Ash turns, and now Smith is the one getting blinked at.
“But you weren’t in the spring musical.”
“I know,” he says. He touches his hair, then the side of his face. “But it looks fun.”
Ash considers it and shrugs. “Okay.”
Smith scoots into Ace’s spot, and Ash examines his face from a few angles before picking out a handful of pigments from their kit.
“Are you gonna do a costume?” Chloe asks Ash. “I think all that’s left on the rack is probably way too big for you. You’ll have no shape.”
“That works for me,” Ash says. “My ideal body is no body at all.”
Chloe snorts. “Just a head floating above a sexy void.”
“That’s so gender of me,” Ash says, beginning to chisel out Smith’s cheekbones. Another buzz from her phone. Another edit to the doc.
Exactly where you are, Shara has written. There’s a pause, and on a new line, she adds, If you know what this is about, why are you still talking to me?
It takes her nearly a full minute to decide what to say. Smith and Ash are talking quietly, but she’s not taking any of it in. It’s like Shara is sitting right here on the chair next to her, reflected beside her in the big mirror on the back wall, watching Chloe’s mouth for the next thing she’ll say.
Because I still don’t know where you are, she finally types.
Shara responds, The next one should get you there.
And then what?
“I’m really sorry if this is a stupid question,” Smith says to Ash, “and you don’t have to answer it, but … the thing you said about gender. Can you explain the whole nonbinary thing to me?”
That finally pulls Chloe back to the present. Ash’s brush pauses over Smith’s half-glittery eyelid.
It hasn’t exactly been a smooth coming-out process for Ash, or even really much of a coming out at all. Their parents don’t know, and the Willowgrove faculty would probably go into collective cardiac arrest if a student asked for their deadname to be dropped from class rosters. But last year, one of their TikToks about weird earrings went viral, and everyone in school saw their pronouns in their bio, so that was pretty much it.
Chloe can see them doing the same math she did with Smith at Dixon’s party, but under his long lashes, Smith’s eyes are warm and curious. A faint memory returns to Chloe: Smith, shoving hair ties and concealer toward the back of his locker.
“When you first started at Willowgrove, back in middle school, you had to tell all your teachers to call you Smith, right?” Ash asks. Their brush starts moving again. “Because it’s not your first name?”
“Yeah. It’s my middle name. Mom’s last name before she got married.”
The answer surprises Chloe. She arrived at Willowgrove after Smith, so she always assumed Smith was his first name.
“What’s your first name, then?”
“William.”
“Your parents named you Will Smith?” Chloe interjects.
Ash ignores her. “And when did you start going by Smith?”
“When I was a little kid.”
“Why don’t you go by William?”
Smith shrugs. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel right. Like, Smith feels like my name, but William doesn’t.”
“How do you know you’re not a William?”
“I don’t know. I just … do.”
“Okay, so,” Ash says. “That’s how I felt about being a girl. When I was a kid, I thought I didn’t like girly things, but then I got older and realized that I liked some girly things, but I hated that liking them made people think I was a girl, because on some level I always knew I wasn’t one. So then I thought maybe I was actually a boy, because I wanted to be feminine the way boys can be feminine, but then I’d look at other boys and I wasn’t one of them either. I knew I wasn’t a girl, and I wasn’t a boy. Like if someone yelled your first name at you. You might answer to it, but it wouldn’t feel right, because that’s not you.”
“So, wait—why did you cut your hair, if you don’t want to be a guy?”
Chloe winces, but Ash seems unbothered. “Because I’m still not a girl, so I don’t like it when someone takes one look at me and automatically shoves me into the girl category in their brain. The hair helps.”
“Okay, but I feel like that too, and I’m not nonbinary.”
There’s the slightest change in Ash’s face. “What do you mean?”