But I’m only half listening. Because inside, I’m still raging. And they’re right, this isn’t D&D … but what if it was?

What if we were heroes?

*

“What if we were actual heroes, like, if life were D ’n’ D?”

Tro drums against the dining chair, staring at me. They all stare.

“Chaos! Havoc! Sweet revenge!” Justice cries triumphantly.

“And axes,” Sabre adds.

It would be kind of nice to run a blade across their knees. Bloody, sure. But nice.

“…you’d be hanged in the square at dawn?” Tro rolls their eyes.

“You do better, then.” I push back.

“Let’s.” Tro leans closer: suddenly, we’re serious, in full council of war, and our game night just got real.

“We could rig the ball somehow? Switch the entire playlist out for Frozen and replace the punch with pure unsweetened lemons.” Justice pulls a lemon face.

“Think bigger.” taptaptaptaptap.

“Have him send a letter to the entire parent body explaining the proper use of pronouns?” Sabre thinks aloud.

“Brilliant!” I grin.

“We’d have to get the tone exactly right. Analyze school letters for word choice, sentence structure, syntax…”

I picture Sabre’s half-orc alter ego hunched over parchment in the library, weaving magic sharper than the finest blade. But it’s not enough. Our party would not waste their time on petty revenge: we’re rebels and activists. “…what if we steal their binary ideals?”

“Uh, what?”

“Wipe out every antiquated rule and reference to binary gender: every policy and letter template, records, sports team rules, and bathroom signs. Replace them. Turn the whole school gender neutral overnight.”

“How? Except the bathrooms, everything’s online.”

“Justice?”

No one breathes as Justice pulls up some coding subreddit and furiously scrolls.

“I … think it can be done.”

*

Tonight, Justice works on a way to add a nonbinary option to school records. I’m trawling through the text from copied school policy pages changing every ‘he or she’ to ‘they’, and cutting every gendered, antiquated rule. No more skirts of modest length, no more listing rugby as for boys.

Slowly, slowly, we make progress.

*

“Can you get my ticket?” The ball is the perfect cover for infiltrating the school systems and uploading the new status quo, but the closer we get to the ticket table, the further my stomach falls.

“No way. You want to see her face when she’s forced to sell you entry to her precious ball,” Tro says, nudging me forward.

“Just one?” Chelsea smiles up at me, too sweet.

“Yes please.”

“Of course you wouldn’t have a date, silly me,” she says, marking off a ticket sale on her sheet. “Oh! Here’s a thought! Can you date yourself? You know, being both an’ all?”

I gawp, all my Borók rage returning. And I would have hit her if my friends hadn’t stepped forward for their tickets, and pushed me out of line.

*

We’re planning. Everywhere we walk we keep an eye out, mark the cameras and security, plotting our course. Game nights are game nights, with this our biggest party challenge yet. We sit making lists on scraps of paper we can ditch in public bins when this is done.