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Yunho's never thought much about being a man. It's something that kind of just happened to him. Not something he became as much as, like, something other people acknowledged him becoming. You're a growing boy, eat some more. You're becoming such a handsome young man. Something he grew into, unquestionably, with rules to figure out and follow.
When he came out, he thought that explained why hanging out with guys always felt a bit like a performance – not consciously, not all the time, but Yunho at his core is a quick learner and a people-pleaser, and that's no different when he's stuck in locker rooms with other boys. Claps on the back and laughing the right amount at the right moment. Perfecting the impersonal distance from each other, which is the length of a joke being told and received well, even if it wasn't funny, even if it wasn't a joke. Of course it took effort – he's gay, and he's meant to be straight.
All these locker room boys are straight, as were all the boys he grew up around in scouts and sports, and all his cousins, and all his childhood icons – well, as far as he knows, anyway. That's all it is, this sense of detachment. It's the feeling of looking at girls and trying to will himself into liking them (oh, she's cute and kind of mean to boys, this is what people are talking about, this is a crush), which is the feeling of fitting himself to a shape too small, not quite his measurements, but with his name sewn in, definitely his – and looking the part (maybe they printed a letter wrong, maybe this is someone else's uniform).
And he still looks the part. He's always looked the part, but especially when the growth spurt hit and his shoulders widened, and especially in his gym kit – you've become such a handsome young man, why haven't you got a girlfriend? from all his aunts the Chuseok after his sixteenth birthday, bro, do you think she's hot? from some upperclassmen who hadn't found out yet. The constant mistaken identity means other boys are cool with him, for the most part. It was awkward at first, like they were waiting for him to, like, change after he came out. Reveal a unicorn horn or something. But Yunho, ever amicable and, apparently, too patient for his own good, kept acting like he always had, making light of the way boys would pause half-way through changing when he came into the locker rooms, laughing it off until they laughed it off, and suddenly he was back to being clapped on the shoulder again. Because he still looked like them. Put him in a line-up of the basketball team and nobody would say, he's gay. He's just some guy. Some tall guy in a cap and gym shorts.
Maybe they wouldn't be so cool with him if he brought it up in more than a passing laugh or comment or an explanation for something one of them said. (But how do you know?) (But one of you is still, like… still the girl.) (Is this because you hang around Hongjoong?) (Yah, I'm so glad you're one of the normal ones. I mean, like, you don't act like a girl.) But when they're just lifting weights or dribbling a ball, the locker room boys are okay. Being some guy is a role he can squeeze down to.
"They're still insufferable," Hongjoong disagrees from Mingi's bedroom floor, as is routine whenever they're brought up. "Wouldn't be caught dead with them."
"Just because you hate sports," Yunho replies, perched on the bed with his legs folded out sideways, feet hanging off the edge. He leans on his left arm filling in some maths quiz due tomorrow. Which is why he's at Mingi's – nobody else explains simultaneous equations in any way that makes sense, let alone vectors.
"I hate straight boys," Hongjoong corrects, not sparing him a glance. He's busy scrutinising Mingi's CD collection, deciding what to listen to next. " And I hate sports. Though they're synonyms, really."
"Yunho-yah, I don't get why you answer their stupid questions," Mingi says. He's also on the floor, but laid out leisurely on his back, because he's done the maths homework due tomorrow and that's enough for one afternoon, it seems, for a person who gets A's without even revising. He's been flicking idly through Hongjoong's English work, a half-finished paragraph he had abandoned minutes ago when the last album finished playing, that Mingi definitely cannot read.
Yunho sighs, putting the pencil down and looking at his friend. "They're seriously just ignorant, Mingi-yah. So if I go that's a stupid question then they'll keep walking around thinking this stuff and they'll never ask if they don't know something. And then you get homophobes."
"You get homophobes anyway. What's stopping them Googling it?"
"What, are they meant to Google who's the girl in a gay relationship? "
"Yes," Mingi emphasises, then rolls over and digs his phone out. "I'll do it right now."
Yunho rolls his eyes. "Mingi-yah–"
"See, the first result is an article on why that's a bullshit stereotype." Mingi turns his phone towards Yunho's unimpressed face as evidence. "Next time, tell them they can Google it if they care so much."
"I'm not gonna tell them that," Yunho laughs, looking back at the maths quiz. "I don't mind explaining things. It's just kinda funny, sometimes, the things they ask."
"You know how girls want a gay best friend to talk about fashion and boys and girl-shit with?" Hongjoong's finally settled on an album. He slots it in the CD player without pausing. "You're like that but for stupid straight guys. The cool gay they can talk about sports and man-shit with."
Yunho extends his leg and nudges Hongjoong forward between the shoulders, eliciting a squeak and a blind bat of his arm backwards. It makes him feel… embarrassed, and almost defensive, even if it's funny and, well, true. He's perfectly aware of the line he toes. Very aware of keeping his feet inside the box. "I'm not a jock, hyung," he reproaches.
The CD starts playing. Hongjoong's bumped the volume up and Mingi scoots over to turn it down with a chastising hyung for the sake of his mother down the hall. Hongjoong tips his head back onto the side of the bed to look up at Yunho, grinning. "I would never call you a slur, Yu-yu. Oh!" He claps his hands, then points between the two of them. "Speaking of gay people–"
"I'm not going to your GSA meeting," Mingi says.
Hongjoong rounds his pointer finger slowly on Mingi. "I wasn't going to, but now I especially won't invite you ."
"Good."
"Good. As I was saying, Yunho-yah," Hongjoong says as he swivels to face only him, an angelic little lilt to his voice that makes Yunho laugh, "my only friend–"
Mingi groans, flopping back onto the floor. "You know why."
"Ugh." Hongjoong waves a hand at him, a dismissive flick of his wrist and an eye-roll. "You spoke to him once and he only takes the minutes."
"Twice." Mingi picks at some lint on the rug. "Then he told me he's just an ally and ghosted me."
"You can't be serious, Mingi-yah," Yunho laughs, then laughs harder when Mingi rolls entirely away from them.
"Are you both free on Saturday?" Hongjoong presses on, smiling where Mingi can't see it as he sulks.
"Uh. We have dance until four, but afterwards, yeah, sure," Yunho says.
"Good, 'cause we're going to a gay party." Hongjoong beams, claps his hands decisively, then snatches his English exercise book back from Mingi.
"A gay party?" he asks into the carpet.
"A party that is gay, Mingi-yah," Hongjoong condescends, giggling when Mingi gets offended and turns onto his back, for his hyung to see him glare. "What?"
"I meant you don't go to parties, hyung," he mutters, crossing his arms over his chest.
"Yeah, well." Hongjoong clicks his pen along to the beat, nodding ever so slightly to it. It's a foreign song and the English goes over Yunho's head for the most part, but he's tapping his pencil against his thigh along to it as well. "Our GSA organised it with the GSA at the academy nearby, so I have to show my face. But it's not a GSA meeting. It's a social. An LGBT social. You know, trying to… connect with each other a bit. Straight minute-taking allies aren't invited."
"What about all the other members he's kissed?" Yunho can't help but indulge.
Hongjoong laughs. Mingi's mouth twists up into an embarrassed smile. "I hate you guys." He gives a middle finger to Yunho's finger heart.
*
Yunho feels kind of bad lying to his family about going. They think he's staying over at Hongjoong's house after dance practice when, actually, they're all crashing at Mingi's, lest Hongjoong's older brother catch them crawling in late and cast his justified judgement on them.
The so-called social slash party is a good hour away, in a late-night bowling alley and arcade. They're all hanging around waiting for their lane to become free in a seating area nestled between claw machines and a wall of cubbies full of bowling shoes. Someone comes over with a bunch of chips and drinks they ordered and Yunho helps dole them out.
Looking at the group, Yunho feels both as comfortable as he ever has here, and also kind of like he's sticking out like a sore thumb.
Hongjoong's in an outfit his mother would sigh very, very heavily at – ripped jeans and one of his DIY shirts, tie-dye drawn over with fabric marker doodles, and a pair of fishnet tights turned into a fishnet shirt, hooked over his thumbs. His hair's freshly split-dyed and Mingi's is still vaguely lilac from toner, but a gentle brown lays underneath the purple sheen. He's in a pair of jeans that look like they have a skirt built in – another KHJ Creation, with the help of Mingi's mother's sewing machine and guidance – with a baggy tank and jacket. They both look cool, with their chains and earrings and rings, and Yunho wore jeans, a t-shirt, and a blazer.
It's a nice blazer, a big green one he thrifted a couple months ago with Mingi, one of three official items of clothing he owns and actually likes. But it's still, well, a blazer, and his hair is its natural dark brown, and when he looks around, everyone else is… cool. Cool in, like. A gay way. In a way that you could pick out in a line-up. Not in a dude-bro homonormative way.
He learnt that word about five minutes ago in a conversation between Hongjoong and someone from the academy, Seonghwa, who's dressed in loose, wide-leg trousers, heeled boots and a shirt Yunho's been eyeing since they arrived. Big, flowy sleeves with a deep V. It's a wrap-around, tied in cross-crosses and a bow at the side. He really likes it. It looks like it's from the women's section.
"–so, like, how are we meant to get real acceptance if it's all conditional on, like, being gender-conforming and boring?" Hongjoong continues, punctuating every other word with a gesture of his hands. Yunho's half-in about three conversations, but Hongjoong's really getting into it now, so he leans out of one to pluck his drink from his hand. "Hey!"
"You're gonna spill it," Yunho says, setting it out of harm's way on a ledge behind Hongjoong, under a very dirty look from him. "Hyung," he says, raising his eyebrows. "Respectfully, you're a klutz."
"Respectfully, you're a killjoy," he says, unable to finish the sentence without laughing. "Anyway, back to homonormativity," he says to Seonghwa.
Seonghwa smiles, like he's trying not to laugh. "Such a fun topic," he agrees, then sighs. "I'm trying to get the GSA to move away from that whole narrative. Especially as a trans person, I just find it so…" Seonghwa thinks for a moment then shrugs a shoulder, expression falling back into gentle consideration. "I feel like fitting in in a way cishet people like would sacrifice some of myself, I guess."
Trans. Okay. Yunho mentally takes note of that as Hongjoong hums, already reaching back for his drink. "Thank you, exactly. I know it's gay-straight alliance, but that's just a name, it's not literal. We should change it, really. Oh– Let me introduce you, sorry!" He gestures to Yunho with the drink in hand again, like he's immediately forgotten he's holding it. "This is my friend, Yunho. A year younger than us, like Mingi over there."
Seonghwa smiles at him, nods politely. There's shimmer or glitter under (her?) eyes. "Nice to meet you."
"You, too, Seonghwa-ssi," Yunho says, then hesitates, trying to figure out the most tactful way to ask as Hongjoong busies himself getting Mingi's attention. "Um, should I call you noona?"
Seonghwa blinks, then smiles, wide and surprised and maybe shy – then replies, "Oh, you can, but– just to be clear, I'm not a trans woman, Yunho-ssi."
"Oh." Yunho feels his ears burn with embarrassment, his eyes go wide and apologetic, worried for a terrible stomach-drop second that he's clumsily misgendered someone. "I'm so sorry–"
"It's okay, I'm not–" Seonghwa laughs a little, as more sweet, nervous words spill out. "I'm not a man either. I've never related to being a man, but– I'm also not a woman, you know? So you can use anything with me. Any pronouns, honorifics, they're all fine." Seonghwa finishes talking, clears their throat, and gestures to Yunho. Gentle hands poking out of loose sleeves. "What should I use for you?"
"Um." Yunho blinks. He's still trying to place what Seonghwa just said, make out the shape it's taking inside of him. "He/him, I guess."
Seonghwa nods, her eyes lingering on Yunho's, before there's a yelp and a wide-eyed Hongjoong staring down at a wet spill across the floor, with an incriminatingly empty glass in hand.
"Hyung," Mingi laughs at him as Seonghwa gathers up some napkins, Yunho's eyes still wandering to the dainty criss-cross of her shirt.
*
I've never related to being a man.
Yunho sees the shape that blooms for him and firmly, viciously looks away.
It comes up at the worst times. When he's sat at the kitchen table and his brother's nagging him to come play, hyung, hyung, hyung, and when he's in the school gym and sees himself in the mirror with his cap on to keep his hair off his forehead. When someone gives up doing laps in gym class, sweaty and exhausted, and their friend intones man up, and it's like they're speaking to Yunho, digging around the parts of him he doesn't indulge, that are too much hassle and not actually important, all that boxed up unease Seonghwa has nudged open.
On Sunday morning, sprawled out in Mingi's bed while he slept their gay outing off next to him, Hongjoong's gentle snores and mumbles filling the early silence, Yunho cleared his search history over and over. It's not like he'd never heard the word non-binary – Hongjoong is a walking LGBTQ+ dictionary – but they had one trans person at school and she left last year, and he's never met a non-binary person. So he's never really thought about it. The same way he's never really thought about what clothes he really wants to wear, how he really wants to look, or about being able to be anything different than what he's always been called.
It doesn't make sense. He doesn't want it to make sense. He doesn't want to turn to this feeling like his name being called through a crowd.
He's not looked up anything since, not told a single person. But it still ripples up through him and almost clicks into place. Almost, if he moved his hands out of the way. If it mattered at all, if it would change anything; as if, even if he was… (Terms and labels float up from the back of his head and he can't think them, he cannot say them even in his head.) As if he'd ever tell someone else. The last thing he wants is to confuse or surprise anybody. The thought of that alone is enough to make his palms clammy.
He's not a woman. He knows that much. So he can be a man. He's okay with that. He's okay being a guy, isn't he? He's okay with his body – well, he's neutral on most body-related things, but he's not… uncomfortable. Not like most of the boys on the basketball team, who keep prodding the fat around their stomach between work-outs. He kind of likes that his legs are full, that he has a stomach. If someone asked him the favourite part of his body, that's probably what he would say. And he doesn't really get the obsession with jawlines beyond, like, they're hot? Maybe? Because he likes his soft jaw, that he's grown into his cheeks and still kept them. That it softens something about his– Ah. Well. Man-body.
Ugh.
Whenever he thinks like that, he has Hongjoong's little chastising voice in his ear going, gender is fake! Gender is a social construct!!! and feels– guilty, which is where this whole topic usually lands in him: as a mixture of guilt and shame. (It feels like he's lying, but he can't tell what about.)
Yunho meets his gaze in the mirrors of the dance studio, shakes it off. At least he has dance. He likes dance. It stops him thinking about everything for a while – kind of how school does, but he actually enjoys this, and doesn't need to do maths. They're learning contemporary now and it lets him drift outside of his shape, into nothing but movement.
"This isn't about being punchy," the instructor tells someone near the front, walking among them as they practice in the mirror. Over and over. Yunho holds his own gaze, extends his arms overhead, steps, spins, finds his eyes once more. Again and again. Mingi's along from him doing the same. "Powerful doesn't always mean punchy. Ah–"
Yunho spins and finds the instructor in front of him. He blinks, stops and drops his head in a knee-jerk bow, but she only smiles and gestures with her hand. "Show me again."
Yunho swallows, refocuses and runs through the eight counts in his head as he moves. He finishes where he started again and the instructor nods approvingly. "Everyone, watch Yunho," she announces to the class, which makes his ears burn red. "One more time, but slower for everyone."
As he runs through it again, he hears the instructor's narration off to the side: "This is what I mean. Controlled but smooth, smooth but controlled, yes? It has to have shape." Yunho steps out and spins. "Men tend to struggle with this. You boys are too stiff. Remember, this isn't masculine or feminine, it's both."
Yunho settles facing the front again, and the instructor pats his shoulder utterly unaware of what she's just told him, of the familiar shape of her words. Like it's something only Yunho can see. A spectre under the bright overhead lights. "Look at Yunho. If he can do this, so can the rest of you. Yes? Let's go again."
Yunho burns. From ears around back through his hair. Up his scalp and down the nap of his neck. He looks in the mirror again and the thought crops up, like a weed refusing to be uprooted.
I've never related to being a man.
He adjusts his shirt, sticking sweaty to his chest, and swallows.
I've never wanted to be a man.
*
Hongjoong lives closer to the school than Yunho and Mingi, but will take the longer bus route home with them sometimes and just get off when it loops back around – or get off a couple stops before them to visit Seonghwa.
It's on one of those occasions at the back of that bus, somewhere between the school playing fields and the local market, that Hongjoong comes out like reporting a change in the weather.
"I'm probably non-binary." Off-the-cuff, mid-text, in typical Hongjoong fashion. Three months and one burgeoning crush after the party, with feet up on the empty seat next to Yunho, sat beside Mingi as the boy searched his phone for a certain song he wanted Hongjoong to hear.
Yunho forgets what they were talking about before. He only remembers being shocked, then not being shocked at all, then feeling himself drying up in the back of his throat, like a wet flannel crumpled and left to harden.
"Yeah?" he'd said around it. "Okay. Cool."
He remembers glancing at Mingi and how he just nodded at their friend. How they both still had one earphone still in, and how the bus kept moving, slowing for crossings and stopping at traffic lights.
Then Mingi said, "That makes sense, actually," and Hongjoong bubbled into a laugh, said, "Yeah? I think so, too," and Yunho felt casual passivity of it all like a vice grip somewhere behind his ribs. Shrink-wrapping the parts of him that had been trying to crawl up his throat since the party – some days or weeks more than others, but very, very much there – in words that sound like lies, sound too scary and different to be truths, sound so close to the ones Hongjoong's tongue had wrapped around so easily.
"What do you want to be called?" Mingi asked. "Still hyung, or?"
"Hyung's fine. Noona's fine." Hongjoong had hummed, examining a chip in his nail polish, then, "But use they for me." Then they nodded, like they'd made their mind up right then and there, with the bus rattling past the hospital how it did every day before and continued to every day after, and Yunho felt–
Yunho feels like he's constantly swallowing resentment, sticky on his tongue. One thumb scraping the outside of the other, over and over, his nails just long enough for it to sting whenever it comes up. He's still swallowing weeks later, pushing the sinking-drowning feeling down into his stomach to join the rest of his guilt and shame and desperate confusion, when he realises it's not resentment at all.
Because Hongjoong is his best friend, and he's happy for them – he is happy for them, because he knows what Mingi meant when he said it makes sense. Hongjoong's always edged on the side of feminine that made other boys angry. They've been called gay since they were too young to know what it meant, when the kids saying it just knew it meant something was wrong, something was softer or looser or brighter than it should be. And when they grew their hair out last year, strangers kept thinking they were a girl; it's the eyelashes, the make-up, the way chronically hanging out with Yunho and Mingi dwarfs them; it's the way Hongjoong never corrected them, just grinned and played it up. It's all of that plus how, as long as Yunho's known them, they've never carried themselves in any way other than a person saying, I know who I am, and I don't care if you don't get it.
(As long as Yunho's known them, Hongjoong's never really hung out with anyone their age at school. A smattering of them come to the GSA, but apart from that, they never really hang out with anyone except the two of them, and now Seonghwa.)
It's the unspoken part that stings instead, in the shape of something like resentment, like jealousy; because Yunho's spent longer than he'd like to admit going over everything that doesn't make sense for him. About how he looks – too tall, too broad, too boring and boy-shaped for anyone to see him and say, that makes sense, actually. About how, some days, he has to dodge Hongjoong's gaze when they correct people, because they're so– certain, because they don't glance back to see if people understood or if they start laughing instead, and Yunho realises he's not been avoiding Hongjoong, he's been avoiding that . Because Yunho twists up whenever he strays even close to how it might feel to do it himself, to say, you're calling me something I'm not, and have someone cock their head, laugh, and go, huh? You?
It's not their fault. It's not their fault that they got it one day and stepped into it with enough confidence to take up space, while Yunho sits on his hands, too large, wrongly-shaped, and pretends it's not real. He feels sick for comparing the two of them. He feels sick, then guilty, then invisible.
He looks at Hongjoong next time a teacher calls to them (boys, lunchtime's over!) and they call back, I'm not a boy! and stand up. His best friend since the first week of high school, when he thought Hongjoong was younger than him and stumbled over himself apologising. An eye roll, a clumsy skip towards his next class, in the opposite block to him and Mingi, saying, Seriously, do I look like a boy? and Yunho knows something has to give.
*
Hongjoong's hunched over their desk unscrewing the cap of a burgundy nail polish when Yunho asks, as a crudely drawn olive branch to this one-sided conflict, "Noona, do you want to paint my nails?"
Hongjoong's jaw cracks as it drops and a lively delight takes over their face. "Yes. Oh my god, really? I thought you didn't like it."
Yunho blinks. "No?" he says, trying to think of if he's ever said that – he hasn't, he doesn't think. He's turned Hongjoong down a couple of times, sure, but that's just because he didn't like the colour. "No."
A smile pulls at their mouth, wide and genuine. "I'd love to paint your nails," they say, already wheeling closer to their friend in their desk chair. Hongjoong guides Yunho, sat at the edge of Hongjoong's bed, to lay his hand on their knee, and Yunho knows he has to ask before his thoughts become the wrong shape – "Why did you think I don't like it?"
"You've just never shown any interest," Hongjoong starts with his thumb, careful, and this is about as focused as Yunho ever sees them, outside of making music or cutting up their clothes. "And you don't really like this stuff in general."
"What stuff?"
"Like, nails, make-up, hair… Clothes," they add, laughing. Yunho glances down at himself, but he's still in his uniform, thankfully, so it's not a comment on his outfit today. "You just roll out of bed perfect, I guess."
"It's not that I don't like it," Yunho says to dodge the compliment. He glances to Hongjoong's face then back to his nails; they smile when the first coat's on his thumb. (Yunho's witnessed this enough to know there'll be more.)
"Then what?" Hongjoong prompts.
"I think I've just…" Yunho rolls his tongue around his mouth, hoping to make some sense of it himself. "I like it, but I've never thought about it for myself. Like, if that stuff… suits me."
Hongjoong hums, moving onto the next finger. "I think you should dabble in it," they tell him lightly. "At least this. You have pretty hands."
"I have man hands," Yunho says, entirely automatic, and makes a face at the honest place his tongue pulled that from.
"They're pretty," Hongjoong repeats, oblivious and certain, with their gaze firmly on Yunho's index finger.
Then, without permission, Yunho's eyes trained on the deep red shade on his thumbnail, he asks, "Am I masc?"
Hongjoong looks up with such a startled, bemused expression that Yunho's ears burn immediately. "What do you mean?" they ask back. Then, "Are you on fucking grindr or something?"
Yunho's eyes widen. It punches a laugh out of him, a big, harsh one he has to cover his mouth to hide. "What?"
"Like, masc4masc?" Hongjoong squints at him. "You're underage, Jeong Yunho–"
"Oh my god, no, I'm not–" Yunho laughs again, shakes his head, covers his ears with the cool backs of his knuckles, then does the same to his cheeks. "No, I wasn't– I'm just asking."
They look at him for a few moments, considering and shrewd. Yunho's not sure if that's better or worse than an immediate answer. "By gay male dating app standards? I guess. Though maybe not so much with the nails and the…" They raise a hand and let their wrist flop.
Yunho stares. "Huh?"
A small, amused smile play on Hongjoong's lips. "You're too gay," they tell him gleefully. "Maybe not at school, but when you're with us or having fun… Yeah, you're too camp. You'd have to only post photos and never speak to pass as masc. One clip of you dancing and you'd be outed, for sure." Yunho thinks about that for a few moments as Hongjoong returns to his nails. "But I think the whole thing is ridiculous and reductive," they add empathically. "Masc4masc is just– Ugh, I can't with it."
"Right." Yunho should've known better than to expect Hongjoong to give a gender question a yes-or-no answer. "Duly noted."
"It's just internalised homophobia and misogyny," Hongjoong continues, wiping the excess polish off on the rim, then moving on to Yunho's other hand. "Why do you ask, anyway, Yu-yu?"
Yunho watches the motion, feels something swoop in his stomach, and doesn't swallow – he knows he has to stop swallowing it. "Just wondering."
Hongjoong lets out a hard-done-by sigh. "You boys and your masculinity… It's so hard being the resident gender outlaw," they say wistfully, and Yunho doesn't swallow. In doing so, he doesn't say anything for long enough that Hongjoong pauses, sets the cap back on the bottle. "Is it those fucking boys?" they ask, and Yunho knows they're talking about the basketball team. "Have they said something?"
"No," Yunho says quickly. Hongjoong cuts their eyes up, searching for any hint of a lie. (They don't talk about Hongjoong around him anymore, unless it's a fleeting mention. They used to, back when he first joined and the older guys, the ones in Hongjoong's year group, didn't know they were friends.) (The only actual argument he's ever gotten into in the locker rooms was over Hongjoong. And he's never going to tell them about it.) "No, seriously, I was just wondering."
"Just wondering," Hongjoong repeats, eyebrow raised. "Do I have to tell you nail polish doesn't make you less of a man?"
Yunho blinks at him. He's not really sure what face he's making right now – somewhere caught between laughing and cringing. "It's not that," he says after a few moments, and wonders what it would be like to just say it: I'm not a man, how Hongjoong says, I'm not a boy, how Seonghwa said, I never related to being a man. He won't, but for a fleeting second, he imagines making it real.
He won't, so Yunho keeps his nails painted instead of speaking. He keeps the burgundy on until the polish chips off into nothing but red flecks across his fingers, and he stops cutting his nails so close to the bed to see them just barely peek over his fingertips when Hongjoong paints them again. He picks out a baby blue on the floor of Mingi's room and Hongjoong paints it on with Mingi doing his best to try and throw them off. And when none of the boys at school bring it up, Yunho chooses to view this as good, even if he knows that it isn't.
He keeps his nails painted, and his hair grows out past the top of his ears for the first time in years. He notices it one night while Hongjoong is saturating Mingi's hair with a deep, inky blue that they're hoping is close enough to black to pass the school's dress code. (Hongjoong's split dye is a source of heavy contention right now, because it's not technically any unnatural colour, but they still don't like it, obviously.) (Hongjoong's delighted to be causing such a petty uproar, and their mother gives them long-suffering and half-amused looks whenever it comes up.)
"Dinner is nearly ready," he says on behalf of her now, from the doorway of the bathroom. Mingi gives him a thumbs up in the mirror and Yunho catches sight of himself as they bicker over him staying still. He reaches up and remembers having to bat off his mother's hands earlier on, tutting and fretting about needing it cut.
"Should I grow my hair out?"
Both Mingi and Hongjoong abandon their spat to look at him.
"Oh my god," Mingi gasps in faux-shock, and Yunho almost groans. "It's finally happening."
"Mingi, pinch me," Hongjoong joins in, covering their mouth with the hand not holding a loaded brush of hair dye. "Is Yunho… changing his hair?"
Yunho gives them both a (hopefully) unimpressed look. "Can you go back to arguing with each other?"
"I've been waiting for this day for so long," Mingi continues despite Yunho's unamused stare, or maybe because of it, and both of them are desperately trying not to break into laughter.
"Will we even recognise him?" Hongjoong muses.
"Dinner is ready," Yunho repeats and takes his leave from the doorway as they cackle.
A few weeks later, Mingi shapes up his hair in his bathroom and insists on styling it. He gets out the straighteners he used to use every single day on his emo fringe in middle school – Yunho remembers, has the MySpace-angle photos to prove it – and by the end of it, Yunho's hair falls in loose, messy curtains. It gets in his eyes and swoops back past his ears, down the nape of his neck, where he sees it peek out either side, and Yunho thinks, I look pretty.
It catches him off-guard. Not because he thinks he's ugly, but– because he doesn't think anything, usually. That's why he owns three items of clothing he actually likes and can count on one hand the amount of times he's worn them.
"Your parents won't be mad at me, right?" Mingi asks once he's swept all the hair into one corner of the bathroom. "They won't think I'm a bad influence?"
"No," Yunho laughs, still turning his head this way and that in the cabinet mirrors. He can't stop… looking. He wants to take a photo of himself, and he doesn't know why it makes him so happy, that he wants to take a selca. "Mingi-yah?"
"Mm?"
"It doesn't look stupid, does it?" he asks anyway.
"No," his friend answers easily, putting all the hair in the bathroom bin and rinsing the rest off his hands. "You look hot."
"Stop," Yunho chides immediately.
"What?" Mingi laughs, drying his hands and turning to look at him. "Yah, I'm a great stylist! Of course you don't look stupid. You look gay and hot. Hang on–"
Yunho looks at him, the baby-mullet of his black hair (the blue did not pass the test) and the eye shadow he's taken to wearing again, just a light brown along the outer edges of his eyes. As Mingi pulls a set of chains off over his head, he remembers the long emo fringe again – and, on weekends, the eyeliner. He thinks about how Mingi wanted a lip piercing so bad that he booked an appointment behind his mother's back when he was fourteen, and how when the day came around, he was too scared to go, because he cried when he had his ears done and he couldn't go through that again.
"Look," Mingi says once he's set the chains around Yunho's neck, gestures to the mirror. "You see the vision?"
Yunho looks, and he imagines telling him. Right now, in the bathroom, with all this unfamiliar euphoria rising up through his feet. So he laughs instead and says, "If I get my ears pierced, will you come with me?"
Mingi, predictably, frantically shakes his head. "I love you, but I'd rather die. Bring Hongjoong noona instead."
*
Yunho gets his ears pierced on his birthday using the money his parents put in his birthday card. Hongjoong helps pick out a set of generic studs for them to heal around and gets a snug piercing for good measure.
Mingi forgets to ask for his necklaces back. Yunho forgets he's wearing them sometimes, and always ends up remembering right before gym class and basketball practice, pulls them off his neck to fall in little clinks into his blazer pocket.
*
They all meet up, the three of them and Seonghwa, to celebrate both their birthdays a couple of weeks into April. Late, because Seonghwa and Hongjoong are both caught up with university applications and because Yunho and Mingi are caught up preparing for dance competitions. Yunho spends the two afternoons beforehand trying to find a woman's shirt that fits him.
He takes a couple off the racks and realises, holding them in his hands, that he'd have to try them on. While he's stood just away from the changing rooms trying to psych himself up to go in, a shop assistant asks, Do you need help with those? What's your girlfriend's size? - so he excuses himself and goes home.
That night, maybe to feel better, maybe just for something to do with his hands, he shaves his legs for the second time in his life. The first was when he'd barely started growing hair because he didn't like it, didn't want it there, and his mother had laughed and told him not to touch it – and looking back on that now makes something twist in his stomach, as he carefully guides the razor over his thigh and watches the hot water wash his hairs away.
He shows up for their belated birthday dinner in the blazer and the first and only pair of jeans he's actually liked the look of on him. They sit higher on his waist than his others, hugging his hips, and they feel nice on his freshly shaved legs. On a whim, tucks in the t-shirt Mingi gave him as a present, which now brings the total number of Clothes He Likes up to four. He wears Mingi's necklaces over the top and tries messing with his hair a bit, and when Seonghwa, in another blouse Yunho likes, says the little braid hidden in his fringe is pretty, it buzzes like electricity down his spine.
*
Yunho's little brother spots his nails one evening when they've just finished eating dinner and says he wants Yunho to make his the same colour. They're a freshly painted pale pink, subtle enough that people don't pay them much attention.
"Shall I ask Hongjoongie hyung?" Yunho replies, laughing when his brother nods enthusiastically; he's always liked Hongjoong, because Hongjoong bullies Yunho and Mingi and it's hilarious to him.
When his brother leaves the room, their father looks across the dinner table at Yunho's hands and says, quiet but severe, "Yunho, that's too far," and Yunho has no idea what to say, so he doesn't say anything.
*
It's a Friday. One of the boys, callous in the way Yunho's come to expect from them, looks at his nails in the locker room and jokes, You've been hanging around Kim Hongjoong too much.
Sat on Mingi's bed later, endlessly grateful he doesn't have to answer any questions about why he left early until Monday, the words come up in his mouth like nausea, and he understands - even though he told Mingi earlier he didn't want to talk, he understands today is it. He has to say something. Anything, everything; the feelings he's been intermittently swallowing and indulging for months, the words that he keeps eyeing out the corner of his eye. He's given himself too many glimpses, flown up too high to land back safely where he was. Exhilaration is quick to become vertigo. He understands that this won't feel better until he throws up.
He waits with the words acrid on his tongue until Mingi's caught up in reading, so he's not looking when Yunho says, "I don't think I'm a man."
Mingi stops mid-turn of a page. Yunho hears the paper crackle then go quiet, feels him look over like a spotlight. "What was that?"
Yunho swallows, tracing the barely-raised threads of Mingi's comforter. "I don't think I'm a man," he repeats, and a breath shudders out of him, staring at the comforter Mingi's had since middle school. "I don't think I'm– anything."
"Oh. Okay." Mingi sits up against the pillows, carefully dog-ears his book and sets it beside him, and Yunho doesn't know if he wants him to keep reading or to look at him right now. It almost makes him laugh, how much he wanted to be seen when Hongjoong came out, how he thinks he wants it up to the point where someone actually starts looking. "What do you want to be called?"
Yunho bites his lip. It should be enough. It's exactly how it went with Hongjoong, this casual acknowledgement, but he feels like crying.
"Yunho?" Mingi prompts, a bit softer now.
"Would you believe it?" Yunho hears how thick his voice is. He clears his throat and the words keep wobbling out of him. "If I said I wasn't?"
"Duh," Mingi huffs. "That's what just happened, isn't it?"
"No, but–" Yunho shakes his head, blinking quickly, and he wants to say, no, but do you really believe it? Or do I look like a liar? Will you call me one thing then think I'm something else?
"Hey." Mingi readjusts on the bed so he's sat next to Yunho and puts an easy arm around him. "Hey, talk to me."
"It's nothing," Yunho says unsteadily, which just makes him cringe, because it's not nothing – it's never fucking been nothing , he just can't help saying it. "Just. Does it make sense?" he lands on, looking sidelong at his best friend and hoping he doesn't spot something bad there.
There's, of course, nothing bad there: it's just Mingi, his face open with concern, rubbing his arm up and down, up and down. "Yunho-yah, you don't need to prove anything to me," he says with a frown. "That's like saying, I don't know. Does it make sense that I'm a guy? I don't know, I just am. It's about what you're comfortable with, isn't it?"
Yunho drops his gaze and stares at Mingi's other hand resting on his knee. His two black nails, the pinky and middle finger. "I could just be a guy, too," he murmurs. "Being a guy is simple."
"Is it?" Mingi asks after a few considering moments.
No, he thinks. It's not simple. It doesn't make sense. I tried so hard to make it make sense. All at once, he presses his face into his hands. "I don't want this," he grits out, shaky with guilt and shame and bubbling discomfort, with something heavy and foreboding in the admittance that this is real. "I really, really don't want this, Mingi-yah."
Mingi's silent for a few seconds, just rubbing Yunho's knee. "I'm not trans, so," he starts, then stops, then sighs. "I won't tell you how to feel, but. Like, if it's something that bothers you this much… then I think it does make sense, Yunho. If it matters so much, then there's something in it." He gives his knee a squeeze. "Have you spoken to hyung?"
"No," Yunho says, and his stomach clenches at the thought.
"I think you should," Mingi continues, and it's what Yunho already knows, has known for months, but he can't quiet the part of him going you're not like them for long enough to plan it.
"I'm scared," Yunho mumbles.
Mingi hums. "I get that it's a big deal," he replies. "I won't tell them, but I think you should. I think they'll help more than me."
Yunho nods, once. Stiff and controlled and, in some small part of him, relieved to have someone say it outside of his own head. To have Mingi there, to prove the world hasn't ended from saying this out loud. "Thank you," he murmurs. Then, dropping his hands, "Ugh. Thank you, Mingi."
"Of course." Mingi offers him a small smile. "I love you, you know," he says, and something in the way it's said, in the soft press of his eyes against Yunho's, tells him something closer to, I know you. "Whatever you want to be called, just… let me know when you know."
It makes Yunho's heart hurt. Physically. Enough that he turns his body and pulls Mingi into a proper hug to let it all out. "I love you, too," he whispers and, in a tiny part of him, he already knows the answer.
*
Hongjoong keeps giving him these expectant looks across the room. Furtive glances up from their desk chair to where Yunho sits at the end of their bed. He gets it. He texted Hongjoong, told them he wanted to talk, then came over freshly showered after dance practice and can't seem to stop stalling.
It's not that the words aren't there now, is the thing. It's just that they're too big.
Yunho can barely open his mouth around the first sentence.
"Yunho-yah," they gently interject, "there's only so much anxiety I can take–"
"I think I'm non-binary," he breathes out, and Hongjoong immediately quiets. Yunho's heart hammers into that quiet like it's baring its teeth, and he hurries to add, "I've been thinking about it for a while, and– I guess I'm finally, um. Telling you. Because I'm… Because I can't ignore it anymore."
Hongjoong swivels their chair to fully face their friend, sat cross legged with their back straight with shock. Yunho struggles to hold their gaze, struggles to hold onto his own train of thought.
"I tried to," he adds. "I really, really tried to. Since the party, when Seonghwa, um…" Yunho tangles his own fingers together. His knee bounces up and down and up and down and he can't find it in him to stop it. "Since then, it's kind of just– been there. And I didn't– um. I didn't want to pay attention to it." Yunho laughs, wet and wispy. He feels the tremor of his leg up through his chest and into his throat. "But then you came out, so."
He chews on his lip and Hongjoong stays silent in their chair, just listening. "I thought I was, like, jealous. Because you seemed so… sure. But I was just– I was just scared to believe it for myself, and… Even now, it's scary, and– I don't want you to think I'm mocking you and Seonghwa–"
"Yu-yu," Hongjoong interjects now, their voice soft and pained. It makes something die in Yunho's stomach. "We would never think that. Me or Seonghwa."
"But you two are both so…" He shrugs a little. "And then I look at me, and–"
"How someone looks doesn't mean anything," Hongjoong says. Something in the tone feels firm, even if they're speaking lightly, gently. "You don't have to look like me or Seonghwa. Yunho-yah…" They offer a small smile, one Yunho catches between dodging their gaze. It's reassuring. Yunho reminds himself to breathe out, and tries not to squirm. "Non-binary doesn't have a look, and it's like… I'm non-binary when I'm dressed up, or wearing pyjamas, or naked, you know what I mean? Sure, you can express your gender with how you dress and your hair and whatever, you do what you need to feel comfortable, but– none of that stuff makes your gender. Does that make sense?"
Yunho traps his hands between his knees and nods, once. Hongjoong leans forward in the chair, and when Yunho holds their gaze again, it makes his eyes sting.
"I'm sorry if I ever made you feel like I'd put you in a box. Because I don't view you like that, at all," they say, sincere in a way that grabs Yunho by the throat. They laugh, just a breath out, shake their head; and he realises that Hongjoong's maybe as emotional as he is. "We don't have to look the same or have the same experiences with this. You're just as gender-y as me."
Yunho smiles a little at the word and so does Hongjoong. It helps blink the sting out of his eyes, even if it just comes back. "I just feel like everyone's always going to see me as a boy."
"Well, if they do, then they're fucking stupid," Hongjoong laughs, which makes Yunho laugh. Their smile is all wobbly and warm, eyes shiny with tears. They breathe out another hah, wipe their eyes, and add, "You're clearly babygirl material."
"Fuck off, hyung," Yunho giggles, hearing how his voice cracks around it. His chin is wobbling and he's laughing and when Hongjoong sniffs particularly loud, they laugh at themselves all over again, and Yunho feels cracked open. Spilling forth, electric and bare. He feels like he's breathing out, for real this time. His ribs can finally heal from the choking, convulsive weight of his chest.
(Their chest. Their ribs. Their lungs.)
Yunho's face crumples, around the smile and the relief. (Their face, their hands, their body.) Out of the thicketed trip-wires of boyhood, stripped and weightless. An untethering.
It feels like an open a window after a week inside. After months inside, staring at their body in the mirror and saying don't think about it. "Yunho-yah," Hongjoong whispers, gets up and stands between Yunho's knees. They reel Yunho in by the back of the neck, against their sternum, and Yunho didn't realise how many tears were clogging their throat, how hard it was to breathe before. "I get it," they tell them. "I see you. You, Yunho." Their nails rake slowly through the grown-out hair by Yunho's neck, and Yunho sniffles, nods into Hongjoong's chest, as Hongjoong's voice wavers above their head. "You're my best friend, you know."
Yunho smiles, chokes out a breath of air. They're hugging Hongjoong around the middle before there's a chance to second-guess it. "Mingi just sat up in his room so mad," they mumble. "He can sense when you don't mention him."
Hongjoong snorts. They're playing with individual strands of Yunho's hair now. "He's outnumbered now," they mutter. "Let him know his place."
Yunho bites their lip, nose very firmly pressed to Hongjoong's shirt. It makes their spine go all prickly, hearing it aloud. Hearing Hongjoong acknowledge it so casually, just how Mingi had. "He's got a lot of blackmail material, though. We've gotta be nice to him."
Hongjoong hums. "Yeah, and? So do we. Hey, Song Mingi versus us?" They ease Yunho back to raise their eyebrows. "We have way more dirt on him."
"I'm not getting involved." Yunho sniffles again, wipes the last of the tears off their cheeks. "I don't pick favourites."
Hongjoong gasps. "What about solidarity?" they ask. "T4T?"
"We're not dating."
"You're getting caught up in details."
Yunho smiles up at them, watching Hongjoong break out of the bit and smile back. They keep a hand pressed to their cheek, against what they are sure is a warm, pink flush, and say, "I love you, hyung. I love both of you."
Hongjoong tilts their head, appraises Yunho with soft, fond eyes. Ruffles the front of their hair. "I love you, too. My giant baby."
"This is a core memory," Yunho counters, pouting up at Hongjoong. "Be nice."
"I'm always nice," Hongjoong coos, sitting next to them on the bed. "Is Yunho still good?"
It takes a couple moments to figure out the question. "Oh. Yeah, it's–" They smile, cringe. "I'm okay with, um. Everything, still. Just. I just wanted you to know, you know?"
"Mm, of course," Hongjoong allows, "but you can ask for things to change, you know that, right?"
Yunho blinks a few times, takes in a steadying breath. "The only..." They look over at Hongjoong. "It's just. Pronouns. I mean. I know, like, other people will use he, and I– Like, I can handle that, but– With you guys, I think. I want to try, um." The precipice looms in front of them, the final leap. Their heart beats faster in their chest, knowing they're about to fall off it. "Using they and them. But other stuff, I think– I think for now, other stuff is fine."
"Like calling you a boy? Girl?" Hongjoong hides their smile. "Babygirl?"
"Why do you keep saying that?" Yunho laughs.
Hongjoong nudges their shoulder. "For funsies. Your ears go red. Anyway." They smile properly now. "Man, woman...?"
"None of them really, uh..." Yunho shrugs tentatively. "I don't really… like any of them, actually."
"So they're not okay?" Hongjoong reproaches, raising their eyebrows again.
"Well–" Yunho wrinkles their nose. "Okay. Fine. I just mean– With other people–"
"Focus on us now," Hongjoong interjects. "What you want from us. If you don't tell anyone else, of course they'll keep saying whatever, so– With me and Mingi, what do you want?"
Yunho thinks for a few moments. The words come up, big and real like billboards, so they look down at their bouncing leg. "Just– friend, you know, or person. Other stuff is fine, like, if you're being light-hearted or whatever, but..."
"Cool. And what do you want to call me?" they continue. "Hyung? Oppa? Noona–?"
"I don't think I mind that stuff much," Yunho replies, still to their knee. "I don't know. Hyung or Noona works, still."
"Alright. Sure." Hongjoong nudges their shoulder again. "Wasn't so bad, huh?" Yunho looks over at them, still very much red-eyed and puffy-faced. "Okay, look, I didn't say it was enjoyable. But you didn't die."
"No," Yunho admits, nodding slightly. "Still breathing."
"Still breathing," Hongjoong agrees. Then they grin, wriggle a little on the mattress, and give Yunho's shoulder a quick squeeze. "The two of us," they tell them softly. "I'm so happy, Yunho-yah. Seriously so happy."
Yunho finds that they are, too. It fills out the pit all of this had been shoved into before, in the depths of their torso. Yunho thinks they could get through the rest of high school without telling anyone - or maybe they won't, maybe they'll want to make a big announcement one day, but right now, this is enough. Knowing that Hongjoong and Mingi know is enough - that the people Yunho cares about see them.