Amy at the Gulf
by Amy K
The original characters and plot of this story are the property of the author. No infringement of pre-existing copyright is intended. This story is copyright (c) 2010 Amy Komori. All rights reserved.
Chapter One:
Dr. Strangeshop or, How I Learned to Hate the Mall
Full-on summer came around. Temps rose, mosquitoes snacked on precious bodily fluids, faces went shiny from the humidity. Emily was no longer a senior at Delacroix High, and I was still trapped in a tiny female body. But at least I’d found a home with the Komoris. They gave me the run of the house and put up with generally black moods.
I hated having a girl’s body, I hated being short (out of curiosity, Emily measured me against the wall one afternoon and I came out just under 5'; I prayed for a growth spurt) and I hated being a little weakling; no more opening peanut butter jars with a mighty, manly twist. Being weak made me feel diminished and puny, and it was the worst part of the whole thing. Well, that and being called "cute" all the time.
About the only thing I didn't hate about it was being Japanese, or at least Asian. I mean, both Emily and her mom were, too. In the aftermath of the transformation, that was one thing I took some comfort from, such as it was. I was more like Emily now.
By now, I thought changing from Mr. Average White Guy into Emily's tomboy cousin Amy from California put me on the city square in downtown Weirdsville, population: me. I figured life couldn't show me anything more bizarre, couldn’t possibly fuck me over any more than it had by robbing me of my Y chromosome and substituting an X—yeah, as if no one would notice. But I discovered I was only at the outermost bus stop in Weirdsville's suburbs, and there was a lot more to see on the journey to the true center of strange.
It started with the preparations for our summer vacation.
Emily and her mother had planned this beach trip for over a year now, their first real vacation together since Emily's dad died. They insisted I come with them, and they weren't about to let me hole up in the rented house and hermitize myself the week we were on the Florida coast along Gulf of Mexico.
"It's not healthy," Mrs. Komori said by way of convincing me.
And my mental health was definitely an issue at this point, since I mostly sat around and did nothing. I stewed in my own estrogenic juices, I guess. Watched TV, barely spoke.
“Yeah,” I said with a shrug. “I guess it’s not.”
“Well, here’s the deal. Emily and I would like to get you out of the house, maybe… if you’re willing… buy you a few things for the trip. Those clothes you’ve been wearing are getting moldy.”
I sighed. I thought about it for a few moments. Thanks to those obnoxious skater punks, the mall and I were totally quits on our already strained friendship and I’d barely left the house in weeks. My initial inclination was just to say no and disappoint and hurt Mrs. Komori. Surprisingly, as I searched my mind for an excuse to beg off, I found deep in my tummy this dull ache to go outside, to get off the sofa and face the world again, or at least do something just a little different that day. But I didn’t want to agree out loud. I nodded instead.
Mrs. Komori smiled. “Good! I’m so glad, Martin. You’ll see. We’ll have a great time and it’ll make you feel so much better.” She jingled her car keys and the three of us set off for the mall to prepare me for our beach blast and sort of re-initiate me into the world of the living.
Before we could even deal with the clothes, we had to walk past the stupid skaters who had humiliated and intimidated me. Mrs. Komori’s adult presence acted as a kind of authoritarian shield from any verbal taunts, but they certainly stared me down as we came through. The skaters sat slouched in their circus-tent clothes. One guy was stretched out on his back, staring up at the ceiling. They had their skateboards leaning against the painted concrete walls of the fountain—which was turned off to conserve water, there being a drought—and I felt jealous. I seethed with envy at how they could roll along and do tricks and still pee standing up and live in a world where they were who they said they were. The fierceness of this whole jealousy-storm took me by surprise
How they looked at us made me angry, too. Under their intense, sulky skater punk gaze-- so uber-boyish and childishly surly and I could imagine their nasty thoughts because they had once been my own—my cheeks and even my ears glowed as if they’d been painted with radioactive substances and then we were out of the Skater Hot Zone. I felt my rage subside in waves.
And there we were, at the Gap, of all stupid places. We stood outside its youth-oriented corporate blandness and the pretty and vacuous models in navy blue and khaki stared down at us from the windows, waiting for us to step inside where it was white and blonde wood all over.
“Do I have to get… you know… girl clothes?” I asked, dubiously.
I'd never dressed up like a girl even as a joke, or for Halloween. It wasn’t that I had been afraid of it or felt it challenged my manhood; it just hadn’t come up, or really crossed my mind before that one time with Emily’s friends back when I was still semi-male. Now, facing the choice, I just didn’t want to wear girly stuff.
“Why not?” Emily asked. “They’re just clothes.”
“If that’s the case, let’s go to the guy section.”
“Amy can wear anything she… uh… he wants,” Mrs. Komori said. “Sorry.”
“Look, I just think girl clothes are better than guy clothes—“
“But you wear guy clothes!”
“Shut up, dude. I’d really like to see you embrace your sassy, girly-chic side.”
“I don’t have one of those… sassy…” I started to protest, and let my voice trail off. Emily’s face was undergoing an alarming contortion. Mrs. Komori and I stared at her as Emily clamped her lips tightly together and her cheeks quivered and darkened.
Then she couldn’t help herself and started giggling. “I’m just messing with you!”
I flushed hotly. “That wasn’t funny.”
“Don’t be mad,” Emily told me. “It was a joke, for God’s sake.”
“Okay, okay.” Still a little angry about it all, I told Mrs. Komori I didn’t want Gap clothes anyways.
She shrugged and we all walked down towards the Macy’s. At malls, especially ours, there weren’t many choices outside the mainstream, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted anyways. I’d always bought my clothes on the cheap at Target or factory outlets. Once inside the department store, I nervously led us to the boy’s department. There weren’t many shoppers, which was definitely a good thing. We got just a few funny looks. Granted, I must have made a vision of intense strangeness: a tiny, black haired girl wearing her would-be hipster father’s clothes. Pre-pubescent androgyny.
“I-I want like some t-shirts,” I said softly, looking down at my big stupid shoes.
“Anything you want,” Mrs. Komori told me reassuringly.
We did a safari through the racks, and I chose a few things here and there, avoided the expensive name brand stuff. I didn’t care about any of that anyways. It was hot out and I needed light tees and some shorts for knocking about on the beach. By the time we hit the underwear section, we had a small audience of mostly older women craning their necks to see what this weird kid was doing with the seeming support of her sister and mother. Breaking some kind of unwritten gender code, I suppose. I frowned fiercely, feeling ashamed, but not because I was doing anything wrong. It was as if they were projecting the feeling they thought I should be having into me, marking me as a freak by their surreptitious scrutiny.
“Excuse me,” a guy in business attire said to Mrs. Komori. “May I help you ladies?”
“My… um… niece is just picking out a few things. She’s visiting us for the summer and for some reason, her luggage ended up in Italy.”
“Would she be more comfortable in our girl’s section?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
I shook my head no, too, and sent special psychic waves of “go away, go away” at the guy, but obviously his receiver was out of service. Or I was doing it wrong. Had X-Men comics let me down? I felt as though I’d flunked out of Professor X’s School for Gifted Youngsters. I’d never get my superhero uniform or my code name: Vagina Girl. Boy-Girl. Girl-Man. Weak Sister. The Lightweight. Once started, it was difficult to stop and I must have come up with about one hundred self-deprecating handles for my hypothetical comic book self, as quickly disdained as she had emerged from my imagination.
“Well, if you need any help, just let me know,” the sales guy said, conceding the point. After all, what did he care?
Then it hit me. “I don’t even know what size I am.”
Mrs. Komori playfully smacked her forehead. “That’s right. I didn’t think to measure you before we left.”
“Probably a small,” Emily suggested.
“She’ll just have to try these on,” Mrs. Komori said. She turned to the sales guy. “Where’s the dressing room?”
“Well, the fitting room is right over here, but she’ll have to use the girl’s rooms.”
“And where are they?”
“In the girl’s department. But… uh… I’m afraid I can’t let you take the merchandise with you from this section.”
“Why not?”
The sales guy gave us an apologetic smile.
“Well, I’m not paying money for something that doesn’t fit her,” Mrs. Komori said. She looked deadly serious.
“Why can’t she just use the boy’s fitting room?” Emily asked. She emphasized the phrase “fitting room” in an almost British-sounding snarky way I would have enjoyed under other circumstances.
“We just… we… It’s store policy.”
I kind of ducked my head down into my chest and raised my shoulders. I thought, Jesus, motherfucker, why are we even discussing this? Now the other shoppers were watching us openly. Live entertainment, and for free. I wanted to run away.
“Are there any boys in the dre-- fitting room now?” Mrs. Komori asked.
“No.”
“Then why can’t she use it?”
The sales guy’s brain must have jumped a track, because his face froze in this rictus of goofy, mannequin-like politeness. “I guess there’s no reason why not. You’re completely right.”
That settled, I began the trying-on process. I wasn’t exactly stoked about wearing kid clothes, but at least they were for boys. As I took off my faded, worn Martin crap and stood there in my oversized old cotton briefs that had gone from smart white to a kind of crusty off-gray, looking at my insipid face and vulnerable little body, I felt as though I were stripping away something else. I wasn’t sure what it was. I found myself trembling a little under the fluorescent lights, maybe from the Macy’s A/C which seemed to be turned down to the “New Ice Age” setting, maybe from something inside.
We’d guessed my size correctly, so everything fit for the most part. I was officially a pre-teen boy’s small, although medium fit me in certain things. It took forever to do the deed, too. Having conceded the use of the fitting rooms, the sales guy was adamant about sticking to the “two items at a time” policy. That added time and increased my frustration. I’d never particularly enjoyed shopping and hadn’t gone through this process in years, since my old mom had last bought my fall school clothes. As an adult guy, I’d just walked in and grabbed what I liked and paid for it, no sweat.
After buying all of that regular-wear stuff, we got into a discussion about swimwear. Boy’s tighty-whiteys were fine, tees and shorts were fine for our newly-minted Amy-girl as she encountered the great, big world all around her. But we were going to be at the beach and that meant swimming and sunning. I couldn’t wear a guy’s swimsuit for that, because society apparently disapproved of chest displays by young females.
“Maybe if you were younger,” Mrs. Komori said, thoughtfully.
“Why can’t I just wear like a t-shirt and some shorts?” I asked.
“Well… no reason, I guess,” Mrs. Komori said.
Emily shut one eye and frowned. I could see her mighty brain working. “Why don’t you just try one on and see if you like it?” She meant a girl’s swimsuit.