In One Person

"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 bag, but the fag word was in the category of hate. (Like the nigger word and the kike word, the fag word could get you in trouble.)

"Fucking football players," I heard Gee say; it was something Herm Hoyt used to say. (Wrestlers are rather contemptuous about how tough football players think they are.) That young transgender-in-progress must have been reading my mind!

"What did you say, you little fag?" the big kid said. He took a cheap shot at Gee--he smacked the heel of his hand into the fourteen-year-old's face. It must have hurt her, but I saw that Gee wasn't going to back down; her nose was starting to bleed when I stepped between them.

"That's enough," I said to the big kid, but he bumped me with his chest. I saw the right hook coming, and took the punch on my left forearm--the way Jim Somebody had shown me, down that fourth-floor hall in the boxing room at the NYAC. The football player was a little surprised when I reached up and caught the back of his neck in a collar-tie. He pushed back against me, hard; he was a heavy kid, and he leaned all his weight on me--just what you want your opponent to do, if you have a halfway-decent duck-under.

The dining-hall floor was a lot harder than a wrestling mat, and the big kid landed awkwardly, with all his weight (and most of mine) on one shoulder. I was pretty sure he'd separated that shoulder, or he had broken his collarbone--or both. At the time, he was just lying on the floor, trying not to move that shoulder or his upper arm.

"Fucking football players," Gee repeated, this time to the whole table of them. They could see her nose was bleeding more.

"For the fourth time, what's her name?" I asked the big kid lying on the floor.

"Gee," the douche-bag, tampon guy said. It turned out that he was a PG--a nineteen-year-old postgraduate who'd been admitted to Favorite River to play football. Either the separated shoulder or the broken collarbone would cause him to miss the rest of the football season. The academy didn't expel him for the fag word, but he was put on probation. (Both Gee and I had hoped that her nose was broken, but it wasn't.) The PG would be thrown out of school the following spring for using the dyke word, in reference to a girl who wouldn't sleep with him.

When I agreed to teach part-time at Favorite River, I said I would do so only on the condition that the academy make an effort to educate new students, especially the older PGs, on the subject of the liberal culture at Favorite River--I meant, of course, in regard to our acceptance of sexual diversity.

But there in the dining hall, on that September day in 2007, I didn't have anything more of an educative nature to say to the football players.

My new protegee, Gee, however, had more to say to those jocks, who were still sitting at their table. "I'm going to become a girl," she told them bravely. "One day, I'll be Georgia. But, for now, I'm just Gee, and you can see me as Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest."

"Perhaps it will be a winter-term play," I cautioned the football players, not that I expected any of them to come see it. I just thought that I might need that long to get the kids ready; all the students in Richard's Shakespeare class were freshmen. I would open auditions to the entire school, but I feared that the kids who would be most interested in the play were (like Gee) only freshmen.

"There's one more thing," my protegee said to the football players. Her nose was streaming blood, but I could tell Gee was happy about that. "Mr. A. is not an old gay guy--he's an old bi guy. You got that?"

I was impressed that the football players nodded. Well, okay, not the big one on the dining-hall floor; he was just lying there, not moving. I only regret that Miss Frost and Coach Hoyt didn't see me hit that duck-under. If I do say so myself, it was a pretty good duck-under--my one move.

Chapter 14

TEACHER

All that had happened three years ago, when Gee was just a freshman. You should have seen Gee at the start of her senior year, in the fall term of 2010--at seventeen, that girl was a knockout. Gee would turn eighteen her senior year; she would graduate, on schedule, with the Class of 2011. All I'm saying is, you should have seen her when she was a senior. Mrs. Hadley and Richard were right: Gee was special.

That fall term of 2010, we were in rehearsals for what Richard called "the fall Shakespeare." We would be performing Romeo and Juliet in that most edgy time--the brief bit of school that remains between the Thanksgiving break and Christmas vacation.

As a teacher, I can tell you that's a terrible time: The kids are woefully distracted, they have exams, they have papers due--and, to make it worse, the fall sports have been replaced by the winter ones. There is much that's new, but a lot that's old; everyone has a cough, and tempers are short.

The Drama Club at Favorite River had last put on Romeo and Juliet in the winter of '85, which was twenty-five years ago. I still remembered what Larry had said to Richard about casting a boy as Juliet. (Larry thought Shakespeare would have loved the idea!) But Richard had asked, "Where do I find a boy with the balls to play Juliet?" Not even Lawrence Upton could find an answer for that.

Now I knew a boy with the balls to play Juliet. I had Gee, and--as a girl--Gee was just about perfect. At seventeen, Gee still actually had balls, too. She'd begun the extensive psychological examinations--the counseling and psychotherapy--necessary for young people who are serious about gender reassignment. I don't believe that her beard had yet been removed by the process of electrolysis; Gee may not have been old enough for electrolysis, but I don't really know. I do know that, with her parents' and her doctor's approval, Gee was receiving injections of female hormones; if she stayed committed to her sex change, she would have to continue to take those hormones for the rest of her life. (I had no doubt that Gee, soon to be Georgia, Montgomery would stay committed.) What was it Elaine once said, about the possibility of Kittredge playin

g Juliet? It wouldn't have worked, we agreed. "Juliet is nothing if she's not sincere," Elaine had said.

Boy, did I ever have a Juliet who was sincere! Gee had always had balls, but now she had breasts--small but very pretty ones--and her hair had acquired a new luster. My, how her eyelashes had grown! Gee's skin had become softer, and the acne was altogether gone; her hips had spread, though she'd actually lost weight since her freshman year--her hips were already womanly, if not yet curvaceous.