The next morning I ended up going shopping. Papa had credit with the biggest of the Mayin banks, and he had given me permission to use it if I needed anything. He trusted me not to abuse it, and I knew very well that it would be taken away if I didn't behave. Of course, since he tended to spoil me, he had also told me I could occasionally get something I wanted. I had a card from the bank, and a note signed by Papa stating that I was allowed to use the card, if I proved who I was with the ID card I had been forced to get when I went to the mainland.

There were things that I needed. Not school supplies, since the school was more than willing to provide those, and not clothes. I had plenty of clothing, since Papa and I had gone shopping for that before I left, and I really wasn't looking forward to when I would have to go clothes shopping on my own. I needed things to put on the walls on my side of the room, because they were just too boring.

I also wanted to try and get some parts for the old computer that Papa had gotten me as my going away present. It was from before the apocalypse, and I had absolutely no idea how it had survived so intact, or where Papa had found it. None of the parts worked, just like any other piece of electronic equipment that went through that time, but I hoped that the data might still be there if I replaced them. It was going to be my own personal project, because I was fascinated by computers and wanted to see just how they had changed in the long, long time it had taken us to rebuild after the apocalypse.

It was going to be hard. I knew that already, especially since I didn't really recognize most of the ruined parts in the machine. I had figured out what most of them were, but they were quite a bit different from the parts that I was familiar with. I realized that it was going to take me a very long time to be able to rebuild the computer, and that I was going to have to teach myself much more than I already knew to do it, but I didn't care about that. It was something that I wanted to do.

When I told Jula that I wanted to go shopping she told me that she wouldn't let me go into the city alone. She didn't think it was safe for me, and not just because I was young. I didn't know the city at all, and I wasn't too familiar with their way of life, so she wouldn't let me go out alone for at least a month, probably longer. Luckily, just as I was going to go back to my room, Alex approached her, for pretty much the same reason. He needed to go shopping.

He was wearing a pair of dark green pants that fit much the same way his pants the day before had, loose and just a little too long. I couldn't identify what they were made out of, but they looked soft, and quite comfortable. I could see his feet that day, since he had on a pair of black boots with thick soles, but his pants covered most of his boots. He had on a close fitting black t-shirt, with a long jacket the same color as his pants thrown over it. He had those same sunglasses on top of his head again, and his hair was still pulled back. I think it was right about then that I decided that I liked his fashion sense, though I wouldn't realize that I thought that until much later.

"Would you be willing to take Kiri with you, Alexander?" she asked him. "He needs to go out shopping, but he doesn't know the city. I don't want to let him go out alone."

"What kind of stuff do you need to get?" he asked me.

"Something to put on my walls," I replied. "I'm not sure just what yet, but they're a little boring right now. And some parts for a computer."

"What kind of parts?" he asked, with more than a little curiosity in his voice.

"Pretty much everything," I said, and he got a surprised look on his face. "I really need to look and see what I can get, because I'm not sure what I'll be able to use. I'm trying to rebuild a pre-apocalypse computer."

"That's going to cost you," he said.

"I was expecting that," I said. "I'm not really in a hurry to finish it."

"So, will you take him with you?" Jula asked him.

"Depends on whether he minds being dragged along while I go look for books and music or not," he replied.

"I don't," I said.

"Then sure," he said, and then he turned to me. "Come on, the bus gets here in about five minutes. We'll be walking if we don't make it in time."

"Have fun, boys," Jula said as I followed Alex to the front door of the dorm. "And Alexander, make sure you're not out too long. And don't make Kiri wait to long for you at the electronics store."

"I'll try," he said. She didn't see the smile on his face as he went through the door, though I did. Once we were outside he turned to me again. "I hope you're a mind mover, because you're probably going to have to drag me out of the electronics store, and I don't think you're big enough to do it without some kind of mayin power."

He was smiling, and he looked more than excited to have an excuse to go to an electronics store. I just smiled back at him. "I think Jula's going to be mad at us when we get back," I said.

"Why?"

"Because I've never really gotten a chance to shop on my own in an electronics store before," I said. "And you're probably going to have to drag me out to get me to leave."

"Oh," he said, and he sighed as he started walking toward the edge of the school campus, where the bus stop was located. "I think you're right."

I overdid it at the electronics store. Besides just looking for parts for the computer, and buying a few that I already knew I would need, I ended up buying a few interesting toys to play with. Unfortunately, two of them were quite expensive toys that Papa was probably going to get mad about. It wasn't anywhere near as expensive as some of the parts I would eventually need for the old computer, but it was still quite a bit of money.

I bought myself a used computer, one that actually worked, and a monitor to go with it. I made the excuse when I bought it that upgrading it and playing around with it would give me some experience when I really got down to business with the old one. And once I got it set up it I could use it for schoolwork. Of course, Papa probably wouldn't accept those excuses. He would know the real reason I bought it, because I just wanted to have it and play with it. I had the people at the electronics store deliver my purchases to the school, since the computer and monitor were a little too bulky to carry back myself.

Besides that, I didn't spend all that much money. I ended up buying a couple posters at a store that Alex recommended. The best way I could describe them would be swirly and colorful. They didn't actually feature any specific scene, just random swirls and whorls of color, and stuff like that. I thought they were pretty cool. I stuck to the ones that featured mostly blues and greens, except for one really cool blue and purple one. That way they would go with the bedding and curtains in the room.

I also bought myself a very large book on computers and a couple books just for fun at the bookstore, and one collection of music by a pre-apocalypse band that sounded interesting when I sampled it in the music store. The man behind the counter at the bookstore looked at me like I'd grown another head when I put the computer book down to buy it. He probably didn't think I would understand any of it.

Alex and I actually ended up getting back to the school much sooner than Jula thought we would. Neither of us had had to drag the other one out of the electronics store, not after I realized that I had spent too much already and needed to get out before I spent more. And the other three stores hadn't taken anywhere near as long. We were back before lunch, though barely, and we ended up heading straight to the dining room once we got into the building.

"Hello, Alexander, Kiri," Jula said as we walked into the room. "Did you get everything you needed?"

"Yeah," Alex said as I nodded. Then we took seats at the table, and I found myself more or less ignored by everyone except Jula during the meal. The same people were there who were there last night, so I was more or less the outsider. Everyone else knew each other, even if they weren't all as close as Ches, Lithubi, and Quunu seemed. I was too busy being excited about the computer to care. I just wanted to finish my meal and get up to my room to start diving into the computer book I had bought.

The door to my room was open when I got up there. That bothered me. I hadn't locked it, since Jula hadn't given me a key to it, but I had closed it when I left. I hoped that Jula had just decided to open it up for some reason, and that someone wasn't in there going through my things. I didn't have anything that would immediately tell someone that I was female, but it still worried me.

I had completely forgotten about the roommate that Jula had mentioned the day before. I really wasn't expecting to see a guy unpacking his things on the other side of the room when I came through the door, bags from my shopping trip in hand. He surprised me, though all I did was jump a little. At least I surprised him as well, which made him jump more than I did, and drop the pile of pants that he was carrying to a drawer.

"Who are you?" I asked him as he turned to me and I got a good look at him.

He was taller than I was, which when I thought about it wasn't too surprising, considering that I was short and he wasn't Japanese. I noticed that when he stood up after picking up the pants he had dropped on the floor. He had short light brown hair that looked as if someone had rumpled it, or as if he hadn't quite brushed it right after waking up. His eyes were bright blue, though slightly hidden behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that he pushed up absently as he stood. And he was skinny.

He had on clothes that looked far too warm for the weather. I would have said that Alex's outfit looked too warm, and the guy standing in front of me was wearing more. He had on a black long-necked, long-sleeved shirt, with a blue-gray t-shirt that said "The voices in my head say I'm crazy," in big white letters over it. His pants were long and black, but much heavier and nowhere near as loose as Alex's pants were. He also had on a scowl that was directed at me.

"I could ask the same of you," he said. "And I live here."

Then I remembered Jula mentioning a roommate, and I realized that that was who he was. "I'm Kiri," I said. "And since I live here too, I guess that makes you the roommate that Jula mentioned would be here soon."

"You can't be serious," he said.

"Why not?" I asked.

"You couldn't possibly be a student here," he said. "This is a male only school. They don't teach duseken here. And I think they would probably die if a shelon tried to claim to go to school here, especially a female one."

"I happen to be mayin," I said angrily. He didn't look convinced, which almost made me panic. Instead, I caught myself before I could let the fear wash over me, and I decided to prove my point with a demonstration. After all, I was telling the truth when I said I was mayin. I wouldn't have to worry that I had lied to him if he came to the conclusion that I had to be male on his own.

So I focused my mind a little and let my mayin gift start to work. Silently, but grinning, I picked him up with my mind and held him there. "See?" I asked him.

"Kiri, what are you doing to poor Fen?" Jula's voice said from behind me. I jumped, and then turned to face her, feeling guilty. I almost dropped my new roommate, because the break in my concentration momentarily made my mind's grasp on him shaky. Jula glared at me. "Put him down, now!"

I turned back to face him and set him on the ground. He didn't actually look scared, which made me feel a little better about what I'd done. Jula, on the other hand, was quite angry with me, and I could almost feel it like I was a telepath myself. I turned back to face her, not sure if I wanted to know what she was going to do with me because of what I had just done. I hadn't meant any harm, but I also realized, when I thought about it a little more, that I could have hurt my new roommate pretty badly if I hadn't been able to hold him up.

"Just what was that about?" she asked. She had changed completely from the kind, babbling woman who had shown me around and started mothering me to a stern authority figure. She seemed to have the mother thing down quite well, since everything I had heard about good mothers said that they could be both loving and hard. I didn't really have any experience to say if that was true, though, since the only "mother" I had ever had was Papa.

"He didn't believe me when I said I was mayin," I said quietly. "I was just giving him some proof. I wasn't going to hurt him."

"And if you had lost control and dropped him?" she asked, her voice still hard, but I could hear the concern in there as well. She really had been worried about him, and not just angry with me for being reckless.

Still, her lack of faith in my mayin gift galled me a little. I had more than enough power behind my mind to keep him up in the air for at least an hour. I wouldn't have dropped him unless something really drastic happened. But just as I was thinking that, the little bit of anger that was starting to rise faded, as I realized that I almost had dropped him. I may have had the power, but I didn't have the proper training to keep my concentration on my gift and not on everything else.

"Gomen nasai," I said, bowing to her in a formal move that would have made Papa very proud of me.

"What?" she asked.

"It more or less means "I'm very sorry,"" I said. "I should have thought before I acted. I should have remembered that a human being is quite a bit different from the rocks that I'm used to playing with. I was stupid. I won't do it again."

"Good," she said, and then her stern face faded away to leave the kind Jula again. "I hope you two boys will get along better from now on."

"I'll try," I said.

Then, as she walked away from the room, I hurried inside and closed the door behind me. I faced my new roommate, who didn't look angry or scared, unlike Jula. Instead, he smiled at me, a smile that showed that he was willing to be friends, but wasn't used to extending that courtesy to many people.

"Just in case you didn't catch it when Jula mentioned it, my name's Fen," he said. Then he pointed at a stack of boxes that had been set on the floor in the middle of the room. "I hope these are yours, because I honestly don't remember ordering them."

"Aren't you mad that I picked you up like that?" I asked him.

"Nah," he said, with a shrug. "I shouldn't have called you a girl. I've met another guy like you before. He was pretty touchy about it, so I'm not really surprised that you are too."

I had to bite my lip to keep from telling him that I wasn't really all that touchy about being called a girl. I hadn't picked him up because I was angry, but because I was scared that he would continue with the thought, or that he might tell someone else. It actually made the little bit of female vanity that I had tried to quash and kill happy to know that someone still recognized me as what I really was, despite the bound breasts and boy's clothes.

"So is this stuff yours?" he asked, indicating the boxes again. I went over to look at them, and realized that the boxes were my computer, monitor, and parts. That made me smile.

"These are mine," I said. "I didn't expect them to be here already. I just bought them this afternoon." Then I lifted the monitor out of the box with my mind, making sure that my hold on it was extra secure since I didn't want to drop and break it. "It's my new computer," I said, grinning at him.

"..." he said, or rather, didn't say. Actually, I didn't get any conversation from him for the rest of the day. He just finished unpacking his things and then proceeded to ignore me. I set up my computer in uncomfortable silence, though it would have been worse if he had been watching me the whole time, or something like that. Instead, I just knew that there was another, unfamiliar, person in the room, and that said person had absolutely no interest in talking to me, or even acknowledging my presence. It bothered me, but I didn't want to be rude and force him to talk when he obviously didn't want to.

That night, during dinner, I found out that everyone else already knew Fen. They were all at least a year older than he was, but they apparently were all at the previous school, for younger children, together at one point. They all remembered him, not because he was he was a good friend or even a nice person, but because of what he was. He was the only one of his kind in the school, I found out, and a good number of the students wanted him thrown out because of it, especially Ches and his two lackeys.

Fen was a she-mayin, and not even noble. It apparently made him the second lowest person in the school in terms of social ranking. He was so far below everyone else, including myself, that most of the other students thought it insulting for the school to allow him to continue his education with them. From the things I heard Ches and his lackeys say, they felt even more strongly about the one person who was below Fen.

I didn't like it. I had known about the Mayinist social ranking system for a long time, but I had never really believed that I would see it quite so drastically. I thought the outright disgust, and even the causal ignoring, from the others towards Fen just because of some silly ranking was a mean thing. True, Fen had been ignoring me and refused to even talk to me, but I felt like it wasn't because he was a horrid person. He just seemed shy to me, and I realized that he probably hadn't ever met someone who was willing to be nice to him despite his being a she-mayin.

It was just that one night of seeing how Ches and his lackeys treated Fen that made me decide to try and be his friend. Well, that and the fact that we were roommates. I was pretty sure that things would go much more smoothly for me if my roommate and I could get along and be friendly with each other.

I decided to start right after dinner, but that was before I reminded myself of the computer that I had just bought earlier that day. I wanted to apologize to Pap for buying it before he got the bill, and I figured that the easiest way to make sure I could do that would be to call him that night. If I wrote a letter, there was always the chance that he would get the bill before the letter, but I seriously doubted that the bill had been given to him that afternoon.

So I approached Jula after dinner, trying to figure out what I would have to do to call my father. We didn't have phones in our rooms, or even the possibility of setting one up if we already had one. But I was pretty sure that there had to be a phone somewhere in the dorm that I could use. After all, Papa had a number he could use to call me.

"What is it, Kiri?" she asked me as soon as she noticed me standing there. I had just been about to speak up.

"I need to call my father," I said. "Is there a way I could do that?"

"Of course," she said, smiling. "Did I forget to tell you where the phones were when I showed you around yesterday?" I nodded, and she grimaced. "I always forget something when showing a new little one around. Each of the resident seniors has one in his room that's tied to the main line, but there are also a few in the main lounge so you can call out. They shouldn't be too hard to find."

"Thank you," I said, bowing just a little out of reflex (in other words, having it drummed into my head by Papa the traditionalist). That earned me an odd look, followed by a quick smile as I hurried off to the main lounge to find a phone.

About a minute later I was settled in one of the chairs near the phones, dialing the number that would connect me to my home in Japan, and then waiting for Papa to pick up the phone. I hoped he would be there, though I wasn't too worried about it. Papa didn't go out all that often, and even less frequently at night. Still, I had to wait through three rings of the phone before he picked up.

"Moshi moshi?" he said. I stifled a giggle, knowing that very few Japanese people answered the phone like that anymore. I figured that Papa was one of the only ones on the whole island who did.

"Konbanwa, otou-san," I replied. It would make Papa feel better if I spoke to him in Japanese, since I was more or less sure that he missed me. I missed him, but probably not quite as much as he missed me. "Do you always answer the phone like that? Doesn't it confuse your non-Japanese acquaintances?"

"Kiri!" he exclaimed. "Why are you calling? Is everything all right? You haven't been caught already, have you?"

"I'm fine, Papa," I said. "Can't I call you if I miss you and want to talk?"

I talked to Papa for almost a half hour. I reassured him several times that I was fine, and that I hadn't gotten exposed as a girl, because he didn't seem very confident that I could keep up the act even for as little time as I had been there so far. I told him about the people I had met so far, though I didn't mention how Fen had thought I was a girl because that would just make him worry more, and about the shopping trip. I eventually did mention my whole reason for calling, though I tried to make it as casual as I possibly could. He got mad, but I think he was just so glad that I called him in the first place that he didn't get as mad as he would have had I done it at home.

I know it was really pretty shallow of me, but as I talked to Papa, I found myself thinking that I was very lucky to be going to school so far away. Because Papa was so fond of me the fact that I was far away made him miss me even more. So, something that would have gotten me in huge trouble while I was at home was a little more tolerable for him because he missed me so much. I just couldn't help but consider taking advantage of his tendency to spoil me a little more, even though it was a really horrid thing for me to do.

Of course, I missed Papa too. As happy as I was to be somewhere else, where I could make a little more of my life and what I was born as, I had never been away from Papa for more than a day before, and it was just a little weird knowing that I wasn't going to see him for at least another couple months. So talking to Papa like that, especially doing it in Japanese, since our language was something that Papa and I shared that not many other people cared to know or use, felt nice. It was reassuring, knowing that even if I missed him I could always call him, and he would always be willing to talk to me.

Because of that, I spent longer on the phone than I really should have. Calls to the island, or any other non-Mayinist lands, were expensive, because the Mayinists didn't really like making it easy for people to get in touch with the non-believers. My calls to Papa would all be billed to him in the end, and I knew that he could afford it, but I still couldn't help but feel a little guilty when I finally said goodbye to Papa and realized what time it was, and how long we had talked. Just that one phone call, which definitely wouldn't be the last one, would cost Papa quite a bit. Still, I knew he wouldn't complain, since I was sure he wanted to talk to me even more than I had wanted to talk to him.

After I got off the phone, I headed back up to my room. Despite the very long phone call, it wasn't that late at night yet when I got back up there. Still, I found Fen fast asleep on his bed when I entered the room. Any other day I probably would have shrugged and headed into one of the lounges to read or something like that, since I usually didn't go to bed very early. But for some reason that day I found myself yawning as I stood in the doorway of the room and saw Fen's figure buried underneath the blankets on his bed. So, rather than stay up later, I got myself changed into pajamas and buried myself similarly. I was asleep within minutes of settling down into the bed.