Siran Adroushan called out across the house, “kids, breakfast is on!”
Armen came in, and Cindy followed a moment later. She checked the stove dials and sniffed for gas before sitting at the kitchen table. Her mother returned from the pantry, glanced at Cindy, and said, “Cindy, how about you and I meet after breakfast in the ladies’ room?” by which she meant the bathroom off of the master bedroom. Cindy turned her eyes as though she’d just sensed she was being watched.
As soon as Cindy left the table to clean up, her mother reminded her of their appointment. When Cindy got back to the ladies’ room, her mother was waiting with a hairbrush in one hand, and a blue aerosol can in the other. Siran nodded to Cindy over to the vanity, and began to decompress Cindy’s natural curls. Then came the rouge and the lip-gloss.
“Mom!” Cindy protested.
“Sit still!” Siran commanded. “A little makeup won’t hurt you. … And we’re going to get you some nice clothes for school. These are fine for the backyard, but you need proper school clothes.”
And so it came to pass. Cindy’s mother had seen enough. It was time for Cindy to learn to dress like a girl—before she became a woman.
The new Cindy didn’t go unnoticed. Sam noticed her though, true to form, he did his best to conceal his awareness. It’s wasn’t hard to do. He had, after all, long seen beauty in Cindy, though the beauty he had seen made mere prettiness seem a mockery. He was just as aware that other boys were beginning to notice her. That awareness was more difficult to keep to himself. It was a distraction, to say the least, and it was undermining his performance on the gridiron. He wasn’t applying the hit quite like before. There was no savagery; no heat. He didn’t plot. He didn’t calculate or time. His heart wasn’t in it, and neither was his head. He could hardly account for his body.
Cindy carried on, aloof but not oblivious. It wasn’t as though she didn’t like boys. It was more that she didn’t really need them. So when the day came that Will—a boy from Cindy’s biology class—asked her if she would help him study for the upcoming unit test, she didn’t mind a bit if she did.
Mackenzie Brown
Sam did mind, though he may not have understood why. Being a male, he didn’t trust the intentions of other males, and, assuming the role of protector, he found himself confronting Will during one lunch break. Sam had seen Will sitting inappropriately close to Cindy, ostensibly discussing something in a textbook. Sam waited around a corner, and spied at the two through a hedge. Cindy got up, put her hand on Will’s shoulder, and walked off. Will watched her walk off, and that was about all that Sam could take. He walked around the corner and up to Will. He stood above the sophomore, and said, “I see what you’re up to.” Will looked up from his notes, puzzled.
Sam continued, “If anythi—” and he slapped his hand onto his neck to cover a stinging sensation as he felt something tumble off his shoulder. He looked down to see a pebble, and then looked out to figure out where the pebble had come from. He saw Cindy squatting about twenty yards away, next to a ground-level planter, casually tossing a larger stone up with her right hand, as if to get a sense of its characteristics as a projectile. Then, without leaving her catcher’s squat, she flung the stone, and it came hissing at Sam’s head. Sam ducked away just quickly enough to avoid the stone. Recovering his balance, he looked back at Cindy. She’d found another stone, and seemed quite satisfied. She prepared to take another shot at his head.
A nearby door burst open and Mr. Miller ran into Cindy’s line of fire, shouting “whoa, whoa! That’s my star defensive back you’re trying to decapitate, there!” The next door down opened, and Mr. Adroushan appeared, looking left to Sam and Will, and then turning to see Cindy. “What on Earth do you think you’re doing?” he barked, whereupon Cindy flipped the stone under the hedge and replied, “just making the world safe for biology.”
“You take her,” Mr. Miller told Mr. Adroushan. “Your kid.”
As Cindy’s dad took her by the wrist, Mr. Miller added, “Say, Garegin: Is she going to be trying out for softball? Baseball?”
Mr. Adroushan let that question go unanswered and pulled Cindy through his classroom door.
“So that’s the way it’s going to be,” Sam mumbled to himself, not knowing exactly what that was going to mean. In any case, it seemed clear that Cindy didn’t want anything from him, so Sam made himself scarce. This was going to be the longest school year yet.