NOVEL WEB 25. Like an Angel
25. Like an Angel
2019 December 12
Thursday
She’s such an idiot. She should have known!
For as long as she’s been down here with him, Aaron’s been practically a force of nature, rarely stilled, even more rarely silent. A creature of energy, always needing to talk or move his hands or pace, and when she thinks of him — and she thinks of him often, more often than she would ever have thought likely — he’s in motion.
And yesterday he was almost calm. When they talked, when they showered together, even when he darted back to kiss her. Too still. Too controlled. Too much like something vital inside him had simply faded away.
She should have known.
How long have they stood there, with him in her arms? Minutes or hours; Stef could believe either. Pippa held her back as long as she could, explained that the thing with Maria was a process, that this was a point a girl sometimes hits — and Stef had pulled snarling out of her grip at that; ‘a girl’! — before she can truly start to organise herself into something new.
If Stef hadn’t been so weak with tears she would have pushed right past her.
“You mustn’t interfere!”
That was what stopped her. That was what put her right back in her seat and wrapped her arms around her legs and buried her head in her thighs. You mustn’t interfere.
Implicit: she already has.
Pippa didn’t say it. She didn’t have to.
If this is all going to happen, and it will — it has to; it’s unstoppable; there are too many women all willing to look in and say everything’s perfectly fine because they were abused to within an inch of their lives and they turned out fine — then she’s making it worse by interfering.
But how can she not?
Eventually Pippa let her go. Decided the time was right. And she didn’t think of it before but maybe this is all part of it. Maybe this is her role. Maybe this is how Aaron becomes a girl, from her intervention. And what would Melissa think of you?
Some intervention. She burst in and Maria cleared out, and now here she is, and here he is, in her embrace at last, and he’s all cried out but she sure isn’t, and he moves only to breathe while she squeezes him tighter, unable to stop and unable to let go, whispering his name in tight and sore breaths so quietly he might not hear.
He gave her one last good day, and he kissed her, and he asked Maria to help him die.
Her belly lurches and her throat constricts and she says his name again, louder and clearer this time, and he sniffs loudly, shifts in her grip as much as he can, and looks up at her. He’s smaller, or he seems that way. Reduced. Like he found a way to miss a fortnight of meals in the hours between the kiss in the lunch room and now.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“No.” She pulls him back in. “I’m not accepting any apologies from you. You’re… you’re a fucking innocent in all this.” She knew this was happening; she’s known since the start; she remembers thinking maybe they all deserved it…
He shivers, and it takes her a moment to realise he’s laughing. It’s an ugly laugh, wet and painful, and she wants to silence it before it somehow injures him, but it doesn’t last long. He goes limp in her arms, weaker even than before. Nothing left of him.
She’s all that’s holding him up, and she’s not doing that well herself. She loosens her grip, reluctantly lets him go, and he takes two steps back to lean against the wardrobe.
He won’t look at her.
Aaron says, “I’m not an innocent,” and Stef doesn’t care that it’s true, that he wouldn’t be here if it weren’t, because she wants to burn anything and everything she has to, to get him out and away from the place that made him ask Maria to help him die.
It happens to a lot of them. It happened to Pippa. She was okay. He’ll be okay. Don’t interfere. Don’t interfere. Don’t interfere.
She wants to hit herself. Nothing justifies this.
“Aaron—”
“Don’t,” he says. “You can’t tell me I’m innocent. It’s—” he coughs, and it almost sounds like he’s laughing again, “—it’s a bad fucking joke. I know what I’ve done.”
Stef looks around at the concrete walls. “None of it warrants what they’re doing to you.”
He shrugs. Actually fucking shrugs, like none of this matters! Or like he doesn’t care any more. But then he flaps his hands at his sides, unable to find anything to do with them. He looks around. He even smiles at her. Little discharges of energy. Signs he’s still in there, despite appearances, despite the way he’s put all his weight against the wardrobe, absolutely drained, useless, used up.
Is this what Pippa meant? Does he see a future, even slightly? Is this the start of it?
“What are you thinking?” he asks, like he’s curious.
Stef laughs. “Fucked if I know.”
The effort of laughing exhausts her in a way no tears could, and she walks quickly over to the bed before she loses her balance. Wouldn’t it be nice if he were to follow her, if he were to show her that the affection he showed her yesterday wasn’t just inspired by his guilt, wasn’t just put on to make her feel good?
How long has she known him? Mere months. And she can’t imagine the world without him.
She chokes through fresh tears because it almost happened. He came close enough that he asked Maria for death and Maria refused him and promised him there’d be no more lies.
No more lies.
“Aaron,” she whispers, in a voice made harsh as she remembers Maria talking around her, lying for her, making the promise and then lying to his face because of her.
Christ, she’s a weight on this fucking place. She’s a black hole, distorting everything around her. She should have let Christine get her out, accepted her offers of help, found a way to transition on the outside. But her weakness, her cowardice, her self-centred stubbornness forced Christine’s hand, and now she’s here and the sponsors are helping her and just by her presence she’s hurting the boys… She’s hurting Aaron.
Stupid boy! she admonishes herself, in the voice of her father. She came here, inserted herself into a process that’s run smoothly for years, and she meddled and she put herself first and she didn’t even consider that the others might have needs that matter because they’re bad men and then she fell in love.
And now he’s asking to die. And Maria’s still lying to him. Lies of omission, sure, but lies are lies, even if it’s Aaron telling them to himself, on her behalf.
She coughs on her tears, but before she can wipe her face, before she can look at him again, he’s sat down next to her, right up against her, arm around her waist, pulling her in, offering his shoulder for her head, placing a tentative hand on her thigh. Comforting her.
“Aaron,” she says again.
“Stephanie,” he says back. His voice is kind, and shaking only a little.
“This is wrong,” she whispers. “This is fucked up. It shouldn’t be you comforting me.”
“Why not?” he asks, and the question’s enough to silence her. “If there’s one thing this place has shown me,” he continues, emboldened, “it’s that the one whose needs are most urgent can change on a fucking dime.” He squeezes her thigh, and his continued comfort forces out of her a bitter breath. “I’m actually kind of calm right now. And you… you’re not.” She leans on him and he smirks. “If there’s two things this place has shown me, the other’s how to jerk off without being seen by the cameras. Now, amateurs, posers, they might say, ‘Just do it under the duvet,’ but to them I say, what if the urge takes me while I’m having a shower? Or watching TV in the common room? Or pacifying myself with inedible breakfast cereal? And what about our changing sensitivities? Sure, I might have got some of the old downstairs magic back — and I have, by the way; you’ll have to tell me how you’re doing in that regard — but honestly I’m bored by the one-dimensional wanks of old, like, I need a challenge, and simply yanking one out with your right hand under the covers while browsing on your phone with your left is fucking easy mode, and doesn’t take into account the additional—”
“Aaron,” she says once more. He’s trying. It’s sweet.
“Yes?”
“You really wank in the lunch room?”
“No,” he admits, “but I have a plan for it. Always Be Prepared; isn’t that what the boy scouts say?”
She laughs, and he lets go of her thigh, but he doesn’t push her away. Bodies touching, they sit together on his bed. He’s smiling at her, and despite what he says and despite what she knows he looks too damn sweet, too damn innocent.
“I have to tell you something,” she says, “and you’re going to hate me for it.”
“Steph,” he says, “I don’t want to know what you did to get chucked in here. I don’t care. Not any more.”
“That’s not—”
“And I know Pippa shows you stuff, too. On her phone.” It’s like he’s going down a list. “It’s why you’re here at all tonight. You’ve been close with her for ages and she’s been letting you in on stuff. Showing you the cameras. It’s fine. I mean—” he shudders for a second, and Stef forces flexibility into her arm so she can hug him loosely, “—it’s not like I like that you’ve probably seen the footage of me apologising to Maria for her helping me up, or me asking her for… for what I asked for.” He laughs again. “Jesus, though, this is so fucking embarrassing. Like, we’re always recorded here, I know that, but the whole point of wanting to fucking die is that you don’t have to deal with the aftermath!” He’s talking louder now, but before Stef can intervene he calms himself, and continues softly, “Especially the way I wanted to do it. I wanted to just fade away. But now I’m still here and so’s that fucking aftermath and, Steph, I feel like a complete idiot. How do you move on from wanting to die without, you know, having to ever think about it or talk to anyone about it ever again?”
“Aaron—”
“All anyone’s going to think when they look at me is, oh, there goes suicidal ideation boy, what’s the matter, gonna—?”
“Aaron!” Stef interrupts, more sharply than she intended. “I know what else Maria told you tonight. That everyone here was once like you. Like us. I think maybe a lot of them have been where you are. I think it’s actually quite normal.” Thank you, Pippa, for putting the words in my mouth. She’ll have to apologise later for not accepting her advice with grace.
“Yeah,” Aaron says, frowning, “fuck. Yeah. I keep forgetting. It’s like my brain doesn’t want to hold on to the information. It’s all of them, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Stef says, “it really seems like it is.”
And there she goes, reflexively prevaricating again. Did you ever think you’d become such a persistent liar, Stefan?
“What?” Aaron says quickly, his hand on Stef’s shoulder so quickly she doesn’t notice it’s there until he squeezes it. “Steph, what is it?”
“Hm? Oh. Nothing.”
“Steph,” he says, using his free hand to cup her cheek and turn her to face him; the action is strangely intimate and, with only the weakest control over her body right now, she shivers. “Steph, you froze.”
She looks down; her hands are balled into fists, and as she carefully unsticks them she finds the imprints of nails in her palms. Any harder and she would have broken the skin. “Shit,” she says. “Sorry.” Deadnaming herself in her own head; unhealthy, probably. “Stupid stuff.”
“Nothing down here is stupid stuff,” Aaron says. “Or everything is. Come on.” He drags on her shoulder. He has no chance of moving her without her permission, so she grants it, and he lays them both down on the bed, pulling the covers up partway. He’s got his back to the wall and she’s facing him, although there’s a good amount of mattress between them. “Tell me.”
“I— I can’t, Aaron.”
“Stephanie,” he says again, in his sternest voice. “You don’t have to keep secrets from me. Who am I going to tell?”
“It’s not that.”
“I know you’re trans, Steph,” he says, and that brings her up short. It shouldn’t, because it was part of his confession to Maria, part of his request, that he saw her adapting in ways he never could, and that’s why he wanted to die—
“Oh God…” she whispers.
“No, seriously,” he says, as she wraps an arm around herself, “I know you’re trans, or something like it, or whatever. I mean, it’s obvious, right? I feel stupid for not seeing it before. It’s really fine. I’m not, like, bothered, or anything.”
He’s too close to it, he’s too close to me…
“No,” she says, because she has to say something before his train of thought leads him around to the lie, the big one, the one she tells every day, the one she makes even Maria participate in, but she doesn’t know what she’s going to say and it’s dangerous to let her mouth just fucking run on like it wants to, “I shouldn’t be here, I should go…”
“I don’t care,” Aaron says, reaching out a hand towards her and pausing it when she shuffles back. “Really.”
She rolls farther back anyway, almost falls out of the bed. She disentangles herself from the sheets and stands up, puts distance between them.
Aaron hasn’t moved.
“I’m hurting you, Aaron,” she says, and there’s no stopping it all from coming out now. “I’m hurting you just by being around you and that’s exactly what I was trying to stop from happening but I’m fucking it up and I’m sorry, fuck, Aaron, I’m so sorry…”
“You’re not hurting me.”
“You said it yourself! To Maria! You saw me… changing, and it made you realise you never could, which is stupid, Aaron, because you can, because all of them did it, and I’m making everything happen too soon, I’m pushing you into shit before you’re ready, maybe all of you, because I’m stupid and selfish and—”
“Steph!” he says. She looks back and he’s sitting up, both hands on the mattress. “You’re babbling. You’re not making any sense.”
He looks so innocent. He looks so fucking innocent. And she’s lied and she’s lied and she’s lied. She wants to break her chest open, she wants to scald herself with the shower water good and fucking proper this time, she wants to get away from him get away from get away from him before she makes things worse the way she has over and over and over.
“I knew!” she shrieks.
It’s his turn to freeze. “What do you mean?”
She can never take this back, but she doesn’t want to. He deserves the truth. Even if it hurts. Even if he never speaks to her again. He deserves it.
More than she deserves him.
“I knew,” she says, quieted and cold. “All along. About what happens here. About what was going to happen to you. That’s why I came here. I wanted what they’re forcing on you. I wanted it for me. So I knew. And I kept the secret. I lied and I pretended to be something I’m not and I’m—”
She can’t even tell him she’s sorry. It’s too big for that.
It’s the work of a moment to escape his room, and then she’s alone in the corridor, considering her options. She could go upstairs, to her other room, but she doesn’t want to see it right now, doesn’t even want to think about it, because it’s something she has that he doesn’t and nothing could be more representative of the unjustified and ugly way she’s elevated herself above him; and, besides, she’s exhausted, has almost no control over herself. Imagine climbing the stairs on these legs! She’d fall and hurt herself.
Maybe she should, then.
No. No, and don’t be so fucking stupid.
She lets herself back into her room, across the way from his, and lets the door close slowly on its own as she throws off her outer clothes and falls onto the bed. She keeps expecting a hand to stop the door, for Aaron to have chased after her, but eventually it finishes closing and the lock engages with a muted thump.
Stef presses her face into the pillow and screams.
* * *
Melissa jolts awake to the sound of some bloody Taylor song on the radio and she wants so badly to pick up the cheap alarm clock and dump it out the window that she can visualise the arc it describes on its way down to the pavement and thus she’s surprised, seconds later, to find herself still face down in her pillow, still sore where she slept on her chest, still surrounded by printouts and half-wrapped in the charger cables for her phone and laptop, with her clock radio untouched and still playing Back to December. It makes her think of that time in her first year when Abby discovered the theory that Taylor Swift’s had multiple relationships with women that she’s had to keep secret for the sake of her career, and woke Melissa early on a Saturday to tell her about it.
Barely two hours sleep. It’ll have to be enough.
Stefan — and she won’t use Stephanie, because that’s a coerced name if ever she’s seen one; the kid’s sponsor probably suggested a name similar to his real one as a way to get him used to the idea of being a girl — barely has an internet presence, and hours of searching hasn’t turned up much more than memories of growing up in Almsworth that Melissa would prefer to forget. Friends she let down; places she never wants to think about ever again. Certainly she’s found nothing to suggest that ‘Stephanie R.’ exists anywhere except inside — under — Dorley Hall.
The radio rolls on to something more recent, and finally she finds the motivation to slap the silence button and roll out of bed. She’s got a full-length mirror set up by the wardrobe in the corner and she’s not surprised to find she looks like complete shit. And while she’d love to say that it doesn’t matter, that what she has to do today doesn’t require her to look her best, the early days of the second year, which instilled almost at the instinctive level the need to make herself up so she won’t be read as male, have never entirely left her. She shuffles off to the bathroom for a shower, remembering with a snort that all the makeup in the world didn’t protect her from Stef’s recognition, outside the Tesco that time.
Under the hot water she grimaces, because that was the other thing that kept her up most of the night: what if Dorley taking Stef was her fault? Vanishing without a trace is one thing, and she knows from the old information packs, from when she still opened them, that the kid took it hard. But he had his family, and even if he lost touch with Russ he still had his education, which by all accounts he worked hard on.
He still recognised her, though. Saw a dead man in a woman’s face. And who knows what that does to someone? The reports from his time at Saints said he was quiet, working diligently towards getting his degree and having some academic difficulties; they hadn’t gone into any more detail because there was no more detail to provide. They didn’t have anyone tailing him or collecting any specific information and they didn’t dedicate more than a line or two to him in the monthly update packs, because he was exactly what he appeared to be. There weren’t even any surveillance photos.
But he’d always been a quiet boy, and he’d always turned things over in his head before acting on them. Just like her. Whatever he did to get on Dorley’s radar must have happened suddenly but built up inside him for a while.
The causal chain leads inexorably back to her.
How dare they take him!
Routine carries her through the rest of her morning, but although she loads up her bag with her usual makeup she goes as light as she dares on her face, because she can’t keep herself from crying for more than a few minutes at a time and she has, unfortunately, shit to do.
It’s raining. Perfect. She pulls down her hood, lets the light spatter coat her face and hair; easier to hide that she’s upset. She just got caught in the rain, that’s all.
Zach, her boss, is early as always. He lives at the other end of a tram journey and prefers to avoid the crush. Good for her, today. No-one else around to see her humiliate herself.
She dumps her stuff — clothes, money and supplies, in a wheeled suitcase and the largest of her shoulder bags — by her desk, and avoids his eyes as she walks towards his office. The door’s open, like usual, and he saw her come in, laden down. The question’s clear on his face. She answers it before he has a chance to ask.
“I have to quit, Zach,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” he says, standing up from his chair and walking towards her. He pauses when she freezes, and makes it look like all he wanted to do was stand on the other side of his desk and lean on the wood. “What’s up?”
“I have a… a…” Melissa waves a hand. She couldn’t come up with a story that sounded good, no matter how many times she rehearsed this moment on her way over. “A family emergency,” she tries. Never mind that she’s never spoken of her family with him; maybe that’ll make it seem more authentic.
“Liss,” Zach says, “you’ve been crying.”
“It’s just the rain.”
“Don’t tell me stories, kid.”
She concentrates on the floor. He’s been good to her and the job’s been better than she expected to get, given that her qualifications stop at A-level. Horrible to have to tear everything up because of Dorley.
“There’s something going on,” she says, slow enough to think through her words, “back home. I have to go deal with it? Find out what’s going on?” Damn. Her intonation isn’t exactly convincing.
“Is that what all those calls were about yesterday?” he asks, and she jumps guiltily. “I’m not that unobservant, you know.”
“Sorry.”
“Melissa, if there’s something going on—”
“I just need to leave, Zach. I don’t want to, but…” She leaves it there. This is harder than she expected.
Zach nods, frowns at her for a moment. “Okay. For starters, you’re not quitting. I’m signing off—” he leans back, pulls Melissa’s holiday card out of his desk drawer and starts scribbling in the appropriate boxes, “—on all your remaining days of holiday, and you’re taking your time in lieu as well, and…” He bobs his head from side to side as he thinks, and Melissa has to smile: he always does that when he counts under his breath. After a moment he leans back again and pulls out another card, this one yellow and quite a lot larger, with more boxes to fill in. “And today and tomorrow, you’re sick. Very sick. It might last all weekend. I do hope it doesn’t ruin your Christmas holiday, which starts Monday, in case you forgot.” He shuffles the holiday card back out from under the sick leave card and waves it at her.
“Zach—”
“Speaking of,” he continues, interrupting her with a grin, “silly me; I forgot to pass all this up the chain. I’m supposed to have all holiday cleared a week in advance, but…” He shrugs. “My bad. I’ll get it all processed today.”
“Zach,” she says, “you don’t need to do that.” The admin office will, at the very least, be irritated with him; someone might yell. Someone might send a passive-aggressive email.
“Melissa, whatever’s going on, it’s clearly important, and you need to deal with it. And everything’s winding down now, anyway. You’re ahead on your work, and you know classes are over soon. We’ll fudge it until January. I can manage one mit circs meeting without you. Just make sure you’re back for the start of the semester.” He drops both cards on his desk and stands up, hugs her before she can get away. “Go sort things out, drop me an email to let me know you’re okay every so often, and I’ll see you on the sixth, all right?”
“Thank you,” she mumbles.
“Safe journey, Liss.” He releases her and gives her a gentle flick on the cheek. “And you might want to cough a bit on the way out. Just to sell the ‘being sick’ thing.”
He would have let her leave right there, but she’s overcome and simply must hug him, so it’s almost five minutes later before she’s walking back out into the rain, coughing occasionally as she goes, and heading for Manchester Piccadilly. She doesn’t get the train; she’s never known exactly how extensive the Dorley panopticon is, whether anyone’s really watching her even now, but on the off-chance she has eyes on her she hires a car with cash, throws her bags in the back, syncs her burner phone to the Bluetooth, and takes the little Ford Fiesta out of the city, heading down to Almsworth via Sheffield. It’s less direct than taking the motorway, but a little extra caution never hurt anyone, and if she is being watched, they’d probably expect her to take the M6.
She spent a long time a few years ago recreating her mother’s playlists as best as she could remember them. She puts one on now, turns the music up, and she sings, and swallows hard when she thinks she might cry again.
She’s going home.
* * *
The Student Union Bar at The Royal College of Saint Almsworth is tacky, ugly, and closed; an outrage, considering the opening times posted on the pub-effect entryway clearly say they should have opened five minutes ago! And it’s raining, and it’s cold, and she’s tired.
Everything links back to Dorley Hall. Everything! She’d had no bites on her missing posters, had nothing but shrugs and condolences from the people she’d spoken to, until she put a poster up on the corkboard in the entrance to Dorley Hall. Then, all of a bloody sudden, two girls — one probably cis but one definitely trans, which is an interesting data point — come bursting out of the place, only barely not panicking, and start asking questions about Mark. They promise to put the word around at the dorm and then later the very same day Shahida’s talking to two more girls from Dorley Hall, both of them (probably?) cis but very keen to let her know that Mark’s disappearance was a terrible tragedy, absolutely awful, and that he unambiguously walked off into the night on the very date the police say he did, and whoops let’s accidentally misgender him and very poorly pretend like it wasn’t incredibly revealing to do so.
Not misgender, though. Not if she’s right.
It kept her up all night: if he— if she transitioned, why didn’t she get in touch? Why did she let everyone think she died?
“Because,” she mutters to herself for the fiftieth time, “Shahida, you bloody idiot, his dad hit him and his brother was practically a stranger even before he left and you… you basically forced yourself on him.”
There was nothing left for him back home. Except Stef, maybe, and that, too, is suggestive. Didn’t Russ break off that friendship because Stef kept insisting Mark was alive? There’s got to be something there. Only now, quite conveniently, Stef’s out of the picture, off ‘finding himself’.
Yeah, right.
A flustered girl opens one of the heavy wooden doors with her backside and apologises for keeping her waiting, and Shahida smiles at her like she’s not in a mood at all and hurries inside, depositing her raincoat on the back of a chair and her bag on the wood-effect table. She’s claimed one of the handful of seats that look directly out of the front windows, partly for the light — cut into diamonds by the plastic leading; pretentious and tragic at the same time — but mainly because the Student Union Bar’s out on the edge of campus, right on the path, and anyone leaving Dorley Hall for their morning classes will almost definitely walk right past her.
Maybe she can spot one of the women from yesterday again.
The girl takes her order and quickly returns with coffee, a rather dry bagel and another apology, and Shahida unpacks her things: laptop, phone, notepad and pens. There’s a pair of outlets on the wall by her feet, which will likely come in handy later, and the password to the university’s guest wifi on the chalkboard above the specials, which she will not be using; she prefers her internet in megabytes per second, not kilobytes, and unmonitored. She shares her phone’s connection to her laptop instead, boots it up, and hops into the old shared chat server for the first time in what’s likely years, to leave a quick message.
She doesn’t have to ignore her unpleasant coffee for long before Rachel replies.
Shahida lingers on the screen for a moment, running two fingers idly up and down on the touchpad, scrolling through Rachel’s messages and back up into conversations Rachel and Amy had without her. Years of them.
It’s good that she’s home. She can find work around here easily, and reconnect with more people than just those in her family. Re-establish the life she ran from.
She checks the time again — closing in on half nine — and calls her mother.
“Shahida!”
“Hi, Mum.”
“Shahida, you’re spoiling me! We saw you just a few days ago—”
“You saw me this morning—”
“Yes, darling, but briefly, as one observes a raindrop or a bird in flight or a ready meal with a yellow sticker. You might even have blurred as you ran past me on your way out, you were so fast—”
“Mum—”
“It’s probably for the best. I might perhaps be overstimulated! After years and years of my only daughter being in the States I’ve become accustomed to infrequent and indifferent communication. You must give me more time to acclimate.”
“You’re so funny.”
“I like to think so,” her mother says. “Now, tell me: nothing’s wrong, I hope.”
“No,” Shahida says, leaning back on the fake-wooden bench and finding the padding surprisingly comfortable. “Remember I said I was going to see if anyone at the university knew anything about Mark’s disappearance?”
“I do, and Shahida, you know what I think about chasing him after so long. You’re only going to create more heartache for yourself. I remember when he disappeared, you were inconsolable for—”
“Mum?” Shahida interrupts. “I do actually have something specific I’ve called for?”
“Ah. Sorry, sweetheart. Don’t let your poor, lonely old mother babble away, just because the echoes are all I have to listen to in this cold, empty house.”
“Mother…”
“Do go on, darling.”
“I thought you were used to infrequent communication?”
“Can one ever get used to abject loneliness?”
“Where’s Edward, anyway?”
“Making breakfast.”
Shahida can picture the grin on her mother’s face, and rolls her eyes at it. When she’s in a playful mood, simple conversations can take forever. “Mum,” she says firmly, “I need more pictures of Mark. I only have the one with me, the one from my phone, and I found someone yesterday who might know something, but he needs a few more photos to jog his memory.” She delivers the prepared lie smoothly. It’s true that she has only the one photo — it became too painful to carry more around with her, and even then she’s lost the occasional evening to it, staring at it on her phone screen, wondering what might have become of him — and she needs a wider selection for what she has planned.
“What can I do, dear?”
“Go to my room and look in the left desk drawer. There should be a USB hard drive in there. I’d like you to email me the folder labelled ‘Mark’.”
Her mother was out of her chair as soon as Shahida mentioned her room, judging by the sounds coming down the line, and it’s not long before she’s sitting heavily back down in her seat and plugging the hard drive into the nest of adaptor cables coming out of the single free USB port on her terribly impractical laptop.
“Mark…” her mother mutters to herself while she looks through the drive. There’s years and years of files on there. “Mark… I don’t see a folder labelled ‘Mark’.”
Oh shit. Did she delete it after he disappeared? “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. There is a folder here that’s called ‘Mark’ but there’s also a less-than sign and a—”
“Yes, Mum,” Shahida says, sighing and massaging her chest and wishing she’d remembered to pick up the bloody USB drive on her way out this morning. “That’s the one.”
“Okay, dear. Just give me a second. Aaaaaand… sent!”
“Thanks, Mum.”
“Shahida, dear, what’s the password for this folder called ‘Work files’?”
“Mum, actually, I’ve forgotten.”
“Are you sure? The computer says it’s very large. Could be important.”
“No, Mum, it’s fine.”
“I’m going to image this drive—”
“No, Mum, you don’t have to do that—”
“You can’t have a single-source backup, Shahida; you know that. I’m going to image this drive and then I’ll put it all on the cloud and then, well, do you remember young Kripesh? He works for a data recovery firm now — I’ve been doing their taxes — and he can have that folder open for you in a jiffy.”
“Mum, really, it’s okay. I think I have the password written down somewhere. And don’t image the drive, please? I’ll do it this weekend, I promise.”
“It’s no trouble.”
“Mum.”
“Well, you know best, I’m sure.”
As soon as Shahida’s managed delicately to reverse out of the conversation with her mother she drops into her emails and extracts the photos of Mark to the desktop. And, goodness, there really aren’t as many as one might expect from such a long friendship. She’s got Mark bundled up in his hoodie; Mark lying on the grass in his boxers; Mark sheepish in his shirt and tank top at that final party. More group shots than pictures of him on his own. There are enough of the sort she needs, though — standing or sitting more or less upright, looking at the camera — and she drops the appropriate ones over the wifi to her phone.
If Mark really has transitioned, well, there’s an app for that…
Shahida fiddles with the results for the duration of her coffee, lightening the hair to account for the way the sun always used to bleach it, throwing on a few age filters to account for the fact that he/she will be twenty-five. When she’s finally happy she transfers them back to the laptop and arranges them on the screen, alongside the most recent untouched photo of Mark she has: him holding the NES controller in Rachel’s room, happily drunk and so pretty and carefree in his loose shirt and tank top he almost doesn’t look different enough from the manipulated pictures that surround him.
“Huh,” the girl from earlier says, as she deposits a fresh cup of coffee and collects the empty one, “she’s pretty. Girlfriend?”
“No,” Shahida says absently, “just a friend.”
She’s right, though; Mark’s beautiful. Just as he always was.
* * *
“Jesus, I look awful.”
The dingy bathroom of a chain burger joint on the A1 isn’t the best place to fix her makeup, so Melissa doesn’t bother, resolving instead to sort out her face when she gets back to the car and has access to both natural light and surfaces she can probably sterilise without overwhelming the antiseptic wipe. It explains why the girl behind the counter frowned at her when she bought her black coffee and bacon butty — absurdly, the lowest-calorie offering on the breakfast menu — and why she hasn’t attracted the unwelcome attention she usually does when she dines alone in places with lots of people coming and going; she’s pale, sickly, and the dark circles under her eyes look almost like bruises.
Just like the vampires in Shahida’s bloody video game, she remembers. Shahida spent about six months obsessed with Vampire Queens: The Seven Great Houses. She bought a 3DS just to play it; she got in trouble for levelling side characters in class; she explained the lore to her and Amy and Rachel in great detail multiple times, online, via text message and in person. She got every ending, romanced every possible character, played all the DLC. Melissa’s never touched the game herself, but she thinks that if asked she could name the heads of each house, their special moves and which gifts are key to their black and rotten hearts, just from association with Shahida.
She leans on the sink and pushes away the indulgent memory. Just another piece of her past; another thing she can never get back, and not just because of the rules of Dorley Hall.
What would Shahida think of her now?
Damn it! She thought she’d stopped crying!
Quickly she washes her hands again, wipes her face, and makes it out of the restaurant without anyone stopping her to ask if she’s okay. She knows she could swallow this if she really needed to, could find that broken piece of her that just about got her through her teenage years and that’s never quite gone away, let it harden her and take her over for the rest of the journey down to Almsworth, but Abby was right when she said not all coping mechanisms are healthy. Many of them hinder more than they help, and more still merely delay the pain, cause it to curdle and spoil inside.
Melissa locks herself in her rental car, puts on another playlist, and indulges in the memories until they recede on their own and leave her spent, dehydrated, and late.
* * *
He doesn’t know how he fell asleep. It was like someone reached into his brain and pulled out the power cord and left him to flop back onto his bed. He should have chased her! He should have demanded to know what she meant!
Except it’s obvious, isn’t it?
There’s no other possible interpretation, is there?
Fuck.
She knew. She really knew, right from the start, and pretended not to.
No, he knew. He’s not going to grant him the courtesy of the gender he claims.
Is he?
Lashing out because you’re feeling angry and isolated again, Aaron?
Fuck it. Who’s he kidding? Steph’s Steph, and no revelation, no matter how appalling, can change that. Steph’s Steph, and she’s a fucking liar.
Oh, she’s a liar, is she? Maybe she can join the club!
Poor Aaron. You’re not pissed off because she did a bad thing, are you? You’ve always assumed she did something awful to end up here, same as the rest of you, and you already decided you didn’t care. No, you’re pissed off because she did something bad to you, a man — hah; a person — who’s done enough bad things to fill a fucking spreadsheet.
Weigh the balance, boy. Sins in each palm. Weigh her shit against yours. Watch your hand fucking plummet.
“It’s not like I can just make myself okay with it,” he mutters, carefully feeling at his sore chest, stretching his aching back, all evidence of the things done to him, things she knew about all along.
He needs to talk to her, at the very least.
Yeah.
He’ll talk to her and she’ll have a reason. A good one. Even if it’s just that he, as someone bad enough to warrant erasing from the fucking world, never deserved the truth! That’s fine! She can explain and they can laugh about it and it’ll be back to how it always was, before he knew all the girls here used to be just like him; before he knew his best friend spent months lying to him; before he asked to die.
She’ll have a reason.
At least he was right that she’s trans, though. Or close enough. He’s not completely imperceptive. Which is… good? For him. Because she was too damn adaptable, too damn good at this too quickly, and yeah, actually, thinking about it, maybe she is partially to blame for his—
“Shut up, Aaron.”
Scolding himself. Whoever’s watching the camera feed will love that. He flips her the bird, whoever she is, and jumps out of bed to rummage through his wardrobe. The shirt around his chest came loose while he was sleeping and he can’t be bothered fixing it; he dumps it on the floor instead and selects his loosest hoodie.
Even with it zipped up he can see the tiny bumps on his chest in the mirror.
He meant what he said: he’s happy for her, that she’s going to be a girl; that she is a girl, really, and that this place is making it happen. She’s already wider than he is around the hip — he runs a hand down his side, pressing into flesh that’s thicker there than it was a month ago, and wincing again at the pain in his lower back — but her waist is just as narrow as it always was. He had his arm around her, earlier, and she concaved pleasingly under his hand. She’ll keep developing that way, and they’ll burn away all the wispy ginger hair on her chin and cheeks and…
And they’re going to rip her open and grind away the excess bone on her face.
He shudders.
“She wants it, you idiot; she fucking wants it.” And isn’t he supposed to be pissed off with her, anyway?
They’re going to take a scalpel to her…
They’re going to cut her open.
He’s out of his room and banging on Steph’s door moments later.
“He’s not in.”
“Fuck off, Martin,” he says automatically. Then, “What? Who?”
“Stefan. Pippa took him away.”
Aaron steps back from Steph’s door, looks Martin up and down. Another shock: he’s wet from the shower and wearing a robe open around a towel, and it makes it horrifyingly clear how much he’s changing, just like the rest of them, and that seems fundamentally fucking wrong somehow; Martin should always and forever look the way he shows up in Aaron’s memory, like someone crossed a minor, disgraced and reasonably inbred royal nephew with Snoopy.
“Okay,” Aaron says, “where did she take… him?”
The man just shrugs. It would be so, so easy to kick him in the balls, really hard. And super satisfying. And it’d probably save the girls upstairs a bit of surgery money later on, if he aims carefully enough.
“When?” Aaron asks instead.
“About ten minutes ago. Excuse me.”
It’s the work of a couple of minutes to search everywhere Aaron has access to — the bathroom, the common room, the lunch room, both corridors; the bathroom again, because he forgot to check the shower annexe the first time — and unless Steph’s hiding in the locked storeroom or Martin’s full of shit and she’s just holed up in her bedroom, ignoring him, then she’s fucking gone.
That’s it, then?
She’s just gone?
For want of anything else to do — what, like he’s willingly going to talk to Martin? like Adam has anything of interest to say? — he heads back to his room to find Maria waiting outside with a plastic cooler.
“Hi, Aaron,” she says.
“What the fuck is going on, Maria? Where’s Steph? And did you know she knew all along?”
She thumbs the pad by his door, nudges it open and walks inside, expecting him to follow. He does, and she’s already unpacking cellophane-wrapped sandwiches and bottles of water.
“I’m not hungry,” he says, kicking the door shut, once again irritated that the safety mechanism makes it impossible to slam.
“It’s after midday,” she says. “You slept in quite late.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Maria shrugs. “Fair enough.” She drops the sandwiches back into the cooler, closes it up and passes him a bottle of water.
“If you’re here for a lecture,” he says, “I’m not in the mood.”
She’s sitting on the chair, and when he drops dismissively onto the bed she rolls a little closer and cracks open her water. “I’m not here for a lecture. Just to talk. And, here, so you know I’m serious…” She swivels around on the chair, taps a key on his computer to wake it up, logs in with some key combination he doesn’t quite see, and brings up what are apparently the live feeds from all the cameras in the basement. She flips through, one by one: lunch room; common room; cell corridor, with Will just about visible, reading or watching TV on a tablet. “And here’s your room. Camera one—” the view of his bedroom disappears, replaced by a blank blue screen, “—and camera two.”
“You’ve turned off the cameras?” he says. She nods. “Okay, Maria, look, you keep taking these risks with me—”
“Am I in danger?” she asks, turning around to look at him with a raised eyebrow.
“…No.”
“Well then.”
“What are you here to talk about?”
“Stephanie. I know what she told you.”
“Yeah,” he growls with renewed bitterness, “that she’s a fucking traitor.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because!” He throws his bottle, unopened, onto the bed. “Because I thought she was my friend. Because I thought she liked me! Because I…”
Going to say you deserve the truth? Fuck. No. Isn’t that the point, Aaron? That you don’t deserve anything?
“Stephanie’s motivations have always been… complex,” Maria says. “More so since she got to know you. And the requirement she keep the secret has weighed heavily on her.”
“Boo hoo,” he says, but without much feeling.
“Does she strike you as someone who would intentionally harm you?”
He doesn’t feel he can answer that without jeopardising his rhetorical position.
“I can tell you about her,” Maria says. “Everything, from how she came to find us, to the deal Aunt Bea struck with her so we wouldn’t take punitive action; everything.”
“‘Punitive action’?”
“Do you want to know or not?” Maria asks. He nods and she continues, “Okay. Don’t be afraid to ask for a break. Not all of this is going to be fun for you to hear.”
* * *
Pippa had to practically drag her out of her room, make promises that Aaron would be taken care of, talk her through every step up the stairs from the basement, but it’s all going to be worth it. Steph’s been stuck down there too long, and it’s not good for her to be surrounded by all that concrete, nor does she benefit from spending all her time around boys who seem, frankly, considerably weirder than the usual cohort. And that’s even taking the current crop of second years into account!
Steph’s safely out of the basement for now, away from Aaron and any consequences, external or self-inflicted, and that’s good and that’s fine; and if Steph’s talking to herself loud enough for Pippa to hear it from the bedroom, over the noise of the shower, that’s probably okay too. The girl’s not had enough sleep — not had any sleep, as far as Pippa can tell, fast-winding through surveillance footage of a night spent tossing, turning, crying and staring at nothing — and she’s just made rather an idiot of herself, in her own eyes; in the eyes of the boy she cares about. So she can talk to herself, she can get it all out, and when she’s done she can have a nice, calm day with the girls. No basement; no boys; no Aaron.
Christine and Paige are up for it. It’ll be just the four of them.
Ultimately, it’s good that Aaron knows at last. It’s been killing Steph to keep it from him, and Maria can deal with Aaron. She’ll give him the real story, the one she, Pippa, Christine and Abby spent a good few hours getting right a couple of weeks ago. And it’s good that Aaron hears it from Maria and not from Steph, too, because goodness knows if Stephanie had to convince her flipping breakfast of her value, be an honest advocate for her own hunger before it would let her eat it, she’d starve.
She can hear snatches through the open bathroom door:
“Stupid. Stupid. So, so stupid. You should have kept the secret, shouldn’t you? Should have protected him like you said you would. Like you promised yourself!” These last two words are punctuated by what sounded an awful lot like Stephanie stamping her foot on the tile. “But that was all vainglorious nonsense, wasn’t it? You were protecting yourself. You were afraid to get hurt. So you hurt him instead, didn’t you? You just blurted it out! Where’s your self-control? Idiot! Stupid, stupid boy!”
Okay. Perhaps that’s enough.
“Steph?” Pippa calls. “Stephanie? Are you done in the shower?”
There’s a wet slapping sound, as if Steph suddenly realises where she is and what she’s supposed to be doing, and stumbles.
“Um, maybe. Oh. Oh fuck, I’m a prune!”
“Come on out. I’ve got tea waiting, and I’ll do your face.”
She emerges a minute or so later, towel wrapped around her chest, hair wild and wet, legs still hairy. Pippa doesn’t comment; she left the shaving kit in the cubicle, but if Steph doesn’t want to shave her legs — or if she was too distracted to notice it — then all that does is slightly limit her choice of outfit.
Stephanie sets the pace, always.
“Feeling any better?” Pippa asks, pushing the little plush stool over with her foot. She’s been populating Steph’s room with nice things, dipping into her own funds when she can’t requisition something from storage; she wants it to feel homely up here. She’s already secured a promise from Aunt Bea that Stephanie won’t be required to move out into one of the smaller first-floor rooms, the ones that lack their own bathrooms, when the rest of her intake move up, so it’s worth the time and expense. The other new girls can be jealous if they want.
“A little,” Steph says, perching on the stool and dredging up a smile from someplace particularly deep inside. “Do you really think Aaron’s going to be okay?”
“Maria’s with him. She’ll take care of him. He’s started to really care about her, have you noticed?”
Steph nods, despondent. “Good,” she says quietly. “Because he won’t ever talk to me again.”
“He will.” Pippa leans over, takes one of Steph’s hands and rubs her palm. “He’ll come around. Maria knows what to say.”
“You mean, she’ll gaslight him until he comes around? That’s not better, Pip!”
Pippa bounces herself along the edge of the mattress, careful to avoid the ends of the outfits she’s laid out. “She’ll tell him the truth and nothing more,” she says.
“How can you know?” Steph protests. “She’s turned the cameras off!”
With a finger under Steph’s chin, Pippa raises her face. “Stephanie Middlename Riley,” she says, invoking their in-joke to lighten the mood, hoping for and getting the slightest of smiles, “would you say you are a particularly good liar? On today’s evidence?” Steph shakes her head. “Even if she were inclined to lie, Maria knows it’s better for both of you if you don’t have to pretend any more. She’s not going to embellish the truth and she’s not going to leave out anything big. From here on out, whether he wants to talk to you or not, you can be completely unguarded around him. No more editing. No more worrying if he’s going to see through the latest story you’ve cooked up.”
Steph’s mouth twitches. “That would be nice.”
“And don’t forget,” Pippa says, removing her finger from under Steph’s chin so she can wag it at her, “we share the blame. You’re the first completely self-aware trans woman we’ve ever had — self-aware from the very start, I mean — and you’ve become… fond of one of the boys. We’re all paddling in uncharted waters here, and we’re drawing the map and refining the, um, the design of the boat as we go.”
“You don’t think I’ve fucked it up?”
“No. Aaron’s ahead on his timeline, for sure. Normally we wouldn’t expect this level of, um, self-disgust for quite some time. The orchi was the trigger for most of us,” she adds quietly, lost momentarily in the vivid memory of Ellie, her sponsor, coming to her the morning after her operation, helping her dry the tears and handing over her morning tea in a mug inscribed with Let It Go and decorated all over with the two cherries emoji. Step one of recovery, Ellie claimed, was learning to laugh about it.
It didn’t surprise Pippa to discover she was Ellie’s first and only subject. She’s off doing something or other in New England at the moment, and Pippa’s happy for her; happier still there’s an ocean between them.
“He’s ahead on his timeline,” she recovers, “but that’s not really good or bad. And also not entirely down to you. Remember, he had a very strong reaction to Maria’s injury, once he had a chance to think about it. It was a powerful motivation for him to reconsider his attitude.”
Steph nods slowly, frowning. She’s getting through!
“He’s a very empathetic and caring person,” Pippa continues, “even though he was forced to bury it deep down. With his core exposed, with all his old excuses stripped away, he’ll find himself.” She pats Steph’s hand. “You’ll see.”
“I hope so.”
* * *
The inside of the rental car is stuffy and claustrophobic and, with the engine shut off and the near-constant rain still battering on the roof and the windscreen, rapidly becoming cold, but Melissa can’t bring herself to get out. Not yet. Because the parking lot at the far end of campus is the closest she’s been to Saints and to Dorley Hall in a long time, and the thought of opening the car door and setting foot on the pavement here again is one that’s dominated her dreams.
The path into campus from here is the one taken when you come in by bus or on foot. It’s the one Abby walked her down on her last night as Mark; it’s the one Mark walked up on his way to the city to die, music roaring in his ears.
Melissa shakes her head. That stupid, stupid boy.
It’s difficult to remember how it felt to want to die. When she tries she finds nothing but rage in her memories; rage, followed swiftly by guilt, both of them obliterating the suffocating silence with their all-consuming intensity. Rage at her mother, for not sticking around to protect her, for dying and leaving her with Dad, for labelling her the man of the house and thrusting unwanted responsibility into the lap of a bewildered kid who barely knew who he was. And guilt, born from her rage, for daring to exorcise her decaying spirit on the memory of her mother. The woman she carried with her always, in her last gift.
She ruined that, too. She stamped on her mother’s iPod as soon as she got off the bus, glad to be rid of the memories, convinced she was walking out into the last night of her life.
In the end, it was just the last night of his life.
Melissa laughs bitterly; that’s a very Dorley framing.
She knows how few Dorley girls conceptualise themselves as trans, and fewer still as having been girls all their lives. Just another way for her to be different, alone. The others were discovering someone new inside them, a vast store of potential, waiting to be explored; Melissa, by contrast, found someone who’d been buried, who’d had the life near crushed out of her. It never felt fair.
They’d thought her stuck up, but in the end she envied their joy.
At least the rain’s letting up.
She’s already redistributed the things she needs: most of her makeup kit and her burner phone are now in a pocket of her luggage, and in her shoulder bag she now carries a taser. It’s a Dorley model; Abby’s, from back when she was still a sponsor, set to Melissa’s thumbprint and couriered to her shortly after she moved up to Manchester, for protection.
She won’t need it.
She’ll just walk in and make her case. Stef doesn’t deserve this, and if they let him go he won’t tell anyone because it’d blow back on her. And, by the way, she’s left a letter for her boss, which he’ll find if she never comes back. So it’s best for everyone that she’s allowed to leave. With Stef.
She thumbs the taser into life, checks the charge level, turns it off and drops it back into her bag.
She won’t need it, but it’s best to be prepared.
She doesn’t start shaking until she’s past Café One and taking her first step onto the path that leads to Dorley Hall. Memory impedes her vision, and the night Abby brought her here seems clearer than the overcast skies of the early afternoon. Past the Student Union Bar (Mark stumbled, tired, overwhelmed, and so hungry he’d almost forgotten how it felt to be full; Abby caught him and supported him the rest of the way) and over the slight bump in the paving that marks the crossover from land owned by Saints to land owned by the benefactors of Dorley Hall (Mark paused, still confused, still asking questions and receiving evasive but reassuring answers) and up to the double doors.
Deep breath.
Here we go.
* * *
“You really think I look okay?”
“You really do.”
“I feel silly. And male. And stupid. And ugly and clumsy and—”
“Steph,” Pippa says, taking her hand again, “you look lovely.”
They finally settled on a simple outfit: a long skirt with pleats over a pair of plain leggings; a wide belt, one of several Pippa’s stocked Steph’s wardrobe with, to help define her waist; and a rather nice patterned top with a sensible neckline, which exposes Steph’s shoulders and her slender, graceful arms while flattering her underdeveloped chest.
Stephanie looks beautiful. Not that Pippa’s biased or anything, but occasionally she imagines what it would be like if they threw an end-of-basement event for all the first years, had a fancy dinner, dressed them all up, had a pageant and so on; in her imagination, even with nine months more development for the boys, Steph wins by a mile.
“Sorry,” Steph says. “No sleep. Stressed. It makes me jittery.”
“No-one can tell,” Paige says from across the table, as Pippa pats Steph’s hand. Once Steph had got herself dressed, Pippa took one look at the state of the girl’s skin and enlisted Paige to help with her makeup. She looks impeccable now — Paige even managed somehow to de-emphasise the brow bumps Stephanie hates so much — and not at all tired, except for the occasional moments when her eyes close and her head slumps forward.
Just as long as she doesn’t do it in the lasagne Christine’s fetching them.
“I really look okay?” Steph asks again.
“You’re beautiful,” Pippa whispers.
* * *
Christine’s waiting for the microwave to ping on the last of the meals she’s warming up for herself, Paige, Pippa and Steph, when a woman with a face straight out of the archives barges through the front doors, spares her a single glance and marches on through the kitchen, looking around with an expression that could be determination and could be fear.
Shit!
With a grunt of irritation Christine abandons the lunches, logs on to a laptop someone’s abandoned on the kitchen table, sets the building-wide biometric clearance to sponsors only, and starts writing the messages that will summon Abby and the other girls back from voting and the sponsors who are still around back from other parts of the building.
What a day for a general election!
* * *
Maria’s phone vibrates on the bedside table, an obnoxious enough noise even if it weren’t bumping against Aaron’s phone — and Steph’s; she left it behind in her rush to escape the room last night — that she picks it up straight away, apologising to Aaron as she swipes over the notification.
“S’okay,” Aaron says quietly. He’s sitting on the bed next to her in a sea of pillows and sandwich crumbs, and she reaches for him, to make sure he doesn’t think she’s abandoned him even for a moment. He takes her hand with trembling fingers and curls them desperately into hers.
He’s holding up okay. He’s going to make it, and she’s so, so proud of him.
Turning her attention back to the phone she reads the message, bites down on her annoyance, and taps the name at the top of the sponsor list.
Tabby picks up. “I just got the alert,” she says, all business.
“Can you take the lead on this?” Maria asks.
“Done,” Tabby says, and the line clicks off. Thank goodness for her.
Melissa’s back! What wonderful timing! At least there’s a limited amount of havoc one woman can cause. Tabitha can handle it; Maria has more important things to attend to.
“Sorry, Aaron,” she says, and he nods at her, eyes shining wetly in the low light.
* * *
“Bloody Melissa,” Tabby mutters, taking the stairs two at a time. She couldn’t have picked a more convenient time to visit? She knows that Shahida girl’s been poking around, doesn’t she? Abby claimed she told her! Said she agreed to stay up in Manchester, safe in her extended sulk! And now here she is! “Bloody Melissa. Bloody Abby. Bloody everyone!”
She’s supposed to be calling Levi tonight!
* * *
Shahida’s watched and restarted this three-second video a dozen times at least, and the more she watches, the more certain she becomes.
She’s lucky she got the video in the first place. She’d only recently gotten uncomfortable on the other seat and switched to the one that faces into campus, and she just happened to be mucking around with the face-morphing app again when the girl came striding into view. Flipping her phone into camera mode took less than a second.
Blonde hair. The right height. And very, very familiar.
Mark?
Why would she be here? It can’t be coincidence. Abby and the other girl, Christine, they must have tipped her off that someone from her past was poking around and now Mark — or whoever — has come back from wherever she’s been to do… what?
That can’t be him. Can it?
Shahida restarts the video again, pauses it at the clearest frame, a three-quarter profile which is only a little blurry, screenshots it and dumps it over to the laptop. She lines the picture up with the others that she made and some of the untouched originals.
It’s Mark.
* * *
When the emergency notification goes off and isn’t immediately picked up, Dorley-issued phones get increasingly obnoxious until their owner pays attention to them. Not usually a problem, but Rabia’s with a patient and the persistent vibration in her pocket is monumentally distracting.
She finishes up, smiles at the elderly man and exits as quickly and quietly as possible, to find a private place to tell the notification that she is busy, that they have way more people than just her on call today, and that they can bother Bella if they really want to.
Rabia makes a mental note to ask Maria to take her off the emergency rota and put her on the real emergency rota — do not call unless the Hall is sinking into the Abyss — and turns off her phone. Goes back to work.
Just lucky the emergency hadn’t kicked off an hour ago, when she was literally wrist-deep in crap. That would have been really annoying.
* * *
Stef’s a little more awake now — being on the receiving end of a well-meant lecture from Paige on how to dress a body that doesn’t yet have its full complement of curves is unsurprisingly invigorating — so she notices as soon as Paige’s eyes widen. She’s facing the kitchen and Stef isn’t, and when Pippa starts making a commotion next to her she’s almost afraid to turn around.
When Charlie, the sponsor escorting the second years at the table opposite, stands up out of her chair, though, it’s impossible not to look.
Bearing down on her table and looking about ready to strangle someone is the woman she’s seen almost every night on her phone screen, the woman she dreams of outside the Tesco at the retail park, the woman who is functionally her older sister, from way before she acquired a whole building of them.
Melissa.
She’s here!
Right fucking now!
Melissa’s frowning at her, obviously taking a second to recognise her because, sure, she looks kind of different, and then Stef realises that Melissa’s fucking looking at her and she’s looking at her when she’s like this: two months on hormones, shapeless, masculine, ugly, and stuffed into beautiful clothes made comical on her horrific, angular body.
It’s hard to move.
It’s hard to breathe.
She barely feels Pippa’s hand on hers.
All she can do is look up at Melissa.
* * *
What have they done to him? Stefan’s wearing their clothes, they’ve done something to his hair, and they’ve put makeup on him… And what the hell is he doing up in the dining hall?
Oh fuck.
She’s been away from Dorley too long, and she always stops Abby when she tries to talk shop, and they haven’t talked in months, anyway; Melissa’s just assumed the programme still functions the way it used to. Maybe they take them at some other time of year now, instead of at the start of the autumn semester. Maybe they have some kind of accelerated programme for cooperative boys. Maybe she misread the website and he’s been here a lot longer than she thought.
Maybe they’ve already operated on him.
Maybe they’ve already mutilated him.
Stefan’s standing, backing up, eyes wide and breath uncertain, and the skinny girl with the short bleached hair is supporting him, and all Melissa knows right now is that she needs to get him out of here, so she darts forward, grabs him by an unresisting forearm and drags him out of the dining hall into the maze of rooms at the back of the building, pointing her taser behind her so no-one can follow.
* * *
Christine finishes sending the last of the alerts, drops out of the secure session, closes the laptop, and near-runs into the dining hall. She skids on a wet patch of kitchen floor and has to grab the doorjamb to stay upright, and as a result enters the dining hall staggering and out of breath just in time to see Melissa bloody Haverford yanking Steph out of Pippa’s confused hands and away to the back rooms, waving a taser around as she goes. In the suddenly quiet room her breathing is the loudest noise, so all heads turn to her, Paige’s and Pippa’s and even bloody Charlie’s included, and she has a moment to thoroughly despise how everyone seems to bloody well delegate to her, even when there are actual sponsors present.
Shit! Shit shit shit.
She holds up a hand and tries to say something but it comes out as a wheeze, so she gives herself a second to get her breath back.
At a table on the other side of the room, Mia throws out a hand and yells, “Who the fuck was that?”
* * *
Abby knew they should have left earlier. The university’s sports centre has been commandeered as a polling station for Saints and all the nearby postcodes, and she and a dozen other Dorley denizens have been queueing for almost an hour now. At least the stewards look equally miserable, having spent the entire morning hiding under umbrellas or clipboards, without access to the extended veranda that plays host to bake and book sales in the summer and exclusively to a cold and miserable queue on voting day.
“Mankind was not meant to queue,” Bella says. She’s the only one of them to have had the presence of mind to bring a small folding chair along, and the group’s been moving around her as the queue moves up, shuffling her from the start to the end of their little gang of sponsors and graduates, so she doesn’t have to get up every time someone votes.
“Who are you calling ‘mankind’?” Donna says, poking at her and making her drop her phone in her lap. “We’re womankind; we’re the ones who inherit the Earth, remember? What? It’s true. I saw it in an old movie. With dinosaurs. And that guy from Thor: Ragnarok.”
“Donna,” Edy says, “either shut up or stop making me feel old.”
“Ede’s feeling the cold, dark embrace of her mid-thirties,” Bella says.
“Don’t worry, Edith,” Monica says, “we’ll never put you in a home.”
“I hate you all,” Edy says. “Not you, Abby; you’re fine.”
“Thanks,” Abby says absently.
The queue shuffles along another few people and Bella, with an irritated sigh, uproots herself and drags her chair noisily over to Abby’s position at the front of the group.
“Hi, Ab,” she says, but before she can move on to whatever she was going to say next the phone in Abby’s bag vibrates, and it takes Abby a moment to realise why it sounds so loud: all their phones are going off at once.
“Drat,” Donna mutters, quickest to check hers.
“All right, ladies,” Monica says, “that’s our cue.”
“I wanted to vote,” Bella protests.
Edy, already walking away, shrugs as she turns around. “It’s not like Almsworth was ever not going to vote for the fucking Tories. Come on.”
* * *
It’s been almost five minutes but she’s finally happy with the wording of the email: it has to seem innocent if accidentally opened early, but still suggestive enough to inspire action. Shahida reads it through one more time, nods to herself, and calls Rachel.
Voicemail. Probably better, actually. The poor girl’s likely stuck in some interminable group activity.
“Rach,” she says, balancing the phone on her shoulder as she starts packing up her things, “it’s Shahida. This might sound like I’m mucking about, but I’m not. I said I might have a lead on Mark; well, I do. I really do. I’m going to go check it out. If I don’t call again by the end of the day, open the email I’m about to send you. Otherwise, delete it without looking. Okay? Okay. It’s… twenty-five past one, December twelfth, and, shit, I forgot to vote. Never mind. I forgot to register, anyway. Open the email if I don’t call; ignore it if I do.”
* * *
Stefan offers no resistance as she drags him through the back rooms. She’s not been through here in years, but nothing’s changed — just like on the first and second floors there’s at least a dozen unused rooms and several more filled with nothing but old crap no-one could ever want. Actually, something’s changed; one of the rooms is now a mini-gym.
She keeps looking back at him. They’ve dressed him up! How dare they! He’s not wearing anything especially showy, not like the stuff she was shoved into when they first left the basement, but the long skirt and the top are unambiguously women’s clothes. Probably one of their humiliation rituals, one of the ones Abby only pretended to do with her; dress him up, note how he no longer looks like the man he claims still to be, all that crap.
They’re doing a bad job, though, because as much as she hates to admit it, he looks good.
“Wh—” Stefan says, and the effort of even that seems to overwhelm him, causes him to trip and nearly fall, and when she catches him he winces as his chest collides with her forearm. God; he’s sensitive there, and he’s sensitive there because they’re making him grow fucking tits! It takes all her willpower not to turn around, find out which one of those bitches back there is Stefan’s sponsor and slap her full in the face.
They reach the conservatory together, Melissa walking for both of them, and she deposits him on a sheet-covered chaise longue that’s seen better centuries while she looks around for an exit. She slips the taser back in her bag, keeping the grip sticking out in case she needs it in a hurry, and tries the fingerprint reader by the expansive double-glazed doors that lead out into the courtyard; it flashes red. Unsurprising. She was probably purged from the system the second she let herself in unannounced.
Still, the doors themselves look like plastic over a wooden frame. Maybe if she kicks at the lock…
She turns around to check on Stefan and can’t immediately find him because he’s no longer where she left him. Instead he’s crouched behind an old armchair, arms over his head, whimpering.
Jesus. When she’s done getting him out she’s coming back to burn this place to the fucking ground. Whatever it takes.
* * *
Tabby’s just finishing up checking the outer perimeter when Shahida, the girl who put yesterday’s cat amongst yesterday’s pigeons, comes striding up the path from campus, too fast for Tabby to duck inside and pretend not to have seen her. She tries the casual approach anyway, just in case.
“Hi,” she says, waving and holding open the main doors.
“You live here, right?” Shahida says, still approaching and talking too loud for Tabitha’s taste.
“I do. Grad student.”
“I just saw Mark Vogel walk past, on his way here. You know him?”
Yeah. Way too loud. “I do,” Tabby admits.
“Tell me about him.”
Shahida Mohsin-Carpenter’s standing off a metre or so outside the Hall, arms folded, glaring. Tabby runs through all the standard scenarios in her head, circles all that apply and discards the rest. She reread Melissa’s file last night, after everything, and she’s fairly certain the girl would take a dim view of her childhood friend being, for example, thrown in a cell, if the option’s there simply to make her a cup of coffee.
The level of disclosure’s up to Melissa, though. Unless Ms Mohsin-Carpenter does something extremely stupid. Or Melissa does.
“I can tell you about him,” Tabby says quietly, “but not out here.”
“Why not?”
“Would you want your private life discussed out in the open like this?”
The girl hesitates. “You should know,” she says, “I’ve left a message with a friend to raise hell if I don’t contact her again today.”
Stupid god damn sensible precautions. “Understood,” Tabby says, and pointedly doesn’t scream in frustration, turning instead her most placid look on the girl.
Shahida nods hesitantly, looks around — for what, Tabby doesn’t know — and consents to be led through into the kitchen. Tabby closes the doors behind them and is relieved to hear the double locks engage. Shahida hears them too, and her head whips around to glare. Tabby merely smiles in response.
* * *
Yes, she’s probably dragged Steph through to the conservatory, since it’s the room farthest from everywhere else — although what she plans to do in there is a mystery — but Christine kicks open every door she finds anyway, to check for Melissa. The job goes quicker when she realises she can deputise the gaggle of second years who are following her like a line of lost ducklings, and assigns them in twos to check all the rooms, leaving behind Charlie, the sponsor who’s been escorting them today, to keep an eye on them and liaise with anyone higher up the chain of command who might happen to pop by.
She’d love to have Paige with her, or Pippa, but Tabby already borrowed the two of them to help her manually confirm the lockdown’s in place and Christine’s the only one of the three of them who can play Dorley Hall’s security system like a grand piano. She’s already found a missing taser in the system which is almost definitely the one Melissa’s been pointing at people — it’s registered to Abby, naturally — and she’s remotely deactivated it, so Christine’s martially unimpressive physique and lack of natural fighting skills aren’t the disadvantage they might normally be in such a situation; from what she remembers from the files there’s little Melissa Haverford can do to her except be aggressively blonde at her.
She checks another door: nothing. On to the next…
* * *
It’s like he’s not even there. Stef’s shaking, he’s whiter than the dust sheets surrounding them, and he’s chewing on the inside of his cheek. But when Melissa crouches down in front of him and reaches out a hand, he jerks away in a manner that forces images into her head of the party she went to with Shahida, of the way it ended.
They must have hurt him bad if he can’t even stand to be touched.
“Stef,” she whispers, as gently as she can, “I’m here to get you out. I’m sorry they found you. I don’t know why they took you, but I think it was my fault, and I can’t let them keep you. I can’t let them do to you what I saw them do to everyone else. I just can’t. So give me your hand and together we can kick through this bloody lock before anyone comes and drags you away from me and back to—”
“I want to stay.”
It escapes from him like a curse, the hissed sibilant stretched to breaking point, and he’s looking at her for the first time since their eyes met back in the dining room, focused and sharp. She has to replay what he said a few times in her head before she gets it.
And still it doesn’t make sense.
“You want to what?”
* * *
The kitchen’s nicer than it seemed yesterday, when she took a peek through the double doors while she was putting up Mark’s poster. It’s larger, too; it can probably comfortably fit more than a dozen people around the main table, and with the chairs stacked at one end, more up against another wall, and room to stand as well as room to cook she wouldn’t be surprised if you could fit thirty or even forty people in here, in a pinch.
It’d probably get really hot, though, with the AGA going.
The Black woman, who introduced herself as Tabitha and tapped out a quick message on her phone before bustling around the room putting on the kettle and extracting mugs from a cupboard, leans on the sideboard next to the AGA and regards her with a neutral expression Shahida bets has been practised for hours in the mirror.
“That sound was the door locking, wasn’t it?” Shahida asks. Tabitha nods. So, her earlier worst-case estimation of the possible level of security implied by the effectively instant mobilisation of four different people to throw her off the trail wasn’t just paranoia, after all. “I can’t leave?”
“Not yet.”
“Can I have my things back?” she says, shifting her gaze pointedly to her bag, taken from her arm as she entered with a smooth motion she almost hadn’t noticed, and now hanging on a coat hook by the door.
“Later. Would you like a drink?”
“That depends on how safe it’s likely to be.”
The woman’s expression cracks for a moment, and Shahida marks a single victory point on her side of the board in her head, which admittedly puts her quite a way behind Tabitha, who in less than two minutes has both successfully locked her inside Dorley Hall and confiscated all her stuff.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’m not going to poison you. But there’s a whole other very dramatic thing happening on the other side of the building right now, and we have to deal with that before we can deal with you. We’re not the most fully staffed organisation in the world.”
“Ah, so you are an organisation of some sort!”
“We’re a privately run women’s dormitory,” Tabitha says from behind a poker face. “I’d say that qualifies as an organisation, wouldn’t you?”
“Fine.”
“Don’t go looking for ulterior motives.”
“Can I leave, then?”
“I said don’t go looking, not that there aren’t any.”
“Who are you?”
“Tabitha Forbes, thirty-two, born and raised in Southampton.”
“I’m looking you up, you know. When I get my stuff back.”
“By all means. So, drink?”
“Fine.”
“Tea? Coffee?”
“Tea.”
“Croissant?”
Shahida sighs, and the woman offers her a self-satisfied smile. “Yeah,” Shahida says, “sure. I’ll have a bloody croissant.”
* * *
“Stefan? What do you mean, you want to stay? Why would you possibly—”
Christine interrupts Melissa via the simple expedient of rushing into the conservatory with six second years and a sponsor in tow, all of whom take up positions to block the exit back into the rest of the building (Charlie) and more efficiently observe whatever the hell’s going on (all the second years apart from Faye, who steps up to stand protectively by her side; cute). As ever, despite the presence of an actual sponsor, Christine appears to be in charge; she ignores the impulse to groan.
“Melissa,” she says, holding up her hands to show she has no weapons, only a phone, “this is all just a big misunderstanding.”
Wrong choice of words. Melissa stands from where she’s been crouched in front of Steph and practically shrieks, “Misunderstanding? You took him—!”
“We didn’t,” Christine insists. “You just need to calm down, and—”
Melissa glares at her, reaches into her bag for something; Christine can guess what. “You’re his sponsor, aren’t you? You’re the one doing all this to him.”
Christine takes a step forward, aiming to put herself between Melissa and Steph. “I’m no-one’s sponsor,” she says. “I’m just a third year—” another step, “—and I’m her friend—” and another, “—and I think you’re scaring her.”
Melissa’s reply is low and quiet. “Don’t call him her.”
Steph’s loud sniff is a warning sign, and Christine quickly covers the rest of the ground needed to stand in front of her. There’s probably no need to physically protect her from Melissa — the two of them were supposedly as close as siblings, growing up — but it seems best to take the precaution, at least until everyone involved calms down.
“Melissa,” Christine says, “Steph is trans. She’s not like anyone else here, okay? She’s different. She’s different and we all know it. She’s not a prisoner. If she wanted, she could leave.”
“You’re lying,” Melissa says. “He’s innocent, he’s just a kid, he shouldn’t be here, it’s all my fault… Look at him!”
Melissa’s obviously expecting everyone to turn their heads towards Steph, because she takes advantage of the distraction to pull the taser from her bag, and even though it’s useless — assuming it is, in fact, the one Christine deactivated — it’s still a mildly intimidating thing to have pointed at her face.
And then she can’t see it, because Faye’s suddenly put herself in the way.
“Whoever you are,” Faye says evenly, “you need to calm down.”
“Yeah,” Mia says from the back of the room, barely audible, obviously talking to the girl next to her, “who the hell is she?”
“Look at him,” Melissa says again. “He’s just a boy. He doesn’t belong here. You’ve taken him in and— and— and dressed him up like a fucking—”
Steph interrupts her, interrupts what Christine was going to say, stuns the whole room into shocked silence. “Please don’t,” she says, quietly, insistently, in a voice with the pressure of intense pain behind it. “Please don’t. Please don’t. Please don’t.”
“Look what you’ve done to him!” Melissa shouts, waving the taser in time with her words. “I need to get him away from you!”
Fine.
Christine turns to the second years, mostly gathered around what looks like it might be, under the dust sheet, an ancient harp. “If any of you take this opportunity to run away,” she says in her best approximation of a sponsor’s voice, “I will be really fucking cross.”
“We won’t,” most of them chorus. In front of her, Faye shakes her head.
Christine holds up her phone where everyone can see it — still not a weapon — and taps through until she finds what she’s looking for.
Behind Melissa, incredibly loud in the almost silent room, the conservatory doors unlock and swing open.
* * *
“Just so you know,” Bella’s saying as they walk up to the Hall, “if the Tories get in tomorrow, I’m going to ask for a do-over.”
“Face it, Izzy,” Monica says, holding the main doors open for the rest of them, “the last general election was terrible for the Tories and our local dickhead still got sixty-two percent. Our votes are ceremonial at best.”
“Oh my God, whatever,” Bella says sourly, buzzing open the kitchen doors.
Inside, Tabby’s got Shahida Mohsin-Carpenter sat at the kitchen table, and she moves to stand behind her and block her in when everyone approaches. It seems like an unnecessary precaution; Shahida’s calmly sipping at a mug of tea and there’s a half-demolished croissant on a plate in front of her. She has the air, Abby decides, of someone who will wait all day for answers, so long as she eventually will receive them, and thus she doesn’t feel too bad when the kitchen doors double lock behind her, sealing the girl in with the rest of them.
“Disclosure?” Monica says to Tabby.
Tabby shakes her head. “Not yet. It depends on what Melissa wants.”
“Yes,” Shahida says, “who is Melissa, and what does she want?”
“Right now?” Tabby says. “To make a big bloody mess.”
* * *
The last few minutes have been tense. They always are these days, when something involving Dorley Hall comes up, but the difference from before is that the tension seems more on Vicky’s side than on Lorna’s. It makes sense: Vicky has a whole year of bad memories there and another of merely tepid ones, whereas Lorna has integrated the Hall and the programme and the histories of some of her new friends into her worldview quite quickly.
Alarmingly quickly, Vicky said last night. Lorna responded with something like, if you can’t beat them, join them, and they had a minor argument, resolved by kissing.
But now Lorna’s phone is buzzing again, and she picks it up, dropping her half-finished sandwich back on the plate.
“It’s Tabby, this time,” Lorna says, reading from the notification and tapping to open it up.
“What does she need now?” Vicky says, frowning at her. They’d had another small fight about Lorna asking Christine to put her on the alert list, but as Lorna explained, patiently and at length, she feels obligated to help protect the Hall, the girls, and Vicky. Besides, if Dorley goes down, who’ll pay for her bottom surgery?
Vicky hadn’t found that funny. Lorna had insisted she wasn’t joking.
“Shahida’s back. And in the kitchen. Demanding answers. I think we should go.”
“You really want to?”
Lorna shrugs. “Not especially? But we do bring a genuinely outside perspective. We might be useful.”
Vicky gathers up their trash onto a lunch tray and stands, pausing beside Lorna to kiss the top of her head. “How are you already so Dorleypilled?” she whispers.
“They put drugs in the coffee,” Lorna says. “It distracts from the mugs.”
* * *
The back doors are open. Wide open. It’s an almost offensive sight, one she knows half her cohort would have done terrible things to see when they were still in Stef’s position. Even into the start of their second year, some of them, probably. She glances over; all the current second-year lot — they’ve got to be second years, considering they were eating together under supervision, and a couple still look swollen from FFS — are focused on Stef, with the exception of the loyal one, the one who put herself between Melissa and—
Oh, shit. She finally recognises the girl who’s been trying to intervene: Christine Hale. Abby’s friend! They’ve even met before, once or twice; she really is just a third year as she claimed, and one who was, the last time she and Abby talked about her, struggling a little.
And Melissa’s pointing a taser at her. More accurately, she’s pointing a taser at a bloody second year who has inserted herself into the space between them. A second year!
Well done, Melissa.
A panting, wheezing sound impinges on her consciousness, and finally she registers that Stef, still crouching down, is breathing shallow and quick and might well be hyperventilating. Christine’s comforting him, but as she looks down and he looks up she lets herself properly examine him for the first time and something in his gaze is different. He’s been running on pure panic since she saw him, and now he’s coming down.
“Stef?” she says.
“Hi, Melissa,” Stef says.
“Are you okay?”
“…Yeah. Kinda.”
“Were you serious when you said you wouldn’t leave?”
“Yeah,” Stef says. He sounds winded and he realises it, so he closes his eyes, forces a stronger, steadier breath — Christine’s careful hand on his back raises and lowers in time, and Melissa feels suddenly jealous of such sisterly intimacy — and then looks back up at her and, in a stronger voice with clear hints of resonance training, says, “I won’t run. We can go outside if you like, but I’m coming back if we do. This is my home now.”
The hissing in her ears is back, threatens to shut out the world, but she swallows, reaches out for a random bit of covered furniture on which to steady herself. She’s vaguely aware of another body piling into the room, and that’s way too many people; she’ll never get Stef away now, not without cooperation, and that’s never going to happen, not now, not after she saw her friend in girls’ clothes and just fucking lost it.
And Stef doesn’t want to leave anyway.
“Is it true? You’re trans?”
Stef blushes but doesn’t look away. “Yeah.”
“Fuck.” Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. “Fuck, Stef. I’m sorry. I’m so… sorry…”
Colours fade and hiss obliterates sound as her knees weaken and her head sways and she drops the awful little taser and she might have fainted, might have fallen and badly hurt herself, if not for the tall blonde girl who walks smartly up behind her and steadies her, loops a lithe arm around her waist.
“Got you,” the girl says.
“I’m sorry,” Melissa says again, shaking her head, consciousness slipping from her grasp, and she’s grateful to the girl holding her up because Melissa fucking Haverford or Mark fucking Vogel or whoever the fuck she is has just made another stupid, destructive and absolutely avoidable mistake, and all she wants to do is collapse.
As the blonde girl lowers her carefully to the floor one of the second years, a girl in a cat-ear hoodie, says, “No, seriously, who is she?”
* * *
The tall white girl with the dark blonde hair, the impeccable makeup and the interesting style choices returns to the kitchen and leans against the door frame. She glances quickly at Shahida, acknowledges her with a nod — Shahida finds herself nodding in return — and raises her eyebrow at the crowds of women who have been pouring into the room from all directions over the last few minutes and who have arranged themselves in a protective huddle around the exit door.
The girl catches Tabitha’s attention with a discreet cough.
“Under control?” Tabitha asks.
The tall girl nods. “Christine’s with them. Steph’s in a bad way—” she pauses as Tabitha jerks her head at another girl, shorter and bleach-blonde, who immediately exits wordlessly into the massive dining hall, “—and Melissa’s freaking out. She almost fainted. I caught her.”
“A religious experience for Melissa, I’m sure,” one of the other women calls out. Tabby waves her into silence.
“Christine?” Shahida says. “From yesterday? Her friend?” She points at Abigail, who’s been trying to hide in the crowd.
“Yes,” the tall girl says to her, before turning back to Tabitha. “Look, Tab, Christine responded as soon as Melissa arrived, alerted everyone, disabled her taser—”
“—her taser—?”
“—and calmed her quickly and effectively. And now she’s taking care of Steph. Despite Charlie being present.”
“Charlie’s priority is the safety of the second years,” Tabitha says. “I won’t fault her for it.”
“Not my point. If you’re going to have Christine constantly go above and beyond, you need to pay her more.”
“She’s still a third year. Still unreleased. She’s lucky we pay her at all.” The tall girl snorts at that, and Tabitha smiles. “That’s the official line. And it’s not our fault she keeps taking responsibility for things.”
“You keep leaving responsibilities in front of her. What’s she supposed to do, just watch as this place falls apart?”
“Excuse me,” Shahida says, leaning forward and glaring at the tall girl, “but what’s going on?”
“Tabby, have we not told her yet?” the tall girl asks.
“We have to ask Melissa what she wants,” Tabitha says.
“Right now she’s incapable of articulating anything useful.”
“Who’s Melissa?” Shahida demands. “Is that Mark? Is that his— is that her name now?”
Tabitha closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose. She mutters something inaudible and then says, “Right. Fine. Okay. Everybody out! Everyone except Paige and Abby. Go on; get moving!”
She makes shooing gestures at the assembled women, who disperse, talking animatedly amongst themselves and collecting mugs, computers, phones, and other accessories on their way, leaving Tabitha, Abigail and the tall girl; Paige, presumably.
“Abby,” Tabitha says, “go find your girl. Sort her out. And keep her out of here until we’re done. Stephanie is Pippa’s responsibility; Melissa’s yours. Christine can stay or go as she pleases, but I suspect she’ll want to stay, at least until Steph is feeling better.” Abigail nods and follows the other women out, with an apologetic shrug for Shahida as she passes. “Paige? You and me, we’re doing disclosure. Right now. I’m not waiting for Melissa to get her shit together.”
Paige pushes off from the door frame and lands in a chair at the end of the table in a single, enviably easy step. She arranges herself gracefully, leaning back in the chair, hands in her lap. “I’m not happy about this,” she says to Shahida.
“Um,” Shahida says, “I’m sorry?”
“My past is my past.”
“Okay?”
“Paige,” Tabitha says, “I know you don’t have a sponsor any more and you’re only technically still in the programme, but you’re quick-witted and level-headed and you’re generally actually present, so occasionally you’ll just have to do something you don’t want to do.”
“Because you want me to consider being a sponsor next year,” Paige says.
“Nope. You’d never do it. We know.”
“Good. Pay me for doing this then.”
“Okay.”
“Ahem,” Shahida says.
Paige rolls her eyes, leans forward and holds out a hand for Shahida to shake. “I’m Paige,” she says. “Apparently I’m helping her talk you through our operation.”
“Shahida,” Shahida says, taking her hand. “I just want to know where Mark is.”
“That’s a question with a very long and complicated answer,” Tabitha says. She’s been rummaging in a bag and she pulls out a tablet. A few taps and she’s sliding it over the desk for Shahida to read.
It’s a contract, or something similar, and it’s long.
“Read it,” Tabitha suggests.
“My parents are accountants,” Shahida says, tapping at the glass. “That means they’re very nearly lawyers. If they read this, what holes will they find?”
“None. Because they won’t read it.”
Paige says in a bored voice, “You’ll find telling anyone about this is one of the things you’re about to agree not to do.”
There’s knocking on the kitchen doors as she reads, and two women are waiting out in the entryway, waving at Tabitha. They’re women she recognises; they’re the ones who came out of the dorm yesterday to ask about the flyer, the ones who started this whole mess. Or this latest phase of it, anyway. One of them’s holding up a thumb, visible through the window, and pointing at it, questioning Tabitha with her frown.
It takes a moment for Tabitha to pull out a phone from somewhere and tap away at it, and then the girls are letting themselves in.
“Hi,” the trans-looking girl says. Lorna, Shahida remembers.
“Disclosure?” the other one says, whose name Shahida has completely forgotten. She’s looking at the tablet and frowning.
“Yes,” Paige says.
“My sympathies,” Lorna says, and then walks over to Tabby, leans on the table next to her. “Can we help?”
“Actually,” Tabitha says, “yes. I’m parched, and I bet Shahida and Paige could use a drink. Milk and sugar, if you would.”
Shahida, caught even in this situation in the trap of politeness, reaches for her mug from earlier and finds it gone; swept up by the sea of women when they left for other parts of the building, presumably. She shrugs, names her tea preference, and carries on scrolling.
“I meant more like, with disclosure,” Lorna says, although she starts filling the kettle anyway. “I do have relevant experience.”
“Would you be happy with that, Victoria?” Tabitha asks. The other girl, Victoria, shrugs. “Then, yes, please, stay and help us out.”
“I don’t especially enjoy being the only exhibition,” Paige says drily, and that’s such a mysterious comment that Shahida returns to reading the document. Most of it’s concerned with keeping secrets and the consequences of failing to do so. Some of it is rather ominous. She barely notices when Lorna sets her tea down in front of her.
“Sorry about the mug,” Lorna says. “It’s the least appalling one I could find. Tabby, where do you even keep the normal ones? I know you have some.”
“Cabinet on the other side of the fridge,” Tabitha says.
Shahida looks up from the tablet again, to inspect the mug. It says, in cursive and surrounded by lipstick kisses, Be the Girl You Want To See in the World (or Else!).
Strange, strange place.
* * *
“What’s going on up there?”
He doesn’t mean to just blurt it out. He’s been trying to listen as quietly as he can, because the story of Steph’s life, as assembled by the sponsors, hasn’t seemed like something he has any right to comment on. His anger, already a sputtering flame, went out when she played him the surveillance from Steph’s cell, from one of her first nights here, showing Pippa giving what he now realises is a standard introductory spiel on the evils of masculinity and the generically awful things he was assumed to have done with his privilege and his body.
When it had been his turn, Aaron received the lecture with jovial confusion, with the same shield of passive-aggressive bullshittery he always puts up — that he always used to put up — when he’s in a situation he can’t control. Maria’s words had been water off a duck’s back; he remembers assuming this was all for the Psychology department or something, and he’d be getting a cheque and a glare and some grudging thanks for doing his part to portray the incorruptibility of the male ego.
Steph, in the video, takes it like an attack. She doesn’t cry, like he assumed she would, like he expected she would, given Maria was showing him the footage as the opener in her attempt to mollify him; she seized up, and that was much worse. Maria narrated, made it clear to him that this wasn’t simply the reaction of an innocent to an accusation of guilt; this was someone for whom masculinity had been a suffocating chain around her neck being casually and cruelly informed that she had in fact wielded it with pleasure and satisfaction as a weapon; someone whose body had for her whole life betrayed her having her body used against her. Aaron was unavoidably reminded of the morning she turned the shower water up too high, tried intentionally to hurt herself, and he had to ask Maria to pause the playback so he could get himself under control. Back then, helplessly reaching for her in the showers, he hadn’t known what he was seeing.
He should have.
He used to follow a few trans women on social media. He followed a lot of women on social media! Mostly women who posted porn! He was — past tense — a growing boy, and growing boys have needs! And while none of the trans women he followed ever posted videos discussing dysphoria, they wrote about it occasionally, had discussions with other women that he happened to see. He wondered at the time what it felt like, and since he found out what the programme was about, he’s been idly waiting to feel it for himself. But he’d never really recognised it until today, when he watched Steph react to Pippa’s lecture like an insect under a blowtorch, when he remembered how she tried to hurt herself.
So, no, he doesn’t feel like he has a right to talk back. But Maria’s called for a break and she’s checking her phone again and if he doesn’t fill the silence with something he’ll fucking lose it because he can’t stop thinking about all the times he treated Steph like a guy, and all the times she played up to it; how much did it cost her?
At school, he was targeted a lot. Not every day, but constantly and consistently, and in his experience the banality of repetition dulls the senses. By the time he left that school it felt like he’d protected himself so well he barely felt the pain; he barely felt anything. It took until Maria, Steph and Indira to open him back up again.
He sees that in Steph. In the video. And in the other videos from earlier in the year, where she’s reduced. She’s less. She’s a creature of survival. And he understands that the woman he’s met just recently, the one absurdly full of life despite the dingy fucking basement they find themselves in, the one who seems inexplicably to like him, is the woman who was always there. Hiding. Protected. Unable to be herself.
He’d go to her right away, had he the ability. He needs to talk to her.
“What’s going on, Maria?” he says again.
She sighs, but looks up from her phone, meets his eyes, and that same compassionate smile, the one he’s become used to and almost dependent on, lights her face. She reaches out a hand for him and he takes it, thinking there was perhaps a time when he would have felt ashamed to be so nakedly needy, and deciding that such shame is obviously incredibly fucking stupid.
“It’s a crazy day,” she says. “That, in itself, is not unusual. When you run a place like this, you get used to crazy days.”
“How crazy?”
“Today, on a scale of one to ten, is perhaps a six. Maybe a seven.”
“What’s happening?” When she doesn’t immediately answer, he continues, not entirely sure that he should but feeling obliged to ask and even a little freed by the concept that he can ask, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Her smile deepens. “What you can do,” she says, “is finish your water and have another sandwich. Upstairs can take care of itself; you’re what’s important to me, and you’ve barely eaten.”
He nods, and tries his best to feel important, and she passes him another cellophane-wrapped package from the cooler.
* * *
The second-year sponsor, Charlie, finishes clearing out her charges from the conservatory — with Christine exchanging hugs with her defender, a girl called Faye, who glares at Melissa on her way out — and promises no interruptions for the time being.
“Just close the bloody doors, would you, Christine?” Charlie says, lingering in the doorway. “It’s December. Nice to see you again, Melissa.”
Is Melissa supposed to know her? Was she a sponsor while she was here? Year above? Year below? This is what happens when you isolate yourself. She waves anyway, and tries not to look as embarrassed as she feels; Charlie smiles and follows the second years out.
“Fuck,” Melissa says, and leans back on the unidentifiable antique furniture that’s supporting her.
“Yeah,” Christine says. She’s squatting next to Stefan. Next to Stephanie. And holding her hand. Something Melissa should probably be doing, if she hadn’t created the whole situation in the first place. “Agreed. What happened? Why’d you come barrelling in here with a bloody taser?”
“Oh God. I’m sorry about that.”
“Melissa, you are far from the first girl to point a taser at me. You wouldn’t have cracked my top fifty most traumatic memories even if I hadn’t remotely disabled it.”
“I’m still— Wait. What?”
“Try it.” Christine fishes Abby’s taser out of her pocket and slides it across the wooden floor. The conservatory’s not been cleaned much and definitely hasn’t been polished for a while, so Melissa has to get up and take a few unsteady steps in order to pick it up. She notes, with a little relief, that Stephanie doesn’t flinch when she comes closer this time. Not like earlier.
She thumbs the biometric sensor; it flashes red. “Huh. You did that?”
“Remember how I opened the back door with my phone? I’m running security around here.”
“Ah.”
“She could do that even before they gave her the job,” Stephanie says, and she sounds unsteady, uncertain, and her voice — which she’s clearly still training — cracks on the last word. “She’s really good.”
Christine hugs Stephanie, kisses her briefly on the temple. “Just rest, sweetie,” she whispers. “You can talk me up to the older girls later.”
Stephanie nods, closes her eyes.
“She had a hard night,” Christine explains. “No sleep.” She looks up as the skinny bleached girl enters the room. “Hey, Pip; how’re things out there?”
“Insane,” the girl says. “Same as always. Steph, are you okay?”
“I would like to sleep for a million years, please,” Stephanie groans.
“Will you, actually, if I put you to bed?”
“Probably not.”
Christine mouths, She’s really wired.
“Well—” the girl crouches down next to Stephanie and offers her arms; Stephanie supports herself on the girl and on Christine, who mirrors the action on the other side, “—let’s at least get some food in you.”
Between them they lift her up onto her feet, and Melissa’s just wondering if there’s anyone around who can do the same for her when Abby rounds the corner and stops dead in the entrance, locking eyes with her.
“Hi, Abs,” Melissa says, mouth dry.
Abby shakes herself. “Hi. How are you?”
“Fucking things up. You?”
“I’m okay.”
“Pip,” Stephanie says, yanking Melissa’s attention back to her again, “I don’t want to eat in the dining hall.”
The skinny girl, Pip, exchanges looks with Christine and says, “What about the kitchen on the second floor? It’s quiet, especially at this time of day, and we can send Melissa up in a little bit.”
Stephanie nods and Pip helps her out of the room. She smiles at Melissa on her way past, embarrassed, and Melissa does her best to smile back, still scarcely able to believe that Stef’s here. And that she wants to be.
Christine follows them, and then Abby and Melissa are alone.
“Oh, Liss,” Abby says, sitting down next to her and coaxing her into a hug, “what are you doing?”
She wants to say, she panicked. She wants to say, she spent all day yesterday anxious about Dorley Hall, she’s spent months trying and failing to find a life after severing her last remaining connection to the place, she’s spent years trying to decide who she really is and what she really wants and failing at both. She wants to say, she let paranoia and anxiety and trauma lead her into a stupid decision. She wants to say, she should have called, she should have known Aunt Bea wouldn’t really have done the things she feared, she should have remembered how much of it’s an act, how much lenience and goodwill the programme extends towards its graduates. She wants to say, she’s overwhelmed and tired and scared of what it means to be back here. She wants to say, she doesn’t know whether she’s terrified for Stephanie or terrified of what it means that she, a supposed trans girl, absolutely hated a good third of her time here while Stephanie’s already lunching with sponsors and third years and dressing nicely and calling the fucking place her home.
She wants to tell Abby how good it is to see her again, how she feels almost whole again with her in the room, how all her efforts to rip out the parts of her that belong to Abby were always doomed, always futile, always stupid.
She wants to do anything but fall into the embrace of her former sponsor, former lover, former best friend, and cry, but that’s the thing she needs most right now and it’s the only thing she’s really capable of, and as Abby’s arms protect her, as her adoring whispers soothe her, she forgets everything else for a little while, and wonders why she ever left her in the first place.
* * *
“You have to stop interrupting, or we’re never going to get anywhere.”
“I’m not interrupting, I’m just — does anyone have another colour of pen? thanks — I’m just making sure I have everything straight.”
“You know we can’t let you take that pad out of here, right?”
“Yes, but writing things down as we go helps me focus, it helps me remember. So, Tabitha, you were saying?”
This is turning out to be one of those days that feels like it’s never going to end, and considering tomorrow’s likely to deliver a Tory majority and probably a third consecutive minor disaster for the Hall, Tabby’s seriously considering doing a Melissa and moving halfway up the country and pretending to be a cis girl with a large and completely unsuspicious gap in her resume and a nice innocent hobby, like collecting bobblehead dolls or raising chickens or something.
“I was giving you the long version,” she says, “and you kept interrupting, so here’s the short version: we take young men, generally between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five but occasionally down to eighteen if we feel it’s justified, who are on highly destructive paths and who are unlikely to reform, and we…” She waves a hand. “We make women out of them.”
“And that helps, does it?”
Shahida’s taking it in stride, which Tabby might have been surprised by, but then she’s already seen off Abigail’s ham-fisted attempt at placating her, she’s literally seen Melissa’s face — she made Tabby unlock her phone and watch the video she took — and she’s just recently watched a houseful of busybody weirdos close ranks around her. Not much of a leap, really.
“It’s not just any bad boys,” Paige says. “We don’t bring in shoplifters or bank robbers or art forgers—” Tabby controls a smirk as, across the table and behind Shahida’s back, Vicky mouths Art forgers? to Lorna, “—because such things are rarely motivated by toxic masculinity.”
“Toxic masculinity?” Shahida says, pausing in her note-taking to look quizzically at Paige, who looks quizzically right back and thus at least partially defeats her. “That’s your excuse? Do you kidnap men for explaining women’s jobs to them on Twitter?”
“Violently destructive masculinity, then,” Paige says. “It manifests differently in different boys, so if you’re looking at all of us and picturing rapists, don’t.”
“We don’t bring in unrepentant rapists,” Tabby says, “as a rule.”
“But,” Shahida says, “to be clear, you—” she points at Paige, “—are a former bad boy?”
“I am,” Paige says, “but, again, be careful what you are picturing.”
Shahida frowns at her. “I’m not picturing anything, particularly.”
“Good.”
“So everyone here is a, uh, a bad boy turned good girl?” Shahida looks around the table, her gaze landing on Lorna.
“No,” Lorna says. “I’m a good girl turned very annoyed girl. And, look, Shahida, Dorley doesn’t take in monsters and it doesn’t take in angels. It mostly selects for young men who have been, frankly, damaged by hegemonic masculinity and the dangerous and often contradictory demands it makes on the growing psyche. Now, I’m not a man — I was never a man, and I’ll thank you to remember that — but as someone who had to pretend to be one until I escaped my godawful mother I understand what it’s like to be profoundly unsuited to the roles made available to ‘young men’—” she finger quotes and Tabby swallows to keep from laughing at her pomposity, which would be terribly rude considering how helpful she’s being, both in lecture and affront, “—and how violent and coercive an experience it can be attempting to conform to them, even if only as a disguise. One I wore exceptionally poorly, by the way. It’s like putting a mouse in a maze and rewarding it with food only when it finally consents to bite the other mice. After a while, after enough behavioural reinforcement, the only way to fix it is to—” she mimes picking up a struggling animal, “—lift it out of the maze altogether. Radically change its whole context.”
“We should talk more, Lorna,” Paige says.
“This is ridiculous,” Shahida says, dropping her pen on the table in frustration. Huh; maybe not entirely in stride, then.
“You know what?” Lorna says. “I said exactly the same thing. I found out about this place, shit, how long ago?”
“Last Monday,” Vicky says.
“Seems longer. I found out about this place really recently, and I thought it was completely and totally fucking bananas. And I was ready to burn it down, I really was. Even after the NDA and the legal threats and all that crap. Because my girlfriend comes from here, and she’s the sweetest, kindest, most generous-hearted person I know, and the idea, the very idea that she could have been what they were telling me she once was? I didn’t just find it offensive; it was a— a— a fucking violation. But you know what? The people who are brought here are often as much victims as they are victimisers, only they need the kind of help no-one else can provide and, God fucking damn it, I had to face up to the fact that it works. Yeah, sure, it wouldn’t work for everyone, and yeah, the process can be—” she leans against Vicky, and the two of them exchange a glance Tabby looks away from, “—difficult, but it works. It takes boys who’ve been hurt, really badly hurt, and who are turning that hurt out on other people, who are potentially building up to something really, really awful, and it saves them. First it saves other people from them, but then it saves them from themselves.”
Vicky holds up a hand to attract Shahida’s attention. “I don’t like to talk about this,” she says, in a voice so quiet everyone else at the table leans forward to hear it better, “but that was me. I was the boy who was going to go off. A lot of us were. My best friend, Christine, she was lashing out, too. Differently to me, but she was. And she was saved.”
“Me too,” Paige says.
Tabby’s about to try to bring the conversation back on topic — drifting into justifications is a temptation she can understand, but collectively they have enough that they could spend all day on them — when Christine enters from the dining hall, walks up behind Paige and leans down to kiss her girlfriend on the top of her head.
“My ears are burning,” Christine says.
“Oh, it’s you,” Shahida says. “From Egg Nation. Does that mean Abigail is a former boy, too?”
“Most of us are. It’s just a thing you have to get used to around here.” Christine directs her attention back down towards Paige, kissing her again, and that’s good, no, that’s great. Vicky and Lorna are, understandably, still a little highly strung, but Christine and Paige are a picture-perfect couple, beautiful and caring and reasonably normal-seeming; the ideal advertisement for the programme. She glances over at Shahida and is pleased to see her watching with interest and… envy?
“Hi,” Paige says, leaning to the side so she can kiss Christine on the cheek.
“You okay?”
“Been better. I don’t like talking about it.”
“I know. I have to take some meals upstairs, okay? And then I’ll be right back down.”
Paige mumbles something which makes Christine giggle and nuzzle her nose in Paige’s hair, and Tabby hides her smirk behind her coffee mug — rather unfortunately printed, in the style of the logo for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with the phrase Feminising Torture Basement, and she subtly checks to make sure the logo’s on one side only; it is, thank goodness — because the two of them are behaving so much like she would wish them to, she almost wonders if it’s deliberate.
Christine props her head on top of Paige’s for a moment, and says, “By the way, Shahida, a lot of us are quite sensitive about our pasts, so I’d be careful throwing around phrases like ‘former boy’. We’re making ourselves extremely vulnerable for you; please try to remember that.”
It’s fortunate Paige picked the seat she did; only Tabby can see Christine’s hand clenched into a fist under the table. Being so open about her status is costing her. It’s costing all of them. They’re all still so new, she remembers; they don’t have Tabby’s long years of cynicism shielding them. Fuck it; everyone’s getting a bonus for this. Well, all the ones on Dorley’s books, anyway. Lorna can get an extra operation or something. Maybe she’d like perkier tits.
“Anyway,” Christine says, and kisses Paige one final time before pushing up and heading for the fridge, “it was lovely to meet you, Shahida. Didn’t mean to interrupt.” She rummages in the fridge for a moment, extracts some tupperware, and carries a wobbly pile of the stuff carefully back out into the dining hall, presumably planning to microwave it all upstairs.
“Where were we?” Tabby says, before anyone else can say anything. “Yes, our intake procedures. Now, Shahida, I’ll let Melissa tell you her story in detail if she so chooses, but she was enrolled on November fourth, twenty-twelve. A very late admission, but it was the judgement of her sponsor that she constituted an urgent case. She would very likely have died by her own hand if not for our intervention.”
To her surprise, Shahida nods, but then they knew each other reasonably well, didn’t they?
“Should I be thanking you, then?” Shahida asks.
“That,” Tabby says, “is another question you should ask Melissa.”
* * *
“I’m all wet. ‘How do you know you’re back at Dorley, Melissa?’ Oh, because I’m hiding in a dark corner, crying. It’s a clue.”
“Tissues,” Abby says, passing over a handful. “Blow.”
“Be honest: how fucked up is my face right now?”
“Blow. We’ll unfuck your face in a minute.”
Melissa makes a noise that echoes unpleasantly off the glass conservatory doors, and drops the used tissue into a plastic bag Abby’s silently holding out. She takes another, wipes down her eyes and cheeks, and disposes of it.
“Thanks,” she says.
“Thank me later,” Abby says, dabbing at still-damp spots on Melissa’s face. “You’ve got people to see. You want to go get ready? Christine’s left the back stairs unlocked; we can go all the way up to my room without seeing anyone.”
Melissa nods, and accepts Abby’s help to stand.
She confessed, wetly, to the chain of logic that brought her to this point, and Abby, charitably, didn’t point out how incredibly stupid it was; it sounded even worse when she came to say it aloud. Instead Abby gave Melissa the rundown on exactly how much she messed everything up: Stephanie’s upstairs, being calmed down by her sponsor — “She’s sort of her sponsor, anyway; it’s a long story, and I’ll let her tell it.” — and, worse, Shahida’s in the kitchen. Abby overheard Tabby announcing that she and Paige were going to do disclosure, so by the time Melissa sees her again, she’ll know the whole sordid truth.
At least she doesn’t have to tell it.
On the way upstairs she gets a summary of how Stephanie ended up here, and it’s almost too much to hear until Abby reminds her: Stephanie’s trans, she wants this, and it’s both Christine and Pippa’s opinion that stumbling into Dorley’s only slightly spiky embrace, despite her initially incorrect assumptions, probably saved her from something much, much worse.
She really was a lot like me, then.
Up in Abby’s room she cleans up and borrows some fresh clothes. She doesn’t put on makeup, despite Abby’s urging; her hands are still shaking a little too much.
“Food,” Abby diagnoses, and leads her down to the kitchen on the second floor, where Christine’s left a lunch for her in the fridge.
Before they turn the corner Melissa halts them both, gathers both of Abby’s hands in hers and holds them in front of her chest. “Thank you,” she whispers. “Thank you for always putting me back together.”
“Always,” Abby says, and they kiss, awkwardly, both of them going for the lips and then reconsidering, but it’s fine, it’s sweet, and they laugh and hug and then Abby pulls her by her clasped hands around the corner to the place where Stephanie’s eating something that smells absolutely delicious.
Melissa lingers in the doorway. “Hi,” she says, nerves still piling up, aware that of all the reintroductions she could have made, she picked perhaps the worst in the history of the Hall. Certainly she’s never heard of anyone else charging back in, years after graduation, and trying to steal a first year.
Stephanie, to her relief, has a smile for her, and nods at one of the chairs. Melissa sits while Abby starts the microwave going.
“Let it stand for two minutes when it’s done,” Abby says quietly, though neither Melissa nor Stephanie is actually talking, just watching each other. “I’ll be around the corner with Christine, in her room, if you need either of us.”
“Hi, Melissa,” Stephanie says, when they’re alone. Her voice sounds less strained than it had downstairs. “I’m sorry for how I reacted.”
Melissa’s grateful she doesn’t have her lasagne already, or she would have choked. “How you reacted? Stef— Stephanie—”
“Just Steph is fine,” she says, interrupting. “I’m not sold on Stephanie yet? Although,” she adds, grumbling, “I think everyone else is. I was just trying it out!” she protests, to the air.
“Just Steph,” Melissa says. “Gotcha. Look, Steph, can we do something? Can you just put your fork down for a minute?”
Stephanie complies, frowning, but doesn’t comment when Melissa stands up out of her chair. She gets it when Melissa tugs on her sleeve, and pushes her own chair back, standing — still a little unsteadily — to accept the hug.
It’s like going back seven years. More. It’s all the things they never said, all the times they never held each other like sisters would; it’s all the moments of affection that made them both ashamed, because boys weren’t supposed to behave that way, and because Steph’s mum would scold them if she caught them hugging.
“I’ve missed you so much,” Melissa whispers, and Steph’s grip on her tightens. She hears her wince, just a little, but the girl — and, God, doesn’t that feel good; the girl — just giggles at it this time. Still getting used to being sensitive up there.
“I’ve missed you too,” Steph says.
They’re well-matched in height, with Steph a little taller — she must have grown quite a lot since Melissa left — and that just makes it more like hugging a sister.
“Seven years I missed,” Melissa says. “You’ll have to tell me all about them.”
“They weren’t all super fun.”
“Just the good bits, then.”
“Deal.”
She can almost feel Steph’s pulse through her thin clothes, and it’s magical. The sweet little boy she used to tutor. The girl she’s excited to get to know. A piece of her past she never thought she’d get back, right here in her arms, vibrant and smiling and alive, and healing in all the ways she needs to. And if today could have gone better, well, it could have gone a whole lot worse, and Melissa’s doing nothing but counting all the blessings that have returned to her.
And then her lasagne’s done, and the ping of the microwave breaks the moment.
* * *
There’s a knuckle stroking his wet cheek and a palm cupping his jaw and he’s not ever felt so vulnerable, not even with Steph. But he’s safe with Maria, and whatever else she might do to him, she really does want what’s best for him, and even if it conflicts absolutely with what he always thought he wanted out of life there’s a relief in letting go, a freedom in giving your life over to someone who has a plan for it, and if she’s going to love him like a sister, then so be it.
He knows about Steph now. All about her. And while it doesn’t change the fact that she lied to him, Maria’s point is and was completely clear: what, ultimately, would have changed?
And he’ll accept comfort from Maria, who put him here.
He swore at Maria a few times when she pointed that out, and she pushed his head back down into her lap. Made him silent again, and asked him if he’d have done anything different if he’d known she was keeping the secret. Would he have let Declan attack her? Would he have left her on the floor of the shower room, scalded and shaking?
No.
No. Obviously not.
Well then.
He swore at her again.
And she pushed him back down again and they spoke of boundaries. And initially he was dismissive: they’ve talked about this before; he’s read extensively on the subject in the books she gave him; as an experienced boundary violator (retired) he’s an expert. But she kept talking. And eventually she posed the question that unravelled him.
What does it mean to have your boundaries violated?
She talked about them like they’re the walls and locked doors of your house, how everyone to a greater or lesser extent lives inside an illusion of comfort and safety, how especially women and most especially marginalised women — women of colour such as her; trans women such as her, effectively; disabled women and gay women and immigrant women and traveller women — are more aware of the transitory nature of the illusion than men generally are, but that the truth is that anyone can smash a window or break down your door or drive a vehicle through your wall and expose you, blow your fucking house down, little pig, leaving you alone and without even the fragments of illusionary protection remaining.
And she didn’t have to tell him the rest because it was suddenly so obvious and so inescapable what he did to those women, what he took from them, and more importantly what he left them with; in their lives, on their campus, in their lectures was a man prepared repeatedly and without apparent shame to violate their boundaries. And why wouldn’t you fear such a man? Why wouldn’t you watch for him around every corner? Why wouldn’t you change your life to avoid him? Because here is a man who knew who they were, who hurt them for no more reason than his own satisfaction, and who might on any random night decide harassment isn’t enough for him any more.
All those women, waiting for him to escalate.
Blow your fucking house down.
He doesn’t know this. He can’t know that, say, Paula Conrad stopped leaving her flat because she was scared he might come looking for her. But she might have done. Any of them might have done! Any of them might have stayed home or dropped classes or dropped out or put their whole lives on pause for fear of him. And even if none of them did, even if all of them tried to put him to the backs of their minds and continued about their lives as normal, he’d still invaded them in a manner more repulsive than he ever realised, than he ever considered, even after he came to Dorley.
He thought he knew what he’d done. He thought he knew why he was here. He thought he knew the man he’d become, the thing they’re trying to excise. But he hadn’t even the slightest idea until today.
“It’s okay,” Maria says, stroking his cheek. She’s still sitting cross-legged on his bed; he’s still lying lengthways, his head in her lap. “It’s okay.”
He’d tell her it’s not, that it never will be, that these will always be the things he’s done, that to set himself up as someone who can judge anyone for anything is ludicrous, but his breaths are coming out in gulps and hiccups and every time he thinks back to something he did, something he laughed about, something he joked about, he wants to just fucking—
Her hand stills on his jaw as if she can tell what he’s thinking, and he knows without her having to tell him that she wants him to get through this, that she needs him to, that what he asked for last night and what he desperately wants to ask her for now is not something she’s ever going to provide for him, because she wants him to live, she wants him to change and grow and, yes, germinating inside him is the faintest hint of determination that he just fucking might, because if the man who came here is someone who could do that to people, over and over, then he’s not content to wait for Maria to take his hand and drag him away from his past; he’s going to take those steps himself. Cautiously and reluctantly because he still doesn’t know how he’s going to do it, how he’s going to become someone he can survive, but he’s going to do it. Because fuck that guy.
And Maria’s going to love him like a sister.
As she whispers reassurances to him, as he gasps for air through the heaving of his chest, as he looks back on his life with disgust, he understands finally that last night wasn’t the end, wasn’t the point of no return; this is.
He doesn’t know how long he lies in her lap, her hands surrounding him, creating a cradle for him, but she knows when it’s over before he does. She releases him with a final, gentle caress of his cheek and he sits up, skin stretched dry and salty, lungs aching, head almost clear.
She smiles and opens her arms to him and he shuffles along the bed and accepts her, wraps his arms around her shoulders, returns her affection as someone who might one day be considered her equal.
“Maria…” he whispers. It’s all he has.
Not a bad place to start.
* * *
Stef knew Melissa would be beautiful. She didn’t expect her to be so sad, and when first she saw her again she really was as miserable as she’s ever seen anyone, but when they come up from one of the longest hugs she’s ever had and Melissa’s face is shining with tears but smiling — and giggling at how inappropriate it is that their reunion’s been interrupted by her bloody dinner — her joy is infectious and Stef can’t stop herself from kissing her quickly on the cheek before she finishes untangling herself and sits down again.
After all this time. There she is. Giddy and graceful and nervous and shy and blowing delicately on the lasagne on her fork. And it’s actually reassuring that she came charging back into her life on the wings of a huge misunderstanding, knocking from its pedestal the unrealistically serene image of her that Stef’s been nurturing for so many years. Better that Melissa’s a disaster, like her.
But people do keep interrupting them, and while it’s sort of fun to see Melissa exposed to Jodie’s bubbly stream of consciousness, Stef would rather have her to herself for a little while longer.
“I can’t believe you just… go places,” Melissa says, as Stef thumbs them out onto the stairway. “I couldn’t get out here on my own until my third year.”
“What about when I saw you outside Tesco that one time?”
“When was that? January? That might have been my first time out alone. Well, almost alone. And Abby was waiting for me. And I was only allowed because I’d been—” her voice becomes bitter, “—so good.”
They climb in silence for a moment.
“I’m sorry it was so hard for you here,” Stef says, buzzing them out onto the top floor so they can cross over the hall to the roof stairs. She walks them quickly, hoping they won’t run into anyone she knows.
“I made it hard for myself, honestly,” Melissa says, after the metal fire door leading to the roof stairs closes behind them. “I sort of did what you did, but the stupid version.”
Stef pushes open the roof door and checks they’re alone — they are — before continuing. “You knew about this place before you came here?”
“No, but it didn’t take me long to work it out. I hid it, though. From everyone, including Abby, as much as I could. Not recommended.”
Someone’s been hard at work prepping the roof of Dorley Hall for winter: the plastic-covered couches that have for a while been squatting on a tarp in the middle have acquired another tarp above, spread out over the brick pillars that mark the edges of the gravel square, the one Christine’s described to Stef as being ‘fake zen’. A few smaller waterproofed areas have been set up around some of the benches at the edges of the roof, with tarps hung from light fittings and rocks sewn into one end, so today’s ever-present rain has somewhere to go, and it’s to one of these that they hurry, their steps lit more by the dim roof lamps and the tacky neon sign on top of the Student Union Bar more than by the dark and overcast sky.
“You want to talk about it?” Stef asks, brushing off the bench and sitting down.
Melissa joins her, shaking her head. “Nah. Maybe some other time? I still need to get myself situated, sort out where I’m staying tonight, move my rental car to the parking lot near the lake, grab my stuff, email my boss, all that kind of stuff. And I need to set aside a good half-hour to really freak out over how much I embarrassed myself today.”
Stef leans over, finds Melissa already leaning into her, and they rearrange themselves on the bench so they can stay in contact. Neither of them has a jacket; they’ll need each other’s body heat to stay warm.
“You can stay in my room,” Stef says.
Melissa snorts. “No offence, Steph, but I don’t want to spend the night in the bloody basement.”
“No, no no,” Stef says, waving her free hand, “I mean my other room.”
“Your other room?”
“I have one on the first floor, with the second years. It’s got its own bathroom and you can access the kitchen and dining hall and everywhere.”
Melissa doesn’t say anything for a second, and when Stef looks over she’s biting her lip, her cheeks are going red, and she’s clearly trying to keep herself from laughing. “You have your own first-floor room? And you’ve been here two months?” Stef nods. “God. I made the wrong decision. I should have come out to Abby. Think of the perks I missed out on!”
“I mean, there’s a little more to it than that. Beatrice was kinda scary when they first found me out.”
“Hah. Yeah. She does that. It’s an act. Mostly an act.” Melissa frowns. “It’s an act until it’s not. But she never really turned that shit on me, and she’ll likely never turn it on you.” She shakes her head a couple of times and then leans on Stef’s shoulder. “I was so fucked up about her for the longest time.”
Stef nods, carefully, so as not to disturb her. It’s more intimate here, despite the cold, despite the openness; there’s a curtain of rain around them, there’s soft light from the lamps, and there’s their little circle of warmth. Seven years vanishing in a heartbeat. Mark and Stefan; Melissa and Stephanie. The way it was always supposed to be.
The way it’s going to be forever.
“I never actually came up here before,” Melissa says softly. “It’s nice.”
“This is my first time,” Stef confesses. “Christine likes it up here, though. She comes up here to not smoke. She says it’s like a bigger, bougier version of somewhere she used to hang out when she was a— ugh, you know, when she was a teenager.”
Melissa smirks. Stef can feel her cheeks round out against her neck. “You get hung up on it, too? How to talk about the other girls’ former lives?”
“Mostly I don’t talk about it,” Stef says. “Pippa, my sponsor, she’s told me about her past, but only the once. It doesn’t seem important, you know? It’s like fixating on what subjects someone did at GCSE when they’re an adult.”
“It’s still weird that you say stuff like ‘sponsor’. That you know Dorley terminology. I’ve always thought of this place as drawing a hard line between my old life and my new one, and now here you are, talking about sponsors and having bloody roof access. I’m actually really proud of you, Stephanie.”
“I didn’t want you to see me, you know,” Stef says suddenly. “Not yet. I didn’t think I was ready. And I was worried what you’d think of me.”
Melissa leans away, looks at her. “What did you think I would think of you?”
A shrug. “I don’t know. That I’m a bad person for cooperating with the programme? That I’m weak for choosing the cheery concrete girlboss torture box instead of transitioning out in the real world? That I’m—”
“I’m sorry,” Melissa says, taking Stef’s hand to take the sting out of her laughter, “the cheery concrete what?”
“It’s what Aaron calls the basement. Or variations on that theme. God. Fuck. That’s the other thing. That’s why I was so fucked up when you came. I messed up badly with him last night and I didn’t sleep at all and then Pippa and Paige dressed me up and… I mean, I’ve had this whole thing I’ve been trying to get over where I don’t want people to see me — especially you, but also just, you know, people — while I’m still so early in transition, because I feel sort of ridiculous and ugly and male, all that shit. And I’m working on it, but… I didn’t want you to see me,” she says again. Melissa doesn’t say anything. Like she doesn’t want to prompt her. But it’s important she knows this; it’s important Stef expel it. “I never wanted you to see me as a guy again.”
“Steph—”
“It’s just so hard, you know?” Stef continues, caught in the need to see it through. “It’s been wonderful getting to know the girls and Pippa’s amazing and so are Christine and Paige and Maria and all the others but it’s hard to look at them and then look at me, like all the shit I hated when I was growing up is still there, and I’m changing but I’m not changing fast enough, and then I feel guilty raging about that because if I’m not changing fast enough then what does that say about— about— Fuck.”
“Steph?”
“Aaron. Everything I want for me is bad for him.”
Melissa lets go of her hand so she can turn around on the bench, tuck her legs up underneath and properly face Stef, properly look at her.
“Okay,” she says, “first, Stephanie: you’re beautiful. You are.”
“I still look male.”
“You look in transition. You look like most other trans women who’ve been on hormones a couple of months. I know there are things about your face you don’t like, and there are things that are— are tells. I know because I had them, too! But you’re beautiful, Steph. You have wonderful features. Only an idiot would call you ugly, and only a complete idiot — or a cis person — would call you male. And do you see any cis people around here?”
She’s so sincere. She’s so fucking sincere. It’d be so easy to believe her. So tempting.
So why not believe her? Stef’s struck suddenly by the vivid memory of the night after she talked to Maria in her room, when she saw herself in the mirror for the first time. What good does denying that do her? And what does she care, in this place, with these girls, if she doesn’t look cis yet?
“Okay,” she says.
“Just ‘okay’?” Melissa asks, poking at her.
“I’ll think about it.”
“Steph…”
“Really! I will!” She’s been leaning forward, so she deliberately relaxes, returns her back to the bench, and Melissa moves in, closing the space between them again. “I can’t promise instant results, but… it’s a process, you know?”
“I know. Just remember—” and Melissa pulls Stef’s face around so she has to look in her eyes, “—I think you’re beautiful. And I’ve known you a long time, girlie.”
Stef nods dumbly.
“Now,” Melissa says, “tell me about Aaron. Tell me how you messed up.”
Another shrug. “He’s my friend. Down there. And I feel stupid about him because he’s this complete fucking jerk and he’s done terrible things and, Liss, I love him. I love him and I want to help him and instead I lied to him, pretended I was just like him, and yesterday…” Stef sucks in a cold, wet lungful of air. “Yesterday he asked Maria to help him die.”
Melissa takes it all in with much more calm than Stef expected. “That’s not uncommon,” she says quietly. “A lot of the girls in my intake had something like that.”
“That’s what everyone keeps saying to me. I just… I don’t get why it has to happen.”
“Abby explained to me once, when I asked her why everyone else in the basement was being such a dick to me, why so many of the boys the programme targets have similar life stories. You know, neglected childhoods, distant or abusive parents, victimisation at school or church or wherever, a history of having to prove themselves and a habit of choosing the most — oh, what was the exact phrase she liked to use? — the most culturally convenient psychological defence mechanism.” She smiles, and tucks a lock of Stef’s wind-blown hair back behind her ear. “I didn’t realise, the first time we spoke, that she was talking about herself, too. It’s different for Black kids, of course, because her… youthful misadventures were punished pretty severely while the white kids in the basement have mostly gotten used to getting away with shit, but still. Sometimes those for whom masculinity isn’t intrinsic but still forms a fundamental part of their socialisation, their training for the world, have the hardest time imagining life without it. It’s their foundation. Their framework for understanding what the world expects from them. Losing it, as everyone here does eventually, is traumatic. Terrifying. They feel lost, like they have to start again literally from scratch. And, fuck, Steph, if there’s anything I understand, it’s feeling like there’s no way forward, wanting to just stop.”
Stef snakes out a hand and grips Melissa’s. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I never knew it got so bad for you. Until you disappeared.”
Melissa smiles. “It’s not like I told anyone. And the ones who worked it out, I pushed away.”
“Still sorry. I would have helped if I knew. And that’s just it; I knew this was all happening to Aaron, and I just… let it happen. That’s my big fuckup. Not telling him. The icing on the shit sundae.”
“Could you have stopped it?”
“Well…”
“He’ll get through it, Steph. He will. And I don’t just say that because we can both point to dozens of women who’ve survived it. I’m saying it because that feeling is a lie. And it’s a lie that can’t survive the gradual realisation of the truth, which is that there is a way to live, and live well. That’s why they do big intakes. And, honestly, if he’s reached that point and he’s being coached through it, he’s halfway there.”
“What’s the other half?”
“‘Don’t be a girl,’” Melissa says, with air quotes. “So much of what’s taught to boys, especially boys with the sort of fucked up relationship to masculinity that the programme tends to sweep up, is based around not being a girl, not being a pussy, whatever. In many ways it’s harder to unlearn than the defence mechanisms. They all have to learn that being a girl isn’t shameful or weak. They have to learn that the thing they were taught their whole lives to be afraid of is actually… fine. Just completely one hundred percent normal and fine.” She rolls her eyes. “Personally, I think it’s clearly the better choice, but that’s the advanced class.” She grins, shows her teeth, but doesn’t quite break Stef’s mood. “You can help with that most of all, I think. Show everyone you can just… be a girl.”
“I guess.”
“Do you want him to stay as a boy? Is that why you like him? Because he’s a boy?”
“I don’t know why I like him at all,” Stef says. “I never have. He just… takes up all my thoughts. It makes me happy to be around him. I don’t think I care if he’s a girl or a boy, but I care that he cares.”
“Then maybe the best thing you can do is let him figure it out for himself. With his sponsor.”
Stef wants to contradict her, wants to confess more, wants to keep pulling out chunks of herself until she can find something to throw at Melissa that will make her judge her. Instead she just wriggles against Melissa’s body and tries to diagnose why it’s so important to her that she disappoints the woman she’s been looking for all these years.
In her head, she draws a circle around the whole conversation and compares it to what she said earlier, about feeling too male to be seen by her, and nods to herself. Reflexive lying; reflexive self-hatred. Got to watch for those.
“You okay, kiddo?” Melissa asks.
“Yeah,” Stef says, nodding slowly, telling herself firmly that Melissa’s right, and of course she is, because she’s as close to an impartial observer as she’s ever going to find, and if she thinks Aaron will be okay, that’s something she can cling to. “Yeah, I actually am. You know, it’s weird hearing you defend the programme like that. Abby always said you hated it.”
Melissa shakes her head. “I do. I did. But it works, mostly. It’s a fucking trauma factory sometimes, and you can definitely argue there are better ways to achieve similar results, but, by its own standards, it works.” She shivers.
“You want to go indoors? It’s getting cold.”
“Um,” Melissa says, frowning, “not yet?”
Stef twists in her grip. “Are you okay?”
“You mean, aside from making a colossal idiot of myself today?”
“Come on, no-one thinks that.”
“I think everyone thinks that.” She smiles weakly. “But that’s not what I’m antsy about. Shahida’s here. Downstairs.”
“I know,” Stef says, nodding. Christine filled her in.
“I feel a bit like you, honestly,” Melissa says, repositioning again so she can look out into the rain. “I don’t want her to see me like this. Not because I’m ashamed of being like this — far from it — but because… because I feel stupid.” She pokes a thumb into her chest. “I’m a trans girl who didn’t work it out until it was too late. I was hours away from ending it when Abby brought me here. By rights, I should have died seven years ago. Except, actually, by rights, I should have died even before that.”
She’s quiet for long enough that Stef nudges her. “What do you mean?”
“Shahida saved my life. I was going to end it, and she stopped me. She had this—” she laughs, suddenly, “—this daft little picnic blanket, and she chattered at me and she took me home to her family and she saved me, and for years I took that with me.” She clenches her fist over her heart. “For years. It was only when it all went wrong with her, and I didn’t know why, because I’m trans but I’m stupid and never worked it out, that I started to really fall again. I didn’t have that to hold onto any more.
“I don’t want to see her because I hurt her so bad, Steph. I know it. At the time I thought it was fine, it was better, because it was me, and I knew I did nothing but bring bad things into people’s lives. Hers especially. I thought it was better that I just vanish. That I just fade away.” Another deep breath. “It took me a long time to get over that. Way longer than it did to work out I was trans. It was Abby, in the end, who got through to me. Who showed me I had value, that I really was, I don’t know, a real person. Not just a hole in the world. Shahida tried to show me, too, but I was missing this— this vital puzzle piece. I didn’t know who I was, I didn’t know why I hated myself, I didn’t know why it killed me to look at her sometimes, or why when she touched me it made me feel…
“God. You know, I actually can’t remember how it felt. I still struggle sometimes with feeling fake, or less good compared to other women, but I can’t remember any more what it was like to have a girl I might have loved touch me like I was a man.” She sniffs. “She touched me, and I ran.”
“I’m so sorry,” Stef says.
“I can’t help feeling that when she sees me, that’s all she’ll think about. Not that I was a man or a boy or whatever, but that I ran. I ran because I was stupid.”
“She won’t,” Stef says, with sudden confidence. Melissa looks at her like she’s going to say something, so Stef continues before she can. “She won’t! She’s been looking for you. Putting up posters all around town. Seven years later she’s still thinking about you. She thought you were dead, Liss! Do you think she’s going to judge you for things you had no control over when you were a teenager?”
“Maybe?”
“She won’t,” Stef repeats, taking Melissa’s hand and standing up. “Come on. Come see her and prove it.”
“But—”
“Come on!”
“Steph!”
“You need to do this, Liss. Not just for the woman who’s been papering Almsworth looking for you, but for you. You need to know that she’s nothing but happy to see you. She’ll understand. I promise.”
It’s easy to be confident about that. Tabby would likely have sent Shahida packing if her attitude suggested she was here to get revenge or something.
Melissa nods, and allows Stef to pull her up off the bench. They’re standing together at the very edge of the protection provided by the tarp, and Melissa’s haloed by technicolour neon light shining through rain.
“How do I look?” she says.
Stef grins. “Melissa, I’ve been dreaming of seeing you again for, what, nearly six years? Ever since I saw you outside the supermarket. And I’ve always thought of you as this… ethereal beauty. Like an angel, or something.”
“And I’m a disappointment?”
“No,” Stef says firmly. “You’re better. You’re real. You’re my fucking sister, Liss, and for the first time in seven years I can talk to you, I can hold your hand, I can hug you. And you’re beautiful. Right now, with your eyes kinda red and your cheeks all flushed, you’re beautiful.”
“I am?”
“Yes,” Stef says, and pulls on her, drags her out into the rain, towards the door that will take them back down into the warm, “now come on!”
There’s a sudden lightness to Melissa, a quickness to her step, and when Stef looks back through the rain she’s laughing quietly and skipping along behind her, holding onto Stef’s fingertips with the barest of contacts. It’s like she’s been made anew. And that’s what this is for all of them, she realises: a chance to go back seven years, to erase mistakes, to start again.
Maybe she can do the same with Aaron tomorrow. There’s not seven years of mistakes there, but there are enough.
They head back down the main stairs, and as they approach the kitchen they can hear voices. Lots of voices. Enough to make Melissa hang back in the lobby, nervous again. Stef smiles, instructs her with a raised finger to wait, and lets herself in.
“Hi, everyone,” she says, as a kitchenful of women turn their attention to her. She silences them — at least five of them are surging forward or asking if she’s okay — with a wave of a hand. “I’m fine. I’m going downstairs for some bloody sleep.”
“Amen,” Pippa says quietly.
“But before I do, I have someone here who wants to see Shahida, but kind of doesn’t want to be crowded. Oh, and I said she can use my room on the first floor tonight, so could someone sort out the biometrics?”
Tabby nods. “No problem,” she says. “All right, clear off, everyone. And, Steph—” she points to Shahida, “—don’t let her out yet, will you? We only let her have her phone again because she had this whole dead woman’s switch thing going on.”
“Right,” Stef says, as the other women file out into the dining hall, most of them waving or winking or otherwise greeting her on their way. “Um, hi, Shahida. I don’t know if you remember me, but—”
“Hi, Stephanie,” Shahida says, smiling warmly. “I’ve been told all about you.”
Stef laughs. “Of course you have. Are you going to stick around? I’d love to chat. Just, you know—” and thinking about how tired she is prompts a yawn, which she tries and fails to keep down. “God. Sorry. Just not tonight.”
“Yes,” Shahida says, hesitant, “I think I’ll stick around.”
“Good.” Stef leans heavily on the table, fatigue making her heavy. “I was going to do this a bit more gracefully, but… Cover your ears?” Shahida complies, and Stef yells, “Liss! Come in!”
A few moments later the kitchen doors open again and Melissa enters, nervous but smiling, and Stef might as well no longer exist as far as Shahida’s concerned. She lifts herself up from the table as quietly as she can and follows the rest of the girls out into the dining hall so she can take the stairs back down to the basement, but she hesitates just beyond the threshold, unable to resist eavesdropping.
“Hi,” Shahida says, enraptured, and there’s a scraping sound as Melissa pulls out a chair to sit down. “Um, Melissa, right? Does that mean I can still call you Em?”
“Sure,” Melissa says. “Em is fine.”
* * *
He’s pretty sure he’s never felt so nervous about anything in his life, and he’s trying to keep down the hysterical laughter that keeps threatening to bubble up at the thought of what he’s about to do, but like Maria said, you can stop still or you can go forward, and after everything today the thought of stopping still scares him stupid.
He knocks on the door.
Maria left him alone in the end, with the cooler and the last of the sandwiches and the promise of a small favour and a dwindling reserve of certainties, of which only two are relevant right now: he’s going to survive, if only out of spite for the person he once was, and he has to do this.
He knocks on the door again.
“Oh. Hi.”
He jumps, because the voice comes from behind him, and there’s Steph, wearing a skirt and a nice top and looking pretty but really, really tired. He steps aside, lets her unlock her bedroom door, and waits.
She turns when she’s inside her room. Frowns at him. “Aaron,” she says, “I know you deserve to kick seven kinds of shit out of me for what I’ve done, but I’m exhausted, so could it wait until morning?”
“I’m not going to do that,” he says, and his voice comes out like claws on cardboard. He’s barely used it today but his throat’s wrecked all the same.
Shit. He’s going to have to start learning to talk the way she does. Something about chest resonance? Sounds hard.
“Um,” Steph says, “okay?”
“Can I come in?” he says, a little more clearly. “I’m not going to yell or anything.”
She nods, confused but too tired to make an issue out of it, and he steps inside, waits for the door to close behind him.
“I asked Maria to buzz me when you got back down,” he explains, sitting on the edge of her bed.
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry. Needed a piss.” She starts undressing with her back to him, pulling off the skirt and top but leaving on the leggings and the bra. She drops a loose t-shirt over her head before she turns around again.
“Brought you your phone,” he says, holding it out.
“Um. Thanks.” She takes it, lays it on the table and sits down on the bed, on the far end from him. “Look, I’m sorry about—”
“Don’t, Steph,” he says. “Maria told me everything. I’m still a little mad? But I get it. Rock and a hard place. I get it.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“I know. You told me willingly, though.” And that’s important. That’s something he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about. Someone else would have just kept lying. It would have been the easiest thing in the world.
But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Because she loves him.
Maria told him that. He knew it anyway, even if he didn’t really believe it. But she told him, and that’s important, too.
Steph breathes out, almost wheezes at the end, like she’s trying to clear something nasty out of her lungs. Before she can get her breath back, though, before she can apologise again or say something else unnecessary or ridiculous or self-flagellating, he moves up on the mattress towards her.
To her frown, he says, “There’s some stuff I want to talk to you about. And you don’t have to talk back. You just have to listen.” She nods, perplexed but compliant, and makes herself more comfortable in the bed, wordlessly handing him a couple of cushions for his back and arranging some for herself. He holds up the edge of the duvet, waits for her nod, and drags it over both of them, enclosing them in a single shared space.
She closes her eyes for a moment. “You can tell me anything,” she says.
“Not up until now, I couldn’t,” he says. He’s been thinking about how he wants to say this, how he wants to start, and at the last moment he abandons his plan and just fucking goes for it. “George Rollins. Georgina. She was the first. She—”
“I know about what you did, Aaron,” Steph says, leaning forward, touching the back of his hand. He turns his hand over, takes hers, and she’s surprised — she’s still expecting him to yell at her, probably — so he seizes his momentary advantage to interlace their fingers.
“You don’t,” he says. “You’ve seen… names and dates and summaries on a screen. You don’t know. And I can’t compartmentalise all this shit, you know? I can’t put all the things I’ve done in a box and call them separate from the rest of me because they are the rest of me. And what I said and did down here, to Maria, to myself, to you, it’s just another part of all of it, and I have to get it out, Steph. I have to get it out.”
“Okay.”
“It’s just… this is important.”
“I’m listening,” Steph says, smiling.
“So,” he continues, “it was primary school. George, she was in the year above. She and her friends called me something, I don’t know what, probably a gaylord, that’s what a lot of the other kids called me back then, you know, like, ‘Hey, gaylord, show us your dick,’ that kind of shit, and I hated it, Steph, I really fucking hated it, and one day I waited behind the shed, out by the car park…”
It’s not a long story, but it’s the first of many. Too many for Steph, who listens as attentively as she can for as long as she can before she slumps over, asleep in what looks like a position guaranteed to wake her with muscle cramps after a few hours. So he moves her, carefully and slowly, keeping her head on a cushion and lowering it until she’s in his lap, her legs instinctively curling up under the covers. He billows the duvet out to catch her splayed arms, shuffles a little so her head is comfortable, and reaches down to pick up her corded headphones.
He sends Maria a message, asks for one more favour: that she put something on Steph’s computer for him to watch, because he doesn’t dare interrupt her sleep. A minute or so later he gets a winking emoji in reply, and Steph’s computer wakes up and starts playing, of all things, The Little Mermaid.
He wonders if there’s a message in that.
Probably not.
