A good friend doesn’t make fun of you for drinking the next morning when you have a hangover. A great friend brings you Advil, coffee, toast, and bacon in bed.
“Oh man,” I said, blearily sitting up. My hair was a messy tangle — I had neglected to braid it before bed, which meant a quarter hour of brushing at the least. “I can’t believe I... oh man.”
“Eat first,” commanded Chloe. She was sitting cross-legged at the foot of my bed, like she had on previous occasions. Had I really drunk so much more than her? She looked offensively healthy.
My stomach rumbled in that hungry-queasy way. I started with the toast as the best option to start with, then turned to bacon. Something about greasy food always helped me hangovers in the past, and today was no exception. By the time I got down the last slice and was cradling the coffee, I felt as if my head might not explode.
“Now,” Chloe said. “Tell me what happened last night.”
“It was nothing, really. He kissed me, and I kissed him back. I thought I wanted it, but then in the moment I wasn’t sure, so I left.” She wore a prompting expression. “No, that’s it, really.” I set down the empty coffee mug and buried my face in my hands, the embarrassment rising up to the top of my head. “He must hate me now. God, why I was I so stupid?”
“He doesn’t hate you. I talked to him last night. He thinks that HE did something wrong and wants to apologize to you. Even if he doesn’t know what it was.”
“I should talk to him,” I said, but at the words my stomach turned. It wasn’t just the hangover, or at least not only that. I wanted to run and hide somewhere. I wished I had never taken this internship. “I should just go home. It’d be so much easier.”
“You’re going to let a boy run you off from something you worked this hard for?” I shrugged forlornly. “That’s stupid. You’re being stupid. Stop being stupid.” I opened my mouth to speak. “Hold on... is something stupid about to come out?”
I laughed despite myself. “No. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. I like him, but I’ve never really done this before, and it scares me.”
Chloe frowned. “Hold on... this isn’t your first relationship. Because we talked about your exes, I remember.”
“No, it’s not that, it’s just. This is different.”
“How?”
I shook my head. “I can’t say.”
She held my gaze for a long moment. “Okay. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. But if you change my mind, I’m here. Just say, ‘Chloe, I want to talk about it,’ and I’ll drop everything, all right?”
“All right.”
“Good. Now, why don’t you get another couple of hours of sleep, then get a shower. If you feel up to it later, we should go shopping or something. It’s a really nice day.”
Another few hours of sleep did cure the bulk of my hangover, and a shower and another dose of Advil took care of the rest. When I finally made it outside, a little after noon, I felt refreshed and reinvigorated.
Okay, I had acted stupid. So what? Did I really care about what some guy thought about me? It wasn’t like I was looking for a long term relationship this summer, not since I would be changing back to a guy in only a few months. I tried it, and had a nice kiss, but now I could get on with the real reason I was here — to get a job offer lined up before I graduated.
Chloe and I had lunch at an Egyptian place close to the apartment, then walked around the
Village, poking our heads into various shops. I was wearing a T-shirt, and jeans with sneakers, and felt about as normal as I had in weeks. Well, so long as I ignored the snug cinch of the bra around my chest, the tickle of my ponytail on the back of my neck, the way that the T-shirt was fitted and rode up to reveal a strip of belly every time I raised my arms. Oh, and it was teal with pink and purple highlights. But other than that, I felt just like a guy.
I had not planned to buy anything at first. There was no room in my tiny bedroom for any knick-knacks, and I was not planning to wear this body long enough to go beyond the wardrobe provided for me by BodyMat. I tried on a few things to humor Chloe, though, and quickly found that shopping for women’s clothes was a much more enjoyable experience than I had imagined.
First off, the sizing was ridiculous. As a man, I had no problem walking into a store, finding pants that matched my waist and inseam measurement, and walking out the door without trying them on. Same thing with shirts, both T-shirts and dress shirts. I would try on jackets, because they were easy, and shoes, because the variation could be legitimately uncomfortable.
Not so now. Sizes were numeric, from 0 up to who knows where, counting by twos. I discovered that “my size” could be a 4, 6, or 8 depending on the manufacturer, and there was even a 2 that fit me just fine.
What’s more, there were clothes that fit fine around the waist, but were too tight (or too loose) in the bust. I would get the bust right, and the skirt would be too long (or too short). I tried on dresses that fit boobs and hips, but which bagged on me weird around the waist. Why couldn’t they do something sensible, like size dresses according to bust, waist, hips, and length? Even when I found one that fit, that didn’t mean I would necessarily like the way it looked on me, or like the material, or anything else about it.
You’d think, after all these difficulties, that I would have hated the experience. It was sharing it that made it special, that and the fact that I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I got to try out clothes that I would have never worn. It was like trying on a new identity every time. For a few minute in front of the mirror, I got to be the kind of person who actually would wear that.
Chloe seemed to enjoy herself as well. She went into raptures over styles of clothing that she claimed she had never been able to pull off before. By the time we had visited half a dozen stores, she has as many bags in tow.
My resolution wavered and finally collapsed when I found myself wearing the little black dress. Honestly, it is such a staple of the female wardrobe, I couldn’t believe that BodyMat hadn’t provided me with one. This particular example had a halter top, which tied at the back of my neck and left my back entirely bare. There would be no bra with this dress. The fabric of the halters did have a bit of support, in the form of two foam pads. They gave me a bit of shape and would keep my nipples from poking out of the front.
I studied myself in the mirror. My eyes were first drawn to my cleavage, which both my old male and new female mind agreed was magnificently on display. In terms of coverage, the dress was actually fairly modest. But it plunged in front, like the neckline had just jumped off a high dive. It did all sorts of interesting things with shadows. It felt like an invitation to intimacy, without actually revealing any of the intimate details.
The dress was slim through the waist, and then flared out into a rather swirly skirt. When I was still it hung down to my knees, but when I turned, it swished out, rising to mid-thigh. Chloe caught me twirling from side-to-side when she came into the changing room we were sharing.
“Okay. So that is fucking adorable,” she said.
I blushed, but twirled again. “It’s really nice. I just have no place to wear it. I couldn’t pull this off at work.” I tugged at the low V of the neckline.
“Who said anything about work? Anyway, a dress like that creates its own place to wear it.”
“I don’t have the right shoes to go with it.”
‘“Right, then that’s our next stop.”
I could feel my willpower wavering. “I mean, I really do like it. But I’d just be getting it to be getting it.”
“If you don’t get it, I will, and hang it in your closet when you’re not looking.” I laughed and shook my head, but Chloe was firm. “I’m serious! You are not walking out of this store without this dress.”
I truly believed she would carry through with her threat, and that was the last push I needed. Before I knew where I was, my card had been scanned, the dress was in a bag, and we were out the door.
Chloe informed me that I had pretty feet, and should not hide them. It actually did not take long to find a pair of high-heeled sandals at the first shoe store we came across. The tiny straps criss-crossed my feet and up my ankles. At the same store, I found a small clutch purse, also in black, with a few sparkly white bits for accent.
I was feeling so much better than I had that morning, and I fully expected that the evening would be just as much fun. Neither Chloe nor I felt like drinking, so we planned to stay in, throw on the comfiest clothes we could find, and watch movies.
We probably would have, if our apartment door had not opened as soon as we arrived. It was Lamar. He reddened as soon as he saw us, excused himself, and crossed the hall into his own apartment.
“Holly...” Chloe began, but I shook off the hand she placed on my arm and burst into the apartment.
I wasn’t sure what I expected, but what I saw was Veronica, wearing a silk robe and, as nearly as I could determine, nothing else. She took one look at us, arched an eyebrow, and returned to her room, closing the door behind her.
I strode forward, hand raised to knock, but then I caught myself. What did it matter? I had rejected him, hadn’t I? And if he had turned so quickly to someone else, then I suppose I had dodged a bullet with him. I let my hand fall and turned around to Chloe.
“I think I’m going to stay in my room tonight. Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine, it’s... whatever you need, you know? I’ll be....” She moved toward me as if she were going to hug me, but her arms were still weighed down with packages. I didn’t feel like being touched right then anyway. I was holding myself together through a fragile edifice of justification, and a bit of kindness misapplied would bring down the whole thing. I retreated.
I called Wanda at BodyMat, but the office was already closed for the day. They were closed on Sunday, too, but would open on Monday. Well, that was fine. I could make it another day like this, but after that, I would be going back to my own body, my own life. It was time to leave these emotions behind.
About an hour later, I got my first period. It figured.
I stayed in my room all day Sunday, leaving only to pee, change my pad, and get some food out of the fridge. Chloe came by to check on me several times, but I informed her through the door that I was fine, that I didn’t want to talk. After the fifth time, she convinced me to open the door a crack. I jumped back in shock at the sight.
It took my brain a couple of minutes to recognize what I was seeing. It was Chloe, wearing a rubber mask like the face of a pug. The eyes bulged and pointed opposite directions, and a rubber tongue lolled from the mouth. “What... what the hell?”
She whipped it off and came into the room. “Shock therapy. Plus pugs are adorable and they always get their way.” She came in and sat cross-legged on the bed. “It worked, didn’t it? You let me in.”
I tried to decide whether to be mad or not. After weighing my options for a few minutes, I decided that I didn’t want to spend my last few hours with Chloe, who had become such a close friend in only a week, in a state of needless anger.
I closed the door and sat down on the bed. The small window was pushed open, but there wasn’t much airflow. I could hear the constant noise of New York City pouring through the window, inescapable.
“I’m going to go home tomorrow,” I said. “I can’t take it here anymore. I have to go.”
“Because of her? Because I will wreck her shit. Seriously.”
I shook my head. “What are you going to do, beat her up?”
“Fuck that. I can get her thrown out of the program. I mean it. One phone call. Done.”
She sounded like she meant it, but whether she could or not, that wasn’t what I wanted. “No, it’s not that. Not just that,” I amended, seeing her about to speak. “I don’t know if I can, but....” I took a deep breath. “Chloe, I want to talk about it.”
“Right.” She left the room. “Just a minute!” she bellowed from outside. I heard the fridge open and the rattle of glass. A moment later, she came in with a bottle of Chardonnay and two glasses. “Confession wine,” she said. “I know we have work in the morning, but fuck it. I’m leaving the door open to get some air moving.”
I accepted a glass and sipped. It was buttery and oaky and cool. “Okay. So. The first thing I have to say is that I’m really a... really... dammit!” My lips would not form the words, no matter what I did. I had a hard enough time even holding onto the thought in my mind. The sentence would just evaporate before it came to the surface.
“What? What’s wrong? Seriously, you can tell me anything.”
“It’s not that. It’s just with the conversion. There was mental conditioning to keep me from saying that I... I....” The words just wouldn’t come.
“Oh that! That’s easy. Just flip the pronouns.”
“Huh?”
“Like this. ‘Your name is Chloe, my name is Holly.’ Like that.” Chloe shrugged. “It’s a known bug, but they can’t keep you from talking about other people, or else there could be all kinds of problem.”
“Right. Okay.” I took another deep breath, a sip of wine, yet another deep breath. “I... I mean, you. You, you are actually a guy.” I swallowed as my voice broke a little. “Your name is, was, Chris. They made me, you, I mean, they made you change your gender as a prerequisite for the internship. And you thought, well, it’s only for a few months, and you can change back, and if you get hired on full time you can be whoever you want.”
I was staring into my wine glass. I couldn’t look at Chloe, afraid to judge her reaction. “Except it’s hard, Chloe, it’s really hard. You hardly know who you are anymore. You don’t even know whether when you feel something now if it’s you, or if it’s your body, or if it’s the conditioning, or what it is. So when Lamar was acting like he liked you, and it felt good, you thought, well, it wouldn’t hurt to spend time with him, right? And then at the party, you thought, well, go up to the roof, it’ll be fun, and that’s it. But then he kissed you, and you kissed him back, and....” I swallowed half the remaining wine. “And it turned you on, and it was the first time you’d ever been turned on like that, like a girl, and suddenly you just had to be anywhere else. And you know you hurt him, because you’ve been on the other side and you know what it’s like, but you can’t TELL him, you can’t tell anybody. But now it doesn’t matter, because you....” I cleared my throat and looked up at Chloe. “Because I am leaving tomorrow. I’m going back to the way things were, and.... and now you know.”
I tried to read her face. Her eyes were shiny, and her forehead was wrinkled, and she had a red flush all over. My stomach sank. “You’re mad. You’re hurt, because I lied to you, because I pretended to be something I’m not. I just wanted this job so bad, but now I know it was a mistake, and....”
“Stop it.” She did sound angry, and it cut the words off. “You do NOT get to blame yourself, for any of this. I am not mad or hurt at you.” She hopped off the bed and began pacing in the tiny space, wine slopping back and forth in the glass and dripping onto her hand. “Okay, now it’s my turn.” She set the wine glass down and cleared her throat. She looked as if she were about to deliver a lecture or break into song.
“Your name is Cassandra Warner. Cassie, to your friends. Except you aren’t sure you really have any because of the Warner part. That’s as in Phillip Warner III, CEO of eNext. You’re the fucking boss’s fucking daughter. You don’t even know what you should really look like, because ever since you were fucking five years old, your precious darling Daddy gave you regular trips to the clinic so you could look however you want, except you were really looking however he wanted you to. You were the debutante, the prettiest little thing in the room, and you got so much attention that you choked on it.
“And eventually you got tired of the long hair and the big tits and the giant ass and whatever other trendy bit of anatomy the ‘personal designers’ gave you for the next magazine cover. So you told Daddy that you wanted to work in his company, but in disguise so no one would know you. He build the whole damn intern program so that you could participate in it. And you do it every summer, not to ‘get more experience’ but so there is a little bit of every year that you can look however you want and talk however you want and have a chance at real friends.” She choked up then, and I instinctually stood and hugged her. We stood there for I don’t know how long, swaying back and forth, my wine glass pressed against her back. Finally we broke apart.
“It’s never worked for you,” Chloe went on. “You’ve never really gotten a real friend out of this. You think he does it on purpose. They’re always mean, like Veronica, or stand-offish, or something. There were a few you thought might last, but they never reached out when they changed back.”
“Oh Chloe, I’m so sorry.”
She grabbed her glass and took a sip. It seemed to calm her. “No, I’m sorry. Here I am stealing your thunder with my own thing.”
“It’s Confession wine,” I said, draining the rest of my own. “That’s what it’s for.” We sat back down, and she refilled us.
Over the next glass, I told her about all of my experiences. Now that I was not directly talking about my conversion, I found that I could use the proper pronouns without difficulty. She was actually fascinated about it. “It’s like talking to someone from a foreign country come to the US,” she said. “They can tell you everything that seems normal to you but they think is weird.”
And so we compared notes. Chloe had been through puberty the normal way, mostly, although frequent BodyMat trips meant that she had occasionally developed in fits and starts. It was such a relief to talk about these things that I did not hesitate when the subject turned to more intimate details.
“I didn’t realize that a kiss was enough to, you know, get me wet.”
“Well sure,” Chloe said. “But only if it was a really good kiss.”
“It was when he pulled me in closer, and I was wrapped up in his jacket and I could smell him, and he made me feel like I was smaller than him, but like in a good way, and... I don’t know, I can’t really describe it.”
Chloe fanned herself with her free hand. “I don’t know about that. You should write this shit down.”
“Maybe I will, who knows.” I shook my head. “I just feel like such an impostor sometimes. Like today when we were trying on clothes. There was a little while there that I could actually forget that, well, you know, the thing. But then suddenly there was a little voice in my head that said, ‘You don’t belong here.’”
“Ha. Welcome to womanhood.” I shot her a questioning look. “Seriously, do you think that there is a single woman in the world who feels fully comfortable in her own skin? Who doesn’t look at herself and think that, behind the makeup and the clothes and everything, that there’s just this impostor pretending to be something she’s not? That eventually, someone is going to realize who she really is and pull aside the curtain and out her to the world?”
“Maybe,” I demurred. “But the difference is, you’re a real woman. And I’m....”
“Holly. You and I have been sitting her for an hour, drinking white wine and talking about our feelings. And boys. And sharing secrets. You think you’re not a woman?” I looked at her then, not knowing what to think. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re a real woman. As long and as much as you want to be.”
The tears that came to my eyes were purely feminine, but in that moment I didn’t care one bit.
I became aware of a presence in the doorframe. It was Veronica. My heart fell, and with her next words my fears were realized.
“I heard everything,” she told us. Chloe’s fists clenched. Whatever power she had in the company thanks to her father, would that protect us, now that we knew her secret? Or would her father simply get rid of me and yank Chloe out of the program altogether?
Veronica took a deep breath, as if steeling herself for something. Finally she spoke. “You’re fat,” she said.
Chloe and I turned to each other in shock. Of everything I might have expected, blackmail or denunciation or anything, it wasn’t a bald insult like that. I regained my voice first. “What the hell are you doing, coming in here and calling us fat?”
“No,” Veronica said, patiently. She pointed at herself. “YOU’RE fat. The conditioning thing, yeah?”
“Oh. Oh!” It clicked. “You mean before the conversion, you were...”
“You were enormous. Gigantic. A colossal behemoth.” Still she stood at the door. “You never had any friends, and you thought, right, come to America and get a fit new body, yeah? They’ll love you. Except they didn’t, and it wasn’t because you were fat, it was because you were you.” She looked stiff, and proud, as if he words were costing her a great effort.
“Just one thing,” I said. “Yesterday. With Lamar?”
“Looking for you. Actually you, not me.” Her face turned scarlet. “I had my robe on, and I, uh, I flashed him.” She swallowed hard. “He bolted. Never seen a man run that fast.”
I traded a look with Chloe, and we reached an unspoken agreement. “Come in. You can take my spot on the bed,” I said. I ran to the kitchen for another glass and, upon reflection, another bottle. I returned and poured Veronica a glass. “Sit!” I commanded, pointing at the bed, and taking the rickety desk chair for myself. “Time to have a chat.”
“Just us girls,” said Chloe, flashing me a smile.
