Once the attic door clicked shut, I hit the lights and faced him. His bleary eyes wouldn’t focus. “What is happening?” he jabbered. “Are you—is—”
“Shh. Hey. Calm down.” I glanced down at myself, at the towel I was still clutching. “Turn around, okay?”
Looking pretty much catatonic, Isaac rotated to face the round window.
I grabbed my T-shirt and sweatpants from the bed, pulled them on, and hung the towel from a hook on the door. “All right,” I said. “So.”
Isaac turned back around, looking like he’d figured it out. “So, um, you’re trans? Sorry I freaked out, it—”
“No.”
His bafflement reappeared. “Then—”
“I’m a girl. I’ve just been cross-dressing.” I scrambled for words. “Everything else I told you is true. I swear. Who I am, where I’m from.” I sat on the edge of the bed. “Except, um, my name’s Jordan, and I’m not a guy.”
He gave his head a hard shake, and then another, as if he were trying to dislodge a stubborn bit of water from his ear. “But why did you—why are you doing this?”
“I didn’t get cast in the musical, because my voice is. Well. My voice. And I’d heard about the competition, and I wanted—I don’t know.”
The incredulity faded from Isaac’s expression. A light frown creased his high forehead.
Was he angry?
I looked down, picking at the fuzzy specks that had accumulated on my sweatpants. “I mean, it was the competition, but then it turned into . . .” Being part of something. Finally, someone else at Kensington had known me again, like only Michael had.
“It’s stupid, I know,” I muttered. “Like I couldn’t have found some more normal way.”
My hope collapsed like a house of cards, fluttering down to nothing. It was over. I’d reached the end of the road I’d been paving all semester, throwing stones desperately at the ground and getting lucky as they stuck.
None of this felt real. I felt like I should want to cry, but nothing came, not a burn to the eyes or a tightening in my throat. Nothing. Some shield of self-preservation had come between me and myself.
A weight depressed the bed beside me. I looked over at Isaac, who inspected my jaw, my nose, my eyebrows. All my features, recontextualized. He looked wary.
“Um,” he said, “you want to go for a walk, maybe?”
“It’s like twenty-two degrees out.”
“It can be a short walk.”
“Okay. Yeah.”
By the time we crept out of the house, I’d regained some composure. I huddled inside Dad’s winter coat, my hands deep in the pockets. Isaac and I sidled through sheets of snow toward the riverbank. At the edge, in the frozen slate of mud and leaves, we stopped still, and the hush settled down in the glade around us.
Time spun out, loosely unspooling. The pair of us had never been quiet for this long. Every time I thought I had something to say, it slipped on my tongue and fell away. I waited for Isaac to unleash the fast-paced monologue—or, if not, to let some angry instinct take over, lash out with something that would hit hard. He said nothing at all.
We didn’t look at each other for a long time. When we did, it happened at the same second, and we looked away instantly, like children who’d been caught staring at something rude or dangerous. I examined the flat band of the river, lying lazy and glittering under the moon. On the opposite bank, the snow seized and spun the cold light like a long tray of quartz chips.
Isaac broke the silence, finally. “It’s, um,” he said. His voice was warm and neutral. “It’s kind of unbelievable you pulled this off for three months.”
“Yeah.”
“How’d you even . . . ?”
I waved vaguely at my face. “I wear a lot of makeup when I’m in girl mode.”
His eyes fixed on my hair. “And a wig or something, I’m guessing?”
“It’s from the costume shop. I’m going to return it, I swear. Just . . . for now.” I twisted my scarf tighter. “And the voice, um, I do a lot of shifting my voice register for my theater classes anyway, since they want me to sound more like a girl.”
“You do sound like a girl,” Isaac said. “I mean, now you do. Mostly. This voice.” Realization filled his words. “After the dance, too, you sounded . . .” He trailed off. The sentence rerouted. “Wait. Didn’t you make out with Victoria Taylor?”
“Yeah. I’m bi, as far as I can tell, so.”
He chuckled. “As far as you can tell.”
“No, I’m serious. I was in this relationship that I’m only now kind of over, and it was impossible for me to figure it out, with that in the way. He took up all my attention, all the time, so . . . yeah, distracting.”
“Huh,” he said. “It just seems like that would be a thing you couldn’t not know.”
“Well, yeah, there were signs, but I don’t know. I thought they were something else, I guess, or I wasn’t focusing on myself hard enough to see what was there. It just got confusing when I did.” I curled my hands in my pockets. “I don’t like not knowing things.”
“I know,” he said, with a touch of amusement.
More silence. We went back to observing the river. I imagined I heard it rushing under that thick coat of ice, rolling dark and quick over its bed.
My voice came out in a feeble little mumble. “Do you think the guys are going to be mad?”
He didn’t answer right away. Obviously, whispered the unspoken response. How could they be anything but livid?
“I mean,” Isaac said carefully, “do you want to tell them?”
My heartbeat became a thudding drum in my ears. “You’d cover for me?”
“Sure.”
“Why?” I asked.
He was still examining the river. “I mean, it’s obvious, right? You didn’t give me away, either.”
The words made my heart slow.
I let myself look at him for the first time, really look. I never looked at the Sharps more than necessary. Whenever we made eye contact, I felt sure they’d read the truth right out of my eyes somehow. So I avoided it. But it was 3:55 a.m., and I had no more energy for avoidance.
Isaac’s thick hair was down for once, hanging in rumpled layers. Moonlight washed his profile. His lips looked chapped and bitten, and acne scars pitted his cheekbones. His thick eyebrows tapered above his narrow eyes, making him look perpetually serious or frustrated.