Content Warning: This section of the guide references racism, colorism, anti-gay bias, anti-fat bias, emotional abuse, and terminal illness.

Avery’s lip piercing means different things to her in different contexts. When she moves to Bardell, she considers it a clear signal of her LGBTQ+ identity—something that inspires mixed feelings in those she meets. She feels proud of her identity and wishes to show it, rendering the symbol of the lip ring as a form of perpetual coming out so that she does not feel her identity is in question. At the same time, however, she worries that she will face discrimination in Bardell more than she did in DC—an idea that the text complicates.

Though Avery does face some overt anti-gay bias (from her classmate, Tim, who mockingly asks if she’s a lesbian, and later from Carole, who accuses her of “corrupting” Simone), she realizes that she has also tacitly faced this bias in DC. There, her friends Hikari and Kelsi disapproved of her lip ring, calling it “trashy.” This, Avery gradually embraces, is one of the ways in which her DC friends stifled her identity, prescribing certain “correct” ways of being and performing a pansexual identity that contains elements of anti-Black racism, albeit ones that are less overt than what she faces in Bardell.