If I Was Your Girl (2 page)

She nodded. “And who's this with you?” she asked, turning to me. My eyes flicked from her to Dad.

“I'm Amanda,” I said. She looked like she expected more information, but I had no idea what Dad had told people about his family. What if he told them he had one child, a son? I shakily handed her my menu and said, “I would like a waffle and Diet Coke please, ma'am, thank you.”

“She's my daughter,” Dad said after a moment, his voice halting and stiff.

“Well, she looks just like you!” We exchanged an uncomfortable look as Mary Anne trotted off to get our drinks.

“She seems nice,” I said.

“She's a good waitress,” Dad said. He nodded stiffly. I drummed my fingers on the counter and wiggled my foot back and forth absentmindedly.

“Thank you for letting me stay with you,” I said softly. “It means a lot.”

“Least I could do.”

Mary Anne brought our food and excused herself to greet a pair of white-haired older men in plaid work shirts.

One of the men stopped to talk to Dad. His nose was round and spider-webbed with purple veins, his eyes hidden under storm-cloud brows. “Who's this little beam of sunshine?” he asked, leaning past Dad to wave at me. I turned so he couldn't see my black eye.

“Amanda,” Dad mumbled. “My daughter.”

The man whistled and slapped Dad's shoulder. “Well, no wonder I ain't seen her before! If I had a daughter as cute as this'n I'd keep her hid away too.” My cheeks burned. “You just tell me if any of the boys get too fresh, now, and I'll loan you my rifle.”

“I don't think that will be a problem,” Dad said haltingly.

“Oh, trust me,” he said, winking, “I had three daughters, not a one of them half as pretty as this one in their time, and it was still all I could do to keep the boys away.”

“Okay,” Dad said. “Thanks for the advice. Looks like your coffee's getting cold.”

The man said goodbye, winked again, and walked stiffly to his seat. I turned my attention straight ahead. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Dad doing the same.

“Ready to go?” he asked finally.

He got up without waiting for a response and threw a twenty-dollar bill on the table next to our half-finished meals. We didn't make eye contact as we got in the car and pulled out of the parking lot.

 

NOVEMBER, THREE YEARS AGO

The hospital bed creaked as Mom sat and rubbed my leg through the thin blanket. A forced smile tightened her apple cheeks but failed to reach her eyes. Her clothes looked baggy; she must not have eaten since I was admitted, to have lost so much weight.

“I talked with the counselor,” she said. Her accent was so different from mine, light and musical.

I said, “What about?” My voice sounded like nothing—flat, toneless, with the faintest deepening that made me never want to speak again. My stomach cramped and twisted.

“When it's safe for you to come home. I told 'em I was worried 'bout what you might do when you're alone, since I can't take any more time off work. I couldn't survive it if I came home and found you…” she trailed off, staring at the light-yellow wall.

“What did the counselor say?” I had met with him a few days before. When he asked me what was wrong with me, I wrote six words on a notepad, my throat still too sore from the stomach pump to speak.

“He said there's ways to treat what's wrong with you,” Mom said. “But he wouldn't say what it is.” She peered at me.

“You won't want me to come home if I tell you what's wrong,” I said, shifting my eyes down. “You won't ever want to see me again.” This was the most I'd said at once in weeks. My throat ached from the effort.

“That ain't possible,” she said. “There ain't a thing in God's creation that could undo the love I have for my son.”

I brought my wrist up to my chest and looked down. The identification bracelet said my name was Andrew Hardy. If I died, I realized, Andrew was the name they would put on my tombstone.

“What if your son told you he was your daughter?”

My mother was quiet for a moment. I thought of the words I wrote down for the counselor:
I should have been a girl.

Finally, she brought her eyes to meet mine. Her expression was fierce, despite her round, red cheeks.

“Listen to me.” Her hand squeezed my leg hard enough that the pain broke through the fog of my meds. When she spoke next, I listened. “Anything,
anyone
, is better than a dead son.”

 

2

Lambertville High sat at the bottom of a hill, dozens of beat-up trucks and station wagons clustered near the entrance. Small pockets of students hovered near the front door, the boys conspicuously slouched and the girls straight-backed and high-chinned, all radiating as much transparent disinterest in one another as possible.

I had barely slept the night before. I gave up trying at five and drank a chocolate-flavored nutritional shake with my medicine: two two-milligram estradiol tablets, which were tiny and blue and tasted like chalk, to feminize my appearance and stand in for the testosterone my body could no longer make, and one ten-milligram Lexapro tablet, which was round and white and waxy, to help me stay calm.

I kept my eyes straight ahead and walked through the double doors, hoping the concealer I wore over the faded, yellowish remnants of my black eye did its job. Inside, the floor was an alternating pattern of green, brown, and gold-flecked white tiles. Fluorescent lights buzzed angrily, but for all their fury, the halls were dimly lit. Display cases lined the walls, shelf after shelf of trophies for cheerleading, marching band, baseball, and especially football, with records reaching back far enough that half the team photos were sepia-toned. The red classroom doors bore faded-looking numbers, and I followed them to 118, the homeroom marked on my schedule.

More than a dozen students sat in groups of three or four, talking so loudly I could hear them in the hall. The room fell quiet as I entered. The girls looked at me and then away again quickly, but a few guys stared for a second longer, their expressions unreadable.

As I moved to find a seat, one face was still turned my way: a tall, lean boy with dark, sharp eyes and wavy black hair. Our eyes caught, and I felt a lurch in my stomach. He sat with another boy, this one tall and bulky with short light hair and a nose that looked like it had been broken before, a half-lidded, sarcastic expression pointed at me. The sarcastic-looking one said something I couldn't make out, and a crimson blush spread across his friend's cheeks.

My heart screamed that they knew, that the one with those piercing eyes was attracted to me for a moment and his friend was making fun of him for it. That was the kind of scenario that got girls like me killed. I had done the research. I knew how often things like that happened. I felt the scar over my ear and remembered that even now that I'd had my surgery, even now that nothing but some legal papers could reveal my past, I was never really safe.

I looked down at my lap and tried to will myself out of existence.

*   *   *

The cafeteria and the auditorium were the same room. The tables were circular, each seating at most five or six people, and half of the seating was on the stage itself. The higher position was clearly reserved for juniors and seniors.

I sat at an empty table on the stage and opened up
Sandman
, a comic book my friend Virginia had recommended, and pulled out the vegetable sushi rolls I had prepared the night before. After a few minutes, I marked my place and ducked to put the book away—and looked up to find the black-haired boy from homeroom sitting across from me.

“Hi,” he said. He wasn't as tall or bulky as his friend, but the muscles in his arms were lean, and he moved with a relaxed grace. “Mind if I sit here?”

“Yes,” I said, realizing too late that I was being rude. “I'm fine, I mean.”

“My friend Parker thinks so,” he replied.

“Excuse me?” I said, nearly choking on a glob of wasabi. “Sorry,” I coughed, before taking a sip of water. “Spicy.”

“Where'd you get sushi in Lambertville?” he asked, pointing to what was left of my lunch.

“I made it,” I said, nervously fiddling with my chopsticks.

“Wow,” he said. “I didn't know you could just …
make
sushi.”

“It's not that hard,” I lied, remembering the countless nights I had spent at my mom's kitchen table, trying to get the rice to stick together. When the stress of transitioning had become too much, my doctors insisted I take some time off. The year at home had seemed fun at first, like an extended summer break, but eventually boredom kicked in. I had started to feel like I was just standing still, like life was passing me by outside and I would be forever trapped in our house with nowhere to go and no one to talk to. I had to occupy myself somehow.

He looked surprised. “Most families around here think a fancy meal is getting Italian instead of Tex-Mex. And I'm Grant, if you were wondering.”

“Okay,” I said. The back of my neck tingled. “I'm Amanda.”

“Sorry for choking you with my lame pun, Amanda,” he said. “I meant it as a compliment, but that kind of thing must be pretty old at this point.”

“Why would you say that?”

“A girl like you?”

I narrowed my eyes. What did he mean,
a girl like me
? My fears from earlier returned in a rush. “Are you messing with me?”

“You're just fishing for more compliments now,” he said, shaking his head and laughing. “Fine, whatever. Did you see the dude with the nose situation who sat by me in homeroom?” I nodded slowly and swallowed. “That's my friend Parker. He wants to ask you out, but he's a big chickenshit, so here I am asking for your number for him.”

“You want my number?” I put my hands in my lap. Blood pounded in my temples. People who looked like Grant had never spoken to me without secretly planning to hurt me. For so many years I'd been on the wrong side of too many jokes, too many pranks, too many confrontations. I'd been knocked down a hundred times in a hundred different ways. “For your friend.”

“Yup,” he said.

“My dad's, um, really strict,” I said. I thought of the look on his face at the diner when the old man had offered to lend him a rifle to use on my suitors. It wasn't entirely a lie. He furrowed his brow and leaned forward on his elbows. For some reason, I felt compelled to go on. “It's complicated … I'm complicated.” I pursed my lips tight and felt my nostrils flare. I was saying too much.

“Okay,” Grant said easily, leaning back in his chair. A moment of taut silence followed as those charcoal eyes flickered over my face. In them I saw curiosity, but not menace. I wondered if a boy like him could ever understand what it was like to be me. To know what it was like to view high school as something you needed to survive. Because that was all it was to me, a series of days to get through, boxes on a calendar to be crossed off. I had come to Lambertville with a plan: I would keep my head down and keep quiet. I would graduate. I would go to college as far from the South as I could. I would live.

“For the record”—Grant rubbed the back of his neck—“I told Parker this would go better if he came by himself. But he's my buddy, you know? So I had to try. He's a horse's ass, though, and you probably think I am too now.”

“I don't,” I said. I started to put my things away and realized my hands were shaking. I believed he was earnest, or at least I wanted to, but my fear had been carved into me over years and years, and it wasn't going to be reasoned with or ignored. “It would have gone the same way if he'd come himself. I—I just can't.”

A look crossed Grant's face I couldn't quite read. He slipped his hands in his pockets and stood. “Well, it was very nice meeting you, Amanda.”

“You too,” I said. My cheeks felt warm.

Grant gave me a small wave and walked away. He stopped after a few steps and turned.

“What book is that?” he said, nodding to the table.

“
Sandman
,” I said, putting a hand over it protectively. “It's a comic book.”

“Is it good?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Cool,” Grant said, waving again and turning to leave. My hands stopped shaking and my breathing slowed, but for some reason I was afraid to consider, my heart wouldn't stop racing.

 

3

Art class came last on Mondays and Tuesdays, and met in the music building at the edge of the school grounds. Outside, the withering heat hit me swiftly, my skin like shrink-wrap under a blow dryer.

“Around back,” a female voice called as I reached the shed-sized wooden building. I followed it, finding a girl alone in the grass. Oval sunglasses shielded her eyes and bright-red lipstick contrasted with her pale skin. Dark bristles grew on a third of her head while the other two-thirds sported a thick, wavy halo of hair.

“Art class?” she said. I nodded and looked around uneasily. She propped herself up on her elbows. “Teacher's in Nashville. Her son fucked up his hand in a car accident.”

“Oh God.”

“Right? He's a musician too. Was a musician. Hey, it's hot as shit out here and you look like you're about to have a heart attack. Why don't you sit? Name's Bee, by the way.”

“Shouldn't we go to the office?”

“Jesus, no,” she said quickly. “They won't hire a sub. They won't hire a new teacher. They'll put my fat ass in PE and move all the art funding to the athletic department like they do with everything. I'm gonna milk this shit for everything it's worth.”

I nodded weakly and sat. The girl flopped back down with her arms spread wide.

“So you're the new girl?”

“That obvious?” I said, pulling my knees close.

“Word gets around.” Sweat glistened on her arms and legs, her face pointed up at the sky.