Excerpt from We Could Be Anyone by Anna-Marie McLemore, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I'd always thought of nail biting as a nervous habit. It was exactly why I'd broken it myself, because of what it might give away. But this boy bit at his thumbnail so casually and quickly, with such efficiency, that it made him seem tougher, impenetrable.

Before I realized I was gay, I'd assumed this heat in the center of my chest was envy, that whatever interested me in another boy was something I wished I had. I knew better now. It was something more dangerous than envy.

Lola and I grew up hearing that we could become anything, but our parents hadn't meant it the way gringo parents did. They meant it as a warning. In the myths they read us, arrogant men were transformed into oysters or woodpeckers. Soldiers who failed at their guard posts became roosters. Young women talked and talked until they turned into buzzing flies (though Lola called that one a bullshit myth meant to shut girls up; Mamá did not correct her).

When our parents told us anything was possible, they weren't flinging open the doors of the world for us. They were telling us to watch ourselves. Propose a dancing contest that you then lose? You might find yourself turned into a tree. Steal a ship and then use it to greedy ends? Look forward to your masts twisting into sea serpents and the sound of the ocean becoming the maddening noise of a thousand flutes played shrilly and out of tune.

Ever since I'd realized what I was, I'd kept on my guard. Especially since the smallest thing—a marble rolled across the back of a hand, the breath hitching inside a laugh—could turn me into a lovesick version of myself.

I refocused on my task, sizing up the jars of tiny magnets in front of me. I weighed the flat disks in my palms, trying to figure out which were best suited for the effect Lola and I wanted.

"What do you do with those?"

I had refocused so hard that I hadn't noticed the boy coming up next to me.

"Some kind of science project?" He reached into one of the jars, his jagged thumbnail white against the dark metal.

"Something like that," I said.

The way he smiled at me was as clear as light through still water. He'd seen me looking and hadn't minded.

But every time someone passed along the end of the aisle, I could feel the bristling static of them watching. A woman pressed her lips together in a pursed smile that was not unfriendly, but a little too knowing. Then came a sneer from a man young enough that I wouldn't have called him sir but old enough that he probably expected me to.

A constellation of names throbbed in my temples. Cydon and Clytius, who fell in battle against Aeneas. Nisus and Euryalus, soldiers slain during a night raid because the moon gleamed off the polished metal of a stolen helmet, alerting enemy horsemen. Hylas, adored by Heracles but dragged underwater by naiads, never to be found by his frantic lover.

Any story I knew about two men in love did not end well. When boys like me fell in love, we tempted fate. Whenever I lingered too long over the shadow of another boy's eyelashes on his cheek or the way he pressed his lips together after he said hello, I tempted fate. Especially in a small town.

Especially as a brown boy in a small town.

My panic was a handful of magnets pulling in more magnets. It repelled me out of that aisle without another word to the boy with the bitten-down thumbnail.

I had to get out of here fast. I had to get out from under the looks of everyone who seemed to know what kind of boy I was.

But I took the corner of the aisle too fast. I ran right into the man who'd been staring at us a minute before.

"Watch it." He shoved me hard enough that I stumbled into a display of watering cans. They tumbled down in an echoing clatter.

I crouched to gather them back together. But the cans hadn't even settled by the time the store owner had me by the back of the collar. "You think my morning's so dull I need boys like you bringing your fights in here?"

Excerpted from We Could Be Anyone by Anna-Marie McLemore. Copyright © 2026 by Anna-Marie McLemore. Excerpted by permission of Feiwel & Friends. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.