Two weeks later, my mind still occasionally went back to the encounter I’d had with Jillian at the clothing store.

It was as if she could see right through me: somehow, she’d said the exact words needed to make me feel bad. To make me feel guilty. By not-so-subtly implying that I wasn’t actually a real girl, that I was just playing pretend, she’d somehow hit the nail on the head, and absolutely crushed me emotionally. I had thought I was past feeling guilty for my plan: it had been months since my ‘coming out,’ after all, and I’d comfortably settled into the life of the newly-out trans girl who’s trying to navigate life as she goes along. I’d even almost stopped thinking about this all being a ruse, and started to somewhat enjoy it.

Jillian had cranked the whole thing back open again.

I sighed. It was no use dwelling over it: this was the bed I’d made for myself, and I would have to lie in it sooner or later. In a few months, I would have to confess to everyone I’d just been pretending. And then, probably, I would lose all the friends I’d made.

Which sucked, to be honest. Not even a little, a lot. It was one thing I hadn’t considered while hatching my plan, how much I would come to enjoy my little queer friend group. Maybe in the future, after all had blown over, we could start over and be friends again?

Doubtful, to say the least.

For the moment, though, I could at least enjoy the time I was spending with them. Like that day, for example: I’d just finished my lessons for the day and I’d come back to my dorm room to drop my school stuff off and take my hormones before heading out again, to movie night. I’d better hurry, in fact, I’d stopped to talk with the professor about a research project he wanted me to participate in, and I was running late, so…

I frowned as I turned the key into my room’s lock.

It was unlocked?

Weird, I always locked it when heading out. There was no way I’d forgotten. Why was the door open?

I pushed down the handle, pushed the door open, and went in.

“Hey! Buddy!” Joe exclaimed; he was lying in his bed, but he sprung up to his feet, a bit unsteadily. “It’s good to see you!”

“Joe?” I asked, wrinkling my nose – Joe stunk of booze, I could smell him from six feet away: I’d noticed my sense of smell had become much more sensitive since I’d started hormones, which was neat, but at that moment I wished it hadn’t. “What are you doing here?”

“What d’you mean?” he replied, waving his arms around. “This is my room, too.”

“No, I mean, where have you been?” I said. “It’s nearly February, I was expecting to see you after Christmas break.”

Joe waved his hand dismissively. “Oh, that. It’s no biggie, really, I was just locked up for a while.”

I blinked. “Locked up?”

“Yeah, funny story,” he replied, pacing around the room a bit. “I was about to come back to college after the break, I just went out for one last night of partying with my buddies from high school. We had fun, drank a bit, became a bit loud, just a bit, one thing led to the other, and before I knew it, this fag was getting in my face.”

I blinked again. “I’m sorry, what?”

Joe nodded dramatically. “It turned out that there was a group of gays at the bar we were drinking at, and one of them didn’t take kindly to something I said, so he walked up to me and said something, I don’t even remember what.” He paused, as if trying to concentrate. “Something about respect? Whatever. But long story short, we got in a fight, and I got three weeks in the county jail. Plus a fine.” He scowled. “The fag got off scot free, of course.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah, ‘oh.’ The system is rigged, I tell you. Rigged!” He took a deep breath, and then, unexpectedly, he stepped forward and crushed me into a bear-like hug. “Man, there are so many freaks out there, you wouldn’t believe it. I’m glad you’re not one of them, my man.”

I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck, and then all the way down my spine; had I had a tail, I was sure it would have poofed up.

Shit. This was… If Joe somehow found out I was trans – I was pretending to be trans – it would be really bad. We were well past the point where I could explain everything away by saying “Hahaha, just kidding, I was just pretending.” Not to him, at least. He would never believe me.

And given what he’d just said, what he’d just admitted to doing…

I gulped.

“Uh… Joe. Buddy. Think you can let go?” I said.

“Oh!” Joe exclaimed. “Of course, of course.” He released the hug. “Don’t want nobody to think we’re some kind of homos, after all. You get what I mean.”

I nodded, and plastered a fake smile on my lips. “Yeah, don’t want that.”

“But anyway,” Joe continued, plopping back down on his bed. “This is why I was so late.”

“Speaking of late,” I said, looking at my watch for effect. “I really have to go now.”

His eyebrows rose in surprise. “Oh? Where you going?”

“I’m meeting up with friends,” I said. Thinking quickly, I pulled my school stuff out of my backpack and set it down on my desk; then I opened my wardrobe and, keeping my body between it and Joe, I grabbed the paper bag which had my hormones in it, and stuffed it in the backpack. “I’ll be out late. Don’t wait up,” I continued, turning back around.

“Alright,” he said, waving at me. “Have fun!”

I nodded, and then left the room as quickly as I could.

-----

“Hi, Lily,” Vicky said, opening the door; then she frowned. “What’s wrong? You don’t look so good.”

“I’m fine,” I said, giving her a weak smile, and walking into the house. “It’s just… Well, it’s Joe. My room-mate.”

“What was that about Joe?” Anna asked from the couch. “What did he do now? Wait, I thought he still hadn’t come back.”

“He came back today, actually,” I replied, taking off my coat and plopping down on the other couch next to Nora. “Found him in the room when I came back from social studies.”

“Okay,” Nora said, putting an arm around my shoulders. “So your chuddy room-mate is back. What about it?”

I took a deep breath. “Well…” I said, and I launched into an explanation, recounting what Joe had told me about his Christmas break. “…and he got three weeks in county jail as a result.”

There was a sombre silence in the room; I felt Nora pull me close to her, in a reassuring gesture, and found myself smiling.

Then Anna spoke up: “Lily, this… Wow. I knew he was an idiot, but I didn’t think he would…”

I nodded. “Yeah, me either. And that makes me real nervous. If he finds out about me…” I shook my head.

“What, you think he would attack you?” Elanor said, looking at me wide-eyed.

“I’m not sure he wouldn’t,” I replied with a grimace.

“But… You’re room-mates!” they said. “You’re friends.”

I laughed a brief laugh. “No, we’re not friends. Nowhere close, actually.” I sighed. “Which brings me to this,” I continued, motioning to my backpack. “My hormones are in here. Can I ask one of you to keep them in their room? So I don’t run the risk of Joe finding them.”

“Of course,” Nora said. “Since I’m already keeping your dress in my room, I can absolutely keep your hormones there, too. You can count on me for this, Lily.” She smiled at me, making me feel warm inside.

“Thank you,” I said, smiling back.

Anna’s brow furrowed. “I think you should tell someone. About Joe, I mean.”

“What would I even say?” I replied. “Do I just go up to the RA and tell him hey, I’m actually a trans girl, surprise! And my room-mate said something that made me go ‘Hahaha, I’m in danger,’ can you do something about it?”

“…Yes?” Anna said. “That’s exactly what I’d do.”

“As would I,” Nora supplied.

I thought about it for a moment. Yeah, that was probably the wisest course of action, wasn’t it? But on the other hand, it would mean telling someone at college – someone who had authority – about me being trans. And that would make it even more real: so far I’d just told other students, but that would be something I wouldn’t be able to walk back later, not easily at least.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I…” I gulped. I couldn’t tell my friends the real reason, so I went for a back-up plan: “Joe doesn’t deserve this.”

“Are you kidding?” Anna said. “He assaulted someone, Lily!”

“That was probably only a misdemeanour assault, though,” Elanor commented. “Three weeks in jail is a misdemeanour, not a felony. Either he didn’t hurt the other person too much, or he got off lightly somehow.”

Everyone turned to look at them. There was a moment of silence.

“Not helpful, Elanor,” Anna said.

Elanor looked sheepish. “Sorry. I’m studying law, it just came out.”

“That’s even the more reason,” I said. “He did something wrong, true, but he paid the price. And he hasn’t done anything to me yet. It would ruin Joe’s life. I won’t do it.”

“I agree with you,” Vicky said.

I looked at her in surprise. “You do?”

She nodded. “Yes, I do. I mean… We can’t condemn someone for something they might do in the future. It’s not that simple. Maybe he’ll come around and see what he did was wrong.” She looked around the room, and I was surprised to see her eyes were pained. “I believe people can change. I have to believe it.”

There was a moment of silence. I looked around the room: everyone was looking pensive – even Melanie and Katie, who hadn’t said anything yet. I nodded. “See? I know this is the right course of action. I won’t do anything, and keep my guard up.”

“To be entirely clear, I disagree,” Anna said.

“As do I,” Nora said. “You’re putting yourself in danger for no good reason, Lily.”

I locked eyes with her for a moment, and then sighed. “Yeah, probably,” I conceded. “But I’ll be careful. I promise.”

“You do that,” Nora said. “I care about you, girl. Don’t make me worry.”

I felt butterflies buzz in my stomach as she stood up from the couch and walked over to her purse, which was lying on the floor next to the TV; she retrieved something from it, and walked back to me.

“I want you to have this,” she said, giving me a can of pepper spray. “Don’t hesitate to use it. And if you need help, call me. I’ll come running.”

I nodded as she sat back down, and patted my pockets – I had my wallet on one side and my cellphone on the other, there was nowhere I could put the pepper spray. For the moment, I decided to put it in my coat, along with my keys, but I would need to think of a better way to carry it; I got up, and slipped the spray into my coat pocket.

“Oh, this reminds me,” I said, sitting back down. “I haven’t taken my hormones for tonight yet. Couldn’t take them in front of Joe.”

I reached into my backpack, fumbled a bit with the boxes, and pulled my usual pill-and-a-half: I popped the hormones in my mouth, and chased them down with a swig of soda, which I grabbed from the table in front of the TV.

“Hold on,” Victoria said. “You’re just swallowing them?”

I looked at her, puzzled. “Yeah? Is that not how I’m supposed to take them?”

“No, you’re not,” she said, shaking her head. “You swallow the cypro, but you put the estradiol in your mouth and let it dissolve under your tongue. This way you get much better effects.”

“Huh,” I said. “Okay, I’ll do that from now on.”

Weird. The thing about dissolving pills under your tongue hadn’t come up in all the research I’d done online: I’d missed that detail. I wondered, was there something else – something important, maybe – I’d also missed?

“Anyway, whose turn was it to pick the movie?” Anna asked.

“Mine. I have it right here,” Elanor said, holding up a DVD case. “Revenge of the Nerds.”

“Nope,” Nora said. “Absolutely not. I’m using my veto. Fuck that movie.”

I looked at her in surprise, as did everyone else – the venom in her voice was startling.

“Why?” Elanor replied. “I mean, it’s no problem, it’s the rules after all. But why?”

“I refuse to watch a movie that normalises rape by deception,” Nora said.

I gave her a curious look. “What’s that?” I asked.

Nora turned her head to look at me. “You know how consent is the basis for a relationship? That everyone has to be on the same page, especially when it comes to having sex?”

I felt a pang of guilt, but I nodded: I’d read about it online, and honestly it made sense.

“Okay, in this movie there’s a scene where one of the protagonists dresses up in a mask for Halloween or something like that, and he has sex with the antagonist’s girlfriend,” Nora explained. “But the girl doesn’t know who the person under the mask is: she thinks it’s her boyfriend. So she didn’t consent to having sex with the protagonist, he’s tricking her into it. Which makes it…”

“…Rape by deception,” I said, nodding again. “Yeah, I get it.”

“And the movie treats this as no big deal. Later on she says she’s enjoyed it, so it’s fine,” Nora continued. “So, again: fuck that movie.”

“Okay,” Elanor shrugged. “I see your point. Here’s my back-up.”

They held up another DVD case. “The Lost World,” Vicky read aloud. “That’s the second Jurassic Park movie, isn’t it?

“Yep,” Elanor said. “It’s one of my dad’s favourites, we watch it often when I go back home.”

“Hey, I know a fun game you can do with this movie,” Melanie said, speaking up for the first time that night.

“Oh?” Katie said, looking at her. “What kind of game?”

“Hold on,” Melanie replied, standing up and walking over to the kitchen; in short order she was back with three six-packs of beer. “Drinking game. The rules are simple: drink whenever a new dinosaur appears on screen, and drink whenever someone gets eaten.”

Elanor gave her a sceptical look. “That’s not nearly enough beer for this,” they said.

Mel shrugged. “There’s more, but I think that’s enough if we pace ourselves. And you don’t have to play if you don’t want to.”

I thought about it: a drinking game wouldn’t hurt, would it? It would be a good way to distract me from the on-going thing with Joe. And I could loosen up a bit, really: I hadn’t drank any booze at all the whole month, the last time I’d put alcohol in me had been the last time I’d gone out with Joe and his friends.

“Alright, I’m in,” I said, grabbing a can.

After all, how bad could it be?

-----

I woke up to the smell of cooked bacon.

Cracking an eye open, I looked around: it took me a few moments to recognise my surroundings – I was still in Vicky, Mel and Katie’s living room, lying on a couch, a blanket draped over me. The curtains were drawn, but a bit of light filtered in through the windows.

What the hell had happened?

I tried to pull myself up to a seated position, and immediately regretted it as a lancing pain shot through my head; I fell back on the couch with a groan.

“Oh, you’re up,” a voice said. “How are you feeling?”

I looked at Nora as she crouched next to the couch. “Terrible,” I mumbled.

“Understandable,” she nodded. “The booze really did a number on you yesterday, like holy shit. Here, take this, it will make you feel better.”

She handed me a pill and a glass of water, and I gladly swallowed both – my throat was feeling parched. I tried to think back: I could barely remember someone rubbing my back while I was bent over the toilet, puking my guts out, and then being laid down gently on the couch.

“But still, it’s weird,” Nora continued. “The drinking game was tough, true, but in the end you didn’t drink that much.”

“It’s the hormones,” Vicky said, walking into the living room: she was wearing a nightgown and a pair of leggings, looking very feminine despite not having a dress on. (I felt a weird sensation down in my stomach, but it was probably the pill I’d just swallowed.) “They absolutely tank your alcohol tolerance. You’re lucky in a sense, Lily: it happened here, among friends, and not somewhere public. That might have been dangerous.” She wrinkled her nose. “Do I smell something burning?”

“Oh, the bacon!” Nora exclaimed, and she straightened up and rushed away to the kitchen.

“She was by your side all night, you know,” Vicky said, lowering her voice. “When she saw how you were looking, she got really worried. And then you said something like, ‘I don’t wanna go back,’ and she asked us to let you both sleep here. She even popped out to the store for a while this morning, to buy eggs and bacon for breakfast.” She winked at me. “You’re very lucky, girl.”

Maybe I was too addled from the previous night, but I didn’t understand what she meant.

“Saved it!” Nora called from the kitchen. “Come on, breakfast’s ready! The Nora Hangover Special!”

“I’ll go call Mel and Katie,” Vicky said. “You take your time.”

Slowly, carefully, I pulled myself up to a seated position, and then stood up: then I dragged my sorry self over to the kitchen, where Nora was heaping bacon onto five plates, which already had fried eggs on them.

In short order, Mel, Katie and Vicky joined us, and we got to eating. The bacon was cooked perfectly, as were the eggs: as I gulped them down and chased them with plenty of coffee and orange juice, I felt like I was coming back to life.

“Now, Lily, you really should try to be careful,” Mel chided me. “I can understand drinking, but that was way too much.”

“Hey, it was you who thought to make it a drinking game,” Katie rebutted. “So if anything, it’s your fault.”

Mel shrugged. “We all stopped when the velociraptors showed up,” she said. “Lily was the only one who kept going. Ah well, we got free breakfast out of it, at least.”

We all laughed at that.

After we’d had our fill, Nora and I thanked the trio for letting us stay overnight; then slowly, walking side-by-side, we made our way back home. As she’d done a few times before, Nora walked me back to my dorm: though the previous time it had been late at night, while now it was morning. When we arrived, I turned to her.

“So,” I said. “Thank you, Nora. I’m really grateful for what you did.”

“You’re welcome, Lily.” She paused for a moment, and then continued, “But there’s one more thing.”

I looked at her, puzzled. “Oh?”

“You know how we talked about consent yesterday?”

I nodded, still wondering what she was getting at.

“I would really like to kiss you right now, Lily. I’m going to kiss you right now. Stop me if you don’t want to,” she said confidently.

I blinked at her. Wait, what? She was going to kiss me? What? Hold on, why did she want to kiss me? After all, I probably looked like death warmed over, not exactly someone you’d want to kiss. Was Nora sure about this? I wasn’t entirely sure myself. What if–

Nora leaned in.

I didn’t say anything, or try to stop her.

Our lips met. I felt her pull me into the kiss, her tongue snaking past my lips, touching my own tongue and flicking a few times against it. By the time we came up for air, my mind was up in the clouds, enveloped by a happy, fuzzy, light-pink fog.

Nora pulled back, and smiled impishly as she licked her lips. “Hmm, tastes like bacon. I like it,” she said, grinning at me. “Did you like it, too?”

I looked at her, wide-eyed. In my mind, the little Lily who controlled my speech looked around desperately, flipping open books and manuals, trying to find the correct response and coming up empty: in the end, she resorted to just smashing a few keys.

“Sfhaadhvkafs,” I mumbled.

Nora laughed. “I’ll take that as a yes,” she said; she leaned forward and gave me another peck on the lips, before smiling at me again.

“Have a good weekend, Lily,” she said, turning around and walking away.

I stared at her back, looking at her go, for several minutes, until she was out of sight; then, still dazed, I walked into the dorm and up to my room. Joe wasn’t there, he’d probably gone off somewhere with his friends; I lay down on my bed and looked at the ceiling for what felt like several hours, a stupid grin on my lips.