George Read online

  “What is Super Special Surprise, anyway?”

  “My dad fries up a bunch of leftovers. Occasionally, it’s awesome. Usually, it’s so-so. And sometimes, it’s so bad we have to order pizza.”

  George said good-bye to Kelly and walked her bike up the cracked path along the house. “One-two-three—” Kelly called out from the basement window.

  “ZOOT!” George yelled into the early evening air. She strapped on her helmet and began the familiar ride home. Houses passed by in a blur while Charlotte’s words continued to roll through her mind.

  At home, Mom was staring at the open pantry cabinet, her long, dark-brown hair back in its usual ponytail. She wore a polo shirt and blue jeans—the same clothes she wore under her white lab coat at work every day. She preferred jeans to skirts and didn’t wear makeup. She said it wasn’t good for your skin, and, besides, women were beautiful enough the way they were. Indeed, Mom was beautiful. She was tall, with a kind, genuine smile, and had the same bright-green eyes as George.

  “Hey, Gee-gee,” she said as she shut the pantry door.

  When George was little and couldn’t say her name properly, she used to call herself Gee-gee. Mom still called her that, even though Scott said that it sounded like a girl’s name. George secretly thought the same thing.

  “Have you seen your brother?” Mom asked as she rustled through the fridge for dinner options.

  “He went to Randy’s house.”

  “Hot dogs and beans it is!”

  Scott hated baked beans, but both George and her mother loved them.

  While Mom made dinner, George headed upstairs to take a bath. She took off her shirt while the tub filled, waiting until the last possible moment to take off her pants and underwear. She immersed her body in the warm water and tried not to think about what was between her legs, but there it was, bobbing in front of her. She washed her hair with lots of shampoo so that the suds would cover the surface of the water. She scrubbed her body, stood with a splash, and dried off with her fuzzy blue towel. Then she wrapped the towel around her torso, up by her armpits the way girls do, and ran a small black comb through her hair. She brushed it forward and stared at her pale, freckled face in the mirror before combing it back into its regular part down the middle.

  In her room, George changed into a pair of flannel pajamas covered in tiny penguins wearing red bow ties. Mom called that dinner was ready, and George went downstairs to eat.

  Mom already sat at the kitchen table, getting ready to take a bite of her hot dog, which was covered in mustard and relish. She had toasted her bun but had left George’s soft and cool, just the way she liked it.

  “Thanks, Mom,” said George. She squirted some ketchup onto her hot dog and took a steaming, juicy bite.

  They ate in silence at first. Scott was usually the one who talked the most at dinner. But a question was burning in George’s mind. Over and over it played.

  “Mom?” she said after she swallowed the last bite of her hot dog. She barely realized she had spoken aloud.

  “What’s up, Gee-gee?”

  George stopped. It was such a short, little question, but she couldn’t make her mouth form the sounds.

  Mom, what if I’m a girl?

  George had seen an interview on television a few months ago with a beautiful woman named Tina. She had golden-brown skin, thick hair with blond highlights, and long, sparkling fingernails. The interviewer said that Tina had been born a boy, then asked her whether she’d had the surgery. The woman replied that she was a transgender woman and that what she had between her legs was nobody’s business but hers and her boyfriend’s.

  So George knew it could be done. A boy could become a girl. She had since read on the Internet that you could take girl hormones that would change your body, and you could get a bunch of different surgeries if you wanted them and had the money. This was called transitioning. You could even start before you were eighteen with pills called androgen blockers that stopped the boy hormones already inside you from turning your body into a man’s. But for that, you needed your parents’ permission.

  “George, whatever it is, you can tell me.” Mom took George’s hand in one of her own, and covered it with the other. “Whatever happens in your life, you can share it, and I will love you. You will always be my little boy, and that will never change. Even when you grow up to be an old man, I will still love you as my son.”

  George opened her lips, but there were no words in her mouth and only one thought in her brain: No! George knew that Mom was trying to help. But George didn’t have a normal problem. She wasn’t scared of snakes. She hadn’t failed a math test. She was a girl, and no one knew it.

  “Mom, could I have some chocolate milk?”

  “Oh, Gee-gee, of course.” She went to the fridge.

  In the weeks after Dad had left the house, Mom had given George a glass of chocolate milk every night before bed. Neither of them would say anything. Neither of them had anything to say. But these were some of George’s favorite memories, just sitting there, being with Mom, knowing she would never leave.

  George wouldn’t finish her chocolate milk until she was ready for Mom to kiss her good night. Then Mom would take the nearly empty glass and turn it over above her mouth for one last drop. George always made sure to leave that last thick sip.

  Now Mom came back to the table with a full glass of chocolate milk, frothy from a fresh stirring. The sweetness filled George’s mouth. She focused her eyes firmly on the creamy bubbles, now resting halfway down the glass.

  She stared at the foam for a minute, and then downed the second half. She felt more than tasted it, coldness running down her throat. Then she handed the glass to Mom, who tipped it over her tongue for that final drop.

  The sweetness of the chocolate milk had coated George’s tongue, covering the words sitting on its tip. Someday, somehow, George would have to tell Mom that she was a girl. But this was not that day.

  And as for how, she had no idea.

  The students of Room 205 tromped up the cold, dark stone stairs. Their footfalls echoed heavily off the tile walls. Two handrails ran along either side of the wall, one a foot above the other. They had been painted red years ago but had chipped over time, revealing layers of orange and green, and patches of bare steel underneath. The girls walked up with handrails on their right. The boys had handrails on their left, and they traveled the long way around the platform halfway up the flight.

  Bulletin boards on the second floor were lined with construction-paper Wilburs and Charlottes that the younger grades had decorated. Principal Maldonado stood at the far end of the hallway. She watched without a word or a smile, making sure the classes filed quietly into their rooms, where teachers sat with lesson plans on their cluttered desks and assignments on the whiteboards.

  In Room 205, the morning journal assignment was written in neat script on the board. It read If you could be a color, what color would you want to be? Explain why in no less than 5 lines. The class settled into the rhythm of the morning, and scratches of pencils in notebooks replaced the metallic scrapes of chairs and coat zippers.

  Once the line at the pencil sharpener had faded and most students were finished writing, Ms. Udell called on a few volunteers to read their journal entries. Janelle said she would be fuchsia because it was bright and dark at the same time. Chris wanted to be orange because it was the only color that was a food.

  George wanted to be pink so that people would know she was a girl, but she hadn’t written that down. Instead, she’d said she wanted to be purple, like the sky at sunrise. She didn’t raise her hand to read her journal aloud. She never did. Ms. Udell said that it was okay for journals to be private.

  At the end of journal time, Ms. Udell addressed the class. “I know this is a big day that many of you have been waiting for—perhaps even rehearsing for.” Murmurs filled the room, as well as a few giggles from the girls. George felt a warm wave pass over her as she remembered reading Charlotte’s lines.
/>   “I am happy to announce that I will be holding tryouts at one thirty,” Ms. Udell continued. The class groaned. That was hours away. “Anyone who is caught looking at his or her lines instead of paying attention today, as well as anyone who asks me questions about the audition before one thirty this afternoon”—Ms. Udell paused for effect—“will be deemed unable to handle the responsibility of performing.”

  She nodded her head firmly, indicating that she had finished with the topic. The class waded through a morning of math, reading, and science, wishing impatiently for the afternoon to arrive.

  “Who eats green beans with spaghetti?” Kelly winced as she dropped her orange tray onto the long table. The school lunchroom was in the basement, and the grated windows near the tops of the tile walls let in little light. Most of the illumination in the large room came from long fluorescent bulbs that ran along the high ceiling.

  George was already sitting down, poking at mushy strands of vegetable with her spork. She leaned down to sniff them, but couldn’t smell anything other than the faint scent of spoiled milk that had seeped deep into the lunch table and couldn’t be removed with all the bleach in the world.

  “Who eats green beans with anything?” George asked, crinkling her nose.

  “I happen to love green beans, you know. When my dad sautés them in garlic with just a touch of olive oil …” Kelly brought her fingers to her mouth and kissed them to the air. “Mmm-wa! Bon appétit! But this stuff?” She picked up a droopy bean between her thumb and forefinger. “It’s limper than the spaghetti! Which is overdone too! It’s not al dente, which is how you’re supposed to cook pasta. Al dente is Italian for ‘to the tooth’ and it means it’s still a little hard in the center, so you have to actually chew it.” Kelly picked up a few strands of spaghetti on her spork and wiggled them in the air. “This stuff is not al dente. I can tell you that much.”

  George shrugged and spun her spork to gather up a mouthful of spaghetti. The lunchroom was already noisy, and getting louder as the rest of the third- through fifth-grade classes filed through the lunch lines and filled the long tables.

  “So do you want to practice?” Kelly asked.

  “Not here.” George nodded at the crowded table. She didn’t want anyone else in the class to hear her reciting Charlotte’s lines.

  “You know they’ll find out when you get the part,” Kelly pointed out.

  “That’s different … if I get it.” George wasn’t sure exactly how it would be different, so she tried not to think about it.

  “Whatever. We’ll practice during recess.”

  Kelly snuck her camera out of her pocket to take pictures of the limp beans and spaghetti until Mrs. Fields, the lunchtime volunteer, scrunched her face in Kelly’s direction and told her to put the camera away.

  “Artists are never appreciated at lunchtime,” Kelly mumbled as she stuffed her camera into her pocket.

  Outside, the smell of pine trees wafted in from the yards of the houses that bordered the back of the school. The air was filled with the buzz of a hundred students at recess, punctuated by yells, laughter, and, occasionally, Mrs. Fields’s piercing whistle. She was a short, wrinkly prune of a woman with poofy gray hair who disapproved of everything and walked with a hunched back that made her look even shorter and wrinklier than she already was.

  Maddy, Emma, and several other girls were gathered in a circle, gossiping about their favorite television show, Not-So-Plain Jane, and whether their parents would let them go next month to see Jane Plane, star of the show, live in concert.

  Jeff had a circle of kids around him too, hoping to get a turn to see his new phone. Mrs. Fields would confiscate it if she saw it, so the boys around him huddled in close. Jeff didn’t let any of them hold it, but he allowed a chosen few to touch the screen.

  Kelly and George found a quiet spot at the far end of the fence to practice. Kelly pulled a copy of the script page out of her pocket. George knew her lines and didn’t need to look at the sheet once as she spoke, but her heart thumped heavily and she spoke too quickly, swallowing the final words of each line. She glanced behind her whenever Kelly spoke, to make sure no one was watching, and missed half her cues.

  Kelly frowned when they were done. “That wasn’t your best performance.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you want to run through it again?”

  “No!” A few nearby third graders turned their heads in the direction of George’s shout. She lowered her voice. “I mean, no. It’s too open. I’ll be all right when I’m alone with Ms. Udell.”

  “I still don’t see what the big deal is,” Kelly said. “So you want to play a girl onstage. It’s not like you want to be a girl.”

  George’s face paled. The air grew hot around her.

  “What’s wrong?” Kelly asked.

  George opened her mouth, but there were no words, so she closed it again. She started to giggle nervously. George’s charged laughter filled the air, and soon, Kelly was chuckling too, though she didn’t know why. George’s laughter grew frantic, and she felt light-headed. Her knees buckled and she dropped to the ground. Not wanting to feel left out, Kelly fell to the black pavement as well.

  The kids in the yard ignored George and Kelly, but Mrs. Fields didn’t.

  “Off the ground!” she commanded. “You don’t know what animals have urinated there!”

  Kelly jumped up and extended a hand to George, who took it and let Kelly pull her to her feet.

  “I hope an animal urinates on her head,” Kelly whispered to George. Then she asked, “So … what were we laughing about?”

  George stared at her best friend. “Are you serious?”

  “Of course I’m serious,” Kelly said, the bright sun shining on her earnest face. “I’m always serious. Except, you know, when I’m not serious. But right now I’m serious.”

  “But you said it!” George didn’t know whether to be relieved or upset that Kelly didn’t see that she was a girl. The high pitch in her voice revealed her anxiety.

  “All I said was …” Kelly paused. “What did I say, George? I mean, I’ve always thought of myself as a funny person, but I didn’t think I was such a good comedian that I could say something that funny without knowing it.”

  George opened her mouth, but as with Mom, she couldn’t say the only words that blared through her brain: I’m a girl. She wished the bell ending recess would ring.

  “Are you nervous about the audition?” Kelly asked. “Don’t be. My dad says that men performing in non-traditional gender roles is good for feminism. He says it’s important, as an artist, to be in touch with his feminine side.”

  Last summer, George had seen that phrase in one of her own dad’s magazines, an article called 10 WAYS TO GET IN TOUCH WITH YOUR FEMININE SIDE. George had been excited to read it, but the article had been disappointing. It talked about taking time to feel your emotions, which George did too much already. Worse, the article kept reminding the reader that finding your feminine side made you more of a man.

  “Can we not talk about it anymore?” George asked. Somehow, it was worse that Kelly thought it was no big deal that George wanted to be Charlotte in the play than if she had said it was a terrible idea. It was as if Kelly didn’t see that anything was wrong at all.

  “Criminy, you’re like a safe, you are!”

  “What?”

  Kelly shrugged. “I don’t know. My dad says it.”

  “Kelly.” George took Kelly by the shoulders, ignored the tickle in her stomach, and spoke very seriously. “In case you hadn’t noticed, your dad is still weird.”

  Deep inside, George worried that she was even weirder.

  After lunch, the class plodded through a spelling pretest, followed by a science work sheet on simple machines, but all George could think about was trying out for Charlotte. Maybe Kelly was right and Ms. Udell would be so proud of George for being herself that she would give her the part. The minute hand of the clock was a terribly slow lever, pushing the hour
hand imperceptibly forward.

  Finally, Mrs. Fields’s wrinkled knuckles rapped on the heavy glass window of the classroom door. Ms. Udell welcomed her in. She would be watching the class while Ms. Udell auditioned students in the hallway. Outside of the lunchroom, she smelled like Necco candy wafers.

  “I congratulate you all for your patience.” Ms. Udell looked directly at Kelly and winked. “The time has finally come to see how you fare as actors and actresses. Everyone who auditions will be given a part.”

  Ms. Udell would be auditioning students from both Room 205 and Mr. Jackson’s fourth-grade class in Room 207. Half of the roles would go to students from each class. Ms. Udell pushed her clunky wooden chair toward the classroom door.

  “Today, you are each reading Charlotte’s or Wilbur’s lines, but I am also casting for Fern, Templeton, and the other characters. If you do not audition today, you will not be cast in the play. If you’d rather not be onstage, don’t worry. Mr. Jackson will need quality hands on the crew.”

  “I was really worried,” Jeff muttered.

  “Mrs. Fields.” Ms. Udell turned her attention to the small woman, who had pulled over a spare chair and settled herself quite comfortably at Ms. Udell’s desk. “Thank you again for staying late. I do appreciate it.”

  “Anything for the theater.”

  “Please do let me know if there’s anyone you find is not mature enough to participate in our production. I’m sure I can find other accommodations for them.”

  “The kitchen staff can always use a young set of scrubbin’ hands,” Mrs. Fields declared.

  Ms. Udell returned her attention to her class and waved a stack of colored index cards. “If you are interested in trying out, I will give you a card with a number on it. The number will dictate the order of your audition. Girls first, then boys. I do not expect you to have the lines memorized, but I do expect you to deliver them clearly and with enthusiasm. You will read only your part. I will read the lines of the other characters. While you wait, you may silently review your part. If you do not wish to practice, you may begin your homework assignment.”