The Illusionist Read Online Free Page B

myself in the mirror, and I’m still seeing traces of girl there from the deformity. I see this face, and I’m afraid that nothing can get rid of that girl stuff that doesn’t belong there. Maybe it’ll never go away, and it’ll always be like this, this shadow of a girl there.
    â€œAnd so I just start crying. And my mom hears me, and knocks on the bathroom door. She sees me standing there with the razor in my hand. ‘Honey, honey,’ she says, and she just—holds me. ‘Oh God,’ she says, ‘It’s so hard.’ And it’s like she knows the truth now, and how I’m suffering, and she starts to cry too.
    â€œShe sits down next to me there on the hall floor, and she says, ‘If it’s gonna cause you so much suffering, then maybe you should live as a boy,’ and from then on, she tolerates me, and doesn’t try to change me, and my dad continues to pretend there’s nothing weird going on.”
    He started dating a girl. He had had other girlfriends before, he said, but he and this girl were really in love. She was beautiful, he said, his ideal, a cheerleader. She loved him, but they didn’t have sex like other people. One reason the girl loved him, Dean said, was that he didn’t hit on her like every other guy.
    But then one day this other girl he’d gone out with—before the cheerleader—she called his present girlfriend, and laid it on her,told her that Dean was really a female. And the cheerleader just went crazy! She turned on Dean, called him a freak. “She said I disgusted her, and she never wanted to lay eyes on me again as long as she lived.”
    Dean paused here in his story. I saw his eyes fill with tears. “You don’t have to talk about it,” I said. I couldn’t bear to see him cry, because then all his efforts to be a boy would come to nothing, and he would be naked in front of me.
    Dean took a swallow, and continued. “ Then I cried,” he said. “Like a fuckin’ girl. I didn’t even want to go on living anymore. Her name was Sharon. Fuckin’ cheerleader—Princess Normal. Now she tells me I’m a sicko, a lesbo, and I tell her I’m not a lesbian!
    â€œShe breaks up with me, and I just want to die. I swallow a whole bottle of antibiotics and they put me in the state hospital for thirty days. I tell the doctor I’m not a girl!” Dean drew his head back, mimicked the doctor’s pompous voice, “ ‘Miss Dean,’ he says, ‘I think this is what we call a crisis of sexual identity.’ ”
    Here Dean spluttered with laughter. “Fuckin’ A it is!” he cried. “It’s a fuckin’ crisis for him. But it ain’t no crisis for me! ”

C HAPTER 5
CHRISSIE
    So, I let Dean live with me, he had wormed his way into my heart.
    I would see him sometimes at the Laundercenter when I went to wash my clothes. There, in the warm, damp atmosphere, condensation running in rivulets down the windows, the machines churning and rumbling, he would hold court. He would stand at the center of a group of girls, and regale them with stories, and perform his magic tricks, making his cards disappear and reappear, drawing quarters out from behind their ears, making his rubber bands jump from finger to finger, his hands moving as fast and smooth as water.
    There were always girls hanging round Dean, young girls, thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. Like birds, chattering and flapping their wings in a ceaseless motion, their hair all puffed up because they’d just been to Trendsetters, which was next door to the Laundercenter, and there would be fresh blusher on their pale cheeks. And Dean would flirt with them and goof around, and smoke his cigarette so the smoke made his eyes squint in a manly way. Now and then, he’d interrupt himself to give change to customers, to sell little containers of Tide and fabric softener, all the