I hunted for excuses. This didn’t fit the whole become-a-hermit-and-hide-forever plan. “I don’t know, guys. I’ve got this essay to write, and—”
“Aw, come on,” Jon Cox said, his composure re-forming. “Look at this.” He waved at the volumes of blue sky overhead. “It’s not gonna last forever.”
Don’t tempt me. I never got the chance to go off-campus. It didn’t take long for Kensington to start feeling like a room whose walls were steadily moving inward.
Also, I felt a little gratified that these two wanted to hang out with me. At some point, it had become hard to tell if a boy genuinely thought I was cool and wanted to be friends with me, or if he wanted something different and wouldn’t admit it for fear of rejection. This made for the worst kind of twilight zone. You didn’t want to assume a guy was into you, but you had to have a plan lined up just in case, because what if he sprang feelings on you out of nowhere in a guerrilla attack and you were unprepared to deflect them in a tactful way? Also, it made a shitty foundation for a friendship, the constant worry that someone would stop caring about you overnight if you didn’t want to date them. It was all very stressful.
But in disguise, this was not an issue. When I wasn’t a girl, I could be sure that guys liked me for me, not for some hypothetical person they thought I could be to them.
It took a moment, but I shook off the gratification and the campus claustrophobia. I had to focus.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have so much work.”
Jon Cox scoffed. “Don’t be sorry, just do it later.” He slung an arm around my shoulders, and I tried not to tense. “Everyone has work, it’s fucking Kensington.”
“Think of it as a study break,” Mama added.
“Yeah,” Jon Cox said. He and Mama split off from me, heading up toward the parking lot. “We’re going to drive by the theater quad in like ten minutes,” Jon called, “and if you’re not there, we’re gonna come in and find you.”
“But—” I called back, but they’d already turned their backs and started jogging away, perfectly in sync as always.
I watched them go, helpless.
I snuck in through my bedroom window. I’d glued the latch back into place—when I’d studied the broken handle, I’d spotted traces of old glue. I wasn’t a wizard. It was already broken when I broke it. Half reassuring, half disappointing.
I flicked my hair into place in the mirror and fastened my baseball cap back on. It wasn’t surprising that Jon Cox had a car. With Kensington’s limited parking, permits were pricey as hell—you could usually tell on sight which people could afford them.
The issue of wealth at Kensington was built into the walls, and not just in the sense that all the portraits on the literal walls were of old rich guys. This was true, but it wasn’t really a concrete problem. The problem was the money this place asked us to drop on textbooks and supplies, even those of us on financial aid. A lot of other boarding schools were adopting full-ride scholarship options that paid for books, travel, laptops—the whole deal. Kensington hadn’t caught up yet. Every semester, I calculated my textbook costs, usually three or four hundred dollars, and prayed it was offset by the money my parents weren’t spending to feed me.
I put away my new clothes and headed down to August Drive. As I waited at the curb, my nerves slipped toward anticipation. I could stay at arm’s length and still let off some steam. Didn’t I deserve it? I’d made it through a whole week of my charade with no slipups. I’d just looked my own prefect right in the eye and fooled her. I, Jordan Sun, was pulling off the most outlandish acting performance in Kensington history, which was saying something, since a couple years ago, the School of Theater had put up an adaptation of Macbeth set on a space shuttle in 2405. (Half the roles had been turned into malevolent AIs.)
I wasn’t just pulling it off, either. I was enjoying it, maybe too much. I liked the invisibility of being a boy, inhabiting a bigger and broader space. I was feeling less apologetic about it by the day.
Lately, I’d been eyeing the male roles in The Greek Monologue and Character and Humanity with envy, too. The parts girls workshopped in classes were usually filled with flirting, swooning, seducing, or heartbreak, only one of which I’d ever been any good at. I found myself wishing I could switch into being Julian. He could dig into some of those guys’ roles, powerful or stubborn men, stoic or genius men, authoritative men—parts I would’ve loved to play for wish fulfillment, if nothing else.
I’d started asking myself: What had I ever gotten out of being a girl, anyway? What did I even like about it? Femininity had always felt inaccessible to me—my best attempt at it had always been putting on makeup and pretending to be more patient and graceful than I actually was, mostly for my mom’s sake. Sometime in middle school, feeling awkward had become my default. Because I wasn’t patient. I wasn’t graceful. I was prematurely tall, I wasn’t skinny, I wasn’t pretty, and I didn’t care about any of it as much as I was supposed to. Square peg, meet round hole.
Maybe, I’d thought for a while, the sense of not fitting was part of the package. But I didn’t know if other girls felt this way. I’d never talked about it with anyone, even Jenna, Maria, or Shanice; and so many girls at school had seemed completely at home with girlhood that for me to admit the weakness—it would have felt like giving up control.
The only thing stranger than being a girl was turning into a woman. “Such a talented young woman,” an aunt visiting San Francisco had said about me last summer, and at “young woman,” I’d felt a pang of confusion. Had I alchemically morphed from a girl into a woman without noticing? When had that happened? Sometimes you heard that getting your period meant you were becoming a woman. But I’d first gotten my period when I was ten, the only one of my friends to walk up to fifth grade with tampons stuffed in my backpack, and nobody had called me “young woman” then. I’d been a kid—a surly, reclusive kid, a little too used to fending for myself.
Maybe the idea of turning from a girl into a woman freaked me out because I still didn’t understand what it meant to become one. What was the woman origin story? What were we, and how did we get there? It was funny, because for boys, it seemed simple, in a way. The world had told me what becoming a man looked like: conquering one thing or another, one way or another. Becoming a woman, as far as they’d told us, looked like blood.
When Jon Cox pulled up a minute later, I stared rudely. He drove a steel-gray convertible, sleek and low to the ground, keypads on its silver door handles. The aerodynamic curves that formed the car’s wide hood emphasized the checkered BMW logo embedded above the grill.