Part 1
Unavoidable Roads

Chapter 3
You Better Run, Girl

It was almost exactly a year before Rich, the pre-teen boy, ventured to wear a dress again. He had mostly put that behind him. He was twelve now, almost thirteen and he was a boy becoming a man, sort of. He was tall, thin and not muscular, with smoky gray/blue eyes, sandy hair and long girlish eyelashes. Once when he was seven his mother had to rush him to the hospital when he fell and opened a long gash in his forehead. With a bandage covering most of his hair, he overheard a nurse ask his mother how old her daughter was. The nurse obviously saw the slight build and thin bones of the boy and thought he had to be a girl. Richie liked to remember that day.

But now he was a boy and played basketball well, and he had friends who were also boys soon to be men; other boys who mostly accepted him in the group but still teased him for not being strong or tough. At 12 Richie was no longer Richie, the boy, but Rich the kid who was sometimes remote and distant but not reclusive. Rich’s life didn’t revolve around all things boy and he didn’t spend all his time playing ball, or roaming the streets. Rich liked to spend an afternoon reading while listening to KDKA.

So when he heard his mom ask if he wanted to go shopping in Pittsburg with her and his sister Mary, he declined. He was old enough to stay home by himself; Gary, his older brother was with his father, working at the general store. He wasn’t really thinking about what he would do when he heard his mom and Mary say they were leaving but when he heard the car leave the driveway, he felt something pull at him, an unconscious urge to just see what Mary wears. It was part curiosity, part necessity. For a year Rich had stayed away from most things girl. He had thought about it. He wanted to go back to the attic but told himself it was not right but was dangerous, if not sinful. He told himself he had to resist and mostly he had, giving in only to regularly wearing panties to bed in the safety and dark of his room.

Now, he was standing in front of the dresser mirror in his older sister’s room. She was almost 18 and leaving for college in a month; he was not even thirteen. He opened the top drawer of the dresser; scarves, hankies, various accessories. He opened the next drawer; panties neatly folded and arranged; various colors and different materials, cotton to silky nylon. He touched them, careful not to disturb the arrangement. The next drawer he opened were all bras and slips, with the slips on one side and the bras on the other. Each bra was folded cups together in a neat row making it seem there was only one cup for each. The bras were almost exclusively white except for an off white strapless one, a black strapless one and one very lacy pink one. Rich touched the bras one by one being careful not to disturb them as they lay quietly waiting their turn to perform their magic. Rich marveled at how they were made; how they were so cone shaped ending in a soft rounded point.

Rich was losing control. He wanted to take a bra out, examine it closer, but he was scared. His heart was racing; he felt warm all over, hot really. He quickly closed both drawers and saw his reflection again in the mirror. He knew what he saw was incompatible with where he was and what he was doing. He knew he shouldn’t be there; he should leave, go read a book. But he couldn’t move. As he stared in the mirror, seeing the boy, the young developing boy/man with short hair and the beginning of an Adam’s apple he unbuttoned his shirt and took it off. He reopened the drawer with the bras and took the first one in the row being careful not to disturb the one behind it. He unfolded it and put his arms through the straps and tried to hook it behind him, finally successfully hooking just one of the three hooks. He adjusted the bra and again looked at himself in the mirror.

A boy stared back at him; a skinny boy with short hair and fuzz on his face; a boy with the slightest bit of fuzzy hair peeking out between the empty cups of the bra he was wearing. He hated what he saw. He hated the way he looked; hated the short hair; hated the fuzzy hair on his chest; hated that the cups were so empty. He hated that he was still wearing pants.

Rich quickly unbuttoned his pants and let them fall and pulled off his briefs. He was no longer in control of what he was doing. He opened the drawer with the panties and like with the bra took the first one being careful not to disturb the others. He wanted the pink lacy one but it was folded between two others and he needed to be ever so careful. At least the top one was nylon and had some lace on the sides. Rich started to step into the panties but was again betrayed by the mirror; a mirror watching every detail about Rich and what he was doing.

The mirror saw the boy in a bra. The mirror saw a boy with the full, but relatively small, compliment of boy parts. The mirror saw the soft mound of fine pubic hair especially arranged for a boy. When Rich saw what the mirror saw he felt ashamed and angry; ashamed of the way he looked and angry that he was becoming more like a man every day. Rich hesitated. He couldn’t put panties over what he had between his legs, even though he had done so many times before. This time the mirror was watching. This time he was wearing a bra. All those times in his grandmother’s attic were different. He was Vickie then; Vickie the little girl where it really didn’t matter if what she had between her legs wasn’t exactly anatomically correct.

Clutching the panties Rich raced into his parents’ bathroom and found his father’s razor. He ran the tap water until it was warm and made a lather with the soap between his legs. He carefully shaved off all of the thin silky pubic hair leaving a completely smooth mound; just the way it had been when he dressed in his grandmother’s attic. He dried himself off and only then pulled on the panties, desperately trying to push his penis out of sight so that the panties showed no boy bulges. The panties were too large and fit too loosely on his skinny hips so the penis flopped loosely inside the panties. As he walked back to his sister’s bedroom he was afraid that what happed in the attic the previous summer would happen again; that there would be an erection, but there wasn’t and Rich, feeling more like a teenage Vickie, was relieved.

Vickie found Mary’s clothes hamper and fished out two pair of her panties waiting for wash. She balled them up and stuffed one into each cup, giving some life to the sad bra. She then turned to Mary’s closet and found a perfect dress. It was plain with short sleeves, buttoned front and mid-calf length. She pulled the dress on and buttoned it up. It was pretty loose, a little tight in the arms and much shorter than how it looked on her sister. Vickie turned back to the mirror and smiled. The mirror seemed to like what she saw.

Vickie twirled around pleased with herself. She pranced first away from the mirror then watched herself walk back to it. She opened the drawer with the scarves and took out one, putting it over the short hair on her head and tying it under her chin. The scarf framed her face and made it appear girl like, giving the illusion of a girl with hair under the scarf. Vickie then opened the bottom drawer and found several garter belts, and stockings. She took one of the garter belts and lifted her dress pulling the belt around her and hooking it in the front. She felt the garters bounce against her legs as she adjusted the belt with the hooks in the back. She rolled one stocking and pulled it over her left foot and up to the thigh, just like she had seen her mother do many times. She hooked the stocking pushing the tab under the top seam and through the key, first in the front and then in the back. She did the same for the right leg. Now she stood in front of the mirror lifting up her dress to see how she looked; to see if she looked the way Mary did, or her mother. Mostly she felt she did, with the exception of the bulge.

Vickie found a pair of Mary’s shoes, pumps with some height to the heels. They fit almost perfectly and she awkwardly walked from Mary’s room to her own and back. She had the house to herself so this teen girl carefully but awkwardly descended the long staircase leading to the living room, and went to the kitchen, fixed some lunch. She cleaned up all of the dishes left by her family that morning and then sat in the big chair in the living room with her legs folded under her, just the way she had seen girls do, and read her book. This book wasn’t about girls, however, didn’t have any part where girls dream about being kissed by boys, or for that matter, nothing about boys thinking about girls. It was a story about war, about battles lost and won; about life and death. It was a story about strong courageous men, probably none who ever wore a dress.

Vickie read for hours, losing herself in the book. She forgot about Rich, or that she was not genetically a Vickie, or even that she was developing not as a girl but as a boy. For that afternoon in early August 1957, this 12 year old boy was again a girl, just like the one who frequented the attic so many times before things started changing. At four o’clock Vickie knew she had at least an hour to conceal what she had done. She picked up the shoes she had kicked off while reading and headed up stairs. She stood in front of the mirror again, this time feeling sad. She looked at the image and tried to talk to the person staring back at her.

“Why can’t this be me?” She asked but the image did not answer. Vickie turned and sat down on Mary’s bed feeling tears well up in her eyes and begin to roll on to her cheek. She untied the scarf, unbuttoned the dress and pulled it off. She stood up trying not to look at the mirror. She unhooked the stockings and rolled them off her legs, unhooked the bra and stepped out of the panties. As Rich reached for his briefs he glanced in the mirror again hating what he saw. Now he was angry; angry that he had let himself do this; angry that he had given in to what he was sure a terrible thing; angry that he was the way he was, and not like those men in the book he was reading; strong, tough masculine men who knew they were men and liked it, even if they got killed.