Read Online Practice to Deceive by David Housewright - Free Book Online

enjoyed watching Laura get dressed, especially when she was going all out for a night on the town. The same with Cynthia. It gave me a pleasure I felt deep in my lower extremities. But watching Steve become Sara made me feel creepy.
    Sara began to emerge almost immediately. The way Steve carried himself, tilted his head, relaxed his posture, used his hands, became, well, feminine. His voice changed, too. It did not become higher, as you might expect, but deeper, throatier, and softer. I swear to God he sounded just like Lauren Bacall.
    “There is a reason why I enjoy your company, Taylor,” Sara said as she smoothed into her skin a healthy dab of Nye Coverette foundation, the same foundation used by actors, concealing the red blotches from shaving and Steve’s inevitable stubble. “In the four, five years we’ve known each other, you never once asked, ‘What went wrong?’”
    “Did something go wrong?”
    Sara smiled. “There are those who think so.”
    “Mom and Dad?”
    “Mom and Dad and the rest of the VanderTop clan do not know about me,” Sara confessed. “Every time I see my father, he asks when I’m going to get a haircut. Can you imagine what he would say if I showed up wearing a Donna Karan original?”
    Sara applied a Q-tip’s worth of Nye Coverette stage cream to each side of her nose, and magically it was narrower.
    “Very few people know about me,” Sara continued. “It’s not because I feel ashamed or humiliated. It’s because I don’t want to deal with their shame and humiliation. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Statistical Manual lists transvestitism as a paraphilia or fetish. It claims people like myself derive abhorrent sexual excitement from cross-dressing. That is not true. I simply like to dress like a woman. Is that wrong?”
    “It’s not for me to say,” I answered.
    Sara turned and looked at me for the first time. “Yes, it is for you to say.”
    I gave it a beat, then answered, “No, it is not wrong.” It wasn’t hard to do. I had expected the question and planned my answer the moment Steve started performing for me, doing a striptease in reverse. If Sara had caught me by surprise, I might have answered differently. Or maybe not. Truth is, except for an uneasiness I felt in Sara’s presence, I didn’t much give a damn. I try not to pass judgment on other people’s lives unless I’m paid for it.
    Sara turned back to her vanity and started applying black eyeliner on the lid of first her right, then her left eye.
    “I started cross-dressing when I was a kid,” she said, then turned to me. “I thought you might want to know but were too polite to ask.”
    I shrugged.
    Sara continued. “I was about twelve. Mom caught me trying on my sister’s miniskirt and sent me to a psychiatrist. The idea that I was nuts scared the hell outta me, so after that I worked real hard at being a macho boy: went out for hockey, picked a few fights, drank beer behind the Burger King. It must have worked, too, because I didn’t think much about cross-dressing until years later when I realized I was the only guy I knew who looked at the Victoria’s Secret catalog for the clothes. I would take binoculars to the Vikings game and scan the crowd. My buddies thought I was scoping out chicks. What I was really doing was looking at women to see what they were wearing, how they did their hair. I’d be in a club and I’d watch a woman walk by. My date would get all hot and bothered. ‘Why are you looking at other women?’ she’d want to know. I’d say I was just admiring her dress, or her shoes. My date would accuse me of lying, but I wasn’t.
    “Anyway, after Mom and Dad gave me my first computer, I began to surf the Internet and I found a news group devoted to cross-dressers. I started lurking, reading the messages they posted. After a while I realized I was one of them.
    “Eventually, I found myself,” Sara added. “It didn’t happen right away. I purged over and