3. Death by Chocolate

2019 October 13
Sunday

It gets easier every day.

She won’t claim it’s not hard, being out in the world as a girl; as a woman. But it’s a thousand times better than what she used to be.

She used to be so angry.

She also, she muses, as she drums the first two fingers of her right hand against the bench, used to smoke, and right now she’s missing it more than anything else she’s had to give up. She makes a fist, calms herself, and watches the horizon.

The Royal College of Saint Almsworth sits at the base of Almsworth Hill, a shallow bump in the landscape only worthy of a proper name because the surrounding countryside is so persistently flat, and Christine Hale sits at its very top, on a bench dedicated to someone whose name has long since rubbed off, waiting for night to fall. She has a marvellous view of the campus, but it’s difficult for her to appreciate it properly.

Beware decisions made in haste. One of her father’s sayings. Some aphorism that impressed the other rich arseholes at his firm more than it ever had her; back home, Christine usually avoided having it or any other of his little wisdoms lobbed in her direction by never making any discernible decisions at all if she could help it, so generally he settled for muttering it at the morning newspaper, or her mother.

If he could see her now… The old bastard’d probably have another heart attack. Absently she clicks her left wrist in remembrance of him. It still hurts sometimes.

But the man had a point, and Christine hates him even more for it: she made a rash choice, didn’t think it through, and now she might have made everything worse.

She’d kill for a cigarette.

Her phone screen lights up: it’s Indira, her Sister. Her sponsor. God, won’t she ever be disappointed if she finds out what Christine did last night?

“Chris-teenie!”

“You know that’s not my name. You picked my name.”

“Wow. You’re in a mood.”

“Just, you know,” Christine says, drawing out the sentence while she thinks of a plausible reason for her equilibrium to be so shot. “Memories.”

“Sweetheart! You’re not… backsliding, are you?”

“No. God. Absolutely not.” Even the thought of it is enough to cause Christine to shudder.

“Do you want me to come home and look after you?”

“I’ll be fine. Really. Just thinking about Dad again. And I thought you were in London this weekend?”

“You know I’d come back for you.”

“You’re sweet.”

“Always!”

“So,” Christine says, standing up from the bench and stretching, “not that it’s not lovely to hear from you, but…?”

“Why did I call? Aunt Bea texted: there’s a new boy. Thought I’d warn you.”

“Oh? Who brought him in?”

“Pippa.”

Christine can’t help but feel sorry for him; she’s not set him up for an easy ride. But manoeuvring the drunk boy into the bushes outside Pippa Green’s window, screaming her best, most well-practised horror-movie scream, and running away… well, it had been the only idea she’d had that didn’t either confirm all his suspicions right off the bat, or leave him in a position to spill all their secrets anyway, the next time he got drunk. She could have gone straight to Aunt Bea, but there are too many ways for that to go spectacularly wrong for poor Stefan, so she struck that off her options list almost immediately. Better he only wishes he was dead, right?

It was God’s own luck that it was Christine he ran into last night. He got only a few incriminating words out before she kissed him, in a desperate attempt to shut him up, but in that time he revealed way more knowledge about Dorley Hall than any outsider is supposed to have. Clearly she needs to have a talk with Aunt Bea about opsec.

“Poor lad,” Christine says.

“Hey, Pippa’s probably raring to go.”

“I repeat myself: poor lad.”

“He’ll be right as rain in no time. Remember what you were like when you joined us?”

“Please, Dira, I thought we agreed Memory Lane was a bad place?”

“For you, not me.”

Sun’s going down. Time to move. “Look, Dira, I’ve got to go.”

“Okay, sweetheart. You’re sure you’re okay?”

“I’m sure.”

“And you’ve eaten?”

“Yes.” She hasn’t, but if there’s one thing Dorley Hall isn’t short of, it’s leftovers to heat up. She’ll take something up to her room later.

“Okay. Kisskiss.”

Christine, feeling conspicuous as always, says, “Kiss!” but doesn’t make the face to go with it. It’s hard not to feel like she’s always being watched. An inevitable side-effect, Indira told her; it’ll go away eventually, or she’ll get used to it. She slips her phone into her bag and starts walking the shallow stone steps down the hill.

Saints, as a campus, is a slapdash mixture of styles, ranging from the very old — the entrance to the Student Union Bar looks like a village pub because that’s what it once was — to the turn-of-the-millennium complex by the lake and the obnoxiously new Computer Science building, which Christine gives a wide berth; more bad memories. Dorley Hall isn’t of a character with even the oldest buildings, having been here before Saints was Saints; it’s a red-brick monstrosity, crawling with vines and wearing its origin as a private hospital on its sleeve — it looks, quite frankly, haunted — and isn’t actually on the campus proper, being set out at the edge of the grounds, where grassy scrubland meets dense woods, bracketed from the rest of the university by a thick semi-circle of empty land which, mysteriously, has never been earmarked for development.

It’s home, and it looms, reassuringly.

Two girls from the upper floors are vaping on the steps up to the main entrance, so when Christine lets herself in to the ground floor kitchen she smells like strawberry bubble gum. There’s no-one inside except Vicky Robinson, eating an omelette at the kitchen table. She smiles when she sees Christine, and surreptitiously drops the paper bag that had been sitting on the table in front of her into her lap.

“I didn’t see anything,” Christine says.

Vicky, through a mouthful of omelette, indicates gratitude, and Christine leaves her to her dinner, heading through the dining hall and the locked door to the floor below.

The security room’s empty. Not surprising for this time of night, this early in the programme. Everyone’ll be working on assignments or just relaxing somewhere, with a laptop open if they have to monitor their charges. Christine ducks in and flicks through the screens and finds the boy. Good: he’s sitting perfectly still. Dozing, probably. She scrubs back through the footage, identifies a suitable start point, and taps the information into her phone. It’s the work of another second to have her phone talk to her laptop, which is up in her room and already connected to the network, and loop the signal.

She loops the video for the connecting corridor and the stairs down, and disconnects the camera feeds for good measure. Her phone gets her through the biometrics on the door down to the basement and doesn’t leave any trace of her in the logs.

You can take the boy out of the hacker, but you can’t take the hacker out of the girl, no matter how many Linguistics lectures she attends.

 

* * *

 

“Where am I?” Stefan demands.

The girl, Christine, looks almost disappointed. “Where do you think?” She’s wearing a light hoodie unzipped over a pale blue t-shirt, dark grey leggings and a pair of running shoes. Appallingly casual and comfortable-looking, compared to Stefan’s scratchy smock. Like she’s popped in to see the prisoner after a nice healthy jog.

“Dorley Hall?”

“Bingo. You’re under it, specifically. Basement two. When all this was a hospital—” she waves a hand around her, causing the light from her phone to flicker eerily on her face, “—this place was the morgue. Or the laundry. I’m not sure.”

“Did you bring me here?”

She looks uncomfortable. “Yes and no. It’s complicated.”

“Well, then—”

“I know, I know. I’m working up to it.”

Stefan sits back from his squat, crosses his legs in front of him and rests his chin on tented hands. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Look. Okay. Look.” Strangely nervous for a kidnapper. “When you said to me, last night, that you know about Dorley Hall, what exactly do you know?”

“Ah. That was you on the intercom this morning.”

“Yes. Please answer the question? It’s important.”

Stefan considers stonewalling her — she’s not the one on the wrong side of a cell door, and he’s reconsidering his earlier resolve to cooperate — but after a moment’s thought decides against. He starts outlining his theory, and Christine’s increasing and obvious disbelief confirms to him that, yes, he’s got entirely the wrong read on things. Feeling foolish, he trails off.

“No, please,” Christine says urgently, “finish. I need to know everything.”

Stefan shrugs. “I mean, that’s more or less it. I thought this was a place that helps trans people get away from unsupportive or outright aggressive families and maybe helps out with transition stuff. But it’s not, is it? I’m just an idiot.”

“Why were you looking at Dorley so hard in the first place?”

“A friend disappeared,” he says quickly. Best that she doesn’t get the opportunity to consider why else an apparent man would look so hard for transition services. “My friend’s older brother. He was… kind of like an older brother to me, too. They lived across the road from us, and we were always in each other’s lives.” He smiles, involuntarily, remembering Mark as he used to be. “When he came here, to Saints, he went missing one night. No leads. Just gone. But then, a year later, I saw him. At least, I thought it was him. She looked exactly like what he would look like if he was a girl. And I thought, maybe… maybe he was a girl all along? Maybe the reason he was so unhappy the last year I knew him was that he wasn’t a he? God, I even started thinking of her as a girl! But I was fooling myself. Because he’s dead, isn’t he? And she was just some girl who looked a bit like him.” He blinks rapidly; whatever this place really is, he’s certain he doesn’t want to cry here.

“Shit,” Christine says, and flops back on her bottom, unintentionally mimicking Stefan. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. I’m an idiot, Stefan Riley.”

He flinches. “Don’t call me that,” he says, before he can stop himself.

“Why not?”

“I don’t like it.”

“Whatever. Look. If you promise not to tell anyone what you just told me, ever, then I can get you out of here.”

“Why? How?”

“Why is because the lives and freedom of a hell of a lot of people, including me and people I care about, rely on no-one ever knowing what you know, and how is because I put you in here, in a roundabout way, so I can get you out again.”

“What I know?” Stefan blinks. “I was right? It’s real?”

Christine looks pained. “Yes and no. Look, do you agree, or not?”

It’s real. It’s fucking real! ‘Yes and no’ could mean anything, but if any part of it is true, that means Mark — Melissa — might still be alive! And it means Stefan, right now, has to face up to his gender fast, whatever it may be, before all this slips away from him. Before Christine gets him out.

But he can barely make his mouth move. He’s never told anyone before. Hardly even admitted it to himself. And he’s always been terrified that if he tells someone, if he actually comes out, if he actually tries to transition, and it turns out he’s wrong, if it turns out it was all just a fantasy, that he’s not trans after all, that it was just a delusion by an ugly, idiot boy who hates his life and can’t take responsibility for it, then he’ll have nothing left to live for. It’s the fear that eats him every night, the fear that’s taken him to twenty-one without seriously considering transition as something he could do, the fear that’s gifted him with nothing but an empty life, a cold, drafty room in a house he hates, and less than £16 in his bank account. Maybe it’s time to abandon it.

“Is it real?” he tries again.

She narrows her eyes. “What’s up with you?”

He has to know about Mark/Melissa. “Are you a trans woman?” It comes out blunter than he means, but he’s overtaken by an urgency he hasn’t known since he first saw Melissa, years ago.

Christine looks at him for a long time. Thinking. “No. Sort of. Not really. It’s complicated.”

“Stop saying that!”

She’s frozen, and he wants to reach through the glass and poke her; impossible. He waves at her instead, and she nods her head aggressively. “I know, I know,” she says. “I’m trying to decide how to say it. I’m not exactly fond of just coming out like— Oh shit.” Her phone is vibrating insistently, and she swipes it up off the ground, frowns at it. “I have to go,” she says.

“What? Now? Why?”

“Someone’s coming, and I’m not supposed to be here. Can you survive one more day down here?”

“I guess. Nothing’s actually happened to me yet.”

“Yeah, well. It might.” Christine stands, and bounces on the soles of her feet. Full of nervous energy. “Listen, you can’t say anything to anyone about me — and that includes meeting me at the party — or about what you know about this place. You have to act like you don’t know anything! And I’m sorry, but people here will think you’re a horrible person.”

“What?”

“Just go along with it! Please! I can fix it all tomorrow! Shit!”

 

* * *

 

Christine ducks into the storeroom with only seconds to spare, and hurriedly taps through her home-grown app, re-enabling the cameras and cancelling the looping video. She brings up the direct feed and watches Pippa Green take the stairs down at a jog and march past Christine’s hiding spot without a glance.

Breathe out.

A bit of luck: if this had all happened a week ago when that Aaron kid was still in cell 2, she’d never have been able to sneak around like this.

As she stands she almost knocks something off a shelf with her elbow, something so ancient and crusted over she can’t even tell what it was; an empty bottle of bleach, maybe? Carefully she puts it back, and looks around the room properly for the first time. God, it hasn’t been cleaned in— are those bedsheets? Maybe this floor used to be the laundry after all. A shame; more symbolic weight to repurposing a morgue.

With Pippa in place and berating poor Stefan, Christine quickly sets the stair cameras to loop for the next thirty seconds and legs it as quietly as she knows how.

Vicky’s still in the kitchen, and this time her guilty expression has nothing to do with the paper bag in her lap and everything to do with the slice of chocolate cake on the table in front of her.

“Hi again,” she says, grinning. There’s icing on her lower lip, and Christine could just reach out and rub it off…

She takes a moment to compose herself. Most girls who graduate from the Dorley programme are attractive, but Vicky is something else. Christine carefully and firmly redirects her intense jealousy of Vicky’s girlfriend to something much more acceptable. “Where did you get that cake? It looks amazing.”

“I know, right?” Vicky says, slicing off a piece and holding it up. It looks like something off a baking show: four perfect layers in two shades of deep brown, clad in icing. “It’s Death By Chocolate. One of the second years bakes.”

How appropriate. Christine laughs. “That’s—”

“It’s not as feminine as you’re thinking. Aunt Bea was delighted when she heard; less pleased when she saw how this girl bakes.” Vicky mimes someone engaging violently with a bowl of cake batter. “It’s like a rugby tackle on the kitchen table.”

Aunt Bea, current custodian of Dorley Hall, is a firm believer in the healing power of femininity, and applies it to her charges at every opportunity. Christine would have scoffed, once upon a time, but she’s since had to admit that for a certain subset of people it does have beneficial qualities. Perhaps not when taken quite to Aunt Bea’s preferred extreme, though. She winces; memories. The programme can be tough.

Shit. The programme! Stefan bloody Riley’s downstairs being softened up by Pippa right now! And Christine put him there!

She shouldn’t have panicked and done that to him. But what choice did she have? He came waltzing into her life just as she’s finally starting actually to like herself, drunkenly babbling things no-one is supposed to know and — apparently unintentionally — threatening not just her future, but that of everyone she loves. What else could she have done?

I don’t know, talk to him like a normal person?

“Shut up, Christine,” she whispers to herself.

“Hmm?”

“Nothing, Vick,” she says.

“You’re okay?” Vicky says, reaching out and taking Christine’s hand.

It’s hard not to admire Vicky, who entered the programme the same week as Christine but graduated in an almost unprecedented two years. It was like she understood, from the first moment, what was being asked of her, and set out to achieve it as quickly and completely as possible. Her drive, her determination, her skill — her frosting-flaked lower lip — are all beyond impressive, and yet she’s unfailingly kind, straightforward, and helpful. She still hangs around Dorley, but it’s because she still has friends here; and because she can steal estrogen for her girlfriend.

Christine gave her the code for the secure medicine locker. Possibly the first thing she ever did in her life she can actually be proud of. She’s pretty sure Vicky pretends to get it online.

“I’m really fine,” Christine says. “Long day. Hey, how’s Lorna?”

She’s unable to stop herself smiling as Vicky launches into a delighted ramble; her love for her girlfriend is infectious. “She finally agreed to sing in front of me and, goodness, Tina, she’s so talented. She hates her voice but she worked so hard on it and she sounds so good and I wish I could just put her inside my head so she could see what I see and hear what I hear and then she’d know she’s the most wonderful girl in the world. With the sweetest voice! And we went shopping and I know I shouldn’t but I used some of my stipend to get some things for her and, well, um, it’s a cliché, but dress go spinny!” Vicky laughs and twirls a finger in the air. “She looked so beautiful and so happy I had to kiss her right there in the changing room. Then we had lunch at this pub on the other side of town and these two guys came up and were hitting on us and we got to do that thing, you know, where you hold hands across the table and you’re like—” she switches temporarily from her usual bubbly voice to a husky drawl that does things to Christine’s hindbrain, “—‘Actually, we’re together’, God, I could have died laughing. Oh, and we went through our Brain and Behaviour notes together and she’s so smart, Tina, I actually can’t bear it. She asks after you, you know; wants to know if you ever got round to playing Bloodborne. I said you haven’t yet, you don’t even have an XBox—”

“—PlayStation—” Christine whispers, through her grin.

“—but maybe when you come over you can play on hers?” Vicky phrases it like a question and Christine nods, playing along. She’s had a long-standing invite and, truthfully, she’d love to drop in to the house Vicky and Lorna share with two other girls — another measure of Vicky’s extraordinary prowess; Christine still feels uncomfortable away from Dorley, and can’t imagine living with, let alone dating, anyone who doesn’t know what happens here — and, among other things, finally see first hand this ‘Vacuous Rom’ Lorna’s been texting her about, but if what she did to Stefan ever gets out she’ll be surprised if she leaves Dorley before 2025. “We’ve got the place looking really nice now and it would be so lovely if you visited. Maybe bring Indira and Paige and Abby along? I’ve told her so much about them and she so wants to meet them.”

“I’d love to,” Christine says.

Vicky blushes. “God, I really just came out and said all that, didn’t I?” She pops the last bite of cake in her mouth and chews thoughtfully. “You know,” she adds in a conspiratorial whisper, “I think there might be brandy in this cake.”

“They’re giving second years alcohol now?”

“I know!” Vicky squeals. “Doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

It takes several more minutes for Christine to disentangle herself from Vicky’s boundless enthusiasm, but she can’t deny that she needed the pick-me-up. Up on the second floor, where all the third-year programme girls live, she bypasses the biometrics on her dorm room door out of convenience rather than subterfuge: she’s got a plate of reheated curry in her left hand and chocolate cake in her right and it’s just easier to speak a command to her phone than to find a thumb.

Inside, she climbs onto the bed and arranges her tools in front of her: curry, chocolate cake, huge water bottle — Aunt Bea insists all second years drink eight glasses of water every day, for their skin, and it’s a habit that’s stuck — phone, laptop, nightly pills. She necks her estrogen and progesterone with a half-litre of water and starts on the curry as she loads the security feeds on her laptop.

She’s not a sponsor; she’s really not supposed to be able to do this. It’s lucky for Aunt Bea she believes in this place, or she could send a whole lot of people to prison. Starting with me, Christine thinks, as she calls up the view of the boy whose kidnapping she’s technically an accessory to.

Stefan Riley. She doesn’t know what to make of him any more. At the party, he’d seemed like a nice guy, a bit quiet and a bit shy, willing to let her take the lead in the conversation. He didn’t undress her with his eyes and he even appeared, through the haze of alcohol and weed, to be genuinely interested in what she said. In all, the kind of man she felt the least uncomfortable around; perhaps even the kind of man she might have taken an interest in independently, had Paige not encouraged her to talk to him.

Hah; encouraged! As if Paige hadn’t painted her up, beautified her hair, squeezed her into a low-cut top, made some cryptic comments about finally finding someone she likes, and dragged her out to the party with the sole intent of shoving her in front of pretty people. At least she picked a nice one.

Who then had to go ruin it by knowing too much. Not enough actually to be right about Dorley, but enough to get them investigated.

Looking for his friend. Not even; looking for the person who might as well have been his older brother. Did Stefan pick Saints as his university solely to investigate a disappearance?

Shit. This is looking more and more like a colossal fuck-up. Her colossal fuck-up. She should have dismissed his theories and sent him home. But, no, she had to go and drag him into the belly of the beast, via Pippa of all people.

He’s lying on his cot with his knees under his chin and his arms curled around his legs. Foetal.

Christine scrubs back through the footage.

“I know about you, Stefan Riley,” Pippa’s saying. Christine zooms in, but the camera angle makes it difficult to get a read on her expression. Her voice is doing that too-level thing she does sometimes, when she’s so angry she can barely hold it in. Christine remembers it well, from when she moved up to the second year of the programme and Pippa, then in her third year, still argued with Aunt Bea. Most of Christine’s memories of Pippa, now that she comes to think about it, are of her arguing with Bea. “I know why you’re here. Do you?”

“This is a School of Psychology thing, isn’t it?” Stefan says. “A study on isolation, or something.”

“Yes, that’s good,” Christine mutters. “Play dumb.”

Pippa laughs. “Stupid boy,” she says. “Do you know what toxic masculinity is?”

Oh, no. She’s doing the whole spiel now? She's supposed to just psych him out! He’s supposed to stew for days before she starts in on him! Is she that eager to berate some poor guy—?

“I’m an idiot,” Christine says. “God, and I’m repeating myself, too.”

Pippa hated the programme. From what Christine heard from the Sisters in the year above her, Pippa fought the hardest, spent the longest time in isolation, had to be warned and restrained over and over again. And only someone very stupid would think her experiences, even now that she’s come to terms with them, has accepted them as a necessary part of her rehabilitation, would leave her the slightest bit of compassion for a boy in the position she’d once been in. For a boy who reminds her of the person she’s grown beyond.

He’s her sin in human form. She’s going to hate him.

“What have I done?” Christine whispers to herself, watching the scene play out on the laptop screen. “What have I done?”