20. All the Little Pieces of Me

2019 December 2
Monday

Stef. Stefanie. Stephanie. Stephenie?

There aren’t that many variations on the name that she can find, and most of the ones that deviate do so mostly in the unique and creative abuse they can heap on the letter e. And she’s scrolled through the name list on the network, and hopped onto the web and clicked at random through baby naming websites; nothing. Besides, Stef just fits. She can’t imagine abandoning it. Adding to it, perhaps, but it’s not just that it’s a connection to Melissa, it’s a connection to her whole past, to her sister, her parents, to Russ, to the memories she made in the little house on a stump of a street on the edge of a city.

It’s barely five in the morning but she’s up before her alarm again, walking barefoot around the basement. Her room’s fine enough — and would still count as the nicest place she’s had to call her own in years if not for Maria’s recent gift of another bedroom, up on the first floor — but changing her scenery helps her think. The lights are low, with just one spotlight in every four on at one-third brightness, and it’s quiet.

She runs an idle finger along the wall of the main corridor, and turns off into the common room. She imagines whichever poor girl pulled the night shift watching her on a screen up in the security room and laughing to herself: Stef’s wandering the halls again.

Stef. Stefanie. Stephanie.

The name is hers, belongs to every version of her, so why would she change it? She never expected continuity to be something she desired, something she needed, and she winces as she remembers protesting to Christine that she wanted a clean break from ‘this guy’ — she’d jabbed a thumb aggressively into her chest, back there in the cell with her — before she could even consider adopting a new pronoun, and now, here she is, embracing her womanhood but still claiming the same old name.

You don’t have to deserve your gender. It’s just your gender.

Seven weeks to internalise such an incredibly simple lesson. No wonder Christine got stressed out with her, way back when! Idiot.

No. She shouldn’t torture herself, she decides, and then breaks out into giggles, imagining a deadpan Maria informing her that torture is explicitly not in her job description, that the responsibility of torture merits a considerable pay bump, and Stef’s basically an intern.

Stupid Dorley sense of humour. It’s wormed its way into her brain.

She leans on the back of one of the couches by the TV, pulls her phone out of a pocket and checks the time. 05:04. Perfect; the automated daily updates will have gone out. She swaps through the sponsor apps, checking for alerts (none) and news (little). Indira’s report on Aaron says he spent the night the same way he spent all Sunday: alone in his room, drifting listlessly from sleep to wakefulness and back again; putting on a series of movies and TV shows he clearly isn’t watching; eating the bare minimum; turning away from the cameras to cry.

It’s hard to stay away. But Indira’s asked her to and so she will, for a little while. At least he’s eating, and at least his plan to resist the treatments didn’t manifest on Saturday night; he accepted the week’s estradiol shot without fuss, in what Indira described in yesterday’s report as ‘death-glare silence’.

She scrolls around on her phone, twisting the fabric cord around her finger and bumping the frog and elephant against her wrist; already habit, after just one day. Pippa got her a phone case and a braided cord to loop through it, and now Stef can take her little keepsakes wherever she takes her phone, so long as she’s careful to hide the case and its companions from the boys. Technically it’s a bit of a risk leaving the case on while out here, in the common room, but who else is going to go for a wander at five in the morning? Who else is going to come out of their room on their own at all, except Martin?

Still. Best not to tarry. Stef kicks off from the couch she’s been leaning on and heads back to the bedrooms, pausing in the main doorway and looking down the line.

Aaron’s door. One down from hers, on the other side. And she has to pass it on the way to her room, so she can’t be blamed for stopping to listen for a moment.

Steady breathing, just about audible. He’s sleeping, good; the confirmation silences the violent thought that’s been coming to her every so often since he rejected her: that he might hurt himself badly enough and quickly enough that no-one could save him. She keeps listening to the breaths: in and out, in and out, with a grumble on the inhalation that suggests he’s sleeping on his back.

She could have checked on the cameras — and she does, several times a day — but this is more real.

Her fingers trace patterns on the door. Maria and the sponsors gave her a lot of trust when they opened up her access. Her thumb opens almost every lock between Aaron and freedom, and it probably wouldn’t take too much to get through the kitchen doors, especially if they worked together. She could just… take him. And, at this time in the morning, there’s probably only the one night-shift girl in the security room, sleepy and slow, and Stef has a taser. They could be out the front door before anyone else caught on.

A list of names and dates on a screen.

He needs to change. Forget the other consequences — Dorley exposed, Pippa and Christine and the rest of them taken away, Stef left once again at the languid mercy of the NHS — Aaron would go back to being the person he was before all this. The piece of shit she remembers from her first day here, who made jokes about the women Raph hurt and the man Martin killed.

And he rejected her. Let’s not forget that.

She checks to make sure he’s still breathing like he’s asleep — he is — and forces herself to walk away, sparing a sheepish glance at the camera as she does so. The sponsors all seem to know how she feels, anyway.

Back in her room, she slumps onto her bed, lies on her back, scrolls around on her phone. Another day to fill. Without Aaron, she’s been at a loose end. Adam’s been leaving his room in Edy’s company only, and does nothing but stare at the television, eat whatever’s put in front of him and ignore all attempts at conversation. And Martin? She spent an hour Sunday morning going over the pamphlets with him, discussing the mechanics of transition and watching him absorb the information with the dispassionate acceptance of someone looking over a utility bill that’s come to the exact amount expected. It’s almost as if the man isn’t there when she talks to him; he’ll answer questions, even hold a coherent conversation, but that’s about it. If somehow she managed to stab him somewhere sensitive with a plastic fork, he’d probably do nothing more than coldly examine weapon and wound, and perhaps return the fork. It’s like he’s decided to make a head start on becoming a new person by dissolving the old one.

So she spent much of Sunday upstairs, in her new room. It’s a vast improvement on the one she came back downstairs to sleep in, that’s for sure: it’s on the corner, which explains its funny shape and why it’s large enough to have its own ensuite, and looks out both onto the woods and the edge of campus. Pippa told her the wardrobe and drawers have been stocked with clothes in roughly her size, but Stef wasn’t brave enough yesterday to check, fearing for the fragility of her newly embraced womanhood.

After lunch, Christine gave Stef her first voice training lesson. “I’m the best in my year,” she’d said, standing up straight and bullying Stef until she did so, too, and favouring her with a song in near-perfect soprano.

“Were you a choir boy?” Stef had asked, before the inappropriateness of the question occurred to her, but Christine wasn’t offended, instead flicking him lightly in the shoulder and impishly shaking her head.

“We weren’t religious, and I think if I’d set foot in a church I’d have melted like the witch from The Wizard of Oz. I’ve just had a lot of practice.” She smirked at him. “Which I’m going to have a lot of fun inflicting on you. Now, chin up! Breathe in; in the chest, not the shoulders! And give me an Aaaaah.”

Stef gave her an awful lot of Aaaaahs.

When they broke for dinner — and to make time for Christine’s obvious pining for Paige — she praised Stef’s progress. “You’re speaking from the right place,” she said, “most of the time. And your projection isn’t bad! So practise every day, up here. It’s soundproofed! All the rooms on first are, or Aunt Bea would have gone crazy by now. Just make sure you slip back into your boy voice when you go back downstairs or you’ll give the guys a hell of a shock. You’ll be able to use them both side by side for now, as long as you keep up the practice, but you’ll probably only see a major pitch lift when you abandon your old voice for good.”

“So I won’t be able to sound like a girl?”

“Of course you will! Lots of women have deeper voices, and if you don’t want to lift your pitch, that’s fine, too; you’re really not that much lower than Pippa. I’m just saying, you won’t be able to do this—” and she slipped briefly into a descant do-re-mi, “—until you stop pretending to be a boy altogether. Which, yes, I know, is horrible, but it was you who wanted to stay down there.”

“Sometimes,” she’d said, “I’m an idiot.”

“Oh! You noticed!”

Stef chased her out of the room for that.

Stephanie.

She likes that one. Likes the ph. More different from her old name than Stefanie. Maybe she’ll try it out for a bit, see how it fits. Like Maria said, her first choice doesn’t have to be her only choice.

The quiet click of her bedroom door startles her, but only enough that she drops her phone on her chest and winces; every time she thinks her nipples have become as sensitive as they’re going to get, they find more spare nerve endings lying around. She sits all the way up and greets her fake sponsor with a smile.

“Hi,” Pippa whispers, shutting the door and tiptoeing into the middle of the room. “Maria wants you at the briefing this morning, but it’s not for a while and I woke up early and I was kinda bored and I thought maybe we could break the seal on your new wardrobe. Get you in something other than a hoodie for a change. You don’t have to, though,” she adds, frowning. “It’s just a suggestion. I’d never want to push you. Actually, I really shouldn’t push you. I was reading that you need to let trans girls take things at their own—”

“Pip,” Stef says, interrupting her before she builds up too much steam, “it’s fine. It’s a good idea, and I could do with a shower, anyway.”

They don’t talk again until they’re out of the basement and ascending. Stef, out of curiosity, pokes her head into the security room as they pass but the woman in there is someone she doesn’t really know; the woman smiles and waves, anyway, looking exactly as bored and tired as Stef would expect from someone on the night shift. Nell, she thinks she’s called. Nell returns to her ebook and Stef and Pippa continue on up, taking the back stairs to the first floor and Stef’s other, nicer, more above-ground bedroom.

When she’s done showering she finds Pippa arranging a selection of outfits on the bed.

“I was thinking modest, but flattering,” Pippa explains, and starts explaining her logic for each choice. Stef, as she does so, can’t help but notice the full set of underwear draped over the back of the chair: sporty, light grey, and with some padding in the bra. That’s fine; it’s not like she has much to fill it out with, otherwise.

She’d always thought her first time wearing appropriate underwear would be revelatory somehow, but the bra and knickers slip on easily, fit comfortably, and are thoroughly unexciting. Pippa’s visibly pleased with how she looks in them, though, which prompts a blush from Stef she can’t control.

“What’s up?” Pippa says, when Stef looks away.

“Um,” Stef says, flapping a hand, unable to find the words she needs.

“If we’re going too fast, we can stop.”

“It’s not that. It’s, um…” She closes her eyes, places her hands on her belly, and runs through Christine’s breathing exercises. Pippa, bless her, gives her the time. Once calmed, Stef opens her eyes, meets Pippa’s gaze, and does her best to explain. “When you looked at me… it felt different. Not bad different. Or weird different. I felt… warm? Like, okay, so you’ve obviously seen me naked, right?”

“Yeah,” Pippa says darkly.

“Not your fault!” Stef says quickly. “Sponsor crap! But you’ve seen me without anything on. And you’ve seen me with all the jogging crap we have downstairs on. But this is the first time you’ve seen me in, well, girls’ clothes. And I know it’s just a bra and stuff and it’s like the simplest thing ever but, Pippa, they’re really comfortable, and when you looked at me it was like I knew you were looking at me, the me I want to be when I’m looked at, and—”

Pippa collides with her, hugs her tight, and when Stef hugs her back, Pippa sniffs, loud and liquid, and says, “I love this for you, Stef.”

They separate, so Pippa can blow her nose, which she does enviably delicately, and then it’s back to work. Between them they choose a loose blue dress — “It’s perfect for you, Stef: it’s right opposite your hair on the colour wheel!” — with a skirt just past the knee and a wide belt in matching colours, to give her developing waist a bit of help. Pippa suggests leggings underneath, for confidence and to keep out the cold, and brushes Stef’s hair, teasing the locks between her fingers and occasionally blasting it with spray, while Stef fiddles with the belt, finding a comfortable compromise between borrowing a figure from it and having it pinch the tops of her hips.

She can’t resist a little spin.

Pippa giggles and bounces over for another hug. “Stef, you look wonderful!” She turns Stef to face the mirror, the one she’s been avoiding since she got up here, and Stef takes in her worst-case scenario: sharing a reflection with Pippa, one of the most beautiful women she’s ever met.

Actually: not awful! Sure, there’s fuzz she missed when she buzzed her face, and her hair is still a lot shorter than she’d like, and she still looks mostly the way she did when she first got to Dorley, but mostly isn’t entirely, and with a dress and a positive attitude she isn’t the disgusting troglodyte she feared she might be.

The girl in the mirror is still there.

Shyly she turns back to Pippa. “Um,” she says, intensely aware of the blush once again flowering on her cheeks, “can you call me Stephanie?”

“I’d be delighted!” Pippa says, her excitement obvious and infectious. “Stephanie.”

Stef turns back to the mirror and confirms the blush has more or less taken over her face. “I just want to try it,” she says quietly.

“You can try it all you want, Stephanie,” Pippa says. “You have so much time to find yourself.”

The slight frown that pricks at Pippa’s eyebrows is suddenly all Stef can think about, and she breaks out of Pippa’s grip and drops hard onto the end of the bed, avoiding the rejected outfits, tucking her legs under herself. Making herself small. “I’m sorry,” she says.

Pippa’s frown deepens. “I don’t understand. What are you apologising for?”

A heavy breath controls her burgeoning shame. “It’s like you said. I have all this time. I have it. This place, Dorley, it was always this big gift-wrapped present that I just needed to fake being a boy a little while longer to get, but now…” Another deep breath. The buds of her breasts move inside the bra; the cushioning feels good. “Shit, even this!” She tugs at the strap of her bra, pulling it out from under the neckline of her dress. “Free clothes, free underwear, and everyone’s falling over themselves to be nice to me!” She risks a look at Pippa; she’s still confused. “I’ve been here seven weeks. And I can’t stop thinking about you at seven weeks. Or Christine, or Paige, or Indira, or Tabby… Didn’t you say your sponsor basically abused you—?”

“Stef!” Pippa says sharply, and stands right in front, makes herself impossible to ignore. “Stephanie. You’re the only one making that comparison, I promise. I don’t resent you for getting what you need from this place; no-one does.”

“That’s not what I mean! They hurt you, Pip. And here I am, beneficiary of all the things they hurt you with—”

“Stephanie,” Pippa says, emphasising the final vowel. She squats down on her knees and places her hands in Stef’s lap. “You need to stop thinking of it that way. I mean,” she adds, smiling, “if you’re worried about me, just remember, I was expecting to spend the whole year with someone like Raph or Ollie. You’re the biggest and best surprise I ever had.”

“But—”

“No buts! Never forget: I was brought here because I needed help. And you came here because you needed help. And this place? It helped me. It’s helping you. Just because the medicine stung a little when it went down for me doesn’t mean I regret being brought here.”

“‘Stung a little’?” Stef says. “I saw Declan, after three strikes.”

“They never did that to me. Or Christine, or Paige, or basically anyone who’s still here. That was… drastic measures.” She reaches up for Stef’s cheek, strokes the downy hairs below her eyes. “Stephanie. You need this. I needed this—” she nods down at herself, “—and I’ll never stop being glad I got it. We all feel the same, and we’re all glad to see you getting what you need. Okay?”

Stef nods slowly. “Okay. Sorry. I just… I like you a lot, and I hate to think of you in pain. You’re like, um…” She doesn’t want to say it. It’s embarrassing.

“I’m like the older sister you never had?” Pippa guesses. Stef nods. “And that’s how it should be. And don’t worry about my old self, and what had to happen to make him into me. He’s still here.” She taps her heart. “At least, the parts of him worth keeping are. And he’s happy — I’m happy — to be here, right now, with you.”

It’s foolish, always thinking about who the girls around her used to be, when they themselves would rather she see them as they are. When they’ve repeatedly asked her to do so! Stef nods again, and together they rise and embrace, and she concentrates on Pippa, the woman in her arms, and nothing else. There’s a moment’s idiot guilt, and then it’s gone, and Stef luxuriates in the warmth of her sister.

“Better?” Pippa says, pulling away.

“Yeah.”

“Then how about trying some makeup?”

Without waiting for an answer, Pippa grabs her wrist and drags her over to the vanity. Stef lets herself be sat down, but fidgets. “You don’t think I’ll look silly?”

“Why?” Pippa asks. “Are you saying I suck at this?”

Stef snorts. Pippa’s eye makeup was the first thing she ever noticed about her. “No,” she says patiently, “I think I’m very good at looking silly.”

“But you’re already so pretty, Stephanie,” Pippa says, dragging a stool over and sitting down next to her. “And you’re only going to get prettier.”

She avoids her face in the mirror. “I look so masculine, though. Less than I did, I guess, enough for me to see—”

“Stephanie,” Pippa says severely, threatening Stef with — Stef squints at the label — a tube of primer.

“Yes?”

“You’re a pretty girl.” She uncaps the primer. “Deal with it.”

“I just can’t see it. I can see a girl, if I try, but a pretty one? No.”

“Well then,” Pippa says, smearing clear gel onto her fingertips, “maybe we need to get you some glasses, pretty girl.”

 

* * *

 

She’s never wanted to see the place before. Actively avoided it, despite how large it looms in Vicky’s history. Because it’s Vicky’s place. She doesn’t know what happened to her while she lived here, has never wanted to push for that knowledge, and Vicky’s never offered it. All she knows is that Dorley Hall is part of Vicky’s past, part of the person she was before they met, part of how she got hurt. Part of what makes the love of Lorna’s life whimper in the dark.

It’s also part of the lies. The lies which keep unravelling, splitting off into more lies as they come apart, tearing at the seams, slowly revealing… something. Lorna doesn’t know what it is yet, but the shape of it is becoming clear. Everything she can actually verify about Vicky’s life is from the time after she left Dorley Hall, with the odd snippet from when she still lived there. As for her life before the Hall…

Vicky’s on file at the school in Thelingford, but the teacher Lorna spoke to, slipping her name in among a dozen others, making suggestions for a reunion, didn’t remember her. Vicky’s parents, both only children, died together in an accident. The only childhood friend who responded to Lorna’s contact on Facebook did so with a terse message about some falling-out that soured their relationship for life, and signed off with a request to have her information deleted from Lorna’s phone.

And then there’s the time Vicky spent travelling, explained as a need to get away after the death of her parents. Vicky has stories of couch-surfing around Australia, working on her tan and taking cash jobs in bars, but not a single friend from that time has ever got in touch. And the idea of Vicky, who isn’t exactly an introvert but who is practically the definition of careful, sensible and diligent, throwing everything away to bum around a country half a world away has never quite fit.

Finally, Dorley Hall. Where everything converges. The place where she met her closest friends — where she met all the friends she has that she didn’t meet through Lorna — and yet the place she doesn’t like to talk about.

It’s also the place Vicky goes back to a lot, despite claiming to hate it. To see her friends, to bum free food off the kitchen, and to get Lorna’s estradiol from some girl who also likes her secrecy. And that girl is Lorna’s natural next target. Sure, she doesn’t know her name, but she does know another girl who still lives in Dorley Hall, who is best friends with Vicky, and who recently has acquired a mysterious trans woman friend who probably would quite like some estradiol of her own…

Lorna works hard to be nice to Christine. It’s not that the girl is unlikeable — quite the opposite — but it’s difficult not to feel jealous. Christine’s pretty, she’s sweet, and she’s never given Lorna the look Victoria sometimes gives her, like she feels sorry for her. Like she wants to wrap her in cotton and protect her from the world; which, yes, very kind, but Lorna doesn’t want pity. Besides, Christine was there for some of the hardest parts of Vicky’s life. Something to be jealous of, sure, but it also makes Christine a keeper of secrets. Secrets Lorna needs.

It’s bright and clear but cold, and it’s early enough that the sun is barely grazing the university grounds. Dorley Hall skulks in the half-light, a brick monstrosity barely restrained by vines that climb from basement to rooftop, as if the earth itself is trying to drag it under. Vicky said it used to be a private hospital, the sort of place you got sent if you were an aristocratic woman who happened to be inappropriately mad or inconveniently self-interested, and it shows. Lorna, approaching in its shadow, feels as if it might swallow her.

But the entryway is brightly lit, and when she pushes through the double doors into the hall, the wall immediately to her left hosts a battered corkboard covered in the usual paper paraphernalia of dorm life: party fliers, instructions for residents on how to dispose of their garbage, emergency procedures, ads for voice lessons — singing lessons, she assumes — and other such mundanities. Pleasingly ordinary. The locked kitchen doors are unusual, though, as is the fingerprint reader next to the mechanism. Perhaps, out here on the edge of campus, they’ve found they need to be more security-conscious than they were back in the famously always-open Windsor Tower, Lorna’s home for her first year at Saints.

She peers into the windows set into the kitchen doors. At the large table that dominates the room, a Black girl is in conversation with a South Asian girl and a plate of pastries. The Black girl looks irritated and the other girl seems sympathetic. Lorna doesn’t want to interrupt, but after a minute it becomes clear that the discussion is still far from a natural break, so she raps on the window and gives an embarrassed wave.

It’s the Black girl who gets up. She lets Lorna in with a thumb to a reader on the other side of the door.

Biometrics inside as well as out?

“Hi,” the girl says. Lorna revises her first impression: she’s older than she thought; late twenties, at least. Grad student? She looks tired and annoyed, which Lorna takes as evidence for her conclusion.

“Hi,” Lorna says, finally assembling her wits a full second after they would have been useful. “I’m Lorna. Vicky’s girlfriend?”

“Hi!” the South Asian girl calls, leaping up from her chair and near-running over to her, only to stop and linger, chastened, about a metre away from Lorna’s confused frown. “Sorry. We all know her, is all. We’ve heard a lot about you. I’m Indira; this is Tabitha.”

“Tabby.” Tabby extends a hand. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

Lorna takes her hand, noting a slight stress on ‘finally’. Have they all been bugging Vicky to bring her over? Vick’s never mentioned it. “Hi,” she says again, uselessly, and shakes for too long.

This is so awkward.

Over Tabby’s shoulder — the girl is tall but Lorna’s taller — she can see another set of double doors, propped open, that lead to a large dining hall and a closed, heavy-looking metal door inset in a concrete arch. She only just has the chance to read the sign — it says Maintenance and must, she decides, be a materials-cheap late addition, judging by the extreme contrast to the otherwise well-maintained and consistent aesthetic; she imagines the custodians of this place apoplectic before what looks uncomfortably like a portal to hell, smashed through the wall of their immaculate dining hall, and berating some poor contractor — before Tabby’s head obscures her view.

“Victoria’s not here,” Tabby says, smiling to make it sound less dismissive. “Do you need to leave a message with us, or—?”

“I know!” Lorna says, too quickly. She’s put her finger on the source of her nerves, and it’s not just that she’s in Dorley Hall: if Vicky’s talked to these people about her, they might know. And while Lorna’s not exactly stealth, here on campus — impossible to be, when she stands on chairs at rallies with a dozen phone cameras pointed at her — she also likes her perception to be at least somewhat under her control. Out and proud among her peers; play-acting a boring little cis girl when she goes to buy her oat milk. Especially when, as the paranoid voice in her head — the one she hates but nonetheless credits with helping her survive those months when just going to the shops had been a terrifying and almost superhuman exercise of will — insists, she worries she’s far more clocky than she wants to be.

FFS in less than three months. People love to tell her she’s beautiful, that she doesn’t need it, and she’s long used to ignoring them. If you haven’t had someone come up to you in the street, block your path, stare at you for twenty-plus seconds and then shout as loud as they can, because they want to see if they can make you jump and they want to hear the noise you make when you do, then you don’t get to have an opinion. Appearance is safety, and right now, she doesn’t feel safe.

She chews the inside of her cheek. She’s being stupid. This place isn’t dangerous; these girls aren’t her enemies. And this is just a perfectly normal building filled with perfectly normal people. That Vicky sometimes whispers its name in her sleep is coincidence and nothing more.

“I’m actually looking for Christine,” she says. “I would have texted her, but I cracked my phone and it’s being repaired.” Quality lie, Lorna.

“Oh!” Indira says. “She’s, um, probably here. I can call her, if you’d like?” Lorna nods, and Indira bustles back over to the table and makes the call. “Hey, sis,” she says into her phone. ‘Sis’? “You’re home, right? Well, you’ll never guess who’s here, in the kitchen, asking for you! No. No. No! No— Teenie, I said you’d never guess! Look, just— no, Christine, please stop being clever. Yes, you’re very funny. It’s Lorna, Teenie. She’s here!” Indira’s eyes meet Lorna’s for a moment. “Which is exciting. I’ve wanted to meet her for so long. Yes, she is very pretty.” Those eyes roll now, and she points at her phone in exasperation, turning her pointing hand into one miming a voice that will not, for the love of God, shut up. “I was thinking,” she says, interrupting whatever Christine’s saying, “you could have her up there? In your kitchen? There’s only Tabby and me down here, and we both have things to do. Yes, ‘things’. What did I tell you about being funny? Yes, I’ll send her up. Yes, unlock them. I don’t know, three minutes? If you’re not wearing clothes, it’s time to find some, unless you want to form a polycule with her and Victoria. Hey! I’m allowed to be funny, too, you know! Yes. Yes. Love you. And be careful, sweetheart.”

“All arranged?” Tabby says. She’s been leaning on the table, with an eye on Lorna, tapping her fingers on her folded arms, a human avatar for the tension Lorna feels in the room. As if visitors are a bad thing, as if her arrival is cause for alarm.

Don’t be stupid, Lorna tells herself. She’s had a difficult weekend, bad sleep, and she feels like she doesn’t know who her girlfriend even is any more. Any one of those could make her paranoid; all three together are making her feel fifteen again, like when her mum still lived with them, and she’s watching for danger behind every door.

“All done!” Indira says, beaming. She drops her phone into a bag on the table and rushes back over to Lorna, grasping her hand and shaking before Lorna really knows what’s happening, all her prior reticence gone. “I wish we had more time to spend with you, Lorna. You must visit again!”

“Um, I will.”

“Just go up the front stairs,” Tabby says, waving a hand at Indira, who releases Lorna and steps back, still smiling, “until you get to the second floor.”

“Christine’ll meet you there,” Indira says.

“Thanks, Indira, Tabby,” Lorna says, and looks at them for a moment longer, making sure to fix their faces in her memory alongside their names. She always makes an effort with that; it’s always seemed important. And she can ask Christine their pronouns later.

Tabby buzzes the doors open for her and smiles again, and Indira wiggles her fingers in farewell.

Once she’s backed out of the kitchen and gotten her bearings, she hears Tabby, muffled by the closing doors, say something like, “What was that?”

“What was what?” Indira says.

“You called her ‘sis’! Did you panic?”

“It’s my day off. You can’t expect me to…”

And that’s all Lorna gets, as the curve of the stairs silences what remains of their voices.

 

* * *

 

The security room’s laid out like the kitchen, which it sits directly under. Where the AGA and the food cupboards would be is a large, custom-fitted security desk, of the sort Stef’s seen in a hundred movies: four large screens, each divided into multiple camera views, a control console for the screens and the cameras, and an open space which tends to fill up with laptops and phones. And where the kitchen table would be there’s a pair of tables, like the ones in the common area, only with padded seats. There’s also another table, added after the room was professionally fitted, which looks like it came from Ikea and which pushes up against a pair of long couches. It’s the one Stef’s most often seen sponsors at, with a couple of laptops in front of them and, inevitably, a plate of snacks. No-one pulling a long shift on monitoring duty wants to sit in the chairs by the security screens when there’s a sofa on which to lounge.

She and Pippa are early.

“Oh, thank God,” Nell says, looking up from her ebook. Stef wonders if the dark circles under her eyes have gotten deeper since she last saw her. “Can I go now?”

“Go!” Pippa says, shooing her. “We’ll watch the screens until everyone else gets here.”

“You’re a doll, Pippa.” Nell pushes herself up, slowly and painfully, and stretches with audible cracks. “Hi, Stef. That’s your name, right? I’m kind of behind on events.”

“Hi,” Stef says, “and it’s Stephanie right now? I’m, um, trying it out.”

“Stephanie, huh? Suits you. I’m Nell. I’m on shit duty. Anyway.” She puts her e-reader in her bag and scrapes her hand along the edge of the table, dropping laptop, pens and notepad in behind it. “Toodles, kids.”

“She seems nice,” Stef says, as Pippa slides into the end spot on the couch.

“She’s not,” Pippa says, and sighs at Stef’s bemused expression. “She’s working on it. Shadowing the rest of us, one at a time, and taking more graveyard shifts than anyone else.”

Stef sits down next to her and leans back into the soft cushion. “How come?”

“Because she wasn’t nice. Bad sponsoring technique.”

“Oh, not like your soft touch, then?”

“No, not like— Are you making fun of me?”

Stef shrugs. “A little.”

Pippa reaches down beside the couch and pulls out a laptop, which has the battered and unloved look of an institutional device. It boots slowly, and she makes coffee for both of them with the pod machine in the corner while they wait.

“How are you doing?” she asks, gesturing backwards with her head at the screens behind her.

Stef, who hasn’t been able to look away from the two cameras monitoring Aaron, groans. “Am I that obvious?”

“A little,” Pippa says.

“God,” Stef says, as Pippa drops back down onto the couch and hands her a coffee in a plain red mug, “I feel stupid.”

“Why?”

“He rejected me.”

Stef’s got a hand on the table, fingers tapping on the surface, and Pippa covers it, silencing her. She squeezes. “I’ve seen him with you,” she says. “He doesn’t know what he feels. About you. About anything. He’s a big ugly ball of repressed everything, and your confession… it pulled on a string. It was like that for a lot of us.”

“You?”

“Me,” Pippa says firmly. “My trigger was different — and who I was when I came here was very different from him — but I recognise a lot of his behaviour. He’s facing up to the knowledge that he’s going to leave here an entirely new person, and on top of that, he’s got you: a friend, who wants more. I’d bet a hundred quid he’s never had someone express that kind of interest before. He doesn’t know how to feel about it. He doesn’t even know how to feel.” She coughs delicately. “Masculinity, for boys like him — boys like I used to be — is an iron maiden. It’s a shell that protects you, but it hurts you as well, and when you’re hurting that much, vulnerability — genuine emotion — is a liability. We can tear away the armour and give him room to breathe, but his wounds have to heal, first.”

“What can I do?”

“Wait for him to come back to you. Be an example for him until he does. And don’t push. Indira’s a great sponsor, and so’s Maria. They’ll know when he needs a nudge, and when he needs to be left alone. But—” Pippa raises a warning finger, “—you should know, things are going to get worse for him before they get better, and you’re going to be down there with it. It gets messy down there when the boys start really changing; we’re still mostly in the warm-up phase.”

“I can deal with it,” Stef says.

“Okay. Just, maybe, practise calling him her?”

“Not until he asks me to.”

“Maybe—” Pippa starts, and then zippers her mouth and nods at the door. Stef turns to see Edy and Maria walk in, slowly and carefully, with Edy holding Maria’s arm and Maria’s face set with an expression of amused tolerance, as if letting her girlfriend look after her is equivalent to granting the greatest of favours. Still, when she sits down next to Stef, she seems relieved to get off her feet.

“Hi,” Stef says.

Maria sits forward, folds her arms on the table and rests her head on them, half-closing her eyes until Edy darts over to the console and lowers the lights. “Hi, Stef,” she says.

“Stephanie,” Pippa says.

“I’m trying it out,” Stef says.

Maria smiles broadly. “Hi, Stephanie. How are you doing?”

“Good. And, um, thanks for the advice. It really helped.”

“Any time,” she whispers.

It’s impossible not to notice how tired she looks. “Can I get you anything?”

Maria smiles, half-visible through the crook of her arm. “You can take the second years off my hands, if you like. I agreed to take some of the admin responsibility for them while I’m spending so much time bedbound, and Mia’s begging me to let her stream.”

“Stream?” Pippa says. “Stream what?”

“I have no idea what game it is,” Maria says, grimacing. “All I know is, she bugs the other girls to play it with her on the LAN here, and wants to take her skills online. But I’ve told her a thousand times: no streaming until you stop making jokes about your huge hog.”

Edy sits down next to her, smooths down her hair and drapes a flannel over her head, for which Maria thanks her. Stef looks away as Maria turns to Edy, not wanting to intrude on their intimacy.

The other sponsors start filing in. Jane waves at her, Indira squeezes in next to Edy and leans around her to wiggle her fingers at Stef, and Monica gives her a smile. Pamela pulls a stool out from under the table and sits down on it with the aura of a woman who will only get back up if ordered to, loudly. The last one in is Tabby, wheeling in an office chair from the storeroom across the hall and collapsing dramatically into it with an exaggerated sigh and a cup of coffee she only just doesn’t spill. She nods at Indira, who nods back and waves her phone, which is open to a set of cameras elsewhere in the building. Some private problem, Stef assumes.

Tabby’s almost blocking the entrance, and even Stef, who doesn’t know her that well, can tell she’s not having the best morning. Everyone in the room is looking at her now, with the exception of Indira, who’s watching the feed on her phone, and into the expectant silence Tabby says, “No-one’s going to ask why I’m pissed off?”

“I think we’re all just waiting with bated breath,” Maria says, from underneath her flannel.

“Didn’t you come in, like, super late last night?” Jane says.

“She had a da-ate,” Monica sings.

“Spill,” Edy says. She’s been setting up laptops in front of her and Maria, with security feeds on one and action points on the other.

“Men fucking suck,” Tabby says.

“Ah. One of those kinds of dates.”

“I thought it was going well with Barry,” Maria says, struggling more upright and leaning on her hands. “What did he do?” Edy removes the flannel from her head before it falls off.

“It was going great,” Tabby says. “And, well, he hasn’t really done anything. Shit. Sorry. She hasn’t done anything.”

Monica snorts into her coffee.

“Ah,” Edy says.

“Not again, surely?” Jane says.

“Again,” Tabby says darkly.

“She told you last night?” Maria asks.

“Yeah. She invited me to dinner, she cooked, it was going to be a whole special evening and I thought it might be something else as well. And then she starts with the whole, ‘Tab, there’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time…’ and I just fucking knew. I had to sit through the whole thing and smile and hug her. And that used up all my supportive girlfriend energy, so today I’m just going to be bitter and alone.”

“You should put her in touch with your last boyfriend,” Edy says.

Tabby laughs. “They already know each other! They had a girls’ night last week! Just to see what it was like!”

“Does she know you’re—?”

“Straight? Yeah. I gave her the usual — God, how stupid is it that I have a ‘usual’ for this? — and we’re going to be friends.” She groans. “I’m taking her shopping next week with Belinda and Kelly. It’ll be like a reunion! All Tabby’s ex-boyfriends turned ex-girlfriends, together again!”

Jane snorts. “You’ll have fun. You know you will.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s nice helping trans girls find themselves. But why do they have to keep finding themselves inside my boyfriends?”

Harmony, arriving late, wordlessly reaches into the paper bag she’s carrying and hands Tabby a croissant, which she attacks with irritated fervour.

“Did she tell you yet?”

“Yes,” several people say.

She lays a caring hand on Tabby’s shoulder. “I do know someone,” she says, “if you’re looking to get back on the market.”

“No,” Tabby says. “Like I said, men suck.”

“Tab,” Jane says, “it might be time to accept that you’re just gay. Join the winning team.”

“To be fair,” Edy says, “none of her boyfriends have actually been men.”

“That’s just it!” Tabby says, and gestures towards one of the security monitors, the one focused on Will and Raph. “Men suck, and we’re all intimately acquainted with how much men can suck, so it makes a twisted kind of sense that the men I’m drawn to eventually all turn out to be women.”

“Tell you what,” Maria says, blinking carefully against the still-too-bright lights in the security room, “the next guy you find interesting, just bring her straight here. We’ll give her the ol’ Stephanie treatment. It could save you a lot of time.”

Tabby scowls at her, snatches the empty paper bag from Harmony, screws it up and throws it at Maria’s head. Edy intercepts it with a frown. Then Tabby blinks, and says, “Oh, hey, Stephanie! You decided to switch up your name? Good for you.”

“I’m trying it out,” Stef says. Various sponsors smile for her, or give her a thumbs up, or groan something unintelligible from their state of near-unconsciousness (Pamela).

“I like it,” Monica says. “But,” she adds, to groans from the assembled sponsors, who can spot a businesslike tone when they hear one, “I’m afraid it’s time we got down to it.”

“Boo,” Harmony comments.

“Actually,” Indira says, standing up and relieving the pressure on the couch, which was struggling to fit the five of them between the arm rests, “there is one thing, before we begin. Tabby and I met Lorna Fielding this morning. She interrupted us just when Tabby was telling me—” she throws a grin across the room, “—about her woes. Lorna’s going out with Victoria. They’ve been dating a long time, and things were going well until recently: Lorna now suspects Vicky of keeping secrets from her. Not funny, Harmony.”

“I didn’t laugh!”

“You smirked. Don’t. This has the potential to hurt Lorna, to hurt Victoria, and to blow up in all of our faces if the situation isn’t contained. Lorna’s an outsider, she’s not cleared, and while obviously we have a profile on her, the contents aren’t encouraging. She’s highly politically motivated, with contacts among notable activists. She’s only a handful of degrees of separation from some fairly well-known journalists.”

“That’s the downside,” Maria says. “What’s the upside?”

Indira smiles. “She loves Victoria. It’s why we didn’t discourage the relationship; Victoria’s one of the most accomplished graduates we’ve ever had, and they fell deeply in love very quickly. Our initial assessment was that their attachment would override Lorna’s need to ‘do the right thing’.”

“Neither of you are with her right now, so I’m assuming you’ve assigned someone?”

“Yes,” Indira says, nodding. “We sent her up to talk to Christine.”

Stef thinks she feels Maria tense for a moment. “How do you see that going?” Maria asks.

“Christine will handle it.”

“You don’t think she’ll crack? Tell her everything?”

“No. She’ll calmly and rationally assess the situation, and then tell her everything. We’ve done it before.”

“Christine hasn’t done it before, though,” Edy says.

“If Indira thinks Christine’s got this,” Tabby says, “she’s got this.”

“They’re friends,” Indira says. “Christine knows her pretty well, she knows Victoria better than any of us, and Christine’s track record of making out-of-the-box decisions that nonetheless benefit and protect us is sitting right there at the table.”

Stef, on cue, waves.

“Christine will find a way to tell her,” Tabby says, “that doesn’t make her fly off the handle.”

“And what if she does?” Edy asks.

“Don’t worry,” Indira says. “My Teenie’s not stupid. She’ll have made sure all the doors are locked before they even start talking.”

 

* * *

 

Lorna’s visited almost every other building on campus. Some, like the old residential towers, seem held together only by the tension between the steadily increasing funding required to keep them upright year-on-year and the potential payout should they collapse with students inside. Others, like the Anthill, wear the money spent on their construction ostentatiously, in curved fascia and internal viewing windows and lecture theatres large enough to hold twice as many students as ever attend her Psychology modules.

Dorley Hall’s different, in every possible way. She’s been told it predates the establishment even of the university’s ancestor college, that it’s served a number of functions over the years, and that it’s never spent more than a handful of consecutive years vacant; from this she has inferred that the amount of money it’s absorbed could build a whole second Anthill, possibly a whole second university, with some left over.

From the outside, it’s imposing. Inside, it’s lavish in the manner of a well-maintained National Trust property: old-fashioned, polished, dignified. The walls of the main staircase are tiled with green ceramic, treated in some way that makes them look almost crystalline, and where the brick has been deliberately left bare, it has none of the dusty sheen she associates with exposed brickwork. The place is out of her league.

Out of Vicky’s, too, but that’s supposed to be the point: she’s just one of many disadvantaged girls who got subsidised rooms in a dorm that’s not technically part of the university and thus can write its own rules. A lot of people stay here for their whole degree, and beyond.

What happened to her here? That something did, and that it was awful, is easier and easier to believe as Lorna ascends; the affluence dripping from every tile, every brick, every fixture lends the building an air of impersonal malice, drills into her more and more by the second that this is one of those old-money buildings built centuries before she was born. An outpost of the ageless English aristocracy, a name bigger than anyone who temporarily inhabits it; this is Dorley Hall, and it will outlast her by generations.

She imagines the lights flicking suddenly off, plunging her into darkness, absolutely alone, and hurries her step. It takes her several more before she feels foolish.

Too many horror games, Lorna.

Christine’s waiting at the exit to the second floor with a shy smile and an oversized checked shirt over a cami and pyjama bottoms. She waves, and Lorna, trapped between her anxiety and her need to be polite in all situations, waves back.

“You really weren’t dressed yet, then?” Lorna says, and Christine rolls her eyes.

“You overheard Indira, huh? I should have words with that woman. Who am I, without my mystique?”

Lorna skips up the last couple of steps, allowing herself to be energised by the sight of a friendly face. They embrace on the landing. “You don’t have a mystique. I know you’re a nerd.”

In Lorna’s arms, Christine shrugs. “It’s true. Come on, let’s get something to drink. The kitchen’s just round the corner.”

Christine leads her down the corridor and Lorna looks around, eyeing the fingerprint locks on the doors. So much security! Why? The kitchen, at least, is open and airy. Less like the one on the ground floor, more like the kitchens in the best dorms on campus: utilitarian, but with fittings and fixtures of the highest quality. Christine nods at the table in the middle and flicks the kettle on, then starts rummaging in the fridge.

“Have you had breakfast?” she asks. “We have cereal, or I could attempt something with eggs. You like them kind of thrown haphazardly into a frying pan, right? Overhand or underhand? Shell?”

“Just a tea is fine, Christine,” Lorna says, and grins when Christine turns around, holding an egg. She was worried Christine would be weird around her, after their conversation in Café One, but she’s acting like her usual self.

“You sure? I kinda wanted to experiment.”

She looks so cheeky Lorna can’t stop the laugh. “I’m sure. Just tea.”

“Your loss. Tea it is.”

The tea takes a couple of minutes to make, which they pass with small talk. Lorna mostly lets Christine babble about introducing Paige to her favourite childhood books, and waking up one morning to find that Paige had stayed awake most of the night and made a serious dent in the stack of novels on the bedside table. Christine talks with her hands a lot, and has to interrupt her flow more than once to sweep her messy morning hair out of her eyes. After the third time, Lorna wordlessly pulls a hair tie out of her bag and hands it over.

“Thanks,” Christine says, ties a ponytail, and starts fishing out tea bags. She looks open and expectant, and why wouldn’t she? Only Lorna knows why she’s here. Only Lorna knows she’s about to risk her nascent friendships with all the girls who live here — not just Christine, but Paige and Pippa, too; they all seem to come together — on a hunch that Vicky is lying to her.

It’s a pretty fucking well-founded hunch, yes, but Vick’s had explanations for everything she’s been willing to answer so far and, as for the rest, absence of evidence is not blah blah fucking blah.

“So,” Christine says, dropping mugs of tea on the table and sitting down opposite, “what’s up? Everything okay? Is this about what we talked about the other day?”

Lorna sips her tea; too hot. She hadn’t thought this far ahead, hoping the right questions would simply come to her. Running for days on no sleep and a mixture of aggrieved self-righteousness and genuine fear of what she might discover hasn’t left her with significant reserves.

“You know what?” she says, putting down her mug. “Fuck it. Yeah. Things have been rough with Vicky. But you don’t know how rough, unless she told you.”

“She told me,” Christine confirms, looking at her tea and not Lorna. Yeah, she would have. They were friends before Lorna even arrived on the scene. “I’m sorry for my part in it.”

“You had no part in it. I’ve just been… ignoring things for a long time. But you do know things I don’t, and I know you lie for her.” Lorna chews on her cheek for a moment. “I know betraying confidences is, like, the worst thing you can do, but— oh!”

She’s interrupted by two other girls, entering the kitchen and stopping short at the sight of her.

It’s the white one with the deep red hair and the trouser suit who speaks. “Um,” she says. “Hi.”

“Hey,” Lorna says, hesitantly.

“Sorry, are we interrupting anything?”

Christine saves her. “Julia, this is Lorna, Vicky’s girlfriend. Lorna, this is Julia and that’s Yasmin.”

The other one, Yasmin, waves from the sideboard, where she’s assembling a basic two-person breakfast. “Hi, Lorna,” she says. “Uh, if you’re looking for Vicky—”

“I know,” Lorna says, sharper than she intends, and smiles in apology. Yasmin nods and Julia leans over and whispers something in her ear, something which makes them both giggle.

“Uh, listen,” Julia says, “we overheard some stuff as we were coming up the corridor—”

“Julia—” Christine says.

“And we know what it’s like to be looking for answers,” Yasmin says.

“We know some of what you need to know,” Julia says.

Christine covers her face with her hands. “Oh, God.”

“I’m just going to come out and say it,” Julia says. “There’s a secret basement here where they turn men into women.”

Yasmin turns around, holding a tray of cereal and coffee. “I used to be a rugby jock called Andrew.”

“She’s lying,” Christine mutters.

“Yeah,” Julia says, “that was never her name.”

“Will you two please go to work and get out of my hair? You’re not helping.”

“We’re just cutting to the chase,” Julia says. “Putting the poor girl out of her misery.”

Yasmin, standing in the doorway with her tray, beckons Julia with her head. “Come on. Leave Christine to show and tell.”

Julia waves.

“You’re only making things harder!” Christine yells, leaning around the table to direct her voice out of the door.

“Good!” Julia yells back.

“It’s payback!” That was Yasmin.

“This is shitty thanks for covering for you!”

“Oh!” Yasmin yells. “Right! Sorry!”

A door slams, leaving them both in embarrassed silence. Christine breaks it. “Sorry about them.”

Lorna winces. At least she and Christine are both bright red; she can’t bear the thought of being overheard, of knowing random people are aware of the problems she and Vicky are having. “Kind of a double act, aren’t they?” she says, wanting for a moment to talk about anything else.

Christine rolls her eyes. “Yeah. They’ve been together ever since we were all, uh… They’ve been together a while.”

Oh, for God’s sake. Christine brings it right back to secrets. “No,” Lorna says, pointing a finger, surprised by her own vehemence. “No, you can’t just trail off like that! I’ve had it from Vicky all weekend! Constant allusions to shit I can’t know, and I’m fucking sick of it, Christine! They’re involved in it, aren’t they? Or they were there. They know about what happened to Vick. You all do! Should I be suspecting those two girls in the kitchen downstairs, too?” She realises her finger is shaking, and drops it into her lap. Ignores her cooling tea. She takes a deep breath and says, with more control, “I realise I must sound crazy to you. Like I’ve gone off the deep end. But I’ve done nothing but think about Vicky’s past, her life, and this place all weekend.”

Christine nods. “You’re sure you’re not better off hearing this from Vicky?”

“I’ve tried! She just shuts down. She goes into this quiet state and I can almost see what she’s thinking. Sometimes it seems like she wants to talk, but she just… doesn’t.”

“We share a lot of secrets. Sharing hers is sharing mine, too.”

“And you see how frustrating that is? You’ve always had these pieces of her, loads of them, and I’ve never gotten to know about any of them. I only get to see how they hurt her. And I’ve lived with that — I’ve made myself live with that — because I love her. But now they’re hurting us, they’re breaking us apart, and if she’s bound by your secrets…” Lorna can’t finish. She knows what she’s asking, or she can guess. She watched Christine, that time they went clubbing, and until Paige came for her she was… twitchy. Wary. It switched on and off: she’d be carrying on a normal conversation, or she’d be dancing with Pippa, or she’d be walking back from the bar, and suddenly she’d be afraid. She hid it well, but isn’t that just another sign of someone who’s learned to live with trauma?

“Okay,” Christine says, her eyes flicking from Lorna, to the table, to the door. “Okay. I’ll tell you.”

“I’m sorry,” Lorna says. “This must seem selfish to you.”

“No,” Christine says instantly. “Absolutely not. If you take one thing away with you today, make it that: you are not being selfish.” She goes to run her hand through her hair, then remembers she tied it up. Her hand hovers uselessly above her head for a second and then she shakes it, like it’s not supposed to be there, and digs in her pyjama pocket, pulling out her phone. “I want to show you something first,” she says, and messes with it for a little while. “Okay.”

She passes it over. Lorna doesn’t take it, just leaves it where Christine puts it, because her eyes instantly lock to the screenshot Christine’s loaded up, of a text conversation between her and Vicky:

Victoria Robinson: It’s fine, I’m just so scared.
Victoria Robinson: She tells me she still loves me. And that word ‘still’ in there, it’s like it won’t stop echoing in my head. It means she knows there’s things she has to forgive. It means
Victoria Robinson: Shit.
Victoria Robinson: It means she doesn’t see me as the same person she used to.
Victoria Robinson: I’ll always be someone who lied to her now.
Victoria Robinson: She keeps telling me she still loves me. And it’s not like she’s trying to convince herself. She really does love me.
Victoria Robinson: But it’s clear she doesn’t trust me any more.
Victoria Robinson: Maybe it’s just too many lies, all at once. Maybe I sound different when I’m talking about the last year or so, to when I’m listing off all the fake bullshit I’m supposed to pretend is my life.
Victoria Robinson: Maybe I sound like a liar every time I open my fucking mouth because I am one.
Victoria Robinson: She’s everything to me. The most special girl in the world. And I’m scared I’m just going to lose her. I’m scared she’s going to decide I’m too broken, too untrustworthy, and just leave. All I want is to tell her everything and I JUST CAN’T
Victoria Robinson: I hate this I hate this I hate this

Lorna reads it through three times. Reaches out for the screen, like she can touch Vicky, comfort her just by proximity to her words. Of course she loves her!

She reads it once more, her eyes catching on the fake bullshit I’m supposed to pretend is my life.

“I know showing you that might seem a bit manipulative,” Christine says slowly, taking the phone back and locking it, “and, yeah, maybe it kind of is. But you need to know, before we get into this, how much this has been killing her. She had to make a decision, before you met, that she can’t go back on, and it’s been the source of a lot of this. So she’s carrying guilt, she’s carrying regret, but most of all, I think, she’s carrying shame.” Christine coughs. “All of us are.”

Lorna nods. “How bad is it?” she whispers.

Christine hesitates, and Lorna reads more into that than into the single word she eventually speaks: “Bad.”

“I won’t see her differently,” Lorna says. “I won’t. I won’t!” she repeats, to Christine’s frown. “She’s my Vicky.” It’s hard to maintain her anger after reading Vicky’s texts, seeing something she was never supposed to see.

“I believe you’ll want to see her the same way. I think you might have to work at it, when you know everything, but I do believe you.” Christine shifts uncomfortably in her seat. “Look, um, there’s one other thing. Before we get into everything. Two other things really, but they sort of rely on each other. This is going to be pretty fucking heavy, so, Lorna, are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“There’s literally no going back.”

“I’m ready!”

“Okay. We’re all part of an… organisation here. And we’re backed by money. Serious money. Which buys serious influence. The secrets I’m about to tell you are also backed by that money and that influence. The sort of money and influence that can make people disappear.”

Lorna breathes in sharply without meaning to, a hiccup that turns into a cough, but she raises a hand when Christine makes to stand up and help her; she’s okay.

People disappearing? How big is this? It’s starting to sound like Vicky’s a fucking spy or something. Is that anything Lorna wants to get involved in?

Yes. For Vicky, yes. She may have kept secrets, she may have lied, but Lorna knows her. There’s no-one else she can imagine in her life. The line I hate this I hate this I hate this keeps nearly superimposing itself on her vision.

“That’s thing one,” Christine says. “And this moment, here, now, is your last chance to leave before I read you in to everything.”

“Christine,” Lorna says carefully, “I appreciate that you’re looking out for me here — I think you are, anyway — but I need to know. I’m all in.”

“Okay. Thing two.” Christine taps on her phone again and holds it out. The screen this time shows an official-looking document, black on white. Lorna reaches over and swipes: it goes on for several pages. “This is an NDA, or something like it. The gist is, if you breathe a word of what I’m about to tell you to anyone who isn’t already in the know, we come for you. With the biggest legal guns money can buy. Look it over, if you’d like.”

Lorna swipes back and forth. The text is tiny. “I trust you, Christine. Just tell me: if I sign this, am I fucked?”

Christine sighs and makes a show of looking around. “You’re here. And you know something’s up. So you’re fucked already, Lorna. But this doesn’t make it any worse.”

“Way to make a girl feel safe,” Lorna says, trying to keep her tone light as she navigates to the last page, taps in her name and the date, and records her thumbprint on the phone’s sensor.

“Okay!” Christine says, taking the phone back and pocketing it. “You’re officially in the loop. Which, yes, I know all this has been a bit scary, but you’re now in the same position as Vicky. And me, and the rest of us.”

“She couldn’t tell me anything because she signed an NDA?” Ludicrous.

Christine snorts. “Not exactly. We’re kept under control by… other means. We sign something similar, yes, but it’s not the paperwork that does it. The secret is too big; no amount of paperwork could keep it hidden. It’s just protocol. Legal fancy dress for the real threat.”

“What do you mean?”

“Remember how I said the money can make people disappear? It’s done so twice in the last month.”

Lorna’s chest tightens. What has she gotten herself into? “You’re fucking kidding me.”

“No. Bad people. Very bad people. A rapist and a… a person possibly even worse than him. A woman who hurt someone I care about, and many more besides. But—” Christine looks away, raps her fingernails on the table for a moment, “—we are capable of doing it to anyone. Remember that. Anyway!” She adopts an almost businesslike affect. “Your NDA is different from ours. Yours is more like what the PMC guys sign.”

“‘PMC’?”

“Private Military Contractors. Soldiers. You know, like in Metal G—”

Every time it seems like it can’t escalate, it does. “You have soldiers?”

“Two on duty at all times.”

Lorna nods, and breathes carefully again, counts five in and five out, until she’s— well, she’s not calm, but she’s riding it. If this is Vicky’s world, if this is the shit that makes her cry out at night, then she needs to know it all. And if she can’t tell anyone else, on pain of being ‘disappeared’? Fine. She and Vicky can keep the secret together. At least they’ll have each other again.

“Okay,” she says eventually. “Tell me.”

“Vicky’s secrets are hers to tell, if she wants to,” Christine says. “And she will want to, now that you’re a part of this. But these are mine.” She takes a long sip of lukewarm tea. “I can’t believe I’m doing this twice in two months,” she mutters.

She looks so uncomfortable that Lorna wants to tell her it’s okay, that she can stop, that they can take a break, but she doesn’t. She just listens.

“I was a boy,” Christine says. It’s like all emotion’s drained from her voice. “And not in the way that you, for example, were assigned male. I was just… a boy.” If her voice is motionless, barely moving from monotone, Christine’s fingers are hyperactive, tapping against and winding around each other. “Not a nice one, either. I hurt people. Not physically, but I hurt people. I was cruel, vindictive, and barely functional. And I was found and brought here. For rehabilitation.”

Lorna’s breath fails in her throat. She listens, increasingly faint, as Christine tells the story of her life. The boy. The childhood. The abusive family. The violence, all directed at his mother, with one exception: when he stood up for his mother, took a blow meant for her, and his mother defended his father, against him. The loneliness. The isolation. The obsession with computers and technology. She gets the pronouns mixed up a few times, but Lorna follows along without issue.

Christine can’t look at her for the next part, seems barely able to speak, and jumps when Lorna reaches over and holds her hand.

She said the boy hurt people? Time to say how. She doesn’t go into his motivations; not important, she says. Stupid adolescent bullshit, she says. The violent logic of the young man who knows no other way to process his grief, his anger, his pain, she says.

And then, capture. Indira, talking to him in the basement under Dorley Hall. Six other boys. One of them, she says upfront, doesn’t make it. The others do. And what they do to the boys, in the basement under Dorley Hall…

Lorna loses the thread for a while. The warmth leaves her body, the clarity leaves her hearing, the moisture leaves her mouth.

She drinks her cold tea. It’s something to do. Across the table, still holding her other hand, Christine’s crying undemonstrative tears, and when she sees Lorna notice them, what remains of her façade crumbles. She rips her hand out of Lorna’s and covers her face.

Lorna can’t stay in her seat after that. She joins Christine on the other side of the table, embraces her, and waits for the grief and the shame to pass. She doesn’t know how real any of this is — Christine’s story fits the facts, but it’s completely ludicrous — but at least some of it is close enough to reality to hurt Christine, and thus likely hurt Vicky, even to retell.

“Sorry,” Christine says after a while, wiping her eyes with tissues from her pocket, and Lorna has to tell her over and over that apologies aren’t necessary. She senses Christine needs some time to recover, so she makes tea for them both, and when she’s done, most of the Christine she knows is back.

Forget all this stuff about ‘rehabilitating bad boys’. If Christine once was a boy, once was someone she hated, if that part is true — and of all of it, it’s the most believable — well, Lorna knows a little something about that, doesn’t she? When you transition you take what you can of your old life with you, no matter how small the shreds you have to tear it into, and Lorna couldn’t take much, just a battered and bruised relationship with her father and stepmum, still on the mend, all long silences and deadnames and embarrassed apologies in the times she goes home to visit; Christine, from what she said, took even less.

“Thank you,” Lorna says as warmly as she can.

“If it were solely up to me,” Christine says, sipping her tea, “you’d have been told all that months ago.” She smiles. “If it were up to Vicky, she would have told you a week after you met.”

“It’s still all too ridiculous.”

“And yet all real.”

Lorna doesn’t know if she’s ready to make that leap just yet. “Jesus fucking Christ, Tina,” she says.

“If he came here,” Christine says, “he’d have to change his name, too.”

 

* * *

 

“So? How was your first briefing?”

Stef flops down onto the bed in her first-floor room, kicking off her shoes and enjoying the muted thud-thud as they hit the rug. “Exhausting,” she says. “And what do you mean, ‘first’?”

Pippa laughs. “You’ve a perspective the sponsor team sorely needs,” she says, kicking the door closed behind her. “Expect to get called on again.”

“Just let me have an ibuprofen first next time, okay?”

It was at the hour mark that she realised how much her impression of the sponsors had changed. She’s always assumed — from no evidence but the slightly haphazard way things looked from her side, back when she was one of the boys — that they mostly just winged it, but in the meeting they went over the boys’ psychology and recent actions in incredible detail, with each sponsor chiming in with her own opinion, often backing it up with surveillance footage. Stef hadn’t contributed much, comparatively, but her thoughts on Aaron, Adam and Martin generated much discussion.

“What did you think about Will?” Pippa asks, sitting down on the chair by the vanity and stretching. “Interesting, huh?”

Active discussion about Will’s response to disclosure had been tabled for the next meeting, with Edy asking everyone to check the archives for boys who responded similarly. Stef, who’d expected to be asked her opinion, had been grateful for the reprieve.

“Weird, more like,” she says.

Ollie and Raph had responded to disclosure the exact way Stef expected. Shouting, swearing, kicking the glass doors to their cells, overturning what little inside the cell could be overturned — mostly just the mattress, although Raph had a good go at detaching the cot from its housing — and otherwise vindicating the sponsors’ decision to keep them separate. They’d had the contents of the NHS pamphlet read to them, and eventually succumbed to the exhaustion of rage, alternately sleeping (Ollie) and sitting on the cot, rocking back and forth (Raph).

Will had been different. The now-familiar disbelief gave way very quickly to something that quite disturbed the sponsors who hadn’t been present for it, and they watched the rest of the footage in silence. It was as if Will had been switched off; he went completely quiet and absolutely still, not even reacting when Tabby told him an orchiectomy would be scheduled for some time in the next few months. She eventually resorted to describing for him what an orchi is and how it is done, in the apparent hope of getting some kind of reaction out of him; nothing.

From the overhead camera angle, Stef had been reminded of Martin, but Tabby, narrating, switched to the head-on angle, in which Will’s face was just about visible, demonstrating nothing like Martin’s placid, dead-eyed acceptance. Will was despairing.

He remained silent, ignored them when they came by to check on him later, and — aside from silently climbing into the cuffs so they could open the cell door to leave food for him — barely moved for the rest of the day. Tabby loaded a video file, audio gain cranked all the way up, and played for the assembled sponsors the only thing Will said for the entire rest of the day, a whisper so quiet Tabby said she barely heard it in person: “It’s not fair.”

Even Adam had asked questions.

“Oh, hey,” Pippa says, “head voice!”

“Shit.”

The reminder is useful: twenty-one years of not really caring how she sounded — except to make sure that as few people as possible had the opportunity to hear her — is a great deal of inertia to overcome in just a couple of days. Stef aahs and hums and gets herself back in the zone.

“You want to make this a practice session?” Pippa says. “We’ve still got some stuff to go over with your treatment plan, and talking is better practice than anything else.”

“Sure.”

“Okay!” Pippa throws her phone down on the bed next to Stef, with the recording app already running. “Let’s talk about electrolysis.”

“Oh, God,” Stef says. She’s heard horror stories.

“First off, at Dorley it’s not quite as bad as you’ve heard. It takes a long time for most trans women because scheduling it can be difficult, and long sessions are costly and painful.” Pippa grins. “But you don’t have to work, and money isn’t an issue.”

“That still leaves ‘painful’, though.”

“It’s not as bad as all that. We can load you up with painkillers and apply numbing cream. But there is an unavoidable downside that we can’t really mitigate.”

Stef laughs. “Of course there is. Go on?”

“Growing out the hair before your session, and caring for your swollen, itchy face after it.”

“Fabulous,” Stef says.

They discuss the arrangements. Stef wants to start sooner rather than later, so Pippa texts the girl who does the sessions — a Dorley graduate, naturally — and she agrees to visit next week for a consultation. Like everyone else, she’s intrigued by the idea of a trans girl at Dorley and, Pippa relays, she’s looking forward to not having to have someone strapped down, right from the start. Stef, unfortunately, will have to avoid shaving for three days beforehand, and she grudgingly makes a note on her calendar. As for the boys — Aaron — if it comes up, she’ll tell the truth: electrolysis is both inevitable and uncomfortable, so why not get it out of the way as soon as possible?

“What’s it like?” Stef asks a while later, as Pippa comes back in with cups of tea. “When you start getting back out there?”

“Hmm. You want to know what it’ll be like for you, or how it was for me?”

“For you.”

Pippa sips her tea, and thinks. “Strange,” she says. “Incredibly strange. All of us here had our social development curtailed, even reset completely, depending on how you think about it. We have the whole second puberty thing to deal with — you know about that — but the strangest thing is learning how to be a normal person. Learning how to talk to normal people. That’s part of why we encourage our girls to go back to school here: you get to mingle with all kinds. It helps if you have a frame of reference that’s not completely limited to Dorley Hall, because, well, we’re all a bit weird.”

Stef laughs. “God. I can’t imagine the bravery it takes to step out of that door for the first time. Hard enough for me, and I want this—”

“Don’t forget,” Pippa says, “by the time we take that step, we want it, too.” She frowns. “Or we’ve accepted it, at least.” She sits back in her chair, looks out of the window. “Sometimes I think we have more in common than I originally thought. You and me. You and all of us. Like, most of us were pretty effing miserable as kids, for one reason or another — it’s literally on the list of things we look for — and then we come here and suddenly we have to adjust to our futures becoming something very, very different to what we expected.”

Stef shrugs. “That doesn’t sound too far off,” she says, and grins at herself; there was a time she might have found the comparison offensive.

“You ever feel like you never got to be a teenager?” Pippa says. “Properly, I mean? Not like, a bad decisions teenager on TV, but just a kid who had friends and hung out and did stupid stuff. I never did any of that. And then I came here and lost three years of my life and now I’m a girl, I’m old, and I’m surrounded by transsexual wine mums.”

“You’re old?” Stef says, incredulous. “Aren’t you, like, a year older than I am?”

“Yeah, but…” She slumps in her chair. “I suppose I just wish this all could have happened in time for me to really be a kid. Restarting your whole life as an adult effing sucks. Sometimes I watch those shows and get upset I didn’t get to go to school as Pippa.”

Stef sits up and reaches out for her hand. “When I’m done,” she says, “when I’m ready, let’s go out and do stupid shit together. Let’s be teenagers.”

She absorbs Pippa’s broad smile, and suddenly can’t imagine being anywhere but here. It’s like she’s supposed to be here, like she has a place here: she needs their help, sure, but it’s more than that. Pippa needs a sister. Aaron needs a friend. The sponsors need her perspective. The boys need an example. And she can do all that while remaining herself; while becoming herself.

Like Pippa, it’s easy for Stef to feel like she never got to be a kid. Always too busy performing as the boy everyone around her expected to see. Here, though, she fits in without even trying, without having to change a thing.

Figuratively speaking.

They make plans after that. Pippa pulls a laptop out of a desk drawer and calls up maps of the university and of Almsworth, and they decide on their future excursions: to the Student Union bar; to the library and the cafés and all the places on campus from which to see the sights; to the club in Almsworth where Christine and Paige got back together; and farther, to London. Pippa’s always wanted to visit the Natural History Museum.

Stef’s phone eventually interrupts them; she puts the call on speaker. It’s Christine.

“Hey, Stef. Got a favour to ask. You know Vicky, right? You know of her, at least.”

“Sure.”

“Well, her girlfriend’s here, and she’s getting read in to the whole Dorley thing, and I think she could really benefit from your perspective.”

“What do you mean, ‘read in’?”

“I think the meaning of ‘read in’ is obvious, Stef.”

“She means,” an unfamiliar voice says, “that she’s told me the most completely insane story I’ve ever heard, and I only half believe it. She thinks you, whoever you are, can sell me on the other half.”

“Yeah,” Christine says, “so come quickly, please. I think she’s about ready to jump out the window and come back with napalm.”

“To be clear,” Stef says, “she didn’t know about Dorley… and now she knows?”

“Yes.”

“No,” Pippa says. “No way, Christine! She’s— Wait, can Lorna hear me?”

“What, am I stupid? No.”

“Lorna’s nice and all, but she’s an outsider. I don’t want to put her in front of an outsider yet.”

“You’re not her sponsor any more.”

“No, but I am her advocate.”

“Okay, but Lorna’s not an outsider; she’s Vicky’s girlfriend.”

“Who Stephanie hasn’t even met yet—”

“‘Stephanie’?”

“I’m just trying it out,” Stef says.

“—and she might be in a highly volatile state,” Pippa finishes.

“You’re not volatile, are you, Lorna?” Christine asks.

“Didn’t I just sign something that says I’m not allowed to be?” the other voice, Lorna, says.

“See? She’s not volatile, she’s not an outsider, and she’s a trans girl. She’s safe!”

Stef, looking sideways at Pippa, shrugs. She’s still not entirely clear on what’s going on, but if she can help Christine, she wants to. She owes her so much.

“Okay,” Pippa says, “but I’m coming with.”

 

* * *

 

Whatever she expected, this is worse.

Lorna still suspects Christine of lying, of covering up something terrible with something… also terrible, but ridiculous, farcical, unworkable; insulting. Like she went online, read a fiction summary from the sorts of websites Lorna visited before she came out to herself, and regurgitated it verbatim. But why would she? If it is a lie — and at least some of it has to be — then why invent such an outrageous story? Besides, Lorna likes to think that she knows Christine, at least a little, and she’s never seemed like the sort of person who would spin a transition-as-punishment yarn in the presence of an actual trans woman. And she told her story, her history, with such conviction!

It’s a stupid lie, or it’s the truth.

Lorna taps her mug with a nail. The surface of the tea responds to every strike, and she watches it, momentarily transfixed by the interaction of ripples, wondering again if she should have followed her other passion, gone to study Physics. But if she hadn’t chosen Psychology, hadn’t chosen Saints, she would never have met Vicky.

“Christine,” she says. “This is ridiculous. And it’s monstrous! The story you’ve told me, I feel like I should be calling the— fuck, no, not the police, but, I don’t know, someone. You want me to believe you and Vicky are part of some kidnapping ring! I don’t— I can’t believe you.”

Christine frowns. “You sound just like someone else I know. Actually, wait a minute! I know who can help you get a handle on this!” She holds up a finger, and with her other hand scrolls down the contact list on her phone. “Just… hold that thought. The one about all this being ridiculous and monstrous.” She hits call, and before she holds the phone up to her ear, adds, “I agree, by the way.” And then she’s on the call: “Hey, Stef. Got a favour to ask. You know Vicky, right? You know of her, at least. Well, her girlfriend’s here, and she’s getting read in to the whole Dorley thing, and I think she could really benefit from your perspective.” She rolls her eyes again, and smiles at Lorna. “I think the meaning of ‘read in’ is obvious, Stef.” Christine covers the microphone with her thumb and whispers, “Newbies.”

Lorna indulges her frustration. She leans across the table, pushes her voice to the very front of her mouth — her phone voice; her public speaking voice — and says, “She means that she’s told me the most completely insane story I’ve ever heard, and I only half believe it. She thinks you, whoever you are, can sell me on the other half.”

“Yeah,” Christine says, “so come quickly, please. I think she’s about ready to jump out the window and come back with napalm. Yes. What, am I stupid? No.” She mouths, Sorry. Lorna shrugs. “You’re not her sponsor any more. Okay, but Lorna’s not an outsider; she’s Vicky’s girlfriend.”

Lorna sits back in her chair, unsure as to whether or not she wants to relinquish her ‘outsider’ status. Wait; fuck. She signed that stupid NDA thing, didn’t she?

“‘Stephanie’?” Christine says, in the manner of a stockbroker asking, ‘How many billions am I up?’ She gives Lorna a thumbs up, obviously realises how baffling that must be, shrugs, and says, “You’re not volatile, are you, Lorna?”

“Didn’t I just sign something that says I’m not allowed to be?” Mum would kill her for being such a bitch. But she’d kill her for being a bitch, first, so screw her.

“See? She’s not volatile, she’s not an outsider, and she’s a trans girl. She’s safe! Okay. Okay! Good. See you in a minute.” She returns the phone to the table. “They’re on their way.”

“I’m ‘safe’, am I?” Lorna says acidly.

“Well, yeah, I think so. I’m fairly sure you’re not going to attack me—”

“Um, no!”

“—and you have literally no way out of here without one of us, so…” Christine shrugs theatrically.

“What do you mean, ’no way out of here’?”

Christine tries to run her hand through her hair, fails, and irritably tugs at her ponytail, freeing her hair to be messed with again. Sheepishly she passes the hair tie back across the table. Lorna slips it over her wrist and raises an expectant eyebrow.

“It goes with the whole kidnapping thing,” Christine says. “You saw the locks on our bedroom doors, right? And on the kitchen door? We have a portion of the third floor and all of second down to ground locked down. With biometrically linked, networked locks. With a few taps on my phone I could open every lock on the loop and you could walk straight out.”

“But you won’t do that?”

“I will. As soon as I know you’re not a danger to us. To the programme, to me, to Vicky.”

“I would never put Vicky in danger!”

“She’s a product of this place, Lorna. Her safety depends on our secrecy.”

Lorna looks at her for a second, then stands, walks over to the sink and washes her face with cold water. It might mess up her makeup, but — and she almost laughs — she can probably borrow something from Christine before she goes. Right now she needs to be alert. She feels disconcertingly like she did that time she got kicked in the head.

She turns around and leans on the wall by the window, in time to see Christine putting her phone down again. “I like you a lot, Christine,” she says. “But I can’t just believe you about this.”

“Will you believe Vicky?”

“Yes.”

“Good, because she just texted asking if I’d seen you. I said you’re here. She’s worried, Lorna.”

Lorna kicks her foot back against the wall. “I’m worried!” she yells. “I’m fucking terrified, Christine! It just keeps getting worse and worse and— Oh, for fuck’s sake. You, too?”

Pippa, poking her head into the room, says, “’Fraid so.”

“Jesus. This is looking less and less like a bad-taste joke at my expense.”

She steps into the room, leading another girl— no, a boy. No, a girl, Lorna decides, taking in the girl’s presentation. She looks in transition: a couple of months of hormone therapy at the most. Pretty. Also, definitely rather nervous.

“I know the exact feeling,” the girl says.

“Oh my God,” Lorna mutters, as Pippa and the girl find seats at the kitchen table, and the girl pulls her legs up under herself to sit cross-legged, arms folded in front of her, taking some of her weight, “you really are doing it, aren’t you?” If there’s someone here who reads like a trans girl early in transition, and if Christine’s been telling the whole unvarnished truth, there’s only one possible explanation. “Hey, um, you. Kidnapped person. I don’t know your name, but say the word and I’ll get you out of here. Somehow.”

“How nostalgic,” the girl comments, mostly to herself. “You’re Lorna, right?” Lorna nods. “I’m Stef. Stephanie, actually. I’m trying it out.”

“You’re trying out a girl’s name? They’re making you do that?”

“Christine,” Stephanie says, looking sideways, “did you tell her anything about me?” Christine, pursing her lips, shakes her head.

“She’s disbelieving everything else I said,” Christine says. “I thought I had her convinced, but she kept… walking it back. So I decided it’d be better coming from you. And then from Vicky, when she gets here.”

“I haven’t met her, have I?”

“Vicky? No. You’ll like her. She’s a sweetheart. Although probably somewhat preoccupied at the moment.”

They both look back up at Lorna.

“What’s going on?” Lorna says.

Stephanie — Lorna’s going to keep thinking of her that way until a better option presents itself, perhaps during an escape attempt — leans on her wrist and says, “Assuming Christine’s told you the whole story—”

“—I’ve told her most of it—”

“—then you know they scoop up new batches of bad boys at the beginning of every academic year, yes?” Lorna nods. Christine didn’t actually say when they kidnap the men, only that they do, on a regular cadence. “I, uh, got wind of this place, and what it does. Actually,” she adds, looking down at the table and smiling, “I was mostly right about what they do, but incredibly wrong about who they do it to. I got myself kidnapped.”

“What?” Lorna says.

“She’s a volunteer,” Christine says.

“What?” Lorna says.

“It’s true,” Pippa says.

“I’m trans,” Stephanie says, smiling.

“You’re a trans girl?” Lorna says. This, at least, is a comforting point of familiarity in an increasingly insane world.

“Yes.”

“As in…?” She has to be clear.

“I was assigned male at birth. I hated it. More or less gave up on life after my twenty-first birthday. And—”

“You didn’t tell me that!” Pippa interrupts. “What do you mean?”

Stephanie takes Pippa’s hand and squeezes it, and Lorna frowns. If all this is true, this makes Pippa and Christine both complicit. And she’s friends with them?

“I mean,” Stephanie says, “that I decided transition was a pointless dream. That I was—” she laughs cynically, “—too manly for it to work out for me. I was going to try and live as Stefan. Forever. That’s why I went to that party in the first place; that’s how I met Christine. I was trying to be a normal guy, and normal guys go to parties when their housemates invite them. Yeah, sure, as plans go, it sucked, I know. I couldn’t have kept it up for more than a few weeks. And then I don’t know what I would have done. Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to find out.”

“Yeah,” Pippa says slowly. “Fortunately for you, you came here and I put you in a cell and—”

Stephanie shushes her, rubs her hand, whispers something Lorna can’t make out. It ends with Pippa and Stephanie hugging each other awkwardly, and Stephanie complaining about poking herself in the tit with the corner of the kitchen table.

“Where were we?” she says, rubbing herself carefully.

“I was about to ask you how you can possibly accept this place,” Lorna says.

The girl shrugs. “The boys down there, some of them are vile. One guy, Declan, attacked me and Aaron, and—”

“Aaron?”

“He’s, uh, a guy who’s down there right now.”

“Forget Declan, then,” Lorna says, seizing on Stephanie’s suddenly downcast expression, “how do you feel about him?”

“None of your business,” Stephanie says, quickly, sharply.

Lorna notes her blush, and says, “No, I mean, how do you feel about them… transitioning him?”

She sighs. “I’m pretty fucked up about it, to tell you the truth.” She looks away from Christine and Pippa — the sponsors, Christine said — and bites her lip. “It used to be that I didn’t want him to change, the way everyone else wants him to. And whatever I said, people would tell me, oh, we have data, we have experience, he’ll benefit in the long run. And they always point to themselves as an example, and I’ve never known how to argue against that.” She holds up both hands, palms flat, like plates on an old-fashioned scale. “It’s wrong versus it works.” She mimes the scales tipping this way and that, and coming to rest roughly even. Christine reaches out and pulls one of her hands down, and Stephanie laughs and shoves gently at her. “But I know he needs to reform, somehow. And especially as I spend more time with Pip and Christine and all the others, it’s like I’m starting to see this future laid out for him, you know? In theory, I still object to what this place does, but it’s become almost a mechanical objection. Like, my morning routine: get up, brush teeth, object to the programme, participate in it anyway. Did she tell you everyone here went through it?”

“Not in so many words.”

“Everyone. Even Beatrice and Maria, the ones who’re in charge. Although—” her face firms, “—they didn’t exactly go through the same thing as Christine or Pip. Even if I wasn’t just plain tired of staking out my position, you try living with a bunch of girls who got cured of toxic masculinity and tell them it can’t be done.”

Lorna’s had her own thoughts about that, although nothing so severe as kidnapping boys and forcibly changing them; hers have gone in more of a PowerPoint direction.

“It’s rehab,” Pippa says suddenly. “What she doesn’t like telling you, because she’s too close to us, is that all of us were dangerous. All of us had either hurt people, or were extremely likely to do so. And, Stephanie—” she smiles at her friend, “—I know you worry about my lost potential, about what the old me might have become… I promise you, he would have just got more and more bitter and angry. As much as the methods have left their mark on me, that mark’s fading, and in exchange I got a life, Steph. Trying to turn Pippa, to turn me, back into him would, at this point, be more injurious to my psyche, to my wellbeing, than becoming Pippa was in the first place.”

Lorna’s legs feel weak. This is madness.

“I know how you feel, Lorna,” Stephanie says, standing and taking a few steps towards her. “When I came here, seven weeks ago, I thought I’d found a place that helps trans people who’ve escaped toxic families.” Another step. “And I shouted, and I protested, and I said it was awful. I even questioned Christine’s gender, right to her face. I still think about that.”

“It’s okay,” Christine says, behind her.

Stephanie briefly looks back. “I’ll always think about that.” And then she’s advancing on Lorna again. “But that guy I mentioned? Declan? Rapist. Manipulator. He made himself into a trap some poor woman kept willingly walking back into, until Dorley took him away. And he was actually beyond the pale; he’s gone now.”

“Gone—?” Lorna says.

“Gone. But the others are still here, and all of them are better here than out there. I’ve read all the files. Ollie. Constantly getting in fights. Married his teenage sweetheart, which was bad news for her because he hit her a lot. Got on our radar when he hit her so hard her head bounced off the bar.” Behind Stephanie, Christine mouths, Our radar? to Pippa, who shrugs. “Raph. Another guy who just seems to get off on controlling and hurting women. Will.” She frowns when she says his name. “When his brother came out, he beat him into the hospital. Martin! Killed someone driving while drunk! And then there’s Aaron.”

“Your friend.”

“My friend. He’s sweet, and he’s clever, and he’s actually quite shy under all the babbling and the bluster. But he sexually harassed a lot of women. So many I still can’t quite believe it. And his rich family shielded him from all the consequences.”

“Stephanie,” Christine says. She’s wearing her disbelief on her face. “I look away for five minutes and you become a true believer?”

Stephanie leans against the wall, next to Lorna. “I’m not a ‘true believer’,” she says, voice cracking. She swallows, concentrates for a second, and then continues in a clearer tone. “If I had my way, I’d… well, I don’t know what I’d do. I wouldn’t release the boys, because you’d all get arrested, and your faces and mine would be all over the internet. It’d end our lives, basically. And I wouldn’t get to transition.” She looks at Lorna. “Yes, I know. I’m selfish. But we wouldn’t take anyone else. If I had my way, this year would be the last one.”

Lorna can’t seem to stop shaking. “I don’t get how this isn’t just a fucked-up punishment,” she says. “You’re taking those men — yes, terrible people, I get it — and inflicting lifelong dysphoria on them! I don’t get how you can go along with that, Stephanie!”

“Ask me about my dysphoria, Lorna,” Christine says, but doesn’t give her time to ask anything. “I’m fine. We all are. I’m not saying it’s not an adjustment—”

“It’s a heck of an adjustment,” Pippa mutters.

“—but I’m not clawing at my skin, trying to get out of my body. In many ways, I like it a lot more than I used to, and not just because I exercise now.”

“You exercise?” Pippa says, as if Christine suggested she can fly.

Before Christine can reply, a loud yawn comes from the corridor. Paige follows it in, and Lorna hides her groan; Vicky’s entire friend group lives here! And they’re all—?

She can’t even think it to herself. Stephanie said she once misgendered Christine, and Lorna realises how wrong that concept is. She can’t imagine Christine or Pippa as boys, especially because it leads inevitably to the conclusion that Vicky was one, too.

Oh, Vicky.

“What’s the racket?” Paige says, blinking rapidly to chase the sleep out of her eyes. “I’m charging all of you bitches serious money for waking me up on the morning my lecture got cancelled. Oh, hey, Stef.”

“Stephanie!” Pippa and Christine say in unison.

“I’m trying it out,” Stephanie says.

“I like it,” Paige says. “And you look great. And, um, Lorna. Hello?”

Lorna brushes her hair out of her face and sighs. “Hi, Paige.”

Paige looks around the room. “What don’t I know?” she asks.

“We had to tell her everything, babe,” Christine says. “You want some coffee?”

“I’ll make it.” Paige fetches a cafetiere down from a shelf and starts filling it with coffee while she waits for the kettle to boil. “Everything about Vicky, or…?”

“Everything,” Christine says.

“Including…?”

“Yes,” Lorna says, “I know why you’re all here.”

Paige drops the spoon heavily into the sink. “Well, ignorance was bloody bliss for a while,” she whispers. Christine stands up and hugs her from behind, resting her forehead against Paige’s back.

“The thing about us,” Pippa says, “is we’re not who we were. We all made a choice to change.”

Paige snorts. “Not Vicky.” She half-turns her head; Lorna’s alarmed to see tears in her eyes. “The thing you should know about Vicky, Lorna, is that she’s not like us. Like Pippa said, we all made the choice to be the women you know now, but Vicky was always a girl.” She turns all the way around and practically picks Christine up to position her more favourably, head to Paige’s bosom. She encircles her with her arms. Protective. Protecting her from what?

Oh, Lorna realises. From me. I’m the threat. The thing that came into their lives, demanding answers to questions that hurt them. Tears in Paige’s eyes, still. That she put there.

She latches on to the last thing Paige said. “What do you mean about Vicky?”

“I mean, she didn’t learn to be a girl like I did,” Paige says. “And she didn’t embrace it like Christine. One day, down there, early on, it was like she woke up from a bad dream, and she was just… Vicky.”

Once again, Lorna’s legs feel weak, and this time she acts sensibly, pulling in a chair and sitting heavily on it before she falls. “What are you saying? Vicky’s a trans woman?”

“No,” Christine says.

“Yes,” Paige says, at the same time. She’s blinked away the tears now, but she still looks vulnerable, and when she speaks she’s more hesitant than usual. “I’ve been thinking about this, ever since Stephanie came out. There are ways in which ‘trans woman’ is the most appropriate descriptor for all of us here, and there are ways in which it is… inappropriate. My womanhood, no matter how accustomed to it I am, was coerced. But Vicky’s wasn’t.”

“She’s always insisted she’s not trans,” Christine says, turning around in Paige’s arms to face out into the kitchen again. “She says she had no dysphoria, no eggy feelings or anything. And I’ve tried to respect that.”

“You’ve literally made fun of her for it.”

“Yes, but—”

“You showed her all those egg memes.”

“And she didn’t find them relatable!” Christine says.

“I think she would have if she let herself think about it,” Paige insists. “But I also think that a subreddit is not a diagnostic tool. Yes, Lorna, I think she’s trans, like Stephanie is. Like you are. She might have lasted another five years, even ten. Maybe even decades, if she put herself deep into denial. But I think she would have died by her own hand, or lived to be a woman. The programme simply found it inside her, ahead of schedule.”

“Paige, I don’t—” Christine says, but Lorna can’t stop herself.

“You really think that?” She doesn’t know why it’s important, but it is. If Vicky’s trans, the way she is, then does any of this really matter? Vicky as a boy, transitioned against his will… that makes no sense. But if she was always a girl, if she’s trans, if she’s like Lorna, that changes the nature of all of it. That makes the lies she was forced to tell much more like the lies Lorna’s told herself, the ones imposed upon them both, to make them boys against their will.

If Vicky’s like her…

And the image Paige conjured, of Vicky dead by her own hand, is not one she’ll ever forget.

“Yeah,” Paige says.

Lorna laughs. It’s a bitter, broken release of tension, and threatens to become a crying fit, so she hugs herself and bites the inside of her cheek for a second. “You mean to tell me,” she says slowly, when she has herself under control, “that I have to tolerate this… abattoir, because it cracked my girlfriend’s egg?”

“Yes. That’s the position you’re in. I’m sorry.” And Paige does look sorry; looks almost haunted, forcing Lorna for the first time to wonder what it’s like to come out on the other side of this blood-soaked programme’s coerced regendering, and face life again. “There are no good options for you. Only compromises. You can’t hurt this place without hurting— Ah.”

Lorna’s blood runs cold. She turns slowly in her chair and there, standing in the entryway, is her girlfriend.

“Hey, Lorna, someone said you’re up here, and—” Vicky starts, still out of breath. And then she looks at Lorna, absorbs the tension in the room. “Oh no. Oh, God. Christine, what have you done?”

Still unsteady, Lorna makes the couple of paces over to the door without issue. She takes Vicky’s hands in hers, steps right up to her and looks carefully, unflinchingly into her eyes. They’re level with each other — Vicky was always tall; something else that suddenly makes sense — and Lorna punctuates her silent reassurance with a quick kiss.

“Hi, sweetheart,” she says.

“What’s going on?” Vicky whispers.

“They told me everything.”

And the weight in her arms increases for a second as Vicky overbalances, almost falls, and has to steady herself against the door frame, against Lorna.

“Lorna,” Vicky says, “oh, God, angel, I’m sorry.” She starts babbling, the words coming out of her in time with her tears as she buries her head in Lorna’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry, you shouldn’t have to be part of all this, all this endless fucking bullshit, you’re too good for this place, you’re too good for me, you should run, you should get far away, you should forget about me and Saints and fuck I’m so sorry I dragged you into this…”

Lorna shushes her, strokes her between her shoulders, and accepts from Paige a guiding hand, leading them into the privacy of one of the bedrooms and shutting the door behind them.

On the bed together, she whispers to her lover that she’s glad she finally knows all her secrets, and that maybe it’s time she told some, too.

 

* * *

 

They give them some time alone, while they share a plate of snacks (courtesy of Indira) and talk amongst themselves. Stef’s had time to think about what it means to her to finally meet another trans girl and to immediately try to persuade her of the relative merits of the kidnapping ring with whom she has thrown in her lot. And that’s a scary enough thought that she welcomes Christine, Pippa and Paige’s distractions.

“Shoot,” Pippa says, interrupting Paige’s story about Christine’s first time in high heels, “it’s almost three. Sorry, Stephanie; I have a tutorial.”

“It’s fine,” Stef says, pushing back from her chair and stretching. “You need to change?”

“No, but I need my laptop. Come upstairs with me?”

“To the third floor?”

“Fourth, actually.”

Stef hesitates. There are non-Dorley people up there, right? Ordinary people, who’ve never even been in a basement except to look for the plastic Christmas tree. And she’s…

No. Screw it. She’s Stephanie today, and — she suddenly decides — Stephanie is confident! Stephanie takes risks! Stephanie goes places, like fourth floors, that Stef would fear to tread.

“How do I look?” she asks.

“Lovely,” Pippa says.

“Beautiful!” Christine says.

She turns to the last girl. “Paige?” she says. “How do I look?”

“You look great,” Paige says, “and also like you’re in early transition. But I don’t think you’ll be recognised. You were in your third year, and no-one upstairs shared a class with you before; the non-programme residents usually move on after their first or second years. And it might be good for people to start seeing you as Pippa’s friend. It’ll give you more freedom to move around the dorms.”

“Assuming you want to be trans as part of your NPH,” Christine says.

Stef doesn’t have time to ask. “New Personal History,” Pippa says. “We all have to decide if we’re going to be cis girls out in the world, or trans girls. Being a trans girl is non-optional if you don’t get bottom surgery, but if you do, it’s open season.”

“I am a trans girl,” Stef says, and finds she likes saying it, likes claiming it, likes the feel of it. Lorna’s a trans girl, too. And so’s Vicky, if Paige is right, and from what Christine says she generally is. That’s good company to keep. “So, uh, that’s probably fine.”

“Come on, then.” Pippa takes Stef by the hand and leads her out of the kitchen and back through the corridor. Stef tries to open the door to the stairwell with her thumbprint, just for the novelty of it, but it doesn’t let her through. Pippa nudges her aside and unlocks the door. “I’ll ask for you to be added to these doors,” she says, as they start heading up. “All the doors. It’s ridiculous for you to have, like, half access.”

The fourth floor isn’t like the first or second, which are arranged around a single long corridor that threads through the building like the Snake game on the emergency phone back home, and they’re not full of unused rooms, either. She and Pippa walk out into a large common area, organised around a handful of sofas and a TV — connected up to a PlayStation and what looks to Stef’s uneducated eye like a nineties Nintendo console — which leads off to a large, open-plan kitchen-dining area to one side. On the other side, regularly spaced doors suggest bedrooms, and twin corridors extend down from the common area, leading to more rooms.

“Wow,” Stef says, and she’s glad she kept her head voice up because two people playing a vintage video game — a Star Wars racing game? — turn around on the sofa and smile at her.

“Hey, Pip!” one of them says, waving.

“Hey, Naila,” Pippa says. “Can you keep my friend company for a minute? I’ve got class and I need to grab my stuff. Stephanie, this is Naila and they’re Ren. Visiting from the fifth floor for what I can only assume are nefarious reasons.”

“How dare you!” Ren says.

“Hi,” Stef says, waving back. Noting the pronoun Pippa used, she adds, “She/her.”

“Ditto,” Naila says, smiling. “You want to play?”

“Um, does it matter if I’m terrible?”

“It’s preferable,” Ren says, waving her down onto the couch and handing her the oddest-looking game controller Stef’s ever seen. They talk her through selecting a pilot and, despite the fuzzy graphics, Stef recognises some of the designs.

“Is this… a Phantom Menace game?”

“This is where the fun begins,” Ren says, and Naila hits them.

“That’s from Episode 2!” she says.

“Actually,” Ren whispers, “it’s from Episode 3.”

It’s relaxing, playing the game, chatting, joking, and being apparently instantly accepted as a woman, as who she is; it’s hard not to think of it as another gift from Dorley, one which she will have to pay back — which she has chosen to pay back — by returning to the cold, depressing, concrete basement and performing boy, but what if…? for Aaron and the others.

Pippa taps her on the head a few minutes later, and Stef lets herself get dragged up from the sofa. She hands back the controller before she gets her legs tangled in the cord, and Naila and Ren resume playing against each other.

“What are you two doing down here, anyway?” Pippa asks, before they leave.

“We came to see a friend,” Ren says.

“But they weren’t in,” Naila says.

“And you guys have an N64.”

“And a load of free crisps in the cupboard.” Naila indicates the decimated foil bags on the table.

“Someone has to pay for those, you know,” Pippa says, and she slings her laptop bag over her shoulder and leads Stef out into the stairwell. She closes the door and checks quickly around them before she speaks again. “So? How did you find it?”

“What?” Stef says. “The pod racing game?”

She laughs. “No, hanging out!”

“Just teasing. It was nice, actually.”

“Just that?” Pippa hops down a few steps, so she can turn and stare back up at Stef. “Just ’nice’?”

Stef briefly sticks her tongue out. “Okay. Fine. Better than nice. Like… a preview of what it’s going to be like. When I’m a girl.”

“You’re—”

“When I look more like the girl I am inside. Better?”

Pippa snorts. “Paige would say you’re a very binary thinker, Stef.”

Stef takes the last stairs down into the main hallway two at a time. “And what would you say?”

“I’d say, I get it,” Pippa says. And then she wags a finger. “Which I shouldn’t, because I’m me and you’re you, so, you know, think about it.”

“I don’t have to think about it. Gonna be a girl whatever happens.”

Pippa swipes at her, but Stef intercepts her hand and hugs her instead. “Have a good tutorial,” she says.

“I will!” Pippa sings, and waves as she kicks open the main doors and marches off into campus. Stef’s almost tempted to follow her, to add to the euphoria of being treated in an absolutely mundane and ordinary fashion by two complete strangers by going out there and finding other people to gender her correctly, but she turns on her heel instead and jogs back up the stairs.

On the second floor, she has to knock to be let back in. Christine opens the door for her, and Stef follows her to where Paige is standing outside one of the bedrooms, struggling with whether to enter.

“They’re still in there?” Stef whispers. The other two both nod. “You want to check on them?”

“We’re not sure,” Paige says.

“Lorna might throw things,” Christine says.

“That’s Vicky’s room. Nothing in there to throw but my clothes.”

“And some decomposing kitchen detritus,” Christine says. “There might be forks.”

“Maybe we should tell her we can probably get her free bottom surgery now?”

“Bribes are unethical, Paige.”

Stef pushes past them. “Cowards,” she says with a grin, and knocks on the door. “Lorna? Vicky? It’s Stephanie? And the other two.”

The other two? Christine mouths at her.

“You can come in,” someone says through the door.

Paige lets them in, and there they are, Lorna and Vicky, wrapped around each other on the bed — with a pile of clothes shoved roughly off onto the floor, which Paige immediately picks up and quickly sorts through — red-eyed and so tightly entwined they’re almost one person.

“Hi,” says Stef.

“Hey,” Lorna says, reluctantly disentangling herself from Vicky and getting into a crossed-legged position on the end of the bed.

“So,” Paige says, “you’re both fully debriefed?”

Lorna nods.

“Almost,” Vicky says. “She wouldn’t let me tell her my old—”

“You don’t know mine,” Lorna says, “and I don’t want to know yours. From what you were telling me, and from what you said, Paige, Vicky was always kinda sorta in waiting. The girl in hiding. The… bad stuff, the things she did, that was her beating on the walls of her prison.”

“Apt,” Christine whispers.

“I still can’t believe you’re accepting this,” Vicky says.

“I’m accepting you,” Lorna says. “You’re my Victoria, you’re my girl, and I’m— I’m fucking glad to know you, at last. To see behind all the secrets they made you keep.” She turns an angry finger on Christine. “You lot very nearly fucked up a perfectly good trans girl, you know.”

Christine holds up her hands. “Not guilty,” she says. “We were in the same intake. I couldn’t fuck her up; I was catatonic because they took me away one day and castrated me.”

“Oh,” Lorna says, covering her mouth, “shit. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’m mostly over it.”

“That’s the other side of the coin,” Paige says, pulling a stool over and arranging herself on it. “Whatever you think of us — the rest of us, that is — you have to remember that we were all remade here. All of us. And the scars are worse for some than others.”

“What she’s saying is, be kind to us. We’re new.”

Lorna leans forward, cupping her chin in her hands. “I still think this place can’t work. That it shouldn’t work.”

Christine shrugs. “We put a lot of work into making sure we only take people we think can make the adjustment. Some people just can’t change. We don’t try to make them.”

“And some people have to,” Stef says, and giggles. Lorna looks affronted, so Stef swallows and coughs, to drown out the laughter that still wants to come out. “Sorry,” she says to Lorna, “I’m still riding kind of a high. But also… I think I want to make a point, if that’s okay?” Lorna nods warily. “I just went up to four with Pippa, played old video games with a couple called Ren and Naila—”

“Oh?” Christine says. “How are they?”

“Good! I stole a bunch of their food. And it was just… It was so normal, you know? Just me, as me, playing a video game with people I’d just met, and they just… I was Stephanie. I wasn’t Stefan, the guy who hangs around with Melissa — or Mark; whatever — and I wasn’t Stef, the trans girl pretending to be a guy down in the basement here. I wasn’t even Stef, the girl all you lot know. I was just me. And that—” she hiccups, and her throat tightens; this is more difficult to talk about than she expected, “—was something I’ve never had before. And it was so fucking random.

“And now I’m thinking,” she continues slowly, mind racing, “that it’s not just that Dorley gave me that experience. All those guys down there are going to have it, too. Lorna, you haven’t met them, and I guess neither have you, Vicky, although you know what sort of people come through here.” Vicky nods. “Those boys have been living poisoned lives. And, yes, sure, most of them poisoned themselves, but still, they’ve barely got a single un-fucked-up relationship between them, familial or otherwise. They’re all of them eventually going to get to do what I just did: they’re going to sit down on a sofa and play Nintendo games with complete strangers, and it’s going to be one of the first truly normal things in their whole lives. They need that.” She shrugs, surprised by her own vehemence. “I want them to have it. They might have been hurt differently to me, but, here, the cure is basically the same. Just a bit more bitter, for them.”

“God,” Christine says, “You are so fucking Dorleypilled. And I remember when you used to call me that.”

“If you can’t beat them…”

“If I can make a request?” Lorna says, shuffling back across the bed to put her arm around her girlfriend. “Don’t try and sell me on this place any more, okay? Not for now, anyway. I don’t know, maybe I’ll get like Stephanie here, and see the sunny side of a bit of light torture, but… eh, probably not.” She squeezes Vicky around the shoulders. “But she’s my Victoria. I came here thinking this place hurt her, and yes, it did, very much so—”

“It really fucking did,” Vicky says.

“—but it seems like it found her, as well. And brought her to me. I’ll… I’ll keep your secrets. Just promise me?”

“What?”

“Those boys, the ones down there. They’re going to be okay?”

“Lorna,” Stef says, “I’m going to do everything I can to make sure they’re okay.”

 

* * *

 

Aaron. Erin? Ellen? Karen?

He’s run every variation through his head, every cutesy modification of his name to make it into something appropriate to what they claim to want him to become. He’d ask someone for better ideas, but he doesn’t know who he’d even ask any more, and he knows no-one has anything suitable. Alien names, all of them, names for a version of him who was never created.

No. Names for the person who will succeed him.

God, he wishes he could turn off that stupid light, the one above the bed that does nothing but slice day from night and deny him true darkness, like he’s a child who needs a nightlight. Like he’s an animal who needs constant supervision.

Well? Doesn’t he? Didn’t he tell Stef his whole plan? Passive aggressive resistance, emphasis on the aggressive? Fucker’s probably told Indira by now. Or Pippa. They’ll have shared Aaron’s secrets like they share everything else, giggled over it, made it part of that weird bond they have, the one Aaron can’t work out if it’s between lovers or a brother and a sister. A bond he aches for, wants to reach out and snap whenever he sees them together, wants to twist and use against them if only he can find a way.

A bond he once felt was in reach. Still, he’s good and fucked that, now, hasn’t he? Stef offered you closeness and you threw it back at him, didn’t you? Who gives a fuck that he scared you? Because now he’s gone.

It’s too much like it always is. Too much a part of the pattern. He arrives somewhere, and he misbehaves because what the fuck else is he going to do? And then they hurt him. Who they are differs every time, as does the manner of it, but it doesn’t matter. It never matters. All that’s real is that he, Aaron, fucked up again, and now he’s paying the price.

And he’s sanitising it. He knows he is. He keeps thinking of Stef’s face as he watched the names and dates scroll past on the screen in the common room; his horror had been obvious. Narrow escape for you, mate. You almost got close to this.

Monica’s voice stays with him, too. Dispassionately evaluating his future along with his past. The harm he would inevitably cause. And wouldn’t he love to argue? Wouldn’t he love to throw it back in her face, like he tried to do with the accusation about the abuse he suffered? But all he’d had were insults and anger, and in the time since he’s not come up with anything better.

Who cares if she’s even right? She feels right, and that’s the worst thing. Maybe he wouldn’t have continued to spiral, continued to lash out, continued to hurt people — women — over and over, because he could and because he always got away with it and because it was a little glimmer of power in a life bereft of it? Maybe he’d have grown the fuck up, like his disappointed mother always wished? Maybe, without this place, he’d have finally become something, someone worthy of… anything.

He laughs. What a fantasy.

The other reality, the one Monica painted in the common room, the one she repaints every time he lets himself dream, the one she claims they’re saving him from, that’s the one that feels real. It’s all too easy to look into the future and see Aaron, thirty years old, settling into a sinecure thanks to his father’s residual contacts, some pointless position where he does nothing of use and experiences nothing he’ll ever remember except for the slap of his hand on his secretary’s arse, a piece of insectoid superiority to get him through the day.

Maybe one day he’ll fuck her.

Aaron hits himself. Open palm, nothing too flashy. Right in the cheek. He hopes it’ll leave a mark, and wants to do it again and again and again, like he’s taking revenge for this woman he imagines, but it’s as pointless and stupid as anything else he’s ever done in this room. He sits on his hands instead, presses his weight onto them, holds himself in place.

His other self. His older self. His past self. Him. Always him. Hurting people for the smallest amount of unimpeded sensation. It’s like pinching yourself to wake from a dream, only someone else feels the pain.

Stupid.

He’ll never become that man now. And as he pictures him, with his shiny-arsed suit and his unchecked casual cruelty, he’s glad of that. He hates him. If he could reach into his future and strangle him, beat him, claw at him until he rips into pieces, he would. In less than a heartbeat.

His hands twitch under him.

But the other future, Monica’s future, Maria’s future, Indira’s future, the one they’re forcing on him with indifferent calculation and undisguised irritation and what feels disconcertingly like love, he doesn’t want it, either. He rejects it as thoroughly as he does every other possible version of himself.

He won’t be the older man, hurting people. He can’t be any kind of man, not any more, not if they’re telling even the slightest fraction of the truth about their intentions. And he refuses to be what they claim to want. He’s looked in the mirror, seen the slight but, now he knows what he’s looking for, unmistakable signs of estrogen working its way through his body, and tried to see himself altered to their specifications: bigger here, rounder there, softer everywhere. Whether he sees a misshapen, ugly creature (as he did yesterday) or something that could actually be mistaken for a woman (as he does today), he rejects the vision entirely.

Why not leave him be?

Idiot. You know why.

He knows what they see when they look at him, when they open him up, look past the surface; they see a serial sexual harasser. They see a rich boy, graduate of a prestigious private school, who walked into a well-regarded university and proceeded to amuse himself at the expense of the women around him, secure in the knowledge that his parents’ money would make any and all consequences vanish.

Well, rich boy, here’s a consequence you can’t escape, at last.

That’s what they see; what does he see when he looks inside himself? If he has to be honest — and what other choice does he have, here, in this prison, where all directions lead right back to this concrete cell? — he’s not sure there’s anything inside him to find. He’s barely a person, just a collection of bad habits and poor self-control, masquerading as human.

But Stefan…

Stef.

He acted like he mattered. Like he could see something, someone there. Someone to care about, to befriend. Someone to — and let’s fucking say it, Aaron, right here in the near-dark — love.

You broke that like you broke everything else.

Fuck it.

Fuck him.

‘You’re my reason.’ Fuck off! Friends don’t do that to each other. They don’t step over that line, no matter what.

Sent him away. For good or ill, he’s gone and he’s not coming back. Just you now, Aaron.

Not Aaron for long, though…

The funny thing is, now that he’s started thinking about the woman they want to make from him, he almost can’t stop. His mind’s eye ably lengthens his hair, swells his body in the appropriate places, dresses it in clothes like the girls here wear. The woman wears her hair loose and her nails painted and she smiles like the world’s a joke only she understands; she walks out of here with Stef and the others, and doesn’t look back.

He can see her, but he’s not her. She’s someone else, someone better, someone new. And for a moment he’s happy for her, in a way he can’t imagine ever being for himself.

He opens his eyes, embraces the dull light, dispels the image. She’s a dream, a fantasy, a person he can’t ever become. Maybe it’s the idea of the new start he hasn’t earned; maybe it’s the thought that there’s a way out of here that doesn’t end in death. Maybe it’s the womanhood, the transition; maybe that’s the chasm he can’t cross, the thing he can’t withstand, the fate he’ll fight against with everything he has.

Maybe it’s because he knows, more clearly than he’s ever known anything, that he doesn’t deserve it.