...Well, Is He?

“Of course—” began Sara, sounding characteristically confident for exactly two syllables. Then she paused, and then she finished her sentence blankly with “—he is…”

She looked out of the little window for a moment, as if the white light shining on the ocean waves could write out the question’s answer for her. Then she looked down at the two who had posed the unusual question. “Why do you ask?...”

Gin and Kanna stared up at her with equally wide, trusting eyes. In the few days they had been together on the island, they had both started to cling to her. Though she herself had no idea of why that was, she would do what she could to make them more comfortable. Answering a few questions was no big deal, though…

“He doesn’t smell like a man,” Gin stated.

“He doesn’t…”

“Kanna thought she was a woman,” Kanna fretted, “but Mr. Policeman said she was a man.”

“Why did you ask... No, more importantly, what do you mean he doesn’t ‘smell like a man?’”

“He smells like a mom!”

“Like…” Sara couldn’t even finish echoing the incredibly confident child.

“Like cookies,” Gin clarified, completely serious. “Sugar and vanilla. And lemon and vinegar from cleaning up. And lavender from the laundry, meow!”

“But when Kanna asked Mr. Policeman…” Kanna fretted.

“Yes, that’s another thing,” said Sara, gently putting a hand on the side of Gin’s head as she turned to face Kanna. “Why were you asking Keiji that?...”

“Kanna didn’t! It’s only, when Kanna asked why Kai slept alone outside, instead of with the girls…”

“He sleeps outside?”

“Mr. Policeman told Kanna that Kai isn’t a girl!”

“He’s not…” Sara hesitated. “Um, why is it you think he is a girl?...”

“Because she’s so pretty!”

Sara sighed wordlessly.

“If he’s not a girl, why is he a housewife?” asked Gin.

“He prefers ‘homemaker’,” responded Sara, absently and automatically. “Ah, sometimes a man is just more pretty than you would think a man could be, like singers and movie stars… and there’s nothing stopping a man from being a homemaker. Just like there’s nothing stopping a woman from being a leader or a fighter.”

“I know that, meow!” said Gin, offended that Sara thought he was not wise in the ways of the world. “But he uses ‘girl’ words for himself, too!”

“I suppose he does,” Sara admitted. Though she still held gently on to Gin, she looked back outside at the shell-strewn beach again, sounding ever more distant. “I think that’s a joke?...”

“What’s funny about it?”

“I’m not sure I understand myself,” Sara admitted, making sure not to press down on Gin as she stood back up. “He’s an unusual person. Please don’t ask him questions like this to his face, it’s not polite to point out ways in which a person is unusual.”

“I wasn’t going to do that, woof.”

“But… Sara is sure that Kai is a man?” Kanna asked, just as confused as when she first asked.

After several seconds of hesitation, Sara said, “Well, I think so.”

He was very pretty.

—

Nao set down her hammer and then her shell full of nails, which made a chiming clatter. She turned to face Kanna, put her elbows on her workbench, plunked her chin on her hands, smile cheerfully, and said, “I don’t know.”

“Eh?” Kanna put one of her hands on her cheek.

“I don’t know, and I haven’t known the whole time, and now we’ve been here for five days, and I’m too afraid to ask,” she said in a rush.

“Nao doesn’t?...”

“I’m not good with this sort of thing!!” she whined, gesturing at everything. “I have a classmate that I thought was a man for weeks only to find out she wasn’t all along! I didn’t know one of my best friends was also a lesbian until after I had known her for a year! I have met her girlfriend several times!! I don’t know, I never know, and I am not asking them now. They’ll say something eventually.”

“Her girlfriend?” asked Kanna, her beautiful, growing brain working so hard that Nao could practically see the synapses firing behind her big blue eyes. “What do you mean?”

Nao made a long, siren-like noise of distress. She looked around for someone, anyone, and found no one. She knew she had just seen Professor Mishima, but where had gone?

Finally she saw him, a distance away, crouched down into the sand to have a conversation with Gin. She couldn’t interrupt that, then.

Still making her noise of distress an impressive twenty-five seconds later, Nao whipped her head back around to Kanna and cut it off with “aaaaaaaaaask Reko. Reko knows all about these things.”

“Okay,” Kanna said, at first uncertain. But, now that Nao mentioned it, Reko was really smart, in the same way teachers were smart. She just knew things about people without even asking them. “Okay, Kanna will!”

—

With a stifled grunt, followed by several audible joints popping, Mishima knelt down in the sand so that he was eye-level with Gin.

“You see,” he said, “Things become less straightforward as a person ages… in childhood, there are girls and boys, and ways that girls and boys are supposed to act, and it all seems quite simple. But the older you get, the more complicated things seem… that’s true of everything, of course.”

“What? I don’t get it,” Gin complained.

“Ah, I’m not being very clear… please excuse this nutty old professor. When you age, you’ll start questioning things that you didn’t think to question before. Things like, ‘why should this be a woman’s job?’ or, ‘why do I think only a man can do this?’ And this is true even of dress, the styles and colors we wear, of temperament, whether you think a person should be able to cry or not, or get angry, or show affection… you will think, ‘why is it a man can’t be gifted flowers?’ or, ‘why would I think a woman can’t be a protector when we all value the protective instinct of a mother?’ All of these things seem to be less and less important with time. To me, however a person chooses to express themselves is fine, if they are honest about it, and striving to be the person they truly are inside.”

“…Okay,” said Gin, who was a smart child, and didn’t waste his time continuing to ask an adult questions if they were determined to not give him a straight answer.

The professor smiled, one of those weird, goopy adult smiles that tells you they’ve chosen to be sad about something that isn’t even sad to begin with. “This is the sort of thing that makes more sense with time,” Mishima said, “but to answer your question, I think Kai is whatever he says he is. Though, come to think about it, I don’t think he has said much about what he is!”

“He says he’s a homemaker,” Gin grumbled.

“Ah. That must be the case, then!”

—

“Eh??” exclaimed Reko, nearly snapping the needle she held in her left hand and bunching up the shirt she held in her right. “Don’t tell me you asked her that!”

Kanna jolted. She clutched the sleeves of her shirt between her hands and poked her nails into the holes between threads as she hurried to explain herself. “No! Kanna hasn’t asked Kai anything at all! Kanna wasn’t sure, and she was curious, so she asked Gin, and Gin said he thought she was a girl too, but then Gin and Kanna asked Mr. Policeman to be sure and Mr. Policeman said she was a man, so we asked Sara, and Sara said she was a man but she didn’t sound like she really knew for sure, so Kanna still felt confused so she asked Nao, and Nao told Kanna to ask you!”

“It’s a good thing she did!” Reko’s anger had drained quickly out of her face while Kanna was speaking. But the time she was done, she had smoothed out the shirt she was repairing (it was Nao’s favorite yellow shirt, Kanna saw) on her lap and her face looked clear and sharp again. “Kanna, please don’t ask Kai any questions about that subject. She’s probably pretty sensitive about it.”

“Sensitive…”

“Especially since so many people insist on still referring to her as a man,” Reko said hotly, “though you have to expect some pushback from people. That’s why the frontline of defense is so important.”

“Frontline? Defense?”

Reko shook her head, and then pinned the needle into Nao’s shirt. “Sorry, Kanna. I’m only confusing you.”

Kanna looked down at her hands. “It’s okay…”

“No, I shouldn’t have gotten so hot-headed. You didn’t do anything wrong, I only got aggravated thinking about things from the past. Listen, Kanna; Kai is definitely a woman, though she doesn’t feel comfortable saying so in front of everyone. She has a man’s body; that happens sometimes. I’ve known a lot of people like this before. Just use her name when you’re talking about her so that she doesn’t feel uncomfortable—though she is pretty tough, honestly. I think that the average sort of pettiness that a woman in her position tends to hear doesn’t really get to her. Honestly, she seems to enjoy confusing people, which is a great attitude to have. Still…”

“…Kanna is confused.”

“Sorry, Kanna,” said Reko with an apologetic smile. “I really think she is a woman, though she looks a little like a man. Sometimes, a person just doesn’t get dealt a lucky hand. Don’t worry about it too much. It is Kai’s concern and not ours, at the end of the day.”

“…That’s right,” said Kanna, suddenly reassured. “Kanna shouldn’t be worrying about things that don’t concern her.”

“…That’s… right, though I’m not sure I like how you said it.”

“Eh? Why not?”

—

Joe looked at Sou. Sou looked at Q-Taro. Q-Taro looked back at the two of them, clearly stunned that they had really concluded that he was the best person here to answer this question.

“Kid,” he said to Gin, “What the heck do you mean.”

“I said what I meant!” Gin protested. “I asked you whether Kai is a man or a woman!”

Sou tried to look at Joe. Joe anxiously lifted his palms up to either side of his face. They both looked at Q-Taro, and Q-Taro looked back at them.

“Well, he’s a man, isn’t he?” asked Q-Taro, annoyed.

“I think so?” said Jou.

“Wait, you just think so?”

“I—well, I didn’t really expect to be asked that!” Jou admitted, putting one hand behind his head. “I mean, I thought so before this moment, but now that I’ve been asked, I guess I can’t prove it?”

“Hell do you mean, ‘prove it’?” Q-Taro asked.

“I mean. I don’t know? How do you prove something like that?”

“Well,” said Sou, and Q-Taro leaned in to physically clamp a hand over his mouth.

“He is or he isn’t, ain’t he?” Q-Taro demanded Joe.

 “I mean, now that you say it point blank, I don’t know!”

“What do you mean you don’t know??”

“I mean, do you know??”

Gin crossed his arms, frustrated. Usually, adults behaved better if you got a few of them together instead of letting the blab on one-on-one, but they were all doing terribly right now! “You mean none of you know?” he asked.

“I mean, I think he is!” Joe said.

“Of course he is,” scoffed Q-Taro. “You can’t tell who is or isn’t a man?”

“He is really…”

“What?”

Blushing slightly, Joe shrugged.

“The hell you mean?”

“What—feminine, you know?”

“You can’t let that sh—stuff fool you! It ain’t about appearances! It’s about the soul! It’s about fighting spirit! You have to keep your head in the game!”

“The game??” Joe squeaked, leaning away from the advancing pitcher. He was still clutching Sou’s mouth as he went, too, moving his head with him as he leaned in.

“You gotta know what you’re working with! Your teammate’s strengths, their weaknesses! Who’s who! What they’re really about! What matters to them! Who’s going to snap under the pressure and who will take the ball home!”

“I think he’s a dependable guy??”

“You’d snap under the pressure,” Q-Taro informed Joe, and Joe apologized profusely.

“If none of you know, I’m gonna go,” said Gin.

Sou, who still had Q-Taro’s hand clamped over his mouth, raised his hand above his head.

Joe, who was now blushing red from being nonsensically reprimanded for his performance in a baseball team he hadn’t joined, and Q-Taro, who maybe did or maybe did not remember the original question, both looked down at Sou.

Sou’s eyelids crinkled, innocently, as he patiently held his hand up. Q-Taro’s eyes narrowed. Sou maintained his expression of innocent helpfulness so flawlessly that Q-Taro slowly, reluctantly, pulled his clutching hand away from his face.

Looking downright adorable, his blue eyes shining, Sou said, “Well, all we need to do to answer that question is just figure out if anyone has seen his dick. And I—”

Q-Taro smacked his hand back over Sou’s mouth so hard that he fell backwards out of his chair.

—

“Of course I’m sure,” said Keiji, looking at the two young people seated at the table with him incredulously. “What do you mean you asked everyone?”

Gin and Kanna had both woken up to greet the dawn, as young folks like them were wont to do. Keiji hadn’t slept, as he was wont to (not) do. The darkness of the island at night, with only the moon and stars above, and the howling of wild animals in his ears…

Kanna was quick to explain that they had asked everyone but Kai himself (or ‘herself’, as it were), and Gin was quick to correct her with “Or Gonbee.”

“…Well,” Keiji said, never too good to let up an opportunity for intel, and the more inane the better, “What did everyone say?”

“Sara said that she thought he was a man, but she didn’t seem sure,” said Gin.

“And then Kanna asked Nao, and Nao said she didn’t know at all!”

“Nao said that she didn’t know?” Keiji asked, stifling a grin.

“Nao said that she never knows that kind of thing,” repeated Kanna, hesitating. “Kanna isn’t sure she really understood what Nao was saying.”

“Nao is a very egalitarian person, I think. Ah, that means… very… fair in how she treats people, despite their differences. So to speak. What happened next?”

“Well, I asked the Professor, and all he said was nonsense.”

“What kind of nonsense?”

“’You’ll understand when you’re older, you’ll understand when you’re older,’” Gin mimicked, disgusted.

Keiji had to swallow back his laughter. What the hell did Mishima think was going on?... “Who next?”

“Well, Nao told Kanna to ask Reko, so Kanna asked Reko, and Reko said that Kai was absolutely, definitely a woman!”

Swallowing back his laughter proved harder at that. Keiji had to hold the cup of hot water that he was vainly pretending was coffee to his face. “It sounds like she was certain.”

“She told Kanna to not bring it up so to not make Kai upset, but Kanna didn’t really know what she meant. She said, ‘some people aren’t dealt a lucky hand.’”

“That,” said Keiji, swallowing a gulp of his pretend coffee, “is undeniably true, and a week of knowing Kai makes me confident in saying he certainly wasn’t dealt a lucky hand in life. Let’s see… there’s still a few people you say you asked.”

“I got Joe and the Hulk and the Loner all in a room together to ask them because I thought they would be serious about it if I asked them all together, but they weren’t at all.”

“No?”

“No! The Hulk just kept saying stupid things about baseball, and Joe clearly didn’t know anything at all, and the Loner would only say things that I won’t say in front of Kanna.”

“Eh??” Kanna flushed immediately.

“Leave it to him,” Keiji sighed, and saw the kids didn’t know what to make of that comment. “Ah. Some people just don’t know how to act their age, I mean.”

“Tell me about it, meow!” Gin fumed. “I couldn’t get him to be serious at all!”

“Some people won’t give a kid a serious answer no matter what,” Keiji smiled.

Gin seemed surprised that Keiji knew that, and spoke warily. “…Some people treat me like I’m dumb, even when I’m asking good questions, and even if I was paying attention the whole time.”

“That’s a mistake. You’re clearly a smart person. You won’t be smaller than them forever, either. They should watch out.”

Gin beamed with the praise. “Yeah! When I’m his size, Sou won’t dare treat me like I’m dumb.”

“I gather he won’t. You should aim to be much bigger than his size, by the way.”

“Yeah! I’m going to be like a Newfoundland.”

“Atta boy.”

“But… can Kanna ask Mr. Policeman why he’s so sure that Kai is a man?” Kanna asked, politely, one hand covering her flush.

“Ah,” Keiji said. “Well…”

He took Gin’s concerns seriously, so he would take Kanna’s just as seriously. He wasn’t sure exactly why the kids were so confused, though. Kai did have long hair, and an oddly pretty face, but his voice and stature were both masculine. But he could remember being a kid and thinking things were one way, or another way, and not liking being told there were shades of gray in-between.

…Maybe he was being childish himself. It wasn’t like he had special knowledge the others didn’t have. He saw a set of traits on Kai’s body and those traits combined made him confident he was a man, even though technically none of those things made it true. He extrapolated based on what he saw, which was the same as what the kids were doing.

Keiji could answer a question honestly. When he felt like it. “Intuition. I don’t want to sound like a stuffy professor, but that does develop as you get older. It is wrong sometimes, though. More importantly, Kai called himself a man in his own words. Do you remember?”

Both of them thought back. Kanna shook her head, but Gin was still thinking.

“It was when we were fixing the wall after the base was attacked,” he prompted, watching for flinches as he brought up the scary memory. Kanna looked down, but Gin was still concentrated. “I had just complimented Kai on his building. I was impressed at how quickly he got the door back up and fixed. I admit I had thought he wouldn’t be skilled at the heavy work. He said…”

“… ‘I’ve always considered myself a working man!’” Gin recalled, triumphant. “That’s right!”

“If he said it, why would I doubt it?” Keiji smiled, leaning back in his chair.

“Though,” said Kanna, looking to the side as she tossed things around in her own head, “’consider myself’ still isn’t a very definite statement…”

“No, that’s true,” Keiji encouraged her. “It leaves some room for doubt. Kai is…”

Ah, he couldn’t call him a liar in front of the kids. It sounded too harsh. It was true, but it would scare them. “…A bit of a joker, too. He gets fun out of teasing people a bit. I understand why you might doubt him at his word, but there’s no reason to doubt such a simple fact about a person.”

He had had the most interesting conversation with Kai the other day. He had tried to get some intel from him, but the conversation only progressed at all once he had given the odd homemaker permission to lie to him. And now, after reflecting on it for a night, he still wasn’t sure how many of the things Kai had told him had been lies. In fact, the most useful information he had gained from the conversation was that Kai loved lying. When he got into it, his pit-like eyes started shimmering, though he didn’t smile. The self-proclaimed ‘villain’ could sense the exact moment his outrageous lies got Keiji onto his back foot, and he had enjoyed pressing him back.

He had decided to avoid having too many similar conversations with Kai. They all had to work together to get off this island. Keiji doubted anyone would benefit from the two of them getting closer to each other.

“…But he’s so pretty,” said Kanna, genuinely upset. “He’s prettier than Kanna!!”

…Ah. Well, to put it bluntly, he was, but Kai had the unfair advantage of being an adult, while Kanna was only a girl. “That’s not true. You’re completely different kinds of pretty; Kanna couldn’t be a better Kai, and Kai could never be a better Kanna than Kanna is. You must love your eyes, they’re such a pretty blue.”

Gin waited patiently through Keiji cheering Kanna up. Keiji might have been paranoid, or Gin might have known he didn’t mean everything he said to Kanna. “But in the end, you all disagree with each other,” Gin finally concluded. “Even though you’re all adults, you don’t have the same idea about Kai.”

“Unfortunately, adults rarely have the same ideas as each other. You asked everyone; you can go with the majority opinion—huh, I didn’t keep track, but it sounds like the majority opinion is a low-confidence assertation that he’s probably a man—or you can go with the most logical opinion.”

“Well, we asked everyone except Gonbee,” Kanna pointed out.

“Do you think we should?” asked Gin.

Keiji laughed, but silently, behind his hand.

“You know,” he said, “why don’t you ask Gonbee?”

—

Gonbee sat alone on a fallen tree, a rope wrapped around both of his hands. He glared down at the two children at the ground below and looped the rough rope around his right knuckles one more time.

He was weaving that rope, actually, out of palm fibers. It had taken an astonishing amount of work, but he had gotten used to fashioning useful items out of whatever he had on hand, no matter how much time or work it took. A rope was going to be incredibly useful in the life he was living now. He could fashion a trap. He could transport goods more easily. He could snap a neck if it came to that.

The boy glared up at him, more defiant instead of less in the face of such a rough person. The teen girl, though, was subtly shaking.

Gonbee had thought she was eleven or twelve, not fourteen. She was so short and small. Someone hadn’t been feeding her. He had to assume it was whoever had her before she was adopted, or else…

Gonbee lowered his hands to his lap, slowly, in a sincere effort to look a little less intimidating. It didn’t seem to have any effect on the anxious young lady. “If you have a question to ask me, ask it,” he demanded.

Kanna jumped and squeaked. Gin planted his paws on his hips and glowered up at Gonbee.

“Hey, Stripes,” he said, making an adorable effort to lower his voice to counter-intimidate the large, dangerous adult man seated above him. “Tell me how you know if someone is a man!”

Gonbee, unbeknownst to most, just happened to be the world’s least flattering transgender representation. He actually had no idea that he was a transgender man, which would have been a surprise to his sister (who couldn’t even remember his legal name). He still thought that presenting himself as a man, which he had been doing flawlessly for nearly fifteen years, was part of an elaborate plot to hide his ‘true’ identity and escape the law after he fled prison, and never mind the fact that he has started it years before his troubles with the law. It had never and would never occur to him that fifteen years of gender presentation and never missing anything about being a woman once might have something to do with himself as a person.

Gonbee snapped the rope between his clenched fists and bared his teeth. “What the fuck do you little shits know.”

—

Gin promised Kanna that it was going to be okay. “Kai can be a little scary,” he told her, “but he can’t be as scary as Gonbee.”

Kanna nodded, though nervously. She sincerely doubted anything could be as scary as Gonbee. Still, she held Gin’s hand and they both approached the ‘man’ in question, who stood at a patch of weather-worn black rocks near the ocean shore, peering into quivering green tidepools and deep black holes. One of his hands was hovering, poised to pick through the pools. In the other he held his frying pan. Inside the frying pan was two live crabs, which skittered and stumbled, but clearly could not find their way out.

Kai straightened up when he saw the two approaching him. His red apron, which he never took off, was tied around a black uniform that was cuffed on his elbows and up his calves.  The sand and the grime, however, only dirtied his skin up to his ankles. Every other part of his was fastidiously clean. Now that they were downwind, Kanna realized that he did smell like lemon, and lavender, and other motherly scents.

He tossed his ponytail, picked up by the wind, back behind his shoulder. “Is there anything I can do to help you?”

Gin and Kanna looked at each other. Gin nodded, and Kanna took a deep breath in.

“Please, um…”

“Yes?” Kai asked. He stood as still and straight-backed as a scarecrow, looking attentively down. The two crabs tried vainly to clamber out of his frying pan.

“Please, um—” trembling, Kanna took in one more breath and then spat out, “Please, Kanna wants to know if Kai is a man or a woman, because she doesn’t know, and she doesn’t want to be impolite! She tried to ask other people but they wouldn’t tell her for sure, so now she has to bother you!! Kanna is very sorry.”

Kai raised his eyebrows imperceptibly. He examined both of their faces. Gin nodded slightly, to back Kanna up.

“Ah, I see,” he said, gravely serious. “I’ve caused some confusion. Let me ask, then, to be sure we’re on the same page… is Kanna a girl?”

“Eh?” Kanna clutched her hands together, rubbing her sleeves between her thumbs. “Well… Kanna has always been a girl.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well… Kanna is a girl… because everyone says so. Kanna walks in the girl’s line at school, and sees the lady doctor, and goes to the girl’s room. She goes to the girl’s side when everyone divides.”

“Do you enjoy doing those things?”

“Does Kanna enjoy it?... She wouldn’t like doing things the other way. She’s rather be with the other girls.”

“Then it sounds like you are content to be a girl,” Kai responded, with only a little tilt of his head.

Kanna didn’t think about it that, way, but… “Yes, Kanna is.”

“Then, is Gin a boy?” Kai asked, turning his gaze to him.

“Of course I am!” he said.

“How do you know that?”

“I am a boy, woof! There’s no need to ask anything, I just know!”

“Through sheer instinct,” Kai noted, sounding impressed. “Yes, if you’re certain about it, there’s no need for any questions.”

“But I wasn’t wondering about myself! I was wondering about you, Kai!”

“Me, Kai…” Kai repeated, sounding somewhat absent. When one of the crabs got a little too close to the rim of the frying pain, his eyes snaped to it, and he shook it until the doomed critter was forced back down. “Well, well,” he said, returning his gaze to the children. “That is, I am a professional person… more of a profession than a person, really. I can be whatever I have to be for the job.”

“Eh?” said Kanna.

“Whatever… you have to be?”

“Precisely.”

“But, what are you?”

Perhaps if one of them had asked alone, Kai might have been more upfront. Being questioned like this, however, made him circumspect. He had nearly forced to be that way, with how thoroughly—punishingly—he had been trained to not give information away. But he wasn’t going to be needlessly unkind to children, either. “What Kai is… is Kai’s business,” he responded, keeping his voice gentle. “You can call me whatever you like. Since I’m male, let’s just call me a man to make it easy. But some people will keep who they are to themself, no matter what.”

“Kanna really doesn’t understand…”

“Hm. Then, to be very plain, there is a difference between public persona and personal feeling. I prefer not to tell everyone my personal feeling. But, as far as public persona, I am a man.”

Kanna put a hand on her head as she thought. The wind picked up strands of her hair, threaded them through her little fingers. Kai saw little specks of blue, leftover from a manicure some person had painted onto her nails over a week ago. “Then, Kanna thinks she understands. Kanna doesn’t always want to tell everyone what she’s feeling, either. That is, Kanna knows she is from another family, really, but she likes people to think she came from her family from the start, and they usually don’t know unless Kanna tells them. Kanna feels happy when people think mom and dad and Kugie are her real family.”

“…I think you do understand,” Kai agreed. “I’m happy when people think a certain way about me, and how I feel about myself is something I prefer to keep to myself.”

“Okay, woof!” said Gin, to appearances completely content with this answer. “I’ll tell everyone else to mind their own business!”

“Please do.” It was Kai’s opinion that most people could stand to hear that message more often.

“Kanna should tell Reko that she has it wrong…” Kanna mused. “She really thought something different.”

For a moment, Kai’s mouth twitched with a smile. He pushed it down again. “Ah, don’t do that, please,” he asked. “I don’t mind if other people have their assumptions… especially if they didn’t bother to ask.”

“But what if Reko tells someone else the wrong thing?”

“That’s Reko’s fault for not asking!” said Gin.

“Exactly,” smiled Kai. He loved impressionable young minds, sometimes. “Someone who wants to know can ask… and if they don’t bother, then I’m fine with misconceptions swirling around.”

Actually, he had only answered honestly because they were children. If someone else had asked, who knows?... The fact that not even his gender was known for certain among the other abductees was a pleasant feeling, because it confirmed to him they truly knew nothing about him.

Which was good for everyone.

Which was good for everyone, but… “I wonder,” he said, “Since you talked to Ms. Reko about this, and ‘others’… I wonder if Ms. Sara was one of those others?”

“She was the second person we asked, right after Keiji,” said Gin.

“Keiji, hm… I wonder what both of them said?...”

“Mr. Policeman said you were definitely a man, and Sara said the same thing, but she didn’t really know for sure. She just kept asking us questions.”

“Sara asked Kanna why you sleep outside, but Kanna doesn’t know.”

“She wanted to know why we were asking. And she didn’t get that you smell like a mom.”

“And Sara said that Kai is an ‘unusual person’, and that we shouldn’t bother you…” Kanna suddenly put a hand to her mouth. “Eh, does that mean that Kanna shouldn’t have said that?... Oh no!”

“An unusual person…” Kai repeated. He turned his head, and the wind blew his hair over his face again. That was good, because he could not hide his smile now. Granted that fleeting privacy, he giggled, nearly silently, at the crabs that trembled when he shook the pan underneath them.

An unusual person. And she just kept asking questions, and surely just kept getting answers, too. Oh, Sara.

…If he had had time to dress, he might have posed as a woman for all of this. It might have made him look more trustworthy. Then again, if the disguise had slipped, it wouldn’t have. Now his face was revealed again by the tricky sea-wind, so he schooled his face and said, “Please don’t worry about it in the future, even if someone has misconceptions. I can handle it myself.”

Gin and Kanna both agreed. He wasn’t sure why, but just as the children were getting ready to go, Kai also said, “I sleep outside because I just can’t sleep at all with a room full of people… the breathing keeps me awake. Though, with Q-Taro especially, it would be the snoring…”

“Oh!” said Kanna. “Ah, thank you for telling Kanna! But she wasn’t trying to pry.”

“I know you weren’t,” Kai responded. “That’s exactly why I told you.”

The children understood enough. They thanked him and sprinted off again, to act like children for a little while, perhaps, until another hungry night approached, with another dangerous morning on its heels. Kai saw, from the corner of his eye, the subtle scuttling of another crab, crawling away from the shifting daylight.

He struck quickly and seized it from between the rocks before it could escape. It wriggled and thrashed in his hand, but he had placed his fingers so that it couldn’t get a grip on him. Its pinchers gnashed fruitlessly at the air instead.

Kai flipped it one way, then the other. A girl. It was easy to tell, because such creatures showed their sex in colors and patterns on their exoskeletons. Those patterns told males of her species what this simple creature was and what she wanted—or, perhaps, just what she was obligated to do for them. Humans weren’t really that different. They would peer at the length of his hair, the set of his shoulders, the bump in his throat, the cut of his clothes, even how he held his wrists to satisfy their need to know what he was, what he was available for, if they had to respect him or not. Even strangers. The scrutiny was not optional. The only way to lessen its intensity was to be exactly what people expected from the start. Professionally, it was a good idea to just be the person people expected, to be undeniably a man, or undeniably a woman, and nothing in-between.

But Kai loved it when they couldn’t tell, and didn’t know what to make of him. He loved it when they were confused. He really, really loved it.