None of the Above(50)

I pulled the pancakes out of the oven, where he’d put them to keep them warm. “Thanks, Dad. But you didn’t have to do that. Cereal’s fine.”

“Oh, it’s Thanksgiving week, so I just wanted to do something special for my girl.”

The roughness of his voice made me suspicious. After my therapy session, I’d told my dad about Dr. LaForte’s theory that I was depressed and he’d jumped on the “eat healthy and exercise” bandwagon.

My suspicion grew when my dad said a little too casually, “It’s a beautiful day. Why don’t we go for a run together?”

I took a bite of a pancake, and a blueberry exploded in my mouth. “Are you sure?” I wasn’t even certain my dad owned a pair of sneakers, but he nodded. “Okay, but you’ll have to tell me if I’m going too fast,” I said, slurping down a glass of orange juice. If my dad thought that I wouldn’t back down from a challenge, he was right.

The moment we stepped outside into the crisp, sunny November air, my heart beat faster in anticipation of the run. “Where do you want to go?” I asked, jogging in place as my dad stretched.

“Let’s just stay around here.”

I frowned. “Can’t we go to the park?” I could see some of our neighbors already out raking leaves or walking their dogs. The elliptical sounded good right now, all private in our basement.

“I don’t want to cut through the meadow. It’ll be all wet from the dew. Come on.” He started running. His stance was so bad I almost laughed. He held his wrists super loose and they flopped around like clappers.

“Dad! You run like a girl!” I shouted after him, because it had always been a point of pride for me that I didn’t, a fact that made me want to both laugh and cry.

Bracing myself for the stares, I started to run, and caught up with my dad in just a few strides. I kept my eyes on the pavement a few feet ahead, focusing on my breathing. Even though my hands wanted to clench into fists, I willed them to relax. Coach Auerbach would’ve been proud of my karate chops.

I saw one of our neighbor’s kids riding his bike toward us, and I sprinted out ahead of my father and crossed the street. But before we reached the end of the block, old Mr. Mullen came out dragging his garbage can. “Ahoy, Lattimers!” He waved, not fazed at all. He probably hadn’t heard the news.

There were four more blocks before the main intersection, and I avoided the one with the most kids. Along my alternate route, though, a few boys were playing street hockey with a ratty orange tennis ball. They took up the entire street, and both sidewalks. I slowed down and was about to turn back when my father puffed up from behind me and kept on straight.

I kept my eyes on the pavement.

“Hey, Krissy!” one of the boys shouted. It was Evan Constantino. I’d been his camp counselor a few summers ago. Taught him how to swim. He raised his hockey stick in the air in greeting. His friends looked at me for a second and decided that I wasn’t interesting enough and went back to bickering about a penalty shot.

I was too flustered to do anything but wave back.

After a mile, I entered the zone. My teammates used to call me the Junkie because I got my runner’s high really early during a run. You know that old cliché, it’s not the destination that matters, it’s the journey? That’s what it was like with me and running. My body loved action. It craved it.

Halfway through the run, I felt the muscles in my face start to feel funny. They stung, almost. It wasn’t until we ran past the evergreens fencing Mrs. Nicholson’s yard that I figured out what the sensation was.

I was smiling.

The only thing better was to run with my teammates, maybe doing a single-line pursuit where we’d run in a column and have the person at the end sprint to the front, or Coach Auerbach’s crazy fruitcake drill where we’d pass a watermelon back and forth while we were running. We’d get to eat the watermelon at the end of practice.

I wondered if Coach Auerbach knew that the NCAA allowed girls with AIS to compete. Would she let me back on the team, at least to practice, if I showed her my father’s research?



When we got back home, my dad was red-faced and hunched over, but I was barely breathing heavily. I felt taller. Looser. After showering I even put on jeans instead of slipping into pajamas again.

I opened my laptop to try to find the NCAA site my dad had told me about. I copied the paragraph I needed and pasted it into a new email to Coach Auerbach:



A female recognized in law should be eligible to compete in female competitions if she has an androgen resistance such that she derives no competitive advantage from such levels.



But as I was about to hit Send, I remembered Rashonda’s look when she walked in on me crying in Coach’s office. Rashonda, who had been my Little Sister. Whose hair I had decorated with barrettes in our school colors before each meet.

I thought about how all the other girls would look at me if I ever went back. Would they think that I was a cheat? Even if it was technically within the rules, would I ever win a race again without someone grumbling about my being a man?

I deleted the message, and went back to my browser to find the one page my dad had bookmarked that made me feel less alone: a list on the support-group home page with links to famous people with AIS. One of them was María José Martínez-Pati?o, a Spanish national champion. She was a hurdler like me. Back in the old days, they used to do sex tests on female athletes, because of countries that were so crazy about the Olympics that they’d cheat by sending men to compete in women’s events. Women had had to get official Certificates of Femininity.