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David Crane rubbed her temples during 5th period and groaned. “Ugh Joey’s got the flu or something.”“What do you mean?” Trey asked, as he looked up from his worksheet. “I saw her and my little brother in the halls this morning.”“I’ve got a headache,” David said as if this explained everything.“So?”“I’ve got a headache,” David repeated. “So I know Joey is sick. I always get a headache like this when she’s sick.” David had always gotten a very specific kind of headache when her little sister was sick, even when they were nowhere near each other (and today David’s headache was bad enough that Joey must have gone home from school already, which meant she was miles away). David was eleven and had never once considered that this might not be a universal experience. Trey was looking at David like she was some kind of freak. “What, are you psychic or something?”“No!” David scoffed. David’s mom always said... and David wasn’t a… so she couldn’t be psychic. No way. “Of course not.” —But after that David started paying attention to the things she just knew the way she knew Joey was sick. The headaches, the feeling in her chest, the way she could remember things that no one had ever told her, the way she sometimes just knew what was going to happen before it did. They all started to jump out at her when it became clear that her friends didn’t know those sort of things the way she did. She had always assumed everyone knew stuff like that.Like in third grade and there was a big draw at school for a giant teddy bear. There were some other prizes, but all anyone in David’s class cared about was the giant bear, and for good reason. The teddy bear was enormous, easily three times David’s volume, and it was kept right in the window of the office so that the kids saw it every day when they arrived. And on the day of the draw the principal had put her hand in a big drum full of tickets, and just as she began to pull a single ticket from the pile David had closed her eyes and just known she was going to win. She hadn’t known how or why she’d known, but she had known, and ten seconds later the principal had called out her name.Or a few weeks ago, when her Dad had been about to take her to piano lesson. She’d had a horrible feeling about them leaving at that moment, and needed to delay their departure, even if it meant being late for her piano lesson that evening. She’d lied and told her dad she’d forgotten her sheet music upstairs and spent five minutes pretending to search for it in her room before the feeling passed and she was ready to go.Or the time David was nine and Tim was getting a puppy after school today. Tim had no idea. The puppy was a surprise. No one knew they were going to pick up a puppy that afternoon except Tim’s parents. But David knew. But of course David didn’t tell anyone. It seemed only polite not to spoil the surprise. Or the time…—“What does it feel like when you have a psychic vision?” Joey asked their mom from the backseat not even a month after Trey had asked the question that David had never bothered to consider before that moment that had been haunting her ever since. “How do you know they aren’t just normal feelings?”It was just the three of them coming back from Joey’s baseball game that afternoon (Dad was driving Grandpa home) and their mom had mentioned having a feeling about Joey’s coach being an accomplished ice sculptor (which had turned out to be correct, which they knew for sure because Joey had immediately rushed over to ask).David listened intently while leaving her headphones on for cover.“It’s kind of hard to describe,” Mom said after some thought. “Sometimes it’s just pieces of information I shouldn’t know about a stranger. Like we’re old friends and I’ve just remembered some long-forgotten little detail they told me years ago. Those ones feel more like memories I suppose, just of things that didn’t happen to me. Other visions just feel like feelings, really strong feelings that come out of nowhere. Some of those are more like dreams than anything, but different. Sharper and more vivid.”“Sometimes I know where the ball will land before its barely left the bat. Is it like that?” Joey asked.David rolled her eyes. “It’s not a superpower for sports.”“When will my psychic powers kick in?” Joey demanded, glaring at David but addressing only their mother.“They probably already have,” Mom said. “You just have to learn to listen to them.”—David was nowhere near as good at chess as her father was, but winning wasn’t really the point. The point was to spend an hour of so with her dad in comfortable silence. Sometimes they spoke while they played, but often they didn’t. David liked the quiet of it, the two of them concentrating together. Joey, who was rarely quiet for any length of time, couldn’t stand it and often complained loudly until someone would play a different game with her. Tonight Mom had ushered Joey away from the chessboard early on and David could hear them laughing uproariously through the closed doors that separated the two very different games being played as her dad pondered his next move.—David was twelve and had absolutely no reason to know that her math teacher used to be a tap dancer. Mr. Greene had never mentioned tap dancing, or dancing of any kind, and nor had anyone else for that matter, but David knew, with shocking certainty, that Mr. Greene had been a tap dancer before he decided to teach math. But even though David knew this it didn’t matter, she reasoned. She probably wouldn’t ever find out if she was right anyway, so it didn’t matter that she just knew that Mr. Greene used to be a tap dancer.It didn’t matter. It didn’t mean anything. David wasn’t psychic or anything. Nope.—“You always have the BEST birthday parties!” the last of Joey’s friends to be picked up exclaimed as her mother ushered her out the door at a brisk pace. “Mom can we set my cake on fire too?!”David had had a bad feeling about Joey’s birthday party going off the rails long before the first guests arrived, but that wasn’t a psychic vision, that was just common sense. David knew how her family’s parties went and sure enough, today’s festivities had included a game of hide and seek that resulted in Dad being trapped on the balcony for 45 minutes, 20 of Joey’s friends believing the statue in the hallway that led to the bathroom was cursed, and a small fire. All of this added up to a fairly eventful day on its own merit, but one that didn’t even crack the top five party disasters David had witnessed.The four Cranes were draped over various pieces of furniture in the living room in full post-party mode (even Joey was looking a little tuckered out).“This is all your side of the family,” Mom said as she watched bits of debris flutter down from the ceiling.“I know,” Dad said as he tried to wipe the charred icing from his shirt and gave up. “I’m pretty sure the Party Gods put a curse on the Cranes generations ago, dooming us to an eternity of party mishaps.”“Do I have the party curse too?” Joey asked.David and both of her parents said “Yes” without hesitation.“And it’s contagious,” Mom added. “I didn’t used to be like this. But as soon as I married into the family,” she snapped her fingers, “the curse got me. So it’s probably for the best if neither of you ever marry an event planner.”Joey collapsed into giggles at their mom’s little joke and Dad smiled before adding in his Serious Dad Voice, “But you both know you can fall in love with and marry whoever you want.”But Joey was too far gone to pay attention to the ‘we love and support our gay child’ pep talk, (she and David had gotten it about a million times since Joey had casually announced her crush on another girl in her kindergarten class years ago). She slipped off the chair sideways as she hiccoughed “Event planner!” and then after another fit of uncontrollable laughter added, “I’d ruin her life!” “You’ve had some parties that weren’t complete disasters,” David pointed out as Joey wiped her eyes but made no effort to remove herself from where she was on the floor. “Not very often. But it happens.”“That’s how the curse works,” Dad said. “Every so often a party goes almost well, making us believe that we’ve beaten the curse, and that’s when it gets you.”“Sorry kids,” Mom said with a grand gesture to the party carnage. “This is your legacy.”—“How’d you know that?!” Monique gaped at her.“She told us,” David lied, already panicking that she’d let that slip out of her mouth without examining where she’d gotten that piece of information.“No she didn’t!” Claire confirmed looking at David in shock. “How do you know that?”“Never mind. Ignore me. I’m wrong. I’m wrong,” David said in a rush. “Never mind.”David wasn’t wrong.—David liked to run. Running was solitary and exhausting and just the right combination of engaging and mindless and she didn’t have to measure herself against anyone or anything but how she felt. People kept trying to get her to join the track team at school (her gym teacher kept casually letting her know when the team was meeting) or suggesting apps that would let her track and compare her runs against others and they were all missing the point. She wasn’t running to be faster than anyone, and she didn’t care if her Tuesday run was a little shorter or faster than her Sunday run. She just liked to run.—“David knew I was pregnant before anyone,” her mom said to Aunt Roz. “Remember?”“What?” David asked, poking her head into the living room from the kitchen. She had just come down for a snack and hadn’t meant to overhear but-“Surely I’ve told you this story,” Mom said with a slight laugh. “My friend Anne was pregnant and was visiting and you had about a million questions so your Dad and I answered them and when we were finished you looked at me and said, ’there’s a baby in mummy’s tummy’. We corrected you over and over, but you wouldn’t believe us, and a few weeks later we found you’d been right.”“I knew you were pregnant with Joey before you did?” David repeated weakly, already slotting this new information into her ever-expanding timeline of not-psychic visions that she working so hard to ignore with the weary beginnings of acknowledgement.—After months of careful consideration David came to identify as intuitive. Intuitive sounded less crazy than psychic, David decided, and David felt crazy enough without parading around the fact that sometimes, far more often than she would like, she knew things she had no reason to know, or knew something was going to happen before it did. She would just do her best to not react when she felt something that had nothing to do with her. To not let on. Maybe it would just go away if she ignored it enough.—The man behind the counter at the museum gift shop was a definitely a gardener who had recently won a large prize for growing oversized vegetables and David knew this despite the man saying nothing to them but general pleasantries about the weather as they made their purchases. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that she knew this about him because she said nothing to him or to anyone about it. It was like she was just like everyone else. So it didn’t matter that she knew the stranger was a prize winning gardener. It didn’t matter.—David walked into her classroom Monday morning to the usual level of background radiation of the feelings of kids around her but did her absolute best not to let any of them come into focus enough for her to start picking up details from anyone. She took a deep breath and exhaled, refusing to engage with the fact that Olli…—David was thirteen and sitting in science class and filled with dread. And it wasn’t like she was scared of a test she hadn’t studied for or worried about her afternoon classes or anything. She had no reason to feel like this, but she was finding it difficult to ignore the feeling that something bad was about to happen. Something bad. Something really really bad.She got through science class and then she went to english but her unrest came with her. Her friend Alex noticed and asked if she was all right and David nodded automatically. Lunch should have been when she started to relax, but she didn’t. There was something about the afternoon that wasn’t right and she couldn’t figure it out. All she had in the afternoon was math and social studies. And she’d done all her homework and there weren’t supposed to be any tests and even if there were, she could handle it. And the feeling that rattled around inside her today wasn’t “I didn’t study enough” at all. It was DANGER, like flashing red lights and ear-piercing sirens. Like the time she’d been walking along a bridge as a kid and the handrail had broken as she’d been jumping trying to see over it and her dad had grabbed her and pulled her to safety. That same jolt of terror was what she was feeling, but non-stop and for no apparent reason.But she came back from recess and went to her desk by the window and pulled out her math text book and tried to ignore the way her body was telling her to run. She had made the decision to ignore all of her not-psychic feelings. That was how she was going to make them stop. She was focusing so hard on trying to copy down problem one from the board that she didn’t notice the teacher had gone over to answer the phone.“David!”It was clearly not the first time the teacher had called her, but David finally looked over at her so the teacher continued, “David your mother is down in the office to pick you up for your appointment. Collect your things.”David had no idea what the teacher was talking about. Mom hadn’t mentioned anything about her having an appointment this afternoon, or said anything about picking her up early. In fact, David was pretty sure that her mom had specifically said she was busy, but David did not question the teacher’s instructions, as they were the excuse she needed to do what her whole being had been screaming at her to do for the last three hours: Leave.So David gathered her things into her backpack and left, and with each step she took away from her desk the feeling that had been amplifying inside her lessened. She was feeling almost normal when she got the office and found her mom waiting for her looking… well… she looked like David had felt all day. “I forgot to mention your Doctor’s appointment,” her mom said in a would-be casual voice.“That’s okay Mom.”And just like that were leaving the school.As soon as they had cleared the perimeter her mom levelled with her. “You don’t have a doctor’s appointment.”David nodded. “I just had terrible feeling all day,” her mom continued. “I know you’ll think I’m silly, but I had this horrible sense that you were in danger if you stayed at school this afternoon, and the more I tried to ignore it, the worse it got and I know how I must sound but I was so worried about you and I would never pull you out of school unless it was really important but look I’m still shaking.” Her mom took a deep breath, and David didn’t quite know what to say, or how to express how grateful she was that her mom had shown up when she did. “It’s okay mom,” David said softly. “I’m okay.” Her mom let David pick the radio station on the drive home, and David looked out the window and hummed along with the music her dad pretended to like for her sake (but it was obvious he hated it) and watched the world drift by. Every mile they put between her and the school felt like safety, and she was so thankful her mom had done what David had been too afraid to do: act on what she had been feeling. And her mom had felt it too. Maybe David wasn’t as crazy as she felt. Maybe…In her head David tried out at least a dozen variations of telling her mom that she’d had the same feeling and the further they got away from school the better she felt but she couldn’t get the feelings into words at all and eventually she asked, “How do you feel now?”“Much better,” Mom said, glancing over at her. “I already feel a little silly for coming to get you but it’s been ages since I had a psychic feeling that strong. I don’t let them run my life, but every once and a while I just know that it’s important. At least you’ll never have to deal with this sort of thing,” she added with a little chuckle. “It’s only the women in my family who are psychic.”“Yeah,” David agreed, her heart sinking as she fell silent.David was very quiet the rest of the drive home.When they got home (without incident) Mom made each of them a cup of tea as David made herself a snack and then David did some math problems at the dining room table until her sister and her dad got home. Joey had been on a field trip to the Science Centre that day (which Dad had been helping chaperon) which meant they got back home at the same time, Joey looking exhilarated and Dad looking exhausted. “Did you hear?!” Joey said to the two of them as soon as she was in the door, “One of the windows in room 302 broke at school! They don’t even know why! It just shattered! Just like that! Apparently there was glass everywhere.”“Yes, but at least no one was hurt,” Dad added far more calmly. “The desk nearest the window was empty at the time.”David watched her mom react to this news without once mentioning or letting on what both she and David already knew:That was David’s desk.—Okay, so David was psychic. A little. Sometimes. So little it didn’t matter. It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t like David was going to tell anyone, ever. David would just ignore it. All of it. It wasn’t important. She was probably just imagining it. Only the girls in her mom’s family were psychic anyway. That’s what Mom always told them. And David wasn’t a girl… Was she though? She’d been thinking about it a lot since that day Mom came and got her from school. The thing was… she’d never felt much like a boy, but that was what the world told her she was, even when they told her she wasn’t very good at being a boy in the same breath. She’d never given it much thought. She had just kind of accepted what everyone told her about her gender. She’d never considered that everyone could be wrong, but now… now she was thinking about it all the time.—“I’d invite you too David,” Victoria said matter of factly not three days later. “But it’s a sleepover and I’m not allowed to have boys sleepover.”“David’s almost a girl anyway!” Mikalia said with a laugh as the rest of the group of them at the movie nodded in agreement. David tried not to dwell on it, even as the “almost” quietly broke her heart in ways she wasn’t prepared let herself acknowledge. —Jordyn was all excited about her date with Tyson that night but David didn’t need to be psychic to know this. Jordyn had been talking about it non-stop for the last four days. David tried to listen politely as Jordyn prattled on and on about Tyson and everything they had said to one another when she had asked him out but David mostly focusing on ignoring the overwhelming sense that Christopher (who was sitting across the room) was having a terrible week for reasons that David should not know. David didn’t even know Christopher that well, they’d never had a conversation outside the context of that one time when they happened to be in the same group for a project. David exhaled and redoubled her efforts at ignoring whatever she was picking up from Christopher. —David hated the feeling of total wrongness that came over her every time her dad announced with delight that they were due for new suits, and tragically, she had grown taller in the last few months so here she was again being fitted for another suit she didn’t want to have to wear. David didn’t feel like herself when she was wearing a suit. They were all so boxy and uncomfortable, she thought as she fidgeted with her collar a little. She didn’t like how they hung from her shoulders. She didn’t like how her dress shoes felt on her feet. She didn’t like her reflection when she looked at the person staring back at her in the fitting room mirror. But her dad was always so proud when she stepped out of the change room, beaming at her and calling her “son” and saying how she’s growing up so fast as the man fitting her new suit called her “young man” over and over.David felt both invisible and horrifically solid standing on the little stool in front of a mirror while the tailor added pins and her dad was practically beside himself with fatherly pride. She mostly got through her days assuming that people saw her as she felt, but every time she caught a glance of her reflection like this it became painfully clear that they didn’t. Her dad didn’t. And the man now adjusting the length of her left sleeve certainly didn’t.She desperately wished she could have sent Joey in her stead today. Joey, who had almost always chosen to wear suits to fancy events, ever since she was small and had tried on one of David’s old ones and loved it. But it didn’t matter. David was getting a new suit, that was that. It didn’t matter that she felt wrong. All of this didn’t mean anything David thought resolutely to herself. She was just overthinking everything. That’s all.—David googled the word “transgender” and then cleared her browser history half a dozen times.—David sighed when she saw that Mr. King was their substitute teacher one gloomy Wednesday. David hated when Mr. King subbed for them.“Divide into two groups please,” Mr. King announced. “Boys on the left side of the room, Girls on the right.”David’s heart sank. She delayed for a few precious seconds where she could remain safely at her desk in the middle of the room and then for a single thrilling moment she considered walking to the right side of the room with all the other girls. No sooner had the thought crossed her mind before icy fear flooded her system, shutting her brain down in the process. Her hands trembled with adrenaline coursing through her at the mere thought of… of… of… of nothing. Nothing. She knew which side of the room she was expected to go to.So she stood up and walked to the side of the room where the boys were, her heart still racing in her chest.—Her music was loud and the park was almost empty and David ran and ran and ran and ran.—David googled the word “transgender” again.And again.And again.—David couldn’t stop thinking about it. She didn’t really know what “feeling like a girl” or “feeling like a boy” felt like. She’d always been told she was a boy, but that had never sat quite right… But she didn’t know for sure she was a girl either. How was she supposed to know? All the answers she found online were variations of “I just knew” and David didn’t just know.She sighed and put down her phone.She knew all sorts of things she had no business knowing. She knew that her music teacher was leaving the country at the end of the school year. She knew Olli and Brian were dating even though they hadn’t told anyone yet. She got headaches when Joey was sick. She knew when her Mom had had a bad day before she’d even come home. She knew Uncle Frasier’s relationship was about to fall apart. But this? The one thing she really needed to know? She had no idea.—David was so sad she couldn't focus on anything but the weight in her heart and she was so angry her hands were trembling and she was so exhausted that her whole body ached with it all the time and she still didn’t KNOW. She wanted to scream at the stars above to answer her question. To beg the universe to give her this piece of information in the same undeniable way she had just known to go east on her last run. The way she had just known that Joey had sprained her ankle even though David had been 10 miles away at the time. She wanted to know this. She would give up her psychic powers if it meant knowing the answer to this one question for sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt. The question that felt so scary she barely even let herself think it.Am I…Am I…She threw herself onto her bed as a fresh wave of despair washed over her and she forced herself to think about something, anything else.—“How was school today David?”“Fine,” David shrugged as she put down her backpack and flopped onto the couch.“You’re sure?” Dad asked, almost casual, but David could feel the concern radiating off him.It was easy to picture Dad being bullied as a kid. He would be a target in a school today, so David couldn’t imagine how difficult it must have been for him back when he was actually in school. He’d been honest with David and Joey about how miserable a time he had growing up so David was sympathetic towards his constant checking in about how things were going for his kids at school. He and Mom had had to go to bat for Joey a few years ago when one of her teachers had insisted on calling her the ‘name on her birth certificate’ and Joey wasn’t having any of it. Joey had steadfast refused to answer to her other name and when the escalating consequences reached the point of contacting her parents, Mom and Dad had backed her up with such intensity that Joey’s name was changed in the school records. Joey and David had laughed about it later, as Joey recalled that the teacher had threatened Joey for days about “bringing her parents into this” as if it was obvious they would side with him as Joey told him over and over to just do it already so they could get this over with. “Yeah Dad,” David said. “Everything’s fine.”—David Crane was fourteen the first time she wrote “I think I’m trans” on a page of a notebook and then scribbled it out, her heart racing with fear as she scratched her pen back and forth until not a single line of text was legible. Then she tore the page out and ripped it into tiny pieces and dropped it into the glass of water on her desk, just in case.She didn’t have to tell anyone. That truth both comforted and terrified her. Because while she dreaded the idea of anyone finding out ever, she also hated the idea of having to live with feelings the way she did now for the rest of her life. But maybe she wasn’t trans. Maybe she wasn’t trans at all. She wasn’t sure yet. So maybe she wasn’t trans.But even as she fished the little bits of soggy paper out of the glass to throw them out, somewhere in the back of her mind, somewhere she wasn’t ready to deal with just yet, she knew.She knew.—“Why didn’t you say something before?” Joey asked, just like she’d asked every time their parents had recounted the tale of how they had finally gotten together (which was not at all the same as the story of how they’d met). David had heard the story a thousand times, but it was still hard for David to imagine her parents before they got together. David knew they were people as well as her parents, of course, but it was still weird that Niles Crane and Daphne Moon were two people who once upon a time didn’t say “I love you” to each other at all. Barely a day went by in David’s life when she didn’t hear her parents say “I love you” to each other before they left the house, or when one of them got home, or when they talked on the phone, or when they bumped into each other in the kitchen or passed the TV remote or any number of mundane reasons she’d heard her parents exchange ‘I love yous’. Her parents called each other “My Love” almost as frequently as they used each others names for goodness sake. The idea that her dad had gone years (YEARS) before telling her mom such a thing defied every piece of evidence David had ever seen of them, but it was true all the same.“Because I was afraid,” Dad said simply, glancing back at them through the rearview mirror in the backseat as they drove home.Joey, who feared nothing but claymation and clowns, couldn’t fathom the idea of being scared into silence.David understood perfectly. —Joey had it so easy, David mused. Joey never really had to come out because ever since she was little it all seemed so effortless. Joey who had crushes on other girls in her kindergarten class and had her first girlfriend in the second grade and corrected anyone who dared assume that one day she might marry a boy because if she got married she would have a wife, obviously. Hell, Joey had even changed her name, taking the nickname Grandpa had given her as a baby and claiming it as her own as soon as she could speak. She never had to announce that she liked girls or preferred to go by Joey, she just did, with an easy truth that David didn’t have even now. David longed to know her gender and her sexuality and her name the same way Joey did. But no, David was just an endless series of question marks, and the more she thought about everything, the more confused she became.David liked girls, sure. But not as much as Joey did. Not as much as the straight boys in her class either for that matter. Not that there was an easy metric with which to measure herself against, but everyone seemed to obsess over who liked who and David didn’t even know where to start. Because girls were great. Girls who got called the right pronouns all the time without having to do any soul searching beforehand. That must be nice. But also the senior who was a head taller than David and wore a leather jacket over her uniform who made David’s knees weak whenever she caught sight of her walking between classes. She was a girl. And the butch girl in her biology class that had always been a tomboy but hadn’t grown out of it the way everyone seemed to think she would for example. She was great. But there were boys too. Sometimes. The red-headed junior guy with curly hair who always wore colourful socks and who had been in every high school theatre production since David had been there. The soft-spoken boy that sat beside her in english class who could barely say three words to David without blushing. Damien. David couldn’t get a read on him beyond the shared sense of not being cishet but not saying anything (and the fact that David had had a psychic vision of him and a pet turtle, which was neither here nor there). —Her parents had wisely booked a couple rooms at a bed and breakfast when it became clear that they were going to be attending the Moon family get together (Mom had gotten a stricken look on her face when the invites had gone around and she couldn’t think of a reason why they couldn’t make it this year but Dad had quickly said they should find somewhere nearby to stay rather than staying with the family) and David was deeply grateful for this. Knowing she had a room to escape to that wasn’t attached to the house barely containing all of her uncles and aunts and cousins made it much more bearable. To make things even better, Joey had only spent the first night in the room they had to share for the week before she opted to join the cousins sleeping in the basement back at the house (Twelve of them David had counted in horror. Twelve kids under thirteen in sleeping bags in a single room) and David couldn’t be happier that her and Joey’s idea of a good time varied so vastly. David was now facing the reality of having a room at a lovely bed and breakfast all to herself, and the room, which had seemed rather small when she was under the assumption that she would be sharing it with Joey all week, now seemed friendly and spacious. There was a bookcase in the hall downstairs full of books that guests were free to borrow and read at their leisure, and upon further inspection David realized that previous readers of the books had signed their name and where they were from in the front of the books. She spent some time perusing the bookshelf and ultimately picked a book that had a good balance of names and locations at the front, figuring half a dozen vacationers from across the globe couldn’t be wrong. —Joey came crashing into the house with the small army of Moon children covered in mud and blood looking like she was having the time of her life. There was evidence on her face and her shirt of a pretty severe nosebleed that clearly hadn’t dampened her enthusiasm in slightest as she happily gushed about the plays she made and how many people she had tackled and how much she wanted to find a rugby team to join as soon as they got back home.Mom took one look at her and just said, “Oh dear. Well, lets get you cleaned up before dinner” while Dad (predictably) looked rather stunned by the state of his daughter (“I thought you were just going outside to play?!”) as David watched in amusement at the familiar scene unfolding. One would think that their dad would be used to Joey’s idea of a good time by now, but he still seemed to be caught off guard by how much Joey delighted in contact sports.Joey was still too excited to be concerned with clean clothes and she and the other kids couldn’t stop describing the game's highlights and asking when they could play again until eventually Mom said, “We’ll look into rugby leagues for you when we get home, alright?”“What?!” Dad yelped. “And spend the next year picking her teeth up from the playing surface?!”“You worry too much,” Joey rolled her eyes as she finally let Mom steer her towards the restroom to wash up. “I’ve still got some baby teeth anyway. I can lose those!”It took two tables (both of which were composed of multiple tables of a variety of heights pushed together) to seat the whole family down for dinner. David ended up at the “grown up table”, while most of her uncles 30 years her senior were at the “kid's table” along with Joey and the rest of the younger cousins. Joey was wearing some clothes she borrowed from Mason (the cousin closet in size to her) because her rugby clothes were no doubt a biohazard at this point.It was loud and chaotic, the 36 of them all eating and talking and just existing in the same room. It made David extra grateful for their usual household of the four of them. Joey was loud and annoying sure, but she was still just one person. Even at her most tornado-like she couldn’t compete with this, David mused as she took a sip of water and the kids table broke out in a rendition of a rowdy song that she didn’t know. —Mom was talking to David’s cousin Audrey as she made some tea and David was trying not to pay too much attention to them, instead she was channeling her focus into sorting and putting away the cutlery and trying to ignore both their actual present-day conversation and the echoes of the one they had when Audrey couldn’t have been much older than four or five. It was stunningly vivid in her head: her mom in a wedding dress years before David was even a thought in her head and little Audrey in a fancy dress and an eye patch. And in David’s head she saw this image of the two of them and heard a single phrase as clearly as if it was being spoken now: “You’re the saddest bride I’ve ever seen.”And David knew this was the exact moment Mom made up her mind to run off with Dad. Mom had never told her about this part of that day (she’d never heard her mention Audrey at all) but there was no doubt that was what David was picking up from them, just as there was no doubt in the version of Mom in her vision about what she was about to do. Joey came tearing through the kitchen chasing after a flurry of younger cousins but she skidded to a halt and crashed into David without even really seeing her as she stared at Audrey and Mom with her mouth agape.“Was Audrey at Mom and Dad’s wedding?” Joey asked David.“No, they eloped remember?” David said as she put a fork in the knife section of the cutlery holder.Joey rolled her eyes, “Not the real one. One of the fake ones after. I just have this feeling I’ve seen a picture of the two of them where Mom’s in a wedding dress-ooohhhhhhh my god! This is a psychic vision! This is what Mom is talking about! David!”David tried to subtly shush Joey, which went about as well as such endeavours ever went, as Joey immediately went up to Mom and Audrey to interrupt with her news.“Mom! Mom! Mom! I just had a psychic vision! Audrey was at your wedding! Not the one to Dad. The one you didn’t get married at! But I saw it!”“Oh how exciting!” Mom said. “Go on then, tell us all about it.”David continued to put the knives away but listened intently as Joey told Mom and Audrey about the few details she had seen. Basically all Joey had gotten was Mom in a wedding dress. She hadn’t even seen that Audrey had been wearing an eye patch because when Mom brought it up and Joey had no idea. “Oh God,” Audrey groaned as Joey giggled. “I forgot about the eye patch.”“Oh shush,” Mom said. “You were adorable. And you changed my life that day.”“What do you mean?” Audrey and Joey asked at the same time while David hesitated to put the forks away even less efficiently.“Have we really never talked about this?” Mom asked Audrey in surprise. When Audrey shook her head with bewilderment Mom added, “You were so young. I suppose you don’t remember what you said to me.”And so Mom told the tale of the moment that had been echoing in David’s head for the last ten minutes, and when she got to the part about exactly what Audrey had said to her way back then, David tried to look like she hadn’t heard it dozens of times before. “So I was right!” Joey exclaimed, missing both the point of the story and the way Mom was looking at Audrey as if she would never be able to repay her for what she did for her that day.“Was this your first psychic vision then?” Audrey asked Joey.“I think so!” Joey said. “I mean, sometimes I know where the ball is going to land when I’m playing baseball but this one wasn’t like that!”Something occurred to David at seemingly the same moment it occurred to Joey, but of course it was Joey who spoke the quandary aloud. “Wait. You’re a Moon girl! So you must be psychic too?!”Audrey laughed. “Maybe a little. I won’t be telling fortunes as my career or anything.”“But you have them too?” Joey pressed. “The psychic visions?”“I don’t really get visions,” Audrey said thoughtfully. “More like, secondhand emotions? I dunno. If someone is feeling a lot of something that energy sort of gets inside of me and I don’t always know where it’s coming from but it’s just there. Does that make sense?”Joey scrunched up her face. “I guess so. So can you feel what I’m feeling right now?”“I don’t need to be psychic to know you’re excited,” Audrey laughed. “You bouncing around in circles is projecting that loud and clear.”“My Joey’s always worn her heart on her sleeve,” Mom said fondly. “Ever since she was a little girl.”David had run out of cutlery to put away and she was running out of viable reasons to be in the kitchen listening to a conversation she wasn’t really a part of but she couldn’t make herself leave the room. Joey was having a conversation with Mom that David had never gotten to have and even now Joey was pressing Mom for more answers about what psychic visions felt like and how often they happened and what to be on the look out for and a dozen other things that David had been dying to ask for years.“Come on,” Mom said as she put her hands on Joey’s shoulders and guided her towards the back door. “Why don’t we take our tea out on the porch and I’ll tell you a few more stories. I’ve been saving some for when you started having visions.”David watched Audrey, Joey, and Mom disappear through the back door, both the kitchen and her head suddenly very empty without the three of them there (her psychic vision finally faded when Audrey was out of sight) and David was left feeling only her own emotions, even as she desperately wished they belonged to someone else. Audrey poked her head back in through the sliding door. “You coming David? Your cup of tea is out here waiting for you.”—A thrilling thought came over her late on the third night when she finished her borrowed book as she reached for the pen on the nightstand to add her name to the front of the book. She’d been on the verge of sleep for the last three chapters but now she was wide awake, her mind racing with possibilities. She stared at the list of names in the front of the book, pen poised above them for a long time, determined to make the most of this opportunity. When she finally put pen to paper, she wrote a name she’d never written down before. —She read three more books from the micro library before the week was done and they flew back home, and each time she wrote her name in the front she tried out a new name, figuring no one would ever cross-reference the books and analyze the handwriting to discover that the collection of Cranes who signed their names were in fact the same person. (Though she was careful to make sure neither her parents nor Joey were paying attention to the books she was reading, even though she was pretty sure that none of her family knew anything about the informal check out system in this Bed and Breakfast, she didn’t want to take any chances.)—Today Joey’s soccer practice had been cancelled, as well as her gym class based on the way she was tearing around the apartment like some sort of hyperactive cheetah while David tried to read the book assigned to her for english. Their parents weren’t home from work yet which meant there was no one but David to try and get her to chill out for 30 consecutive seconds and after half an hour of trying to ignore her without success David put down her book and changed into her running clothes.David emerged from her bedroom and followed the noise to where Joey was trying to walk on her hands in the living room and announced, “We’re going for a run. Put your shoes on.”And Joey, who generally listened to David about a third of the time, dropped her feet back onto the floor and ran to grab her shoes. David had intended to let her hyperactive little sister set the pace, but Joey fell into step with her with neither complaint (rare) or competition (practically unheard of) so they ran side by side in companionable silence for a long while. “Do people at school ever give you a hard time?” Joey asked out of nowhere as she stretched her arms above her head and looked over at David. They had slowed to a walk through a neighbourhood park and David looked back at her with concern.“Why?” David asked at once, wondering how on earth she hadn’t noticed something was off before. She’d always been more in-tune with Joey than anyone else but she hadn’t had any psychic headaches lately. “Are people giving you a hard time at school? Are you being bullied? Do I need to come down there and-” Joey giggled a little and David stopped and asked, “What is it?”“Just the thought of you coming down there to be my enforcer,” Joey said with a grin. David had to admit she had a point. Joey was thirteen and full of self-confidence and righteous anger and made of finely tuned muscle whereas David was fifteen and little more than anxiety and doubt walking around in a delicate human shell.“I would you know,” David said quietly, kicking a pebble out of the way. “If someone was giving you a hard time for being gay I’d—”“They’re not,” Joey assured her. “Honestly, they’re not.” She said when David looked at her skeptically. “I’m not even the only gay kid in my class anymore. I was just worried about you.”“I’m fine,” David said automatically.“I’m just saying,” Joey said. “If anyone gives you a hard time about anything just say the word.”“And what?” David asked with a hint of smile.Joey grimaced, as if the answer was too dire to speak in words. “I’m just saying. I got you. Okay?”“Race you back home?” David said, speaking Joey’s primary language by way of showing she understood and appreciated what was being offered.Joey took off sprinting and David charged after her, the feeling of a pact being sealed between them as they bounded across the grass.—Jet was a soft butch girl with short curly black hair who had transferred to their school in the middle of the year and whenever she and David stood next to each other they were as likely to be referenced collectively as “boys” as they were “girls”. It was like having a super power. Group gendering. “There’s this roller rink about an hour outside of town,” Jet said to their group one day during class when they were all supposed to be working on problems 4a,c,f,g,and k. “It plays old music and everyone roller-skates around in a counter-clockwise circle and at this point it’s basically a gay club for all the teens who don’t have fake IDs. But not a club. But still super gay. Wanna go this weekend?”“A roller rink?” Claire asked in disbelief.“I’ll go,” Monique said.“Me too,” Winston added. (Winston went anywhere Monique was going if he had the option).Jet nodded. “David? You in?”David shrugged. “Sure, why not.”But by Friday, the group chat was full of messages of which the gist was that Claire and Monique (and therefore Winston) did not want to go to the roller rink that Saturday as planned. David assumed it wasn’t happening, but Saturday afternoon Jet texted David, “They all bailed, but do you still wanna go?”David didn’t know Jet all that well. They’d never hung out alone outside of school before at all, and certainly not alone, but David replied, “Yeah” without hesitation.“I’ll come get you at 7.”—The gods of the universe were on David’s side tonight (and to be clear, they were almost never on her side). Her parents were at one of Joey’s sporting events (David could look at the calendar to confirm which one, but she didn’t care that much right now), which meant that neither of them were there to see her off when Jet came to pick her up. David texted them to let them know she was going out and would have her phone on her, but she was spared any additional parental questions and slipped out into the night.—Jet was a little older than David and already had her own car. David suddenly felt both quite young and quite old as Jet unlocked the doors for them. “Nice car,” David said when she saw it. She knew nothing about cars, but whatever this was it looked nice.“Guilt gift when my parents divorced,” Jet said with a wave of dismissal. “Didn’t you get something when your parents split up?”“My parents are still together,” David replied as she got into the passenger seat.“No shit!” Jet laughed as she scrolled through her phone looking for the ideal playlist. “Look at you, Mr. Nuclear Family!”David tried to laugh along with her, but all she managed was a kind of grimace and then fell into silence.“Sorry,” Jet said seriously. David brushed her apology off, but Jet never called her “Mr.” again all the same.—David had never been to a roller rink before. There was a big disco ball hanging in the centre which David chose to believe had been there since 1975 and it was so lame and so kind of great all at the same time. Jet had thrown a couple of extra pairs of both rollerskates and rollerblades into her trunk (“I’m the youngest of five kids. I’m in a house full of abandoned sports equipment”), so David didn’t have to rent skates which was how David came to be wearing rollerblades with huge teal plastic buckles and bright pink laces. And maybe it was just because Jet mentioned it but, the other people there did look kind of… not so straight, which David found quietly heartening.She and Jet roller-skated in a counter-clockwise circle as they laughed at their poor form. —“We should go if we want to beat traffic.” The words were out of David’s mouth before she realized what she was saying, and retroactively realized she should have at least checked her phone for cover or something before just blurting that out.“Cinderella, it’s barely midnight,” Jet said pointing to the scoreboard clock overhead. “What traffic?”But five minutes later they were on their way back to her car and the twinge in David’s chest softened with relief.—“Did you have a good time last night son?” her dad asked over Sunday breakfast, “You got back pretty late.”“Yeah it was fun,” David yawned as she ignored the way her stomach tightened at the word ‘son’.“Not too much fun I hope.”David rolled her eyes. “My friend and I went to a roller rink Dad. Hardly a scandalous Saturday night.” “Well, so long as you had a good time,” Dad said after discreetly confirming with Mom what in fact a roller rink was.—“David. David!” David stopped and stepped to the side of the hall and let Jet jog her way towards her.“Carlos and Daniel were stuck on the highway for three hours Saturday night!” Jet said. “A truck crashed or something? If we’d left twenty minutes later that would have been us!”All the same, David didn’t like the way Jet was marvelling at her and resolved to redouble her efforts to ignore her psychic visions in the future, even if it meant sitting in traffic for hours on the way home.—Her Dad had had an argument with uncle Frasier about some benefit they were both attending but he hadn’t mentioned anything so David didn’t ask about it and Joey was sleep deprived and fighting with one of her best friends over something stupid that had blown up into something much bigger and her mom was planning a big surprise for Dad for his birthday and Jet was still in love with her emotionally distant ex and Connor’s dog was sick and her science teacher was pregnant but didn’t know it yet and Arthur had taken karate as a kid but stopped when he moved schools and David wasn’t supposed to know any of this but she felt it rattling around inside her all the time, the ongoing rush of things she shouldn’t know and feelings she shouldn't feel, as they weren’t even hers to begin with.She put on her noise-cancelling headphones and called back towards where her parents were in the kitchen that she was going for a run.—David lay on her bed and scrolled through a trans girl’s blog in the wee hours of the morning. She was only a year older than David was now, but she’d been on hormones for over a year and had already legally changed her name and her wardrobe and she looked so happy and comfortable in her own body in all of her latest photos.David’s eyes burned with exhaustion and she really needed to put her phone down and just go the fuck to sleep but she couldn’t look away from the young woman smiling at her posting about how great it was to finally feel like a real person. —“I’m worried about you,” her mom said one evening when they were the only two at home.“I’m okay,” David replied automatically.“Okay,” her mom said. “But it’s okay if you’re not.”—David couldn’t articulate why, but she could feel that it was very important that they go visit Grandpa tonight. She’d tried to ignore the feeling all day, even as it got so strong that she couldn’t focus in math at all, but when Mom and Dad got home from work she practically ran out of her room (where she had been trying and failing to get her math homework done) and slid to a halt by the front door as she said, “Can we go visit Grandpa and Grandma?”“Right now?” Dad asked as he hung up his jacket. “We’re going over there for dinner on Sunday.”“I know,” David said. “But I really want to go visit them. Tonight.” She tried to sound calm and rational and not at all like she was already calculating the fastest sequence of bus routes to take if they said no. But then her mom took one look at her and agreed to take her just as soon as she changed out of her work clothes.So twenty minutes later the four of them were on their way to her grandparent’s place (her Dad had agreed to join them as soon as Mom said she would go, which meant Joey was coming along by default because found the house too quiet when she was there alone.)Grandpa answered the door with a huge grin, delighted they had stopped by and was his usual self, hugging them all in greeting except Joey, who he playfully punched on the arm (as was her preference). David took a deep breath as she looked around the room and then back to Grandpa. He was in good spirits and, as far as David could tell, perfectly fine. Grandma was out, so it was just the four of them and Grandpa for the evening. It was a normal visit, unremarkable in every way. Grandpa talked to David mostly about school and to Joey mostly about baseball, but that didn’t ease the tension David had carried around in her chest all day very much. She knew she had been ridiculous by insisting they all come over here, and she was being ridiculous now, still feeling… something. She wanted to stay longer, even choosing to hang around waiting for Grandma to get back so they could say hello, but once Grandma had safely returned and it was getting late, there was no reason for them to hang around so late on a school night.David took care to hug Grandpa extra long when they were leaving, even waiting for him to make the rounds and hug the whole family before hugging him a second time and saying she loved him.As usual, Grandpa blushed and blundered a little before returning the sentiment.Dad drove home and Mom kept stealing glances at her from the passenger seat which David did her best to ignore.When David woke up to the sound of the phone ringing and looked over at the clock (3:26 a.m.) she already knew what it was about.—The next two weeks were a blur she didn’t care to clarify. Her grief too heavy and painful to examine, just something she must endure. Her dad repeatedly expressed gratitude that David had made them visit that night, but she couldn’t take solace even in something as simple as her father’s thanks, and every time he mentioned that final visit that she’d just happened to have inspired David felt worse and worse.David knew her mom was also glad they’d gone to visit him that night, she’d told her so, right when she’d knocked on his door and David had pretended to be asleep so that she’d have a few more moments of being able to pretend that it hadn’t happened. That Grandpa wasn’t dead.But Mom had come in and spoken her name so softly, and David could feel her hand shaking a little as she laid her hand on his shoulder and gently pried her from sleep. And so David woke and looked up and her mother and let her tell her what the phone call had been about.David didn’t remember much of the specifics of that conversation, but she remembered the way her mom had said, “I’m here if you want to talk. Okay?”—A painful but familiar ache weighed upon David as she scrolled through the pictures of trans girls excitedly celebrating the latest milestone of their transition. David refused to label even part of what she was feeling as jealousy, but even so, jealousy would only begin to describe the collision of hope and sorrow that consumed her whenever she let herself browse the trans parts of the internet. Everyone seemed so much further along than her. Everyone. Hormones. Name change. Surgery. Paper work. Pronouns. Hormone blockers. Laser hair removal. Everything. There were people her age already out there living their lives in ways David couldn’t even comprehend. How was she supposed to know how to do all this trans stuff? She didn’t even have a name. She couldn’t even allow herself to consider the possibility that she was trans without a “maybe” or “I think” or some other less committal qualifier, even in her own head. It still felt too dangerous a possibility.And every day she spent wondering if maybe she was trans without saying or doing anything she marched further along the puberty track she had been dealt, and she knew better than most that the changes testosterone were doing to her would cost her later. Her silence had consequences and every testosterone-based change she noticed made her hate herself even more. And still she did nothing. Said nothing. —It was just David and her mom in the car when David broke down crying on the way to school one foggy Thursday morning. She didn’t know why, it just happened. One minute they were pulling out of the parking garage and the next she was crying into her knees unable to stop and all she could say when her mom asked what was wrong, if there was anything she could do to help was “I’m just so tired” and “I’m sorry” over and over.The car came to an abrupt halt but David didn’t look up from her knees, still trying to get herself together, so she didn’t realize that her mom had pulled over until the passenger side door opened and arms wrapped around David who was still tightly curled where she sat.“You have nothing to apologize for,” her mom said as she held her firmly in a hug, despite the awkwardness of their positions, her voice full of love and concern. “Nothing at all.”“I’m sorry,” David whispered as she felt her Mom hold her even tighter. “I’m sorry.”“Whenever you’re ready to talk about it,” Mom said. “I’m here okay?”—David had unwisely invited her friends Claire and Monique over to watch a movie, which would have been fine except Joey and her friend Tucker were also around (baseball practise had been cut short due to thunderstorms) and they decided to join them for movie night, the two of them devouring so much popcorn so quickly that David had to get up and make more not 15 minutes into the movie.The movie wasn’t to Tucker and Joey’s tastes and they were making this known while David, Claire, and Monique did their best to ignore them. The strategy didn’t really work, but Joey and Tucker eventually fell into a semi-complacent quiet-ish which was really all David could ever hope of her younger sister as the movie played on. But near the end of the movie when the lead woman dramatically left her fiancée at the altar for another man Tucker groaned and rolled his eyes.“That doesn’t really happen,” Tucker complained loudly. “It’s just in the movies.”“Sure it does,” Joey piped up at full volume. David shushed her but nothing she did would deter Joey from finishing proving Tucker wrong. “My Mom did it.”David discreetly turned up the volume of the TV a few points, but it didn’t matter. Claire and Monique weren’t paying attention to the movie anymore.“Yeah right,” Tucker fired back.“She did!” Joey insisted. “She left the guy she was going to marry on her wedding day because she was in love with my Dad!”“Is that true?” Claire asked as she turned to David for confirmation as Monique looked at David and said, “You never told us that!”“Why would I tell you that?” David asked, taken aback by being confronted as if she had been concealing something she should have revealed. “It’s not something that comes up.”“So it’s true!” Claire said.“No it’s not!” Tucker insisted. “There’s no way.”“It is! MOM!” Joey yelled.From another room David heard her mom reply, “What have I told you about yelling in the house?”“ONLY IN EMERGENCIES. WHICH THIS IS. MY HONOUR IS AT STAKE.”Footsteps and then the inevitable, “For goodness sake Joey,” as their mom emerged in the doorway and leaned against it. “What’s the emergency? I don’t see any blood or fire today.”“Tucker doesn’t believe that you left a man at the altar,” Joey said. “Tell him the truth.”“It’s true,” she confirmed without flourish. “I did leave a man at the altar.”David sank a little further into the couch and tried to watch the end of the movie as Joey turned to Tucker and said, “I told you so” and both Monique and Claire looked at her mom with new eyes.—Her dad took great pleasure in calling her “son”. Barely a day went by without David hearing some variation of “C’mere son”, “I love you son”, or just “son” in place of her name. Her Grandfather had called his sons “son” too and it was obvious her dad took pride in that identity. And David didn’t resent her father’s use of the word, she just wished it didn’t make her skin crawl. She was going to have to tell him. Sooner or later she was going to have to tell him and one of the things that would happen was that her dad would never call her “son” again with that love in his voice. And David wouldn’t miss the title, but it was impossible not to fear that the love may change as well. —David was pretty sure her mom knew. David hadn’t told her (David hadn’t told anyone) but lately there was some level of understanding between them that let David breathe just a little easier. David was psychic and David was trans. In David’s head they were connected, at least in terms of having to tell her mom. It was, after all, only the women in her family that were psychic. —“I think we’re about due for some new suits!” Dad announced with glee Saturday morning as Joey reached for a waffle and David shrunk a little behind her orange juice. “How about I take the three of us out for lunch and then we can get you two properly outfitted for the season.”Joey agreed immediately on the condition that she get to pick out a fun coloured tie and get dropped off at her friends house for a sleepover later that night, which gave David time to meticulously pour syrup into each individual square crevasse of her waffle as she stalled for time.“What about you son?” Dad asked. “Saturday suit-fitting with your old man and Joey?”David chewed the piece of waffle in her mouth far more throughly than necessary, trying to figure out a way to politely decline while very much knowing that most of her formal clothing no longer fit.“David and I were going to go out shopping on Saturday,” Mom said with a would-be casual glance in her direction. “Remember David?” “Oh yeah,” David said, seizing the ready-made excuse her mom had provided. “Mom and I have plans.”“Oh,” Dad said. “That’s alright. Looks like it’s just you and me Joey. Depending on how long it takes, maybe we can stop by the art gallery afterwards.”“Or the trampoline park!” Joey suggested as David and her mom simultaneously smirked into their breakfast at the way Dad tried to sound as excited about that option as well.—Tonight Joey was at Ingrid’s house which meant David was free to sit across from her dad at the chess board in contemplative silence for as long as the game took while Mom read on the sofa beside them. David moved her bishop and then sat back, letting her dad think over his next move while she went back to thinking about the version of the story that her friends got when they asked Mom about that time she left a man at the altar. She’d been thinking about it a lot lately. Not because any of the story had been new to David, but because of what her mom had seemingly left out. Because while Mom had answered their questions, she hadn’t finished the story the way David had always heard it finished. When her mom or her dad spoke of how they got together, the story wasn’t about how much they regretted that they hurt people along the way, or that things worked out in the end, or not to rush into marriage or to follow your heart or whatever else Mom had said to Claire and Monique that night.The end of the story, whenever Dad or Mom told it to David and Joey, was this:Be brave. Speak your truth. Take the risk. Even when you’re terrified. Especially when you’re terrified.Her parents knew how close they came to missing out on everything and it still scared them to this day. David could feel their fear whenever they talked about it, the heavy silence with which they considered the path they almost ended up on because they were too afraid to say something. There was a version of their lives where they never told each other how they felt and it scared the hell out of them. And that stirred quietly in David’s mind, how long her parents both waited and regretted in silence because they were too afraid to say what they needed to say. And it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the same at all. But David, who held her silence day after day, dooming herself to another day of being misgendered for the millionth time because she was terrified of every possible outcome, knew in her heart of hearts that she was her parent's daughter. “Dad…” David said as she made up her mind, not daring to glance up from the chess board at first, but then looking at her father who was looking back at her with his undivided attention. “There’s something I need to tell you.”