A couple months pass.

Today's different. One of the eighth graders announced that he— that she's a girl now. Some of the other students made fun of her, but other students suck, he knows that already.

The more important discovery today is that apparently you can just decide to be a girl!?!?

He's gonna have to think about that.

A few weeks more pass.

He's not sure how he feels about being a boy, but he's starting to think he doesn't like it. 

He doesn't really do most of his homework, but passes the tests in class. He argues with his parents about it a lot. It's just so frustrating, what's it even for?

It can't really just be to "get into a good school," can it?

Eh. It doesn't matter for now, he'll get back to it later.

That night, he talks to his parents about not liking being a boy, and wondering if he might like being a girl better.

They're confused, at first. Then shocked. He's ten, where's this coming from? Where were the signs?

But eventually they decide it can't hurt anything to try, so they suggest trying it out at home. They'll buy a couple skirts, and try using feminine pronouns at home and letting her wear those around the house, and if she still likes it when her birthday comes around then they'll talk to the school for her, and talk about names.

Her parents noticed how much she seems to like being a girl at home, so for her eleventh birthday they sit down with her and go through a bunch of baby name books together. She seems drawn to uncommon names, eventually settling on Sable, but her parents want something a bit more normal as well, so they give her Valerie as a middle name.

The rest of her gifts are some cute shirts and skirts, and some hair ties. Her parents sure know how to stick to a theme.

Telling her classmates is not going well. 

Between Claire calling her a gross freak, Michael calling her a faggot, Joseph pulling her skirt, and the other kids laughing at her, today's honestly pretty terrible. She's managing to hold in her tears for now, but she's really not sure why she's still putting up with school.

She cries herself to sleep that night.

Her mom tries to talk her out of transitioning at breakfast the next morning, asking why she's trying to do something that exposes her to so much abuse, especially in the deep south where they live.

Sable huffs that she doesn't see the point of anything if she doesn't get to be herself while doing it, and if she doesn't have nice people she's doing it for. She stomps back up to her room and skips school that day.

Three months later, the other students haven't gotten any better.

Sable skips school every few weeks, and she regularly has screaming arguments with her parents about the homework she hasn't done and her lack of motivation. They want her to just buckle down.

Things finally come to a head one day, and she tearfully demands to know what the point of it all is.

The answer of "get good grades, eventually get into a good college, graduate with a good degree, and get a well-paying job," does not improve her state of mind.

That... really is all pointless. It's just an endless cycle of pointless work to get pointless rewards in the company of people who hate you for trying to be yourself. It's never actually going to be worthwhile, never going to mean anything to anyone. Something breaks inside her.

She screams. She sobs. She storms back up to her room, cries to herself for hours.

Eventually, in the early afternoon, she leaves the house unnoticed, catches a streetcar, heads down to walk along the river.

In the distance, washed up on the bank of the river near a bend, is a large piece of what appears to be some kind of driftwood, human-made once, but now water-worn and old.

Huh. Driftwood's often pretty. And it's kind of melancholy. Fits her mood.

She hops down from the ledge to the riverbank proper to take a closer look.

As she gets closer, the driftwood resolves into something that looks like it was torn off of a sailing ship in the midst of a terrible accident. It's a piece of a wall from somewhere on the ship, likely belowdecks, and the piece of wall is mostly surrounding a large wooden door, warped slightly from the water soaking through the wood. It smells slightly of salt and the ocean. 

When she gets close enough, she can see the words "Be Sure" roughly scratched into the top of the doorframe, looking as though graffitied by a sailor with a sharp knife. 

Oh it's pretty. She wishes she had a camera. 

She steps closer, running her fingers across the carving. Hm, does it still open? She tries the door.

It will take some pulling, but the door will open. 

The ancient wood seems to be covering the mouth of a small cave, there's a worn pathway that Sable could easily fit through at her current size, and there's faint daylight coming out of the other end of it. The air smells strongly salty, with a hint of seaweed and fish on the breeze. 

Huh. That's.. not what should be behind this door. There should be the rocks of the riverbank, not a cave, and definitely not light and sea breeze. Oh she has to check this out.

Down into the cave she goes. It's even Sable-sized!

The tunnel is not short, but nor is it too long. The cave is nearly smooth, with dark rock, and somewhat but not perfectly round. The air continues to smell of brine as she makes her way through the passage, the sunlight at the other side getting brighter and brighter, the nuances of fish and seaweed and sunlight-on-sand growing stronger against the scent of salt. 

Well. This definitely doesn't fit the normal rules of what she thought was possible, but she didn't like those rules very much anyway. She rushes faster through the cave, eager to see what's beyond.

She emerges from the other end of the tunnel about midway up a hill. The hill is rocky, with shrubs here and there, clinging to life as best they can. Beyond her, down the hill she can see where the hill flattens out into a sandy beach area and an ocean beyond, vast and wide and dark, the waves crashing onto the shore with a loud splash and the smell of seawater. Birds circle overhead, arguing with one another as they watch for something edible in the deep waters beyond. 

Sable is very sure she's not in Kansas Louisiana anymore. There should not be an ocean less than a day's walk from New Orleans, and certainly not walking inland. 

Hopefully this place is better than the meaningless garbage of school and grades.

She walks down the hill. It's pretty, here. 

The hill gently flattens out into the beach. There are more plants as they get closer to the ground, though much of what she does see is lichen on the rocks when they're not slippery with seaweed. 

The waves crashing onto the shore with regularity are tall. Definitely taller than she is, and they smell strongly of salt and seaweed. 

It's low tide, and so there are some areas where the beach has not yet turned to sand, and there are small tide pools full of very small fish and little crabs, as well as some floating jellyfish and quite a few tentacled creatures, including squid and octopi. 

"Octopi! And squid! Tentacles are so cool." She crouches down near a tide pool, grinning. "Hello, little sea creatures."

There are lots of small fish swimming around, nibbling at the plants growing against the rocks and the seaweed floating at the top of the pool. There's also a few shelled creatures, including some snails and hermit crabs, crawling around inside. 

As she watches, a clump of rock up against the side of the pool snakes out a tentacle along the floor of the pool, grabs a sea snail, and pulls it close to it. The clump of rock becomes much more smooth and octopus-like as it uses another tentacle to pull the snail out of the shell, and move it into its mantle to eat. The fish near the previously nondescript clump of rock scatter, but are unable to leave the pool to escape -- but the octopus seems happy enough with its current meal. 

"I'll leave you to your meal," she says as she stands with a smile. It's kinda tempting to see what it feels like to get hit with a wave bigger than she is, but she'd rather not get smashed against the rocks. She walks further along the shore. It's so calming to watch the waves.

For about 10 minutes worth of walking, the beach is more or less the same as it was before. Then, in the distance, she can see a green smudge of trees, growing up out of the water where the land meets the shore, and somewhat beyond the shore. 

As she gets a bit closer she can see that they're strange-looking trees, with their leaves way up high and their trunks really more like branches, splitting apart and coming together almost like very thick roots before they meet the waterline. It's hard to see where one tree ends and another begins. 

"Wow," she murmurs. Those trees look so different. She's never seen trees like this before. She keeps walking, examining them curiously as she goes, and then looking onward to what she'll find next along the shore.

Some part in the back of her mind has made a note of where the nearest fish-containing tide pool is, and where the trees are, in pursuit of dinner later if need be. Mostly, though, she keeps walking.

The closer she gets to them, the more she might notice that the smell of salt and fish is being cut through with another smell, somewhat reminiscent of rotten eggs. There is some kind of fruit on the trees, though. It's green, sprouting up out of a set of leaves almost like petals, about apple-sized. The fruits very well might be edible, but she'd need to try them and see. 

Where the trees meet the shore the shore curves inwards, and if she peers past them she can see a small bay up against the large hill that she earlier climbed down. There's a big hole in the hill, essentially a cave, that the water is in. The trees and land around the bay protect it from the waves, and so the water is placid and clear. 

"Oooh."

She heads toward the bay. She paid enough attention in school that she recognizes the smell of sulfur, and it doesn't really bother her. The bay, though, looks cool. She wants a closer look.

The bay is visible now only because the slope of the hill has lessened significantly as she's walked around the edge of this island. She can go through the strange trees to get there (and deal with the sulfury smell), or she can try to clamber over some of the rocky hillside to go around the trees.