January Girl by Jennifer Brock

A teenager in a version of America where one law is different makes a new friend.

I hate skiing. I'm not saying that I hate it when I go skiing; I've never tried it and never want to. I mean I hate that skiing exists. I wouldn't have ended up like this if it hadn't been for skiing. My mother had been scheduled to have induced labor to bring me into the world as a normal, healthy baby boy on December 27, 2001. However, Dr. Miriam Brown, my mother's obstetrician chose to go skiing over her Christmas break and came back with a broken arm. She should have done what everyone else does at Christmas and gone visiting with relatives we can barely stand, to eat too much food and exchange meaningless conversation and even more meaningless gifts. But, she just had to go play in the snow on dangerous mountains and went straight into a tree! She could no longer take care of my mother's pregnancy, and Dr. Jeremy Finch, the doctor covering for her, would only take emergency cases; my mother's inducement was considered an elective procedure and so he wouldn't do it. That meant I had to wait until January to be born when my mother went into labor naturally. But more importantly that meant I had to wait until 2002. As you know, the Berry Wilson Act states that male babies are only allowed to be born in years divisible by 3. So when I emerged from my mother's womb into the bright light of the delivery room, the doctor said, "Congratulations! It will be a girl!"

Now you might wonder why I blame skiing and not the law for giving me the life I've got. Well, stupid Dr. Brown knew about the law when my mother found out she was going to have me, and knew that skiing can be dangerous, but nonetheless decided to go risk her future and mine in a senseless sport! So that's why I hate skiing and not the BWA. Maybe you think that's a bit ridiculous, but I don't care – no one ever said feelings had to make sense. If they did, they wouldn't be feelings. Besides, the law has done a lot of good. It was originally enacted because too many boys were being born. Because of people using selective termination or in vitro fertilization, many more parents were choosing to have baby boys than baby girls. And economically, there was less demand for the kinds of jobs uneducated male workers traditionally did, which led many of those young unemployed males into criminal lives. But under the new law, with male births only happening one year out of every three, crime would be down when our generation came of age. Plus, by separating us out by birth year, it meant girl students wouldn't have to compete with boys for the teachers' attention, and we collectively perform better than our coed predecessors.

So that's how I ended up receiving a life of medical treatment: getting hormone injections as an infant to try to make my brain develop in a feminine manner as it finished growing, having my testes removed as soon as they descended, and going through medically-assisted puberty with controlled and monitored doses of more hormones. Sometime next year they'll do an analysis of my bones to see if I'm finished growing, and when they determine that I've reached my full adult size I'll get the greenlight for my surgery. And that will be a great relief, to finally look just like all the other girls everywhere, no longer feeling ashamed or self-conscious in a changing room or a public bathroom. I won't ever be able to have kids, but there will always be orphans who need homes, so I'll have options when the time comes that I feel like I want a family.

So you see it's not a life I chose, but it was chosen for me. And it's all skiing's fault. (Do you think maybe I should blame trees instead?)

Anyway, the thing I want to tell you about happened last week. It was the start of a new school year, so I was all excited to see what my friends had been up to, but a little nervous about meeting new people. You read stuff that says like all adolescents at one time or another feel like everyone thinks they're weird or wrong, but when you have objective evidence that you're not like everybody else there's really no way your mom can say, "Don't worry – everyone goes through this," and take it seriously. I go to a support group for girls like me, and some of them live undercover like spies, pretending to be Ordinaries. It seems to cause them a lot of anxiety, so I don't know who has it easier. I've been out as a January Girl to my classmates ever since an incident in kindergarten (I can still hear them chanting, "Emily has a pee-pee!" if I close my eyes and think about it) so I've gotten used to it. So the first day of school was sort of like any other day to me.

So I go to school and it's kind of weird how all the girls are like checking each other out to see whose boobs got bigger over the summer or whatever, and some of them are looking over at me all frowny and stuff, and then Ashlee Poole comes over and tells me, "I was talking with Lyssa and Abbi, and we are so jealous! It's like you got even prettier over vacation, and we can't catch up. It's not fair. Justin totally knew what he was talking about!" The blank look on my face told her I had no clue what she was talking about, so she explained that her favorite heartthrob had recently tweeted about how he preferred January Girls - that we're hotter and better at sex than natural girls. Ashlee showed me on her phone where he'd posted a photo with two models he claimed were girls like me. I think he was probably just trying to be controversial. The only thing in his tweets that made sense was that he liked how one of us would never turn him down because she was on her period – we don't get those. I kind of shrugged off what I guess was supposed to be a compliment from Ashlee and we talked a little about what we'd done over the summer. I told her I was sure she looked better at the beach than I would have; I can only wear a totally unsexy bathing suit with a skirted bottom.

Our teacher Ms. Hughes came in and got everyone settled down and then revealed the big news – there were a few new students joining our class, and one of them was a boy! Josh Tucker was tall, thin but not too skinny, with wavy honey-colored hair and piercing blue eyes. He was sharply dressed in the boy's version of our school uniform, a white polo shirt tucked into khaki pants and black penny loafers. Madison Evans raised her hand to volunteer to show him around the school, but Ms. Hughes directed him to the empty seat next to me and said, "Emily, look over his schedule and help him find his next class." Madison did not like that and sneered at me. She was older than the rest of us, having been born in 2001 with the boys (The law was written such that boys could only be born in certain years; it didn't care when girls were born) but her parents chose to enroll her a year later with the girls. But that meant every step of the way she'd always point out that she was more mature than the rest of us. She was the first girl in our class to start wearing a training bra, although she wasn't the first girl at school to need one. That was Alexis Ortiz, one of those secret January Girls I mentioned. Luckily a few of the Ordinaries got their boobs before the rest of us, so no one thought Alex's development was a clue. It's not like she'd mention it to me, but I don't think Madison was the first girl in class to get her period either.

Anyway, I introduced myself to Josh and had started looking over his papers when Madison turned around and very loudly whispered, "It's probably best you took care of him since you two have so much in common." Just to make sure she got her point across she added, "I mean both having penises and all." Ms. Hughes snapped at her and she turned back to face front.

I imagined rolling my eyes at Madison (no point in getting myself in trouble) and a satellite crashing through the ceiling above her seat. Josh got a cute crinkle in his forehead and asked me, "Is that true?"

I sighed. "Yep. I'm a January Girl. Are you ok with that?"

He smiled at me, making his eyes sparkle somehow. "You're not the first I've met; in fact my best friend at my old school was one. I kept wanting to make her do guy stuff but she was zero percent tomboy. A total girly-girl but fun to be around anyway. When we're allowed to use our phones later I'll show you a picture of her. And send her one of you if you'll let me. I bet she'd like you."

That was a relief. "So you've been in a class full of girls before? How come you're in ninth grade instead of tenth?"

Now it was his turn to be embarrassed. "I'm a Canada Boy." When parents conceive boys in off years and don't want to have them converted or aborted, and they can afford it, they go abroad to deliver them. It was kind of cool that he was part of a group created by the BWA, too. In a weird way Madison was right.

I put my schedule next to his and showed him that we'd being going to the same class first period, which was probably the real reason Ms. Hughes chose me. So I got to do the honors of introducing him to our history teacher Mr. Arnold, and then we sat in the back of the class and tried not to be noticed. He wrote in my notebook asking if Mr. Arnold really thought his toupee was fooling anyone, and I had to stifle the giggles so hard that it sent me coughing. I was almost glad to send him on his way to math class afterwards.

He met back up with me at lunch. I was sitting at my usual table with Ashlee and Sarah and Lyssa and Alex. (We pretend not to be too close during school, but she's okay hanging as long as enough Ordinaries are there.) When I saw Josh I waved over to invite him and he came and sat next to me on the bench, close enough that our hips were touching and I kind of liked it. It made me start wondering if maybe I was like starting to get attracted, you know "that way," to boys. Some January Girls never develop those kind of feelings, so I hoped I might just be one of the lucky ones.

At the end of school when we were getting stuff from our lockers, he pulled me aside and had me lag behind a little when everyone was rushing off to find their rides. He pulled out his phone and told me to smile so he could send a selfie of him and me to his friend Grace. And he (rather smoothly, I thought) got my number so he could send me the picture. Then he scrolled through the pictures on the phone and showed me what she looked like. She was cute, with long red hair and green eyes and a smile that hinted at mischief. He said, "Thanks for showing me around, Em. You really helped me feel comfortable here." He flipped through some more pictures on the phone. "Here's Grace and me at the Spring Dance last year." He showed a picture of him in a fancy suit next to Grace in a beautiful green dress, next to another couple, a shorter boy with tan skin and slicked back black hair wearing a bright red bow tie next to a girl with brown hair in a tight updo with straight bangs wearing a red dress that didn't seem to fit right. "Grace was really there with Taylor, and I was with Zach, but we couldn't tell anyone." He looked up into my eyes to make sure I understood what he meant. "My parents accidentally caught me and freaked out – they'd gone through so much trouble to have me that disappointment doesn't begin to cover it. My dad actually said to me, 'if we'd known you were going to turn out a sissy, we should have just let them cut your dick off.' And there was a fight and my mom and I ended up moving here. So while I can't completely understand your situation, I might be the one person here who sometimes wonders if what they did to you wouldn't have been better than what they did to me." He was almost crying there so I gave him a hug and said we were still friends and I wouldn't tell anyone.

So, Diary, can you believe it? I guess maybe skiing isn't so bad.

Oh, and we're going to tell Madison we're dating.