Gender Bender

Olive Young can barely feel the breath in her lungs as she bolts out of the office, clutching the navy paper folder tightly in her arms. Welcome to Millennium is scrawled across the front in golden cursive, and she subconsciously traces over the indented letters with her thumb. She can’t believe it. When she walked into Director Lee’s office – all five-foot-four, one-hundred-ten pounds of her – she had been sure he’d send her straight back to her home, nearly a thousand miles away. But somehow, she made it. She was in Millennium. After running away from home, opening her fake bank account, hiring a sketchy guy to forge some academic transcripts for her, and riding many, many trains … everything had paid off. She reaches into her pocket and takes out her phone, letting out a sigh of relief as she glimpses the picture on her lock screen. All of it … for you, Parker. She drinks in the strange, musty scent of the halls. She’s going to have to get used to it. Millennium Academy, a school in the upper echelons of wealthy society, built to house and educate hundreds of rich yet troublesome teenagers whose families simply couldn’t be bothered to deal with them. It’s home to tens of famous alumni, renowned for its long-standing traditions and Socratic-style curriculum, and a boaster of numerous nationally acclaimed sports teams. And an all-boys’ school. ___ The dorms are located in multiple buildings behind the school, and Olive’s assignment is in one called “Mustard.” She’s not sure why, but all of them are named after variations of colors. There’s a “Teal” and a “Vermillion” and even a “Alabaster” as well. She swipes into the dorm building with her new ID. Every time she looks at her picture, she has to do a double take. It looks so unlike her – her long, silky black hair replaced by a disheveled bob; her eyebrows darkened as naturally as possible with the darkest shade of her eyeshadow; her narrow shoulders draped by the smallest size of Millennium’s navy-colored sweater vest. Still, more than anything, she’s grateful everything worked. She had never been a tomboy, and other than hanging out with Parker, she didn’t have much experience with boys. But somehow, she’d managed to fool enough people to get this far. The building is relatively empty, given that it’s around the late afternoon – according to Director Lee, the boys were probably out exploring the city or finishing their homework for the day. Olive makes her way towards a silver elevator and hits the button for the third and highest floor. It opens up to a long corridor with doors interspersed through both sides of the walls. She walks, looking at the metallic gray numbers attached to each door until she finally reaches one that has 36M-P. Her dorm lay behind a manual keypad attached to the lock of a heavy wooden door. Olive tentatively enters the code typed in bold ink on the cream-colored paper she’d fished out from her initiation folder. 21609. Ironically, the numbers almost create his birthday. Only he was born on May 16th and in the year 2003. Close enough. Everything reminds me of you. She pushes the door open effortfully with the side of her body. As she stumbles into the suite, she’s instantly hit by a strange odor – something like a mixture of sweat and old food and mold. She winces from the abruptness of the stench, but it isn’t unbearable. Sometimes, Parker’s room smelled like this, too – just maybe not this bad. The suite is a sort of miniature living room: a long, tan couch and two sofa chairs surround a small wooden coffee table immediately next to the entrance. Books and crumpled papers cover the entire length of the table, along with a few empty – but suspiciously saucy – plates and Styrofoam cups. A TV has been chaotically plugged in at the other side of the room so that the chairs are facing it. A number of game consoles are shoved into the nooks of the TV stand. Olive stands there, staring at the place for a moment, taking it all in. She hadn’t expected a suite – then again, she hadn’t really expected anything. But the room so obviously screams “boys” that she doesn’t know how to react. “Hey, there!” She jumps, whirling around at the sound of the voice. Behind her stands an Asian boy with what she can only describe as the most “e-boy” haircut possible: black locks parted straight down the middle, the strands separated by his forehead having been dyed a lime green. “New suitemate?” he purrs, slinking towards her. He circles her before breathing in an aggressively near her hair. “Brilliant! Fresh meat.” Olive glances around him and realizes that she’d forgotten to close the door to the suite behind her. Now, two more boys appear around the corner of the doorframe. One of them is golden-haired, pretty, with a round face and round blue eyes covered by an even rounder pair of wire-framed glasses. The other is a raven-haired beast of a guy – nearly a foot taller than her – with cat-like amber eyes. His pale skin is striking beneath the darkness of his hair, which falls like curtains to the tips of his eyes. He is … really handsome. “Oh,” the blond one says, pausing at the doorway. “Is this him?” The black-haired boy frowns at her. “Guys, it’s our newest victim,” the Asian boy says, his voice brimming with excitement. He grabs her by the shoulders and ushers her towards the newcomers at the door. “Isn’t he the cutest little thing?” Olive stands there, blinking at them, confused and disgruntled by the sudden amount of attention she’s receiving. “Knock it off, JC,” the blond boy huffs, shoving the Asian boy aside to enter the suite. He brushes past Olive and plops onto the couch horizontally, taking up the entire length. “Sit down, and let’s have a chat,” he says to her. “We’re your new roommates.”