He has a point.
Hayden presses a button, and the screen flickers to a start menu. “I wish we could play all the way to the end, but this game takes, like, a million years to finish.” He sets the difficulty level to beginner and passes me a controller with tons of buttons.
“Which one does what?”
“It’ll tell you when you start playing. You’ll get the hang of it fast.”
The game starts. As promised, pop-up messages tell me which buttons to use. The problem is remembering everything in time to fight my first opponent.
I die in under five seconds. “Told you I was bad!”
“It’s your first try. You’re fine!” Hayden laughs. “Start again.”
It takes me four attempts to figure it out. Then I’m off on another mission, running Roxas through Twilight Town. I glance at Hayden during a lull in the game. “What grade are you going into this fall?”
“Eighth. What about you?”
So Hayden is a year older than me. I press a button, and Roxas hops onto his skateboard. “Seventh. When do you start?”
“The last week in August, which feels so early. My Minnesota school didn’t start until after Labor Day. How about you?”
“Around then, too.” I run Roxas straight off a building roof, but he bounces back to his feet without any kind of injury. “I can start whenever I want because I’m in an online program, but I like to get ahead on homework. That way, I stay caught up when I’m gone for competitions.”
“Do you travel a lot for skating?”
“Not a ton.” I shrug. “Usually, I do local events as practice before traveling to wherever Regionals is.” I don’t tell him I’m hoping to skip it this year. The closer I get to Los Angeles, the less I want to jinx it.
Hayden fiddles with his costume’s half-attached zipper. “It’s cool you get to visit other places and don’t have to go to an actual school.”
“Well, I just started homeschooling last year,” I explain. “I went to regular elementary school in San Francisco.” I go quiet, eyes on the screen. Roxas is caught between two buildings. I’ve been so focused on Hayden, I’m not even sure how he ended up there. “I think I might be stuck.”
Hayden takes my controller and gets Roxas back on track in a matter of seconds. He pauses the game to give it back to me, but I shake my head. “Keep going. I just want to watch.”
Hayden guides Roxas into a dark forest, in pursuit of a mysterious enemy. Roxas attacks the creature, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect at first.
“Watch this,” Hayden says as the screen switches to a movie cut-scene. A weapon appears in Roxas’s hand out of nowhere. It looks like a huge key, but he swings it like a sword, easily defeating the enemy. “That’s the Keyblade I’m trying to design. Dad said he’ll help me cut it when I’m ready.”
“That sounds like something I did in my fourth-grade art class,” I say. “Except it was a mask, made out of papier-mâché.”
“Maybe I’ll take art this year.” Hayden looks thoughtful. “My new school lets you choose a focus, like science or performing arts and stuff.”
Performing arts. As Hayden quickly completes Roxas’s current mission and moves on to the next, my gaze shifts to the fabric strewn around his room. “Maybe you could focus on theater.”
Roxas stops moving on the TV screen as Hayden looks at me. “How come?”
“Well, you like dressing up as characters and—”
“Yeah, for cosplay,” he cuts me off. He looks tense, knuckles clenched around the controller. I meet his gaze, and his cheeks flush a little. “Sorry. It’s just, I like getting to choose, not having someone tell me who I have to be. Maybe that doesn’t make sense to you, but it’s different for me.”
I think about my free program, about how things were different before Miss Lydia chose my princess music. “I think I get it, actually.”
“Okay.” Hayden doesn’t say anything else, but Roxas starts moving again. By the time Mrs. Lubeck comes upstairs to take me home, things feel back to normal.
Hayden fills me in on more of Roxas’s story during the drive back to the BART station, and as we talk, it feels like we’ve known each other forever. But when I step off the train back in San Francisco, reality sets in.
Ana might mean “I” in another language, but the Lubecks only know me as a boy named A. Then there’s Mom, Tamar, and Alex, who know me as Ana, but don’t know how I truly feel.
I’m still hiding who I am from all the people who matter.
Chapter Twenty-One
Before I can pack for next week’s competition, Mom and I take a trip to the laundromat down the street. We load clothes into a big washing machine, then Mom leaves to pick up toiletries while I keep an eye on our clothes from my perch on a folding table.
I could text Hayden while I wait, or even Tamar. Part of me wants to ask Hayden about those gender-neutral pronouns, but I’m not sure exactly what I want to know that I can’t look up online on my own. It’s not like he uses them himself.
I pull out my phone. Although we didn’t meet up last Sunday, Tamar finally sent me the videos of her Intermediate Moves. I click on the first clip, hoping it’ll be a good distraction.
Tamar appears on my screen, standing at one end of the San Francisco rink. Turning backward, she starts the back double three-turn pattern. Her edges look steady, turns controlled, although she could work on extending her free leg more.
I click to the spiral sequence clip. This doesn’t look bad, either. Tamar isn’t super flexible, but her leg is at hip level for all but her last back inside spiral. I make a mental note, then move on to the video of her bracket turns.
A woman steps in front of my
