None of the Above

by I. W. Gregorio

  When everything was said and done, Dr. Johnson reached over to put her hand on my dad’s knee. “Mr. Lattimer, I just want to reiterate: the bottom line is that Kristin is perfectly fine. And while I’m relatively certain about the diagnosis, we still need to get the results of some blood tests to confirm everything. I’m also going to send Kristin to a specialist to see whether any surgery needs to be done about those hernias.”

  “Why would she need surgery?” my dad asked suspiciously.

  “Well, in some cases, the gonads are more prone to developing cancer. . . .”

  “Cancer?” My dad’s voice cracked.

  “It happens in fewer than one in one hundred people,” Dr. Johnson said, as if that were supposed to make me feel any better, “and usually only in much older individuals. But some doctors do recommend a gonadectomy, or removal of the testes.”

  “If there’s a risk of cancer, shouldn’t we do it right away?” asked my dad. “Can we see this specialist tomorrow?”

  “We’ll have to check with her schedule,” Dr. Johnson said.

  “What do you mean, you’ll look at her schedule?” my dad said, his voice growing louder. “This is an emergency.”

  “Well, it’s not technically an emergency, Mr. Lattimer,” Dr. Johnson started, but when she saw my dad’s face getting red, she backpedaled. “However, I’ll place a call to Dr. Cheng.” She picked up my chart and headed toward the door. “I’ll be right back.”

  After she left, my dad slumped into his seat, and put his hand up to his forehead. I hurried over to his side, knowing that if there was anything that could break him, it was the thought of another cancer. “It’s okay, Dad,” I said, my face pressed up against his coarse brown hair.

  “But what if it isn’t?” His voice caught. “I couldn’t handle it again, sweetie. I just couldn’t.”

  “She said the tumors only develop when people are older,” I reassured him. It felt weird to be the one comforting him, like somehow I was the adult and he was the teenager.

  A few minutes later Dr. Johnson came back in and told us that the specialist had an appointment the next Monday at four o’clock. “Dr. Cheng will be able to talk to you about surgical options,” she said. “She’ll be able to give you more details about cancer risk.”

  At the C word, my father’s face sagged again. But to be perfectly honest? Even knowing what cancer did to my mother, sometimes I think it would’ve been so much easier if things had been as simple as cutting out a tumor.

  CHAPTER 5

  When we got home from Dr. Johnson’s office, I collapsed onto our couch, sinking into a cocoon of worn cushions and handmade afghans. The shock and fear had worn off, leaving me empty. Dazed. Numb.

  None of it made sense. I didn’t understand how I could be part boy. Did it even mean anything, if I still looked like a girl on the outside? I had boobs and hips and cheekbones and lips that Sam loved to kiss.

  Sam. Just thinking his name made a ripple of pain go through my body. I would have to tell him. Except . . .

  Maybe I wouldn’t.

  I didn’t have to tell anybody. For months after her cancer diagnosis, my mom kept it secret except for my immediate family. The only way for someone to know that I wasn’t a girl was if he had ultrasound vision, or was able to look at my cells under a microscope.

  Or was it more obvious? I stared at the childhood pictures on our mantel. Was it just that all babies look alike, or did I look like a boy in that nine-month-old portrait? All of a sudden, I remembered the time when I was eight and cried when my aunt Carla got me a pink pair of sneakers instead of the blue ones I wanted. Then, the day my mom gave me a spanking when I made a mess in the bathroom because I wanted to see if I could pee standing up like the boys in my summer camp.

  Had these all been hints of what I might be?

  “A hermaphrodite,” I whispered. Saying the word out loud gave me the creeps. It made me sound like a bug, or something that belonged in a rock collection. I couldn’t remember the name of the syndrome Dr. Johnson had mentioned. My dad would have remembered, was probably burning bandwidth looking it up now. But what was the point of looking it up when they weren’t sure I had it, yet? All Dr. Johnson had done was do a quick ultrasound and mash on my crotch.

  It’s a mistake. I repeated it over and over in my mind until I actually believed it, the way Coach Auerbach had us chant mantras before meets to get the team into a winning mind-set. Say something often enough and you’ll believe it.

  I forced myself to pull out my copy of The Merchant of Venice. It was the perfect thing to get my mind off doctor’s visits and blood tests, because deciphering Shakespeare took every ounce of my brainpower, when I did it right.

  Act 1, with all the haggling and usury and blatant anti-Semitism was only okay, except for the part when Portia dissed all of her suitors, which was pretty enjoyable. Then, in act 2, scene 6, good old Will stabbed me in the gut.

  But love is blind, and lovers cannot see

  The pretty follies that themselves commit;

  For if they could, Cupid himself would blush

  To see me thus transformèd to a boy.

  I knew it was stupid for that sentence to hurt. It wasn’t like Shakespeare wrote it with me in mind—he was talking about how Shylock’s daughter disguised herself as a boy to escape his house. Even so, I couldn’t stop the tightening of my throat as I read it, or the acceleration of my heart.

  Cupid himself would blush, I was such a freak.

  I tucked The Merchant of Venice back into my knapsack and pulled out my precalc book instead. In math, there were no cross-dressers, no girls turning into boys. I lost myself in the numbers, and in the equations that I could actually solve.

  Halfway through my problem set, our doorbell rang. It was Darren Kowalski. He had the faintest sheen of sweat on his forehead, and wore sweats and a long-sleeve cross-country shirt saying MY SPORT IS YOUR SPORT’S PUNISHMENT.

  “Ms. MacDowell said you needed someone to take notes,” he said. “There’s a handout, too.” He pulled a sheaf of papers from his CamelBak hydration pack.

  “Thanks,” I said. It made sense for Darren to have volunteered. He only lived a half mile away—the equivalent of a chip shot for a distance runner.

  “No problem. You doing okay?”

  I peered up at him, wondering when he’d gotten so tall, and tugged self-consciously at the afghan around my shoulders. I must look like some sort of invalid. “Of course,” I said, my tone clipped. “I’m fine.”

  There’s nothing wrong with me.

  “Oh. Okay.” Darren shifted the weight of his lanky body as if getting ready to run away.

  Instantly, I regretted my defensiveness. My mom was probably rolling over in her grave at my manners. Darren had no way of knowing why I’d been absent. I regrouped, and gestured toward the kitchen. “Do you want something to drink?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve got one here.” He nudged his CamelBak straw with a finger.

  “Oh, okay then.” I was just about to reach for the door handle when my dad came down the stairs, carrying his laptop.

  “Krissy, you should look at this website I found—”

  He stopped short when he saw Darren, and the shame on his face was a second stab in the gut.

  My dad snapped his laptop shut and managed a weak smile. “Darren! Haven’t seen you in a while. How’s everything?”

  “Fine, Mr. Lattimer.”

  “How’s the college search going? You still on the premed track?” Darren’s mom had always talked about how good he was at math and science, and wasn’t subtle about wanting him to become a doctor.

  “That’s the plan,” he said.

  “You looking at State at all?”

  “Yeah, and Columbia. Maybe even Yale.”

  “A real brainiac, huh?”

  Darren gave an embarrassed shrug and scuffed his shoe against our doormat, looking as massively uncomfortable as I felt.

  “How’s your mother doing?” my dad aske
d. “She seeing anyone these days?”

  Oh my God. Could he be more awkward? According to Aunt Carla, Dad and Ms. Kowalski had broken up because Ms. K still wasn’t over her ex-husband, who had announced one day out of the blue that he was gay. Our whole town had buzzed about it for weeks; rumor was he’d fallen in love with an elementary school teacher.

  “Dad,” I interjected. “Darren’s in the middle of a run. He probably needs to get going.”

  “Of course. Well, good luck with colleges, Darren.”

  “Sure,” Darren said. He shot me a grateful glance. “See you tomorrow, Krissy.”

  I watched him lope off into the twilight before hunkering back down to my problem set. It wasn’t until much later, after I had gone to bed, that it occurred to me that my dad never did get around to showing me whatever website he’d found. But it didn’t matter, I decided.

  Because it’s all a mistake.

  CHAPTER 6

  Sam met me at my locker Friday morning, like usual, and slung his arm across my shoulders while giving me a kiss on the forehead the way he always did. But all I could think of when he touched me was, I may have testicles.

  “You never called me yesterday,” he said. “Did you get my texts?”

  “Oh, yeah.” I tried to sound casual. “My phone ran out of battery and I didn’t get them until late.”

  “As long as you’re cool,” said Sam.

  “Yeah, I’m cool,” I said, forcing a smile.

  They say that the best hurdlers learn to compartmentalize. They break down each race into its components, and when they perfect the little things, the big picture comes together naturally.

  So I focused on one piece of my life at a time. When I was in the car with Faith and Vee, I made sure not to mention Homecoming, and concentrated so hard on laughing and keeping my smile planted on my face that my cheeks hurt when I got home.

  When Sam came over on Saturday afternoon to “study” just like he always did, we fell into our make-out routine the way my feet slid into my worn running shoes. There were even a couple of moments when I allowed myself my usual fantasy where Sam proposed to me on graduation day. We’d go to college, of course (Sam was still waiting to hear from State), and then work for a few years before buying a house in the burbs and having kids who ran and played lacrosse and football.

  I guess I’d forgotten about the part where I might not have a uterus.

  The Monday of my specialist’s visit, I got through the day class by class. The urologist had scheduled me for her last appointment. I sleepwalked through bio, and felt like a robot during math. In my child development class we watched a video about shaken baby syndrome and it was so horrifying that I lost myself in that. Then there was English.

  On Mondays, Ms. MacDowell always did class “seminar style.” As we moved our desks into a circle, she talked about how she always liked to teach The Merchant of Venice and Othello together because they were Shakespeare’s most problematic plays. “Today, let’s discuss how both plays unsettle assumptions and disturb the conscience with their portrayals of the Other.”

  “You mean by being racist and anti-Semitic?” Natalie Goldstein asked.

  “And sexist,” Jessica added. “Women in his plays are controlled by men and don’t have power unless they cross-dress.”

  “Interesting. Why do you say that the play is racist and sexist,” Ms. MacDowell asked, “rather than saying that it’s a play about racism and sexism?”

  “Because Shylock’s the villain,” Natalie said. “He’s the one who gets punished in the end. Poor guy. He loses his ducats and his daughter, and they’re going to make him go to church every Sunday.”

  “But was Shakespeare completely unsympathetic to Shylock’s situation?” Ms. MacDowell pressed.

  “No,” Jessica said. “He gave Shylock the best monologue in the Western canon.” She stood up straight and used her actress voice. “‘Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands . . . ?’”

  “Yeah, and the Christians in the play are kind of asshats,” Darren said. “They might win, but in the end they’re the hypocrites. I mean, Portia goes on and on about the quality of mercy, but at the end of the trial she’s just as vengeful as Shylock was.

  “Plus,” he added, “in the allegory of the caskets, Shakespeare basically says that people should look past the appearance of things. ‘All that glisters is not gold,’ you know.”

  Ms. MacDowell smiled at Darren, and looked around the circle at the rest of us. “What do you all think? Is Shakespeare subversively arguing for a world where, in the end, it doesn’t matter whether we’re black or white, Jew or Christian, man or woman?”

  As my classmates piped up I stayed silent, my eyes riveted to the clock, my mind trying its hardest not to go there: maybe Shakespeare was preaching that it shouldn’t matter if you were a man or a woman.

  But what if you were something in between?

  CHAPTER 7

  When I walked into the specialist’s office and saw all the old men sitting around, I was glad my dad had come, even if he couldn’t look me in the eye anymore.

  Most of the magazines were about golf and cars, and all the little brochures by the windowsill advertised Viagra and drugs for people who peed their pants. I stuck out like a sore thumb. One of the other patients, a man with white hair and brows so bushy they almost flopped over his eyes, kept looking up from his magazine in my direction. I wanted to say something to him about how it wasn’t nice to stare, but I knew it would draw more attention, so I tried to focus on the paperwork I was supposed to fill out. On the top of the very first page it read:

  NAME: SSN: DOB: SEX:

  I stared at the posters on the walls, which were all colorful diagrams of kidneys and prostates. Each of them had cross sections of people cut in half—one male, with the penis sticking out like the mouth on a faucet. One female.

  That was when I realized that life was a multiple-choice test with two answers: Male or Female. And I was None of the Above.

  I was still staring at the posters on the wall when the nurse called me back to an exam room, where we waited for another fifteen minutes until a door swung open and a petite woman with black hair laced with gray came in. She reached out to shake my hand.

  “I’m Dr. Cheng,” she said. “So nice to meet you. I’ve got Dr. Johnson’s notes, and I know that you must be totally overwhelmed by what she told you. Do you have any questions up front?”

  I knew it was just her standard open-ended question to get me talking, but I almost started crying right then. Can you make me into a girl? I thought. Tell me that I don’t have balls.

  What I said was:

  “Am I really a hermaphrodite?”

  She winced. “We don’t like to use that word anymore, because it isn’t really an accurate term and carries a lot of stigma.”

  No kidding. I looked down at my blank form, and remembered the hours I spent memorizing the gender of certain nouns in French class. Hats and fish are masculine. Freedom and lemonade are feminine.

  “So what am I?” I closed my eyes to remember the word my teacher had used when she told us that Russian actually had three genders. “Neuter?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “When speaking about your condition, we use either the term intersex, or disorder of sex development—DSD for short.”

  Like that was any better. When I didn’t say anything, Dr. Cheng rolled her chair and leaned in closer, as if she were moving in to look through a microscope, and I was the specimen. “Not that it matters what we call you, Kristin. You’re here because Dr. Johnson felt out of her depth and wanted you to talk to an expert about your condition and the types of treatment you could choose to have in the future.”

  “Treatments?” my dad interjected. “What treatments?”

  “Can you do uterus transplants?” I asked hopefully.

  But Dr. Cheng shook her head. “Transplants aren’t really a viable option yet. I’m sorry.” She opened the folder she was carrying. Calmly, she exp
lained to me that the ultrasound and blood tests had confirmed that I did not have a uterus, that my body was pumped to the gills with testosterone, and that my chromosomes were in fact XY. “All this suggests that you have something called androgen insensitivity syndrome, or AIS. Have you done any research on this yet?”

  My dad nodded, but I shook my head. I’d been so stupid, burying my head in the sand.

  “It’s actually a very common form of intersex,” Dr. Cheng said. She handed me an article that looked like it was written in Greek, and gave me a mini lecture on how embryos develop, using words like “mixed signals” and “defective receptors.” It was mostly gibberish, but the bottom line was that I was a car that came off the assembly line all messed up. I was a lemon.

  Dr. Cheng must’ve seen my eyes glaze over, because she finally stopped all the science talk and explained what all the mumbo jumbo meant in real life. I would never get my period. I could never have a biological child of my own. My vagina was only two inches long, which was why it hurt like hell when Sam and I tried to have sex—not that I mentioned anything about that in front of my dad. Finally, the testicles in my hernia might need to come out in the future because they could become cancerous.

  “Why the future?” I blurted. “Can’t we do the surgery now?”

  “It’s very controversial,” said Dr. Cheng. “If you take the testicles out, you’ll have to start taking estrogen for bone health. Plus, the risk of cancer in the gonads is very small.”

  “But not zero,” my dad insisted.

  “No,” Dr. Cheng admitted. She looked down at my chart.

  “I’ve done some reading online,” my dad said reluctantly, not looking at me. “Sounds like surgical removal is the way to go. For psychological reasons, too.”

  Like not having to walk around knowing that you have testicles inside you. “I’d like to. . . . I do want to take them out.”

  Dr. Cheng leaned in. “Kristin, I totally understand that impulse. But why don’t you go home and think about it before scheduling the surgery? There are side effects, and risks.” She turned toward my dad. “There are a lot of issues to sort out, and if you want to talk to someone, I know some great therapists. This is a difficult, scary life change, and it will take some adjusting to.”