“I’m not a boy, Daddy—I never was—which, you may remember, is why I could get pregnant!” Little Ray was calling, all the way down the stairs. The diaper man’s ghost continued to address me in the plural. I’d fallen asleep when the night groomer got into bed with me, maybe at my mom’s prompting.

“You can tell me what’s on your mind, Kid,” Molly said in the dark. “Only if you want to tell me.”

I had plenty to say. I’d not stopped wanting to know who my father was—I’d just stopped asking my mother. “I know the snowshoer has asked her—she won’t tell him anything,” I told Molly.

“I’m in the club, Kid,” the snowcat operator said. “Ray won’t tell me, either.”

Elliot Barlow had long been a go-between for me. Now I had two. I was already telling the snowshoer what I wished my mom would tell me. “You have to give Ray more time, Adam,” Elliot had said. “It might be easier for her to tell me or Molly first.”

The night when Molly told me she was in the club, I began to understand what the little English teacher had meant. Like Little Ray, I was keeping a secret. I hadn’t even told Nora and Em. If I told anyone, I was beginning to think, it might be easier for me to tell the trail groomer first.

I knew the snowshoer wore my mother’s clothes. Okay, he missed her—we both did. But, even when my mom was away, I didn’t wear her clothes. Yes, they were close to the same size. Although Elliot had to stand on his toes when he kissed her, and Little Ray had ten or twelve pounds on him, her clothes fit him.

I know, I know—my mother kept her clothes in the snowshoer’s bedroom in Amen Hall. I could understand his temptation to wear her clothes to bed. But—by the wrestling season of my third year at the academy, when I was seventeen—Elliot was in the habit of dressing himself in Little Ray’s clothes whenever he was in our faculty apartment. In the evening, students often knocked on our door—wanting the snowshoer’s help with their homework, or because they had other problems. What if one of the students saw the little English teacher dressed as a woman?

Because my mom was a jock, a lot of her clothes weren’t very feminine, but Elliot was into her makeup, too. Little Ray kept most of her makeup in the snowshoer’s bathroom. Elliot liked her lipstick, her eyeliner, her eye shadow. When he put on her face powder, every trace of his beard disappeared. He had a light beard.