Sam gave him the middle finger, but stood up anyway and handed me a towel. The other people in the hot tub hooted, and I had a vague sensation that I should be embarrassed, that I should be a little afraid. And then Sam lifted me up over his shoulder, and my teeth were chattering in the freezing air, and all I needed was to be warm again.
Up in the master bedroom Sam stripped off his suit as soon as we shut the door, and grabbed at mine. Before I knew it I was naked, chattering. I groped at the bed in moonlight. We hadn’t even bothered to figure out how to turn the lights on.
I slid under the cotton sheets. My hair was still wet, the sheets cool, and goose bumps formed on my arms. When our skin touched it burned so sweetly I closed my eyes. His body enveloped me, devouring me. I didn’t notice the cold again. Sam’s hands were everywhere.
And then they were there.
“Oh, God, baby.”
I held my breath, waiting for the pain, but it didn’t come. Not at first.
“Hold on a sec,” Sam said, and all of a sudden he was gone. I heard him rustling around the gym bag we’d left our clothes in. “I knew I had one somewhere . . . there it is.”
When he got back in bed my pulse quickened, and I wasn’t sure if it was from lust or fear.
“Be gentle, okay?” I whispered.
He bent down, and I forced myself to take in deep, even breaths.
At first, my crappy attempts at Lamaze did the trick. Or maybe it was the tequila. Sam groaned.
I kept my hips still, afraid to move, and for a minute, things worked. I almost laughed out loud with relief.
I was having sex. With a boy. And he was warm and he thought I was sexy when I laughed and he didn’t notice that my body was a lemon.
I started moving my hips, sliding my hands along the light hairs on his back. I could feel his glutes tighten as he moved and when I reached down to touch them they were so delicious that I pulled him against me.
Mistake.
I closed my eyes with the pain but managed to stay quiet. When my fingers clenched, Sam must’ve thought it was because I was so into things, because he went faster. I gritted my teeth, and turned my head. Just before I couldn’t take it anymore, Sam shuddered and collapsed on the bed next to me. I turned my head away to wipe my tears on the pillow and when I turned back Sam’s eyes were still closed.
“Oh, baby,” he said, still catching his breath. “Oh, baby.”
After a few minutes, Sam started snoring. I pulled my legs together and rolled off the bed. The pain made me stagger to my knees. I could feel it in my belly, a burning deep inside, in a place that shouldn’t be allowed to hurt. Somehow I managed to pull my clothes out of Sam’s duffel bag and drag them on. Why had I decided to wear skinny jeans? I crab-walked to the door so my jeans wouldn’t rub against my already raw skin.
Out in the darkened hallway, I shut the door and leaned back with my eyes closed. The party rumbled on, and I could hear at least one of the other bedrooms at the far end of the hallway getting some use. For several minutes, I stood there frozen, wondering if Sam and I had sounded like that.
No. I hadn’t been making any cries of pleasure.
I stumbled toward the stairs, wincing with each step. I told myself what Coach Auerbach always told us before each meet: no pain, no gain. I’d done what I’d set out to do. We’d had sex, and Sam hadn’t noticed anything. Wasn’t that what I wanted?
I only got two steps down the stairs before I started crying.
I turned back into the darkness. There was a bathroom at the top of the stairs, but it was locked. I jiggled the handle so they’d know someone was waiting. I heard someone puking, and wiped away my tears.
“Everything okay in there?” I said.
“Yeah, yeah. It’s all peaches and cream,” a familiar voice yelled back.
“Vee? It’s Krissy.” The door opened a crack and Vee waved me in. Faith knelt, praying to the porcelain gods. The room reeked, and I felt queasy myself.
“I told her not to mix a screwdriver with a mudslide.” Vee shrugged. “You okay?”
By the way Vee stared at me, I knew my mascara must be a mess.
I covered my mouth with my hand, suddenly overwhelmed by nausea and pain. “Oh my God, I need to sit down.”
She cleared the way for me to sit on the edge of the bathtub, but when I sat it drove the crotch of my jeans up, bringing new tears to my eyes. I gasped and fell onto my knees.
“God, Krissy. What happened?” Vee looked closer, took in my sex hair and my new hickey. Her lips flattened. “Did Wilmington do this to you? That son of a bitch . . .”
And that’s what did me in. After holding it together through all the doctor visits and the awkward conversations with my dad and the fucking advice from Aunt Carla, the thing that tipped me over the edge wasn’t the world’s most painful vaginal dilation. It was Vee being sympathetic.
I was so sick of being strong, of keeping it all bottled in.
So I let the floodgates open.
“It’s not Sam,” I said. “It’s me. I found out last week that I’m intersex.”
Vee’s furrowed brow told me she did not compute, so I swallowed and tried again.
“I’m a hermaphrodite.”
For a moment Vee’s face went completely blank. Then she laughed.
CHAPTER 11
Back in eighth grade, when the typical thing we did on Friday nights was have a sleepover at Faith’s house and stay up all night singing “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” until her parents made us shut up, Vee, Faith, and I spent months perfecting our ability to lie with a straight face. Let me tell you this: there is nothing in the universe that is half as funny as seeing your prim-as-a-parasol, Bible-studying friend Faith go up to the douchiest member of the boys’ basketball team and tell him with a straight face that the extra-small condoms he ordered accidentally got delivered to her house, and where would he like her to leave them?
More recently, we’d moved on to an epic game of bluff wars. One of Vee’s more successful dupes ended with me dressed in a slutty nurse’s outfit in one of the stalls in the boys’ locker room.
I got her back, though, when I managed to convince her—with the help of some “articles” that I’d gotten from the internet—that laxatives were an aphrodisiac. Vee didn’t speak to me for a week after that. But I’d proved that, in the right circumstances, I could pull off a lie. Which was maybe why she thought I was trying to pull a fast one when I told her I was a hermaphrodite. Because who in the world would possibly believe that? Certainly not Vee, who’d helped me buy my first bra, who’d seen me naked in the shower after swim class every Friday during sophomore year. She’d set Sam and me up, for God’s sake.
So she laughed, and I wanted so badly to smile and say ruefully, “Damn it, I thought I had you for sure.” But I couldn’t.
“It’s not a joke,” I said. I am not a joke, I thought.
Vee’s face scrunched up in confusion. Faith had stopped puking, and rested the side of her head on the rim of the toilet seat. Her eyes were glazed. “That you, Krissy?” she slurred. “I think I’m sick. I don’t have the enzyme you need to drink, you know. It’s my parents’ fault. Everything’s my parents’ fault.”
“Shhh,” Vee said, stroking Faith’s long, straight hair. “We’re both here. Everything’s gonna be okay.”
Was it? I hoped so badly that it would, so badly I allowed the truth to stumble out.
As if from far away, I heard myself say, “That visit to the ob-gyn? I found out why I’ve never gotten my period. When my mom was pregnant with me, something went wrong. I’m not . . . I’m not exactly a girl.”
Vee’s hand, still intertwined in Faith’s hair, froze. “Shit. You’re serious, aren’t you?”
I got up, wincing, but this time I held on to the pain like a touchstone. With fire burning in between my legs, I told Vee about my chromosomes taking a detour. About not having a womb. About having testicles.
At the word testicles, Vee let out a nervous
giggle.
Being laughed at once was bad. Twice was unbearable. My face flushed, and I could barely breathe from the humiliation. How could I have been so stupid? I lurched up and headed for the door, but before I could run out, Vee reached over and grabbed my arm.
She covered her mouth with her other hand, and I could feel her stiffness, like she was trying to control herself. “I’m sorry, Krissy . . . I . . .” She groped for something to say, and I felt the shame start to dig into my bones.
Vee put a hand up to her head. “Jesus, Krissy. I totally don’t know what to say.”
The silence in the room pressed in from all sides, suffocating me. I stared at Faith’s hand splayed against the Sullivans’ impeccable grouting. She always had the best nails.
Finally, Vee said one word. “Shit.”
I looked up at her, saw the crease in between her eyebrows. She was in the confusion stage. Had I already missed the revulsion, or was it still to come? “You can’t tell anyone,” I told her, feeling the panic rise in my throat.
She just shook her head. Then she asked, “Have you told Sam?”
I leaned against the door and closed my eyes, still feeling slightly fuzzy. “I will. I just need some time. There’s a lot I don’t know. I might have surgery.”
Vee grimaced. “What, like he’ll deal with it better if he thinks you had a sex change?”
“It’s not like that!” I insisted, stung. “I’m a girl. Dr. Cheng said that people with androgen insensitivity syndrome should be considered girls.”
I saw the reflection of my words on Vee’s face: should be. Meanwhile, Faith, always a happy drunk, started singing. She got up and tried to dance, and tripped on the bath mat. Vee caught her. “Okay, I think it’s time to make my first drop-off of the evening.” She looked over at me. “You wanna go home, too?”
I nodded. I did, more than anything in the world.
The minute Vee turned the engine on, the metal station we’d been listening to pulsed through the car at max level.
“Turn it off,” Faith moaned from her position curled up in the backseat.
So we drove home to country music dialed down to a murmur. Somehow, even though I couldn’t understand the words, I still got their misery.
I sat shotgun, of course, and looked over at Vee every once in a while, but she kept her eyes glued on the road as if she were taking a driver’s test.
At the Wus’ house, Vee spritzed some breath freshener into Faith’s mouth and we walked her into her house and up to her room. We made sure that she was lying on her side in case she puked while she was in bed. Her parents were already asleep.
From when we walked out of the Wus’ until we were almost near my house, Vee didn’t say another word. The silence, the not knowing what she thought, felt like a bowling ball in my stomach. Finally, I blurted out, “Aren’t you going to say something?”
Vee let out a frustrated puff of breath, and pulled over. “Oh, Krissy. I just . . . What the fuck?”
“Tell me about it. Promise you’re not going to treat me like a freak?”
That got her to grin. “Oh, Krissy,” she simpered, like she was quoting from a second-rate chick flick, “don’t you know I love you just the way you are?” She switched to her normal voice. “Seriously, haven’t we been through enough shit in our lives that you trust me not to drop you just because of some . . . hormone thing?”
I blinked at the unexpected tears in my eyes.
“Hey.” Vee reached over to grab my shoulder. “We’ll get through this, just like we’ve gotten through the rest of it.”
I took a deep breath and nodded, suddenly so, so weary. “I think I’ve got to just sleep everything off. Night.” I fumbled to open the door. “Drive safe?”
“Like I have a choice. I’m more sober than a nun in outer space.”
“Wish I could say the same.” I stumbled into my house and sat on the couch, planning to pull off my knee-high boots before heading up to my room.
Then I made the mistake of closing my eyes, and before I knew it, I drifted off to sleep.
CHAPTER 12
I dreamed that I was eight, and an evil witch had transformed me into a beast that was part girl, part bear. When I left in the morning to catch the school bus, a mob of angry neighbors and PTA members threw batteries and cans of tomato sauce that exploded on the ground next to me, spattering me with crimson. But I was lucky: it was all just a nightmare within a dream, and when I woke up sweaty and trapped in my sheets my mother was already in my room, brought in by my screams. I hugged her and burrowed my head into her neck. I could smell the Pond’s cold cream lingering on her skin as she stroked the back of my flannel pajamas and whispered into my ear.
“Nothing to be afraid of, my love. It was just a dream.”
“But the witch turned me into a bear!”
“Even if you were a bear, you would still be my baby. You’d still be my Kristin Louise Lattimer.”
Then my mom’s voice rose, and sharpened to a needle point that sent shards of pain through my head. “Kristin Louise Lattimer!”
My eyes opened and I felt a hand shaking my shoulder. Aunt Carla’s hand, to be exact.
Back to the real nightmare.
I opened my left eye. My right eye was mashed into one of the velour throw pillows on our living room couch. A pillow that happened to reek of chlorine and vomit.
I craned my neck to face Aunt Carla and got blindsided by a headache the size of Texas.
I turned and stifled another groan at the pain that caused. My dad sat on his La-Z-Boy, slapping the TV remote in his hands over and over again. “Krissy, I know it’s been a tough time,” he said in a voice strung tight between anger and compassion. He paused, and I could tell he was trying hard to give me the benefit of the doubt. “I’m glad that you went out with your friends, but this . . . you know there’s no place for this. Not in our house.” He waved at the puke stains. “You’re grounded for the next week.”
“I’m so sorry, Daddy,” I moaned. “It won’t happen again. I’ll go clean up.” I reached down to grab my purse and jacket.
“That’s not all. Cell phone,” my dad said flatly, holding his palm out. “You’ll get it back on Monday morning.”
Seriously? “Dad, I know that what I did was wrong. You don’t have to treat me like a baby.”
My dad shook his head. Looking at him, I was struck for the first time by how heavy his eyelids were, how sad, like a stray dachshund. “You know the deal, Krissy. Actions have consequences. Especially actions that involve alcohol.”
My guilt swallowed up my indignation. I handed over my cell phone. My dad handed me a Tylenol.
Dragging myself to my bathroom, I did the best I could to shower off the smell of hot tub and booze and sex. When I came out and tried to check my email, though, I couldn’t connect to the wireless.
“Dad, the internet’s down!”
“No, it isn’t. I turned it off. You’re grounded, remember?”
“Dad!”
“Consequences, Krissy. I’m taking your car keys, too.”
“What about running?”
My dad thought for a second. “You can take a half-hour run today and tomorrow.”
That would be just enough time to run to Vee’s or Faith’s house. But not to Sam’s. It’d have to do. Not until later on in the day, though, when I’d stopped feeling queasy if I moved too quickly, or if I thought about what I’d told Vee.
Just like my mom would’ve wanted me to, I sat in my room and thought about what I’d done, and the thinking was ten times worse than losing my cell phone, a hundred times worse than not being able to check Facebook. Because when the Tylenol kicked in and the throbbing in my head faded, a simmering fear replaced it. Not a boiling-over fear, not quite yet, because the back-and-forth in my hungover brain sounded something like this:
OMG, she’s going to spill everything.
No, she isn’t. Remember how she kept the secret about Faith’s crush on Danny Evans for a
year and a half?
She told Bruce that Jill Sorrento was cheating on his brother.
That’s different. It was, like, the ethical thing to do.
What if she lets it slip?
No one would believe her anyway.
When Aunt Carla called me down to prep for dinner, I was grateful for her chatter. I fixed the green beans, taking care to snap the ends perfectly so the fibrous seam peeled off like a piece of green dental floss. Then I mixed the ingredients for a loaf of whole wheat bread, wiping the layer of dust that had accumulated on our bread maker. After starting the mixing cycle, I washed my hands and cleaned up the counter as best I could.
“You good now, Aunt Carla?” I asked. “I’d love to go for my run before dinner.”
She sniffed. “You and your runs. Would it kill you to skip one?”
I had an answer to that. It was Coach Auerbach’s favorite (and only) Bible quote. “First Corinthians: ‘Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it.’”
The late-afternoon sun cast my shadow far ahead of me, and I chased it to Vee’s house, trying to ignore the fear that bubbled up to the surface again. The flood lamps were already on at the Richardsons’ house when I got there, and when I walked up to the front porch I felt as if I were in the spotlight. Before I rang the doorbell I made sure to wipe the sweat off my face and redo my ponytail. Vee’s father answered the door, his BlackBerry at his ear.
“Hello, Kristin,” he said, looking irritated.
“Hi, Mr. Richardson. Is Vee here?”
“Hold on for five seconds,” he said into the phone, putting it on mute. Mr. Richardson turned to me. “I’m sorry, but Vanessa went to the Carousel Mall with her mother in an effort to decimate my last paycheck. I’ll tell her you stopped by.”
“Could you tell her that my cell phone isn’t working? She can come to my house.”
“Of course,” he said, pressing the Unmute button. The door wasn’t even closed before he resumed his conversation.
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