I KNEW LESLIE AS A QUIET BOY who sat in the last row of my fourth grade class at Fammatre Elementary in San Jose, California. The following fall, on the first day of fifth grade, Leslie came to school wearing a pink-flowered sundress. Leslie’s slicked brown hair waved in boy fashion behind her ears, and her skin looked even more leathery in delicate frills. She still played softball that day, while everyone watched, open-mouthed at her swishing dress and bare legs.

I wanted the real Leslie back with her button down disco boy shirts and bell-bottom chords. She’d wear a gold chain, a thin cross dangling into her chest. This new image in a frock didn’t work for me. She hadn’t been just a tomboy. She’d been accepted by all the kids at Fammatre as a boy. Her boy tan lasted through winter rains. She played sports and spent most days outdoors, way past the hour when girls had already gone in to help their mothers with dinner.

At recess, Leslie was either in the field playing softball, or winning at Tetherball, able to withstand any rope burn around her upper arm. I stood in line, knowing the whole time she’d beat me, but I played her anyway. My skinny arm swung the ball so it rotated twice and Leslie’s muscled arm jutted high in the air, receiving the rope easily, stopping my turn. I slunk to the end of the line, secretly holding back tears, cradling my rope burns.

Often, Leslie wore a thick blue sweat-band around her head, pushing her mid-length brown hair back. It hung like a man’s hair does when it grows out. There was no curl to it, just a mild wave.

When all the guys in the lunchroom saw her in the dress, they didn’t want anything to do with her, huddling close to their end of the bench, leaving no room for a girl in a dress. With sideways glances and all-out stares, I took pity on her. She stood with her lunch tray, alone and scanning for entry. I invited her to sit next to me and the guy table laughed into their mashed potatoes. We found that we lived close to one another and that we both loved to draw horses. We talked about bands.

“My favorite band is the Beatles. What’s yours?” Thanks to my father’s far reaching though dubious-at-times musical interests, I loved the White Album.

“Really, the Beatles? Cool. Me too.” Leslie pulled her hair back and took a bite of Salisbury steak, gravy dripping onto her chin. She did what she always did to wipe it off, rubbing her chin on her shoulder. Instead of blending into her burgundy button down, the white lace and porous cotton absorbed the grease spot.

“Ah, man. I forgot. The dress.” She was back into what seemed like her own private nightmare. I wanted to ask her about the dress-wearing, but didn’t dare.

On Monday, she was her old self again, wearing the button down disco top and jeans. The boys let her sit with them again, socking her on the shoulder and doing cool hand-shakes. Every Friday, though, she showed up in a sundress and would suffer rejection, persecution, and an occasional spit-wad barrage. Her guy friends finally got into the groove where they accepted her all week, but disappeared from view on Fridays. These became our friendship days.

Later that year, Leslie won best artist award for the fifth grade. Her three horse pictures hung in the lunchroom with blue frilly ribbons. One of them, on a poster board, her year-end project, was a fat horse head facing forward, watery brown eyes staring down on our hot lunches.

During Art hour, she taught me the best way to draw a horse, with the curve of the hip-bones first. “That way the animal is anchored and balanced,” she explained. Leslie’s horses had beautiful manes, wild on the blank paper’s implied wind, their legs in mid-trot, perfectly symmetrical down to flaring nostrils. Mine had perfect hip-bones, but the heads shrunk on their gargantuan brown bodies and the people around them looked like emaciated dwarfs.

“Here’s the horse’s head.” She tried to draw me a template to trace and graft onto my horse’s bodies, but they still shrank. While she fixed my poor, uneven horses, I got the nerve to ask her. “Why do you wear a dress on Fridays?”

She flipped her hair up in that tough boy way and looked around the room.

“Why do you wear that orange poncho all the time?” I looked down. The poncho covered my blips of pre-breasts and hung loosely around me. I turned red.

For a moment, her lips weakened and then, to take it back, she admitted, “My mom makes me. She says I have to learn how to wear a dress.” She returned to the emerging horses, now with darker lines that made sense. I watched her jutting elbows to see what I was missing in technique. Leslie’s whole hand curled around the crayon like it would drop if she didn’t clutch it so. To me, it was some combination of movements artists had in the womb. My hands looked plain and un-bendable, no matter how hard I pushed on the crayon.

Being friends with Leslie gave me safety from the tough girls. The tall ring-leader named Kristi had made a practice of holding her fist in front of my face as I passed her in the hallway. Her big boobs earned her instant popularity and a posse of small sixth grade girls followed in her wake. After befriending Leslie, Kristi and posse found a new victim and began to kick the backpack off a smaller fourth grade boy whose pants fit so tight, an inner tube surrounded his middle. I looked back at him in the hallway and studied how I must have looked to Kristi. I thought I saw the most vulnerable part of myself in his whimpering attempts to avoid her.

I couldn’t think of what I ever did to Kristi to make her hate me. Maybe it was the day our fifth grade combined with hers when our teacher was sick. Her teacher, Mrs. Schumacher, was tall, like my grandmother, and wore a pair of glasses so round they looked cartoonish. She’d only reach for them at the end of a long tether hanging around her neck when she read. She reminded me of a good witch, just one step away from granting wishes for the whole fifth grade. Her gray-black hair swirled into a bun at the back of her head.

That day, Mrs. Schumacher read a book to the combined class, probably to take up time. We got to a page where the main character, a mouse, found a lonely louse in its bed. She asked if anyone knew what a louse was. I was the only one to raise my hand.

“It’s a small bug that lives in your hair.” I don’t know if Kristi started hating me then, or if it was just after that, when Mrs. Schumacher called on me for every answer, indulging my ego to the fullest. After that day, though, the little group of sixth grade girls called me Stink Bug and other names affiliated with louse.

After Leslie showed me how to wear sweat bands around my wrists to begin winning at Tetherball, the group of girls stopped calling me names. Leslie would motion to me, “C’mon Beef, we’re gonna learn how to do a flip on the handlebars.” Her nickname for me made me feel like I’d joined an elite, tough club. I was Beef, the raw, the strong, the draw-er of horses.

Leslie led me to the cement playground out back. She swung her lithe body onto the top handlebars. Kids ignored her dress flooding her face, revealing a pair of shorts and her wife beater shirt that made its appearance under every button down during the week. Her body swung circles three times around the handle bars and dismounted in a high curve onto the cement with tough grace. My one swing never made enough momentum to carry me anywhere but straight into the cement. I bruised easily hanging out with Leslie, but I was Beef and that’s all that mattered.

Leslie and I walked most of the way home together and delved deep into strange subjects like space, time, and why we were born to our parents and not somebody else’s. This time was also reserved for weird confessions. Leslie’s were heavy, even life-threatening. She’d broken into a soda machine once and stolen all the quarters. She’d hitch-hiked to Sears to steal candy-bars. My confessions were too tame, and I tried to make them sound more sensational. When I told her that I’d stayed up ‘til midnight once it didn’t even muster a wince from her, even when I added that I went outside and climbed a tree.

At these times, I’d picture her closet in my head. It would contain all her boy shirts and at the very corner, three sundresses, out of place and very wrong. I wanted to challenge her mother and tell her the kind of hell it was for Leslie to wear those dresses, but she never invited me over and later that year, she moved.

On one of our last walks home, she finally admitted to me, “You know that girl who always made a fist at you? That Kristi chick? Well, I beat her up.”

I stood still. I didn’t know what to say.

“Really?” I studied Leslie’s rough hands and imagined her artist grip, only this time punching Kristi’s perfect full lips.

“Yeah. She had it coming.” Leslie curled her hair around an ear and continued walking. She waved goodbye at her block, hair lilting behind her, like a boy’s.

I never thought of her again until I started holding hands with a boy named David who wore his shirts open and played with his necklace during Math. For a while, we held hands in the hallways. He told me I was his girlfriend. He didn’t like to hang on the bars and when I beat him at Tetherball, we’d retreat into the baseball diamond grass where he tried to show me his black belt in Karate by chopping at the air. He told me he could break a board in half. I leaned into that heady green that only rises up in the middle of a wet San Jose summer. I started to feel like Beef again, only something had changed.

Then, the memory of Leslie came trampling over me, as if she’d sent one of her horses to remind me of her. David didn’t have anything on Leslie, I thought to myself as I watched his sissy Karate chops. That’s when I realized that David wasn’t my first boyfriend at all.

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ELISABETH KINSEY teaches writing at Regis University, writes for Greenwoman Magazine and teaches workshops in fun environs. Her published works appear in Ask Me About My Divorce, Seal Press (2009), Wazee Journal, The Rambler and Emergency Press. She is in the editing stages of her memoir: The Holy Ghost Goes to Bed at Midnight: Half a Mormon Life, so stay tuned. She can be called on to speak about divorce, leaving a strict religion, or Italian cooking.