Parrotfish
Why was everybody freaking out about it? It was my life.
    Gail was looking at me, confused. “What’s your mother talking about?”
    “Aunt Gail, I’m transgendered, okay?” I was pretty sure a nurse would know what that meant. “I’m a male, a boy. And I want people to call me Grady, not Angela.”
    “Oh,” she said, looking back and forth from me to Mom. “Well, wow.”
    “Yeah, wow,” Mom said sarcastically. “Big wow. So, every time you think you’re having a hard time with that little baby, just remember this is the easy part. Someday he’ll be a teenager and all hell will break loose.”
    “Thanks, Mom,” I said quietly. “Thanks for your support. I’m so happy to know that you think of me as a big terrible problem!”
    And of course after that I made a fast getaway to my room, punctuating my remarks with the obligatory door slam. I was glad I didn’t have to stick around and hear how shocked Aunt Gail was, how she never suspected, and all the rest. I wanted this first part to be over. I wanted Grady to be a real person, for people to know him . I wanted to start life over again.
    I got the hot-water bottle from the bathroom I shared with Laura and filled it until it bulged. Then I crawled under the covers, hugging that rubber gut-heater as if it were my baby.
     
    Around three o’clock, as I was staring at my Global History book, pretending to read, Mom knocked on my door.
    “I’m sorry I got so mad before,” she said. “I’m working on how to feel about all this, but it’s hard.”
    “I know,” I said. “It’s okay.”
    “Well, it’s not okay, but I really came up here to tell you you have a phone call.”
    “I do?” Eve was the only person who ever called me, and she’d been AWOL for a week or more. Unlike most other high-school kids, I had no cell phone and no need for one. Mom handed me the cordless phone from downstairs.
    “Hello?”
    “Hey, where did you go? You weren’t in TV Production.”
    “Is this Sebastian?”
    “Yeah. I was going to tell you about my Environmental Science project, remember? Stoplight parrotfish?”
    Save me.
     
           SEBASTIAN: You wanna come over and see my aquarium? I have two red warthog google-fish and three blue wiggle-whammies! Gosh, fish are so cool!
           ME: Sure, Sebastian. I hope your fish have one of those little castles to swim in and out of. That’s really exciting.
           SEBASTIAN: Oh, yeah. I have a castle in the tank—and a mirror in there too, so they can watch themselves going about their busy lives.
           ME: And so they get their lipstick on straight.
           SEBASTIAN: Ha! Good one!
           ME: What do fish do all day, besides eat and poop?
           SEBASTIAN: Well, eating and pooping do take up a lot of their time. And dying. Sometimes they do that too.
           ME: The old belly-up routine, huh?
           SEBASTIAN: Yeah. Oops, just lost another one!
     
    “Are you listening to me?” Sebastian said. “The Smithsonian website says that in lots of fish, gender ambiguity is natural—especially in reef fish. I picked the stoplight parrotfish for my report because they’re so pretty, and because they change color when they go from female to male—from dull gray to bright green with a yellow stripe. Isn’t that awesome?”
    He had my attention now. “What? Fish change from female to male?”
    “That’s what I’m telling you. Stoplight parrotfish do. Actually all parrotfish do. And the two-banded anemonefish can change either way. Slipper limpets can change back and forth, and so can hamlets and small-eyed goby and water fleas and slime mold—”
    “Fleas and slime mold. Wow, I’m in goodcompany. Does the hamlet fish carry around a skull and ponder suicide?”
    Sebastian was quiet for a second. “I thought you’d be interested in this, but it doesn’t seem like you are.”
    I sighed. “It’s just . . . I don’t know what this has to do with me,

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