So Mason was looking for me, for the first time in what seemed like forever. What could that possibly mean?

My overactive imagination was more than ready to offer up a few ideas. What if this was it? What if he had finally snapped, and today, finally, he had decided that it was high time to beat the everloving shit out of his very favorite punching bag? That would be just my luck.

As soon as I heard from Ben that he was after me, I made the decision that I simply wouldn’t give him the chance. Drawing upon years of accumulated experience in fading into the background, I went full stealth-mode, using my classmates for cover as I darted from class to class during the in-between periods. I did see Mason once, waiting outside my biology lab, but managed to duck inside before he could grab me. When I glanced back, out the door, he was staring after me, grinding his teeth.

Oh yeah, he looked mad.

I couldn’t help myself. I gave him a little wink over my shoulder and a wave, taking brief joy in his flummoxed expression before I skipped in to take my seat. It was colossally stupid—that little stunt would probably result in the consequences being so much worse if I did get caught, but then again, I wasn’t planning on letting that happen. 

…And gosh, now that I thought about it, I don’t think I ever would have done something like that when I was younger. Having emotions is wild!

But also occasionally inconvenient, too. I really should have stayed solely focused on Mason for the rest of the day, making him my top priority, purely out of self-preservation. Instead, someone else kept getting stuck in my head.

Ashleigh.

Aside from the very start of the day, I didn’t have any opportunity to use my phone—all my other teachers were far too strict, and as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t risk having the chance of getting my phone confiscated entirely. If I was patient, I would have waited until after school, maybe even until I was safely at my computer at home. But Ashleigh had said she was checking her own phone today. She was waiting for me. Every time I thought about that, every time I realized how much she must be hurting, confused and alone and waiting for me to contact her… it made my heart ache all over again. 

So I spent my time in class obsessing over her, trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to say and how to say it, so I would be ready when I did get the chance. While everyone else in biology took notes on cell division, I was writing out attempt after attempt at a message for her: “Dear Ashleigh,” “Hey!” “I’m so so sorry,” all got scratched out as I wrestled with what tone to take, what to say, how to express myself absolutely perfectly so that somehow at the end of reading everything all she would still find a way to like me.

And then at lunch, I screwed up.

The plan was good: Mason would no doubt immediately head down to patrol the cafeteria, so I’d linger here in the halls while they were safely full of people, before slipping up a back stairwell. I could sit up at the very top, where no one would come, while I typed out my message to Ashleigh. Maybe she’d even be around and able to talk.

But I was too impatient. As soon as I drifted out into the hall, I pulled out my phone, eagerly checking Discord in case she had sent something else this morning. She hadn’t… but from there, it was too tempting and too easy to just go ahead and start typing a little bit, and then the words actually started flowing out better than I expected, and so I continued, and…

And then suddenly I realized the sounds of other students around me had dwindled down to silence. While I was staring at my phone, everyone else had made their way to the cafeteria, and it was just me and one other person in the hall. Just me and Mason.

I spun on my heels, my fight or flight instincts screaming at me about how nice the latter sounded right now, but before I could escape, he was already on top of me. He yanked my backpack by the handle, pulling me around to face him.

“Hey,” he said. “We need to talk.” His expression was unlike any I had seen before. That immediately scared me more than anything else: when he used to pick on me, he was always grinning like a jackass. The fact that he looked grimly serious now could only be a very bad sign.

“Uh,” I squeaked out. I weighed my chances of just leaving my backpack behind and running. But he was taller than me and obviously in better shape. If I made him chase me down, would that only make it worse for me in the end?

Ignoring my distress, Mason glanced up and down the hall. “Not here,” he growled, before jerking his head in one direction. “Someplace quiet.”

Shit. Okay, maybe it was worth the miniscule chance that I could get away. But as his hand gripped my shoulder, I realized it was too late. He started walking, pulling me along down the hall until we got to a windowless door set into the wall.

With a click, Mason opened it and pushed me inside. “Okay, hold on one minute,” he said darkly, and then closed the door again.

Alone again, I let out the breath I had been holding, but as I looked around, I realized exactly how trapped I was. He had brought me to a janitor’s closet—I guess the custodians here really did just leave these unlocked, huh?—with no other doors, not even a window. Nothing in here was the least bit helpful, not unless I wanted to brandish a mop at him, which would be so pathetic that it wouldn’t even qualify as a joke. 

The only way out was through the door that Mason himself had just closed, and I could hear him still right outside. …Actually, was he talking to himself? I could make out the rumbling of his voice, sounding more and more frustrated, but not any of the actual words he was saying.

Maybe this was it, then. I hoped Ben would say something nice at my funeral. He was the only person I knew who’d even miss me. Well, him and Ashleigh, but…

Ashleigh.

As I stood there in the janitor’s closet, awaiting my fate, I realized that there was one thing I could still do: no matter what Mason was planning on doing to me, right now I had the chance to send my message to Ashleigh. I could still do that, still accomplish this one last thing that was important to me. Maybe then my ghost wouldn’t be stuck haunting a stupid closet for all eternity due to unfinished business.

I pulled my phone out again, looking at the message that I was in the process of typing out:

AllieKitten <nya~!>: Hi Ashleigh. I’m sorry for leaving so suddenly last night—I know how much that must have upset and worried you, and I really should have stuck around to explain and talk about things rather than running away. The truth is, what you said hurt me a whole lot, way more than I think you ever intended. And the reason for that is because… Because I haven’t been entirely honest with you. It’s not that I’ve lied to you, not at all! But there’s something important that I should have shared with you earlier. I think I was scared, too—worried that you wouldn’t want to spend time with me anymore if you knew everything about me. Maybe that’s still what will happen when you hear this, but I want to at least tell you the truth. Because… I love you, Ashleigh.

So here it is: I’m transgender. I’m a girl, but… I was raised as a boy. Right now, basically everyone in my life thinks that I’m a guy. (Trust me, it sucks) That also means my body isn’t like most other girls, I guess, but I’m trying to fix that. I’m taking hormones, which are starting to help, and… well, I have a lot of anxieties about how I look, but I hope things will get better in the future, when I can live more openly as myself. It was really difficult for me to make the decision to be a girl, but it’s made me so much happier, even if no one else knows right now. And getting to spend time with you, getting to get to be your girlfriend, meant absolutely everything to me. I know this is a lot but I really hope it doesn’t change things for you. I really hope you can still see me as Allie, just like always, because that IS who I am. I promise.

I took a deep breath in and let it out again. It wasn’t perfect. My words still felt clumsy as I read them, grasping towards something but coming short… But then again, I wasn’t sure that there would ever be a perfect way to say exactly what I wanted to. In the end, all I could do would be to take the risk, to reach out, and hope that Ashleigh would be willing to do the same.

I just had to send it.

I just… had to push send.

Urgh.

I don’t know how long I would have remained standing there, staring at that unsent message as my finger hovered over the button, if it weren’t for my very major real life problem intruding once more. I practically jumped at the sound when the door to the janitor’s closet opened again. There Mason was, uncomfortably close in the cramped closet as he stared at me with unnerving intensity.

My heart thudded in my chest as our eyes met, neither one of us making a move. He glanced away first, frowning as he caught sight of the phone still in my hand. But that was enough to break the spell. If I was going to do this, I had to send it now, before he decided to, like, break my phone or something.

“Okay,” he said, voice rough. “So—”

My thumb tapped ‘send,’ and all my messy, heartfelt words shot out into the ether, winging their way across the internet to wherever they were going, probably some distant—

Mrwaohr!

We both startled at the sudden interruption, blinking at each other.

That was weird. That sounded just like… like I dunno. Like the noise cows make in Minecraft.

“Um, one sec,” Mason said, pulling his own phone out of his pocket. His breath caught as he saw whatever notification had popped up, and then he glanced up at me, looking alarmed. For the briefest moment, his eyes slid down to my phone again, but then he shook his head, as if momentarily considering something and then rejecting it out of hand. “Okay, sorry,” he said. “This is important, I’ve got to read this real quick.”

I just stared at him, my eyes growing wider and wider as something unfolded in my head.

I watched as he read the message on his phone, watching the complicated journey that his face went on along the way. He started out with a totally uncharacteristic expression of relief, a smile flickering at his lips. And then as his eyes moved back and forth, scanning the message, his breath caught and his face froze. Slower now, he continued reading, until his eyes stopped moving, having reached the end. For a moment he just kept staring straight ahead, his face paling. Then he swallowed heavily, and eyes moved up, clearly starting to read through a second time.

I was suddenly finding it kind of hard to breathe. My brain felt like a car stuck in the wrong gear, engine groaning as everything stalled out. For some reason, I couldn’t help but feel that I had been given an exceedingly simple problem—2 + 2 = ?—but yet every time that I tried to compute the answer, I just got ‘zebra.’

I kept watching as Mason opened his mouth and then shut it again. He chewed on his lip, at this obviously having completely forgotten that I was even there in the closet with him. He was just so fixated on his phone. He had to have read the message at least a half dozen times as I kept staring at him.

He took one deep breath, and his fingers shook a little bit as he started typing out something.

And like lightning, my eyes went straight down to the screen of my own phone, straight to where the Discord app was still open, just in time to see:

AshleighVee is typing…

I felt a little bit like someone had punched me in the stomach.

“Ashleigh?” I said, my voice so weak that it came out as kind of a croak.

Mason’s head jerked up, his eyes wild. “Wh— How do you know that—”

He saw the phone in my hand, and if he was pale before, now his face looked positively ashen. His eyes kept bouncing around. He met my eyes, then stared at my phone, then looked up at me again. Then he startled, looking at his own phone again. I realized now that I knew the contents of that message in exact detail. But then Mason started staring at me all over again. This time his eyes darted from place to place, looking me up and down like I was someone he had never seen before in his entire life.

“Allie?” he asked, the question so quiet that I could barely hear it over the racing of my heart.

I didn’t trust myself to speak, so I nodded, ever so slightly.

For all that Mason was significantly taller than me, for as much as I had just been certain that he was just about to beat me up, right now I could have knocked him over with a feather. I had no idea what he was thinking right now. I had no idea what I was thinking right now.

Somehow, things made less sense than ever. This was the kind of dream where any moment now I’d wake up, and in the light of day this would be so obviously bizarre and nonsensical that I’d forget about it before I even managed to get out from under the covers.

But that didn’t happen. I didn’t wake up. We kept staring at each other, totally at a loss for what to do or say next.

It just didn’t make any sense! The catastrophizing part of my brain was eager to leap to horrifying conclusions, to spin some kind of elaborate scenario where my childhood bully had just enacted some terrifically complicated catfishing scheme in order to completely and utterly crush my spirit. But… no. Even that possibility was so transparently at odds with reality that it held no sway over me—I mean, it was so obvious that Mason was just as surprised as I was with… with whatever was happening right now.

But then, what? What did it mean? What did it all mean??

I didn’t have the slightest clue where to start, which meant that it was Mason who finally broke the shocked silence.

“You’re a girl,” he said, his eyes still tracing the contours of my face, occasionally flicking back to meet my gaze directly. Somehow, the words came out hard, like an accusation—not even a hint of doubt or questioning in the statement, but as if it was still somehow my fault.

“Y-yes,” I said, my mouth feeling dry. I was preoccupied with trying to figure out how to understand what was going on. This whole situation was some big, awkwardly-shaped couch that I was trying to fit inside the apartment of my brain. No matter how much I pushed or pulled, it was stuck fast, right there in the metaphorical doorframe. But there had to be some angle where it’d fit, some particular way that I could turn this whole thing over in my head and suddenly it’d slide right through.

But what?

“You decided to be a girl,” Mason said again, his voice rough, just like before. His eyes were cold and flinty, in a way that made me shiver.

Once again, I couldn’t even speak. I just nodded.

If Ashleigh was Mason, this whole time… Well, that seemed utterly ludicrous. Completely impossible. Because that meant the reverse also had to be true: this whole time, Mason was Ashleigh. Which meant…

As if tied directly to my thoughts, Mason said one more thing, this time a question. Halfway through it, his voice broke softly, and I could suddenly see something in his eyes: astonishment, pain, and a deep, deep longing.

“You can do that?” he asked.

And then everything did make sense, after all.