NOVEL NEXT 31. Skin and Bones
31. Skin and Bones
2004 December 24
Friday
She remembers being burned here. She remembers being cut here. She remembers being hit, stroked, taunted and groped here. She remembers being dressed and painted and given drinks to serve and men to obey, and refusing, and suffering consequences as varied as they were demeaning. She remembers exactly where she was standing when she was first thrown to the floor, when she was first marked, when her soft new skin was first torn open, here in the dining room at Dorley Hall. And she remembers the other girls, who obeyed more quickly, who succumbed more readily, who were taken away, who left her behind, a toy that wouldn’t be wound up, a pet who wouldn’t behave.
Not submissive enough (she cultivated a pride they couldn’t penetrate).
Not broken enough (she never let them break her).
Not ashamed enough (she wears this body like a scar).
Maria sits at the head of the table, in the seat that was once Grandmother’s, and surveys the dining hall: the dent in the floorboards from when she tried to drive her brand-new high heel into Karen’s foot; the dark spot from when Barbara was told what awaited her after Penelope was finished moulding her and vomited up her dinner; the tear in the wallpaper from when Sarah threw a plate at Frankie. Other memories stain the room, memories attached to names long gone, but Maria tries her hardest to forget them; best to linger only on the girls who survived.
The scar cream on her forearms itches. It’s not that she hates her scars, exactly; Maria is emphatically not what they made her, but what she made herself, and the scars are a record of that struggle, the price she paid. Sometimes she runs her fingers over them, each rough line of closed and knitted flesh another victory. But when she looks at herself she wants to feel new.
They have rooms on the third floor now. Still a novelty to look out from unbarred windows. Maria opened up one of the spare rooms and put out photos, set up candles, laid out some personal items that Grandmother’s people never burned. She goes in there sometimes and lights the candles and remembers; the rest of the time, she keeps herself locked up tight.
Eleven candles. Eleven girls — or boys, or something else; does it even matter any more? — the world will never see again. And she knows there were more before her time. Beatrice has the numbers; Maria doesn’t care to. Not yet.
Beatrice Quinn. The woman who marched into this place not five months ago and took it out from under Grandmother’s hands. The living, breathing proof that there’s life after the programme, that their whispered promises to each other don’t have to dissolve with the daylight, that one can be an unwilling woman and still walk the world with pride.
Maria will never forget the look on Grandmother’s face when Beatrice walked back in after a decade and a half; like the ghosts of all her victims had returned to her at once.
Beatrice reclines in another of the wobbly old dining chairs, her feet up on the table, and whether it’s a calculated insult to the studied and ultimately fake gentility of Dorley Hall’s above-ground operations under Dorothy Marsden or whether it’s just for comfort, Maria finds satisfaction in it anyway. Picture us, you old hag, putting our filthy hands all over your things, marking your precious antique furniture with our shoes.
They chased her out the day they took over, and while she’s been promised — against everyone’s will — continued use of her flat on the first floor, they have control of the locks now and they’ve shut her out of everything, even the dining hall and kitchen; she can cook her own damn food. She knows only what they wish her to know, and while Beatrice has said that this state of affairs probably can’t continue forever — the Smyth-Farrow estate has too much influence, and the man himself is too belligerent, too used to having his desires satisfied to remain forever quiescent — the old woman can’t, for now, force anyone’s hand but her own. Now that the Hall is under new management, Bea said, the estates of Smyth-Farrow and Lambert are in a state of cold war.
They just have to wait her out. Two years. They don’t even have to bring her in on anything until they start the programme up again, in whatever form it eventually takes.
Around the table: Maria, at its head; Sarah and Barbara, her best friends from under Grandmother, to her left and right; Natalie and Trish, fellow survivors; Beatrice and Ashley, representatives of the new controlling interest; and at the other end of the table, Teri. Maria doesn’t know much about Teri, save that she knows Bea and Ashley, and that she regards this place as one might a mass grave. And that, if Maria steps outside herself for a moment, is perhaps the most comprehensible attitude towards Dorley she’s yet encountered.
Teri’s yet to say much. She’s just been sitting at the table with her mug — which says Tranny Granny on the side — and subjecting each of the girls present to the odd searching look. She doesn’t approve of the plan, that much is clear, but beyond that her thoughts are a mystery.
“We’re not yet committed,” Beatrice is saying, “but in the new year we have to have our costing and staffing ready for review, so this is it: this is volunteer time.”
“I already said I’m in, Bea,” Ashley says. She’s been unusually intense recently, and Maria has a few reservations about her motivation for joining up, but she’s not short of ideas. She also insisted on the wood-effect laminate wallpaper for the basement residential corridor, which struck Maria as a strange choice the moment she saw it, but for now it covers up the stains and the dents and they’ve blown their budget on the other restorations, anyway.
“I’m… still uncomfortable,” Natalie says. Not a surprise: Nat, of all of them, had the most difficulty adapting and was the closest to being shipped out when Elle and Beatrice took over. What is a surprise is that she’s still here at all; enough of them walked out with Elle on that first day, never to come back, that it’s a wonder they have enough people for their little endeavour at all.
“I’m not going to say we don’t need you,” Beatrice says, “because we do. But you’re also under no obligation.”
“Say the word,” Teri says, breaking a long silence, “and you can come home with me. You won’t even have to go work for Ms Lambert. I have spare rooms and I’m a good cook. You don’t have to be involved with this… monstrousness.”
“Teri—” Ashley starts.
“Save it, Ash. I can’t believe you’re going along with all this.”
“After the year I’ve had? I’m almost offended you’re staying out of it.”
“It’s not right.” Teri taps her fingers on the table. “I know I’m not the only person who sees it.”
Ashley glares at her. “You don’t think most men would have their attitudes improved if they became women?”
“That’s a platitude, Ash, not a way of life. And women can be awful, too; it wasn’t just men who took Linda’s house from us, remember? I know you’ve had a hard time, but that’s no excuse for—”
“A hard time? A hard—! No. Okay. Whatever, Teri. If not for me, then think about them.” Ash gestures towards Maria; Maria wishes she wouldn’t. “Barb went out into the world for the first time and she got groped! And when she objected—”
“Ash,” Barbara says, speaking up for the first time. She’s hugging herself tight under the table.
“Sorry, Barb. The point is, Teri, there’s nothing that works against guys like that. Nothing except… what Elle proposed.”
“It’s madness, Ashley,” Teri says.
“You’re not going to report us, are you?” Barbara asks.
It’s enough for Teri to back down. “No,” she says after a while. “Not at all. I’m sorry, all of you; I shouldn’t have raised my voice.” She drinks for a moment, to punctuate, to create space. “I’ll never report you. I might disagree with… with what you’re planning, but I’d never throw any of you to the wolves like that.” She shakes her head. “Never. The same system that protects men like that would not be fair or kind to any of you.”
“It’s the condition, Teri,” Beatrice says, leaning on her wrist. She sounds tired. “We do this: monetary support for life. We don’t: someone else does it anyway, with methodology we don’t control. And we weren’t exactly flush with legal identities here, not until Elle Lambert came along and—” she waggles the fingers on the hand she’s resting on, “—waved her magic money wand. She says jump, we’re obligated to ask how high.”
“Sounds almost as bad as—”
“No,” Maria says, more sharply than she intended. “Don’t finish that sentence, Teri. You weren’t here.”
“Nothing can justify this.”
“You. Weren’t. Here. And neither was Beatrice, actually, not recently, but we’ve compared notes and let me tell you, whatever you heard about this place from her, we had it worse. And I have no family and no home and if some secretive aristocrat wants to pay me and put a roof over my head in exchange for running a rehabilitation programme and taking a few men who are genuinely dangerous off the streets, what am I going to say? Sorry, rich lady, you can keep your money, I’ll just go stay with my dead family?”
“You can stay with me.”
Maria thumps the table. “And who the fuck are you? Some random woman who thinks she knows best? The ‘tranny granny’? Do people even say that word any more?”
“And what would you know about that?”
“Be nice to them, Teri,” Ashley says. “Everything’s still fresh for them. You remember what that was like, right? They’re just like we used to be.”
“Are they?”
“Yes!”
Barbara’s been holding Maria’s hand, the way they used to, downstairs in the dark, and Maria draws strength and stability from the connection. “No,” she says. “We’re not like you, not really. Not all of us. I wouldn’t have chosen to be Maria. But she was… something like a pressure valve. An escape hatch. And she’s the only person I can be now.”
“There’s such a thing as testosterone, you know,” Teri says. “You can be a man again, and—”
“Stop. No. I know what’s possible. I know, biologically, that I could have back most of what I used to have. But I don’t want it. The man I used to be is dead, Teri. He died with my family. This—” she thumps the table again, “—is who I am now.”
“You’re serious? You’re really serious?”
“Completely. I didn’t fight to be Maria just to have you come along and offer to take her back like she’s a fucking jacket that doesn’t fit.”
“See?” Ashley says. “They are just like us.”
“I don’t understand how you’re all okay with this,” Teri says.
“The ones who weren’t are gone,” Sarah says, in her slow and deliberate way. “We’re not the success story of Dorley Hall, Teri; we’re the rejects. The ones they didn’t want. The defective products. They turned us into girls and we were the ones, for whatever reason, who said, ‘Fuck you, okay then,’ and did our best to be girls.”
“How is that not what they wanted?” Teri asks, and Sarah laughs.
“You’re a good person, Teri,” she says. “I hope you don’t leave us forever.”
“They wanted us to hate ourselves,” Maria explains. “We were supposed to grovel and beg for our old bodies back, we were supposed to look at ourselves and weep. We refused. We found a way to live with it. To embrace it.”
“And yet you still want to inflict this on other people?” Teri says.
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
“It’s nuanced.”
“Look at it this way, Teri,” Ashley says. “Worst comes to the worst, we’re still getting rid of abusive men. It’s a win-win.”
“You’ll be making them less abusive by… forcibly turning them into women?”
“Yes!”
Trish, who’s been playing with a pencil the whole time, says quietly, “It works.”
“I’ll never believe that,” Teri says.
“They picked us up for nothing offences,” Trish continues, turning the pencil over and over in her hands. “Pickpocketing, shoplifting, getting in a fight at the wrong time. The offence didn’t matter. What mattered was that we went through the courts or the cops and we got on their radar. They sifted through the data. They found girls— boys like us. Minor crimes. Indicators of disadvantaged backgrounds. Not a one of us wasn’t poor. But I wasn’t quite like the others. I hurt people. Badly. And I…” She hiccups, and Maria notices for the first time that she’s crying, crying so cleanly it’s almost impossible to see in the low light. Natalie rubs her shoulder. “I was a big man,” Trish says, injecting so much venom into the words that she spits. “A big man in a little boy’s body. And I was running on automatic. I hurt people because that was what you did. And that nightmare woman Dorothy — fucking ‘Grandmother’ — may have mutilated me but I fucking— I—”
Natalie shushes her. “It’s okay. You don’t have to.”
Trish nods. Covers Natalie’s hand with her own. Looks back at Teri. “I’m better now. I’m different. I didn’t want this. But now that I have it? I’m never going back.”
“Well,” Teri says, and in that drawn-out syllable Maria can see someone gathering her thoughts, creating a space in which to do so. “I can definitely understand why someone would prefer being a woman.”
Trish shrugs. “Honestly? Woman or man feel about the same to me. But the obligations are different. The expectations. I’ve got… more room.”
“We’re not going to be like Dorothy,” Maria says. “We’re not hurting people for pleasure. We’ll be—” she taps her chin for a moment as she decides how to word it. “We’ll be creating a second chance for the kind of young men who need it, but who would refuse it if it were just offered to them.”
“It’s like a scholarship for bastards,” Ashley says unhelpfully.
“We’re in control. We even have a good idea of what to look for. There’s one guy I’ve had my eye on who I think would be perfect. He’s been menacing women outside a health clinic. Abortion protester. Very intense. Comes from some culty church up north. He’s young, like eighteen or nineteen; young enough for us to steer him in a new direction. If we pick him up, we wouldn’t just be saving the women he goes after; we could save him, too. If we leave him alone, in ten years we could be looking at a bloody nail bomber.”
“Except,” Teri says levelly, “by ‘pick him up’ you mean kidnap him, harm him permanently, and hope against hope that at the end of it you have a woman and not a basket case.”
“Give us credit,” Maria says. “We all lived it. We all saw who made it and who didn’t. And we had nothing to do down there but talk amongst ourselves. We’ve got a good idea of what it takes to be suitable.”
Teri nods, mostly to herself, and stands. Pushes her coffee mug towards the middle of the table. “I’m sorry, girls,” she says, “but I’ll have no part of it. I’ve said my piece, and now—”
“Were you serious?” It’s Natalie, half out of her chair, being pulled down by Trish but staring urgently at Teri. “Were you actually serious about letting us come with you?”
“Nat—” Trish says, standing with her.
Natalie hugs her. “I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I just can’t. I’ll visit. I will. But I can’t stay.”
“Don’t visit,” Trish whispers. “Don’t make yourself come back here. I’ll visit you. Every week, okay? I love you.”
“I love you more than anything.”
It takes a few minutes for Trish and Natalie to collect Nat’s meagre belongings from the room they’ve been sharing, and then they’re gone, Natalie and Teri. Neither of them looks back.
Trish shuffles closer to Sarah, who hooks an arm around her and draws her closer still, and Barbara and Maria continue to hold each other, and that’s it until Beatrice draws a slightly unsteady breath, and the meeting continues.
Against the wall, by the unlit fire, they’ve set up a small Christmas tree, with presents for each of them scattered underneath, and Maria finds herself watching the fairy lights draped through the branches flicker on and off, rather than meet anyone else’s eyes for the next little while.
2019 December 24
Tuesday
Aunt Bea intercepts them on their way down the stairs and for a moment Christine’s heart freezes. Is she not feminine enough? Did she do her makeup incorrectly? Is there something wrong with her dress? It takes her only a second to snap out of it, to remember how much of the ‘Aunt Bea’ persona is an act, intended to scare impressionable young men, and how really, if Christine was truly ready to graduate, she would have grown out of this reaction by now, and—
“Teenie,” Indira whispers, and squeezes her hand.
“Oh,” Christine says. “Sorry.”
Beatrice smiles softly. “There is no need to apologise. I simply wished to ask a favour of you both, but, first, I think I’m going to mandate that you, Christine, take a fortnight off in the new year. Paid, of course.”
“Um.”
“Decompress. Attend to your studies. Visit friends, and do so without the need urgently to run back to take care of some—” she curls her lip, “—picayune technical issue.”
“Are you sure?” Christine asks.
“We survived fifteen years without your expertise, Christine, dear; by the skin of our teeth at times, I must admit. For two weeks, we will be fine.” Bea must be able to see Christine’s doubt in her face, because she adds, “We’ll contact Elle’s people if we have any problems.”
“Okay, but don’t just contact her people, go straight to Ja—”
“Christine! We will be fine.”
A fine organisation wouldn’t have been so ramshackle as to allow a twenty-one-year-old idiot with a phone, a laptop and an anxiety disorder to walk through their locks as she pleased. Christine doesn’t say it, though. She just smiles and nods. Indira’s grip on her fingers loosens, and Christine realises that her sister’s standing subtly in front of her, having placed herself between Christine and Bea, and the swell of love she feels once again for Indira displaces all else.
“You had a favour to ask?” Indira prompts.
Beatrice blinks, interrupted in her quest to extract as much information as she can from Christine’s silence, and says, “Oh! Yes. Would you mind meeting Teri and Ashley? They’re just parking, out by the lake. I’d go but—” she smiles mischievously, seeming suddenly younger and more agile, like the Beatrice Christine’s been encountering more and more these last couple of months, “—I have a first impression to make.” She flicks at the lapel of her pea coat to reveal a surprising quantity of décolletage for one her age. Her dress, presumably, is under there somewhere.
“That depends,” Christine says, “on how slippery it is out there.” She leans on Indira and waggles one of her feet back and forth. “These are pretty high heels for me.”
“You’ll be fine,” Indira says.
And she’s right: bundled up in a long winter coat that reaches almost to her feet, Christine’s able to concentrate more on walking than on not freezing to death, and by the time they reach the car park by the lake she’s as comfortable in her heels as she would be in any other mildly awkward shoe. She wonders if that was the point, if this was another lesson in femininity she has to pass before Bea will let her graduate, if Indira received instructions to that effect earlier today, but dismisses the thought as mere speculation: there really is no way to know whether any given thing around here is part of a fiendishly thought-out and cunningly executed plan to make you into the girliest girl around, or a total coincidence.
Indira nudges her, and Christine looks up from contemplating her feet to see a chunky, old-looking Volvo pull into the car park. From the driver’s side climbs a bottle-blonde woman with soft features and pale skin. She waves at them and starts fussing with a wheelchair stored in the boot, while another woman, older, Black, equally arresting to look at, opens the passenger-side door and waits patiently as her seat whirrs slowly and steadily out until she’s perpendicular to the car, ready to transfer to her wheelchair.
Teri and Ashley. Indira gave her the very, very quick version on their way out here: Teri as in the legendary Teri and Linda, who took Beatrice in when she was living on the streets; Ashley as in Auntie Ashley, one of the first sponsors and instrumental to the early design of the rebooted programme. Neither have been involved in almost ten years and Teri, Indira said with a grin, officially disapproves.
Indira offers to help Teri into the wheelchair but she’s waved off. Ashley simply parks it next to the extended passenger seat and Teri, with a grunt of effort, quickly moves herself from one to the other.
“Don’t bury me yet, Indira,” Teri says, as she wheels closer.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Indira says. “Teri, Ashley, this is Christine. My sister.”
“Hello, Christine. Pretty as the rest of them, I see. Now, tell me, whatever it was you did to end up here, you’re not going to do it again, are you?”
“Um,” Christine says, feeling heat rush to her cheeks as she tries to decide how she’s supposed to respond to such a question. She doesn’t hear Ashley rebuke Teri, or whatever Indira says to her; it’s not that she’s insulted or embarrassed, more that she’s… irritated? Outraged? Dira would probably say that’s a good thing, that she’s moving on from the shame that’s characterised the last few years, but expressing it probably isn’t the best move here. Bea didn’t invite one of her adoptive mothers here for Christine to snipe at her, after all. She tries for a simple, emphatic, confident denial instead. “No, Ma’am. Wouldn’t even occur to me.”
“Polite little thing, aren’t you?” Teri says.
Christine can’t stop herself smiling. “It’s how my sister raised me,” she says, which prompts a throaty laugh from Teri. Without another word, the old woman starts down the path towards the Hall and looks back, expecting Christine to walk with her. Behind them, Ashley and Indira fall in step, carrying on a quiet conversation.
“I apologise for the question,” Teri says, nudging Christine in the hip with her elbow, “but someone has to be the conscience for this place, and since no-one else has ever stepped up, I have to do it. This whole enterprise needs an outside eye on it from time to time.”
“Actually, we have a few new consciences. You’ll get to meet them tonight; they’ll all be sitting together.”
“A few! Fascinating. Well, go on, then, Indira’s sister Christine; tell me about yourself…”
* * *
He doesn’t know what’s worse: the time before, when Jake was too close to him, when he shaved him and made him dress up, when he told him all the things that he, the soldier, the man with the gun and the taser and all the keys and the big fucking dick, could do to him if he so pleased; or tonight, when Trevor tried his hardest to do as Valérie suggested, and cooperated, suggesting that he administer his own hormone injection, and Jake had laughed and hit him.
It was so fucking desultory. Like his heart wasn’t in it. “You must think I’m stupid, love,” Jake had said, pushing him face-first into the couch cushions and roughly spiking his thigh with the needle. “I’m in control and I stay in control. That means I’m the one that handles the sharps, right? Don’t want you getting any ideas about attacking me, do I? Christ, whatever even gave you the idea I might say yes? This shit was covered in training, darling. Prisoner protocol. It’s fucking elementary. Maybe if you’d paid attention you wouldn’t be a bird.” And then he’d slapped Trevor’s arse, said, “All done,” and left immediately.
The old woman didn’t even stick around for long. Probably sensible, given her age and frailty, but he still feels uncomfortably abandoned. The entire encounter was so rote that for a while he thought Valérie’s predictions had come true, that he hadn’t broken quickly enough or in the right way and they’ve become bored of him already. Mutilated and left to rot.
Except that’s not it. On her way out the old woman told him to expect someone to come train him. Someone to whom he’d better give his respect. Someone who would have the power of life and death over him.
He’d almost asked if it was Val. Almost blown everything right there.
Blown what, Trevor? Her impossible dreams of escape?
Fuck.
Another soldier, the one Valérie said is called Callum, came back with the old woman a short while later, and Trevor was briefly frightened that the leering, unpleasant man was to be his new handler, but all he did was replace the smashed mirror. And then Dorothy informed him curtly that any further infractions would result in loss of privileges. Ordered him to look at himself. “Really get to know your new body, Trevor, my lad,” the old woman had said. “There’s no going back, and I think you know that, but you don’t know it yet.”
More or less what Valérie said, but with a self-satisfied sneer.
Double fucking fuck.
Not content with altering him, imprisoning him, injecting him with poison, now they want him to look at himself. And there’s a good fucking reason he hasn’t been doing that.
Trevor looks. And struggles to hold himself together.
* * *
Okay, so, everyone’s looking and a lot of people are talking, and by ‘a lot of people’ he means more people than he’s seen in one place since Maria got hurt, and the memory of that, the vivid sensory echo of her hitting the floor, makes him reach behind and take her hand again, even though the rest of him is locked in Steph’s embrace, because the last thing he needs right now when he’s under so many eyes is to relive that moment.
Maria’s hand in his; Steph’s arms around him. Anchors. Connections to the real and to the present and not to the thing who crawled into this place months ago and celebrated when his friend was injured.
Yeah. They’re all looking. All the girls and all the women and all the nonbinary people— Because, yeah, that’s what Maria said, that not every Dorley girl remains a girl, and he’s wondered a few times why they okayed her telling him that, why they wouldn’t think he would take any alternative path to the one laid out for him, and he’s come to the conclusions either that they have great faith in him to choose the path that best suits him, whatever happens (hah!), or that they know Stephanie will tell him everything anyway (more likely), or that Maria wasn’t necessarily supposed to tell him but did anyway because Dorley is disorganised as hell and/or because Maria does whatever the hell she wants (bingo).
Maria squeezes his hand.
They’re all looking and they know why he’s here, and if they don’t know exactly why then they can probably guess, they can read it in his guilty eyes and his fearful stance and the fact that he’s a man or something like it who came up from under the dining hall instead of through the fucking front door and that means he’s done something awful enough to warrant the risk of removing him from the world altogether, and they know that, and—
“Aaron,” Maria whispers. “Relax. Remember what I said.”
He nods, and as Steph releases him, he replays it: almost everyone here was once like him. It helps.
And then Steph kisses him right on the lips — someone at one of the tables yells something appreciative — and steps back to admire him again and he blushes under her inspection and on the tingle of her lips on his and he forgets momentarily about all the other girls, about any other girls.
He wishes he’d done more than just skim the material on voice training but it’s too late to feel guilty about that (again) so he experimentally pushes his tongue down and tries to lift the muscles in his throat, and when he says, “Hi, Stephanie,” it comes out sort of okay. He’s not sure what he’s going for, really, like, perhaps simply not sounding like that guy, like the guy who wanted to see Maria hurt. The guy all these graduates used to be just like.
They understand. They have to understand.
“Hi, Aaron,” Steph says, and darts forward for another kiss. Right on the lips again. It’s too quick — he wants to linger, wants her to pull him in, to force his body into shape with hers — but it’s enough for now. And everyone’s still watching, anyway; he’s pretty sure he can hear giggling.
“Um, Aaron?” Maria says, holding up their conjoined hands. “I need to go get changed. That means you have to let go of me.”
“Oh,” he says, still experimenting with his voice, “sorry.”
She wiggles her released fingers at him, kisses him on the temple, and practically skips off towards a pair of double doors on the other side of the room. Has he ever seen her like this? It makes her seem so young.
Everyone’s looking. But he’s riding it: if he thinks too hard about them then their collective gaze becomes like holding a microphone up to a speaker until it screams, but he has other things to concentrate on. It helps that some of them have turned away, returned to their own conversations, but it also helps that of the ones who are still looking, none of them seem unhappy to see him, an experience hitherto rare in his life.
Maria wants him here. Steph wants him here. And these other people seem nice, too. A greater contrast — between the people filling out the hall, resplendent in their dresses and other outfits and chatting happily with each other, and the sullen, grudgingly nonviolent Raph back in the basement — he can’t possibly imagine.
Hah; what would Raph say, if he could see all this? In the absence of Ollie and most especially in the absence of Will’s entire personality, Raph’s reverted to someone more like the man who first arrived in the basement, someone capable of acting like a relatively normal, if blokish, guy; although he remains someone who got his girlfriend pregnant, instructed her as to what she should do with the baby and then fucked off, and probably hit her, too, though there’s no more proof for that than what he did to the supply cabinet and one of the toilet doors, what he tried to do to Maria, and what every instinct screams when he walks into a room. What would that man say to someone in a tux with a sports bra underneath, so his nipples don’t chafe?
The silk shirt is nice, though. He asked Maria how she even found one, let alone the rest of the ensemble; all he knew was that she didn’t rent it.
“Some of the girls have boyfriends, Aaron,” she’d said.
“And they’ve somehow resisted the temptation to make them into girls?”
“You said it yourself: not all men are bad.”
And he’d had to point out that he’d specified only Keanu Reeves and the guy who saved a bunch of dogs from the big dog masher, and Maria had slapped him lightly on the arm and then pulled him into a hug so sharply it made his chest hurt a little. She’d whispered something to him he hadn’t been able to make out, and he didn’t ask what it had been. Preserving the moment seemed more important.
“You look great,” Steph says.
“You don’t think it’s too much? Or too little? I think Maria was a little disappointed that I didn’t ask her for, I don’t know, a full Christmas ball gown, but it’s like I told her, I don’t have the hips for it, not yet, and—”
“Aaron.”
“Um?”
“How do I look?”
Part of him wants to tease her, to extract from her the embarrassed squeals and frustrated affection he’s become so fond of, but they’re not in her room and there are people watching, so he gives it to her straight. “You look so fucking beautiful, Stephanie.” It bursts from him with such energy he mangles half the syllables, but he means it more than any thought he’s ever tried to express.
It doesn’t matter that what he said was half nonsense because she squeals and hugs him tight again, and they both have to pull back because both their chests hurt, and that’s funny, too.
One of the girls who came over with her, flanking her on her right, coughs politely, and he looks at her properly for the first time. She’s one of two: darker-skinned, probably South Asian, with large, expressive eyes, an amused smile and a sweet little bump in her nose; she stands with a blonde, white, thin-as-hell woman, who’s drinking in the scene in front of her with undisguised delight, and who looks quite a lot like Clarissa from Clarissa Explains It All, which he got briefly addicted to in reruns while avoiding his primary school homework.
“Hi,” the South Asian one says, “you must be Aaron.”
He shrugs. Yeah, he must be.
Steph takes charge, moving around to stand next to him and placing a possessive arm on his shoulders. “That’s Shahida,” she says, “and that’s Melissa. Yes. My Melissa.”
Steph’s Melissa beams at them both, and he’s briefly overwhelmed, because that’s Melissa, the one Steph’s been talking about all this time, and the implications are just too damn much. A piece of Stephanie’s life, a piece of her soul, back in her life to stay.
There’s so much he wants to say to her! Thank you for caring for Steph when she was young. Thank you for being her big sister. Thank you for putting her on the path that led her here, to the place that saved her, that allowed her to in turn save him. Thank you for coming back for her. Thank you for loving her so fiercely that you would risk everything for her.
There’s so much he wants to ask her! What was Steph like when she was a kid? Was she just as quietly, insistently sweet? Did she have those moments of sudden confidence yet, those times when she’ll just lash out with her opinions or the things she wants to make happen or (one time) with her fist, or are they new? What was it like to just hang out with her in her childhood room? Are there any embarrassing photos?
“H— Hi,” he says, and fumbles it, stuttering slightly.
Shahida giggles. “You’re cute,” she says.
“I am?”
“Yes,” Steph whispers, and he fucking loves it when she does that, because she has to lean down a little to make herself heard, and the angle of her breath means he feels the heat of her all down the side of his neck. Fucking goosebumps.
“Well,” Melissa says, pointing back and forth at herself and Shahida, “we need to go get changed, but we’re at your table, so we’ll see you in, what, forty-five minutes?”
“Go,” Pippa says, waving a hand. “We’ll get them seated. And we’ll try and boost Aaron back up to polysyllables, too.”
“He’s normally much more talkative,” Steph says.
“I’m sure,” Shahida says, laughing again.
* * *
God, he’s doing so well.
Steph doesn’t want to let go of him, though, because it’s easy to believe that the reason he hasn’t turned tail and fled back downstairs under the pressure of so many eyes on him is he’d have to throw her off to do so. He’s not even shaking, discounting the brief shiver when she whispered in his ear again.
It’s good to see him in something other than the basic joggers, t-shirts and hoodies they pile up in his wardrobe downstairs, and as she looks down at him again, in his tux, with his hair slicked back and his hands nervously clenching and unclenching she feels once again the shock that Aaron Holt is, inexplicably, the one for her.
She’s never given much thought as to what kinds of person she’s attracted to. The gender question dominated her life for so long that all other aspects of her personality were of secondary importance, and while she doesn’t think she’s ever been attracted to a man, she’s never ruled it out. Although it would be difficult, even now, to describe Aaron as a man in the same way that, say, Will was a man when he arrived at Dorley. Honestly, Aaron’s not the man he used to be, either, and not just because he’s started to reject the identity; his face and his body have started softening, the way Steph’s have, and she’s spent the last five minutes debating with herself whether she should tell him that the tux, on him, is less James Bond and more…
Well. Less James Bond, at any rate.
He looks good, though. And she doesn’t think he looks good in a way that would excite, for example, most people who are attracted to men. And she wonders if he’s seen that for himself, if that’s part of the reason for his nerves.
She squeezes him more tightly around the shoulder, and he looks up at her, smiles for her.
He’s doing so well.
She’s a little surprised that she is, as well. Less than three months ago she would have been making a beeline for the alcohol or whatever else she could get her hands on to help her cope with the fear and the disgust that always crept across her skin when she became the centre of attention, but today it’s different. Maybe it’s that the ponytail grazing the back of her neck is a sufficiently constant reminder that she doesn’t look the way she always assumes she does. Maybe it’s because she’s transitioning, she’s on her path, and only time separates her from the person she wants to be. Maybe it’s just that she’s become used to spending time with beautiful people.
It also helps that every third person she meets tells her she looks lovely. It’s good for the soul.
She does wonder if they should move on from their awkward little huddle by the basement door, though. Paige and Pippa are shifting on their heels and Steph’s definitely starting to feel a little uncomfortable.
And then, sweeping in through the main doors from the kitchen, is Beatrice as she’s never seen her before. That dress!
Steph’s dress is lovely and she adores it, but she knows that’s at least partly because it compensates for her still-developing figure. Beatrice, it turns out, has no such issue, and her dress practically writhes across her body, hugging shapely hips and toned thighs, plunging to indecency across the bust, and training out slightly around her ankles, not quite trailing on the floor but instead exposing jewelled sandals with straps that entwine her calves. The dress is a mid-grey, and it shines in the low light, practically glitters, and where it is belted tight around her waist the material ruches and shimmers. Around one wrist she wears a simple silver bracelet, which matches her necklace and earrings, and her hair has been swept back from her face, the better to display her understated, elegant makeup.
She looks like she should be attending the Oscars. Or declaring war on the world from inside her volcano lair.
Next to Steph, Aaron whispers, “Holy fucking shit.”
The noise level in the dining hall drops almost to nothing. Conversations stop and people nudge each other and point and stare, and Beatrice drinks in the attention, commands the room with an easy smile, and the sound of her heels fills the room as she crosses the floor. Pippa and Paige stand aside as she approaches and she stops a metre or so away from Steph and Aaron, hand on her hip, fingers tapping on her clutch.
“Good afternoon, Stephanie,” she says. “You look magnificent.”
“Um, hi, Beatrice,” Steph says. “Thank you.”
“And Aaron! I’m so pleased you felt able to join us. I understand you asked my Maria specifically?”
Aaron doesn’t reply until Steph squeezes his shoulder again, at which point he says, “Oh, um, yes, I wanted to see how the other half lived, you know? Or the same half. The half I’m going to be. I think. That is, if it’s okay by you. I’m, shit— God! Sorry. Swearing. Swearing in front of, um…”
Beatrice favours him with an amused smile and beckons him forward. Steph releases him, rocking a little on her heels as she regains her balance, and he steps closer, looking up at her.
“How are you finding your accommodations?” Beatrice asks.
“My— my accommodations? Oh. The basement.” Aaron links his hands behind his back. Steph wants to reach out and take them but doesn’t. Beatrice is being theatrical, and Steph’s certain she doesn’t want to interrupt her performance. At least, not yet. “They’re fine,” Aaron continues, hesitant but growing in confidence. “It’s not where I expected to be spending the academic year, but, it’s, uh… It’s fine.”
“I’m pleased. Let me look at you, darling.” And she reaches out with a finger and takes Aaron by the chin, directs him to look up, left and right, examines him as one might a potentially impressive puppy at a dog show. “You’re coming along nicely.”
“Beatrice,” Steph says, surprising herself, all reticence fleeing at the sight of Beatrice’s hand on Aaron. “Don’t.”
Beatrice laughs. “Ah. Your rebellious streak.”
“I’m not rebelling, I’m just…” Steph steps forward, takes Aaron by both shoulders. “Would you please let go of him?”
Beatrice does not let go. She holds him there, as if with finger and thumb around his chin she can exert more pressure, more control, than Steph can with both hands. “Answer me this, Stephanie,” Beatrice says. “Do you trust him?”
Without hesitation, Steph says, “Yes.”
“Do you trust me with him?”
“I trust Maria with him.”
Beatrice nods, the slightest and briefest inclination of her neck. She looks Aaron in the eyes for the first time. “And you, Aaron, do you understand what is expected of you?”
“Yes,” he says. Sharp, quick. Confident.
“And, finally, Aaron — and do take your time with this question; I don’t necessarily require your answer tonight — do you consent to it?”
“Yes.” Exactly as quick as before.
A broad smile. She’s pushing him. “All of it?”
He pushes back. “Yes.”
She releases him. Aaron stumbles and Steph catches him, embraces him protectively. Takes possession of him back from Beatrice.
“I’m impressed, Aaron,” Beatrice says. “I can’t recall the last individual under our care who responded so positively.”
“I had incentive,” Aaron says.
“Indeed. And, Stephanie, while I must commend your… passion, I suggest you learn to keep your counsel at moments such as these.”
Steph presses herself against Aaron, flexes her fingers in his hand. “I remember asking you, once,” she says, “if the intent of this place is to teach us to submit without complaint when we are touched without permission. You said that it is not. Did that change?”
“No, Stephanie.”
“Then you will ask before you touch him again.”
“Steph, it’s okay,” Aaron says.
“It’s quite all right, Aaron, dear,” Beatrice says. “Your little firecracker has, once again, made a good point. I promise to ask, Stephanie.”
“Good,” Steph says. “Thank you.”
“Aaron, Stephanie,” Beatrice says, curtseying, “have a wonderful meal.”
* * *
In addition to the pronoun pins Christine’s seen a few people wearing, someone took the time to prepare personalised place cards for each of the tables, complete with pronouns, and as Christine smooths her layered skirts to sit she notices with interest that while Steph’s card displays both her full name and her pronouns, Aaron’s simply says, ‘Aaron’.
Interesting.
She looks for him, if only to find out what he’s wearing to dinner, and is amused to find that he chose to wear a tux, in the slightly less dapper ‘tie’ variant, but before she can get up to go talk to him, Bea enters from the kitchen, looking even more stunning than she did on her birthday, and strides directly towards him.
Oh. Wow. Time for an inspection, is it?
She’d almost forgotten what the regular check-ins with Aunt Bea were like, back when she was obliged to suffer them weekly (for most of her second year) and monthly (for a total of four times, after which her soft release from the programme, still ongoing, began), back when the woman she’s still only just starting to understand as a complex and, underneath it all, rather sad woman was still the terrifying Aunt Bea, custodian of Dorley Hall, ultimate architect of Christine’s womanhood and final judge of same, with the power to have her thrown back in the cells or out on the streets or even to wash her out, and it doesn’t matter how toothless those threats were ultimately proven to be, Christine can feel her spine straightening and goosebumps blooming on her forearms as she watches Beatrice crook a finger under Aaron’s chin and twist him this way and that.
Aaron’s got all that bullshit to come.
And then Christine snorts, and contorts her stomach to hold back the laughter, because suddenly Steph’s intervening on his behalf. Maybe Aaron’s not going to have to deal with all that; maybe it’ll be different for him. Dorley’s changing all the time, and it feels like it’s changing faster than ever lately. The third year, for example, used to be far more rigidly structured, with greater requirements and higher levels of discipline, and most of that has fallen away, to the point that Christine’s intake all have about as much freedom as they could wish for. And that’s without taking Vicky’s two-year completion record into account.
She’d always expected Dorley and the programme to undergo a wrenching transformation at some point in the future, some calamity wherein everything catches up with it, some vital element is compromised, or some girl refuses explosively to cooperate and the Sisters unite behind her, but perhaps it’ll go on the way it always has: changing bit by but until it is, one day, unrecognisable.
Christine briefly locks eyes with Dira, who split off from her with a kiss and a promise that she looks — yes, Christine, please stop doubting yourself — absolutely beautiful to go join Charlie and Nadine at the second years’ table; Indira grins, white teeth bright behind her dark lipstick, and rolls her eyes. Business as usual: Aunt Bea’s scaring the newbies again.
Aaron’s clearly shaken by the experience, because after Beatrice takes her leave he leans into Steph’s embrace, almost overbalancing them both, and then the two of them allow Paige and Pippa to guide them to the table.
Theirs is one of the larger tables in the room, to accommodate a higher than average number of people who would throw a sulk if they didn’t get to sit together for Christmas Eve dinner, and places have been set for Christine and Paige, Pippa, Steph and Aaron, Vicky and Lorna, and Melissa and Shahida. If Abby had stuck around and Indira had decided to be stubborn, they might have had to roll out some of the plastic garden furniture from the storerooms.
Abby…
Christine frowns and checks her phone again. No reply to her message. Christine doesn’t have to ask where she is — where else would she be but with her family — but she wants to know if her friend is ever coming back. Melissa’s return, and her reunion with Shahida, did something to Christine’s Sister, and she doesn’t know exactly what.
“Hey, Christine,” Steph says, and Christine clears her head. Abby can wait. She’s with family; so should Christine be. She stands and starts pulling out chairs, pausing to air-kiss Steph and, after an embarrassed pause, Aaron. And then Paige is giggling and pressing her back down into her seat and nuzzling against her cheek and Christine’s distracted.
When the two of them come up for air, the others are all seated, Aaron’s addressing a glass of wine and Steph’s leaning on both hands, watching her and Paige kiss, grinning like she’s won the lottery.
“You two are adorable,” she says.
“Quiet,” Christine says. Her follow-up, which would have been significantly more cutting, is muffled by Paige, and even Aaron laughs at her then. Between kisses she manages to say, “Sit, Paige.”
She plants a final kiss on Paige’s pout, and exaggeratedly turns to Steph, Aaron and Pippa.
“She’s right,” Aaron says. He sounds a little subdued. “You’re both… cute.”
“He’s covering,” Steph says, and leans over to kiss him on the cheek. “He’s scandalised.”
“It’s true. Two women? Going at it? Gross. Never imagined that, ever. Never had dreams about that, ever. Never—”
“Aaron,” Paige says, “you can stop after the first thing.”
“How little you know him,” Pippa mutters.
Steph kisses him again. “Is this all of us, then?” she asks, sitting back down in her chair and gesturing at the empty seats.
“Vicky and Lorna, last seen doing each other’s hair,” Paige says, pointing at the appropriate place cards, “and Melissa and Shahida.”
“They just went upstairs to get changed,” Aaron says. “Melissa… She seems nice.”
Steph laughs. “You said two words to her.”
“It was just…” He waves his hands vaguely. “She was so… Fuck, I don’t know, Steph; I’m just glad she’s here. I’m happy you get your big sister back.”
Steph scoots her chair closer to Aaron and hugs him gently. She whispers something to him, something Christine can’t make out, and he smiles and nods and they kiss again.
It’s good that their relationship going so public hasn’t inhibited them. She and Paige’s early fumbles, the first time they got together, were something it took Christine a good few weeks to become comfortable talking about much even with Paige; but, again, things have changed. In two short years, things have changed so much.
There’s a tap of heels on hardwood: Indira coming back over, smiling at Aaron who, to give him credit — Christine’s heard a lot about Indira’s brief period as Maria’s replacement — doesn’t flinch when he realises it’s her.
“Hi, Aaron,” Indira says, leaning on the back of an empty chair. “So, you survived your first encounter with Aunt Bea! How are you feeling?”
Aaron swallows, but when he talks, he sounds the same as always. “Better than Declan.”
“Hah! Yes. Considerably so, I imagine.”
“She’s not so scary. I only peed a little.”
“Did she have to do that to him?” Steph asks. “Get all… touchy?”
Indira shrugs. “It’s what she does. You might not agree with her methods, but with them she’s raised a generation of girls to womanhood.”
“They started as boys, though.”
“Details!”
“Sorry you have to babysit the second years, Dira,” Christine interjects. Indira’s given Bella the evening off so she can spend Christmas Eve at Rabia’s table.
“I don’t mind. At least I can drink them under the table. Well—” Dira leans over, beckons for Christine to rise with her, and kisses her on the forehead, “—I’d better get back to my table. See you after dessert.” She halts a few steps away from them. “I’m proud of you, Aaron,” she adds, turning around to look directly at him. “I expect you’ll hear a lot of that tonight. Don’t let repetition reduce the impact: we’re all proud of you. Maria most of all, with the possible exception of Stephanie here.”
“Thanks,” Aaron says, with excessive politeness. “And, um, thank you, Indira. For looking after me after Maria was hurt. I know it took a load off her mind to know you were helping out.”
Indira blows him a kiss. “It’s what I do, sweetie.”
* * *
It’s quickly become routine to observe with delight that Aaron’s doing okay, but he is. He’s talking with the girls at the table with growing confidence and, sure, he’s asking questions more than answering them, and thus not spending a lot of time actually talking, but when Steph stops to think about it, it makes sense. He’s been under constant surveillance since he arrived here and had daily reports filed on his progress; there can be little anyone at the table doesn’t know about him. Little they’d feel comfortable asking in polite company, anyway. But, to him, everything up here is new. He’s met Christine and Paige before, sure, but only briefly, and Lorna, who recently emerged from the stairwell with Vicky in a pair of predictably lovely dresses, fascinates him.
“So you found out about this place and, what, decided not to burn it to the ground?”
“Oh, I wanted to,” Lorna says, swilling her wine around and sniffing it. “But when the woman you love—” she nods at Vicky with a smile, “—owes her life to the abattoir, it takes all the fun out of ripping down the door and setting all the pigs free. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I am a pig.”
Steph’s chair still abuts Aaron’s, and she plans to keep it that way until the food arrives, because then she gets to hug him. She squeezes his shoulder and says, “You were a pig.”
Aaron nods at Lorna. “Correction: I haven’t been a pig for, oh—” he pretends to look at a watch, “—several minutes.”
He can’t escape her kiss, and Lorna giggles at them. “This place keeps surprising me,” she says. “First it was Christine. She told me everything, starting with the fact that she, herself, is a fine product of the nightmare factory. She told me about all this horrific shit that was done to her — without her permission — over a cup of tea in a bloody dorm kitchen. Then my girlfriend turns out to be one, and she tells me that without the literal mutilation she might never have discovered who she really is. And then I meet the second years, for whom all of it should still be really fresh, but they’re also having a wonderful fucking time, so they’re no good.” She points at Aaron. “Finally I turn to you, someone who’s been here mere months, and you’re… here. In a nice suit with a glass of wine. Chatting happily with the women who kidnapped you, despite them being the women who kidnapped you.”
“Actually,” Aaron says, “the woman who kidnapped me is— Shit, is Maria still getting changed?”
“I think so,” Paige says.
“Damn. I kind of wanted to point to her, you know, to be precise?”
“I know who Maria is.”
“I do plan to chat with her again when she gets back down, if that helps.”
“One person,” Lorna says, leaning on her wrist. “I just want to meet one fucking person who acts normally around here.”
“What is normal?” Steph asks, and when the whole table looks at her she releases Aaron to spread her arms wide. “Genuinely asking! I try not to make as many assumptions as I used to. I’m not Dorley’s usual clientèle. Everyone keeps telling me that.”
“‘Normal’ would be someone who’s screaming and yelling and trying to escape and generally acting like, fuck, I don’t know, like they’ve been tied to the railway tracks and there’s a big train labelled like a political cartoon with feminisation coming right at them.”
“You should have met me a month ago,” Aaron says.
“You’re not even a little conflicted about all this?”
“Oh, I’m conflicted. Inside me there’s about nine million wolves and they all have contradictory things to say, but almost none of them think Maria doesn’t, you know, have kind of a fucking point. About me, specifically, but also about basically everyone else down there.”
“Everyone gets pilled eventually, Lorna,” Vicky says. “Even you.”
“I know,” Lorna says, leaning her head on Vicky’s shoulder. “I hate it.”
“You could come down and meet Ollie,” Steph says. “He’s very vocal about how much he hates it here.”
Aaron nods. “That is a man who is cruisin’ for a castratin’.”
“Aaron, how are you, of all people, so casual about this?” Lorna asks. “Her—” she points at Steph, “—I can understand, but you…”
“Disclosure was, what, almost a month ago? I’ve had that long to get used to the idea that someday pretty soon I’ll be taking my trip to the vet to get fixed. And you can’t spend a whole month screaming, or you’d lose your voice.”
“It’s still a bit of an unpleasant day, though,” Pippa says.
“I plan to enjoy it happening to Ollie,” Aaron says. “Having to undergo the procedure myself will merely be the opportunity cost. I’ll do anything for a laugh.”
“Christ,” Lorna mutters.
“I don’t know how Harmony’s going to deal with Ollie, to be honest,” Steph says. “He got zapped again today, and chucked back in the cells. And Beatrice told him off over the intercom. At least Raph’s finally leaving his please-tase-me phase.”
“That’s optimistic,” Aaron says. “Fairly sure his oh-so-reasonable act is fake as shit.”
Steph kisses him. “I choose to be hopeful.”
“Didn’t you yell at him a few hours ago?”
“Mainly at Ollie.”
“Right.”
Lorna’s still leaning on Vicky, and Steph mirrors her, nestling her head in the crook of Aaron’s shoulder and feeling him press back on her, almost unable to believe what her life has become. She’s transitioning, at last, and she’s beginning to see the effects, at last, and she’s been put in nice clothes and had her face and hair done up and she’s with Aaron and her Sisters, so why wouldn’t she feel good? The day could last forever and not be long enough.
The only people missing are Melissa and Shahida, and they’ll be back down soon.
Aaron and Lorna talk for a while longer, and while Christine, Paige and Pippa mostly listen in and provide comments, Steph prefers simply to enjoy herself. And to tug on the skirt of her dress, which is still a novel enough sensation that it serves as yet another reminder of how much her life has changed since she followed the breadcrumbs Melissa inadvertently left her, and found the Sisters.
“Hey, kiddos,” someone says, and Steph realises she closed her eyes at some point; almost too relaxed. Opening them finds Donna and Jodie, dolled up in emerald and in black and red respectively, standing at the empty end of the table. Not people Steph knows especially well. “Someone has something to say.”
Donna elbows Jodie, who laughs nervously and then leans forward on the table, palms down, facing Lorna. “So,” Jodie says, “I was talking with Donna, and I know you heard the genesis of the conversation but we really got together and brainstormed and it was hard, Lorna, because you did so much for me, you helped me make maybe the most important decision of my life, and—”
“Wait,” Lorna says, “slow down. Is this about your new history thingy?”
“My NPH, yes, and whether to be trans or cis.”
“That’s the most important decision of your life? Not whether to be a girl at all?”
Donna snort-laughs, and Jodie says, “Oh, no, that was barely even a decision, and it happened so gradually that by the time I realised it was something I could make a viable decision about, I’d already made up my mind! Like, I was just sitting there, towards the end of the first year, and they’d done the big snip and they were talking to us about face surgery and, you know, whether we wanted it, whether we’d consent to it — because you don’t want to give that surgery to someone who doesn’t, or they might not do the recovery properly!” Donna looks a little uncomfortable at this, and Steph would put money on Beatrice’s Dorley not always having been so generous regarding consent for FFS. “So, okay, yeah, I was sitting there in my room, and we had it looking nice at that point, we had some posters up and things, and Donna came in and she asked me if I was okay, and she used to do that every day, just taking care of me and stuff, and I looked at her and I said, ‘Yes,’ and that’s when I started to know. I felt pretty and I felt happy and I wanted out of that bloody basement, for sure—” she giggles, “—but I didn’t want to go back, only forward, and she knew it, too, because that same day she took me upstairs and showed me my new room, and I threw open the windows and looked out on my new view and breathed in fresh air and… and I named myself. Right there and then. In my head. Not out loud. That took another couple of weeks, I think?”
Jodie turns to Donna for confirmation, and Donna says, “Three. You were making breakfast with Paige, and—”
“Oh,” Paige says, “I remember this. She was scrambling eggs for both of us. She put the plates out on the table and asked if I wanted pepper and said, ‘I’m doing soy bacon. Call me Jodie.’ Then she did the bacon. I wasn’t a fan.”
“It was kind of stiff,” Jodie says. “I’ve found a better brand since. So, yes, Lorna, that was the easy part. It was natural and simple, like opening a window and looking at the blue sky for the first time and knowing it’s a girl’s skin the sun’s shining on and a girl’s hair the wind’s blowing about. You helped me with the difficult thing, the thing I had a real and practical choice about, and I haven’t had a moment’s doubt since, and I’m so happy, and Donna and I, well, we wanted to get you a present.”
Donna one-handedly hugs Jodie. “But what do you get the girl who has everything?” she says. “Or, at least, the girl who will have everything, probably by the end of next year. We talked about it for a long time and, I have to confess—”
“We asked some of your friends!” Jodie blurts out. “Sorry! Not Victoria — we didn’t want to hand her any more secrets to keep — but some of your other friends, and they were so helpful, and I hope, I really hope you’ll like it.”
Donna, who’s had one hand behind her back this whole time, reveals a gift-wrapped present, which she passes to Lorna. Once the paper’s off, Lorna holds a green DVD box, which confuses the hell out of Steph until Lorna says, “Holy shit!” and turns it round for the rest of the table to see.
“You like it?” Jodie asks.
“Holy shit! Jodie, Donna, how the fuck did you get a signed launch copy of Fallout: New Vegas?”
Donna smirks. “I know a girl who used to be a guy who knows another girl who, uh, didn’t.”
“Wow…”
Their end of the table dissolves into hugs and cheek kisses at that point, and Pippa snaps a few photos of the four of them — Lorna, Vicky, Jodie and Donna — posing with the DVD box. Jodie and Donna return eventually to their table, pausing to greet Melissa and Shahida, who appear in the stairwell at exactly the right time.
Steph gets a good look as they walk over, and decides that between the two of them they could probably give Beatrice a run for her money in the glamour department. They both wear flower-print dresses, in different shapes to best flatter their respective figures. Melissa’s hangs from the shoulder and gathers at her waist, rounding out her skinny body and adding more shape to a bust that, Melissa’s privately told Steph, ‘could be bigger’. She wears soft white flowers in her hair and white low-heeled sandals. Shahida wears a deep red dress printed with white-petalled flowers. It leaves her shoulders bare, cinches at the waist, and flowers out from the hips; Steph’s certain that if Shahida were to spin, the skirt would billow out around her. In her hair she wears flowers that are, Steph suddenly realises, the same colour as the flowers on Melissa’s dress.
They match.
Are they making a statement of some kind? Are they together? Or is this just coordination for fun?
Someone on the other side of the room whistles, and Shahida and Melissa curtsey together before sitting down in the two remaining seats, giggling conspiratorially the whole time.
Steph wants desperately to tell them how amazing they look, and to ask if there’s, you know, any symbolism to the matching dresses, but Beatrice, at the centre table, taps a spoon on her wine glass and silences the room.
“Ladies and other friends,” she says, as the last of the hubbub quiets, “welcome home. Some of you have come far—” someone cheers, “—others have merely come downstairs. Two of you—” she raises her glass to Steph and Aaron, “—have come upstairs, which is quite without precedent. The vast majority of you came into yourselves here, within these walls. Some, however—” she places a hand on the shoulder of the woman sitting next to her in a wheelchair, who laughs and bats her hand away, “—did not require our assistance. And while most of you are women—” Shahida, lost in the moment, wolf whistles loudly, and is frantically hushed by a grinning Melissa, “—many of you are not.” She raises her glass again. “But there is one thing we all share. We are a family, bound not by blood but by choice, by obligation, by bonds wrought of love. And when you strip away all the… Christian paraphernalia, that is the real reason to come together at the end of the year, when the days are cold and the nights are long.” She drinks deeply from her glass, regards it for a moment, and frowns, as if about to say something else. Then, appearing to reconsider, she says, “You are my family, and I love you all,” and takes the hand of the older woman, accepting her help to return to her seat.
“That was more emotional than I expected,” Pippa says quietly.
Christine shrugs. “She’s had a rough year.”
“True.”
Someone puts some quiet music on — not, thankfully, anything too Christmassy — and the second years wheel carts out to each table, each laden with the dinner options everyone requested, set out on heated trays.
Faye, when she delivers to their table, winks at Steph.
* * *
Christine Hale: Please?
Christine Hale: Be paranoid
Christine Hale: You get into habits around shitty security practice and then you get sloppy and then we’re all exposed
* * *
Ash looks around at their table, which has fewer familiar faces than ever. “No Maria this year?”
One of the younger girls points to the table directly behind her, at which Maria and the rest of the first-year sponsors are eating. “She’s dating now, Auntie Ashley. She wanted to sit with her girlfriend. Who,” she adds with a smirk, “I think you know.”
Ash looks through the press of people at their table in time to see Maria place a hand on Edith’s forearm, apparently in response to something she said, and can’t help but smile. About time that girl found someone! And Edith was always so kind, so polite, after her initial struggles. A good choice.
The girl who spoke is familiar to her, but a stranger nonetheless, and she’s struggling to remember where she knows her from. “I’m so sorry,” she says, drawing on her years of association with Bea and the habits and mannerisms they both picked up from the aristocrat who provides their funding, overriding her natural accent in an attempt to sound properly contrite, “I can’t quite place you.”
The girl laughs. “Don’t worry about it,” she says. “And you don’t need to be ‘on duty’ with me. I came here the year before you left.”
Images return to her: a philanderer, quite the sex pest for one so young, and a bout of inebriated rage which drew the attention of the Hall; a combative boy, aggressive even after the orchiectomy; a relieved and rather cheeky girl, sunbathing on the roof of the Hall, flirting nonstop with anyone who came by. “Jane!” she says, remembering. “Nat’s girl.”
“Bingo,” Jane says with a smirk, punctuating the word in the air with her fork like she’s bursting a balloon.
“Apologies,” Ash says, tapping her forehead. “Getting old. Names are harder to find than they used to be.”
“Shush, Ashley,” Bea says, interrupting her conversation with Teri to scold her. “If you’re old then so am I, and I’m very much not old.”
“Quite right,” Teri says, from Bea’s other side. “Now, as I was saying…”
Jane grins at Ash. “Be told,” she says.
Ash play-pouts. “Fine. I accept your premise that I am crammed top-to-toe with youthful vigour. So…” She spears a roast potato and readies it. “You’re a sponsor now?”
“I am. I’m with Maria’s lot, actually, so normally I’d be sitting with her, but I’m getting my face time in with the boss instead because I’m due to take over in the security room in a bit. No dessert for me.”
The girl— Ash covers her grimace by over-chewing her roast potato; she can’t keep thinking of her that way! It’s infantilising; the woman’s got to be in her thirties. The woman, Jane, is frowning a little now, her bonhomie revealed at least partly as a front, and years of abandoned sponsoring instincts return to Ash in a flash. She wants to tuck Jane’s pretty hair behind her ears; she wants to make sure she gets enough to eat; she wants to reassure her that she’ll always be beautiful, that she has all the potential in the world, that she doesn’t need to be a man to succeed. Nor does she need to find one.
She settles for being intrusive. “Darling,” she says, “are you okay?”
Jane nods, and finishes her slice of turkey before answering. “I am. Just… I’ve been thinking of making this my last intake. I feel like I’ve been doing this forever.”
“How many have you…?”
“Raph will be my third.” She starts vigorously cutting up the rest of her turkey. “And he’s fine. He’s fine. He’s so much like the others, so I know he’ll be fine.” She points down with her knife and taps at a handful of different points on her plate. “He’s hit every mark I’ve expected of him so far, with the exception of the attack on Maria.”
“I heard about that,” Ash says, nodding to keep up Jane’s momentum. She doesn’t need to say she’s glad Maria’s okay; it’s obvious, and Maria herself is a perfect picture of health. Jane deserves all her attention. This feels important, like this is the first time the girl’s expressed these thoughts out loud.
Jane parks her cutlery. “But I went to his funeral, Auntie Ashley. I went to another fucking funeral. And I can’t do it again. I can’t see another weeping mum and know I did that. So he’s it. He’s my last. I’m helping Raph and then I’m done. Out. Gone. Which—” and the girl chews on her lip for a second, “—fucking sucks because then Maria and everyone will be short-handed.”
Ash lets out a few of those sponsoring instincts. Reaches across the table for Jane’s fidgeting hand. “Don’t worry about that,” she says, pouring love and reassurance into her voice. “Focus on him; focus on yourself. Let Bea worry about staff. She said there might be some graduates interested in taking a spell at sponsoring and, well, even if that falls through, they can always do smaller intakes for a while.”
Jane writhes, but Ash keeps hold of her hand. “I hate that. I hate the idea that we might not pick up some guy who’s hurting people, some guy who could be saved, because I’m… fucking flaking out.”
“Don’t,” Ash says sharply. “What did Elle call this? Triage on the world. We’re performing triage on the world, Jane, and that takes its toll on anyone.” She shakes her head, half playing the role of consoling sponsor, half in genuine sorrow. “Lord knows it did on me.”
There’s a silence between them for a moment. Ash is aware of Bea’s eye on them, even as she carries on talking with Teri and some of the others at their table.
“Can I ask…?” Jane begins hesitantly.
“Ask anything, dear.”
“Why did you leave?”
Ash allows a rueful smile onto her face. “Because I wasn’t angry any more. And without the anger it was… It was too hard.”
It’s been a long time since she told her story to anyone; but then, it’s been several years since she came back to Dorley Hall, and every time she returns it’s harder to leave again, to walk away from the family here, the bonds of mutual trust. But Teri insisted on one last visit, and she doesn’t have many years left, so they came back together, mother and daughter. Teri said she’s got to reassure herself that things are still being run as humanely as they can be, and if Ash is honest with herself, so does she.
She starts from the beginning, and Jane listens attentively to the story of a trans woman who had everything going for her, who had a plan, who had a career, who had a life. Even children hadn’t seemed impossible. And when Ash gets to the part about the man who betrayed her, who assaulted her, who outed her, who robbed her of opportunity and companionship without so much as an apology, who acted as if he were doing the world a favour by hurting her, who left her without a home and without prospects, undefended by anyone who might, had she not been trans, have taken her side, Jane’s rage is satisfying, and her clenched fist under Ash’s hand is comforting.
Dorley Hall was here when she needed it. It gave her direction again, it gave her hope again, and it gave her a constructive outlet for the feelings that might otherwise have consumed her.
But nothing lasts forever.
* * *
She’s got the calorie breakdown on her phone and she’s checking everything on the plate in front of her, the plate Shy loaded up with no apparent awareness of what she was doing. Melissa doesn’t actually believe that for a second; this is the woman who bugged Rachel until she practically threw sandwiches at her at school, and she will have overloaded Melissa’s plate on purpose. But it’s okay. It’s good. She’s supposed to be eating more, anyway, and she even made sure to pick out a dress with a loose enough waist to accommodate it, because nothing makes the old feelings come back like a belly trying to escape confining clothes.
This is how she’s done it ever since Abby. Ever since that day down in the basement when she got the mirror back and understood with a certainty she’s since built her whole life on that her body had changed, that it was no longer her enemy, that it needed to be cared for. And she’s tried her hardest to take care of it. Even if sometimes she’s had to take shortcuts.
God, the turkey’s going to make her so sleepy.
This is the other way she’s done it: start eating and stop thinking about it. Harder than it sounds, but she’s had practice. She looks around the table. Shahida’s talking to Lorna and Vicky, Steph’s talking to Paige and Pippa, Christine appears to be texting, and the boy, Aaron… is watching her.
She gives him a little wave. “Hi,” she says.
He’s not what she expected Steph to pick, as much as she’d ever given much thought to her little sister’s choice of partner, and while a part of her wanted to reject him on sight, back when he came up from the basement, purely because he came up from the fucking basement, and she knows what boys are like when they still live there, she knows Steph wouldn’t choose someone without value.
She wouldn’t, would she?
And does he know what he looks like in that tuxedo?
“Hi,” he says.
“So,” Melissa says, and gives herself time to think with a Brussels sprout. “So.” And then she laughs, and almost does something very undignified with her half-chewed sprout, because all she can think of to say is something like, ‘How did you meet my sister?’
“Are— Are you choking?”
She swallows. “No. Definitely not. Hi, Aaron.” She winces; she’s starting to repeat herself.
“Hi,” he says. “Um. Is this awkward or am I massively misreading the situation?”
“It’s awkward. But that’s on me. So, uh, Steph’s told me a lot about you?”
The boy grimaces and his voice drops, losing the timbre he’s been trying to hold on to and plummeting into his chest. “Christ, I hope not.”
It’s enough to make Melissa wish she was choking. Idiot! He’s up here, just three months into the programme, because he’s changed! Because he’s already becoming someone new. And projecting your discomfort onto him could hurt that progress!
She takes refuge in cliché. “She’s told me only good things, I promise.”
They both eat. Melissa has another sprout, a slice of turkey, a potato, and a forkful of string beans.
“I’m sorry,” Aaron says, quite suddenly and with his attitude somewhat restored and his mouth full of potato, “I know I’m staring, but… Fuck. Is it weird to say I’m excited to meet you? Like, not even excited.” He swallows. “Happy. I’m happy to meet you and confirm that you’re, like, real and stuff.”
Melissa makes a show of looking down. “Yep. Definitely real. And stuff.”
“No, I mean it. This is actually a huge deal for me.” He’s properly animated now, and conducts his words with cutlery. “Like, she’s been talking about you forever. Before I knew she was here on purpose, before I even knew she was a girl, she was talking about you. You’re, like—” he leans forward, away from Steph, and drops to a whisper, “—the whole reason she was able to keep going. And it’s absolutely fucking crowding out everything else in my head every time I look at you that all I want to do is thank you and hug you and kinda sorta platonically hump your leg because she’s here, she’s fucking alive, she survived long enough to make it here, and you did that. And it’s like it’s fate? Which is bullshit because everything is just a string of stupid coincidences, but the fact is that you, her sister, are not only a girl the same way she’s a girl, but you found this place first and like test-ran it or whatever, and it’s so—” he waves a hand around, and then frowns at himself and removes the fork from it so he can continue waving it more safely, “—so fucking cosmically satisfying. And I’m also glad because, you know, she loves her family and it’s been killing her that she can’t see her little sister until she’s done with all this, and even then she knows she’ll have to lie to her and she doesn’t say that part much but I can see her thinking it, you know? She’s the world’s least subtle thinker and she’s terrible at hiding shit from me. But she gets to have you now. Her big sister. Not just family but closer than that, more important than that; someone who’s been where she needs to go, who can help show her the way. That’s fucking incredible, Melissa. I’m so fucking happy for her. And I’m a little jealous. My version of you, she’s gone, and there’s no way to find her, and it’s presumptuous of me to even call her that because she was a much smaller part of my life than you are of Steph’s. But it’s still a little, you know, hard. But, mostly, I’m happy as hell. So,” he adds finally, nodding to himself and sitting back, “thank you.”
“Oh. Um.”
“No, no,” Aaron says, slipping into an easy grin and giving Melissa, suddenly, an idea of what might have attracted Steph to him in the first place, “take your time. I know I’m a lot.”
“I get it,” she says, half to herself. “Yeah. I get what she sees in you.”
“Really? I still haven’t worked it out.”
* * *
Christine drops her phone onto the table and looks around, obviously hoping to have gone unwitnessed but meeting Steph’s eyes, and she looks so sad that Steph asks the question by raising her eyebrows.
Christine checks around again and mouths, It’s Abby.
Oh.
Right.
Yeah.
That’s all Steph needs to know. Abby, Melissa’s sponsor, her lover for a while and always her friend, who left the Hall soon after Melissa came back and who has barely been seen since.
Abby, who did so much for Steph.
She waits for a moment in Melissa’s quiet conversation with Aaron when neither of them is looking in her direction, and mouths, You okay? back to Christine.
Christine nods, blinks rapidly like she’s holding back tears, and deliberately puts her phone back in her clutch. Steph reaches out under the table with her foot, hooks Christine’s ankle, and hopes, with a brief second of contact, to convey the message, I’m here whenever you need to talk, which seems a little too complex to deliver any other way. And Christine smiles at her and leans into Paige for a hug, and that’s that for now.
* * *
“It’s frustrating,” Lorna’s saying, over an almost empty plate, “all the secrecy around this place.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Shahida says, nodding. In truth, she doesn’t share Lorna’s annoyance, whatever its source, and the reason for that is holding her hand under the table as she talks with Stephanie’s cute little butch girlfriend.
“Oh, I don’t think you do,” Vicky says, grinning fondly and, when Lorna pierces her with a look, taking refuge in her glass of wine, like she’s saying, hey, I can’t possibly respond to whatever accusations you might throw at me, I’m way too busy drinking.
“Tell me,” Shahida says, squeezing Melissa’s hand before she lets go, so she can prop herself up on both hands and appear appropriately studious.
“So,” Lorna says, “okay, yes, sure, I could use a few hundred extra eyes on the moral calculus of this place, because I can’t escape the feeling that I’ve been bribed with a girlfriend and free bottom surgery so I don’t look too hard at this literal house of horrors — don’t laugh, Aaron; I can hear you — but the other thing is, well, there’s a hell of a thesis here!”
“A thesis?”
“Yes! Probably dozens, actually. I mean, just for an example, and not to go straight for the obvious one, but we don’t normally say, oh, it’s fine that some guy punched some other guy in the face because the other guy eventually agreed he deserved it—”
“We do, actually. We have this thing called ‘not pressing charges’.”
“That’s not an ethical judgement, though! That doesn’t usually happen because the victim became convinced that his face really needed punching. It’s just… practical.”
Shahida doesn’t say anything to this, just jerks her thumb at Aaron, who seems desperate to say something but is having trouble with a large piece of turkey.
“She’s got a point, Lorna,” Paige says, looking up from her whispered conversation with Christine. “The programme is nothing but practical.”
“No, okay, so what about the implications of inter-Dorley relationships?” Lorna says.
It takes Shahida a second to work it out. “You mean, relationships where one participant is an outsider, and the other isn’t?” She does her best not to look round at Melissa, who, despite Shahida showing off rather more of herself than she would normally be comfortable with, has frustratingly shown absolutely zero amorous inclination.
“Right. It’s a seriously crunchy topic.”
“Is it ever,” Vicky mutters.
“Who do you tell? When do you tell them? What do you tell them? Because it can’t be the truth, not unless you have leverage over them or are convinced you can sway them to your side before they call the police.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Shahida says quickly. “Em’s coming back to mine for Christmas lunch tomorrow and we’re just going to say she went away for a while.”
“No, that’s— Wait, what?”
“Melissa,” Vicky says, “you’re going to see someone else you used to know? Are you trying to pull down our knickers in front of the whole country?”
“No,” Shahida says, “just my mum. Look, I told Tabitha. She’s like my liaison here.”
“What did she say?” Lorna asks.
Shahida makes quote marks with her fingers. “‘On your head be it.’ She trusts us.”
“Or,” Melissa says quietly, “she knows the only way to stop Ess doing whatever she wants is to tie her up, and she’s not nearly kinky enough for that.”
“This kinda scares me,” Vicky says. “Like, kinda really scares me, you two.”
“What have you told your mum already?” Lorna asks.
“Nothing,” Shahida says.
“Nothing?”
“She knows I’m bringing a friend. Someone who has no family. Someone who is—” she takes Melissa’s hand again, “—special to me.”
“And you’re just going to… present Melissa?”
“Yes!”
“I do actually think it’ll be fine,” Melissa says. “We’re just going to say I had some problems, and that Shy tracked me down and talked me into coming back. She knows what my dad was like; she’ll think that’s the reason for the secrecy.”
“My mum loves surprises,” Shahida says, nodding enthusiastically, “and she loves finding out people she thought were dead are actually alive.”
“Does she?” Vicky says.
“Well, I assume.”
* * *
Another mirror.
The thing with mirrors is that you can get used to them. You can get used to anything with enough exposure, and certainly his body and face have been changing slowly enough that the full-length mirror in his bedroom downstairs has long since ceased to be as intimidating as it once was. It’s always shown more or less the same person in exactly the same context, barely any more different from day to day than any random person might be, and he’s often found himself paying closer attention to some detail of the rumpled sheets behind him, or spotting a paperback that fell on the floor and got scooted under the bed.
But this is a new one, in the bathroom on the ground floor, just around the corner from the dining hall, and it’s impossible to deny the truth:
He’s different now. And the kicker of it is, he’s so accustomed to his new face that he can’t say how it differs from his old one, not unless he finds a bloody photo and holds it up to compare. Is it his eyes? Does he look more awake now? More alert? Ironic, considering he’s three glasses of wine in and his tolerance has gone to shit.
Everyone watched him when he came up from the basement. Everyone watched him again when Aunt Bea spoke with him. And when he stood to walk the entire length of the dining hall on his way to the toilets, every fucking person in the room watched him do so. He could feel their eyes on him, evaluating him, and what’s strange, what he’s really going to have to sit with and fucking analyse, is that he felt suddenly really stupid in his tux.
Like he didn’t fit in.
This was a mistake.
He’s touching the surface of the mirror with his fingertips, practically stroking the glass, when the toilet in another stall flushes and, guiltily, he withdraws his hand. Starts washing it again, just for something to do.
He needn’t have rushed. Muffled swearing starts to fill the room, and he’s drying his hands with a paper towel by the time the stall opens and a tall girl steps out, clad in greens and blues and still adjusting her bust.
“Never wear an elaborate dress to any event where you might have to piss,” the girl says, looking right at him and causing him to realise that he’s staring at her chest, wondering if she grew those things herself, or if the doctor helped.
“Shit,” he mutters, “sorry. Rude.” He looks away, exaggerates the movement so he’s practically staring at the floor. At least he had the opportunity to spot her she/her pin.
“Don’t worry about it,” the girl says, leaning towards him and grinning. “We’re all girls here.”
From another cubicle — another one he hadn’t realised was occupied; normally he’s not quite so self-involved, he’s pretty fucking sure — someone coughs, loud and fake.
“We’re all girls and nonbinary people here,” the girl amends.
“I’m not exactly—”
“We’re all proud of you,” the girl says chattily, washing her hands. “No-one’s ever been allowed up so early.”
Well. The record needs correcting, then. “It’s not just me. Steph’s here, too. And she was in the basement less time than me. I’m just following her, really.”
The girl shrugs, then holds out a hand. It takes a second for him to understand that she’s asking him to pass some paper towels.
When she’s done drying her hands, she looks at him again, closely, like she’s searching for something in him. “Steph’s doing great,” she says slowly, “but she’s just another girl, you know? She is what she is. What she was always going to be. Or what she always should have been, I suppose. But you… I look at you, and I see me. Except—” her face breaks into a smile, “—you’re up here! You’re doing amazingly! It just feels like vindication, you know? Are you still Aaron?”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you picked another name?”
It’s his turn to shrug. “I don’t think I’m there yet, you know?”
“Farah!” the other person calls from inside the stall. “Leave the poor kid alone!”
“Sod off, Am,” Farah says. For his benefit, she mimes throwing her balled-up paper towels over the door at the room’s third occupant.
“I can hear you doing shit out there, Farah.”
Farah giggles. “I’m innocent!”
The toilet flushes and, shortly after, a striking person dressed a little like him exits the stall and gives him a wave before washing their hands — and he confirms, checking the pin on their lapel, that they are they/them.
“Hi, Aaron,” they say. “I’m Amethyst, and — as you probably gathered — this giggling idiot is Farah, the weight around my neck.”
“You love it,” Farah says, air-kissing them.
“Sorry my Sisters have been staring at you all night. If you need a break — and, don’t take this the wrong way, but you look like you do — then may I suggest the back rooms? There are dozens of them. Just turn left out of here instead of right. Get lost for a little bit.”
“Thanks,” he says. “I’ll, um, think about it.”
“Happy hols, kiddo,” Amethyst says. Behind them, Farah’s already opening the door to the corridor, and she turns and waves over her partner’s head. “Oh, and don’t forget: if you don’t like what they want you to be, it doesn’t have to be forever. Sharp tux, by the way.”
He gives them a full minute before he follows. He uses the time to breathe deeply, to clear his head, to once again become used to his reflection, and to very carefully not wonder what it is that makes Amethyst look so good in their suit, while he…
Shit. Irritably he kicks open the door and almost falls over someone even shorter than him; a novelty even in mixed company, and a practical impossibility here.
“Sorry,” he says, backing up, and realises that she’s not short, she’s using a wheelchair.
“Aaron, yes?”
Why does everyone keep asking him that? Wait; he knows this woman. Knows her name, anyway; Pippa was talking about her in awed tones. He should have paid more attention. “Teri, right?”
“Right.” Teri looks behind her, and then beckons him closer. “You want to get out of here, Aaron?”
“You mean, like, to another room? Because I’m—”
“No. I mean, to London. Or to Scotland. Or to bloody space. Somewhere not here.”
“Oh. Um. Not really?”
“How long have you been here, Aaron?”
“I don’t know.” He knows; he’s not sure why he instinctively dissembled. “Three months. A bit less.”
“They brainwashed you in three months?”
“Hey!” He’s not brainwashed! And neither’s Steph, nor Adam, nor… Okay, Martin might be, but Martin could probably contrive to have his mind rearranged by a particularly intimidating geometric shape. And Maria’s never so much as hinted that that’s what she wants from him! If anything, he’s brainwashed her! Edy says she never laughed so hard at so many filthy things before he came along.
“Aaron.” She says it sharply, like she’s trying to dislodge something from his brain, and he realises he zoned out.
“Sorry. But no. I’m not brainwashed. I’m just… Wait; sorry; who are you?”
“I’m Teri.”
“Yeah, gathered, but that doesn’t help. You’re not a sponsor, are you?”
“Hah!” Teri whacks him on the elbow. “Don’t make me laugh. No, I’m the woman who took your ‘Aunt Bea’ in off the streets many, many years ago. Gave her a bed and hot meals and all the hormones she could swallow. So this whole thing is my fault, in a way.” She looks around again, and mutters, “This whole bloody self-perpetuating nightmare…”
“You don’t approve.”
“I don’t know.” She glares at him. “I didn’t used to. But that was fifteen years ago, and I’ve met too many people who would once have begged me to offer them what I just offered you, and who are now so convinced of the value of their vaunted programme that they turn around and run a whole new generation of kids through it. It’s… baffling.”
“Can’t argue with the results, I suppose,” he says, wondering why he’s trying to reassure her. If he even is; he can’t get a handle on her. But she’s older than him, a lot older, and don’t they have funny ideas sometimes?
He laughs to himself. Funny ideas like kidnapping is bad. Fuck, maybe he is brainwashed.
“Kid, I’ve argued with the results until I’m blue in the face,” Teri says, “and the results just smile at me and ask if I want another bloody cup of tea in another bloody funny mug. You really don’t want to leave?”
He leans against the wall. Slides down it until he’s on his haunches, a little below Teri’s eyeline. “I met Steph here,” he says. “You know her?”
Teri nods. “One of Dorley Hall’s ‘new consciences’.”
“Hah. Yeah. Maybe. She told Aunt Bea off in front of the whole room earlier, so maybe.”
“Yes. I caught some of that.”
“Not the first time she’s done something like that. Not the first time she’s done it for me.” He thumps his head against the wall, just hard enough to serve as emphasis. “And you know what I’ve done to deserve someone like that? Absolutely fucking nothing. I’m a piece of shit, Teri; but you know that. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”
She regards him kindly. “That doesn’t mean you have to let them make you into a woman. Seriously; we can leave. You can live with me. I know what they say, that when you’re back out in the world you’ll backslide. They always say it, but it doesn’t have to be true. Not with work. I’ll help you. You can stay you.”
“That’s kind, but I’m okay. Or I will be, or something.” He shivers. He’s not exactly okay. Hopefully she didn’t notice.
“Are you transgender, Aaron?”
“No. But I know a good deal when I see one, even if Maria and Steph and all the others had to spend months pulling the fucking cataracts out of my eyes first. Bea asked me if I consent. I said yes. Those people out there? I want everything they have, Teri; everything. I want the family, I want the home, I want to be wanted, to be needed, to have something to offer people that isn’t just, you know, waggling my fucking dick at them. Sorry.”
“Darling, I’ve seen enough dicks not to be offended just at the thought of them. Though, perhaps, don’t bring yours up again.”
“Deal.” He stands up. “I’m staying, Teri.” He looks behind him, at the maze of the back rooms, the places where Amethyst said he might find a few moments of peace and quiet. He looks ahead, out towards the end of the corridor, where he can see a little way into the dining hall. He can almost see Steph.
He knows where he’d rather be.
“Oh, well,” Teri says. “I tried.”
“I’m grateful,” he says. “You wanna go back in? I think we’re having dessert soon.”
* * *
It’s not the second years who clear off the tables, but a random assortment of graduates. Christine doesn’t know how they were chosen or whether they volunteered; she’s just glad she doesn’t have to get involved. She doesn’t want to move just yet. One too many roast potatoes, probably. At least she requested the sorbet for dessert. Paige asked for the chocolate cake. God only knows where she plans to put it.
Maria stands up from her table and calls for silence the same way Bea did, by tapping a spoon on a wine glass. The room is considerably less receptive to her request, though — or, possibly, everyone is simply more drunk — and it takes a while and much throat clearing from Bea before Maria can speak and be heard. Christine uses the time to admire her dress.
“You all know me,” she says, projecting her voice in a way that Christine, who is justifiably proud of her own voice, finds impressive. “And so you know I tend to get a little maudlin this time of year. Well, I’ve had a good meal and a pretty decent amount of wine—”
“Lush!” Indira shouts.
“—so I’m sure you’ll be happy to discover that this year is no exception. I want to tell you…” She pauses, looks down at Edy, looks over at Bea, and smiles. “I want to tell you about my parents.
“My parents were very serious about Christmas. Very serious. We’d throw open the door, we’d put out a spread of finger food, and we’d welcome the neighbours in, to view our tree, to sing carols, to take an individually wrapped present. The presents weren’t much — mostly little cakes Mum would bake or small toys Dad would make — but they were important. My parents came to this country as adults, and when they arrived they had no support network, no community; no friends. They did the work. They built their own community.” She looks down at the table. “When I was eight, Dad lost his job. Took almost three months to find a new one. And in that time, the friends they’d made, the community they’d built, they were there for us. Food parcels. Spare clothes, because I was growing fast and my school trousers were halfway up my shins. Very little money — no-one really had any at all — but a lot of love.” Edy, looking up at Maria, takes her hand. Maria smiles, and continues, “That’s gone. All of it. And there will always be a part of me that lives forever back then, that can’t and will never move on. But the rest of me, she sees a lot of that old community here, now. Because what we have here is built on love. On the belief that the start one has in life does not have to decide one’s future. On the certain knowledge that people can change, if they are offered the opportunity. And on the drive to find new family, new friends, and to forge connections that will last a lifetime.
“Beatrice already said it, but I’m stealing her bit. You are my family, all of you. You’re my place in the world. You’re why I get up in the morning and you’re how I sleep so well at night. I treasure you. Those who were there from the very start—” she raises her glass towards Bea, “—those I’ve found along the way, and those who are new. Aaron, that means you.”
Aaron raises his wine glass towards Maria, then turns back around to face their table and sinks into his chair. Steph hugs him and Christine, feeling a swell of affection for the little shit, takes the hand he’s left on the table. He’s surprised, but when he meets her eyes she smiles, and sheepishly he returns it. She squeezes his fingers and releases him.
“All of us,” Maria says, “have holes in our lives. People we were taken from; people who were taken from us. And sometimes it’s easy to focus on that, on what we’ve lost, on who we’ve lost, and lose sight of the tremendous gifts we’ve been provided with. But it’s also important not to forget. To live in all the moments, good and bad, that make us and sustain us. So, with that in mind, I would like to propose a toast: to the people we’ve lost.” She raises her glass to the air.
“To the people we’ve found!” Edy shouts, standing to join her and raising her own glass.
“To family,” Bea says, standing and joining the toast.
“To family,” most of the women around Christine mutter, and so she quickly joins in, draining her own glass and trying not to think of her mother, alone with her bastard dad on Christmas Eve. Except she’s not, is she? Maybe she’s still at the food bank. Maybe she’s gone to someone else’s house? Maybe while she’s out there’ll be a fire, and Dad will burn…
“To family,” Paige whispers in her ear, drawing Christine out of her thoughts and into her girlfriend’s arms. “I love you so much, Christine.”
Around the table, the other couples are sharing similar sentiments, and Melissa and Shahida are shuffling nervously around the thing everyone else has been able to see for weeks, and Pippa’s being included in the hug Steph and Aaron are sharing, so Christine feels able to just stop bloody caring about anyone and anything else, her parents included, and focus on the one thing that’s most important to her.
She leans into Paige’s embrace, presses her head against Paige’s chest, and replies, “I love you, too.”
* * *
“Hey. Liss.”
“Oh. Um. Hi. Rabia, right?”
“Right. Listen, um, I’ve got something to ask you, and it’s awkward, so I’m just going to come right out and say it. You wanna come say hi to Nell and Autumn and Tash? And also Bella, I suppose, but you don’t have any reason to hate her, so—”
“I don’t hate Nell.”
“But you do hate Autumn and Tash?”
“No! But I thought I’d better be specific about— You’re being cheeky, aren’t you?”
“Never. But you should know that Autumn is very much against this. Me coming over here to get you. Not because she doesn’t want to see you, you understand; she’s just embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed?”
“Apparently there was a bit of a clique?”
“And I wasn’t in it. That’s true enough.”
“You don’t have to come.”
“No, I want to. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I kind of want to talk to them again. Can I finish my sorbet first?”
“If that’s sor berry important to you, yes.”
“If I do come over, will you keep being like this?”
“Very likely.”
“…I’ll still come over.”
“You’re a saint, Melissa.”
* * *
“Did you ever track down the rubber Santa and the fairy lights?”
“Yes. Someone made a shrine in one of the back rooms. Santa shibari’d with fairy lights on a cardboard altar. Fake mistletoe and candles all around it.”
“A shrine to Santa? Have we started getting intakes that develop weird little religions down there?”
“No, the second years are just annoying. They keep trying to jump-scare me with the weird shit they leave lying around.”
“A good thing you found it before Maria did.”
“Yes.”
“Too much like—”
“Yes.”
“You want me to have a word with them? Suggest some… boundaries for her extracurricular activities?”
“Please. After Christmas, though.”
* * *
“I’m getting too old for this, Ash.”
“Didn’t you bollock me less than an hour ago for saying exactly that? Because of what it would say about you?”
“Yes, but there’s a difference.”
“Explain.”
“No.”
“Fine. For what, exactly, are you getting too old, Beatrice?”
“This authoritarian act. Inserting myself into the therapeutic process. Sometimes I feel I’m more a hindrance than a help, honestly. I should trust the sponsors. I don’t know what I was thinking, manhandling the Holt boy.”
“The Holt boy? Oh, Aaron. He seems sweet. A bit quiet, though— Hey! What’s so funny?”
“I’m sorry, Ashley, but you should see him at almost any other time. He talks so much and so fast it’s a wonder he remembers to breathe between sentences. Maria had a compilation made of his greatest hits and, well… Hmm. I wonder if it’s a bad sign that he’s so quiet tonight.”
“He’s probably just intimidated. He’s up here in his cute little tuxedo, surrounded by sophisticated women—”
“—and your good self—”
“Yes, thank you, sophisticated women and me. No wonder he’s subdued.”
“Or it’s because an interfering old bat grabbed his face like a prize race horse the second he had the temerity to show it above ground level.”
“You’re not as scary as you think, Bea, sweetheart.”
“Hah! I’ll have you know I very nearly made one of the lads in the basement widdle himself today.”
“Oh?”
“The usual story. Macho man, thoroughly homophobic and utterly repulsive. Would have made life miserable for the others if he’d been allowed to continue mingling. Gave him a dressing-down over the speakers and sent him back to the cells.”
“Did you do the Elle voice?”
“Naturally.”
* * *
It takes a while for Charlie to lead Nadine up to her room on the top floor, what with Nadine’s expansive dress and Charlie’s inebriation, but it’s worth the struggle, worth begging Indira to let them sneak off for half an hour, because when they finally close themselves inside Charlie’s room, she drops her trousers and waits to enjoy the look on Nadine’s face when she realises what she’s been wearing under her pant suit.
“Charlene! Are those… boxer shorts?”
“Why, yes, Nadine, they are.”
“When did you buy boxer shorts?”
“Remember the year before graduation, when I kind of, uh…”
“Ah. Your ‘freakout’.”
“Right. I ran away. Bought a whole outfit. Dressed up as a guy. Went to London, walked around. Felt wrong. Felt weird. It was obscurely like I was in drag, except as a dude.”
“There are such things as drag kings, Charlie.”
“You know what I mean. At least it cemented that I did the right thing.”
“By being kidnapped?”
“By consenting. You know, like the kid, Aaron, did tonight.”
“Hmm.”
“Anyway, I found the boxers in the back of my drawer the other day. Felt like being a little naughty for Christmas. Getting a lump of coal in my stocking and stuff. And what’s naughtier, Nadine, my dearest darling, than wearing men’s underwear under Aunt Bea’s roof?”
Nadine, eyes wide, playing along with the sheer scandal of such impudent effrontery, steps closer, takes Charlie by the waist and dips her.
“Harlot,” she whispers.
* * *
“Is that her?”
“Who?”
“Stephanie! The, you know, the trans girl.”
“Loads of us are trans girls, Jenna.”
“No, you doofus, I mean the one who was trans before she got here. The one who sought us out.”
“Oh, shit! That’s her?”
“I don’t know, Daisy! That’s why I’m asking you!”
“Well, ask someone else!”
“You’re just mad because we missed turkey.”
“No, I’m happy we made it in time for profiteroles. Look her up! She’ll be in the directory.”
“Isn’t it rude to get out my phone at the dinner table? I don’t want to be rebasemented.”
“Do you think that’s likely? I’ll do it. Look. Yes. Stephanie. Likes to be called ‘Steph’. Aww. She’s come so far since she got here.”
“Who’s that with her? The cutie in the tux?”
“Don’t know.”
“She’s hot.”
“She’s— Oh. Jenna, she’s Aaron Holt.”
“Really? That’s Aaron Holt?”
“I mean, we were told to expect a guy.”
“Yes, but I was expecting, y’know, a guy, not a hot butch chick.”
“Jenna—”
“You know, she really is cute…”
“Jenna, you tart, are you leaving me for a jailbait first year?”
“She’s not jailbait; says here she’s almost twenty-two!”
“I can’t take you anywhere, can I?”
“Yes, you— Oh, shit, Daze, do you think she heard us?”
* * *
The two latecomers at the next table, who just returned to their dessert, giggling and whispering to each other, aren’t the only ones to have she’d him tonight. Over and over, when they think he can’t hear them, the Sisters have been coercively gendering him more consistently and insistently than Maria’s ever tried to. He’s pretty sure it’s not a conspiracy or anything like that; he saw himself in the mirror in the toilets, saw himself anew, and he’s had to acknowledge that without the inertia of recognition, he looks pretty fucking girlish already. Throw in a Sisterhood who are naturally inclined to look for the womanhood in everyone they meet, and, well… It’s an easy error to make.
Is it an error, though?
It’s not supposed to be, right?
He agreed to all this. Aunt Bea asked and he fucking consented. So why, when some well-meaning graduate applies to him the obvious pronoun, does he feel so fucking ashamed?
He’s at war with himself. Just like usual. Just like when Steph touched him intimately and he recoiled as much as he leaned into it. Just like when they first told him what they do here, what they really do, and a small part of him, so small he almost couldn’t hear it at the time, called his objection habitual.
This was a mistake.
He looks down at himself again; the fucking tuxedo.
This was a mistake.
He hasn’t touched his gateaux.
A touch on the side of his head startles him, but it’s just Maria, smoothing a lock of hair back behind his ear, crouching down beside him, her long black dress flowing out around her feet.
“You okay?” she says. “You’ve been a little quiet.”
He glances to the other side; Edy and Tabby are talking with Steph and Pippa, distracting them so Maria can have this conversation privately.
This isn’t right, though. It’s Christmas Eve! She shouldn’t be worrying about him right now. She has her own life, and he wants her to be able to live it.
Shit. He’s not been as careful as he wanted to be, probably been broadcasting to everyone with eyes to see that he’s having deep misgivings about coming up out of the basement at all.
“You’ve been watching me?” he asks.
“I’m your sponsor.”
“Not tonight, you aren’t.”
“Well then, I’m your Sister.” She brushes against his cheek with the back of her thumb. “And that’s something I’ll be long after I stop being anything else.”
Oh yeah. The family thing. It’s important to her. It’d be nice if it could be important to him, too. He wants it to be. God, he wants it to be. “I’m fine. I ate a lot. Made me sleepy. Sleepier. Trouble sleeping last night, you know?”
“Again?”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t mention it earlier.” Does she sound genuinely reproachful? Or is she just teasing? It’s the latter more than the former, lately; at least, he’s pretty sure.
“I didn’t want to worry you.”
“Oh, Aaron,” she says, and touches his cheek again. “Perhaps we should start you on the progesterone. We weren’t thinking of introducing it until late January, but it’s good for sleep.”
Always half an eye on his endocrine system, huh. “So,” he says, checking again to make sure no-one else is listening, “uh, I’d kick myself if I didn’t ask… What else will that do?”
“Aside from help you sleep?” Maria asks. He nods. “Well, it’s good for mood regulation… general health… it’ll help balance your system, since you have essentially zero testosterone any more…”
Edy leans down, filling the space between him and Steph. “And it’ll give you nice, round breasts,” she whispers.
“Ah,” he says. He stammers for a moment, enough time for Edy to smirk at him and return to her conversation with Pippa, Steph and Tabby.
“Sorry,” Maria says, smiling in the direction of her retreating girlfriend and miming too much to drink. “But, yes, it’ll help with breast growth, too. Probably. It does in most people.”
“That’d be just my luck, to be the only girl in the intake with a flat chest.”
“Would that bother you?”
No. Yes. Maybe. Fuck. “Uh, what’s it like? Having breasts?”
Maria laughs. “It’s like having a couple of sacks of pleasingly shaped fat hanging off your chest, tipped by sensitive bits. I’m not the woman to ask about that; I’ve had them half my life and I’ve forgotten what it’s like to not have them. Ask one of the third years.”
“Yes, but they scare the hell out of me.”
“You’re really okay, Aaron? This is a lot, I know. No-one will think badly of you if you don’t want to stick around.”
“I’m fine,” he says. “I promise. I really am.”
“Proud of you,” she says, and rises to join the conversation going on behind her.
He’s not fine. He’s a world away from fine. But to admit it would be to disappoint her, and that’s the last thing he wants in the world.
* * *
It’s obvious Maria wants some privacy with Aaron — as much as that is possible in a room full of busybodies — and while there’s probably no harm in Stephanie overhearing whatever she has to say, Pippa decides to create the space anyway. It’s easy with Edy and Tabby around, anyway, since even when at least one of them is slightly the worse for wear for alcohol, their sponsor instincts are so old as to be undefeatable. The two of them create a body barrier between Steph and Aaron; Pippa provides the topic of conversation.
“So, Tab,” she says, wondering if she’ll pay for this later, “what’s it like, dating a man who can’t possibly decide he’s a girl one day?”
Tabby sighs dramatically, with one hand clutched to her breast. “It’s incredible, Pippa,” she says. “Such a relief. Do you know, the other day he started talking about obscure indie bands and absolutely none of them were unlistenable industrial noisecore? I still didn’t care, obviously. But I enjoyed the novelty.”
“I don’t get it,” Stephanie says.
“Me neither,” Pippa whispers to her, over her half-finished gateaux.
“You two really do put the ‘baby’ in ‘baby trans’,” Edy says.
“It’s just a stereotype,” Tabby says. “A trans girl stereotype.”
Stephanie frowns. “But I don’t listen to— What was it again?”
“Steph,” Tabby says, “I love you, but you are the least online trans woman ever to have existed. Even less than Pip.”
Edy comes up from whatever it was she just whispered to Aaron to say, “There’s a qualitative difference—” she struggles with both words, “—between the terrible music taste of men—” with her hand she unsteadily delineates two categories, “—and eggs.”
“Gotcha,” Stephanie says.
“So,” Pippa says, “what’s he actually like? Aside from not a girl?”
Tabby grins broadly. “He’s really sweet. He’s into city-builder video games and classic lit and he was talking recently about how he’s become one of those beard guys. Said he never expected to, but now he has the straight razor and the strop and the weird cream stuff and everything.”
“He does have a very neat beard,” Edy says.
Christine leans across the table. “Tabby finally encountering a non-denial beard for the first time in her life.”
“Hey, I had a beard before I got dragged here,” Tabby says. “That wasn’t a denial beard.”
Maria rises from where she’s been crouched next to Aaron, and walks around him to help support the unsteady Edy. “Tabitha,” she says, “that was kind of a denial beard.”
“It wasn’t!”
“Oh, sweetie.”
“Just because I retroactively consider myself as having been trans all along does not mean that at the time it was a denial beard. I could have been a regular, normal guy with a beard.”
“Were you, though?”
Tabby sighs. “Ugh. Fuck all you bitches. I’m going to go text my boyfriend.”
* * *
“I can’t believe you had half my sorbet. I don’t know where the food goes on you.”
“I’m tall,” Paige says, hooking her little finger around Christine’s and reminding Christine that she plans, at the earliest possible polite time, to escape to her room with her girlfriend. Charlie and Nadine did exactly that, and ever since then Christine’s been keenly aware that she could be forcing down ever-smaller spoonsful of dessert or she could be tearing off a dress that’s become rather uncomfortable and, generously, doing the same for Paige.
“You’re not half a sorbet and an entire slice of cake taller than me, Paige.”
“I’m tall and I jog,” Paige corrects, and Christine has to admit that that’s probably what makes the difference. She really should start taking care of herself again. Maybe in the two weeks off Beatrice promised her…
At least she’s not the only one feeling overfed. Melissa appears to be almost asleep at the table, allowing the conversation Shahida’s having with Vicky and Lorna — about, apparently, what Shahida’s masc name would be if she happened to get swept up in some bizarre ‘opposite Dorley’ — without contributing. She’s minimally aware, though, and catches Christine looking. They exchange sleepy smiles.
Shahida spots their silent communication, grins at Christine and starts rubbing Melissa’s back, at which Melissa makes near-silent moans of what could be pleasure or nausea. With her other hand Shahida beckons at Steph, who still seems annoyingly perky — presumably she didn’t make as many inadvisable roast potato consumption decisions as Christine — and walks around the table to join them.
She’s getting good on those heels.
Pippa shifts her chair up so she’s closer to Vicky, and that leaves Christine and Aaron.
Aaron is… quiet. He picked the gateaux for dessert, but he’s hardly touched it.
“We’re going to have leftovers for a month,” she tells him, leaning back in her chair to give her belly the room it needs.
“Can’t wait,” he says.
“Oh, Yasmin says hi. No idea where she and Julia are tonight, so she can’t say hi herself, but…” Christine shrugs, feeling awkward. “She says hi.”
Aaron nods, and then smiles as a thought strikes him. “Tell her I think she’s cool,” he says.
“Will do.”
“Hey,” he says suddenly, sitting up, activating like someone put in his batteries, “I never said. Happy Christmas.”
God. He’s so sweet. Nothing at all like the guy in the intake files any more. “Thanks. Happy Christmas.”
“And, uh, thank you. For not asking if I’m okay.”
She shrugs. “I have an idea what it’s like. My first big event here was intimidating and confusing and I didn’t even properly know if I was really a girl yet, or if I was just faking it because Dira wanted me to be a girl bad enough for both of us.”
“Were you faking it?”
“No,” Christine says, shaking her head. “Not in the end. Not ever, really. It was just doubts. And residual shame. And a million other things. You’re starting to get an idea of what that’s like, I think.”
He grimaces. “Am I fucking ever.”
“Hey,” Shahida calls, and Christine looks back to find her leaning over Melissa, looking at Aaron, “did you pick a name yet?”
“Who,” Aaron says, “me?”
“Yes. We’re talking guy names. I’m forsaking the obvious and picking ‘Geoff’ for mine; I think I could pull it off. Do you have a girl name yet?”
For a second Christine thinks he’s going to tell her off, or go quiet, or do anything other than reply, quietly and steadily and with most of his usual self to the forefront, “I’m not going to consciously choose a name, actually. I’m going to wait for one to pop into existence nearby, like a Higgs Boson, and claim it.”
Melissa snorts. “Who told the funny little guy about the Higgs Boson?”
“Hey, Christine,” Aaron says quietly, when Shahida’s turned back to the others, “I’m going to step out for a while. Get some quiet, you know?”
“Sure,” she says. “If you go where the bathroom is and keep going, you’ll get to—”
“The back rooms?”
“Yeah.”
“Stall anyone who comes looking for me?”
“Promise,” Christine says.
He frowns for a second, and then smiles, blows her a kiss, and takes his leave.
* * *
Val’s back in the house, getting all the final prep done for Christmas dinner — everything that can be done the day before, anyway — and no doubt bristling under Callum’s odious fucking gaze, and that bastard Jake’s off giving Declan his injection and no doubt preparing him for another enthralling evening of providing amusement for Dotty, and Dotty herself is doing God only knows what to prepare, and that leaves Frankie, in charge of yet another captured young man.
Dotty gave her the official notification, and thank fuck she finally did because erasing the records of Val’s occasional visits to the bungalow’s almost gotten her caught every time, and in one way it’s a shame because it means Val doesn’t get to see daylight again but it also means no more sneaking around for any of them for the moment.
It’s simple again: Val’s the maid; Declan’s the toy; Callum’s the guard; Jake’s the big dick; Dotty’s in charge. And Frankie, sinful old Frankie, gets the dirty job once again.
She laughs to herself as she imagines the mess the old woman’s digestive system likely makes of the bogs around here, and corrects: she gets the second-most dirty job. Whipping some bitter young lad into shape is still preferable to cleaning the toilets after old Dotty’s had a big meal.
Poor Val.
Truth be told, she’s almost looking forward to it. It’s morally simple this time: this one’s not going to get shipped off for some horny old cunt to play with, not if she and Val have anything to say about it, nor is he going to remain in menial servitude for the rest of his life. She just has to teach him to play the game well enough for them all to win.
Because the soldiers have guns, and that means Frankie, Val and this Trevor kid, well, they only have to win once, don’t they? They just have to get a gun off of one of them and then it’s game bloody over.
The bullet in Dotty’s head has been decades coming, and though she knows Val has a better claim on it, Frankie’s fingers are itching at the thought of it being her who gets to pull the trigger.
Val never had the tools to get out of here when it was just her and the corpse of the old pervert Smyth-Farrow. Starved almost to death trying to escape. But there’s a whole operations centre here now, and there are guns and all sorts of shit. The codes don’t matter; all they need is the freedom to explore their options. And the pantry’s stocked and all the freezers are full to bursting; when they control Stenordale Manor, they won’t even have to rush.
When she pushes open the door to the bungalow and finds the lad Trevor curled up on the couch, arms around his head and so far past crying he’s just making the occasional moaning sound, she’s not surprised. Seen it all before, hasn’t she?
She shuts the front door, turns off the overhead so the room is suddenly lit only by the table lamp — low light creates a better, more trusting atmosphere — and raps twice on the coffee table to get his attention.
No response.
Fine. Nothing new under the sun.
She looks around: quite the setup. He’s chained by the ankle to what looks to be a retaining wall in the dead-centre of the bungalow, with enough give to make it to the bed, the kitchen — it’ll have been cleared of all utensils more deadly than plastic teaspoons if Jake and company aren’t completely stupid — and the couch, but he’s also got a telly and a Sky box and a pretty hefty pair of speakers. She turns it all on, finds the music app, and starts In the Air Tonight playing.
A favourite.
The music will bring him back eventually. She sits in the armchair, gives him the time. A luxury, compared to how Val had to rush every meeting with him, but that’s Dotty all over, isn’t it? Handing her the keys to the shiny new prisoner like it’s the fucking 1980s again, letting her have all the time she needs with him.
Dotty thinks Val’s too cowed to rebel with more than harsh words and the odd bit of gob in her salad; she thinks Frankie’s always been loyal. False assumptions both, and convenient spaces in which to manoeuvre. So Val’s practically got the run of the manor with only that idiot Callum to watch her, and Frankie’s got unrestricted access to a former soldier.
So he’s chained to the wall and he’s so paralysed by fear and shame and self-loathing that he doesn’t even look up to see which new tormentor has entered his cage? So what? She’s worked with worse. She’s done worse, and still put out viable product in the end.
And Dotty still doesn’t know it was she who helped Beatrice escape.
The lad’s still curled up, so she kicks the arm of the couch.
Nothing.
“Okay, lad,” she says, “I haven’t got all night. Wake the fuck up. I’m not here to hurt you.”
Still nothing.
She looks around. There’s a stray shard of mirror glass on the mantelpiece, next to the new mirror, and she knows instantly what that means. So, reluctantly, because she’s not getting any fucking younger, she pushes up out of the generous armchair, walks carefully through to the bedroom, strips the top sheet off the bed, and drapes it over the mirror.
“Lad,” she says, choosing this time to sit on the couch next to him and scooting his feet up a little so she can fit, “I need to talk to you.”
It’s a gamble, sitting so close, especially since even in his current reduced state he could more easily overpower her than she could an ant, but it’s one she’s confident about. He might have been a soldier for hire, but he took an easy job, and she’ll bet her life he’s never tried to kill anyone before. Taking a life the first time is hard, even for a broken old bitch like her. This lad? No way he could keep his anger up long enough to strangle her.
The song ends, and the algorithm picks Edge of Seventeen. Fine. It’s a great song. Makes her think of Val. Makes her think of all the incarnations of Val. Karen used to say she looked a lot like Stevie Nicks.
Well then suddenly there was no-one
Left standing in the hall, yeah, yeah
In a flood of tears
That no one really ever heard fall at all
Well I went searching for an answer
Up the stairs and down the hall
Not to find an answer
Just to hear the call
Of a nightbird singing
Come away, come away
Trevor still hasn’t responded. Whatever. She’ll just talk, then.
“My name’s Frankie,” she says, settling back on the sofa and crossing her legs at the ankles, which is the farthest up she can comfortably cross them these days, unless she contorts herself into positions probably no-one wants to see on an out-of-shape woman in her sixties. “And I know who you are, of course. Trevor Darling — commiserations on the name, by the way — ex of the Peckinville private military gadabouts, most recently under the care of Dotty Marsden and her associates at Silver River. But that’s all I know about you, so until you open that pretty little mouth of yours, I’m going to talk about me.
“I’m a monster, Trev. A living, fire-breathing monster from the dawn of fucking time, or the dawn of this whole wretched project, anyway. I got my start by stabbing a man in the dick because he hurt my sister, and that was good and righteous and true, except it’s been twenty years since she even spoke to me, hasn’t it? And you know what? I think that’s funny. I think that’s really fucking funny. I kicked off my whole career because of a woman who won’t even reply to my Facebook messages.”
“What career?” It’s a whisper, but it’s audible, and Frankie’s seen enough men in such depths of despair that she’s almost impressed he’s listening.
“My career of making girls like you, babe,” she says. It’s another thing she’s learned: if they’re unresponsive, make absolutely clear just how much you don’t give a shit about them. How unremarkable you think their plight is. How wretched they are, and how little that impacts your day. Belittle the worst thing that’s ever happened to them. Whatever your real beliefs, whatever the sight of a ruined man clinging to the end of his life actually does to you, bottle it all up; it won’t help him and it won’t help you. “Taking tender lads off the street and plucking and filleting and dressing them until they’re sweet, simpering little ladies.”
She doesn’t wince at that, but that’s the other thing: you must outwardly maintain the belief that femininity is the pinnacle of human expression, unless one happens to have been — what’s the modern term? — assigned male, and then it becomes the most degrading state imaginable. ‘Little lady’ is, depending on context, the highest praise or the direst insult. A funny position to take, since Frankie has herself never been the most feminine of women, but hey-ho; you read from the script you’re given.
“A ‘simpering little lady’?” Trevor hisses. “Is that what I’m going to be?”
“Not if I have anything to say about it, mate. But it’s like my pal Val told you: you have to learn to play the part if you’re ever going to get out of here.”
“You’re working with her? But you said—”
“Yeah, Trevor, lad. I was one of the people who made her. And now we’re friends! Isn’t life grand?”
* * *
There’s a glass room at the back of the building, terminating the rats’ maze of hallways and extra bathrooms and mini-gyms and storerooms and rooms that look like they ought to be fumigated with a flamethrower. Steph told him about this room, said Melissa took her here, but he’s fucked if he can remember what it’s called. It’s kind of nice, though; he always knew there were woods behind the university, a finger of forest reaching out to connect it to the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty one of his first-year dormmates was always enthusing about, but he never went looking. Just shut himself in his room between classes, unless he was out doing, uh—
Yeah. Well done. Memory Lane is a stupid place to visit.
The big windows are nice. That’s what he was getting at. And Saints is close enough to the edge of what passes locally for civilisation that through the sloping glass roof he can see stars. Always was a little too much light even on the other side of campus for that.
Not such a bad place to make your home, with views like this. And it’s not all that’s nice to look at around here.
“Hey.”
It’s a girl’s voice, relatively deep but similar to the way Steph sounds when she gets it just right, when she catches the lightning in a bottle and gets that look on her face he wants to—
“Aaron, right?” the girl says, and he pinches the skin on his forearm to force himself to focus. When he gets like this his thoughts run away from him and he always chases them, always ends up—
Shit. Focus.
“Hi,” he says, turning away from the window and frowning when the girl turns out to be someone he doesn’t recognise. She’s pretty, a little stocky in the way some of the Dorley girls are, and she’s dressed up for tonight, in a dress that in the dark looks so black that it swallows all shadows but which, when she turns on the overhead light — ow! his fucking eyes! — turns out to have intricate jewelled butterfly patterns sewn into it. “I like your dress.” And he really does; it hugs her curves, exaggerates her relatively impressive bust, and feathers out at the wrists with a sheer, sparkling fabric that makes him think of insect wings.
“I like your tux,” she says, stepping closer.
“I don’t.” He says it before thinking about it, but he doesn’t, he really doesn’t. It’s uncomfortable, it feels weird around his hips, and of the handful of women and nonbinary people he’s encountered tonight wearing similar clothes it undoubtedly looks the shittest on him.
The girl smiles. Playful. “Would you rather’ve worn a dress, d’you think?”
He can only think of Steph, in black, with a ponytail he’s certain she didn’t have this morning, and that leads to wondering what it will be like to go back downstairs with her tonight, back to their bedrooms, and peel it off, pull off her boots, and—
But then she’ll have to undress him, won’t she? That’s the way these things are done. He can’t just be a disembodied pair of hands or whatever, he has to participate, which means she has to touch him, has to—
“Aaron?”
“Sorry.” He looks around for somewhere to sit, finds only white sheets covering things that’ll probably fall apart if he so much as touches them, and settles for the floor. Cross-legged. One advantage of the tux. Steph couldn’t do this right now. Steph would sit on her butt and she’d have to smooth out the tight skirt of her dress so as not to expose too much thigh, and she’d stretch her legs out in front of her. God, and the cute little Christmas tree pattern on her tights would catch the light like— Focus. He looks up at the girl and forces a smile. “I’m all over the place tonight.”
She hitches up her skirts and sits down in front of him, facing him, and when she does she has to rearrange her bust, which she accomplishes with a frown of concentration and a chewed lip. “Still getting used to these things,” she says, and then snaps her fingers. “Shit,” she adds, “you do know the big secret, don’t you?”
“Unless Maria has another surprise waiting for me next week, then, yeah. I know our intake isn’t exactly unique.”
“Good. Wow. That would have been embarrassing. I would have had to improvise something about, oh, I don’t know, I had a really late puberty, or I’m actually fourteen years old and just precocious, or… I don’t know.” She grins at him. “Happy I don’t have to. My boobs are new. I keep whacking them on things.”
Oh yeah. She’s new, then. One of the second years, probably. Maria suggested he ask someone like her what it’s like to have breasts, but maybe she meant for him to ask what it’s like to be a girl, to become one in adulthood, to choose it, and he would but he doesn’t even know how to start, and probably Maria just meant exactly what she said and he’s just overthinking shit again, and—
Fuck. Maybe he should whack his head against something a few times, see if he can find his reset button. All he knows is that this girl, he envies her, the same way he has everyone else he’s met tonight, and he can’t decide if it’s because they’re done, because they’ve moved on from their old selves and they’re either getting ready to start their new lives or they’re here to visit the old alma mater and indulge in a little nostalgia about the time they finally were allowed to lay down their burdens (and grow two additional burdens as compensation, a little farther up), or for… some other reason he can’t put his finger on, can’t identify, something that feels like it’s been lurking on the periphery of his consciousness ever since he decided he was going to accept everything Dorley has to offer. And the more he thinks about it, the more his head hurts.
He’s envious. That’s all he needs to know. He looks at those girls out there — and this girl, right here — and then he looks at himself, in his stupid tuxedo, and he wants to hide away forever. But that would disappoint Maria, and it would worry Steph, so here he is, sitting on the floor in a— in a— in a whatever this room is called, getting dust on his borrowed suit.
“I’m Faye,” the girl says. When he doesn’t reciprocate with a name — why bother? he has only one, and she knows it already — she continues, “I became a girl here, actually.”
It’s so absurd that he laughs. “Doesn’t everyone?”
She opens her mouth to correct him, and then realises. Laughs with him. “Not at Dorley. I mean, here. In this room. It started here, anyway.”
And she tells him the story: the girl, so new she wasn’t even sure she was a girl yet, bound up by fear of her own temper and obligations to her friends and to the girl she loves; and Christine, a year ahead of her and like her in so many ways, taking her by the hand, introducing her to the people in her life, showing her that, sure, for some people, girl is something you are, but for others, it can simply be something you do.
“And someone you do, too,” she finishes with a giggle. “But, seriously, I was caught up in my head. Like you are, I think. Scared to take the next step. No—” she raises a finger to forestall any objections he might have found, had his head been operating correctly, “—not scared. Intimidated. It all felt so large. But it’s just a lot of little things. Being a girl — being a woman, which is preferable — is only one of them.”
Easy for her to say. Being a girl — a woman — is just one part of her glorious, multifaceted personality? Cool. Great! What if your personality is clinging for its life over a bottomless pit, and the prospect of being a girl or a woman or a fucking platypus is the only thing keeping you from losing your grip, and—
Why is he arguing with her about this? In his head, sure, but isn’t that her whole damn point? That he can simply incorporate womanhood into his idea of himself?
What fucking idea of himself?
“Aaron?”
“Sorry. I’m doing it again.”
She takes his hand. “Yeah. I did, too. Don’t let it swallow you. My advice: stop thinking. Let yourself feel, and don’t worry about what those feelings mean. Allow yourself to have some fun with it. Live a little.” She giggles. “Dance, maybe.”
“Dance?”
“Yeah. Can’t you hear the music?”
No, actually. He gets all stoppered up when he falls too far into himself. Sensory information ceases being important, or something. He swallows to pop his ears and allows the sensation to open him back up.
She’s right: there’s something playing. It’s faint, because it’s had to travel all the way back here, but it’s just about audible.
Of course it’s Taylor Swift.
* * *
Shahida and Vicky claimed their spots on one of the couches while Melissa and Lorna relieved themselves, and then they swapped over, which gives Melissa the opportunity to watch Shy as she walks purposefully back to her across the dining hall.
The slit in Shy’s dress flicks open with every step. It’s difficult not to be entranced.
Melissa’s not stupid, much as she occasionally insists to herself that she is; she knows Shahida likes her. And Melissa likes her back. So much. Enough that it’s a little painful to be around her when she’s dressed and made up and looking her best, because despite what Melissa sees in the mirror and despite the men who constantly — constantly — hit on her, there’s always been a part of her living forever in Rachel’s room, seventeen years old, awkward and unsure. When the person who would become Melissa first started to appear, and then Shahida put her hands on her and Mark recoiled, knowing in every part of himself that he wasn’t good enough, that he didn’t belong there, that this was a space for women and he was invading it, that his body was wrong and broken and so twisted up it was barely alive. When Rachel and Amy looked at him like he was any other man; untrustworthy and potentially violent.
She’s still not worked out how to live without the fear that, without warning, everything — everything, even her body — could be taken away from her in an instant. It’s the fear that bites at every happy moment, that threatens every friendship, that undermines every thought she’s ever had.
Sometimes she thinks the other Dorley girls have it easier, that to have become a woman here, completely and totally, is better than to have been stumbling towards it your entire life. But she knows that’s unfair; as much as she’s probably the graduate who’s spoken the least with the others here — hell, Steph knows more people here than Melissa, and she’s been here less than three months! — she’s overheard enough conversations to know that at least a few of them lived lives before Dorley that seem, to Melissa, strikingly familiar.
She laughs at herself. Wouldn’t that make it easy? If everyone here was a secret trans girl all along? How… bloodless.
And then Shahida sits down, folds herself into the space created by Melissa’s outstretched arm, sinks into the sofa cushion with a grumble of contentment, and though her presence prompts echoes of Mark’s fear and uncertainty, it’s nothing Melissa can’t handle by taking the inside of her cheek between her teeth and biting.
Shy’s back in her life now. For good, if they both get their way. And that means Melissa has to face up to her shit.
Not tonight, though. It’s easy to let the good food and the alcohol, the murmur of conversation, the warmth of the fire and of Shy’s body, and the persistent girl-pop soundtrack relax her, and if her anxiety is to persist, these are the best conditions in which to smother it.
“Merry Christmas,” Shahida says to her, rubbing her bare shoulders into the cushion and the back of her neck against Melissa’s forearm.
“Happy holidays,” Melissa replies.
“Oh my God,” Tabby says, from where she’s perched cross-legged on a hassock chair with her back to the fire, “get a room, you two.”
Shahida sticks her tongue out at her, and Melissa says, “I’m sorry you don’t get to spend the holidays with Levi.”
“He must be hot if you miss him already,” Shahida says.
“No,” Tabby says, tapping her lower lip with a finger, faking contemplation, “it’s just nice to get away from all this estrogen for a while.”
Shahida snorts, and holds in laughter that otherwise might consume her. “Tab,” she says, pressing herself more against Melissa, “most of this estrogen—” she waves a hand behind her at the room, where most attendees are still sat at the tables, “—is your fault.”
“What’s Tabitha’s fault?” Paige asks, as she and Christine walk over, hand in hand, looking for a spot on one of the couches to slot into. Lorna shuffles up, and Paige drops into the space Lorna’s created. Christine perches on the padded arm of the couch.
“Girls,” Vicky says.
“Bad Tabby,” Christine giggles, wagging a censorious finger.
Tabby shakes her head. “I get no respect around here.”
“Actually,” Melissa says, “I wanted to ask you something, Tabby.”
“Oh?”
“I’m thinking of moving,” she says quickly, before the rising fear can stop her. Shy squeezes her forearm. They’ve talked about this — she wouldn’t be planning to reintroduce herself to Shahida’s parents if they hadn’t! — but it’s still nerve-wracking to raise the subject around other people, to make it real. “Moving back down here, that is. To Almsworth. Or somewhere close by.”
“That’s wonderful!” Tabby says, and by the way she smiles and leans forward to take Melissa’s hand, she seems genuine. Melissa bites the inside of her cheek again: of course she’s genuine! People actually like having you around, idiot!
“There are… logistical challenges, though. My family still live and work around here.”
Tabby nods. “Shouldn’t be a problem if you live on or near the grounds. And, honestly, you don’t look that much like you used to, not if someone’s not looking for it. You were, what, three minutes into your transition when Steph recognised you, yes? And it still took her a good few minutes and a fuckup on your part.”
“Yes, but Shahida—”
“Shahida is a terrifying monster who sat in the SU Bar scrutinising every blonde who walked past and comparing them with a half-dozen photos that she’d edited to make you look like a girl. No-one else is that psychotic.”
“Thanks, Tab,” Shahida says.
“You can keep the room you have here for as long as you need it,” Tabby continues, frowning slightly as she thinks, “or there are a few places we own in the city, close enough for convenience but far enough away from your old stomping grounds and your father and brother’s habitual haunts—”
“You know those by heart?”
“I have, as I believe has been noted, sort of adopted you two, and your friend, Rachel. Or, possibly, been adopted by you. It’s a complex, multifaceted relationship. And it’s my job to know this stuff. And Will has been pretty docile lately, and in a stage of his development where prodding him too much would be counterproductive, so—” she shrugs, “—I’ve got the time.”
“Oh,” Melissa says, “I wasn’t asking for a free house, or anything…”
“Liss,” Tabby says, “it’s staff we’re short on, not money or property. On that subject, if you’d consider sponsoring—”
“No.”
“Not even one boy?”
“No, Tabitha.”
Tabby holds up her thumb and forefinger, less than a centimetre apart. “One little guy?”
“Shy, save me.”
“Tabby,” Shahida says, very seriously, “make your own girls.”
* * *
He’s concentrating so hard on his farm game that he doesn’t notice her knocking, and it’s only when she sits down on the mattress behind him and the springs creak that Adam turns around, spinning in the computer chair with his legs crossed and seeming so much like the carefree young man he might have become without the influence of his family and his church that Edy’s heart strains against her chest, creates aches in her ribs and forces the air out of her lungs.
If she’d only gotten to him five years ago, none of this might be necessary.
“Hi, Adam,” she says.
His eyes widen as he takes her in, and she bites her lip, shy under his scrutiny, unused to inspiring the awe she sees in him. She’s far from the most glamorous graduate, and rarely goes all out; for tonight she wore a cute little jacket-and-skirt combo, belted tight under her breasts, and while Maria told her in sensuous whisper that she looks ‘tempting as fuck’, Edy knows that next to her — or Tabitha, Paige or Indira, or any of dozens more — she looks less like a hot chick and more like a mildly gussied-up primary school teacher. But she’s dressier than Adam’s ever seen her, and she supposes she is showing quite a lot of leg.
“Hi, Edy,” he says, and swallows. “How was the party?”
She lets him see her satisfied smile. “It was nice to see old friends again. I took some pictures, if you’d like to see?” He nods, so she pulls them up on her phone. The first is a selfie she took with Maria, in front of the Christmas tree.
“Maria looks so pretty…”
She can’t help but agree.
She runs him through the photos she selected before she came down. Stephanie and Aaron are not visible in any of them; they’re limited to just the sponsors he knows, Beatrice, and the second years. His eyes widen again as she points to each of them, names them, and gives him a moment to absorb them.
“They were really boys?” he asks, almost all the breath gone from his voice.
“Yes.”
“They look… like they’re having fun.”
“They are. They’re very sweet, Adam. I think you’ll like them.”
There’s a near-silent gasp from him, and his hand, clasped firmly in hers, stiffens. “I’ll get to meet them?”
“Yes.”
“They won’t hate me?”
That’s enough to get her to drop the phone on the mattress and pull him over to her, onto the bed beside her, into her arms, the better to draw him into her, to whisper to him, to show him once again that her love, unlike any he’s known before, is genuine, and as close to unconditional as it can get in this place.
“They won’t hate you,” she says, rubbing his upper arm. “They’ll understand.”
“But I’ve done awful things.”
“They’ll understand,” she repeats. And they will: Edy did worse than Adam, for far less approval, and yet Beatrice and Ashley and Maria love her no less for it. “I promise they’ll understand.”
* * *
Steph finds him sitting on the floor of the conservatory at the back of the building, mouthing along to the Taylor Swift track that’s playing in the dining hall, his eyes closed, his hands cupped in his lap and his legs crossed, one foot tapping in time with the music. His hair, which started the evening slicked back and which has been determined ever since to return to its usual slightly shaggy mess, is playing around his cheekbones, and she’s surprised he hasn’t brushed it away like usual. The light from the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling is stark, and under different circumstances might have been unflattering, but here, now, he looks…
…so pretty.
The song ends and the playlist moves on and he opens his eyes, smiles up at her. He doesn’t seem embarrassed to have been caught singing along.
“Hey,” he says.
She doesn’t reply. Decides instead to sit down in front of him, though she quickly discovers that her dress is too tight to mimic the way he’s sitting, which earns a smirk from him. Instead she arranges herself with her legs stretched out next to him and her hands on the floor to support her torso.
His eyes are a little damp.
“I like your tights,” he says, and lays a hand on her knee, runs a thumb over the material. “I wanted to say all evening. They look really good on you. They feel nice, too.”
He’s touching her so casually and yet so intimately and they’re alone and there’s nothing stopping her from taking his hand in hers and moving it up her leg, under her dress… But he’s been crying, if only a little, and he came out here for a reason. She needs to know why, so she can help him. But his hand is on her leg and every nerve in her body is crying out for—
“Stockings,” she says, abruptly, interrupting herself. “They’re stockings, not tights.” He smiles at her again. “Easier to pee in, Paige said. And, yes, I like them. Listen, Aaron—”
“Don’t,” he says. He’s not upset, not about this, anyway, but he is firm. “Please.”
“Don’t what?”
“Not that name. Not tonight. I’d like to be someone else, if that’s okay?”
“Someone else? Aar— Sorry. Are you all right?”
He taps his fingers on her inner thigh for a moment while he thinks. It’s quite distracting. “That’s a hard question to answer,” he says.
They’re alone. Alone in the conservatory with no-one coming to get them and only one door between them and the outside world…
Steph asks, “Do you want to get out of here?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t want to go to bed yet.”
“No,” she says. “Do you want to get out of here? Leave. Out the door. Into the woods. Never to come back.”
“You’re not the first person to ask me that tonight.” He squeezes her leg, then retracts his hand, starts intertwining his fingers in his lap, a nervous habit she’s very familiar with. “No, thank you. Getting out of here, that’s what he wanted. Him. The guy. That’s what he’d do. And I don’t want to be him any more. I told you that, or I think I did. That’s sort of what’s been eating at me all night, actually. Like, I kicked him out of my head but I haven’t replaced him yet, haven’t had the slightest fucking idea who to replace him with, and he keeps trying to get back in. Keeps banging at my fucking windows. And he has all these… habits. Survival shit from the old days, when worrying about the way people saw me was second nature. When worrying about how much of a man I was being was important to me. And it still is, you know? Kind of?” He moves closer to her, so they’re both facing the opposite direction from each other but their hips are almost touching.
“Give me one of those,” Steph says, before he can say anything else.
“One of what?”
“You’re going to wear your hands down to nubs if you keep doing that.” She holds out a hand. “Give me one.”
He holds out his closest hand and she takes it, clasps it in both of hers, holds it in her lap. Just minutes ago, this would have been exciting for her; now, it feels necessary.
She smiles at him, and he continues. “I’ve been like a body without a person. Ever since… you know. I look at myself and sometimes it feels like I’m empty. Just skin and bones and nothing else. Other times, it feels like he’s still there, and he’s telling me all this useless shit, shit I don’t want, shit that shouldn’t be important any more. And—” he looks away, and she grips his hand more tightly, “—sometimes, when you touch me, he’s there, too, telling me I shouldn’t let you, telling me a man wouldn’t let himself be treated the way you do.” He looks right back at her, eyes shining. “And that’s bullshit, Steph. I know it is. I don’t want you to stop anything about what you’ve been doing. But I can’t not tell you about this, you know?”
“I know. You’ve been crying some nights. I thought it was about something like this.”
He nods. “It was. Faye said— You know her?”
“I do. She told me you were back here, actually.”
“Right. She said that when she was like me, she was intimidated. That what it took to get past it was understanding that womanhood could be — should be — just a part of who she is, a facet of her personality. And that was really scary, because I’ve been thinking for longer than I want to admit, since long before Dorley, that I don’t actually have a personality, that I’m nothing more than my shitty habits and my bullshit stress responses and my unstoppable and irresponsible libido.”
“You know that’s wrong, right?” Steph says gently. “You’re— Aaron— Shit, sorry. Look. I love you. I actually, genuinely do. I can’t imagine life without you. And not the ‘old’ you, the one you sent away, the one who keeps banging on your windows—”
“Demanding I crank out a quick wank whenever a pretty girl or an unexpectedly erotic shadow crosses my path,” he interjects with a smile, and she squeezes his hand again.
“You see? That’s you. The shitty jokes, that little grin you do, the way you’re instinctively sweet. Fuck. Remember the mice?”
“The mice?”
“You told me. When you were a kid. You caught mice in a bucket. You took them miles down the road to release them because you didn’t want them to die from the poison the pub put out.”
“I forgot I told you about that,” he whispers.
“That’s all you. And it’s not something I think you should get rid of. I think the guy, this creature you hate so much, he needs to be cared for, not thrown out.” She feels him wince at the pronoun. “You’ve always been this sweet, loving person. You’ve just also been all the other stuff, the stuff you hate.” She raises her knees up, traps his hand in the space between her belly and her thighs. Warms it. “I can’t claim to completely relate,” she says, “but before I got here, before I truly accepted that transition was something I could actually do, that living as a woman was something that was actually possible for me, I was someone I hated, too. I built this person, this boy called Stefan, to face the world for me.” She snorts. “Truth be told, he wasn’t very good at it. He didn’t have many friends, and by the end he didn’t have any, and he was about to drop out of his degree and get fired from work, and he was bad at dealing with complex emotional shit because, well, he had no subtlety.” She winces, remembering. “Hard to be a real person when you can barely even feel anything. I hated my body and I hated myself and I hated my voice and I hated the way people looked at me and nothing else was strong enough to break through all that. In the end I walked into the arms of this… secretive and, if we’re honest, kind of deeply weird feminisation reform dormitory and chose to stay here, knowing it would cut me off from my family, from my sister, and I did it because I didn’t have enough of me left not to do it. I think if I’d walked out when Christine offered, I’d be lucky to be alive right now. She said she could get me hormones, and I believed her — still do — but it’s not just the hormones that have put me back together. It’s Pippa and Christine and Indira and Maria… and you.” She’s still looking into his eyes, a connection at least as important as the hand she holds in her lap. “I was an empty shell. Nothing left inside me. Everything burned away by the need to survive. At least, that’s what I thought. But she was always inside me. The real me. And she was hard to find and even harder to listen to when she started making herself known and it was, actually, Maria who got me to see her in the first place, but just because she was small, and quiet, and inexperienced, doesn’t mean she wasn’t there.”
“I don’t have—”
“You do. The real you is in there. You’ll find them. I know you will.”
He smiles again, breaks eye contact, and wiggles his fingers to suggest that he wants his hand back. She complies.
“That’s the other thing Faye said. She said I should try just feeling for a while. So I have been. Then, before you came, and now.” With one hand on the floor he stands, rises slowly, holds out the other so she can rise with him, and when they’re both on their feet he loops an arm around her waist, stands slightly on his toes so he can rest his chin on her shoulder. The music’s still playing and they don’t dance, not really, but they sway in time with it. “I want all the things I’ve been denying myself,” he says. “I want to feel what it’s like. And when I close my eyes and I concentrate on just feeling…” He coughs, leans back to look at her, a sheepish smile on his face, then quickly kisses her on the cheek and returns to his place on her shoulder. “The funny thing is, people keep coming up to me tonight and offering to help me escape, or telling me I don’t have to be what Maria wants me to be, but… Fuck, Steph. I don’t know how to say it. I don’t have the words. I don’t even have the language for it. It’s like I’m trying to find something in the dark and I’m feeling around for it and I have no way to see it but I know I’ll know it when I lay my hands on it.” He closes his eyes. “There’s accepting what I’ve been offered. There’s actively choosing it. I’ve done both of those. I told Maria and I told you and I even told the scary lady who runs the place. I’ve made the choice.” Finally, so quietly she almost can’t hear him, he finishes, “And then… then there’s wanting it.”
Steph holds her breath. Rolls the thought over and over in her head. Wonders if she should ask the question that seems so obvious and yet so dangerous.
Until she breathes again, even the dust in the old conservatory stays still.
Steph whispers, “Do you want to be a girl?”
* * *
There’s a tree in the AirBnB. Not some grand, lavishly decorated confection like they have every year at Dorley Hall, but a plastic job from Argos with exactly five baubles that don’t shine satisfactorily no matter how vigorously her dad polishes them with his shirt sleeve. But it’s surrounded by presents, and those are home to all the festive cheer missing from the tree, with large looped golden bows tying up neat piles of packages. Her mum’s work, for sure.
Dad’s got an action movie on, but he’s got the sound low and the subtitles on because Mum’s asleep on Abby’s shoulder and it wouldn’t do to wake her. He winks at her when he catches her looking, but even his long-lost daughter can’t keep his attention when on the telly there’s a flaming tyre rolling in slow-motion out of the burning wreck of a truck.
Her phone buzzes. Another text. She ignores it. It’s hard to wrench herself away from the Hall, and especially from her friends there, but sometimes it takes your comfortable rut being ripped out from under you to make you realise that it was never all that comfortable to begin with. Melissa left her to try to live her life, and that was the right decision, and now Melissa’s life is bringing her back to the Hall at the exact same time Abby’s reconnecting with her family. Serendipitous.
And it’s better for both of them that they remain apart, no matter how many times Melissa texts. And Shahida seems lovely, living up entirely to the person Melissa described to her over and over again in those early months in the basement, and Abby’s glad. And no matter how many times Shahida tries to call her, Abby will never pick up.
Indira will arrange for her hormones and things to be sent on. And then Abby will go home with her family and Melissa will have Shahida and the Hall and everyone can get on with their lives.
“Hey, Abs!” her dad whispers. “Look at this bit! I love this bit!”
On the screen, a robot made of silver liquid struggles with a gun that’s got stuck in a barred door, and Abby laughs as quietly as she can, because Dad’s grinning, and his joy, his happiness, is a well she could return to over and over.
They watch the rest of the movie together.
* * *
“Do I have lipstick on my face?”
“It’s Dorley Hall; everyone has lipstick on their face.”
“Yes, but I didn’t, not when I left the room, and I don’t want to go back in there and have everyone know we’ve been… you know…”
“Kissing?”
“Not just kissing.”
“No,” Steph says. “Not just kissing.” At his request she touched his chest, touched him in the ways she’d been trying to remember not to, and his response had been extraordinary, enough so that she wanted to skip out on the rest of the evening to go straight downstairs and see what other sounds she could get out of him; but he wanted to say goodnight to Maria first, and truthfully she doesn’t want to vanish without seeing Melissa and Christine again, so they redressed him in the elements of his tuxedo that seemed important at the time — “Not the cummerbund. Fuck the cummerbund. Whoever invented it deserves to wear nothing but cummerbunds for the rest of his miserable life. Maybe even eat them.” — and headed back to the dining hall.
And then a pair of second years exiting the loos giggled at the both of them, and now he’s paranoid.
She turns to him, inspects him with exaggerated care, rubs at the side of his mouth with her thumb, and confirms, “There. No lipstick.”
“Good. Thank you. That’s all I wanted.”
Steph’s not sure how long they’ve been gone, but the couches by the fire that had been sparsely populated when she left are now full to bursting, and various stragglers have dragged over dining chairs or deposited large cushions on the floor or otherwise made themselves comfortable. Beatrice is just about visible in the kitchen with the friends she invited, and everyone else has either dispersed, is in the process of dispersing — the two second years from before give her a wave before joining the others of their cohort in the stairwell — or has settled down around the fire.
Maria waves them over. When they get there, Rabia and Bella stand up from one of the couches and offer them their seats.
“We were going to bed, anyway,” Rabia insists when Steph makes no please we couldn’t possibly hand gestures.
“Woo!” Shahida shouts. “Yeah, you were!”
Tabby’s sitting farthest away from where Steph’s standing but it sounds like she mutters, “Why is the crudest person here a bloody cis woman?”
“We’re going to bed to sleep, Mohsin,” Rabia says, showing her the v sign, which prompts more giggles from Shahida that Melissa has to help smother.
“What have you been putting in your hot chocolate, Shahida?” Lorna asks.
Melissa answers for her: “Rum.”
“There’s hot chocolate?” Aaron asks, sitting down and dragging on Steph until she sits down with him. She’s got the end space, which puts Aaron between her and Vicky, but neither of them seem uncomfortable with this state of affairs. Vicky, in fact, nudges him gently with her shoulder in greeting; he nudges her back, grinning.
Maria cups her hands to her mouth and shouts, “Hey, hot chocolate wench! Two more!” and a few moments later, Monica enters the dining hall from the kitchen, carrying a tray.
“I told you,” she says as she approaches, “if you call me that one more time, you’ll be wearing your next mug.”
“As long as it’s alcoholic,” Maria says, “I don’t care.”
Monica crouches, setting down the tray on a small coffee table. “Kids,” she says to Steph and Aaron, with a thumb pointed at Maria, “they get so excited on Christmas Eve. Need a little ‘help’ to go to sleep.”
“You’re not too old to put over my knee, Monica,” Maria says.
“Why is everyone so horny tonight?” Tabby moans.
“Tabitha’s missing her boyfriend,” Maria stage-whispers to Aaron, who plays along, nodding emphatically.
“Shahida?” Tabby says. “Pass the rum.”
“Ignore them all,” Monica says, passing a mug to Steph and another to Aaron. “It’s ten to midnight on Christmas Eve, so they’re obviously all drunk out of their tiny little skulls. You made the right decision hiding out; coming back might have been the mistake.”
Steph turns her mug around and rolls her eyes at what she finds. The mug is printed, in elaborate handwriting-style text, with, You’re practically perfect in (almost) every way! The ‘almost’ has been added after the fact, and the silhouette of Mary Poppins has had her traditional umbrella altered to look like a pair of garden shears. “Is there alcohol in this?”
“A little,” Monica says. “Not enough to turn you into one of them, though.”
“The horror,” Aaron says, and Steph realises he’s a little more nervous around Monica. A sponsor he hasn’t had much opportunity to get to know properly. But she grins at him and he responds in kind, relieved.
“Have you had a good night?” she asks.
Aaron considers the question. “It’s been… Yeah. I have.” He sips from his mug, and then holds it out so he can read it. Smirking, he turns it around to show Steph the caption: You can’t spell ‘emasculate’ without C U T E.
“You people are all incorrigible,” Steph says, unable to keep a giddy smile off her face.
“Us?” Monica replies, an innocent hand held to her chest. “I promise you, we are the perfect picture of innocence.”
* * *
She took pity on the lad in the end. Let him cover himself in a dressing gown and slippers and brought a blanket in from the bedroom. Made them both a cup of tea and put the telly on. There’s nothing worth watching, but it’s distracting, and that’s better than letting Trevor dwell on his situation.
Frankie showed him the knives and other things she brought over from the main house. Showed him where she’s hiding them. He laughed at her, hysterically and with a despair she once, a long time ago, found almost titillating, and said there was no way he could get through the chain around his ankle with a kitchen knife, and she had to slap him to get him to be quiet long enough to tell him that that’s not what the knives are for.
“We’re going to fill this fucking place with weapons, Trevor, lad,” she said. “Weapons and tools and anything else me and Val can find, so that when the time comes, there’s something to hand.”
His hand to his cheek where she hit him, he’d replied quietly, “What time will that be?”
“When we fucking say so, Trev.”
So now they’re watching TV and talking quietly, and he’s coping about as well as she expected him to.
“This has to be a one-time thing, Trevor, lad,” she says, when the commercial break starts. “Because it’s Christmas Eve, and because I think you’re finally realising just how far up shit creek you are. You get one night. We’ll watch shit telly together and I’ll keep the tea coming and we can talk about whatever you want. But you have to know: after tonight, it’s time to get your shit together.”
“What do you mean?” His voice is sullen and shaking but he’s coherent and he’s listening and that’s good enough.
“I mean I know what it’s like, Trev. When you don’t want what’s been done to you. When you think you’ll never adapt. When you’re convinced you can’t adapt. I know because I’ve seen every possible response to forced transition under the sun. And, yeah, sure, you’re in a more extreme position than most. But I need you to remember something: when we get out of here — and if you do your part then we’ll have a fighting fucking chance — I know people who can rip those melons off your chest and give you all the testosterone you could wish for. Elle’s people are good, Trevor. They can give you back your whole life. Or almost all of it. Except you’ll be better off, won’t you, because Elle Lambert will pay you serious money for the look inside Silver River you got, and because I bet she wants soldiers she can seriously trust. She’ll have a use for you, and that means cash.”
“We can’t get out of here,” he says flatly. “We can’t. We can’t cut this chain and we can’t get the codes or the keys because this is a military operation. And what are we? An old maid, an even older woman and a… a fucking castrated soldier.”
“No-one cares about your balls, Trev,” Frankie says. “Jesus, you men and your fucking testicles. And you’re wrong: we can and we will get out of here. Because it’s not Silver River in charge here, it’s old Dotty, and she is many things and most of them are bad for you but she’s also arrogant and inflexible. See, I’m in her trust. It’s a stroke of luck, her assigning me to you. That means I get leeway and it means I get access, and those are things I can exploit.”
“How do you know she trusts you?”
“Four decades of silence, Trev. Four. Fucking. Decades. That’s how long I’ve been keeping her secrets and following her rules. She trusts me. Oh, yeah, absolutely, she’ll have me shot without a second thought if she thinks I’ve betrayed her, no fucking doubt, but there’s a way around that: we don’t let her think that.” She sips noisily from her tea. “Four decades, Trev. We only need to last a few more months on top of that. So don’t fuck it up, and we’ll have a chance of getting out of here alive with all our bits and pieces intact. Well, hah, not in your case. Or Val’s either. But who’s counting, eh?” She nudges him with an elbow.
“That’s not funny.”
“Val’d laugh.”
And that’s the miracle of it, isn’t it? Val would laugh, and all. After all her years trapped by the will of the rich and powerful, Val would fucking laugh. And that, more than anything else, is what makes Frankie believe anything’s possible.
“Oh, cheer up,” she says. “It’s almost Christmas.”
* * *
He remembers how Maria and Bea got the attention of the room, so when he feels Steph starting to fall asleep next to him, he nudges her awake, kisses her quickly, stands them both up, and carries his mug over to one of the tables to look for a spoon. The conversation around the fire isn’t loud enough really to warrant it, but he’s never done it before, and it looked fun, so he takes spoon, mug and Steph to the middle of the room and taps repeatedly on the mug.
The inhabitants of the couches, chairs and cushions arranged around the fireplace all turn to look, and when he’s sure he has their attention, he puts down the mug on a nearby table and runs a hand through his hair.
“There’s something I want to say,” he says, uncomfortably loud in the now-silent room. “A few things, actually. Fuck, I wish I’d written something down.”
“Take your time,” Maria says.
“Okay. Thank you. Okay.” He coughs. “Okay. First of all, you’re all terrible people, you know that? Just awful.” A few people laugh. “No, I mean it! You took me away from everything I knew, everything I was, my whole future, and never once considered that I might have wanted to keep being a miserable piece of shit. You didn’t ask me if I would prefer to live a life of cruelty and drudgery, no, you had to kidnap me and bring me to this awful, awful place.” He smiles. “You’re all terrible. Especially you, Maria,” he adds. Maria blows him a kiss; he pretends to catch it and put it in his pocket. “Now, I’m aware that when I talk, I tend to, uh, go on a bit.”
“A bit?” Maria yells.
“Yes, thank you, my benevolent and loving sponsor. You know—” he turns slightly, to address everyone else, “—she once accused me of trying to filibuster lunch. Can you believe her cruelty? So. I talk. With that in mind, and because I’m getting very sleepy, and because me and my girlfriend, I think you know her, the lovely Stephanie—” Steph waves, and a handful of cheers and whistles come from the women on the couches, “—have our concrete underground bedrooms to return to… I’m going to make this quick. Thank you, Maria. Thank you for believing in me. Thank you for never giving up on me. And thank you for the opportunity to start again. Fuck you for making me do it in heels; I’ve been watching Steph all night and that shit looks hard.”
Someone shouts, “You get used to them!”
“But thank you, Maria. If I have to have a sister, I’m glad it’s you.”
“Love you, too,” Maria shouts.
He bows, as deeply as he can, and when he rises he leans into Steph, to steady himself, to keep himself balanced for the final thing he wants to say. And he has to say it, because he needs it to be real, to be known by everyone.
“I’ve had a wonderful night tonight,” he says. “And the only reason I’m sad is because it has to end. The food’s been great, the company’s been wonderful, and all sorts of lovely people have given me their time and their help. It’s impossible for me not to feel good, after all that. So. Ladies and others, Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas. For the last time ever, I’ve been Aaron.”
