23. Forget Me Not

2019 December 11
Wednesday

“Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!”

“Uh, Vick? Usually I’m the sweary one.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“This is bad, then?”

“It fucking might be.” Vicky tears the poster from the corkboard and examines it up and down. She checks the back, as if it might become less terrible on closer inspection. “I can’t believe this. Shit!”

Lorna holds out her hand for the poster, and looks it over. The man on the front wasn’t, by the looks of him, much more than a boy when the picture was taken, and a pretty boy at that. She rereads his name: Mark Vogel. “Who is this guy?”

Vicky takes the poster back, and with her other hand pages through her phone. “Melissa,” she says. “Used to be Mark, obviously. Graduated years ago. Ah.” She stops swiping through and taps on an image. “Graduated 2015. Left the same year. Within days of graduation. Technically she kept a room here while she finished her degree, but that ‘technically’ looks very technical, and—” she peers at the screen, “—she never actually finished, I guess. Reading between the lines, she came back as little as possible until she just… stopped coming back.”

“Jesus, Vick, is every missing person around here a girl now?”

She shrugs. “Mostly only the ones who weren’t girls already.” She must be distracted, or she wouldn’t be quite so flippant about Dorley’s history around Lorna. “Here,” she says, holding up her phone and showing Lorna a photo of a beautiful blonde girl, recognisably related to the boy on the poster. She’s smiling and hugging a Black girl who is, Lorna notes with tired inevitability, also beautiful. A girl could get a complex hanging around this place.

“That’s him?” she asks, uselessly.

“Her,” Vicky confirms. “And, look.” She scrolls down, and Shahida’s name is listed, along with Stephanie Riley’s and a few others — although for Steph there’s a note that says her surname is placeholder — in a column marked PTA.

“Parent Teacher Association?” Lorna asks, feeling stupid.

“‘Pre-Transition Associates’,” Vicky murmurs. “What’s interesting is you can go onto your file entry and make notes. I have, and so’ve Christine, Paige, Pippa, Jodie; all of us. Melissa doesn’t seem to have done anything. Someone else must’ve updated Steph’s name.”

“What does that say to you?”

Vicky shrugs. “Maybe she hasn’t touched her file because she left this place and never looked back?”

“I like her already.”

“Yeah. Same. Come on. We need to talk to this Shahida woman.”

“Do we have to?”

“I don’t like it any more than you do, but you know the consequences of letting this kind of thing slide. For us; for her…”

Christine’s warning echoes again. “Fuck,” Lorna says. “Yes. I know. Fuck.”

“Now you’re getting it.”

Lorna leads Vicky out, kicking open the doors and heading for the path that leads to the campus proper. She knows, logically, awfully, that she has to become part of protecting this place so Vick doesn’t get outed, along with Christine and her other friends here. Hell, even the evil bitches who stuck around to torture boys are kind of okay when you get to know them, and they’re paying for her GRS and they make a mean cup of coffee; probably she should keep them safe, too. So she’ll help check on this woman and try to find out what she knows, and if she happens to kick the main doors to Dorley Hall open with enough force to rattle them on their hinges, well, that’s probably just a fucking coincidence, isn’t it?

“Hey!” she shouts, when she judges them close enough, thanking God and her extensive voice training that her yell is clear and comes from the head; she repainted her face after the electrologist got done with her, and she judged herself as passing about as well as she does normally, i.e. middling-well, but she doesn’t know this woman, doesn’t have any clue how she might feel about trans women, and Lorna’s discovered that sounding ‘right’ can push cis people into gendering you correctly, and that it can even help if they clock you. The kind of people who respond to trans women with violence are sometimes mollified by a feminine voice, and have been given to sort her into the nonthreatening category because of it.

Roll on FFS. A life without these constant calculations, where her gender is in her own hands and not in the grip of strangers’ prejudices, sounds pretty fucking sweet.

The woman turns around. “Hi?” she says, stopping and waiting for Lorna and Vicky to catch up.

“Shahida, yeah?” Lorna says. “That’s your name on the poster?”

“It is,” Shahida says, frowning but not hostile.

“Um, am I saying it right?” Lorna says, lowering her voice, understanding suddenly that while she was running the talking-to-cis-people calculus in her head, Shahida may well have been running the talking-to-white-people equivalent in hers.

Shahida smiles gently. “Right enough. Do you have any information?”

“Oh,” Lorna says. “No.” Clever! Came running. Didn’t have a plan.

“We wanted to ask you about Mark,” Vicky says quickly. “Since you’re looking for him and all. I used to live in that dorm, and we know a lot of people there, and they know even more people, et cetera. Was Mark a student here?”

“Yes,” Shahida says. “But not for very long. He started in 2012, and… left the same year.”

“We probably know someone who knows someone who was around back then,” Lorna says. “We can ask around, put the poster in the group chat, tell people to message you, all that stuff.”

“Thank you,” Shahida says, nodding. “What did you want to know?”

Crap. What do they want to know? And are they helping this woman get closure, or just getting her away from the Hall? She gestures to Shahida’s shopping bag full of posters. “Where are you putting those up?”

“Everywhere. Every dorm, and every major building here at the university. Outside that bloody club in the city. The bus stop where they found his iPod. The station. And anywhere else I can find a corkboard or a spot of spare wall.” She shrugs, looking at the floor. “I’m not stupid,” she says, subdued. “I don’t expect to find him. I think… I think I always expected it to end the way it did. Mark was always like that. He was ephemeral; like snow. Something… someone you appreciate in the time you have, because you know it can’t last.” Lorna wants to reach out. Can’t help feeling it would be unwelcome. Shahida’s in her own world for a minute; best to wait for her to return on her own. When she does, it’s with a quick shake of her head and a businesslike smile. “I just want to know whatever there is to know. And I want something to tell his brother.”

“His brother?” Lorna asks. She remembers another name on the list on Vick’s phone, and almost says it aloud.

“He’s got a younger brother,” Shahida says. “Probably about your age, actually.” She waves a loose hand at Lorna and Vicky. “I’ve been checking in with him, now and then; just emails, mainly. That poor kid…” She starts counting off on her free hand. “His mother dies when he’s just a boy, like, eleven, or something. And he fights a lot with his brother about it, because they’re both dealing badly with it in their own special ways, and then he disappears, and then his best friend just ups and leaves—”

“His best friend?” Vicky asks.

“Kid called Stefan. Met him once, but Mark could barely shut up about him; he was more like a younger brother to him than Russ was. And he and Russ weren’t talking, haven’t for ages, but it’s one thing when someone you always meant to make up with is just up the road, and quite another when he’s halfway round the world. Which is,” she adds, frowning, “a little worrying, given what I know about him. But whatever; he’s gone, and he’s taken any chance they had to make up with him. And Russ’ dad’s been a mess — a big mess — since his wife died, and worse since Mark disappeared.” She clenches her hand into a fist. “Russ’ world just keeps retracting, year after year after year. I want to give him some closure, if I can.”

Lorna doesn’t trust herself to say anything. That one act, taking Mark/Melissa, keeps snowballing, and all these poor people, people who loved a boy who doesn’t even exist any more, are left hurting and alone. Fucking Dorley.

“Russ asked you to put these up?” Vicky says.

Shahida smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “No. I think he’d get pretty mad at me if he found out what I’m doing. This is all me. I got back into the country a few weeks ago, and just… being back in Almsworth. It brought it all back. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Mark ever since. Besides, it’s almost exactly seven years since he went missing. Anniversaries, you know?” She kicks at the dirt at the edge of the path. “And we didn’t leave it in a good place. Now he’s gone, and that’s where things will always be.”

A part of Lorna, a part she hates, cheers at this: no new evidence, no long chain of people all searching; just one woman, fondly remembering someone she used to know. She glances sideways at Vicky, thinks she sees the same relief — and the same disgust — pass through her girlfriend, and resolves to hug her as hard as she can as soon as this is over.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“It’s okay.” Shahida swings her shopping bag in idle circles, transfers it from hand to hand almost like a juggler, apparently without paying attention. “I’ve got nothing. I know it. But I’m going to look, anyway. Ask around. I have to.”

“Yeah,” Lorna says. “Yeah. I get it.”

Small talk carries them a few more minutes, and Lorna feels every one of them. Thunder splits them eventually, rolling in the distance and threatening a return of the rain, and Shahida excuses herself, rushing off towards the car park and leaving Vicky and Lorna free to walk unsteadily back to the safety of the Hall.

“What do we tell them?” Lorna says, when the doors have closed behind them and they’re alone in the echoing entryway.

Vicky swallows. “Everything she said. And then we walk away. Whatever happens, I want no part of it.”

“Yeah,” Lorna says. “Agreed.”

Hands find hands. For a moment they stand together, holding each other up, and then it’s time.

 

* * *

 

“No,” Vicky says, irritated, “I don’t know her! She left before I even got here!” She’s leaning forward on the kitchen table, head cradled in her arms and with a laptop open in front of her with a list of contact numbers on the screen; Melissa’s is highlighted, but all of them have tried her phone, Lorna included, and she isn’t answering.

“And don’t yell at Vicky,” Lorna says.

“Okay, fine,” Rabia says, “keep your knickers on. If you don’t know her, you don’t know her! I just thought that since we have exactly one sponsor here right now—” she jerks a thumb at Bella, sat in one of the chairs in the far corner of the kitchen, hissing into a phone, with the girl Lorna thinks is called Rebecca rubbing her between the shoulder blades, “—we could maybe give her a bit of a hand.” She’s drinking from a mug which reads Boys: Just Raw Material for Girls, which strikes Lorna as rather tasteless, considering the conversation she and Vick just had.

“Where’s Indira?” Vicky says.

“Security room, keeping an eye on Steph and the boys.”

“Get Edy, then!”

Bella covers the phone with her hand. “Edy took Maria to bed for a nap. In my opinion, this does not constitute the kind of emergency we want to wake up the concussed woman for.”

“What about Tabby, then?” Vicky says. “Or— or— Where are the third year sponsors, anyway? We haven’t all been released, have we? Someone must be on duty.”

“Your sponsor’s taken the year off,” Rabia says, peering at the screen of another laptop. “Christine’s been released from Indira, who’s downstairs, anyway, and Francesca’s off… somewhere. Everyone else is at their other jobs.” She jabs at the trackpad. “Izzy, babe, there’s only two girls on call today, Abby and Christine, and neither of them are picking up.”

“They’re both out today,” Bella says, having finished her phone call. “This was supposed to be a quiet day. Everyone’s off running errands. Going to class. Going to work. Even on-call people.”

“Seems short-sighted.”

Bella laughs. “If you can find us twenty more staff, you go right ahead,” she says. Rebecca offers her a hand and she takes it, moving with Rebecca’s support over to the table, where she slumps into a chair, rests her chin on her hand, and drums her fingers on her cheek. Thinking.

“I don’t see why this is such an emergency,” Lorna says. “All she wants is closure. She won’t find it; she’ll stop.” She clenches her stomach against the bile that threatens to rise over such a glib summary, but it doesn’t make sense for the poster to have incited such panic!

“Attention is attention,” Rabia says. “A name that could be connected to us comes up after, let’s see—” she flips screens on her laptop, eyes darting as she reads, “—seven years, and people start talking. Normally we deal with all this kind of stuff while we’re still here, but Melissa, if I’m reading this right, basically ghosted us after doing the bare minimum. This Shahida woman was already on the outs with her before she came here, and by the time you know what happened she was at a uni at the other end of the country. Sometimes things don’t get resolved cleanly; sometimes they fester. And when they pop, we deal with them.” She glances at Bella with a smile. “The last one I was involved with, though, we had more people around to deal with it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bella says. “You try telling the current crop of third years they should stick around to usher the next generation into womanhood. Julia and Yasmin’d laugh in your face, Jodie might honestly actually bite you, Paige would ignore you, Christine’d follow Paige wherever she goes, and Vicky…” She points across the table. “Well, she already left.”

“Still,” Rabia says, “you could make it easier on yourselves by being more careful with these local pickups. Melissa lived locally before she was a student here, and that means local roots. Tearing those up is always going to be messier.”

“You’re welcome to become a sponsor, you know, if you have all these suggestions.”

“Sorry. Just a nurse.”

“Anyway,” Bella says, “I’m barely older than Melissa. Address your complaints to the management.”

“There has to be someone around,” Vicky says.

“What about Nell?” Rabia says, tapping on her screen. “Says here she’s a sponsor and she was in Melissa’s intake. If we can’t get hold of Abby, why not try her?”

“Bad idea,” says one of the second years. Faye? She folds her legs up under her chin and Rebecca immediately starts comforting her.

“Agreed,” Bella says, and leans far enough away from the table to hold Faye’s hand for a moment. “Nell wasn’t on good terms with Melissa.”

Faye mutters something that sounds like, “She’s not on good terms with anyone.”

“She is working on herself, Faye,” Bella says firmly. “And she gave you your second chance—”

“—so I should give her one,” Faye recites, with foul humour, but she unfolds a little and leans into Rebecca’s hug. “I know, I know.”

Lorna wonders if she can get Christine to give her access to the files or the logs or the diaries or whatever the hell they keep around here, because now absolutely is not the time to ask for the backstory on that, and she knows she won’t stop wondering until she finds out. Maybe Jodie knows…?

“Anyway,” Rebecca says, slightly muffled by Faye’s hair, “Nell’s probably still asleep. Night shift.”

“Punishment detail,” Faye mumbles gleefully.

“She’s been given time to cool off,” Bella says, “that’s all.” She’s trying for a censorious voice and failing; there’s a hint of glee. Apparently she doesn’t like Nell, either.

“Oh,” Lorna says, remembering, “something else that might be important: Shahida says she knows Stefan. They met only once, but supposedly Mark talked about him a lot. And she knows Stefan’s gone to find himself, or something, but she seemed like she’s worried about him, too.” Vicky nudges her. It takes Lorna a moment to get it. “Shit! Stephanie. Melissa! Her, not him. Hers. Both of them! Shit.”

“Don’t worry about the names and pronouns,” Rabia says drily. “You get used to rapid context-switching around here, especially in emergencies.”

“Oh? Deal with a lot of grieving relatives, do you?”

“Yes,” Bella says. Faye snorts, cynical.

“Of course you do. Of course you do. Jesus fucking Christ, what am I involved with?” Lorna lays her head on the table, and Vicky scrunches her fingers in her hair, the way she likes. She reaches behind her neck, grabs Vicky’s hand and holds it. Together. They survive this madness together.

She is better at dealing with names and pronouns than this, anyway. Obviously! It’s just that, up until recently, most of her friends and acquaintances were people who’ve never in their lives been kidnapped and forcibly regendered, and Lorna rarely gets involved in situations that require her to use deadnames and old pronouns.

She frowns, and counts in her head — including Vicky, she’s close with at least five Dorley girls — and confirms that, yes, while it is still true that most of her friends have never been kidnapped and regendered, the ratio’s closer than she’d like.

The conversation’s been going on around her. “What do you think, Rab?” Bella’s saying.

“About what? You’re the sponsor; I’m just the nurse.”

Vicky leans closer to Lorna, so she can whisper. “Yeah, right. Just the nurse, I’m sure.”

“If this Shahida woman’s got her mind on Stephanie as well,” Bella says, as Lorna wonders what exactly Vick could mean by that, “then we have a potential point of escalation.”

Rabia nods. “Yes. If she starts investigating her, too, she might poke a hole in that backpacking story. If that falls, then she’s got herself a very easy game of join the dots.”

“Yeah.”

Someone clears their throat, which makes Lorna jump. Judging by the way the kitchen table scrapes slightly across the floor, almost everyone else in the room reacted similarly. In the doorway into the dining room stands Mrs Prentice, smiling and peering in.

“’scuse me, gels,” she says, “but I was told to expect a lift. I didn’t want to disturb you as you seem to have a crisis on, but—” she taps her wrist, “—time’s getting on, and all that.”

“Shit,” Bella says. “I was going to drive you, but I’m caught up in this.”

“We can,” Vicky says quickly, raising a hand. “We’re no use here, and our car’s not far.” Lorna wants to kiss her; anything to get away from all this ghoulish speculation.

“Wonderful!” Mrs Prentice announces, beaming. “Tanya’s just getting her things together — she won’t be a moment — and then we can all head out together!” She looks around the room, at tense faces. “I’ll, um, help her get everything packed up, shall? Yes. Good. Back in a few!”

“Okay,” Bella says, clapping her hands as Mrs Prentice heads back downstairs, “I’m putting together a plan. It’s not ideal, but until people start trickling back in, we work with who we have. So. Rab, are you okay holding down the fort here for a little while?” Rabia nods. “Good. I have to go and have a long and probably horrible conversation with Elle’s point woman, to let her know we have a minor crisis on our hands. Vicky and Lorna—” she points, “—are taking our friends home. So… Rebecca. How are you feeling today?”

“Good,” Rebecca says. She and Faye are less wrapped up in each other than before, but they’re still holding hands. “Pretty good.”

“Do you think you could manage a trip across campus?”

“What?” Faye says, as if Bella just asked if Rebecca could go for a dip in a volcano.

Rebecca’s startled by the question but assembles her wits quickly, putting on a confident face and nodding. “I think so,” she says. “Can Faye come, too?”

“Would you be okay with that, Faye?” Bella asks.

“Yes,” Faye says, fierce. She stands, pulling Rebecca up with her. “Yes, definitely.”

“Good. You know the offices on the far side of campus? The ones where they warehouse some of the lecturers?”

“The Halliday Building?” Faye confirms, and Lorna swallows a cynical retort. The Halliday Building is only barely on campus; there are car parks with greater prestige. It doesn’t surprise her to learn that Christine’s Linguistics lecturers have offices there, rather than in the newer, considerably more plush, and considerably more central quad offices, reserved for those who teach more fashionable degrees. Saints’ Linguistics programme might well be one of the best in the country but it’s still, in the university administrators’ likely opinion, only Linguistics.

“Yes. Go there, find Professor Dawson’s office. She’s on the third floor, if I remember correctly. Christine’s got a meeting with her today. Go there, tell her we have an emergency, and we need her, and bring her back here, okay?”

“Christine’s not a sponsor, Isabella,” Vicky says, as the two second years nod. “I know she’s on call, but she’s just tech support!”

“I’m aware, Victoria,” Bella says patiently, “but we need an expert on Melissa and Shahida, to tell us whether this is a complete shitshow, or just a—” she waves a hand distractedly as she searches for a way to complete the metaphor, “—just a speck of stubborn stuff on the bottom of the bowl. Abby’s our expert. No-one else got close to Melissa in her time here — don’t give me that look, Victoria, I wasn’t on staff then and I wasn’t in her intake — and Abby wasn’t the most thorough record keeper. By design, probably; she and Melissa kept secrets. So we need her, and she’s not picking up and she’s not answering her messages and we don’t know where she is, which is troubling, because we should. But Christine’ll know where she is, and even if she won’t tell us — she and Abby share secrets, too — she’ll be able to get in touch. So.”

“You really think this is urgent enough to pull her out of her meeting? She’s going to fail the year if she misses much more.”

“Please. You and I both know that girl could recite her textbooks backwards. We’ll lean on the staff if we have to. That sort of thing is what the crisis fund is for. Rebecca, Faye, you’re sure you’re up to this?”

“Yes,” Rebecca says.

“Yes, Bella,” Faye says.

“Then go. And—” Bella raises her voice as they head for the door, which Rabia stands up and opens for them with a thumb and an eyebrow cocked at Bella, “—take umbrellas from the pot in the hall! And no running away!”

“You’re sure they’ll come back?” Rabia says.

Bella shrugs. “All their stuff is here.”

“Be serious. Please?”

“Yes. They’ll come back. They’re committed. And they won’t want to leave Aisha and Mia behind. And they quite like me, too. They’re good girls, Rab. It’s fine.”

“If you say so.”

“Jesus,” Vicky says, watching the girls walk stiffly down the path, hands held tightly, folded umbrellas wielded like weapons, looking furtively around as if monsters might leap out from behind every bush. “That’s unexpected.”

“It’ll be good for them,” Bella says. She’s paging through her phone, frowning.

“What’s the big deal?” Lorna asks.

“It’s December,” Rabia says, “and they’re second years. Still healing from the FFS, still barely out of the basement. No-one goes out solo — or even in an adorable twosome — this early.”

“Melissa did,” Bella says.

 

* * *

 

Christine doesn’t like to stand out. At school, it was a way to get hit; at home, a way to get hurt. So she kept to herself as much as she could, kept her interests to herself, and returned home every day to dodge her father, complete her schoolwork in the quiet of her own room, and escape to the balcony or the shop in town, to smoke, to switch off, to retreat from consciousness and become nothing more than a need, fulfilled by her cigarettes. She missed a lot of meals, claimed at home to have eaten at school, and at school simply avoided the cafeteria.

Whenever she talks about her school days in front of Paige, the conversation has a tendency to end in hugs and tears.

But now Professor Dawson’s looking at her like she might be someone, and Christine’s fear of standing out collides with her awareness that she has yet to complete her NPH; technically, she’s no-one. She hopes the professor doesn’t get it into her head to look her up. She’s sure her provisional identity can stand up to the scrutiny — she’s run the usual tests on it herself — but the fear of it won’t leave her.

“Ms Hale,” Prof Dawson says, leaning forward on her desk and swiping away the course list Christine’s been rolling up in her fingers, “while I am both grateful and impressed that you are so up to date on the material, despite your absences, our tutorials and workshops become rather more vital next semester, and your presence will be required.” She smiles, to soften her words. “Marks are assigned according to contribution, and the weightings are fixed; when I say required, I mean required. Unless you plan to submit mitigating circumstances forms on a weekly basis.”

“No,” Christine says. “No, Ma’am, I don’t.”

“Good. Because that would give the panel one hell of a collective headache.” When Christine nods solemnly, Prof Dawson shakes her head. “That was a joke, Ms Hale. You’re allowed to smile.”

“Sorry, Ma’am.”

“And please, call me Professor. Or Marianne!”

“Sorry.”

“You’re not at school any more, Ms Hale, and a measure of independence in your work is a good thing. It’s a valuable skill to cultivate and something we — I — recognise. But I’m afraid you’re going to have to start showing your face again, or I will be required to follow up. Yes,” she adds with a grin, “there’s that word again: required. I can no more dodge the obligation than you. So, while I’m perfectly happy to allow you your privacy when it comes to your… extracurricular activities — whatever it is that keeps you out of my lectures — you have to meet me halfway.”

Christine’s refused to explain her absences, tried instead to imply she’s got a job, that she needs the money, and when Prof Dawson pointed out that Christine lives in Dorley Hall, famously a dorm that does not charge for its accommodation, Christine shrugged, tried to look haunted, and hoped the professor’s imagination would fill in the rest: terrible debts, perhaps, or a stricken family who can’t provide for themselves. Sometimes the best lies are the ones other people come up with themselves.

She wonders which truth the professor would find most appalling: that Christine watches the saved videos of her lectures while monitoring the inmates of an underground prison, or that she watches them at 200% speed.

“Um,” she says, speaking thickly through the treacle in her throat; for some reason she can rattle off course materials and lecture notes with ease, but asking anything of an authority figure always spikes her anxiety, “could you, perhaps, put that in an email?”

Prof Dawson raises an eyebrow. “I’ve put it in several.”

“No, I mean, that wording exactly.”

“I don’t follow. How will that help?”

Christine swallows her irritation and pulls her laptop out of her bag, quickly typing up a spec email that covers the salient points: Christine will be required to attend two tutorials and one workshop per week, at these times, and there can be no allowance made for rescheduling; Christine’s final grade is dependent on her attendance; Christine will be investigated if her absences continue to pile up.

The professor peers at the screen. “What precise wording, Ms Hale.”

“Please?”

“Oh, fine,” Prof Dawson says irritably. She snaps a picture of the screen with her phone. “You’ll get the email before the day is out.”

“Thank you, Ma’am,” Christine says, letting another Ma’am slip out in her relief. Something concrete to show to the sponsors, to get them off her back, to perhaps even force them to admit that since the security audit is complete and the network patching is done, Christine can go back to being mostly an ordinary student once more, and earn her salary on call. She wonders if she ought to have added something about attendance is considered crucial for Christine’s continued feminine development, but that would probably be pushing it.

“Are you sure there’s nothing you’d like to tell me, Ms Hale?”

Christine shakes her head, but her reply is interrupted by furious hammering at the professor’s door.

“Oh, good grief,” Prof Dawson says, and raises her voice. “I’m with a student!” The knocking pauses to absorb this information, and then resumes. The professor hangs her head and shares a resigned roll of her eyes with Christine, who doesn’t know entirely what to do with it. “Fine. Come in!”

The noise ceases and the door creaks hesitantly open. Behind it, holding hands and shyly examining the floor, the professor’s bookcases, and all other points of interest in the office bar the professor herself, stand Faye and Rebecca.

The second years.

From Dorley.

What the hell? Christine almost wants to check the date on her laptop, to make sure she hasn’t lost track of time justifying her absences to Prof Dawson and accidentally let six to eight months slip by.

“Yes?” says the professor.

“I, um, know them,” Christine says, and then tries to force some levity into her voice; if they’re here, now, something’s happening. “Hi, girls. What’s up?”

“Hi, Christine!” Faye squeaks, and Christine returns her little wave as Rebecca swallows hard and prepares to speak.

“Um,” Rebecca says, “we need to borrow Christine, Professor Dawson.”

Top marks. Barely a stutter.

“May I ask why?” Prof Dawson says, leaning forward, interested.

When she gets back to the Hall, Christine’s going to find whichever sponsor had the bright idea to send the girls after her and attack her with something dense, like Aaron. The professor’s already curious about her; this can do nothing but make it worse! And as for the effect this could have on the girls…

“We need her,” Faye says, cowed into monosyllables by— well, by any number of things, Christine realises, as this’ll be her first time out since she was taken. She remembers her first time leaving the dorm; terrifying. The fear of discovery around every corner. Only Indira, whispering reassurances into her ear, kept her from bolting immediately for the safety of the Hall, the prison that became home.

She starts packing up her things. “Sorry, Professor,” she says, and silently congratulates herself for strangling the Ma’am on its way out. “It must be important. Could we continue this another time?”

“We were more or less done,” Prof Dawson says. “Look, Ms Hale. Christine. If there’s anything going on at home, or in your dorm, or—”

“There isn’t!” Christine promises, remembering to fetch up her umbrella from the coat stand by the door on her way out. “Thank you so much for seeing me!”

“I’ll be pleased to see you again,” the professor shouts at the closing door, “in my lectures!”

In the corridor, Christine grants herself a moment to lean against the wall and pinch the bridge of her nose, before more pressing concerns take over: the girls. She checks up and down the corridor to make sure they’re alone, and whispers, “Hey. You two okay?”

Faye nods, biting her lip.

“First time out, huh?” Christine says. “You’re doing way better than I did.”

“Really?”

“Really. I was a basket case after ten minutes. Dira practically had to drag me around campus. I’m proud of you.” She turns to Rebecca. “Both of you.”

“It feels silly,” Rebecca says, “that it’s such a big deal. I mean, going out was never like this before.”

“Well,” Christine says, “it is a big deal. And you know why. It’s not silly in the slightest to feel like this is a big step. Yes?”

“Yes,” Faye says.

“The first few minutes were hardest,” Rebecca says. “But then we were just, like, talking, concentrating on each other, and it was… less awful? Even though I’m still kind of puffy in the face. I’m amazed nobody said anything.”

“You are not puffy!” Faye says, startled into animation by Rebecca’s self-deprecation. “You’re beautiful! Bex, you’re so beautiful. It’s me who’s puffy.”

“Nope.”

“Neither of you is puffy,” Christine says. It’s true: it’s been long enough since FFS that the most obvious healing is largely done with, and it takes a practised eye to spot where the girls are still slightly swollen.

“Anyway,” Faye says, “I kind of thought walking past Café One was hardest.”

“Oh,” Rebecca says. “Yeah. Actually, I think you’re right.”

“What happened outside Café One?” Christine asks.

“Some boys started yelling at us. Calling us dykes. That kind of stuff.”

“It’s 2019!” Faye says, indignant. “You can’t say that stuff in 2019.”

Rebecca smirks and pokes her. “Didn’t you say you used to—?”

“Nope. Nope. Never that.” Faye relents under Rebecca’s poking, and attempts to escape. “Yes. Okay! I said other stuff! Really bad stuff! But not that! I’m technically correct!”

Christine corrects for the instinct that’s telling her to take the girls’ hands like they’re a pair of toddlers, despite them both being almost as old as she is — and ignoring the other instinct that says she needs to drag the still-wriggling Faye away by her ear — and leads them out of the Halliday Building. Thankfully, the rain hasn’t yet returned.

“Lesson one about being a pretty girl out in public,” Christine says, once they’re clear of the building and can talk relatively freely, “is that men will comment on you. Sometimes they’ll try to touch you. So you have to be ready for it. And that goes double if those men think you’re gay.”

“That really sucks,” Faye says, with an edge of guilt to her voice that makes Christine wonder exactly how much of a little shit she used to be.

“Yeah,” Christine says, “it does. Welcome to the gender everyone looks at.”

“We were holding hands,” Rebecca says to Christine. “Maybe they’d’ve left us alone if we weren’t?”

“They’ll take any excuse,” Christine says, as they walk up the steps up towards the quad. “You just have to learn how to not let it get to you. Which is a lot harder than saying it makes it sound. And,” she adds, switching into a rote, sponsorly voice, with an appropriately exasperated expression which makes the girls giggle, “you’ve learned your lesson from when you used to do things like that, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Faye says, in a primary school voice.

“Yep,” Rebecca says, “that’s exactly why I was basemented. For yelling ‘dyke’. I would like you to believe that with your whole head.”

“I will,” Christine says, and Faye snorts. “Come on. Let’s get back home, and then your idiot sponsor can tell me why she packed you off to fetch me in such a hurry.”

Faye tugs on her sleeve, and Christine slows up enough for her to whisper in her ear, “Melissa.”

“…Of course.”

Melissa, whose disappearance ultimately sent Steph to their door, whose absence has Abby so lonely she’s risking contacting her family without permission — which, thankfully, seems to be going well, and thus has probably used up their institutional supply of good luck for the rest of the year — and whose spectre has seemed to hang over the place for years; why can’t you be pretty and compliant, like Melissa was?

Everyone admires her, no-one knows her.

Melissa. Always bloody Melissa.

 

* * *

 

Meal replacement shakes suck. She’s tried every kind, and they’re all the same: chalky, thick, and with an aftertaste that can’t be masked no matter how much chocolate or red berry or banana flavouring they throw at it. She drains it into the sink, half-drunk, and guesses she got maybe 200 calories out of it. Not quite enough. Whatever. She’ll add a bit of garlic bread to her dinner tonight, make it up that way. A memory of Abby rises up in her head: You have to eat, Mark!

No. No, we are not feeling nostalgic for Dorley today! Hard not to think about it, what with all the phone calls, but she’s capable of being dispassionate, damn it; she’s capable of remembering what the place was really like. That her second year wasn’t too bad and her third actively quite nice doesn’t change the fact that her first year, even with Abby’s support, was hell.

God. Yes. The phone calls. Several of the girls from there have been calling for the last half hour. She’s ignored them, obviously; probably someone from her intake is visiting and reminding everyone of The Girl Who Left. Perhaps Nell’s telling stories about her again.

It doesn’t matter. If it’s anything important, Abby will call.

And she’s not supposed to be thinking about Abby, either! Abby’s consented to give her the space she asked for, so why isn’t she cooperating with herself?

She rinses the horrible milkshake bottle and throws it and its plastic cap a little too hard into the recycling bin.

“Lunch piss you off?”

She whirls, smiles, laughs it off.

Zach. Her immediate boss. Lovely guy. Took her aside on her first day and explained, ‘to get it out in the open’, that he’s trans, he’s in a relationship with another trans man, and that anything she reads about him in the papers is probably a lie. “The perils of activism,” he said, and showed her a tweet from a History professor at Saint Almsworth that made her breath catch in her throat both from the association with Dorley Hall and the repulsiveness of Professor Frost’s mode of expression. She even questioned his choice of name! “I wanted a name that was a little unusual for the UK,” he’d said, “because I like to stand out. But I didn’t want one of those trans guy names, you know? And of course the good professor had to needle me on it.” And she nodded politely and schooled her face and pretended not to know what the hell he was talking about. And that led to a five-minute primer on trans man naming conventions of the mid-late-two-thousands. Eventually he showed her screenshots of Tumblr posts on the subject, and she let herself laugh.

That had been an interesting first day.

“Never go on a diet, Zach,” she says. “You have to eat literal garbage.”

It’s her explanation for the meal shakes and the times people have noticed her counting calories on packet lunches and emailing conference organisers for nutrition information: she’s on a diet. No-one questions it, even though she’s still technically slightly underweight; diets are virtuous.

“Not literal garbage, surely?”

She kicks at the bin. “My ‘healthy soy milkshake’ had the consistency of that gross, thick liquid I’m always cleaning out of the teabag graveyard.”

He places an innocent hand over his heart. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m sure.” With his other hand he picks up and hides the metal tin, the one he keeps by the sink and dumps his used teabags into.

“I can still see it,” she says, grinning. “You’re— Zach—” she leans around slightly as he passes it from one hand to another, behind his back, “—you’re terrible at this.”

“Fine,” he says, returning it to the counter. “I’ll empty it next time. But I’m docking your pay.”

“You pay me to scrape mouldy tea bags into a plastic bag and take them down to the skips?”

“You do that?” Zach says, gasping. “God. I’m so sorry. I’ll do better.”

“See that you do,” she says, but can’t maintain the stern attitude without laughing. The laugh turns into a cough. “Ugh,” she says, patting herself at the base of her throat, “I think some of that horrible milkshake got stuck.”

“Poor girl,” Zach says, rubbing her shoulder. “Hey, are you still seeing, oh, what was her name… Joyce?”

“She likes Joy,” she says. “And no. It didn’t work out.”

As per usual. She can’t let herself get to know them, no matter how much she wants to; she’s too much like she used to be. Almost a decade since Shahida, and she’s still stuck in the same pattern, even if the reasons are different this time, even if the secret is a new one. It’d be funny if it weren’t so heartbreaking.

“Sorry, kid,” he says, and she laughs and pushes him off. He’s older than her, thirty-seven to her twenty-five, and likes to remind her at every opportunity. She doesn’t mind.

He opens the door for her, at once chivalrous and reminding her that her lunch break is over, and she follows him out of the tiny corner kitchen and back to the office, where she drops into her chair, shares a smile with him as he slips back into his room, and dumps her phone back out of her bag onto the desk.

Two more missed calls.

She scrolls through. Just like the others, they’re from women associated with Dorley; she gets the updated directory every time there’s a new intake, which is a delightful yearly reminder of what still goes on under those antique floorboards. Rabia, Victoria, Lorna, none of whom she knows, and Bella, who she’s pretty sure was gearing up to sponsor someone for the first time when she left. Or perhaps it was when she was in her third year? God. Who even cares? What does it matter which exact batch of people she tortured?

She hates that she’s thinking about Dorley again. She’s long gone — even if sometimes it feels like her mind never left — and they’re not supposed to be bothering her. Whatever! Her phone will play a tune if Abby calls; for everyone else it’ll stay silent. She flips it over, places it face down on the mouse mat. Out of sight, out of mind.

She kicks up from her desk, walks over to the counter, pulls up the blind and smiles at the first student of many, shuffling nervously up to the counter, paperwork in hand.

“Hi,” she says, “I’m Melissa. How can I help you?”

 

* * *

 

“Bloody blonde bitch still isn’t picking up.”

“Still? Does she have the world’s longest lunch break, or what?”

“World’s longest, blondest pain in my arse, more like.”

The first thing Christine hears when she opens the kitchen doors and ushers a subdued Faye and Rebecca inside is Bella complaining about — who else? — Melissa. She didn’t get much out of the girls on the way home, having decided that keeping them comfortable and safe took priority over whatever slow-motion disaster’s engulfing the Hall this week, so they kept up a light-hearted chat all the way through campus. Just three girls, walking home, joking, laughing; perfectly normal. A good lesson for them.

For her, too, if she’s honest. Technically, she hasn’t graduated yet, for all that the sponsors seem content to heap responsibilities on her. Sometimes she forgets how little time she’s spent as a woman; sometimes that terrifies her. The thing with a basement transition is that you don’t get gradually acclimated to the attentions of unruly straight men and cis people in general, as someone transitioning out in the world might; you’re dumped straight into it. Sink or swim. And sometimes she still feels like she’s drowning.

She needs her Paige. Unfortunately, it seems she has shit to do.

Christine waves away Bella’s attempt to say something to her and instead escorts the second years into the dining hall and sits them down together on one of the couches at the far end of the room. Almost immediately they cling to each other, and Aisha and Mia, who look to have been absorbed in what Faye and Rebecca ought to have been doing instead of gallivanting around campus on the whim of their irresponsible sponsor, abandon their laptops and rush over, flanking their Sisters.

“You girls okay?” Christine says.

“Yeah,” Faye says. “Yeah.”

“I don’t want to do that again for a while, I think,” Rebecca says.

“What happened?” Aisha asks. She’s sitting on Faye’s right, stroking her shoulder.

“We saw you were gone,” Mia says, “but we didn’t know where.” She’s on Rebecca’s left, holding her hand.

“Give them some time,” Christine says. “I’ll go get Bella. She’ll take you all upstairs, get you some tea or something.”

She’s turning to go when Faye grabs for her, finds her hand, and pulls her back. “Thanks, Christine,” she says. “Not just for this. But for everything. At the dinner. Everything after. I’m… I’m really glad I met you.”

Rebecca nods emphatically, and the other two echo a moment later. Christine smiles as warmly as she can. “I remember being you,” she says. “It was only a year ago. Seems longer. So I want to help.”

“It’s so weird you’re only a year on from us,” Mia says. “You’re so… together.”

Christine snorts. “I’m a mess. Ask anyone.”

“Maybe,” Mia says thoughtfully, “but maybe I want to be a mess.”

“Live the dream,” Christine says. “Message me if you need me, girls.” She pulls away, but Faye keeps hold of her, leans forward, and kisses her on the knuckles.

“Seriously,” Faye says, “thank you.”

Once again, Christine wonders if this is how Pippa became a sponsor: you keep trying to help, and someone always has to notice how bloody helpful you are, and before you know it you’re being handed the keys to some poor kid five minutes into adulthood whose only mistake was being a complete bastard.

She halts the thought. Now’s not the time to be thinking about mistakes. Because hers were many, and weren’t really mistakes at all but decisions made in desperation and cruelty, and she needs her girlfriend, her sister, or something to drink or smoke if she’s going to contemplate them.

Everyone here has a similar story. Everyone except Steph.

She shuts the kitchen doors behind her, and rounds on Bella before either of the older women can say anything. “Isabella Callaghan, if you send those two outside without an escort again any time before, I don’t know, Valentine’s Day, I’ll make a very unsatisfied report to Aunt Bea.”

“Christine—”

“You could have waited. Half an hour. Forty-five minutes, maybe. And I’d have been done and checking my phone again.”

“The day’s getting on, Christine,” Rabia says. “And she is the sponsor here. If she thought it couldn’t wait, it couldn’t wait.”

“This isn’t some clever psychological ruse to get me to say I’d be a better sponsor than her, is it?”

“No,” Rabia says. “I’m not involved with that side of things. I’m just the nurse.”

“Why not send someone from upstairs to get me, then?” Christine says.

“Upstairs?”

“You know, the cis floors.”

“The cis floors?” Bella repeats, amused.

“Does that mean you think of all of us as trans?” Rabia says.

“I think we need a whole new word for us, but until we get one better than just capitalising Sister, I’m cleaving closer to trans than I am to cis. And if you call yourself a cis girl while you’re under this roof then we’ve effectively expanded the definition of the term beyond usefulness. And we’re getting off the point.”

“We can’t involve outsiders in Dorley business,” Bella says.

“You. Don’t. Have. To. Loads of people up there know me! Hell, some of them even know Steph!”

“Wait, what?”

“Oh, sorry, did we not run that one past the good decisions gang down here?”

“Christine, that’s an unacceptable level of exposure—”

“No, it’s giving Stephanie the opportunity to hang with outsiders and socialise as who she is, with people who can see she’s a trans girl and don’t care. It’s healthy. And she won’t expose us.”

“Whatever,” Bella says, “the point is, I don’t mean ‘outsiders’ as in people who don’t know you, I mean people who mustn’t be involved in our operation in any way.”

Christine wants to scream. Wants to take Bella by the lapels and shake her. She slumps into a chair instead and glares at her, hopes the sheer psychic energy of her frustration will reach her.

“You tell them I have a family emergency or something,” she says. “You’ll be drowning in volunteers. Why are all you sponsors so bloody stupid?”

“Christine,” Rabia says, calmly, quietly, with a hand laid on the table between Christine and Bella, “you know you’re not being fair. We’re between a rock and a hard place today. Staff out or sick, you and Abby both on call and yet both unavailable, and we needed Vicky and Lorna to drive the surgeon and the electrologist, and, well…”

“We don’t trust Lorna yet,” Bella finishes, exchanging a glance with Rabia. “She has just enough knowledge to fuck us, really hard, and—”

“Wait,” Christine says. “You had Vicky and Lorna here and you sent second years out to get me? Fuck it. Conversation over. I’m making the report today. No—” she raises a finger to shut them both up, “—don’t say anything. I’m on staff. I have the authority. Bella: go into the dining hall and fetch those two girls and their cute little polycule back to their rooms and sit and talk to them about their experiences out there, because they need you. They need you to be their big sister, so go do it. Rabia will brief me, and I will do everything I can to help. And if I hear from Faye and Rebecca — and maybe Indira, too, when she gets looped back in — that you did your job as a sponsor, I will erase my draft report and make a new one that says you did the best you could in a difficult situation. And next time, I don’t care how sweet we have to keep her, the surgeon can take a bloody taxi. Now, Bella, go. Do your job.”

She glares at Christine, mutters, “You’re Indira’s kid sister, all right,” and leaves.

“Proud to be!” Christine shouts after her.

“Go easy on her, Christine,” Rabia says.

“Why? She ought to have enough experience by now with getting yelled at by someone younger than her. Personally, I think you’ve all forgotten what it’s like to be brand new. Go easy on them.” She jerks a thumb towards the dining hall. “They’re the ones who need accommodations made for them. Now, talk me through it.”

Rabia shrugs, clearly unwilling to escalate, and fills her in: Shahida showing up outside with the posters; Lorna and Vicky asking her some questions — “Not our idea,” she makes clear; their inability to reach Melissa; their inability to reach Abby; finally, their inability to reach Christine.

“Yeah,” Christine says, “I get it. You need Abby because everyone else here was a complete freak to Melissa because, I don’t know, she was too pretty, or too kind, or too sad, or too weird, or something. And Abby’s not around, so you need me to go get Abby so she can talk to Melissa and work out how scared we need to be about this old girlfriend, or whoever she is.”

“That’s about it,” Rabia says. “But I think it was more complicated than that, with Melissa—”

“Don’t care. We brought her here; we have responsibility. Abby’s talked about her at length, and I know things got better for her in the second and third year, but what was that thing Aunt Bea used to say? ‘Only necessary trauma’. I think we inflicted way more than was necessary, out of carelessness, or from being too busy or whatever. Stretching the duty of care to breaking point, because this place has no staff and no time and it runs on the edge of the catastrophe curve. I’m amazed it all hasn’t fallen apart yet.”

“Money,” Rabia says, shrugging. “Papers over a lot of cracks.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it does. Okay. I’ll go get Abby.”

“You know where she is?”

“Of course.”

“And why she’s turned her phone off?”

“Of course.”

“And you’re not going to tell anyone?”

“No.”

“Fine,” Rabia says. “Fine. I get how this works. You have your little clique, you run around doing whatever you want, and Aunt Bea lets you get away with it because you have useful skills and a pretty face and she’s desperate to keep enough girls around to keep this place running ‘on the edge of the catastrophe curve’.”

“Yeah,” Christine says, tiredly, “we all have our little cliques. This whole place functions because it’s a bunch of interlocking little cliques.” She meshes her fingers to illustrate. “That’s the whole point. That’s why we don’t rat each other out, because for every person who drives one of us up the wall, there’s someone else we love more than life itself. Rabia, I’m not trying to fight with you!”

“Yeah. I’m not, either.” Rabia shakes her head, runs her hand through her hair. “Just stressed. And it’s… weird being back. For more than just a visit, I mean. I’m still settling in at work and now all this, and… and I’ve been trying not to let it get to me. Sorry, Christine. I shouldn’t be rude; I barely know you.” She stretches her arm as far as it’ll go. “Stressed out,” she says.

“Back at you,” Christine says. “I go straight from a frankly terrifying meeting with my course supervisor to this shitshow, via a pair of second years who couldn’t have been more freaked out if they tried. So. Yeah. I’m sorry, too.”

“Will they be okay? The girls?”

Christine nods. “Yeah. I know them both pretty well. And it’s nothing we didn’t do, once upon a time.”

Some of the tension eases, and Rabia smiles. “I remember my first time out. Later than theirs, obviously. April, maybe? I remember it was just about the nicest day so far that year, and I was so happy to be out in the sun again. Trish took me to Café One. We had omelettes.”

“Trish was your sponsor?”

“She was. She’s moved on. Sells houses. We keep in touch.”

“Huh. Don’t suppose she’d consider coming back?”

“Fuck, no!” Rabia laughs, and Christine smiles, grateful that Rabia doesn’t seem to be holding a grudge. It’d suck to have the new nurse as an enemy. “She visits, and we talk all the time, but she’s living the normal life.” She sighs. “Much like I was.”

“How bad is it, being back?”

She looks away, plays with a stray lock of hair. “I mean, I get to see Bella again. Pick up where we left off. So that’s good. And the hospital here’s actually nicer than my old work. Being here again? That’s more complicated. I didn’t like who I was when I came here, even before I had it all thrown in my face.” She grins, and adds, “By Trish.”

“Yeah. I get that. Most days the Hall feels like home; occasionally it still feels like the prison where all that shit was done to me. But I met Paige here, and Indira, and Vick, and everyone else, and even if I do occasionally lose my shit and yell, it made me a better person. So… yes. It’s complicated.”

Rabia nods. “Go on, then,” she says. “Go get Abby, and we can get this shitshow on the road. I’ll make sure Bella isn’t too mad at you. I think she’ll realise you have a point.”

“Thanks. And, um, apologise for me, will you?”

“I will.”

“What will you do while I’m out?”

Rabia raises her hands and takes in the whole kitchen, strangely quiet now it’s just the two of them. “Hold down the fort, as instructed,” she says, “and that’s all. I’m not a sponsor; I’m just the nurse.”

 

* * *

 

A pressure around her midriff wakes her, and she stirs, stretches, and tries not to dislodge whoever it is who has an arm around her waist. Pippa? She’s been known to latch on when they drop off together. No, Pippa’s busy today. And Stef hasn’t seen her much lately, anyway; she’s been buried in schoolwork and dividing her time between the library, the university’s many small kiosks, and her own bed, for what she’s described as a series of increasingly short and unsatisfying sleeps. Pippa’s been so absent from Stef’s life she actually apologised! Stef shushed her: they see each other all the time, still, like at breakfast this morning; movie nights and sleepovers and gossipy catchups and all the other things Pippa shyly calls ‘sister stuff’ can resume when she has the time.

So. Not Pippa, then.

Her hand automatically finds the one holding her and she closes her palm over it, realising as she does so that there’s only one realistic candidate remaining.

Aaron’s hand twitches. Unconsciously, he curls his fingers through hers.

There’s not a lot of light in the room, but there’s enough to make her momentarily regret opening her eyes. They switched from the overheads to the bedside lamp as they talked, as he let her hug him, as the setting became more intimate and warm from their shared body heat. It might well have been late morning, and it might now — she leans her head up enough to check the time on Aaron’s phone, charging on the table — be only mid-afternoon, but Aaron’s tears, and the long, difficult conversation they had after, had the feel of a post-midnight confessional. They said to each other the sorts of things you say late at night, when the alcohol or the weed is wearing off, when sleep is only minutes away.

She told him again that she likes him. That she thinks about him when he’s not around. Tried to reinforce that there really are things about him to like, aspects of him that are worth saving, and for once he didn’t argue back. Progress? Looking back, she still doesn’t know. But she’s pretty sure she fell asleep first, and that means it was him who hugged her.

But now she has to answer the question: does she want him to wake up with her in his arms? Will the delicate balance they achieved just hours ago have survived? Is it even safe for him to rouse and to realise he’s been hugging his— his friend for hours? Or does he genuinely not care about that any more? Before she can come to a decision, Aaron moans, squeezes her for a moment — she’s being held tight around her naked belly she’s being held tight around her naked belly! — and then with a sheepish smile withdraws his hand and shuffles a little way back. It’s not to get away from her; it’s so he has room to sit up.

“Morning,” he says, sleepily, with a delightful curl to his lip that Stef has to hold herself back from leaning forward and kissing.

“Afternoon,” she corrects, and she’s amused to note that it comes out in something like the head voice she’s been practising. He’s seen her in a bra, now; little point in pretending she isn’t changing in other ways, too. Fine work, Judas goat. “It’s a little after three.”

“Don’t care. I could sleep forever.”

“I couldn’t,” Stef says, stepping up off the mattress. “I’m hungry, and I’m pretty sure I smell.”

“You do not.” Bless him, he actually sounds offended on her behalf.

“I do!” she insists. “It’s warm in here, and even hotter with, uh…”

“With the two of us under one duvet,” he says, unbothered.

“We got all sweaty,” she says, wondering how to respond to an Aaron who appears to have suddenly dropped all or most of his misgivings. “Or I did, anyway, and—” she lifts her armpit to sniff it and exposes to Aaron, if he hasn’t already noticed, that she’s shaving her pits now, “—it lingers.”

He humours her, sniffs himself through his shirt, and grimaces. “Me too,” he says. “I might not be wearing just a sports bra—” he briefly adopts a we’ll-talk-about-it-later tone of voice, “—but I can still kinda smell it, even through the shirt.” He closes his eyes, and sounds something closer to conflicted when he speaks again. “It’s the fucking hormones. Everything smells different. Including me. And don’t ask me how I’m dealing with that. I’m dealing by ignoring. For now.”

“I wasn’t going to ask anything of the sort,” she lies.

“Convincing,” he says, curling his lip again, and Stef has to turn away because there’s a warmth in her belly that has nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with his lips and the memory of his arm around her. So she’s not looking when he hops out of bed and brushes by her with the kind of casual closeness she’s never seen from him, even at his most convivial. But he’s not paying her any attention at all: he’s collecting his wash kit from the dresser; she was just in the way. Disappointing.

“I’ll, um, get my stuff, shall I?” she says.

Back in her room she has to lean against the door for a minute so she doesn’t yell out. He held her! It’s not just that he didn’t object to her hugging him, he flat-out full-on fell asleep with his arm around her waist!

Is she ready for this?

Fuck no.

Will she follow it wherever it leads?

Extremely yes.

And while she could certainly pretend to herself that she’s trying to help him acclimate, that demonstrating physical closeness even as his body changes under him might make it feel less alien to him, she’d be lying to herself and she’d know it. As bizarre as it would have seemed to the Stefan who first met him, she wants to kiss the little fucker and she wants him to kiss her back.

Robe. Shampoo. Conditioner. Shower gel. She buzzes her face again with the razor, just in case — avoiding the little patch of longer hairs that the electrologist told her to leave alone for at least a day; horrible, but necessary, since some of their number have been zapped, and the dead follicles could get infected if she messes with them overmuch — and practically leaps for the door.

He’s waiting for her with a smile, right on the other side. Shit! She tries not to stagger, manages to pull up to an embarrassed stop, and steadies herself on the door frame.

God. He’s smiling. How is he still smiling? “What’s changed?” she asks, unable to stop herself, and when he laughs, she laughs too, at the absurdity of it.

Everything’s changed. Silly question!

When they’ve calmed down he shrugs, and she follows him down the corridor to the bathroom as he talks. “I just realised that I can’t stop this. They have all the power, and I have none. Except… Maria put herself in my power today. Sat close to me, turned the cameras off—” he shrugs off his t-shirt and throws it haphazardly into the corner of the shower annexe, and Stef has to smile; whatever else has changed about him, he’s still messy, “—made sure I could see her injury’s still healing… practically dared me to try something. And I didn’t want to.” Fully naked now, he picks a shower, turns on the water and steps under. “I felt sick at the thought of it.” He starts lathering up, and Stef realises suddenly that she’s just standing there, still mostly clothed, watching him wash. Thank God her mouth hasn’t been hanging open. “Obviously I’m not going to do anything to get out of here, so why not surrender to the inevitable?”

She nods, stepping out of her trousers and stacking them on the wire rack, and carefully pulling off her sports bra. She has to contort her shoulders to get it off without grazing her sensitive chest too badly, but she’s become more flexible since the hormones; it’s getting easier to make her body do what she wants. Pippa says to expect that to get even better, and she can’t wait. “That makes sense,” she says. “And, listen, if there’s anything I can do to help—”

“There’s something I wanted to ask you, actually,” he says.

Stef channels her reaction into setting herself up in the shower next to his. It’s hard not to compare their bodies; they’re really not all that different. She has a little more development in the hips and the butt, he has more in the chest, and if she’s any judge she’d say his face has changed more than hers: there always was a nice shape to his jaw, and the way it’s starting to round out is… nice. Really, really nice. And his eyes, which had been kind of sunken when they first met, are brightening. He’ll always have quite pronounced eyelids, but not only do they suit him, she thinks they work better on a face that is gradually feminising. And his—

Stop, Stephanie!

Whether he’s putting on a brave face or not, he doesn’t want this. The least she can do for him is to stop fantasising about him, stop obsessing over the way his forcibly altered body pleases her.

Shit. He said something, didn’t he? How long has she been standing under the water, watching him?

“Um,” she says, having failed to find anything actually useful inside her head.

He pauses in soaping under his armpits, and smiles at her. “What should I call you?” he asks.

Okay. She was wrong. Before, she was a picture of eloquence; now she’s lost for words. “What do you mean, what should you call me?” she manages, eventually. She’s vaguely aware of warm water sluicing down her face, and she absently brushes her hair out of her eyes.

“Don’t you think you should, maybe, wash?” Aaron says wryly.

“Oh. Yes.” She unhooks her shower gel from the pipe and starts applying it. His eyes follow her hands as she does so, and even when she soaps up her chest he doesn’t look away.

“Funny feeling, isn’t it?” he says, prodding at his own swelling chest. “I kinda like the tingle when the water flows over them.” He grins, refusing to answer her question just yet, prolonging the moment a little longer, just to be a jerk. Finally he puts her out of her misery. “What name should I use for you?”

“What name?” He can’t mean what it seems like he means…

“Stef,” he says, rolling his eyes, “you’re wearing a sports bra, you’re doing your hair differently, you’re doing something with your voice, and I’ve seen you in makeup enough times that I feel I should be marking on my calendar the days I’ve seen you bare-faced, like I’m in a black-and-white newspaper cartoon marking off the days until some obscure American holiday no-one’s heard of and all of a sudden your cute dog comic’s been taken over by kids wearing huge buckled hats.”

“What?”

“You said yourself, you’ve decided to stop struggling. And we both know what that means: you’re going to be a girl, like they want. You’re getting ready for it, right? The voice and everything, and I can see the sore skin you’re trying to hide; electrolysis, yes?”

She nods, no longer even pretending to wash. She’s just standing there, watching him talk, addicted to his voice, wishing the moment could never end, that this incarnation of Aaron — barely altered, much more calm, and apparently entirely accepting of her womanhood — could freeze, could last forever, could leave Dorley with her.

“It suits you, you know,” he says. “You’ve seemed more alive lately than ever before. Which, I guess, makes you… lucky? That you’re taking so well to this. So… what should I call you? If you’re going to be a girl? Just Stef?”

“I’m trying out Stephanie,” she says, almost so quiet that the water drowns it out.

He chews on his lip, tries it out in his head. “Stephanie,” he says, and nods to himself. “I like it. It suits you… Stephanie.”

“Really?” She knows the smile that captures her face is broad and goofy and probably really stupid-looking but she couldn’t keep it down if you offered her the world.

“Really.”

Fuck it. She leaps forward, almost slips on the wet floor, and hugs him, pulls him in tight, as tight as he held her in bed, tries to pour into the contact all her gratitude, all her affection, and her perhaps vain hope that he’ll find a way to follow her.

“Thank you,” she whispers. She has to lean down a little so she can whisper in his ear. “Thank you. It’s been so difficult down here. This… this means the world, Aaron.”

“Just don’t go asking for my new name,” he says, his voice wavering.

“I won’t.”

“Um, Stephanie?”

“Yes?”

“We… um… fuck… we’re touching, Stephanie.”

She’s about to say something like, ‘Of course we are; we’re hugging,’ and then she realises what he means and releases him, backsteps carefully, and wonders if her blush has reached her legs yet. But when she regains her courage and looks him in the face again, he’s smiling, and blushing a little too, and that makes it all the harder not to just step back in and hug him all over again.

They were touching, were they?

Shampoo. Do your shampoo, lady, and stop being weird about the poor man.

“Sorry,” she says, when she’s rinsing it out.

He shrugs. “Occupational hazard,” he says, and while maybe he has to force it, he’s making the effort, God bless him, and she’s so fucking proud. When he asks her to do his conditioner, like always, like before, he sounds normal, like his old self, and she catches a grin as he turns away.

She wants to say it, but she can’t, and maybe she’ll never be able to, and maybe it’ll never be wise, so she won’t, but she mouths it instead, as she massages conditioner into his hair and feels him quiver ever so slightly under her fingers: I think I love you, Aaron Holt.

 

* * *

 

It’s been a while since Christine was last in the Anthill, which is damning because she’s supposed to have two lectures a week on the second floor. She really has been busy lately. With any luck, Prof Dawson’s email will be persuasive enough — and Christine can prostrate herself pathetically enough — that Maria and Edy will take pity on her and stop giving her jobs. She’s not behind, not at all, and it was gratifying to have the professor acknowledge that, but if nothing else, going to lectures gets her out of Dorley Hall. The cis people who comprise the bulk of the student population may intimidate and occasionally confuse her, but they probably have better taste in mugs.

Paige’s lecture is on the third floor, and Christine opens the door quietly, intending to find her and catch her attention somehow. Unfortunately, the lecturer finds her first.

“A late arrival?” he says, interrupting himself. “I’m not sure I know you.”

“You don’t,” she says, and flinches against the attention of a whole lecture hall’s-worth of students. “I’m here for Paige Adams?”

“Do you have a message for her, or are you here to take her away from us?”

There’s something about the phrasing she doesn’t like, and she squints at him. Wasn’t this the guy who kept looking down Paige’s top? Men are so fucking gross. And they do have spare cells back home…

“Minor family emergency,” she says, trying to sound apologetic, trying to keep herself from fantasising too hard about locking the man behind a reinforced glass door and making him write I will not perv on girls one third my age a hundred times on the concrete wall. “I need her for the rest of the day. Sorry.”

“Fine! Fine.” He throws up his arms, and then turns on the smarm to say to Paige, down in the third row, “Ms Adams, you’ll find notes and a transcript on the intranet. Come to me if you have any questions. And do please leave quietly.”

Paige nods for him, throws her bag over her shoulder, and trots quickly up the stepped rows. Christine, watching the lecturer’s eyes track Paige all the way up, holds the door for her and covers the last metre or so of her escape with her body.

“What a fucking creep,” she says, when they’re safely away.

“I know,” Paige says. “But this is the only module I’m ever going to have with him, so I only have to put up with him for two more semesters.”

“Should we be worried? He was giving you…” Christine waves her arms, trying to find the right word, and fails. “…a look,” she finishes with a sneer.

“Probably not. The TA approached me in the second week, when it was clear it was me he’d fixated on, and advised me to request that our one-to-ones happen down in the nook, rather than in his office.” The nook: a cosy, rounded area on the ground floor of the Anthill, home to a scattering of desks, vending machines, and booths for conducting impromptu meetings.

“That sounds like he does this every year.”

“With most of his classes, too.”

“Jesus.” Christine doesn’t ask why Saints doesn’t do anything about him; he’s a prestigious name. “We could basement him.”

Paige pretends to consider it. “No thank you,” she says. “I need him to finish out teaching the module, and he might be too upset with me to do that from a cell. Kidnap him after.”

Christine mimes writing a note. “Kidnap professor pervert… when do you think, around August time?”

“September,” Paige says. “Let him have some fun in the sun first. So, what’s my ‘family emergency’?”

“I’ll give you the quick version in the car.”

The quick version reminds Christine just how irritated she is. She yelled at Bella! And every time she doubts she deserved it, she doubles back and gets irritated with herself for peacemaking with Rabia. Because they should be more careful with the second-year girls! And Christine should stand up for them if no-one else will! God, if only Indira hadn’t been stuck down in the security room, if only Bella hadn’t been borderline panicking and making poor decisions, if only Christine hadn’t agreed to see her professor today…

“Christine,” Paige says quietly, turning down the music, “talk to me.”

“It’s nothing,” she mumbles.

Paige smiles, the loving smile reserved only for her, and reaches for her hand. “Nothing’s nothing. We’ve got time before we get there. Tell me.”

So she does, filling in all the details she’d left out of her summary, and notes Paige’s jaw clenching a few times as she listens.

“You were right,” Paige says, the hand gripping Christine’s tightening for a moment and then releasing her, to change gears. “Pippa’s the only new sponsor; everyone else is at least three years out from being in Faye and Rebecca’s position. They’re forgetting what it was like to be so new. I see it sometimes when some of them talk to you. I’m… going to propose something to Maria. I don’t know what yet.”

“A kick in the head for every sponsor?”

“Maybe.” Paige drums fingers on the wheel as she turns the car onto the high street. “I’m going to talk to the second years,” she says. “Ask them how they’re doing. What their plans are. How they feel about what was done to them, how they feel about the programme, how they feel about each other. Whether they feel ready to go out. I think they’ll talk a little more readily to someone like me. And then—” she grins, “—we’re going to take them out.”

“Out?”

“Yes.”

“Out where?”

“I don’t know yet. Somewhere fun. Somewhere very not-Dorley. We could book out a roller-skating rink, for example.”

“You want to take the second years roller-skating.”

“Yes.”

“Even though Faye and Bex had a hard time today.”

“Yes. They’ll be with all their friends. And me, and you. And if we book somewhere out, they’re not going to run into all that many people. I’m certain it’ll be good for their resocialisation.”

“I suppose?”

“And we’ll take a lot of Dorley girls to keep them company and keep them safe. No sponsors. Only those of us who are ‘just girls’.”

Christine shrugs. “I’m on staff, so—”

“Yes, but the second years love you, anyway.” She pauses for a moment to concentrate on downshifting as she pulls into the multistorey car park in the city centre. “Jodie’ll help, I’m certain. Vicky, too, I suspect, and where Vicky goes, Lorna follows, and that’s good, because she’s an outside presence who is known to be friendly. We grab Abby, Pippa — yes, she’s a sponsor, but she’d be the first to say she’s not much of one — and anyone else amenable.”

Christine nods, thinking it through. “Maria or Bea will insist on a sponsor,” she says, “and they’ll say Pippa’s too junior and Abby’s too retired and I’m too not one.”

“We get Donna, then. Or Indira.”

“Maybe not Dira. She’s been working with them. They might be nervous around her.”

“Donna will do it,” Paige says, pulling up into a parking space. “She’s always been considerate with Jodie. I’ll roll up a plan over the next few days and bring it to Maria.”

“Are you sure you want to do this? This is much more engagement with the programme than you’ve ever had before.”

“It’s not for the programme,” Paige argues. “It’s for the second years. And it’s for me. I want to help them. I’ve been feeling guilty about just leaving them to it.”

“Sweetheart!” Christine says, bumping up against her as they exit the car park and head out into the city centre. “You should have said.”

“If I’d said,” Paige says fondly, “you’d have tried to help. Because you’re wonderful. But also very, very busy. I didn’t want to pile anything else on you. When we do this, it’ll be me who puts it all together, liaises with the sponsors, books the venue, everything; you’ll just have to come along and have a good time.”

“And help show the second years there’s life after castration?”

Paige leans down, shoulder-hugs Christine, and leads them both over the road at the pelican crossing. “They already know that,” she says. “We’ll show them there’s life after Dorley.”

 

* * *

 

Lunch is takeaway pizza, which is a surprise. Indira shuttled it down in three boxes, and Stef’s about to point out that three larges is way more than the two of them could eat — and possibly more than all four of them could comfortably manage if Martin and Adam miraculously were to reappear — when Indira lays them all out and opens the first box: two-thirds empty.

“We’re burning the midnight oil upstairs,” she says, by way of explanation. “No-one has time to cook. The metaphorical midnight oil,” she adds quickly, clearly sensing Aaron about to say something clever about the time; it’s almost four. She points at the boxes in turn: “Barbecue beef, pepperoni, and a veggie one, with peppers and mushrooms and things.”

“Thanks, Dira,” Stef says, and Aaron nods his gratitude.

Stef wonders if Indira sees anything different in Aaron’s body language when she’s around. It’s like he’s afraid of her.

“Shall I do us a slice of each?” Aaron says, pointedly looking away from Indira and reaching for Stef’s plate. She nods, and decides against asking what’s going on that’s so important it’s taken over the kitchen; Dira wouldn’t be able to give details with Aaron around, anyway. Whatever’s happening, Stef pictures piles of empty pizza boxes upstairs, and sponsors gathered around the table, talking, arguing, working the problem, and to her surprise she feels drawn to them. She almost catches Indira’s sleeve as she leaves, to ask if there’s anything she can do to help, but thinks better of it. They have more than enough people upstairs. Aaron’s her priority, and she refocuses on him in time to take back the proffered plate, now laden with pizza.

He’s so different.

After showering, Aaron propped his door open and got dried and dressed in full view, and Stef still hasn’t been able to get a read on why. At the time, she took her cue from him, stepping out of eyesight only when she had to be completely naked; despite them sharing a shower, it felt important, somehow, while she was dressing, to hide from him her genitals and the exact contours of her chest. Something about being in her bedroom made his gaze feel more intimate. Still, if he wanted to look at her, whether he was trying to prove something by it or — and her heartbeat quickens just to think of it — simply to enjoy the sight of her, she was going to let him, damn it, she was going to give him a show, and she stepped back out of the shadow of the door as soon as she was in her underwear and sports bra.

She knows what she looks like; she has the barest of curves, very little development in the chest and her face isn’t all that different from how it was two months ago, but the differences are there, and they’re important to her, important enough for her finally to accept herself and gain a modicum of peace inside her body, and apparently they’re visible enough to Aaron for him to flip his perception of her. So, fuck it, she’ll stand in his eyeline in her sports bra, arching her back and brushing out her hair, and if he doesn’t like it he can turn away or close his door.

He did neither. He dressed himself and then he watched as she donned jogging trousers and a loose hoodie. And when they walked into the common area, before Indira ambushed them with pizza, he called her Steph, and insisted to her he said it with the ph, and when she pushed playfully against him, to thank him, to tease him, he pushed back in equal spirit.

And now, here he is, experimentally chewing on vegetarian pizza, and smiling at her when he catches her watching him.

What’s happened?

He’ll deflect if she asks. He always does. He’s talked recently about how he doesn’t want to do the awful things required to have even a chance of escape, and he’s talked about surrendering to the inevitable. But the details are never there.

For now, it’s better if she doesn’t push.

“This isn’t bad,” Aaron says, through the remains of his first slice. “There’s these tiny lumps of meat-like substance, hidden under the peppers, and they’re actually okay. I think I’ve had them before, actually, these geometric blocks of this-is-meat-we-swear extruded fungal substance. At Elizabeth’s. When it was her turn to cook for the family, she always made them have it, because she insisted it was better for her dad’s heart than real meat, and she’d marinade it in… Fuck.” He frowns. “That was a stupid place for my memory to go.”

She reaches for him, and he lets her take his hand for a moment. But then he whips it away, out of her reach.

“Sorry—”

“No,” he says, and laughs. “It’s not… whatever you’re thinking. I’m greasy. From the pizza.”

Stef forces a smile. “I’ll be greasy, too, before long. It’s fine.”

“Try the veggie slice,” he says.

She obliges, aware of his attention as she tastes it, and when she nods at him he grins broadly.

“Right?” he says. “It’s not bad.”

“I still like real meat more,” she says, switching to a pepperoni slice. She takes a bite, but stops chewing when Aaron snorts into his beaker of water. “What?”

“Nothing!” he says, wiping his face with his sleeve. “Nothing.”

“Aaron—”

“Stephanie,” Aaron says, leaning into the final syllable, “I’ve got to watch my tongue, now that there are ladies present.” She can’t help looking around, and he rolls his eyes at her. “You’re ladies,” he clarifies.

“Hey,” she says, “I might be… adjusting, but I’m not that different. I’m still me, still Steph. Remember when you came up to my door and without preamble just started talking about masturbation? I like that Aaron. So, if you’re thinking something—” she lowers her voice and leans towards him, “—disgustingly reprehensible, I want to know about it.”

“Well, now it’s just embarrassing.”

She uses a trick she learned from the voice training documents on the server to push her voice all the way to the front of her mouth. “Please?”

He chews on his slice for a moment. “Fine,” he says, “but I’m still not going to say it. I’m going to make you work it out.”

He has to talk her through it in the end. Maybe she’s just slow on the uptake because her relief that Aaron seems to be adjusting is overriding her ability to see the bloody obvious, but it takes him almost thirty seconds to get her to absorb the humorous implications of ‘liking real meat’ in light of her recently embraced gender. When understanding dawns, she snorts and tries to pinch him, and he dodges.

“Aaron!” she exclaims. “That sucks! That’s so My First Innuendo.”

“And that’s why I didn’t want to explain it,” he says, returning to his slice and rolling his eyes at her. “Bad jokes get worse when you explain them; for shitty innuendo it’s, like, that but with logarithmic scaling, or something. Exponential? I don’t know; I study rocks.”

Stef shrugs. “I study language. When the books get mathsy, I glaze over. I always leaned on Melissa for the hard science stuff. I liked it, and I was sorta good at it, but I’ve forgotten a lot since school.”

The thought of Melissa is a hard one, and one that’s been preying on her since Lorna brought her up in the waiting room upstairs; it’s not just that she doesn’t want to be seen by her until she’s ready, it’s that she is, in no uncertain terms, cooperating with the sponsors, with the programme. What will Melissa think of her?

She doesn’t flinch when Aaron takes her hand, but it takes conscious effort. She’d almost forgotten he was there.

“I’m sorry you lost her,” he says. “I know how important she was to you.”

“I’m, um, sorry you lost Elizabeth,” she says.

“You don’t need to reciprocate.” He looks away, looks inward, looks truly unsettled for the first time.

“I do!” she says. “I need to. I want to.” She shrugs. “It’s natural! It’s you.”

He shakes his head, but in apparent contradiction says, “Yeah.” It’s a long time before he continues, and Stef almost says something more times than she can count, but his eyes are sharp, and she doesn’t want to provoke him into doing or saying or thinking something that will cause him to — what’s the word Christine used? — backslide. “Yeah,” he says again, leaning back in his chair, away from her. “Sorry. Still adjusting, you know? To the new world. To the whole new situation. To the, um… You know what, Steph? I’m still kinda tired. All this shit’s taken a lot out of me. I’m going to have a nap. You can finish my slices; I’ll get Maria to bring me something later, if I turn out to need it.” He pushes his plate away and stands, but puts a hand on Stef’s shoulder when she copies him. “No, you should eat. Really. You won’t be missing much; I’m just going to be sleeping. Loud snores. Very obnoxious.”

“Okay,” she says, and doesn’t reach for his hand.

He’s halfway out of the room when he turns around and asks, “Steph, you’re okay with this, right? With what they’re doing to you? With what they’re making you into?”

Hesitantly, and with what she hopes is just the right amount of introspection, she nods. “Yes. It’s new, but it’s, um… I’m okay with it.”

“Good,” he says, turns away again, and then he’s out of the door and walking briskly down the corridor. She listens to him go, and so she hears him hesitate, turn around, and come back into the lunch room. He dawdles at the doors, not looking at her, and she wants to say something but she’s frozen absolutely, pizza slice dangling comically in her hand.

Like he’s come to a decision and he wants to act before he takes it back, he darts forward, encircles her with gentle arms, and kisses her softly on the forehead.

“I’m happy for you,” Aaron whispers, and then he’s gone.

 

* * *

 

“Christine!” Robert Grant bellows, when she and Paige tentatively poke their heads through the front door. She quickly takes in the scene: Robert, seated in a decadently plush recliner; Abby, two other younger women, and Diane, Abby’s mother, all arranged around a Monopoly board; and another woman, older than Abby, holding a baby and sitting a safe distance away from the easily swallowed houses, hotels, boots and boats. Christine instantly wants to hold the baby, and just as instantly realises she won’t have time.

The atmosphere is so damn familial it hurts.

Robert leaps up from his recliner and marches over. She manages to say, “Hi, Robert,” in time to get it out before all the breath is squeezed out of her, but not quickly enough that the last syllable doesn’t come out as a wheeze. When he releases her she adds, “Hi, Diane, Abby, and, um, everyone,” raising her voice so the room can hear her.

“Hello again, Christine,” Diane says, standing up from the Monopoly board and encouraging the younger women to follow suit. “And who is the lovely young lady by your side?”

“Paige Adams,” Paige says, with a curtsey. “Christine and I are together, and I’ve known her and Abby for a while now.”

“Paige Adams,” Diane says, smiling and stepping forward to take one of Paige’s hands in both of hers. “It’s wonderful to meet you. Are you, um, are you like Christine, and our Abigail?”

“No,” Paige says, and only Christine hears the hesitation. “I’m just Paige.”

“Well, come in and have a cup of tea,” Diane says, as Robert steps aside to make room, “and tell us about yourself.”

“Um,” Christine says, watching the frown that’s been developing on Abby’s face deepen, “we’ll have to take you up on that another time, I’m afraid. We need to borrow Abby for the rest of the day.”

“Oh,” Robert says, with innocent concern, “nothing bad, I hope?”

Abby, skilled at decoding messages contained entirely within Christine’s tone of voice, is already sharing a hug with one of the girls around the Monopoly board. The woman with the baby passes up a handbag from the sofa.

“We hope not,” Christine says. “One of the other girls, from where we come from, she’s having a hard time, and she needs Abby.”

Robert claps his hands together. “Say no more!” If Abby and Christine have their own coded language then so do Robert and Diane, because by the time Abby’s halfway to the front door they’ve coordinated a carrier bag full of foil packages.

“Straight into the freezer with these, Abigail,” Diane says, and Abby nods seriously.

It takes a few more minutes to extract her. Abby’s family are demonstrative and generous with their affection, and even Paige receives hugs from everyone present, bar the baby, who Christine doesn’t get to hold but does, with permission, get to kiss on the wispy hair atop his head. The Grants and the other women — cousins by close association, not blood, but just as important, judging from how firmly they and Abby embrace — extract from Christine and Paige a promise to visit properly next week, before the Grants return home for Christmas and Robert’s extended sabbatical comes to an unfortunate end. No rest, he says, for the wicked. “But some rest for the lovely,” his wife says, hugging him and smiling at Abby, Christine and Paige.

“I hate leaving,” Abby says, as they round the corner at the end of the street and disappear out of sight of her waving family. “I really could live with them. They don’t care, Chrissy. They’ve forgiven me and they don’t care at all that I’m different now. They love it, actually! Mum keeps saying how much womanhood suits me.”

“I’m so happy for you,” Christine says, with generosity and genuine feeling and absolutely zero jealousy.

“They do seem nice,” Paige says.

“They are,” Abby says, exhaling all her remaining warmth. “And, since you’re here, Paige, when did Christine tell you about my family?”

“About two seconds after I got home from meeting them,” Christine says. “No more secrets from Paige, remember? Ever again.”

“Yeah,” Abby says, “I remember. Sorry, Paige. I know you’re trustworthy, it’s just… they’re mine. And I’m surprised by how important that is to me.”

“I think I get it,” Christine says. “And you know Paige; she won’t tell a soul.”

Paige says, “I’m a vault,” and punctuates the sentiment with the double-beep from the remote lock on the car.

Abby takes in the situation, which Christine explains as Paige drives them back towards Saints, with extreme tension. “It had to be Shahida,” she mutters. “Had to be her.”

“Who is she?”

“I’ve never met her. But Liss has told me all about her. They were… something. Something complicated, something close… something that ended really, really badly. I’ve had our people give me annual reports on her; last I heard, she was in the States.”

“Vicky and Lorna said she’s just recently got back,” Christine says, “and started feeling all nostalgic.”

“Fuck.”

“That’s what the rest of us said, too. How dangerous could this get, Abby?”

“For us?” She wiggles a flattened palm at around knee height. “Not very. But Liss says she’s persistent, intelligent, and the reports say she’s earning decent money, so she has resources. She could make herself very difficult to deal with humanely.”

“Melissa won’t let us do anything to her, surely?”

“No,” Abby says. “And neither will I, and Maria will step pretty hard on the idea, too. No-one wants to harm an innocent woman.”

“Which means we have two realistic options,” Paige says. “Fob her off, or brief her and hope she doesn’t go immediately to the police.”

“I’m strongly on Team Fob Her Off,” Christine says.

“Same,” Abby says. “God. Why now?”

“What do you mean?”

Abby watches the city go by for a while, and when she replies, it’s slow and painful. “Melissa was my world for a long time. We fell in love. At least, I did. And I thought she did, too. And, yes, I know how unethical that is. We kept it a secret from the other sponsors, and from the rest of her intake. A bad secret. I think everyone knew. It felt like everyone did, anyway. We were happy, though, or happy enough. But as soon as she could, she left. Left Dorley; left me. And we still talked, sure, and I still visited her, and she still came back from time to time, since she still officially lived on-site, and when we saw each other it was just like it used to be, and I know most of her decision was just that Dorley was… not kind to her. But, still, distance changes things. And she wanted it to. She said to me once that she didn’t have a way to know—” she has to stop for a second, to wipe her eyes, to swallow, to breathe, “—to know that we were ever real. So she started seeing other people. To, I think, find something that felt real to her? I don’t know. She was never super clear about that, and I didn’t want to go on at her, because, I mean, we really shouldn’t have gotten so close, not in the way we did. She was right, really. How could it be real? She was in the worst place of her life, and I was the one who held her hand through it. We should never have so much as kissed.” She sniffs. “She asked me to step back from her life a few months ago. No calls, no visits. No contact, unless she initiates it.”

“Abby…” Christine had known some of this and guessed a lot of the rest, but it’s hard to hear all the same. She shouldn’t have sat up front, next to Paige; she should have sat in the back, with Abby, so she wouldn’t have to say all this alone.

“And now… I was just feeling ready to start my life again. I have my family back. I’m moving on. I’m even doing well at work! So, of course, here’s Shahida, and here’s Melissa again, and here I am… A fucking wreck in the back of a car, stupid and vulnerable and— and—”

“It’s okay, Abs,” Christine says.

“It’s not. I’m excited, you know? Like an idiot, I’m excited to talk to her again. To have an excuse to call. Even though it’s been only months since we talked, and even though it’s because of the girl who loved her before I even knew her. I haven’t moved on, it turns out. I’m pathetic.”

It takes longer than expected to get back to the Hall, because Paige stops the car and they both join Abby in the back seat, to make sure she knows she’s loved, she’s needed and she’s appreciated, and whatever happens with Melissa and Shahida, that’s something that will never, ever change.

 

* * *

 

Her phone’s been face down on the desk all afternoon and has over the last couple of hours acquired the quiet menace of an unexploded bomb. And with the counter having closed twenty minutes ago and all her work either completed or yet to be started, she’s having trouble filling the last hour in the office without engaging with the bloody thing. Eventually she decides she’s had enough, throws it into her bag with a brief glance at the screen — there’s at least a dozen more missed calls; damn! — and grabs her coat from the rack.

“Zach!” she calls. “I’m taking time in lieu!”

“How dare you!” he shouts back. “Get back to your desk and chain yourself there!”

She smiles, and a couple of the other girls in the office giggle. If he were serious, he’d be far ruder. He pokes his head out of his office and she blows him a playful kiss, which he pretends to be horrified by.

“You’re way ahead, anyway,” he says. Of course she is; nothing else in her life but work. “Nothing serious going on, I hope?”

“No. I’m just tired.”

“See you tomorrow, then.”

She says her goodbyes to the other girls and bundles up, taking the stairs down from the second floor two at a time. Melissa doesn’t live far from the university, which is nice on most occasions but wonderful on a rainy day like today; when first she started working here she had to get the tram in, and there’s little more miserable than squeezing onto packed public transport when you’re soaking wet. She folds up the hood of her raincoat, steps out from the shelter of the admin building, and is immediately brought up short by the tune coming from her bag.

Abby’s ringtone. I Knew You Were Trouble. An in-joke she hasn’t wanted to drop. Abby played it for her, down in that cold, concrete room, when Melissa was finally ready to laugh.

She hates how her heart leaps to hear it. She backtracks until she’s under cover again, pulls out her phone, plugs in her headphones and drops it back into her bag, thumbing the answer button on the cord.

“Hello?” she says, like she doesn’t know exactly who’s calling.

“Liss,” Abby says, and Melissa’s bombarded by memories. Hearing her voice again is like coming home, and that’s why she’s all the way up here, over a hundred and fifty miles from Almsworth, because that voice, that face, that generous heart have enough control over her that she needs the distance to fight back.

“Hi, Abs,” she says, stepping back out. On her hood, the rain drums static. “What’s up?”

“Are you somewhere you can talk?”

It makes her chest tighten: something really is going on, and they need to talk Dorley business. What could possibly have happened? She doesn’t know whether she feels foolish, having ignored the calls from the sponsors, or viciously righteous; they should be able to solve their problems without her! It feels underhanded, getting Abby involved, since she isn’t even a sponsor any more. She just helps out with admin sometimes, or something.

As far as she knows. They last saw each other before the start of the semester. More than enough time for everything to have changed. Maybe Abby’s a full-time sponsor again. Maybe Melissa successfully put enough distance between them that Abby got lonely enough to go back to Dorley and take on a new girl.

And that would be your fault, wouldn’t it? Selfish, stupid, short-sighted Melissa.

It’s hard not to tell herself out loud to shut up, but she manages it by tightening her free hand into a fist and focusing on the pain of the nails digging into her palm.

“I’ll be home soon,” she says.

“Okay.”

Silence on the line. Melissa wonders how she sounds to Abby; the short, cold breaths of someone hurrying along streets drenched with rain, the splashes as she kicks up water with her boots, the clicking sounds she makes with her tongue as she heads off all the things she wants to say. Things like, I’m sorry. Things like, Have you found someone else? Things like—

“How are you?” Abby asks. The suddenness makes Melissa, currently trying to open the door to her apartment building, drop her key fob, and her irritated mutterings are audible on the line. “Oh, sorry,” Abby says. “Bad question?”

“No,” Melissa says, scooping it up and jabbing it at the sensor again, “no, it wasn’t you. I’m just dropping things as usual. I’m okay, Abs. Not brilliant. Money’s tighter. My roommate moved out. Looking for a new one.” She checks her mail nook; bills. She leaves them there to steep for a few more days. “Work’s fine; Zach’s still great. So I suppose I’m fine. Just fine. Absolutely fine. How’s, um, things with you?”

“That,” Abby says, “is a very complex question, and most of it’s classified. But there’s one thing I can say, before we get into the reason for my call, as long as you promise to keep it to yourself?”

“Who would I tell?” Elevator’s broken again. Five flights; fun. “It’s just me up here.” Her voice echoes in the stairwell.

“I’m back in touch with my family, Liss,” Abby says, with bad timing: Melissa misses a step and has to grab onto the handrail to avoid falling over.

“You are?” she says, when she’s no longer in danger of braining herself on the tile. “Is that even allowed?”

Abby laughs bitterly. “No. They’re treating Indira as a five-year test case. Five years, Liss! I didn’t want to wait.”

“What will you do if anyone finds out?”

“I have no idea. Christine knows, though, and she’s helping me keep the secret. You remember Christine?”

“Little brown-haired thing? Terribly nervous?”

“She’s come into her own since you met her,” Abby says, with a fondness that makes its way into Melissa’s belly and twists itself into intricate knots. “And she’s not little; she’s taller than you! She’s dating Paige now, and they’re very cute together.”

“Paige?”

“Paige Adams, the Instagram girl.”

“Ah. Good for her.”

Melissa doesn’t ask if Abby’s good fortune means there’s any way she might see her own family; she’d rather not. Russ is her only family who matters, and he’s better off without her. Her disappearance opened rifts between him and everyone in his life, but according to the last report — the last one she could bring herself to open, anyway — he’s back on his feet, with new friends and a steady job and a flat. Living away from their father. And she never got on with Russ, anyway, not really, not like brothers should; he always said she liked Stef more than him.

Probably true.

It would be nice to see Stef again, but he’s another person on a long list of people who are, ultimately, probably better off without her. Another memory: a boy, shivering in the January cold, sheepishly holding out a bag of groceries, asking her questions she can’t answer, and all she can do is comfort him one last time.

Worse than useless, always.

“Liss?” Abby asks urgently.

Melissa hiccups, finds herself breathing heavily, pitched forward on the stairs and supporting herself on the railing. “Drat,” she says, straightening up and leaning against the inside wall of the stairwell, unsteady. “Sorry.”

“Breathe, Melissa,” Abby says quietly, and counts for her.

This is why she left. Dorley Hall comes back into her life and suddenly she’s a mess.

With Abby’s encouragement she makes it back to her flat, shuts the door behind her, shuts out the world and Dorley and her family and Stef, and listens to Abby as she talks about her parents, and the family friends from down the street who’ve grown up and one of them has a baby, and cousin Derek and how he’s a man now, and Christine and how much she’s changed since Indira first dumped her in a cell.

It’s still strange to Melissa that Dorley works, but she’s seen too many destructive boys go on to become happy women to fight against it any more. Almost a shame, if she’s really honest with herself, that she can’t count herself among their number.

After a few minutes she puts Abby on speaker, dumps her raincoat on the peg and her bag on the rack to dry, kicks her boots off onto the mat, and collapses onto her bed, face first, wincing as she always does at the stinging pain from her chest, a daily reminder that she needs to break that childhood habit. She drops Abby down on the sheets and curls up around the phone, keeping her on speaker and closing her eyes, so it’s more like she’s really there. More like she’s not alone.

“Go on, then,” she says. “Give me the bad news.”

On the line, and in the bed next to her, Abby sighs deeply. “It’s Shahida. She’s back from America and plastering Saints with missing posters, and they’ve all got your old face on them.”

All Melissa has in her is, “Oh.”

So it’s not just Abby and Dorley Hall that are back in her life, then.

 

* * *

 

The kitchen’s tense. As soon as they got back, Abby vanished up to her room to make a phone call she insisted not be recorded, and to that end Christine’s slumped at the kitchen table with a laptop in front of her, monitoring the live feed for the entire surveillance system, confirming in real time that no-one’s sneakily switched on the circuit that covers Abby’s room, and that no-one’s tried anything stupid like hacking into Abby’s phone while Christine’s around and in a bad mood.

Neither of those eventualities is especially likely, but Abby likes her privacy, and Christine likes Abby.

A handful more sponsors and hangers-on have drifted in since they got back. Pippa, the most recent arrival, sits sucking down coffee and looking very much like someone who just got done with a full day of classes and came home to find her dorm in panic mode, and Christine feels her exhaustion on a spiritual level. Maybe all of them can just go fall into a bed somewhere and sleep for a week after this; Pippa can go get Steph and Christine can get Indira, and they can fetch Abby together and all ball up into a sisterly cuddle pile.

“For the record,” Pippa says, inserting herself into the conversation currently happening somewhere over Christine’s head and pointing a pizza slice at Bella, “she’s right. It’s too early to send second years out without support.”

“I know, I know,” Bella says. “I’ve had my kicking. You don’t need to join in.”

“I volunteer, by the way. If you need to talk to someone for whom all that stuff is still pretty recent, call me. Christine’s still, somehow, busier than me, and she hasn’t even graduated yet.”

“Yes, please,” Christine says, aware as she does so that her voice sounds a little slurred; God, she’s tired. “Pippa can be Dorley’s conscience for a while. From now on, I’m tech support only.”

Pippa pats her hand and Paige, sitting on her other side, kisses her on the temple.

“How long do you think she’ll be?” Rabia asks.

“Abby?” Tabby says, from her position leaning languidly against the door frame into the dining hall. “Talking to Melissa? Could be hours. I know you hate waiting, but—” she sucks air between her teeth, “—sucks to be you.”

“Tabitha Forbes, you malign bitch—” Rabia starts, but she cuts herself off when Tabby makes a rude gesture. “Shit. I’m too tired to throw things at her. Volunteers to do it for me?” Tabby retracts her middle finger and makes a heart with her forefingers and thumbs instead, and Rabia blows her a kiss. “Awful woman,” Rabia says, giggling. “Just awful.”

“Lovely to have you back, Rab,” Tabby says.

“Oh sponsor, my sponsor,” Rabia says.

Before anyone else can contribute, Christine holds up a hand. “She’s done.” She leans hard into Paige’s shoulder for a second, absorbing as much energy as she can from the contact, and then pulls her personal blocks out of the security system, puts it back how it was when she found it. “This was so much more fun when I wasn’t supposed to be doing it,” she mutters, slamming the lid of the laptop shut, and Paige kisses her again.

A few minutes later, a drawn-looking Abby, her face now bare of the makeup she wore to visit her family, returns to the kitchen and accepts the chair Bella pulls out for her.

“Thanks,” she says. “Okay. First things first: Melissa’s going to stay in Manchester. She’s not coming down.” A handful of people around the table sigh with relief; some of the sponsors had been convinced Melissa would immediately come back to Dorley and thus put herself and the Hall in danger of exposure, but Christine hadn’t thought it likely and neither had Abby. “I’ve agreed the story we’re going to tell Shahida; it’s essentially the one the public already knows, but with a few extra details. We’ll call her, arrange to meet somewhere quiet but close by. Christine and I will go see her, talk her through it.”

“Why Christine?” Bella asks.

Abby illustrates with her fingers a chain of connections: “Lorna and Vicky talked to her. Said they know people who live at Dorley. Christine’s going to be the girl they know. And she knows me, and I know— I knew ‘Mark’.”

“Should we get Lorna and Vicky, too? Since Shahida met them already.”

“I thought you didn’t trust Lorna,” Christine says.

“I just don’t know her,” Bella says, exasperated. “But you do — a lot of you, apparently — so I suppose I’m fine with her. Someone call Lorna and Vicky?”

“Let’s not chuck a half-dozen white girls at her,” Abby says. “It’ll just be us two. Me, the one who knew Mark; Christine, the go-between.”

Unspoken: Christine, the one Abby trusts. She can almost hear every sponsor in the room thinking it.

“Fine,” Tabby says. “Approved.” She fends off a dirty look from Bella with, “I’m senior sponsor on duty. If you want to go wake up the concussion patient, be my guest, but I’m a hundred percent certain Maria will back Abby and me. Edy will, too.”

“No,” Bella says, “I meant— never mind. Can we at least have the initial contact on the record?”

Tabby nods. “Yes. Abby, you have your work phone? Good. Disable privacy, just for the call, please. Christine, confirm.”

Christine resists the urge to groan loudly and merely opens the laptop again, brings up the network entry for Abby’s phone, and gives Tabby a thumbs up when she’s done switching off all the features that protect her, a graduate and ex-sponsor, from the eyes and ears of Dorley.

The call is brief. Shahida accepts the meeting but disputes Abby’s suggestion for a location, countering with a large café within walking distance of the university called Egg Nation. Christine, thinking back to Abby meeting her parents in a touristy pub in the city, finds herself nodding: large space, plenty of staff, plenty of witnesses; safety. They both get wired, a process far less grandiose than the terminology makes it sound; Bluetooth microphones in their bags. The recordings will still be muffled, but it’s better than relying on the tiny mics in their phones. And then they’re off, Abby waiting indulgently on the front steps while Christine says goodbye to Paige. It’s a half-hour walk to Egg Nation, and when they’re sufficiently far from the Hall and Christine’s pulled out her second phone to check them both for any active signals she doesn’t expect (none, but better safe than sorry), she asks the question on her mind.

“I know that look. There’s something you didn’t tell them, isn’t there?”

“Melissa asked me not to tell Shahida that she’s dead. Just that she’s gone.”

Christine nods. It’s against procedure for a reason, but she’s not exactly surprised. “She won’t be happy with that. She’ll keep looking.”

“I know,” Abby says. “But she begged me, Chrissy.”

They walk in silence for a little while.

“You know you should tell her Mark’s dead, right?” Christine says, without much conviction. The good employee.

“Yep.”

“And you’re not going to.”

“Of course not. Melissa asked. And I love her, Christine. Even if she pushes me away. She went over it again, Chrissy. Just now. All the same stuff that sounds like she’s reading off a notebook or something. She said still doesn’t know—” she coughs, and rubs at her throat, “—if we were ever real, or if it was just this fucking place pushing us together. And she’s right. Bonding within the intake is one thing — we’ve had a lot of healthy, lasting relationships come out of there — but what we did was quite another. I had control over her life. Control over her body. Yes, it was mutual, but even so…” She kicks at a stone, watches dispassionately as it bounces down the road. “I want her to be happy, Christine, and I’m okay if that means she finds someone else. I really am. But she’s not happy. She’s making herself miserable.”

“And you, too.”

“Yeah. And me, too.”

 

* * *

 

Shahida hates going out alone sometimes, especially in smaller cities like Almsworth. Yes, she grew up here, mostly, but the shine’s gone off the place since she’s been away. Maybe it’s just seeing it with adult eyes. Maybe it’s just that her best friend, the boy she thought she might spend her life with, probably died here. Maybe it’s that, after so much time in Los Angeles and San Francisco, everything in this country looks… squalid. It’s not that Almsworth and even London feel cramped and small after America, although they do; it’s that they feel old. Worn out. Neglected over centuries, with the cracks in the brickwork and the crumbling and poorly maintained façades inexplicably called heritage, and cherished.

And there are other things about England that have gotten uglier over the years.

Really, she doesn’t know why she’s doing this. She misses him, and there are fragments of him almost everywhere she looks around here, but he’s dead, and that’s all there is to it. By his own hand, if that’s what you call walking away into the night and never returning. She’s seen him a lot, over the years, in her dreams, vanishing into the darkness; it mingles with the memory of seeing the scars on his wrists, the last time she saw him.

Stupid. The worst thing in the world happened here, in this city, and she came back anyway. Exorcising her demons by marching right up to them and daring them to blink first. How did she think she would feel?

She checks her phone: twenty minutes since the woman, Abigail, asked to meet. It’s not fair of her to be so impatient — she has a car, was close by, and suggested the venue herself; Abigail said she and her friend (friend singular, Shahida confirmed) would have to walk — but she doesn’t care and resents her for it, anyway. Which is part of the toxic thought loop her therapist talked about, actually, so maybe she should be firm with herself and try to be generous.

Or she could distract herself.

Yeah. Better.

She dwells a little on yesterday, spent with her aunts. Her mum’s sister and her wife had a daughter who Shahida had thus far communicated with only over the internet, and who turned out in person to be perhaps the most adorable child Shahida’s ever seen. She allowed herself to be clambered all over while her aunts filled her in on everything she missed in her years away, and fed her enough that she still doesn’t feel particularly hungry twenty hours later. It had been hard to leave, even after Auntie Mona tried to get Suzain to call her ‘Shahida MC’, which was definitely not funny.

She glances down: twenty-five minutes.

Okay, time for her primary travelling hobby.

Shahida, a veteran of airports, railway stations, metros, and nearly flat expanses of tarmac and dirt on which one might, if one is lucky, find a bus, likes to watch people. Likes to imagine lives for them, stories which just happen to be playing out their most crucial moments right in front of her. Turning a commuter who is late for his train into a panicked father rushing to deliver the ransom for his kidnapped son keeps her mind off the fact that her own immediate future is mundane, as it was when she returned nightly to her small and empty San Francisco flat, or actively depressing, as it is now, chasing dead leads on a dead friend in a town she’d rather forget. So she looks around Egg Nation, and dreams:

The white woman in the severe suit, she’s on her way home to her loving wife after a difficult job interview, stopping for a snack before the long train journey. Tonight they’ll drown their sorrows in wine and each other, fall asleep together, and wake to find a message from her future employer on her phone. Jubilation! But also complication, because now they have to rip up their lives and move halfway across the country, and is another thirty thousand pounds a year worth it? It might not be, except that they’ve been thinking about IVF…

The Black woman in the fashionable dress and the large canvas bag, well, she’s obviously a buyer for a local art museum. It’s not a huge name yet but it has funding behind it and some of the bigger fish are interested but she doesn’t care about that, because she’s just commissioned an up-and-coming young artist for an installation that will, she’s certain, change both of their lives. The woman’s building a stage for the girl, dedicating a whole wing to her vision, waiting impatiently for the day the work is finished and the art world will come to Almsworth and be forever moved by what they’ve seen…

The two white girls talking in hissed whispers a few tables over, they’re sisters, running away from home, and the older and more confident one is waiting to meet a broker who can provide new identity documents, while the younger and more apprehensive one keeps watch for vengeful relatives, who might appear at any moment to drag them back to the horrors that await them in the locked dungeon of the family home…

The blonde girl in the corner of the café, staring unblinkingly at the other customers with an uncomfortable intensity, she’s obviously a serial killer. No ordinary person moves so carefully and so deliberately, and— The girl catches her eye and smiles, and Shahida looks quickly away.

Hmm. What about the Black woman and the white woman, just now walking in and looking around? They could be…

Oh. Right.

She refused to send a picture of herself, but Abigail snapped a selfie during the call and texted it over, and there she is. So the white woman must be her friend. The girl Vicky and Lorna know.

Shahida waves. Might as well get this over with.

They seem friendly enough when they sit down, but Shahida picked a table visible from the counter, anyway.

“Hi,” she says. “I’m Shahida.”

“Abigail,” Abigail says.

“Christine,” the other girl says.

“So!” Shahida says. “What did you have to tell me?”

Abigail shrugs. “What did you want to know?”

“For starters, how do— how did you know Mark?”

She smiles, and Shahida wonders if they were close like she and Mark almost were, and instantly hates her for it. “I was just finishing up my degree when we met,” Abigail says. “And we didn’t meet in class — I was a journalism student and he took Physics. As you know, I’m sure. I was actually working on something for my internship: I interviewed new students at Saints, asked them how they were coping with the classes, what it was like living away from home, that kind of stuff. A puff piece for one of the junior writers at work.”

“And work was…?”

“Work still is the Gazette. You can see my byline there sometimes.”

Shahida nods, notes the pride in Abigail’s voice, and gestures for her to continue.

“Mark was one of the first students I interviewed,” she says. “And from the start, something felt different about him. It was like he had something he wanted to tell me, something he needed to tell me, but he couldn’t find the words to say it. We had this incredibly mundane conversation where he supplied absolutely the most generic answers you can think of, and the whole time all I wanted to do was ask him, ‘What are you really thinking?’ But I didn’t. We chatted a little, after the interview, and then… that was that, I thought.” Abigail crosses her arms, leans forward on the table. “And then I saw him the next day. And I kept seeing him after that. Just around. He was taking a couple of modules in the building I worked out of, and you know how it is, once you know a face…”

“Yeah,” Shahida says.

“He always seemed so sad. No—” Abby frowns and chews on her lip for a moment; a professional actor could not have performed thoughtful better, “—not sad. More like… empty. Like the thing he couldn’t tell me about, the thing he couldn’t find the words for, was his whole life. And it got worse. Quickly. He started blocking people out. Didn’t smile at me in the hallways any more; didn’t notice me. He was always head down, both hands on the straps of his backpack, get to the lecture, get away. And, one day, in the Anthill, he—”

“The Anthill?”

“It’s what the students call the lecture theatre complex down by the lake,” Christine says, breaking a silence which she’s spent carefully watching Shahida’s reactions. “It, um, looks like an Anthill. Or kind of a big poo.”

“Right.”

“One day,” Abby resumes, “he’s walking up the main steps, head down like usual, going fast, and he bumps into a girl. You know, like you might do if you’re not paying attention to where you’re going. And he wasn’t a big g— guy, but he was charging up those stairs, and she was standing right next to the railing, and she almost went over.”

“I didn’t know any of this,” Shahida says, and starts taking notes on her phone.

“The girl was fine; her friends grabbed her and she didn’t fall. But she got a scare, and maybe a bruise or two, from the railing. She yelled at him, understandably, and… I was there. I saw it all, and you could see him taking it all in, right there. If you’re… empty, then sometimes the worst things come along and fill you up, you know? It was just an accident, but I think that was it for him. I tried to catch up with him but he got nabbed for a debrief by the security guard at the Anthill and then… then I never saw him again.”

“That’s it?”

“Not quite.” There’s a cruet laid out on the table, and Abigail takes the pepper pot and starts turning it around in her hands. “I was worried about him, so I went to his dorm, asked around, and someone said he went out, to that club.”

“Legend,” Shahida supplies, with a sneer she doesn’t even try to resist.

Abigail points with the pepper pot. “Yes. So, call me obsessive, I went after him. Never found him. He was just gone. I found his iPod, though. That was me. Just off the pavement, in the grass, at the bus stop by the uni. He’d stamped on it until the screen was smashed, but it was easy to recognise. On the back of it, there was—”

“A sticker. The blue flower with the circlet of skin.” Shahida doesn’t have to think hard to imagine it. After Mark’s father got the iPod back from the police, she asked him for it. He practically threw it at her, along with a few boxes of books and other sundries. He had to concentrate on Russ, he said. Whole lot of good that did either of them.

The music player had been his mother’s. The family bought it for her when she started getting sick, to replace her original model, because the new one could play video. Mark spent a whole week torrenting TV shows and learning how to use transcoding software so he could compress them to fit as many as possible on the hard drive, with enough space over to copy the entire library from her old one. It was, he told her, her lifeline through years of repeated hospitalisation.

Days before she died, she called him into her room, gave him her music, and showed him the sticker on the back. She’d had it made, a variant of a logo from the cover of her favourite band’s first album, but with the flower in blue instead of red, and with her own words on the paper double-wrapped around the stems, here rendered as torn and tattooed skin:

My Dearest Mark,

Forget Me Not.

Sometimes Shahida plugs a pair of earbuds into the broken device and listens to the soft and muffled hiss of silence.

“He never changed a single song,” she says, and in the burning of her cheeks becomes aware of the stares of the other women. “Sorry. Memories.”

Abigail’s biting her lip again. “I quite understand. When she— when he disappeared, I was consumed with guilt, with the idea that I could have done something different. I kept playing back his last days, thinking I should have tried harder to talk to him after the accident…”

She keeps talking, but Shahida’s not listening. She’s watching the other girl, Christine, instead, whose reaction to the pronoun slip was to jump as if she’d been kicked, and then go very still. Under her scrutiny, Christine visibly relaxes and returns to nodding along with Abigail, but something about her mannerisms can’t help but ring false. Maybe it’s because the girl refuses to respond to Shahida’s staring, which has passed curiosity and is now bordering on the rude.

Abigail’s still talking. Shahida’s not even there any more. She’s in LA again, and it’s only her third month in the States. This guy, Travis, her first fling in the new country, has invited her on an outing someone at his work is organising, and it’ll be their last night out and their last week together, although neither of them know that yet. Still, she’s frustrated with him, and leaving his side more and more to mingle, to meet people, to find the kinds of strange stories she’s been craving. She finds an older man, much older, with pimple scars on his cheeks, a dense but well-trimmed beard, and strange horizontal scars on his chest that are fully visible under his loose denim jacket, and he’s surrounded by people who all look far more interesting than Travis’ work colleagues, so she joins in a conversation on the periphery, makes herself automatically novel by virtue of her accent, and soon enough she’s talking to the big guy, who sits holding court on a bench and occasionally shares kisses and loving touches with another man, not quite as big as he, and somewhat androgynous.

The big guy’s name is Nathan, and he’s transgender. He tells her so when he catches her looking at his scars; don’t worry, he’s used to the attention, and if she’s not going to be rude, neither will he. No, he doesn’t normally show them off like this, but not because he’s ashamed; the judge would yell at him if he turned up to work without a shirt on. Why are they celebrating? Well, this guy here — another bear hug for the other man — finally worked out that they’re supposed to be husband and husband and not husband and wife! After thirty years of marriage! Isn’t he handsome now? He’s still picking a new name, so just call him Dumbass for now. No, he won’t mind; he’s a dumbass. Come, girl, have a drink with us, and tell us about yourself.

She met more trans people after that, and a lot more other kinds of people besides, through Nathan and his now-husband, through their friends, through work, and she returned home a lot more worldly than the Shahida who left a provincial British city to find herself. And now she wonders, as Abigail’s talking, if that’s been the answer all along, if that’s what she was too naive to see at the time. The trans women she’s spoken to talked about dissociation, about depression, about isolated childhoods and dysfunctional familial relationships, about bullying and loneliness; about their antipathy towards being touched. And the older ones, they told her about the way things used to be done, the way they still are done sometimes, if things are bad, if you have the resources or you’re desperate enough: you leave home, you move across the country, you cut all ties with your former life, and you reinvent yourself.

Is she reaching if she thinks it all just fits? And if she thinks the women in front of her know more than they’re telling her?

Is Mark not dead, after all? Is he really just… gone?

 

* * *

 

It’s dark in here again. Better this way, with the new curves on his body barely illuminated, with the reflection of his new shape just a silhouette, a shadow, flat and empty and dead.

The girl. His future. He reaches out, fingers making contact with the glass, and traces the outline of his body.

He withdraws. He doesn’t want to touch her.

Aaron doesn’t punch the mirror. Maria, back when she first showed him out of that nasty little cell and into his room, she said it’s safety glass, or perspex, or plastic, or fucking mithril or something, and it has to be because then angry boys like him can’t smash it and use it to hurt themselves, and he fucking wants to, he wants to take everything out on it, to see which breaks first, him or the glass.

Angry boys like him.

Not so angry any more. Not so anything any more.

He doesn’t punch it but he imagines himself punching it, like a man would, a hulking fucking man like the boys at school who came at him in the dark, like Will used to be, like Declan, with his beer barrel body. He doesn’t punch it and instead he sits perfectly still, and tears the door clean off the wardrobe. He hugs his legs to his body and bites his tongue and closes his eyes, and drops the mirror on the floor and stamps on it until cracks appear in its polished surface. He opens his eyes again, looks at his reflection, shattered in his mind’s eye but in front of him unbroken, and wonders which version of him, which version of the mirror, he prefers.

Academic. He’s where he is, he’s who he is, and what’s happening won’t change. Can’t fight it. Accept it, or don’t.

Steph. Stephanie. The girl coming out of the man like she was there all along, just waiting for someone to help her, and he didn’t help, did he? No, he didn’t see it until she’d already seen it herself, and all he could do was acknowledge her. What a helpless, useless little boy he is. Does she dream of turning back the clock, reversing the changes, returning to the man she was? No. No, she doesn’t and no, she shouldn’t. She’s better than him. Always will be; always was.

Hurt people hurt people.

It’s what the school nurse said, the first and only time he went to see her, with his bloody nose and his bruised jaw and the raw skin on his buttocks where they hit him with the improvised cane. She said those boys must be so miserable to have felt the need to inflict such pain, and he wondered then if anyone would ever use that excuse for him.

And then he got to find out, because he hurt people. And they found a hundred ways to explain it all away.

Oh, that poor lad. He must have had his reasons. And he has such a bright future!

He wants to spit blood. Fuck her, fuck them, and fuck that poor lad. Never saw an impulse he didn’t chase, and he chased them all the way to Dorley fucking Hall. Except this place gave him something nothing and nowhere else ever has: clear eyes. And with them he’s seen himself, an infinite reflection of mean, nasty, brutish deeds, moments of joy extracted from the pain of others.

Hurt people hurt people.

But he’s not really a person, not any more. No more excuses.

Aaron’s glad he didn’t kick the mirror, that he wasn’t like Declan and Will and the boys who bullied him, because then he’d be scattered into a million imperceptible shards, and that would be like hiding from himself again. And he can’t do that. Not any more and never again.

Here, at the end, he wants to live in the world. For the first and the last fucking time: he wants to live in the real world.

 

* * *

 

Edy’s in the shower, and that gives Maria time to catch up on work without being on the receiving end of a well-meant lecture on recovery protocol. She can always hide the laptop under her pillow if Edy gets done more quickly than she expects. Abby, Christine, Tabby, Bella and Rabia have all submitted reports on the drama of the day, and if one combines them into, as it were, one massive document in one’s head, the synthesis is that, basically, things went okay, and Bella should have been more careful about sending Faye and Rebecca out on their own. Still, Indira’s checked in with the girls and verified that they’re okay and watching movies together in Faye’s room, and Abby’s confirmed that the encounter with Shahida went to spec, so that’s fine.

Bea would tease her, echo her own words back to her: see, this place can function without you for one measly day!

Maria sips at her tea and, looking away from the screen for the first time in a while, notices that Edy brought it to her in her favourite mug, a present from one of the younger sponsors, who got hold of some unsold and genuinely vintage Royal College mugs from the brief period in the 1980s when Saints had a gift shop. The girl had it customised in such a way that the modifications have withstood dozens upon dozens of trips through the dishwasher. The original text, floating over generic geometric shapes, reads, Come to the Royal College of Saint Almsworth and find yourself! The girl added, in blood-red letters, IF WE DON’T FIND YOU FIRST!!

It makes her smile every time.

She and Beatrice are the first to admit that the unusual circumstances of their respective transitions have left them with a shared sense of humour that borders on the macabre, but they were surprised when most of the girls who came up under their new regime seemed to share and embrace it. Bea commented at the time that it might mean they were doing something wrong, but by then someone had found her mug collection, and the first imitation — which read, To Reinvent Yourself Takes Balls! — had appeared on a shelf in the kitchen, and it seemed most sensible just to run with it, to let the girls indulge themselves. Maria said at the time it might help them adjust. After a while it became nothing more than a silly tradition, a way for graduates to one-up each other on major gift-giving holidays, or to extract adorable frustrated noises from some of the younger, more sensitive girls.

In the end, she doesn’t manage to put the laptop away before Edy gets out of the shower, but her partner favours her with nothing more than a raised eyebrow and a promise to make her another cup of tea when she’s dried her hair, and Maria goes back to combing through the day’s reports. So she’s got her eye on the computer when Consensus chimes: Indira on a voice call.

“It’s Aaron,” Indira says, without preamble. “He’s whispering to himself, but it’s too quiet to pick up. He’s been acting unusually all day — I’ve been keeping half an eye on him, despite the palaver — and now he’s back in the dark in his room, and he won’t look away from his mirror.”

“How long?” Maria asks, calling up the camera feeds. Edy shuts off the kettle and returns to her side, frowning down at the screen. Aaron is indeed staring at himself in his mirror, legs tucked up under his chin, arms circling his shins. He’s completely still.

“Only about twenty minutes. I was helping out upstairs by the time he started. Nell got on shift and called me immediately; he must have started during the switch-over.”

They’re still sloppier than they should be, as an institution, but Maria doesn’t say it. Five, ten years ago, they had enough staff that they’d spot things like this instantly; now, they’re perpetually playing catch-up.

“What’s your assessment?” she says.

“I think you need to go to him, Maria,” Indira says. “I think you need to go now. It’s time.”

“Yeah. Thanks, Dira.”

“Call me if you need me,” Indira says, and the connection closes with the familiar descending chime.

Before Maria can say anything, Edy’s already thrown an outfit on the bed and is offering her a hand up. Maria dresses, brushes her teeth, puts her messy hair in a tail and tests herself for steadiness. This far out from the incident, the moments of disorientation and weakness are rare, but she has a cane if she needs it. Not this evening, though.

Edy walks with her, all the way down past the kitchen, where the impromptu crisis management team are reheating cold pizza and someone’s broken out a bottle of wine, and the security room, from which Nell waves and Indira nods seriously at her. As they enter the second-floor basement, Edy peels off, finding Adam out of his room, conducting a subdued conversation with Stephanie in the common room, so Maria has a moment alone to prepare herself before opening Aaron’s door.

She knocks. Aaron needs the illusion of privacy. It’s more than she ever had, and she’s seen how much it helps them to have their personal space respected, even when they know they’re being watched all the time. And he’s not the same as the boy who arrived here, not any more; he’s earned some respect.

He doesn’t answer. She’s got her phone in the other hand, watching him from above, and she can see that he doesn’t react at all. So she lets herself in, taps on her phone for some low lights to come on to supplement the dull glow from above the bed, and closes the door carefully behind her.

Still nothing.

Indira’s right. This is different. This is new, for him.

Maria’s a connoisseur of toxic male fragility, and she knows by now all the ways such a psyche can shatter, all the points into which one must hammer one’s nails to turn holes into cracks and cracks into waves of broken glass. Aaron’s someone she originally expected to break much later, months from now, around the time of the orchiectomy; probably she has Stephanie to thank for his accelerated development.

Aaron does, too. The sooner they realise they’ve stepped over the hard line between their past and their future, the better. Vicky and Christine, to take two examples who’ve been on her mind a lot lately, illustrate the point: Victoria established a new future for herself early on and was much happier for it; Christine, though, sank about as low as Aaron has, and it took the orchiectomy, the clean break with her past, for Indira and her friends to bring her around.

Take away a vital part of them, create that hard line between the old self and the new. It doesn’t have to be anything physical.

She crouches down in front of the silent boy.

“Aaron.”

Aaron unwinds in shudders. He looses his hands from around his calves and places them on the floor behind, he lays his legs down flat, and he raises his head. “Maria,” he says.

“Talk to me, Aaron.”

He nods slowly. Every movement a great effort. “I need your help.”

“Okay. Do you want to sit more comfortably?”

“Sure.”

She stands and reaches for him and he pulls himself up on her arm, staggering away as soon as he’s on his feet and waving his hands at her. She’s confused until she realises he’s spluttering an apology, but it’s barely audible.

“Aaron,” she says, more firmly than before, allowing a little bit of sponsor voice to creep in, “you don’t have to apologise.”

“I do,” he says, still waving her away. “I fucking do, I shouldn’t be pulling on you like that, shouldn’t be using you, you were attacked, I can still see it on you, I can see it in the way you walk, and it’s like you said, you have something to live for, someone who cares for you, and you’re worth it, Maria, and I shouldn’t just—”

He’s cut off when she grabs his arm by the elbow, trusting in the physical contact to break him out of the shame he’s talking himself into, and he looks at her with wounded innocence.

“Aaron,” she says.

“I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted, if you insist on repeating it. Shall we sit down?”

He nods, and she guides him to the bed. He sits with his legs crossed, easily falling into a comfortable position, and she insists on propping some of his pillows behind him, so he can lean against the wall. He asks why she’s fussing over him.

“You’re worth it,” she says, rolling the chair over and sitting down opposite him.

“You both think that. You, Stephanie. Indira, too, actually, although she had a funny way of showing it. You all think I’m worth it. And I haven’t been able to bring myself to believe it. Because it’s stupid, Maria, and all of you, you’re too smart to miss that. So you’re all lying, or you’re all seeing something that’s not there. But it’s okay, because now I understand.”

“What do you understand?”

He breathes deeply, almost smiling as he looks around the room. “I told you. I’ve seen who I would have become. And I understand now who I was, before I was brought here. I can fill in the details, all the terrible things I’ve done, all the terrible things I was going to do, and it makes an ugly fucking picture.” He laughs. “It’s not one I want anyone to see, not any more. So, I understand: I had to be taken out of the world. It’s better off without me. And I know that, to you, that’s half the job. You want to see me change. You want to see me grow. But I can’t. So I won’t.”

“You can, Aaron,” Maria says, reaching for him but retracting her hand when he flinches away.

“I can’t. I’ve seen how it’s supposed to go, okay? I spent the afternoon with Steph. With Stephanie. And she’s a… a she, now. I can see it, and so can she. Fuck, actually, I don’t know how I didn’t see it weeks ago. Being with her, acknowledging her as the woman she’s becoming, it unblocked something, you know? Inside me. Like pulling all the hair out of the plug and suddenly the bath’s draining properly and that’s just it, Maria, I’m fucking empty. Take away the mask, take away the armour, the bad habits, everything, and there’s just a fucking void. I’m just this. And that’s all I’ll ever be. I don’t want to drag this out over days or weeks. She’s falling for me. God only knows why, but she is. And the longer I’m around, the more it’ll hurt when I’m gone. Because I won’t survive this, Maria. I won’t make it through. I won’t be a girl like Steph. Something in her has learned to want this. Maybe it was in her all along. And you know what? I can look into her past and I can see it all. Maybe she only acted like a piece of shit because she had something inside her that made no sense, that defied all understanding, that wouldn’t come loose when she picked at it or when other people picked at it for her, and no-one could tell her what it was, and then she’s brought here and injected with all sorts of dumb shit and suddenly that thing inside her that was always coiled up and taut and— and fucking strangling her is loose and pliable and free and she realises: oh shit, I’m a girl. And I’m so happy for her, Maria. Jesus, I’m so fucking happy. And I think that’s a good note for me to leave on, you know? I’m happy for my friend. I’m happy she’s becoming the person she was always supposed to be. I think I showed her that today. And that’s how I want her to remember me. Not as this empty shell. Not as me.” Still leaning away from her, he breathes, dry and empty. “What I want from you, Maria, is your help. I want to end it, and I need you to help me.”

“I won’t do that.”

“You’d do it for Declan but not for me?”

She doesn’t quibble. “Yes.”

Now he leans forward, now he reaches for her, but she denies him. She won’t support him in this.

“You can do it painlessly,” he says. “You have anaesthetic here, right? Just stick me with needles, put me under, and end me.”

“Aaron,” Maria says, as kindly as she knows how.

“And promise me you’ll take care of her, Maria,” he says, reaching again for her hands; again denied. “Promise me! She’s the one good thing in my life and she does not deserve to be dragged down with me. Because, look, I nearly fucked up today. I almost ruined it. I got wrapped up in my own shit and I almost let it show and I almost shouted at her just for being happy, just for accepting herself, and I can’t do that again. I kept seeing it in her eyes, you know, or I was afraid I would see it in her eyes, the disappointment that I’m not living up to what she thinks I can be, so I bottled it and ran back here before I fucked up, terminally. And that took everything I had! I’ve got nothing left for the rest of it.” He sits back again. “It’s Steph’s fucking trolley problem, Maria, only she’s on the safe track and I’m under it. And that’s where I should be. I’m happy there, Maria. I know what needs to be done. I’m waiting for the wheels. I’m ready for the release. But that means you have to do it for me. Because—” he loses control, and the last words come out in a breathless gasp, “—because I’m too much of a coward to do it myself.”

“I won’t help you like that.”

It’s not even a whisper now. Barely a sound. “Please.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I think I will love you, Aaron. Not like Steph does, nor how she will. But I’ll love you like family.” That’s his trigger point. His lever. Like a lot of the girls, his family has been cruel or indifferent towards him, expected things of him he couldn’t possibly supply or become; chosen for him a future in which cruelty is an inevitability and happiness an afterthought. There’s a missing piece in the boy’s life, and she and Stephanie and all the sponsors are ready to provide it, if he’ll let them. There’s only one requirement. “I’ll love you like a sister,” she says.

He doesn’t even flinch. “You won’t,” he whispers. “I won’t make it.”

She holds out her hand, makes him place her palm against hers. Accepts him on her terms. Lances her fingers between his, captures him, holds him. He looks like he wants to pull away, but he doesn’t follow through.

“There’s something you should know,” she says. “Look at our hands. Look at my fingers and look at yours. You see how they’re the same? And remember how you asked what happened to me when I was younger?”

He says nothing, he just keeps his eyes fixed on hers.

“Aaron,” Maria says, “can you keep a secret?”