I don’t let people know this, but I have a really good memory. It’s why I learned how to read so fast. It’s why I’m so good at knitting sweaters. It’s why I don’t lie. That’s the first thing my parents taught me, after I became an Elson at four years old:

“Meg,” they said, “Elsons don’t lie. It does nobody any good.”

I didn’t know very many people before them. They started fostering me when I was two. I don’t remember my parents, or why I was in an orphanage, or for how long. It’s like I wasn’t alive until Emily and Meguinis Elson the Fifth decorated their spare room into a nursery. I was pale, like them, but they had dark hair. Mom’s is really tightly curled, while Dad’s is flat. I’m blonde: kind of a dirty blonde, but when you take a look at my gene pool it’s pretty clear that I wasn’t born an Elson. I was born to be an Elson.

The very first lesson I learned was not to lie. So I never did.

For a week, I was their daughter. Then, one night, Mom tucked me into bed. I was staring off into the distance. I did that a lot. I thought a lot. I thought about how the city from below my window look. I wondered how they lived. I wondered how much they lied. I wondered how many of the books in Mom’s shop she had read. I wondered if, someday, I could read them all too. I wondered how she managed to knit my blue and orange socks. I thought about how I didn’t want to be a daughter.

“Hey, Mommy,” I said. There was a bit of a swell in Mom’s chest.

“Yes, Meg?” she said, trying to keep it casual. Her cheeks reddened like ripened apples. I always thought her cheekbones look like apples.

I played with the hem of my brand-new sheets. They had a cartoon character on them: Lemonpanda. He was the one thing I carried on from Before. “You don’t want me to lie, do you?” I asked.

Mom blinked. “Of-of course not,” she said.

I nodded. “I don’t think I’m a girl,” I admitted, heart hammering in my chest.

Mom blinked quickly. I don’t think she was surprised that I said that. I think she’s more surprised I said it so soon. “Do you think you’re a boy?” she asked me.

A breath escaped my nose. “I don’t know,” I said. “I like Daddy’s beard. I think I would want one like it someday.”

“You don’t have to decide right now,” Mom said. She brushed her fingers through my waves. My hair went down to my shoulders. I never liked it that long. “Have you ever heard of nonbinary?” she asked. I shook my head, and she described it to me. Not a boy, not a girl. Some people only felt like they were a boy or girl sometimes. But I never felt like one of them. I was just…me.

At the end of our conversation, she kissed me on the forehead. “I love you, Meg,” she said.

“I love you too.”

“Thank you for telling the truth.” She squeezed my little hand. “You can always tell me the truth. Daddy too.”

I slept really well that night.

A few months later, I started school at Pine Cove Elementary.

The banner above the Kindergarten hallway was too colorful. Welcome to K-I-N-D-E-R-G-A-R-T-E-N! That’s not how it said Kindergarten. I spelled it out in my mind. Mommy made me read a lot of books about going into Kindergarten before today. She wanted me to be ready.

I was an androgynous-looking, five-year-old non-binary kid in a school full of people who are on a binary. I was adopted and I knew it. I talk weird because I spend all my time thinking and reading.

Most of all, I hadn’t made any friends yet.

Kids are awkward. They come into our bookstore, If Books Could Kill, with their parents. They sit in the Kidz Corner and draw quietly on the free paper while their Mommy or Daddy or whatever they called their parent. Meg lived there, making a Meg-shaped dent in the orange bean-bag chair, earning paper cuts every ten books.

“You look like a very smart girl, Meguinis,” my teacher said as she sat down with me. While I was thinking about weird kids, we had walked in, hooked my backpack under a cubby, and sat down with Miss Sharp. Tracy, she wanted me to call her.

“I’m not a girl,” I said. “And my name is Meg.”

Mom’s grip tightened on mine. “Meg is non-binary,” she said. “And we named them after my husband, Meguinis the Fifth.”

“Oh!” Tracy blinked, embarrassment heating her face. “I am so sorry, Meg,” she apologized.

Wouldn’t that have come up when they signed me up? I wondered, remembering all the paperwork my parents filled out. Tracy said some other things, asking about allergies and stuff, but I was getting bored. My eyes wandered to my classmates. A lot of them were playing with toys. Some brought toy cars from home. One girl had a stuffed bear with her. Three kids stacked cubes into towers, or stuck building blocks together.

Tracy noticed my shifting attention. “I’m sorry,” Mom apologized. “They’re very curious.”

“That’s okay,” Tracy said. She pointed to the last table, the table I had yet to look at. “That’s where you’re going to sit.”

There were only three name plates, but two seats were already taken. They were brother and sister: twins. They had the same dark skin and bright orange eyes and dark curly hair. The girl stared at the table, not moving at all. Like a Kidz Corner kid, the kind of Kidz Corner kid whose parents made Mom’s lips go tight and pale. Her brother, smashed a lump of purple clay into the table. He rolled it into a snake, karate chopped it in half, and gave the other half to his sister. She didn’t take it.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Giving my mom a hug goodbye, a lump in my throat, I watch her leave the classroom. At the last moment, she wipes a tear from her cheek. Mom had warned me that she might cry.

I sat down at the last name plate, the one that said Meguinis Elson, the only name I’d ever known. The only name I ever cared to remember. The girl didn’t look up at me. She continued staring at the table. The boy looked up from his snake, which was now more like a cinnamon roll. “Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m Meg,” I replied. I could read his nameplate from here. Cadman King. The girl in front of me was Rosaline King. Those names were long. Proper. Then again, this was a private elementary school.

Cadman stared at me for a little longer. He tilted his head. “Are you a boy or a girl?” he asked.

“Neither,” Meg said. “I’m not a girl. I’m not a boy. At least, right now, I don’t think.”

“Your name makes you sound like a girl,” Cadman says. He pronounces his L’s like W’s and doesn’t pronounce his R’s at all. They’re all silent to him. If I wrote it all out now, it would get really annoying, so use your imagination. “But you look like a boy.”

Back then, I wanted to call him mean. Nowadays, I’d think he’s blunt. Blunt the way awkward five-year-olds are. I wanted to punch him, or yell.

“Didn’t anyone teach you to talk?” I spat back, slamming my fist on the table. Rosaline flinches. “You sound dumb.”

Cadman breathes hard. He purses his lips, hands curled into fists. He wants to punch me, too. I can feel it. “You’re dumb!” he shouts, storming off to sit in the corner.

A little bit of guilt rises in my throat. I don’t do anything about it. I grit my teeth and walk to the little library. It has some worn picture books. Mom has a lot of them in the store, so I grab one I’d never seen before. I don’t feel like returning to my seat. I sit there and read while Cadman sobs in the corner.

While I’m there, while Tracy talks down Cadman, Rosaline walks past me. She has to, to get to the toys. She walks past quickly, but on the way back, with a jar of green clay, she lingers. Our eyes lock. Neither of us speak. I don’t think she hates me. In fact, with her empty stare, I don’t think she feels much of anything at all.

The guilt becomes more pungent.

Tracy scolds me for calling Cadman dumb. She tells me I can’t be mean to people. “I was just telling the truth,” I said. “He talks dumb.”

Tracy pinches her nose. This must’ve been her first year teacher, and I was her first problem child. “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” she said.

She made me apologize to him. I think I meant it, but he didn’t believe me. He pouted and returned to his clay. Rosie made a green bear for him. It made him grin ear-to-ear.

After everyone has met with Tracy and the parents leave, Tracy begins our first day of Kindergarten. She had one of those carpets with the days of the week and the weather on it. “Let’s gather on the carpet so we can all get to know each other better!” she said. There’s a bit of nervousness to her voice. I think I did that.

Cadman immediately leapt onto the carpet, roaring like a bear. A couple other people see him do that, and they copy him with meows and barks and other animal noises. I see that he has a bear on the back of his purple hoodie.

Rosaline gets up slowly, her hands linked in front of her, shuffling past Cadman’s pulled-out seat. She has the skirt of her pink dress bunched up in her hands. I move just as slowly as her, watching. Her hands start to shake, and she dives under the table.

I stop. Why are these two so weird? I wonder, kneeling. She hugged her knees to her chest, trembling from head to toe. I think tears are going down her face. She’s a quieter crier than Cadman.

Tracy swallows and walks through the sea of four-and-five-year-olds. She kneels at the table, too. “Meg, please go sit at the carpet,” she tells me. I think she’s afraid I’ll make it worse. So I crawl away, but not too far. I want to listen.

It’s hard to hear through my classmates.

“What’s wrong with her?” one asks.

“Is she crying?”

“Who is that again?”

“Did she get hurt?”

“Are they both this weird?”

“Great. They’re both crybabies.”

Eventually, I’m able to listen over them. Cadman had crawled over to comfort her. “What’s wrong, Rosie?” Tracy asked her. Rosie. That’s much shorter than Rosaline. “Do you want to sit on the carpet with us? With Caddie?” Caddie. Now that’s an unfortunate nickname.

Rosie shakes her head, her face buried in her arms. Caddie holds her arm. “She doesn’t like groups,” he said. “She gets really scared when we’re in them.”

Tracy nodded. “How about you and Caddie sit in the back? That way you won’t be so crowded.”

Somehow, Tracy and Caddie managed to get the sniffling Rosie to sit on the edge of the carpet. Rosie apparently had a lot of freckles: her face was sprinkled with golden flecks.

Tracy sat in the comfy-looking chair at the front of the carpet and began class. She introduced everyone to Terry the Turtle, the stuffed turtle who grants people the ability to talk while she is sitting in her chair.

I didn’t listen. I looked at the Kings.

Rosie leaned on him, staring at her hands, wiping her snot on her arm. Gross. Mom and Dad always told me to use a tissue. So I ran to the tissue box, grabbed some tissues, and brought it to Rosie. Rosie blinked up at me. She frowned a little. Caddie glared at me, but he seemed more conflicted than anything. The person who made him cry is now giving his sister tissues.

I sat down next to them.

Tracy’s explanation faltered. I think she was going to scold me again but decided not to. Instead, she passed Terry to the person right in front of her. The girl with the teddy bear hugged Terry and her bear. “Um…my name is Allie, and I just lost a toof!” She pointed to a gap in her smile. The class ooed and awed.

“That’s very cool, Allie,” Tracy said in the condescending voice adults talk to kids with. “Can you give Terry to the person next to you?”

The kid next to her took Terry. “Um…I’m Freddie,” he said. “I…I like chocolate,” he said.

Terry was passed around, and everyone shared their name and very interesting details, like “My dog is named Sparky!” and “My favorite color is blue!” and “My daddy is an officer!” My dad is also an officer, but that’s not about me. That’s about my dad.

Terry got into Caddie’s hands. “My name is Caddie, and I like listening to my aunt’s stories,” he said. “She calls us every day and tells us a new story. She’s a detective!”

“Wow,” Tracy said, cautiously impressed. “What’s her name?”

“Beza King!” Caddie said.

Tracy must have recognized her name. “That’s really cool, Caddie. Can you give Terry to Rosie now?”

Caddie carefully put Terry in her lap. Rosie gingerly pressed the beads out of Terry’s arms. “Um…” she murmured. “Mynameisrosieandilikegreen,” she mumbled really fast, throwing the turtle at me.

I flinched in surprise. I barely understood her. I looked to Tracy. “I’m sorry sweetie, but can you say that a little louder?”

Rosie took Terry back. “I like green!” she shouted, dropping Terry on the ground. She shook again. I didn’t think she could make any noise that loud.

Tracy swallowed a sigh. “That’s a really pretty color, Rosie,” she said. “Now it’s your turn,” she said to me.

I looked at Terry. He reminded me of a stuffed turtle I had once. “I’m Meg and I like to read,” I said.

“That’s very cool, Meg. We’re going to read a lot in this class,” Tracy said. “Can you please pass Terry to me?” I passed Terry to the boy in front of me. Tracy continued talking. “Another interesting fact about Meg is that they are nonbinary. Does anyone know what that means?” Everybody shook their heads. Everyone except me. “That means that Meg doesn’t want to be called a boy or a girl. We’ll call them ‘they’ or ‘them’ like how we call Allie ‘she’ or ‘her’ and how we call Freddie ‘he’ and ‘him.’ Okay?”

Everybody nodded.

“Now, it’s time for math time. We’re going to learn our numbers today.”