Archive of Our Own

She cuts her hair during junior year of high school. September is smudging into a heartbreakingly chilly autumn like watercolors bleeding into canvas, and Lan Zhan decides she wants a change. She wants something for sure, an unnameable and unquantifiable thing with a desperation that almost scares her, so she gets a haircut. Not at the brightly lit salon across the road that Uncle lets her go to every two months or so to get a trim for split ends; for this, she takes the bus to the next district where the hairdressers won’t recognize her, and asks an unfamiliar woman for a pixie cut. 

“How short?” The hairdresser has light, frizzy curls streaked through with highlights, and she’s biting her lip a little as she fastens the cape around Lan Zhan’s shoulders. The question comes out bored, scripted. It’s a reasonable enough request, but Lan Zhan is sixteen and impulsive for the first time in her life and hasn’t thought that far yet. Frantically, she tries to remember the short, styled haircuts of actresses she’s seen on the news, the female models called bold for their androgynous looks on the catwalk. Which one of them? What does she want?  

At her blank stare, the hairdresser takes pity and pulls a sheaf of reference photos out of a drawer. The pages are laminated thick and glossy, different hairstyles displayed across them in a neat array. “We also accept clients’ own reference images, so you can use your phone to search if you have anything specific in mind.” 

Lan Zhan flips through quickly, feeling far too self-conscious as she tries to focus on the pictures. Every flitting gaze becomes a reprimand. Her pulse knocks against the muscle of her throat.  

One of the models on the sheet is East Asian—her hair is cropped short, revealing her ears, and she has a choppy side-swept fringe just above her eyebrows. Lan Zhan has not had a fringe in almost a decade. She has never had hair that exposed her ears, or anything more daring than a lob in middle school which eventually grew out into the sheet of bland mid-length hair falling down her back right now. 

“That one.” She points at the square she means, the one with the smiling model who has a face like hers but framed with short, asymmetrical hair.  

“You sure? That’s very short—a boy’s haircut, almost.” 

“I am sure,” Lan Zhan says firmly, and the hairdresser nods.  

Lan Zhan’s hair is pulled into a ponytail and snipped off at the base, leaving it a short bob that can be cut down further into the right shape. In the mirror, she sees the tidy mane of her cut hair, still held together by elastic, being set aside into a cart. The sight of it is surreal. She’s seized by the sudden urge to laugh and only just manages to keep her face neutral as scissors begin shearing off dark strands. 

It takes just under forty minutes. She pays for it with her own money.  

When she arrives home, her brother is at the kitchen table with his school notes spread out in front of him, and the door to the patio is open to let in the cool air.  

“Ge,” she says softly to get his attention. A breeze passes through the room, and her neck and shoulders prickle with absence. She thinks her head should feel lighter than this; there must be some tangible difference that can be defined outside of loss, shouldn’t there? 

“Ah, Lan Zhan—” Lan Huan’s head, bent over his work, turns towards the noise. She can pinpoint the moment he looks at her properly; the moment he sees the change, catalogues it. “Your hair?” he says. It’s halfway between a question and an exclamation.  

“I wanted a change.” That seems the most economical way to describe it, the way that will attract the least questions but not constitute a full lie. It wouldn’t even be a malicious lie, anyway, the kind Lan Zhan has always been warned against telling. She doesn’t know what she wants, and a change is as desirable as anything else might be right now. 

“It looks good, a-Zhan. Very different.” If it were anyone else, the last comment would have rankled. But Lan Huan means well, she knows, and his smile is fleeting but genuine. “Meimei, come here. Let me see it properly.” 

She lets him run a hand through it and ruffle up the ends, teasing that she’ll stop shedding long hair everywhere she goes now. Afterwards, in her room, Lan Zhan copies the motion for herself. Her fingers slip down the strands too fast, still reaching for ends that are no longer there. 

— 

When Uncle gets back from work, he looks at her properly and freezes, taking in the change. “A-Zhan,” he says in greeting. His face is inscrutable. “And a-Huan.” 

“Good evening, Uncle,” Lan Huan says, switching swiftly to Mandarin. Lan Zhan manages a nod and a smile, tongue caught somewhere between her back teeth. Surely Uncle wouldn’t react too badly—he’s reasonably conservative, yes, but not to the point where he would object to short hair on a woman, and it’s not as if it wouldn’t grow back eventually. 

“You cut your hair.” It’s a neutral observation, no inflections added. Lan Zhan has no idea how to defuse the situation, or if the situation needs defusing at all, so she just gives him the same line she gave Lan Huan. 

“I wanted to change something, so I thought… I thought a haircut would be appropriate.” 

Uncle makes a hmph sound. “Speak Mandarin at home,” he tells her, the way he always reminds the two of them when they default to answering in English, and then goes into his bedroom.  

Nothing more is said about her hair, or lack thereof, until after dinner, which is when the whole thing falls apart. 

“Lan Zhan,” Uncle begins as soon as they’ve put down their chopsticks, and Lan Zhan sucks in a breath. She begins listing evidence in her head that the confrontation will not be as awful or painful as she fears: he is not the kind of person to object to short hair on women. He knows that haircuts can and will grow out. He may just be curious. He is her uncle, the only paternal figure in her life. Her parent in all but name. 

“Yes, Uncle?” 

“You said you wanted a change. That’s understandable, of course it is. But really, must the haircut have been so drastic?” His expression is still completely neutral. Lan Huan slants her a quick look, and Lan Zhan exhales the single breath she’s been holding in all the while. That’s fine. She knows how to answer this. 

“I’ve never had short hair before. It was appealing to me because it was new, and interesting.” 

“I see.”  

“I’ve heard it’s not difficult to grow out a short cut like that,” Lan Huan adds, trying for appeasement. “She can style it back into a bob and it’ll be like before once it gets longer.” 

Uncle looks somehow more pensive, now. “A-Zhan,” he says. “Is this a rebellion? Something I’ve done, somehow, that you felt—felt, stifled by? Wanted to rebel against?” 

“Uncle, it’s simply—” 

Uncle presses on despite his usual strict rules against interrupting others. “You’re not like this usually. Are you acting out because of an identity crisis?” 

“An identity crisis?” Something in Lan Zhan’s stomach twists, a warning.  

“You know what I mean, Lan Zhan. What other kind of girls get their hair cut like that? People will say things.” 

A dull silence falls over the room after his statement. Across the table, Lan Huan’s face goes stiff and scared. Lan Zhan can feel the blood pounding through her ears now, white noise rushing to the rapid kick of her heartbeat. She didn’t think—she’d never thought the confrontation would go like this.  

Lan Zhan has known about her queerness for four years now, and she has never had any problems accepting it. She’d come out to her brother two years ago. He’d come out to her ten months ago.  

The haircut had not been related to her sexuality on any conscious level; she’d not thought that her uncle would connect the two when she herself had no intention of doing so.  

“No,” she says, forcing her mouth to open and head to shake. She feels blindsided beyond belief. She should have left her hair alone and just waited two years to go to college, she should have left her hair alone— 

“But why else—the short hair,” Uncle says, gesturing at her. “You look like a boy, Lan Zhan.” He takes Lan Zhan’s silence as agreement and continues. “A-Zhan, you might as well just tell me instead of lying about it. It wouldn’t even be surprising at this point, with the friends you keep and the way they behave. Luo Han’s daughter, that Luo Qingyang, always stirring up trouble. The Nie boys, you can’t think I haven’t heard the rumors about both of them.” 

His voice takes on an almost pleading tone as she remains silent, hands curling into pale knots in her lap where he cannot see. “You’ve never been interested in boys or marriage to begin with, and—I just want to know if you’re like that, too. I think I already know, just tell me yes or no.” 

“I am not a lesbian, Uncle,” Lan Zhan says. More—she needs to add on to it, as she would normally. “It’s good that you were conscious of the possibility and tried to speak to me about it, but your assumptions were wrong.” 

Her brother is perfectly still now, his head bowed, revealing nothing at all; she longs to look as placid and calm as he is. Their uncle stares for a long, hard moment.  

“The haircut has nothing to do with my sexuality,” Lan Zhan repeats. It’s not a lie, and neither had been anything else she said.  

Finally, Uncle nods. “Well, in that case. I’m glad I was worried for nothing, then.” He pushes his chair back to rise as if nothing is wrong. “A-Huan, a-Zhan, you both have homework to do. Don’t let me keep you.” 

— 

She goes into Lan Huan’s room later that night. “Are you okay?” she asks in English, when the door is closed behind her.  

“A-Zhan, I should be asking you that,” Lan Huan says. He’s not studying; he has his phone in his hands and his schoolwork is stacked into a neat pile that means he has not touched it yet. “I can’t believe he would—I didn’t think Uncle would subscribe to such stereotypes. I didn’t think he would practically force you to out yourself on his terms.” 

“He didn’t give me a choice,” Lan Zhan agrees. Out of everything, it’s that part that smarts the most. His reaction hadn’t been nearly as awful as it could have been—Lan Zhan had imagined disownings and talk of conversion, before, when running through the possibilities in her head—but it shakes her how he would have forced her to tell him. If she hadn’t denied it, he would have just made his assumptions and continued on, taking even that choice from her. 

“You might as well just tell me, instead of lying about it,” Lan Huan repeats under his breath in an imitation of their uncle, looking exhausted and gutted and very, very small. She winces. 

“I should have left my hair alone until college,” she says, quieter. “I’m sorry. If I hadn’t cut it, we wouldn’t have had that scene and he wouldn’t have started thinking about it. About the possibility of either of us being queer. And Mingjue-ge, too, he’ll pay more attention to the two of you if he ever decides to confront you about it. Now that I’ve made it seem like a real concern.” She’s aware she’s rambling, far more than she ever usually does. Nothing about this makes sense. 

Lan Huan shakes his head. His hands are skimming over the screen of his phone in repetitive, jerky movements, and he ignores the way it lights up into a bright square with text after text from someone Lan Zhan is sure is Nie Mingjue. The guilt, irrational as it is, smothers the pit of her stomach. “You don’t know that. It could have happened any other way. And Mingjue and I are the worst kept secret at the school already. We’d been careless with it.” 

“It shouldn’t have had to happen,” Lan Zhan says, raising her voice to cut him off. The comment about school and worst-kept secrets—Lan Huan has been dating a boy since the end of his own junior year, but no one has yet tried to speculate about his sister. Why would they? Pristine, quiet Lan Zhan with the appropriately styled hair, never rocking the boat any more than she has to. That’ll change, when she goes back. There’ll be more questions than she cares to answer. 

“A-Zhan, it is not your fault. It is not anyone’s fault that Uncle is unwilling to change his views, and it will not be your fault if people make assumptions about the hair.”  

“I know, ge,” Lan Zhan says. She doesn’t know what else to say. Her plans for coming out to Uncle had started and ended with sometime after college when I get a job. She hadn’t thought about any of the specifics, because she couldn’t fathom a situation in the foreseeable future where she would have to bring them up. Now that she suspects he suspects, every incriminating opinion and piece of behavior feels like it’s falling into place for Uncle’s scrutiny to sweep over. She’d trusted him, she realized. There is a measure of trust in letting one’s guard down around someone to the point of carelessness, and Lan Zhan cannot take it back now.  

Her brother’s voice breaks into her thoughts. “Lan Zhan, give me your hand.” On instinct, she slides it towards him on the desk, palm-side up, and Lan Huan puts his larger one on hers with a gentle pressure. It’s the way they used to do it as kids when Lan Zhan figured out she disliked being hugged on some days, the feeling of skin on skin unbearable. They have the same fingers; long, with prominent joints shifting restless under skin.  

Lan Huan taps the edge of the violin callus on her index finger, and she taps back. The air in the room feels suffocating now. 

— 

She grows up. They both do. Lan Huan goes to college across the country, and sends back pictures of his campus, rain-slick buildings and power lines carving up the dusk. In the June before she graduates, there’s a new flurry of photos on their WeChat thread—Lan Huan at pride, throwing up peace signs with a painted rainbow on one cheek. There’s a sloppy, six-second video, too, and Lan Huan cries, I wish you were here, meimei, before being jostled out of frame by a grinning Nie Mingjue. 

I miss you, Lan Zhan texts back. After a second of hesitation: I wish I was there with you, too.  

I want to know if it’s possible to be so happy, she means. 

Two months and you’ll be off to college, her brother says. And he’s right; all too soon, the summer is dying, the heatwave finally breaking on a cool gray morning in August, and Lan Zhan is stepping into the airport carrying a rolling suitcase to fly away from home. Uncle accompanies her all the way to security, a steady hand on her arm.  

“Lan Zhan,” he tells her. “Call home when you are settled, yes?” 

“Of course.” 

“I am proud of you. I will look forward to your visits.” 

(What Uncle does not know: The black baseball cap she is wearing low over her eyes has a thin rainbow around the inside brim, and had been a gift from Luo Qingyang—Mianmian, who is pansexual. Inside the lining of her pristine off-white suitcase is a collection of pins gathered over three years. Last week, her brother’s boyfriend’s sibling, Nie Huaisang, had explained to her the concept of genderfluidity when she asked, and then tentatively called her they before she could find the right words to ask again. The pronoun hadn’t fit right at the moment, but the rest of it had. She is wearing a compression sports bra that has been doubled over on itself to bind her breasts against her body until they are flat, almost invisible through her sweater. There are things we do to keep sane. There are secrets we keep to survive.) 

“I will miss you, Uncle,” Lan Zhan says. It is not a lie; Lan Zhan has never lied to her uncle and she is not going to start now. She will miss him, despite it all. Perhaps it is the home he has created that she will not.  

He hasn’t brought up her hair in years, but she still lives with the fear that he will. I do not want to hate the man who raised me, but I have come closer than I should have sometimes, she thinks as he pats her arm awkwardly. They’d never been much for physical affection, either of them, and somewhere along the way, Lan Zhan realizes she has stopped touching her uncle entirely. It seems as though he doesn’t know what to do with the fact, either.  

Boarding the plane feels like an exhale. Was this how Lan Huan had felt, too? Her ribs rise and fall, heavy against the presence of her makeshift binder, and she lets her shoulders sag for just a moment before walking forward. 

— 

She meets Wei Ying in college. Wei Ying is brilliant and beautiful and constantly around, and Lan Zhan is perhaps already a little bit in love.  

“Lan Zhan!” Wei Ying cries out from somewhere behind them, and suddenly there’s a warm body hurtling into theirs. “Hey,” she says, voice muffled through what seems to be a mouthful of Lan Zhan’s scarf.  

“Wei Ying,” they greet. Wei Ying shuffles around to their front so that they’re facing each other, and smiles blindingly.  

“Are you wearing eyeliner? Oh, you are! God, you look stunning, Lan Zhan, really, it’s unfair.” Wei Ying is reaching up to brush the corner of Lan Zhan’s eye, the briefest, softest touch. Lan Zhan tries not to lean their head into it. They try not to read too much into these touches, these little gestures of closeness. Wei Ying is free with her affections. To give added meaning to them would be presumptuous at best and unwanted at worst. 

“Anyway, before you distracted me. What I was going to ask was—come with us to Nightless City this Friday. Nie Huaisang and Jiang Cheng wanted to organize something, and I thought I’d invite you, too.” 

“Nie Huaisang?”  

Wei Ying mistakes their question for confusion and clarifies, “From the other campus! And Wen Qing and her brother are coming, too, and Mo Xuanyu, and hopefully no Jins, but Huaisang is exactly the kind of bitch who would invite a random Jin cousin just to see me lose it—” Wei Ying makes a dismissive gesture. “Anyway, you know the crowd. Us Chinese-American diaspora children have to stick together. Will you come?”  

Lan Zhan isn’t fond of clubs; they have nothing against the idea of clubs, or the people who regularly frequent them, but the lights and music and alcohol have never meshed well with their tastes. Still, it would be a good excuse to see Wei Ying, and they have always been close to Nie Huaisang. 

“I’ll be there,” they say, and Wei Ying beams, squeezes their hand. The gesture makes something pull low in their stomach.  

So that is how Lan Zhan finds herself at Nightless City on a Friday night, sitting at the bar nursing a tonic water as the strobe lights dart across the floor and cast flickering shadows onto faces and bodies. On occasion, the familiar members of their little group outing will flit into her vision: Nie Huaisang in a stylized hanfu and braids, Jiang Cheng with the Wen siblings, Xiao Xingchen kissing Song Lan on the dancefloor while Jian Qing makes faces at them from the side. And Wei Ying, always Wei Ying. Wei Ying is near the edge of the crowd, and once in a while, the light will sweep over her in a wash of blue and red and gold, turning her from woman to strange, beautiful statue. No, a statue could not possibly copy Wei Ying’s likeness. Not like when she’s dancing like this, arms cast in the air, face swinging between different shades of glee. The night yawns around them—all of them, but Wei Ying most of all, and Lan Zhan, who is sitting at the bar with a half-empty glass in hand, wanting her—moonlight and neon, every color on full blast like a spectrum pushed overboard. Lan Zhan wants, and wants, and wants.  

And suddenly Wei Ying is in front of her, yelling to be heard over the bassline that pours into the floor beneath their feet. “Dance with me, Lan Zhan! C’mon, just one song, just one dance!” 

It won’t be one dance—not if Lan Zhan is allowed to have a say, which she is not. (Lan Zhan would dance with her for as long as it takes. Lan Zhan would dance with her, and keep her.) 

“Just one dance,” Lan Zhan says out loud, and lets herself be pulled into the pulse of bodies by Wei Ying’s hand, locked with hers. The music surges to a crescendo. They dance together to not one, not two, but five songs, arms and shoulders and hips against each other as Lan Zhan pretends that she doesn’t notice the passing of minutes, or hear the transitions between each, pretends that the noise of the club stops her from recognizing the basic composition principles that every student in the music conservatory program should know.  

Pretends that she isn’t looking at the awful, devastating line of Wei Ying’s throat, bared sharp as she throws her head back and lets her hair spill out of the twin Dutch braids she’d been wearing for most of the night. 

But the fifth song ends, and then the next one up is something slow that drips across their bare skin to catch fire, and Lan Zhan cannot pretend anymore. “I’m going outside,” she says, and Wei Ying answers with, “No, I’ll come with,” and Lan Zhan is suffocating as they drag each other past all the couples on the dancefloor to burst out of the nearest exit onto a fire escape together.  

Lan Zhan remembers that Wei Ying is minoring in music education. They’ve taken several composition classes together in the main lecture hall, learning how verses and choruses work in tandem with the rise and fall of notes. They’ve danced five songs. She is afraid to examine what that means.  

The night is crisp and almost painfully bright, the moon waxing into a silver coin above their heads. “Wei Ying,” she says. “Wei Ying, Wei Ying.” The name shapes itself in her mouth before she can stop it. Wei Ying leans herself on the rail of the balcony and grins like a blade in the dark.  

“Lan Zhan, won’t you come here?” And that’s how it’s always worked so far, Wei Ying asking and Lan Zhan giving, and Lan Zhan would give again and again, but that’s not the point. The point is that this time, right now, she needs to know— 

“You come here,” Lan Zhan says, voice feeling hazy and soft. Wei Ying is a silhouette against the glittering backdrop of the city. You came to the balcony with me. Are you going to come to me again?  

And Wei Ying does. All the blood turns in her body, a slow humming pulse attuned to the way Wei Ying steps close and kisses her, inexorable tide and imperceptible change both. Verses and choruses of all the songs they have danced to, will dance to. 

— 

The binder comes in mid-February, a nondescript brown package that Lan Zhan first thinks is the paperback they ordered last week before realizing how different the weight and give of the bundle is from what a book should feel like. They wiggle a finger under the tape that seals the wrapping, and peels it apart without ceremony despite the breath she finds herself holding. Two binders fall out, a piece of paper that explains the guidelines for safe binding fluttering to the floor.  

Lan Zhan picks up the closest one, flesh-toned and as close to their skin color as they could get it, to examine. It’s made of a thin, stretchy material not unlike lycra. The middle, where their chest would fit, is layered over with some kind of compression fabric, and when Lan Zhan puts it on, it flattens the curve of beautifully; it doesn’t shift around the way folded-up sports bras do, and they don’t need to constantly adjust the straps every time they move.  

Lan Zhan cleans up the discarded packaging and stares for a long time in the mirror. They’re dressed as masculine as they can today, a pair of men’s cigarette pants and a loose crew neck paired with a looser jacket draped atop it all. With the binder on, the fall of their top is smooth, unbroken. No curves visible enough to betray them. The person in the mirror looks androgynous and poised, like someone people who would confuse the gender of. A woman in one light and a man if they push their hair back and someone else entirely when they tilt their head in the right way.  

Nie Huaisang spots it immediately, the first time they run into her while she’s wearing it. She doesn’t mind so much that the change is obvious to them; everyone finds a way to recognize the people most like them, and Huaisang’s grin is quick, a flash of cat-eyed solidarity. 

“Lan Zhan!” they call out. “Zhan-er, you look handsome, come grab a coffee with me!”  

Lan Zhan smiles at the descriptor. They go to the cheapest coffee stall on campus and then sneak their drinks into a nicer cafe across the road, which is such a quintessentially Huaisang move that Lan Zhan has to roll her eyes. Huaisang just gives her a wide-eyed look. “Zhan-jiejie, I am but a poor undergrad student under the wheel of capitalism—can I still call you that?” 

“Jie is normally fine.” She declines to comment on the true inaccuracy in their statement, the frankly laughable idea that they are anywhere close to broke. She knows full well that their Twitter is overflowing with commissions, and Huaisang is unerringly canny with their finances. 

“—well, Zhan-jie, you know I have awful spending habits, I’m always out of cash. Perhaps my brother will have to lend me some more money for this month.” They sound perfectly gleeful about this. 

“I will make sure to tell da-ge about your thriving commission slots,” Lan Zhan says placidly. They’re both slipping back into the broken Mandarin they used to speak in when they were younger, Mandarin conjunctions mixed in with English nouns for the words they can’t remember.  

Huaisang takes an indignant sip of iced latte. “You wouldn’t, I take NSFW comms on that account!” 

Lan Zhan stirs the tea leaves in her own drink and lets Huaisang launch into a meandering story about their most recent classes, the perils of buying a new tablet off Amazon, and how Jiang Cheng had tried to make them dinner last night and ended up almost setting off the smoke alarm.  

“You’re not allowed to cook in the student dorms,” Lan Zhan points out after the story has wrapped itself up into an indiscernible but suitably climactic conclusion. 

“Yes, that’s probably why the smoke alarm was set off,” they say with a mournful sigh. “And speaking of Jiang Cheng—” Lan Zhan has about a single second of warning to figure out where this is going “—what’s this about your new girlfriend? Cheng-er’s sister?” 

“Mn.” 

“Aw, don’t start that with me, Lan Zhan. If you don’t keep me up to date, I’ll have to ask Wei Ying for details now, and she’s no use at all.” At her raised eyebrows, Huaisang sniffs and continues, “She’s so gone for you. Completely useless. Although I don’t know why people think you’re any better. Both of you are the same, ugh.” 

“Oh,” Lan Zhan says. She hadn’t thought—Wei Ying, liking her back with the same visible intensity that must be clear on Lan Zhan’s own face; Wei Ying, kissing her on that fire escape, the night a sprawl of music and precious jewels behind her. Proof of desire, of another woman who desires her. A shudder runs through her body.  

Huaisang taps their acrylics on the table, the strip of glitter glued onto the middle of their thumb glinting in the light. “You really like her, huh?” 

“I don’t want to—ruin it.” 

“Ruin it?” 

“She doesn’t know,” Lan Zhan says in a rush. “I haven’t told her yet.” Speaking it means she has to confront it. Wei Ying thinks she is dating a woman, and Lan Zhan is… maybe not quite that.  

“Are you going to?” Huaisang’s voice is neutral, no hint of judgement in it. Lan Zhan doesn’t know how to respond to that question.  

“Eventually,” she settles on. The word settles on her with a heavy pallor. It’s a ticking clock, an expiration date. Eventually, she’ll have to say something, and Wei Ying will have to react to it.  

“You don’t… have to,” they say. The acrylics patter faster.  

“Hm?” 

“You make it sound like a big inevitable thing. You can just, not.” 

“I know.” She drains her tea to stall. “I just—Sangsang, I don’t even know who I am. How do I ask someone else to—” The thought has been taking up more and more of her head these days, ever since she started wearing a binder. Today is a she/her day. Anything else would make her blanch. Maybe she’s just too queer and the wires had gotten crossed; maybe she’d have just been a woman all her life if she hadn’t found other words for it, and that makes her the imposter. 

Huaisang doesn’t say anything. Of course they don’t. They, of all people, would have no empty platitudes for her. So she only looks down at the dregs of her cup and swirls them around while Huaisang watches, trying to read futures for herself out of the patterns in the tea leaves. 

— 

The first time she bought from the men’s section had felt like rebellion in and of itself. This time, Wei Ying is with her, holding Lan Zhan’s right hand in her left and a jumbo milk tea in the other, dragging them both this way and that to browse through the clothing on the racks. 

“Lan Zhan, look at this one,” she’s saying. She pulls an oversized graphic tee off its hanger and holds it to her torso. In her combat boots and slouchy cargo pants, hidden behind the thick drape of the shirt, Wei Ying looks almost effortlessly masculine. It’s the kind of look that confuses; someone passing by might take an extra beat, a second look at the strong cut of her jaw to place her as the woman she is. Lan Zhan feels a sudden, irrational stab of jealousy.  

“No?” 

The silence had dragged on too long in her contemplation, and she hastens to fill it. “I was just thinking of something else. The shirt suits you, a-Ying, it’s a nice color with those cargo pants.” 

“Ah, well.” Wei Ying spins around to find a mirror and eyes her reflection. “I do look too much like a man. In this outfit, I mean. I’d probably never wear this shirt with these pants.” 

“We are in the men’s section,” Lan Zhan points out.  

“Yeah, I know, I just… don’t want to look entirely like a man? Nothing wrong with dressing masc, but I know what works for me, and that doesn’t.” 

Lan Zhan frowns. It hadn’t occurred to her that this was an experience most women didn’t go through. Given that she’s genderqueer, and only woman-adjacent some of the time—it’s getting easier to say to herself, the words—it does feel like something that should have clicked sooner. “You’ve never wanted to look like a man?” 

“No, not really.” 

“Oh.” 

Lan Zhan remembers begging clothes off Lan Huan while their uncle was away on an overnight trip. He’d agreed readily enough, so she had ended up spending the better part of two days in boys’ clothes. With a baseball cap shadowing her face and a dark mask covering half of it, it had been difficult to tell that she was meant to be a girl under it all. The thought had given her the strangest kind of relief, taking away a burden she hadn’t been aware existed until that very moment.  

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying says. “Is that something you want? Would want?” 

Two binders tucked away neatly next to her bras and underthings. The days where she is fine until it isn’t. Nie Huaisang, saying genderfluid to them.  

“Some of the time,” she settles on revealing, feeling strangely exposed despite the fact that the admission by itself can mean any number of things, not all of them necessarily true.  

Wei Ying nods as if not fazed in the slightest. “Do you want clothes for that, while we’re here? I think you should get a beanie. Hats seem great for messing up gender presentation.” 

“A beanie,” Lan Zhan says, bemused. Whatever reaction she’d expected, it was not this.  

Instead of answering, Wei Ying whisks a beanie off a nearby mannequin. Lan Zhan makes an attempt at protesting, but she’s shot down on the grounds that “there are no staff around, so it doesn’t count, Lan Zhan!” and made to put it on. It does, in fact, mess up her gender presentation. Lan Zhan thinks she likes it; she looks careless and handsome, and beautifully ambiguous. Wei Ying’s hand is firm in hers. 

She ends up buying the beanie; two of them, in different colors. It feels less of a rebellion this time, but only because it has begun to feel so exceedingly normal. 

— 

Wei Ying is sprawled on top of her in her dorm bed. They aren’t doing anything, just lying there in the golden evening, watching the sun’s hands retreat across the room as nightfall sets in. A window is cracked open to let the air circulate. It feels liminal. It feels safe. 

“Wei Ying,” she says, and the mess of hair on her stomach mumbles out an acknowledgement.  

I have to tell you something, she means to say, but her mouth skips over the introduction like a broken record and immediately settles on, “I’m wearing a binder, Wei Ying.” (She is. She can feel the clutch of its fabric clinging to her, familiar as the sensation has become now.) 

“Right now?” Wei Ying asks, and scrambles to roll off Lan Zhan. Her hair is wild as she sits up, tangled into the drooping semblance of a ponytail. “Ack, you should have said before, I’m sure my head was pressing down on—” 

“No, you were mostly on my stomach. Stay,” Lan Zhan says automatically. But that hadn’t been the exchange she wanted to have.  

Wei Ying sinks back down, this time on the bed itself against Lan Zhan’s shoulder so that their faces are closer together. She shifts to throw a leg more comfortably over Lan Zhan. “Okay, so you bind. I didn’t know that, but thank you for telling me.” 

“Ask… ask me what it means.” Lan Zhan can feel her pulse rabbiting, skittish and uneven, even as she tells herself there is no reason to be this nervous. “Please.” She’ll be the one to say it—she has to be, but now she can say it in answer to a question. 

Wei Ying stills, then obliges. “Lan Zhan. What does the binder mean?” Her breath is very close to Lan Zhan’s ear now, stirring the part of her hair that has been cropped shortest.  

“I am not a woman all the time,” Lan Zhan says. The sun is almost touching the horizon now, blinding where it tries to meet the smudge of dark at the end of the world. Somewhere, someone has started playing music, and the notes drift in through the open window. “I am genderfluid, and the binder is part of that,” she says. 

“Okay, then.” Wei Ying’s voice is impossibly soft, just as quiet as the music that’s wrapping itself around them. “Thank you for telling me,” she says again. “Do you have anything you need me to change? With names, or pronouns?” 

Lan Zhan kisses her head. The light thrown across them has shifted from gold to blue now, slow and strange like they’re underwater. “I’ve started to use they/them pronouns. Not all the time, but I will let you know which days. And it would be nice if—if masculine-coded words were applied to me, sometimes. I don’t mind gendered language otherwise.” 

“Handsome?” Wei Ying tries out, and laughs with delight as she sees the flush on Lan Zhan’s cheeks. “Handsome. We can work with that. You are, very.” 

“Wei Ying—” she begins, and then laughs a little hysterically, adrenaline and nerves coming down together as she begins to process what happened. Wei Ying tucks herself closer to her.  

“Do other people know about this? Am I allowed to mention it in public?” 

Lan Zhan pauses to consider this. “You were the first that I properly said it to. Huaisang knows, because we’d talked about it when we were younger.” 

“Mm, I always forget you two went to the same high school. You said your brothers dated, yeah? Lan Huan and the da-ge Nie Huaisang is always on about.” 

The comment itself is innocuous enough, but it cracks something open in Lan Zhan. She remembers high school, those moonless years spent thinking she’d never get out; every hour she’d burnt out searching for something to be, all the ways she’d tried to punish the shaking body that had brought to her this point, wanting to understand things not yet within her grasp. “I didn’t know,” Lan Zhan says, and she’s not talking about who she went to high school with anymore. “Back then, I didn’t know it was something you could be.” She hates the way her voice falters in the middle, a soft thing rolling over to show its underbelly. 

“Oh, sweetheart,” Wei Ying breathes, in a way that means I want to make it better for you. In a way that means keep talking, I’ll listen. 

The words come spilling out now—Lan Zhan has been missing words for most of her life, and now that she has them, they don’t ever seem to stop. “I thought I would be okay with being a girl forever, because I was fine with it so much of the time. And then sometimes I would want to dress like a boy, and have people think I looked like one, but I didn’t know what that meant for me. After I cut my hair, my brother lent me his clothes sometimes—” She breaks off, and makes a frustrated gesture into the air. “It was—complicated. It’s still complicated.” 

Wei Ying adjusts her weight so that her body is wrapped more securely around Lan Zhan’s. She still smells like the perfume she’d put on for the day, like citrus and something darkly floral. Like Wei Ying.  

“But you’ve made it now. You’d had to be so strong, your entire life, and you’ve made it all the way here.” 

“To you.” Lan Zhan lets herself say, drifting.  

“Not just me. To yourself, too,” Wei Ying says, and Lan Zhan takes in a watery breath. The evening has turned everything in the room to shadow, dusky like images on faded black-and-white film. She feels so tender and real that she can hardly bear it. 

— 

Their brother has moved out of his dorms and into a small one-bedroom flat by the time Lan Zhan is in their second year and Lan Huan in his third. Lan Zhan goes to visit over Lunar New Year, taking a cross-country flight that lands just as the blueshift fog rolls in; it lingers thick against their ankles as Lan Huan flings open the door with a smile around his eyes.  

“I’ll make the tea,” Lan Zhan says once they’re both settled. Lan Huan makes a noise of protest, but they bat away his hands and open the cupboard above the sink, which is where Lan Huan has always kept a box stuffed full of teabags. Riffling through it, they fish out the small flat container of pearl jasmine tea squeezed into the bottom.  

“Earl Grey?” they ask idly as they replace the box and fill a kettle with water. There had been a tidy pile of teabags at one end that had stained their fingers with the smell of bergamot. “You’ve never liked black tea.” 

“Ah, a-Yao likes it.” There’s something in his voice that makes them turn around. When they do, Lan Huan is looking very fixedly at the tabletop, fingers tapping out a rapid rhythm on his knee. 

“A-Yao?” 

“Yes, he doesn’t really do caffeine, but he’s fond of the lavender blend, so I keep some in stock for—” 

“Ge,” Lan Zhan says, letting exasperation color their tone.  

“A-Zhan,” Lan Huan says in the exact same tone. Lan Zhan continues to stare at him, and he huffs out a small sigh before conceding. Their brother is stubborn, but the kind of stubborn that knows when to yield; Lan Zhan’s difficult streak has no such compunctions. “Meng Yao is my boyfriend. We’ve been together for about three months now. I didn’t mean to not tell you, exactly, I was just going to… wait a bit. It was a bit complicated at first.” 

“You and Mingjue-ge—” 

“Mingjue is my partner, too. Both of them.” 

Lan Zhan nods agreeably. “You’ll have to show me pictures sometime. Of you and Meng Yao and Mingjue-ge.” 

“I—” Lan Huan ducks his head, looking as embarrassed as they’d ever seen him. “Well. Of course. A-Zhan, I honestly thought you’d have a stronger reaction to this, me dating two men at once.” 

They pause. Recalculate. Right now, they want their brother to be laughing instead of somber. He has two partners, and his sibling home for the new year; it’s an occasion for gladness. “You’ve already started seeing the one, it is really not too much of a stretch—” they begin, knowing how to balance the insolence of their voice into something that will knock Lan Huan out of the soft doubt he pulls around himself like a cloak sometimes. 

“Lan Zhan!” Lan Huan says, just as predicted, but he’s smiling now, helpless, as the water starts to boil, and Lan Zhan presses their shoulder against his.  

“You’re happy. That’s all.”  

They stay up later than advisable that night, drinking tea and playing old songs on Lan Huan’s rented piano, trading oranges for the sake of upholding at least one tradition in the midst of breaking another dozen. It’s dark out when Lan Huan lingers over the last glissando of a Rachmaninoff concerto. As the notes fade out, pianissimo, Lan Zhan tucks their body into the little dark alcove between the edge of the piano and the wall. They’re far taller than the piano now, of course; they can rest an arm on it comfortably in a way they never could growing up. The room grows quiet around the corners. 

“I have a girlfriend,” they say out loud, and Lan Huan smiles at them from the piano seat. In the half-day they’ve been together, Lan Zhan has learned that their brother smiles quickly, and often, now. The light of the single artfully antique lamp they’ve switched on, a concession to the dark outside, turns him precious golden. 

“Is it the Wei Ying you’ve told me about?” 

Lan Zhan tilts their head in confirmation. “That is not all.” The next thing takes longer to say. Their throat works, and Lan Huan glances sideways at them, waiting. “I identify as genderfluid.”  

The formality is a shield. The formality is a retreat. There’s something to be said about how the people one loves best can twist the knife hardest. 

Lan Huan turns to face them properly. “So you’re my sibling, then?” 

“Right now, I am your sibling, and I am using they/them pronouns in English.”  

“And at other times?” 

“There are she/her days where I am your sister. My name is still Lan Zhan, all the time.” 

“Okay, then,” Lan Huan says, and that’s that. He rises unsteadily from the piano bench and takes the short step to the left that puts himself nearer to them. “I love you. You know that, right?” he says.  

“We don’t say that often.” It’s not an accusation, not when it’s simple fact. Neither of them grew up showered with verbal affection—neither of them have particularly adopted the habit of their own volition, either. Love makes itself known in any way that matters. 

“Sometimes it is important to say things. Even just to make them real to yourself.”  

Lan Huan’s next words are contemplative. He looks impossibly still; the glow of the lamp lights up one side of his face, and the other is cast in shadow, unreadable. “Does Uncle know?” 

“No,” Lan Zhan admits. They knot the fingers of one hand into the other, digging in until they can feel the bright bursts of pain all the way up their wrists. 

“Ah.” 

“Do you… do you think I should tell him?”  

Lan Zhan is sixteen and cutting their hair, dreaming and dreaming as the summer ends. They are looking their uncle in the eyes in a dining room starved of air. They are leaving home for college. Space and time and perspective compressed into bearable moments of memory; every hurt a scabbed-over twinge, every figure an animatronic on a string in the distance. Would you think less of me for not doing so? 

“As long as you’re happy,” Lan Huan says. Their own words sent back to them. 

Lan Zhan breathes out. “Then he will likely never know.”  

They hadn’t realized this was what they wanted, but speaking it out loud, they can feel the truth of the statement set in. Lan Zhan would in fact be perfectly content not to tell their uncle. Lan Zhan owes him many things, but never this. They will not make plans to tell him, and they will not face his undoubtedly clumsy reaction, and they will continue to live with themself and their quietly visible pride, like they have through everything. 

As long as you’re happy. That’s what they’ve been trying to be, both of them, since high school when it felt like the world was too small to ever let them breathe. Their younger selves haunt the threshold of this room, this transitory white space between one year and the next, hungry ghosts that nobody has blackened paper money for. Someday, Lan Zhan might even invite them in.  

But there will be time for that later. Now is not about the past, or the things and people that live there. “Ge,” they say instead, touching Lan Huan’s hand briefly. “It’s getting late.” 

Lan Huan nods. His hand is warmer than blood in the heat of the room. “You must be tired. I’ll make up the spare room for you, and your luggage can go in the…” His voice trails off as he pads to the door and exits the living room, presumably to do exactly as he says. Lan Zhan loves him with a ferocity that startles. 

Before they follow, Lan Zhan puts their hand on the pull-chain of the lamp and tugs. In the second before it turns off, their shadow lengthens on the floor before them, stretching ever forward, caught in a flare of light.