"Shut up!" Heather wailed.

"No way!" I exclaimed, jumping out of my seat. "I have to do it now."

"You have to do it. Let me start brainstorming." She got up to go to her office. "One last thing-do they have a title?" she asked me.

"Yes," Tom told her. "It's called The Sky Is Crying."

TURKS AND CAICOS

At some point during our vacation, Sylvan asked me if my friend Paul was gay, which he is. Instead of giving him a straightforward answer, I saw an opportunity and told Sylvan that not only was Paul gay but that he was actually still a woman who was currently going through gender-reassignment surgery. He was raised as a boy until he was eighteen and started dating a girl. He found out that boy parts are different from girl parts and that he had the exact same parts as his girlfriend. Gender reassignment is a pretty laborious process, so each month he got estrogen injections, and his body had been slowly transforming his girl parts into male parts. After this trip he was getting his penis.

"Holy shit, Chels." Sylvan was horrified. "What happened to the girl?"

"She was freaked out," I told him. "She enlisted in the military immediately after he told her and has since been deployed to Iraq."

"So he has girl parts right now?"

"Yes. He has a clitoris, but after this vacation is when they inject him with the hormones to enlarge the clitoris into a full-blown penis."

"Why didn't he want to stay being a girl?"

"Because he spent his whole life thinking he was a boy and associates more with boys. If you look closely at his tits, you can see that they used to be bigger."

"Oh, my God, Chels." Sylvan was rubbing his head. "I've never heard of anything like this."

"Yup. What they do is give you pills to basically turn your clitoris into a penis. Pretty fucked up, huh?"

Sylvan and I were on a boat watching Paul swim around with a snorkel, looking for fish. "He looks so much like a guy," Sylvan said.

"I know. It's taken a lot of work for him to get there. He used to have hair longer than mine. It's amazing to actually watch the transformation. His body has been through so many stages. At least now people think he's a guy. There was a time not long ago when you couldn't tell what he was."

Sylvan was flabbergasted, and I was having the time of my life. He was still rubbing his head as if he were in pain and asked me, "So is he technically a boy or a girl right now?"

"Right now he's both. His parents, wanting a boy, decided that even though he had a coslopus, they would raise him as a boy. After he found out he was a girl, he got into real estate, because he knew that was the quickest way to make a buck, and he's been saving money ever since to make 'the change.' "

"But, Chels, he looks and talks and walks like a guy," Sylvan told me.

"I know, Sylvan. Medicine is amazing," I declared. "A-mazing, His real name is Bernice, but his parents just called him Bernie, and then when he found out that they were lying to him his whole life, he changed his name to Paul."

Sylvan couldn't stop asking questions. Luckily, I had an answer for each one. When Paul came in after snorkeling, Sylvan got up and handed him a towel. He also started pulling out Paul's seat each night at dinner, which clearly confused Paul every time, but was enjoyable for me to watch.

"I don't get it, Chels," Sylvan asked. "Does he like girls or boys?"

"Boys."

"But if he likes boys, wouldn't it have been easier to just stay a girl, instead of becoming a man and then becoming gay?"

"That's a pretty good fucking question, Sylvan," I told him. "One that I ask myself every day when I look at Paul's ass. It's hard to understand the transgender community and what their thoughts are. Why they want to cross two hurdles instead of one, but I don't ask questions, Sylvan. I don't judge. I'm not the Lord."

At the end of the trip, Sylvan told Paul that he was one of the most amazing people he'd ever met and that Paul had more guts and courage than half those soldiers who go over to Iraq.

"Thank you, Sylvan," Paul said quizzically. "That's a really nice thing to say to someone. I think."

"Gosh," Eva remarked to Paul. "You must really have made an impression on him."

Paul told me after that that he felt bad for judging Sylvan based on the fact that he couldn't swim. "That guy's a sweetheart through and through. You should have heard what he told me when we said good-bye. I'm definitely going to use him as a driver the next time I'm in New York.

"You should definitely use him," I told him.

IKE TURNER

On the same trip, Paul and I got into a food fight one night around three in the morning. This is something we frequently participate in after seven to ten cocktails. We are respectful enough to do it only in the privacy of our hotel room, and I usually end up the champion, as Paul is gay, which can lead to terrible hand-eye coordination. While we don't intentionally involve others, it usually requires anyone else in the room to run and duck for cover, as it can get pretty violent, with one or two fruit items ending up stuck to a wall and Paul screaming that I'm an angry dyke. I'm more apt to fight with Paul instead of someone like Tanya, because I consider Paul to be more of an equal and Tanya to be more of a mad harlot.

Things got particularly hairy one night on our vacation in Turks and Caicos, and fruit throwing eventually graduated from grapes and decorative acorns to ripe nectarines. When I turned around to peg a strawberry in Paul's direction, I didn't have time to duck before a nectarine hit me square in the eye. It hurt, but not enough to make me cry, and I quickly recovered, although all our other friends were a little taken aback at our level of violence.

Ted scolded us both: "Stop it, you two! Chelsea has a television show, and I already gave her one black eye when we were playing Wii tennis. People are going to think I beat her."

Sylvan was more impressed with Paul's hand-eye coordination, because at that point he didn't know if Paul was a boy, a girl, or a sea animal.

Either way, the party came to a screeching halt with Paul really concerned that he'd hurt me. He hadn't, but when I woke up the next morning, my friend Stephanie suggested that it would be a good idea to have me fake a black eye. With Eva and Stephanie's help, I was able to make one side of my face look like Rihanna's, and then I headed down in the bright sunlight with a hat and sunglasses, like any respectful abused woman.

My brother, Delicious, Ted, Paul, and Sylvan were all down at breakfast already when the girls and I arrived. When Paul caught on to my face, he was horrified. I assured him it was no big deal and that I had time to heal before I had to tape the show again. "Don't worry," I told him. "I bruise easily. If it's still there by Monday, I'm sure my makeup artist can cover it up. Or I'll just tell the audience my friend hit me with a nectarine."

"You should take iron," Ted told me as he got up from the table, giving me a thumbs-up for my cosmetic handiwork. Ted was in our room that morning when I applied my shiner and was excited to be included in a joke. "Good job, Paul," Ted told him, and threw his napkin down on the table dramatically before heading over to his beach chair.

Not knowing that it was a joke, Sylvan was disgusted by the whole event. He said to Paul, "If you weren't a girl, I would have the right mind to hit you," and then he stormed off. Brian, Ray, and Paul all looked at each other, wondering what Sylvan was talking about, until I explained to them that Sylvan didn't have a ton of experience with gay men and that calling men girls was just English slang for gay guys.