Chapter 21: 21. Gunpowder Boy

2019 December 5
Thursday

She fell asleep last night with her phone by her head and the alarm set to vibrate, but she wakes early, anyway, and silences it before it has a chance to wake her companion. She quickly checks to see if the night shift left any urgent messages — no, all quiet — and sets the phone down carefully and quietly on the bedside table, turning over after to make sure Maria’s asleep. She is, and Edy steals a few moments with her.

The bandage came off yesterday, and the skin underneath, while still bruised and swollen, looks healthier than it did when they inspected it together, before bed. Edy checks it over again, just to be sure, reaching up and flipping up a corner of the curtain behind the bed to let in a little more light, and shielding Maria’s eyes with her other hand so as not to wake her. Everything looks fine. Maria turns over in her sleep, prompting Edy to drop the curtain and move aside, give her the space she needs, and her gentle snores give way to long, slow sighs.

Edy can’t resist leaning over a little more, until she’s inches from Maria’s cheek. She mouths a silent prayer and kisses her as gently as she can, lips barely grazing the skin, indulging in the barest contact, the reassurance that Maria, her Maria, is fucking alive. Slowly she turns away, swings her legs out of the bed and hops silently to her feet.

“Right,” she whispers to herself. “Back to work, then.”

She tiptoes her way around, quietly assembling her morning routine. The low light doesn’t matter; she knows this place like she knows her own room. She’s been spending her nights in Maria’s flat for far longer than just the past week of Maria’s convalescence, and there’s talk, should their relationship prove stable in the long term — she snorts, insulted, at the suggestion they might ever break up — of moving her stuff out of her room and giving it to one of the other long-time sponsors. Edy’s failed to come up with a decent reason for being allowed to keep her own place when she barely uses it any more — “I need it to store my shoes!” is not, apparently, sufficient, even given the size of her collection — so she’s resigned herself to the loss. She glances at Maria again; if she has to sleep here for the rest of her tenure at Dorley Hall, she’s not going to complain.

Cami and knickers go in the hamper; necklace goes in the wicker basket by the sink; Edy goes in the shower.

She leans out of the bathroom door when she’s done, to check if Maria’s still asleep. She is, and that’s good, but it does mean she can’t blow dry her hair. She towels it vigorously instead, scrunches some curling gel into it, and ties it up, finger-twisting a few bangs out around her forehead, because she knows Maria likes it like that… and it alleviates Edy’s fear about her hairline. Which, yes, has never to her knowledge outed her, but it’s been a source of considerable dysphoria since her transition, since before she would even acknowledge that the word dysphoria might mean something to her, since before she truly accepted her new name, her new role. She remembers examining herself in the mirror after eighteen months of hormone therapy, disappointed that the one thing estrogen didn’t change was the thing she’d always disliked about her appearance. She could get it fixed, sure, but the prospect of letting someone take a scalpel to her face is beyond intimidating! It doesn’t matter how many Dorley girls get work done every year and survive with nothing more than some swelling and bruising and complaining about not being allowed to sniff for weeks, she’ll never so much as follow them into the consultation room. She’ll instead take pride in being pretty as she is, she’ll tease out her hair to de-emphasise her hairline, and she’ll curate a folder on her laptop of photos of professional models with tall foreheads and imperfect hairlines.

She double checks her reflection. It’s fine. Like always, it’s fine. “Silly girl,” she chastises herself for the thousandth time, and blasts her bangs with hairspray.

She reclasps her necklace, adjusts the crucifix so it sits properly in the hollow at the base of her neck, and pauses to reflect on it for a moment, and to say another prayer, asking to be blessed with good fortune. Maria’s made gentle fun of her for her beliefs, but she’s always insisted that not everything she was taught was wrong, that there’s value especially in the things her mother whispered, before her father got to her.

All done. Time to get dressed! Most of her clothes are still back in her room, but she and Maria are basically the same size and have been sharing clothes for years, so it’s entirely possible that the stretchy jeans and peach top she digs out of the wardrobe are hers, actually.

No, she decides, as she checks them over; definitely Maria’s. She’s the one who likes the big department store in the city, and the tags suggest expensive brands. She smiles as she pulls them on, imagining Maria justifying spending the extra money on them because they’re just that fucking cute and it turns out, as she poses in the mirror on the back of the door, that she’s right.

It’s not as if either of them pays rent, anyway.

Her earbuds are charging off the laptop in the kitchen, and she sticks them in, re-syncs them to her phone, and loads up one of Maria’s bands. “We must continue your modern cultural education,” Maria said, when she came home from the hospital, “if you’re going to keep subjecting me to your emo nineties shit. Give and take, Ede; the foundation of a healthy relationship.” Which means listening to Maria’s playlists at least half the time. Some of it’s grown on her, though. She cues up a recent favourite and hums along as she puts the coffee on, throws bread in the toaster, and digs in the fridge for the butter and jam. She has time while the bread toasts and the coffee percolates, and she spends it leaning on Maria’s kitchen counter, listening to Maria’s music and watching Maria sleep, her chest rising and falling as she breathes.

Goodness, but she loves her so much. There’s no-one stronger and definitely no-one more beautiful and it still astonishes Edy sometimes that it took them so long to recognise their feelings for each other. But Edy had to become first someone worthy of love, then someone ready for it, and Maria had to let her guard down. Damaged women, both of them, but carefully and lovingly mended. They both know how and where they’ve been wounded, and they press gently on each other, always; Maria, especially, can’t always keep hers hidden, sometimes can’t walk or speak or breathe for the memories that overwhelm her, and Edy’s there, every time, to help her come back to herself, so that for the next day, and for the next month, the next year, Maria can be Maria again.

The woman she loves is so fucking strong.

Edy prides herself on being a kind woman — the requirements of the programme permitting — but sometimes when Maria sleeps she speaks her memories aloud, relives in her dreams the burns and the cuts and the girls she couldn’t save, and in those moments Edy wishes for nothing more than the means to find old Dorley’s so-called Grandmother and hurt her, hurt her the way she hurt Maria, hurt her so badly she never recovers. At least the nurse’s fate was grimly satisfying. The woman deserved no less than what she got: segmented and buried in pieces, her fingers and teeth thrown in bags into the sea.

Ah! The toast is done. And the smell of it wakes Maria. Edy pauses the music, butters and jams the toast, pours the coffee, and carries it all over on a tray to the bed, where Maria’s piling up pillows behind her head, smiling at Edy, and bouncing upright with an energy she hasn’t shown since before the attack. That’s good; that’s great! She’s healing well, returning to her old self, and when she’s better she can go back down into that dank, awful basement and confront Will fucking Schroeder and make him face up to what he did to her.

Edy pushes down the flash of rage — it’s neither Godly nor becoming, it helps no-one, and it’s actively counterproductive to get angry with the boys, even when you’re not around them; she remembers well what it was like to be them — and concentrates on arranging the tray so Maria can eat her breakfast and drink her coffee without issue.

“Hey, baby,” she says, squatting down by the bed.

“G’morning,” Maria says, and Edy wants to exult: she left the spotlights on in the kitchen, they’re right in Maria’s field of view, and she’s not squinting! Another good sign. Maria reaches out, cups Edy’s cheek. “Coming back to bed?”

“I can’t,” Edy says, pouting. “Back to work today, for real.”

Maria slowly blinks away her sleepiness. “I could unilaterally give you another week off,” she says. “I still have that ‘head injury’ get-out clause; I can basically do what I like.”

“I think Monica might expire aggressively at me if I take any more time off.”

“Fine,” Maria says, leaning into the word with a grin, “I will generously allow your highly important work to take you away from me. For a while.”

“You’re so magnanimous, baby.”

“Those boys won’t rehabilitate themselves, after all,” Maria adds, and takes a bite of toast.

Edy lingers while Maria eats, and they share the idle joy of mundane daily tasks undertaken with the one you love, but then work does indeed take Edy away, out of the door and down the corridor and into the third floor proper, where she greets a handful of early birds, up making coffees and teas and filling thermoses and bagging sandwiches; people to whom she is Edy, the grad student. She waves to a friend who really is what she pretends to be, reconfirms their plans to meet for lunch later, and taps her earbud; the song starts up again, and gets to the chorus.

She treasures these mornings. It’s not just about time with Maria, it’s about time as herself, as the woman she gets to be ever since she was saved from herself, saved from the confused, angry, lonely boy, prone to bigotry, zealotry, and all the other things that were stained into her flesh as a child. It doesn’t matter how many years she puts between herself and him; she’ll always be grateful that it’s Edith who greets the morning sun and not that broken, spitting, desperate child who once sneered with her mouth and hated with her voice and hurt with her hands.

Every day’s a victory.

On the stairs down the music pauses itself; Aunt Bea’s calling. She’s been checking in every morning since Maria persuaded her to stop moping around the house, packing her back off to her responsibilities with a promise to take it easy, to definitely not go back to work until she’s fully healed, and Bea wouldn’t be Bea if she didn’t call every day to confirm Maria’s keeping that promise.

“Good morning, Aunt Bea,” Edy says. “Just a moment.” She ducks into the second floor and hurries around the corridor to the kitchen; she doesn’t actually know who’ll be awake at this time of day, not without pulling up the timetables, and she doesn’t want to disturb anyone by carrying on a loud conversation outside their door. Julia and Yasmin are breakfasting at the kitchen table, but as soon as she comes in, they clear out, ignoring her conciliatory gestures and whispering to each other. It’d be nice if they didn’t hate her and the other sponsors quite so much, but at least Christine’s started getting through to them, thank the Lord. “Okay. Ready.”

“Edith,” Bea says. “How’s my Maria?” Straight to the point, as ever.

“She’s sitting up, she’s eating toast, and given that I’m obediently listening to one of her playlists right now she’s probably listening to one of mine, God help her.”

“No signs of—?”

“None, Aunt Bea. I know what to watch for.”

“Sudden changes,” Bea says, in a voice tinny even over the expensive earbuds Maria bought her, “repeated vomiting, seizures—”

“I have the list,” Edy says.

“Sorry.”

“She’s fine. She’s recovering! And, once I’ve been to work this morning—” and discharged an obligation to a friend, Edy doesn’t add, because Bea doesn’t need to know about every single one of the deceptions and accommodations they all have to make in their lives outside the programme, or the guilt would eat her alive, “—I’ll be back with her, watching out for her. We might play some board games.”

“Be careful with that, Edith.”

Edy laughs. ‘Board games’: code for sex. For all that Bea’s role as the prudish custodian is entirely an act, she still doesn’t like to think of the woman who is almost her daughter doing such things, and neither Maria nor Edy want to raise the topic with her; they arrived at a succession of polite euphemisms almost by accident.

“Light board games,” Edy says, and hopes Bea understands that she’s teasing her, or she might end up like the nurse.

Bea sighs down the phone. “You’ll be the end of me, you two,” she says. “If the current lot don’t get there first.”

“Which current lot? The first-floor hooligans or the… eclectic mix in the basement?”

“Please. The worst thing the second years have done is somehow defeat the sound dampening on their rooms. I’m talking about the trans girl who, I’m told, is now volunteering to stay in that concrete hole because she thinks we can’t be trusted with the care and feeding of her horrid little friend.”

It’s almost entertaining, the way every conversation in the house seems to come back to young Stephanie. Almost. “It’s okay,” Edy says. “Maria will be back with Aaron soon, and Indira’s doing a great job in the mean—”

“Is she wrong, Edith?”

Uncertainty from Aunt Bea; unsettling! “What do you mean?”

“Stephanie’s actualising, growing, so fast. She’s a perfect example for the boys, better even than Victoria! So why do I feel like her every victory is a defeat for me?”

Edy puts her weight on the kitchen table. “I still don’t understand.”

There’s a long pause on the line, and when Bea finally says, “No, no, I suppose you wouldn’t,” it’s with the weight of years, and she sounds for the first time like a woman of fifty-five, to whom life has not been especially kind. “It doesn’t matter. I’m just second-guessing everything I’ve done in my life.”

“Aunt Bea, no! One precocious trans girl doesn’t change anything.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“No.” Edy says the word with as much certainty as she can. “She doesn’t change the good you’ve done, the lives you’ve turned around. Aunt Bea, you saved Maria, you saved me, you saved, goodness, I don’t know how many girls—”

“Did I? Or did I just… make assumptions? Put my pet theories into practice?”

Edy bites down on her immediate reply. Says, instead, “Are you alone out there? Or is Elle with you?”

“It’s just me this year,” Bea says. “Just me.”

“Maybe you should come home. Or maybe one of us should come out and stay with you.”

“No. No, but thank you, Edith. You’re very kind.”

“It’s the way you made me,” Edy says.

“Edith… You made yourself,” Bea says. “Maybe… maybe I will come home. There are no leads, anyway.”

Fruitless tasks undertaken for loves lost become ritualised so easily, and Bea’s search is an annual memorial. Always conducted during the first week of December, always fruitless. No-one expects a fifty-three-year-old woman — or however she might choose to conceptualise herself, this long after she was taken away — to resurface after so long, but her memory is owed, and Bea obliges. It probably wasn’t the best idea for her to go alone so soon after the trauma of Maria’s attack, but she wouldn’t be talked out of it. Edy’s always been surprised Elle still allocates funds to the task, but the woman is nothing if not sentimental — sentimental and ravenous, she remembers — and considers the disappearance of Valerie Barbier a major loose end.

Bea’s never spoken to Edy of Val, the girl who survived alongside her but was taken away less than a year before her escape, but Maria knows everything, and thus so does Edy. Empathy softens her voice.

“I’m so sorry, Aunt Bea.”

“Edith, please. Just Bea.”

“If there’s anything I can do, Bea…” She leaves the sentence hanging. Aunt Bea’s story’s changed a few times in the telling, and Edy doesn’t know if that’s because she prefers not to remember it vividly or because the experience was so traumatic that the memories simply never fully formed, but one thing’s always been consistent: Val and Bea named each other. They were, in a sense, in the only sense that matters to Bea, born together under Grandmother’s hand, and there’ll always be a part of her that believes they might still, one day, die together.

Bea’s quiet for a long time. And then, with a sniff rendered crackly and loud by the poor connection, speaks with the businesslike tones Edy’s come to find almost reassuring from her. “Edith, my dear,” she says, “if I thought there was something you could do that you weren’t already doing, I would have docked your pay. Good morning. And… thank you.”

Edy doesn’t start the music again until she’s back on the stairs, because she stopped to listen to the faint sounds of argument coming from Yasmin’s room. She taps a reminder into her phone — someone needs to check in on Yasmin and Julia, and it needs to be someone other than their sponsors, who share at least some of the blame for their isolation; perhaps not the long-suffering Christine, though, considering the rate at which she’s been accumulating responsibilities — and takes the rest of the stairs at her leisure, singing along quietly until the much-interrupted song ends.

There’s no-one in the downstairs kitchen, which isn’t all that surprising for the time of day, but Monica, an earlier riser than anyone, has left two thermoses in a clear carrier bag by the sink. She opens them, sniffs to check the contents — the pink one with red hearts and happy faces on is hers; cute, Mon, if Edy was six years old — and goes to find Monica, to thank her, swinging the bag from her little finger. Monica’s in the makeshift gym, out in the rat’s nest of rooms behind the dining hall, midway through her cardio, so Edy restricts herself to a few sardonic gestures, absorbs Monica’s answering grin, and steps up to the treadmill to share a high five.

Time to go to work!

She drops in to the security room on the way past — Nell’s on the night shift again, as she has been for a while and will be for at least another few weeks — and then it’s down into basement two, past the corridor to the cells where Will, Raph and Ollie still languish, and onwards, to the bedrooms. Stephanie, rushing past on her way to the bathroom and probably trying to get done before any of the boys wake up, smiles at her, and Edy smiles back.

Is she wrong, Edith?

Edy shakes her head to dispel the errant thought, and watches Stephanie disappear into the bathroom. She’s no existential threat to the programme; she’s just a girl, doing what she has to, muddling through with guesswork and good intentions, just like everyone else. Just a Vicky who worked herself out years earlier, and who, with luck, will choose a less problematic girlfriend.

Besides, Edy likes her. And it’s nice to help someone who knows she’s being helped.

She knocks on Adam’s door. He doesn’t answer, but she knows he’s awake, so after an appropriate pause for him to cover his nakedness — not that he’s ever naked, even in private, except during his ablutions; ungodly — she rolls the lock over and greets him with coffee and a hug.

He still looks so sad.

He’s been withdrawn since disclosure. Not as badly as Aaron, but worse than she hoped. Still tied up in his conception of manhood, his perception that his worth, his entire self, is bound up in his man’s heart, his man’s soul, and that silly little thing between his legs. It’s what they taught him, after all, and with rather more focus than is usual. Patriarchy’s messages are implied, insinuated, inserted into TV shows and playground bullying and open-palm slaps from your father, but Adam… For him, they made it explicit, codified, made him learn it rote, dressed it up as virtue and love and holiness. Edy’s still not worked out if the method of his indoctrination is going to make it easier to get it all out of him, or considerably harder.

She hugs the boy tight. At least he’s stopped trying to push her away, like he did right after disclosure. He releases her earlier than he used to, though, and she takes her tongue between her teeth for a moment to hide her disappointment.

Baby steps, Edith.

She sets the bag with the thermoses down carefully on the dresser, and motions for him to join her at his bedside, kneeling on the rug they repositioned for comfort on his first day. He kneels without hesitation, and she arranges herself next to him, knees on the rug, ankles tucked under, hands clasped over her heart, just like him.

The prayer’s a simple one, an entreaty for strength to face the coming day, to withstand troubles, carry burdens, and so on, recently rendered into modern English by some luminary. She smiles as she always does at the closing lines: Your grace is your most precious gift. Please, Lord, make me worthy of it. Isn’t that the point? To make him actually worthy of the Lord’s grace? To sift through the poisonous muck they pumped into him and find whoever’s left underneath it all?

He taught her the prayer at the end of the first week and said it aloud with her at the end of the second, a sign that her attempts to develop a rapport with him were bearing fruit. He showed her how to kneel, how to hold her hands, which words to emphasise; talked through with her the meaning behind every line.

She didn’t tell him she already knew it.

 

* * *

 

Christine’s frowning at her reflection when Paige squats down next to her, reaches out and delicately takes the open tube of primer out of her hands.

“I want to do your face today,” she says.

“Why today, all of a sudden?” Christine says, leaning forward to inspect herself more closely in the mirror set into the vanity. She lets Paige keep the primer; she’s more interested in whether that’s just a bit of discoloured skin by her nose or— yes, it’s a zit.

“I want to do your makeup every day,” Paige says, bouncing on her toes and continuing in a childish whine, “and I haven’t gotten to for ages.” She turns a toothy grin on Christine, who looks at her supposedly adult girlfriend in mild astonishment. “Please?” Paige stretches the word out, distorting the vowel as her smile widens under Christine’s scrutiny.

There’s no defeating her when she’s set her mind on something, but Christine makes a token effort. “I’m supposed to be doing it myself. Aunt Bea said so.”

“And you’ve got pretty good,” Paige says, straightening up and moving to stand behind Christine, encircling her with her arms. Christine raises a sceptical eyebrow, and Paige squeezes her gently in response. “Yes, you’re no makeup artist, but—” she punctuates her faint praise with a kiss into Christine’s hair, “—you’re at least as good as half the cis girls out there on campus. I’ve seen the looks you’ve been doing.” She rests her chin on top of Christine’s head. “It’s no secret that I spend a lot of my time watching you.”

“But—”

“And Bea’s not even around!”

Leaning into Paige’s embrace, Christine looks up at her — dislodging her as she does so — and says, “She has eyes and ears everywhere, you know.”

Paige takes advantage, plants another kiss on Christine, this time on her nose, and pushes her head down again. “Don’t you have admin access to her eyes and ears?”

“Not the ones in Edy’s head.”

All it takes, in the end, is for Paige to bring her face down level with Christine’s, meet her eyes in the mirror, and press their cheeks together. “Please, Christine?”

It’s all Christine can do not to blush. They’ve known each other for years and been back together more than a month and still Paige can render her helpless with nothing more than a little bit of physical contact. “Fine.”

Squealing with excitement, Paige reaches out with her foot and hooks in the desk chair, rolling it over so she can sit next to Christine. She starts sorting through Christine’s supplies, pausing occasionally to kiss her again, and her affection soon has Christine laughing.

“I missed you,” Paige says, when she has Christine sitting still with her face immobile; trapped.

“Sorry.” It’s a word you can say without moving your mouth much.

It’s true that between their classes, Paige’s obligations towards her Instagram account — a new box of clothes from some brand or other arrived on Tuesday, prompting a flurry of photo sessions with Abby behind the camera and Paige in front of it — and Christine’s job here, they’ve seen each other only mornings and evenings this week. Mostly it’s been Christine’s fault: in a fit of post-Lorna conscientiousness, she identified a security hole even she never knew about, and the tedious work of patching and updating software, checking the logs for intrusions (none recorded) and the files for signs of tampering (none so far) has kept her in the security room from early until late. It hasn’t escaped her notice that it’s also put her in contact with almost all the sponsors at one point or another; the very mechanisms of her job keep embedding her deeper and deeper in the programme. At least she had the chance to talk to Nell again, in the brief windows where their duties overlapped. Nell thanked her for pulling her out of a destructive spiral, and claimed already to have asked Rebecca’s sponsor, Bella, to apologise to Faye on her behalf. Christine, a girl designed by nature — and Indira — to be terrible at holding grudges, forgave Nell with hugs and a promise to have lunch some time. “Three weeks,” Nell had said. “Maybe a month. When I’m off the night shift and I’ve stopped falling asleep at ten in the morning.”

“Not your fault,” Paige says, “and you don’t need to be sorry. But I’m going to pretend that it is, and you do,” she adds, in the voice she uses when she’s concentrating, “so I can make you let me dress you, too.”

There’s no way for Christine to refuse, not with Paige so close, so beautiful, and so presumptuous. To be taken care of like this is a reaffirmation of her new life as well as their relationship, so when Christine replies, she leans forward and takes Paige’s free hand in a rush of emotion. “Please do,” she says.

Paige likes to push things. “Please do what, Christine?” she whispers.

“Please dress me, Paige.”

 

* * *

 

The fucking strip light in the ceiling. It’s all he’s looked at with any consistency for days now. Night/day. Night/day. Night/day. Red/yellow. Red/yellow. Red/fucking/yellow, like a playground rhyme. Closing his eyes and listening carefully he can almost hear cadence in its electronic hum, and he could easily believe that if he recorded it on his phone for an entire day and sped it up the waveform would coalesce into something legible, and Aaron knows for absolute certain that it would sound exactly like the ticking of the old grandfather clock in his parents’ house.

He hated that thing. An antique, apparently, but he always thought it was artificially aged, all its imperfections painted on or scraped deliberately into the wood. It was just like the manor house, with its wooden beams and grand staircase and suspicious similarity to three other manor houses on the same cul-de-sac. Just like the supposedly vintage carpets they laid down. Just like the fancy clothes they started wearing. Affectations all, fake and utterly pointless, because his father sold, didn’t he? Made enough money to live like a complete bastard for ten lifetimes, and all it cost him was his influence. The man didn’t know what he had until it was gone, and now, even though the family had more money than anyone he grew up with ever imagined was possible, it wasn’t enough. None of the toffs were interested in them. What use to the truly influential is a man with a pot of cash but no name, and no business venture with which to shape the world? Mere money isn’t enough, or lottery winners would be Lords.

So his mother and father sent him off to boarding school, hoping he could become what they never could, and while he was getting the crap kicked out of him and having his shit stolen and being forced to do things he despised, they bought a fucking grandfather clock. When he went home for the holidays he wrapped a shirt around the pendulum.

Red/yellow. Night/day. The distinctions are meaningless; he sleeps when he sleeps (but mainly during the day) and he pisses when his bladder fills (almost always at night). The rest of it’s a mire of dead introspection, self-hatred and shit movies. Nothing especially new; another purgatory. How did he survive the last one? By being evasive, bloody-minded and at least twice as clever as the other boys in the dorm, and, oh yeah, there was Elizabeth for a while, too. As much a friend as an idea into which he could escape; proof that the other world, the ordinary world, still existed.

How about here, then? It’s just boarding school all over again: people with power over him, imposing their will. And, instead of Elizabeth, he has—

Yeah. Doesn’t have anyone, not any more.

Best not to think too hard about that. Best not to think too hard about anything! Think of the consequences! A relentless focus on his own poor decisions, bad behaviour and knee-jerk responses to unexpected advances might lead to something drastic! Yeah! He might be kidnapped and stashed underground and forced to take estrogen and eat vegetarian food!

You know what? Fuck this place. Fuck the implant, fuck the estradiol. Fuck this stupid room and the stupid light strip. Fuck the inoffensive romantic comedies on his computer and the girl-pop music on his phone. Fuck Indira, fuck Maria, and especially fuck Stefan.

And, fuck, he stinks. How long’s it been since he had a shower? How many days? And why isn’t Indira making him do it? He sees her wrinkle her nose up when she comes in!

That’s stupid. Are you always going to wait for someone else to fix it? Or are you going to take care of yourself for once, Aaron? Are you going to regain a little tiny sliver of pride? If they’re so intent on erasing you, on erasing Aaron, and replacing you with some girl, some stranger, then why are you fucking helping? Wasting away in your room until one day you just cease to be and someone else walks out is possibly the most pathetic way you could have responded to your predicament.

Get off the bed. Turn on a real light. Take off those clothes and — he sniffs them; gross! — throw them in the corner. Gather up your stuff and put it away. Brush your greasy hair. Fuck it; bundle up those bedsheets, because they’re probably crusty as shit, and throw them in the corner, too. Put together the wash kit, throw on a robe, and let’s fucking go.

Aaron’s composure lasts long enough for him to open the door, stride out, and almost walk right into Stef in the corridor.

Staggering backwards, Aaron loses his footing and follows his canvas wash bag to the floor, spilling plastic bottles, his electric shaver, and his toothbrush across the concrete. He goes down hard, even with the small amount of padding his arse has acquired thanks to those fucking injections, and the pain conspires with surprise to rob him completely of any notion of what to do next.

“Sorry,” Stef says, pulling her— no, his robe tight, and frowning down at him.

Aaron opens his mouth and something fucking stupid falls out. He doesn’t even know what; probably nothing more than a lungful of idiot vowels, the kind of noise you make when your body needs to react to something but your brain is busy with more important matters.

Like: who the fuck is that?

He can’t stop staring, because Stef looks like a different person, and that’s completely ridiculous because it’s been less than a week since they saw each other last, since Aaron threw him out of his room, threw things at him, for having the audacity to claim to care, to boast of an emotional response higher up the curve than mere artless cynicism and chatterbox prevarication, to demonstrate an affinity for something actually fucking real and not the evasions and excuses behind which Aaron habitually hides, shunting anything about himself that might be worth a damn into places from which it can’t escape. Stef’s standing there looking down at him and he looks different, he moves different, he’s smiling and bending down a little and Aaron’s struggling to keep the pronouns straight in his head and to come up with a word to describe him that isn’t—

“Aaron?” Stef says.

No, no, the Stefan Aaron knows is twitchy, moves awkwardly, folds his arms into his body, and wears his hair artlessly, but the person looking down at him, wearing an approximation of Stefan’s face — and it’s close, it’s really close, but it’s like the sharper edges have been filed down just a little and the harder lines have been filled out — doesn’t glance around like Stefan does, doesn’t seem to have that need to constantly check for people watching her, doesn’t make herself small like Stefan does, and her hair… It’s damp from the shower and finger-combed out of her face, but it’s… different.

“How are you doing that with your hair?” He asks the question as soon as it occurs to him, because it’s better to grab onto some minute piece of trivia and examine it in detail than to try to process the whole picture at once, the entire fucking person standing over him.

“What?” she asks. “Oh, yeah, Pip got me some mousse. You just rub it in, then sort of lean over and shake your head and deal with the stragglers after.”

“Oh,” Aaron says. “Huh.” Not, in the end, especially helpful.

Stef — and it definitely is Stef, even though his voice is more clear than before, even though he stands and moves differently, even though Aaron spotted before he tightened his robe that he wears his towel higher on his body — starts rounding up Aaron’s wash kit from where its constituent pieces fell, and Aaron would help, or get up and run away, or swear at him, or do something, but his disbelief can’t be overridden. He can’t stop staring; it’s been less than a week! How can one man — or something — change so much in so short a time? Or has he been changing all along, little by little, week by week, and Aaron’s just been too self-absorbed to notice?

“Aaron?” Stef says, crouching down right in front of him and tipping bottles into Aaron’s wash bag. “Are you okay? Did you hurt yourself?”

Why would he have—? Oh. Right. He fell. He has a sore arse. “Not really.”

“Then budge up!” Stef says, making shooing gestures. “You’re sitting on your toothbrush.”

Still only half in the moment, Aaron lifts himself up an inch and dumbly pulls his toothbrush out from under a buttock.

“Give me that,” Stef says.

“Why?” Aaron asks, holding the thing like a week-old dead fish.

“It fell on the floor,” Stef says, in a voice so dripping with derision Aaron almost laughs. “It’ll be dirty. I’ll get you a new one.”

Aaron doesn’t respond, so Stef just reaches forward and snatches it, straightening up and grinning at him. Stef’s hair — it’s not longer, it can’t be, not in any meaningful way, there hasn’t been enough time, but it looks longer, and softer, too, and doesn’t seem constantly to fall in his eyes any more; mousse, apparently — haloes him in the ceiling light, its mid-orange colour blazing like the morning sun.

“Um,” Aaron says.

“Tell you what: why don’t I go to the storeroom and get you a new toothbrush, and when I’m done, you’ll be back on your feet, and we can talk? Catch up? Okay? Aaron?”

Aaron nods, and Stef turns on his heel, takes a right at the end of the corridor. Heading for the storeroom, the one in the common room, which supposedly he can just walk into now. Another change, since he’s been gone.

And what the fuck, Aaron, was that?

He replays the encounter. It’s easier to believe, on review, that Stef is still basically the same person, because Aaron’s seen this new Stef before, in little flashes, when he let his guard down, when he forgot to be worried, when he felt safe… and that would be a reassuring thing to realise, except that Stefan fucking Riley is flowering into a self-assured, confident and attractive person down here, in this obscene concrete pit where the pretty girls smile at you as they hold you down and hurt you.

The sound of Stef’s bare feet skipping back up the corridor reminds him that he has a job to do, and that job is to stand up and reassemble something like a working brain, so when he comes face to face with Stef again he doesn’t say anything dangerously stupid, like, hey, Stef, why are you suddenly so fucking—?

“Toothbrush,” Stef says, rounding the corner and holding it out. It’s blue, and still in its packaging. The cardboard’s peeled a little at the edges, and Aaron wonders how long it’s been in the storeroom. Do toothbrushes have use-by dates? Is that even a thing? How would that even work? Would the bristles just fall out, or—? “Toothbrush?”

Aaron jumps, then takes it. “Toothbrush,” he agrees. “Um, thanks.”

Stef’s grinning at him, like what he said was funny or something. He leans against the wall with his shoulder, hands clasped behind his back. “So,” he says, “are you up and about again? Or is this just a one-off?”

Aaron shrugs. “I, uh, hadn’t thought that far.” He points down the corridor and hefts his refilled wash bag. “I was just going to have a shower.”

Stef snorts, and wrinkles his nose, just like Indira did. “I wasn’t going to mention it, but, yeah, maybe go do that.”

Fuck. Yeah. Of course he noticed. The first time since Saturday he’s left his fucking room, smelling like an armpit’s arse, and he runs into Stef! Literally! Probably left gross sweaty patches all over Stef’s nice, clean—

“Yeah,” he says, limply waving his new toothbrush, “I’ll just go wash up, then.”

“You do that.” Stef unlocks his door with his thumb and pushes it halfway open. Aaron can see inside: it looks as tidy as ever; oh, yeah, and it doesn’t stink, either. “I’m going to go get dressed,” Stef continues, “and if you want to talk, I’ll be in the common room when I’m done. No pressure.”

Aaron nods, backing away. “I might join you.”

He can’t miss the way Stef’s face lights up. “Really?”

“Yeah. But no gay stuff, okay? And I don’t mean that all homophobically, I’m not trying to get all hate crime-y or anything, you know, I support the gays, I think everyone should get to choose their own sexuality, or, you know, born this way, whatever, it’s just that I, personally, am not into it.”

Stef bites his lip and frowns lightly and Aaron hates the way the rush of blood in his ears and the sudden dizziness combine to almost obscure Stef’s reply: “Okay, Aaron. Sure. No gay stuff.”

Aaron practically runs for the bathroom.

 

* * *

 

He’s back. He’s out of his room and he’s talking to her and he’s back. He was looking at her kind of funny, out there in the corridor, but that’s not important. That’s just a detail. It doesn’t matter, because the little shit’s not going to rot away in his room, after all. Even if he kind of smells like he has been, a little bit.

The sponsors were right: what Aaron needed was time and nothing more. Irritating. Stef makes a mental note to listen to them a bit more in future; they basically wrote the book on making happy girls out of sad boys. And with only a — she attempts the maths in her head, but quickly gives up — fifteen-ish percent failure rate!

She examines herself in the mirror. Decent enough, considering. Eyebrows still a little bushy, obviously, but she didn’t miss any spots when she shaved, and her skin looks pretty clear.

That failure rate, though; it’s worrying, and it’s why she’s still down here. All the reassurances, all the promises, all the statistics in the world won’t make her abandon that boy entirely to the care of people who, no matter what they say, have seen a hundred boys like him and probably aren’t all that attached to any specific one. Not until he becomes more like them, at any rate.

So, how should she deal with him, now everything’s (mostly) out in the open? She’ll have to be careful not to be too feminine around him; she’ll be the first to admit she’s rather let that slide, since it’s just been her and Martin.

And, of course, ‘no gay stuff’. She giggles; she can work with that. Keep her distance, that sort of thing.

She critically examines the contents of her wardrobe. It sucks. Upstairs she has skirts and dresses and leggings and jeans and some things she’s not entirely sure of the names of yet, and anything she doesn’t have can be borrowed or bought, but down here it’s nothing but fitnesswear; male fitnesswear, at that. At least she has nicer underwear now — still very nearly possible to explain away as briefs, should it come to that — and sports bras, so she doesn’t poke through the t-shirts.

The bras are harder to explain away than the other underwear, which very nearly look like briefs. She plans to claim, if anyone — such as Aaron — pulls her up on them, to have very sore nipples and to have gotten fed up with them rubbing against the t-shirts, which isn’t all that far from the truth. The boys will all be getting bras of their own, anyway, sooner or later, and for the same reason. Pippa said they prefer to wait until someone snaps and asks for one, and when Stef raised a doubting eyebrow she said it usually happens eventually, notwithstanding Aaron’s early (terrible) jokes. It was Pippa who did so, in her intake, which didn’t make it any more pleasant to be around the others. “I swear we had nastier t-shirts than you,” she said, rubbing one of Stef’s tops between her fingers. “It was like sandpaper on my nips. After a month, I couldn’t take it any more.”

Stef dumps everything out onto the bed and sorts through sizes and colours. There’s not much variation in either, but with a little experimentation she comes up with an outfit that is, at the very least, presentable: a dark green t-shirt (to hide the sports bra), the baggiest pair of joggers she has (for comfort, and to exaggerate what little contrast there is in her figure), and a hoodie, tied around the waist (to cinch the t-shirt tight). She brushes out her hair and experimentally tries bunching it up behind her head; still not quite long enough for a ponytail, although she can gather a few strands if she really yanks on it. Another few weeks, maybe. She scrunches it, instead, and shakes her head again to even out the slight wave.

In the mirror she looks… androgynous. Barely any more feminine than she looked before she started getting dressed! Not an outcome she particularly likes, but Aaron’s back, so for the moment she needs to strike a balance between looking how she wants to look, and looking so masculine she wants to claw at herself. She catches herself wondering if she can speed up his development, so she can dress the way she does upstairs, and then frowns and has to stop herself from kicking the wardrobe; necessary or not, she won’t celebrate Aaron’s feminisation. Not prematurely.

“Fucksake,” she mutters. Why does everything good have to come with a side-order of shit?

Never mind. There’s no changing his trajectory, so it’s better just to forget it. Forget it and help him acclimate to now. The future’s a worry for another day.

She pulls the case and the charms off her phone, locks them in the drawer, puts her computer to sleep, and heads back out.

Aaron’s not in the common room yet — she thinks she heard him pad wetly down the corridor while she was agonising over her hair — but she chooses to trust that he’ll show. No-one else is around yet, so she declines to turn on the TV and fetches instead a book from the pile in the corner. Relaxed restrictions since Will and the others got put back in the cells have meant a slow widening of the scope for entertainment in the common room, and the unlocked cabinets now give them access to chess and draughts sets, a Monopoly board, a delightfully dated early 2000s Trivial Pursuit claiming to be the ‘Cyberspace Edition’ that she wants at some point to torture Christine with, and a healthy supply of romance books, from battered and ancient het stuff Stef’s been ignoring, to newer queer romances. She undogs the page she was on in her latest read — she described it to Martin as ‘lesbian baker meets bisexual barista’, which information the man received with the same dispassionate placidity as he does everything else; God, it’ll be good to have Aaron back — and settles down on the couch, arranging herself so she’ll see Aaron when he comes in. She scans the page and picks up where she left off.

Ah, yes: the bakery and the upscale coffee shop are duking it out in the town’s annual Croissant Contest.

 

* * *

 

Aaron determinedly recentres the he pronoun in his mind as he pushes through the doors to the common room and sees Stef curled up on one of the couches, his elbow on an elevated knee and his temple resting on his wrist, doing that little fucking frown again, and reading a book with a pink, purple and blue cover, illustrated with a cartoon pastry in the shape of a heart. He looks unguarded, relaxed, and ridiculously feminine. Which still makes no sense: he looks barely any different from how Aaron remembers, so what’s changed?

“Aaron!” Indira squeals from behind him, running up from the direction of the stairs. He turns around and backs away from her into the common room, but she follows, letting the doors shut behind her and leaning on them. Does she know she’s blocking his way out, or is she just being ditzy? Impossible to tell. “You’re out of bed!” she enthuses. “And—” she sniffs, “—you washed!”

He holds up his hands, as if to ward off evil. “I did,” he says, hating the way he stammers over the words and finding nothing else to follow them; whatever part of his brain ordinarily does the talking for the rest of him is obviously horribly out of practice. It doesn’t help that her boundless enthusiasm and limitless energy are both turned all the way up this morning; come back, cynical, sardonic Maria! All is forgiven! Even these fucking tits!

Shit. When did he get so bad at dealing with overwhelming people? He survived years of boarding school, years of braying halfwitted posh fucks with no conception of personal space or consent without losing his grip this badly!

Yeah, but you never spent almost a week in the dark with only your phone screen for company back at school.

“What’s the occasion?” Indira says, but before he can reply and before she can say anything else, a hand — Stef’s — closes over his shoulder.

“Hey, Dira,” Stef says, moving forward into the space Aaron occupies and subtly pulling him back at the same time. “Do you mind if I borrow him for a bit? We have a lot to catch up on.”

“Of course,” Indira says, beaming at the both of them. “Why don’t I go upstairs and let them know there’ll be one extra when they start on lunch?”

“Thanks, Dira.”

When she’s gone, and when he’s collapsed in a couch, opposite from Stef, tired out from even this much contact with — he counts — two people, he manages a smile for Stef.

“Thanks for the rescue.”

“No problem,” Stef says, retrieving his book, folding the corner of a page over and throwing it onto the other couch cushion. “She can be a bit much, sometimes.”

“Only sometimes? She’s like if you could fill a nuke with niceness instead of radiation and explosions. And that only makes it scarier when she turns it off and threatens to feed you through a tube.”

He tried the passive resistance thing a couple of times, leaving his food uneaten and then, when she switched him to the nutrient shakes, waiting until the early hours and pouring them down the toilet. The first few times she cheerily provided more food, more milkshakes, and waited with him until he choked at least some of it down. And then, one time, she didn’t bring anything. She let him go hungry, all night and for most of the next day, and came back in the evening with a new milkshake. Before she handed it over — and he was alarmed to find himself instinctively grabbing for it — she gravely informed him that if he didn’t cooperate, she’d have him taken to a spare cell, strapped down, and tubed. It was enough to make him reconsider his still-forming plans to resist the injections.

“Jesus, Aaron,” Stef says.

“Yeah, well, I’m getting used to her. Never thought I’d miss Maria, though.”

“Careful,” Stef says, nodding in the direction of the nearest camera array, “someone will record that and send it to her.”

Aaron smirks, cups his hands around his mouth in a makeshift megaphone, and yells, “I miss you, Maria! Come back and save me!”

Stef laughs. It’s a real laugh, too, reaching his eyes and rocking his body back a little on the couch. It’s good to see. But then he curls up, suddenly too serious, and bunches his knees up under his chin, the way he used to, back before he learned to relax; just the sight of it makes Aaron’s heart lurch.

“So,” Stef says, “what about me? Am I too much?”

Oh. Yeah. That. “Sometimes,” he says. He doesn’t want to push Stef away, push him further into the arms of the sponsors — they seem to have gotten to know each other even better in his absence; he calls her Dira! — but lines have to be drawn, you know?

Stef looks away. “Sorry.”

It’s Aaron’s turn, now, to lean forward, to lessen the distance between them. “Hey,” he says, “no, look. I get it.” Stef looks at him again, and Aaron’s uncomfortably transfixed. Did Stef always used to bite his lip so fucking much? There’s something going on with him. Something beyond the tits and arse they’re all being forced to grow. But whether it’s new or whether it’s not, it’s distracting, and Aaron’s got to look down at his knees or he’ll mangle his words. “I really get it. And I’m, you know, maybe a little bit flattered? Maybe a lot? It’s good to be noticed and stuff, but suddenly—” his throat goes dry, “—suddenly I’m thinking maybe you never did notice me that way, and I’ve just been stewing on a misunderstanding for nearly a week, like, maybe you were just sort of awkwardly expressing a desire for good, manly company and honest friendship among best bros or some shit, but I read it the other way, the uncomfortable way, and I’m sorry for that, for assuming, and also sorry for overreacting? Oh, yeah, and when I say stewing on it, I mean it’s only one of the things I’ve been thinking about. One of many things. You know. In my room. In the dark.”

“You didn’t have your lights on? For five days?”

“Not the point. I’m sorry, okay? You apologised to me for, you know, that thing you said that I totally misinterpreted, and now I’m apologising to you for, uh, I guess for throwing things. It’s just that I’m not gay, and I probably still have all this latent homophobia, like Maria’s books talked about, and I was having a bad day… We all were, actually, because that was when the truth about all this came out and, shit, I need to say sorry for that, too. I basically said you were fine with all this.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Stef says, and Aaron looks up to confirm that the lighter tone of his voice does in fact mean he’s smiling. “You were kind of right. I… adapt. Like I said. I keep going. It’s not necessarily a healthy coping mechanism, but it works.”

“Yeah. Yeah, no, I get it.”

Stef unfolds again, tucks his ankles under his backside, his hands under his calves. Still a little closed in, maybe, but not seriously so. Shit, has Aaron ever paid such close attention to someone’s body language before?

“For the record, though,” Stef says, and the blush is right there on his stupid freckled cheeks, “I did notice you ‘that way’.”

Well.

There it is.

Okay then!

This is absolutely something he needs to nip in the bud right away; he needs to clarify his position, confirm that they’re just going to be friends, pals, buddies, mates, and no more, because if there’s one complication he doesn’t need while he’s sitting down here underground like a fucking potato growing unexpected tits, it’s—

In his haste to come up with something to say, Aaron swallows air. It bursts back out of him in a hiccup, and he slaps his chest a couple of times, to steady his breathing. “Fuck,” he gasps, airless and faint. “Fuck.”

“Sorry!” Stef says, for the hundredth time, and releases one of the hands he’s had trapped under himself to wave defensively. “I won’t bring it up again!”

Aaron shakes his head, massages his ribcage, and swallows experimentally. “No,” he wheezes, “it’s fine. We can talk about it. Maria always said I should talk more.”

Now it’s Stef who looks like he’s about to faint. “Maria said that? To you?”

Aaron coughs. God, that hurts. “Talk more about important things, she said. I quote, ‘If you paid half as much attention to the contents of your mind as you did to the contents of your underpants you might one day find you have something useful and intelligible to say.’” He frowns. “That’s not an exact quote. I think she stopped in the middle to sigh at me. She used to do that a lot, you know, like get halfway through a thought or a lecture and just look at me like I’m the world’s biggest disappointment — which, fair — and do this little sigh, like—” and he demonstrates. Hams it up a little, for Stef.

“You actually miss her, don’t you? For real.”

What, actually, is the point of pretending otherwise? In a few months or a few years or however long it ultimately takes, he’s not even going to be him any more. He won’t be around to remember the embarrassment, so why not just say it? “Yeah. Kinda.” Stef’s watching him, not smiling, merely attentive, and Aaron fills the silence. “She always seemed like she took me seriously, you know? Like, however much she disliked me — hated me — she was invested in me. And, even now, knowing this was their plan all along, their big experiment, or whatever, I think she was genuinely rooting for me. Behind the frustration and the, you know, the very real hatred. Indira… it’s more like she’s babysitting me. Which, I guess, she sorta is. Keeping me fed, keeping me breathing, for when Maria gets better. You think she’ll get better?”

Stef nods. “I’ve been getting updates from Pip. She’s on the mend.”

He’s surprised at the intensity of his relief. “Good.” And then not surprised at all by his need to change the subject. “So, uh, you’re gay, then?”

“Dunno,” Stef says, shrugging. He doesn’t seem all that bothered by the question. Of course: while Aaron’s been hiding, Stef’s been working on himself. And his hair. “Maybe? Or bi. It’s never come up before.”

And why did that make him feel better? “Dude. Seriously? I’m your first?”

Stef laughs, a little too loud. “What? No. I’ve kissed people before.”

“Oh, have you now?” Aaron says, smirking. “Very convincing.”

“Girls,” Stef clarifies. “I’ve kissed girls.”

More than Aaron’s done. “Yeah, well,” he says, suddenly bitter, “you’re going to be one soon enough, if these maniacs get their way. And I don’t see any way to stop them.” Getting strapped down and fed through a straw does not appeal. “I don’t suppose you’ve come up with a way to get out of it, have you?”

Stef shakes his head. “Nope. Locked doors. Tasers. Outnumbered like five to one, at best. They have a whole houseful of women trying to make me more like them, and I was never a fighter, Aaron. If anyone threatens to strap me down, I’m going to do whatever they say. I’ve been making my peace with it.”

“Hence the hair mousse.”

“Yes,” Stef says, laughing. Actually laughing about it!

“Jesus tapdancing Christ,” Aaron says. “It’s beyond surreal, you know that, right? You’re all confident now, with your hair mousse, and your…” He flounders. “Okay, so maybe that’s the only thing, but still, I remember when you first walked in here, all scrawny and glancing around you like a— a—” God, he’s not doing well. “Right, um, you know when you catch mice? Like, the humane way, not with traps. You get a tall bucket and a long ruler and you put some peanut butter on the end of the ruler and when the mouse runs up it to get the food the ruler tips over—” he mimes it, pivoting his joined arms at the hands, “—and the mouse falls in the bucket. And then you get out of bed and reset the ruler for the next mouse. Anyway, in the morning, when you come for the bucket so you can take them out of the house, and you look down to see if they’re okay, they do this thing where they run around, testing the walls to see if they can climb out or otherwise escape, and they constantly stop what they’re doing to check on you, to make sure you’re not a threat. Like, scurry, look, scurry, look.” He mimes that, too. “That’s what you were like when you got here.”

Stef’s watching him, eyes soft. “You used to catch mice in a bucket?”

He’s blushing, he knows it. He squirms into the couch cushion. “Our old place, before we got rich, it was near a pub. Pubs get mice. So we did, too. And I didn’t want to catch them and put them out the back door because pubs also put down traps and poison and stuff.”

“What did you do with them?”

Now he’s really blushing. He remembers a boy at school — his old school — making fun of him when they caught him with his mice. Took them off him. “I put perforated paper over the lid of the bucket, put the bucket in a rucksack, and walked a few miles down the road to where there was an old farm. Lots of stuff around to eat, no-one putting down traps.”

“You’re so kind, Aaron,” Stef says, and the warmth in his voice is almost enough to push Aaron back to his room right away.

“You’re different now,” Aaron mutters. “That’s all I was trying to say. You’ve changed. Become, I don’t know, more… Look, you’re not all skittish any more. It’s weird. It’s like you’re happy, even though you’ve given up.”

“I haven’t given up. I’ve just… Look, okay, it’s like the trolley problem, right?”

“Right. What?”

“The trolley problem, the thing with the two tracks, and the lever, and—”

“I’ve seen the memes.”

“Okay. So there’s a guy on both tracks, right? And in this example, he, well—” he smirks, “—he gets made into a girl whatever happens. But by pulling the lever, I can change it from an experience that’s a huge, painful struggle from beginning to end, to something that’s just kind of not so bad. I chose to pull the lever.”

“Stef, that’s— that’s actually bullshit. It’s also not how the trolley problem works.” Maybe if it was Declan on the other track…

“It’s just what works for me,” Stef says quickly.

“Yeah, well, I think I need to find another thought experiment,” Aaron says. “Maybe one with a big fucking drill I can use to escape this place. I don’t want it, Stef. I don’t want what they’re doing to me.”

“I know,” Stef says quietly. “How are you doing with that?”

He has to laugh. “Honestly? Fucking terribly. It’s like I can feel these fucking tits growing, Stef. Yeah, I know there’s barely anything there right now, but I know how this shit goes.” He starts counting on his fingers. “They’re pumping me with estrogen, they’ve been completely suppressing my testosterone for months, now, Indira’s been talking about introducing progesterone soon, and I’d ask where it ends but I know where it ends. ‘All the way,’ that’s what they said. And I know exactly what that means, now, because I asked: they’re going to take my fucking balls, Stef, and when I close my eyes that’s basically all I can think about.” He winces; it’s exactly a half-truth. “For a while I managed to pretend to myself that it was all just a ploy, a game, all part of some grand punishment. Some fun they were having with our bodies and minds, seeing who breaks first, who lasts longest, and so on. Grind our boners to make their bread and all that. But Indira convinced me: they’re fucking serious, Stef. They’re turning us into women because they think it’ll help us. Make us better people. And you want to know the worst thing? I blame myself.”

“What? No, Aaron—”

Impossible to stop it all coming out now. “I blame myself, and I fucking should! There were eight of us in this place when I got here, with, what, three of us from the university itself? Four? I forget. I didn’t ever care enough about the others to remember. It doesn’t matter. Point is, there were eight of us. All of us bastards; even you, apparently, although I struggle to see it. And that’s the other thing I can’t stop thinking about: if I’d been just a little bit less of a prick, if I’d kept it in my fucking pants, if I’d kept my head down, some other poor fucker would be down here and I’d still be walking around out there, not a care in the world. It’s like this place is a natural disaster, a fucking tornado or something, and I was the idiot running up to film it on my phone, and the footage of my fuckup will circulate on the internet forever with a timestamp that will only get more poignant with the passing years. I’m the idiot disappearing into the swirling clouds while my phone drops from my hands.”

“You don’t deserve this, though.”

“Didn’t say I do. But I fucking might, Stef. I really might! I thought about my future, about the man I was going to become, and I hated him. I hated how inevitable it was that I was going to be him some day because I have — had — have no self-fucking-control, and I hated him.” Clenching his fist is involuntary and inevitable. “I hated his guts. It was like coming here let me see myself from the outside for the first time ever. I see myself, but only as I’m getting sucked into the fucking tornado. I mean, I always knew I was a bastard, sure — I told you, as a kid I thought those fuckers at school were some grand retribution from the universe — but I never knew I was so fucking pathetic. I’m a slimy little fuck who takes no responsibility for his own shit, imagines karmic retribution because it’s easier than facing the people he’s hurt… I took pictures of my own cock, for Christ’s sake. What they’re doing to me? I don’t want it. I hate the thought of it almost as much as I hate myself right now, but I can’t pretend I didn’t bring this on myself.”

Silence for a little while. Stef’s just looking at him, compassionate.

“You know what I don’t get?” Aaron says. “Why you like me. Even now. Especially now! They gave you a whole fucking PowerPoint presentation on my shit.” Stop talking, Aaron. “What is there to even like about me?” Stop talking now. “There’s nothing to me, Stef. Nothing there. Take away the bad shit and there’s nothing left.” It doesn’t matter that they’re in the common room any more, doesn’t matter that someone might come in. Doesn’t matter that all this is probably being recorded. It’s all coming out and that’s that. “And that’s what scares me, you know? Even more than everything else. More than what they want to do to me. I’m scared I’m just a hardened shell of shit around nothing. I’m scared because I know it’s true.”

He expects Stef to come over, to hold his hand or pat him on the arm, the way he used to, occasionally, but he doesn’t. On the other couch, miles away if he’s an inch distant, he stiffens up, and plays with his hands. He looks lost, but when he talks, it’s with a conviction Aaron’s not sure he’s ever heard from him.

“Who’s talking to me, Aaron?” Stef says. “Right now, who’s talking to me?” Aaron doesn’t answer; he doesn’t know. “Remember, weeks ago, when Declan attacked us? Who was it who charged him, pushed him aside, stopped him from seriously hurting me? When I hurt myself, who brought me back to my senses? Was it the ‘nothing’ inside your shell? Or was it you, the real you, the one who doesn’t need to do all the shit you used to do? The one who isn’t defined by what you’ve done, or what people say about you, or even what’s going to happen here?” Stef doesn’t get up, but he does move to the other end of the couch, almost close enough to touch. “I hated you when I first got here. Like, really hated you. Because I saw the shell. Like Maria did, and the other sponsors. But when we got to know each other, I started seeing you, and God help me, I like you.” He pauses, knots his eyebrows again. “I think Maria sees you, too. A bit. Maybe not the way I see you, but she does.”

It pulls a smile out of Aaron. “I never understood you,” he says. “You’re too good for this place.”

Stef smiles. “I got some help recently. While you were in your room. And it helped me realise just how much we filter when we look at ourselves, when we think about ourselves. I got so used to seeing myself one way…” He trails off. Is that why he seems so different? Someone helped him to see himself in a different way? Here? That seems… risky.

“What other way is there to see yourself?” Aaron asks. “As a— as a fucking girl?”

“No. As someone with potential, not as someone whose life has been squandered.” Stef leans back a little, and Aaron resists the instinct to lean forward to match. “I always saw myself as someone kind of… waiting around for life to start. Everything was awful, and kept getting worse, and it was like, if I waited long enough, maybe everything would just work out. Stupid as hell, I know. And then, obviously, I came to Dorley.” Stef shakes his head. “I made everything so complicated, up here—” he taps his temple, “—but it’s pretty simple, really. The guy I was, he was dumb. But I don’t have to be him any more. Not if I don’t want to.”

“I mean, that’s not really optional, is it?” Aaron says, without thinking.

Stef rolls his eyes. “I don’t mean it like that. Although, I guess, kind of a little bit like that?” he adds, looking thoughtful. “Whatever. That’s not the part that matters.”

“Not the part that matters? Stef. Stefan.”

“Yes?”

Fuck it. “Never mind.” It’s starting to become clear now: the different way he stands, his confidence, the hair mousse… Stefan’s been spending too much time around women. That’s why he bought into his trolley problem bullshit; the women around here are simply too nice to him, whereas the men are sub-fucking-par. It’s too easy for him to see men as the failure state. That’s got to be it. What man does Stef even have, if not Aaron? Adam? Martin? Tweedles Dee, Dum and Dickhead in the cells?

“Aaron?” Stef says. “You okay?”

Is he? It’s getting to be a complicated question. “Yeah. Sort of. I don’t know. Look, uh, Stef. I’m going to head back to my room now, for a bit. And I mean just for a bit!” He adds quickly, to combat Stef’s obvious disappointment. “It’s not going to be like it was; I’m not going to go all fucking hermit again. I need a bit of time to get back up to speed, you know? After so long on my own, it’s kind of tiring just being around people.”

Stef nods. “Sure,” he says. “Sure. Just don’t be a stranger, okay?”

“I won’t,” Aaron says, standing up and stretching limbs made stiff and sore by tension. “I’m, uh, glad I didn’t fuck things up between us completely. You know. The other day.”

“Yeah,” Stef says, unfolding from his couch and hopping to his feet, “I’m glad I didn’t, either.” There’s an awkward moment where neither of them seems to want to look at the other one, and then Stef blurts out, “So, um, hug?”

“What?”

“I’ve missed you, man.”

“That’s still so weird. That you miss me. That anyone would.”

“Elizabeth missed you, right? When you saw each other regularly. She missed you when you weren’t there.”

“I suppose.”

“And that was strictly platonic. So’s this.”

“You want a platonic hug?”

“Yes.”

“Because you missed me.”

“Yes.”

“Fine.” Aaron doesn’t know quite how to proceed, so he loosens his arms and waits.

“Okay, just, if you come over, like—”

“Oh, sure. Shit, I’m stuck in the sofa.”

“So move your foot?”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“You have hugged someone before, haven’t you?” Stef says, embracing him. He sounds all too smug for Aaron’s taste, so he steps lightly on his toes for a moment.

“No trick questions.”

“Sorry.”

“Okay. We’re done.”

“We’re done.”

“Yeah. Just let me step back—”

“Sure, and I’ll—”

“Hah!”

“Don’t laugh.”

“Now you’re stuck in the sofa.”

Aaron sidesteps out from between the couches, to give Stef the space to extricate his foot from the troublesome spot where the flap of fabric intersects with the front leg of the couch. When he’s done, Aaron nods, smiles, and scurries out of the common room. Halfway down the corridor he turns and yells back at the closing doors, “Tell Indira I’m sorry I’m going to miss lunch! I’ll have something later!”

Stef yells back, “Sure!” and Aaron wonders, as the doors close, how he got his voice to sound so clear.

 

* * *

 

She sits back down on the couch after he leaves, sinking heavily into the cushions and thinking furiously: he seemed… okay? Still railing against the changes, obviously, but surviving. Making jokes. Even reflecting on his past! And she saw the look on his face when she did her best to ram home that there are things about him that are real, that are likeable, that are worth preserving. He looked like she’d offered him a frozen hippo. Like she’d presented him with a concept he never considered before.

Stef retrieves her book and flicks through it but leaves the page corner folded because she knows she won’t be able to concentrate on anything else. She runs the pages against her thumb as she thinks.

Could she have supported him more vocally against the programme? Perhaps. He’s definitely still dwelling on the changes that are to come. But there’ll be time to talk to him more about that, if he’s true to his word and doesn’t disappear into the dark for another five days. Maybe tomorrow, now the air’s cleared, they can talk in more detail about his future.

That went pretty well!

“I don’t think any of us could have done better,” Indira says, flopping down onto the other couch, into the exact spot Aaron just vacated. “You brought him out of himself just enough.”

“He did that himself,” Stef argues, sitting forward again. “I didn’t get him to leave his room. We just… bumped into each other.”

“I saw you linger in the corridor when you heard him banging around in there, so take some credit. It’s okay, Stephanie, really. Seeing him again is good for both of you.”

“Do you have to make everything so transactional?” Stef says, and when Indira laughs, adds, “What?”

“Think about what you just said, Steffie. Play it back in your head. Slowly, if you have to.”

“I still don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

“Everything you do is transactional. By definition. Because you’re doing them. They’re trans actio—”

“Oh my God,” Stef snaps. “Really? Now? After…” She waves her hands around as she tries to think of the right word to sum up colliding with Aaron, dressing for him, talking him through his self-hatred, and having to watch him leave again. It takes a few seconds before she realises her brain, still running on useless adrenaline, isn’t, in this instance, going to be helpful. “After that?”

“When you’ve been here as long as I have,” Indira says, more gently, “you learn to see the humour in everything.” Her tone turns mournful, inspiring Stef to look back at her; she’s frowning, and twitching her upper lip. “You have to, or it’ll all get too much.”

“You could just stop, you know. If it’s all too much. I know you’re kind of committed, with this lot. But why not close it all down when we move on?”

“Are you kidding?” Indira says, blinking hard and wiping at her eyes. “The programme will go on as long as we can make it go on. I know you’re still sceptical, but we do good work! If we hadn’t intercepted this intake — yourself excluded — Declan would still be assaulting his girlfriend, Ollie and Raph would still be Ollie and Raph, Will would be wandering around campus like an unexploded rage bomb, Martin would be, admittedly, mostly only a danger to himself, and Aaron… Well, you know what he was up to.”

“What about Adam?” Stef says. “I’ve never been able to get a handle on exactly why he’s here.”

She shrugs. “Adam spent his entire life being wound up like a toy by a Christian sect of fanatical bigots. He was on the verge of being unleashed on the country as a deeply conflicted young man with prejudice practically tattooed onto his bones and the need for righteous justice drilled into his head. He was a walking hate crime, Steph. The way he was raised, he had almost no choice not to be. At the very least, we’ve saved a few Pride parades and abortion providers from being picketed by him; at worst, we’ve prevented something truly awful.”

That’s close to Stef’s conclusions about Adam, put together from the pieces he gave her when she went to see him in his room a week or so ago, but it’s still startling to hear it confirmed. “Yeah,” she says. “Point made.” Not exactly, but it’s not a conversation Stef’s keen to have over and over again.

“And ‘transactional’ is still funny,” Indira says, smiling again.

“It’s not.”

“I’m going to have it put on a mug.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to inspire one of those bloody things.”

She pulls her phone out of a pocket in her dress and taps at it for a moment. “Too late!”

“Shit.”

“Sorry.”

“I meant what I said, though,” Stef says. “I don’t want to think of everything I do as so… cynical. Even if some of it has to be.”

“You sound like Pippa.”

“Well… that’s fine. She has good instincts.”

“She does. And she knows when to suppress them, just like you. You got your foot stuck on purpose, too, didn’t you?”

No choice but to admit it, really. “Yeah. I wanted to keep the tone light. He got his foot all wrapped up in the fabric under the sofa, and it seemed like a good thing to copy. Don’t grin at me like that! I don’t like manipulating him.”

Indira switches couches, sits next to her and wraps an arm around her shoulder. “It’s okay,” she says. “He needs it. He needs to have a friend, an ally, just as he needs me to play my role and Maria, hers. When Aaron leaves here — and she will, with your help — she’ll have a life she could never have dreamed of. The fact that he never knew to dream of the exact life we’re giving him isn’t as important as the opportunities she’s going to have.”

Stef would protest, but what would be the point? She nods, instead, and sinks into Indira’s arms, allowing herself to be comforted. Like she said to Lorna, her objections have become routine; everyone here knows them, herself included. It’s exhausting to keep trying to fly into the wind. She’s not exactly Dorleypilled, like Christine said — like she used to accuse Christine of being — but she’s one woman against a whole platoon, whose commanders are all true believers and whose troops are, at best, just going along with it for the sake of a quiet life. She can’t beat them; why not join them?

“It’s okay, sweetie,” Indira whispers. “He’ll be okay and so will you. We’re all here for both of you.”

Besides, it’s nice, here in Indira’s arms. Easy to see why Christine loves her so much.

They decide to go upstairs for lunch. No point hanging around the basement, Indira said, if there’s no-one else to hang around with. Christine and Paige join them out of the security room, with Christine packing up three laptops to bring with her, “So no-one messes with them. You people have no instinct for opsec.” Indira responds with an injured look and an exaggerated finger pressed to her breast that makes Christine giggle and lunge for her, and the two of them arrive in the dining hall ahead of Paige and Stef, because Paige wants to add a little more volume to Stef’s hair and try some eyeshadow colours on her, and pointedly gets Stef’s permission before doing either.

“Yes, yes,” Indira says, “you’re so ethical. I’m very impressed.” She ignores the rude gesture Paige directs at her, and asks, “Who wants pizza? I want to order in.”

A show of hands — including from two other groups of women in the dining hall — approves the idea, and Indira goes around the room, taking orders. Christine, Paige and Stef claim a smaller table near the kitchen, so Stef can meet people coming and going and get another precious glimpse of the outside world through three sets of double doors, and Paige unwraps a new-looking eyeshadow palette and bids Stef sit very still.

“Thank you, Stephanie,” she says.

“Oh, uh, no problem.”

“I’ve been wanting to try these shades,” Paige says, frowning in concentration, “But there aren’t many here with your colouring. Would you mind if I took a picture afterwards? I won’t upload it anywhere.”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Stef says. “If I look okay, can you send it to me, too?”

“You’ll look more than okay, Steph,” Christine says, poking her gently in the upper arm. “You’re really pretty already, and only getting prettier.” She giggles. “We saw how Aaron responded when he saw you. Like you were a sexy cartoon fox and he was a skunk with his jaw dropping to the floor.”

Stef desperately wants to close her eyes, but Paige is still layering colour onto them, so she settles for having a minor, perfectly stationary panic attack. “You were watching?”

“On and off. Didn’t listen, though. Just wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to lunge at you, or something.”

“He wouldn’t.”

“All the same,” Christine says, “it’s my job now. I have to be responsible.” She sighs grandly, holding the back of a hand to her forehead. “It’s awful.”

“It actually is,” Paige whispers.

Christine stretches, giving Stef another chance to look at her outfit. “You look great, Christine,” she says, taking in the eye-catching makeup and the artfully faded green dress with the faint white spots down each side.

“I know, right?” she says. “I was Paige’s first victim of the day. Did you see the shoes?” She angles her feet so Stef can see: white sandals with black soles and black detailing on the straps. “The shoes are my favourite part.” She covers one side of her mouth with her hand and stage-whispers, “I’m keeping them.”

“I already said you can keep them,” Paige says absently. “You’re not a rebel.”

“She thinks I’m not a rebel,” Christine says to Stef, shaking her head.

“Life is hard,” Stef sympathises.

“Her feet are smaller than mine, too,” Paige says. “Those shoes are literally useless to me.”

“Paige, you have lovely feet!” Christine says, a little too loud. She slaps an embarrassed hand over her mouth, too late to stop the entire dining hall overhearing.

A girl on the other side of the room, wearing a hoodie and pink and white thigh socks, yells, “Woo! Yeah!” before her friend silences her by pulling her hood, which has cat ears on, down over her head. Stef giggles at Christine’s mortified face, now mostly hidden behind her hands.

“Thank you, Christine,” Paige says, and air-kisses in her direction.

“Why is it,” she says, “that I can spend a year in a dungeon and have my testicles nonconsensually removed, but it’s only at times like this that I want to die?”

Indira, returning from her rounds, sits next to Christine and rubs her between her shoulder blades.

“So, how is Aaron?” Paige asks, while Christine copes with her mortification.

Stef tries to shrug without jolting Paige’s hand. She’s moved on from Stef’s eyes and is doing something around her temples. “He’s struggling. But he’s out of his room, as you saw. I presented my acquiescence as me simply acceding to the inevitable, and he was… well, he wasn’t okay with it, but he didn’t throw things at me, either. And we talked about his guilt, his self-hatred, stuff like that. Progress, I think.”

“I never would have expected you to like him,” Paige says, as she does something to Stef’s cheek.

“Me neither,” Indira murmurs, still comforting Christine.

You are reading story The Sisters of Dorley at novel35.com

“Yeah, well,” Stef says, trying to frown without moving her face too much, “I kinda do. So we all just have to accept that I have terrible taste in men — or whatever — and move on.”

Paige grins, sits back, and extracts from her shoulder bag a truly massive phone in a sparkly pink case. “Moving on. I’m done! Say cheese?”

Stef obliges, and has to admit, when she sees the picture, that she looks pretty good. A lot like Pippa’s makeup from the night she came home from the club, but in a mixture of oranges and blues that feather away from her eyes. “Did you put something sparkly on my cheeks?” she says.

“I put something sparkly on your cheeks. Don’t worry; I have stuff in here to get it all off you before you go back down.”

An irresponsible part of Stef, the part that wants to just throw all her responsibilities to the wayside, move upstairs and indulge herself, tempts her to tell Paige not to worry about it. She ignores it, thanks her again, and turns to Indira and Christine, who are still wrapped up in each other.

“Hey,” she says, “I’ve been meaning to ask… Melissa doesn’t know I’m here, does she?”

“No,” Indira says, shaking her head, “and that’s intentional. Abby was all set to tell her about you, back when she thought you were one of our—” she smiles toothily, “—more ordinary residents, but she changed her mind after Christine told her the truth about you.” She elbows Christine gently. “And hey, Chrissie, sweetie, I’m still offended you told her and not me.”

“Sorry,” Christine says, stretching out the final vowel. “But I was still your job, back then. I didn’t want to have to make you choose.”

“She didn’t tell me, either,” Paige says, smirking.

“Stop stirring, babe.”

“Never.”

“Why wouldn’t Abby want Melissa to know about me?” Stef asks.

“The programme was difficult for Melissa,” Indira says, leaning forward on her wrists. “She came in late, and she was very obviously of a different character to the others. Steffie, about Melissa… this might be difficult for you to hear.”

“I’ll be okay,” Stef says, reaching out to touch Indira’s elbow where she’s resting it on the table. “I want to know. If it’s about her, I want to know.”

Indira nods, and double taps her phone screen to wake it. “Pizza in fifteen,” she says, reading off the website on the screen. “Ish. Okay, the thing with Melissa is that Abby thinks she got to her just in time. That she might only have been months, even weeks, from doing something drastic.”

“To someone else?” It comes out quickly, but the idea of Melissa hurting someone on purpose has to be dispelled.

“No. Not unless it was collateral damage. It’s why Aunt Bea okayed such a late entry; the chances of her surviving another year were slim. Did you know that sometimes, with people like Melissa, we don’t necessarily bring them in straight away? One of us will try to befriend them, steer them gently towards better outcomes. Find them a therapist, pay for it if necessary; we have access to all sorts of very believable fake grants. As much as some here might fervently believe that womanhood is the preferable state for anyone who can handle it—” Indira rolls her eyes, and Stef wonders who, exactly, thinks that, “—it’s not actually our first choice. Sometimes lives can be turned around with the most minimal of interventions; a few targeted acts of kindness. I have a friend who graduated from Saints last year who still doesn’t know we helped him. Definitely doesn’t know what we do here. But with Melissa… She was in real trouble. Abby said you could see the end in his eyes. And, um, sorry about the pronoun. It’s just that I remember the exact way she said it. Hard to forget, actually.”

“It’s okay.” ‘You could see the end in his eyes’ — it really had been that bad, then? “Is that why it was so hard for her here? Because she was… close to the end?”

“That’s how it started. But she came in late, as I said — in November; imagine if we added someone new around the time your lot started getting your first estradiol shots — and that meant slotting into a developed dynamic, and she wasn’t exactly an assertive girl. And it was kind of a rough intake, and she was an easy target. So she spent most of her time with Abby. And because the sponsors assigned to her year had their hands full with the other residents, and Abby was a first-time sponsor who really wasn’t cut out for the job… It was a recipe for isolation and heartache. Melissa left the first chance she got, and she’s barely been back since. Broke poor Abigail’s heart.”

“I thought they were still friends?” Stef says, thinking of the photobooth pictures.

“Friends, yes,” Christine says. “But Abby wants more. Always did. She told me the story of how they first met, properly, outside the club, and I think she fell in love with her right there and then.”

“The club? The one where Mark disappeared?” The deadnaming’s accidental, and Stef winces; but there’s something about the period between Melissa retreating from her life and her disappearance — the part of Melissa’s history she has no access to — that’s indelibly stained with Mark. She decides to do better; she’s the actual trans girl in this bloody place, after all! She should be better at this than the rest of them.

“Yeah.”

“I thought she would have just knocked her out? Isn’t that what you did to me?”

Christine smiles. “It’s probably best if Abby tells you herself. Or if Melissa does, when you see her again. Because you will see her again. When you’re both ready for it. I think Abs has a plan to soften her up, to slowly prepare her for the idea of you, here. And, hey! I didn’t knock you out! You just can’t handle your drink, Steph.”

“I think the overall impression,” Indira says, “from Abby and the sponsors, including me, is that if Melissa found out you were here, she’d come barrelling in and try and get you out, by any means necessary. And you don’t want to leave yet, do you?”

Stef gets a flash of Aaron in his concrete room, in the dark. “No,” she says. “Not yet.”

“Abby thinks she’ll think it’s her fault you’re here,” Christine says.

“Which is true,” Paige says. Indira glares at her. “What? It is! I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. If she hadn’t come here, Stephanie would never have even thought about us.”

“And Melissa’s got a rather… poor view of her younger self,” Indira says, rolling her eyes at Paige and returning her attention to Stef. “It’s yet another thing that colours her view of the programme.”

“She’s okay, though, isn’t she?” Stef says. She knows she is — she’s checked her file often enough — but sometimes it’s better to hear it than read it.

“She is. She’s got a nice life. She’s up in Manchester now. Doesn’t seem to have a steady girlfriend, but she’s got a flatmate and a job and, of course, Abby visits constantly. It’s fifty-fifty, if Abby’s not here, whether she’s at work or she’s up with Melissa. Right now, for example, I haven’t seen her for days, so I assume that’s where she is.” Indira smiles with her tongue between her teeth. “Pining.”

“They could be together,” Paige says idly. “Romantically, I mean. You don’t know.”

“They’re not,” Christine says. “Abby would be insufferable if they were.”

“True.”

“Hey, kids,” a voice says, and Stef looks around to see Tabby approaching, clutching a steaming, bright red mug in one hand, and a laptop in the other. “Mind if I join?”

The four of them wave various hands and Tabby sits at the end of the table, rests her elbows and cradles her head between them, groaning theatrically. Indira shifts her chair over, pushes Tabby’s things out of the way, and starts rubbing Tabby’s back the same way she rubbed Christine’s. Stef reaches over to move the mug farther away from the laptop, in case of spillage, and takes the opportunity to look at the design: it says, in capitals, KEEP CALM AND CAPTURE MEN, and where the crown would normally be is a stylised cartoon prison cell. Just once, Stef would like to see a mug with something innocuous printed on it. Christine’s promised her there’s the odd mug with simple boomer humour on, and the occasional innocent visual pun, but Stef’s decided Christine probably imagined them.

“You okay, sweetie?” Indira says.

Tabby, with her head still facing straight down, continues moaning and groaning. On the other side of the table, Christine picks up her phone, unlocks it, and frowns. Stef isn’t quite sure what to pay attention to.

“I hate those bloody boys,” Tabby says. “Oh, avoid Harmony. Ollie pissed her off so much I think she was headed out to the campus gym to beat the crap out of something, and if anyone gets in the way she might unload on them instead.”

“Are they really that bad?” Paige asks.

Tabby straightens up. “They’re… difficult. Ollie’s worst. Raph is merely obstructive. And Will… Fuck. Stephanie, I’m glad you’re here, and I’m glad Dira is, too, because I need to ask a really big favour.” She drinks deeply from her mug. “Will’s asking to talk to you.”

“To me?” Stef says.

“He said he has to talk to someone, and that it can’t be me. I asked him, who then? And he picked you. Instantly. But I didn’t say yes. Didn’t even say I’d think about it, or that I’d ask you. So he has zero expectations here.”

“It doesn’t seem like the best idea, Tab,” Indira says. “But Pippa’s out today, so I’ll cosign it with you if Steffie agrees.”

Stef’s thinking. Why would Will want to talk to her? They didn’t exactly part on good terms; she shouted a warning to Maria that might have saved her life and certainly ruined Will’s escape plans. Admittedly, those plans were pre-ruined, and she merely hastened their demise, but still: he has good reason to hate her. And she has no reason to help him.

Except for Adam.

Damn it.

“I’ll do it,” she says. “When’s best?”

“Really?” Tabby says, loud with relief. “That’s brilliant, Steph! And after lunch is fine.”

“You’re sure?” Indira says.

“He’ll be behind a locked door, right?” Stef says, and Indira and Tabby both nod. “Then I’ll be perfectly safe.”

“Thank you so much,” Tabby says. “I feel like I should give you a present. Um, I could make you some lunch?”

“Pizza’s on the way, actually,” Indira says sheepishly. “You just missed it.”

“Damn.”

Christine, who’s been whispering with Paige for the last minute or so, raises a hand. “You can have mine, if you want, Tab. You like spicy beef?”

“Love it. What’s up?”

Christine turns her phone around, showing a half-dozen texts from Vicky.

“We have to go do Lorna damage control,” she says. “Again.”

 

* * *

 

Christine really should get her driving licence. She and Paige signed out one of the Hall’s handful of cars, and Paige didn’t complain for a moment about the need to chauffeur her girlfriend to their friend’s troublesome girlfriend’s house and miss out on her pasta salad. She keeps glancing at Christine, the frown that lightly puckers the bridge of her nose firmly in place.

Paige finishes lurching the hatchback through the roundabout and onto the bypass, settles into a steady seventy, and asks the question Christine’s been dreading.

“How much shit are we in, exactly?”

Christine scrolls up and down the text messages from Vicky for a moment — all, apart from the ones exchanged after Christine got in the car, variations on a theme: Lorna’s working herself up to do something to force Vicky’s release from her responsibilities — and eventually admits, “Quite a lot. It’s not as bad as it could be, since she hasn’t actually done anything yet, and she’s still centring Vick’s wellbeing, so she shouldn’t do anything rash, but… I did half a job, I think, when I read Lorna in. I was trusting Vicky to do the other half, and I know she’s tried, but she’s too close to her.” She shrugs. “My fault. My responsibility.”

“Not your fault,” Paige says instantly. “The sponsors are too eager to get you to do things like this. I know Lorna asked for you, but this kind of thing is too much to drop on your shoulders.” She drums her fingers irritably on the wheel. “She’s your friend, too; reading her in should not be your sole responsibility. And, yeah, I love Vicky, obviously, but she should have been more careful, and she should have done the work. She didn’t.”

“I can’t be too upset with Vicky—”

“I can. I won’t show it, but this is her mess you’re stuck with — and it’s our day together she’s intruding on.”

Christine nods. “That’s not all I’m worried about. Lorna knows about me, Paige. I told her everything. And I remember how she looked at me, after. She sees him when she looks at me, and I’m… not good at handling that.”

Paige reaches over the gearshift and squeezes Christine’s thigh. “But you’re not that person any more. You’re Christine. You’re amazing. If she sees some stranger when she looks at you, some guy she only knows about because you told her about him, that’s her problem, not yours.”

“I think all of Dorley is her problem.”

“Well,” Paige says, “she never lived through it. She can’t understand, no matter how much she claims to love Vicky.”

“You don’t trust her, do you?”

“I’m keeping an eye on her. It’s just a shame we can’t lock her in the basement with no outside ideological input and wait for her to come around to the Dorley worldview. Vicky would get very upset with us.”

“Paige—”

“Worked with Stephanie, didn’t it?”

“Paige Adams, that’s the most cynical thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Am I wrong, though?”

Christine’s forced to think about it for a second. “No, not technically. But it wasn’t on purpose!”

“All the same.”

“You’re joking, aren’t you?”

“Obviously,” Paige says, grinning. “Vicky would never let us do it.”

“God,” Christine says, massaging her temples. “I’m so tired of these constant adrenaline spikes. I want one normal week. I want to go to class and relax with you and not have Vicky’s girlfriend constantly threaten to out us as kidnappers and torturers and not find any fucking security holes in our network. One week. To relax.”

“It’s a shame we don’t have more time,” Paige says, “or we could pull over and I could help you relax right now.” With her left hand resting on the wheel, she raises the first three fingers.

“Are you being filthy again?”

“Yes.”

Christine smiles, forced once again out of a bad mood by Paige, and whispers, “Later.”

Vicky and Lorna live with their other housemates in a four-storey terraced house on the other side of Almsworth, a long way from most of the city’s student-aimed accommodation and actually quite nice, for a rental. Paige pulls up in the first available space, a little way down the road, and Christine takes the opportunity presented by the short walk to the front door to calm her nerves. It’s just Lorna, right? A fundamentally nice person?

A fundamentally nice person who is convinced that Christine and everyone else involved with Dorley — with the sole exception of Vicky — is complicit in kidnapping and torture. Which, once again, yes, but it’s not that simple!

Hmm. Very calm, Christine. At least she has her lines of attack prepared.

Lorna opens the door, looking irritated. “Hi,” she says, packing a lot of insincerity into one syllable. “Vicky told me she texted you.”

“And you wish she hadn’t,” Paige says.

“Astute. Well, come in, then.”

The ground floor’s laid out exactly as Christine expects, with the main space divided into nominal dining and living areas, with enough furniture for several people and a stack of cheap-looking wooden chairs in the corner for guests. At the back of the room, one door leads into an L-shaped kitchen extension and another out into what is probably an extremely small garden. Vicky emerges from the kitchen as Lorna shuts the front door behind them, carrying a tray with four mugs of tea and a plate of biscuits.

Christine has to smile. Vicky always did like to play the host. It had been barely a week into their second year before she had the two of them and Jodie over to her room, and had them sit in communal confusion while she served drinks and snacks and engaged them all in enthusiastic conversation about what they were going to do with their new lives. At the time, Christine assumed she was just revelling in feeling normal again, after their year underground; now, looking back, it seems more likely that Vicky felt normal for the first time in her life.

Those small but sunny first-floor rooms already feel like a lifetime ago. Not a care in the world, except for the requirement to construct a new self out of the scraps left to her.

Vicky silently hands out mugs, slides the tray onto the coffee table, and curls up in an armchair. Defensive.

“She shouldn’t have texted you,” Lorna says flatly, pointedly sitting in another chair on the other side of the table and embracing her mug of tea with both hands.

“Lorna—” Vicky says.

“Vicky! You can’t just call on your kidnapper mates for help when you lose the argument.”

“Lorna,” Christine says as gently as she can, “yes, she should.” She and Paige are perched together on the central sofa, because if nothing else Christine’s going to need Paige’s reassuring warmth as close to her as possible. “You have to understand what’s at stake here. Whatever you’re planning—”

“I’m going right to this Beatrice woman,” Lorna snaps, “and I’m going to tell her I’ve got files on a flash drive mailed out to a friend in another country, and if she doesn’t give Vicky complete freedom, then my friend will make those files public. Vicky needs to get away from that place, she needs to be allowed to see family and friends from before she was kidnapped, before she was tortured; she needs to be able to tell people she’s trans; she needs to be able to live her life!”

“Lorna, darling,” Vicky says, half out of her chair in alarm, and Christine wonders if Lorna’s never actually vocalised her plan before; she’d assumed Vicky was being circumspect via text for opsec reasons, which, now that she comes to think about it, was probably foolishly optimistic of her, “that’s such a bad idea! You can’t do that!”

“Why not?”

Vicky’s falling over words in the haste to get them out. “You know why the programme still freaks me out so bad? Why I got out as soon as I could? It wasn’t because I didn’t need them any more, it’s because I know the lengths Aunt Bea will go to in order to protect it! It was drilled into me! She’s capable of some really dark things, Lorna. You have to let this go.”

“You know I can’t.”

“I’m fine. Really.”

“And you know that’s a lie.”

Christine, pinching the bridge of her nose, leans forward on the sofa. “Lorna, okay. There’s some stuff you need to know. Stuff we only touched on before. But, first, have you mailed the flash drive yet?”

“I haven’t even made them yet,” she says, affronted. She glares at Vicky and adds, “I wouldn’t have done it without talking to you first! You know that.” She looks back at Christine. “You didn’t need to bring in these… people.”

Great! Christine gets to be ‘people’. She rubs her fingers together as she breathes slowly. Vicky glances over at her, nervous about her reaction; Paige takes a bourbon cream from the plate.

“Vicky’s right, Lorna,” Christine says. “You have to drop this. Remember how I told you about the people who were made to disappear? One of them was just a violent rapist who was already in our custody, but the other… I need to tell you about Karen.”

Lorna sits back in her chair. All defiance. “Who the fuck is Karen?”

“Karen was a relic. A remnant of the old days, before Aunt Bea took over, when the programme at Dorley was about nothing more than sick pleasure. Long story short: she was trained as a nurse, and we needed her this year, for routine medical examinations. We can’t exactly contract out. But she was a sick woman, Lorna, and I mean sick. She loved to humiliate people, loved to hurt them. And she hurt our boys, and she hurt Stephanie.” Another controlled exhalation. The briefing on Karen’s fate hadn’t been pleasant. “And she was also a game piece, a way for the old custodian of Dorley — the one who is actually sadistic and cruel — to remind us of her influence. Maybe as a prelude to some other action; we don’t know yet. So Beatrice… took her off the board.”

Lorna shifts uncomfortably, behind her mug. “What do you mean?”

“Bea had her killed. Through her contacts. Her very rich contacts, who can do more or less whatever they want. It wasn’t just because she hurt us, although she did. It was because of who she was, what she represented. And Karen wasn’t just anyone; she was connected. They had to be careful how they went about it. You, Lorna, with the greatest respect, are not. If Bea perceives you to be a threat, you will be controlled. Through insinuations, through threats, through restrictions placed on your freedom and your movements; possibly even through death. Bea doesn’t like to hurt people and she doesn’t like to waste them, but she has generations of women and other graduates to protect, and their loved ones, and their livelihoods, and I cannot promise you that if you go up against her, she won’t hurt you.”

“Tina,” Vicky says, “do you really think—?”

“Yes,” Christine says. “You said it yourself: Aunt Bea is capable of dark things, and you’re absolutely right to be wary of her. She might seem like an affable middle-aged fuddy-duddy, but she scared the crap out of me even before I found out what happened to Karen.” Memory makes her shudder. “I will not show you the pictures. Bea’s dangerous, Lorna. Please believe me, and please don’t do anything to piss her off.”

Lorna, in her armchair, nods. Sniffs noisily, wipes her nose on the back of her hand. “Thank you, Christine,” she says. “Thank you for showing me exactly who you are.” She leans forward, dumps her tea mug on the table, and folds her arms. “I kept thinking about you. After I got back home that day. And all the others, sure, but especially you. I was fixated on you. And I couldn’t figure out why. Until I woke up sweating, because it all came together: you, Christine, locked me in! You told me, right there in the kitchen, that all the doors were locked! You told me you had control over them! And then you told me the worst shit I’ve ever heard in my life, fucking torture and kidnapping and nonconsensual fucking surgery, and you threatened me. Exactly like you did just now. You told me all the awful shit your precious programme is capable of, and told me it could all be directed at me, should I step out of line.

“And you told me about yourself, and the more I think about you, the more I get it. The boy who threatened women for money! Pathetic and disgusting and — oh look! — incredibly familiar! You think you’ve changed, Christine? You think you’re a better person because they abused and gaslit you into thinking you’re a fucking girl now? You’re not. You’re him. The boy you claim to hate so much. The boy who threatens women. You just do it for Aunt Bea, now, instead of for yourself. And that’s even more sad.”

Vicky shouts at Lorna and Paige tenses but the room fades away, becomes irrelevant, useless. Christine wants to argue, she wants to fight, she wants to step up out of the couch and scream. And she wants to run out of the room and find a dark place and never come out, she wants to scratch at her arms until they bleed, she wants to tell Lorna she’s wrong, she’s wrong, she’s so fucking wrong! but nothing comes out, nothing makes sense, because she’s right, she has to be. Christine’s him and always has been and always will be, no matter the shapes they bend her into or the dresses they wrap around her.

All the while Lorna spoke Christine could feel her jaw tighten and her limbs shake and her head lighten and her belly ache, and she unravels, is unmade, piece by agonising piece, skin and senses stripped away until near nothing is left, and when Paige’s arms close around her she’s almost surprised to find she can feel the heat of her at all.

 

* * *

 

The absolute fucking gall!

Lorna watches as Christine crumples in her seat, as Paige wraps her arms around her and whispers in her ear, as Vicky yells and reaches out— towards Christine! As if she’s the injured party here! She comes barging in, bringing the whole horror show with her, and immediately starts making the same threats she made before, as if everywhere is her domain, as if every house in the city belongs to Dorley fucking Hall, and fuck that.

Paige is clustered around Christine, and Vicky’s sat back in her chair, having decided against going over to join her friends on the couch; she’s watching them both, instead, fingers tented in front of her mouth, anxious and concerned.

Ugh.

Lorna kicks the table to get everyone’s attention, spilling some of her tea. Paige and Vicky look at her; Christine’s still a motionless mass in Paige’s arms.

“For fuck’s sake, Christine,” she says, “don’t just—”

“Shut up,” Paige says. She’s crying, but not silently like Christine; Paige is crying in ugly gulps, and they make her voice uneven.

“She fucking—”

“Shut up, Lorna!” Paige shouts. “I will not tell you again!”

It’s enough to make Lorna obey, to dry her protests in her throat, because Paige isn’t just shouting, she’s holding herself still, making herself into a rigid cage around Christine, and she’s looking at Lorna with an expression of absolute fury, contorted into a sneer by the tears she’s still getting under control.

“Paige…” Vicky whispers.

“When she told you about herself,” Paige says, and her voice is quieter now, steady and controlled, and Lorna would prefer she was still shouting, “she made herself vulnerable. Incredibly vulnerable. And she did it because she thought of you as a friend. She liked you, Lorna. She really did. And you have the wrong reading of your conversation on Monday, when you came into our house, asking questions. She gave you several chances to leave, but you insisted, and she let you in. And, as part of that process, she made herself vulnerable to you because she thought it would help you understand.”

“She’s a—”

“If you interrupt me again I will send the recording of this conversation to Beatrice and let the cards fall where they may. Clear?” Lorna doesn’t even nod, she just stares, and Paige continues. “She liked you, and so did I. But I thought you were brighter than this, Lorna. This behaviour… Do you know how much you’re scaring Victoria? Do you even know what she risked, starting a relationship with you? Of course you don’t. But she loves you, and she thinks you’re worth it, and so here you both are.

“I dislike the programme, Lorna. I refuse to participate. I have been, with one or two minor exceptions, the cooperative, compliant woman Beatrice intended to make of me, because I want to leave. I want to take Christine and I want to move away and discover who we both are without that place constantly weighing on our thoughts. But I am also a product of the programme at Dorley. Before the programme, my self-destructive behaviour threatened to hurt people and my limited outlook prevented me from recognising that. They took me in. They showed me another path. I took it. I chose womanhood, or my interpretation of it, and I am, thanks to them, the woman I always could have been, but never would have been. I am the possibility no-one else thought to offer me. I owe them my continued life, just as Christine does, just as Vicky does. I am no cheerleader for the programme as it currently operates, but I have no argument with the results. So, do you think you can try to understand my position, the way I try to understand yours? You can answer.”

Lorna frowns. Paige is so certain… “I can try. You… like who you are now. You like who Christine is now. You’re glad you were kidnapped and manipulated.”

“Try harder,” Paige says, and stops for a moment to consider her next words. “Christine told you her story. But she’s Christine; she is not one given to the most generous interpretation of her own history. She described to you a monster, a man who hurt people for no reason. So I want to tell you who I saw, the first day we met, in the basement under Dorley Hall.”

And Paige does. In her even, steady voice, as she gently comforts her girlfriend, she describes a wounded boy, defensively crass and instinctively aggressive. She talks about the day he first walked into the main area of the basement, arms wrapped protectively around himself, where Paige and Vicky — or the people who were to become them — greeted him cautiously and he responded in kind. She talks about how he gradually opened up, how he talked about his family, how he shouted at Indira and then apologised the next day, genuine in his regret, terrified that he’d made the one wrong move that would wreck their fragile, sisterly relationship.

“She makes no excuses for what she did,” Paige says, “and I intend to offer none of my own. But she was broken, Lorna. She’d been hurt so much that there was almost nothing left of her. She lashed out at people because, inside, she was bleeding to death; she just couldn’t see it.”

“And you could?”

“Indira could. She saw her potential almost as soon as she met her. She told me once that she had a clear vision of who she would become, that she knew they would be sisters. And they are. And that brings me to my second point, now that you are, I trust, aware of just how cruel it was to dig up her trauma and throw it back at her: she and Indira are sisters. Christine is so close with Indira’s family that they have offered to formally adopt her.” She’s been tapping away at her phone as she speaks, and now she holds it up. There’s a photo on there, someone Lorna recognises. “And you may know of Indira’s mother: Aasha Chetry.”

No. Fuck no. “Is that the same Aasha Chetry who—?”

“Yes.”

“Fuck. I don’t know of her; I know her!” They’ve been to protests together; she once said Lorna should meet her daughter, Indira. “Aasha Chetry’s trans daughter is a fucking Dorley girl?”

Paige nods. “And she and Christine are family.”

“Shit.” She hadn’t even noticed the familiar name, back in Dorley Hall’s kitchen, when Indira introduced herself; it would have been absurd to even consider it.

Christine leans up from Paige’s lap, moving slowly. Paige brushes her hair out of her face, kisses her on the forehead, and leans her carefully back in the sofa cushions. She keeps one arm around her as Christine closes her eyes and wipes her face with a tissue Vicky hands her.

“These are the people Dorley saves,” Paige says. “People like Indira Chetry. You’d love her, if you got to know her. Assuming, that is, you can get over your habit of seeing people like us as who we used to be.”

Paige doesn’t have to spell it out; her tone does it for her. She thinks Lorna should respect the identities of the Dorley girls the same way she expects people to respect hers. But it’s different for them than it is for her; it has to be! On some vital but important level, it’s fucking different.

How, exactly? she asks herself, forcing a moment to herself to try and be at least a little generous to Paige and Christine. How many times has she told some struggling egg or some nervous newbie there’s as many ways to be trans as there are trans people? How many times has she fought back against the pathologisation of transness? How many times has she insisted that rigid categories are the enemy of true gender diversity?

It’s still different! She is not going to grant a bunch of reformed bad boys the same access to transness as her and— and—

And Vicky.

Vicky, who came from the same place as Christine and Paige. Who is best friends with the both of them. Who can’t be claimed to be meaningfully different to her friends, as much as Lorna wishes it to be true. And why can’t Christine be just like Vicky, an egg who never realised she was being cracked? She’s a fucking idiot; does that count?

And who said access to transness is yours to grant?

She kicks the table again. “Fuck it,” she says. “I get it, okay? You’re good girls now, or whatever. I fucking get it. God, I wish I didn’t, but I do.”

“You don’t, actually, because I haven’t even got to the point yet. If you start digging, if you make threats, if you release information, then you risk outing all of us to the whole country. Which includes Indira Chetry. Forget what those idiots in the paper would say about the rest of us; how do you think they’d react if it comes out that trans campaigner Aasha Chetry’s beloved trans daughter is actually… one of us. Actually a man.”

“She’s a trans woman, Paige,” Christine whispers. Her eyes are still closed. “She sees herself that way. She’s very serious about it.”

“Yes,” Paige says, “I know, but that’s how they’ll spin it. Normally they have to make things up in order to portray transness as illegitimate; this will be a gift to the grift. They’ll get weeks of coverage out of it. Months. Katherine Frost will probably write a book. The damage done to trans rights in this country will be catastrophic.”

And the principle of trans collective guilt means every trans person in the country would be tainted with Dorley’s shit. Lorna groans; justified or not, the place would become a proxy war for trans rights nationally; globally.

There really is only one response. “Fuck,” Lorna says. She leans back in her chair, rubs at her tired eyes. “Fuck! Why couldn’t you lot have shut down years ago?”

“Not our decision, darling,” Vicky says.

“You should know,” Paige says, “that I’m not threatening you; all I’m doing is relating the consequences of outing Dorley. And Christine wasn’t threatening you, either. She was describing our reality, the one you insisted on stepping into. We graduate from the programme as part of a delicate and interdependent web of people, and we survive because we trust each other. And if we don’t trust each other to be compassionate — and every graduate I’ve met is — then we at least trust each other to not work against their own interests. No person in the web can break it without exposing themselves.”

“She’s right,” Christine says, sounding delicate. “I wasn’t trying to threaten you. Not at all. Just warn you.” Lorna risks a look, and she seems so small. And Lorna did that to her! Well fucking done.

She can’t hold onto her anger; the more time she spends around the girls, the more ordinary they seem. It’s like when she left Dorley Hall on Monday all over again: Christine and Paige are once again just Christine and Paige. Only in her head, in her nightmares, do they become anything else.

Except she knows, doesn’t she, that she’s not being fair to them! They’re just trying to live, day to day, the same as her. With many of the exact same problems, day to day.

But they torture people! Okay, maybe Christine and Paige don’t, but they’re part of a system that does. Some kind of bizarre, generational Omelas where everyone takes a turn at being the child at its heart, and comes away full of praise for the experience.

“All of us have restrictions on our behaviour,” Paige says. “You’ve opted into some of them. Nothing more. If Vicky, for example, were to get it into her head to run to the papers and spill everything, we’d be trying to persuade her otherwise just as fervently.”

“What about coming out to people?” she asks. “Vick can’t tell anyone she’s trans, can she? Because of some stupid form she signed.”

“No,” Paige says, and Lorna wants to leap out of her chair, to seize the remnants of her rage because that, if she’s honest, is the crux of the whole thing, that she has a girlfriend who is even more like her than she ever thought, but she can’t tell anyone, has instead to keep living lies she thought she threw aside when she transitioned, but Paige continues, with a stricken look on her face, “and neither can I.”

It’s like cold water thrown in Lorna’s face.

Christine, still moving slowly and carefully, takes Paige’s hand and cups it between both of hers, and Lorna aches suddenly for Vicky. So, as Paige talks, Lorna stands up and makes her way over to Vick’s chair, where she is accepted with an embrace she decides right there and then she’ll never leave again.

“I worked out what I wanted to do when I was still in the first year,” Paige says. “I knew I wanted to get into fashion somehow, and I knew I wanted to do humanitarian work. We get access to a stipend when we graduate, enough to live a comfortable life in the dorm or a frugal one outside it, and I decided I wanted to volunteer. I still plan to, for as long as I don’t have to pay my own rent. And the two vocations, they dovetail.” She tries to touch her index fingers together, but Christine won’t let go of her hand, so she brings the other one down to meet it and crosses her fingers in Christine’s lap. “As a minor fashion influencer, I have a following. I can use it to shine a light on issues and communities that need it.” She shrugs, smiling. “And I don’t have to pay for clothes. Useful, for someone on a fixed income. To that end, I took a long, hard look at the relative rates of engagement for trans women and cis women in fashion, and the relative safety of trans versus cis women, in this country as well as worldwide, and made up my mind quite quickly. I don’t like pretending to be cis, but if everyone important to me knows who I really am, then why should I care what my followers think? Or what some NGO thinks?”

Christine nuzzles her, whispers something in Paige’s ear that broadens her smile, and they share a kiss. Lorna feels foolish — worse: cruel — for the things she imagined about Christine. For the things she said to her! And why, she asks herself, is she inventing enemies in dorks like Christine, when real ones abound, for someone like her? What’s one potentially misguided forced feminisation operation against the shit out there hurting people on an industrial scale?

But they still kidnap people! And yet here she sits with three kidnap victims; two of them are kissing each other, and the third cradles her in her lap. And all three of them are planning to leave, which the kidnapping ring actually permits…

Screw it. She squirms around in Vicky’s lap and meets her lips, squeezing a delighted squeal out of her girlfriend and consolidating her advantage by throwing her arms around Vicky’s neck and pressing up against her.

Maybe there really is something to worry about at Dorley. But maybe it’s just not her fucking problem.

 

* * *

 

The cell corridor looks different than she remembers. Much more cluttered: there’s a love seat at one end, paired with a couch and a small stack of chairs; a small table with unfolded wings has been pulled away from the wall, and bears evidence of a foil-packed lunch; and there’s a sheaf of power packs on one end of the couch. No plug sockets in the cell corridor, apparently. Sloppy! Stef has notes for version three of the basement.

She passes Ollie’s cell first. He’s asleep, and twitching. His cot, pulled out into the middle of the cell and bolted back down — the cells seem much more modular than she thought! — has straps hanging from it, currently unattached, in position for all four limbs. They’ve been force-feeding him, Tabby said, and it shows: Ollie’s sleeping topless, and below his shallow breasts unmistakable ribs stretch out bruised and discoloured skin. Are they beating him, too? Or is he doing that to himself?

Raph is next. His cell’s less bare than Ollie’s, with a soft-looking duvet on his cot and a pile of books under it. He’s sitting on the floor, on a small square of carpet, clothed and healthy-looking, holding his phone sideways like he’s watching something on it. He doesn’t seem to notice her walk by, which is a relief; Stef doesn’t know what she’d say to him, and now she doesn’t have to find out.

Will’s on the end, in the cell Stef first woke up in. It’s laid out similarly to Ollie’s, with the cot against the far wall, and he’s already wearing the shackles that are bolted to its base. Even with his legs stretched as far as they’ll go he can’t reach even halfway down the length of the cell, Tabby reassured her, and that’s good because Stef agreed that if she’s really going to listen to him, and if it’s really going to do him any good, she’ll have to enter the cell. Join him in his space.

They insisted she take protection, so Tabby temporarily issued her a taser from the sponsor locker. It’s larger than the one locked in her bedside drawer, and heavier in the hand; she holds it up, makes certain it’s ready for use, and knocks quietly on the glass door.

Will, lying on the cot and staring up at the ceiling, sits up, frowns at her for a moment, and then nods, and she lets herself in with the biometric reader set into the wall. Will’s door clicks, and hangs open by a couple of centimetres.

“Hi,” Stef says.

The last time she saw him, he had the look of someone who exercised daily, and his muscle tone had survived the testosterone suppression better than she thought it would. Now, though, it’s hard to tell: he’s dressed in layers, the way she used to, and it hides everything but his head and hands.

“Hello, Stefan,” he says.

“May I come in?”

He frowns. “You’re asking if you can enter my publicly viewable cell?”

She doesn’t recoil from his snarl. A little hostility is to be expected. “Yes.”

“Sorry,” he says, and she’s not prepared for that. He clinks his hands in the shackles, makes a show of testing them. “I’m safe. You can come in.”

She doesn’t question the apology — later, perhaps — and hooks the door more widely open with her toe, stepping inside and letting it latch behind her, still hefting the taser, but not pointing it directly at him. Making her capabilities and her intentions clear.

“They gave you one of those, huh?” he says.

“Just for this.” Stef leans against the closed glass door, tests it, and leans against it, sliding down until she’s sitting with her feet together and her knees elevated. She rests her arm on her legs, taser ready. Just in case. “Before you ask, we can’t use it to escape. They’re watching on camera — though with microphones off, they promise — and as soon as that cell door locks behind me again, it gets deactivated. I could throw it at someone, maybe.”

“I wasn’t going to ask,” Will says. He’s quiet. Not like before. Maybe time in a cell has calmed him down. Maybe it was disclosure. She remembers his reaction, when they told him everything: total silence. Eerie. “I like your eyes,” he adds, after an awkward silence. “The makeup, I mean.”

She’d almost forgotten about it. Christine and Paige left in a hurry, and then there was pizza, and then Tabby and Indira were talking her through what she needed to know… It’s probably fine that she left it on. One of them would have mentioned it if they thought it was important. Probably. Hopefully.

On her internal chalkboard, Stef bypasses the column labelled carefully choreographed operation and adds another check mark under shitshow.

“Yeah,” she says, “thanks. Pippa asked, I said yes. It’ll wash off in the shower, she said.” It’s an easy lie. Will’s not been around; he doesn’t know Pippa’s been away today.

“It’s… pretty.”

“What’s up, Will? Why am I here? Tabby comes up to me before lunch and tells me you want to talk to someone, and it can’t be her. So, why me? You want to unburden yourself of your guilt for attacking Maria? Or your brother? Or those other people?”

He winces each time. “No. I just wanted to talk. And I can’t talk to them.” He nods sideways.

Stef can’t resist rubbing it in. “I thought Ollie and Raph were your new buddies, after Adam was insufficiently violent for your needs.”

“Stef—”

“He’s miserable without you, by the way.”

“Please.”

“Sorry,” she says. “I’m here to listen. Really. I’ll listen.”

He closes his eyes, tips back his head and breathes deeply. “I don’t even know where to start. Except to say that I do feel bad for Maria. And for my brother. And for the others. The ones they know about and the ones they don’t. I see them a lot, Stefan.” He taps his temple. “I’ve hurt a lot of people.”

“Why don’t you tell me about your brother? Wasn’t he the first one you, um…?”

“Attacked? No, he wasn’t the first. But, sure, I’ll tell you about him. He’s called Christopher. He likes to be called Topher. He’s funny, he’s kind, he’s creative as hell, and everyone always said he’s going to do something incredible with his life. I hope he does. I hope he forgets about me, and lives an amazing life, and I hope I die here.”

“But didn’t you beat the shit out of him? Why do you care about him now?”

“Do you want to hear this, or do you want to ask stupid questions?”

Stef surrenders, two palms raised. “Talk.”

“It was in June. We were supposed to be out of our place the first week of July, right?” Stef nods; the academic year ended with the last full week of June. Some landlords like you to pay for the whole year, others — including the uni itself — kick you out the week after the end of the semester, so they can get the industrial hoses in and rent out the rooms to conference goers over the summer. “I left early. I was done. Tired out. Just wanted to go home. See my family. Catch up with some of the lads, you know? I had a job lined up, full time, and I didn’t want to go straight from uni to work; I wanted some time for myself.” Stef nods again. She’s been on the go more or less non-stop since she left home, but some people’s summer jobs buy luxuries, other people’s pay the rent. “So I’m home a few days earlier than anyone expected. My parents are both at work when I get back, so I let myself in, have a piss, make a tea, all that stuff. I’m going up the stairs when I hear… noises. Coming from my room. Obviously, I barge inside, ready to kick off, and there’s Topher. On my bed. With a guy. And they’re fucking.”

Stef says nothing. She just waits. Will’s been shifting on the cot as he talks, unable to find purchase on his story, on his body, and firing out staccato sentences in time with the twitching of his fingers.

“I throw the mug at them,” Will continues. “It’s hot. Of course it is. Not as hot as it could have been — I added milk — and most of it got on the wall where the mug smashed. But some of it got on Topher. On his face. In his eye. And in the moment, I really didn’t give a shit. He was like a— a blur in front of me.”

She’s frozen still now, terrified that any movement, any reaction, could break the spell. Will’s talking in a rhythmic monotone, lost in his recollection.

“I was empty, growing up. Never knew what to do, where to go, who to be. Followed what everyone else did. But never felt anything about any of it. I was just there, and empty. And everyone… put things in me. Expectations, hopes, dreams; whatever. Sometimes I thought I could feel it. Fizzing, popping, glowing things, dropped into me. And I took it all in. Like I was a cheap knock-off of real people, who couldn’t function without it. Not like Topher. People would tell him what they wanted from him, and he wouldn’t have any of it. He’d fight back. He’d tell them who he was. What he wanted. Me, I didn’t know. But I didn’t have to. Dad put things in me. Mum. Teachers. Other boys at school. Girls. And every time something happened—” he raises his voice suddenly, becomes animate, grips the frame of the cot with both hands and stares through Stef, “—it set some of them off. All the things they put in me. Fizzing, popping, glowing, lit specks of gunpowder. Chain reaction. Uncontrollable. Explosive. The first time it happened was when a boy set me off by the football pitch out back of the school. He said something to me, and it was like a spark. I put his fucking face in the mud. Hand on his head—” he mimes the action, “—and the other hand on his back. I put him in the mud, and I don’t let him up until he starts wheezing. Got suspended for that. Dad said I did a good job. Said I needed to be prepared. Said if I was going to get in fights I needed to get in shape. Bought me a set of weights and hung a punching bag in the garage. Stood by me while I learned how to use them. Just… putting things in me.” Will holds up a hand, palm flat and facing upward, and with his other flicks an imaginary bit of grit into the air, away from him. One of his fizzing, popping, glowing, lit specks of gunpowder.

“There’s a moment,” he continues, “after I get set off, where it’s like everything goes white. And it’s like I’m not there. You’ve seen videos of when they set the nukes off? There’s a flash of light too bright to see and a shock wave that obliterates everything for miles around. I’m there. At the centre of it. And then I come around and I see what I’ve done and I’ve got two choices: I act like I fucking meant it, or I run.

“Topher was the first time I ran. I beat him, man. Worse than I ever beat anyone. I don’t know if it was just the surprise of it, or if I’m really that much of a piece of shit that my first and only reaction to finding out my brother is gay is to almost blind him and nearly kill him. And I start seeing him everywhere. In everyone. His blood, his dislocated wrist, the red marks on his face. And it just keeps—” he hits his open palm with his fist, “—happening. I get fired because I lose it at some woman who wants to know where the printers are. Fortunately I only yelled at her, but I was pretty fucking scary. Then some guy bumped me in the street and I started shit with him right there. Fought him and his three mates. Mum wanted to kick me out but Dad was proud of me and that might be the worst part. He was always proud of me. Even after Topher. Never even occurred to me before, that Dad might be homophobic, but of course he is, Stefan. Of course he is. And he saw himself in me, and why wouldn’t he? He spent years pouring every bit of himself he could find into me. And I saw myself in him and I couldn’t stay there.

“So I leave. I go live with a mate for the rest of the summer. I hear from Mum that Topher doesn’t want anything done to me, he doesn’t want me committed or arrested or anything. He just never wants to see me again. Well. Getting his wish, now, isn’t he?”

“I’m sorry, Will.”

“Save it.” It comes out with a pointed finger and a wince; he forgot about the shackles, pulled his wrists too tight. There are red marks around them. He must do that a lot. “I get taken down here after I blow up at some first-year kid outside a lecture. He just walked into me. Not his fault. But I was angry, and I was guilty, and I made it his fault, yes? Like, staying with my mate, talking myself in circles with him, I made it Topher’s fault. He shouldn’t have been in my room. He should’ve told me he’s gay. That kind of shit. It’s easy to make yourself believe things that let you off the hook, right? He got me reading his shitty ‘philosophy of manhood’ book, too. I don’t know. Easy to believe. And then, two days after I’m let out into the common area here, I’m talking to Adam, and he tells me, ‘Your actions are yours alone’.” He shrugs. “I’d heard it before, obviously. But he meant it, and that made it mean something to me, as well. And it’d be great if I could say, that was it, that was me, I’m a better man, hallelujah! Of course I’m not. It’s still just someone putting things in me again. I don’t really think about it until Maria.”

Stef’s been wondering when they’d make it onto the woman Will nearly killed. She keeps her mouth shut; there’s only so many interruptions she can risk.

“Maria was the end. I was isolating myself; you know that. Talking to Ollie and Raph’s like yelling into a cave: your own bullshit coming back at you, distorted. I pushed Adam away after he came to see me the night before, and I already missed him, but I couldn’t say it. That was all the shit Dad put in me, right? You don’t miss people. You don’t make room for people in your life. You stand alone. Bullshit. And I worked it out, by the way. I already knew what testosterone suppression does, and what it doesn’t do. Adam showed me his chest, and I thought about it. Thought about the way we were all starting to look. I put—” he laughs, loudly, unexpectedly, and Stef jumps, “—two and two together, and got it mostly right. After that I was just… waiting for it. Waiting to go off. But it didn’t happen. I never lost control. I got angrier and angrier and I was waiting for it to happen and it just fucking didn’t. When I did that to Maria, I was in control. I chose it. My fucking decision. My action and mine alone. And I was so angry with you, Stefan, for warning her. But I’m glad you did. I almost did something a lot worse. Tabby says she’s okay, now.”

“She is. She’s doing better. Edy’s back to work today.” Will frowns, and Stef realises she’s being way too candid.

“I’d ask how you know this stuff,” Will says, “but I get it, now. I never understood you before. Always too docile. Too friendly. Too ready to buy into their whole rehab pretence. But I know now: you’re like me.” Stef, as patiently as she can, waits out Will’s pause, the time he needs to gather his thoughts. If she says anything, if she moves a muscle, she might reveal more than she wants to a suddenly extraordinarily perceptive Will. “You worked it out. You lied to Aaron and Adam, and you tried to lie to me, to keep us calm, because you worked it out. You knew what they were doing, and you were just letting it happen, weren’t you?” Stef just stares. “I get it!” Will whispers, hoarsely. “I get it. Who I am—” he jabs both thumbs into his chest, “—who I was, who I was made into, was a fucking hollow shell, for people to fill with whatever they wanted.” He brushes his hands together, as if cleaning the dust from them, and he smiles. “All their little sparkly bits of gunpowder, all their violence and expectations and desires. Waiting for someone to light my short fucking fuse. And if they—” he nods upwards, “—want to rip me apart and put me back together as someone new? Good. Maybe they know how to fill all the empty spaces inside me with something less volatile.”

“You’re… okay with it?” Stef says.

“Not really.” Will pulls up his sleeves on both arms, exposing rashes and scratches and cuts, doubtless from scraping ragged nails across the skin, over and over; Stef’s familiar with the wounds, and what’s required to make them.

“Jesus, Will.”

“You should see Ollie.”

“I’ve seen him. How’ve you seen him?”

“They took us showering in threes. I think he charges the walls in his cell. Don’t know why. Maybe he’s trying to knock his idiot head off.” He rolls his sleeves back down. “So, no, I’m not okay with it,” he says. “Or, actually, sometimes I am. Sometimes I’m not. But—” he makes a show of looking around the cell, “—it’s not like I have a choice, is it? Maybe what comes out the other side of all this isn’t someone who does this to themselves. Who does what I did to other people.” He breathes deeply. “And I might not be okay with it, but, Stef, I’m not sure I even care any more. It’s not worth it, being me, not any more.” He looks Stef in the eye, suddenly intense. “Yeah. Decision made. I quit. I’m done. As of right now. They can have me. Tell Tabby. I know you talk to her, or you wouldn’t be here. Tell her what I said.”

“All of it?”

“Just the last part. That I’m done being him.”

“Yeah,” Stef says, “yeah. I’ll tell her. You’re done. Okay.”

“I mean it. I’m cooperating. I know she won’t let me out of the cell, but if she does, I won’t make trouble.”

This is so much more than she expected. “Look,” she says, standing too quickly and staggering for a moment from the head rush, “I’ve, uh, I should go.”

“You get it, though, right?” He’s too kind, too gentle, and it’s more than disconcerting from Will; it’s like the whole building fucking shook, and it’s trying to take her feet out from under her. “You understand me?”

“Um,” she says. “Yes. A bit?”

“Hey,” he says, smiling, reaching out. “Don’t worry, Stef. You don’t need to say anything else. Not yet. Just… come back and see me again, yeah?”

Stef nods, one last time, and lets herself out, controlling the urge to run until she’s out of sight of all of them.

 

* * *

 

The room Lorna and Vicky share is the largest one in the house, taking up the whole top floor, with windows out to both the street and the laughably small back garden, with a segment cut out for the stairs up and another for their bathroom, which juts out into the room by the back window and reminds Christine of her ensuite, back home at Dorley Hall; the whole place is like her room, or Paige’s, but scaled up by a factor of two. It’s nice.

“You want another tea?” Lorna says, heading straight for a long table set up under the front window, with desk chairs, laptops, kettle and mini-fridge; a place to work, Christine assumes. Lorna pours water from a filter jug and starts the kettle without waiting for an answer.

“I like your room,” Christine says, sitting cross-legged on an errant chair and enjoying the light, airy atmosphere. The windows are open and December wind is blowing through; normally she’d be too cold, especially in the minimal clothes Paige picked out for her, but for right now the chilled air is welcome.

“I can’t believe you’ve never seen it,” Lorna says, searching through a small pile of mugs for clean ones. Christine half-expects them to be like the mugs back home, with appropriate slogans and jokes on: Me, Myself, the Bedbugs and I, or, I Joined the Waiting List at the Gender Clinic So I Could Bequeath My Place in Line to My Future Daughter, or, Bad Bitches Live Here!! (and so do we), which is a mug Christine’s seen in an Almsworth charity shop and would have bought and brought home if she hadn’t been a hundred percent certain it would have disappeared within a week and turned up again in the downstairs kitchen, altered by whoever at Dorley gets her kicks that way. “We invited you over often enough.”

“Yes, please,” Christine says, when Lorna speculatively holds up a milk carton. “And I never came because I never wanted to intrude.”

The statement seems to surprise Lorna. “Really?”

“I love Vicky, and I miss her terribly, ever since she moved out, but this is her space. Your space. I’m… I’m part of her other life, I guess. The one she wants to forget.”

Lorna carefully places the mugs on the floor and then bounces over to Christine, lifting her up out of the chair and hugging her. She’s as tall as Paige, and Christine struggles to find an appropriate place to fit her face.

“She doesn’t want to forget you,” Lorna says. “And neither do I. I’m sorry.”

“I am, too.”

“I mean it. I’m really sorry.”

When they release each other, Lorna hands out cushions and they sit on the floor together, luxuriating in a patch of sunlight like cats, warming themselves against the breeze.

“I don’t see you as him,” Lorna says suddenly, and reaches out to touch Christine’s hand. “I don’t. I know what I said. I was mad, and scared. Scared to fucking death, honestly! I still am, a little. But there’s a version of you in my head, which was just getting scarier the more I thought about everything, and then… there’s you. It wasn’t fair of me to make you into the monster I imagined.” She looks down. “And, shit, I get why what I said hurt you so much. Down there, after Paige got done talking, I put myself in your shoes, imagined you saying that to me, and… Fuck, Christine. I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you,” Christine says, turning her hand over in Lorna’s grip and squeezing her in return. “I admit, I was going to ask if you really did see me that way. As, uh, him. Because I kind of obsess over that stuff. But you didn’t really know the old me, so you can’t ever see him in me, not really. All you did was pick the scabs off some old wounds.”

“I’m still sorry. Do you… want to talk about it?”

Christine lets go of her hand and leans back, closes her eyes in the sunlight. “I think it’s good for me to remember him, sometimes,” she says. “I’ve been thinking of him as something dead. Something I killed. Like a stain that got wiped away. And I never really squared that with how I think about my Sisters. And, yes, I know calling them that sounds kinda culty, but they’re the only family I have now.”

“Indira’s very nearly your sister for real.”

“Yep.” A broad smile takes her, and she lowers her head, hides her shyness. “She’s my big sister. My closest family. But that’s what I mean: I love her more than I love anyone except Paige, and I don’t think of her as having this dead creature in her past. And Paige, I remember who she was, and that person didn’t die, either; she grew, she changed, she— she bloomed, Lorna, into this wondrous, caring woman, who I don’t know if I can ever love too much. A woman I’m going to spend my whole life with. And I remember Vicky, and she was the same. I don’t know if she really was always trans or not, but, just like Paige, she made herself into someone she wanted to be. Someone she needed to be. And Paige is right about me: I’m… not generous with myself. So you’re right to say that the boy is still me, because he is. I didn’t kill him; I was him, and he’s me. If I killed him, if he’s not a part of me… then maybe that makes me more likely to repeat his mistakes? And I do wonder if I’ve been coming close to that, lately. Once or twice.”

“Not from what I’ve seen.”

“Paige says that, too.”

Lorna giggles nervously. “Paige kinda scares me.”

“She wouldn’t have sent the recording to Bea. I don’t think she was even recording at all, actually. She’s just protective of me, that’s all.”

“As am I, of Vicky.” And Lorna smiles, takes Christine’s hand again. “We’re lucky, aren’t we?”

“Lorna,” Christine says, “I’m constantly bowled over by how lucky I’ve been. I never, in a million years, thought I would deserve what I have now, let alone be handed it all for free. I’ve accepted the restrictions placed on me because… Well, would you complain if the boat that saved you from drowning had some finicky rules about who you’re allowed to say saved you? I’m sorry you’re inside those restrictions, though. All the pain in the arse with none of the benefits.”

“Hey, I got Vicky. Like you, I can’t believe my luck.” She snorts, pats Christine’s hand, and withdraws to drink her tea. “I’m still going to think of you all as trans, though, whatever you say. It makes my brain hurt less.”

“Hell,” Christine says, “maybe we are. Maybe the word can encompass girls like us. Or maybe it doesn’t have to; I’m happy being a girl, being Christine. Like Paige said, everyone important to me either knows the truth. Or, uh, knows something close enough to the truth that I’m fine with it.” Lorna raises an eyebrow, so Christine explains, “Indira’s family think I’m trans, like her.”

Lorna smirks, and says, “Let me get this straight.” She holds up the hand that isn’t holding her mug and counts down fingers as she withdraws them into her fist. “You were assigned male.” Christine nods. “You were uncomfortable with your life before transition.” Christine nods, but wiggles a flattened hand, to indicate, it’s complicated. Lorna sticks her tongue out. “You transitioned to womanhood, which you initially found difficult but eventually grew to find comfort and happiness in.” Nod. “And now you live as a woman, among women, and prefer to think of your old, male self as something you transcended.” Nod. Lorna pulls in her thumb, the last digit standing. “And some people think of you as a trans woman, and you’re fine with that.” Christine nods again. “There. Problem solved. I diagnose you, Christine, with being a fucking trans woman! I’m calling it. I’m claiming you. You’re trans.”

Christine shrugs. “If you say so.”

“I do!”

“You should tell Steph that. She’s been trying to square that circle with me for weeks.”

“I thought she was going by Stephanie now,” Lorna says, frowning.

“We talked about it. She wants people to alternate. Which usually means Bea calling her ‘Stephanie’, everyone else calling her whatever they feel like, and Pippa calling her ‘Stephanie Middlename Riley’ when she’s annoyed.”

“She doesn’t have a middle name?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“God. She should pick one.”

“She should!”

“It’s so weird that she’s down there, with those boys.”

“You should come see her,” Christine suggests.

“What?”

“Come see her! And you can meet more Dorley girls. Come hang out at the dorm.”

“Maybe.”

She looks evasive, so Christine doesn’t push it. Instead, she suggests, “Actually, maybe just come visit once. Next week. Steph’s having her electrolysis consultation, and we’ll be bringing in someone to talk to her about what surgical options she wants, too. She doesn’t know that yet, though. It’s a surprise. You should come! Talk to them, too.”

Lorna blinks. “About what?”

“Your FFS is booked and funded already, right?” Christine says, and Lorna nods. “What about GRS? I don’t know if you want it, but if you do, or you want an orchi or anything, now that you’re in the know, we can probably help with that. No charge.”

“You’re kidding,” Lorna insists.

“Nope.”

“You’d pay for it?”

“Not me, personally, but yeah.” Christine doesn’t actually have confirmation yet, but if Maria or Bea make a fuss, she’s certain she can make Lorna’s case. It’s like Paige said: they can’t keep her in the basement until she comes around to their point of view, but they can tie her to them with gratitude. And one visit for a consultation will become another and another and, sooner or later, Dorley Hall will just be the place Vicky lived for a while. The place her other friends still live. The place that paid for her bottom surgery.

“Shit, Christine,” Lorna says. “I mean. Fuck.”

“No pressure, obviously.”

“Fuck that! Give me all the pressure. Jesus. I want GRS, Christine. I really want it. I only picked FFS first because I value my physical safety. I was resigning myself to a years-long waiting list or doing another fundraiser or just never getting GRS and living with it, but… But! Fuck! Christine! Fuck!”

Christine laughs, and Lorna laughs, and they put their mugs down and share an awkward hug, reaching over from their respective pillows. Lorna’s sweet, when she’s not being paranoid.

“I meant to say, by the way,” Lorna says, once they’ve finished their tea and put away their pillows and they’re heading down the stairs to the living room, where Paige and Vicky are playing a racing game on the PlayStation, “how nice you look.”

“Thanks! Paige caught me this morning and wouldn’t let me go until she made me beautiful.”

“Well, she does good work.”

“She really does. Hey, do you want to get food in? We were about to have lunch when Vicky texted.”

Lorna nods, stepping aside so Christine can navigate the narrow first-floor landing. “Are you okay with ordering for my housemates? Deb’s probably going to be back soon, and the others won’t be far behind.”

“Sure.”

“Are you going to bill it to the torture dungeon?”

“Obviously.”

“Cool! Then what’s the most expensive takeaway in town? Oh!” Lorna bounces down the last few steps and into the living room, drawing the attention of the other girls. “Vick! Remember that artisanal burger place we saw?”

Paige drops her controller and rushes over to embrace Christine. On the screen, her car crashes spectacularly into a tree.

“You’re okay?” she asks.

“I’m good,” Christine says, nuzzling Paige’s shoulder and squeezing her as tightly as she can. “We’re good.” She stands on tiptoes and whispers, “We’re going to get her in to see the consultant about GRS.”

“I’m glad,” Paige whispers back. “But she’d better not hurt you again…”

“She won’t.”

“Then I’m happy we can help her.”

Christine nods, still on her toes, unwilling to leave Paige’s embrace or lower herself from a place where she has contact with her, cheek to cheek, just like this morning. Eventually they separate, and they’re finding places to sit when the front door opens and Lorna and Vicky introduce Debbie around, inviting her to join the debate over which place to order in from. Vicky raises an eyebrow and a controller and Christine’s taken it before she realises Vicky switched the discs and Bloodborne is loading and Lorna is excitedly sitting down next to her, perched practically on top of an indulgent Paige, explaining to her how the gun-parry timing works and recommending which builds to choose.

Today, Christine reflects, as she designs a striking, tall, blonde hunter and wonders if she can find a striped waistcoat and majestic hat for Paige to wear in the many boxes of clothes in her room, could have gone a lot worse.

 

* * *

 

“Who’s talking to me?” he whispers. “Right now, who’s talking to me?”

Aaron’s lying on his bed, stretched out and almost satisfied. Indira brought him lunch, which turned out, bizarrely, to be pizza. And good pizza, too! And then the pizza made him tired, as it always does, and the grease made him feel gross, so he had a quick second shower and retired again. He tried looking at himself in the mirror, but he still has good reason mostly to avoid it, especially if he has been changing the way Stef has — and he has, all but inevitably — so there he lies, inspecting the parts of himself he can stand to look at in the lamplight and asking himself the same question, over and over again.

It’s not that it’s especially revelatory; it’s basic therapist stuff, probably. Identify the root of the patient’s self-loathing, question it, ask if the terrible things the patient attributes to himself, considers a vital part of himself, actually constitute load-bearing pillars of his personality or if he is, in fact, a whiny little bitch.

Aaron’s never been to therapy. But his guess is, he feels, probably accurate.

So, if it’s not revelatory, then why does he care? Maybe because it was Stef asking the question. Stef, the guy who all but declared his love, and who doubled down on it today when offered an out! Stef, the only guy who’s ever really given him the time of day without extracting from him a heavy price in return, usually paid in humiliation or pain. Stef, the guy who seems genuinely to care what he thinks.

The guy who thinks he can be better.

Oh yeah, one catch: you’re here, so, better or not, you’re going to be a girl.

The sponsors ruin everything.

But still. He has a friend. A friend who might want something from him he can’t give — he’s never, even accounting for his defensive overreaction when Stef first told him, which he thinks his imaginary therapist would probably meaningfully raise their eyebrows at, been into guys — but who doesn’t seem too bothered about that. And here, especially here, Aaron will take any friend he can get. Screw the complications.

He’s gearing up to put on a movie, something mind-numbing, like one of the romances they clutter the hard drives with, when there’s a knock at his door, and there’s really only one person it can be. He hops off the bed without hesitation and opens the door to Stef, still looking like a—

Um. That’s new.

“Hey, Stef,” he says. “Nice… eyes?”

Stef blinks, and then laughs. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “Forgot about that. One of the girls wanted to get some practice in, and she cornered me. Apparently no-one else in the building has my colouring. I kinda like it!” He runs a finger across his cheekbone. The skin seems to sparkle in the low light.

“Yeah,” Aaron says. “It’s, uh, pretty, I guess.”

“Thanks,” Stef says, beaming, and Aaron’s thinking of ways to puncture the mood, because it’s weird for Stef to be so happy about being slathered in makeup, when Stef’s expression sours anyway. “Can I come in? I don’t want to be alone right now.”

Aaron stands back to let him in, but has to ask the question: “You sure you want to be with me? You don’t want to call Pippa, or one of your other sponsor pals?”

He shakes his head. “No. Right now I don’t really want to be around anyone who’s… involved in all this. Just kinda want to give my head a break, you know?”

Yeah. Aaron knows. He holds out a welcoming arm, like a fucking greeter at a restaurant or something, and Stef stops loitering at the door and walks nervously in, sits down on the end of the bed before Aaron can stop him.

“Hey, you, uh, might not want to sit there, I mean, maybe it’s okay since I changed the sheets this morning, but, uh, actually, just sit right exactly there, okay? Right there and don’t move. Like, a muscle.”

“What do you—?” Stef asks. “Oh. Right. Yeah. I remember. Last time— actually, the time before last that I was in here, you were very, very worried about me sitting in your, uh, what did you call it? Your ‘spectacular nightly leavings’.” Aaron winces at Stef’s grin. “It’s fine, Aaron. I’ll sit in the spunk.”

“So,” Aaron says, closing the door and sitting at the other end of the bed, a nice, safe, chaste distance away, “what’s up?”

And Stef lays out, with a weird flat affect and a look of stress that almost makes Aaron want to repeat their awkward hug from earlier, what just happened. Will baring his soul! Ollie being force fed — emphatically not an empty threat, then — and hurting himself. Raph… just sort of existing, apparently. And Stef, shaken enough by the experience, by something he’s not telling Aaron, coming straight here, not even pausing to wash off his sparkly eye makeup.

“Fucking hell,” Aaron says. Stef’s slid down off the bed by this point, and is sitting on the floor, leaning back on the mattress, supporting his head with his hands. He looks nice from that angle; Aaron wishes his cheekbones looked half as good.

“Yeah,” Stef says heavily, stretching his toes out.

“What now?”

“Now, I think,” Stef says, “I want to do absolutely nothing. I don’t want to think about this place, or Will’s shit, or Ollie’s bruises. I know this might be a little selfish of me, to come running back into your room like this, but I want an evening like we used to have, brainless and stress-free. But,” he adds, pushing up from the floor, “if you’d rather be on your own, I can—”

“No,” Aaron says quickly. “No. Stay. We’ll watch mind-numbing crap. It’s fine. I, uh, I missed that, too.”

“Cool,” Stef says, leaning his head back against the mattress and cupping his hands in his lap. Aaron’s heartbeat returns to normal. “What shall we watch?”

It takes a few minutes to decide, and they end up picking a vampire romance TV show with nine seasons on tap, all of them likely to be entertainingly terrible. Aaron, to be closer to the screen, moves up on the bed, sits close enough to Stef’s head to be able to prop a pillow behind it, for which Stef thanks him profusely. As they watch, as the teenage girl on screen talks about her upcoming prom, and then gets enveloped in eldritch vampire fog and menaced by crows, Aaron slides down into a more comfortable position, with his legs dangling off the edge of the bed and his head barely vertical enough to see. When teen vampire number three makes himself known, stalking prom with a single drop of blood on his lip, Aaron feels a pressure against his leg. Carefully he levers himself up on his elbows and sees Stef’s head leaning against his calf, and he’s about to make a fuss, or a joke, or push him away, or kick him and order him to leave, when he hears snoring. Faint and slightly troubled snoring.

Fuck it.

He turns down the volume a bit, turns on the subtitles so he doesn’t miss any subtleties of plot or characterisation, and lets Stef sleep, clutching Aaron’s leg like a plush toy.

Stef’s been going non-stop lately, it seems. Best to give him a break.

 

* * *

 

Hard floor. Kinda cold. And there’s… snoring? She’s leaning on something. A bed. Her bed? No; Aaron’s bed. Aaron’s bed!

The realisation causes her to try to stand, quickly, but her back complains enough that she has to cover her mouth to keep from whimpering. Sore! Keeping her silencing hand in place, she massages the small of her back with the other hand, and the movement is sufficient to wake Aaron, if only a little.

“Hey,” he says, from up in the sheets somewhere. He sounds barely conscious. “I left my duvet on the floor. Just lay it out and roll yourself up in it, like a sleeping bag.”

“You sure?” Stef asks, coming to a crouch as she starts gathering up the duvet, the spare pillow he left for her, and a couple of hoodies that don’t smell the cleanest but will do as a makeshift mattress. “I can go back to—”

“Shut up and go to sleep,” he says, and she hears a smile in his voice so she doesn’t push it.

He’s snoring again before she finishes assembling her bed, and it’s not long before she joins him, falling asleep in the company of her friend and content to know that he’ll probably, maybe, hopefully be okay.