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Owen is fourteen when he feels like his skin is too tight on his body for the first time.
Coming back from school, he throws a shirt carelessly over the mirror in his room and pretends he didn't do it on purpose. Mother may get angry at him for the mess, if she ever comes home from work, but he doesn't care. He carefully avoids looking at his reflection in the bathroom cabinet and conveniently forgets to switch the light on when he showers, though really it's just that he's always tired these days and things keep slipping from his mind. He pitches his voice lower — or well he tries — it always comes out a little squeaky — when he snarks at his classmates — but that's just because sarcasm doesn't sound that impressive if it's in a fucking girly princess voice like the one he has.
When he's fifteen, David from three doors down shows up at school in a skirt and says his name is Katie.
Everyone points and laughs and he hears someone throw insults his — or is it hers now? — way under their breath. He doesn't say anything, but something inside him feels awed — breathless with jealousy — confused. He never defends Dav— Katie from the bullies, but the day after his auntie Helen gives him an expensive dress he hates for Christmas, he goes to hi— her house and hands the lilac monstrosity to Katie with a (hopefully) nonchalant shrug.
Katie beams and when it looks like she's about to cry he leaves as fast as possible. Auntie Helen pouts when he tells her what he's done with the dress and Mother scowls, but he remembers Katie's smile and feels okay.
At sixteen, his mother boots him out of the house, and he goes to stay at Jake's. After two months of dressing in his old clothes and feeling freer than ever, Jake's mother gently tells him to sod off and so he goes on to live with whoever will take him. He crosses Katie in the school hallway once, and she does a double take at his unevenly cropped and bleached blond short hair — too much beer and kitchen scissors on a bad night, is all — then after the school day ends, she waits for him in the parking lot and invites him back to hers for tea.
Judy's mom — he's sleeping in her living room these days — is already getting impatient at him, so he accepts and after disgustingly sweet — he loves sweet — biscuits and a too sugary tea, Katie gently suggests staying at hers. His clothes are worn and slightly stinky, and that's probably why he accepts her old jeans and the button down she hands him.
At seventeen, after three months of living with her — and okay, maybe making out with her once or twice — she tells him about her dream of becoming a doctor and how she wants to help people like her. He asks who are the people like her, and when she tells him the word "trans" and its definition, it feels uncomfortably fitting. That weekend he gets drunk and tells her he thinks he's a boy. She just nods and holds his hair back as he throws his soul up into the toilet. It's getting long again. Katie's parents are incredibly patient with him, and even accept him when he tells them he's not a girl anymore – honey, we thought we had a son for fifteen long years, but we were wrong, we're not surprised we were wrong about you too. They tolerate his snarky attitude a bit less and so he learns to be polite — it's not hard when they love and care for him more than his own mother ever did. He spends the last two years of high school trying hard to be better, and at eighteen, he changes his name in his documents and goes on T.
At twenty, when Katie goes to university to become a doctor, he follows. He wants to help people too.