Mosaic have been playing together for nearly a year now. I joined six months ago, just after I finished my Highers.

I guess I’m taking a gap year.

Coming out as a dude bang in the middle of my Highers was a bit of a kicker. My mum was all right about it. If anything she was too accepting, and wanted to have a heart-to-heart about sex and gender and specifically my sex life and gender every five minutes.

It was pretty intense.

Like I said, my dad’s not really speaking to me.

I ended up splitting up with my boyfriend too. He said he wasn’t gay, which is fair enough. And he said I was weird, which isn’t.

Anyway. That was a lot. So I decided to take a year off before college.

And then, a couple of weeks in, I was bored shitless.

Me and boredom are a bad combo, and I knew if I let myself mope for a whole year I’d end up with a head full of mince.

I was nervous about joining the team at first.

I used to play on a girls’ team when I was at school. We were pretty good, and even made it to the finals in a couple of Scottish Women’s League youth competitions. It hadn’t really occurred to me that I would have to drop it after I came out. I guess I should have realized where it was going when the team captain pulled me aside one day and asked if we could talk.

I didn’t know what it would be like to play with guys, and I didn’t know where I would fit on the team, but I needed to do something.

I hadn’t played since coming out. I’d put on a bit of weight, and I was nervous about playing in a binder. But after my first night on the pitch it felt like something had woken up inside me.

My legs and butt were aching, but I felt at home in my body for the first time in a while.

At my first social, some of the guys admitted that they didn’t know how to talk to me at first.

“Slowly,” I said. “I’m a bit thick.”

Gregor was the only one who laughed.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” said Liam, over a plate of sausage rolls. “But I just worry about saying the wrong thing, you know what I mean?”

The socials for the under-18s team happen in the college student union, usually after a match. No booze. They can be awkward, sort of a cross between a kids’ birthday party and a high-school empty, when someone’s mum and dad have gone on holiday and left them at home on their own for the first time.

By which I mean, they’re mostly about people copping off with each other, sometimes someone sneaks some booze in, and there are sausage rolls.

“Don’t say the wrong thing, then,” said Alistair, knocking back a shot of vodka he’d sneaked in in an empty body-spray bottle. “Then all you’ll have to worry about is those honking sausage rolls.”