Chapter Text
Shawn looked at himself in the mirror. He did often, almost always liking what he saw, but sometimes he didn't. Sometimes, he hated it.
He wasn't unfamiliar with self-hate. Not even close to it, actually. He hated how whiny he was, how much of a burden he was to people. He hated how different he and Cory were. He hated how he held Cory back. He hated how he felt about Cory, especially knowing how Cory felt about Topanga and how he didn't feel about Shawn.
What was different though was how he hated how he looked. Sometimes, his body was too masculine, too feminine. Sometimes it wasn't masculine enough, wasn't feminine enough. Sometimes it was just plain ugly, but he just chalked that one up to normal teenage insecurity.
He thought about how it would be like if he were a girl, well if everyone else thought he was a girl. He knew, deep down, that he was a girl sometimes, other times he was a boy, sometimes both, other times neither. He tried looking like a girl, sometimes, changing the way he walked around in a room or stealing Topanga's lip gloss once and putting it on. He put back before anyone noticed. Whenever he did this though, he was always alone. He thought about what his name would be. He liked the name Veronica.
It made him hate things a little less.