Word Count: 682

There was a day when Paris was in the fifth grade, when he was ten years old, that stood out starkly in his memory.

He arrived home that afternoon in tears, dropped his school bag just inside the front door and stumbled his way through the living-room. His mother came from the kitchen to stand in the archway, startled by his sudden, tearful arrival. Paris flung himself at her, wrapped his arms around her, and cried against her abdomen.

“Baby, why aren't you at ballet?” his mother asked.

Paris's only response was a series of wracking sobs.

“Baby, what happened?”

He could not yet speak and so his mother stopped trying for the time being. Instead, she held him to her and shushed him quietly, brushed at the thick curls on his head and kissed him where she could. After a while she held him away from her enough to check him for injuries, but there was nothing more than the shin he'd scraped by jumping off of one of the swings on the playground during recess two days before.

“What happened?” she asked. Paris might have been young then, but he was still able to understand the look of worry on her face.

Slowly, Paris managed to calm down enough to explain himself.

“They made us watch a movie at school today,” he said.

“What kind of movie?”

Unable to or not wanting to discuss it, Paris shook his head, and then cried, “They made me go into a room with all the boys!”

His mother stared at him with a look of dawning comprehension—fear, too; a trace of horror; and the sort of worry and confusion and quiet acceptance she always wore when he went to school in pants and came home in one of his cousin's skirts. It was a scary expression because Paris didn't know what she was going to inevitably settle on. He shrank away from it, his body still wracked with sobs.

He was ten years old—small and pale, with a head of fair blonde curls cut like Shirley Temple, and a Knightside uniform that was just a smidge too large for him.

For growing into, his mother had said when they'd bought it to replace the one he'd outgrown last year.

But Paris didn't want to grow into it.

He wore the pants today to placate the adults in his life, and the appropriate shoes, too, but he'd traded his boring tie for his cousin's bow. He wore one of her headbands in his hair, and earrings shaped like stars in ears he'd begged and begged his mother to let him get pierced over the summer.

His mother looked into his face—into his eyes—for a long time. Then she lowered herself onto her knees in front of him, put her terrified face to his shoulder, and wrapped her arms tight around him.

“Okay,” she said.

And that was all she said. Just “Okay.”

That night his mom and dad argued heatedly in their bedroom. Paris only heard parts of it, but it was enough for him to shove his head beneath his pillow and press it tight to his ears. He mumbled songs to himself and thought of the games he might play with his cousin at recess the next day, and when he finally fell asleep he had a dream about going into space on a rocket ship, in a tutu and a space helmet, and landing on a silver beach on the moon where his parents sat waiting for him, only they were both smiling instead of arguing.

The next morning his father left early for work before Paris woke up, and his mother let him stay home from school so she could take him to see a doctor who didn't really look like a doctor, and who asked him questions about school and his cousin and his mom and dad and what he wanted to be when he grew up.

Paris told her he wanted to be a ballerina.

She didn't laugh at him at all.