None of the Above(34)

“You mean, in court?” I didn’t know if my dad could afford a lawyer.

“We’ll see if there’s an issue,” my dad said, still scrolling through an article. He clicked through to another article and there was a close-up of a runner. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.

“Is that her?” I asked.

My dad nodded. We both stared at a shot of Caster waving the South African flag after winning a race. She had tight cornrows that emphasized her thick eyebrows and the hair on her upper lip, and her toned arms and six-pack reminded me uncomfortably of Sam’s. In her yellow-and-green skintight track uniform, you could see that she was flat as a pancake, and that she definitely did not have what my aunt Carla called childbearing hips.

My dad clicked on the little triangle at the center of the picture, and a video played.

“When she won the eight-hundred-meter dash at the 2009 world championships in a time of 1:55.45, Caster Semenya was just eighteen years old,” a woman with a British accent said. “Because she had improved her personal best time by eight seconds in less than a year, officials decided that they were ‘obliged to investigate’ for performance-enhancing drugs. When they found a level of testosterone that was four times that of a normal woman, this sparked a gender-verification test and a year-long ban from competition. But Caster Semenya and her family insist that she is a girl. The controversy has sparked a firestorm of criticism against the International Association of Athletics Federations’ handling of the matter, with some accusing the organization of being sexist, racist, and insensitive to privacy and human rights.”

Next they had clips of an interview with Caster’s father: “She is my little girl. I raised her and I have never doubted her gender. She is a woman and I can repeat that a million times.” They showed pictures of the South African town she grew up in, and interviewed her high school teacher and her grandmother, who told the camera, “It is God who made her look this way.” And then they ran a clip of an interview with Caster.

Her head was bowed, except for when she took a swig of her water, and the guy interviewing her was offscreen so you could only hear his voice. You assumed it was a man, and he asked the usual questions about her time and whether she would set a world record. Then Caster talked, and her voice was deeper than his. My dad gave a start.

As I stood behind him, trying not to have a panic attack, my dad searched “intersex test,” and I got to read about how in the seventies, before lab testing was developed, officials would have all the girl athletes parade naked in front of doctors to make sure all their parts were in order. Then he clicked on a link to a David Letterman skit about a “gender verification test” that involved hitting a person in the crotch with a baseball bat. My dad swore and closed the tab right away, but I’d seen enough to make me feel sick.

Together, we found another article about Caster where this women’s magazine gave her a makeover. They’d put on hair extensions, stuffed her in a dress, and decorated her with earrings and dangly bracelets. LOOK AT OUR CASTER NOW! In some ways, that was the worst of all. How easily you could make someone look more “feminine.” How easily you could turn a freak into a homecoming queen.

One thing Coach Auerbach hadn’t mentioned was that, even though Semenya was cleared to race in the Olympics, some people thought that she had thrown the gold medal race because she didn’t want to face any more controversy, and didn’t want to be accused of having an unfair advantage. And who could blame her?

My dad surfed onto a video of Caster at a press conference a year after the controversy broke. While he watched Caster talk about staying positive as an athlete, all I saw were the YouTube user comments underneath. God, it sounds like a dude, said one. It LOOKS like a dude too, said another. Then: OK here’s the real test. What guy would want to stick his wiener there?

And all of a sudden it was too much.

“Turn it off,” I said loudly. My dad jumped. “Please turn it off,” I pleaded.

He blinked and shut his browser. “Honey, why don’t you go see if there’s a game on?” my dad asked. “I’ll be done in a second. I can make popcorn.”

I swallowed. My dad’s hand was still on the mouse. I might not have the stomach to read any more, but he did. When my mom was throwing up from chemotherapy, all I could do was hold her hand. But my father researched every kind of antinausea treatment and came home with ginger and peppermint oil and DIY acupuncture wrist bracelets. It’s what he did to keep the powerlessness from eating him alive.

I shook my head and gave him a kiss on the head. “You keep reading. I’m going to bed.”

I trudged up the stairs to my bedroom, telling myself, I don’t look like Caster. I look like a woman. I am a woman. Dr. Cheng said so. Just to prove it to myself, I dug into my closet and got the emerald-green Victoria’s Secret nightie that Sam had given me for Christmas. I put it on and posed in front of a mirror. I told myself that if I took a picture and posted it on Craigslist personals I would get hundreds of responses.

I would. I knew I would.

But the only response that I wanted was one from Sam. With shaking fingers, I tore off the nightie. Even after I’d curled into bed in my flannel pajamas, though, all I could think about was Sam, and each memory was like a hot poker in my chest: The look of joy on his face when he saw how pleased I was with his gift. The way his lips parted ever so slightly when I modeled it for the first time. The feel of his biceps against my rib cage when he lifted me up for a kiss.