Free Trans-Sister Radio (2000) by Chris Bohjalian

she's your they , I just don't care."
    "And if she's not alone?"
    "I still don't care."
    "Look, I just think you should know there are people at the school who believe he shouldn't be teaching. There are people there--"
    "Will!"
    "There are people there who say he's a transvestite!"
    "Dana? Oh, please."
    "Have you noticed his eyebrows?"
    "Clearly you have."
    "Look, I'm sorry I had to tell you."
    I shook my head and sunk as low in my seat as I could. "You're not one bit sorry," I said.
    "I am."
    "Well, in that case, let me reassure you: Dana has never worn a dress in his life. And he is an absolutely fabulous lay."
    I know now I was wrong about the first part. But the second part remains undeniable. Indisputable.
    I am cocksure.
    Certainly I thought about Will's allegations off and on in the first two weeks of September, but I never gave them much credence. I was busy with the start of the new school year: nineteen new students, the committee meetings that appear out of nowhere, the first field trips of the fall--including an excursion to a maritime museum on Lake Champlain, which was in reality an absolutely terrific day, but seemed to strike everyone who hadn't been there as a disaster.
    We were in the midst of a glorious September heat wave--one of those last, wondrous tastes of high summer--and the temperature must have hit ninety degrees. The kids always love the replica of the Revolutionary War gunboat and the actual artifacts that have been pulled from the deep water, and that class was no exception. Unfortunately, when it was time to return to school, the bus driver couldn't get the vehicle to start, and it was clear it was going to be an hour before another bus would arrive. Since there wasn't a whole lot else to do at that point, I let the kids go swimming in the lake in their school clothes. I was present, and so were four adult chaperones, and only nine or ten kids chose to dive in. No one was going to drown. But two of the girls decided to take off their shirts so they were swimming in what amounted to sports bras--the sort of opaque halter tops in which grown women exercise all the time. And though I insisted that both girls put their shirts back on immediately, the rumors that spread throughout town were astonishing. Two parents called the school, and I ended up spending more time dealing with the aftermath of the field trip than I'd spent planning it.
    Meanwhile, when I wasn't at school, I was getting used to living in my house without Carly. I was not, however, getting used to living alone. Dana spent three nights with me the first week Carly was gone, and four nights with me the second. He would be there when I returned home from school, and he would insist on cooking me the most astonishing meals. This wasn't dinner, this was dining: Smoky pumpkin soup and sweet potato vichyssoise, a loaf of walnut beer bread he baked himself. A wild mushroom tart, with hen-of-the-woods sickle puffs he found growing on one of our hikes. Pastas with salmon and pine nuts and fennel.
    Once, when I'd had a few glasses of wine, I found myself examining his face in the candlelight--first with my eyes, and then with the tips of my fingers--and I believe I almost asked him something. Why are you so beautiful? perhaps. Why are you so smooth? What is it about your face that I love?
    But I didn't. A big part of the allure was the mystery: A magic trick loses its luster once you know the secret.
    In the middle of the month we went for a picnic up in Lincoln. High in the mountains, yet no more than a half-hour hike from the road that coils through a gap near the summit of the four-thousand-foot Mount Abraham, is a ledge that faces west. Its views of sunsets and smaller hills are certainly not a secret, and yet only once in the dozen times I've been there have other people stopped to picnic, too. It may be too close to the road for the hikers who want to take on the Long Trail or venture to the top of the nearby mountain.
    But it is indeed