From the critically acclaimed author of Lies We Tell Ourselves comes an emotional, empowering story of what happens when love may not be enough to conquer all

Toni and Gretchen are the couple everyone envied in high school. They’ve been together forever. They never fight. They’re deeply, hopelessly in love. When they separate for their first year at college—Toni to Harvard and Gretchen to NYU—they’re sure they’ll be fine. Where other long-distance relationships have fallen apart, theirs is bound to stay rock-solid.

The reality of being apart, though, is very different than they expected. Toni, who identifies as genderqueer, meets a group of transgender upperclassmen and immediately finds a sense of belonging that has always been missing, but Gretchen struggles to remember who she is outside their relationship.

While Toni worries that Gretchen won’t understand Toni’s new world, Gretchen begins to wonder where she fits in this puzzle. As distance and Toni’s shifting gender identity begin to wear on their relationship, the couple must decide—have they grown apart for good, or is love enough to keep them together?

Praise for Robin Talley

‘The main characters are terrific in what is a moving YA novel. And an important one.’ – The Telegraph

‘This is so thought-provoking it almost hurts to read it, yet every word is needed, is necessary and consequently this is a novel that lingers long after you’ve finished it’ – Lovereading

‘This is an emotional and compelling read that I did not want to put down. It is […]beautifully written and the tension just simmers on the pages.’ – Bookbabblers

‘This book packs a very powerful punch’ – Historical Novel Society

‘With great characterisation, tough issues covered, and a plot which had me guessing right up until the last pages, this is a must-read. Massively recommended!’ – The Bookbag

‘This exceptional novel of first love and sexual awakenings is set against a backdrop of shocking racism and prejudice. It is incredibly well written as the tense, riveting story seamlessly combines fiction with historical fact.’ – Booktrust

‘Every now and then a Young Adult book comes along that I want to push into every readers hands both young and old and Lies We Tell Ourselves is that book for 2014’ – Jess Hearts Books

‘Talley has mixed two controversial topics together to create a firecracker of a story’ – Cheryl M-M’s Book Blog

*A Goodreads Choice Awards semi-finalist 2014*

Also by Robin Talley

LIES WE TELL OURSELVES

ROBIN TALLEY grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, writing terrible teen poetry and riding a desegregation bus to the school across town. A Lambda Literary Fellow, Robin lives in Washington, D.C., with her fiancée, plus an antisocial cat and a goofy dog. When Robin’s not writing, she’s often planning communication strategies at organisations fighting for equal rights and social justice. You can find her on the web at www.robintalley.com or on Twitter @robin_talley

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise for Robin Talley

Also by Robin Talley

About the Author

Title Page

Before

1

2

3

4

5

Before

6

7

8

Before

9

10

11

12

Before

13

14

15

16

17

18

After

Acknowledgments

Extract

Endpages

Copyright

Before

OCTOBER

JUNIOR YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL

HOMECOMING

TONI

Even before I saw her, it was the best night of my life.

It was Homecoming. I was about to walk into a ballroom full of people. A girl in a flouncy dress was clinging to my elbow, her photo-ready smile firmly in place, her left hand already raised in a preparatory wave.

I didn’t smile with her. I didn’t know if I could even remember how to smile.

I was happy, yeah—I was so, so, so happy that night—but I was terrified, too. Any second now I was bound to throw up.

Everyone in that ballroom would be looking at us. Everyone in there would be looking at me.

I’d known them all since we were kids. To them, I was Toni Fasseau, substantively unchanged since kindergarten. Short red hair and black-rimmed glasses. Pompous vocabulary and a pompous grade point average to match. And most of all, gay. Extremely, incredibly gay.

Tonight, though, when they looked at me, they’d see something else. This morning, a story had come out that had temporarily made me the most famous student at Martha Jefferson Academy for Young Women in Washington, DC. It would probably only last until the next senator’s daughter got caught shoplifting at Neiman Marcus, but still.

It took all my concentration just to breathe as I walked through the ballroom doors. My date, Renee, beamed out at the rapt crowd, still hanging on my arm.

For her, the attention was fun. For her, tonight was nothing.

For me, tonight was everything.

It was too much. My stomach clenched, unclenched and clenched again as my brain whirred with a thousand thoughts at once.

I’d won. I’d actually won.

We turned the corner and saw the crowd. A few hundred of our classmates and their dates, dressed up in their finest finery.

All I saw was their eyes. Hundreds—no, thousands, it felt like thousands—of eyes fixed right on me.

I looked down, took a breath and tried to focus on something else.

My outfit. That was something.

Tonight was one of the first times in my entire life when I actually liked what I was wearing. Spiffy new gray-and-black-striped pants, a bright blue shirt, shiny black shoes, black-and-white-striped suspenders, and a black top hat.

Granted, the top hat might’ve been a little much, but the suspenders rocked. Before we’d even made it through the parking lot, a dozen different people had come up to high-five me about the lawsuit. Half of them complimented me on the suspenders, too.

There’s something about looking exactly how you want to look—finally—finally—that feels like you’re being set free.

Like most of the girls at our school, my date, Renee, had gone the fancy-designer-dress-and-matching-high-heels route. She’d worn bright blue to match my shirt, which was awesome of her. She kept her arm tucked through mine and beamed at the crowd as we entered the cheesy hotel ballroom through the balloon arch we’d spent hours making at yesterday’s Student Council meeting.

“You go, T!” a guy I vaguely knew yelled from across the room, giving me a thumbs-up. “Lesbians rock!”

I gave him a thumbs-up back. Even more heads had turned in my direction at the guy’s shout. People grinned and held their punch cups out to me.

“You’re popular tonight.” Renee grinned and waved at the crowd again.

“Oh, that guy was just expressing appreciation for how my suspenders show off my übertoned physique,” I said. Renee laughed and fake-punched me in the arm. I made a face like it hurt, and she laughed again. Renee was just a friend, being straight and all, but I was so, so glad to have her there with me that night.

My hands shook as I exchanged smiles and nods and more high fives. I made a big show of escorting Renee around the room, holding her elbow and using my free hand to make swooping motions with my arms like a guy in an old movie might do. That made her laugh.

I laughed, too. I couldn’t believe tonight was really happening.

I never thought I’d win. For so long it had seemed impossible. Then, last night, the school administration had finally backed down.

For years, I’d begged. I’d written strongly worded letters that were just as strongly ignored. I’d given impassioned speeches to my classmates. I’d gone to administration meetings and made presentations full of graphs and statistics and quotes from important court cases.

It hadn’t mattered what I said. I spoke at meeting after meeting, but at each one, the administrators just thumbed their phones until I’d stopped talking.

Then last week our school’s Gay-Straight Alliance decided that since we’d already tried everything else, we might as well go the old-fashioned route and have a rally. We made posters and sent out an invitation telling people to gather on the front lawn of the main building after eighth-period bell. We figured we might get a dozen people there.

Instead, almost the whole school showed up.

I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think anyone besides my closest friends even cared, much less agreed with me, but those speeches I’d been making had paid off. The photos in the news reports that day showed hundreds of my classmates waving homemade posters and burning old school uniforms with the gleaming glass Martha Jefferson Academy sign in the background. You could hear the chants on the video clips.

“What do we want? Equal rights! When do we want them? Now!”

“Gay rights are everybody’s rights!”

And, embarrassingly, “We stand with Toni! We stand with Toni!”

The news coverage woke the school administration up. So did the letter my newly acquired ACLU lawyer sent over. She called me last night with the news. I could hear the glee in my lawyer’s voice as she told me they’d caved.

Starting immediately, I was allowed to wear pants to school.

It was like being let out of prison. Except my prison was the entire world. I would never, ever have to wear that stupid blue-plaid uniform skirt again for the rest of my life.

The Washington Post called to ask me a bunch of questions. My lawyer drove me to two different TV stations to do incredibly scary on-camera interviews, and a profile of me went up on a website that was so big even my grandparents read it.

And now I was at the Homecoming dance, and everyone was looking at me.

I’d been buzzing and giddy for hours, but as I stared around at the crowd, another feeling climbed in. The one that comes when you know people are talking about you but you don’t know what they’re saying. It’s like bugs crawling over your skin. It was nearly as bad as it was before, with my mother, when she... No. I wasn’t going to think about my mother right now.

It was all too much. My mind was skittery, unsteady, unfocused. I couldn’t deal with this rapidly growing ache.

I needed to get out.

The idea bloomed fast inside me. I’d feel so much better if I’d just turn around and walk off the polished wooden dance floor. Go hide in the parking lot until everyone found someone else to stare at.

Then I saw her.

She was dancing. Her head was thrown back with laughter. Her eyes sparkled. Her smile radiated light.

Everything else that had been spinning through my head floated away like air.

GRETCHEN

The last thing I wanted to do was go to the Homecoming dance.

We’d only moved down to Maryland the day before. I hadn’t even unpacked. I wouldn’t start my new school until Monday, and going to a dance where I didn’t know a single person was guaranteed to be the most awkward experience of my life, basically.

But my parents thought it was the best idea ever. They even found me a date. My dad knew someone who knew someone who had a nephew who went to the University of Maryland who wasn’t doing anything that night. A recipe for true love if ever there was one.

So I opened my suitcases and tore through my boxes until I found the green-and-silver lace dress I’d worn to my brother’s wedding last year. It was a little tight, but I could dance in it. Mom lent me a pair of heels that pinched my toes so much I wound up leaving them in the car and going into the dance barefoot. At least my toenails were still polished from when my friends and I gave each other mani-pedis at my goodbye party back in Brooklyn.

The nephew, whose name was Mark or Mike or one of those, turned out to be a pretty nice guy. He told jokes that made me laugh. He poured my punch for me, which was cute. And since neither of us knew anyone else and we didn’t have anything to talk about, after just a couple of minutes of us standing around self-consciously he asked if I wanted to dance. I said sure, because I will pretty much never turn down an opportunity to dance.

Mike/Matt/whatever wasn’t a half-bad dancer, and soon we were in the middle of the floor, shaking our booties to the Top 40 the DJ was playing. (Were all DJs in Maryland this boring, I wondered?)

No one else was dancing that early, and before long a bunch of people had gathered in a circle to watch Matt/Marc/etc. and me. So I hammed it up, because what else was I going to do? I started doing this Charleston-type thing I’d seen on TV once, where you bend at the waist and move your knees in and out. It was a blast. Mike/Matt tried to do it, too, but we could barely keep up with each other. He started laughing, then I started laughing, then he started going faster, then I started going faster, and then he grabbed me and swung me around into a dip. I was laughing so hard I nearly fell over.

I was upside-down when I saw the girl in the top hat and suspenders smiling at me.

The blood was rushing to my head. When Mark set me back on my feet, I could barely stay upright.

I smiled back anyway.

TONI

I couldn’t believe I’d never seen her before.

She must have gone to a different school. There was no way I could’ve just not noticed her.

She had long blond hair, almost to her waist, brilliant blue eyes and the warmest, widest smile I’d ever seen. Even upside down.

She was in the middle of the floor with a guy I’d never seen before, either, dancing like a maniac in a punk-looking green dress. Her feet were bare and her toenails were blue.

No one came barefoot to Homecoming. In fact, every other girl in the room—except me, of course—was wearing shoes that must’ve cost at least a hundred dollars. Maybe two hundred. Come to think of it, I had no idea how much shoes were supposed to cost.

“Who’s that?” Renee asked. I shrugged, helpless.

The song ended. The blond girl climbed back up, clinging to the guy she was with.

Her face was mesmerizing even though she was probably the only girl in the room who wasn’t wearing any makeup. Except me, again.

She was probably straight. God, though, she was beautiful.

It wasn’t just her model-perfect face, either. It was her smile. It was the light in her eyes.

Lord. I’d thought all that love-at-first-sight stuff was supposed to be a load of bull.

I could feel my face turning pink. Crap. I’m pale with red hair, so my face will turn pink pretty much anytime the wind blows, but it’s never stopped being embarrassing.

A new song came on.

“Want to dance?” Renee asked.

No one else was dancing except the blond goddess and her equally blond boyfriend. That was probably why Renee wanted to go out on the floor. She was never happier than when everyone was looking at her.

“Sure,” I said.

I couldn’t actually dance, but I figured Renee would take care of the hard parts. Plus, people at our school always gave extra leeway when they saw gay people being noticeably gay. They liked to coo about how cute we were.

Renee grabbed my hand and pulled me behind her onto the dance floor, leaving maybe ten feet of space between us and the blond couple. This close, I could get a better look at the girl’s face. She and the guy were still dancing like maniacs, with the guy’s back to us. The girl looked so happy. So light. For a second I thought I saw her look at me, but I probably imagined it.

Renee started doing this dance I’d seen some boy band do on TV once. I tried to imitate it. I felt ridiculous, but I laughed so it would seem like I meant to look ridiculous. Renee laughed, too. I took her hand and tried to spin her around, except I didn’t know how to do that, so we both stumbled, but we kept laughing. I pumped my fist in the air in one of those crazy ’70s dances, and Renee laughed again and started doing the same thing opposite me. The people watching us started to clap.

I could’ve sworn I saw the blond girl look at me again.

GRETCHEN

Crap. I was being too obvious. The girl in the top hat saw me looking.

I mean, she had to be gay. She was dancing with a girl and she was wearing a top hat. Right?

Not like it mattered, since apparently she had a girlfriend.

Of course she did. I’d always had awful luck with girls. Besides, I could tell this one was popular, what with the way everyone kept smiling at her and reaching out to high-five her. The popular ones never stayed single for long.

Everyone was gathered in a circle around her and her girlfriend, clapping while they danced. Mitch/Max and I stopped to watch them, too. The girl in the blue dress was being kind of show-offy, but the girl in the top hat looked like she was having the time of her life, dancing like John Travolta in one of those old movies where he wears those gorgeous suits.

I couldn’t help it. I wanted to dance like that, too.

I wanted to dance like that with her.

So I did.

I walked over to the two of them, tapped the girl with the top hat on the elbow and smiled at her.

She stopped dancing and blinked at me. Then she smiled, too.

Max/Miles/Mark figured out what I was doing, and he went with it. He strode right up to the girl in the blue dress, grabbed her hand and started twirling her. She laughed and followed him.

The girl in the top hat bit her lip, but she looked right at me as we started to dance. She was still smiling.

I kept my shoulders even and my smile in place so she couldn’t tell, but I was pretty sure that was the most nervous I’d ever been in my whole life.

TONI

I was pretty sure I was hallucinating.

Beautiful blond straight girls you’ve never seen before don’t just come up to you at your Homecoming dance and start disco dancing with you out of nowhere. Not in normal life.

Of all the things that had happened to me lately, this was by far the strangest. And maybe the best.

It took me a second to realize the girl was mirroring me, doing the same weird feet-shuffling and arm-waving moves I was doing. I dialed it up and added in some swaying from side to side. The blond girl grinned and did the same.

The song changed again, but we didn’t stop moving. It was the first time I’d ever had fun dancing.

The girl leaned in toward me. I have a thing about personal space, so normally that would’ve made me back away. But I didn’t want to back away from this girl. She moved her lips toward my ear so I could hear her over the music. The proximity made my face flush again.

“I’m Gretchen,” the girl said.

Gretchen. It was such a gorgeous name.

“Toni,” I said.

Gretchen shook her head. She couldn’t hear me. I had to lean in to her ear, too. I blushed to the roots of my hair.

“I’m Toni.” I tried desperately to think of something to say that would make me sound cool. “Nice shoes.”

Gretchen laughed. Her whole face opened up when she laughed. Dear lord.

My heart was racing. I did not have the mental or emotional capacity to deal with this.

Gretchen pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, looked down at me and smiled again.

Yeeeeaaahhhhh. I was going to be dead before the song was over.

GRETCHEN

Did she like me?

It seemed like maybe she liked me.

That was a flirty thing to say, wasn’t it? “Nice shoes,” all casual like that? When I wasn’t wearing shoes at all? Ha ha.

Also, she kept, like, staring at me. In a cute way, not a creepy way.

It didn’t matter, though. She already had a girlfriend. The little ninny in the poufy blue dress. A pox on the poufy ninny, I wanted to say.

Still, I felt like touching Toni. Nothing dramatic, I mean. Maybe I could just accidentally brush up against her shoulder. Or maybe a piece of her spiky red hair would fall down into her eyes and I could brush it away. Yeah, that would be perfect.

I waited, but none of her hair fell down. It was packed pretty solid with gel. Plus, most of her hair was tucked under her top hat.

Maybe the music would switch to a slow song, and I could put my hand on her waist. Or loop my arms around her neck. Yeah, that. The neck thing.

Except you weren’t supposed to do that to someone else’s girlfriend. Darn it all to heck.

Maybe Toni and I could be friends. I needed friends at my new school.

Except I didn’t want to be friends with her. Not just friends anyway.

She leaned into my ear again. I got the same thrill I’d gotten when she’d done that before. “Are you new here?” she asked.

I nodded. “I’m from New York.”

She opened her eyes wide, like she was impressed, and smiled. I smiled back.

She moved in again. “So. Would you rather run for president or go to Mars?”

I laughed. It was such a random question. “Mars.”

“How come?”

“Because then at least you get to do something no one’s ever done before. Go exploring. Learn new things. Being president just means you have to try to fix a bunch of stuff no one’s been able to figure out how to fix yet.”

I had to lean close to her for a long time to say all that. By the time I pulled back, I was blushing as hard as she was.

“What about you?” I asked.

“President,” she said. “Just because no one’s figured out how to fix it yet doesn’t mean no one ever can.”

I nodded. If anyone could fix the world’s problems, it just might be this girl with the red hair and the top hat.

I smiled at her.

The music switched to a slow song.

TONI

I put my hand on her waist.

So she was probably straight. Whatever. Screw it. She could take my hand off her waist if she wanted to.

She didn’t take my hand off her waist.

GRETCHEN

My heart was pounding so fast.

I had exchanged, like, three sentences with this girl, but somehow, I felt like I’d known her forever.

My hands were trembling, but I linked them behind her neck and stepped in closer. I was a couple of inches taller, so I looked down into her eyes and smiled again.

God, she had the most amazing eyes.

TONI

I wanted to ask Gretchen something else. I wanted to know everything there was to know about her.

It was just—

There was something about the way she was looking at me.

I love to talk. I talk constantly. When you’re talking, people always know you’re there.

But I didn’t have any words just then.

Not with her looking at me like that. Like she could see all the way inside me.

GRETCHEN

I leaned in to her ear again, even though we were close enough now that I didn’t need to. I swallowed my nervousness and asked, “Is that your girlfriend in the blue dress?”

Toni didn’t pull back. She didn’t answer, either. For an anxious second I thought she hadn’t heard me.

Finally she shook her head. “Just a friend.”

TONI

“Oh,” Gretchen said.

She was blushing.

God, she was adorable.

I nodded toward the blond guy who was now leading Renee around the room in a dramatic-looking tango. Everyone was watching them. Which meant they weren’t looking at Gretchen and me anymore. “What about you? What’s up with that guy?”

“Oh, right.” Gretchen glanced over, then turned back to me with a cute little quirk in her eyebrow. “I don’t know. My dad’s friend knows him or something? He’s all right. Not for me, though.”

She scrunched up her face adorably. God, everything this girl did was adorable.

“Not for you ’cause...why?” I asked.

She blushed again.

I seriously could not deal with how this felt.

Oh, my lord.

I was really, truly, genuinely about to melt into a puddle of utter uselessness.

Oh, my lord.

GRETCHEN

I was still nervous.

So nervous I didn’t know how I was even going to stay standing, let alone move.

So nervous I could hear my heart beating in my ears. Louder than the music. Louder than the people talking and clapping.

So nervous it was like I was floating outside my body, watching this whole thing play out from the ceiling of the hotel ballroom, somewhere near that carefully crafted balloon arch.

I was so nervous I could barely breathe.

But I kissed her anyway.

TONI

I melted.

1

AUGUST

SUMMER BEFORE FRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE

1 YEAR, 10 MONTHS TOGETHER

TONI

I still melt every time I kiss Gretchen, but it’s different now.

That first night, back at a high school dance, we barely even knew each other’s name. Now we’re about to leave for college, and we know each other inside and out.

Before I met Gretchen, I wondered if I’d ever even have a real girlfriend. It seemed impossible, once. I’d gone out with other girls, sure, but nothing had ever lasted. I didn’t think I’d actually find anyone willing to put up with me for more than a month or two.

But I still daydreamed. I’d sit there in health class, my eyes soft-focused on the whiteboard while I pictured some pretty girl and me skipping hand in hand through daisy-strewn meadows, gazing into each other’s eyes, laughing at our little inside jokes and never, ever getting tired of each other. I used to think no real relationship could be as exciting as my health-class fantasy.

What blew me away was that the reality turned out to be so much more. I never imagined that being one half of a whole could make you feel more whole all by yourself. I never dreamed I’d want to tell someone all my secrets and know their secrets, too.

But now everything’s changing. I don’t know what our lives are going to be like after tomorrow, but at least I know that no matter what happens next, we’ll always have each other.

Knowing I can count on that is the only thing holding me in one piece while I count down our last few hours together. I’m trying to act like it’s not a big deal, but as the minutes tick by it’s getting harder and harder to pretend.

“Pass me the shampoo?” Gretchen asks. I find the Target bag with four bottles of Sun-Kissed Shiny Grapefruit and hand it over.

“You know, they do have stores in Boston,” I say as Gretchen loads the bag into a suitcase. I’m sitting in Gretchen’s desk chair, one of the only surfaces in the room that’s not covered in open boxes, suitcases and laundry baskets. “You don’t have to turn your dorm room into your own personal CVS.”

“You are so funny, T.” Gretchen kisses me on the cheek and grabs a stack of socks from the dresser. “You must teach me your ways. How much shampoo are you going to pack?”

“I already packed, but I’m not bringing any shampoo. I’ll get some when I’m up there. How are you going to take all these suitcases on the plane anyway? Are your parents going to pretend your bags are theirs or something?”

Gretchen laughs. “Do you think I should bring all my shoes or just some of them? I can probably leave my cowboy boots here, right? They’ll take up so much space.”

I eye Gretchen’s closet door, still covered in photos from two years’ worth of debate tournaments. “You only own, like, two pairs of shoes. I think you should bring them all unless you want to go around barefoot.”

Gretchen sighs fake-dramatically. “I own more than two pairs of shoes.”

“Well, yeah, I guess there’s three if you count your sneakers and your Birkenstocks.”

Gretchen laughs again, even though it’s the oldest joke there is. For the last two years of high school Gretchen wore Birks every day unless it was raining or snowing. On those days, the sneakers came out. Gretchen always looked totally out of place in hallways filled with girls in designer ballet flats or chic dress code–friendly one-inch heels.

Not that any of it ever stopped Gretchen from becoming absurdly popular. That part was pretty much guaranteed from the first fateful Homecoming dance on. When you make that much of a stir before it’s even your first day of school, you’re going to amass a sizeable crew of devotees.

Which I guess meant I wound up being kind of popular, too. Walking down the hall holding hands with Gretchen every day was enough to make anyone feel like a celebrity. Winning that fight with the school administration junior year didn’t hurt, either. The blue plaid pants I finally got to wear looked ridiculous, like old-man golf pants, but it was such a relief to be out of those stupid skirts I’d been wearing since kindergarten.

Every time I walked down the hall wearing my old-man golf pants with my gorgeous girlfriend by my side—every single day felt like that night at the dance. Ever since Gretchen came here, it felt like I could finally be—well—me.

Now it’s all over. High school. Everything about the life I’ve had here. The bad parts and the good.

I watch Gretchen pack, dressed in an old pair of cutoff shorts and a tank top, blond hair hanging loose and messy, perpetual smile firmly in place.

Gretchen is definitely one of the good parts. Gretchen’s the good part.

I can’t keep pretending.

“I’m going to miss you.” I don’t mean to say it. The truth just sort of spills out of me. “So much.”

Gretchen turns around, face falling. Right away I feel bad. I hate making Gretchen look like that.

It’s been happening more and more lately. All summer we’ve been making plans, looking up our roommates online and studying the Boston T map and talking about what it’s going to be like to be on our own, but over the past week or so, Gretchen’s gotten a lot quieter. I think it’s only just started hitting home for both of us how big a change this is going to be.

“I mean,” I go on, trying to act nonchalant, “I know we aren’t going to be that far apart in the geographical sense, but it just feels like I need to see you every day, you know? This is going to be so hard. I actually kind of can’t deal when I think about how hard it’s going to be.”

“I know.” Gretchen puts down the socks and draws me into a hug. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” I squeeze tighter. I love the way Gretchen feels in my arms.

I can’t wait any longer.

“Hey,” I say, still trying to make my voice sound breezy. “You know how I snuck off at Target while you were in the toothpaste aisle?”

“Yeah.” Gretchen pulls back. “I figured you were buying something embarrassing. I saw you checking out that box set of Pretty Little Liars.”

“Well, yeah. You know I always had that thing for Emily. That wasn’t why I snuck off, though.”

“So why did you?”

Gretchen’s leaning against the hand-me-down dresser, the sad expression from before replaced by the smile we both get whenever we play this game. The I-have-a-secret-and-I-can’t-wait-to-tell-you game.

“Close your eyes,” I order.

Gretchen obeys.

“Now promise not to laugh,” I say.

“T! You know I can’t promise that. I always laugh, even when it’s not funny. I’m already laughing now just standing here!”

“Okay, but you have to promise not to laugh with malicious intent.”

“I swear I won’t laugh with malicious intent! Can I please open my eyes?”

I stand up and pull the tiny bag out of my pocket. “Okay.”

Eyes open, Gretchen looks inside the bag, then claps and laughs. “This is perfect! You really got this while I was picking out my Aquafresh?”

“Yep.” I grin and pull out another bag. When Gretchen gets happy like this, especially when it’s because of something I did, I always turn into a giant, embarrassing, grinning goof. “I got one for me, too.”

“Aww. You are such a sap! I love it!” Gretchen hugs me again. “That was such a fantastic night, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

The Target has a kiosk where you can get jewelry engraved. I got us each a silver disk on a leather cord. Gretchen’s disk has a top hat in the center. Mine has a bare footprint.

When we leave tomorrow, Gretchen and I will be apart for the first time. We’ll be in the same city, but at different schools—Gretchen at Boston University, me at Harvard. We’ll only be able to see each other on weekends. Maybe the occasional weekday if we’re up for trekking across the city.

I wanted us to have something solid we could look at. Something to hold in our hands when we couldn’t hold each other. Something to remind us both of where we started out. Not that there’s any way we could forget.

“This is so insanely sweet,” Gretchen says. “I should’ve gotten you a present, too.”

“No, you shouldn’t. Don’t be crazy. It only occurred to me when I saw the kiosk.”

“Toni. Tell the truth.”

“Okay, I’ve been thinking about it for months.” We both laugh. “If you want, you can always pay my mom back for the twelve ninety-five I put on the credit card.”

“Your mom can afford it.” We laugh again, and Gretchen’s arms link behind my neck. I’m still freaked about tomorrow, but touching Gretchen helps. Touching Gretchen always helps.

“Thank you,” Gretchen says. “Really.”

“You’re welcome, really.”

We kiss.

Have you ever wanted to breathe someone in until they become part of you and never let them go? That’s what kissing Gretchen is like.

Maybe that’s how it is for everyone when they kiss someone they really love. I don’t know.

We break away and Gretchen goes over to the closet, where most of the clothes are still hanging.

“Hey, so, there was something I wanted to talk to you about,” Gretchen says, grabbing a bunch of pants still on their hangers and tossing them into an open suitcase. I wince at the thought of the wrinkles. “It’s kind of, um, a thing.”

“What’s up?” I sit on the edge of the bed to watch Gretchen pack.

“Well, it’s just that—”

Gretchen’s phone buzzes. That’s the third time in the past five minutes.

“Who keeps texting you?” I ask.

“Uh.” Gretchen glances down at the screen. “Well. If I tell you something, will you promise not to get mad?”

I laugh. “You know that’s never a good way to start, babe.”

Gretchen puts on a mock-innocent expression I’ve seen many times before. There’s no way not to smile at it.

“It’s possible,” Gretchen says, “that I told Chris and Audrey they could come over and help us pack tonight.”

“Why?” I can hear the whine in my voice. It’s our last night together.

“They were asking when they could say goodbye,” Gretchen tells me. “This was the last chance. I said they can’t stay long. Chris tried to make a stink about it, but I told him he’d just have to deal.”

I roll my eyes, but I can’t really complain. Chris is my best friend, and Audrey is my little sister. I’ll see Gretchen every week once we leave for school, but I’m not going to see Chris or Audrey until Thanksgiving. If I come home for Thanksgiving.

“It’ll be fun,” Gretchen says. “We can hang out on our own after. Don’t worry.”

I cross the room, loop my arms around Gretchen’s waist and kiss the back of Gretchen’s neck, provoking a round of giggles.

“I never worry about anything when you’re around,” I say. “How long until they get here?”

“Half an hour, maybe?”

We both smile. Then we start making out.

It’ll be a while before we get another chance, after all. At least a week. The last time I went a week without seeing Gretchen was when my family went to a resort in the Dominican Republic. I was so lonely. Plus I kept feeling guilty about the exploited workers who handed me fresh towels every morning. For the first two days I texted Gretchen every other minute. Then my sister told me to put the phone down already because I was embarrassingly whipped.

I guess we lose track of time, because we’re still kissing when the front door slams.

“Crap.” Gretchen scampers off the bed. I go over to the mirror to check my hair. It’s all mussed. I try to smooth it back, but it’s a lost cause.

Gretchen’s mom opens the bedroom door without knocking, coming in with a bright smile and a long glance around the room. The rule in Gretchen’s house, which we tend to break a lot, is that we can hang out as much as we want but we’re supposed to leave the door open. Gretchen’s parents are keeping up the pretense that all we do is hold hands. It’s kind of cute, actually. My parents prefer to believe Gretchen and I don’t even do that much.

“How’s the packing going, girls?” Gretchen’s mom asks. I bristle at the “girls” thing, but I try not to let them see.

“It’s going great!” Gretchen smiles.

My annoyance slides away. Gretchen’s smile beams out so much happiness, so much warmth, that sometimes I can barely stand it. I gaze at Gretchen’s bright, open face and wonder for the trillionth time how I ever got this lucky.

Gretchen’s mom steps aside, and Audrey and Chris poke their heads into the room. Chris is grinning big, but my sister looks pouty. Audrey just turned sixteen and doesn’t have a driver’s license yet, so Chris must’ve stopped by our house to play chauffeur.

“Hiiii!” Gretchen sweeps forward and grabs them both into a three-way hug. I’m not a hugger, so I stay where I am.

I’m going to miss them, though. My friends. My sister. Even Gretchen’s parents, who have always been really nice to me.

It’s not that I won’t ever see any of them again. They’ll be around when I come back for breaks. Except that coming home for breaks also means seeing my mother again.

My mother, who still calls me Antonia, no matter how many times I say I hate that stupid girlie name.

My mother, who hasn’t allowed me to get a yearbook photo taken since I turned twelve and finally cut my hair supershort, the way I’d always wanted to.

My mother, who’d pretended the whole threatening-to-sue-the-school thing wasn’t happening junior year, except to walk around the house muttering about how no daughter of hers should want to go to school looking like a freak show.

Maybe I should find some excuse to stay on campus for every break over the next four years. After all, it’s not like I need to come back to Maryland to see Gretchen.

Audrey, though... I’d hate to leave my sister in that house alone for good.

“Hey, T.” Chris fist-bumps me. Chris has gotten really muscly over the past couple of soccer and basketball seasons. Whenever we fist-bump now, I’m afraid this is going to be the time Chris forgets to exercise self-restraint and I wind up with a dislocated shoulder. “You ready? Starting tomorrow we’re mortal enemies.”

“I’m so ready,” I say. “When’s the game?”

“Right before Thanksgiving. Remember, we have to hate each other on game day. It’s the rules.”

“Are you guys seriously going to the Harvard-Yale football game?” Audrey asks. “That’s got to be the nerdiest event of all time.”

“Actually I think it’s less about nerdiness and more about drinking cheap alcohol in a field with your buddies,” Chris says.

“Gross,” Audrey says.

“Oh, because you’ve never done that,” Gretchen says. Audrey laughs.

“How are you holding out after yesterday?” I ask Chris.

“Oh, I’m great. We got back together this morning, actually.” Chris grins big. I sigh.

Last night I got an epic series of texts about Chris’s latest breakup with Steven. They were on and off for pretty much our whole senior year. They kept saying they were going to break up for good before the end of the summer—they still believe that old wives’ tale about how you shouldn’t start college in a long-distance relationship—but they could never stay apart for long.

Chris says it’s because their love is pure and true. I say it’s because they’re hormonal teenagers who don’t know how to keep it in their pants. Not that I’m one to talk.

My friends are always fighting with their boyfriends or girlfriends about the littlest things. My friend Renee, who was my date for Homecoming junior year, realized she was bi and got together with this girl named Liz soon after the dance. Then they spent the entire year fighting about what movie to see that weekend, or whose music to plug into the car stereo, or which of the guys on the lacrosse team was the most obnoxious. Then they broke up. Now Renee’s going out with the lacrosse guy they rated third on their list.

Gretchen and I, though—we never fight. We take turns listening to each other’s music. We only like dramas or highbrow comedies that don’t have any Saturday Night Live stars in them. I think all the guys on the lacrosse team are obnoxious, but Gretchen thinks that’s only because I never took the time to get to know them. I think Gretchen only thinks that because Gretchen’s too nice to think anything bad about anyone.

The thing is, who cares what music you listen to on a random Tuesday afternoon? The stuff that really matters runs way deeper than any of that.

And when it comes to the deep stuff—the really deep stuff, the things we can only tell each other, the things no one else could understand—Gretchen and I are golden.

“Well, good luck,” I tell Chris with a shrug.

Audrey pokes me in the side. “Chris, please ignore my sister’s indifferent tone. She’s still learning how to function in our normal human society.”

“Hey.” I flick Audrey on the shoulder. “Don’t call me an abnormal human.”

“I call them like I see them,” Audrey says, flicking me back.

“Whatever. We’ll be fine,” Chris says. “I leave tomorrow and he leaves the day after. I’ll be in Connecticut and he’ll be in California. This is why they invented texting and video chat.”

“I know you two will make it work,” Gretchen says, smiling as big as ever.

“Thank you, Gretchen,” Chris says. I’m not nearly as sure, and I’m about to say so when Chris adds, “I mean, you guys are doing it, right?”

“Well, it’s not like that for us,” I say. “We’ll be in the same city. It’ll be a pain to go across town, but we’ll deal.”

Chris makes a weird face. “You are? I thought—”

“Actually, hang on.” Gretchen bounds over to where I’m sitting on the bed and grabs my hand. “Let’s go talk outside for a sec.”

“What?” There’s something going on that I don’t know about. I hate not knowing things. “Why?”

“Just for a second.” Gretchen pulls me up and through the door. I get a quick glimpse of my sister’s face as we leave the room. Audrey won’t meet my eyes.

I have a really bad feeling about this.

We wave to Gretchen’s mom in the kitchen, go out the front door and walk down to the grassy strip on the corner of the block. Someone tied a plastic swing set to a tree root there with a bike lock years ago. The swings are too small for us, but we climb on anyway, dragging our feet on the ground and leaning back so our hair doesn’t get tangled in the plastic chains.

“What’s going on?” I hate the antsy feeling in my stomach. The idea that Gretchen’s been keeping a secret from me. On our first date, we said we’d always be honest with each other. Since then we’ve always told each other our secrets. I have, at least.

“I was trying to tell you today,” Gretchen says. “Actually, I’ve been trying for a while. It keeps not being the right time.”

“I think it’s the right time now,” I say.

Gretchen’s wide blue eyes are locked on mine. “I’m scared you’ll be upset.”

“I’m upset already. Just tell me.”

Gretchen’s chin quivers. I hate seeing that. I take Gretchen’s hand and that seems to help. Gretchen smiles, a small smile.

“So you know how I applied to a bunch of different schools,” Gretchen says. “Tufts would’ve been my first choice if I’d gotten in.”

“Yeah, I know. Their admissions office is made up of complete idiots. Your application essay was amazing.”

“Thanks.” Gretchen takes a long breath. “My second choice was NYU, but they wait-listed me.”

“NYU?” I shake my head. “No, you only applied to Boston schools. That was our whole plan. We love Boston.”

“You love Boston, sweetie.” Gretchen’s voice is soft. “You love Harvard. It’s always been your dream.”

Oh.

I love Harvard. Gretchen loves New York.

New York was where Gretchen lived before the Daniels family moved down here. They had a brownstone in Brooklyn. It sounds like paradise whenever Gretchen talks about it.

“You got in off the wait list,” I say.

Gretchen nods and rubs my palm gently. I have to struggle not to pull my hand away. “I found out last week.”

I close my eyes. “Last week?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“I didn’t know how.”

Gretchen isn’t coming with me.

We can’t just hop on the subway and see each other whenever we want to.

Gretchen’s leaving me. This is only the first step.

“Oh my gosh, no, don’t cry, T!” Gretchen squeezes my hand tight. I blink fast against the tears, trying to focus on the orange light of the sunset that’s pouring in through the trees. “I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you sooner! Look, it’s only for a semester, just to try it out. I can always transfer back to BU after that. I talked to them on the phone, and they said that would be really easy. I only thought—you know, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe we could just sort of see what it’s like. New York and Boston are superclose. We can take the train and be there in, like, seconds.”

I pull my hand out of Gretchen’s grip and turn to stare at the cheap red plastic leg of the swing set. It’s covered in grime from yesterday’s rain. I didn’t notice that before we sat down.

I can’t believe Gretchen didn’t even tell me. Applications were due in January. That means Gretchen has been keeping this secret for eight months, maybe longer.

Did I do something wrong?

I must’ve done something wrong, or else Gretchen would’ve stuck to the plan, right?

Gretchen doesn’t really want to be with me. There’s no other explanation for this.

“Toni.” Gretchen’s hand is on my shoulder, gentle. I want to wrench away, but instead I lean into the touch. I always lean into Gretchen’s touch. “We’ll still see each other. It’ll be all right. We can do this.”

I turn and stare into those blue eyes. I’m looking for anger, but I don’t see it there. I see guilt and something else. Hope, maybe. Hope that I’ll go along with this new plan.

Well, it’s not as if I have a choice.

Gretchen’s plans are already made. So are mine. No wonder Gretchen laughed off my question about fitting all that luggage on the plane. They wouldn’t fly to New York. They’d drive. It’s only a few hours north of here.

Wait. Chris. Chris said something before about us doing the long-distance thing. Chris knew about this before I did. So did Audrey.

How many others knew about my girlfriend’s not-so-secret plan before me?

It’s getting hard to breathe. I lurch to my feet, the swing set creaking as my weight leaves it. Behind me I hear Gretchen suck in a breath, but I don’t turn around.

I’m not used to feeling like this around Gretchen. I love Gretchen. Anger is reserved exclusively for my mother.

I close my eyes. I can’t let Gretchen see what I’m feeling.

We never fight. We aren’t like that. Anger and love don’t go together.

“Fine,” I say. “Fine. It’s fine.”

Gretchen’s fingers are light on my arm. “Are you sure?”

“Can we take the train and see each other every weekend?” I ask. “Because I thought I was going to see you every weekend.”

“Yes, sure, totally, every weekend.” Gretchen lays a soft hand on my cheek. I turn, and our eyes meet. I hate seeing Gretchen look so sad. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” I sniff. I’m such a wuss, crying out here on the street.

“Oh, crap,” a familiar voice says.

I look up. Audrey’s standing right in front of us, wavy brown hair streaming over awkwardly folded arms.

Christ. Now my kid sister is seeing me cry.

“Are you guys fighting?” Audrey asks. “You guys never fight.”

I answer quickly. “No.”

“No,” Gretchen says at the same time.

Audrey looks back and forth between us. “Chris wanted me to say he was sorry. He’s a total idiot who can’t keep his mouth shut.”

I don’t react, even though I want to flinch. I can’t believe Gretchen told them and not me. My fingers curl and uncurl, the nails digging into my palm, but I hold my hand down low where they can’t see.

“Relax,” Audrey says. “It’s just college. Whatever. Afterward you can get married and have your little picket fence and adopt a hundred Chinese babies and be the most boring, stable couple on the planet, like you’ve always been.”

I try to smile. Coming from my sister, that’s a compliment.

When we were kids, Audrey and I used to say we were BFFs. The truth is, though, for a long time, I’ve felt much closer to Gretchen than I ever felt to Audrey or even Chris. Gretchen knows me better than anyone ever has or ever could.

Like with the gender stuff. I’ve never been able to talk to anyone but Gretchen about that.

Gretchen’s always listened and never, ever judged. When I first said I was genderqueer, Gretchen was so cool with everything, I couldn’t believe it. When I said I wanted to stop using gendered pronouns, Gretchen didn’t laugh once. It was never an issue between us at all.

I couldn’t imagine telling anyone else about that. Audrey was out of the question, because what if Mom overheard? I couldn’t tell Chris, either, because Chris was the ultimate joiner—a member of every sports team at the guys’ high school and half the clubs, too. Chris would’ve founded an interschool Transgender-Cisgender Alliance and ordered trans and nontrans folks to hold gender-neutral-themed softball tournaments and car-wash fund-raisers. And that would’ve been the final straw that made my mother officially disinherit me.

Back in ninth grade, when I first came out about liking girls, my mother told me I was in a “rebellious phase.” As far as Mom was concerned, this was yet another attempt on my part to torment my family. It got so bad I had to leave home and stay at a friend’s house for a week. I can only imagine what my mother would consider my real motive if I announced that I wasn’t even a girl in the first place.

So when I needed to talk about that stuff, I needed Gretchen.

I still need Gretchen now. It’ll take a lot more than a couple hundred miles between us to change that.

It’ll take more than a couple of lies, too.

Gretchen’s chin is still quivering. I put my finger in the dimple there, and Gretchen laughs. Only a small laugh, but it’s something.

This will be okay. If I just keep telling myself that, it’ll have to be the truth.

“Hey, this way we get to prove that the urban legend about long-distance college relationships is dead wrong,” I say.

Gretchen’s smile is almost too bright this time. “That has always been my number-one goal in life!”

I laugh, but now I’m actually thinking about it kind of seriously.

I’m pretty sure that rule—the don’t-go-to-college-with-a-girlfriend-back-home-unless-you-want-to-get-cheated-on-and-break-up-immediately rule—is just about casual relationships. Once they’re in different places, people in relationships like that probably get distracted as soon as someone new and shiny shows up in their dining hall. None of that has anything to do with Gretchen and me.

Plus, we’ll only be apart for a semester. After that, Gretchen can transfer back up to Boston, and college will be just like we always pictured it.

I squeeze Gretchen’s hand. The quiver in Gretchen’s chin has been replaced by that smile I love so much.

I lead us back toward the house, trying to think of a nice way to tell Chris and Audrey it’s time for them to go.

Gretchen and I still have tonight.

A few more hours until our world is scheduled to turn upside down.

2

AUGUST

FRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE

1 DAY APART

GRETCHEN

I’m in New York now. So I have to do New York things.

There’s no point thinking about other stuff. Especially not about the car ride up here. About crying quietly in the backseat while Mom and Dad droned on about meal plans and registration. About how I wouldn’t let them help me unpack and basically shoved them out of my dorm room as soon as we got here. About how now I’m sitting on a bare mattress surrounded by boxes and laundry baskets full of towels and a suitcase full of jeans and old stuffed animals, waiting for the tears to start again.

There’s no point thinking about Toni up at Harvard. Being all smart and wearing wool scarves and doing whatever else it is people do up there.

Being mad at me.

Because, yeah, Toni’s mad. I’ve never seen Toni as mad as I did last night.

It’s all my fault. I lied. I spent a week acting like I was going up to Boston even when I’d already made up my mind. I spent months not mentioning I’d even applied here.

I just couldn’t do it. Tell the truth. I tried and tried, but I could never say the words.

Toni was so excited about college. About finally getting away from all the crap back home and living the life T had always dreamed of. I didn’t want to ruin that.

Instead I made it a thousand times worse.

I’ve got to find a way to make this up to Toni.

It seemed so important before. Coming here. Coming home.

Now it just seems stupid. How am I going to make it through a whole semester until I transfer? I can barely make it through a single day without Toni.

No. Thinking about that won’t help. I need to focus on fixing this. Making Toni forgive me.

I looked up the bus schedules from New York to Boston in the car, and I sent Toni a long email with a list of times I could go up there this weekend. Today’s Thursday, so I figure I could go up on Saturday morning. That way we’ll have had only two days apart, which seems like a good way to start. I figure for the first few weeks I can go up there instead of Toni coming down here. It’s the least I can do. The very least.

I haven’t heard back from my email yet, but Toni’s texted me twelve times since I got here anyway. Mostly funny stories about stuff the flight attendants said or jokes about how scary Boston cabdrivers are.

Maybe things will start to be all right. Maybe.

God, though. I’ve never seen Toni look the way T did last night. Like I’d just destroyed everything that was good in our world.

A random guy sticks his head inside the door of my dorm room. I jump up off the mattress, alarmed.

Then I remember my door is propped open. Everyone else’s doors were propped open and I figured it was the thing to do.

The guy grins at me. I try to smile back.

“Hey,” he says. “They told me there was a blond girl in this room.”

“They told you right,” I say.

“A bunch of us are going to a comedy club. Floor trip. We’re meeting downstairs in five.”

“Okay, cool.”

The guy leaves.

Perfect. A distraction!

Wait. Can I really just...leave? What about Toni? What about what I did?

I should really just sit here for the rest of the night. I don’t deserve distractions.

My phone buzzes. Another text from Toni.

My roommate and I are going to some burger place. What r u doing tonight?

Oh. Well, I guess if Toni’s going out, it’s OK for me to go out, too. I text back about the comedy show. Toni writes back right away.

Don’t forget ur pepper spray!

I smile and respond,

You too!

That’s a joke. Toni’s maid Consuela is awesome but also kind of scary. She makes Toni and Audrey carry pepper spray around with them whenever they go outside after dark. She stands in the door and yells after them, “Don’t forget your pepper spray!” It gives the muggers an unfair advantage, really. They can all probably hear her from miles around. They’ll know to be prepared.

I stare down at my phone screen and breathe in and out until I’m sure I’m not going to cry. Then I go to the mirror and brush the fattest tangles out of my hair. I look around the room one more time—at my side, with the bare twin bed and plain wood desk and half-empty boxes everywhere, and the other side, where my roommate’s neatly made-up bed sits under black lace tapestry hangings and the desk is decorated with pretty purple candles. I decide it isn’t worth trying to clean up my side. I don’t want to miss the group leaving, and it will take me hours just to make a dent in this mess. I head out into the hall, locking the door behind me, and take the elevator down fourteen floors to the lobby.

When I get outside the dorm, a dozen people are standing around the sidewalk, waiting to go. We’re all freshmen, so no one knows each other yet, and everyone’s checking out everyone else. You can tell what they’re all thinking:

This is it. This is the only chance I will ever have to establish my college social status. If I do not immediately bond with the coolest people here, I will be friendless and pathetic until graduation, and I will whimper alone in my dorm room every night.

I sit down on a bench to text Toni again.

A guy standing a few feet away lights a cigarette. Smoke gets in my face. I wave my hand around to blow it away. The guy doesn’t notice. He’s cute, but it’s the scruffy kind of cute, with messy hair, a bored expression and a pair of bowling shoes poking out from under his khaki pants.

A girl across from me is looking at the guy, too. She’s rocking on her heels, about to pounce.

It’s now or never, I imagine the girl thinking. I will be the first girl here to approach the mysterious cute boy. He will think I am bold and intriguing, and will immediately want to make out with me.

She walks toward him, smile in place. I try to catch her eye and signal her to stop—this guy is very obviously gay—but she’s too fast.

“Hi,” she says to the guy. “Excuse me. I was wondering. I couldn’t help but notice. Those shoes, with the stripe, that you’re wearing. Are those bowling shoes?”

She’s doing that thing where you’re nervous, so you use more words than you need to. I feel bad for her.

“Yes,” the guy says.

“Because I’ve been wanting to get bowling shoes,” the girl says. “Where’d you find them?”

The guy exhales a long puff of cigarette smoke. I cough.

“I slept with the little old man,” the guy says.

The girl blinks at him. “Uh. What?”

I feel even worse for the girl, but it’s hard to keep from laughing.

“Who?” she asks.

“The old man,” the guy says. “At the bowling alley. With the foot spray. His name was Gerald. Charming fellow.”

“Oh,” the girl says.

The guy looks at her.

“Um, okay,” she says. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around.”

The girl walks away. Probably to give up on the whole comedy-club idea and slink back to her room for the next four years.

When she’s far enough away, I laugh out loud.

The bowling shoes guy turns around. His lips twitch.

“What’s funny?” he asks.

“That was so mean, what you did to that girl!” I say, still smiling.

He frowns. “It was just a joke.”

“Oh, come on. How was she supposed to come back from that?”

He frowns some more. “I don’t know. I didn’t think about that.”

“Where did you get those shoes?” I ask him.

“A vintage shop down on Canal. Are you into vintage clothes?” He looks down at my Martha Jefferson Academy for Young Women Tennis Team T-shirt. “By that I mean real vintage, not some ancient crap you dug out of the bottom of your girlfriend’s closet.”

I clutch at my heart. “Your wit, it burns me.”

The guy sits down next to me. “Hi. I’m Carroll.”

I laugh some more. I can’t believe how good laughing feels after everything that’s happened. “No way.”

“Yes way.” He pulls out his wallet and shows me his New Jersey driver’s license. It says Carroll Ostrowski next to a photo of him looking twelve years old and even scruffier than he does now.

“Little-known fact,” he says. “In 1932, Carroll was the hundred and seventy-third most popular name for boy babies in the United States.”

“What happened after that?”

“It fell off the chart thirty years later.” Carroll smiles, showing off extremely prominent dimples. “My folks fancied themselves eccentrics.”

I laugh again. I can’t wait to tell Toni this story later. Toni’s parents are into old-fashioned names, too, so they named their daughters Antonia and Audrey. Bad, but not as bad as Carroll.

“You don’t have a nickname?” I ask Carroll.

“In high school I tried to have people call me Carrey, ’cause at least that sounded kind of like a guy’s name. Then I got beat up anyway, and I figured now that I’m out of that hell town, I should embrace the real me.”

“Okay, Carroll.” I smile. He’s clearly rehearsed this speech, but it’s funny anyway.

“So?” he asks. “I showed you mine. You show me yours.”

“Oh. Okay.” I dig in my bag and pull out my Maryland driver’s license.

“Gretchen Daniels,” he reads. “Also somewhat old-fashioned, and yet not the sort of name that prompts disbelief. I like it.”

“I’m glad you approve.”

The other guy, the one who stuck his head through my doorway earlier, motions for us to come with him. We get up and follow him down the street. I don’t know if he’s our orientation guide or our RA or just a very outgoing freshman, but whoever he is, he doesn’t know the city at all. He has us looping all the way around Washington Square Park.

It’s fine, though. I’m busy with Carroll. It’s distraction city over here.

“That’s my roommate,” Carroll says, pointing to a tall guy in a sports jersey. “Juan, from LA. He already hates me, but he’s hot, so I’m okay with it. Who’s your roommate?”

“I still haven’t seen her. I know her name’s Samantha and she’s from South Carolina. Oh, and she’s a goth. I know because there’s black lace and purple candles spread out all over her side of the room.”

“Is she in Tisch?” Carroll asks. Tisch is the arts school, where all the wannabe dancers and filmmakers go.

“No,” I tell him. “She’s Arts and Sciences, same as me.”

Carroll snorts. “Why’d you pay all that money to come here for that? You can take English and math anywhere.”

“Hey.” I give him a shove. “Anywhere isn’t New York. I guess you’re an artsy fartsy Tisch kid, then, since you have such an attitude about it?”

“Absolutely! I’m a drama queen all the way, baby.” He strikes a pose like he’s about to burst into song. I laugh.

We make fun of each other for the rest of the walk to the comedy club. Once we get inside, it turns out the comedians aren’t that great, so we spend most of the show whispering to each other and writing funny notes on our drink napkins. We annoy the heck out of everyone else in our group, but that’s probably because we’re having a way better time than they are. Carroll’s not as much fun to talk to as Toni, but then, no one I meet here is going to be as much fun as T. That’s the thing about soul mates, I guess.

It’s late when we get back to the dorm after the show, but my roommate still isn’t there.

“Maybe she had a séance to go to?” Carroll says when he sees all the candles.

“What if she’s been kidnapped?” I ask. “She is from South Carolina. A stranger in the big city. Some weirdo could totally have lured her into a van.”

“Yeah, you always hear about that happening to goth country bumpkins.”

“Should we go ask the homeless people outside if they’ve seen her?”

“Nah. Let the vampire fend for herself.” Carroll shoves some boxes out of his way and sits down on the floor. “Sit with me.”

I join him on the floor. For the first time all night, it’s awkward.

Suddenly I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what you’re supposed to talk about when you’re sitting on dirty industrial carpet in a dorm room surrounded by cardboard boxes full of books and shampoo and tampons and all the other junk you made your parents haul up from DC.

“So tell me about your girlfriend,” Carroll says, and just like that, the awkwardness is gone.

“What makes you so sure I have a girlfriend?” I finger my top hat charm and smile. Carroll’s certainty that I’m taken is making me feel a lot better about what happened yesterday. Things between me and Toni can’t be too terrible if I’m radiating coupledom.

“You’ve got that hippie granola Indigo Girls vibe.” Carroll points to my Birkenstocks, which aren’t so much hippie as they are superbly comfortable, but whatever. “So I figure that makes you a lesbo, and all lesbos have girlfriends. It’s, like, a law. I mean, not that I’ve ever met a lesbo before you, but trust me, I am wise in the ways of lesbos.”

I laugh. Toni would point out the lack of logic in his arguments, but that sort of thing doesn’t bother me.

“We’ve been together for almost two years,” I say. “T left for college today, too, in Boston.”

He asks to see a picture. I pull up our Queer Prom photo on my phone.

“Wow,” he says. “A redhead. She’s really butch, huh? With the short hair and the suit and all that?”

I shrug.

“You clean up good, though,” he says, pointing to the dress I was wearing in the photo. I’d borrowed it from my friend Jess. It was long and black with pink dinosaurs printed all over the fabric. “You should try combing your hair more often.”

I elbow him. “Some of us have better things to do than hang out in front of the mirror for hours every morning.”

“Touché,” he says, but he smiles like I complimented him. “What did you say your girlfriend’s name was?”

“Toni. T for short.”

He gives me back my phone and starts rooting around in the nearest open box. It’s full of high school stuff. I’d wanted to have it with me up here, but this afternoon, as I watched my dad sweat while he hauled boxes out of the car, across the jam-packed New York sidewalk, through the lobby and up the fourteen floors to my room, I wondered if maybe I should’ve just left a couple of those things back home.

Carroll pulls my yearbook out of the box and flips through it. He laughs. “You went to an all-girl school?”

“Yeah.” I wonder if everyone in college always goes through everyone else’s stuff without asking or if this is a New Jersey thing.

“So you and your girlfriend are trying to stay together?” he asks. “Even with the long distance?”

“Toni and I aren’t trying to do anything,” I explain. “It’s not, like, an effort. Toni and I have always wanted to stay together, and we still want to.”

“Come on. Everyone knows you’re supposed to be single when you get to college. How else are you supposed to have any fun?”

“Being with Toni is fun.”

“But you don’t even know what other girls you’re going to meet.”

“Doesn’t matter. I don’t want to be with other girls. I want to be with Toni.”

“What’s up with how you keep saying her name over and over? It sounds weird.”

Yeah, I know it’s weird. I sigh.

“I don’t use gendered pronouns when I talk about Toni,” I say.

My life would be a lot easier if he let it go at that, but I already know he won’t.

“‘Gendered’?” he asks. “What, you mean like she?”

“Yeah.” He’s giving me the strangest look. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to explain.

“That’s so weird,” he says.

“It’s what we do.” I shrug. “Toni doesn’t use gendered pronouns at all anymore. For anyone.”

“That’s impossible.” He sits back on his elbows like the point is now settled.

“No, it’s not,” I say. “I thought it would be, too, when Toni first told me about it, but I’ve been listening to Toni talk without saying he or she even once for the past year.”

“So she used to use pronouns, but she doesn’t anymore?” he asks. I nod. “So you’re saying when she talks about you she says Gretchen over and over?”

“Basically.”

“So weird!”

I sigh. “Look, this is a big deal to Toni, and I love Toni, so that means it’s a big deal to me, too, okay?”

He grins and cocks an eyebrow. “Love, eh? Twoo love?”

He pronounces it like the priest in that old movie The Princess Bride. I can’t help laughing.

“Yes,” I say. “It’s totally twoo.”

“Come on, though. You’ve got to admit this thing with the pronouns is crazy.”

“No, it’s not. We should all do it, really. Our language patterns are totally sexist.”

He laughs. “Do you say ovester instead of semester, too?”

“No,” I say. “That’s dumb.”

“Hey, look, it’s funny. What, is your girlfriend one of those hard-core bra-burning lesbo feminazis? ’Cause you don’t seem like that type at all.”

Should I tell him?

Toni isn’t out to many people back home. Just me and some online friends. No one ever asks, and Toni doesn’t volunteer it.

No one’s ever asked me before, either. When I moved to DC I joined Toni’s group of friends right away, so all my friends there were Toni’s friends first. I never talked to them about Toni, since they knew T better than they knew me.

But I can already tell Carroll’s going to be a good friend, and it’s not as if Toni ever asked me to keep it a secret. Besides, Toni doesn’t even know Carroll. I want to text and ask if it’s okay for me to tell him, but Toni’s probably asleep by now.

Well, if it turns out Toni minds, I won’t tell anyone else after him.

“Toni’s genderqueer,” I say.

Carroll looks at me blankly.

“You know,” I say. “It’s like being transgender.”

He pulls back, an ugly look on his face. “Your girlfriend’s a man?”

I grimace. “No. God, come on.”

“So, what? Your girlfriend’s an it?”

“No!” This conversation isn’t going how I thought it would. I wish I’d never told him. I stand up and pace to the other end of the room.

I don’t know how to say this so he’ll understand. I’ve never had to explain this to anyone. I’ve barely even talked about it with Toni besides the really basic stuff. Toni and I talk a lot about how male and female are such restrictive, limiting terms, and how our society is so rigid about labels and it’s so damaging and...to be honest, mostly it was Toni who said all that. I nodded like I understood it all because I wanted to be supportive, but there was an awful lot I didn’t follow.

“Sorry.” Carroll shakes his head. “Look, I’m from this tiny town way out in Jersey, okay? We don’t have this stuff out there.”

I sigh. I can tell Carroll really doesn’t know any better.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I didn’t mean to freak out on you.”

“Seriously, I’m just trying to understand,” he says. “I didn’t mean to say the wrong thing. But what does this all mean? Did she, like, get a sex change operation?”

I lean my head against the base of my roommate’s bed. Carroll’s flicking through my yearbook again.

“No,” I say.

“So, what, she’s just a butch lesbian?”

The truth is, I’m not really clear on where the lines are between all these things. I was always afraid I’d say the wrong thing if I asked Toni too much about the details.

“No,” I say. “Toni hates the word lesbian.”

“So, what is she?”

“It’s complicated.” I’m getting tired now. “You should look it up sometime. Genderqueer. It’s, like, a really well-known word.”

“Right. Okay. I’ll look it up.”

I should look it up again, too. I read some stuff online back when Toni first told me about it, but I got kind of anxious reading all that, because it seemed really complicated, and I couldn’t figure out where Toni and I fit in. So I stopped reading. That was more than a year ago.

This whole conversation is making me feel really guilty. Not just because I outed Toni to Carroll, though I’m kind of wishing now that I hadn’t done that, either. But talking about Toni at all just reminds me of what I did. Of how Toni looked at me last night.

I need more distractions.

So I show Carroll yearbook pictures and tell him more about my friends back home. He’s shocked by how many gay people went to our high school.

“I think it was partly because it was an all-girl school,” I say. “Going across the street to the guys’ school was so much effort. People got lazy.”

“At my school, I was the only one,” he says.

“That you know of.”

“No. I’m positive. It was a small school. Everybody knew everybody’s business.”

He’s got to be totally wrong, but I let it go. “Were you out?”

“No, but everyone knew anyway. It sucked.” He sticks his lip out in a fake pout. “Do your parents know?”

“Yeah. I told them the summer before ninth grade.”

“Wow.” He shakes his head. “Do your girlfriend’s parents know, too?”

“Yeah. Well, not totally. Toni’s out to them as gay, but not as genderqueer.”

“Is she going to tell them?”

This one I do know the answer to.

“Not at least until college is over,” I say. “Toni’s mother is awful. She’s this total rich bitch. She practically kicked Toni out of the house just for being gay.”

For some reason, Carroll smiles.

“Hey, are you hungry?” He stands up. “I’m starving.”

“Yeah.” Now that he’s mentioned it, I’m starving, too. “Is there a vending machine?”

“Who cares? We’re in New York! They have twenty-four-hour delis here.”

I laugh. I can’t help it. He’s like a little kid.

We take the elevator down fourteen floors again and go outside. I’ve forgotten how much I missed New York at night. Even the stores that have their shutters pulled down for the night still have their signs lit. People are walking down the sidewalk in groups, laughing. I’m going to miss this next semester.

There’s a deli at the end of the block. We pick out ice cream and crackers and peanut M&Ms. At the counter, Carroll asks the clerk for a box of condoms.

I laugh. “What, you think you’re getting lucky tonight?”

“You never know who you’ll meet at breakfast,” he says, all mysterious.

We stop by Carroll’s room so he can drop off his stuff. Juan’s honking snores are so loud we can hear him from the hallway. This sends me into a giggle fit.

“Shh,” Carroll whispers. “I don’t need to give him any more reasons to hate me.”

“Why do you think he hates you?” I ask on the walk back to my room.

“He’s a jock. Jocks always hate me.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“It’s in the jock DNA. It’s like, jocks are born with a fear of falling, a taste for Pabst Blue Ribbon and a powerful hatred of Carroll Ostrowski.”

I laugh and push open my door. The light is out. Strange—it was on when we left.

Then I see a dark shape on one of the beds.

“Crap! She’s alive!” Carroll stage-whispers behind me.

“Shh!”

Wow. I’d forgotten I even had a roommate.

“Mom? Is that you?” the lump on the bed mutters.

Carroll loses it.

I shove him back out the door before his echoing laughs can wake up Samantha. I grab a blanket out of the nearest open laundry basket, dart out into the hall and lock the door behind us.

“Sorry about that,” Carroll says, but we’re both cracking up now.

We go to the lounge at the end of the hall. It’s not much bigger than my room, but it has a microwave and a TV and a couple of unsanitary-looking couches. I find spoons for our ice cream and Carroll turns on the Food Network. It’s a show about waffles. We sit on the least gross couch and eat ice cream out of the cartons with my blanket spread over our laps.

“It’s like a sleepover,” I say. “We should’ve gotten popcorn.”

“Should we go wake up your roommate and invite her?” he says.

“Only if we get your roommate, too,” I say. “Except then he’d just be honking in here.”

“Yeah, it’s better with just us,” he says.

We watch the waffles bake in silence for a while. Then Carroll asks, “So, what do you do for fun when you’re not eating ice cream and watching the Food Network with your new best friend?”

I laugh. “Back home, you know, the usual. Hanging out, parties. I played volleyball and did debate all through high school.”

“Oh, no, you’re a jock, too,” he says. “Are you playing here?”

“No way. College volleyball is crazy intense. Besides, I was never really a jock. I liked playing, and I guess I was pretty good at it, but it was never my absolute favorite thing. Not like with you and theater.”

“Why do you assume I’m obsessed with theater? Just because I could sing you the entire score of Wicked right now?”

I smack his arm and bounce in my seat. “I used to love that show! I’ve seen it, like, thirty times at the Gershwin. What’s your favorite song? Mine used to be ‘Popular’ but it’s so overdone. I think now I like ‘For Good’ more.”

“What?” Carroll isn’t bouncing with me. “You saw it here in New York? I thought you were from Maryland?”

“I am. Well, my family lives in the DC suburbs now, but I lived in Brooklyn until two years ago.”

He looks pissed. “Wait, you’re from New York? Have you been secretly laughing at me this whole time for being such a tourist?”

“No!” Then I remember. “Okay, yeah, I did a little bit when you got so excited about the deli, but only in the nicest possible way.” I smile and tilt my head on his shoulder. “Come on, you can’t be mad at me. You’re my only friend here!”

“That’s true.” He settles back. I guess everything’s okay now.

We watch the waffle show for a while longer. I’m getting tired. I sink down lower on the couch and pull the blanket up to my chin.

Carroll is quiet for another minute. Then he slides down next to me and pulls the blanket up over our heads. I laugh sleepily. It’s so dark under here, all I can see of his face is his nose and his eyebrows. The reek of cigarette smoke is strong.

Now that it’s quiet, I can’t help thinking about Toni again. About what I did. God. I’m a truly horrible person. I don’t see how I can ever make this right.

“Look,” Carroll says, as if he can hear my thoughts. “We’re in college now. It’s going to be amazing. This’ll be a totally different universe from high school. We’ll have nonstop fun from tomorrow through May. I guarantee you.”

I nod against his shoulder. I think about seeing Toni the day after tomorrow, and how maybe college doesn’t need to be completely different from high school.

“Besides, you know what the most important thing is?” he asks. “The key reason college is going to be so amazing, for you in particular?”

“What?” I say, already smiling because I think I know his answer.

“You have me,” he says, kissing me on the cheek with a loud smack.

3

SEPTEMBER

FRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE

1 WEEK APART

TONI

I dodge an unusually aggressive squirrel as I cross Cambridge Street and take out my phone to text my roommate. I’m going to be late for lunch. Ebony will probably already have eaten and be long gone by the time I get there. Ebony’s on the varsity tennis team and inhales food by the shovelful.

I played tennis in high school, too. I even thought I was good. Until I saw Ebony play.

Ebony is cool, though. Vastly superior to our other roommates. We all moved in a week ago, and right away Ebony and I decided we should share the smaller of the two bedrooms in our suite, and let Felicia and Joanna have the bigger one. We avoid running into them in our shared common room as much as we can. In return, Joanna and Felicia use their alone time to complain about Ebony and me. (We know. You can hear everything through the walls in this place.)

Sure enough, when I get to our usual table near the front of the dining hall, there’s already an empty food tray in front of Ebony, who’s wearing gym clothes and munching on a protein bar.

“Sorry.” Ebony sweeps a manicured hand over the tray, indicating the plates full of crumbs and salsa splotches. “I was about to starve to death. I’ll sit with you while you eat, though.”

“You don’t have to,” I say. “I should be reading Race and Politics.”

“Classes have barely started,” Ebony says. “Stop being such a psycho overachiever and go get some food. The only thing you need to know about race and politics is that white people suck.”

“Totally.” I stand up. “Want anything?”

“A banana, maybe? Actually, make that two bananas.”

My phone buzzes with a text while I’m in the food line. Gretchen.

Hey remember I told u about Briana from debate?? Crazy Texas chick w big hair?? Guess what she’s here!!! In my nat sci lab.

Yeah. I remember Briana.

Briana was the star of the national high school debate circuit. Gretchen ran into Briana at tournament after tournament over the past couple of years. They started out as rivals but they got to be friends, sort of.

Here’s what Gretchen told me about Briana: One, Briana was a cheerleader during the off-season. Two, Briana was hot. Three, Briana was brilliant. Four, and best of all, Briana was gay.

Now Briana’s at NYU.

Not that it matters. Sure, Briana gets to see Gretchen every day, but that doesn’t mean anything will happen. Obviously. I trust Gretchen. Mostly.

No, not mostly. I do trust Gretchen. Gretchen only kept the NYU thing a secret to avoid hurting me.

I understand. For real, I do.

I just wish I could force my brain to stop obsessing about it so much.

Gretchen sent me an email the day we left with a list of bus times, but I said I thought we should wait a week before our first visit. I said it was because we needed time to settle in, but the truth was, I also wanted time to figure out what all this meant. How we’d wound up hundreds of miles apart instead of across the river from each other like we’d planned.

I mean, I’m not one of those people who would insist my girlfriend go to a certain school just to be closer to me. I’m not some Neanderthal.

But, damn, this sucks.

What if Gretchen meets someone in New York? What if stupid Briana from Texas screws up everything we have?

Why couldn’t Gretchen just leave well enough alone?

I text Gretchen about how funny it is that Briana’s at NYU. Then I pick up my burger and fries, and trudge back to where Ebony’s drinking from an enormous water bottle. I manage not to slam my tray down on the table, but it’s hard.

I hate being mad.

“You’re lucky you can eat that crap.” Ebony takes the bananas and gestures to my tray, stealing a french fry at the same time. “You’re so skinny. What do you weigh, ninety pounds?”

“More than that,” I say. Five pounds more than that.

Ebony whistles. “I know girls that would kill to look like you.”

Yeah.

Except for the part where I don’t want to look like a girl. At least, not most of the time.

Like, for example, I have this enormously complicated relationship with my chest.

I’m told most people have complicated relationships with their chests. My sister reads Cosmo and Marie Claire, so I’ve absorbed via osmosis the insecurities you’re supposed to have about different body parts. If you have breasts, they’re either too big or too small. They stick up too much or they hang down too far. Your nipples can be too pointy or not pointy enough. There are so many ways your breasts can be weird that I doubt anyone thinks they have normal, acceptable breasts.

I can’t relate to any of those problems, though. My problems are more like...sometimes, I wish my breasts weren’t there.

It isn’t as if I hate them. Sometimes I almost like them. I usually don’t want anyone else to notice them, though. Most days I wear loose-fitting tops and sports bras and try not to think about it.

It’s worst in the summer, when there are pool parties and water parks and trips to the beach and all those other torturous hot-weather activities. I’ll do whatever it takes to avoid wearing a bathing suit in front of other people. It’s creepy, when you think about it, that people will strip down in front of complete strangers just because it’s warm out. I’ve always found air conditioning vastly preferable.

There are things that can be done about breasts. There’s chest-binding. And then there’s top surgery.

Surgery just seems so...extreme. So permanent. My chest is part of me. It’s bizarre to think about getting rid of a part of myself, forever.

Except—people get rid of parts of themselves all the time. Isn’t that what shaving is? Cutting your hair? Getting your ears pierced? It’s all costume. Fitting in to what society expects. Gender’s no different.

It’s exhausting, thinking about all this. It’s easier to talk it through. But Gretchen is the only person I’ve really talked to about this stuff so far, and even Gretchen can’t totally relate. My girlfriend’s great at listening, but I can never tell how much Gretchen really understands.

“T? T, are you there?” Ebony’s been calling me T lately. It makes me homesick. “Are you listening?”

“Oh, sorry.”

“You always get that look on your face when you’re missing the honey,” Ebony says. “Is it that bad?”

I shake my head. “I can handle it,” I say, though I’m not actually sure that’s true.

We didn’t get to talk last night. Chris and Steven are having issues again, so I spent hours online with Chris instead. I resisted the urge to say I told you so. Instead I read over drafts of the long email Chris was planning to send explaining why open relationships weren’t a good idea. I also listened patiently and tried to offer helpful tips while Chris ranted about some hot freshman interloper at Stanford who had the audacity to be named Elvis. (Seriously, only Steven would find a guy named Elvis attractive.)

It’s been a week since Gretchen and I last saw each other, though, and I hadn’t realized how lonely it would feel. Even with how complicated everything’s gotten, I still wish I could see Gretchen. I wish we could touch. I need someone I can be honest with. Someone I don’t have to act around.

I thought talking on video chat would help. We were used to that since we talked online every night back home. But it’s completely different, talking from my dorm room to Gretchen’s dorm room instead of talking from one house to another.

Back home, I knew Gretchen’s room almost as well as my own. When we talked I could see Gretchen stretched out on the bed, ankles crossed, lips twitching into the camera. I could pretend I was right there, my arm around Gretchen’s shoulders, my lips moving in for a kiss.

When we talk now, Gretchen’s dorm room looks wrong. Alien. White painted cinder block walls and brand-new Target sheets on the bed, still showing the wrinkles from their cellophane wrapper. I’ve never leaned back against those walls or felt those sheets against my skin.

I can’t imagine being in that room. I can’t imagine seeing Gretchen in my tiny bedroom, either, with the ancient bunk beds and the obnoxious roommates cackling on the other side of the door.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s not about our dorm rooms at all. But I don’t want to think about what else it might be.

“Well, you’re way better than me,” Ebony says. “I was online with Zach for six hours last night. Almost slept through class.”

“Crap, that sucks.” Long-distance relationships. Hatred of our roommates. Tennis. This is what people bond over in college, I’m finding.

I like Ebony, but we’re not exactly BFFs. I’m pretty sure Ebony’s just nice to me because I don’t have any other friends here. I just haven’t figured out how to meet people yet. At least, not people I actually want to hang out with.

Everything will be easier if Gretchen transfers to BU. I can’t imagine making it even one semester on my own here.

“So, do you know what groups you’re signing up for?” Ebony asks.

I shrug. “Mostly.”

The campus activities fair is this afternoon. Ebony and I spent breakfast going through the list of student organizations. Now we’re about to come face-to-face with the upperclassmen who run all the clubs, and I’m getting nervous.

“What’ll you do if you get hit on at the UBA table?” Ebony asks. “Tell them you’re already taken or play it cool?”

“That,” I say, “is the least of my worries.”

Before I’d even gotten accepted to Harvard I already knew I wanted to join the Undergraduate BGLTQIA Association. (It stands for Undergraduate Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, Queer, Intersex and Asexual Association. I think. Actually, I get confused about what some of the letters stand for. They seem to change a lot.)

I started the Gay-Straight Alliance at my high school in ninth grade. It was awesome, but Harvard’s UBA is in another league altogether. Last year, they held the first Intra-Ivy Queer Asian Weekend. People from all the other Ivy League schools came down and held panel discussions and led a Queer Asian Equality March. Then they had a dance party and played Margaret Cho routines on the big screen.

The UBA is one of the most important student groups at Harvard. Visiting their table at the activities fair will be putting my first foot in the door.

Sure, odds are, no one will even notice me there. Two hundred freshmen will probably sign up today. There isn’t much I can do this year anyway—freshmen can’t hold leadership roles in the big organizations. But I have to make a good impression, or at least avoid making a bad one, if I want to get a decent spot as a sophomore.

“You don’t need to stress,” Ebony says, stealing the rest of the fries off my tray as we get up. “You’re going to comp that political blog, right? So you’ve already got your big activity.”

“I might not make it onto the staff, though. Not everybody who comps their first semester gets invited.” We turn in our trays and push through the doors into the open air. Everyone is already streaming toward the Yard. I shift on my feet. It’s stupid to be nervous.

“Oh, no, I heard everyone makes it on those things unless they’re seriously lame,” Ebony says as we join the flow of people. Even in gym clothes, my roommate’s tall, muscled form and long, swinging braids stand out as we walk through the crowd. People always turn to look when we’re out together. Probably thinking I look like a little person next to Ebony.

It’s weird being surrounded by classmates and not recognizing anyone. In high school I’d known everyone since we were kids. Sure, I hadn’t liked a lot of them, but at least I’d known what I was dealing with.

“Anyway,” Ebony says, “if you don’t like the UBA you can always join one of the other gay groups instead.”

“None of the other groups has as much clout as the UBA,” I say. “You’re not planning to settle for one of the lesser engineering groups, are you?”

“Well, no, but that’s because the geeks in FES can kick the geeks in ESH’s asses.”

“Hell yeah, we can! FES has got it going on!” a guy on the sidewalk next to us yells, making the “Live Long and Prosper” sign from Star Trek at Ebony. Ebony laughs and signs back. I roll my eyes, but I laugh, too.

The truth is, I already love Harvard. I knew I would before I got here, but the real thing is even better. I may not know many people yet, but the way it feels is exactly what I always hoped it would be.

The Yard is packed—more crowded than it was on move-in day. I try to take deep breaths as I scan the booths for the groups I’m signing up for: the UBA, the PolitiWonk blog and the Model Congress. All I see in every direction is people jumping up and down, hugging, and eating the free candy the groups have set out on their tables. Am I the only lost freshman here?

Someone to my left yells, “Eb!” Ebony grins and waves at a girl in tennis gear.

“I’m going to go say hi,” Ebony says. “You’ll be okay on your own, right?”

What am I, a toddler?

“Of course,” I say, but Ebony’s already gone. All right, then. I push past a group of guys high-fiving each other by the Ukrainian-American Brotherhood table and find a spot blessedly free of people so I can collect myself.

A girl rushes up to me and presses a mini Snickers bar into my hand. “Hi! I’m so glad you’re interested in the HSWMS! Let me tell you about what we’ve got planned for this year!”

I blink at the girl. Then I realize this spot was only free because I’m in front of the Harvard Students Waiting for Marriage Society table.

“Oh, sorry,” I say. “I’m not interested.”

I put the Snickers back on the table in case it has abstinence cooties.

I back away from the HSWMS table and allow the throng to carry me from booth to booth. There must be hundreds of them.

Hmm. Maybe I should sign up for some other groups, too, just in case. It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to join the College Democrats. And the Japanese fencing-club people look like they’re having a great time waving swords around.

Then I see the giant rainbow flag pinned high on a brick wall. I’ve found the UBA.

The crowd in front is bigger than for any other table in the row. Behind the booth and wading out into the sea of students are upperclassmen wearing bright purple T-shirts that say, “We’re so gay! Harvard UBA!”

Cute. Maybe too cute.

The sign-up sheet is front and center in the middle of the table. All around me, freshmen are elbowing their way toward it, but I linger at the back of the crowd.

Just go up there and sign the list. You don’t have to talk to anyone. Just put your name down and get out of there.

“Hi!” someone perks at me before I’ve unfrozen. It’s an alarmingly cheerful blond in one of the purple shirts. “Are you a freshman?”

“Uh, yeah,” I say.

“That’s fantastic!” the girl says as if we aren’t surrounded by freshmen on every side. “We have special cupcakes for freshmen!”

The girl points to one end of the table. Eight neat rows of cupcakes are laid out, each with the pink letters QF carefully written on chocolate frosting.

“It stands for Queer Freshmen,” the girl says.

“Uh-huh,” I say.

Maybe Ebony was on the right track. There are at least four other LGBT groups on campus. Surely one of them is less focused on T-shirts and cake decoration.

“Don’t worry about her,” a short black guy with a buzz cut says as the blond wanders away to pounce on someone else. The guy is wearing a matching T-shirt, too. “Shari was the bake-sale queen four years running back in Kansas City. It’s safest to humor her. Her bite is way worse than her bark.”

I smile at the guy. “Thanks for the tip.”

We shake hands. It isn’t easy in the press of moving bodies.

“I’m Derek,” the guy says.

“I’m Toni.”

“Tony with a Y?”

“No, I.”

“Ah.” Derek nods, as if this explains everything, and points to my wrist. “Great tattoo.”

“Thanks.”

“Queer history buff?”

I blink in surprise. On my eighteenth birthday I got a blue star tattooed on my wrist. Back in the thirties and forties, blue stars were one of those secret signals closeted people used to aid their gaydar. I’d thought that was cool. I’d also wanted to piss off my mother by getting a tattoo. No one has ever known its back story until I explained it, though.

“Sort of, yeah,” I say.

Derek nods. “Are you trans?”

I blink again. No one’s ever come straight out and asked me before.

No one I’ve met online. No one in the LGBT youth center where I volunteered in DC. None of my high school friends.

Not even Gretchen.

So it’s strange acting all casual about it here, with someone I don’t even know. For a second I want to look around to make sure no one’s listening. Then I decide I don’t care. I’ve been worrying about that stuff my whole life. I’m in college now. It’s time to get over it.

What am I supposed to say, though? That I’m definitely somewhere on the transgender spectrum, and that even though I’ve spent hours upon hours upon hours reading websites and thinking about every possible angle of this stuff, I still haven’t found a label that feels exactly right for me?

There are tons of options I’ve read about. I usually describe myself as genderqueer just because it’s the word the most people seem to understand, but sometimes I think gender nonconforming would be better. Sometimes I think I’d rather go with gender fluid, and a lot of the time I want to pick nonbinary, because that one sounds the least committal. Gender bender sounds cool, but I’m afraid people will think it’s a joke.

Should I try to tell Derek about how sometimes I think just trans by itself is the best word? It’s just that I’m not sure I really consider myself a guy, necessarily, or at least not every day. I just don’t consider myself a girl. If I call myself trans I’m afraid people will think I’m a dude when the truth is, I’m really not there. Maybe someday I will be, but it also seems entirely possible that I could stay exactly the way I am right now for the rest of my life.

I don’t think I should say all that, though. Probably best not to scare Derek off with an ideological rant about the evils of labels thirty seconds after we’ve met.

“I’m genderqueer,” I say.

“That’s cool,” Derek smiles. Like this is a totally normal conversation. Like those weren’t the two most nerve-racking words I’ve ever spoken out loud. “There are a bunch of other GQs on campus.”

“There are?” I haven’t noticed any. Unless Derek is, but I doubt that. From the amount of stubble poking out of Derek’s chin, Derek’s probably been on testosterone for a while. As far as I know, guys taking hormones don’t usually identify as genderqueer. They identify as guys.

Wait. Is that right? How do I know that for sure? Maybe there are hundreds of genderqueer people at Harvard giving themselves testosterone injections as we speak.

Shouldn’t I know how all of this works, just instinctively?

Derek lets out a deep laugh, oblivious to my angst. “Yeah, believe it or not. I’m trying to get more of you guys to join the UBA. I’m the trans outreach cochair this year.”

“Who’s the other cochair?” I don’t see anyone else in a purple shirt who looks trans.

“My roommate, Nance. She couldn’t be here. Had an ultimate Frisbee game.” Derek points to a tall guy with an expensive-looking haircut wearing a jacket, tie and suit pants with a purple UBA T-shirt despite the ninety-degree heat. “That’s Brad, by the way. He’s the UBA president.”

“Why’s Brad wearing a suit?”

“Oh, he’s probably planning to change shirts and go to an informational interview this afternoon. Every time I’ve seen Brad in the past two years he’s been on his way to an informational interview.”

I laugh. My anxiety—about Gretchen, about labels, about meeting new people—is starting to fade into the background just a little.

Derek points out the rest of the UBA board members at the table. Shari, the perky blonde, is the social chair. All the other board members are guys.

“So, are you going to sign up or what?” Derek smiles at me again.

“Oh, right.” I smile back. I can’t believe how nervous I was about this.

While I wait my turn at the sign-up form, Shari notices me again. “Oh, hi there! I’m so glad you’re signing up! I see you already met Derek!”

“Yeah,” I say, surprised to see that Derek is still standing next to me. I thought the UBA people were all supposed to run back into the crowd, seeking out more converts.

“Did you meet Brad yet?” Shari asks. I look up, but Brad has retreated back behind the table and is furiously poking at a tablet.

Shari and Derek roll their eyes at each other. I’m getting the sense that Brad is president of the UBA because it means Brad gets to go on informational interviews and talk about being president of the UBA.

“Well anyway,” Shari says just as I reach the front of the line. “Ahem!”

Suddenly Shari’s voice is projecting past the table and out to the gathered crowd. The freshmen stop talking and push toward the front of the table to hear. A hush has fallen at the booths around us, too. I have to admit, Shari’s got some serious crowd-control prowess.

“You guys,” Shari says, beaming out at the rapt group, “I’m so excited to tell you what the UBA board’s decided to do this year! I know you’ll all want to be part of it. You all know that awesome new show The Flighted Ones?”

Lots of people nod. I’ve never watched The Flighted Ones, but my sister Audrey is obsessed with it. It’s about a group of twentysomethings who turn into winged superheroes at night and fly around fighting crime. Two of the characters are gay and are considered hot by the people who have opinions about such things.

“We’ve decided to have official UBA-sponsored Flighted parties every Tuesday night!” Shari says. “We’ll watch the show and have snacks! Everyone will want to come because everyone’s watching the show anyway!”

Next to me, the other freshmen murmur assent.

“Well, but that’s not all you’re doing this year, is it?” I ask.

The murmurs stop. I can feel the other freshmen looking at me. Shari and Derek are, too. Even Brad has lowered the tablet and is peering in my direction.

Crap. I didn’t mean to say that out loud. Now, though, with all those eyes on me, I have no choice but to keep going.

“I mean, it’s not that I don’t like cupcakes and cheesy TV shows, because I do, sometimes,” I say. “But there’s also going to be advocacy work, right? We’re going to do stuff to address the key issues affecting the queer community?”

I stop talking when I realize Shari’s glaring at me. I shouldn’t have mentioned the cupcakes.

Great. I haven’t even joined yet and I’ve already pissed off the UBA’s queen bee. I should probably slink off and join the Queer Youth of America, Inc., Harvard-Radcliffe Chapter. I can see their table in the distance. A giant poster of Neil Patrick Harris is hanging from it.

“We need more members,” Shari says to me, not projecting anymore. “If you know a better way to recruit members than fun social gatherings then you can run for the board next year.”

“Now, Shari,” Brad says, chuckling, even though everyone else behind the table looks uncomfortable. “I’m sure she didn’t mean to imply that—”

Derek interrupts Brad in a voice loud enough to match Shari’s. “Hey, Toni has a point. We have a lot of other goals for this semester. Maybe the officers should each give our prospective new members some of the bullet points?”

Shari groans.

“Derek, that’s an excellent idea,” Brad says, turning back to the tablet screen. “Why don’t you kick us off?”

“Okay,” Derek says. “So, hi, everyone. I’m Derek Richmond, and I’m the cochair for transgender outreach. Now that we’ve got gender-neutral housing campus-wide, my fellow cochair and I thought this would be a good year to work on an official guide to transitioning at Harvard.”

Wow. I’d love to read that. I’ve seen stuff on the internet about transitioning, but it’s mostly about why binding your chest with ACE bandages is bad for you. It isn’t about the scary, big-picture stuff that keeps me up at night, like having to ask my professors to call me by some other name. Or having to tell my mother.

I catch Derek’s eye and nod. Derek smiles.

“So, I’m seeing a few confused faces,” Derek goes on, looking around the table at the other freshmen. “What that means is, we need a guide for transgender students who are transitioning. They could be starting to live openly as women, or as men, or as a nonbinary gender, or making some other change related to their gender presentation. The transition guide will have sections on how to tell your roommates and professors you’re transgender, how to get your name changed on your ID, where to find gender-neutral bathrooms, how to get legal hormone injections, safe places around town to shop for clothes and makeup, whatever. We’ll post the guide on the web and try to get some stories in the Crimson, too.”

The space around the table is getting even more crowded as the freshmen lean in to hear what Derek’s saying, but there are still a lot of blank expressions. I’m so busy watching the crowd I almost miss what Derek says next, but I snap back to attention when I hear my name.

“We could use some help writing the guide from someone who’s new to the Harvard community,” Derek says. “Toni, are you up for it?”

Now everyone’s staring at me again. The other freshmen in particular.

I shift from one foot to the other, but Derek looks perfectly at ease, waiting for me to answer.

It would be stupid to say no. This is as involved in the group as I can get freshman year unless I want to help with cupcake-baking duty. Besides, it sounds interesting.

I wish everyone would stop staring at me, though.

“Sure,” I say.

“Cool,” Derek says. “Why don’t you come back with me after the activities fair? You can meet Nance and we can brainstorm.”

“Excellent idea, Derek,” Brad says without looking up. “I’m sure he’ll have a lot to contribute. Kartik, your turn.”

Kartik, the treasurer, takes over and starts talking about fund-raisers, but half the people gathered on both sides of the table are still looking at me.

I push my way toward the sign-up form and write my name, fast, then back away.

As soon as I’m safely anonymous in the crowd again, my heart starts to slow down. That was terrifying.

Also...kind of awesome.

Now that I’m not nervous anymore, it’s easy to find the other clubs I liked and put my name down on their lists. I sign up for a couple of others, too. Why not? Maybe I should start being more spontaneous now that I’m in college. Maybe that’s how you meet the people who are actually worth meeting.

As the fair winds down, I make my way back to the UBA table. I dodge Shari, who’s sweeping the table clear of cupcake crumbs, just in time to see Derek look over and wave for me to follow.

Whew. I’d been half-worried Derek would forget about me.

We walk across the Yard onto a road I don’t recognize. I’ve never been to any of the houses where the upperclassmen live.

“Will Nance be home when we get there?” I ask as we climb the steps to Derek’s floor. “What about Frisbee?”

“Yeah, she’ll be there,” Derek says. “To be honest, Frisbee was an excuse. Nance hates hanging out with big groups at UBA events. She prefers to handle things behind the scenes.”

That seems odd for someone whose position title has the word outreach in it.

Derek’s house looks a lot like my freshman dorm—old and grand. Loud voices echo toward us as we climb the stairs to Derek’s room.

“Er,” Derek says before turning the key in the lock. “I should probably apologize in advance for anything my roommates might say over the course of the afternoon. Sometimes they get kind of...well. You’ll see.”

With that I’m nervous again.

Derek’s room has a huge common area that’s a lot nicer than mine. It has a bar on one side, a big-screen TV and two leather couches. As the door swings open, I see two people sitting hunched over on a couch in front of the unlit fireplace, arguing about what sounds like the plot of a video game involving toy ponies. When they see me, they stop talking right away.

“Toni,” Derek says, “this is Nance and Eli.”

Nance and Eli wave. Then in unison, as if they rehearsed it, they say, “Yo.”

Then both of them, and Derek, too, start laughing and talking about how funny it is that they both said “Yo” at the same time.

I wave back.

Derek goes over to sit on the couch, perching on the arm and gesturing for me to come join them.

I do. All three of them smile back at me.

They look almost like a family, hanging out here. They remind me of my group of friends back home. Except that in my group of friends back home, I was the only one who was trans.

“Hey,” I say. I try to smile at them as coolly as possible. In this moment, my greatest wish in the world is for the people in this room to like me.

“Toni and I met at the UBA table at the activities fair,” Derek tells the others.

An extremely short Asian person with extremely tall pants stands and slaps my hand. “Hey, man. I’m Eli.” Eli’s voice is very high.

“This is Nance,” Derek says, pointing to the girl who’s still sitting down. “Nance, Toni’s helping us with the transition guide.”

Nance squints at me through a pair of glasses that are almost identical to my own.

“You’re a freshman?” Nance asks in a Southern accent that sounds fake.

“Yep,” I say. “Sorry.”

Eli and Derek laugh.

“S’okay, man. You can’t help it,” Derek says.

I sit down on the couch next to Eli, determined to act as if I fit in here. “What, are you all sophomores?” I ask.

“No way! We look like sophomores to you?” Eli asks.

Eli’s the only one whose gender presentation I can’t figure out. I’m pretty sure Derek’s a trans guy, and I’m pretty sure Nance, whose haircut is almost identical to mine, is a butch lesbian. I can’t tell about Eli, though.

“Sorry, no, you all look really old,” I say, even though Eli looks about nine. All three of them laugh. “Grad students?”

“Juniors,” Nance says, then turns to Derek. “Was tabling as vile as usual?”

Derek shrugs. “Will you guys please at least show up at the next meeting? Don’t make me and Toni fend for ourselves all year.”

I try not to smile, but I’m positively giddy that Derek’s including me this way. As if I’m already part of the group.

“No way,” Nance says. “I put up with those bitches enough as it is. I’m sick of hearing Brad go on and on about how he’s one of the first out gay guys in his final club. It’s like, way to be a groundbreaker. You’re a rich white guy who got a bunch of other rich white guys to let you pay them to be their friend. Five points to Brad.”

Eli laughs. “I might go to a meeting or two. I like free cupcakes.”

“Does Shari make those for all the meetings?” I ask.

“Usually,” Derek says. “She’s gotten good at the food coloring. Every meeting has a different theme. Maybe she won’t make them next time, though, now that you called her out on it.”

“No way!” Nance says. “Did he really?”

It takes me a second to realize Nance is talking about me.

“Yeah, and you should’ve seen it,” Derek says. “Toni opens his mouth once, and Shari’s all over him.”

Okay, now Derek’s doing it, too.

No one’s ever called me by male pronouns before.

It’s strange. Not necessarily bad. It’s...I don’t know what it is, actually.

“So, Toni, what’s your story?” Nance asks. “You got somebody back home?”

“Back home?” Was Nance asking about my parents? I don’t usually rant about my mom to people until I know them better.

“You know, like a girlfriend?” Eli blushes. “I mean, or a boyfriend, or whatever?”

“Oh. Yeah.” A boyfriend? How weird. First the pronouns, now this. It’s been years since anyone thought I was into guys. “My girlfriend goes to NYU.”

“Cool,” Derek says. “Do you have a picture?”

“Yeah.” I try to ignore the familiar twinge of anxiety that’s flared back up in my stomach now that we’re talking about Gretchen and flip through the photos on my phone until I find a good one. “This is us at Queer Prom last year.”

“You had a Queer Prom at your high school?” Nance asks. “Where are you from?”

“DC,” I say.

“Oh,” Nance says. “Figures.”

I want to ask what Nance means by that, but then Eli peers at my phone and whistles like a trucker. Except with Eli’s high-pitched voice it sounds more like a teakettle.

“Nice,” Eli says. “Very nice.”

“Yeah, you’ve got a definite hottie there,” Nance says.

“Uh. Thanks.” I’m not sure whether to be proud or offended. I’m leaning toward proud.

“Yo, guys, don’t be crass,” Derek says, squeezing onto the couch with the rest of us and leaning over to look at the picture. “Show some respect.”

“Hey, man, I have the utmost respect for hotties!” Nance says. Everyone’s laughing, so I do, too. “Ask anyone!”

“That’s not what I heard.” Derek smiles and takes the phone out of Eli’s hand. As Eli reaches over to give it to Derek, I catch a glimpse of a chest binder through Eli’s T-shirt. I guess that means Eli presents as male, too. I wonder if Eli’s definitely trans, like Derek, or still figuring it out, like me.

Nance turns back to me. “Are you going to try to stay with your girlfriend all year? You didn’t want to take a break or anything, what with starting college?”

“‘Taking a break’ is juvenile,” I say, making air quotes. “You’re either with someone or you’re not.”

“Yeah, but freshman year is hard,” Derek says. “Long distance is tough when you haven’t done it before.”

“I know. I’ve heard all the clichés,” I say. “How everyone always breaks up freshman year. I’m just saying they couldn’t have been that committed in the first place if all it takes is some distance to split them up. Besides, Gretchen and I are barely even long distance. New York to Boston is a couple of hours on a train. We can see each other every weekend if we want to.”

“Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much,” Nance mutters. I decide to ignore this.

“Every weekend?” Eli asks. “Are you really going to do that?”

“That’s the plan.” I don’t mention that we skipped last weekend.

“Our friend Andy used to have a girl like that,” Nance says. “She was gorgeous, too. She dumped him, though. She had issues with the trans stuff. You know how it goes with some girls.”

“Is your girlfriend cool with it, Toni?” Eli asks in a soft voice. “Or are you not out to her?”

I can’t imagine keeping such a big secret from someone I care about as much as Gretchen. Is that really normal?

Well, I guess Gretchen kept a pretty big secret from me.

“Gretchen’s very much cool with it,” I say. “We’re completely honest with each other about everything.”

“Hey, you should get her to come up for the Halloween dance so we can meet her,” Derek says. “Since you’ll be visiting back and forth all the time anyway.”

“There’s a Halloween dance?” I ask.

Nance snorts. “Dance isn’t the right word. It’s more of an excuse to dress up in slutwear and drink a ton of alcohol.”

“That works for me,” I say, and the others laugh. Not that Gretchen or I usually drink very much. Gretchen is such a lightweight, and I’m always the one stuck driving.

But I don’t have to drive up here. Everyone walks everywhere at Harvard. I can do what I want here.

I can be who I want.

“Some of the straight guys come in drag,” Derek says. “Mostly it’s respectful, though. It’s supposed to be just for the people in our house, but we can get you guys in.”

“Cool, thanks. I’ll tell Gretchen.”

Nance launches into a story about last year’s Halloween dance and Derek joins in. Soon all of them are rushing to tell me all the best stories from last year, and the details on everyone I met at the UBA table, and all the reasons we shouldn’t be hanging out and talking right now (all four of us have reading we should be doing instead).

Derek and Nance and I don’t do any work on the transition guide, but that’s okay. We have plenty of time.

And I have plenty of time to think about this transitioning stuff on my own, too.

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