---

 
The thing I hadn’t counted on was Tom being at Susan’s. He was the one that opened the door. For a moment I could see he was about to ask me what I wanted, then he did that strange, quick reassessment I’d been seeing in other people, and said. “Alex. What the fuck?”

I shrugged. What was I going to say? “It’s a long story, Tom. Can I come in?”

He ushered me in. “Man, I thought you were Susan for a moment. If I hadn’t just seen her in the kitchen …”

“Thanks, Tom. Makes me feel great.”

“Well … There’s something different, right? Makes you look like a chick?”

I took my coat off and hung it on the rack in the entrance hall. I patted my chest. “No boobs, Tom.”

He looked embarrassed. “Uh, yeah, whatever … Susan’s in the kitchen.”

I found Susan in the kitchen plating some stir fried beef and steamed rice. She glanced sideways when she saw me come in. “Sure you won’t eat?”

“I’m fine, thanks,” I said. “I sure could use a drink, though.”

She finished shaking some of the stir fry from the wok and looked up through her hair at me. Then she straightened up and looked me over more closely. “Jesus, Alex, what did you do?”

“Eat your food. We can talk over dinner.”

Susan carried the food to the table, then fetched another glass and placed it next to the bottle of red wine that was already opened. “So,” she said, motioning both Tom and I to sit, “You look quite … interesting, Alex. I think interesting is the right word. Tell me how this little fashion contretemps came about.”

I looked warily at Tom, then at Susan. “You remember I told you I was going to play blackjack?”

“Blackjack?” Tom said. It was obvious Susan only told him some things, not everything. That was reassuring. Sort of. Then I remembered Susan had told me not to join Arun’s team, and that I’d never really got around to telling her I’d ignored her advice.

So I took a large slug of the wine in my glass, and started the long tale that led to where we were, sitting at the table …

 

~o~O~o~
 

The next day, I called in sick rather than go into work. A braver man than I would have gone in, on the principle that any day had to be better than the two days before, but after the evening at Susan’s, when I’d drunk too much wine and had to end up on her couch because I was too drunk to drive, I thought a day off for better behavior was in order.

Tom had been helpful. I had figured out, over dinner and wine, what it really was that Susan saw in him, apart from the beefsteak body and winning smile: he was really good at listening, and he never missed a chance to inject some humor into the situation. In fact he gave me a mercilessly hard time, sending up my ambitions with the team, comparing us to bad television shows like The A-Team and Charlie's Angels, and rolling around in his seat with laughter during the description of my feminization at the hands of Lucy and Alice, but it was levity I needed, because I was feeling particularly sorry for myself after a whole two days of being called “Miss.” After his initial double take at the door, Tom didn’t make me feel like it was a huge burden. If anything, he got Susan and I to laugh about it too. And I was really, really glad about that, because despite all the laughter I could tell, right through the night, that Susan was really pissed that I had ignored her advice about joining Arun’s team.

Susan hadn’t been able to offer any advice on how to thicken my eyebrows. She didn’t have an eyebrow pencil – as she said, nobody had used those things much since the 1960s – but she tried sketching in some extra brows using eyeliner and it just looked silly. I supposed eyebrow pencil would look equally silly. Or gay. And while I wasn’t sure I liked being mistaken for a woman, it seemed safer, or at least less uncomfortable, than being mistaken for gay.

“Why do you think that is, Alex?” Susan had asked me. I was embarrassed to admit I didn’t have a good answer.

“Because one of them is obviously a mistake,” Tom had said, and both Susan and I had looked at him like we had no idea what he was talking about.

“Being a woman,” Tom had said. “Once you find out it’s not the case, it’s like, ‘stupid me’ because it’s a case of misunderstanding. If I think at first glance someone is a woman, and it turns out they’re not, then I just think ‘boy I’m stupid’. But thinking someone is gay … It’s not something that’s easy to get out of your head, or disprove. So I get where Alex is coming from. It’s less embarrassing, somehow, to be mistaken for a woman, because you can disprove that one.”

It gave me something to think about, all through the day off work. I was embarrassed – stung even – whenever someone called me ‘Miss,’ but it didn’t make me uneasy, at least not in the way the “gay” taunts some of the kids at school had thrown at me did. Being mistaken for a woman was probably transient – my eyebrows would grow back.

But I had to leave Nebraska for the gay taunts to go away.

I guess the taunts didn’t go away, come to think of it. I did.

All in all, whether or not people thought I was gay actually wouldn't matter all that much. It seemed like at least a third of my graduating class was gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Several people were into the poly scene. Nobody would give a damn what I did.

If I had demons to face about being mistaken for a woman, or being considered gay, they were my personal demons. They had nothing to do with my life in Boston. And I could never see myself moving back to Nebraska.

I let myself out of Susan’s house around 11:00am and drove home. Parking in Somerville was such a bitch that I couldn’t find anything close to home, which didn’t improve my mood any. When I got home, I collected the mail, and let myself in. Nobody else was home, which was good. I had been back three days but still wasn’t ready to face my housemates looking the way I did. I wondered what Alice was up to. Maybe I could avoid seeing the housemates by hanging out with her that afternoon. So long as we didn’t drink. My hangover wasn’t ready for that.

“What are you up to?” I asked when I called her.

“Looking at information on PhD programs,” she said.

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’ve got enough money I can keep going in school next year without killing myself. I’m debt free, and then some,” she said. “You must be okay too, right?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “Why a PhD? Aren't you like super-educated already?”

“Blackjack’s not my life, Alex. You know that.”

“I never said it was … but you’ve got the whole Artificial Intelligence thing going on.”

“It’s not enough. I’ll never get ahead unless I do at least a Ph.D. With my Masters I can get perhaps a mid-level job in Information Retrieval.“

“Really?“ I had no idea what went into being an expert in AI. For that matter, I wasn't sure what a mid-level job in Information Retrieval meant. Writing algorithms?

“You need to consider your future, too,” Alice said.

“I am. I was thinking of maybe buying a house, though.”

“Really? You don’t think you’ll ever go to grad school?”

“Haven’t thought about it,” I said. I guess by not thinking about it I was putting it aside for good.

“You should. You’re too smart to work as a sysadmin all your life.”

I snorted. “No way that would ever happen.”

“Well, plan for something, then.” She obviously sensed the need to change the subject. “How are you coping with the eyebrows?”

“I could use some help. Any ideas?”

“Nope. I was thinking about it last night.”

“It’s driving me mad,” I said.

“You look cute when you’re mad,” Alice giggled.

“Ack! I don’t want to look cute!”

This made her laugh out loud.

“Seriously, Alice, I need help. Really. I feel like a walking freakshow.”

She stopped laughing. “I’m sorry, Alex. I know. I could see it was bugging you on Sunday. Why don’t you come over and we can talk about it?”

A half hour later I was at Alice’s. She lived in a nice, upscale apartment in Kendall Square. I’d been there a couple of times, but never for very long. She had been there when she was an undergraduate, and I wondered how she could afford it on the small allowance from her scholarship. Her parents must have been loaded. I never wanted to ask, because Alice seemed to guard her privacy very closely. When she talked about her youth, it was in very general terms. I knew she had been to a pricey prep school before getting into Harvard, and that her parents lived in an upscale part of Connecticut, but beyond that, I didn't know much at all.

“Thanks for having me over,” I said, after she’d made some green tea. We sat on the couch together. Alice reached over and flicked my hair.

“You could cut your hair,” she said. “That might be a start.”

I weighed it up. Most of the reason I kept my hair long was actually just laziness – I really didn’t like the experience of having it cut. Maybe it was because most hairdressers in Cambridge had no idea how to cut Asian hair anyway. But I wasn’t really attached to the idea of having long hair. I had cut it years ago, to avoid precisely the same kind of problem I was having now.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“It couldn’t hurt,” she said. “Besides, it might be nice to see your face a little better.”

Alice moved into “take charge” mode, and within a few minutes had made an appointment for me with a hairdresser nearby. “You can trust her,” she said. “I’ve been going to her since I got here. And she said she can fit you in at the end of the day today.”

“She cuts guys, right?”

“Of course,” Alice said. “You think I want to make the problem worse?”

So we sat and talked for a few hours, while I waited to leave for my appointment. She showed me brochures on some of the Doctoral programs she was looking into. Most of them had something to do with A.I. They looked interesting, if you were into that kind of thing. I said as much.

“So what are you planning to do with your brain, Alex?”

“I have no idea,” I admitted. “Poetry?”

“Well, there’s a good MFA program in Baltimore,” Alice said. “No, really, there is.”

“Alice,” I said gently. “I was joking.” I thought she would know that. My favorite subjects at Harvard had been in physics. I had been one of Feldman’s favorite pupils. I had no real experience with English, or any other language, as either prose or poetry. I did take 'Rebirth and Karma in Indian Literature and Ritual,' in my junior year, but that was mostly because I was in lust with Amrita Roa, one of the TAs in my house that had recommended the course, and because it was all I could take to complete Harvard’s infamous Core. Not that my lust for Amrita ever went anywhere. Whatever. Core Core Core. Sanskrit is actually interesting.

On the core core core comment just there: I think Harvard is unique in having a “core“ of subjects that you have to complete regardless of your major. It’s all part of the idea of a balanced education. As an undergraduate I hated it, as most students hate it, because the range of subjects available seemed to have little to do with what I was actually interested in. In retrospect I was kind of glad I had done them. But if you ever meet a Harvard grad, all you need to say is “Core“ and you’ll notice a kind of twitch immediately.

I poured us both some more tea and looked at one of the pamphlets Alice had from the Office of Career Services at Harvard. It had a checklist for people considering further study. Alice had obviously been through this for her masters at MIT, but it was all new to me. The fourth question, which was supposed to discourage applicants who weren’t committed enough, asked: “Do you feel ready for graduate school or are you responding to expectations from family, friends or peers?” The question immediately after that was “Are you considering graduate school as an exciting intellectual and professional challenge or is it a way to delay entering the ‘Real World’ or avoid a job search?”

“Well?” I asked her, holding the pamphlet up and pointing to the questions.

“I’m considering an intellectual challenge,” she said smugly. “What about you?”

“I honestly don’t know, Alice.”

“You don’t have any idea what you want to do with the rest of your life? No ambitions?”

“Not really,” I said. “I mean, I know I’m supposed to have some. I used to have.” I shook my head as though I was trying to clear it. “I think Harvard got me all messed up.”

“It’ll do that,” she said.

We sat and drank tea and talked about nothing much, and then it was time for the appointment she had made for me.

The salon was only two blocks from Alice’s, so I walked.

The hair stylist, Stella, was in her mid-thirties, a pretty woman who reminded me vaguely of Winona Ryder, if Winona Ryder had been Scottish. It was late in the day, and she was the only one in the place. I figured she’d sent the other staff home already. I introduced myself. “I’m Alex Jones? Alice Kim made the appointment for me?”

It turned out Stella was an incessant chatterbox. I didn’t mind, since it meant she didn’t seem to expect me to say very much. After instructing her to “cut it off” and reassuring her that, yes, I was sure, I wanted to have short hair again, she went at it with a vengeance. First I had the shampoo, then the cut, then the blow-dry. I think I probably said about ten words the whole time, but Stella more than made up for both of us, prattling in a near-intelligible Glaswegian accent that took me a few seconds to process every time she spoke.

When she was finally done with the blow-drying I looked in the mirror and didn’t much like what I saw. My hair was shorter. Short. But I didn’t seem to look all that masculine. Fucking eyebrows. Now that my hair was gone, the fact that my eyebrows were plucked was actually more obvious.

I was a good cut. I could see that. But it was still, somehow, very feminine. Gamine.

“What do you think?” Stella asked.

“It’s good.” I didn’t quite know what else to say. “Thanks.” I had very short hair, now. Short, wispy bangs over my forehead. Short on the back of my neck. And yes, still, it was undeniably not masculine.

Stella seemed to sense my doubt.

“Easier to take care of, too,” I added. For some reason I didn’t want to disappoint her.

“It suits you, I think,” Stella said. “Brings out your eyes.”

It did that. I realized suddenly, with a sickening pit in my stomach, that there was every possibility that Stella had assumed, all through the process of cutting my hair, that I was a woman. Alice had made the appointment for me, but she’d just said “for my friend Alex.” Stella probably figured Alex was short for Alexandra.

I paid for the haircut and left the salon determined to give myself a number 2 buzzcut when I got home. I wondered whether I should actually shave my eyebrows entirely. Would looking like Marilyn Manson be better than looking like a woman? Probably. Anyway, first I had to go back to Alice’s to retrieve my car keys.

As soon as Alice opened her door I could tell she had the same feeling about the haircut that I did.

“Well?” I said.

“I think it’s more than just the eyebrows,” She said gently.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a nice cut.”

“Yeah. What do you mean ‘more than just the eyebrows’? I mean … I think I know what you mean, but –“

“Maybe we should discuss this over dinner?”

Alice grabbed a sweater and we went around the corner to a small Italian place that she liked. Of course the first thing that happened as we walked in was that the hostess said “good evening ladies.” If Alice hadn’t put a steadying hand on mine I probably would have bolted.

I settled down over dinner. Alice was always good at relaxing me. But eventually, after we’d eaten and discussed friends and were onto zabaglione for dessert, Alice got serious again. “So, Alex …”

“Yes?”

“You said, back in Baton Rouge, that when you were younger …”

My appetite for dessert was gone. “Yes.”

“I can sort of see that.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew now, that even though there had never been anything sexual between Alice and I, there was absolutely no possibility of it now, or ever. When she put her hand on mine, across the table, I knew it was the kind of reassurance she’d offer to any of her 'other' female friends. It was not a romantic gesture.

“It must have been hard.”

“I don’t really …”

“I’m not trying to embarrass you, Alex. You know I care about you, right? We’re good friends.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled.

“So it’s tough for you to deal with this now.”

“You have no idea.”

We were both silent for a few moments.

“Here’s the thing,” Alice said. “It doesn’t matter what people think.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“No, Alex. You are who you are. How people perceive you doesn’t change who you are.”

“I’m not sure that’s true.”

“Of course it’s true. How can what people think impact on what’s inside you?”

“It just does. I don’t know …” I paused, looking down at the tablecloth. I couldn’t explain to myself why it mattered, but it did.

“Maybe,” I said, “it matters more to men than it does to women.” I took a sip of wine.

“In fact, I’m sure it does.” I took a much bigger swig of the wine. “Men really care a lot what people think about them. The worst thing that can happen to a guy is to have his masculinity impugned.”

Alice squeezed my hand. “Not the worst thing, surely.”

I shrugged and withdrew my hand. “Pretty bad. Bad enough to make me think I was going to crack up when I was sixteen.”

“Back in Nebraska?”

I nodded. “I didn’t exactly have the best time in high school.”

“So, what are you going to do now?” Alice said.

“I figured I could try shaving my eyebrows, shave my head.”

“I have a suspicion – and please don’t take this the wrong way, Alex – that it mightn’t help. You know, you have feminine bone structure.”

“Did you not hear that thing I said earlier, about men having their masculinity impugned?”

“Lying to you isn’t going to make you feel any better.”

“Try me.”

“You might end up looking like Sinead O’Connor.”

“I might take that chance. Could it be worse?”

“Well, there’s one other thing,” Alice said.

“What?”

“If you shave your head, Arun is going to bar you from the team. You’ll stick out too much. Like Sinead O’Connor.”

“Well, if I can’t play blackjack, I guess there’s always graduate school,” I said. Alice had the good grace to laugh.

 

~o~O~o~
 

Back at home I ran into Pete as I came into the kitchen. He was drinking orange juice straight from the carton. As soon as he saw me he spilled it down the front of his t-shirt. “Alex!” he gulped. “What the fuck?”

“Do not fucking start,” I growled.

“What –“

“I know, Peter.” He always knew I was angry when I called him Peter.

“Know what?” he said.

“What?”

“What the fuck?”

We both stood facing one another, unsure what to do next. Pete was spilling more OJ onto the floor from the carton.

“Uh … Is this deliberate? Did you lose a bet? Is there something I should know?”

“It’s a long, long fucking story,” I said, straightening the carton in his hand to prevent all of the juice flooding across the kitchen floor. “If you want to hear it you’ll have to get me drunk.” Considering I was half toasted from dinner with Alice, that wouldn’t be hard, but Pete didn’t know that.

“Oh … kaaaay,” Pete said. I could see his eyes roving over me, as though he was looking for further evidence of my weirdness.

“Arggggh.” I said. “Fuck, Pete.” I sat down at the kitchen table and put my head in my hands.

Pete reached into the refrigerator, put the juice back, and pulled out a couple of beers. I immediately stood up, got a sponge from the sink, and mopped up all the orange juice from the floor. Then I sat back down.

“Alex, how long have we known each other?” Pete said as I sat back down.

“Four, five years?”

He set a beer on the table in front of me, and cracked the ring pull on his own. “So, you want to tell me what’s been going on this past year?”

I opened the other beer, and began to tell him the story of how I’d started playing blackjack. I was getting good at the story — it was the second time I’d told it in two days. I felt better telling it, even if I was breaking the team’s vow of silence by doing so. At least I could stop living a secret life in front of the people closest to me.

 

~o~O~o~
 

Pete was good at helping me get my head together. His advice seemed pretty sound. “You should nix the job at Gene Systems.” he said.

He was right. I did hate it, and it wasn’t like I needed the money, so long as I stayed on the team. Even if I left the team, I had enough money that I could live for at least a couple of years, comfortably. More than comfortably.

I called up work the very next day and spoke with Justin, my boss. It was a quick conversation, but when it was done I was free. I might have had freaky eyebrows, and chick hair, but I no longer had a corporate job, and I didn’t have to deal with going to the office and explaining myself to anyone.

 

~o~O~o~
 

With no job, there wasn’t much of a reason for me to get out of the house. So I stayed in. It was fall, the weather was getting cooler, I was afraid of looking like a chick.

I was semi-serious when I mentioned to Alice that I might shave my eyebrows and my head, but I was actually too depressed to do anything about it. She was right. If I did, Arun would kick me off the team and, now I didn’t have a job, blackjack was my sole source of income.

Income aside, I wasn’t regretting leaving the job. Pete and Alice had both said some things to me in the past few days that rang true: I was wasting my life, or at least my brain, working at Gene Systems. If I didn’t need the money, there was no point continuing there, especially since being a Unix sysadmin ranks on the job-satisfaction scale right up there with air traffic controller: your job is critical, but nobody notices your work unless you screw up and the servers or airplanes go down.

Pete had also talked to me in an unfamiliar way on that Wednesday night. I wasn’t sure whether it was because he was freaked out by the way I looked, or because it had been so long since we’d exchanged more than three words, or because he was just pissed at me for blowing off our friendship for blackjack, but he made a point of asking me some deep personal stuff.

That wasn’t Pete’s style. He and I never talked about deep stuff. The whole point of our relationship had been that — as best buds — we never had to. But when he asked me what I wanted, and I answered that I didn’t know, he told me, pretty bluntly, that at my age that was a pretty fucked up thing. “How can you not know what you want?“

“So what do you want from life, Pete?” I responded.

“A second round of funding for our business. A new laptop.” He paused to drink. “A woman who’s not going to treat me like I’m disposable. It’s not a grand plan, but I’m not running for president.”

“It doesn’t sound like a plan at all.”

“Well, I don’t want much. Really. Startups are kind of fun, and we could use the investment, but I’m not going to give the business away. I can wait for a new laptop – next year’s one is always better. I really could do with a woman in my life, but you know me, I only seem to attract the ones who are looking for someone who’s going to be rich. You’re probably going to be rich, if this cards thing continues. Maybe I should hook you up with Linda.”

Linda had been Pete’s previous girlfriend, who had turned out to be an expert in psychodrama. The fact that Pete even mentioned her in relation to me suggested that he wasn’t all that happy with me.

“The point I’m trying to make, Alex,” he said, now sounding more than a little buzzed from the beer, “is that I know what I want, and I’m not throwing away friendships to get it. You understand?”

I understood. The “throwing away friendships” part of the sentence was hard to miss.

I thought the lessons of the evening had been learned, then. I had been given sage advice by two friends about needing to actively plan my life. That I had allowed myself to be distracted by playing blackjack, without a plan for what would happen when, inevitably, I stopped. And I’d been reminded by one of them that friendship requires at least two people. I thought that was enough for one night, but there was more.

Pete downed the rest of his beer and then looked me straight in the eyes and asked, “How long have you known you wanted to be a chick?”

I just looked at him blankly.

He stared back at me.

“You don’t?” he said.

“No.”

I was a bit stunned. I knew I looked like a girl. I mean, I’d looked like a girl for most of my adolescence, and I looked even more like a girl now. But Pete knew me as well as anyone, even if we hadn’t seen much of each other lately. He knew I was sensitive about my masculinity, or lack thereof. Now he was sounding like Justin, my boss at Gene Systems.

We suffered through what was probably the first really awkward long silence the two of us had ever shared in our five years of friendship. It was me that finally broke it. “Pete. Why would you say that?” I said.

“I, uh …” Pete looked down at his beer, then back up at me. Then he laughed. “It’s a pretty fucked up thing to say, then, isn’t it?” He laughed. “Man, alright, I fucked up. Big time. I’m sorry, dude.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I said. “Be certain.” I took hold of his hand, across the table, unconsciously mimicking the way Alice had taken mine earlier in the evening. “Why would you say that? Because of the way I look?”

“No. Yes …” Pete had stopped laughing. “No.”

He was going to withdraw his hand, but then obviously changed his mind and left it in mine.

“I really don’t know, Alex. Yes, you look like a chick. You really look like a chick, right now … and, you know, the very first time I saw you – it was at Adam Hirschfeld’s party, remember? – I thought, don’t hate me right now – I actually thought you were a girl with bad fashion sense, or maybe a lesbian geek.”

“You never told me that.”

“Well, because then we started talking, remember, and eventually I realized you were a guy, and I liked you, and, you know, I don’t really think about things all that much, but I’m usually not completely insensitive. Just tonight.”

“You’re not being insensitive,” I said softly. “Thanks for telling me.”

“Then there was the Halloween thing.”

Three years earlier, I dressed up as a woman for Halloween. I hadn’t really wanted to do it, on account of my sensitivity about being mistaken for a woman at the best of times, but the theme of the party had been gangsters and molls and while Pete got to go as a gangster, Talia convinced me to get dressed up as a moll, and I entered the party on Pete’s arm. Talia dressed as a gangster, too, and her girlfriend Jill went as a moll. The depressing thing about the night was that everyone thought I was a woman, and a couple of people thought I was prettier than Jill. I never set them straight, but it was an unpleasant reminder of my high school years, and I vowed not to do it again. The experience was so unpleasant I think it was one of the contributing factors to my sophomore year breakdown. Thinking about gender, and me, and where I fit in, did bad things to my head.

“Anyway, Alex, it’s not like I think you’re gay, or anything,” Pete said. “Not that it would matter,” he added quickly. “I’ve just thought, you know, sometimes the way you do things, you sort of act like a chick.”

“Say what? Like what?”

“Like holding my hand?”

I withdrew my hand as though I’d been bitten. Pete laughed, and I realized he’d been teasing me.

“Bastard,” I said, smiling again.

“But seriously Alex … you never thought about being a chick? You do act like one sometimes.”

“You keep saying that. How?”

“I don’t know, man … The way you sit down?” he shrugged.

“The way I sit down? That’s it? That’s all you got?” I was mildly outraged for a moment, until I thought about it. “Wait, how do I sit down?”

“Like a chick,” Pete said. “You slide into a chair the way a girl would do it.”

“And based on this, you think I want to be a woman?”

“You always keep your hair long. Until now, I mean.”

“So does Aaron.” Aaron was a mutual friend from our days together in Matthews. He wasn’t a big guy, but there wasn’t anything feminine about him.

“Yeah, but yours always looks beautiful.”

“Uh.” I really didn’t know what to say to that. What could anyone say to that?

“You never raise your voice,” Pete continued

“That’s ridiculous. Lots of women raise their voices. Linda used to scream at you.”

“I meant … you know, you often sound like a chick, too.”

“Thanks, Pete. You’re making me feel really great.”

“Sorry. It’s not just that. I guess I was jumping to conclusions. Sorry. This past year where you’ve kind of been absent from your entire life … I don’t know, when I saw you tonight, you looked, uh, pretty good. You look beautiful, Alex. I guess maybe I thought you were going over to the other side, and that was what all these changes in the way you’ve been acting have been about.”

“Changes in the way I’ve been acting?” I was trying to let the comment about “you look beautiful” slide by me.

Pete thought I was beautiful?

“Just, you know, being absent. Ignoring me. Then the haircut. I mean, I get the story about the casino and all that, but it seemed like there might be more. I figured maybe you didn’t know how to tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“That you wanted to be a chick. Except you don’t.”

“This conversation isn’t making a whole lot of sense.”

“No, but that’s why it’s starting to feel like old times, dude.”

“Yeah.” I smiled. It was feeling like old times. Both of us were tired, and drunk, but we were spending time together. I realized how much I had missed Pete, this past year. My sudden onrush of sentimentality might have had something to do with the fact I was drunk for the second night in a row. It was a habit I was going to have to break.

“I tell you what, Pete,” I said.

“What?”

“I’ll forgive you for thinking I want a sex change if you’ll forgive me for being a shitty friend this past year and more.”

Pete weighed it up: “Seems like a fair trade.”

“Good.” I shook the empty beer can in front of me and three-pointed it into the open trash bin beside the kitchen bench. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to bed.”

I went to bed, but it took me a long time to get to sleep, drunk though I was. Pete, my very best friend in the world, thought I was beautiful. I had seriously mixed feelings about that.

 

~o~O~o~

 

We were supposed to have a team meeting Thursday night, but it had been postponed until next Monday, and the planned work on the weekend had been cancelled. I wasn’t sure whether we’d even work the weekend after that, after what had happened to Henry. We had planned to head to Atlantic City, since we were still trying to stay out of Vegas. But in the interim, until that meeting, there didn’t seem to be a good reason to leave the apartment. Not if it involved further humiliation.

So I stayed indoors, taking no action at all for a few days. I watched some bad movies, ate cheese and crackers and instant ramen, and listened to Fugazi, Bjork, Husker Du and Pixies on endless repeat. On Friday morning I called Henry to see how he was doing, but I got his machine, and his cellphone was turned off.

Monday I had to go pick up my glasses. The meeting Arun had called was scheduled for 6pm, so I figured I’d swing by the store and pick them up just before closing, but I got caught up watching Goodfellas on DVD, and there’s no way you can turn off that sequence of Henry’s pre-arrest paranoia once you’ve started watching. Then, when I looked up at the time, it was 5.15pm already, so of course by the time I got to the store they were closed. So I went to the meeting without my glasses, and in a foul mood for having missed the one important thing I was supposed to have achieved for the week.

Arun was addressing the team when I walked in, but as soon as he saw me he faltered.

“Nice haircut, Alex,” Lucy said. I glared at her and took a seat. I didn’t know whether she was serious, or being sarcastic. Alice smiled at me reassuringly. Lucy looked mildly chastened.

“As I was saying,” Arun said. “Friday night it’s Atlantic City. We’ll be staying at Bally’s, playing Ceasars and the Tropicana. The Trop is still a bit of a mess with the renovations, but I’m hoping that will work in our favor. There’s a possibility, a slim possibility, that Whitwell will have spread our photos around, and we need to be extra vigilant this weekend. I don’t think anyone needs reminding about what will happen if we don’t.”

“How is Henry?” Dan asked.

“He’s okay,” Lucy said. “I spoke to him yesterday. He’s gone to the Caymans for a rest.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Dan said.

“He said he might not come back,” Lucy added. “To the team.”

“Henry’s welcome back at any time,” Arun said.

“I don’t think he wants to come back,” Lucy said. “I can understand that.”

“Well, he’s welcome if he does,” Arun said sharply. “Now, can we get back to the task at hand? From now on, we’re going to sharpen up our emergency plans. All of you have cellphones?”

There was general nodding. I had just picked up one of those tiny Ericsson flip phones a few weeks ago, which fitted in my pocket easily.

“You can’t have phones on at the table, but you can leave them set to silent and the casinos won’t be any wiser. In addition to the usual lookouts, I’m delegating Lucy here to keep tabs on the security guys, in a discreet way, to see whether we can spot them discussing us before they actually make a move. If she does, she’ll send everyone a text message, which should make your phones vibrate. Make sure she has your number in her phone before you leave.”

“And if we have to leave?” Ziyen asked.

“If we have to leave, don’t go back to Bally’s. We’ll all meet at the Mickey D’s a block away. Everyone know where that is?” He drew a rough map on the whiteboard. “It might not even be safe to go back to our hotel, so make sure everything’s packed and ready to be bumped out in a hurry if we have to.”

Arun ran through the rest of the procedures for the weekend, including who was carrying the money. Eventually we were all done, and it was time to leave.

As I got up Alice came over to me. “How are you?”

“Better, thanks. Sorry I was such a mess the other night.”

“Not at all. Actually, I thought you were pretty good.”

As everyone else was leaving, Arun interrupted us. “Hey, Alex.”

I turned to face him.

“Interesting look you’ve got going on now.”

“Are you trying to be funny?”

Arun at least had the grace to look embarrassed. It was satisfying to see him lose some of his normal composure.

“Sorry.”

I heard Alice chime in on my behalf. “Arun, Alex went all out to help, for Henry, and let’s face it, for you, too. The least you can do is try to sympathize.”

How I loved Alice then, for coming to my aid. I really didn’t know what to say to Arun.

“Sympathize?” Arun was puzzled. “Of course I sympathize. Alex, I was amazed you went through with that last Sunday. I don’t know anyone else who would have. It took guts. I really admire that.”

“You do?” I finally squeaked.

“Of course. Without you, we would have lost a lot of our stake. And everything Henry did would have been for nothing. You were sensational.”

“As may be,” Alice said, “he’s been suffering for it since.”

“Whose idea was it to cut your hair?” Arun asked.

“Mine,” Alice and I said simultaneously.

“Okaaaay.” Arun said, smiling. Alice and I laughed, too. The ice was broken.

“So here’s the thing, Alex," Arun said.

“The thing?”

“Yeah.” He shuffled his feet slightly, like he was about to pitch on a mound. “I have one more big favor to ask.”

“I think I know where this is going,” I said.

“Me too,” Alice said. “Why, Arun?”

“It’s to our advantage,” Arun said. “On the one hand, if Alex plays as a guy, looking like that, he’s going to stick out like a sore thumb. Really.”

“Yeah,” I said begrudgingly. It wasn’t really something I could argue with.

“On the other hand, if he plays as a woman …”

“You’re saying I look more like a woman,” I said.

“Well …”

“You’re saying he’s safer as a woman,” Alice said.

“Yes,” Arun said. “And – and believe me, Alex, this isn’t the reason I’d ask you to do this – if Alex plays as a woman, he’ll … she will … be the only one of us that we can be sure Whitwell doesn’t know about yet.”

 

~o~O~o~
 

After Arun’s speech, Alice and I went out for dinner again at a Thai place on Kendall Square. We talked through the pros and cons of what he’d said. Everything made sense. Everything Arun said was logical, and in a completely bizarre way almost sensible. It just wasn’t something I thought I could do.

“Why not?” Alice asked.

“What do you mean, why not?” I said. “Did everything I said the other night not mean anything?”

“Yes, Alex, of course. But you’re being mistaken for a woman now anyway. How can it be worse?”

“Well for one thing, I could be beaten to a pulp by someone who doesn’t like transvestites.”

“I hate to say it, Alex, but you could be beaten to a pulp by someone who doesn’t know the difference between androgyny and transvestism. I think the people who are inclined to beat up on transvestites probably aren’t that discriminating in terms of who they hit.”

“So what you’re saying is, I don’t have a choice in this.”

“Of course you have a choice. You have a lot of choices. You can play as you are, despite what Arun says. Or you can take his advice and exploit the situation, which actually makes some sense, in an Arun kind of way. Or you can not play at all …” Once again, she took my hand across the table. “But truly, Alex, tell me honestly: if you’ve really been mistaken for a girl so often throughout your life, didn’t you ever wonder what it might be like?”

I was going to lie, but I realized I couldn’t. “Once or twice.”

“At least you’re honest. I can’t imagine there’s a person alive who hasn’t thought about ‘how the other half lives’ at least once.” She smiled. “And who knows, you might actually enjoy it.”

“Shoot me now,” I groaned.

“Watch it!” she laughed.

After our discussion I had thought we might go back for a nightcap to Alice's apartment, which was around the corner from the restaurant. It seemed like there was still a bunch off stuff we needed to discuss — I certainly needed a lot more advice if I was going to continue presenting as a woman — but she begged off. I had the feeling she maybe had something lined up with her mystery man.

Friday morning Alice decided we should shop for some clothes for me to wear while we were in Atlantic City. I had expected the shopping experience to be nerve-wracking, but it was no drama at all. Before we went out she had me try on one of her bras, which she padded out a little with some cotton balls. I still looked like a fairly flat-chested girl, but as Alice said, I looked very much the way most other Asian women my age looked.

Makeup was more problematic. Alice hardly wore any, and wasn’t too expert in applying it. Down in Baton Rouge it had been Lucy that had done all the hard work on my hair and makeup. We both spent a half hour or so with the makeup salesdroid on the Shiseido counter at Neiman Marcus, and came away with a couple of lipsticks each, some mascara, and a bunch of free samples.

“This is fun, Alex,” Alice said. “I never had anyone to do this with, before.”

“You never had girlfriends you went shopping with?”

“Not for makeup. Not back home, no,” she said. “I was the science geek. And the only Korean in a sea of white preppie girls. You can’t share makeup with white girls – their coloring is all wrong.”

“I can’t imagine you not being popular, Alice. You’re so pretty, so smart.”

“I wasn’t exactly pretty when I was younger”.

We talked about what it meant to be a teenage girl and how peer group pressure influenced you. Well, Alice talked about all that. I didn’t talk much at all, mostly listened, but I realized as we were talking that a lot of what Alice was describing was similar to my own school life. Although it was impossible to imagine now, beauty that she was, Alice had been an outsider at school, someone who never fitted in, both because she was Korean, because she wasn’t afraid to be smart, and because she didn’t give in to the Queen Bees at her school. Alice had gone to Farmington (the name Harvard insiders gave to Miss Porter's School for Girls, a super-expensive boarding school in Connecticut that boasted famous alumnae including Jacqueline Bouvier and Edie Beale). I had also been an outsider, and while I hadn’t had beauty on my side I’d had some oddly similar experiences. Listening to Alice, it didn’t sound like my problems as a teenager had been nearly as bad as hers. Teenage girls are vicious. The girls at Alice’s school certainly sounded that way.

For the rest of Friday afternoon Alice schooled me in the subtleties of femininity: how to sit, how to walk, how to talk. The first two I had no problem with; as Pete had said a few days earlier, there were some things I did that weren’t neatly gendered. Speaking was the thing that terrified me. Alice sat me with a tape recorder and made me listen to my own voice, which I thought sounded horrible. She was right, I didn’t have an especially deep voice but — despite what Pete had said to me — I thought it still sounded like a guy’s voice. Alice tried to teach me how to soften it, how to avoid making declarative statements, and how to put more tonal highs and lows into each sentence. I wouldn’t have said, at 3pm before Dan picked us up in the van, that I sounded like the most feminine woman I’d heard, but at the end of a few hours of Alice’s solid tuition I sounded – on tape at least – like someone you had to think hard about to work out whether they were male or female.

On an intellectual level, I was actually kind of fascinated by how I sounded. I wondered what the real signifiers for voice on something like radio actually were, and I thought about it on the whole trip down to Atlantic City in the van.

At a rest stop on the turnpike Arun pressed an envelope into my hand. I opened it in the ladies room. Inside were a bunch of IDs and a note. The note simply said: “For your next W2G filings, and something more personal. A.”

The IDs included a Texas drivers license for Alexandra Leung of Galveston Texas, a California license for Alexa Chin of Redondo Beach California, and a New York license for Lisa Lee with a Park Avenue address. The last ID, which I took to be the “more personal” part, was a new Massachusetts Driver’s License, in the name “Alexandra Jones,” with my current address.

I studied them all closely. If they were fakes, they were excellent fakes.

By the time we actually went through the doors at our first casino in Atlantic City, the playing itself was a total anti-climax. If Whitwell had our details, they hadn’t been passed on to the crews at the Trop or Ceasars. We didn’t make as much as we would in Vegas, but we made a lot more than at the podunk places like Lake Charles.

 

~o~O~o~