esperanza

Terrence

I laughed, a snort really, then we were both chuckling as we got into my car and sat looking at each other. With her pretty, feminine features, the glasses, even though they were definitely boy glasses they still failed to make her look like a boy, at least to my mind.

She blushed and I realized that I might have been staring at her.

"Any ID in there, something to tell us what your name really is?" I asked while poimting at her backpack and simultaneously diverting my gaze.

She reached into the backpack, and produced a small black purse that seemed to embarrass her further. Inside the purse she found a pocketbook and in that was a student I.D. for "Terrence Harper Hope." She read the name out loud and suddenly had an epiphany, "My folks called me Terry."

"You remember that now?" I asked.

I looked at the picture, a serious- looking, slightly younger version of the face Kelly wore now. At an age when long, tousled hair is all that is needed to achieve androgyny. The little box for sex had an 'M' in it.

She nodded. "I remember a little bit."

She read more from the I.D. "This is for Tustin Unified High School, that's down in Orange County."

She might just as well have come from Canada or New York City.

"It says I'm a 10th grader, but it's two years old. And my birthday was... Son-of-a-gun, I got the same birthday, I'm just, just forty-nine years younger!" Tears began to leak from her eyes again and her glasses seemed to fog up, she pulled them off and wiped her face with the back of her hand.

"Terry?" I said quietly. The picture on the I.D. certainly look like her, but ... well, couldn't it have easily been of a brother?

She bit her lip and smiled at me. "Keep calling me Kelly, willya? Please? Probably no one else in this life ever will again."

I couldn't bear to think of hurting her by saying anything about my doubts, so I just nodded. Still playing along, still feeling vaguely guilty about doing so, I said, "Kelly, what do you want to do? I have computers at home, if your folks still live in Tustin or Orange County, I may be able to find their address and phone number on the internet."

I might as well have sandbagged her. She slumped in the seat and trembled. The glasses fell from her hand and landed on the floor board. Neither of us made a move to retrieve them immediately. "I guess it isn't fair to them, they don't know where I am, where Terry is. Huh?"

"No, but that is for you to decide, from the birth date on the I.D. it looks like you really are eighteen, by about three months." I smiled. "So you are an adult, and I really can't presume to tell you what you have to do." But was she, really? I wanted to believe that at least.

"Let's go back to your place, huh?" she suggested.

Retrieving the boyish glasses from the floor, she replaced them in her coat pocket. Perhaps not wearing them had become a habit of the body. Perhaps they weren't really hers and just a pair that she had found that fixed her eyes well enough.

Driving back, I surprised myself by discovering that I was happy. And that I did believe her, the whole thing, I believed it all once more as I had done in the rainy parking lot when she had blurted out the story.

I tried to figure out why believing her made me happy. I knew I felt happy for her, she knew now what her name was, she had an identity and that was good. But it took most of the drive back before I realized that part of my happiness was based on the fact that she was eighteen, of a legal age. Legal age for what, I didn't want to think about too much.