Another Country -20-

“The doctor says it isn’t really that unusual,” Mom commented

With Mom in the room, Dr. Hitchcock had me take off my shirt to show him my…breasts. Somehow, my face didn’t catch fire. There was a nurse in the room too, but I couldn’t look at her.

“Now I’m just going to touch you to palpate for any nodules or anything else unusual,” he said.

Unusual? A boy with breasts wasn’t unusual? He did touch me, gently, but I’d rather not think about that or try to remember.

“Put your shirt back on, Bobby,” he said after what seemed like hours but was probably less than two minutes. I still had my shirt in my hand, so that didn’t take long. Mom had suggested I wear the chemise, too, but I had left it at home on the advice of the part of my brain that didn’t live on Mars.

Dr. Hitch ordered some blood tests. The nurse turned vampire and filled two tiny vials with my blood, then Mom and I moved to his office while he wrote things on pads.

“The doctor says it isn’t really that unusual,” Mom commented.

“He’s not the one who’s turning into a girl,” I said. My breath sounded funny in my ears.

“You’re not…” Mom began but stopped. She smiled at me, I’m not sure why, but that actually helped me feel a bit more normal.

Dr. Hitchcock returned and settled behind his desk. He looked at me, solemn as a toad, and said, “It’s called gynecomastia.” He paused, testing the word for flavor. I didn’t like it.

He continued, “Greek, I think, for ‘womanly breasts’. It’s caused by the cocktail of hormones produced when young men are going through puberty. Your body is producing a flood of hormones, male hormones and female hormones, too.”

He put his hands on his desk, palms down. “These mixtures can be unstable but normally achieve balance after a year or two.” That hit with a bit of a shock. A year or two? “We’ll know more when the lab work is done, if there’s anything out of the ordinary going on, that is.”

Mom just looked at him.

He made a throat-clearing sound. “Shouldn’t be more than a few days.”

Mom didn’t forget what I’d asked her to ask him for me. “Bobby needs a script from you to skip P.E.”

“Oh,” said Dr. Hitch. “He’s perfectly all right to play sports or…”

“He’s already been bullied twice over this,” Mom interrupted.

Twice? Oh, she probably means Chud twisting my nipples. I winced at the memory, but that hadn’t been bullying, just overenthusiastic teasing. Chud was a friend and teammate, still, yeah, it hadn’t been pleasant.

Seeing the determination in Mom’s eyes, Dr. Hitch quickly filled out a short letter to the school. Mom and I read it over, and it ought to do what we had talked about without letting any felines out of confinement.

After that, we left the doctor’s office. Mom didn’t take the turn toward our end of town but instead headed downtown. “I need to see Nadine to get her signature on a form,” she explained.

Nadine Merrit was Josh’s mom and owned several businesses on a block of Main Street. They were all connected, and Josh and his mom lived in an apartment above Merrit Bridal, Lingerie and Dry Cleaners. Josh would be at school now, but my experience in the upstairs hallway where I had seen a naked Josh on Saturday morning came back in a rush, like the memory of falling off a cliff.

Mom just looked at me. “Josh will be at school,” she said.

“I know,” I uttered, then cleared my throat and said it again. “I know, it’s not even noon yet.” Normally, Josh and I, along with thirty other kids, would be listening to Mr. Kaiser drone on about matrix math or polynomial extraction, whatever that was. Meanwhile, lunch was approaching, both hypothetically and right where I sat in Mom’s car.

“You can come in with me,” she offered.

I shrugged, knowing that Mrs. Merrit did not keep cheeseburgers in a drawer underneath the till.

“There are some beautiful wedding gowns to look at,” she said.

“Mom!” I couldn’t tell if that was teasing or not. I stopped thinking about food, though.

“Just saying,” she continued. “Nadine and I might be a little while filling out her forms for the state.”

“Mmphm,” I grunted. Mom implying I might want to look at wedding dresses still stung.

We parked on the street, and I reflected that diagonally across the nearest corner was Papagallos, a taco stand that sold crispy hard-shell tacos filled with al pastor—roast pork, farmer-style. My mouth watered at the thought.

I’d intended to wait in the car, however long it took, but the thought of tacos put my brain into neutral, and I ended up following Mom into the triple-headed Merrit Emporium, averting my eyes from the slender mannikin beside the door that looked way too much like me—same not-really-blonde hair color even.

Josh had once taken a Polaroid of me standing beside it, both of us wearing cut-off jeans and t-shirts. Disturbing. I wondered if he still had the photo, but couldn’t decide whether I hoped he did—or that he didn’t.

Josh’s mom acknowledged my presence right away, reminding me, “Josh’s in school, dear.”

“I know, ma’am,” I answered politely without rolling my eyes even slightly.

Mom and Mrs. Merrit immediately got down to serious nattering while Olivia Muñoz twiddled fingers at me from the dry-cleaning counter where she was working at the far end of the store. I smiled back at her to let her know I’d seen her wave.

Olivia is probably thirty, still looking like another teenager, and I would have been happy to go talk to her. But she had a customer, a fussy old man with a torn pair of pants that needed mending as well as cleaning. Not the pants he was wearing, another pair.

Mom and Mrs. Merrit continued smiting numbers. I stopped listening to their conversation about inventory audits and missing receipts when my ears began to bleed, choosing to actually wander the aisles, yes, looking at bridal gowns. How could girls even walk in some of these frou-frou outfits, I wondered, careful not to step on any dangling cabooses.

I could feel my face turning red, embarrassed by thoughts I firmly refused to entertain, when I heard Mom summon me with a word. “Bobby,” she said and something in the way she spoke my name set off alarms in my fingers, toes and the pit of my stomach.

I carefully extracted myself from the sea of whiteness and approached a pair of middle-aged women, Mom and Nadine, who looked as if they had something fun in mind. Fun for them but almost certainly not for me.