I lie in bed most nights for a good hour before I fall asleep. Beneath soft quilts tucked under three of the four mattress corners, I push the edge of the fabric on my cheek up and down and up because all my skin craves being covered but nowhere wants the tingling itch of the quilt's hem. But the fabric leaks a taste in the water that reminds me of me, and tonight instead of sleeping I think about me, girl-too-small-to-be-a-girl.

I possibly never would've noticed how I'm smaller, except for the biology books in the school library. Little black words, on paper dyed glowing blue, the ridges of the letters rising in bumps--I read them and ran my fingers over the words and sometimes practiced reading with my eyes shut. Just in case one day, my vision went as numb as my ears.

One biology book in the school library hollow, which I think my Mum would've banned if she knew I found it, talked about growing up. Or...puberty stuff. But like, not in depth.

I didn't ever think about all the kids being born boys before then. I don't think I consciously knew boys or girls were a thing until after I was ten or maybe fourteen. Mum was just Mum, Da was just Da, Wrass was just big-boned Wrass helping carve wood and Parro was just chatty Parro, always hanging out with friends.

What the biology book taught me about puberty stuff (but not in depth, of course. Just, growing up stuff): everyone's born a boy. It's not until year twelve or thirteen or so when anyone's body changes to a girl. But it's not only at year twelve or thirteen, any boy at any age could have their body turn into a girl. But that's super unlikely, because unless some plague wipes out all the women, or the men go out into the middle of nowhere, all the small fish people will stay men.

So yeah. All the larger fish people become women, usually starting around age twelve or thirteen.

I don't know when that happened to Wrass. Or Mum. I don't know when some of my classmates started showing up different to school; Salmo was always just Salmo and Mantara was always just Mantara and after this book I went, oh, Salmo's been a girl for a while now, hasn't she?

But I switched to a girl when I was sixteen. Mum pulled me out of school hardly a month later. She told me some things Parro said to her that some of my classmates said; I think she kept most of the truth back though, because the little bit she said hardly sounded like enough reason to pull me out of school.

Like, Nudibranc's too small to be a girl. Her deaf ears didn't get the memo. Her body's too stupid to know what it shouldn't be doing. You know how much extra food she's eating to transition? She's using up important resources. Who ever heard of a girl weaker than all the boys in the class--oh right, Nudibranc hasn't heard that.

Mum cried when she told me, I told her it's actually a myth that girls eat more when they're transitioning, it might seem like it, but only because age twelve-thirteen is when everyone's growing a lot and eating more, and the bigger fish people--who usually transition to girls--eat more than smaller fish people.

And of course I hadn't heard that. Did they not know what being deaf meant?

What the biology book taught me: people like Parro and Ange should get hormone treatment, to force one of them to switch so they can have babies. Two girls loving each other are freaks of nature, since you can't switch back to a boy after your body's changed over to a girl. Your body can't remake something it ruined to make something else.

Boys and girls should fall in love and stick together, never spend more than a week apart, because being in physical proximity ensures the boy stays a boy, so he doesn't accidentally switch to a girl when they're both fifty and ruin the family.

Some of that biology book made my heart squirm and my stomach tighten and my bladder go tight as a rock weighing me to the floor. But I read the whole thing for the intriguing bits, about boys or girls and myths of eating more, and I needed to know what people mutter about when their voices go soft rather than have no idea and get...murdered at the surface because they wrongly think I'm a freak of nature. Or, I don't actually think I'll get murdered at the surface. I just say that because when Parro and Ange first got together, Wrass often catastrophized about getting murdered at the surface. Almost every day, Mum told her to quit talking about it. But with the rasping of the quilt on my cheek, Wrass's hand signals repeat that Parro and Ange better be careful so they don't get murdered at the surface.

If I did think anyone would get murdered out in public, I wouldn't go to the travelways at all. Obviously. But I mean, it's better that I read about what people mutter than to have no idea and assume they might all be nice people instead.