“You like being upsy-down?”

Another Country 5
by Erin Halfelven

I got onto Aviation Boulevard and followed it out to the side street where we lived in a tract full of ranch-style homes built in the 1950s. The lots were bigger than more modern areas of town, with deep backyards and detached garages.

It was barely noon, and Mom wouldn’t expect me home for hours. If I showed my face, I could expect her to find some chore for me to do, so I turned left on Harmony instead of right and headed for the playground around my old elementary school. That’s where I had met Josh, back in the fourth grade. Maybe not the best thing to come to mind.

I parked my bike under a grove of the standard eucalyptus trees, wrapping my chain around a volunteer growing up from the older tree’s roots and already fifteen feet high with a trunk at least five inches thick. The smell in the grove had that mediciney tang and I thought again of koala bears, wondering if they really did smell like coughdrops like I had heard.

I had things to think about more important than imaginary medicine bears. What was happening to me? Was I really turning gay? Or was something weirder happening to me? Bored with ordinary news, sometimes Mom picked up one of the tabloid newspapers in the supermarket. Publications like Weekly Weird World had stories about Bigfoot, Elvis sightings and alien abductions featured on the cover, but inside were smaller reports about odd things happening to ordinary people.

A frequent reoccurring story involved some unsuspecting teenager suddenly changing sex. There was always some medical reason given, but I had never bought into such stuff any more than I believed in batboys or ancient reptile civilizations. Was something so strange happening to me? I made a face. Maybe being gay was not the worst thing that could happen.

I guess everyone wonders at some time what it would be like to be the other sex, but it’s always seemed to me like another country with border guards and strange customs. I was a boy, and girls didn’t even speak the same language. You can’t talk to them about basketball or cars; what they want to discuss is usually about clothes or the crush they have on some boy band singer.

I peeled some of the papery bark off a eucalyptus and crumbled it into strings and shreds in my fingers, making a face as I thought about girls. Josh had a girlfriend, Mallory Jesperson, a perfect example of the foreignness of the gender.

Mallory had a head full of reddish curls and the latest gossip about celebrities, including the British royals and other people who had not the slightest relevance to her own life. She had opinions about fashion trends in Paris and Milan and an encyclopedic knowledge of brands of mascara.

I made another face, thinking about her. She had curly brown hair with red highlights and eyes that were either blue, or gray, or green, unknown for sure because she had contacts. She wore colorful blouses over tight jeans or sometimes wraparound skirts. She was slender and probably the best-looking girl in sophomore class. Josh seldom took his eyes off her if she was anywhere around.

But even Josh didn’t seem to be able to carry on a conversation with her. She and I had never really got along. If she didn’t ignore me, she hit me with little verbal barbs that Josh never seemed to notice. One of her recurring topics was my height, which was kind of weird since, unless she was wearing heels, we were both about five-foot-three, with neither of us weighing more than a hundred pounds.

I stayed under the trees for a while, watching a group of kids playing softball on the diamond in the far corner of the field. Closer to the buildings on that side were the gym bars and other fixed playground equipment, and no one was using those, so eventually, I wandered in that direction.

Ten minutes later, I was hanging from the high bar by my knees, and looking at the world from a different point of view. I wasn’t sure it was helping.

Just the sight of Josh’s…uh…member had pushed me out of my own feeling of being myself. Then Chud stuck his fat fingers into the problem. Then Gary….

“Whatcha doing?” someone asked.

I looked around. A girl, maybe eight or ten, stood at one post supporting the bars, looking up at me with what might be the stick of a Tootsie Pop in her mouth.

“Just hanging around,” I said, knowing that I would probably get a smile from her.

More than that, a giggle. “You like being upsy-down?”

I revised her estimated age downward. “Sometimes,” I said.

She wore a short pink dress that looked like she might have been attending a kiddie birthday party. “How do you even get up there like that?” she asked, leaning her head sideways and moving the stick from one corner of her mouth to the other.

“It’s not hard. I’ve been doing it for years.”

“Could you show me how?”

“Not unless your parents say it’s okay. You could get hurt if you fall.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “‘Sides, I’m wearing a skirt,” she noted. She stepped sideways then a step back, and took what surely was a Tootsie Pop out of her mouth with one hand while tugging on the skirt with the other.

I was getting a crick in my neck trying to look at her, so I reached up and grabbed the bar, did a flip and landed on my feet.

“Neat!” she exclaimed, waving the Tootsie Pop at me.

I sort of squinched my eyes at her. I’d landed a bit harder than I intended on the compacted dirt and clay under the monkey bars. Harder than some of the rocks in the local desert.

She laughed at my expression, I guess. “Good thing you weren’t wearing a skirt,” she said. “It woulda flown up over your head.”

“I don’t wear skirts,” I told her. “I’m a boy.”

“Nuh-uh!” she laughed. “You got little boobies like my sisters, and boys don’t got boobies.”

I glanced down at my chest. The t-shirt cloth Chud had twisted still lay oddly, emphasizing whatever I had there.

“If you’re trying to make people think you’re a boy, it’s not working,” the little girl observed. “Maybe if you wore two shirts to hide your boobies.” She added a really obnoxious giggle to the advice.

I rolled my eyes at her instead of strangling her because there was nowhere to hide a body on a school playground. Then I bounced on my toes a bit to stretch myself out and headed over to retrieve my bike.

The little girl followed me. “I’m Elf. What’s your name?”

Elf? Who names their kid Elf? “I’m Bobby,” I said. And immediately regretted it. But I’d been known by that name when I attended school there.

She crowed. “I knew it! Bobbie is a girl’s name!”

I ignored her, got on my bike and made my escape.

Maybe I could sneak into the house without Mom finding carrots for me to peel or weeds to pull up. Two shirts? Did I really need to do that?