Chapter 6

Soo Yi had expected to feel exposed walking back onto campus in January. Instead she felt something closer to invisible in the way she’d always wanted to be — not unnoticed, exactly, but no longer questioned. The story had traveled the way these things always did over a long break, picked up by the campus paper before Thanksgiving and then by a Houston news affiliate over Christmas, until by the time spring semester started there wasn’t a single person in her four classes who didn’t already know exactly who she was and exactly what had happened to her.

What surprised her was what that knowledge did to the way people looked at her.

The two girls who’d built and posted the image — Courtney and her roommate, the ones whose devices the metadata had traced everything back to — had taken the federal plea in December rather than risk a trial. But a plea deal came with conditions, and one of theirs was full cooperation: both of them, facing real prison time, gave up the other two without much hesitation once their lawyers explained what cooperation could shave off a sentence. It turned out the other two hadn’t just cornered Soo Yi in the library that day — they’d been in the group chat where the image was planned, had picked the caption together, had needled Courtney into finishing it when she’d hesitated. That was enough for the DA’s office to add conspiracy and aiding-and-abetting charges against them both. Neither ended up doing real time — first offense, no prior record, cooperation of their own once cornered by the evidence — but both pleaded down to probation, a permanent federal record, and a civil settlement Jung Woo’s lawyer had insisted on before any of it was finalized. All four of them were gone from Texas A&M for good either way, and all four of them now carried something on paper that would follow them for the rest of their lives.

Nobody on campus was arguing anymore about what Soo Yi was. The single ugly irony of the whole ordeal was the thing it had settled beyond any possible debate: you didn’t build an image like that, didn’t go to that kind of trouble, unless you already knew — with total certainty — exactly what you were looking at. The people who’d spent a year and a half needling her about which bathroom she belonged in had, in the end, provided the most emphatic proof possible that they’d never doubted her femininity for a second. They’d just enjoyed being cruel about it.

She noticed it first in small, physical ways, walking into Organic Chem that first Monday morning. The lecture hall had two hundred seats and she’d always gravitated toward the back corner out of habit, but this time, as she came through the door with Brad half a step behind her, she caught at least a dozen heads turning — not with the old sneering curiosity, the up-and-down appraisal she’d learned to brace against, but something closer to careful neutrality. A guy from her Genetics class who’d once laughed along when someone called her “it” in the hallway actually nodded at her, quick and businesslike, like acknowledging a colleague. She didn’t know what to do with that kind of reception. It had been so long since walking into a room hadn’t cost her something.

“You okay?” Brad murmured, catching the hesitation in her step before she’d even fully registered it herself.

“I don’t know how to walk into a room where nobody’s staring at me like I’m a problem to be solved,” she admitted quietly, sliding into a seat near the middle instead of the back corner, for the first time since August. “It’s strange. Good-strange. But strange.”

“Get used to it,” Brad said, dropping into the seat beside her like it was nothing. “This is just what normal looks like. You’ve just never gotten to have it before.”

She thought about that all through the lecture, half-listening to the professor work through reaction mechanisms she already understood, turning the sentence over instead. You’ve just never gotten to have it before. It was such a simple thing to say, and it landed with more weight than he probably intended, because it was true in a way that reached back years before Brad, years before Texas A&M, all the way to a version of herself who used to eat lunch alone in a bathroom stall rather than face a cafeteria that had already decided what she was. Normal had never been available to her. She hadn’t known, until just now, how much room that absence had been taking up in the middle of her chest, a weight she’d carried so long she’d stopped registering it as weight at all.