After
Chapter 1

Passing streetlights bathe the back of the car in sharp, unnatural orange and make the blood drying on my hands look fake, but it’s not. It’s real.
So are the handcuffs.
The police station is awash with noise, the world thin and unreal, too distant for me to hear what anyone’s saying; there’s a song stuck in my head.

you and i curled in the safety of the deep leaf shadows

A woman speaks to me gently, her words drifting past without meaning, but all the other voices are loud and angry. My wrists ache. I’m handcuffed to a metal table in a small room that smells of sweat and something worse. Fear, maybe. Or hopelessness.

our mouths lodestones, forever drawn to each other

They take samples from my hands, then clean me up and stitch the cut in my palm. There’s a tideline of rust-red in my nail beds. I get stuck looking at how whole the flesh there is; it’s been so long since I chewed my skin off in meaty chunks. Now, I can smell his blood on them.
I’ll never bite my nails again.

Before
Chapter 1

“Max!”
The sound of my name makes me look up from my work, and I can’t suppress a wide, face-splitting grin. I changed it over seven months ago, right before year thirteen started, but it’ll never get old. My dad did so much work, leveraging his friends in the fire services and their connections, to get my name change sorted and my medical care organised. It’s the only fight he’s ever stood his ground for, but it’s the most important one.
Max. It rolls off the tongue. Sounds like me. Like the boy that’s been fighting to climb out of his girl-skin since birth.
My maths teacher is staring at me, waiting for me to zone back in. She squints in the thick stripes of March sunshine pouring through the blinds, but the affection on her face is clear. She likes me. Most of the teachers do . . .
Or did, I guess. A lot of them got weird this year when I came out. Started tripping over my name and pronouns, stumbling through conversations like they needed a map for how to speak to me. As if they thought I had changed instead of their perception of me. Not Ms. Hennessey, though. Even when she was adjusting and slipped on my pronouns or name, she corrected herself and moved on instead of apologising and making me reassure her.
Now, her eyebrow twitch implies she’s going to wait for me to stop daydreaming and verbally respond. I find my voice after a moment. “Yeah?”
She inclines her head towards the door. Is it time to pack up? No, that’s wrong, school hasn’t even started yet. I’m the only one in here, revising instead of messing around outside on the sun-slicked fields, reluctant to come in for the first day back after Easter break.
It’s easier to avoid Danny if I stick to classrooms or the library. Less chance he’ll “accidentally” shoulder me into a wall in the corridor or loudly brag about all the girls who want him when I happen to be nearby.
A woman steps into the room, and my ribs constrict, talons around my lungs. Breathtaking—I understand the phrase for the first time. She has a long, rich swathe of probably dyed red hair furling down a silky blouse and green, piercing eyes. A new student teacher? I squirm, confused and uncomfortable with their focused attention.
“Max, this is Emily. She’s going to be joining our class for the last few months of school, and she’s also ahead. I thought you could work together. She’s new to town, from London. Maybe you can show her around.”
Sour saliva gathers under my tongue. I finished the advanced level year twelve book last spring, and now I’m working on some more interesting stuff as an independent project. Ms. H—as everyone calls her—never made me join in with the main lessons. Now, she’s trying to force someone to join me at the back of the room. She probably thinks she’s helping me make friends.
Until this year, school wasn’t so bad. Better than home, anyway. I was a loner, but mostly by choice, and I never had to give myself a power up talk to get through the doors in the morning. Not like it’s been since summer and Danny. These days, I don’t have any energy left over for anything except surviving the hole he left in my chest.
“Sure.” I fail to sound welcoming. With Emily assessing me, I’m an insect under a microscope and can’t stop myself from squirming. This girl isn’t small-town pretty, she’s big city. She’s one of the sunshine people, the type that glides through life in their own perfumed bubble. They don’t have to wade through the shit, so they don’t believe it exists. Her straightened hair and sticky pink lips are so shiny the lights reflect off them, as if she’s made of precious stones. It’s hard to look right at her.
“Gloss.” The random word drips out of a heart-shaped mouth. She has light eyes, like a cat. They laser into me, scanning me from head to toe. Judging my beat-up Chucks and my chewed raw nails.
Finding me wanting, like the rest of the world. Like Danny. I force myself away from the thought of him.
My island of isolation at the back of class suits me just fine. I don’t need an interloper, especially one who probably wants to get vaccinated before sitting next to me.
“What?” I trip over the question and let my fluffy, dark fringe flop in my face. I’m sure my cheeks are flushed, highlighting my inflamed skin in all its hideous glory.
“Call me Gloss,” she says to both me and Ms. H. It’s a decree that brooks no argument. “Everyone does.”
“Uh . . . Okay. Welcome to Ridgepoint.” What am I, a butler?
I swallow, needlessly moving my textbook over and knocking my phone off the table in the process. Ms. H chuckles, and it’s thunder in the silent room. The sun that was warm and pleasant has become oppressive while I was distracted, burning my back through my thick hoodie as I scramble to pick up my phone. There’s a fissure across the middle of the screen. Great.
“Nice to meet you, Max.”
Gloss’s sugar-sweet drawl seizes me by the intestines and squeezes, and the cracked screen doesn’t matter anymore. My name in her unplaceable accent echoes in my ears. I shove my phone in my pocket to avoid her gaze, and the bell rings, saving me from having to unclench enough to respond. Students shove their way through the narrow doorway, drawing the weight of attention away from me. I can finally inhale.
“All right, all right. Daniel, sit down! Ashdeep, give Devon’s bag back. Lina, his lap is not your seat.” Ms. H does her level best to herd the animals while I wither into myself, trying to avoid catching Danny’s attention.
Gloss takes the chair right next to me, all precise angles and lustrous hair. Focusing on details helps me ward off panic. Her skin is as smooth and pale as creamy paper, her white shirt almost sheer. The artfully puffed sleeves turn into tight cuffs halfway down her forearms. They’re fastened with miniature gold buttons. Black lines peek out from under a matching gold watch on her delicate wrist. A tattoo? Or a doodle? She doesn’t seem like a doodler. I tug my ragged sleeves over my hands and poke my thumbs through the strategic rips to keep them there.
Making the mistake of glancing across the room, I catch Michelle’s eye. She flashes me a quick smile, which drops off her face when Danny flops down next to her, slinging his arm across the back of her chair. She leans into his side with a little pout. I struggle to drag my gaze away. Luckily, Gloss leans over, reaching out with one manicured finger towards my ragged fringe, jerking my attention back to her.
“You need a haircut,” she tells me, cool and collected as if she’s commenting on the weather.
My throat closes so my indignant, defensive response comes out as a strangled squawk. My mother is always telling me I need a haircut to get the fringe out of my eyes. It’s her favourite line—when she’s not telling me I should grow it out to look more feminine.
And then Gloss drops her hand and touches my chest, brushing her fingertips against my “he/him” pin. Electricity jumps into my sternum. “You need a haircut. This is a butch lesbian haircut. Not a young man’s haircut.”
I choke on my own spit, distracting me enough that I miss his approach.
“He is a butch lesbian.”
My spine stiffens. I don’t need to turn around to know that Danny’s looming over my desk, but I do anyway, forever unable to resist him. Paper crinkles as he leans against the poster-covered wall. The sight makes me want to reach out and push him away from the work he’s casually ruining. The way he ruined me.
His long blond hair is perfectly scruffy, and the stubble on his cheeks sparkles, gold glittering in the sun. He’s bronze after spending the last two weeks surfing in Newquay. Can I smell the salt? I wish I didn’t know what he looked like laughing in the waves, hadn’t checked his socials forty times a day over the holiday, torturing myself. Is it still misgendering if someone uses male pronouns but calls you a lesbian? Does he know how ridiculous it is for him, of all people, to call me a lesbian? If I was brave, I’d raise an eyebrow at his belt buckle and make him remember the very unlesbian things we did together under the summer sun. But I’m not brave. I stare fixedly at my pen, squeezed in my hand. The plastic creaks, splitting under the pressure. I focus on the crawling sensation as the crack works its way through the shaft, under my sweaty fingers.
Danny smirks at Gloss. “Hello, gorgeous. What’s someone like you doing back here with the cryptids?”
He’s drawling the way he does when he wants to impress someone, when he thinks he’s extra cool. My stomach does that frustrating melt-and-slide into warmth. I scowl. The pen snaps in my fist.
Gloss inhales softly. She turns her laser eyes on to him, drags them over his body like she did to me. He preens; he knows his thin white T-shirt makes him look like a Greek god, all golden skin with a six-pack you can see the shadows of through the fabric. He makes Primark look like Gucci. I stare at my ink-stained hands. I don’t want to watch the car crash of Gloss teaming up with him to torment me.
“Yes, I’m sure it’s a vast shock to discover that I might choose to spend time with someone thoughtful and intelligent instead of an arrogant asshole with the emotional range of a Bop It.”
It takes me a moment to catch up, to believe she hasn’t giggled and flicked her glorious wave of hair over her shoulder to look up at him in feminine awe like every other girl and a good number of the boys at school.
“Go away, you spoilt toddler, the adults are talking,” she says, dismissing Danny with a sneer that makes my skin crawl.
My eyes dart up without permission to watch Danny as he registers what Gloss has said. He looks confused, almost hurt, for a moment. Like a kid who’s dropped an ice cream and is staring at the empty cone trying to work out what’s happened. Then his face hardens, and his summer sky eyes go flat and cruel.
“Whatever, bitch. Catch you later, Maxipad.”
My heartbeat spikes, tears prickle my eyes. I should take a deep breath to try and ward off the anxiety attack threatening to burst open in my chest, but I can’t. My body’s stuck.
Gloss turns to me, putting her back to Danny as though he no longer exists. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone ignore Danny. I didn’t know it was possible.
“You working on stats right now, Max?” She pulls my stats textbook over, and a waft of strawberries and clean linen teases me; I can breathe again.
Everything outside us fades away.