Miracle (boyxboy)

Chapter One

"Agh. Gross! Nobody wants to hear about your nasty girl issues, Maddy!"

My twin tossed her bobbed hair. It was the same dirty blond color as mine, though she wore hers several inches shorter. "Then go be somewhere else," she chirped as her friends giggled.

"You really ain't never had a period, Maddy?" one of her friends reiterated, making me cringe all over again. "That's so weird. By fifteen you should totally be on the rag like the rest of us."

"That's what I'm saying!"

"And the doc doesn't think anything's wrong?"

"Says I'm just a late bloomer."

"Super late. I got mine when I was nine!"

As if I needed to know that. I glanced around uncomfortably, hoping no one else was listening in. Most of the other kids were over at the picnic table, stuffing their faces with chocolate cake and made-from-scratch icing that I'd spent the better part of the morning working on. Tyler, the one I was most worried about, was preoccupied with three flirty girls hovering around him like flies on a horse's ass. The longer he stayed over there, the better. But it wasn't as if I could just walk off from my sister and her friends right now. I was still on his radar.

"Hey, you're lucky," Hailey piped up, nudging Maddy with her shoulder. "You got better boobs than any of us and you don't have to mess with tampons? Trust me, you're not missing out."

I clapped hands over my ears and glared. "Ugh, who talks about this shit at a birthday party?" It was already weird enough that Mom insisted on taking Maddy for a doctor checkup on our birthday every year. Not me, just Maddy.

"Oh, suck it up, Connor."

"Yeah, I don't know why it should bother you. You're practically a girl anyway."

Amused horror raised the brows of the other girls, and one murmured, "Oh no she didn't."

I stiffened, but it was Maddy who took my side now, both verbally and physically. She stepped close to me and gave her friend an icy stare. "Not cool, Jenna."

Jenna, who was relatively new to the inner ranks of my sister's social circle, tried to laugh it off. "Come on, it was a joke."

"It ain't funny," Maddy snapped, and wound an arm around mine. "Nobody gives Connor crap like that, you got it? Apologize."

I rolled my eyes a little. "She was kidding, Maddy."

"I don't care. She's apologizing or we're not friends anymore."

I sighed as the other girls' lips shaped into gleeful oohs. Jenna glanced at me with a wry grimace. "Sorry, Connor."

I had to nod acceptance. Since the day I'd come out to my family a year ago, my sister Madison had turned into an overprotective, zero-tolerance crusader for my rights. I guess it was because I'd been picked on pretty much nonstop since we started kindergarten. Maddy and I were fraternal twins, obviously, but except for one glaring difference we had still ended up with nearly the same genes. We were skinny, with the same hair and pale blue eyes, the same narrow facial features. We even had matching clefts in our chins. We both hated tomatoes, loved comic books, and preferred French fries to ice cream. And we were both attracted to boys. More often than not, the same boys.

Unfortunately, we were also the same height: five foot two. Perfectly respectable for her as a teen girl, but I was the shortest guy in our class and I always had been. Where Maddy made our dainty bone structure look cute, I just looked like a wuss. And that was exactly what I got called. Actually, it was one of the nicer labels I'd been christened with over the years.