Felix Ever After(80)

“What? He’s not.” Austin shrugs. “Now he gets Ezra to himself. They’re in love with each other. Everyone knows that. You’ve said it yourself more than once.”

Leah’s face pinkens, and she glances at me. It’s a question that I myself haven’t known the answer to, that I’ve been confused about—but the more that I think about it, the more obvious the answer becomes. I’m starting to feel like an oblivious idiot. It looks like everyone knew exactly how I felt, even before I did.

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” I say, leaning back in my seat and crossing my arms, “because he hates me now. He won’t even look at me.”

No one speaks for a second, until Leah murmurs that she’s sorry. “Maybe things will still work out. You never know, right?”

The lunch is awkward—I don’t think it could never be not awkward, with me and Austin sitting across from each other—but the conversation eventually picks up as we talk about the last TV shows we binged, what movies we’re looking forward to, what we’ll do during the day once the summer program is over. Once upon a time, it wouldn’t have been a difficult choice: I’d spend every second of every day with Ezra. Now I’m not even sure what my life looks like without him. I’ll have to do a lot of rebuilding, a lot of reimagining, but I’m not sure I even want to. I’ve seen him in hallways, across the parking lot, on opposite ends of the classroom. He always ignores me, and I’ve been too afraid to reach out to him—to tell him the truth. To say that he was right, about everything. To tell him that I love him.

“Austin,” Leah says, “are you still going to that Ariana Grande concert next month?”

I’m swinging my foot beneath the table, but at the word grande, I freeze. Austin hesitates. He stares at the cheese pizza he’s barely picked at. “Still trying to, yeah.”

“Mom’s letting me buy tickets, too.”

“Okay.”

“It should be fun to go together, right?”

“Jesus, you really don’t know how to figure out when a person doesn’t want to talk about something, do you?”

Leah turns to me with a grin. “He’s embarrassed, but he’s obsessed with Ariana Grande.”

“I’m not obsessed.” He won’t meet my eye.

“You’re a little obsessed. It’s nothing to be ashamed of—I mean, she’s a fucking star. It’s okay to be obsessed.”

Austin doesn’t speak. He glances up at me before looking away again. And even though I’m staring at him, I can barely see him. All that I can see are the text messages from grandequeen69. The anger, the hatred this troll had for me, the fucking gallery of me and my pictures and my deadname, driving myself crazy as I tried to figure out who the piece of shit was, if they were sitting in my class . . .

“It was you,” I say.

Leah looks at me, startled—then confused. “Sorry, what?”

Austin still won’t look at me. He knows exactly what I’m talking about.

I’m shaking my head. The confusion, the shock, the anger—it spills through me, and I can barely make sense of how I’m feeling, how I should even react. I want to laugh and cry and scream and launch myself across the table to beat the shit out of him all at once. There’s only one thing I want to ask him. “Why?” He still won’t look at me. “Why did you do it?”

Leah’s confusion is turning to fear as she looks back and forth between us, realization dawning on her face, though it looks like she’s having a hard time believing it, too.

Austin swallows as he stares at his pizza.

“Why did you fucking do it, Austin?”

“You don’t have to shout,” he mutters.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath so that I don’t freak out on him. If I hit him, I’ll be kicked out of St. Catherine’s.

“It was a mistake,” he tells me. “It was a mistake. That’s all.”

“It was a mistake to hack into my Instagram and take my fucking photos and tell the entire world my deadname? And all those fucking messages—the transphobic bullshit you put me through. That was just a mistake, too?”

He doesn’t say anything.

“Why?” That’s all I want to know, the question repeating itself over and over again in my head.

He takes a second to answer. When he does speak, he says, “I don’t know why the gallery was such a big deal. I thought you were proud to be trans.”

“Are you fucking serious?”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Leah says. “You? It was you, Austin? Please tell me you’re fucking kidding.”

My hands are balled up so tightly that they’re shaking. “I am proud to be trans. But that shit was personal. Those photos. My old name. It wasn’t your place to put it on display.” My voice is rising again, but I don’t care. “You didn’t have my permission to do any of that. It was fucking abusive. It was a fucking attack.”

Austin swallows and looks down, hair falling into his face. He swipes some strands back behind his ear.

“Please tell me that you’re kidding,” Leah says, her voice tinged with desperation.

“You really pissed me off,” Austin tells me. “You know?”