26. The One That Got Away

1985 March 20
Wednesday

He hadn’t wanted to come to the UK. Did anyone? Cold and windy and wet and miserable, and you can’t get a good cup of coffee, and the boys are rowdy and the girls are worse. Perhaps it’s just his upbringing, but he’s always preferred the pace of life, and the taste of it, in Paris. But he’s old enough now at nineteen to start learning the way his parents do business, and the townhouse is lonely without his parents, so grudgingly he agreed to cross the channel with them.

Don’t be a snob, his mother insisted, when he gagged on borderline inedible British hotel food.

It’s just your imagination, his father told him, when the drunken lads jeered at him in the street and their girlfriends laughed along.

Fucking England.

He closes his eyes again, tries to forget about the concrete ceiling and the iron bars and the single recessed light bulb that burns a harsh yellow-white, too bright and with an unpleasant and incessant buzz, and remembers his mother and father. They come to him as he saw them last, ugly red dots dead-centre forehead, tongues hanging stupid.

He was useless when they killed them. He practically hung there in the arms of his captors, paralysed by fear, willing his feet to run or his hands to strike and finding nothing inside him but white-hot static.

The cold efficiency of it all! The emotionless practicality! Against street thugs or opportunist thieves he and his father might have had a chance, but the first act of the ones who attacked them had been to place a gun to his head, and against that all three of them were powerless.

His mother had begged. His father had attempted to bargain. Instead they were made to walk through darker and darker streets to a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere and stand facing the end, and he could do nothing. Not until the guns fired and he finally broke his captors’ grip and ran to them.

Couldn’t even catch them as they fell.

He rolls over on the hard cot, screws up his face, fights the tears. His father always told him to hide his weakness, but that’s a consideration long in the past. He’s just so fucking tired of the headaches.

He finds a better memory. Four nights ago. Dinner at the hotel. More slop, and his mother scolded him for the judgement. Her half-smile, the eye contact she shared with his father, indulgent and fond. His father’s chuckle, and the way he leaned across the table to make his promise. They’d eat at his favourite restaurant when they got home. Just one more thing to do, while we’re here.

“Vincent!”

Fuck. Her again. Her voice, guttural and deep, saturated with the unthinking arrogance of the English upper classes and their retinue. He’d loathe it even absent context. She says his name again, rapping metal-on-metal on the bars of the cell with the end of the cane she carries as an affectation, and she says it with the same satisfaction as she did when she greeted him two nights ago, when she strode into that dingy little room, swinging her cane like a ringmaster’s baton and regarding the death of his family as one might look upon the contents of a grisly but necessary mousetrap.

His parents’ business partner in this country; their murderer. Dorothy Marsden.

“Vincent Barbier, you will look at me when I speak to you, or it will not end well for you!”

Two fingers to her.

She claps her hands twice, sharp in the still underground air like fucking gunshots. Footsteps on concrete as underlings step forward and the door to the cell slams open. Rough hands grab at his limbs, pull him out of his cot, press him against the wall, and there she is: Dorothy, who insisted with ridiculous pomp that he call her Grandmother, who has taken his parents from him and thrown him in a cell to starve, who approaches him pinned like an insect and presses the end of her cane to the wall between his legs, locking eyes with him and smirking as she drags it up, scraping it on the concrete and forcing him to the tips of his toes as the cold metal begins to press painfully up against his genitals.

“Vincent, Vincent, Vincent,” she says. “What are we to do with you?”

Does it matter? Two days without food and one without water have made clear what she wants from him, so what even can she do, in this space between life and death, that is worse than what awaits him?

He spits dry in her face. Nothing but the barest flecks reach her, but on her nod they beat him to the floor, anyway.

 

2019 December 12
Thursday

The girls all clear out at Stephanie’s instruction, leaving the formerly bustling kitchen suddenly open and intimidating, the massive table and the camera in the cornice and the carefully innocent-looking doors out to the entryway all reminders that Shahida’s locked into a place she doesn’t belong, where the motives of her hosts are something she has to take on trust, where someone’s always watching. Not even Melissa’s presence is enough to dispel her unease, and she nervously reintroduces herself while trying not to look at the massive biometric bolts on the only exit.

She left voicemail for Rachel, instructing her to disregard both email and previous message. That might have been premature.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Melissa says, settling in the chair she’s pulled out next to Shahida, crossing her legs under her, just the way she used to. “It’s like a normal kitchen, and then you start noticing things.”

She saw her looking at the locks, then. “It’s not so bad,” Shahida says, wanting to disabuse Melissa of the notion that Shahida is in any way unnerved; this is her home, this is somewhere she feels safe, and the least Shahida can do, after everything, is not taint it. “The AGA sort of reminds me of home.”

Melissa rolls her eyes. “It gets so hot in here when people are cooking. It’s a nightmare.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Shahida says quickly, and Melissa snort-laughs, covers her mouth and looks wide-eyed at her. Shahida sighs. “Shit. Sorry. I’m trying too hard to make this—” she looks around, her gaze encompassing reunion and torture house both, “—normal.”

“Shy,” Melissa says, and Shahida warms at the nickname, the one she likes even more than the others Melissa has for her, “this place is unbelievably weird. You’re allowed to be freaked out.”

“They were telling the truth, then?” It’s not that Shahida doesn’t believe Paige, Tabby and the others, not after everything. But doubt is proportional, and the truth is… Well, it’s ridiculous.

“Did they tell you this place is a good girl factory?” Melissa asks from behind a wry grin, and Shahida nods. “Then, yes, they told you the truth. The details are… messy.”

“They didn’t say much about the process. Mostly focused on results.”

Melissa nods. “Wise.” And then animation takes her and she leans back, swivelling on her chair to face Shahida properly. “Jesus, Shy, you look amazing!”

There’s Mark there, in all the details of her: in her nose, delicate and with the slight kink removed; in her eyes, just as intensely blue as ever but topped now with shaped eyebrows and a brow that seems subtly different; in her smile, broad and genuine and so fucking real it chases away the dregs of Shahida’s nervousness. Because it’s all true, and here’s the proof, beautiful as he always was but alive in ways he never was, and she doesn’t care what it took to make it happen because it fucking happened.

She needs to say something and she does, mumbling thanks or something superficially like them but she’s distracted now by Melissa’s voice, which is light and melodic and again so much like the best of Mark, the way Mark was when she or Rach or Amy dragged him briefly out of his shell and into the light with the rest of them, and she’s torn between exulting in just getting to hear it and her sudden and intense curiosity as to how she did it, how she gets her voice to do that; did she have surgery (Shahida’s read it’s not ideal), or did she train it? And if she trained it, which method did she use? When first exploring her theory Shahida watched a video of a trans woman demonstrating something called ‘head voice’, and meant to watch more, to try to gain a more intimate understanding of the mechanisms by which Mark had become the woman she desperately hoped he’d become, but fell into a tangent of wondering if she, a cis woman, spoke in head voice automatically, or if it was solely a way to hack vocal cords that had been subjected to an unwanted testosterone puberty.

And when she moves her hands and her fingers, when she reaches out, there again is the echo of Mark, but there’s a confidence there, a solidity, where Mark had always seemed a little unreal, like if she stopped looking at him, stopped keeping him in her thoughts, he would fade away—

“Shy?” Melissa says, and Shahida refocuses. Melissa’s close, so damn close, and leaning closer, reaching for her, creating in Shahida a giddiness that displaces all else. “Shy, what’s up?”

Shahida grabs Melissa’s hand, just to feel the fingers, just to feel the anchor of the real fucking person in front of her, and forces herself to close her eyes, to breathe deeply, to still herself, and the intoxicating energy that’s been threatening to overwhelm her finds its balance, finds stability through her contact with her friend. Opening her eyes, she still feels at the crest of a wave that might crash at any moment, but she’s riding it now.

Melissa’s seen this in her before, once or twice, and she’s been waiting quietly. To hold her hand as she processes is enough.

“I’m okay,” Shahida says. “Too many inputs,” she adds, and Melissa nods.

“Do you need time?”

“No. I’m fine. It’s not even— I’m just— Fuck.” She holds up a finger, asks for a moment. Melissa nods again. “I’m looking at you, taking you in,” Shahida says, unable to stop herself from smiling at how lewd that sounds. “And it’s like I’m seeing all seven years at once. I want to know everything, and even the idea of how much everything there is… It’s overwhelming.”

Melissa pats her hand. A disappointingly platonic gesture. “There’s no hurry,” she says. “Before I, um, rushed down here, I told my boss I had an emergency to deal with. He’s given me until the start of the next semester off.” She frowns. “Used up all my holiday days, though. And I should email him, actually.” She shakes her head. “Later. What I mean is, I don’t need to leave any time soon. I know you probably have a thousand questions; we have time for all of them.”

More like a million questions. Shahida feels childlike; she’d expected to be the together one in this situation, even if she can’t put her finger on exactly why. But then, Melissa’s been living this life for seven years, which is almost as long as Shahida’s been running from hers.

She looks around the kitchen. It’s still just as empty, with only the two of them in it, but it seems friendlier now. Context is everything.

“It was good to see Steph,” she says. “I was worried about her.” Shahida congratulates herself on hitting the correct pronoun and then struggles not to scold herself for what Melissa might infer from her statement: that Steph might have been in trouble because she left.

She doesn’t seem to mind, though. “It was really good to see her again,” she says, withdrawing her hand so she can prop her chin on it. “She’s doing so well here. Which is incredibly weird, but it kind of makes sense. She always felt like she needed the right environment, and she’d thrive. She’s… she’s making jokes about this place, and she has friends, and— and I feel so stupid.”

Melissa’s blinking fast, like she’s trying to hold back sudden tears, so Shahida breaks the boundary between them again, puts a hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay, Melissa?” she asks, and even through her concern she thrills at the name. Em is good, and it’s wonderful to be able to use it again and revel in the restored connection to their shared adolescence, but Melissa’s the name she chose for herself, and it fits so marvellously. A Melissa would have those long, graceful arms; a Melissa would have those delicate eyebrows, those full lips, that soft peach skin. A Melissa would be so beautiful it almost hurts to look at her.

“Yeah,” Melissa says, “I’m okay. I made a colossal idiot out of myself today, but I’m okay.” She smiles at Shahida, and she’s no longer close to tears, instead radiating serenity. “And I make an idiot of myself a lot. The saving grace is that this place is built on acts of colossal idiocy. It just sort of absorbs them. I point a taser at this lovely girl, Christine, and she tells me it’s fine, she’s deactivated it, she’s had tasers pointed at her by people who are far more intimidating than I am, and, oh, by the way, she’s controlling the security for the entire building from her phone. So that’s me dealt with. And then I misgender Steph because I’m congenitally incapable of reading a room, and she just forgives me. I come charging in here—” she mimes, on the table, a little version of herself running across the wood, “—all bad plans and faulty weapons, and I just bounce harmlessly off a bunch of airbags.” Her mimed self flies backwards and lands on its butt. Shahida giggles.

“You should know,” Shahida says, “three different women made it very clear to me that they understand what happened completely. They know you and Stephanie are close, and that Christine girl — she’s lovely, I agree, although mostly I spoke with her girlfriend, Paige — complained vociferously about how some ‘bored, second-rate sponsor’ updated the records without checking the notes first. She said she put flags all over your file specifically relating to Stephanie, and they just got ignored. She also said something about wanting to quit and go live in a nice, normal house with only the people who were around this table at the time, because everyone else in the building is—” Shahida brings up her quoting fingers for the second time, “—‘criminally incompetent’.”

Melissa snorts. “That sounds about right. They have to run this place entirely with graduates — because who else could you bring in? — and it means everyone has to be a Jill of all trades and a, uh, mistress of none. God. That’s probably a mug, actually. Anyway, if this place seems chaotic, that’s why.”

“Christine said something similar, actually.”

“Oh?”

Shahida laughs, remembering the outraged look on the girl’s face. “One of the older women told her to calm down, said it can’t be that bad, and she said—” she takes a moment to remember Christine’s exact words, “—‘Dorley’s a shambles and opsec is shit and pretty soon I’m going to have to find a way to be in five places at once or we’ll be on the cover of News From The Anthill by the end of next year.’”

Melissa nods, and pushes up out of her chair. She stands for a moment, pensive and hesitant, and Shahida almost asks what’s up before Melissa says, “Um, Shy? Can I, um, have a hug, please?”

“Of course!” Shahida says, too loud. She stands and collects Melissa into her arms, privately amused that, after all this time, she’s still taller than her. And then Melissa’s almost squeezing the breath out of her so Shahida returns the passionate contact and for a little while, they say nothing.

“Steph didn’t want me to know,” Melissa whispers, loosening her grip but not breaking the embrace. “And I get it. I know why. I don’t blame her. It’s hard to be seen while you’re all in between, and I get that. I do. When all you want, all you need, is for people to look at you and see a girl, but you’re still working on it yourself… It’s really hard. But it’s everyone else. They agreed I shouldn’t know, because I wouldn’t trust them with her, because even if I knew she chose to be here I’d come running anyway and fuck everything up. And I don’t know if I’m more upset that they think that of me, or that they’re bloody right.”

“Em…”

“They made the right decision. I think. Fuck, I don’t know.”

“What’s done is done,” Shahida says, wincing at the cliché, “and you’re here now, and so am I, and so is Stephanie… It could have gone a lot worse.”

“Yeah,” Melissa says, nodding into Shahida’s shoulder, “yeah. And I guess it’s not the only reason they didn’t tell me. I asked Abby for some space a while before Steph even showed up. She was just doing her best to respect that.”

“I talked to her, too,” Shahida says.

“Abby?” Melissa, smiling, steps out of the hug and leans casually on the edge of the kitchen table. “What did she say?”

Shahida, hiding her disappointment, mirrors Melissa, and taps her fingertips on the wood. What should she say about Abigail? Should she tell her that Abigail and Christine tried to throw her off the trail, but messed up? Should she tell her that Abigail’s love for her is so written all over her face that it broke Shahida’s heart a little? Because, goodness, Abby’d been so agitated during their conversation that after a while Christine had to give her a shoulder massage. She’d terminated their conversation with a simple, “Please take care of her,” before leaving the room at speed, with one of the other girls trailing her, which Shahida thought a more eloquent summation of her designs on Melissa’s heart than anything she could have said.

A rival. And one who knows Melissa better than anyone, even Shahida, ever knew Mark.

“She said you’re amazing,” Shahida says.

“So’s she.” Melissa looks up at the ceiling. “She saved my life. Much the same way you did, actually, at the bridge. She found me right on the edge, and she rescued me.”

Shahida tries hard not to be bitter. “Except she had the resources of a mysterious organisation with methods laser-targeted to meet your needs, and I had… a picnic blanket.”

Melissa reaches for her, takes the hand that’s tapping idly on the table, meshes their fingers together. “To be fair, it was a very funny picnic blanket.”

The contact turns Shahida’s thoughts incoherent. “I still don’t get that,” she mutters. “It was just a blanket.”

“I know,” Melissa says, and the warmth, the fondness in her voice is calming. And then a yawn catches her, and she pulls her hand away to stretch, leaning even farther back. It’s another human moment, a grounded and boring and simple thing, and it reinforces once again Shahida’s relief: she’s here, she’s alive, and everything else is unimportant. Even if they can never have the relationship Shahida once dreamed of, Melissa is whole.

Smiling at the apex of her stretch and enjoying the release of tension in her limbs, Melissa looks over again, illuminated perfectly by the overhead lights. She looks wonderful. And tired. So damn tired. All Shahida’s protective instincts fire up, replacing Melissa for just a moment with the image of Mark, from the last time she ever saw him: thinning, exhausted, wounded.

Unfair to think of her that way. Mark was always the shell around Melissa, and now she’s here, and while Shahida never knew how to help Mark, it’s pretty clear what the girl in front of her needs.

“We’ve both had a hell of a day,” Shahida says, when Melissa’s done stretching, “and Stephanie gave you her room. Why don’t we go somewhere with more comfortable chairs? And a little more privacy?”

“That sounds great,” Melissa says, sighing, “but I’ve got to go move my car to the long-term car park, I’ve got to bring in my things, I’ve got to email my boss…”

“Actually, Tabitha sent one of the other girls to move your car and bring in your luggage. The athletic-looking one with the really long black hair?” Shahida holds a level hand over her head, to also indicate tall.

“Monica,” Melissa says, nodding and prodding at the shoulder bag she dumped on the table. “How did she get in? I’ve got the key card.”

“How do these people kidnap eight boys a year without anyone noticing?”

“True.” Melissa looks away. “They really did give you the rundown, didn’t they? You know all of it. You and Steph. That’s so strange…” She flexes her fingers for a moment, releasing tension. “I’m a little surprised at how much they told you, actually. Institutionally, we’re given to thinking of outsiders with information as pretty dangerous to us.”

Shahida shrugs, trying to say with her body what she can’t bring herself to say aloud because she still doesn’t quite believe it of herself: that she hasn’t even considered trying to take this place down, because all she cares about is that Melissa’s alive, and if Dorley is important to her continued safety then everything else, moral quandaries included, can go hang. “I heard from several victims who assured me that they’re happier now, better off, better people, and so on, and I also met some of their girlfriends, and then one of those girlfriends, an extremely determined young thing who swears she only found out about this place a fortnight ago, stridently defended the very concept of therapeutic kidnapping. I had no chance.” She nods at the notebook sticking out of her bag. “I did make an org chart, though, and graphed the process out a bit.”

“Of course you did,” Melissa says, sounding stunned.

“So,” Shahida says, “why don’t you email your boss and I’ll make us some tea or some hot chocolate or something, and then we can go upstairs? Monica dropped your luggage off in the dining hall; we can pick it up on the way.”

Melissa nods, still frowning a little, but after a moment her expression clears, she smiles at Shahida, and extracts a phone from her bag. She switches it on and waits through the bootup while Shahida, taking the absence of an expressed preference as a vote for hot chocolate, finds oat milk and a clean saucepan.

“Steph said she’s got an ensuite in her room,” Melissa says, while she swipes around on her phone. “I’d kill for a shower. And it might wake me up a little.”

“Or make you even sleepier,” Shahida points out. “That’s how it usually works for me.”

“I remember.” Melissa might be trying to hide her smile or she might just be typing her email but either way she looks sweet, tapping away at the screen. “Oh,” she adds, “they do actually have mugs here that aren’t a complete embarrassment.” She puts down her phone, looks around the kitchen. “I’m, um, not sure where, though. I think they redecorated? Everything looks kinda different.”

“They’re in the cabinet by the fridge,” Shahida says, quickly shooting a grin at Melissa before returning her attention to the milk. You mustn’t allow oat milk to boil or it becomes unpleasant, and on an unfamiliar stove it must be watched carefully. When Melissa laughs again, though, it’s very difficult not to throw the bloody milk in the sink and start again after, just so she can spend a couple of minutes drinking in the elixir of Melissa’s pleasure. She’s missed this so much.

“Okay, it was odd that Steph knows stuff about this place I don’t, but you…”

Shahida shrugs. “I listen.”

It doesn’t take long for the milk to heat up, nor for Melissa to finish her email to her satisfaction, and soon enough Shahida’s arranging mugs on a tray and beckoning for Melissa to follow, only realising after she steps into the dining hall that she has no idea where to go from there. But she has time to get her bearings while Melissa finds her luggage and checks everything she needs is where it should be, so Shahida keeps careful hold of her tray, waits for her to be done, and stares at the place.

It’s so damn big…

Dorley Hall looks large from the outside, sure, but aside from its slightly incongruous architecture it could be any institutional building. Yesterday, before she put up her missing poster on the corkboard — damn; she’ll have to run around taking those down, unless some poor underling from here has already done so — she’d assumed it was another grand old university building, probably an administrative one, and populated it in her imagination with rows of orderly offices, cavernous conference rooms and cute little kitchenettes, in which harassed staff would gather mid-afternoon to complain about recalcitrant students or some new piece of unworkable guidance come down from above.

It was only after she got a look into the kitchen and met Victoria and Lorna that she’d realised it was a dorm. It’s incongruously large and opulent-feeling for student accommodation, and that alone would have been enough for her to search it out online had Abigail and Christine, also associated with the Hall, not come to talk to her. It sat like a celestial object in the centre of her theories, dragging them all into its orbit; how could she not lose a few hours to investigating it?

It turns out that Dorley Hall isn’t and never has been owned or administrated by the university. Instead it’s passed through multiple private hands, all of them obfuscated behind generic organisations and guarded by financial firewalls, the dirty tricks of old money with something to hide; distressingly common in the UK. The most she could find out was that it last changed ownership in 2004, and since then has been the property of a trust set up to provide accommodation and financial assistance to women and nonbinary people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

She smirks. What a cover! Still, someone’s paying for all this, and at least now she understands why something so apparently straightforward is veiled in such secrecy, even if she still doesn’t have a clue as to the motives behind the money. There are cheaper, simpler and less risky methods of reform, surely?

Except Victoria, Lorna, Paige and Tabitha all argued quite persuasively that, in their collective opinion and regarding the inhabitants and graduates of the Hall, there is not.

Melissa taps her on the shoulder, nods to confirm she has everything she needs, and leads her quietly across the dining hall, smiling at the few remaining women who, blissfully, keep their interactions to waves and returned smiles. Probably because they’re mostly older ones who look like they have actual work to do, with laptops and notebooks spread out on tables. Tabitha, huddled with Monica on a small couch by the unlit fireplace, nods at them as they pass.

Dorley Hall’s got a total of three staircases up from the ground floor — and one down — and Melissa’s leading her towards the one at the other end of the dining hall that goes right up through the building’s centre and leads, according to Paige, who gave her a very quick rundown of the layout, directly to the first and second floors, the locked-down areas for the girls who are still in the programme and not yet technically granted their freedom (Tabitha had laughed at that; Paige had scowled at her for it). There’s another at the back of the building, locked to everyone but the senior sponsors, which will take you up to the third floor if you have access, and finally there’s the main staircase at the front of the building, publicly accessible, backed up by a small elevator and leading to all five above-ground floors. Third years like Paige and Christine are supposed to use the central stairs unless they’re actually leaving the building, but rarely do; the main staircase is simply closer to all their rooms. No-one, Paige said, wants to walk all the way down the corridor and around the corner, past a load of unused rooms, and then walk all the way back through the building when they get to the ground floor.

What surprised Shahida was what an ordinary, everyday concern that was. Here’s Paige — tall, beautiful; a transformed man, supposedly — and she lives in the house of the people who forced change upon her, who compel her behaviour still… and she complains about the layout of the staircases, about having to walk past all the rooms that lie empty because of the need to house each year separately from each other.

She found herself liking Paige a lot. The others, too, but Paige especially, with her earnest nature and the emotions she wears clear upon her face. Shahida felt she ought to fight it, to stand up for reason and morality and all that other stuff, but almost immediately found the impulse absurd, given everything she’d seen. And that’s the point of it all, they told her; to build responsible, thoughtful, happy people out of irresponsible, careless, miserable young men. The girl thing is almost a side-effect.

Almost.

But it does seem to work.

Paige: helpful, sincere; dating Christine and incapable of hiding how much she revels in that fact. When her girl had leaned over her, kissed her, demonstrated her love, Paige had beamed like she’d won the lottery and blushed right through her foundation. It was adorable.

And then there’s Vicky: shy but friendly, and once she realised Shahida wasn’t judging her for her past almost immediately started to discuss things with an enthusiasm Shahida wanted to bottle. And she’s dating Lorna, a girl from outside the Hall, to whom she clings with a fierceness that makes Shahida’s heart ache.

And Tabitha: level-headed and pleasingly straight-talking, willing to hand Shahida most of the information she asked for; a little difficult to concentrate around, because her smile is—

“First floor,” Melissa says, to break Shahida’s concentration and prevent her from automatically continuing on up; she would have done it, too, just kept climbing until her head bumped into a wall or ceiling. Too much new information to absorb.

“Thanks,” Shahida says, smiling and following Melissa into a wide corridor dotted with labelled rooms. She can hear voices muffled almost into silence from behind one of the closer ones, labelled Faye and decorated freehand with sharpied stars and hearts.

The door opens as they approach, to reveal a girl, one of the second years, stepping half out into the corridor and leaning back on the jamb. Behind her, dotted around the room and making it look quite crowded, are various other girls; and, yes, they are all unambiguously girls, in that they feel very adolescent to Shahida, despite all having to be, per Tabitha and Paige, at least nineteen but likely twenty or older.

“Hi,” Melissa says, stopping with her luggage and looking only a little like she’s hiding behind it. “Faye, right? I’m sorry about earlier. I was, um…”

“You were worried,” Faye says, smiling, “about Steph. It totally makes sense.” Her voice is husky; Shahida can’t help but compare it to Melissa’s and wonder how long the girl’s been training it (if that is, in fact, what they do here; Shahida needs to get into the mechanics of everything, and as soon as she finds someone willing to give her a whole afternoon of their time, she will). The girl glances behind her. “We all have someone we’d break into an evil feminising torture facility to save.”

(The girls break out into giggles. “Oh my God, so evil,” one of them says.

Another holds up two hands in surrender and squeals, “Rescue me, Faye! I’m your damsel in distress!”

A third leans back on the bed and pretends to struggle against an invisible enemy. “Help,” she moans, “I’m… being… feminised… right now!”

“Shut up,” another says, leaning forward to swat her on the knee. “You picked those stupid socks out yourself.”)

“Of course,” Faye continues, meeting first Melissa and then Shahida’s eyes and shrugging, “the girls I’d want to rescue are already all here, and they’re being—” she raises her voice, in volume and pitch, “—super annoying! So maybe I’d just leave them here.”

(“Guys, stop it!” the girl on the bed stage-whispers. “We’re embarrassing Faye in front of the crazy lady!”

“Melissa’s not crazy, Mia,” the first girl says. “She’s passionate.”

“Well, I think it’s romantic,” says the damsel in distress, hugging a cushion.

“She’s not in love with Steph, Aisha. They’re, like, sisters, or something.”

“I don’t mean romantic like that, I mean romantic like, you know, throwing everything away on a quest to save someone. It’s epic. Like an old movie.”

“Okay. That’s it. Get the pillows.”)

“Sorry,” Faye says, “I’m needed. Pillow fights get messy without even teams. I hope you get a good night’s sleep, Melissa. We’ve apparently—” she air-quotes, “—‘defeated the soundproofing’, so just ping me on Consensus if we’re keeping you up. I don’t have a surname yet, but I’m the only Faye in the directory.”

“Have a good pillow fight,” Melissa says to the closing door.

“She doesn’t have a surname yet?” Shahida says.

“They— We have to pick a new one. You can’t keep your old one, obviously — hence Haverford — and there’s a big book of safe names, somewhere. Ah; here we are.”

The door just before the corner, labelled Stephanie, opens to Melissa’s thumbprint and reveals a room that’s bigger than Faye’s but not enormous, with a second door inside that Shahida assumes leads to the ensuite. She deposits her tray of hot chocolates on the dresser so she can claim a bean bag chair and give Melissa, who looks more tired by the minute, the bed. Melissa, having stood back to let Shahida through, toes the door closed, dumps her luggage and bag by the wardrobe, kicks off her shoes, and drops face first onto the mattress. A muffled giggle follows, which confuses Shahida until Melissa rolls over and sheepishly rubs one of her breasts, through her clothing.

“I never got out of the habit of just flopping into bed,” she says, “and I still get sore around here sometimes, so…”

Shahida, eyes wide, nods. Yeah. She cured herself of the same habit during puberty, for the same reason, but it took a while. She laughs suddenly, the realisation hitting her for the dozenth time and with absolute clarity that Melissa is alive, and she’s the person she used to see sometimes when Mark could fully let go, and with a lightness in her chest she retrieves the hot chocolates and passes one of the mugs over.

“‘ROGB: Rapid Onset Girl Basement,’” Melissa reads off the side of hers. “I thought you said you knew where the normal mugs were, Shy.”

Shahida snorts. “Yeah, but they’re no fun.” She rotates hers so Melissa can see the slogan: Boys Will Be Boys (Without Prompt Intervention), superimposed over a silhouette of a man, circled and crossed out in red.

“Oh my God,” Melissa says. “I should have known you’d get into the mugs.” She shuffles up on the bed, displacing pillows and plush toys, and pats the mattress next to her, nodding when Shahida frowns questioningly. “It’s weird with you all the way over there.”

That’s good, right? The whole time Shahida’s been worrying that Melissa won’t want her close for some reason, that Abigail provides for all her emotional needs, that the hug and the other brief contacts they shared were one-time deals… so this is good. She scrambles to her feet, carefully holding the mug out in front of her, with another hand underneath when it threatens to spill, and climbs onto the bed, reaching forward to put her drink on the table so she can flop forward onto the pillows, turn over, and shimmy up the headboard. She feels playful; she feels seventeen again.

It helps that Melissa’s been smiling at her. “What?” Shahida asks, when she’s in position.

Melissa runs a hand through her hair, and she looks so much like she did that night at Amy’s. Except her hair’s loose and longer than it ever was, her cheeks are more full, she’s had some work done on her face, she looks smoother and softer and she has breasts… Fine. She looks different. But she feels like the same person to Shahida, the person she understands at last is and always was a girl, who related to her like a girl, who might just have loved her like a girl.

Who might still, with time.

“It’s just… It’s nice to see you,” Melissa says, and then shakes her head and laughs at herself. “Understatement. It’s amazing to see you. And you’re just like I remember, Shy. You move like you always did. You talk the same. It’s like nothing’s changed.”

Shahida smiles and pokes at her belly. “Some things have changed.” She’s bigger than she used to be, but she likes the extra weight.

Melissa giggles and pokes herself in the chest. “Two can play at that game,” she says.

Can I join in? she wants to say, and she swallows it. She might feel seventeen again, but she’s not, and twenty-five-year-old Shahida is better at controlling her impulses. Mark always responded oddly to her playful flirting, and now that she knows why, she’s angry at her past self for ignoring the signs and indulging herself anyway. No, she’s going to be careful, the way she always wanted to be, and being careful is emphatically not flirting on their first evening together. They haven’t even talked about sexuality yet! Melissa probably thinks of her as the same straight girl she always claimed to be, and if she flirts with her…

If Shahida flirts with her, Melissa will think she still sees her as a boy. And that could hurt.

She sips at her hot chocolate instead, and Melissa does likewise. It’s warm in Stephanie’s room, and pleasingly decorated, and with the white noise from the rain battering at the window it’s among the most comforting places Shahida’s ever been. She smiles at Melissa again, wriggles her shoulders against the headboard, and grins when Melissa copies her.

It’s nice.

It’s so bloody nice.

“You don’t have to say or do anything, you know,” she says, into the companionable silence. “The girls have given me enough to think about. You don’t have to talk about any of it if you don’t want to. You can just… hang out.”

Melissa nods slowly. Drinks some more hot chocolate. “What do you think of the girls?”

Shahida breathes out carefully, watches the ripples in her mug. “When Paige told me about who she is — or, actually, who she used to be — I expected that to affect how I looked at her. But, you know, it just didn’t. I like her. I like Tabitha; I like Victoria. I like Lorna, although she’s not from here.”

“She’s not? Which one is she?”

“She’s dating Victoria.”

“And Victoria is…?”

Shahida giggles. “Victoria’s Vicky; I just think she looks like a Victoria. Elegant, you know? She’s the third year who isn’t a third year. She finished the programme in two years, moved out, and started dating Lorna. And a couple of weeks ago — less a few days, I think — they had this whole disaster I don’t know much about, which ended up bringing Lorna into the fold. She’s quite the ambassador on Vicky’s behalf. And between them they seem to know everyone.”

Melissa nods, and that doesn’t seem unusual until she doesn’t say anything, just keeps rocking her head. She sets down her mug on the table beside her and pulls her knees up so she can hug them.

“Em?” Shahida says. “Em, what is it?”

It comes out in whispers. “That’s all stuff I could have done. If I hadn’t been so stubborn. If I hadn’t been so stupid.” She relaxes a little, lets her legs sag, leans against the headboard and looks sideways at Shahida. “It wasn’t just you I ran from. I ran from everything. From my own shit. From Mum. From Dad and Russ and my whole life. And then, here, I had as little to do with everyone as I could, and I signed myself up to be a stupid fucking cis girl and I ran from here, too. I keep—” she slaps her knee in time with the words, “—making things hard for myself. Because I don’t stick around to make things work. I just… run. And before I know it I’m faking being cis around a boss who’s a trans man and I’m trying to date but I can’t because I’m scared of being seen and understood and— and fucking real. Shy, I am so stupid and so prone to overreacting I saw Steph’s name on a screen and drove all the way down here to get her out without stopping to think for even a second, and the only way that deviates from my usual shit is that I was running to and not from for once.”

“Hey,” Shahida says, when the words dry up and Melissa’s left staring at nothing, looking past her into places Shahida doesn’t want to visit, “you’re being way too hard on yourself, Melissa. And even if all that’s true, you can just stop running. You’re home, or whatever this place is, and it’s not all that scary here, really—”

“Shy—”

“It’s not! Tabitha locked me in and for a split second I was worried and then she made me tea and fed me croissants and was pretty apologetic about the whole thing; and Steph’s here, Em. Steph’s here, and I’m here, and— and Abby’s here, and you don’t need to run. You don’t need to pretend to be a stupid cis girl—”

“—sorry—”

“—and you don’t need to be on your guard. You can just… be.”

There’s another gasp from next to her and Melissa’s gaze refocuses on her, and before Shahida knows it Melissa’s reaching for her and wrapping her so tightly in a hug it takes her a second to rearrange her limbs so she won’t pinch a nerve, because the last thing she’s going to do is let go of this beautiful, sweet, damaged girl ever, ever again.

 

1986 February 14
Friday

They brought in the new mirror last week. Toughened glass or something, so he can’t ever do again what he threatened to do with the old one. They don’t know it was only a bluff, the last thing he had left to damage them with after his failed attempt to get at Karen’s carotid artery with a shard of broken glass. Four of them to tackle him; overkill, obviously, but clearly it’s important to them that he not turn any weapons he might find on himself, and that’s useful to know.

Truth be told, he only shattered the old mirror because of what he saw in it. Everything else had just been opportunistic. Satisfying to cut the bitch Karen, though, in the same way she delights in cutting him. She loves to threaten his veins, loves to dig into his wrists, loves to restrain him and kiss him and touch him in the places they’ve mutilated him; loves to hold his life in her hands.

He got her in the shoulder. He hopes it scars.

And now he has a mirror he can’t break.

What he sees: a beautiful woman, with blonde hair almost to her shoulders, a choppy fringe cut to her eyebrows, an artfully sculpted face, and the remains of messy colour only partly wiped from her lips. She’s slight-hipped and slim-shouldered, stands on crooked legs and shivering ankles, and wears a soft green nightgown draped over her small breasts. Some of the cuts on the back of her wrist have opened up again, staining the hem of her gown and smudging her palms red.

When he first saw her he despaired, for he understood then that there was no way back. She’s everything they’ve taken from him.

The other girl consoled him. Offered him a rare moment of comfort in this nightmare. And then, like the others, she was taken away.

All the girls who were here when they brought him in, all the girls who were once like him, are gone.

Except he’s not much like him any more, either.

She consoled him because once you’re ready, once you’re healed, once you’re done, you don’t have long. She looked at him with death already clouding her eyes and made him promise to defy them to the end and he didn’t even see them take her away. Her room was just empty, the door open and the few books and other scraps she’d accumulated cleared out.

She never even had a name.

But despair can’t last down here. Dwelling on it will kill you as surely as the bitches upstairs eventually will take you away. He wished her a quick and painless end, and did his best to forget her.

That was two days ago.

“Vincey-boy!”

The shout’s accompanied by a banging on his door, intended presumably to wake him up; pointless, since he barely sleeps and Karen knows that, but sometimes she gets it into herself to pretend to be civil, to knock before entering, to allow him to clothe himself, and today might be one of those days. It usually presages other forms of unpleasantness, but he’ll take the little reprieves where and when he finds them.

He coughs before he answers, forces some bile into his throat. He’s been experimenting with his voice, with projecting it the way his old singing teacher taught him, but he doesn’t want them to know. The last girl gave him the idea. Defy them to the end, she said; well then. He knows there’s one thing they don’t want from him.

Idiots should have put microphones in the rooms.

“I’m awake,” he yells. Good. Just as deep as always.

Karen kicks the door open. It crashes into the concrete wall and rattles there, loud enough to wake the whole floor, if there were anyone left but him. Karen’s in her tweed, a class affectation as fake as her accent, and he hides his irritation; dressing up usually means guests, and guests usually means he has to perform for them. Put on something titillating, serve drinks, answer any question put to him in his man’s voice for their tittering amusement. Display the only parts of Vincent that are left, for their arousal. Sometimes they masturbate. Sometimes they involve him in their debasements.

“But you’re not dressed, are you?” Karen announces, glaring at him. “Come on. To the back with you.”

He complies, stands with his back to her at the far end of the room, hands flat against the wall, head down. Making himself safe so she can rummage through his clothing chest.

“Did you shave, boy?” she demands.

“Yes,” he says. She doesn’t mean his face. It doesn’t need it any more.

“Then dress yourself.”

She drops her choices for him on his bed board and leans against the door, clearly planning to watch him change out of his nightgown. She’s like the rest of them: obsessed with his body, with the alterations they’ve made to it, with the changes that continue to happen. She’s got a sheaf of photos, some of them candids from the cameras behind cages in the main room, some of them posed, and she likes to show them to him in order; a sadist’s flip book.

See your shame, she tells him. So he pretends to.

He hates what they’ve done to him, but simply having been made to look like a woman is nothing to be ashamed of. He’d ask his mother why English women are like this, if they hadn’t had her killed.

He dresses. She has at least selected for elegance today: a black skirt with a wide belt, cut to below the knee but tight enough to slightly restrict his movement, a white blouse with billowed shoulders, and white sandals with a low heel. She’s put out his makeup colours as well, and sneers at him as he paints his face. They think he should be ashamed of this, too.

When he’s done, he stands, examines himself from head to toe in the shatter-proof mirror. His hair falls easily and is controlled with a little finger combing, so he considers himself finished, and turns around to be evaluated.

“You’re like Lady Di fucked Stevie Nicks, Vincent,” Karen says. “We are fucking artists.”

He winces when she uses that name, and her smile deepens. She loves that. Loves to feel like it harms him whenever she uses it. Loves to imagine that the dichotomy between body and name causes him pain. But it means nothing any more, and describes someone long dead; she could name him anything and it would mean the same. But she likes to hurt him, and she thinks it a weapon, so when she calls him by that name he winces, and he controls her, just a little.

She beckons him to follow, and even though she’s walking ahead of him, he can picture her glee at the sounds his heels make on the concrete. Every artefact of femininity she forces onto him gives her shivers of pleasure. Childish impulses in adult bodies, all of them. This prison is a playground for cruel and artless English girls who never tired of crushing bugs with rocks.

The underground area’s laid out around an L-shaped central corridor, which tapers off past the bedrooms into an eventual exit to somewhere unknown, and which terminates just past the main room in a double-locked iron door blocking the stairs up into the main building. Some old hospital for the rich and secretive, Karen said on one of her more loquacious days. It hasn’t officially served patients for many years but — and she made snipping motions with her fingers — they keep the equipment bang up to date. That was a month before they operated on his face.

Karen leads him off the main corridor and into the central room, an ugly affair of benches and seats and restraints and discarded devices, somewhere he and his fellow girls are allowed to congregate after hours; somewhere they are abused.

Dorothy’s there, waiting in the centre of the room. All up in her tweeds, too; another wannabe aristocrat. And with her, bent under her hand even though he’s taller than anyone else present, is a boy. He’s skinny, malnourished even, and his messy black hair’s pushed back from his face with the remains of whatever product he had in it when they took him. It has a blue sheen, suggesting hair dye, and a ragged cut; probably doesn’t quite reach his eyes when brushed flat. He has healing puncture marks in his earlobes and one eyebrow; they’ll have removed his piercings when they brought him here.

But it’s his eyes that are inescapable. The fury in them, the sheer, concentrated hatred.

And the beauty. The boy’s eyes shimmer in the light, green-grey and sparkling with tears, flicking around the room, searching for answers. Or escape, perhaps.

He’s breathtaking. The boys they take always are. Except for the one who’d been Vincent, who used to regard his reflection with the interested indifference of one who planned to age into his looks. He still doesn’t know why they bothered with him, why they didn’t kill him with his parents, especially since Karen took pleasure in informing him just how much work it took to make something pretty out of him, and how much money. Their jobs are so much easier if the boys are already delicate and feminine.

The boy is these things and more, and can’t have been able to put up much of a fight when they took him. Although the bruises blossoming ugly on his exposed arms and upper body suggest he tried, anyway. Good for him.

“Vincent!” Dorothy commands. “Attend!”

He steps forward, realising as he does so that Karen’s hand is around his upper arm, the better to control him, and he fights off a sneer. This is not the time to try anything stupid.

The boy’s eyes bore into him. Probably trying to work out if he’s prisoner or captor. Either that, or trying to puzzle out why Dorothy used a man’s name for him.

“This,” Dorothy says, “is David. He belongs to Frankie.” She nods sideways, and he spots the ginger one lounging by the entrance, twirling her weapon around one finger. She’s clumsy; he hopes she drops it and zaps herself. “But while he is down here, he is your responsibility.”

“Mine?” he asks. Shit. The golden rule: say as little to the bitches as possible. Karen giggles at him; the boy doesn’t react except to frown slightly.

“Yeah,” Frankie says loudly, her crass voice carrying as it always does. “Yours. Idiot boy.” She’s the odd one out amongst them all, the only one who doesn’t pretend to an aristocratic accent, but he doesn’t like her any more for it.

“He’s a little older than we normally do,” Dorothy says, twisting the boy in her grasp like an attractive ornament she wishes to show off, “but just look at him! Frankly, I couldn’t resist.”

Karen leans closer and whispers, “Happy Valentine’s,” before releasing him. She’s still laughing, and he wants to puncture her pleasure somehow, perhaps by prodding at her bandaged shoulder, but that would not end well, not for him, not for the boy.

“Make sure he knows what’s expected of him,” Dorothy says, turning to leave. “Oh,” she adds, “and do ensure he’s properly dressed. Or you know what happens.”

He nods as the women file out, leaving him alone with the boy.

The first time they gave him the run of the place, after they turfed him out of his cell with no more instruction than to comport himself appropriately, the four girls lounging despondently in the main room descended upon him and greeted him with sympathy and compassion, and when he asked why he’d been imprisoned with four beautiful women they informed him, sadly, that that is not what this place is for.

“It’s a toy factory,” one of them said, “and we’re the toys.”

“So are you, now, sweetheart,” another said.

“We’ll teach you how to live with it,” the third said. “At least for as long as you can.”

The fourth said nothing, but embraced him and cried on his shoulder.

They cared for him, they taught him, and they were taken away.

Looks like that’s his job now. He steps forward, holds out a hand.

“You don’t need to be scared of me,” he says, leaning into the accent Karen keeps trying to beat out of him, the better to differentiate himself from their captors. “You’re… David?”

“Davy,” the boy says.

The boy hasn’t taken his hand yet, so he takes another slow, careful step forward. Eventually Davy accepts it and he guides the boy to one of the clumps of chairs in the far corner of the main room. It’s minimally comfortable, with cushions and a handful of books, the bitches upstairs having presumably realised that you need to provide some entertainment or your prisoners will lose themselves before you’re done having fun. He sits, crossing his legs at the knee in the manner that’s become unnervingly comfortable ever since he healed from their first mutilation. Davy sits to attention, like a schoolchild.

Start with the basics.

“How old are you, Davy?”

“Twenty-one.”

A stab of jealousy. At least the boy got to finish his teenage years. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

Davy stares at him.

“What does it matter?”

“Indulge me.”

“Why do you sound like that? And why’s your name Vincent?”

He frowns. “What’s the last thing you remember, Davy?”

“I was at home,” Davy says, sullen, “with Mum. I just got off probation. We were going to celebrate. She went out for food. She was only gone ten minutes. Then the doorbell went and then I was fighting for my fucking life. And then I was here.”

It takes a heavy breath to get him through what he needs to say next. “Davy… how long have you been here?”

The boy shrugs. “Woke up about an hour ago with that old woman in my face. One of the other ones, the ginger one, she brought me food, then they dragged me in here.”

Damn it.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. How do you feel? Any… unusual sensations?”

Another shrug. “Not really. Bollocks are kind of itchy.”

Double fucking damn it. There goes any hope that they haven’t done to Davy what they did to him…

“Seriously,” Davy says, “who the fuck are you?”

They can break someone in a year. It’s a common boast of Dorothy’s, one she likes to relay with embellishments to the drunken old fucks she makes him serve sometimes. And she’s been right so far, or close enough: the girls who were taken from him had been here a maximum of fourteen months; enough time for their surgeries to heal — or heal enough — and for a course of hormone treatment to soften them up, the way Dorothy prefers.

But the other girls all gave up.

If today’s Valentine’s 1986, then it’s been almost a year for him. A year of abuse, of mutilation, of unending degradation… and he’s still fighting. Not in the way the other girls fought, because Dorothy and her bitches are ready for that. He’s fighting simply by refusing to become what they want, and he knows they’re starting to see it.

He won’t be humiliated. He won’t be made ashamed. And maybe, from now on, he won’t react to the name they use for him, either.

How long can he last? Because now he has someone to protect. Someone to help. Someone who might be able to fight them the way he’s learning to.

It’s been a year and they haven’t broken him? He decides, right here, right now, that they’re never going to. And the agitated innocent in the chair next to him, glaring fear and confusion with those beautiful eyes?

They’re not fucking breaking him, either.

 

2019 December 13
Friday

It’s satisfying to lie here, one arm around her, feeling her belly rise and fall in slow time with her deep breaths and her whimpered snores, and to do so without conflict, without confusion. He knows exactly who she is. She’s not a girl through adaptation, like Maria or Monica or the other women here; she’s a girl because she’s always been one. She’s a girl no-one could see, and she unveiled herself here, in this absurd place.

She showed herself to him. How could he be angry about that? How could he deserve to be angry about that?

Aaron chooses to feel special instead. Because she picked him.

She picked him, despite everything. Despite all he’s done, despite his behaviour towards her, despite—

No.

She knows. That was the point of telling her, yes? That was the point of fucking bleeding out in her bed, telling and retelling the stories of the women and girls he’s wronged. The final challenge, the one which nearly killed him when he faced it himself: know me; know all of me.

She saw his remorse. She saw how absolutely and completely the knowledge had broken him. She saw his determination, raw and unsteady and new but real, to mend himself, to make something out of the wreckage of Aaron Holt.

God, he hopes that’s what she saw. But she fell peacefully to sleep in his lap; she wouldn’t do that if she hated him, right? He told her everything, or as much as he could, and she persisted in looking at him like he’s someone.

Steph fell asleep in his lap and he lay back and stroked her hair and watched the movie Maria picked for him and tried very, very hard not to cry at all the stupid romantic bits. She messaged him when it was done, asking if he wanted her to put something else on, but he said it was fine, and wished her goodnight, and she sent him a hug emoji.

All of this is so new. How ridiculous to feel at peace in the place that imprisons him.

So now he lies sleepless in his friend’s bed, with his arm around her, to make certain she doesn’t turn over in her sleep and fall, and thinks about mermaids.

Everything’s a lesson down here. Everything’s a tool. Even the accidents; especially the accidents. Steph being here in the first place, a trans woman thrown to the misanthropic, misogynist and occasionally outright violent wolves: a tool. A lever. If Maria’s to be believed, not one they even knew about for a while, but a tool nonetheless; a moderating influence on the boys. It had worked on him! And Maria’s attack: another tool. Aaron had been forced to undergo Indira’s tender ministrations, and face up to the ugly implications of his own grim satisfaction at seeing Maria hurt. Not something a good man would enjoy.

And now here’s the bloody Disney cartoon. He wondered as he watched who he was supposed to identify with. Is he the Prince, centre of a love story that becomes convoluted when the full details of the girl’s backstory are revealed? Or is he Ariel, asking the impossible — to walk on land; to be forgiven — and trading the only life she knows in return?

He’s not the Prince. The man’s barely a character in his own right, and the love story is almost incidental. He’s just the reason why Ariel chooses voluntarily to sacrifice a part of herself.

So is he the mermaid?

You want dick pics? I’ve got twenty!

Fuck it. Maybe he’s the fish.

Steph grumbles, and he loosens his grip, lets her fidget a little, listens to her mutter something incomprehensible and sweet. Smiles because even in her sleep the voice exercises she’s been doing are changing the way she sounds.

She’s going to be beautiful.

Of course, they say that to him, too.

Maria talked about the voice inside him, telling him he’s a man, telling him men can’t change, but while it’s definitely there, it’s not been the whole of the problem.

It’s the choice. The one that’s implicit in everything Maria’s said, in everything she’s not said, in the evidence of the other girls: Pippa, Tabby, Edy; Steph. Fuck, even the others, the nameless women who help out sometimes, who point tasers and bring food and scowl at him when he cracks jokes. The girls who came down when Maria got hurt — once again his throat almost ruptures at the thought of it; his emotions are so close to the surface these days — like the tall blonde one Steph seems to know. All of them, avatars of the choice. All of them women who, at one point, chose the same thing.

It’s the choice and it’s the only one left: accept it or don’t. Refusing to participate isn’t enough; they’ll just keep injecting him and changing him no matter what, and Maria will be disappointed and Steph will grow distant and they’ll probably bring Indira back to grin at him and feed him through a tube and he’ll be a girl-shaped hole in the world. No.

It’s the choice and he knows what Elizabeth would say, if she somehow knew everything and could still, afterwards, bring herself to speak to him. The only time she ever shouted at him was one afternoon when he was lamenting his awful fucking school. He was complaining like he always did but she was different, and he didn’t see what was going on with her until she raised her voice. Tell your parents you don’t want to go any more, she said. And if they don’t listen, run away from the bloody school! Make them listen! Make yourself a problem and make them or bloody social services solve it! Do the hard thing! She shouted at him and fled to the back room in tears and when he followed her and placed a nervous hand on her shoulder she apologised. They lost the shop barely six weeks later. She must have known what was coming, and still she made time for the windblown rich boy refusing to properly evaluate what’s in front of him. Do the hard thing, Aaron.

It’s the choice and it’s terrifying and it has implications he hasn’t even begun to examine and even though he knows Maria and Steph and all the others will be there for him every step of the way he still doesn’t know if it’s something he can do without losing his mind completely. But Maria said it: it’s not just Steph and the girls he knows; the girls upstairs are rooting for him now. The ones who used to view him with contempt. A family. His for the joining.

It’s the choice and he made it without meaning to. And it’s only now, looking back, here with the girl who might love him curled up in his arms, that he understands how and when he made it. Because the choice to grow, to become someone new, to reject the person he once was and all his excuses and all his bullshit, the choice to live with it, is one and the same as the choice to become like Steph, like Maria. And he rejects the comparison even as he makes it, not because it’s inaccurate but because if he’s going to do it, if he’s really going to do what Maria asks of him, then he’s not going to hide from it any more, especially not in his own head. Yes, he’s going to be like them, but he’s going to be his own person. His own creation.

It’s the choice and he made it.

He’s going to be a fucking girl.

 

1986 September 9
Tuesday

She rarely knows the exact date, but sometimes they give her just enough information to keep track of roughly what time of year it is. She knows when she was brought here, and she knows when Dee got here, and that idiot Frankie was going on about her birthday a few weeks ago, which means it has to be September by now.

She’s beaten Dorothy’s much-vaunted timetable by half a year. She can almost see the bitches getting desperate.

Karen took all her things away, including her clothes. Said they were for visitations only. But camera coverage down here is laughable and their staff of sadists is small enough that she was able, with the help of Dee and one of the new girls, to hide away a few items in a box behind a cabinet in a disused and filthy room a little way past the bedrooms. They’ve even got money in there, and a passport; Frankie was stupid enough to bring her purse down with her a few months back, and the downside of drawing your captive population from the ranks of petty criminals is that some of them can pick pockets.

She closes her eyes for a second. The girl who stole it for her didn’t make it. Learned she was about to go on the table, that the countdown to the end was about to start, and took the other way out. Smart or stupid?

Academic, really. She’s running on guesswork most of the time herself.

At least she doesn’t have to pretend shame to Karen any more. No, she spits the names and the pronouns back in her face. Karen wants him to be humiliated by his woman’s body and his man’s soul? Fine; he’ll embrace the body, he’ll teach himself to revel in it. And he’ll even begin working on the soul. Anything to survive. Nothing else matters.

She still needs a name, though.

“Vincent!”

It’s Karen again, waiting outside her room. The bitch doesn’t even come in here any more, not since it was rendered empty. None of them do. They take away her clothes and make her walk around in underwear and find their pleasures on her body as they like, and still it infuriates them that she refuses to bend to them. The slightest bit of independence is an outrage.

In the corridor she finds her ‘sponsor’ waiting with a sneer and robe, and she is quickly and roughly clothed. Karen hooks an arm around hers and drags her towards the stairs, up through the first basement and into the house proper, through the dining hall and into the corridors at the back of the building that led eventually to the surgical suite, and for a brief moment she’s terrified Dee’s died on the table. The boy’s been up there for days, recovering from facial surgery, and she’s tried not to show it but she’s been scared for him. The bitches have been too successful with him, hurt him too deeply. She’s helped him as much as she can, but there’s a block, something he can’t get past, that’s preventing him from adapting the way she has. She understands — identity is a difficult thing to discard — but it leaves him vulnerable to their manipulations and their scorn.

Maybe he just needs more time. Not something that’s in vast supply here.

“David’s been asking for you,” Karen says, pulling on her arm again to stop her outside the recovery room. “Begging for you, actually. It’s very sad. But Grandmother likes this one. Doesn’t want him to have an episode.” Karen shrugs, with the indifference of one who doesn’t care if any of the girls lives or dies, as long as she can watch it happen. “Fix him.”

“Alone,” she says, and enjoys the deepening of Karen’s scowl. Bitch hates it when she uses her new voice.

“Obviously,” Karen replies in what she likely hopes is a withering tone. She kicks open the door and shoves her charge roughly through, but there’s no time to give consideration to her treatment because there’s Dee, lying there on the incongruous hospital bed and propping himself up on his elbows.

She waits for the door to close before she speaks.

“Hi, Dee.”

The boy has a smile for her. “Hi.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Like someone filled my head with cotton wool and my chest with— uh, what’s a ball that’s bigger than a tennis ball but smaller than a football? Never mind.”

“They won’t feel like that forever.”

“But they’ll be in me forever,” Dee says. “Frankie’s already taken great pleasure telling me how much it cost to make me look like a ‘slag’.”

“Ignore her.”

“You know I can’t.”

She pulls a stool over, sits by the bed with her elbows on the mattress, and takes one of Dee’s hands in hers. “You can. You can embrace this.”

“I can’t. I don’t know how you do it. Fuck—” and he tips his head back, ripping his hand away from hers and grimacing at what’s probably only a fraction of the pain that’s to come, when they take him off the drip, “—they’ve fucking unmade me, Vince! They keep coming at me and taking things and changing things and even before this I didn’t recognise the face in the mirror and now…” He struggles against the short chains that keep his hands away from his face. No touching the merchandise until it’s ready.

“That’s not my name, Dee.”

Dee glares at her. “Yeah, well Dee’s not mine.”

“David is a weapon for them to use against you,” she insists, grabbing at his hands, getting them both under her control, “and so’s your old sex, and so’s your shame, and so’s your ego. You can do what I did. You can just forget it all. You have to, if you’re going to survive this. But more than that, it’s freeing, Dee. And it really, really annoys them.”

“Is that a good thing?” Dee says, irritable but calming down. His complaints never last long; he knows she’s right. He’s just not ready to accept it.

“They’re going to put cigarettes out on your back whatever you do, Dee,” she says. “At least you can make them hate it. Look at how they are with me. They want me to be Vincent. They need it. We’re here at their pleasure, so why not deny it?”

“Because you lose yourself?”

This again. She responds the same way she always does. “What’s left to lose? Half the agony of this place is from trying to hold on to your manhood.”

There’s not much for Dee to say to that. There never is. And he’s so close! What does a construction like manhood get you, anyway, when they’ve taken your balls and reshaped your body and taken a chisel to the bones in your face? How can it possibly help you, at this point? Why not simply let it go?

He looks away and she sighs. It’s easier said than done. She knows that, too.

She expends a lot of effort to seem more comfortable than she is, but the truth is she misses her former self so much that sometimes she thinks she can hear him, scratching at the edge of her consciousness, trying to break back in. But he can do nothing but weigh her down now, and she needs to be nimble to survive. Cut it all away.

There’s only one thing for her to discard.

Vincent’s not her name any more, hasn’t been for a long time, but replacing it’s harder than the pronoun shift, harder than accepting herself as something more akin to woman than man. There’s something so final about it…

And then she laughs at herself suddenly — clamping her teeth shut to keep it inside — because if she can’t take that final step then she has no business berating Dee for his reticence.

At least she’s thought about it. At least she has ideas.

One idea in particular.

She almost laughs again; it seems so simple. Why didn’t she name herself months ago?

She leans forward a little more, lets one of his hands go but keeps the other, squeezes it. “I’ve actually been thinking about names, Dee,” she says.

“Really?”

“I need a new one. I can’t be nobody forever. But I need your help.” She doesn’t, but she wants to involve him. Wants him to see naming yourself as something powerful, perhaps even something joyful. She’ll present a choice to him, involve him in the process, and hopefully encourage him to think harder about his future, and the new identity he’ll build for himself. “I have two I’m thinking of,” she says. “Béatrice and Valérie.”

“I like them,” Dee says. “Why those two in particular?”

“Béatrice was the name of my first tutor, when I was young. She was kind, she was pretty—” she grins, “—and she helped me learn your awful language. And Valérie—” now she affects a sigh, deep and mournful, “—was the name of the older sister I never had.”

Dee frowns at her. “What happened?”

“My mother miscarried. And then she had me, and the doctors told her not to risk another. She told me to keep the name for any daughters I might have one day.” She risks a wry smile. “And since I’ll never have any daughters…”

“You should use it,” Dee says quickly. “It suits you. You should be Valerie.”

“Valérie,” she corrects. “You really think so?”

“I do. It’s a shame, though,” he adds, frowning thoughtfully. “Beatrice is such a pretty name. Especially the way you say it. Maybe you should keep it for a middle name.”

A pretty name, is it? “I don’t need two.” She stands, leans down to whisper in his ear. “I think you should have it. If you want it.”

His breath catches in his throat and she knows he’s considering it, and even if it’s only for a moment it still feels significant. She wills him to take the name, to embrace it. Tries to imagine what he could be, free of this place. If they were free of this place together…

Valérie rises, remains close enough almost to kiss him, and watches as his wide eyes lock with hers.

“Think about it,” she says. “Béatrice.”

 

2019 December 13
Friday

She wakes in the morning to Melissa, standing in the light streaming through the window and repeatedly interrupting her sunshine halo as she rubs her hair dry with a powder blue hand towel. She’s brushing her teeth with her other hand and staring at a random patch of wall as she does so, and she’s not noticed Shahida’s awake, so Shahida can watch her do her thing.

Melissa’s dressed in simple clothes, although whether they’re from her suitcase or borrowed from Stephanie’s wardrobe Shahida has no idea. She’s wearing loose jeans and a high cut grey top that exposes her shoulders and, damn, she’s still thin, but it works for her, and Shahida’s almost hypnotised by the little motions she makes as she cleans her teeth and dries her hair. It’s like Rach’s bedroom all over again, with Shahida borderline obsessed with every movement Melissa makes; this time, though, Shahida’s not going to push, and Melissa’s not going to run.

Eventually she’s caught staring.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” Melissa says, surprisingly articulate despite the mouthful of toothbrush. She balls up her towel under one arm, raises a finger to ask Shahida to wait, and darts back into the bathroom. After a few seconds of spitting and rinsing, she emerges, damp but unencumbered. “How did you sleep?”

“I slept well,” Shahida says, choosing not to mention how disappointed she was that, despite both of them having fallen asleep together, when Shahida woke up in the middle of the night, Melissa had moved to the couch. She’d even found a blanket from somewhere, now carefully folded up. “Better than I’ve slept in a long time, actually,” Shahida admits.

“Oh?”

She can’t say what she wants to say: that even after she finally moved on, sometimes, late at night, she couldn’t help but remember the dead, and wonder if there was something she could have done, wonder if something else could have happened instead of the obvious, the inevitable. On those nights she barely slept, and she’s had a lot of them since coming back to England.

Instead she forces a laugh. “I think I dreamed that this—” she waves an arm at Melissa, the room, the building, “—was all just something I imagined.”

Melissa smiles, and turns to rummage in one of Stephanie’s drawers. “It does have a sort of unreal quality to it, doesn’t it?” she says, straightening up and looking for a wall socket for the hair dryer she’s found. She pauses in her search, meets Shahida’s eyes, and adds, “It’s really good to see you too, Shy. I think I said that a lot last night, but it is. It won’t ever stop being good to see you. It’s amazing, actually.”

Shahida’s glad the stunned silence is broken by Melissa blow drying her hair, because there’s nothing she can say to that.

It’s not that she expected Melissa to be mad at her, even though part of her, for the longest time, has thought that an entirely appropriate response to her ham-fisted adolescent meddling. It’s that in some way everything since then has been shaped around the hole Mark’s death punched through her. Her achievements, her relationships, her life have all been in part in his memory, and now here she is, walking around the room brushing her hair and looking for all the world like a Disney princess threw on jeans and a t-shirt for an incognito trip to the mall.

Changed utterly, and yet still exactly the same.

‘Amazing’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Shahida resorts to the banal. “What’s the time?” she asks, when Melissa starts carefully putting the hair dryer away.

“Um,” Melissa says, looking around for a phone and failing to find one. “A little after eight, probably?”

“Eight? Neither of us have anything in particular to do today, do we?”

“Not as far as I know,” Melissa says with a shrug.

“Then why are you dressed and ready at eight in the morning?”

Melissa taps at her bare cheek. “I’m not quite ready yet. But it’s wise to be awake. The day starts early around here, especially on this floor, and I thought you might want to have a chance to get your shit together before the inevitable— Too late!”

As if scripted, there’s a knock at the bedroom door. Melissa grins and shakes her head, glances over at Shahida to check on her — she’s still in bed but she’s sitting up and she’s got on a baggy sleepshirt she found in a drawer; she’s fine — and runs her hand through her hair before she opens the door. Strands of golden blonde shimmer through her fingers and cascade over her shoulders and Shahida shakes herself: she’s got to stop finding every damn thing the girl does unspeakably hot or she’ll never make it to lunchtime.

It’s Faye again, once more heading up a small crowd of girls who, Shahida gets the strong impression, would be clambering over each other to see inside were they not also, between them, carrying pastries and mugs of coffee and other items of breakfast paraphernalia.

“Morning, Faye,” Shahida says, waving.

They’re all in various states of night dress — the same things she saw them in last night, actually; they must have had a sleepover or something — and at least two are yawning, but they manage to enter with their cargo and drop it off on the bedside table without spilling anything. When Faye takes a step back they all step back with her, almost but not quite out into the corridor.

“I made the croissants,” says one. “I made them yesterday, so they’re not the most fresh, but they should still be pretty good.”

“They’re amazing,” another one says. “Aisha’s just modest.”

“Modesty’s a virtue, dork,” Aisha says, and a minor scuffle precipitates at the rear of the group.

“I made the coffee,” Faye says. “But it’s just instant. The machine’s busted, and the other machine’s busted, and someone didn’t wash the cafetiere—” two of the girls point, giggling, at the one wearing a light pink hoodie and stripy socks, “—and I didn’t want to bug Christine this early to see if we could use the one from her kitchen. So. Instant.”

“Instant’s fine,” Melissa says. “Thank you. All of you.”

Shahida has to ask. “Do you always travel as a pack?”

The one standing next to Faye, the one who brought the milk jug, replies, “Not always. But you’re interesting! And it’s been a while since anything new happened here. Just Steph a little while ago, and then a whole lotta nothing.”

“Didn’t you all get…?” Shahida doesn’t want to say forcibly remade, but she waves her arms around a little and the girls seem to get it.

“Yes,” the one in the hoodie says, “but that was ages ago.”

It takes a couple of minutes for the girls to file out, still talking amongst themselves and breaking off into smaller groups, presumably returning to their own rooms to get dressed, and Melissa can’t hold in the giggles, which burst out into laughter just after the door closes.

“Oh my God,” she wheezes, sitting heavily on the bed next to Shahida, who shuffles up to give her space, “oh my God…”

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” Melissa rubs at her chest. “It just… It makes me so happy to see that.”

“What? The girls?”

“Yes,” Melissa says. She’s got her breath back and she’s grinning at Shahida, who is still dealing with her annoyingly persistent disbelief that the pack of giggling schoolgirls used to be boys. “We weren’t like that in the second year. I mean, I wasn’t, obviously, but even Nell and her lot… It took them a lot longer to get used to things. And it makes me think…”

Shahida touches the tips of Melissa’s fingers, to prompt her. “Yes?”

“Maybe this place got better. I want it to be better, and my intake was a long time ago. Maybe the sponsors are just better at it now. I hope so.” She presses herself into the soft headboard, stretches, and picks up her coffee mug. Plain, this time; disappointing. “I want this place to be good, Shy. They always said they were helping the other girls. And they were, sure, but it took a long time. And a lot of pain. I think… I think I want this place to feel like home. Abby’s here, and Steph’s here, and you know about it, and… I just want to have what Abby has here. What Steph’s building here. What the second years have. I want to get to know Christine. I want to try to connect with my intake. I want a family, Shy. I want it so much.”

Shahida takes her hand again, curls her fingers around her wrist. “I think you can have it,” she says. “Everyone I’ve talked to wants you to have it. No-one seems interested in punishing you for what happened yesterday, and my overall impression is that a lot of the girls find you kind of… interesting? They want to get to know you, anyway. I think, if you asked for a room on a more permanent basis, or even just for permission to visit more, or however it works, they’d give it to you without a second thought.”

“You’re probably right,” Melissa says, leaning against her. “The longer I’ve been away, the more my memory has populated this place with monsters. But they’re just people. So maybe the problem’s me. Maybe it wasn’t always, but maybe now it is.”

“You’re not a problem,” Shahida insists. “You’ve just had a hard time.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Keep telling me that. Every half hour or so, please.”

Shahida laughs. “It’s actually weird how normal this place feels. Ignoring the locks and the silly mugs and what I know is going on in the basement… Once or twice I’ve thought it was all a conspiracy, quickly whipped up, to make me, personally, believe everyone here is just a normal but kind of neurotic woman. Paige and Christine, Lorna and Vicky, the sponsors working away on their computers, all the second years, last night and this morning… No-one seems like they’re here against their will. And that, in itself, feels a little suspicious? And then I feel very stupid for thinking that,” she adds, releasing Melissa and fetching her own coffee before it cools, “because everyone here quite clearly is a normal but kind of neurotic woman.”

“Don’t forget the nonbinary grads,” Melissa says, sipping from her mug.

“You have those?”

“Oh, a bunch.”

“They’re still neurotic, though, right?”

“A hundred percent of them, probably.” Melissa frowns. “I really wish I’d gotten to know my lot more.”

“So do it now. You’re back; take advantage of that! Message people. Say hi. Bury the hatchet.”

“The scalpel,” Melissa corrects.

“Em,” Shahida says, “that’s so crass.”

“Hey, you liked the mugs…”

Shahida hops into the shower after coffee, and Melissa waits just outside the bathroom, keeping her company, letting the steam out of the window, and passing her a towel when she’s done, with respectfully averted eyes.

Shahida doesn’t have a change of clothes with her, and she’s still taller than Melissa, so she borrows a top from Stephanie’s wardrobe to go with her trousers. Melissa does her makeup while Shahida dries her hair — and, goodness, it’s fun and a little bizarre to watch Melissa paint her face with confidence and competence — and then they swap places, with Shahida at the vanity applying slightly more makeup than she generally wears and Melissa sitting beside her on the couch, talking about nothing.

It’s like the old days, except Shahida isn’t worried about her any more, and Melissa’s free.

“Oh, hey,” Melissa says, as Shahida’s finishing up and contemplating going upstairs to disturb Christine so they can borrow the third years’ coffee maker, “your phone just lit up.”

Shahida makes gimme gestures, and Melissa feigns reluctance, getting up from the couch and retrieving the phone from the bedside table. Shahida wants to lean up and kiss her as she hands it over — it would be the most natural thing in the world — and frowns at herself in the mirror instead. Go slow, Shy.

Rachel Gray-Wallace
Shy I read your crazy email

what the hell is going on?

are you okay?

is someone after you?

is someone from THE UNIVERSITY after you?

why would a university be after you?

and why wouldn’t you be able to contact me after last night?

Shy?

SHAHIDA????

Shahida
I’m here, I’m here. I was putting my face on.

Rachel Gray-Wallace
okay cool good for you although istr that takes you like two minutes tops and I’ve been messaging you for half an hour

Shahida
I did a little more than usual! I wanted to look nice!

And I had a shower and had to dry my hair.

And WHY did you read the email?

Rachel Gray-Wallace
um

you sent it to me

so I opened it

that’s what you do with emails I’m pretty sure

Shahida
It said DO NOT OPEN UNLESS YOU DON’T HEAR FROM ME on it.

Rachel Gray-Wallace
and?

I didn’t hear from you Shy

Shahida
I left a voicemail!

Rachel Gray-Wallace
oh

I don’t listen to those

does anyone?

I think I have like sixty

all spam

I just swipe the notification away

wait

do americans listen to voicemail?

is this some weird yank habit you’ve picked up, leaving voicemails and expecting people to listen to them?

is that what they do between hamburgers?

Shahida
They don’t eat as many burgers as you might think.

And, no, I suppose they don’t really answer their phones or pick up voicemail.

But you’re a professional woman! Professional women listen to voicemail!

Rachel Gray-Wallace
I love that you think that

Shahida
Anyway, I’m fine, so you can ignore the email. I was just being silly.

Rachel Gray-Wallace
do you want me to copy paste all the paragraphs from your email that don’t support what you just said?

because there are so many

actually

I think that’s maybe the only thing that might persuade me to believe you

no one in actual danger would write such a long email

NINE PARAGRAPHS SHY

NINE

no wait

I’m being stupid

YOU would

you absolutely would pause your investigation of a ~mysterious secret organisation~ to write me a novel about it

I bet even being chased by an axe murderer would only force you down to three paragraphs and a yours sincerely

yeah so I’m back to being suspicious again

Shahida
Rach, please just ignore it, okay?

Rachel Gray-Wallace
I love that you think I can do that

Shahida
Please, Rach.

It’s important.

Rachel Gray-Wallace
WHY’S it important Shy?

what’s going ON?

> Em&Em has joined the chat!

Rachel Gray-Wallace
what

> Em&Em has changed his name to Melissa.

Rachel Gray-Wallace
WHAT

> Melissa has changed her pronouns to she/her.

Rachel Gray-Wallace
WHAT????????

Melissa
Hi, Rach.

“Was that really a good idea?” Shahida asks. Melissa, sitting cross-legged on the bed with a laptop open in front of her, shrugs.

Rachel Gray-Wallace
wtf wtf wtf

Melissa
I’ve missed you.

Rachel Gray-Wallace
shit

babe

WHAT

shit

fuck

Shahida
You need to keep this a secret, Rach.

Rachel Gray-Wallace
yeah yeah yeah I got the whole secrecy gist from your email

just one thing

that’s really you Mark?

oh shit sorry Melissa

but I mean just to be clear you WERE Mark Vogel?

this isn’t a joke or something?

Melissa
It’s not a joke.

It’s really me.

Rachel Gray-Wallace
okay

okay

okay

we need to meet

I’m on campus I’m on campus I’m on campus where are YOU

Melissa points at the screen. “She’s on campus,” she says. “She was always going to open that email, you know.”

“I know,” Shahida says. “I was panicking. Sorry.”

“It’s not like you knew what you were getting into. This is all kind of my fault, anyway. I should have reconnected sooner. Avoided all this.”

“I thought you weren’t allowed?”

“No, but—”

Rachel Gray-Wallace
BITCHES WHERE ARE YOU

DON’T LEAVE ME ON READ, I HAD BREAKFAST AT A WEIRD PLACE THAT BURNS EGGS AND I’M CRANKY AND SUSPICIOUS

NOW I’M JUST WANDERING AROUND

Shahida
Caps.

Rachel Gray-Wallace
stfu

Melissa
Do you know Café One?

Rachel Gray-Wallace
I’ll find it

Melissa
We’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.

 

1987 January 22
Thursday

It’s so fucking hard to move. The bitches upstairs had guests over last night, and while it was one of their look-but-don’t-touch evenings, one of the guests overrode Dorothy — and was able to override her! — and took an interest specifically in Val. He liked to stroke her hair, squeeze her buttocks, slap her, call her Vincent. He used her full old name, too, Vincent Barbier, which she hasn’t heard since her very first days down here. He used it like it was important to him, like just saying it while touching her was a sensual experience to rival the finest wines.

She learned his name, too. Smyth-Farrow. Smyth with a fucking y, like that means anything in this bastardised language except that its bearer is old money and wants everyone in the country to know it.

He asked her how much sensation she still had in her penis and she spat in his face, and that was when Karen hit her.

So many bruises.

She slept in the main room overnight, with Dee and the others, and while everyone else eventually returned to their rooms, Dee stayed, spent an undoubtedly uncomfortable night in a lumpy old armchair, since Val took the only sofa long enough to sleep on. And now she’s stiff, and Dee’s still sleeping, and all she wants is a mouthful of water.

Correction: all she wants is to return in kind every abuse inflicted upon her for the last two years. All she’s likely to get is tepid, metallic water from the fountain in the corner.

If only she can get up off this fucking sofa.

That’s all you want, is it?

Shut up.

I’m offended you don’t want me back.

Shut up and go away. I’m tired and I’m hurting and I don’t want to think about you at all.

Then don’t. And try not thinking about pink elephants while you’re at it.

Fuck off and die again.

With a grunt she pushes up from the sofa, ignores the pain as best she can, staggers across the room while shielding her eyes from the motion-activated lights, and leans heavily on the water fountain.

The water’s horrible, as usual.

Weakling.

The voice isn’t real. She doesn’t hear it, within or without, and the personality it represents is long dead, a relic of the teenager who never got the chance to grow up. But she creates it nonetheless, succumbs irresistibly to the temptation, and the more she pushes back against the parts of herself she needs to forget, the louder she protests, in the voice of the boy she buried.

Failing completely to remake herself. Just another failure among many.

They took another girl away last week. Here one day, gone the next. She still doesn’t know where they go, what happens to them. She hopes they die, quickly and painlessly, but she reminds herself in Vincent’s voice that they probably go to the country manors of merciless bastards like Smyth-Farrow.

She swore to save all of them, to teach them to be like her, and yet she loses them anyway, and inside herself, she rebels. What’s the point of surviving when everyone around you gets taken away?

Moving slowly on bruised and tired limbs, roughly piloting the stranger’s body she’s still doing her best to convince herself is her own, she makes her way back to the sofa and collapses onto it.

She’s losing the fight. If they want her defeated, they almost have her.

At least Dee’s still here. They’ve talked names, several times, and Dee’s rejected them all. Too big a step. But she’s been experimenting with new pronouns, and yesterday morning, before the men came, she asked if Val would teach her to speak the way she does, and shared her plan in whispers. In substance, it’s the same as Val’s: the weak point is when they take you, when they move you out of this concrete prison, so if there’s ever a chance to get away, it’s then. Fail and get killed? You’ve lost nothing. But succeed? Escape? Now you’re a man out in the world who looks like a woman, and if you can’t make yourself also sound like a woman and act like a woman, you’re rolling a set of dice weighted heavily against you.

It’s progress. Maybe Dee can do it even if Val can’t. So she’s going to teach her, and Dee’s going to survive.

 

2019 December 13
Friday

One of the sponsors corners them in the kitchen on their way out. She quickly closes her laptop as they approach — Shahida gets a glimpse of what might be camera feeds — and rises to offer a hand to Melissa, which Melissa can hardly refuse.

“Indira Chetry,” she says. “You probably don’t remember me.”

“Hi.”

“I’m Christine’s sponsor. Or I was. The bloody girl’s so precocious they set her free and now I’m doing odd jobs for Maria, picking up slack, et cetera. I assume I don’t have to give you the lecture about pointing a taser at my Christine, do I?”

“Um,” Melissa says, still limply holding Indira’s hand, “no?”

“Good girl. Don’t do it again.” Indira releases her. “And Shahida! Welcome to England’s premier women’s college.”

“I thought Saints was co-ed?” Shahida says, frowning and borrowing a habitual Americanism.

“Give us time. Now. Girls. Where are you off to?”

Ah. She’ll be the gatekeeper, then. What should they tell her? Are they even allowed to do what they’re about to do?

“Before Shahida knew about us,” Melissa says, stepping subtly between Shahida and Indira, “she sent an email to an old friend. Very vague stuff, no details, but it was suggestive enough that the friend’s come here to make sure she’s okay. So we’re going to do damage control.”

“I see,” Indira says, nodding, her expression neutral. “What’s your plan?”

Melissa runs through it, talking quickly to forestall any objections. There’s a ‘standard story’, which Melissa intends to stick to: she hit rock bottom, she ran out on her degree, she travelled to another city, realised she’s trans, and transitioned with the help of some friends. She’s come back to Saints to visit an old friend; running into Shahida was coincidental. And she never got in touch before because, once she realised she’d been officially declared missing, she decided it was better that way.

“Mark was bad for everyone he touched,” Melissa concludes. “He should stay dead.”

Shahida wants to protest, but Indira preempts her. “Are you okay, Melissa?” she says. “We can send someone to delay your friend if you need some time. Not to delay her in a bad way,” she adds, glancing at Shahida. “They’d just strike up a conversation, buy her a drink, accidentally spill something on her, that sort of thing.”

“I’m okay,” Melissa says, smiling. “This is just bringing up memories.”

“Understandable. Just remember, you have all the resources of this house available to you; you need only call on us. I’ll be on duty all day. Speaking of: do you have the app suite on your phone?” Melissa shakes her head. “Download it soon. Christine can help. In the meantime—” she leans over and reaches into a cloth bag hanging from a peg, “—take this.”

Melissa takes a rather chunky looking phone from her and unlocks it. “Should I, um…?”

“Yes. Hit record now, drop it in your bag and forget about it. It’s in a battery case; it can record all day.”

“It’s going to record us?” Shahida asks. “Isn’t that rather invading our privacy? And Rachel’s?”

Indira, smirk firmly back in place, mimes pulling out a notepad and pen. “‘Invading privacy’…” she mutters to herself, pretending to write it down. “There. Now it’s on the big list of crimes, under ‘kidnapping and mutilation’ but above ‘movie piracy’.” She waves the pretend notepad in the air. “Go! Bring us to justice!” When they just stand there, she shoos them off. “Seriously, it’s fine. I’ll review the recording myself, and delete it when I’m done. Christine can vouch for me.”

“And who vouches for Christine?” Shahida asks.

“Me,” Indira says, and shoos them again. They take the hint this time.

“Are all the sponsors so weird?” Shahida says, after Melissa’s buzzed them out.

Melissa laughs. “Abby’s not weird,” she says, “but she’s not a sponsor any more, so… maybe they are all weird, actually.”

Abby. Yeah. “Will she back us up, if it comes to it? If Indira finds something on the recording she doesn’t like?”

“She will.”

“Will we… see her again?” Will she take you away from me?

“Abby’s giving us some space for the moment,” Melissa says. “We texted a bit, this morning, while you were sleeping. She doesn’t want to be a third wheel. I told her she’s being ridiculous, and that’s when she stopped replying.” She shakes her head, stops still on the path. “I hurt her, Shy. She saved me, and we— we fell in love, and then I ruined it, like I ruin everything.”

“Em, no,” Shahida says.

“It’s okay. I’m not spiralling. I’m better at heading them off than I used to be. Thanks to her, actually. But I’m serious: I hurt her badly by running off. And probably even more by coming back here for Steph and not for her. And yesterday she still helped me, comforted me, and stepped aside so you and I could reconnect. Without her in the way. She’s… she’s fucking selfless, Shy.”

“You’ll talk again,” Shahida says, massaging Melissa’s shoulder, clenching her stomach against the thought of Melissa loving someone else, reminding herself once again that her affection has never brought anything good into Melissa’s life. “You’ll talk again,” she repeats. “She has other friends she can turn to?” Melissa nods. “Then let her. When she’s ready — when you’re both ready — you can fix things.”

“Yeah,” Melissa says. “Yeah. You’re right.”

It makes them a little late, but Shahida keeps Melissa there on the path, in the shadow of Dorley Hall, talking quietly, holding each other, until the smile returns to her face. It feels as natural as breathing.

Rachel meets them outside Café One, runs across the quad towards them and envelops Melissa in the first tackle hug Shahida’s seen in a long time. It doesn’t take Melissa more than a fraction of a second to reciprocate, and when Rach comes up for air her eyes are red and she’s grinning like an idiot.

“Melissa!” she says. “Melissa. Mel-issa. Me-lissa. I’ve been practising under my breath. Good choice of name.”

“Thank you!”

“So now,” Rachel says, “you have to tell me everything about where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing and why—” she leans in and whispers, “—you’re dead.”

“Hi, Rach,” Shahida says, poking at her.

“Hi, stranger.”

“Do you want to go somewhere quiet? To talk?”

Rach jerks a thumb behind her. “We can’t talk in the café?”

Melissa meets Shahida’s eye, and she jerks her head subtly towards her bag, and Indira’s phone. Shahida decides she means that Indira won’t like it if they discuss Melissa’s recent past — or supposed recent past — in a crowded space.

“What about up on the hill?” Melissa says.

Rachel makes a show of looking around. “There’s a hill?”

“Hillock, then. It’s nice. There’s a bench. There are rabbits.”

“Ooh!” Rach squeals, seeming to lose a decade in an instant. She links arms with Melissa, pulls on her, and says, “Take me to the rabbits, Melissa!”

 

1987 August 24
Monday

“You just have to be careful with it.”

Dee waves the hairbrush irritably. “I know. I know. I hate it. I keep thinking I’ll pull the extensions out.”

“I know, sweetheart. But you won’t, not if you’re careful. Here; put your hand in mine.”

Val holds her hand out and Dee, with only a moment’s hesitation, lowers her hand, hairbrush and all, into Val’s palm. She lifts both their hands up and starts brushing through Dee’s hair, detangling the tips first and working up.

Dorothy decided Dee needs hair extensions; her natural hair’s still too short and tends to spike out at all angles. And it fell to Val, who’s been wearing extensions since her third month underground, to teach her how to care for them. She’s wondered if the bitches upstairs have noticed how close she’s become with Dee, or if they care at all. Because this is about as intimate as she’s ever been with anyone.

The other girls have experimented among themselves. And why wouldn’t they? In such a place you find comfort where you can, and homophobia doesn’t last long when the only other people who care if you live or die are other men who look like women. But Val’s never done anything more with the other girls than a little amateur fumbling; first, because she was alone for so long; second, because of Dee.

There’s no pretending she isn’t in love with her.

She guides the brush through Dee’s hair. Carefully does it. The girl’s sitting on the shorter of the two stools in Val’s room, and looks up with her deep grey-green eyes. She’s still wearing a little of the makeup Frankie slathered on her, even though she’s supposed to take it all off before bed; Val’s going to have to take her to the bathroom later on to wash it off. But she’s delaying it, because that will mean the end of the night, and Dee looks irresistible.

They haven’t done anything. Val doesn’t even know if Dee would be amenable, and doesn’t want to ask; Dee’s femininity has developed slowly but surely since her surgeries, and helping her understand and embrace it has been all that’s kept Val going. Arguments with the memory of Vincent; dreams of the day her parents were murdered; open wounds and itching scars. All of it wearing her down. But she keeps it together. For Dee.

She releases Dee’s hand and returns the brush to the utilitarian vanity.

“Thank you,” Dee whispers, in the voice Val’s been teaching her.

“Of course,” Val says, and resists the temptation to reach out and touch her just for the sake of it. Showing her how to care for herself, that’s fine, but she mustn’t indulge herself on the girl. It would be foolish to risk everything on the chance of a night’s pleasure.

She’s beautiful, though. And it’s hateful to see her that way. The boy who was brought here, freshly unmanned and glaring defiance, would not thank her for it. They taunted him when he first woke up after surgery. Told him the things they would force him to endure, so he could pay for the cost of making him beautiful. And that was almost the end for him. It’s only since, with Val’s help, that the girl has recovered some of herself, has found her resilience and her hatred once more, but she still stumbles. Several times Val’s had to help a near-catatonic Dee get dressed or eat, while the bitches watch, amused.

“What will you do,” Dee asks, when everything’s put away, “when you get out?”

It’s not a question; it’s a game, one Dee plays when she doesn’t want the day to end, when she doesn’t want to return to her room and shut herself in, alone with the girl they’ve forced her to become. Val does her best to respond differently every time.

“I will go back to Paris,” she says, “and I will learn to cook. I will apprentice at a terrible restaurant, and when I am good enough I will apprentice at a mediocre restaurant, and when I am—” she laughs at the look on Dee’s face, “—no, listen, when I am good enough I will apprentice at a reasonable restaurant, and when I am good enough I will apprentice at an excellent restaurant. And then—”

“Valerieeeee—”

“—I will open my own restaurant.” She points at Dee. “And I’ll need an apprentice.”

Dee giggles. “Will I have to start at a terrible restaurant first, or can I go straight to yours?”

“You’re making unfounded assumptions about the quality of my restaurant, dear Dee.”

Dee, still laughing, opens her mouth to say something, but the whine of the intercom cuts her off.

“Enough gossiping, boys.” It’s Karen’s voice. The bitches can’t hear them talk, but they can see them now. Innovations. “David, go to your room. Vincent, go to sleep. I have a job for you in the morning and I want you rested and looking your best.”

Val winces, because the fragile state of Dee’s rebellion is always challenged when they assert her maleness, but for the first time Dee doesn’t seem upset. Instead she nods at the crude little camera above the door and stands up from the stool, stumbling on her feet and holding out a hand for Val to steady. She takes it, and Dee falls easily into her embrace.

“Thank you,” Dee says.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m okay. This is helping. You are helping. It’s— I’ve— No-one’s ever been so kind to me, Valerie.”

Val squeezes her, relishing the contact and reminding herself that it’s just a hug: an emotional high, not a sexual one. “You’re a wonderful girl, Dee,” she whispers, and Dee twitches only a little. “And you’re stronger than them.”

“You’re… you’re a wonderful girl, too,” Dee says, stepping back but not releasing her. They stand a forearm apart, holding each other at the elbow.

“Thank you,” Val says, and risks it all, leaning forward to kiss her quickly and lightly on the forehead.

For a moment Dee looks like she might reciprocate, and those grey-green eyes are suddenly intense, stripping Val almost to the bone, but then she smiles, ducks her head, and walks quickly for the door. It closes behind her with a click and Val is alone again, with the girl she’s made out of herself.

 

2019 December 13
Friday

The swimming complex at the university sports centre is no Peri Paradise, but what is? Not even the arguably even more magnificent water parks she visited while in the States could measure up to the domed tropical wonderland she visited when she was thirteen. Understandable; it was her first real holiday; it was her first major outing since Dad died; it was where she met Mark.

Shahida looks over at Melissa, who is currently suffering through a bout of extreme Rachel enthusiasm over which swimsuit she should buy from the shop at the university’s sports centre. Rach is enthusing over a two piece; Melissa’s unsure and clearly needs rescuing, so Shahida steps in and makes her own, considerably more modest suggestions.

Rachel absorbed Melissa’s story with a thoughtful frown and a shrug, and dragged her into another hug when she was done, saying as they embraced that she really needs to meet her wife and what does she do for a living and how long is she in town and does she have a girlfriend or a boyfriend or a theyfriend or any other kind of partner and oh my goodness they need to reconnect with Amy and re-experience the wonder of her parents’ pool. And Melissa made the mistake of mentioning that Saints has its own pool — its own swimming complex, in fact — and from there her fate was sealed.

Shahida hasn’t been swimming in ages.

Whereas Melissa, it turns out, when they burst into the changing rooms together with their newly purchased swimsuits, hasn’t been swimming in more than seven years.

“This is so fucking scary,” she whispers to Shahida, yanking her into the cubicle and confessing.

“Really? Seven years?” It’s hard to imagine.

“Longer. Not since the last time we went to Amy’s together.”

Shahida knots her eyebrows. “How come?” she asks. And then she feels stupid, because the answer’s obvious.

“When you’re early in transition,” Melissa says, as Shahida manages not to berate herself for not guessing slightly faster, “and you’re, um, intact… it can be actively dangerous. So even though I missed it, I just kinda gave up on it.” She shrugs nervously. “And then not swimming became a habit.”

“We don’t have to do this—”

“No. I want to.” Melissa forces a smile. “And so do you. Just maybe stay with me? At least until I get used to it?”

Shahida wraps her arms around Melissa’s shoulders, pulls her in close and holds her, feeling once again fiercely protective. She wants to go back to the Hall and find Abby and shout at her for all the things Melissa’s had to experience, but the more she thinks about it — the longer she holds her — the more she realises that this isn’t a Dorley thing. It’s just a people thing. It’s what people have always been like, when you don’t know them, when you’re marginalised in some way they don’t share; sometimes even when you do know them. Each one a potential threat.

Melissa’s not been able to go swimming…

“Um, Shy?” Melissa says.

“Oh! Sorry!”

Shahida releases her, and she’s half-turned the lock on the cubicle door before a hand on her shoulder stops her.

“Stay?” Melissa says. “Please?”

Dumbly, Shahida nods, and turns around in time to see Melissa turning her back, pulling off her top. She should look away, and she knows it, but she doesn’t, and the lacquered walls of the cubicle are just reflective enough that she’s sure Melissa knows she’s looking.

Without her top on it’s clear that while she’s still thin, she’s not thin the way Mark once was, all ribs and too-taut skin. She’s supple and smooth, and if Shahida had to pick one word, one over all others to describe her, it might be healthy. Or tantalising, perhaps.

Or hot.

Off comes her bra, and Shahida realises that perhaps she should get changed herself, or else Melissa’s going to be standing there in her swimsuit and Shahida’s going to be fully clothed, still staring at her, and won’t that be awkward? So she turns away, strips, and pulls on the black suit she bought, and when she’s done, so’s Melissa, who smiles bravely and poses for her.

Every time she thinks Melissa can’t get more beautiful…

Shahida remembers when she first started thinking of herself as gay. It was after Travis, after Vivek, and after, finally, Austin, who cheated on her with a girl from his gym and who even before that had irritated her with his dull manners and grating, ungenerous spirit.

And she remembers realising that all the short-lived relationships she’d had with men were nothing more than attempts to recapture what she’d had with Mark, to find somehow in someone else the fleeting spark that charged the air between them, that leapt electric from her skin when she touched him, that made her make stupid, reckless decisions, that made her excited to wake up every morning because she might get to talk to him, see him, be with him. Man after man after man, nothing more than a series of disappointing, dispiriting boys.

Maybe Mark had simply been special. Unique. Maybe there were no other men like him, anywhere.

Maybe men were just fucking boring.

And when Austin’s sister Jordan made kitchen cocktails with her and drank in memoriam of her jackass brother’s fidelity, when she took Shahida by the hand and into her cramped bedroom on the top floor of her sweltering Los Angeles apartment, when she touched her in places no man had ever bothered to, Shahida realised she had a whole world to explore, and people to explore it with who interested her far more than any man ever had.

She tore off the label straight with gleeful abandon, and when she and Jordan amicably broke up she told the next girl she was bisexual, and the next, and the next, and the one after that she told she was gay, because there really was no doubting it any more; women were who she wanted, who she would always want.

Except for Mark. As she grew older she tried to think of him less and less. She lit candles for his birthdays and on the anniversary of his disappearance, and gradually she forced him to become the boy she once knew, the boy she couldn’t help, the boy who vanished from her life.

Until she came home from America and saw his memory everywhere.

Mark. Her first and never was.

And now here’s Melissa, standing in front of Shahida with swimsuit and nervous smile, and everything makes sense at fucking last.

Sometimes the only boy you’ve ever loved is a girl, too.

Melissa’s tied her hair up in a bun, ready for the swim cap, but she’s done it imperfectly, and Shahida wants to reach forward and tuck the stray hairs back, smooth them down against her neck, draw her in and kiss her, and she realises she’s chewing on the inside of her cheek when Melissa asks her something, says her name, breaks the spell.

“Oh my goodness, Em, you look bloody amazing, like, shit, you just… You look fantastic.”

Melissa laughs and says, “You look great, too. But I asked if you’re ready to go.”

Shahida coughs. “Ah. Yes. I am.” Salvaging her dignity, she unlocks the door and holds it open, and to her delight Melissa laughs again and curtseys her thanks before stepping daintily out into the changing rooms and finding Rachel waiting for them around the corner, and if Shahida’s a little put out that Rachel gets to hug her — again — she’s gratified when Melissa escapes Rach’s clutches quickly and almost skips the rest of the way into the main complex, excited to swim for the first time in years.

There’s two pools in the main area, one Olympic-sized and the other a shallow, warmed pool for relaxing, and Shahida hears the splash of Melissa diving into the larger one and starting to swim delighted laps almost before she gets the chance to take in how everything’s laid out. It’s nicer than she expected, with a glass roof letting in the dull December sun, and she gives herself a moment to absorb all the sensations that batter her, to smell the chlorine; to watch Melissa swim.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Rachel says, quietly.

“She’s a miracle,” Shahida says. Melissa always loved to swim, even when she had to cover herself in oversized shirts and swimshorts. She’d always seemed at her freest in the water.

“You got changed together, I saw.”

“She was nervous.”

“She doesn’t seem nervous now,” Rachel says, and something in her voice makes Shahida turn around. “Her story’s bullshit. You know that, right?”

Taking care to control her reaction and relieved that Indira’s phone is back in the locker room, Shahida says, “What do you mean?”

“It’s too much! People don’t get declared dead and then just show up. Is she working? Does she have a job?”

“Um, yes.”

“Then her National Insurance number, her records, everything, will connect her to Mark! And Mark wouldn’t be dead any more.”

“Rach—”

“Tell me I’m wrong.”

Shahida glances back to check that Melissa’s still swimming. She is, and as she reaches the top of a lap she grins and waves at her; Shahida waves back.

“Look,” she says to Rachel, leaning in closer to whisper as quietly as possible, “I know her story’s bullshit, okay? I know. We talked about what to tell you; that’s what we decided on.”

“Why lie?”

“Because the real story is about more people’s secrets than just hers. She can’t go spreading it around, and neither can I. So you just have to trust me, Rach.”

“I doubted she was Mark. Just for a second. But, you know, I doubted. I was worried about you. Thought you might be getting scammed or something.” She sighs. “But she looks like him. Even moves like him.”

“It’s him,” Shahida says. “It’s her, Rach. She’s Melissa, and she’s… Look, we spent the night together last night. Just as friends, before you say anything. She slept on the bloody couch, without me even asking. We talked, and we— we hugged. But mostly we talked. She’s the same, Rach. She’s the same and she’s more. She’s not going to hurt me.”

“Okay,” Rachel says, and bumps shoulders with Shahida. “I won’t push. And I do trust you, Shy. And I want to trust her.”

“So do it. Trust us both, leave me to handle the dark and scary truth, and you can just… be her friend?”

Rachel nods, smiling. “Sure. Sure.” She nods again, firming up her resolve, and Shahida almost sighs with relief; Rachel doesn’t lie about her intentions. She might be very rude about them, a lot, but she doesn’t lie. “But you two have to workshop out some of the holes in that story before we bring Amy in on this.”

“Yeah. Yeah. We will.”

“You know what she’s like. She pokes at things.”

“We won’t be in such a hurry for Amy. We’ll work it out. I owe it to her not to half-ass this.”

Shahida starts at the sudden contact on her other shoulder, but it’s just Rachel wrapping an arm around her. They both watch Melissa swim.

“I see how you look at her, Shy,” Rachel says. “I see you staring.”

“Yeah,” Shahida says heavily.

“Is she— Does she like women?”

“She was in love with another girl. So yes. But I’m not going to try anything, Rach. Last time I almost fucking killed her.”

“That’s bullshit, Shahida, and you know it.”

“Still. I just want to be friends. That’s enough.”

“Enough for now.”

“Yeah. Enough for now. Come on; let’s swim.”

 

1987 December 2
Monday

It’s four in the morning when they come for her, when they drag her roughly off her hard bed at gunpoint — and they’re real guns; not the usual bulky tasers or that ridiculous shotgun Dorothy brings out sometimes, but sleek pistols of the sort that killed her parents, years ago. She’s still taking stock when a woman, the only woman out of the six people standing either in her cramped room or out in the corridor, steps into her field of view to hand her some folded clothes and waits patiently for her to dress herself, and it’s only when she drops them onto the bed and unfolds them that she realises they’re the most ordinary things she’s been given to wear since she arrived: blue jeans, a white bra and t-shirt, a black jacket, some nondescript underwear and a pair of grey tennis shoes; the kind of clothes she’d be relieved to wear if it weren’t under such circumstances.

As she dresses she looks at the faces watching her and recognises none of them. The woman is small, unassuming, dressed for the office; the men wear casual outfits that all have, she can’t help noticing, enough give in critical places to conceal more weapons than just the pistols she can see. All of them are professional in a way Val’s not used to; not one of them, for example, has sneered at her or touched her inappropriately. The woman even possesses, if one stretches one’s imagination to the limit, an ounce of sympathy.

Val decides to test it.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

No-one answers. Oh well. Worth a try.

This is it, then. The day it all ends. She finishes dressing, feeling foolish. Her plans all hinged on the day they finally came for her, the day they took her away from these concrete walls; she would break free and run, screaming for help, because Dorley Hall’s near some university, right? Someone would hear. But she assumed tasers, wielded by the careless bitches upstairs. Dorothy’s battered shotgun. Against professionals with pistols, she can do nothing.

She yells anyway, for all the good it will do, but all it does is wake Dee, and as the girl kicks uselessly against the inside of her locked bedroom door, Val feels like a horrible man/woman/whatever for rousing her, terrifying her, and leaving her with nothing she can do to help.

Because she can’t. Because this is the end.

They lead her up the concrete staircase, past the still-new security station where Frankie gives her a sardonic little wave, and up into the main hall, and it’s only as they’re manoeuvring her carefully through the kitchen that she hears running feet behind her. Bare feet. Unusual.

And then more hands are grabbing at her from behind, just for a second, and there’s a smack and a thud as whoever it is gets pulled off her, hit, and falls to the floor behind her. One of the men holding her lets go, turns around, raises the butt of his pistol and is about to strike downwards when Frankie’s distinctive voice stops him.

“Don’t hit the fucking merchandise, you idiot!”

There’s a girl on the ground behind her.

Dee?

What the hell?

“What’s she doing up here?” the woman escorting her asks, pointing downward.

“I let him out,” Frankie says, out of breath and seemingly almost as intimidated by the weapons as Valérie. “Look. Her worship’s sweet on this one—” she points at Dee, staring up at Val and wiping blood from her mouth, “—so that means, one, do not fucking hit him, not in the face, and, two, let him say goodbye to his friend, for Christ’s sake.”

“What do you care?”

Frankie steps forward, places herself absurdly between Dee and the men. “I care because his welfare is my welfare,” she says, and Val notices she’s got her taser switched on and ready. One taser against all these people! How much power does Dorothy have over her, that she’d risk herself this way? “Grandmother. Likes. Him.” She jabs the air with each word. “And she wants him broken, not catatonic. So give him five fucking minutes, before my headache turns into a migraine and before my boss calls your boss. Okay?”

Five minutes.

Nothing like enough. There are no words to exchange, no sentiments to share. Val could tell her to be strong, to always fight back, but where’s that gotten her? She can see the lorry, made up to look like a refrigerated transport, parked up right by the double doors out of the Hall, and she tries not to focus on it as she cradles the precious girl in her arms. Her end is coming, and she can think of nothing to say to Dee to make it okay.

Five minutes, over all too quickly. And then Dee’s being dragged back into the kitchen by Frankie and Val’s being pulled towards the back of the lorry. She looks wildly around as they effortlessly contain her struggle: there’s more men waiting, guns ready, blocking any possibility of escape. She never had a chance at all. So she locks eyes with Dee until the doors close, and then all she can do as they drive her away is listen to the sound of the tyres as the vehicle transitions from gravel to grass to smooth tarmac, and wonder where, exactly, they’re taking her. Maybe Dee will do better; maybe she’ll choose a name, make a life for herself somehow.

Maybe it doesn’t matter any more.

Maybe nothing does.

In the absolute dark of the back of the truck, no illusions remain. Dee will share her fate, as will all the other girls under Dorley Hall. And all that waits for Valérie or Vincent or whoever or whatever it is that clings vaingloriously to life inside her abused and altered shell is degradation and death.

The only hope she allows herself is that her end will come sooner rather than later.

 

2019 December 13
Friday

Christine raises her head from the kitchen table long enough to read the text from Professor Dawson. She’s offering a friendly ear and as much office time as Christine needs, if there’s anything she needs to get off her chest, but, please, do try to stop missing her lectures.

“I’m going to do it,” Christine says, laying her head back on her upper arm, which is splayed out across the table.

“Do what?” Tabby asks. She’s looking annoyingly fresh, awake and attractive, which seems unfair for — Christine glances back at her phone — eleven fifty-eight in the morning.

“I’m coming out to my professor. Going to tell her I was — what did Maria call it? — coercively assigned female in a basement. I’ll tell her about the hormones, the orchi, that week where I tried walking with the book on my head; everything. Maybe then she’ll stop bugging me to unburden myself on her.”

Tabby’s quiet for long enough that Christine expends the effort to move her other arm out of the way, and when finally she can see her, she’s got a smile waiting for her.

“The book thing hasn’t been required for a long time, you know,” Tabby says.

“Yes, but you walk with such grace, Tab; I, on the other hand, stumble around like a drunken baby elephant looking for the light switch.”

“I think Paige would disagree. But I suggest you don’t tell your professor about it, even if you did choose it yourself. She’d think us a terribly old-fashioned forced regendering facility.”

“‘The rain in Spain…’” Christine mutters. “Fine. I won’t out us to my Linguistics professor.”

“By George,” Tabby says, reaching forward and tapping her playfully on the arm, “she’s got it.”

The clock on her phone ticks over to midday, and shortly after another text arrives from Prof Dawson. This one suggests she contact the counselling service, and Christine makes a mental note to never ever talk to the university’s counselling service, before shooting off a quick reply to the effect that she overslept, and it won’t happen again.

“You need some coffee?” Tabby says. “The second years cleaned the cafetiere.”

“Oh, God,” Christine says. “You’re the best sponsor. Yes. A thousand times yes.”

Tabby’s already filling the kettle. “I think William would disagree.”

“How’s it going with him, actually?”

“Not bad,” Tabby says. “Get him away from boys who clap like seals when he says something clever or does something stupid and he becomes quite different. And ever since he admitted his guilt to Steph, he’s been cooperative.” She turns to fill the cafetiere. “We’re thinking of moving him back to his room soon. Privileges restored, and so on.”

“Will that be safe for Steph? For Maria?”

Tabby nods. “We’ll have more people down there. And—” she shrugs, “—Maria says Aaron’s become quite protective of her lately. I don’t think William’ll be a problem.”

A couple of minutes later and Tabby’s laying a large cup of coffee down in front of Christine, and tapping her on the shoulder to wake her. As Christine’s eyes refocus and she forces herself up onto her elbows, she blearily reads the words SOME PEOPLE ARE KIDNAPPERS. GET OVER IT! on the side of her mug.

“Cute,” she says. It’s not one she’s seen before. Then she clears her throat; she sounds like she’s been gargling nails.

“You okay, Teenie?” Tabby says, sitting back down opposite and borrowing Indira’s pet name for her.

Christine puts off her reply until she’s had something to drink. Tabby went above and beyond: there’s cream, there’s chocolate sprinkles, there’s sugar, and under it all there’s what tastes like double-strength coffee. Normally Christine would choose something a little plainer, but right now she appreciates the calories and the caffeine.

“I haven’t been sleeping well,” she says, as her stomach warms.

“I know. Dira said the thing with Lorna shook you up.”

Christine nods. “Not entirely her fault, though. We put her in a very difficult position and I… handled it poorly. And we’re friends again, so—” she wags a tired finger, “—don’t yell at her.”

“Indira already did.”

“Yeah. Kinda told her off for that.”

Tabby smiles, and sips coffee. “She’s just protective.” Her mug’s pink, and when Christine squints at it Tabby swings it around so she can read the cursive: Do everything a man can do, but ball-less and in high heels! “Do you want to talk about it? The thing that’s keeping you from sleeping?”

“Are you sponsoring me?”

“I’m being a friend, doofus.”

Christine needs more coffee for this conversation. She finishes the whole mug, and then while Tabby makes her another, she tells her about her sleepless nights. The memories of her old self, flooding back. Paige waking up to find her staring out of the window, crying noiselessly and watching the rain catch the light from the lamps on the path. Paige looping arms around her, protecting her, reminding her who she is.

And then Melissa came storming back to Dorley, waving a taser around and trying to abduct Steph, and reminding Christine that, yes, anyone can go home.

“We’re going to ask Dira to take us,” she says, halfway done with her second cup. “Paige and I, we’re going to go back to Brighton. We’re going to visit my old school and my old village. All the places I used to go. I need to say goodbye to him, Tab.” Her eyes are stinging; she swallows and rubs at her face. It’s not like she has any makeup on to ruin. “I think… I think I need to forgive him.”

She jumps as arms wrap around her. She hadn’t even noticed Tabby get up, but now here she is, embracing her from behind, so she pushes out from the table and stands. Tabby gives her room to move, and draws her back into the hug when she’s ready.

Impossible not to cry now.

“That’s okay, isn’t it?” she says, finding room between heaving breaths. “He— I did such awful things. And I don’t ever want to forget them, but—”

Tabby shushes her, strokes her hair. “It’s okay,” she says. “You need to forgive yourself. It’s important. And—” she squeezes Christine tighter, “—it’s good. You deserve forgiveness, Christine.”

“Really?”

It’s childish, to ask for confirmation like that, to be held in someone’s arms and be reassured and still ask for more, but it’s never something that’s been discouraged, and Tabby’s whispered, “Really,” is all that’s needed for Christine to cling to her, like the mother she always wanted, and let everything out.

When finally they release each other, and when Tabby drops a sisterly kiss on Christine’s temple and departs for the security room — to check on Will and to chat with Indira about Christine’s plan — Christine flops back down onto her chair, less tired than she was but more drained. Fortunately there’s enough coffee in the cafetiere, and it’s on the table in front of her, so she fills her mug for a third time and downs it in one.

She giggles. She’s going to forgive him. She’s going to forgive herself.

She’s also had three cups of coffee and she needs to balance it out with something to eat before she starts vibrating. She checks the time — twelve forty; good, Paige will be out of her lecture soon — and makes herself some nice, mundane Weetabix.

A couple of minutes later she’s roused from mindless Twitter scrolling — the Tories got back in, because they were always bloody going to, and her timeline is despairing — by the doors banging open, and looks up to see, rather than Paige or any of the other girls she was expecting, Aunt Bea. She’s steadying herself on the frame, looks as exhausted as Christine feels, and is assisted by two women, one whom Christine doesn’t recognise and another she’s seen only in pictures.

“Ah,” says Elle Lambert, “Christine, isn’t it?”

Oh shit.

Christine’s got sponsor-level access now, which means she knows who Elle is: the money. But not just the money; she’s involved, right at the top, and members of her family were connected to Grandmother. Yes, dead members of her family, it has to be said, and reading between the lines it seems like Elle might have killed at least one of them herself, but the link to Dorley Hall’s previous, sadistic custodian is close enough to be unsettling.

There’s also the obvious and unanswered question: what the hell is Elle Lambert doing all of this for? None of the answers Christine’s come up with have been reassuring.

She stands, supremely glad for Tabby and all her revitalising coffee, and realises as she does so that she’s barely out of sleeping clothes: shorts and a tank, and thick socks with rubber paw prints on the soles. Not the best state in which to make a first impression on the money.

“Um,” she says, “yes. I’m Christine.”

“Elle Lambert,” Elle says, as if it’s at all necessary. She glances at her companion, who gives her the slightest of nods, and steps out from under Beatrice’s arm. The other woman doesn’t seem affected by the increased weight she has to support, and starts helping Aunt Bea across the kitchen.

“Good evening, Christine,” Bea says, as she passes.

“Is Maria available?” the unknown woman asks.

It takes a second for Christine to call up the information on her phone. “She’s in her flat,” she says, “on the—”

“—the third floor,” the woman finishes. “Thank you.”

Elle, meanwhile, has been pouring herself a glass of water, and sits down at the kitchen table. Christine reminds herself to try not to look nervous.

“Christine Hale,” Elle says. “Third year. Recently joined the staff, officially.” She’s staring slightly to one side, as if reading from a notebook only she can see.

“Yes.”

“I’ve been following your career with interest. Impressive that one so young has already acquired so much responsibility.”

“Thank you,” Christine says, because complaining about all the jobs that keep falling into her lap seems unwise right now. And Elle Lambert’s ‘following her career’? Does she have a career?

“Will you do me a favour?” Elle says, and Christine nods, probably slightly too emphatically. “Bring Beatrice something to eat in a few hours?”

“Is she… okay?”

“There’s nothing wrong with her. She’s just very tired. We thought we had a lead; we did not. Emotional stress exaggerates physical exhaustion; you understand.” Christine indicates that she does. “But we did discover something troubling.”

“Troubling, Ma’am?” Christine says, wincing at the involuntary Ma’am.

“Security at Peckinville is implicated,” Elle says, and Christine can’t control her reaction; Peckinville Associates has been run by a consortium headed by the Lamberts for over four decades now, and it provides the men who spend the majority of their time playing PlayStation in the rec room downstairs. “Not seriously so — you do not have to worry about the staff assigned here; all are personally vetted. But any breach is concerning.” She frowns, and sips at her water. “Any theft is concerning. And the fact that it’s taken so long to be uncovered? Deeply concerning.”

Breach? Theft?

“Why are you telling me?”

“My assistant will brief Maria once Beatrice has settled in, and thus all the senior sponsors will be briefed in turn.” Elle smiles, and it’s not the most pleasant smile Christine’s ever seen. “I imagine, therefore, with your skills, that you’ll discover this anyway. I simply wish to assure you that I approve of your initiative.” She raps on the table, signalling the end of the conversation. “Good work securing the system, by the way; I have no expertise in the area myself, but my assistant was quite impressed. You have a promising future ahead of you, Christine Hale.”

“Oh,” Christine says, “thank you.”

Elle finishes her water and stands. “You can thank me, child, by living a full and happy life.”

“On it.”

“And by continuing to help your sisters.”

Christine doesn’t trust herself to say anything helpful, so she just nods.

 

2005 October 7
Friday

The central courtyard of the Smyth-Farrow estate is entirely enclosed, surrounded on all sides by the building itself, exhibiting on each of its four main walls an anachronistic mix of styles from decades and centuries past, and covered overhead with wire mesh over thick, stainless steel bars. The bars are the newest addition, just ten years old, added after Crispin Smyth-Farrow caught her climbing the naked brick, using handholds she’d carved diligently with cutlery. So no more metal cutlery and no more sky, and no more escape from the deep dirt of the central courtyard, where the bodies are buried.

She tried to help the first ones, she truly did. They’d arrive, terrified and shaking, shipped in from Dorley Hall in civvies, to be dressed immediately by her in the uniforms Smyth-Farrow prefers, the ones that emphasise what they’ve been given and what they’ve lost, and she would press upon them the need to survive, to spit his perversions back in his face, to fight him. But one of his many ‘little cruelties’ — his words; his ghastly, minimising words, whispered always through a delighted sneer — was to delight in taking the girls away from her just as she became close with them, just as she broke through their fear and their shame and their self-disgust, as she once did with Dee. He’d take them away and she’d never see them again, and all he’d tell her was that they’d outlived their usefulness.

Eventually her kindness and her optimism ceased to amuse him, and he desired more to make her suffer instead; he made her bury the next one in the central courtyard, knowing that when she dug deep enough she would find the wet and decayed bones of the others, an ossuary of dirt hidden under paving slabs and braced with ancient foundation.

And so she buried her, she stroked the girl’s cheek before covering her with soil, and she wondered as she worked if there was a better way to help these girls, if to insist they resist was to hasten their ends. So she made herself cruel, unwelcoming, cold. And they lasted a little longer, and he left her alone a little more. Her reward for becoming more like him.

She never decided which was worse for them: six months more life or six months less misery. But it was academic; for the sake of her own soul, she numbed herself. The girls he dragged in front of her became nothing more than dead women walking, wounded men with nothing to offer her, and without emotion she showed them their roles and their uniforms and the punishments they would have to endure. Sometimes she entertained the notion that one of them would escape and bring the authorities down on the manor, name her as accomplice, torturer, murderer. Sometimes she dreamed of it.

She knows why he kept her and none of the others. She asked, after the third girl, and he told her: she was a commission. Her parents had been an inconvenience in one of Smyth-Farrow’s ventures, and she, the boy who’d just become a man, masculine for his age but with so much potential, had been too tempting to kill. He told her this as he bent over her, trapping her arms at the wrist, and she spat on him, smashed her knee into his groin, and that time made it as far as the inner gate.

But that was years ago, and the old man slowed down, and no more women came. He confided in her that the money was running out in perfect sync with the rest of his days, and that he was delighted it be so; his bastard children wouldn’t see a lick of inheritance, he said, for he spent every last penny on pleasure. On the most disgusting pleasure money could buy.

“You…” he said to her, wheezing and weak, through the reinforced glass that protected him. “You were worth everything. To see you suffer, to experience your hatred, to look upon your body and see you in there… It was worth everything.”

At least she got to watch him die.

But the manor is and always was a fortress, and getting through the glass and out into his wing of the building wasn’t enough to free her. The locks and the bars are all still in place and the children he despised never returned, so she shut his body in the room he kept her in, and rationed everything as she searched for a way out.

She ran out of food after three weeks.

Now she waits, as weak as he became at the end, starving in absurd luxury, spending her remaining time looking down from his bedroom window at the courtyard that imprisoned her. She’d try harder to keep her eyes open, but sleep is easy and willpower is difficult to come by, so the days slip quickly away.

And then there are voices. Echoing: coming from the cavernous entry hall. It seems impossible, seems like a hallucination, but with little left to lose she summons everything that remains, staggers out of the master bedroom and down the long corridor, legs shaking, ankles near collapse. After what feels like hours she finally makes it to the balcony over the hallway and she’s about to lean on the banister, about to rest, when she puts names to the faces staring up at her and the voices shrieking in delight.

She tries to back away, starts making plans to run, to slip around them and out of a front door they might miraculously have left open, but she’s weak and she’s slow and she falls, drops backwards onto the carpet, has to sit there unable to move, has to listen to the thump of feet on the stairs, until Dorothy Marsden’s looking down on her and Karen the sponsor’s laughing like a hyena.

“That evil old bastard,” Dorothy says. “He really kept you? All these years? I thought you dead, Vincent.”

She’s not heard that name in a long time. Old Smyth-Farrow forgot it as his faculties fled him, leaving him nothing but his self-satisfied malice, and she was glad to forget it, to finally leave behind the last vestige of the life that was stolen from her.

In Dorothy’s mouth it’s despicable, a corpse exhumed, and Valérie would spit, if only she could.

 

2019 December 13
Friday

The second years got the morning off. Indira and their sponsors have apparently been briefing them on how situations like yesterday’s kerfuffle with Melissa are supposed to go, and Stef likes to imagine Indira in full schoolteacher mode, sitting with crossed ankles on a desk at the front of the room and asking questions like, “Can anyone tell me how to disarm taser-wielding blonde women?” while, say, Mia lurks in the back row with her hood up, hoping she doesn’t get called on because she hasn’t done the homework.

It’s left no-one to do the cooking, though, and the fridge has been depleted of all but a few bare scraps of leftovers, so Edy and Christine have been heating up batches of stew, which they’ve had volunteers ferrying in from a chest freezer somewhere. And when Maria came downstairs for her session with Aaron and sent Stef up so she wouldn’t distract him, she got roped into a production line of chopping and buttering a huge pile of French loaves.

The stew’s really good, though, even if she does have to intercept a few well-meaning questions from the second years while she eats. It’s understandable; the last time any of them saw her she was immobile and sobbing on the floor of the conservatory, and they have concerns. Pippa insists she shouldn’t be embarrassed about it, and Faye backs her up, and gradually all the girls at the table start discussing their own most mortifying moments at Dorley. Pippa’s: on her first time out as Pippa she spotted someone she used to know, panicked, hid in a bush, realised eventually that it was, in fact, someone else entirely, and returned to the Hall with her tail between her legs and twigs and leaves stuck in her hair.

“Is that why you had it cut so short?” Aisha asks, and Pippa pretends to throw a hunk of French bread at her.

“At least you had your tail removed shortly after,” Faye says, and Pippa gives in to temptation and the second year gets buttered bread all over her top.

After lunch, Christine hands Stef a container of stew to take downstairs for Aaron. Edy’s prepping one for Adam and Ella’s supposed to show up in a minute, so Stef lingers in a kitchen for a moment; it’s been a while since she last had a chance to talk to her.

Which means she’s there when Melissa and Shahida re-enter the building, all energy and damp hair, and as soon as she catches Shahida’s eye the woman’s got her in a hug. Melissa, a few seconds later, carefully nudges Aaron’s stew a bit closer to the middle of the table, so Shahida doesn’t accidentally knock it over in her exuberance.

“Hi,” Stef says. “You, um— Wow, you smell of chlorine.”

Shahida stands back, briefly lets her go and then grabs her by each shoulder. “I do, Steph,” she says, grinning. “Hi.”

Behind Shahida, Melissa waves, and Stef smiles at her.

“Good swim?” Stef asks.

“The best,” Shahida says, punctuating her words with squeezes of Stef’s shoulders. “It’s so good to see you, Stef! Especially now you’re so pretty!”

“Oh, um, thank you!”

“I always wanted a chance to get to know you,” Shahida continues. “And then Em disappeared and that was kind of all my life was about for a while. Eventually I realised that without her I’d never have a reason to see you again, and you’d grow up and so would I and that would be that. But now…” She looks back at Melissa. “Now I have the chance!”

“I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Same.” Shahida squeezes one more time and then steps away. Stef briefly rocks in place, suddenly unsupported. “I’m going to be around for a while, at least until I find a job somewhere, so we’re going to have time, we don’t have to rush anything, but I just wanted to say… Hi.”

“Hi,” Stef says again.

“Hey, Stef,” Melissa says, walking up behind Shahida and looping an arm around hers. “I’m sticking around, too. Until early January. So come see me, okay? Or maybe—” her smile turns nervous, “—maybe I’ll come down there and see you.”

“We’ve done so much with the place,” Edy says, watching with detached amusement from another corner of the kitchen.

“R— really?”

“No,” Stef says, “it’s still horrible.”

“We restuffed the couches!” Edy protests. “Actually, Melissa, we’re prepping a room for you, up on the second floor. It’ll be a bit bare for now, but after tonight you won’t have to squat at Steph’s again.”

“Perfect!” Shahida says, spinning around to take both of Melissa’s hands, and making Stef instantly feel like a third wheel. “I can go home, get some cushions…”

“Thanks, Edith,” Melissa says.

“No problem,” Edy says. “Someone’ll point you at the right place tomorrow, and we’ll get Shahida put on the system; just entry and room access, for now. As long as we can trust you!” She adds in a light tone, smiling and pointing a finger at Shahida.

“I’m here for Melissa,” Shahida says. “And Steph. And I like Paige and Tabitha and Victoria and Lorna, too.” She shrugs. “I’m not interested in making things hard for anyone.”

“Just remember,” Edy says, “we’re very powerful, we have friends in high places, we can ruin you with a stroke of a pen, and so on and so forth. Ah!” She looks over Melissa’s shoulder and spots Ella about to buzz herself in. “Steph, we should deliver our dinner before it gets cold.”

Stef’s swept up in Edy’s aura of busyness, and allows herself to be guided out through the dining hall and back down the stairs. She extricates herself at the security room, though, spotting Pippa, and remembering something she wanted to do.

Pippa’s still setting her things out on the table, having left the dining hall only minutes before Stef, so she doesn’t feel too bad about interrupting her work. She’s spreading out what look like lecture notes, and Stef catches her attention when she fails entirely to suppress a giggle at how organised they are: printouts with text inside multiple nested bullet points and further annotated in neat but cramped handwriting in multiple colours.

“Hey, Steph,” Pippa says, an easy smile spreading across her face even though they saw each other barely ten minutes ago. Her eyes flick to the stew in Stef’s hands. “For Aaron?”

“Oh,” Stef says, remembering it, “uh, yeah.” She leans back, places it carefully on a flat spot on the security console. “Pip, can I hug you?”

Pippa’s smile widens, and she stands quickly, stepping forward and into the embrace. Stef remembers once being amused and a little bitter that she’s taller than Pippa, but right now it’s comforting, because right now she wants nothing more than to hold Pippa like a friend, like a sister, and that little extra height makes her feel protective.

Melissa’s back, and now Shahida’s back, and Christine says she’s thinking of visiting her old city, and it’s been hard to watch all of it happen and know that she is, at best, years away from being able to see Petra again, or Russ, or her parents. Harder still to think of Pippa, longer isolated from her family than either Stef or Christine. And she’s lonely. It’s been obvious in the amount of time she spends at the Hall, more than is required for her duties — especially now that Stef is, in large part, being sponsored by all of Dorley — and while her isolation’s abated somewhat, with Stef no longer in an adversarial role, with her repaired friendship with Christine, and with Rani, Stef still sees her sometimes, staring at nothing, running her fingers over her bracelet, turning it around on her wrist. So until something changes, until Pippa finds a way to see her family again, or until things get serious enough with Rani or some other girl that she starts a new family, Stef wants to be her sister, wants to be her friend, wants to be her comfort.

“You okay, Steph?” Pippa whispers, and Stef pushes closer into the hug.

“I’m okay. And you’re okay. I just…” She presses her cheek against Pippa’s. “I’m glad of you, all right? I’m happy we met. I’m so happy we’re friends. And even though it’s only been a little while, I’m happy to call you my sister.”

Pippa makes a strange sound, and starts stroking the small of Stef’s back. “You are my sister, Steph.”

“And Christine said Tabby might be reintroducing Will, soon, so it’s going to change down there, and I might not be able to get away as much with him knocking around, so I wanted to jump on this opportunity while I still have it.”

“You’re sweet,” Pippa says, and starts to withdraw, kissing Stef gently on the cheek.

“Love you, Pip,” Stef says, grinning and stepping away and wiping damp eyes with her sleeve.

“Love you too, Stephanie,” Pippa says.

Stef leaves her to her work, retrieving the stew and waving at her as she leaves. On the way down she spots Edy and Ella pouring out a bowl each for Adam and Martin in the lunch room and finds Maria and Aaron sitting at opposite ends of one of the couches in the common area, bickering.

“I’m still trying to understand the moral you were trying to teach me with that.”

“There was no moral. I promise.”

“No, see, because there has to be, because everything’s a tool, right? I was thinking about it and while, yeah, often there’s no malicious intent—”

“—‘often’—?”

“—there’s always a point to the things you say and do, yeah? So, like, I got to thinking, what was the point of the movie you picked?”

“I thought you might like something sweet and brainless to fall asleep in front of?”

“No, no, Maria, there’s no way it’s that simple, I’ve been down here for months now, I know how you work. What I’m getting at, right, what I think is the lesson, yes, is that you’re Ursula.”

“I’m not Ursula.”

“Can you sing?”

“I’m not Ursula.”

“No, you totally are! Who are your little eels? Is one of them Edy?”

“I’m going to smack you.”

“I’m so not scared of you.”

“I’ll send for Indira.”

“Fine. I give up. You’re not Ursula.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re the crab.”

As Aaron reaches towards her, Maria holds out a hand to keep him at bay and pulls her phone out of a pocket in her cargo pants. She dials — or pretends to dial — and says, “Hi, Indira? I have a disobedient little mermaid here, and I’d like to discuss a deal vis-à-vis exchanging their voice for something.”

“Don’t listen to her, Indira!” Aaron shouts, play-struggling against Maria’s outstretched hand, and Maria keeps up the poker face for another whole second before a snort breaks through, and then laughter, and she meets Stef’s eyes.

Aaron slowly turns around, cheeks red. He shrugs.

“I brought you some lunch,” Stef says.

They take it into Stef’s room in the end. Aaron argues against them going back to his room, because he hasn’t yet had the chance to ask Maria for that UV light and pack of cleansing wipes, so they make an impromptu table out of the chair and sit either side of it on cushions, keeping it from rolling away with their toes.

“I’m going to ask someone for more furniture,” Stef says, looking around the room. If she really is going to be more limited by Will’s presence — and Ollie and Raph’s, eventually — then maybe she can make her downstairs bedroom a little more like her upstairs bedroom. More pillows. A couple more chairs. Maybe a plushie.

“You really ate upstairs?” Aaron says, before spooning the last chunk of beef into his mouth and pouring the remains of the gravy after it.

“Yep.”

“You really can go everywhere, huh?”

“I can’t leave,” Stef says. “I mean, I could, probably, but it wouldn’t be wise because I’m supposed to be a secret. I’m supposed to be in Eastern Europe or somewhere. But, like, I suppose technically I can leave? Except they’d immediately come fetch me back and then I couldn’t leave any more, I bet. But yeah. I can go upstairs.”

“Because they know you won’t run. And they know you won’t tell anyone.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

He waves a hand at her. “No, no, yeah, no, I understand. You have friends here. I get it. And, besides, I, uh…”

She reaches out, takes his flailing hand, and smiles at him when he looks at her. She knows she blushes, can feel the heat in her cheek, and unconsciously she bites her lip. He’s so fucking cute. How is that even possible? How is he the same boy she met all those weeks ago?

“‘Besides…’?” she prompts.

Trapped in her eyes, he stares at her for a while before shaking his head. “I have no idea where I was going with that.”

He picks up the plastic container and places it by the computer, and pushes the chair out of the way. It rattles across the floor and bumps into the bedside table behind him.

“You okay?” he says.

Everyone keeps asking that today. She gives it a moment’s thought; coming from him, it means something a little different. “Yes,” she says. “Thank you for last night. Not just for, um, telling me all that, but for giving me another chance.”

She’s still holding his hand, and he examines it, frowning. “You should have told me,” he says slowly, “but I know why you didn’t. And last night I was all, I can’t be mad at her because I’m such a piece of shit and I don’t deserve the truth, and that’s not at all a productive way to think about myself.”

“Is that Maria talking?”

He squirms out of her grip and rolls his eyes at her. “That was from me discussing with her some of the thoughts I had while someone was sleeping and missing all of The Little Mermaid, thank you very much.” Stef raises an eyebrow. “Fine,” he adds. “It’s her words. But it’s my sentiment. Thinking of myself as inherently worthless, while it might be technically correct, is not actually helpful. So!” He repositions, rolls his legs under himself, moves his cushion closer to Stef. Unintentionally, perhaps. “Now my thing is that I’m not mad because I’m capable of viewing your actions through a more objective lens. I know what I was like when you got here. I know what the others were like. I wouldn’t have come out to me, either. So then it’s just a matter of timing. And Stephanie—” he smiles, and she might have expected otherwise, but it’s a fond smile, a warm smile, “—your timing sucked.”

“Sorry,” she whispers.

He shuffles closer again. “Apology accepted.”

“Really? Just like that?”

“Hey, you brought me stew.”

“Aaron—”

“Stephanie.” Her name in his voice. She wants to hear it over and over again. It’s more than validation; there’s a thrill to it, a shiver that takes over her spine and makes her want to reach for him and touch him.

She sits on her hands.

“I said to Pip,” she says, thinking as she goes, “when I ran into her just now, how happy I am to know her. And that goes for you, too. I know we haven’t known each other for long, but…” She bites her lip again, rewinding through everything she’s thought about him, all the realisations… All the fantasies. “You say you know what you were like when we met. Well, so do I. And I know you now. And you might say you’re not that different, but I can see the ways you’ve changed, and it makes me—”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Aaron says quietly.

“Say what?”

“I wouldn’t say I’m not different. Not any more. Steph, I’m so different.” He collects his hands in his lap, looks away. “I’m so different that I think if I saw the Aaron you met when you got here, if I saw the Aaron who lived out there, I’d kick his arse. I’d drag him down here myself. Sure, I might just drop him off and leave out the back door, but since that’s not an option I have…”

He’s filled with energy again, and it’s earthing itself through his hands. He’s turning them over in his lap, wrapping his fingers around his wrists, rubbing his thumbs together. Always moving, even though the rest of him is still.

She waits for him to collect his thoughts.

“I think I’m glad I’m here,” he says, almost silently. “I think I’m glad Maria — or whoever it was — stuck me with that needle. I’m glad I had to face my own shit. I’m glad I saw it reflected in crazier and crazier ways in Will, in Ollie, in fucking Declan. Seeing the urge to hurt people taken down different paths. You can’t deny you’ve hurt someone when you’ve fucking hit them, you know? But you can do it if all you’ve done is pushed yourself into her life, made her feel a bit less safe, made yourself into someone, something she has to worry about. You can pretend. Until you see the same urge with a different outcome and you understand. It’s all the same. Lashing out. Excuses. Reasons to cause pain. Reasons not to feel.”

“You know what they’re going to do to you, though.”

“Yeah,” he says, snapping his head up, looking her right in the eyes. Intense but not frightening. “Yeah, I know.”

“You want to be a girl?”

“No. Not at all. But it’s a way away from it, you know? And there’s something easy about it, too. Maria and them, they’ve done it to countless boys. They’ve done it to each other. They’ve got a system. With instruction manuals and step-by-step guides and when you give up, when you decide that what matters to you isn’t some gender you got slapped with basically at random when you were born but becoming someone new, well, suddenly it’s simple. They’ve got the guides. I just follow them.” He taps a finger on his knee. “Step by step. And what’s so scary about being a girl, anyway, right? You’re doing it. Maria did it, and she didn’t even want to. And it’s not like girls are worse than guys, either. Weaker or whatever. I’ve never thought that. Even if I pretended to.” He snorts. “Truth is, I always kind of thought they were better than me. Got a bit bitter about that. Let it drive some… some nasty shit. So no; I don’t want to be a girl. But I don’t have a route to being a better version of Aaron. I literally wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“We could find one—”

“Stephanie,” he says again, smiling. “I’m trying to tell you—”

“No,” she protests, angry suddenly that he just seems to be accepting it, that there isn’t anything she can do, and feeling stupid because she seems stuck in this endless cycle where she goes from wanting to get him out, to run from Dorley with him as fast as she can, to wanting him to get through the programme, to change the way he seems to want to, to become a new person, but that means—

There’s a finger under her chin. Pulling her in. There’s a hand on her cheek. Filling her with warmth. And there’s pressure on her lips and she realises she’s closed her eyes in her frustration and so she opens them again and there he is, pressed against her, and the finger under her chin presses harder so she follows it up, climbs dumbly to her feet. Her chin drops; he’s no longer pushing on it. Instead his hand finds the small of her back and she arches it, accepts his touch, pushes herself into him. She forces life into her limbs, touches him in the places he’s touching her and, finally, feeling like she’s been waiting for this for hours, days, years, she kisses him back.

 

2019 December 14
Saturday

There’s a uniform waiting for her on the chair by the door. Strange. It’s been years since she was required to wear anything in particular, since the enmity faded to mundane, brutal hatred through the tedium of endless repetition. Granted, the old fuck’s been in a worse mood than usual, stomping about her stolen estate with surprising vigour, slippered feet making comically soft noises on the carpet and made all the more amusing because Val still remembers when the bent and tired Dorothy was actually capable of being intimidating.

She despises the brutal practicality that keeps her here: she has the run of the house, keeps an ordinary bedroom far away from the hole Smyth-Farrow stuck her in, has a library of books, music cassettes and VHS movies; lives almost as Dorothy’s carer, trapped in her service and inside these walls by the locks on the windows and doors and by the nine-digit code known only to the old woman and her dwindling cadre of sadists, themselves also ageing, decaying. Unable to leave but able, sometimes, to take petty revenge on the old Dorley lot. She hasn’t seen Karen for a long time, but Dorothy dresses only for comfort these days, and Frankie, Karen’s replacement, dragged back into service from whatever corner of this horrid country she’d been skulking in, looks every one of her sixty-three years and more; Val delights in making herself up when she can, the better to emphasise that their abused prisoner still cleans up better than any of them.

The wages of sin is shitty skin.

They could take it out on her. Stop her estradiol. Restrict her food. Lock her back in her old room. But the fight’s gone out of all of them, and Val’s kept her hatred burning safely in the back of her mind, limiting herself to spitting in their food and laughing at their attempts to hurt her. Indolent old bitches. She could outrun and outfight them on her worst day.

And yet today there’s a uniform. It’s not one of the old ones, thank God, the ones Smyth-Farrow used to delight in; borderline fetishwear with cutouts in titillating places. It’s just a housekeeper’s uniform: beige dress cut to below the knee, white apron, dark tights.

They probably have visitors.

Dorothy still finds her pleasures sometimes, and Val wonders if she doesn’t take something, if her orgasms are entirely medicated, if her eighty-one-year-old body can’t even delight in deadnaming and misgendering Valérie any more without serious pharmaceutical assistance. She’s sharper on those days, anyway, and it’s always when someone comes to visit, when the old woman wants to pretend she’s still the fierce and powerful Grandmother, and not a revenant, hiding in a mansion, waiting to follow its last true owner to an ignominious end. Hated by all; feared by no-one who still matters.

Val dresses. Does her makeup for good measure. There’s pleasure in looking nice, and even at fifty-three her face is an excellent canvas.

The old Smyth-Farrow estate is essentially four buildings in one, each added decades after the last to expand the mansion and enclose the courtyard, and the failed attempts with each addition to match materials have become increasingly obvious as the place ages, as it crumbles along with Dorothy and the rest of them. She had money once, Val knows, but she suspects the bulk of it goes on protection, with none left for maintenance; the old woman has enemies still, which is presumably why she claimed Smyth-Farrow’s place for herself: even in its death throes it remains a fortress.

Val’s room is in the servants’ quarters on the far side of the house from the front hall and the main suites, and she strides through the place as if she owns it, because it annoys the hell out of Dorothy when she does.

But the old bitch looks pleased. Ecstatic, even.

“Vincent!” she exclaims. Ah. Back to that, are we? Val tries to examine her pupils from afar, to see if she’s on something. “It’s good to see you in uniform once more. It’s about time we had some more discipline around here!”

“What do you want?” Val says, taking up station near the corridor that leads away towards the parlour and the main kitchen. If this is a trick, if there’s someone waiting for her, she knows the estate well enough to lead them on a merry chase.

“I have a present for you, Vince!” The woman’s grinning like a child.

Val props her arms on her hips and waits and Dorothy, realising that she’s got all the reaction she’s going to get for now, claps her hands. Frankie steps through into the hall from the entryway, dragging a near-naked woman behind her.

No.

Not a woman.

But not a man any more.

Valérie would recognise a Dorley girl in the early stages anywhere. The girl Frankie deposits roughly on the tiled floor, who drops limply to her knees and looks off into the distance with the stare of someone who has no particular use for anything they can see, has a relatively large frame. She’s got the slightly loose skin of too-rapid weight loss and the pallor of one who’s been starved. Val looks for the telltale scars near the crotch and finds them, still raw and new, for the girl makes no effort to hide herself. She’ll have been castrated, kept without food and with very little water until all fat has dissolved and all muscle has wasted away, and then put on a high estrogen dose, to encourage development in the ‘right’ places. The only item of clothing she’s wearing is a bra, one of the large, sturdy sort you have to wear after breast surgery, and a slight redness to the skin on her cheeks and neck suggests she’s had some hair removal treatment as well. Her forehead and nose are clad in bandages that make Val think of Dee, looking up at her from the recovery bed back at Dorley Hall. Most tellingly of all, though, her face is marked with despair, the sort of despair Val hasn’t seen since Smyth-Farrow last dropped a new girl in her lap with the twisted grin of one who is already fantasising about how he will murder her.

Grandmother’s modus operandi. Clear as day. She just never thought she’d see it again.

Dorothy’s cackling and Frankie’s smirking but Val ignores them both, walks over to the girl and crouches down in front of her, lifts her face until she can look her in the eye.

She won’t be like she used to be, under Smyth-Farrow. She can’t be that cruel any more.

“Hello,” she says. “I’m not like them. I won’t hurt you.”

“You might not,” Frankie says, in her appalling accent, and laughs her gratingly unpleasant laugh.

“Why is she here?” Val asks, glaring at Dorothy.

The old woman’s face turns sour. “Because of Elle,” she says. “Because she took from me. Again! So this time, I took from her in return. I’m not entirely without resources.”

“She started something,” Frankie says with satisfaction. “We’re just firing back.”

“You’re going to train him,” Dorothy says. “You’re going to make him into another you. And you’ll do it, or we’ll shut you in your old room. No books. No tapes. No food.”

Val nods. Old threats. She turns a little, shutting the old women out, trying to make it so it’s just her and the new girl in their own little world. Trying to make it safe. She wishes she’d guessed this was about to happen so she could have brought a robe or a towel or something to cover the girl’s nakedness, but if she’s going to be living in the servants’ quarters with her, there’ll be something.

“Hey, sweetheart,” she says quietly, holding out a hand to the girl and, when she doesn’t respond, placing it slowly and carefully on her forearm. “What’s your name?”

The girl doesn’t meet her eyes. Barely moves, except to shift her weight, to subtly accept Valérie’s hand on her.

“Declan,” the girl says.