Chapter 1: Chapter 1

“You can’t change how you’re made, or who you are. You just have to learn to live with it.”

That was the point I was trying to get across to my friend, Grace. You would think she would understand; after all, she was a catkin, and so she certainly had a lot to be happy about. Cats were great! They were so adorable. Sometimes I wished that I could have cute ears or whiskers or a tail. 

But my point was that I didn’t. And that was fine. It was something that I was okay with. 

...Because I had to be.

Unfortunately, when I opened my mouth and tried to put the words together, it just kept coming out wrong. I’m not sure what about what I was trying to say had made my best friend quite so fed up with me, but so far the more I tried to explain, the worse it got. At this point, we had been at lunch in the university cafeteria for half an hour, and I think the only work my spoon was getting was in helping me to dig myself a deeper hole.

“It’s like… okay, so I’m a guy, right?” I said, taking another run at it.

She just glared at me, one of her aforementioned cute feline ears flicking at the top of her head. Her annoyance was more than easy to parse.

“I’m a guy,” I said again, my mouth twisting up. “And because of that, I have to act in certain ways. I have to be tough, and strong, you know?” 

“Oh,” Grace said, finally speaking up. “So now you’re going to bring toxic masculinity into this?”

“No, no,” I protested. “Not toxic, not being a jerk. I mean, like… the good kind of masculinity. The opposite of toxic. Like, um. Medicinal… masculinity?”

Her eyebrows floated upwards. “And just what does this medicinal masculinity consist of?”

I hesitated, trying to think. “You know. The good stuff about being a guy.” There were good things about being a guy. I was sure about it, even if I was sort of having trouble thinking of anything when put on the spot. “The… Um. You… you can… hold doors open for people and stuff?”

“Oh!” she said so brightly that it had to be sarcasm. I could see her tail lashing behind her, thumping against the booth she was sitting in. “So, now you’re talking about being patronizing.”

“No, no, that was a bad example. I’m not--” I took a breath. “It’s like Spider-Man--you know, the comic book one, not our calculus teacher--”

Oh, now her eyes were narrowed practically to slits as she gave me a Look.

I swallowed, but continued. “You know? With great power comes great responsibility?”

“So you’re powerful, are you?”

I slumped down in my chair. “Yeah. I guess. Look, you’re the one who asked me to help you move in this semester, because I could lift the heavy furniture. And how many times have you needed me to get stuff from the top shelves or somewhere else up high?” 

Oh, and now I could see her fur bristling, as if I had tried to pet her the wrong way. I let out a sigh. There goes my foot right into my mouth again. I forgot that she was touchy about her height. I mean, in my defense, I couldn’t understand it! It seemed like it’d be so great to be small, rather than big and ungainly and taking up space.

“That’s just being tall,” she said icily. “There are tall women. And weak men. And plenty of other people with any number of genders and corresponding ability to pick up boxes.”

“W-well, yeah,” I admitted. “But…” 

I grimaced. Maybe I should just cut my losses here, because it certainly seemed like I was only making her more and more upset. But the thing was… this felt sort of important. I couldn’t leave it alone. I guess it was because I was a guy and had to defend myself and my gender? 

Or, well, that wasn’t exactly it. It was more like… I had to explain to her that this was the way the world worked, because it was. It had to be. If it wasn’t, if there wasn’t any reason for me to be like this… Ugh. If I couldn’t at least be useful even if I wasn’t able to be comfortable, then… how was I supposed to deal with that?

“I don’t get it,” she said. “Especially coming from you.” She crossed her arms. “Isn’t your mom a shifter? That’s supposed to be genetic, right? So you could look however you want to look. And yet you stay as a humankin.”

I felt a knot form in my stomach. “It’s not that simple,” I said, my voice dropping along with my mood. “I don’t… I can’t control it very well.”

That was something that my mother had drilled into me as a kid: the dangers involved for someone who was only half-shifter like me. Even for a full shifter, it was more about feelings and intuition than complete conscious control. You can’t just try to transform lightly; you might turn into something unexpected and get stuck in a form you hate. Or even worse, sometimes a particular form might come with certain instincts or urges that could be dangerous to you or others around you.

I remembered all too well the day when she sat me down and had that whole conversation with me. And I remember the nightmare I had that night, when I dreamed of my body twisting into an unfamiliar form, some kind of huge scary beast that was overwhelmed with uncontrollable anger and resentment, running wild, threatening everyone I loved.

I mean, heck, it wasn’t that much later that I went through puberty and found it to be basically exactly that already. I was always terrified that trying to shift on my own would just wind up as puberty 2.0, with even more uncomfortable body hair and gross feelings I couldn’t manage. Even now I was always a little scared of what she had said: that sometimes strong emotional reactions could trigger a shift of their own accord. So, I was extra careful never to let myself get too angry or upset, because if that caused a chain reaction... 

No. I had to be perfect. I had to be a good boy. Even if I was a little bit jealous of some of the other animalkin sometimes, I couldn’t risk trying to change, because I might wind up becoming trapped as something far more terrible than my normal form. And this was already pretty bad.

How was I supposed to tell all that to Grace? I couldn’t. It’d probably make things even worse. I let out a miserable sigh.

The fury in her eyes faded a bit at seeing how pathetic I looked. I could see indecision warring on her face, but when she spoke, her voice was soft. “I just worry about you, you know? I think you’re too wrapped up in who you think you have to be, and don’t give yourself the space to consider who you want to be.”

“Who I want to be…” I muttered. Literally anyone else, for starters? But no, that was just the depression talking. I shouldn’t give into that, I should grin and bear it. “I want to be exactly who I am,” I said. “I want to help people.”

Grace let out a very familiar exasperated sigh, one she tended to use a lot around me. Hey! I was being optimistic here! I was trying to look on the bright side!

“And how are you going to help people?” she asked.

That was a tougher question. I chewed on my lip a bit as I glanced around the cafeteria. It wasn’t like there was anyone in a particular crisis in the middle of their lunch. There was a mouse girl working her way through a mountain of burgers, but she seemed to be delighted by the challenge in front of her. At a different table, there was a wolf girl by herself, furiously writing in a notebook. But she, too, seemed to be doing perfectly well, given the soft but triumphant ‘awoo’ noises she was making to herself each time she flipped to the next page.

Ugh, was I just staring at the girls again? I didn’t mean to, I didn’t want to be a creep, but if I wasn’t paying attention to it, I had the worst tendency to get lost in staring at a cute dress that a girl was wearing, or wind up spiralling into weird thoughts about how her hair clip would look if I could wear it, or all the other things that guys always did when they looked at girls.

What was I doing again? Okay, yes, I had to find someone to help.

And that’s when I saw my opportunity; right there, across the cafeteria. It was as if we were right in the middle of some after-school special about bullying: a shark girl with a malicious grin was pacing in circles around a clearly terrified boy with colorful feathers.

I steeled myself and stood up.

“Come on, what are you doing?” Grace said, sounding exhausted. “I know you’re helpful. I just want you to stop being so weird about it. It’s not healthy to base so much of your self-worth on other people’s opinions of you. So--” She finally glanced over at where I was resolutely staring. “Oh. Oh no. Hold on, wait, stop--”

I squared my shoulders and started heading that way, hearing Grace hastily leap up behind to follow. She was saying something about this was a bad idea and how I should stop and I didn’t need to prove myself, and I wasn’t really listening any more. Not because I wanted to ignore her, but because my brain miiiight have been a bit too preoccupied at panicking about the course of action I had set it on.

When I got closer, the shark girl and the bird boy she was tormenting were talking too, but even though I could hear the words, I couldn’t really parse them. I just could see how terrified the boy looked.

“Yes, you are going to leave us alone,” the shark girl said, her voice a raspy drawl. “If I bump into you in the athletics building… if I so much as see you again, do you know what’ll happen to you?”

“Y-yes!” the bird chirped.

“Oh, do you? Because I don’t. I have a few ideas, but I’m not sure if they’re painful enough.” Her eyes glittered, not an iota of mercy in them. “I might have to workshop them a little. But I’m sure we can--”

“H-hey,” I said, cutting in. The shark girl’s eyes snapped to me, and I suddenly felt pinned in place by the intensity of her stare. “You should pick on someone your own size.”

I mean, we were the same size. Basically. I was maybe slightly taller than her, but she was… well, her shoulders were maybe even broader than mine, with the kind of athletic physique that showed that she swam a lot. Or maybe that was the ‘UNIVERSITY SWIM TEAM’ jacket she was wearing. Either way, she looked very much like she could pick me up and throw me through the closest window, if she wanted to. 

But the point of standing up for someone isn’t to win the fight, it’s to make sure you’re the one who gets hurt and not the original victim. At least, I think? Definitely. Maybe. I hadn’t ever been in a fight before, but whatever, it wasn’t like I cared what happened to my big stupid body, so I might as well put it on the line for someone else.

While I was wrestling with all this, the shark was preoccupied with sizing me up. Finally, her mouth stretched back into a cocky grin, revealing rows of teeth that did in fact look awfully sharp.

“Hey shitbird,” she said to the boy she was bullying, even though her eyes remained locked on me. “You heard me. We have an understanding now, right?”

He mumbled something.

“Then beat it,” she spat out.

The bird didn’t need any more excuse than that to fly the coop. He was gone so fast that I swear a single feather hung in the air behind him.

Which just left me and the shark. Well, and Grace behind me, tugging in vain on my sleeve to try and extract me from the situation. Oh, and maybe everyone else in the cafeteria, who were all now staring at us.

I could feel strange feelings stirring up inside me, uncomfortable with all this attention. I shoved it all down, focusing on what was important. I needed to be strong. I needed to be useful. I needed to be a man.

“So,” the shark girl said, her voice deadly soft. “Who the fuck are you, and what exactly are you trying to prove?”

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“I’m…” My mouth went dry. I shouldn’t say my name, right? For some reason whenever I had to introduce myself, I always felt like I was saying something weird or wrong when I said my own name, like I was gonna mispronounce it even though I should know my own name better than anyone. But actually, I didn’t really need to say it now, not in front of all these people. Right? “I’m a concerned citizen,” I ended up saying.

That got a laugh from her, albeit a raspy one without a lot of genuine mirth.

“And what exactly is your concern, here?”

“You shouldn’t bully people,” I said. Gosh, this wasn’t nearly as hard as I expected it to be. Sure, it maybe felt like I was floating outside of myself, watching as my body went on autopilot in upstanding-young-man mode, like this was some TV show I was watching. I just needed to follow the script. “Bullying is wrong.”

“It’s… wrong,” she repeated, still looking utterly bemused. I guess from her perspective, it was as if a small minnow had swum up and announced that the local apex predator should knock it off. I mean, I wasn’t a minnow, but… The way she looked at me clearly felt like she saw me as such.

“Yes,” I repeated. “It’s wrong.”

“Do you even know why I…” she trailed off with a wry grin, shaking her head. “Okay then, and what if I don’t want to, Mr. Concerned Citizen? What if I’m out of lunch money and decide I’m gonna steal it from some twerp. What are you gonna do about it?”

Oh. Hm. I hadn’t exactly thought this far ahead.

“Then I’ll fight you,” my mouth filled in, still on autopilot mode from a thousand bad depictions of what it meant to be manly.

“You will fight me,” she said, voice dripping with disbelief.

No no no no no no no no no no no--

“Yes,” my traitorous mouth said.

The shark girl gave me one last look up and down. And then her grin grew impossibly wide. “Okay,” she said. “Then let’s fight.”

That’s when I realized exactly how quiet it had gotten in the cafeteria. Everyone was staring at us now, hanging on to our every word. Even Grace at my side looked completely shocked, totally uncertain as to what to do. You and me both, friend.

I was rescued by an unexpected gesture.

“But not here,” the shark girl said. “Bad vibes. Don’t want an audience.” She whipped her head left and right, glaring at the people staring at us, but even though they cowered in fear, as soon as she looked away they tried to furtively glance over once more.

Then the shark girl moved up to me, as I stood frozen. She was unnervingly fast--she was standing over there, but then suddenly she was just inches from me, one hand gripping my shoulder with enough force that I thought it might leave a bruise. But she wasn’t punching me or anything. She just whispered, in my ear.

“Six p.m. sharp. Backstage at the theatre in the fine arts building. Come alone.”

And then she was gone, shoving past me hard enough that I almost fell over.

“What did you just do?” Grace immediately hissed at me, as everyone else in the cafeteria slowly turned back to the conversations they were having before.

“I…” My head was spinning. “I don’t really know?”

“You idiot. You colossal idiot.”

“Hey...”

But she didn’t seem to be joking around. She looked genuinely upset. “Don’t you know who that is?”

“Um,” I shrugged. “She’s… on the swim team?”

“Not just on the swim team. That’s Sawyer Selachi, their ace. She’s got the best time on the 400 meter individual medley in the whole state. And she’s by far the scariest person I have ever met in my whole life. ”

“...Huh, you seem to know an awful lot about her.”

Now Grace wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Well, I… might be president of the official university swim team fanclub.”

“But you hate swimming!” I blinked. “Wait, is this one of those cat things, like you hate water but love fish?”

“No,” Grace said, muttering. “I hate water but I love hot girls, maybe.”

“...What?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said hastily. “And do you know who you saved? Do you know what situation you just stuck yourself in the middle of?”

I shifted in place, uncomfortably. “I just saw someone who needed help.”

Grace’s ears went flat against her head. “That wasn’t an innocent victim. That was the creep who’s been harassing the girls on the swim team all semester. He’s been to, like, every single meet.”

Everything seemed to be moving awfully fast. I desperately tried to grab onto something. “Wait though, how’s that different from you? Aren’t you also obsessed with them, apparently?”

Grace shook her head, entirely unfazed by the comparison. “It’s different, trust me. I don’t lurk outside of classrooms so I can stalk people around campus. I don’t post photos to internet fetish sites without people’s consent. I didn’t just get busted trying to sneak into the girls’ locker room with a camera!”

“Oh. Oh.” I said, my stomach sinking. “So…”

“Yeah. And from what I’ve heard, the university wouldn’t do shit about it, so Sawyer must have decided to try and handle things her way.” Grace let out a sigh. “For what it’s worth, though, he did look suitably freaked out, so maybe that lesson will still stick.”

“Then everything is good, right?” I said.

Grace stared at me, and then the realization caught up to me. 

I swallowed. “Except for the part that now she’s going to expect me to show up and fight her.”

“Yeah…” Grace said. “And trust me, you’re toast.”

I gulped, shaking only slightly. Because guys were supposed to be strong. I was strong and stoic. I could face this, right? 

Grace took one look at me, and I guess I was less convincing than I had hoped, because she immediately switched from smartass to sympathetic friend mode. She reached out to give me a half-hug--I mean, I was so much bigger than her that it was probably hard for her to give me a real hug, I thought with a grimace. But when she spoke, her voice suddenly sounded a lot more soothing, like she was dealing with a frightened animal.

“Hey,” she said. “Come on, we can deal with this. You could just not show up.”

I shook my head. “No, I have to. I can’t run away.”

“Why?” she asked. “Come on. What was it you said last week? ‘Discretion is the better part of staying the heck alive’?”

“That was in our D&D game!” I scoffed. “In real life I’m not a cute tiefling rogue who can be mischievous and daring and then flee when things get tough.”

“Hmm,” Grace said. “But you get way more lively and into that than your actual life.”

“But that’s exactly what I was telling you to begin with,” I said, only a little despondent. “We don’t get to be who we want to be. We have to be who we are. And I’m a man.” I gestured at my big, stupid body. “And so I have to act like one.”

Grace frowned. “Which means being a macho idiot even when there’s no reason to?”

“No.” I swallowed. “It means facing the consequences of your actions. I-- I’m sure if I explain the misunderstanding, she’ll… understand. I’ll just go to meet with her, and…” I trailed off, not even managing to convince myself.

Grace gave me another look. “Okay,” she said. “I understand.”

I let out a sigh of relief.

“It was nice knowing you,” she said, patting me on my back. “I’ll say some really nice things at your funeral.”

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