Outside Manzanita, Alix Robinson-Guy (12) squats on a chair while strategically eating her Skittles. Carefully tearing open the fun-sized packet, she pours them all in one hand and gently sifts through them, searching for each color. She groups them together on top of the flattened empty wrapper, and then pops them in her mouth, one by one. The green ones are her favorite.

“I think the best way to eat Skittles is if you seperate them all into each flavor and then you eat them one at a time. It’s the same thing with jelly beans,” Alix said. “Sometimes I go the usual rainbow route but sometimes I like to eat all the green ones first because once you finish a packet of Skittles you can start another one.”

Rainbow Skittles, rainbow backpack — as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Alix wears the vibrant array of colors with pride.

“My old backpack broke, and my mom was buying me a new one. She was like, ‘Oh, it’s a rainbow backpack, it’s gay like you.’ and I was like, ‘Oh, yes it is,’” Alix said. “So now I have my rainbow backpack and it’s very distinctive. I feel like I’m really straightforward, so a lot of the things that people assume about me turn out to just be right. There’s not really a lot of layers going on here. It’s all on the surface, I’m an open book.”

Her rainbow backpack is a constant visual reminder of progress made and progress yet to come.

“I think one of the things about LGBT rights is that a lot of people think that there’s not really a lot of work left to be done because, ‘Oh, you can get married so now, everything’s on the up and up,’” Alix said. “But that’s not true. People can still fire you if they think you’re gay. And that’s just wrong on a fundamental moral level.”

She compared the “bubble” that surrounds Silicon Valley to the harsher “real world.”

“I find it difficult to believe that some people just don’t care about certain things that are happening in the world right now,” she said. “I wish more people cared about politics, but when I say I wish more people cared about politics, what I really mean is that I wish more people agreed with me about politics.”

As she’s progressed through high school, Alix has broadened her LGBTQ+ rights lens to include more general human rights. This focus manifests itself in both her reading choices — she loves fantasy and sci-fi but also historical fiction.

“I loved The Great Gatsby,” she said. “I feel like it’s a really fantastically written novel, from the first page it is spot-on. I don’t usually say this about books, but I think it’s one of the few books that speaks to human experience.”

Although her writing doesn’t typically involve 1920s America, she still aims to capture the human experience in its flawed glory.

“I do like to write but not the kind of stuff that ever gets finished,” she said. “I usually write science-fiction with aliens and stuff. Aliens are a really good writing tool because you can use aliens to examine how humanity functions and how they contrast.”

Harker alum Kevin Kai Huang (‘17) got to know Alix through the GSA (Gender Sexuality Alliance) and appreciated her funny antics.

“Every day at lunch, Alix would get fries and then put extra salt in them, which we always laughed about because the fries are already salty, so adding more salt was just ridiculous,” Kevin said. “Alix is very unapologetic, and I really respect that because just being yourself unapologetically is something that a lot of people might have a hard time doing it, but Alix really does that well.”