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Fall birthdays are better than spring birthdays.

John had a dark blond bowl cut and two square front teeth with a gap between them. While we waited on stumps at the end of the Nearings’ driveway, now his driveway, John taught me how to lie. He told me the plotlines of the previous night’s TV shows so I could say I’d watched them, and what it felt like to zip your penis in your fly so I could pretend to be a boy. Once I got started, it was hard to stop. The stories you could tell by lying were much more interesting.

The bus driver yelled, “No runnin’!” as John and I scrambled to beat each other up the steps and down the aisle to get the smaller of the two back seats. Along the way to school, my friend Paul came back and sat with us. John said Paul was his friend now, and that I could play with them only if I pretended to be a boy. It was much preferable to play with John at his house than stay at home, so I decided to be a boy so I could watch TV and eat junk food. Given the choice of my two gender role models at that time, Mama and Papa, being a boy seemed the better choice. Mama couldn’t win. Nothing worked out for her. She was always saying how hard it was to be a mother. Nursing all the time, cooking and cleaning. Work-your-fingers-to-the-bone.

“I try so hard, and no one appreciates it,” she’d say. “It’s shit.”

“I don’t want to be a girl,” I said to John’s mother.

“Oh, but being a girl is so much fun, you get to grow up to be beautiful and have babies,” she said.

“No,” I said. Those things were not much of a selling point, given Mama’s situation. Papa, on the other hand, had always been excited about something. It wasn’t necessarily the things I wanted him to be excited about, like reading The Lord of the Rings to me or playing the games I wanted, but at least he was full of enthusiasm for the world around him. He glowed with the energy of being in charge of his life, even if life had other ideas.

In his absence, I decided I would be in charge, too, I would be a boy. I read a book that explained that the way to get something was to pray for it every day. You simply had to repeat the wish hundreds of times. If you did this, it would come true.

“I wish I was a boy,” I whispered to try it out, amazed at how simple it was. I sat on the swing under the ash tree by the farmhouse and pumped my legs back and forth as I repeated my prayer. I wish I was a boy. I wish I was a boy. I wish I was a boy. Sometimes I worried that becoming a boy might be irreversible, so I stopped wishing. Deep down I knew, as Papa said, that anything was possible.

Spring returned, though we no longer found much joy in the white-throat’s arrival.

However, one morning, as I lay in my bunk, the good feeling returned. It hadn’t come in a while, and I was afraid I would scare it away because you can’t feel the good feeling and be aware of it at the same time. I was thinking about the way light creates the shapes of things, when suddenly I felt it, like a smooth stone in my mouth. My body dissolved its boundaries and became part of all things. Just as suddenly the feeling was gone, and I was me again, lying in my bunk as the ache of reality returned. Mama was always angry, Clara crying, Heidi dead, and Papa gone. Today was my ninth birthday, but not really. My birthday was October 10 now, because John said fall birthdays were better than spring birthdays.

The floorboards creaked as Mama drifted into the kitchen. From above in the bunk she looked soft in the light, her face still open from sleep, not closed up like during the day.

“Mama.”

“Ummmm?”

“Do you ever get the good feeling when you first wake up in the mornings?”

“The good feeling?”

“Yeah, like a smooth stone in your mouth?”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“Like warm light surrounding your body.”

“That sounds nice.”

“Do you get that?”

“Not recently.”

“Why do I get it? Where does it come from?”

“I’m not sure.”

I lay back down and tried to make the feeling come back.

“Happy birthday,” Mama said. She was lighting the stove. Smoke puffed up, and the oaky smell