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Ronan’s name has not always been Ronan.
In the hospital, he is swaddled in a pink-checkered blanket and christened with Niall’s grandmother’s name. Cradling the tiny dark-haired head in one of his hands, Niall regards his newest, perhaps most precious, creation. This child, born equally and miraculously of flesh and dream matter, has Niall’s dark eyes. Aurora’s chiming laugh is fond when she sees the birth certificate and the middle name Niall has chosen – his own.
Despite being a daughter bookended by sons, Ronan’s childhood is never overtly feminine. Aurora wasn’t raised with traditional values about how boys and girls should behave and therefore passes none of them onto her children. She sews capes and breeches alongside gauzy layered skirts for their dress-up box; orders plastic dinosaurs and electric cars and baby dolls for them all to play with, never discouraging them from having preferences that defy convention. Her children are strong and beautiful and handsome and gentle in equal measure, and she tells them all so.
When Niall comes home from a trip to find Matthew wearing a mess of lipstick and toddling about in a pair of Aurora’s pumps alongside his sister, who is dressed as a knight and sporting a new haircut shorter than her brothers’, he regards them quietly from the doorway. Matthew loses his footing and topples to the carpet, pudgy face comical in its surprise. Before the shock of it can catch up to him and become tears, Niall’s daughter brandishes a cardboard sword and shouts, “Princess! I’ll save you!” before charging forward.
Niall smiles, misgivings forgotten, and steps forward out of the darkness of the hall. “The dragon is here!” he roars, and his children shriek in delight.
~
When Niall and Aurora’s daughter is in third grade, Aurora receives a concerned phone call from the teacher. “When we split up into girls and boys for class activities, she insists on sitting with the boys,” Ronan overhears from the receiver held to his mother’s ear. He instantly bolts from the kitchen table, fleeing from the house and scrambling up into his favorite hayloft. Shame and anger are acquaintances he’s becoming more and more familiar with, and he sits with them, small fists pressed to his eyes in an attempt to push back the tears.
He wakes some time later, the wooden beams lit red and gold by the setting sun through the slats, to the sound of footsteps climbing the ladder. His mother appears at the edge of the loft, her hair pressed into perfect gossamer curls, mouth the color of pomegranate seeds. “I went down to school,” she tells Ronan calmly, reaching over to brush away a piece of straw stuck to his cheek. He can’t meet his mother’s eyes, and turns his face away from her hand. “Mo chroí. It’s alright. Listen to me.” Her melodic voice has taken on an urgent edge, and Ronan’s eyes and face burn in equal measure as he watches the dust motes in the air. “There is nothing about yourself you need to hide, and if anyone ever makes you feel like you do, you come and tell me immediately.” Ronan looks at her then, desperate for reassurance and truth, and she smiles at him. “There you are. Do you understand?” Ronan nods then, and allows his mother to cup his cheek, her slender fingers cool against his burning skin.
He never finds out exactly what she told his teacher, but from then on, he’s allowed to sit where he likes at school.
~
At the Barns, Ronan never has a reason to believe that he should be anything less than completely himself. It’s not until his thirteenth birthday that his gender starts to feel more like a roadblock than a pothole that can be navigated around. Although he still dresses like his brothers, the people around him seem to only notice his high voice, the ever so slight swelling of his chest. He begins to hate school more than he’s hated anything in his life; more than the doctor’s visits he always tries not to scream through, more than the unjust death of the sweetest cow in the herd, more than his father’s long absences. So Ronan stops going. He hides from his family in the hayloft, high in the oak trees on the edge of the property, among the strange antiques and boxes of gently rustling objects in the attic. Places he feels safe. Places that haven’t ever been touched by anyone but his family.
One afternoon, Aurora manages to track down his newest hiding place: a boy-shaped nest in the tall grass of the unused cattle pasture. He’s shirtless, almost defiantly so; his torso and bare legs streaked with dirt. His mother settles next to him like a lavender scented cloud, gently pulling his head into her lap. She strokes the close-cropped hair at his scalp and Ronan closes his eyes and listens to the wind rushing through the field.
The dreamlike atmosphere makes him brave enough to ask the question that’s been stuck in his head for weeks. He tries to keep his voice casual, but fails immediately. There’s too much yearning in him. “What would you have named me? If I had been born –” He falters; doesn’t want to say born a boy because he doesn’t understand what that even means – “differently?”
Aurora is quiet for a pulse, and then hums, resting her hand against his forehead. Ronan’s worried that she doesn’t understand, but when he sneaks a look at her face, she’s watching him with so much focused love that his fingers dig into the earth.
“Your Da’s always been fond of the name Ronan,” she tells him thoughtfully. “It’s a family name, and I think he planned to pass it on. But we found it didn’t fit either of your brothers when they were born.”
The clouds are tumbled and stretched like fresh-turned earth above them, and Ronan’s eyes follow their curves to the horizon. His heart is beating painfully fast.
“What do you think, mo stór?”
His lips shape the name, and he feels it trickling over him, settling in under his skin. Ronan, he thinks, and warmth fills his stomach. Ronan Niall Lynch.
-
Ronan wakes to the sound of his father’s car coming up the drive. Niall Lynch hasn’t been home since Ronan became Ronan to the whole family. Nothing has changed, but everything has. He grabs up the handful of recent objects he’s pulled from his dreams, because this is their ritual, and he runs down the stairs and out the front door in his bare feet.
Mist, golden with the dawn’s light, crowds close to the house, and his father looks like an ethereal being striding up the walkway in his dark suit. His shoulders are set in tired preoccupation, but his eyes crinkle at the corners when he sees Ronan racing toward him.
Ronan slows to a stop in front of his father, offering up his handful of treasures: a small cream-colored egg speckled with magenta, a sheet of stamps that depict Aurora’s face, a golden lighter that produces green flame. They’re nothing special, but what they represent is sacred to the two of them.
Niall studies the objects gravely, giving each item due consideration, and then he straightens up, his grin sharp as split earth. “Ronan,” he says, clapping his hand on Ronan’s bony shoulder. He says the name like he’s the first one to ever pair the syllables together, like he’s crafted it with fire and iron deep beneath the earth. The sound of it makes Ronan’s heart explode like a pipe bomb ricocheting off his ribs.
This is real, he thinks, wildly, giddily. This is me.