The Best Boy Ever Made Page 4

  Chapter Three

  I watched Sam jog up the road and turn down the lane. It was cool and clear but it looked like it would be a beautiful Sunday. Sam was dressed in baggy shorts and a long T-shirt. She always insisted on wearing a sports bra that was almost two sizes too small. I teased her about it, sometimes, but suddenly I understood what she was going for. She was dressed like a boy, as always.

  I, on the other hand, was wearing a more appropriately sized and flattering running bra, a sleeveless T and Lyrica shorts. I was stretching out as she approached.

  She always had the same inscrutable expression when she ran, except today. Today she had a look of total terror in her eyes. She had the same expression last night when we talked. It made me incredibly sad. Did she fear I would reject her?

  “Sam!” I snapped. She started. I reached out and grabbed her by the shirt. “You are my best friend. You have been my best friend since we were five. Nothing is ever going to change that, nothing.”

  She looked relieved but uncertain.

  “Not even this,” I repeated.

  She blew out a sigh and a sly smile crept on her face, the old Sam again. “Thanks.”

  “Everything ready?” I asked.

  She nodded, “And you?”

  “Crockpot is on,” I replied. It was our Sunday tradition. You might have thought by what we have said about 4-H and the goats that we didn't take track serious. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

  I had learned this great trick from one of my cousins. She had made it to Luther College on a cross country scholarship. She taught me a carb-loading trick that me and Sam adopted.

  Most people don't realize this but there are three ways that your body stores energy. Most people know all about the first two. Some energy in the form of carbohydrates as glucose, or blood sugar. Some energy is stored as fat. Finally, some is stored in the muscles as something called glycogen.

  Glycogen is the key to long term energy, the kind of energy you need when you run fast for a long time. You need good glycogen stores. That's what carb loading is all about. You have to trick the body into storing more of the carbohydrates you eat as glycogen. You do that by depleting the glycogen you have and eating extra carbohydrates.

  So every Sunday for about three weeks before track or cross country, and about three weeks into season, six weeks in all we go for a long run once a week. Sam drives the route first and hides bottles of gatorade every three or four miles. We'll run to the first set of bottles, down them, and run on. We'll put in a long easy twelve miles that way.

  By the time we are back, our glycogen stores will be completely depleted. I will be shaking like a leaf as we drink our final bottles of Gatorade and cool down. Then it's time for phase two. Inside I've got a crockpot going with two packages of Rice A Roni and two lean turkey breasts. We'd cool down and go inside and tuck in. We'd each eat an entire Rice A Roni package and a turkey breast.

  Britney and Mom would be grossed out by how much we'd be eating, but I didn't care. I knew I had burned that many calories. And our bodies would be hyped and ready to replace all that glycogen and then some. By the time we hit peak running season we'd have so much stored glycogen in our bodies that we could run all day. Last fall we won the last three meets, placing first and second and then we had turned around and jogged alongside the boys JV team and out ran most of them.

  “So we're officially still cool?” Sam said.

  “Yeah,” I replied, “and I don't want to hear about not finishing the 4-H project together again, either.”

  “Cool,” Sam said. She turned and bolted off down the road with me, once again, right behind her.

  #

  “No!” I declared, shutting the Macbook with a snap. I stood and paced across my bedroom. I looked back at the offending computer and pointed my finger. “No,” I said one more time.

  Okay, I told myself, calm down. It was going to be okay.

  I really didn't know what I had expected when I decided to look up about transsexual people on the web, but it had not been that. I had started typing in trans, and it had offered an auto-finish. Like a fool I had even clicked the “I feel lucky” button. I had not been lucky.

  Don't get me wrong, I know there's a lot of unsavory stuff on the Internet. I don't go looking for it, but I am not a complete prude either. I know what guys look like in the nude. I know what girls look like. I had just never seen that particular combination of guy/girl on one person before.

  I sat staring at the now closed Macbook. That was not what Sam had in mind, I was sure. Sam could talk about an animal's anatomy in the most graphic sort of detail without a hint of a smirk, but mention a girl's breast and she blushed about three shades. Mention her breasts and, wow. She didn't even refer to them as her breasts. She would gesture at her chest and call them “those floppy things.” In our joint lingo, developed through years of knowing each other, I called her breasts “floppies” as well. In hindsight I should have seen this whole I want to be a boy thing coming.

  Well, whatever she was thinking, I knew she was serious. I was going to have to get on board, and that meant I was going to have to learn what she meant.

  I opened the laptop again and reopened Safari. It asked if I wanted to resume the previous session. “No,” I said again, pointing at the screen. I shook my finger back and forth, “no.”

  I sighed and opened a new session. I went to google again, but this time I was going to be clearer. I typed in "transgender" instead of "transsexuals." I searched my mind for the terms she had used and, for good measure added a comma and the term female to male.

  This looked a lot more hopeful. The site names seemed more along the lines of educational stuff. I checked the actual web addresses, too. I was not going to click on the first site offered again. The addresses didn't sound like porn sites so I figured I was safe. Finally, shielding my eyes just in case, I clicked on a link that offered “profiles of successful transmen.”

  It was mostly text, so I figured I was safe looking at it full on. I scrolled down. The first name on the list was Jamison Green and the picture stopped me cold.

  It was a head shot, that's all. It was so... ordinary. That could have been any middle aged man. He had short hair with a receding hairline and a well trimmed beard. There was nothing at all in the picture that indicated he was, or had been, a female.

  I skimmed the biographies but mostly I looked at the pictures. It was the same everywhere. A few had boyish faces that betrayed the barest hint that they had been born women, but they were all quite clearly men.

  None of the them were over muscled, either. I had a steroid induced version of Sam circulating in my brain ever since she mentioned taking testosterone. Only one person on that first list was buff and he appeared to be a weightlifter.

  I jumped back to my first search page and began to scroll down through the links. I felt a lot better knowing that transmen looked pretty much like any other men but those guys were way old. I figured I had several years to come back and read up on them. Right now I wanted to see and hear about transmen that were a little closer to Sam's age.

  I found that, too. I found several articles, interviews and even some YouTube clips. I was struck again by how ordinary they all seemed. They looked like normal guys. They talked like normal guys. They acted like normal guys.

  On the surface, their stories were so different. They lived in different parts of the country, they had different ambitions in life, but there was a certain sameness running through them all. It wasn't always obvious, but it was there. It was there in the way they talked about themselves, their bodies, their lives. And it was pure Sam.

  There was something else that was tickling at my consciousness, bothering me. I kept seeing it in the site names and the organization titles. It was an acronym, a set of letters that I hadn't seen until recently but was becoming more and more acquainted with. It was LGBT.

  I had seen it throughout my research on gay marria
ge. They all used that acronym. I hadn't paid much attention at the time. I knew what the first two letters were for, L for Lesbian and G for Gay. That was all that really mattered for my purposes. I had a vague guess that the B probably stood for Bisexual.

  Now I was learning that the T stood for Transgender. Transgender as in Sam. As in I-think-I-should-have-been-a-boy. As in I-couldn't-possibly-marry-a-boy-but-I-am-not-a-lesbian Sam. I was willing to play along if that made Sam happy, but I couldn't say I quite understood. Wanting to be a boy wasn't the same thing as being a boy, whatever she said.

  Some of the guys online had talked about that a little bit. They had mentioned MRI studies of transgendered peoples' brains confirming that they were, in fact, boys. At least their brains were. I had bookmarked some links and had a bunch more reading and research to do.

  But if that were the case, why were they part of the gay community? I couldn't quite understand that. It was like they said one thing here and did another there. Maybe Sam would know. I would have to ask her a ton more questions.

  That would have to wait. My brain was getting more than a little fried staring at the screen so long and I still had a few evening chores before bed. Besides, I had something else bothering me. My gay marriage debate. I was torn. The connection between transgender and the gay community confirmed what I had feared, I was taking a stand that would hurt Sam. I hated doing that.

  She might think she's a boy. She might take testosterone injections to make herself look like a boy. Someday she might have surgery to remove her “floppies.” Her birth certificate would say she's a girl, however, and any marriage license would require that. I thought about my key winning point; Sam would have the right to marry, as long as she married a guy. Was that freedom for Sam? Or just another trap?

  #

  “I am glad you could stay,” Mrs. Oleson, Sam's mom was saying.

  I nodded. “Me, too.” I wasn't just being polite, either. I could smell the pot roast simmering on the stove in the heavy cast iron crock, the mixture of meat and vegetables making my stomach growl in anticipation. I thought about the frozen pot pie sitting at home, Mom off with the church ladies, Dad busy in the field and Britney off with her friends. What would you rather have, a frozen pot pie by yourself or a home made pot roast with a warm loving family?

  “Oh Sam,” Mrs. Oleson said, “tell you what, since we've got company why don't you go downstairs and pull the last of the rhubarb crumble out of the freezer, there's a good girl.”

  Sam made a face, which I assume to be at the “good girl” but went to basement.

  Mr. Oleson watched her go and then cleared his throat. I wondered why he would seem nervous in his own house, but I soon found out.

  “So I hear she finally told you.”

  He didn't have to explain what. “Yeah.” I nodded.

  “And you're still here.”

  “I will always be here,” I said. “She's my best friend, no matter what.”

  “That's a relief. I don't know what she'd do without you. I was worried about how she'd take it if you balked.”

  “Never,” I repeated, though I did have my doubts. I was reading a little bit every night and learning tons, but I was still bothered by this “not gay but part of the LGBT” thing. I could accept that Sam was born, through no fault of her own, with a body that was female and due to some quirk of biochemistry, a brain that was male.

  But if she was part of the LGBT community wouldn't she want to go live in some LGBT friendly place like San Francisco? That would be almost as hard as losing her. What if she became part of one of those communities and we drifted apart?

  I had such a clear idea of how things were supposed to be and she was always such a big part of that. Not having her down the road when I needed would be hard. But what if we just weren't friends anymore? That would be terrible. Or what if we were like some of Mom's friends that had moved away? They would talk on the phone about all sort of inane things because they had stopped having anything in common long ago.

  “Are you doing okay?” Mr. Oleson asked, noticing that I had drifted off into my own world.

  “Yeah, I mean it's a shock in a way,” I said, “but in other ways I always kind of knew.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  Sam returned, stopping the conversation. She set the rhubarb crumble on the counter and returned to her seat opposite me. She looked back and forth, as though guessing conversation had been about her.

  I said, "Sam's stuck by me through tons of stuff. I'll stick by her too." She gave me a sheepish grin.

  "You are a remarkable young lady, Ms. Alecia Mueller," Mr. Oleson said.

  "That she is," Sam threw in. "That she is."

  We ate the rest of the meal in silence, though I think it was a more comfortable silence.

  #

  "Faster! Faster!" Coach Terrance was shouting as we raced passed, her hands waving in the air, "Come on! You can do it, I know you can!" She kept right on shouting at our retreating backs as we raced past.

  She was yelling at me. I was neck and neck with a girl from Earlham, a few districts over. I had almost turned my ankle and fell on the last corner. Now I was in the struggle of my life to regain second place. This was the final lap and I had to dig deep to find the energy to push faster, to force myself alongside and then ahead of the girl.

  I knew Coach Terrance was shouting encouragement at me because Sam sure didn't need it. She was four paces ahead of the two of us and oblivious to the drama taking place a few feet behind her. She was always like that when she ran. She didn't know what place she was in (usually first). She didn't hear the coach or the crowd. I could tell her about any given race after the fact and it was like telling someone who hadn't been at the meet.

  When you run you are always either running from something, or to something. You have to dig deep and find something that motivates you to run that much faster, push yourself that much harder. I know people who run for their health, they're running from that fat slob they'll become if they stop. A lot of people are running away from stress, pain, fear whatever.

  What could make Sam run like she did? Was she running from or to? I was starting to find out. She was running from the girl that everyone wanted her to be, wasn't she? Or was she running towards something? I thought of Sam running towards pride flags and San Francisco. I faltered and the girl passed me on the back lap. There was less than half a straight away and the curve between us and the finish line, a few paltry hundred yards and she was pulling ahead.

  Then it hit me, it wasn't that girl I was racing. It was Sam. As always, I was chasing Sam. I had been racing for weeks now, trying to learn about this whole transgender thing, trying to get on board with it, because if I didn't she would run away and be gone. I pulled up on the girl in the curve, the crowd was going wild. Coach Terrance was jumping up and down. Her screams had turned incoherent and her clipboard was on the ground several feet away. I spared her the barest glance and turned my attention forward again. I was gunning for Sam and running for my life. She might run away from this school, this town, this life, but I would be damned if she would run away from me.

  My lungs were screaming and I was terrified that I would fall. I pushed on and for the first time, ever, we crossed the finish line abreast. It was a photo finish and I wasn't even sure which one of us won.

  As our pace dropped, her head shook and she looked over at me. She gave me a quizzical look as she found me, not behind her, but alongside her. Then she broke into the biggest grin ever. "Did we win?" She glanced back at the other girls.

  I nodded, too winded to talk. My lungs slowly stopped burning just as my legs started to burn. I would pay for that push later today, but right then I didn't care.

  We were halfway around our victory lap and already I could see the team spilling out onto the track to greet us when we reached back around to the finish line again. Coach Terrance had shouted so hard she was bent over double, like she had run the mi
le herself.

  I spared a glance at the scoreboard. "Hey, Sam," I panted.

  "Yeah?"

  "Tied the school record," I said, "not bad for a couple of juniors, huh?"

  #

  "So how was your session yesterday?" I asked. We had jogged a couple of easy laps around the school while the men's heat was run. Now we were walking another couple of laps to get our muscles cooled down before we sat down, otherwise we'd get wicked bad leg cramps. It ain't fun.

  "It was okay," Sam replied.

  If Sam had thought she could drop the transgender bomb on me and leave it at that, she soon found out otherwise. She should have known better. In the last few weeks I had been pumping her for details and I was now in the know about her therapy, and all that stuff.

  "Actually," she said, "Ms. Henderson has an assignment for me." It's hard for Sam to talk about herself, but she's learning. I think it helps that I won't let up until I know everything, anyway.

  "An assignment?" I echoed, "like homework?"

  "Yeah, sort of."

  "I didn't know therapists could give homework."

  "They can do whatever they want," Sam said. "They can have you locked in the looney bin if that's what they want." They nearly had too. Sam told me that towards the end of her first session there had been some discussion of that. She had to promise not to try to hurt herself again, and had to make the same promise every session. It scared me a little to think that someone would want to put Sam in the looney bin.

  "So what sort of homework is it? Some sort of workbook on being transgender?" I laughed.

  "No, it's not that kind of assignment." Sam replied, "It's kind of awkward. She, umm, wants me to go to a gay bar."

  I stopped in my tracks. "What?"

  "She wants me to go to this bar in Des Moines."

  "Wait! Your therapist is making you go to a bar, a gay bar?"

  "Well it's not like that. They have this teen night, or something."