Pen is sick of trying to live up to everyone's expectations. No she doesn't want to be a boy, but she's not entirely sure she wants to be a girl if that means wearing skirts and just being what everyone wants her to be.

Pen is sick of trying to live up to everyone's expectations. No she doesn't want to be a boy, but she's not entirely sure she wants to be a girl if that means wearing skirts and just being what everyone wants her to be.
Saffron feels powerless. She is stuck at a school filled with boys whose idea of entertainment is snapping bras and flipping skirts, with a principal whose motto seems to be "boys will be boys." So she can't really be blamed for following Gwen, the older, elegant, takes-no-shit world-walker through a rip in space and into Kena, a world recovering from a civil war where the good guys accidentally put the bad guy on the throne.