We were halfway up a set of stairs—a third set of stairs, down a corridor at the back of the house—when I finally worked up the courage to ask. “So… what happened to Amy?”

Noelle stopped, a few steps above me, and I almost ran into her. She looked back over her shoulder, an eyebrow lifting. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, is that it? Is she…” My voice dropped, as I imagined the worst. “…okay?”

Noelle laughed, and turned to keep walking, talking as she went. “Yeah. She got a scholarship to a college in LA, and is very head-over-heels for a girl who actually likes her back. The family stuff is rocky—I think Dad would disown her, if it wouldn’t be even more embarrassing for his ego and political prospects—but we still talk pretty often and she seems very happy.” She let out a sigh. “I’ve met her girlfriend once and she’s great. Honestly, I’m kind of envious.”

I blinked as I trailed after her. “Y-you are?”

She stopped suddenly, looking back again at me strangely. “What?”

“You… want a girlfriend?”

She whirled around. “What? No. That’s not what I said.”

“But…”

“I mean it must be great to be in a real city, where you can be out and proud and it’s not a big deal.” She froze again, thinking through what she had said. Then she shook her head. “Not that I have anything to be out about. I mean, I’m just sick of being in this shitty small town.”

“Oh. Yeah, that makes sense,” I said weakly. “And, besides, you have Dustin.”

“Exactly,” she said, crossing her arms and fixing an intense glare on me. “I’m not… I’m not like my sister. Okay? I can’t be.”

“Oh...” I said. “I thought…”

“You thought what?”

“I thought you were fine with your sister being gay.” 

“I am!” The look she was giving me made me wince. “I didn’t say it was bad, I just said— You’re getting me all confused. I wasn’t saying I had a problem with it… I mean jeez, there’s part of me that would love to be a lesbian, it’d make things way easier.”

“It would?”

“Well, I guess not easier.” She made an annoyed noise, relaxing a bit. “Wow, you’re really frustrating, you know that?”

I took a step back. “I’m sorry!”

“I guess I meant it’d make some things make more sense?” she said, more to herself than me. “No, that can’t be right either. But it doesn’t matter, okay? I’m just not.”

“Because of Dustin?”

She nodded. “Yeah.” Fondness crept into her voice. “Dustin is great. So there you go.” She rolled her eyes. “Not gay. Don’t go spreading any rumors, okay?”

“I would never,” I said firmly.

“And don’t go imagining me with a girl either,” she said, taking a step forward to poke me in the chest. “You guys are all the same. I bet you were already doing that, weren’t you?”

“N-no!” I protested. “It’s not like that. I-I mean, sure, thinking of you with a girl is… is hot, but… well, thinking of you with Dustin is just as— And I wasn’t! I swear!”

Her glare melted away, replaced with confusion. She tilted her head as she stared at my stammering and blushing. And then she smirked. “You’re a strange one, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, somewhat relieved. “I’m just weird. I know that, don’t worry about it. Ignore me.”

“Mmm.” She turned again, and walked down the hall to a door, evidently done with whatever that trainwreck of a conversation had been. 

I trailed after her as she led me into a bedroom that was huge but oddly empty. It wasn’t exactly what a high school girl’s bedroom should look like, in my opinion. Like… there should be more… posters on the walls? And one of those corkboard things with colorful pins and pictures of you and your friends from that time you went canoeing and stuff. And way more stuffed animals, obviously. That had to be one of the best parts of being a teen girl instead of a teen boy: you got to keep your stuffed animals, and they were cute and fun instead of childish or emasculating or whatever. 

Instead, Noelle’s room looked more like a place to sleep in, not really a place to call home. I wondered for a moment if she was so intent on not wanting to fall into anyone’s expectations that she didn’t allow herself to have much fun at all. But she still did have a bed and a desk and even a computer. I wondered if she had, like, cable internet instead of dial-up. Wow.

Noelle hopped up on her bed, sitting cross-legged next to a pile of books already stacked there. She gestured at the desk’s chair and I awkwardly sat down.

“So I figure we’ll start with some research. I’ll go through some books, and you can see if there’s any resources online?”

“Sounds good,” I said. “Um. Also… what’s the subject again?”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Sorry, I wasn’t paying much attention in class,” I admitted.

Noelle nodded. “Okay, well… the topic is sexual dimorphism in biological organisms. Which I know is Clark trying to cram gender essentialism down our throats. I bet he knows that it’d bug me, specifically. So I’m thinking that we dig into the ways that reproductive biology is a complex spectrum across all sorts of different organisms, and there's plenty of cases with species that operate outside of just a monogamous male-female binary.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay. Of course.”

She nodded, looking pleased.

“But also I didn’t understand like half the words you said right there.”

“Seriously?”

“Look, I’ve not been paying attention in class for a long time,” I admitted.

She let out an extremely long sigh. “Okay. Well, I guess we have to take this from the top.”

 

 

 

---

 

 

 

Forty-five minutes and a surprisingly thorough introduction to gender later, we had swapped places. Noelle had taken over on the computer, since she had a better idea of what she was looking for, while I was sitting on the bed—vaguely worrying that I was contaminating it with gross boy sweat or something—while I leafed through some science books. Though I knew I was supposed to be gathering a wide variety of examples, I had kind of gotten stuck in the first book I opened, which talked a lot about endocrine conditions in humans. Surprisingly, there were a lot that kind of blurred the lines between male and female? I had never known that sometimes people were born intersex, and in such a wide variety of ways. Like apparently your chromosomes matter in that they help determine how your body produces hormones, and those hormones change body development, particularly in puberty. But occasionally people don’t have XX or XY but XXY, or maybe there’s something else going on so that their body doesn’t produce testosterone or… It was making my head spin a bit, and I kept getting stuck on sentences that said stuff like ‘hormonal response’ and ‘binomial distribution,’ and then I’d drift off into idly wondering what my own chromosomes looked like, even if I knew that was silly. I tried to force myself to stay focused and remember the original goal: to…to…

What were we doing here?

I looked down at the pile of books. More than a couple of times while flipping through them I caught myself wondering why she even had all these on hand. She had only heard about the project today, and it wasn’t like she had time to go to the library. So where did these come from? Why did she already know so much? All together, this seemed very important to her, but… no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t quite put the pieces together as to how or why. The story about Amy made sense, and I understood her grudge against Mr. Clark. But why now? Why this particular subject?

“What are we doing here?” I said, but this time out loud.

Noelle responded immediately. “Showing everyone that Clark is full of shit.”

“Well, okay, yes, but…” I shrugged. “C’mon, everyone knows that already.”

“What’s your point?”

I let out a sigh. “I don’t know. But something doesn’t feel totally right. Like if we’re also just trying to prove him wrong without caring about the details, that approach is…”

“Like we’re not any better than him?” Noelle asked, narrowing her eyes.

“No." I shook my head. "I mean, obviously we’re better than him. But I don’t know that it’s worth devoting so much time and energy for the sake of one obnoxious bigot, you know?”

Noelle frowned, tapping a pencil against the desk. “I see.”

“One science presentation isn’t going to get him fired, and it sure as heck isn’t going to change his mind. So what’s this even about? It feels like there’s something you’re not telling me.”

The pencil tapping stopped. Her lips pressed together in a thin line as she gave me another calculating look. “For a total space cadet who’s definitely failing biology, you can be kind of smart sometimes, can’t you?”

“…What?”

She hesitated another long moment, chewing on her lip as she thought. I fidgeted, not certain exactly what to say or do, until finally she came to some decision and nodded to herself.

“I know someone,” she said carefully, “who… who was born one way, but would feel more comfortable the other way.”

I looked down at one of the books, one with a word that had been sort of lodged in my own brain ever since I had read it. “They’re transgender?”

She looked up at me, eyes widening. “Yeah.”

“Oh.” That gave things a lot more clarity, I supposed. That’s why she had said that Clark probably knew this subject would bother her. Because he would be very big into that ‘God created them male and female’ shit. He was exactly the kind of person to learn, like, two scattered facts about biology and then weaponize his authority as a teacher to say whatever he wanted. Ugh. God, now that made me sick to my stomach too. I had found out trans people existed like fifteen minutes ago and now I would die for them, because that… The idea of being stuck in a body that made you uncomfortable? Of seeing the things that would make it better, that would make you feel right, and then have people tell you that you’re wrong for existing? That was crushing. Heart-breaking. Ugh, right?!

I let myself fall backwards on the bed, letting out a breath as I stared up at the ceiling, deep in my own thoughts. I got what Noelle was going for, now. Demonstrate the way that gender got blurred, the way that variations in the human body, particularly on a genetic level, could lead to any number of outcomes. But… was this the right approach here? Because I could tell what Clark would say: those circumstances were only abnormal developments, things that were wrong. One more way to say that intersex people, and trans people too, were just flawed or diseased. That felt so wrong to me on a gut level, but… How could we prove—if not to Clark, at least to the class—that what really mattered was… Wait, what was it that really mattered?

What you wanted to matter? Could it be that easy? But if that were the case then…

I sat up again, suddenly, and grabbed a book, flipping through it to try and find a chapter I had been sort of guiltily reading before, even though it hadn’t at the time seemed relevant.

“Everything okay?” Noelle asked, still watching me with some amusement.

“Mm-hmm. I just need to find…” There. “Social construct!” I proclaimed.

“What?” She raised an eyebrow. “You need to find a social construct?”

“No, no, I… What we really want to talk about here isn’t biology at all. Not really. It touches on it, but— Actually, it’s fine because I think we can get Clark to play right into it.“ I sucked in a breath, using the time to try and herd my rapidly spiraling thoughts into a semblance of order. “Okay, so… The thing is, gender is the thing. And gender is a social construct. Like half the stuff we look at and code as ‘male’ and ‘female’ isn’t some biological difference but the way you act, the way you dress, things like that, right?”

“You mean… like how we pick out pink and blue for babies,” she said. “I was looking that up earlier—pink used to be the ‘boy’ color and blue was the ‘girl’ one, but they swapped places over time.”

“Exactly,” I said, excitedly.

She chewed on her lip. “But so what? How do we actually use that in a presentation?”

I was hopping up and down in place now. “That’s where I got an idea… So we start by playing into that. We begin our presentation talking about all of the ‘fundamental differences’”—I made sarcastic air quotes with my fingers—”that set men and women apart. Men are strong and have short hair and are… manly, I guess. Women are nurturing and refined and demure, whatever. Clark will eat that up, right?

“For sure,” she said cautiously.

“And then we turn around and show that they’re all made up. They’re fake. There’s women who are strong, too, or men who are nurturing.”

“Which means that…” Her eyes lit up, and she stood straight up out of her chair, also beginning to bounce on her heels as she picked up my meaning. “In that case, what’s wrong with letting people make their own decisions about gender and how they want to be treated?”

“Yes!” I let out a laugh that was practically a nervous giggle. “It’s not biology or science or God’s plan, it’s just people. The things that matter are what we decide to matter.”

We were both so suddenly excited, that… well, I don’t know who did it, but suddenly we were holding hands, looking into each others’ eyes in the middle of Noelle’s room as we giggled madly. I was the first one to realize exactly what had happened, and I froze, suddenly blushing as I pulled my hands back, shrinking into myself. 

“Sorry,” I muttered, ducking my head and unable to meet her eyes. “I got a little too worked up.”

What was I even doing? For a moment there I had forgotten everything. I had let my guard down. It had felt like we were friends, just two girls laughing together as they did their homework. But that wasn't the case. It couldn't be. I was who I was, and if I acted like this... if I acted too familiar with her, too weird, it'd just make Noelle uncomfortable. That was the last thing in the world that I wanted to happen.

And then my heart basically stopped as she stepped even closer to me. I felt her fingers brush against my chin, raising my gaze up to her again. She was smiling in a way that I knew was meant to be reassuring, but the sight was so truly radiant that my breath caught in my throat.

“Hey,” she said softly. “We’re good. Don’t worry about it.”

I nodded, still unable to stop blushing, but Noelle at least had the graciousness not to say anything about it.

“So then, back to research, since we have a better idea of what we need now?” she asked, voice light and unconcerned.

I cleared my throat awkwardly, pulling back and staring down at the floor. “R-right.”