“Oh please hurry,” she begged in the dark as the tears came. “I’m so cold. Oh God, I hurt! Please! You’re so mean to me!” She burst into sobs that no one heard or would have been moved by were she standing in the middle of a packed coliseum.

No one cared. No one ever had.

Patty Passman’s first mistake in life was being born a girl to parents who already had six girls and were devastated when they had yet one more on their last try. Passman spent her childhood trying to make it up to them.

She pounded on her sisters and told them they were ugly, stupid and flat-chested. She broke toys, dismembered dolls, drew obscene pictures, passed gas, belched, spat, didn’t flush the toilet, was insensitive, hoarded candy, kept quarters meant for the Sunday school offering, lost her temper, teased the dog, played Army, played doctor with other girls in the neighborhood and refused to play the piano. She did all she could to act like a boy.

She toned it down as years passed, only to find she had been gender contraire for so long she had fallen too far behind in the female race to ever catch up or even come in last. She was disqualified and defaulted by all except Moses Pharaoh, who nominated her for the wrestling homecoming court because, he told her as he escorted her across the spotlit basketball court that illustrious night, he was turned on by fat women with small teeth.

Afterward, the two of them ate lasagne, garlic bread, salad and cheesecake at Joe’s Inn. On the way home in his ’69 high-performance Chevelle, with its 425 horsepower and 475 pounds of torque, Moses drove her up to the observation point at the end of East Grace Street.

What Passman knew about kissing she had learned from movies. She was not prepared for the huge garlic-tasting thick tongue thrust down her throat. She was shocked when Moses shoved his hands down her chiffon neckline, groping for the Promised Land. He parted her, crossed her, broke all ten commandments, or seemed to, on that awful night when her long pink satin dress was pushed up and crushed, all because she had not been born a boy.

She was shivering and feeling crazed again when the wagon rumbled awake. It pulled ahead. With each turn it took she rolled on her side like a log in the tide. Minutes seemed forever. The van finally halted.

“Sally Port One, put the gate up,” a male voice announced.

Passman heard what sounded like a grate lurch and begin slowly rolling up. The van drove ahead and stopped again. The grate screeched back down. The van’s tailgate swung open, a cop standing there, chewing gum.

He was disheveled, his waist drooping over his duty belt like excess pizza dough hanging off the pan. One eye was hazel, the other brown, his graying hair slicked back, ears and nostrils bristly like stiff paintbrushes. Wagon drivers were the flatworms of law enforcement, a throwback to a spineless, lazy, lower order of life Passman had grown to despise.