The Greatest Lie Part 3

My weekend escapade with my first real lover, Jake, convinced me that I was destined to live as a girl, despite having been born a boy. Unfortunately, it was my male persona to whom the University of Minnesota had extended admission and a scholarship, and I wasn’t quite sure how they would react if I showed up asking for a room in the women’s dormitory.

It was bad enough that I, a product of middle class privilege, had leveraged a Spanish surname into a lucrative scholarship, but to present them with an undisclosed gender reversal might put me sideways with the Admissions Committee and the scholarship people. I needed the dough from the scholarship, because during my senior year I had managed to alienate my parents through some complications arising from my crossdressing habit. With great regret, after I arrived in Minneapolis, I changed back into boys clothing to register as a freshman entering the summer session, and tried to reclaim my male persona.

One good thing about registering for summer school was there were hardly any other freshman around. I got assigned to a single dorm room, and got all of the classes that I wanted. As a freshman, I was quite a novelty among my classmates, who were split between remedial types that were making up failures from the prior year and nerds who were single-mindedly piling up credits as fast as possible. I was so young that I had little in common with my older classmates and spent most of my time in my room or the library reading and doing homework, dressed en femme. Naturally, I loved studying. I had to, because, typical ambitious me, I had signed up for all upper level classes.

The teaching assistant for my "Gender Roles In Literature" class was Jon, a tall, dark intellectual grad student in the English Department. At the end of the first week of class, he invited me for coffee. By then, I was getting lonely, so I gratefully accepted. As I usually do when I meet new people, I asked a lot of flattering questions and let him talk about himself.