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Dex can’t believe it, that they’re letting him get away with it. Letting her get away with it. She might be lying to all of them, but she won’t lie to herself. When he’d gotten onto the Samwell hockey team, the men’s hockey team, because he’d always been good, good enough to play with the boys, good enough to win, he’d emailed the team manager, shocked at her own daring, disgusted that she felt this was necessary. She’d pretended she wasn’t doing it the whole time she was writing, and then pressed send and imagined she hadn’t done anything at all. But she had, and so when she toured the campus along with the other frogs, Larissa, Lardo, the team manager, read her name on the sheet as Dex, her nickname on her high school hockey team, the name she’d said she would “prefer,” like names were something you preferred or didn’t, like some kind of fucking liberal. And when, a few days into preseason, Nursey had said Hey, wait, what’s your first name, Dex had lied, had straight up fucking pulled something out of her ass, because she was a liar, fundamentally, said Will because she liked the name, because she hadn’t paid enough attention when they told her untruth was a sin.
They all knew it was a lie. Obviously they knew. They weren’t fucking blind, were they: she kept her hair short and played as well as anyone else, was 5’10” and scored as many goals in practice as the other freshmen on the team, but even if they pretended to be, they weren’t actually morons. They knew what she was doing, and they let her get away with it, kept letting her get away with it like it didn’t matter. It drove her crazy.
The worst part was that she liked it. The worst part was that she was happier than she could remember ever being, even given the things that sucked, the distance from home and awful professors, her horrible d-partner and all the new, confusing teammates. The worst part was that she liked it, liked the stupid coddling, the dumb pretense. She liked being treated as a fucking child, as anything other than a gross, delusional, asshole freak. She liked being treated as a boy.
Once, in the locker room after a game, someone—Holster—had said, Hey, Dex, what’s your middle name, and Dex, stupid, startled, had answered automatically, Alexandra. He’d frozen as soon as the word had left his mouth, hating himself, hating Holster, wanting to disappear, and then Chowder had said, Oh, no way, my uncle’s name is Alexander, and Bitty said, mine too, and Ransom said, I have a cousin, and suddenly they were laughing about how everyone had an uncle Alex, and a few weeks later Chowder mentioned offhandedly that both his parents were only children.
It was like that. Everyone treating Dex like a little kid, a porcelain doll, except they chirped him and argued with him and checked him at practices just as hard—he couldn’t know for sure, but he paid close attention—as they did everyone else. And Dex was stupid, stupid for liking all of it, stupid for going along with the pretense, stupid for wanting to, thinking she ever could be, a real, a normal boy.