“Okay.” I found that it was easier not to stammer if I kept what I said as short as possible.

“Cool. You know how I said that some part of me wanted to look like this?” they asked.

“Yeah.”

“Well, yeah, I think this part is kinda all of me, so…” They took a deep breath. “Can you please call me Abigail? And use she/her pronouns?”

“O-oh, sure.”

“Wait, just like that? You’re okay with this?” Abigail half-yelled.

“Y-yeah, I mean… if you feel better like this, then I... don’t really see a reason why I wouldn’t be okay with it?”

“I guess that sounds like you, it’s just… you’ve started acting all weird around me since I changed, and I guess I was just kinda scared I was going to lose my best friend.” She sighed in relief. “I’m glad that wasn’t the case, but still, what’s gotten into you?”

“I… don’t really know. It’s not just around you, I’ve been actually ‘all weird’ all the time since Wednesday afternoon, and I have no idea why, or even what I’m feeling… I think I just need some time to figure it out on my own…”

“Huh… That’s fair, I guess; you gave me time to work out stuff, so I should give you time too.” She paused for a minute, as we started to walk again. “By the way, don’t worry if you’re having trouble connecting how I am now to the… old me. Even I still have problems with that.”

“Uhh, I actually kinda don’t have that problem? Like, something about you translated or something, and I can pick up on that? You’re still you in my eyes…” I answered.

“Oh, that’s kinda neat. A good thing, too, cause I’m still your bestie; don’t you think you’ll be getting rid of me that easily!” She smiled and nudged my arm, which somehow made me feel tight in my chest.

“By the way, a lot has happened this week, but are we still up to meet up at your place tomorrow?” Abigail asked.

Oh, right, we’d planned that back on Monday; we’d sort of just wanted to hang out and play games. That felt like it was so long ago…

“I… guess it should still be okay, as long as you’re still up for this, I’ll just need to fill my folks in, and update Sophie on the whole ‘name and pronouns’ thing,” I answered.

“Oh, of course you’ve been telling her everything.”

“I-I mean, it’s Sophie,” I countered.

“Yeah, that’s fair.” She smiled again.

We then walked towards the tram stop, and had some slightly less awkward, not quite smalltalk.

When I got back home, Sophie welcomed me by eagerly asking, “So how are they doing?”

“S-She goes by Abigail now,” I stammered.

“Oh. I didn’t expect her to come to terms with being trans that fast, to be honest.”

“Trans?” I asked.

“You know, transgender, the thing where people aren’t the gender initially people see them as,” she explained.

“Huh… I guess it makes sense that... that it’d be a thing.”

“So, besides that predictable revelation, how’s she doing?”

“Better than on Wednesday, and… way better than before that… She’s even all… confident now and stuff…”

“I mean, it makes sense, she doesn’t have the stuff weighing her down anymore.”

“She’s got me and my weird… feelings weighing her down…”

“Aren’t you over exaggerating a bit there?”

“She… She was all scared that I was going to react to her badly because of how I acted around her…”

“Oh wow… Now that is bad, you couldn’t hurt a fly. You’d rather run away and hide.”

“I-I’m not scared of flies, it’s just... moths…”

“And butterflies. And most other things.”

“D-Don’t change the subject! It’s serious! I don’t know what’s happening to me and I don’t know what to do and… and…” I paused. “I… I don’t even care how much it hurts me anymore, I just want it to stop affecting people around me…”

“You know, that’s not a good way to deal with that kind of stuff.”

“T-then what am I supposed to do? I… for the last couple years all I could do to control my feelings was just pushing them down so I could function normally, and it wasn’t even a choice I made, it just kinda happened, and now it’s not working and I’m lost on what to do…”

“Okay, first of all, that is no way to manage your feelings, that’s how you get toxic masculinity.”

I shuddered at the thought. I wanted to be as far away as possible from that.

“T-then what I’m supposed to do? I… I don’t know any other way…”

“Well, I’d suggest you try letting yourself just feel what you’re feeling. Remember when we were younger and I used to tell you to just let yourself cry it out? It’s kinda like that.”

I did indeed remember that. Despite all the trouble literally everyone who wasn’t Sophie or Abigail gave me whenever I cried, crying in Sophie’s arms was still a positive memory.

“And if that doesn’t work, it still might help you figure out why you’re feeling that way,” she added.

“That… actually makes a lot of sense… Thank you.”

“Anytime. Now what do you want for dinner?”

I spent the rest of the day trying to follow my sister’s advice, and it did actually help a bit. The only real hiccup was when I accidentally looked in the mirror again. The face that looked back at me was a complete stranger, though even I had to admit he looked conventionally attractive. Despite that, for some reason, I found him rather ugly. I never could put a finger on why I did, but that didn’t exactly change how I felt -- I didn’t like him.

It wasn’t until ten in the evening that the lack of our parents around started to be suspicious. When I asked Sophie about it, she told me they’d left for another one of their weekend trips about an hour before I was back from the school, and they wouldn’t be back until Tuesday around noon, which they’d neglected to tell me was happening. To be fair, it was better than before they’d decided we were old enough to stay home; let me tell you, having large amount of weekends unavailable for resting because our parents wanted to take pictures of some antique buildings in a city halfway across the country, or even worse, go mountain hiking, wasn’t exactly doing any favors to our already exhausted by school minds. They’d called it ‘active resting’, but neither me nor Sophie’d found any actual rest in it.

I still didn’t like how they’d always neglected to tell me about this stuff, like all the times I’d found out about our weekend trips or family visits on a day before basis… Sure, I wasn’t so great at communicating, but still, they were the adults, they were my parents, the people I was supposed to learn the communicating from the most, and it felt like they gave me practically nothing; and that’s not even mentioning that we weren’t even really that close if it wasn’t me who put in the effort to initiate the conversations.

With that one more thing to sulk about, I went to bed in the weird state of feeling both better and worse than before.

Saturday came, and so did Abigail, currently sitting next to me and effortlessly beating my butt at racing games. She’d always done that, but this time, it was different, and I didn’t mean the obvious thing. Abigail was the kind of person who played games a lot and got really good at them. I was the kind of person who played a lot of games and got above average at them at best. That information, combined with the fact that I obviously wasn’t doing as ‘well’ as usual, made the fact that she was still noticeably better than usual really impressive.

“You got better at this,” I barely piped in between my best attempts at focus.

“Well, it’s easier to do stuff when you don’t constantly feel like shit,” Abigail casually said as she crossed the finish line.

I was a little taken aback by the word use. It wasn’t like she never swore, but it was always very serious when she did.

Having noticed my surprise, she added. “Oh, right, I guess I haven’t explained it to you yet…”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“It’s okay, I want to.” She took a deep breath. “So there’s this thing called gender dysphoria. A lot of trans people have it. It’s basically a varying amount of discomfort when something points out stuff to do with gender or things that don’t fit who you are. Like your body doesn’t feel right because certain parts are generally prescribed to certain genders, or when people treat you a certain way only because they perceive you as gender you’re not. It can be big things that are very general, but it can also be the tiniest, silliest things that you hate yourself for even noticing. It doesn’t even need to be much to really screw you up, it can just be a barely noticeable feeling of general wrongness that wouldn’t really do that much, but it doesn’t go away, and over the years it slowly tears away at you until you feel like all that’s left is an empty shell. Apparently a lot of people even get suicidal about that stuff if it’s not addressed properly… So yeah, I’d been kinda experiencing that stuff, basically since the puberty started, if not longer; and I’d never even noticed! I just thought it was normal, because… well, it was for me… So, umm, I’m still kinda new to this, but I hope I explained it well enough…”

That was… a lot… I couldn’t even begin to imagine how something like this could feel like, even though everything she said sounded… strangely familiar… I’d probably been just noticing the way stuff affected her, even if I didn’t realize it back then. Or something. Either way, not only from what she said, but from her tone too, I could tell it’d hurt her a lot more than I thought…

“I’m sorry…” I answered.

“Thanks.” She paused for a moment. “Speaking of feeling like shit… I can see you’re still not doing too well; are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”

“I… actually am not sure of anything at this point, but yesterday I talked about that with Sophie, and it kinda helped, so if you want to…” I trailed off. She gestured for me to go on, and I nodded. “She told me to let myself just feel my feelings and see where that goes, which kinda made me realize how bad my method of dealing with stuff like that was before… You know how I used to really easily get emotional and overwhelmed when we were younger?” She nodded. “Well, at some point I just started being able to hide this stuff and push it down, though… I didn’t exactly get a choice in the matter, it just sort of happened on its own, and it meant that I could help people easier, and people like our classmates, or… my parents... didn’t give me a hard time like they used to anymore… So I just kinda… went along with it, and only now it’s catching up to me…”

“I swear, one faithful day I will stab your parents. Probably right after Sophie…” She sighed deeply. “But seriously, I’ve… actually thought about this stuff lately. I mean, when I was figuring the whole ‘being a girl’ thing, I did a lot of introspection, and… we both changed the ways we acted around the same time, but because of my dysphoria and depression, I didn’t really notice that you were changing because of the hurt too… And you not only didn’t get the mental health care you obviously needed because of your stupid parents, but also… I haven’t exactly been a great friend, I relied on you way too much, without really considering how it affected you… And yeah, you can say that you wanted to help, and I’m grateful for that, but… you obviously didn’t know how it’d end up, and, I mean, neither did I, but… I’m sorry is what I’m trying to say.”

“It’s okay. We made mistakes, but it’s in the past, we know better now, or at least, we try to, I guess.” I tried, and failed, to say something that sounded smart.

Abigail gently laughed. “Okay, you dork, what do you want to play next?”

We spent the rest of the afternoon playing various games on my Switch, and at the end, I also showed her my shiny Eevee, which we then evolved into Sylveon. After only half an hour’s discussion, we named her Cutie.

Sunday passed simultaneously very slowly, and way too fast. Turns out, there was another thing that had made a return after a good few years, and that was my anxiety about going to school. After I’d ‘learned’ how to hide my emotions, even from myself, it hadn’t really been a big issue, aside from the couple times when my less than ideal academic performance’d really showed itself.

But now, it was only becoming more and more clear just how scared I was, and of course, to make it even better, I had no idea why that was. I really didn’t want to do this… But I didn’t even understand what ‘this’ was, it didn’t make any sense, I just wanted to stay here and hide like I… used… to…

I didn’t want to be seen. There was something wrong. I used to hide a lot as a child when I became upset, or guilty, or embarrassed, or simply didn’t want to be seen. When I hadn’t wanted to bother people with my presence. It was like an instinct, it was natural for me to do that. And now I didn’t know what was happening and I was losing my defences and just didn’t want to get hurt, so I wanted to hide in a place that was safe until whatever it was that was happening to me didn’t do that anymore.

By Monday morning I was positively terrified. I didn’t even know if I could really do this, I wanted to just ask Sophie if it’d be okay if I stayed home, but I knew that even if she agreed, I’d still get a very hard time from our parents, who definitely wouldn’t understand. I did not want to deal with my parents being upset with me without my defences. But I had to do something.

I opened up my closet. If I couldn’t have a safe place to hide, I should at least have some cover. After a minute of searching, I’ve found my hoodie. Since I no longer could use my ugly body as a disguise, I needed to at least cover it up. Doing the world a favor and all that.

All could have gone smoothly, if it wasn’t for Sophie catching me just as I was about to walk out.

“Are you seriously going to walk out dressed like that?”

“Yeah, why?” I answered.

“It’s already still summer temperature outside,” she deadpanned.

“Oh come on, Abigail got away with doing that for years.”

“I’m… not sure you realize just what connection you’re making here, but… I guess if it makes you feel better… Just try not to get a heat stroke.”

“I’ll try, bye!” I said as I left the apartment.

On my route to school, I thought about what Sophie had said. I guess drawing a connection to Abigail as an excuse to justify similar actions could imply that the reasons behind why we did that were also rather close. Knowing what I knew now, it was rather easy to understand her potential motivation -- she wanted to cover herself up, because when people looked at her, they saw someone that wasn’t her, and she understandably didn’t want them to see that.

Wait.

Wasn’t it exactly how I was feeling? Not just in that moment, but for years now?

If it was, then why did I initially react literally the opposite way she did? While she started to hide, I abandoned my instinct to, instead opting to… to… use the idea that it wasn’t me people looked at as a shield. I suddenly realized that it wasn’t that different from just hiding, it just happened internally, and paradoxically looked like the exact opposite thing from the outside.

It was at the moment I reached the school that I realized I had no idea where I was going with that train of thought, so I did the totally responsible thing and abandoned it.