down your butt. Anyway, you’re the real pervert ‘cause you’re a Peeping Tom. So you’re going to watch Blair’s body change? How are you going to that? By spying on her when she takes a shower? Now that’s perverted.

“Okay, I apologize: So your eyes didn’t sneak into my pants; but you’re really naíve if you think I’m going to be hangin’ outside the bathroom door, hopin’ to get a glimpse of Blair in the nude. No, now that I know the real reason for her ‘modesty’ around me, I intend to seduce her. After that, she and I will be able to look and touch to our hearts’ content.”

Without further ado, Kirk and Big Al reentered the Finlayson house; he went upstairs to see ‘what’s up with Blair’, while she sought out the chatelaine of the house. Big Al found Maggie with her arms half in dishwater. After a brief exchange of niceties, Al boldly announced: “Ms. Maguire, you should know that I intend to marry Blair as soon as the law allows us girls to marry each other. Blair is my ideal woman.”

Maggie coughed, cleared her throat, and then said: “At ten, Blair is a long way from her wedding day. Alicia, I am sure you’re realistic enough to know that Blair is more likely statistically to marry a man than woman. Do you have any evidence that Blair is a gay girl?”

“Gay? That I don’t know yet. But a girl, a genuine girl? I already know that Blair isn’t one.”

Maggie gave a start: “Blair not really a girl? What makes you think that? Has Kirk been joshing with you?”

“Ms. Maguire, it’s got nothing to do with Kirk. I accidentally saw Blair in the buff. I saw his … you know what.”

“And you still want to marry Blair? Have I been wrong, Alicia in supposing that you liked girls better than boys?”

“Nope. I’m definitely a lezzie, Ms. Maguire. That’s why I want to marry Blair. With a nip here, and a tuck there, I believe Blair can become the most beautiful female in the entire world. Blair is so cute. I think about her a lot whenever I’m alone.” Big Al blushed, her cheeks a fire-engine red.

With Maggie remaining silent, apparently lost in thought, Big Al plunged on: “Ms. Maguire, I can help you and Blair. Just give me one sleepover with Blair. I promise you that I will get her so turned on by the female body that she’ll insist on getting one of her own as quickly as possible. One sleepover and Blair will never think of herself as a boy again.”

Maggie after a minute’s reflection replied, “Alicia, you’re Blair’s best girlfriend. Of course, you can sleepover with Blair — as best girlfriends do — any time you want, so long as it’s not a school night. We can’t have you keeping each other up all night giggling and gossiping and then falling asleep in class. Why don’t you ask your parents if you can sleepover this coming Friday night?”

Big Al flashed a huge, winning smile: “Sure thing, Ms. Maguire. I suggest you have some feminizing pills for Blair to take on Saturday morning. After a night with me she’ll be keen on feminizin’ her body as quick as possible.”

As she had done when speaking with Kirk, Maggie gave what she thought was no more than lip service to the idea of immediately putting Blair on “feminizing pills”. It was easy, she felt, for kids to get over-enthusiastic about Blair’s transformation; they didn’t risk going to prison for messing with the body chemistry of a preteen. But was it mere lip service? Just ten days later Maggie would be insisting that Blair swallow some ‘feminizing’ herbs that Kirk had purchased off the Internet (by using Laird’s identity and credit card).

As we shall see next, It was Blair’s brief fling as a ballerina that finally convinced Maggie that it was folly to wait even one more day without trying to make “her daughter” more feminine in all the ways that truly mattered.

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. It’s a familiar theme in the TG literature, but this time with an unfamiliar twist. With Alicia determined to turn him into a lesbian and Maggie to turn him into a ballet dancer (and Wili), Blair doesn’t know which will come first: the loss of his virginity or a broken leg.

Chapter 9 A ballet school’s choice

On the Monday after Blair’s tryout with the girls’ soccer league, Maggie had taken her daughter to The Dame Margot Pavlova Ballet School. Its studio was a fifteen-story walkup located on the top floor of the Sealand Building, a squat, postmodern cube with a façade of blue glass, white masonry, terracotta “pillars” and dark green tiles. Blair gushed that he’d never seen a lovelier building.

Huffing and puffing, and desperately gasping for breath like a five-pack-a-day smoker at the summit of Mount Hood, Blair staggered through the Corinthian- leather portals of the ballet school to find Maggie already deep in conversation with a short, slender, bearded man wearing jet-black shades and dreadlocks partly hidden by the hood of his purple, zippered sweatsuit, on which glittered his bling-bling -- three “goon” chains and four honoring dance crews.

The little man, who looked to be in his forties, still had a lean, dancer’s body. He waved to Blair to join them: “Yo, you must be Blair. I bet you is a rain woman, you be lookin’ so fly! Yo’ threads are kickin’. (Blair was sporting a wet pink umbrella; two hair ribbons, one white, one pink; a white halter top over a pink leotard; and, of course, his hopscotch sneakers, with their dangling charms. He carried his ballet slippers in a silver lamé bag.) “Blair girl, put your arms over your head, give us a twirl, and let’s see you shake yo’ booty.”

As Blair feigned several ballet turns, the little man declared, “That’s the real shit! Girl, yo’ booty is quite the ba-donka-donk. You is also a natural dancer built tight and muscular. In a year’s time I predict you be our prima ballerina. Girl, you put yo’ junk in that change room over there, where you can hang with the other girls in yo’ class while I talk to yo’ mama about the bread.”

Blair, more than a little confused, looked to Maggie for confirmation. She nodded, pointing to the girls’ change room. Blair skipped off, leaving the adults to complete their business. “Mr. Five Cent — that’s the name you gave, right?” Maggie asked. When the little man nodded, she continued: “You said Blair’s classes would cost two ‘benjamins’. I believe that’s slang for two C notes or $200 cash. Am I right? And the price includes a guaranteed role for her in a public performance? Is that right?”

Nods to all questions.

Maggie next said: “Then we have a deal. But I must be frank — I was more than a little shocked when I found out that Dame Pavlova doesn’t exist and that you, a man, own and manage this school.”

“Listen to my flow. As I related to yourself befo’, the peeps in this areous ‘spects a ballet school to be Russian. To me, that’s wack, but I can’t live with no bread. And so, I named this joint afta the skank who danced duets with Stravinsky. You aksed about my creds. They is the bestest: I was a principal of Les Ballets Trocadero de Monte Carlo, which means I done danced befo’ the queens of Europe. But don’t you worry none ‘bout a man learnin’ yo’ girl, cuz I leave the newbs to Madame Monica Rafferty to ‘struct. And that bee-itch is bad! She been dancing with the St. Petersburg Ballet. You should seen her be dancin’ the roles of both Odette and Odille in “Swan Lake” in New York City! She had the peeps’ eyes a-poppin’ out of their sockets.”

“The St. Petersburg Ballet? That must be the world-renowned Kirov,” decided Maggie, who didn’t know about the little-known Florida ensemble whose costume malfunctions had brought infamy in New York and criminal charges in West Palm Beach. (Google Anything for a Moped for further information about Monica’s dance company.)

Mr. Five-Cent mumbled something that sounded to Maggie like agreement. She then grilled him about his name. Yes, he hadn’t been born Lucky Five-Cent; it was a street name. Pressed, he admitted that he’d been named Lars Swenson at birth, but to survive life in the ghetto he’d changed his name — along with the way he talked and acted — so that he would fit in, despite being a scrawny-ass white boy who couldn’t jump.

Maggie was horrified to think that Lars, er … Lucky Five-Cent, had grown up always having to keep his head down for fear of stray bullets. She regarded the little man with new respect.

Before she could discover the name of the horrific slum that had deprived Lucky of an education in Standard English, he, seeing his assistant Monica arrive, said to Maggie, “Sku me, but I’m gonna bail. Gotta see my banker. You can chill with Monica until class.” And he hustled off without making any introductions.

“Well, I never …” Maggie was not amused! However, Monica soon put a smile on her face; not only was the young woman unassuming, pleasant and physically attractive, she also spoke Standard English. She must have been the woman who had taken her phone call and arranged Blair’s registration. After the niceties, Maggie couldn’t contain her curiosity about the curious proprietor of Dame Pavlova: “I don’t envy Mr. Five-Cent his upbringing. It must have been terrifying for a small, vulnerable white boy to grow up in a place like Bedford-Stuyvesant, Watts, Highland Park-Detroit or the Chicago South Side.” She was fishing for information. For some reason she needed to know more about Five-Cent’s ghetto childhood.

Monica smiled: “He does give the wrong impression, doesn’t he? My boss grew up in Fargo, North Dakota where he lived until his folks paid for him to study dance in Paris, France. Fargo has always been whiter than Snow White, with less than a thousand black folk even now. His best friend from his childhood, Sven Larsson, told me that Mr. Five-Cent used to talk with as strong a Swedish accent as that pregnant, Brainerd cop in the movie named after his home town.”

“So why now does he talk so black?” Maggie asked.

Maggie couldn’t help but laugh: “You think he talks like an African American? He doesn’t talk like any of the ones I know. He’s developed a lingo that’s uniquely his own. I don’t think anyone else on the planet talks like Mr. Five-Cent. I don’t see how he could have been much influenced by African-American English because he’s not exactly surrounded himself with blacks. Sure, he once had an African-American lover, but that dude, an older man, spoke like Darth Vader or, if you will, like Morgan Player playing God. The only other black male that I know he ever got intimate with was a Belgian. Mr. Five-Cent said that Guy spoke French with a cute Flemish accent.”

“Mr. Five-Cent can understand French?”

“Not only that, but he also speaks French as well as German, Spanish, Estonian and Romansh. He doesn’t even need subtitles to understand British movies about slum kids.”

Maggie was now thoroughly flummoxed. “Then why is his English so poor?”

“Because he watched too many Hollywood movies? Or maybe because he wants it to be? He believes the ghetto shtick helps the school to get donations — and they are much needed, let me tell you — from prosperous whites, who’ll be extra generous if they decide that he grew up as disadvantaged as any ghetto black. He also hopes to attract his first African-American pupil to Dame Pavlova. But I think his efforts to ‘talk black’ are backfiring, as I have seen more than one African-American parent angrily stomp out of here after the initial interview.”

Maggie nodded. She could see that any black parent interested in ballet lessons for their progeny might view his “Hollywood” hip-hop language and style as a contrived insult, as though he were condescending to their supposed level.

Two doors were flung open. The soft sound of tiptoes running bare or in slippers entered the room. Monica headed for its center after a few last words to Maggie: “I fear I’m the one who must rush off now because I see my young charges are now ready and eager to dance. You might want to sit in one of those folding chairs by the windows because it will give you the best view of Blair’s work at the barre. As a novice, she’ll be spending a lot of time there. And don’t you fret: Your daughter will have loads of fun at Dame Pavlova.”

Ten girls and one boy quickly encircled their dance instructor. Blair, the twelfth member of their class, was a late arrival, off to a late start in the change room, and a late stop in the dance studio. (Indeed, Blair might have sailed into a wall had he not veered into two of the girls, almost flooring them.)

“Well, well,” chuckled Madame Rafferty, “for a newcomer you do like to make a grand entrance. And those darling leotards do make you stand out from the crowd.” (Poor Blair was the only one dressed in pink; everyone else, including the lone boy, was dressed in a uniform black, although a handful of girls had personalized their look with colored ankle warmers, while the boy wore a lavender-and-blue silk scarf.)

“I assume, girls and boy [Monica smiled at the solitary, undisguised male in the room], that you’ve all met Blair. I am sure you will be good to her, because, thanks to her, we’ll have an even dozen dancers for the performance later this spring by you, the school’s novices, of Giselle, the 1841 ballet classic by Adolphe Adam. You will be dancing to choreography by the immortal Marius Petipa as modified for this class by Dame Margot Pavlova herself. This ballet is, as eleven of you already know, is designed to give people the willies.”

Blair noticed that the rest of the class laughed politely, as though they once thought this a good joke. But what did it mean?

“The Wilis,” the instructor continued, “were supernatural beings who lured young men to ‘death by dancing’. I’m sure,” she chuckled, “that there have been many urchins, who dragged kicking and screaming to a ballet, thought that they were about to die from sheer boredom at having to watch girls ‘flit about’. Well, we mustn’t let any of those tykes die during our performance; so we want our Wilis to be as scary to them as a midnight monster movie. By scary, I don’t mean we’re going to frighten your family with dangerously inept lifts and jumps; instead we’re going to give everyone the willies by having ten of you girls dressed as Willis dance menacingly around Giselle and Count Albrecht in gossamer dresses so fluffy, white and flimsy that you’ll look like demons from hell.”

Blair shuddered. He had the willies. Somehow it was scarier to dance in public in a flimsy white dress than to practice soccer in pink sneakers and shorts. He wouldn’t be able to hide in a dance production or wander around the perimeter— he’d have to take center stage and let it all hang out. However, knowing that “it” couldn’t ever be allowed to “hang out” he was wearing two pairs of super firm, cotton-spandex panties under his leotard to keep well-hidden any excitement he might feel at seeing athletic young bodies — the lone boy’s especially — in tight, form-fitting garb. Gosh, their leotards closely followed the contours of their buttocks! Blair knew that he had to be careful: One of the girls was already tittering because she had caught “the new girl” staring at the bulge in Taylor’s dance belt. Blair was amazed that a twelve-year-old boy could be that big.

“And that, Blair,” Monica droned, “is our class objective for the spring term: to mount a production of Giselle for your parents and the invited public. Since you are a true beginner, you will dance as part of the corps de ballet, as a Wili. As for the rest, as we have only one male dancer — I don’t know what we do without you, Taylor — Mr. Five-Cent has eliminated the male roles of Hilarion, Wilfrid and Giselle’s father. As all but Blair already know, Linda Hernandez will dance the role of Giselle. The rest of the featured roles for girls are still up for grabs: namely, those of Giselle’s mother Berthe, of Myrtha, the Queen of the Wilis and of Bathilde, the fiancée betrayed by our sole male and villain, Duke Albrecht of Silesia. For obvious reasons, the role of the Duke will be danced by Taylor. All of you girls also get to be a Wili. Well, that’s enough information to bring the newbie up to speed. Now off you all go, including Blair, to the barre, to begin your exercises.

Her class in place, their hands lightly grasping the wooden barre along the right-side wall, she asked them to perform a sequence of half and full knee bends (demi and grands pliés) designed to stretch their leg muscles as they went through the five basic positions of ballet. As Blair strove to emulate their moves, taking Taylor as his exemplar, Madame Monica evaluated the newcomer’s flexibility, suppleness, lines and balance.

It didn’t much concern her that Blair couldn’t distinguish one position from the next — that much she expected — but she’d never seen a girl before who was unable to keep her balance even with the aid of the barre. Moreover, she had seen sixty-year-old Swedes in better condition than Blair: “The girl might be able to float across a room as though she has wings instead of feet, but she’s already out of breath after a few simple exercises. And she’s using the bar to pull herself up from a half-plié! Has that girl ever used her abdominal and thigh muscles?”

Blair didn’t do any better at éleves and réleves (also performed at the barre) where he was supposed to rise onto the balls of the feet, from a both a standing and plié position. In theory Blair was supposed to practice each of them for each of the five ballet positions, but a fundamental lack of balance made it impossible to rise to the occasion. Monica advised Blair to work on her pliés while the rest of the class completed their battements tendus (stretching their legs along the floor to a point) and ronds de jambe (a circular motion of their working foot on the floor).

Away from the barre, the class worked on arm placement, pirouettes, arabesques, lifts and spotting for turns. Through all, Blair stumbled about like a one-legged drunk. Never had a girl at Dame Pavlova shown less coordination or balance. That, however, wasn’t the assessment of Blair’s instructor, who was kind enough to say that she remembered a girl so overweight that she kept tripping over the feet she could not see, but of Maggie, who refused to believe during an after-class chat with Madame Rafferty that there couldn’t be another child of Blair’s age, of whatever sex, who had so little natural talent for dance. “The only thing that Blair can do,” Maggie decided, “is spot for turns. She’s also got the muscles to lift the other girls high off the floor, except when she drops them.”

Madame Rafferty agreed: “Ms. Maguire, you’ve got a point. Considering Blair’s progress in lifting, spotting and leaping, I’d say that she had an adequate first outing for a boy. But I fear she has a long way to go to catch up to the other girls her age.”

Over the next seven weeks, little changed for Blair at Dame Pavlova, even after Madame Rafferty had, in desperation to ready “that clumsy girl” for the public performance of Giselle, begun giving him free tutorial classes. With Mr. Five-Cent’s enthusiastic accord, Blair was told to move as slowly as possible two yards behind the closest Wili: “Blair honey, think of yourself as the army reserve, poised to rush to the front lines if one of Wilis already there falters or falls because of audience pressure.”

Blair, no fool, realized that he “sucked” as much at dance as he did at “soccer.” It might have seriously damaged his self-esteem if he had taken any of it seriously. Sure, Blair had hoped to play the female lead in both sports and dance, but, after failing the two auditions, he was happy to have a bit part in “both companies” that enabled him to study girls at close quarters — so that he could perfect the way he acted as one — and, in the case of dance, to hang out with a boy, Taylor, whose flowing blond locks and lithe athleticism were beginning to push Justin Bieber to the back and side periphery of Blair’s impossible dreams.

Blair was gradually coming to realize that it was tougher being a girl than he had anticipated when Maggie had first asked him to assume the role. It turned out that a boy with little ability or joy in movement wasn’t magically turned into a star player or dancer when he tried out for girls’ soccer or dance. And while Blair had inevitably made a host of new friends (actually acquaintances) by joining two, close-knit groups of girls (and one handsome boy), only one of them so far — the inimitable Big Al — seemed to like Blair as a girl enough to travel from a downtown studio or an out-of-state soccer pitch to visit “her” at home.

That was especially true of “dreamy” Taylor. Thanks to Miss Umbridge’s lesson on gaydar, Blair understood that his feminine gender was an insurmountable obstacle to a “special friendship” with the peacock of the Pavlova flock. Indeed, Taylor had even suggested that Blair was unfortunate in not having been born a boy: “You’re a good-looking gal, but if a boy had your looks, he would be as cute and sexy as they come.”

Not surprisingly, Blair had difficulty getting that compliment and verb choice out of his mind, especially at night, as his wet dreams, his very first, betrayed. Blair spent a lot of his waking time mulling over whether Taylor’s mom could be persuaded to authorize a sleepover for her inexperienced son with a girl who might, just might be old enough to bear his child.

“Gosh, maybe she doesn’t even know he’s gay,” Blair fretted. He decided that telling Taylor’s mom, “Don’t worry, he won’t even try to touch me because he doesn’t like girls” might not be the best strategy for getting an overnight with the dreamy male dancer.

While Blair was pondering how to procure his first sleepover with a boy, Maggie announced that she had already arranged for his first with a girl on Saturday night. Blair went ballistic. He said the sorts of things that a child only says to its mother (because anyone else would storm out of its life forever). Was she a complete dummy? Otherwise, didn’t she know that It was a no-brainer that inviting another girl to a sleepover risked blowing his cover once the two of them got down under the covers. Blair felt he had no choice but to explain the “facts of life” to his retarded mother: “Mommy, you don’t understand what girls are like these days. They’re not as ignorant as they were when you were young before the war. Big Al already knows that she likes girls, and only girls.”

Maggie took everything Blair said without blinking an eye, as though Blair were reading the telephone book to her. Maybe, Blair decided, his Mom was too Victorian, too much a product of the Puritans, even to realize that lesbianism actually existed. Maybe she thought lesbians were poets?

Blair felt he had to explain slowly and carefully, like a teacher to a grade-five sex education class, that lesbians like Big Al craved sex — the real thing — with girls:

Mommy, Alicia wants to do dirty things with other girls, things so dirty that a lady your age you can’t possibly imagine. Because she’s much stronger than me, she’ll definitely get into my panties if you let her share my bed. If you are stupid enough to let her do that, she’ll hate me for not being a genuine girl. If that happens and my only best friend rejects me, I’ll hate you forever.

Blair then started sobbing. He didn’t need an onion to fake the tears; they were the genuine thing. Why couldn’t his mother realize that she was about to ruin his life with her dumb sleepover?

Taking Blair into her arms, Maggie did her best to soothe “her daughter”:

There, there, my dear, sweet Blair. I know you could never hate me. Don’t worry your sweet little head. Everything’s under control. It was Alicia who asked for the sleepover. I know she’s a lesbian and that part of her friendship for you has its origin in sexual attraction, but there’s much, much more to your relationship than lust. Alicia is an only child. She loves you like the sister she’s never had; she could also love you as a brother. You think us old folks don’t know anything about the lives of teens. But sometimes we’re on top of things. Blair, I’ve already had a heart-to-heart with Big Al and she’s promised to leave you alone and untouched if you make it clear that your answer to sex is No. But, as I also said to her, it won’t bother me in the slightest if your answer is Yes. Every girl, I said, should experiment with lesbianism in her tweens and teens. I did.

“What? You told her all that?”

“Yes, sweetie. What I didn’t tell Alicia is that I want you to seduce her.”

The two of them laughed about a possible turnabout — Maggie heartily, Blair nervously.

Maggie then said:

Blair, it’s time for you to get down and naked with another female. Enjoy the intimacy. Take a few hours to explore Alicia’s body. See and feel what you’ve been missing and what you soon can have. You’ll be simply amazed at how much pleasure a girl experiences from having any one of her many, many erogenous zones touched. I promise you, sweetie, that after a single night experiencing the body of another girl, that you will be begging me the following morning for a bosom, clitoris and vagina of your own. Trust me.

By this point Blair was doing most of his thinking with his little red head. So he accepted his mother’s rather vague assurances that somehow she “knew” that Big Al would still love him after she had viewed his “superficial masculinity.”

“I’m positive,” Maggie said soothingly,

that Alicia won’t let a tiny thing like your penis stop her from loving the real you. I bet she calls it your clitoris because that’s what a girl has, and you, sweetie, are nearly the ideal girl for her. Sure, she’ll want you to improve your body, just as she would if you had a cleft lip, a wart or cellulite, but I am positive that a night spent naked together will prove to both of you that you are no more than a year, a few pills and a minor operation away from being the best-looking teen girl who ever lived in the Columbia Valley. Will Alicia reject you? No way, sweetie, no way. I promise.

It was with considerable nervous and sexual excitement that Blair awaited the sleepover with Big Al. Neither of them had slept a wink during the last thirty-six hours and both were running purely on caffeine and nerves by the time they’d downed a couple of cans of Red Bull and stared at their untouched dinners.

After dinner, they briefly played soccer with their dolls, with Blair warning off Kirk by announcing in no uncertain terms that dolls were “only for us girls”. Not only did Blair want to be alone with Big Al, but he also realized that Al appeared to be too distracted to stop Skipper, Blair’s avatar, from scoring at will.

Both “girls” gave up on doll soccer after a few minutes. It now seemed too immature a game for them to play, compared to the adult game they both had in mind. Maggie smiled as they mumbled an excuse to head up to bed at 8 pm on a Saturday night. She noticed that both girls were already holding hands, with Blair taking the lead on the stairs, as she had hoped.

What happened that night in Blair’s bedroom has remained a secret that both girls have kept even from their mothers. Yet their flushed cheeks, heavy eyelids, sudden maturity, constant sighs and smiles, conspiratorial looks, affectionate language and physical closeness convinced Maggie that both girls had lost their virginity — as least much as one girl can lose it to another.

Both of the lovers came up Maggie to talk, as much as they ever would, about their first night together. First Big Al assured her that, “Your daughter now knows that I love the real Blair, three warts and all. We agreed that she’s definitely a lesbian and a transsexual, a girl in a boy’s body, and that I’m going to help her become the girl of all of our dreams. I think if Blair can grow some breasts real fast, that she’ll never want to live as a boy again.”

As Maggie talked next with Blair, her sense of triumph soared:

Mom, while Alicia and I agreed that we shouldn’t talk about things that should remain private, I want you to know that I’m really ashamed of telling you that I hated you for inviting Alicia to a sleepover. I should have realized that you were right about the sleepover. You’re always know what’s best for me. Now me and Alicia are tighter than ever, best girlfriends for life. She says that a girl my age should show some breast development or people will soon start wondering about my femininity.”

“Blair, do you think she’s right?”

Blair replied:

Yeah, she’s right. Even in my training bra, I’ve got the flattest chest in my two classes. It’d be downright embarrassing to have breasts like these [Blair pointed to his chest] if anyone at school actually knew that I was a girl. I couldn’t get a date as a girl with this chest even if I offered to pay for both popcorn and the movie. Alicia also says that growing real breasts, even big ones, won’t make it impossible for me to return to being a boy ‘cause she read somewhere that teenaged boys often get titty at puberty ‘cause of a ho-mone imbalance. But they lose their breasts when they get older. Alicia says that my boobs will pop like a balloon as soon as I no longer want ‘em. So I don’t have to worry about growing them, do I, mommy?

Maggie, slyly nodding, asked: “So what are you saying, Blair? What should I tell your father?”

“If you want him to approve, then you should tell him I definitely want to be a girl and that I want you to start giving me whatever medicine it takes for me to get the sort of breasts that Alicia says a girl my age should have.”

“Don’t worry, Blair, with your help your father will have no choice but to agree to your becoming a real girl as rapidly as possible.”

But did Maggie intend to follow through? Even after Blair told an appalled Laird and a bemused Kirk that he was a lesbian who needed to grow real breasts to please his girlfriend, Maggie dithered over whether to grant the request. There was still the law to consider, and she hadn’t liked how much drinking Laird had done in the first hours after his youngest son declared himself a lesbian.

In the end it was Blair’s performance in Giselle that cast the deciding lot in favor of rapid feminization. After seeing her child stumble about the stage of the small theater rented by the Dame Pavlova School for its student productions, Maggie couldn’t wait a moment longer to wring the boy out of Blair.

Had she continued to attend Blair’s dance lessons, it would have been easy for Maggie to have averted the disaster. A simple “No” would have sufficed. But, distressed at seeing Blair stumble about the studio with all the artfulness of Hulk Hogan, the hirsute pro wrestler and “actor”, trying to stand on point in a tutu, Maggie soon got into the habit of doing her shopping during her child’s lessons and rehearsals. Maggie should also have been more suspicious than credulous when Blair, fighting for breath from excitement and exertion from running down fifteen flights of stairs, gasped, “You’ll never believe what happened at rehearsal today. Madame Rafferty and Mr. Five-Cent like the way I dance! I’ve now got one of the lead parts! Isn’t that cool!!”

Maggie, knowing that she and Blair lived in an era and country where every kid got a gold star, figured that the dance instructors had promoted her daughter to the fictitious rank of “duodecima ballerina,” still leaving her worst in the class and eleven steps below prima. Maggie might have lingered long enough outside the Sealand Building to confirm this hypothesis had it not been pelting rain. She and Blair ran for the car without further discussion about the “lead part” freshly bestowed on Maggie’s daughter. The entire topic soon passed from Maggie’s mind, probably because she didn’t want to pick at the scab that was her daughter’s dancing career.

Maggie, expecting a dance rerun of the soccer games she had attended, had little expectation of actually seeing her daughter anywhere near the center of downstage during the single public performance of Giselle by the novice class of Dame Margot Pavlova Dance Academy. Maybe, however, there would be a glimpse of Blair as “she did her thing” well upstage near the exits. And of course, there was sure to be at least one opportunity to give “her” a standing ovation during her first and only bow.

Maggie, having left Blair at the stage entrance, had arrayed her family, which now included Big Al as well as Laird and Kirk, in the first row center, left empty as usual by a general-admission audience unwilling to assume the responsibility of staying sufficiently alert and smiling to convince a group of beginners that they could dance like the Bolshoi Ballet.

Several rows behind them there sat by special invitation from Maggie, who paid for their tickets, an angry Lucretia Umbridge, homeroom teacher extraordinaire, and, beside her, Felix La Rond, Master of Psychology. Both had agreed to attend Blair’s first outing as a petite danseuse de 10 ans, in order to confirm their prejudgments that Blair was either a sick little puppy who needed to be quarantined like a rabid dog or, conversely, a twenty-first century Dorothy from Kansas leading a small band of like-spirited souls on a trek through an American Land of Oz to battle, possibly to overcome, the forces of sexual and gender repression that had transformed a toddler named Lucretia, a little girl full of hope and charity, into Miss Umbridge, a sexually-frustrated, hate-filled “Wicked Witch” of the Pacific Northwest.

Mr. La Rond looked pleased with himself. Miss Umbridge looked alternately expectant and irritated — “expectant” because she expected Blair (“the little pervert can’t help himself”) to commit an indecency that would strengthen her case for his expulsion on “compassionate” grounds; and “irritated” because the psychologist’s “love handle” was filling half of her seat.

Then there came a hush, broken only by a few dozen people coughing and Mr. La Rond burping, as the theatre’s lights dimmed and the string orchestra from a local high school began a semblance of the overture to Giselle.

Maggie’s eyes wandered to take in the rest of the audience; she was already having difficulty focusing on the stage, even staying awake, because Blair, a Wili, wouldn’t appear until the second act. “I wonder how wispy her costume will be? It’s been frustrating not to see any of the costumes in advance. It would have been fun to have sewn a fairy’s dress, gossamer wings and all, for Blair, but the dance school insisted on providing their own. I do hope the costume doesn’t look threadbare.”

She looked down the first row: as expected, Laird and Kirk were slumped in their seats. Was that a video game in Kirk’s lap? Alicia, in contrast, was perched on the front third of her seat. Maggie sighed: “Ah to be young and in love again. Look at Alicia; she’s visibly tingling with anticipation. Doesn’t she know that there’s an entire act to get through before her beloved makes her first appearance?”

It soon became apparent that Blair had confided more in “her” girlfriend than in “her” mother. Either that or Big Al had been a better listener. Because Blair’s first appearance came in the second scene of the first act, and far from being lost in the scenery, he — and this pronoun definitely fitted the occasion — was playing the lead male role (actually the only male role) in the Five-Cent version of Giselle — that of Duke Albrecht!

Maggie at first couldn’t believe her eyes: Her daughter Blair was dancing “in drag”, wearing a white shirt, a leather doublet, and beige tights with a dance belt with so much padding that Maggie’s sweet little filly looked like a well-endowed stallion.

Stunned, Maggie sagged in her chair, her mouth catching flies. Laird looked even more surprised. Big Al, however, was already giving Blair a standing ovation, yelling “bravo” over and over until the hostile glares from everyone around her (including those of five girls on stage) forced her to sit down.

Kirk had a look of supreme satisfaction on his face — like Sylvester, the “putty tat,” would have if he were able to catch and eat Tweety Bird with “good old dwanny” helplessly having to watch. Maggie, seeing the feline smirk, decided that Kirk had deliberately kept her from discovering that Blair’s “promotion” would entail the girl’s running about publicly, and embarrassingly, in male drag. That was far from the dance debut that Maggie had in mind for a daughter whose fragile sense of gender identity could be shattered all too easily by a fool’s miscasting. Kirk would have to pay some sort of price, she decided, for his complicity in this outrage.
Laird watched in amazement as his “daughter,” playing a nobleman disguised as Loys, a male peasant, flirted with, then seduced, then danced a love duet with Giselle (Linda Hernandez, actually), until the pas de deux was interrupted by Giselle’s mother. (“The hag probably thinks a girl as pretty as Giselle can do better than marry a peasant,” Laird thought.)

Next, Bathilde, the Duke’s erstwhile girlfriend, wrathfully stole a horn and sword from Blair’s, er … Loys’ pretend cottage, thereby proving to the rest of the dancers that the Duke was a cad bent on betraying both Bathilde and Giselle. At this news, Giselle fluttered wildly around the stage, finally dying from a weak heart, although onlookers understandably thought that the sword (Duke Albrecht’s) she was thrusting into her belly might be more at fault.

The curtain came down on the first act. With Big Al’s help, Laird was able to restrain Maggie from rushing backstage to “rescue” Blair from the “indignity” of playing a masculine role in the school’s production.

The second act opened with Blair (Albrecht), dressed in a “ducal” outfit of a pink ruffled shirt, a burgundy velvet doublet and pink tights, praying at Giselle’s grave, which unaccountably — given the forest’s infestation with Wilis -- has been put in a moonlit glade. It was just like Blair, Laird thought, to be such a hopeless romantic that he risked a fairy’s death by going into the bushes alone.

Inevitably, given the plot summary in the program guide, the Wilis, female fairies who have been jilted (like Giselle) before their wedding day, rose out of their graves like bloodthirsty zombies, thereby frightening the bejeezus out of Blair (Duke Albrecht) who ran like a frightened rabbit to safety in the theater’s wings. (It was at this point that Kirk decided that sissy Blair made an excellent Duke.)

For some unknown reason the Wilis obligingly left the stage and glade, leaving wily Giselle to greet Blair (Duke Albrecht) as he leapt back into the scene. (Although there was nothing balletic about Blair’s technically-deficient leap, it showed more verve and guts than Laird has ever seen from Blair before.)

A true romantic, Giselle, buying into Blair’s professions of enduring love, forgave him, at which point Blair (the Duke) had his second chance to dance a romantic pas de deux. As before, Linda Hernandez (Giselle) danced around her motionless beloved, who from time to time proffered his hand to support (like a barre) her turns or pliés.

“This is the logical moment,” Laird hoped, “to end this silly, old-fashioned ballet.”

Yet Adolphe Adam, the composer, alas, had other ideas, for the scene ended with Blair (Albrecht) chasing after Linda Hernandez (Giselle) as she ran deep into the forest offstage. (An audible moan could be heard from Kirk — was this blasted ballet ever going to end?).

Blair (Albrecht), failing to leave while he was ahead (Giselle had, after all, forgiven his dastardly behavior, and as a corpse had little more to offer him), was suddenly surrounded by the Wilis, whose mirthless queen sentenced him to “death by dancing.”

Briefly the audience was frightened out of its wits by Blair’s mistimed leaps, jumps, turns and twirls. (One mother will later tell her husband that, “I haven’t been so frightened for anyone’s safety since Jessie crawled out onto the window ledge when she was eighteen months old and we still lived in that high rise.”)

Fortunately, no one fainted, no one had a cardiac, because Linda Hernandez (Giselle) returned to protect Blair (Albrecht) from having the Wilis force him to dance until he had inevitably, given his sorry technique, broken his right leg, left arm, nose or skull. Her love saved Blair (Albrecht), as the Wilis slunk back like Vampire Edward into their diurnal graves; love also saved Giselle, who having refused to give into feelings of hatred and vengeance, ceased to be a Wili. Presumably she then went to heaven. Either that or she will rot henceforth unnoticed in her grave. (Certainly, she couldn’t count on flowers from Duke Albrecht!)

This time it was Big Al who moaned — loud enough for all to hear. It was a moan of love mixed with desire. She hadn’t believed it possible for one girl to love another as much as she did Blair, a true heroine.

For perhaps the first time in the history of a Dame Pavlova novice production the entire audience stood to applaud a performance. True, it wasn’t the first standing ovation for one of its productions because its audiences were usually quick to rise to their feet in order to put on their raincoats and so be first to the exits. But the standing ovation never involved more than two-thirds of the audience. The rest sat on their hands.

This was, therefore, the first time that the entire audience was sufficiently awake at the conclusion of a student performance to rise en masse for the exits. Usually, there were a couple dozen parents or friends who had fallen into such a deep slumber that they had to be awakened by a sharp poke from a crestfallen member of the dance company or, lacking that, much, much later by a member of the cleaning staff.

Blair’s performance had kept everyone awake. It was like watching a tightrope walker perform without a net, some said. No, it was more like watching a lion tamer without a chair or whip, said others. Nascar fans said it was like watching a rookie driver trying to squeeze his car between two old pros in the final lap; and football fans said they hadn’t seen anything so exciting since “Rudy”, the famously puny (at 165-pound, 5-foot six-inch) defensive end, had sacked the Georgia Tech quarterback in the second and last play of his playing career with the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame.

Admiring his astonishing spunk, Rudy’s teammates carried him off the field on their shoulders; and briefly, it looked like Blair might exit the stage in similar fashion. Behind the curtain, his fellow dancers crowded around to thank him for filling in for Taylor. Alone in front of the curtain, Linda Hernandez (Giselle) received considerable applause, much of it for the bravery she had shown by trusting Blair to lift her into the air.

As for Blair, the applause was interspersed with shouted compliments — or maybe they were insults, for the “praise” had a calculated ambiguity, as in “Way to go, kid, it took real guts to dance like that in public” or “Thank you, Duke Albrecht, for proving that an evening of student dance can be as suspenseful as a Hollywood thriller” or “Kid, you’re a natural performer. I haven’t seen so many pratfalls since Charlie Chaplin, Curly Howard and Chevy Chase were in their prime.”

Immediately after the dancers had made their final exit from the stage for the single dressing room, Maggie cut short her family’s chatter about Blair’s key role and remarkable performance:

That will be quite enough talk about Blair’s humiliation, thank you. This was supposed to be the climax of Blair’s first four months as a female; and what was it instead? It was a bloody farce! The last thing I expected to see tonight was my daughter prancing around the stage pretending to be a grown man! A man! And not just any man, mind you, but a man who disguises himself as another male in order to seduce a consumptive female, who isn’t half as cute as, from my count, six of the Wilis. I mean — is there some kind of plot afoot to confuse Blair as to her true gender and identity?

“Now, honey …” Laird began.

“Don’t honey me! I am determined to uncover who is at the heart of this conspiracy to put Blair in a masculine role, thereby undoing weeks of progress in getting her to accept her feminine destiny. Just the other day she was asking for something to help her develop a mature female body more quickly; and now she’s been confused by hearing a lot of men praise her “manly” courage and athleticism. Blair has been sabotaged! Are any of you responsible?”

Maggie looked fiercely at Kirk, Laird and Alicia; but they all shrugged, and she realized deep down that none of her extended family had the means, the motive, or the money to bribe Mr. Five-Cent into risking permanent damage to his school’s reputation by assigning Blair a leading role in Giselle. No, if there was a culprit, it wasn’t Big Al, Kirk or Laird. It had to be the Fargo pimp or Monica, his dimwitted assistant.

“The three of you need to wait here for Blair. If she arrives before I get back, then I’ll meet you all at the McDonald’s across the street. I’m going to tear a strip off the clowns who run this so-called school.”

And before anyone could reply Maggie strode determinedly to the stage, climbed up onto it, and continued to and through the wings in search of a backstage confrontation with the impresarios of the ballet.

She found Lucky Five-Cent in a corridor giving Monica Rafferty his version of an after-show “rap-up”. Monica was dressed in a simple white blouse and black slacks, her only affectation being a paisley silk neckerchief. Five-Cent, in seeking gangsta chic, looked quite the wangsta: He was dressed entirely in black (save for the gold around his aviator sunglasses and bling-bling), his outfit comprised of a Brooklyn-style baseball cap (on sideways), a “Panther & Cobra” zip-up hoodie and black tee, bling-bling, Unlimited Drips shorts and (sockless) Coogi mid-height footwear sneakers.

As Maggie neared, Five-Cent, bowing deeply from the waist while flourishing his Chi Sox baseball cap like a Virginia cavalier, saluted Maggie: “Here come the queen bee herself! Monica, she’s gotta be the prize bee-i-itch here cuz her whelp is da bomb; that little thing be the funkiest white girl I done see. Shiznit, considerin’ the tough situ, that little hoe was bumpin’; she was down for it! That fox was showing off her booty real fine!”

Five-Cent stopped the flow when he realized that Maggie, far from being pleased with the praise he was heaping on Blair, was looking like someone whose quarter of weed had been ganked.

“My bad, Ms. Maguire, I should let youse get a chance to rap. Wassup?

“Cut the crap, whitey. I don’t like being called a bitch, and I definitely don’t like my daughter being called a little whore. You know that I enrolled Blair at Dame Pavlova because I wanted her to experience the ultimate thrill for a girl her age — to dance in public in a pink tutu or a white dress with gossamer wings. I wanted her to be a Wili! Instead, you had her masquerading as a dude and parading around with an overstuffed dance belt. Are you trying to fuck with my girl’s mind? Are you trying to make her gay, or worse, a transvestite like George Sand or Gertrude Stern? Why the hell did you do it?”

Five-Cent pulled back, cowering from the verbal assault. Afraid of being whacked, he slunk partly behind Monica for protection. Once there he felt safe enough to retort: “Shi-it, woman, is you totally loco? What you bitching about? We made your hot-ass daughter into a star!” Seeing Maggie’s hands forming fists, the short little man disappeared behind Monica.

That was Monica’s cue: “Please allow me to explain, Ms. Maguire, since this was my production and I made the decision to give the role of Duke Albrecht to Blair. I felt she was the appropriate choice after Tyler broke a leg trying to stand on point atop the seat of his moving bicycle. Because of his folly, we had no choice but to ask a girl to play the male lead. Blair, I admit, was not the first girl we thought of for the role of Albrecht; indeed, given her inexperience, she was actually the last.”

“You’re not telling me that Blair got the male part because she was the only girl who wanted it?”

“Not at all. Quite the contrary. Blair actually showed less interest in the role of Albrecht than any of the other girls, save for Linda Hernandez, who was already slated for the role of Giselle. I think the idea of a leading role intimidated Blair; that, and she said that you were keen on seeing her in Wili white. But the auditions for the role of Albrecht went so poorly that I, with the concurrence of Mr. Five-Cent, came to see Blair as our best candidate.”

“How could that possibly be? My Blair is a sweet girl, but her dancing ability reminds me of Elaine’s “Dry Heave” dance with the “little kicks” on the Seinfeld Show. It’s a wonder that Linda Hernandez can still walk after their love duets.”

“True, all too true. Yet you’re overlooking the assets that Blair brought to the part. First of all, Blair is by far the best actress in her dance class. She alone could make the part of Duke Albrecht believable; she alone among the girls could make us forget that she was a girl in a boy’s part. Second, Blair has unusually strong leg and arm muscles for a girl so loath to exercise. I felt that her physical strength would make up for her lack of technique when it came to lifting her co-star. Blair staggered about a lot when doing the lifts tonight, but she didn’t once drop Linda on her derriere, and that might not have been the case had I chosen a less muscular girl. The third reason is that Blair can’t dance well enough to be a Wili, and if I asked any other girl to be Albrecht, I would have been effectively a Wili short.”

“Not good enough for the corps de ballet, but good enough for the second lead? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I thought you knew that the male roles in a ballet as antique as Giselle don’t require anywhere near as much expertise as any of the female roles. The male is little more than a porteur, his primary job being to carry or support the ballerinas as they do the real dancing and arching. So I told Blair to plant the soles of her feet firmly on the ground whenever one of the girls, usually Giselle, came near. I said they’d cue her on what to do next. As for the leaps expected of a male character, I simply told Blair that she should, given her absence of technique, simply jump as high and as far as she could. Sheer exuberance, I said, would have to compensate for her lack of form. And, you must admit, it largely did. Your daughter was a big hit with the audience. She enjoyed herself immensely.”

“Well, I didn’t enjoy the evening — not in the slightest. You had no business putting my daughter in a male role without consulting either me or her father. You didn’t consult her father, did you? I see you shake your head, so you admit that you acted in a highhanded way that has made a mockery of the ballet as a finishing school for young ladies. Madame Rafferty and Mr. Five-Cent, if that’s you still hiding behind your assistant, this is the last you will see of either Blair or me. I am withdrawing her from this mockery and sham of a ballet school.”

“I beg you to reconsider, Ms. Maguire, for you won’t find a better dance school for Blair. All the ballet academies in the region are drastically short of boys, and if you take Blair to one of our competitors, I assure you that, given Blair’s strengths and weaknesses, that they’ll assign her a male role in their productions too.”

“Well, I never! What an insult to my daughter — to suggest that she’s not feminine enough for a female role!”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Monica feebly replied.

“Well, that’s what I heard,” Maggie rejoindered. “You, Madame, are no lady; and you, Sir, are no black man.” And with those insults, Maggie stomped down the corridor, and then out of view.

Five-Cent emerged: “Don’t pay her no mind, Monica baby. I know why that poontang be buggin’ us. She is a playa hata. She don’t like to see that little hoe of hers become a player and get some juice, some respect. Lordy, that old ass bitch is a attention whore just like her sweet fuckin’ daughter.”

“Whatever you say, boss, whatever you say. I don’t envy Blair having a mother like that. I do hope that sweet girl will be all right.”

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. It’s a familiar theme in the TG literature, but this time with an unfamiliar twist. After his extraordinary dance debut, Maggie is determined never to have Blair appear in public as a boy again.

Chapter 10 Choice at McDonald’s

“Blair, you were amazing. Your performance was exciting, daring, frightening even. Son… Blair, I mean, I’ve never been prouder of you.” Laird then literally applauded his youngest child in front of Kirk and Blair’s two biggest admirers, Maggie and Big Al, who joined Laird in clapping loudly enough to turn the heads of two families sitting near to them in McDonald’s.

Laird continued:

This is the first ballet I’ve ever seen. And frankly, until now I believed it was for only for sissies. Was I ever wrong! I owe you an apology, Blair, for ever thinking that ballet was like golf or tennis. It takes real guts to leap as high into the air as you did when you obviously weren’t sure of where you were coming down! Now I realize that ballet is a bruising contact sport — like football or pro soccer. Sometimes I saw you run over two or three Wilis in order to get to the girl playing Giselle. It was incredible how often she spun into you, almost knocking you over. But Blair, you stood your ground …”

“Dad, I think you’ve got it wrong ….” Kirk began, but Laird cut him off: “Blair, you made me mighty proud of the way you almost always got the better of the collisions, even when a dancer charged at you like an enraged bull at a cape. And are you ever strong! Strong enough to be able to haul Giselle’s sorry butt up repeatedly from the stage after she got her feet entangled with yours. What’s wrong with that girl? Why wasn’t she looking where she stepped? Is she nearsighted and too vain to wear glasses?”

“Yes, Laird, Blair certainly stole the show,” Maggie said; “but it was monstrous that our daughter wasn’t allowed to play a female role. I’ve already told the school’s management that our entire family was outraged by the miscasting. Blair, I was so looking forward to seeing you dance in a white dress and gossamer fairy wings. You were born to be a Wili.”

“So why was Blair given the male role?” Kirk asked, not so innocently. “Is my precious sister too masculine for a female role? Or is she too much of a sissy to make a convincing girl?”

Maggie gave him a severe look: “Kirk, don’t talk that way about your sister; it’s hurtful” — a painful reality that Big Al amply demonstrated to Kirk with a hard jab to the shoulder.

Maggie took control:

Alicia! No rough stuff in McDonald’s! You’re not eating at home. As for you, Kirk, I don’t think you’d want us to discuss whether there’s anything sissy about you. You can either refrain from butting in or we will change the topic to your sexuality. It’s possible that you’d make an even better female than Blair. Rather than discuss Blair’s performance should we go back to Dame Pavlova to enroll you as a girl dancer?”

“No effing way. I’d die first.”

“Then I take it, Kirk, that I have your silence while your father and I discuss with Blair her future as a dancer.”

Maggie then addressed Blair directly:

Sweetie, the two cretins who run Dame Pavlova have told me in no uncertain terms that, being permanently short of boys, that they will almost always be asking you to play a male role in the school’s performances. And they actually had the gall to tell me that the other ballet schools would treat you just as badly. They too would want you to play Albrecht, rather than Giselle.”

Blair was startled; he hadn’t heard anything like this from his instructors. “But why? Why won’t they let me play a female role? Do they think me a boy? Have they been … laughing at me behind my back?” Blair rapidly inhaled several times.

“Don’t fret, sweetie,” Maggie replied. “Monica and Mr. Zero Cents are 100% convinced that you’re a girl. And why wouldn’t they be? You were born a girl; you are a girl; you will be a girl and a woman until the day you die. But, like many girls, you’ve got a slight weight problem.”

“Blair has a weight problem? I don’t understand. Blair doesn’t look any heavier than the other girls her age. Indeed, she looks to me to be on the small size — like ten-year-old boys usually are when compared to girls their age,” Laird objected.

“Oh, I’m not saying that Blair weighs too much …”

“I’ll say! Blair’s weight is perfect — just like everything else about her,” announced Big Al with a big smile for Blair, who naturally blushed. Big Al then put a big paw on Blair’s bare thigh. Blair responded with a kiss on Big Al’s cheek and a hand on the big girl’s jeans.

“Maggie! Dad! Alicia and Blair are acting like lesbos again! Can’t you get them to behave themselves in public,” Kirk said loudly enough to be heard at the next table.

Laird responded: “Kirk, hush. Don’t raise your voice in a posh restaurant. As for you girls, a bit of decorum please.”

“Please let me continue — without interruptions,” Maggie interjected:

As I was saying, Blair has a weight problem that makes it difficult for her to dance the female roles. The problem is a simple one: Her weight is mal-distributed, with the result that she lacks the balance of most other females. It’s a simple, well-known fact, Laird, Kirk, that we women have better balance than you men; that’s why only female gymnasts work on the balance beam, and why any reality show that wants a girl to beat the guys asks everyone to stand on top of a pole or to walk a tightrope. Why do we gals have better balance? Because of the way we’re built — close to the ground with lots of weight around the hips, instead of a protruding beer belly that even you, Kirk, will be developing by age twenty-one. Simply put, women have a lower center of gravity — like a sleek sports car — while you guys are as easy to tip over as a SUV. No male dancer can stand on point the way the gals do.”

“Let me get this,” Laird replied. “You’re saying that Blair lacks the balance needed for female roles because she doesn’t have enough weight around her hips.”

“Precisely! At ten she also lacks the mammaries that we females use to such advantage for our twirls, turns and pirouettes. Breasts plus hips equal body in motion!”

“Hmm, what are you suggesting?” Laird asked. He wasn’t at all sure he liked the drift of the conversation. Blair wondered too: Was his mommy saying that he’d never be allowed to dance a female role unless he grew boobies? That raised a bigger question in his mind: Was the role of Giselle worth a body change?

As Maggie spoke, Big Al’s hand disappeared under Blair’s skirt. Thus hidden, the only sure evidence of its progress was the glazed look in Blair’s eyes. At a crucial juncture in Blair’s life, the kid was finding it impossible to concentrate on what Maggie was saying, just as Big Al likely intended.

“What am I suggesting? Simply this — that the deplorable choice of the Pavlova dance academy to assign a male role to Blair has left us with no choice but to commence the feminization of Blair’s body, and to accomplish it as quickly as possible so that she will never again face the abject humiliation of being asked to pose as a male in public. In short, Blair should start taking estrogen as soon as feasible. Am I not right? What say you, Laird? And you, Blair, and you too, Alicia. You also have a stake in this discussion.”

Laird grunted what may have been a yes, or maybe it was simply a grunt. Big Al, on the other hand, said it was a great idea; she was all for it; and she would help Blair adapt to her new body. “You can consider me,” Big Al said, “ecstatic over this decision.”

As for Blair -- with body arched in the chair, toes curled up, eyes looking towards heaven — “she” was simply ecstatic. When Blair’s spirit finally returned to the mundane world of McDonald’s, “she” cooed: “Whatever Alicia wants is cool by me.” Big Al rewarded Blair with a big wet kiss on the lips.

Kirk was pouting: “You didn’t ask me what I thought of your giving Blair a girl’s body as fast as possible.”

“Kirk, I don’t think you have the right of veto. Everyone else, including Blair, is eager for her to develop such a womanly body that she will never again be a credible male, whether it’s in dance, at school or at her white-dress wedding. So I do hope, Kirk, you’re not going to be negative. Blair doesn’t need negativity on the day of her first outing as a dancer.”

“Me, negative? Never. Not bloody likely. As far as I am concerned, I’d like Blair to grow boobs next week and get her dick cut off the week after. Why wait?” Kirk looked around: Everyone was nodding, although Blair may simply have been giving Alicia permission to move her hand, palm up, underneath his slightly raised rump.

Kirk continued: Well, I’ve sot the solution to Blair’s problems. Remember, Maggie, when you asked me to look up herbal hormones on the Internet? Well, not only did I look them up, but I also bought enough of ‘em to make Blair look like Miley Cyrus.”

At this point, Kirk emptied the pockets of his jeans, his shirt and his hoodie, producing one bottle of pills (or capsules) after another, until seven bottles of herbal hormones occupied the center of their table.

Maggie picked each of them up to read their labels: one bottle of saw palmetto, two bottles of Evanesce-ES, two bottles of Feminol, one bottle of AndroEase and one of CalmCompanion.

With some mispronunciation and misinformation, Kirk explained that this was the first month’s supply of “syngized” herbal extracts that would pump Blair’s breasts and thighs full of natural, fi-toe-stral estrogons, while blocking sperm-making in his testosterones.

Kirk added: “Blair needs to take 6 caps of Effervesce per day, four of FemAll, and two each of the willy shrinkers. I’ve even bought a cream for Blair to rub on her breasts to help them grow. Maggie, just make sure that Blair takes lots of ho-mones three times a day and she’ll need a real brassiere in a month or two, instead of a kiddy training bra.”

“Kirk, I never …. I am very impressed that you showed so much initiative. But how on ever did you know that we’d be talking about breast augmentation today?” Maggie asked.

“When Blair, bubbling and gushing like a tween girl, told me that he was set to play Duke Albrecht, a guy, in the dance show, I figured you would be revising your timetable for Blair as soon as you saw her in a dude’s clothes, even in the sissy clothes worn by male ballet dancers. So I came armed with the solution to Blair’s problem, to your problems, and to mine.”

“That was extraordinarily thoughtful — and perceptive — of you, Kirk. But where did you find the money for the pills? They must be expensive,” Maggie asked.

Kirk looked down at his sneakers as he said, “Well, I had to buy the pills on-line using a credit card.” He lowered his voice to add, “So I sort of used dad’s.”

“What the f….” Laird started to say, but Maggie cut him off sharply: “Laird, how can we be angry with Kirk for using your card? What choice did he have? There is no way the Feminol company would have accepted cash or sent feminizing hormones to a minor. The boy had to pretend to be you, an adult. No harm was done, and much good can now be done.”

“No harm done? But what if the Feminol company puts my name on a marketing list? The postman will tell everyone that I’m a tranny if flyers advertising fake breasts and vaginas, padded panties, size 18 dresses and extra-large, high-heeled shoes start filling up our mailbox, and all of them addressed to Laird Finlayson, female impersonator. We’ll be run out of the neighborhood! I’ll lose my job at the insurance company.”

“Their website promised that they wouldn’t share your address with anyone,” Kirk replied. “If they lied, the worse that will happen is your online mailbox may get some ads for 5x-sized lingerie, but that’s no worse than the Viagra and penis enlargement ads I bet you already get — not that I’m saying that you need anything like that.”

“We’ll see what happens, young man. We’ll also see about a suitable punishment for using my credit card without permission,” Laird said.

Maggie whispered in Kirk’s ear. “Don’t worry, Kirk. I’m proud of you, and I’ll make good any cuts your dad makes in your allowance. There is no way I’ll let you be punished for helping to feminize your sister. That would be insane.”

Kirk pushed two printouts towards Maggie. After reading them, she knew exactly the dose she wanted Blair to take, starting right there and then in McDonald’s: four of the phytoestrogens, two of the anti-androgens and, for good luck, two saw palmettos. However, the instructions warned against taking the capsules on an empty stomach, so she suggested that Laird take their orders. Everyone but Maggie wanted a burger and fries, but she admonished Blair for ordering a Big Mac combo: “Sweetie, if you’re going to be a ballet dancer, then you’ll have to order a salad just like your mommy. Dancers can’t afford to gain weight; it makes the girls difficult for a boy to lift and the jumps difficult for a boy to attempt. There are no lard-asses in dance.”

“Then I don’t want to be a dancer. I want a burger!” Blair said, stamping his foot on the floor for emphasis.

“Blair, let there be no doubt about this. If your father buys a Big Mac for you, then I will have no choice but to withdraw you from Dame Pavlova. Your promising dance career will be over. Is that understood? So what will it be — a salad or a burger?”

“A double cheeseburger combo. I suck at dancing anyway. I’m much better at soccer. I’ll help dad bring back the food,” and Blair sped off to the order counter, arriving there first.

Maggie smiled. For a mess of potatoes, cereal and beef, Blair had readily sold her birthright to become a dancer. That was fine with Maggie, as she had no intention of letting her daughter anywhere near another ballet company until she had the body and balance of a bosomy teenaged girl. So Blair would be allowed on this day to eat a big cheesburger; after all, her dancing had burned off hundreds of calories.

Of course, it would be salads for Blair at lunch from tomorrow onward because Kirk’s printouts advised that a feminizing “girl” had to avoid carbohydrates. Maggie also realized that It would be easier to constrain Blair’s waist development with extra-firm shapewear (with the end goal of an hourglass figure) if the girl were put on a diet that gave her just enough calories for feminization, but not enough to lengthen bones or strengthen muscles. Maggie could see no advantage to Blair in growing much taller; short girls had their pick of males.

As Blair and Laird did the ordering for the table, Maggie swore Big Al and Kirk to do everything they could to persuade Blair to take her hormone capsules “three times a day without fail.” Big Al said, “Blair will do anythin’ to keep the good feelings coming. I’ve been teachin’ her to love the female body — mine and hers. There is no way that she’s going to cheat me out of seeing her curves and breasts grow larger and her male clitoris, smaller, as all should.”

“Too much information,” protested Kirk, who didn’t like being reminded that his buddy Big Al was sexing it up with Blair. Kirk also seemed reticent to talk about the bottles of hormones. None of the bottles, Maggie pointed out, was sealed, which was highly unusual, she thought, in the post-Tylenol-tampering era. And after a quick count of the capsules in one of the bottles of Feminol, Maggie concluded that none of the bottles contained its advertised number of capsules. “What gives?” she asked.

Big Al answered for Kirk: “I was with Kirk — at the computer — when he ordered the hormones. They’re expensive, just like you said, and so Kirk asked in each case for less than a full month’s supply. That’s why there appear to be some pills missing. Ain’t that the truth, Kirk?”

“Yeh, that’s true. I wanted you, Maggie, to see how many bottles Blair would have to take each month. So I asked for fewer capsules in each bottle. It made sense to me.”

“Well, if it made sense to you, I guess it should make sense to all of us. But, Kirk dear, I will need you to go on-line with me tomorrow to ensure that we have an adequate supply for the remainder of the year. Blair will have to take pills like these for the rest of her life, but it’s a small price to pay for my happiness — and hers, of course.”

As Blair and Laird returned with four burger combos and a bacon ranch and chicken salad, Maggie could see that Kirk and Alicia were whispering conspiratorially. At her age, Maggie didn’t have hearing sharp enough to catch more than a couple of words, one of which was “Blair”. She did hope that Kirk and Alicia were going to cooperate as promised; but one never knew with kids.

Maggie already had given six capsules and two pills to Blair, who having secured one last assurance that their effect was temporary and reversible, raised them to his lips. He was about to pop them into his mouth, then to be washed down with an orange soda, when all hell broke loose in McDonald’s. Blair, startled by the clamor, accidentally dropped the capsules and pills down into two small, open containers of ketchup.

The commotion had started on the far side of McDonald’s, though within direct eyeshot of the Finlayson table as they discovered after the row became sufficiently noisy and intense to break through the mesmerizing discussion of Blair’s gender transformation. Some tables were already emptying, their occupants heading for the exits; others were reaching in their handbag or baby carriage for a concealed weapon, some of which even had a legal permit. (Mrs. Edna Podboski’s zip gun and Reverend Jim Brown’s sawed-off shotgun, however, were definitely illegal, shame on them.)

Although both disputants were to blame, Miss Lucretia Umbridge should have known better than to ask Mr. Felix La Rond, her reluctant companion at the dance concert, to join her for coffee at a fast-food restaurant “in order to get to know each other better.” She should have appreciated that La Rond, the consummate professional, would decline to discuss Blair’s sanity publicly in a fast-food joint. Such conversations were, he believed, reserved for higher class establishments like Red Lobster or Olive Garden.

Miss Umbridge’s essential point, ever more loudly expressed when the psychologist seemed too dense to comprehend it, was that Blair had shown, by dressing up as a female in order to dress up as a male who then dressed up as another male, that he was a schizophrenic, bipolar, multiple-personality, narcissistic, paranoid psychotic — possibly even a bed wetter — who needed immediate psychiatric help, preferably in a secure, institutional setting in a far-off State.

La Rond, busily eating his second “double quarter pounder with cheese,” wiped his mouth with a stained shirt sleeve, then grunted something.

“How can you possibly disagree?’ Miss Umbridge said, her voice rising to a fever pitch. “Look at the facts — first, the boy upsets an entire school by insisting that he’s a girl. Then, after everyone has bent over backward to accommodate this first delusion, he changes back into a boy in front of the entire community, to the shame and horror of his own family — you saw the mother rush out of the theater. Did you see her face? It was purple, I tell you, a violent shade of violet. Come on, admit it, Felix! That kid changes gender the way that other people — though not everyone [she looked at the psychologist with disgust] — change their underclothes. That’s abnormal. Even you can, Felix, can surely see it.”

La Rond started to respond, but decided he’d rather tackle a double side of fries. His silence stirred something primeval in Lucretia Umbridge. She started shouting, “It’s your fault, you fat pig, that the kid’s gone psycho. It’s your damn fault; it’s entirely your fault.”

She then deliberately swept his ketchup-drenched fries onto the floor, as well as onto the arm, lap and walker of Maude Benedict, an elderly lady so hard of hearing that she hadn’t noticed the disturbance. The shock of seeing her arm mysteriously “bleeding” (with ketchup) caused Maude to scream, “This is the Devil’s work! The Devil is right here in McDonald’s!” Maude rose to her feet, reached for her walker (apparently to make a quick escape), but, misjudging the distance, she missed it entirely, ending up on her hands and knees, desperately crawling for the nearest exit.

Either out of god-fearing chivalry or gut-shriveling thirst, La Rond rose ponderously to his feet, his table shaking violently as he used it to lever his mass upward. It wasn’t clear whether he intended to help Maude Benedict to get up from the floor or merely to return to the cash registers to replace his large fries. It also wasn’t clear whether he deliberately spilled his large Hi-C Orange Lavaburst and Miss Umbridge’s small Diet Coke on the teacher’s lap. Both drinks had probably been launched into motion by La Rond’s pressure on the table, but Miss Umbridge, convinced that the psychologist had deliberately wetted her, threw what remained of his drink, mostly ice, in his face. Umbridge screamed, La Rond howled and Maude Benedict yelled, as the orange drink dripped off the table into her eyes, “Fire! Fire! I can see the fires and hear the hounds of Hell!”

Someone reacted by pulling the fire alarm, which was the signal for everyone, including Big Al and the Finlaysons, to run for their lives — out of the overheated McDonald’s, past the garbage bins and spilled trays into the puddles of the rain-chilled parking lot. Last out were Maude Benedict, who required help from two of the teenaged counter staff; Felix La Rond, whose mass took extra time to gain momentum; and Miss Umbridge, her arm tightly gripped by the McDonald’s manager, who, watching and listening from afar, had decided that she was the culprit to hand over to the police.

Big Al, Maggie and the three Finlaysons watched awestruck, as the responders to the two emergencies — the fire alarm and the report of a “crazy lady” endangering the patrons of McDonald’s — decided whether the source of both alarums should be taken away in handcuffs in a police car or in a straitjacket in an ambulance. By this point, there was little doubt as to the identity of the “crazy lady” because Maude, fallen asleep from exhaustion, looked considerably saner than Miss Umbridge, who was loudly and profanely trying to extricate herself from the Manager’s grip in order to force “the fat turd over there” to do something about the “the little shit of a boy who thinks he’s a girl who thinks he’s a boy who thinks he’s another boy, who probably thinks he’s Jesus Christ.”

That last bit sounded pretty loony and fire chief and four police officers agreed with the EMT paramedics that Miss Umbridge should go as quietly as possible to a public hospital for psychiatric assessment. Instead, she went as noisily as possible, so noisily that it took three days of pleading from Felix La Rond, Master of Psychology, and Nea von Aft, Principal of Lewis A. Clark Charter School, to “spring” her from the cuckoo’s nest.

By the time of her release, Miss Lucretia Umbridge was mad enough to sacrifice her career if that is what it would take to rid the public schools of Oregon of a shape-shifting demon named Blair Finlayson.

When they finally returned to their table and a complimentary beverage (or fries) care of McDonald’s, the Finlaysons, now drenching wet, excitedly discussed the fate of Blair’s homeroom teacher. Naturally they hoped that they had seen the last of her. Blair spoke the most kindly when “she” expressed the hope that maybe Miss Umbridge might be able to continue her teaching while living at the asylum. Maggie, in contrast, thought that the best fate for the “hateful” teacher was to be treated as badly as anyone of her students for the rest of her “unnatural life”.

While thus engaged, they were surprised to see the corpulent figure of Felix La Rond, Master of Psychology, looming over them, a chocolate triple shake in one hand, baked apple pie in the other, blocking their view of the restaurant. He spoke first, pausing after every third or fourth word to guzzle his shake or to chomp on his pie: “Might I intrude … Ms. Maguire? What … I have to say … will … only take a … moment. But first … am I correct … to assume that this … handsome gentleman is … your husband Laird … and that one of … these two stalwart lads … is Blair’s brother Kirk?”

Big Al used a few choice words to correct the misapprehension.

“A thousand pardons … my dear girl. Of course, Kirk … looks more the man … than you. And last … but far from least … is Blair, who was … stunning, simply stunning … in her dance debut. However, do tell me … child, why you were … cast in a male role. I would have … assumed a priori … that you, of … all girls, would have … insisted on a female role … if not that of … Giselle herself. Certainly, you are attractive … and feminine enough … for the lead female role.” La Rond terminated this encomium with a loud belch. He had finished his snacks. He wouldn’t tarry long at the table before hunting for more.

Blair beamed — almost as brightly as Maggie, who quickly explained that Blair hadn’t been given a choice of roles: “My daughter either had to pretend to be a boy or there wouldn’t have been a performance.”

“Ah, if only Blair’s teacher had known that the gender choice was not Blair’s to make, then she might not have become so agitated that she had to go to the hospital for … ah … consultations. I do hope the Finlayson family will be discrete about the … ah … disturbance here today. Ms. Umbridge was having a bad day — don’t we all? — and she shouldn’t have to pay with her career for a brief … ah … attack of nerves. She’ll soon be back in the harness, more eager than ever to help pull Blair along to the next grade level.”

Kirk and Blair duly promised to say not a word at school about the fire alarm, police, ambulance or straitjacket. Blair did, it should be noted, cross his fingers as he made the pledge.

“Ms. Maguire, may I take advantage of this chance meeting to suggest that Blair should start seeing me once a week at school. Possibly immediately after school on Wednesdays? It’s important that I build a case file, demonstrating Blair’s mental soundness and fitness for school work or otherwise Blair’s crossdressing during Giselle might be used by Miss Umbridge or others that Blair is so confused about her gender as to require special education elsewhere. By building the case for considering Blair as a true transsexual who has no doubt whatsoever about her own innate femininity, I believe I can make it impossible to expel Blair from Lewis A. Clark Charter School as long as Blair is circumspect about her attire.”

La Rond addressed Blair directly: “I am right, Blair, in believing that you have no second thoughts about spending the rest of your life as a female?”

La Rond patiently waited for an answer while Blair debated his options. Of course, he had second thoughts and would continue to have them until the estrogen coursing through his system (coupled with the suppression of testosterone) made his mind and emotional makeup more feminine. There wasn’t a lot of testosterone in the pre-pubescent boy, but it was sufficient to produce doubts. And yet, if he expressed those doubts, Blair realized that he might be playing into the hands of his great antagonist, Miss Umbridge.

Blair had to affirm he was a transsexual or possibly face the teacher’s wrath without any allies. Maybe even Maggie would turn on him, and Kirk would offer little protection against bullying if Blair went back on their implicit deal — namely, that Kirk would cover Blair’s back as long as Blair was making strides towards becoming a female student at another school.

As Blair mulled over his best answer, Maggie answered La Rond’s query on her daughter’s behalf: “Dr. La Rond, I assure you that Blair’s determination to become a female in body and soul has never wavered, and will never waver, for just today, not more than forty minutes ago, Blair asked for and greedily gobbled down several estrogen and testosterone-suppressant capsules. At this very moment she is turning into a genuine woman before our very eyes.”

“Thanks for that information. Congratulations, Blair, on making a tough choice, but I am confident that it’s the right choice for you. I shall record this information in your school file and also inform Principal von Aft that you have finally taken a definitive, indisputable step towards adopting a female persona along with your female clothes.”

After a brief pause, while he considered his words carefully, La Rond continued: “There is one other point I’d like to make about Blair. While her dance moves are refreshingly novel and infinitely entertaining, I do not feel that ballet is her true forte. Blair is not a natural athlete. She is, however, a remarkable talent as a thespian. She has a true gift for acting — never have I felt the shame and longing of Duke Albrecht more intensely than I did while watching Blair dance the last act. Professionals could not do as well. Blair should attend an acting school, either in addition to her dance lessons or, preferably, in their stead.”

Maggie then told the psychologist that Blair and the family had decided to find an alternative to the Dame Pavlova experience. Did Dr. La Rond possibly know of an acting school in the central city? As it turned out, he did — an acting school near SW 4th Avenue run by Wil Shakspear.

After her disappointment at not finding a genuine Russian in charge of Dame Pavlova, Maggie got a bit rude about the school’s name: “The Will Shakespeare acting school! Is Will another phony hiding, like Mr. Zero Cents, behind the name of a great artist! What’s Shakspeare’s real name? How about Archie Leach or Norma Jean Baker?”

La Rond got a bit huffy, which was a bit scary since he looked big enough to blow a house down. “My dear lady, I assure you that Wil Shakspear is the real name of the school’s founder and head teacher. Wil is a contraction of her real name, an understandable contraction when you consider that it’s short for Willamette, as in the river and valley. As for Shakspear, that’s an English translation of her American Indian name. She is, you should know, a member of the Lower Umpqua tribe. So I would not, if I were you, make fun of her name. She literally knows how to shake a spear when’s she angry.”

After the requisite apologies, he gave Maggie and Laird the information, including the proper spelling, which they’d need to inquire about enrolling Blair in acting lessons at the Wil Shakspear School of Acting.

La Rond had, it turned out, one last thing to say — this time about Kirk: “Ms. Maguire and Mr. Finlayson,” he whispered when he saw that the boy had become distracted, lost in his own world; “I am mildly surprised that Kirk has not come to see me of his own volition. I am even more surprised that none of the teachers has sent him to me after one of his countless brawls in and about the school. From what I have heard, Kirk is a seriously disturbed youth.”

Laird bridled, then challenged: “What? Are you saying that Kirk needs psychological counseling because he behaves like a normal boy, unafraid of taking on his peers in a bit of rough and tumble?”

La Rond rebutted:

Normal? I think not, not unless you consider a volcano about to blow to be the normal state of the Los Angeles basin or an American ski resort. Can you not see how tense your son is? Look at the paper cups from your first round of drinks. Kirk has twisted every one of them into knots. His leg shakes so violently that it’s a wonder that it hasn’t knocked the food off your table. Look at Kirk’s hands. They’re clenched, don’t you see? It’s rare that they’re not. Mr. Finlayson, your son Kirk is seething with emotions that he desperately needs to discuss with someone who is, frankly, not a member of his family. There is so much anger in the boy; we must find a way to understand its origins before he can safely vent it. I must insist for Kirk’s sake, for Blair’s sake as well, that Kirk also see me once a week to discuss his hopes, fears and anxieties. Don’t deny me this request, for I do sincerely believe that Kirk has much more than the average teen to get off his chest.

La Rond then put his big paw of a hand on Kirk’s shoulder to get his attention: “How about it, Kirk? Will you come by my office at lunch hour on Wednesdays and Thursdays? We’ll share sandwiches and desserts as you tell me about your hopes and dreams. In me, you’ve got someone who will really listen — for a change. Naturally, we’ll discuss your feelings toward Blair. Her transition is bound to be unsettling for you.”

The last allusion to Blair alerted Maggie and Laird to their simplistic assumptions about Kirk’s ability to cope with having a transsexual for a brother. Possibly, Blair’s flagrant lack of masculinity was undermining Laird’s sense of his own. Yes, the rotund La Rond was right: Kirk needed to see a shrink, and the zero cost of his sessions with the school psychologist struck them as eminently reasonable.

Surprisingly, Kirk didn’t put up much of a fuss about sharing his lunch hours with “the school shrink”. Instead, he said that there was much he could tell La Rond, but for the sake of the family he probably wouldn’t. While Maggie didn’t appreciate the hint of menace, she hadn’t the foggiest idea of what Kirk was alluding to. That being the case, she wasn’t about to let Kirk worm his way out of his sessions “on the couch” for fear that he might “spill the beans about god knows what”.

After the psychologist had finally waddled off to order his third helping of dessert, Maggie finally remembered that Blair never had, as she had claimed to La Rond, actually taken the herbal hormones. Blair became quite flustered as he looked for them, but finally found one of them sticking out of his ketchup. Blair had no problem pouring the ketchup, capsules and all, down his throat. With that one dramatic flourish, Blair really did start his body down the path to womanhood, as the next three days of nausea made abundantly clear.

Told that the best treatment for his flu symptoms were more of the capsules, Blair faithfully followed Doctor Maggie’s orders for the first four days, at the end of which his nipples were tingling with signals to darken and grow. Blair, who had never experienced puberty as a male, was about to enter it as a female. The constant tingling drew Blair’s fingers frequently to his nipples after he had smeared them with estrogen cream in an attempt to soothe the irritation.

But all that was in the future. While still at McDonald’s, Maggie reacted to Blair’s meal of hormones and ketchup with gushing praise: “You’re the best daughter any parent could ever wish for. Isn’t that so, Laird?”

Laird shrugged. Maggie was insistent: “Please say it, Laird. Blair needs to hear you say it.”

“Blair, you’re the best daughter a father could have.” Laird looked for approval from Maggie, and won it, even though Maggie wondered at his choice of word to emphasize.

“And definitely the best girlfriend a girl could have,” Big Al piped in.

With Maggie urgently prompting, Kirk added, “Yeah and you make an okay sister.”

They had a group hug. Kirk and Laird were clearly uncomfortable. Blair took pride of place. This was clearly “her” moment to star. Big Al, who had the best view of the world outside McDonald’s, suddenly became so excited that she released her grip on Blair to rush to a nearby window through which the sunlight was now streaming. The rain had finally let up. Big Al, considering it a favorable omen, went closer to the window to peer out.

Big Al announced: “Look everyone, it’s finally stopped raining. Wow, I think I see a rainbow.”

“It’s one of McDonald’s Golden Arches, you doofus,” shouted Kirk. But no, it was the real thing, as the family quickly discovered as they stood, awestruck at the window, to view the entire arc of a rainbow stretching, Maggie hoped, from Blair’s soccer pitch to their home in Bybee Lake. The extended family stood together silently, hand in hand, Laird glumly, Blair all smiles, and Maggie and Big Al with tears of joy in their eyes.

All of them wondered at the emotions convulsing Kirk’s body. He was shaking so violently that their hands transmitted his sobs from one person to the next so that even Maggie, at the other end of the human chain, felt one tremor after another pass through Blair’s hand to hers.

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. It’s a familiar theme in the TG literature, but this time with an unfamiliar twist. After the pandemonium at McDonald’s, Blair has ingested his first feminizing hormones and Maggie thinks she sees a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Or was that merely a Golden Arch? In this chapter Kirk get wiser about politics and Blair, about sex change.

Chapter 11 A choice of tea parties

After her three days of psychological evaluation, Miss Umbridge took a two-week, mental-health leave before returning to Lewis A. Clark. It was the sweet life for Blair, as the substitute behaved more like a stand-up comic than like a teacher. He eschewed homework for student reports on “interesting websites” they had found in the nether sectors of the Internet. Best of all, he had no idea that Blair was supposed to be treated with suspicion and contempt. Instead, he quickly established that anyone questioning a student’s heterosexuality would be putting his or her own sexual orientation into discussion.

In contrast, life for Kirk had deteriorated. Indeed, on the morning after Blair first felt his nipples tingling from his daily estrogen intake, Maggie received a call at 11:00 a.m. to pick up Kirk, who had been sent home from school at the insistence of his Social Studies teacher, Adlai Stevenson Tingle.

The confrontation between teacher and student had been brewing ever since Tingle, obsessed with current events, had begun lecturing his class about Barack Obama, subprime mortgages and Cinco de Mayo instead of World History, as decreed by the official curriculum. Kirk, who rarely showed much interest in his studies, might not have cared about the shift in focus had the teacher been less dogmatic (what thirteen-year-old likes being told what he must think and do?) and had Kirk not been keen on learning more about Saudi Arabian and Afghan women. Kirk thought it “really cool” that they didn’t have to show their face in public. That way their looks weren’t being constantly assessed by visually-obsessed males. A homely kid, Kirk sometimes wished he could wear a nijab.

But world history, even the recent past, slipped by the wayside during the healthcare tussle in Congress. Republican “obstructionism” provoked Mr. Tingle into telling the students, ad nauseam, what he really thought about Republicans and political conservatives; capitalists, corporate shysters and oil-spilling sons of BP; climate deniers and Gaia-raping, Viagra-popping miners; test-pushing school boards; Big Business, Big Pharma and small business; Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and all the other Wall Street bloodsuckers with Central European names; gun-toting, God-fearing, reactionary rubes; as well as foreign-owned companies, their runaway cars, lead-flaked toys and slave labor; Southern rednecks, addled Californians and toothless Appalachians; Cuban exiles and Hawaiian haoles; Mormon baby factories and Catholic baby molesters; Scientologists and babbling-in-tongues evangelicals; female-hating, ovum-loving anti-abortionists; treasonous (to the feminist cause) stay-at-home mothers; xenophobes, anthropophobes, anuptaphobes, tropophobes, gynophobes and homophobes; balding, middle-aged, male heterosexualists, ageists and lookists; ticky-tacky white suburbs and the “bourgeois” blacks who moved into them; methane-belching cows and bull-torturing Spaniards; Anglo-Saxon imperialists and their Afghan-hating friends; Bush-league presidents; Zionists, Texans and Nazis; “too-stupid-to-live” volunteer soldiers and deer hunters; the Americans who stole Oregon from its native people and the Southwestern states from Mexico; moose-hunting Alaska idiots; anti-immigrant bigots and racists; fatties, smokers, pet owners and carnivores; virtually all white males and most white females. Mr. Tingle said he especially “hated haters.”

Kirk didn’t know what to make of these tirades coming from the apparently self-loathing teacher, Mr. Tingle being a middle-aged, overweight, balding white, hamburger-eating Episcopalian from the California suburbs who still lived with his stay-at-home mother. Not only did the endless pronouncements from Mr. Tingle confuse Kirk, who was left uncertain as to whether it was Catholic priests, polygamous Mormons or Islamic mullahs who abused children, but he usually didn’t have enough prior knowledge to challenge the teacher to justify any of his self-evident biases.

Kirk did know, however, that he heartily disliked being told that he was a “privileged white kid”. Privileged? Did Mr. Tingle have any idea what it was like to grow up in a family where everything revolved around the sexual fancies of a kid brother?

There was one exception — one moment in the onslaught of opinion where Kirk espied an opening. It was during Mr. Tingle’s (by now) ritualistic condemnation of the Tea Parties as subversive, demagogic, racist and downright un-American. The teacher even mocked them as “tea baggers”.

Thanks to playground gossip, Kirk understood the insult being hurled at the conservative activists who had organized “tea parties” in instructive emulation of the destructive Boston Tea Party of 1773 to protest against “taxation without representation”. So he put up his hand for the first time in weeks and asked, his demeanor innocence incarnate, his teacher to explain the term “tea bagger”. Tingle, who prided himself on his ability to discuss all things sexual with his sixth graders, patiently explained that tea bagging was originally gay slang for one man’s putting his mouth entirely around the scrotum of another.

“So it’s something gay men do?” Kirk asked for repetition. The teacher’s affirmative gave Kirk his opening: “As I understand things, you despise the people who go to a Tea Party; and to demonstrate how much you despise them, you accuse them of performing gay sex acts on each other. So, aren’t you a homophobe, Mr. Tingle? Isn’t using ‘tea bagger’ as an insult the same as calling a dude a ‘pillow-biting, cock-sucking punk’? And didn’t you tell us that those were hateful words that we should never use?”

Mr. Tingle spluttered with rage. “How dare you insult your teacher, you uppity little punk! Get out of my class! Right now! Get your books and go tell the vice-principal that you’re being sent home for the rest of the day as punishment for brazen insolence. As Kirk left the class, he heard his teacher admonishing the class that while it was necessary for Kirk to be punished for his disrespect for authority, that they shouldn’t give the boy a hard time when he returned to class because the “poor kid already feels bad enough having a sissy for a brother.”

Inasmuch as Tea Parties had led to a half-day suspension, Kirk, being a recently-minted teenager, had no choice but to attend one. With luck, Mr. Tingle would see him on television. Now that would be choice indeed! It was easy to persuade Laird to take him to a Tea Party, as Laird, who hadn’t voted since Ross Perot lost his third-party bid, had never heard of the T.P. phenomenon. Laird readily bought the explanation that Kirk was expected to attend and report on a Tea Party as a Social Studies assignment.

It was more difficult, at first, to obtain Maggie’s consent, for she had heard that the Tea Parties were as disorderly as a teen house party with the parents away. There was no way, therefore, that she would permit Kirk to attend one, as long as Blair childishly insisted on tagging along. Blair, assuming there would be cake, clowns and ice cream, refused to “be left out of a party”. However, after two successive evenings had been marred by Kirk’s tantrums, Maggie received an invitation in the mail that permitted her to announce that she would take Blair to a tea party in Polish Knob, a small town south of Beaverton, while Kirk and Laird attended the political Tea Party downtown. Blair readily endorsed her plans after being told, quite truthfully, that he was more likely to find food and drink at the Polish Knob affair.

Kirk convinced his father that they’d have to carry homemade signs if they wanted to have a chance at getting their fifteen minutes of fame on television. It was difficult to know what to put on the signs, since Laird had never tuned into politics and the political signals Kirk had been receiving had been thoroughly distorted by an opinionated teacher. Simply put, both father and son hadn’t the foggiest idea of either the values or the goals of the Tea Party Movement. Even so, Kirk was, as a onetime boy scout, determined to carry a positive, patriotic message. And what could be more patriotic than supporting the President? Thus, Kirk devised two slogans that used “black slang” to express his family’s support for Barack Obama, the country’s first black President: “Obama is the shit!” and “Obama is the dopest President yet!” It’s hard to get more complimentary than that, Kirk believed.

At their Tea Party Kirk and Laird found themselves at the back of the crowd, their view of the podium blocked by a “fence” of waving placards, two Uncle Sams on stilts, two guys acting like asses in a donkey suit, and several Founding Fathers including a toothless George Washington and a bearded Abraham Lincoln, the latter played (disconcertingly for Laird and his son) by an exceptionally short woman.

Kirk and Laird heard not a word from the podium, partly because their hoodies muffled anything beyond the immediate sound of rain pelting concrete cobblestones, and partly because of the sales pitches from strolling hucksters of patriotic caps, tee shirts and buttons, but mainly because the two Finlaysons were yelling their own slogans in raucous disharmony with those of their neighbors. As most of the folks in the back were like themselves — middle-class whites from the suburbs — Kirk and Laird received a warm welcome for their brazen “insults” to the “socialist” President loathed by most of the Tea Partiers. Whenever Kirk shouted, “Obama is the shit,” he got a thumbs-up or a pat on the back from the men around him, although two or three of the older women muttered about “washing the child’s potty mouth with soap.”

It was only when Kirk and Laird chanced upon a middle-aged African-American wearing a business suit to the Tea Party that things got tense for the first time. An internist opposed to the Democrats’ healthcare package, he chided Kirk for making political dissent “so personal”: “Son, it’s always wrong to make an ad hominem attack on a politician, even the President, when it’s his party’s policies you should be opposing. After all, Barack Obama needed about 280 Democrats to get his mandates through Congress. I also think it bad manners for a child to call the President, any President, the ‘dopiest’.”

“Attack President Obama? That’s a crazy thing for you to say,” Kirk protested. “You’re a black dude, aren’t you? Don’t you know your own language? In ebony-icks, bad and dopest is compliments, heap big compliments. I’m calling Barack the dopest, not the dopiest. The “i” makes all the difference.”

“In the fourth century,” the internist replied, “an iota — that’s Greek for the letter ‘i’ made quite a difference. Adding it to the Greek word homos, thereby changing its English meaning from “the same” to “similar” when discussing Jesus and God, could get you declared a heretic to be executed. And your sign, son, does appear to have the damning ‘i’.”

And so it did appear because the incessant rain had caused the marker’s ink to run, an “i” magically surfacing between the “p” and “e”. Oops! After what the black man had said, Kirk now wondered whether his sign was somehow calling President Obama a “homos,” which appeared to be the Greek for “homo.” Kirk nervously looked around to see whether his father was standing close enough to cover his son’s back if they both needed to make a run for it.

“Son,” Kirk’s newest acquaintance now said. “After growing up in the home of two lawyers in Shaker Heights, Ohio, I went to Yale University and to the Harvard Medical School, and I do not, in consequence, know or speak Ebonics. Nor do I speak like a Hollywood Indian. But now that I know the true intent of your sloganeering, it’s incumbent on me to warn you that your message is not the one that this assemblage wish to read or to hear. Unlike you, they tend to dislike President Obama. Thus, I humbly suggest that before your apostasy becomes widely known that you and your father … RUN for your lives!”

The doctor chuckled as the party-crashers Kirk and Laird scuttled away like roaches from cake crumbs when the kitchen light comes on. “Those are two dumbass white boys” he said to a Latino friend, who replied, “Si, they’re as ignorant as an illegal looking for ‘la vida dulce’, the easy life, here in El Norte.”

Unfortunately, or unfortunately, neither Laird nor Kirk got to see themselves on television. Nor did anyone else, inasmuch as local television and radio deemed the rain-shortened, tri-neighborhood “Charity Run for Exotic Viral Diseases” to be a more newsworthy event. However, attendance at a Tea Party brought benefits to Kirk at school after Mr. Tingle somehow learned that Kirk had “courageously defied the riotous, neo-Nazi horde” with his pro-Obama message. From then on, Kirk could cut Mr. Tingle’s class at will, simply by saying that there was “anti-Tea Party stuff” to be done. While it would have been politically incorrect to call Kirk the “teacher’s pet”, he had definitely become the “teacher’s animal companion”.

Where attending a Tea Party ended up being a rewarding experience for Kirk, for Blair it proved more enlightening. Perhaps he should have realized that he wasn’t being taken to a political rally when his mom told him what to wear. Blair was to start with pink lipstick and eye shade, pink nail and toe polish, his electric pink Peace and Love bikini panties, a pink-and-white Peace Sign shaped (padded) bra, teardrop earrings and matching gold pendant (all with pink sapphires), a velvet pink hair band, her newest “party dress” (a thick strap, polyester tank dress in multi-tiered pink cloud chiffon and neckline of rosettes), and the only non-pink item — strappy, open-toe dress sandals with a soft satin fabric upper and glittering sequin trim and  ¾ inch chunky wedge heels. Blair had rarely looked more girlish and even now, after four months of dressing exclusively en femme, he felt foolish and vulnerable.

After the long, ninety-minute drive in the pouring rain to Polish Knob, a small town physically dominated by college buildings and a tall bulbous tower, the journey of Maggie and Blair came to an end in the visitor’s parking lot (aesthetically laid out in the shape of a camel’s toe) of the Yoni Punani Academy for Girls. Ominously (in a good sort of way), the rain stopped at the precise moment that Maggie turned off the car engine. The sunshine removed the last of the clouds that had been darkening Blair’s visage.

After a short stroll (actually, Maggie strolled while Blair skipped) past the school’s pie-shaped garage and an adjoining tool shed bizarrely festooned with lobster pots, bear traps, conch shells, bearded clams and stuffed peachfish, Blair and Maggie entered a bushy park with a fringed mound of wiry brown brambles (sheltering the grunion nests) and an alcove containing a box (decorated with hand-carved beavers, bells and cups) planted with honeysuckle and sheaths of anemones of love. They then transited a grotto in a secret cavern with space for a special nook for a statue of the fertility goddess Astarte, the one with a vertical smile and a forbidden rose clutched by her right hand.

As they came back into the light, they snatched a quick glimpse of two whimsical, less sacred artifacts -- a bas relief of Mrs. Slocum’s pussy (that is, of her pussycat, from the sitcom Are You Being Served?), a statue of a bearded lady and a mosaic map of Tasmania (Australia). After these frivolities, they came to a slit trench filled with cream-colored water and a snatch of lotus flowers; after which they pushed as quickly as possible through a dusky, undercut tunnel (and possible bat cave) that slashed like an axe wound through the inner heart of the campus. After pulling out of this “stench trench” (for it smelt of rotten tuna), they reached The Velvet Cage (the school gym) and The Honey Pot (the school cafeteria, then advertising filet-o-fish, buns, loose meat and vertical bacon sandwiches (with optional cabbage) and sweets such as sugared almonds, cookies, cake and donuts).

From there they penetrated a field encircling Pleasure House (the girls’ after-school activity center), Treasure House (the school library), The Nooch (a snack stand featuring fish tacos, beavertails, jellyrolls and passion fruit) and The Cockpit (home of the girls’ debating society). By then Blair and his mother had reached the inner terrace of the Punani campus, the lower mouth of which led through a jade gateway to a golden doorway (trimmed with red pearls) behind which was the climax of their journey — the Theodora Williams Auditorium & Theatre (usually known by its acronym) — in which the Academy was hosting an open house and tea party for those girls (accompanied by a parent) intending to enter the school in September.

Waiting in an antechamber lined with black velvet was Madam Flossy Cabrá³n, the school’s headmistress, who greeted all arrivals with “Fellow quims, welcome to the gates of heaven. Here wisdom is not a forbidden fruit, but a cherry to be popped.” Madame Cabrá³n already knew about Blair, whose pink ensemble she praised extravagantly, before suggesting, “Child, I want you to meet Angela, who will become your roommate in September at the suggestion of her mother and yours.”

Blair turned in confusion to Maggie: “My roommate, mommy? Am I being sent to a boarding school? Don’t you want me at home anymore?” He was on the verge of tears.

“There, there. Don’t fret, sweetie. Your father and I have decided that the Yoni Punani Academy for Girls is the ideal school for you, given its emphasis on academics, music and theatre, and its de-emphasis on sports. You’ll love it here, and the school is the ideal place for you to develop the manners and poise of a well-bred young lady.”

“But boarding school?”

“Only for five days a week, Blair sweetie, and only because the school is a ninety-minute drive from our house. I’ll pick you up every Friday afternoon and we’ll spend the entire weekend together, as well as holidays and three weeks each summer.”

As Blair still looked glum, Madame Cabrá³n asked Maggie, “We expected that you would have already told your daughter about our policy requiring all of our students to sleep here a minimum of five nights a week so that the school may have the time and opportunity to acculturate them as pure Punani girls.”

“I’m a little surprised at Blair’s reaction,” Maggie replied. “She’s known for months that her father and I intended to send her to a private girls’ school in September — to get away from the bad example being set by her older brother — but she’s not yet eleven and so bound to have some last-minute jitters.”

“Of course, my dear. Blair, we at the Punani Academy are aware that young girls are prone to homesickness — they even miss helping with the housework — and that’s why we permit pre-teens like you to spend weekends at home. From experience I can promise you, however, that you’ll be more eager to get back to your friends at school on Sunday evening than you will be to go home on Fridays to see your brother. Now, do take my hand, and I’ll take you over to meet Angela. You two are bound to become best girlfriends.”

Angela turned out to be a pretty, raven-haired eleven-year-old, short and slight, yet pleasingly curvaceous for her age. After the exchange of a few desultory words interspersed with long pauses during which both girls looked nervously toward their mothers who were in animated discussion a dozen or more feet away, Angela suddenly whispered, “Blair, do be a sweetheart and lower your ear. I have a secret to share. It’s a really big secret, so I have to whisper it.”

Curious, Blair did as bidden; he could feel Angela’s breath gently misting his ear.

“Blair, my mother has told me all about you.” Angela’s voice got even lower: “I know you and I are the same — that we’re both girls with a boy’s body.”

Blair almost leapt out of his skin.

Angela held tightly onto Blair, keeping him seated: “Don’t worry! I’ll keep your secret if you keep mine. Let’s get out of here. My mother told me about a music practice room where we can have some privacy. If we’re going to be best girlfriends, as I really, really want us to be, then we can’t have any secrets between us.”

In the soundproofed practice room, Angela was a torrent of information: That her mother is a real ball-breaker who learned to hate males as a result of her grandfather’s lecherous eyes and fingers, her father’s early abandonment of the family, her two old brothers who fled home after years of regularly forcing themselves onto and into her in every sexual way conceivable (her pregnancy scare at twelve precipitated their flight), and three failed marriages, broken each time by a philandering, absconding husband, the last of whom left her with Andrew, a male infant to raise.

There being no way that she was going to let Andrew grow up to be the sort of person who hurt females — in other words, to grow up as a male — the much aggrieved mother immediately renamed him “Angela” and raised him — actually there was no longer a “him”, just a “her” — as a girl. Angela said that she had no doubts, whatsoever, of her own gender identity until a year ago when she had accidentally seen another girl and a boy fully in the nude. (They were, Angela blushingly affirmed, “in the act of doing it,” which made the naked truth about her own sexuality even harder to deny.)

After much questioning and challenging, her mother had finally brought Angela to a recognition that not only had she always been happy being a girl, but that she also couldn’t conceive of living life as a boy. But Angela wanted things regularized: in return for continuing to live as a female, her mother had to agree (reluctantly, given the expenditure involved) to give Angela an appropriately female body (with the appropriate birth certificate) before year’s end. However, her mother’s assent had also carried a condition: to wit, that Angela thereafter attend a boarding school. This condition her mother imposed because, as she admitted, she no longer wanted to have around her any reminder of “the weasel who screwed my life the most.” Her mother had hoped that a year of feminizing hormones would eliminate any resemblance the girl had to her father, but it hadn’t happened, and it was time for Angela to leave home to complete her education.

“So you see,” Angela concluded:

My mother pretty much decides what will become of my life. I learned long ago that it was pointless to resist her will. I think I could have been a good athlete, but mother said that it wasn’t ladylike to sweat, and so each year I become ever clumsier and prissier — I can’t seem to help it any longer — and now I want to vomit if I see dirt on my dress or grass stains on my slacks. I am so very pleased that this school puts little emphasis on sports and actually bans jeans. Mother definitely picked the right school for me. She always knows what’s best for me. I always do what she wants because I’m happiest when she’s happy. It must be the same for you: you too are mother’s little darling. That’s why you’re wearing that darling pink dress — to please mommy.

“I wear what I want. I do what I want. No one’s the boss of me,” Blair shot back. He hadn’t appreciated the aspersion on his … Well, “manhood” wasn’t the correct word; maybe “autonomy” was. Yes, “autonomy” would have been the correct word had Blair ever come across it. His “manhood” was not something he had much defended even before the momentous trip to the Mall, but he had an independent streak apparently lacking in Angela.

“I’m sorry, Blair. I wasn’t trying to diss you. I was just talking about the facts of life. Your mother, like mine, holds all the cards. You’re just a kid, and nobody listens to a kid. So your mother can do whatever she wants with you. You don’t have any choice if she’s really determined for you to be a girl.”

“Yes, I do have a choice. I’ve got an ace up my sleeve. I can play it if I have to. You’ll see.” Blair stood defiantly, his feet placed firmly on the ground — looking more like a male footballer than a girl in a party dress.

Angela wisely changed the subject: “Let’s not fight. We’ve got so much in common that we just have to be best girlfriends. I’ll let you see my breasts if you want.”

The offer definitely intrigued Blair, who bombarded Angela with questions about her breast development. It emerged that she has been taking the same herbal capsules as Blair, but for twenty-six times as long as his two weeks. The result, she boasted, were “boobs as good as those of a thirteen-year-old girl. Like my mother, I’m going to have big jugs.”

These Blair definitely had to see. And so it came to pass that Blair saw his first female mammaries. They were, remarkably, on a boy. Could Blair touch? Sure, if he reciprocated. And so, Blair got to touch his first breasts since his birth mom gave up breast-feeding. To his surprise, Angela’s felt not all that different from his own — at least, as they had become during the past two days. Their mutual curiosity soon stripped Blair of both dress and bra, and Angela excitedly confirmed that a mass was forming under each of his nipples that felt very much like a woman’s mammary. Angela estimated that Blair would no longer have to pad his bra in a week or two and that by the time he entered the Punani Academy that he’d be further along in female puberty than most of the girls in his class. “You’ll no longer fit into boys’ clothes. Won’t that be great?”

“Great? I don’t know yet. But I definitely want to know what it looks and feels like to be a girl. I’ve got to grow me some melons. That way I’ll be a better able to owdishon for roles where an actor dude has to pretend to be a girl. I’ll know exactly how to walk with breasts, since I would have had ‘em once.”

Angela was incredulous at Blair’s naivety:

Blair, they’re not going to be asking you to play male roles after you’ve developed breasts and feminine curves. You’ll only get girl roles. Don’t you know that you and I are playing the gender game for keeps? Once you’ve got breasts, the only way to get rid of them is for a surgeon to cut them off with a hacksaw. The same goes for your hips if they get too big for boys’ jeans. Hack! Hack! You could die from the loss of blood! It makes me shiver even to think of someone sawing off my nipples! As my mother splained, when young kids like us take estrogen and suppress the guy hormones in our balls there soon comes a day where there’s no going back. My mother says it’s already too late for me to ever look like a normal dude. She says the only choice I’ve now got is between being a popular, pretty girl or an unpopular, weird-looking guy — both for the rest of my life. That’s not much of a choice, is it? I mean which would you choose?”

Blair was thoughtful. He could now see that Angela’s pretty face had such round, soft, feminine features and her body, such wide hips and perky breasts that it was already difficult for her to “pass” as a male.

Angela, anxious to talk to someone about her transformation, added:

Tomorrow a real doctor will be giving me a shot of super-duper hormones that will, unfortunately, make me sick for a week, like people often are from a flu shot. A bit of wooziness is, my mother says, a small price to pay for the peace of mind I’ll have from then on. She says that after that first shot I’ll never ever wonder again whether I should become a boy. In fact, she says I’ll no longer think at all like a male, which my mother says is a messed-up way of thinking. I’ll be thinking only like a girl after my shot — more emotional, more in touch with my feelings, better able to make friends. Once I get the first shot — like polio boosters there will be more than one — I’ll hate my cock and balls so much, according to my mother, that I’ll be begging, actually begging! — for her to have them cut off. She says I’ll go crazy if I don’t get rid of them. Luckily, the doctor has a clinic in Cuba where he can replace my boy stuff with … well, you must know what we girls normally have between our legs?

Angela, her face reddening at having to mention, sort of, girls’ unmentionable parts, stared over Blair’s shoulder at the school’s crest etched in the glass door of the practice room: it contained an engraving of a sheath made from a split piece of wood into which a sword was deeply thrust, under which was arrayed the school motto, “Ipsa vulva angusta et tenera potestas est”.

The phrase was Greek to Angela at the time, but the following September Angela used a Latin-English on-line translator to figure out that it roughly meant, “There’s power in a soft, tight vagina.” After she began dating teen boys, she knew what the motto really meant.

Angela next told Blair: I’m really looking forward to my shot tomorrow, because I want the certainty, the peace of mind that it will give me. You’ll understand what I mean when the time comes for your shot….”
“I won’t let anyone stick me with a dumb needle that makes me want to be a girl forever,” Blair interrupted.

Angela smiled condescendingly (she was after the elder):

You don’t think you’ll ever get a shot or want one? Blair, you’re such a baby; you don’t understand mothers at all, do you? Mine will tell yours that you’ll be much, much happier after a shot in your arm, and yours won’t give you a real choice about getting it because she’ll be convinced that the final disappearance of the boy in you is for your own good. She’ll want you to stop having doubts about completing your sex change; she’ll want to give you the finality, the certainty that the shot will give you. Blair, once the super duper hormones surge through your body, your dick and balls will start shrinking so fast that you’ll be able to watch them get smaller, and soon your dick will become so tiny, much smaller than your pinky, that you’d rather die than let anyone, including your father and brother, see it. That’s when you will beg your mom for an operation to give you a girl’s private parts ‘cause they will look a lot better and work a lot better than a baby peepee. I know that’s what your mom has got planned for you.

This was a lot for Blair to absorb. There was no question that his self-confidence has been sorely shaken; he was much less confident of being master of his destiny than he had been before Angela told him about the mind-control shots and the mothers’ master plan. He realized, of course, that their “mothers” were quite different: His was one to love, hers was one to fear. And yet, both mothers wanted a daughter so much that they were administering ho-mones to feminize their son’s body. According to Angela, if Blair continued dutifully taking his cocktail of ho-mones, after two or three more weeks he’d have a girl’s body for the rest of his life.

Until now there hadn’t been much of a downside to Blair’s playing the part of Maggie’s daughter. In fact, it had been a primo role: His father and brother no longer muttered about his being a homo; strangers looked at him with more respect than they had when he’d come across as a sissy boy; there were also a lot more men now watching his every move and lauding his looks, and Blair loved the attention; in Alicia he’d found a girlfriend who did wonderful things to his body; he had been able to play soccer and to “star” in ballet without anyone’s expecting him to perform like a male; he’d had a chance to perfect his acting by playing a really difficult role, at least for a boy; he had been able to “bug” his least favorite teacher; he had acquired an extensive new wardrobe and no longer wore seconds from Kirk; he had learned that girls’ clothes were a real turn-on, psychologically and erotically; he was being offered a chance to go to a better school (although he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of boarding over); and best of all, his mom paid far more attention to her daughter than she had to Laird’s second son.

Indeed, there had been so few negatives to the role of Maggie’s daughter that it had been almost three months since Blair had seriously considered giving it up. He reckoned that no matter how he dressed or behaved, his future was his to control. Yet Angela was now saying that in less than a month his choices would be as restricted as a breast in a firm-support bra.

Somehow everything was different after talking to Angela. What a killjoy she was! It didn’t surprise him that she was already asking for the lower bunk because she wet her bed. A bed wetter! And she dared to call him a baby!

His mind thus occupied, Blair gave a start when Maggie, coming up from behind, tapped him on the shoulder to announce that the two girls were wanted in an antechamber of the auditorium where tea and cake would be served.

At the tea party Blair was a severe disappointment to his mother and Madame Cabrá³n. His mind now buzzing with a hundred unwanted thoughts and images, he forgot to sit and sip demurely like a girl. Indeed, he even showed a flash of panty as he sprawled slack-jawed and his little finger simply wouldn’t behave itself. It kept on trying to grip the cup. The words “please” and “thank you” seemed to be beyond his linguistic skills. In his unseemly (for a proper young girl) passion for cake he kept reaching far across the table, accidentally bumping arms and brushing against bosoms, in each case causing spilt milk or tea. As for his tea-pouring technique, Blair, his hand shaking, had so much difficulty finding the target that he scalded Angela’s mother, even as he drowned the cake crumbs on his own dress.

Madame Cabrá³n tried, in her own haughty way, to be kind to Maggie when discussing Blair’s performance at his first tea party:

Oh my, I see that there is some work to be done with Blair, who is not yet as poised and ladylike as our Punani girls. As you know, we receive more applications than we have spaces in the sixth grade, and frankly I wasn’t sure until now that the Yoni Punani Academy was the best fit for a girl from one of the newer suburbs. But I now appreciate that Blair desperately needs an elite finishing school like ours for her to have any hope of growing into a proper young lady. It won’t be easy, but our staff will rise to the challenge. She will, I promise, be ready for her debut in polite society eight years from now. If you will now see Ms. Gloria Huffington, our registrar, she will explain the procedure for enrolling Blair. I look forward to teaching her voice, posture and overall poise.

The news from Ms. Huffington was unsettling: To enroll Blair she would need his transcript from the Lewis A. Clark Charter School and a copy of his official birth certificate. Of course, Ms. Huffington had used “her”, and she was unlikely to be pleased with the “male” notation on Blair’s records. Indeed, Joy Torres, Angela’s mother, had already confirmed that there was no way in this lifetime that the Punani Academy would knowingly admit a transgendered student.

“Is there a way,” Maggie asked Joy, “to fake my child’s school and birth records? Do you happen to know someone good at forgery?”

Maggie thought no one could overhear. What she didn’t know was that Blair, intent on eavesdropping, had secreted himself behind a marble statue of a vestal virgin (also known as a temple prostitute).

“Forgery?” Joy replied:

Why settle for a fake when you can have the real thing? Doctor Benny Sentirsi, he’s the gender specialist I told you about, well, he gave me the phone number of a computer geek. He’s barely fourteen-years-old, but he can hack into any system, without anyone being able to track him down. And all the kid wants for pay is a Spiderman comic. I bought him an Amazing Spiderman #50 for $150, and for that small sum he hacked into the newspaper and government database in which my child’s original name and sex were identified. The complete record now shows that eleven years ago I had a baby girl whom I named Angela Maria Torres. Nowhere in the world of bits and bytes is there any evidence that a boy named Andrew ever existed, and with paper records everywhere heading for the dumpster, that’s all that matters.
Are you saying that this teenager has the ability to change Blair into a female -- that Blair’s school records and birth certificate can be altered to show that he’s always been a girl?”

“Yes, Maggie. Josh — that’s the teen’s name — will also alter Blair’s sex in the birth announcement in the newspapers, in his baptism certificate, in his library card — anywhere that you can think of. And fast! Is that kid ever fast! I promise you that Blair will no longer exist anywhere on the public record as a male within one week of your cutting a deal with Josh. Take this — it’s Josh’s mobile phone number.”

Maggie stuffed the note into her purse, but she still looked doubtful about using it: “I don’t know. It’s got to be risky to alter Blair’s school and birth records. There must be a law against doing that.”

“Maggie, there probably is, but it’s worth some risk, isn’t it, to enroll Blair in the Punani Academy? Once Blair enters it, you’ll have a daughter for life. Which reminds me — here’s Doctor Sentirsi’s phone number and address. He’s the one to contact, discretely mind you, when you decide to hurry up Blair’s feminization with injections and when, a while later, you decide on surgery to give Blair the female genitalia she’ll need to be a happy teen. Sentirsi has a protected clinic in Cuba where he’s transformed several colts into fillies, though none as young as Angela or Blair. But there’s always a first, isn’t there?”

To Blair’s consternation Maggie accepted the second phone number with greater alacrity than she accepted the first. Even worse, after hearing the entire conversation so far, he missed out on what Angela’s mother said next, because she dropped her voice real low, real conspiratorial-like. But he thought he heard this much — “… of course, Doctor Sentirsi will say that he never breaks the law; but it’s easy to call his bluff, all you have to do is ….”

And that was the last of their conversation Blair overheard, for Angela, finally locating his hiding place, tugged at his hair. That led to tickles, and the two mothers, alerted to the presence of their chicks, ended their discussion of Blair’s future. All four then took a quick tour of the school’s classrooms and residences, during which Angela and Blair decided that they wanted to share a room in Cooch Hall. They thought it somehow more “real,” its girls less prone to vain display and artifice, than Merkin Hall.

After the two “girls” kissed each other a tearful adieu, Maggie and Blair drove home quietly, pensively, in the pouring rain, the windshield wiper being their lone musical accompaniment. Blair couldn’t remember the last time Maggie hadn’t said a word for more than an hour, and he considered the silence ominous (in a bad way).

Dinner was a blur. Blair couldn’t concentrate until he knew what Maggie was going to do next. Did she intend to use those phone numbers? About half an hour after he was supposed to be asleep in bed, he crept into the upstairs hallway in his powder blue nightie and pink ballet slippers because he thought he’d heard Maggie pick up the phone. Suspecting at first that it was only his imagination — the kitchen and TV room phones were so far away — he pressed himself tight against the hallway wall when he suddenly realized that she was, remarkably, phoning from the bedroom. That was almost never done when both parents were at home, for they kept no secrets from each other. But here she was, his own mother, sneaking a phone call while her husband watched the NBA playoffs downstairs.

Blair realized that his life was spinning out of his control as he listened to Maggie’s side of the conversation:

Hello, Josh, my name is Maggie. I’m a friend of Joy Torres and her daughter Angela. Joy told me that you’re a whiz with computers. She also told me what you did for Angela. I’ve got a daughter named Blair; she’s got the same problem that Angela had. You know — a foul-up in her official records so that all of them erroneously state that she’s a male. Do you think you can fix the records so they all say that Blair has always been a female? You can? Great? I’ll email you the details. When can you do it? We’re in a bit of a rush because a school is asking for Blair’s birth certificate. By next Thursday? That’s super. I have the perfect Batman comic as a reward for you. It’s quite choice, as you kids say.”

A batman comic! For the price of a batman comic he was being sold down the river by another boy. In less than a week he, Blair, would be officially a girl in the eyes of the law. He knew what that implied, for he had seen the commercials about identity theft. He knew that it was almost impossible to get one’s good name back once it had been lost. And what about one’s sexual identity? Would the guys in the government tell him that it would take too much effort to change his sex back to male and that he should therefore bring his body into full compliance with the government records as quickly as possible? Might not the federal government actually mandate a sex change for him to avoid its having to admit that its computers had made an error?

Questions like these can keep a boy from falling fast asleep.

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. It’s a familiar theme in the TG literature, but this time with an unfamiliar twist. In the last chapter, Kirk was enlightened about US politics and Blair about the long-term effects of hormones and Maggie's plans for him. And now they want him to play on a girls' team in front of a hometown crowd!

Choices, Chapter 12 A Na’vi choice

It was now mid-May. Miss Umbridge had returned to the class more than two weeks ago. Yet life for Blair went on much as usual at Lewis A. Clark Charter School, because either the sanitarium had chilled her out or because she was still on powerful tranquillizers. Whichever the case, discipline was becoming lax in Blair’s homeroom as the growing excitement and waning attentiveness of his classmates signaled that the countdown to summer and to the end of Blair’s days as a schoolboy had begun.

Ironically, Miss Umbridge had returned to teaching on the same day that a pimply-faced, bespectacled teenager named Josh had come by the house to collect two Mighty Mouse comic books from the 1950s that Blair, to his chagrin, had been required to find on-line for Maggie to buy. (She hadn’t truthfully explained why she needed them, as he fully realized.) For Blair, it would have been upsetting to have his birthright identity sold for the price of a rare Spiderman comic, as had happened to Angela, but for two stories about a flying mouse? That was galling indeed. As was catching his mother in an outright lie.

Maggie said nothing after Josh’s visit about the change in Blair’s legal and education status, but Blair knew enough to appreciate that he was increasingly becoming entangled in the web that Maggie had been weaving. He reckoned that he’d have to say he was a girl even to get a driver’s license. And no boys’ school would take him now!

But the best evidence that the “commedia e finita” for Blair’s boyhood — that the comedy was ending with Blair being unable to take off the Columbine mask he had lightheartedly begun wearing the preceding January — could be found on his chest.

(I know, I know — there is no possible way that Blair, still six weeks shy of his eleventh birthday, thought about I Pagliacci and a female character from the medieval commedia del arte when he looked at his chest. Still, I felt a sudden compulsion to expose my erudition, hidden thus far in my tale like Waldo’s private parts in a crowd scene, and I trust that anyone who has stayed with Blair’s story through several chapters won’t be so unkind as to observe that references to the death scene of I Pagliacci have become about as fresh as references to the ‘writing on the wall’. As Popeye the Sailor, one of my two favorite philosophers (the other being Chairman Mao), profoundly opined, don’t expect more of me, “I am’s what I am.”)

It wasn’t the writing on the wall that disturbed Blair (he’d simply blame the scribbled phone number on Kirk) but rather the condition of his chest: It now sported two small, female breasts. Yes, knockers, the real thingees. They had a puffy, red, angry appearance (as though rebuking him for fooling around with ho-mones); the boobs resembled two crocuses that had dared to poke their way through the spring snow. Big Al was, of course, thrilled with the first shoots of Blair’s womanhood, but soon realized — to their mutual frustration — that she’d have to go easy on her attentions until Blair’s “love cups” had become less enflamed.

As Blair believed Angela when she told him that breasts, once grown, could never be lost without major, dangerous surgery, he understood that physically as well as legally his options had narrowed to making the best of being a girl. Overall, he reflected, a permanent change of sex might even be an improvement over life as a sissy male; yet he still wished that he’d waited until he’d tested the waters as a teenager to make such a major choice in life. “Who knows?” he wondered, “Maybe teenagers are kinder than tweens to boys who are a bit different, even a bit ‘queer’?”

Blair’s life was now rushing out of his control: Even soccer, a sport that had hitherto proved a blessing, bestowing on him his first lesbian relationship as well as plenty of time for slowly walking about, thinking deep thoughts like Stuart Smalley and communing with nature, was now threatening to make him such a pariah in his own school and community that he’d need to find a boarding school much farther away than Yoni Punani if he were to escape the pitchforks of his neighbors.

His problem was simple: There were rumors that that his team would have to forfeit if he missed the second game of the home-and-away series that would determine which team of girls, aged 10 to 12, were the “Best in the Valley”. Several teams had already been knocked out, and the trophy and the honors would go either to the best team from the Washington side of the Columbia, the Breakers, or to the best team from the Oregon side, the Smiters.

True, the Oregon contingent weren’t from Bybee Lake, Blair’s home town; he wasn’t that unlucky. But the Smiters did hail from the adjoining community of Smith Lake, and that town’s multi-purpose field had been torn up by rampaging fans of the losing team in the Oregon State Croquet Championships.

The Smiters consequently chose the best pitch in Bybee Lake for its home game and grudge match against the Breakers, who had won 1-0 in front of their home crowd in Rose Villa, Washington. The close score scarcely reflected the balance of play, which had been almost entirely in the Smiters’ half of the field, but the Smiters had in Christine Ronaldo an awesome goalkeeper (6 foot 2 inches tall with lightning-fast reflexes) who had kept them in the game until a penalty kick in added time.

Naturally, given Blair’s luck, the best pitch in Bybee Lake formed part of the campus of D. B. Cooper High School, which in turn was less than three full blocks away from the Lewis A. Clark Charter School. There were bound to be a lot of kids (well some at least) from Blair’s school cheering on the Smiters against the Breakers. Not only were the Breakers interlopers from another State, but the Smiters had been the only team in the tournament not to run up the score against the Bi-girls, the woeful team representing Bybee Lake.

At first, only Big Al had been upset when Blair missed his team’s home game against the Smiters “on account of illness”. Frantic with concern, Big Al showed up at the Finlayson house at midnight with flowers for Blair. When she learnt that he had been feigning illness, her relief gave away to anger, probably with him, but understandably transfered by her to her father and teammates, whom she accused at a team meeting of being “delighted” that Blair had reported in sick.

She blasted her father: “You’re the one who’s sick, not Blair, ‘cause winning the damn trophy is more important to you than her well-being. Dad, you told us that there’s no “i” in team; I guess there isn’t a “b” either — “b” as in Blair.”

The speech had little effect on her fellow Breakers, who still did not regard Blair as a “real” member of their team, but it did reach the ears of four rival coaches and Ms. Beverly Bolton, president of the Girls’ Friendship League. Assuming not unreasonably that Blair had sat out the championship game in Rose Villa at the request or insistence of her coach, Gus Anderson, in defiance of the league’s mandate to “give every girl a chance to reveal what she’s got”, Bolton deliberately stirred the normally placid waters of interstate girls’ soccer by informing the coach of the Smiters that it was more than an outside theoretical possibility that the Breakers were forcing one of their players to feign illness in order to strengthen their team effort. Bolton couldn’t “prove” anything, she admitted, but she hoped that the Smiters could find a way to “compel” the male coach of the Breakers to play fair: “Perhaps we shouldn’t even allow men to coach girls’ soccer. Male coaches are so problematic. Either they have a Lolita complex or they’re much too competitive. They play soccer like it’s a war. Aren’t men beastly?”

Eda Petrie, coach of the Smiters, not only agreed that the worst player on the Breakers had a god-given right to play soccer, but she was determined to force the issue. She told the media (the news appearing in several free papers and on local cable) that she believed that the Breakers were so eager to win the championship that they were benching their worst player (fortunately, Petrie didn’t know Blair’s name), even though this meant that they no longer had the requisite eleven girls on the field.

Citing a technicality of a technicality, Petrie argued that the Breakers should be disqualified, the trophy going to the Smiters by default, if the Washington team did not have eleven girls on the pitch at the starting whistle. After the Bybee Bi-Weekly filled its op-ed page with two letters strongly siding with Coach Petrie and the Breakers and the Rose Villa Shoppers’ Guide couldn’t find a single rejoinder to print, it was clear that public opinion was massively behind the Smiters.

Coach Anderson crumbled like a New Orleans dike: without consulting Blair, he announced in the Smith Lake Seniors’ Times that all eleven of his girls were now healthy and ready for the big game in Bybee Lake.

However, Blair wouldn’t play ball. Despite two visits by the coach to his house to plead with Blair and his parents, Blair refused to disgrace himself by playing for an all-girl’s team in his home community. To be recognized publicly as a crossdresser was really, really bad; but much, much worse was the near certainty that Blair would leave the game with the reputation of being “the sissy kid who plays soccer worse than any girl.”

As Coach Anderson didn’t know that the “little prick” had an eenie-weenie secret between his legs, he personally lacked the necessary leverage to get Blair to budge. After all, Blair needn’t ever cross the Columbia River again.

But Big Al had the knowledge needed to induce Blair to change his mind about showing up for the big game; and, out of team loyalty, she used it to compel Blair to agree to play. No, she loved Blair far too much to threaten to use her knowledge of his primary sexual characteristics to punish a no-show. Instead, she used her intimate knowledge of Blair’s erogenous zones to persuade him that he’d do almost anything to please Big Al. After she made it clear to Blair that there was only one way for him to secure relief him from the intense sensitivity wrought by her tireless ministrations to his “zones”, he gasped that “yes, “yes, anything you want. I’ll do anything for the team.”

As Blair couldn’t renege on a promise made in the act of love, it was settled: he’d be rejoining the Breakers for their final game and that he’d need to find a disguise that would prevent anyone’s connecting the dots between “Blair Fines,” his name on the Breakers’ team roster, and Blair Finlayson, the suspiciously fey boy who attended the Lewis A. Clark Charter School.

Maggie advised Blair to trust his fate to Pierre, his hairdresser: “He will be able to change your appearance so that one no will know you are really are.” So off they went to the mall. As it was his tenth visit to the salon, Blair knew what to expect — Suzanne would give him a manicure, pedicure and makeup hints while Pierre cut and shaped his “hairs”, with Blair’s hairstyle becoming more daringly feminine as his hair grew down to his shoulders. Of course, Pierre kept in mind the need for plausible deniability, which meant that Blair’s still had to look somewhat “masculine” when brushed against the grain and commonsense. This time Pierre took Selena Gomez (from Wizards of Waverly Place) as his inspiration, which meant that Blair’s bangs now swept down to his left eye, exposing his right forehead, while his thick, layered hair now had dark-blonde highlights and, thanks to a curling iron, curled around his chin.

As Blair admired his new look in the mirror, Maggie asked Pierre if he knew of a way to disguise Blair so that none of his schoolmates would recognize “him” as “she” played for an out-of-state girls’ soccer team. It was a tall order, and in Pierre’s judgment, a wig was “outside of the question” because it would be difficult to explain to the Breakers and could be inadvertently torn from Blair’s head, exposing his blond locks to ridicule. “It is necessary to tint the hairs,” Pierre said. “To have the hairs become jet black will render unrecognizable the look of the pretty Blair, especially when Suzanne applies to her the makeup appropriate for the young girl with hairs so foncés — so dark.”

While a dye job had obvious short-term appeal, it was problematic in the mid-term: Blair risked obvious exposure if he still had black hair when he returned to school. Someone was bound to connect Blair Finlayson to Blair Fines if they had the same hair color. It would be difficult, though not impossible, to find a temporary black hair dye that could survive a rain shower (a not unlikely event in Bybee Lake), yet wash out after two or three shampooings. Black was, Pierre explained, the most permanent of the temporary tints. Blair came up with a daring solution:

Why not dye my hair blue? Wouldn’t that wash out better? I’ve always wanted to be one of the cool kids who dyes her hair a wild color. Next we could buy a Na’vi nose and ears for me at a costume store; I could even get some amber-tinted contact lenses so that I could disguise myself like a Na’vi in the movie Avatar. And of course, I’d smear my face, arms and legs — whatever shows — with blue theatrical makeup. If you braid my hair to look like a queue, no one will recognize me! I guess I’ll have to do without a tail, which Na’vis should have, ‘cause the other team will be pulling on it all day.

Maggie knew there had to be several problems with her daughter’s scheme, but she could see only one: How would Blair justify to her teammates her decision to show up in a Na’vi costume for the big game? “Won’t they think you a bit tetched?”

“Don’t worry, mommy. My teammates already think I’m skxawng. That means a ‘moron’ in Na’Vi. Already they don’t think my insanity is curable. And they don’t even know about my ding-a-ling. I’ll tell ‘em that my Avatar outfit will give me a ‘neural contact’ with Eyewa, goddess of nature, which will enable me to move about the soccer pitch as fast as the wind in July. I’ll tell them that the plan is to borrow me some energy, that way becoming the baddest cat on the pitch. After all, Na’vis are four times as strong as humans. Looking like a Na’vi, I am going to take my game to a whole new level. That’s what I’ll tell ‘em.’

Maggie was impressed: “By golly, Blair is really using his little gray rock. His plan might actually work. I know where we can buy the Na’vi prosthetics, but, Pierre, what about the blue costume makeup and hair tint? Do you have something that will last as long as the game, even if it rains, but can be washed out easily with body lotion and shampoo? I don’t want my baby’s skin to look as rough as a Hammerhead Titanothere’s when she returns to school the Monday after.”

Pierre, after reflected for a moment, advised:

It’s is difficile to find the hair dyes and the make-up that are temporary enough for the goals of Blair, and yet impermeable to the rain that the télé has just come to forecast for the day of the match. After all, we cannot have Blair resemble the zebra with the blue and white stripes; nor, let us perish the idea, can we permit his blonde hair to reveal itself. And so, it is necessary that one utilize products that are truly color-fast. And these are not facile to find if one also wants them to vanish themselves after one or two shampooings. But, we have the good chance! Samples of “Tree of Souls,” a new line of products from the Corporation Acme, have just arrived in my salon, and while one must wear a breathing mask while they are being applied, Monsieur Wile E. Kyotay, the responsible for the corporation, maintains that they are both permanent and temporary — tout at the same time. It’s magnificent, isn’t it?”

And so it was arranged that Maggie would bring Blair to Pierre’s salon ninety minutes before the game, with Pierre promising “with the speed of the Fan Lizard to transform the pretty and young Blair, the ordinary Homo sapiens, into the Na’vi extraordinaire.”

Surprisingly, all went well at the salon on game day. Granted, the toxic fumes from Acme’s “Tree of Souls” products did cause Blair’s eyes to fill with so many tears that his amber-tinted contact lenses went swimming about, and fifteen minutes were lost until they could be relocated at the top of his eyes. In general, the contacts may have been a bad idea since they irritated Blair’s eyes, making it difficult for him to see clearly during the game.

Even so, he got to the Breakers’ dressing room in plenty of time to hear Coach Anderson’s pep talk to his girls:

Girls, I know you’re aware that we almost forfeited this game and the championship. The Smiters were pissing on us and not even giving us the courtesy of calling it rain. They had dreams of flying away with the trophy without even having to play for it, but eventually they had to wake up when Blair, our pintsized … er … Na’vi, finally came to her senses with Alicia’s help, and now we are ready to ANNIHILATE the Smiters! Show what you've got! Oh yeah, who's bad? You, you’re awesomely bad. That's right. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about bitches. There are some punk girls from the pukey state of Oregon who want to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes. Well, kill them back! They’re sitting on shit that you want. So that makes them your enemy. So kick him hard, kick ‘em often, kick them in the place where the eye does not see. Now wheel your meat outta here!

As the girls, still shell-shocked stumbled onto the playing field, Coach Anderson grabbed Blair by his queue, pulling him back into the locker room and down onto his knees. The Coach snarled:

You little blue bitch, did you find yourself some local tail, and just completely forget what team you're playin' for? Your team is the Breakers, and not some bunch of tree-hugging Oregonians. If you intentionally screw the team today, I’ll shit you out dead with zero warning. No, don’t say anything. Shut your pie-hole and listen: Just stay away from the play. Yeah, you've got nothing to offer this team but a warm body. But keep running around the field, got it? That way you’ll fool everybody into thinking you’re trying to help. After the game, get your punk ass back to mommy because you’ve got no future with any team of mine. Try not to trip over your shoelaces when you run onto the field. That shouldn't be too hard even for you.

With tears blurring his eyesight, Blair misjudged the step out onto the field, and tumbled headfirst on to the grass, ending up at the feet of Big Al, who had tarried to help lift her girlfriend’s spirits after the Coach’s pep talk. Lovingly, Big Al helped Blair onto “her” feet, held her Na’vi girlfriend close, and assured “her” that the team was happy to have “her” back.

“But, Alicia, the coach doesn’t trust me,” Blair said. “He suspects me of being a turn-color turncoat like Jake Sully in Avatar. He believes I’ve fallen in love with a girl from Smith Lake. I know I shouldn’t say this about your dad, but he’s stupid — ignorant like a child. By now he should know that we’re like a mated pair. I’d never betray you or your team.” The two “girls” embraced, and would have kissed right then and there had they been brazen Canadians, but they held back for fear of hearing the L-word.

Big Al stared deep into her lover’s eyes as she gave her pep talk:

Blair darling, you don’t have to tell me or your teammates why you’re dressed like a Na’vi. We all know it’s to prevent your homies from knowing that you played a big role in Washington whipping Oregon’s butt today. That’s one bow we don’t blame you for wanting to take in a mask of sorts. If you were fixing to hurt the Breakers, you’d want your entire school to know that it was you whose “mistakes” helped the Smiters to win. You’d be flaunting your pretty blond locks like Lady Godiva, the candy maker, so the whole school could get a peep at you delivering the goodies for ‘Whoregon’. So, no more worrying about my dad, just think of them Smiters as scared little insects. Let’s scatter them roaches!

As Big Al dragged Blair onto the field, one hoped, and the other dreaded, that Blair’s game would become the stuff of legends. As expected, it was raining buckets. Had Blair looked down, she would have seen that her blue make-up was already dripping down her kit all the way to her socks and sneakers.

As the two teams headed to their dressing rooms to dry themselves at half-time, the two-game composite score stood tied at one apiece after an “own goal” by the Breakers. Although Blair, having never budged from the perimeter of the penalty area of the Smiters, couldn’t have been farther from the play, Coach Anderson was convinced that Blair had deliberately bumped into one of the Breaker strikers, thereby setting in motion a chain of events that ended with Susie Haggerty forgetting which net she was attacking. Big Al was yellow-carded for trying to pull her down before she got off her killer strike.

Despite this unlucky break, the Breakers should have been leading by a runaway score because the game had been played almost entirely in the Smiters’ half of the field. Yet, as in game one, Christine Ronaldo, whom even Big Al reckoned to be “one big damn goalkeeper,” was able to stop every Breaker shot on net, whether it came high or low.

Given the flow of the play, the Breakers had surprisingly few scoring opportunities even though, or possibly because, Big Al had been transferred to the offence after the low-scoring first game. Determined to have her girlfriend score the winning goal, Big Al kept passing the ball in Blair’s direction rather than going for the goal herself. Each time that she hit the ball in Blair’s direction the little Na’vi had half the net wide open; all he had to do was to make contact with the ball, but that proved impossible time and time again. Unable to time his kick to trap or redirect the ball, Blair ended up each time lying face down in the mud or sitting on the wet grass on his pretty little derriá¨re as the ball went wide or (if Big Al slowed the pace of her pass to give Blair a fighting chance) into Christine’s big paws. At the half, there wasn’t a muddier player than Blair on either team. Ominously, the mud had a deep-blue tint.

Blair expected to lose the mud when Coach Anderson tore a strip off “her” at half-time. Instead, the Coach, on his knees tearfully implored “her to forgive his harsh, pre-game remarks:

Dear girl, I know you don’t hold a grudge. You wouldn’t throw the game, would you, just to spite me? Think of your teammates’ dreams and hopes! Think of Alicia! You can’t let her down, not after she told me that you’re ‘the bestest girlfriend in the whole wide world’. We can’t let Alicia down, can we? Darling, darling Blair, will you forgive me?

Blair, confused by the Coach’s tears — Of affection? Contrition? Exasperation? — didn’t know what to answer. Interpreting Blair’s silence as rejection, the Coach next knelt in front of his own daughter:

Alicia, I ask you in turn to forgive me for yelling at your friend. You say there are no hard feelings. If there aren’t, then will you promise not to pass the ball again to Blair? You know that she [he paused to bite his lip] tries too hard to kick the ball. Don’t you realize that Blair is going to hurt herself if you keep passing the ball to her? Either she’ll pull a muscle kicking the air or she’ll fracture her tailbone or nose on one of those hard landings. Alicia honey, think of what’s best for Blair and the team.

Alicia still thought that Blair’s contributing something to the victory was “best” for both girlfriend and team, but she solemnly promised her coach and dad — to loud, spontaneous applause from her teammates — that she wouldn’t pass the ball again to Blair.

After the noisy celebration, Alicia’s teammates came over individually or in small groups to say that there were no hard feelings, for they too hoped that Blair could one day be a winner — it just wasn’t going to occur in a soccer game. Olivia suggested that Alicia find something “less physically challenging” for Blair to attempt.

“Yeah, like dominos,” said Jessica.

“No way,” said Branwyn, “Blair would get blood-poisoning from a splinter or be inconsolable after breaking a nail. She should stick to reading — but she should use an iPad so that she doesn’t get a fatal paper cut.”

Not understanding that Blair considered these barbs to be closer to Cupid’s arrows than to the poison-tipped, verbal spears hurled “her” way each day at Lewis A. Clark Charter School, Big Al charged into the second half of the game still determined to make a star out of her girlfriend. Even so, she kept her promise no longer to pass — or rather to attempt to pass — the ball to Blair.

Now, drawing deep on her knowledge as a pool hustler, Big Al endeavored to carom the soccer ball off of Blair’s shoulder, shin or seat past Christine into the net pocket. That meant, of course, striking the ball much harder at Blair than during the first half, and Blair, having little comprehension of the finer points of either soccer or billiards, concluded, as the ball banged against elbow, knee or shoulder blade, that Big Al was punishing him for his first-half ineptitude.

Blair bore his “punishment” with the fortitude that had enabled his heroic forebears, the whisky-befuddled Scots, to “pict” up their kilts during the first hootenanny to show their bucknaked blue McDuffs to the invading Romans, who, apparently stunned by the sight of male nudity, ran in terror back to their own camp. It was a brave thing for the Scotch to do, thought Blair as he rubbed his sore left cheek, to turn their naked backside on a Mediterranean male. So he vowed to absorb his chastisement with a smile — like a young schoolboy fagging for a senior.

Unable to understand the half-wit smile now permanently on Blair’s face, Big Al kept blasting away, but as Blair had an unwitting knack of ruining the angle at the last second with a clumsy pirouette or failed leap, the ricochet always went in the wrong direction.

Finally, the pain ceased: Big Al no longer had anything to bank off Blair’s shins because the Breakers had wordlessly, but unanimously resolved to keep the ball away from Big Al, who now ran around the pitch almost as aimlessly as Blair. Effectively two players down, at the seventy-third minute mark the Breaker attack looked set to smash itself to pieces on the adamantine, Smiter defense.

Then came Blair’s moment of soccer glory — a triumph even greater than his memorable terpsichorean turn as a “male” in Giselle: As he wandered around aimlessly, occasionally pausing to rub an “Alician” bruise, Blair accidentally bumped into Christine Ronaldo, who, seriously off-balance after a spectacular catch, fell heavily to the ground, badly spraining her ankle.

As Christine was helped off the field (with two of her shorter teammates serving as underarm crutches) to go to the emergency room of the general hospital (where, lacking adequate insurance, she waited twelve hours before finally having her lower left arm set in a cast), the Smiters demanded that Blair be red-carded — sent off the field — for “unsafe play” — that is, for deliberately, and with malice aforethought, injuring the opposition goalkeeper.

While the referee by now knew enough about Blair’s athletic ability (especially in the pouring rain) to realize that the “bump” might have been accidental, she had no choice in the circumstances but to hold up a red card, expelling Blair not only from the match, but also from the facility, as Big Alice, as team captain, had to inform her girlfriend.

Blair left the high school campus with her parents, the three of them more perplexed than embarrassed. Kirk, however, stayed behind to report back on the game’s final moments and to look for Blair’s left soccer shoe, which had flown off — to where no one yet knew — when Blair petulantly expressed his frustration at not being allowed to finish the game.

As the Smiters actually had more than eleven girls on their roster, they rearranged their squad to put Nancy Paderewski between the posts. At five-foot-four, she was not, however, as formidable as Christine when it came to shots heading for the upper corners, for the simple fact that she could not angle a jump that high.

Meanwhile, the Breakers were discovering that having to play with one girl short was better than playing with a short girl in net. Indeed, with Christine gone from the game and Big Al no longer trying to make Blair an unlikely heroine, the Breakers were able to loft four unanswered goals, winning the trophy 5 to 1 on aggregate.

The Smiters were not gracious losers. Believing that someone with Blair’s minimal soccer skills could only have suited up for the sole purpose of hurting their star goalkeeper, they refused to shake hands with the Breakers in the post-game ritual, an unladylike decision that shifted the hometown boos, until now directed at “the goon’s team”, sufficiently toward the Breakers for them to head for the locker room, their mud-caked heads held high.

Once there, realizing to whom they owed their victory, they voted to give the game ball to Blair. There was a lone holdout, who thought her three goals merited the honor, but even she was won over by Big Al’s point that, “Without Blair’s absence, we could not have carried the day.” Big Al and her father were deputed to bring the ball to Blair with the team’s signatures and congratulations, but not significantly, with a request to play for the Breakers again next year. Not that Blair would have agreed to return: Having won the Columbia Valley Girls’ Championship his first time out, Blair decided there was no further glory to seek in organized soccer.

It was fortunate that the Breakers won, or else it would have been a truly dreadful day for Blair, who suddenly realized after they had all clambered into the family’s SUV that he was oozing a toxic, odiferous mixture of blue dye and chemicals from every exposed pore of skin, as a consequence of his hair dye’s streaming in rivulets through his makeup all down his torso towards the tips of his fingers and toes as a consequence of the endless downpour. And yet his hair looked only slightly less blue.

The realization that he now looked more like Xavier University’s mascot Blue Blob than like a Na’vi came upon Blair quickly when Maggie shrieked at him for staining the front seat of the SUV a cyan blue (a color which never quite washed out). Mortified, Blair lay prostrate on the backseat floor, hoping never to be seen by another living person until he had spent an hour, two hours — whatever it took — under a shower head retrieving his normal looks.

Blair was so desperate to de-blue himself that he even begged for Maggie’s help with the scrubbing (especially of his back half), and for the first time ever Maggie got to see one of Laird’s modest children without a stitch of clothes, stark naked other than for the dye-makeup mixture that caked every inch that Maggie could see — which included Blair’s budding breasts. This was the moment that Maggie had been longing for — actual, physical proof that Blair so wanted to become a girl that he had been taking “ho-mones” like clockwork. And thanks to the blue dye, Maggie didn’t even realize that Blair’s juvenile breasts were still an angry red color, and highly sensitive to the touch.

Though she couldn’t be certain which was Blair and which, merely a blotch of blue goop, Maggie decided that the aureoles around Blair’s nipples had become larger, darker and much more feminine than those of a preteen, either a girl or boy. Maggie was so elated that she would have wet herself while hugging her daughter in the shower, had not she been fearful of ending up as blue as Blair.

After three hours of scrubbing, only the wrinkled skin disguised the obvious: that the best Blair could do was rid himself of the stench and to eliminate the discolored patches in his now uniformly blue skin. Miraculously, even his hair matched his cheeks, which matched his arms, which matched his eyes, returned to their familiar blue by the removal of his amber contacts. Both the make-up and dye had been experimental, Pierre had said. Some experiment! Blair felt like an experimental rabbit in a cosmetics lab. It’s not easy being blue.

It’s probably just as well that Blair didn’t know that “she” had in thirteen-year-old Cody Akins a fervent, new admirer, who having found “her” sneaker at the soccer pitch, decided that Fate had decreed that the “bitching blue Breaker” was his Cinderella to shoe one day.

There is no really no way to explain “love at first sight”: Perhaps it was the glistening blue skin that made Cody decide that Blair was “gorgeous,” for Cody had been looking for his own Na’vi to love since he’d seen Avatar for the ninth time.

Or perhaps it was Blair’s youthful spirit and preteen body, for girls Cody’s own age found the teen immature — and short.

Perhaps it was Blair’s sheer ineptitude; there was something endearing about a girl who literally took it on the chin and got back up smiling. Or perhaps it was the daringly casual “bump” that had won the game for the Breakers. Though Cody was convinced that Blair had done it deliberately, and though Cody came from Bybee Lake (indeed, he was Kirk’s best male friend at Lewis A. Clark), he admired the girl’s chutzpah. Cody would never have dared to foul a star player in front of enemy fans.

Or perhaps, in the final analysis, it was Blair’s innate “boyishness” that appealed to Cody who, though he spent most of his time frantically girl-watching, gave himself away with the music stored on his omnipresent iPod. Songs by Elton John, Freddy Mercury, Adam Lambert, Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, Rufus Wainwright, the Petshop Boys and Frank Sinatra should have been a giveaway. (He was possibly protected by the fact that few of his age group had ever heard of these “golden oldies”.) Naturally, Cody loved show tunes.

Kirk, seeing his “best bud” scoping out the soccer chicks, had come over several times during the game to chat. They had also taken shelter from the rain together at half-time. At first, Kirk found it amusing that Cody was talking so much about Blair, and so he contented himself with “cruddies” (sardonic remarks) about the “Washington” girl’s inferiority compared to the local hotties, but as the extent of Cody’s sudden infatuation with Blair — Blair, of all people! — became apparent, Kirk wanted to upchuck. And when Cody, having been the one to find the sneaker, refused to give it to Kirk because Cody was determined to present it in person to the “Na’vi princess”, Kirk actually “tossed his cookies” — the remnants of two soggy hot dogs — behind a lamp post.

There is no telling what Kirk would have done the following Monday had he the slightest inkling that Cody might be gay, inasmuch as Kirk later blamed his own rash actions on his concern that word was bound to get out at school that Cody, having had his pick of twenty-four real girls on two soccer teams (plus dozens more in the audience) had become smitten with a cross-dressing boy, and Kirk’s younger brother at that! Neither Cody nor his friends would thereafter be able to escape the unfair suspicion that they were all “homos”.

Kirk vowed to protect Cody’s reputation come what may; that’s what besties did for each other.

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. It’s a familiar theme in the TG literature, but this time with an unfamiliar twist. Blair is feeling blue after his first public appearance as a female Na’vi. Kirk’s best friend Cody, however, believes he has found his Cinderella in the strange girl from Rose Villa.

Choices, Chapter 13 Kirk’s choice

Laird, Maggie and the two children had a family conference to discuss whether Blair should stay home from school “sick” until his skin and hair had lost their doleful color. Kirk was adamant: There was no way Blair could go to school in blue face, as there was far too much risk of someone’s making the connection between the Na’vi girl from Rose Villa and the blond sissy from Bybee Lake.

Brother of a crossdressing sissy and goalie-tripping renegade was not a title that Kirk would wish on anyone, least of all himself. Kirk held that someone should shave off Blair’s hair (which Maggie refused to permit) and insist on Blair’s spending eight hours a day in the family bathroom with a scrub brush and sandpaper until he had sloughed off his outer layer of blue skin.

While Maggie dithered, unable for the first time in memory to cast a vote, Laird came down heavily on Kirk’s side: Blair should stay home from school until the tell-tale blue had faded away. As for Blair, his vote in favor of skipping school was a foregone conclusion, especially after Kirk promised (after an outburst of petulance) to contact his sister’s teachers to learn if there were any undone tests or assignments that might affect Blair’s promotion to the sixth grade.

Miss Umbridge refused to cooperate — to no one’s surprise.

The first Monday after the bluing of Blair, Cody talked obsessively about the winsome Na’vi from Rose Villa at every opportunity — not only to Kirk, but also to their best female friend since kindergarten, Nicole Petrović. At the time, a thirteen-year-old tomboy who preferred “hanging out with the guys” to dating them, by the time of her seventeenth birthday she had transformed herself into the easiest lay at Lewis A. Clark.

During a frank session with Felix La Rond, Nicole attributed her promiscuity to her erstwhile friendships with Kirk and Cody: “I learned from my first ‘boyfriends’ the bitter truth about nice boys, and ever since then I’ve been damn quick to verify the heterosexuality of dudes in the best way that I know — by having them bust a nut inside my pussy.”

However, her disillusionment with “nice boys” still lay in the future as she listened to Cody talk like a love-sick fool about a girl from out-of-state whom he was likely never to meet. “I guess,” she whispered to Kirk, “this crush goes to show how young Cody still is — he’s like those twelve-year-olds who post on the blogs that they know and love Zac Ephron or David Archuletta better than anyone else on the planet. Like those girls, Cody prefers to love from afar.”

“Well, it’s time he grew up,” Kirk replied. “It’s revolting the way Cody gushes over that blueberry tart. He knows nothing, absolutely nada, about her; she could be Washington State’s most notorious dyke for all Cody knows. If our friend doesn’t shape up soon — and quick — it may be necessary to learn him the facts of life.”

It wasn’t only Cody’s unfathomable crush on Blair that was pushing Kirk’s buttons. It was also the gossip at school about Blair’s sudden illness. One nosey parker had used a pilfered copy of the Breakers’ team roster to identify the blue devil on the Breakers as “Blair Fines”, a name suspiciously similar to that of the malingering boy. The kid raised the possibility that Blair might be sufficiently sissy, strange and spiteful to play in drag in a girls’ league in order to avenge himself on Smith Lake, either the community or its team, for some imagined slight.

Stephanie Willett wondered if the blue dye used by the Breakers’ avatar was more colorfast than anticipated. “Maybe,” she hazarded, “Blair is hiding out at home until his blue badge of cowardice has faded sufficiently for him to show his face around this school again.”

Others speculated whether Blair might actually be a girl, who had been masquerading as a boy at Lewis A. Clark in order to escape her “juvie” criminal record in the neighboring State. The most frequently-expressed opinion, however, was that Blair, a hopeless sissy as a boy, had finally crossed over the gender gap to be reborn as a girl. The expected him soon to appear in their midst, scrubbed pink and wearing pink.

Kirk heard all the gossip and innuendo, even though it seemed like most of his schoolmates were falling silent, shuffling their feet in embarrassment, whenever he passed by. He felt it was only a matter of time before a delegation of students or teachers showed up at his home to confirm or squelch the rumors raging ‘round the school. Desperate, feeling trapped, he felt like he was drowning and that his best friend Cody was helping to pull him under.

“It can’t continue like this,” Kirk told Nicole; “there is no place in this school for both me and Blair.” One of us has to go.”

“Then it should be Blair,” Nicole said. “The little wuss has no right to humiliate you in front of your friends. Even I’m beginning to wonder if Blair is crazy enough to join a girls’ soccer team. But why would he? From what I have seen he’d rather hang out in a boys’ locker room as team manager, smelling their jockstraps and picking up soap dropped in the showers.”

“Nicole, that’s no way to talk to me about my own brother. Blair may be strange but I can prove to you that he’s not hot for other boys, not like they say. Jeez, he even has an older girlfriend he regularly forks.” There was no need, Kirk felt, to tell Nicole that Blair and his girlfriend had a lesbian relationship. That would definitely be too much information.

Nicole was flabbergasted: “Blair a precocious Bluebeard? Will wonders never cease? Then all the rumors about Blair are wrong! But what can you do to stifle them? They’re ruining your reputation as much as his.”

Kirk thought a long while. He then said:

Everyone is guessing whether Blair is actually sick or just hiding out. I want you and Cody to come to my house today after school to investigate and report back to the staff and students of our school on Blair’s true condition. I really, truly believe that my future at Lewis A. Clark depends on you being an honest reporter, and Cody being one too. If you see Cody first, be sure to tell him we’re meeting at my place after school, and be sure to spread the word that the two of you are going to Blair’s house to settle once and for all whether or not my brother has been a “blue meanie” in need of some ‘transformation magic”, as The Beatles put it. Oh, one last thing — tell Prince Charming to bring the lost sneaker ‘cause while we’re checking out Blair, I’ll tell Cody where to find the girl whom the shoe fits.

Nicole, delighted at the prospect of having exclusive information, if even for a short time, that her classmates were desperate to have, agreed to the plan with alacrity. She went looking for Cody to ensure that he’d be her back-up witness on the morning after.

As for Kirk, he had no illusions about what he was doing — a visit by Cody and Nicole would make it impossible for Blair to return to Lewis A. Clark. “I’m finally calling Blair’s bluff,” Kirk said to himself —

He’s been play-acting at being a girl from the start and has no intention of becoming one for good. If I’m right, once his girly avatar becomes common knowledge, he’ll call off this crossdressing charade and agree to be sent away to military school to shape up as a male. He’ll never be able to come back to Lewis A. Clark. If I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am, then Blair will be begging for an immediate sex operation so that she’ll be able to hang out in the showers of the Punani Academy where, being a muff eater, she’ll want to watch the action. She may even be able to show her face around Bybee Lake if her looks change enough. Heck, once that slut Blair has a snatch, even Cody may decide to give her a sympathy fuck, which won’t be his reaction this afternoon when he learns that his mysterious piece of Blue Velvet is my brother. I can’t wait to see Cody’s face!

Later that day when Kirk arrived at their usual rendezvous, he found Cody, sneaker in hand, Nicole, and Emma, a girl whose name he knew but had never met. Sheepishly, Nicole explained that her Spanish class, believing that she was too close to Blair’s family to be an entirely trustworthy witness, had deputed Emma to find out what the “weirdo was up to.”

“How did your Spanish class know you were going to see Blair?” Kirk asked incredulously.

“Well, I guess I sort of was bragging.”

“How typical of a girl!” Cody snorted. “Want to spread a rumor at lightning speed? Tell a girl it’s a secret for her to keep.”

Neither girl looked pleased. Cody was such a sexist! As for Kirk, while he would have preferred to limit the expedition to his two friends, he considered Emma’s involvement a “good omen” since it meant that “someone up there” wanted to expose Blair’s gender games to a maximum of publicity, thereby forcing kid “brother” either to admit that he’d been hiding his true gender orientation — his homosexuality — behind a girl’s skirts or else to live openly as a girl full-time by going away to a boarding school.

Kirk couldn’t explain why it was so important to him that this choice be imposed on Blair. Possibly it was simply a case of his being envious of the attention and affection that Maggie was lavishing on her newfound “daughter”. Yet Kirk didn’t think he was seeing red because his blue-skinned sibling was making him green with envy. Although it was hard to express, what most infuriated Kirk were Blair’s facile assumptions, first, that it was easy for a male to fake being a female; and second, that he, Blair, a snot-nosed kid living in a one-woman household had the slightest notion of the interior life of a girl his age or any age. Blair was all histrionics, a poor player that struts and frets his hour as a female upon the stage, and then, after being outed, is heard no more. The story of his feminization is a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Kirk believed that he knew a million times better than Blair what it was to think like a real woman, rather than to make dumb show of being one.

(Okay, okay, I admit that there’s no way that Kirk, a poor scholar at best, came up with that “sound and fury” line on his own. Yes, I plagiarized it from somewhere else — it’s probably from a flick about Newt Rockne entitled “Where’s the Rest of Me?” in which President Reagan was gippered out of all of his legs — but dear reader, it’s important to remind you through my film-script references that you are reading, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, a work of art. And I also need to distract you from Kirk’s last thoughts, as will surely be the case if the words “work of art” get you LOLling about. I don’t want too many of you, having decoded my signals, to stop fouling off my curve balls and knock one out of the park. Do you like the baseball simile? I’m proud of it myself, since it binds together a paragraph that started with a reference to Newt “The Babe” Rockne, the sexually-ambiguous dude — just look at his nickname, for land’s sakes! — who once predicted where his homerun would land by using a hot dog to point to a target painted on a bald head in the grandstand. At least, that’s the way I remember it.)

To get back to Kirk and the three-person commission of inquiry, it was with more anticipation than foreboding that they approached Blair’s lair. As it turned out, Kirk wouldn’t have to penetrate Blair’s inner sanctum (aka his bedroom) because Blair had finally emerged to eat. He had been too depressed to eat more than a dry piece of toast at breakfast and had foregone lunch entirely. However, Maggie had finally convinced Blair to put down his scrubbing brush and sandpaper long enough to put on some makeup, do his hair, and put on a Sunday dress to remind himself that blue could be beautiful.

Maggie, of course, expected her daughter to use her fashion sense to offset or compliment her basic blue. Instead, Blair endeavored to make himself as blue as possible — with dark blue eye shade, mascara and face powder, with a blue velvet hair band, blue “sapphire” earrings, pendant and bracelet, blue ballet slippers and a blue dress. Blair thought the ensemble vividly expressed his current emotions.

Although Maggie mildly chided her daughter for “wallowing like a sow in her own misery”, she felt sorry for a child so depressed that she ate only the blue M&M candies from the bowl that she had put on the kitchen table to boost Blair’s morale with a sugar high. However, exhausted by her efforts to cleanse Blair in spirit and in body, Maggie soon headed up to her bedroom for a “brief nap”. She fell into a deep sleep, dreaming of Blair’s wedding day and gown. When both turned blue, she woke with a start.

Meanwhile, Kirk and the detectives discovered Blair, still in the kitchen, still playing with his bonbons, still wearing a blue dress, and still looking as glum as the bluebird of happiness after she’d discovered a cuckoo in her nest. Cody was first to react: “It’s incredible. My Na’vi Cinderella is right here in Kirk’s house! Kirk, how did you know where to find her? How did you persuade her to hang out here?”

Then, before Kirk could reply, Cody went down on one knee to proffer the lost sneaker to Blair: “My fairytale princess, may I be thy knight and servant? Wouldst thou permit me to place this, thine slipper, upon thine foot?”

“I’m not a fairy!” Blair objected. “Have you ever seen a blue fairy?”

While everyone scratched their head in contemplation of the great unknown — What color was Tinker Belle, for example? — Cody, with some fumbling with the laces, replaced one of Blair’s ballet slippers with the lost soccer sneaker. “Let there be a blaring of heralds’ trumpets,” Cody said with a dramatic flourish, “for I, Prince Charming, have found the most beautiful girl in all Christendom even if she be but a lowly guest in Kirk’s humble abode!”

“What a doofus you are, Cody,” said Nicole. “You must be joshing us. Surely you recognize that your mystery girl is Kirk’s little brother? Come on, Blair; introduce yourself to us before Cody makes a perfect ass of himself by trying to kiss you.”

While Blair would have welcomed a big wet kiss from Cody, a handsome dude to whom he now owed a favor, Kirk’s presence made pretense pointless. As he didn’t want to get off on the wrong footing with a boy who obviously liked the way he looked, blue hue and all, Blair concluded that his name must come before the kiss. “Of course, I’m Blair. Who else would be living here?”

Emma threw some hardball questions, for which she figured she already knew the answers: “If you’re Blair, then you’re a boy. So why are you dressed up that way? And were you the one who played at soccer for the Breakers, a girls’ soccer team?”

Trapped at home with no place to run, Blair had no alternative to the Big Lie. He had to put a reverse spin on his crossdressing and double-crossing that would make him more hero than heel in the eyes of his fellow students after his treacherous brother and his three spies had spread their version of the truth:

Yes, I played for the Breakers, but only so I could sabotage them. I was always looking out for the interests of us Oregonians. If you saw the game, then you know I wasn’t playing like I wanted the Breakers to win. The red card incident wasn’t my fault. Some big ox deliberately pushed me into the goalkeeper in order to get both of us out of the game. She succeeded: that’s why my game plan failed; but I should be given a medal for dressing up like a girl (which I find very distasteful) in an attempt to help a local team conquer the Valley.

Nicole, smiling despite herself at the sheer audacity of the lie, challenged: “Oh yeah, and why are you wearing that blue dress right now? I don’t see a soccer game anywhere.”

Blair hastily replied:

That’s where you’re wrong, though I can see where you might jump to the wrong conclusion. Didn’t you know that the Breakers are celebrating their victory with a banquet tonight? So I had to dress one last time like a girl so they’d never suspect that I was always trying to trip them up. If they knew the truth, they might retaliate against my family. Their coach has mob connections, don’t you know? He’s coming for me …

“Cut the crap, Blair,” Kirk butted in. “You’ve got to stop lying to people — and to yourself. Listen, everyone, Blair has told his family that he is a genuine transsexual who’s wanted to be a girl since he became old enough to play with dollies. Admit it, Blair, you’ve not worn a stitch of boys’ clothing in several months; you’re taking hormones to give yourself female curves and breasts; and you’re scheduled to have your willy chopped off, ‘cause it’s the only thing male about you.”

Well, the teens became even more slack-jawed than usual. They had never met a genuine transsexual before. Nervously, they wondered whether the disease might be contagious. Emma spoke first:

You’ve got our sympathy, Blair. You’re pretty for a boy. So maybe you can pull it off. But you’ll never be able to have a baby, and that’s tragic. And obviously you won’t be able to return to Lewis A. Clark because now that we know there’s no way we can permit you to embarrass the guys who aren’t in the know, or confuse girls into thinking they’re lesbians. No, we can’t have that.

“Emma, you’re right,” said Nicole. “Look at how Blair tricked Cody into thinking that she was his Cinderella. Thanks to Blair, Cody has made a fool of himself at school. We can’t let that happen to any other guys. Blair, you’ve got to stay away from Lewis A. Clark. Does everyone agree? Do you, Kirk?”

Kirk replied hastily and brutally:

You’re bloody right, I do agree. Blair is already scheduled to attend a girls’ school in September; he should start tomorrow instead, so that you three can immediately spread the word that I am not Blair, am nothing like Blair, that in fact Blair’s only my half-sister, and that I would never mock the female sex by flitting around like Peter Pan in a skirt. How about you, Cody? We can help restore your reputation at school by spreading the word that it was you, outraged at being tricked by a tranny, who told Blair never to disgrace the halls of Lewis A. Clark again.

All eyes, including Blair’s (now drenched in blue tears), turned to Cody. Until now, the other teens had been so intent on making self-serving speeches that they hadn’t noticed that Cody not only hadn’t said a word since he’d declared Blair “the most beautiful girl in Christendom”, but that he’d never once taken his own eyes off Blair’s baby blues. So intently had Cody been staring that Blair had twice looked away in embarrassment. Blair didn’t have enough experience to know whether it was hate or love that burned intensely in Cody’s eyes.

Cody spoke slowly, his eyes never wavering from gazing at Blair:

Why are you all being so cruel? As soon as Blair’s skin and hair return to their normal color, what’s wrong with Blair’s returning to school dressed whatever way he wants? Nobody need ever know that he helped the Breakers win. What’s so important about a soccer game, anyhow? If there is a dress code, nobody knows it. So why can’t a boy wear a dress? I’ll wear a kilt if it makes life easier for Blair at school. And I don’t see why he should have to go away to school even if he is, as Kirk says, a transsexual. As good Christians or — he doffed a figurative hat to Nicole — or true humanists, we should help Blair through what’s bound to be a painful and emotional transition. Blair, you have an obligation to attend Lewis A. Clark as a female so that you can help us all to become more loving, more tolerant human beings.

“Well, if that isn’t the biggest, smelliest load of horse dung that I’ve ever come across,” replied Emma. “If Blair tries to attend our school as a female, someone will cut off his testicles for him before the day is over. Cody, I don’t know what you’re smoking, but I for one believe that the Christian thing to do is to write postcards to Blair at her new school far from here where she can make a new beginning.”

Kirk, Nicole and Blair concurred: It was inconceivable that Blair could attend Lewis A. Clark, as either boy or girl, now that his crossdressing was becoming a public knowledge. Kirk, who had finally noticed how much Cody was still staring at Blair, now said to his friend:

Hey dude, I think you’re still having trouble seeing Blair for what he is — a mixed-up boy. He’s not Cinderella and that was a boy’s sneaker and not a glass slipper that you put on his foot. You’re still looking at Blair as though he’s a real girl. What will it take for you to snap out of the trance you fell into at the game? Do you have to see his nuts before you stop thinking, no matter what anyone says, that Blair is actually a beautiful girl? If that’s what it takes, I’ll put down his panties here and now.

Blair ran in panic from the room, with Cody close behind him. Cody was calling out — “Blair, come back. You don’t have to run away. I’d never let Kirk do that to you.” Cody soon came back alone, saying that Blair had barricaded himself in the upstairs bathroom.

“You won’t see Blair for several hours,” Kirk told them. “He’ll be frantically trying to scrape off the tell-tale blue that proves that he’s a double-crossing crossdresser. Hey, I’ve got to get some fresh air. How about we go to Burger Queen for shakes?”

The girls agreed, but Cody said he had to split because he’d promised his folks to mow the lawn on the first day it didn’t rain. Kirk didn’t quite buy Cody’s excuse (for one thing, it had rained heavily all morning); but he figured that Cody was sulking over their treatment of Blair. At least that’s what Kirk suspected when Cody said, as they parted company, “You shouldn’t treat a stray dog that way, never mind your own brother.”

Kirk’s flip reply didn’t help mend the tear in their friendship: “One would think you still had the hots for Blair, the little prick, ball sack and all, but I promise you that once he’s out of sight, she’ll be out of your mind. Or vicey-versa.”

Cody shook his head, walked away, and then, after Kirk and the girls had vanished from view, he doubled back to Blair’s house where he rang the doorbell. Because Blair didn’t budge from the bathroom, Cody prowled the exterior of the house to see if he could catch a glimpse of the boy in the blue dress. Instead, he found that the sliding door between the kitchen and an outdoor patio had been left open. The two-inch gap was hard to miss. Without even weighing his options, Cody pushed open the door to enter the Finlayson home. He endeavored to make as much noise as possible, even calling out to Blair and Kirk, so that no one would think him a sneak thief, and little boy blue would not take fright.

He found Blair, not in the bathroom furiously scrubbing as Kirk had predicted, but in his bedroom lying on his bed, face in the pillow, sobbing. Cody called out quietly, “Blair, it’s Cody. I’m here as a friend.”

Blair gave a start, raised his head, looked deep into Cody’s eyes, and said, “I know you’re my friend. I see it in your eyes.”

“Blair, why is your brother so awful to you? I had no idea that Kirk intended to expose and mock you as a crossdresser. Gosh, I like the way you’re dressed. You make a really cute girl. I promise I’m not going to tell anyone about your turning blue.”

“Are you sure? You don’t think I look stupid?”

“Heck no! You look really sexy in blue. I know you’re a boy but I still think you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. But I need to know: Why did Kirk nark on you today? Does he hate you that much?”

“Kirk’s my brother. I love him and he loves me. But he’s real conflicted about my dressing like a girl. Sometimes he says it’s better to be a crossdresser than a homo, but other times he seems to take it as a personal affront that Maggie picked me to be her daughter.”

“Do you really want to be Maggie’s daughter?”

“Sure, why not? It’s a good deal. But I do wish Kirk would lighten up. Cody — do you know how sexy a name you’ve got? — I could make real trouble for Kirk if I told our parents everything I know about him. But he’s got a lot of pain. I don’t want to hurt him; so I bite my tongue whenever I get angry.”

“Blair, you really are a sweet kid. Can I come over and sit beside you on the bed?”

Blair’s face brightened.

“Before I come over there, Blair, I’ve got to be honest about my intentions. I intend to kiss you because I’ve been in love with you since I saw you play soccer for the Breakers. You’re my Cinderella. I even brought back your shoe.”

“I know. It felt good when you put it on me. But you understand now that you fell in love with someone you thought was a girl. And I’m not really a girl — not down where it counts. Now you know the truth. You wouldn’t want to kiss me if you saw me naked.”

“If I saw you naked, Blair, I’d kiss every inch of you. You being a boy makes me love you even more. I love the way you look right now. Well, maybe you could look a little less blue. You look really cute whether you’re wearing a dress or soccer shorts. You’re perfect. You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever met, but I also really dig the fact that you’re a boy. It’s a real turn-on that you’re both a girl and a boy, two for the price of one.”

Blair, now sitting up on the bed, held out his arms: “If you still want to, you can kiss me. I’ve always wanted to be kissed by a boy.”

“Me too.”

That day, with Maggie tossing and turning in the next bedroom, Blair and Cody didn’t go beyond French kissing, at which Cody, despite his three-year age advantage, was as callow and inept as Blair was proficient. It didn’t take long for both kids to know that one of them was still a virgin. Blair shyly confirmed that he’d “done it” with a girl, but reassured Cody that he had never been with a boy. So Cody could still be the first.

Eight days later they had the Finlayson house to themselves, and by the end of a long afternoon of wild passion there was only one thing that Blair hadn’t yet done to either a boy or girl. He was a natural, lifelong bottom. So Cody was always on top of their relationship.

Blair found Cody an easygoing lover and best male friend. Outside the bedroom it didn’t seem to matter to Cody what gender Blair chose to be (although Cody advised Blair to stick to a single one at school). Inside the bedroom, Cody wanted Blair to be as convincing a female as possible, without however, any surgical or hormonal enhancement. Cody wanted “his girl” to remain a boy physically.

Their “affair” could not long be hidden from Big Al, who squeezed a confession out of Blair by sitting on his chest until he begged for breath. She appeared to take the news calmly: “What we’ve got is special, Blair honey; it’s not something that you can do with a boy. No one can make love to a girl like another one can. I know every place on your body to make you tingle.”

Big Al even agreed to hang out with Cody. So all seemed right in Blair’s romantic life. He was having his cake and sausage too. Yet there were problems brewing: Big Al had no intention of devoting “the best years” of her life to loving Blair, only to discover one day that he’d rather be a gay male. Blair’s affair with Cody was warning enough that Blair might not be a born lesbian. As all is fair in love and … sex, Big Al repeatedly badgered Maggie to accelerate Blair’s feminization. As Big Al reminded Maggie,

If you want Blair always to be your daughter, then you’ve got to get Cody out of her life. You know the sorts of disgusting things that Cody does to Blair. They’re going to pollute your daughter’s mind along with her body and convince her that she is — despite her innate femininity — a gay male. We’ve got to fight that delusion. You’ve got to make Blair’s body so fundamentally female that Cody will lose interest in it. Take it from me, Ms. Maguire, that Blair’s boobs have stopped growing. They’re nowhere near big enough to turn off a queer male like Cody. So you’ve got to find a doctor to feminize Blair’s body as quickly as medically feasible. Blair will never again be tempted by gay males once she’s got a vagina.

Blair’s tender age (as well as ethics and the law) still made Maggie hesitate until Kirk came to her one day demanding that she tell Cody and Blair to stop kissing and groping each other when he was around: “You told me that Blair would stop acting gay if we encouraged him to act and dress like a girl. But he’s acting fruitier than ever. It’s like he’s trying to gross me out. And besides, Blair has no right to try to turn my best friend into a homo by confusing Cody about the sex of the kid he’s kissing.”

“My dear, I doubt that Cody is still confused about Blair’s sex if they’re groping each other. However, Alicia has also been complaining about their public displays, and I’ll definitely have a word with Blair.”

Kirk went away upset — his usual mood these days. Maggie understood that it was undoubtedly troubling to him that both Cody, his best male friend, and Alicia, the girl he seemed most to admire, were besotted with Blair. Blair’s easy charm, apparently alluring as much to lesbians as to gay males, was difficult for a plain-looking kid like Kirk not to envy — maybe even to hate.

It would take a lot of plastic surgery to make Kirk anybody’s heartthrob. The poor kid would have to settle one day for a wife who admired “his mind”. And more’s the pity — Blair was not only more physically attractive than Kirk, he was also more intelligent. The only thing that Kirk really seemed to have going for him was his firm sense of personal identity — he knew who he was, even if “who” was a very forgettable, very average boy with, alas, less than average looks.

No, that was too harsh an assessment. There was one realm where Kirk excelled. Maggie had never met a male of any age with comparable insight into the female mind. His deep, instinctual understanding of “what women want” could one day make Kirk a millionaire if he were to design or sell women’s wear.

Thoughts of Kirk did not occupy Maggie long. She couldn’t ignore Alicia’s warnings about Cody’s dangerous influence on Blair. If she didn’t act soon, the “pedophiles” would claim another victim in Blair; her hopes for a daughter would be smashed like a climber falling off the mons veneris, the mountain of love.

A mother on a mission, Maggie marched to her bedroom where she made a secret call to arrange an appointment for Blair in four weeks time (the first open date) with Doctor Benny Sentirsi, the specialist in “gender confirmation”, whose name she had received from Joy Torres, Angela’s mother.

Maggie was no longer going to act like Hamlet, forever dithering; now she was Julius Caesar, staking all on crossing the Rubicon. She was determined not to lose her daughter to a gay boy.

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. It’s a familiar theme in the TG literature, but this time with an unfamiliar twist. Thanks to Kirk, everyone at school now knows that Blair is a crossdressing, Na'vi turncoat. Does Blair have any future at Lewis A. Clark? Is s/he now trapped in skirts forever? Does it matter that Cody gets turned on by the sight of Blair in a dress?

Choices, Chapter 14 A Shakespearean choice

It took less than twenty-four hours for Blair’s crossdressing and bluing to become universally known at Lewis A. Clark Charter School. It took even less time for Blair to be expelled. Miss Lucretia Umbridge made certain of that. As soon as the rumor began circulating, she barged unbidden into the office of Principal Nea Von Aft to announce dramatically that a crossdressing Smurf was bringing their school into disrepute and should, consequently, be expelled.

Von Aft, looking up from her crossword puzzle, asked, “Does the Smurfette have a name?”

“Who else but Blair Finlayson? Surely Felix consulted you about the brat? Didn’t Felix tell you that Blair has been dressing like a girl for months?”

“Why no. Felix never mentioned it to me. Are you saying that the younger Finlayson boy has been openly crossdressing for months, and none of the parents have objected? Oh my, how society’s values have changed!”

“You misunderstand — I was the only one, outside of his immediate family I guess, who knew that Blair Finlayson was wearing girls’ clothes to school because the boy strove to keep his vice hidden by choosing unisex designs that either sex could wear.”

Principal Von Aft, now pretending to read her mail, replied:

I don’t see the problem if the boy favors a unisex look. Are you saying that he’s an emo or a goth? My dear Miss Umbridge, if we were to expel every boy who wears ear studs or makeup, even black lipstick, as well as a pink tee shirt and tight-fitting jeans, we wouldn’t have enough pupils to qualify for State funding. I fear that we all must accommodate ourselves to modernity, Miss Umbridge, tawdry and dispiriting as it may be. The unisex look is here to stay, for boys as well as girls. Anyway, didn’t you just tell me that no one is complaining? I can advise you from my long experience in school administration that inaction is usually the best course of action. Now, is there anything else you want to talk about?

“Well, I’m complaining for one, and there will be many others before the week is out, my dear Principal, because Blair isn’t an emo or a goth; he’s a blue-skinned transsexual, a true freak of nature. As such, he-she will draw the media to this school like flies to sh … er, to excrement, and parents will, in consequence, withdraw their little darlings en masse to shield them from the great hullabaloo. You’ll lose your school.”

The teacher had finally grabbed the principal’s attention. Von Aft put down her mail, her letter-opener making circles in the air, to say:

A transsexual, you say? And blue-skinned, like a Smurf? But surely the color’s not permanent? I’ve heard of blue bloods, but never of blue-skinned people outside of the movies and children’s cartoons. The child Blair must have deliberately dyed its skin in some way. I do hope it wasn’t trying to look African-American, for that would be serious indeed. We could be accused of harboring a racist student. I am sure that the child’s skin color will soon revert to normal. Or do you fear that Blair is for some reason trying to keep its skin as blue as possible?

“Damn the blue skin,” ejaculated Miss Umbridge:

The color of Blair’s skin isn’t the real issue. It’s his gender: Now that the entire school knows that Blair is a transgender, he won’t be coming to school in unisex clothes anymore. Where would be the fun in that? Blair will have nothing to lose, and something to gain, by making himself look as feminine as possible. He’ll be wearing a halter top and a skirt or hot pants to school and insisting on using the girls’ toilets and showers. Is that alright with you? Because it won’t be alright with most of our parents.

Principal von Aft virtually leapt out of her seat so that her twitching feet could have room to roam. Back and forth she paced across her office, with each pass forcing Miss Umbridge ever closer to the back wall, until the teacher was pressed against it. As she paced, the principal kept muttering to herself about her “pension,” her “political prospects” and the “union election”. Finally she resolved to show some resolve: “I have decided that Blair can neither stay at this school nor can he be formally asked to leave.”

“Huh? What sort of decision is that?” Miss Umbridge asked.

Nea von Aft replied:

A devious one, as you’d expect by now of someone qualified to manage a charter school. As we cannot abide the unfavorable publicity of making the decision for Blair, we must let the child — or more properly, its parents — make the decision and I am sure that they will, with suitable guidance, opt to remove it from Lewis A. Clark forthwith. Will you be available to meet with the blue child, its parents and the school psychologist an hour after classes have ended today? There is no reason to let this matter fester another day.

As it happened, everyone was available for the fateful meeting in the school’s office. All but Felix La Rond (who was closely examining the organic apple that he had brought for wormholes) were staring at Blair, the “Smurfette,” who had, as Miss Umbridge had predicted, decided to abandon all pretense of dressing like a boy. Blair, deciding that pink best complimented his blue skin, had opted for pink jewelry, headband, sweater, bobby socks, Mary Jane shoes and a pink ruffle miniskirt (under which occasionally flashed his pink cotton panties).

Looking at him, Miss von Aft decided that she couldn’t, and Miss Umbridge, that she wouldn’t, permit Blair to attend school looking like a, like a … cherry tart.

At the principal’s request, Miss Umbridge started the meeting by expressing her “concern” for Blair’s safety, given the tone of the remarks she had heard in the classroom and schoolyard. “It’s abundantly clear,” she ‘reported’, that it will be unsafe for Blair to use either the boys’ or the girls’ washrooms. I can’t honestly say in which he would be less likely to have his head pushed down a toilet.” She turned to Blair, “Do you understand, dear child? They may drown you alive!”

Laird asked whether it would be possible, in that case, to allow Blair to use a washroom normally off-limits to the students — “the toilet adjoining the teacher’s lounge, for example. I’m sure the teachers would be adult about sharing it.”

“I fear not,” Principal von Aft quickly replied. “Some of the teachers are quite prickly about preserving their privileges — one of which is having a temporary respite from constant contact with their students — and I am sure there will be a union grievance if we were to impose Blair on their private space. No, from a labor-management and riot-control perspective, it’s simply impossible to find a washroom for Blair to use at the school. But surely the child could wait until it got home from school?”

Laird didn’t think that sounded like “reasonable accommodation”. He also questioned whether the school was willing to protect Blair if push came to shove.

“This school has a zero tolerance policy with respect to violence,” replied Principal von Aft with considerable edge to her voice. “I can assure you that when Blair is seriously hurt by another student, that the latter will be severely punished.”

“Yes, I’d insist on a week of after-school detentions,” interjected Miss Umbridge.

“A week’s detention for gaining a reputation as the macho male who beat up the sissy? That’s hardly a credible deterrent, now is it?” Laird spluttered.

“We think it is,” replied the principal huffily. “At this time of year it’s still quite a punishment to lose an hour of sunshine. In any case, I would be loath to impose an excessive punishment on a child who will, as you say, become the school’s paladin for slaying the blue-skinned monster for them.”

“Monster? How dare you call my child a monster?” replied Laird, his voice nearing a shout.

“Please keep your voice down, Mr. Finlayson. You don’t want to air your dirty laundry in public,” said Principal von Aft, who continued:

I’m not suggesting that Blair actually is a monster; all I’m saying is that many of the students, probably a majority, see him as one. We must deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. In short, while I and the teaching staff will do our utmost to protect Blair from physical harm, we will be constrained by the necessity of not making martyrs out of the inevitable army of would-be bullies, for if that happens, we may lose control of the school. Then education would cease as teachers barricaded themselves in their lunchroom. The forces of chaos and disorder would claim another victory. Blair would surely suffer the most if the bullies replaced the teachers at the front of his classes. You’ve seen The Lord of the Flies — think of poor Piggy’s fate, and he didn’t even crossdress!”

Blair spoke up: “Dad, mom, I’m no longer safe here! I’ve gotta change schools!”

“Blair, your principal is deliberately serving up an apocalyptic scenario,” replied Laird, taking his daughter’s hand, “I’m surprised that she hasn’t added a meteor and tidal wave to her lurid tale. Maggie, you’ve been awful silent, what do you think of all this malarkey? Don’t you agree that Lewis A. Clark can protect Blair without having to give up its educational mission? All it needs is the will to do it.”

“Laird, I fear I must concur with Blair and Principal von Aft. Realistically, there is no way that Blair can attend this school as a girl. At least not openly. We’ve always known that our daughter would have to change schools in the fall. That’s why we’ve enrolled her in the Yoni Punani Academy. So all we’re really talking about is the last month of this school year. Of that there are probably only two weeks that really matter.”

“Madam, I do admire your perspective and perceptiveness,” cooed Principal von Aft:

As you say, the last week or so of school is primarily given to class trips and special speakers; we might even ask you to speak to his class about tolerance toward the disabled, including transgendered children like Blair. If Blair were definitely gone from the school, I am sure that the other children would give his mother a fair hearing, if only out of sympathy and guilt. As for the last two weeks of book-learning and testing, why couldn’t you home school Blair? You teachers could provide Ms. Maguire with the books and teaching tools that she’d need, isn’t that so, Miss Umbridge?

Miss Umbridge sullenly grunted a yes. Blair piped in that he thought home schooling a good idea. “At least that way I wouldn’t be beat up; and Cody and Alicia could still come by to see me.”

Everything seemed to be settled until Felix La Rond unexpectedly spoke up. Either he had run out of food or, more likely, he felt that Blair was being railroaded by the three women, none of whom seemed to question whether a change of gender was in the boy’s best interest: “While I take it, ladies, that the three of you believe that Blair both wants to be a girl and would be better off becoming one, have you given any thought to the psychological implications of what you are doing today? They are weighty, weighty indeed.”

Laird took the bait: “What do you mean by ‘weighty’? Are you suggesting that we’re about to damage Blair in some way?”

Felix shrugged. While he thought it imperative to remind the women who were playing with fire that there was a danger that someone, probably Blair, could get scorched, it was much too close to dinnertime for him to launch into a disquisition on the subject of gender dysphoria.

Besides, he wasn’t entirely sure of what he should say, given that he hadn’t concluded one way or another, despite weekly sessions with both Blair and Kirk, whether Blair was actually a transsexual. Until this farce of a meeting he was leaning towards the affirmative. It was Blair’s unisex approach to dressing for school that he’d found most persuasive: that is, it indicated a strong desire to live quietly as a female, rather than noisily and dramatically as a drag queen. For transsexuals, sexual identity was about bringing unity to soul and body, not about bringing disunity to a school classroom. And so, La Rond’s professional opinion had been coming down on the side of recognizing Blair as a genuine transsexual, whose life would be easier at another school, one lacking the ghosts of boyhood past. But the clownish pink outfit, on top of the blue skin and hair, made the psychologist reassess his diagnosis. Was it possible, after all, that Blair was no more than a ham actor?

Suddenly seized by doubts, all that Felix La Rond could do was to evade: “What do I mean by weighty? I mean exactly what the word says. Our decision today is a weighty one, not to be made lightly. And that is my professional opinion.”

His hands rummaging through his pockets all the while, he finished his enigmatic remarks by popping two breath mints from his left jacket pocket into his cavernous mouth. They’d have to suffice until everyone has stopped nattering about Blair. Felix thought, “The kid can take care of himself and will be come out on top, despite the villainy and folly all around her.” Felix made a mental note to salute Blair with a pint of draft beer.

As the psychologist’s mind turned to his favorite brews, the meeting gradually ran down, as Maggie promised to home school Blair for a month, a pledge she kept, and the principal and teacher pledged to provide the necessary school supplies, a promise they had no intention of keeping. “There is no point to spending the money,” Principal von Aft explained to Miss Umbridge when they were alone, “because there is no way that Blair is going to fail any of his final tests, right?”

Miss Umbridge understood: The last thing the school wanted was for Blair to have to repeat his year, for that would give “it” or its parents, an excuse for its return to Lewis A. Clark. For the first time in her life, Miss Umbridge would be an easy “A” — or A+, whatever it’d take to get the transvestite Smurf out of her life. Blair’s other teachers would fall into line — of that Umbridge was sure. Besides, she knew that Principal von Aft would leave nothing to chance. Von Aft would even find a way to have Blair “appear” to attend the last four weeks of school so as to get reimbursed by the government.

And so it was that Blair left Lewis A. Clark Charter School for the last time, wiser and bluer — and definitely more feminine — than when he entered its hollowed [sic] precincts.

Blair had but one regret — that Miss Umbridge had outlasted him at Lewis A. Clark. He had wanted to dance wildly — like a young savage, she’d say — at her “early retirement” party. As it turned out, she left the school one week after Blair, without a party, without a formal retirement. In fact, she left the school in even greater disgrace than Blair. He at least stayed out of jail.

Ironically, it was her lifetime practice of cultivating “teacher’s pets” that proved her undoing. After Blair fell out of her favor, Miss Umbridge had switched her attention to Alex Shirazi, the thirteen-year-old student with the tight-fitting pants whose crotch she had once accused Blair of coveting. Actually, she had been the one doing the leering; and, as Blair’s continued presence in her classroom challenged her need for control, she increasingly fantasized about having her way with Alex. Maddened by Blair, she became mad for Alex.

And so, on the pretense of helping him with homework, she invited Alex to her house, got him blind drunk, and tried to have sex with him. He awoke from his stupor to find his teacher, stark naked, writhing about drunkenly on top of him, trying evidently to get his insensate body “to perform” for her.

Alex, full of rum and dread, yet void of lust and passion, responded to the outrage by vomiting in his teacher’s face. As she recoiled in horror, Alex rolled off the living room sofa, retrieved his jeans and briefs from the rug, and then, leaving his sneakers and socks behind, ran half-naked from the house. Barefoot and disheveled, his cheeks marred with cheap lipstick, Alex held nothing back (other than his homosexuality) from his parents when they chanced upon him as he was sneaking home via the garage door.

As she watched his bare posterior fade into the twilight, the truth dawned on Miss Umbridge: Not only was Alex gay, he was downright gynophobic. In a secret deposition (secret, that is, from his parents), Alex later testified that he found female nudity nauseating as a result of several unfortunate experiences: first, there had been the Swedish au pair, who after molesting him in kindergarten had betrayed his puppy love by running off with Travis, his underage cousin; second, he had been publicly humiliated in the third grade when it became general knowledge that he was still breast-feeding; third, his grandmother imposed petticoat punishment on him for even the most trivial offense (like not putting down the toilet seat); fourth, his favorite aunt paid him to dress up like a girl whenever he visited her; fifth, his father, anxious to ensure that his son’s first sexual experience was with a female (he didn’t know about the au pair) engaged for Alex a cut-rate hooker, who turned out to be a dominatrix; sixth, his two older sisters regularly “pantsed him” in order to see, measure and mock his weenie; seventh, his mother made him wear his younger sister’s castoff clothes; and eighth, and perhaps the best explanation for his condition, he had at an impressionable age seen a video of Britney Spears in which she wasn’t, gasp, wearing any panties. The sight of her hairy vagina (he swore it had teeth) so traumatized Alex that he swore off females for life. And yet, like Miss Umbridge, they often found him sexy cute and they would not leave him alone.

It’s also possible that Alex didn’t like girls because he was born gay. Maybe there’s no need for Britney Spears to feel guilty about her effect on lads like Alex; they were predestined to play for the other team.

Whether or not one blames Britney, one must fault Miss Umbridge for letting her stereotyping and biases interfere with her own “gaydar”. Normally she would have regarded Alex’s tight jeans, satin shirts and lavender sneakers as damning evidence of “queerness”, but she convinced herself that his clothes choices were normal for his “ethnic” group (like kimonos for the Japanese, sarongs for Tahitians or saggers for urban Swedes).

Alex was a Persian or Iranian (okay, okay, a Farsi-speaking American of Iranian descent), and most of the teacher’s knowledge about Persians she had absorbed from the movie 300, a film ostensibly about suicidal bodybuilders from Sparta, but which also conveyed thousands of memorable images of their Persian foes. The movie taught Miss Umbridge that Persian males have always looked effeminate, even when they were whomping Greek “macho, macho men”.

Yet none of the perfumed Persian males in earrings and makeup were gay in the fifth century BCE, and there still seemed to be a Persian immunity to homosexuality, at least in the mind of Miss Lucretia Umbridge, who had been profoundly impressed by the speech of Iran’s tiny president to a group of American college students, in which he had denied that there were any live homosexuals in his country. Now how many countries could claim that?

Accordingly, Lucretia Umbridge never gave a second thought to the possibility that Alex might be a gay Persian. Ignorantly she groped her way to disaster. Maybe, just maybe, Alex would have refrained from telling his parents about her “indiscretion”, and they in turn the police, had it been impossible to keep his sexual orientation a secret, but no one thought it “queer” that he had spurned the unsought advances of a middle-aged, drunken teacher. Alex’s father, a devout Muslim, was determined to have her punished for introducing his son to alcohol. He wanted to make certain that Miss Umbridge would never have a chance to serve hard drink to children again.

It was Kirk who had the pleasure of informing his family that the dreaded Witch of the Pacific Northwest had been led away in handcuffs from her classroom, her broomstick left behind. Months later, however, it was learned that Miss Umbridge eventually copped a plea about copping a feel, one that will keep her far away from children for the rest of her life, but will not prevent her subsequent appointment as the Education Czar in Washington.

Meanwhile, Blair had a new home room teacher in Maggie. Kirk envied his ‘sister’s’ life as a home schooler. With every lesson effectively a tutorial, Blair raced through his assigned course of studies, giving him ample time to hang with Big Al as well as with Jasmine and Megan, two girls whom Blair had met at a home school “social”.

Angela had also attended the social, and though she and Blair still didn’t click enough for Blair not to lose her phone number, Kirk, who had attended the event as a lark, struck up an immediate friendship with her. Blair suspected that Kirk was only pretending to like Angela, whom he considered a dweeb, in order to retaliate against Blair for moving in on Big Al and Cody. In any case, it was hard for Blair to take seriously Kirk’s claim “that no one has ever understood me like Angela”. And yet Kirk and Angela could talk for hours about nothing.

The best thing about home schooling is that Blair had lots of time for Cody. Sometimes the two of them hid out in Blair’s bedroom, but increasingly they worked together in the rec room on their lines. Cody had enrolled in the Wil Shakspear Actors’ Studio to spend more time with Blair, and the two of them were looking forward to appearing together in their first Shakespearean play, As You Like It.

Normally the school’s head, Wil Shakspear, would have deemed Blair much too young to attempt Shakespeare, but she judged Blair to be a born actress with a superior ability at memorizing a script. Besides, Wil liked the sexual tension that Blair and Cody unexpectedly (given Blair’s tender age) brought to their roles opposite each other as Rosalind and Orlando, the romantic leads.

This time Maggie left nothing to chance. Before permitting Blair to join the Actors’ Studio, she interrogated Wil Shakspear about the ratio of male-to-female students and likely roles for a girl as young and pretty as Blair. Their meeting began awkwardly as Maggie, noticing the abundance of masks, disks, totems and wooden chests decorating Ms. Shakspear’s office, asked whether they were “Indian in origin.” They must be, she thought, inasmuch as the studio head was an Umpqua Indian.

“Yes, they’re Indian,” was the laconic reply.

It was then that Maggie made the mistake of asking whether the “artifacts” all came from “the same Indian tribe”. Miss Shakspear, her face simultaneously showing amazement, disgust and wry amusement, explained that she had spent five years in Mumbai, India as artistic director of a small, English-speaking theatrical troupe, and had consequently fallen in love with “Indian art,” several examples of which she had brought home when her own “Passage to India” had ended. For example, the painted mask from Kerala on the wall behind her desk had been worn by Kathakkali dancers; and the elephant totem, or tiki, came from Bengal.

Poor Maggie, she had assumed that Native Americans were, like New Yorkers, only interested in their “own culture”. Wrong-footed from the start, Maggie never completely regained her balance. As a result, she didn’t dare grill the Studio director as thoroughly as she had planned. Thus, she never asked for a written guarantee that Blair would never be asked to pretend even for a single moment to be a male. She settled instead for the assurance that Blair would be playing Rosalind, the principal female role in the (junior) students’ production of As You Like It. Maggie thought it the perfect part for her daughter after Wil Shakspear told her that Harold Bloom, a highbrow critic, considered “Rosalind” to be one of Shakespeare’s “greatest and most fully realized female characters.” It would be a feminizing experience indeed for Blair to meld her essence with Rosalind’s.

Later, at the first and last public performance of the play, both Blair and Maggie wished that Maggie had found time to read a plot synopsis. That night Maggie expressed such a profound dislike for Shakespearean comedy that Blair, who had come to revere the Bard, never again felt that he owed his stepmother either unquestioning obedience or respect. In short, Maggie’s “philistine” outburst at the performance of As You Like It was the moment that Blair, already sexually active and increasingly cynical of outside authority, completed his coming of age. Afterwards, he had the temperament of a very short adult.

Naturally, Maggie had arranged for a large audience of Blair’s friends to bear witness to her folly: In addition to Laird and Kirk, the first two rows also contained Cody’s sister Shelby, Big Al, Angela, Jasmine, Megan, Linda and Taylor (the latter two from the Pavlova school) and, somewhat surprisingly, Alex Shirazi (who admired Blair for standing up to Miss Umbridge), as well as a driver or two for each kid. In the last row of the theater, a large tub of popcorn partially hiding his face, sat Felix La Rond, ever curious about the life and loves of Blair Finlayson.

The play, a pastoral romance, started badly: Blair (Rosalind) didn’t even appear until the second scene and Celia (played by a red-headed girl not half as beautiful as Blair) had the lion’s share of the girls’ lines in scene two. In scene three, the focus finally shifted to where it belonged — to Blair (Rosalind), who has been told by villainous Duke Frederick, her uncle, to “get out of Dodge” for the capital crime of being her “father’s daughter”: “Within these ten days if that thou be'st found so near our public court as twenty miles, thou diest for it.”

As death threats went, it was unusually polite, and no mafia don would have given her ten days to get lost; nevertheless, Blair (Rosalind) is quickly convinced by red-headed Celia to flee together to the Forest of Arden. Maggie’s spirit soared as she heard Blair (Rosalind) fret that she was too beautiful to venture safely into the forest where thieves did abide. That’s how Maggie thought of her daughter: as one so beautiful that she was safe only in the company of women. But Blair’s next lines caused Maggie’s spirits to crash earthward, down to the pit of hell itself:

‘Were it not better because I am more than common tall,’ said Rosalind, ‘that I did suit me all points like a man? A gallant curtle-axe upon my thigh, a boar-spear in my hand …. We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside, as many other mannish cowards have, that do outface it with their semblances.’

But a tiny voice — a small hope — yet remained in the Pandora’s box that Maggie had opened by enrolling Blair in the Shakspear Studio. As the language had been abstruse, even by Elizabethan standards, she thought that perhaps she had misunderstood Rosalind’s (that is, Blair’s) intent. Surely the girl wasn’t saying that she was going to dress up and pose as a man? Thus, Rosalind’s reply to Celia’s question — “What shall I call thee when thou art a man?” — Maggie found totally crushing: “I'll have no worse a name than Jove's own page; and therefore look you call me Ganymede.”

Not only a man but the most famous catamite, or bottom, in gay history and myth! Her Blair was playing Ganymede or ”Sodom’s Minion” in the words of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (the other definitions Maggie found inconcise). Such a role mocked her efforts to transform Blair into a proper young girl. Much of the world already regarded Blair as a Ganymede, Bagoas, Antinoos or “beauty’s rose,” the young male, “my love,” to whom Shakespeare addressed his first twenty-six sonnets. The last thing Maggie wanted, therefore, was for her daughter to call herself “Ganymede” and to crossdress as a male in public.

Maggie couldn’t STAND it! Was there a conspiracy to prevent Blair’s transformation? Were first the dance school and now the actors’ studio privy to said conspiracy? Was some entity with godlike powers, maybe the Sun god Ra or Jehovah Himself, intent on playing with her hopes and dreams, and Blair’s, as though they were finger puppets on the fickle hand of fate? Maggie had been jerked around one time too many. She was no longer going to accept the whims of cruel Fortune quietly like a good little girl. There was only one thing to do: She let forth a SCREAM so loud, so prolonged, and so high-pitched that the last Shakespearean words that Blair’s family and friends heard that night were Rosalind’s about a “clownish fool”.

Alas, poor Blair, his first time to strut as a mere. comedic player upon the stage ended tragically in the First Act, as Maggie, her screams still piercing ear lobes, leapt up to stage front, grabbed Blair (Rosalind) by one arm, and then dragged the child actor, kicking and cursing, to the exit. Blair’s friends and relatives also hustled for the exits as the curtain fell prematurely on Act One.

An hour passed before the play resumed with Blair’s understudy, a timid girl, who refused to take her turn upon the stage until she had been assured, and reassured, that the “crazy woman” had been apprehended by the police several blocks from the theater, still raging, the police reported, at her daughter for being “a hopeless Ganymede,” whatever that was. The police suspected it was a new slang word for “whore”, but Laird vouched for Blair: His daughter, not yet eleven, had never accepted money for sex.

Back in the theater, Felix La Rond, who had used the hour-long interval to eat a three-course meal, regretted Blair’s forced exit because, “That kid really gets into the head of a female character. He’s much more credible as a sixteenth-century princess than that wan little creature who replaced him.” After having after-theater coffee mit schlag and Viennese cake, he intervened to prevent Maggie, still being processed by the police, from being sent to a mental hospital for evaluation.

“I can vouch for her,” Felix said, “as her daughter attends my school. I assure you that Maggie Maguire was simply suffering from stage fright, the result of seeing her child for the first time in a starring role; Maggie Maguire is as sane as her daughter Blair who in turn is as sane as Billy Bibbit.” That settled it for the police (who had never heard of Billy Bibbit, the suicidal mama’s boy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), especially after Wil Shakspear phoned the station to say that she wouldn’t press charges so long as Blair and her family never again came within shouting range of the Actors’ Studio.

While Maggie regretted her impulsiveness (Blair for one refused to talk to her for a week), she now knew that she had been foolish to trust Blair’s fate to the whims of blind fortune. Maggie would have to take more decisive steps. Not only was she going to put Blair’s feminization henceforth under a doctor’s close supervision, but she also planned to give the family an ultimatum, one that started composing itself in her own mind. The actual phrasing kept changing, but it always came down to the same choice: Either Blair became a girl for keeps or Maggie walked.

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. It’s a familiar theme in the TG literature, but this time with an unfamiliar twist. It seems impossible for Blair to stay a girl, even in a play. Maggie decides to take him to a doctor to accelerate his feminization. But why would any doctor cooperate?

Choices, Chapters 15 Mandy’s choice

Maggie was pacing. Already Blair and she had been waiting for over an hour. Why did these greedy doctors overbook? Finally, just as she had finally decided to leave in a huff or a minute and a huff, a haughty, middle-aged nurse with ramrod straight posture suddenly blocked her view of the door; the nurse sniffed, “Doctor Bene Sentirsi can see Blair now. I suppose you will insist on accompanying her.”

The nurse, pivoting sharply on her heels like a palace guard, marched into the physician’s consulting room, Maggie scurrying to keep up, Blair lagging well behind. After slapping Blair’s newly-made file onto the doctor’s desk, the nurse left to the quick march playing in her head.

“So you are Blair. And what can I do for you and your mother today,” the doctor began.

Maggie replied: “I’ve become worried by Blair’s breast development. It started early enough, given that she’s still one week shy of her eleventh birthday; but it seems to have entered a period of … stasis. Her breasts are no longer growing; and they’re always an angry red, puffy, and ultra-sensitive to the touch.”

“Hmm, Sentirsi replied, “I think I need to look at them. Blair, would you please remove your halter top and bra, that is, if you’re wearing one.”

Blair hesitated. He had never let an adult male see his breasts. It wasn’t proper.

Sentirsi cooed: “Oh come now, Blair, you’re going to have to get used to male doctors seeing you without your clothes. After all, I am going to have to give you a vaginal examination as well. I can assure you that I have seen so many female breasts in my practice that they have lost the allure they held for me in my adolescence.”

“If that’s the case,” Blair mused, “then why is he staring at mom’s breasts? And why, come to think of it, is she wearing that blouse? Not only is it missing the top button but I heard mom complaining only last week that the blouse had become too tight to wear anymore. She’s practically popping out of it.”

Blair also couldn’t remember when he’d last seen his mother wear a mini-skirt and sheer stockings. It was with these vaguely unsettling thoughts that Blair stripped off his halter top and training bra.

Doctor Sentirsi pinched, poked and prodded. He then looked up in some perplexity. “It’s definitely a rash. The swollen breasts and rawness result from the allergy and from the itching and scratching it induces. Does Blair have any known allergies?”

“Allergies? I don’t know of any,” said Maggie. “Oh, maybe strawberries. I remember being told that they once gave her hives.”

The doctor picked up Blair’s halter top and bra, on both of which he noted the J. C. Penney label and the polyester blend. He asked, “Do you often shop for Blair at Penney’s? And are Blair’s bed linen made of polyester? When Maggie nodded twice, Sentirsi believed he had found the culprit — it was polyester. He explained that allergies to polyester were quite common and that Blair’s symptoms — especially the redness, the sensitivity and the swollen breasts — were classic.

“The treatment is straight-forward. Blair should avoid polyester from now on. Her bed sheets should be 100 percent cotton and any comforter or duvet should be made from wool. And I’ll prescribe a hydrocortisone cream to deal with the symptoms.”

The truth was gradually dawning on Maggie: “Are you saying that Blair’s breasts, tiny as they are now, will be even smaller when her allergy abates?”

“Of course, Madam. Except for some subcutaneous fat, which might be baby fat, Blair hasn’t started breast development at all. It’s going to be quite a while before she has breasts as magnificent as her mother’s. While I shall have to verify my conclusions by examining her vulva, it would seem that Blair is late to enter puberty. She still has a boyish chest and [his eyes dropped] … waist, and hips.

Maggie glared at Blair, then yelped, “But that can’t be. That simply can’t be. Blair has been taking herbal hormones for months. They should have kick-started puberty.”

“Herbal hormones, like what precisely?” queried the doctor, a severe look on his face. He didn’t like people to self-medicate.

“Well, Blair has been taking Evanesce, Feminol, AndroEase and CalmCompanion, several pills of each, two or three times a day.”

“AndroEase? A testosterone suppressant? What the f ….” Doctor Sentirsi never finished the expletive (or was it an interrogatory sentence?); instead he grabbed Blair tightly by both shoulders and said in his most authoritative voice, “Blair, tell me the truth. You are a boy, aren’t you?”

Before Blair could answer, Maggie interjected: “Blair’s actually a transsexual, a girl who was born with a boy’s body. She and I have been trying to rectify that cosmic mistake, but as you have observed, the herbals that she has been taking were, it would seem, a total waste of money. That’s why Blair has come to you — to have a doctor oversee and accelerate her feminization. She desperately needs hormone therapy and surgery if she is to have the feminine body she needs for boarding school in September. Isn’t that right, Blair sweetie?”

Blair, gulping, nodded.

His veins bulging, his fists clenched, Dr. Sentirsi leaned towards Maggie:

Feminization is entirely out of the question. Blair is far too young, criminally too young, even for hormone therapy, never mind reassignment surgery. Madam, are you out of your mind? You cannot legally, morally, ethically, sensibly or sanely mess around with the body of a prepubescent. No matter how severely Blair appears to suffer from gender dysphoria, nothing can — or should be done about it — until he has passed beyond puberty and is thinking like an adult. A sex change for a ten-year-old? It is sheer lunacy. What’s next — gold crowns on his deciduous teeth?

Maggie shot back:

My dear doctor, the only lunacy is to require a transsexual, who knows her own mind and destiny at age ten, to have to endure the agony of undergoing puberty as the wrong sex. He or she — it’s the same for both sexes — will never look as naturally feminine or masculine as they would if their hormones worked with, and not against their development into happy, well-adjusted teens. What earthly good does it for Blair’s features to coarsen and for his chest and chin to grow unsightly hair if he’s destined to become a woman at the first legal opportunity — at the first moment that you, the almighty physician, deems acceptable? Who are you to play god?”

“Ms. Maguire, I am a doctor. I always play god. It’s a role that I spent more than $150,000 to obtain. And you, Madam, with your insanely inappropriate behavior have put me in an extremely awkward position. On the one hand, as a doctor, I am required by State law to report your treatment of Blair to Child Protective Services. If CPS are true to form, they will charge you with abuse and take Blair into protective custody, and since I suspect that your husband is implicated in this mess, Blair will probably end up in foster care.”

Blair started wailing. “No, I don’t want to lose my parents. I’ll do almost anything to stay with them. I love them. They love me. Foster care will kill me.”

“That, alas, is the ‘other hand’ or the equation. If I report this situation to the authorities, I will surely destroy a family, and possibly a child as well. What makes my situation especially hellish for me is the fate of my own brother.”

Sentirsi’s voice was quavering. “My parents called him Michael, but she was Mandy to those who loved her. So many, many people loved her.”

Sentirsi suddenly broke down completely. Blair went to his side and wrapped his small arms around the weeping doctor.

Dr. Sentirsi wrapped his own arms around Blair: “Mandy died exactly fifteen years ago Tuesday last week. A suicide. Our family didn’t have the money for her surgery, because every dollar we could earn, save, beg or borrow was going to my medical education. Finally, in despair, Mandy took a desperate gamble that in heaven she could at last be a woman. She told us beforehand that God owed her at least that much. If only I had recognized the signs of distress …. I wish I shared her faith in an afterlife. It would make it easier … to live … with my guilt.”

Dr. Sentirsi, breaking free of Blair’s embrace, buried his head in his own hands. His sobs were the only sound in the room until Maggie spoke: “Blair sweetie, I want you to put your halter top back on. You can stuff your bra in your purse; it seems that you don’t need it. When you’ve dressed, could you return to the waiting room? Please tell the doctor’s nurse that he has asked for privacy while we discuss your … condition. Would you do that for me?”

As Blair hurriedly dressed, Maggie strode over to the window and pulled shut the Venetian blinds. As Blair quit the room, he saw that Maggie had gone over to console the seemingly inconsolable doctor. The last Blair saw were her hands kneading Dr. Sentirsi’s neck to release the tension.

Maggie spoke softly and sensually as she worked the tension out of his shoulders and neck: “There, there, you have no reason to reproach yourself. You couldn’t have known.”

“But I should have known! I was her brother. I was interning at a hospital; I shouldn’t have been so blind ….”

“An intern? You mean you were working sixteen hours a day for a risible salary? It wasn’t your fault. It really wasn’t. Yet now I know why you’ve been providing hormone therapy for teens as young as thirteen, and why — yes, I’ve been told —you’ve got a clinic in Cuba where you’ve been doing gender reassignment surgery, again for young teens who otherwise would have to wait four years or more for it. It’s all because of Mandy, isn’t it? You’ve been helping girls just like her.”

Maggie then swiveled the doctor’s chair so that he faced her. Tenderly she took his head in her hands and lifted it so that she could kiss his lips; then she whispered in his right ear, “Bene, that’s the perfect name for you, for you are a saint walking among us. You know, don’t you, that you’ve saved many, many lives? Think of all the brothers and sisters, parents and children, who have their Mandy still present in their lives — all thanks to you.”

This time he kissed her back.

As she kissed Bene’s lips, cheek and forehead, Maggie found time to say, “I just know you can help Blair too. Sure, she’s young but she’s a smart kid and she knows that she was born with the wrong genitals. You can help her, I know you can.”

Before the doctor had a chance to reply, Maggie took one hand and placed it on her blouse, his fingers touching the bare top of her right breast. She didn’t have to move the other hand; of its own volition it began unbuttoning her blouse.

Sentirsi said nothing until the blouse lay upon the floor: “You’re so beautiful. Your breasts, they’re wonderful. Please, please let me see them in their natural glory.”

“Put your arms around me, Bene. I want you to unhook my bra.” Then, as the doctor’s fingers fumbled with the clasp, she whispered in his ear, “You can help Blair. I know you can. I know you will.”

“I can’t. I just can’t. Blair is much … too young. I don’t have … the right,” the doctor said, breathlessly, just before he tried to bury his head between Maggie’s exposed breasts.

With one hand Maggie guided Bene’s lips to suckle on a nipple, and with the other she moved his right hand to unzip her slacks: “Bene, the priests and the lawyers would say you didn’t have the right to help any of those girls. They were all too young in somebody’s eyes. Blair needs your help. Don’t let her become another Mandy. You can’t ask her to wait six or eight years.”

Bene had nothing to say, for Maggie’s lace thong was coming off with her slacks.

At this point in Blair’s story, it is important to realize that Maggie is, no matter her behavior, the only mother the poor child has. For Blair’s sake, it is best not to relate vivid stories about the half-hour she spent in the doctor’s locked office.

By all means let your imagination and sympathy roam. Ask yourself what you think Maggie would have done to further her ambitions for Blair. Consider as well how much or how little a doctor as fundamentally decent, yet as lawless as Bene Sentirsi, would demand of her, as she pled for her child’s happiness. How far did they go? How much did they do? Or how little? These are questions for you to answer in your own imagination, for they cannot be laid out in a story about a child, even one as sexually precocious as Blair Finlayson.

Blair had just finished his third pamphlet about the dreadful ailments that might await him as a woman when Maggie, her face flushed and clothes disheveled, emerged from the consulting office with Dr. Sentirsi. Excitedly she rushed over to Blair to say, “Sweetie, it took a lot of persuading, but the doctor has agreed to take you on as a patient. He’ll be giving you your first shot — that’s the really important one — on Thursday. In the meantime I have pills for you that will work a lot faster than those herbal hormones. And this is the best news — we’re going to Cuba, to a Caribbean island, in July! Won’t that be fun?”

Meanwhile, Dr. Sentirsi asked his nurse to schedule a series of sessions with Blair, as well as a weekly appointment with Maggie to deal with her “cervical” problem.

“Wednesdays, right after lunch, as usual, doctor?” the nurse asked.

“Yes, Wednesday afternoon will do fine,” said Bene, as his fingers played with Maggie’s thong, currently in a pocket of his white coat, but destined for his trophy drawer. Maggie definitely wasn’t his first “mlf”, but she was the best so far.

It was in the car driving home that Maggie detected that Blair was less than enthusiastic about the hormone therapy she had just arranged. “Do I have to?” Blair whined. “Things are fine the way they are. Nobody ever guesses I’m a boy. I don’t need boobs to fool ‘em.”

“Fool them? We’re not playing a game, Blair sweetie. We’re playing for keeps. I don’t want you merely to pretend to be my daughter; I want you to be her -- a real girl, who for love of me is willing to become a complete female … forever and a day.”

“But I’m a really good actor. I got the lead in both Giselle and As You Like It, didn’t I? And I’m much better at playing a girl than Corey Haim, Alex Linz, or Chad Lowe, or even that little French boy in that rose movie. Isn’t that enough, mommy?

“Blair, can’t you understand that I want you to be a real girl, not a pretend one?”

“I want to be a real girl for you, mommy, but I can’t grow girls’ breasts.”

“And why not, sweetie? Why have you changed your mind? There have been weeks when all you talked about was getting breasts to please Alicia. Blair, have you given up being a lesbian?”

“Sometimes I’m a lesbian,” Blair confirmed:

Alicia calls me a lipstick dyke. She’s got a way of making me beg for boobs, even for a virgina, ‘cause I know they would make her so happy. And I always aim to please. But I stop wanting to have a girl’s body when I’m with Cody. He’ll freak if I grew boobs or my willy vanishes.

Maggie sighed. Deep down, she’d always known it was a mistake to allow a gay boy like Cody to pal around with Blair. However, she had welcomed Cody into their life because he encouraged Blair to associate his sexuality with crossdressing. Cody had always seemed as anxious as Maggie for Blair to dress in an especially feminine way. Until it was too late it hadn’t occurred to Maggie that Cody was also teaching Blair to love the male body, even Blair’s own.

Maggie admonished Blair: “You can’t live your life to please Cody. He’s almost three years older than you; he’ll soon be moving on to girls or boys his own age. You can’t count on Cody. Your family — that’s what you can count on in life. And you know that everyone, even Kirk, wants you to continue with your sex change.”

“I don’t think that Kirk wants me to be a girl. He just doesn’t want a sissy brother at his school.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying, Blair. Everyone believes that you’ll have a much happier, better lifer as a female than you’ve had as a male. Isn’t that already the case — I mean, that the past few months have been your happiest? As a girl, you’ve made far more friends, including two exceptionally close friends, than you ever had as a boy. You even won a soccer trophy as a girl. You’d never have gone near a soccer pitch as a boy. Even Cody wants you to be a girl for him. You know something? You two boys are awfully loud when you’re together; I’ve even heard you through two closed doors. I know that Cody treats you like a girl, Blair. If you don’t start taking precautions, you could get pregnant.”

“Do you think I could get pregnant? Boys can’t have a baby, can they?” Blair asked.

Maggie replied:

Boys don’t normally get pregnant and have babies, Blair, because they don’t let other boys do to them what Cody does to you. Of course, you’re at risk of getting pregnant. That’s one reason why you’ve got to start taking the pills Dr. Sentirsi gave me for you; one of them is a birth control pill. If you’re going to do ‘naughty things” with Cody, then I insist on your protecting yourself by taking this pink pill each morning. After all, with you entering puberty, you and Cody will become capable of creating a baby together. If you can cum, Blair, then you’re not too young to have a baby. So you’ve got to go on the Pill. Understood?”

No, Blair didn’t understand. He was getting very confused. He would have sworn that a guy couldn’t get pregnant, but earlier that day he had seen revealing pictures of a pregnant man in the waiting-room copy of Egyptian Weekly Magazine. Unable to read the eGypsy language, Blair couldn’t decipher how the guy got knocked up, but given the basics of male plumbing, the man must have gotten pregnant while lying on his stomach, just like he did for Cody. Maybe, Blair hoped, the pink pill could undo what he and Cody had done together last night: “Mom, can I have a pink pill now? I don’t need any water ‘cause it’s pretty small — not like that other one the doctor gave you.”

Maggie smiled exultantly as Blair got his first taste of synthetic estrogen. Fear of pregnancy would keep Blair taking the pink pill. All Maggie had to do now was to sell Blair on the merits of the “horse pill”. There was no point, Maggie decided, in sugar-coating it. She wanted Blair to know it would give her “big boobs” and a “smaller willy” and maybe even make it impossible for her ever again to wear boys’ jeans. So Maggie, stopping the car by the side of the road, held out the “horse pill” and told Blair to swallow it, even as Maggie exaggerated its immediate effects:

I want you to take a Big Pill like this twice a day and to give us a big smile when Dr. Sentirsi gives you a needle with enough female steroids in it to turn two boys like you into females. After taking just one of these Big Pills, your body’s chemistry will become half-female. After three of the Big Pills, your body will have swung so far over to the female side that you’ll never be able to be a boy again. Your genitals will eventually disappear entirely — that’s after just a couple of months of taking the Big Pills. But don’t fret — the doctor can give you a clitoris and vagina so you don’t end up with nothing at all to touch between your legs. Okay, Blair, this is where the play-acting stops and real life begins: If you love your family, if you love me, if you want to be truly happy, you will take the Big Pill now and will keep taking it until Doctor Sentirsi declares your sex change complete.

Blair cautiously moved his right hand toward the Big Pill, as though towards a glowing hot coal. He actually touched it before his arm retracted with a violent spasm, as though he had scorched his fingertips. “I can’t, I just can’t. I’m happy with the way I am. I don’t need my body to become more feminine ‘cause I already look prettier than most girls. Everyone says so.”

“Maggie replied sharply:

Blair, you little fool, if you don’t start taking the Big Pill, then male puberty is going to make your body ugly; your cute button nose will become an enormous hooter, and your features will coarsen. Who knows? You may end up looking like Quasimodo, the bell ringer of Notre Dame. Your eyebrows may grow together into a bushy unibrow; if that happens, you’ll look like a werewolf bitch whenever you wear a dress. You may end up with such a heavy beard that you’ll have to apply your makeup with a trowel, and still have a five o’clock shadow. Your shoulders may become so broad that you’ll look as hopeless in drag as Michael Oher, The Blind Side offensive tackle. And you’ll probably end up so narrow in the hips, with such a skinny ass, that Gumby will have more chance of passing as a female than you.

“That might not happen,” Blair objected. “Maybe I’ll grow up beautiful like Justin Bieber, Jason Dolley or Nick Jonas. They don’t look like cavemen.”

“They’re still awfully young. Time will tell. Look at what happened to John Travolta and Corey Haim. Passing through male puberty is, Blair, like playing Russian roulette with your appearance. You are a true beauty right now and if you faithfully take the Big Pill, I guarantee that you will always be a beautiful girl. If you don’t take it, one day you might look like Mick Jagger or Keith Richards. Here — take the pill, sweetie. Do me this one big favor. If you do it, you’ll be my beloved daughter forever; I’ll never stop loving you. Take the pill, sweetie, and you’ll never lose your mommy again.”

This time Maggie put the Big Pill directly on Blair’s tongue, and as one would a cat, she stroked his throat to activate his swallow reflex. Sure enough, the pill started going down Blair’s throat.

Maggie had won. Or had she? Without water, the pill proved too big for Blair to swallow. He started choking, his face becoming Na’vi blue once again. Alarmed, Maggie herself put her arms around her “daughter’s” chest to expel the Big Pill. It plopped into the dirt as Blair, bent over, fought to regain his breath.

Finally, he had inhaled enough oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide to speak: Apologizing for wasting a pill, Blair actually offered to take another. Though tempted to let him try again, Maggie realized that Blair needed a glass of water to keep the Big Pill down: “Blair, sweetie, you’re the best daughter, indeed the best child, any mother could have. The Big Pill can wait until we get home now that you have convinced me that you are committed to changing your sex permanently.”

During the rest of the drive home, Maggie reminded Blair, over and over again, of the critical importance of Blair’s completing his sex change. She explained how suicidal she had felt when the doctors told her that she would never have a daughter. She had almost gone out of her mind. Grieving for the daughter she’d never have, her mind had been seized with thoughts of harming herself, of running away, even of finding another family to love, one with a daughter Blair’s age. But then, like a Biblical miracle, she and the Finlaysons had been saved by the fortuitous discovery that Blair was a transsexual.

“That’s what you are, Blair — you’re a transsexual. As such, you have a split personality. To heal yourself, to become a whole person, you need these pills and some minor surgery by Dr. Sentirsi. Once you have the right body, a gorgeous female body, you’ll never be lonely or unhappy again.”

Blair was doubtful. Life just wasn’t that simple. It is true that he’d often fantasized about being a female, but not for the rest of his life. He just wanted to be a real female long enough to verify whether Alicia was telling the truth when she told him that no male had ever experienced anything like the orgasm that one woman could give to another. His body tingled in anticipation of comparing the two types of orgasm that Alicia had promised him; yet that tingling was the very reason he feared losing his manhood forever. Both Alicia and Cody had amply demonstrated to Blair that there was nothing wrong with the pleasure sensors in his existing, male body. What he already had, he was understandably reluctant to give up — especially when it was easy for him to pass as a female.

“Blair, I have an idea,” said Maggie. “Let’s make a party out of your taking your first Big Pill. With chicken nuggets, fries, chocolate milk, vanilla ice cream and chocolate cake — all the things you like. And we’ll invite Alicia and Angela. Isn’t that a great idea?”

Blair guessed so. He wasn’t going to turn down ice cream and cake. So Maggie pulled out her mobile phone, and as she drove along one-handed, she arranged for Alicia and Angela to attend Blair’s “coming out” party. As Maggie got into convoluted conversations with their mothers, through inattention she and Blair had one narrow escape after another from slow cars, passing cars, turning cars, cars wandering like them over the white line, and from cars brazenly parked in the parking lane.

As his brief life kept flashing through his brain, Blair wondered if he really wanted to die as a girl. The mere thought of being undressed in the morgue so seized him with dread that he and Maggie almost ended up there, as he became too preoccupied to advise Maggie that traffic was backed up at a stop light. Fortunately, it was only a fender-bender.

Understandably, Blair begged off accompanying Maggie to the supermarket. That gave Blair some time alone with Kirk, who had arrived home from school with the news that “the guys” had discussed over lunch whether any of them would ever date “a girl like Blair” after a sex change. In principle, the answer was “no” or “never” or “I’d rather date a nanny goat”, but two of the guys allowed that Blair was bound to be “a fox” and that for “her” they might make an exception — just out of curiosity, mind you.

Kirk told Blair that the conversation “almost made me lose my cookies, but, funny thing, “it also made me realize that it might be different for you, Blair. Maybe you won’t end up looking like a drag queen or skank. By starting young and being prettier than a heap of girls, maybe you can become a real babe, “cunt, periods and all”. Kirk expected to be hugged for his magnanimity, but Blair hung back, more pensive than grateful.

First of all, Blair wanted to find out whether he’d have “periods,” whatever they were if he became a real girl. Kirk’s reply was not reassuring: “Of course, you’ll have ‘em. If you’ve got a cunt, then it’s going ooze blood once a month, like clockwork.”

“Ooze blood? That sounds dangerous! Do girls ever die from their periods?”

Kirk was “reassuring”:

Nah, they stuff a sponge or piece of cloth up their cunt to stop the bleeding. So girls rarely die from having a period, but I’ve heard that they can become murderers when they’re on the rag — real crazed like that older chick with a guy’s name in Fatal Attraction. So you’re going to have to learn Yoga, sewing or Mohammedism, something to help you chill; otherwise you’ll off somebody. But never take drugs; that ain’t cool.”

Possibly if Kirk had been less “reassuring”, Blair would have left undiscussed the events of his day, for the two siblings hadn’t confided in each other for several months, in fact not since the expedition to Pierre’s salon and to J.C. Penney’s. Blair had been “too full of herself” for a real conversation, and Kirk had been too resentful of his “sister”, especially after Blair had “used her feminine wiles” to intrude on Kirk’s friendships. Most of all, however, Kirk resented Blair’s beauty and the effortless ease with which Blair passed as a female.

Yet it took only two words from Blair to topple the psychological barriers built over the past six months. Big Pill. Once Blair started talking about that evening’s last-minute party, Kirk became all ears. He even became sympathetic. Most of all Kirk wanted to know whether Blair “really wanted her girl’s night out to last a lifetime.” Blair, in turn, wanted to see whether Kirk had been keeping faith. After both had bared their souls, they again became close enough, if only for an evening, to hatch a conspiracy to mess with the Big Pill Party.

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. It’s a familiar theme in the TG literature, but this time with an unfamiliar twist. With the help of a sex-crazed, guilt-ridden doctor Maggie has obtained the "Big Pill" and Blair is fast running out of wriggle room. Will the Big Pill Party go as Maggie wants -- with Blair making a psychologially irreversible decision to be a girl for life?

Choices, Chapter 16 Maggie’s Choice

Maggie couldn’t understand why her children were so churlish. The balloons, the streamers, the soda pop, candy and popcorn should have prepped them for an evening of fun. She did so much want Blair’s most fateful step yet to be associated with laughter and joy. This was to be the evening in which Blair would, by faithfully swallowing the Big Pill, believe that she had made an irreversible decision to become Maggie’s daughter till death did them part several decades thence.

While Maggie anticipated some nerves from Blair that evening, the high-strung kid seemed ready to snap. Blair seemed to be picking fights with everyone. Even Alicia judged “her” to be insufferable, and twice within the first half-hour Blair apparently had said something to cause Angela to burst into tears. While it was possible that Angela’s hormone therapy was simply making the girl weepy, there was no mistaking the tenor of Kirk’s remarks, which seemed not only to be misogynistic (with three “girls” present) but also homophobic (with two “lesbians” present). Did Kirk really expect to impress Blair, Angela and Alicia by telling them that they had an obligation “as females” to have a lot of babies so that Bybee Lake’s native population didn’t get replaced by “outsiders” who bred like rabbits — you know, like New Englanders, Japanese and Canucks? A feminist, Maggie silently applauded Alicia for forcing a recantation from Kirk by way of a half-Nelson.

What probably upset Maggie the most, however, was her inability to catch either Blair or Kirk dipping a hand into the candy or popcorn bowls, even though the contents of both were rapidly disappearing. It was almost as though they didn’t want her to see them having fun.

As the dinner party commenced, lugubrious Laird laid low the lingering party spirit. Blind drunk even before they sat down, he acted as though they were attending a wake. “Lesh drink to Blur, todaysh the day that she’s gonna take a rilly, rilly big pill so she duzn’t hav to worry eva again ‘bout puttin’’ the toilet down afta pissin’. Blur will be a good little girlie now on. She’ll stop peein’ on the rug.”

Fortunately or unfortunately, those were the last coherent words that Laird said that evening. Mumbling something, he left the table, picked up a half-full bottle of bourbon and a used beer glass, stumbled over to the living room sofa, where he soon fell fast asleep, snoring fitfully, the bottle now empty, the beer glass full to the brim with bourbon, two popcorn kernels floating on top.

Maggie apologized on Laird’s behalf, but her guests graciously claimed to have seen their parents in even worse shape. Kirk would have none of it: “You’re just trying to make us Finlaysons feel better. I don’t believe your mom ever got that hammered, Angela; and Big Al, your father’s been going to AA since you were in Pampers. No, my dad got awesomely trashed tonight because he’s ashamed of Blair. Any dad would get shit-faced at a Big Pill Party.”

Blair and Maggie glared at Kirk. Angela looked away in embarrassment. Big Al looked set to slug Kirk.

“We don’t use the s-word in this house, young man,” Maggie lectured. She otherwise didn’t know quite what to say. She was pleased, therefore, when Big Al asked, “What’s a Big Pill Party?”

“Alicia,” Maggie began,

"I’m so pleased you asked. Angela has already been taking the Big Pill as you can see from her new cup size. We’re having a party tonight to celebrate Blair’s decision to start taking Big Pills from this evening onward. She’s been taking herbals for months, but they’ve produced little or no breast development. So Blair is switching today to synthetic steroids. Today, when I filled my prescription for six months of Big Pills, theoretically for me, but actually for Blair, the pharmacist refused to believe that I was menopausal. I guess I should be flattered. He said that the high potency of the Big Pill didn’t make any sense unless I was trying to change my sex as rapidly as possible. So I had to admit that I was born a man. He was shocked, but he nonetheless complimented me on my success “at passing”. Blair, sweetie, if that druggist talks, then you’ll have to get used to everyone’s thinking your mother is a man. That’s a hoot, isn’t?"

“I don’t see the humor in it,” said Kirk. “When word gets around that my mother is as big a weirdo as my sister-brother, I won’t be able to show my face in public. Blair, you’re ruining my life. No wonder my friends won’t be seen with me.”

“I am not,” Blair said. “I’m not the reason you don’t have any friends. It’s your own sour puss.”

They were about to come to blows, but Angela in all innocence diverted them: “Ms. Maguire, I didn’t know you were originally a dude. Does that mean that Blair and Kirk are adopted? I mean they couldn’t be yours, could they now?”

“Angela, you are a total doofster! Were you born yesterday, along with your tits?” said Kirk. “Blair isn’t adopted. When two guys make a baby together, the kid is always a dickhead like Blair.”

Maggie admonished him: “That’s more than enough, young man. One more comment like that and you’ll be having the longest timeout of your short life. Angela dear, I was never a man. I’ve always been a woman. You do understand, don’t you, that the drugstore would never knowingly provide Big Pills to anyone Blair’s age? That’s why the prescription had to be in my name. That’s why I fibbed to the druggist.”

Kirk wouldn’t let up: “Come on, Angela, you know that Maggie isn’t our mother. Mine died and they’re still looking for Blair’s in the zoo.”

Kirk easily ducked Blair’s slow-motion punch; however, in doing so, he “accidentally” bumped Big Al’s arm, causing her to spill hot chocolate on her jeans. Big Al gave Kirk a mighty shove, causing him to bounce off Blair, who fell off his chair onto the floor.

Maggie raised her voice:

"Children, that’s quite enough! This is an adult occasion: A Big Pill Party for a transsexual child like Blair is the equivalent of her Bat Mitzvah. We’re celebrating Blair’s step into female puberty. It would help set the mood, consequently, if you, Blair get out from under the table. Your brother can see that you’re trying to tie his shoes together. And you, Kirk should get a paper towel for Big Al, to help her sop up the spilt milk; but don’t you dare put your hands on her thighs. Remember how a gentleman acts around a lady."

“Al’s no lady; she’s a bull dyke,” replied Kirk. This remark got him a sharp punch to his midriff, leaving him breathless and wordless.

Maggie used the lull in the “conversation” to serve cake and ice cream to the quarrelsome quartet. Atop Blair’s slice of cake, amongst the icing rosettes, she had artfully placed the now sugar-coated Big Pill that Blair would swallow, according to Maggie, to prove (before witnesses) that Blair wanted to live the rest of her life as a female. Then, to (over)dramatize the occasion, Maggie fibbed that Blair’s sexual transformation would become “virtually irreversible” once she had taken two Big Pills, followed by one Big Shot from Dr. Sentirsi in two days time. Maggie finished by explaining the importance to the peace and tranquility of Blair’s entire family that she keep her promise to take both a sufficient number of Big Pills and Big Shots — however many it took — to look like a complete female after reassignment surgery in July.

Angela and Big Al applauded; they urged Blair to “start with the icing” in order to get to the Big Pill “lickety-split”.

“Come on, sweetie,” said Maggie, camera poised, “start with the Big Pill, just like your friends said. This is the moment of truth — when you prove how much you love your mommy.”

“That’s it. I can’t stand it anymore!” Kirk shouted. “I’m tired of Blair being treated around here like Cinderella and me like an ugly stepsister. Let’s see if Blair is willing to eat her cake and pill off the floor!” With that, Kirk swept Blair’s plate of cake onto the floor between their two chairs. When Blair reached downward to save what he could from her upturned plate, Kirk pushed him up and away, in order to reach the “cake” first. Ignoring shouts from their tablemates, the siblings tumbled about on the floor, smearing themselves with cake and ice cream.

Finally, Blair, announcing that he’d found the Big Pill, surfaced with his mouth closed shut, the pill ostensibly inside. He then gulped down a swig of chocolate milk. “There, I’ve done it. Kirk couldn’t stop me from swallowing the Big Pill.”

Big Al and Angela applauded, but Maggie seemed paralyzed by doubt and suspicion. She didn’t move a muscle until Kirk, still lurking below the table, celebrated Blair’s “achievement” by pulling down his “sister’s” pink cotton panties (with white lace trim at the waist and legs). As Kirk rose to brandish them, Maggie told him in no uncertain terms to retire to his room “to reflect on how boys should treat girls.” Kirk headed off, but not until he’d wrapped the panties around Blair’s head like a head scarf.

Maggie noticed that Blair was reacting to her supposed humiliation with a moronic smile, while Kirk practically seemed to relish his banishment, despite the damage done to his standing before their guests. Suspecting that her kids were somehow in cahoots, she resolved to wrap the party up early. Fortunately, Coach Anderson offered to drive both his daughter and Angela home. His breath smelt of Gatorade.

As soon as the Coach had departed with the two girls, Maggie told Blair that she wanted a heart-to-heart, mother-daughter chat at the kitchen table. Once seated, she took Blair’s hands in hers and said, as softly as she could, “Blair, you didn’t swallow the Big Pill, did you? Did you even find it?”

She could see that Blair was weighing her options. After due deliberation, Blair countered, “I told you I swallowed the pill, didn’t I? Do you think I was lying?”

Maggie might have bought the lie if her daughter had been able to look Maggie in the eye or Blair had used more forthright language. Blair, Maggie noticed, had answered with interrogatives. Possibly to avoid an outright falsehood? And so, Maggie asked, “Blair, I don’t want rhetorical questions from you. I insist on a straight answer. Did you swallow the Big Pill and is it somewhere in your digestive system?”

Blair shook his head: “You’re right. I never found the pill. Kirk must have it. Maybe he threw it down the toilet. Didn’t you hear a flush after he went upstairs? Do you want me go to my room for fibbing?”

“Not so fast, young lady. As for Kirk, If he flushed a Big Pill down the toilet, he’ll be paying for it out of his allowance,” Maggie said.

"The Big Pills are expensive, so costly that their price proves, Blair, how much your father and I love you. It’s going to cost a fortune to transform you into the girl of our dreams. But it will be well worth it because I know that the day of your final operation is going to be the happiest day of your life — and most definitely of mine. Why, then, did you tell us that you swallowed the pill? Was it because you, always the ham actor, were improvising? Did you think that the party would be a bust if you admitted that you couldn’t find the Big Pill? Is that why you pretended to find it — to allow everyone to party with you? Is that why you lied?"

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Blair, the shoes on his twitching legs clacking against the chair and table leg.

A wide smile lit up Maggie’s face:

"Always my thoughtful Blair! No mother could hope for a sweeter daughter! While we’ve got to stop losing Big Pills, I’ve got another one here for you to take, and a glass of milk to help you get it down. So that there won’t be any tomfoolery this time, I want you to start swallowing the moment I place the pill in the back of your mouth. After you drink some milk, I want you to open your mouth really wide to prove that you actually took the Big Pill. Once you’ve done that, I’ll let you stay up late to watch television with me. We’ll curl up under a blanket and watch one of those sentimental movies about girls and their horses that brings tears to the eyes of we females. Now open wide …"

Blair’s jaws slammed shut. “I can’t! I won’t! You can’t make me!” Tears welled up in his eyes.

“What are you saying, Blair? That you don’t want to be my daughter?”

“Not if it has to be for the rest of my life! Not if I can’t ever be a boy again! I promise, mom, to continue dressing like a girl — for months or even years if you want. However, I refuse to act'ly become a girl. If you make me take a Big Pill or have surgery, I’ll run away from home. Thanks to Cody, I know that I’m not a transsexual, never was, never will be, because I’m actually a gay boy — just like Kirk says I am, and daddy fears I am.”

“Blair, what about the Punani Academy? Were you ever interested in going to it?”

Blair explained:

"Sure, I ‘m still interested in going to it, ‘cause it’s an amazing place. It would be awesome if Cody could be my roommate at Punani. I’ve talked it over with Cody. He says he’s cool with my dressing like a girl 24-7 during our entire stay at Punani, but he’d insist on the school administration knowing that I’m really a boy so that the school nurse doesn’t try to give me ho’mones to grow me boobs ‘like other girls my age.’ As for the girls at Punani, Cody knows where to find me some stick-on falsies that look like the real thing. I’ll even be able to shower with them on! Of course, everyone will have to know that Cody’s a dude because there’s no way he’d ever pretend to be a girl or wear anything but guys’ clothes. Do you think you could get the school to admit us both, me in skirts, and Cody in Levis?"

Maggie, perplexed, said:

"Blair, I simply don’t understand you. You’ve got no problem with crossdressing for months or years at a time. You didn’t even make a peep when we sent two-thirds of your male clothes to Goodwill and put the remainder in deep storage. I know for a fact that you love dressing up in your feminine finery. Now you talk excitedly about Cody’s finding you some ‘fake boobs,” and I assume that a plastic vagina will be next. But why on earth wouldn’t you want the real thing? Any why would you risk someone’s publicly exposing you — doing his utmost to humiliate you — as a crossdressing male, when you’re one of the lucky few who has a mother and doctor able and willing to transform you into a girl before you even hit male puberty. I’m offering you a chance to stay beautiful for the rest of your life. It’s an offer that Dr. Faustus accepted, why won’t you?"

“Did that doctor have to change his sex in order to look beautiful for life?” Blair asked.

Maggie had to admit that Faust not only stayed male, but received a good-looking wife for selling his soul. Blair didn’t think the wife part of it much of an incentive for a gay boy. Besides, he and Cody were already hitched for life.

Maggie pounced:

"Blair, you’re not even eleven yet, and you’re talking about being with Cody for the rest of your life? At your age, neither of you can be sure that you’re even going to end up being gay after your male hormones start raging. And if Cody really is a homosexual, then he’ll probably end up cheating on you with two thousand other boys, like all gays do. Could you handle his showing up with a new boyfriend twice a week? If you really want to marry a boy and live with him for the rest of your life, Blair, then you definitely should take the Big Pill because it will turn you into a real woman, and thus able to marry a heterosexual guy. Heterosexual males love their wives till death do them part. That’s what they promise in their wedding vows. So if you and your husband are both heterosexuals, you a female and he a male, then you’re much likelier to stay together forever than two gay boys, like Cody and whoever."

It had been an effective speech, for Blair had heard plenty of schoolyard warnings about “pedal files”, gay guys (presumably on bicycles) who were so crazy for sex that they’d do it with any boy, no matter his age or looks. And Kirk had told him when he started “doing it” with both Alicia and Cody, that Blair was “behaving like a typical gay slut.”

Blair now didn’t know quite what to do — he certainly didn’t want to be gay if Cody was going to cheat on him with two thousand other boys. Yikes, that would mean that Cody would be sexing it up with every boy in the elementary schools of Bybee Lake. Maybe to make quota he’d have to fool around in Smith Lake too! But it Blair, by taking the Big Pill, grew boobs as big as melons (or worse, lost his pecker), then Cody would be sure to leave him for a “real boy”, no matter how many times Cody asked Blair when they “sexted” with their mobile phones to pose in panties and a bra.

Blair was torn — to swallow or not to swallow, which was out of the question? As he pondered his options, he picked up the Big Pill speculatively, turning it over and over in his palm. He even tasted it for a couple of seconds with the tip of his tongue (almost giving Maggie an orgasmic rush), then decisively returned it to the table. “No,” he said. “You’re wrong. Cody loves me. No matter what other gays do, he’ll be different. He’ll never let me down.”

“Blair, if Cody truly loves you, he’ll accept your being a transsexual. He’ll love your body, no matter how feminine it becomes, because he loves the real you, deep inside. He says he loves the inner you, right, and not your blue eyes and blonde hair?”

Blair nodded. Maggie continued: “Well, the inner you is female. You know it; your entire family knows it. You think the reason that no one’s figured out that you’re a boy when you’re ‘acting as a girl’ is because you’re a good actor. That’s not it, not at all. To play a girl doesn’t require any acting from you at all because you are just playing yourself, your inner self. You’re no more acting when you dress up as a girl than John Wayne was acting when he played a tough cowboy; or Johnny Depp, a pasty-faced freak; or Madonna, a wanton slut.”

“I am a good actor, I truly am,” replied Blair, now pouting.

Maggie wasn’t going to let him change the topic:

"Of course, you’re a good actor. As a girl and transsexual, it takes talent for you to play a male role like Count Albrecht or even to be a half-convincing Ganymede when you’re obviously more comfortable being Rosalind. Most of all, sweetie, it takes enormous talent for you, a female since birth in all but body, to play the role of Blair, the sissy gay boy, so convincingly until you grew out of that role five months ago. Here take the two pills [which Blair reluctantly did]. It’s about time that you gave Cody a chance to prove how much he loves you. By taking those pills in your hand right now, without further fuss, you’ll prove that you have faith in Cody, to prove that you’re worthy of his love."

With one hand, Maggie placed Blair’s left hand around the glass of chocolate milk, and with the other Maggie guided (some might say “forced”) Blair’s right hand up to ‘her’ mouth, tilted it so that both pills slid to the back ‘her’ throat, the pink pill disappearing from view, and then brought Blair’s hand up to ‘her mouth,’ tilted to glass, and washed the Big Pill down Blair’s throat. At long last, the pill had not proven too big for the ‘girl’ to swallow.

Maggie suggested they toast the moment with glasses of chocolate milk. First she toasted Blair’s wisdom in giving a Cody a chance to demonstrate his deep and abiding love. Next, Maggie toasted Cody for being able to love Blair for what she truly was, a transsexual who has just made Maggie the happiest mother in the world. Finally, Maggie toasted Blair for having the courage to embrace her destiny as a real woman, who one day would, with the help of modern medicine, give birth to Maggie’s granddaughter, who would be another living doll like Blair.

Though Blair looked like she’d just taken arsenic, he nevertheless drank to each of his mother’s toasts. At Maggie’s urging, Blair added another of his own: “May I grow up to be as beautiful as my mom!”

Maggie took Blair into her arms to reward her daughter with dozens of loving kisses, after every three or four of which, Maggie took time to inhale and repeatedly to say, albeit in different words each time, that she loved Blair so much more deeply now that Blair had finally made an irreversible decision to become physically, as well as emotionally, a real daughter to Maggie.

It was almost immediately after Maggie used the word “irreversible” that Maggie noticed that Blair’s feminization was going into reverse. For whatever reason it was evident that Blair was having difficulty keeping the Big Pill down. Three or four desperate gulps revealed that Blair was actually at risk of vomiting his meal of milk and pills all over the kitchen table. It was, therefore, with a mixture of relief and despair that Maggie watched Blair lurch to the kitchen sink, where the kid promptly and repeatedly undid Maggie’s entire evening. Blair even had to admit that the Big Pill looked intact as it swirled down the drain.

“Sorry for hurling. I must have the flu,” Blair gasped, “cause I can’t seem to keep anything down”

Maggie wasn’t buying it: “You don’t look like you have the flu or any sort of virus. You can’t keep the Big Pill down because you refuse to complete your transformation into my daughter. You’re being stubborn and mulish. It’s hard to believe that you love me at all.”

“I do love you, mommy.”

“If you love me, then you’ll take the Big Pill and keep it down. Sit down at the table.” The Maggie carefully quartered a Big Pill with a paring knife. “Here, there should be no question now of the pill’s being too large for you to get down and to keep down.” Once again, Blair had the Big Pill in hand, albeit in quarters. Maggie next said: “Here’s a glass of water, just in case the chocolate milk is too rich for your delicate condition. Take a good healthy swig for each piece of pill — that is, if you want to prove to me that I’ve not been wasting my time on you today.”

Maggie then took a piece of pill, placed it on Blair’s tongue, and then, without waiting for Blair to raise ‘her’ own glass, Maggie, using a second glass of her own, emptied enough water into Blair’s mouth not only to wash the quartered pill down to the pit of ‘her’ stomach but also to half drown the ‘girl’. However, the pill stayed down despite, or because of Blair’s successful efforts to cough up the excess fluid in ‘her’ windpipe.

“You … almost … drowned me,” Blair remarked.

“Don’t be such a baby. One down, three to go. Now where did you put the rest of the Big Pill?”

Actually, they lay on the kitchen floor, close to where they landed after Blair, first in shock, and then in panic, threw up his hands in an attempt to block the watery assault on his windpipe. “They’re on the floor,” Blair announced. “I guess I’m fated to have only one-quarter of a Big Pill today. Oh well, what’s the rush to swallow the whole thing? Now mommy, now can … may I go up to my room?”

Maggie meanwhile had retrieved the pieces of Big Pill from the floor, and after giving them a quick dusting with a paper napkin, advised Blair that they were now clean enough for consumption. “Here,” she said, “a glass of water will drown any germs that might remain.”

Blair finally rebelled. As ready as he was to obey his mom, he blurted out: “First you tried to drown me. Now you’re ready to poison me — all so I’ll take that damn pill. Well, I won’t. It’s time you understood that you’re not the boss of me. Maybe I’ll take a Big Pill tomorrow, but I probably won’t. Stop playing God with my body and soul!”

Maggie was crying:

"How can you speak to me like that, Blair? All I’ve ever wanted is for you to be happy. I’ve never tried to make you do anything that deep down you didn’t already want to do. I was right, wasn’t I, about your wanting to live as a girl. At first, you weren’t sure it was the right thing for you, but now you’re ready to spend years at an all-girls’ school, just as long as Cody is your roommate. Sweetie, I’ll try to make that happen for you. But I can’t help you if I don’t trust me. I can’t even continue as your mother or as Laird’s wife if you no longer trust me. Here’s another Big Pill. If you take it now, this instant, with or without water, whichever you think best for you, then I’ll know that you still love and trust me. But if you won’t or can’t take the Big Pill, then it will be obvious to me that I’ve lost your love and respect, and so must leave this family. I mean it, Blair. Either you take the Big Pill or I am packing my bags to leave you and your family. You will have to take full responsibility for destroying this loving family."

Maggie then placed an entire Big Pill once again on her ‘daughter’s’ tongue: “No more talk, Blair. Either swallow it or spit it onto the floor. Depending on your next move, we can either hug each other like a mother and daughter and I can bake you a batch of Tollhouse cookies, or … I can start packing to leave. If I have to pack, I’ll probably be gone before you wake up tomorrow. It’s your choice: Do you want a mommy or not?”

Blair spat the Big Pill onto the kitchen table. “Cody is right. I’m not a girl in a boy’s body. I’m a gay boy through and through. There’s no way I’ll be happy in my future life as a gay boy if I have a girl’s body. Mom, I’ll do anything else you ask. I just can’t take the Big Pill — ever … never. You understand, don’t you?”

“Yes, I understand that I’ll never have a real daughter if I continue to live with the Finlaysons.”

With that said, Maggie marched over to Laird, still dozing on the sofa, poked him half-awake, and announced, “Laird, it’s not working out. I’ve made my choice and it’s to leave you and your family. I’m not ready to give up on my dream to have a daughter, but I no longer believe I can achieve it here.”

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. It’s a familiar theme in the TG literature, but this time with an unfamiliar twist. His mother says she is leaving his family because of his refusal to feminize his body. To stop her from going, Blair has to make a choice that is, thanks to Maggie, no real choice at all.

Choices Chapter 17 Blair’s choice

Blair, tears flowing down his face, grabbed on to Maggie’s sweater as she tried to ascend the stairs. “Mom, you can’t leave,” he squealed, “Not until you know everything. You don’t know half of what’s going on here.”

Maggie was tempted to brush him off, but Blair was so pitiful-looking she lingered to kiss him one last time. It was definitely him this time. She no longer hoped for his metamorphosis into a genuine girl, but she couldn’t help loving him. And, darn it, Blair looked especially pathetic and vulnerable in his chocolate-stained, white party dress and ruined makeup.

As she paused to kiss him, Blair repeated, each time with increasing urgency, “There’s something I’ve got to tell you. He made me promise, but I can’t keep it secret any longer, not when you’re so upset.”

She finally heard him — “What promise? What secret? What have you been keeping from me?”

“You probably won’t believe me, not when you’re mad at me.”

“Try me.”

Blair, afraid to look Maggie in the eye, looked down at his feet:

First, I’ve got a confession to make: I haven’t been taking the ho-mones since I talked to Angela at the tea party. Until then, I thought any boobs I grew would go away as soon as I stopped taking the ho-mones. So I figured it would be a hoot to see myself with hooters; and I knew that Alicia would go nuts over them. It would be cool to have them for a couple of months, but I don’t want ‘em for the rest of my life ‘cause Cody would hate ‘em. So when Angela told me it would take a dangerous operation to get rid of my boobs once I got ‘em, I stopped taking the ho-mones, cold turkey like.

“You should have told me months ago that you weren’t willing to feminize your body. We could have saved a lot of money and heartache.”

Blair doubted it: “If you had known the truth, wouldn’t you have abandoned me and the family months ago? What was so wrong with letting you believe that I was changing into a girl? Anyway, I actually believed I had taken the ho-mones long enough to give me some small breasts for the rest of my life. In other words, that it was too late for me ever to be 100 percent boy ever again. When Doctor Sent-Here-to-See told me I only had an allergy, I realized that I still had a real choice: So no more ho-mones for me!”

“Blair, those herbal pills weren’t cheap. What happened to them? Did you flush them down the drain?”

“No,” Blair answered. Then he mumbled something. Maggie demanded a clarification. So Blair told her that none of the pills had been wasted.

“If you didn’t take them, who did?”

Finally, Blair cut to the chase: “Kirk’s been taking the pills. He was desperate to take the Big Pill after he heard you say that it worked a lot faster and better than the herbal pills. So that’s why we staged the fight — so Kirk could get the Big Pill. I bet he ate it even before he left the kitchen.”

Maggie was dumbstruck. “You’re telling me that Kirk has been taking your pills for months? You’re telling me that Kirk wants to become a girl? Kirk of all people? It’s impossible to believe.”

“Mom, Kirk started taking the ho-mones even before that day when we saw the rainbow at McDonald’s. Don’t you remember that the pill bottles were half empty? As soon as he got the pills in the mail, he started taking ‘em because Kirk’s been desperate to have a body worthy of a girl. That’s how he’s put it — not to ‘get a girl’s body’. He’s always had that, Kirk said; but ‘to get a body like other girls have’.”

“Like other girls? What are you saying? Are you trying to tell me, Blair, that Kirk is …”

Blair cut her off: “Yes, Kirk knows he is a transsexual. He’s always been one, he says, or at least since he’s been three or four. That’s why he’s always been so angry — ‘’cause he thinks he’s too ugly actually to live life like a girl. That’s what he keeps telling me — not that he’s a girl trapped in a boy’s body, but that he’s a girl born so ugly that it’s impossible for anyone even to imagine Kirk’s really being a girl. Like you mommy. It was so easy for you to see me as a girl that you’ve been doing everything you can to make me into one. That’s because I’m a little blond sissy. And people always say I’m cute enough to be a girl. But no one can imagine Kirk as a girl because, he says, he’s ‘ugly even for a boy’.”

Maggie rebutted:

Blair, you’re not being fair to me. It’s never been a question of looks. Kirk’s has always seemed to despise femininity. Look at his attitudes towards sissies, homos and girly girls. The only girl he’s ever seemed to admire is Big Al, Alicia; and yet he can’t stand her being a lesbian. No, Blair, there’s no way you can convince me that Kirk believes himself to be a transsexual. There is no way that a transsexual could despise the gender she covets. Nice try, though.

Blair now said:

You gotta understand, mom, that Kirk told me that he despises girly girls and sissy boys because he’s a fem'nist who thinks that there’s far too much emphasis placed on the way girls and women look. Girls should be strong like Big Al, not sissies like me. That’s what Kirk says. He said that Big Al is exactly the sort of girl he dreams of being, except for her being a dyke. It disgusts him that Big Al is sexing it with me. Kirk admits he’s a homophobe, which sure doesn’t help us to get along. Sometimes I really get mad at him. He always apologizes afterwards, but it’s not long again before he says something bad about us gays.

“Let’s see if I got your story right: You’re saying that Kirk has been trying to feminize himself for months, without telling me, because he believes that he’s a transsexual. Yet he also despises traditional femininity, possibly because of his own appearance, and in an ideal world he’d be a bull dyke, but one who’d only have sex with hetero guys.”

“Yeah, that’s about it. When Kirk saw a rerun of the first season of Survivor, you know the one — the one with the gay dude who went around in the nude?”

Maggie knew the one, mentally adding, “Yeah, the show in which the gay dude later went to prison for evading taxes on his million-dollar prize.”

Blair continued: “Well, that show had a female truck driver named Sue. She’s the sort of woman Kirk wants to grow up to be — you know, tough, reliant, takes no crap from anyone. Kirk also admires Roseanne Barr, women wrestlers and girl hockey players.”

“Blair, I know you’re upset that I have to leave; that’s why you’re telling me this wild story. But it’s impossible to square your version of Kirk with the one who, for example, created that scene at Penney’s or mocked you for playing with dolls.”

Blair replied with a touch of insolence:

That shows how much you know about Kirk. He acted up at Penney’s because he hoped that the clerks would ‘punish’ him by fitting him for some girls’ clothes. That way he’d learn what size to buy. He also hoped they’d secretly add some girls’ undies for him to wear in the stuff you bought for me. Kirk was especially anxious to get some shapewear because he wanted to know if he’d look acceptably female if he had the breasts and curves of a teenaged girl. Since then almost every time you and dad have left him alone he’s been admiring himself in the mirror while wearing his shapewear, often with a dress on over it. He even got me to wear his boys’ underwear to school most days, so that you’d not notice when doing the wash that he’s been wearing a bra and panties to school virtually every day since we shopped at Penney’s. Of course, he wore his own stuff, but also anything of mine that fitted him.

“You’re telling me that Kirk has been dressing like a girl every time I’m gone from the house?”

“Yeah, and I’m also telling you that he likes to play dolls even more than I do. I’m too grown-up now for dolls. They’re sitting on a shelf. But sometimes Kirk takes my dolls into his room, and I know he loves to dress and undress G.I. Joe in Barbie’s clothes ‘cause he thinks G.I. Joe is the doll that looks most like him. So he wants to see what G.I. Joe looks like as a woman.”

“G.I. Joe disappeared soon after we brought him home. You’re telling me that the action figure has been all this time in Kirk’s room? Well, I’ve not seen the doll. Where’s he been hiding?”

Blair answered, “In a white shoebox under Kirk’s bed, along with the dresses, skirts and halter tops that fit G. I. Joe the best.”

“Okay, Blair. That’s the first story from you that I can verify without having to ask Kirk to prove he’s not a secret transsexual.” Grabbing hold of Blair’s right hand, Maggie said, “Let’s you and me pay a visit to Kirk’s room. I want to see if he has a white shoebox under his bed.”

When Maggie knocked on Kirk’s locked bedroom door, there was a panicky voice announcing that she’d have to wait for a few moments because he wasn’t decent. “I’ve got nothing on but my underpants. Wait a sec.”

“Kirk, this is ridiculous. I’m your mother and there’s nothing special about a boy’s chest. Unlock the door please.”

His face flushed from exertion, Kirk was wearing his felt bathrobe when he finally came to the door. Maggie saw that she wouldn’t have to look under the bed for a white shoebox; it was sitting closed on Kirk’s bed. “What’s in the shoebox?” Maggie asked.

“Nothing much,” Kirk replied evasively.

“Even so, I’d like to look inside it. There shouldn’t be any secrets between a son and his mother.” Before Kirk could grab the box himself, Maggie seized it, opened it, and spilled its contents — G. I. Joe and his dress collection — onto the bed. She realized that at least part of Blair’s story was true. Was the rest?

“Kirk,” she said in her most parental voice,

Today we learned that Blair has been suffering needlessly from an allergic reaction to polyester. Had he not been so shy, I would have seen the rash and puffiness around his nipples, and he’d have been spared weeks or months of itching and pain. I realize now that I should have been insisting on inspecting you both on a regular basis just to make sure that you’ve not got a problem like acne on your shoulders or back that should be treated by a doctor. So off with the robe, young man. I want to look at your chest, back and legs.

”I won’t. I simply won’t. You can’t barge into my room and tell me to strip. This isn’t Chippendales. I want to be left alone. You told me to go to my room as punishment. Isn’t that enough? If you respected my wishes, you’d leave me in peace.”

“Kirk,” Blair said quietly, “She knows. I told her everything. She knows about the Big Pill, the ho-mones and the crossdressing. She even knows that you’ve got girl’s boobs and that you see yourself as the only transsexual in this family. You may as well take off your robe, given what mom already knows.”

Maggie was truly shocked. This was the first she’d heard about Kirk’s having boobs. Had the herbal hormones and testosterone suppressants actually worked?

“She knows?” Kirk asked in amazement. “You pinky swore that you’d never tell anyone, least of all Maggie and dad. Now you’ve broken your solemn promise. How could you do it to me? You’ve always been a hopeless sissy, Blair, but until now I had hopes you might yet prove yourself a Man. Instead, you’re the biggest loser I know.”

It was as though Maggie weren’t even there. She surmised that Kirk was having difficulty accepting that not only she was standing there, in his inner sanctum, but that she knew his innermost secrets — well, at least those he had shared with Blair.

“Kirk honey, don’t blame your brother.”

“My brother? I thought Blair was my everlasting sister!”

“Not any more I’m not,” Blair replied:

After I told mom that I’d never agree to take the Big Pill and so would never become a real girl, she got so upset that she said she was leaving dad and us … forever! She was going upstairs to pack. She said she was going to be gone before we woke up in the morning. She was upset, Kirk, because I could never be the daughter that she needs and wants. I’m just a boy who likes to dress up. But you, you’re different. You already are the daughter that mom wants. She’s just gotta to know the truth. That’s why I couldn’t keep your secret any longer. I had to tell mom; it was the only way to keep our family together.

“Blair’s telling the truth, Kirk. He did the right thing by breaking whatever promise you extracted from him. Now, honey, please take off the robe. I need to see the real you.”

“Blair’s the daughter you want, not me,” Kirk said loudly and emotionally to Maggie. “He’s as pretty as any girl, and as soon as he puts on a dress everyone wants to get it on with him. Jeez, Blair could probably make a million bucks a day if he turned pro. I’ve known for a long time that he’ll never agree to a sex change. It would upset his marriage plans for Cody.”

“Kirk, I know all about Blair. But what about you, honey? Aren’t you now the center of attention?”

Kirk punched the wall —

"Me, the center of attention? You mean like the bearded lady at a carnival freak show? Maggie, I’m the homely boy nobody notices until he gets a black trench coat and starts listening to Metallica. If I were a girl, I’d either be the nice girl who’s never had a date or else the not-so-nice feminist who spends her Saturday evenings working on a thesis about ‘lookism’. Maggie, every time that God puts a girl into a boy’s body, it’s a frigging tragedy. But if God was to put a girl inside this body, with a face as fugly as mine, it would be a frigging farce. You really don’t want to see me without my robe. You can’t handle it."

“Yes, I can honey,” Maggie said as she walked over to Kirk who put up no resistance as Maggie untied the sash of his bathrobe, pushed it back over his shoulders, and onto the floor. Kirk, wearing a white, uplift bra (that he’d somehow bought himself) and white cotton panties, with a lace trim and padding on the sides and rear, was now exposed as a crossdresser — just like Blair. Yet Maggie wasn’t looking at Kirk’s lingerie. Her eyes were feasting on his breasts bulging out of the top of his bra. In size and shape, they would have turned most fourteen-year-old girls into a shower room exhibitionist.

“Kirk, your breasts are magnificent,” Maggie gushed, but how did you keep them a secret?”

“With lots of tape and painfully tight sports bras, that’s how,” Kirk answered. “And didn’t you wonder why I’m still wearing big, bulky sweaters and a heavy coat in mid-May? Do you want to see what I look like without a bra? Blair can stay. He’s been measuring them once a week since I started taking the herbal pills.”

Kirk, blushing furiously, slowly undid his bra. Soon enough, two youthfully perky breasts were liberated, their aureoles surprisingly large and dark for a male less than six months into his sex change. “What do you think?” Kirk shyly asked. It was obvious that his breasts were the part of his body he liked best. Possibly they were the only part of his body he didn’t loathe.

“What do I think?” Maggie echoed. She extended her arms outward, beckoning Kirk to come to her as girls have to their mother since the beginning of time. Maggie called out, “Kirk, love, you are the most beautiful daughter any mother could ever want or be lucky to have. Please come to me. I have so many apologies to make and I have so many wondrous plans for you, my dear, dear Kirk, my one and only true daughter.”

Mother and daughter fell into each other arms, sobbing. For the first time ever Kirk called her “mom,” over and over again. Her daughter would never again refer to her as Maggie.

Finally catching her breath, Kirk said, as he had once before, “But mommy, I’ll be butt ugly as a girl. You’ve always wanted to have a beautiful daughter like Blair.”

Maggie replied:

"No sweetheart, you’ve got that so, so wrong. A daughter has always been what I wanted. Her looks don’t matter. I’ve never said to myself that my daughter has to be beautiful, or intelligent or good with her hands. All I’ve ever said to myself is that I want a daughter to mother and to love! I’d never enroll a daughter of mine in a beauty pageant. They’re grossly exploitative. But if the judges saw you through my eyes, Kirk, you’d be sure to win Miss USA because my daughter is by definition the most beautiful girl in the entire world. Even so, I understand your concerns and your fears. You’re a teenager now and teens are never satisfied with their appearance. They always want to have their breasts enlarged, their ears pinned, or their nose bobbed. Well, we’ve got plenty of money to help you to improve your self-image. But seriously, sweetie, you’ve not had any help in learning how we women make ourselves look truly stunning. I guarantee you that with a little instruction from Pierre and me, you will look so beautiful by the end of this summer that you could even seduce Blair’s teen idol, Justin something."

Maggie then explained to the two children that Laird, whom she now intended to awaken even if it took smelling salts, was not likely to welcome a second of his boys becoming a girl. So she thought it wise to give Laird the “good” news about Blair first — namely, that Blair had decided to dress and behave like a boy for the foreseeable future.

When Blair objected, Maggie lectured him about letting Kirk have her moment in the sun, growing and blossoming in femininity without everyone’s comparing Kirk to her kid brother, still playing around in dresses:

"I’m not saying, Blair, that you can never again dress like a female; I just want you to cool your jets for a year so that your dad doesn’t feel like he’s no longer got a son. You’ll have to be the only son for a while. Can you handle the role? Needless to say, it would help if you kept Cody more in the background. Your father doesn’t need to know that you two are ‘an item’. Agreed””

Blair not only agreed, he understood. His dad could only handle one daughter at a time. Besides, there was no need for either of his parents to know what he wore when he was alone with Cody. His door did, after all, have a lock.

"After your dad has got used to the idea of having Blair the prodigal son return, we’ll give him the joyous news that you, Kirk, have become his daughter — indeed, that you have always been his daughter. Kirk, you will, of course, be the one to undergo surgery as soon as it can be arranged so you won’t have to worry about skinny-dipping in front of the other girls — no boys mind you! As for you, Blair, we’ll have to have a long talk about your schooling next September now that you’re not welcome at Lewis A. Clark.”

“A military boarding school is what Blair needs,” Kirk offered.

“How about a school for the performing arts?” Blair rebutted.

“The decision can await another day. Before we wake your father, Kirk, it’s best if you decide on a new, more feminine name. I assure you that there will be no difficulty in making it your official name of record. My geek is still in the market for classic comic books.

Have you ever thought of naming yourself Ellen Margaret in memory of your birth mother? I do think the two names — hers and mine — together make a simply divine name, indeed the perfect name for a student at the Punani Academy come September.”

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. It’s a familiar theme in the TG literature, but this time with an unfamiliar twist. We've learned that Kirk is TS at age 13 and Blair is TG at age 10 and 11/12ths. Poor Laird! Does it all work out for the best? Dawn, your intrepid reporter, asks a crystal ball to predict the future of the two Finlayson family.

Choices, Chapter 18 A wedding choice

Will Maggie do right by Kirk? Will Kirk become Ellen? Will Blair stop crossdressing? Will Laird and Maggie stay together? Does Laird even have a choice?

These questions, among others, compelled me, fabulist Dawn DeWinter, to consult the occult. Once before, Madame Zeta, a fortune teller in New York City, helped me to look into the future. Then I wanted to know whether Kyle, an Iowa teen who would do “Anything for a Moped,” ended up — through happenstance or predestination — changing his gender to female, and his name to Demi. With the help of a crystal ball, Madame Zeta told me enough about Demi’s future for me, and more important, my readers, to feel assured that she was going to have a long and vigorous life.

So once again I took the Path Train to New York City in order to look for Madame Zeta at the Brazilian Tea Room in central Manhattan. I hoped she would be able to foresee far into the future of Kirk, Blair and their parents. Once again, I found her peacefully snoozing on a pool table. After I had refreshed her with a splash of water and a tumbler of brandy, I discovered that Madame Zeta’s rates have gone up significantly since I last consulted her.

She blames higher inflation and taxes, as well as the need to build a big nest-egg before she’s put out of business in December 2012. Naturally, I ask, “What’s going to happen then?” (It’s always good to have advance knowledge of the future — for example, that a volcano is going to erupt in Greenwich Village. If I knew when that was going to happen, I’d have time to seek refuge in Iceland or Hawaii.)

“I guess you’ve not been reading the tabloids, Dawn girl. Don’t you know that the Mayans predicted that the world will end at the Winter Solstice in the year 2012?”

“What the fcuk!” I exclaim, or words to that effect. “Are you telling me that I’ve got only two more years to live? I’m not ready to die. I can’t and I won’t die a virgin!”

“Calm yourself, Dawn. Don’t stain your panties.”

“Who the hell are the Mayans?” I ask myself. “I know they are Indians of some sort, but if the Mayans could really foresee the future, then why didn’t they immediately use their war elephants in days of yore to push the British back into the sea when the Brits came looking for chutney and tea?”

Madame Zeta then explains that she asked her crystal ball to predict what will happen to New York when the clock hands reaches 21 December 2012, Eastern Standard Time (that, one hour ahead of Ottumwa, Iowa).

At first, the crystal ball comes up with plenty of excuses for its fuzziness (blaming Zeta for excessive drinking and abrasive cleaning agents), but gradually a picture comes into focus. It is of a very tall dude terrorizing New York City. According to Madame Zeta, no one could mistake the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl as he lumbers down 7th Avenue. True, he appears this time in the guise of a fifty-foot-tall, cockney-speaking gecko lizard, his modesty protected by suit trousers and a feather boa; even so, Madame Zeta would recognize Quetzalcoatl anywhere because she has a memory for faces.

When it reaches its destination inside Madison Square Garden the Aztec god thunders out to the standing-room-only crowd at a hockey game: “Don’t pay no mind to de Mayans. Dose ‘ayseeds never figured ‘ow to predict de future correc’ly. And don’t put your faith neider in dem Nostramusses, Cayseeds, Shite Twelvers, Messianists, and ‘vangelists who also claim to prophesy de future. It can’t be done by no one but an Aztec god or his priest. Got it, ever’body? ‘Ave a nice day.”

The giant lizard then ambles across town and into the Hudson River. As its head disappears beneath the foamy sludge, the crystal ball shuts down completely. It will take Madame Zeta several months to convince the ball to make even minor predictions (such as whether a fully loaded pizza will give her heartburn).

After that pronouncement, Madame Zeta tried to save her fortune-telling business by finding an Aztec priest to consult, but the ones she found loitering around Times Square turned out to be frauds. One of them even tried to persuade her that the Aztecs told the future via Three Card Monte. Finding Aztec priests impossible to find, even in Manhattan, Madame Zeta went next to the Public Library on 42nd Street. There she read that the Aztecs told the future through ball games between communities. This knowledge didn’t help much because she couldn’t figure out whether a Yankee victory or a Mets loss was the better predictor of stock market prices or the winner of the Kentucky Derby.

Not knowing whether the return of Quetzalcoatl two years hence will effectively destroy her livelihood, Madame Zeta coolly informs me that I have to pay top dollar for any and all predictions:

After all, Dawn, you soon may not be able to get any insight into the futures of Blair and Ellen without having to go down to Mexico, where you’ll risk ending up becoming a human sacrifice. You don’t want to have your living heart yanked out of your still steaming body, do you?

No I don’t want that. So I buy what little information I can at Madame’s current, extortionate prices. The crystal ball deigns to tell me about a single day in the future of the Finlayson family: January 2, 1921, Blair’s wedding day approximately ten years thence. The ball assures me that advance knowledge of this one particular day will tell me and my readers all that it is safe to know about the future. In an apparent attempt to justify its price hike, the crystal ball suggests that to ask for information about a second day would have me repeat the sin of Adam and Eve by attempting to pig out on fruit from the tree of knowledge. Besides, it adds, a TG writer can’t afford the whole truth. Nor do his readers necessarily desire it.

At first, the crystal ball is as fuzzy as a dream sequence in an old movie. But gradually, like the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz, a scene comes into focus. It seems to be a hospital room, with a woman who resembles Kirk on the bed, with Maggie and Laird beside her. So it must be their daughter!

Through eavesdropping, I learn that Kirk has indeed become Ellen. Maggie, however, has never sought to change Kirk’s name legally. It was simpler, ultimately safer, she held, to pay Josh to change Kirk’s vital and school records to “Ellen Margaret, female”. Computers say that the boy never existed, which is all that matters in the Computer Age.

But it took more than computers to make Ellen into a woman so real that only her gynecologist knows the birth truth. It took the help of her brother Blair, her father Laird, her friends and mentors, and above all, it took Maggie’s help. In the end, Maggie has proved herself a far better mother than anyone would have predicted in 2010. Needless to say, she has never been able to undo all the damage she did to Blair’s trust on the night of the Big Pill Party, yet he loves her as much as he does any woman.

Through the wondrous crystal technology, my spirit drifts to a second scene, this time in the quaintly timbered “Mozart Room” of the Trapp Family Lodge on the outskirts of Stowe, a ski resort in Vermont. A calendar informs me that it is the first Saturday in January, 2021. The setting reminds me of the movie White Christmas, except that Vermont actually has snow, fresh snow, with not a yellow streak in sight.

A sign at the entrance to the Mozart Room announces a double wedding. I am surprised, yet pleased, to see that Blair is about to wed his childhood sweetheart, Cody Akins. Yes, the same Cody Akins, Kirk’s buddy who taught Blair how to love a real male, emotionally and sexually, instead of sighing over a teen pin-up. As a lark, Cody has actually invited Justin Bieber to the wedding, but Bieber, who has never heard of either bride or groom, declined the invitation.

I don’t need the crystal ball to explain why Blair and Cody have chosen the Trapp Family Lodge for the ceremony — Blair simply adores The Sound of Music, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical about the Von Trapps’ courtship, marriage and flight from the Nazis. Blair doesn’t know which role he likes best — that of Maria, played by Julie Andrews, who got the best songs to sing — or of daughter Liesl, the sixteen-year-old girl who got to kiss and nestle with Rolf, the scrumptious telegram boy.

The Trapp Family Lodge makes abundant sense, if one wants the most romantic spot for Blair in the entire state of Vermont. But why Vermont? It may seem an odd choice, since it is far from the family hearth in the Pacific Northwest and from the jobs that Blair and Cody have found in West Hollywood, California where they wait on tables whenever they are between acting jobs — which is most of the time.

But the breaks are now beginning to go their way: Cody has recently found a meal ticket in a series of TV commercials about the necessity for countries to learn their credit score before the World Bank, China and the IMF stop taking their calls; and Blair has a starring role in a movie (it will begin filming in February), in which he plays an immature, fourteen-year-old boy, who, maddened by the failure of “Global Warming” to warm up a normal winter in Minneapolis to tolerable, heats things up by burning down his school, one room at a time. It’s Blair’s angelic smile (he still looks the total naíf at age 21) that wins him the role of the cold-blooded killer — like Patty McCormack in Bad Seed or Macauley Culkin in The Good Son.

But back to the question of Vermont. Why there? Because it was one of the first states to legalize same-sex marriage and because it has the best ski hills in New England — a vital consideration to Blair’s sister, Ellen Margaret Finlayson. (Technically, Blair is not having a same-sex marriage, the crystal ball haughtily explains, because Maggie has forgotten to change his sex back to male. So far, whenever anyone has noticed the “F” beside Blair’s name, they have, assuming yet another computer foul-up, corrected it themselves to an “M”.)

Not only is Ellen Margaret going to attend Blair’s wedding, she is going to share it, for the second half of the double ceremony will see Ellen marry Oliver Kennedy Lowell III, a lawyer and yachtsman (already planning an America’s Cup challenge) from Bar Harbor, Maine. It’s Ollie who suggested the January 2nd date, because he likes the idea of starting 2021 off with a bang — actually, a pop, of champagne corks.

Since I know far less about Ollie than I did about Cody, I persuade the crystal ball to linger a while on his face, form and finances. I can see that Ollie’s physiognomy betrays the consequences of several generations of inbreeding amongst the descendants of the Puritanical founders of Boston, Massachusetts, especially after they, having fallen in love with equine show jumping, began to choose their wives for their riding skills rather than for their looks. (Ellen, for example, has developed a magnificent seat -- as well as derriere; she can guide her favorite gelding, “Alexander Kirk”, over any fence while riding side saddle.)

As a consequence of such marital choices, Ollie has a long, rectangular “horsy” face. Blair, whose tropes always seem to come from show business or the movies, told Ellen — after a “few too many” (which meant a couple of cocktails for Blair, still a drinking novice) — that Ollie reminds him of Fred Gwynne, a comedic actor known for his roles in The Munsters (as Herman) and My Cousin Vinny (as the stern Southern judge) — which is a bit unfair, considering that Ollie is barely twenty-six.

Whenever anyone intimates that Ollie has a horsy look, Ellen always shoots back (correctly, says the crystal ball) that Ollie is also hung like a stallion. To Blair, from whom no secrets are hidden, she confides that Ollie can mount her for hours. Moreover, if Ellen is — in horse lovers’ parlance — a “good seat,” Ollie has “good hands”. Blair is drunk enough on that occasion to say, “Maybe I should have volunteered for all those sex operations. Ollie sounds awesome.”

And many operations there have been — all of them made possible by Maggie’s Wednesday sessions with Dr. Bene Sentirsi (who is sitting in the second row fingering the thong he lovingly removed from Maggie’s loins after the Wedding Rehearsal).

Maggie has been almost as anxious as Ellen to erase every tell-tale sign of Ellen’s maleness in near record time. Maggie even took Ellen at fourteen to Sentirsi’s private clinic at the Playa Larga resort on the Bay of Pigs for sexual-reassignment surgery (SRS), done illicitly by one of Cuba’s most brilliant surgeons to supplement his official income, which paid him less in twelve-hours a day than a cab driver earned in eight in the resorts. (The Sentirsi clinic has long been tolerated because of its discrete service to wealthy foreign socialists and Cuban Communist elites, as well as its skills at smuggling and bribery.)

Ellen has needed a lot of help from the world’s surgeons, far more than the average candidate for SRS. Despite a fortune paid on plastic surgery, there is only so much that modern medicine can do for a boy originally as homely as Kirk. Indeed, it is a testament to money and medical science that Ellen hasn’t ended up being an ugly woman. However, there are limits to how much one can reshape a Jay-Leno brow or Frankenstein-Monster chin.

As a consequence, while her face still has too many hard edges to be called beautiful, it is a face with loads of character. A Democrat might say that Ellen looks a bit like a young Ethel Kennedy, the sports-loving widow of John F. Kennedy’s murdered brother. A Republican might say that she looks like a young Barbara Bush, wife and mother of Presidents.

Cinema-besotted Blair predicts that Ellen will, as she ages, evolve into a Grand Old Dame “like Judy Dench, Miss Marple or Helen Mirren”. Possibly, but in the meantime her chiseled looks commend Ellen to Ollie almost as much as her excellence in elite sports and her remarkable zest for life, treating almost every day as a special gift — as though she has beaten a normally mortal disease.

I have to ask the crystal ball, “Does Ollie know on their wedding day that Ellen once had male genitalia?”

The ball treats the question with some contempt: “Of course! What choice did she have? With a drama queen like Blair in her family, that “secret” was bound eventually to get out, but it was Ellen herself who first broke the news to Ollie. She waited until she had proven herself to be the “woman of his dreams” by crewing his catamaran to victory in the Marblehead Regatta. In relating her saga, Ellen explained that Maggie had paid another comic book to have Kirk’s birth, library, sports and school records replaced by hers at age thirteen. Since Kirk has never officially existed, and since Ellen’s operations have never officially occurred, she assures a silent, pensive Ollie that no one will ever be able to dispute her right to the trophies she has already won, or will win in future, as a woman. Nor, she said, did anyone have the moral right to challenge them because, “I began taking female hormones before I had a wisp of body hair. I had scarcely entered puberty. We Scots are late bloomers.”

When Ellen finally finished her story, Ollie, trophy in one hand, a gin and tonic in the other, replied simply: “Why, this is good news. I’ve never liked condoms. I shall henceforth dispense with them.”

That night in their bedroom Ollie gave exuberant, repeated proof that little had changed for the man with the good hands, and the woman with the good seat. However, it would be the first time — but definitely not the last — that he performed oral sex on a woman. Until that evening Ollie feared that “she might smell down there,” and, not wanting to lose “the world’s ideal woman”, kept his olfactory concerns to himself. (When I wonder why the Crystal Ball is careful to describe Ollie’s plunge into oral sex with Ellen as his first time “he has done it with a woman,” it sneers, “Don’t be daft, Dawn, for I’ve already told you that Ollie attended a boys’ boarding school in rural Connecticut for several years.”)

Inasmuch as Ollie has ten older siblings, there is no familial pressure to reproduce. Thus, for Ellen to bear a child of their own matters less to Ollie than does a lifetime membership in the New York Yacht Club or the Boston Athenaeum. Besides, their globe-trotting lifestyle would be unfair to a child, he says, for the child would inevitably end up in a boarding school or living at grandmother’s house. Ellen knows her man well enough to understand that, if she ever changes her mind about children, that Ollie won’t balk at adoption, provided that the child has a good “pedigree” (i.e., athletes in the family tree).

Why do Ellen and Ollie agree with her brother and Cody on Stowe for their nuptials? Well, the wedding couple both have often visited the resort, Ollie, because of its proximity to the New England coast, and Ellen (who recently graduated from Smith College in western Massachusetts) because it has the best ski hill in Vermont. Skiing is Ellen’s greatest sports passion (outside the bedroom at least), and she already possesses Olympic bronze medals for the Women’s Downhill and Giant Slalom. However, on her wedding day she is definitely going for the gold.

Laird and Maggie both attend the affair to give away one of the brides: Laird, his daughter Ellen; Maggie, her son Blair. There was no way, Laird said, that he is going to “give away Blair to a man, with Blair dressed in a wedding gown.” Thus, Maggie will do the honors.

Both parents admit to feeling uncomfortable during the ceremony because of Blair’s insistence that they honor the talent and heroism of the Von Trapp family by wearing traditional Austrian garb: Maggie in a dirndl, consisting of a white lace blouse with embroidered sleeves, a full-length red velvet dress (with a tight bodice), a long, embroidered-lace apron, as well as a necklace and earrings made from deer antlers; and Laird in a white cotton blouse and in Lederhosen, brown leather shorts (with a drop-front) held up by suspenders with a cross strap at his nipples.

Laird is not pleased to learn five minutes before the ceremony that he will be the only man in the room wearing leather shorts. “It’s just like Blair,” he pouts, “to order ‘short shorts’ for me. My legs and thighs are completely exposed; even a strip of my butt is sticking out.” He fears that every gay male in the room will be staring at his derriere.

“Why couldn’t the boy let me wear our clan’s kilt, to be true to our Scots heritage?” he moans.

Blair later explains:

Dad, if you had worn a kilt, most of our friends will conclude, given the circumstances, that you are wearing a skirt — drag, in other words. We can’t have them thinking that, because some will accuse you of trying to upstage your children, others of trying to mock our life and clothing choices, and the rest will assume that you too are TG — on the theory that an apple doesn’t far from the tree. In the latter case, I assure you that you will not want to hear their bitchy remarks about your ‘lack of fashion sense’. Dad, do you want them to say out loud that, ‘You’d think that hag would realize she’s much too old to wear skirts?’

Better shorts than a “skirt.” Even so, for the first time since his own adolescence Laird feels self-conscious about his knobby knees. The Crystal Ball, which claims to see and hear all, confirms that Laird is fortunate not to overhear what Lance Cartwright, an actor friend of Cody’s, later says about the “geezer who imagines that anyone wants to see him in hot pants.”

As Dr. Bryce Frederick Mercury-Wilde and the two grooms wait patiently at the front of the Mozart Room for the first of the brides to “process” down the center aisle — “Whoa, there, “I say to the Crystal Ball. “You really want us to believe that Dr. Mercury-Wilde of St. Wicca infamy will preside over the ceremony?”

“Why yes, whom (the Ball is proud of its grammar) do you expect to preside? He is, after all, the only religious minister that Blair and Ellen have ever knowingly met, and you must admit that he did play an important, albeit brief, role in both their lives.”

“Ah yes, but especially in Ellen’s. I remember now: Mercury-Wilde was the first person ever to say that Kirk, though dressed in boys wear, seemed more intrinsically feminine than Blair did, even wearing a dress.”

“Yes,” I replied. “The preacher gave Kirk the hope that precedes change.”

“You don’t need to stress the words ‘hope and change’,” groans the Crystal Ball. Your feeble attempt at an Obama-ism is further proof that your wordplay is more pedestrian than Olympian. Indeed, one might reasonably say that just as Kirk’s encounter with Dr. Mercury-Wilde unintentionally watered the seeds of hope from which Ellen sprouted, that you may have also, quite unintentionally, proven to yourself (as well as to your readers) through this writing exercise that you too have a choice — in this instance, the choice of a more fitting career than that of a fictional writer of a fiction that purports to be non-fiction. Have I made myself clear?”

Well, I never. I am the Ball’s intellectual superior! I’m the one ultimately paying for the ammonia cleaner it needs in order to shine! By what right does a hunk of cheap plastic have to insult me?

“And you,” I snarl to the Crystal Ball, “might choose to shut up!”

It is the wrong thing to say. The Crystal Ball clams up. It says not another word. Madame Zeta chides me, “Dawn, dear. Don’t you think it a tiny bit unwise to tell a seer of the future not to tell you anything more about it? Unfortunately, we’ll have to turn to a back-up.”

She then turns the belly button of “Harvey,” a six-foot-tall, stuffed rabbit sitting a foot from the table. I haven’t noticed it till now, but giving it close attention, I realize that it must have been a masterpiece of taxidermy until it began to molt. A 1950s’ television screen is located just below the rabbit’s navel.

“What’s wrong with this?” I ask, pointing to Harvey’s groin. “Won’t television give us better reception than a scratched, clouded and flattened Crystal Ball? (I am trying to get the Ball’s goat. I know it is still listening).

“I’m afraid not. As you see, the television set is an antique, and thus is not hooked up for cable. I’m afraid we’ll have to use the rabbit ears as an antenna.”

I hear the crystal ball groan, but it remains dark, giving nothing away.

It’s through the help of the many flickering “ghosts” on the 1950s’ television screen that I can complete the tale of Laird and his family. If anything turns out not to be strictly accurate when the year 2021 rolls around, it’s probably my fault, not the ghosts’, because I wasn’t always listening as closely as I should, inasmuch as I was constantly having to adjust the horizontal and vertical to get any sort of picture at all.

Now where were we? Ah, yes, with Dr. Mercury-Wilde presiding over the joint wedding. You may be wondering why the grooms have agreed to such an exotic choice. Well, it appears that Cody no longer has a choice, having a decade earlier chosen to persuade Blair to be more forceful, and less passive, in his interpersonal relations. Blair carefully listened, and over time their roles have switched. As a result, Blair has been in control of their wedding plans.

As for Ollie, he is delighted to have Dr. Mercury-Wilde officiate, for he has known the erstwhile preacher for six years as a de-motivational speaker at Government seminars, a role that the preacher adopted soon after a bankrupt St. Wicca’s became a gay dance and show bar.

It turns out that Mercury-Wilde has a knack for explaining to regulatory agencies that, since they live nihilistically and existentially in an entropic universe without God, that, “Their attempts at regulation are a futile effort to bring about a higher good. He recommends to regulators that they seek the inner peace that comes through full, friendly cooperation with the business world.”

While the exact message doesn’t mean a lot to Ollie, spender of old money rather than seeker of new, he applauds anyone whose essential message to the world is, “Why can’t we all get along?” Thus, he warmly “thirds” the hiring of Mercury-Wilde for the wedding ceremony.

And now the erstwhile preacher, garbed in a flowery silk kimono, waits with the tuxedoed grooms as Blair, followed by Maggie, fairly skips down the central aisle in spiked heels, bare legs (waxed to a sheen) and a careful reproduction of the red satin gown, with a sensual shimmer, peasant neckline and puff sleeves, worn by Bette Davis, playing a memorably bitchy Southern belle, to the Olympus Ball in an Oscar-winning movie from 1938 called Jezebel.

In antebellum New Orleans, the red dress makes Bette’s character, Julie, resemble a prostitute; and it still has the power to appall Stowe, Vermont: “I gather Blair wants us to know that he’s not a virgin — as though any of us thought he might be,” mutters a society matron in an aside.

There are contrary murmurs: “Ah, Blair is always so considerate; he’s allowing Ellen to star alone in white.”

“And well he should. After all, Ellen is the only woman getting married today. I don’t know why Blair feels the need to wear a dress at all?”

“You must be a guest of Ollie’s or you’d realize that Blair has been wearing skirts longer than Ellen.”

“Do you mean that Blair crossdresses most of the time?”

“No, generally he dresses like the flamboyant male actor that he is. But whenever he wants to get Cody really randy, Blair dresses in his most suggestive women’s finery.”

“Yes, I heard that Cody actually begged Blair to wear a wedding dress, and that it was Maggie who insisted that he not wear white, so as not to compete with Ellen.”

“I don’t understand — “Why does Cody want Blair to get married in a dress?”

“Cody certainly didn’t impose anything on Blair. It’s a mutual decision. I gather Blair was posing as a girl the first time they ever had sex — that was eons ago when they were both mere children.”

“I see: the sex is best when Blair plays the wench.”

“From what I’ve heard, silky lingerie turns Cody wild. And Blair does look totally believable and beautiful as a woman. Such small, delicate hands. And Mick and Bianca Jagger lips. I’ve never seen a man with a smaller Adam’s Apple.”

“The blond, shoulder-length hair — is it actually his?”

There are several murmurs about Blair’s “do”, but no consensus emerges on whether he has grown his hair long “for the occasion” or simply bought a wig. On the other hand, everyone “just knows” that Blair is still “male enough” to require lots of padding to mimic a woman’s curves. One individual of indeterminate gender who seems to be “in the know,” claims that Blair’s breast attachments are of “such high quality” that “they warm up to his body temperature and feel real to the touch. Imagine that.”

“Imagine that! Is it true that Blair owns a fake vagina?”

“He certainly does, yet I doubt he’s wearing it now. Still, from what I’ve heard, he’ll definitely need it for the honeymoon. Where Cody is concerned, the more orifices the better.”

The ladies’ uninformed speculations are driving me crazy. I walk over to the television set, grab and shake its rabbit ears, while demanding to know how much of the gossip is true. “For starters, why is Blair wearing a red dress and has he grown his hair down past his shoulders for the wedding?”

The television ghosts temporarily disappear. The picture briefly looks unusually clear: “How should I know?” says the TV set. “What do you think I am? A crystal ball?”

Evidently that is all I am going to learn about Blair’s motivation and performance on his wedding day. Fortunately, I don’t need the television’s help to recognize his processional music: It’s a recording of “Something Good” from The Sound of Music:

Perhaps I had a wicked childhood
Perhaps I had a miserable youth
But somewhere in my wicked miserable past
There must have been a moment of truth
For here you are standing there loving me
Whether or not you should
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good
Nothing comes from nothing
Nothing ever could
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good.

As they reach the front, Blair takes Cody’s hands and together they continue the song a cappella, (with Blair taking Maria’s part, and Cody, that of Captain Von Trapp):

CODY:
For here you are standing there loving me
Whether or not you should
BLAIR:
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good
BLAIR AND CODY:
Nothing comes from nothing
Nothing ever could
BLAIR:
So somewhere in my youth
CODY:
Or childhood
BLAIR:
I must have done something
BLAIR AND CODY:
Something good...

As hoped, their audience rises in standing ovation, and remains standing while Ellen and Laird, arm-in-arm, slowly proceed down the broad aisle. Ellen is wearing high-heeled platform pumps in Diamond white silk (with peep toes, each adorned by a Swarovski crystal) and the same modestly flamboyant, floor-length, white gown (with full sleeves) made of Shantung silk that Julie Andrews wore to marry Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music. Its cathedral train and long, flowing veil are kept aloft by two seven-year-old girls dressed as page boys. Ellen has copious tears in her eyes as Big Al, her best friend from childhood, in a soaring baritone belts outs, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” from The Sound of Music:

Climb every mountain
Search high and low
Follow every byway
Every path you know

Climb every mountain
Ford every stream
Follow every rainbow
Till you find your dream

A dream that will need
All the love you can give
Every day of your life
For as long as you live

Climb every mountain
Ford every stream
Follow every rainbow
Till you find your dream (And reprise)

There isn’t a single dry eye in the Mozart Room. Even as tears stream down his cheeks, Laird’s face shines with pride in his daughter.

Once again tongues quietly wag: “Isn’t her dress divine? It’s just like the one that Julie Andrew wore in the musical. She’s marrying her own Captain Von Trapp. How romantic!”

“Well, in my humble opinion, the dress is old-fashioned and frumpy — the sort of thing an ex-nun like Maria would wear. Ellen should have worn something more au courant, something strapless — to show off her magnificent breasts — like Jennifer Garner wore in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.”

”Don’t tell me you liked that movie! Ellen would look even better in Kate Hudson’s wedding dress in You, Me and Dupree.”

“Another dog of a movie! In it, Kate Hudson was getting married in Hawaii; Ellen would freeze to death if she wore that dress in January, in Vermont. “

And so it went — most of the comments concerned, as they normally do at wedding, the bride’s gown. There were, of course, some remarks, all positive, on the bride’s beauty, usually along the lines of “Ellen simply radiates poise and beauty. She’s never looked lovelier.”

Only Babs, Ollie’s ex-fiancée, is tacky enough to say the obvious — that Blair is still a more beautiful female than Ellen — when he wants to be. And yet, as Babs’ mother immediately ripostes:

"Blair still acts the part of a frivolous, adolescent girl. It’s a role that will wear thin as he ages. Ellen, on the other hand, is the very essence of a mature, adult woman, which I find remarkable for one so young. Babs darling, there is much you could learn from Ellen about what it takes to become a complete woman, capable of capturing and keeping a real man like Ollie."

It is unknown what Babs or her mother will have to say if either of them subsequently learns about Ellen’s sex at birth. However, this is clearly a closely-held secret in 2021.

The second bridal party also includes the Maid of Honor for both: It’s Angela Torres, Ellen’s first roommate at the Punani Academy. The elder by two years, Ellen has grown into a “big sister” to Angela. Consequently, when Angela’s mother, having achieved her goal of thoroughly alienating her ex-husband from his erstwhile son, decided against spending additional money on “the wretched child,” Ellen persuaded Maggie to pay for Angela’s last year at the Punani Academy and for the girl’s gender-confirmation surgery at age eighteen (done locally, legally, and in Dr. Sentirsi’s case, non-lustfully).

Maggie has thus ended up with two daughters, plus Blair, who often plays the part of one. After the wedding, according to the knows-a-lot television set, Angela will be the only one of Maggie’s “children” still living at home (in Ellen’s old room, where she has been ensconced since Ellen left for Smith College).

Briefly I am worried for Angela’s sake — “She’s not going to end up a lonely old maid, is she?”

Madame Zeta gives me a withering look: “Get a grip, Dawn, Angela’s only twenty-years-old in January 2021. There is lots of time for her to find someone to love. Considering the way she looks in that strapless bridesmaid’s dress (cocktail length, in buttercup yellow gauze, with rouched bodice and tatted lace hem) I can’t imagine she has any trouble attracting beaus. One of them surely will, like Ollie, forgive an inability to have children.”

“Maybe she will be able to have them,” I then remark; “who knows what marvels medicine may have achieved by 2030? Look at all the breakthroughs in genetic research: They could make it possible for Angela or Ellen to conceive a baby by her own husband’s sperm, at least with the help of a Petri dish. And gosh, an artificial uterus should be snap for the doctors to make in the 2030’s. Tell me, Telly, will Angela or Ellen ever give birth?”

The television set, unamused by the nickname, briefly flickers in annoyance before bringing into focus (well, into focus by 1950’s standards — there are still a lot of ghosts) the rest of the wedding ceremony.

The second bridal party soon reaches the front of the Mozart Room where Ollie (as well as Blair, Cody and Maggie) await. Ellen briefly falters; and then, departing from script, turns to the audience to say, “Please, would all of you join me in applauding my mother Maggie? If it weren’t for her, I would never have had this joyous moment. Mother, you have my eternal love and gratitude.” The audience, already standing, stamps its feet in appreciation.

Unversed in religion, the two couples borrow their brief wedding vows from an Internet site:

"We are assembled here to celebrate the joining of Ellen and Blair to Oliver and Cody, respectively, in the unity of marriage. There are no obligations on earth sweeter or more tender than those you are about to assume. There are no vows more solemn than those you are about to make."

Who gives Ellen and Blair in marriage?

Laird and Maggie answer — he for Ellen, she for Blair.

Then the minister says to Ollie:

"Will you take this woman to be your wedded wife? Will you love her, comfort her, through good times and bad, in sickness and in health, honor her at all times and be faithful to her?"

Ollie answered “I will”.

Then Mercury-Wilde turns to Cody:

"Will you take this man to be your wedded wife? Will you love him, comfort him, through good times and bad, in sickness and in health, honor him at all times and be faithful to him?”

Cody answered “I will”.

And next to Ellen: "Will you take Oliver to be your wedded husband? Will you love him, comfort him, through good times and bad, in sickness and in health, honor him at all times and be faithful to him?"

Ellen answered “I will”.

And then to Blair:

"Will you take Cody to be your wedded husband? Will you love him, comfort him, through good times and bad, in sickness and in health, honor him at all times and be faithful to him?"

Blair answered “I will”.

And finally to all four:

"As you take these preliminary vows, Oliver and Ellen, Cody and Blair, I would have you remember: To love is to come together from the pathways of our past and then move forward, hand in hand, along the uncharted roads of our future, ready to risk, to dream, and to dare.
If there is an exchanging of rings, kindly present them."

Dr. Mercury-Wilde then says, first to Ollie, and then to Cody:

"Please place the ring on Ellen’s finger and repeat after me: I, Oliver, take you, Ellen, to be my wife, to love and cherish from this day forward, and thereto pledge you my faith. With this ring, I thee wed."

With similar words, Cody, Ellen and Blair also pledge their fidelity with rings.

And finally the climax:

"Oliver and Ellen, Cody and Blair, inasmuch as you have consented together in the union of matrimony and have pledged your faith to each other in the presence of this company, I now pronounce you Husband and Wife."

"YOU MAY KISS YOUR BRIDE!"

Blair swoons, his lips unkissed, theatrically to the floor. While helping Cody to raise Blair to his feet, Mercury-Wilde steals a French kiss from an insentient Blair, which no one but I, Dawn — thanks to the rabbit ears — notices, as Mercury-Wilde adeptly keeps Blair’s back to Cody and the audience.

Blair, still woozy, is mightily confused: “Did Cody just kiss me? If so, why is he already coming back for seconds? And why does my hubby have foul breath today? I can’t handle another kiss like that until he takes a breath mint.”

With the bride now standoffish, the groom doesn’t know what to do next. The gay newlyweds look at each other blankly, while the hands of Mercury-Wilde discretely, yet sensuously, fondle the inner curves of their buttocks.

Both the bride and groom, at first thankful for his “moral support”, smile briefly and wanly in the ex-preacher’s general direction. However, their eyes soon widen and their jaws clench as the minister’s hands move ever more wantonly. Shantung fabric, stretched taut, effectively protects Blair’s “privacy”, but thin, loose-fitting, polyester/wool trousers let down Cody. After a quick, involuntary yelp, Cody “feels” that he has no choice but to sidle even farther away from his bride and their lecherous celebrant.

At this point, Mercury-Wilde, realizing that he has gone too far, scuttles from the Mozart Room. He finally appreciates that this is not the right time to ask Blair and Cody (especially Cody) if they are interested in a honeymoon foursome with Bruno and him. He’ll phone the newlyweds first thing tomorrow to make his proposition before they fly off to Salzburg, Austria to take “The Sound of Music” bus tour and to London to attend the revival of “Billy Elliot: The Musical”, with Daniel Radcliffe (of Harry Potter fame) in the role of thirteen-year-old Billy.

I am aghast! Not by the curious casting, but by Dr. Mercury-Wilde’s machinations. They are shockingly devious for a Wall Street executive.

“Will Blair and Cody say yes to his proposition?” I beg to know.

“What do you think, dummy?”

I could have done without the sarcasm. I was simply asking what every one of my readers is anxious to know. The Blair I knew at ten would be far too romantic to consent to a four-man honeymoon. Yet the past decade seems to have changed him. He’s definitely more assertive. Is he also more adventurous or, after ten years of sex play with Cody, even a bit jaded? I can’t say, and the television set doesn’t say; but I do know this — it’s not ideal to learn about one’s sexuality at too young an age.

Meanwhile, back in the Mozart Room, Blair and Cody, still standing almost a yard apart and unsure how to re-connect, shuffle their feet. So too do many in the audience. This is not the Hollywood production that the attendees anticipated from the normally “gay” gay couple.

Thanks to Blair’s vapors and the minister’s presumption, Ellen and Ollie enjoy uncontested center stage. As they embrace in the limelight, they linger … and … linger … on the kiss that seals their marital bliss.

The audience erupts in applause, prompting Blair, his lips firmly closed, to bestow a dry kiss on his beloved. Cody, taking Blair into his arms, finally kisses his bride. “Gosh,” sighs Blair, his lips letting down their guard, “that’s the Cody I know. It’s taken him only a couple of minutes to improve his breath and technique by a thousand percent. How does he do it?” This time, with his own back to the audience, Cody, now thoroughly aroused, presses his “joy stick” into Blair’s hand.

“Behave yourself, little brother,” Ellen whispers. You two can wait for the honeymoon if Ollie and I can.” She and Ollie then win another round of applause for the longest kiss yet — it is a ladylike kiss, like the one Ingrid Bergman bestows on Humphrey Bogart in the movie Casablanca.

Blair withdraws his hand long enough to cue the release of the two dozen doves from the cages that he’s secreted behind a velvet curtain at the front of the Mozart Room. Majestically, romantically, the doves soar to the ceiling of the salon — like prayers to Heaven for the wedded bliss of the two young couples.

Or so it seems until the doves, freaking at the enclosed space, start flying frantically above the audience in ever-narrowing circles, panic loosening their bowels. Mid-air collisions soon cause them to plummet to the ground like pelicans dive-bombing for fish.

“I don’t know why they’re doing this,” Blair gasps, as he steps daintily around a stunned dove, to drag his husband (his tuxedo splattered) towards an exit; “They behaved much better when I saw the very same birds released at a gay wedding at Russian River last summer.”
“That was an outdoor wedding,” Cody moans.

Breathless from sudden exertion, Maggie, asks her husband as they run from the Mozart Room: “Laird … which one … do you think … will be first … to give me a granddaughter?”

“Maybe … maybe … neither,” Laird gasps: “Ellen and Blair … may both choose … to adopt a boy.” He bends over to catch his breath.

“We can’t let the child’s gender at birth … be an obstacle, can we?” Maggie replies after they had reached “safety”. No longer winded, she declares: “My choice is definitely a granddaughter, one way or another. On that I am unanimous.”

The television suddenly goes dead. When I complain, when I ask to know if the two couples will live happily ever after, Madame Zeta chides me:

"I promised you a happy ending, and you’ve got it. Now you know that Ellen and Blair will be happy on their wedding day some ten years hence. What more do you want from me? To predict whether they will have happy marriages? No one can predict that. The outcome of a marriage is subject to so many variables that a happy ending depends on having a lot of luck. Will Ellen and Blair continue to bask in Good Fortune? The answer lies far beyond the capabilities of my rabbit Harvey or my crystal ball, of Tarot cards or I-ching dice, of tea leaves and coffee grounds, or of a witch’s cauldron or Delphic oracle, or even of goat entrails or chicken bones to reveal. I suggest that you either consult an Aztec priest, if you can find one in New York, or you can return on Tuesday for my weekly, group séance at which we use a Ouija Board. The Ouija may be able to tell you something more."

Take advice from an Ouija Board? Not on your life! I’ve seen the trouble it made for Dr. Mercury-Wilde. Kirk punched him out, remember? I’ve got a glass jaw. If I get hit by someone, I may never get back up.

“Be sure to take an advertising brochure,” Madame Zeta calls out to me, as I head off to my unknown future.

- THE END —

To those who have read thus far: “May you be poor in misfortune, rich in blessings, slow to make enemies and quick to make friends. And may you know nothing but happiness from this day forward.”