Up close, and now that they were actually looking at me (though it appeared to be with mild disdain), I could see Kai was… pretty…. I didn’t like to try and guess what people defined themselves as, but if I had to, I thought Kai was nonbinary. Their head was shaved to a minimal stubble, and they had their septum pierced with a small silver ring. They weren’t wearing makeup, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if they did sometimes. They wore similar cutoff jeans and a shirt that proclaimed DOWN WITH THE PATRIARCHY. Where Diego had flip-flops, Kai wore black boots with silver studs along the laces.
And both of them were staring at me.
“Um, hi,” I said, closing the closet door behind me. “How are you?”
“You were shouting in the closet,” Diego said, arching his pierced eyebrow. “Why were you shouting in the closet?”
“Oh. I was… practicing.”
“For?”
“You know, stuff.” That sure sounded convincing.
They didn’t look like they believed me. “What kind of stuff?” Kai asked. Their voice was soft and gravelly, deeper than I expected it to be.
I thought quickly. “Adult stuff. You’ll understand one day when you’re older.”
Kai grimaced. “That was lame.”
“So lame,” Diego echoed.
“I try,” I said. “There’s just some… things, I needed to work out. And hey! I didn’t really get a chance to introduce myself—”
“What are you?” Kai asked.
I blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“Queer?” they asked, looking me up and down.
I forced myself not to fidget under their gaze. My hair was pulled back in a tight bun, the ends crinkled and sticking out. I hadn’t
tried to straighten it, happy with the way it looked. My tie was a little crooked, and my collar felt like it was choking me, but I thought I looked all right.
“Gender-fluid? Trans?”
I wasn’t used to such bluntness. I had no problem with who I was, but it was still almost shocking to hear it from someone I didn’t know. I wasn’t offended, but I was curious. “Does it matter?”
Kai shrugged nonchalantly. But there was a weird edge in their eyes that made me think it did. “Just good to know, you know?”
Diego bumped their shoulder. “Had a straight guy here once. He was nice.”
That sounded ominous. “Nice, huh?”
“He tried,” Kai said. “Didn’t quite get it.”
“At least he tried,” I said. “That doesn’t always happen.”
“So, what are you?”
They weren’t going to let this go. “Is it important to you?”
The same shrug. It isn’t, that shrug said. But it is.
When I was thirteen one of the other foster kids had gone in my room while I was out. He’d trashed a lot of my stuff simply because he could. I’d been furious because I’d had so little to begin with. Back then I was dealing with my own shit and hadn’t been able to understand the anger this other kid had been carrying. He was destructive because he didn’t know how else to be. I can see that now. But I wouldn’t have been able to do anything at the time.
He’d been gone the next week. I never found out what happened to him.
But when I came back into my room, I found the kid had thrown a heavy book against the mirror on the back of the door. The mirror was cracked down the middle, and my reflection was fractured. A little on the nose, but it’d made more sense than anything I’d ever felt before.