16. What She’s Looking For

2019 November 9
Saturday

Everyone will know soon. All the women of Dorley, from Beatrice on down, will know about him. Already he can feel their eyes on him, stripping him, flaying him, judging his womanhood, finding it wanting; finding it absent. And what if they’re right? What if, now that he’s been exposed, he’s discovered as a fraud? How can you know, Stefan, what it is to feel like a woman when you’ve spent your whole life hiding from it?

What if it was just a fantasy all along?

Stupid boy. Stupid, lucky boy. Doubts are meaningless here. His gender was decided for him, long before his clumsy confession, and no amount of denial or fear can break down the ironclad procedures of Dorley Hall. He’ll be transitioned whether he likes it or not. Whether he participates or not!

Isn’t that why he’s here? He’s too weak, too broken, too ashamed to do it himself.

And they all know that now.

He twists in the bed, ties the covers in knots. So stupid, to let himself be discovered. Sure, keeping up the façade had been painful, and his assumed maleness — not to mention his invented and redacted but still vividly implied recent history of abuse — had been an obstacle to his friendship with Pippa, but there’d been a comfort in it all the same, one he recognises only now, when it’s gone. When they thought him a man they expected nothing of him.

Horrible to realise that misery has a comfort all of its own, a predictability.

He doesn’t know how to be a woman, doesn’t know how to act, who to be. And they’ll see this and they’ll know that of all the broken boys taken in this year, this one is by far the most pathetic. This one dreams…

Stupid girl! Stupid, spiralling girl. Why would any of them think that? He told Pippa, confessed everything to her, and she didn’t judge him, didn’t pity him. She was delighted!

But she had reason to be, didn’t she? Sponsoring him’s been hard for her. She’s a true believer, the same as the others, and considers herself without a doubt to have benefited from her sponsor’s intervention, but surviving the programme is one thing; putting someone else through it is quite another. His coming out untangled the knots in her conscience. So she isn’t, necessarily, a good barometer.

So what about Christine, then? Her reaction, now he thinks back to it, was a lot like Pippa’s: she believed him quickly and easily and moved on to practical matters.

Almost as if people can see it in you, idiot.

Like Pippa, she didn’t judge him; she simply accepted him. Tore up her life just to help him. Abby, too; she’s known about him almost as long as Christine, and she’s never acted towards him with anything but compassion.

Pippa’s kindness, Christine’s, Abby’s, all genuine. If he thinks carefully about it, if he stops assigning malicious intent to people who have displayed no evidence of it — towards him, anyway — then he has no reason to believe any of the women at Dorley Hall will think unkindly of him for this. Nor to believe any of them will have expectations of instant, perfectly performed womanhood; they were once boys, just like he tried to be. Worse: abused and abusive boys, all of them.

He frowns at his ungenerous description and discards it. It’s a relic, his own self-hatred pushed outwards, imprinted on women who have only ever acted in what they believed was his best interest. Better instead to embrace the truth: they’re women, without caveats or qualifiers or the stains of their former identities. Christine claims and clings to her gender as fiercely and with as much conviction as any woman Stefan’s ever known — despite her insistence that she’s not trans, which carries with it hints of an inferiority complex Stefan’s wanted to interrogate for weeks now; hah! like he has room to talk — and berated him for being gauche enough to draw attention to her once-maleness. Pippa likely would react similarly, though Stefan’s gut recoils at the thought of accusing her as harshly as he once did Christine, back in that cell.

’Not trans’. What are they, then? Do they even have a word for it? ‘Coercively reassigned female’?

Perhaps just call them women, Stef, and leave it at that.

He stretches some of the tension out of his limbs, rolls his neck, cracks his fingers. Concentrates on the physical sensations, imagines nerve endings firing, blood vessels flowing, lungs inflated. Positions himself firmly in his body. The exact inverse of his older mechanisms for dealing with dysphoria, back before he was capable of properly naming it, adapted for his new circumstances; because it’s not really all that bad being in this body, now he knows it’s changing under him. As long as he doesn’t do anything stupid, like let self-loathing convince him that a building full of women who once looked very much like he does will judge him for wanting to follow in their footsteps.

So.

What now?

At least he can talk to the sponsors without them treating him like a monster. As much as things have been moving that way for a while — helping Aaron after Declan knocked him down in the shower seemed to change something in Maria’s attitude, at least, if the exasperated glances she’s been sharing with him recently are anything to go by — knowing that it’s over for good is a profound relief. They know now that he’s exactly like them.

Mostly like them.

In broad terms.

A chime from his PC startles him out of his thoughts, and when he’s untangled himself from the wreckage of his bedsheets and sat up he can see a prompt on the screen, requesting he create a PIN. That’s new. He pushes off the bed, grateful for the distraction — he’s spent a solid hour deep in thought, most of it unproductive and highly self-critical, and has come up with nothing more useful than ‘stop overthinking things’; laudable in concept, unworkable in practice — and taps in a PIN. He picks the number from his old debit card, presumably cut in half by Pippa, because it’s the only four-digit code he can reliably remember.

The PC makes another noise and quickly reboots, and when the desktop reappears — after prompting him for his PIN again — there are twice as many icons. There’s also a text file, placed centrally on the screen, labelled, Read me! – Christine.

Hi Stef!

Congratulations on putting the cat among the pigeons, depositing the fox in the hen house, shouting fire in a crowded theatre, etc. Things are weird here again! Abby’s thrilled. So’s Maria, I think. She’s got this smirk on her face that I’m pretty sure you put there, and it makes sense: she’s been basically running this place for years, and you’re the first genuinely new thing to happen since we stopped tweaking the intake guidelines. If you hadn’t come along I think sooner or later she would have invented you just to relieve the monotony.

So, as of the moment you entered that PIN you gained a hell of a lot of access privileges. You’re actually on a custom profile I’ve set up, because Maria is being cautious and wants granular control over your shit.

To break it down:

• • Your door access is unchanged, so for now you can’t let yourself out of the basement or into the boys’ rooms. Anything with a red light is still locked for you. We don’t want you accidentally using the wrong biometric reader because you’re sleepy and letting yourself into, I don’t know, Martin’s room by mistake. But you WILL be able to leave the basement on request. It’ll require a bit of organisation – we don’t want one of the boys seeing you strolling up the stairs – so you can’t do it on a whim, but it’s something we can make happen (and I should probably warn you, now you’re ‘officially’ in on the joke, they might ask you to attend the Christmas party, apologies in advance for that, I suggest you start thinking up an excuse NOW). Only thing you won’t be able to do is leave the Hall without an escort – you’re on second year rules, basically.
  • As for networking, your PC has an unrestricted mode – which you’re in now, reading this – and a restricted mode. Hit the shortcut on the desktop to switch between the two, or slap ctrl-alt-delete if you’re in a hurry. In unrestricted mode you can access our network and use our streaming accounts and you can go online. BUT: no social media, no email, no nothing. Consider the internet a read-only resource for now. And we monitor that shit, so just be sensible about it.
  • If you want to get a head start on things like voice training – not shifting your pitch, obviously, unless you want to spend the next several months whispering to the boys and pretending you’ve got a REALLY sore throat, but expanding your range, practising your breathing and finding your head voice will all be helpful to you when the time comes, believe me! – there are training documents and videos on our network, all open to you in unrestricted mode. Have a poke around, there’s all sorts of useful shit on there.
  • Your phone is unchanged for now. Like the door locks, it’s a precaution, not a lack of trust: it’d be too easy for you to slip up and accidentally show someone something he’s not supposed to see. Maria says we can revisit this stuff when you’re more accustomed to being a free(ish) woman.

Pippa’s okay. She’s mad at ME because I’ve spent a month lying to and manipulating her, and that’s fair enough I suppose, so I kind of want to ask you a favour: be her friend? She’s lonely, and I fucked it all up.

Anyway. That’s everything. You can reach me on Consensus if you want to but otherwise, congrats! You don’t need me any more.

Take care, Stef,

Christine

He reads the last paragraph through a couple of times. ‘Congrats! You don’t need me any more’? That’s unusually self-deprecating, even more than he’s come to expect from her. Does Christine think he’s angry with her? He’s perplexed by her, sure, and feels ugly and masculine in her presence, but he sees a lot of beautiful, confusing women these days and he’s a lot more on top of the discomfort he feels around them than he used to be.

Before he can hop on Consensus and call her an idiot, someone knocks on his door. He grumbles under his breath — he’s getting a little sick of people dropping by today — and considers pretending to be asleep, but then the knocking starts up again and doesn’t stop.

Fine.

He takes a second to make sure the computer’s back in restricted mode, looks quickly around his room to make sure nothing’s amiss, and then opens the door to a nervous Aaron, still knocking, now waving his hand uselessly against air.

“Hi,” Stefan says, stepping aside to let him in.

“Hi, Stef,” Aaron says, hovering at the perimeter, reluctant to step inside. He starts twisting his hands around each other, and he looks smaller than usual.

“What’s up?”

“Hey. So. Look.” Aaron looks left and right, as if checking for witnesses, and then continues in a whisper, “Are you okay? Feeling good? Or good-for-the-basement, anyway? Nothing ticking over in that head of yours, waiting to explode? Are you going to seem completely fine and then snap like a fucking twig and scare the shit out of me again?”

“What are you talking about?” Stefan says, frowning and sorting through the apparently endless events of the day.

“Declan!” Aaron says, finally coming inside, ducking under the arm Stefan’s holding the door open with and perching on the edge of the bed. “I’m talking about Declan.” He looks at his hands as if suddenly and for the first time noticing his habit of gesticulating along with his speech, and sits on them, holding them still. “And about what happened after. It’s been hours, Stef, and we only just got out of lockdown and I spent the whole time thinking they were lining up to kick the crap out of you. You didn’t hear me banging on my door, yelling your name?”

“Oh. No. Sorry.”

“Not your fault. I guess the soundproofing has to be pretty good here. But you’re okay?”

“I’m okay.”

“Because, man, they dragged you away! Back to the cells! Like you’d done something wrong by smacking the world’s dumbest rapist in the teeth! And all I got from you after was a thumbs up through the fucking common room door, and for all I knew they could have made you do that, and I know there’s another exit near the bedrooms and I don’t know what happens when you wash out and I thought I was going to be alone down here again and—”

“I’m okay, Aaron.”

“No beatings?”

“No.”

“And you’re not going to freak out and try to hurt yourself again?”

“No.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Jesus’s big fat floppy dick,” Aaron mutters, and flops back on the bed. “Stef, mate,” he continues, voice slightly strained from the unusual position his upper body’s ended up in, “I thought I was going to have to talk you down from, I don’t know, something drastic and awful. Or I thought I’d never see you again. What happened?”

“I got the talking-to of my life,” Stefan says, slightly taken aback by the intensity of Aaron’s reaction. Possibly the boy just doesn’t want to be left with only Will and Adam to talk to, an understandably horrifying concept. Stefan sits down at the head of the bed and arranges the pillows for comfort, throwing one to Aaron and using the time it takes to situate himself to cover for the thinking he needs to do. He knows he’ll have to wing this conversation, to feel out what elements of the truth he can use to spin his latest lie, and he suppresses a moment’s irritation that Beatrice didn’t leave him with any instructions beyond, ‘Don’t tell them anything.’ Perhaps improvising a cover story is his first task as an official collaborator. “But that was all it was. I had to promise I wouldn’t hit anyone else.” He shrugs. “It was more about Declan than me. He was on his last chance, and he blew it: he’s washing out.”

“For good?” Aaron says, breathing out heavily. “You know this for sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Who told you?”

“Pippa. And Maria, a little bit, as well,” Stefan adds, borrowing a bit of her authority, certain that if Aaron asks her to confirm any of it she’ll lie as smoothly and professionally as she does when she tells Aaron he’ll leave Dorley ‘a changed man’.

Fuck. Because that’s still happening, isn’t it? To Aaron; to all of them.

Aaron, sitting up against the wall himself now, head resting on the pillow Stefan gave him, ankles tucked under, frowns at Stefan as if he senses his disquiet, and well he should: it’s different now. Which doesn’t entirely make sense — Stefan’s been lying to Aaron since they met — but now that Stefan is, officially, on the side of the sponsors, now that he’s been upgraded from prisoner to prison guard, it’s different. How could it not be?

Welcome to the team, he remembers with a shudder.

Aaron blinks at him, looks almost comically innocent, and Stefan wonders how the punishment can possibly be proportional to his crime. It seems catastrophically unjust.

Except it’s not supposed to be punishment, is it? No, it’s rehabilitation, or Beatrice’s twisted idea of it, one she’s recruited generations of women into helping her carry out — simultaneously beneficiaries, employees and justification for her ideology; convenient — and in Stefan’s mind it’s transformed over the weeks from barely believable to straightforwardly horrifying.

He can’t stop looking at Aaron. They’re going to change him. They’ve already started.

“So, um,” Aaron says, uncomfortable under his gaze, “did Pippa or Maria happen to tell you what ‘washing out’ actually involves?”

Stefan swallows some of the tension out of his throat. “No,” he says, and he’s relieved it comes out sounding almost normal. “I asked. But no.”

“Because I have a theory.”

“Oh?”

“I think they hunt us for sport, dude.”

“Aaron—”

The boy snorts. “That wasn’t serious. Okay, actually, maybe it was a little serious? Because we’re never leaving here. You know that, right?” He drums his fingers on his thighs. Allocates all his attention to the task. “I’ve been thinking about this. They’re never going to let us go. They can’t, or we’ll go to the police. I don’t care how many books on feminism Maria makes me read, none of them have a bit that’s made me any less likely to call 999 the second I get out of here and start ugly crying about kidnapping rings until the operator sends someone with a box of tissues and a SWAT team. And that means ‘washing out’, or whatever bullshit excuse they eventually use to get rid of us, means either being shipped off somewhere else — somewhere worse — or they’re doing a Dexter and dropping us into the sea in bin bags.”

“I’m not sure—”

“I don’t want to die, Stef!” Aaron says, and Stefan notices for the first time that his eyes, normally always a little puffy from poor sleep, are red: he’s been crying. “I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to sit around in this fucking dungeon watching people get carted off, one by one. I’m ready to tear this place up! Run at someone and just get tased over and over again! Because what’s the point in being a good boy, staying out of trouble, keeping my pecker in my pocket, reading all Maria’s books and eating every spoonful of shit they shovel at me, if my grand reward is that I’m the last one to leave? Do I get to sit in the common room and watch while they drag you away? Because I had a preview of that today, Stefan, and I didn’t like it one fucking bit.”

“Hey,” Stefan says, leaning forward, not touching him but closing the gap between them. Sincerity by proximity; show him he’s not scared. “I’ve been talking to them. No-one’s dragging me away. Or you. Declan’s a fucking monster. You’re not and neither am I.”

“Not even for—?”

“No.”

“Then how do we leave?” Aaron shouts. “Because I can’t come up with a way that doesn’t involve body bags and meat cleavers.” He’s stopped drumming on his thighs and instead wrapped his arms around his waist, shrinking himself. Stefan’s had enough experience to spot someone trying to hold down rampant panic, and he’s torn between concern for Aaron and anger at Maria and Beatrice and all the others for allowing this to happen.

But that’s the point, right? That’s the benefit of someone washing out: the threats are suddenly real. The boys start fearing for their lives, not just their freedom. They can’t pretend it’s just a psychological experiment any more, or Woke Jail, or anything else. Will called washing out ‘the bogeyman’. Not any more. Stefan finds himself wondering at the convenience of the timing; just when it’s starting to sink in that they’re going to be down here a long, long time…

It can’t be true that Dorley takes in one extra boy per year with the express intention of washing them out, can it? Beatrice said she doesn’t like to waste people, and if she’s to be believed — and Stefan has to trust her credibility, else the promises she made about his own future start to look suspect, and this place becomes even more of a horror show — then such an action would be abhorrent to her.

He can believe she’ll seize on any useful side-effect, though. A shame one of the boys had to go, but what a splendid motivator for those who remain! Everything’s a lever.

He wonders, suddenly, if they ever lose boys from the fear they stoke in them. If that counts as a failure or another kind of success; another bad man off the streets forever. Would Aaron, convinced that the same fate awaits all of them, do something drastic?

“Can I tell you a secret?” Stefan says quickly, stomach lurching, needing to do or say something to make it better, and rapidly deciding what exactly that is.

Aaron, looking down at his knees again, nods.

“And you’ll keep it to yourself, just for now?” he says.

Aaron nods again.

“Because I was explicitly instructed not to tell anyone about this, and it could hurt me badly if it gets out that I did.”

Aaron nods again. “I won’t hurt you, Stef,” he whispers.

“Remember, after the thing with the nurse, when I asked to speak to someone in charge about the way we were treated, and I met a woman called Abby?”

“Yeah.”

“She said she was down here, once,” Stefan says. “Down here like we are. Kept here, just like us, until she reformed. She said it was years ago, and that there have been a lot of people down here between her and us. Enough people that, if all of them really had disappeared forever, it’d be a national scandal.” Granted, all of them actually have disappeared, with Stefan and his supposed backpacking holiday as the sole exception; they’ve got to be bribing someone, surely? Lots of someones. “She survived.”

“She got out?”

“Her and dozens of others, over the years. They stay down here, they reform, they move on.”

Aaron’s breathing slows a little. “You didn’t happen to meet any more of these ‘others’, did you?”

“No. But she didn’t seem like she was lying. And I think she was telling me more than she was supposed to, you know?”

Aaron nods. “So, what, do they have girl intakes and boy intakes? Or are they normally mixed and we were just really unlucky and got a no-girl one? Or is there a whole other basement?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t say. I think she was more interested in reassuring me. Maybe she knows everyone gets scared about this, at some point.”

“So, if she got out, why’s she still around?”

“She said it’s cheaper than renting. And she has friends here.”

“Don’t suppose she said what she did to end up down here?” Aaron says.

Stefan pretends to remember, sorting through ways to repackage the things Abby’s told him about her life before graduation. “She said she had behavioural problems. Bad ones. She said she hurt someone. And that she fought against this place to begin with, but eventually came to realise that being made to change was the only way she was ever going to change.”

“Is that really it?” Aaron says. “We change, we leave?”

“It’s a pretty big change they want, I think. Like you said, they don’t want us running off and dobbing them in the second we get out. We need to believe we’re better off than we were before. Better people.”

“This is sounding kind of like a cult, Stefan. Are we going to end up worshipping a moon goddess or something? Is there going to be a spaceship you can only get aboard via mass suicide?”

“I’m sure she would have mentioned if there was a suicide spaceship.”

“We just… change,” Aaron says.

“Yes.”

“Become better men.”

“Yes,” Stefan says, looking away.

Aaron unwinds a little more, stretches his legs out in front of him, lays his hands in his lap. “Maybe, then… maybe you had the right idea, going on at me about my shit. Maybe I shouldn’t have given you grief about it.”

“I don’t think it’s so granular. I think it’s a whole process and they’re only just getting started. Although, I suppose deciding never to do it again couldn’t hurt.”

“Way ahead of you.”

“Good.”

“Fuck,” Aaron says, after a moment spent playing with his lower lip with his teeth. “Down here a while, then?”

“Probably, yeah.”

“This Abby, is she hot?”

“She’s beautiful,” Stefan says. “Like, model-pretty.”

“Nice. You think maybe guys don’t call the police because they get to live in a big house full of hot women, after?” The grin Aaron turns on Stefan is half-smug, half-cheeky, the way he usually is, and Stefan is so relieved by the apparent return of the boy’s equilibrium that he laughs out loud, lets the pressure out of his chest with an undignified snort that turns into a hysteria that takes a good few seconds to recover from. When he does, Aaron’s crossed his hands behind his head, looking up at him, still smiling, and it takes everything Stefan has not to hug him.

“What’s so funny?” Aaron says, play-acting offended.

“I,” Stefan says, between breaths, “have no idea.”

Aaron shrugs. “At least you got a laugh out of it. It’s a nice change of pace; I’ve spent the evening feeling like the mousetrap is about to snap shut around my neck. Just this impending and inescapable sense of doom.”

“You’re not doomed.”

“Let’s hope,” Aaron says, half-joking.

“You’re not doomed,” Stefan insists, losing his levity as fast as it came. He knows exactly what it’ll take for Aaron to get out of here.

“Aww. You do care.”

“I do, actually,” Stefan says, looking at Aaron in profile and wondering, as the guilt ties itself around his spine, how Aaron will look as a girl, whether he’ll survive long enough for them both to find out, and what exactly would happen if Stefan just told the truth right now, if he admitted everything. Would Aaron tell the others? Try to escape?

Would he hurt himself?

“You mind if I just hang out for a bit?” Aaron says. “Kinda don’t want to go back to my room right now.”

“Yeah,” Stefan says, the confession freezing on his lips and his fingernails biting his palms as he realises that the truth has to be kept from Aaron, lest he try something drastic enough, one way or another, to end his own life or wash out. So Stefan will keep the secret. Lie to him. Spin stories. Cooperate with Maria. Be complicit. And comfort him when, one day soon enough, Aaron wakes up mutilated. “Sure.”

 

2019 November 10
Sunday

“I feel weird about this.”

“It’s fine, Aaron, really.”

“No, it’s not fine, not at all. They got really strange about us showering unsupervised, remember? They made us always go together, at the same time every morning? It was a whole thing? I know you remember this, Stef; have you gone wrong?”

“Please stop tapping on my head.”

“I’m just trying to find the bit of you that’s gone crazy.”

“It’s fine, Aaron. Really! Those rules were because of Declan, right? Well, he’s gone now. Gone gone.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“I think I should, because you seem to have forgotten. We’re safe. Whatever happens to him isn’t ever going to happen to us, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“So?”

“Yeah. Fine. We’re safe. There’s always Maria, though. Showering at the appropriate time, that’s her rule. And she likes rules. Loves them. Probably sleeps with a big book of them. Probably strokes its sexy hardback spine and—”

“Remember the microphones, Aaron.”

“Good point. Still, Maria, though.”

“I’ll protect you from Maria.”

“My hero!”

“Get off me!”

“My knight in shining armour!”

“I’m your neighbour in a bloody dressing gown, now get off me.”

“My knight in a… greenish-black robe!”

“I said, get off me— ow!”

“What? What’s up? What did I do?”

“Oh, uh, nothing.”

“That wasn’t nothing, Stefan.”

“It’s just… my chest is a little sore, that’s all.”

“Huh. You too?”

They’d talked for a bit. Watched a movie together, Stefan keeping a careful eye on Aaron until the anxiety seemed genuinely to leave him. He threw in a lot of reassurances about how nice and normal Abby seemed, how probably there are others at Saints who’ve been through the same thing, and that the reason they never heard anything about it before they ended up here is because the people who leave are grateful, not dead. Partway through the movie, Aaron switched position, moved closer to him, and while it was a little uncomfortable, in the way personal contact with Aaron can be — Stefan’s long since rejected the idea that Aaron might be flirting, having decided instead that he’s just drawn to the novel sensation of being close to someone who’s nice to him — mostly it made Stefan aware of how much the day’s effort and anxiety caused him to sweat. So, somewhere after two in the morning, he persuaded Aaron to come along for an illicit late-night shower, because sitting in your own stink is bad enough in an ordinary bedroom and downright appalling in the poorly ventilated basement rooms.

“Yeah,” Stefan says, turning his back on Aaron and hanging up his dressing gown on one of the pegs in the shower annexe, “I’ve been sore for a couple of days. Probably just a side-effect of the Goserelin.” He makes a show of massaging his chest; is it his imagination, or is there a little development there? The flesh seems more firm, even if there’s nothing visible just yet.

“Hah!” Aaron says, triumphant, disrobing and, following Stefan’s example, turning away. It’s been a while since Stefan was last intentionally subjected to the sight of Aaron’s penis; the thought of it is almost nostalgic. “I knew it! You said it can’t make you grow breasts!”

“It can’t.” Stefan ducks under the water and wets his hair, and then ducks back out to add, “But maybe it can make your nipples hurt.” He shrugs. “I’m not a doctor.”

“No, Stef,” Aaron says, picking the tap next to Stefan’s and starting the water, “you are not. Jesus, this feels good.”

Stefan ducks his head under. “It really does.”

“No, you don’t understand. This feels really good.” Aaron turns to him and holds out his arms, as if to demonstrate, and then sheepishly turns away again, cheeks red, when Stefan’s eyes unavoidably flicker downward for a moment. “I’ve never had a shower like this. It’s like the water’s kissing my skin!”

Stefan laughs. “Maybe you’re just in a good mood.”

“Yeah,” Aaron says, rubbing in the shampoo and half-turning his head to grin at Stefan without danger of further exposure. “That must be it. I’ve got the basement euphoria. Common medical condition that comes from being entombed in concrete for weeks. You’d know about that, being a doctor and all. Or,” he adds, rinsing it out, “it’s just from knowing I’m not going to die down here. Kind of a relief, really. You okay to do my conditioner?”

“Sure,” Stefan says, shrugging. Earlier, while they were watching the movie, Aaron confided that he really does have difficulty raising his left arm over his head for more than a few seconds. He can stretch okay, he said, and wave and all that, but he can’t apply pressure and he can’t lift things. He hasn’t said why; Stefan assumes it’s an injury from boarding school, from when the other boys used to delight in hurting him. Whatever the reason, Stefan’s happy enough helping him with rubbing in his conditioner. “Come here and stay still.”

“I’m going to ask Maria if we can start taking our phones into the common room,” Aaron says, squirming as Stefan massages the conditioner through his hair; it’s getting longer, starting to look more like Stefan’s unkempt thatch, and the shorter hairs on the back and sides are getting shaggy. Aaron normally keeps it slicked back, but when it’s wet it falls in his eyes, and when he shakes his head to clear them it’s almost cute.

“Okay. Why?”

“For the cameras, Stef! Imagine if I’d been able to get you on video, smacking Declan around! You should have seen yourself; fucking glorious. Just whap! and he’s on the floor like a fucking, I don’t know, a black-and-white-cartoon banana-peel-assisted ass-plant, and you’re standing over him, all, ‘Come on then.’ You deserve to see that. Spank bank material for life.”

Stefan slaps him lightly on the side of the head, both as reprimand and to let him know he’s done with the conditioner. “I wouldn’t mind forgetting it, actually. My thumb still hurts.”

Aaron laughs. “You hit him with your thumb inside your fist?”

“Why does everyone keep on at me about that? It’s not like I’ve been in a lot of fights.”

“Hey,” Aaron says, holding up a pair of soapy hands, balled up with the thumbs inside, “no judging. I would have done the same.”

“I thought you got in fights at your awful school?”

“Oh, sure, I got in fights. I just didn’t get much opportunity to fight back.”

“Jesus,” Stefan says, turning around to wash himself in the place he doesn’t like to think about. “I’m sorry, Aaron.”

“Yeah, well, the joke’s on them.” Aaron starts rinsing the conditioner. “Now they’re all licking taint to climb the political and corporate ladders and I’m having an illicit shower in a kidnapper basement with my best bud.”

“They’d be so jealous,” Stefan says, giggling into the water.

“And I bet their nipples don’t tingle at night, either,” Aaron adds, shutting off the tap and shaking the hair out of his eyes. “They really are missing out.”

 

* * *

 

“That was weirdly fun,” Stefan says, hanging up his wet towel and pulling on a t-shirt. Aaron hadn’t wanted to return to his room, not even to pick up spare clothes, but he did agree to get changed with his back turned and is already stretched out on the end of the bed, clad in Stefan’s too-big-for-him jogging bottoms and hoodie, scrolling through Stefan’s phone, looking for another movie.

“Yeah, actually, it was,” Aaron admits.

“It was like sneaking out from a school trip. Clandestine in a really basic kind of way, you know?”

“Aww,” Aaron says, “you’re always so wholesome. I can picture it now.” He raises a hand to the ceiling and continues in a narrator’s voice: “A trip to Chessington, a cruel and heartless Geography teacher who makes the boys and girls take separate buses, and you, a brave thirteen-year-old, sneaking out of the boys’ floor to find out where the girls are sleeping.”

“How did you know my Geography teacher was cruel and heartless?”

Aaron shrugs. “Aren’t they all?”

“You’re wrong about Chessington. Our school could never’ve afforded it. Wrong side of London. We did once go to that place where all the wattle-and-daub houses used to be.”

“Isn’t that mostly just a big field?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Your big school trip was to a field.”

“It was a different field to the ones around where I grew up.” Stefan says. “Novelty value. Anyway, I never sneaked out on any trip, except to call a friend of mine back home. Never even sneaked out of school. I was very well-behaved,” he adds primly.

“Man, what did you do to end up here?”

“Corporate espionage,” Stefan says.

“Liar.”

“Art forgery.”

“I’ve seen your doodles; you can’t draw.”

“I colluded with the French, to—”

“Will you stop? I’m trying to find a movie that isn’t quite saccharine enough to make me vom and you’re being very distracting.”

“Sorry.”

Aaron drops the phone on the bed, giving up. He rests his head on his crossed hands. “You might have been sweetness and light at school,” he says, “but I wasn’t. I mean, I guess you know about the recent stuff—” he coughs delicately, and looks uncomfortable, “—but I mean, before. When I was a teenager. When I got transferred to hell.” Stefan doesn’t ask what he means by that; it seems clear. “Hey,” Aaron adds, “did your parents have, like, a life plan for you?”

“A life plan?”

“Yeah, like, what did they want you to be?”

Stefan shrugs. “I don’t know. I never asked. It’s not the sort of thing I’ve ever wanted to know.”

“Huh,” Aaron says, contemplating Stefan’s response as if it’s by far the least relatable thing he’s ever said, which it might well be. “After Dad’s business got sold and we were suddenly rolling in it, they developed plans for me. Big plans.” He waves a hand around. “I was going to be in business. I was going to be in politics. Jesus,” he adds with a derisive sniff, “they wanted me to be prime minister. Didn’t matter what I wanted, obviously, or that they’d moved me away from my friends and made me hyper-fucking-miserable. That was a bonus, actually: no ‘distractions’. So off I go to a brand new school, a fucking sardine tin of dickheads that twists open and rains them down on me as soon as I get there, and oh yes, I have to live my entire life there, too. Can’t be prime minister if you don’t network. Stupid, obviously.”

“How come?”

“None of the posh boys gave a fuck who I was. And Dad, well, he sold, didn’t he? Wasn’t in business any more. He had more money than sense even when he didn’t have any money, and now he was rolling in it he didn’t understand that family connections matter to those people, and he didn’t have any, ergo, I didn’t have any. And I sounded wrong. I even looked wrong. You know that look aristos have, like someone not too far up the family tree fucked a trout and had a lovely clutch of fish babies, and the glassy eyes and floppy jaw become dominant genetic traits? Yeah. You know the one. Didn’t have that, either. Nothing about me fit.”

“That sounds awful, Aaron,” Stef says, extracting two bottles of water from the stash under his bed and waggling one at Aaron, who takes it.

“Thanks,” Aaron says, cracking it open and taking a drink. “And, yeah, it was pretty fucking awful. If the other boys weren’t locking me in the coal shed, they were aiming a kick at me in the hall or randomly taking my stuff or— or doing other shit. And I guess I could have told my dad, you know, said it wasn’t working out, but as far as I was concerned he stopped giving a shit as soon as he slammed the car door and drove away. Probably not actually true — looking back, I think he would have moved me on if I made enough of a fuss, like if I really made a problem for him — but when you’re a stupid kid, you’re a stupid kid.”

“Right.”

“So I start exploring, looking for places to be left alone. And, yeah, I found lots of little nooks and crannies, loads of secret spaces… all of which had already been comprehensively mapped by generations of posh twats. You know, like, ‘Son, this is the room where I first played soggy biscuit and made Dumpy Doggins eat it,’ that kind of thing, and Dumpy Doggins is in parliament now.”

“What’s soggy biscuit?”

“Don’t ask. Anyway, my only choice is to get the hell out of hell, so that’s what I do. I start sacking off classes and just go wandering. I skip breakfast, I skip dinner, I sneak back to the dorm late at night. I show up to just enough lessons not to get kicked out, and that turns out to be not very many, because posh school? Not exactly academically rigorous.”

“Really?”

“Yeah! I expected to be behind when I started there but it turns out those boarding schools are just big kindergartens for the well-bred. They don’t need to know things; they just need to learn how to hide their sociopathy in a suit. Takes years to teach, too. That kind of cruelty takes a lot of sanding down. Hey,” he adds thoughtfully, “why aren’t there any of them in here?”

“There might have been, in other years. Probably not, though. Harder to kidnap someone if they’re related to the queen. God,” Stefan adds, giggling, “imagine waking up to another ordinary day in the basement, and Prince William is there. Maria standing in front of him, like, ‘Imperialism is just another facet of toxic masculinity.’”

“Anyway,” Aaron says, and Stefan makes apologetic gestures for the tangent, “I started exploring away from the school, and there was a small town a mile or so down the road. I ended up going there a lot, because there was nowhere else even close. Middle of nowhere, literally. And there was nothing to do in town, so I started hanging around at this corner shop. I’d go there in my shitty little uniform and buy a Mars Bar instead of actually having dinner, and after a while they started noticing me. And when I asked if I could use their kettle so I could make a Pot Noodle, they started talking to me, asking how I am, making sure I get something a bit more substantial to eat. Well—” and he blushes, looks away from Stefan at the ceiling, starts turning his hands around each other again, “—Elizabeth did.”

“Elizabeth?” Stefan asks, into the sudden silence.

“Yeah. She was the eldest daughter of the family who ran the place. And she was… kind to me. And interested, you know? Like, she actually cared. We’d talk, and she’d listen and offer advice, and she was so fucking pretty, Stef, you don’t understand, like, I’d gone from being a child at a normal school where the girls were kids just like me, to this shitpit full of posh boys, none of whom I’d have wanted to touch even if they didn’t ritually kick the crap out of me all the time, and then there she was: a woman. And she was kind, confident, intelligent… All the things you’d want someone to be. Just hanging out with her was a life-changing experience.”

“Did you, uh—”

“Did we do it?” Aaron finishes, looking vaguely scandalised. “No. Christ, no. She was in her twenties. Much older than me. I just, you know, fancied her a bit, I mean, obviously I did, she was gorgeous, but she was also a nice, smart, interesting woman who made a bit of time for me. Maybe the first and last person to be kind to me. Until, uh, well…” He coughs. “But the family lost the shop and had to move. Rent went up or some shit. And we meant to stay in touch, but the posh boys stamped on my phone and that was it, you know? When I eventually got out of hell I tried to look her up on Facebook and realised I never even knew her fucking surname.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Years ago. I had a lot of school still to get through and nowhere to escape to, after she left.”

“I’m sorry, Aaron.”

“You know,” he says, rolling back over and making himself busy with the phone again, “that’s the good thing about this place: people can’t leave me. They literally can’t. Locked in.”

“I wouldn’t leave you, anyway.”

Aaron stops scrolling. “Really?”

“Really. Remember? I said we were friends, and Will called us gay?”

“Yeah. Huh. Cool. So, uh, wanna watch something called Desperately Seeking Susan?”

 

* * *

 

Since yesterday, Christine’s been holding Paige’s hand a lot. She needs the reassurance: she came close to wrecking their relationship, close to wrecking Paige herself — Christine’s had to get over her innate disbelief that anyone, let alone Paige Adams, could like her that much, because clearly she does, and sooner or later you have to let go of your own self-loathing before it hurts someone who matters — and now that they’ve reaffirmed their bond she doesn’t want ever to be out of contact with her. Paige’s slender fingers anchor her, keep her safe, and she’d worry she was being too clingy if Paige didn’t need the connection just as much. Maria poked gentle fun when they came down for breakfast and didn’t unlink to pour cereal; given that they are both right-handed, this required some ingenuity.

But, because Paige takes her classes very seriously — she’s already impressed one of her History with Human Rights professors enough that she’s practically been guaranteed a spot on one of the summer placements, which makes Christine ache with both pride and pre-emptive loneliness at the thought of losing her for three whole months — they’ve been forced to detach from each other, so Paige can concentrate on her work. She’s still within sight: perched at one of the smaller tables around the edge of the dining room, laptop and binders scattered in front of her, frowning, typing, occasionally singing under her breath. Christine can’t think of anything she’d rather look at, and suppresses her irritation when two more of her Sisters, sounding distressingly chirpy, enter the dining room and make a beeline for her table.

Indira kisses her on the top of her head and sits on her left; Abby deposits three coffee cups on the table in front of her and folds into the seat on Christine’s right. Christine almost doesn’t want to look at the mugs, because she knows Abby will deliberately have picked out the ones with the worst, most awful jokes on and, sure enough, when she picks hers up to take a sip it says on the side, You Have a Special Way of Making People Smile. With depressing inevitability the word Smile has been crossed out and replaced with Girls, apparently at the printing stage. Cute, for certain (very localised) values of ‘cute’.

“You’re very sweet together,” Abby says, nodding at Paige, “you and her. I do love to see it. She was miserable, you know, last year, after you broke things off.”

“I know,” Christine says. “I don’t really want to talk about it, if that’s okay? I’ve spent enough time recently cataloguing my mistakes. The list is long.”

“She’s testy,” Indira stage-whispers over Christine’s head. “No sleep.” Indira’s response to discovering Christine had been hiding a whole trans girl from everyone except Abby had been, mercifully, confined to Christine’s bedroom and thus was moderated by Paige’s presence, but it had still been rough, even if it ended in hugs.

“Oh?” Abby said, raising her eyebrows and smirking, but Indira cuts her off, shaking her head.

“Bad dreams,” she explains, and squeezes Christine’s shoulder.

It’s true. Nightmares jerked her out of bed several times overnight. If it hadn’t been for Paige, gently rubbing her back, stroking her hair, kissing her, promising her that everything’s okay, Christine wouldn’t have got more than a single hour. It was one of the factors that moderated Indira’s reaction: when she walked in, Christine was curled up in Paige’s lap, clinging to her like she was the last woman on Earth.

“I’m worried about Stef,” Christine says.

“You shouldn’t be,” Indira says. “Maria’s on her side, and Pippa was already on her side; she’s safe.”

“Physically, maybe. But haven’t we officially recruited her? What’s that going to do to her brain?”

“We’ll watch her. Don’t worry.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t go see her in person,” Abby says, “just for the reassurance.”

Christine smiles. “I thought about it. But I checked the feed and Aaron was with her all night. I wouldn’t have been able to see her without prompting some awkward questions.”

“All night?” Indira says. “They slept together? That’s… early.”

“No,” Christine says, and pulls out her phone, bringing up the appropriate footage. “See?” She scrubs through it, covering hours in seconds. “They watched a movie, washed up, watched another movie, and eventually fell asleep. That’s Stef in the bed; Aaron’s curled up on a pile of hoodies on the floor.”

Indira giggles. “Like a puppy.”

“Stop,” Christine says, dropping her phone on the table. “That’s not an image I ever want in my head.”

“It’s right there,” Abby says, ever helpful. “Look.”

Christine drinks her coffee, eyes to the ceiling. “You can’t make me.”

Indira, aware more than anyone else of the shortness of Christine’s temper when she’s tired, engages Abby with local gossip, and Christine shoots her a grateful smile before letting herself zone out. She rests her chin on her free hand, sips her coffee and returns to watching Paige, a pastime she’ll never tire of: Paige is sweetly deliberate in everything she does, and as Christine watches she swipes on her laptop’s touchpad, peers at something in her written notes and starts typing, all with the same careful, controlled gestures so typical of her. That little dent between her brows when she frowns: Christine wants desperately to kiss it.

She’s still singing to herself, too.

God, how did she let herself almost ruin this? How did she nearly miss it in the first place? All those times she thought Paige was just being pushy, she was actually supporting her, fighting for her, caring for her, the way she’s always done, since before she was Paige.

A woman she’ll never deserve. Best start trying harder, then.

The sound of fresh coffee being poured wakes her up, and when Abby sits back down, putting the cafetiere aside for one of the second years to pick up later, she gently strokes the back of Christine’s neck, where her hair becomes wispy and fine, and kisses her on the cheek.

“Sleepy little thing,” Abby says.

“Who are you calling little?” Christine mumbles. “I’m taller than you.”

“I think you should know, I refilled Paige’s mug just now and she didn’t spot me coming, so I got to hear what she’s been singing to herself half the morning.”

“Oh?”

“It’s You Belong With Me, but she’s changing the lyrics. I’m pretty sure she made them about you.”

Christine looks back at Paige, and it doesn’t take long for her to start up again. Now that she has context, she can guess the words:

I wear short skirts, she wears t-shirts
I’m cheer captain and she’s on the bleachers
Dreaming about the day when she wakes up and finds
That what she’s looking for has been here the whole time

“Chrissy,” Abby says sternly, “if you break her heart again, I will be so very cross.”

“Same,” Indira says. “This is your second chance with her, and take it from me: second chances are precious.”

“She’s made herself very vulnerable,” Abby says, “opening up to you again. Don’t forget.”

Christine drinks her coffee, deliberately slurping it, to be rude. “It’s possible to have too many older sisters,” she says.

“Nope,” Indira says.

“I haven’t heard that,” Abby says.

“Me neither.”

“Sounds like a myth.”

The table is a much nicer place to rest her head than on her hand, and if she closes her eyes she can pretend that two of her dearest friends and closest family aren’t ganging up on her. Someone — Indira, probably, judging by the angle — starts rubbing her back, and she wriggles into the movements, accepting the comfort. Wonders, the way she sometimes does, what her old self might be doing at this moment; doubts he would have been surrounded by people who love him as much as Abby and Indira love her, even if they are capable of being, from time to time, mildly irritating.

Her old self; she’s starting to struggle to remember his name. Good.

Over her head, the conversation’s moved on from Christine’s love life and her litany of errors and onto just where the hell Abby has been the last few weeks.

“I’ve been around,” she says.

“Not much,” Indira says. “We’ve missed you.”

“I’ve been working!”

“And not sleeping in your room?”

“Well, no. I have an actual budget for this article, and it’s taking me all over the place. I’m getting to know the Travelodge network much better than I ever wanted to.”

“Huh,” Christine says. “I assumed you’d been staying with Melissa.”

Abby looks away. “No,” she says. “She’s, um, seeing someone. And she doesn’t want to see me again. For now.”

“Oh. Shit. Abs—”

“It’s fine, Christine.”

“But still—”

“Can we change the subject?”

Indira jumps in again, discussing her new responsibilities and noting that Nell, Faye’s sponsor, has been effectively suspended with pay, reduced to filling in on the basement rota; Dira is co-sponsoring Faye with Bella, Rebecca’s sponsor, which doesn’t take up much of anyone’s time as Faye and Rebecca are inseparable, and practically sponsor themselves.

“As bad as these two?” Abby asks, twitching her finger back and forth to indicate Christine and Paige.

“Worse,” Indira says. “Sometimes they have… guests.”

“Gosh,” Abby says, sitting back. “Your year wasn’t like that, was it?”

“Not really. Yours?”

“Definitely not.”

“They’re very sweet, though,” Indira says. She nudges Christine. “They talk about you a lot.”

“In what context?” Christine asks warily, remembering Faye’s aborted attempt to kiss her.

“They were asking if they could come up to the second floor to see both of you again.”

Ah. Good. That sounds innocent. “Any time,” she says. “But I’ll see them soon, won’t I? Aren’t the second years cooking today?”

“Yes,” Abby says, in her primary school teacher voice, “and that means they’ll be busy. Cooking is hard work, Christine.”

“No, it’s easy,” Christine says. “You take the leftovers, you put them in the microwave, you eat the leftovers.” She sticks her tongue out and earns a light smack to the shoulder.

In fact, Faye and Rebecca can do little more than wave at Christine as a line of sponsors escort them and the other second years into the dining hall a couple of hours later, bearing Sunday lunch (and vegetarian option) and a few bottles of wine, which prompts Paige, sitting down next to Abby and frowning politely at her until she agrees to swap seats with Christine, to complain once again that this batch of second years are getting way more opportunities to exercise their alcohol privileges than she and Christine ever did.

“Confirmation bias,” Indira says, leaning around Abby and gesticulating with the nut cutlet on her fork. “You remember every time we pulled you, kicking and screaming, out of the liquor cabinet, and you extrapolate from there.”

“One time,” Paige says, presenting the appropriate number of fingers. “One time. I just wanted a whiskey.”

“And she wasn’t kicking and screaming,” Christine says, loyal to the end but resisting the urge to kiss her, lest she cover her in gravy.

Aunt Bea pokes her head around the door from the kitchen just as Christine’s finishing her chicken, and exchanges a few meaningful nods with Maria before retreating. Something about her demeanour and dress — stiff movements, sunglasses, very long coat — suggests a hangover, and she whispers as much to Paige.

“Or a booty call,” Paige whispers back. She giggles, and adds even more quietly, “A Bea-ty call!”

“Cover your mouth when you say things like that!” Christine hisses, grinning.

After dessert — a strange sort of pudding-thing, soaked in alcohol, which Christine decided was intended to knock them all out — Maria taps a spoon on the side of her glass, for silence, and a roomful of sleepy women give her what passes for their full attention.

“Where’s Pippa?” Paige asks Christine quietly, as Maria gives the room the run-down on Stef’s arrival at Dorley.

“No idea. Maybe she didn’t want the attention.” Christine smiles at the surprised faces that turn her way when Maria summarises exactly how Stef remained hidden for so long. “I know the feeling,” she adds through gritted teeth. Paige hooks fingers with her, under the table.

Mercifully, Maria moves on, efficiently covering the last month, editing out most of Stef’s difficulties — the nurse included — and Christine relaxes her shoulders again.

“Excuse me,” someone on the other side of the room says. It’s Rebecca, raising a hand.

“Yes?” Maria says.

“How will her treatment differ from ours?” Rebecca asks. Christine could swear she and Faye are holding hands under the table, like she is with Paige.

Maria shrugs. “It’s what you’d expect, really. She’s excused the resocialising stuff, unless she’s with the other residents. And she’ll know in advance when… certain procedures are scheduled.”

Christine’s about to whisper something sarcastic to Paige about how Maria is still euphemising the orchiectomy to a room of women who’ve all had one, when she notices how quiet most of the second years have gotten. Rebecca in particular has lost a little colour, and Faye’s whispering in her ear, rubbing her upper arm. So much fresher for them than it is for her, Christine remembers. Being reborn fucking hurts.

Maria gives them some time.

Indira suddenly snorts and covers her mouth with her hand. She makes conciliatory gestures towards Maria, who rolls her eyes and, looking to the second years to see if they’re ready to continue, starts covering the rules around interaction with Stef: don’t seek her out, unless you’re a sponsor or she’s visiting upstairs, which, yes, she will be allowed to do. At the second-year table, mild indignation replaces upset.

It’s not until Christine, Paige, Indira and Abby are decompressing in Indira’s room on the third floor, arranged in comfortable piles on the double-size couch, that Indira explains what caused her almost to inhale her alcoholic sponge pudding: they should all have known Stef was a white woman, she explains, the second she asked to see the manager.

 

2019 November 14
Thursday

Declan’s departure — confirmed by Pippa to have finally occurred overnight; there was a delay of several days before he could be ‘picked up’, a term which seemed deeply to disturb her — hasn’t reduced tension as much as Stefan hoped it might. Will’s been talking about Declan as if he’s dead, holding forth to the whole common room, and Stefan’s reassurances that none of the rest of them are likely to share his fate seem only to piss him off. Perhaps because Stefan only half-believes them himself. He can’t stop thinking about the false choice Beatrice offered him, the night she found him out, and how it’s the same choice facing the boys, though they don’t yet know it: to accept her and her methods, or to wash out.

In the face of that, what can Stefan do? Beatrice asked that he help the boys acclimate to the alterations, that he make himself complicit in every aspect of their changing bodies, and he’s realised that even without her he would have a moral obligation to do just that, else she might wash them out.

The most disturbing thing, the thing that’s been keeping him up at night since long before he accidentally came out to the whole building, is that there are dozens of girls up there in the Hall, and none of them have ever attempted to rush Beatrice, remove her means of control — whatever it is — by force, and take over. None of them feel strongly enough about what goes on down here, it seems. And it’s obvious why they don’t: they all survived it, and they think themselves better people because of it. Why would they deprive anyone the opportunity to change and grow, as they did?

True believers.

Ollie and Raph remain the most spooked. Since Declan left they’ve spent most of their time in their separate rooms, and in the common areas they huddle together as if afraid someone might attack them, a thought Stefan initially dismissed as ludicrous before remembering that the most recent punch had been thrown by him. His thumb still aches a little.

Will and Adam have paired off again. Will’s been volubly irritated by Aaron’s dismissal of his concerns and Stefan’s equivocation, and where Will goes, Adam goes; along with one of the TV-side sofas, dragged a few metres away and set up with its own small pile of bean bag chairs as a makeshift table.

So Stefan and Aaron are a twosome once more, sitting together at lunch and in the common room, and spending most evenings in Stefan’s bedroom. Aaron generally returns to his own room to sleep, but not always. (Stefan’s visited Aaron’s room just once; Aaron suggested he might not want to sit down anywhere unless he had access to a blacklight and a mop.) It’s meant that Stefan’s time with Pippa has been reduced largely to quick check-ins, which Stefan would consider more of a shame if she didn’t insist on gendering him female when they’re alone together, which causes his dysphoria to flare up; he’s been meaning to ask her to stop, but she’s seemed delicate of late, and he hasn’t had the heart. If she’s still fighting with Christine — or ignoring her, at least — then he might be all she’s got.

This afternoon he’s lounging on the sofa with Aaron, laughing at the awkward reality show on the TV — Pippa called the two of them ‘a pair of giggling schoolgirls’, and Stefan, after consideration, chose to take it as a compliment — when Monica, free of her responsibility for Declan and thus, according to Pippa, now first in line for all the most irritating sponsor jobs, blanks the screen with her phone and tells Stefan and the boys to shut up and pay attention.

A handful of other sponsors take up positions by the doors, as if anticipating an escape attempt. The last one into the room, escorting Martin, sits him down at one of the tables.

“What’s this?” Aaron whispers.

“No clue,” Stefan replies, shrugging and pulling himself up from his slouch.

Monica taps her phone again and, with the unmistakable ripple of a PowerPoint transition effect, the words What Is Feminism? appear on the television. Off to the side, in his castle of bean bag chairs, Will groans.

“Okay!” Monica calls, in a clear, room-filling voice that makes Stefan think of school assemblies. “Before we begin, I would like to address a few concerns about Declan. Yes: he has washed out. No: this does not mean he’s dead, or turned into burger meat, or sold into sexual slavery; yes, William, we heard your lurid little fantasies and this is the only time we will dignify them with a response. All this means, as far as you are concerned, is that he is no longer around, and that he has gone to a place that is considerably less pleasant than the basement of Dorley Hall. If you do not wish to share his fate, if you wish to continue your rehabilitation in comfort, I advise you to avoid assaulting us or your peers.”

“What about Stefan?” Raph shouts. “He hit him!”

“Stefan—” and Monica flashes her eyes momentarily to Stefan’s, as if to apologise for using the unambiguously gendered version of his name, “—has been instructed that any further outbursts will be punished to the full extent of our abilities.”

“That’s it? He floors Declan and gets off with a bitching out?”

“If you will recall,” Monica says, raising her voice again, “Declan attacked Stefan and Aaron first. We’re viewing Stefan’s actions as… pre-emptive self-defence. Keep your hands to yourself and you will have no problems with him, I am sure.”

“She means Declan started it, idiot,” Will says, in a surprising display of solidarity. Stefan tries to shoot him a smile but he’s too busy glaring at Raph.

Is Declan alive? Stefan has no idea whether to believe Monica or not. She’s not as senior as Maria, as far as he knows, but she’s older than many of the other sponsors, and necessarily more in the loop than mere graduates; she may well know things Pippa and Abby don’t. He also doesn’t know her at all well. Would she lie? Well, yes, she would; isn’t she lying right now, to everyone here, pretending that they have a route out of here that isn’t abhorrent to them?

Isn’t Stefan?

Shut up. Unhelpful thoughts.

“And with that over with…” Monica says, tapping her phone again: the words What Is Feminism? are now underlined. “What is feminism?” She gestures at the screen with each word.

Aaron puts his hand up. “Oh!” he says, full of enthusiasm. “I know this! Maria made me read all about it.”

“Go on,” Monica says warily.

“‘Feminism is the radical notion that women are purple.’”

“Very funny.”

“Thank you!”

“I’ll tase you if you’re that funny again, okay?”

“Uh,” Aaron says, “yes, ma’am.” He turns and adds to Stefan in stage-whisper, “I like her.”

Monica ignores him and returns to addressing the room. “Now,” she says, “we find that men like you—” her eyes flicker to Stefan again; he shakes his head minutely, trying to indicate his indifference, “—come to us with a, shall we say, somewhat inaccurate impression of feminism. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been misinformed by your peers or online or by some other source, the fact remains: you are wrong about feminism and you are wrong about feminists. What you will need to learn, in order to leave this place as better people, is not just why you are wrong, but how you came to be wrong. In this course — and, yes, this is a course, and from next week we will be assigning note sheets and homework — we will begin with your misconceptions, move on to the mechanisms that misinformed you and how to recognise common radicalisation techniques, and finally cover the histories of the movements that make up various feminisms and related social movements worldwide, up to the present day. Any questions?” Without looking, Stefan reaches out and pulls Aaron’s arm down from its raised position. “No? Good.” Monica taps her phone again and the TV moves on to a photograph of a woman with bright red hair and glasses — Stefan recognises her from any number of insulting memes — with the caption, You Have Been Lied To.

 

* * *

 

Aaron, citing feminism fatigue, retires to his room, presumably to wank away any lasting impression Monica’s extensive first session might otherwise make on him, so Stefan finds himself alone in the early evening for the first time since Declan washed out. Not a situation he enjoys: Aaron’s surprisingly sweet when he’s not performing for an audience, and without him Stefan’s responsibilities weigh heavy. He’s started imagining the boys — Aaron especially, but Will and Adam and even the others, occasionally — in three states: as the women Dorley wants to make of them, as free men after some hypothetical and almost definitely impossible escape, and as black-bruised corpses. He feels an undue influence over them, as if poised perpetually at the cusp of each of their futures, able to grasp their lives and twist them one way or the other at a whim.

He tells himself, as severely as he can, that his perception of power is an illusion, that the outcomes for these boys are practically predetermined, and the best or worst his presence can achieve is to help or hinder their acclimation.

He also pinches himself on his inner thigh. Pain helps, and marks there are easiest to hide, even from Aaron.

Stefan puts on some music. He’s discovered that movies are a terrible distraction, but music, with the headphones up as high as they’ll go — probably terrible for his hearing, but if he survives to be an old woman at least she’ll be alive to appreciate the tinnitus — chases away almost all thought. Helps him to concentrate on one thing at a time, to dissect himself without interruption.

Hours later, after letting the mix wander through the tastes he shares with whoever put the Dorley playlists together and those he doesn’t, he stops the music, drops the headphones onto the floor, and stretches, feeling the acid in his limbs boil away, feeling clear, feeling renewed. Because it’s all quite simple, in the end.

It’s one thing to know you have no choice but to help the people you’re trapped with adjust to their own mutilation, but another to accept it, and Stefan, who has spent years as a closeted and barely-out-to-himself trans woman, knows there is both grace and strength in survival, should you wish to claim it.

There’s only one real choice, offered to him as it is to them all: to live with it, or die because of it. He’s going to help everyone choose properly.

He yawns, cracks his jaw, and sits up, collecting himself. His phone screen is a forest of notifications: Christine and Pippa have both tried to get in touch. Pippa just checking in, Christine asking if she can visit. He shoots off quick replies to both, suggesting that Christine can come see him any time, as long as he’s alone and as long as she promises to try talking to Pippa again, because she really is lonely and he doesn’t have as much time for her as he wishes. Christine’s response is laden with considerably less sarcasm than usual; she acquiesces, and warns him to expect her and Paige in a few minutes.

Stefan’s heart skips up as he contemplates how little time he has to get ready, but he can’t bring himself to turn her down; there’s no escaping the fact that he’s grown accustomed to having Aaron around in the evenings, and without him the place feels almost comically large.

How much his horizons have shrunk, that such a small room could be so vast!

Quickly he checks himself over, and immediately abandons the idea of brushing his hair: it’s not yet long enough to put into even the world’s smallest ponytail, so it’ll just have to hang loose and unstyled. The rest of him looks about as presentable as he gets, lately — he’s very much enjoying the clearer and softer skin — so he takes the rest of the time to quickly buzz his jaw again with the electric razor. Every little helps.

Christine lets herself in — obviously — but she has the good grace to knock a couple of times first, so he can yell out that he’s presentable.

He almost doesn’t recognise her. She always shows up in his memory in the clothes she wore for their longest talk, back when he came out to her: nightgown, leggings, flannel. Tonight, she’s wearing a tennis skirt with a black and white repeating design around the hem, a black, long-sleeved top cut quite low and exposing collarbone and cleavage, and a pair of ankle boots. Her face is made up and her hair, a little longer than the way he remembers it, is artfully arranged.

“Wow,” he says, almost involuntarily, “you look great!”

Christine grimaces under the praise. “Thanks,” she says, “but this isn’t my idea.”

Another girl follows Christine through the door, embracing her as she comes and saying, “Don’t act like you don’t love it.” She’s tall, and her dark blonde hair is brushed carelessly out of her face in a way that would, on Stefan, look like he’d gotten caught in an updraught. She’s wearing a loose jacket, a simple white top, a denim skirt and tennis shoes, and her beauty absolutely short-circuits him. How was someone like her ever like him?

“Jesus Christ,” he says.

Christine snorts. “No,” she says, “Jesus was a boy.”

The other girl — Paige, presumably — grins, resting her canines on her lip, and kicks the door shut. “Hi, Stef,” she says. “I’m Paige. I’m with her.”

“Hi,” he says, still reeling.

It takes them a minute or so to get organised, given the limited seating in Stefan’s room. With Aaron or Pippa he’d share the bed, but despite talking to Christine at least once a week since the day he arrived he doesn’t feel close enough to her for that to be appropriate. He resolves the debate by bouncing out of bed and claiming the computer chair, positioning it so that with the wheels locked he can put his feet up on the bedside table without spinning out across the floor, and he makes get on with it gestures at Christine and Paige until they reluctantly take the bed.

“I feel bad about this,” Christine says, leaning against the wall with her legs sticking out. “We’re kicking you off your own bed.”

“It’s fine. I promise.”

“But—”

“Christine,” Paige says, “it was her decision.” She pokes Christine on the shoulder as she takes up position next to her, sitting close enough to take one of Christine’s hands in hers and entwine their fingers. “Respect it.”

“Fine,” Christine says, rolling her eyes and smiling. “You see what I have to put up with?” she adds to Stefan.

“You poor thing,” he says. Paige turns amber eyes on him, interested and kind, and he finds himself shrinking away from her.

“What’s up?” she says, instantly concerned.

Why didn’t he wear a hoodie? At least then he could hide more of himself. “Oh, uh, it’s nothing.” She continues to look at him. Fine. “It’s just… it’s weird, being, um, seen by more of you. When it was just Christine, when I first got here, that was one thing, but then it was all the boys, and Pippa and Maria and all the other sponsors, and then Abby, then Beatrice, and now you… I feel foolish. And stupid, claiming womanhood in front of all of you when I look and sound like this and you look and sound like you. And I worry, now that you know me like this, you won’t be able to see me as a woman later.”

“Is that what your pronoun thing is about?” Paige asks.

“Maybe? A bit?”

“Stef,” Christine says, “I don’t want to be mean, but you’re being silly. Look at who you’re talking to.”

“I am. That’s the problem.”

“So, remember where we came from! Do you think we, of all people, will ever have trouble thinking of someone as a woman, just because of how she started out?”

He wants to protest, to tell her off, to insist that she doesn’t know how it feels. But maybe she does? At some point Christine will have had to realign her perception not just of several of her friends’ genders, her girlfriend’s included, but her own, too. She’ll have had to reckon with the world in a whole new way, and feel her way to a new understanding of herself.

He thinks of his coining for Pippa and Christine and all the Dorley girls — ‘coercively reassigned female’ — a term that, mouthful though it is, still doesn’t adequately encompass even the little he knows about the process of going from someone like Aaron to someone like Paige. They’ve been here, possibly in this very bedroom, and now they’re women, out in the world. In broad strokes, there can be little about him they haven’t seen in each other before.

“No,” he admits, “probably not.”

“Does that mean we can call you a girl?” Paige asks. “I know I pronouned you earlier — habit, sorry — but I really won’t do it if you don’t want me to.”

“I mean, I felt weird when Pippa was doing it, but I think that might have been kind of silly. Running on autopilot, you know?” He exhales, counts a heartbeat, and breathes again, drums into himself with the new breath the idea that the women in front of him, casually beautiful though they are, have more in common with him than almost anyone else he’s ever met, and they’re not interested in judging him.

He groans. ‘Hate me,’ Christine had said, when he was still in the cell, before she even knew about him. He looks at her again and recognises in her unsteady gaze the same concerns she had a month ago, when she first revealed herself to him: her insistence that he ought to find her repulsive, because of her past, because of who she is; a notion as ridiculous now as it was then.

Either they’re both judging each other, or neither of them are.

“I’m an idiot,” he says.

“Oh?”

He blows out his cheeks. “Long story. The short version is, like I said, that I’m an idiot. You don’t need the details. Call me… call me whatever’s most comfortable for you.”

“Then… she/her?” Christine says, and when he nods she smiles broadly at him. The relief is similar to when he resolved Aaron’s concerns about washing out, except that this time the panicking idiot with the incorrect assumptions is him, and has been him for a whole month. It’s a delight to let them go.

“Thanks for coming down to see me,” he says, finding some warmth for his voice. “Really. I appreciate it.”

“You’re okay?” Paige says.

He laughs. “About this? Yeah. I think I actually am.”

It still takes another few minutes of slightly stilted conversation for them to hug, though. Christine jumps in first, kicking off her boots so they’re very nearly the same height, and whispers to him as they embrace, “Welcome to Dorley, Stef. And I don’t mean that the way Bea means it, all loaded with obligation and shit. I just mean, you’re our Sister now—” the capital letter seems to slip in via a slight emphasis, “—and that means we’re your family, and you’re ours. We’ll help you with anything you need. No matter how small.”

He’s only just managed to thank her when Paige joins them. She’s unable to mitigate her height, instead angling herself so she doesn’t shove Stefan’s face into her chest, and says, “Nice to finally meet you,” to him as they part.

“God,” Christine says, putting her feet up on Paige, who pouts and rearranges them for greater comfort, “it’s weird being back in these rooms. I did not have a good time in here.”

“She didn’t,” Paige says to Stefan, shaking her head. “She said the rudest things to poor Indira.”

“It’s still strange,” Stefan says, “thinking of you two, down here, with everything still to come. And then thinking about how it’s all still to come for them, too.” He waves a hand at the door.

“How are you feeling about that?” Christine says.

Stefan shrugs. “I hate it. I really hate it. But, short of an upstairs coup that takes Beatrice out of action — no sign of that, I take it?” Two heads shake in unison. “Damn. So, yeah, I know it’s going to happen. And I know what’s going to happen. So, do I help them deal with it or not? Morally, I don’t think I have a choice.”

“And it’s what Aunt Bea wants from you,” Paige says.

“She doesn’t have to do what Bea says,” Christine says. “You don’t,” she adds, looking back at Stefan. “Everyone knows about you now. I think if she tried to wash out an actual trans girl she really would get deposed. Besides, she likes you. I think she doesn’t know exactly what to do with you, and when she came down to see you that night she was still kind of flailing, but she likes you.”

“Really?” he says.

“In addition to your general novelty, you know who you are, Stef, and what you want, and you’re in a position to help the people in your intake. That’s a huge leg-up! That’s, like, a good thirty percent of what she tries to drum into us once we get into the second year and we’re finally mostly over the whole, ‘argh, my precious balls!’ thing.” She covers her groin with a protective hand.

“Actually, that’s something I want to know: how do I help them with that? I can’t see Aaron reacting well to the orchi.”

“He won’t,” Paige says. “None of us wanted it at the time, except for Vicky.”

“The best thing you can do,” Christine says, “is reassure him — all of them — that there’s still a future. You don’t need nuts to have a nice life.”

“Put that on a mug,” Paige says.

“They can all even still have kids. As for the immediate aftermath,” Christine adds, frowning, “everyone’s different. Some people shut down. Others become violent.”

“What did you do?” Stefan says. “If it’s okay to ask.”

“It’s fine. I shut down for a while. Paige and Vicky helped me through it. In a way, it was the start of me. A thing you need to understand, Stef, about boys, about cis boys—”

“Nominally cis boys,” Paige interjects.

“—is that losing their testicles is a violation so profound it can prompt some serious soul-searching. It’s a shock to the system like no other. For me, it made it easier to discard the person I used to be.”

“I’d already done that,” Paige says. Like Christine, she’s wearing a slight frown, expressed in the tiniest pinch between her eyebrows. “It didn’t mean I wanted the orchi, but I was prepared for it, when it came.”

“When she worked out what was going to be done to us,” Christine says, “long before the big snip, she went very quiet, and stayed that way for a while. And, yes, she was quiet before, unless we were alone together — me, her, and Vick — but she sort of retreated into her own brain. When she came back out, it was like she’d cleared the deck, got herself ready for anything.”

Unexpectedly, Paige plants a quick kiss on Christine’s temple, pulling away before a giggling Christine can respond, and holding her at bay as she says to Stefan, “I worked it all out, once we started developing our new secondary sex characteristics. The logical next steps. The likelihood of escape. Weighed next to how much I’d liked my life up to that point — not that much — it made sense to acquiesce. Quite a relief, actually. To stop lashing out because people didn’t understand me. To discard my armour, and forge the new tools I needed to live the new life I was being encouraged to accept.”

“Strength in survival,” Stefan says, nodding.

“Precisely,” Paige says. “And, besides, I’d finally found someone who understood me. I’d do anything to stay by her side.” She lets go of Christine, who overbalances for a second and then vengefully kisses Paige on the lips before returning to something like an ordinary sitting position. “It took coming down here for me to feel seen for the first time.” Christine loops an arm around her waist, and Paige continues, “I never used to think of other people as properly real. Perhaps because none of them treated me like I was real. Christine did. From our first week together.”

Stefan’s eyes flick to Christine. “I’m glad you have each other, then,” he says, squashing his jealousy, over their beauty as well as their connection, as firmly as he can.

“Me, too,” Christine says.

They talk for a while longer, mostly covering the practical side of transition. Stefan’s never taken the opportunity to talk, face-to-face, about what he can expect from transition with other trans women before — or whatever; close enough — and he can’t conceal his fascination when they reveal they’ve both had bottom surgery.

“Of course it feels like a part of me,” Christine says, as he leans in, rapt. “Because it is. There’s nothing there I didn’t already have, it’s just… rearranged.” She smiles wistfully. “When it was first healing up, when I was still getting used to it, I remember finding a patch of darker skin on my… uh, on me, and experiencing this sudden swelling of joy, of completeness, because I remembered exactly where that patch of skin used to be, and it was like, oh, yeah, it’s there now. A comforting bit of continuity. And, yes, for a while I got these sensations, like itching or whatever, and it seemed like they were coming from something I, um, didn’t have any more, but that didn’t take long to stop. Those feelings relocate quite quickly. Now it just feels like a part of me, like I’ve had it all along.”

“It’s warm and fuzzy,” Paige says, and grins her toothy grin.

Later, as Christine is scrolling through the unlocked movies and TV shows on the network, looking for something they can watch together that’s not on the approved list for the basement’s girls-to-be, and Paige is on her phone, asking one of the duty girls to send some popcorn down in the dumbwaiter, Aaron starts banging on Stefan’s door. He knows it’s Aaron without asking; it’s not that he has a special knock, but he’s the only one who doesn’t stop knocking until Stefan consents to open the door. He doesn’t open up this time, though, just waves the girls into silence and says, through the door, “Yes?”

“Uh,” Aaron says, muffled, “can I come in?”

“It’s late, Aaron,” Stefan says. “Can we talk about whatever it is in the morning?”

Behind him, Paige whispers, “Did you forget to put the other rooms in lockdown?”

Christine says, “I didn’t forget; it just seemed like overkill.”

“Oh, right,” Aaron says, “is ‘it’s late’ code for ‘I’m finally masturbating’? Good for you, Stef.”

Stefan’s glad he’s facing away from Christine and Paige, so they can’t see him blush.

“No!” Stefan says, louder than he intends. Christine laughs; Paige shushes her.

“Look, uh,” Aaron says, “I wanted to talk to you about that, actually.”

“What a surprise.”

“No, I mean, really. I’m serious. Are you, uh, can you, um—”

“Out with it, Aaron.”

“Can you get it up? Dick-wise, I mean.”

“I really haven’t tried.”

“Okay. Could you maybe try for me?”

“For you?”

“Yes. Because I can’t, is the thing. For a good few days, now. It’s not happening. Doesn’t matter what or, uh, who I think about. Doesn’t matter if I stroke it or rub it or fucking sing to it. It doesn’t do anything any more. I try all my best moves, and all my worst ones, too, and no matter what, the snake won’t come out of the basket.”

“In your metaphor, you’re a basket?”

“What? Maybe? Does it matter?”

“I’m just trying to fully understand the picture you’re painting, Aaron.”

“Fine. I get it. You’re tired. You’re being a bitch. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Sleep well, Stef.”

“You too.”

It’s just about possible to hear Aaron’s door opening again, and when it closes Stefan leans gratefully against the wall. On the bed, Christine is only barely holding in a serious attack of the giggles.

“You see what I have to put up with?” he says.

 

2019 November 22
Friday

It’s been a week since Aaron formally informed Stefan of his inability to maintain an erection, a momentous enough event that Aaron’s started dividing time into BF and AF (Before Floppy and After Floppy), but nothing much else has changed. Aaron’s been dwelling overmuch on his erectile difficulties — “I told Maria and she laughed and said it was just the surroundings getting to me, and yeah, okay, that’s definitely true, but I feel like my balls are like one of those baseball pitching machines, and it’s broken, and it just keeps racking up and racking up and it’s starting to shake with how overloaded it is and one of these days it’s going to explode and shower a small American town with baseballs.” — so to distract him they’ve been watching progressively sappier movies; they’ve seen The Princess Switch three times now, and have started to develop some esoteric theories about the genetics of it.

Will’s continued to agitate, and he’s started talking to Raph and Ollie, which Stefan would be more concerned about if he hadn’t also relented and started talking to him and Aaron again, too. It’d be nice to imagine them all getting along, or at least never attacking one another again, and Adam’s been happy to run interference on Will’s worst days.

From Saturday to Wednesday, almost everyone had a cold, which dampened Will’s revolutionary fervour somewhat and reduced the common room to a chorus of dull sniffles and slurps as they drank hot lemon and watched TV from under the blankets Maria eventually agreed to let them drag in from their bedrooms.

Aaron’s still spending most evenings in Stefan’s room until very late, but tonight he’s decided, the way he sometimes does, to get an early night. Stefan’s under no illusions about what he does — or tries to do — alone in his room, and prefers not to think about it if he can avoid it. He settles down instead for an evening of internet, catching up on what’s been happening in the outside world since he started living mostly underneath it, and he’s just started to wonder whether or not he should ask Pippa, Paige, Christine or Abby down — maybe see if he can finally meet the famous Indira — when Aaron’s repetitive knocking starts shaking his door.

Aaron’s got Stefan’s hoodie, the one he borrowed and never returned, wrapped tight around his body, and he’s twisting his hands around each other again. Stefan stands aside and the boy immediately enters and starts talking as soon as the door closes, pacing back and forth on the carpet.

“So, please stop me if this is too much information, because I’ve been made aware that generally I just, you know, say stuff, and that sometimes that stuff is a lot for people to really take in, and Maria especially has told me she experiences conversations with me the same way someone standing in a river experiences water, but, anyway, the thing is, I was undressing, getting ready for bed and, you know, maybe thinking about having another go at a cheeky wank, see if I can really blow the doors off, but before I could even try I took off my t-shirt and, so, the thing is, and I don’t care what you said about this before because my chest has definitely been feeling a little puffy lately, and, anyway, long story short, I touched my nipple and I came in my pants.” He stops pacing and faces Stefan, flushed and wide-eyed. “Thoughts?”