Chapter 2

The sun was rising just like it did every day with prompt and explosive force from the low-lying hills to the east of their town. There were odd streaks of red in the sky that looked like the trail of some huge bomber jets heading out to a mission of total destruction.

Thankfully, that was only a speculation and not the true fact.

It was only the rapidly changing of seasons and the cold air was chasing the warm air out of the naturally formed basin that took thousands of years to develop.

Julie Costello looked at her carefully stacked luggage sitting forlornly in the hallway right by the front door. She could have lifted it all herself and put it in the family Chevy Silverado without any assistance from her family but she knew they all wanted to be a part of her departure and she was not the sort of person that would deprive others of their need to show that they were supportive of her decision to accept the scholarship offered for her sports participation on the State University field and track team. Her specialty was the Cross-County Run that was the most grueling event in the competition at State level.

She had a restless night burdened with a secret that she had not passed along to any other living soul because it was so singularly ridiculous she could almost laugh at her comical predicament.

Julie was accustomed to getting up early each morning and doing a two hour practice run before the sun started to peek over the horizon. That was why she was so familiar with how the sunrises are supposed to look and why they sometimes looked different but for reasons that were quite normal and made a lot of sense when you sat down and thought about it.

So many of those false UFO reports were simple weather balloons and the darting lights were reflections of an optical illusion that bore no danger to mankind. She was a bit of scientific nerd if the truth be known because her personality was based entirely on facts and on the truth above all else.

That was the terrible reason why she could not share her secret with anyone else because it would attest to the fact that she was about to become the world’s greatest fibber bending the truth in ways that she had never done ever before.

She was not including her lie about no longer being a virgin because the shame of “not losing it” was more than the supposed loss of innocence in transitioning to a mature adult.

In fact, her future of falsehoods would involve a transition that she was not at all certain she could pull off with any degree of success. It would depend on a lot of luck and creative acting to convince those around her that she was not good old Julie Costello but the new member of the Men’s Cross Country team and her identity as “Jules Costello” winner of a full four years of scholarship at State University with all tuition and room and board paid for as well as a monthly stipend that would pay her incidentals and put no financial burden on her less-than-rich parents.

She looked at her short-cut hair in the hallway mirror and saw that it was a good start on her program of constant reaffirming her false identity. Of course, she could have admitted that the application had accepted her error in leaving the gender box blank and assumed that the mistyped “Jules” and not “Julie” was a “he” and not a “she” in the normal course of processing the applications.

She would have to agree that her photos in the application were entirely misleading because she was sweating profusely after a long competitive run and her chest was quite flat with no curves underneath the numbers on her tightly fitting tank top. She would have to agree that at that moment she definitely looked more like a boy than a girl but it had never entered her head as she had precious little concern with matters of sex or gender and devoted her full attention to becoming a better runner and learning the mysteries of the scientific world waiting to be explored in the classroom and the laboratory.

It wasn’t that she was opposed to sex.

It was just that she really was not all that interested in it and in fact was not even quite certain if she liked boys better than girls or vice versa.

It could be that the stress of running constantly had forestalled her chest development and her “down there” systems were sort of on hold whilst she worked to build more leg muscle for the uphill slopes. She knew that she was sexually attractive because her not-really a boyfriend and other young lads had pestered her to do this or that and seemed to really enjoy touching her in certain places that she didn’t think interesting at all. She drew the live at anything more than that because it might be detrimental to her running style and she was not willing to risk any threat to her ability to come in at the front of the pack at the end of any competitive cross country run with a ruthless determination to win that far surpassed any pleasure at physical contact with others.

The truck was loaded with top speed and she waved to the family she was leaving behind with a smile on her face. She knew it would be her last performance as “Julie” for a long time and she headed straight to the restrooms to make the necessary changes to her appearance that supported the claim to being a part of the male gender and suddenly a minority no longer.

Jules was no longer a part of the “weaker” sex and yet she/he felt no different. Julie was no more and the birth of Jules was a foregone conclusion to the need to play a role in order to live her dream of academic success and success on the field of sports as well.

Fortunately, in the sport of cross country, she would be showering and getting prepared on her own and the cross country runners were a separate breed not at all inclined to interacting because it was a fierce sense of competition that ruled the roost and made everything else irrelevant.