Ethan texted her Thursday afternoon: Jordyn sent the group text. It's done. She knew cheer was done for the year, even if she had been in it for the last several weeks. She missed cheer, the fun, the team.
She read it in the Calloway kitchen while the microwave beeped behind her.
Nobody moved to stop it.
Three beeps. Four.
Tom was upstairs. Becca was somewhere in the living room with the TV on low. The sound carried through the vents in fragments.
She put the phone face down on the counter and let the microwave keep going.
On the way home from school on Friday, Drew mentioned that Nate was having people over after practice. End-of-season thing. Football and cheer both.
"You coming?"
He asked it without looking at her, one hand inside his hoodie pocket, shoulders up against the cold. Traffic hissed past them from the wet street.
"Yeah," she said.
The answer arrived before she'd decided if it was hers.
That night, she heard Tom in the hallway outside the room.
One footstep. Then nothing.
Not silence exactly. Floor vent humming. Pipes ticking somewhere in the wall. The refrigerator downstairs kept kicking on.
Just a person standing still outside a door.
Becca caught her on the stairs Friday morning and fell into step beside her like she'd been waiting.
"Okay, so I have to ask," she said, at a volume that suggested she'd already checked nobody else was in earshot.
"What is it actually like?"
Maya looked at her.
"Being a boy," Becca said.
"Like. What is it actually like?"
"Colder than I expected."
Becca stared at her. "That's it? Three months, and that's what you lead with?"
"The shower is faster. I don't have to dry my hair as long."
"Okay, that tracks." Becca leaned against the wall.
"Have you peed standing up yet?"
"Several times."
"And?"
"It's fine. It's easier. I don't know why you'd want to do anything else."
Becca looked personally offended. "What about the pit thing. Because Drew gets these, like the whole shirt. Does that happen?"
"Yes."
"Is it as bad as it looks?"
"It's worse. Because you don't notice until someone else does."
"Oh, that's disgusting." She said it with complete admiration.
"What else. Does it make the noises? Like the —" she made a vague gesture that covered significant ground.
"Constantly," Maya said.
"Without warning. Without apparent cause."
Becca lost the battle with the laugh. It lasted about four seconds, then she pulled it back and looked at Maya with the twins' look.
"You doing okay though?" she said.
"Actually."
The pivot was fast enough that Maya didn't have a defense ready. "Getting there," she said.
Becca nodded. That was enough for her. She went downstairs, and Maya stood on the step.
At school, she heard her own name called down a hallway and kept walking. She was Ethan, and Ethan didn't turn around. She got to the end of the corridor and stood there for a second with her hand on the wall, Ethan's hand, Ethan's palm against painted cinder block, and didn't turn around. Practice, the drive back, the Calloway house quiet by evening.
By the time Drew appeared in the front hallway, he was doing the thing with his hands in his pockets, looking for nothing in particular. She reached for Ethan's jacket on the hook by the door, the plain olive one, slightly too broad in the shoulders. It had been there since the first week. She didn't know whose it had been before Ethan's. She wasn't sure Ethan knew either. She put it on and followed Drew out into the cold.
Nate's house was loud and warm, smelling like someone's parents being gone. She moved through it the way she'd learned. The nod that wasn't quite a hello. The angle of the shoulders that said passing through. She had a drink in hand even when she wasn't drinking it.
The cheerleaders were there. Jordyn first, always Jordyn first, then Sofie, then the rest of the squad in their close cluster near the far wall. Sofie passed close enough that Maya caught it: her own shampoo, coming off someone else's hair. Three months and she'd forgotten what she smelled like.
Then she saw herself, or rather, she saw Ethan.
Her body. Her face. Across the room.
Moving through the squad with the fluency she'd built over three years. Every mark hit, the right distance, the right warmth, nothing sticking. Sofie leaned in, saying something. Her own face receiving it with the ease she'd spent a long time building.
She hadn't seen it.
Not her own face. Not from ten feet away. Not her own work, running without her, not needing her at all. Like watching a film of yourself and not recognizing the swimmer until you see your own stroke.
That was when she saw Connor.
He was near the back of the room, slightly outside the cluster of lacrosse guys that had claimed the kitchen end. Talking to someone she half-recognized from the athletic wing. Easy. Not performed. He asked a question and then just waited.
She watched him laugh at something. The real one, arriving before the social one caught up.
She crossed the room.
He didn't see her coming. She got within a few feet, and the person he was talking to glanced at her. Connor turned, and she'd already opened her mouth.
"Hey," she said. Ethan's voice, slightly too low, still not hers.
"Hey." The slight pause.
"Calloway, right? Drew's —"
"Yeah."
A beat. The other person drifted away, leaving the two of them standing there, with the party noise around them and no clear reason to keep talking. Connor looked at his drink. She looked at the room. Neither of them said anything for a second, the kind of second that either ended with someone walking away or with someone deciding not to.
"How's it going?" she said.
Not a question, and he took it as one anyway. He talked about a group project that had collapsed in a way that was both his fault and not, and he was funny about it. She laughed, and it came out wrong, lower than it should have been, and Connor's face did something small, a half-second of adjustment.
They talked for a few minutes about school, the end of the season, and the relief of a Friday night with nowhere to be. He asked Drew about something with a girl; had she heard about that? She said, "Yeah, a little."
He said Drew was handling it badly in the way Drew handled everything badly, which was to say not at all, just absorbing it, and she said that sounded right, and Connor smiled.
Then he asked if she knew Maya.
He asked it carefully. He was watching her when he did.
"A little," she said.
"From Drew mostly."
He nodded. Looked at his drink. "You were at regionals."
"Yeah."
"She was good." He turned the cup in his hands.
"I don't think second tells you much about what I saw." A beat.
"She didn't know I was there. I didn't find her after."
She had heard this already. She received it again now through the same wrong door, standing instead of sitting, three weeks later, in a loud room instead of an empty one.
"She knows you think that," Maya said.
"That she was good."
He looked at her. "Drew tell you that?"
She didn't answer. She didn't have an answer Ethan Calloway would have.
He stood with it for a moment. Then something shifted the considering look, giving way to something quieter. "She saw me."
"She saw you."
The cup went still in his hands.
"Why are you telling me this?"
Not hostile. Just a real question. He laughed once after he said it. Too fast. Like he heard how direct it sounded, a second too late.
"Sorry. That came out weird."
"It's fine," she said.
"I don't know. I just thought you should know."
He looked at her. Something was working behind his eyes that wasn't quite landing anywhere.
Then he nodded, the slow kind, not at her, just processing. "Tell her I said hey."
Not a closing. A door left open.
"I will."
She left him there and made her way back through the room, and that was when Ethan appeared, coming from the direction of the squad, her own body moving through the crowd with the ease she recognized as hers and the stillness she recognized as his, the two things layered in a way that still stopped her sometimes. He found her near the back wall, and they stood side by side, facing out.
They talked about his shoulder. The house. Practice ending next week. She told him about Tom.
She watched her own face go still.
He said thanks.
What she actually wanted to say was: Connor is good. He's actually good. I'm sorry I didn't see that. She didn't say it.
A group pushed through the space between them, and by the time it cleared, the moment had shifted. Just two people standing near a wall at a party.
"Later," she said.
"Yeah," he said.
She moved back toward Drew and found herself replaying the way he'd said it.
Nate drifted through nearby, and Drew pulled him in, the two of them talking about lacrosse starting back up in February, who was coming back, who'd graduated out, and whether Marcus Chen was going to get his act together by spring. Drew said something about the new coach running a different offense, and Nate said that was going to be a problem for certain people. Drew said, "Yeah, certain people," and they both knew who they meant. It was the kind of conversation that had years of shared context underneath it, easy and shorthand, and she stood at its edge and listened.
After Nate drifted off, Drew looked at her over the rim of his cup.
"Good guys," he said.
"On the team. You'd like them."
She looked at him.
"Listen, Maya —" He stopped. Rotated the cup in his hand.
"Ethan. The team's going to have space in the spring. If you wanted to try it."
She stood with that for a moment.
It was Ethan's body, Ethan's spring. She didn't know if he'd want to play lacrosse. She didn't know if she'd still be Ethan in February.
She'd have to ask Ethan. She couldn't commit his body to a sport without asking him.
But Drew wasn't really asking Ethan.
The lacrosse was just the door he had available.
"I'd have to think about it," she said. Which was true in more ways than Drew knew, and possibly more ways than she did.
"Yeah," Drew said.
"Thanks," she said instead.
Drew nodded. Finished his water.
Back in his room, she stood in front of the desk.
The research stack was gone. The bed still sat too high off the floor. Ethan's notebook was where it had been for weeks, squared neatly beside the lamp.
She picked it up.
Dense pages. Tabs. Lists. Cross-references. The system she'd built.
She put it back down.
Then she got Ethan's coat and went out.
Clement Street was quiet, the restaurants mostly closed, a few lights still on in the laundromat at the corner. Cold enough that her breath showed. Ethan's breath. She walked with his stride, his hands in the olive jacket's pockets. Earlier, across the room, she'd watched Ethan smile at something Sofie said and known the exact second he was using her version of it.
She passed the park on Sixth. The swings were moving slightly in the wind, the working one, the broken one, both of them. She slowed without meaning to. The broken swing caught the light from the street, the chain on the left side hanging loose, the seat turning in a small arc by itself. She and Ethan had sat there in November and divided up each other's lives like they were logistics problems. She'd been so certain then that there was a way to solve it. That she'd find it and reverse it and be back in her own body before Christmas.
She kept walking.
The drugstore was at the end of the block. She went in.
It was practically empty, except for the teenage clerk reading a magazine, flipping the pages.
She stood in front of the notebook shelf longer than she meant to. Composition books. Spiral-bound pads. Cheap planners are already marked with next year.
She chose a thin wire-bound notebook with a blank brown cover.
No labels. No sections. Nothing organized.
Back at the desk, she set the new notebook beside Ethan's.
For a second, she looked at both of them.
Then she opened hers.
On the inside cover there was a blank line for a name. She wrote hers. Looked at it. Erased it.
She wrote Ethan's. Looked at it. Erased that too.
She sat with the blank line for a moment. Then she wrote:
Someone else's name.
She looked at it for a moment. Then she turned to the first page and started.
At his desk, she opened it to the first page and reached for Connor. Started: the management apparatus and stopped. She crossed it out immediately.
Blank page.
She tried again. Wrote: Tonight I watched myself from across a room and I didn't
Stopped. That wasn't it either. She crossed it out.
She wrote: Sofie's hair smelled like my shampoo.
She sat with that for a minute.
She wrote: Someone put a second mug out before I came downstairs. Nobody said anything about it. I almost didn't say anything either.
She stopped. Started again: I don't know what you're supposed to do when someone does something like that. I didn't do anything. I just stood there.
She wrote: Becca asked how I was and I had to think about it. That's new. I think that's new.
Then, lower on the page, after she'd been sitting for a while: Connor was there tonight. I talked to him. He said things I
she stopped writing. Sat with the pen on the page. The ink made a small dot where it rested.
She wrote one more thing: Drew mentioned lacrosse. I need to ask Ethan.
She closed the notebook. Turned off the light.
In the dark the mug came back. Steam already rising before she came downstairs. Someone had set it out without being asked.
She'd noticed anyway.