Reese underlined the words on the blackboard: anagnorisis and peripeteia. She wrote so vigorously that her hair, bound in a dark knot at the base of her skull, bobbed with the impact of chalk to board. She finished the final A and clapped her palms. They puffed dust. “Recognition,” she said, “and reversal. Cornerstones of Greek tragedy. A character’s sudden epiphany, imposed by newfound knowledge—and the choice they make as a result. Who can give me the final recognition and reversal in Antigone?”
Most of us raised our hands. Reese aimed her stare around the table, lingering on the kids who avoided her eyes. Eventually, she picked Ash Crawford, whose hand was crooked above his head. Reese’s method for starting a discussion wasn’t harassing the kids who hadn’t done the reading. She expected competence and didn’t fawn over excellence; she wasn’t going to chase us down to get us to do the work. If you slacked, you just knew, somewhere in your marrow, that she knew; she figured it out just by looking at you, and a dark patch of guilt grew like mold as the class churned forward and left you behind.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I squeezed it, shutting it up.
As Ash Crawford barreled into an explanation of why Creon might be the protagonist of Antigone, Reese perched at the oval table and scanned the fifteen of us. The roundtable discussion format was part of the air of collaboration that Kensington wanted to foster, that we weren’t “anonymous faces at desks, but equal-footed members of an ongoing discussion!” Or so all the admissions pamphlets exclaimed.
My dad, who’d gone to a disorganized disaster of a public high school in 1980s Los Angeles, referred to Kensington’s methods as “hippie garbage.” This baffled me. For somebody who ranted enthusiastically and often about the countless problems with his own schooling, Dad was weirdly fast to condemn any method that differed from it in any way. But at least he’d made it out with a diploma. His high school class, he’d told me, had boasted a 45 percent dropout rate. Social pressures aside, Dad’s spinal cord injury had happened his sophomore year. Adjusting to a wheelchair had never made anyone’s life easier.
My phone buzzed again. Reese’s eyes fixed on me and narrowed. The woman had the directional hearing of an owl. I could’ve sworn she grew a foot taller in that instant.
The second the bell rang, I tried for the twentieth time that week—and failed—to disable the vibrate function. I was going to have to start burying my phone deep in my backpack. Every waking second, new messages barraged the Sharps group text. During Greek Monologue, I’d missed this collection of gems:
Isaac (11:48 a.m.): Okay guys, who wants to sing a background part on my EP?
Jon Cox (11:48 a.m.): ooooh I am Isaac, I am so fancy, I am making an album, ladies look at me and my guitar
Isaac (11:48 a.m.): I swear to god, Jon
Jon Cox (11:48 a.m.): Can I borrow your guitar, does it work on girls?
Isaac (11:49 a.m.): Yeah. Like a magic wand basically.
Jon Cox (11:49 a.m.): really?
Isaac (11:49 a.m.): Of course not, you sentient walnut
Nihal (11:49 a.m.): Isaac, have you settled on a title? Because if this is the same EP with that “Smaller Cities” song, I like that as a title.
Jon Cox (11:49 a.m.): ok HEAR ME OUT how about u title it ‘eelectric eel’
Isaac (11:49 a.m.): . . . I’m just saying what we’re all thinking: that seems really Freudian
Nihal (11:50 a.m.): Literally nobody was thinking that.
Mama (11:50 a.m.): I assume none of your background parts are written for basses?
Isaac (11:50 a.m.): Uh, no, you’re right.
Mama (11:50 a.m.): Okay so frankly the anti-bass discrimination in our society has gotten out of control. And as usual, your part of the problem.
Nihal (11:50 a.m.): *you’re
And on, and on.
The freshmen and I didn’t say much. Marcus only popped in to volunteer his services, always punctuated with an exclamation mark: “I have an XLR cable you could borrow, Isaac!” or “I can print the arrangements, Trav!” His eagerness to help was a tiny bit excruciating, but it made sense. What else did he have to contribute yet? The same went for Erik and me, too new to joke around with the others.
Anyway, I didn’t intend to reach the point of joking around. No more easy conversations with Nihal; no more feeling like this could be some sort of family. I was glad that the Sharps were decent guys, and that they were funny, and surprisingly down-to-earth, and that making music with them got more exciting every time, and that I looked forward to eight o’clock all day. All that was fine. But it was not the point. I didn’t need friends—I needed the competition, and so I would stay under the radar. Arm’s-length acquaintanceship only.
I’d started studying random boys in a way that could be described as either subtle or incredibly creepy. Research! They moved in different ways, obviously, because they were not all part of some male hive mind controlled by a remote queen, but there were similarities. They led their stride with shoulders and chests, their spines straight, less of the curve you sometimes saw with girls, especially dancers. Hip movements were minimal. Also, sometimes, they sneakily adjusted their crotch areas.
The crotch area was a simple enough fix. I rolled up a sock and stuck it into my pants. The first day that I did this, the sock dislodged itself during rehearsal, slipping lower and lower down my pant leg until my fake penis had reached my knee. I excused myself to the bathroom. Trav was less than happy, but he didn’t notice the knee penis, so I counted it as a victory. The next day, I folded the sock into my underwear in an elaborate loop the loop. This was more effective.
The more I tried to lead my gait with my shoulders and chest, though, the more my chest felt like a stumbling block. Luckily, I was on the small side of a B-cup, but my boobs weren’t invisible. A sports bra only got me so far.
At the end of the week, I consulted Google. How to flatten chest, I typed into my laptop, sitting on my bed, and clicked on the result that looked the least like porn.
I scrolled down to a section that warned about the health risks of strapping your chest back with ACE bandages. There was a list of shirts called “compression shirts” that you could buy, but I kept reading, hoping for something free. One bullet point suggested using the control top of nylon pantyhose. I had a pair that I didn’t mind disemboweling. I fished them out of a drawer and settled back on my bed to follow the directions.
I’d already snipped off the legs of the nylons when I looked back at the computer screen, suddenly curious. What was this site?
I scrolled up.
Here, said the introductory paragraph, are some tips for passing that worked for me before I started hormones.
I stopped. I reread the sentence. Hormones.
I set my scissors down and peered at the sidebar. It read, Charlie. 24. He/him. My unofficial collection of emotional and physical resources for trans people. FTM resources, which I have the most of, are here. Click for MTF, genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, non-binary, and general resources.
For a moment I was taken aback. Then I felt a sudden, distinct twinge of guilt. My hand found its way to my mouth, and I started chewing my nails.
I didn’t know how big Kensington’s trans population was. I’d met two trans kids here who were out: One was Will Teagle, a genderqueer kid in my grade; he was co-president of the Sexuality and Gender Equity club. The other was Jo Cavaliere, a trans girl in the film school who’d asked me to act in her senior capstone film last year. She’d come out halfway through filming, and then started her transition, which was followed by a week or so packed with people’s mortified apologies every time they referred to her with male pronouns. Some days she waved it off. Others, she seemed too tired.
It stunned me how awkward a bunch of well-meaning people could be. There was something exceptionally clumsy about a bunch of cis kids trying to act nonchalant about her transition, rotating between aggressive supportiveness, curiosity, and intense silence around the topic for fear of saying the wrong thing. Trying to normalize—but not to ignore. Trying to be chill—but not distant. Things had grown steadily less weird as we came to the collective realization that this was not, shockingly, even sort of about us.
I reread the website’s sidebar and tried to tease apart the bud of unease in my stomach. I hadn’t given it serious thought, how my act contrasted with the way some trans kids lived their lives. I was just playing a role, and trans people weren’t, so it hadn’t felt relevant, hadn’t felt like it was in the same ballpark. But it had weird echoes, didn’t it? I was on a website that trans people used for their day-to-day. I felt like I was poaching, fishing earnest resources out of this site and turning them into ruses to trick the Sharps.
I lay back on my bed, staring at the ceiling. Cross-dressing and drag had their own history. I wasn’t doing anything unprecedented. Still, I felt that I’d edged into a place that was not mine. Worse, I pictured some nightmare scenario in which the Sharps found out about me cross-dressing, got furious at me for lying, and somehow carried that anger over into a situation with someone trans who was just living their life.
If they would act that way, though, that had to be something deep-seated, some land mine of darker thoughts waiting for a foot to hit it. Kensington, probably because it was an arts school, was such an overwhelmingly liberal place when it came to social issues—I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have that sort of opinion around campus. Or anywhere, really. It was a strange thing to have an opinion on somebody else’s existence.
I thought of Nihal’s contemplative air and Isaac’s carelessness. I thought of Erik’s peacocking, showing off every talent he had, and Marcus’s desperation to please, and I tried to make sense of the possibility that any of these normal, decent-seeming people could secretly hate an entire subset of the Kensington population. It didn’t compute to me. And it struck me, all of a sudden, how incredibly lucky I was not to have to worry about those opinions when I walked out into the world every morning.
From what I’d seen, none of the guys seemed that way, but I hadn’t seen much yet. I didn’t want to believe it, but I couldn’t know. I imagined the sort of stone that’s smooth and gray on the outside, which splits open to reveal a jagged red mineral interior. I wished I could tell who was gentle all the way down, and who turned to sharp edges the deeper you got.
That evening, as usual, Nihal and Marcus were working in the Nest when I arrived. Tonight, gentle guitar music echoed through Marcus’s laptop speakers. He was always playing something that threatened to send me to sleep, classical piano or the occasional Gregorian chant, probably to calm him down. Marcus was so anxious, so excitable, ready to be startled into laughter or nerves by virtually anything. Talking to the kid stressed me out.
A serene counterpart to Marcus’s furiously bouncing leg, Nihal sat by the piano in meditative stillness, tracing line art on a series of cartoon panels.
I hovered over his shoulder, peeking at the cartoon. Bold line art gave the characters exaggerated features, heavy-lidded eyes and dramatic mouths. He’d done the background in dappled watercolors.
“That’s really beautiful,” I said.
“Hmm?” He looked up at me.
Shit—I hadn’t fixed my voice. I straightened up, shoving my hands in my pockets. “Uh,” I grunted, “looking good, bro.”
“. . . thanks,” Nihal said, sounding a little weirded out. I backed off and considered the merits of melting into the floor.
As I set down my things, a clicking noise rang through the window where Marcus sat. He flinched away, lost his balance, and toppled onto the sofa, his laptop folding shut beside him.
“Wh—that guy threw something at me,” he yelped, scrambling up on his knees.
Nihal’s hand stilled against the paper. He set down his pen, stood, and strode to the window. Grim recognition flashed across his face. He tugged at one side of his turban, distaste settling across his expression.
I approached the circle of dusky sky. Marcus twitched away on the sofa so I could see.
A boy was at the bottom of the library building, standing on the long strip of pavement that stretched toward Arlington. He wore a brown leather backpack and was unreasonably tall. His dark hair gleamed in the sunset. It was the kid from the amphitheater.
I sank down, hiding most of my face from view. He wound up like a pitcher, lashed out a hand, and another pebble clattered off the side of the building.
“Hey,” Nihal called sharply. “Cut it out.”
“Make me,” the boy called back, flashing an infuriating grin. “Those your rooks?”
“None of your business.”
“What’s a rook?” Marcus asked.
“It stands for rookies,” Nihal said. “Also a crow pun.”
Marcus gave his usual halting guffaw. I peered down at the boy. “He’s a Minuet, right?”
“Yeah, their music director. Connor Caskey,” Nihal muttered, a deep scowl settling on his face. “He’s the only other Visual Arts person in an a cappella group, so he’s the closest thing I have to an arch-nemesis, basically. He lives a floor up from me and spends all his time being the absolute worst.”
“Caskey?” Marcus repeated. “Like Dr. Caskey?”
“Yep,” Nihal said, and glanced at me. “His dad’s the Dean of Music.”
“He teaches my Baroque and Bach class!” Marcus exclaimed. “He’s kind of a tool.”
“Yes,” Nihal said. “It runs in the family.”
Connor Caskey’s voice rang up. “I saw your desperate e-mail the other day, Singh. What happened? Someone finally crack under the weight of Trav being a total nutcase?”
For a long moment, I watched Nihal trying to decide whether to take the high road, his mouth thinning in frustration. Finally, he muttered something indistinguishable and stuck his head back out the window. “For your information,” he called, “someone transferred to Andover.”
Caskey let out a slow whistle. “Wow! The lengths people will go to escape you guys.”
“. . . rrrghshnff ” was the noise that ground out of Nihal’s mouth.
Caskey grinned toothily up at us, running a hand through his hair. Behind him, someone opened the Arlington side door, calling something that the breeze snatched away. Connor said something in reply, backed up from the Prince building, and gave us a salute that turned into a middle finger. “Later, Muppets,” he called, and jogged toward Arlington.
We leaned back from the window. “Muppets?” Marcus said blankly. “Why?”
Nihal shuffled his comic into a black portfolio case and tucked his ink pen into a pouch. “We do not deign to absorb insults from lesser groups. Got it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What’s his problem?”
Nihal shrugged. “He acts like it’s all a joke, but I think he might still be bitter about the Sharps not letting him in. Which is actually sort of sad, since it’s been three years.” He rolled his eyes. “Or he may just enjoy the whole rivalry thing, because, again, he is the worst.”
The worst? Maybe. Still, it was a little exhilarating, having an actual sworn enemy. Rivals—the word was exciting, a dare. A hurdle to jump. More than that, the term made everything so cut and dry. It wasn’t often the world offered you on a silver platter an enemy whom you could dislike instantly and irrationally, no guilt involved. Connor’s cocky grin fixed itself into my mind’s eye, and it made me want to grin right back.
On Saturday, I arrived at the Dollar Sale the moment they opened the roped-off enclosure, trying to avoid the inevitable crowd. I’d added a ratty baseball cap to my glasses, casting a deep shadow over my face.
I darted through collections of swiveling chairs and clumsily constructed side tables. In one row, beside a forest of wobbly lamps, a fleet of fans turned in the breeze, abandoned. Those were probably donated by kids who’d been lucky enough to get air-conditioned housing this year. The AC life was a life the theater students would never know. Not even Pepper House, the dorm for theater seniors, had AC. It had been a constant sore point for Michael, who heated up like a radiator in his sleep, always ending up with his sheets banished to the foot of his bed, a mess of soft, crimped cotton.
Stop thinking, sang a voice in my head. Stop it, stop it, stop.
I doubled my speed.
A sprawling map of clothes lay farther down the lawn, spread across picnic blankets in the deep shadow of Marden Cathedral. Near the stone path that led to the cathedral doors, I scooped up a six-pack of men’s T-shirts, all varying shades on the grayscale, zipped inside a plastic case. I tucked it into the huge red bag they handed out to shoppers and next added multi-packs of undershirts and boys’ socks. Buying guys’ clothes was like buying bulk cereal.
Instinctively, I checked the tags, keeping the names I recognized. The more I dressed like the Sharps, the more I was one of them. Invisible. And, honestly, it would be nice to blend in for once. I snatched up twenty-three dollars’ worth of Vineyard Vines, Barbour, and Joe’s Jeans so quickly, the crowd was just starting to seep in when I brought my red bag to the counting table.
Approaching the table, I halted in my tracks. The school got the prefects to work this event, and the prefect manning the table . . . just my luck. It was Anabel, beautiful in a summery sundress, the fine point of her nose lifted in the air.
I swallowed, looking around. With people arriving in earnest like this, theater and music kids alike, it was too risky to wait for the workers to change shifts. I could get through one thirty-second interaction with Anabel, right? The hat, the glasses, the hair . . . I looked nothing like myself. Besides that pair of Hall Standards meetings right after move-in, we’d barely seen each other this year. All I had to do was keep my head down and act normal.
I strode up to the table, sliding the bag across to Anabel. “Yo,” I grunted, staring at the table. The white plastic had the stubbly texture of plaster.
“Hi there,” she chirped, spilling the bag out. With crisply manicured nails, she picked through the bag’s contents item by item. I felt spoiled, with all the pricey denim and classy button-ups she was sorting through. A silky tie and—I was officially a sellout—a pair of boat shoes. I’d also stumbled on a pair of khakis perfect for performance and black dress shoes a size and a half too big. It wasn’t like I’d be running a marathon in the things. They just had to fit enough.
Anabel’s hands slowed as she moved to the next clump of items: three dresses and a pair of sparkling heels. I shifted in place.
“My, uh, my girlfriend couldn’t come,” I blurted.
“Oh.” Anabel let out a silvery laugh. “I was going to say, performing in Hedwig or something?”
“Yeah, no, she’s got me doing her dirty work.” I pulled on the lopsided smile I’d been practicing in the mirror, more of a smirk than a real smile. “Ha ha, typical B . . . Bertha.”
Mentally, I gave myself a hard smack. What the hell? Who was actually named Bertha, besides that seventy-two-year-old administrative assistant at my middle school?
“That’s considerate,” Anabel said. “Nice to know chivalry isn’t dead.”
I coughed. “No, yeah. Chivalry is just, uh, super alive.”
Then, like a moron, I looked directly at her. Mild confusion flickered across her expression, and she tilted her head, one curled blonde strand bouncing forward across her eye. “Wait, sorry, have we met?”
“Nope. No. I don’t think so.”
“You look really familiar.”
I shrugged, angling my face firmly down at the table. Ohshitohgodohshit, I thought. “Probably just the Kensington effect,” I mumbled. “I think I would, um, remember you.”
She laughed again. “That’s sweet. Again with the chivalry.”
There was a teasing edge to her voice that made my cheeks heat up. Was that—was she flirting with me? Why was I getting flustered? She couldn’t be pursuing me—I’d told her I was dating Bertha. I would never cheat on Bertha. We had a beautiful relationship.
Unsure what to do, I very loudly said, “Ha ha ha,” and then wanted to die.
Anabel shuffled the clothes back into the red canvas. “All right,” she said, sounding amused. “That’s twenty-three dollars.”
I handed her the crumpled bills, and she sorted them into the beige metal box that served as a register, humming a song from the musical. Anabel had gotten one of the three leads this year, her first lead part. She was going to be good—she’d always impressed me in smaller parts. It was always tough to begrudge other kids their victories. Most people at Kensington were nice enough, even with the bloodthirsty levels of competition. It would’ve been so much easier if they were divas and assholes and I could hate them comfortably from the sidelines.
“Aaand here you go,” she said, handing me my bag.
“Thanks.” I grabbed it, turned, and froze in place. Jon Cox and Mama stood behind me in line, a lamp arching its neck between the two of them. A smile spread across Jon Cox’s face, his tortoiseshell glasses glinting in the painful sun.
“What’s good, man?” he crowed, dragging the lamp forward.
“Hey,” I said, trying not to sound too flustered. “Um. Nice lamp. I’m gonna—” I took a few halting steps back, trying not to look like I was engineering an escape. They approached the table. The two halves of my life faced each other down.
Mama folded his arms, leaning back to talk to me. “I don’t see why we’re getting another lamp,” he huffed. “We have one in our room already.”
“You’re roommates?” I said, wondering if they ever left each other’s side for more than five minutes at a go. Mama nodded, his dark curls flapping in the wind.
We looked over at Jon Cox, who was leaning deep over the table, giving Anabel his confident grin. “Hey. How’s it going? You’re Anabel, right?”
A supremely bored look spread across Mama’s round face. “Oh, God, not this again,” he muttered.
I looked toward the road, and freedom. “Sorry, bro, I really have to go, but I’ll see you at reh—”
“He always does this,” Mama said tiredly. “Don’t abandon me. I spend 90 percent of my life third-wheeling.”
I bit the inside of my cheek and stayed put, giving the table a cautious glance.
“Sucks that you have to work this thing,” Jon Cox was saying, giving his glasses a nudge up his nose with a knuckle. “How long are your shifts?”
“Not too bad,” Anabel said. “An hour each.” Her attention flickered over his face, from his blue eyes to his even smile.
Watching Jon Cox’s performance was kind of fascinating. With his balanced, patrician features and the way his golden hair caught the sun, he was hard to look away from. He also had it, whatever it was—the charm some guys have that radiates out like a gravitational field. Michael had had it, too.
“Jon,” Mama said loudly, “you’re holding up the line.”
Anabel came back to herself. “Right,” she said, glancing down at the box and back up at him. “That’ll be a dollar.”
“Yeah.” Jon Cox pulled his wallet from his pastel-yellow shorts and paid. “Thanks. I’ll see you around.”
As he backed away from the table, I drew the guys toward the exit. The line flooded up, hiding Anabel from sight, and the tension unknotted from my shoulders.
“What the fuck,” Jon Cox said, battering Mama around the torso with the lamp. “She was like an eight.”
Mama swatted the lamp away. It swung toward a tiny freshman girl with a messenger bag who dodged it with a squeak. “My bad,” Mama called after her and turned back to Jon. “I’m doing you a favor. Remember Laura?”
They pulled identical grimaces.
“So, yeah,” Mama said. “Leave theater girls alone.”
“Not everybody is gonna be Laura.”
“All I’m saying is,” Mama rumbled, “maybe something would go well if you spent less time picking up random girls, and more time, I don’t know, making friends with girls, so you can find someone who actually makes sense with your terrible personality.”
Jon Cox grinned. He didn’t even seem to hear the insult. “The Internet disagrees,” he said. “Pickups work. They make you look like an alpha. Women love alphas. It’s a real thing.”
I couldn’t contain myself. “Oh my God it completely is not a thing,” I mumbled.
Jon Cox elbowed me. “Back me up here.” I rubbed my bicep, scowling at him. We reached the entrance of the enclosure and slowed, waiting for the crowd to clear.
“Well,” Mama said, “not to sound like a sixty-year-old, but—”
“You always sound like a sixty-year-old.”
“—but maybe you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet.”
Jon Cox flicked the lamp over his shoulder. “I officially like this lamp more than I like you.”
“I’m just trying to help,” Mama said. “It’s sort of sad watching you bounce around from girl to girl like a hormone pinball, just so you can pretend you’re not pining afte—”
“I’m not pining,” Jon Cox said as we passed the teachers who manned the entrance. “I don’t pine.”
Mama looked skeptical but stayed quiet. As we reached August Drive, Jon Cox nudged me. “Julian, what’re you up to? We’re gonna go for a drive. I texted the group—we’re picking up Isaac in a second.”
“A drive?” I said. “You have your license?”
“Yeah.”
“Aren’t you a sophomore?”
Red tinged his cheeks. “Yeah, but I, um.”
“He’s old for his grade,” Mama cut in, sounding strangely protective. “So, you coming?”
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.
“Climb in,” Jon Cox called from the driver’s seat, one hand lazily resting on the dark curve of the wheel. Isaac lounged in the back, his guitar in his lap. Mama sat in the passenger seat, fiddling with the bumping radio.
“Climb?” I repeated. No way was I putting my dirty shoes on a car that had probably cost what my parents paid for five years’ rent.
“Yeah, I mean, within reason,” Jon Cox said.
After a second, Mama snapped his fingers at me. “Maaake haaaste,” he sang, a rumbling operatic sound.
I braced my hands on the door and vaulted in. My elbow buckled a second too soon, and I barreled into the neck of Isaac’s guitar. He snatched it away, instantly inspecting it, fingers skimming every inch of the wood. It was a beautiful instrument, sleek and rosy.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, settling in the soft black leather of the backseat.
“All good. She’s intact.” Isaac peered at me through narrowed eyes. “But watch it. Damage my baby, and I will ship you back to California in my guitar case.” His face lit up. “Did you guys know there was this girl who tried to ship herself to the Beatles in a box? Apparently she forgot to put air holes in the crate, which was, like, amateur mistake. If I was going to—”
Mama turned up the music, drowning him out. Isaac gave him the finger, Jon Cox laughed, and we revved down the street and through campus.
I kept one hand on my head, holding my baseball cap on. The film houses passed by, identical dollhouses, square black windows shielding musty-looking curtains. We rounded a corner and slid between the two biggest dorms on campus, Wingate and Ewing, which faced each other down as if in a Western standoff. Finally, we passed through Arthur’s Arch, leaving campus behind, framed by that imposing iron A.
Instead of continuing through town toward its array of shops and restaurants, we headed down a side street and out into the open countryside. Jon Cox accelerated until the wind started to billow around us, heavy waves of air. The woodland that encircled Kensington was assuming the tinge of autumn yellow, worn out by a long summer. Every so often, a peeling clapboard house cropped up on the side of the winding road, or a clearing dipped into the woodlands, fields rippling with tall grass and wildflowers.
The breeze tasted like loam and the coming fall, and it made the golden tassel of Jon Cox’s hair ripple. “Hey,” he told Mama, “can you Insta this?”
Mama sighed. “Like I said. Slave to the Internet.” He picked up Jon’s phone, entered his password, opened Instagram, and snapped a stupidly photogenic picture. “You should pay me for doing your branding,” he grumbled.
Isaac glanced at me. “Jon Cox has, like, eighty thousand Instagram followers,” he explained.
“Ugh,” I said, involuntarily. He laughed.
“What can I say?” Jon Cox said, sounding satisfied. “Insta girls love me.”
“It’s probably 90 percent bots,” Isaac shot back. “The spam algorithms love you.”
“Follow me,” Jon Cox called back to me, ignoring Isaac. “Join the crowds.”
“I don’t do social media,” I said, which was true. If I’d had it, I would have deleted it to stay under the radar, anyway.
We were far off-campus by now, and the music faded out. After a second, a plucking guitar riff rang through the speakers. “Love Me Forever.”
“Yes,” Jon Cox yelled, turning it up, summoning the bass to thud against my back.
“Here we go,” Mama groaned, sinking in the passenger seat. I glanced into the side mirror. He’d sunk so low, all I could see were his thick eyebrows hiding beneath the chaos of hair over his wide forehead.
Jon Cox and Isaac were already singing along at the top of their lungs. Isaac was strumming along on his guitar, too, the strings vibrating inaudibly under the crisp envelope of the sound system. “Last night you said you love me,” he and Jon wailed. “You said you can’t stop, can’t stop thinking of me—”
In front of me, Mama started to sing an octave down. His voice cut through the song like a bassoon. “Baby, I hope it doesn’t tear you apart . . .”
Jon Cox cracked up. The persistent bray of his laughter was infectious. I couldn’t stop myself from grinning, and as my smile spread wide, a warning chimed in me. Arm’s length. Keep your cover. Don’t get in too deep.
As the chorus approached, Jon Cox turned up the volume even more, drowning my thoughts. That huge, splashy hook blared out, and before I knew it, I was singing too, yell-singing at the top of my lungs. “And you asked, ‘When you gonna tell the truth?’ and I said, ‘Never’ . . .” The sound of our voices dissipated instantly, whisked away in the rush of the wind barreling through Jon Cox’s car. Lost out in the world. “’Cause you’re looking for somebody who can love you forever, and I can’t do that—I can’t do that—I can’t do that, oh no, no, no.”
The sun glowered down at us. The wind rose. We rushed by a house where a pair of middle-aged women sat on the lawn in plastic chairs, reading yellowing novels, dressed in florals. They glanced up as we passed, and their deep-set eyes tracked us until we were gone. The woods around us broke into rough waves of grass as we headed for a steep hill, and when the car crested and plunged down the incline, my stomach lifted. My heart lifted. Everything lifted, and I looked around at the guys in the car, laughing now, laughing about those dumb lyrics, all love and yearning, and I thought, This is wonderful, this is wonderful, this is never going to last.
Nothing lasts. I knew that, and I spent half my life repeating it to myself. Only Michael had ever managed to make me forget. He lived in the moment so much, he threw away everything other than the world in his immediate orbit. Sometimes I could’ve sworn he had no past and couldn’t give a damn about the future, that he was some temporary blessing that flickered in and out of existence exactly as he wanted. You had to grab Michael by the shoulders and bully him to wring out any information about his life back home: Seattle and his three little brothers. His parents’ calm suburban life did not interest him, and neither did Kensington kids’ usual obsessions with what was coming next, colleges or conservatories or auditions. All Michael wanted was the wildness of the present, and he wanted it all at once. It was exhilarating, right up until the point that it became selfish.
I sat in the back of that glimmering car with its purring engine and I let myself think about him without anger, without longing, without anything. Michael wasn’t perfect, which I’d known, but maybe he wasn’t even perfect for me, which hadn’t occurred to me. It seemed a little clearer to me now. It wasn’t enlightenment to live like you had no history and no consequences. The world wasn’t just made out of instants—it was made out of plans, too, and the ability to learn from your mistakes. I wished he’d learned.
The song reached its bridge, falling back in order to build into the final chorus.
Isaac wedged his guitar securely between seats. He grabbed the shoulders of Jon Cox’s seat and maneuvered himself to his feet, craning his long body over the driver’s headrest. The wind clawed at his hair, clearing the straggling locks back from his forehead. My throat tightened—if we hit anything, or even braked too fast, Isaac was getting pitched straight over the windshield—but Jon Cox and Mama didn’t say a word. It wasn’t until Isaac leaned forward to fiddle with the bass levels on the sound system that Mama smacked his hand away, shouting over the music, “Sit down, moron, you’re going to hurt yourself.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Isaac yelled, sitting back down, “and the lyrics to this song kind of suck. I told Trav we shouldn’t do it. People are gonna think we’re dicks.” He put his legs up over the side of the car, crossing them at the ankles.
Jon Cox turned the music down. “Nah, bro,” he called back, glancing in the rearview. “Everyone knows the Minuets are the asshole group.”
I suppressed a laugh. It was true. Everyone knew the reputations: The Minuets were assholes. The Sharps were pretentious. The all-girls’ group—the Precautionary Measures—were super-gay. The jazz group—the Carnelian, named for one of our school colors—were a bunch of drinkers. And the two coed groups, Hear Hear and Under A Rest, were quagmires of in-group incest.
It had been only a week, but I couldn’t imagine what in-group dating would feel like. You’d never get a break from the person you were seeing.
Had the Sharps ever had a problem with that? They must have. The School of Music was less gay, proportionally, than the other schools, but that wasn’t saying much.
“Hey, do you have a phone charger?” Mama said.
“Yeah,” Jon Cox said, nodding at the glove compartment. “In there.”
Mama reached for the glove compartment’s handle. It snapped open, and there was a loud, distinct pop.
Out exploded a twinkling burst of glitter. It danced and twisted in the air like flour in a hurricane.
For a second, I just stared, unsure what the hell was happening.
Isaac flinched and drew his legs back into the car. Mama spluttered helplessly, his pale face screwed up and smothered in sparkles. He scrubbed at his forehead, spitting glitter over the side.
“What the shit?” Jon Cox said, as it settled. “Is that glitter?” A million flecks reflected the sun from the seats, from the backrests, from the dashboard—every last leathered crevice. Tiny, blinding points of light. As Mama hit the power button, killing the music, the hollow rush of the wind whipped up to fill the silence.
“Did you lend your car to someone?” I asked.
“Of course not. I don’t let anyone borrow this thing.”
“Hang on.” Mama leaned forward, staring into the glove compartment. “I—there’s a note in here,” he said, sounding disbelieving. He yanked it out. “It says, ‘Might want to put your roof up. Signed—’ and there’s a dotted half note.” Mama lowered the note, his expression injured. “Oh, come on.”
“The Minuets,” Isaac said.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Minuets are in 3/4 time,” Mama said. “Dotted half note. It’s a joke.”
“Great joke,” Jon Cox said. He slammed the heel of his palm against the steering wheel. Once, twice. “Fuck. I’m gonna be vacuuming glitter out of this thing for the next eight years.”
“And not all minuets are even in 3/4,” Mama said, as if that were the worst part of the whole thing. “Some of them are in 3/8. Or even 6/8, for some of the Italian—”
“Man, shut up,” Jon Cox said. Mama emitted a sigh and went quiet.
“It’s okay, Cox,” Isaac said, a grim smile stretching across his face. “We’re gonna sort this out.”
When I got to the Nest that night, Isaac was sprawled on the floor in front of a hefty mason jar, snipping the heads off matches. They danced in the glass as they toppled in, plink, plink, plink. Nihal sat nearby with a sketchbook open in his lap. Jon Cox and Mama were in their usual spots on the sofa, both on their laptops.
“Hey,” I said, dropping my backpack into my chair. “Isaac, what’s that?”
He didn’t look up. “Science project.”
“Sure,” I said. “Is this about the glitter?”
“Maybe.” Isaac snipped another couple of match heads into the jar.
“Isaac has an evil plan,” Jon Cox said, looking up from his laptop. “He won’t explain.”
“My theory,” Isaac said, “is that they did it ’cause of the competition. They want to put us on edge, you know? Distract us. Which is, obviously, never going to happen, ’cause you could probably shoot Trav in the knee and he’d still show up at rehearsal ready to go.”
“You think they could win?” I said.
Nihal let out a merry chuckle but didn’t answer.
“I don’t know.” Isaac set his scissors on the ground. “I guess it depends. Aural Fixation has nine people, all male, so they might want their opener to contrast with that more than we do. Our best shot is to be so freakishly good that they have no choice but to hand it to us.” He flicked the empty matchbook into the trash can. From his backpack, he tugged out an unlabeled white bottle the size of a shampoo bottle. The cap popped open, and clear liquid glug-glug-glugged its way into the jar.
Isaac screwed the cap onto the jar and swirled it a few times. The match heads swam around, tiny red fish caught in a whirlpool.
“So,” I said slowly, “just to make sure: That’s not an explosive, right?”
He hopped to his feet, and Isaac took up his guitar by its rosewood neck, flopping down hard on the sofa. Jon Cox and Mama grumbled with no real malice.
“No exploding,” Isaac said, tugging a pick out of his wallet. “But in a couple days, those off-key degenerates are going to be sorry. And we’re still going to win the competition, and get famous, and that’ll be that.”
I sat down hard. “I can’t believe those guys sell out stadiums. Do people really care about a cappella that much?” I shook my head. “I don’t care about a cappella that much.”
Jon Cox, typing something into his MacBook, mumbled, “Nobody does except Trav. But it’s a thing now.”
“It’s probably those movies.”
“Right.” Jon Cox grimaced. “Girl power.”
The derision in his voice stuck into me like a pin. I shot him a look. He probably didn’t mean anything by it—he’d been in a shitty mood since the glitter incident. I got the sense that the Minuets’ sabotage had gouged a deep wound into his pride.
“They’re not bad,” I said. “The movies, I mean.”
“Not to nitpick,” Mama sniffed, shutting his laptop, “but their group only sounds good after they augment the bass. That’s essentially a coed sound.”
Isaac chuckled. “Aaand there’s the verdict from the pretentious peanut gallery.”
I thought for a second. My words kept falling apart before they reached the front of my mouth. “But—I mean—” I took a deep breath. “The Precautionary Measures are really good, though.”
Isaac nodded, spinning the lid of the mason jar around his thumb. “No, definitely, they’re great musicians. But believe me, they’re not winning this thing.” He shrugged. “Girls’ groups have a reputation.”
“What reputation?”
Isaac went back to his matches, picking around the words carefully. “Some people would say, um, that they don’t really . . . it’s a vibe thing. If we’re looking at musicality, the Precautionary Measures are obviously better than the Minuets. But the Minuets sell it. There’s comedy, you know?”
Drop it, warned a little voice. Let it go. But I couldn’t. “Why can’t girls’ groups have comedy?” I blurted out. Jon Cox, Mama, and Isaac looked at me with confusion, obviously baffled about why I was fighting them on this. Nihal had stopped sketching.
“Guys’ a cappella is just funny,” Jon Cox said blankly. “A bunch of music nerds jamming out pretending to be instruments.”
“To be fair,” Nihal said, his voice a quiet reassurance, “that is the same thing that girls’ groups do.”
Mama waved his hand. “I think we’re all kind of missing the point. Again, let’s look at the music.” He pointed at me and Nihal. “You two sing up to what, an F5?”
I glanced at Nihal. “I can kind of get a high E out,” I said reluctantly.
“G-ish on the better days,” Nihal said.
“Well, yeah, then,” Mama said.
“Well, yeah, what?” I said.
Mama shrugged. “Even girls’ groups hardly ever write parts that sit on a high F.”
With a snip of the scissors, Isaac finished guillotining the last of the matches. “The Measures obviously have ranges above that,” he added. “I think a couple of them have the F an octave up, which is wild.”
“Well, yes,” Mama said patiently. “But nobody’s ever going to arrange anything up there for more than about two seconds. Having bass gets you a hundred times more mileage than being able to sing notes from, like, Die Zauberflöte.”
Jon Cox grinned. “Here’s a fun game. Try to make Mama go a full conversation without name-dropping Baroque music.”
“Oh my God,” Mama said. “Die Zauberflöte is Classical Era; I’m embarrassed to know you.”
“Really digging yourself deeper here, Theodore,” Nihal said.
Jon Cox raised his hands. “Yeah, sorry my parents aren’t music professors.”
They kept bantering. I stayed quiet. Discomfort had settled like a bed of needles beneath my skin. My teeth were clamped tight together to keep the words in. I almost wanted to go to the Precautionary Measures right now and vent to them, but I sat there, wondering. Were the Sharps right? They knew more about music than I did—was my reaction a knee-jerk denial that girls’ groups were necessarily worse than guys’? It was true that all the songs we covered were bass-heavy, from recent thudding pop songs all the way back to the jazz standards from the thirties, whose double bass plucked along beneath flaring horn sections. Obviously, girls’ groups had a different sound quality.
How could it be objectively worse, though? Plenty of songs in the coed and all-guys’ concerts were missing something, too, not innovative enough to hook an audience in either. That seemed like the real battle—making each song engaging moment to moment. Not something as indefinable as “vibe.”
It just didn’t feel right. Music aside, didn’t they hear what they sounded like, with all the vague talk about comedy? It smacked of the same old argument that “girls aren’t funny,” as if all girls had one specific sense of humor and the Powers that Be had decided along the line that it missed the mark.
I didn’t want to fight the guys on it. All I wanted was for them to think a little bigger. For the first time, sitting among them, I felt inadequate, struggling to reach some tier they’d put themselves on. This was supposed to be the place where I was finally good enough.
I felt eyes on me. I glanced over at Nihal, who gave me a resigned-looking shrug and went back to his sketchbook.
Before rehearsal, the guys asked me to pull “After All” from the archives—a classic Sharps song, originally by sad indie boy Hendrix Bird. Since I didn’t know where the archives were, Nihal led the way. We wound down into the practice room where I’d done my callback, opened a filing cabinet, and started rummaging.
Nihal’s careful hands drew out two bursting manila folders. He shouldered the filing cabinet shut and placed the folders gently on the piano lid. “Here we go. The esteemed Sharpshooter Archives. You check this one.” He angled a folder my way.
“Not alphabetical?”
Nihal’s lips quivered, making his beard twitch. He didn’t bother answering.
I opened one of the folders and flipped through the clutter of arrangements. “God, there’s so much.”
“Mmhmm.” Nihal licked his thumb and started paging through the arrangements with a caution that verged on tenderness. “There’s twelve years’ worth of music in here. Everything after they stopped teaching by ear and before they started arranging digitally.”
As my fingers flipped aging pages, rivers of handwritten notes splashed across yellowing staff paper, a glimpse of memory folded against my vision. Last year, Mr. Rollins had asked me and Michael to alphabetize his cabinet of audition sides, its drawers crammed with photocopied excerpts from A Streetcar Named Desire and The Aliens and Much Ado About Nothing. I remembered sitting on the floor cross-legged in this sort of quiet. Easy and natural.
Nihal asked, “Do you have friends in the Precautionary Measures?”
“Why?”
“You seemed a bit—” He made a strained face. “—earlier.”
I kept my tone casual. “It’s nothing. I just didn’t think the guys were the type to throw shade.”
Nihal hummed his usual little chuckle. “They probably didn’t even realize they were,” he said. “Isaac, Jon Cox, and Theodore are delightful people who tend to get so far up their own asses they lose sight of daylight.”
I laughed, but my smile faded fast. I was doing exactly what I’d said I wouldn’t do. Random afternoon car rides with the Sharps, long conversations, feeling betrayed by opinions that distanced me from them—this was too much.
But I didn’t want to pull back. It was hard to miss isolation.
“Hey,” I said quietly. “Do you have a lot of friends in the Visual Arts school?”
Nihal’s hands faltered. “Why?”
“No reason.”
Nihal glanced at me. He had the kindest eyes, hazelnut brown, tapered at the edges as if in a permanent smile.
“No, really, it’s nothing,” I said. “The Sharps are so—” I broke off, shrugging. “Everyone’s so tight.”
“Yeah, and?”
“And what if I’m not like you guys?” The words fell out before I could stop them. I backtracked. “I mean, what if I don’t . . . fit?”
Nihal looked at me curiously for a second and said, “Julian, last year we only had two rooks: me and Jon Cox.” He raised his eyebrows. “Jon Cox, the most archetypical Kensington kid in the history of Kensington kids. And then me.”
He went back to paging through the music, still unhurried, serene. “I worried about what it’d be like in the Sharps. If I’d get staring, or weird questions, or the feeling that . . .” He switched folders. “But it wasn’t like that.”
“Why?” I said.
“I suppose it’s the work, right? It has to be.” He shrugged. “You can be weird. You can be a frickin’ furry, for all the guys care. We’re just trying to make something.”
I looked back down at the folders. Weird, sure. But would they be as forgiving of a girl? Someone who broke their circle of brotherhood, or all-male back-patting, or whatever it was at heart?
“Thanks, man,” I mumbled, nearing the middle of the folder.
“Sure.”
“Also, why do you call Mama Theodore?” I asked.
“Because he asked me to.”
“Oh.”
“Found it,” he said, plucking a stapled piece of music from his folder.
The archives went back in the cabinet, and Nihal shut off the lights when we left.