Subject: Fwd: New Diagnosis
My heart stopped. I clicked on the email.
Hi Kristin,
I am so glad that you emailed me! I would love to speak with you and answer any questions you might have about your diagnosis. When is the best time to talk?
Yours,
Maggie Blankman
“Dad! I got an email from someone in the Support Group!”
“How about that?” he said, brightening.
I wrote Maggie a quick email telling her it’d be fine to call anytime after seven at night.
All of a sudden, I didn’t need any coffee. I wolfed down my Raisin Bran and did some thigh stretches while leaning against the kitchen counter. “Dad, is it okay if Sam and I go out tomorrow night?” I knew it’d be fine, but I always liked to tell my dad my plans ahead of time.
“I’ll see if any of the guys want to come by and watch the Rangers game. You go have fun.”
“Love you.” I pecked him on the cheek and sprinted up the stairs to take my shower.
“We’re on for tomorrow,” I told Sam at lunch.
“Sweet! It’s gonna be awesome. It’s Richardson’s turn to be DD, and she’s gonna bring her parents’ van.” Sam leaned down to whisper into my ear, and a flutter went down my spine. “I’ve been thinking about you every night.”
The flutter expanded, settling nervously in my belly. I faked a smile. “Me, too, baby.”
It wasn’t a lie. I had been thinking of him, too. One of the Frequently Asked Questions on the AIS-DSD Support Group website was:
Can I be sexually active?
Yes, and we’re here to help give you support on how to be healthy, active, and fulfilled in and out of your bedroom. . . .
They didn’t go into specifics. Maybe the people in the Support Group knew that I was this close to running away from the whole thing, screaming, “TMI!”
There was way too much information, but I could understand how my dad could get addicted to all the research, because the alternative was to be adrift.
Alone.
“Earth to Krissy?” Sam said impatiently.
“What?” I’d zoned out.
“So Vee’s gonna start the circuit around seven, so maybe seven fifteen at your house? Don’t forget the hot tub.”
The flutter curdled into a ball of dread. I hadn’t.
As I waited for AP English to start, I swiveled back in my chair to ask Jessica Riley if she’d been to Andy’s post-Homecoming party.
She shrugged and twirled one of her curls around her finger. “Quincy and I stopped in for a little while, but we ended up meeting my sister and Darren at Carmella’s. I promised my mom I wouldn’t take her to a party with alcohol.”
“That’s nice of you.” I pressed on to the real question I wanted to ask. “How big was the hot tub? Could a lot of people fit?” Maybe if I waited long enough, there wouldn’t be room for Sam and me. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about the bikini after all.
Jessica laughed. “I’m pretty sure it’s only supposed to hold eight people, but there were at least a dozen in it when we were there. It was a total group grope.”
Not what I wanted to hear. Before I could respond, Darren leaned in from across the aisle. “Did I hear my name taken in vain?”
“Yeah, I was telling Kristin that my sister thought you danced like a Muppet on crystal meth.”
Before I could tell Darren that she had said no such thing, he flashed a smile. “Sweet! Exactly what I was going for.”
On the way home that afternoon, as Vee and Faith debated whether to wear jeans or miniskirts to the party, or just wear a dress over their bikinis, I wondered how they would react if I told them. After all, there was almost nothing we didn’t know about one another. I knew that Vee couldn’t stand it when people laughed at her and wasn’t above white lies to protect her reputation. I knew that Faith was so afraid of hurting other people’s feelings that she never made decisions except by committee. And the two of them? They knew that I was horrible at keeping secrets, and that I had the fashion sense of a blind nun.
That summer’s Spartan Car Wash had, in fact, been the first time I’d ever worn a bikini. My mom would have sooner slit her wrists than parade her prepubescent daughter around wearing a two-piece, and after she died it wasn’t like my dad and I spent quality time bonding over what kind of swimwear I’d have each summer. The suit that I brought to the car wash at Hanna’s Quick Stop had been a freshman-year summer-vacation gift from Aunt Carla, who had used some Kohl’s Cash to buy it when she realized I’d outgrown my previous suit. It was a black two-piece, but not the sexy kind. The tankini top covered my entire midriff, and the bottom was cut like boy shorts.
Vee wrinkled her nose when I pulled out my suit in the back office that was our impromptu changing room. “Seriously? Boy-cut is so, like, five years ago. Why don’t you try one of mine?” She had brought four bikinis. I’d chosen the purple one because it had a little more substance than the others. At least the top part was padded. The one that Vee wore looked about as thick as a sheet of two-ply toilet paper, and wouldn’t have worked for me because I had a little more going up top than she did.
Until I stood at the side of Route 30 during rush hour, I hadn’t actually thought about how wearing a bikini is basically like being in public in your bra and panties. But we got a lot of donations. We also inspired an op-ed piece in the Observer-Dispatch decrying “the objectification of impressionable young women under the pretense of school spirit.”
“Hey,” Sam said when he read the piece. “There were some hot cougars out there objectifying me. Why didn’t they write about the poor, impressionable young men?”
“Whatever,” said Vee. “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” She let me keep the purple bikini.
Stressed out as I was about Friday’s party, it took me a while to dig through the summer clothes stored under my bed. Eventually I found both Vee’s suit and the one from Aunt Carla. I shut my door and put on the bikini. I stood in front of my full-length mirror and stared at my groin. With the right lighting, you could see two little shadows that didn’t quite belong there—my hernias. I coughed just like Dr. Johnson had told me to, and something just above my bikini line jumped under my skin, like that moment in horror movies right before the alien pops out of the person’s stomach.
I tore off the bikini, disgusted with myself. It was just a matter of time before I disgusted Sam, too. Instead of trying on Aunt Carla’s suit, I pulled on a pair of sweats and a thermal top. Then I curled up in my bed, and thought up some excuses for not going to Andy Sullivan’s party.
Somewhere in between “I’ve got the stomach flu” and “My dad grounded me because I flunked a math test,” my phone went off. I panicked, thinking that Sam was the last person I wanted to talk to, but it was an unfamiliar number.
“Hello?” I said.
“Hi, is this Kristin?” a woman’s voice asked. It was a good voice.
“Yes. May I ask who’s calling?” I answered automatically. My mom had drilled that one into me when I was five.
“This is Maggie Blankman. From the AIS-DSD Support Group?”
Holy crap, I’d forgotten. “Oh, wow. Thanks for calling.”
“Of course; my pleasure.”
There was a moment of silence as I panicked. Was I supposed to have prepared questions?
“Nice to meet you,” Maggie said after what was probably only a few seconds, though it felt like hours. “You said in your email that you just found out last week?”
“Yeah. My ob-gyn figured it out when I went in for my first appointment. How about you?”
“My family found out about my AIS when I was six. Of course I was really young, so they didn’t tell me all the details of AIS right away. My mom’s a doctor, so she spent a lot of time when I was little slipping in stuff about different types of anatomy, and how adoption wasn’t unusual. She finally told me the truth when I was sixteen. I was lucky I was able to find out about it gradually. It�
�s rough having to find out everything at once like you did.”
“Yeah.” I felt a pang of jealousy. She’d known for so long. There was another silence. Over the line, I could hear the strains of a Sarah McLachlan song.
“How’s it going?” Maggie asked. “Do you have any questions?”
Did I have any questions? My mind roiled with them, but it was like shooting a moving target—I couldn’t pin one down.
“So . . . what am I?” I asked finally.
She knew what I meant right away. “You’re a girl. You can do everything every other girl can do except get your period and give birth.”
I wasn’t sure about that. Everything? I had to screw up every ounce of my courage to ask the next question. “What about sex? I tried a couple of weeks ago with my boyfriend, and it was a disaster.”
Maggie made a sympathetic sound. “I’m really sorry about that. When you know about it beforehand, you can do things to get yourself ready.”
I grimaced a little at her euphemism. “I know. My doctor, she . . .” I struggled to say it out loud. Over the phone. To someone I’d never met, even if she was in medical school. “I’ve read all about . . . dilation. But it seems so creepy.”
“I can totally understand, but you get used to it. Supposedly, it’s not that different from using a tampon. ”
I stifled a giggle. My mother would roll over in her grave.
“Remember,” Maggie said, “you might not even need to do it for long. Some of us don’t have to do it at all.”
My cheeks flushed, and I felt a wave of warmth throughout my body, but not because of the subject matter. Because she had used the word us.
It was one of those times when you don’t realize how lonely you are until, suddenly, there’s someone by your side. My eyes prickled, and I started sobbing, my breath coming out in shuddering gasps.
Maggie misunderstood my tears. “Kristin. I know it seems strange, but a lot of perfectly normal XX women have to dilate, too, for a ton of reasons. . . .”
“No, no,” I said, laughing. “I’m not sad-crying. I’m happy-crying. It feels so amazing not to be alone.”
“I know what you mean.” She took in a deep breath. “This really is a sisterhood, you know? You should always feel free to call me, but there’s a senior at the U, Gretchen Lawrence. She only lives an hour away from you. I’ll email you her information.”
After we hung up, I blew my nose and rifled through the stack of papers that my dad had brought up to my room. I drummed the little white cardboard box with the dilators, and read Dr. Cheng’s handout one more time.
I booted up my computer and typed in the URL for the YouTube link from the pamphlet. A still shot popped up of a middle-aged woman with short blond hair sitting on a couch in what looked to be her living room. You could see her dining table in the background, and a family photo on the end table.
It was all very civilized.
The video was fascinating, in a disturbed kind of way. They had found the woman with the most reassuring voice on the planet to demonstrate their product. She had classy hands, too, that made the dilator look less like a sex toy and more like, well, actual medical equipment.
I watched the video twice, then sat back in my chair. I opened the white cardboard box and took out the individually wrapped dilators, which were just clear plastic rods with rounded tips.
I took the smallest dilator. It went in about two inches before it hurt. The second time, I lay in bed as the pamphlet described and it went in a little farther.
It felt gross. It felt dirty, and I could picture—no, practically feel—my mom rolling over in her grave, but I repeated Maggie’s phrase like a mantra: It’s not that different from using a tampon.
After half an hour, I stopped. But instead of putting my sweats back on, I had the impulse to put on my black two-piece, which Aunt Carla had made a big deal about being a “shaping” suit. I’d never been so grateful for someone’s obsession with cellulite. The bottom was made from a heavy spandex that hid my hernia bulges completely.
And I remembered what I told Maggie: No one had had a clue. Not my mom, my dad, or Dr. Arslinsdale. Not even me.
I went to bed with that hope in my mind.
CHAPTER 10
The third time I dilated, I got to three inches, which sounded like a bad locker room joke waiting to happen, but seemed like progress. The sample kit from Dr. Cheng had three sizes, and gave information on a more complete set, which I almost ordered online. But then I imagined my dad coming across the line item for MiddlesexMD.com, and I used what I had. I ached a bit afterward, but it was a good ache, like the burn of a deep stretch. The pain focused me, and kept me from thinking too much, because when I really thought about what I was doing—what I was putting and where—another part of me withered from shame.
Each time I dilated, it got a bit easier. But the morning of the party, I knew it wasn’t enough.
When Vee drove up in her mom’s minivan just after seven, she looked surprisingly chipper for 1) being the designated driver and 2) driving her mom’s minivan instead of her Jetta. But she’d been much less bitchy since her doctor had switched her to a soft cast and told her she didn’t need to use crutches anymore.
“All right, girls—are you ready to paaar-TAY?” she crowed as I got into the backseat.
“You do know that the whole point of being designated driver is that you don’t do any drinking, right?” Faith asked. As SADD secretary, she had been the one who’d organized our car pool. After extensive soul-searching, she had decided junior year that the Bible did not specifically support laws against underage drinking, and that God would forgive her for doing something technically illegal as long as she wasn’t hurting anyone else.
“Of course, Miss Prissy Pants,” Vee said, giving me her patented love-Faith-so-much-but-OMG-can-she-be-a-buzzkill eye roll. “Can’t you see that I’m just high on LIIIIIFE?” She put down her window and whooped into the frigid night air, setting some neighborhood dogs barking.
“Sweet Jesus, girl,” Faith’s boyfriend, Matt, yelled. “Turn the damn heat on. And the stereo.”
“Sorry, Mattie,” Vee purred, flipping him the bird, “I don’t have any Hannah Montana for you to listen to tonight.” But she switched on the radio and found something loud and bassy.
When we picked Sam up, he pulled himself next to me and gave me a deep, hard kiss. Involuntarily, my knees pulled together. I felt a phantom throb between my legs and forced myself to breathe in and out. I willed my thighs to relax.
“Everything all right?” Sam asked when he came up for air, and to put his seat belt on.
“Of course,” I said. I had to get my act together. “It’s just freezing in here.”
“Here, take my coat. I’ve got the perfect thing to warm you right up. . . .”
My hands were ice-cold, but he slipped them underneath his waistband.
“Jesus, Wilmington. At least wait until we get to Sullivan’s house?” Bruce, sitting shotgun, peered back through the rearview mirror at us. “You’ve got dibs on the master suite. We get it.”
I blushed, and used it as an excuse to pull my hands out of Sam’s pants. He turned and leaned forward to grab Bruce in a headlock. “What, lordy-boy? You giving up your territory? We can wrestle for it.”
When we got to Andy Sullivan’s place, everyone else congregated at the keg in a parade of red Solo cups, but I spotted some people doing tequila shots at a back table.
“Hey, Krissy, you want?” asked Craig Martinez, holding out his arm.
I didn’t want. I needed. I took a lick of salt with lime in hand and tossed down two shots.
“Thanks,” I said, my eyes watering. Craig grinned, and in the light it looked like a leer.
I went back over to the keg. About halfway through my second cup, I was finally ready to face Sam. He was down in the rec room playing pool with a bunch of his teammates, and I brought him a couple of vodka shots, thinking that if he were drunk off his ass he’d be le
ss likely to realize that something was wrong with me. I watched him for a while with Faith, until Vee came down and told us people were starting to go into the hot tub.
She made a face when I brought out Aunt Carla’s suit. “Oh. My. God. Why did you bring that thing?”
“I couldn’t find the bikini you gave me,” I lied.
“Whatev. Good thing Sam’s probably so horny he’d screw a horse.”
My laugh sounded tinny even to myself.
Vee and Faith shrieked as they stepped out onto the freezing deck. When they dropped their towels and slid into the hot tub I tried not to stare, tried not to be that creep in the locker room who checked out the other girls.
I chugged the rest of my beer and let out a breath. It hung like a cloud in the frigid air as I let my towel slip to the floor and plunged into the hot tub.
Once I was in the tub I wondered what I had been worried about. It was so steamy that no one could see anything, and anyway I was safe under the water. Safe and warm and starting to get very drunk. Everything that everyone said was hilarious, the funniest thing I’d ever heard. My brain felt Saran-wrapped. I hardly noticed it when Sam came out onto the deck, didn’t register anything until there was a splash next to me and hands reached around my waist.
“Have I ever told you how sexy you are when you laugh?” Sam nuzzled into my neck.
“You’re just saying that because you’re so horny you’d screw a horse.” I giggled.
“Doesn’t mean you’re not sexy, though.”
He thought I was sexy even in Aunt Carla’s spandex nightmare. My drunken heart melted. “You’re the best boyfriend ever,” I slurred, dangling my arms around his shoulders. I kissed him, and our wet bodies rubbed against each other and everything was heat and muscle and lust.
“Dudes!” someone shouted. We ignored him, our tongues tasting of lime and beer. The voice got louder and I felt someone’s hands on my shoulder, shaking us apart.
“Yo, Wilmington. Lattimer,” Andy Sullivan yelled into our ears. “What did I say in my email? No cum in the tub. This is a five-bedroom house.”
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