“It’s a process,” I tell him. “You can’t just walk through with me. Do you even have a passport?”

“Why would I have a passport?”

“Okay, then, good luck. I’ll meet you at the gate.”

“No. I’m not going through TSA alone. You have to go with me.”

“I really don’t,” I tell him.

“If I have to suffer with your awful family for a week, the least you can do is wait with me.”

“You say that like I don’t have to deal with my family either.”

“Neil.” Wyatt stands there, his arms crossed like he’s scolding me for getting a bad grade on a test or something.

I breathe in aggressively, letting it out through my nose. “Fine.”

“Good, let’s go.”

It takes half an hour to get through TSA because they’re training a dog to sniff for bombs or drugs or something. Toward the beginning of the line, people have to go one at a time, letting the dog smell them as they pass. We finally make it, scanning our tickets and giving the TSA agents our IDs before we have to unload our laptops, take off our shoes, and Wyatt has to lift his guitar case carefully onto the conveyor belt.

“You don’t have to do this in Global Entry,” I tell Wyatt, standing there in my socks, and he gives me a look. “Just saying.”

Wyatt goes first and is patted down lightly by security before he’s passed on, and then it’s my turn. My heart thuds in my chest when I see what the screen for the scan looks like, the areas of my body highlighted in bright red.

God, this is mortifying.

The agent directs me out and suddenly I’m surrounded by two other agents, all of them whispering to one another before one of them has the balls to ask, “Are you a boy or a girl?”

“What?”

“Boy or girl. We need to know so an agent can pat you down.”

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Our scanner detected an abnormality,” another agent says.

An abnormality? What the absolute fuck is this scanner picking up on that it can tell I’m trans? This absolutely has to be some kind of human rights violation.

“I’m not abnormal,” I say, feeling a heaviness in my head. “My ID says male—don’t I look like a boy?”

“Sir—” The agent pauses, like he isn’t sure if sir was the right word to use for me. “Just step to the side and pick an agent to pat you down. We don’t want to cause any problems.”

“Seems like you’re doing a bang-up job of that already,” I tell him, stepping to the side like a good little boy. I can see Wyatt standing a ways away, our bags and shoes already collected at his feet.