I was nervous. We were going to Maine, one step closer to finding out whether my entire life had been one long lie, and I was nervous.

“None,” Graham assured me patiently. He didn’t sound bothered. Then again, he’d had plenty of practice calming me down when I decided to get worked up about something.

We met in the same class, but we got to know each other because we had a friend in common—Carlos, who had long since gone off to wherever it is college friends go when you’re not in college anymore; having a life without needing to structure it around class schedules and the need to win another round of Trivial Pursuit: The Tequila Edition. Carlos had been infamous for his mixers, which were somewhere between a Star Trek convention and a bacchanal.

Graham, who had been going by another name then, had been seated at my table for a game of Truth or Dare. We’d both been asked to reveal one truth about ourselves that people frequently doubted.

“I’m an alien,” I’d said, and people had cheered, because why the hell not? We were in college, we were open-minded scientists in training, and if I wanted to come from space, I could damn well come from space.

“I’m a man,” Graham had said, and people had laughed, because he was still on his parents’ insurance, and they hadn’t been paying for his hormone replacement therapy yet, and he hadn’t wanted to cut off his hair until he was really starting his transition. So they’d looked at him, these geniuses in waiting, these future architects of the world, and they’d seen a woman with identity issues instead of the man he was, and they laughed.

But they hadn’t laughed at me, because me claiming to be an alien who looked like their idea of a woman was more reasonable to them than Graham claiming to be a man who looked like their idea of a woman. They knew what the world was supposed to be shaped like. Somehow I, with my utter rejection of humanity, fit the mold better than Graham did for rejecting what they wanted him to be.

He’d been upset. I’d been enraged. I hadn’t been shy about letting them know, either, ripping them up one side and down the other for being disrespectful assholes who didn’t deserve to be allowed to have nice things or make good discoveries or survive the inevitable invasion of their world. Graham had been quiet at first, cheeks red and hands shaking, but by the time I’d finished yelling, he’d been grinning, relaxed, and even amused as he watched the show.