22. Waterslide

2007 August 7
Tuesday

Sometimes all it takes is getting away from your life for a while, and going for a dip.

Surrounded by hundreds of acres of woodland and bisected by a wide, slow-flowing river, Peri Park is the home counties’ premier self-contained holiday resort: a sprawl of villas, apartments, restaurants, plazas and play areas, clustered around an entertainment village which has at its heart an enormous multi-level swimming complex, domed under glass, teeming with tropical plants and complete with its own wave machine, over a dozen waterslides, and nearly two dozen poolside bars, eating areas, and family-friendly chill zones.

It’s about the best thing thirteen-year-old Shahida’s ever experienced.

For most of her life she lived with her parents in Essex, in a village awkwardly positioned for all forms of entertainment, but most especially swimming, being far enough from both the beach and London that every excursion was an expensive compromise. Worse, the visits to see her gran’s sister’s family in Edinburgh, to take advantage of the pools there, were forever promised but never delivered, and holidays farther afield, to see their extended family in Lahore, similarly always seemed to fall through. Time and money, work and responsibilities; Shahida tried not to complain. She swam instead in the pool in the nearby town, but couldn’t find much joy there: her mum said the council never funded the place properly, and that plans to extend and expand it always ended up abandoned, but whatever the reason it was a miserable place, squat and dirty, always packed too full of people, with an unpleasant smell and a strict time limit for swimmers. Dad took her every couple of weeks anyway, so she could keep her form up and practise her diving, and it was fun enough, in the absence of better options. Stopping in the park for an ice cream after was reliably the best part.

And then Dad died, and Shahida forgot about swimming for a while.

Six months later, almost to the day, she and Mum moved out of the old house. They went farther inland, to a new suburb on the outskirts of a city called Almsworth, into a nice new-build house, semi-detached at the garage, done up in mock Tudor cladding and with room to expand. It could have swallowed their old house twice over. Mum explained that Dad’s life insurance was pretty good, and Shahida decided to view the place as his last gift to them.

Life began again: Mum went back to school and so did Shahida, excited for her new start in a new city.

It’s not been everything she hoped. She’s had difficulty making friends; there aren’t that many kids her age in the suburb, and while there are a couple of local prospects she’s cultivating it’s hard to get truly close with people when you only see them at school. She’s playing the flute again, but doesn’t find the music the school band selects especially interesting. And her schoolwork’s continued the way it always has, unchallenging and boring. Bit by bit she’s made a life, but mostly she finds it notable for the things she wishes for, the lost puzzle pieces: a real, close friend; a challenge; and some bloody excitement!

And she still doesn’t get many opportunities to swim! Not until now. Not until the combined incomes of Mum and her new boyfriend finally grant them the opportunity to take the first real holiday of Shahida’s life. Not until Shahida begged Mum and Edward to take her to the biggest waterpark in the country, handily located less than forty miles from their new home. Not until here!

Dad always said he wanted to take her somewhere like this, but while it’s not quite the same without him, she can’t bring herself to feel sad any more; two years is a long time to mourn. Eventually she found a spot for him inside her, and remembers him solely the way he asked to be remembered: happily, and with love. He resurfaces from time to time, and it’s like she can feel his arms around her, comforting her, telling her that he’s okay, that she’s okay, and everything about that has just become normal now.

Shahida smiles, taps her heart in remembrance, and returns to the view looking out over Peri Paradise.

She already knows the place well. On their first full day at the park she stood in her swimsuit at the entrance and looked out over the stepped pools, building a mental map of all the activities available to her and planning her route. Today’s adventures start at the topmost level of Paradise, a rocky outcrop that hosts two restaurants, a sunning area festooned with palm trees and pink people, and this, the viewing platform, which backs onto the Grand Flume and from which you can watch the crowds ebb and flow like the tides.

The sun, diffused by the great glass dome that bends closer here than anywhere else, glows warm and comforting on her bare shoulders. She’s about to head off for the flume when someone catches her eye:

Leaning against the railing a little way along from her, but looking down over the edge rather than out across the strata of swimming pools, is a boy, about her height and thus probably about her age, with blond hair plastered wet to his cheeks. Under his loose t-shirt and long swimming shorts he looks thin, almost delicate, but Shahida might still have approached him if he’d been twice her size; she’s never been intimidated by boys the way people expect, probably because, unlike the girls at school, she has no investment in whether or not they like her. Besides, other kids her age, alone and unsupervised and pensive, are inherently interesting!

He looks up as she leans on the railing next to him, and he returns her welcoming smile with the sort of blushing nervousness she likes to see on a boy.

“Hey,” she says, rolling sideways on the railing so she’s propping herself on one elbow, and pretending like she only just noticed him. Nonchalance works best for befriending the shy ones, and the shy ones are her favourites. “It’s pretty great here, isn’t it?”

“Hmm?” he says, and then almost laughs when she gestures out at Paradise. “Oh, yeah. It’s nice.”

“’Nice’ is absolutely an understatement,” Shahida says, turning again to rest her back on the railing, to indicate that this boy, this stick-thin kid who still has yet to look right at her, is as of now more interesting than all the myriad delights behind and below. “Coming here was my idea, and now Mum and Edward are already talking about coming back next year. Because there’s nothing like these pools anywhere else in the country!” It’s true: Edward’s an accountant, and when he explained to a very serious Shahida the kind of budget they were working with for their first holiday she almost screamed. They could have gone anywhere in the country — and many places abroad — but, as luck would have it, the best swimming in England turned out to have been right on their doorstep for two years. Shahida knows this for certain; her research was very thorough. “There’s other stuff to do here at Peri, like walks in the woods and horseback riding and stuff, but you can do that in a hundred other places. I don’t know why you’d bother when you could come and enjoy—” she straightens, spins around to face out across the dome and throws her arms in the air, “—this paradisical place!”

The boy screws up his face, giggling. “‘Paradisical’? Is that a proper word?”

“Who needs proper words,” she says grandly, “when you have a tropical swimming complex maintained at exactly twenty-nine-and-a-half degrees centigrade!” She’s aware she’s over-egging it a bit, but her enthusiasm’s genuine, and it’s fun to let yourself get carried away; besides, she got a laugh out of him, didn’t she? She lowers her voice to a whisper and adds, “The ideal temperature for swimming.”

“You haven’t swum yet,” the boy says, pointing to Shahida’s bone-dry swimsuit and then blushing and looking away, obviously feeling like he was just hugely inappropriate. So cute!

“Not today,” she says, flicking at the flared skirt of her suit. “Not yet. I have a plan!” She smiles at him again, draws out another blush. “What about you? Which pools have you tried?”

“Um,” he says, pointing, “just that one.”

She follows his finger and frowns in disbelief. “That’s the kiddy pool,” she says flatly. “You don’t want to go in the kiddy pool.” Exaggeratedly she widens her eyes, pretending to have been struck with sudden inspiration. “You should come with me! I can show you the good stuff!”

He looks over towards the gaggle of parents hiding their sunburns under the parasols that surround the plaza. “I’m supposed to stay with—”

“Oh, come on!” Shahida reaches for his arm and drags him away from the railing. The queue for the Grand Flume isn’t far, and if she can get him there, away from any family members who might object to her borrowing him, she’s home free. He offers basically no resistance, and she pulls him across the stone tiles. “Let’s ride the flume and then I’ll show you all the sights.” Keep him talking; keep him distracted. “How long have you been here?”

The boy staggers a little under her grip; his wrist is so thin! “Uh, we got here two days ago. We didn’t come to the dome until today, though.” He smiles at her and she smiles back, to encourage him. “We went horseback riding yesterday,” he adds sheepishly.

“Mistake!” Shahida says, laughing. “Clearly you need to stick with me. I’ll show you everything in the proper order.” She lets go of his wrist as they approach the queue, skipping around behind him to trap him in place. She turns him around to face her. “You have to see things the right way, or you won’t get the full experience. You should ride the slides and then try out the relaxing whirlpool baths, not the other way round. Oh, and at three, they empty out the wave pool for an hour so people can ride mini jet-skis! We’re not old enough for that, unfortunately.”

“How old are you?” he asks.

“I turned thirteen in March,” she says triumphantly.

“Oh!” he says, rubbing his wrist where she grabbed it. “Cool! I turn thirteen in a month.”

“That’s perfect!” Shahida says. “It’s clearly fate that we met. I needed a friend to share this place with and you—” she turns them both around again and points to the gaping mouth of the water slide; there’s only one person in front of them in the queue now, “—needed to try that. It’s the tallest flume in Europe!”

She’s clearly won him over, because he says, “You’re such a dork for this place,” and laughs again, and it’s the kind of laugh she wants to hear over and over, so she broadens her smile. She wants him to feel comfortable around her.

“What’s your name?” she asks. As he tells her, the attendant indicates that it’s her turn to go, so she steps forward into the maw, looks back over her shoulder and says, “One thing you should know about me, Mark, is that I’m a dork for everything.”

And then there’s nothing but the thrill of the descent.

 

2019 December 11
Wednesday

Dorley Hall’s still so fucking intimidating.

The rain doesn’t help, sure — it’s one of those very English days where the sky will occasionally just open the fuck up for a half-hour or so at a time, and Lorna and Vicky’s trip from the car park was spectacularly ill-timed — but even in the best of conditions the great brick beast of a dorm makes her nervous. More so, now she knows exactly what goes on beneath. She wonders as they approach if, right now, under her feet, some unwilling boy is being subjected to—

She shudders.

Vicky reaches for her hand and squeezes. Lorna takes the opportunity to latch onto her whole arm, to sink into her, to steady her soul against her as well as her body. She becomes a weight against her, slowing them both to a stop.

Rain collects in the collar of Lorna’s shirt. She doesn’t care. Right now, she’s holding Vicky, and nothing else matters.

It’s still tense between them sometimes. Less so as the days pile up, as Lorna manages to keep her shit contained, as she stops just unloading on people who don’t deserve it, but she still despises the distance between them and takes every opportunity to close it. Christine’s visit and Lorna’s apology did a lot to reassure Vicky, so Lorna’s been actively keeping up the connection; texting with Christine, meeting her for lunch when their timetables allow for it, and making arrangements for her to come visit again.

It honestly feels good to have Christine as a friend again. Bit of a shame she’s not going to be around this morning; a catch-up meeting with one of her professors, apparently. Even Dorley’s connections can’t get you out of missing that many lectures.

“We can just go,” Vicky says, positioning herself between Lorna and the Hall. “You don’t have to take what they’re offering.”

Lorna shakes her head, and yanks sopping hair out of her eyes with the hand that’s not keeping them both anchored. “I already did,” she says. “We wouldn’t have covered FFS without them.” It still rankles, finding out that the large, anonymous donation to her crowdfunder came from Dorley. “Not to mention all the estradiol you steal for me. And, God, Vick; I’m fed up with waiting to start my life! They can give me bottom surgery! For free!”

“We really can—”

“No,” she says, wriggling out of Vicky’s grasp. She forces a laugh. “I’m being silly, Vick. I’m letting my imagination run away with me. Whatever they do underground is none of my business. It can’t be, not if I’m going to know about this place and stop my brain from dribbling out of my ears. And if I don’t care, they don’t care. Nothing’s going to happen to me in there that I don’t want to happen.”

“I wouldn’t let it,” Vicky whispers. “And we can still make it work without them.”

“I know. Vick, you’re sweet, you’re, God, you’re so fucking sweet, and I love you to pieces. But I’m here now, and I’m already in on the joke and stressed as hell about it, so I might as well reap the rewards. Come on; I’m drenched and so are you.”

She reaches for Vicky’s hand again and drags her towards Dorley Hall, trying to ignore the way the place still looms so large, and failing: she hunches her shoulders against its bulk as they come up to the entryway, but soon they’re inside and hanging up sopping wet coats and squeezing out soaking hair and too busy for Lorna to spend all that much time worrying about it any more.

“‘In on the joke’?” Vicky says, grinning.

Lorna groans. “I’ve been talking to Christine too much.”

Vicky’s still reaching for the fingerprint lock when a girl bursts out of the kitchen doors, wraps her in a hug and then immediately steps back, shaking her arms exaggeratedly to dry them. “Ew!” she squeals. “Victoria! You’re so wet!”

“You noticed?” Vicky says. “Lorna, this is Jodie, from my intake. Jo, this is Lorna.”

“Oh my God,” Jodie says, leaping forward and grabbing one of Lorna’s hands. “I’ve wanted to meet you for so long! Victoria’s told me all about you!”

Lorna smiles, limply accepts a kiss on her knuckles, and says, “Hi.”

Jodie’s dressed mostly in black, with matching wine-red stockings and hair, and she jangles when she moves quickly: jewellery, apparently.

“Jo runs a World of Darkness stream,” Vicky says, “and—”

“Right!” Lorna says, making a show of remembering. “You’re that Jodie! I caught a little of your stream, once.” It’s a lie, but only just; Vicky’s been briefing her on people she’s likely to run into — fighting against the impediment that is Lorna’s terrible memory for names — and showed her some screenshots of the stream. Jodie dresses up for it. “I like the hat you wore.”

“Which one?”

“Oh, the, uh, it was like a sun hat, but black, with, um, a pink accent? Like a gothic, vampiric sun hat.”

“Isn’t it great?” Jodie says, bouncing on her heels. “I got that locally, actually! Normally I get my things online, because, yeah, Almsworth, not exactly the goth capital of the world, but there was a whole outfit in the window of a charity shop in town and it was just gorgeous so we went inside and they had boxes of this stuff they were still putting out. It was like an awesome old lady witch just died and her familiars were donating all her clothes.” She mimes something complicated which, if Lorna uses her imagination, could possibly be a raven delivering a box of clothes. “Very sad. Anyway, we got first pick and I got so many great things for the stream. I can show you sometime, if you’d like?”

“Oh! Yes. Maybe?”

“Hmm,” Jodie says, frowning at Lorna and picking limply at a wet lock of hair, “you’re here to see the consultant, right? Well, she’s always running late, so how about you come up with me and get yourself sorted out?”

“Sorted out?” Vicky asks.

“Yes! Both of you! You’re soaked. You need showers, fresh clothes… Victoria’s got her own shower, of course, even if she does have to climb over fifty boxes of Paige’s stuff to get to it, so you—” she points at Lorna, “—can use mine!”

“Jo, it’s really okay—”

“It’s decided!” Jodie says, and drags Lorna towards the stairs. “And don’t worry about missing anyone; you’ll be done with plenty of time to catch up.”

Lorna half-turns and shrugs at Vicky. Getting cleaned up would be nice — she hadn’t exactly been looking forward to facing this place while looking and feeling like a drowned rat — and she’d much rather accept a shower from this Jodie girl than ask one of the sponsors. So they both follow her up to the second floor, where Vicky disappears into her room and Jodie opens the door to hers in the manner of someone presenting an ancient tomb on the day of its first unearthing.

It’s surprisingly normal inside. She does have a vase of black roses on her windowsill, though.

“So,” Jodie says, “bathroom’s there, and everything you need should be on the caddy in the shower cubicle; there’s a clean towel on top of the basket by the sink; and when you’re done I, um…” She intertwines her fingers nervously. “I have something to confess.”

Ominous.

But the shower’s hot and the water pressure is downright fantastic and when she’s done, and found the set of clean — and not particularly vampiric — clothes left outside the bathroom door, and dressed herself and started drying her hair, she feels content and comfortable and not especially concerned about whatever it is Jodie has to confess.

Jodie re-enters the bedroom backwards, with two mugs of tea, pushing open the door with her bottom, and smiles when she sees Lorna’s new, much less bedraggled appearance.

“Looking good!” she says, and sets out a coaster and a mug of tea on the dresser.

“Thanks,” Lorna says. “And thanks for the clothes, too.”

“Okay, so, the thing is,” Jodie says, waving away Lorna’s thanks and settling down on the end of the bed, “I had an ulterior motive for asking you up here. I wanted to get you on your own, because I need some advice.”

Advice? Not where Lorna thought this might go. She nods, and embraces her mug of tea with both hands. “If I can help,” she says, “I’d be happy to.”

Jodie chews on her lip for a moment. “So,” she says, “I haven’t done my NPH yet. That’s, uh— you know what that is? Yeah, okay. And it’s not actually unusual to leave it so late, like, last year, Pippa’s year — you know Pippa? — it was gone Christmas before some of them were making their final decisions, but this year, this intake, everyone’s a prodigy, right? Yasmin and Julia did theirs a while ago, Paige even earlier, Victoria did hers last year — which I guess you know! — and, sure, Christine’s a holdout like me, but she’s also the world’s most adorable disaster and has let way too many people think of her as trans to be anything else at this point. But. Anyway. It’s not really my NPH that’s the issue? I mean, I’m sort of fixated on it, but delaying it’s a symptom, not the actual problem, right? The problem is— oh, God, this is awkward…”

“Hey,” Lorna says gently, “relax.” Jodie’s not at all what she expected from a random bad-boy-turned-girl. She considers for a moment that she might have been encouraged, or outright ordered, to put on an act for the benefit of the dangerous outsider, but dismisses the thought as useless paranoia: after a certain point, you have to assume either that everything is Machiavellian manipulation from a houseful of devious kidnappers, or that the girls are, for the most part, what they appear to be, and Lorna’s experience with Vicky and the other members of her intake strongly suggests the latter interpretation. And even if it is sensible to assume the worst from the sponsors, none of Vicky’s intake are in that role. “Whatever you want to say, you can say.”

“Thank you,” Jodie says, nodding emphatically. “So. I haven’t finalised my New Personal History, right, and that means my identity is still sort of in limbo? Like, I’m enough of a person as far as the uni’s concerned that I can go to lectures and stuff, but my bank account is still controlled by the programme, I don’t technically have a birth certificate… all that crap.” She waves a hand: unimportant. “But it’s my identity that’s the question. I’ve been… thinking about it.”

There’s enough of a pause that Lorna has to fill it. “About… being a girl?”

Jodie’s eyes go wide. “No! No, that’s, um, very much decided. I like me this way. I love me! But, well, also, my history is kind of important to me? Not the stuff that brought me here, the bad stuff, the stuff I won’t even try to foist on you until we know each other way better, at least, assuming you even want to know me— Shit, that was a presumptuous thing to say, actually!”

“Not at all,” Lorna insists, stifling a laugh. There’s something very engaging about Jodie, for all that she talks like she’s a can of Coke and someone shook her up before opening her. “You’re a friend of Vick’s right? And Christine’s?” Another emphatic nod from Jodie. “Then you’re a friend of mine. We can work out the details later.” She wonders for a moment if she’s going to regret this, and then decides it probably doesn’t make any difference. At this point she’s knee-deep in Dorley Hall; why not make friends?

“So,” Jodie says, “I’ve been toying with ways to describe myself, should I ever meet another trans woman. Another one I can actually talk to about being trans, I mean! Because I can’t go unloading on that girl in the basement; she’s got enough to deal with. Have you met her? She’s really nice, but she’s crushing hard on this boy down there? And she knows what’s going to happen to him but she can’t say anything? And he’s starting to see her for who she really is and he’s denying his feelings and he’s refusing to accept what’s happening but you can see the little glimmers of who he might become, right? And she’s helping keep him stable and he’s helping her in his own way and, God, Lorna, it’s so sweet and so sad and I’m so addicted and where was I? Shit. Yes. How to describe myself. So.” She holds up both her hands, one with her thumb touching her forefinger in an oval shape, the other curled into a fist, and wiggles them. “Trans people. You have eggs, right?” She nods at her more open hand. “Well-understood concept. And then you have me.” She nods at the closed fist. “I’ve been thinking of myself as having been something more like a seed. A girl in potentia, right? Now, an egg is fragile, yes? Vulnerable to moments of revelation, random events or people that will crack her shell and reveal the gooey girly mess inside, right?” Lorna, bemused, nods, and Jodie grins and drops her egg hand. “Well, a seed is tougher. And there’s not really any stuff inside, right? It can last years without breaking. Lifetimes, maybe. And it’s fine like that! It can happily be a seed until, eventually, it biodegrades. Circle of life! Even if you break it apart, crack it like you would an egg, there’s just bits inside. Crumbly little seedy bits. But.” She plunges her seed hand down into her lap, buries it between her calves. “If you plant the seed, if you water it, nurture it, love it, then maybe, after a while, you get a little plant. And if you keep watering the plant, if you care for it until it’s strong enough to stand up on its own, you get a flower, right? And maybe… maybe the flower is beautiful, and enjoys being beautiful, and likes the feel of the sun on her leaves… You get the idea?”

“I think so.”

Jodie sips her tea, looking out of the window as she does, at the rain lashing against the pane. “I could’ve gone my whole life as a seed, happy enough, with not a moment of dysphoria and not a second of questioning my gender. I even played a girl in a play at school and that’s egg-cracking ground zero, but it did nothing for me. But this place planted me and took care of me and helped me grow, and now… Now I’m happier than I ever was! More me than I ever was. Free of restrictions, free of expectations. Free! But my history, the guy I spent the first twenty years of my life as, he’s still important to me, too, right? He messed up, yeah, absolutely, and I’d want to take him aside and give him the sternest talking to if I ever met him, but he’s still me, and he’s still important, and I don’t want to forget him. He’s still inside me, in memories, in habits, in some of the things I like, in some of the things I say… Just because I, um, grew out of him, doesn’t mean he’s gone, yes?” She’s frowning slightly. “And this is what I wanted to talk to another trans woman about. And not someone like Victoria, either, or Donna, my sponsor; they’re both lovely but they’re also both from here, you know? Wonky perspective.” She wobbles a flattened palm from side to side. “I need a normal trans woman, like you.”

“Oh,” Lorna says, unused to being considered normal. “Sure. Go ahead?”

“I’m trans,” Jodie says. “I’ve done a lot of thinking and it just fits, yes? I’m a trans woman. It feels right to say. But that’s not my question. It’s the setup to my question.” She squirms, wrinkling the bedsheets. “What I want to know is… Being out, is it worth it?” She raises a finger to forestall Lorna’s answer — unnecessary, since Lorna hasn’t yet formulated one; she’s not even sure what question Jodie’s asking, exactly — and then taps herself twice near the base of her belly. “I’m still intact. Down there. Not my balls, obviously—” a giggle bursts through her otherwise serious demeanour, “—but otherwise I’m shipshape. And I kinda like it that way? For a while I thought I didn’t, I thought I’d want to get rid of it like Christine and Victoria and all the rest, but then I just kind of got used to the idea of being a girl with a penis, you know? Another thing that just felt comfortable, felt right. But if I want to keep it, and if I want to be known as a trans woman, which I do, those are both things that dictate my NPH, you know? I have to fill it out as a trans girl. Officially.”

“You mean,” Lorna says, “if you don’t want bottom surgery, you have to be trans? That’s… coercive.”

“Not really!” Jodie says quickly. “I mean, think about it: if they construct a watertight identity for me as a cis woman and then I, say, want to go swimming or something… Well, I can’t ever go swimming. Because if I get found out, then my identity gets looked into, and if it gets back to here…” She waves her hand again, and Lorna understands.

“Suddenly everyone’s in danger.”

“Yes.”

“Because of your penis.”

“Yes. And I’m not fighting that, Lorna, I’m really not, and I understand why it’s the policy, but this is why Donna’s been telling me to take my time thinking about it even though I know she’s waiting for me to choose, because it’s scary, Lorna! I want to be trans, for real, on paper. I want to be me! I’ve seen what it’s cost Victoria and Paige to have to pretend to be cis girls and I don’t want that for me but, also…” She shrugs. “I’m scared of it. Scared of being out. Because of transphobes. TERFs. The bloody Tories! I’m scared of all of them! So I think what I’m asking, what I want to know, is can I be me, and still be safe? And, if I can’t, if that’s a sacrifice I have to make, is being in community with other trans people worth the risk of having to be trans in this country?”

Well, Lorna? Is it?

Jesus fucking Christ.

That’s a hell of a question to have to answer so early in the morning.

 

* * *

 

Therapy’s a mirror and a refusal to look away.

Five foot six (and a bit). Aaron’s been five foot six (and a bit) since he stopped growing, years back. He’d been one of those boys who shot up early in puberty and then just stayed there, increasingly emasculated as the other boys outgrew him, and increasingly frustrated as his mother measured him against the door frame of his old bedroom in the old house, marking notches closer and closer together. When he went off to boarding school he lost track of it, and endured much from boys both older and larger than he, with his diminutive nature a particular sticking point. So, one summer holiday, staying at his parents’ new house, he waited for them to go out, and rummaged in the drawer under their bed for the rolled-up greaseproof paper he saw his mother pack on their last day in the old place. She always had been sentimental, not that it ever helped him, particularly; he always felt like he was her son aesthetically more than spiritually or biologically or whatever, like she clung more to the idea of him more than to the ugly reality of Aaron himself. So she ritualised their relationship, performed it, and one of the things mothers do is keep track of their growing boy’s height. She traced the height marks onto paper before they moved out, and kept it safe. For all he knew she got it out occasionally and imagined what the version of him she preferred was getting up to. Pencil marks on greaseproof paper, describing the boy she wished she had.

He rolled it out and lay on it, flattened down his hair and marked off his new height: a fraction of an inch taller than when they left the old place, years ago. So that was it, then: already his adult height at fifteen.

He tore the paper up, scattered the remains on their bed. He kept his resolve when he heard her crying over them; she didn’t cry when the head of the house at school called them in to tell them he’d had his arm broken, but she weeps over paper?

Five foot six (and a bit). That’s how tall he was at fifteen, and that’s how tall he was when he came to Dorley Hall. And when he found out about the Goserelin implant, and got the lecture from Will on its effects, he marked his height next to the mirror, stood with his back to it and scratched it into the wood with his fingernail. Just in case. Because that’s what happens with old people, isn’t it? After they’ve run their bodies dry of testosterone or estrogen and begun supplementing with oils and tinctures out of cans with peeling paper labels and sell-by dates from the seventies, they shrink, right? Denying your body testosterone, it’s like the male menopause, or something.

Whatever. Will called him a moron when he asked about it. He probably wouldn’t even have bothered making the marks if this concrete girlboss purgatory hadn’t been so fucking boring, if he hadn’t been filling the brief periods between wanks with whatever he could find to keep himself busy. It’d been the wildest of precautions.

Not so wild, after all.

His eyes flick from the new scratch by the mirror, to his naked reflection, and back again. His imaginary therapist has been telling him to face up to it, to understand every detail of what they’re doing to him, to document it, and while he despises the impulse to do so he has to admit that it’s better than hiding from it and letting his imagination run wild. Even if what he sees in the mirror is horrifying, it could probably still be worse.

Compared to how he was when he got here, his chest is unmistakably swollen (in two places), and his arse and hips are getting fleshy (which might be why his lower back hurts). His face is a little softer (in the way Stef’s is) and his arms… those are probably the most different. He used to be proud of his arms, the way the veins stood out, like they do on body-builders. He might have been short and average-looking and physically unimpressive no matter how many push-ups he did, but he had veins like the ripped guys had, and that was enough. And it was sort of fun to press down on them and watch them pop back up again. Gone now, though. Melted into his softening skin. Another piece of himself he won’t get back.

That, and the height.

Five foot six (and nothing). And that’s being generous.

He asked Stef his height once, and got an answer in centimetres. Not helpful, for Aaron; at the boarding school they insisted on teaching primarily in imperial units — one time, he’s certain, his History teacher cried when he was telling the class how the glorious British Empire gifted its weights and measurements to the world — and while he’s happily converted for almost everything else, human heights are a black box to him. Stef laughed when he came up with a conversion that put Stef at over six foot, and put him out of his misery: Stef’s five foot nine. One hundred seventy-five centimetres. Which would make Aaron…

How should he know? He’s a Geology student. Whatever he is in centimetres, he used to be at least one more.

And it’s exhausting to stay angry. It’s coming up on two weeks since they came clean about their intentions — and more than two months since they started suppressing his testosterone! — and, God help him, it’s sunk in and then some. Yes, he hates it, and he renews that hate every time he sees his reflection, every time he brushes against a sensitive nipple, every time he gets naked to wash and has to feel his arse and his thighs and shave his softening face, but nothing can bring that early anger back. It drained out of him, along with his resolve to fight. And that’s probably for the best: keeping up his rage felt like feeding a cancerous organ, a growth inside him that poisoned his bloodstream and offered him nothing but pain. And he has examples, in Martin and Adam and the others who’ve been shut away in the cells, of the futility of fighting against it, whether mentally or physically. So: resentful resignation, that’s where Aaron’s landed, firmly and decisively.

He snorts, and prods at his bottom. Firmly indeed.

His second phone alarm goes off. 9am. Late for breakfast, so where the hell’s Indira? Usually she’s bustling around him by this point, asking friendly but pointed questions, making veiled threats, ruffling his hair. Is this another one of her little lessons? Is he expected to intuit something from her absence?

Or maybe there’s been some kind of horrible plague, and everyone upstairs is dead? Hmm. Wishful thinking. And it’d suck for Stef, who inexplicably has friends up there. And everyone down here would all die of hunger.

He shrugs, noting in the mirror the slightly different way his chest moves now when he does so, and returns to his routine. He takes his daily photo, saves it out to the computer, throws the phone lightly onto the bed, then turns away from the mirror and rummages in the carefully arranged piles of clothes in the wardrobe. He spent a while late last week sorting through the clothes in there, checking for softness, testing for thickness, trying them out, and eventually settled on a selection of five long-sleeved cotton t-shirts, which he keeps apart from everything else. He grabs one, stands up straight and wraps it carefully around his chest, looping the arms all the way around himself and tying them tight over his belly. He bunches the material up around his sore, swollen parts, and rolls it tightly underneath for a little extra protection.

He’s gotten good at avoiding his reflection during this part, because he knows what it looks like when he wraps his developing chest like this. A few days ago, just to mess around, he posed in the mirror, pulling the t-shirt wrapped around his breast buds tight, like a crop top, and moments later wished he’d had breakfast so he had something inside him to throw up besides acid. He turns his back on the mirror instead, pulling out a short-sleeved t-shirt and tugging it over his head, and finishing with a hoodie and joggers. Then he looks at himself, from every angle he can attain in the mirror, and confirms that he looks more or less like he used to, with perhaps a little extra bulk from the improvised support. Blame it on hormonal weight gain.

Aaron might not be able to stop what they’re doing to him, but he’s fucked if he’s asking for a bra.

 

* * *

 

The direst warning about Dorley Hall: it’s makeover central. The first and second floors in particular are swarming with girls who are still learning, or who have become expert and enjoy exercising their talent, or who have become expert and enjoy inflicting on others the tortures their sponsors subjected them to. Jodie, at least, asked first.

Lorna’s quite enjoying being pampered, actually. And the prep’s given her time to assemble her thoughts, so she can answer Jodie’s question honestly and thoroughly.

“It’s worth it,” she says firmly. “For so many reasons, it’s worth it. For one, you get to be part of a community of people who understand you, who share some of your base assumptions. You talked about Vicky before, and you’re absolutely right that play-acting as a cis girl hurt her; especially because she felt — was made to feel — like she had to do so in front of me. But that’s shit you already knew, or could guess.”

“Mm-hm,” Jodie says, nodding. She’s been sorting through foundations on her dresser, looking for a match for Lorna’s skin; they’re close in colour, but Lorna’s less inclined to accentuate her pallor. She dabs a couple of colours on the back of her hand and lifts a lock of Lorna’s hair, to check the foundation against her skin, and brushes accidentally against the small spot of stubble Lorna’s been letting grow the last couple of days. “Oh. You, uh, missed a spot.”

Lorna bats her hand away, gently but quickly. “Sorry,” she says immediately. “I hate anyone touching that. I hate feeling it on me.” Jodie’s innocent fingers brought with them a familiar cascade of unpleasant memories, the most vivid of which is always the man at the hospital where she worked admin for a while, who reached up from his bed, grabbed roughly at her face and rubbed at her chin and cheeks, checking for facial hair; evidence of maleness.

Jodie, wide-eyed, shakes her head: an apology. “You want to talk about it?”

“Not right now?” Lorna says, rubbing at the fine hairs herself to dispel the sensation. “I’m fine. Really. I’m fine.” Repetition helps. She forces a smile. “I grew out a bit of beard because I want to see Stephanie’s electrolysis consultant today.” She shrugs, sheepish. “Laser didn’t get everything, and I’ve been meaning to get finished off for ages…”

“…and if Dorley’s going to pay, why not take advantage?” Jodie finishes.

“Exactly! It’s not too noticeable, is it?”

“No. I had to lift up your hair to see it. You’re fine. After your consultation, if you want to get rid of it, you can come back up here. I have clean razorblades and stuff, and I’m done with my lectures at eleven.”

“Thanks, Jodie,” Lorna says, and Jodie beams at her and starts dabbing spots of foundation around Lorna’s chin.

“I can avoid the whole area, if you’d like.”

“It’s fine,” Lorna says firmly. “I’m expecting it now. I’ll be fine.” Jodie nods, and Lorna puts her thoughts back together. “I was talking about community, right? And why it’s worth it. And I think it’s because community is safety, Jodie. Your question’s backwards: it shouldn’t be, ‘Is community worth the risk of being yourself?’; it should be, ‘Can you safely be yourself without community?’ If that makes sense? Okay, so, I’m thinking aloud here, but Dorley Hall, the programme, it’s failed you. All of you! It’s all set up to make cis-like women out of you, to push you out into the world to live as cis women, to pretend that the first two decades of your life never happened. And you can live that way, I’m sure — I don’t doubt there are reams of success stories — but, Jodie, it hasn’t escaped my notice that a lot of graduates still live here.” It had been quite startling, when Vicky was first going through the names of the people she might run into, just how many women and nonbinary people still orbited Dorley Hall well into their thirties. “They still live here, or they come back here a lot, and they spend most or all of their time around other graduates. And that’s not a criticism of them! But I think it’s a criticism of the process. Because it’s not just that Dorley girls are the only ones who understand Dorley girls; it’s that the understanding keeps you all safe!” Lorna nods to herself. She likes sorting through her thoughts like this, aloud and preferably with an audience, even if Vicky sometimes has to banish her up to the bedroom when she’s working on an essay. Jodie steadies her head with a hand, and Lorna remembers she’s not supposed to be moving. She continues, as Jodie sponges makeup around her jaw and neck. “Dorley Hall’s like the trans community in microcosm. You’re a big found family — kidnapped family, I suppose — and you all look out for each other and instinctively understand each other’s needs and tell terrible jokes that only make sense inside these walls.” Jodie bites her lip, and nods. “And everyone comes back here because here’s the only place where they can have that. But. But. If you come out as trans, if you embrace it, if you make it your, uh—” Lorna waves a hand, forgetting the terminology.

“—New Personal History—”

“—New Personal History, thank you, then you can still have that when you leave Dorley. We, the great and intermingled and heavily dysfunctional LGBTQIA-plus community, we have our own shit jokes and our own support networks, and we will look out for you, just like your Sisters do. Yeah, we’re far from perfect and we have a fresh bout of infighting every other Wednesday, but we’re out there, Jodie. Dorley Hall doesn’t have to be the only place that understands you.”

“But I could still be cis,” Jodie says, slowly and uncertainly. “Not cis like Victoria or Paige, where they hate it, but cis like Julia and Yasmin. You know them? They’re just down the corridor — only not right now; right now they’re at work — and they’re cis in the world, but to each other they’re just… Julia and Yasmin. They don’t have to pretend with each other like Victoria did with you, and they get the benefits of being, you know, cis.”

“But you don’t want to do that, because…” Lorna says, and pauses for a moment as she decides exactly how she wants to continue. “Because! Jodie, you’re not cis! None of the people here are! And the more I learn about you, the more of you I meet, the clearer it becomes to me that you have trans experiences. Trans lives. It doesn’t matter that you wouldn’t have chosen transition on your own; if you were a seed, like you said, or a pine cone, or a— a— a fucking potato! It doesn’t even matter that you pass well enough that you can fake being cis! Because this country — fuck, most of the fucking world, Jodie — imposes from top to bottom a gendered system on bodies and lives that are incredibly diverse, and when you go out there you’re going to have to survive in compliance with it. You’re going to have to live in a world premised on an assumption that’s hilariously false, that takes as a foundational component the belief that man and woman are two simple and separate categories with no crossover, no complication, no nuance, no third or fourth or four-thousandth option… You’re going to have to exist inside that system just to earn money, to pay rent, to live, and that’s before you even think about actual personal fulfilment! And facing all that down alone is hard, Jodie, it’s so fucking hard, because when you’ve seen the eighth and ninth and tenth colours of the rainbow, you can’t go back. You need the community, because we create little bubbles of reality in the mad, structured chaos of the cis world; places where you can exist as yourself, people around whom you don’t have to keep up the act. And we’re— we’re—” And Lorna stops, snorting as she tries to hold in a laugh and not upset Jodie’s steady hand, keeping herself as still as she can while her shoulders shake. “Sorry,” she continues, once she’s got herself under control. “I just realised I dropped into a speech I wrote a few months back. Imprinted on my brain, you know? You get my point, though, I think. Community is safety, but it’s more than that. It’s a place, and it’s a conceptual space, and it’s a huge group of people who are downright excited for you to be yourself, no matter how weird and delightful that is, and who will help you live that way. We’ve housed people; we’ve funded surgeries; we’ve provided guidance and roadmaps and medication and— and fucking love, Jodie. When I say I wouldn’t be cis, even if it meant no-one would treat me weird in the street any more, even if it meant better employment prospects or not bracing for a heart attack whenever I open Twitter, it’s because I can’t imagine giving up the community. Giving up the knowledge that there’s more to life than cis gender mythology. Giving up all those extra colours in the rainbow. I love being trans, Jodie, because it’s me and because it’s real. I love it! And I think you will, too.”

Jodie wants her to present her lips to be painted, so Lorna does so, consenting to be silenced. Jodie dabs at her, still frowning, in concentration and contemplation.

“I think you’re right,” Jodie says after a little while. “Um, do this?” She pops her lips, and Lorna copies her. Jodie nods again, smiling, and starts putting things away as she talks. “I think you’re absolutely right. God, Lorna, you don’t know how long I’ve been obsessing over this! And I’ve bugged Donna about it and Tabitha and the handful of other grads who are officially trans and they were just like—” she lowers her voice a little, dropping into an impression of someone Lorna can’t identify, “—‘Oh, it’s easy, Jodie, it’s just better this way,’ which was, you know, reassuring but not actually helpful, and I suppose I could have pressed harder and got into an actual conversation about it but I’ve caused Donna enough trouble over the years and Tabitha’s so busy, and kind of intimidatingly pretty, actually, like, God, have you met her? I hate that she’s straight, shit. Unfair. But, yes, wow, Lorna! I’ve been chewing over this for so long and it’s like you just reached into my head and pulled out all my thoughts and picked them apart for the good ones and threw the rest away because, shit, yes, I’m going to do it.”

Lorna blinks. “You’re…?”

“Lean back?” Jodie says, and Lorna, confused, obeys; Jodie douses her in fixing spray. “I’m going to be a trans woman. Legally. Paperwork-ly. I’ve decided. And I always wondered, if I do decide to get bottom surgery one day, but I go trans on my NPH now, will I regret being out? And I think, now, actually, that I won’t. Although I also, y’know, think that I won’t get bottom surgery. You know?”

Lorna sorts through her words for the salient ones. “You’re going to be a trans woman?” she says. “That’s great! Jodie—!”

She’s interrupted by a raised finger. Jodie’s digging in her bag for her phone, and when she finds it she places it on the dresser and dials out, on speaker.

“Hi,” an unfamiliar soprano voice says, picking up after just two rings. “Everything okay, Jo?”

Jodie, suddenly overcome with excitement, seems unable to speak. Lorna prods her, unblocks her, and it all comes out at once. “I’m ready, Donna. I’m ready to do my NPH! I’ve been thinking and talking and I’ve decided and, Donna, I’m going to be trans. I’m keeping it and I’m going to be trans, Donna!”

There’s a moment of silence, and then Donna replies, “Really? Seriously?”

“Yep!”

“Fuck yes, Jodie! Welcome to the winning team. What tipped you over?”

“Remember I told you about Vicky’s girlfriend, Lorna? She’s here, and she talked me through it. She helped me make up my mind.”

“God. I’m going to buy that girl a present.”

“She can hear you, Donna.”

“Hi,” Lorna says, hesitant.

“Oh! Hi, Lorna! I’m going to buy you a motherfucking present! Well done! Jo, I have to get back to work, but I’ll drop by tonight and we can go over everything, okay?”

“Sounds great,” Jodie says.

“Proud of you, sweetie.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too,” Donna says, and the line clicks as she hangs up. Lorna, for a moment, envies the connection the two of them seem to have. What was that about found families?

Jodie turns back to Lorna with a huge smile on her face, and almost tackle-hugs her, leaning back at the last moment so she doesn’t mess up the makeup job. “Thank you,” she whispers, and kisses Lorna behind the ear. “God,” she says, sitting back, curling her legs up under herself and spinning from side to side on her chair, “there are so many people I can’t wait to tell!” She squeals. “I can come out on stream!”

“That’s really something it’s okay to do?” Lorna asks.

Jodie flaps a dismissive hand. “Oh, yes. Donna’s been hoping I’d jump this way. She’ll have everything ready, and we can have preliminary documents done by the end of the week, probably.”

“How does that even work?”

She shrugs. “Don’t know, actually. Never really been all that interested in the mechanical side of things, you know? I think we do birth certificates from hospitals that have since been demolished, or something? Paper-only records, electronic filing mislaid, et cetera. Donna says the machinery of the British state is like all other machines made in Britain: unreliable and full of holes.” She stops fidgeting on her chair for a second and reaches out for Lorna’s hand. “You think it’s okay for me to do this, right? To be trans? Like, specifically a trans woman? I’m not appropriating anything?”

Lorna laughs, and pats her hand. “Jodie, we’ve known each other for about an hour, and we’ve already talked about my beard hairs and your penis. You’re definitely trans; no-one overshares like us.”

Jodie giggles, and takes in and lets out a lungful of air, blowing her hair out of her face and leaning back on her chair. “God,” she says. “Weight off my mind.” She flips her phone screen-side up on the dresser and pouts at it. “Ugh. Why can’t it be lunchtime already?”

“Hungry?”

“It’s when my partner gets out of lectures. I don’t know if you know xem? We do the stream together.”

“Oh, yeah,” Lorna says, concentrating. “Connor, yes? With the big vampire teeth.”

“Xe’s known I’m trans since we first met,” Jodie says. She blushes. “I, um, sort of broke the rules to tell xem, but I told xem I was still deciding if I wanted to be stealth, and xe said my secret was safe with xem. Actually… You know what? I’m going to wait until Friday night. We don’t stream until Saturday, and on Friday, Connor’s making us dinner, so I’ll make it into an event.” She giggles. “A night to remember. God, I’m so excited to be open. Really open. No more existential crises for me, at least until we can decide whether to use my stored sperm.”

Lorna can’t help but look away.

“Oh,” Jodie says, “sorry. Sore point?”

“A little. I couldn’t afford to get any stored.” Lorna chews on her cheek, thinking. “Actually, I guess, maybe I could, now?”

Jodie nods vigorously. “Yep. We’d pay for it. Ask Auntie MILF.”

Lorna coughs. “‘Auntie MILF’?”

“Just my little revenge,” Jodie says, grinning. “I called her a MILF in my first year and got an earful and a week in the cells. But now that I’m a girl… She likes us to be a little rebellious.”

Lorna cross-references that assertion with the thing about being put in the cells for a week. “She… likes it when you call her a MILF?”

“She pretends she hates it. But I’ve known her a while now. Beatrice angry and Beatrice pretending to be angry are very different. Donna says she likes being busted out of the role she plays, that she mainly puts it on to help the first and second years acclimate, and to remind the rest of us to play our roles.”

“God,” Lorna says, “this place is so weird.”

“I know. We’re the mice who chased off the scientists, and now we control the maze. But the street mice say we’re kind of odd. Come on!” Jodie grabs at Lorna’s hand, pulling her up from the chair. “Let’s go back down to the kitchen; I want to tell Tabitha.”

“Tabitha?” Lorna says, smoothing down her borrowed clothes. Jodie’s mentioned her a few times; Lorna’s blanked on the name each time.

“I thought you met her? Black, about your height, somewhere in her thirties, tragic love life? Crazy pretty?”

“Oh,” Lorna says, stretching the vowel as realisation dawns, “Tabby. Yes, I met her.” The one whose ex-boyfriends are all ex-girlfriends, Vick said. Lorna had a thought about that…

“She’s a darling. Now come on!”

Lorna, closer to the mirror, peers at the makeup Jodie applied: heavy eyeliner, dark lipstick, and contouring — something Lorna never learned how to do. “You’ve made me look a little bit goth, haven’t you?”

“I think it suits you!”

“You know what?” she says, grabbing her bag from the bed and following an ecstatic Jodie out of the room. “I think it suits me, too.”

 

* * *

 

Like everything else down here, the dining room’s gotten a little more plush since the more violent boys had their batteries taken out and got put away in their boxes. Metal cutlery’s still a rare treat, but the chairs have sprouted cushions, the lights have dimmed and warmed from their prior harsh blue-white, and a few plants have appeared on the sideboard; plastic, Aaron assumes, and shudders to think what Declan might have achieved with access to a ceramic pot, fake dirt, and some fake leaves. Breakfast these days has also been upgraded, and now includes a choice of cereals, toast with butter and Marmite, fruit, and orange juice. Even the coffee tastes better.

Just a shame Stef isn’t around to eat with him this morning.

No-one is, actually. No Stef, no Indira. Edy, sitting with Adam in the common room and comforting him after his morning cry — or possibly his morning tantrum; the soundproofing between rooms is pretty good, and all Aaron can see is the doubled-over Adam’s shaking back — is keeping a discreet half-eye on him, and brought him coffee when he first stumbled in, but aside from her he’s had no human contact since bidding Stef goodnight. Martin, may his personality rest in peace, is probably knocking around somewhere, although Aaron’s long since given up keeping track of him, ever since it became clear that he wasn’t going to do or become anything interesting any time soon.

Where is Stefan? Since Aaron finally emerged from his room they’ve spent a lot of time together, enough time that Aaron’s having a hard time not thinking about how close they’ve gotten. But it’s only natural that they’d intensify their friendship, right? The two of them are basically the only sane ones left, what with the drunk and the church boy taking turns being the least functional person in any given room, the interchangeable violence twins Ollie and Raph rotting away in the cells — with one of them, according to Stef, smacking himself around for reasons and gratifications Aaron can’t fucking begin to imagine — and Will… Will asking for Stef, unburdening himself like he’s a sensitive boy with real feelings and a real human heart inside his wooden body, despite being the one who slammed Maria’s head into the fucking floor.

Jesus, this place.

Stef, though. Yes, it’s normal and natural that they should be so close, but he finds himself thinking about Stef when he’s not around, and that’s crossing a line, surely? He shouldn’t look forward to seeing another guy quite so much, right?

Hah; if Stef can even be thought of as ‘another guy’ any more. Aaron’s seen him with little bits of makeup on a few times now, when he hasn’t washed it all off properly. Every time, he wants to grab him, drag him away from Pippa and the others, shut him away in his room and provide for him a space where he can be a fucking man for a while, away from the pervasive and pernicious influence of the sponsors, of his so-called sister.

His sister. Stef’s been calling her that. And he means it! Aaron knows he does because he made fun of him and Stef, very seriously, doubled down. He had to agree to be nice to her, to treat her the way he’d treat Stef’s actual sister, but, if he’s honest, he only put up a fight for the look of the thing. Because what’s the point of being rude to any of them, anyway? What does it get him? A moment’s satisfaction, which down here goes about as far as he can spit. And the few times he’s really pulled it out, when he’s dug deep into the worst things he can think of and tried actually to hurt one of the girls for what they’re doing to him, it’s reminded him of before, of the faces of the women who didn’t deserve it, so much so that it’s ruined the simple joy of calling his captor a bitch.

And what would those women think, anyway? The women he persistently harassed? If they knew the little shit who persisted in broadcasting his dick at them had been locked in a basement for months, that he was on course to have his fucking balls removed? Would they care? Would they call the police?

He rolls his eyes and shovels another plastic spoonful of Coco Pops into his mouth. No. Only two people have ever gone to bat for him: Stef, who is stuck down here with him, and Elizabeth, who no doubt would react with disgust if she found out about the things he did after she left.

So he’ll stop trying to antagonise the sponsors, because it gains him nothing. And he’ll be a little nicer to Pippa if Stef asks it of him, because it costs him nothing. Pippa’s cute, anyway, if a little sharp-featured. Aaron likes his girls a little softer, like—

No. Cut that thought right the fuck there. Stef’s his friend. Nothing more.

Where the hell is Indira?

He’s working on his coffee when he gets his answer: Maria walks carefully into the room and sits down at the table opposite him, and he has to lock his legs to stop himself from jumping up and giving her a hug. She’s okay! Yes, Stef said she was, Indira said she was, and so did Pippa and Monica and Jane and Harmony and Ella and Edy and everyone else he’s not-so-subtly asked about her, but knowing it is one thing, seeing it quite another. Lies are hardly unusual here.

“Hi, Aaron,” she says.

“Maria! You’re back!” He looks around the room, hunching his shoulders suddenly, as if Indira might jump out from behind a chair or a cereal box or a plastic potted plant and drag him off to be tubed.

“I’m back. But you’ll have to be gentle with me.” She’s talking quietly, without the edge he remembers, and he nods almost unconsciously. “I’m still sensitive sometimes,” she says, tapping the side of her head, where the flesh is discoloured and still healing, and Aaron blinks as the memory of her hitting the floor returns in technicolour. He hadn’t exactly behaved well that day. He winces, remembering shouting for the guard guys to help him; he should have been helping her… Like Stef did. “And I still get dizzy occasionally,” she continues, directing a slightly puzzled frown at him, like she can see his thoughts, “but that does not—” she points at him, “—comprise an invitation to try anything funny, Aaron, should you catch me in a moment of weakness.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he says quickly. “Seriously. Where would I even go? And I don’t want to hurt you,” he adds, annoyed with himself for how true that is, “I just, you know…”

“Consider it a test,” Maria says, dropping her finger and smiling. “I am unpleasantly vulnerable at the moment. If you can be around me without exploiting that, I’ll consider relaxing more of the restrictions on you. You’d have more freedoms.”

“Like Stefan?”

“Like Steph.” Maria softens the f, somehow. “Although probably not as many. She’s— he’s been cooperative for longer.” She realises Aaron’s noticed the pronoun slip, and winces.

“That’s his reward for cooperating, then?” he says, allowing a little venom into his voice, leaning into Maria’s error. “He gets girled more quickly?”

“Bluntly?” Maria says. “Yes. You both know what’s happening here, Aaron. Warts and all.” She gives him a second to acknowledge that yes, in fact, he does know about the estrogen and the tits and the impending mutilation, that he hasn’t somehow forgotten, or forfeited his intellect entirely, like Martin. “So, just the same as Steph, you have a choice: are you going to make it harder for yourself, or easier? Indira will have shown you the lengths we’re willing to go to.”

He nods. “When I refused to eat,” he says, keeping his voice controlled, “she played along for a while, acted like it was all a game, and then, before I knew it, it was a day since I’d had anything and she was threatening to strap me down and feed me forcibly. I, uh, didn’t pick that option.”

“We’re serious about this,” Maria says, nodding, satisfied with Indira’s manipulation. “And that is the least of what we will do if you are uncooperative. The most is Declan.”

“Yeah, yeah. You don’t need to drop his name. He’s fish food, I know.”

“So?” Maria says, leaning her chin on her hand and smiling. Aaron hates how pretty she is, how much he wants to please her, how glad he is that she’s okay.

“So what?” Aaron says, projecting annoyance.

“Are you going to make it harder for yourself, or easier?”

“I’ll take option three.”

“Aaron,” Maria says, frowning at him.

“No, listen. I know the choices. And I can see the consequences. Martin’s unpersoned himself; Adam’s cried so much I don’t know how he hasn’t shrivelled up like a grape from dehydration; the psycho gang are all in literal solitary confinement—”

“They have entertainment,” Maria interrupts. “And visits. It’s not literal solitary confinement.”

“Hey!” Aaron raises a finger. “You got to list all my crimes without interruption, didn’t you?” She looks at him. “Okay, marginal interruption.” She looks at him. “Okay! But you still had tasers! Just… just let me finish, okay?” She nods, and he sips lukewarm coffee to moisten his throat. “I get it. I understand the limited room I have to work with. I fight back, I get put in what is, whatever you say, basically solitary confinement. Solitary confinement with iPads, or whatever. I fight back too much, I end up like Declan. And I’m not stupid, no matter what you all think of me, so—”

“—no-one thinks you’re stupid—”

“—so I’m not going to do anything that restricts me further. But I have a loop, Maria. I have a friend, and I have meagre entertainment, and I have the scraps of my pride. I’m not going to risk all that. And, yes, I know Stef has accepted what you’re doing. He—” and he leans nastily on the pronoun, to make a point, “—explained to me how he’s trolley problem’d the whole thing out, come to the conclusion that the best thing for him, personally, is to embrace it, to treat Pippa like his fucking sister, to put on makeup and act different and— and change from the man I knew… and I hate to watch it. I hate that he seems to be happier. And I understand that I’m supposed to be like him, to see him thrive and decide to follow in his footsteps, okay? It’s so obvious, you might as well have put it up on the fucking screen. But I’m not going to. I’m not ready. I’ll never be ready. And I told him, I can see how it might work for him, but it can’t work for me. I can’t just accept this.” He wants to pull at the fabric of his hoodie, to tent it out in the appropriate places and accentuate his point, but he doesn’t; it might unbalance his DIY bra. He settles for flapping his fingers at his chest. “That’s… that’s what I told him.”

“You also told him you hate yourself,” Maria says. It’s not an accusation. More like an acknowledgement. He can see the compassion on her face and it makes him want to run. Into the fucking wall, like Ollie. “You said you imagined your future self, and you hated him.”

“You watched the videos, did you?” Aaron spits. “Have a bit of reality show fun?”

Maria nods. “Not fun. But yes, I watched the videos. We talk about you, you know. Up there. And the girls who hated you at first, who thought you were — and I’m sorry to be rude — a worthless piece of shit… some of them are rooting for you now.”

“They’re rooting for me? To become a fucking girl?”

“To change,” Maria says, leaning forward. “To throw aside the abusive man you used to be, and the even worse man you know you were going to become. And you’ve changed a lot already. You see that, don’t you?” Aaron takes the fucking fifth. “I remember the boy who came here. He was flippant, arrogant, actively ran away from his feelings—”

“Maria, I want to run away right now! That’s all I want! I have dreams, I have fantasies about waking up and finding all of you unconscious or something, because Will got out, or someone pumped the building full of knock-out gas, or aliens invaded or what-the-fuck-ever, and all the doors are open, and I walk up those fucking stairs like it’s the end of the movie! I want to get out of here, Maria! I want to go back to my life!”

“Do you? Do you really? Now you’ve seen yourself clearly for the first time — and I know you have, because I know you, Aaron — do you think you could go back out there? You know what’ll happen. Maybe you’ll report us, sure, and maybe some or all of us get arrested, and maybe Steph does, too, for cooperating with us—” no, no, do not play the Stef card that way, “—but then you’ll be in the same position you were in before. Same family who don’t give a shit about you. Same empty life. Same crappy future everyone’s trying to shoehorn you into. The man with a bit of money in a very smart suit. And slowly, surely, your old habits will come back.” She can’t know this. Just because he fears it, because he sees it when he looks past the changeling in the mirror into the eyes that are still his, that still belong to the boy who did those things, doesn’t make it true. “Only it’ll be worse, this time, because you’ll see yourself doing it, and you’ll hate yourself for it. You’ll push against the temptation but you don’t know how to be anyone else, Aaron; you haven’t learned how yet, so eventually you’ll give in, and that will be it.” He remembers it, sees it, feels it in the pulse hammering in his palms: the hundredth hour alone in a room barely any more homely than his hole down here, only from there he can look out of the window and see all the people living lives they want to live, being the people they want to be, and how dare they… “Before you know it you’ll be that piece of shit guy again, hurting women because you’re bored and lonely and borderline suicidal and you hate yourself. Is that what you want to run back to?”

“Stop, Maria,” he whispers. “Please?”

“All right,” she says. “I’ll stop. I’m not here to make you miserable, believe it or not. I’m here to help you.”

He sniffs. It’s getting hard to talk. “You’re helping me? By making me into a girl?”

“You have to break the cycle, Aaron.” She raises both hands like she’s holding a thin piece of wood, and mimes snapping it. “You have to break free. And you can’t do it on your own. And you can’t do it and remain as you are.”

“How do you even know that’ll work?”

“Because it has to. Because I’m not throwing you back out there to die.”

“I won’t.”

“You’ll die,” she says, quietly, evenly, “or you’ll wish you were dead.”

He only has so many denials in him, and he has nothing useful to say in response. Whatever. Whether she’s right or wrong, she has the keys to all the locks. So whatever.

Why does she care?

What is there, under all this, to care about?

“Aaron,” she says, and he looks up, realising she’s said his name a few times, that he went somewhere for a while. “Hey.”

“Hi,” he says.

“You okay?”

He shrugs, smiling. “I’m here, aren’t I? Of course I’m not okay.”

She nods, and pushes up from her seat. “Finish your breakfast. I’ll be in the common room when you’re done. We have a group activity planned.”

“Will Stefan be there?”

“Steph is on a different schedule today. Don’t worry; you’ll see each other later.”

“Wait,” he says, before she can leave. “About Stef… He told me about Will. About going to see him. Going to see him in his cell. Why would you risk that?”

Maria leans against the wall, regards him for a moment before she answers. “There was no risk. Will was cuffed in place, and we gave Steph a taser. Part of Will’s rehabilitation is going to involve visits, now and then, if we can persuade people to make them.”

“Okay, fine,” he allows, “just not Stef. Not ever again.”

“You’re not the only one who needs Steph, okay? Will is—”

He hits the table hard enough to hurt his hand. “Fuck Will! Don’t risk Stef’s safety again! If you must use him, if absolutely no-one else will do, then send someone with him, keep him on the other side of the cell door, I don’t know, just be more careful.” Maria’s still watching him, her expression controlled. “He’s my friend, okay? He chooses to be my friend. Even after all the shit you put in his head about me — which, yes, I know, is all true, don’t even say it — he still wants to be my friend, and you know how many people I can say that about? One. Him. I had one other good friend, and she never really knew me, and she left, anyway. Stefan stayed. So take better care of him, okay? Or I really will make trouble.”

She smiles, steps forward, reaches down and takes the hand he used to hit the table. He goes limp, unwilling to trust himself, and she holds it, massages the part that hurts. “We’ll be careful, Aaron,” she whispers, and lets him go. She pauses at the door. “We won’t risk Steph. We won’t risk any of you. You’re all important to us. That’s what you need to understand.” She smiles. “Oh, and we can get you a sports bra,” she says. “So you don’t have to improvise.”

Fuck. She noticed. Idiot; she always notices things. “No thanks,” he says, as smoothly as he can.

“You did ask for one, once.”

Does she have an encyclopaedic memory, or does she just rewatch old surveillance videos for fun? “That was a joke. A bad one.”

She shrugs. “Not one of your best, I agree. You’re sure?”

“I’m fine the way I am,” he says.

“Suit yourself,” she says, and then she’s gone, striding into the common room to link up with Edy, leaving him alone with the cold dregs of his coffee.

 

* * *

 

Breakfast in the kitchen’s always nicer than breakfast downstairs. Actual sunlight, for one thing; no boys, for another. She hopes Aaron isn’t too lonely, though, eating breakfast alone. Maybe Maria’s return will do something for that; Stef cheered with the rest of them when Maria came through, announced her return to work, stole a croissant from a complaining Monica’s plate, and threw up V signs on her way down to the basement. She wonders how the reunion’s going. Aaron definitely missed her, and not just because Indira drove him up the wall; he’s gotten… softer, over the last week or so. He’s still not okay with what’s happening — he might never be, despite what every sponsor claims — but he’s dealing with it better. He’s changed.

It was horrible, when Monica put Aaron’s abuses up there on the television for all — for Stef — to see, and sometimes she looks at him and he looks back at her and she can almost see him thinking about it. He’s always wondering what she sees in him, why she chooses to come back to him every day, why she pursued his friendship. She can see the shame written all over him. Christine told her that shame is one of the sponsors’ most powerful tools, particularly for certain types of people, and the way she avoided her eyes suggested to Stef that Indira leaned hard on it, when it came to finding Christine in the remains of her former self.

She really hopes he isn’t too lonely, even with Maria to keep him company.

God. Croissants! They don’t get pastries downstairs, but the main kitchen appears to have a never-ending supply. This morning’s are apparently courtesy of Aisha, a second year with a passion for baking, and her sponsor, Charlie, who, according to Pippa, supervises Aisha’s baking from a suitably safe distance. Stef doesn’t get why that’s funny, but some of the other sponsors laugh, and Pippa leans over with her phone and another croissant to show her a video of Aisha treating cake batter as if it personally wronged her. That the final result looks impeccable seems to Stef to contravene the laws of physics.

When Lorna, Vicky and Jodie return, stumbling through the doors in a congenial huddle, Stef, trying to be a welcoming presence, catches Lorna’s eye and smiles at her; Lorna’s returning smile, though, has none of the hesitation it had the last time they met, and Stef wonders what’s turned her around on this place. Surely not just the offer of free surgery.

Stef’s smile turns into a laugh as she remembers how annoyed Christine was when Pippa spoiled the surprise that she’d be seeing the surgeon today as well as the electrologist. “That’s not the kind of thing you just spring on people, Christine!” Pippa had said, and then dissolved into giggles as the whole room collectively and simultaneously pointed out to her that, at Dorley, it is exactly the kind of thing they just spring on people.

Jodie’s announcement — that she’s decided to be a trans woman, officially — prompts hugs and congratulations from the table, a high five from Tabby, and sincere thanks from Indira, who claims that with Christine now the last holdout she’ll have to sign her NPH before too long, and then Indira’s mother finally can boast to her friends of her daughter’s beloved almost-sister, who is sweet and kind and beautiful, and who swept all the viruses off her computer and set her up with free movie streaming.

“Hey,” Lorna says, settling down at the table with a cup of coffee and leaning over to Tabby, “I heard you were single, and looking?”

“Oh,” Tabby says, clutching her croissant defensively, “I’m, um, flattered, but I’m—”

“I don’t mean for me!” Lorna says quickly. “I just, I was told that, uh, you’ve been having some trouble with, um…”

“Oh, God.” Tabby buries her head in her hands. “Does everyone know? Has someone been putting up posters on the corkboards? Was there an announcement on the uni website?”

“Vicky told me,” Lorna says, as Indira muffles her laughter.

“I’ve been helping her get up to speed about everyone,” Vicky says, from her position by the door. “I made a spreadsheet,” she adds, blushing.

“What’s Tabby under?” Indira says. “Expert egg cracker?”

“Indira Chetry,” Tabby says, “I will bury my croissant in your hair if you don’t zip it right now.”

“So,” Lorna says, “I know someone. He’s thirty-four, single, and he could not be more of a guy. And I don’t mean that in a bad way; I mean that he is absolutely, definitely, no doubt in the world a guy.”

“You can’t know that,” Tabby says gloomily.

“I can. He went to a lot of trouble to be a guy.”

“Oh,” Tabby says, perking up. “Oh! Fuck. Yes. Set us up. I promise I know how to be super normal, not like all these other weird bitches.”

“Hey!” Indira says. “I’m normal!”

Tabby wordlessly points to Indira’s coffee mug, which says WORLD’S BEST KIDNAPPER on the side. Indira sticks her tongue out.

“Oh,” Tabby says, “is he okay dating T4T?”

“You’re trans and out, right?” Lorna asks. “He won’t want to deal with stealth shit.”

Tabby nods. “First one here to try it. Got my Gender Recognition Certificate and everything. Government registered trans woman.”

Lorna and Tabby settle down together to swap details, and Lorna starts telling her about her friend, pausing only to receive from Vicky, who has to go to lectures, a kiss that lasts long enough to make Stef feel a little uncomfortable. At the mention of lectures, Pippa, who’s been complaining all morning about her workload, groans and leans back in her chair.

“Three lectures today, Stef,” she says, as Stef hugs her. “Three! And a workshop. Why did I go to university, again?”

“Because,” Indira says, picking up coffee mugs and pastry plates to wash them, “deep down, you really, really wanted to be captured and feminised.”

“That wasn’t in the prospectus,” Pippa mumbles, and rests her head on Stef’s shoulder.

 

* * *

 

“Fuck, that’s actually terrifying.”

It’s Lorna’s first time seeing the basement entrance up close, and it’s not making a more positive impression than when she saw it, briefly, from the other side of the kitchen, on her first visit to Dorley Hall. An extrusion of concrete supports surrounding a metal door, it’s both uglier and more crude than she remembers, and creates an impression that anyone stepping through might not ever emerge again. And Stephanie lives down below, almost all the time? Shit.

“Pippa says they can hide it,” Stephanie says, “in case the authorities ever visit.” She’s leaning against the closest table, watching Lorna with an unavoidably amused expression on her face. “See those bookcases? They move, but they’re not on wheels, because that leaves marks in the wood; there’s a metal support behind them, set into the wall, and at the push of a button they just sort of—” She mimes two enormous bookcases arcing up and along the walls and back down again, meeting in the middle. The mental image is amusing, and Stephanie rolls her eyes at Lorna’s laughter. “It’s not that quick. Takes about two minutes, I think. You can see the guide rails in the concrete, look.”

Lorna looks. “That’s fucking wild, Stephanie.”

“Right? I kinda wanna see it.”

Indira returns from the kitchen with two thermoses and escorts them both down, through the horrible concrete arch and into the first basement. It’s surprisingly cool; Lorna expected the underground areas to be warmer — possibly because she can’t get the gates of hell imagery out of her mind — but a light breeze flows over their heads, carrying dust motes through the spotlights. She reaches up and feels it tickle her fingers.

“Air con,” Indira says. “We don’t want the boys to boil, do we?”

Lorna’s still working on her response when Stephanie starts making smothered gasps, and she turns around to see the girl leaning against the wall, hands over her mouth, making apologetic eyes at Lorna.

“Sorry,” she says, when she gets her breath back. “It just hit me: cool and unusual punishment.”

Indira snorts. “You’ve been here too long, Steph,” she says.

“No arguments there,” Stephanie says, and massages her chest.

Indira’s got it into her head that Lorna will benefit from a tour of the facilities, so she gets dragged around the first floor basement and witnesses all the amenities: a security room with more computers than she can quickly count, a comfortable-looking couch and table arrangement, and two girls Lorna doesn’t know but who Stephanie peels off to talk to; a rec room, done up with wallpaper and softer lighting, more couches, and a TV hooked up to a battered laptop and a couple of games consoles; a break room and bathroom for the PMC soldiers, with its own stairs up to the back rooms on the ground floor and an access door to the rest of the basement that doesn’t even unlock unless a sponsor hits the panic button; various storerooms, unused spaces, and a small bathroom with shower facilities; and, finally, the medical area.

“Waiting room,” Indira says, guiding Lorna in, sitting her down on one of the ubiquitous couches, and pointing at other doors leading off, “surgical rooms, recovery rooms, storerooms, and other stuff that’s yet to be developed. We don’t do any actual surgery here, yet, beyond the orchis, but we’re slowly getting set up for it. Don’t ever let anyone tell you setting up a full surgical suite is easy.”

“The, uh, orchis?” Lorna says, before realising: oh, yeah, the nonconsensual surgery. The mutilation. It happens here. Fucking hell. “There’s none scheduled for today, I hope?” she adds, attempting to sound light and failing.

“No,” Indira says. “Not for a couple of months yet, unless Steph wants to get hers done before the rush.” She pulls up a plush stool and sits, cross-legged and leaning forward, and Lorna feels suddenly like a kid at summer camp, about to be lectured on safety procedures by the teenager in charge. “I know it makes you uncomfortable. I’m not going to give you the speech about how necessary it is. I just want to remind you that I had mine done here, too, and I didn’t ask for it.”

“Would you want to undo it, if you could?” Lorna asks. She knows the answer — all the Dorley girls seem to feel the same way — but asking feels like an obligation.

“No,” Indira says, and smiles. “In fact, I’d ask why they didn’t do it sooner. I’m told you know my mum.”

“Oh,” Lorna says, wrong-footed and stumbling to keep up, “yes, uh, I don’t really know her, not as a friend, but we’ve been to protests together. Chatted a few times, you know.”

“I’m surprised we never ran into each other,” Indira says. “Although I suppose this place does keep me busy,” she adds, thoughtful. “And I’ve been spending a lot of time with Hasan…”

“Hasan?”

“My boyfriend.” Her smile turns wistful. “A childhood friend, actually. He’s… he’s wonderful, Lorna.”

“What does he know? About you, I mean.”

Indira doesn’t seem to mind the question. “He thinks I ran away, came here to finish my education, and finally contacted my family again when I felt ready. He doesn’t know what we do here. He knows I’m trans, though, obviously; he knew me when I was a kid.”

Lorna nods slowly. “Christine said you think of yourself as a trans woman. She said you’re very serious about it.”

“I am. I may not have come to it by the same path as you, but—”

“No, no, I get it,” Lorna says, holding up surrendering hands. “After Vicky — and now Jodie — I can’t possibly dispute it. Actually, it was Christine who made up my mind on that front.”

“About that,” Indira says. “About what you said to my Christine…”

“I know. I was awful to her. I apologised. To her. A lot.”

“Yes,” Indira says, waving a hand irritably, “I’m aware. If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have let you in the building. I would have blocked your access to surgeries and whatever else you think you’re going to get out of us and I would have found a way to make your life hell.”

It takes Lorna a second to come up with something to say. “What?” she manages, eventually.

“I know you have it in you to ruin us, if you choose,” Indira continues, “and you know very well that we can ruin you back, ten times harder, before you get the chance to do anything.” She’s talking levelly, like she’s dictating a shopping list. “But I don’t care about that. I care about Christine. I love the others, too — all of them are my Sisters — but Christine is my sister. And I will defend her like family. You hurt her bad, Lorna, with your little speech, and I know you think you made it all better, but Paige told me she’s been crying at night again, like she used to, and—”

“Oh, fuck, I’m—”

“Do not apologise to me!” Indira snaps, letting out all the fury she’d been keeping contained. “Yes, you helped draw something out of her that needed to come out. She’s needed to stop hiding from who she used to be for a long time. But it’s a process, Lorna. It’s something that needed to happen carefully and over time and you—” she points at Lorna, who jumps, “—yanked the plaster off all at once. Irresponsible. Don’t forget, she’s been in transition for just over two years and she’s identified as a woman for even less time than that; she needs to be cared for, not… assaulted. Now, she’s coping. She’s dealing. Because she has Paige, and she has me, and she has all her Sisters, and she’s surrounded by people who love her. But you need to know how close you came to lighting a bomb, Lorna, because if you’re going to be here, around our girls, and especially around girls who have yet to graduate, you need to learn to think before you speak. Say you understand and agree.”

“I do. Fuck. I understand and agree. Indira, I’m— I didn’t mean it. I was frightened and confused and— and—”

“We’re a rehabilitation facility.” Indira’s voice is calm again, but not neutral any more. She’s talking like a teacher now: brisk, indifferent. “And that means we have within our walls and under our floor a lot of people who are processing massive amounts of trauma. Some of it self-inflicted, some of it lifelong, and, yes, some of it inflicted by us, as part of the process. Their relationships to their Sisters, to their own bodies, to their own minds, can be tenuous, and the last thing they need is someone wielding their past against them as a weapon. Especially someone who should know better.”

She should defend herself. She should fight back! This place is a fucking kidnapping ring, for Christ’s sake, and one of the chief kidnappers is lecturing her for not being sufficiently respectful! And yet… what would be the point? It’s the same old dance, one she’s been going through the motions of for weeks, and she’s tired of it. What was it Stephanie said? That her objections to the programme had become mechanical? That had been a horrifying thing to hear at the time; now, it sounds absolutely reasonable.

After all, if she’s not going to bring the place down, brick by brick, abuse by abuse — and she’s not — then she can at least try not to trigger the victims. Especially if they happen to be her friends.

“I’m listening,” she says, leaning forward, because even though she doesn’t especially enjoy being so close to Indira when she’s in this kind of mood, she wants to make clear her sincerity. “I fucked up. I realise that. But you lot could have done a better job with the initiation, Indira. Adjusting to the existence of a place like this? Hard. Realising there’s nothing I can do about it, or I’ll start an avalanche that will consume innocent people? Harder. Finding out that the love of my life was… helped… here? Hardest of all.” She snorts. “Even if sometimes I feel like I should thank you for her, like I should find her sponsor and fucking kiss her or something. But Christine… I know what I said to her was wrong. And not just because it hurt her; she and Paige and Vicky made me realise it was factually wrong. I was working off incomplete information and a hell of a lot of assumptions, and I was panicking, spinning out. But she— Christine— Fuck, Indira… I saw all of her. I saw how wrong I was. I saw how badly I hurt her. And, fuck, if she’s crying now, because of me, then—”

“It’s moved beyond just what you said,” Indira interrupts. “It was merely the trigger. The thing is, Lorna, she was hurt so much when she was a boy, and she never dealt with it. Never faced it, not properly. She always concentrated more on the terrible things she did, on the ways she lashed out and externalised her pain. Now she’s facing up to all of it. All at once. That she’s still mostly the same kind, cheerful girl we all love is a testament to her strength. And in the bad times… She has Paige. She has me.” She almost smiles. “We’ve got her. We’re taking care of her. Christine will be okay. I just need you to know: it can’t happen again. With anyone here, not just her. Clear?” She says it kindly, sweetly.

“Clear.”

“Well done. And thank you again for talking with Jodie. We haven’t, historically, had much chance to incorporate positive outside influences into the programme.”

Lorna nods, acknowledging the thanks silently because she doesn’t feel up to more than single-syllable responses right now. Christine… She needs to apologise again. Or talk to her again. She didn’t say anything about having a hard time!

Fuck. Maybe she doesn’t trust you with that, yet? She’d be well within her rights.

Fuck!

She rubs her eye with the back of her hand, and isn’t surprised that it comes away damp. She has that stinging feeling all through her head that suggests her whole system’s building up to a big cry. She swallows, and takes a few seconds to breathe and calm herself. Indira sits back, gives her the space she needs.

“Sorry about this,” Lorna mutters, swallowing, popping her ears, flexing her jaw; getting herself back under control.

“Take all the time you need,” Indira says. “And your point about our initiation methods is well taken; I will give it some thought. And Lorna, I do apologise if I was… a little harsh. Remember Aaron? Steph’s ‘friend’?” She doesn’t finger quote; she doesn’t have to. “I’ve been filling in as his sponsor after Maria was attacked, and I’m still a little bit in that mode.”

“It’s okay. I, uh, think I’ve needed someone to really yell at me about it, to be honest. Paige was angry, but she’s, y’know, my friend. Kind of. I think. I hope she still is!”

“She is,” Indira says. “But, like I said, I’m sorry if I pushed too hard. Christine’s my sister. She’s my weak spot. And she’s so special. She might well be the future of this place.”

“I don’t think she wants to be.”

“Not in its current form, no,” Indira says, shrugging. “But Dorley can change. It’s changed before; ask Maria what her transition was like.”

“Still. I think she wants to take Paige and get the hell out.”

“She does. But she’s young. And, yes, I know I’m not that much older than either of you, but those years do bring perspective. I never thought I’d sponsor, but I’m good at it. I’m good at finding the woman inside the boy; good at finding boys who need to change, and who can come to accept it. Not a talent I ever expected to develop.”

“What does Hasan think you do for a living?”

“He thinks I’m a grad student and live-in Big Sister to all the disadvantaged girls of Dorley, paid by a charitable trust. Both things are, broadly, true. Now, how about you nip down the hall to the bathroom and get yourself cleaned up, and I’ll tell Steph she can come in.”

“Did you ask her to give us some time alone together?” Lorna asks, standing and wiping at her eyes again.

“Yes,” Indira says, with a toothy grin, “I’m very devious. Come on.”

Stephanie’s waiting alone in the room by the time Lorna gets back, with repaired eye makeup — she’s already texted an apology to Jodie for ruining her excellent work; Jodie had to be dissuaded from ditching to come down and redo it for her — and for all that she understands Indira’s position better than Indira thinks she does, she’s grateful not to have to face her again.

“Hi,” she says, and Stephanie looks up from her phone, puts it away in a pocket and smiles at her.

“Hi!” Stephanie replies. “Sorry to leave you alone with Dira. Did she say what she needed to say?”

“Hoo yeah,” Lorna says, flopping down onto the stool Indira vacated. “She really fucking did.”

“You okay? She’s lovely, but she can be… intense.”

“Yeah, I’m okay.” Lorna stretches. Stephanie’s quite a calming presence, sitting as she is in very basic clothes and no makeup and still very obviously early in transition but with the newfound confidence many early transition girls have: she’s discovering herself for the first time in her life, and loving it. Lorna’s experiences during the same period of her life were rather tainted, and she’s come to enjoy experiencing it vicariously through other trans girls. “Did you hear about what I said to Christine?”

“Yes. From her. No details, but I don’t think I need them. You’ve made up?” Lorna nods, and Stephanie smiles and says, “Good. I owe my life to Christine, I think.”

“Oh?”

“How much did I tell you about how I ended up here?”

Lorna frowns. “Not much, actually. I think you said you got yourself kidnapped? Or something? I remember being kind of overwhelmed at the time and, uh, not following up on things I probably should have followed up on.”

Stephanie tells the story: how she struggled with her gender all her life; how she refused to accept her womanhood, largely on the basis that she simply didn’t believe she could pass or be happy with the resources available to her; how her surrogate older sister — and she corrects herself: older brother, at the time — vanished, and how she traced the disappearance to Saints, to the doors of Dorley Hall itself; how she followed her lost friend, didn’t find her, and gave up on ever transitioning.

And then Christine. Stephanie accidentally revealing that she knew something was going on at Dorley Hall, and waking up in a cell. Lorna’s prepared to rekindle a little of her outrage until Stephanie gets into how Christine repeatedly put her own safety on the line to try and get her out again. How when she found out Stephanie was trans she basically begged her to let her rescue her. How she ran all of Dorley Hall, including her own beloved sister and Aunt Bea, around in circles, keeping Stephanie hidden, until Steph herself fucked up and exposed herself.

“You ever think this place could use its resources to help trans girls?” Lorna says, slowly, thoughtfully.

“Aside from us, you mean? Yeah, and Beatrice has an answer to that: you know how the NHS is always going after private transition services?”

“Fuck.” Yeah. Obviously. The political and medical establishment in the UK seems set on keeping the population of happy, alive trans people as low as possible, and gatekeeps access to transition services jealously. No private transgender diagnostic service has survived more than a few years without invasive and, in most cases, terminal investigation. Not something Dorley can afford. “Shit, Stephanie, that’s— God. I hate it. This stupid fucking country.”

“Yeah,” Stephanie replies heavily, nodding.

“So,” Lorna says, attempting to lighten the mood, “what did attract you to the sinister basement that offers free FFS, GRS, electrolysis and hormones?”

“The view.”

“Well, yeah.” Lorna looks around at the walls. “I can’t imagine living in this place. I’m barely getting used to above-ground Dorley Hall, which is plush and posh and full of friendly, happy people who are… Well, okay, I’ll be talking to someone who seems completely normal and then someone else will say something that’s just a little off and I suddenly remember: oh yeah, they kidnap boys here.”

Stephanie laughs. “I know what you mean. The sponsors are like this whole houseful of nosy older sisters who love you and want to help you, and it’s easy to get used to thinking of them that way, and then one of them hands you a cup of coffee in a mug that says, An Apple a Day Keeps the Missing Persons Unit Away. It’s jarring.” She shrugs. “They kind of remind me of teachers, though. Or nurses, maybe. They’ve got a difficult, stressful job, which they mostly see as a calling, and they feel a deep obligation to the boys. Yes, they make rude jokes about them sometimes, but they’re committed. You can ask questions about what they’re committed to…” She grins. “But I think I’m a convert, overall. I’ve not met a single one who isn’t happy, and I’ve met most who are in the building. Even the second years, the ones who’ve accepted themselves as women for only a few months… They seem happy. Genuinely so. They even bake! Chalk it up to selective entry procedures, I guess.”

“God,” Lorna says, absorbing it all. “God. What’s it even like, down here?”

“Well, I spend most of my time one floor down,” Stephanie says, pointing at the floor. “I doubt Dira’ll want to give you a tour of that place. It’s mostly just kinda boring, though. I hang around, I talk to… well, mainly I just talk to Aaron because Adam’s in his own little world, Martin’s completely checked out and the others are still in the cells for attacking Maria.”

“I heard about that.”

“She’s okay now. But, yeah, I hang out, I read, I watch TV… I pretend to be one of the lads. And if it all gets a bit much, I go upstairs and spend time with Christine and Paige and Pippa and the sponsors. Or go to the upper floors and see people who don’t even know what happens down here. Get a slice of normality. Be Stephanie for a while.”

“And you got to see your friend again,” Lorna says, conversationally. “That must have been nice.”

“My friend?”

“Melissa? I think?”

“Oh. Yeah. No. She doesn’t come back here much. She’s actually a bit of a stranger to most people here, Abby says.”

“Abby?” Lorna asks, frowning. She hasn’t met an Abby. Mentally she searches through the lists of names and faces Vicky showed her.

“Abby was Melissa’s sponsor. And from what everyone says, they won’t let her sponsor anyone again after that.”

“Too mean?”

“Too nice. Jane says Abby got lucky with Melissa but Tabby says they were well matched. Said that ‘Mark’—” finger quotes, “—was the most docile boy they’d had in years. Whichever; they were very close, to the exclusion of almost everyone else. And then Melissa left and Abby stayed. Kinda stayed. She works, but she’s still around sometimes.” Stephanie taps her chin thoughtfully. “Haven’t seen her much lately, though. Anyway, Melissa doesn’t like this place, and she’s got her own life, and, honestly? I’m glad. I’m glad she’s happy, and I’m glad she doesn’t come back here.”

“Don’t you want to see her again?”

“Oh, I do!” Stephanie says. “I really do. I dream about it! She was basically my sister, only I didn’t know it, and she didn’t know it, and she never knew the real me… And that’s the thing. I want her to meet the real me. I don’t want her to see me like this.”

“But you’re so pretty!” Lorna says. She’s not lying or exaggerating: Lorna doesn’t connect beauty to cis-passing, and Stephanie’s rather captivating.

Stephanie laughs bitterly. “I’m waiting until people stop putting the ‘but’ in that sentiment. Until I do, too.”

“Ah.” Yeah. Lorna’s been there. Still is there, to some extent. Because while other trans women can be beautiful, she can’t, not while she structures her life around avoiding places that will subject her to cruelty for looking trans. “I understand.” She nods, vigorously, holds a hand out to Stephanie, who takes it. “Maybe more than anyone else here can, I get it.”

Stephanie returns her nod, and Lorna stands up from the stool and joins her on the couch, where they settle into a friendly hug. Lorna’s not quite sure who needs the comfort more: Stephanie, missing her sister, stressed out from having to play a role; or Lorna herself, still shaken from Indira, still conflicted about accepting help from this place. But it’s nice, it’s companionable, and it gets them through the next ten minutes of small talk before the consultant and the electrologist arrive, and they hurriedly disentangle.

The electrologist winks at them anyway.

 

* * *

 

Maria’s promised group activity turns out to be another instalment of Monica’s much-interrupted series of lectures on feminism, and Aaron’s protests — that he’s read all the books Maria gave him, that it’s ridiculous even attempting to give lectures when, with Stef off on some unspecified other task, he’s the only person in the room capable of giving coherent responses — fall on irritated ears. So he decides to display his conscientious objection to and contempt for the whole process by giving deliberately wrong answers. It’s hard to concentrate, though, because Maria, sitting at his table with him, keeps laughing at his bad jokes.

“What’s with you?” he hisses to her, after Monica calls a break and swipes near — but not at — Maria’s head on her way out.

“I don’t actually know,” Maria admits. She’s leaning her chin on her hands and looking at him from just one chair over. Too close; he wants to warn her that she’s not safe here, that the last time she let her guard down—

“Maria!” he says, forcing the memory out of his head. “You’re actually scaring me a little. Where’s the arch sarcasm and hyper-critical nagging I’ve come to know and love?”

“I don’t know,” Maria says, and bites her lip as she thinks. It’s both an attractive gesture and one that reminds him of Stef, and he directs his attention firmly towards the metal table until she starts talking again. “I think I’m different. Or my priorities are.” She walks her chin forward a little on her elbows, so she’s closer still to him. “When I was young, I spent a long time thinking I was going to die. So much that it became background noise. And when you live with something dark and horrible like that for so long that you get used to it, it shapes you. You think it doesn’t — because you barely think about it at all any more — but it does. I was… kind of hard. Not hard as in uncaring; more like unyielding. But then Will happened, and hospital, and recovery, and for the first time since I was young, I got scared. Scared for my life. Because I have someone who loves me, someone who’ll be hurt if I die. Someone to live for.”

“Jesus,” Aaron mutters. It doesn’t cross his mind to wonder if she’s lying; she’s never seemed so sincere. “What happened to you, when you were younger?”

“I’ll tell you,” she says. “Someday, I’ll tell you all of it.”

He nods. God, someone must really have hurt her, way back when. Who? He needs the knowledge like he needs oxygen, and why is that? What’s changed? Is it just that she says she wants to help him? Does it not even matter any more that her methods are the most twisted he’s ever heard of? Is the expression of interest, of investment, all it takes?

Yeah. Maybe.

He lays out his right hand, palm up on the table, for her to take if she wants.

She does. She shifts her weight so she’s only propping her head on one hand, and clasps his with the other, interlacing their fingers. Their hands are almost the same size, he notices. Both of them are relatively small people.

“It’s not just my recent brush with death,” she says. “There’s… new people in my life, making me reassess the way I think about things. I’m proud of you, by the way.”

“You’re… proud of me?” Around him, he’s aware of Edy leading Adam out of the common room, and Martin following Ella, but it’s hard to concentrate on anything but Maria’s clear, brown eyes looking directly into his. “Why?”

She squeezes his hand. “You’ve been here a little over two months, and already you’re well on your way to being a new person. Not in the way you’re about to say,” she adds quickly, her smile broadening. “I don’t mean your gender. But you’re different. More thoughtful. More careful.”

“I was always those things,” he mumbles, unable to look away.

“No. You always had the capacity to be those things. You just… weren’t. You built this character to hide behind, this shell, this idea of the funny guy, the sarky guy, the rude little misogynist. You built him to help keep yourself safe.”

“Didn’t work then, did it?” Aaron whispers.

“You don’t think that, though,” she says. “I know you don’t think that. You’ve always believed, deep down, that if you dropped the act, if you let yourself find out who you actually are, the bullying, the isolation, the alienation would all get worse. That the man you built really did keep you safe.”

“That’s not true.”

“Don’t lie to me, Aaron,” she whispers. “And don’t lie to yourself.”

This is too much like Stef. Too much like his notion that there’s more to Aaron than the front he puts up. Are they comparing notes on him? Is she deliberately mirroring his arguments after watching videos of his conversations with Stef? Or is he just that easy to read?

“I’m not lying,” he says, aware of how unconvincing he sounds. Who’s talking right now, Aaron?

“You know you’re better than the cruel, careless, ugly person you used to pretend to be.”

“No,” he says, matching her whisper, fighting to breathe properly through a thickening throat. “I’m not.”

“You will be.”

He knows what she means. He’ll keep changing. Without and within. Whether he asks for it or not.

“There’s no way out of this,” he says, “is there?”

“No,” Maria says.

“I still don’t understand why you think this can possibly work.”

“You will.” Maria rebalances again and, still holding Aaron’s right hand with her left, reaches out with her other hand and tucks a stray hair behind his ear. “In the end, you’ll get it.”

“You can’t know that.”

She runs her knuckles down the side of his face, takes his chin between her thumb and forefinger, and cups his jaw, gently moving his face from side to side. He can no more stop her than he can raise the dead.

“You’re going to be so very beautiful,” she whispers.

There’s a long pause before he feels able to reply. “I don’t want this.”

“I know.”

She releases him, frees both hands, and shuffles closer again, hopping over onto the seat next to his, close enough for their shoulders to touch. With her right hand she fiddles with something in her pocket, and she nods at the corner of the room. He follows her gaze: the light on the camera bump has gone red. He looks around, and all the cameras are the same. Switched off.

“We’re alone, Aaron,” she says.

“Why?” he asks.

“Because you haven’t been alone in a long, long time.”

“But you’re not safe with me…”

She reaches for him. “I trust you,” she says. “And you need this.”

She’s right, he realises, and as she takes him into her arms, cradling his head between shoulder and palm, as he grips her right back, clinging tight to her belly and her shoulders, as he cries into her clothing, as he takes great gulps of air and expels them into her embrace, he wonders who will come back from this: the hateful, vindictive man Stef and Maria say he constructed to protect himself, or the thoughtful, kind person they both claim to see, deep inside him.

 

* * *

 

It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin. Lorna saw the electrologist first, while Stephanie saw the surgery consultant, and then they swapped. The electrologist agreed that her remaining finer, lighter hairs were best taken care of with electrolysis rather than laser, arranged with her a timetable structured around her lectures, and even offered her a choice of where to attend: here, in basement one, or at the clinic where she sees her usual clients. Lorna, surprising herself, picked Dorley, which turned out well; the electrologist has to come to the Hall, anyway, for Stephanie and anyone else they can persuade to get started with hair removal, so this way she gets to block out a whole day for it.

The surgeon’s a more complex proposition. She introduces herself as Mrs Prentice, and shakes Lorna’s hand like a steam piston. They cover GRS, including timetables, realistic expectations and a possible date, allowing a few months for her to recover from FFS first.

“My calendar’s reasonably open,” says Mrs Prentice, as Lorna flips through a leaflet, feeling lightheaded, “but we should probably make a decision sooner rather than later.”

“Um,” Lorna says, and shakes herself. “Yeah. Summer, probably. So I’m not missing any lectures? I’m missing some for FFS already so that’s non-optional. How’s August?”

“August…” Mrs Prentice flips through her phone calendar. “Yes. I can do August. How about the seventeenth? Get it done on a Monday and you’ve got the whole week free!” She laughs, and it fills the room. “Sorry. A little surgery joke. No, you’ll be flat on your back for days. The seventeenth do you?”

“Yeah,” Lorna says. “That’s good. I can do that.”

“Excellent! We’ll do the operation out of a little private hospital in the city. One of the girls here—” she pronounces it ‘gels’, with a hard g, which makes Lorna smile, “—can give you the details. You’ll come in on the Monday, fast for the day, have a lovely enema and poop your guts out — marvellous fun! — in the evening, and we’ll do you first thing Tuesday morning. Did you talk to the electrologist about de-hairing down there?” Lorna nods. It’s going to take up the bulk of their sessions; fortunately, they have numbing cream. “Excellent! I look forward to it.” Mrs Prentice snaps shut the leather cover on her phone and drops it back into her bag. “I must say, it’s nice to discuss this with someone who actually wants it, for a change.”

“Do you do all the, uh, boys down here?”

“They’re gels by the time they come to me, but yes. I do the face as well as the bits downstairs. The facial consultations can be a bit dicey, and some of them call me all sorts of colourful names, but by the time it comes to the vagina installation they’re generally here by choice. Still. You sure you don’t want me to tackle your face, too? It’d make a lot of sense to keep it all in-house, so to speak.”

“Oh, no,” Lorna says, “it’s fine. We’ve raised the funds, paid the deposit, done the consultation… I’m happy with the surgeon I have for that. No offence.”

“None taken! But do think of me if you decide to have any revisions. Ms Quinn pays above market rate.” She waggles her eyebrows suggestively. If Lorna had been closer, she’s certain Mrs Prentice would have elbowed her, too.

“Ms Quinn?”

“I believe you know her as ‘Aunt Bea’?” She smirks, as if it’s the most wonderful joke.

“Oh. Right. Um…”

Mrs Prentice’s smirk broadens into a knowing smile. “You have something to ask, don’t you?” she says. “Well, gel, out with it!”

“Are you really… okay with operating on people who don’t want it?”

Mrs Prentice laughs. “Quite okay with it, gel, quite! Oh, I had some qualms in the beginning, at least until my palms were crossed generously with silver, but it’s something else when the gels come to see you a year later, looking like butter wouldn’t melt, and they thank you for your good work. One gel, who was truly a pleasure to work on, she hugs me every time we run into each other, and, goodness, I have to say, she came out beautifully.” She leans back on her chair. “And she had strong features, before. Pronounced brow, prominent eve’s apple, all the stuff young gels these days worry about. I knew what she’d look like when the swelling went down, but when she came running up, when she hugged me, when I saw how happy she was, when she gave me the address of her ‘picture-gram’ account, or whatever it’s bloody called, well, that was a true pleasure. You know, with some of the gels here, I feel like I’m tinkering, making tiny adjustments, but with her? We practically remade her. Gave her a whole new life! And she loves it. It’s rather an intoxicating feeling, I have to say.”

Lorna presses on a few other topics, satisfying her curiosity — no, Mrs Prentice doesn’t do work on the NHS, but she has discounts available for ‘friends of the Hall’; no, she doesn’t do the orchiectomies, but she knows the gel who does, and she’s ever so good — and returns to the waiting room with rising excitement.

FFS in less than three months; GRS in nine!

2020’s going to be an incredible year.

 

* * *

 

Ten test hairs, all at the back of her jaw in the patch of stubble she grew out just for the occasion, and each one of them hurt like hell. Stef felt the needle go in, even before the blast of intense pain. She was ready for the test session to stop after less than a minute and practically begging for it after two; awful to know she has hours and hours of this ahead of her. At least the electrologist promised numbing cream, codeine, and headphones so she can distract herself with an audiobook.

She’s committed to genital electrolysis, too. At least Lorna’s going to suffer with her on that front. When she left to go back upstairs, Lorna was suggesting she bring a bottle of schnapps to share, to get them both through the pain; she’ll drain half and go in for her appointment, and then when Stef comes up she’ll polish it off. Collaboration!

The surgeon talked her through the orchi — “Don’t worry about it! It’s so simple and quick, it’s like pulling an olive out of a jelly salad!” she said, and made a popping sound to accompany her mime — and agreed to table the GRS option for now. But Mrs Prentice was enthusiastic about Stef’s face. She took photos from all angles, pointed out the bits she wanted to shave down and the bits she wanted to build up, and then showed her a photo manipulation that made Stef want to leap across the room and embrace her right there and then. Mrs Prentice saved the pictures out to the network — Stef quickly moved them to her private folder — and told her with every appearance of pleasure that she looks forward to working with her.

So now she’s sitting in the security room, practising her deep breathing, calming herself down, preparing to pretend, for the benefit of the boys downstairs, that an upper-class megaphone of a woman hasn’t just changed her life. Maria finds her there, and sits quietly at the other end of the table until Stef’s ready to speak.

“Hi,” Stef says, eventually.

“Good session?” Maria asks.

“Electrolysis is awful,” Stef says, poking gingerly at the aloe-covered patch of skin on her jaw, “and the surgeon is… a lot. But the FFS projections kind of blew up my remaining doubts. I might actually come out of this looking okay.”

Maria grins. “Haven’t we all been telling you that?”

“I have a very thick skull,” Stef says, affecting the most serious voice she can, “which impedes the efficient transfer of information. Fortunately, Mrs Prentice is going to shave it down.”

Maria throws an imaginary pastry at her; Stef fields it, takes a bite out of it, and beckons her over to show her the pictures.

“So,” Maria says, when they’re done with their small talk, “I know you were probably planning to, anyway, but I wanted to ask you to drop in on Aaron when you go back down.”

“Has something happened? Is he okay?”

“He’s okay,” Maria says, making mollifying gestures. “We connected, actually. He let me hug him! And he cried into my shoulder.”

“Oh,” Stef says. “Oh. That’s huge, Maria. That’s actually huge!” She silences the jealous voice that says it should have been her Aaron hugged. She was up here, wasn’t she?

“The next few hours will be important for him, Steph. He needs to feel like what he did was okay, that it wasn’t taboo, that it wasn’t a mistake. You can help him with that.”

Stef frowns. “You’re asking me to cooperate in his… regendering.”

“I’m asking you to be his friend,” Maria says. “Nothing you weren’t going to do anyway. I just thought some context might help.”

Nodding slowly, Stef stands. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. He’s all right, though?”

“He’s fine,” Maria confirms, with a slight frown.

“What about you? Are you all right?”

“I’m adjusting. Strange being back at work. Do you know how long it’s been since I had a holiday?” Her mouth twitches, and for a moment she’s looking at nothing at all.

A few minutes later and Stef’s on her way back down to basement two. As she takes the last step down into the main corridor she trails her fingers in the air-con, like Lorna did, and smiles. Lorna seemed more comfortable this time, despite her encounter with Dira; hopefully she’ll get over the last of her reservations with more regular exposure to the mundanities of the programme. Because it’s like she said: life down here really is mostly boring.

She whips out her phone and checks her face and hair with the selfie camera. She didn’t do anything special this morning, aware that she was going to be both poked and prodded by the electrologist and photographed and analysed by the surgeon. But she’s had a tendency recently, which Aaron and the girls have all pointed out, to trend feminine in her presentation, and the last thing she wants is to look too much like she chose to be here.

Aaron opens the door quickly when she knocks, and he practically drags her inside.

“Where’ve you been all morning?” he spits, kicking the door shut behind her and then, when the safety hinge kicks in and the door slows to a crawl two centimetres from closing, irritably pressing against it with his toe until it’s fully shut.

Stef, not wanting to antagonise him, waits for them to have a semblance of privacy before answering. “Busy,” she says. Does she want to tell him? He’s agitated, and his hands are trembling, but he’s also got damp hair and he smells of mint; he’s showered, and that’s not something he does when he’s having a hard time.

“‘Busy’,” Aaron mimics.

“Do you want to know?” she asks, flopping down on his bed at the pillow end, leaving plenty of room for him to either join her, sit down on the chair, or pace, as he prefers.

He joins her on the bed. “Fuck. I don’t know. Probably not.”

“Did something happen?”

“Stef,” he says, tucking his feet under and leaning back against the wall, “I’m worried about Maria.”

“Did she hurt you?”

“What? No!” He looks away, hunches his shoulders, hugs his belly. “She’s just being stupid, that’s all.” Then he explodes outwards, gesturing wildly with his hands. “And I should hate her! Stef, I should fucking despise her! Look at what she’s done to me!” He unzips his hoodie and pulls up his t-shirt and there, underneath, is… another t-shirt? Wrapped and tied tight around his chest?

“Aaron, what’s that?”

He drops his shirt again and glares at her. “You can’t guess? It’s the DIY version of the thing they have you in.”

“You mean, this?” she says, pulling off her t-shirt and throwing it onto the bed between them. It’s a risk — ever since their first interaction after Aaron’s self-imposed solitude, she’s made at least something of an effort to present mostly neutrally; revealing her sports bra is a big step away from that — but he’s evidently seen it under her clothes, so why not?

“Yeah,” he says, not looking directly at her, “that.”

“Sorry,” she says, not putting her top back on, “but it’s better than having my nipples rub against—”

“Damn it, Stef, I know! Why do you think I wrap a fucking t-shirt around my chest? Like, ten percent of the time, when I’m in the right mood, which I’ll have you know is getting rarer and rarer, I’m sensitive there in a way that’s kind of exciting, but the rest of the time it’s like having an itch I can’t scratch the size of two flattened tennis balls! It’s infuriating.”

She points at the rumpled material, now clearly visible under his top. “Does that… help?”

“It’s better than nothing.” He shrugs. “Kind of. Not really. I have to sit leaning forward so there isn’t as much pressure. I have to think about it all the time. No, actually, that’s not right. I used to think about it all the time. But I think it’s become habit.” He frowns, taps a finger on his knee. “It’s like Maria said…”

“Tell me about Maria.”

“I told you. I’m worried about her. She’s not behaving like herself.”

“Well, she had a pretty bad fall.”

“She was attacked, Stef! Will attacked her! And you! You did the right thing straight away. You helped her! Me, I just sat there, watching, complaining.” He clenches a fist. “And that’s… fuck. I want to say it’s only fair. Because she’s the one holding me here. I know, I know, it’s actually a whole building full of sexy prison guards, but it’s always felt like it was mostly her. She was the one I saw the most. And when Will attacked her… I was happy, Stef. I was fucking happy. She was getting what she deserved.” He’s been looking away again, and when he looks back at her his eyes are wet and the muscles in his jaw are tense. “She has someone who loves her,” he continues, clearly having trouble keeping his voice under control. “She has someone who loves her.”

“She does,” Stef says, nodding.

“You know? Of course you know. You know everything around here. You’re practically a sponsor.”

“Aaron, I—”

“No,” he mutters, “I don’t care. You’re coping, in your own way. I don’t hold that against you. That would be so aggressively stupid, right? That would be just like a judgmental little prick like me, to decide the way someone’s playing the hand they’ve been dealt is wrong, just because I wouldn’t do it that way, wouldn’t it?”

He’s gesticulating again. Stef catches his closest hand by the wrist. “Aaron,” she says, when he’s been startled into shutting up. “It’s okay. It’s fine. You can disagree with how I’m doing things if you want.”

“I don’t know what I want, Stefan!” He snatches his hand back and lifts himself up off the mattress, so he can sit facing her, cross-legged. “That’s just it!” He starts counting on his fingers. “I don’t know what I want. I don’t know who I am. I think the guy who came here is fucking dead, and I’m just what’s left, trying to figure out how to relate to people from first principles, and the corpse of the fucker I’ve been raised from is no help because he never knew, either. She turned the cameras off, Stef!”

“What?”

He plunges his hands into his lap, makes himself small and undemonstrative. “She turned the cameras off,” he says. “Everyone else left the room and it was just her and me, sitting at the table together, and she was telling me all this stuff about how she was feeling, and she turned the cameras off. It was… so stupid of her. I could have done anything to her.”

“So?” Stef says. “Did you?”

“No,” he whispers.

“Would you ever?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“She trusts you. And I think she’s right to.”

“She says I’ve changed.”

“She’s right about that, too.”

“Stef,” Aaron hisses. “Stefan. Stef. I’m so fucking scared, man! Everything’s shifting under me! Even my fucking mind! I know what I want to say! I want to say I haven’t changed, or I don’t want to change, or… or fucking something! But I can’t stop dwelling on all the shit I did, and saying I don’t want to change is a lie, because the guy who came here? If he’s dead then I’m glad and I will piss on his grave, but, Stef, I’m starting to have trouble recognising myself. I look in the mirror—” he unearths a hand from his lap and flails in the direction of the wardrobe; Stef intercepts it as he brings it back, holds onto it, keeps it as a point of contact between them, an anchor for him, “—and everything’s different. Different like you’re different. Only I can’t shrug it off like you! I’m, God, Stef, I’m even shrinking. I’m shorter than I was. Isn’t that fucking ludicrous? I’m shorter and I’m softer and I’m changing and I’m alone with Maria and she’s acting like I’m… like I’m a…”

“A friend?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that such a bad thing?”

“We hugged, Stef! She hugged me and I just fucking clung to her and cried like a little girl.”

He’s whispering still, urgently, his voice hoarse and his whole body leaning towards Stef, as if he can make her understand through proximity and urgency alone. She shifts closer to him, keeping hold of his hand.

“And boys don’t cry?” she asks.

“Boys might. I don’t.”

“Tell me why, Aaron.”

“Because!” he snaps. “That’s my reason. Fucking because. I don’t know.”

Only son of nouveau riche, social-climber parents. Boarding school kid picked on for his height and his accent and his family’s lack of connections. Forced to hide his sensitivity under so many layers of shit that he forgot how to access it.

“Because it’s not safe to be seen as weak,” Stef says. “The places you’ve lived, and the people you’ve been around, have put you under pressure to be strong, right?”

He shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Well, it’s safe here. In this room, with me, it’s safe. When you’re with Maria, it’s safe. What use is strength, down here? Why not let yourself be weak?”

He doesn’t answer, just curls up more tightly. But he doesn’t take his hand back again, and Stef, not at all sure that this is the right thing to do, carefully pulls on it. Aaron looks up, his face a mess, and Stef holds out her free hand. Hesitantly he takes it, shuffles closer to her on the mattress, and lets himself be accepted into her arms.

“You’re safe,” she whispers, gathering him up, feeling his arms tighten around her, resting her chin on the top of his head. “It’s just me here. No-one else. You’re safe.”

He’s buried in her now, his shoulders heaving with quiet but insistent sobs, and she holds him, strokes his hair with loose fingers. He stiffens for a moment, likely wondering if it really is okay to be doing this with another guy, and then he relaxes, pulls on her waist with both hands, and lets it all out again.

 

* * *

 

The lasagne really is very good. Lorna’s been waiting in the kitchen for Vicky to get done with her lecture, and she’s met several new residents and several new ex-residents, who apparently all have developed the habit of just dropping in when they’re in the area and hungry, and she can only watch so many people rummage in the fridge and un-foil and microwave something that smells delicious before she succumbs. The atmosphere reminds her very much of her first-year home in Windsor Tower, only with much better food.

And, yes, everyone here but her is technically a kidnap victim, blah blah blah. The refrain’s more than tired.

“So?” one of the new girls says. “How are you finding the infamous Dorley Hall?”

She does wish people would stop asking her that, though.

“We’re not ‘infamous’, Bella,” says the woman who introduced herself as Rabia. “That’s the whole point. Infamy implies fame, and we’re a secret underground feminisation operation. Sec-ret.” She accentuates the syllables with her fork, extracted from her moussaka.

“Right,” Bella says, slapping herself on the forehead. “I only hope the other places keep quiet, too.”

“Other places?” Lorna asks.

“Well, yeah. We don’t know anything for certain, but you hear rumours. And I doubt Grandmother got the idea all by herself, you know? Besides, forced fem in fiction is a really weird thing to just come out of nowhere; that’s always felt like cover, to me.”

“This is like the bit in the vampire movie,” Rabia says, grinning at Lorna, “where the woman in the catsuit explains they planted the stories about Dracula so no-one would take the idea of vampires seriously.”

“Don’t be silly,” Bella says. “Vampires don’t exist.”

“What about the one upstairs?” says one of the second years clustered around the other end of the table.

“That’s just Jodie,” says another. “And, Lorna, they’re messing with you. We’re not a franchise.”

“This has got to be the only place like this,” says the first one.

“Yeah,” says a third, “if there are other forced fem shops around the country, then why was I taken from Cardiff University?”

“I was on my holidays,” Bella says, with her mouth full.

It’s strange to watch the second years, who’re barely months out of the basement, uniformly pretty and almost uniformly a little nervous, interact with the older women with close to the same level of flippant disregard for their experiences as she’s used to from Christine and the others. One of them catches her looking and smiles shyly.

“I made that,” the girl says, nodding at Lorna’s plate.

“The lasagne?”

“Yep. Bex and Aisha helped, but I made it. What do you think?”

“It’s lovely.”

The girl beams at her. “Good! Because layering the pasta took ages. I wanted to make a spag bol, but Bex—” she nods to her right, at the girl sitting next to her, currently chatting with the girl on her other side, “—she said she really wanted lasagne, so…” She spreads her hands in front of her, saying, Who am I to disagree?

Lorna grins.

She’s almost done with her lunch, and chatting with Rabia about her degree, when a pair of hands close over her eyes, accompanied by a kiss on the top of her head and the second years saying, “Aww!” in unison.

“Hey, Lorna,” Vicky says, leaning down and scooping up some of what remains of Lorna’s lasagne with a finger.

“Hey, Vick,” Lorna says. “And, hey! Get off my lunch!”

“I’m hungry!” Vicky protests. “And, wow, this is good.”

“Thank you!” a voice from the other end of the table pipes up. “You want me to wrap some up to take home?”

“Oh, goodness, Faye, would you?” Vicky says. “I haven’t had time to eat.”

The girl nods and jumps up and Lorna returns her attention to her girlfriend, who’s pulling her chair back and crouching down next to her.

“How did it go?” Vicky asks.

“Good!” Lorna says. “I’ll tell you later.”

It’s not long before they’re heading out, hoping to beat the next rainstorm, with Vicky clutching a portion of lasagne in tupperware. “Really,” she says, when the kitchen doors close behind them, “are you okay? I hated leaving you alone in there.”

“It was actually fine,” Lorna says, dodging around a woman pinning something to the corkboard by the entrance and pushing open the front doors. “Seriously. You don’t have to worry about me while I’m— Hey, Vick, you okay?”

Vicky’s tarrying, beckoning for Lorna to come back. “Yeah,” she says, “I’m fine. I just forgot something, that’s all.”

Lorna holds the door open for the woman, lets her through, and then joins Vicky by the corkboard. “Seriously, Vick, what’s up?”

Wordlessly, Vicky points to the poster, pinned up by the woman who just left. Around a central picture of a delicate-looking young man and above tear-off slips with phone numbers and email addresses, are the words:

MISSING: MARK VOGEL

Last seen November 2012
in the vicinity of ‘Legend’ nightclub in Almsworth

If you have ANY information, please contact:
Shahida Mohsin-Carpenter
Rupa Mohsin-Carpenter
Edward Mohsin-Carpenter