I’ve heard that in a negotiation, the first person to talk loses. Or something like that. I am determined not to be that loser. I will stand my ground.

“I am so sorry, Meg.”

Like a rock. That’s me.

I’m sorry for leaving. I’m sorry for worrying her. For breaking the rules. For letting her down. She doesn’t say a word as I spill out everything that had happened. Except the kiss. I’m not ready to talk about that, yet.

“And then she kissed me.”

Damn it.

I really don’t know what the hell is wrong with me. Put me in a place with people being genuinely nice to me for a few days, and I fall to pieces.

“Why was it necessary for you to be the one out there fighting monsters?” she asks, “Couldn’t you have left it to the police?”

“The police?” okay, I snort, “Did you see the video?”

“You thought that the police couldn’t handle it, so you decided to go all Buffy Summers?”

I’d watched the DVDs of those shows with my aunt. I was more into Willow than Buffy. Although I guess with the ass kicking . . .

Wait, no. Take the offensive.

“How did you know I was gone, anyway?” I switch the subject.

“Shelly did a bed check when the noise stopped. Standard procedure in a potential emergency,” she pauses, ”We’re serious about keeping our kids safe. How can we do that if you’re out there? Fighting who knows what?”

That makes sense. I can totally understand where she is coming from, but . . .

“I have to do it,”

“Why?”

“Because I can.”

“We’ll talk more about this tomorrow. I have to get some sleep.”

She looks even more tired than Tim. I feel like crap.

“Okay, Meg,” I hesitate, “Are you okay to drive?”

“I’ve got that covered, but thank you for worrying.”

I shrug. It’s what I do.

#

The gang at table D are super annoying Sunday morning.

“Hey Parker, what happened last night?”

“Everything Okay, Parker?”

“Nice shoes, Parker.”

They won’t stop bugging me, so I eat by myself at the away table. It isn’t further away than any of the others, but there are four main groups of us, and six tables. Whoever doesn’t feel like hanging out with their usual crowd, but isn’t feeling especially anti-social hangs out at the fifth. The sixth is the away table. The first rule of the away table is that there is no talking at the away table. It’s an unspoken rule.

Not that everyone always sits in the same groups. Layla had sat with us at table D for a couple of dinners over the last week, Sebastian probably spends about a third of his meals at other tables. The counselors encourage the mixing whenever possible.

I do some more mixing at lunch.

My job the first week had been breakfast dishes. That wasn’t so bad. We have a restaurant style dishwasher, so it was mainly a matter of clearing any dishes kids had left out and loading them in. Even most of the pots and pans went in the dishwasher. I only had to hand wash a few items, and on Sunday, hand clean the waffle irons.

After lunch the new job list is posted. I glare at it for a full minute, appalled by the injustice. This will not stand.

Meg has the misfortune to have scheduled our follow up for right after lunch.

“Are you punishing me?” I start right in, as soon as I walk into her office.

“We’ll have to write up a service plan, but other than that, no.”

“Then it’s not fair!”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me here.”

I pull a copy of the jobs list out of my pocket and slap it down on the desk.

She glances at it.

“I see,” she pauses, “You realize that all the jobs are on a rotation. Right? Everyone has to be on laundry eventually.”

“But I don’t even have any laundry! No one has to wash mine, so why should I have to wash theirs?”

“Towels? Wash cloths?”

I reach under my chair and pull out a big, fluffy towel. Much nicer than the Promise-issued ones, with a matching wash cloth on top. I plop them on her desk and cross my arms.

She pauses before speaking. “Are you saying that your abilities should get you special treatment?”

That isn’t what I meant. Well. No. Maybe.

“No,” I don’t quite growl.

“I think maybe we should postpone our talk until tomorrow.”

But she came in on a Sunday. Well, if that’s what she wants.

“Fine.”

When I get back to my room, Cindy is sitting on a nearby bench, reading. She puts away her book.

I walk past her to my door.

“Want to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?”

I don’t turn around, but I don’t walk in the door.

“Anything.”

“Not right now, thanks.”

But no thanks.

I accidentally slam the door behind me.

It’s that I’m not happy to be a girl. I still am. The idea of changing back makes me clench up inside. But everybody expects me to be super-girly right away. To “share my feelings,” and talk about what’s bothering me. Can’t I just work things out for myself?

I was six years old when my Mom died. She’d been sick for a little while, then caught pneumonia, and never got better. I didn’t really understand what had happened, but I knew she was gone.

My father didn’t want me to be sad. He kept trying to cheer me up. The sadder I seemed, the harder he would try. He made me watch stupid cartoons. He couldn’t afford to buy expensive presents, but he bought me so much cheap, colorful crap that I couldn’t see the floor of my room.

A couple of months after my Mom passed, her sister, Tabitha moved in with us. By this point I was going around pretending to be cheerful all the time, so I wouldn’t disappoint my father, and he would stop trying so hard. It was working with my father, but Aunt Tabitha saw through me right away.

“It’s okay to be sad.”

That was the first thing she said to me after my father left me with her when he went to work. It was the first day of summer, but he still had to work.

So I started being sad again. Not all the time. But most of the time, then less, and less. She must have talked to my father, too, because he stopped being quite so intent on cheering me up.

She never tried to replace my Mom. She was always Aunt Tabitha, or Aunt T, but I loved her. I loved my father, too, but Aunt Tabitha became the one I went to when I needed advice, or I got hurt, or I just wanted to talk.

She lived with us for five years. We were a kind of family.

When I was eight, she was the one I told that I was supposed to be a girl. She was the one who supported me, who told me I could be anything I wanted to be.

She was the one who talked my father into getting me prescribed puberty inhibitors, when the time came. He was sure the whole trans thing was only a phase. That I’d grow out of it. It took two years to talk him into it.

And then I screwed it all up. One night at dinner I asked them if they were going to get married. I’d seen the way he looked at her. I guess I hadn’t noticed the way she didn’t look at him. We were a family. Weren’t they supposed to be married?

My father lost it. He never hit me, but the things he said, the names he called me. Aunt Tabitha tried to calm him down, but that made it worse. She wasn’t my mother. She wasn’t really part of this family.

The next day when I got home from school, her things were in boxes, and she wasn’t there. The day after that, the boxes were gone, and so was she. I never saw her again.

I did talk to her on the phone sometimes, when my father wasn’t around, but not often. She told me it wasn’t my fault. I knew it was.

After the things he said, I was surprised that he let me take the blockers as planned. Not that they did any good. On my tenth birthday, I had been 4’8” tall. On my eleventh, right before Aunt Tabitha left, I was 4’9”, and on my twelfth birthday, I was five and a half feet tall. My voice was changing, big time. And the hair. Ugh.

My father took me off the medication. We’d tried. It hadn’t work. It obviously wasn’t meant to be. I needed to suck it up and be a man, like I was born to be.

I’d never asked to wear girls clothes. Okay, I started to once, but when I saw the look on his face I dropped it. But now he decided that since I was growing so fast, I needed a whole new wardrobe. No shorts. No light colors. Only manly clothes. Not quite his words, but the intent was clear. And men and boys don’t wear jewelry. The necklace had to go. He had to pull it off my neck himself.

Something had to give. I was six months from turning thirteen when I called Aunt Tabitha. I hadn’t talked to her in months, but I really needed her. At least her voice. I begged her to let me come live with her, but she told me it wouldn’t work. That my father would never allow it, and if I ran away, that would be the first place they would look. I was angry and hurt, but I understood, or at least I thought I did. Then she tried to help, and I ruined everything. She’d said it a million times before, and it had helped.

“You can be anything you want to be.”

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t not be this hairy, bulky, horrible thing. I wanted to be like her, not like my father, and I couldn’t be.

It wasn’t her fault. I hadn’t told her that the blockers stopped working. I didn’t want her to worry about me. I hadn’t told her about the hair, and if I talked in a whisper, and tried really hard, my voice wasn’t so deep on a phone connection. She couldn’t know how impossible everything was.

But I was angry. I lashed out. I called her hurtful things and told her she wasn’t my mother and she wasn’t part of my family and I never wanted to see her again.

That didn’t push her away. She was my Aunt Tabitha. She was driving back across the country to see me when her car crashed. The funeral was too far away for us to go, my father said.

She’d left me her savings. around two thousand dollars. We deposited it in my bank account on a Friday. My father kept talking about what I should do with the money. College fund. A used car in a few years. Or invest it for later.

He wouldn’t stop talking. About the money. About the future. About how I’d eventually be glad that the blockers hadn’t worked. And then I knew.

I felt like an idiot. Of course they hadn’t worked. Or, more accurately, the pills he gave me did exactly what they were supposed to, as far as he was concerned. They shut me up. For all I knew, they might even have been a testosterone supplement.

That’s when I finally hated him.

I didn’t confront him. What would have been the point? I spent the weekend researching. I had heard a story recently about these cults where the men married a lot of women and they lived in compounds out in the middle of nowhere. They wanted plenty of women for the men, so the girls born there stayed there, but when boys started getting too big, they’d kick them out, sometimes dumping them far away. They didn’t have any ID or even social security numbers. No way to prove who they were.

So I read up on them. How I could pretend to be one. How I should act, what I should know. Monday morning, instead of taking the city bus to school, I took it to the bank and withdrew all my money. I wasn’t sure they’d let me, but my dad had set it up so I could. He said he trusted me.

I bought a bus ticket to Dallas, Texas, and set off to find my new life.

So, here I am. If I care about Cindy, and Kristen, and Henry, and Sebastian and Kelly. If I care about Meg. If I care about this place. The best thing I can do for them is to stop it. Walk away. Before they care too much about me. Before I can really hurt them.

All I have to do is walk out. No one can stop me. No one here, anyway. I don’t need a place to sleep. I can pull food out of thin air, if necessary. I can just go. Never look back.

Right now. Out the door.

It turns out I can stare at the door for a very long time without blinking. Thirty minutes, minimum.

Just leave already.

But I don’t want to. One week. One stupid week, okay, and two days. Nine stupid days and I can’t just leave. I already care about this place. These people. Idiot.

#

Cindy isn’t waiting outside my room when I leave my room for dinner. Not that I expected her to be. I’m not disappointed, of course. Why would I be?

At dinner, no one comments on my recent stays at the away table. Not to ask me what was up, or welcome me back. Come on. It was only two meals. Why would they? I’m not sure how I feel about that.

By the time dinner is done, conversation is back up to normal. Henry and Kelly get into an argument, or maybe heated discussion, over whether muffins are dessert or breakfast. Kristen and I bore everyone else by talking about Monday’s English test. Sebastian and Cindy are mostly quiet.

After dinner, I catch up with Cindy halfway to her room.

“I’m really sorry,” I tell her.

“For what?” She keeps walking.

“I’m sorry that I was rude earlier.”

“You were rude?”

Still walking. Damn. Hmm.

“Want to talk about it?”

She stops, but doesn’t look back.

“About what?”

“Anything.”

She turns around.

“Not right now,” she says.

She steps in and gives me a hug.

“Thanks,” she finishes.

And a kiss on the cheek.

Two kisses in two nights. Damn.

I watch her walk the rest of the way to her room. I hadn’t really noticed before how nice her legs are.

#

School is fine on Monday, except for the dread. Four thirty, as soon as we get back from school, is my appointment with Meg. By last period I’m ready to chew my nails off. I only manage not to by blinking up a thick coat of polish on them. Blech.

“I’m sorry for being a jerk.”

I should have that on a tee shirt. I resist the urge to be wearing one.

“I won’t do it again,” I finish.

“That would make you unique, then,” Meg observes, “Apology accepted, vain promise noted.”

She shuffles some papers on her desk. I make a mental note to always have some papers on my hand, if I’m ever condemned to a job at a desk, to shuffle when I want to stall.

“If you were to be hurt while breaking curfew, it could be very bad for us,” she begins.

She goes on for a while. Promise has to have rules in place to keep the kids here safe. They have to apply the rules fairly and consistently. She has seventeen other kids to think about, as well as all those Promise might help in the future. All good points.

“This is all to say that I can not give you permission to leave the facility after curfew,” she is summing up.

Damn it. She has to understand. I can’t not go out there and help if I’m needed.

“If you are caught outside the facility at night, you will face the same consequences as any of our other residents.”

This isn’t fair. Wait. What are the consequences for breaking curfew? I remember something about loss of privileges. It takes a lot to get kicked out.

“If we have any evidence of you breaking curfew, we will have to consider it, and if it is conclusive, take similar action.”

She pauses. Her posture changed. She suddenly seems less official.

“In other words. Don’t get hurt. Don’t get caught, not even on camera. And if that damn noise starts up again check in with the duty counselor so they can check you off the list. Got it?”

“You’re serious?”

“It’s my job to protect the kids here at Promise. Not just your bodies, but your futures, your souls, your selves. You can protect yourself physically far better than anything we can do, but I think I know the damage it would do to you to make you choose between staying here and helping people.”

Once again, I really want to hug her.

“But there is one more thing.”

Or maybe not.

“I know you don’t want to lie any more.”

True.

“I need you to sign the service plan that says you won’t leave your room after curfew.”

She slides a paper to me.

Ugh. Is breaking a promise the same as lying? Making a promise knowing you are going to break it would have to count. I look at the paper.

“I can’t sign that,” before she can object, I go on, “What if there’s an emergency. A fire? An earthquake. Anything that would make it less safe for me or someone else to stay inside than to leave?”

She thinks about that, then opens up her laptop. After a few seconds, the printer behind her whirs. She hands me the paper.

“I the undersigned, Parker Jordan, promise not to leave my room after curfew, barring an emergency, imminent danger to myself or others, or when necessary to preserve the safety of myself or others.”

That’s the last straw.

I hug her.

And that’s before she hands me my first phone.