A sister and a family support a curious twelve-year-old in a newfound exploration of gender.

CHAPTER 43
When I got home after the shift, there was something that had been niggling my memory right from my first sight of that news report. I pulled it up on iPlayer on my telly, and paused it at one of the clearer views of the team and scanned along their faces. They were a right mix of types, some clearly more ‘physical’ than others.

“How can that woman be so hot?” Marcus asked the world at large as he drank from his tumbler.

“Who?” His friend, Paul, asked.

“Over there. With the long straight platinum blond hair and eyes so green we can see their color across the haze of the dance floor.”

“You’re really into this girl? Oh, her. Wow. That hourglass figure must have been work.”

“You think?”

“Maybe. Why is no one near her?”

“She’s in a league all her own. Deservedly.” He drank again.

“Or they all know she has chlamydia.”

CHAPTER 18
I watched the two of them dancing round each other, and felt my worries start to ease. Jacky had timed her visit to coincide with Mary’s summer break, and I would have two weeks in the middle of it, but it had still been a worry, leaving them together without me there to moderate, or perhaps shush one of them when I could see a secret about to be divulged that I would rather keep private. A bit like having your parents to stay, knowing that as soon as you leave them alone, they’ll be looking for your more embarrassing possessions.

I found a jacket that remembers a missing girl, and it’s rewriting my body one day at a time. Now I have to solve that girl's murder before the coat finishes its work and I disappear into someone else’s life.

Mark Lansing never wanted to stand out. He was perfectly happy disappearing into a football huddle with the rest of the team until one play made him the talk of the town. Thrust into a spotlight he never wanted, every choice can reshape his future, and every decision could transform him in ways he never believed possible. Mark’s destiny will be determined on the field … assuming he can figure out how to dress the part.

CHAPTER 42
Not good news at all, I thought, wondering if we were going to see a repeat of schooltime fallings-out, where friends were pushed hard to take a side, pick the ‘real’ friend over the ‘false’ one, but Amina had been clear on that issue. Same people, just no longer a couple.

The weather wasn’t helping, my birthday having flown past as unnoticed as I could manage. There was too much bound up in such an occasion, none of it calling for celebration. I was off the next day, so it was another evening of tears before and during bedtime, as well as waking up in a chair again, as the light slowly emerged outside my living room window.

Chapter One

Calibration

"Motor response is still three milliseconds, too slow."

It quickly became routine, as she more than pulled her weight around the house. Two of us would go to work, One would go to school, another to college, and the last would wander around Perth, gradually getting to know the layout. She seemed particularly attached to King’s Park, often borrowing a pair of binoculars and a bird guide for the day.

CHAPTER 41
As we walked off towards a nearby pub, Elf and Wildcat drifted back so that they were walking either side of me.

“Elf says good things about you, Jen. You ever ride?”

“No, not my thing, really”

“Well, be welcome at the clubhouse---ah”

Chapter Two: The Wish

James was up at six forty-five.

Not a decision — just what happened when you stopped setting an alarm and let four years of early calls do what they’d been trained to do. He lay still for a moment in the grey morning light of the front bedroom, listening to the house. Window open. Curtain moving. Gull somewhere busy already.