Chapter 1: Only Place I Know How to Live

This morning starts as most of them do: with the sound of Willow Finch swearing quietly at a stuck zipper.

I’m lying on my stomach in her bed, technically, since we split nights between her mom’s house and my apartment with a pillow mashed under my chest and the blanket kicked down to my calves. The radiator in Willow’s room hisses like an angry cat. Outside the window, the November fog is so thick it turns the streetlight into a soft orange bruise. I’m completely bare, because I’m always completely bare, and the sheets are cold against my thighs where the blanket doesn’t reach.

Willow is standing in front of the small mirror she taped to her closet door, wearing nothing but a pair of gray sweatpants and an expression of profound betrayal aimed at the hoodie in her hands. She’s been trying to pull the zipper up for about thirty seconds, and her dark curly hair is still wet from the shower, leaving dark spots on the back of her gray t-shirt. (She put the t-shirt on first. The hoodie is going over it. I’ve watched her get dressed enough times to know her system: t-shirt, then hoodie, then socks, then sneakers, then, if it’s really cold, a beanie that makes her look like a sad avocado.)

“Do you want help,” I say, my voice muffled by the pillow, “or do you want to keep fighting a piece of metal and cloth until one of you surrenders?”

“I want this zipper to go to hell,” she says. “I’ve been doing this all week. I think it’s personal.”

“The zipper doesn’t know who you are, babe.”

“It knows.” She finally yanks it up with a sound of strained triumph. “There. Victory.”

I roll onto my side so I can watch her finish getting ready. This is one of those small rituals I’ve come to love more than almost anything else. Willow in the morning, her movements still soft with sleep, her guard not quite up yet. She pulls her wet hair into a messy bun that immediately starts shedding curls around her temples. She finds her sneakers under the bed (left one first, then she has to get on her hands and knees to reach the right one). She checks her phone: no messages, which makes her frown slightly, because she’s the kind of person who wants the world to be awake when she is.

“You’re staring,” she says without looking at me.

“You’re star-worthy.”

That gets a smile. She turns around, and for a moment, she just looks at me naked, tangled in her sheets, still half-asleep. Her gaze isn’t sexual right now. It’s something softer. Something that’s been there since we were twelve years old, sitting next to each other in Mrs. Delgado’s English class, before either of us knew what any of this meant.

“You need to get up,” she says. “We’ve got fifteen minutes before we have to leave, and you haven’t even pretended to do your hair.”

“My hair doesn’t need pretending. It needs to be short, which it is.”

“Fair point.”

I stretch, letting my arms reach over my head until my spine pops in three places. The cold air hits my ribs, my stomach, the undersides of my breasts, and I shiver automatically, the same shiver I’ve felt thousands of times now, so familiar it’s almost not worth mentioning. Almost. Because the thing about being naked all the time is that you never stop feeling the air. You just stop being surprised by it.

I swing my legs out of bed and stand up. The hardwood floor is freezing. I hissed.

“Socks?” Willow offers, holding up a pair of thick wool ones.

“No.”

“They’re just socks, Kate.”

“They’re fabric. And once I start with fabric, where does it end? Socks today, leggings tomorrow, a full snowsuit by December. Next thing you know, I’m back in jeans, crying in a dressing room because nothing fits right.”

Willow laughs, but there’s a thread of something else underneath it, not to worry, exactly. Recognition. She’s heard this speech before. She’s heard variations of it for the past two years, ever since I first told her I was going to do it. Get naked. Stay naked. Stop hiding.

“Okay, you dramatic disaster,” she says. “No socks. But you’re not allowed to complain about your feet being cold.”

“I never complain about my feet being cold.”

“You complained yesterday.”

“That was a factual observation, not a complaint.”

She throws a pillow at me. I catch it, drop it on the bed, and head for the bathroom to brush my teeth. On the way, I pass the mirror above Willow’s dresser, and I catch my own reflection the way I always do, a glance, a check-in, a confirmation that I’m still here.

I’m sixteen years old. Third year of high school, which sounds weird to say because I skipped a grade in elementary school, so I’m younger than almost everyone in my classes. That’s fine. I’m used to being the youngest in the room. I’m also the nakedest in the room, which takes some getting used to even after two years.

My body: average height, lean from walking everywhere (I don’t have a car, and my mom’s apartment is a mile from school, so I walk naked through the streets of our small Washington town every morning). Pale skin that flushes bright pink when I’m cold or embarrassed or angry, which is often. Short auburn hair, because long hair felt weird against my bare shoulders when I first started this, like a curtain that was trying to hide me from myself. Gray eyes that people say look older than the rest of me. Small breasts with pierced nipples: the left one has a silver ring, the right one a small stud. The ring is functional now because of work. The stud is just because I liked the way it looked when Willow took me to the piercing shop on my fifteenth birthday, before I’d even applied for the program, back when the idea of being naked in public still felt like a dream I’d never actually live.

I brush my teeth. I run a hand through my hair to flatten the sleep-mussed parts. I don’t put anything on my skin, no lotion, no makeup, nothing, because that feels like another kind of hiding. (Willow says this is a little extreme. I tell her she’s probably right. I don’t change anything.)

When I come back to the bedroom, Willow has her backpack on one shoulder and my backpack in her other hand. She’s wearing the defeated hoodie, now zipped all the way up, and the beanie that makes her look like a sad avocado. Her sneakers are tied. She’s ready.

“You’re beautiful,” I say.

“You’re biased.”

“I’m accurate.”

She rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling. She holds out my backpack. I sling it over my bare shoulder, the strap rubs against my collarbone, a familiar friction, and we walk out of her room together, down the hall, past the closed door where her mom is still sleeping (she works late shifts at the hospital, three nights a week, so mornings are sacred silence in this house).

The front door. The porch. The cold.

November in Washington doesn’t announce itself. It just gets darker, one minute at a time, until you realize you’ve forgotten what sunlight feels like. Today, the temperature is hovering around forty-two degrees, which is practically balmy compared to what’s coming, but the fog makes it feel colder. It sits on my bare skin like a wet cloth, seeping into my pores, raising goosebumps along my arms and thighs before we’ve even made it to the sidewalk.

Willow glances at me. “Cold?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to?”

“No.”

She doesn’t finish the question. She knows the answer. She’s known it for two years.

We walk. Side by side, not quite touching Willow’s hands in her hoodie pocket, my arms crossed over my chest, mostly out of habit than actual modesty (I stopped caring about modesty a long time ago). The neighborhood is quiet this early: a few cars, a few dog walkers, a few people who’ve seen me enough times that they don’t stare anymore. That’s one of the small mercies of living in a small town. Eventually, the novelty wears off. You become part of the background. The naked girl is just the girl who’s always naked, and people have better things to do than gawk.

Not everyone, obviously. There’s always someone new, someone visiting, someone who hasn’t gotten the memo. But for the most part, the walk to school is uneventful.

“You’re thinking about it again,” Willow says.

“Thinking about what?”

“The day you first told me.”

She knows me too well. I was thinking about it. I’m almost always thinking about it, in the same way you’re always thinking about the scar on your knee or the way your grandmother said your name, not constantly, but in the background, a low hum of memory that never fully fades.

“I was,” I admit. “I was thinking about Mrs. Delgado’s classroom.”

“The blue chairs?”

“The blue chairs. And your shoes.”

Willow laughs. “My shoes?”

“You were wearing those ridiculous purple sneakers with the glitter laces.”

“They were not ridiculous. They were cool.”

“We were twelve years old, Willow. Nothing about us was cool.”

She bumps her shoulder against mine, a small, affectionate collision. “Fair point.”

Flashback: Seventh Year of School, Age Twelve

I need to take you back. Because you can’t understand why I’m walking through a Washington winter with nothing on if you don’t understand what it felt like to be twelve years old, wearing clothes that felt like a lie.

I met Willow Finch on the first day of seventh grade, in Mrs. Delgado’s English class. I was the new kid, not new to the town, but new to the school district, because my parents had just separated and my mom had moved us across town to a smaller apartment, which meant a new school, new teachers, and new hallways to get lost in. I was small for twelve, with hair I kept long because I thought it made me look older, and I was wearing a hoodie three sizes too big because I’d started to notice things about my body that I didn’t know what to do with.

The classroom had those plastic blue chairs that stuck to the backs of your thighs if you wore shorts, a poster of Maya Angelou on the wall, and the smell of old coffee and whiteboard markers. I sat in the second row because I didn’t want to be in the front (too visible) or the back (too cliché). Willow sat next to me because her last name started with F and mine started with O, and alphabetical order is the great unifier of middle school misfits.

She was wearing purple sneakers with glitter laces. I remember thinking: Those are the ugliest shoes I’ve ever seen. I want to be her friend.

Mrs. Delgado made us go around the room and say our names and one interesting thing about ourselves. When it was my turn, I said, “I’m Kate, and I used to live in Oregon,” which was true but not interesting, and the boy behind me whispered “Boring” loud enough for everyone to hear.

Willow turned around and looked at him really, the way she looks at things she’s about to draw or paint or photograph, and said, “She’s not boring. You just don’t know how to listen.”

That was it. That was the moment.

We were best friends by the end of the first week. We traded lunches (her peanut butter sandwiches for my fruit roll-ups), walked home together (she lived four blocks from my new apartment), and stayed up late texting about teachers and crushes and the mysterious horror of puberty. She was the first person I told when I got my period. I was the first person she told when she realized she might like girls, not boys, not yet, maybe never.