April.
He was still in the AP classes that he'd started in September, and he was passing them, and his essay on Frankenstein — the one Jess had suggested, the one about the creature being more human than Victor — had gotten an A and a note from Hartwell that said Most insightful argument I've received in ten years of teaching this text. He had read the note with the modest satisfaction of someone who understands that being seen accurately by anyone is not nothing.
His mother had met Callum.
The meeting had been exactly what the meeting needed to be, which was: Diane Vasquez sitting across from Callum Thayer in the farmhouse kitchen and asking him, directly and without anger, to explain what he had done to her child and what it meant going forward. Callum had answered everything honestly, including the things that were uncomfortable. Diane had listened with the specific quality of a woman who is a professional assessor of risks. At the end she had stood up, and shaken his hand, and said: "You'll teach him everything he needs to know." Not a question. An instruction.
"Already started," Callum said.
"Good," she said. And came home and cried for about an hour in her bedroom, which she thought Mare didn't know about, and which Mare knew about because he could hear through walls now, and which he had held privately and not raised, because some processing needs to be private.
The voice had fully settled. Not just lower — full, natural, his. He no longer thought about it unless someone who hadn't heard him since October heard him now and reacted, and the reactions had stopped being the worst part of his day. They were just data: people recalibrating their categories. He could handle people recalibrating their categories. He had done it himself, repeatedly, over the past six months, and it turned out it was survivable.
Jess called him he now without thinking about it, which was the milestone he hadn't known he was waiting for until the day she said something that used the pronoun in mid-sentence and didn't pause, and he had thought: there it is.
Dom, who was still his friend and had meant it, had said, at some point in February: "Can I ask you something?" and Mare had said yes, and Dom had said, "Was any of it real? The — us, before?" And Mare had thought about it carefully and said: "The part where I like you as a person is real. The rest of it was me trying to be something I'd been told to be." And Dom had nodded and said "Okay" and "For what it's worth, I think this version of you is better," which was awkward but genuine, and they had shaken hands because they were boys who didn't quite know how to hug yet, and that was fine.
He stood at the bathroom mirror one April morning, the window open because April in Oregon meant rain and rain meant wet earth and he could smell the earth from three blocks away and it was magnificent, and he looked at himself.
Five foot six. Dark hair. Jaw that had settled into something recognizably his own. Eyes that were dark brown with that pale catch of light in certain angles. Voice that was low and true. Shoulders that fit the shirts he'd started buying.
His great-great-grandfather Mateo had stood in a mirror somewhere once and looked at himself after the wolf had done its work. Had taken a name. Had run with a pack until he was ninety-one, and the pack remembered him.
He thought about names.
He had been thinking about it since December, in a low background way, and the thinking had gradually assembled something.
"Marco," he said, to the mirror. The name his father had considered for him before his mother had won on Mara. The name that had always been running parallel. The one that had the same vowels, the same root, the same family sound, but was his.
He said it again. The mirror had no opinion. The rain said nothing. The earth smell came through the window.
"Marco Vasquez," he said.
It landed exactly where it was supposed to land.
He grabbed his jacket. He had to get to school.