Mr. Lockhart, the guy who runs the club, is a tall, skinny white dude with unruly Einstein hair, a nose like an eagle’s beak, and a wide, friendly smile. He starts by saying there are some new folks and we should introduce ourselves with our name, grade, the pronouns we want to use in this room today if pronouns are important to us, and anything we’d like to share.
While everyone’s moving desks into a circle, I quietly freak out. No one but Griff, Mom, and my former friend Camille asks what pronouns I prefer. They just assume, or call me “it.” And here’s this guy asking our preference. And “in this room,” which means he gets that some spaces are safe and some aren’t. And “today,” which means he gets that . . . it can change.
He understands that.
I trip over the desk I’m shoving. I look across the room at Sam sliding into a desk next to the girl in the purple jeans.
We get situated and start. Henry and Alyssa go first (Henry’s a he, Alyssa is a she, they’re both eighth graders), then Griffey, then I tell everyone I’m Ash and in seventh, since I’m too intimidated to say anything else. The girl Henry pointed out introduces herself as Esme and says she goes by she/her at school and is pre-HRT MTF, but I’m not sure what that means. Sam is an eighth grader like Griff and claims not to care about pronouns. Sam’s friend’s name is Mara, in seventh, and is going by he/him today. The rest of the kids use the pronouns I expect from their appearances.
“Great,” Mr. Lockhart says when we’re finished. “Last time I asked you to think about ideas for decorating our booth in the gym for the fall dance in a few weeks, so let’s start with those.” He uncaps a marker. “Just shout stuff out.”
“A rainbow balloon arch for photos,” Henry says.
Alyssa says they should give away rainbow light sticks. Griffey suggests a punch bowl full of Sprite with rainbow ice cubes. Sam says the dance is the same day as National Coming Out Day and it could be a great chance for anyone who wants to come out publicly to do it, maybe with a premade poster they could hold up under the rainbow-balloon photo arch.
Griffey wiggles his eyebrows at me. “How’s that for an opportunity?”
I ignore him and play imaginary piano scales on my legs under the desk, trying to settle my nerves. There’s so much conversation, and I’m missing most of it, because I can’t stop staring at the kids around me. Trying to figure out Sam. How Mara can so casually proclaim to go by he/him with those curves. What the heck all those letters Esme said might mean.
Griffey jabs me. “Stop staring.”
I snap my eyes to Mr. Lockhart, my face burning. I’m doing the exact thing I hate when people do it to me. All the arguments I imagined yelling at kids at my old school about not assuming my gender crowd my mind. But now they’re aimed at me.
It does not feel comfortable.
I doodle the shape of Mr. Lockhart’s croaky vocal fry to distract myself. Then I draw the triangular scuff-shuffle of my shoe scraping the tile floor. Then I draw Griffey’s explosive sneeze that looks like a bomb going off, and then I’m nowhere, lost in sounds and lines, far away from bathrooms and genders and uncertainty.
Griffey squeezes my arm and I blink back. It looks like we’re finished. I’ve filled the bottom of my notebook page with a sketch of the dream-song I was trying to write down this morning. Stick figures are break-dancing on top of it. It’s so thick and angled and guy I can barely look at it.
I rip out the page and crumple it. My eyes drift again to Sam. Their voice is in that middle range where mine is, with a texture and color like sun-faded purple construction paper. Their black shirt, black jeans, black canvas shoes, and wire-frame glasses could go either way. Like the carefully neutral outfits I’ve been wearing.
It’s an itch in my brain I can’t scratch. A box I can’t check off. Next to a box labeled Mara that keeps changing from pink to blue and back again, and two boxes labeled Yes and No under a question Mom asked me a while ago: Does your soul have a gender?
When the meeting is over, I follow Griff to the front of the school where the activity buses line up. “You okay?” Griffey asks. “You’re quiet.”
“Fine. Um, do you know what . . .” I bite back the question. I can’t ask if he knows what Sam really is. It’s the wrongest thing I can ask. It’s fully disrespectful. Not to mention “what Sam really is” is a flawed concept to start with, which I totally freaking know, despite my dad telling me that gender fluid and nonbinary aren’t real identities.
So why can’t I stop thinking about it? What if puberty hits me like a freight train and I don’t look androgynous anymore, like Mara doesn’t? What if I still feel undecided after that? How can Mara be so casual, like this stuff isn’t terrifying?
“Do I know what?” Griffey asks.
I blink back to the line of buses. “Um, Esme said a bunch of letters. Pre . . . something.”
“Pre-HRT MTF. That’s pre–hormone replacement therapy male to female. She’s trans. Hasn’t started physically transitioning yet.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Which doesn’t make her any less of a girl.”
“I know.” I say it so fast it sounds defensive. As if I don’t know.
But I do.
“I’m glad you came with me.” Griffey wraps me in one of his rib-cracker hugs, then punches my arm. “Ladies first,” he smirks. He gestures for me to get on the bus before him.
We slide into a seat at the back. Griff sticks his left earbud in my
