Manifestation
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Girls can wear jeans.

Girls can grow their hair out and they can cut it short. Wear short skirts and baggy pants, high heels and combat boots, evening gowns and business suits. Thongs, boxers, and boy-shorts. It's okay to be a boy; for girls, it's like a promotion.

Just so long as they're not seriously considering switching gender roles.

For all that the sexual revolution did, terms are still one or the other. Men and women may have equal rights, but they are still men, and women, with social norms and expectations. Words still divide them; he or she, blue or pink. The bathrooms are still designated pants, or skirts. People base their actions towards another person based on two things: their apparent gender, and how they conform to the stereotypes of said gender. And when their apparent gender really isn't so apparent, it makes for wonderful gossip.

Ryan Thackary came home smelling of summer in late July and spicy masculinity. It clung to his plain t-shirt and his hair unpleasantly until a vigorous shower, in which his skin was scrubbed pink and the roots of his short dark hair were refreshingly tender. As he passed with a towel around his hips, the bathroom mirror and it's florescent glare were nothing he would spare more than a passing glance - he knew of all the blemishes that violently white light would retort back at him, how the clandestine beauty of his eyes would be blanketed by dark bags and overcast by a bushy brow line.

The peculiar vanity mirror in his room, watching him as he dressed, wasn't any more good-natured. Ryan had always known the vanity was in the mirror, the way it portrayed his reflection. It would started pleasantly with a more appeal eggshell complexion beneath the golden overhead light that rippled idly with the whirl of the fan. It nit-picked at the details - how his lips were chapped and raw at the corners, his hair was ratty, his eyebrows nearly connected above the bridge of a hooked nose. His lashes may be flattering to those English-green irises, but there was a ring beneath his eyes for each one of his sixteen years. He looked like a bushy raccoon, half-starved and undernourished with those thin cheeks and weak lips. And while it mocked him, he could only distantly ponder it's very existence, sitting beside the dresser as if ordinary boys kept vanity mirrors in their rooms.

Not that Ryan was ordinary. Well, he knew he was, in the most mundane and forgettable sort of way.  He did feel out of place, however, and he did leave that mirror at his dresser's side. Not out of his own vanity, but because he often meditated on his own reflection. He was quite sure that this was the way everyone else perceived him: all blemishes and big-browed. It was strange to him; that uncomfortable-in-your-own-skin sort of strange, and agonizingly frustrating. It was as if he had been designated a label in kindergarten, when everyone - friends, peers, teachers, even parents - began their ever-fickle judgmental process that would follow a child into their adult life and beyond. It was a label in which you were expected to live up to every. day. of the rest of your life. And if you didn't? Well, that was all the incentive the brutish boy of the playground ever needed to rub your pretty face in the dirt.

At sixteen, he was a bit taller than the other boys. Too lanky to be much of a threat, but with a slouch and scruffy hair and uncommitted eyes, Ryan could hide away in loose-fitting clothes and be categories with the sort of students who avoids their own label with marijuana. A substance he wouldn't touch, but would accept the cultural reaction to - both the condescending attitude of his peers and the suspicious prejudice of his teachers - because he was usually left alone. Ryan knew it wasn't the real him that was reflected out to people, or that the mirrors reflected back at him, but it was something people could understand.

He never let his parents have time to worry about drug use, however. They were more concerned with the subtle, legal, unthreatening things, like the way he grew out his nails, or the whimsical collection of preteen-colored make-up on his dresser. It wasn't something Ryan really cared making the effort to hide. Nor was it something his parents really cared to talk about, and bewildered by his shamelessness, he was left relatively alone to indulge in his own guilty pleasure.

In those hours after the day had ended, when Ryan would find himself waiting for sleep like a runaway at an unfrequented bus station, he would sit before that vain mirror. He experimented, learned how to change that reflection that never suited him, manipulating it. Not really making it the way he knew it should, but the slightest bit better, and not just in the means of cleaner skin and mollified eyebrows. With these colors he could paint that thin awkwardness of his face to look less brittle, perhaps even pretty. He even felt he looked younger, jaw shaved and smooth, not that it ever grew much hair in the first place.

It was on a night like this that he met her. At a very uneventful three-in-the-morning, while wearily picking after a loose hair on a shadow blush. He glanced up at his musing, and found and intriguing angle, or maybe an out-of place shadow... or someone else entirely.

Someone he'd never seen before.

Ryan didn't glance over his shoulder - something sinking in him told him he'd find nothing but a lonely room behind him. It was what was before him that mattered anyway, and he leaned in closer. Her face was thin - cheekbones smoothing down into a delicate chin adorned with luscious, que-sera-sera lips. Hair long and wavy; the warm light color of a mature beauty, found in mysterious women sitting aloof in ritzy restaurants. She watched Ryan back through soft, familiar eyes and curling lashes, framed by perfectly with subtle gold and sculpted brows that flowed down into the contours of a charming nose. She smiled at him and he could only stare. She was breathtaking, so swore a stirring recognition somewhere above his diaphragm. She could do everything, like the world unraveled at her feet - out of view but likely put upon the pedestals of classic heels. To her, looking like a woman wasn't degrading; her beauty was a gift, a power, a thing to be idolized and appreciated. Ryan opened his mouth, wanting to speak with her, but found his voice had failed. He'd found something - someone. Someone remarkable, yet Ryan had no idea how to approach her. He couldn't speak, and when he reached up, his zealous fingertips found only the surface of the mirror.

Her fingers were reaching up to him, however, each matching slender tip baring the crescent of a long, lacquered nail. Ryan still wanted to know more.

She smiled again, almost sadly; but there is sadness in beauty. Lovingly, like a sister and a nurturer, she leaned forward to give Ryan a reassuring kiss. But all Ryan felt was smooth, flat glass, as cold as reality.