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Evans was nine years old when James Potter told him he fancied him. They had been sitting on the swings in the school playground one day and Potter had said, “You’re very pretty, Evans.” Evans blushed. He liked that compliment very much, but he wasn’t yet quite aware of why.
“Thank you,” he said, “so are you.” That wasn’t quite right, he thought, but he didn’t know how to describe Potter, so he didn’t try.
“I like you,” Potter continued. He rubbed his toe in the dirt and looked at Evans expectantly. Evans wasn’t sure what to say, so he didn’t say anything. He sat there silently for a minute, frowning at Potter, and slowly, Potter’s face fell and his shoulders slumped, and he stood up and walked away.
After that, he talked to Evans less, and Evans, who hadn’t had many friends in the first place, was left alone.
It was a lonely few years, and his parents worried for little Evans, but he did well in school, and spent much of his time at home playing with his sister. His parents encouraged him to make friends, but he would simply shrug and say he didn’t mind. They would frown, and worry, and he knew they were acting out of love, but he had always wanted his parents to be proud of him, and their worry felt an awful lot like disappointment. He promised himself that in secondary school, he would make friends, and then maybe his parents would be happy.
Evans did make friends in secondary. They were perhaps not the friends his parents expected him to make, but they were friends nevertheless. On his first day, he had been sitting alone in the back corner of the classroom when a girl came and dropped her bag on the desk in front of him. She sat down, then twisted around and smiled at Evans.
“Marlene McKinnon,” she said, holding out a hand.
“Evans,” Evans said. He shook her hand.
“Have you got a first name?” Marlene asked. Evans shrugged. He had a first name. He rarely used it. He didn’t like it very much.
Marlene didn’t question him further, and instead turned to wave to another girl that had just come in. “Dorcas!” she called out. “Come here!” Dorcas made her way over and sat next to Marlene.
“This is Evans,” Marlene said. “Evans, Dorcas.”
“Nice to meet you,” Evans said with a smile. Dorcas smiled back.
“You too!” she said. She turned to Marlene. “Is he our friend now?”
“Yep!”
“Good! He looks nice.”
The rest of the students slowly trickled into the classroom, and Evans watched them as he half listened to Marlene and Dorcas’s conversation. One girl he recognized from his old school. Mary. She had been friendly to him. She paused at the door, surveying the classroom, and when she spotted Evans, she smiled and waved and made her way over. She took the seat behind Dorcas and next to Evans.
“What’s your name?” Marlene asked cheerfully.
“Mary Macdonald. Yours?”
Everyone introduced themselves, and the four of them started talking, and Evans found that he felt quite at home with his new friends.
~~~
Evans was fourteen years old. He wanted to grow his hair longer but his mum wouldn’t let him. His sister had a boyfriend and didn’t want to spend time with Evans anymore, and Evans couldn’t stop staring at James Potter.
He supposed he was gay, but that word didn’t feel right. It felt off somehow, but he wasn’t sure how and he knew that maybe he should think about it but he didn’t really know what would happen if he thought about it. So he didn’t. There were a lot of things he didn’t think about.
His friends noticed him watching Potter, of course, and teased him about it. He would usually go red, and shrug, and sink into his seat, wishing he could hide. He didn’t want to like Potter. He wanted to be normal, like his sister was. He wanted to be happy and not want to disappear into the floor every time someone looked at him. His parents said that shyness was normal at this age, but Evans didn’t think it was shyness. He wasn’t shy. Mary was shy. Mary rarely talked unless she was with her friends, and she got nervous when she had to ask for directions. Evans was sure he wasn’t shy.
In the middle of the night, Evans would lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and all the thoughts he ignored during the day would fill his head, and he couldn’t stop them. He didn’t understand why he felt so wrong. He stared at the blank white ceiling, and thought about his friends, and he didn’t think he liked girls but maybe he did, because he had lost count of the amount of times he had caught himself admiring a girl’s makeup, or hair, or clothes, and that was what liking someone felt like, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?
But then there was Potter. He was fairly certain he liked Potter. Potter also had nice hair, but it was hair that Evasn wanted to touch, to run his hands through. He wasn’t sure how looking at girls’ hair made him feel, but it wasn’t like that. It was all far too confusing, and eventually exhaustion would take over and Evans would fall asleep with no more answers than he had found the night before.
When they were fifteen, Dorcas told the group that they were nonbinary. Marlene hugged them tightly, and Mary tried to do the same but Marlene wouldn’t let them go, so Mary settled for a smile paired with a squeeze of Dorcas’s hand. Evans smiled, and rested a hand on their back, and resolved to look up what that meant when he got home.
That night, Evans googled, and he googled some more, and then even more, and then oh. Wait. That makes sense. That’s me.
By that point he had gone far off his original question of what is nonbinary? He had found the answers to that, and then clicked on another link on the website, and there it was. A whole page about trans women.
Evans had never cried happy tears before, but there’s a first time for everything.
The next morning, he wasn’t sure what to do about it. He knew what felt wrong now, and why. He blinked. He was still using he and him pronouns in his head, he realized.
“She,” Evans whispered. “She, she she.” She stared into the mirror. “She.” She smiled, and her reflection smiled back. Her reflection. Evans was giddy. She covered her mouth to hide her massive smile, then uncovered it because she wanted to see her smile. Not his, hers. Her reflection grinned back at her, and it wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t what she wanted to look like, not at all. But it was her, and right now she wanted to bask in that.
“Petunia!” Evans heard her mother call out, “Can you tell your brother to come down? He’s going to be late!”
And shit. Well. Evans’s good mood vanished instantly. She couldn’t tell her family, she realized. Certainly not while she was living with them, and maybe not after either. She looked in the mirror again, and winced, and looked away. She tugged on her blazer and went downstairs, pushing past Petunia as she went.
“Are you okay?” Dorcas asked her. “You seem off today.” The two of them were walking to Dorcas’s house to work on a school project. Evans shrugged and kicked a pebble across the sidewalk.
“I’m fine.”
“Okay.” Dorcas studied her with a sidelong glance. “You can tell me, you know. If something’s bothering you. You don’t have to, but you can.”
Evans smiled at them. “I know. Thank you. Maybe eventually.”
“Alright.” Dorcas smiled, and squeezed Evans’s hand, and Evans knew that when she got up the courage to tell Dorcas, they would be absolutely wonderful.
Evans was sixteen when she finally told her friends. She had told Dorcas first, of course, and they had been just as wonderful as anticipated. They had immediately taken Evans under their wing, and promised that she could come over to their house whenever they wanted. They were out to their wonderfully supportive parents, and they said that even if Evans didn’t want to come out to Dorcas’s parents, they would welcome her with open arms. They loved Dorcas’s friends.
Evans did come out to Dorcas’s parents, and they responded with a warmth that she knew she wouldn’t get from her own parents. She sniffled a little bit, and Mrs Meadowes just hugged her tighter.
“You come over here anytime, dear, you understand?” she said. “We’ll always be happy to see you.” Evans nodded and wiped her eyes. “Is there another name you’d like us to call you?” Mrs Meadowes continued. Evans shrugged.
“I don’t think she’s decided on that yet, mum,” Dorcas said. Evans wanted to agree, but being called “she” so casually, like it was the easiest thing in the world, made it impossible for her to speak, so she just nodded.
“That’s okay,” Mrs Meadowes said. “Just let us know when you’re ready.”
“Thank you,” Evans whispered.
“It’s no problem at all, sweetheart,” Mr Meadowes said with a smile. Evans returned it to the best of her ability, and then Dorcas took her by the hand and pulled her upstairs.
“How are you?” they asked. “You weren’t overwhelmed?”
Evans shook her head. “No, not at all. They’re so––” she sniffled again. “They’re so wonderful.”
Dorcas grinned. “They are, aren’t they? They’d be happy to adopt you if you let them.”
Evans laughed out loud at that. “I might just let them.”
“So,” Dorcas said, “do you want to talk about the name thing? We don’t have to,” they added in a rush. “It’s okay if you don’t want to think about that right now or if you don’t want to change your name at all, but if you do want to talk, you can.”
Evans bit her lip. “I have thought about that, actually. Did you know, my parents had the name Lily picked out for me if I had been born a girl?”
“That’s a pretty name,” Dorcas said.
“It is. I always liked it better than mine. I think I want to be Lily.”
“Lily,” Dorcas said with a smile. “It suits you.”
“Does it?” Evans asked.
“Yeah, I think it does.”
“Lily it is, then.”
~~~
The day after Lily’s seventeenth birthday, she was at Dorcas’s house to avoid her father, who wanted to start teaching her to drive. He’d wanted to for ages, and Lily was getting worse at coming up with excuses to say no. She wasn’t against learning to drive, exactly, but she knew that her father would turn it into “male bonding time”, and so she was avoiding it for as long as she possibly could.
Lily sat cross legged on Dorcas’s bed next to Mary and Marlene as Dorcas dug through their closet, tossing clothes on the bed and barely missing their friends.
“Mum wants me to get rid of all my old clothes,” they said, their voice muffled. “This is all stuff I don't wear anymore, feel free to take things you like!”
Mary and Marlene started going through the pile that was quickly building up on the bed. Lily sat and watched, feeling oddly self conscious and hating it.
“Lils?” Mary said suddenly.
“Yeah?”
“What do you think of this one?” She held up a pale yellow skirt. It was long, and flowy, and had bright little flowers all over it.
“It’s pretty,” Evans said, “you would look good in it.”
“Not for me, for you!” Mary put the skirt over Lily’s lap. “Want to try it on?”
Lily didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t thought about wearing skirts before. But she had only been out to her friends for a month, and no one had said anything about her trying different clothes. But now…
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Marlene said, and Mary nodded. Lily looked down at the skirt.
“Um, is there somewhere I can go to change?”
Dorcas emerged from the closet for a moment, a wide grin on their face. “Bathroom’s down the hall!”
“Right.” Lily laughed. She stood up, feeling more than a little nervous, and went to get changed.
When she opened the bathroom door, her friends were all standing outside, and they gasped when they saw her.
“You look gorgeous!” Mary said.
“Absolutely beautiful,” Dorcas added. Marlene squealed slightly and nodded enthusiastically.
Lily looked down at the skirt where it fell around her calves. She liked it. She really liked it. With a small laugh, she turned slightly, just enough so that the skirt swirled around her legs.
“Thank you,” she whispered. Dorcas smiled.
“You’re welcome.”
When Lily was leaving that evening, Dorcas offered to let her take the skirt home. Lily shook her head.
“I can’t,” she said, “my parents.”
“I’ll hold on to it for you, then. Anytime you come over here, it’s all yours.” They hugged her, and Lily hugged back, trying to pour all her gratitude into it. Dorcas seemed to understand as they stood up on their toes to kiss Lily’s forehead.
“We all love you so much,” Dorcas said firmly.
“I know,” Lily replied. “I love you all too.”
When Lily got home, she caught a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror and cringed. She looked down at her jeans and wished desperately that she could have kept the skirt. Maybe it would make this all a little bit less painful.
When Lily was eighteen, she moved out. She was lucky enough to get into a university in London, far enough away that her parents didn’t try to convince her to stay at home. She told them she would come home for Christmas, but she wasn’t sure if she would follow through. Dorcas, Mary, and Marlene were all going to London as well, and the four of them decided that rather than all living in uni accommodations, they would find a flat to share.
On the day that they moved in, Lily pulled the skirt out of the bottom of one of the boxes in her new bedroom and put it on. She stood in front of her mirror, and almost smiled. She hadn’t had a haircut in nearly four months, and her hair was starting to fall over her ears and brush against the back of her neck. I can do this, she thought, and it was the first time in a very long time that she had thought so. She turned away from the mirror before she could start to catalogue all the ways she still didn’t look right, and picked up her backpack from the corner by the door. She reached in and pulled out a folded up flag in pink, blue, and white. She had bought it at a shop near the flat, and it was still wrapped in its plastic packaging. She took it out, unfolded it, shook it to try and smooth out the creases. She put it back down to dig around in the boxes again until she found a package of thumbtacks. Carefully, Lily put the flag up on the blank walls of her room, then stood back with a giddy smile on her face. There was a knock at the door, and when Lily turned to see who it was, Dorcas had already poked their head in.
“How are you?” they asked.
“Fantastic, and you?”
“Wonderful! Now come into the kitchen and help me out, Mary and Marlene can’t agree on where to put the cutlery and I don’t want to have to apologize to the neighbours for them shouting on the first day.”
“No, that wouldn’t give a good impression, would it?”
“Not at all.”
“I’ll be right there,” Lily said, and Dorcas blew her a kiss and headed off down the hallway. Lily took one last look at the flag, then followed.