Dreadnought (Nemesis, #1)

by April Daniels

Obviously I can’t tell anyone about this. If it got back to Dad, he’d kill me. He’s obsessed with “making a good man” out of me. “You’re a man now,” he says as his justification for friggin’ everything. He wants me to be strong and boisterous and popular. It’s bad enough I’m quiet and like to be alone, bad enough I don’t like sports even after he forced me to join the football team, bad enough I couldn’t care less about cars. If he found out I might be a girl…well, I don’t really want to think about what might happen. The dirty little secret about growing up as a boy is if you’re not any good at it, they will torture you daily until you have the good graces to kill yourself. The posturing and the dominance games are almost inescapable. It’s hard to walk from one end of school to the other without getting shoulder-checked in the halls. Locker rooms are a forgotten circle of Hell. God forbid anyone ever catch you sketching flowers in class, or reading a book that’s “for girls.” Maybe for people who really are boys, that stuff works. Maybe it fits for them. But I don’t get to fit. Not anywhere. The one thing I must never do is try to fit in with the girls. I don’t know what would happen if I tried, but I have a screaming animal instinct that tells me not to even consider it. When I turn eighteen, if I haven’t killed myself yet, I’m going to move out of the house and go on hormones. Maybe save up for surgery. But for now, what I have is nail polish.