In the gelled quiet of the auditorium, I sink into the water of my own long-ago bath. Jen was beside me, though we were big enough that our elbows and knees bumped. Our mother must’ve been in a hurry. Dressed for a restaurant, shining us up for some babysitter. In the jostle of wet limbs and the metallic tang of the water, I gave myself over to her scrubbing, disappearing my body, until her sponge caught my nipple and I howled. Jen gaped as my scream sliced the air and left it in scraps around us.

“Are you okay?” my mother asked, certain I was. She knew the borders of my body. She knew better than I did what hurt.

My nipples ached. Soon they’d swell like Jen’s, but I could never stick my chest out like her, calling them bomb-bombs and rattling them at neighbors. And the way Jen watched, tense arm gripping the rim of the tub, made me shrink back in the cooling water. “I’m okay,” I said, too many times. Jen’s face sagged. She mumbled, “Why’s she gotta be so weird?”

Minsie bows over their printed speech. The chatter in the audience rises. “I have my notes here.” They lift the page. Stage lights shine through a block of text. “It’s all about my private body feelings. My relationships. Coming out. My ‘journey.’ But you know what?” Minsie plucks their glasses off their face, fingers trembling. Maybe they’re older than they look. “Fuck all that. I don’t have to tell any of you shit. None of us do.”

A pocket of quiet opens across the room, like when a musician finishes a song, and the audience decides together not to bust the mood. The blank air swells inside me. I have to transition. I’ve always planned to, really. Whether it will take months or decades, I’ve known I’d come to this. And with Minsie up there, statuesque with their soft skin and square head, I’ve never considered my position has any advantage, that I could ever be all right, much less great, powerful, flinging aside my notes before two hundred beautiful teens.

The silence bursts and the crowd roars, and it’s like they’re roaring for my choice. Girls with bony knees and big noses bash their hands together; boys with styled hair and evergreen hoodies throw their fists. They leap up and wave. “Don’t tell us shit,” chants a kid next to us. This from kids who’ve spent their lives documenting their stories, who’ve offered the world every grain of their shit.

Sunny claps halfheartedly, glancing over his shoulder. “I gotta talk to Emmerson. I don’t like how we left it.”

“Shouldn’t we start home?” Cheers ring out around us.

“But when will I ever be in a place like this again?”