Marked by the Mob, our young hero and his mom flee to France where staying safe means taking on a whole new persona. There’s a story within the story when — who would have guessed? — our, uh, heroine helps out a gender-conflicted friend, but then the Mob catches up with uh, her. Does it all come out right in the end? Duh.

Looking for kinky stuff? Try Fictionmania. Hugs, Daphne

 © 01.2008 by Daphne Laprov

We Run For Our Lives

Mommy shook me awake real early. Even though it was summer, she had to turn on the lamp by my bed. Outside it was just barely light. “Bobby, you have to get up now. Mommy needs your help.” Something about the way she said that made me sit up right away. “What’s the matter, Mommy?”

She sat close, and wrapped me in her arms. “It’s PapaDaddy, honey. He got very sick last night. I don’t know how to tell you this . . . he’s dead, he’s gone to . . . uh, Heaven. He’s with Kristen now.” Mommy started crying, so I cried too, even though I was a boy. I thought about fishing with PapaDaddy on his big boat, and about going to watch the Red Sox in spring training games, and picking grapefruits right from the tree for breakfast in the garden. I remembered showing him my report cards from school and how I could reach the last level in Hard Hat Mack. I knew that though I didn’t love PapaDaddy the way I loved Mommy, I would miss him an awful lot.

“Can I see him, Mommy?”

“Yes, darling, but only for a little bit. We have a lot of things to do.”

I went into Mommy and PapaDaddy’s bedroom. Some suitcases were halfway packed with Mommy’s stuff. PapaDaddy’s big body was in the big bed. Even his head was covered up, but Mommy pulled down the blanket and said “you can give PapaDaddy a kiss if you like,” so I did and then I knew he was really dead because his fat cheek was cold and he wasn’t breathing.

Mommy covered PapaDaddy up again and told me to go pee and brush my teeth and then come back. When I came back, Mommy was in the room that we called PapaDaddy’s office. She was sitting at his desk, opening all the drawers and boxes. I could tell that she’d been looking for something for a long time.

“Sit down, Bobby,” she said. “No, over here, by me.” Mommy cleared a stack of papers off a little low table and pointed. I sat. “Honey, we have to go away from here,” she said. “We have to go away right away, just as soon as I can get us ready. And there’s something very important that I need you to do, like a big boy, without crying or anything. Do you understand?”

I nodded, waiting for the mystery to unfold. “You know that even though PapaDaddy is — was — your father, he was not my husband. Not legally. He wanted to marry me but he couldn’t because of . . . well, it’s too late now.” I knew what Mommy meant. PapaDaddy had a wife who lived up North. One day she came to Florida and saw Mommy at our house and there was a big fight. She yelled a lot at Mommy and PapaDaddy, and Mommy yelled back, too. I didn’t see the end of it because PapaDaddy told me to go out back for a while, but later he told me that he loved Mommy and me and everything would be OK. Except it wasn’t, because he didn’t marry Mommy.

Mommy explained that as soon as PapaDaddy’s children knew he was dead, we’d be in big trouble. PapaDaddy had some children who were grown up. They were my half-brother and half-sisters, but I was supposed to call them Uncle and Auntie. I think they hated me because I had a different Mommy, Uncle Ricky especially. When he came to see PapaDaddy they’d go into the office and shut the door and yell a lot. Once it didn’t shut all the way and I heard Uncle Ricky say something about PapaDaddy had “better forget about taking care of that little bastard.” He meant me. He called my Mommy a whore, too, and PapaDaddy told Ricky to shut up if he knew what was good for him. PapaDaddy’s business associates (that’s what he called them) gave me the creeps, except for Joey who gave me money to go buy popsicles — one for him, and one for me. He always wanted lime. Joey waited outside with the limo when the business associates came to see PapaDaddy.

Mommy must have found what she was looking for, because she was filling up a suitcase with stuff. She told me to put on my bathrobe and go bring in the Miami Herald. She said I should look to see if Toto was out in front, and when I came back in right away, I should come find her in Kristen’s room.

Kristen was my half-sister who died last year. She had leukemia. Mommy was Kristen’s mommy too. PapaDaddy wasn’t her father, but he was as sad as Mommy and me when Kristen was dying.

Toto’s car was right on the other side of the road, as usual. Toto was supposed to be PapaDaddy’s bodyguard, but Mommy told me he really worked for Ricky. Mommy said Toto told Ricky everything we did.

Mommy was getting some clothes and stuff out of Kristen’s closet. I told Mommy I couldn’t see real well through the black windows, but it looked like Toto was sitting inside the car already. I asked her what she was doing with Kristen’s stuff.

She knelt, and took my hands, one in each of hers. “We’re going on a long trip, Bobby, and we’re going in disguise so PapaDaddy’s business associates can’t find us. Can you pretend to be Kristen — for Mommy?”

I kind of sucked in hard. “Mommy, I’m a boy,” I answered. “Everybody will know.”

“Listen to me, Bobby. You are almost as tall as Kristen was when she, uh . . . (Mommy bit her lip) and you are about as heavy, and we can use this,” she said, picking up the wig that Kristen used after she had chemotherapy and lost all her own hair. “Hold still a sec,” she said, and put the wig on my head. “Take a look and tell me what you see.”

I knew what I’d see in the mirror -- somebody who looked a lot like Kristen. My sister and I had already played that game, before she went to Heaven. “I look sort of like Kristen, don’t I?” I said cautiously. “Exactly,” said Mommy.

While I got my clothes on and ate some cereal and snuck another look at PapaDaddy, Mommy made some telephone calls and filled up two roll-on suitcases and some shopping bags and a briefcase. I put my blankie and my Game Boy and some other things in my school backpack. Mommy called me and we carried the bags into the garage through the kitchen door and got into Mommy’s BMW. “Now we will pretend to go shopping,” she said.

The shopping mall near PapaDaddy’s house had an underground garage. Mommy knew Toto was following us, and that he’d pause for a moment before going in behind her so she wouldn‘t see him. As soon as we got inside she stopped at the curb, took out the suitcases and shopping bags and gave the keys and some money to the parking guy. “Park as far in back as you can,” she said, “not in the valet parking — and hurry, for God’s sake.” Then Mommy and I grabbed all the bags and went into Lord and Taylor, up the escalator and toward the rest rooms in the back. “Goodbye, Beamer,” she said. “Ah, well, too bad about that, too.”

A saleslady started toward Mommy and me. “Not just yet, we have an urgent call of nature,” Mommy said pointing toward me. “Could you watch these bags for ten minutes?” The lady smiled knowingly, and put the bags by the register.

Mommy made sure no one was inside the women’s room, took me inside and locked the door. “Everything we need is right here in the shopping bags,” she said. “Let’s get busy.”

After I took off all my clothes, Mommy gave me a pair of Kristen’s panties and a tee shirt. It was pink with lacy stuff around the neck and sleeves. Then she gave me some pants with little flowers on them that had a zipper in the back. I put them on, and a white belt, and then some sandals while Mommy was stuffing my boy clothes into the trash can. “Goodbye boy clothes,” I said. “Ah, well, too bad about that, too.” Mommy cracked up.

Mommy had brought a washcloth, and I had to have my face and neck washed again and then she told me to hold still while she put the wig on me. It was the same color as my own hair. While Mommy brushed the wig, she said “this is beautiful. No one could tell it isn’t your own hair. When she finished brushing the wig, Mommy said “You’ll have to learn to do this yourself until your own hair grows out,” Mommy said. She added a barrette clip to keep hair out of my eyes. Then she took a necklace and a watch out of her pocket. I’d never had a watch, not even a boy’s watch. This one was Kristen’s, and it had Tinkerbell on it.

Mommy cocked her head at me, and asked “How’r ya doin’, sport? Not too many cooties?” It kind of surprised me that I felt OK in Kristen’s clothes. Except for the wig and the necklace and the colors, they weren’t a whole lot different than my boy clothes. While I was thinking about that, Mommy put a cap-thing on her head, pushing all her hair up underneath, and then took a dark reddish-brown wig out of her bag and put it on together with some tortoise-shell sunglasses that made her look real different from my regular mommy. “One more thing — you need some lip gloss,” Mommy said, and gave me a little red pocketbook she fished out of the bag. The lip gloss tasted like bubble gum, but I knew that already, because Kristen put it on me once. Mommy put on some more lipstick herself.

Then Mommy made me go piddle the way girls do it, and told me not to ever forget, and went piddle herself.

The saleslady had put our suitcases behind her counter so Mommy thanked her with a $10 tip. Looking at me, the lady got all confused and we knew she was trying to remember what I looked like when I went into the rest room. Before we both broke up laughing, Mommy grabbed our bags and pulled me away toward the escalators.

We stopped just long enough to buy me a pair of sunglasses like Mommy’s, and then after she made another phone call, we went to the street entrance of Lord and Taylor and caught a taxi. Mommy told the cab driver we were going to the Palm Beach Airport but there was enough time for one more errand, so he should stop for just a few minutes at Jermayne’s. Mommy took the brief case inside Jermayne’s. I figured out that she was getting her good jewelry out of storage. Then Mommy came back out, and still holding onto the briefcase, signaled me to come with her to a shop a little further down the street.

Just then I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Toto’s car was cruising slowly down the street. He was swivelling his ugly head from side to side, squinting at the crowd of shoppers. . . . I tugged on Mommy’s skirt. “Look there,” I whimpered. “Keep cool,” she said and stepped through the doorway.

“My daughter is old enough to have her ears pierced,” she told the lady inside. I gasped.

“I know it’s a surprise,” Mommy whispered to me. “Be brave! Do this for us!”

The lady was rubbing my ear with alcohol and I was asking if it would hurt when I felt a sudden pinch and one ear was done. So doing the other one was no big deal, and a couple of minutes later we left the shop and I had little gold studs in both ears.

We got back in the cab and the driver said he was glad we were back because there was a traffic jam building up ahead. Some doofus hadn’t been looking where he was going. He’d run a light and smacked right into the side of another car. Mommy and I both guessed the same thing and when we reached the intersection we were right on — it was Toto! I wanted to open the cab window and go “na-nah na-nah nah-nah” but Mommy said that wouldn’t be wise.

Pretty soon we were at the airport. The tickets Mommy had ordered were waiting for us. Mommy checked our bags all the way through to Paris and presented our passports, I mean she showed her passport and Kristen’s. The ticket guy squinted at the picture of Kristen and said “hmm, looks like you’ve gained a little weight, Miss.” That was the first time anyone ever called me “Miss.” We stopped at the airport bookstore and Mommy bought me one called The Princess Bride. She said that even though the title is pretty dorky there was a lot of action in it. And then our plane got called and soon we were on the way to Atlanta where we changed to a bigger plane. There were maybe a zillion people in the back but we had business class seats so it was nicer. The flight hostesses were real nice to us, especially after Mommy mentioned that she used to be a stew for Delta, too. That was how she met PapaDaddy, on a Boston to Miami run pretty soon after Kristen was born. I got asked if I wanted to be a flight hostess when I grow up and I answered that right now I was thinking of being an entomologist, which led to a discussion about bugs and their eating habits.

Later, Mommy whispered to me that it would probably be better if I didn’t go out of my way to talk about gross stuff — it wasn’t real feminine, she said. Then she told me a lot of things about how we were going to live in France. I pointed out that I didn’t speak French and why couldn’t we go live in England? She said at my age I’d pick it up real fast; I would go to a school where they spoke both English and French. That seemed OK, I thought.

While we were eating dinner (some stuff that wasn’t as gross as it sounded on the menu), Mommy explained more about why we had to go live in France. In the first place, PapaDaddy had died real suddenly, before he could give her stuff he had promised her. It wasn’t fair if all PapaDaddy’s money went to Ricky and his sisters, because Mommy had given up her career and ten of the best years of her life. That’s why, after Mommy knew for sure that PapaDaddy had died of a heart attack, she had gotten up and searched until she found the combination to his safe. All the money that was in there as well as her jewelry was in the briefcase, she said, and we’d be in good shape.

The other important thing, Mommy said, I was in danger. She had a copy of PapaDaddy’s will — it was in the safe, too. PapaDaddy left five million dollars plus interest to me — except it was to be held in trust and I wouldn’t get it until I reached 18. Mommy said that was practically an inducement to Ricky to have me bumped off. Ricky and his business associates were a bunch of thugs, she said. They controlled a big organization. Now that PapaDaddy was dead, they were his heirs and Ricky didn’t have to respect Mommy anymore. All in all, it was a lot better if Ricky couldn’t find either of us. Ricky would order people to look all over for a blonde woman with a nine year-old son (me). They wouldn’t find us because instead we were a brunette with a ten year-old daughter.

I was thinking Mommy was pretty smart and thinking maybe I’d watch the in-flight movie when suddenly I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.

It was morning when we got to Paris. Mommy and I went to a hotel and we slept until the morning after that. That’s how tired we were. We ordered breakfast from room service, and ate it in our robes on a balcony looking down a long narrow street with a church at the end. Mommy said first we’d go to the spa in the hotel and then we’d spend the rest of the day shopping.

Mommy had it all figured out. She told the ladies at the spa that we were celebrating the remission of my leukemia, which everyone agreed was a true miracle. We were celebrating with a vacation in Paris. My hair had fallen out but was growing back in — yes, they should cut and style it as much as possible being still so short.

Of course the ladies took wonderful care of us. It was the first time I’d ever had a real massage. I was squeaky clean and smelled like strawberries, from the rubbing oils, when I put on a change of clothes — a tank top and sandals, and shorts, and the necklace and the watch and the wig, because Mommy said we couldn’t take a chance on my being recognized.

We went to the rue St. Onge near the hotel. Mommy was wearing a nice pants suit. She explained that people in Europe dress more formally than people in the US, and that’s why it was important to shop right away for me — because I was a dead give-away for a little American girl. Mommy needed a lot of new things too, she said.

By the end of the afternoon, when we got back to the hotel, our room was filled with clothes. Some had been delivered for us, and we came back loaded down with the rest. I was wearing my favorite new dress, a white sailor dress with blue trim.

It was sinking in to me that we weren’t playing a game. I wondered if it was OK for us to go off and leave PapaDaddy. It made me feel sad that I’d never see him again. I wondered what would happen if someone knew I was a boy. I thought there must be something wrong about pretending to be my sister. Kristen was my best friend but she wasn’t me!

Mommy could see I was about to cry. She kicked off her shoes, climbed on the bed in our room, had me lie down next to her, and pulled up a quilt over us both. Mommy hugged me tight and we both cried for a while. Mommy said she knew all this must be terribly confusing. She reminded me why I had to be a perfect little girl for now. If Ricky knew where I was, there would be big trouble. Mommy said she would love me no matter whether I was Bobby or pretending to be Kristen.

Then it was time to wash up quickly and dress for dinner with Jean-Cristophe. While we were changing, Mommy told me about him. He was a friend from when she was working on the trans-Atlantic flights. It was just possible that Jean-Christophe was Kristen’s daddy, but Mommy didn’t think so — she just wanted me to be alert to the possibility. Mommy explained that since I was now supposed to be ten instead of nine, and because little girls generally were more sedate than boys, it would be excellent if I managed to get through dinner without squirming too much.

Mommy had me put on a light green dress without sleeves, white knee socks, shiny black shoes with straps, a black velvet jacket and Kristen’s wig. When she was dressed too, Mommy patted a little blusher onto my cheeks and nose and told me I was a lovely daughter. She hoped I didn’t feel too bad pretending to be a girl for a while.

I was surprised that I still felt OK with this. I guess I liked all the attention I was getting from Mommy and all the pretty things. I didn’t know anybody in France, so probably they wouldn’t know Bobby Zamboni either. I twirled experimentally before the mirror. I could see that no one would think I was a really a little boy. Mommy laughed, and said she had another surprise, something to complete the picture. She reached into the dresser, took out a tiny box, and handed it to me. “Open it,” Mommy said.

Inside was a set of tiny pearl earrings! I knew that boys weren’t supposed to like jewelry and stuff, but these were sooo pretty! Yes, I wanted to put them on!

Mommy said I could but just for a few hours because my ears were still a little raw from the piercing. We were still admiring my earrings when the telephone rang to announce M. Jean-Cristophe. He kissed Mommy on both cheeks and then kissed me the same way, said I might call him J-C and might he call me Mademoiselle Kristen, and proposed that we go straight to the Bois de Boulogne to dine at one of the open-air restaurants. He felt sure that the tres jolie petite fille (by which he meant me) would be pleased to discharge some energy there running about by the lake and feeding the ducks.

J-C was right, I was pleased to feed the ducks and I was pleased to be me, a little girl in the park in the long twilight of a Paris summer. When it was time to order dinner, we had oysters. I was amazed that they were really delicious, and I was at least as well mannered as Kristen ever was, speaking in whole sentences and taking small bites. I fell asleep between the cheese and the dessert, just kind of remembered being carried to J-C’s car, and only woke up again as Mommy changed me into a long cotton nighty and tucked me into bed. Afterward, I could hear Mommy and Jean-Cristophe whispering on the balcony for a little while, and I fell asleep thinking well, if this is France and if I’m going to be a girl for a while, I guess it’s OK.

School

With help from some of her French friends, Mommy found a house for us west of Paris. I had a nice room upstairs, with a ceiling that slanted down to the floor and my own bathroom. To throw Ricky and his business associates off our track, Mommy was using Kristen’s official daddy’s last name as hers. Even though she was never married to him, she had some identification that she was able to use to rent the house. That’s how I came to be enrolled in September at the Ecole Jeunesse Internationale as Kristen Eliot. They put me in a class with a bunch of other kids who didn’t speak French. The maitresse told us that as soon as we were able, we’d move out of the transitional class into the regular program, where some classes were taught in English and some in French. School started out OK but recess and gym kind of sucked.

At recess, the girls all squatted down in a corner of the yard and talked. I couldn’t understand fast enough for that to be any fun so I went over to where the boys were playing football, which is what they call soccer in France. When I got a chance, I kicked the ball. I know I kicked it the right way, but the boys got mad anyway. A bunch of them came over and backed me up against a wall, yelling at me. I said I didn’t understand French.

Someone answered in English “You are a girl. We don’t play with girls.” The others laughed. “Go away to your side,” he said.

Gym was like recess but with teachers in charge who organized games. The trouble with gym was that they had one game for the girls and another for the boys, and the girls’ games were all pretty dorky. The first week there was a tag game where I got tripped. I got up, and then I got tripped again. I looked around for the teacher, but she wasn’t paying attention, so as soon as someone else tried to trip me, I hit her good. The girl started screaming and yelling something and the teacher made me sit on a bench. That day I had to take home a letter that informed Mommy that I was deficient in sports.

Mommy and I therefore had another of our talks. I said I was tired of being a girl, and why couldn’t I have a boys’ haircut and wear shorts to school? Mommy rolled her eyes up to the ceiling, because this was the kind of conversation we’d been having every few days already since we came to France. She told me that she knew that some bad people had been already looking for me and for her on account of Ricky. Mommy said again that I just needed to be Kristen for a while until everything calmed down. Then I could go back to being a boy. She made me promise for now to be very careful not to let anyone know I was Robert and not Kristen.

I said that if I’m supposed to be a girl, what about when our gym class started swimming lessons and we had to change all our clothes together? Mommy admitted that would be a problem. She promised to think about it.

Not much really happened during my first year in France. After a while a few of the girls began to be nice to me sometimes. But since I didn’t have any real friends, I had plenty of time to do my homework. It seemed to me that being a bad student wouldn’t make any of my problems better. So I took the trouble to get pretty good marks and soon I could understand a lot of what French people were saying, even on television. It wasn’t much longer until I began talking some myself in French and then I got put into the regular classes at the school.

Here’s something I noticed: if a boy got good marks or did something intelligent, the other boys teased him. One new boy who was real smart was always being called a sissy and getting shoved around. His name was David, and he wasn’t much good at sports, either. I wanted him to fight back just once, even if he got hurt, so they’d quit picking on him, but he didn’t. He just hung around looking sad or reading by himself on the bus. After a while David stopped raising his hand or always giving the right answer when the teacher called on him.

On the other hand, for a girl — me, for example — it was OK to be real smart as long as you didn’t act too smart, like making fun of kids who made mistakes. Girls got judged by other girls more on how they looked. That wasn’t such a big deal in my school because we wore uniforms and could only have our hair so long, and no makeup and so on.

Our regular school uniform was a white blouse and a pleated gray skirt hemmed to exactly three centimeters above the knee and knee socks and black buckle shoes. Mommy thought the school rules were hysterical, she said, but I had to obey them anyway. She wanted me to blend in. The girls in the upper school got to wear shoes with a little heel and no strap. If it was cold, there was a uniform coat and beret, which were wine-colored. The school insignia were monogrammed onto the beret and the jumper front. You had to wear the beret if you wore the coat. Girls’ hair couldn’t be any longer than the shoulders unless it was braided. Any girl who wore makeup or colored nail polish before deuxieme (the next to last year of the upper school) would be punished, even expelled. Those were some of the rules. The teachers were supposed to enforce them even if we were not at school, but just on our way there or going home, because everyone in the town could tell we were from the school and anything we did supposedly reflected on the school.

The boys’ uniforms were pretty much the same except they had jackets without collars and wore pants — short pants up to middle school, and then long pants, and their shoes had laces and they didn’t have berets and their hair couldn’t be more than seven centimeters long..

One day Janine told me she wanted to be my friend. I said OK, and that meant I automatically had Sylvie and Anne and Jocelyn as friends, too, because they all did everything together. So now there were five girls who always had their heads together in a corner of the playground during recess. I found out that I was supposed to like the kids they liked and stay away from the ones they didn’t like and obey a bunch of other rules they made up, and we all promised to help each other and not keep any secrets.

I felt good because now I had some friends and they were the prettiest girls in my class. Still, I thought it was not fair to Denise or Caitlyn or other girls they called losers. I decided that anyway I’d obey the rules of my new friends and see what happened.

My mother seemed happy when I told her that I had made some friends and that I was invited to Sylvie’s house for a sleepover next weekend. Mommy made a telephone call to make sure it was OK with Sylvie’s mother and then she talked to me about how to act cool at a sleepover. Since Mommy was almost forty and she wasn’t French, I wondered how she knew all this stuff, but you know, she did know a lot.

Oh, you are probably wondering what Mommy did about the swimming class. She got a friend who was a doctor to give her a letter about how I had to wear a truss because of a rupture of muscles in my tummy. It was OK to swim or do other sports, but I couldn’t take it off without risking hurting myself again — and of course the truss hid my weinie when I changed my clothes. Mommy told Sylvie’s Mommy about the truss too, just in case.

Football

While we first lived in France, it seemed like every few months Mommy was introducing me to some new man friend of hers. I liked Jean-Cristophe, but he didn’t come around too often anymore. Mommy said J-C’s wife was jealous because J-C had been her friend before, back in her stewardess days. Then there was a guy named Antoine, who was greasy and didn’t last very long, and Thierry the pilot who always brought me jelly beans, and Edouard and Franck. The one I liked best was was Jean-Marc, who taught me how to play football.

It happened like this. One Saturday morning, I was kicking a ball against the back of our house when Jean-Marc came out to see what was making all the noise so early. He said it was waking Mommy up. Then he asked me did I know how to dribble the ball, and I showed him some moves that I’d seen on TV. He said I had the right idea but I needed a lot of practice.

Down the hill from our house there was a park where I’d seen kids play football, so we went there. Jean-Marc got in the goal and had me try to kick the ball past him. He said the secret of making shots on goal was to trick the keeper — the guy in the goal. To do that took teamwork, he said, looking past me at someone who was standing by the fence. “Hey, kid,” Jean-Marc yelled; “do you want to play?” The boy looked around, as if to see if Jean-Marc was asking someone else, and then he slowly came over. I knew him; it was Hervé, a boy in the class after mine at school.

“Look,” said Jean-Marc, “I’m trying to teach Kristen how to make a crossing pass on goal, and I need your help. OK?”

Hervé looked dubiously at my braids, and then nodded. I knew what he was thinking, and so I said, “Look, if some other boys come, you can quit, I won’t mind.”

Well, we practiced with Jean-Marc for about forty-five minutes. By the time Olivier and a bunch of other boys showed up, I was getting the hang of it. I was drenched in sweat, and so was Hervé. He looked at his friends, and then he looked apologetically at me and Jean-Marc. “Wait here a minute,” he said.

From the corner of my eye, I could see Hervé talking with Olivier on the other side of the field. They were horsing around the way boys act when they meet. Then Hervé detached himself from the group and came running back. “You can play with us,” he announced. “Laurent couldn’t come today. We are short one player . . . and anyway, it’s just a practice.”

Jean-Marc decided it was time to check if Mommy was awake yet, and I stayed to play football with the boys. Fortunately, I’m a fast runner. I think that must have made up for my not knowing hardly any football moves, except for crossing passes on goal. A couple of times I got knocked down hard. I knew that was sort of a test, and when I didn’t cry, the boys on my team started passing me the ball a little. After a while, the score was 2-2 and somehow I caught up with the ball near the other team’s goal. I heard Hervé yell “Kristen, to me!” I sent him a crossing shot just like we’d practiced with Jean-Marc. He booted it home, and I was a momentary hero.

When we had to quit because it was lunchtime, I told the boys I’d had fun, thank-you-very-much. Olivier said I played pretty good for a girl. Philippe yanked on one of my braids, and I poked him back in the stomach. They said I could play again next Saturday if I wanted to. That was how my football career began.

De-cliqued

My new friends at school were divided. Janine and Jocelyn decided there was nothing wrong with my playing football with the boys on Saturday morning. Anne and Sylvie, on the other hand, had never heard of any girl who wanted to play football, and thought it odd that I liked it. They all agreed, however, that as long as it did not interfere with our outings on Saturday afternoon, it did not disqualify me from membership in the clique.

Saturday afternoon was bonding time. Sometimes we took the RER train to the city to see a movie or visit the big stores. Once we all went to some rock band competition, chauffered by Jocelyn’s mom. Another weekend, Mommy drove us all the way to the beach in Normandy. Mostly, however, we just hung out at Janine or Sylvie’s house. They had moms who’d let us practice putting on makeup or watch grown-up movie tapes. And of course, we talked and talked. When we talked about boys, I was rated something of an expert, because my football games had given me special insight into the character of Hervé, Olivier, Laurent, and the rest of the two dozen or so boys who were regulars there. They were mostly from our school. When the talk was about girls, I just listened. To tell the truth, I didn’t much like how my friends cut up the other girls at our school. Caitlyn was mousy. Denise had a horrid Belgian accent. Olivia and Brigitte were sluts. Eleanor was a suck-up. It went on and on. I wondered what they’d say if I left their clique.

I thought about that -- quitting their clique. Semi-officially, it was “Janine’s clique.” That’s what other kids called it, because of the way that especially Jocelyn and Anne always did exactly what Janine told them to. Sylvie and I were more independent, I guess, but I noticed that if Janine said a skirt or a hairband was ugly, I stopped wearing it. My closet started to fill up with stuff Mommy bought me that I wouldn’t wear unless she made me do so.

What really bothered me, however, was my growing realization that Janine was dumb. Oh, she was smart enough that she could get OK grades, but I don’t think she ever looked inside a book unless it was in class. I loved to read, myself, ever since we lived in Miami. PapaDaddy used to take me to the library and help me carry home big stacks of picture books. Then I was reading books without pictures. By the time we’d lived in France for a couple of years, I could read French books as easily as English ones. I guess I would read almost any book I picked up. I learned a lot of big words that way, which amused grownups especially when I mispronounced them. I learned also that I had to be careful not to use too many big words around Janine, because it made her positively hostile, like she was threatened or something.

It was my lending books to Sylvie that provoked a crisis. One Saturday afternoon, a nasty, rainy spring day, I arrived at Janine’s house to find my four friends were waiting for me, arranged like a panel of judges. “Sit there, Kristen,” Janine ordered me. Anne and Jocelyn scowled at me too. I looked at Sylvie; she was avoiding eye contact, her gaze fixed on the toes of her shiny boots. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I sat down and silently regarded Janine.

“We have been discussing you,” Janine told me. “We have decided that you are becoming way too weird.” Jocelyn and Anne nodded vigorously. Janine glanced at Sylvie, who was now studying a lamp near the window. Swinging her leg, she gave Sylvie a little kick. Startled, Sylvie spoke in a choked voice. “It’s like, you’re always trying to. . . to get me to do a lot of stuff that nobody else wants to do.” “You don’t follow our rules,” Anne chimed in. “You think you’re too smart for us, doesn’t she, Jocelyn?” Jocelyn agreed, and suggested that if I liked to talk to Caitlyn so much, maybe I should hang out with her and Denise and the rest of their sorry-assed friends.

This went on for about fifteen minutes. I didn’t say anything. I just got madder and madder. My face was burning while Janine summed up the indictment: “So you see, Kristen, we trusted you and gave you our friendship. In return, we expected you would be loyal to us. We expected you would follow the rules. When you decided to waste your Saturday mornings playing football, we made an exception for you. But our group has to keep up its prestige. We can’t be the coolest girls in school if any one of us does a lot of creepy things. Nerdy things. Like you’ve been doing. Things cool girls just don’t do, like for which you aren’t even sorry, are you? Are you?” Janine was screaming at me.

I swallowed in hard. My whole life up to then — PapaDaddy’s death and our running away from Miami ahead of his business associates, my rebirth as Kristen and all my efforts to find a new life in France — was it all a waste? Was I going to become a social pariah at eleven? And then the absurdity of my being ejected from a clique of bratty little girls just overwhelmed me. I started laughing. I thought when we watched Heathers, these little bitches didn’t have even a clue what it was about! I laughed so hard that tears streamed down my cheeks. It was Janine’s turn to be speechless. Hers, and Sylvie’s and Jocelyn’s and Anne’s, while I picked up my backpack, walked out of the room, down the stairs, and out of Janine’s house.

Serious Talk

My eyes were still overflowing when I got home. I didn’t answer when Mommy called, but just threw off my raincoat, ran to my room, slammed the door and sprawled sobbing on my bed. That’s where she found me. The shock had worn off, and the pain had set in. Rejection sucks.

My getting dumped by Janine and the rest of my ex-friends led to some really long talks with my mom. I don’t think she’d been paying much attention to my social life, and now she wanted to catch up.

I had a lot of questions for her, too, like when could I go back to being a boy? I made her tell me again why it was necessary for us to hide out in France under fake names with me disguised as a girl. What did she expect when I was thirteen or fifteen? I mean, if every other girl in my class grew boobs and I remained a titless wonder, wouldn’t that sort of blow my cover?

There was a lot of stuff I hadn’t understood two years ago when PapaDaddy died. Mommy said that even though she mailed the Miami police a letter explaining everything that happened before we left, the cops still wanted to question her about how PapaDaddy died and where was the money that was in his safe.

That was one problem. The other problem was even bigger.

Mommy explained that PapaDaddy knew that he probably wouldn’t live to see me grown up but he wanted to take care of me. That’s why he invested five million dollars in US Treasury bonds and had his lawyer put the bonds “in trust for any children who are or shall be born to me (PapaDaddy) and Karen Summers (Mommy’s maiden name) until their eighteenth birthday(s).”

Mommy said that if I didn’t show up to claim my inheritance when I was 18, the bonds would go to Ricky’s kids instead. So it was logical that Ricky, who was a thug, would try to have me bumped off if he could find me. She knew Ricky was still looking for me and her, because her lawyer sent Mommy a letter from Ricky’s lawyer. Her lawyer said he answered that he didn’t know where we were. He told the Miami police the same thing. Mommy said that’s why I should tell her right away if I noticed anybody hanging around our house or asking about us.

Pretty soon, Mommy made an appointment for us with a specialist in Paris. Her name was Dr. LaTourette, and she was an endocrinologist — that’s someone who studies hormones and things like that. Dr. LaTourette talked with me and Mommy together for a long time, and after she understood how I came to be a girl, she asked my mom to wait while she talked to me alone.

She wanted to know was I OK with being a girl and doing girl stuff all the time. Did it bother me that I had to hide my weenie, and that I couldn’t do boy things? I told her how I played football with the boys and didn’t really feel I was missing out on anything important. I liked being attractive and having pretty clothes and not having to do a lot of dorky boy stuff like giving each other noogies and wedgies or wasting a lot of time on video games. So, yes, I said, I was OK with it for now, but I was a little worried about my future.

Dr. Tourette told me to strip so she could examine me. I took off my dress, my shoes and tights, and asked “my panties, too?” She nodded, and then she poked and probed at me with instruments, asking me to breathe and cough and stuff. She took a long time checking my weenie. She wanted to know did it ever get stiff or feel funny, and how did I feel when I went pee. I told her.

Then Dr. LaTourette called Mommy back in. She explained that I was developing normally, but that she could prescribe a medicine that would stop me from going into puberty, if that was what we wanted. It would give some more time for me to mature emotionally. However, she said, female hormones were another matter altogether. Because the process would be hard to reverse, she couldn’t prescribe hormones that would make my body develop like a girl’s. That was forbidden unless it was recommended by a psychiatrist who was expert in matters of child and adolescent sexuality. Dr. LaTourette thought I should be seeing a psychiatrist.

At this point, I gave my mom a long look. I didn’t know she had been thinking about my being a girl forever. Then, after some more talk, we all decided to try just the hormones that would delay puberty for now, while I thought hard about this new idea.

Four Friends

Actually, I thought about my permanently being a girl only every now and then, because there were too many other things in my life that needed doing. I had to pay more attention to my schoolwork now, because next year there would be exams to get into the high school. And of course, I had to sort out my school relationships, starting with Caitlyn and Denise. Basically, I swallowed hard and asked each of them to forgive me for being a jerk. Caitlyn said she and Denise figured out a long time ago that there was something about Janine that turned people into jerks, and that it would probably wear off pretty quick now that I was out of her orbit. So we started hanging out together and after a while we were pretty good friends.

Occasionally we talked about boys. Not like they were objects from another universe, or potential boyfriend/sex objects, but whether it was possible just to have a boy as a friend. We decided to conduct an experiment.

Caitlyn and Denise and I went into the cafeteria and as usual, David was sitting alone. Without asking, Caitlyn and I sat on either side of him, and Denise sat opposite, and we took our lunches out of our backpacks. Denise said “David, you need some friends,” and Caitlyn said “We’re the answer to your prayers.” It was my turn. “You’re probably wondering what this is about, aren’t you?”

David nodded. His mouth was hanging open, and there was still some food in it. “The thing is,” I continued, “we’ve decided that you have potential to be a human being. But you’ll have to work at it. And we’re prepared to help you.”

David gulped, and succeeded in swallowing his food. “You three girls are teasing me. Why don’t you leave me alone?”

Caitlyn gripped David’s elbow. “Listen up, David. This is your big chance. You may not get another.”

“David,” I said, “you are smart. You are probably the smartest boy in this whole school, but you don’t act smart. You spend all your time in your own weird, grubby little world.”

“So what’s it to you,” he asked. He was on guard, but I could tell he was interested, so I got right to the point. “We — that means Caitlyn and Denise and me, for now — are disgusted with the cliques here. We don’t want to be a bunch of fashion zombies or airheads. So we are making our own group of friends — people who are smart and aren’t afraid to show it, and who don’t feel threatened by people’s differences.”

David bit his fingernail. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ve noticed you don’t act as stupid as the other girls.” He examined the end of his finger. “But I’m not much interested in girl stuff.”

“Like what, doofus,” Caitlyn asked. “You mean Barbie dolls?” She rolled her eyes at Denise and me. “Tell him the deal, Kristen.”

“Look, David,” I said. “Provisionally, we think you might be the kind of person who makes a good friend, somebody interesting, someone fun to hang out with. If you shape up.” I had David’s full attention now. He’d forgotten about his hangnail. “There are some requirements. Basically, you have to become likeable.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Attractive people like themselves. They have self-esteem. Your self-esteem score looks like it’s about zero, which is crazy. You’re smart, you aren’t too ugly for a boy, your Mom and Dad probably love you, you’ve read a zillion books, and you know more about computers than anyone we know. So why do you dress like you do, fail half your classes, pick your nose, bite your fingernails and, by the smell of you, take a bath about once a month? What’s wrong with this picture?”

“I’m a loser. Leave me alone. Go find another lab animal to torture.”

Denise reached across the table and gripped David’s wrist. “No, I don’t think so. We chose you. We’re going to save you from yourself, and you’re going to let us, because you’ve got nothing to lose.”

Denise was right, though it took the rest of lunch period to wear down David’s resistance.

Next morning before the first bell, we all met as agreed at David’s locker to check him out. I wasn’t expecting too much, but he was actually waiting for us there. He was still a little damp from washing, his hair was combed, his shirt was tucked in, his socks matched, his shoes were shined, and lo and behold, he’d had a manicure. I pointed that out, approvingly, and David blushed. “Yeah, I asked my mom to cut them for me.”

“David, you look just great,” Caitlyn said. “Now, show me your homework.”

“Uh, it’s mostly done,” David answered. “I’ll have to do the geometry problems at lunch break.” We all looked very stern. “Don’t do that again,” Denise said. “You know we agreed that lunchtime is for hanging out together.”

That was the beginning. David backslid sometimes, but heck, we all have bad days. We coached him and praised him. By Christmas break, when we got our report cards, David’s grades were as good as mine and Caitlyn’s, and almost as good as Denise’s. Also, we really were friends, the four of us. It seemed as though we never ran out of things to talk about, or ideas for fun things to do on the weekend. We all had roles in the middle school play. On Armistice Day, we all hiked over the hills to St. Hilaire and had a picnic on the riverbank. I couldn’t persuade the girls to come to play football on Saturday mornings, but after a while David showed up. I talked to Olivier and got him to promise to be David’s football coach, like he’d helped me. Good old Olivier!

Before Christmas, we all chipped in to order identical silver neck chains with our names on them. I was a little afraid that David would think that was too fruity, but he went along. “I’ll wear it inside my shirt,” he explained.

I Go On-Line

On the morning after Christmas, just after ten, our doorbell rang. I’d invited David over to help me get my new PC running. He was the only other one in our gang who was in Paris for the holidays. Denise had gone home to Belgium with her parents and Caitlyn was at her grandparents in the Midi. Mommy had finally agreed I could have a computer for Christmas. Unfortunately, she didn’t know anything about computers and neither did I. Fortunately David and his father were computer wonks. I think they made David’s in their basement out of parts they got from catalogues.

With that kind of experience, it was a snap for David to set up my computer. The Apple G3 that Mommy’d bought me was one of the first real home computers. We tested it by playing Lode Runner and David decided that it worked fine.

“What’s your ISP,” he asked. “What’s an ISP,” I answered. “Internet Service Provider, dummy. That’s how you use this thing to communicate with other computers.”

That led to a discussion about money with Mommy. We had been having a lot of money discussions lately, and they were getting more difficult. The investments J-C made for Mommy were not doing so well, and we had what she called a “cash flow problem.” Even so, hooking up to an ISP was obviously necessary. David and I both said so. David said that just having a computer but no access to other computers was like having a boat with no sail or motor. He explained very patiently that computers created a whole new way to get and share information, that anybody who expected to have a real career in the future would have to understand and use computers, and so this was another kind of investment, an investment in my future, and one that was certain to pay off big time.

Mommy didn’t look entirely convinced, but she agreed anyway.

The next day David showed up with a bunch of floppy disks, and helped me get hooked up to Compuserv. “This is a portal,” he said, “you go through it and hook up to whatever interests you.” Then he showed me how. David explained that a huge number of people were using personal computers, maybe as many as five million, and they grouped together mainly by the things that interested them. I could click on Compuserv’s home page to get a list of “usergroups.” More than half, I think, were computer tecchie groups like “Kaypro owners” or “Unix users.” But there were lots of other categories, like baseball cards and film noir and MG owners. If you clicked on “MG Owners,” there were sub-groups like “MG-TC” and MG-A” Anybody could start a group, David said, and anybody else could join in by posting messages.

David showed me this other thing, called electronic mail, which was how to send a personal message to another computer user. You had to know the address. His address was [email protected]. I was a long number at Compuserv.com. Then it was time for David to go. “Enjoy yourself,” he said.

I had an impulse. “C’mere,” I said, pulling David closer to me and planting one on his cheek. “Here’s a kiss for being such a sweet guy.” David blushed and ran for safety. I started to explore “cyberspace.”

There were a couple of things I had been wanting to research for a long time. The first one was PapaDaddy. There was a usergroup called Mafia. I read a bunch of posts and decided I was in the right place, so I left my own post, which was

Does anyone know what happened to Carlo Zamboni?

Then I started on my second project, which was to find out if there were other kids like me. Since it was obviously a question of sex, I tried a bunch of alt.sex usegroups. Every one I opened was creepy. Some were really gross and perverted. Then I looked into soc.support.cross-dress and started to find some useful information. My mom was yelling for me to go to bed, so at last I turned off the Apple and fell asleep knowing that at least I was not the only person like me.

The next day, and the next, I was exploring, trying to make sense of long threads and extract some useful information from them. Like what "homosexual" meant, and "transvestite" and "crossdresser." Then I found some postings from people who claimed to be "transgendered."

I picked out two that seemed to be the most normal. I wrote them a direct message explaining my situation. I said that I was a twelve year-old boy kid who for safety reasons had to live in disguise as a girl. I didn’t mind it too much, but I worried that if I didn’t stop soon, maybe I couldn’t go back to being a boy. I said I needed to understand what this was doing to my brain. I was having weird dreams.

Then I turned off my computer, and put on my warm-ups and reeboks and went for a long run along the river. I ran until I was completely exhausted, came back home by bus, and fell asleep on my bed, too tired for dreams.

Next day, there was a message from David.

How’s it going? Can I come over?

Sure, two-thirty?

See you then. ;-)

There were a couple of answers to my post about PapaDaddy. The first one said “Carlo Zamboni died in Miami in June 1984. His bitch of a mistress killed him, stole his money and vanished. There’s an Interpol warrant out for her arrest.” I sucked in real hard. Mommy couldn’t have killed PapaDaddy, could she? The second message was a copy of an obituary from the Miami Herald:

Carlo Zamboni, 68, Crime Figure

Carlo Zamboni, reputed boss of the Massachusetts branch of the Cosa Nostra during the 1950’s and 60’s, was found dead in his bed in his Coral Gables residence on June 17 after Miami police received an anonymous telephone call. Zamboni, born Carlo Francis Zambonese in 1914 of Italian immigrant parents, grew up in Boston’s North End. He first became notorious during the Prohibition era as driver and reputed hit man for Sonny Abruzzese, a flamboyant smuggler who bragged that “half the cops in Boston are on my payroll.” Zamboni was convicted of two counts of racketeering in 1964 and served nine years in federal prison. After his release, he moved to the Miami area where he lived in seclusion and became an avid sport fisherman. Zamboni leaves a son, Ricardo, daughters Carmela and Alessandra, and several grandchildren.

There was also an answer to my message about being raised as a girl, from someone who signed herself “Aunt Polly.” Basically she said that I had to think very hard about whether I would be happier living as a man or a woman. There were lots of kids whose bodies were one sex but for reasons that only God understood, their brains told them that it was a big mistake. In their emotions and personalities, they were virtually members of the other sex. Society treated this as a big joke, but it was a tragedy. Kids like this would grow up and try to live in the gender role that seemed right but because transgender persons most always looked and acted odd they would be found out and persecuted.

Aunt Polly knew all this, she said, because she’d lived through that hell herself before she finally met a kind man who gave her shelter and helped her get hormones to change her body and money so she could get a college degree. She said that if I decided that I really wanted to stay a girl, I should do everything I could to enter counseling now, and start in on hormones as soon as possible so I wouldn’t end up a freak. She ended by saying I could write to her as often as I wanted if that would help.

I wrote back

Thanks, Aunt Polly. I’ll be in touch. Love you lots, Kristen.

David Shares a Secret

David and I were sprawled on my bed. I turned off the TV. The football match we’d been watching had ended in a tie. David said “Kristen?” He was looking at me intently. “Why’d you kiss me the other day?”

I guessed he’d been a little shocked, so I was careful with my answer. “It was just because you were sweet to give me all that help with my computer. I really appreciated it. It’s hard to believe you’re the same little geek you were eight months ago.

“Y’know, hooking up with you three girls was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Yeah, maybe so,” I said and waited to see what would come next. David hitched forward a little, so our foreheads nearly touched. “Can I tell you a huge secret? I mean, can I trust you to not to tell anybody, not even Denise or Caitlyn?”

I nodded, sitting up cross-legged and pushing back my bangs. Receptive posture for a pre-pubescent girl.

“I wish I were a girl too,” David said. Then the words came flooding out. He’d never felt like he was really a boy for as far back as he could remember. Girls were nice; they weren’t rough and nobody made fun of them if they weren’t good in sports or if they liked to read books. He knew it was wrong to feel like that and he guessed he was queer. Before my friends and I began our “experiment” with David, he was really sad. He tried talking to his mom about his feelings but she wasn’t any help. David said he had decided that it would be best if he died.

“So you see, Caitlyn and Denise and you saved my life.”

“Oh, c’mon David, you’re being melodramatic. Everybody has weird feelings sometimes. It doesn’t mean you are the wrong , uh, gender.”

“Yeah, right. You’ve got it so good that you don’t know what it’s like to be screwed up like me,” he said. Little did he know!

“I think I can appreciate how awful it must have been for you,” I answered. “We didn’t just pick you out at random. Have you stopped?”

“Stopped what? Thinking about killing myself or wishing I wasn’t a boy?”

“Well, both things, I guess. Especially the first.”

“Yeah, I’m OK about that now, I think. But not about the second. I dream about being a girl all the time. I lie in my bed at night and imagine that some fairy dust might land on me and I’ll wake up just like you. Or that I’ll have an accident and to save me the doctors will have to cut off my weenie and then they’ll decide that the best thing is for me to live for now on as a girl. When I’m with you three, I’m happy, but I don’t know if it’s because you are my best friends or just because I hope maybe a few more girl cooties will rub off on me.”

“I guess it could be both, and they’d be both all right, huh,” I offered. I’d had another impulse. “David, take off your clothes,” I said.

“All of them?” David was scarcely breathing.

“You can leave your underwear on if you want,” I said as I shut the door of my room. I started rummaging through my chest of drawers. After I found what I was looking for, I looked around and saw David was standing in the corner with just his skivvies on. “We’re going to start slow,” I said, handing him panties and a camisole, some hiphugger pants and a sweater. It was pretty much the same thing I had on, except my pants and top were yellow and the ones I gave him were shades of green. “Oh, and you’ll need these,” I added, digging out socks and a pair of loafers. “Now go put them on.”

David grabbed up the clothes and scuttled inside the bathroom as though he was afraid I might change my mind. When he came back out a few minutes later, I could see that all the clothes fit, which was no surprise, because give or take half an inch in any dimension, David was the same size as me. In general, he looked just like any other late blooming 12 year-old girl, leaving aside the hair and the fact that he didn’t know how to stand, or what to do with his hands, and the shit-eating grin he was wearing on his face. “Ta-da!” he said by way of announcing his transformation.

“How’s that feel,” I asked. “Is it what you expected?” While David searched for words, I sat him down at my dressing table. “OK, now I’m going to touch you up a little.” I took the tweezers and worked on his eyebrows, something I’d actually wanted to do for a long time.

“Don’t do anything to me that someone can tell, OK?”

“Not to worry. Just hold still.” I combed back his unruly brown hair and brushed a little blusher onto his cheeks and temples. “Girls our age use just a little bit of makeup if they have any sense. Now do this,” I said, pursing my lips in lipstick mode. I carefully applied some light pink gloss to his lips. Then I reached down inside the neck of David’s sweater and pulled up his silver neck chain so it was on the outside like mine.

“Sit there and admire yourself a while while I go get something,” I said.

My mom heard me going over to the spare bedroom. “Kristen, what are you guys up to,” she called. “Not much, Mom,” I answered. “We’ve been watching the football match.” I opened the closet door and found the box I was looking for. Then I went to her bathroom and got a pair of clip-on earrings.

“David, this is a wig that was my sister’s when she had chemotherapy, before she died. I’m going to try it on you.”

Made for a ten year-old, the wig was a little small, though not impossibly so. It looked like David was wearing a rat’s nest. I brushed it into submission, added a lime green headband, attached the earrings under the blonde locks, and stood back to admire my creation. “Not half bad,” I said.

David was gaping into the mirror. He stood up, sat down, turned, twisted, put his arms in an O over his head and went up on his toes like a ballerina, and generally acted like an airhead. “Not half bad? I am beautiful!”

“Which proves once again,” I told him, “that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But you do look just like a girl.” I backed him against the wall and snapped a picture.

Then David asked if he could try on a dress, and I told him he couldn’t. He’d had enough excitement for one day. I told him it was time to go home to dinner, wiped off his lipstick, and made him put his boy clothes back on.

“By the way,” I whispered as he was pulling on his parka. “What’s your girl name?”

“You pick one,” David replied, kissing me on the cheek. “Tell me what it is next time.”

Questions, and a Good Cry

I couldn’t sleep. A couple of days had passed since David confided his secret. The Christmas holiday was over; school was starting again in the morning. I’d received some more replies to my post about PapaDaddy. I had to talk to my mom.

The light was still on in her room and the door was cracked open. “Mom, may I come in?” She’d been reading. Mommy scooted over to make room for me in bed. “What’s up, sweetheart?”

“Tell me again how PapaDaddy died.”

“Well, uh . . . OK, I guess you’re old enough to know the details now. We were together in bed, making love. Then he just, kind of, couldn’t breathe, so I slid out from under PapaDaddy and tried some of the things I learned in stewardess training, y’know, like mouth to mouth respiration, but it didn’t help. He was thrashing around. He pushed me away. He sat up all pop-eyed and red in the face and then he just fell over. I always guessed it was a heart attack.”

“So you didn’t kill him, huh?”

“Certainly not! Why’d you ask me that, sweetie?” Mommy was on guard.

“I know the cops want to question you about how PapaDaddy died, and what happened to the money in his safe,” I answered reproachfully.

“Yeah, that’s true. And Ricky Zamboni wants to question me too. If it were just the cops, we wouldn’t be hiding, because it isn’t worth all the stress. But Ricky is poison. He’d have us killed in a split second. I keep hoping that he’ll die. Thank God PapaDaddy was in the habit of keeping a lot of cash on hand. I sure earned it.”

I hugged Mommy to show her that on balance I believed her version of the story. “Can I ask more questions?”

“Sure, what the hell. Spill.”

“If Ricky is going to kill us if he can find us, how am I going to collect my inheritance before the uh, statute of limitations runs out?”

“Sweetheart, if I knew the answer to that, do you think we’d be hiding here? It’s a problem I just haven’t been able to solve.”

“Where’s Ricky now?” (I knew the answer already; so, it turned out, did my Mom.)

“I heard he’s CEO of Zamboni Maintenance Services in Boston. Supposedly what his company does is legit, but I think it’s a façade for laundering what Ricky gets from the rackets. They can’t get anything on him. The son-of-a-bitch is too smart to get his own hands dirty.”

“What do you think I should do, er, about what people think I am?”

“Wow, that’s a change of direction. You mean, should you stay a girl as far as everybody but me is concerned, or switch back to boy mode?”

“Yeah, something like that,” I answered.

“Here’s what I’ve been thinking,” she said. “First, you’ve adapted amazingly well. No one would ever guess you are a genetic boy. Of course, that can’t last. . . .

“Second, if you decide you need to get back into being a boy, we’ll have to move somewhere else, for two reasons. First, your friends at school would never understand if one day you announced you were really a boy all the time. Second, the social workers and police would probably come and take you away from me.”

“Third, you don’t have to choose yet. I’ve been thinking you should wait until you find out if you’re attracted to other boys or to girls.”

“Huh?”

“I guess I’m old-fashioned. I’d rather you grew up heterosexual.”

I exploded. “Jeeze Louise! You’ve played your little game with me and now I don’t know what the heck I am. Is your idea to just wait until I turn into a real freak?”

Mom counted to ten, I think, and then said “Kristen, you have plenty of reason to be upset with me. I really never thought it would go this far. But we were safe, and you seemed OK emotionally.”

“Well, now I need someone to talk to. Are you going to do what Dr. LaTourette said?” I meant her recommendation that I get into counseling.

Mom answered yeah, she supposed so, and made the little sigh she makes when she thinks about expensive things.

I wasn’t going to let her off the hook. After all, she was the cause of my being confused. “We can afford it, can’t we?”

“Well, yes. . . . we’ll make do. I just wish another Thierry would come along. This time I wouldn’t let him get away.” She looked wistful.

Thierry had wanted to marry my mom. She’d loved him, but she turned him down gently, knowing he’d never get comfortable with being the stepfather of a girl who was really a boy. Our Benz sedan was Thierry’s goodbye present.

What could I do? I kissed Mommy and cried and told her I was sorry I’d been mean. She said “no, sweetheart” and kissed me and cried too, and thanked me for being honest about my feelings. She asked me to forgive her, and I said there was nothing to forgive, she’d done her best.

With the Shrinks

Three weeks later I started counseling with Dr. Raoul Corbin, FFC(Psyc).

It was nice having someone else I could talk to about what I called “the Kristen problem.”

I tried to make him promise not to blame Mommy. He said he couldn’t promise that, but he could promise that anything we said to each other would be confidential unless I gave him permission to tell someone else, including my mom. I decided that was OK.

I told Dr. Corbin about the usergroups I’d visited on Compuserv and about my e-mail friend “Aunt Polly.” He said I should be skeptical about anything I learned that way, and double check with him. I decided not to tell Dr. Corbin about David for now at least.

I told him that I felt fine being a girl; was that OK? It was, he said. I was worried about what would happen to me whether I stayed a girl or went back to being a boy. He said that was normal. He wanted me to take a lot of tests to explore how I felt about gender and relationships. Dr. Corbin explained that sometimes what we think we feel isn’t what we feel unconsciously, which is the cause of a lot of neurotic behavior. I asked if he thought I was neurotic. He said that his first impression was that I was a well-adjusted twelve year old girl with a precociously adult vocabulary.

I was sent to a tecchie person who administered a bunch of tests. She blew away Dr. Corbin’s promise of “total confidentiality.” “So,” she asked, “you’re a boy who thinks she’s a girl?” “Technically,” I replied. “I have a penis.” I was angry, so I screwed up her tests by answering the questions on the first one the way someone would if their gender orientation were female, on the second as if their orientation were male, and so on, back and forth. I counted nine tests, and I was amused when Dr. Corbin tried to interpret them to me. He detected a lot of conflict, he said. I said we both detected a lot of bullshit, and explained what had happened. He was not so amused. I was wasting my mom’s money, he said, and he wasn’t totally responsible for technicians who could read behind the lines, however finely drawn. We called a truce, and Corbin referred me to a colleague for a backup assessment.

Marie LeMaitre, PhD, was, in a word, cool. We hit it off a lot better. The first half-hour of my counseling session she spent asking questions about what I did for fun, what I was reading, what parts of school did I find useful, was there anything that I really wanted to do that I couldn’t, and stuff like that. Then she asked me if I’d ever heard of the Harry Benjamin standards, and I admitted that I’d seen references to them on the Internet. “Kristen,” she said, “you are about as smart as kids get. You just have to make up your mind which way you want to go. Then you can write your own script.”

I picked up on that, and got her to tell me where I could find the complete text of the Benjamin standards. She gave me a whole reading list on transgenderism.

We had ten minutes left. I said there was something else: I knew a person, a boy my age, who was really convinced he should be a girl. He was really tortured. If his parents knew, they’d freak. My friend was a train wreck looking for a place to happen. Could Dr. LeMaitre help?

Really, Dr. LeMaitre was good. She stopped the clock and first of all, she made sure that I wasn’t referring obliquely to myself. Convinced I was telling it straight, she said that if my friend was really only twelve, she could not see him without parental consent, which seemed like a pity in this case.

I was sent back to Dr. Corbin with a “gender-conflicted but head-on-straight” report from Dr. LeMaitre. She’d be happy to see me again, anytime, she told him. Corbin and I went back to once-every-two-weeks sessions. I set out to master every item on Dr. LeMaitre’s reading list.

Serious Research

“David,” I said, “come on over. We have work to do.” He was knocking on the door in fifteen minutes. It was our winter holiday. Mom was at the hospital where she did volunteer service, so David browsed through my closet. He pulled out tights, my best turtleneck sweater, an A-line jumper and my low-heeled pumps. I said “Look, we aren’t going dancing,” and had him put on some flat strap shoes instead. We retrieved Kristen’s wig from its hiding place and I did a little make up work, topping it off with a puff of cologne. When David was happy with the way he looked — and smelled — he reminded me that I owed him a new name.

“Your new name is . . . of course . . . Renée,” I said. In French, Renée literally means “reborn, ” which is what David was. “Yeah,” he said, “Renée. I like it.”

Reincarnated as Renée, it was easy to think of David as “she.” My friend fell naturally into the part. Whereas David was awkward, Renée was graceful and poised. David was often tongue-tied; Renée was never at a loss for words.

We worked together to find all the books and articles on Dr. LeMaitre’s list. He found several medical journal articles at a university library and made copies. On a couple of rainy afternoons, David came over with his Dad’s medical dictionary. First he raided my closet, then we deciphered the articles he’d copied. I found some other articles by file-searching the Compuserv archives with my computer, and I used my birthday money to buy a couple of the books that were in French. Aunt Polly had some of the English language books on the list. She air-mailed them to me. It cost her a lot of money. She enclosed a picture of herself, too. Even though she had square shoulders, a lot of chin and pretty big hands, Polly was a babe. No one would guess she was a pre-op — that is, a transsexual who hasn’t yet had the male-to-female (MtF) operation.

Here’s some of what we found out.

- There are tens of thousands of MtF transsexuals, at least, and a lot of FtM transsexuals too. Cross-dressers, or transvestites, get their kicks from just pretending to be members of the other sex, but transsexuals are sure that except for the physical details, they are part of the other sex. In other words, they are gender-conflicted, and finding some way to resolve that conflict is their main objective in life.

- Many transsexuals never find a solution. They lead sad, often desperate lives, often on the margins of “normal” society. Others hide their dreams and try to repress their emotions. They may marry, have children and moderately successful careers, but their dreams never stop.

- There are some clubs where adult transsexuals dress up and socialize. A lot of cross-dressers are members too. Most of the people who join the MtF clubs know they’ll never pass for women, but at least it’s an “outlet.”

- Most psychologists think the only solution for a true transsexual is a sex-change. Someone who takes the right hormones for several years, and who then demonstrates proper “socialization” by living successfully in the non-birth gender role, is a candidate for sexual reassignment surgery, or SRS.

- The Benjamin standards forbid doctors from prescribing hormones until a person is sixteen, and don’t allow surgery until at least eighteen. Most transsexuals and many doctors think this is way too late to get “optimal results.”

- Puberty is a terrible time for most transsexuals. That’s when they realize that they are irretrievably different from other kids. Their head is going one way and their body another. It’s almost impossible for most kids to get good information about what is going on. They think they are some weird kind of pervert. Some commit suicide.

- A transsexual who aspires to SRS ought to have good medical help. Endocrinologists can prescribe a sequence of hormones that will block the ones the body naturally secretes and replace them with ones that trigger the “right” physical development. After that, a skilled surgeon can create sexual organs that are perfect working replicas of the real thing, well, except for not having babies.

I Get Kissed

My mom bought me some training bras. “Here,” she said, “I know there’s nothing to train, but you can at least look the part.” I don’t know if there was a connection, but a couple of weeks later Olivier phoned. His parents had some tickets for the circus, he said; would I like to come? “Sure,” I said. I expected there would be a bunch of other ninth grade kids, but when they came to pick me up, there was just M. and Mme DuFarge, Olivier’s big sister and her boyfriend, and Olivier. We had a great time. Afterward, we stopped at the Café Odeon for dessert. Olivier’s parents asked me lots of questions. They said I was charmante. On the way home (it had gotten dark), Olivier’s sister Babette and her boyfriend were all wrapped around each other on one side of the back seat, and Olivier and I were sort of squashed together on the other. He held my hand, so I kind of leaned my head on his shoulder. I wanted him to smell my cologne. Babette and her boyfriend got off at a Metro station. Then we got to my house. Mme DuFarge said I should thank Mommy for her for letting me come, and maybe we could all get together sometime? Olivier walked me in, still hanging on to my hand. His was sweaty. Just before we got to the door, he pulled me aside out of the light and kissed me, just a peck. I said “Wow” and pulled him closer and kissed him back. I stuck my tongue in his mouth, in and out, real quick. Olivier kind of shivered and squeezed me hard. He tried to kiss me back but I pulled away and ran inside.

I hung up my coat, and wandered upstairs to find my mom in her bedroom. “Mom, I think it’s time for me to go on pills,” I said. She sat bolt upright and flicked off the TV. “Is something wrong,” she asked. “No,” I answered. “Not at all. I think I just found out that it’s guys that I like.”

Downtown

By May I could already see some result from the pills Dr. LaTourette had prescribed for me — spirolactone, which is an androgen blocker, and a female hormone, estradiol. My breasts were tender, and now I really did need the training bra. My hips were getting bigger, too.

My mom got invited to spend a weekend with some friends at their cottage in Périgord. Actually, we both got invited, but I begged off saying David and I had to study for a big history test, which was true. I asked if it was OK for David to spend the night. My mom thought about that for a while and agreed.

David showed up just as my mom was leaving early on Saturday morning. “Have I got something to show you!,” he whispered, and waited while I helped my mom carry stuff out to the Benz and then kissed her goodbye.

“OK, spill. What is it?” David extracted a blonde wig from his bookbag. “Remember I went to my cousins’ last week,” he said, pulling it over his short blonde hair. “I found this in their attic.”

“Wow — you look so 70’s. Like, uh, what’s her name, Petula Clark.”

Downtown is one of my Mom’s favorite songs. I was humming it while I helped David change into Renée mode.

When you're alone and life is making you lonely
You can always go — downtown
When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, I know -- downtown

As usual, Renée wanted to tart it up. “Look, Dumbo,” I said, “you just want to use enough makeup and jewelry to enhance your good looks — not so much that you make everybody wonder what message you’re trying to send.”

The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares
So go downtown, things'll be great when you're
Downtown -- no finer place, for sure
Downtown -- everything's waiting for you

“What’s turned you into a birdie,” Renée asked while I fastened a hairbow on her that flattened out the wig a bit and had the added merit of matching her dress.

“Don’t you get it? We’re stepping out today,” I said.

I had to wait a moment while that sunk in.

“Me? No way! I can’t do it,” Renée gasped. Turning to face me, she crossed her arms in a King’s X. “Not yet!”

And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you
Someone who is just like you and needs a gentle hand to
Guide them along

“Kristen, what’ll I do if we meet somebody who knows us? I’ll be dead meat, I know I will.” Renée was hyperventilating.

“Lighten up, sweetheart. You’re the one who wants with all her little heart to be a girl, right? Now’s your chance, so take it! You look and act every inch a chicklet. Your own mom wouldn’t recognize you. If ‘not yet,’ than when? Are you going to stay in the closet for the rest of your life?”

“Are you sure?”

“Is the Pope Catholic? I’m going to find some film.”

Twenty minutes later we were out the door.

We can forget all our troubles, forget all our cares
So go downtown, things'll be great when you're
Downtown - don't wait a minute more
Downtown - everything's waiting for you

Renée and I had a blast! Window shopping on Avenue Mouffetard. Mango sorbet at a little café in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Fending off two boys who wanted to pick us up. Buying tapes at the underground mall at Les Halles. We met our English lit teacher and his wife in the park. Mr. Cheseboro recognized me so I grabbed Renée’s hand and introduced her as my cousin from, uh, Dijon. He started asking her did she know some teacher at the lycée there so I asked quickly him if he’d take our picture together.

We got home about dark, ate the dinner my mom had left for us, and listened to the Guns n’ Roses tape I’d bought. It was feeling kind of late. Let’s go to bed,” I said.

I lent Renée some jammies and persuaded to hang up her wig for the night. I went into the bathroom to pee and made sure my weenie was tucked tight. We got into bed and I turned out the light.

“G’nite Renée.”

“G’nite Kristen.”

Five minutes pass. “Kristen?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Spill.”

“Do you play with yourself, Kristen? I mean masturbate?”

“Yeah, sometimes. I suppose everyone does.”

“What do you think about when you do it?”

“I dunno. Mostly just that it feels good. Sometimes I think about being kissed by Olivier or some other boy.” Silence. I figured out that Renée wanted to tell me something. “What about you?”

“I — I think about being a girl. I imagine maybe my parents see how unhappy I’ve been. Like, one day my mom tells me she’s always really wanted to have a girl, not a boy. She goes to a chest and pulls out lots of pretty clothes for me. And my dad says whatever I want is OK. And sometimes I think about hanging out with Caitlyn and Denise and you and we’re all wearing dresses and heels and makeup and giggling.”

“That gets you excited?”

“Yeah. I guess I’m really a mess. But I want to thank you. Can I kiss you?”

“Uh, look, Renée. It’s really boys that I’m into -- but give me a nice hug.”

Summer Plans

A few weeks later, I was being counseled. Dr. Corbin asked if he could ask a really personal question. “Shoot,” I said.

“Do you play with yourself, Kristen? I mean masturbate?”

Jeez. Déjá  vu. “Yeah, sometimes. I suppose everyone does.”

“What do you think about when you do it?”

I told him what I told Renée, and he recorded what I said.

“So tell me, what am I supposed to think about,” I asked him. He said he had wondered if I got excited thinking about being a girl.

“Why should I,” I said. “In most essential respects, I am a girl. I think like a girl. I act like a girl. I feel like a girl. A normal girl, not a girlie-girlie girl,” I added, thinking of Janine and her clique. “Write that down, too.”

He wrote. I had an impulse. “Uh, Dr. Corbin?”

He looked up from his pad expectantly.

“I know a boy like that” I said. “One who gets all excited thinking about being a girl.”

“Is it the one you told Dr. LeMaitre about?”

“Yeah. A lot has happened since then. I helped him a little. When he dresses up as Renée, no one would guess he’s a guy.”

Dr. Corbin asked if David’s parents knew. I said my friend was afraid to tell them. He was pretty sure his dad would go nuts, and probably take him out of school and not let him hang out with his girl friends anymore. Dr. Corbin said it was often like that, unfortunately. He thought I ought to let my mother know about Renée.

I told my mom. When I got done, she sent me upstairs to get her a Valium. She didn’t say what she was going to do.

It was two days before my mom finished thinking about me and David/Renée.

I was helping clean up the dinner dishes when she said “I have an idea. You know the Marcellins? The people with the cottage in Périgord?”

I said I remembered them. He was a movie director, and their kids were obnoxious.

“Don’t worry about that. They’ve asked me if I’d like to use their cottage while they are all in the States. He’s shooting a movie there.”

I said I’d rather go to the States, too. I was getting more and more curious about my native country. “We’ll go back when it’s safe,” my mom answered, like she always did. “Would you like me to invite David to spend the second part of July with us at the Marcellins’ cottage?”

I told my mom that was an excellent idea, if she really meant Renée, not David. She answered that that was the way she meant it, and then she laid a heavy one on me. Mom said she respected my concern for my friend. But I needed to understand, she said, that by helping Renée live out her fantasies, she (my mom) was taking a big risk. Some people might say she was corrupting a minor.

“That would make two minors, I guess. Is the penalty double if you get found out?”

Mom gave me a hug. “You are getting big and smart too fast for me, missie. But maybe this is a way I can get to know you better, and your friend too.”

Idyll

We went down to Périgord right after Bastille Day. David’s dad brought him and his suitcase of boy things over to our house. My mom promised that she’d have David phone home every couple of days. We threw the rest of the luggage, including a big suitcase for Renée, into the back of the Benz and headed for the autoroute. I leaned over the seat and whispered to my mom. She nodded and turned in at the first rest stop. “C’mon,” I said to David, grabbing a sack, and led him toward the restrooms. We had to wait for a minute or two until I could sneak him into a stall in the ladies’ room. Five minutes later we climbed back in the car with my mom. “Mom, this is Renée,” I said.

The place where the Marcellins had their cottage was really nice. It was on the edge of a village famous for paté de fois gras. There were lots of flowers, and a river. The smell of goose crap was only evident when the wind blew the wrong way.

Next day, Mom took us into a town called Pontleveque. It was a market day, and we needed to fill up the fridge and pantry at the cottage. When the food was all bought and in the car, my mom announced it was time for haircuts. Somehow David had evaded a haircut since several weeks before school let out. That was a good thing because it gave the stylist something to work with. I just got my hair squared off and trimmed. Renée ended up with a pixie cut. Mom told the stylist that Renée had gone through a tomboy stage which she now regretted. Was there some appliance that would look nice for dress-up occasions? Mademoiselle had just the thing, an extension that Renée could pin under a hairband, and fortunately in just the right color. Mom haggled down the price, paid for the haircuts and the extension, and then gave back all she’d saved in a big tip.

One beautiful summer day followed after another at the cottage. We shopped for food and cooked and ate, we swam, we climbed hills and bicycled through the fields, we played cards and badminton and once we went to see how fois gras is made. You don’t want to know the details of that. Gradually Renée relaxed and began to act like a normal girl. What I mean was that she quit exaggerating her mannerisms and changing her clothes all the time.

At the end of the second week, Dr. Corbin and Dr. LeMaitre showed up for two nights. I hadn’t picked up on this, but it seemed that my mom had invited them to visit. Ostensibly, it was a field trip to observe young transgendered kids in the wild. Actually, that provided perfect cover for Raoul (Corbin) and Marie-José (LeMaitre) to develop an amorous dimension in their relationship. Renée and I got doubled up so they could have a bedroom to themselves. Mom outdid herself cooking.

Renée Makes a Choice

Dinner on the second night was a huge dish of paella, served outside at dusk. Mom had sent Raoul and Marie-José to town for mussels and shrimp. They brought back lots of wine to wash dinner down, too. Renée and I were each allowed to have some. I didn’t take much wine because I wanted to hear the grownups talk, not my head buzzing.

At first the conversation was mostly about Renée. The doctors asked her quite a few questions. She wasn’t uncomfortable answering; maybe it was the wine. Renée said she thought her mom had really wanted a girl, but she couldn’t think of any special event that made her think that. She didn’t feel particularly close to either her mom or dad, she said, but she wished she were. Sometimes she felt as if David was a big disappointment to them, especially to her dad. Whenever he got a good grade, his father would say “yes, but what about these other subjects? If you can get A’s in history, why can’t you get them in math?”

Gradually the conversation became more general. Dr. Corbin explained that for years — going back at least to Freud -- there’s been argument whether transsexualism is the product of nature or nurture. In other words, are some people born with a transgender orientation, or do they learn it in reaction to things — even random things — that happen to them in their childhood? It was becoming clear, he said, that there’s no one-size-fits-all explanation of anything that has to do with transgender people. There are many more transsexuals than used to be believed, and they are much more individual and complex in their emotions and psychology.

Dr. LeMaitre said that not until the late 1960’s did enough transgender people get in touch with each other that it was possible to talk about a transgender culture. Up to then almost all transgender people led lonely, dreadfully repressed lives. Now, even though the medical profession had come grudgingly to accept that transgenderism, or transsexualism, was not a perversion but rather a rare but very human condition, only a small percentage of transsexuals are brave enough to get help.

The research that Dr. LeMaitre was doing focused on what could be done for transsexuals who are identified at an early age. The bodies of boys like Renée, she said, can be perfectly feminized if treatment starts early enough. However, most doctors are afraid to risk their licenses prescribing to young teenagers. They reason that “kids are always changing their minds” and hormone therapy is not fully reversible. The practical result is that most transgender kids — even those who come “out” — are absolutely miserable watching their growing bodies betray their deepest wishes. When at last they can begin on hormones, the results are way less than optimal.

Dr. Corbin said that when doctors don’t step up to the problem, some boys with understanding mothers take a lot of high-estrogen female birth control pills. It is medically a bit risky, but it generally leads to physical feminization.

Dr. LeMaitre talked about computer networks. She said they had potential to revolutionize the lives of transgender people — or of any widely-dispersed,120 marginal community. She predicted that in a few more years, say by 1995, it would be easy for anyone with a home computer and a modem to get almost any kind of information, and to communicate with anybody else anywhere. It would be like the Protestant Reformation. Sexual knowledge wouldn’t be the exclusive property of the “priesthood” anymore.

While my mom refilled the grownups’ wine glasses, I asked the doctors to explain the difference between “transgender” and “transsexual.” It seemed to me that they were using the words interchangeably.

Dr. Corbin said there’s a lot of overlap. Strictly speaking, “gender” refers to emotional and psychological characteristics and “sex” to physical characteristics. It’s possible, he said, for a transgender person to adopt the behavior and mannerisms of the non-birth sex, but not feel the need for hormones or surgery to make the body fit the behavior. And it’s possible for transsexuals, conversely, to adapt their bodies without conforming their behavior to the new appearance. For most practical purposes, however, most “trans” people want the whole package, so the words are used interchangeably. He asked if Dr. LeMaitre agreed. She said the notion of an immutable and bi-polar sexual order is breaking down. We are only beginning to recognize the range of possible diversity.

That reminded Dr. LeMaitre of something else, she said. Most transgender people go through considerable evolution. At first they may be obsessed by an exaggerated notion of what femininity or masculinity is. Given an opportunity to act out, they often act outrageously. They dress to extremes. (I giggled, thinking of David’s bad taste in clothes.) They may have a very active sex life. Gradually most settle down, they find better balance in their gender lives, and they try to integrate their new roles effectively into the larger society. If through surgery and hormone treatments they have been able to get a body that “looks the part,” they’ll usually be able to lead productive and happy lives.

My mom spoke up. “I think every parent wants their children to grow up happy and productive. I guess that if the parents of transgender children understood that dealing with the situation, instead of denying it, has the greatest chance of success, they’d more readily accept that their children are, uh, special.”

Renée got to the point. “What do you all think I should do?”

Dr. Corbin looked fondly at Dr. LeMaitre. “You talk,” he said. “OK,” she agreed, “but you add anything you want to say.”

“Raoul and I discussed this while we were driving back from Pontleveque,” she said. “Transgenderism isn’t about sex, it’s about identity. We agreed that in behavior, mannerisms, your way of expressing yourself, you are stereotypically feminine, just as Karen told us you are. In fact, it’s very hard to imagine you in a male persona. My training and experience tells me you’re right for early intervention.”

“You mean I should start hormones now?” asked Renée.

“Hormones and counseling,” Dr. Corbin replied, “and as soon as possible, you should be living full-time as a girl.”

For an instant, Renée looked hopeful. Then she shook her head. “My parents will never agree,” she said. “They just won’t. They’ll be too worried about what their relatives and friends will think.”

“Renée, honey,” said Dr. LeMaitre, “would it be OK if I talked with your parents? Do you think I might, just might be able to persuade them?”

There was a long silence. Then Renée shrugged. “Might as well,” she said. “It can’t hurt, can it?”

It Did Hurt, Of Course

Well, to make a long story short, the approach to David’s parents was a huge fiasco. They listened politely at first. They agreed that over the past eighteen months (since he hooked up with me and my girlfriends), David’s personality and grades had brightened up amazingly. They weren’t about to buy into Dr. LeMaitre’s explanation, however. They’d noticed that David had gotten secretive and was “acting kind of poofty.” In their view, apparently, David had a long history of fantastic ideas, and convincing himself that he was “really” a girl was just one more of them. He’d get over it. The problem was me, they said, abetted by my mom. I had encouraged David in this delusion. He would not be allowed to hang out with me anymore. If my mom and I didn’t stay away from David, M. & Mme Becker (his parents) would get an injunction against us.

That was enough to scare off my mom. The last thing she wanted was legal proceedings — even if they came to nothing, they might help Ricky Zamboni to track us down. She told me to cool it with David.

I could still see David at school, of course, and he continued to eat lunch with Denise and Caitlyn and me. Overnight, almost, he turned into a real sad sack, almost as bad as he’d been before we adopted him into our gang. Caitlyn was upset, and questioned him on it, but David just told her and Denise that she couldn’t possibly understand, and please lay off him. As the only one who knew all the details, I guess I should have been more attentive to David. Heck, I was just as bummed as he was, but life goes on, y’know?

I was distracted by three new things in my life. First, I joined the cross country team. I really do love running. So there was practice three times a week, and meets on most Friday afternoons. Even though I was only a sophomore, I won the second race I was in, and after that was I was up in front of the pack.

Then there was school. I got into advanced placement classes in biology and psychology, so there was a lot more homework. Psych really turned me on, maybe because of those long talks with Dr. Corbin and Dr. LeMaitre.

The last thing was that this year Olivier got seriously interested in me. He’d grown about three inches over the summer and it seemed like he’d grown a sex drive too. We spent a lot of time talking on the phone, and going to movies or hanging out at a café with his bunch of friends, and a lot of necking, of course. I told him that inside my bra or below my waist was off limits. Olivier was still shy enough not to protest.

It was the end of October before my mom finally got some photos developed that she took during our vacation. I thought David might like to have a set for old times’ sake. I left a note on his locker telling him I’d give him some pictures at lunch.

When the bell rang for lunch, I looked in my math book, at the place where I’d hidden the pictures. They weren’t there! I flipped through all my other books, and then rooted through my backpack. There was some tittering from the other kids as they saw me frantically searching while they crowded out of the classroom. I didn’t notice at the time. Now I was all alone in the room. I looked under my desk, and all the desks around me. I ran back to my math classroom, and looked around my desk there. No pictures.

David was waiting for me outside the cafeteria. “What took you so long,” he asked, pushing open the door. I saw a huge crowd of kids around the table where Jeannine’s clique ruled. “It is him! It’s the same geeky smile! See!” That was Jocelyn’s high nasal squeal. I recognized it instantly. “And who else does he hang out with except Kristen, anyway?” said someone else.

My heart sank into my stomach. Derisive laughter rolled out from the knot of kids and washed over us. David stood there sort of dazed; he hadn’t figured it out yet. “This is just too rich,” we heard Jeannine say. “I always knew there was something real weird going on between them.”

“Hey, look who’s here!” shouted one of the boys in the group. “Hi there, pervy! Where’s your dress?” More laughter. Loud, raucous, derisive laughter. David turned and fled out the door. I ran after him. He disappeared around a corner. I couldn’t find him, though I searched until the class bell rang.

For the rest of the afternoon — two more classes — there was snickering and catcalls wherever I was. When Denise saw me, she slunk off in the opposite direction. I decided to walk home instead of riding the bus with other kids, so I could think.

There was a message waiting on our phone. I punched in the code and heard David’s voice. “Goodbye, Kristen. You were my best friend. I wish it turned out different.” Was David dumping me, I wondered. If he ever needed a friend, it was now. I got on my bike and rode over to his house.

There was a police car in the driveway, and a crowd of neighbors on the sidewalk. “What’s going on,” I asked one of them. Two of them answered me, tripping over each other to share the details. An EMT truck had just left. They’d seen the boy carried out on a stretcher. His mom had come racing in just after the EMTs. She worked. The boy was quiet, kept to himself, but a nice boy. Maybe he fell. He was unconscious. No sign of the father.

I broke away as soon as I was sure they had no more useful information and pumped my bike uphill to the hospital. I ditched the bike at the back entrance and found my way to the emergency room door. David’s mother was standing there outside, her face dead white and her breath scratchy. She had a letter in her hand, and she’d been crying hard. “Mme Becker? I got a scary message on my telephone from David.”

“He tried to kill himself. I got a call at my office from a teacher at school. Some of the children told him that pictures of David and you were being handed around — pictures of David all dressed up in girl’s clothes. David didn’t show up for his afternoon classes, and his teacher thought I should know.

“I found David passed out in the upstairs hall. He’d taken almost a whole bottle of prescription painkilling pills. Washed them down with gin.

“Are you satisfied now, you little bitch?” she asked.

David’s mother’s question wasn’t worth answering. “Will he be OK?,” I asked instead.

“They don’t know. They’re pumping his stomach,” she said.

When I slipped out to phone my mom, I saw a TV camera truck pulling up. I told my mom to wear sunglasses and how to get in the hospital the back way. Then I saw M. Becker arrive and run into the building. By the time my mom came, David was being transferred to the Intensive Care Unit. One of the TV crew was trying to get David’s mother to answer questions. Mme Becker didn’t want to talk to him. My mom went over and chased away the reporter. She said something to David’s mother. Mme Becker recoiled and slapped my mom hard, and then stared at her hand. The TV crew got it all on film. David’s note had fallen to the floor, writing side up. They got a picture of it, too.

What’s Wrong with This Picture?

Two reporters were waiting when we got home about midnight. As we got out of the car, one asked if my mom had anything to say. No, said my mom, just that we were relieved that David was out of danger. They asked if I was David’s friend. Mom pulled me away. Without asking, the reporter took a picture of us going in our front door. There were 17 messages waiting on my phone. I was too tired to listen to any.

The morning papers had the text of David’s note. “Mom, Dad: I’m sorry. I don’t blame you. I just need to be dead. It’s better for everybody that way.” L’Express printed the story under a stupid headline: “Forbidden Frocks and Frills, 14 Year-Old Boy Attempts Suicide.”

I couldn’t stop crying, it seemed so unfair. Mom said I didn’t have to go to school. I guess I cried nonstop for about an hour. I heard my mom getting the phone company to agree to give us new, unlisted phone numbers. I got dressed and put my face together. My eyes were all swollen and red.

I made a list of the merely stupid phone messages from the day before and deleted the obscene ones. Most were anonymous. A few messages made me feel better. Denise said she was sorry that she ran away from me at school and could I ever please forgive her? Caitlyn told me to hang tough and call as soon as I could. There was a message from Gretchen, another girl on the cross country squad. She said she just wanted me to know I had friends, and how could she help? Olivier had called twice. His first message was just babbling; no matter what, he said, he loved me. In his second message, Olivier said his parents were acting like dorks but not to worry, just don’t phone his house right now. He would see me at my locker before school. Well, I’d missed him already.

Mom and I went back to the hospital before 10 am. A couple of TV trucks were planted in the parking lot. David’s parents wouldn’t let us visit David, but they took my flowers and card. M. Becker took my mom off in a corner. I could hear them arguing. A little later, Mom grabbed my arm and stormed out of the hospital.

She was seething. “I have never been so insulted in my life,” said my mom. “That asshole accused me of being a lousy mother, a degenerate. He said he’s going to sue me for medical costs!”

While my mom got on the phone trying to connect with a lawyer friend, I thought I might as well do some homework. There was a Psych term paper due that I had hardly started. I stared at my first paragraph without enthusiasm. Really, I could care less right then about Pavlovian conditioning. I highlighted the paragraph, zapped it, and started over. “David Becker was a very unhappy boy,” I typed. “His alter ego, Renée, was a very happy girl. Is there really something wrong with this picture?”

I typed and typed. The words seemed to flow without conscious effort. When I wouldn’t come to eat, Mom brought me a sandwich. I wrote down stuff about transgender people that Renée and I had learned in our research, and some of the things Raoul and Marie-José had told us. It was getting dark when I typed the last paragraph:

“Kids like David Becker are rare but their conflict is very real. They didn’t choose it; it happened to them. And they do not challenge our own masculinity or femininity. They are the exception that tests us — that “proves the rule.” If we can accept — no, embrace — a David who presents himself as Renée, we affirm our own humanity and sexual self-esteem. We make the world safer for all kinds of people, including ourselves.”

The next morning, Wednesday, I felt fine about going back to school. In fact, I couldn’t wait to turn in my Psych paper. I wondered if Mr. Gonzalez would take off points because it was a day late and 18 pages long instead of ten.

At school, they was still talking about David’s attempted suicide. A “Committee of Concerned Parents” had been formed at a meeting the previous night. There was a vase of flowers in front of David’s locker. Kids, including some I didn’t know, came up to me and said they were sorry, or just gave me a hug. Caitlyn and Denise kind of took charge; they made sure I wasn’t ever alone whenever classes changed. Not everybody was nice, of course. I also heard a lot of snickering, and rude remarks that I ignored.

The newspapers and TV pretty much dropped the story when nothing more happened. I went to the hospital twice more after school, but they wouldn’t let me see David. On Friday, I learned that he’d been discharged to home.

Dr. LeMaitre phoned that evening. She wanted to tell me that she’d seen David and he would be OK, she thought. His parents had asked her to help after talking a lot with David and, I guess, losing a lot of sleep. Marie-José said they were listening to her and to him.

My homeroom teacher gave me a note from Mr. Gonzalez. He wanted to see me, so I stopped at his room on my way to my first class. Mr. Gonzales asked me if it would be OK if my term paper was reproduced and distributed to all the members of the Committee of Concerned Parents. I said OK, and be sure my name is on it, and then I had second thoughts. I asked him to let me check with my mom. He gave me a note so I used a phone in the school office instead of going right to class.

Of course my Mom agonized. She hadn’t seen my paper. I told her how to turn on my Apple and coached her until she got my paper up on the screen. Then I went to math class. When I called her up again at mid-morning break, Mom was really up. “Honey, I am so proud of you. It’s a beautiful, beautiful paper. But. . . .”

“What, Mom?”

“there are a lot of split infinitives and run-on sentences.”

“Aw, gee. I guess that means it’s OK if they give it out to the Concerned Parents?”

“Sure,” she said. “You bet.”

An End to Regret

They called a special assembly toward the end of November. Everyone knew it could only be about one thing. The parents and the school administration had been meeting almost every other day, so the kids quieted down right away when the principal stepped up to the microphone. “Good afternoon, everyone,” she said. “I want to thank you all for your patience, and most of you also for your good manners while our school has gone through a serious crisis.

“I have two announcements to make. First, that the Committee of Concerned Parents, the school administration and the trustees have reached an agreement that will permit Renée Becker to take her place among us.” Here and there some kids clapped spontaneously. Then the applause grew and spread and soon — as far as I could tell — the whole student body was on its feet celebrating.

The principal continued after the noise died down. “Second, that the trustees of the school, meeting at lunchtime today, have approved an amendment to the by-laws that reads as follows:

We welcome and value diversity in our school. When the school community embraces people of all kinds, we affirm our own humanity and self-esteem, and enhance the learning environment. We will not permit discrimination against any student or member of the faculty or administration on the basis of his or her race, personal belief, origin, gender, or sexual preference.

There was more applause, though not as stormy as before. The principal gestured for silence. “Now,” she said, “it’s my pleasure to turn over the microphone to someone who has a lot of people she wants to thank.”

Renée came onstage from the left. Standing before three hundred kids, she was confident and graceful in a white blouse, gray sweater and pleated skirt, black tights and low heels — the school uniform. She waved, acknowledging the applause of her friends and her former tormenters. “Thank you all,” said Renée. “I’ve received countless messages of support, so many that I can’t acknowledge every one, but every one of you should know that I am deeply grateful that you pulled together for me.

“There are some people I do want to single out,” Renée continued, “most of all my parents. I can’t tell you how much I love them. I know now that they love me too. I want to thank my doctors at the hospital, and the EMT team that saved my life. I want to thank Dr. Marie-Jose LeMaitre and Dr. Raoul Corbin, who helped save my life in another way. I give my thanks and love to the kids who were always there for me, Denise, Caitlyn and especially Kristen. And also Kristen’s mother. I appreciate what the trustees and the administration and some of the parents had to do to make the school a place that welcomes people like me. All of you are wonderful people — teachers, classmates, everybody!”

Well, of course there was a lot more applause, and some wolf whistles. Renée glanced to the right, and finding me waiting in the wing, she winked. That was my signal to cut the lights, then to switch on a single overhead spot and cue up the music. While the lights were dimmed, Renée had pulled out a couple of pins so that her hair — well, her fall, but no one could tell — lightly brushed her shoulders. Her green eyes sparkled, filled by happy tears. And then, Renée sang to us all a song of forgiveness and hope reborn:

Non, rien de rien
Non, je ne regrette rien
Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait, ni le mal
Tout ça m'est bien égal
Non, rien de rien
Non, je ne regrette rien

No, Renée had no regrets, she sang. It all balanced out, the bad and the good. We listened entranced as her clear soprano voice swelled toward the final notes.

Non, je ne regrette rien
Car ma vie
Car mes joies
Aujourd'hui
á‡a commence avec toi.

I regret nothing, for my life, my joys
Begin today with you . . . .

Kevin Enters My Life

I was sixteen when education, that is, learning more stuff, became seriously important to me. I got real scared when I figured out that my Mom had gone way into debt and, worse, she didn’t have a plan to get us out of it. I began every day thinking the roof’s going to cave in; what can I learn today before I’m up to my ass in shingles? I signed up for more advanced courses, figuring that if I could ace them, maybe I could win a scholarship — even to a college in America.

America — I was becoming obsessed about my home country even though, as Mom kept reminding me, I didn’t have a valid passport nor much hope of getting one. I knew that when I spoke English I didn’t sound like an American, or even a Brit. That’s why his accent alone was enough to make me a pushover for Kevin Shaunessy the moment he sat down next to me on the first day of our AP American History class. He was handsome, he was fit, his French grammar was atrocious but his Boston, Massachusetts accent was cute, and he was smart, curious and thoughtful. I was ripe for him. I’d already cooled it with Olivier, dumped Esteban, discouraged Luc and Sasha, and run from Paolo — all because they had too little interest in anything but getting into my pants.

Kevin was new, so new at school that he didn’t know that my locker room rep was frigid, frigid, frigid! When he said he was an American and asked me if I’d help him get oriented to Paris of course I said “yes” and my heart screamed YES!

A few weeks later, Kevin and I were sitting on the terrace of a Left Bank café trying to make a few drops of expresso last for at least an hour when I realized I loved him. We’d been talking about how people make decisions as best they can on the information they have, and then have to deal as best they can with the consequences. It could have been code for my mom’s and my life, but actually, it was the follow up to my question to Kevin — why hadn’t he enrolled at the American School when he and his Dad moved to Paris?

“We talked a lot about that,” Kev said. “My dad offered some ideas, but he let me make up my own mind, and what I decided was that this could be the one opportunity in my whole life to get to know people that aren’t Americans. And anyway, the Lycée Internationale is a lot closer to our house.”

“I’m an American,” I said. “Technically.”

“Yes, and if I’d gone to the American School, I’d never have known you.” Kevin squeezed my thigh, just a little bit, and of course it fried my circuits. Not for the first time, either. I wanted so bad to drop my panties for him, but of course I couldn’t.

Instead I whispered “I hope I can make you happy you do, uh, know me, ‘cause you are a very special guy — just when I was beginning to think all the smart ones were taken.”

“You make me feel good about being smart. That’s not a guy thing, you know. . . at least, not in high school in the USA.”

Just embarrassed enough to pan the café for watchers before doing it, I couldn’t help pushing my knee between Kevin’s thighs. “Being smart is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for me, mister. You have to be a hunk, too. Fortunately, you qualify on both counts.

“So — I guess it’s about time to take you home to meet my mom. How about coming to dinner next Saturday night? In fact — do you want to bring your dad?”

Kevin’s mother was dead seven years already. “Breast cancer really sucks,” was all he’d said. He’d told me that he and his Dad had gotten over it -- mostly.

“Seriously, my mom and I are wicked good cooks.” I used the Boston intensifier I’d just learned from Kev.

“Unless Dad has a really good excuse, we’ll be there. I’ll let you know for sure on Monday or Tuesday.” I understood what Kevin meant. His dad was skittish about hooking up with another woman. He was also putting in sixty hour weeks at the American Embassy, trying to get on top of his new job as Legal Attaché. I’d pried out of Kevin meant that Legal Attaché meant his dad was the representative in France of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation — the FBI.

Monday passed. No answer.

Tuesday came. History class. Kevin gave me an awkward smile and passed me a note. “Look, sorry, my dad can’t make it. Can I come anyway?”

I made a frownie over “dad,” crossed out ‘Can’ and replaced it by ‘May,’ and made a smilie over that. “Viens á¡ sept heures Samedi soir,” I added. Come at seven on Saturday night.

Mom liked Kevin. Everybody did, even Denise, who didn’t approve of men generally. Like no boy I’d ever known, Kevin listened. He made a serious effort to imagine what was going in in my head, and the head of everybody else who sought his attention. Of course, I told him everything — well, almost everything.

I told Kevin that my mom and I had moved to France when I was seven, after my Dad died, because she was seriously afraid of my stepbrother. I stood between Ricky and an inheritance — not that he needed it, Ricky was already loaded, but he was nasty — and she’d thought it a good idea to stay out of sight until my eighteenth birthday, when the trust fund would be mine.

I skipped over the part about coming to France disguised as my sister Kristen, wearing the wig my mom had bought when she went through chemotherapy, using Kristen’s passport. Poor Kristen had died of leukemia. It just about wrecked my mom. If she hadn’t had PapaDaddy to comfort her . . . and then PapaDaddy was dead, too.

Considering that Dr. LeMaitre had started me on hormones — androgen blockers, and then later estrogen and progestone — nearly four years ago, it didn’t seem immediately necessary to tell Kev that genetically and by the evidence between my legs, I was a boy. The rest of the evidence told a different story: a well-rounded tush, small waist, breasts that heaved when Kevin kissed them, blue eyes, curly auburn hair.

Before I met Kev, the boys liked me OK. I think the consensus was that I was a fun date except for my hangups about sex below the waist. Actually, I got on better with girls, in a friendship sense. I didn’t know any boys as deep as Sandra or as thoughtful as Denise or as kind as Gretchen and Caitlyn. Heck, I didn’t even know any boys who read books for fun. They’d grown up twitching their Game Boys instead — not my thing at all.

My friend Renée had become a stunner. She’d just blossomed after her parents agreed to gender reassignment. Dorky and depressed David had given way to a girl who was self-confident, totally aware, and, well, still maybe a little over the top in her choice of clothes. Too much lace and silk for my taste, but on Renée of the black satin tresses and goofy grin, it worked.

Renée claimed to be jealous of me, jealous that she didn’t see Kevin first; on the other hand, she was mad about her own beau, Alvin. He was huge, about six-three. Renée was just the right size for him; when she danced with Alvin wearing three-inch heels, his nose poked her in the eye.

Kidnapped

Terminale, our last year at the lycée, flew by in a blur. Kevin and I double-dated a lot with Renée and Alvin (he had a car), we did our homework together, played off each other as the romantic leads in the senior play, went for long walks in the Paris drizzle and long bicycle rides on the cliffs along the Seine when spring came at last. We both took the SATs — Kev got a higher math score but I beat him in verbal aptitude by sixty points!

Kevin’s dad said our scores were good enough to get into top American colleges. That was a downer — I didn’t have the money to pay for college. To go to college in America, I’d have to claim my inheritance. To claim my inheritance, I needed a passport — no, it was my alter ego Bobby Zamboni who needed a passport! What the heck was I going to do? I tried not to think too much about a puzzle I couldn’t solve.

Then Ricky Zamboni caught up with me and my mom.

It was a Friday, almost dark, but the evening was warm. Dusk was arriving later each day as I slogged home from school. I’d run my butt ragged again with the rest of the cross country girls. I was still our lead runner but there was a new girl, a sophomore, ready to take me on, so I was training hard.

I had topped the hill and was turning into our lane when the two men closed in on me, one from either side. I punched, and I tried to scream but all that came out through the blanket they’d thrown over me was a whimper. My arms were pinned. Then I was aware of someone’s heavy hand over my face, of chloroform, and of passing out.

When I awoke, it was through a bitch of a headache. There were two guys sitting in the room watching me. My hands were tied together and to the posts of a bed. The older guy seemed amused and the young guy looked sort of embarrassed.

“Would one of you please get me a big glass of water and a couple of aspirin,” I asked as sweetly as I guessed was called for, given the power relationship in effect.

“Oh, now you’re awake. No aspirin,” answered the younger one, “but we’ve got plenty of water.” He brought me some in a dirty glass. I drank it anyway.

The room was empty of furniture except for the bed, a couple of wooden chairs, and a small lamp on the floor. Shades were pulled down over two windows. My bag of books was thrown into a corner along with some dirty dishes. The mattress I was lying on stank of dust and urine.

The older guy was jowly, hairy and heavy-set, with a leather jacket, thick-soled shoes and tobacco stains on his hands — the kind of mechanic-type person you see all the time in France hanging out in cheap bars. He was examining the contents of my pocketbook, arranging stuff into piles: photos and notes, cosmetics, Walkman, my ID’s and credit card, money. Watching him paw through my life felt like rape, but I played numb.

The younger guy wasn’t that much older than me, and looked less like a thug. His clothes were newer and fit him better. It looked as if he worked out regularly at a gym. He was trying to grow a mustache, and he had a ring in his right ear.

“I have to use the bathroom,” I said. The older guy gestured untie her to the younger one, pointed to the door, and continued his study of my photos.

Propelled by my junior captor, on unsteady legs I lurched into a narrow hallway. He jerked me up short at the door of a bathroom. “God, do you have to be so rough?”

He loosened his grip and replied “Leave the door open.”

I pulled away, stepped into the bathroom, slammed the door and bolted it. “Like hell I will,” I yelled through the door, waiting for the splinters to fly. Surprisingly, he didn’t try to knock it down.

The tiny room had no douche, no windows — just a filthy toilet and sink. I flushed what was in the toilet and sat to relieve myself. Suddenly, bathed in a cold sweat, I realized that I had to chuck my cookies too. I retched, and retched some more. When at last the retching ceased, the crying began. My anger and fear spilled out in desolate sobs.

There was a tapping on the door. “It’s me, Pépé. I have a towel for you.”

I cracked open the door and glared at him through my tears. “Please,” he said, “use these.” He handed me an almost clean towel, my hairbrush and a roll of toilet paper, and then he pulled the door shut.

When I came out, Pépé tied me up again, this time to a chair. Though it was growing light outdoors, the shades stayed drawn. The older guy was peering through a slit, as though he expected someone, and cursing softly. “I have to go to phone,” he told Pépé. “Don’t take any stupid risks.” I heard a door open and shut, and then the rumble of a hard-starting engine.

Pépé and I sat silently. I was regretting my breakdown in the bathroom. Pépé just gaped at me; more naíve than nasty, I guessed. It seemed as though it was up to me to start the conversation.

“I need more water — from a clean glass — and would you please untie my hands?”

Pépé got me water. “I can’t untie you,” he said apologetically while holding the glass to my lips. Marcel would have a fit.”

“Marcel? That’s his name?”

“Yeah, Big Marcel. . . . my uncle.”

“Thank you for letting me use the bathroom alone, and for the towel,” I ventured.

“I, uh, knew you needed that. I can tell you’re a lady with class,” said Pépé.

“It was sweet of you. . . . Couldn’t you at least loosen the ropes on my wrists? They’re killing me. Don’t worry. I know I can’t get away.” The hell I did. My brain was racing, trying to figure a way out of there. I could see Pépé was torn.

“If you’ll untie me, I’ll give you a kiss.”

Pépé went behind my chair and thought for a second. I felt him fumbling with the ropes, and then a blessed rush of blood back into my fingers. “Uh, look — I’ve loosened the ropes, but you have to promise me, uh, when Marcel comes back you’ll hold the ends like this, so they look tight.”

That didn’t sound too hard. “Pépé, come around in front of me. Put your face near mine and shut your eyes.” He did as he was told. I leaned forward and opened my lips. He kept his lips tightly sealed, so I just sort of wet them and pulled back. “You can open your eyes now. Was that the first time a girl ever kissed you?” He didn’t answer. “Was it so bad?”

“No, it was very nice. Still . . . I know you don’t really like me. Marcel says I have to watch out for tricks.”

“If you’d help me get out of here, I would like you a lot.”

“Aw, please shut up, OK?”

I’d been kidnapped, but why? I was trying to figure out a motive when Marcel returned, and it all came clear.

He’d brought food. Bread and cheese, blood sausage and a jug of cheap wine. My tum couldn’t endure the thought of food so I begged off. When they finished, Marcel pulled his chair over to me.

I winced from the wave of garlic that hit me as he announced his purpose: “Now we are going to have a talk.” He had the photos from my purse in his dirty hand.

“Which one of these boys is your brother, Robert?”

Mom Meets Mick

At about the same time, my mother and Kevin’s dad were waiting for the phone to ring.

When I didn’t come home, she’d found Kev’s number and phoned him. “No,” he’d told her, he hadn’t seen me since before cross-country practice. Then Kevin had jumped on his bike. At my house, he found my Mom on the edge of hysteria. She’d been sitting at the phone, picking the receiver up and putting it back down again, not quite able to phone the cops. The French cops, who if they investigated just a little would find that she was living in France under a false name and with an expired American passport. Tres irregulier. And what about me? What would les flics dig up about me? How long would it take them to tumble to the truth — that I was a genetic boy, who’d fled to France when he was nine under cover of his dead sister’s passport and for the last eight years had been raised as Kristen Eliot, hiding from the New England mobster who wanted nothing better than to end the life of his stepbrother, Bobby Zamboni?

It was past dinnertime. I always let my Mom know if anything was going to make me late for dinner. It was way late already, but she wasn’t ready yet to assume foul play. It was too scary a thought to contemplate. She asked Kev please to phone other friends — Renée, Denise, Olivier — to see if anyone knew where I was.

Kev slowly shook his head, smiling wanly as if to signal an equal reluctance to fear the worst. He opened his hand to show my mom a small green book. She recognized it immediately — my address book. “I found it at the corner, where your lane meets the street,” he explained. “Kristen had it at school today, so she nearly got home. . . . I think you need to call the police, Mrs. Eliot.”

As my mom reached for the phone, it rang. Startled, she picked it up, heart pounding. “Listen carefully,” said a voice speaking French. “We have your daughter. She is safe — safe just as long as you don’t talk to the police. You will get her back if you cooperate.”

“What . . . what do you want? Who are you?”

“Who we are doesn’t matter. We have friends who want to talk to you and to your son Robert. They’ve been out of touch with you for a long time. They have a high concern for your safety, and his. . . .”

“Uh, wait a minute. Let me think. . . .”

“I will telephone you again tomorrow morning. Think until then. Remember, if you want to see your daughter again, do not bring the police into our private affair.”

A click. The caller had hung up.

Kevin waited for my mom to speak. “I’ve been threatened,” she told him. “Kristen too. He said I won’t see her again if I talk to the police. Oh, God . . . what am I going to do!

Now Kevin took a deep breath. “Mrs. Eliot, you know my dad’s a police officer, don’t you? He works at the Embassy as representative of the FBI?” She nodded, fighting back panic. “Dad could help us manage this.”

“Yes, OK, call him, please. But he shouldn’t come here. Maybe we’re being watched.”

Kevin stood up, and put on his jacket. Though his own heart was racing, he found himself speaking calmly. “The café on the north side of the rapid rail station — you know it? Take an indirect route, and meet us there in half an hour — at quarter to nine. Dad and I will be in the back. Oh, and if you think anyone is following you, don’t go into the café. My dad has a phone that he carries in his briefcase. Call us at this number” — Kevin scribbled it down — “and we’ll figure out Plan B.”

Mom tranced for an instant, figured out which side of the station was north, and nodded. “Thank you, Kevin. I can see why Kristen is so fond of you.”

“Can I get out the back way?”

My mother took Kevin to the kitchen and pointed outside. “Climb over that fence. Yes, the white one. You can reach the next street by crossing through the Forchettes’ garden. They’re away. No one will notice you.”

Mom let him out. She pulled down all the shades and turned off most of the lights. Then she allowed herself a ten minute cry before repairing her face and following Kevin through the Forchettes’ property. Her mind was made up. To save me, she would surrender to the American police.

Precisely at quarter to nine, my mother entered the café, refused an invitation to join some friends, and found Kevin and his dad in a dim corner.

Kevin made introductions. Michael Shaunessy said “You haven’t had dinner, have you, Mrs. Eliot? I’ve taken the liberty of ordering us bowls of soup.”

“Oh, yes. . . . I guess I ought to eat something. Thank you Mr. Shaunessy.”

“Mick,” he corrected.

“Mick,” she repeated. “Kevin says you are discreet. I know you can help Kristen, if anybody can. For that I thank you in advance, and now . . . I need . . .there’s a story I have to tell you. My name isn’t Eliot. It’s Summers, Karen Summers. In Miami, I was known as Karen Summers Zamboni, but Carlo and I never were legally married.

“Kristen is the, uh, child of Carlo Zamboni. If Ricky Zamboni figures that out, Kristen’s dead. If he doesn’t, maybe someday she’ll be able to collect her inheritance.

“And, as you probably know, because Kristen said you’re from Boston, the Miami police want to ask me what happened before my son Robert and I disappeared ten years ago.”

Kev’s dad nodded, and waited for my mom to continue.

“If you’ll help us, I’ll tell them and the FBI what I know.”

He nodded again. The soup came. They ate it in silence. At last, Kev’s dad spoke. “Mrs. Eliot — I’ll call you that, unless you’d prefer . . . .”

“Call me Karen. That’s fine.”

“OK. Thank you for trusting me.”

“I don’t have any choice, actually.”

“Yes, you do. You’d be surprised how many people think — wrongly — it’s better to do exactly what kidnappers tell them to.

“The FBI would like very much to put Ricky Zamboni away for the rest of his life. If you can help us do that, the least we can do is help you and Kristen. Here’s what I suggest. . . .”

The Bad Guys Give Orders

A long night of work passed for Mick Shaunessy, a sleepless, fretful night for Karen Eliot. By morning, over one hundred French police were mounting an unobtrusive manhunt for my kidnappers, about whom nothing was known but that one of them spoke with a south of France accent and that they were almost certainly working for the American racketeer Ricky Zamboni. A tap was on our phone. It rang. Mick put on his earphones and nodded to my mom to pick up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“You thought about what I told you?”

“Yes. Who are you? What do you want?

“Listen carefully. You with your son Robert will go to visit Senlis Cathedral tomorrow. At precisely noon, you will take a table at the Vielle Ville restaurant. You will order Croque Monsieur sandwiches and a pichet of red wine. Across the square, you will see your daughter, also getting her luncheon.

“A person will sit at the table next to you. You will be handed two documents — one for you, one for Robert. You will each sign the documents, renouncing any right to any part of Carlo Zamboni’s estate. Then you each will open your passports and set them next to the page you have signed. The person who has given you the documents will examine the passports and then photograph you with the passports and the signature page of the documents.

“Are you listening carefully?”

“Yes, of course. Is my daughter all right?”

“She is all right for now.

“When the documents have been retrieved, and only then, a signal will be given, and your daughter will be allowed to cross the square slowly to where you are seated.

“If you do not follow these instructions exactly, there will be extremely unpleasant consequences. Do you understand?”

Karen looked at Mick. He showed her thumbs-up. “Yes, I do,” Karen said. “And if you harm Kristen, I don’t care how long it takes me, I will find you and rip out your eyes.”

There was a pause, and then “You sound brave, Mme Eliot. Do not be too brave.”

Karen waited till she heard a click. “OhmiGod Mick! What do we do now? I’ll sign anything, . . . just don’t take chances with Kristen’s life. Please!”

Hanging On

Robert. It was Robert they were after. Kristen was just a pawn in the game. A pawn to catch the Queen, my mom, and nail the Prince, Robert, Carlo Zamboni’s love child and heir to millions of dollars left in trust to him.

What I knew, my mom knew, and they didn’t know, was that Kristen was Robert. Above all else, they mustn’t find that out, or I, Kristen, would be dead and in a convenient dumpster. Not finding out was a problem, because Marcel was getting randy.

He hitched his chair up close. “You are very pretty, for an American. Are American girls all as hot as it is said?”

Marcel had been hitting the garlic pretty hard. I thought of freaking out, but controlled the impulse. “You need to brush your teeth, very thoroughly,” I replied, not answering his question. Truthfully, I didn’t know the answer.

“I think we should find out if you are hot. First Pépé, then me.”

“You will find I am very cold under circumstances of force.” Trá¨s froide!

Pépé was getting anxious. I threw him a smile of sorts.

“Pépé is a virgin. Have you ever been fucked by a virgin? He will not satisfy you. When Pépé has fucked you, then you will be ready for me.”

Under ordinary circumstances, Marcel’s scenario might work, particularly if it ended with me chopping off his prick with a cleaver and bounding out the back door, but his premise was wrong. I had a prick too. I’d never been fucked by anyone. Too much was invested in preserving my identity as Kristen Eliot, not as Robert Eliot or — God help me — Robert Zamboni.

“Marcel,” I said. You are a real man and a nice guy. I can tell. Unfortunately, it’s my time of month; Pépé can tell you that. He’s done nothing but take me to the bathroom. I stink, Marcel. Perhaps I can please you just as much by, uh, making love to your cock? May I do that, Marcel?”

He wanted it. “Marcel, go to the bathroom. Wash well. Then untie my hands and introduce me to your cock.”

There — I’d shot my wad. Would it work?

“All right. First me, then Pépé. No tricks.”

So happy was I, I blew Pépé a kiss as Marcel headed for the bathroom. Pépé seemed ill. I pondered whether, hands free, ankles hobbled, I should bolt for the door as Marcel climaxed. Not the first time, I decided.

Morning came again, at last. It was Sunday. I was sick of Marcel’s cum and — truth be told — Pépé’s as well. I’d coaxed him to step up to the challenge; with just a tad of encouragement he’d sprayed my forehead. Grounds for a real bath. Marcel and Pépé had fallen over themselves heating water and towels so I could purify myself, behind closed doors, to ready myself for another round.

Anything to keep my weenie — Robert’s weenie — safe from their attentions.

Marcel had gone out. He returned with a bag of croissants. I was so hungry that I ate one.

Marcel went out again, evidently to phone someone. Pépé shyly asked if I would be so kind as to service him once again. I told him, as I proceeded to comply with his request, that he was a nice boy and I would rather meet him under other circumstances.

This time Pépé didn’t hit my forehead. I daintily spit his product into a glass, and asked him if Marcel was going to kill me. Pépé said that even if Marcel should have such a thought, he would not allow Marcel to kill me. I asked Pépé if we could meet after . . . this. Face it — I didn’t want to die and was willing to say anything. I figured that Marcel had orders to shoot to kill if he met Robert.

The roar of the aging, ailing van announced Marcel’s return. He was visibly anxious. The jacket and boots I’d been wearing on Friday evening were returned to me. Again I was hobbled but my wrists were left free. Marcel had a sack — a sack that must have held turnips before — that he pulled over my head. I imagined what I would do — rolling, twisting out of the way if, exiting my prison, we were met by a hail of bullets. In the event, no such thing happened. We left the house, got in the car — Pépé in back, Marcel driving, me in the right front, wrists and ankles tied together, the sack over my head.

At first I tried to keep track of the turns. After half an hour, all I knew for sure was that we hadn’t crossed la Manche -- the English Channel. We stopped long enough for Marcel to make another phone call, drove some more, stopped so that he could phone again, drove again.

Shit Keeps Happening

At last Marcel pulled off my hood and removed my hobbles. He had parked in a narrow side street in a town I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t anywhere in Paris, for sure.

While I was brushing my hair back into submission, I memorized the license plate of the van, just in case: 75-494Z361.

“Listen,” Marcel commanded. “There is a restaurant at the end of this street, on the square. You will go there, and take a table in the open air, order a cup of tea or a soda. You will look across the square and see your mother and your brother. Pépé and I will be nearby. You are a smart, nice girl; do not do anything stupid. Do not wave. If you do anything stupid, someone — you, your mother, Robert — will be hurt. When I give you a signal, you may walk across the square to your mother.”

I nodded blankly. Pépé was close behind me. I squeezed his hand. For a thug, he was sweet.

My legs were numb from disuse. I could hardly walk but at last I reached the square a block away. There was a cathedral — one huge spire. Worshippers were spilling out from the Sunday service. I looked anxiously to the far side. There! At what a sign proclaimed the Restaurant de la Vielle Ville, my mother and omiGod, Kevin!

A waiter was hovering in front of me. “Order a soda!” croaked Marcel, sitting down at the next table. The soda appeared. I was watching Kev and my mother and someone with a camera. It flashed four times. The someone waved to Marcel. “OK” he said, “you can go. Go to your mother!” I sensed that Marcel was relieved that he hadn’t had to kill me.

The cathedral square was as wide as a soccer pitch. I stood but the square was heaving, or so it seemed. To steady myself, I looked up at the massive cathedral. OmiGod! There, on a parapet! A man, prone, sighting a rifle. Sighting a rifle right at my mom and Kevin. I screamed, heard a muffled thwuck, screamed again and again, hysterically.

I sensed a policeman pulling me to my feet, propelling me into a black windowless van that roared out of nowhere, slamming the door. People in the square stared dumbly. Kevin was dead, maybe my mom too. With me in it, the van careened out of the square. Slowly my screams subsided into wretched sobs, but not for long. . . .

The van stopped, its door slid open, and in came Kevin. My sweet, brave Kevin, covering me with kisses.

Explanations

Kevin was a hero. I only found that out after the fact. The thugs were supposed to blow him away. The bit about the photos was only a pretext, to lull my mom. In the end, however, it was the cops who held the high ground. They’d triangulated on the phone calls, tracked Marcel and put a transmitter on the van. They didn’t bust into the house where I was hidden because I might have been caught in a crossfire.

There was no way Kev’s dad would have allowed him to get shot. The guy I’s seen on the cathedral parapet was a police sharpshooter. He’d waxed the guy that was about to blow away Kevin.

Marcel, Pépé and a guy named Padraic got captured. The woman with the camera got away, lost in the crowd coming out of the cathedral. Pumped full of truth serum, Marcel still didn’t know who was paying him. Pépé and Padraic knew even less. All three got put away as perpetrators of a kidnapping. I felt a tiny bit bad for Pépé, I guess. Heck, I felt a lot worse for Kevin.

See, he knew now that I was a guy, and it was only a week before the Senior Prom. My mom had had to spill it all out, because if she didn’t explain to Kevin’s dad about Robert and his relationship to Ricky Zamboni, none of this would have made sense, would it?

I figured that I owed Kev a long talk, and opportunity to back out of every promise he’d made. Being that escaping from being kidnapped was a once in a lifetime occasion, we both cut school on Monday. I’d washed and washed, brushed my teeth until my gums bled, slept I don’t know how long, got up, showered again, put on clean underwear, and still felt like a slut. I discarded my cami and put on a tee shirt Kevin had given me, a sweater and pants and low heels.

We got off the RER train at the Tuileries, crossed the Seine to the Champs de Mars, and lay on our backs watching the clouds float over the Eiffel Tower. I told Kev everything about me. I told him what I’d done to improve the chances that Marcel and Pépé wouldn’t kill me. I explained why I was a girl, from the morning I woke up and PapaDaddy was dead, to my decision to accept the identity that had been thrust onto me, to my plan to have sexual reassignment surgery as soon as my inheritance was in hand.

“Kevin, sweetheart,” I said. “If you can’t hack this, I’ll understand, and I’ll love you for what you’ve done. I’m sorry. It’s just the way I am.”

My guy was conflicted. I could tell. “It’s not me,” he said. “It’s my dad. He has to report everything. That’s the way the FBI is. It’s a very conservative organization. And . . . he’s fallen for your mom!” Well, heck. Who would have thought that?

At half past two, I kissed Kev goodbye and went down to the US Embassy annex near the Place de la Concorde for an interview by a vice-consul. Kev’s dad had set up the appointment so that I could get a passport, actually two passports. The vice-consul’s job was just to play dumb and accept a passport application from Kristen Eliot. And also another one from Robert Zamboni. I was to be officially two people for a while.

Kev’s dad and my mom had figured out what led Ricky Zamboni to me. It wasn’t so difficult, actually. Mom had been considering our debts and freaked out. She’d written an old friend for help; the so-called friend had passed on her contact information to Ricky.

The really odd part was why Ricky still gave a shit. He was worth over a hundred million, ran most of the rackets in New England, and had a platoon of lawyers to advise him whenever he got near to personally doing anything illegal. The FBI had been trying for years to get him on a conspiracy rap, but that’s really hard to prove.

All Ricky needed to do was let me have the $5 million plus interest that PapaDaddy left me and we would have been quits. Evidently Ricky still bore a personal grudge, which is why my mom ended up making a long deposition and we both ended up under the US Federal Witness Protection Program — WITSEC is what it’s called for short.

Happy Ending in Sight

WITSEC gives someone brave enough to provide valuable evidence a new identity, resettles them somewhere they won’t be recognized, and supports them until they find work. My mom was going to testify that she’d been on board PapaDaddy’s boat, Tarentelle, the night Ricky offed the two guys from Portland who’d been holding back on him. Fhwupp, fhwupp again, splash splash, food for sharks was the story. Mom hadn’t seen all that, but she’d seen and could testify that the two guys from Providence, Frank and Aaron, boarded the boat in Miami Beach on Saturday afternoon and were no longer on board on Sunday morning without Tarentelle ever returning to port.

Mick said that was all that was needed to make the case against Ricky. It pulled together lots of collateral evidence. He assigned my mom and me bodyguards so I could finish the last few weeks of the school year.

Kevin told me he loved me. I couldn’t stop crying, I was so happy.

It wasn’t clear where things were going with my mom and Kevin’s dad, but she was happy too.

The night before the prom, I climbed into bed with her. “Do you like me?” I asked.

“You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?” she asked.

“Uh huh,” I confessed. “Does that mean we can’t talk, mother and daughter?”

“You shouldn’t need whiskey to talk to me.”

“It’s easier. How did I get to have such a great mom?”

“Great, hell. Lucky is more like it. Have you figured out why you were kidnapped?”

I nodded, but she told me anyway. “I was desperate for cash to cover bills that were due. I wrote an old friend to arrange for liquidation of some jewelry I’d left behind in Florida. Unfortunately, she owed Ricky, and that put him onto us.”

“Mom, he still knows where to find us.”

“True. The FBI knows too. Ricky knows that one false step puts him in Leavenworth for life.”

My mom turned down the light to dim.

“Mom, Kevin says he loves me.”

“Yeah, I know that already. Mick told me. Kevin’s a sweet guy. He asked his father if it was OK first. FBI stuff. Do you like Mick?”

“He’d be good for you, Mommy.”

“Y’know, I hoped you’d say that. If it’s OK with you and Kevin, we’re going to marry after he retires next year.”

“Aw, gee, Mom — how could Kev and I object?”

Justice Is Done

A lot had happened in just a year. At sixteen, just short of seventeen, I’d been stuck in France, basically broke, a genetic guy who looked, thought and acted exactly like a girl, but who also had a prickette and no valid passport. At seventeen, just short of eighteen, thanks to the FBI witness protection program, Ricky Zamboni’s obsession, really good SATs and grades, and Ivy League colleges’ desire to have full tuition-paying students from geographically diverse places, I was a brand-new freshman at Brown University. Kev was nearby at Rhode Island School of Design.

Now all I had to do was collect my inheritance.

As I exited South Station and connected with Agent Jillian Greene, I thought that I had little to fear from Ricky Zamboni. My mom’s account of the murder of Ricky’s “business associates,” was the missing link the federal prosecutors had been after for twelve years. Ricky was already a guest of the government. Jillian was my bodyguard for the last act in the life of Bobby Zamboni.

She guided me toward the Boston federal courthouse, six blocks up Franklin Street on Post Office Square. It was a clear, late autumn day. I felt strangely OK in my boy gear — a lightweight navy suit bought specially for the occasion, black socks, wingtip shoes, hair pulled back in a discreet ponytail, no makeup or jewelry, my breasts flattened by a specialty bra I’d found in a certain Providence shop, and a leather backpack. The only concessions I’d made to the way that I’d rather be was a pink oxford shirt open at the collar and, under all the drab, the sexiest underwear I owned.

“Don’t you think we ought to buy you a tie?” asked Jillian. Not a straight arrow, I guessed — just someone who’d rather not take chances with the judge.

“Maybe,” I answered, “but I’d rather buy a miniskirt and three inch heels. . . . and dress like you.”

Homage to a really cute girl, and I meant it. I looked to see if she’d picked up on my compliment and read horror on her face.

“Kristen, trouble!” I looked left and saw what Jill saw, a truck gathering speed, heading right at us. She body-checked me, slamming me backward, her with me. The truck plowed into a wall where we’d been standing. The wall shuddered. Bricks from above tumbled about us onto the sidewalk.

The driver had jumped free. Jill’s gun was out. I pointed at the driver disappearing up an alley. She took aim, then shrugged and holstered her weapon. Jill muttered something into her walkie talkie. “The guys will probably catch him,” she explained to me. “My job is to get you to court.”

At the court we soon were. “All rise,” cried the bailiff. “Court is in session, the Honorable Jesse Barraclough presiding. First case, Robert Zamboni vs Estate of Carlo Zamboni.

Jill and I had already dropped in for a few informal words with Judge Barraclough. The FBI knows how to pull strings. He was clearly intrigued, and asked me a few questions about my last nine years, all friendly. I could see where the judge was going.

The Zamboni family’s lawyers didn’t contest that Carlo Zamboni had intended to provide for his son by his mistress, Kristen Summers. Nor did they contest that he’d sired a son, Robert Summers. However, they respectfully suggested, Carlo only intended to provide for a son. He’d be appalled and embarrassed, they offered with all due respect, if he knew that his son had turned into a flaming transvestite, a degenerate boy who commonly presented himself as a female person.

There was an excited murmur from the press gallery.

Called to testify, I acknowleged that it was true that I commonly presented myself as a female. Not that I was a mincing transvestite whore from Hell, or wherever, but, yes, since 1986 that I had been living in France under an assumed name and gender, in order to avoid being dead at the hands of Ricky Zamboni or whoever else might resent my being an heir of Carlo Zamboni.

To make a long day short, about four-thirty Justice Barraclough ruled for me and instructed State Street Bank to transfer the trust amount — which had risen from $5 million to twice that — into an account at the First Bank of Providence, Rhode Island. The owner of the account — me — was Kirsten Emerson. Emerson was the name Mommy and I had agreed on with the FBI. WITSEC was resettling her about an hour away from Providence — I won’t say where, just in case.

Jill flashed her badge to fend off reporters while I excused myself to the ladies’ room. Even before the door closed behind me, I was pulling the band off my ponytail, shaking my hair free.

I stuffed the suit, the wing tips and the breast band into a trash can. For an instant, my thoughts flashed back to another ladies’ room in Florida. Then, I was a little boy running for his life, disguised by his mother as a girl, his boy clothes stuffed in a trash can. Nine years later, in all respects but a physical detail or two, I was a young woman who could, at last, live without dread.

From my backpack, I extracted a little black dress, hose and heels, lipstick, blusher, earrings and bracelets. Out of the ladies’ I came, resurrected as the person I wanted to be, my liberated auburn tresses framing what the mirror had reminded me was a definitely foxy face.

“Jill! Let’s celebrate! Do you know the Cock and Bull?”

“Aw, heck,” Jill answered. “Never did in the old FBI, but this is almost the 21st Century. Let’s party!” And we did.

Now ten million dollars richer, I picked up the checks. We slept that night at the Four Seasons. In separate beds, with separate guys. Kevin for me; he’d come up from Providence to help us celebrate.

I could go on with this story, tell you about college, my SRS, marriage, all that, but the exciting stuff is over, so here I’ll stop.

Hugs, Kristen

About the author. Daphne Duck was hatched way before computers or even Harry Benjamin was invented. She wants the current generation of kids to know that there is help out there for them if they can find an adult they trust — a parent, teacher, social worker — and dare to be honest about scary, weird feelings. The French Confection is Daphne’s third story to be posted on Big Closet top shelf. The first was a short fable, Summers on the Farm, and the next was a novella, With a Little Help from Her Friends. Anyone who wants to talk about serious stuff with Daphne can reach her by e-mail at [email protected].

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