Ikal.

This youth t-shirt of Ikal portrays a twenty-three-year-old who doesn't look it at first glance. People guess eighteen. Sometimes nineteen if he's wearing the jacket that runs big on him. The reason isn't aesthetic or luck: axolotls keep juvenile features their whole lives — smooth skin, a light build, that unfinished look to the face — and Ikal keeps them too. Biologists have a technical name for that. In practice, it means he still gets asked for ID in places where they really shouldn't need to ask.

Teenagers get this without any need for explanation. There are ages when the body doesn't match the brain — or the other way around — and you spend a long stretch being treated according to a box that doesn't match who you are inside. Ikal has learned not to argue with that. He shows his ID when asked, pays what he has to pay, and goes. That's not the battle. Well, not that one — there's another one that's duller but more important.

Ikal dropped out of high school at fifteen. It wasn't rebellion, bad grades, or trouble at home. It was a simple calculation: the chinampa he'd inherited from his grandmother needed someone to water it every morning and decide what to plant, and he was the only candidate. He'd sit in class thinking about how the canal looked that morning and leave the canal thinking about things no textbook would explain. At some point he chose.

Now, at twenty-three, a biologist he knows from the university has been pushing for months about a scholarship to finish an open-enrollment high school diploma and maybe study biology after. Two years on one end, four on the other. Ikal is thinking it over. Not because he doubts he could do it intellectually — he knows he could — but because of something duller: if he goes to class two days a week, the chinampa doesn't get watered, and if he hires someone to water it, the scholarship stops covering costs. Teenagers who take non-linear paths tend to carry calculations like this that nobody mentions in the guidance counselor's brochures. Is it worth going down that road? That's for him to decide.