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somehow threatening. She felt as if she was walking on a tightrope with no safety net beneath her, and everyone down below, including all her family—her brothers and sister, her mother and father—were looking up at her and chanting: “Fall!”
    So could they be right? Was she really that bizarre, that atrocious?
    No, girl, came her internal reply, you're not. You're not at all. Just don't, don't, don't give in. Just remember all of your sisters out there in this great big universe.
    Right. When she was in California Kris had used a friend's computer, surfing the Internet day after day, week after week. Discovering a worldwide community, she realized for the first time that she wasn't alone, that there were hundreds of thousands if not millions of transgendered people just like her. She'd made friends on the Net, shared stories, laughed, cried, and confessed, all the while learning what estrogens were the best, where to buy shoes for her long feet, and exactly how doctors used the skin from the penis to construct a vulva and a vagina.
    Yet now she was here in this Minnesota, without a computer and cut off from that new world. Consequently, she felt more isolated and alone than ever before.
    It was a tiny room with dark-pine paneling and a single bed, on which Kris now dropped herself. She bowed her face into her hands and tried to hold back the tears. She was such a fool, such an idiot. She never fell in love with anyone her own age, only guys a lot older than she. Oh, and straight. Often married to boot. It was just like her shrink had told her: She went for the guys she could never have, the ones that were perpetually and eternally unavailable. But did she listen to that? Learn anything? Hell, no, for here she'd done it again, fallen crazy in love with a guy she could never have. What was even more stupid was that late this afternoon she'd gone and blurted it out to her shrink.
    Seated in his small office downtown, Kris had said, “You're never going to believe who I have a crush on.”
    “Try me,” replied Dorsey, a small man with thick gray hair and heavy glasses that did little to mask his intense eyes.
    “Stuart Hawkins. You know, the judge, the one who's in the paper all the time. He's just so…I don't know … so sexy. I can't stop thinking about him.”
    Dorsey had sat in his hard wooden chair for a long time, those beady eyes not blinking, his thin lips not moving. Or had he been trying to stuff his amusement? Had that been it? The very possibility had made Kris so pissed that she'd almost blurted it out, told him that just a couple of weeks ago she'd finger-fucked the good judge.
    But then Dorsey had muttered his usual nonjudgmental, nonindicative grunt, saying only, “Oh.”
    And Kris had tapped every bit of her considerable will to be silent, because, no, she guessed Dorsey wouldn't have believed her. At best, he'd just chalk it up as another of her fantasies, all too many of which focused on so-called straight-acting, straight-appearing fatherly types. Could she help it if she just wanted a good lay from a solid hunk?
    Blotting her eyes, Kris pushed herself to her feet, then crossed to the small half-bath, a tiny room packed into one corner of her bedroom. Kris stepped in, flicked on the light, and looked at herself in the mirror of the minute medicine cabinet. Ew. Nasty. She saw hair that was wet and tousled, puffy red eyes, and a face that was definitely not male, one that was in fact becoming less so by the day. While she'd always have her small Adam's apple—which neither surgery nor drugs could ever eliminate—the months of hormone therapy had already had an amazing overall effect. In that way she was lucky: Because her testicles had long ago been removed, she wasn't having to take large doses of estrogen to suppress testosterone production. And as soon as she'd started taking it orally, she had been quick to see breast development, a softening of her skin and body, not to mention the improvement