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syllables of “Angela!” as loud as possible. Bitch.
    Ms. Marino, my Spanish teacher, was easy. It was her first year teaching, and she just wanted us all to like her. I could have said, “Please call me Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart from now on.” I could have told her I’d decided to become an elephant or a lilac bush and she’d have said the same thing.
    “Why, that’s wonderful! I’m so happy for you, Grady! ¡Mis mejores deseos para tí! ” Then she called on me three times, always shouting out “Grady!” at the top of her lungs, rolling the R so it sounded vaguely Spanish. Apparently, Mrs. Norman was right: Changing my name was getting me way too much attention, especially from teachers.
    The half-awake kids in my Spanish class didn’t seem to care what name I was called. I barely ever spoke to any of them anyway, except when forced to converse in our foreign language.
    “Para la merienda, ¿quieres la chuleta de puerco o la sopa?”
    “Mi comida favorita son las chuletas de puerco con arroz.”
    As if the high school cafeteria ever served a recognizable pork chop anyway.
    Next class, however, was gym. I’d been dreadingit the entire Thanksgiving vacation. Gym was one place it mattered very much whether you were a boy or a girl. There was no gray area for Grady—you either changed clothes in the boys’ locker room or the girls’. And I could no longer imagine using either one. Unbinding my boobs to step into the girls’ shower? I didn’t think so. The boys’ ? Right. Or I could just jump into an active volcano.
    Ms. Unger and Coach Speranza cotaught gym class. Sometimes the boys and girls did stuff together, and sometimes we split up according to gender. I wasn’t crazy about Ms. Unger, but I’d never be able to put up with Coach Speranza for the rest of the year. He was the kind of gym teacher who encouraged the athletes to make fun of the kids who had a hard time huffing around the track or getting to the top of the climbing rope. He believed public humiliation was a teaching tool. Even Ms. Unger didn’t like him, and she wasn’t such a sweetheart herself.
    I found Ms. Unger in her office just inside the door to the girls’ locker room, bent over a newspaper that was spread open on the floor. She looked up at me from her task of digging dog shit out of the crevices of her sneakers.
    “Right in the middle of the track!” she said, as if I’d asked her a question. “There’s a sign out there begging those idiots to pick up after theirmutts, but they ignore it. Somebody could slip in this and break a leg. One of these days I’m gonna catch one of those morons, and then they’ll be sorry!”
    Ms. Unger’s tirades always scared me a little bit. She got so mad over the dumbest stuff. I just stood there watching her work.
    “Did you want something? You’re not gonna ask to be excused from gym today, are you, cowboy?” It was obvious that I’d be sorry if I did. When Ms. Unger started calling people cowboy, it usually meant her patience had been stretched thin.
    “No,” I said. “But I wanted to talk to you a minute.”
    “So talk,” she said, digging at the sole of her shoe.
    “The thing is, I’m changing my name. I’m going to the principal’s office next period to tell him about it too. I’d like people to start calling me Grady.” I smiled, hoping to appear likeable and harmless.
    Ms. Unger put down the shoe and looked up at me. She squinted her eyes. “Don’t tell me.”
    Her gaze took in the haircut, the shirt, the pants.
    “Good Lord,” she said. “You’re transgendered, aren’t you?”
    My mouth fell open. “Well, yeah. How did you know?”
    “I’m not blind,” she said. “And I’m not a math teacher—I’m a gym teacher. And you’re not the first one.”
    “I’m not?”
    She sighed. “About five, six years ago. It was a boy, though, going the other way. Mr. Gleason was teaching with me then—not Speranza .” She said the name as if it were something else