[Content Warning: transphobia and crushing loneliness]

I woke disoriented from dreams of swirling snowfall in narrow, cobbled streets. It took me a moment to figure out where I was. The white plaster ceiling, close enough to touch. A narrow, wood-paneled room. A bustling, bare-chested boy just visible over the edge of the bunkbed...my roommate?

Oh.

Oh. I was in Oakridge House, at Harmine University. I felt a wave of relief wash through my rib-cage. I had made it. I had placed high enough on the merit exams. I’d gotten out. I wasn’t stuck in that frigid little mill town anymore. I had...classes?

I sat bolt upright, smacked my head on the ceiling, and fell flat again, swearing and rubbing my head through my jumbled mop of dark curls. Had Alexi seen that?

He had.

He was laughing at me.

“What bell is it?” I groaned.

He shrugged. “Ninth? I think.”

As I rubbed my head, I peeked through the messy fall of my hair, admiring the gliding play of muscles in Alexi’s back as he turned and stretched. He was only a year or two older, but his body fit together, like it made sense, and the curves of his pectorals above his taut stomach looked so...yummy.

I flushed a little at the thought. It was envy, that was all. It must be, right?

In comparison, my own chest was disappointingly flat and shallow. I was hyper-conscious of how ill-suited my body was, how it just wasn’t right. I was short, scrawny, but also somehow lanky, like a bedraggled bird with half its feathers gone, or a half-drowned cat. The worst part was that I felt like everyone knew it, like I couldn’t hide my own discomfort with myself, my own awkwardness.

I sighed quietly. If only I could act easily, fluidly with people, like Alexi. I was uncomfortably aware of how many friends he had, while I had...well...none. So far. It was only my first term. Well, almost second term. Okay, time to stop thinking.

I rubbed my face and kicked off my blankets, then scooted down the ladder. I was wearing pajamas that I’d begged from the School Laundry along with my standard issue linens and blankets. I was acutely aware that they were several sizes too large.

Alexi didn’t look at me, busy packing his spellbooks into an expensive-looking leather case embossed with a flashy allegiance insignia. Glumly, I headed to the washroom. It had always made me uncomfortable, the brusque indifference that boys showed each other. Like I was born with the wrong expectations, like my body was anticipating a world of interaction that was warmer and more friendly, something...else.

I relieved myself in the water closet, then splashed my face with hot water (the plumbing here was incredible, after growing up in Stuhkrad) and shaved. I looked unhappily at my face—too many things wrong with it to count. Better not to linger looking at it. I shoved the feelings down into the compressed ball of leaden resignation I was used to carrying around in my ribcage.

When I got back to the room, Alexi was gone. Our room wasn’t very large to begin with, but he’d made it considerably smaller with a beautiful, polished oak desk. He’d even asked me first, which I thought was nice. Come to think of it, he proposed most—okay, all—of the ideas for our shared space, and I had gone along with them agreeably. I didn’t take up very much space, after all, and to tell the truth I liked it that way. It seemed right, somehow.

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I threw on some of the baggy, dark clothes I’d brought from home (this accurately described all my clothes, actually) and, hauling my bookbag, hurried through a maze of courtyards and corridors, bustling with other students, to the morning frenzy of the dining commons.

Though Harmine drew students from all over the Imperial Democracy and even from adjoining nations, with a wide variety of different hair-styles, eye-shapes, skin-colors and accents, almost everyone wore the same muted neutral colors that were in favor with the Yavenese Imperial Standards. I shuffled along with the press of bodies, attracting no notice, keeping my head down.

I slipped through the packed dining hall, full of knots of shouting, laughing boys and long tables of students with bleary faces and dark half-circles under their eyes, also mostly boys. I slunk to the least busy corner, grabbed a handful of food, and fought my way back outside. I sat on the wide shallow steps with a scattering of other students, munching a cold sausage inside a dense roll of black bread and reviewing my notes from yesterday’s lecture. Students streamed past me, up the steps and into the dining hall.

The sunlight was making my paper notes too bright to look at. I hunched over my notebook, trying to shade it. A gusty fall breeze swirled showers of giant golden maple leaves around the wide courtyard like a tumble of coins. I looked up from scanning scrawled equations, closed my eyes and took a long breath in through my nose. The sweet, loamy smell drew me into a deep current of nostalgia for the mossy forests and cool streams my child-self had played in.

I sighed softly and opened my eyes, and immediately stiffened like I’d been gut-punched. There was a girl in front of me, coming up the steps. Actually there were two girls (rarely did girls walk anywhere alone here, I had noticed) but I unintentionally locked gazes with this one as soon as my eyes opened.

She looked a few years older than me. She was wearing a thigh-length navy skirt and jacket, over a creamy white blouse. I saw her serious mouth, and a light furrow between her eyebrows as she studied me and then an intensely clear yearning boiled up and kicked me in the stomach like a draft horse—ah-shit-I-wish-I-could-look-like-her—as I looked in her eyes. Eyes that were like vernal pools on the forest floor, filled with brown leaves, still and dark, except for when they rippled mysteriously with some deep movement.

All of a sudden, I realized I was staring and dropped my gaze to the steps between us, my face rapidly flushing hot. Damn it! I knew this yearning. It didn’t always happen, but sometimes, when I looked up and saw a strikingly pretty girl, it came utterly unwilled, a helpless reflex. And I would know—I would know—that I could never admit this to anyone because then—

Something compelled me to look shyly back up at her, and I saw she was still looking at me with that faint furrow, not quite a frown—was it pensive? Was it curiosity? Then they were past me. I sat there, hunched and hot-cheeked, for a long minute, then groaned in confusion and put my head in my hands.

Girls had always stirred a deep-set craving in me—a craving that was utterly unlike the fascination I felt towards some boys. It was a craving that made me deeply uncomfortable. Not just because it was entangled in a sexual lust that felt too intense, like I was trapped on an out-of-control carriage careening down a much-too-steep hill, but also because—oh no, the hot clawing plunge into shameful memory—

~ ~ ~

I had been on the roof of the featureless gray block of the tenement back in Stuhkrad with my older sister Kisma. We’d both grown up here. The sunset sprawled glorious and bloody across the horizon. We were both sitting on the edge. I kicked my feet over empty space and looked at her. She took another drag and passed the thick-rolled cigarette to me. I took it automatically but didn’t bring it to my lips. Tobacco made my stomach hurt but I still liked to come up here with her for her smoke break. It was our time.

“Kisma...” I hesitated.

“Mm?”

The words were so heavy. I struggled to lift them out, to show them to her.

“What do you think about, um, a-about, you know, um, k-kuffa?”

“Kuffa?” She raised an eyebrow at me. There was no scorn in her voice, which emboldened me a little.

“Yeah, you know, the people who, um, change into girls.” I had to look away at this point. I couldn’t show her the truth in my eyes. The words began to rush out of me. “From boys, I mean. Or from being girls, into boys. Or somewhere between?”

“Eli,” she said slowly, “why are you asking me this?”

I stared into the gory dying of the sunlight. My throat was tight, my heart flooded with panic and shame and unmourned grief. She was right. This was too dangerous of a question to ask. Imperial social hygiene propaganda was brutally clear about exactly what citizens should think of degenerates. And there were informers everywhere. My foolish hope that I could alleviate my crushing loneliness, even with someone as close to me as Kisma, was just that—foolish. The next question I had readied—whether she would be willing to call me Ellie, instead of Eli, at least when we were alone—died and turned to ash inside me. It was just dumb luck that I hadn’t blurted that out, too.

“N-no reason.”

“Okay, okay,” she sighed. “Look. If I were to think anything about...them, it would be questions. How? How do you even do that? And here? Here, in Stuhkrad? And why? Oh, Eli, why? Surely there’s nothing that’s worth being hunted and hated like that?”

I risked a glance and saw her staring at me, stricken. I looked intently at the concrete I was squeezing with bloodless knuckles. I’d dropped the cigarette, I noticed.

“You already have such a hard time with those lunatics that hurt you after school. If you—they would murder you, Eli.”

I nodded stiffly.

~ ~ ~

Tenth bell began ringing and I stuffed my notes away and hurried to class.