I finish high school without her, because I have to. It sucks, but at least I spend less time within three feet of my toilet. Way less time. It’s too hard to be in the place she used to be, so I avoid my house altogether.
I stay on campus between school and practice, camping out with Sarah and a bag of Doritos in the bleachers or driving Emily to Whataburger for patty melts. I join Key Club and volunteer at the spring fair and get myself invited to parties that I actually attend, to no one’s disbelief more than my own.
Maybe it’s proximity, or maybe it’s the fact that all the emotional energy I used to spend on pretending to be a girl can now be redirected to other things, but actual, real-life friendships find me. Emily helps me pick out a suit for homecoming, and when her date makes a shitty comment about it, she pulls me into the limo and leaves him stranded at the Cheesecake Factory.
Sometimes I wonder if Rosemary was ever there at all. What if I made the whole thing up? What if this is some weird side effect of puberty, and I’ll never see her again now that the hormones are starting to settle down?
(If I went on T, could I see her again?)
After practice one day, I’m alone in the locker room with Bella, who’s twisting her wet hair into a long braid. She’s stillawful, but I think she might be finally warming up to me since the game last month, when the other team’s forward fouled her and I accidentally-on-purpose pushed the girl into the water table.
“Random question,” I say, trying to sound casual. I don’t even look up from unlacing my cleats. I’m nonchalant. I’m definitely not somebody who spent a decent portion of eleventh grade having an emotionally fraught relationship with a dead girl. “Do you remember my sixteenth birthday party, when you convinced everybody to do that Bloody Mary thing?”
From the corner of my eye, I can see a piece of hair slip out of her fingers. She weaves it back into her braid.
“Yeah,” she says. “So weird, right?”
“Did you, uh—did you actually see someone? In the mirror?”
“It’s a kid game,” Bella says. “The whole point of it is to scare your friends. It doesn’t actually work.”
“Yeah,” I say. I tie up my Vans and throw my cleats in my duffel bag. Why did I think Bella could help? “I kind of thought maybe I saw something, but... Never mind. I don’t know.”
I’m reaching for the door when she says, “I guess I don’t really know what I saw.”
When I turn back, Bella’s still sitting on the bench, twisting a hair tie around the end of her braid.
“Sometimes, I think I saw her,” Bella says. “Most of the time, I’m pretty sure I dreamed it or something. But, you know. Maybe there was somebody there.”
She pulls a fresh T-shirt on over her sports bra and shrugs, settling the fabric and the end of the conversation over her shoulders. I’m still frozen when she brushes past me to leave.
Across the locker room, above the mint-green tiles that never seem to dry out all the way, I swear a red shadow moves in the corner of a mirror.
I pack up my bathroom without looking at the mirror, load up the car, and head west.
I’m rooming on a girls’ floor. Mom and Dad have been cool about me cutting my hair and wearing boys’ clothes and everything, but I haven’t actually told them that I think I mightbea boy yet, and it feels weird to come out to my student housing paperwork before my parents. So on paper, for now, I’m listed as a girl, which means I’ve been assigned a dorm room on a girls’ floor with a girl roommate.
That’s the other thing—if I’d been put with the boys, I’d get clocked by a cis roommate on day one, but it might be easier to ease a cis-girl roommate into it. I’ve been assigned to a girl from North Carolina named Chelsea, and she seems pretty normal from the few text conversations we’ve had. I’ll get to know her, maybe drop some hints and see how she responds before I tell her everything. Who knows, maybe Chelsea’s trans, too. Maybe our suitemates will be a couple of chill queers and we’ll turn our shared living area into UCLA’s smallest gay club.
After Mom and Dad leave, my RA comes in to introduceherself: Liv, junior, premed, lives across the hall and two doors down. She’s a tall girl with a set of keys attached to her belt via carabiner, so I’m pretty sure she’s queer, and I like her immediately.
“I’m supposed to talk to you about your living arrangement,” she says.
My fingers tighten around the edge of my last cardboard box. Has she already figured me out?
“Okay,” I say.
“It’s about one of your suitemates,” Liv says, and I stop squeezing my Hamburger Helper stockpile. “I’ve already had a few calls with her, and she seems super sweet. She asked me to let all of you guys know ahead of time that she’s got some health issues she might need some support with.”
“Oh,” I say. “Yeah, of course, I’m happy to help however I can.”
“Cool,” Liv says. She leans her hip against the door of the suite. “She’s a total badass. She had a pretty serious accident year before last, and she was in a coma for a while, but she’s been busting ass to pick up where she left off before it happened. She actually got accepted here like two years ago, before everything went down, but she deferred until this semester to make sure she was ready.”
“Oh my God, that’s amazing.”
“I know, right?” Liv says. “Anyway, she pretty much has everything handled, but she does have some memory issues, so she wanted you guys to know.”
“Yeah, I wanted you to tell them in case I forgot to,” says a wry voice from the hall.
