Shane heard the hum of conversations as he passed the teachers' break room. Lunchtime. He knew the sociable thing to do would be grab his lunch from the Jeep, join the others in the break room, and look for a friendly face. Sometimes he made himself do the sociable thing. That day, though, he just wasn't willing to make the effort.

He stood in the door of his classroom, imagining how it would look, full of students. Things were a lot different here from how they were at Center, where he'd been a teaching assistant in the spring. Though the building was old, it was well-maintained. The desks weren't new, but they weren't covered with pock marks and years' worth of carvings by bored kids. None of the chairs displayed the kinds of cracks and splinters that would pinch and impale hapless students. One of the four blackboards had a chip in a corner and another showed a patch of old adhesive that someone had clearly tried to scrape away but, aside from those minor flaws, they looked good. He wished they were whiteboards, though. He liked full, vibrant colors on white much more than white and sickly-looking pastels on green-black. Besides, he hated chalk. He hated the way it smelled, like something long-dead. Dry-erase markers, by contrast, had an intoxicating scent, almost as potent as the smell of permanent markers. He also hated chalk for the way it dropped little pieces of itself everywhere. Chalk was a depressing thing in its visible, constant dwindling toward nothingness. He shuddered at just the thought of its residue on his hands. He thought maybe he'd bring some whiteboards.

Shane tried sitting behind the massive desk but it felt artificial. It also was way too high for him, even after he raised the chair to its highest setting and his feet couldn't reach the floor. He'd need to replace the chair or sit on a phone book to comfortably write there. It was a minor thing; he didn't expect to spend much time there, anyway. He'd likely spend a lot of time at the boards and moving among the students. He got up, rounded the desk, and sat on top of it, his feet dangling. He felt much more comfortable there than he had in the chair. Besides, from up there, he could see everything going on in the classroom. Still, would the kid in the last chair of the middle row be able to see everything that went on in the classroom? He didn't think so.

He went to the seat and lowered himself into it, then imagined all the chairs around him filled with students of equal or greater size. He could only see the top halves of the boards that way, and even then, only if he leaned. Not good. He supposed he could put the little ones in front and the larger ones in back, but a lot of short kids already felt self-conscious. Besides, that wouldn't work if there were big guys who had vision or hearing problems and needed places up front. He left the chair and began rearranging.

He put the desks into an arrangement reminiscent of a pie wedge, with fewer desks in front and more in the back. He staggered them so each had a decent range of vision. He sat on his desk again and looked out at the students' chairs. Much better, he decided.

The classroom had several empty bookshelves he couldn't wait to fill. There also were two huge, cream-colored locking cabinets. The key was in the handle of the one on the left. The cabinet was empty. He stood back, examining its shelves, and calculating how much of his stuff it would hold. The second cabinet had no key, but the key from the first one fit.

That cabinet was full, mostly with green-and-blue textbooks, the student versions of the teachers' copies he'd received over the summer. He'd be teaching geometry, algebra and calculus. Some of the books were brand new, since they'd been updated for the new year, and some had clearly passed hands a few times already. He ran his hand over the spines, touching each one, sending his best wishes to the students about to become their caretakers and wondering about the students who'd come and gone.

Shane loved books. Fancy bindings or cheap paperbacks, fiction or non, he loved them for what they represented. In some of his earliest memories, the little girl he'd once been and her father were reading together. Later, books had taken her all kinds of amazing places, allowing her mental and emotional escape from the dismal commune where her mother had seen fit to raise her after her father died. Later, after she'd been sent to live with her grandparents in a place that was much more refined but equally soul-sucking, the power of books had extended into physical reality. It was what he'd learned from them that had enabled him to escape his grandfather's house at the age of seventeen without fear that he'd end up having to live on the streets. He loved computers; there was no denying that. Books, though, would always be the heroes of his youth. He loved the way they felt in his hands and the way they looked, crisp text arranged in an orderly fashion on rectangles of paper, and he loved the sounds pages made when he turned them. He loved the smell of them, the mingled scent of paper and printer's ink, each varied production process rendering its own aroma. He loved the way they tasted, too, the fulfillment of the scents' promises, as diverse as the bouquets of wine. He never felt he fully possessed a book until he pressed his tongue to the sheaf of pages. He never tasted library books--no telling where they'd been, and he didn't think future borrowers should be subjected to pages he'd tongued--but he did taste the rare books that became his own, and they were even better than new ones. He'd been collecting them since he was sixteen and now had twenty, one for each year of his life, most of them written by philosophers and mathematicians. Despite the huge house he and Julianna had bought that summer, he hadn't brought the rare books home. They resided in a climate-controlled storage unit along with other personal treasures that he didn't think belonged in his life with Julianna.

Nobody knew he put his tongue to books. He'd never confess it and most certainly wouldn't let himself be caught doing it. That was, like many other aspects of his personality, a private matter, just another obsessive compulsion in a long list of them, and among the relatively harmless ones. He had an oral fixation. So what?

A question of the ages was whether crazy people knew they were crazy. He knew at least one of them did. No doubt about it, he was more than a little off.

The mind was a very strange and complicated thing, he thought, one with evidently abundant capacity, and yet it proved itself oddly self-limiting. For every bounty it bestowed upon its bearer in one realm, it seemed to draw payment from another. He didn't know why it was that the intellect so often drew from the well of sanity--one that, given his mother's odd behaviors, probably wasn't all that deep in him, to start with.

The world, of course, loved its crazy geniuses, but mostly only after they were dead and it didn't have to put up with them anymore.

The top shelf held papers and other things. He stood on his tiptoes but still couldn't get a good view of what was up there. He considered climbing the shelves but, after assessing the topple-potential factors, decided against it. Just wouldn't do to squish himself that way on his first day on the job. He pulled the rolling chair from beneath his desk, set it in front of the cabinet, and climbed up.

He found stacks of blank paper and graph paper. There also were boxes of pencils as well as a box that contained compasses, protractors, and other implements, evidently for the benefit of students who either didn't have any or forgot theirs on particular days. He'd brought a few implements of his own for the same reasons, along with some notebooks and other supplies. Even in the county, not all kids' families could afford to buy every item on the back-to-school list, especially when there were several kids in the family. He planned to play games with the kids throughout the year and let them choose prizes. For the start-of-year prizes, he'd gone heavy on the basics.

He jumped to the floor, pushed the chair out of the way, and closed the cabinet, putting the books back to bed for a few more days. They deserved the rest in preparation for whatever the kids might do to them once they came out of the cabinet.

He'd ignored the growing gnaw of hunger in his mid-section for close to an hour while he checked out the classroom, but now it had become downright annoying. He made his way out of the building, down the walk, and into the parking lot. Mary approached with a large box, clearly struggling under its weight.

He was never quite sure whether to offer assistance to women he didn't know well in circumstances such as that. Some women took offense. It especially seemed to bother them when males who were a great deal shorter than they were offered assistance. He didn't blame them, really. It bugged him sometimes when bigger guys offered to do things for him, though there were times offers of assistance were a godsend.

He was still working out the politics of the situation when a corner slipped from her fingers and the box began to tilt. Mary's cry of dismay was the deciding factor. Nobody would want to drop a box of her things if there was a convenient alternative. He hurried to close the distance between them and dropped to a knee, catching the box before it hit the pavement.

"You're quick," Mary said as he regained his feet.

He smiled. It was true. He was quick. It wasn't much compensation for being a runt, but it helped.

"Thank you," she said. "My husband packed the car for me. I didn't realize quite how heavy it was until I got here."

He nodded. He thought the box probably weighed about eighty pounds. A lot of men didn't realize how heavy eighty pounds could be to a one-hundred-and-twenty-pound woman like Mary. The box was also big and bulky, suitable for long arms but not so much for short ones. Because Shane's arms wouldn't reach to ideal locations for stability on the sides, he leaned back a little to better balance the weight. Years of the constant packing and unpacking of playing in a band had served him well. He carried the box to Mary's classroom, asked her where she wanted it, and then slid it down his body until it rested on his feet and the floor. He tilted it with his hands to get his feet loose. "Any more?"

"No," she said, "that was the last one. I'd kept putting it off."

"All right, then," he said. "See ya later."

He carried his boxes to the classroom, set up his CD player, and put in Mozart. He sat cross-legged on top of his desk, eating his ham sandwich and chips, drinking his Coke, and deciding where to put his things. The classroom had clearly been well-cleaned at some point over the summer, but some surfaces showed layers of dust. When he finished eating, he pulled out his cleaning supplies and put on his rubber gloves. He filled the bucket in the restroom and went to work, dumping, cleaning and refilling the bucket several times.

A knock came as he was wiping down a desk. He'd heard people passing by several times but hadn't heard this one coming. He raised his head and made out the silhouette through the frosted glass panel in the door. A short person with fuzzy hair. Might be Sadie. That would explain why he hadn't heard her coming. Her geriatric shoes, with their rubber soles, enabled her to operate in stealth mode, a fact that sometimes irritated the hell out of Cookie. About the only person who ever called Michael Cook by his first name was his mother. He'd never moved out of the house in which she'd raised him. She hadn't been a young woman when she adopted him and so, by the time he was old enough to think about getting out on his own, she was getting old enough that he'd have worried about her if he left. Now twenty-seven, he remained at the house, and he'd even moved his longtime lover, Evan, in, too. His mother treated them both like teenagers and complained about Cookie's coming and going at all hours. He didn't have much choice in that. He was a bounty hunter by trade, and a lot of criminals were easier to catch at night. That was one of the reasons Evan was there, so Sadie wouldn't be alone at night. She was always after Cookie to get a real job. Cookie complained sometimes that he'd 'walk out on the old biddy' except that she made damned good cookies. He was full of shit. Michael Cook had a lot of rough edges but he loved his mama. So did Shane.

"Come in!"

The door opened and Sadie appeared. "Getting settled all right?" she asked.

"I'm good."

She pointed at the desks he'd rearranged. "The cleaning crew's not going to like that."

He gave a half-shrug. The desk array would be harder to navigate than the original configuration, but how well were they really cleaning if they did so with the goal of conveniently moving around the places the kids spent the most time? It wasn't really their fault, he thought. School systems didn't have enough money to pay people to fully clean their huge buildings. Given that, it was no wonder schools were breeding grounds for germs. Within his arsenal were numerous cans of Lysol. He planned to kill all the little bastards he could.

"I heard you were going to take Mr. Garrett's place," she said. "I'm glad."

"Well," he said, using a steel-wool pad to rub some gummy substance from a chair leg, "that makes one of us."

"You'll be fine, Shane," she said. "You'll do a good job for the kids."

"Any other potential land mines you should've warned me about, but didn't?"

"Can't think of any," she said, her eyes twinkling with mischief. "Anyway, I best get back before Geraldine starts counting the clock. Just wanted to stop by."

He smiled, looking up at her. "Thanks."

"You know, you'd probably get more visitors if your door wasn't shut."

That was an extrovert's way of thinking. Sadie was still waiting for him to 'come out of the shell.'

"Yeah," he said. "Thanks. Maybe I'll open it a little later."

She nodded and leaned over him, whispering. "You don't want them to think you're strange on the first day."

"No," he said as a slow smile claimed his lips. "Can't have that."

She headed for the door, opening it and then turning. "By the way," she said, "you might not want to go overboard on the decorating."

"Why?"

She giggled and left.

Given the two warnings, he considered leaving the room almost bare. He could only guess that there were some at the school who got their kicks trashing new teachers' newly decorated classrooms. He supposed he should take it as a good sign that, even after the hair thing, the principal liked him enough to warn him. Still, he didn't have the heart to deprive any would-be troublemakers of their kicks. He'd decorate as he'd intended and trust that no real harm would be done. Whoever the would-be culprits might be, he didn't think the principal and Sadie would smile about it if it was something really bad. Nonetheless, he wouldn't be human if he didn't want to know what the hell happened to his shit.

He pulled out his cell phone and called Cookie.

"Hey, Kitten," Cookie answered.

"Hey, Sweetheart!" Evan's voice said from a little further away. A rustling sound came. "Talk dirty to us!"

Shane laughed. "Isn't he supposed to be at the karate school?" In addition to teaching there, Evan handled the administrative crap.

"Yeah," Cookie said, and his breath caught. "He called out sick."

"He all right?"

"Yeah, just one of them end-of-summer cold things."

"I might die!" Evan called. "I want white roses!"

"Don't mind him," Cookie growled. Shane heard a cry. Evan's voice. "He's drunk on NyQuil."

"Are you two fucking?"

"Uh-huh," Cookie said. "Start talkin'."

Shane laughed. He'd talked dirty to them a few times, fun between friends, and they'd gotten up to quite a few other things together. That was before he got engaged to Julianna. Either way, he couldn't imagine he ever would have done it from within the school.

A mental image tried to form in his mind. Both Cookie and Evan were attractive men. He pushed the vision away and got back to business. "Could you do me a favor and drop a couple crumbs at the Jeep?" That was what Cookie called their tiny recorders. Shane had bought most of the electronic equipment Cookie used; Cookie was paying it back as he could.

"Will do," Cookie said. "How's the first day goin'?"

"S'all right," Shane answered. "Ma brought Jimson's."

"That bitch," Cookie said. "She brought him Jimson's!"

"She always liked him better than us," Evan said.

"She better bring us some when she comes home or we ain't lettin' her in," Cookie said.

From the sounds of their voices, Shane thought orgasm couldn't be far away. He was a married man with a wife. He didn't think he ought to stick around for that.

"Oh, god," Evan breathed.

Shane's bottom trembled. "Catch ya'll later."

He disconnected, put the phone away, and returned to his cleaning. Bedroom thoughts tried to form. He focused his mind on doing math calculations.

He heard footsteps in the hall. They slowed outside his door and he saw a woman's silhouette. From the shape of the hair, thick and pulled back at the nape of her neck, he thought it might be Faith Rush. She continued on, probably wondering what kind of strange new teacher kept his door closed on the first day when he ought to be playing the getting-to-know-you-all game.

He felt a twinge of guilt for depriving people of the opportunity to stop by and be kind or obnoxious to him, as they saw fit, but left the door closed.

For all Sadie's good intentions, the others at the school probably would figure out he was strange before too long, anyway. He was pretty sure most people did.

A few times in his life, he'd resolved to do better. He'd focused on projecting a normal persona. It wore him out and, within days, made him feel like a true basket case. He thought people could maintain only so much falsehood in their projections without exploding into shards.

He needed to focus on projecting as male and quasi-mature. Adding all the other crap on top was just too much effort to maintain over time, and increased the chances that he'd screw up on something that really mattered.

At least coming across as male wasn't as hard as it had been in the beginning. Years of execution had made it easier. Beyond that, in the beginning, he'd gone for the ultra-male presentation, one that was nearly impossible to maintain. He'd since come to realize he didn't have to be mega-male. Most real men weren't. Everyone fell somewhere on the broad range of human gender, and life was a great deal more pleasant for him after he stopped trying to show himself at a point far M of center. He knew now he only needed to end up a little past center. The hardest part of knowing someone was in the beginning. He couldn't make even little mistakes then. There could be no chinks in the male armor, no hints that would make people suspicious. Once he'd known people for a time and they'd accepted him for what he was supposed to be, he didn't have to try quite so hard.

At times like the current week, though, when life required meeting large batches of new people, he had to work especially hard on the I'm-a-guy thing. He wished he didn't have to do it. He wished he could just be himself. Unfortunately, he had to go on the assumption that every new person he met knew someone who already knew him. Within his wide net of personal relationships, the only people who knew what he was were his grandparents, because they'd made him that way, and Julianna, because he'd told her before he asked her to marry him. Even knowing the truth, she'd wanted to marry him. He'd feared at the time it was too good to be true--and it was. Bryan, Cookie and Evan had more or less figured out at least some of it, he thought, though he'd never talked about it with them. Nobody else knew. Even at sex clubs, the only places where he ever allowed the woman inside him to show a little of herself, people just regarded Daye Stark as a man who sometimes liked to play dress-up.

He felt like a fraud.

There were times it was tempting to leave it all behind, to go to a completely new place where no one knew him and start all over again. Just be what he was. Much of his reason for being in Maryland was gone now, with the departure of Bryan and the others. By the time they made their plans to leave, though, he'd already loved Julianna. Even if he hadn't fallen for Julianna, he still might have stayed. He had dozens of friends in Maryland, people he'd come to know and love over the years. He didn't want to face the rest of his life without those friendships. Maintaining them would require some contact, which would entail projecting the him they'd come to know, and he'd be more likely to mess that up if it occurred within the context of a very different kind of life.

Among the greatest potential disasters would be slipping into his real voice or forgetting to walk like a man in front of someone.

His secret hope was that he could somehow... someday... slowly let down the pretenses and be himself with the people who loved him. He knew it would take a miracle. There were people who'd hate him if they discovered the truth and others who would be so disgusted they wouldn't want to know him.

He was living the consequences of his confession to Julianna now and might continue to do so for the remainder of his life. Of course, that was an extreme circumstance, because of the intimate aspects of their relationship. She had it worse than anyone, being in love with him. She didn't want to be disgusted. He knew that. She'd thought it wouldn't matter, but it did. Worse, it seemed to matter more as time went by than it did in the beginning.

Julianna at least had a right to care about the nature and structure of his privates and internal organs. Other people would let it matter when they had no real justification for doing so. People seriously freaked over the concept of people like Shane. They had an easier time with transgendered people because, whether or not they accepted the concept of gender reassignment, they still were able to personally classify transgenders. Someone like Shane didn't fit into people's schemas.

A redneck scene played in his mind sometimes, drunk men sorting the sexes.

"Hey, Jim-Bob, what're we gonna with this one?"

"What's it got?"

"Well, it's got a pole. Ain't much of a pole, but it's a pole."

"All right, then, put it in the M bucket."

"'Cept, see, the doctors made the pole. 'Cause it weren't there. And we didn't put them other ones with fake poles in the M so I don't know we should put this one there."

"What'd it have to start with?"

"Didn't have neither one, Jim-Bob, that's what I'm tryin' to tell ya. Had somethin' like I ain't never seen before. Here. Look at the picture."

Jim-Bob looked and his lip curled in disgust. "Well, hell." Jim-Bob always scratched his head at that point.

"And get this. Says right here on the paper, it had one nut and one of them woman-things on the inside."

"You're shittin' me."

"I shit you not."

Jim-Bob shivered. "I tell ya what to do with that one. Go throw it in Lemon and Henry's bucket when they ain't lookin'. Let them figure out what to do with it. And if anybody asks, we never seen it."

"You're a smart man, Jim-Bob."

Beyond the prospects for hatred and disgust, there were people who'd feel sorry for him. Shane wanted to avoid the pity even more than the hatred and disgust.

He didn't know how he'd avoid any of it without the miracle.

Making it all more difficult was the fact that the required magnitude of that someday miracle grew with every new friendship he made.

Still, it was not beyond God's power to make that miracle happen. He was the one who'd made Shane as he was in the first place, neither male nor female, but right in the middle. The doctors called it a disorder of sexual development, an accident of birth, but Shane couldn't help but feel God must have had a reason for making him that way.

He worried sometimes that he might have displeased God with the whole male act but didn't know what else he was supposed to do, living in a world that insisted a person be one or the other. The law made it so. A person had to be clearly marked as male or female to have a status as human. Shane would have preferred the female classification but his grandparents had made the decision and, by the time he was old enough to do anything about it, he'd already come to treasure friendships that were built on the lies.
There was no easy way out. Whatever wisdom he would need, to cause the minimal damage while sorting it out, he knew he did not yet possess--but he prayed for it every night.

God had answered a great many of his prayers over the years. On questions related to gender, though, He remained strangely silent. Evidently, Shane thought, this was something God wanted him to work out on his own.

Shane would have preferred the miracle.