17. Afterglow

2019 November 22
Friday

“You just—”

“I touched my nipple and I came in my pants,” Aaron repeats. “Simple concept, Stef! Oh yeah, and it’s messed up! It’s wrong and very, very strange. Men’s nipples aren’t supposed to do that! I’ve thought back through the handful of girl-on-guy videos I’ve seen and every TV show where the attractive Americans rub together and also my extensive history of touching myself in every possible place a human male can touch himself and I can’t come up with any counterexamples. My nipples are supposed to be decorative. Non-functional! They’re like a pair of ornate vases on either side of my own personal mantelpiece, too small to keep anything in, too attractive to ignore, just, sort of, you know, present. And, after I finished having a fun little panic attack, I came up with a very short list of possible causes. You ready?” He starts pointing in the air at an imaginary chalkboard. “One: It’s the Goserelin implant. I know, I know, you’ve pooh-poohed this idea a thousand times already but I’m really squishy under here, Stef.” With the hand that isn’t pointing he fondles his chest and then withdraws it like he’s just suffered an electric shock. “In a way I never was before! And it’s not just regular body fat, either, because I did comparison squeezes on my arse and on my chest and after I nearly passed out I came to the conclusion that they are not the same. And the only things about my life that’ve changed are getting dragged down here and getting the implant, so unless men spontaneously grow little tiny titties to get through the harsh sunless Scandinavian winters, like a camel, kinda, then it’s got to be that in the absence of testosterone my body’s decided, oh, whoops, we need hormones to live, let’s make some, and flipped a coin and picked the wrong one.”

“I’m pretty sure that doesn’t happen.”

“Really? You’re pretty sure? Because it’s only the integrity of my chest on the line, here, Stef. Okay, let’s go to option two.” Aaron moves his pointing hand. “Ball cancer. That’s got to be it, right? I’ve got fucking ball cancer. It makes you grow full-on tits — and I know you have a low opinion of Fight Club but it’s basically a documentary where this is concerned, and since I don’t have any other ideas I’m going to believe it with both sides of my sore and puffy chest — so if it’s not the implant, it’s ball cancer! Oh, God, Stef, I’ve got ball cancer. Cancer of the balls, Stef! Are they going to have to cut them off?”

“Aaron!”

“Yes?”

“You do not have ball cancer.”

“Then what is this, Stef?”

“To be clear: you brushed against your chest and just immediately came?”

“Yes!”

“Really? Immediately?”

“Well…”

“Aaron.”

He closes his eyes and leans against the desk, waking the computer when he sits on the keyboard. On the screen, the text editor starts filling up with consonants. “Don’t make me say it,” he says. “It’s embarrassing even for me.”

Stefan, aware that Aaron is compelled to fill silences with information about his erogenous zones even when it isn’t pertinent to the topic at hand, sits down on the end of the bed, cross-legged, hands in his lap, looks up, and waits. After a moment, to force the issue, he raises an eyebrow.

“Fine,” Aaron says. “Fine!” He bounces back up off the desk and into a pace that takes him in wobbly circles through the small portion of space between the desk, the bed, the vanity and the door. “Yes, my hand brushed against them and, yes, it felt good, but that’s been a thing for a while. It didn’t immediately Jackson Pollock my boxers. What’s changed is that this time, it felt better than good. It felt… really, really good. It felt… Listen, Stef, because this is important, and I think it qualifies as mitigating circumstances, okay? Like when you miss an essay deadline and you fill out the little form and you provide the evidence and you have a little cry and they look at you all sympathetic and tell you, ‘It’s not your fault’? Well, that’s now, because I’m telling you, it felt so good. ‘Good’ is actually underselling it. ‘Great’ is underselling it. How can I put this…?” He stops pacing and leans against the desk again. “You know how, when you wank, and when you do it right, when you don’t just go at your prick like a jackhammer because you have nought point eight seconds to have an orgasm before one of the other boys comes into the dorm and starts hinting about how you can finish him, too, when you really spend the time, when you make love to your dick, and the tip just keeps getting more and more sensitive, especially if you keep stepping back from the, you know, the critical moment, until eventually it’s like you’ve got your big toe on a garden hose and you can feel the pressure building up and all it would take is for a pretty girl to blow gently on it and you’d have no choice but to let go and ruin the neighbours’ barbecue?” Stefan, who only touches himself to keep clean and, occasionally, to provide sperm samples for kidnappers, nods. Aaron returns to pacing. “Well, if we call that heretofore unbeatable sensation a ten and the starting position a zero, then just touching my nips when I’m in the right kind of mood has slowly been climbing from a two to a six. And that’s a straight up six, no prep work, no porn, just some thoughts I’m maybe a little uncomfortable about, and, you know, if your body starts handing you sixes for doing basically nothing then you owe it to yourself to see where things are going, right? Especially if the traditional body part for handling hot sweaty nice feelings has been taking a vacation in the land of one-point-five. I’m absolutely not questioning where that six is coming from, not in the moment, anyway, because I’m too busy taking that six out to dinner, showing her a good time and a bottle of wine, seeing if I can’t get her up to a seven or an eight, so obviously I go in for another stroke, you know? It would be a crime not to! Am I drawing a clear enough picture for you?”

“Yeah. Vivid.”

“So I immediately drop my trousers,” Aaron continues, miming but not reproducing the action, “because I’m starting to feel a little nasty downstairs, for the first time in a while, but when I go to drop my boxers as well, I realise that what’s going on down there is fine but it’s got nothing on what’s happening at balcony-level so I think, fuck it, although being honest I’m not really thinking anything coherent at that point because the finger I’ve got walking around upstairs is giving me sevens and eights while my dick is stuck on failing grades so I just go for it, and before I know it I’m lying on my back with both hands on my chest playing Spirograph with my nipples and that’s basically the point where I’m wondering if my chest has always been quite this soft and bouncy but I don’t care because I’m eighting, nining and I’m starting to ten and, God, Stef, I’m feeling warm all over, and that’s completely new and kind of exciting, and eventually when it finally happens, when I let go and, you know, flood my sunken cavern, I’m at a fucking eleven and it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean?” There’s a hint of hysteria to Aaron’s laugh. “I mean I normally come like an electric guitar riff, you know? It’s loud and it’s sort of complex and it’s really high-pitched but it’s also quick. Like, it’s over, and the echoes are nice, but that’s it. Sometimes I wonder afterwards why I even bother. Sometimes they even feel like discharging a chore my body’s handed to me because I happened to see a bread roll that looks like a sexy bottom and it turned me on. But this? This was like, man, I don’t know. Like I’m surfing a huge wave with full orchestral backup and one of those heat patches strapped to my back, and the ocean keeps throwing me around and the strings are getting louder and the heat is spreading out all through me and it just keeps going and until eventually I’m riding a wave a hundred metres high and when I finally hit the beach I destroy every little striped hut and hot dog stand and give all the sunbathers a nasty surprise. It was a life-changing orgasm, Stef. A fucking religious experience. And the afterglow, oh, God, the afterglow. I bask in it and I bask in it and I bask in it, until I finally start coming down, and then, suddenly, I remember exactly how I got there.” He pauses for a second before returning to his anxious circling. “I’m scared. I’m fucking scared, because something’s happening to me and either they’re doing it to me and won’t say why or my body’s doing it to itself, and I don’t know if it’s going to stop. And it’s all I can think about! This is not normal, Stef!”

Well.

Fuck.

He knows how this is supposed to go: he’s to act to support the sponsors, and for most intakes the sponsors just pretend nothing’s happening until it becomes impossible to deny it any longer. Christine said that in her year they worked it out early, thanks to that girl Vicky, who caught on and immediately started evangelising girlhood to the rest of them; a potential option, if Stefan wants to play Vicky’s role, but he’d have to clear it with someone first. He’s also got the impression that Christine’s intake lacked a Declan or a Will, that it was practically wall-to-wall introverts who’d been swept up by Dorley for violence Christine called social rather than physical. Stefan imagines trying to sell Will on the positives of growing breasts; it doesn’t end well.

Time to deny everything, then.

“Aaron,” he says, hoping the slight wobble in his voice isn’t audible. “You need to take a breath.”

“Oh, I took a breath,” Aaron says. “I took several.” He demonstrates, closing his eyes, breathing heavily and moaning softly for a few moments. “It was quite sexy, actually, Stef, you should have seen—” and then he cuts himself off, like his own mouth has run away from him, like he forgot for a moment that he should be panicking.

“Sit.” Stefan pats the mattress.

“Sit?” Aaron asks, tilting his head.

“You’re catastrophising,” Stefan says. “You need to calm down.” He frowns, wonders why that ordinary phrase sounds so strange, and it takes a second for it to hit him: Pippa’s bloody playlists. And Christine’s, too. This whole house has a Taylor Swift problem. Aaron’s still looking at him, quivering with the energy walking in circles has thus far failed to release, so he adds, “You’re not going to solve anything pacing around, talking without thinking.”

“But that’s my whole thing,” Aaron says with a weak grin.

Stefan ignores the joke. He grabs Aaron by the wrist and yanks him down onto the bed. The boy bounces, collides with Stefan’s shoulder and rights himself by grabbing, with various hands, the bedframe and Stefan.

“Sit,” Stefan says.

“Jesus,” Aaron remarks, twitching his hand away from Stefan’s thigh and cradling it in the crook of his arm like a wounded animal. “I thought that was a suggestion, not a fucking command.”

“You were making me dizzy, going round and round.”

“Yeah, sorry, but question, Stef: why am I the only one who’s panicking?”

“You’re not,” Stefan says with an exaggerated shrug. “Will is. You’ve seen him on his doomer soapbox.”

“Yeah, and the only reason I haven’t joined him is you, and your insistence that there’s a way out of here that isn’t, you know, horizontal.”

“Look.” Stefan rearranges himself, hopping backwards on the bed so he can twist to face Aaron, and gauge his reaction in real time. “This stage, the running around like headless chickens stage? It’s clearly part of it. They want you to panic.” This is, perhaps, pulling back the curtain a little too much, but if he dresses it up as speculation, that’s probably fine. “We’re repenting of our sins, remember? Got to spend a little time in hell for it to really stick.”

“You think?”

“I mean, they could just be planning to take us all out back and shoot us one by one, but this is a very spendy setup just for that. They want something from us; this is part of how they get it.”

“Okay,” Aaron says, breathing out slowly and matching the action with his hands, the way Stefan’s come to learn he does when he’s trying to calm himself. “Okay,” he continues, after a few more shallow breaths, “but the chest thing, Stef. My chest; yours. You said your chest was sensitive the other day. Have you, uh, tried to, you know, touch them? Your nipples?”

“No.”

“You want me to try?”

“No.”

“So. What about our mutual chests? What are you going to say when you start having surprise orgasms? When you start feeling uncomfortably fleshy? Hell—” he laughs briefly, “—what am I going to say when you come panicking about it to me?” Aaron switches to a deeper voice. “‘Son, you’re finally becoming a man. This is just what that’s like. The men in our family are very chesty.’ Or—” he switches to falsetto, “—‘Darling, you’re a woman now, and your body is changing. Don’t worry about that blood in your knickers.’” He coughs, suddenly embarrassed. “What is there that makes this better?”

Stefan blinks, remembering something he stumbled upon while exploring the limits of his new access to the internet (he can go almost anywhere online, but he can’t post, which is fine by him because he never did). An excuse good enough to buy a little more time. Another deception, but whatever; you can get used to any cruelty with repetition. “Gynecomastia,” he says.

“What. The fuck. Is gynecomastia?”

“It’s the not-actually-that-rare phenomenon where adolescent boys grow—”

“I’m twenty-one! This is a pretty fucking late adolescence!”

“I don’t mean that’s what we have,” Stefan says, rolling his eyes, over-acting his exasperation. “I mean, it’s common. Boys growing small, uh…” He mimes a pair of invisible breasts on his own chest, and eats the anxiety spike: it’s dangerously close to telling the truth about himself, but if he’s doing this to Aaron he deserves to feel bad about it.

“So?”

“So, it’s manageable! It goes away as they grow up. As puberty takes hold.” Stefan pauses for effect. “It goes away with testosterone.” He doesn’t actually know this for sure — he didn’t exactly read the page in detail — but how the hell is Aaron going to check his facts? It might as well be true. “And you know what’s going to happen when we leave? When the last Goserelin implant just dissolves or washes out with our pee or whatever?”

It takes Aaron a second to get it, but he does. “You really think it’ll just… go away when we get out of here?” Is Stefan imagining a look of slight disappointment on him? Yeah, he definitely is. Wishful thinking, Stef; it’d be so convenient to think of one of the boys down here as being a little bit like him. Nicer still if it were Aaron. But no: he’s the only girl in a prison that will eventually be full of unwilling women, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

It surprised Stefan to realise, late one night, face buried in his pillow and body covered up with sheets so no-one could possibly see or hear him, that if it was only his future on the line he’d give it up in a heartbeat if it meant Aaron, at least, wouldn’t have to be mutilated. But it’s clear that nothing he can do can save any of them. He could tell the truth and get washed out himself, or he can keep participating in the lies; neither choice gets Aaron out of here intact.

Eye on the prize, Stefan, and the prize is survival. For everyone.

“Yeah, it’ll go away,” he says, upbeat and hopeful.

Faking it, anyway.

 

2019 November 25
Monday

They haven’t spent much time alone together since their conversation about Aaron’s inopportune orgasm, so the knocking at Stefan’s door is a surprise. They haven’t even showered together, and when he opens the door to him, it shows: Aaron’s hair looks lifeless, like he rubbed in the conditioner with one hand and couldn’t massage it properly. But he’s needed space to reflect, and Stefan’s opted to give it to him, staying out of his way, keeping to light conversation at meals and in the common room and going back to his room alone, confident that if Aaron really needs him, he’ll show up again, panicking and grasping some part of his body, like usual.

Aaron’s not panicking tonight, though. He looks calm, his face set in its usual resting smirk.

Stefan steps aside to let him in, and Aaron sidles in. Rather than pace or sit on the bed or lean on the desk, he arranges himself on the floor, looking up. He seems calm, and almost still, for Aaron. He’s dressed the way he usually does the last few days: in the larger t-shirts he’s borrowed from Stefan, which don’t chafe quite so much.

“Hey,” he says, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I wanted to apologise.”

Stefan shoves the chair aside and sits on the floor facing him. If he’s going to apologise — if this is going to be one of those conversations — he wants them to be level, neither of them looking up or down. “What for?”

Aaron’s concentrating on a spot on the rug. “I haven’t been around. And we haven’t really talked. I just kind of unloaded on you and then went quiet.”

“It’s fine, really. I thought you might need some time to think. This place can get to you.”

“Never seems to get to— Oh, yeah.” Aaron’s clearly remembered the time, weeks ago, that Stefan had a serious try at slaking his skin off in the showers. The boy shudders, and Stefan has a traitorous thought: considered cynically, hurting himself in so relatively public a fashion was a smart move, given that it’s cemented him among the boys as someone who’s already had his breakdown. “Sorry. We don’t really talk about that, either. The shower thing. How have you been doing, since then?”

“Good.” A lie, and a particularly unpleasant one. “I guess I’ve realised that, well, I’m stuck down here. The worst has already happened.”

“I guess. No more evil nurses yet, anyway.”

“Fingers crossed. How have you been, Aaron? If we’re talking about the deep stuff again.”

The boy shrugs. “Well, Stefan, I’m growing tits.”

Stefan makes a show of squinting. “Not really big enough to call tits, surely?”

“Hey!” Aaron protests, holding his hands up to his chest. “My body, my rules!”

“And how do you feel about your—” Stefan leans forward, pretending to inspect him, “—magnificent jugs?”

He’s trying to keep the tone light, and either Aaron’s willing to be persuaded by it or he really is more sanguine than Stefan expected. “I thought about it,” Aaron says. “A lot. About what you said, about teenagers with gynecomastia, and how it goes away during puberty. And then I thought, what if it doesn’t? What if we’re past puberty so it doesn’t work like that, even when the testosterone comes back?”

“Aaron—”

“No, wait.” Aaron holds up a finger. “And then I thought, what about trans men? What do they do?”

“Pretty sure they bind, and eventually get them removed.”

Aaron claps his hands. “There it is! That’s what I thought! So that’s my, I guess, worst-case scenario here. Yours, too. Get them removed.”

“Like a trans man?”

“Sure. Why not? If it works for them, it’ll work for me. And that’s only if it gets bad enough. If it’s like you said, that they’ll go away on their own… that’s fine, too. Hah!” Aaron looks up at the ceiling, having either guessed or been told there are cameras in the rooms, and grins. “You wanted me to panic?” he says, to the ceiling. “Guess what? Not panicking any more.” He looks back down at Stefan, energised. “We’ve got this place all figured out. And, you know—” he looks away again, trying to hide his grin, “—in the meantime, since I’m stuck with, you know, whatever’s going on under my t-shirt, I might as well take advantage.”

It takes Stefan a moment. “You’ve been touching them again, haven’t you?”

“Non-stop,” Aaron says.

“Oh my God.”

“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. In your pants.”

Stefan hits him. “You dick! All this time you’ve been hiding away in your room, I thought you were fucking depressed or something!”

“I was! I was really, genuinely depressed! Just, you know, in between visits to the lemonade factory.”

Stefan leans back on his hands, finding it difficult, between Aaron’s dirty grin and the mental image of his last few nights, to keep his composure. “I can’t believe you, Aaron,” he says, stifling a giggle.

“Dude, I’m growing tits! What do you want from me?”

 

2019 November 27
Wednesday

“This is it,” Maria says. “If the shit’s going to hit the fan any day, it’s going to hit it today. And you all know what that means: Edy, Monica, Jane, Harmony, Ella, Tabby, you’ve all gone at least one round with this. And Pippa, well, I’m sure you remember what it was like. Christine: you’re in reserve.”

Pippa, sitting serious on one of the briefing room stools with her clipboard and phone out on the table in front of her, nods and worries at her lip. Christine, frowning, worries at her coffee instead. She’s chosen not to comment on the mug she’s been given, which is decorated in a faded pink with an illustration of a woman in silhouette floating from an umbrella above the words, in embossed and nearly rubbed-off cursive, Super Femmy, Fabby Lipstick, Castrate the Atrocious! The thing’s got to be over a decade old, and thus dates Dorley’s appalling sense of humour to at the very least some time before Christine’s first puberty.

Maria’s called the sponsors down to the briefing room on the first-floor basement, and ignored much grumbling and slurping from novelty mugs before she dropped the bombshell: something’s probably going to happen today. And even Christine, who’s never been involved in any official capacity before and whose intake was, to hear the other sponsors bitch at Indira about it, unusually relaxed — not that it had felt that way at the time — can guess what that means: one of the boys has worked it out. Some of it, anyway.

Christine’s here because, even though she still hasn’t properly accepted Bea’s job offer — to fill a new role that’s a cross between Head of Network Security and Helper Monkey — she’s been getting roped into more and more sponsor-aligned work. Her fault, really. She’s been spending evening after evening down in the security room with laptops hooked up, patching the holes she used to exploit, which has meant a lot of time staring into space or scrolling on her phone or chatting with friends while she waits for code to compile or archive searches to complete. Maria was always going to notice. Roles around here tend to expand to fill the space available, and the devil always finds work for idle hands.

She’s glad to be sitting with Pippa, though. There’s still tension between them, but better her than the other sponsors, whose cynicism Christine finds wearing after a while. The youngest one is Indira’s age but lacks Dira’s charming tendency to give Christine enough rope to hang herself with and then catch her before she falls, and the rest are, well, everything Christine expects from sponsors. She likes them as people, mostly, but at work they expect both confidence and detachment, and while they don’t actually criticise her for her occasional squeamishness, they always seem dishearteningly surprised by it. Pippa, for all that she has yet to forgive her, shares with her the oil-and-water beliefs that, yes, Dorley’s work can and will help these boys, and that, yes, it’s still really, really awful.

It’d be nicer still if Paige were here, but Paige has classes today and, occasional visits to Stef aside, refuses point-blank to get involved. She said so, loudly, in the middle of the dining hall, and seemed quite irritated when Harmony and a couple of the other sponsors made light fun of her principled objection.

“How many of them have developed?” Monica asks, looking up from her clipboard. Without Declan and in addition to her duties as the basement’s lecturer on Feminism 101, she’s moved into something approximating Indira’s current role, maintaining a watch on all sponsors and subjects. Christine doesn’t know her that well yet, but Pippa checks in with her a couple of times a week and says she’s guarded but nice enough. Groups of sponsors that work well together tend to keep working together, and cliques like that can be hard to break into.

“Aaron, Adam and Stef,” Maria says. “Yes, I know,” she adds, to a murmured chorus of mild surprise, “that’s a lot at such an early stage. Adam’s the most recent. We’re talking only tiny bumps, here; barely Tanner 2. Stef’s been wearing hoodies to hide her own development and protect herself from accidents and knocks, and she’s talked Aaron out of panicking about it — I swear, at this point that boy would jump off a cliff if she asked him to — and managed to persuade him to keep it between the two of them. Well, mostly between the two of them.” She sighs. “Aaron asked me for a bra yesterday.”

“Um, breakthrough?” Jane says.

“No,” Maria replies, sounding tired. “No. He’s just being a little shit.”

“Poor Maria,” Edy says, patting her on the back.

“So, what’s so special about today?” Monica says. “None of those three are rabble-rousers.”

Maria nods at Christine, who hits the play button on her phone. The main screen in the briefing room comes on, showing Will’s room.

“Last night,” Maria says, gesturing at the screen, “Adam went to see William. Now that, in itself, is not unusual; they’ve been talking to each other about their sensitive chests and the other little changes most of the boys have noticed. Quietly, in private, the way it normally goes with bonded pairs. They’ve come to similar conclusions to the ones Stef encouraged in Aaron: it’s just the Goserelin. William’s history’s helped us here. He’s always been very firm that the Goserelin was going to have some kind of an effect on them, drawing on both his experiences with his father and his, uh, didactic nature when it comes to what I believe his fellow Redditors would term, ‘Science, bitch’.” Her finger-quotes are almost as arch as her tone. “It doesn’t mean that he’s been enjoying the experience, but so far it hasn’t energised him enough to become a topic for his little speeches.”

“Except for the time Aaron needled him about his reduced muscle mass,” Monica points out.

Will’s been soapboxing to the whole common room, on themes of injustice, disproportionate punishment, the need for a robust corrections system that nevertheless does not include unexpected kidnapping rings operating out of innocent-looking dormitories, and so on. The unpleasant fate of Declan, which initially worried Will into a blessed near-silence, eventually had him standing by the TV, shouting over the reality shows until one of the sponsors either told him to shut up — which tended only to encourage him — or consented to hit the mute button. Tabby dragged him back to his room a couple of times to give everyone some relief but general agreement’s been that dumping him in a cell just for being loud would set an unfortunate precedent. Mostly they’ve been letting him get it out of his system.

“Adam asked Will to feel his chest,” Edy says, “and Will very nearly put two and two together on the spot.”

“Now he’s had a chance to sleep on it,” Tabby says, “he’ll almost definitely have come up with something close enough to the truth.”

“As his sponsor,” Maria asks, “what’s your guess on his reaction?”

Tabby shrugs. “His response to the Goserelin’s mostly been to yell a lot, but he’s a very… masculine individual. To a point of overcompensation, in my opinion. Certainly he’s already sensitive about his muscle loss, although he’s attributed it fifty/fifty to the Goserelin and to the lack of exercise equipment. Confirmation that Adam’s growing breasts? The expectation that he will, too? He might hurt himself; he might even try to hurt someone else. It could be bad.”

“Fantastic,” Harmony says. “Another time-bomb boy.”

“Yeah,” Ella says, poking her. “He could be worse than you were.”

“Ladies,” Maria says, “try to remember, we wouldn’t have taken him in if we didn’t believe he was worth helping. So let’s keep an eye out and try and save him from himself, okay? Any questions?”

As the others talk, Pippa wakes her phone and taps the shortcut to the cameras in Stef’s room. She keeps them out of active monitoring, normally, just spooling straight to disk — one of the privileges of being an acknowledged and actualised woman is a slightly higher degree of privacy — but with activation in easy reach, in case of emergency. Christine can see the screen and shares Pippa’s relief to see Stef alone and still in bed and thus, for now, safe. Pippa taps out a message to her, summarising the briefing, and they both get a giggle out of Stef’s disgruntled reaction to her PC waking up and playing the alert sound over and over.

Stef stops flipping the bird at the camera when she starts reading Pippa’s message. When she’s done she looks up at the ceiling, smiles — at the wrong camera; Pippa taps the screen a couple more times to clip that so she can tease her about it later — and starts collecting up her things for her morning shower, pausing to check under her bed for her pocket taser, test its charge, and slip it into the lining of the hoodie hung up on the wardrobe door.

Last resort, Pippa said when she handed it over. Christine hopes Stef remembers that.

 

* * *

 

Pippa meets Stefan’s eyes as he passes her in the corridor on the way to the dining room. She’s asking if he’s okay; in response, he shrugs. It’s a complicated question, and not one he feels up to answering.

Aaron’s not at the table yet, but the others are. Adam’s on his own at the end of the table he usually shares with Will, and a quick glance shows why: Will’s eating with Raph and Ollie, hunched in a conspiratorial circle, one or other of them occasionally glancing around to make sure they’re not overheard. Stefan doesn’t know what they could possibly be discussing that would have any hope of achieving anything, but checks the weight of his hoodie against his hip anyway, feeling for the little taser. He’s practised, and he can pull it from its slightly awkward inside pocket and have it ready in about two seconds. He hasn’t actually used it yet, but he’s fairly confident he knows which end is which.

He sits next to Adam, because the boy looks lost without Will, and they share what he hopes is a companionable silence. He still feels inhibited from talking to Adam a lot of the time; especially today. Maybe it’s the tension in the air. Maybe it’s the boy’s tendency to insert religious metaphors into longer conversations. Maybe it’s because every word out of Stefan’s mouth lately makes him feel like a liar.

Appropriate: he is a liar.

Aaron slumps into the chair next to Stefan and starts pouring porridge, managing a decent ratio of oats in the bowl to oats on the table considering how tired he looks. When he’s done he sits back and raises an arm; Edy, Adam’s sponsor, steps over from the little cart parked by the door and pours out hot milk from a thermos. It’s the compromise they struck after everyone got sick of the Weetabix: they can choose porridge some days, but only if a sponsor keeps control of the hot milk and Aaron promises never to summon them with an imperious snap of his fingers or ever again refer to them as his ‘mummy milkers’.

They eat in near silence, interrupted only by the occasional exclamation from Will’s sibilant huddle and Martin slouching in to conduct his daily Weetabix penance.

“Hey, Stef,” Aaron whispers.

“Yeah?”

“Does it feel weird today, or is it just me?”

Stefan makes a show of looking around, taking in the nervous sponsors, a downcast Adam, and the three irritated faces on the other side of the room.

“It’s not just you,” he says.

“Any idea what’s going on?”

“Nope.”

“You think Will’s got…” Aaron trails off, but gestures with his elbow towards Stefan’s chest.

There doesn’t seem much point in denying the possibility. “Maybe,” Stefan says.

“You, too?” Adam hisses, grabbing on to Stefan’s sleeve and pulling it; the first physical contact they’ve ever had that Stefan himself didn’t initiate.

Stefan shrugs. “I’ve been a little swollen,” he whispers, just loud enough to be heard from the other side of the room. “I think it’s something like gynecomastia, from the Goserelin.” Time to see if the lie works twice.

“What’s that?” Adam asks.

“Breast-like swelling,” Aaron says, pointing at Adam’s chest with his spoon. “Happens to up to seventy percent of adolescent boys at some point or another in their development. Goes away on its own during puberty in seventy-five percent of cases. Occasionally caused by other factors. There are options for removal, if necessary.” He picks up on Stefan’s raised eyebrow. “What? I can’t do the reading? I asked Maria to get me a screen grab of the Wikipedia page.”

“It goes away?”

“Yes.”

“None of you know shit,” Will says, raising his voice and glaring at the three of them. He keeps eye contact with Aaron for a moment before returning to his huddle, shaking his head and muttering, “Gynecomastia…”

Well. It almost worked. Edy, still guarding the hot milk, gives Stefan a half-smile when none of the others are looking.

 

* * *

 

Will clearly planned it carefully.

The sponsors’ shift changes have never been particularly timely, a consequence, Pippa says, of Dorley’s staffing shortage, and the fact that almost every sponsor has responsibilities elsewhere: their studies, for the younger girls and some of the postgrads, and actual honest-to-goodness part-time jobs, for Maria and some of the other older ones. Sometimes sponsors are late and sometimes they are distracted, especially if it’s been hours since a briefing that warned of potential problems that, despite a little tension at breakfast, have yet to emerge. The most professional people in Dorley’s employ, according to Abby, are the contracted PMC guys, and they spend ninety-nine-plus-percent of their time goofing off in the basement one break room, isolated from the actuality of Dorley’s work by air gapping and a PlayStation 4. To them, Dorley’s just one of a number of secretive assignments with eccentric security requirements, but as contracts go it’s quite sought after as it offers the most amount of free time on the job to, for example, play video games.

After breakfast they trooped into the common room, subdued and in two groups: Will, Raph and Ollie taking up station on the metal tables, and Stefan, Aaron and Martin coalescing around the bewildered Adam, who kept looking across the room as if Will might at any moment renounce his dubious association with Raph and Ollie and return to whatever relationship he’s been cultivating with Adam over the past two months.

One of the sponsors flicked on the television and Stefan’s group tried to concentrate on the brace of reality shows, bringing Adam in for as many conversations as they could on the subjects of whose cake should win versus whose actually did, which dress she should say yes to, and which date was the least cringe-worthy. It worked to distract him for a little while. They even got him to express a slightly baffling opinion about one of the men on the dating show: “Unworthy of God’s grace.”

During the early hours after midday — it’s difficult to keep accurate track of time in the common room, with phones still officially discouraged — a handful of sponsors responded to reminders and left, eventually paring the supervisory staff down to three: Maria, Edy and Pippa. They took up position at the back of the room, a sensibly wary distance from Will’s group, but made the mistake of turning in on each other to talk without being overheard.

Stefan didn’t see or hear the signal Will gave, and so didn’t understand what was about to happen until all three men were out of their chairs and running across the room. He didn’t have enough time to find his taser, or put himself in their way; all he could do was shout, “Look out!” and then it was too late.

He’s sitting cross-legged now, with a hand under Maria’s head to keep it off the concrete as Edy checks her airways and Pippa directs the hired soldiers while keeping her taser pointed at Aaron, Adam and Martin, who for the moment all seem too stunned to react. Stefan hopes none of them wonder why no-one’s pointing a taser at him.

There’s blood on his hand and he’s trying desperately not to look at it.

The military contractors drag first Will and then Raph off to the cells, and by the time they return for Ollie, Aaron’s recovered enough to yell out, “They’re keeping us locked up! Help us!”

The soldier holding Ollie’s legs directs a withering look at Aaron, says, “Yeah, well, it looks like you fucking deserve it, don’t you?” and lets the door shut on Aaron’s outraged expression.

In the quiet, Stefan strokes Maria’s hair while they wait for help to arrive.

 

* * *

 

The whirlwind of activity drags Christine with it as it passes through the kitchen, with sponsors summoned from elsewhere on campus rushing in through the front doors and the two PMC guys — not anyone Christine’s met, and not anyone she’s likely to meet again; they’ve seen rather too much and will find themselves moved on before long, bound by NDAs and, rather more pertinently, threats — laying Maria down gently on the kitchen floor. Paige, back for lunch between classes, gets roped into swelling the ranks of sponsors downstairs while Christine helps keep Maria comfortable on cushions brought up from the break room.

“Move over a little, please,” Edy says.

Christine shuffles out of the way and Edy, frowning in concentration, stamps as hard as she can on the tile, cracking it. She retrieves a knife from a drawer and swipes it quickly across her forearm, then squats down and squeezes the wound, carefully dripping blood onto the crack in the floor, which she then smears with a finger.

“Edith!” someone yells from the front door, diverting her attention and giving Christine a chance to respond to blood the way she usually does, with deep, controlled breaths and averted eyes. When she looks back, Edy’s wrapped a sheaf of paper towels around her arm and is directing the soldiers back down to the first basement, there to stay until relieved.

“Christine,” Edy says, crouching back down, returning to Christine’s eye level. “Take a taxi to the hospital, please.”

“Of course,” Christine replies. No thought necessary; Edy may sound and look calm but her girlfriend’s lying on the kitchen floor, conscious but incoherent. Anything she needs, she gets.

“I’ll join you when I can.” Edy waits for Christine’s nod and then shouts to the whole ground floor, “Will someone please call Indira, Monica and Beatrice and get one of them back here to relieve me?” Edy’s the most senior sponsor on-site, bar Maria, and a stickler for the rules; others might disregard everything in this situation to go with the ambulance, but Edy will make sure her responsibilities are covered before anything. Christine would admire that if it wasn’t stupid as hell.

Jodie, leaning on the doorjamb and observing the situation with obvious distress, agrees to call anyone and everyone, and takes her phone outside to get away from the hubbub.

“Christine,” Edy says, turning to face her again, “there’s one of ours at the hospital: Rabia. She just started there recently, and she’s our new house nurse. She’ll be embedded in the hospital systems by now, so can you check in with her and make sure nothing untoward is recorded? We need everyone to think Maria—” her voice cracks, but she recovers, “—fell, and fell here.” She points to the cracked tile. “There was no Will, no attack, and if she says anything about him while she’s incoherent, someone needs to be there to cover for her. That’ll be you, for today.”

“On it,” Christine says.

“You know the nurse?”

Christine pulls up the relevant record on her phone, already updated with her new position. She shows Edy the screen. “I have her name, picture, job title; everything. I’ll find her.”

“Good. Thank you. I’ll have someone tell her to expect you.” Edy raises her voice again. “How long did they say for the ambulance?”

“Should be only another couple of minutes,” someone says, and Edy nods, locks eyes with Christine again for a second, and then returns her attention to Maria, who is mumbling under her breath and looking at nothing.

“Stay with me, baby,” Edy says, crouching down and taking one of Maria’s hands. “Look at me. Listen to my voice. Stay with me. Please, Maria. Stay with me.”

 

* * *

 

The image of Maria’s head hitting concrete is impossible to shake. There’s still blood there, on the floor, between his knees; he wonders if it will stain. If it will be the last mark Maria leaves on this place. If Will and the others will wash out, if the sponsors will become more cruel, if this is the beginning of the end. She seemed to wake before the soldiers carried her out, but even though her eyes looked at him he doesn’t think she saw him at all.

Still a little blood on his hand, too. He wipes it on his trouser leg. It doesn’t entirely come off.

What a place this would be to die.

He’s aware of movement, of people filing in, but it’s a hand on his shoulder that forces him to focus on anything but the floor in front of him. He looks up, startled by the contact; Paige has taken him by the arm and is tugging gently, encouraging him to stand, holding out her other arm to support him.

Paige?

The absurdity of it is enough to completely clear his head. If there’s one thing she’s been clear about, it’s her refusal to even consider ever participating in the sponsor process.

He checks to make sure the boys are still on the couches, behind him, and whispers, “What are you doing down here?”

“Filling in. I’m not happy about it.”

“Is Maria okay?”

“No news yet. She’s being taken to the hospital. But she was unconscious for less than thirty seconds. There’s reason to be hopeful.”

“Good,” Stefan says. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it.”

Paige makes a show of letting him stand on his own, of checking him over for harm, and when she’s done she turns him around so she can face him. “I don’t think there’s anything you could have done, Stef, and I’m glad you didn’t try, or we might have been sending two women to the hospital today, and you’re considerably less explicable.” She smiles weakly. “You’re supposed to be out of the country, remember?” He nods; she’s not wrong. If he gets hurt he’ll have to be treated on the premises, because leaving Dorley would create problems big enough that Beatrice might just write him off. “Go join the others,” she says. “Edy will be down again soon.”

Oh, God. Edy! Isn’t she dating Maria? Pippa’s kept him up-to-date on Dorley gossip — she likes to talk, especially when she’s sleepy — and according to her, Edy and Maria’s long-standing friendship became something more after Beatrice’s birthday dinner, when Edy put a happily drunk Maria to bed and never left. After that, it escalated: spotted holding hands in the dining hall; seen walking together on campus; caught leaving Maria’s room again and giving up on keeping the secret.

How’s she going to react? She’s always been, next to Pippa, the most calm and kind sponsor; she brushes Adam’s hair, for goodness’ sake! What will this do to her?

At some point, while Stefan was sitting on the floor, Adam and Martin dragged the second sofa back to its usual place by the TV, and with Aaron they’re sat in an anxious circle, ignoring the muted television and the women who keep coming in, in ones and twos, whispering to each other.

“This is fucked,” Aaron’s saying, as Stefan sits down next to him. “This is so fucking fucked. And you, Stef!” He whirls on Stefan. “Why would you warn them?”

It comes out too loud. “Because I didn’t want anyone to get hurt, Aaron!” Stefan says, and winces against his voice. Too fucking deep. He bites the inside of his cheek. To go to pieces over voice dysphoria at a time like this would be stupid as well as selfish. Keep it in, let it out later, when it can’t hurt anyone else. A mantra, lately.

“But what if it had worked?”

Irritation overrides self-disgust. “You mean, what if Will outright killed her? Or held her hostage? You saw those army guys, right? And you see how many people are down here now, right?” He throws an angry arm in the direction of the almost two dozen women at the other end of the room, and takes a moment to wonder if Dorley needs to reconsider its work/life balance if it can field this many women only after the worst has happened. “You think he could fight his way through all that? Even with the idiot twins on his side? Even with help from you and you and you?” He points at the boys in turn; Adam recoils from his finger. Into the silence he starts counting, tapping his hand on his forearm with each point. “There are guards. They have batons. And tasers. And there are armed men. At least two; maybe more. And they have fucking guns, Aaron. Real guns that shoot real bullets! There are doors and locks and stairs and— and— Jesus Christ, Aaron, do I really need to say all this again? If you don’t get that this was nothing more than a demonstration of how fucking stupid Will is capable of being, how pointlessly violent, then what’s even going on in that head of yours?”

He pushes against Aaron’s temple. The boy offers no resistance, instead holding up his hands. Conceding. “Stef, I get it, that was a dumb thing to say, but, please, calm down—”

Stefan recoils at the sheer idiocy of it. “Is that going to help? Being calm? Will that make it so Will didn’t just slam a woman’s head into a concrete floor? Aaron—!”

He’s interrupted by Aaron grabbing urgently at him, taking his hand and squeezing it until he shuts up. It’s so unlike Aaron that Stefan bites back his anger and focuses on the subject of Aaron’s gaze, which turns out to be Adam, curled up in the corner of the other couch, making himself small the way he does when someone has triggered a memory from a past none of them have yet been able to understand, beyond guesswork.

“Shit,” Stefan says. He smiles at Aaron — a thanks; an apology — and swaps seats, sits down next to Adam and, slowly, holds out a hand, making clear that it’s an offer, not an obligation. “I’m sorry, Adam. I won’t raise my voice again.” He’s aware of a couple of the sponsors looking on, but that’s not important at the moment.

“No, it’s okay,” Adam says, quietly, finding the few words an effort. “I’m sorry for my reaction.”

“You’ve got nothing to apologise for,” Stefan insists, injecting as much sincerity and kindness into his words as he knows how, leveraging the breathing and pitch exercises he’s been doing in his room to raise his voice to a near-whispered alto. Anything to seem less threatening, less male: Adam doesn’t respond the same way when sponsors raise their voices, and Stefan’s come to the obvious conclusion about the gender of Adam’s tormentor, whoever he was, in the life he left behind. There’s a part of Stefan that wants to rub his own nose in that, to crow about how he, a supposed woman, is so easily able to emulate the man who hurt the boy, but he ignores it as much as he can. Self-hatred can be so self-indulgent, and Stefan has more important things to do. It works, anyway: after a few more quiet reassurances, Adam finally takes his hand. “The fault is entirely mine,” Stefan continues, “and I’m genuinely sorry. I was angry and I was scared, and because of that I raised my voice, but I didn’t mean to hurt you, and I’ll try to do better.”

“This is all my fault,” Adam says. “If I hadn’t gone to see Will last night, Maria wouldn’t be hurt. If I hadn’t told him about my—”

“His actions are not your responsibility,” Stefan says quickly. Adam’s chest is not a subject he wants to deal with right now. “And neither is Maria.”

“Edy likes her,” Adam whispers.

“I know.”

“I’m so scared for her.”

“Did you see the girl who helped me up?” Stefan nods at Paige, hovering nearby and, for all that she has a taser, absolutely failing to look menacing. She’s not paying much apparent attention to them, seeming mostly focused on her phone, but it’s clear she’s listening. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Aaron staring at her, and wraps up his irritation with that along with all the other things he doesn’t want to think about right now. Aaron can look at pretty girls if he wants to. “She told me Maria’s probably going to be okay. She wasn’t out for long.”

“But the blood!”

“There wasn’t much,” Stefan says, showing him his other hand, the one he’s been keeping in the front pocket of his hoodie, so he doesn’t have to look at the drying blood, so he can feel the weight of his taser. There’s very little left on it now; more must have rubbed off inside the pocket. “See? I had my hand under her head, covering the wound. It was just a trickle, really.”

“You really think she’ll be okay?”

Stefan flicks his eyes back to Paige, who nods. “I do,” he says.

Adam smiles. Relaxes his grip on Stefan’s hand a little. Absorbs the knowledge for a moment. “What’s going to happen to Will?” he asks.

“That depends on them.” Stefan tilts his head towards the door, where Edy’s just entered and is talking animatedly with some of the girls. Relieved smiles on several faces; a good sign. “He did a really, really bad thing, but it could have been a lot worse. And he thought he was protecting you, I think.” Protecting Adam or protecting himself?

Adam gasps, holding in tears, and Stefan knows the drill: he pulls on his contact with Adam, drags him into an awkward hug, and lets him cry on his shoulder. There’s a lot of tension to let out, and after a little while the shuddering gulps become ordinary breaths, still saturated with moisture but indicative of someone who has passed through the worst of it. Aaron surprises Stefan by coming to sit on Adam’s other side, placing a tentative hand on his back, and stroking his spine. He makes searching eye contact with Stefan, asking if he’s doing it right. Stefan nods, mouths, Thank you, and Aaron smiles.

What a sight they must be. A far cry from the day Stefan met them all.

They remain that way for some time. On the other end of the sofa, Martin stays silent, his legs hitched up under his chin, his thoughts a mystery as usual. Stefan can’t find his usual resentment for him; they’ve all had a scare. Maybe he’ll try to pick him apart some time, find the man beneath the misery. Preferably before Dorley removes the man entirely, Stefan adds to himself, and disguises his laughter as a cough.

The gallows humour here gets everyone eventually.

When Adam’s mostly dried out and sitting back and Aaron’s returned to the other sofa where there’s more room, Edy sits down in front of them on one of the bean bags. She looks like hell: makeup smeared and rubbed off, eyes red, and there’s a dressing on her forearm which confuses Stefan as he’s sure she didn’t get hurt in the altercation. She also looks vulnerable, unarmed and sat in front of them, which feels foolish on a day like this, but Stefan quickly checks and there are several sponsors behind them with tasers aimed, just in case the basement’s least-likely rebels decide they want to have a go.

“Are you okay, Edy?” Adam asks.

She smiles at him, brittle but genuine. “I’ve had better days,” she says, “but I’ll be okay.” They link hands for a second, before Edy drops hers back into her lap with the abrupt motion of someone who’s been running on adrenaline for a long time and is starting to reach the end of her reserves. “Now,” she continues, addressing all of them, “since it’s just you four, I won’t give you the big speech. Nor will I give you the one I’m planning to give to the others, which is an even bigger speech. The short version is, none of you are in trouble. Not even you, Aaron, for questioning why Stef would try to warn us.”

“I panicked,” Aaron mumbles, into his chest. “It was a shitty thing to say.”

“It’s understandable; we’re your captors. You don’t have to like us. But, and I believe I am summing up general sentiment here, if anyone tries anything like that ever again, we won’t bother formally washing them out, we’ll just bury them in the woods and walk away happy.” Adam hiccups, and Edy adds, “Sorry. But you need to understand the… depth of feeling here. You all might want to be on your best behaviour for a bit.”

“You don’t have to worry about us,” Stefan says. “Right?”

Adam nods, Martin remains quiet, and Aaron crosses himself.

“Good,” Edy says. “Now, Maria’s been taken to hospital, but we don’t, for now, believe her life to be in danger. William, Raphael and Oliver are in the cells and will remain there until we can evaluate them. No-one’s washing out just yet, but their future depends entirely on how they respond to this. When you speak to them — and you’ll all have the opportunity to visit, with our supervision, if you want, and I encourage you to do so — it would be helpful if you could impress that upon them. Do it for their sake—” she shoots a withering glance at Aaron, who closes his mouth and makes a conciliatory gesture, “—not ours.”

“He’ll be okay?” Adam asks.

“That’s up to him. I’m sure you know by now that his past is not a pretty one and that, as he is now—” Edy allows a snarl to creep momentarily into her voice, “—the world would not miss him. Certainly his brother wouldn’t, nor the students he assaulted.” She closes her eyes and takes a breath before continuing. “But he, like Oliver and Raphael, is not done yet, and we are dedicated to releasing the potential hidden inside such troubled boys. I promise you, we don’t throw anyone away on a whim, no matter how… angry we might be, in the moment.”

“Troubled boys?” Aaron says. “Are we ‘troubled boys’ too?”

“If you’d like to dispute the label,” Edy says, “be my guest.”

“No, well, it’s just that it’s very Dickensian.”

“Well,” Edy says, standing up and stretching, “we are an old-fashioned operation.”

 

* * *

 

Christine needs a fucking cigarette.

Rabia, the nurse, met her out of the taxi, and they greeted each other with the usual Dorley-solidarity hug, the one that says, I know some really weird shit about you and you know the same stuff about me and we’ll never, ever tell. Fully briefed and prepared, Rabia gave her the latest on Maria’s condition: awake, not exactly lucid but aware of where she is, and being kept overnight at minimum. Christine introduced herself as the new Head of Network Security — reasoning that if she’s going to keep getting drawn into things like this she might as well take a salary for it — and Rabia quickly went over her integration with the hospital systems as they took the lift. There’s no need for Christine to check the work unless she wants to, as it was set up by Elle’s people. Christine nodded and pretended to know who Elle was. Another graduate? Since when did any of them have ‘people’?

In Maria’s private room they positioned Christine, truthfully, as a dorm-mate of Maria’s, here to keep her company until family arrives, and Christine greeted the doctor, settled into one of the bedside chairs, and held Maria’s hand. She spent the next few hours talking quietly to her when she seemed receptive, reassuring her that everything’s taken care of back home, and trying to ignore how much the whole setup, private room and all, reminded her of visiting her mother in hospital, years before Dorley, after another fabricated fall.

Rabia offered to cover for her for a while at the end of her shift and that was all the excuse Christine needed to leave the building at a near-jog, find a quiet spot in the parking lot with a railing to lean on, and glare out at the late-night traffic.

She really, really needs a fucking cigarette.

The addiction’s long gone, wasn’t even sparked up again by the smoke she bummed off of Naila on Dorley’s roof, over a month ago, but the emotional need will never leave her. A final gift from the boy they burned out of her: his need, always, to be occupied.

Her fingers twitch.

Smoking was a way to hide from his regular bullies, or from his dad’s temper, or from his mum and the marks on her arm and face. He’d smoke behind the pool maintenance shed at school or on the back balcony at home or on the roof of the phone repair shop in town. One cigarette after another. And there was a difference: at school it was a prop, an excuse to get away, a reason to occupy his hands, and he could make one last forever, or until the bell went, taking little drags and watching the cars go by, wondering what would happen if he just walked out onto the road; on the balcony he’d smoke as quickly as possible, to satisfy the need before his dad found him; on the roof, a place no-one knew about except the guys in the shop, who owed him a few favours and asked no questions, he’d smoke five, ten in a row, substituting cigarettes for self-control.

It was to the roof he escaped after he caught his dad’s hand, practically broke his own wrist in one last desperate attempt to give a fuck, to keep his father’s hands off his mother’s body. He’d had to fight his way out of the man’s grip as the bastard apologised: didn’t mean to hurt his son; didn’t mean to hurt another man.

Look at me now, Dad! Want to take another swing?

She remembers the last time he saw him and her fingers twitch.

Dad got sick after she disappeared, Indira told her, during her first year at Dorley, and she always wondered if she was the cause. There are times when she hopes she was, when she thinks she might have poisoned the old fuck with her absence.

Indira also told her how her mother stayed by him. Always devoted, despite everything; always an idiot. But it eats at her: if she hadn’t disappeared, if her mother hadn’t lost her son, might they have left together, when he/she was old enough and able to support her? Could she/he have saved her instead of giving up, turning all his bullshit out on other people, becoming the kind of person Dorley scoops up for reform? Would her mother even have come? It kills her that she could find out; she could go see her mum and drag her away from her father’s bedside, leave him to fucking rot, and all it would take is breaking Dorley’s strictest rule and exposing herself to more humiliation than she thinks she could stand.

She imagines meeting her mother again, coming out to her, packing her suitcases and taking her away from that huge, empty house, and her fingers twitch.

She thinks of the info packets piled up on her desk, the updates on her family, unopened. Maybe one of them says he finally died. Maybe her mother’s free, and better off without the both of them.

“Hey,” says a warm, familiar voice, accompanied by a hand closing over her fingers. “I thought I’d find you out here.”

Shit. Should have stayed with Maria. Lived with the memories. Another bad decision made in haste.

An arm encloses her, turns her around, makes her look down into soft brown eyes. “How are you doing?” Abby says.

“The usual,” Christine says. “Having a minor breakdown over shit I can’t control. Jonesing for a smoke. Hating my dad. Did you see Maria yet?”

“Yes. She seems to be doing okay. The nurse, Rabia, she sent me looking for you. She said you seemed upset.”

“She’s perceptive.”

“It’s nice to have one of ours here.”

Christine nods absently. “She seems to know her stuff, too. Speaking of, who’s Elle?”

The quizzical look Abby adopts is one of her less convincing deceptions. “I don’t know,” she says.

Christine rolls her eyes. “I’m on staff now, Abs, against my better judgement. I’m allowed to know shit.”

“Perhaps, but I’m not allowed to tell.”

“Fine. Be mysterious. I’ll just look it up, anyway.”

“Come on inside,” Abby says.

“No. Wanna be cold and miserable.”

“There’s hot chocolate…”

“No.”

“And baked goods…”

“Fine!” Christine says. “Foul temptress. Evil hussy.” She succumbs, as she was always going to, to Abby’s mischievous grin, and consents to be dragged inside, but because she still has her pride she keeps up a string of insults until Abby presses a hot drink and a warm pastry into her hands.

 

* * *

 

They’ve got the lights low in Maria’s room. It’s late, but the room is warm and the murmur of the television hanging from the ceiling keeps them company when none of them have the energy to talk. Maria, lucid again, sips water from a bottle Christine got her from the vending machine. Abby, having stuffed herself full of sweet things, sleeps on Christine’s shoulder.

A couple of hours ago she snapped a picture of Maria, sitting up and smiling, head wrapped and fingers v-signing, and sent it to the group chat. Almost immediately she had to turn off notifications, because her phone wouldn’t stop vibrating with messages from Dorley graduates across the country, asking her to pass on their good wishes and their relief, and she’s glad she didn’t say how exhausted Maria looked from the effort of smiling for a few seconds. Let her remain, to everyone else, as invincible as she always has been; it’ll be their little secret.

It seemed to make her happy when Christine told her she was officially accepting the job, too.

God, what a long day. Christine checks her phone: ten to midnight. She’s been going since five in the morning! She had to get up extra-early to make herself look beautiful before the briefing, and while she’s a lot better at it than she used to be, it still takes time and effort and a setting on her alarm she deeply resents. Worse, the other girls, Paige aside, have stopped complimenting her on her efforts, but she knows that if she stops, if she starts slobbing around in shorts again, someone will notice. Officially.

At least the skirts and things are comfortable, and she likes how she looks in them, and you can layer them in the cold weather.

Maria whispers something and drops her capped water bottle onto the bed, apparently unable to stay awake any longer. Christine’s briefly alarmed, but she’s read Rabia’s briefing through three times: only if there’s a sudden and unexpected change in Maria’s condition should she call a doctor; normal sleep is downright encouraged, and this looks normal enough. Careful not to dislodge Abby, she reaches forward, retrieves the bottle and sets it down on the table, settling back in her chair without waking her sister.

She checks her phone again: midnight.

It’s not so bad here, really. With a belly full of hot chocolate and pastries. With the lights down and Maria and Abby quietly snoring next to her. With the knowledge that Maria really will be okay.

It’s not even very much like her mother’s room in the private hospital any more. Too many people. Too much love.

Maybe she’ll run some searches on her mum when she gets home. Maybe she’ll finally open those info packets. Maybe she’ll look into the past she’s been trying so hard to forget, and make peace with it.

Maybe, just for a minute, she’ll close her eyes.