Sarah ran.
The movement of her body and the pumping of har arms made her shoulder burn. With each step the blood seemed to flow heavier, trickling down her arms and chest and staining her white shirt red. People were startled as she ran past them, and several of them called out to her. But on and on she ran, forcing her athletic body to its limit.
At last she ducked into a dark, quiet alley. It was the kind of place she never would have dared go before; dark alleys were not safe for any girl, much less one of her own looks. She supposed it didn't matter now, though, did it? She wasn't a beautiful girl anymore. She was the kind of thing that preyed on beautiful girls. And so, finally feeling self and relatively hidden, she slowed, stopped, and slumped to the ground, exhausted.
Her lungs burned. Her shoulder throbbed. Even her breasts ached like a mother; with her boobs, she wasn't built for running braless. How far had she run? She didn't know, but it was too far, even for a girl in her good shape.
As her breath came back to her, though, the pain in Sarah's shoulder overtook all the other complaints in her body. She probably needed to get to a doctor. Or better yet, a hospital; they were probably better prepared to take walk-ins. Probably better equipped to treat gunshot wounds, too. Sarah scowled at the thought of being one of those poor people who her daddy always complained about having to treat for free, but she didn't have much choice. She just hoped her daddy wasn't at the hospital when she showed up. After all...
Oh, her daddy. Oh, her daddy... for what felt like the fiftieth time that morning, Sarah began to cry.
Repositioning herself, she tried to get a better look at her wound. It was hard to get a good look at it through her shirt. She hesitated for a moment... but then she realized she was alone. And besides, she was supposed to be a guy, right? What did it matter if she walked around shirtless? So she pulled her blood-soaked t-shirt off over her head to get a better look.
Her shoulder looked awful. It was gushing blood, and there was an ugly gash where the bullet had gone in. She couldn't bear to look at it for long. Her arm was slowly stiffening up, but the fact that she could move it at all was probably a good sign. Right? All in all, she knew she was lucky, though she felt anything but. The bullet had hit her left shoulder. Had it gone just a few more inches to the right...
Oh, Daddy. He was a doctor. A healer. He was supposed to make people better. But he'd shot her. His own daughter. She hadn't even realized her daddy owned a gun.
How had it come to this? Sarah went through the events of her morning, her bizarre morning. Everything had seemed fine when she'd woken up. She'd seen her own reflection that morning; she knew, because she'd spent an hour getting it ready for the world. Her daddy had seemed in fine spirits when he'd kissed her and sent her off; it was one of his rare Saturday mornings off, and he always seemed delighted to watch her as she went to cheerleading practice. Gabby had been on time, like always... not like Sarah, who was always running late when it was her turn to drive. (As the only two girls on their team who lived in Sarah's gated community, they always carpooled.)
But halfway through the school, something bizarre had happened. No, bizarre wasn't strong enough a word. Freaky? Fucked up? However she wanted to say it, the facts were the same. One minute Sarah had been sitting in Gabby's car. The next, she'd found herself suddenly standing on the approach to the football field, with half a ton of equipment weighing her down. She was running; she was mid-stride, and the momentum of her body kept her running forward for a few steps, until at last she regained control of her body and stopped. She stood stunned for a long couple of minutes, staring at her body and wondering what in the world had just happened to her, until the football coach shouted "Benitez!" in her direction. She looked up at him, responding not to the name but simply to the sound of his angry bark; but then she returned to staring at her clothing in confusion. A moment later, though, Sarah heard the crunch of footsteps on gravel, and the coach shouted "Benitez!" again, his voice growing louder as it neared her. Sarah expected the coach to walk past her and ream out this Benitez kid he was talking to; so Sarah was startled when the coach stopped directly in front of her and yelled, with his face alarmingly close to hers, "Benitez! Stop daydreaming and get the hell onto the field!"
Sarah looked up at him in shock; but as the look on his face grew more and more menacing, she decided it was safest to play along. So she walked up to the football field, the seething coach one short stride behind her.
The next half hour was a gruelling exercise in... well, in exercise. Sarah was used to a good workout; cheerleading was an intensely athletic activity, after all, and when Sarah wasn't in practice or at school, she was usually in the gym keeping herself in shape. A body like hers took hard work, after all. But Sarah had never had the experience of working out in full football gear. And if Sarah had thought her coach had worked her and her fellow cheerleaders hard, she'd never dreamed what hard work the football coaches expected from their players, or how agressive their verbal abuse was. Was this what Biff went through every day?
Biff. She'd been so confused that she'd totally forgotten about her boyfriend. Desperately she scanned the field for Biff. It was hard to tell the players apart in their uniforms, so instead of looking at their faces she studied the back of their jerseys. Although she looked for the entire hour she was on the field, however, she couldn't find the jersey marked "Meadows".
A great deal of the coaches' abuse was directed toward Sarah personally. Perhaps it was because she'd stood dumbstruck on the road to the football field for so long, but more likely it was because she was dead last in all the team's warmups. She'd done the stretches just fine; they weren't all that different from the stretches the cheerleaders warmed up with. But when they'd gotten to the pushups, she'd struggled to keep up with the coach's count, used neither to boy pushups nor to the additional weight of football equipment on her back. She'd fallen behind in situps, too. And when the coaches made them do four laps around the track, Sarah lagged way behind the other players.
She'd wondered at first why the coaches were making a girl go through this torture along with the football team. Was it some kind of prank, or a football-cheerleader exchange program? But as the morning passed, Sarah began to realize that the coaches didn't know she was a girl; they seemed to think she was a boy, a boy named Benitez. Of all the crazy things that had happened to her that morning, that had been the craziest. How could they not have known she was a girl? Sure, these football uniforms were bulky and unflattering on a girl, and they made everyone look kind of a like. But couldn't they hear her voice? Couldn't they see her smaller size? And even a big football jersey couldn't do anything to hide breasts like Sarah's. Sarah had been tempted at one point to rip off her helmet and show the coaches her long blonde hair, but she'd thought better of it. The coaches already had it in for her. She didn't want to risk making them any angrier than they already were.
Once the brutal warm-up routine was over -- how could all of that have just been a warm-up? -- the coaches split the team in half and had them play a game against each other... "shirts and skins," so to speak, though Sarah was glad no one was asking her to take her shirt off. Sarah knew the rules of football well enough to fake her way through... but she wasn't at all prepared when she felt the ball land in her arms. She looked at the ball in shock, and then looked up... Just in time to see a player who must have been twice her size and three times her way crash into her.
Sarah and the other player tumbled to the ground in a pile. Sarah winced at every blow. She wasn't used to this kind of abuse, and she dreaded the probability that this was going to leave her with bruises.
"Benitez, Johnson," one of the coaches said, walking to them. "You okay? That looked like a pretty nasty tackle."
The other player--Johnson--looked up at the coach blankly, but Sarah had had it by now. "No! She shouted, rising awkwardly to her feet. "No I'm not okay! I'm tired and sweaty and I hurt all over and this moron just rammed his whole 500-pound body into me, and it HURTS!" The coach looked at her in surprise. "And, um," she added, "I think I might have twisted my ankle." She walked around in a circle and feigned a limp.
"Me, um... me too," said the other player. "I think I'm hurt too, um... coach..."
The coach frowned, then said, "All right. You two better get to a doctor. We don't want you playing hurt." He turned. "The rest of you! Get back to the game! You're short two players, but we can make this work!"
Relieved, Sarah walked back to the school, pretending to limp as she went. The other player followed a short distance behind her; he was silent as they walked, and Sarah was glad.
Sarah reached the outer door to the boys' locker room and, after a moment's hesitation, stepped inside. The locker room was deserted, for which Sarah was grateful. The layout of the room was pretty familiar; it was just like the girls' locker room, but backwards and with a couple of urinals in the bathroom. Sarah headed directly to the bathroom and stepped in front of the waiting mirror.
She'd expected to see her own reflection looking very silly in an ill-fitting football uniform. Instead, Sarah was shocked to see the reflection of a tall boy. Brown-skinned and with a rather nice head of thick black hair, the boy in the mirror was handsome and fit, though he didn't have the huge, round, brick-shaped figure that a lot of the guys on the team had; Sarah thought it looked more like a basketball player's body than a football player's body. Sarah had seen this boy on the team, though she'd never really gotten to know him. If Sarah had to look like a boy, this wasn't a bad boy to look like... but she really wished she didn't have to look like a boy.
Sarah went to the locker room. She saw a locker marked "Benitez"; she was grateful they were labelled. She didn't know Benitez's combination, but Biff had taught her how to break into a locker; Sarah popped the locker open and removed the clothes inside.
Benitez's clothes consisted of a white t-shirt, jeans, socks, sneakers, and boxer shorts. No bra, though that shouldn't have surprised Sarah. They were going to look ugly and frumpy on her, but they were better than her uniform. She just hoped none of her friends saw her. As the trendiest girl in school, Sarah felt a certain responsibility to dress well so that everyone else would know how to dress. The thought of Sarah McMillan, fashionista, dressed like this? Mortifying.
Sarah took off the heavy uniform she'd been wearing piece by piece, then put on Benitez's normal clothes. She felt sweaty and gross, and she wouldn't have minded a shower; the thought of taking a shower naked in the boys' locker room was unnerving, though, even if everyone did think she was a boy. Once she'd finished dressing, she looked herself over. She felt like a nerd in these clothes... like that loser Karyn Black. She dressed kind of like this. But she was supposed to be a boy, she reminded herself, and this was how boys were supposed to dress.
She went back to the restroom, where she found the boy who had tackled her staring at his reflection and running his hand over his jaw, where Sarah noticed a fresh cut. "It'll heal," she said, bitterly, as she splashed some water over her face and hair and dried off.
Out of the locker room, through the school, and onto the streets, Sarah wondered what her next move was. Really, she could think of only one option: she wanted to go home. She needed to talk to her daddy. He was smart; if anyone could figure out what had happened to Sarah, he could. And maybe he could fix it, though Sarah doubted this was something her daddy could fix with a scalpel. The walk home was long, though, and if this Benitez kid had a car, she didn't know which car it was. Walking home couldn't be any worse than what she'd already been through, though, so reluctantly she set out.
Nearly an hour later, Sarah arrived panting at her front door. She wondered for a moment if she would knock... but why should she? This was her own house, after all, and it was ridiculous for her to have to knock for access to her own house. So she leaned down and removed the key that was hidden under one of the rocks in the garden.
Walking inside, she saw her daddy seated in his favorite chair in the living room; she stared wide-eyed at her over the top of his newspaper. She ran up to him. "Daddy! Oh, you'll never believe what I've been through this morning!"
Her daddy stared at her for a moment, shocked. Then he said, in the tone of voice he only used when he was mad at Sarah, "Young man, what is the meaning of this?"
"Daddy?" Sarah said, startled. "Oh, no, Daddy, I'm not a man. It's me, your daughter. It's Sarah."
Her daddy raised an eyebrow. "Boy, this is my house. It's my private property. I don't know who you think you are or what you think you're doing, but you do not walk into another person's house without permission."
"But... Daddy," Sarah said, tears forming in her eyes. "Daddy, I thought..."
Her daddy rose to his feet. "My daughter is in her bedroom and my wife is in the kitchen," he said, his tone threatening now. "I love them more than anything in the world. They're fragile and precious and very dear to me. And I won't have a strange boy barging into my house to do God-knows-what to them. Now leave, before I'm forced to take more drastic measures."
"Daddy!" Sarah cried, desperate and shrinking beneath the overwhelming anger of her father's gaze. She'd never seen him like this. "Please, Daddy, it's me! It's me! I'm Sarah, I swear, I--"
With that her father left the room for a moment... and when he came back, he was carrying a handgun.
"Daddy," Sarah whispered. "Daddy, no. What are you..."
"Leave," her father said commandingly. "By the time I've counted to five, I expect you to be on the other side of that door, and I expect you to keep walking. And if I ever see you here again, Lord help me. One."
"Daddy," Sarah said, "listen to me!"
"Two."
"Daddy, please... I don't know where else to go!"
"Three." Her father lifted the gun and pointed it at Sarah."
"Please, Daddy, I can prove it!"
"Four."
Suddenly Sarah leapt at her father. She wasn't certain what she was trying to do, but she threw the whole force of her body into him and knocked him to the ground. Something must have happened when they toppled over... a quick series of emotions crossed her father's face. First rage, then a blank stillness, then confusion, then shock. And somehow, in the course of all this... somehow his finger must have pulled the triigger of the gun. Sarah heard a loud crack, and then she felt an agonizing pain in her shoulder.
She dropped to her knees and screamed. Her father jumped to his feet, crying, "Oh God, oh my God, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" But he was still waving the gun around in his hand as he flailed his arms.
And so Sarah had gotten to her feet. And she'd run.
Now she was huddled shirtless behind a dumpster bleeding more blood than she'd ever seen in her life. She was terrified, she was confused, she was lost, and for all she knew she was going to bleed to death.
Well, she couldn't let that happen. So she took the bloodstained shirt in her hand, tore it, and wrapped it around her shoulder as a makeshift bandage. And then she pushed herself to her feet and started off toward the hospital.
