I wake up to sunlight slowly creeping into the tent. I feel like I just woke up from a nice dream, like I slept just the right amount. The air on my face is cool but the rest of my body is comfortably warm. It’s a good sleeping bag.

Sadie is still asleep to my left. There’s only a wave of strawberry blonde hair visible where her head is nuzzled into the fabric of the sleeping bag.

But Kim isn’t there anymore. Her sleeping bag isn’t, either, and so are her shoes.

Slowly, careful not to wake Sadie, I get up and put on my shoes before opening the tent flap and climbing out. The sun is only just rising over the horizon, flooding the sea with twinkling shards, fragments to a beautiful morning. The sky is clear. There’s dew glittering in the grass around the tent.

Kim is sitting with her back turned towards me, looking out at the sea. Her hair is moved by the lazy breeze but apart from that she’s completely unmoving.

I approach slowly. She must’ve heard me coming because she doesn’t flinch when I sit down next to her. She has this faraway look in her eyes, this slight crease in between her eyebrows.

“Having trouble sleeping?” I ask as the wind picks up.

She shrugs and turns her head just slightly to give me a listless smile. “Wasn’t ever gonna be easy, was it? But I’ve made up my mind. I’m just…” She takes a deep breath. “… trying not to freak out.”

“You’ll be fine.”

She gives a slight nod, then swallows. “Of course. That’s what I’m trying to tell myself.”

Sadie comes out of the tent not too much later. We try to have breakfast but Kim won’t stop fidgeting and when I ask whether she’d like to return home early, she nods.

It’s not like she’s returned to old patterns with her behaviour. She still seems reasonably certain that she’s not going to let herself be blackmailed. But she also can’t seem to return to the same braveness from yesterday, that proud defiance.

Sadie and I do our best to distract her, try to be loud and fun around her but it doesn’t seem to help all that much.

When we arrive at her place, her parents come to help us carry everything back into the house. They do seem a little concerned as to why Kim would’ve left her phone and also why she’s so quiet now, but they accept her explanation that she’s just tired. Which conveniently seems to be rather true. She probably didn’t get all that much sleep last night. She was okay for the drive but now she’s stifling yawns every few seconds.

Sadie and I try to insist on staying at least until dinner but she doesn’t let us.

“Girls, I really appreciate you trying to help, but I need to prepare for tomorrow. Maybe meditate or something. Be alone for a bit.”

Sadie gives her a tight hug. Seems crazy now how they’ve only started hanging out every now and again a few weeks ago. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

Kim snorts in reply. “Don’t worry, I’m not in shock anymore. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I hug her, too, wishing there was something I could say to make it easier. But there’s nothing. It’s all been said and if she doesn’t want us to stay, there’s nothing I can do. It’s on her, now, to keep going forward.

Neither Sadie nor I do much for the rest of the day. We try to do some homework but fail miserably. Even watching movies proves hard because neither of us can maintain the necessary base level of concentration. When I finally fall asleep that evening, it’s two in the morning.

Kim’s a great actor. She proves that yet again when Sadie, Henry and I walk into class on Monday morning and she’s there, sitting in her seat, chatting away with Linea and some of the other girls.

There are tells, though. The way she’s sometimes a little too slow with her laughter, the way her eyes focus differently, straying just for fractions of seconds at a time.

The assembly Kim plans to make the announcement at is in third period. Kim only barely seems to manage to hold herself together until then. Once, at the end of second period, our history teacher asks her to explain to Felix just why the treaty situation leading up to World War I was so fragile and important for what followed and she just looks at him stone-faced for a whole three seconds before snapping out of it and asking, “Sorry, could you repeat the question please?”

Then, right as the bell rings, she jumps out of her seat and hurries over to Sadie and me. “Sorry, could I borrow the two of you for a minute?” she says, just like we didn’t just spend the whole weekend together. But her eyes are unusually intent.

“Sure,” Sadie and I say in unison and get up.

Before anyone can ask what this is about, she leads us out of the classrooms and to a small conference room she unlocks before locking it behind us and leaving the key in the keyhole.

Then she starts taking deep and deliberate breaths, leaning against the door with her eyes closed like she’d been holding her breath for the last hour.

Neither Sadie nor I say anything for a long while. We’re just there. I assume she just used us as an inconspicuous escape route from the classroom.

“Would you like to practice?” Sadie asks then, uncertainly. “So you’ll have done it with an audience before?”

But Kim shakes her head. “No, I… I just couldn’t handle… acting normal anymore.” She takes another deep breath. “And I guess now there’s no backing out anymore, is there? I already talked to Christoph.”

Christoph Lang, our principal. She’s probably the only student ever to be on a first-name basis with the guy and I strongly doubt that’s ever going to change.

“You’ll do great,” I tell her and I think I do a good job of sounding confident. But it’s also the first time I’m not a hundred percent confident. She always does amazing, of course, but this is an extreme situation. Hell, I’d have long left the country in her place. But she isn’t me. She’s Kim and Kim is strong, so impossibly strong. I really hope she’s going to hold on long enough to make it.

“Did you get any new messages?” Sadie asks and Kim shakes her head.

“No. Nothing. He might be trying to wear me down. Or he’s going to use the assembly to make the publication. They brought out the canvas so….”

“But that would make him traceable,” Sadie interrupts. “Unless he’s some genius hacker, but I doubt that. He’d’ve long made it into your devices then.”

“There’s of course the chance that he was just bluffing,” Kim says in a low voice, before jerking herself straight. “But I’m not risking that.” And there she is again. The proud and strong Kim from the beach by the cliffs.

Sadie’s eyes twinkle. “Go easy on them. They don’t know what’s coming.”

“Nique sa mère,” Kim scoffs, the corners of her mouth hinting at a grin as she repeats one of Sadie’s favourite swears.

Then the bell rings, signalling that the break is officially over and we are to go to the assembly hall now.

Kim stays still for another second, then she pushes off the door, takes a deep breath and says, “Right-io.” before throwing the door open and marching out like a warrior into battle.

The others are already at the assembly hall, currently busy filing in. Linea waves us over but Kim only nods at her before making her way to the front of the hall, sitting in one of the seats right by the stage. Instead of her, I take the seat next to Linea.

“She’s going to be talking a bit today,” I tell her and she grins vaguely.

“She does that sometimes.” Then she grows suddenly serious and leans in to ask in a low voice, “Say, Wells, is there something bothering her? She’s… tense today.”

I nod slowly. “You’ll hear about it in a second.”

Her eyes grow big. “Fuck. But she’s not… leaving, is she?”

I shrug. “I don’t think so? It’s… just hear what she has to say.”

She nods hurriedly. “Of course.” For the rest of the time until Mr Lang walks onto the stage, her eyes are dead-locked on the back of Kim’s head like she’s trying to read her thoughts or transmit a message telepathically.

Fortunately for probably both Kim’s and Linea’s psyche, Mr Lang doesn’t take long to make it through his list of announcements. Barely five minutes after all of us have sat down, he ends his speech saying, “And now I will hand the floor to Kim, who’s going to make a few announcements of her own.”

He waits for her at the stairs leading down from the stage where he hands her the microphone before walking off. But Kim doesn’t walk to the centre of the stage and she doesn’t put on a PowerPoint on the laptop that’s already plugged in and connected to the beamer. Instead, she walks right up to the edge of the stage and sits down, her legs dangling over the edge.

A low murmur goes through the rows as she sits. Nobody’s ever done that, as far as I can recall. More to the point, it’s a huge break in character for her, to be on stage in her function as a volunteer and head girl and whatever else and then suddenly act affable.

She patiently waits until the room has gone silent again, then she lifts the mic to her lips.

“Hi,” she says and just the way her voice sounds through the room sends goosebumps down my arms. “Some of you may know me. Sometimes, I come up here and clown around about all the important things we care oh so much about but none of us really want to worry about. But not today. Today, I am going to tell you a secret.” There were a few chuckles at ‘clown’, but by the time she briefly lowers the mic to look around, the room is perfectly silent. Her eyes squint past the light and glide over me and I feel like for just a moment, they lock with Linea’s.

“My name is Kim Elizabeth Schneider,” Kim goes on. “I’m head of the student council. I spend way too much time studying for tests and exams, just to squeeze out those last bits I need for full points. I do volunteer work in my free time. I head the debate club and the spring-dance preparations. I try my best to be nice to people, I…” She swallows visibly. “… try my best to be perfect. I have friends. A lot of them, even, I would say.

“But here’s the thing about me. I wasn’t always this way. I used to be quite different, actually. Mediocre at school, few to no friends…. I used to love watching cartoons and stay up past my bedtime. I used to be really into football. I used to be a boy.”

The room around me erupts in a wave of murmurs and half-asked questions. I turn slightly to glance at Linea. She’s sitting in her seat the exact same way she’d been sitting earlier. I’m not sure she’s even breathing.

“I got the virus when I was six,” Kim says, her voice sounding over the low voices filling the room, reclaiming it for herself. “I was the twentieth case in the whole country. There wasn’t anything they could do to stop the changes, then. I changed within two weeks and I hated it. In that, at least, I wasn’t alone. There was a time when I was certain everybody hated me. I was ostracised at school, got called names, and beaten. There were several attempted kidnappings between my sixth and eighth birthday. Between my sixth and fourteenth birthday, I swapped schools twenty-six times. I found a way to like myself, with enough therapy. I tried to keep my past a secret. But wherever I went they found out and then it would all just start over.”

She gives a slight shrug. “I got this idea in my head that, if I’m just nice enough, if I work hard enough, if I’m just perfect enough, they’d stop trying to hurt me. But that never worked. Until I came here when, suddenly, it did.” As she says those last words, she smiles at the audience. I turn briefly to look at my classmates behind me and Ben catches my eyes. He furrows his brow at me, an unvoiced question.

“Until now. On Saturday, I got a message from somebody who knows this about me and is now trying to get something… to see something in return for their silence. And I’m not making myself subject to that on top of everything I’ve been through.”

Finally, she gets up. When before she seemed somewhat normal as she was talking, the warrior has now resurfaced. She stands with her head held high, her shoulders squared, and her jaw set. “So, here I am. My name is Kim Elizabeth Schneider. I used to be a boy. I am happy the way I am now. And to this person who I’m sure is watching right now: I’m no longer thirteen years old. I’m no longer scared of the dark and I am certainly not scared of you. Fuck! You!”

SeptemberMorgan

As always, please tell me what you think of the chapter and have a nice week. Happy holidays to everybody that celebrates!