On the weekends all the girls in the same year in our boardinghouse loaf around in the common room, watching endless DVDs, documentaries, and reruns of Hollyoaks.
We make “the boat,” where we push the two sofas together to form a square, and then dump all the comfy cushions in the middle. There’s a door to the kitchen, and everyone takes it in turns to do the “toast run” so that we have TV snacks. We try to avoid our turn, for we see the invisible dirt on our fingertips seeping angrily into the spongy white slices of loaf: E. coli, salmonella, listeria. At the beginning of term we made toast for everyone, and Ellie got sick the day after. Enough said.
A collective popcorn is made about once a day. We try to get out of the kitchen when the microwave is on, because Mum once said you shouldn’t stand near one in case the rays escape and fry your organs. Most girls in our year have already got their period, and we can’t help wondering if the reason we haven’t had ours is because we fried our ovaries in the past. Mum wouldn’t have a microwave, just to be on the safe side, but Grandma had one, so it’s possible the radiation occurred when we were younger. Either way, there’s no point compounding the damage.
There’s normally a power struggle about what we watch. Alice likes gruesome horror stories and films about planes going down with people clutching their babies and shrieking, but she’ll settle for a documentary about serial killers. Ellie would rather watch Disney classics. The rest of us slot somewhere in between. Personally, we like the serial killer shows, because it’s a relief to know there are people out there worse than us.
Recording our mistakes has become our full-time occupation. Most words are generated when interacting with other people, like at mealtimes or when everyone is hanging out in the dorm. At these busy times, remembering everything that has been done wrong is such an effort that there’s no time to actually work through the list. In quieter moments, like being in assembly, doing homework, or pretending to read a book, we get a chance to stop and review the day’s data so far. It’s called a Pause. By rights then, watching TV should be bliss. Not much talking gets done, and there’s ample time to go over everything. Yet nothing about these routines is pleasant. It’s like making yourself answer the same math question over and over and coming up with a different answer every time, even though you don’t actually like math, so there’s no conceivable reason why you would want to occupy all your free time with it.
She tells me that over time doing these lists will make us perfect, but it’s little consolation. Every day feels like an unrelenting slog of words generated, letters compiled, actions reviewed—with nothing to show for it but exhaustion and despair.
At 7:00 a.m. every weekday, the Wimborne alarm screeches throughout the house. We roll over, not wanting to open our eyes, because within five minutes letters will be dancing and cartwheeling across our brain.
We swing our legs out so they dangle over our bed, reaching down to our top drawer to pull out some pants before grabbing our school uniform from the chair. Actions start to be recorded:
School uniform on, we brush our teeth with Alice.
The alarm sounds again at 7:15 a.m. and the whole of Wimborne files downstairs to the common room for roll call. A range of offenses are committed.
The others can be summarized as follows:
Once we’re in assembly, it takes about ten minutes for the hall to be full. The chaplain marches onto the stage to tell us that Jesus has come to save us, generating the first Pause of the day. It’s time to address the list so far.
We go through it three times:
A few more letters pop up while the chaplain talks, and we slot them in at the end.
Between three and ten letters are normally generated on the way to class. While you don’t communicate in class as much as in everyday life, interaction is still required. When the teacher is talking, you can pretend to listen while actually reviewing words, but you might not finish if you’re interrupted by something inconvenient like a worksheet. So classes are Half Pauses.
Full Pauses include going to the toilet, having a shower, and, most importantly, the time before we go to sleep. Full Pauses are used to review all words created that day, though the depth of the review can be tailored to the time available. A toilet review must be quick (otherwise someone might think we’ve gone for a huge shit, and that would generate so many letters it doesn’t bear thinking about). We get longer in the shower, say twenty minutes, but we can only focus on reviewing once we have washed our full body three times, or nine if we still don’t feel clean. We go over the list until someone bangs on the door and shouts to hurry up. Bedtime has an indefinite time allocation.
At the end of the day, there tend to be between 100 and 350 letters.
The day’s list must be analyzed before we sleep, along with the red letters carried forward from previous days. We lie on our bed re-sorting the letters into red and green afresh, deciding what is definitely green and can be discarded, and what is so serious it must be taken with us into tomorrow. This takes up to four hours.
A Christmas tree materializes in the Wimborne entrance hall, and our housemistress is sitting next to it, tapping away on her BlackBerry. When she looks up, she sees Georgia and ourselves bashing the snow off our shoes on the doormat outside.
“Hey, you’re first back,” she calls. “You guys get to decorate. I’ve got to go do some jobs.” She kicks a cardboard box of baubles and tinsel in our direction and disappears down the corridor.
We couldn’t be happier to oblige. We untangle the lights and wind them round a few times, before starting on the plastic red and gold baubles. It takes about twenty minutes. Finally, Georgia lifts us on her shoulders and we plonk the star on top.
Alice arrives back from math, pulls the rest of the tinsel out of the box, and takes it upstairs to Harper. We follow.
At her heels like a dog, She sneers. It’s pathetic.
We add CLINGY to the list.
Up in Harper, Ellie and Soo-jin have hung fairy lights from the curtains. The four of us sit on the floor in the middle of our twinkly grotto, cutting scrap paper into snowflakes. “I Kissed a Girl” blasts from the speakers on repeat.
They are bitching about teachers. It takes me a moment to realize they’re looking at me. “Well?” probes Ellie. “Don’t you have a teacher you don’t like?”
We’ve been cutting quietly while revising a list, but verbal interaction is now required. This means we’ll have to start all over again on this list after we’ve spoken, which is annoying and panic-making. Frustration prickles across our skin like static. But at the same time, it’s nice to know there are people nearby who stop you fading away altogether.
Because here’s my friend’s worst thing about being in a dorm: our lists get interrupted. And my best: our lists get interrupted.
One biology lesson a few months later, when the sun is shining brightly through the windows behind the whiteboard, and Georgia is sitting next to us drawing patterns with her protractor on her worksheet, we learn the shocking truth.
We are a boy.
We can’t believe we didn’t realize before.
We find out when Mrs. Nelson says we don’t look like we are concentrating very hard and tells us to read aloud from the textbook to the class. We were two letters away from finishing a routine that had been going on since we sat down at the beginning of the lesson. We want to scream. We want to throw the book at her and tell her she has cost us half an hour of our life that we will never get back. We don’t, because anger only hurts the one who feels it. Instead, we sit up straight, smooth down the page, and read aloud carefully:
Jan was looking at her chromosomes under a microscope in biology class, when she saw something unusual. Instead of having XX chromosomes like a normal girl, she had XY. Shocked and confused, Jan went to the doctor, who explained that due to a genetic mutation, she had been left with an XY genotype, which explains why despite being 16, Jan has never had a period.
Although Jan had lived all her life thinking she was like other girls because she was born with a vagina, she has no ovaries. Instead, she has internal male testes. While Jan will not be able to have children, she has recently started dating Tom. Tom understands about her condition and is supportive. Medication means Jan can expect to live a relatively normal life.
And that’s when we know. We are like Jan. It explains everything. All that time spent worrying that we didn’t get our period because what happened when we were younger damaged us and made us infertile, we were focusing on the wrong thing. We don’t even have any ovaries. It’s clear that we are a hermaphrodite. It explains why we have so much hair on our arms and legs, and why we have no boobs or bum and the body of a boy.
We clamp down hard on our lip so the scream doesn’t escape, because no one is ever going to want to marry a boy who thinks like a girl.