Just Ash

Text copyright © 2021 by Sol Santana

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Santana, Sol, author.

Title: Just Ash / Sol Santana.

Description: Minneapolis : Carolrhoda Lab, [2021] | Audience: Ages 14–18. | Audience: Grades 7–9. | Summary: Ash has never thought much about being intersex. But when he gets his period and his parents pressure him to ‘try being a girl,’ he must fight for who he really is —Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020012541 (print) | LCCN 2020012542 (ebook) | ISBN 9781541599246 (library binding) | ISBN 9781728417356 (ebook)

Subjects: CYAC: Intersex people—Fiction. | Gender identity—Fiction. | High schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction. | Family life—Massachusetts—Salem—Fiction. | Salem (Mass.)—Fiction.

Classification: LCC PZ7.1.S2633 Jus 2021 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.S2633 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012541

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012542

Manufactured in the United States of America

1-48118-48770-4/30/2021

For everyone who has been told that they are not enough exactly as they are. You are more than enough.

1

As soon as I walked through the front door, I knew there was no escape. Mom hovering in the dining room just beyond the foyer. The wall phone was ringing in the kitchen on my left, but Mom didn’t rush to answer it like she usually did. No sign of Dad—yet—but his museum closed early on Wednesdays, so he had to be in the house somewhere. My stomach felt thick and full of ice.

I slammed the door, shutting out the September chill, and dropped my schoolbag. I kicked off my cleats, padding across the hardwood in my socks to stand in the center of the dark-wood dining room, with its oval table and its hanging chandelier. In the 1600s, that monster would’ve held real candles, and some poor enslaved person probably had to stand on a ladder and light them one by one. Now each socket contained a tiny crystalline light bulb that did nothing to diffuse the natural shadows of the house. It was like being back in colonial times. I took a deep breath to steady myself, inhaling the scents of pine and ash rolling off the thick walls.

Ash, Mom said, looking hesitantly at me.

Great. Coach must have already called her and told her what had happened today.

Her tightly clasped hands had gone white at the knuckles. The pale roots of her hair were showing where the sandy brown waves were turning gray, catching up to the wrinkles around her mouth.

My name was Ashley. I suspected it was the only name Mom and Dad could agree on when I was born. My sister, Evie, once told me that the doctor had advised them to give me a unisex name, just in case. When I was born, Dad had been certain I was a boy; Mom and the doctor had been less convinced. Our family physician had explained the basics to me when I was little, but my parents had always avoided talking to me about my body.

Until now.

Dad’s voice behind me: Turn around.

I revolved on the spot, feeling that I had no choice, my stomach tightening instinctively. Dad didn’t look like my friends’ dads, which had made the fear of him worse when I was growing up. His grizzled gray hair hung down to his shoulders, accentuated by a mean widow’s peak. In any other city, he might’ve been an amateur MMA fighter, maybe a truck driver. Here in Salem, where automobiles were banned on our main street, he co-owned a witch trial museum. It sounded more impressive than it really was. Museums like his were a dime a dozen in this town.

He didn’t say anything else, just looked at me. His eyes darkened with disgust. He was close enough for me to smell the alcohol on his breath.

Oh, Mom cried.

I glanced at her over my shoulder. Her face was buried in her hands. Her T-shirt strained against her heavy frame with every sob.

Nicole, shut up, Dad grumbled.

I almost agreed with him. It wasn’t fair that she was carrying on like this. She wasn’t the one who’d been humiliated in front of the entire soccer team, called off the field and made to walk the block and a half home in his blood-stained white uniform.

Go upstairs, Dad said. Go change out of . . . that.

I sprinted out of the room, bolting up the staircase. My footfalls on the ancient wood matched the frantic thumping of my heart.

Up in my room, I slammed the door behind me. There was some comfort in its familiarity: the muted gray walls that matched the color of the bedsheets; my gaming computer taking up the whole of my desk space. I used to have a poster of Lionel Messi above my bed until my thirteenth birthday. Now that I was sixteen, a T-shirt from a Skeletronics concert had replaced it. Theta’s signature was scrawled across the bottom in big white ink. Meeting the band for a few seconds when I was fourteen was one of my favorite memories.

I pulled off my shirt, then yanked my shorts down, balled them up, and tossed them onto the bed. The seat of my pants was covered in blood.

Why was this happening? I was so angry, I felt tears stinging my eyes. If you knew me, you knew I never cried—not even when I was eleven and accidentally slammed the car door on my hand.

Pulling open my drawers, I tugged on some sweatpants and a T-shirt. Okay, I thought. Calm down. Just calm down.

The mantra did nothing except make me angrier, and scared. I punched a picture frame off my nightstand, heard it hit the floor and shatter. I knelt on the hardwood, my whole body shaking. This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t supposed to happen to me.

A knock sounded on my door. Mom opened it without invitation. She stepped inside, wiping the corners of her eyes with the inside of her wrist.

I have something that’ll help you, Mom said.

She crossed the floor to me and leaned down. In her hand was a small, square, plastic package. I took it from her, not understanding.

It’s a sanitary napkin, Mom said. For the bleeding.

I looked up at her, feeling dumbfounded and lost.

Is your stomach hurting? Mom asked. Do you have any cramps?

Mom, I said, I’m kind of tired. Can I just lie down?

Did you change your underwear? Mom asked.

Mom, please?

Mom hesitated, then backed out of the room. She didn’t close the door behind her.

I stared at the crinkling little square in my hand. More than anything, I felt lost.

Screw this, I said out loud, dropping the pad on the floor. Screw all of this.

***

It wasn’t an exaggeration when I told Mom I didn’t feel well. I felt so sick that when I lay down, I managed to sleep for three and a half hours. When I woke up, my phone was buzzing wildly on the nightstand. My chest and throat tightened. Unlocking the phone, I scrolled reluctantly through my messages. In my dark room, the glow of the screen was the only light.

dude, said a text from Corey Dietrich. He wasn’t on the soccer team but had five different gossip outlets in eleventh grade alone. wtf?

I left him on read and kept scrolling.

The most mundane message came from the local library, letting me know I’d forgotten to return Tituba: A Biography for the second week in a row. I avoided all the texts from the soccer team, including two from my coach. He probably only cared that he was down a forward right now. Coach Frank could be pretty slow on the uptake.

hey, said a text from Michelle Carrier, my other best friend. everything okay?

Shifting, I lay on my back on the bed. I pressed my head against the headboard, running my fingers along the sides of the phone.

I’d first met Michelle when I was thirteen years old, on a middle school field trip to the Freedom Trail in Boston. Matthew Sommerheim called her the N-word and left her in tears. I held her hand, vowing to kick his butt as soon as the teachers weren’t around. A few months later, Michelle covered for me when I egged our principal’s car as vengeance for his decision to cancel Pizza Fridays. If there was anyone I could trust with what I was going through right now, it was Michelle.

Except I didn’t want her knowing about this, did I? I hated this part of me. I’d never hated it before, that was true. But I’d been able to compartmentalize it until today.

nbd, I texted Michelle. i just got a little hurt during practice. i’ll be ok.

She must be watching TV with her parents right now. It was their corny nighttime ritual, something I liked to tease her about.

is somebody hurting you, ash?

I could see why Michelle would think that. My skin crawled, but I wrote back, no.

Michelle wasn’t like Corey, and that was why I knew it was safe to talk to her. She knew how to interpret it when I went terse and quiet. When she didn’t reply, I felt relieved.

My stomach chose that moment to lurch with hunger. I’d gone to bed without eating dinner. I didn’t feel up for a run-in with my parents, but I pocketed my phone and crept down the stairs, taking the creaking steps as quietly as I could. I stole into the kitchen, congratulating myself on my stealth—

And ran straight into my mom. She was sitting at the tiny table in her fuzzy blue bathrobe, hands wrapped around a cup of cranberry juice.

You don’t have to go to school tomorrow, Mom said. We called the doctor. They can fit us in at eleven.

I didn’t know if I was happy about skipping school or apprehensive about the doctor.

Dr. Howe can make it stop, right? I said. The—the blood?

Mom nodded. I didn’t like the way she looked at me. Like she barely recognized me. Who was I, and what was I doing here? Where had her actual son gone? I felt a fresh wave of fear. I wanted her to tell me that things would be okay, that we could go back to the way everything was before.

She averted her eyes, sipping her juice.

2

When I got out of bed in the morning, I stepped on broken glass. Cursing up a storm, I sat down and picked the tiny shards out of my foot. Blood ran from the shallow wounds, thin and watery, until I pressed my pillowcase against them. I was getting sick of the sight of blood.

The photo I’d knocked over the night before was the only one of my sister and me. I scooped it off the floor and sat looking at it, lost in thought. I was ten in the photograph; Evie was nineteen. Frozen in time, we stood in Lappin Park on Essex Street. We were posing in front of that statue of Elizabeth Montgomery astride her broomstick, our arms around each other’s shoulders. That day, Evie had said it was funny that the town most famous for executing suspected witches embraced all things occult now. It was a total one-eighty, she said.

I put the photo on my nightstand, pulled my pajamas off, and strode across the bedroom to open the closet door. The mirror on the inside lit up when I pulled the drawstring light. Normally I spent approximately zero percent of my time thinking about my appearance, but all things considered, maybe that should change. I looked pretty unremarkable—scrawny, dark-haired, strong shoulders, tanned skin. I had pecs and pubes. If my hair had been longer, I would have looked less like a prettyboy and more like a tomboy. You could only really see my Adam’s apple when I talked.

What was really different about me was between my legs. My penis was small, about four inches. Instead of balls, it hung over a pair of tight vaginal lips. I’d grown up with them, never giving them extra thought before now. It wasn’t like they did much of anything. I pissed the other way, from my dick, which I’d properly acquainted myself with when I was twelve years old and found out how good girls looked in two-pieces.

A sharp pain shot through my stomach. I ran as fast as I could to the bathroom, scared of bleeding through my pants.

A few minutes later, I was downstairs in the kitchen, sitting at the table with Dad, watching Mom scramble eggs. It was hard to have an appetite this early in the morning, especially for something so greasy. I wondered whether Dad was coming to the doctor with us. He didn’t say. After sopping up his eggs with a slice of bread and shoving it in his mouth whole, he got up and left without a word. I guessed that meant he wasn’t coming with us. I didn’t want him there, anyway.

After breakfast, Mom and I walked up Summer Street, where we’d lived my whole life. The houses like mine were old and gray, with splendid gates standing out front. Little prefabricated junks stood between them, cheaply made houses that hadn’t existed until the past twenty years. They cost less to move into but went up in flames every time there was a lightning strike.

Just before Summer Street turned into North Street, we turned onto Essex, where cars were banned. The road was so picturesque that it might as well have popped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. The sidewalk was entirely brick and lined with stooped green trees, though a few of the leaves were curling at the edges and turning yellow. Once, the street’s main attractions might have been silos and pillories. Now the storefronts with their unlit neon signs advertised knickknacks and talismans, tarot readings, crystal wands to bring out your inner witch. I’d never quite worked out how much of the flair was genuine and how much was catering to the tourists. Come October, our little town was going to be swamped with them.

Mom and I ended up on Bridge Street, along the river. My favorite restaurant, the Pickled Pearl, was open for business. A giant fake crab sat on the weathered roof, fishing rod clutched between its pincers. The restaurant looked out of place between the historically unchanged houses on either side of it, two- and three-story residences, all dark gray—a color the Puritans apparently had had a real hard-on for. The chimneys were jammed in the centers of the roofs, which was the style back in the day. The windows were round and latticed underneath the pointy gables, hanging modillions dripping like gingerbread icing. The Puritans were supposed to be all about the simple life, but their houses definitely didn’t reflect that philosophy. Years later, the descendants who had inherited them, my family included, didn’t seem to mind their forebears’ hypocrisy.

You could cross all of Salem by foot in twenty-five minutes. It didn’t take us long to reach our destination. The doctor’s office was in a flat building across the street from the Satanic Temple. I’d been going there for checkups since I was in kindergarten. Most of the other patients were still small. When we walked into the waiting room, there were two toddlers playing with the train set on the floor. The seats were big, multicolored Lego blocks, a circus mural on the wall. I considered grabbing a toy car and joining the kids, but I didn’t have to. A nurse called my name mere minutes after we sat down.

Mom, I said when we got to the exam room, could I do this alone?

Mom looked at me in shock. You don’t want me here?

Of course I didn’t.

Let’s give Ashley a minute to change into a gown, said the nurse.

That taken care of, I sat on the exam table, which was covered in a sheet of paper. Eventually the door opened again and two people walked in—Mom and the doctor.

I stared. You’re not Dr. Howe, I said.

A lady in her late forties smiled at me. I’m Dr. Tran, she said. She had a triangular, pointy face framed by very straight hair. You don’t have to worry; Dr. Howe handpicked me to replace him.

I must have been staring at Dr. Tran while I waited for instructions, because her smile flickered. I’d been told before that my default face was kind of cold-looking. I couldn’t help it if I’d been designed that way.

Dr. Tran listened to my heart and lungs with a stethoscope, though I didn’t know why that was necessary. Then she sat at her table and looked at the information on her computer screen.

So, she said, I see here you have congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

What?

That you’re intersex.

Yeah.

Is that why you’ve come in today?

I’m bleeding, I said. The thick cotton pad felt uncomfortable in my