Number Four Has A Secret

One of the biggest events in Santa Barbara is Halloween. The area adjacent to UCSB campus, Isla Vista (I.V. to locals) transforms into a six-block-long, three-street-wide, contiguous outdoor party. There are mounted police. The horses wear riot gear. It is, in a word, intense. And incredibly fun.

The year that we lived with Number Four we learned that she had never dressed up for Halloween past the age of ten or so (again, crazy mom). Since I had already been exposed to the horrors contained in her closet, I knew there was a gold mine in there for a classic "Fashion Victim" costume. I had her go throw on a bunch of random clothes and then did her hair and makeup. The results were fairly spectacular, but sort of...off course from the original goal.

Here, take a look:


The most common statement we heard about this costume was, "That is an awesome girl costume!" As in, they thought it was a guy, dressed up as a girl...yeah...

We sort of had a conspiracy theory about Number Four. For a long time we suspected that she was a hermaphrodite, or possibly transgendered. Did I mention that we are also kind of horrible people? The thing is, we had quite a bit of evidence. That photo is Exhibit One, if you will. There was also the fact that she told us she had to start taking birth control to induce her period, which was a rather strange thing to share with people she had only moved in with a week prior. Or to share at all, really. That seems to me like the kind of thing you keep to yourself.

Further evidence was that she never really seemed to enjoy the greatness that was The Mens Room. The Mens Room was Pamala and Number Four's bathroom. Since we only had one shower in the apartment, their bathroom consisted of a toilet in a room. By itself. Just a toilet. Weird, right? So we completely plastered the walls with pictures of hot men that we cut out of magazines. It was a very elaborate construction; there were little scenes throughout the room. I have no idea how there are no pictures of this, but alas, there are none. What can I say, sometimes college makes you dumb. But anyway, Pamala, Orly and I would constantly add to The Mens Room, but never once did Number Four clip out a picture of a hot man from a magazine. I'm not sure how that contributes to the Number-Four-is-a-hermaphrodite theory, but it does.

Another piece of pseudo-evidence was her mismatched brothers. Like you would expect, she had a weird brother (he of the sweet-potato-pie incident). But she also had a completely normal brother. Not the kind of guy I would personally be friends with, as he seemed more like the frat brother kind of guy, but far more normal than you would suspect. Also, her weird brother was not weird like she was, he was actually just normal-weird. The kind of weird that you are comfortable with. Sort of...late-bloomer, band-geek, video-gaming kind of weird. How is this evidence, you ask? Well, it is a bit of a stretch, but stay with me. It goes like this: if Number Four had two brothers, both relatively normal, then it stands to reason that she should fall within that same spectrum of relative normality. But that was not the case. So something must have been very different about Number Four that set her so far apart from her brothers. Add to that the fact that she was just, well, mannish, and presto! You have our Number Four is a Hermaphrodite Conspiracy Theory. It also fits in with her batshit crazy mom (yes, I'm going to continue to string that one out).

In closing, I leave you with this: