None of the Above (6 page)

I watched the video twice, then sat back in my chair. I opened the white cardboard box and took out the individually wrapped dilators, which were just clear plastic rods with rounded tips.

I took the smallest dilator. It went in about two inches before it hurt. The second time, I lay in bed as the pamphlet described and it went in a little farther.

It felt gross. It felt dirty, and I could picture—no, practically feel—my mom rolling over in her grave, but I repeated Maggie's phrase like a mantra:
It's not that different from using a tampon.

After half an hour, I stopped. But instead of putting my sweats back on, I had the impulse to put on my black two-piece, which Aunt Carla had made a big deal about being a “shaping” suit. I'd never been so grateful for someone's obsession with cellulite. The bottom was made from a heavy spandex that hid my hernia bulges completely.

And I remembered what I told Maggie: No one had had a clue. Not my mom, my dad, or Dr. Arslinsdale. Not even me.

I went to bed with that hope in my mind.

The third time I dilated, I got to three inches, which sounded like a bad locker room joke waiting to happen, but seemed like progress. The sample kit from Dr. Cheng had three sizes, and gave information on a more complete set, which I almost ordered online. But then I imagined my dad coming across the line item for MiddlesexMD.com, and I used what I had. I ached a bit afterward, but it was a good ache, like the burn of a deep stretch. The pain focused me, and kept me from thinking too much, because when I really thought about what I was doing—what I was putting and where—another part of me withered from shame.

Each time I dilated, it got a bit easier. But the morning of the party, I knew it wasn't enough.

When Vee drove up in her mom's minivan just after seven, she looked surprisingly chipper for 1) being the designated
driver and 2) driving her mom's minivan instead of her Jetta. But she'd been much less bitchy since her doctor had switched her to a soft cast and told her she didn't need to use crutches anymore.

“All right, girls—are you ready to paaar-TAY?” she crowed as I got into the backseat.

“You
do
know that the whole point of being designated driver is that you don't do any drinking, right?” Faith asked. As SADD secretary, she had been the one who'd organized our car pool. After extensive soul-searching, she had decided junior year that the Bible did not specifically support laws against underage drinking, and that God would forgive her for doing something technically illegal as long as she wasn't hurting anyone else.

“Of course, Miss Prissy Pants,” Vee said, giving me her patented love-Faith-so-much-but-OMG-can-she-be-a-buzzkill eye roll. “Can't you see that I'm just high on LIIIIIFE?” She put down her window and whooped into the frigid night air, setting some neighborhood dogs barking.

“Sweet Jesus, girl,” Faith's boyfriend, Matt, yelled. “Turn the damn heat on. And the stereo.”

“Sorry, Mattie,” Vee purred, flipping him the bird, “I don't have any Hannah Montana for you to listen to tonight.” But she switched on the radio and found something loud and bassy.

When we picked Sam up, he pulled himself next to me and gave me a deep, hard kiss. Involuntarily, my knees pulled
together. I felt a phantom throb between my legs and forced myself to breathe in and out. I willed my thighs to relax.

“Everything all right?” Sam asked when he came up for air, and to put his seat belt on.

“Of course,” I said. I had to get my act together. “It's just freezing in here.”

“Here, take my coat. I've got the perfect thing to warm you right up. . . .”

My hands were ice-cold, but he slipped them underneath his waistband.

“Jesus, Wilmington. At least wait until we get to Sullivan's house?” Bruce, sitting shotgun, peered back through the rearview mirror at us. “You've got dibs on the master suite. We get it.”

I blushed, and used it as an excuse to pull my hands out of Sam's pants. He turned and leaned forward to grab Bruce in a headlock. “What, lordy-boy? You giving up your territory? We can wrestle for it.”

When we got to Andy Sullivan's place, everyone else congregated at the keg in a parade of red Solo cups, but I spotted some people doing tequila shots at a back table.

“Hey, Krissy, you want?” asked Craig Martinez, holding out his arm.

I didn't want. I needed. I took a lick of salt with lime in hand and tossed down two shots.

“Thanks,” I said, my eyes watering. Craig grinned, and in
the light it looked like a leer.

I went back over to the keg. About halfway through my second cup, I was finally ready to face Sam. He was down in the rec room playing pool with a bunch of his teammates, and I brought him a couple of vodka shots, thinking that if he were drunk off his ass he'd be less likely to realize that something was wrong with me. I watched him for a while with Faith, until Vee came down and told us people were starting to go into the hot tub.

She made a face when I brought out Aunt Carla's suit. “Oh. My. God. Why did you bring that thing?”

“I couldn't find the bikini you gave me,” I lied.

“Whatev. Good thing Sam's probably so horny he'd screw a horse.”

My laugh sounded tinny even to myself.

Vee and Faith shrieked as they stepped out onto the freezing deck. When they dropped their towels and slid into the hot tub I tried not to stare, tried not to be that creep in the locker room who checked out the other girls.

I chugged the rest of my beer and let out a breath. It hung like a cloud in the frigid air as I let my towel slip to the floor and plunged into the hot tub.

Once I was in the tub I wondered what I had been worried about. It was so steamy that no one could see anything, and anyway I was safe under the water. Safe and warm and starting to get very drunk. Everything that everyone said was hilarious,
the funniest thing I'd ever heard. My brain felt Saran-wrapped. I hardly noticed it when Sam came out onto the deck, didn't register anything until there was a splash next to me and hands reached around my waist.

“Have I ever told you how sexy you are when you laugh?” Sam nuzzled into my neck.

“You're just saying that because you're so horny you'd screw a horse.” I giggled.

“Doesn't mean you're not sexy, though.”

He thought I was sexy even in Aunt Carla's spandex nightmare. My drunken heart melted. “You're the best boyfriend ever,” I slurred, dangling my arms around his shoulders. I kissed him, and our wet bodies rubbed against each other and everything was heat and muscle and lust.

“Dudes!” someone shouted. We ignored him, our tongues tasting of lime and beer. The voice got louder and I felt someone's hands on my shoulder, shaking us apart.

“Yo, Wilmington. Lattimer,” Andy Sullivan yelled into our ears. “What did I say in my email? No cum in the tub. This is a five-bedroom house.”

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 fucking 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.

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?

More recently, we'd moved on to an epic game of bluff wars. One of Vee's more successful dupes ended with me dressed in a slutty nurse's outfit in one of the stalls in the boys' locker room.

I got her back, though, when I managed to convince
her—with the help of some “articles” that I'd gotten from the internet—that laxatives were an aphrodisiac. Vee didn't speak to me for a week after that. But I'd proved that, in the right circumstances, I could pull off a lie. Which was maybe why she thought I was trying to pull a fast one when I told her I was a hermaphrodite. Because who in the world would possibly believe that? Certainly not Vee, who'd helped me buy my first bra, who'd seen me naked in the shower after swim class every Friday during sophomore year. She'd set Sam and me up, for God's sake.

So she laughed, and I wanted so badly to smile and say ruefully, “Damn it, I thought I had you for sure.” But I couldn't.

“It's not a joke,” I said.
I am not a joke
, I thought.

Vee's face scrunched up in confusion. Faith had stopped puking, and rested the side of her head on the rim of the toilet seat. Her eyes were glazed. “That you, Krissy?” she slurred. “I think I'm sick. I don't have the enzyme you need to drink, you know. It's my parents' fault. Everything's my parents' fault.”

“Shhh,” Vee said, stroking Faith's long, straight hair. “We're both here. Everything's gonna be okay.”

Was it? I hoped so badly that it would, so badly I allowed the truth to stumble out.

As if from far away, I heard myself say, “That visit to the ob-gyn? I found out why I've never gotten my period. When my mom was pregnant with me, something went wrong. I'm not . . . I'm not exactly a girl.”

Vee's hand, still intertwined in Faith's hair, froze. “Shit. You're serious, aren't you?”

I got up, wincing, but this time I held on to the pain like a touchstone. With fire burning in between my legs, I told Vee about my chromosomes taking a detour. About not having a womb. About having testicles.

At the word
testicles
, Vee let out a nervous giggle.

Being laughed at once was bad. Twice was unbearable. My face flushed, and I could barely breathe from the humiliation. How could I have been so stupid? I lurched up and headed for the door, but before I could run out, Vee reached over and grabbed my arm.

She covered her mouth with her other hand, and I could feel her stiffness, like she was trying to control herself. “I'm sorry, Krissy . . . I . . .” She groped for something to say, and I felt the shame start to dig into my bones.

Vee put a hand up to her head. “Jesus, Krissy. I totally don't know what to say.”

The silence in the room pressed in from all sides, suffocating me. I stared at Faith's hand splayed against the Sullivans' impeccable grouting. She always had the best nails.

Finally, Vee said one word. “Shit.”

I looked up at her, saw the crease in between her eyebrows. She was in the confusion stage. Had I already missed the revulsion, or was it still to come? “You can't tell anyone,” I told her, feeling the panic rise in my throat.

She just shook her head. Then she asked, “Have you told Sam?”

I leaned against the door and closed my eyes, still feeling slightly fuzzy. “I will. I just need some time. There's a lot I don't know. I might have surgery.”

Vee grimaced. “What, like he'll deal with it better if he thinks you had a sex change?”

“It's not like that!” I insisted, stung. “I'm a girl. Dr. Cheng said that people with androgen insensitivity syndrome should be considered girls.”

I saw the reflection of my words on Vee's face:
should
be. Meanwhile, Faith, always a happy drunk, started singing. She got up and tried to dance, and tripped on the bath mat. Vee caught her. “Okay, I think it's time to make my first drop-off of the evening.” She looked over at me. “You wanna go home, too?”

I nodded. I did, more than anything in the world.

The minute Vee turned the engine on, the metal station we'd been listening to pulsed through the car at max level.

“Turn it
off
,” Faith moaned from her position curled up in the backseat.

So we drove home to country music dialed down to a murmur. Somehow, even though I couldn't understand the words, I still got their misery.

I sat shotgun, of course, and looked over at Vee every once
in a while, but she kept her eyes glued on the road as if she were taking a driver's test.

At the Wus' house, Vee spritzed some breath freshener into Faith's mouth and we walked her into her house and up to her room. We made sure that she was lying on her side in case she puked while she was in bed. Her parents were already asleep.

From when we walked out of the Wus' until we were almost near my house, Vee didn't say another word. The silence, the not knowing what she thought, felt like a bowling ball in my stomach. Finally, I blurted out, “Aren't you going to say something?”

Vee let out a frustrated puff of breath, and pulled over. “Oh, Krissy. I just . . . What the fuck?”

“Tell me about it. Promise you're not going to treat me like a freak?”

That got her to grin. “Oh, Krissy,” she simpered, like she was quoting from a second-rate chick flick, “don't you know I love you just the way you are?” She switched to her normal voice. “Seriously, haven't we been through enough shit in our lives that you trust me not to drop you just because of some . . . hormone thing?”

I blinked at the unexpected tears in my eyes.

“Hey.” Vee reached over to grab my shoulder. “We'll get through this, just like we've gotten through the rest of it.”

I took a deep breath and nodded, suddenly so, so weary. “I think I've got to just sleep everything off. Night.” I fumbled to
open the door. “Drive safe?”

“Like I have a choice. I'm more sober than a nun in outer space.”

“Wish I could say the same.” I stumbled into my house and sat on the couch, planning to pull off my knee-high boots before heading up to my room.

Then I made the mistake of closing my eyes, and before I knew it, I drifted off to sleep.