If I Was Your Girl(3)

“She seems nice,” I said.

“She’s a good waitress,” Dad said. He nodded stiffly. I drummed my fingers on the counter and wiggled my foot back and forth absentmindedly.

“Thank you for letting me stay with you,” I said softly. “It means a lot.”

“Least I could do.”

Mary Anne brought our food and excused herself to greet a pair of white-haired older men in plaid work shirts.

One of the men stopped to talk to Dad. His nose was round and spider-webbed with purple veins, his eyes hidden under storm-cloud brows. “Who’s this little beam of sunshine?” he asked, leaning past Dad to wave at me. I turned so he couldn’t see my black eye.

“Amanda,” Dad mumbled. “My daughter.”

The man whistled and slapped Dad’s shoulder. “Well, no wonder I ain’t seen her before! If I had a daughter as cute as this’n I’d keep her hid away too.” My cheeks burned. “You just tell me if any of the boys get too fresh, now, and I’ll loan you my rifle.”

“I don’t think that will be a problem,” Dad said haltingly.

“Oh, trust me,” he said, winking, “I had three daughters, not a one of them half as pretty as this one in their time, and it was still all I could do to keep the boys away.”

“Okay,” Dad said. “Thanks for the advice. Looks like your coffee’s getting cold.”

The man said goodbye, winked again, and walked stiffly to his seat. I turned my attention straight ahead. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Dad doing the same.

“Ready to go?” he asked finally.

He got up without waiting for a response and threw a twenty-dollar bill on the table next to our half-finished meals. We didn’t make eye contact as we got in the car and pulled out of the parking lot.



NOVEMBER, THREE YEARS AGO

The hospital bed creaked as Mom sat and rubbed my leg through the thin blanket. A forced smile tightened her apple cheeks but failed to reach her eyes. Her clothes looked baggy; she must not have eaten since I was admitted, to have lost so much weight.

“I talked with the counselor,” she said. Her accent was so different from mine, light and musical.

I said, “What about?” My voice sounded like nothing—flat, toneless, with the faintest deepening that made me never want to speak again. My stomach cramped and twisted.

“When it’s safe for you to come home. I told ’em I was worried ’bout what you might do when you’re alone, since I can’t take any more time off work. I couldn’t survive it if I came home and found you…” she trailed off, staring at the light-yellow wall.

“What did the counselor say?” I had met with him a few days before. When he asked me what was wrong with me, I wrote six words on a notepad, my throat still too sore from the stomach pump to speak.

“He said there’s ways to treat what’s wrong with you,” Mom said. “But he wouldn’t say what it is.” She peered at me.

“You won’t want me to come home if I tell you what’s wrong,” I said, shifting my eyes down. “You won’t ever want to see me again.” This was the most I’d said at once in weeks. My throat ached from the effort.

“That ain’t possible,” she said. “There ain’t a thing in God’s creation that could undo the love I have for my son.”

I brought my wrist up to my chest and looked down. The identification bracelet said my name was Andrew Hardy. If I died, I realized, Andrew was the name they would put on my tombstone.

“What if your son told you he was your daughter?”

My mother was quiet for a moment. I thought of the words I wrote down for the counselor: I should have been a girl.

Finally, she brought her eyes to meet mine. Her expression was fierce, despite her round, red cheeks.

“Listen to me.” Her hand squeezed my leg hard enough that the pain broke through the fog of my meds. When she spoke next, I listened. “Anything, anyone, is better than a dead son.”





2

Lambertville High sat at the bottom of a hill, dozens of beat-up trucks and station wagons clustered near the entrance. Small pockets of students hovered near the front door, the boys conspicuously slouched and the girls straight-backed and high-chinned, all radiating as much transparent disinterest in one another as possible.

I had barely slept the night before. I gave up trying at five and drank a chocolate-flavored nutritional shake with my medicine: two two-milligram estradiol tablets, which were tiny and blue and tasted like chalk, to feminize my appearance and stand in for the testosterone my body could no longer make, and one ten-milligram Lexapro tablet, which was round and white and waxy, to help me stay calm.

I kept my eyes straight ahead and walked through the double doors, hoping the concealer I wore over the faded, yellowish remnants of my black eye did its job. Inside, the floor was an alternating pattern of green, brown, and gold-flecked white tiles. Fluorescent lights buzzed angrily, but for all their fury, the halls were dimly lit. Display cases lined the walls, shelf after shelf of trophies for cheerleading, marching band, baseball, and especially football, with records reaching back far enough that half the team photos were sepia-toned. The red classroom doors bore faded-looking numbers, and I followed them to 118, the homeroom marked on my schedule.