Be a girl

I didn’t want to be back at school so soon. It had only been three days since the incident with Jaxon. I knew it was a terrible idea, but dad insisted that I not miss too much. Sure, I was still shaken up by that, and the events at James’ school, but that didn’t matter apparently. On the walk over I felt mostly fine, though a little nervous for the day ahead. But that quickly changed as soon as I entered through the front gate as I was immediately overwhelmed with anxiety. Today was going to be such a joy.

Jaxon was absent from homeroom which was absolutely no surprise to me. I was sure everyone thought he was just sick. And I supposed that was kind of accurate. Kind of. He hadn’t contacted me at all since I ran away from him, so I was very worried. I had no doubt that he was extremely upset with me, and as such, did not want to talk to me.

The real question was: would he come back to school? Or would he find a new one? If he did come back, how long would it take? Better yet: why was I even asking these questions? He obviously wanted nothing to do with me now, so why did it matter if and when he returned?

I was much more conscious of my gloves today, constantly checking that they were securely covering both of my hands to reassure myself that no accidents would occur today. Perhaps I was being a little paranoid, having avoided any accidents for nearly a month and a half until the incident on Monday. Still, it was better to be safe than sorry.

I found a nice quiet spot by myself during recess. It was a spot I usually found myself on those days when I needed some time to be alone. I was sure the others would be worried about Jaxon and me given that neither of us had been here for the past two days, but I simply did not want to be around people right now. Plus, none of them knew I was at school today anyway, so they weren’t going to come looking for me.

Unfortunately, I had chemistry today, which I shared with Isabel. I sat down in the corner of the room, right at the back in order to be away from people in an attempt to avoid her, but she came over and sat down next to me like normal. The concern painted on her face was obvious.

“Are you ok?” she asked, “You missed two days of school.”

“I’m fine,” I replied with the weakest smile ever smiled. I tried to make it less forced but failed miserably.

“If you say so,” she said, sounding completely unconvinced. “Hey, Jaxon’s in your homeroom, right? Is he here today?” I shook my head. Jaxon as she knew him was now gone forever. “I see. He hasn’t been here since Monday either. I’ll have to check in on him later.”

“I’m sure he’s fine,” I lied, trying to sound as convincing as possible. I rarely lied because I knew I was terrible at it. I really hoped she’d not catch on. The last thing I needed was to have Jaxon’s absence linked back to me.

“I hope so.” She paused for a moment before she asked me, “Where were you at recess?”

“I just wanted to be alone.”

“Oh, ok.” She paused again, thinking of what to say next, “Did you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Alright.”

I was saved from Isabel’s irritating nosiness by the teacher beginning the lesson and requesting everyone be quiet. I remained silent for the entirety of the class, not even talking to Isabel. She caught on quickly and thankfully respected my wishes.

Eventually the bell rang, and everyone stood from their seats, eager to head to lunch. Izzy tapped me on the shoulder gently to get my attention before I could escape the classroom. “Hey, do you wanna hang out, just us two?”

“I’d rather be left alone,” I sighed.

Izzy frowned. “Whatever it is that’s troubling you, I promise it’ll help you feel better if you talk about it. I won’t judge you.”

I suppressed a scoff. If I tried explaining any of the details, she’d look at me like I’d completely lost the plot. Still, I couldn’t exactly say that. That would only make her more intrigued as to what was wrong.

“You sound like my dad,” I responded, suddenly reminded of a conversation we had right at the beginning of this whole mess. I definitely felt far more comfortable discussing this whole matter with him, not least because he was entangled in the whole mess.

“Well, your dad is right,” she said. I wasn’t getting out of this, was I?

“Alright,” I relented, “Let’s find somewhere quiet at lunch.” She nodded with a smile. She gave me a quick goodbye and a wave before heading out of the classroom. I followed her out the door, but we immediately separated once outside the building as we each made our way towards our lockers.

At lunchtime, I led Isabel to the spot at which I had spent recess. Nice and quiet. No one ever came back here. The building even blocked all the noise from all the loud teenagers running about and screaming.

I breathed in the comfortably cool, early autumn air, smelling the pleasant odours of the flora surrounding us. I peered toward the sky, observing the fluffy stratus clouds hovering peacefully in the sky, drifting slowly in the wind.

“I don’t know what it is that’s going on,” Izzy began, carefully taking a seat in the grass beside me, “and I know you’re not exactly a ray of sunshine on the best of days, but I can tell when something’s off. You seem… more down in the dumps than usual.”

“Is it that obvious?” I asked.

“Kinda, yeah.” Oof. “I don’t want to be nosy or anything, but you’re my friend, and I’m worried about you.”

I thought back to what dad had said about bottling everything up and sighed. He was right, which also meant Izzy was right. And I wasn’t going to get any better at opening up if I always chose to keep it in at every opportunity. Talking to dad about this would be far better, but perhaps it was good to not only have one person to confide in.

Of course, I couldn’t give her any details; I needed to be vague. “It’s family matters.”

“Oh.” She paused for a moment, biting her lip. “I’m not really familiar with your whole family situation.”

Right. I avoided personal topics whenever I hung out with our friend group. I hadn’t even gone into much detail about my family with Jaxon. Though I was sure he’d figured out a great deal on his own. Especially after what I did to him the other day.

“Well, it’s… not great. My parents are separated, though not divorced. But they only separated a few months ago.”

Izzy cringed. “Yeah, I can see why it might be hard for you to talk about if they split so recently.”

“You have no idea,” I said, shaking my head. If only she knew the whole truth of my family situation. Not that she ever would. Hopefully. At the very least, I couldn’t transform her, so she wouldn’t be able to fit the pieces together on her own like Jaxon no doubt already had.

“Yeah, probably. My parents are still together, so I have no idea what it would be like.”

“It’s… bad. Up until a few months ago my parents were perfectly happy, and then something happened and now they hate each other. They were fighting with each other the other day after my brother got in trouble at school. He thought it was all his fault that they were yelling at each other, so he started crying. Did they notice? Of course not. They were too busy having a shouting match. I ended up walking him home and neither of them noticed until we were most of the way back.”

“Wow, ok. That’s pretty rough.”

“Yep.”

“Does your brother usually get in trouble like that?” Isabel asked.

I shook my head. “He’s pretty well behaved normally. Though in this case I’m not really surprised by what he did.”

She raised her eyebrow at that comment. “Oh? What did he do?”

Now that I could not say. I felt my chest tighten at the prospect of accidentally revealing the truth, which prevented me from speaking it. Although, all my words were failing me right now, so I couldn’t even tell Izzy that I didn’t want to tell her what my brother did. My mouth simply opened, and nothing came out.

My friend, of course, noticed this quickly. “Are you ok?” she asked, concerned for my wellbeing once again. I took a few deep breaths and hung my head limply. “Ok, um, maybe we should change the subject?” she said. I nodded.

And so, she changed the subject of our conversation. With the anxiety of revealing sensitive information dissipated, I found myself able to speak once again. We mostly just chatted about our mutual interest in science, as we usually liked to do.

It was nice to talk about something that actually made me feel good with someone who was also interested in similar topics to me (and who wasn’t my dad). It helped me to temporarily brush aside all the awful currently in my life.

Eventually, the school bell rang signalling the end of lunch, and we parted ways. I did feel better, though not because of the initial topic of conversation. Not being able to talk about the entire truth only made discussing the issue of my family stressful and anxiety inducing. Not fun.

When I arrived home after the end of school, the overall mood was much more depressing than previously, and it wasn’t great before. Both my dad and my brother were really getting beaten down by mum’s actions, and there wasn’t really anything any of us could do. This new, manipulative side of my mother was scary. She held all the power over all of us and she knew it and was exploiting it. It was, in short, utterly appalling behaviour in my opinion. But what could we do? She held us all in a stranglehold.

The next day at school, Izzy found me at recess, insisting that I not be alone. It was just the two of us again, as I didn’t really want to deal with the others. Sure, the others were nice, but they were rather loud, and Izzy and I seemed to get along much better with each other than we did with the others. Jaxon was really the main reason I even hung out with Oscar and Rachel. And now he most certainly hated me. Fun.

Of course, he wasn’t here on Friday either, worrying Isabel even more than on Thursday. She explained that she tried to call him, but he declined, and stuck to texting instead. The reason why was self-evident to me, but the lack of explanation from Jaxon only worried her more. Apparently, he insisted that he was fine, but I highly doubted that. He was just saying that not to worry Izzy. I of course acted oblivious (as best I could) about Jaxon’s absence. Whether Izzy had picked up on my undoubtedly poor attempt at deception, I could not tell.

There was no mention of me in Jaxon’s texts, nor had he tried to contact me since the incident, not that I had tried either. If he wanted to talk to me, then he would contact me first. And since he hadn’t, then he clearly didn’t want to speak to me.

Like all days, Friday came to an end, and everyone made their way home. Now James and I got to spend the weekend at mum’s place. Delightful. Mum was still displeased with James’ behaviour a few days ago, but she didn’t give him any explicit punishment for it outside of a stern talking to. Unless you counted what she was already doing as a punishment; forcing James to be a girl when he had explicitly stated that he didn’t want to be. That was the norm though.

Like all weekends, I really just wanted it to be over as quickly as possible. Being in mum’s presence was taking a toll on me. Not that my situation was comparable to James’. I couldn’t imagine how much he loathed mum these days. He never expressed it while we were at her place outside of being miserable.

Aunty Miranda tried cheering the both of us up, but to no avail. We were simply too in the depths of despair. Our antagonist dwelled within the same walls, imprisoning us until the beginning of the new week.

But like all things, our time with mum did indeed pass. Now it was back to school. Back to acting like everything was perfectly fine so that no one tried to pry too deeply. Not that I was doing a very good job of that lately.

When I arrived at homeroom, there was some girl I didn’t recognise talking with Mr. Manning. They were speaking rather quietly – barely above a whisper – so I couldn’t make out what they were saying. It wasn’t my business anyway, and it would be rude of me to eavesdrop. She was probably here to make some announcement for some upcoming event or something. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I didn’t really get a good look at her as her back was turned to me, but one thing that was strikingly obvious was her height. She was close to a foot taller than me. I may have been short, but very few people were that much taller than me, especially girls.

I sat down in my usual seat and noticed the seat beside me where Jaxon normally sat was once again empty. No surprises there. I didn’t really pay too much attention to the goings on in homeroom while waiting for all the morning admin to begin. It was quite dull last week without Jaxon, and given that he wouldn’t want anything to do with me from now on, I suspected homeroom would remain dull until the end of the year. I was unfamiliar with the rest of the students in my homeroom, even after a month and a half. I never tried striking up a conversation with anyone but Jaxon, and no one tried striking up a conversation with me. That was all fine by me.

Mr. Manning clapped his hands together loudly to get everyone’s attention and told us all to be quiet for an announcement. The girl who was talking to him earlier made her way over to the centre of the whiteboard at the front of the room and gave the class a smile.

Now able to get a better look at her, I noticed that she had a very pretty face, at least from what I could tell at this distance. Her hair had a subtle waviness to it, resting on her shoulders. Not only was she strikingly tall, she also appeared to be quite athletic. Both her arms and legs were toned with muscle. Not bulging, but she clearly worked out. She could probably pick me up like I was made of feathers.

She seemed familiar, though I couldn’t quite place my finger on it. The fact that I was sitting toward the back of the classroom certainly didn’t help. Perhaps I’d caught a glance at her while walking past other students heading to class.

No, she seemed more familiar than she would have had I only seen casual glances at her in the hallway. Plus, a girl as tall as her would definitely stand out amongst the rest of the student body. I recalled that there was one girl whom I’d met who was as tall as the one standing before the class.

My eyes widened in shock.

“Hi everyone,” the girl said with a little wave and a big smile, “I’m Jaxon. I’m a girl now.”