None of the Above(67)

Focus on the area under your belly button, and breathe in using your abdomen, as if you’re pulling the breath out with a string. Relax your shoulders. Reach out. Now draw a picture in your mind.

I visualized myself getting out of Faith’s car and entering the doors of Ralph Perry High with Vee by my side. As we walked through the hallways, people stopped and stared, and I imagined myself standing tall and ignoring them. Good people were there, too: Jessica and Darren, and maybe even Jorge and Quincy.

Then I remembered the heaviness in Darren’s voice while we were filling éclairs. The moment Becky called, he had started to say something. I had a hunch that he had been about to let me down easy. Thank God he hadn’t had the chance.

I deleted Darren’s face from my visualization and put in Rashonda Glenn and Peggy Shah. Once classes started it was easier to see how I could fall back into the routine, the machinery of school.

Maybe I was ready, after all.

But as I pictured myself walking into the cafeteria, Bruce appeared. And he did more than stare. He taunted, and got some of his buddies to follow me into the hall as I fled. He cornered me in a stairway, pushed me up against the wall, and unzipped my jeans as I flailed. . . .

I opened my eyes, my heart pounding.

Leaning up against my bookshelf, half hidden from view, there was a picture board that Faith and Vee had put together for me on my sixteenth birthday; I had taken it down one day after things fell apart, and hadn’t rehung it yet. My gaze settled on one picture of the three of us hugging in front of a church. We were all wearing black.

My mom had been sick for almost a year before the cancer finally took her. She died in the summertime, and on the morning of the funeral I went out with Aunt Carla and some of my mom’s friends to collect wildflowers—her favorite.

I remember Aunt Carla bawling behind me as I bent over to pick a daylily. “What is Bob going to do with a motherless child?”


“Shhh,” Mrs. Wu whispered. “It’ll be okay, Carla. Kids are resilient. Look at how poised and strong Kristin’s been today.”

Poised, I thought, when they poured dirt over my mom’s casket. Strong, I told myself that night when I hugged my father as he sobbed.

Six years later, I realized I was neither. How poised could I be if I was sitting in my room, trembling at the thought of Bruce Torino bullying me? How strong was I if I couldn’t even envision a place or a time when I could stand up and confront my diagnosis, rather than fleeing from who I was?

Except, according to Gretchen, such a place existed. People with AIS found ways to live and thrive, ways to be loved. And some of them had shared their stories. I turned my computer on and found the link she’d sent me to the support-group website. I expected maybe a couple of testimonials or links to magazine articles, maybe even a video or two.

I didn’t expect 146 personal stories, ranging from a few paragraphs to a few pages. Written by women who’d found out about their AIS when they were as young as twelve and as old as thirty-five, and by a few men with partial versions of AIS that sounded even more confusing and mind-messing than what I had.

Then there were links to information on other types of intersex, including conditions that were nowhere near as cut-and-dried as AIS was. Syndromes like 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, where you start out looking like a girl but then “virilize” when you hit puberty.

For the first time since my diagnosis, I felt like I’d gotten lucky. Only lucky didn’t completely describe my feelings: humbled was a better word for what I felt reading the honesty on that webpage. Truth stripped naked for the entire internet to see.

The common thread from all those stories was that talking helped, and listening, and time. One day I would find my own place. I couldn’t run there, though, because it didn’t exist yet; I had to build it myself, out of forgiveness, truth, and terrifying gestures of friendship.





CHAPTER 41


Before I left to go clubbing the next Saturday, I came up with a story for how I met Gretchen just in case her friends asked how we knew each other. Once we got there, though, I relaxed, because it turned out to be one of those clubs where the bass was so intense you could feel it in your cheekbones. It was the perfect way to hang out with four people you barely knew, because we couldn’t have had more than a five-word conversation if we’d tried.

Gretchen introduced me to her girlfriend, Julia, as we waited outside in line, and I liked her instantly, even if I was intimidated by how glam and gorgeous she looked in a black sheath with a gold belt and fishnets. Inside the club, we met up with their friends Jenn and Leslie at the coat check. We’d barely exchanged words before I was half deaf from the pounding music and strangely amped up, itching to move. We plunged into the strobe-lit chaos.

For the first time since my surgery, I danced. Not the single-girl dance, all flirty and mussing my hair around, but the girlfriend dance, in a little circle with the others. I danced until I could feel the sweat soaking my top. Once in a while one of the other girls would take a break to go to the bathroom or get a drink, but I kept going even when I didn’t like the music, as if I were running a race. I just moved and enjoyed the feeling of being lost in a crowd.

Then the music stopped, and an emcee came onto the stage and chatted us all up. The crowd started to make that restless, get-on-with-it murmur, and we slid off the dance floor to get a better view of the stage. As I did, I saw a familiar lanky figure standing against a wall.