Outside the Lines

by Caitlin Ricci

  "I do too." I knew where I would have been if he hadn't found me, though I don't think he did. I'd never been all that open about my life before, and aside from the basic questions of what happened to my home life and what drugs I'd tried up to that point, he hadn't pressed. I'd stayed clean and he'd kept me safe. That was all that mattered then, and I tried not to let anything else come into that space. It'd worked so far, and I had a good track record of keeping my past in a dark little box that wasn't to be touched or thought about.

  "You were so thin," he continued.

  I smirked. "I'm still thin."

  He chuckled, and the sound was dark and beautiful. "Yeah. I guess you are. Want some chocolate? I got some good stuff yesterday at the store."

  Shaking my head, I knew I couldn't go there with him. Not here, in this place. Not again. "Maybe another time." It was a lie. I wouldn't be coming back here.

  I'd come to say nearly everything, and I was working up to the next part in inches that felt like claws scratching over my already fragile nerves. Getting up the nerve to come back and see him had taken enough work, and now that the first part had been done, I wanted to go. But I had to know the rest, and I wasn't going to get up the courage to come back here again. I wasn't a brave person, but I wasn't a scared little child either. Somewhere between the two was where I made my claim, and I lived a pretty comfortable existence on my own.

  "Do you have a few more minutes?" he asked me.

  I nodded. "I do."

  "Great." He got up from his chair, and I was left looking up at him as he went to the door. "C'mon, I have someone that I'd like you to meet."

  At first I didn't move, but he didn't budge either as thoughts raced through my mind. I didn't need to meet the counselors; I knew from the website that they mostly hadn't changed since I'd been here.

  "Aren't you even a little bit curious?" he asked me as he still held the door open.

  That was it, my Achilles' heel, and he still knew it. I had a natural curiosity that he'd exploited before to get me to try something new. I found myself getting up from the chair before I'd even decided that I'd follow him. But I guessed that the idea that I wouldn't follow him never really occurred to me.

  Past the small library full of donated books and worn out couches and up the stairs, I followed him. Most of the kids were out back. I could hear them yelling as they played something that sounded a bit like football. But there were others in the upstairs bedrooms that we passed, and I could hear them talking and listening to music through the doors left ajar. Three bedrooms with two sets of bunk beds in each, the same as when I'd been here. Even the paint was the same ugly shade of mustard.

  "In here," Alex said, stopping in front of a door that was mostly open. Second bedroom on the left.

  I didn't ask who I was supposed to meet; instead I knocked on the door and waited for a quietly called word to enter the room I'd once shared with three other people for four years. Going in, I noticed that nothing had really changed, though the closet doors had been taken off and replaced with sheer drapes. It was a nice touch of color.

  I didn't see the kid right away; they were hiding in the corner of the bottom bunk. Wearing a long dress that was too big on them didn't hide the bruises on their left arm. This was the kind of kid I worked with, and the pain I could see in those perfect blue eyes was all too familiar.

  "Hey," I said, crouching down so that I could see them better. "I'm Trin."

  "Like Trinity?" they asked me.

  I nodded. The connection was easy enough I supposed. "I named myself after this place once I went to college. Want to talk for a bit?"

  They shrugged. "You work here?"

  Shaking my head, I figured that I might as well get comfortable on the floor. "No. I came back to see Alex, and he said I should come meet you. I can leave if you want."

  "I don't."

  "Okay." I didn't press. I didn't even know what Alex thought I should talk to this kid about anyway. I waited to see if the kid wanted to say something to me because I was coming up with a big blank.

  "I like your eyeliner," they finally said.

  I smiled. "Thanks. I have a friend that does it for me. I kept stabbing myself in the eye."

  They smiled too. "Me too. I had contacts once, but I couldn't handle them so I wear glasses now, but people make fun of me for them. So..."

  "I used to wear them too. Ended up getting surgery," I revealed.

  The kid moved closer to the edge of the bed then fixed the dress around their legs. "Because people made fun of you?"

  "People made fun of me for so many reasons that my glasses didn't even get noticed. I got the surgery because I'm generally a klutz and kept breaking them. After I figured out that I was paying more to get them replaced every few months than the surgery would cost me, I decided to save up and just be more careful until I got it taken care of."

  This was basic talk, I knew that. But I also knew from working with my own kids that digging deep right away wasn't the right way to go for most kids. I had one I could do that with, a brassy little thing I liked to call my bulldog. I went gently with this one and didn't really have a plan. I was just talking, not giving therapy after all, and yeah, there was some small part of me that wanted to show Alex that I was good with kids too. I wanted him to be proud of me, but only partly because of my own ego. I also wanted him to know that I was good at this because he'd made me that way. Not by doing anything direct, but because he'd taken care of me and shown me what it meant to be good to others and myself.

  Before Trinity House, I hadn't known what it meant to be like that, but I preferred to think of that time as only darkness, as if I'd been born among my friends and family of this house and anything before that, before Socks was born, didn't exist anymore.

  "Do you dress like that because you don't know if you're a guy or a girl?" the kid asked me.

  I wanted to smirk and nearly did. Kids were blatantly honest and I loved that about them. They didn't have the same social guidelines as my peers did, and so they would tell me flat out if the shoes I was wearing didn't go with the skirt.

  "I know what I am," I answered them. "And what's your name anyway?"

  "Naran."

  I nodded. It was a nice, gender neutral name. "It's the same back and forth," I realized, smiling now because names and words like that made me happy for no real reason.

  Naran smiled too and crept closer, joining me on the floor. I didn't back up to give them more space, letting them decide where they wanted to sit in relation to me. Moving back felt like I was getting away from them instead of being polite. I'd felt that as a kid, but hadn't realized what it had meant until I'd taken a body language class my first semester of college. I was better at controlling my reactions now.

  "So then what are you?" Naran continued once they'd found a place on the floor in front of me. Our knees were almost touching.

  "Neither." My answer was automatic, but I saw confusion in Naran's eyes. "I don't feel like I'm male or female. I'm not trans, I'm genderless or agender, depending on what you want to say."

  Naran frowned and propped their chin up on their knee. "But you have to be something."

  "Why?"

  Naran squinted at me. "Because you have to be. You've either got a dick or not."

  I rolled my eyes. "Yeah. And I know where I go on the reproductive slot. But my sex isn't my gender. No one ever told you that gender and sex aren't the same thing?"

  Naran looked at me like I was an alien telling them that they could fly. I'd felt about the same the first time I'd found this out online.

  "Alright. Crash course on gender stuff alright?" I asked them. Naran slowly nodded though the dazed look was still there. "Gender is different than sex. You can be trans and be bi. You can be a man and be straight. Right?"

  "Of course."

  "So think of gender as how you feel. And sex as what your body actually is. And sexuality is who you are attracted to. Making a little more sense now?" I asked them, hop
ing I was making sense. I had charts up in my office for this sort of thing. I might be able to scrounge up a notebook and a pen here if Naran needed a visual aid.

  "I feel like a girl," Naran let me know. It was said almost as an uncertain confession, like she was sharing the deepest part of herself with me. I smiled at her.

  "Okay. So your gender is female. Your sex is biological, and you don't have to share that with anyone that you don't want to. And do you know who you like?" I asked her, relaxing my shoulders and releasing a bit of tension that I hadn't known I'd been carrying around.

  Naran blushed and ducked her head a bit.

  I giggled. I knew that look well enough. "So there is someone."

  "Yeah..."

  "What's their name?" I continued, feeling like I was gossiping with Andy about his latest crush on a cute co-worker.

  She played with her skirt for a bit before answering me. "Her name is Andrea," she said after I'd nearly given up on her answering me.

  "Pretty name. Is she pretty too?"

  Naran nodded. "She is. She doesn't know I like her though. Should I tell her?"

  That was a dangerous question for me. I wasn't good at telling people that I liked them, so I jumped onto what I probably should have figured out years ago but was just beginning to realize. "Telling her and not getting your feelings returned is a whole lot better than never asking."

  "You think so?"

  "Sure."

  Naran smiled at me; the expression was genuine and nearly took away the pain in her eyes. "Thanks."

  I nodded and watched her get up and leave the room. Alex took her place on the floor in front of me as soon as she was gone. "Knew you could do it."

  "Because we're both outside of gender norms?" I asked him.

  He nodded. "Yeah. Sorry, I knew that they were having a hard time with things and so—"

  "She," I interrupted him. "Naran feels like a girl."

  Alex smiled and looked a bit relieved. "Good. I'm glad she pinned that down."

  "It could change," I reminded him. "Gender is fluid."

  "I think I gave you that speech when you were crying one morning because you couldn't figure out why you felt like a boy one day and a girl the next and most days neither," he countered.

  "I remember. I was sitting on that top bunk." He'd put his head on his arms on my bunk while I'd sat there crying with my back against the wall and a pair of jeans in one hand and dress in the other. We had talked for a good hour, and I'd ended up wearing the jeans under the dress with sneakers and a baseball cap for the rest of the day.

  That might have been the day I decided that I wasn't comfortable being completely one side or the other but instead was somewhere else entirely. I'd had some idea of that initially, but having a solid idea was a lot different than an initial guess.

  "You're good with the kids," Alex complimented me.

  I straightened up a bit under his praise. "Thanks."

  "I bet you're good at your job."

  I shrugged. "I try to be. I'm still just human so I can admit that I do make mistakes sometimes, but I don't screw up too badly, and I fix it when I do. I'm still learning my kids and they're learning me. They're not the precious little angels that we were here."

  He laughed and I grinned. We weren't necessarily bad, but going from the streets to having structure again was a hard adjustment for a lot of us. Some of the kids I was with ran away, others fought, most lied, and all of us snuck food and hoarded it in our rooms until one of the counselors, usually Alex, found it and made us put it back so that others could have the food too. My personal vice was cookies.

  He'd stayed with me through withdrawal, depression, anxiety, and more tears than I cared to ever remember. He'd only ever let me down once, and I knew that I was ready to ask him about that moment now.

  "I have a question," I said.

  "What's up?"

  I took a breath and pressed my palms together on my lap. I knew where to start and what I wanted to say. But knowing that and making the words come out were ideas that were on completely different planets. Finally, I took the plunge. Like I'd told Naran, it was better to ask than to never know. And I'd been stressing about it for the past six years. It was enough.

  "When I was eighteen, I graduated from this place. I went to live with another counselor, but I asked you. And you said no."

  He'd gone still. I didn't know him well enough to know what that meant. He'd never given me the look that he was giving me now either. "I remember. You went with Kim. Stayed with her for six months then got accepted into college and moved into the dorms."

  I nodded. "You took someone else to live with you. I want to know why."

  "Didn't you enjoy your time with Kim?" he asked me, avoiding the question.

  "Of course I did. She was a great counselor and treated me like her own child. But you were my best friend, and I want to know why I couldn't go with you." I was being insistent and I wasn't about to let him back out now. I'd come to thank him for what he'd done for me, and I'd come for this answer. After this, I could walk away from Alex with only his memory. He'd hurt me the day that he'd rejected me, and though the pain had long since passed, I needed to know what I'd done to make him say no to me that night.

  "I couldn't, Trin." His voice was soft and his eyes showed his pain. I should have dropped it. If he'd been a kid in my care, I would have. I knew when I was close to getting too deep. But Alex wasn't one of my kids, and he didn't get to brush me off. Not this time.

  "Why not? I'm not asking for a lot here, Alex. Just an answer. Just tell me why. That's all I want to know. Please?"

  I was ready to beg him. If he made me, I would. There was a time I would have done anything for him. I didn't feel all that different right then.

  "Because I loved you."

  I would have called him a liar, but there were tears in his eyes before he looked away from me. "What?" I demanded.

  "You were eighteen, and I was in love with you, a child I'd watched grow up from the time you were fourteen. When you were here it was hard enough not to tell you how I felt about you. If you'd come home with me, I wouldn't have been able to stop myself. I turned you away because I was protecting you. From me. I had to keep you safe."

  I could only stare at him. "I wouldn't have turned you away," I whispered. I felt as if I was breaking apart. Alex had loved me? No one had ever loved me. No one knew how to love me. I'd barely begun to love myself.

  He met my gaze and wiped a few tears from his cheeks. "I know. I saw how you looked at me. I didn't want that for you. I didn't want to be someone that took away your innocence. I loved you, and you were just a child."

  I shook my head. "I was eighteen, not a child," I told him adamantly. I knew a perv when I saw one, and I knew in the deepest parts of myself that Alex had never, ever been that for me or anyone else here. He was too good, too kind, to ever be that kind of a monster.

  "Thanks. That helps. A bit. I think." He sounded relieved, almost absolved.

  "You said you loved me then. How about now?" Dangerous territory should have been the theme of the day, I decided as I waited for him to answer that question. He could hurt me again as I sat open and vulnerable across from him. I would have let him, too, if he would just tell me the truth.

  "I didn't think it was possible to love you more than I had then. But now I know I do."

  He sounded scared telling me that. I reached out and took his hand, easily entwining his fingers in mine. "Me too."

  We sat like that for a long time, neither of us willing to move from that spot until he said, "I get off at six. Want to get some coffee?"

  Smiling, I gave him a little nod. Coffee with Alex sounded just about perfect.

  Chapter Three

  Alex

  I never thought that I would be seeing Trin again. I'd wanted to. And sometimes I had even dreamed of what it might have been like to see them smile at me again in that soft way. But I'd never thought that it could have ever been a possibility. And
now I was going out for coffee with them.

  It was a date. I was sure of that. A date with Trin. Who was nine years younger than me and who I had met when they were just fourteen. Part of me revolted at that idea. The age difference was bad enough but I'd known Trin when they'd been a child.

  The other, stronger, part of me told me to get over those details and focus on the here and now as I packed up my desk and locked the files away for the day. I headed the two blocks down the street to the coffee shop to meet Trin.

  The facts of the day were that Trin was twenty-four now, and utterly stunning with long, nearly white hair and perfect pale skin. Their eyes were the same sky blue that had first caught my attention, and the combination was almost ethereal.

  I was thirty-three, heavier than I would have liked to have been, and I had absolutely zero social life. I didn't have time for one. My life literally consisted of being at the shelter, raising awareness and money for the shelter, and getting things for the kids at the shelter. Sometimes I got a full six hours of sleep. Most nights I was too worried about one of my kids to get more than a few hours before coming back to work, whether or not I was supposed to be working there at the time. Sometimes Kim came in and found me slumped over one of the many files that I'd been reading to try to figure out what I could do to personally make a kid's life better.

  Soft jazz played overhead as I entered the coffee shop. Trin was against the back wall, well away from the closest window, and their eyes were on me as I entered. I expected nothing less from them. Trin had always had a way of protecting themselves in whatever situation they were in, even if it was unconsciously. I was both glad and sad to see that this trait had been preserved into adulthood.

  Trin smiled up at me and rose from the table to greet me. My ex had rarely even done that for me. Standing there in front of Trin, I wasn't sure what to do now. Did I hug them? Shake their hand?

  "Hey. Can I hug you?" I asked.

  Trin's smile grew a bit and they nodded. "Yes please." They stepped into my arms and I held them loosely. They were lean, like a cat, and warm, without pressing against me too much. We were friends, not lovers, and I felt the tightness in Trin's body as they stood there in my arms. I had loved them, and I still did, but in some ways, we were almost strangers as we stood there in the coffee shop.