Being Emily by Rachel Gold Page B

world—until it was gone and she found herself teetering at the edge of the unknown.
    Underneath her initial disgust, and all that questioning and discomfort lay simple fear. Well, she could handle fear.
    She went into her bedroom and pulled out her journal. She spent so much time on the computer she knew her mom would look for a journal there, so she kept hers in physical form and hid it among her books.
    She opened it to a clean page and wrote out her fears:
    What if Chris goes through all of this and he’s wrong but he can never go back again?
    What if I can’t be attracted to him through this and we split up?
    What if the rest of the school finds out?
    What if tonight was a warning and God doesn’t accept transsexuals?
    If I keep loving him, what am I?

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
     
    Though I generally liked the man, I avoided Dad as often as I could, because the older I got, the more likely he was to clap me on the shoulder and start a sentence with “Son.” Anything that started that way wasn’t going to end well. Nevertheless, he caught up with me on Friday morning, clapped me on the shoulder of sweater number three and said, “Son, I’ve got something you’re going to like.”
    “What, Dad?” I asked, feeling like a poorly cast character in Leave it to Beaver.
    “It’s a beauty,” he said, which meant either a car or truck. “A 1976 Ford Bronco. The seller’s driving it out from the Cities Saturday morning. I thought you’d work on it with me.”
    Okay, guilty confession, I do think cars are cool. I’m willing to give that up if it prevents my entry into the world of official girlhood, but for the time being it’s saved my butt with my Dad more often than I can count.
    “Sweet,” I said, letting some actual emotion into my voice. “I’m taking Claire to the city at one, but I’m around all morning.”
    He beamed and smacked my shoulder a couple more times, then sauntered off to work. When my dad was working, he was generally a happy man. The few times in life he’d been out of work were miserable for all of us.
    I grabbed a few slices of bread and hightailed it out the door before Mom could appear and grill me about Dr. No again. I cruised through the school day, buoyed up by the thought of Saturday afternoon. Claire and I missed each other in the halls, but this was the time of year she started to get busy with all the clubs so I didn’t worry about it.
    I ran aground abruptly in psych class. Mr. Cooper handed out our assignments. The guys booed, and I forgot to join in because my mouth was hanging open while my heart threatened to leap up my throat in a mixture of excitement and panic. The assignment said, “Pretend you wake up tomorrow morning the opposite sex. Write a four hundred word essay about your experiences.”
    “Gross,” the guy in front of me said.
    “Neanderthal,” Jessica said back to him. She turned to me and batted her eyelashes. “You wouldn’t be a jerk about being a girl, would you?”
    /run: emergency avoidance procedure
    System Failure
    I stared at her blankly. “Uh,” I said.
    “If I were a guy, I’d show some of the guys around here how to dress,” she said, clinching the fact that she’d make a terrible guy.
    “Yeah,” I said. “Funny.” There was no emotion in my voice and I could hear that it was missing, but I couldn’t do a thing about it.
    “It’s not bad being a girl,” she said, putting her hand on my forearm. She was flirting, of all things.
    “Sure,” I said and stood up as the bell rang.
    “Jeez,” she said. “You guys are all alike. You’re afraid of anything the least bit feminine.”
    “Sure,” I said again and bolted. The walls were a blur closing in around my head.
    An assignment to pretend we were the opposite sex, who comes up with something like that? And how was I supposed to do it? My body was fading rapidly from a solid to an invisible membrane so thin that if anything brushed against me I’d split open. I would have to