The day Kya went to Dalacine was not Addison's favourite for a number of reasons. Obviously, the main one was the fact that Kya was leaving, but the knock on effect of that was the stress that came with it. There had been a strange countdown towards that day; Addison didn't sleep the night before. She tried, but she had an overwhelming feeling that everything was going to go to shit when Kya was away from her. That counted for both of them. The problem was, Kya wasn't convinced that Dalacine was going to do anything other than make her feel worse (or at least that was what she had said over the text messages they had shared) and that made Addison worry obsessively over her. Even worse, Kya's mum had advised her not to come over because she felt like her daughter wanted time alone. Personally, Addison didn't know when Kya's mum got to decide these things, but she guessed that the woman knew better than she did. She lived with Kya after all.
As for what was going to go to shit for Addison, well, she wasn't sure exactly what it would be. She had spent the whole night getting in and out of bed, trying to sleep and then giving up. For some reason she always ended up drawn to the mirror, taking in her reflection again and again even though she knew it was wrong to torment herself like that.
At one point in the night, she googled how to be happy with herself and her body. She spent over an hour scrolling through useless articles. Just be yourself! they'd say, and Addison would sink lower in her chair. Being herself was more difficult than they seemed to understand. It wasn't just a case of faking it until she made it or whatever they had told her because she had been trying that for years. She still did it now, sometimes, more as a hopeless effort at being normal than anything else.
She would stand there, sometimes in front of a mirror and sometimes not, and try to convince herself that this was the way she was supposed to look, and that she was just psyching herself out. She didn't have to be a girl, maybe she was just a really effeminate guy. She was male, a he, one of the guys, a bro, a lad, a whatever you want to call it okay I'm not- I'm not trans, please just stop being trans.
The pep talk often turned into hopeless pleading with herself. She knew the truth, she'd known it for a long time, but that didn't mean that she wanted to accept it. Why she'd been shoved into the wrong body, she didn't know, but she wished she could just adjust herself to it. Fake it 'til you make it has to apply to this, right? But she'd been in that body for sixteen years and nothing had changed. Her mind didn't adjust because she wasn't a he. It was all just some stupid mistake that was too difficult to fix.
Addison wanted to rip herself out of her own, wrong skin. That was the point: everything was wrong. Usually she could ignore it, or at least pretend she didn't mind, but recently there was more at stake. There was Santiago at stake. She knew he was pansexual, which meant that really he might not mind that she was secretly a girl, but that didn't stop her from thinking about it.
That was what Addison was good at: thinking. What if it was too late and Santiago's opinion on her couldn't change because he'd fallen in love with the male Addison and not the female? What if he really hated trans people? What if his private school friends would judge him so he would ditch her? What if everything just went wrong?
Addison picked up her phone as she left her house, heading to Kya's. The family was already waiting there when she arrived in their driveway. Kya was in the car with her mum, her dad was leaning into the front seat, placing a back on Kya's lap, and Ezra was knelt in the doorway with her hands on the twins' backs, reassuring them of something. Kya's dad gestured for Addison to get in the back of the car. She slid in the seat next to Kya, clicking her seat belt into place.
Kya's parents were in the front having their own conversation when they left the driveway. Addison saw the front door shut behind Ezra, who had ushered the twins inside. There had been a pained look on her face. The radio was turned up, making Kya's parents' voices wordless mumbles.
