None of the Above(21)

Sam gave him the middle finger, but stood up anyway and handed me a towel. The other people in the hot tub hooted, and I had a vague sensation that I should be embarrassed, that I should be a little afraid. And then Sam lifted me up over his shoulder, and my teeth were chattering in the freezing air, and all I needed was to be warm again.

Up in the master bedroom Sam stripped off his suit as soon as we shut the door, and grabbed at mine. Before I knew it I was naked, chattering. I groped at the bed in moonlight. We hadn’t even bothered to figure out how to turn the lights on.

I slid under the cotton sheets. My hair was still wet, the sheets cool, and goose bumps formed on my arms. When our skin touched it burned so sweetly I closed my eyes. His body enveloped me, devouring me. I didn’t notice the cold again. Sam’s hands were everywhere.

And then they were there.

“Oh, God, baby.”

I held my breath, waiting for the pain, but it didn’t come. Not at first.

“Hold on a sec,” Sam said, and all of a sudden he was gone. I heard him rustling around the gym bag we’d left our clothes in. “I knew I had one somewhere . . . there it is.”

When he got back in bed my pulse quickened, and I wasn’t sure if it was from lust or fear.

“Be gentle, okay?” I whispered.

He bent down, and I forced myself to take in deep, even breaths.

At first, my crappy attempts at Lamaze did the trick. Or maybe it was the tequila. Sam groaned.

I kept my hips still, afraid to move, and for a minute, things worked. I almost laughed out loud with relief.

I was having sex. With a boy. And he was warm and he thought I was sexy when I laughed and he didn’t notice that my body was a lemon.

I started moving my hips, sliding my hands along the light hairs on his back. I could feel his glutes tighten as he moved and when I reached down to touch them they were so delicious that I pulled him against me.

Mistake.

I closed my eyes with the pain but managed to stay quiet. When my fingers clenched, Sam must’ve thought it was because I was so into things, because he went faster. I gritted my teeth, and turned my head. Just before I couldn’t take it anymore, Sam shuddered and collapsed on the bed next to me. I turned my head away to wipe my tears on the pillow and when I turned back Sam’s eyes were still closed.

“Oh, baby,” he said, still catching his breath. “Oh, baby.”

After a few minutes, Sam started snoring. I pulled my legs together and rolled off the bed. The pain made me stagger to my knees. I could feel it in my belly, a burning deep inside, in a place that shouldn’t be allowed to hurt. Somehow I managed to pull my clothes out of Sam’s duffel bag and drag them on. Why had I decided to wear skinny jeans? I crab-walked to the door so my jeans wouldn’t rub against my already raw skin.

Out in the darkened hallway, I shut the door and leaned back with my eyes closed. The party rumbled on, and I could hear at least one of the other bedrooms at the far end of the hallway getting some use. For several minutes, I stood there frozen, wondering if Sam and I had sounded like that.

No. I hadn’t been making any cries of pleasure.

I stumbled toward the stairs, wincing with each step. I told myself what Coach Auerbach always told us before each meet: no pain, no gain. I’d done what I’d set out to do. We’d had sex, and Sam hadn’t noticed anything. Wasn’t that what I wanted?

I only got two steps down the stairs before I started crying.

I turned back into the darkness. There was a bathroom at the top of the stairs, but it was locked. I jiggled the handle so they’d know someone was waiting. I heard someone puking, and wiped away my tears.

“Everything okay in there?” I said.

“Yeah, yeah. It’s all peaches and cream,” a familiar voice yelled back.

“Vee? It’s Krissy.” The door opened a crack and Vee waved me in. Faith knelt, praying to the porcelain gods. The room reeked, and I felt queasy myself.

“I told her not to mix a screwdriver with a mudslide.” Vee shrugged. “You okay?”

By the way Vee stared at me, I knew my mascara must be a mess.

I covered my mouth with my hand, suddenly overwhelmed by nausea and pain. “Oh my God, I need to sit down.”

She cleared the way for me to sit on the edge of the bathtub, but when I sat it drove the crotch of my jeans up, bringing new tears to my eyes. I gasped and fell onto my knees.

“God, Krissy. What happened?” Vee looked closer, took in my sex hair and my new hickey. Her lips flattened. “Did Wilmington do this to you? That son of a bitch . . .”

And that’s what did me in. After holding it together through all the doctor visits and the awkward conversations with my dad and the f*cking advice from Aunt Carla, the thing that tipped me over the edge wasn’t the world’s most painful vaginal dilation. It was Vee being sympathetic.

I was so sick of being strong, of keeping it all bottled in.

So I let the floodgates open.

“It’s not Sam,” I said. “It’s me. I found out last week that I’m intersex.”

Vee’s furrowed brow told me she did not compute, so I swallowed and tried again.

“I’m a hermaphrodite.”

For a moment Vee’s face went completely blank. Then she laughed.





CHAPTER 11


Back in eighth grade, when the typical thing we did on Friday nights was have a sleepover at Faith’s house and stay up all night singing “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” until her parents made us shut up, Vee, Faith, and I spent months perfecting our ability to lie with a straight face. Let me tell you this: there is nothing in the universe that is half as funny as seeing your prim-as-a-parasol, Bible-studying friend Faith go up to the douchiest member of the boys’ basketball team and tell him with a straight face that the extra-small condoms he ordered accidentally got delivered to her house, and where would he like her to leave them?