Bad enough I have to write a diary for school. So why did I write another one? To tell the truth …

Stupid Diary, by Karin Bishop

Part 4

March

One of the dullest months, broken by storms and that power outage, and midterms.

*

I’m blessed to have a couple of really good friends, and other friends as well, that have helped me grow up a little. It’s something that I think too many of us take for granted, so I just wanted to say that my friends are so important to me.

*

And my mother, of course. After last month’s scare with the sickness she had from the train crash, I can’t even conceive of not having her around. After all, who else would put up with me?

*

I’m usually pretty even-tempered but maybe it was the storms this month but I’ve just been cranky. Crotchety. And my friends both called me on it and let me rage until I was back to normal. Weird; must be static in the air or other things like that.

*

I think I did pretty well on my midterms; we won’t know until the first week of April.

*

I’m being treated for a medical condition that I’m not going to write about here, but I brought it up to say that I’ve been spending a lot of the time with doctors and at the hospital, and I’m beginning to think about maybe having a medical career. I don’t see myself as a bedside doctor or brilliant surgeon, but maybe in research or psychology. It’s fascinating to think that people can cure other people’s minds, because, after all, what’s really in anybody’s mind? Who can tell?

*

For that matter, what is normal?

March Truth Time

Oh God Oh God Oh God however did I survive this month?

*

Hormones. Oh, my God, hormones! It seems my body is a little …odd. I seem to be pretty much chemically female. Genetically male, of course, but genetics doesn’t show what’s going on in my cerebral machinery, and apparently it decided that it wasn’t enough that I be smaller than any ‘typical’ male–we don’t use the ‘normal’ word here–but my cerebral machinery also thought it would be fun to squirt female hormones through me at puberty.

I’ve mentioned how I’m soft, no matter how much exercise or diet regimens I try. Well, it’s girl softness, which is actually pretty darned fine with me! And I mentioned how odd (and wonderful) it was to put on a bra for the first time? That’s because it was an A cup and I filled it. Just me, with my fleshiness. That night I revealed myself to Celia and her mom, and later to Molly …nobody commented on my bust or lack thereof. And nobody asked if I ‘stuffed’, either. So like Goldilocks, maybe I was just right …

The doctors, of course, rolled up their sleeves and started tweaking things. My system is pretty responsive, as well, we discovered, so they could get results pretty quick and on to the next experiment.

Only …it was me they were experimenting with. Mom and I agreed to it, of course, and it had to be done, but still …it messes you up.

It sure did me.

*

I was going along, perfectly fine, enjoying life. The doctors said I might feel different things or not, but I didn’t expect to become a raging bitch. There’s no other words for it–oh, yes, there is. It’s funny; when I was trying to be a tough guy, hanging out with Mackie, we’d use the word ‘cunt’ all the time. I’ve changed so much that now that I actually want my penis removed and a vagina in its place, I can’t bring myself to say it. Even typing it just now seems rude, and if I had to, I’d say that somebody said ‘the C word’.

So I blew up at Celia for something so silly that I’m embarrassed about it …it was how plum was some nail polish. She’s strong–one of the reasons I love her–and she gave it right back to me. Her mother heard us, and even hearing her try to calm us by saying ‘girls, girls’–which I always loved to hear–didn’t work. Her mother just looked at me and said, “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were PMS-ing.” Celia and I looked at each other and laughed, and then I completely burst into tears. “Yep,” her mom said, chuckling. “PMS.”

It was the hormone mixture, of course.

School was harder than it had ever been, for two reasons. I was having trouble concentrating for the first time since last fall, when I improved as a student. And I was getting angry and upset and it was all I could do for Larry to not scream at somebody. I was walking down the halls out of school with Molly and I snapped at her over some little thing and she said, “Ah …I see you’re acuent today.”

I’d never heard the word; she pronounced it ‘ah-cue-ent’ and asked her what it meant. She grinned and said she’d learned it from Tommy, her gay brother, and it was a polite and discreet way to refer to somebody when they were being a (C word). Again, I laughed and then choked on tears. Molly said, “You’ve got it bad, girl. Get yourself together; kids can still see! Are they fiddling with your ‘mones?”

And she was right, of course. Molly’s always right. The doctors were fiddling–if you can call turning a happy girl into a raging she-male monster ‘fiddling’! I stormed into my next session with my exasperated and long-suffering Mom and we told them that whatever they were doing, they got their results so knock it off! They gave us these Buddha smiles and nodded, made notes, and gave me two shots and new pills. They calmed me down within a day and life went on.

*

Later I found out that they wanted to see my reaction to testosterone. Here I was, thinking they were merely adjusting the mix of my female hormones, and they rammed a bunch of boy ‘mones in me! They said that the way it upset me was just about what they thought would happen, but they had to try it anyway. It turned out a strong dose of male hormones was like poison to me! I’d passed another hurdle and thank God I hadn’t done any serious damage to my relationships. Once we knew what had happened, my girlfriends told me that now I would be more tolerant when they got weird during their periods.

*

Periods make me sad, because I’ll never be in that club, so to speak. It’s the one thing that medical science can’t do for me. Mom pointed out that young girls and older women don’t have periods and they’re not any less female, and I had to accept that. But we realized that the new hormone mix was making me ultra-feminine, with serious nesting urges. I arranged and rearranged my closet a dozen times, I baked up a storm, and it was only when Mom alerted the doctors that it might be next to impossible for the new, ultra-girly Larissa to stay undercover as Larry that they eased off on the dosage. As I mentioned, apparently I’m a medical marvel because it only takes a couple of days for my body to react. It’s partly the reason why I sort of ‘fell out of boyhood’ so fast last fall; the docs think it was when my body started really flooding the estrogen into me. And I reacted fast. Sort of like a teeter-board, one doctor said. A little too much this way, and whoops!

*

When the storms blew in, and the power blew out, Mom and I spent a lot of time with candles. It was kind of a fun thing, and I made an off-hand remark about ‘pioneer women’ and since we didn’t have TV or computers to spend time with so we had a couple nights of story-telling. Our kitchen is gas so we could cook, and make hot cocoa the real way, and we’d curl up on the couch and Mom talked.

She talked about our family, telling me my family history almost two hundred years back, with one branch Yankee sea captains and one branch truly pioneers, trekking across the west in Conestoga wagons. It humbled me as she talked. We talked mostly about the women, who lost their family names and forged new families. We talked about their life, growing their own food and preparing all day, cooking out of a wagon, or running households while their captains were at sea.

Strong, independent women, taking on burdens that would probably break a lot of men. It humbled me as she talked and I had such respect for her and all the women that preceded her that I resolved to ‘amount to something’. I was a sort of an ‘honorary’ female, something unthinkable in their time, but I wanted to contribute as much as they could. I couldn’t bear children but I could raise some, and I could do other things in the world. This all made me think more of getting into the medical field. I wanted those women to look down from decades and centuries past and say they were proud of Larissa.

*

When we talked about bearing children, Mom said it was time I started learning more physical things about females, so we had long talks about women’s bodies and emotions. I learned about menstruation and reproduction …well, we’d covered those in class, but with Mom telling me I fully grasped the significance to women’s lives. Mom told me about her own first period, the tough time she’d had as a teenager until her periods became regular, and some stories about other girls she knew. She told me about being pregnant with me, and about the birth, and breastfeeding me. I realized that if the doctors were right, I would be able to breastfeed at some point! Wow!

*

We were both aware that she’d kind of skipped over the how she got pregnant with me. That brought up three new areas to talk about. My father, men (and boys) in general, and sex. Just a few light topics by candlelight between us girls …

Mom had been telling me the genealogy of her side of the family, because she knew it. My father’s we dispensed with rather quickly, since most of it was unknown past my grandfather on my father’s side. My grandfather appeared in Los Angeles at some point with a general store. He did pretty well, had a fine time of it and then lost everything in the Stock Market Crash of 1929. He and my grandmother–a Los Angeles girl about which nothing was known about before her marriage–struggled like everyone did in the Depression, and he went to fight in World War II. My father was conceived while my grandfather was on furlough, before going back and dying in the Philippines. My father was raised by a single mother–another strong woman–and became a salesman like his father had been, only instead of having a store he traveled. He did a number of different sales jobs.

He was actually assistant manager of a Ford dealership when my mother met him. She was gorgeous–I’ve seen pictures–and he was handsome and a born salesman and she didn’t say it but I kind of got the feeling that I wasn’t planned. At least by him, anyway, for as soon as I came along there were troubles in the hasty marriage. Mom admitted that she kind of wanted to get away from my grandmother’s farm and become a nurse in The Big City and here was this dazzling soon-to-be-manager of a car dealership …and then, all too soon, it became obvious that he’d never become manager and never become much of a husband.

He was already fooling around before she found out, and I remembered yelling from that time and I think I mentioned that. And maybe because of the marriage, maybe because of me, maybe because he’d never be manager, but my father started drinking, which made everything worse. Finally, Mom said, she asked herself what was best for me–the toxic environment of two people who didn’t love each other but stayed together for society’s conventions, or a single, non-yelling, loving mother.

Easy choice!

We had no contact with him at all; she wasn’t entirely sure where he was. He paid child support–she didn’t discuss alimony–and it was an automatic bank transfer. If it stopped coming, we’d still be okay financially, but she would have the hassle of tracking him down. My strong paternal grandmother died of cancer when I was three, and I think she was a bit ashamed of her son but I was told she doted on me.

So that was my family.

*

Now, men (and boys) in general …

Mom checked that I knew The Birds & The Bees stuff correctly, and filled in some questions I’d had about, well, you could say ‘hydraulics’. I knew boys had erections–even though I’d never had one–but nobody had said anything about girls getting wet. It was like the subject of female sexuality was considered a little too personal–or too sexy?–to go into. Suddenly, the concept of rape, with an un-lubricated vagina, became much more terrible to contemplate. And back in September I’d talked about basically gang-raping Celia? I felt sick to my stomach; I was so ashamed and disgusted with who I’d been.

*

Since I’m telling the truth here, I’ve got to say that I’d never thought about sex. Oh, I talked really big around Mackie and Steve. Even that horrible thing I’d said to Celia was threatening her with something I didn’t have the ability to do and didn’t have the first idea how to do. Well, yeah, I’d seen porn–Steve’s favorite pastime–and had vague, general ideas what it was all about; but the physical sensation, what my body would do to fuck someone like I’d threatened …no clue. The doctors and the therapist think it’s because of my hormonal soup, I mean, from childhood until last year, when the soup became …more strongly female flavored, should I say?

As I slid nearer to girlhood last fall, there were the first little inklings in the back of my mind that there was something about boys and girls. Maybe it was my new girlfriends all talking about boys. Middle school and junior high are transitional periods. You get scrawny boys with Mickey Mouse voices and no pubic hair next to muscled guys that are shaving, and you get thin-as-a-twig, flat-as-a-board girls that play with Barbies next to curvy babes in makeup, fishnet stockings and leather miniskirts …and they’re all the exact same age!

So I figured some girls weren’t quite as into boys as they seemed and others were really into boys and didn’t talk about it, so I fit right in. The more I became ‘one of the girls’, the easier it was to just relax and go with the flow. Occasionally I wondered if I’d be one of those people that had zero interest in sex their whole lives, or be interested in boys, or interested in girls. Sexually interested, I mean. And the knotty question of ‘would I be gay or a lesbian’ if I like boys or girls was something I didn’t really go into with my therapist Ms. Belasco.

But it wasn’t until this month and the Hormone Madness that things tipped decisively. It wasn’t the raging part; it was afterwards, when they made me Super-Femme. Or, it might have been a combination of the two because of events that kind of bumped into each other.

*

Like the way I bumped into Mark Brashear. I was in the raging ‘mones part of the month so I kind of bulled my way down the halls. Larry always moved in a kind of stealth mode, slipping around groups and never coming into contact. Now that I look back on it, that was weird. Anyway, these two guys came around the corner and I bumped into one of them, looked up and saw it was Mark. He’s a sports star for the school; I don’t have him in any of my classes but he’s supposed to be pretty smart, too. So I kind of growled and kept walking, and not twenty feet later Molly came up to me and said, ‘be cool, girl’ in that quiet voice of hers and I settled down and didn’t think anything of it the rest of the day.

*

About a week later I was in the full throes of the super-femme hormone rush, and was folding my camisoles for the umpteenth time and the thought, ‘gee, I wonder if Mark Brashear would like me in this one or in this one?’ floated out of nowhere. I shrugged it off–I was in a kind of la-di-dah mode with that hormone mixture–and was folding and refolding my bras and had this flash of Mark’s fingers on my pretty lace bra and my white skin underneath …

*

About that white skin: My soft body is starting to make sense, getting curves as some of the softness leaves my waist and goes to my hips. Mom says I’m getting curvier and that’s very cool, especially with no Boys’ PE to worry about. And over the months the softness at my chest changed; first there was a hardness under my nipples like a small raisin, which grew to a marble, and then my nipples starting really reacting to cold and touch. And the softness started swelling in two slight mounds as if my newly-sensitive nipples were pulling them outwards.

Back when I first discovered it, I ran to Mom and proudly showed her the tiniest improvement to prove that I was now, undeniably, growing breasts of my own! And my bras fit better and in one of them you could almost see actual breasts in the cups, not just mounds!

*

So, back to folding my bras …I got distracted with my nesting and laundry and stuff and after getting in bed that night, I stared at the ceiling and remembered my thought about Mark and my bra. My fingers slowly moved to my chest–hey, women are supposed to self-exam their breasts, right?–and my fingertips spun lazy circles around my nipples. They hardened like they do now, poking my nightie slightly, and I thought of looking pretty for Mark. What would I wear on our first date? I thought of a white lace dress in Macy’s that I loved but hadn’t bought, but what if we were just doing fun stuff? Mentally I selected that skirt and that top and maybe I could borrow those shoes from Celia and I thought about how I’d wear my hair, and all these thoughts were tumbling as my fingers circled.

And we’d have fun on the date, because he was smart and funny and confident and really, really male and I’d feel so delicate and protected and feminine with his arm around me and we’d smile at each other and he’d lean down and I’d close my eyes and feel his rough lips on my lips, shiny with lipgloss, and his hand would reach around my side and cup my breast and I’d put my hand over his and squeeze it gently, reassuring him that I wanted more, as his tongue danced in my mouth–

*

During the power outage, while Mom and I talked about not knowing if I’d like boys or girls or sex at all, I told her about my thoughts about Mark, and some dreams that I’d had. She smiled and hugged me and simply said, “So now you know.”

So now I know.

April

Got that big fat Break in the middle of the month, and early spring after those terrible March storms. But everything is taking a second place to my grades, because I got an A or an A- on every midterm except one B+. The weird thing is that all those years where C and D grades didn’t bother me, now I’m really mad at myself for the B, even if it is a plus, and I’m wondering about ways to make those minuses disappear into full A’s. And, Mrs. McKenzie, I’m not just saying that to butter you up. For the first time I have the possibility of being an A student and it feels great!

*

For Spring Break, while college kids headed to Florida, Mom and I went to Manhattan! I’d never been there before, and although I don’t know Paris or Rome, it’s hard to believe there is a greater city than New York City. The energy, the variety of people and lifestyles and cultures, and the culture …wow! We saw some Broadway shows, but the Guggenheim and the Met, and MOMA …I could do nothing but tour those museums for months. Lots of exotic food and accents and some cliché stuff, too, like cab drivers yelling at each other and, come to think of it, everybody yelling at each other! It’s just their way of life and I realized it didn’t really mean anything to them; to them it was just part of daily living. I told Mom that in NYC, yelling is the grease for the wheels of society. She laughed so hard tears came to her eyes! She said that I’m getting more poetic as I’m getting better grades and if I become an A student she won’t be able to stand my intelligent remarks.

But I still want those A’s!

*

I’m exploring medical colleges for my (far) future, in terms of what high school classes they want to see on the transcripts. Unless something radically changes with me, I still want to pursue medicine in some form. I want to make a difference.

April Truth Time

We had the most incredible time in New York, and we felt like outlaws, because we flew there so of course I had to be Larry for Homeland Security and on the plane. But it was a small price to pay, because from the time we landed until I was back in the line at the home-bound security check, I was Larissa for the whole week! We’d planned carefully so with my hair back in the boy’s ponytail and slouching, I looked physically–at least from a distance–like a bored boy. I wore panties and a cami undershirt, but a baggy Pendleton and cargo pants. And boy’s flip-flops. Hopefully nobody would go through my suitcase because they’d find nothing but girl’s clothes!

So our plan was in two stages, getting semi-girlish for the shuttle to our hotel and then fully changing in the hotel room. But, we were able to do the whole thing at the airport, because Mom found a unisex bathroom with handicap access, big and square and just for the two of us. Mom opened my suitcase as I was already stripping out of my Larry drag–I got that term from Molly Chen. With a quick hair and makeup touch-up from Mom, we left the bathroom as mother and daughter, with me wearing flats, a denim miniskirt and a lime tank top under a white hoodie. Larissa was ready for New York!

*

Not really! Because the city was just so overwhelming! But we got a great hotel in Midtown (I tried to learn all the proper terms) and I freshened up a little bit while Mom looked at the phone book and made some calls. The first thing she did was take me to a salon for a mani-pedi–sheer bliss, but the most amazing thing was she had them put extensions on my nails before applying polish. She said I could spend the entire week grappling with long nails for the first time, and it would give her some amusement. My hands looked lovely and I couldn’t get over how pretty my feet were–it was a shame to hide my toes in flats so back at the hotel I switched to strappy sandals.

We just walked around Midtown, which has more than enough to sight-see for a week all by itself, and had a lovely Italian dinner and then we went to my first Broadway show, an incredible teen musical called Spring Awakening and I’m not even going to start talking about how fantastic it was!

*

The show brought up topics of teen sex, anxiety, rape, suicide …just a typical teen world–but in the 1890s! Mom and I went to a famous deli for ice cream sundaes afterward and talked about the show. I was embarrassed at first until I realized that all the people around us were talking so casually about some pretty racy subjects (including some illegal ones!) that I opened up to Mom.

I told her how hard it was continuing the Larry thing, and the thought of two more months–half of April, all of May and half of June–was killing me. “That’s like forty more times I’ve got to be Larry!” I moaned to her. Mom said she had a maybe surprise, since my grades were so outstanding. I’d never known this because I was never in the good students’ world before, but it might be possible that I could take an earlier dismissal from school. It meant getting the teachers to sign off on me taking the finals earlier. I qualified for it now, and with my doctors creating the right kind of letter, I could get out earlier for ‘medical reasons’ and maybe be out by the end of May. The only downside would be that my friends would still be stuck in school, but they’d understand …all of my girlfriends knew how hard it was to keep up the pretense of Larry.

*

The weather was cool-ish when we got there with some rain during the first night but after that it got nicer and nicer, part of that early spring, until it was almost hot by the day we left. Mom had an old friend from nursing college that she’d kept in touch with. I vaguely remembered her from stories Mom occasionally told. Her name was Joan and like a lot of women, she was divorced and living with a new boyfriend. They had a really cool apartment on the edge of ‘the Garment District’–do I sound like a New Yorker? We visited her the first full day we were there when she got off shift, and she was a delightful lady but Mom kidded her (maybe) that she was working ER too much because she was kind of skittish. She said there’d been some rapes near her hospital and everybody was skittish. It made me think again about how casually I’d threatened Celia with rape oh, so long ago. I was mortified to remember.

Joan either didn’t know about Larry or had been briefed or just took things in stride because she completely accepted me as Mom’s daughter Larissa. We laughed and Mom even let me have a glass of wine when it looked like we were settling in for a long night. Finally her boyfriend came home, an Italian guy named Marco–of course–who worked in the fashion industry, and we said goodbye, but as a lovely parting gift, Marco gave us the addresses of a couple of places with insanely cheap designer clothes, and told us the procedure to get his discount!

*

The next day we did a little cruise around the Statue of Liberty and then headed back to the Garment District and omigod would my girlfriends go crazy there! I knew that money was tight for us, especially with this vacation, but Mom said there were some things that we’d just have to take advantage of.

I’d remarked on how smartly dressed the businesswomen were in Midtown; Mom surprised me by finding and then buying for me a bankers’ striped black suit, with a skirt, slacks, and jacket, and a white satin blouse that just matched the whole thing. Mom said it would be for things like a court appearance to change my name, and I had to go along with that!

At some point I’d mentioned West Side Story and how pretty Maria was; Mom chuckled and said we weren’t Hispanic–neither was Natalie Wood, for that matter–but she found me a white lacy peasant’s blouse and a colorful mid-calf length skirt and said it was ‘walk in the park-wear’ for me. And we picked up some denim skirts and tops, but they were so ridiculously cheap–$5 for a top and $9 for skirts!–that it was justified.

Mom said I’d need some shoes; Marco had told her where to go for those, too. So I got my first pair of black high-heel pumps and some others and I asked her how we were going to pack all this but she had it figured out. The next stop was one of those hole-in-the-wall instant tailor places, and she had my business suit fitted–I especially loved the slacks and high-heels–and we’d get it the next day. Then we stopped at a UPS store and bought a flat box and labels and I knew what was up: With the airlines charging for bags–and extra bags were insanely pricey–we were going to box up all of our NYC souvenirs, clothes, and shoes, and ship them to ourselves!

*

I was sorry to leave New York; it was an incredible experience but also an incredible growth experience for both of us. For the first time, ever, we were truly mother and daughter every second of the day. I woke up in the morning in a nightie, showered, did my hair and makeup and chose a cute skirt and top and shoes, grabbed my purse and headed out. And that’s exactly what Mom did, too; we were just two females getting ready.

We spent the whole day together as mother and daughter. I learned so much about life and about being female from her and from watching other girls and women. I shouldn’t admit it, but I even loved the sexist catcalls from construction workers, like ‘Hey, pretty lady’ and ‘Hey, babe’ and even ‘Hola, chica!–all to me! It was incredibly exciting to me because it validated that I was a pretty girl. Nobody saw a boy–nobody!–not the waiters that called me ‘mademoiselle’ or the clerks who said, ‘yes, miss?’ and by midweek, any residual fear I had that I could be ‘read’ as a boy vanished. By the end of the week it dawned on me that I’d spent several days–I mean, full, 24-hour days–without even thinking of myself as male.

*

Coming back home was an adventure, with me being even more of an outlaw. We’d boxed up everything and had it ready for the UPS courier and I sighed after my pretty things left in the truck, because it meant I should probably remove my nail polish and long nails. Mom had a proposition.

“Honey, your nails are so pretty, and I know you’d like to keep them right up until school on Monday,” she began, and I couldn’t help it; I burst into tears at the thought of being Larry.

She calmed me down and said, “Here’s my thought, and I didn’t bring it up on the way out because if anything backfired we’d lose the whole vacation. I don’t foresee any problems, but even if they were, so what if we’re delayed getting home?”

I said that would even be a plus for me because of less ‘Larry-time’.

She made a face and went on. “Here’s the idea, similar to what we did on the way here. Larry’s ponytail, and you can stick on a Yankees cap if you want. Wear your pretty lingerie and a tank you like, and the same shirt and pants you wore out here. Wear socks and your trainers.”

I’d brought them for walking as a boy but hadn’t used them.

She explained, “When you have to take your shoes off at Security, your socks will hide your pretty toenail polish. Wear those little gloves I found for you at that Armenian shop; they’ll look like a Goth or punk boy would wear and will hide your fingernails. We clear Security and should have an hour before boarding. We’ll go to the airline desk and get the manager or supervisor and I will show him your documentation from the hospital.”

My doctors had thoughtfully provided letters on the hospital letterhead explaining that I was medically diagnosed as transgendered and was under treatment. Mom had also obtained a letter from the airline itself–it only arrived two days before we left–that stated their acceptance, subject to TSA and Homeland Security regulations. That’s why I had to go through Security as Larry. But the airline didn’t care who or what I was as long as my seat was paid for and my butt was in it!

So that’s what we did. Larry slumped his way through Security without problem–I couldn’t believe how slick it had been!–and then we were referred to the supervisor, an older lady named Ruth Steegmuller. For some reason her last name scared me, but one call and ten minutes later, the supervisor agreed, but seemed skeptical.

We found another handicap-unisex-family changing room and I had my things ready on the top of my carry-on. Off came the socks and trainers and pants and Pendleton. On went pink flip-flops, denim skirt, and heather-gray hoodie with ‘Hollister’ in pink letters. I already had a light pink tank top that had ‘NYC’ in rhinestones. I fluffed out my hair and put on makeup and my earrings. We’d managed to find a big assortment of magnetic earrings in a lot of styles from a little vendor in Greenwich Village, so I wore small hoops.

You could have knocked over Ruth Steegmuller with a feather! She stared as we walked to her–I had my regular walk, as Larissa, of course–and then a huge smile broke out like sun after a storm.

She leaned forward so only we could hear and say, “If I didn’t know better I’d swear it wasn’t possible! You are a lovely young lady, and I wish all the best to you in your new life!”

Even the hour delay after we boarded couldn’t dim my great mood from her comment!

*

We had the rest of Saturday evening at home, because of the time difference. Celia wanted to come over–we’d texted about it while I was in NYC–and so we ordered pizza. Mom, of course, sniffed that “it wasn’t as good as Ray’s” and I shot back, “Yeah, but what is?” and we laughed together, we ‘women of the world’ while Celia just rolled her eyes.

Celia went nuts when she saw my fingernails and said she’d help me remove them tomorrow night–the only cloud on the evening–and she went super nuts when we told her about the discounts in the Garment District. She thought Mom was brilliant for shipping our purchases instead of paying the airline, and she seemed pleased (a bit) at the Statue of Liberty keychain I’d brought back for her. I didn’t tell her that her real gift was in the UPS box–two killer tops!

*

A groggy Sunday with unpacking and then Celia came over again around five with some tools. She’d had some experience removing nail extensions and we were going to try to shorten them but still leave them longer than Larry typically had his nails. Then she scrupulously removed every trace of polish; I did my toes later that night because they weren’t as critical. Mom had gently suggested I start ‘dialing Larissa down and dialing Larry up’ during the evening so it wasn’t such a shock tomorrow morning. I realized she was right, because at first I couldn’t even do Larry. I’d been Larissa around-the-clock for nine days. It had been heaven but it messed up my ability to fake boyhood. Nothing had been required at Security except the sullen walk and downcast eyes and a couple of bored ‘no’ answers to their questions. So I needed the extra time to get Larry back.

*

At school I work hard to maintain the image of a boy; I’m so nervous that I’ll give myself away. I keep checking with Celia and Molly that ‘Larry’s in place’ and much as I hate it, I seem to be doing it okay. So I’m picking right up with my classes, and my friends, and everything seems like it might be on an even keel until the end of the school year. I just have to keep it going until then, and then Larry goes away forever.

I really hope I can get that early release; no word, yet.

End of Part 4