12. Queen of Hearts

2019 October 26
Saturday

“We’re really not going to talk about it?”

“We’re really not going to talk about it.”

“Really? Because I feel like a little group therapy session, a lot of sharing of our feelings, maybe a group hug—”

“Discussion over! Go snuggle with your boyfriend if you want to talk about it so much but right here, right now, over my tomato soup, we are not. Fucking. Talking about it.”

“Hey, Stef; you hear what Will just called you?”

Stefan regards his spoonful of tomato soup. Regards Will, who seems more full of compressed rage than usual; Adam, quieter than usual; Aaron, considerably more talkative, but with his normal level of tact.

“He doesn’t necessarily mean me,” he says.

“Oh, babe!” Aaron says. “You wound me!” He gets a kick for his trouble, under the table. If it’s harder than it might otherwise have been, well, that’s just revenge for poking Stefan on his scalded shoulder.

“He definitely means you,” Adam says, almost too quiet to hear. “There’s no-one else who’ll put up with him.” Stefan’s careful to laugh, to show he appreciates the joke. Of all of them, Adam has the hardest shell, reveals the least of himself, but he’s been opening up little by little over the last few days, and as soon as Stefan saw it was happening he decided to encourage it, if only to find out what he did, why he’s here. A smile, nervously returned, is Stefan’s reward.

“No-one at this table has any appreciation for the therapeutic process,” Aaron says. “I’m trying to open up, people! To live in my moment!” He’s been trying to get Will to respond to his theories about Karen the nurse — he thinks the whole thing was a display of power, to teach them to submit to female authority — but Will is uncharacteristically reluctant to engage, and every time the topic is raised, Adam becomes more withdrawn. So Stefan, sensing another round of argument, puts a cautionary hand on his arm, and Aaron only flinches a little.

The four of them sit at the lunch table in their usual places: Stefan and Aaron near the door to the main corridor but with their backs to the wall, Will and Adam a few places down, facing the door to the common room. Two pairs of eyes on both entrances. They’ve maintained this habit for almost a week, the better to warn each other should something unpleasant seem about to happen. Declan, Raph and Ollie, their oppositional group, take their lunch at the tables in the common room, and for the last several days have declined to cause any trouble at mealtimes, apparently acknowledging that four beats first three and now two, with Declan out of the picture. Because while Adam is quiet, Stefan scrawny and Aaron scrawnier, they have Will, who, despite considering himself a man of words — which prompted Aaron privately to comment, “He’s a rare breed: a dude capable of calling himself ‘a man of words’ both without irony and without being forced by his own sense of self-satisfaction to immediately bend over and blow himself to orgasm over just how thoroughly intellectual he is.” — is easily the physical equal of anyone in the basement, and all they have to do to keep him around is put up with the occasional homophobic remark.

Stefan senses a moment of tension from all of them when the door from the corridor opens, but it’s only Martin Holloway, clutching a tray and hovering in the entrance like a schoolchild searching for the safest seat in the canteen. Martin normally eats alone in his room. More out-of-character behaviour from one of the boys; probably a reason for that.

“Moody!” Aaron says. “We’ve missed you, buddy! I was trying to figure out just the other day what was missing from the lunch room and at first I thought it was ketchup but then I realised: it was your intense aura of crippling depression. Please, come, sit; engulf us.”

“Hello, Aaron,” Martin says, monotone, and with a nod to the table picks a chair and dumps his tray in front of it. “Hello, everyone.”

Stefan’s grateful that Martin sits closer to Will than anyone else. He still can’t stand the man. Maybe it’s just a lack of exposure, maybe if he’d been subjected to a little bit of Martin every day he might have built up a tolerance, like with Aaron, but maybe not; all Stefan can think of when he looks at him is that the sad bastard’s left a dead man and a grieving widow in his wake.

“Uh, Stef?” Aaron says quietly. “Aren’t you being incredibly rude?”

Stefan nods and dips some bread in his soup. “Yep.”

“Oh. Good. Okay. Just checking. FYI, I’m calibrating my morality off of yours, so you’d better not steer me wrong. I don’t want to blink and end up a serial killer or a member of the Conservative Party or something.”

“Says Captain Dick Pic.”

“Hey! You can’t kill with those.”

“No, but you can hurt someone badly.”

Aaron drops his plastic spoon in the bowl, splashing his hoodie with soup. “When are you going to stop needling me about that? Seriously, Stefan. It’s getting old.”

Stefan shrugs. “When you show some remorse.”

It’s a risk: Stefan’s already made Aaron mad at him once today, and it was Aaron who extended the olive branch, not him. But he’s still going to keep at it, and keep making Aaron be the one to make peace, until he gets the result he wants. He’s not sure exactly why this is so important to him — beyond the fact that it bothers him to be friends with someone who would do something like that — but it would definitely be satisfying to reform Aaron before Dorley gets to him. Two fingers to the whole bizarre programme.

“Why are you always so self-righteous?” Aaron mutters.

“I thought you were calibrating your morality off me?” Stefan says innocently.

Aaron snorts. “You shit. I’ll find out what you did, eventually. You’re a bastard, too, somehow.”

Stefan nudges him with his elbow. “Don’t be rude. Eat your soup.”

Aaron blows him a kiss and starts dismembering his bread roll.

“Hey, uh,” Martin says, “Stefan?”

“Yes?” Stefan says, not bothering to hide his irritation. Across the table, Will looks annoyed and Adam upset, and Stefan realises he probably should have paid attention to their conversation instead of testing Aaron’s malformed conscience. Fucking idiot Martin Moody.

“I, uh, just wanted to ask: how many times did they tase you?”

“I’ve never been tased, Martin.”

“Not even this morning, with the nurse?” Martin says, turning his plastic spoon over and over in his hands. It’s clean; he hasn’t touched his soup.

“No.”

“Not even when she—?”

“No, Martin.”

“I don’t believe this,” Will says, standing up out of his seat and ignoring Adam pulling on his sleeve, trying to sit him back down. “You didn’t fight back at all?”

Declan, bruised, walks past in Stefan’s memory. Why don’t you fucking poofs fight? “Of course I didn’t,” Stefan says.

Will bangs the flat of his palm on the table, making Adam jump. “Why the fuck not?”

“Calm down, Will,” Stefan says.

“What the fuck did you say, you little homo?”

“Jesus, Will.” Stefan points past him. “Look at Adam!”

Will twists, finally seeing it: Adam, withdrawing, pulling his hands away from the table, pulling his legs up under him. Reducing the amount of space he takes up. “Fuck,” Will says, instantly dropping the attitude. “Adam. I’m sorry.”

Adam whispers something too quiet for Stefan to hear.

“No,” Will says, sitting down, moving his chair away from Adam, giving him some space, “I said I’d do better.”

“What’s happening?” Martin says, but Will silences him with a glare.

“What’s happening,” Stefan says quietly, as Adam slowly uncurls, “is we all got assaulted.” He continues, not for Martin’s sake but for Adam’s, Aaron’s, even Will’s, “Just because I didn’t fight back doesn’t mean— Look. I had a bad morning. Aaron knows how bad. And on top of that, we saw Declan being taken back to the cells, looking like he’s been beaten. Badly. He got his third strike when he came at Aaron and me yesterday, and that’s apparently what happens to you after three strikes. No more comfy bed. No more movies. No more lunches at the table where we bicker about whatever stupid shit is bothering us that day. No more afternoon telly. You just get the living shit beaten out of you, and then you get escorted to the showers, washed, and escorted right back to your cell, where presumably they carry on beating you.”

“But that’s Declan,” Will says. “You don’t care about Declan.”

“No. But I care about me and, God help me, I even care about you lot. Declan’s our canary: he gets violent with the metal cutlery, they take it away; he misbehaves too much, they beat him until he stops. He’s a message to the rest of us: don’t fuck around or you’ll end up like him. And so that’s what I’m thinking when the nurse strips me naked and starts fondling me: put up with this or you’ll get the Declan treatment.” A lie, but a believable one, and probably more useful than the truth. “So I take it. I don’t fight back.”

“That’s the point of this place,” Aaron says, gesticulating with his hunk of bread and spraying the table with droplets of tomato soup. “To make us not want to fight back. To train us to put up with whatever shit they feed us. And I admit, man, I was sceptical at first. Plush bedrooms and free food? What, they’re going to bore us until we submit? No. Turns out, being bored is the reward. The punishment is being made to look like a mouldy orange that can’t walk straight. So, yeah. Some old bitch of a nurse wants to feel me up? I’m going to lie back and think of England. Hell, it wasn’t my worst wank.”

“I pushed her,” Will says. “Got my first strike and got tased. When I stood up, Tabby hit me, and warned me I’d get another strike if I tried again.” He pulls his t-shirt back, revealing a raised welt on his right pectoral.

“I tried to get away,” Martin says. “Tased.”

“I didn’t,” Adam says, and all heads at the table turn to him again. He’s got his hands locked together, arms touching at the elbows. Like he’s in prayer. “I didn’t try to stop her.” He sounds almost like Martin in his monotone. “I didn’t try to get away. Even though I wanted to, I couldn’t. I froze up, like when— like when—”

“Adam,” Stefan says, standing slowly, “it’s okay.” He shoots a look at the others at the table. “You guys want to go watch some TV?”

Aaron takes the hint first, dragging Martin with him into the common room.

“I’m not leaving,” Will says. His fingers are twitching, as if he wants to comfort his friend but can’t bring himself to display even a small amount of physical intimacy.

“I’ll bring him through,” Stefan says. “I promise. Just, please, give us a minute?”

Will glares at him. “Fine,” he says eventually.

As Will reluctantly joins Aaron and Martin in the common room — Aaron’s already turned on the TV; there’s a baking competition show on — Stefan sits carefully in the empty seat next to Adam. Gently he cups Adam’s shoulder in his right hand and rests his left hand on the table, open and available.

Adam, with some hesitation, takes it.

“Do you need to talk about it?” Stefan asks.

Over the next twenty or so minutes, Adam hesitantly tells Stefan a story. It’s unclear, incoherent, and ultimately doesn’t leave Stefan with significantly more information about Adam’s past than he already had, but it makes one thing certain: Adam is the person in the basement least able to deal with someone like nurse Karen. Stefan, at least, has ways to compartmentalise, but Adam has nothing. No coping mechanisms, no structures around which to rebuild himself. He’s almost a blank slate, albeit one on which his church has scrawled around the edges a lot of nonsense about demons and subservient women and the requirement to procreate and the primacy of the unadulterated human form.

It’s not hard to imagine how a man like Adam, inculcated with such bigotry his whole life, might say or do something that would put him on Dorley’s radar, but it’s impossible for Stefan to believe that he deserves it. And while escape from this place, for Adam, is likely impossible — for the moment — Stefan can at least do his part to make the next year or so a little less pointlessly traumatic for him. For all of them.

He waves for Will to come and take Adam into the common area, and when he’s alone in the lunch room he checks the light on the biometric lock on the door to the corridor: still green. Outside, two sponsors are leaning against the wall, keeping watch on the basement residents as usual. Tabby, Will’s sponsor, is lazily messing with her phone, obviously bored, but Edy, Adam’s, anxiously meets Stefan’s eyes as soon as he steps out into the corridor.

“I’m Stefan,” he says, stopping a safe distance away from them and folding his arms around his waist, to seem as nonthreatening as possible. “I’m Pippa’s— um, I’m her responsibility, I guess.”

Tabby rolls her eyes. “We know.”

“Good. I want to speak to someone in charge, please.”

 

* * *

 

Almsworth town centre is concentrated around a hill even more shallow than the one graced by the university, with a small cathedral at its apex and a cluster of smaller, Church of England-aligned buildings giving way, halfway down, to a shopping district that connects directly to the old town houses by the river. The large bus station is the newest building, emerging recently from the shell of a department store. It’s become a minor social hub, extending towards the railway station on one side and the cinema on the other, with chain restaurants and small shops on its upper level and a covered walkway on the ground floor that crosses three side streets and provides shelter to people queueing for the town’s most popular nightclub. It’s one of only two truly modern sprawls in the town centre, which otherwise comprises mostly brick buildings abutting each other, three streets thick along the river, separated by the occasional cramped alleyway. Smaller chain stores and an ever-increasing number of estate agents inhabit the antique buildings in the manner of hermit crabs, their flashy fasciae protruding from shabby, crumbling brickwork.

The other modern building is the main shopping centre itself, which climbs the street closest to the station and embraces the angle of the hill like a collapsed layer cake: each level is roughly equal in size and each juts out from under the floor above, a giant’s staircase leading up to the cathedral, against which the shopping centre’s top-floor semi-open-air café squats as closely as is legally permitted. The cathedral fights back against the noise of shoppers and diners with a skirt of thick trees and bushes, voluminous and several layers thick on the graveyard side and trimmed back almost to the bare branch where they intersect with the shopping centre property line.

Paige took Christine and Pippa straight from the bus station to the café, insisting on a real coffee — meaning one with two shots of sugar-free caramel and a swirl of something fluffy on top — before serious shopping can possibly feasibly commence.

Christine doesn’t especially enjoy being away from the university grounds, a whole bus ride away from her bolthole at Dorley Hall, but it’s nice up here, with the rain shutters pulled back and a light wind rippling through the surrounding greenery, lending the café a lush, earthy smell and providing occasional glimpses of the magnificent cathedral grounds. She drinks daintily from her caramel coffee, trying not to get too much lipstick on the straw — Paige won two rounds out of three; Christine had to put on makeup and had to try Paige’s favourite coffee, but she got to wear shorts out — and concentrates on her friends and not, for example, the roomful of strangers who might at any moment make unfavourable judgements about her.

Pippa, who chose a plain black coffee and seems not to be regretting it, leans back in her chair and stretches. “I really needed this,” she says when she leans on her hands again. “My world’s basically contracted to just the library, the Philosophy buildings, and Dorley flipping Hall.”

“I’m not sure I needed this at all,” Christine says, trying to keep her tone light. A pair of younger men sat at the table behind them a few minutes ago, and their presence is inhibiting in more ways than one. She remembers when that was her, although she’d be alone; hoodie up, headphones on, innocently circling the food court and the surrounding shops with the exploit running on her phone, waiting for—

No. She was different then. She wasn’t herself; she was still him. She closes her eyes, edits the memory. Inserts her old self in her place. Funny; she’s starting to forget what he looked like. Even though it seems like everyone out here who gives her so much as a passing glance can see him perfectly.

“It’s okay,” Paige whispers, stroking her thumb gently on the back of Christine’s hand. “You’re safe with us.” Christine concentrates on the sensation, skin against skin, forces herself to inhabit the present, to remember the face in the mirror. The boy’s dead; let him stay buried.

I know who I am now, she tells herself. Another little litany from Indira’s repertoire. “Am I that obvious?” she says aloud.

“To me, you are.”

“I hate this, Paige. I feel… conspicuous.”

“No-one thinks there’s anything strange about you. You’re just another girl.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Only because I’ve had the practise. You need to get out more.”

“I should be better at this by now,” Christine says, and slurps some more coffee to give her hands something to do.

“Paige is right,” Pippa says, offering a tentative smile and an outstretched hand, which Christine takes, feeling absurd to be accepting comfort over something so elementary. There are probably second-year girls who are better at being out in the world than she is. “None of us was instantly good at any of this.”

“Except Vicky,” Christine says.

“Even her,” Paige says. “She was the most immediately natural of all of us, but she still had to learn how to…” She trails off, considering her words, and Christine resents yet again the entire outside world, a place where none of them can truly drop their guard. She imagines a life spent that way, always careful, and understands why people like Maria and Aunt Bea retreat to Dorley, to a world that gets them. That’s not going to be her, though. Even if she forgot quite what it’s like to be out here. “Vicky had to learn how to leave the Hall,” Paige continues, still reassuring Christine’s stiffening fingers, caressing her from nail to knuckle. “She had to learn how to be Vicky, out here. Lorna did, too, when she transitioned. It’s jarring for all of us.”

“That’s not the same,” Christine whispers. “Lorna’s trans. Actually trans.”

“It’s close enough. I know you believe there’s a huge difference between you and her—”

“Yeah, because she’s authentic and I’m not.”

“—but there isn’t.” Paige leans closer. “You may have come by your genders differently, but the material effect is still the same. You know she’d tell you that, if she knew your history.”

“She doesn’t,” Christine says. “And she can’t, ever. So she won’t.”

“It gets easier, you know,” Pippa says. “I went out once a month, to start with. Into town. I’d go to random places, like a coffee shop or Waterstones or that place by the river that sells paintings of cats, and I wouldn’t let myself leave until I talked to at least one person. About anything.” She grins into her coffee mug. “I learned a lot about cats.”

“How do you stop feeling like a fake?”

“It fades.” She takes a sip, looks at Christine, takes in the casual, ordinary girl who left Dorley and immediately forgot herself, and reaches out, takes Christine’s other hand. “I don’t know you all that well, Christine, but I think you’ve said before that you see yourself as a girl, right?”

“At Dorley, yes, I’m a girl,” Christine says. “Even at Saints. If it gets bad in a lecture, I can just leave. Go straight home. But, out here, I feel fucking trapped. Here, I’m a girl only as long as no-one asks me any difficult follow-up questions. I hate this, Pip.” She’s too visible; she imagines herself easily disassembled, breasts and pretty face torn away as messily as they were once applied, reduced to a thin, scared boy in girls’ clothes. Obvious to everyone.

Behind her, the men finish their drinks and stand up, startling her, causing the tooth biting her lip to break the skin. She frees a hand, wipes away the blood with her thumb and inspects it: pleasingly real. An anchor.

“I forgot it could be like this,” she whispers. “I think I want to go home, Paige.”

“No,” Paige whispers, moving her chair close and making contact with Christine, shoulder to shoulder. “You’re staying here. As long as it takes. You need to.”

“Because Aunt Bea wants me to?”

“Because I want you to. And because it’ll help.”

“Are you sure about this, Paige?” Pippa says.

“Yes. She’s my— my best friend, and she fades as soon as she steps out of our front door. It kills me to watch it happen.”

“Did you know it would be like this?”

Paige nods; Christine feels her weight shift. “It’s easy to forget, when you’re around her,” Paige says, and resumes gently stroking Christine, a finger along the length of her bare forearm, “but she’s only at the start of her third year. In some ways, she’s as advanced as anyone I’ve met at Dorley, and at home she’s confident, sweet… fully herself. But Indira wasn’t great at pushing her to difficult things, especially after they grew close. A lot of the time she forgot to act like a sponsor. I remember being jealous: when Francesca was making me walk the grounds of Saints, still swollen from surgery, Christine and Indira were watching movies together in Indira’s room. But, as awful as she was, Francesca prepared me for life out here. Practically rubbed my face in it. But Christine… Everyone loves her too much.” There’s a smile in Paige’s voice. “No-one wants her to hurt.”

Christine shifts her weight, leans her head against Paige’s shoulder. The gentle soprano of Paige’s near-whisper is as effective a balm as anything else she can think of. Nevertheless: “You’re talking about me like I’m not here, Paige,” she says.

Paige squeezes her forearm. “Sorry.”

“How are you doing?” Pippa says.

“I’m… riding it,” Christine says. “The longer I’m here, in one place, and nothing happens, it gets a little easier. Maybe I’ll try talking to someone in a minute. About cats.”

“Would you like to know my method?” Paige says. “None of these people matter.”

“That’s your method? No-one matters?”

“Some people do.” Paige lets Christine’s arm go and lays her hands out on the table. “I sort people into two groups: those who matter—” she curls one hand into a ball, “—and those who don’t.” With her other hand she describes a huge volume. “And I choose who matters to me. Right now? Here? That’s you two. Christine and Pippa. The rest of them might as well be cardboard. And no-one cares what cardboard thinks, do they?”

Christine nods slowly. Enjoys the sensation of her hair rolling across Paige’s shoulder and tickling her cheek as it falls. “I think I’ll try the cat thing first,” she says.

They sit that way for a while, slowly drinking their coffee, Pippa filling Christine’s silence with complaints about her Philosophy dissertation and her millennial supervisor — “He made a ‘can has cheeseburger’ joke last week. I had to Google it.” — and Paige contributing chatter about her History with Human Rights modules and a professor who she thinks keeps trying to look down her top. Eventually Christine feels able to join in, and when she leaves to use the women’s bathroom and realises she forgot to feel at all anxious about it until after she gets done washing her hands, she announces to Paige and Pippa, feeling a little chastened, that she’s ready to get on with things.

“You’re a star, Christine,” Paige says, rising to embrace her and punctuating her praise with a kiss to the temple. “Now,” she adds, gathering up her bag and her phone and dragging Christine along by the wrist as she strides towards the exit to the rest of the mall, “who wants to shop?”

 

* * *

 

They put him in the cells. It’s not punishment — although he can hear Declan’s moans from the other end of the corridor, which is unpleasant enough — but it’s best none of the boys know where he is or what he’s doing, and the cells are the only place down here where that can be accomplished without locking down the whole basement. They left the door open for him, so he can stretch his legs, even go look at Declan if he wants; he has a reputation as the one who’s no trouble, Edy said.

Stefan doesn’t go look at Declan. Remembering his first nights under Dorley, he does a little yoga instead. He’s been neglecting it.

He’s been running through the encounter with the nurse, over and over, and still he finds no sense in it. Granted, today’s been Stefan’s first actual encounter with the methods they use to reform and transform their patients; it’s possible they’re all like this, one invasion after another, that they have nothing in their future from here on out but constant violation. That doesn’t ring true, though. They can’t possibly induct their charges into womanhood with an assault.

Pippa said it was new. That she hadn’t expected it. And — although the nurse interrupted her before she could finish her sentence — that she hadn’t had it done to her, when she was down here. And she spent the whole time shaking, Stefan remembers. Two hands on the taser to keep it steady. Like she was angry. Or scared.

He lies back on the cot, hoping someone cleaned it after the previous inhabitant of this cell moved on, and thinks through what he wants to say to whoever comes down.

He hears her before he sees her: echoing footsteps in the corridor, the twin-tone click-clack of heels on a hard surface. Something about her gait suggests an older adult, and images of severe schoolmarms and society proprietresses merge in his mind. It’s a surprise, then, when a friendly looking woman, aged somewhere above the mid-forties, raps gently on the side of the open door and smiles when he meets her eyes.

She wears a light dress, low heels and no tan on her pale skin, she cuts her blonde hair to the shoulder, and she stands like she owns the place. Aunt Bea, he presumes.

“Knock knock,” she says. “I’m Beatrice. I run this establishment.”

He looks at her outstretched hand for a moment before taking it. “Stefan,” he says.

“I’m aware,” she says, and her smile falters as she looks around. In his cell, down the hall, Declan yells a string of particularly potent expletives. “I do hate this place,” she adds, and pulls on his hand, encourages him to stand. “And there’s nowhere to sit, unless we’re to share that horrid little cot. Why don’t you come with me?”

Her suggestion startles one of the girls waiting outside, someone Stefan doesn’t recognise. “Aunt Bea—” she says.

“Oh, we will be quite safe,” Beatrice says. “Won’t we, Stefan Riley?”

Stefan Riley, full-named for the first time in a while and temporarily lost for words, crosses his heart instead, a gesture which unaccountably makes her chuckle.

He follows Beatrice out of the cell corridor, through the doors at the end and up a winding flight of concrete stairs. He’d expected her to lead him into a room in the first basement, the one Christine said functions mostly as admin and security, but she keeps going, and soon they emerge into a dining hall of the sort one might find in a National Trust property.

Stefan unconsciously ducks away from the high ceiling. Agoraphobia! That’s new! Too much time underground. Beatrice notices his reaction and takes his hand again, pulls gently until he moves of his own accord, and eventually sits him down at a rustic, wooden table in a bright, airy, lived-in kitchen. There’s a small pile of dirty dishes on the table and a mug that says, Once a Princess, Always a Princess — the first double-s has been mostly scratched off — which is quickly cleared away by the other occupant, who turns out to be Abby, wearing rubber washing-up gloves.

She’s standing at the sink, behind Beatrice, and is thus in a position to mouth the obvious question: Does she know? Stefan shakes his head, both to answer Abby and to pretend amazement at the opulence of his surroundings. “This is so much nicer than the basement,” he says to Beatrice, who smirks.

Abby rinses the incriminating mug, stacks it on the drying rack with several others, and drops her rubber gloves over the edge of the sink. “I expect you’ll want the room,” she says to Beatrice.

“Thank you, Abigail. This is Stefan; he’s our guest, downstairs.”

“Actually,” Abby says, “we’ve met. Pippa asked me to check on him. Hello again, Stefan.”

“Hi, Abby,” Stefan says. “How was the birthday dinner?”

Abby considers for a moment. “Alcoholic,” she says. “Would you like some coffee, before I go?”

Beatrice shows her a professional smile and, as Abby pours coffee into two plain mugs, turns it on Stefan. It shouldn’t be a surprise, particularly, but Stefan nonetheless is a little perturbed that the woman in charge of the place that took eight boys against their will — correction: seven and Stefan — and immediately subjected them to unwanted hormone treatment is able to meet his gaze steadily and without apparent difficulty. Is her conscience really so clear that she can look calmly in the eye someone who is, on her instruction, about to be permanently altered? Or is she just that confident in the results she gets?

Abby — living, breathing exemplar of the results Beatrice gets — nods at both of them and scurries from the room, no doubt texting Christine as soon as she gets out of sight, and a part of Stefan has to admit that Beatrice might have a point: Abby is still graceful and gorgeous, even in a hurry and a battered GO SAINTS! t-shirt. And she’s never seemed anything other than happy.

“First things first,” Beatrice says, clasping her hands together on the table; terribly sincere. “I would like to welcome you to Dorley Hall. Officially.”

How should he reply? He was expecting, despite the fondness with which Abby always speaks of her, a harridan, a tyrant, not this affable and attractive older woman, with her coffee and her light and airy kitchen and her novelty mugs. How might one of the boys respond? How might Aaron?

Stefan quickly decides against the idea of attempting to channel Aaron. “I don’t know if I can thank you for that,” he says, with precision: he can thank Christine for it.

“In time,” Beatrice says, smiling, “you will. Our programme can be quite transformative.”

Ah; they’ve reached the stage of the conversation where the vampire starts talking suggestively about ‘wine’. Earlier than he expected. “I suppose I’ll have to see it to believe it,” Stefan says, hoping his performance of ignorance is adequate.

“I’m sure you will.”

Stefan gets the feeling Beatrice isn’t done with her little routine quite yet, so he sips his coffee and rehearses the points he wants to raise. Her gaze is uncomfortable, and he tries not to squirm under it; angry he may be, but that doesn’t mean he’s any happier meeting yet another new person while still his unmodified, unsatisfied self.

“You intrigue me, Stefan,” Beatrice says, narrowing her eyes a fraction. “Your record suggests that you are, frankly, dangerous to be around, but in the two weeks since you arrived, you have calmly followed all instructions and made no trouble for anyone. You claim to love your sister so much that the thought of her believing you dead is enough to guarantee your submission, but you frequently go beyond what is asked of you. I hear you’ve been pushing particularly firmly against the Holt boy’s unpleasant habits.”

“Um,” Stefan says, “the Holt boy?”

“Aaron.”

“Oh. Yes, well. He shouldn’t have done what he did, and if I’m going to be friends with him, I need him to acknowledge that.”

“And what precisely will that achieve?” Beatrice asks, tapping lightly on her mug.

“I’ll feel a bit less gross when I laugh at one of his jokes.”

“Why, Stefan? Why are you so pliable? Why do you try to do your friend’s sponsor’s job for her? And why, after your only incident of aberrant behaviour to date, did you ask immediately to see me?”

He sips his coffee again, playing at savouring the flavour. It’s an obvious ploy for time, but he wants to seem intimidated by her, a cover for his mounting discomfort. The back of his neck itches again, and he scratches at it distractedly.

“I don’t see what other choice I have,” he says. “The doors are locked; the girls are armed. There’s nowhere for me to go. Besides, you provide food, a bed, washing facilities; as long as I’m safe, I have no reason to push back.” Beatrice nods. Doesn’t give anything away by her expression. “As for why I’m here right now…”

“Do enlighten me.”

“Your nurse sexually assaulted us this morning.”

“Is that how you would describe it?”

Stefan dumps his mug heavily on the table. “Yes. She came to each of our rooms, had us strip naked, and groped us. We were given no option to refuse, and we had weapons pointed at us the whole time.”

“Karen Turner is a medical professional.”

“Medical professionals ask permission,” Stefan says, looping both hands around the mug and pressing hard. The heat is a useful reminder. “She didn’t. Not only that, but she enjoyed herself. Treated me like an animal. And Pippa, a woman I’ve trusted up to now, let her. You say this programme is transformative? If this is your example, I have to wonder what you’re transforming us into. Perhaps,” he adds sweetly, expending much to maintain a steady voice, pressing his fingers harder into the hot mug, “you intend to teach us to submit quietly and without complaint when we are touched intimately under threat of violence?”

Beatrice looks him directly in the eye. “We most definitely do not.”

“Then help me understand. Pippa came to me afterwards and told me that this nurse’s methods are new. I didn’t want to listen to her at the time because it was all so fresh, but if she’s right, then I’m even more confused.” Is he playing this too innocent? Hard to say; Beatrice is difficult for him to read. She stays silent, inviting him to continue. “Can I be blunt?” he asks.

“I am suffering from an overabundance of bluntness of late,” Beatrice says. “Oh, go on,” she adds, waving a hand at his confusion, “say your piece.”

Controlled breaths. He closes his eyes, to block out as many senses as possible; better for remembering the second half of his prepared thoughts, better to feel less conspicuous. It doesn’t matter that she gets to see him struggling; it probably pleases her. “I think this was unintentional. The nurse, Karen, she said the old nurse retired, and I bet it’s hard to get replacement staff here. Most nurses would report you immediately. So my guess is, you take whoever you can get. And that’s Karen: a vindictive old pervert who gets off on exerting power over people less than half her age. Who likes to traumatise people. Boys. Men.”

“You would consider yourself traumatised by your experience?”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“My emotional responses are not a consideration,” Beatrice says, and then snaps her head around. “Yes, Abigail?”

Abby stands in the doorway connecting the kitchen to the vast dining hall, nervously shifting from foot to foot. “He’s right, Aunt Bea,” she says. “It’s wrong.”

“Thank you, Abigail.”

“You never did anything like that to me.”

Stefan and Beatrice realise at the same time that there’s only one possible conclusion to be drawn from Abby’s statement: that she was once under Beatrice’s control, just as Stefan is. A little gift from Abby: another thing he doesn’t have to pretend ignorance about. He wants desperately to thank her, and hopes she doesn’t get in trouble for helping him.

“Times were different,” Beatrice says.

Abby shrugs. “We weren’t.” She doesn’t wait to be dismissed, just turns and marches back into the dining hall.

Stefan picks up the cue he’s been given. “Abby was in the programme?” he says, with just the right amount of incredulity. Having watched her leave, he keeps looking at the door into the dining hall, trying to give the impression that he’s wondering if the handful of other women he saw in there were in the programme, too.

Beatrice maintains a creditable poker face. “She was unruly. Girls can be too, you know.”

“That’s so hard to believe. Last night, she was very kind to me.”

“That’s the whole point,” Beatrice says, her composure briefly faltering. She sighs and picks up her drink with both hands. “Since you were so generously blunt with me,” she continues, “I will be blunt with you. You’re correct: we don’t have a lot of choice when it comes to nursing staff, and from what you and some of my sponsors have described to me, her methods differ from her predecessor’s more than I expected. I do not condone the actions of nurse Karen Turner. She will be contacted and disciplined.” She sips from her coffee, carefully places her mug back on the table, and pinches the bridge of her nose. “What a day,” she says, her voice losing some of its pitch and accent. “I’m having my authority undermined by a twenty-one-year-old child.”

“Don’t worry,” Stefan says. “I’m still extremely intimidated by you.”

Beatrice goes still for a moment, looks placidly at Stefan, and then bursts out laughing. “Good!” she says. “Good. Although,” she adds, almost to herself, “it’s likely not the best sign that several people have told me that lately.”

Abby’s briefly visible in the dining hall, checking up on Beatrice’s laughter from a safe distance. “And,” Stefan says, realising there actually is something he can do to reduce the likelihood that Abby gets censured, “it really helps, knowing Abby went through the programme.”

“Does it now?” Beatrice is still smiling, still coming down from her mirth, but something of her edge is returning.

He nods. “It’s proof that I’m not going to be down there forever. Proof that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.” And the light’s coming from a kitchen right out of an AGA brochure. “And she’s sweet. Kind. A role model.”

“I will be sure to let her know,” Beatrice says. She finishes her coffee. “Pippa’s agreement with you, to guarantee your good behaviour: I’m invoking it.”

“Okay,” Stefan says, thanking Christine once again. Whatever feat of manipulation she pulled off to get Pippa and Beatrice to agree to the letter, and thus absolve him from having actually to behave like a bastard, is going to be hard to repay. When he’s done, when he’s finally a girl just like her, he’s going to find out what she likes and buy her a hundred of it.

“You did not meet with me,” Beatrice says. “You do not know that some of the residents of Dorley Hall are programme graduates. And whatever you might have inferred about the duration of your stay, you will keep to yourself. Say you understand and agree.”

“I understand and agree.”

Beatrice stands briskly. Holds out her hand for Stefan’s empty mug, places it upside down in the sink next to hers. She leans against the sideboard with both hands. “You met with Abigail, not me. You discussed this morning’s events. She passed on to you the message that the nurse will be disciplined. And tonight’s vitamin jab will be administered by someone else. That is the information you will take back down with you. This and nothing more. Say you understand and agree.”

“I do. I mean, I understand and agree.”

“Good. You really are an interesting boy, Stefan,” Beatrice says, before raising her voice and calling, “Abigail!” While they wait, she turns a smile on him and adds, “I find it particularly fascinating that, in your whole time here, you haven’t so much as glanced at the way out.” She points to the other exit from the kitchen, through which a pair of external doors and the Saints campus are visible. Before he can respond — before he can even decide what she means — Abby’s returned. “Abigail, please return young Stefan to the facility.”

“Of course,” Abby says. “This way, Stefan.”

Beatrice watches as they leave the room, but Stefan doesn’t relax until they’ve passed through the double biometrics and started heading down towards the first floor basement. He holds up a hand, asking for a moment, and leans bodily against the wall, closing his eyes.

It’s something about how Beatrice looked at him. It was like the way Pippa and Maria looked at him, back when they thought he was going to be just like the others — as opposed to whatever they think of him now — but both more intense and more impersonal. It makes sense: this place has been rehabilitating men, by its own curious methods, for a long time, so Beatrice will have seen dozens of boys go through the programme. Dozens of boys just like him. She probably only bothers learning their faces when they get new ones.

Awful, always, to be counted among their number.

“You okay, Stef?” Abby says, not quite in a whisper. “We’re mostly out of camera view here, so we can stop for a while if you’d like. Everyone will understand needing a moment to get yourself together after your first encounter with Aunt Bea.”

“She really wasn’t all that bad,” he says. “This is mostly me stuff.”

Abby touches him gently on the forearm, almost as a request. He covers her hand with his, and she firms her grip. “Like last night?” she says.

“Like last night. Like this morning. I kind of thought I’d be stronger than this, that I’d be better prepared.” He scratches at his neck again. “I picked the wrong time to crack.”

“May I hug you, Stef?” Abby says, and when he nods she embraces him. It’s a while before they release each other, and Stefan wonders, with his face buried in her shoulder, how many times she’s done this for Christine.

 

* * *

 

Context is everything. No matter how much your world changes — no matter how much you change with it — when your world consists only of Dorley Hall, the mini-supermarket on campus and the well-trodden paths to the Anthill, the Student Union bar and the Linguistics department, you can adjust to anything, given time. Christine became a girl there, among other women like her, and draws comfort from familiarity and routine.

The fitting rooms in the upscale section of the largest department store in Almsworth Mall are a quite different context in which to be a girl, and Christine clings to Paige’s arm as she looks at herself in triplicate, stuffed into a mid-thigh dress which makes only the barest contact with several important parts of her upper body. It’s beautiful, and causes the small part of her that still remembers what it was like to be a (nominally) straight man to want to wolf whistle, but the prospect of wearing it out tonight is not one that sits well with her.

“Paige!” she hisses. “This dress is missing large chunks of dress!”

“So?” Paige says.

Paige spent an hour patiently guiding Christine through the racks and watched her pick out calf-length skirts, low-heeled shoes and other attractive but disappointingly ordinary attire until she just couldn’t take it any more, irritably snatched Christine’s bag away from her, pinned her against the wall, and told her quietly but firmly that if she doesn’t select something stunning and sexy to go with all the sensible skirts and Sunday-lunch sandals then she’s going to start a bonfire right there on the border between lingerie and the designer dress department, throw all of Christine’s modest purchases on top, and use the smoke to call Vicky for aid.

“So,” Christine explains, “usually those parts of me are covered up?”

“We’re going clubbing,” Paige says, untangling herself from Christine’s grip and pushing her closer to the triple mirrors, “not to church.”

“But—”

“All the stuff you picked out is really nice,” Paige says, standing behind her and holding her still by the shoulders, trapping her in the mirrors, “but none of it really makes a statement. Except, ‘I work the front desk at a funeral home,’ perhaps.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Oh, it’ll please Aunt Bea, I’m sure. But it doesn’t please me.”

Christine decides to get to the heart of the matter. “I look stupid.”

Paige’s fingers stiffen on her shoulders for a second, and then she turns Christine around to face her. “You don’t. You look sexy. You look gorgeous. And you’re also not going to be alone. I’m going to be wearing something at least as immodest, and I heard Pippa making appreciative noises over something highly revealing.”

Christine tries very hard to let that sink in. What’s the most vital thing about becoming a girl at Dorley? You don’t have to do it alone. And tonight she’s going out with Paige and Vicky, the two girls who helped her through some of her darkest moments. So what if she has to show off an alarmingly large section of hip?

Besides, she has to get good at this. Step one, stop panicking that random cis people — she’s never quite worked out where the Dorley women stand on the cis-trans spectrum, but she’s certain that whatever she once was, she’s not cis now — can see a boy in you: in progress, and currently going pretty well, because she keeps not being found out, and even Christine can’t maintain that level of anxiety over something that steadfastly fails to make itself into a problem. Step two: be confident!

Trickier.

Be kind to yourself, Christine, she tells herself, and appends, this time, but don’t be a bloody wimp.

“Okay,” she says, prying Paige’s fingers off her shoulders and turning around; the reflections help, and she’s never seen her bottom from quite this angle before, or in quite so perky an outfit, “I’m done wussing out. I’m good. I’m buying this.”

Paige does not exhibit the delight Christine expected. Instead she holds up another net bag. “Not just that one, I hope. I have more for you to try!”

“Paige—”

“Come on, Christine. For me?”

It’s generally easiest to let Paige have her way, so Christine agrees to step in and out of anything Paige hands her. Eventually they narrow it down to three dresses, all of which will be joining Christine’s selections — and a few other things Paige picked up while Christine wasn’t looking; she needs variety in her wardrobe! — on Aunt Bea’s credit card bill.

Christine’s shrugging off the last dress when Pippa joins them, twitching aside the curtain to make sure no-one is too on show — for which Christine is grateful, as she would have been moments away from showing her underwear to the whole shop — and then entering with a giddy smile, smoothing down something in an attractive blue-green and requesting critique. She has a few other options, of course, but this—

Paige stops her. It’s perfect. She doesn’t need to change a thing.

Christine holds a couple of her chosen dresses up against her body so Pippa can enthuse about colours and patterns while she gets changed, until Paige hands Christine her bag: it’s buzzing.

She unlocks her phone and scrolls through her messages. There are a lot. “It’s Abby,” she says, flicking through. “Holy shit.”

“What?” Pippa says, re-clasping her bra.

“Stefan asked to see Aunt Bea.”

“What?”

Pippa drops the rest of her clothes on the floor and races over to where Christine’s sat. She makes insistent gestures with her finger until Christine scrolls back up and they both read through everything together. “Oh, Jesus,” she says.

“Anyone want to explain?” Paige asks. She’s dividing their purchases from the clothes to be returned to the rack and looks about five seconds away from complaining that no-one’s helping her.

Christine explains quietly as Pippa swipes up and down through Abby’s texts, and then, when her own phone starts buzzing, reads through her own messages from Abby, as though they could possibly provide any additional information. “Oh, Jesus, God in heaven,” she mutters. “Oh, Jesus, Mary and flipping Joseph.” She shrugs off Christine’s comforting hand on her shoulder. “I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t have come. This is a flipping disaster…”

“It seems like it’s actually okay,” Christine says, re-reading the texts. “Abby was there, and it sounds like Aunt Bea agrees about the nurse. No harm.”

Pippa throws her phone back in her bag and buries her face in her hands. “Aunt Bea’s going to think I’m a terrible sponsor.”

“So? Screw Aunt Bea. You’re not a sponsor for life, are you?”

“Goodness, no. It’s just a one-time thing until I’m done with Saints.”

“Then why care? Be like Abby: do it once, produce an amazingly girly girl who annoys everyone around her with how effortlessly feminine she is, and quit while you’re ahead.”

Paige, with a shopping basket hanging off each elbow, passes Pippa the dress she wore out this morning. “She’s right, you know,” she says. “You don’t have to be a ‘good sponsor’ for him. You don’t have to follow the scripts. I’m not convinced everyone needs that kind of constant pressure, anyway, and besides, you’re not Maria and this isn’t your career. This is just pocket money, right?”

Pippa stands and drops her dress over her head. “It was supposed to be paying it forward,” she says. “And how come Abby texted you first, Christine?”

“She texts me about everything!” Christine says, covering. “Sometimes I know what she’s having for breakfast before her stomach does. And I know Stefan, remember? I asked her to keep me in the loop. I want him to get through this okay.”

“Okay,” Pippa says. “Good. I do, too.”

“You think he will?”

Pippa sits back down on the bench, turns her bracelet around on her wrist a few times. “Last night I would have said yes, guaranteed. But this nurse situation… It hit him hard, Christine.”

“It does seem like he calmed down, though,” Paige says. “He asked to see Aunt Bea, and they took him up to the kitchen. You don’t do that with someone who’s falling apart; you don’t put him in a room full of sharp knives.”

“Sharp knives and novelty mugs,” Christine says.

“I think he’s okay,” Paige says, warming to her theory. “Remember what I said this morning? That he just needed time? I think he got it. And now he’s up and advocating for himself? He’s fine.”

“Coping, anyway,” Christine says.

“Come on,” Paige says. “Let’s go abuse Christine’s credit card privileges. The sooner we get out of here, the sooner we can get home and Pippa can check up on Stefan. Christine: you’re still naked.”

“Shit; so I am.”

 

* * *

 

“Sit still!”

“This is why I need to practise doing my own makeup,” Christine says, “so you’ll stop torturing me with all your brushes and sponges and things.”

Paige swats her on the shoulder. “Sit still means no talking,” she says. “And they’re your brushes and sponges and things; hygiene, Christine.”

Christine frowns at herself in the vanity as Paige leans away to find a better brush, sponge or something. “This is a lot heavier than last night’s foundation, Paige,” she says, resisting the urge to poke at her cheek.

“Of course,” Paige says, painting a careful line along Christine’s nose. “Different looks for different nights.”

“This heavy, though?”

“It’s a simple equation. Last night was an elegant dress plus refined company — don’t laugh, please, not now; some of them count as refined, anyway — plus warm, dim lighting. I enhanced your natural features and chose colours to suit your outfit. Tonight is a sexy dress plus dancing plus club lighting. I’m not going for elegant, I’m going for hot.”

Christine eyes the dress. They did buy the one with the cutouts in the end, but it’s not the one Paige wants her to wear tonight. Paige’s choice is worse: strikingly red, even shorter than the other dress and even more attention-grabbing. Something to do with the colour looking just right with Christine’s deep brown hair, although that’s probably just an excuse.

She decides to deflect from one source of anxiety to another. “Natural features, Paige?” she says. “I don’t have any natural features. I was made.”

“No, Christine,” Paige says, frowning as she works, “I was there, remember? I know what you looked like before and after. Estrogen changed you enough that when you went under the knife they took only millimetres off you, made changes so subtle it took until the swelling went down to see what was different. They didn’t ‘make’ you; they just… brought you out.”

“They took much more than millimetres off of here,” Christine says, unsure why she’s stuck on the subject but needing to follow it to its end. She taps the spot on her neck where her Adam’s apple used to be, marked now by the faintest scar.

“True,” Paige admits. “But it was big.”

“It was. I kind of hated it, actually.”

Paige puts the brush down, and traces Christine’s frown along her brow with the back of her finger. “I’ll get you to believe you’re beautiful if it’s the last thing I do, Christine,” she says. “Besides,” she adds with a businesslike air, turning back to her tools, “if anyone here is artificial, it’s me.”

Shit. Well done, Christine. “Paige, no.”

“I had a lot more work done than you. I think that’s how you found it so easy to sleep with me, early on; I was like a completely different person. Rebuilt from scratch.”

“No, that’s not it. Paige, you were my—”

“I wonder sometimes if that’s why I had an easier time adjusting,” Paige continues distantly, still rummaging in Christine’s motley makeup pile. “When you looked in the mirror you saw you, but different; someone who might have been your sister. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a stranger.”

“Paige—”

“It took me a long time to come to terms with it,” Paige says. “Hours looking at myself, feeling almost like my thoughts were coming from someone else. A monster in my own labyrinth.”

“Paige, please— Oh, you fucker.”

Paige turns back to Christine with a grin and wags a finger. “Got you,” she says, and sticks out her tongue.

“You cow!” Christine says, nudging her with a foot. “I knew ‘monster in my own labyrinth’ was too melodramatic for you.”

“Here endeth the lesson,” Paige says, once she’s put her tongue away. “Be careful who you complain about your extremely minor alterations in front of. I made peace with my plastic long ago; others haven’t.”

“Yeah. Okay. You got me. And you’re right. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologise,” Paige says, returning to her work. “Just rein it in when you’re around Pippa, okay? She’s coming by soon.”

“Is she… sensitive about the work she had?”

“Very. I was talking to Willow, and she said—”

“Willow?”

“Yes. She graduated with Pippa. She does outreach now for one of the brands I work with. I’ve mentioned her, I’m sure?”

“I don’t think you have,” Christine says.

“I’ve mentioned her.”

“If you say so.”

“Willow said she’s glad Pippa’s making friends at last.” Paige worries at her lip for a moment. “She was — is — kind of a loner. And she said she has a real thing about how much she had done. She wants to see her cousin again someday, and she’s terrified she won’t be recognisable.”

“God,” Christine says, glaring at herself in the vanity mirror, “I’m an idiot.”

“No,” Paige says, swatting her again. “Idiots don’t know when to stop.”

“Point taken.”

Pippa arrives with Abby several minutes later, and they find Christine sitting very carefully on the end of her bed in full make-up, dress and sandals, with her largest and puffiest coat — Paige’s only concession to the late October chill — folded up on her knees, and Paige prettying herself at the vanity with the staggering efficiency of someone who absorbs new makeup techniques like other people absorb oxygen. It takes Christine a second to notice them come in because Paige, consumed by concentration and sitting with crossed ankles in a dress at least as daring as Christine’s, is a sight so arresting she has difficulty looking away. Abby has to cough, politely, knowingly, for Christine to recover herself sufficiently to greet them.

Pippa’s wearing the blue-green dress she tried on earlier, and gone light on the accessories, with the exception of her ever-present bracelet. She’s done a lot of work on her face, especially around the eyes, where an iridescent swipe of eyeshadow connects her eyelids to her temples. She returns Christine’s finger-wave and perches nearby on the edge of the bed, radiating nerves. Abby, however, is still inhabiting her favourite ratty old t-shirt, and plants herself on the sofa behind Paige, decently positioned to look suggestively from Paige to Christine and back again, a gesture packed with significance that Christine deliberately ignores.

“Hey girls,” Abby says. “Guess what?”

“You’re not coming tonight?” Christine says.

“Yes, but—”

“Abbyyyy,” Christine whines, abusing the final syllable and feeling gloriously childish. Something about Paige’s scolding has left her energised, and while she can’t claim to be feeling confident, she is, for once, excited to leave campus and shake what Paige and three carefully aligned mirrors all insist is a very nice booty. “You have to come! You said you’d come!”

“No, you sent me eight — sorry, nine — texts informing me that I’m coming.”

Christine pouts. “Fine,” she says. “But at least stay with us until we go.”

“Actually,” Abby says, and grins at Christine’s exasperated expression, “I’m here because Maria’s coming up. We have news.”

Christine glances at Pippa, but she doesn’t react; just continues to look like she’d rather be anywhere else. Clearly she already knew.

“News about what?” Paige says.

“The nurse. She’ll be up in a few minutes.”

Rumours of the nurse — her actions, their subsequent consequences — spread through the Hall while they were out, enough that five sponsors dived on Pippa when they got home, and pestered her with variations on the theme of: Did she know her boy came up to see Aunt Bea? After being here only two weeks?

It didn’t take long for them to discover that the rumour mill held little information they didn’t already have, so they excused themselves upstairs, reasoning that they might as well be putting on their faces while they wait for Abby to come up with the goods. The goods, apparently, being Maria.

“Pippa,” Christine says, to break the nervous silence, “I thought you were going to go see Stefan?”

“I was. But I need to know what Maria has to say and, anyway, Stefan seems fine. I checked the feed and he’s watching TV in the common room, sitting with the usual people, chatting away, and Edy and Tabby and a couple of others have an eye on them. I kind of didn’t feel like intruding.”

Christine nods, and goes back to watching Paige put the finishing touches to her makeup.

A few minutes later and they’re all arranged in varying states of comfort around the room — Abby with Pippa, Paige having gravitated quietly towards Christine — while Maria paces.

“First off,” she says, “this goes nowhere. I know, I know, everyone will know by tomorrow morning, but I’d like to at least pretend we have some semblance of opsec around here. Christine, I can see you trying not to smirk.”

“Sorry.”

“So, the nurse. Karen Turner. She’s not one of us.” Maria pauses for reactions, and gets them: everyone at Dorley is a graduate; that’s how it works. “Barb, the old nurse, who you remember, if not fondly, she was one of us. Older than me, actually. Which means that, like me, she came up under Grandmother, an experience which instilled in her a profound sense of empathy and a strong desire to rescue the next generations of girls from the people who hurt her here. People like her nurse. And her nurse — and mine — was Karen Turner.”

“Shit,” Christine says. “She’s one of Grandmother’s people?”

“Yes.”

To the best of Christine’s knowledge, the only people still knocking around Dorley Hall who came up under Grandmother’s regime are Maria and Aunt Bea herself, neither of whom are habitually loose-lipped about prior operational procedures. But enough older graduates have come back now and then, whether for events like Aunt Bea’s birthday dinners or to serve as nurses, electrolysis technicians and the like, that bits and pieces of information about the old programme have trickled out.

By all accounts, it was a bloodbath.

Under Aunt Bea’s selective recruitment criteria — the first of her many reforms to be implemented — they stopped taking in murderers and serial rapists, the ones Grandmother used to refer to as ‘punishment detail’. Aunt Bea prefers to focus on those she believes salvageable, those for whom masculinity has been a double-edged sword, a source of pain as well as strength, and still there have been years where nearly half the recruits proved inflexible, beyond help, and had to be washed out.

Under Grandmother, Dorley took in new recruits twice a year, from all over the country, in far greater numbers. Most didn’t last six months. Training methods were brutal, solitary confinement was commonplace, humiliation a daily chore, and the men were usually castrated on arrival. They were dressed up, photographed, taunted, sexually assaulted, and beaten for the slightest infraction. Their final genders, for the few who survived to complete the programme, were generally not respected.

Grandmother, Christine has long inferred, had the tendency to view womanhood as inherently degrading, at least when applied to those who’d been assigned male. To her, Dorley Hall was a place to enact punishment and indulge her desire to humiliate men, and she surrounded herself with people whose proclivities matched her own. It was only when Aunt Bea — a young graduate who had in her years away developed enough contacts and honed enough skills to create for herself an entirely new identity — returned to the fold and started to make reforms, that graduates like Maria were allowed to stay on and attend Saints as ordinary women. Christine’s long suspected Aunt Bea has something on Grandmother, some leverage that made her hand over control, but what, she can’t hope to guess. Reportedly, the few years when Bea and Grandmother ran the place together were turbulent.

“She worked for Grandmother?” Pippa says urgently. “She’s cis, then?” Maria nods. “Jesus. She’s cis and she knows about us. About me.”

“Yes,” Maria says.

“No wonder she looked at me like that.”

“I promise you, briefing and debriefing her in the security room was just as little fun.”

“Why did we allow her back?” Pippa says.

“We didn’t have much option. And she promised she’d cooperate.” Maria rolls her eyes. “More fool us. She knew once she was down there she could do whatever she wanted. We couldn’t stop her without making the whole place look weak. Imagine the boys seeing us squabble amongst ourselves?”

“Is that why you bottled it?” Christine asks. “Why you let her assault Stefan and the others?”

“I didn’t ‘bottle it,’” Maria says, glaring at Christine. “I made a decision.”

“We can’t get Barb back?” Pippa says, as Paige puts a hand on Christine to calm her.

Maria leans against the wardrobe. Tired. “Barbara’s husband got a job in Canada and she’s going with him. Fifteen-odd years helping out? She’s done her bit.”

“Wait,” Christine says, “our identities can survive international travel?”

“Of course. We’re understaffed, not incompetent. Regardless, the point is, Karen is never coming back.”

“So,” Paige says, “what are we doing for a nurse, then, if we can’t have Barb and we don’t want this Karen woman?”

“I don’t know,” Maria says. “But, Pippa, you’re comfortable with doing a basic injection, yes?” Pippa nods. “You’ll be doing Stefan’s jab tonight. All of us will be doing it for our boys. And unless we have any unexpected problems, we have a little while to secure a new nurse. One of our graduates is in nursing; she might be willing to transfer to a hospital nearby.”

“This is such a fucking disaster,” Christine says, leaning back on the bed. “You know how fucked up what she did is, right?”

“I was there.”

“This is a delicate time for those… boys.”

“I know. I was there. And unless you want to volunteer, Christine, your input is strictly advisory.”

“I’m just saying, I would have turned my taser on the bitch if I’d been in charge down there.”

Maria offers her a brittle smile. “Yes, well, perhaps one day you will be.”

 

* * *

 

Christine spends most of the bus ride back to town silent, working her forefingers against each other, thinking. Paige, in the seat next to her, knows when she needs to be left alone and merely offers her hand.

She’d been all set to go after Maria, to confront her alone about the nurse, to demand to know why she didn’t do more to protect Stef, but Abby stopped her, took her aside — shut them both in Christine’s bathroom — and asked her to give Maria time.

“She’s probably not dealing very well with this,” Abby had said, sitting on the toilet lid.

“She definitely isn’t,” Christine said, feeling awkward, unable even to lean on something for fear of staining her diminutive dress; she doesn’t clean her bathroom as often as she ought.

“Don’t be too angry with Maria.”

“But I really, really want to be, Abs.”

“What I mean,” Abby said, “is that we don’t know what it was like back then, under Grandmother, and she does. Did you know, Maria is the only Dorley woman to have spent time in the cells after graduation?”

“She— what?”

Abby leaned forward on her knees. “She told me the story once. She was celebrating some milestone or other, went out drinking in Almsworth with friends — other girls from the programme, some of whom she helped sponsor. They were very close. They still keep in touch. Some of them are… pretty conveniently placed, for us. Anyway, on their way home they stole a sign from outside an employment agency. Wrenched it off the wall and brought it back here, intending to put it up in the security room downstairs. They thought it was hilarious. Grandmother didn’t.”

“I thought she wasn’t in charge after Maria graduated?”

“She wasn’t, but she hung around like a bad smell. Insisted to Bea that Maria be punished. Bea relented; I don’t know why. Maria said she’ll always remember being marched down to the cells, still drunk, and locked in by Grandmother. ‘As an example to the other boys,’ she told her. She was down there two weeks.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“What was the sign? Is it still around?”

Abby smiled. “It said, ‘Transition Services’ and yes, it’s still in one of the storerooms somewhere.”

Christine snorted. She had to admit, in Maria’s position, she might have stolen that.

They’ve arranged to meet up with Vicky and Lorna at the bar that hangs off the back of the station complex, a cheap place that gets rowdy later in the evening but which, for now, is host mostly to shoppers knocking back a quick drink before their train arrives. While they wait, sitting carefully in their stunning dresses and idly playing with their drinks, Christine fills Paige and Pippa in on everything Abby said.

“I think the whole thing was a twisted power play,” Christine says. “Karen was a nurse under Grandmother, right? From before the reforms? So that makes her a sick bitch who gets her kicks humiliating men, just like Grandmother. She comes back, ‘just to help out’, makes promises about being on her best behaviour and then immediately reverts to type as soon as she gets her hands on someone.”

“And she was flipping smug about it, too,” Pippa says. “Complimenting me on making Stefan ‘docile’, when anyone could tell the poor boy’d practically left his body by that point. Jesus, actually, she said something like, ‘Half the boys are unconscious for this. I’m sure you remember.’ I thought that was directed at me, but…”

Paige picks up the sentence where Pippa dropped it. “It was obviously aimed at Maria. A reminder: ‘I know who you were.’”

“Maria said the debriefing in the security room was no fun,” Pippa says. “I wonder if Karen deadnamed her?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Christine says. “The whole performance, it wasn’t just about her power over the— over the boys, it was about her power over us. All the unworthies of Dorley, from Aunt Bea on down. All the unreal women. Shit.” She pulls out her phone. “I’m going to find her Facebook. Fiver says she’s a TERF.”

“You know,” Pippa says, stirring her drink and looking into the middle distance, “you get locked up for a year, you have your sex changed against your will, you get a new name and a new face and you can’t ever see your family again, but it’s not until after you graduate, after you turn around and start doing all that to someone else, that you finally find out what a flipping snake pit the place really is.”

“Was,” Paige says.

“Is,” Pippa insists. “As long as people like Karen can still come back, I’m sticking with the present tense.”

“Yeah,” Christine says, putting her phone down on the table, “about that. Abby said she’s going to talk to Aunt Bea. She’s worried that someone like Karen, someone who’s still bitter after two decades that we’re no longer her evil little playroom where she gets to take the toys apart, might make things difficult for us.”

“You think Aunt Bea might try to shut her up?” Pippa says.

“She thinks Aunt Bea might have her killed,” Paige says. “Right?”

“Yeah.” Christine nods, as Pippa gasps. “She knows everything, Pip, and she’s kept quiet up until now for some reason — loyalty to Grandmother, maybe. But whatever it is, her incentive to keep quiet, especially after all these years, has to be way weaker than ours. We have no choice but to stay silent, but Karen might throw caution to the wind, especially if she sees Aunt Bea ending her contract as a snub. It might call for drastic measures.”

“What exactly do you mean,” Pippa says, “about us having an incentive to keep quiet?”

“It’s the cold logic of Dorley,” Paige says, having finished her drink. “Whatever we—” she indicates the three of them with her glass, “—think of what happens there, what was done to us, what we’re currently doing to a whole new batch of people, we all have attachments there, right? That’s part of the sponsor bond, or it’s probably supposed to be. Christine’s never going to go to the police, or the media, or dump all our secrets on Pastebin, because even though she and I are arguably victims of Dorley, she doesn’t want anything to happen to Indira or Abby.”

“Or you,” Christine says to Pippa.

“Me?”

“You’re part of it, now,” Paige says. “Another reason for us to never blow a whistle.”

“That’s… cynical.”

“It might just be a happy accident,” Christine says. “A lucky side-effect that just happens to benefit Aunt Bea. But the fact remains that even when we leave the programme, our whole world is Dorley. Our friends.” She glances at Paige. “Our family. The freedom of everyone we love is reliant on the wellbeing of Dorley Hall. Even Indira, who has her family back, who’s dating a nice cis guy who’s probably never even heard of forced feminisation, she’s tied to the place. To me. And, hell, I might not like Maria that much but I don’t want her arrested.”

“We all have a reason to stay silent,” Paige says. “To keep the place going, year after year. If you discount wherever Aunt Bea gets her money from — do you know, Christine? No? — then we’re effectively self-sufficient at this point. Aside from the major surgeries, and this Karen woman, all the roles that keep the programme going are filled by Dorley graduates.” She twirls a finger in the air. “We’re an endless loop: girls femming girls femming girls. A snake biting its own tail.”

Christine can’t resist. “Not its own tail, Paige.” She snorts into her drink.

Paige hits her lightly. Christine’s about to respond with some mild violence of her own when Pippa points towards the door: Vicky and Lorna, looking stunning as usual, are waving and grinning wildly. Christine’s happy to drop the subject; she’s found nurse Karen’s Facebook and discovered she’s a member of an organisation called Women Run The World, who have some worrying content on their social media posts. Quickly she forwards a few screenshots to Abby, bags her phone, and does her best to put the whole thing out of her mind, because Lorna is striding towards her, arms out, and it’s time to be a cis girl for the rest of the evening.

 

* * *

 

Legend — still popularly considered the worst nightclub in Almsworth; also still the cheapest, which is important because Christine’s access to Dorley’s accounts isn’t supposed to cover nights out — is packed, and Christine can’t decide whether she finds the crowds reassuring or intimidating. And being bundled along with Pippa and Lorna to the women’s bathroom swiftly becomes an education on the subject of how many women can fit in front of one mirror; she feels, once again, a little childish when Lorna deals with attention from excited and complimentary cis girls with grace and humour while Christine hides in a stall, controlling her breathing.

Better at this doesn’t actually mean good at it, not yet.

“The secret is to have really good eyeliner,” Lorna says to her, as they make their way back to the tiny table Paige and Vicky are guarding. “Cis people love it when you have good eyeliner.”

“Do they?” Christine says, and mentally kicks herself for saying ‘they’ and not ‘we’. Fortunately, Lorna doesn’t seem to notice, and Christine successfully delivers her back into the arms of her girlfriend without making any more obvious mistakes.

Lorna and Paige dole out drinks and Christine leans forward on the table, grasping her bottle by the neck and then, when Paige makes fun of how phallic it looks when she takes a swig, moves her grip to its base.

“How did your chat go?” Lorna says, over the music, which is quietest in this corner but still loud enough to inhibit conversation.

“My chat?”

“With the trans group. About your friend?”

“Oh! Good. They were really helpful.”

“How is your friend? Do I get to know her name yet?”

Stef’s name hasn’t been decided on; ‘Stefanie’ isn’t a foregone conclusion. “She’s, um, really private,” Christine says. “I don’t have permission to share anything much.”

Lorna nudges her with an elbow. “Don’t break any confidences on my account. I’m just— I wanted to thank you.”

“Oh? What for?”

“For taking an interest. For wanting to help. And for not assuming you already know best just because you’re cis.”

“Um,” Christine says, looking away, “it’s— I just— I hate seeing her be miserable.” She congratulates herself on hitting the right pronoun. Bloody Stef and her— his insistence on valuing self-loathing over identity. “Oh,” she remembers, “congratulations on the surgery date. That’s what we’re celebrating, right?”

“Right.”

“Is it okay to ask what you’re having done?”

She laughs. “It’s probably not okay? I don’t mind, though. Here, here, here and here.” She points at a few spots on her face: hairline, brows, nose, jaw. Essentially the same work Christine had done. “They’re just making tiny changes, but it’s enough.”

Christine nods. “I’m looking forward to seeing you get even more gorgeous,” she says, and Lorna giggles and bites her lip. Vicky, Christine reflects, is lucky.

“I was asked to ask,” Lorna says, “are you with someone?”

“With someone? Like, a girlfriend? No.”

Lorna grins. “You like girls, then?”

“I don’t actually know!” Too much alcohol — two drinks; lightweight — making her too honest. “My last relationship was with a woman. But I’m still figuring myself out. I want to be better at being me before I inflict myself on someone else again.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Did it end badly?”

“Kind of,” Christine says. Paige took the break-up calmly, kindly, and didn’t talk to her for two weeks.

“Anyone I know?” Lorna asks. Christine leans closer, so she can point to Paige, currently dancing with some guy, without anyone seeing. Lorna’s eyes round out and she giggles. “Paige?” she whispers. “Wow.”

Christine nods. “I started getting messed up about who I was, what we were doing together, what it ‘meant’—” she finger quotes viciously, “—that we were together. And she didn’t have any of those problems herself. She knew exactly who she was. Which made me a little bitter, for a while. I dealt with it badly, and I didn’t exactly take it out on her, but it didn’t help, either. She can do better than me, anyway.”

“Tina,” Lorna says, borrowing Vicky’s nickname for her, “I’ve seen the way she looks at you. You might think that. I don’t think she does.”

“Who asked you to ask, by the way?”

“Oh, it was— oop!” Lorna’s interrupted by Vicky swooping in behind her, looping her arms around her and dragging her laughing away from the table, allowing her back only briefly to put her drink back down, and then they’re gone, dancing, leaving Pippa and Christine alone to guard their rickety little outpost.

“They have so much energy!” Christine says to Pippa, who’s been looking thoughtful. “I can’t stand it.”

“I know!”

“What’s up?”

Pippa shrugs. “Just thinking about Stefan,” she says.

“I thought you said he was fine?”

“Yeah, no thanks to me. I just stood there, Christine. I watched that— that bitch hurt him, and I did nothing. Said nothing. I should have helped him, but I was too busy being his stupid sponsor.”

Christine takes her hand, squeezes it. “Remember what Paige said?” she says. “Earlier on, in the changing rooms? You don’t have to be a good sponsor for him. You don’t have to be like Maria. I think he probably just needs a friend more than he needs someone to point out all his masculine failings.”

“Yeah, well,” Pippa says, “I flipping suck at that, anyway. I go too hard or I don’t go at all.”

“So don’t try! I bet you’ll make more progress talking to him than lecturing him or, God forbid, doing all that shit where you’re supposed to make him hyper-aware of the way his body’s changing.”

Pippa slumps a little on the hand that’s holding her head up. “I wasn’t looking forward to that. You really think I can just drop all the sponsor stuff?”

“I think so. But, more importantly, Paige thinks so, and Paige is always right.”

“Paige is always right,” Paige says, descending on them. She’s got her hand around a handsome guy, slightly taller than her, clearly already and understandably besotted, and she’s dragged him back to their table. “What am I right about this time?”

“Pippa and Stefan,” Christine says.

“Oh,” Paige says. “Yeah. Just hang out with him, Pippa. Now, come on; I’ve got us a couch! This is Nadeem, by the way.”

It doesn’t take much of Paige’s persuasion to get them to abandon their tiny table and decamp to one of the couches in the bar area, where Nadeem and his friends — mostly men, with a couple of girls — are gathered. Paige immediately claims an empty space at one end, pushes Nadeem down into it and perches on the cushioned arm of the sofa, knees hooked over his legs. Christine and Pippa take stools by the nearby table, and one of the girls greets them and introduces them around. They’re Saints students, most of them at the start of their third year, pissing away their student loans.

“You should warn your friend,” one of the girls, Rani, says to Christine as they return to the couch with a new round of drinks, “Nadeem isn’t the relationship type.”

“It’s okay,” Christine says, “Paige isn’t, either. Not with boys, anyway.”

“Oh?” Rani says, grinning widely. “She likes girls, too?” Something in Christine’s face gives her away. “You?” Rani squeaks.

“Yeah. For a while.”

Two of the men vacate the couch, giving Rani and Christine a place to sit and relieve themselves of their armfuls of drinks. “Is it hard, seeing her with someone else?” Rani says.

“I wouldn’t say I like it,” Christine says, necking half her bottle, “but it was me who ended it, so I don’t really have a leg to stand on.”

“What are you two talking about?” Nadeem says, leaning around Paige to collect their drinks.

“You!” Rani says. “I was telling Christine here that you’re not into commitment.”

“Nope!” he says. “Too young, too gorgeous.” He kisses Paige on the cheek, and Paige leans into it, laughing.

“Me neither,” she says, as Pippa, Vicky and Lorna cluster in to retrieve their own drink orders. “Besides, boys are for fun!” She takes Nadeem’s jaw in her hand and twists it so she can kiss him on the mouth. “And that’s all!”

“That’s kind of cold, isn’t it?” Pippa says.

Paige stops kissing Nadeem long enough to grin at her. She reaches her free hand down into Nadeem’s trousers. “Nope!” she says. “Pretty warm.”

Christine rolls her eyes, ignores Pippa’s concerned look, and goes back to talking to Rani; she’s taking Electrical Engineering, which Christine knows just enough about to be able to understand her, and which is a fascinating enough topic that it distracts from Christine’s incipient fear that Rani — beautiful, confident, and almost definitely cis — will see right through her.

I know who I am, she tells herself, when Rani playfully pushes her in response to a terrible computer science joke she couldn’t resist telling, and it takes almost a full second for Christine to start panicking that she will somehow turn out to have male bones, detectable by the slightest touch, by which time it’s already obvious that Rani thinks nothing is amiss. I know who I am, and I’m definitely getting better at this.

Behind her, Paige and Nadeem finish their drinks and Paige drags him back out to dance, allowing Vicky and Lorna to claim their spot on the couch and resume kissing.

“Being single sucks, right?” Rani says.

Paige is dancing with her back to Nadeem, pressing herself against him, exuding confidence and sexuality and inspiring in Christine the usual mixture of envy and interest. “Yeah,” she says, “it really fucking sucks.”

Later, when a few more of Rani’s friends have arrived and monopolised her time, and Vicky and Lorna are off dancing again, Christine and Pippa sit together on the end of the couch, having fended off two random men each.

“This is the club where Abby’s girl got taken from, you know!” Pippa says, to break up an awkward pause in the conversation.

“Can we talk about something other than Dorley, for once?” Christine snaps. “Sorry,” she adds quickly, and puts an apologetic hand on Pippa’s knee. “I’m just trying really, really hard to be a normal girl. It doesn’t necessarily come easily, especially somewhere like this.”

“You don’t need to apologise,” Pippa says. “I’m kind of running out of things to say, anyway.”

“How about,” Christine says, glancing back at Rani and her friends, who look to have the couch under their protective custody for the foreseeable future, “we go dance, instead?”

“Um,” Pippa says. “Okay?”

“You don’t want to?”

“I’m no good at it.”

Christine stands and holds out her hand, inviting Pippa up as if she’s a debutante. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from looking out there—” with a flourish she directs her free hand towards the dancefloor, “—it’s that if you’re pretty, you don’t have to be good at dancing. Just move around a bit, and the boys won’t be able to keep their eyes off you.”

Pippa allows herself to be lifted off the couch. “Girls,” she says, following Christine, still holding her hand.

“What?” Christine yells, over the music.

“Girls! I want the girls to look at me!”

Christine manoeuvres them through the throng and finds Vicky and Lorna, enraptured by each other near the middle of the dancefloor. “I think we can arrange that!”

 

* * *

 

Three trips up and down from the dancefloor and Christine, exhausted, falls into the middle of the couch between Vicky, who looks like she wants to fall asleep, and Pippa, who is talking animatedly with Rani and has one hand on her thigh. She meets Christine’s eye and smiles, looking happier than Christine’s yet seen her, so Christine winks and starts to lift herself back up off the couch, intending to give her some space. She’s intercepted by Paige, alone.

“Hi, Christine,” Paige says.

“Hey. You having fun?”

Paige takes her hand, pulls her along with her, back towards the dancefloor, but slowly, keeping them for the moment in the quieter bar area. “Yes,” Paige says with a smile.

“How was he?” Christine says with, she hopes, good humour.

“Fun!” Paige says, leaning down so she can talk at a normal volume. Her breath tickles the fine hairs on Christine’s neck. “And that’s all. How about you? You okay?”

“I’m fine. It’s not as scary as I thought it would be.”

“Of course it’s not,” Paige says, wrapping an arm around Christine’s waist and closing her fingers around her hip. “You’re beautiful. No-one is ever going to think otherwise.”

“Paige—”

“Come with me,” she says. She unwinds Christine from her arm, a dance in miniature, and catches Christine’s hand again, leads her through the thinning crowds.

“Paige, I don’t—”

“Come with me.” It’s like a spell. It carries Christine to the middle of the dancefloor with her.

Their spot claimed, Paige holds Christine in place and dances slowly, in half-time with the music. Wickedly smiling, she runs her free hand around Christine’s jaw, down her neck, eventually rests it on her back, and pulls her gradually forwards, one heartbeat at a time.

“What’s happening?” Christine says.

Paige presses her lips against Christine’s ear. “We’re not the way we used to be,” she says. “We’re not confused, we’re not finding ourselves, and we’re not scared all the time. We know who we are now. Both of us. Don’t we?”

Christine moves with her, her hands finding tentative spots on Paige’s hips. Paige is still leaning down, her face buried in Christine’s hair. “Yeah,” Christine says. “We do.”

“This doesn’t have to be any specific thing,” Paige says. “It can be whatever you want. But I miss you. And, just for one night, I want to feel like you miss me, too.”

“I do, Paige. I do.”

“Then be my girl, Christine. Just for tonight. Please?” Paige’s voice is shaking, and she breathes carefully between each sentence. “Let me have you. Just for one night. Will you do that for me? Will you let me have you?”

Christine looks up and Paige steps away, and suddenly she loathes the instincts screaming at her that this is too soon, that it’s not right, that she’s not ready. She digs her fingers into Paige’s hips, refusing to let her retreat, pulling her back in, stepping into her and kissing her on the collarbone, once, twice, then moving up, warming Paige’s neck and allowing herself to be pushed away, just a little, just enough, so Paige can kiss her back, first on the jaw, then on the chin and then, finally, their lips meet and Christine is, for the first time in a long while, and maybe just for tonight, Paige’s again.

“Good girl,” Paige whispers as they part, but it’s only for a moment, enough time to look into each other’s eyes, enough time for Paige to raise her hands to the back of Christine’s neck, enough time for Christine to think, Yes, I know exactly who I am, and then they’re kissing, once more, once again, and it’s nothing like it used to be.

 

* * *

 

The door closes behind him. The biometric lock engages. Perhaps the most welcome sound Stefan’s heard all day.

Abby dropped him off in the common room and he told Aaron, Will and Adam exactly what Beatrice asked him to. The news that the nurse would not be the one to administer the promised vitamin injection released a tension from the room that Aaron had been covering with nervous babble and Adam with wary silence. Even Will seemed relieved, relaxing his neck and sitting back on the sofa, and when Adam joined him and leaned his shoulder against Will’s, he didn’t move away, instead accepting the other boy into his space without comment or fuss.

It was easy to hang out with them all afternoon. To talk about nothing. To watch a cooking show, a makeover show, a dating show, a couple of light comedies. To laugh at the bad jokes and at Raph and Ollie sulkily stalking out of the common area, lost without Declan’s chest-thumping idiot bravado. Even Martin, sitting on a bean bag chair a safe distance from all of them, didn’t seem so bad, offering some commentary on the TV shows that, while not actually especially interesting to Stefan, showed more of a commitment to participating than he’d shown at any other point.

But that was then, and this is now, and he’s alone, with nothing but the memory of the nurse and the look on her face when she touched him.

The advantage of the thick concrete walls: you don’t need to muffle yourself when you cry. Stefan lets it all out. Everything from Mark’s disappearance to his own growing masculinisation to meeting Christine to waking up in the cell; everything since. Eventually his stinging skin, pink from the hot water, drags him somewhat out of it, and he’s drying his face and applying another layer of moisturiser when there’s a knock on his door.

He gets up, opens it, but it’s not Aaron. It’s Pippa.

“Hi,” she says. Quiet. She’s wearing a lovely blue-green dress with eye makeup to match, although her lipstick is a little smeared, and when his eyes flicker to her lips she covers them shyly with her fingers. But only for a second. No sense hiding it when he’s already seen it. “Can I come in?”

Stefan opens the door the rest of the way, returns to his bed and slips his hoodie back on, covering his upper body. Not something he particularly wants her to see under any circumstances, but especially after this morning. His skin is peeling in a few places; uglier than usual.

“Does that hurt?” she says.

“Yeah,” he says.

“How are you treating it?”

“Moisturiser. It’s all I’ve got.”

“I’ll get you something better in the morning.”

“Thanks.”

Pippa sits delicately on the chair and shuffles it closer to the bed. She puts her bag down by the computer desk, and the little plastic container she had under one arm she deposits by the keyboard.

“Is that the vitamin jab?” Stefan asks. If Abby’s right, that’s his first shot of estradiol. He can barely take his eyes off it.

Pippa nods. “Are you ready for it?”

“I am.”

It doesn’t take long, and for all that Pippa has obviously had a little to drink, she has a steady hand. She settles awkwardly back on the chair and looks away while Stefan pulls his trousers back up and retreats to the corner of the bed. He imagines the estradiol suffusing him, curing him, fixing him. Sternly he reminds himself not to expect quick results. Everyone responds at their own pace, he remembers; it would be foolish to imagine his body will change at anything but the slowest possible rate, given its track record.

“Once per week, for the foreseeable future,” Pippa says, boxing up the needle and putting away the swabs. “Are you okay with me being the one to administer it from now on?”

“I understand and agree,” Stefan says, to be annoying.

“Don’t— You don’t need to say that.”

“Oh?”

Pippa shifts on the stool, like she wants to sit more comfortably but is restricted by her dress. Normally she wears things with a little more room. “Damn,” she says to herself. “Should’ve got changed.”

Stefan smiles, waves a hand at his wardrobe. “I have more hoodies than I can wear in a week, if you want to borrow something.”

She blinks at him, surprised. “You wouldn’t mind?”

He laughs. “It’s your stuff, anyway. Take what you need. You can lock all the doors and change in the corridor.”

“I’ll, um, change in here, if that’s okay,” Pippa says, pulling a hoodie out of the wardrobe and draping it over herself, so she can drop her dress under cover.

“Oh,” Stefan says, “uh, shit. Just a second.” He pulls his knees up and turns around on the bed, faces the wall, and stays that way until the sounds of Pippa struggling with fabric have ceased.

“Thanks,” she says, now wearing much more modest clothes that don’t go nearly as well with her eye makeup. “I didn’t want to change outside.” She folds the dress a few times and drops it into the main compartment of her bag, then crosses her legs under herself and leans back in the chair. She stares at him for a few moments, and he has time to wonder what exactly it is she sees, before she says, suddenly, quickly, “My apology was crap.”

“What?”

“Earlier. After the nurse. I didn’t give you time to breathe, I just came at you, and when you didn’t immediately accept my apology, I got mad. I’m sorry. Sorry for the crappy apology, sorry for the nurse, sorry for… me.”

“For you?”

She breathes through her nose for a second, thinking. “What you need from me, down here, is consistency,” she says. “Like Maria, with Aaron. She’s been a sponsor for a long time, and she’s good at it. I, on the other hand, am terrible at it. I hate being strict — unless I get angry, and then I’m a complete and total cow — and it makes me… unpredictable. And that’s the worst thing for you, when you’re already trying to cope with everything else down here.”

“No,” Stefan says, allowing himself to smile, “the worst thing is what Monica’s doing to Declan.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah. Sorry. Too much time around Will. I’m getting pedantic.”

She matches his smile. “The least of your worries, down here.”

“True.”

“That was brave of you, by the way, talking to Aunt Bea.”

“She wasn’t so bad. Bit of a softie, really.”

Pippa snorts. “Don’t let her hear you say that.”

“Actually,” Stefan says, grinning, “I get the impression she’d find it kind of funny.”

“Yes, she probably would. Look, Stefan; are you okay?”

He shrugs. “I’m not. But I’ve been not okay for a long time.”

“This morning—”

“Can we not talk about that?”

“Of course,” Pippa says. “I just— Can we start again?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you like hot chocolate?”

“Um. Yes?”

Pippa pulls her phone out of her bag and taps away at it for a few moments, texting someone. “Wait for it,” she says with a smile, putting her phone away and stretching. “I asked for marshmallows, too, if that’s okay.”

A few minutes later — time they fill with awkward small talk about the TV shows he watched that day — the light on the little dumbwaiter by the door goes green, and Pippa extracts a pair of hot chocolates, in plain mugs, piled high with marshmallows. He takes his, and it’s hot enough that he has to put it on the bedside table for the moment.

“So,” Pippa says, blowing on hers, “I was saying, I want to start again. From the top.” She takes a sip, winces at the heat, and sets it down by the computer. “I’m Pippa. I’ll be your sponsor. Hi.” She holds out a nervous hand, and Stefan resolves to talk to Abby about her, ask if anything’s up, because she seems anxious for Stefan’s approval, which when previously offered tended to be thrown back in his face.

What the hell. “I’m Stefan,” he says, taking her hand. He adds, “Stef, actually.”

“Hi, Stef,” Pippa says. “Hey, do you want to watch a movie?”

She doesn’t give him a chance to reply, just passes him her hot chocolate — he puts it down next to his — and practically leaps onto the bed next to him, stretching out her legs so her feet dangle off the side. She leans forward, fetches the mouse and hands it over, silently offering him the choice of what to watch.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Stefan says, giving her back her hot chocolate as A Christmas Prince starts playing. “You really want to start again?”

“I do. I got some advice from some friends of mine — Christine and Paige; you’d like them — and I’ve decided, sod being a bad sponsor. I’m just not going to be a real sponsor at all.”

“That’s, uh—”

“You don’t need to know how to feel about it right away,” Pippa says. “Take your time. Now shush! I haven’t seen this one.”

Stefan shrugs, and settles back into his small pile of pillows, extracting one and handing it over before he gets too comfortable. Pippa stuffs it behind her head, smiles her thanks and starts working on her hot chocolate, and the smell of it is too much to bear. He sips gingerly at his, expecting it to scald his tongue, but he’s not at all prepared for the marshmallow that gets stuck to his nose.

He leaves it there for a whole minute before Pippa notices and laughs long enough and loud enough that they have to rewind the movie.