Years ago, my at-the-time best friend read that book aloud to me. I didn't think much of it, but my friend-at-the-time had just come out then, and something about the book's chorus of gay predecessors watching over the youth of today really spoke to her.

This was long enough ago that I do remember side-eyeing the trans thing, but didn't really dwell on it too much.

What I very much remember about that plotline is how young the characters came across. At some point partway though the book, I think one of them drives a car, and my friend and I suddenly realized that that Ryan and Avery were actually supposed to be several years older than we'd thought they were. If I recall they're actually like 16, but we thought they were 13.

My friend flipped back through the book and figured out that in the scene where they first meet, they're looking across the room, over the head of this 13-year-old kid. She concluded that somehow we had gotten mixed up on that line, and had thought that the 13-year-olds were them, not some other kid at the dance.

I thought we maybe just thought of them as young teens because they just seem like young teens. One has pink hair and the other has blue hair. There's the trans thing, which even back then I associated with a middle school phase. And their relationship is very chaste, taking things slow. (I think it's a first relationship for both of them, though don't quote me on that.) It's not that any of these things are conspicuously out of place for 16-years-olds, but they're equally believable for 13-year-olds.

So I dunno, I find it moderately funny that the arrested development that comes with trans identity shone show clearly through this book, event though it presumably wasn't what the author was going for.