Read Online Being Emily by Rachel Gold - Free Book Online

write about waking up as a girl for the assignment even though every morning, just for those few minutes between waking and having to move, I was a girl with no stupid physiology to contradict me.
    I had to get out of the school building without looking like I had to get out. By force of will I kept my feet steady, past my locker, past the lobby, into the biting cold, my car, the key in the ignition. Wait for it to warm up. Forget English class.
    Up until I was about nine or ten years old, I still held out hope that I would grow up to be a woman, even though the evidence was mounting against that idea. When the other girls started to speculate about what it would be like to get their period, I imagined that a period was the end of childhood, like the end of a sentence, and after that I’d get the right body parts. I was old enough to have given up on a magical solution, but somehow I convinced myself that my problem would be sorted out through puberty, that I would start to grow breasts and that thing between my legs would recede and I would become like the other girls.
    It didn’t help that my best friend at the time, Jessie, started to grow her breasts just before her tenth birthday. For years we’d both been flat-chested and then a few weeks before her birthday she snuck me into her room to show me the tiny bumps her breasts had become. We’d been comparing bodies on and off for a couple years, ever since she’d talked me into peeing in the woods with her on a park outing with our families.
    “I want my breasts to start growing too,” I told her. She looked at me like I wasn’t a real person. I slammed out of her bedroom and didn’t talk to her for a couple of weeks.
    I thought about that incident over a year later when I woke up to find that my nipples ached and felt swollen. For days I floated on clouds. I was going to show her and everyone. But the happy feeling just dissipated. I didn’t grow breasts. Instead I grew a couple inches in the space of a summer, my shoulders widened, and I started sprouting hair on my chest.
    I drove over to Claire’s. I couldn’t go home. I didn’t have swim practice and soon Dad and Mikey would be home. I couldn’t let myself cry with them in the house. And I needed to know where I stood with Claire. 
    When I got out of the car I realized I’d left my coat at school. Fumbling the key into her front door, I pushed into the house shaking with cold. I planned to have a little cry and then wash my face and wait for her to come home so we could talk, but that planning part of my brain wasn’t running the show.
    I walked through the living room and into her room feeling like someone was crushing my chest, like I’d gone underwater and couldn’t get to the surface. My eyes swung from side to side looking for anything that would stop this feeling. Without thinking about it, I opened her closet door and curled myself into the bottom. Ever since I was a kid hiding in my mom’s closet, I’ve found comfort in dark, enclosed places. The small part of my mind that was still thinking told me I was being an idiot, a baby, a wuss , a fool and a dozen other sneers.
    I leaned against the back wall of the little space and finally managed to cry a few of the thousand tears I’d been saving up from the past months. Wiping my face, I looked at my hands. My freakishly huge hands. I hated them. I hated this stupid body. Whose bright idea was it to make me a boy? Was it so hard to put a girl together? Did they just run out of girl bodies that day? Did I do something miserable in a past life? Maybe I’d been Hitler or Stalin.
    “Chris?” Claire called from the living room, and then a little closer. “ Chrissy ?”
    God bless her.
    I cracked the door and crawled out to see her looking down at me with wide eyes.
    “Sorry,” I managed, hating my deep voice.
    She knelt down on the carpet and grabbed my hands. “What happened?”
    “Weird stuff,” I said. I cleared my throat and wiped a