Amanda is riding on a bus on her way to live with her dad in a southern town called Lambertville. She’s scared about starting a new life, but she recognizes that “something had to change. Because I had changed” (1). A man in the seat ahead flirts with her, and in normal circumstances, she would have been thrilled; now, she’s too nervous to care. She hasn’t seen her dad in over five years, and he hasn’t seen her since her surgery.

She finally arrives, and her dad greets her. There’s an awkward distance between them. When they go to eat at a local diner, this awkwardness grows after a man comments on Amanda’s beauty.  

Amanda thinks back to when she woke up in the hospital after attempting suicide. That was the first time she admitted to her mother that she should have been born a girl. She didn’t think her mother would accept her, but she said, “Anything, anyone, is better than a dead son” (11).

On the morning Amanda starts her new high school, she takes her hormone replacement pill “to feminize my appearance and stand in for the testosterone my body could no longer make” (13). She tries to blend in, but a handsome boy named