Janet

Amy brings the food back in, and goes into the kitchen to grab us plates, silverware, and bottles of water from my fridge. She doesn’t say anything about all the horrible shit I just told her – just splits up our food, hands me some water, and sits down next to me. I watch her pick the broccoli out of her General Tso’s chicken, and I can’t resist saying something. “Babe, that’s the healthiest part of the meal, what are you doing?”

She looks over at me and smiles. “You can have my broccoli if you want. I can’t stand the stuff.”

I shrug. “Honestly, I’m not a big fan of it either, but I always eat it because I feel like I owe it to myself or something.”

She grins. “You’re adorable.” She leans over and kisses me on the cheek. I’m pretty sure I blush.

We end up putting on Pitch Perfect, which both of us apparently loved when we were in junior high. It feels cheesy now, and we spend the entire movie cracking each other up by singing along with the songs and yelling along with the best lines, which we still somehow know by heart. It’s a lot of fun.

By the time the movie ends, I’m feeling better. But I still can’t help feeling a little weird about having unloaded all that shit onto Amy. She’s poking around on my Netflix, maybe thinking about putting on something else, but I touch her arm. “Hey. Um… are you sure you aren’t too freaked out by that horrible story I told you?”

She smiles and shakes her head. “Not at all. I’m really sorry you went through all that. It sounds like hell, frankly. And it makes me understand a little bit better why this place is so…” She waves her hand. “Spic and span?”

I laugh. “It’s fine, you can say it, I’m a neat freak.” I shake my head. “You should have seen it when I finally felt better and really started to dry out. Like a week and a half after Alex left, I looked around and started realizing how bad the place was wrecked. I went on a huge cleaning spree and threw a ton of shit away. Bags and bags of booze bottles and empty Ziploc bags and bloody paper towels… It was so fucking gross. I never wanted to let it get like that again. So…” I shrug. “I guess I’m kinda neurotic about cleaning these days. I hope it’s not too weird.”

She grimaces. “Does it make you hate how my place looks?”

“No!” I smile to think of it. “Your place looks like someone has really made it their home. I love your place. I wish it was bigger – I always worry you don’t have enough space. But it’s nice.”

She looks pleasantly surprised. “Wow, thanks! I’m glad my mess feels homey to you.” Then she sits back on the couch, looking thoughtful. “You know, you really told me a lot about you today, and I feel sorta bad about how little you still know about me.”

I tilt my head at her. “I know a lot about you, or at least it feels like I do. For one thing, I know over half a dozen ways to make you cum.” I hold up the first two fingers of my right hand and she cracks up before I even have to wiggle them at her.

“No no, you’re right, in some ways I feel like you know me better than almost anyone,” she says, shaking her head as her laughter winds down. “But honestly, if you want to even consider dating me, there’s a lot more I should tell you. My name, for one thing.”

I laugh for a second. Then it hits me. “It occurs to me it probably does not say ‘Amy Nitrate’ on your birth certificate.”

She grins and shakes her head. “Nope. It also doesn’t say ‘female.’ Thankfully my California driver’s license does. But yeah… this is my real name.” She sorts through her purse, pulls out a driver’s license, and passes it over to me. “McNeil, Cecelia Violet,” it says on the name line. In her picture, Amy looks determined. I wonder how hard she had to work to get this ID with her real name and gender on it.

I hand it back to her. “Thanks for sharing that with me. Do you… want me to call you something different?”

She gives me a one-shoulder shrug. “Whatever works. I will tell you that all my friends call me… well, Cecelia sometimes, but mostly Ceci. So if you meet my friends, that’s what they’ll all be calling me.” She smiles. “They’ll probably tease me if you call me Amy, but I don’t mind.”

I giggle. “I’ll try not to get you teased. But so um… is there anything else you want to tell me?” I hesitate for a second. “Honestly, I would ask questions, but I don’t know what’ll be OK to ask.”

“I mean… I’ve showed you how to stimulate my prostate on camera. I think we can talk about whatever when it’s just us girls here.”

“OK, well… you told me at your place – feels weird to think that was just this morning, but it was – that you don’t go through doctors for your hormones. Did you ever?”

She laughs. “I should really just tell you my whole transition story. That’s pretty fun. I was a wild and crazy teenager too.”

“Yeah? Tell me all about it.“ I grin at her, slide over to her on the couch and lean my head on her shoulder. She smiles and puts her arm around me.

“OK, so I’m from Alabama originally, as you know,” she says. “I was born in Opelika though, not Birmingham. That’s where Auburn University is. That’ll only matter to you if you watch college football.”

“Nope,” I say, shaking my head.

“You’re not missing much,” she says, and squeezes my shoulders. “Anyway, my parents split up when I was 10. I’ve never seen nor heard from my dad since. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead, and honestly I don’t care. My mom and I may not be cool now, but he still did her dirty. And me too. We had to pack our shit into our car and drive to Birmingham in the middle of the night. My mom’s friend got her a job, but it wasn’t a 9 to 5, so I was home by myself a lot. That’s probably what got the whole thing started.

“I was on the internet all the time, on our crappy desktop computer. I figured out how to wipe the history long before it occurred to my mom to start checking on what I was looking at. By the time I was 12 or so, I was – like you – looking at porn online when no one was around to catch me. I’d just discovered masturbation, you know? I was having fun.”

I nod. “I know that feel.”

“Right. Just some harmless teenage fun, you know? But then I found some porn with trans women in it. ‘Chicks with dicks’ or ‘shemales,’ whatever tasteless shit people call it. Well, I didn’t know that was a thing a person could be. And once I found out, I couldn’t get enough. All the porn I watched had trans women in it. I was googling around the internet, finding some horrible brain-poisoned shit that was all about how I could never be a woman, it was only certain kind of people that were genetically predisposed to transition and blah blah blah. But I was also finding tumblr blogs where people were writing about being trans. And this was before tumblr shut down adult content, so I was seeing all kinds of crazy explicit shit. But one of the main things people on tumblr wanted to tell me was that if you wanted to transition, you could. You didn’t have to feel dysphoria, you didn’t have to be straight, you didn’t have to want to get rid of your cock… none of that brainworm bullshit. You could just be trans.

“So I was like… clearly this is me. I’m a trans woman. Or, well, a trans girl. I was maybe 14 when I reconciled myself to this. But I also knew I couldn’t tell anyone. My mom didn’t like gay people. My dad would rant when he was drunk about not wanting to be raising a faggot or whatever. I guess he saw through me even before I knew anything was up. Even the kids I was friends with in high school were calling shit they didn’t like ‘gay’ and talking about ‘he-she’s,’ and I just knew I had to hide it all.”

“What year was this?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Oh… 2018? Maybe 2017 at the earliest.”

“And kids in Alabama were still saying homophobic stuff?” I’m kind of shocked.

“Wasn’t it like that in Utah around then?” she asks.

I shake my head. “I was basically gone by summer 2017, but… in my high school, there were a bunch of gay kids, and they were largely left alone. Course, I had no idea I had anything in common with them… even when I was hooking up with Denise, I still didn’t really have a good understanding of my pansexuality. I thought it just meant I liked messing around with women — and trans and non-binary people, hypothetically, though that wasn’t happening for me back then. But I always thought I would be in relationships with men. I didn’t know I could, like… fall in love with a woman.” I freeze as I say it, realizing what it implies about my feelings for her. But either Amy doesn’t catch it, or she’s not concerned with it, because she just moves on.

“That’s kind of crazy. I figured Alabama and Utah were equally bad in terms of cultural progress.”

“There’s no way Alabama’s as bad in some ways,” I say. “The LDS church has so much control of Utah, it’s… really sketchy. I had to get out. I wouldn’t have been safe there.” I shrug. “But I guess in some ways it wasn’t as bad.”

“Let’s just agree that both of them suck, and move on,” says Amy, and I giggle and nod. “So anyway,” she continues, “my mom was working a lot. When my 16^th birthday was coming up, she told me she’d get a new car and give me her old one, but in exchange, I had to get a job. And I had to contribute to the budget. She wanted me to give her a couple hundred bucks a month to buy groceries with. That seemed reasonable until I started working like 12 hours a week at this Dollar General. I was making about $350 a month, and over half of it went straight to my mom. It was a bummer.

“But then summer came around, and they gave me a whole bunch more hours, and for a couple months I was making like... $700, $800 a month? Well, I’d found links to places where I could buy hormones online a while back already. I’d been saving up. Suddenly I could afford to buy hormones. I bought ‘em in pill form at first. I was like ‘fuck yeah, we’re doing this!’ I knew some basics about what people got for dosages, and I could get a year’s supply for a couple hundred bucks. It wasn’t much at all.

“But I couldn’t just have it mailed to my house, right? I had to figure out a way to get it without anyone knowing.” She grins to herself. “Lo and behold, there was a UPS place right down the street from the Dollar General I was working at. I could rent a mailbox there for ten bucks a month. They didn’t give a shit what I got in the mail. So I ordered some hormones, and I started taking them. And then I ordered some clothes too. I was carrying around a whole supply of girl clothes in the trunk of my mom’s old Corolla. And I didn’t go out too much, but at that time, when I did go to hardcore shows or whatever, I presented as female. It was kind of awkward with people I already knew, but in that world, you’re supposed to accept people who are marginalized, so most people were just like, ‘What are your pronouns? What should I call you?’ That’s when I came up with Cecelia. I’d been reading The Virgin Suicides.” She looks over at me and makes a wry face. “I know that’s a weird way to latch onto a name, but…” she shrugs. “What can I say? I liked it.”

“So wait,” I ask. “You were how old when all this was going on?”

“16,” she says. “I started taking hormones the summer before my junior year of high school.”

“You must have looked pretty girly after a while, right?”

She laughs. “Oh, shit would probably have gotten real weird when summer of 2020 rolled around and it was too hot for me to hide my brand new boobs under hoodies anymore. But I was saved by the pandemic.”

“Oh my god, that never occurred to me.”

“I was starting to worry about it! Like, it’s never very cold in Birmingham, even in winter. But you can pull off a hoodie most of the time, so I just like… lived in them. And I wore loose pants so no one would see the changes in my hips and ass. But there was no way by May I’d be able to hide the changes.”

“And what about your face? You must have been getting… prettier, right?” I giggle.

“Who says I wasn’t pretty before?” she says, and grins at me. “But seriously, you’re right, I was looking more feminine. No one really picked up on that over Zoom when I was doing online classes, and what’s wild is that my mom never picked up on it either. Birmingham schools didn’t fully return to in-person learning until fall of 2021, and by then I’d graduated. Even when they were doing hybrid learning in spring 2021, my mom didn’t want me to go, so she signed for me to stay fully virtual. She said she didn’t want any more risk of getting COVID than her job already gave her, but I have to wonder if on some level she wasn’t thinking ‘Ethan’s getting awful girly looking, I don’t want him to get beat up,’ or some dumb shit like that.”

Ethan? I think. Crazy to think Amy was ever someone named Ethan. But that hardly seems like a positive contribution to the conversation, so I remain silent.

“My mom never said anything about noticing the changes in me,” Amy continues. “We just kind of… kept on along like we were. I graduated high school, and she didn’t ask me about college, because I guess she figured I’d been a mediocre student and I probably didn’t care to go to college. Which I didn’t, so score one for Mom. Anyway, once I was 18 I started looking into camming and stuff. I wanted to show off my body for someone. I mean, a couple of hardcore boys hit on me at shows a couple times, so it’s not like no one was into it, but that felt a little… too real. People on the internet were safe.

“So yeah, once I was old enough, I started working the cam sites, and I did mess around with the kind of disreputable places that pop up on people’s computers when they go to Pornhub. The pay was OK at best, but it was enough that I could quit Dollar General without my mom noticing. So by fall of 2021, I was doing cam stuff a lot. I started saving up money, and buying more clothes and hormone supplies. That’s when I went to injections. And I was already talking to Brandy on twitter, back when it wasn’t run by the richest transphobe in the world yet, and she’d made some tentative offers to come out to LA when I was ready.

“I thought I had this whole plan in place, where I would wait until summer 2022 to come out here. But then one day in February of 2022 — I remember because it was a couple days after my birthday — my mom got sick and came home from work in the middle of the day. I heard her come in the door, and I had my room door shut – it didn’t lock, unfortunately -- so I had time to get signed out, but it fucked up my money for the day. And I didn’t have time to put anything on. So she comes busting in and I’m in there naked, tits out, cock out, makeup on, sex toys and lube on my bed… I mean, there was no hiding what was going on. And she couldn’t pretend I wasn’t a girl anymore either.”

“Holy shit,” I say. “Seems like the worst way possible to come out.”

“God, yes. She screamed something at me about putting something on. Maybe this wasn’t the smartest thing, but I figured, fuck it now, so I put on a bra and a tank top and some women’s jeans and walked out there. All like, ‘What are you talking about, Mom? You’ve always had a daughter.’”

I crack up at this. “I swear to god, babe, you are a national treasure.”

She smiles and pretends to tip a nonexistent hat to me. “Why thank you. So she’s like, you know, ‘What the fuck is this?’ and I’m like ‘I’m a trans woman,’ and she’s like ‘Since when?’ and I’m like, ‘Uh, about two years ago?’ and she’s like ‘This has to stop now or you have to move out,’ and I’m like, ‘It’s not stopping. I’ll pack my stuff.’ Which I don’t think is what she expected. So I go in my room, grab my backpack, dump everything out of it, fill it with clothes and hormones and all the money I had, walk downstairs, grab what I had in the trunk of the Corolla, which was luckily already in a duffel bag, and I walk down to the bus stop. While I’m waiting for the bus, I start messaging Brandy over twitter, and I’m kinda freaking out. She’s like, ‘If you can handle staying on the couch, you’re welcome here,’ and I’m like, ‘Perfect, I’m taking a city bus to the Greyhound station right now.’ And I got on the bus, and I’ve been here ever since.”

I shake my head. “That’s wild. Have you ever talked to your mom again?”

She nods. “It didn’t go well. She called me an abomination.”

“Aw, babe… I’m so sorry.” I lean into her and give her a one-armed hug. “If it makes you feel any better, my mom called me the whore of Babylon back in 2019, and we haven’t spoken since. So I don’t really have a family anymore.”

“I’m lucky; I have my sisters. My last name, McNeil? That’s Brandy’s last name. She’s my family now. Her and all the other girls who’ve washed up at Brandy’s place over the years. There are about seven of us.”

“I hope I get to meet them.”

She looks over at me and smiles. “You will. Brandy wants to meet you too.”

“Wait, does she already know I asked you out?”

Amy laughs. “No, she’s gonna lose it when I tell her. She’s been saying for weeks that you clearly like me, and I don’t have to be afraid of you. But…” she shrugs and trails off.

“I have a question that wasn’t answered in your story. What have your previous relationships been like? Were they with men? Women? Non-binary people?”

She smiles sadly and shakes her head. “I haven’t had any.”

This blows my mind. “No fucking way, I don’t believe it!”

She holds up a hand. “I will swear on a stack of Bibles! And Brandy will back me up. I just… haven’t ever done that. People have asked me out, but… I never felt safe with any of them. And when I liked people, it never seemed like they liked me back. Or that they understood what I’m about. Like… most of the women I’ve gotten to know in a ‘we’re into each other’ sort of way come from the hardcore scene. When they learn I’m a sex worker, a lot of them run. And the ones who don’t, they always ask if I would give it up if we got serious.”

I make a disgusted noise. “I’ve gotten that before. People gotta get over themselves.” Then I shrug. “Hey, at least it weeds out the ones who can’t handle it, right?”

She looks down into her lap. “That’s been everyone so far.”

I put my hand on her thigh. “Everyone but me. Not that I’m trying to make this awkward, but I’m just saying. I think it’s cool that you do sex work. I want to do sex work with you. And I don’t mind if you do it with other people, either!”

She gives me a small smile. “I know, babe, and believe me, I am thankful. It’s nice to be understood for once, instead of judged. But like I said, I need time.”

I nod. “And you’ll get time. I just wanted to make sure, since we were talking about it, that you knew your line of work would never be a problem for me.”

She nods. “I know.”

I look over at her, hesitate for a second, then lean in and kiss her. It’s supposed to be a small sweet peck on the lips, but she meets my barely-suppressed passion with heat of her own, and it turns into a big hot open-mouth kiss. After too short a time, I pull back and hold up a finger. “Before anything else happens, it’s almost midnight. You’re welcome to stay here, but I understand why being in bed with me might lead you to do things you’re not sure you want to do. So I’m glad to give you a ride home.”

She nods. “Much as I regret to say it, I think that’s probably the better move.”

“OK, well… do you still want to shoot on Monday? For your channel?”

She hesitates. “Only if you do.”

I nod. “I very much do. Everything that’s happened today has only made me hornier for you. Not only are you hot as fuck, you’re sweet, and caring, and you’re there for me. And I hope I can be there for you too.” I grin. “So yeah… I’ve definitely still got the fire for you. I definitely still want to shoot with you. Assuming you don’t think doing a scene on camera will screw up your ability to figure out how you feel about… all this.”

She makes a strange face. “Honestly, sex has been the most constant and reliable aspect of our relationship, the whole time we’ve known each other. If anything, I think us stopping having sex will be more confusing and painful.”

“Awesome!” I say, and slap her thigh lightly. “I’ll give you a ride home, and we’ll meet up and fuck on Monday as scheduled!”

“Perfect,” she says, and smiles.