Trying on dresses and skirts for the first time wasn’t uncomfortable, per se. It was just different; the whole Bedroom Committee was different. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. While everyone else signed up for the theater club or the gardening club, or got jobs at the local fast food place, I became something of a top star in the crossdressing community. I was the youngest in the club when I first joined, but the others said I looked so perfect in womenswear that I ended up being the face of the society. 

My confidence grew exponentially doing drag. I blossomed, so to speak. Nights were filled with perfection, charm, curiosity. Outside of being assumed a ert, doing drag was an outlet that made me feel powerful. Becoming head of School Festival Operations was a stern job that took all my energy, so much that the drag club section of the Bedroom Investigation Committee Youth Division felt like pure euphoria. 

It was a release. Everyone was open and kind, beautiful inside and out. 

Sometime after, the students at school found out about my crossdressing. I didn’t confirm or deny it, but I wasn’t hiding it in the first place, and it was quite obvious. I loved the flare, the attention, the drama, although my friend’s often took to making fun of me for it. 

I was popular. 

It wasn’t a problem. People swooned over me. I had friends in every club. I had my people who didn’t care about the kind of clubs I was in, people who never thought to even ask.

Like my fans. 

I can’t say I know exactly where they sprung from, only that they were intensely loyal. They followed me across campus, asking for pictures, giving me gifts, checking in on me. It made quite a lot of other men jealous. What was the saying? Women love me, men wanna be me, and x-genders get gender-envy over me?

If I had a chance, I’d shake every single one of their hands. 

They were all admirable in some way. The fans held so much passion in them, so much for nothing. I would have gotten bored of myself within a few days, let alone a year. The jealous men(because I had male fans, too) even had their own unique traits. At least they had the ability to just like people out of nowhere. I wasn’t stealing any girls from them, no matter how much they liked to believe I was. None of those women really knew me. None of them were actually in love with me. They just liked the idea of me, which was admirable by itself. Although it made them angry, the only person really keeping women away from them were their individual selves. And in the case of the x-genders, a few of them were fans of me too. I don't know why, I wasn’t trans myself, but I also found it nice to be looked up to by the transgender community.

“What’s so good about it?” A friend of mine, who at the time was currently crushing hard on a kouhai in his club, asked me. He, too, was admirable. 

I barely gave him the time of day, just glancing at him from my computer screen full of emails. “Imagine it. The glory? The freedom? That's the goal.”

“What exactly is so glorious about it?”

That was a good question. To him, crossdressing was nothing but a waste of time, something to make people’s eyes pop out of their head when they look at you. It wasn’t embarrassing for him to have a friend who did it. To be embarrassed would be to care, and this guy didn’t care about much of anything(except that girl). To me, crossdressing was a pool on the hottest day of the year. Rain in a drought. It was the cheering in a crowd, the smile on people’s faces. I couldn’t explain that to him because he wouldn’t understand it. 

“I just like getting people’s attention.” I said instead, a half truth. 

He snorted. “Are you gonna date any of them?” He asked, already knowing the answer. 

This is where he and I differed. I scoffed. “Why would I date someone who doesn’t even like me?”

Don and I were introduced way after he and I had already met. It was maybe a year ago now that we’d gone out to lunch with our mutual friend, each of us too busy with campus life to ever really go around meeting people otherwise. At first, I’d thought Don was a disgusting scoundrel, a dullard using adoration as an excuse to achieve his vulgarity. But, as I got used to him and his loathsome passions, I saw that he, too, was worthy of praise. All this over a girl he’d hadn’t even met? I’d thought, ignorantly. 

It became apparent that he wasn’t very fond of me either, actually. As his brazen play soon revealed, he thought of me, the Director of the School Festival Operations and member of the Bedroom Investigation Committee, as someone equally as gross and unsavory. My association with the club was something my fans never minded, nor any of the people at school who cared enough to know about it, up until his play got popular. The Codger of Monte Cristo. The play of Don Underwear and his fateful encounter with the person who sat across from him during last year's school festival. He wrote an entire script, piece by piece, to get the so-called Apple Girl from that day to find him and return his love, and I, as head of the school festival operations, was found deplorable by the student body for trying to do my job. The existence of guerilla plays is illegal according to school rules, and I had a reputation to uphold. I hadn’t heard the entire story until the last day of this year’s festival, after having chased him down the entire week. I’d thought he was a hopeless romantic, a bumbling idiot like those in fairy tales, yes, but one I’d hoped would soon find what he was looking for. Or who. I thought it was nice. 

I’d never thought it would be me. 

His play described me as a “shameless bastard”, the nickname Director Sleaze forced upon my character, the only known antagonist— Don’s words; he had no qualms with throwing his friend under the bus, although who was I to blame him? I’d have done the same thing in his place. Up until some of the final moments of the play, I’d been planning on revealing myself as the girl he’d been looking for the entire time, the Apple Girl who’d really just been me dressed up as an idol for a thing a friend of mine had invited me to do for them, and taking him in while he was struck still with surprise. That had been the plan. But like most of my plans throughout the past festival, it didn’t go quite like that. Instead, Don, the man I’d known for little over half a year, the vagabond I’d been chasing the entire past week, confessed his love to me, right there, on stage, unbothered by the fact that I was a man and not a woman, unbothered by the woman who’d just declared her love for him mere seconds before from the crowd, unbothered by my trickery or status or association with Todo, the old man leading the Bedroom Committee. 

And it was there that I…that I finally felt what I'd thought made everyone else so admirable. There, on that stage, wearing a silly dress with my long pink wig discarded on the floor beside me, sick and struggling not to cough, was where I felt my heart race in my chest for the first time in years. To others, which was such an everyday occurrence, so unordinary and normal for them, was something that’d only happened to me maybe three times in my entire life, happening for that third time. My face was hot, either from the sickness or the blush blooming onto my face from the sudden attraction I was feeling. Don’s eyes were passionate, and genuine, and he liked me. He liked me, despite it all, despite everything he knew about me, despite all the time we’d spent together the past semester, despite the vitriol he’d written into his play. 

I accepted him, finally feeling that something that I’d always wanted to feel. Drunk off the idea that someone wanted to get to know me, to be with me, to understand me. I was ready. I was ready. And then I fell. 

I don’t remember much after that. My friend told me I’d been crying. Again, not sure if it was because I’d fallen ten feet from the platform down underneath the make-shift stage or because I’d been rejected so soon after. With me now actually physically out of the way, Don had moved on to the girl who’d confessed to him. It was immediate, that I remember. 

I gained a lot of fans after the musical. While I was sick, a lot of them came by with gifts and cold remedies, but ended up getting sick, too. Noriko and Don had also gotten sick, and my friend and his kohai soon after, too. They all started dating, although I didn’t have any spite towards them. I was disappointed, for sure, but they were still just as admirable to me then as they were before. My friend got his girl, and Don found his own love. He reciprocated to her just as easily as I reciprocated to him. Noriko, dubbed Fish Girl by fans of the musical, was a nice woman. I held nothing against her. Why would I? She finally received the love she also wanted. 

I wasn’t even jealous, I was just…sad. Is that what jealousy is, I wondered. Just being sad? And if so, was I even deserving of it? If I could only like when I know it’s reciprocated, did I even really like them? Or was I just wanting to like them? Was I just excited by the idea of someone liking me? I was sick, and this was all I could think about. It was like a storm was raging in my head. Did I like Don? Do I now? Even though he doesn’t like me anymore? Am I even capable of liking men like he is? Was he just pretending to bring a solid ending to The Codger of Monte Cristo? But the look in his eyes…the more I thought about it, the more sure I was that it wasn’t true. Don didn’t care about gender, he cared about his idea of a fairytale fated meeting. And I was equally as queer, because I’d fallen for it. For him. I liked him, and now it was all for nothing because I hadn’t been able to take him in or get a partner that night. That’s what I’d thought. 

“It’s insane what you kids convince yourselves of at your age,” Todo had said days after, at a bar where we were sharing a drink. 

“What do you mean by that?” I asked. 

“You act like any of this stuff is important. It’s not! You guys just put yourselves out there and after college never speak to each other again! But what you think is happening is that this life is gonna be the whole of it, so you cry over spilt milk and keep yourselves from moving on!”

“Huh?”

“Who cares if you’re gay? Or straight? Or bi or pan-whatever they call it these days— just do whatever you’re gonna do and leave college with no regrets! None of this matters!”

I disagreed with much of what he said wholeheartedly, but what was the point in arguing with a drunk? “Is that why you came back to college, Todo-san?” 

“Huh? Oh, sure, yeah,” he was already drunk off his tail. “Just go up to that guy. Everything’ll work out.”

Don and I still had a mutual friend, so we still saw each other around. Two weeks had gone by since the festival, one week to get over a cold, another to try to get over Don. Everyone knew what had happened between us, but they all were also overcoming colds and had either forgotten, or thought it was a part of the musical or a fever dream. After leaving the bar where I had been drinking with Todo-san, I ran right into the man himself. 

It was there, outside a sketchy old bar, smelling of booze and old men, that I was confessed to by Don for a second time. 

There were a lot of P words floating around in that conversation. A lot of words I hadn’t enough of a mind to really comprehend at that moment. Surprisingly, ert wasn’t one of them, so that was good. Todo was a bit eccentric, but he wasn’t a bad guy. A lot weird, yes, but he never judged me for my crossdressing habits, or my romance issues. He paid for my drinks, and he let me, in a drunken haze, rant for as long as I needed to. That is to say, I was -faced when Don came up to me spouting P words such as polyamory, and panual, and please followed by go on one date with me; in fact, I was so ed up that I gave him a P word myself: pee, as in, I have to pee, because I’d had two gallons of alcohol and was not sane enough to have a conversation like that one at that time. 

The next day, when I was fully lucid and also simultaneously losing my mind at how my life was managing to go right then, I texted him and agreed to go on one date. 

We’ve been dating for three weeks, and a very interesting three weeks it’s been. Don is a surprisingly gentle lover. He asks before he kisses me, and he wants to pay for every meal. He massages my shoulders after a busy day, and he takes pictures of us whenever we go out somewhere. I showed him my favorite ice cream place, and he showed me all the written material he left out of the final product of his musical. 

It’s so strange. I never thought I could be so cherished like this. It’s completely unlike my fans, who keep a charitable distance from my personal life so long as they can idolize me within their comfort. Don actually takes the time to get to know my interests, to talk about my favorite type of clothing without underlying judgment, to bounce off my quips and relax with me after a long day of stewardship. 

And Noriko doesn’t seem to mind in the least. I was actually quite worried that this entire time the whole “polyamory” thing had been a ruse and I’d actually been helping him cheat on her with me. But when we all went to brunch together, it became apparent that she was just as nervous as I was, and that she was pretty cool about it, just like he’d said. I couldn’t help being a blushing mess around Don. He was so honest about his feelings. He said what he meant, no matter what, even if it was embarrassing. He called me handsome and cute. He went to my impromptu drag shows. He knew how I liked my caffeine, and he’d buy it for me without me asking, as a surprise. 

And it’s only been three weeks. 

I’m smitten. I get it. I get what that cool-headed senpai meant when he talked about his kouhai. It was this. I was slowly drifting, and I liked it. 

I like Don.