“My heroes,” I say.

“Mine too.” Justice bounds over to Sabre, leans in and kisses his cheek, right over the bin.

“Filthy hero. I’m going to shower for a whole entire week.”

“Well, yes.” He laughs, and pushes Sabre through the door.

“We did encounter one last problem though,” Tro says.

My mind spins, runs through every precaution and map and list. What? What did we forget?

“The last loos. The ones everyone is using tonight. How do we—”

“Easy.” Sabre re-emerges from the loos, pulling off his gloves. “Forget the bins, we can fix that later. We just need the signs. And I, filthy hero that I am, brought crazy glue. We’ll slap them over the originals on our way out.”

Holy Order of the Dragons, we are done.

*

“Be right there!” Justice says as we reach the hall door. “I, uh … need to pee.”

“Same,” Sabre says, hugging his bag to his chest, grinning.

“Pee. Sure.” Tro rolls their eyes fondly as the boys disappear, hand in hand. “That’s what kids are calling it these days.”

So Tro and I step through alone. I wonder how everyone sees us, in our suit and dress, together – inseparable.

Tonight, I do not care.

And then there’s Sabre. In his bright pink killer heels.

Justice, warm in gold.

“Whaa?”

And Sabre takes my hand, Justice takes Tro’s and we’re heading for the throng.

It’s true, the crowd does part for beauty queens and heroes. And I should be uncomfortable with everybody looking, but I’m not. We’re heroes. And we’re fiiiine.

*

I stop, stare at the school gates and the swarm of press badges and fluffy microphones, until Tro’s at my side, dragging me through the throng.

“Big news this morning.” A reporter grins conspiratorially at a camera. “At Greenglade High, where pranksters turned the whole school upside down…”

“The message from students this morning is ‘all genders welcome’,” says another.

And it’s true, there’s a gathering of students behind all the cameras, with hastily drawn placards saying ‘TRANS RIGHTS ARE YOUR RIGHTS’ and ‘RIGHT TO BE, RIGHT TO PEE’ and ‘ENBY (bathrooms) OR NOT ENBY (bathrooms)? THAT IS THE QUESTION!’, which is a stretch, honestly, but it makes me laugh.

To one side, Matt DeFranco has an arm round Chelsea as she wails into a microphone. “I just don’t see why they couldn’t go through proper channels instead of targeting nights some of us have worked so hard for.” But she’s nearly drowned out by the crowd.

“What the HELL?” I choke, as Tro pulls me inside.

“Oh, you know. You learn a thing or two about stories when you live in Chrull. It needed an ending fit for dwarven song. So I called the local news and gave it one.”

*

At first, Boules is on the warpath, but the press, it turns out, praises him for forward-thinking in this time of change.

The hallways are full of whispers, glances and a few triumphant grins in our direction. It’ll fade, I’m sure. But maybe some of it will stick.