LITMIR.BIZ

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wore his black hair long and loose, almost to his shoulders, swept to one side. Shade shook her head imperceptibly, watching, analyzing.

      “Didn’t ask your name, asked what you are.” This from the black player. “See, I heard you’re crazy. I heard you think you’re a girl.”

      Shade nodded. Ah, so that was it. Shade was gratified to have an answer. She had never really talked to a trans person before, maybe she should make an effort to meet this new kid—assuming he survived the next few minutes.

      Mental check: he or she? Shade made a note to ask Cruz which worked best for him. Or her. And decided in the meantime to insert female pronouns into her own internal monologue. Not that her internal monologue—or her pronoun choices—would matter to the kid who, from all indications, was seconds away from serious trouble.

      Cruz licked her lips, glanced up the street, and sighed in obvious relief: the school bus was wheezing and rattling its way up the street. Thirty seconds, Shade figured. Cruz thought she was safe, but Shade was not so sure.

      “I don’t think I’m a girl, and I don’t think I’m a boy, I just am what I am,” Cruz said. There was some defiance there. Some courage. Cruz wasn’t small or weak, but she was both when compared to the football players.

      “You either got a dick or you don’t got a dick.” The white one again. Obviously a philosopher. Shade had the vague sense that his name might be Gary. Gary? Greg? Something with a G.

      “You seem way too interested in what I have in my pants,” Cruz said.

      Shade winced. “Mmmm, and there we go,” she said under her breath.

      The bus rolled up, wheels sheeting standing water from the gutter. It was the black one (who Shade believed was named Griffin . . . or was she confusing her G names?) who shoved Cruz into the side of the still-moving bus.

      Cruz lost her footing, staggered forward, and threw up her hands too late to entirely soften the impact of her face on yellow-painted aluminum. There was a definite thump of flesh-padded bone against aluminum, and the rolling bus spun Cruz violently, twisted her legs out from under her and she fell to her knees in the gutter.

      The bus stopped, the door opened, and the gnome of a driver, oblivious, said, “Let’s move it, people.”

      Earbud boy and the two frightened freshmen, as well as the two lumbering thugs, all piled aboard.

      “There’s a kid hurt out here,” Shade told the driver.

      “Well, tell him to get on-board, he can see the nurse when we get to school.”

      “I don’t think she can do that,” Shade said.

      Cruz sat on the curb. Blood poured from her nose, and hot tears cut channels in the red, all in all a rather gruesome sight.

       Don’t think about a face covered in blood. Don’t go back to that place.

      Shade made a quick decision, an instinctive decision. “Go ahead, I’m taking a sick day,” she told the driver. The bus pulled away, trailing vapor and fumes.

      “Hey,” Shade said. “Kid. You need me to call 911?”

      Cruz shook her head. Her breath came in gasps that threatened to become sobs.

      “Come with me, I’ll get you a Band-aid.”

      Cruz stood and made it most of the way up before yelping in pain as she tried her left ankle. “Go ahead, I’ll be fine,” Cruz said. “Not my first beating.”

      Shade made a soundless laugh. “Yeah, you look fine. Come on. Throw an arm over my shoulders, I’m stronger than I look.” For the first time the two of them made eye contact, Cruz’s tear-filled, furious, hurt, expressive brown eyes and Shade’s more curious look. “I live just down the block. You can’t walk and you’ve got blood all down your face. So either let me call 911, or come with me.”

      It was all said in a friendly, easygoing tone of voice, but much of what Shade said tended to have a command in it, like she was talking to a child, or a dog. Lack of self-confidence had never been an issue for her.

      They nearly tripped and fell a few times—Cruz had to lean heavily on Shade—but in the end they made their way down the sidewalk and turned left onto the walkway that led through a gate, beneath the tendrils of an overgrown and fading panicle hydrangea bush, to Shade’s back door.

      They entered through a kitchen much like every other kitchen in this well-heeled neighborhood: granite counters, a restaurant-quality six-burner stove, and the inevitable doublewide Sub-Zero refrigerator. Shade fetched a baggie, filled it with ice and handed it to Cruz.

      “Come on.” They headed upstairs, Cruz holding the carved wood railing and hopping, with Shade behind her ready to catch her if she fell backward.

      Shade’s room was on the second floor, walls a cheerful yellow, a gray marble bathroom visible through a narrow door. There was a queen-size bed topped by a white comforter. A desk was against one wall. A dormer window framed a padded window seat.

      And there were books. Books in neat shelves on both sides of the desk, between the dormer and the southwest corner, piled around the window seat, piled on an easy chair, piled on Shade’s bedside table.

      Shade swept a pile of books from the easy chair and Cruz sat. Shade stepped into her bathroom and came back with a bottle of rubbing alcohol, tissues, a yellow tube of Neosporin, a box of bandages and a glass of water.

      “Put your leg up on the corner of the bed,” Shade instructed. Cruz complied and Shade laid the ice bag over the twisted ankle. “Take these. Ibuprofen, it will hold the swelling down and dull the pain.”

      “You’re being too nice,” Cruz said. “You don’t even know me.”

      “Mmmm, yes, that’s what everyone says about me,” Shade said with a droll, self-aware smile. “That I’m just too darn nice.”

      Cruz carefully wiped blood away, using her phone as a mirror. Then, suddenly remembering, she pulled a small purple Moleskine notebook from her back pocket. It was swollen from curb water in one corner, but otherwise unharmed. Cruz stuck it in a dry jacket pocket with a sigh of relief as Shade fetched a trashcan for the bloody Kleenex.

      “Shade Darby, by the way. That’s my name.”

      “Cool name.”

      “It’s something to do with the moment of my conception. I gather there were trees. Not the kind of thing I ask too many questions about, if you know what I mean. And you’re Cruz.”

      Cruz nodded. “In case you’re wondering, I have a dick.”

      That earned a sudden, single bark of laughter from Shade, which in turn raised a disturbing red and white smile from Cruz.

      “Is that a permanent condition?” Shade asked.

      Cruz shrugged. “I don’t have a short answer.”

      “Give me the long one. I’ll tell you if I get bored.” She flopped on her bed.

      “OK. Well . . . You know it’s all on a spectrum, right? I mean, there are people—most people—born either M or F and are perfectly fine with that. And some people are born with one body but a completely different mind, you know? They know from, like, toddler age that they are in the wrong body. Me, I’m . . . more kind of neither. Or both. Or something.”

      “You’re e), all of the above. You’re multiple choice, but on a True/False test.”

      That earned another blood-smeared grin from Cruz. “Can I use that line?”

      “I understand spectra, and I even get that sexuality and gender are different things,” Shade said, sitting up. “This is not Alabama, after all. Or it didn’t used to be. Our sex ed does not end with Adam and Eve.”

      “You’re . . . unusual,” Cruz said.

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