Little Orphan Amy!

by Amy K

The original characters and plot of this story are the property of the author. No infringement of pre-existing copyright is intended. This story is copyright (c) 2010 Amy Komori. All rights reserved.

Chapter One:

Liz Phair’s Second Album

I still had no real identity, but once we got back from Florida, Mrs. Komori immediately started building a fake one for me. The idea was that as soon as Mrs. Komori could swing it, Amy Komori would become a real live girl, with a Social Security number, a school record and a past.  Mr. Komori had been a lawyer, and Mrs. Komori had connections, so she knew what records were needed and what wheels to grease.

The initial discussion—“This is what I’m going to do.”—ended with a debate on whether or not I should go to school in the fall. I was against it; after all, I'd already been and graduated. But Mrs. Komori insisted it'd enable me to create a life.  Maybe becoming socialized would help me forge some kind of compromise between my body and my mind.  After that, I left it to her.

"Hey, think of the grades you'll make," Emily told me later that night. "You already know all that shit."

“Think of all the stupid things I’ll have to put up with,” I said.  “Getting up early, obeying rules, passing tests, eating crappy cafeteria food, making friends, figuring out social cliques.”

“You did all that when you were in school?”

“I tried to.  Kinda, I guess.”

“You must’ve been a little kiss-ass.  A total brown-noser.”

“I wasn’t.  I got in trouble a lot, too.”

“I didn’t.  I got away with everything.  Therefore, you must also have been stupid.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it, Bullshitter.  You did not get away with everything.  You told me about the time you and that girl whatshername got caught leaving school grounds—“

“It’s like when you lost your rod, you totally lost your sense of humor, too.”

“I—“  Damn, it was always so easy for Emily to put me on.  I was helpless against her.

Mrs. Komori worked all day, then made dinner for us and spent her evenings doing paperwork at the dining room table.  I burned with curiosity as to where she came up with all this information.  As far as the system goes, a person is information.  Without that, you weren’t a person.  I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and asked her.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she told me.  “In order to do this, I’m having to call in a lot of favors from people and it’s difficult keeping everything straight.  So what I’m doing is, I’m using a lot of my own little biographical details.  It’s easier for me to remember my own life than make up one up for you.  Is… is that okay?”

“Oh yeah,” I said.  “Sure.”

What did it matter?  I was just shocked an upstanding citizen like Mrs. Komori would do something for my sake that was what you might call "somewhat dodgy."  As in "totally fucking illegal in all fifty states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands."  A big ass federal crime.  Not that we were going to use it for outright fraud.  Well, I suppose someone could argue that point in criminal court, but we weren’t out to scam little old ladies.  Just the United States as a whole.  For all intents and purposes, Martin was as dead as Kurt Cobain.  Deader, even, because at least Cobain left a musical legacy.  All Martin left was a broken lease.  So why did Amy Komori have to be his corpse?

I looked over Mrs. Komori’s shoulder at the piles of paper.  Reading her neat handwriting, I learned I’d just turned twelve years old and was whip-smart, as Liz Phair might have it.  Mrs. Komori apparently started first grade at 5 years old, the little nerd; this meant Amy did, too, and was also a nerd.  Based on transposed details from Mrs. Komori’s childhood, I discovered that at Amy's previous school, she took advanced placement classes, was active in both the Glee and Science clubs and the Gifted Program.  The only thing Amy’s biography gleaned from my own was her ability to play guitar somewhat as evidenced by her short stint in the school’s mariachi band.  That last bit was my singular contribution.

As I read the notes and letters, tragedy entered into it— Amy Komori wasn’t exactly Mrs. Komori’s niece:  she was the daughter of some distant relatives, orphaned at a young age.  Traffic accident.  She’d lived with a series of foster parents until Mrs. Komori learned of her pitiful existence and enfolded her back into the loving embrace of family.  What a lucky child.

“What are you gonna tell like your real relatives, Mrs. Komori?” I asked.  “I mean, they’ll kinda know you didn’t adopt me from any other branch of Komoris.  And even if you did, it went through pretty fu—uh—freakin’ fast.”

“Oh, I’ll figure something out,” she said.  “Um… the less you know about this part of it, the better.”

“You want me to…”

“A little privacy, yeah.”

I left the dining room and went back to my room.  Somewhere down the hallway, Mrs. Komori was creating me.  A girl of paper was forming on that dining room table, and she was me and I was her, and I’d be her flesh and that was that. I'd start back to school in the fall. But first, there was the last month or so of summer, and a lot of things to work out in my head.

Emily knocked and came in.  She sat on the corner of my bed and said, “Mom’s pretty busy, huh?”

“Yeah, she’s giving birth to me.”

We both laughed a little at that.

“I’m an orphan, apparently.  I’m not sure if I’m adopted or just living with you guys.”

“Well, that makes sense.  I mean, no one’s ever going to believe you’re my natural sister.  You don’t look anything like me.”

“Well, she’s still gonna have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do, mang,” I said, aping Al Pacino in “Scarface,” which had been on TV the night before.

“Jou don’ worry jour leetle head about that, mang,” Emily teased.  She ruffled my hair.  “Oh fuck me, what a mop.”

“Lemme introduce jou to…  I kinda… wish I did look more like you.”

“Really?  Why?”

“I dunno.  I don’t wanna open up a whole can of dead worms or anything, but I didn’t date you ‘cause of your brilliant mind.”

“Oh, fuck you.  You did so.”

“Okay, that was part of it.”

“’Cause I am a fuckin’ genius.  I can do all kinds of maths and scientifical junk.”

I smiled mysteriously and said no more.  But it was true.  I did kind of wish I looked more like Emily.  Maybe we truly could be sisters, then.  I couldn’t remember a time in my life when I wished I looked like any girl, but there it was.

“You look…” Emily said, and she searched for a suitable adjective.  “Well, I don’t want to insult you by saying cute.  You’re a really good looking kid, Marty-boy.”

“I look half starved.”

“You’re an orphan.  All the coolest orphans look that way.  Oliver Twist, Annie… um… that… other one…”

“There is no other one.”

“Yeah, that one!”

The phone was ringing and Emily hopped off the bed to answer it.  It was Darla or someone and then I was alone to fend for myself during the long hot dog days before fall and school.

Chapter Two:

Amy Goes Rolling

With Mrs. Komori creating me from thin air and her own childhood, and Emily gone with her friends so much, I learned to amuse myself.  How I chose to do that was with a pair of inline skates I found in Emily's closet.  If I wore three pairs of socks, I could wear the skates and stumble around in them out on our driveway to my heart's content. Mrs. Komori saw me one morning, and took me to Toys-R-Us and bought me an inexpensive pair my size, plus some pads and a helmet and I took to skating right away, as if I’d been born with wheels on my feet.

Since I weighed about as much as if I'd been carved from balsa wood, flat surface skating came easy for me. Looking for a challenge one afternoon, I tossed on the last remaining pair of my humungous boy's pants and a tee, my helmet and knee pads and headed the empty parking lot that passed for the local skate park. 

Where those same skater punks who harassed me hung out when they weren’t propping up the dry fountain at the mall or huffing glue.

When I first got to the skate park and saw them there, I almost turned around and went home.  I could feel fear, palpable and strong, like a clammy hand around my chest and stomach, squeezing.  I trembled with adrenaline, ready for fight or flight.  Somehow, I forced myself to stay.  I just made sure I kept as far from them as possible without rolling on the sidewalk.  It wasn’t long before they noticed me gliding around by myself at the far end of the lot.

First came giggles, then coughs.  After that didn’t work, they started upping the ante with nasty sexual remarks that got louder and more pornographically detailed until they caused my face to burn.  But they directed their most vicious remarks at my inline skates.

Scared to the point of almost peeing in my pants by them, I still showed up day after day, just to prove something to them and myself.  I skated through a shitstorm of verbal abuse.

“Look at that stupid bitch,” one kid would say and I’d fume and try a 360—or even a 180-- crack up and land with a loud, “OOF!” and a clatter of plastic, narrowly avoiding the shattered beer bottles glittering diamond-like on the lumpy asphalt.  If I hadn’t had that helmet, I would have scrambled my brains.

The umpteenth time I destroyed myself in one of my spectacular, sprawling, incredibly painful falls, one of the kids ironically called me “Maki,” after an aggressive skater who had recently been on ESPN.  His buddies had no idea who she was, so he explained it like this:  “She looks like that fuckin’ Maki off that rollerblading shit.  Did you see that the other day?”

“Fuckin’ rollerbladers, dude.  Get that weak shit outta here.”

“I’d fuck that Brazilian chick, though, dude.”

“Why don’t you fuckin’ go home and play with your precious little Barbie dolls, Maki?” another one said.

“Why don’t you go home and play with your precious little dick?” I told him.  I got up with my head turned away from them so they wouldn’t see my shameful tears, wiped them away on my shoulder.  I looked down at my bony brown forearms, my dumb arms with little pills of rubbed-off skin and shiny red blood droplets starting to bead up among them, then over at him with narrowed eyes and the boys all reacted with mock fright, trying to embarrass me more.

But as the days went by, I learned a lot of the intimidation they’d aimed at me was from their own internal insecurities.  They could glide around on their skateboards and do ollies and kick flips and 540s, and curse and spit and call me a stupid girl and a rollerblader, but they weren’t actually going to do anything physically.  They were too scared of each other and their opinions to risk humiliation if I proved to be a little wildcat or something.  They weren’t even trying to break me, I realized.

They were trying to break me in.  Finally, one of them actually talked to me like a human being.

“Hey, Maki,” he said from under his blond hair, his eyes squinting at me, his head at an angle.  He held his skate deck under his arm, and I could see blood running down from his elbow in bright rivulets, a startling crimsom against his pale skin.

“What?” I said with an exasperated snort.

“Where you from?”

“Cali,” I lied.  “My name’s not Maki.”

“Oh?  What is it?”

“Ma—my name is Amy.”

“How come you do rollerblading?”

“It’s not rollerblading. Roller Blades is a brand name.  These are…”  Actually, I didn’t know what brand my skates were.  El Cheapo Grandos from Toys-R-Us or something.

“Whatever.  How come you do it?  You’re like the only kid I know who does it.”

I decided to play it tough, with a thundering in my chest making me feel anything but.  “What makes you think you know me?”

He kind of smiled, his upper lip rising to show perfect white teeth, the results of his parents’ belief in high-priced orthodontia.  About an hour later, he’d broken out all the front ones and his mouth was a huge red smear that made everyone forget about his damaged elbow.  He cried like a baby and I threw up twice before his parents came to take him to the ER or dentist or wherever.  But by the time that happened, I was grudgingly accepted as part of the tribe.  The girl who was into the lamest, most weak-ass shit anyone could be into, but with her own little niche nevertheless.

Later that summer, someone built a wooden vert and I set about learning how to do what I learned the aggressive skaters called “pumping it,” which sounded nasty but was anything but.  Since everyone around me was a skateboarder, I had to figure it out for myself from skating videos and magazines.  Starting in the middle, I rode up, back down, up, back and forth like a timid old lady re-learning how to walk after rehabbing a broken hip, trying to go higher and higher while everyone waited, their impatient energy making me push myself.  It was scary as hell at first, but once I gave into gravity and started tucking into the drop, I found myself going high and higher up the vert walls.  Pumping on a vert.  Now I was almost skating for real.

My breakthrough was when I managed to do a 180 without falling to my knees and sliding down amid the same mocking, egalitarian laughter that greeted the boys’ crashes.  With that figured out, I got higher and higher up the vert walls with every run until one spectacular afternoon I reached the coping… and went above it.

I shrieked with joy!

And because I was so light, I could throw my bird-weight body up until I felt almost as if I were flying and not care if I broke my neck.  I’d explode upward into the sun, these crazy high-pitched sounds coming out of my lungs and throat in a completely involuntary reaction.  It felt so good, I almost wet my pants.  I was reusable like the space shuttle, launching myself over and over, rising ever upward.  Total fucking rapture!

As soon as everyone saw how massive my airs were, they re-nicknamed me Ayumi, after another Japanese professional skater-- not that I was anywhere near her class—because it was closer to my real name. 

This time I didn’t mind having a nickname because I was actually becoming better at riding the vert—and everyone enjoyed my sliding, crashing failures at doing anything more than a 180, although I tried and tried to do 360s and once even a flatspin-- than most of the local posers on their skateboards.  There were a few hardcore guys who were miles better than the rest, of course.  But fear of bodily harm kept the rank and file somewhat in check, whereas vert rash made me feel strong again.

Badass in a way I'd never even felt when I had XY chromosomes.  Kinda.  To an extent...

Once I’d proven I could skate with the woodpushers and take their shit, the boys started getting other ideas about me, and that was definitely not something I wanted or needed. I had just about reached a point where, when I skated, I could almost forget I was girl; suddenly, I ran into a reminder of it, as big as a billboard and as brightly lit.

"Hey, Ayumi," my new friend Patrick, he of the newly-repaired grillwork (his smile still wasn't quite the same as it had been the day he first dared talk to me), said as I painted flowers on his skate deck with a paint marker, my tongue sticking out from concentration.  I could feel his hot breath on my bare neck and I was vaguely considering brushing him away as if he were a fly or gnat.  He was leaning way over, getting a little closer with every breath.

"I'm doing this, dude," I told him softly.  I intently formed a petal.

"I finally got a fuckin’ Playstation for my birthday.  Wanna come over?"

I was about to say, “Sure,” when Patrick did something that made me shy away like a skittish kitten.  He reached out and started stroking a tuft of my hair behind my ear in this flirtatious way, with the backs of his fingers against my neck.  As I squirmed, I looked up at him and he had this sex-creep expression in his eyes that set me off in a major way.

"Fuck you!" I snarled.  I threw the marker at him, pushed him on his ass. As I skated away, I could feel his and everyone else’s admiring looks all over me as they poked loud, braying fun at Patrick for liking boyish Ayumi the way guys like girls, and at me for getting so freaked out about it.  All I could think was, Don't look at me like that! Don't think those things about me!

I stopped, wheeled around, balled my fists on my hips and jeered, "Fuck all you little Playstation-playing pussies!"

Immediately, everyone shut up. They looked so stupid, like a bunch of dressed-up chimps, I started laughing my ass off. I felt like Emily all of a sudden.

Patrick wasn't quite so friendly the rest of the day, and there weren't so many one-of-the-gang put-downs directed at me.  I got a wide berth.

A few girls had just started coming around the vert, so I hung with them when I wasn't up.  We chatted about skating and general topics like school and music.  It didn't last long.

The Patrick incident had flamed out one of the engines, but the next thing sent the Amyplane right into the mountain.  This girl flat out told me, "Geez, Amy, I wish you were a guy-- you'd make a cool boyfriend."

I grinned like an idiot and just about melted into the gutter and down the storm drain.  It was flattering but as I chewed my lower lip trying to think of something to say back, I fractured.  Apparently, I was more brittle than Patrick’s teeth.

“I-I better go,” I said.

“Why?”

“I just have to.”

“You’re back early,” Emily called from her bedroom when she heard me come in.

Finding her home perked me up a little.  I thought, Yeah!  It's about damn time I got her to myself!  I quickly threw my skates and helmet on the floor in my room, pulled off my knee pads and pants, changed to shorts and went to talk to her about everything that had been happening lately.

She and Darla were sitting on the floor, their backs against the bed, both of them holding scissors, colored construction paper scattered around them.  Darla gave me a look, a jack-o-lantern stare, a mysterious flickering behind her eyes.

I backed out quickly, alone with my troubles.  I took a shower, wrapped myself in a towel and plopped myself on my bed with my hair wet.  I could hear Darla and Emily murmuring to each other right through the wall.  I tried to force some tears, hoping I could squeeze out the hurt the way I would a big ol’ turd, but nothing happened except a few dry sobs.  That ended my first stint as an aggressive inline skater.  I just didn’t have the heart to go back to the skate park and face those kids.  I couldn’t be anyone’s girlfriend.  I couldn’t be anyone’s boyfriend.  I couldn’t be anyone’s anything.

Chapter Three:

The Loneliest Fairy Princess

At home, not wanting to do anything and mired in this sludge-like personal inertia, I moped for a day or two.  My inline skates, helmet and pads lay where’d I’d dropped them on the floor.  Sometimes I rolled over in bed and stared at them through the black foliage of my hair, blinking because the strands tickled my eyelashes.  Disinterested.  The ceiling light reflected dully on the plastic skates, the bland wall beyond. 

“You wanna go somewhere?”  Emily asked through the door.  I thought to myself, You’re just asking because you feel guilty about abandoning me.  As soon as one of your friends calls, you’ll ditch me.

“Go away,” I told her.  And she did.

It was like being in limbo.  Male soul, female body.  No one could possibly understand how it felt.  Well, maybe a few people could, but they had been born with it; mine happened while I was conscious of every little development.  Ugh… so fucking complicated!  Skating had been a release until the kids started rubbing my condition in my face, however inadvertently.  Skating sucks, I thought.  The whole world sucks.

But I could feel myself coming to a decision.  While Emily had been this huge “Grease 2” fan, I knew “Grease” to be the superior movie and I’d forced her to watch it with me once (although afterwards she told me she hated it, simply out of spite).  Yeah, “Grease.”  For some reason, I started thinking about how, towards the end, Sandy realizes she can’t go on living as this sweetie-pie girl next door and keep Danny Zucco.  So she gets Pinky to trick her out head to toe in bad-ass black and tease up her hair.  At the school fair, she blows Danny’s brains out with her smoldering sexiness and they sing and dance and fly away in a fantasy version of Greased Lightning, their pet hot rod, probably to some castle in the sky where they fuck like crazed monkeys.  Okay, that last part was my own story innovation but it was at least hinted at, right?  I felt dumb framing my dilemma in terms of Sandy’s choice, but maybe genderless freak wasn’t what I was meant to be anymore than she was meant to be a naïve young virgin.  A wild sex kitten had been living inside Sandy all the time.

What lived inside me?

Maybe some kind of girl.  Yeah, I should just fucking go all the way and be a girl, I thought, and my mood-clouds parted with a hint of a sun reluctant to show itself for fear it was all just a joke.  I imagined it as looking a little like the Raisins Bran sun, with a face and everything.  No, Mr. Sun, it’s definitely no joke.  I’m totally serious about this.

Then I lectured myself:  I mean, maybe that’s the message you received from your secret heart when you fell in love with that sundress at Macy’s, and you can’t deny it ‘cuz you know you wanted it.  You wanted it at the store, you wanted it at the beach.  That was your heart saying, “You are a girl now.  Go ahead and be one!”

It felt good to admit it.  Yeah, I agreed with myself, I could just try being a girl.  I mean, that’s what Patrick wants me to be.  That must be what God or Satan or Darla or a virus or bacteria or whoever or whatever turned me into this wanted as well, or why else would I be lying there feeling so tiny and helpless?  That’s what that Macy’s asshole sales guy and those little old ladies want.  Everyone wants me to be a girl, so why shouldn’t I get with the program and be happy for once?

The sun was out and smiling and showering me in raisins while I danced in the vineyard.  I sat up, got dressed and went into the kitchen where Mrs. Komori was enjoying a Saturday morning off.

“Um, I have an announcement to make,” I said.

“Okay…”  Mrs. Komori said, looking a little confused.

“I-I kinda… I want to get some girl clothes and try… you know…”

“Try them on?”

“Well, that, too.  But I mean more like try on… gender.  I want to try on a new gender.  I mean, the way I see it, I may be a guy inside and stuff but maybe I could try being a girl.  Just to see if I can do it.  Like it.  See if I like it.  Or something.”

“And you feel you need girl’s clothes to do that?”

“Yeah.  I mean, don’t I?”

“If you want them, I guess.  I mean, personally, I don’t feel clothes make any difference.  I mean, if you’re happy dressing like a boy…”

“But I’m not.  That’s the point.  I’m miserable like this.  I don’t know what I am.”

“You’re you.  You’re Martin.”

“Yeah, but that’s just it.  I don’t know if I am anymore.  Inside, yeah.  But like when I was skating I was free but then the… Patrick?  He he like… like-liked me.  A-and this one girl…  It was like I couldn’t escape.  But it’s like why did they have to treat me like that?  Why couldn’t I be just a person with them?  When I did things before, as a guy, I was Martin.  Now when I do things, I’m Amy to everyone else no matter how I think about myself.  It’s like everyone wants me to do this.  So I’m ready.  I wanna do it.”

“Slow down.  You’re really not making any sense at all.”

She was right. I’d been babbling and waving my hands around like a crazy person.  But I was thinking on the fly, working out things out loud instead of in my internal dialogue.  It was a jumble but what I was trying to explain to her was this feeling that Martin-soul in Martin-body equaled one person, Martin-soul in Amy-body equaled another person.  I’d tried just being the old me wearing a new skin, but it led me to ennui, to malaise, defeat, depression, gloom and bizarre fixations on Olivia Newton-John and the Kellogg’s Raisin Bran cereal mascot.  I had to be a new me.  The one people expected when they saw this bony girl.

So I cajoled Mrs. Komori into dragging me right back to that Macy’s store—I was so impatient to get out to the mall I was actually squirming and grinning like an idiot in the car-- and buying some tops, dresses and skirts for me.  Since school was coming up, we needed to be practical and mostly bought items for fall, but they were all intensely feminine in a wannabe teeny-bopper way.  This time, when I tried clothes on, everyone seemed to approve; I was being rewarded for doing things in the right way.  If Mrs. Komori evinced any doubt, she was careful not to voice any misgivings.

“You look great, Amy,” she said, but I thought I heard something off in her tone.

I was too busy, too focused to care.

“I wanna check one more thing,” I said.  My eye brows up, I looked questioningly at the clearance rack.  End of season sales, big mark downs and discounts.  Would it be there?  What if it wasn’t?  I bounced over to check…

And it was.  That little sundress, like pure love made of cotton and summery colors.  It had waited for me, and this had to be a sign from the gender gods.  We’re well pleased with you, Daughter of Eve.  I beamed happily as I took it off the rack, but turned to Mrs. Komori with this hesitant, embarrassed feeling in my stomach.  Oh shit, what was Emily going to say or think?  She knew I wanted this stupid thing since way back and she was gonna give me so much shit about it!  But the wanting was strong and overrode all other desires and fears.

“That’s soo cute,” the sales woman told me.  Mrs. Komori came over, felt the material, and checked the price tag, which was marked in red.  It was super cheap. 

She said, “Go.  Go try it on.  I’ll wait.”

I practically ran to the dressing room.  I couldn’t remember being this excited about a piece of clothing in my life.  I pictured myself skating in my old Martin pants hurling skyward off the vert into an impossibly vivid sky, a kind of shaky-cam mind-video of the butch little monster I’d been less than a week before.  As I slipped out of my clothes for the billionth time that day and into the sundress-- the pale lines on my shoulders sharply contrasted with the darkness of my tanned skin-- I saw that aggressive skater girl take a huge tumble and come up changed.  There she was in the mirror, farmer tan and all, but much softer now, frail and pretty.  Black hair, ridiculous.  Black eyes, glittering.  High cheeks, long nose, a couple of black freckles like lonely stars in an empty galaxy, waif-thin body in a floral dress that came down to just past my almost chocolate knees.

Oh fuck yeah, I sighed to myself.  This is what I was craving all along.  Despite the misgivings in her eyes, Mrs. Komori took it all so bravely.  She even greeted me with a supportive hug, helped me pick out a sweet pair of brown Teva sandals to complete my sundress outfit, plus enough undies to last two weeks and put all my discoveries on her credit card to boot.  I felt warm all over as I wore the sundress and sandals home, the cashier cutting the plastic tags for me while I stood there smiling.

My cheeks hurt!

Emily was in the kitchen drinking a Dr. Pepper when we came in.  She did a spit take, spewing soda and foam all over the kitchen counter, which pissed off Mrs. Komori and led to a short little argument between them while I put the bags in my bedroom.  I checked myself in the mirror.  Still a girl, I thought.

“Marty-marts!” Emily called.  “Come lemme see your new look!”

I bit my lip.  Oh fuck, here we go, I thought, and walked down the hall, my arms stiff at my sides.  I stepped into the kitchen and Emily was still wiping up her mess with a paper towel.  She stopped and looked me all over.

“Turn around,” she said.

I folded my lips back and mashed them firmly with my teeth as I slowly rotated.

“Wow,” Emily said.  “I mean, just wow!”

“Wow good or wow bad?” I asked.

“I don’t know.  How does it feel?”

“Pretty good.  I didn’t tell you before, but I’ve decided I’m gonna try to be a girl now.”

“Okay…  Don’t know why you need a dress to—“

“Emily,” Mrs. Komori said, a warning in her voice.  “This is what she wants.”

“She?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “And you don’t have to call me Martin anymore.  Just Amy.”

“I was already doing that half the time anyways, in case you didn’t notice.”

“I noticed.”

“Well… okay.  I mean, good for you.  I just think you should be who you are—“

“This is who I am.  Now.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.”

Emily was really scrutinizing me.  I could tell her bullshit detectors were working overtime and she usually had them set to high-gain or ultra-sensitive frequencies anyways.  I had no idea what she detected there in the kitchen, or what she thought she was detecting.

Mrs. Komori left us alone to go put up her bag and car keys.  Emily came over to me and flicked the little string bow over my left shoulder.  She circled me, just looking down at me.  It made me feel pretty dumb, almost naked.  She appraised me with her artist’s eye and that cunning, evil genius mind of hers.

“Yeah, I knew you wanted this dress the first time you saw it,” she said quietly, her voice almost conspiratorial.  “I just never expected to actually see you in it.”

“Yeah.  I dunno why I wanted it.  Something just clicked.”

“That’s cool.  You look really good in it.  Remember when I suggested getting a haircut?  You should let me take you to the place I get mine done.  If you want.”

“Yeah, cool.”

“I’ve kinda been neglecting you, but there’s all this shit I have to do before school starts back.”

“Yeah, I remember what it was like.  I guess I’m on track to start… I don’t know what grade.  Seventh?”

“Um… Amy?”

“Yeah?”

“You really know… like dresses and stuff?  I mean, yeah, I like them too and all but it’s not really necessary or anything.  If you really do want to be a girl, just be one in your own way.”

“This is my own way.”

“I hope so.”  Then she added, softly, “Or you’re in for a wicked surprise.”

The following Monday, wearing my awesome, freshly laundered sundress, I took Emily up on the haircut thing.  She had her hairdresser—this muscular cool dude in a tight tee and jeans—give me a bob with short bangs and little points curling below my tiny ears, the back practically shaved.  We hit Moldy Oldies for a vintage dress, long and in ice blue velvet.  We even stopped by this jewelry story and I had my ears pierced... two little silver rings in one, three in the other, one up top. Seemed like the thing to do. I felt so adorable, it was sickening.

Little Amy Girly-girl. I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was doing, but I worked at it with more diligence than I’d ever approached anything before, other than aggressive inline skating.  In a way, it was like learning to pump on the vert all over again.  It was certainly very physical.  I tried walking like a girl, talking like a girl.  And while it caused me pain at first, I fake-giggled a lot.

But whenever we drove past the skatepark on some Komori family errand, I ducked down in the car so Patrick and the others wouldn’t see what I’d become.  They probably don’t even miss me, I thought.  Fuck ‘em.  I’m a girl now.  Girls don’t do that stuff.  Well, Maki, Fabiola, Ayumi and some others do.  And the girls on skateboards tearing it up on the vert without me—there were more now.  But most girls don’t.  And I’m like them.  The acceptable majority, acceptably girly in the most acceptable of ways.  I will play with my precious Barbies.  Except for being too old for dolls and not even interested in them in the least.

I can do this, I thought confidently.  Bravada.  Soon school would start and I’d be pretty well versed in this being a chick business.  So I thought.  Then I overheard Emily and her mom discussing how concerned they were about ridiculously exaggerated  my act was becoming.  Not long after that, Emily took me aside.

"Knock it off with the fucking drag queen act, okay?" she whispered.

"What?"

"You're flitting around like a-a little flamer. I liked you better when you were a butch little skater."

I flushed with anger instantaneously.  She'd poked me hard, right in the spot most sore.  "What am I supposed to do? I'm a girl now!"

"Act like a girl, then. Not... I don't know.  This is exactly what I tried to tell you!  I don't know what you're acting like, but it's scary!"

"Yeah, and nobody’s teaching me how!”

“Amy, I have my own life, too.”

“But I don't!  I don’t have any life at all!  And I’m doing this all alone!”

“Do you honestly believe that?  I mean do you really and truly think no one is doing anything to help poor little you?”

“I don’t know!  Probably!  The only thing I do know is I used to have this thing between my legs I'd stick in you... remember that?"

Emily slapped me. She instantly looked more shocked and hurt than I did.  “Oh shit, Amy… Martin!  I’m sorry!”  So distressed, the situation so twisted, she didn’t even know what to call me anymore.

But I was already running to the bathroom.  I took off my dress and climbed into the bathtub in my underwear and turned on the water, hot and steaming.  Emily came in to apologize, and I screamed at her, my face red, my eyes streaming, “Go away!”

“Martin, I’m so sorry!  I-I didn’t mean—“

"Get out! Get out!"

She did.  I cried in the tub for hours and no one came to check on me.  My fingers turned all prune-like and I compulsively gnawed the fingernails down to the quick.  They itched and bled.

This was worse than breaking up with Emily at the beach.  It was breaking up with myself.  I’d failed at staying me, I’d failed at being a girl.  What did that leave me?

Nothing is what.  Even Emily and Mrs. Komori started freezing me out.  Their patience had limits, and I'd trampled all over them with rage and ingratitude, scared the only two people I had left in the world right out of my life.  I had food on the table, but we all ate in silence and I retreated back to a room that wasn’t really mine and where the closet was stuffed with both boy and girl clothes and my inline skating stuff lay ignored.

Chapter Four:

I Don’t Meet Mayim Bialik

Now I learned what alone really meant.  Trapped in a girl’s body with no one to turn to, a stranger in the Komori house, a stranger to myself.  To really stick an ice pick in my heart, Emily started dating Toby again, and I learned that the only kind of pain as luscious as having an ulcer on your tongue you could flick against your teeth was the hurt I derived from stealing “Playboy” and other glossy sex magazines from convenience stores.  Most of the stores put the porno behind the cash register where you couldn’t get at it, but I found the ones that did and looted them at will.

It wasn’t that difficult.  If I had on a dress, I found I was really adept at putting the magazines behind my back, hiking up my skirt and slipping them down into the waistband of my panties.  If I had on pants, they went down the front.  Then I could slip sideways out the door, duck around the corner of the store, pull the magazines out and run like hell in case anyone followed.

Sometimes I’d even be laughing or maybe crying as I ran, but I couldn’t tell the difference.

I’d usually just stick them under my dress or shirt when I got back to the Komoris’ house and walk to my room quickly with my arms folded across my stomach, hopefully hiding my contraband.  Then I’d lock myself in my room and sit cross-legged on the floor and flip to the centerfold and just stare.

Why did I even want these magazines?  When I was around this age as a boy, the answer was pretty simple.  Naked woman, any naked women, made me excited and I’d jack it like millions of other kids my age.  As I got older, I also developed a kind of ironic detachment from the imagery versus the reality, plus a vague unease about objectification I really never examined because—you know-- it sure felt good to jack it looking at hot chicks.  But now, under these circumstances?  I really didn’t have clue.

Because mostly the women in them made me feel a new kind of strangeness, kind of uncomfortable.  After all, we were the same general species or family now, sisters or cousins or something.  Well, we had the same junk; after that we diverged wildly.  I’m not even sure what it was they were saying to me or about me.  What comment on womanhood does a surgically-altered sex object who’s about twenty percent post-consumer recyclable plastics make to a thin, vaguely genderless person with a skinny little kid-girl body?  I was hardly more likely to look or be like any of them than I had been when I’d worn a guy’s flesh.  Huh, I thought, maybe even less likely now.  And I didn’t even want to look or be like them. 

The magazine women, the centerfolds or whatever, were usually blonde, obviously enhanced and heavily airbrushed. This one posed falling out of her clothes in a garage, that one pretended to masturbate in a fake French villa. I never tried to match their poses or figure out what was the big deal about it by touching myself down there, but staring at these seemingly impossible bodies made me feel a wimpy kind of warmth inside that might have been all I had left of a libido or the first inklings of the one I’d have when my new body passed through puberty.  I wondered sometimes if I’d still like women, or would I be into men.  Or both.  Or neither.  Eventually, I'd get the urge to pee and shove the magazines under my bed.

The twelve-year-old pervo. Or perva.

I also bought cigarettes out of vending machines and smoked while I gazed at the world through eyes like black slits.  I’d rarely smoked when I was alive but I decided it didn’t matter much if I did now that I was dead.  And I kind of liked the way it made me feel.  Nauseated.

But the end of summer wasn’t all theft, the joys of light literature and addicting myself to nicotine.  Now that I officially no longer gave a shit about myself or anything else, I started skating again.  I found I couldn’t keep way any longer; the call was too strong.  It was so mighty, in fact, it completely overrode all other considerations at the park, like Patrick’s crush or sexual desires or whatever it was little skating deviants had in their brains, hearts or nether regions for girls.  My illicit activies brought me little joy, but I skated with fierceness now.

It was exhilarating.  Already an invulnerable thief, I decided I wasn't a girl, I wasn't a guy, that I was something new, something both and bad-ass and dangerous (in a humiliatingly cute and tiny way). I felt full of this wired energy, a runaway robot shaking itself apart, shooting out sparks, streaming acrid white smoke, catching the dry leaves on fire.  On the vert, I gave my new philosophy its fullest expression.  If I'd been reckless on the vert before, now I was downright suicidal.  Damn those stupid consequences to hell!  My airs became larger, I kept going higher and higher.  And when you do that, you have to fall back to earth sometime. Gravity demands it.

Gravity, my friend.  Gravity brought me sliding down the curved side of the vert on my face, on my shoulder, on my knees.  Gravity dumped me off the side of the vert onto the asphalt one time when I lost my balance while I was screaming my head off at some slight by Patrick, real or imaginary.

Patrick and the other guys and girls at the skate park were actually scared of me.  I showed up every day, climbed to the top of the vert, stuck a cigarette in my mouth and waited my turn, barely saying a word.  When and if I did, it was usually something biting and mean.  I made people cry.  They still called me Ayumi, but now it was usually in the context of a quick, "Here comes that crazy Ayumi bitch" and they'd scatter before me like the gulls had at the beach and stand as far away from me as possible.  The new Ayumi lived in an unhappy world all her own, with gravity frequently her only companion.

And boom, just like that, gravity really nailed me.  Just when you think you’ve hit bottom, gravity, like a true bosom pal with your best interests in mind, shows you there’s a whole lower level and it’s covered with rusty nails and broken glass.  Gravity tosses you there and rubs your face all over, slicing you deeply.  Causing tetanus of the soul.  I got caught stealing.  Busted.  Imagine the surprise on that fat cashier's face when she stopped me going out the door and made me come back in, only to reveal my booty-- a men's magazine.

"What would a little girl be doing with smut like this?" she asked. She barely had any teeth.

"I like chicks," I said casually, with a harsh edge that sounded strange in my little girl voice; Emily could've pulled it off better, though, with her deeper pitch. I pulled out my cigarettes and slipped one into my mouth. I immediately thought of Winona Ryder in "Heathers," right before Christian Slater blew up. Yeah.

The cashier took my cigarettes away from me and my lighter. In a really unfair trade, what she gave me back was a long lecture about Jesus and sin and Hell.

“Don’t they believe in Jesus in your country?”  she asked.  “Don’t they pray?”

“First off, I’m as American as you.  And second, the only thing I’m praying for is for the police to come and throw me in jail before I have to listen to anymore of your bullshit,” I told her mildly, with my eyebrows raised.

She looked angry for a moment, then shook her head.  “You are just about the rudest little girl it has ever been my sorry luck to meet.  I feel sorry for your parents.”

“They’re dead.  I live with my aunt.”

She sputtered a little.  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that.  It explains a lot, but I am truly sorry to hear that.  I’m gonna pray for you, I honestly am.”

“Yeah, well…”

Just then two cops came in and I started to get nervous.  They acted officiously and efficiently, asking direct questions with little or no trace of warmth, took down my name and Mrs. Komori’s phone number and address.  Everyone talked, and the cops took notes.  I hoped the cashier wouldn’t notice the slight quaver in my voice as I explained my point of view, which was I was guilty as could be and I had no excuse.  I stared at my feet as the cops escorted me to the car (they didn’t cuff me), and I overheard a couple of racist comments from other people in the store. I wanted to punch everyone in the face. I was so full of anger and self-loathing. My skin crawled, my clothes disgusted me.

So this is how it ends, I thought at the police station while another cop, this time a sergeant with white chevrons on his blue-gray sleeve, looked me over.  I was sitting in a thinly-padded metal chair beside his desk and other cops were busy typing or running their mouths all around us.  It was a lot like any office, only kind of dirty and everyone had a gun except me.  I was slouched down, trying not to meet the sergeant’s gaze, looking down at my knees, which were shaking a little.  I pressed them together to try to stop the trembling.

“Need to use the little ladies’ room?” the sergeant asked.

“No.”

“Wanna tell me what you thought you were doing?”

“No.”

“You realize stealing is wrong, right?”

“No.  Uh… yes?  Yes.”

“Uh huh.  You think stealing is cool, huh?”

“No.  Uh… yes?”

“Well, I guess you’re learning otherwise now, huh?  Not too happy, huh?”

“Not very.”

“Okay, kid.  Don’t you think your parents are going to be pretty disappointed?”

“Mrs. Komori will, yeah.”

“Tell me your full name.”

“My full name?”  I thought about it for a second.  Again with the names.  I had at least two I could give him.  Then I told him in the squeakiest voice possible, my throat very raw, “My name is Amy Komori.”

“No middle name?”

“Not that I know of, no.”

I was kind of tired of having to say “Amy Komori.”  The cop sergeant made me tell him my address again, too, and asked me a lot of questions about right and wrong in between more practical bits of info about what I was being charged with—some kind of misdemeanor-- and how I’d get a juvie court date for a hearing plus many other things I barely heard.  I nodded my head as if I understood.

While we were doing that, Mrs. Komori showed up at the door and one of the cops who’d arrested or whatever they’d done to me met her there and took her away someplace for what I guessed would be a very interesting talk that would seal my fate.  The bestest, most wonderfullest moment of this special “Blossom” episode-- guest starring me as Blossom’s irresponsible friend who learns her lesson that stealing is a cry for attention but never appears on the show again-- came when the cops decided it was time for the heartwarming, climactic reunion between adopted parent and juvenile delinquent.  While the cop sergeant repeated to Mrs. Komori a lot of the information he’d already told me, I stared at the tile floor and then I was released into my “caregiver’s custody,” he called it.

Driving me home from the police station (now Amy Komori had a police record-- cool!), Mrs. Komori had a long talk with me, the first time she'd spoken to me in days.  She started lamely, just stuff about how she’d had some trouble enrolling me in school because of the late start she’d gotten with the paperwork.

“Apparently, they set the rolls months in advance,” she explained.  “I guess that makes sense.  They need to know who’s in what class and blah blah, whatever.  But I was able to talk to someone at your school and with the administration.  Anyways, you squeaked by and we’re good to go come September.  Which isn’t that far away.”

“Uh…” I said.  Why was she telling me all this at this specific juncture in time?  Didn’t we have a more pressing issue?  Actually, I was more than a little afraid-- “more than” as in “extremely”-- she was dancing around her real topic, namely the kicking of my narrow ass out of her house for good.  I’d be in school and living with a foster family for real. 

She said she knew I was going though something very difficult, something no one had probably ever gone through before. No shit. But I let her talk without any sarcastic comments, because I wasn't feeling so tough at the moment; Patrick and the gang probably would have been embarrassed for me if they’d seen me.  The hammer was about to drop, smashing me flat.

 "I know Emily and you slept together, Martin," she said.  My first thought was to deny it, but I kept my mouth shut instead.  Here it comes, the first bit of recrimination to justify her decision to cut me loose, as if she needed it; I’d done more than enough.  "And I resigned myself to that, because I knew you loved her, and I knew that she'd slept with other boys who probably never loved her as much as you did."

"Yeah, I did," I said softly as I sunk into the seat. For some reason, I wished, really wished I didn't have butterfly-shaped barrettes in my hair.

“I’m telling you this because I want you to know I care very much for you,” she said.  “And I know Emily does, too.”

“I—“

“No, let me finish.  Like I said, I know it's difficult but beyond that, I really can't even begin to fully understand what you're going through.  Sometimes even I can’t believe it, and yet there you are.  Um… not really sure why you thought being more like a girl was what you ended up doing.   Because it was a little... bizarre.  I really, really wish I’d handled that better, too.  I just—Well, whatever.  Water and bridges.  And here we are."

“But—“

“Uh uh.  Please.  Were you really happy doing all that giggly, dress-up stuff?”

“No.  I thought I was at first.  Well, not doing it exactly.  More like because I thought I was finally doing what I was supposed to be… doing.  Obeying the rules or playing the game or something.  Although, yeah, I do really like that one dress.  I don’t really know why.  I just do, I guess.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought,” Mrs. Komori said.  She told me there were all kinds of ways to be a girl, and while choosing a few stereotypical behaviors and playing them up to the nth degree might be one of them, I'd probably be happier finding some other method.  If that was what I truly wanted.

“But I don’t know how to… do anything.”

“Who does?”

“Yeah!  That’s right.  I know it is.  I thought everyone wanted me to be a girl, but that was a disaster.  I just wish I knew who I was supposed to be.”

And then she told me, “You’re so freaked out about figuring out who you’re supposed to be or what stupid people want for you that you’re forgetting just to be.  You know how we learn who we are?  By being.”

“Yeah?  What about doing?”

"Doing, being.  What’s the diff?" she told me, smiling.  “And you know what?  You may not like hearing this, but eventually, you might find having a woman’s body, or being a woman isn’t so bad after all.  You might even come to like it.  We can do some amazing things.”

I really wanted her to explain all about those “amazing things” because it definitely would've made me feel happier, but instead she told me how being a woman in the United States was still a difficult proposition at times.  She said she tried not to focus on it too much, but if I was ever interested she could tell me a lot of what she claimed were real horror stories, or just minor incidents that added up over time.  At the same time, she talked up a lot of progress that had been through the efforts of so many incredible women down through the years—and some men, she went out of her way to mention—and that she enjoyed so many more opportunities than her grandmother had, or even her mom.  She said she hoped Emily—“And you, too, depending”—would have an even easier time of it.

“There’s still a long way to go, though.  Life isn’t fair,” she said.

“Is that supposed to be encouraging or discouraging?”

“I’m really not sure.  But it’s up to you.  Be a woman, be a man, be anything at all your heart desires.  Just to throw this out there, there are other paths you might take.  I have no idea what they might be, but they may not involve you being a woman at all.  Emily told me you didn’t want to go to the hospital when this started.  Well, you may want to go to a therapist at some point.”

“I probably could use some kind of therapy.” 

“I’m talking about a-a gender therapist person or something.  Who knows?  For now, just don’t get so hung up on what you think others expect of you.  You just might become something no one’s ever seen before.  And now for my next point, and this one is going to be a little more difficult for you to hear.”

"Shoot."  Here it comes, I thought.  The ol' don't let the door hit your fanny speech.

Mrs. Komori explained all the things she and Emily had done trying to help me, no matter what fool ideas otherwise I’d gotten in what she called my “messed-up little head.”  She let me know in no uncertain terms she considered my responding shitty attitude inappropriate and insulting.  My stomach clenched; I was listening to the perfect lead-in to her final self-justification for fobbing me off on the state.

As a little hail mary ploy, I quickly interrupted:  “I know you’re doing all that work for me and stuff, and I’m so grateful I have a place to stay.  God, I can’t even begin to tell you how grateful I am for all that.  I mean, no matter how stupid I’ve been acting.  I’m so, so sorry.”

Place to stay.  I hoped she realized this was my way of begging for a home without actually getting on my knees.  Although if I'd had my skate pads on, I might have been tempted.

Then she went on to tell me a lot of other things, about how Mr. Komori died, and how painful that was for her, and how Emily just took it quietly, then cried alone at night and became a very different person afterwards. But eventually, even though the pain never went away completely, they got on with their life together.  Everything, Mrs. Komori said, depended on our ability to do that.  Otherwise the sorrow of simply living would overwhelm us all and we’d do stupid things like kill ourselves.  Or simply steal.  Or smoke.

“Y-you know about that?” I asked.

“I do wash your clothes.  Or haven’t you noticed?  You smell like a fire in a tobacco barn.”

“Oh…”  Wow, I knew I had been a complete little bastard around the house.  Or bitch.  But I’d never even considered that during all the silent phase and awkwardness following that massive break with Emily, someone had continued to see not only that I was fed, but that I had clean clothes, as well.  I’d never even for a second thought about why my smelly, sweaty, smoky clothes were vanishing from heaps on the floor and coming back fresh and folded and carefully placed on my made-up bed.  Food was a necessity; laundry, however, was an expression of…

Of…

Then, Mrs. Komori said, "I don’t know if it’s even my place to stop you from doing that.  I guess I’ll figure that out as we go along, too.  I’ll be just being right there alongside you.  But what’s most important is, I want you to know I will be here for you through all of this. I love you.  I see this hurt child and I can’t help it.  I love you whatever or whoever you decide to become."

Love!  It was love!  I was right!  I couldn’t stop myself from smiling at her from the first real happiness I’d felt in months and months. When I met Emily, I loved her so much, I thought I'd die. And I thought I'd die again when I changed into a girl and lost myself and her simultaneously and forever.  But I didn't die.  Thanks to Mrs. Komori, I lived.