Mistakes were made today

Lei's friends bombarded him with dresses on his birthday. Like, join the Fashion Club once and make mainly dresses and suddenly everybody thinks you're into the stuff. He liked explosions too. Didn't mean he wanted a whole closet of the stuff.

He was going to try one out.

What could it hurt, right? These things were apparently his anyway, so it wasn't that weird, probably. He pulled out his mysterious gift giver's dress, which was a cute blue and white dress with a bow, and tried it on. As a joke, of course. This whole experience was funny, and weird, and nothing about it should be as serious as it felt like being alone in an empty room.

He put it on and stood in front of the vanity Izzy gave him. This didn't feel right. Or, no, it did, it was just — it shouldn't. Even the dress seemed to agree. It didn't fit right, like it was loose and tight at all the wrong edges, and he just — just wanted to cry, really. Lei gathered up his hair and let it fall in front, trying to obscure those weird angles, and that looked... fine? He wondered if there was a part of him that was brave enough to...

From his room to the kitchen and back. That shouldn't be too hard, right? Blood renewed with newfound confidence, he exited his room and kept his head low, sticking near the wall and walking with slow, deliberate steps. He got to the end of the hallway with minimal interaction until —

"Hey, is that Feng? What the hell is he wearing?"

A few guys in his class stood from their place in the student lounge to get a better look at him, and Lei's everything practically screamed NO NO NO NO. He bolted it out of there, almost tripping on the heels Clarence gave him, and locked himself in his room.

When his back met the door and safety began registering back in his head, he slid down and curled into a ball, shaking and sobbing a little, overwhelmed. That was scary — that was... No more of this. No more. He was going to burn all these dresses and mail all his friends really rude letters about being the kind of assholes that would give their male friend a bunch of dresses for his birthday. Lei took off his heels and set them aside, feeling like garbage.


@"Kait"

Lei's blood ran cold with fear when he felt the knocking at the other side, internally preparing for the added insults and possible bullying if they chose to knock down the divide.

"I saw you in the hallway. Just wanted to make sure you're alright."

Chloe?

The fear washed away, but his hands were still trembling. He was dragging out this silence for too long and it was starting to get suspicious. Voice cracking, he said, "I'm... I-I'm fine..." Sniff. Aw, shit. He wiped his tears off. "S-Sorry. That whole thing in the Hallway was weird."

A pause.

Trusting people was kind of hard right now, and he and Chloe weren't that close... but if there was one thing he knew about the girl, it was that she wasn't cruel, at least not to people who didn't deserve it.

Did he deserve it? No, of course not. Possibly.

"G-give me a moment." He stood up on wobbly legs and quickly changed into his space PJs, taking a moment to check his own reflection. His eyes were definitely puffy. So that sucked. He put his hair up in a ponytail and opened the door, checking the hallway for those guys. "You can come in... Did a lot of people see me?"

Now that they were alone and Lei was pulled into a warm, safe hug, he could feel all of the things he violently shoved beneath the surface rise back up like a bad burrito you ate the other day. He sobbed.

"No, no, it's ok. I get why they'd do that? I mean... it — it was weird." His voice faltered a bit. He had always wondered why it was all right to shame people that did different things, but that was just how the way things were, he supposed. Maybe if he were a lot more normal and stuck to his place, he would... "It's my fault."

"Why would..." Lei's eyes widened, and then a soft, "Oh."

He didn't know what to do with that information. The gut reaction was that's weird, but that was how he viewed himself, still growing out of it, too. He didn't know he and Chloe had that much in common.

And Chloe. Chloe was fine, wasn't she? Chloe had all these cool demon organization business, she was in the council, and she had friends. He didn't know what to say. Maybe there was something missing here, because it couldn't be that accepted, not after he heard those people make a big deal of it after. After he gathered his thoughts for a bit, he decided to ask her the biggest question in his mind, and it was, "Was it hard, when you decided you weren't the boy everybody thought you were?"