None of the Above(53)

I thought about the pink estrogen pills as Gretchen went on. “Screw that gender essentialism bullshit. Men have as much of a right to care about clothes as women. Girls can like sports and cars and guns too. So why does it even matter if you identify as a girl, a boy, or as neither?”

“It matters because we live in the real world,” I said with a heat that surprised me. “I don’t want to be some poster child. I just want to get through high school in one piece, graduate from college, and have a family.”

“With a boy?” Gretchen interrupted.

“Yes, with a boy,” I said painfully. “And if that makes me repulsively”—I searched for the word that I’d heard one day on an episode of Dr. Phil—“heteronormative to you? Well, you can suck it.”

Gretchen’s eyes opened wide. “That’s right! Because you’re a hermaphrodite, so you must have a penis!”

We both burst out laughing, and God it felt good. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a good, old-fashioned belly laugh, the kind where you can barely breathe and your eyes start watering.

“Well,” Gretchen said, “that was cathartic.”

Catharsis. At the end of that first session, Dr. LaForte had used the same term. She’d said that one of the reasons I was so depressed was that I’d been bottling up my emotions. “You might find it helpful if you shifted from inward repression of your feelings to outward expression,” she explained. Then she gave me a little notebook with a Monet painting on the front, and told me to start a journal. “I don’t expect you to show it to me, Kristin—I just want you to get things out there—your anger, your fear, your confusion and sadness. The goal is to release your emotions in a structured manner.”

So far, the book had stayed blank. But the night after I met Gretchen for the first time, I dug it out of the bottom of my book bag. I tried to write down everything I remembered from our conversation, tried to tease out the tangled web of theories and ideas and come up with something I could live by, in the real world.

One last thing that Gretchen said just before we parted ways stuck in my head:

“I’m not saying that you have to become this übermilitant Intersex Warrior. I’m just telling you to be careful of letting other people define who—and what—you are.”

They were words to live by. Yet, like so many things in life, easier said than done.





CHAPTER 30


I started running in the evenings, mapping out a new route to avoid the park, where Sam ran and sometimes played basketball. There were some woods behind my neighborhood, with a thin trail developed enough so I could keep up my pace without worrying about twisting my ankle.

It felt weird starting up a new routine. Disconcerting. At first, I experimented with the timing of my run to avoid seeing too many people, and it made my workouts seem less about the running itself and more about the path I took. The key was to leave my house at four thirty, well before rush hour, to avoid the strings of cars and after-work dog walkers. Evening patterns weren’t as predictable as mornings, though, and it kind of drove me crazy. Then, one day I bumped into Darren.

I had just entered the woods and was so focused on the ground that he was almost past me before I heard him shout my name. I could tell he was near the end of his loop because he had that slump-shouldered gassed look, but he slowed to a walk when I raised my hand at him.

Usually when I pass people I know while I’m in the middle of a workout, I’m a nod-and-wave person. Especially when I’ve just started my run. But when someone stops for you, the polite thing to do is to chat for a while, and so I did. The motto on his running tee made me grin: I’M TOO XC FOR THIS SHIRT.

“Hey. You always run here?” Darren asked, slightly breathless. “Haven’t seen you before.”

“Just trying out something new.”

“Which path are you taking?”

“There’s more than one?” I asked.

“Yeah, this is the perimeter trail. Good for speed. But there’s an offshoot that takes you up some hills.”

“Really? Where?” Short hills were good for strength. Perfect for hurdlers.

“There’s a fork about four hundred yards down. Here, I’ll show you.” Darren turned around and started to jog back into the forest. I almost protested that he was tired at the end of a run, but I knew no cross-country runner worth his salt would ever complain about having to go an extra mile. So I followed.

It felt bizarre running with a boy other than Sam. We weren’t close to being in sync; Darren was so tall his stride was almost a foot longer than mine. The trail was barely wide enough for the two of us, and I had to duck a lot of branches and steer clear of bushes. At one point I stumbled as my sneaker caught on an enormous root, and Darren shot out his hand to steady me. I flung out my arms for balance, and caught on to his forearm, feeling his sinewy muscles tense as he braced my fall.

Our eyes met. His were a shifting hazel, dark and deep. I felt a flicker in my chest, and let go of his arm, taking a long breath before I resumed my run. Darren let me run a little bit in front of him, and I noticed him cutting back his stride to match my post-surgery pace.

By the time we reached the top of the hill, the sun was just above the tree line. I climbed on a rock at a little overhang and looked south over our town: The manicured sea of the golf course. The streetlights lining the way downtown. The crisscrossing roads that were already starting to crawl with normal people living out their happy, average lives.