by Chris Jones

Chapter 2: Consequence

   Michael kinda loses it when he's surprised. I had already gone into shock by that point. I don't remember thinking about it, but apparently I kept Michael from punching the doctor.

   There were more tests. I was in tests for the rest of the day, as a matter of fact. I did blood tests, sonograms, more X-rays. It turns out that I wasn't quite as healthy as the doctor thought I was. I had a significant hormone imbalance, which was probably why my... parts... had not grown correctly.

   Hell, I don't even want to *think* 'labia'. I'm a guy, dammit!

   It was probably also the reason that I had relatively flat hips... for a fourteen year old girl... and a flat chest.

   Those weren't the only things wrong with me. The fact that I didn't piss right was almost certainly the reason I had been so sick growing up and why I had so many infections. It was almost certainly why I had pneumonia a couple years ago. Also, while I had a uterus and ovaries, I didn't have fallopian tubes... which meant I couldn't get pregnant.

   Part of me was angry at the revelation. Another part of me was overjoyed. Of course I couldn't get pregnant! Guys weren't supposed to get pregnant!

   The doctor was quick to point out that artificial insemination might be an option if I decided later that I wanted to have a baby.

   That was the point at which I quit listening to him.

   When I got home, I realized that I had scribbled down some notes. I also had a couple booklets the doctor gave me. One was about plastic surgery. The other was about sex-change operations. I couldn't look at either of them at first. They were both pretty gruesome.

   Michael was... I'm not sure. Outraged. Angry. I'm not sure if he was mad at the doctor or mad at me. I know that I was pretty upset.

   According to the ultra-sound examination I endured later that afternoon, under the swollen skin of my featureless crotch, I had a complete set of girls' body parts. At least the doctor said I did. Because of that, I had three options. I could continue on as I was... a genderless, sexless doll in every sense of the word. The doctor said he didn't advise that. Some of my infections were caused by not being able to urinate correctly. I would only have more health problems down the line if I left it like that.

   The second option was more radical. I could undergo a gender reassignment procedure. A sex change, to bring my body in line with what I thought it was supposed to be. I'd get my penis implant, but I'd also have to undergo surgery to correct the rest of my body. Fat would be removed from my hips and what little breast tissue I did have would be sliced out of my chest.

   After just a few minutes of thought, this seemed like the best course of action. Even if there was incredible pain involved, I was a man! I would make my body behave in the manner it was supposed to!

   I skipped making dinner because Michael wouldn't come out of his room and I didn't really care to eat while I was reading the booklet about sex-change surgery.

   Like I said, the procedures are... at best.. gruesome. You end up with horrible scars all over your abdomen and chest. They can be eventually removed with more plastic surgery, but not for a while. I would never be able to father children and I would have to take hormone supplements for the rest of my life. Worse, what a sex change could not change was your bone structure. Your face wouldn't look any different. If you were a bulky man, you would probably still look like a bulky man. If you had a masculine-looking face with a prominent chin, you were looking at a whole new round of plastic surgery if you wanted to 'pass'. If you were a petite woman, you were never, ever going to be a big, burly man.

   Most of the pictures in the pamphlet were of men who had a sex change to make them female. One or two of them really looked like women. The rest all looked like guys in drag. None of the pictures of people who were originally women really looked very masculine. Mostly they looked like girls in guys' clothes with beards and moustaches.

   After looking at the pamphlet for a couple hours, I happened to glance at an old family photo sitting on a shelf in my bedroom, taken right after I was born. I thought a little about the way my mom looked in the photo. She was short and had long, reddish-orange hair that was about the same shade as mine. She was slender... petite. She was just barely five feet tall. I had managed five-one, but it had been a while since I last grew any at all. I kept waiting for another growth spurt to put me on par with the rest of the guys in my class, some of whom were pushing six feet or taller.

   For the first time, I realized it wasn't coming.

   I was my mother's son, alright. Or her daughter.

   "Fuck."

* * *

   A few hours later, Michael came out of his room. His face was still dark, but he wore a look of grim determination.

   I had given up the pamphlet and was sitting on couch. I was glued to HBO. hoping the martial-arts action flick I was watching would take my mind off everything I had been through.

   "I called the lawyer who handed Mom and Dad's estate," he said, sitting down next to me.

   I grimaced. I didn't like dealing with that sort of thing.

   "Oh."

   "Yeah, I asked him about filing a malpractice lawsuit against Doctor Herbert."

   "You didn't tell him what was wrong with me, did you?" I asked in dread. I didn't want *anyone* to know who didn't have to.

   "No, I just said that he misdiagnosed a birth defect," Michael answered defensively. "He said we have to prove to the court what harm that would cause you."

   "Wonderful," I commented darkly.

   On screen, Jet Li was being beat up by a bunch of white guys with batons. White guys are always the bad guys in these movies. Americans are the lackies and French guys are the bosses.

   "So, you wanna go talk to him tomorrow after s--"

   "No." I cut him off.

   "Gabe, we gotta do somethin'. You can't just let that freak get away with what he did!"

   The evil French guy had the cute Asian girl and had a knife to her throat. With Asian-produced movies like this, you didn't know how things were going to turn out. I've seen a lot of them where the girlfriend or the main character gets killed before the end of the movie. If it were an American movie, Jet Li would get up and kick the French Guy's ass, but it might not work that way here. My stomach tightened up when I saw the guy dig the knife into her throat.

   "Gabe! This is wrong!" Michael said. "We've gotta fix it. We've gotta--"

   "I've gotta parade in front of a judge with my shorts around my knees. No thanks, Mike."

   French guy actually cut the girl's throat. Jet Li killed him with a face punch, and now he's trying to keep the girl from dying. He's running her to a hospital. Hail a cab, moron. Wave down a car.

   "Gabe--"

   "Have you called the insurance company yet?" I asked quietly.

   Jet Li got the girl to the hospital. She's in surgery. They never die if they get medical help. Doctors in movies are always flawed guys who are only perfect when it comes to the OR table. Even though she's been through eight kinds of hell and had her throat cut, she'll live. Jet Li will thank the doctor, the girl will be reunited with her family, and that will be the end of it.

   "They'll only cover plastic surgery if it's for reconstructive purposes," he answered, staring at the carpeting. "They don't cover sex-change operations."

   This time, on screen, the girl dies on the table. The doctor's beating on her chest, but her eyes are open -- movie death, if you watch action movies. Habeas Corpus. After a few more second, he declares her dead. Now he's gonna go tell Jet Li and Jet Li's gonna go kill a bunch more American thugs and the French guy's boss, who's probably a German guy.

   "Even if we win a malpractice case, it won't be for years," I said. "Those things drag on forever. Even then, the lawyer will take everything."

   "We'll take out a loan," He parried. "It'll be another payment, but we're doing okay now."

   "We can't afford it, Mike."

   "I'll take some overtime shifts answering phones in the support center, and you can get a part time job."

   "We can't afford a hundred thousand dollars worth of surgery, Mike! We can barely pay the rent and the car payment. How are we supposed to pay that kind of medical bill?"

   "We'll make it work," he declared. "Somehow."

   "Yeah, right," I answered.

   Yup. Jet Li kills the German guy, who's really a spy. After that he picks up the dead girl's little sister to take care of her. The credits roll. Next on HBO is 'Boys Don't Cry'.

   "What's that one about?" Michael asked, trying to change the subject.

   "It's about a girl who pretends to be a guy, only she's raped and murdered by the guys who find out she's really a girl," I told him.

   Michael's face turned green. He didn't watch too much of the movie.

* * *

   I should have stayed home from school the next day. I had a geography test, however, and my grades had been slipping a little. Regardless of what else I had lost, I still had my scholarship to Benson's. I didn't want to lose that on top of everything else.

   It was an orphans' scholarship established several decades ago, back when there really were orphanages. Now it's used to make sure that kids of dead alumni get into the school. While I wasn't strictly speaking an orphan, I was pretty close. I started out going to an AISD elementary school, but Michael put my name on the list when I was seven. Since there weren't any kids of dead alumni that year, I ended up getting it by default. I've been going to Benson's since third grade.

   What it meant was that despite the fact that Michael and I lived decidedly middle-class lives, I was the 'poor' kid. I didn't fit in very well, and I didn't have a lot of friends. At fourteen, a lot of the guys were starting to bulk up a lot, too. We had at least five or six guys who were more than six feet tall. Inevitably, the tallest, strongest guys in class were also the richest, the meanest, and the most likely to bully you for entertainment. The bullying was not hard to bear so long as I did my best to stay inconspicuous.

   Luckily for me, one of the largest guys in the class was one of my few friends.

   "So, what was goin' on yesterday?" Tony asked me.

   Anthony Fazzi was the son of a New Jersey businessman who came to Texas to make it big in the computer industry. He didn't quite make an empire, but he does run a profitable manufacturing plant. Tony has a big house near Benson's and he never wants for anything. Surprisingly, and it may be because he's the youngest son in a big Italian family, he's a very easy-going guy. He rarely finds reasons to use violence because he doesn't have to. He's six-foot-three, better than a foot taller than I am, and weighs 220, all of which is muscle. If you threaten Tony, you better have a few friends with you to back you up.

   "You found a hot little number that likes red-heads, right? Huh? You do the deed in that apartment of yours, Angelus?"

   He's also a complete and utter pervert.

   "Yeah, Tony. I took the day off yesterday because I got laid," I responded sarcastically. "No, I went to the doctor, dipshit."

   We were changing for gym. Tony had stripped down to his boxers before putting his sweats on. Again, it may be because he's from a big family or knows that half the girls in school are hot for him, but Tony has *no* self consciousness. I think he'd walk out naked if somebody dared him to. He'd even be cool about it afterwards.

   Me, I stripped out of my slacks and pulled my pants up before anyone might see my boxers. Of course you couldn't tell that I didn't have a dick if you weren't looking for it, but I didn't want to give anyone any ideas.

   "Me, if I had my own apartment," Tony said, "I'd have chicks up there all the time!"

   "Sure you would," I kibitzed, knowing that if Tony *was* seriously interested in having a girlfriend, he could walk out the doors of the school this afternoon with any girl he wanted to. I don't know if he just wasn't interested yet, busy with other stuff, or shy. My guess is that he was too hounded by his mother. Each of Tony's four older brothers had been 'stolen' from her by a 'No-good Texas Trailer-trash Tramp'. Of course, Mrs. Fazzi never actually used that phrase around her daughters-in-law, but she cautioned Tony constantly to avoid the kind women his brothers married-- tall, pretty blondes. I got the same treatment whenever I visited his house. 'Why can't you be more like Gabe, Anthony? You don't see him slobbering over some whore with more boobs than brains!"

   I always figured that my problem was that I was in the very serious situation of being shorter than any of the girls I was interested in.

   I realized, as I pulled my shirt off over my head, that I probably always would be, regardless. If what the doctor told me yesterday was true, I would *never* be able to be with a woman I liked.



   "What's up?" Tony asked me. "Earth to Angelus. Come in Angelus."

   "What?"

   "You're starin' off into the ozone. Coach Marone says five minutes."

   "Sorry, just thinking," I replied.

   "Thinkin' 'bout what? The doctor? Was she a hottie?" he asked. "Did she give you a hernia exam."

   "I wish," I said, standing there in front of him. "Doctor Grimes is this creepy old guy. He smells like sardines and tobacco."

   "Yeugh. He has a cute nurse, though, right?"

   "Edna the nurse is probably older than your mom," I replied.

   "Hey, Angelus said he wants to do Fazzi's mom!" someone yelled out across the room.

   I made a mental note of the person who had made the crack. No help for you in Algebra, bitch. When everybody comes around to copy off of my homework, he would get some 'special' answers..

   "My brother Ricky dated this nurse for a while," Tony went on, oblivious. "He picked her up in the grocery store of all places. Man, she was a hottie. She had hugest, most incredible--"

   "We ready in here, ladies?!" Coach Marone shouted into the locker room, silencing all other conversation.

   "Yeah, yeah," Tony griped, pulling his tee-shirt down over his bare chest. "What's up with you today, Angelus?" he asked.

   I swallowed hard and tried to do my best that I hadn't just realized what I had been doing. Me, a naked girl, flashing my chest in a room full of guys.

   Catching myself in a mirror I could see that my breasts were very slightly swollen and rounded when compared to those of the other guys. I would never have seen it if I wasn't looking for it-- obviously no one else did-- but what I had were, at least in part, breasts.

   Quickly, I pulled my own shirt down and hid my deformed body.

   How disgusting. How gross. How perverted.

   I ran to catch up with Tony. He was talking with Joey Blair, a guy who's almost a friend. He's usually pretty indifferent. Joey's really into rap music and R&B. He's not a poseur like the white guys who wear gang colors without knowing what they really mean, but he's not a bass-freak either like the idiots who drive around with stereo systems that give you cancer. Probably, he thinks that black girls are sexy.

   "So then the guy gets arrested, he's going to jail, and he never even sang the music in the first place," Joey told Tony.

   "Huh?" I asked, trying to figure out what they were talking about.

   "Sirius T.," Joey said.

   "The rapper? He shot a guy, right?" I vaguely remembered hearing something about it.

   Joey nodded.

   I don't stay up-to-date on the music and rap scene like Tony does, but I do hear a lot about it because I stay up on movie news.

   "Yeah, over some fake gang-banger shit with another rapper," Joey added. "It turns out that Sirius T. wasn't even a real rapper. He didn't write the lyrics and he was just lip-syncing at the concerts."

   "It's like Milli-Vanilli, except this guy doesn't have dreadlocks and a squeaky voice," Tony noted, grinning.

   "Milli-Vanilli didn't shoot somebody," I said. "So why did he shoot the guy."

   "His manager told him to. At least, that's what he said in the tiral. What a wannabe," Joey stated in disgust. "I don't think I have any respect at all for someone who pretends to be somethin' they ain't just so they look cool."

   His words hit me in a brick in the stomach.

   "What if he didn't know?" I said, weakly.

   "Oh, he knew. He wanted to run with the big boys, and did everything he got told to. The 'big boys' all think he's full of shit. Now he's a murderer and both him and his manager are gonna get their asses rammed in federal prison."

   "Harsh," Tony said, "but you don't shoot someone cause it's cool."

   "What if he really didn't know," I asked. "What if his manager lied to him? Told him that the other guy was gonna attack him," I said.

   "You know," Tony disagreed with me. "You know when someone's lying to you."

   I tried to keep from swallowing.

   "I was a little kid when my grandpa died," Joey said, his voice going kinda distant, "At the funeral, there was this black guy. It was funny, because my grandpa was the kinda good ol' boy who would always say 'nigger' if he could get away with it."

   "Black people don't do that at all," Tony noted sarcastically.

   "Well, Grandpa meant it," Joey countered. "He was a racist bastard and everyone knew it. I don't actually know if the man every actually attended a cross-burning, but I know for a fact that he had a white robe in his closet."

   "Creepy," I said, letting myself get carried away into the narrative of the story.

   "Anyway, my grandma asked this black guy who he was because she didn't know him. He wouldn't say at first, but after a while it came out that he was my dad's half brother. Uncle Louis."

   "I thought your grandpa was Klan member," Tony interjected. "When did he find time to settle down and have kids with a black lady?"

   "Oh, he didn't settle down," Joey explained. My grandpa raped Louis's mom back before he married my grandma."

   I felt a nasty little jolt of shock crawl up my spine when I heard what Joey was saying. I suspected that was what happened when he started talking about it, but it was still difficult to hear.

   "Turned out that he raped a lot of black girls," Joey continued. "He and his buddies did it for fun when they were teenagers. Louis didn't really hate him. He didn't want to laugh over the coffin or anything, but he was curious about what kind of people would treat someone like my grandfather as family. My grandmother pried it out of him. Louis didn't really want to say it, but she made him. You know what she said after he finally admitted it?"

   "Huh?" Tony asked.

   "She said, 'Well, Eustace always was a lying son of a bitch. I'm not surprised he lied about this.'"

   "Damn," I whistled. "Rough. Right on the day of the funeral."

   "Yeah, they were married fifty years and she threw away all his photos and stuff that night. She sold all his World War 2 gear at an auction and sent an anonymous money order to Louis's mom," Joey continued. "To the day, she acts like he was never alive. That's where lying gets you," he concluded.

   "Enough chatter, ladies!" Coach Monroe shouted as we walked out of the hallway and onto the athletics field behind the main school building. "Ten laps around the track!"

* * *

   Real life isn't like the movies. I wanted to ask Joey more about his grandfather and half-uncle, but I realized that he probably didn't know a lot more. There was no satisfying conclusion. No climax. Jet Li didn't get to go beat up the aging veterans who sit in the Donut Stop from six to ten every morning just because they were relics of a racist era. There's no restitution for the wronged. Uncle Louis probably works a suck job somewhere and will until he retires or dies and his mom probably spent the money she got on medication or medical bills since she's probably just as old as Joey's grandma.

   What he said, however, stuck. Liars don't prosper. They always get found out in the end. They always end up being punished for their sins. That's something that Michael's always stressed. He hasn't been a great father figure, but he's done his best and that's one of the lessons he's tried to teach me. In Joey's grandpa's case, it was after he died. His wife and kids forgot all about him. His grandkids will never remember the kind old man who gave them a twenty on their birthday. They'll remember the rapacious thug who brutalized black girls when he was a kid because all his friends were doing it too. His lies lost him everything he had done for his family. Everyone he knew regrets that he was ever alive.

   Ironic that I find out that I've been living a lie for nearly fifteen years, huh?

   "Dude, what's eating you?" Tony asked while I was pondering this in English class. "You've been a moody bitch all day."

   We were supposed to be watching a movie of the theatrical version of 'Othello', which we had just finished reading in class last week. The teacher was a deaf old bat, so she had the volume on the TV up so loud that it masked ten or eleven quiet conversations in the room.

   "Nothin'."

   "Bullshit. You've been acting like someone shot your dog since you came to school. It was the doctor, right? You found out something bad at the doctor."

   Tony isn't nearly so dumb as he tries to make people think.

   "Yeah, it's the doctor," I admitted quietly. I could feel my face and ears burning. In my pants, I could feel the fabric of my boxers slide across the blank flesh of my crotch... a permanent reminder of what I had learned about my body.

   "What is it? You sick again?"

   "I think I'm gonna have to have surgery," I stated quietly.

   "What kind of surgery?" he asked.

   "It's not like I'm dying or anything," I said.

   "What kind of surgery," Tony repeated. "Like open-heart surgery?"

   "It's... corrective," I said. "It's supposed to fix that's been wrong with me since I was born."

   "Like what?" Tony demanded.

   I refused to answer him, staring up at the old actors on the TV set.

   "It's a hernia, right?" Tony guessed.

   "Yeah," I lied. "It's a hernia. Like a hernia."

* * *

   When I got home from school, Michael was already there.

   "What're you doing home this early?" I asked.

   "Took the day off," My brother responded. He was still wearing the polo shirt with his company's logo on the sleeve, so I assumed he worked half the day and came home to meet me.

   "Can we afford that?"

   "I've got a few vacation days saved up," he told me. "I thought we'd go talk to a loan officer at the bank," he said. "For the surgery."

   "For a sex-change operation," I substituted.

   I could see Michael swallow, but he nodded. "After all, you're my little brother. I have to do what it takes to help you."

   For a second, I wanted to say 'Sure! Let's go!', check into the clinic right then and there and not come back out until my body had been cut, sawed, hacked, and re-plumbed like an episode of 'This Old House'.

   My strong point has always been math, however. The costs estimated in the pamphlet I read for the surgery were huge.

   "Most people borrow that kind of money for a house, Mike."

   "We'll make it work," he said.

   "We can't afford it," I told him, shaking my head.

   "We'll make it work."

   "Even if they bank would lend us the money, and they probably won't, it'd be another house payment for thirty fucking years, Mike. You got that much extra money in your paycheck? You gonna get a big raise anytime soon? Did we win the lottery while I wasn't paying attention."

   "We'll declare bankruptcy if we have to!" Mike growled. His face was shining and beads of perspiration were starting to come out on his head.

   It felt like there was this huge weight settling on my shoulders. I couldn't help but think about the images I had in my head... myself, male and powerful... tall and confident... strong... well hung. Then there were the images of the people in the booklet I read. They were doing the best they could with bodies that didn't work right. They all tried to look confident and happy for the pictures, but you could see the thread of self-hate in their eyes.

   I already hated my body.

   "I'm having the surgery."

   "Great!" he exclaimed.

   "Not the sex-change. The corrective surgery," I stated. I stared at the floor so I didn't have to see Mike's face crashing.

   "Fine," he replied.

   He turned around and stepped back into his room.

   It wasn't fine. It wasn't going to be fine.

   Still, it was all I could do.

- - -

~to be continued...