HALL OF FAME (LGBT)

hall of fame

Kids in junior high gravitate towards people who are like them. Before that, when we're younger, it doesn't matter so much. Children will befriend whoever, but then we get older, and suddenly we want to be with people who understand us. We drift apart with old friends and make new ones. It's just the way of life.

I met them in eighth grade. I was shy and nervous at the back of the class in a new dress I bought despite the disapproving glances of my father. My older sister's makeup was oily and heavy and unfamiliar on my face, and I felt awkward and gangly in my floral skirt, a full head taller than all the other girls, who cast me strange glances over their shoulders when they thought I wasn't looking.

The school year had started a week ago already, so my classmates had been given ample time to start to get used to the new me, to the one who wore flared skirts instead of boot cut jeans, who wore her hair scraggly and only down to her shoulders (grown out over the summer, not that it ever showed much, with my natural texture) and didn't correct the teachers when they forgot her new name.

The apologies were the worst part.

The "oh, I'm so sorry, I won't do it again, I promise, I just keep forgetting—" when all I wanted was for them to stop making a big deal of it.

They walked into the class a step ahead of the math teacher, head lifted and spine straight as a rod. I remember sitting up straighter to look at them over the heads of my classmates, my eyes falling immediately on the large pin placed brazenly in full view on their backpack strap that they clutched with white knuckles.

They/them.

They had skin covered in freckles and short, curly brown hair that looked like it had never seen a brush or a comb in its life.

But it was the way they walked that dragged my attention inevitably towards them. Chin lifted, steps confident, never making eye contact with anyone. They moved purposefully toward the back of the class, towards the empty seat beside me, and glanced over at me.

Our eyes met.

In each other, we instantly saw ourselves. Both gangly and long limbed in the throes of our early teenage years. Me with my face too strong and defined for my tastes and flat-chested in a dress meant for girls who had started to blossom already, them with an angry set to their jaw and dressed in a t-shirt flaunting the album cover of a metal band that I didn't recognize.

I smiled, and they smiled back as they slid into their seat.

"I'm Phoenix," they said over the sound of the teacher beginning our math lesson. The smell of dry erase markers and pencil shavings hung over us. What a fitting name for someone who looked as though they could spark forest fires with their gaze alone.

"Sophie Williams," I replied.

—

Grade ten. Frosted windows letting bright sunlight spill across the clean white tiles of the school's only unisex washroom. Hormone replacement pills rattling in a white prescription bottle in my backpack. A sharp, coppery smell lingering in the air. Blood, ruby red against the white of the sink.

Phoenix was leaning against the counter as I hurried back in, locking the door firmly behind me and dumping supplies on the counter. Their head hung over the sink and a steady flow of blood dripped from their nose, each lingering for a second before plummeting downward.

"Now tell me what happened," I insisted, wrapping an ice pack in paper towel from the dispenser on the wall.

They ignored me, hands gripping the side of the false granite countertop, next to scattered tissues covered in blood.