NOVEL NEXT 13. Driftwood
13. Driftwood
2019 October 27-31
Sunday
Day 1.
No boobs yet.
Monday
Day 2.
No boobs yet.
Tuesday
Day 3
No boobs yet!
Wednesday
Day 4
No boobs yet.
Thursday
Day 5
No boobs yet.
Aaron knocked on my door this morning and asked if my nipples were sensitive, but I think he was just trying to get me to look at his chest again. He’s DEFINITELY not developing faster than I am. It’s only been five days!
2019 November 1
Friday
Day 6
No boobs yet.
Maybe Aaron IS developing faster than I am? It’d be just my luck.
Christine’s notes: Don’t do this to yourself, Stef.
Stefan’s notes: Stop reading my diary entries and stop hogging all the double-strength estrogen.
Christine’s notes: Maybe you can gaslight Pippa into injecting you twice on Saturday? Once in the morning, once in the evening? Just make sure to present the other thigh.
Stefan’s notes: Were you born unhelpful or is it a skill you developed in some kind of torture basement?
Christine’s notes: I cultivated it entirely on my own. You have to be a little bit of a douche every day. It’s a whole regimen.
Stefan’s notes: You’re doing really, really well.
Christine’s notes: You know, we could have this conversation over Consensus like normal people.
Stefan’s notes: We’re not normal people. Besides, I’m enjoying how passive-aggressive this is.
Christine’s notes: I have to admit, your punctuation is better in this format, for some reason.
Stefan’s notes: How’s my punctuation now?
Christine’s notes: I’m viewing these on my phone and it messes with the line structure so I’m going to assume you’re breaking out the ASCII art solely to express your undying love for me.
Stefan’s notes: It’s a middle finger. In a way, it DOES express my undying love for you.
Christine’s notes: How sweet. I’m impressed, though. You couldn’t have Googled that; does that mean you know how to type it in from memory?
Stefan’s notes: It’s literally the only transferable skill I retain from my junior school computer classes.
2019 November 2
Saturday
Day 7
One week on estradiol. I’m due my second injection today sometime. Probably this morning; I know Pippa’s seeing Rani tonight and she won’t want to be weighed down with sponsor stuff in the evening. It’s their first real date since they met a week ago. I hope it goes well, but I admit to being a bit jealous. It’s lonely down here. Yes, I have Aaron and the others, and that’s fine, in its way, but I have to be the same edited version of myself that I was with Russ. The same version of myself that I am with Pippa, even. I hate that I never see anyone who KNOWS me. The last time was with Abby, though, and I freaked out at her, so maybe it’s better I keep myself in check.
It hurts to see other people getting on with their lives while I’m… stuck. Oh well. At least I’m dot dot dot stuck with bloody estradiol and goserelin swimming around inside me. Even if their effects on my body thus far have been underwhelming.
I can feel it in my head, though. Starting goserelin was a bit like turning off a pair of speakers that had been blaring awful music into my head, all my life. And I was in silence for a little while, there. Now, estradiol’s starting up new music, music I like and fuck, this metaphor sucks ASS.
I hope Rani’s good enough for Pippa. She deserves some happiness. Sometimes she seems so sad and I really want to hug her, but we’re not there yet. I think sometimes she still sees the Bad Guy when she looks at me, like she remembers who I’m supposed to be. Not often, but enough to keep a little bit of distance between us.
Still, she held my hand when she found me crying that one time. Okay, those two times. I’m doing that a lot more, now. Before it was like a, I don’t know, a storm, a really bad one, one of the ones they have to name, that comes once a year and knocks down buildings. Now it’s like normal, boring rain showers. I still get wet, but it’s not the end of the world.
I am terrible at metaphors. I’m discovering this about myself. Glad I took Linguistics and not Creative Writing.
Christine, if you read this, you nosy, nosy cow, I’ll come at you with my morning Weetabix. You won’t stand a chance: it’s hard as a rock and barely qualifies as food.
Christine’s notes: Ah, the many cruelties of Dorley.
2019 November 9
Saturday
Alarm at seven. It’s loud, and mindlessly musical, like an orchestra warming up. He has no control over the time it goes off — nor the music, nor the volume — but he refused Pippa’s offer to ask permission to change it. Keeping the same schedule as everyone else is good, for the role he’s playing, for his stability. Because when he rolls out of bed and checks himself over in the mirror and sees no progress, no changes, it’s hard to swallow it all and prepare for another day of doing, essentially, nothing. Routine keeps him in check where optimism fails him.
He came here, he stayed here, he gave up years of his life for this: to break this body, strip its flesh, burn it back to the bone and start again. To become new. And so he waits.
Stefan covers himself. He wears joggers and a robe to the showers so he doesn’t have to be naked until the last possible moment and he pulls them on, stretching the sleeves to the knuckles, closing the robe to the neck. He buzzes his face with the electric razor, picks up his wash kit and heads to the bathroom. They still have designated time slots to wash up in the morning; thanks to Declan, supposedly, but he’s rarely allowed out of the cell and never when anyone else is around. Showering in shifts is, like the plastic cutlery, just another step in a gradual tightening of restrictions that was always, one way or another, going to happen. Christine said something about that: that Dorley, especially in the first year, is like a checkers board. There’s only so many moves to be made and, sooner or later, as a group, you’ll make all of them.
At least the sponsors wait outside while they wash now. Pippa’s doing.
Aaron, late as usual, takes the shower next to his and starts running through his routine at double speed, making up for lost time. Stefan, hair and body already washed, conditioner soaking in, enjoys the hot water — below scalding, this time and every time — and laughs as the shampoo bottle slips out of Aaron’s soapy hands.
“I’m going to have to bend over to get this,” Aaron says, “and before I do—” he presents a cautionary finger, “—I want you to know that there is no unsexy way for me to do this. I’m just going to have to bend down, and you, somehow, are going to have to cope.”
Stefan nonetheless retreats to a safe distance. “You could bend at the knees instead. Very unsexy.”
“What?” Aaron says, his rear end elevated. “I can’t hear you down here!” He wiggles his bottom for emphasis; Stefan resists the temptation to step forward smartly and slap it. It’d be funny, probably, but the message it would send is not one Stefan wants to endorse.
Because over the last couple of weeks, Aaron’s got more physically demonstrative — a lot more forward with his backside — and Stefan can’t decide if the boy is just teasing him, or if he is genuinely trying, perish the thought, to flirt.
The idea is distracting enough that he almost swallows shower water, and he coughs it up with the help of a few slaps to the back. He decides, when Aaron’s hand doesn’t linger, when the little perv behaves exactly as one ought in such a situation, that he’s imagining things.
Besides, Aaron likes girls. That’s what all those dick pics were about. Life down here is strange enough without convincing himself that Aaron, of all people, is coming on to him.
“So,” Aaron says, straightening up and starting work with the shampoo, “did you hear we’re due our next round of dick deflation?”
“Um. What?”
“The Goserelin. You know, the implant? The thing they stuck in our bellies when we got here that suppresses all our snips and snails and severely limits the function of our puppy-dog tails. It’s been a month — longer for me, actually — and I don’t know about you, but I’m itching for a new belly bump.” He finishes rinsing out the shampoo and then puffs out his stomach, cradling it in his hands like an expectant mother.
“I didn’t know.” Stefan pretends to think about it. “But it makes sense.”
“Yeah.” Aaron holds out the conditioner bottle. “Rub it in for me?”
“What? Why?”
He makes a show of stretching. “I slept funny. My shoulder’s sore. My World War One injury is acting up. I have a fear of reaching above my head. My wrists only move counterclockwise. A bottle of conditioner killed my father. I’m very weak and don’t think I can rub hard enough, and you have those long fingers—”
“Aaron.”
“Just help me out, would you? I’m tired—” he interrupts himself with a huge yawn that doesn’t inspire one in Stefan; faked, “—and I kind of want to do nothing more than sit down and stare at something interesting until it does the magic eye thing. Like you; I bet you’d look like a Picasso.”
“Fine.” Stefan snatches the conditioner bottle out of Aaron’s hand and, with a firm grasp on the shoulder, turns him away. When he starts spreading the conditioner through Aaron’s hair, the boy makes moaning noises. “Aaron, what are you doing?”
“Relax,” Aaron says, twisting his head as far as he can to grin at Stefan, “I’m just teasing.”
Stefan turns Aaron’s head back towards the front. “Don’t.”
“Aww. But you seem so secure in your masculinity. I can’t help but give it a little prod.”
“What does masculinity have to do with anything?”
“Stef,” Aaron says, trying to turn around again and failing; Stefan’s palms lie flat against the sides of his head, holding him in place, “it has everything to do with everything in this place. Like with the second round of Goserelin: what are the chances, do you think, that we’re in for another round of very manly rebellion from Will and Raph and all the others who fought back before?”
Stefan shrugs, rinses his hands, turns his own shower to cold and starts finger-combing his hair under the water until it runs clear. He’s almost pleased to have to give a moment’s thought to a sensible question, for once. “After the nurse? Low. Unless the mean girls try something.” ‘Mean girls’: Aaron’s nickname for Raph, Ollie and Declan. Not one Stefan would have chosen; too obvious, although if it has a saving grace it’s that none of the boys appear to have seen the movie.
Maria smirks every time Aaron says it.
“Exactly my point!” Aaron says, whirling around, finger-first. “That nurse was softening us up. We had weapons pointed at us and were borderline sexually assaulted—”
“—no ‘borderline’ about it—”
“—and now we’re all just going to calmly submit to the next indignity! We’ve been manipulated into suppressing our natural masculine responses for fear of reprisal.”
Stefan can’t help it. “You have ‘natural masculine responses’? Where?”
“Maria!” Aaron shouts. “Stef’s being mean to me again!”
Maria, waiting around the corner, just out of sight, yells back, “Good!”
“Everyone’s a critic.” Aaron rinses his conditioner — too soon, in Stefan’s opinion, but he always times it so they finish their showers together, and Stefan just got done with his — and shuts off the water. “Anyway, Stef, we’re all kind of… softening up. In more ways than one. I know you’ve noticed. And you, just for example, don’t seem to be particularly bothered by the prospect of another month on the floppy dick juice. Less bothered than I am, even, and all it’s done for me is made my wanks more challenging.”
Stefan’s bad at remembering to dislike the implant. Principal among its many beneficial effects is that he hasn’t had an unwanted erection for weeks, although the downside was that it took him four days to fill the sperm cup, given his reluctance to ‘coax the old boy into life with a bit of soft music and gentle yanking’ as per Aaron’s suggestion. Pippa, for reasons she hasn’t yet explained, covered for him with Maria, claiming to have dropped his first sample.
“What would be the point in caring?” he says. “I feel like I say this over and over again, but they have the tasers, Aaron. And the batons. And the keys to the many, many locks.”
“You don’t think we should fight even a little?”
“No.”
Aaron claps him on the back. “Good! Hah! Shit, Stef, that’s all the excuse I needed to just sit down and take it. Fighting’s for idiots, you know?” He quickly wraps his robe around himself. “Maria! I’m ready for my emasculation now!”
Pippa, waiting with Maria, intercepts Stefan as they leave. “Hey,” she says, touching him gently on the shoulder, “I heard you talking about the new Goserelin shot. Are you really ready for it? I know it’s not a good thing—” she looks sideways at Maria, who is preoccupied with Aaron, “—but it’s the rules. We can do the, um, the vitamin jab at the same time. Get it all over with at once, you know? That way, you won’t be waiting around for—”
She’s starting to babble. “Yeah,” Stefan says, cutting in. “Sure.”
Her eyes are everywhere but on him, and he has to remind himself: she doesn’t know. She thinks she’s deceiving him. The ‘vitamin’ shot! Maybe that’s the barrier between them? Not her perception of him, but her perception of herself.
Her fingers stiffen on his shoulder. “I can get one of the others to do it, if you’d rather.”
“It’s fine,” Stefan says. The smile is easy to make genuine, and he reaches up to cover Pippa’s hand with his own. “I’m not going to make a fuss.”
“Maybe you should,” she whispers, and bites her lip.
“Hey, Pip,” he says. “I won’t.”
She looks at him at last, is pleased to discover him smiling, and brightens. She matches his smile, comes back to life, and pushes him away with a laugh, shaking water off her hand. “Ew, Stef! You’re all wet!”
He squeezes out a few more drops from his hair and flicks them at her — she evades, giggling — as he leaves with Aaron.
“So,” Aaron says, out in the corridor, nominally alone together, “are you two kissing, or what?”
“Who? Me and Pippa? No! She’s just… We’re friends. Besides, she’s dating someone.”
“How do you even know that?” Aaron shoves him gently. “You really do have the Stockholm Syndrome, don’t you?”
Stefan plasters on his toothiest grin. “What, you don’t hug Maria?”
“No. I think if I tried, I’d set off a bunch of booby traps hidden in her clothes. And, hey, speaking of boobies—”
“Nope,” Stefan cuts him off, and turns away to unlock his door before Aaron can get his nipples out again, “I don’t know why I have to keep telling you this, but reducing your testosterone is very unlikely to make you grow breasts. You’re still just as flat-chested as I am. Now go and, for the love of God, put some clothes on.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Maybe several extra layers, to be safe!” Stefan yells, as Aaron’s door closes behind him.
He can’t help checking himself in the mirror again. Aaron definitely isn’t swelling up on the chest — he had ample opportunity to check, in the showers, and did so, to calibrate his expectations — but, unfortunately, neither is he.
A few minutes later, when he’s dried and dressed, Pippa enters, carrying the ‘vitamin’ injection kit and the slightly more intimidating Goserelin implant needle. Smiling apologetically, still remorseful about the lies. So he keeps up the chatter with her, tries to make it feel as normal and routine as possible.
One in the thigh, another in the belly, and he’s out the door again, waving Pippa goodbye and heading to the dining room for his rock-hard Weetabix.
Aaron doesn’t waste any time getting to the point. Ever since Will and Adam seemed finally to resolve their ideological differences — Adam doesn’t ever mention demons any more, and Will hasn’t called him a ‘religidiot’ for weeks — it’s generally Aaron who cuts through everyone’s morning haze. The boy’s mouth has no brakes.
“It’s come to my attention,” he says, “that my ‘sponsor’—” he air-quotes with a Weetabix, for emphasis, “—is aloof, highly critical, and physically undemonstrative, and I consider myself discriminated against in this regard. Thoughts?”
“No thoughts,” Stefan says. “Eating.”
Aaron uses his Weetabix as a pointer. “Stef has movie nights with his. Meanwhile, Maria treats me like a disobedient child.”
“Perhaps if you didn’t behave like a disobedient child,” Will says, “she might upgrade you to deeply unpleasant adult?”
“You’re one to talk. I’ve seen how Tabby treats you. If she could get you behind a big sheet of glass and only touch you with those big rubber gloves they use to manipulate nuclear material, she would.”
“That’s called professional detachment, Aaron. She’s got a job to do and, no matter how much I don’t like it, no matter how much I don’t particularly like her, she’s doing it.”
There’s a whistle as the speakers set into the ceiling activate and Tabby, amid a small amount of microphone whine, says, “William, that’s the most sensible thing you’ve said this week.”
Will nods, satisfied.
“Hey!” Aaron yells, looking up. “Tell Maria I want hugs from now on!”
The circuit clicks off with a loud thump and a spit of feedback. Stefan imagines Maria, in the security room, hitting a rocker switch slightly too hard.
“No hugs for you,” Adam says, and Will grins, nudges him with his elbow.
“I’m getting it from all sides today,” Aaron says. “Martin, what about you? You best buds with Ella? Does she tuck you in at night?”
“She hates me,” Martin mumbles.
“Yeah, well. You did kill a guy. Adam? How’s Edy?”
“She combs my hair,” Adam says. He’s not eating, just drinking a glass of oat milk and leaning his chin on his hand.
“It’s true,” Will says. “She combs his hair. I’ve seen it.”
“That’s it,” Aaron says, throwing down his plastic spoon. “Maria!”
The speakers remain stubbornly silent for the rest of breakfast, denying Aaron his catharsis, and when Maria arrives to escort them into the common area she doesn’t respond to Aaron’s outstretched hands and pleas to ‘just hug it out’.
It’s a little concerning that she’s there; for the last week or so they’ve largely been watched over remotely and left to their own devices, except when one of the sponsors has something they want to say in person. Pippa says security room detail is preferable to standing around in the corridor or sitting on the sofas at the back of the common area because they don’t have to expend the extra effort to appear competent and menacing and can just talk, catch up on schoolwork or, more likely, as long as at least one girl stays alert to the screens, nap.
Maria ushers the five of them over to the sofas by the television, the area Stefan’s group has essentially colonised, and Stefan’s alarmed to realise that a lot of the other sponsors are back: Edy, Adam’s sponsor, leans against the wall by the TV; Tabby, Will’s sponsor, sits on top of the cabinets by the storeroom; Jane and Harmony, attached to Raph and Ollie, are positioned at one of the central tables, watching over their charges who are sitting at another; and a handful of faces Stefan doesn’t have names for — sponsors to second- and third-year girls, most likely — are lounging around near the entrance to the room.
All of them are armed.
What the hell is going on?
Stefan’s not the only one to notice it, and conversation around the television is subdued. Adam and Will huddle slightly closer than usual, and Aaron’s complicated arrangement of legs is reduced simply to hugging his knees. Stefan, looking around, catches Maria’s eye and mouths, What’s going on?
but her only response is to shake her head.“I don’t like this,” Adam whispers, leaning back against Will’s shoulder. “It’s too tense.”
Stefan nods. He’s been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since their first estradiol injection. When one of the boys finally realises he’s growing breasts it’s all going to kick off, and that’s presumably where the slow development of trust with the sponsor comes in, but how anyone who doesn’t want it can be talked through it is still a mystery. Although Christine did warn him, weeks ago, that part of the process of rehabilitation was— how did she put it? Prying their fingers off the driftwood of masculinity and forcing them to learn how to swim?
He’s known all along he’s living in the calm before the storm, but he’s not ready for everything to go to shit just yet.
Eventually, the reason for the amped-up security becomes clear, and it’s not that, say, Martin is getting a little chesty: Declan, escorted by Monica and two others, saunters back into the common room like he never left. He’s wearing his hoodie open, with no shirt underneath, and while he looks perhaps a little leaner, he’s no less intimidating a figure than he was when he attacked Stefan and Aaron in the showers and started all this.
“I thought you said he was so bruised he looked like a mouldy orange!” Will whispers, edging away from Adam and causing the other boy to have to shift his balance. Stefan couldn’t have missed the dismayed look on Adam’s face if he’d been a hundred meters away.
“That was two weeks ago, Will!” Aaron whispers back. “I assume they eventually stopped beating him when they found out you can’t cure dickhead with a baton.”
“Hi, Aa-ron,” Declan says, sauntering over and leaning on the back of Stefan and Aaron’s sofa. “Hi Stef-an. Nice to see you both again.”
“Hi, Declan,” Aaron says, angling himself out of Declan’s reach. “How was life in the cell? Read any good books?”
“You’re so funny, Aa-ron!”
“Well, you know, I try.”
“It won’t help you.”
“All right,” Monica says, tapping Declan on the shoulder with her baton, “come on. Let’s get you settled back in your room.”
“I’m coming back for you,” Declan says. “You too, Stef-an.”
“No, you’re not,” Monica says, hooking an arm around Declan’s elbow and pulling. He steps back, shrugs her off and raises his hand, and for a second it looks like the shitshow is about to start, right here in the common room, but every sponsor in the room points their taser at him and he smiles, flattens his palms in surrender, and allows himself to be walked out of the room. He throws Aaron and Stefan a grin as the door closes behind him.
“You really had to let him out?” Stefan says to Maria. “Couldn’t have kept him in there another couple of months?”
“That’s not how things work here, Stef,” Maria says, and she follows Monica, Declan, and half the other sponsors out into the corridor, leaving them almost alone.
“Fuck,” Aaron says.
* * *
The rooms on the second floor and up are arranged in twos, so their bathrooms can abut and share plumbing, and one of the consequences is that, for Christine, waking up in Paige’s bed can be disorientating: the room is laid out in perfect mirror image to her own.
Once upon a time it would also have been the room with the most clothes in by far, but since their first shopping trip together two weeks ago Christine and Paige have been twice more into town, to look through the smaller shops down by the river, and once down to London, to poke around the massive cathedrals of commerce on Oxford Street. All in the name of both acclimating Christine to being seen as a normal girl — and a pretty girl, Paige insists — by a variety of cisgender strangers, and accelerating her through six months of feminine development in a fortnight. Christine’s room bulges with bags, boxes, and piles of clothes, cluttering to the point where Paige cleared her a small space in Vicky’s room, now also almost consumed.
Clothes, it turns out, are fun.
“What time is it?” Paige moans, rolling over in bed and flopping her hand over Christine’s chest.
“Ouch!” Christine pushes her off for just long enough to pull Paige’s arm tightly around her waist, where it can do useful things such as embrace her and not, for example, brush roughly against her sore nipples. “I’m aching again. Be careful,” she scolds.
“Sorry,” Paige says with a grin, and uses her advantageous new position to kiss Christine on the cheek. “If this is another growth spurt, I’m going to be so mad at you.”
Christine waits for Paige to pull back a little and then she turns over, meeting her face-to-face and kissing her on the lips. “Stay mad,” she whispers.
It’s warm in the room despite the November chill — Dorley Hall’s centrally controlled heating is too miserly for Paige, who feels the cold, so she runs an electric heater on a timer and probably wipes out a reasonable percentage of the money saved in the process — so Christine kicks off the blankets, enjoying the sensation of the high thread count sheets (another influencer bonus) gliding smoothly over her waxed legs and suppressing a giggle: her old self would never have got to discover how good that feels.
Paige rolls over again, onto her back, causing her teardrop breasts to flatten against her chest, and it’s too tempting not to ambush her, to push up with an elbow and let the momentum carry her onto Paige’s side of the bed, squashing one of her own breasts against Paige’s ribs, slipping a cheeky hand into her underwear, searching.
Thin scars buried under pubic hair; new since the last time they were together, in their second year. Christine’s discovered them, kissed them, run her fingers over them, blessed them in every way she knows how, added a third finger in the middle and coaxed from Paige sounds Christine never wants anyone else to hear. Those moans, those squeaks of delight, are hers.
Christine has scars to match; Paige has returned the favour, and because she treasures everything about her, she calls them beautiful.
“Scars are powerful,” Paige said a few nights ago, when they lay next to each other out on the green, soaking in the starlight. “Scars mean survival.”
Christine doesn’t like to think of herself as someone who survived — she prefers reborn — but Paige is all about the redefinition of self, so she hugged her and kissed her and took her back to her room. She had to run back out the next morning before class, to retrieve the dewy picnic blanket before the heavens opened.
Today she contents herself with a quick and playful caress before dropping a kiss on Paige’s nose and skipping off to steal her shower.
A minute later, Paige joins her, opening the frosted glass door with a shyness Christine feels she’s the only one ever to have seen and whispering, “Tease.”
They take their time getting ready.
Her makeup, when eventually she applies it, receives Paige’s approval on the first attempt, and together they head downstairs for breakfast, on the way exchanging greetings and smiles with Julia and Yasmin, who they catch returning to Yasmin’s room; their rekindled relationship apparently melting the hearts of even the second floor’s most dedicated loners.
“Christine!” Aunt Bea says, as they flop into chairs at the packed kitchen table and accept coffees in plain mugs from a second-year girl Christine only sort of recognises. “You look wonderful. Paige must be rubbing off on you.”
At the other end of the table, Jodie hiccups and inhales her orange juice. Christine, probably visibly bright red under her light foundation, doesn’t believe for a second Aunt Bea doesn’t know exactly what she’s implying.
That Aunt Bea! What a jokester! Christine can almost ignore the many disturbing things she knows or suspects about her, to which she’s recently added the discovery that the nurse Karen Turner’s entire electronic profile has vanished. Facebook: gone. LinkedIn: gone. Her staff page at the local hospital: gone. She’s not even on the electoral roll and, when Christine used a random (and, miraculously, still functional) London payphone to call the council, she turned out to not be on their records, either. The woman’s just gone. The suggestion that Aunt Bea, or someone she’s close to, is able to perform such a feat is more than a little disturbing, and Christine spent a whole afternoon last week making triple-sure her unauthorised escapades around Dorley Hall have had all their digital footprints wiped clean.
Whatever. Aunt Bea could be a mafia don and there’d still be nothing Christine can do about it. And if she did have the nurse killed and her presence scrubbed from the internet, all that means is there’s one less devil in the world. She puts it out of her head.
She’s surprised to see Jodie downstairs, though. It’s not that she’s unsociable, like Julia and Yasmin; she just has other friends. She also looks considerably less goth than usual. Is someone at Dorley attempting a teen movie glow-up on her? Is Aunt Bea? Christine hopes it backfires, and that she returns to her usual all-black-with-frills by next week. Jodie, patting her chin dry with a kitchen towel, notices Christine’s attention and rolls her eyes in good humour.
Pippa wiggles her fingers at them. She’s sitting next to Jodie with a bowl of porridge and a mug that reads, It’s all fun and games until someone loses their— and Christine would ask her to turn it round so she can see what the last word is, but she can guess; to describe Dorley’s institutional sense of humour as monomaniacal would be appropriate but leave you with no words to describe Dorley’s institutional approach to the male gender. Pippa’s not normally one for the novelty mugs — she takes a more reserved view of the whole process than most of them, which is perhaps why Aunt Bea asked her to be a sponsor — and Christine regrets missing the look on her face when it was handed to her.
Aunt Bea meets her eyes. Raises her eyebrows, expectant. Whoops.
“Thank you, Aunt Bea!” Christine says, belatedly. “That’s very kind of you to say.” She takes a deep sip of coffee so she doesn’t have to expend the effort to make her smile look genuine. Aunt Bea’s right, though: she does look good. Paige suggested a skirt-and-top combo that is in practical terms equivalent to her habitual shorts-and-t-shirt, especially with a pair of bike shorts underneath, but actually makes her look — and still she struggles sometimes to say the word even in her own head — cute. She likes the feeling, especially when Paige takes her in with a smile. “How’d the new Goserelin injection go?” she says to Pippa. “That was this morning, right?”
Pippa swallows her porridge. “Easy as pie,” she says.
Aunt Bea drums her fingers on the table for a moment. “He’s still cooperating?”
“He told me he wouldn’t make a fuss, and he didn’t. And I overheard him talking to Aaron.” She blushes into her novelty mug, gives up fighting the pleasure straining at the edges of her mouth. “He said we’re friends.”
“Excellent work, Pippa!” Aunt Bea says, causing a frown to flicker across Pippa’s brow. No happy moment unsullied: Aunt Bea has a way of making any friendship between sponsor and subject unpleasantly transactional. “How do you believe he will respond when the physical changes become apparent?”
“I’m, um, still not sure. He didn’t seem comfortable when Aaron challenged his masculinity this morning. It might be a problem.”
Aunt Bea finishes her coffee. “Then your priority is to continue to deepen your rapport. If you’re his friend, become his best friend. And when the changes start, don’t forget: they are mandated by us, not you. You are there simply to help him through an ordeal you are powerless to prevent; we are his enemy, you are his ally.”
That’s not the way it’s usually done. Bea must have discussed this strategy with Pippa, though, because she nods calmly. Whether or not she follows through with it doesn’t especially matter, but it does at least have the benefit of not putting Pippa at odds with a Stef who glares at his chest morning and evening, willing it to swell. Christine’s more concerned about Stef’s acting skills; it’s going to be hard to coast on fake apathy when everyone around him is panicking.
She still feels bad about reading the diary entries he vouchsafes to her care, but after the showers, after the nurse, she was worried about him, and it’s now become another of the games they play, another board on which to clash. Christine smiles, remembering a three-page tirade on the subject of Will’s tiresome Reddit atheism which, if you took out all of the insulting asides directed specifically at her, would read like a first-draft essay for medium.com.
God, she hopes it’s a game they’re playing. She likes him a lot, but has no real idea how he feels about her. For all she knows, he could hate her, and his little jokes might be his only way of expressing that. She needs to find a way to see him in person again, to recalibrate. Text-only friendships — if that’s even what this is — suck.
His ‘true believer’ jabs are the only ones that really hit home. They remind her of the awful things they’re in the process of doing to everyone down there with him, things she could put a stop to at a stroke, if she were willing to pay the price; she’s not. ‘Dorleypilled’, he called her, and the worst thing is, it’s accurate: she looks around the table, at Pippa, at Jodie, at Bea, and most especially at Paige, and can’t imagine any of them any other way.
Fine; she can imagine Jodie a little more goth. She’s wearing light blue and it’s weird.
“No! Maria! It’s fine!”
The shout echoes in the dining hall but probably comes from the basement stairs. It sounds like Monica, and it’s accompanied by the staccato steps of someone wearing medium-high heels and a seriously bad mood.
“I just need ten minutes away from that odious piece of shit! Ten minutes when I don’t have to breathe his stink! Ten fucking minutes of peace and fucking quiet!”
Monica, charging into a full kitchen as she finishes yelling behind her, flushes when she realises how many people — including Aunt Bea — witnessed her outburst. She stands almost to attention for a moment; Christine wonders if she was ever a soldier, or just an overexcited boy scout. “Sorry,” she says. “Won’t happen again, Aunt Bea.”
“See that it doesn’t. Now; are you okay, Monica dear?”
“I’m okay,” Monica says, dropping heavily onto the rickety wooden chair by the door, the one they stand on to change the bulbs. “It’s Declan. He’s back among the boys as of a half-hour ago and he’s learned nothing from his time in the cell.”
“Declan’s out?” Pippa says, dropping her spoon in her porridge and getting halfway out of her chair before Aunt Bea stops her with a hand to her shoulder.
“Don’t worry, Pippa,” Aunt Bea says. “It’s all under control.”
“Yeah,” Monica says, leaning her head back against the wall and closing her eyes, “not exactly. First thing he did was threaten Aaron and Stef.”
‘Stef’. Even the other sponsors call him that now. Pippa started it and now everyone does it, including half the boys downstairs. On the day he finally extracts his head from his arse and starts thinking of himself as a girl, he’s going to have the easiest name transition ever. Unless he decides to go by something completely different. Some people have strong opinions about their names. Christine hadn’t; she had Indira pick it, with her only specification being that it share no syllables and no initials with her deadname, deeply buried and quickly forgotten.
Pippa shakes off Aunt Bea’s restraining hand. “He threatened Stef? What did he do?”
Monica’s still got her eyes closed. “He said, ‘I’m coming back for you.’ Don’t worry; Maria’s still down there and so are, like, ten more of us, and the PMC guys have been told to stop napping and watch their phones. Stef’s safe, Pip.”
“All the same,” Pippa says, “I’m not going to the library today. I’m staying here.”
“So, if he’s under control,” Paige says, innocently sipping her coffee, “what’s got you so pissed off?” Aunt Bea directs a frown at her that Paige ignores.
“I’m pissed off because I have no control, Paige,” Monica says, leaning forward on her knees and clenching and unclenching her fists. “I’m pissed off because I shut my eyes and helped turn a man into a bag of bruises and he just fucking grinned at me while I did it. I mortgaged my conscience for that piece of shit and he doesn’t even have the decency to care. And now he’s wandering around down there, knowing full well that we just threw everything we had at him and he didn’t break.”
“That’s not everything we have,” Christine says. “Has he been getting the shots?” Monica nods. “Then he’s going to have a fun surprise soon enough.”
“He’s not going to make it that long,” Monica says. “He’s going to revert right back to his old behaviour — except worse, because we’ve made it clear that he’s a block of concrete and we’re a rubber fucking hammer — and create ten times as much work for the rest of us trying to keep him under control. That place is a— a— a shitpit of tension, now that he’s out. The other boys are all on edge, except for Raph and Ollie, who have their big, tough role-model back, and that means we need to be on active duty again, twice as many of us, at all times, just when things were starting to feel nice and calm down there.”
“Yes, well,” Aunt Bea says, “it doesn’t do for our subjects to get too comfortable.” Pippa bites her lip. “And, besides, the reintroduction of an undesirable element can be a catalyst.”
“He’s a fucking catalyst all right,” Monica says, standing heavily and kicking off her shoes. “I’m going upstairs to get some proper shitkicking boots on, and then I’m going back down there to spend the next six hours looking very much like I’m ready to kick some shit. Pray for me, girls.”
“I still don’t understand why we don’t just wash him out,” Pippa mutters, angrily re-engaging with her breakfast. “I mean, I know that’s the last resort and everything, but still.”
“Everyone deserves a fair chance,” Aunt Bea says. “Four or five, even. If we washed people out as soon as they became difficult to handle, this house would be empty.”
Monica yanks open the door to the entrance hall. “Not quite,” she says, pausing on the threshold. “It’d just be Melissa, sitting alone at the kitchen table like the bloody Twilight Zone.”
* * *
The bedrooms in the basement are, as Stefan originally observed, laid out and sized like mid-budget dorm rooms, and thus comfortably can seat two — one on the bed, one on the chair — and even three if two people don’t mind sitting together on the bed. At four, they get cramped.
Stefan’s taken the head end of the bed, after stuffing his pillows into the wardrobe to protect them from Aaron’s roaming feet, which unfortunately are still attached to Aaron, camped out at the other end of the bed and twitching nervously. Adam’s perched on the roller chair and Will’s sitting with his back against the door, long legs almost interfering with the computer desk. Martin, to Stefan’s relief, didn’t follow Stefan and Aaron the way Will and Adam did, and is presumably locked in his own room, doing whatever he normally does in the eighteen hours a day he spends in there, only perhaps with added Declan-related anxiety.
None of them seems to want to start the conversation. Not even Aaron, who stops fidgeting after a little while, draws his feet up under himself, and starts quietly drumming his fingers on his knees. Stefan puts some music on — one of Pippa’s playlists; it’s mostly Taylor — and decides that if no-one else will break the silence, it’s up to him.
“So. Declan.”
“Declan,” Aaron says quietly. “Again.”
“What do we do about him?”
“We go back to the old system,” Will says. “We’ve been getting slack, anyway. Getting soft. We stay in our group.” He whirls his finger around the room, encompassing all of them. “This group. Fuck Moody Martin; he’s useless. He can fend for himself.”
Adam reaches out towards Will, but Will ignores him. “What if Martin needs our help?” he says, covering for his dismay.
“He doesn’t deserve our help,” Aaron says into his chest. “Hands up everyone here who’s killed a guy.” No-one raises their hand. “Exactly. I’m a bastard, Will’s a bastard, and it’s anyone’s guess about Adam and Stef, but none of us are killers. So Declan can have him, if he wants him.”
“He doesn’t,” Stefan says, and then frowns when they all look at him. He said it quickly, but it feels right, so he interrogates it. “Declan never went for him. None of them did. Because he wouldn’t fight back.”
“Exactly,” Will says. “It’s no fun when you know they can’t fight back.”
“Yeah,” Aaron says. “Martin’d take a punch and beg for another.” He raises his hands in pretend plea, but drops them again almost immediately. Doesn’t even have it in him to shit-talk Martin properly, which is almost heart-breaking.
“Why did they let him out, anyway?” Adam says. “I’ve been thinking about it, and it doesn’t make any sense.” He leans forward on his chair. “People, when they get taken like that, they don’t come back.”
“I don’t know, but it’s fucked their authority right up,” Will says. “Maybe not with any of us — I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to spend two weeks getting the shit kicked out of me in a cell and I have a healthy respect for those tasers — but Declan’s got them beaten. They’ve spent a fortnight repeatedly fucking him up, and now he’s back.”
“What about washing out?” Stefan says.
Will waves a dismissive hand. “That’s the bogeyman. Always lurking, never seen. The big threat they never deploy.”
Not true, unless Abby and Christine both lied, which seems unlikely at this point. The washouts go, and they don’t come back, and given that anyone who went through what Declan did and subsequently got released would go straight to the police, it’s not likely they go anywhere good.
“I’m choosing to take the threat of washing out seriously,” Stefan says.
“Suit yourself.”
“No, but seriously,” Aaron says, “what is their plan with Declan? With all of us? I mean, we all got our new Goserelin implant, right? So we’re here another month. And then another. And another. What’s the endgame here? Unless we all wash out in the end, some of us are walking out. And then we, what, don’t go to the cops? Or the papers? Out of the goodness of our hearts? And are they even going to stop with the Goserelin? Are we going to start getting psychotropic shit next, or something?”
“What are you saying?” Will says. “That we’re here forever? You said you thought this was an experiment or something, that we’d all been gotten drunk and made to sign a consent form. Eight weeks max, you said.”
“Yeah, and you thought it was ‘woke jail’ and you thought it was demons and I have no idea what Stef thought it was because he never opens his fucking mouth unless it’s to needle me about my fucking dick pics and for Christ’s sake I know that’s a messed up thing to do, Stef, of course I do, and I’ve had more than a month in a concrete hole to think very very hard about how absolutely and comprehensively I’ve fucked my life up and you know what I realised? I’m exactly like Martin the fucking murderer. His loving family leaned on the court; my shitty family made it all go away. He ran off from rehab because he wanted a drink; I started straight back up with my shit. I’m exactly as pathetic as he is and I have to live with that and, to be brutally fucking honest, I’m almost pleased to be facing some kind of real consequence for it, if only because it’ll piss off my family, but I still go to bed every night thinking about it so will you please stop bothering me about it every single fucking day?”
“Yeah,” Stefan says. “I’m sorry. I just—”
“I get it. You don’t want to hang out with a little freak pervert.”
“No! You’re— shit, Aaron, you’re my friend.” No pretending like he’s not, not any more. What’s that saying? There are no atheists in foxholes? Well, maybe there are no truly healthy friendships in the Dorley basement. No ethical fraternity in late-stage feminisation.
Anyway, his moral high ground is a lie. All of them here fucked up and hurt people. Including Stefan. He barely knows his parents any more, and his sister — his excuse — is a near-stranger because he decided closing himself off completely after Melissa left was a better option than facing up to his shit. Sure, it felt safer at the time, to burn away quietly over years and years rather than take a risk, but there’s no such thing as self-immolation without collateral damage. No son/daughter for his parents. No older brother/sister for Petra. No best friend for Russ, when he needed one the most. All his fault.
He hurt people. It almost feels good to realise it.
“That’s a joke,” Aaron says. “We’re not friends. We’re just… here at the same time.”
“No,” Stefan says, reaching forward, risking the contact. Aaron doesn’t flinch at the hand on his arm. “I mean it. Look, I’ve been alone for a long time. I wrecked everything, out there. Lost everyone. Was barely even talking to my housemates by the time I got dragged down here. And actually meeting you — all of you — has been… I don’t know, healing? I used to have two best friends; one left me, the other one I left, and I’ve been missing them ever since. In you, I have something I haven’t had since I had them.”
“Uh—”
“I’m being serious, Aaron. You’re my friend. I fucking like you, okay? And don’t give me that look, Will, unless you think the emotion we call friendship is queer or something. I’ve not been as close to anyone since Russ or Melissa.”
“Oh, shit,” Aaron says, “are we finally getting your tragic backstory?”
“No,” Stefan says, and then remembers: “Not enough paragon points.”
“Hey! No callbacks.”
“So, I’m sorry. I won’t bug you about it again.”
“Good,” Aaron says. “Thanks. Fuck. And, hey, sorry about the feelings, William.”
By the door, Will throws up his hands in exasperated surrender. “You’re all gay,” he says.
Fuck it. Stefan takes Aaron’s hand, meets his eye and cocks an eyebrow. Aaron nods, and together they look over at Will. Stefan makes a kissy face and says, “And that’s why you love us,” and is relieved when, after a moment’s conflicted hesitation, Will laughs.
* * *
Stef’s screwed. He has to be. He’s down there, under pressure, having already cracked at least once, having tried to hurt himself in the shower, having been made practically catatonic by that nurse’s assault, and now Declan’s back, throwing his weight around, making insinuations and threats. Amping up the stress levels. Monica called it a ‘shitpit of tension’ down there; how long until Stef, trying to adjust to yet another new normal, fucks up and exposes his true self? To a man already predisposed to violence towards him? Will even Maria and Monica’s twenty-four-hour attention be enough to protect him from the consequences of that?
God, and if Stef accidentally outing himself gets back to Aunt Bea… that’s everything Christine wanted to prevent in the first place. There’s no telling what Bea would do. If anything, the ambiguous fate of the nurse has left Christine more scared of her than she used to be.
Shit.
Shit!
Christine’s well aware that she’s spiralling. She excused herself from the kitchen table and practically ran upstairs, shut herself in her room, faked a forgotten assignment when Paige messaged her, and now she’s lying on her bed, drumming her fingers on the frame, wishing for a cigarette.
She needs to situate herself when she gets like this. She needs context, needs information. But she’s already messaged Stef and got no reply. She’s messaged Abby for moral support; no reply there, either. And with that, she’s got nowhere to turn to except the security feeds. She’s out of confidantes.
No. Almost out of confidantes.
She yanks her laptop open, loads the Consensus app, and starts thinking through how to translate Stef’s situation onto that of the anonymous ‘friend’ she invented, weeks ago.
Okay this is weird, I’m changing it back
Christine’s halfway through her next message when the door slowly opens and Paige steps carefully through. She smiles, but it’s a nervous smile, one that causes Christine’s heart to lurch, so she quickly types out a grateful goodbye, closes her laptop, and stands up from the bed. Paige takes a step back, leans against the door, and Christine, limbs going cold, doesn’t move any closer. She doesn’t know what’s going on, but Paige hasn’t seemed this brittle since the end of their second year, when Aunt Bea locked her in her room for a week.
“Paige—” Christine says.
“You don’t have an assignment due, do you?” Paige says. She’s hugging herself, balling her fists in the fabric of her long dress, drawing it up almost to her knees.
Shit. “No,” Christine says.
“You seemed so scared when you left the table. More than you would be just for schoolwork. It was more like the way you used to get, years ago, when you thought you’d done something wrong. When you were just waiting for the consequences to find you. And when you—” Paige sniffs, and Christine aches, “—when you lied, and told me you had some assignment to do—”
“It’s not anything bad,” Christine says, wanting desperately to move towards her but anchoring herself with the fear that if she does, and Paige bolts, and she can’t get to her, this might all end. Paige, the girl who has endless confidence and boundless grace, until suddenly, sometimes, she doesn’t.
“Are you seeing someone else?” Paige says.
Christine’s reply is instant. “No.” They never agreed to be exclusive, never even really talked about whether or not they’re girlfriends, and yet they both know they are. They fell in deep with each other, almost too quickly for Christine to really think about what she was doing.
Almost too quickly. Because the lies, like the guilt, have been weighing on her.
Paige nods. “Okay,” she says. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
Christine nods, confused. “Yes.”
“Good. Because there’s something going on that I don’t know about. Something that makes you really scared sometimes, something that makes you close your laptop when I look over, something that is really important to you, but which excludes me. And I need to know what it is, Christine. So I’m going to go around the corner to the kitchen and make us both a cup of tea, and when I come back, I want you to have decided whether or not you want to tell me. Okay?”
Christine sits down on the bed, slowly, moving every limb with care so as not to overbalance. She looks up at Paige, sees the tear tracks on her face, and knows at that moment that she will never keep anything from her ever again.
“Okay,” Christine says.
* * *
Will predicted that Declan, Raph and Ollie would have taken over the sofas by the TV and, sure enough, when the four of them returned to the common room, there they were, slouching across as much space as possible, marking their new territory. But it didn’t take a lot of four-versus-three intimidation to get them to shift back to their usual spot on the metal tables; between the numbers disadvantage and the roomful of women with weapons, Will’s gamble worked. Declan might not be intimidated by the worst Dorley can dish out — as far as he understands it, anyway — but clearly he doesn’t want to go straight back in the cell before enjoying a single night in a soft bed.
“They’ve never actually properly thrown down with any of us, right?” Will said, back in Stefan’s room. “Yes, they’ve chucked the odd plate, they’ve made threats, but correct me if I’m wrong: the only time any of them actually came at us was Declan, with you two, in the showers, right? And all he really managed then was knocking you on the floor, Aaron.”
“And then Stef made him look like an idiot,” Aaron said, grinning.
“Not the point. With anyone else, I’d expect them to respect you for outsmarting them, but Declan’s thicker than a pig’s knuckle; that won’t even have occurred to him. But what he does know is, we’re all basically unknown prospects, yes? I’m about his height and at least as built, and Adam’s slim but not at all weak.”
“We arm-wrestled,” Adam said.
“And I only just won. And you two, you’re both kinda small, but anyone who’s been in a real fight knows you can’t discount the skinny guys. It’s the skinny guys who’re quick. It’s the skinny guys who’ll break a bottle over your face.”
“Or shove a plastic fork up your nose,” Aaron muttered.
“So,” Will continued, ignoring Aaron, “we’re a united front. Like before, only moreso. We do everything together. No exceptions. If one of us has to piss, we all have to piss. I don’t care, Aaron, before you say it, if it makes us look like a bunch of girls. You’ll have to learn to make sacrifices if you don’t want to get your face split open. Declan and his cheerleaders are going to want to get us alone and we just don’t let them. Agreed?”
Stefan, sitting in his usual spot on the sofas and filtering out the vast majority of the baking show on the TV, is still a little surprised they were able to push Declan’s lot back to the tables, and reluctantly he gives Will a few points on his internal scoreboard. It was him who did most of the talking, after all. Stefan’s not able entirely to relax, though, not just yet, not with his back to the room and Declan undoubtedly irritated. So he keeps his ears open, half to Aaron’s prattle — reassuringly resumed after an unsettling period of keeping his thoughts mostly inside his head — and half to Declan, Raph and Ollie’s conversation, in case there’s anything of value to be found there.
He’s never listened to them before, not really. And mostly they talk about what he would have guessed: a mishmash of sexist and racist jokes, some bravado about a time in their life they kicked a particularly large amount of arse, that sort of thing. After a while, and a lot of tedious and unpleasant chat Stefan is already trying to forget, Declan starts dominating the conversation, going over a time when a former girlfriend — one of the ones he hit, apparently — returned to his place to pick up some of her things, and Declan had had a lot to drink that night, and she had a smart mouth on her, and he was feeling—
Oh. Oh God.
Declan is describing a rape.
And he thinks it’s funny.
It’s over in less than five seconds. Almost before he knows what he’s doing, Stefan’s vaulted over the back of the sofa and launched himself at Declan, catching him hard enough in the face to knock him off his seat and onto the floor. And as Declan stares up at him, confused, clutching his nose, as Stefan cradles his fist in his other hand, flexing his thumb — he punched with it inside his fist; rookie move — and as the room around him slowly starts to react, Stefan realises that he doesn’t regret hitting Declan at all.
Not even if he gets back up.
Not even if he balls those huge fists of his.
Not even if he shouts his name with venom and spittle.
He wants a fight?
Fuck it.
He can have one.