Chapter 2

It was another three days before Madison saw anybody besides her family.

Mom came up every morning, of course, and every hour or so thereafter, to see if she needed anything. Madison had gone most of her high school career without missing a day of school; to miss three, now, in a row, was an unprecedented disaster. But Mom seemed to realize that maybe space was best, that silence was golden, and didn't push her to get up and face the world.

Dad came up when he could, but it was clear that the whole matter sat strangely with him; he seemed caught between sympathy, morbid curiosity, and a wild hope that Madison would suddenly emerge from her bed and declare her intention to become the star quarterback of the NFL. Connor she never saw, but she thought she saw him skulking around at times, and once he seemed about to come into her room before changing his mind and backing out again. She didn't know what to make of her brother. He probably didn't know what to make of his either.

Her parents, of course, had immediately taken Connor to the doctor and asked for a full battery of genetic tests. The results took a bit longer to come back (last she had heard, in fact, DNA testing was an overnight process; she wondered what miracle had allowed Dr. Winters to deliver an answer on hers in under half an hour), but they showed that he was in perfect health, with no uncharted anomalies to his name. Mom joked that she had hoped he'd become the first human male to get pregnant, but Madison could tell that she was relieved.

Her relationship with her mother was strained now. Thomas Bechtel hadn't tried to hide his confusion over his bizarre new child; Cassie Bechtel did, but without much success. The joking, the teasing, the openness was gone; it was as if Madison were an alien creature, ready to burst out with some new strangeness if anybody's back was turned. Madison began to dread her mother's visits, and didn't mind when they started to get shorter.

And then, finally, on Thursday night, a new face poked in through the doorway.

"Where the hell have you been? Craig's been nagging me day and night-- Haven't you heard your cellphone? I'm sure he's left you like a gazillion messages. I know, because I left you a message, or tried to, but your mailbox said it was full and wouldn't let me leave one. He called, I called, Jessica called, Wanda called, you didn't pick up." Nancy Butler dropped her backpack in a corner and advanced on Madison, still talking. "Dr. Zelvetti asked me if I knew what was going on. Lisa Myers--you remember her, last year's president?--she called, and I don't know how she found out seeing as how she's a freshman at college. Nobody knew anything, and you sure weren't showing up. So finally I said, Screw it, and came over here." She plopped herself down on the foot of the bed. "So what's going on? Did you come down with something? Did you catch the eep or something?"

Madison tried to muster a smile at this, but didn't manage to succeed.

"So, what's going on," Nancy said. "On Monday you say you're getting this amenorrhea thing checked out, and then you don't come to school for three days. Did they find out that you secretly bleed delicious, delicious chocolate pudding?"

"No," said Madison.

"That you're pregnant?"

"No."

"Well, it's not an STD, 'cause you've never done it."

"No."

Nancy waited, blinking behind her glasses, but Madison said nothing.

"Look, Madison." Nancy gave her a direct look. "Do you trust me?"

Madison sighed. She wished it was as simple as that. "Yes."

"I'm your friend. I love you. I'm worried about you, and if you're willing to tell me, I want to know what's going on."

Madison covered her face with her hands. Do you? So did my mom. Look where it's gone since then. "Do you promise?"

"Promise what?" said Nancy on the other side of that black wall.

"That you're my friend. That you love me."

Nancy rolled her eyes. "We've been calling ourselves BFF for two years, Madison. What do you think?"

I thought I was a girl!

Madison sighed and took her hands from her face.

She wasn't sure how much she'd be able to explain, but it startled her to realize she remembered almost all of it--it was like Dr. Winters' explanation had been burned into her brain. She could picture it, see it, remember it like it was happening right now.

"There's a mutation in human DNA that can cause the person to be unable to respond to testosterone. The testosterone shows up, but the body doesn't know what to do with it. Now obviously that doesn't cause much trouble when the person is a girl--she doesn't have much testosterone flying around to begin with, just a lot of estrogen, and she develops normally. But what happens when it's a guy?"

Nancy's eyes had grown wider by the word. Now she said, "What happens?"

"He..." Madison felt bile rising in her throat. "He develops into a girl ... He develops into me."

Nancy stared.

"They found out yesterday that I don't have a uterus or ovaries. Instead, I have testes. Me. I have balls! They're just ... Floating around in my body somewhere." She had a weird mental image of a burping up a testicle and tried to shove it away. The image, not the testicle. Both. What would she do if that happened, swallow it again? What would it taste like? She had a brief but fleeting sensation of warm, salty rubber in her mouth. Hurriedly she pushed down the bile. "Evidently my body's just normally converting the testosterone into estrogen, so everything's fine, but ... I'm ... It's..." She felt tears threatening her cheeks, as they had so many times over the last few days--she, Madison, who never cried. It was one of the masculine things she prided herself on.

Opening her eyes, she saw Nancy's gaze darting to the computer on Madison's desk.

"It's called Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome," said Madison, and immediately Nancy was on the Internet. She was there for some minutes, occasionally ejaculating comments like, "Ohh, androgens are the steroid hormones. They control development of masculine characteristics," and, "Ohh, 2 to 5 out of 100,000;" and sometimes less-helpful analyses like "Wow" or "I didn't know that." Finally she came out of her reverie and went back to the bed.

"Madison, that's ... Well, you're really lucky, aren't you?"

"I don't see how," said Madison in a fragile voice. It figured that Nancy would go hunting the data before coming to address her friend. She'd always been nerdy, but Madison had always been willing to forgive it before.

"Well, you ... I mean, think of all the mutations you could have suffered. Most discrepancies just cause spontaneous abortions in the womb. Instead you've ... You've grown up, you're here, you're healthy. You're ... You're a perfectly healthy girl."

"But I'm not a girl!" Madison burst out. "I have balls. I'm a guy!" Then--she didn't know how it happened, but it did--she was bawling on her best friend's shoulder, while Nancy wrapped her arms around her and held her tight. It was the truth she'd been trying to deny to herself all this time--the ones her parents had skirted around, the one she hadn't felt comfortable saying until her best friend was here--her last, best hope for finding somebody who would not judge. "Wuh-wuh-what the hell am I, if I have ... If I have b-b-boobs and a snatch and ... And-and-and and testicles! I have long hair! I have dresses! My closet has p-p-pink in it! And purple! And ... I have a boyfriend, and ... And I was ... Th-th-thinking about having sex with him! What the hell am I?!"

"You're Madison Bechtel," said Nancy simply.

"But who is that," Madison moaned, and her best friend didn't have an answer.

After Madison had managed to pull herself together again, Nancy said, "I guess you'll want to break up with Craig."

Madison didn't see any way around it. There was no way she could possibly remain with him, not with all these things lurking over her head. "I hate to ask this of you..."

Nancy put her hand on hers. "Of course I will. I wouldn't want to face him either if I were you."

"Just ... Please don't tell him everything," Madison said, mopping her face with her hands. "Just ... Tell him that I ... That I know he only wants to have sex with me, and that I'm not interested, and that we should just end it before it gets worse."

Nancy paused. "Does he really? Or is that just an excuse?"

Madison sighed. "I don't know. It--" Well, ever since Nancy had brought it up ... But so much had changed in the past week; she felt like she didn't know up from down anymore. In her gut, she felt like, yes, it was true. But my gut has testicles in it. What could she trust? What was true anymore? "I think it's true."

Nancy gave disgruntled shrug. "Close enough for government work, anyway."

"Don't tell him anything else. If he wants to know more..." A sigh. "He can talk to me."

"And are you going to tell him?"

"No," said Madison. "Please don't. I don't want this to get out." But somehow, it did.

But that was a matter for later, for weeks from now, and a matter of change. For now, she had enough to deal with as Nancy began to chivvy her from her bed. "Come on. Your mom says you've been in there for three days straight. You need to get up and stop being a lump." She wrinkled her nose. "And you need a bath, too. Just because you're secretly a guy doesn't mean you're allowed to turn into a slob."

Madison tried to muster a smile at this. This time she succeeded a little more. "Most guys don't seem to realize that."

"Well, you're not most guys," said Nancy. "I don't make friends with just any old guy. Or any old girl, either."

Madison turned and gave her a hug. "Thank you."

Nancy gave her one of her rare smiles. Even this was twisted, as though she wasn't used to doing it. "You didn't give up on me--not for years. I'm just returning the favor."

Madison hugged her again. She had never been very demonstrative with her friends--she wasn't one of those kiss-the-air types; it just didn't suit her. And now she found herself wondering how she ought to be reacting to hugging a close female friend. Should I be getting an erection? What does it feel like to have an erection?

Nancy was giving her a direct look. "What are you thinking of?"

"Trust me," said Madison, "you don't want to know."

"The doctor did say that you'd be able to have sex comfortably, right?"

"Yeah, she did. But ... I mean ... I mean, how do I know, right?"

"Well, there's always Pinkie," said Nancy, referring to the vibrator they had, with much giggling and blushing, procured from a disreputable shop a year before. Neither of them had ever gone back in--Madison because her sex-toys days were done, Nancy because she'd found out how to get things much more cheaply on the Internet.

"Yeah, but ... That's not the same," Madison said. "How do I know if what I do to myself is anything like what a boy would do to me?"

"Well, if you really want to find out, you're asking the wrong person," Nancy said with a wry smile. "The person you really need is Craig."

"God no," said Madison. "He'd freak out. Can you imagine that? 'Craig, thanks for showing me what sex is like, now, you should know that I'm actually a boy.'"

Nancy gave her a pointed look. "You could, you know. Lie."

"You know I don't do that," Madison said.

"I know," said Nancy. "It's one of the craziest things about you." And then: "It's one of the greatest things about you."

After she had gone, Madison began to attempt the trip down the stairs and into the kitchen. The key word seemed to be 'trip'--she was dizzy, light-headed on her feet, weak. Part of it was the black-outs; her doctor (not Dr. Winters) had said that this was normal for teenagers, whose bodies sometimes outgrew their circulatory systems. But even more than that, she realized she was hungry. She hadn't eaten in three days.

Her parents seemed surprised to see her, but they covered it well: "We were wondering if Nancy was going to have any effect on you." They seated her at the table and gave her food to eat. Madison wondered if they had expected her to remain a hermit for the rest of her entire life. It was only later, when she kept seeing that hastily-covered look of surprise, did she realize that it wasn't her presence that startled them, but her existence.

Other than that one comment, though, there was no other real response to her sudden return from exile. She got up and did her homework (at least, what little homework she knew was assigned), and nobody treated her any differently from what had come before. And when she got up and went to school the next day, she felt as though she had entered a time warp, because other than a little look of sympathy from Nancy none of her friends treated her differently either.

But then, none of them knew yet.

The only two real differences were after school ended.

The first was that her father came to pick her up, instead of her mother like usual. Cassandra Bechtel worked part-time, and more to occupy her time than for the money, so she was more available for errands like that. Stanley Bechtel, who was a high-up in a local corporation, took as much time as he could away from his work to be with his family, but there wasn't much of it to be had. There had been weeks when Madison didn't even see him. Clearly, this wasn't to be one of them.

At first it was just the same pleasantries: how was your week? Just fine, how was yours? Just fine, very busy at work. Much homework? Rather too much of it--finals were coming up. And then for a while there was silence.

Finally Dad said, "Your mother's been beating herself up over this."

Madison blinked a lot. "My ... Really?"

"We looked it up online, and this ... This particular syndrome only manifests when the mother provides a faulty gene. It can't have been me--if I had it, I'd be like you--beautiful and sterile." Dad gave her a quirky smile. "So your mother is kind of blaming herself for being a carrier."

"Well, that's ridiculous," said Madison. "It's not her fault. These things ... Well, these things happen, don't they? It's not like she had any control over which genes she released to make me."

"I know, and that's what we've been telling her," said Dad. "We're hoping she comes around."

Madison said, "What about you?"

Her father was silent for a short time. Then he admitted, "Well ... I have to admit, I'd always hoped for a first-born son."

Madison said nothing.

"And, now that I have one ... I'm starting to think what a stupid wish that was," he said.

Madison said nothing.

"All of this is so weird to me," said Dad. "I'm just a normal guy. All these biological facts are beyond me. The only thing I'm good for is integrated research and fact-finding for facilitation of R&D. It's..."

" ... what they pay you for," Madison agreed, completing his catch phrase.

"And I can't lie and say that this shit hasn't confused the hell out of me," Dad said. "But ... No matter how confused or weirded out I get, I keep remembering: this is my-- My son, my daughter, whatever: this is my child. I ... can't turn away from that."

Madison felt another wash of tears in her eyes and blinked them back desperately. "I ... I don't know what to say."

"That's all right," he said. "I didn't know what to say either."

"I must get it from you," she said.

"Aren't girls supposed to be the ones that are good with language?"

"No, that's Connor."

"So ... Are we going to find out something weird about him?" Dad said.

"God forbid," said Madison, and they laughed.

The second was about half an hour after they got home, and it was rather less pleasant. Specifically, it was Craig, hammering at the front door, demanding to be let in. "You owe me more than that! You can't just--just send some lackey to break up with me! I've been with you for five months, I deserve more than--"

Madison hurried to the front door. "Don't bang on it. The glass, remember?" The panes on the front door had been shaky for the last three months, thanks to an incident involving Connor and a thrown football he had been sure he could catch.

He caught her wrist in his hand. His grip was stronger than she'd realized. "You owe me more than that. What's going on? What did I do?"

"It's not you, Craig." With a hand on his chest she eased him back out the door and shut it behind her. "It's me."

"That's bullshit," he said. "People don't just change overnight."