Chapter 1: Ari
I remember the first night I woke up in the castle. I was in a hospital bed covered in heavy blankets. The doctor said I had been found passed out in the street in the rain, suffering from hypothermia. I thought I was just in a hospital, and now that I’d been caught, they’d send me back to my mom or the orphanage, but I noticed a young lady standing behind the doctor watching. I would soon learn this was Princess Yvette of the Evermore Kingdom. She had long, dark brown hair and bright blue eyes. She seemed happy that I was awake.
“Hello, Princess, he just woke up,” the doctor replied, turning to Yvette.
Yvette came closer and sat on my bedside. I slid away, nervous.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
Her skin was fair but clear, unlike mine, which was covered in freckles and pale. Her eyes were bright and mine dull. Her hair was long and flowing and vibrant, while mine was tangled, tattered, and dark. She was beautiful, and I was ugly. She was royalty, and I was an orphan; regardless of where I had come from before, that was what I was now.
I stayed quiet.
It would be even worse when they looked closer and found I wasn't normal.
“My name’s Yvette. I want to help you. Can you please tell me your name?” she asked gently again.
I hugged myself nervously and kept my eyes down.
“Ari,” I whispered.
“That’s a cool name. What happened, Ari? Did you get lost? Do you need help finding your parents?” she asked.
I just shook my head, drawing my knees up and burying my face in my knees.
“Do you have parents?” she asked.
“I used to,” I mumbled.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I started having seizures,” I murmur.
“They’re also intersex,” the doctor added, quietly handing Yvette a clipboard of papers. They knew. They had looked while I was passed out. I knew they were probably checking for injuries or the cause of my passing out, but I still felt violated.
She barely glanced at it.
“Ari, are you a boy or a girl?” she then asked.
No one had ever asked me that question. I found it odd, then again, I didn’t know what intersex meant back then either. No one had bothered to tell me I was different from other little boys my age.
“A boy,” I asked, looking up confused.
She smiled and ruffled my hair.
“It’s okay, you can stay here if you have nowhere to go,” she replies and smiles.
That was the most kindness I’d been given by another person. Most pushed me around or ignored me because I was an orphan and weird. My mother had abandoned me in the street when I started having seizures. I guess being intersex and having seizures was too much for her.
Yvette visited me often, but other than her sister Nova and a few others, the other children still seemed to pick up the fact that I wasn’t normal. They bullied me. I was shorter than most boys my age, which was due to my body’s inability to respond to testosterone. I was started on HRT when I was thirteen to mimic a normal boy’s puberty, and while I did grow, I was still only five foot ten by the time I was seventeen, shorter than most of the boys still.
I remember when I had my first crush, and it wasn’t on a girl; I thought I made a mistake about my gender. I was fourteen, and they brought in a rough-looking older boy to clean him up and give him a space in the castle. His name was Adam. He had blond hair and green eyes. I followed and watched him at a distance for a while. I didn’t say anything to him or anyone else, though. Eventually, Adam caught me looking. At this point, he seemed weary but not scared. I backed off then. One day, I went to the castle garden. It was beautiful. Yvette took me here often and talked about coming here when she was eight with her father, Cyrus and King Lance before he became king.
I was sitting under a cherry blossom tree, weaving a flower crown, when Adam appeared. I wasn’t paying attention at first. I didn’t even know he was there until I saw his shoes at the edge of my vision, and I glanced up.
He sat down beside me, and I became nervous again.
“You’re Ari, right?” he asked, sounding almost as nervous as I felt.
“Yes,” I replied, returning to my weaving to distract me.
“How long have you been here for?” he asked, watching me weave.
“Six years,” I answered.
“Why did your parents abandon you?” he asked.
It was no secret that Yvette took in orphans, misfits and runaways. She believed everyone deserved love and a home, even if she had to provide it. Some of the children had found families within the castle walls and others outside, and some, like Adam and me, were left behind.
I hesitated. People knew I had seizures; it would be a health risk if they didn’t. I didn’t have a lot of friends. I was scared of telling people the truth; half the time, I thought my mother abandoned me because I was intersex, and the other half, I thought it was because of the seizures.
“I was born out of wedlock, I’m not supposed to be here, I was an accident. I’m not even supposed to be here,” he murmured, looking away.
This made me trust him; he was a mistake, like me. A jumble of genes that created a person whom no one ended up wanting in the end.
“I have seizures, and I’m intersex,” I finally answer, still nervous.
“What does intersex mean?” he asks.
“I’m not fully male, my parts look different, and I have to take testosterone because my body doesn’t respond to what it produces,” I explain.
“So, who do you like then?” he asks curiously.
I hesitate again.
I never ended up telling him that day, and I guess he just accepted it. We became friends and would often play hide and seek in the castle’s garden. I once hid in a bush, weaving a flower crown. I could hear him calling my name, but it took him a while to actually check the bush I was in. The leaves were blocking out the light, making it dark inside the bush. He opened the leaves and spotted me, and climbed inside, not realizing there wasn’t much space. He ended up knocking into me, and I ended up on the ground underneath him. He was apologetic at first, but didn’t move off me, and neither of us moved. We were frozen before he finally moved, and he kissed me before sitting back on his heels.
“Do you feel it?” he asks.
I only nodded before actually speaking.
“I thought it was wrong, though. Or I’d made a mistake thinking I was a boy,” I answered.
“Yvette’s father was trans, and he was in love with the king,” Adam reminded me.
He wasn’t wrong, but it didn’t matter.
Eventually, Adam made more friends, friends with Peter and John, who, unlike him, thought I was a weird freak of nature. Their influence turned him against me. At first, they’d just tease him for liking a weirdo from the in-between, and he promised it didn’t bother him and he still liked me, but I guess their words started eating away at him.
One day, all three of them approached me. I was weary.
“Look, it’s the alien, he’s not even human. He doesn’t have human parts,” John sneered.
Adam must have told them; maybe I should have told him not to share that information with just anybody. Peter was holding a flashlight. The two of them dragged me off to a shed and brought me inside. It was dark inside. They threw me to the ground and gave me a few blows to the head, causing me a bloody nose.
I couldn’t see who was doing what in the darkness, but one of them turned the flashlight on, and I saw it was Adam who was holding it now. It was flashing like a strobe light at a rave. I could feel myself become nauseous and my eyes rolled back in my head before I passed out.
Apparently, I was out for a while before anyone found me. Adam, John, and Peter hadn’t thought to tell anyone out of fear they’d get in trouble for what they did. I knew my relationship with Adam was over then. Eventually, it wasn’t John or Peter leading the bullying; it was Adam, who became just like everyone else who found me weird.
Yvette had talked to the other children multiple times, but nothing ever changed, so I just had to live with it and avoid it like the plague to the best of my ability. I isolated myself from everyone but Yvette and Nova.
“Are you okay, Ari?” Yvette asked one night when she found me sitting on a balcony looking up at the moon, which was washing everything below in a white-grey light.
I shrugged.
“I just wish I was normal,” I whispered.
“But if you were normal, you wouldn’t be you,” she replied.
“If I was normal, maybe Adam would still like me,” I echoed, confessing the fact that I liked boys to someone other than myself and Adam.
“You’ll find someone who will love you, all of you, heart and soul. You’re still young, wait and see,” she replied. “I didn’t meet Ree until I was thirty-five.”
Ree was Yvette’s partner. They had a black bob cut curled at the ends, but they often wore suits, dress shirts and pants. They looked like me a lot, the more I thought about it, but I just thought it was a coincidence.
“I promise you, we’re all weird and different in our own way, and there are always people out there who will love us for who we are, okay?” she replies, giving me a half-hug.
I only nodded. I could only hope she was right then.
