We were girls then, Kim and Rae and me. We were all girls and we didn’t like it. Every night I had dreams about planes crashing into my girlhood, bombs dropping onto my girlhood, tanks crushing it under their deep chain treads, talons tearing off my girlhood and flying away with it and tossing it into the hammering waves.

When I told those dreams to Kim and Rae, Kim snorted, a juicy snort that sent droplets of spit onto her notebook. She was the biggest of us and the closest to leaving her girlhood, and it made her cavalier. “Fucking Casey,” she said. “Give it a rest. In a couple of months you’re going to wonder why you made such a big fucking deal about it.”

Rae scratched at the half-healed friendship bracelet tattoo her parents had flipped out on her for getting. “It’s a big deal right now. It’s a big deal for Casey.”

“And don’t swear so much, Kim,” I added. “My parents will hear.”

“Sounds like a girl problem,” Kim said. She stuck her fingers in her mouth, pulled out a stiff hunk of gum, and flicked it toward the trash can. It missed.

“Aren’t dreams supposed to be wish fulfillment?” Rae wondered. She rubbed her socked feet together, one red sock with candy canes, one pink sock with ice cream sundaes. Both the candy canes and the ice cream sundaes wore smiling faces.

“I mean, yes. I wish I could stop being a girl,” I said. “Not next month. Right now.”

“Violently,” Kim said.

I was sitting on the floor, on a pillow from my bed, which had a Little Mermaid pillowcase worn threadbare by years of dealing with my head. I pulled it out from under me and whacked it against the leg of the desk.

“Pillow fights are for girls,” Kim said.

I whacked my arm against the desk instead. It hurt, because it was a girl arm with limp muscles and a small bone running down the centre.

“Ouch. Let me see,” Rae said.

But because I was a girl, it didn’t leave a mark.

In early June, Kim became a truck.

“Oh my God!” I heard her yelling outside my window. My Beauty and the Beast alarm clock hadn’t gone off yet.

I flung open my strawberry-printed curtains and saw Kim in my back yard, doing wheelies between the swing set and sandbox. The turf and mud kicked up from Kim’s tires landed all over the sun-bleached plastic sand toys and the cracked pink seats of the swings.

I ran outside. “You did it! Wow!”

I didn’t know much about trucks, but she was a pretty jacked one, with big tires that had lots of tread. Her cab bounced around as she rocked up over my old teeter totter, splintering it.

“Maybe quiet down the motor a bit,” I said. “My parents are still asleep.”

“I can’t!” she said. “I don’t even think I have a catalytic converter.”

She left my yard via the rear gate, rolling right over it, and roared away down the lane with a chunk of our chain link fence caught on her mud flap.

“See you at soccer,” I called after her, but I didn’t think she heard me.

It took way longer than I thought I could stand, but in late July, I became a gun.

It would have been cooler if I was a machine gun. I was more of a standard handgun. I could only shoot one bullet at a time, and I wasn’t made for war.

I complained about it to Kim. “Like, at least I could have been one of those 3D printed ones. My serial number hasn’t even been filed off.”

“Sounds like someone needs a visit to the shooting range,” she taunted. She was busy driving over a row of cars that had been lined up like sardines in a tin. “Go shoot some paper targets like a bitch-ass girl.” Under her huge, beefy tires, windshields crumpled into heaps of blue-green cubes.

I was so annoyed, I shot off a couple of random rounds. One of them went through the siding and drywall of a house and through the shoulder of a grandfather who was watching television.

“Oops,” I said. “I didn’t want to hurt that guy.”

“Chill out, he didn’t even die,” Kim said. “Go be something else, if you’re going to whine so much. Go be a chest freezer or like, a laundromat washing machine.”

She was living her best life, crushing those cars. She turned around and went back over them, crushing them some more.

“I don’t want to be those things,” I said.

“Negative Nancy,” Kim said. “You’re all about what you don’t want to be.”

She roared around the track, flinging mud.

I shot her in the chassis as she went by, but I don’t think she noticed.

In the fall Rae became a boy. He looked almost the same as he had before. He still had socks with cute kawaii food on them. He still had the tattoo of the friendship bracelet around his wrist.

“What’s the point?” I asked. “How is it different being a boy if you’re still you?”

“It’s better because you know I’m a boy,” Rae said.

“But you kept all your girl stuff,” I said.

“I kept all of my stuff,” Rae said. “I was always a boy, so it’s not just girl stuff.”

“But why keep anything?” I said. “Didn’t you have the desire to just, like, fire yourself into the sun?”

“I guess the change didn’t mean the same thing to me that it means to you,” he said.

He patted my titanium top tube. I was a $20,000 road racing bicycle just then, but I wasn’t loving it.

“I’m here for you whenever you need to talk,” he said.

I raced away at a blistering fifty-six kilometres per hour. But a tiny burr inside my rim wore down my tube until I got a puncture, still in sight of Rae’s house, so my exit wasn’t as dramatic as I would have liked.

I’d been machines, mostly: fancy machines, useful machines, machines nearly obsolete. I was getting the hang of choosing what to be, instead of having it handed to me. I spent a year as a rotary telephone, which was my favourite so far, because I got to hear a lot of conversations.

I listened to everyone talking about what they were. I got some ideas. I tried being an alligator, because it was cool and badass, but not a machine. Only I hated the taste of fish.

Rae asked me if I’d ever been something uncool. I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I had nothing to lose, so I tried being some random uncool things. A dinner roll, the white kind that comes in bags at the grocery store. A dime, not a rare one but a plain, slightly worn dime from only a couple of years ago. A video game console, which I guessed some people did find cool, but since I wasn’t one of those people, it was boring.

I began to despair. I became a syringe and had to watch someone overdose while I sagged out of the necrotizing skin on their arm. That fucked me up some.

I became a rock and sat under the sun and rain and sun and rain and sun and rain.

I even went back to being a girl. Trying for a hard reset. Casey, back in town! Casey, in her old bedroom, running her girl-soft fingertips over her worn plush rabbit. She had loved that rabbit. She hadn’t even thought about taking it with her. I couldn’t be her anymore, even when I was.

I watched Kim doing truck stuff: driving through muddy creeks, racing other trucks, hosting tailgate parties. She was kind of a jackass, but she really liked being a truck.

I watched Rae doing boy stuff like painting his nails, reading to his friends’ kids, and going for walks to look at birds. He was a really nice boy, and he always had been.

It finally hit me: I wasn’t going to figure out what I wanted to be until I stopped being what I didn’t want to be. Simple, right?

I’d said it to Rae, years ago; didn’t he just want to fire himself into the sun? He didn’t, but I did.

I probably should have planned a trajectory, asked an astronomer. But I’ve always been impulsive.

I’m way out on my journey now, speaking into the void, in case there’s anyone else out here.

I’m traveling at 28,000 kilometres an hour. It will take me seven months to reach the sun. It’s been only a month since I started. I still have so far to go.

I’m getting closer, though. I can feel the warmth on my face, and it feels like hope.

© 2026 Claire Humphrey