In One Person

told, when the “cracks” belonged to the boys. Both the girls’ bare midriffs and the boys’ plumbers’ cracks were hotly debated rules, which were constantly under revision in infinitesimal ways. They were sexually discriminatory rules, the students said; girls’ midriffs and boys’ cracks were being singled out as “bad.”

Here I’d been expecting Martha and Richard’s “special” student to be some cutting-edge hermaphrodite—a kind of alluring-to-everyone melange of reproductive organs, a he or a she as sexually beguiling as the mythological combination of a nymph and a satyr in a Fellini film—but there in Richard’s office, slouched on that dog bed of a couch, was a sloppily dressed, slightly overweight boy with a brightly inflamed pimple on his neck and only the spottiest evidence of a prepubescent beard. That zit was almost as angry-looking as the boy himself. When he saw me, his eyes narrowed—either in resentment or due to the effort he was making to scrutinize me more closely.

“Hi, I’m Bill Abbott,” I said to the boy.

“This is George—” Mrs. Hadley started to say.

“Georgia,” the boy quickly corrected her. “I’m Georgia Montgomery—the kids call me Gee.”

“Gee,” I repeated.

“Gee will do for now,” the boy said, “but I’m going to be Georgia. This isn’t my body,” he said angrily. “I’m not what you see. I’m becoming someone else.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I came to this school because you went here,” the boy told me.

“Gee was in school in California,” Richard started to explain.

“I thought there might be other transgender kids here,” Gee told me, “but there aren’t—nobody who’s out, anyway.”

“His parents—” Mrs. Hadley tried to tell me.

“Her parents,” Gee corrected Martha.

“Gee’s parents are very liberal,” Martha said to me. “They support you, don’t they?” Mrs. Hadley asked the boy—or the girl-in-progress, if that’s who he or she was.

“My parents are liberal, and they do support me,” Gee said, “but my parents are also afraid of me—they say ‘yes’ to everything, like my coming all the way to Vermont.”

“I see,” I said.

“I’ve read all your books,” Gee told me. “You’re pretty angry, aren’t you? You’re pretty pessimistic, anyway. You don’t see all the sexual intolerance ending anytime soon, do you?” the boy asked me.

“I write fiction,” I cautioned him. “I’m not necessarily as pessimistic about real life as I am when I make up a story.”

“You seem pretty angry,” the boy insisted.

“We should leave these two alone, Richard,” Mrs. Hadley said.

“Yes, yes—you’re on your own, Bill,” Richard said, patting me on the back. “Ask Bill to tell you about a transsexual he knew, Gee,” Richard said to the girl-in-progress, as he was leaving.

“Transgender,” Gee corrected Richard.

“Not to me,” I told the kid. “I know the language changes; I know I’m an old man, and out of date. But the person I knew was a transsexual to me. At that time, that’s who she was. I say ‘transsexual.’ If you want to hear the story, you’ll just have to get used to that. Don’t correct my language,” I told the kid. He just sat there on that smelly couch, staring at me. “I’m a liberal, too,” I told him, “but I don’t say ‘yes’ to everything.”

“We’re reading The Tempest in Richard’s class,” Gee said—apropos of nothing, or so I thought. “It’s too bad we can’t put it onstage,” the boy added, “but Richard has assigned us parts to read in class. I’m Caliban—I’m the monster, naturally.”

“I was Ariel once,” I told him. “I saw my grandfather do Caliban onstage; he played Caliban as a woman,” I said to the girl-in-progress.

“Really?” the kid asked me; he smiled for the first time, and I could suddenly see it. He had a pretty girl’s smile; it was hidden in the boy’s unformed face, and further concealed by his sloppy boy’s body, but I could see the her in him. “Tell me about the transgender you knew,” the kid told me.

“Transsexual,” I said.

“Okay—please tell me about her,” Gee asked me.

“It’s a long story, Gee—I was in love with her,” I told him—I told her, I should say.

“Okay,” she repeated.

Later that day, we went together to the dining hall. The kid was only fourteen, and she was famished. “You see that jock over there?” Gee asked me; I couldn’t see which jock Gee meant, because there was a whole table of them—football players, from the look of them. I just nodded.

“He calls me Tampon, or sometimes just George—not Gee. Needless to say, never Georgia,” the kid said, smiling.

“Tampon is pretty terrible,” I told the girl.

“Actually, I prefer it to George,” Gee told me. “You know, Mr. A., you could probably direct The Tempest, couldn’t you—if you wanted to? That way, we could put Shakespeare onstage.”

No one had ever called me Mr. A.; I must have liked it. I’d already decided that if Gee wanted to be a girl this badly, she had to be one. I wanted to direct The Tempest, too.

“Hey, Tampon!” someone called.

“Let’s have a word with the football players,” I told Gee. We went over to their table; they instantly stopped eating. They saw the tragic-looking mess of a boy—the transgender wannabe, as they probably thought of him—and they saw me, a sixty-five-year-old man, whom they might have mistaken for a faculty member (I soon would be). After all, I looked way too old to be Gee’s father.

“This is Gee—that’s her name. Remember it,” I said to them. They didn’t respond. “Which of you called Gee ‘Tampon’?” I asked them; there was no response to my question, either. (Fucking bullies; most of them are cowards.)

“If someone mistakes you for a tampon, Gee—whose fault is it, if you don’t speak up about it?” I asked the girl, who still looked like a boy.

“That would be my fault,” Gee said.

“What’s her name?” I asked the football players.

All but one of them called out, “Gee!” The one who hadn’t spoken, the biggest one, was eating again; he was looking at his food, not at me, when I spoke to him.

“What’s her name?” I asked again; he pointed to his mouth, which was full.

“I’ll wait,” I told him.

“He’s not on the faculty,” the big football player said to his teammates, when he’d swallowed his food. “He’s just a writer who lives in town. He’s some old gay guy who lives here, and he went to school here. He can’t tell us what to do—he’s not on the faculty.”

“What’s her name?” I asked him.

“Douche Bag?” the football player asked me; he was smiling now—so were the other football players.

“You see why I’m ‘pretty angry,’ as you say, Gee?” I asked the fourteen-year-old. “Is this the guy who calls you Tampon?”

“Yes—that’s him,” Gee said.

The football player, the one who knew who I was, had stood up from the table; he was a very big kid, maybe four inches taller than I am, and easily twenty or thirty pounds heavier.

“Get lost, you old fag,” the big kid said to me. I thought it would be better if I could get him to say the fag word to Gee. I knew I would have the fucker then; the dress code may have relaxed at Favorite River, but there were other rules in place—rules that didn’t exist when I’d been a student. You couldn’t get thrown out of Favorite River for saying tampon or douche