her name is lindsey, but she makes everyone call her nathan

photo by Ted Schuetz

This morning I drove Jamie and her friend Renee around the neighbourhood so that they could put up signs advertising their yard sale. The title is taken from something that Jamie said, but the rest is fiction.

♥ ♥ ♥


Someone was doing something to the house next door, and it woke her much earlier than she'd planned. She lay there listening to the scraping, buzzing and pounding while she came fully awake. She shifted under the weight of the clean sheets and blankets (bless her mother, who still believed in Spring Cleaning, and who had hung her bedding out the day before, while she was at school) and sighed because the heat from her sleeping body had created a delicious cacoon.

She didn't want to leave it, but threw aside the heavy comforter anyway. Still nude, she walked into her private bathroom and sat down to pee. In the next few moments her hands were washed and her teeth brushed, and she stood in front of the full length mirror, perusing her body while the tub filled with steamy water.

She had perfect breasts, which seemed ridiculous and incredibly ironic, considering her other problems. Problems that hadn't really been realized until she was sixteen and trying to have sex with the first boy she ever loved. Such pain! She didn't panic at first, because didn't every girl experience some modicum of pain at the start? As time went on, she knew it was something more and her doctor confirmed it. Now several years later, and she was trying to decide which way to go.

She could stay a woman, but actual intercourse was going to be an issue throughout her entire life. The surgeons had said (over and over) that reconstructive surgery could only do so much. There would always be pain, but she loved men. She adored her breasts, and the thought of removing them panicked her. She reached up and cupped them both, admiring how full they'd become just in the last year. Apparently college was good for them, and if she'd gained the freshman fifteen, so be it.

Of course, the only other option was to become male.

Apparently she had some evidence of male sexual organs, although she'd never truly felt "male", unless you counted the fierce competitive nature she'd shown during basketball season. And volleyball. Okay, track too. But who was to say that was a male thing anyway?

Sighing, she slipped into the tub and put the matter out of her mind. If anything was going to happen, it wasn't going to be for (at least) another semester. Just for today, she was going to stay Lindsey.

Just for today she wasn't going to worry.