Chapter 1: 1. Welcome to Dorley Hall

2012 October 16
Tuesday

“I’m telling you, mate, I’m worried about your brother.”

“He’s fine! It’s just teenager stuff. That’s what Mum says.”

“We’re teenagers and we’re not like that.”

“Older teenager stuff, then. Something happens in your brain when you turn eighteen that turns you into a massive prick. It’s hormones. Or today’s turbulent job market.”

“Russ, I’m serious. He didn’t come to my birthday this year, fine, and he barely had one of his own, okay, but he won’t even reply to my texts!”

“Stef, seriously, it’s nothing. He’s probably met a girl or something and decided it’s uncool to keep texting his little brother’s best friend. It probably is, also, dude.”

“If you talk to Mark, can you please just tell him to text me back?”

“Fine, if it’ll make you feel better, but I’ve barely talked to him in ages. You’ve talked to him more than I have this year.”

“Russell—”

“Stefan! It’s fine. He’s fine. He’s probably just depressed about his zits. Now shut up; teacher’s coming.”

Stefan obliges, and stops glaring at Russell. He glares at his World History textbook instead, in the unlikely event that he can intimidate it into making sense. Next year he can finally drop this stupid subject and never look back, but for now he really needs to commit whatever a castellan is to memory, and decide from the evidence supplied whether they were in servitude to the counts or ruled over them with an iron fist. Assuming castellans even had fists. Or iron. They could have been giant cats for all Stefan knows.

He’s too distracted. Too worried about Mark.

It’s not normal to be close with your best friend’s older brother, especially when they’re four years older than you. But not only do the Rileys and the Vogels live on the same road, very nearly opposite each other — with the cardboard telescope from Stefan’s subscription to Junior Science Magazine (plastic lenses free with first issue!) you can watch TV in the Vogels’ house from Stefan’s bedroom window — but Stefan very nearly shares a birthday with Russell’s older brother.

Every year on September 2nd, Russell, Mark and their dad trek over the road to Stefan’s house to celebrate his birthday, and every year on September 3rd, Stefan, his mum, his dad and his baby sister return the favour, visiting Russell and Mark’s extended family for fun, festivities, and rather more expensive cake and presents than Stefan’s parents can afford.

But this year, on Stefan’s fourteenth birthday and Mark’s eighteenth, it didn’t happen, and no-one saw it coming. Sure, Mark had gotten more and more sullen over the last few months — longer, maybe — but come Stefan’s birthday he simply didn’t show. Disappointing, but not the end of the world; Mark’s own birthday was the next day! But when the next day came, Mark made only the most cursory appearance at his own party: he talked to no-one but his dad, sliced off an extremely large piece of cake, and disappeared back upstairs to his room, there to hide behind his blackout curtains with his computer and his plate of death-by-chocolate, with sprinkles.

To Stefan, for whom Mark had been not just his tutor in the sciences but the older brother he never had — his sister is eleven years younger than him, and just awful at physics — it was crushing. His last chance to see Mark before he left for university, and he didn’t even look him in the eye.

 

 

2012 November 8
Thursday

Russell’s been out of school all week, and no-one will tell Stefan why. He’s texted, he’s called, he’s asked the head of year and the lunch lady; he’s even stopped by the house and banged on the door for what seemed like hours.

Nothing.

So when his phone starts ringing and Russ’ name comes up, Stefan doesn’t care that it’s almost midnight, that he has school tomorrow, that’s he’s royally pissed off with Russ for ignoring him. He picks it up before the third ring.

“Russ? Is that you?”

“Stef. I’m at your door. Can you come let me in? I don’t want to ring the bell and wake your parents.”

“Sure, Russ, sure. I’ll be down in a second.”

Normally, Stefan would argue: he’s not allowed visitors this late. But Russell sounded so drained, so worn-out that he wants to see him in person just to make sure he’s not deathly ill. He throws on his dressing gown and some winter socks and takes the stairs down three at a time. Practically drags Russell into the living room and deposits him on the good sofa, the one that still has a nice bounce to it.

“Russ,” he says, “you look terrible.”

“It’s Mark,” Russell says. “He’s missing.”

It takes a while and the intervention of both Stefan’s parents, and two mugs of hot chocolate each, but Russell eventually gives them the whole story:

Mark hadn’t originally intended to live on campus. The Royal College of Saint Almsworth isn’t far out of town, and for a fraction of the money required to rent a dorm room Mark could have bought a reasonably terrible car and commuted. But Mark’s had a difficult year, and he wanted a fresh start — new friends. Russ doesn’t know what happened with Mark’s old friends, but they stopped visiting or texting a long time ago.

So Mark went off to live in dorms and had reportedly a fairly uneventful first month at Saints. But it wasn’t long before his professors started to find him ‘disruptive’ and ‘disrespectful’; he was asked to leave a lecture for the first time about a week before his disappearance, and by that Friday had stopped even showing up.

That Saturday, he didn’t return home to his dorm.

According to the police, Mark entered Legend — popularly considered the worst nightclub in Almsworth; also the cheapest — at 1924 on Saturday, November 3rd, and left at 0144 after collecting his coat. The attendant was the last person to see him.

“We’ve been waiting to hear something since Sunday morning, when they told us he was missing. But they have no leads, no evidence, not even a fucking suicide note! Sorry, Mrs Riley.”

“That’s okay, dear.”

“A suicide note?” Stefan says. “You think he might have killed himself?”

Russell shrugs. “That’s what Dad thinks. I mean, he won’t say it, but that’s what he thinks. I mean, it makes sense, right? His friends stop talking to him, so he moves out to the dorms to try and make new friends, and when he doesn’t, he gives up. On everything.”

“Jesus.”

“Stefan Riley,” his mum says, “you do not have the same leeway as Russell. You do not take the Lord’s name in vain in this house.”

“Sorry.”

 

 

2014 January 19
Sunday

Stefan’s mum never remembers to buy the stuffing.

They’ve been eating on the cheap ever since Dad was downsized and Mum was forced to cut her hours or join him on the dole, and while as a family they’ve become expert at providing acceptable meals on a budget — with help from the food bank — every so often Mum gets nostalgic for a real Sunday lunch, and saves up until they can afford a proper roast chicken with all the trimmings.

Plus, this one’s going to be a celebration: Dad might be going back to work! Fingers crossed.

But she always forgets the sage and onion stuffing mix. Just Stefan’s luck that he happened to be hanging around the house with nothing to do; the perfect candidate for the half-hour walk to the big Tesco near the university.

He’s waiting in line for a self-checkout machine to free up, exact change in one hand and box of stuffing mix in the other, when he sees her.

Stefan doesn’t normally talk to strangers. It’s not that he’s shy, necessarily — engage him in conversation on the phone or online and you might struggle to shut him up — but he’s not the biggest fan of being around people. He fidgets under inspection, and when pretty girls look at him it makes him feel hot and uncomfortable.

But this girl, one ahead of him in the queue and just now stepping up to a checkout, seems to be so anxious she’s having difficulty operating the machine. The checkout next to her opens up and Stefan nips in and watches her scan her food with shaking hands, sometimes needing two or three tries to get things to register.

Poor girl. He wonders what she’s so upset about.

He puts his stuffing through and is about to leave when she drops her debit card, and when he scoops it up for her and holds it out, she looks at him like she’s seen a ghost.

“Um,” he says, still holding it out.

“Oh!” she says, starting to come to her senses. “Thank you.”

God, but she’s pretty. Bright blue eyes, a river of blonde hair that frames her face and looks like someone put a lot of work into it, and a cute little nose that—

Stefan frowns. There’s something familiar about her. Something he can’t quite put his finger on.

The woman — Melissa Haverford, assuming it’s her debit card in his hand — shakes herself, takes the card from him, smiles her thanks, and marches out of the store. Wobbles a little as she rounds the corner to the exit, as if she’s not quite used to the modest heels on her boots.

Stefan watches her go, puzzling over the encounter. It takes him a second to realise she left her shopping behind. He mutters a word he’s still not allowed to say in the presence of his mother, drops his stuffing box into her plastic bag, slings the whole thing under one arm, and leaves Tesco at a jog.

She’s not far down the road.

“Hey!” he yells, wincing at how loud and deep his voice is. “You forgot your shopping!”

She doesn’t look around, starts walking even faster. Which turns out to be a mistake: it’s January and the pavements are slippery. She goes down onto her butt; it looks like a pretty painful fall, but at least it gives Stefan the chance to catch up with her and return her groceries.

“Hi,” he says, looking down at her. She looks every which way but back at him.

“Thanks,” she mutters, and Stefan frowns. Even her voice is giving him déjà vu! She’s said not three words to him but something about her alto tone is— that’s it! He finally places it: she sounds just like Russell’s mum! Her voice is still as etched into Stefan’s memory as anyone’s. It’s been a good few years since she died, but she always had a kind smile and a coke for him whenever he went over to see Russ.

Suddenly, Stefan knows exactly why everything about this girl seems so familiar. He offers her a hand up, and as she takes it, he says, “Do you know Mark Vogel?”

“W— what?” she says, her face now pale enough that the blush on her cheeks looks almost comical.

“You look like him,” Stefan says. “I thought you might be a relative, or something.”

She finishes standing up, but can’t find anything to say.

“Melissa, right?” Stefan says, and she nods dumbly. “Do you know Mark?”

“Oh, um, I used to,” she stammers. Her voice cracks a little, and Stefan suddenly feels guilty for mentioning Mark at all. For introducing a bit of scabbed-over grief into her afternoon. She clearly didn’t expect her grocery shopping to be interrupted by some pipsqueak fifteen-year-old interrogating her about her dead relative.

“Sorry. If it’s upsetting to think about him, I mean. I shouldn’t have… Sorry…” Stefan trails off. His cheeks burn as she looks at him. She doesn’t look scared any more; she’s actually smiling at him, the same indulgent, patient smile Mark would always turn on him when they went through his Science homework together and spotted an error.

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“It’s okay,” she says. “He’s been gone for a while now.”

“Yeah. I miss him.”

The girl, Melissa, puts a gentle arm on Stefan’s shoulder, takes her shopping out of his hand. Gives him back the stuffing box. Favours him with another smile, broader, almost genuinely happy.

“I’m sure he’d miss you too, Stef,” she says, and squeezes his shoulder.

She’s halfway up the road and boarding the bus back to the university before Stefan realises he never told her his name. Confused, he watches the bus pull away, clutching his box of sage and onion stuffing, his shoulder still warm where she touched him.

 

 

2015 September 14
Monday

Stefan sits alone for his first class in AS-level English Language. Around him, his new classmates — some of whom he knows, most of whom he doesn’t — settle into their chairs, chatting, laughing. He doesn’t mind being alone, though; he needs to concentrate. His GCSEs were only average, and the next two years need to go well if he’s to get into the Royal College of Saint Almsworth and qualify for one of their small number of assistance grants.

Saints has a fantastic and highly sought-after Linguistics programme, and Stefan’s curated his choice of subjects at AS-level to give himself the best chance possible: English Language, English Literature, German and Psychology. He doesn’t have a second choice university; it’s Saints, or it’s nowhere.

He saw Melissa only once more, a year ago, outside his then-new part-time job at the Tesco near campus. She didn’t see him, or pretended not to, and climbed into a waiting car less than a minute after he spotted her. She looked different: more adult, more womanly, as if the first time he saw her she was still developing.

Stefan has a theory about that.

On his sixteenth birthday, his parents told him he wouldn’t need to get a part-time job, the way they’d all been expecting he’d have to. Dad was working full time again and Mum had been able to find a job she could do with a laptop from the front room, so she could keep Petra in her sight at all times. He could just concentrate on his studies if he wanted. But Stefan took a job, anyway, because working at the big Tesco gives him an excuse to wander over to the Saints campus on his lunch break, or on his way home, the better to look for Melissa, or Mark, or clues.

Mark isn’t the only boy to have vanished. Stefan’s painstaking research indicates that, going back at least two decades, between two and six boys vanish every year from the Royal College but, like Mark, they rarely disappear on campus. Some go out into town and never come home; some leave campus at the end of term and never get off trains they were seen boarding; some leave suicide notes and vanish into the night. Unruly boys, most of them, with reputations around campus. A woman in the admin office implied, when Stefan pretended to be a reporter following up on the disappearances, that the school was better off without them!

Stefan’s not convinced the school is without them, though. It wasn’t hard to get pictures of most of the vanished boys, and after a few nights spent memorising their faces, he was pretty sure he’d recognise them anyway, even if they… looked a bit different.

So far, he’s seen five. Five girls, all of them so startlingly exact a match to five of the missing boys that they’re either unusually similar-looking siblings, or they’re the missing boys. Six, if you include Mark, or Melissa.

Sure, some of them have definitely had some work done — a brow-reshape here, a tracheal shave there, in addition to a catch-up girl puberty to supersede their boy puberties — but if Stefan was given to gambling he’d stake all his savings on them being the same people.

He doesn’t have names, though. So he doesn’t have the first clue who’s doing this.

Who is helping these women?

He’s still pondering the question when he gets home. It preys on his mind as he collates his notes from the day’s classes, as he showers, and as he sits up in bed, reading on his phone, too wired to sleep.

Someone at Saints is clearly helping closeted trans women start new lives. And comprehensively, too: Stefan’s looked it up, and the facial surgery he thinks some of the girls have had runs to the thousands of pounds. And then there’s the faked disappearances and the new identities. Maybe whoever is doing this is prioritising girls with unsupportive families? It makes sense, thinking about Melissa; her dad’s nice enough, but got religion in a big way after her mum died.

It all lines up. Even the rumours of the boys being ‘unruly’ prior to their disappearances. Bigots infest every public sphere, and it doesn’t take much to misinterpret a dysphoric trans girl’s misery if you’re already given to dislike trans people. And didn’t Russ, years ago, say Mark was considered disruptive in lectures?

As for who is helping them, he doesn’t have any names. But he has an address: all the girls live at Dorley Hall, an older dormitory on the edge of campus. It’s reserved for girls from disadvantaged backgrounds; a bequest, apparently. And if anyone qualifies as disadvantaged, it’s trans girls so afraid of their own family and friends’ reactions that they fake their own disappearances.

Stefan closes the book on his phone — he wasn’t reading it, anyway; he’ll have to go back a couple of dozen pages to pick up from where his mind started to wander — and opens the camera app. He switches it to selfie mode and examines himself in the screen.

He needs to get into Saints. And he needs to find whoever is doing this, whoever is helping these women, because his parents, well, they’re nice enough, but they got religion the same way Russ and Melissa’s dad did, and if there’s one thing Stefan’s sure of, it’s that he’s not a boy.

In the camera, he runs a finger over his pronounced brow, his masculine jawline, his high hairline, and sighs.

He sure looks like one, though.

 

 

2019 October 12
Saturday

He hates how fucking cold his room is. It’s costing him £450 a month and the view out of his tiny window is mostly of an advertising hoarding but the worst thing is undoubtedly the way he has to do his assignments under the duvet if he doesn’t want his typing fingers to seize up. And it’s not even that cold out! It’s just that somehow the shape of the building contrives to funnel all the wind in the entire street right through the tiny window and into his room, into his bed, into his bones. He’d run his little oil heater all the time if he could afford it, but he can’t.

Two whole years at Saints. Nothing. Whatever the mechanism the Dorley people use to identify closeted trans women, it clearly hasn’t worked on him. And he’s looked! He’s looked everywhere. He spent all his spare hours searching, scouring, hoping, convinced there was some secret he hadn’t found, some code word he hadn’t learned, some sympathetic ear he hadn’t caught the attention of. He even went to Dorley Hall, asked to see Melissa or to talk to someone who knows her, pretending to be on some innocent errand, but they turned him away. He wasted enough time on his search that he nearly failed his second year and had to retake two exams over the summer, all the while staying in an overpriced and under-maintained house share with people he barely knows. He can’t even go back and live with his family to save the money because Dad got an amazing opportunity in the city back in 2018, and now his childhood home belongs to someone else.

It’s not like he has much of a home to return to, anyway, even before they moved away. His few acquaintances have all moved on, and Russ, the only one who hasn’t, doesn’t speak to him any more. Shouldn’t have told him his brother was still alive. Move on, Stefan. Get over it. Leave well alone. Shut the fuck up or fuck off!

His twenty-first was the most depressing birthday of his life. He couldn’t even afford a slice of cake from the Tesco he still works at.

Worse: he thought he looked unrecoverably boyish at sixteen, but it turned out puberty had a few more tricks left up its sleeve, and it deployed them at regular intervals. It’s not that he’s unattractive — before his third year at Saints, when he started wearing his bad mood on his face and not just under his skin, girls hit on him relatively regularly — but he’s so… male. He knows that’s not a very helpful way of thinking about it, but if what he sees glaring back at him from every mirror, window and piece of cutlery he encounters is at all accurate then even the world’s most accomplished plastic surgeon would have their work cut out. Probably a Nobel-worthy feat, carving an attractive, feminine face from his caveman mug.

“Not helpful,” he tells himself again, trying to divert his thoughts from the track that usually ends in alcohol and Netflix and his perplexing inability to cry, even though sometimes it feels like he’ll die if he doesn’t. “Not fucking helpful.”

He’s given up. Officially. He made the decision two days ago, but it’s harder than he expected.

He’s read about dysphoria, about the visceral get-me-out-of-my-body feeling many trans people describe, and while sometimes he’s certain he can relate, his attitude towards his body — even his face — has always been that he doesn’t have to like it to live in it. And while, yes, he’s still certain he’s not really a boy — say it: you’re twenty-one now; it’s not boy you’re failing at, it’s man — he’s never been able to say, categorically, that he’s a girl. That certainty, that rock on which to completely rebuild his life, has always eluded him. And all the time he’s obsessing over what he can’t have, he’s missing out on what he can.

Would he be happier as a girl? Almost definitely. But, he’s had to admit, it’s a dream, and he has to live in reality. Whatever happens in the shadows at Saints to give trans girls a new start has passed him by, or found him unworthy, or never existed in the first place, and there’s nothing he can do about it. It’s time to make the best of what he has, and what he has is a masculine body and no money.

He’s told no one of his theory. Even if they — whoever they are — can’t or won’t help him, he wants them to keep helping others, and the secrecy is obviously an important part of that. He thinks of Melissa sometimes — beautiful; scared — and for her, and everyone like her, he’ll keep the secret.

Plus, if he told anyone, they’d think he was fucking crazy.

Fuck it. His housemates invited him out tonight and, as part of his deal with himself to get the hell over it, he’s going to go. Surprise them all: hermit gets drunk with other people for a change.

The party’s on campus, in one of the new luxury dorms out where the old Psychology building used to be. The place has been a building site since he started at Saints; it’s strange that it’s not any more.

Everything changes but him.

This was a bad idea.

But then someone from last year’s Psycholinguistics class spots him, waves him over, offers him something to smoke, and he re-evaluates his plans to leave. Maybe he’ll stay awhile, get high, reconnect with people. If he’s going to commit to his new goal, to just be a guy, or some approximation of one, then step one should be, stop being so fucking miserable all the time. Hang out with friends. Remember what it’s like to be a person.

Forget his obsession with something that probably was never real in the first place.

He meets Christine an hour or so later. She’s sitting cross-legged on a snooker table, drinking from a bottle, laughing with another girl. A mutual acquaintance makes the introduction and she pats an empty spot of green baize, inviting him up. Feeling a little light-headed, he hops up on the table. Almost loses his balance finding a way to arrange his limbs that doesn’t put him in potentially unwanted contact with the girl; a pointless exercise, since she giggles at him and stretches her legs out onto his lap.

She’s studying Linguistics, too! Planning to specialise in speech and language therapy. He doesn’t have any plans for his degree, and tells her so; she encourages him to look into speech therapy. Very rewarding, she says. There’s no money in it, but if it’s money you want, piss off to the Business School and become a heartless bastard.

He laughs.

She hops off the snooker table and beckons him to follow, snatching a half-bottle of gin as she leaves the room. The building’s unfinished, and dangerously exciting to explore together. They poke drunken heads into rooms marked as construction sites, stagger down flights of stairs that lead to doors that won’t open. Eventually end up on the roof.

There’s something calming about a clear, starry sky. The Royal College is far enough out from Almsworth proper that the light pollution from the town mostly doesn’t reach it, and as he looks up into the infinite he feels, for the first time in a long, long time, almost content.

He doesn’t have to be a girl. Maybe he doesn’t have to be a guy, either — that’s a thought for another day — but he can make friends, meet nice girls, and drink and smoke with them under the stars.

He tells her about his family, who still text all the time. His little sister’s ten now, and learning to play the trombone, both of which are existentially terrifying concepts. She laughs and kisses him on the temple. She’s glad she took a chance on a good-looking guy tonight, she says. It’s just a shame she has a lot of work on or they could stay up all night.

He offers to walk her home, but she declines with a smile. She’s not turning him down; she’d actually like to see him again. It’s just that she lives on campus. A very short walk. Whereabouts? Dorley Hall.

“Oh, hey,” he says, warm from the alcohol and loquacious from the weed, “I know a funny thing about Dorley Hall…”

 

 

2019 October 13
Sunday

The bright overhead lights aren’t the only reason he’s got a pounding headache when he wakes up — that he imbibed basically everything anyone handed him last night is probably a major contributor — but they aren’t fucking helping. Where is he, anyway?

He opens his eyes a crack, but can’t see anything useful until he forces himself to sit up and angle his head away from the lights above. Through the glare and the headache he identifies a small, hard cot: his bed for the night.

Not one he recognises.

Did Christine take him to her place? He looks around, but she’s nowhere in sight. The room itself isn’t much to look at: bare concrete walls on three sides, and a clear glass wall and door on the fourth. It looks like it leads into an equally bare, though less brightly lit, concrete-walled corridor, and when he stands up, staggers over to it and leans on the handle, it doesn’t move.

The floor is concrete as well, and cold against his feet.

Wait. Why are his feet cold?

He looks down: his shoes are gone. As are his socks and all his clothes, replaced by a green smock that goes down to just above his knees and just behind his wrists and appears to be all he has on.

He tries all the walls, the door again, the joins where glass meets concrete. He pulls the tiny mattress off the cot; he pulls the cot away from the wall. Nothing. Grudgingly he rebuilds the bed, sits heavily on it and cradles his headache in his hands, waiting for whatever happens to happen. Perhaps it can bring him a painkiller when it does.

A few minutes later, the shrieking of an intercom system obliterates the eerie silence, and a voice he doesn’t recognise addresses him over a speaker he can’t see.

“What do you know, Stefan Riley?”

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