The Swan Who Thought She Was a Duckling

They walked out the front door and down a few streets before standing outside of the sig house. Her nerves were uneasy because she knew that going unrecognized in here might be harder than she thought. Randy grabbed her hand and began walking in the house not knowing her inner battle.

“Aye, Newhouse just got here with a pretty hot chick.” Jane sighed as the guy didn’t blow her cover.

“Grab me a beer?” she asked watching Randy walk away. She moved next to the guy who announced her arrival, “thanks Tony.

He frowned, “How long do we have to do this? You’re our teammate.”

“I’m hoping by November the staff and school will believe enough in the new kicker to not care that she’s a girl. If not we’ll say we met through my brother. I promise it won’t be that much longer.” She grimaced as he walked away toward her other teammates that were in the house.

She turned but couldn’t find Randy. She started to push through the house and ended up in the living room. She felt terrified. She tried to move her body to the music but felt even more awkward than she was before. She decided she would walk back toward the front of the house and maybe make a quick exit when she collided with someone.

“Damn it.” She heard the large body shout as she tried to apologize for knocking into them. She realized he had spilt a drink all down the front of her, “I’m so sorry, come on.” He pulled her behind him as he started weaving his way through the crowd of people. He started to climb the stairs when she stopped. She knew this scene, her older brother had told her about it from when he was on campus. Spill the drink, take her upstairs to get a shirt, get her in bed.

“I’m not going upstairs.” She mumbled trying to sound assertive but in the end sounded like the scared freshman that she was.

“I promise I’m not pulling the spill a drink get sex ploy on you. I seriously was trying to get outside to smoke. You’re small enough that I didn’t see you. I’ll let you wait outside the door and give you the dry shirt.” He sounded genuine enough that she started to climb the stairs again. “How did you know about that anyhow, I’ve never seen you which means you’re in fact a freshman?”

She laughed, the first hard hearty laugh since she’d been put in the awkward situation for a party. “My brother went to school here, told me the different tricks the guys use. Wanted to make sure nothing bad happened to his baby sister.”

He shook his head and moved down the hall to the third door. “Well I’ve never done it, I’m different.” He stepped into the room and began rummaging around. When he came back out he handed her a woman's shirt. “My sister leaves clothes here a lot. You can bring it back on Monday if you want. I’m Jake by the way.”

She didn’t want to tell him her name for fear of figuring out her identity. “Thanks Jake. You’re not so bad.” She smiled as she changed the shirt in the middle of the hallway

“Well you’re welcome. You gonna stay or leave for the night?”

“I’m not sure I didn’t really want to stick around for the sorority girls judging me. I’m not a very girly girl. I like to keep things simple. I’m going to go back downstairs. I’ll see you around Jake.” She quickly moved down the hall and toward the stairs. She was nearly halfway down them when she saw Randy standing there with worry on his face.

This was the part of her life that she really didn’t like. The look of fear most people have when they think something bad is happening. No one knows her secrets, which means that they have no idea just how strong she actually is. “Did he hurt you Jane?”

She laughed, it was the only way to deal with his over protectiveness. “No Randy, I bumped into him and he spilled his drink on me. I stayed out in the hallway as he got me a different shirt. Don’t be so quick to worry. I’m a big girl.” She muttered the last part patting his cheek before walking back toward the kitchen.

The music grew louder and the squealing of girls alerted her to the fact that many of the most popular boys had just arrived. This is the part of the night that had brought so much worry to her. This would be the make or break point in her years here. If the guys kept her cover the next three years would breeze by, if they didn’t keep her cover she was done for. She would become a joke here just as she had become in high school.

She locked eyes with a tall blonde guy and nodded her head as she began walking toward the front door. “Whoa there pretty girl, where are you going?” She turned her head and pushed off the counter. “I don’t believe that we’ve met.”

She looked him over a few more times before she decided to speak up, “We haven’t, but trust me you won’t forget me.” With that she walked right out of the kitchen and headed straight for the front door. The house had become stuffy and not her type of scene.

She had gotten halfway down the block before she heard feet pounding on the pavement. Her eyes rolled as she tried to figure out a way to get further away without having to speak to whoever it was. Talking to someone right now would not be a good idea since she had a small amount of anger built up from being treated like a joke in high school.

“Where are you going Jane?”

She turned to find Randy running down the sidewalk, she was glad it was him and not Jake or one of her teammates running after her. She turned back around and sat on the edge of the sidewalk. The questions were going to begin and she knew it. “What do you want Randy?”

“To know what the hell was going on in there.”

She cringed a little at that comment and turned to look at him. “Do you know what it’s like to be the odd man out in a group?” She left the rhetorical question hanging in the air between them. “I do know what it’s like. I’ve had to deal with it my whole life. My family accepted it, but no one else can accept what it is I do.”

“What are you talking about? There’s no way you do anything scandalous because you seriously dress more modest than most girls in that house. What are you talking about?” He was being persistent which meant that she was going to have to tell him to shut him up.

“What I’m about to tell you has to stay here. There is no mentioning this to other people.” She snuck a look from under her arm as she turned her head back into her arms. “I’m the new kicker on the football team. I use my younger brother for the website picture but all the scouting pictures have my picture. I don’t ever take my helmet off and try to avoid drawing attention to myself.” She took a deep breath before she continued, “I didn’t want the guys to come up to me tonight and have it look like they knew me intimately, that only leads to terrible things.

“When the guys finally can talk to me it’s because I met them because of my brother. I was a joke at my high school because of the fact that I played football. It leaked my senior year that I wasn’t actually a guy, but that I was a girl and shit hit the fan. I was no longer able to hide in the background like I had for so many years. I don’t want that to happen here. That’s why the two guys were raunchy with me, I told them to act that way.”

Randy looked over with wide eyes and a slack jaw. No girl would ever ask that of a guy and she knew it. She had asked her best friends on the team to not say anything when she was in high school and it had hurt them more than it had her. It was a hard thing to ask of people you cared about. “Why would you want to go through that? Clearly if you made it here then you’re pretty damn good.”

She laughed really hard at that comment. Everyone thought it would be so easy to just tell the world that you were a woman in a man’s world. Hadn’t anyone ever watched that Disney movie from when she was a kid, Motocrossed? It made perfect sense as to why she was asking that of her friends. He would have to be told to understand and she knew it.

She swallowed and looked over at him before standing in front of him with her arm extended. “Let’s walk and talk I want out of this dress and whatever this girl calls a top. I’ll explain everything on the way, and what we don’t finish on the walk I’ll tell you at your place.”

He nodded his head and pushed himself to his feet before standing beside her waiting to begin the trek back to the house. “The guys on the team are always apprehensive when we first start practices, but by the time preseason ends they are all so protective of me that the sexist comments stop and the hitting on me stops too. When we get to the first week of classes they all want to hang out and do fun things like preseason with me, but I can’t bring myself to do that because I’m afraid that I’ll get figured out and then the worst thing happens.

“When the student body finds out that I’m not actually a boy it makes it difficult to function on the team because I’m not an all-American boy like the rest of them. I actually had a guy in high school tell me I should just get a sex change because no guy would ever want a girl who played football and was manlier than half of the men they were friends with.”

He wrapped an arm around her and squeezed her shoulder in an attempt at comfort. She had experienced this moment from many of her close friends, but none of them truly understood how she felt. “It’s honestly not bad because it’s like having fifty plus brothers that all care and look out for you, it’s the girlfriends that bring drama. They think I’m getting with their boyfriends, they think that I want their boyfriends. Honestly after you see them cry their level of cute goes down, but I digress. I’m terrified to join the sorority my mom was a part of because I’m afraid I won’t fit in with them, especially because I’m not girly, my whole outfit was your sisters.”

He laughed to himself as he pictured his sister’s closet full of frilly clothing. He tried to picture Jane’s closet and only came up with pants and shirts and maybe a few dresses that were conservative. “Do you dress girlie at all?” He had to know if he would ever see her like this again.

“Yeah, I do. I just don’t dress revealing like this. It’s actually terrifying to dress like this and have people staring at me.” She looked down at her feet as she kept following him down the street.

He bumped into her side and smiled, “Why aren’t you as confident as you should be? You are drop dead gorgeous, I mean seriously I was worried in the hallway because Jake is a player. He preys on girls that look like you, quiet, innocent, modest girls. He’s done that since we were freshman and he only does it because those girls love the attention of a cute guy telling them how much they mean to him.” He looked down at the concrete they were walking on and fell silent.

She knew what this meant it had happened to someone he cared about. This was one of the problems with hanging around the guys so much. Eventually you felt something for them and eventually it all began to fall apart because someone began to feel something for someone that they shouldn’t feel something for. “You don’t have to explain Randy. I know how it goes.”

He began to walk up the sidewalk toward his house. She was afraid it would become awkward between them, she had never trusted many people with her secret for that very reason. She heard the key scratch as it entered the lock. When the door pushed open she followed him in, the house was different without all the bodies that had been in before the party. He began to climb the stairs and she got nervous. She didn’t stay with guys, she had never really partied much either.

Her chest started heaving, she didn’t have anxiety this often but when she was in a new place, a new situation and trying to hide her secret it was easy for her to begin to panic. She sat on the stairs with her knees close to her chest, she squeezed her knees to her body and waited for it to pass before standing again.

Moisture began to wet her cheeks before she realized she was crying from all of the sudden changes from the plan that she had set out for the evening. She needed to get back to her room before the real panic set in and she would begin to hyperventilate, which was also a rarity.

She heard quick footsteps then saw Randy in front of her, “are you okay Jane, I can’t believe I left you down here by yourself. Come on let’s go upstairs” Her breaths started getting shallower at his request to go upstairs. He quickly tried to fix the situation that he had started, “okay, so we won’t go upstairs what’s wrong? How about this, I’ll go grab you a shirt and some shorts, then we’ll walk you back to your room. I’ll sit with you until you’re calm again once you’ve calmed down I’ll come back here.”

The shakes and anxiety started to lessen enough to where she was just breathing heavy. She began to squeeze herself harder before she looked back up and saw him still staring at her. She had to explain everything to him before her whole life fell apart. It seemed like everything was just becoming one big cluster fuck this year already and she had only been around campus for a month. “Can we just go upstairs?” Randy nodded his head and stood up in front of her.

She wanted to be normal for once, not the girl who is scared of her own shadow because she had hidden behind the fact that no one truly knew who she was. As much as she wasn’t socially awkward she was because she had never been the girl that the guys wanted to date in high school. She had never been the one to have guys calling her at night to talk to her. The stairs seemed to be taunting her, telling her she wasn’t worth a guy like Randy or anyone for that matter.

He pushed his door open and walked right in. Jane stood right behind him and stared at the room, uncharted territory. This was somewhere that she had only heard about from the guys when she overheard something in the locker room. “Randy I need to tell you something so you know who I am.”

He looked up from a drawer where he passed her a t-shirt and shorts. He moved to his bathroom and came back in shorts and a t-shirt himself. It was as if he was ignoring her because he didn’t know how to deal with someone such as Jane. “I understand what anxiety is like. I’ve been there before I found ways to deal with it. You just need to tell me when it occurs and I’ll avoid putting you in those situations.”

She looked up with wide eyes from the clothing that she held in her hand, her hands were still shaking from the fear that she felt from him inviting her upstairs. For once it felt nice to be someone and not just a teammate who can easily be tossed aside. “I’ve never been an actual person around guys, I have always been one of the guys, that person who has seen them at their lowest which has caused them to see me as nothing more than a person and team mate. It’s made it hard for me to socialize. When things don’t go according to my plan I get nervous and have an anxiety attack.”

He nodded his head and allowed Jane to move toward the bathroom. She looked in the mirror and looked hard at her reflection. Her hair looked like a perfect debutant like her mother had taught her when she was in middle school, her glossed lips didn’t look her own with the bright pink gloss, and her brown eyes sparkled with the smoky look that she had put on before leaving the room. She had seen this look before, only it had been in a time where her mother had agreed to allow her to play football if she also competed in pageants.

It was the fear of losing who she was that had given her anxiety in most of her life. The fear of not being good enough to maintain the success that she had achieved for the hard work that she had put forth. She looked away from her reflection before putting on the clothes that Randy had given her and walking back into his bedroom. “Promise we don’t tell your sister this?” she knew that if Ally found out it would be the end of their close friendship. Her brother was off limits, as was most of the people that she had become such good friends with.

He laughed a little at her request, “Promise Jane.” He put a movie in the DVD player and went to sit on the bed. “You know you could come sit down with me. I don’t bite and I won’t try anything with you. I value your honesty and that you tell me anything, which is far from what most people have with me.” She sat down beside him and got ready to watch the movie with him.