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Everything started with thin splatter of blood lining Theodore’s pants and the sharp, rolling waves of pain hitting his gut.
He wondered if he was dying.

--

Theodore Sartoshi and Marissa Knus had spent much of their childhood in the old skeleton of a sand-building, where the walls had just crumbled enough for two small children to crawl through. It was secluded enough, tucked in a back alleyway, a remnant of an old shop that was part of a husk of an indoor marketplace long since starved to death in an old recession. The people who had once made this center vibrant had come to terms with life crammed into make-shift slums that receded into the dirty core of Ador. Shunned by the noble and the middle classes alike—and even looked down upon the lower peasants—these people were like rats lurking in the bowels of a sewer, dirty and better left unseen.

But this was the only life that either child had ever known. Growing up, both had scampered through the rows of tents, booting chickens from their path, feet absolutely filthy from sand and grime, and clothes little more than rags. They’d wreak general havoc this way, coming to annoy the decrepit old seamstress in her ragged tent or to beg the can collectors to spare them a few cents for candy. The stench of sewage was thick in the area; both children usually came home splattered with it from where it seeped down the gutters.

They’d been told to stay to the three blocks that marked their territory and above all to stick together. Marissa had once wandered out where the tents blended with stick dwellings set into the walls, little caves guarded by threadbare old blankets usually tied to one side. The men living there usually spent their days taking long drafts of tobacco-sticks and releasing their cloying fumes. From there she’d seen the towers of the factories that her father and brothers worked. Menacing buildings lit internally by furnaces where much of the metal of the town was shaped and welded together, they were hulking monsters that spewed smoke and dust into the air so heavily that sometimes it trapped the heat and smothered the sunlight.

“One day I’ll follow them there and work too. S’important to work.” Marissa had once told Theodore. That was the day that she’d begun collecting tin cans and shards of glass from the streets in a little canvas sack. Because such things could be recycled, and could yield a few pennies here and there to those who had scavenged enough.

“Mama, what do you do for work?” Theodore had asked once he’d ducked under the burlap flap draped over the wooden structure of his home.

His mother was crouched over a tin can and a tiny wood stove, mashing at a thick paste. She looked up, looked back down, then looked at him again, brow creasing. “Mercy, child, you’re completely filthy!”

Theodore had to rock back on his heels to stare the small length down his legs at the grime that coated from his knees to the tips of his toes. Even drawing up his pants at the thigh by the strings had not spared them from horse manure and sludge. He merely smiled sheepishly and tugged the ends of his shirt down. “But mama, what do you do? Marissa collects glass and stuff and her Papa goes to the factory and comes back covered in black! But you never leave here…cept when I go with you to the market for squash. Does that mean we’re rich?”

There was no denying the focus and intelligence behind her son’s fierce eyes, strengthened yet limited by childlike innocence, and for a moment Theodore’s mother felt her smile fade. “Dear son, if it’s within my power, you’ll never have to know what it is that I do for work.” She beckoned Theodore forward so she could hold him in his arms, fingers sorting through the reddish tangles that clumped around his head. “My, this is the filthiest hug in history. Fetch me the pail and we’ll draw enough water to maybe begin to find you beneath all this.”

--

“What do you mean you didn’t know you were a girl?”

Years later, the two still visited their little hideaway, though they’d had to pry away a few more sticks and gouge out hardened sand from the entry to accommodate growing bodies. They’d also made the entrance more secure by setting up a barrier of stones further down the alleyway.

Theodore sighed and threw the beige shorts down. The tiny drops of red mocked him from the folds of fabric. “I never thought about it, okay. I didn’t know it was a thing to think about. I mean, there’s collecting scraps and being hungry and running around and finding food to worry about.”

“But you take your pants off and there’s no mistaking it!” Merissa said. She regarded him with raised brows, arms crossed while she leaned against an old barrel. “You never questioned why you and your own mom were identical? Never played with the other boys out in the canals?”

Frowning, Theodore slumped against the second barrel and watched the silhouette of a woman’s skirt slink past the assorted cracks of the wall, the shadow blinking out the sunlight dappling the sand floor. He set to compressing his stomach at intervals in hopes of stemming the pain and the uncomfortable bloating. “I said it just never occurred to me. She always called me son. And she told me to stay away from the other little boys. I obeyed, okay.”

She laughed.

Any other time, Theodore would have perked up at that quiet little tremoring giggle, but now he felt the colour rise in his cheek and a prickling, uneasy sensation light up the back of his neck and scalp. “Hey. It’s not funny.” He sat up straighter, tense.

Marissa shook her head and put her knuckles to her forehead, hard, to help reorganize her thoughts. “Sorry,” she murmured. “It’s just that for a kid who grew up on the streets you’re pretty naïve. But that’s your mother’s fault, not yours…” She sighed and studied him, lips slightly pursed. “I mean, she had to have known so…” She sighed again. “But, if you need me to teach you how to be a girl, I can. It’s not that hard, really. I mean, the actions of it. Apparently there’s a mindset too”--she chuckled to herself—“but my dad says I’ll never get the hang of that. I’m too rambunctious.”

Now the uneasy sensation grew in him, but the prickling gave way to cold goosebumps rising despite the suffocating heat pervading the shadowed little cellar. “To be a girl…?” And he studied her—truly studied Marissa—for the first time that he could remember, trying to look past the stains on her feet and dirt smudged in her face, or the mischievous light in dark eyes that inspired him to get into trouble with her. He took in greasy black hair that hung in limp ringlets and a ragged bodice loose around an undeveloped chest. Her chin tapered into a delicate point and plump lips always suggested a smile. Her skirt hung in tiers down to her ankles, concealing calves Theodore knew to be strong and fast.

And he thought about himself.

All 5’6” and still growing of him—or her—strength already coiling into a lithe frame though his were muscles underdeveloped. There was nothing feminine about his square jaw, no defined cheekbones or slender waist—just a stock-straight figure and a crop of copper hair jabbing haphazardly in every direction. His trousers bunched at his knees and a too-long jacket hung far past his waist, dwarfing him.

He hung his head and shrugged. “You sure that’s even possible?”

With another laugh, she ducked her head to catch his eyes and offered a bemused expression. “Maybe? If not, then it’ll be a riot to have tried. I don’t suppose it really matters one way or another, so long as you continue to do as your mama says and avoid the boys out by the canals lest they see you naked!”

She whooped, spun, then ducked the leather pouch that went flying by her head, her skirt blossoming out around her. But Theodore was shaking his head and suppressing a smile, even as he stood and headed for the exit, pausing only to scoop up his bag as he went.

--

It should have been obvious before, and Theodore spent the next five hours berating himself for not making the obvious connections. Before he had been too stunned to say much to Marissa about the subject, other than a few uneasy questions, but now his mind was racing with uncertainties that fueled the quickened tread of his feet back and forth in front of his mother’s tent. Too many questions but not the right words to ask them, and perhaps not the right words to form the answers.

Theodore’s fists had tightened so much that the veins and tendons bulged from his wrists and his hands ached. But to release would bring the stress surging straight up his arms and back to his chest, where it had already down a number on his hammering heart. So instead, he focused on forcing the air out and in, finding no comfort in the dwindling rays of the sun over the top of the alleyway or the murmur of voices from the tents nearby. People were settling in for the night, fathers tucking weapons beneath or beside the mats they slept on and children curling up together. It would not be dark for another few hours, but thieves didn’t always wait until the night to slink about.

Theodore forced another breath and ducked inside. Empty. As he’d suspected, his mother was still out, and these outings grew with frequency and length lately. The breath scraped out of him again and he found distraction in the little flame stove, preparing a meal of corn and scraps of bread.

“So it’s that simple,” he muttered to himself. “She’d been deliberately lying to me for twelve years. Great.” He’d dragged over the sack full of rags from his sleeping mat to sit on, since he could not stand inside the tent without ducking. Anything in here had to be performed at what Theodore compared to a crawl.

He found no comfort in the soggy mess that the corn made of his bread or how it was all only half cooked. And if his mother took any longer, he’d have to pull out the last chunk of candle and try to sustain a flame on its already shortened wick. He was determined to wait up.

He lit the flame with two shards of dark rock and waited, picking at the skin around his nails until they bled and he had to wrap them in cloth. He hissed, silently berating himself more; he’d feel that tomorrow—and opening up any sort of wound in this toxic environment was begging for an infection.

A stray gust of wind dragged sand into the tent. A potential sandstorm. Theodore rose to his feet, fist wrapped around the negligible piece of wax. If any sort of storm was picking up, he’d have to find his mother. He grabbed the cloak tucked under his sleeping mat and threw it over his head and shoulders, more than prepared to shove away the flap and going searching blindly—

Right as his mother came stumbling in, shaking the sand out of her own cloak. “It’s bad out there,” she murmured, watching Theodore squat down to set the candle down on the floor. “We’re lucky to have the walls sheltering us from most of the wind. Step out for a moment and you’re bombarded from all sides with coarse sand.” She unclipped tarnished hoops from her ears and worked to smooth her skirt.

Theodore only watched; he was calm on the outside, but inside the maelstrom threatened to rip him apart.

The hoops plinked! down into the jar his mother kept them in, then she set to removing the iron grip of her tattered corset, nimble fingers unworking the ribbon so she could unwrap the stiff article from around her bodice, as if removing armour. She replaced it with a simple shirt and pulled the cloak back around her shoulders.

Next, she pulled out the leather pouch that she kept beneath her skirt and counted out three large, copper coins which she tossed into her jar before hiding it in the back of their tent.

“Mom, I’m a girl—“ Theodore finally blurted out when he felt the simple background noises overwhelming in the silence.

She froze. Her voice came out impossibly small. “I know.”

“No shit,” Theodore muttered.

“Watch your language.” Her tone held no power. She looked away and eased herself down onto her mat. “But yes.”

“Then why lie to me.”

“Honestly, boy, I’m surprised you didn’t figure it out sooner…”

“D-don’t insult my intelligence.” Theodore already felt a pang of shame, but now tears prickled his eyes. He immediately wiped them away.

“I wasn’t…” With a wry smile, his mother pried off too-tight slippers and dabbed a dirty rag into a pan of water to begin smudging at the colouring on her cheeks and lips. She dropped the rag and finally looked at him.

“Then why all this? I feel like every moment of my entire life has been a lie.”

“Because,” his mother sighed and wrung at her hands. For all her beauty she looked well and truly tired. The corners of her eyes and lips sagged. “Because you had to believe it. Look at this life around you, Theodore. Think about the squalor and the filth and the unsavory people we’re packed in here with, like trash dumped and compressed to be buried in this hell hole.”

“It’s just…it’s just where we live. What do I have to even compare it to?” Still, Theodore was quiet a moment as he racked his brain to try to think of a place that wasn’t like what he’d grown up with. Were there places different? Cleaner? Were their people whose stomachs weren’t shrunken and who didn’t squabble over a few pennies?

She shook her head. “In all the years I’ve raised you, I would have hoped that I’d taught you how to think.” Another sigh, but somehow she seemed relieved. “Naïve child with a hard life. I don’t know how you’ve managed that. Not with shrewd parents like you’ve had…”

Theodore’s eyes snapped up. “Parents. I’ve only got yo—“

“But we’re getting off topic.” And that was the end of that. Instead she beckoned Theodore to sit closer as she dipped another rag into the water. She set to dabbing it around his feet, working away at the mud caked at his soles. “Theodore, people like us don’t…escape this place. Especially not women like us. Even the families with fathers work themselves to death just for a crust of bread here. We’re lower than peasants.”

Theodore scrunched his brow. He remembered peasant teenagers who used to straddle the borders between their close spaces. Though dressed in rags just as he was, they could sometimes afford shoes and would sometimes make a show of stuffing barely fresh bread down their faces when Theodore or his kind were watching. Their lives had seemed extravagant.

“That’s why I can get a job! Marissa works unwrapping corn and cracking nut—“

“Women’s work,” his mother said. She frowned. “Low-paying women’s work.”

“But mom, if I am a woma—“

“And I already told you that being a woman will never get you out of this hellhole. You think I raised my only daughter as a son just to play some cruel joke? No, I did this so you’d never have to suffer the humiliation of being the lowest of the low among the lowest. All women here eventually meet the same fate, and it’s a fate worse than death. But a man? A man can claw his way out. He doesn’t have to resort to…to what I’ve had to resort to just to scrape up meager rations.”

With a sigh, Theodore hung his head. “So in the end, all that matters is what people think you have in your pants…?”

His mom quirked an eyebrow. “At the end of the day, yes. But you put on a good enough front, you can convince people of anything.” She sat watching him a moment. “Which is just what we’ll continue to do. When you’re old enough and smart enough, perhaps you can even trick the highest of the high into thinking that you’re one of them.” Her laughter came out shaky. “You’ll claw your way to the top one way or another.”