duodecimal

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Tony finds him on the twelfth school day after The Incident, which is also the thirteenth day that Marshall has worn a skirt and fishnets to school, because at this point he is leagues and light-years beyond giving a fuck what anyone has to say. He is, however, afraid to go into the men’s bathroom dressed this way, which means he uses the gender neutral bathroom in the student office, which is also the bathroom Tony uses. So maybe it’s a coincidence—Marshall opening the door and coming face-to-face with Antonia Tobias Barnaby, six feet tall in platform boots, with his hair rumpled and his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his stupid pirate-looking peacoat.

Maybe it’s a coincidence.

Marshall doesn’t think so.

Twelve days. That’s about right. That would be Marshall’s luck.

“Hey,” Tony says.

Marshall shoves past him. He does not look at Tony, nor does he look at the office ladies he passes every day now, who always nod at him wide-eyed when he asks to use the bathroom, staring at his combination of button-down, skirt, fishnets, and Converse like he’s some Frankensteinian monster come to ravage their student office. He marches out into the hallway without a backward glance.

“Marshall.” God, he hates Tony’s voice. “Marshall.” A flash of Tyrian purple out of the corner of his eye: Tony’s coat. The lunch bell is ringing; the halls are swarmed; and still Tony keeps dogged pace at his side. “Oh my God, Marshall. I want to apologize.”

Marshall sidesteps a crowd of upperclassmen girls who are not pretending not to stare at him. He finds his locker. He spins the combination lock.

“Marshall,” Tony says, leaning against the adjacent locker. “Christ.” He’s panting a little. He looks like shit. Dark circles, wrinkled shirt. Twice as unkempt as usual. He doesn’t really look drunk, but then, with Tony it’s impossible to tell. Maybe, Marshall thinks, well aware of the cruelty of the thought, no one would recognize him sober.

In his platforms, and with Marshall in flats, they’re the same height. Marshall only notices because he never noticed how much shorter Tony actually was until twelve school days ago when Tony was spittle-snarling foam-flecked up-in-his-face.

“Can you just hear me out, Jesus,” Tony says. “I’m trying to apolo—”

“I don’t want your apology,” Marshall says, cold, controlled. He focuses on keeping his head up, keeping his voice steady, keeping his hands from trembling with fury or fear. “I want to watch you drink yourself to death.”

He yanks his locker open so forcefully he almost pulls the door off its hinges. It’s a barrier between them, solid, impenetrable, as he digs for his lunchbox.

When he slams his locker shut, Tony’s gone.

Marshall’s not a monster. He tastes guilt for a moment, bitter, fleeting. But only a moment. Then it turns to bile and he swallows it back.

II.

The thing about twelve is that it’s Marshall’s number. Not his favorite number. Not his lucky number. Those are childish things, frivolous and meaningless. Twelve is his number. There are twelve months, and twelve Olympian gods (not Greek gods; there are hundreds of those), and twelve Zodiac signs, and twelve days of Christmas, and twelve belongs to Marshall Gardner, factually, thank you.

He doesn’t sing. He can, but he doesn’t, because he isn’t perfect at it and as a rule Marshall does not do things he is not perfect at. But he does play piano, because he is perfect at that. And every year, when the school musical comes around, he takes off from acting and takes it upon himself to drag the old piano out of storage in the choir room so he can manage the singers’ rehearsal warm-ups.

Ms. Mab always thanks him for giving her extra time to get her rehearsal schedule ready. Marshall accepts the thanks, because it’s polite and politeness is integral to being a decent person (thou shalt not brush off the theater director who acknowledges you, especially when thou art but a lowly sophomore), but secretly he doesn’t find the music hard. In fact it’s so easy it’s deadening. He entertains himself by keeping time split up into threes and then fours and then sixes, counting patterns that don’t exist, subdividing phrases, multiplying measures. Six is a good number—a perfect number, nominally, because its divisors sum it, one-two-three. Three and four add to seven, which is another holy number (sins, weekdays, wonders of the world), so those are good too (two is good too; it accordion-folds into both twelve and six, and in general it’s duality, balance, symmetry).

Overarching, always: twelve. A bracket for the smaller parentheses of notes that he patters out with fingers bitten to the quick of each nail.

The counting keeps him company. It keeps him awake. So does the fact that he is constantly listening, with at least one ear, for Lina’s voice.

He was twelve when he met Lina. Sixth grade. All of his old friends had gone to the other middle school, which meant Marshall was eating lunch alone in the library and gradually discovering that he was very imperfect at making new friends. As a task, it necessitated 1) talking to people 2) without making them decide they dislike you 3) or deciding you dislike them, and that made it… hard. Probably it didn’t help that all the teachers called him out on the first day of class, because they knew his brother. “Brent’s such a sweetheart,” they said, to which Marshall gnawed on his knuckle and did not say no he’s really not because thou shalt not correct a teacher with a truth they will not like. “Do you like football too?” his teachers would ask, and then Marshall would have to find the most polite way to say no and come up with something else he liked, except the best he could ever come up with was books and musical theater, which always made his teachers go, “Oh,” and squint at him like they were putting him in a box: Brent Gardner here. Marshall Gardner there. Neat demarcations. Marshall likes neat demarcations. He didn’t much like the squint, though.

Evangelina Chang sat next to him in sixth grade English. She was nearly as tall as him and right in the middle of her USSR phase. She was also the only person in sixth grade English who knew how to use quotation marks properly, which meant she annoyed Marshall exponentially less than everyone else. After nine conversations (he counted; he counts these things), Marshall felt confident noting that her favorite color was green. Not that he took physical notes. He felt like that would be serial-killery. But the notes were in his head.

Most of her outfits were green. Green skirts. Green t-shirts. Lime-green nail polish. Even, rarely, her hair ties, when she put her hair up. Her pocket watch clock was also green. Copper-green. Oxidized, like the Statue of Liberty. (Or maybe it was only painted that way; the effect was the same.) The tenth conversation was about the clock. Honestly Marshall had been trying to figure out how to ask about it for a while, but he was also trying very hard to be normal and there are no conversational rules for asking someone why they carry a pocket watch around in the 2010s.

In the end, he and Lina were the first two people to finish their spelling quizzes. (Affect and effect. The number of people who still mixed them up drove Marshall a little batty.) Talking after quizzes was against the rules, both the class rules and twelve-year-old Marshall’s own (thou shalt not disrespect authority figures On Pain Of Death), but Lina was about to pull a thick book about the Soviet Union out of her backpack and Marshall knew he was seconds away from a missed opportunity, so—

He leaned over.

He pointed at the pocket watch wrapped around her wrist.

He whispered, “Why do you have that?”

He didn’t realize it sounded a little accusatory until she frowned at him.

“Uh,” she whispered back. “Because I like it?”

“Don’t you have a normal watch?”

“This one’s better,” Lina said, cracking her book open. “I think it’s fancy. My dad gave it to me.”

“I like it,” Marshall told her, a little frantically. “I didn’t mean to say it’s weird.”

“It is weird. That’s why I like it.” Lina shrugged. She made a motion with her hands that made her lime green nail polish catch the light. She said, “I guess I’m a little weird,” with more than a hint of pride.

These days, sophomore year, when he brings up the clock conversation, Lina—with their half-shave and their unpainted nails, though still with the pocket watch usually in their coat pocket—will roll their eyes and say something about how their twelve-year-old self is so embarrassing in hindsight. Which is true; Marshall can give them that; the both of their convictions that they were the only unique individuals in society was obnoxious to say the least. Still. He can’t regret it when it led to the rest of them—to Lina&Marshall, complete with the ampersand, and complete with the studying together and the group projects and the lunches out by the Ellisburg used bookstore and the way they danced like idiots to Katy Perry at middle school graduation.

The first time she ever came over to his house, he spent two hours cleaning beforehand and they did all their homework in the first fifteen minutes and then the awkwardness was tangible enough to swim in. Two years of daily-texting later Marshall sat on Lina’s bed and let her paint his nails yellow, because it’s always been his favorite color and she saw him pick the bottle up to gaze at the liquid sun inside and she wanted to and Marshall does what Lina wants. And when he looked down at his fingers shining bright bright gold and started bawling for no reason he could place, Lina held him like she never planned to let go.

A year after that he held Lina the same way when they started crying coming out as genderfluid. And he’s bad at hugs and worse at comforting crying people and he had no idea what that word even meant except that sometimes Brent said disparaging things about trans people. But Lina buried their head in his shirt and whispered, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” and then Marshall went home and opened an incognito tab on his computer and searched “genderfluid.” Not because Lina didn’t explain, but because he needed to know more than the basics. Because they’re his best friend. And that’s what friends do: try to understand each other as best as they possibly can.

And maybe he can’t understand everything. But he can try. Maybe he’s cisgender, maybe there are things he’ll never really get, but he can read articles on what genderfluid entails until one in the morning. Maybe he can’t understand perfectly how Lina feels when they get depressed, when they spiral further down than sad or tired, when their voice goes dull and thin and they come to school in the same unwashed sweater every day. But he can sit with them on the phone and listen to them talk and he can give them space when they need it and he can do their chemistry homework for them without being asked. When the Chang parents finalize their divorce, which is right when Brent decides to spend a gap year at home, Marshall can go over to Lina’s house and scream into their pillows with them until they both feel okay enough to go make root beer floats. And when he gets his license he can get them both out of their houses as often as they want. He can crank up their playlist of show tunes in the car and he can sing, flawed and off-key as he might be, because it makes them happy, and because Lina Chang is the only person he can sing with. (The only person he can sing for.) When it’s just the two of them, with the windows rolled down, belting out every song uneven and far too loud, he doesn’t even care if it’s perfect.

Sometimes Marshall wonders if he’s pathetic. Clinging so desperately to Lina when everyone likes Lina, or at least the person they think Lina is. He wonders if he’s using them, even, because people don’t like Marshall but people do like Lina&Marshall-complete-with-ampersand. Sometimes he wonders if he’s just been twelve for four years. Just a kid convinced he’s the last original person in the world, latching onto the only other weirdo he can put up with.

But he doesn’t think he’s the last bastion of genuinity, not anymore. He just thinks everyone else is insufferable. And slobby. And careless. And cruel. And so what if he thinks so? Clearly the problem’s not with him, because he does like Lina. He likes Lina a lot. The error isn’t in his functioning, then; the error is everyone else. And for a long, long time, Lina&Marshall is all he needs. His fingers spidering over the piano. Their voice rising above the rest. Their clock with its hands ticking inexorably in their pocket one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve.

(The name Evangelina has ten letters. Their middle name is Yu. Two more. When he’s twelve it feels like a good omen. When he’s twelve it feels like reason enough to fall in love.)

III.

In the first week of the freshman year musical, when Marshall first began playing the piano during warmups, he established a schedule. He doesn’t sing in front of anyone except Lina. But he’ll be damned if he misses a drama club production. So during the musicals he helps assistant-direct or stage-manage or do whatever else there is to do, which really means that he stalks around micromanaging costumes and stage crew and generally keeping the whole place on its feet, you’re very welcome. Most of the time he ends up in the green room reorganizing costumes and props. Rehearsal starts at 3PM sharp. School ends at 2:45. So at 2:50 on the dot he drops his backpack off in the green room; at 2:55 he’s in the choir room warming up the piano; at 3:00 he’s sitting on the piano bench marking any absent singers tardy.

Marshall hasn’t altered this routine a single day in two years.

On the twelfth school day after The Incident, he steps into the green room and Tony Barnaby is asleep on the props table.

Marshall’s veins flood with ice. He freezes in the doorway, backpack already half-slung off his shoulder.

The stillness in the room is suffocating.

There is no conversational script for finding the lesbian who enacted psychological torture on you mere weeks ago asleep on your shit.

In the end what spurs Marshall into motion is watching the minute hand on the wall clock tick from 2:50 to 2:51.

He approaches the way he would approach a sleeping guard dog. Frankly Tony looks the part—scruffy hair, heavy eyelids, sharp teeth, complete with a punk spiked collar. He’s curled up under his boysenberry-colored peacoat, shivering. The props (Little Mermaid paraphernalia: a trident, a crown, a fork) are stacked haphazardly under the table. This, in Marshall’s view, is the most heinous thing: that Tony not only chose to sleep on the props table, but that in order to do so he must have actively decided to move everything else out of the way.

Marshall reaches out, very gently, and takes the edge of the table.

Then he summons his marginal amounts of upper body strength and turns it on its side, dumping Tony to the floor.

“Whatthefffuck—” Tony’s growling immediately sharpens the accuracy of the guard dog comparison. “Can’t a bitch get some fucking sleep around here or—”

Sprawled ungracefully on the floor, he looks up and makes eye contact. His face flattens. It is a look Marshall’s gotten to know well over the past two weeks: the look of a person realizing they can no longer lash out at Marshall Gardner, because he’s been recently publicly humiliated, and now people feel bad.

Marshall points. “Get out of my green room.”

“You make it really fucking hard to feel bad for you, you know that? Is your name on it, or?”

“I don’t want you to feel bad for me,” Marshall grits out through his teeth. “I don’t ever want to see you again.”

Tony arches an eyebrow. “This morning you wanted to see me die,” he says, clearing his throat as he climbs to his feet. “Feels like we’re retrograding a little.” He puts out a hand to lean against the props table, misses, goes down again with enough of a crash that Marshall suppresses a wince.

He bites down on his tongue so he doesn’t ask how much Tony’s had to drink. “Get out,” he repeats stiffly, “of my green room.”

Tony picks himself up off the floor. It’s a process involving multiple wobbly handholds on the side of the table, and not involving his coat, which he’s left for dead on the floor. Without it all he has on is a short-sleeved black t-shirt for some punk band. Emphasis on the short sleeves, because Marshall can see his arms trembling.

“For your information,” Tony says, breathing hard, “Lina said I could hang around.”

Marshall’s scoff feels like breathing fire. “Lina did not say that.”

Tony scoffs back. “Ask them.”

Marshall can feel his blood pressure rising. He doesn’t trust himself to speak, just spins on his heel and marches for the door. It’s near 2:55 anyway; all he can say is that Tony better be gone by the time he’s back for both of their own goods.

The singers are gathered in the choir room, perched like nesting birds atop the choir risers. Marshall stomps up to the bottom riser and stamps to a stop with enough force that his skirt (the yellow one; the first one; his favorite one) flares around him. He crosses his arms. He demands, with diction and projection that ought to make the singers jealous: “Lina. What the hell is Tony doing here?”

Pin-drop silence. A dozen gazes on him.

Marshall and Lina haven’t spoken, beyond perfunctory are-you-okays and what’s-the-homework texts and hi-how-are-you rehearsal greetings, in thirteen school days.

Now they blink at him from the top of the risers, lips parted, cut off in the middle of some animated story for the freshmen. Behind them, Marie Song looks away from Marshall, a split-second expression flashing across her features—something between exasperation and guilt.

Marshall’s a live wire pulled tight enough to fray. “I saw that, Marie,” he snaps, and Marie glances up at him wide-eyed. But just for a moment. Marie Song doesn’t look him in the eyes these days.

With Ms. Mab who knows where, the entire room’s turned toward Marshall. Like he’s standing in his own private spotlight in the fishnets and lemon-yellow skirt he first wore to school thirteen days ago.

Suddenly the attention, the eyes, the emotion radiating off of everyone (impatience, irritation, or worse, pity) is palpable. It itches.

Everybody knows, is the thing. They all heard about The Incident. Rumors spread fast in drama club. And everybody wants to see Marshall knocked down a peg. None of it would have happened otherwise.

Marshall keeps his chin up, stares at Lina.

Lina looks at Marshall. Eyebrows drawn together. Mouth downturned. He’s known them for four years. He tastes acid a moment before they say, slow and careful, “Tony doesn’t want to go home. I said as long as he doesn’t bother anyone—”

“Great!” Marshall hisses, tossing his hands into the air. “Okay! Great!” He whirls on his heel and marches to the piano. When he flings himself down onto the bench the whole thing rattles. His face is suddenly, terrifyingly hot; there’s a tightness in his chest and a horribly ominous burn behind his eyes.

He does not raise his eyes over the top of the piano, because he knows what he’ll see: a dozen theater kids staring at him. A dozen theater kids wondering who the hell Marshall Gardner thinks he is.

(“He’s not even on the club board, Jesus,” one of the freshmen said last rehearsal when they thought he wasn’t paying attention, to which another said, “God, he’s literally a sophomore and he thinks he can boss us around,” to which the first hissed back, “Like, does he not know everyone hates him, or…”)

“It’s 2:58,” Marshall says, adjusting his glasses so he can keep staring down at the keys instead of looking up. “You have two minutes.”

There’s a general scattering amongst the singers (unprepared, of course; they always are). Marshall ghosts his fingers across the piano keys. He bites down on his lip, hard, so it doesn’t wobble. And then he runs the same scale three times in a row, frighteningly fast, fingers blurring, counting eight and eight again and eight again is twenty-four which is twice twelve which divided into three is eight again—

When he glances up again, there are two freshmen gazing unabashedly at his fishnet-clad legs tucked under the piano bench.

“I hear pictures last longer,” Marshall says bitingly, and both of them flinch away.

At 3:00, when the singers assemble, he runs through warmups so fast the notes crash and thunder over each other. The singers fumble and falter, even though they should be able to do this, even though they’ve been practicing this music for weeks, which is why Marshall feels perfectly vindicated in his disdain, and why he lets himself savor it like fine wine.

Lina’s the only one who keeps up. This doesn’t surprise him, nor does it make him feel any better.

IV.

Most of it—near all of it—wasn’t Lina’s fault. Most of it—near all of it—was Antonia Tobias Barnaby’s fault. Marshall knows that. He does know that. He’s never been hesitant about laying blame upon the proper heads. He suspects—no, he knows—that that’s part of why it happened, his laying blame in the proper place and getting the Ashwood High GSA shut down. But also just him in general. Marshall Gardner: the problem.

He knows what people think. That he thinks he’s perfect, and that he’ll accept nothing less from everyone else. It would make him laugh if he found that sort of illogic amusing. As if he’d be so exacting if he were already flawless. As if he doesn’t already know the world doesn’t spin like he wants it to.

Here is Marshall Gardner: sixteen, sophomore, the graduated quarterback’s geeky little brother. Drama kid, Honor Roll, teacher’s pet, killjoy. Homophobe, depending on who you ask. The kid who reminds the teacher about the homework. The kid who carries around a clipboard at rehearsal and gives line notes no one asked for. The kid who thinks he’s better than everyone else, who well-actuallys people, who one-ups people, who takes authoritarian control of every group project and gets near-apoplectic when someone half-asses work. Marshall, straight-edge; Marshall, kiss-up; Marshall, perfectionist.

Here is Marshall Gardner: imperfect.

He doesn’t know exactly when it started happening—the long and slow and unforgivably tight winding-up of the springs that power the gears that power Marshall. Maybe the metaphorical machinery was always there; maybe he’s always been Like This, capital-L, capital-T. He can’t tell. It’s not like he’s ever had another brain with which to compare. What he knows is that sometime between twelve and sixteen, when everyone else was loosening up and breaking down, when even Lina cut their hair and painted eyeliner hearts on their cheeks, when everyone in the grade and maybe the world started going to parties and fighting with their parents and showing their true colors—Marshall Gardner went black and white.

He didn’t sprawl out. He pulled in. He didn’t loosen; he straightened up, and he followed the rules, same as he’s always done, except more.

Lina talks sometimes about being The Weird Kid, capital letters. About knowing you’re different, and knowing everyone else knows you’re different, but not knowing why or what to do about it. For them it’s got something to do with being a girl and also a boy and thus sort of neither and sort of both. And something to do with being one of the only Asian kids in a lily-white school district in a too-well-off neighborhood in a Midwestern suburb. And something to do with the bone-deep sadness they’re always assuring Marshall they do take meds for.

Marshall listens. Marshall always listens to Lina. That’s one of the rules. In truth, though, he doesn’t really get it. He’s never felt like The Weird Kid, capital letters. He’s never felt like the odd person out, because he doesn’t really feel like a person at all. Whatever he is, it’s not something anyone else can see when they look at him—or, at least, they can only see the effect of it, not how far down it goes.

He doesn’t know what he is, then. Not inhuman, surely. Not a monster; not grotesque. But not a person. Humanity is something he doesn’t reject, but stands on the outside of, looking in.

Not a monster. But not like everyone else. Never like everyone else. Missing some integral trait that everyone else has, and that he can sort of get away with pretending he has—for the most part. His act is, like the rest of him, horrendously and nauseatingly imperfect. There are things that slip through. There are always things that slip through. But it’s better to be an unlikable person than not to be a person at all.

Whatever Marshall is, whatever’s the reason for the gears wound up in his head, they’ve been winding up tighter and tighter for years on years on years, as far back as he can remember. Keeping him in place. Keeping him straight and stiff and striving for perfect. He’s always had the rules in place. But since twelve years old they’ve been cinching tighter and tighter, noose-taut and tightrope-precarious. The holy commandments of Marshall Gardner:

Thou shalt be a perfect friend. (He’s read the psychology textbook; he’s familiar with the philosophy; he knows it’s important to go places and do things with your friends, to take interest in their interests, to learn everything about them as so not to forget anything and say something tactless or irrelevant or boring or annoying. Everything, always. That’s why he knows so much about being genderfluid, after all. And he’s not doing it because he’s in love with Lina, emphatically not, because first of all he’s never told them that and second of all it doesn’t matter if they reciprocate or not because they’re still his best friend and he still cares and he would never want to make them uncomfortable. He’s not thinking about them constantly in a creepy way; they don’t run in the back of his mind like a screensaver on a Windows computer because of any kind of romantic inclination. They’re in his head, always, all the time, because they are his favorite person in the world, because they are his only friend, and because they need someone to put them first. With their parents getting divorced, with their sister off at college, with everyone in the grade worshipping them without knowing about their depressive periods or The Weird Kid Thing—Lina needs someone to put them first.

If they seem particularly distant lately, if the texts are getting less frequent, if they haven’t been to his house in weeks, that’s all the more reason to be there for them. They need some space right now. So he’ll give it to them. He’ll give them whatever they want. That’s part of being a decent person. Being a decent friend. That’s the rule.)
Thou shalt work hard every moment of every day. (It’s not that he cares about the content of his schoolwork. In fact he thinks the school system’s warped and broken, institutionally. But that doesn’t matter, because he will have a perfect GPA, and shining teacher’s recommendations, and extra credit in every class. He does his homework first thing every Friday night, otherwise he’s a bad person. This productivity-based judgment doesn’t apply to everyone else, just him, except when it does apply to everyone else, which is when he stares at the people around him and wonders how they can be so shamelessly lazy, how they can be so careless about this, the teenagers’ day job, the only tasks set to them, and if they can be so careless here then what will they do as adults, the world is run by C students is what Marshall’s mother always says, and he won’t be one of them; he’s supposed to rise up above them, and that’s why he works the way he does. Everything done days in advance. Reading ahead in every class he can. When he isn’t ahead he can’t relax; he can’t focus on anything else; he doesn’t sleep. The only thing that comes before school is Lina, because being a shitty friend is the only thing that can make him feel sicker than half-assing an assignment, and if Lina asked he’d flush all of his textbooks down the toilet and curse out all of his teachers, but as it is he stops mid-math-problem when they video call him and doesn’t let himself work while they talk because devoting anything but his full attention to them is shitty friendship and so what if he slips behind, he’ll catch up, he always does.)
Thou shalt not let others get away with things. (The school rules he barely cares about. In middle school he went nuclear when anyone swore or talked too loudly in the halls or God forbid cheated on a test—but he doesn’t care now. What he cares about now is what’s actually right and just and proper, which is why he snaps at people at rehearsal for wasting others’ time but couldn’t care less if they cheat on their homework. It’s why he got the GSA shut down—not because he meant to, but because someone had to tell administration about the president’s habit of drinking on campus. It’s why every time Brent says something about those queers at the dinner table Marshall jumps down his throat and ends up in a fight with all three of them, Brent and both their parents, because it’s so cruel and unempathetic and immoral to say those kinds of things, and Marshall knows about Lina and he knows how it’s affected them having to grow up wearing a thousand different masks and he won’t put up with that kind of thing and it doesn’t matter if it’s just a joke or if you’re being so triggered, Marshall, God because if he stands by and lets it happen he’s just as bad, isn’t he, isn’t that how it goes?)

Thou shalt not lose track of thy lists. (When he walks through the halls it’s with blood coursing in his ears and his chest crumpling like paper as he counts assignments in his head and organizes dates and slots out blocks of time this first and then that and then he’ll have to make a list to organize the others but he may have a list already that just needs editing but he can’t remember and he can’t remember the last time he made a list of his lists so really that ought to come first even if the first assignment will take ten minutes tops—the lists come first because they always do because that’s the way these things are done and so what if it’s inefficient, it works, it always has, and he’s ahead on all of his schoolwork anyway so it doesn’t matter.)
Thou shalt remain in balance. (If he’s been too judgmental in his head, he stays after rehearsal to help stage crew clean. He doesn’t order them around. He keeps his head down and does his part. If he’s been particularly nice, if he hasn’t thought anything unkind about anyone all day, he can maybe eat an ice cream bar at home, but then he’s got to pay it forward the next day. He tends to be cruel, is the thing; he tends to be really, really nasty in his head. He just has to make sure it never comes out, and maybe, with luck, train himself out of it like a schoolteacher rapping a pupil’s knuckles. Punishment and prize. Newton’s law. Give and take.)
Thou shalt not be bad at things in public. (When the football unit swings around in gym class, the gym teacher tells him one two three times that she’s excited to see him play, see what he learned from Brent, maybe he can teach everyone else something, huh, so the first day of the unit Marshall locks himself in a bathroom stall and swallows six ketchup packets from the school cafeteria along with half a bottle of water because he swore before God and his perfect GPA that he would never play football at Ashwood, even for a grade, because he’s awful at it and he hates it and he hates Brent and he hates gym class and the gym teacher can’t make him play after she hears him vomit himself dizzy in the locker room bathroom. And he’s good enough at being sick that he’s out of school for the rest of the week, and the extra time off means he gets halfway through the semester’s psychology notes.)
Thou shalt not procrastinate. (To waste time is to be a bad person, which merits punishment, which in itself is a further waste of time, and—)
Thou shalt not waste anything, actually. (At the end of every school year he rips all of the unused or half-used pages out of his notebook to use them again, to fill up every half-inch of white space on every single page with scratch work. Otherwise he’s wasting paper. That’s what’s killing the planet, right?)
Thou shalt not delegate. (It isn’t that he thinks he’s better than everyone else. It’s just that no one can do things the way Marshall knows they have to be done, and explaining it gets him so tongue-twisted, because how can he put into words what he was born knowing? So it’s not a self-centered thing, really; it’s just easier to do everything himself. Everything, always.)
Thou shalt, however, be delegated to. (Everything, always. He’s cleaned Mab’s office four times. Whether he has homework or not, whether he can really afford to stay late during tech week or not, he says yes; he takes up the mantle; he takes the hardest part in the group project; he has to. This is a rule of being a decent person: doing things for others. Doing things the right way, because you can. Because you were born knowing how.

He was born knowing how. Not all the rules go all the way back. But he can remember teaching the girl who sat next to him in kindergarten the proper way to write her sevens, with the dash through the middle, and at the time he was five, so it was cute, not the kind of thing that made people hate him, yet.)
Thou shalt have the right human emotions at the proper times—not too much, or too often, but with a definite humanity to them. (Sometimes he isn’t sure what they’re really meant to feel like. Disappointment. Delight. Sadness. He can do anger and he can do stress and he can do satisfaction, sometimes, rarely, and everything else he’s yet to learn. But he will. He learns quickly. His grades show that, don’t they?)
Thou shalt not forget that twelve is, always and forever, thy number.

Here is Marshall Gardner. Marshall, who wants to kill himself when he gets an eighty-nine on the calc test, who sobs for an hour in the bathroom. Who snaps every time someone misquotes Shakespeare because they’re wrong and it feels like sandpaper on his skin. Who wants to scream at the people around him why don’t you care about anything, why do you think it’s so cool not to care about anything! Who has his life plotted out in highlighter-slick detail. Who still wants to cry when he remembers seventh grade and Lina’s bedspread and his fingernails painted yellow as the sun and brighter than anything he’d ever seen.

Here is Marshall Gardner: catastrophically, fearfully imperfect.

Does he not know everyone hates him? He does. He knows everything. That’s kind of the fucking point. The joke’s on them, because he hates them too. Every other fucking person in the world. Everyone except Lina. Because if there weren’t so many eyes maybe he could breathe. If there weren’t a thousand expectations hanging on his every move maybe he could finally just breathe.

But then again, Marshall thinks sometimes, when he’s lining up the corners of his papers on the desk because otherwise they make his neck itch, when he’s cross-referencing spreadsheets to make his fifth classic-novels-to-read-someday to-do list, when he’s pawing through every emotion he’s felt all day to make sure they’ve been good decent-person real-human not-robot emotions, when he lets too much of the inner meanness slip and he feels it physically like grime clinging to his skin—

Then again, he thinks, maybe not.

He doesn’t want to be likable. He doesn’t want to be liked, because he doesn’t want anything; he just does things. The decent-person struggle has nothing to do with being liked. It has everything to do with everything else. The grades. The graciousness. The grit of his own skin under his nails when he digs his fingers into his palms. The gears in his head. Golden gears for his golden perfect reputation, and because he loves the color yellow.

He works. He organizes. He cleans. He excels. He counts in twelves and twelves and twelves and twelves again. And he doesn’t waste time, which means he doesn’t want things.

And then there’s Lina.

And then there’s the note.

And then there’s everything he has, everything he built, everything everyone ever thought of him, an empire of months and gods and books and black and white piano keys, crumbling slow and inexorable through his stupid frozen fingers, and darkness painting over the gold.

At 3:17, Marshall storms back into the green room with a thunderous scowl on his face and a to-do list already clicking away in his head.

Tony is sitting on the fucking table again.

“Get off of that,” Marshall snaps.

At least he’s not lying down. Still, he looks as bellicose as ever, arms crossed over his chest. “Did I lie to you, Marshall, or—”

Marshall barks a laugh. The tremble that started in the choir room hasn’t fully left, nor has the redness in his cheeks, no matter how fiercely he pounded on the piano keys. “Yes. Not today, though, miracle of miracles—”

Tony pulls an ugly face. “Are you saying you’ll let me stick around, Your Highness?”

Marshall snaps a finger, motions Tony down from the table again, and starts putting the props back where they should be.

“First of all,” he says through gritted teeth, “it’s Your Majesty. Second of all. Fine. Lina’s word goes. One day’s accommodation of one Antonia Barnaby.”

The guard-dog snarl again, low and vicious: “Watch it, Gardner.”

And Marshall should not engage, but his face is still flushed and if he doesn’t use his teeth to bite he’ll bloody his own lip. “It’s your name, isn’t it?”

“You call Lina Evangelina? No. And for whatever reason they actually like you. We are not there. If you wanna get fancy you can go Tobias; keep Antonia out of your fucking mouth.”

“Some apology,” Marshall observes, minutely adjusting the trident so it lines up parallel to the table’s edges.

Behind him Tony splutters. “This isn’t the apology. Do you want the apology, or—“

Marshall turns to bare his teeth in a plastic smile.

“No,” he says. “But you can make yourself useful.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Sit—” Marshall points to the corner of the room. “And stay out of my way.”

And—miracle of miracles, wonder of wonders—Tony actually slumps over to the corner and sits down. He draws his coat around him like a cloak, rests his head on his knees, and fixes Marshall with a baleful half-asleep stare. Once again, Marshall does not ask how drunk he is, because that would be expressly shitty and Marshall hasn’t earned an expressly shitty moment today. Instead he goes to the costume rack and starts on point one of the to-do list, itemizing the costumes by size and color and logging it all into a spreadsheet, an endeavor that the costumes people keep claiming they will do and then not doing.

He can’t shake the tremble, nor the knowledge that someone (and not just someone, but Tony Fucking Barnaby) is in his green room watching him work. Still. He does his best. And because he’s Marshall Gardner, his best is almost (but torturously-only-almost) perfect.

He has each track of the musical memorized; he knows each prop and light cue as well as the stage managers; he knows which lines each cast member tends to drop. Lina is Ariel, because how could they be anything else, and they don’t need his help, because they were born to play roles like this, born for the spotlight, something they call main character syndrome and he calls talent refined by incredibly hard work. They don’t need his help. But he keeps an eye on them alongside everyone else—Oscar-playing-Triton who can never quite hit the low notes and Violet-playing-Flounder who’s going to kill someone racing around on her Heelys and Marie-playing-Scuttle who’s stalwartly pretending Tony isn’t around because if they ever got back together before The Incident it definitely didn’t last. All of these people Marshall can have in and out of the green room, proper props in hand and costumes carefully plotted on the spreadsheet, in ten seconds tops.

It’s his kingdom. No one raises their voice. No one touches anything Marshall doesn’t tell them to touch. Maybe every single person in drama club hates him, but at least they respect his authority. Which is all he needs or cares about.

Tony doesn’t say much. When Marie comes in he sets himself to stalwartly pretending she doesn’t exist right back, and then, when she’s gone, he says, “You’re like Stalin.”

Marshall shoots him a look. “Guess who’s going to the gulag first.”

“Holy shit,” Tony says. “Was that an actual fucking joke? I didn’t know you knew how to make those.”

“Usually I don’t waste them on people like you,” Marshall mutters, but without much malice.

Part of it is that he just doesn’t have the malice in him. He’s calmer now that he’s organizing things, scribbling notes down on his clipboard and settling cells into spreadsheets, but he can still feel the burning behind his eyes.

The other part is that Tony’s being off. Marshall has been friends with Lina for four years. Lina has been friends with Marie for three. Marie and Tony have been on-and-off for at least two. Even before the whole thing with the GSA, Marshall and Tony weren’t strangers. Which is to say that Marshall knows Tony is loud. Disruptively so. Right now his voice sounds distinctly watered down. He hasn’t moved out of the corner since Marshall made him sit.

Marshall’s only ever seen him struck this dumb once. And that was thirteen days ago, when they both finally and decisively stepped over the line.

Marshall tries to focus on the clothes hangers clicking against each other and the fabric sliding smooth over his skin as he sorts. Not the telltale tremble in his hands.

There is no way Tony came here exclusively to torment him. No one’s life revolves around Marshall like that. Marshall’s parents’ lives don’t revolve around Marshall like that. Marshall’s life doesn’t revolve around Marshall like that. His hands aren’t shaking, because he doesn’t care, and he doesn’t have anything to be nervous about—

“Hey,” Tony says from directly behind him.

Marshall almost drops Mab’s six-hundred-dollar work laptop.

He does a cartoon-character fumble to grab it and spins around, and then they’re face-to-face: Marshall reddening, Tony the color of spoiled milk.

“You guys—have a bathroom here?” Tony’s voice is strained; one hand creeps up to cover his mouth. “I’m gonna hurl.”

Marshall stares at him.

“No you’re not,” he says, even as he near-throws the laptop onto the props table. He grabs Tony by the collar and tugs him at a military clip toward the backstage stairs leading up to the changing rooms. “No you’re not, no you’re not, no you’re not—”

“Ow,” Tony says as Marshall drags him, “ow, ow, ow, hrrk—”

“I swear to God—” Marshall’s voice jumps an octave. He yanks on Tony’s collar so hard Tony almost trips over the top stair, pulls him into the tiny changing-room bathroom with the shitty broken lock, thrusts him at the toilet—

Tony’s puking before he’s even fully on his knees. Ugly-puking. Violently. Marshall shies away, clutching both hands to his chest as he stumbles back with a grimace.

Stumbles into the door, that is, which closes behind him and—true to its traitorous nature—clicks shut.

Tony throws up again. This time Marshall doesn’t hear it, as he is existing in his own private bubble of split-second silence, throat dry, heart stalling, where the only sound is the telltale click of the door locking.

The bubble pops. Marshall spins and grabs for the doorknob and pulls. The door shakes in place. The handle won’t turn.

Marshall stumbles back so fast he trips into the sink, tingling numbness already racing up both of his arms. No, no, no, no, no, no no no no no—

“Gardner?” Tony says hoarsely.

Marshall, eyes fixed on the locked door, says, very softly, “Fuck.”

VI.

Here’s what happens, in short: Marshall quits being a pessimist for about a day and it ruins his entire life. Alternatively, in shorter: Tony Barnaby happens.

What happens, in long, starts with the note, which in turn means it starts with Tony and Marie breaking up—but really that means it starts with the Ashwood High School GSA.

Freshman year: Antonia Barnaby (she, at the time) has a Tyrian purple coat, violet shutter shades, a gender crisis, and a drinking problem. She is also the president of the Gay-Straight Alliance. Marshall doesn’t know why anyone thought this was anything but an embryonic disaster, but all the same, he doesn’t mean to get the club shut down. He knows people think he meant to, because he’s Brent Gardner’s younger brother and Brent Gardner is what Lina calls a bass-boosted homophobe, so maybe he should understand why people think what they think—but Marshall is his own goddamn person and he can’t handle how insufferably short-sighted everyone is about that. It’s not, for the record, like Brent is very nice to him either.

All the same, sometimes he wonders about it, very quietly. Watching Antonia swagger around with an eyebrow slit and a glittery\ purple suit top and a water bottle full of vodka and her nails painted black. In Marshall’s view the last thing is almost the most egregious. Not really, of course, because his problem is with the drinking, but come on, if given the chance to paint one’s nails any color they wanted, without facing social backlash for it or feeling guilty as a murderer, out of every single shade of every single vibrant color in the world—who in their right fucking mind would choose black?

Barnaby. Barnaby would.

Antonia crashes through the world like it’s hers to break. Cheeks whiskey-flushed. Smile barbed-wire-sharp. Sprawling out to take up space wherever she sits. She snarls at people who call her ma’am or miss and she kisses Marie in crowded hallways without a hint of fear and she laughs louder than any of the jocks and maybe Marshall is a homophobe, without meaning to be, because Marshall hates her. He hates her with a heat formerly reserved for people who misuse there and their. He hates her smirk and he hates her voice and he hates her clothes and he hates the way she treats the whole world like a joke because she’s never sober enough to do anything but.

“You should be nicer to Tony,” Lina tells him backstage, the day Antonia shows up to sit in the audience and distract Marie even though they’re only two weeks out from tech.

“Antonia, you mean,” Marshall says, and when Lina frowns: “That’s her name.”

“She’s figuring out gender stuff,” Lina says stolidly. “Marie says it’s been… really… bad. Like, bad.” They gnaw at their bottom lip (they always do; their lips were bleeding the other day). “Plus her parents are never around.”

“You went through your gender thing with your parents fighting on the hour. I don’t see you getting wasted every weeknight.”

Lina’s look isn’t reproachful, exactly, just tired. “God,” they say under their breath, quiet, like maybe they don’t mean for him to hear it, “you’re such a dick sometimes.” And then it’s their cue and they’re gone and Marshall’s left standing backstage feeling like someone’s shot him dead on the spot and all his blood’s turned to ice.

He drops six cues in his first scene. When he’s not speaking he’s biting down on his hand, hard, worrying at his right index knuckle with his teeth the way he used to do as a little kid when he panicked. Halfway through the runthrough, Mab taps her mic and says, “Marshall, finger out of your mouth,” and in the audience he hears Antonia Barnaby snicker.

As soon as rehearsal’s over he’s at Lina’s side, fumbling for an apology he doesn’t have, breath coming too fast and too shallow, GodI’msorrypleasedon’tstoplikingmeIdon’ttrytobeadickplease—and then he stops, because Lina’s just sitting at the side of the stage, frowning down at their phone, and he says, “Lina?” and they say, exhausted, “Do you think your parents could give me a ride home?” with an unspoken I’m-so-sorry-I’m-asking slotted between every word.

“Yeah,” Marshall says, heart calming down. “Are you… okay?”

To which Lina just makes a face and mumbles something about their dad staying late at work, and Marshall watches them wind their pocket watch chain around and around and around their fingers, and he counts the links in the chain, one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve, until he can breathe again.

So that’s it: Marshall hates Tony, but Lina doesn’t. And Marshall doesn’t want Lina to think he’s a dick. And he’s not a monster, even if he’s far too cruel on the inside. And so he’d like, in the end, to say the email he sends to Ashwood administration is for Antonia’s own good. Obviously a sixteen-year-old who can’t go two days sober is having some issues. Tony needs a school counselor, honestly. So really Marshall’s being nice, if you think about it.

Except he’s not. Because the GSA only has four members and when the president gets temporarily suspended the whole thing goes down. And because whatever happens when Antonia gets called down to the office doesn’t work, because she’s still drunk out of her mind more often than not, it’s just that she used to bother Marshall to make a joke of it and now when she looks at him there’s something cold in her eyes.

Anyway. Marshall knows he wasn’t being any kind of selfless. He just couldn’t take seeing Antonia Barnaby stand on top of the world.

///

Sophomore year Antonia turns into Tony, jams Tobias into the middle of his name and starts snapping when people call him a she. Sophomore year is also when Tony and Marie break up. “For real this time.” Whatever that means. Not because of the gender thing—Tony’s still a lesbian (a fact that sent Marshall on a multiple-hour Google spiral about pronouns and gender nonconformity). Marie breaks up with him because of the drinking. Because she doesn’t like it, and he won’t stop, and so she calls it off and calls it permanent.

“Congrats,” Marshall mutters when Marie says so.

“Shut up, Marshall,” Lina says, with enough force that it feels like a brick to the face—because they’ve never told him to shut up. Brent has. Plenty of other people have. But never Lina.

To Marie, they say, “He doesn’t mean it, Marie, he’s not people-trained. Are you okay?” And then Lina and Marie talk about it, presumably; Marshall doesn’t know because he’s scowling at the floor with his cheeks burning.

“I’m people-trained,” he says out loud, but neither of them look at him, just carry on like he didn’t speak.

Tony and Marie have broken up before. Tony and Marie have broken up—at Marshall’s last count—nine times. They always get back together within the week. This time they go a full two weeks without talking. And because Lina is really Marie’s friend, and only Tony’s because of necessity and trans solidarity, this means Marshall has two blissful weeks completely free of Tony Fucking Barnaby.

Two weeks. And then Tony waltzes into the choir room right before rehearsal starts, right when Marshall’s setting up his sheet music on the piano. He’s slouching and swaggering and only slurring a little: “Have you seen Marie?”

They are not the only people in the room. Lina and Marie aren’t here yet. Pretty much everyone else in the musical is. Pretty much everyone else in the musical is now staring at the two of them—Tony, who’s strolled in almost-shouting, and Marshall, who he’s clearly shouting to.

Two dozen eyes burn on the back of Marshall’s neck. Marshall keeps his head down. He keeps sorting his sheet music into stacks. He hopes, passionately and with no small amount of irritation, that Tony will take it up with someone else.

Tony doesn’t, of course, because Tony would rather die than do what Marshall wants. He comes up and leans on the piano like he owns it. Like a bad boy in a teen movie. Hip cocked. Running his hands through his shitty undercut.

“Hey, Marshall. For the record, I don’t want to chitchat with you either. I just want to know if you know where—”

“She doesn’t want to talk to you,” Marshall says, because he’s pretty sure this is true. Even if it’s not, it’s in Marie’s best interest; God knows she can do better. Surely there are more butches in the world.

“Fascinating how that is not what I asked,” Tony deadpans, but with a definite edge to his voice.

He waits a moment longer. Like Marshall’s going to say something. Which Marshall isn’t. And Tony must get that, because he goes to leave, and as he does he puts out one hand and pushes Marshall’s carefully organized stacks of sheet music off the edge of the piano.

Marshall jumps to his feet a second too late. An avalanche of paper flutters through the air to the floor.

“What are you even doing here?” he snaps at Tony’s retreating back. “Isn’t there a bottle with your name on it somewhere?”

Tony spins around. “God,” he says, “even your insults are like… you sound like you live in the 1800s.” And then he snorts at his own joke like it’s funny, like he has any kind of wittiness in him, like he isn’t full to the brim of White Claws and stupidity and nothing else.

Marshall stands in place, hands resting on the piano keys, feeling his face color as he stares down at the paper scattered halfway across the floor. “Don’t bother me anymore,” he says coldly. “This is not my problem, okay? Marie dumping you for being intolerable is not my problem.” And that’s enough, he should stop there, but he’s trembling with fury and the rest of it tears its way out: “You being a stupid fucking drunk and ruining everything you touch is not my problem. Can’t you go get another club shut down?”

In the resulting, resounding silence, Marshall watches Tony register that everyone in the room is looking at them. He watches Tony’s face flush darker and darker. He counts the beats: one, two, three. Four, five, six. Seven—

“You’re going to wish you didn’t say that to me,” Tony says, deadly quiet.

Then he turns on his heel and storms out of the room.

Marshall’s eyes follow him to the doorway, where Lina’s frozen. They stare at Tony when he brushes past them, and then they stare at Marshall, and then they take a few steps into the room and say, “What happened? What did you say?”

Like they already know. Like they think the answer is something bad.

Marshall’s face burns. He steps out from behind the piano, kneeling to gather up his music, and he says to the floor, “Nothing that wasn’t true,” and it doesn’t make him feel better. In his head he counts five extra sets of twelve, for the five beats Tony cut off; only then can he settle his shaking.

///

Four days later he finds the note.

End of rehearsal. A good rehearsal, honestly. Smooth, as far as drama club goes. The costumes crew has finally mustered enough productivity to take the whole cast’s measurements. Everyone’s almost off-book. And when Marshall gives Marie the line notes he jotted down for her (there’s one bit she always trips over in the middle, and Mab must not think it’s important because she never calls her on it, but Marshall thinks it’s important because fudging lines could put the show in copyright danger), she doesn’t snap at him or tell him sugar-sweetly to fuck off. She smiles. Actually smiles. And okay, maybe it’s not a very nice smile, but that might just be Marie’s face, because then she actually claps him on the shoulder and says, “Thanks, Marshall.” Like they’re friends.

He doesn’t… get it, but he’s not complaining.

So, all in all: a good rehearsal. He sticks around, even after Lina leaves, to tidy up the green room, because he always does. And there it is, on the props table, tucked under Triton’s trident: a piece of notebook paper messily folded over three times.

Marshall does not make a habit of reading others’ mail. He’s going to recycle it, actually, except he unfolds it ever so slightly to make sure it’s not something of Mab’s, and then he sees the handwriting in dark green pen. Lina’s. Unmistakably.

Even then, he’s not going to be nosy, until he sees his own name.

Marshall glances back and forth, fast, and finds the green room and adjoining areas empty.

He leans back against the prop table, adjusts his glasses, and unfolds the paper fully.

He didn’t know people actually passed notes in class outside of teen movies. But that’s what this is, right? It has to be. It has to be Lina’s handwriting, too—a little messier than usual, but he’s been doing homework with Lina for years; he knows what their writing looks like. Especially offset next to Marie’s blocky letters in black pen:

lina I support you and everything but i s2g you have the worst taste in the world b/c marshall gardner is one of the most flour people I’ve ever met

first of all i’m not sure you have ANY better taste second of all i SWEAR he’s not that bad! don’t be rude!

what a ringing endorsement

i can’t help it, okay? he’s really very sweet. he’s always there for me. okay?

get a therapist queen

MARIE. GOD

look. sometimes he sings for me. okay? sometimes he sings for me & maybe that’s why.

I think you should just tell him you like him

it’s not that easy!!! i literally cannot imagine talking to him abt it!!! i would genuinely fucking die on the spot!!! how do you tell your best friend in the world that you want to make out w/ him & sometimes you fantasize abt seeing him in fishnets!!! what the fuck!!!

Marshall, standing alone in the green room with his knees suddenly weak, thinks, Oh.

VII.

Mrs. Karen Gardner calls herself a stay-at-home mom. What she means, of course, is that her husband makes enough money that she can forgo work without endangering the status of the yacht. She doesn’t actually “mom” at home. She does pilates. Or her dance class. Or whatever it is with the yoga mat. She’s up to date on Goop. She attempts every day to look exactly like she did in high school, complete with smoothing over her wrinkles and flaunting the two-decade-old maxi dresses she still fits into. Because she does still fit into them—and all of her clothes from high school. Which she still has, hung up in her closet like mounted hunting trophies.

And Lina once said Marshall shares a body type with the stick bug from A Bug’s Life. And the result of these two things in conjunction, and thoughts of Lina in general, is that Marshall actually stands in the threshold of his mother’s vast closet for a full twelve seconds. He knows this because he counts to keep himself from bolting. And then, once he hits twelve, he bolts anyway.

In his room—the last bastion of safety, order, and cleanliness left in the house whenever Brent’s home—he sits on his bed and seriously considers the situation at hand.

He’s not sure what, exactly, feels so taboo about it. It feels sort of like a rule: thou shalt not thieve clothing from thy holy mother. But it isn’t a rule; in fact, it doesn’t have anything to do with the rules. That’s the part that scares him. Not the way the idea of putting on his mother’s clothes feels absolutely, unconditionally, utterly damning. But the way that feeling comes from something else in him. Something that might have roots deeper than even his twelve commandments. Something that might be embedded so many miles down that he doesn’t know how to dig it up.

In the end he decides he’s a homophobe, and he drives to Target.

What it comes down to, as far as he can figure, is the fear that he’s about to become a fixture in some kind of 1960s anti-homosexual commercial. Here you see a small boy slipping into his mother’s closet, aware that he is doing something wrong but succumbing to the temptation to try on her high heels… That kind of thing. Of course he’s not a small boy, nor are there any heels in the equation (he’s never walked in them, so he’s almost certainly bad at it, so he won’t be wearing any). But it’s the meat of the thing. The fear of what people would think. The fear of what he would think of himself, or rather, what the cold aloof judgmental voyeur in his head would say. And God, the fear of what Brent would say. Of what words would be flung at him, sticking to the back of his neck like spitballs, making his shoulders tense up and his skin prickle.

The issue is that those words wouldn’t be true. Marshall could wear his mother’s prom dress and he would still be a cishet guy. Well—cishet excepting his embarrassing freshman-year celebrity crush on drama club senior Indrajit Chopra, because he maintains that was more of a hero-worship self-recognition-through-the-wound-up-kindred-spirit type of thing, not a gay thing. And also excepting his four-years-running thing for Lina, because they’re genderfluid, but they’re a girl some of the time, right? And when he started liking them even they thought they were a girl. Ergo it’s not gay. Ergo Marshall is not gay. Ergo Marshall is a cisgender straight guy afraid of being seen as gay, and what kind of straight person is afraid of being seen as gay? The homophobic kind. Ergo: Marshall is a homophobe, checkmate.

In his opinion this all makes logical sense. And yet it’s still not enough to drive him into his mother’s closet.

So: Target.

He’s been in a Target once. With Lina. Lina is the only person he goes places with. (Brent doesn’t take him anywhere anymore, for both of their sakes.) “I cannot believe you’ve never been in a Target,” Lina said, “I hate your fucking one-percent family,” and Marshall was inclined to agree. He drives to the same one now, half because of the memory—thinking about Lina while performing an endeavor in Lina’s interest feels auspicious, or at least he convinces himself it does—and half because it’s a little ways out of town.

In the parking lot he hits his knuckle against his teeth, repeatedly, and coaches himself: Normal person time. Normal person time. You are making a purchase. That is something normal people do. You should say something nice to the cashier. You can come up with something nice to say, right? You’d better be able to. A decent person would be able to.

He chews the shit out of his knuckle, just a little bit, and then he shoves his hand in his pocket so no one can tell.

The Target is less daunting than he feared. The only obstacle he faces is that there are no fishnets in the “pants” section, which gives him half a panic attack until he thinks to check near “leggings” instead. Rifling through womens’ leggings makes him feel more than a little creepy, but if Lina were here they would say something about the gender binary and double standards and how if they can shop in the mens’ section without anyone batting an eye he should be able to look for fishnets—and even though they’re not here to hear him say it, it does make him feel a little better, particularly when he finds said fishnets.

His fatal mistake is trying to cut the shortest, most efficient path out of Target. Because that’s a straight shot through the center of the women’s section. And that’s where the splash of yellow in his peripheral vision brings him to a full stop mid-step.

It’s somewhere between buttercup and lemon. Emphasis on the latter. At least that’s what he thinks; he’s no artist, but he’s spent enough time fixing his own costumes (to the chagrin of the costumes folks, who, if they’re going to take issue, should stop being so relentlessly incompetent) to find his way around a color chart. When he reaches into the rack, the fabric’s so silky-soft that he almost drops it. Instead he pulls it toward him to see what he’s holding—

Which is a skirt.

A nice skirt. A very nice skirt. Something even his hyper-conservative parents would call nice if they saw it on a girl his age. Not tight-tight, but not nun-length, either; he’d estimate halfway down to the knee.

Marshall twists his fingers in the fabric.

It’s the color that’s getting him. It’s like the sun. It’s the same color as the turtleneck he doesn’t wear to school anymore, because he wore it out so badly that it started shedding fuzzies behind him like a breadcrumb trail. It’s his favorite shade.

Drop it, Marshall tells his hands, but they don’t. They only start, unmistakably, to tremble.

If it were a coat or a shirt or even pants—he could wear yellow pants. Anyone can wear yellow pants; that’s no mark of bravery. People wear pink pants. Bright pink. Even guys. For fuck’s sake, Oscar Diaz wears a leopard-print coat to school. Yellow pants are nothing.

Marshall raises his free hand to his mouth and bites down on his knuckle. Hard.

The funny thing is that he isn’t thinking about Mom and Dad and their Fox News allegiance and their pointed comments about liberals and feminists and homosexuals and his theater habit. He’s not thinking about what Brent would say, either. In fact he’s not even thinking about Lina, even though he’s always thinking about Lina.

What Marshall’s thinking about is two years ago, when even through his sudden tears he could see his nails shining exactly this color yellow.

What’s drying out his throat is that he doesn’t know what this means. He doesn’t know what it means to want something this bad. To want anything this bad, but especially this. It’s like his stomach has turned to ice. Again he thinks of his mother’s closet. Aware that he is doing something wrong but succumbing to the temptation…

Lina says they’ve never forgotten the first time they put on a button-down. It was for a middle-school forensics meet. They fixed their bowtie and looked into the mirror and something clicked, one domino toppling at the start of a chain that led to their freshman year coming-out. But this—that—does that mean—does this—does standing in the middle of a Target with his hands on a lemon-yellow skirt make Marshall…

He lets the fabric spill silky over his hands, bright as the sun.

Let go, he tells his hands again, but he doesn’t.

He doesn’t want to be a woman. He doesn’t think he wants to be a woman. But he does want—he wants—what does he want?

To be pretty, Marshall thinks, swallowing against the sudden lump in his throat. I just want to be pretty.

He flips the skirt over to look at the price tag. And despite the burning behind his eyes, he actually laughs out loud.

Look, he tells his cold judgmental internal voyeur, taking the skirt off the rack and absconding into the men’s dressing room feeling rather like a thief—this isn’t up to me. This one is very solidly on God, and/or whoever set the skirt’s price at exactly twelve dollars.

Marshall is not a fanciful person. He reminds himself of this as he locks the changing room stall. His job is to be perfect. His job is not to let flights of whimsy send him airborne. His job is not to hop awkwardly around the Target dressing room on one foot as he pulls on a lemon-buttercup-yellow-skirt.

When he glances at the mirror his breath catches.

Frankly he expected it to feel more wrong. As it is, what bothers him is the hair on his legs and the color clash with his shirt (gray). Both of these issues are very solvable. Other than that he looks—fine. Good. Very good. The skirt falls halfway to his knees, just like he thought it would, and it’s exactly his favorite color.

He’s never cared much about looking good. Mostly he dresses to look professional. Button-downs. Vests. Pressed slacks and khakis. Black and white and gray, and maybe the occasional shade of blue. He’s never put clothes on and looked in the mirror and actually felt dopamine. He’s never been this taken with a piece of fabric, with the way it makes his legs seem twice as long and ten times as nice, with the incredible softness, with the color.

Slowly, hesitantly, Marshall cocks one hip. Then he cocks the other. The skirt shifts with him, swishing ever so slightly. He tries his hands on his hips, then crossed over his chest. He takes his glasses off, then immediately decides he hates that and puts them back on.

His smile startles him.

Most of the time when he tries to smile (smiling is critical to decent-personhood; thou shalt smile at friends, enemies, and strangers) he looks like he’s getting a root canal. At least according to Marie. And granted, Marie isn’t very nice to him, but she said it right next to Lina, who snorted and then immediately tried to hide their snort. Which Marshall thinks indicates it’s true.

Is this his real smile, then? This quiet self-satisfied little curve? He doesn’t mind it.

Marshall bites down on his knuckle. Hard.

Before he can stop himself, he spins. Rather, he twirls.

The fabric flutters out around him like a blossom, soft and sleek. Marshall spins until he’s falling dizzy against the dressing-room walls.

What would Brent say if he saw me, he thinks, and his real-life actual giggle is so startling that he claps a hand over his mouth.

Marshall looks down at his little red Target basket and his fishnets.

He looks back at his reflection. Sharp eyes behind severe glasses; neatly combed hair; the somewhat-out-of-place gray shirt, and the colorsplash of the skirt.

Maybe later he’ll justify it by saying that Lina already brought up fishnets and this is really only diving headfirst into that concept. In the moment he’s thinking that he does not intend to let any other person have this skirt, ever.

Okay, he thinks, okay, so I’m doing this, and the tension in his muscles eases so fast he gets dizzy.

At the checkout counter he compliments the cashier’s dyed hair, despite not liking it all that much, because first of all, he told himself he would be nice, and second of all, he officially doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to unconventional fashion. The fishnets slide beneath the scanner. Then the skirt. When the cashier raises an eyebrow, he says, “Gonna surprise my girlfriend,” with confidence and a chin raise. And Lina is not his girlfriend or his partner (yet) (?) (!!!), but that’s the only actual lie involved. He’s pretty sure coming to school in a skirt and fishnets will count as a surprise.

But they will like it. He thinks they’ll like it. They like when he likes things. They say he doesn’t do it often enough.

He likes the skirt. He likes it quite a bit. He thinks he’ll like it more once he can shave his legs and slip the fishnets on and really make the best out of being gangly and too-tall and rather stick-bug-shaped.

When he steps out into the parking lot, he’s not really thinking about Lina at all. He’s thinking about the weightlessness of the twirl and the softness of the silk. He’s thinking that he forgot how much he likes the color yellow.

VIII.

He doesn’t actually end up in detention because he gets dress coded. He ends up in detention because he argues about it. But before he gets dress-coded—Lina.

They don’t share any classes right now, nor do they have the same lunch. So during passing period, right before his lunch hour (during which he normally eats in the black box, to ignore and be ignored by every other theater kid), Marshall finds Lina’s locker and waits. Which is to say that he leans back against the cool smooth metal and stretches his legs out in front of him.

This morning he left the house in the same pressed pants he always wears, because he isn’t quite ready yet for Brent to see him strolling off to school in fishnets. He changed in the school bathroom, which was more than a little stressful; he spent ten minutes trembling in a stall waiting for the feet outside to disappear, and he spent another five minutes after that gathering the courage to step out into the hall.

The whispers have followed him throughout each of his classes. So have the stares. None of that matters when Lina looks up and sees him and their mouth fully drops open.

“Holy shit.” First they’re gaping; then they’re smiling, incredulous and open-mouthed. “Marshall? What’s—what’s the fucking occasion, what—what?”

Marshall’s smile stretches almost too wide for his face. He’s been running through one-liners in his head (he’s settled, in fact, on a tongue-in-cheek come here often?) but seeing them look at him like this is enough to make him dizzy. All of the words fly out of his head at once. He ducks his head and blushes and grins.

“Do you like it?” he manages finally. And immediately he’s kicking himself for sounding so childish—but Lina laughs disbelievingly.

“I fucking love it,” they say. “I think you look fantastic, I—are you feeling okay?” So saying, they reach up to lay the back of their hand against his forehead.

The touch nearly makes him swoon. With the two of them this close, with Marshall wired and jittering and feeling—and feeling attractive for once in his life, feeling pretty—the swirl of emotions is heady and suddenly he’s doing what he never wastes time doing, which is wanting, he is wanting, specifically he is wanting this and he is wanting it so badly that there’s a tug in his stomach and a lump in his throat—

“Marshall?” Lina waves their hand in front of his face. They look… a little alarmed, actually. “Are you—what’s happening? Why are you smiling like that? Did something happen?” They frown. “Did Tony trip down the stairs or something?”

His snort of laughter snaps him out of it a little. Lina drops their hand, Marshall regains his ability to think—and then the two of them are looking at each other and suddenly all of his tension eases.

There’s something very soft in Lina’s eyes. Something understanding.

Marshall thinks of the note. He thinks of I literally cannot imagine talking to him about it. He thinks of sometimes he sings for me and maybe that’s why.

Suddenly he knows, with black-and-white twelve-commandment conviction, that they’re fine. The two of them are going to be fine. That’s the point of all the fuss and fishnets. So that Lina doesn’t have to talk about it; so that they know he knows; so that they don’t have to be so distant anymore; so the two of them can be the way they’ve always been. So Marshall can admit, without saying so, how much he wants to close the gap between them and press his mouth to Lina’s, however chewed-up and scabbed-over their lips might be.

The world’s shrunk down to this locker and the space between the two of them. When he speaks his voice comes out soft and breathy: “I was going to tell you.”

Lina’s eyes crinkle as they smile. One hand comes up to rest on his elbow, barely a brush of a touch, and suddenly Marshall can feel his own heartbeat thudding so hard that it shakes in his hands. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s hard to figure this stuff out. I get it. You don’t—you don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to.”

“I—I do want to. I—”

The bell rings.

“Fuck,” Lina says emphatically, though they don’t drop his arm. “Shit. Marshall—if you want, I can—like—how do I make skip class sound better than—”

Marshall’s laugh is half nervous euphoria. “No! No, go to class, I just—maybe—rehearsal? Maybe we should talk at rehearsal.”

“Definitely.” Lina squeezes his arm. They flash him a grin. And then they’re gone, darting off through the crowded hallways, leaving Marshall leaning against their locker, breathing like he’s run a marathon, with fireworks going off in his head.

Even when he’s able to walk, he’s struck so dizzy-dumb that he doesn’t blink at the unkind word some junior guy slings at him, nor does he snarl at the cluster of girls who stare.

In fact, he floats through the hallway with his heart soaring and doesn’t take note of anyone at all, until he turns the corner and comes face-to-face with Marie Song.

Who stops dead in front of him and lowers her heart-shaped prescription glasses.

Marshall blinks. He thinks to step around her, but that would be—that would be rude, right? They seemed to be on good terms the other day. He raises a hand and offers her a little wave and a, “Hi.”

Marie’s bubblegum-pink-lipsticked mouth curves up into a grin. Not a kind grin, but not an unkind grin, either. More like she’s just wondering at him.

“God,” she says, almost to herself, like she’s impressed. “You’re a braver motherfucker than I thought.” Then she slips around him and keeps walking.

Marshall blinks. He whirls around to demand, “What does that mean?” but Marie’s already vanishing into a clump of seniors and—

And suddenly Marshall realizes that he doesn’t care.

He doesn’t care. He genuinely doesn’t. It’s like a weight off his chest: that he’s not wound up about this. He’s wearing fishnets and a skirt to school and Lina likes him back and all of the rules of the universe are inverted and Marie’s vague bullshit doesn’t matter because nothing can hurt him anymore.

It’s a wondrous thought. Marshall stands stock-still in the center of the now-mostly-clear hallway, and it feels like a scene from a movie, like the sun breaking through the clouds to catch him in a spotlight ray as he stands in his lemon-yellow skirt and thinks, with perfect clarity: Nothing can fucking hurt me anymore.

A moment later, a heavy hand comes down on his shoulder, and Mr. Taylor says, “Gardner. Dress code.”

Marshall startles so hard he jumps sideways. When he looks up wild-eyed, the calc teacher is looking back, gazing at him with an amused sort of disbelief.

“Dress code,” he repeats, nodding at Marshall’s legs. “This a football thing, or… what? Like, cheerleader day?” When Marshall stares at him blankly: “You should go change, kid, or I’m gonna have to write you up. Sorry. Them’s the breaks.”

Marshall blinks. “Dress code.”

“You got pants to put on? Or…”

Marshall blinks again. He frowns. “You can’t dress code me.” Cutting Mr. Taylor off: “What do you mean, dress code? I’m not naked, am I?”

Mr. Taylor eyes Marshall’s fishnets. He gives Marshall a dubious look.

“Oh, come on,” Marshall snaps. “I am not the first person to wear fishnets to school. Girls wear leggings under their skirts all the time and no one has any issue with—”

Taylor chuckles. “Well, yeah, but the rules are different for us guys, right, and—”

Marshall’s been burning with nervous energy all morning. He is also fucking invincible. “Don’t act like we’re the same and then throw some transphobic double standard at me,” he says. “That is so fucking stupid.”

The two of them stare at each other.

Marshall crosses his arms, cocks one hip, and stares Taylor down.

“Okay,” Mr. Taylor says, like he’s taken aback. “It’s—I guess it’s detention then.”

Marshall’s short-lived invincibility pops like a punctured balloon.

IX.

Marshall’s elementary school had a wildcat mascot and a behavioral reward system. Exceptionally good behavior, performed in clear sight of a teacher, won you a pawprint, a slip of green paper marked with a cheaply-inked cat’s print. Supposedly you could exchange them for candy in the office, but Marshall never turned in a single one. He hoarded them. Mint-green papers lined the insides of every one of his school folders like hunting trophies, blatantly visible whenever he opened one, the elementary-school equivalent of flashing a Rolex. The summer after fifth grade, before he went to middle school, he counted: four hundred twelve pawprints. Probably a school record.

Pawprints had their inverse, as well. Acting out got you a signature on the inside of your assignment notebook. No whimsical name, just a near military-sounding title that every well-behaved student lived in fear of. Three signatures meant a call home.

In fourth grade Maddie Graham stuck her chewed-up gum to the underside of Marshall’s desk. In full view of Marshall. His ensuing shriek was loud enough to bring a teacher swooping over—and loud enough that in the end, he and Maddie both received a signature.

Maddie Graham didn’t care. Marshall cried so intensely that he threw up in the bathroom and had to go home.

He’s never had detention.

The first thing he does after staggering away from Taylor is go to the bathroom and stave off a panic attack. He’s had two or three, and those were ugly enough in his bedroom with Lina talking him down over the phone. He straight-up refuses to have one at Ashwood Fucking High School.

And he manages to avoid it. Either by sheer force of will, or by digging his nails into his arms and trying to astral project out of his body. Even so, when he stumbles out of the bathroom his face is red and his entire body is shaking and when some guy he’s never seen shoulder-checks him and mumbles, “Queer,” Marshall thinks he might reenact fourth grade and vomit into the nearest trash can.

The second thing he does, once he’s sitting in the black box, is what he has to do: text his parents. He sends might be late coming home; I have a detention to the family WhatsApp, because there’s no use lying about it; he’s sure Mr. Taylor will email his parents. The downside of honesty is that Brent is in the family WhatsApp. Which means that about two seconds later Marshall’s phone buzzes twice, loudly, and displays:

Brent: R U KIDDING? DETENTION?

Brent: LMFAO WHAT DID U EVEN DO

Marshall slams his phone down onto the table. He considers slamming his head down as well.

It’s possible that, when the bell rings to end lunch and the theater kids stream out of the black box, Violet Green says something nice about his skirt. Marshall’s not sure, because he fully doesn’t hear her. In fact he doesn’t hear anything that comes out of anyone’s mouth for the rest of the day. Not his teachers’ lectures. Not the whispers. And not the words that splatter onto the back of his neck, just like he knew they would.

Maybe there’s some mercy in that.

But it can’t be mercy, because there is no merciful God. Marshall’s faith in a merciful God dies the moment he steps into the chemistry classroom for detention and raises his eyes from his phone—an explanatory text to Lina half-drafted at his fingers—to see a familiar purple coat.

“No,” Marshall says, stopping dead in the doorway.

Tony glances up and does a full double take. Marshall is suddenly, freezingly seized by the fear that Tony’s going to say something about the skirt—as if Tony isn’t trans, as if Tony would be the person to hate-crime him today—but all Tony does is lean back in his chair and whistle.

Marshall genuinely considers turning around and walking back out.

But Mr. Stiller’s already set up post in the classroom, laptop and half-graded assignments set out before him. “Welcome, Gardner,” he deadpans. “Welcome back, Barnaby.” (To which Tony responds with finger guns.)

Somehow they are the only two people here. Somehow. Because apparently even Ashwood’s juvenile delinquents took a day off specifically to ruin Marshall’s afternoon. Marshall stalks across the room, tense as a taut bowstring, and sits as far from Tony as possible. He pulls out his calc textbook. He opens his calc notebook. He is painfully aware of Tony watching him do all of these things, one eyebrow quirked, as if doing homework in detention is in itself mockable.

Mr. Stiller regards them both for an uncomfortably long moment.

Then he shakes his head and mutters, “I’m missing the football game for this.”

As if it’s Marshall’s fucking fault.

The impressive part is that they make it almost the full two hours. Marshall finishes his calc homework and skims through the section for next class. He means to work on psychology afterward, but he ends up opening his psych notebook to the last page and scribbling an impassionately offended letter about double standards in the school dress code. Part of him reasons that if he really made a stir out of this, he could probably get on the news. Buzzfeed or something. Brave high school student takes aim at transphobic school policy! But then again, Marshall’s parents would crucify him if they knew he owned a skirt at all. They might still crucify him solely for getting detention. In the end the whole exercise makes him, mostly, miserable.

Across the room, Tony’s put his head down on the desk and seems to have gone to sleep. Either that, or he’s hiding his phone. Marshall would like this to be the case, because he’d really like to narc on Tony right about now, but he doesn’t have a good vantage point, and if Tony’s hiding his phone he’s doing a damn good job of it. So it’s unverifiable. Just like Marshall’s other hunch is unverifiable: that the opaque water bottle on Tony’s desk, the one he sips from intermittently, isn’t full of water.

He can’t prove it. So he can’t call him on it. So they make it almost two hours in peaceful, if stiff, silence.

At 4:50, Stiller stands up. “I’m going to use the restroom,” he informs them. “I dearly hope you’re both smart enough not to win yourselves another detention in your last ten minutes here.” And then he’s gone, before Marshall can ask him to hold it until five-o’clock so he doesn’t have to be alone in a room with Tony Fucking Barnaby.

Stiller leaves.

It’s dead silent.

4:50.

4:51.

4:52: Tony throws himself down into the chair next to Marshall’s, props his head on his elbow, and says, “They did nnnnnnot give you detention for the skirt.”

Marshall doesn’t miss that he has to catch himself on the edge of the desk, so he doesn’t fall out of the chair. Nor does he miss the slur in his voice and the way he overemphasizes each word. Marshall sets his pencil down, looks Tony in the eyes, and says, “You did nnnnnnot show up to detention drunk.”

“I’m not drunk.”

It would be unconvincing even without the kick on the t and the k.

“And I’m the queen of England,” Marshall says, turning up his nose. “As if that’s not what got you here.”

Tony’s face hardens. “I’m here because I missed English twice,” he says, at a volume that obliterates any last hope he had of appearing sober. “And yeah, queen looks about right.”

“Oh, and I’m the homophobe!” Marshall snaps. Calm down, he tells himself, calm down, but he cannot believe he is spending detention with Tony Fucking Barnaby when he should be at rehearsal right now, talking to Lina, telling Lina what he should have told Lina four years ago—

“You are the homophobe. You fuckin’ hate gay people and you still dress…” Tony gestures.

“No, no,” Marshall says, like he’s talking to a small child, “look, you’re the one doing the stereotype thing. You. A stereotype is when—”

“Don’t pull that shit. Like I’m too dumb to see how you look at me.” Tony’s up in his face now, teeth bared. “I guess it’s fine for you to wear whatever the hell you want, I mean, you’re not one of the filthy homos. So who cares. But when I dress like a man, when I want to be called Tony, then I’m some delusional degenerate—”

“I have never called you—”

“Well, you make it pretty fucking clear.”

Marshall stands up and steps away. Tony steps after him, into his personal space. “Did people stare at you today, Marshall?” he says, fake-sympathetic, sticking his lower lip out in an overexaggerated pout. “Awwww. I wonder how that feels.”

“As if it’s the same, girls can wear whatever they want and—”

“You think you can do whatever you want and it’s fine ‘cause you’re, ‘cause you’re you and you think you’re fuckin’ better than everyone else—and smarter, and shit, and you just gotta show it off, right? Gotta get the GSA shut down just to prove you’re better than the filthy queers, what were you, assigned cop at birth?” Tony kicks the leg of Marshall’s desk. Hard enough that Marshall’s pencil rolls off the edge. “Like you’re so perfect and above all the rest of us—”

“Well, aren’t I?” Marshall snaps. He waves a hand at the water bottle on Tony’s desk. “At least I’m not drunk off my ass in the middle of my hundredth detention while I let my grades slide into the abyss—”

“I don’t know how the fuck Lina puts up with you.”

“Is that what this is about? You’re jealous?” Marshall crosses his arms. “Maybe if you didn’t drunk-text Marie begging her to un-dump you—”

“I don’t know how the fuck Lina puts up with you!” Tony slams his hand down on the desk and laughs out loud, an ugly incredulous sound. “Holy shit, I don’t know how they do it! If I had to pretend to like your ass I’d drink bleach—”

“Maybe you should. Just put it in your stupid little bottle and pretend like it’s water.”

As soon as he says it Marshall knows he can’t take it back. He can’t put the words back in his mouth. He can’t wipe the split-second look of wide-eyed hurt off Tony’s face.

Nor can he undo the cold and terrifyingly flat look Tony turns on him a moment later.

“Right,” Tony says, overenunciating, slow. “I’m so jealous of you, Marshall. M’just so fucking jealouuuus. Because you’ve got it all figured out with Lina. Right?”

Marshall stares him down. His hands tremble. He should apologize, is what he should do, because what he said was a step too far even if he hates Tony with everything he has—he should apologize, but Tony’s still talking and God, Marshall cannot stand him, maybe he just wants it to hurt for a little, maybe he just wants Tony to feel like shit, maybe he’d just really like Tony Barnaby to feel gut-wrenchingly imperfect for once—

“You and Lina,” Tony drawls. “Because you’ve got them all charmed. Wanting to make out with you. And see you in fishnets. ‘Cause you’re allllways there for them. And sometimes you even sing for them. That’s so sweet. That’s just so sweet, I can’t take it—”

Marshall whirls on him, barely breathing. “Are you spying on me?” he demands. “Did you read my mail, did you—what the fuck is wrong with—”

Tony tosses his head back. His eyes glitter wild and wired; his smile is triumphant, gleaming, sharp. “I didn’t read it,” he says, savoring each word. “I fucking wrote it.”

Marshall knows, immediately, that he’s telling the truth. And that—the instantaneousness of the realization—is the part that really hurts. The fact that it’s not half as shocking as it should be. The fact that it makes sense in a moment. The sudden quiet plummeting of Marshall’s stomach.

A week ago Tony stared him dead in the eyes and said, “You’re going to wish you didn’t say that to me.” Not a threat. A promise.

And Marshall thinks, Oh.

He thinks, Oh. This is it.

There’s a moment where they’re just standing there. Where all Marshall can hear is his own heart pumping in his ears. Where they’re just staring at each other. And he watches the smile-snarl on Tony’s face—primed for another battle, unprepared for a surrender—waver and peel away.

And then all the blood rushes back into Marshall’s body at once. Without thinking, he whirls. Grabs the bottle from Tony’s desk. Twists the top off and thrusts the bottle forward and drenches Tony in lukewarm illicit alcohol.

A beat of shocked silence. Tony stands stock-still, arms extended, staring open-mouthed at the stain dripping down his shirt. And for a moment—for once—he doesn’t have anything to say.

But just for a moment.

Marshall’s back slams against the wall before he knows what’s happening. His neck snaps back; the bottle falls from his hand—and then he’s pressed up against the wall with Tony’s hands on his shoulders and Tony snarling into his face, inches away, so close his spittle lands on Marshall’s face: “You know what I hate about you? You know what I really fucking hate about you? Do you know what I really fucking hate about you, Marshall, is that you’re such a fucking hypocrite! You think you’re so much better than everyone else and you look down on all the common people as if you know what it’s like—”

He’s shorter than Marshall. A good deal shorter, without his platform boots. Marshall’s never realized that. Nor has he ever seen Tony this up close, iron-tight grip on Marshall’s shoulders, eyes so wide the whites show and his breath hot and pungent in Marshall’s face and his hair dripping dark with whatever was in his water bottle and Marshall thinks, Oh my God, he’s going to kill me. He’s actually going to kill me.

“You know what it’s like to be a stupid fucking drunk? You have any idea what it’s like being in a fucking cage knowing you locked the fucking door? You have any idea, Marshall?” Marshall tries to lean back, to sink into the wall, to squirm out of his grasp, and Tony grabs his shirtfront. “You have any fucking clue what it’s like being closeted? When people use the wrong name for you every damn minute of every damn day and it sounds like sandpaper on your fucking ears but you hate yourself so fucking much that you don’t even correct them because you just want to fucking be dead and maybe if you drink enough you won’t have to think about it, do you know how that feels? Do you know how it feels having people tell you you’re going to hell for kissing girls and saying they’ll beat the shit out of you? Do you have any fucking idea?”

Marshall’s breath comes in harsh, terrified pants. He can’t speak. He can’t think. He—

Tony pulls him off the wall, jerks him across the room by his shirtfront, to the broom closet where the chem teachers store the extra materials. Marshall regains enough speech to gasp an, “Ow, ow, Tony—”

Tony yanks the door open. The closet’s mostly empty, just extra textbooks and boxes of beakers and a solitary broom and dustpan. Not even a foot deep. Completely dark.

When Tony lets go of his shirt Marshall stumbles—and Tony shoves him forward so hard Marshall staggers into the closet wall and nearly sinks to the ground.

“You wanna throw stones, Gardner?” Tony demands, voice hoarse and hysterical. “Why don’t you get in a glass fucking house for a little while?”

“Tony,” Marshall gasps, and he turns around—

Tony slams the closet door shut.

And locked.

What happens doesn’t have to happen. It’s needlessly dramatic; it’s a series of unfortunate coincidences that could be avoided. It should be avoided. It would be avoided—

If Tony Barnaby didn’t storm out of detention without waiting around for Mr. Stiller. If he didn’t walk straight home dripping wet and go for his parents’ liquor cabinet. If he didn’t spend the evening getting so shitfaced smashing drunk that he didn’t answer a single text and didn’t remember anything at all and woke up fully clothed in his bathtub the next morning nearly choking on his own puke with the world carnival-wheel-spinning around him and tears wet on his face.
If Marshall didn’t comply so responsibly with the rules of detention, tucking his phone neatly and obligingly into his backpack. The backpack resting beside the desk in the middle of the chemistry room, outside the broom closet, and completely inaccessible.
If Marshall’s parents weren’t used to their younger son’s ability to take care of himself. If Marshall didn’t have a habit of spending as little time as possible at home. If it were at all unusual for Marshall to stay hours after school. If Mr. and Mrs. Gardner worried about him.
If the janitors didn’t see the light on and Mr. Stiller’s laptop open on the desk and skip over the room entirely.
If the Ashwood High football team weren’t playing, and if Mr. Stiller weren’t interested, and didn’t slip out to watch, and if the sportscast booming over the field weren’t loud enough to block out the sound of a sixteen-year-old banging on the inside of a closet.
If, for that matter, Marshall Gardner had just done what everyone expected of him and become a football player like his golden-boy brother, thus negating everything by placing himself outside on the football field at this very moment instead of in detention for wearing a skirt and fishnets to school.
Or if he just hadn’t mouthed off to Taylor. If he’d allowed himself to remain decidedly vincible for a good thirty seconds.
Or, barring both of those things—if he hadn’t filled his water bottle up before detention and drunk all of it in the two hours since.
If Marshall just stuck to his habitual pessimism for a single week. If he didn’t get his stupid hopes up when he damn well knew better. If he didn’t want so badly for Lina to want him back. If he didn’t want so badly to be pretty.
If Marie Song and Tony Barnaby weren’t straight-up sadists. If Marie were a little worse at imitating her best friend’s handwriting and narrative voice. If Tony were a little less perceptive about how to hit people where it hurt. If they weren’t able to put aside the last messy breakup long enough to plot a prank on the jackass who got their GSA shut down and gave line notes no one asked for and lorded his superiority over everyone else in the world.
If Marshall didn’t get the GSA shut down. If Marshall didn’t give line notes no one asked for. If Marshall didn’t lord his superiority over everyone else in the world. If Marshall could handle seeing Tony at the top of the world for once. If Marshall could handle anything. If Marshall were—he thinks from the inside of the chemistry broom closet, folded up like a too-big insect, legs crossed uselessly against the need to pee, with the walls pressing in too tight for him to sit or stand comfortably and the darkness closing over his head and his heart beating so frightened-rabbit loud he can’t hear anything else—just a little bit less hateable.
If exhausted, overstressed, increasingly-distant Lina Chang didn’t forget about what he had to tell them, and forget to look for him when he didn’t show at rehearsal, and forget about him altogether entirely.

///

Marshall’s sixth grade English class read a Ray Bradbury short story called All Summer in a Day. The story of a civilization living on Venus, where it rains endlessly, nonstop, and where the sun appears only once every seven years. The story of one girl, Margot, who lived on Earth once; who saw the sun once; who misses it. Who keeps saying that her parents might take her back to Earth. Who the entire class hates, because she doesn’t act like the rest of them; she doesn’t act like a human being; she won’t accept their overtures of friendship; and what’s worse, she got to see it, got to stare up at that great yellow-gold brilliance, and none of the children raised on Venus ever have.

What the rest of the class does, on the day the sun appears for only a few hours, is lock Margot in a closet. What they do is go out into the sun. What they do is go outside when the rain stops and run around and pick flowers and celebrate the sun they have never had the chance to feel, until the rain comes back and they file back into the classroom and then they remember. They remember. And they go with hanging heads to let her out. That’s the last line of the story—They unlocked the door, even more slowly, and let Margot out.

It cuts off there. There was a movie version that the class had to watch and write some comparative essay on, but Marshall and Lina thought it was awful. They sat in the back of the classroom and giggled about the acting and wasted a bit of time, just a little, which Marshall was okay with because it was Lina and he was really starting to think they might be friends.

Which is why he felt brave enough to admit that he preferred the end of the movie: the children gather flowers for Margot, and bring them to her when they let her out of the closet, even though the rain’s already coming back down. “At least there is an ending,” he pointed out. “The story just stops on a cliffhanger.”

“That’s why it’s good,” Lina said, rolling her eyes, but she rolled her eyes in a way that made it clear that she still liked him even if they disagreed, and that meant Marshall didn’t care she thought he was wrong. “It’s good because you have to imagine it!” Gesturing fiercely, green fingernails flashing: “It’s the suspense, Marshall! It’s the suspense!”

Marshall didn’t like suspense. He liked certainty. He liked straight, concrete, orderly facts. He didn’t want to imagine anything; he wanted to know what happened.

Here’s what happens: written-story-Margot’s tale cuts off before the children ever see what they’ve done to her. Margot’s story cuts off as soon as she’s locked in the closet and the reader never sees her again. Margot’s misery never happens because the story ends and she ends with it, and however she comes out of that closet, angry or miserable or completely destroyed, exists only in the world of imagination.

Here’s what happens: that makes Margot lucky.

///

When the closet door opens, Marshall’s leaning on it, because his limbs have long since fallen asleep. He staggers out on legs so numb that he pitches forward to the ground and barely catches himself on the floor without busting his lip.

And then he’s there, crouched on the tiles, looking up at Lina and Marie, and they’re staring down at him.

Because they’re the ones who find him, Lina and Marie. Of course they are. Of course it’s the two of them who realize he’s gone, Marie who texts Tony and doesn’t get an answer, Lina who makes sure he’s not at the football game, both of them who call teachers and retrace steps and eventually come upon the chemistry room with the light still on and Marshall’s backpack sitting on the floor.

When this happens it’s 8:15 PM.

Marshall’s been trembling for so long that he’s too tired to tremble anymore. His face is red and shining with tears and his knuckle is bleeding where he broke skin biting it and there’s a dark spot on his skirt where he’s wet himself and it’s dripping warm down his legs and ruining his brand-new fishnets.

Marie and Lina stand over him, eyes huge, mouths hanging open.

“Oh my God,” Marie says, but Lina doesn’t say anything at all, they just reach out—

And Marshall pulls away.

Tangled on the floor in his stupid stupid skirt, face red, mouth screwed up, snot and tears dripping down his face, he twists away from them, bares his teeth like an animal, lets out a wet ragged breath and realizes he’s still got the energy to shake after all.

Lina’s eyes are huge and dark. They stand there, hand extended, wordless.

Marshall reaches for the nearest desk. He pulls himself to his feet, stumbling, legs starting to tingle. He staggers sideways trying to pick up his backpack, almost sags back to the floor. He doesn’t bother trying to hide the dark spot on his skirt. He doesn’t bother wiping the tears away, either. He’s shaking so hard it takes him three tries to put on his backpack.

“Marshall,” Marie says, face chalk-white, and Marshall says, “Thank you,” and when she flinches away he staggers past her for the door.

He doesn’t look back, because the silence says enough, and if they come after him, he’s fast enough to outpace them.

He walks home. Fifteen minutes in the dark. Lemon-yellow skirt glinting like a reflective vest. Wet face and wet fishnets. When he opens the front door, Brent lumbers into the front hall and gets halfway through a, “Where the fuck have you been—” before he actually looks, and then it’s pin-drop silent. And of course a moment later the silence shatters like a dropped glass, when Brent says, “What the fuck,” and their parents enter with a thousand scoldings at the ready—but all of that is a blur, a too-loud too-bright too-harsh world that slips through Marshall’s fingers, and anyway, he knew that was coming. The first moment of silence is the moment that sticks: Marshall swaying in the doorway with his face red and shining; Brent open-mouthed gaping; and the fact that for just one second the Gardner brothers are on the same page in just one way, in recognizing that this moment changes everything, always.

XI.

So here he is. Twelve days after The Incident. Still imperfect. Still wearing fishnets. And once again trying not to have a panic attack in a school bathroom.

Trying. Not faring very well. By the time his back hits the sink, his arms are numb and his face is tingling and it feels like there’s an iron band wrapped around his chest. “No,” he says weakly, “no, no no nononononono—”

“Gardner?”

“The door,” Marshall pants, “the fucking—the fucking door locked and now we’re stuck in here and I c-can’t breathe no no no no God oh God—” He slides to the floor, face in his hands, heaving for air. Not here, not here, not here, not here he is not going to have a panic attack right here and now but he can’t breathe and his heart’s flopping in his chest like a fish out of water and there’s bile swirling around his stomach and into his throat—

“Marshall,” Tony says forcefully, and grabs both of his hands.

The warmth of the touch is like an electric shock. Marshall gasps in a breath and squeezes Tony’s hands, hard. Come on, come on, come on, he thinks desperately, think think think think think, what’s the—what’s the—I know this, I know this, what am I supposed to think when I—

One thing you can feel. Tony’s hands. Dry and rough and startlingly warm. No, it’s—fuck, it’s four things you can feel, five things you can see, that comes first—Marshall’s chest tightens and he ignores Tony squeezing his hands and he forces himself to focus on Tony’s purple coat (one) and the cracked tiles on the bathroom floor (two) and the seam of light shining from beneath the door (three) and his own bright yellow skirt (four) and his yellow Converse (five)—that’s five, that’s five, that’s five. Okay, okay, okay. Four things you can feel. Tony’s hands. The tile bathroom floor under him. The tile bathroom wall behind his back. His own tongue in his mouth probing desperately at his teeth as he tries to think—

“Breathe,” Tony says, voice hoarse. “Breathe. Yeah?”

Marshall registers that he is holding Tony Barnaby’s hands and pulls away so fast he almost twists his wrist.

Tony snorts. “See? Right back to normal, you’re all good.” His eyes flit toward the door; he frowns. “You have your phone?”

Of course not. There are no phones allowed during rehearsal; it’s zipped into his backpack. Maybe the idea of being caught without it again makes Marshall twitch, but he doesn’t break the rules. The rules outclass his anxiety. He would say this, but he’s still gasping for air; his words have flown apart into jumbles; all he does is shake his head.

“Okay,” Tony says. “I’ll text Marie. Or—yeah. Yeah. Just give me—a second.” And before Marshall can inform him that Marie won’t have her phone either, Tony stands up, stumbles two steps back to the toilet, and pukes again.

It is a bad sound, Tony puking. It’s wince-inducing. But it’s number one on the list of three things he can hear. Two is the heater whirring. Three is his own panting breath calming down. Good, right, next is two things he can smell—vomit (one) / dust (two)—and then one thing he can taste—

Tony looks up from the toilet, bleary-eyed and white-faced, to see Marshall cupping his hands under the faucet to drink the tap water. “What the fuck.”

“Shut up,” Marshall says weakly, because he doesn’t have the energy or inclination to explain further. And then he sinks back to the floor and focuses on evening out his breathing and counts in his head onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelve onetwothreefourfivesixsevene ightnineteneleventwelve onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelve twelve times.

His rasping breathing billows through the bathroom, echoing off the walls behind the sound of the toilet flushing.

“God,” Tony says. “I really fucked you up, huh?”

Marshall’s hysterical laugh takes him by surprise. “I’d think! I would really think, I mean, you locked me in a closet—”

“I know,” Tony says morosely.

“And then you forgot about me!”

“I know, I know—but.” Tony raises one finger, lecture-style.

There is an appropriately dramatic pause.

“I feel really bad about it.”

Marshall inhales through his teeth. Exhales through his teeth. Forces his balled-up hands to relax. “I’m thinking about strangling you.”

“Yeah, that’d be fair. Ugh, shit.” Tony shifts to sit up and lean over the toilet again. Through strained breaths: “Sorry. About this.”

Marshall’s still thinking about strangling him. Or holding his head underwater in the toilet bowl until he stops moving. Still—he’s not a fucking monster.

Seeing Tony Barnaby miserable, with clear embarrassment in his voice and real shame audible in his words and a flush creeping up his neck, is… less gratifying than Marshall would have expected.

He should feel embarrassed, he reminds himself, near-viciously. Showing up to school so drunk out of his mind it makes him sick. Isn’t he empty by now anyway, how much did he drink to begin with, he’s looked shitty all day—

And then it clicks. And once it clicks it feels painfully obvious. “You’re hungover.”

“No shit,” Tony mutters.

“You’re in withdrawal,” Marshall clarifies. “You’re sober.”

The heater whirrs. The sink drips. Marshall realizes he’s rather resigned himself to sitting in the corner, even though it’s probably unsanitary. Oh, well. He folds his hands gingerly in his lap. His knuckle’s still scabbed over from where he bit it to hell in the closet, and so he resists the urge to bite at it again, because the last thing the current situation requires is someone splattering blood all over the floor.

“Depends what you call sober,” Tony mutters finally. “My record’s, like, two days.” He spits.

“You’ve been sober for two days?”

“S’my record. Since the other week. Right now we’re going on eighteen hours.” He spits again and adds, with violence, “It fucking blows.”

“You look awful.”

“Thanks,” Tony snarls. “Feel awful too. But the other week I got so fucked up I thought I was actually going to die. So. Sorry I look and sound like shit. I’m fucking working on it.”

Marshall can recognize that maybe he should have been a little kinder about it. Even if it’s the truth—Tony’s huddled in on himself, pale-faced, small.

“The other week,” Marshall says, “meaning…”

Tony huffs a little laugh. “Yeah. Went right home and nearly sent myself to the fucking ER.” He runs a hand through the hair sticking to his sweaty forehead. “Thought I was gonna die or have to call my parents, y’know, whichever’s worse, same difference.”

“Is that why you don’t want to go home?”

Tony scoffs. “They’re never there, m’not avoiding them. If I go home I’m gonna get fucked up again and I just…” He shakes his head. “Guess I’m just putting it off.”

Marshall doesn’t know what to say to that. His first thought—I wish my parents were never around—is one that he can recognize as unnecessary and unhelpful, but he doesn’t have anything necessary or helpful. He doesn’t like seeing Tony upset. It feels like an inversion of the natural order.

His knuckle is halfway to his mouth before he remembers the scab. He sets his hand back down. He tugs at his fishnets. New fishnets, not the ruined ones (though he rather misses those; he managed to get really attached to them in one day). He salvaged the skirt, of course, at least. He has more of them now, but the yellow one will always be his favorite, bright as the sun and soft as silk, no matter what memories go with it.

When he came home that night his parents grounded him. No taking the car; no goddamn Target runs; no more dressing like a— (insert transphobic comments here, thank you for that, Mom and Dad!). As if they can stop him. As if he can’t just wait until they’re off at work and take Brent’s car keys out of his room while Brent’s in the basement playing Call of Duty. As if he can’t change in the bathroom at school again. As if his life hasn’t shifted in its entirety in one day; as if he’s going to go back to wearing pants like he’s the same person he used to be. His life is ruined and he’s untouchable. Two opposing ideas that exist together, somehow, in harmony, woven together like threads of yellow fabric.

When he told them what happened his father scoffed. What the fuck did you expect, dressing like that? he said, jerking a thumb at Marshall’s soiled fishnets. You can’t just walk into school like that, Christ, it’s like you’re daring someone.

Well, if that’s what it is, then he’s going to deserve it. If that’s what it is to dare someone, hasn’t he been daring people for a long long time? With the everything about him? At least now he can do it on purpose.

Today’s the first day he dared to wear the first skirt again, though. And here he is locked in a tiny room again. Figures. At least it’s a bathroom on this go-around.

Tony flushes the toilet again. His voice is raw: “Are we just… stuck in here, or…”

“You texted Marie?”

“She hasn’t said anything.”

“She won’t have her phone. Rehearsal rules.” Marshall settles his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands; he might as well get comfortable. “They’ll come find us eventually.”

“Sorry.”

“At least the lights are on this time.”

Judging by Tony’s grimace, the you should be is well enough implied. Good. Marshall wants him to feel bad, but of his own volition, not because Marshall’s actively antagonizing him, because then they’re both culpable and Marshall is awfully fucking sick of feeling culpable—

“That’s why,” Tony says.

Marshall looks at him.

“However shitty I am. Seems like it’s… a lot worse when I’m drunk.”

It’s been a long time since Marshall’s seen Tony anything but. But he doesn’t say it. In part because of the culpability thing. In part because they both already know.

Tony sits back against the wall, shifting away from the toilet. They’re in opposite corners now, both of them watching the door. “Do you remember Andy?”

“Of course I remember Andrea. She was your GSA VP.”

“Yeah, you would know.”

Marshall scowls. “For the record,” he says, “I didn’t mean to get the GSA shut down. And it was not because I hate gay people, it was because I hate you specifically.”

Tony blows him an unenthusiastic kiss.

“Yes,” Marshall says, rolling his eyes. “I remember Andrea.” Andrea Drea went to Ashwood High in their freshman year, and Marshall couldn’t have missed her, because she followed Tony around like he had her on a string. They were inseparable. Almost more so than Tony and Marie. Andy and Antonia; Andrea and Tony; rabble-rousers and hell-raisers and the best of friends.

“Pretty sure she transferred schools because of me,” Tony says, sinking down against the wall. “‘Cause of the shit I said to her when I was drunk.”

There’s no laughter in his voice. When Marshall glances at him, his eyes are dark and his face is drawn.

Marshall opens his mouth to say something vaguely constructive and comes out with, “What is this, therapy?”

Tony jabs a finger at him. “Whoa, all right, you have needs-therapy written all the fuck over you. Don’t get mouthy.”

Marshall looks down at his skirt and arches his eyebrows. “Oh, now I’m crazy. Feels a little transphobic.”

“First of all, literally trans. Second of all, the person you are in those fishnets is more mentally healthy than the person you were for sixteen years before that,” Tony says fiercely. “It’s like they’re holding you together, I swear to God.”

“I guess you think I should thank you, then. Since this is all your work.”

“Oh my God, you are so fucking hard to talk to.” Tony knocks his head against the bathroom wall. “I am bored and trying not to puke and I wanted a distraction and I came up with emotional honesty, it is not that deep.”

“I don’t care if I’m hard to talk to,” Marshall snaps. “You locked me in a closet, made me piss my pants, and ruined my life. Go tell Andrea you’re sorry; I don’t want to hear it.”

This seems to be their conversational standard: snapping and then silence. All right. Fine. Marshall reaches instinctively for his phone, then remembers it’s downstairs in his backpack. Rehearsal must be near over, though. When they came up here it was almost five—

Tony employs a lengthy throat-clearing as a leadup to, “Piss your pants?”

“Marie didn’t tell you?” Marshall gives him the root canal smile. “I’m surprised it hasn’t gone around. Seems like the rest of it has.” He bites at a nail. When Tony doesn’t say anything: “I was locked in the closet for three hours and I wet myself. And then the person everyone now knows I’m super into came and unlocked the door for me. And then I went home and my parents told me it was my fault for wearing a skirt to school.”

Silence.

“No,” Tony says weakly. “Marie didn’t… tell me that.”

“Nice of her,” Marshall says scathingly.

“It wasn’t her idea. I mean—the letter was her. But she—I mean, the closet wasn’t… that was impulse. And I’m the one who, who brought it up to her. Doing… something. To you. After what you—I guess I just—”

“Trust me that I know where to assign blame,” Marshall says tightly.

Another pause.

“Well,” Tony says finally. “I am sorry. I didn’t—I didn’t mean for it to be…” He exhales. “I’m sorry. Like, really, actually sorry. I don’t think… it means that much, though, huh?”

No, Marshall thinks, it doesn’t, but his lips feel frozen together. Suddenly the burn is back behind his eyes.

He balls his hands up in his lap. It doesn’t stop the tremble.

After that they sit in silence for one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve minutes (maybe shorter, maybe longer, without his phone it’s impossible to tell, but he wants to think it’s twelve) until Lina opens the door.

XII.

Here they are again: Lina standing in the doorway, and Marie hovering a few feet behind them, and Marshall sitting on the floor. He doesn’t fail to note the parallels. Neither does Lina, it seems, because they beeline right to him and put out their hand to help him up and, once he’s standing, they look him right in the eyes and say, “Are you okay?”

And Marshall looks away.

Don’t look at me like that, he wants to say. With Marie and Tony right there. Like I’m made of glass. He can still taste acid on his tongue; he can remember the feeling of his lungs gone flat in his chest. He hates the pity in the question, because he’s earned it. Because he just had a goddamn panic attack about a stupid locked door. Because Lina has every reason to watch him like he’s about to shatter.

“I’m fine,” he says, brushing his skirt off and brushing past Lina. In the doorway he pauses, just for a moment, to offer over his shoulder a painfully stiff, “Feel better.” Tony, who’s getting unsteadily to his feet, looks up, but Marshall doesn’t make eye contact, just storms out of the bathroom and back to the green room.

Lina follows him at a shadow’s-length. It’s quiet backstage, abandoned; he can hear a few people knocking around in the auditorium, gathering up their backpacks to leave, but there’s no one left in the green room. When he regains his phone, the display informs him it’s five-fifteen.

No one seems to have come in while he’s been gone. (Either they assumed he had everything handled, or they glanced in, noted his absence, and—what? Felt grateful? Exhaled a relieved breath?) It’s no more disheveled here than it was when he yanked Tony upstairs. Even so, Marshall starts reorganizing the props.

“You don’t have to stay,” Lina says. “Mab said we can go home.”

“It’s fine.”

“I can clean up.”

“It will make me calmer,” Marshall says through his teeth. He aligns the edge of the trident with the table. He aligns it again, because it doesn’t look right. And then he aligns it once more, until it’s as parallel as possible, and he watches the hand extended over the table shake like it doesn’t belong to him.

When he turns around, Lina’s leaning against the wall, casual as an action-movie hero, arms crossed, dark eyes trained on him. Lips bitten to hell and beaded with blood. Winding the chain of their pocket watch around and around and around their fingers.

“Okay,” they say evenly. “Let’s have it out.”

Marshall’s teeth are still gritted. His jaw hurts. He manages to raise an eyebrow.

“I said let’s have it out.”

“Have what out?”

“Why you’re upset at me,” Lina says. “You’ve barely talked to me in two weeks.” They wave a hand. “Which is ironic! I know! Usually I’m the one who gets avoidant when my brain gets all shitty. But here we are, comrade.”

Marshall’s known Lina for four years. He’s never seen them willingly start a probing emotional conversation. Well, when they came out, maybe, but even then they tried to play it off as a joke. (Literally. They opened with knock, knock—who’s there—genderfluid. …guess what!) Generally they avoid talking about feelings the way Elizabethan Englishmen avoided the plague. “You hate having things out.”

“Yeah, I really do,” Lina says, tucking their pocket watch into their coat. “But I also miss you. And it looks like you’re not gonna come to me.”

Marshall looks back at the props table. He plucks up a loose piece of costume fuzz and flicks it into the trash. He considers realigning the trident.

“If you’re mad at me for not finding you earlier,” Lina says, infuriatingly calm, “you should be. You really should be. It’s my fault, Marshall, and I’m really really sorry. Can we talk about it please so—”

Marshall spins. “I’m not mad at you for not finding me,” he says irritably, even as he’s telling himself to bite the words back, even as he can feel the tremble starting up in his hands again. “I didn’t even tell you I had detention. Because I was embarrassed. It was like I stood you up, which was expressly shitty of me, which makes it not your fault, actually—”

“Then what—”

The words burst out: “I’m mad at you because you told Marie I sing to you!”

Lina blinks, brow furrowed.

“The letter,” Marshall grits. “You told her—”

“I didn’t write the letter. I didn’t know the letter existed until Marie told me, I swear to God—”

“I know you didn’t write the letter—but you told her! She wrote that! In your handwriting! That I sing to you! Which means you must have told her that!” He’s gesturing like a crazy person, like he’s come completely unhinged, like he’s totally lost it, like he can’t control his own limbs, and he almost can’t; he just keeps flailing his hands like maybe that will make them understand and stop the burning behind his eyes— “Why did you tell her that?”

Lina looks taken aback. Their voice verges on frustrated: “I’m sorry I didn’t realize literally anything I said out loud could be used against you in a forged document—”

“That was private,” Marshall says. Desperate. Near pleading. “Why would you tell her that?”

Because try as he might—and he has tried, over and over in the hours spent in the closet, over and over in the hours since—he can’t imagine it as anything but the foreground to laughter. Maybe Marie started it (God, I don’t know how you stand Marshall, has he ever had fun) and Lina was defending him (well, actually, he has and I know because…) or maybe Lina brought it up of their own volition. But he cannot see it as anything but a punch line. Marie and Lina, leaning in nearly close enough to knock their heads together, breathless with it. Are you serious? / Of course I’m serious. / He sings? / He belts. / No way. / Broadway show tunes. In the car. On my honor. And their shared laughter, their breath mingling, their unbidden giggles bursting out at the thought of it—

He looks at Lina and he knows he’s right. They don’t look ashamed. They look guilty, a little bit—but mostly they just look sad. And that’s worse.

“Why would you tell her that?” Marshall repeats, far softer, fighting the lump in his throat. “You know she doesn’t like me.”

“I wanted her to,” Lina says, equally soft. “I thought—I don’t know. I guess I thought, maybe if she knew you liked things, maybe if she knew why I like you—if she could just see you were a person—”

Marshall bites back a hysterical laugh. His voice ricochets up again: “Well, maybe I don’t want Marie Song to see me as a person! Maybe she doesn’t get to see me as a person, did you ever think of that?”

“Well, maybe that’s why I’m your only friend, did you ever think of that?” Lina snarls back. “And maybe that’s why I worry about you! Did you ever think of that? Ever come up with that one?”

Incredulous: “Worry about me!”

“Yeah! Because I’m your only friend! Because I’m the only person who gets—” With aggressive air quotes. “—to see you as a person! Because I’m your only friend and I’m not even a good one, half the time I’m off the map and the other half I’m asking you for favors and nobody else likes you because you don’t like anybody else and so it’s just me! Don’t you think that stresses me out? That you don’t have anyone else to talk to?” Lina tosses their hands into the air with a disbelieving half-smile. “And you put all this pressure on yourself, and you try to do everything all the time, and you don’t have any other friends! I’m sorry I wanted my other friends to be your friends so you actually have friends that aren’t shitty-all-over-the-place so maybe you can calm down for once in your life! But then that got fucked up and you got locked in an actual fucking closet and—why wouldn’t I worry about you, Marshall? Why not?”

“I don’t want you to worry about me,” Marshall screams, “because I am perfectly fine!”

In the resulting, resounding silence, Marshall watches Lina’s face fall. He watches the bitter smile vanish. He watches sadness overtake their expression again, and he registers that he’s gasping for breath, and he counts the beats: one, two, three, four, five—

Lina opens their arms.

Marshall takes two steps forward and collapses into them. He’s bawling as soon as they touch.

Lina wraps their arms around him, tight, enveloping, like they never plan to let go.

And Marshall’s crying for the first time in thirteen days, but really, he’s sobbing like he hasn’t sobbed in years. Face screwed up and flushed red. Mouth frozen half-open. Horrible little animal sounds coming out of his mouth, half-screams muffled into Lina’s shoulder. Shaking from head to toe, every part of his body, like he’s going to start breaking apart.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.” That’s what he says over and over into Lina’s sweater, what he’s repeating before he even knows he’s talking. And the irony is that he doesn’t even know what he means by it, not when there are so many things he could mean, not when there are so many things he doesn’t know. I don’t know why I’m crying. I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know how to feel better. I don’t know how to be a person. I don’t know why I’m like this, but I think it’s my fault— He doesn’t know which he means, so he just says it over and over, helplessly, uncontrollably, as he sobs: “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Lina doesn’t say anything. They just hold him. Tighter than anyone’s ever held him. Tight as the gears wound up inside their pocket watch; tight as the gears wound up inside his head.

At some point he becomes aware that they’re on the floor, that Lina stepped back until they stood against the wall and then sort of slid to the ground, Marshall in their lap, their arms wrapped around his shoulders. He rubs uselessly at his face. Through his choked racking sobs: “I’m s—”

“Don’t say you’re sorry,” Lina says, pleasantly and warningly and very very gently. “I’ll break your neck.”

Marshall’s attempt at a laugh is a watery sniffle.

Lina rests their head on his shoulder, pulls him in close. “I don’t know either,” they murmur into his ear. “I wish I could tell you, though.”

When it prompts a fresh wave of tears, all Lina does is stroke his hair.

“Thank you,” Marshall whispers finally, when he’s able to speak.

Lina pulls his hand gently away from his mouth, so he doesn’t bite down on his scab, and says, very softly, “Is it okay for me to tell you I love you?”

Marshall sniffles again. “What do you think I am,” he says, wiping ineffectively at his nose, “an incel?”

“I don’t want to be tone-deaf.”

“I love you too,” Marshall mumbles, folding further into their side. Haltingly: “Marie… told you.” And he knew that, he did know that, but it still puts a pit in his stomach. That he didn’t tell Lina for four years, and now they know anyway.

“She showed me the letter. I mean—I made her. I was… I’m pretty mad at her, Marshall.”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“She knows.” A laugh, without humor. “Just because we don’t fight in public doesn’t mean I’m not mad at her. Trust me.” They run their fingers through his hair again. “I’m… sorry. I wish I’d known. I hate to think I… led you on.”

“I’m not an incel,” Marshall repeats, a little indignantly, or as indignantly as he really can sound when he’s still this stuffed-up. “It’s not—Lina, you don’t owe me anything—”

“I thought you were going to come out,” Lina says. “When you—I mean, I—I have trans brainrot. But I thought you wanted to talk to me because… well…”

Marshall, crumpled in her lap, kicks one leg out so they can both look at his fishnets.

“I don’t know,” he says, staring at the floor so hard the tiles blur. “I don’t—I don’t think—I mean, I think I’m a cis… het… guy. I just… I don’t know. I don’t know, I wish I did, but…”

“Hey. Hey. Nothing wrong with that. Seriously, Marshall, you don’t have to know anything.” Lina pats his head, a little frantically, like they’re trying to head off another spell of panic. Which is good, because he’s feeling it, gripping his chest with tight claws, and he breathes into their shirt until it passes.

And then, very carefully, they say, “Although… I mean, you do… did?… like… me.”

“Do. Not that that changes anything. And… I know, and I wondered if maybe… I mean, I know if I were trans… you’d be so… but I don’t think… but I don’t know and—”

“Not… exactly the point I’m making,” Lina says gently. “Point I’m making is more along the lines of, uh. Not a girl.” When he glances up at them bleary-eyed: “And. Just… I don’t know, sometimes I think about last year’s drama club and, you know… that time you… fell over getting a compliment from Indrajit Ch—”

Marshall buries his head in their sweater with a muffled groan.

“It’s okay! It’s okay.” Lina pats his back again. “Don’t think about it right now, okay? It’s fine. Don’t worry about it right now. Marshall. Marshall. Hey.” They thread their fingers through his and tug on his hand until he looks up and makes blurry watery eye contact. “Whoever you are—cis or trans or gay or bi or straight or wearing fishnets or dressed like a fucking business major—you’re my best friend. Okay?”

“It’s—hard for me,” Marshall says, biting down on his hand before he remembers that hurts. “I don’t know why it’s so hard for me. Acting—”

“It’s okay—”

“Acting like a person.”

“Of course you’re—”

“If I wasn’t… like this…”

“Then it’d be less okay to lock you in a closet to atone for your crimes?”

“Well, when you put it like that,” Marshall mumbles.

Lina pulls his hand away from his mouth again. “It’s okay,” they repeat softly. “Do… you want to come to my house? Tonight? I don’t know if you have homework, I just miss you—”

“Yes,” Marshall says immediately. “Yeah. I… yeah.” With his free hand he wipes at his eyes. He might have another deluge of tears coming on. But he hopes not.

Lina spreads his fingers, examines his hand. “You bite your nails,” they say, like they’re just now realizing.

“You bite your lip,” Marshall says, pulling his hand away, but Lina hangs onto it.

“I used to bite my nails,” they say. “As a kid. That’s why I painted them.” They put a hand up like he’s about to burst out at them. “Not trying to press. Just offering.” They look him up and down, from his Converse to his skirt, and they smile. “I’ve still got your yellow, you know.”

This time Marshall’s the one who wraps his arms around them and holds on as tight as he can. He presses his face into their shoulder. He lets the last tears fall as they will, because Lina’s got him, and he’s got them, and for once, here in the green room, he can breathe. He holds onto them. Against his chest, inside their coat, he can feel the shape of their pocket watch pressing into his ribs, and he imagines he can feel it ticking as each second goes by: One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.