Today, I would echo my mom’s heartfelt endorsement of the snowshoer’s femininity. But, at the time, wouldn’t that have put him in more danger of being found out? I not once neglected to tell him how nice he looked in Little Ray’s clothes. I always praised how pretty he was in this or that outfit. But I stopped short of telling him that he was a woman. I didn’t say he “just wasn’t born one,” as my mother had told me—only she’d used the she word for him.

I didn’t go that far. Even when it was just the snowshoer and my mom and me, or when only Molly was with us, I thought it put Mr. Barlow at risk to use feminine pronouns for him. I would not refer to him, in the third person, as she or her. I even told my mother that she should stop using female pronouns for the snowshoer.

“What if you slip up?” I asked my mom. “What if you call him her, or you say he’s a she, around someone else? Someone who doesn’t know—someone who’s not one of us,” I said to her. “What if you call him her, or you say he’s a she, around Abigail or Martha?”

“I didn’t know you were such a nervous Nellie, sweetie,” my mother said.

Poor Mr. Barlow. He was always mediating between my mom and me—he didn’t like it when we quarreled. “Take it easy on Adam, Ray,” the snowshoer said. “Fiction writers are worriers—they have heightened imaginations. They imagine worst-case scenarios.”

I knew the trail groomer agreed with me. Molly knew my mother wasn’t careful concerning what she said to whom—she just said it, whatever it was. I knew the night groomer had heard my mom use feminine pronouns for the snowshoer around the wrong people. “Listen to your one and only, Ray,” the snowcat operator said. “The Kid’s right—you could be more careful.”

“You’re not a fiction writer, Molly—you’re just a nervous Nellie, too,” my mother said.

“Pronouns are a habit, Ray,” the little English teacher said, always mediating. “You don’t need to have the writer gene to worry that you might repeat yourself—we all repeat ourselves.”

This caused an uncomfortable silence. For an English teacher—a man of words—the mere mention of my having the writer gene was not the most carefully worded thing Elliot Barlow ever said. If I had the writer gene, if there was a writer gene, I certainly didn’t get it from my mom—she didn’t even read fiction. As Molly had said, I was the only fiction writer Little Ray ever read.