33. Until You Make It

2019 December 26
Thursday

She’s trying out her new pronouns. Not her new name, which settled into her subconscious almost as soon as she decided on it — her old name, her old everything, had become so mired in bad memories, so draped in the scorn of the people who abused him, so stained with the viscera of those he abused, that when it finally became clear to him how easy it would be to drop it and how proudly those now close to him would celebrate such an act, she did so immediately and with satisfaction. New pronouns are trickier, though; harder to internalise.

And she could well have lingered on the old set, would have had plenty of excuses to do so, but she tried being Bethany and remaining a he for all of twenty seconds before it became unbearably stupid.

Is that a weakness? Is she too binary in her thinking? Too attached to the clear line between man and woman to imagine something as simple and as ordinary and as boring as a woman’s name with masculine pronouns attached? Fuck it; probably. But that might be a strength down here, in the place where they want you to transition in a year or two from man to woman and refine the details later. Better to overshoot and have to back up a bit than flail forever at the dividing line.

Still an imperfect thought. That Aaron Holt, he was such a binarist. Thank God he’s dead.

Maria warned him once of the dangers of trying to enlighten himself too quickly, of setting his standards too high too early and becoming disheartened by his inability to live up to them, and she was, like always, right.

In the end, he was driven away from his old name by an antipathy and disgust that seemed to deepen by the day; she’s been drawn to her new pronouns by the love of people she’s come to admire.

Steph helped. For the last few hours of Christmas Day she relentlessly gendered her. Took her to the kitchen where Maria and Edy and Christine and various other sponsors and Sisters and — dare she say it? dare she even think it? — friends were hanging out. Reintroduced her with a joy that made her heart swell, made her throat stick. All the while holding her hand, lending her strength. And the Sisters responded with nothing but pride.

Is it really so simple? Once he was a man who did terrible things; now she’s the new girl, ushered into a family that grows by a half-dozen or so every year, offered forgiveness and love and sisterhood. Can she really leave it all behind so easily?

She laughs at herself; nothing about this was ever simple. They’re going to cut off her fucking balls!

And yet.

There’d been a moment, late on Christmas night, when the alcohol had come back out, when Monica and Tabby were showing off what horrible crimes they could commit with nothing more than a cocktail shaker and what turned out to be an extremely large spirits cabinet hidden behind a door she’d thought purely decorative, when she’d lost her nerve, and though she didn’t say anything, she was seen.

Christine had detached herself from her intimidatingly beautiful girlfriend, taken her by the arm out into the hallway, sat her on a bench by the front doors, and let her have some time to herself. They sat companionably together, looking out at the grassy front lawn and the narrow path from the Hall to the university, the darkness interrupted every so often by bright points of light. She imagined walking that path, going back to class, and as soon as she did so she shuddered:

She was looking out at the place where she hurt people.

She was truly fucking glad to be locked up.

And then Christine took her hands and told her a story. Told her about a boy mired in misery and loneliness, a boy who was too bloody clever by half and essentially unsupervised, a boy with access to too much money and too many toys and too much time, a boy who allowed himself to become poisoned. Told her of the women he hurt. Told her of the brief, insolent sparks of pleasure such pain brought.

“You know what Bea told me?” Christine said, holding her hands, looking out into the darkness with her. “She told me the women I hurt know I’m gone. That they know I’m dead. And that some of them, she said, were sorry I couldn’t be helped before it was too late.” Christine released her hands, brought her into a hug instead, an embrace inside which she felt small but protected. “She said — and I’m paraphrasing here, but you’ve met Beatrice and you know how she likes to express herself when she’s really leaning into the persona — ‘In light of your reformation, I would suggest that most or all of those women would likely forgive you.’”

“What did you say to that?”

And Christine laughed. “Bethany, I cried my fucking heart out.”

They talked a while longer. She took the point: that it isn’t enough that she grow, that she change, that she become someone worthy of forgiveness, someone capable of comprehending it; she must also understand that without him the world still turns. That when she leaves this place, it won’t be to the same world.

Everything’s new. Not just her.

Back in the kitchen, Steph kissed her and hugged her and found her a new chair because Pippa had nicked the old one, and she relaxed back into the conversation, only realising after several minutes that she and Christine had been outside Dorley Hall’s locks the whole time.

She could have run!

But why would she?

So they all called her Bethany and she and her and gradually it become quite ordinary. By the end of the night, Bethany Erin Holt — or Bethany Erin Someone, since Maria said she’ll need to a pick a new surname, and, no, she can’t have Maria’s, not even if she asks nicely — was the outline of a girl, an etching, a suggestion of wants and needs and new friendships and a preference for a cocktail Tabitha made with raspberry liqueur, and that’s more than she was before.

Still weird, though. To be new. To be her. To hop out of bed and stop to quickly kiss Steph on the forehead, feeling that the kiss is given by a girl, or by someone who isn’t going to stop striving until she becomes a girl. To narrowly avoid sweeping the stuffed frog and elephant off the bedside table — Pippa’s Christmas gift to Steph — as she regains her footing, because her centre of gravity seems to be changing every day and she can never quite get used to it. To make the two silent steps required to reach the wardrobe and to open the door.

Because there, in the mirror, she is.

Two days ago, this face and this body belonged to a man: Aaron Holt. No middle name. Oh, sure, he’d been aggressively dismantling himself piece by piece — he’d asked to die! he’d asked to die and someone who loved him took him by the hand and showed him how to live! — but Aaron he’d been.

Yesterday, Christmas Day, they belonged to someone in flux, someone whose prior self had been renounced before God, country and a gaggle of drunken women. Not just women; she breathes a silent apology to Amethyst, and not just for grouping them with the rest of the Sisters. She still feels a little guilty for not seriously considering their reminder that she could, in the fullness of time, look elsewhere for her gender than between the binary couch cushions.

‘The binary couch cushions’? Jesus, Bethany, you need coffee. And quite possibly a kick in the head; or another one of Tabby’s raspberry cocktails, which would have much the same effect.

Focus.

Wait, what the fuck was she even doing again?

Her reflection squints back at her, and she can tell just by looking that the poor girl has a bit of a hangover.

Right. She was reorientating herself. If Bethany’s to be real, if she’s to fulfil the potential the other girls all seem to think she has, then she needs to believe in herself.

This face. This body. This girl. These slight hips and this belly that for the first time has a subtle roundness to it, a hint of shape, a softly convex curve she already loves to run her hands across— Correction: she loves it when Steph runs her hands across it, loves the things she whispers as she does so, loves the new sensitivity, loves the promises such contact makes with every caressing finger. And Maria’s told her it’s only the start, that after a couple of months she’s only just begun to sensitise. She’ll get softer, rounder, more apt to shiver and bend with every touch, and the part of her that still complains about this, the part of her that clings unreasonably to her old name, the part of her that finds all of this to be emasculating and objectionable, can be silenced more easily every time Maria hugs her or Christine takes her into her confidence or Stephanie Fucking Riley kisses her, and also because that’s the point, isn’t it? Her masculinity hurt people. And it didn’t even protect her in return; the money did. And even that’s not accurate: the money protected the reputation, the freedom, the name of Aaron Holt. It cared nothing for his soul. And now his reputation is ruined, his freedom has been taken violently from him, his name has been discarded and even his bodily integrity has been violated, and she feels her soul finally begin to shed its tarnish.

She’ll tell Maria all this. She wants to please her, wants her to be proud of her. She’ll probably leave off the bit about the violated bodily integrity, though; Maria might be put out, because while it’s true, it’s not the sort of lesson Maria wants her to internalise going forward. Protect yourself, Bethany, as long as it’s Bethany you’re protecting. We’re the only ones allowed to cut bits out of you.

Mere months ago, she would have laughed at such a trade. Would have imagined herself a simpering, feminised wreck, performing obligate womanhood for a contemptuous audience; a creature of nothing, writhing in its own entrails, eking out a shadow of a life within the new, narrow borders allowed it. Now she thinks this trade is her salvation. Now she clings to it.

Even if she can’t cling to the fucking point to save her life.

This face, this body—

Fuck it.

She needs coffee.

She wheels around and kisses Steph again, for longer and with the intention to wake her, and when her eyes flutter prettily open and her face relaxes into a welcoming smile, Bethany says, “Yeah, okay, so the feminised and simpering little creature they made from the corpse of Aaron Holt is absolutely fucking dying from a headache and from a critical lack of coffee, and it’s almost ten, Steph, I lay beside you for fucking ages while you were making these cute snoring noises but it’s been an hour and my mindfulness exercises were a disaster. Come with me for a piss and a coffee.”

“You have mindfulness exercises?”

“Yeah. I made them up.”

“You have a mind?”

“That’s what the exercises are for. You coming?”

 

* * *

 

The mood around the table in the lunch room is sombre. Steph’s not the only one to have a hangover; not only did Bethany speak of little else as they got dressed, but Maria and Pippa are glaring at their coffees with a viciousness they might normally reserve for someone like Ollie. It helps Steph feel like less of a lightweight: ordinarily the sponsors would have their shit together by the time they got down here, but today, they’re all feeling dreadful together.

She’s pretty sure Pippa cursed Tabby’s name a couple of times.

Bethany’s the most cheerful of all of them, and when she’s finished slurping chocolate milk from the end of her bowl of Coco Pops, she asks, “Where is everyone this morning?” and Steph’s the only one who doesn’t seem annoyed with her for introducing the concept of a conversation to a table that would much rather enjoy its caffeine and misery in silence.

It was late last night when Steph and Bethany excused themselves; how much more could the sponsors have possibly drunk?

It’s Maria who answers. “Edy’s with Adam,” she says, counting off on her fingers, “because he’s still taking his breakfast in his room—”

“And his lunch and most dinners,” Pippa mutters.

“—Martin’s with Pamela in the common room—”

“Does he even count as a someone?” Bethany asks quietly.

“—Will’s probably sulking because Tabby has yet to appear to give his ego a good pat-down—”

“Can’t believe she gets to sleep in,” Pippa says. “She’s the one who did this to us.”

“To be fair,” Maria notes, “it takes two to drain a shot glass.”

“But only one to fill it with enticingly purple liqueur.”

Steph asks, “Why are we blaming Tabby? Monica was involved, too.” And that had been a squandered opportunity; of all the sponsors assigned to their intake, she’s the one Steph knows least well, but every attempt to make conversation ended with another drink, except for the last one, which ended with Monica asking Steph if she wanted to arm-wrestle. Steph had demurred; Monica had already beaten everyone else except Tabby, who declined on behalf of her drinks-mixing arm. All Steph found out about Monica that she didn’t know before was that she spent six months bartending in Australia before she was taken by Dorley and another six months after graduation; she said the contrast was endlessly fascinating.

“Monica isn’t here to blame,” Pippa says, refilling her coffee from the cafetiere. “Whereas Tabitha effing Forbes will surely be along momentarily, whereupon—” she pulls something from the pocket of her hoodie, “—I will throw this at her.”

“Is that a croissant?” Bethany says.

“Yes. I don’t know exactly how old it is, but I found it behind the microwave in the kitchen on the second floor. I expect it to bounce.”

“No throwing pastries at your fellow sponsors,” Maria chastises, but her heart isn’t in it, and when Pippa proffers the cafetiere she just nods, allowing Pippa to refill her coffee and place the weaponised croissant in the middle of the table without further comment.

“Where’s Raph?” Bethany asks.

“Hmm?”

“You ran down everyone else, but we never got to him.”

“Oh. In his room, probably. This might be the hangover talking—” Maria taps at her skull and winces, and it’s enough for Bethany to gasp and reach across the table towards her, “—but I wouldn’t especially mind if he never left it again.”

“He’s not been out since Christmas Eve, I think,” Pippa says.

“Good.”

Maria reaches for Bethany’s waiting hand and squeezes it. Steph averts her eyes, finds Pippa doing the same, and shares a smile with her. She’s reminded of her first week at the Hall, when Pippa kept turning up at her cell in a different dress each time, always perfectly made up and perfectly pissed off with her — with the person Pippa had thought Steph was — and she remembers wondering if Pippa had naturally perfect skin or if she was simply very skilled at makeup.

Skilled at makeup had turned out to be the answer; Pippa has some redness around her jawline, from when she had a zit problem as a teen, and this is only the third time Steph can recall seeing it. Combined with the hoodie and the joggers — Pippa’s dressed basically the same as the full-time basement occupants this morning — and Steph has a picture of a woman who would much, much rather be in bed.

“You don’t have to stay down here, Pip,” she says. “Not for my sake.”

Pippa snorts, and knuckles Steph on the shoulder. “Steph, I love you, but if it was just for you I’d still be in bed. We’ve got a staff meeting later; I thought I’d better make a start on having a functional brain beforehand. Checking in with my sister—” another playful poke, “—is a bonus, but not one I’d’ve forsaken sleep for.”

“What she means,” Maria says, looking up from the silent conversation she’s been having across the table with Bethany, “is that I knocked very loudly on her door half an hour ago and suggested she get her little blonde butt out of bed or there would be consequences.”

Pippa stops kneading Steph’s shoulder long enough to make a sarcastic heart symbol with her thumbs and forefingers.

 

* * *

 

Tabby’s been making the effort to look good lately. Not just for Levi — it would be pointless to do so now, with him so tragically far away — but for Will. The little bastard is at one of the critical moments, one of those times when he could leap forward, make the kind of progress Bethany has, or he could regress, like… well, no-one in the basement has meaningfully done that, not yet; there hasn’t been time. Raph is taking tiny, shuffling baby steps forward, Ollie remains stubbornly immobile and Adam and Martin are their own little enigmas, understood by their sponsors and bafflingly opaque to Tabitha. But Will… She’s got to be careful with him.

And that starts with taking care of herself.

When the cases were assigned she argued for and got Will, argued that she should have him rather than Monica, and she’s never regretted that decision. Sure, Monica’s probably the only one of them who could stand up to him if it ever came to it — and, she remembers with a grimace, it fucking did come to it, and it was tasers and Stephanie bloody Riley that saved Maria’s life, not physical strength — but Tabby’s never relied on her body in such an overt way.

So when she knocks on his door, she’s dressed with care. She likes to style her hair to emphasise its natural curl, which is a lot of work on its own, but today it’s tied back, gathered into a loose bun. She wants her face clear; she wants Will to have no excuse not to look at her, not to see in her face the love she has for him — and, yes, she loves him, because someone has to, because it feels like perhaps no-one ever has. Liking him, enjoying the time she spends with him, those are things that will come with time, but the idiot boy needs love.

She’s wearing light makeup, just enough to emphasise her eyes, and the faded green denim shorts and loose white drawstring t-shirt are meant to make her seem approachable. Tabby wants to look like the girl next door, as sweet as can be, so that when the time comes for her to tell William that she was once very much like him, the impact will be all the greater.

“Go away!” Will shouts in response to her knock.

Rolling her eyes, she opens the door to his bedroom, steps inside and pushes it closed with her heel. When it’s shut again, when it’s just the two of them in his space, she says with amusement, “No.”

He’s already backing away, positioning himself as far from her as possible. His eyes flick downwards; he’s thinking about using the handcuffs under the bed.

“No,” she says again. “And don’t you tell me you’re dangerous. Remember what we talked about.”

He nods. She has a fair idea what he’s thinking: not only has he opened up to her on, depending on how you count it, three or four occasions, he also talks in his sleep. He’s terrified of himself; terrified of what he could do to her.

“Tell me who you are, William,” she says, seating herself on his chair, just outside his reach.

“I’m who I decide to be,” he whispers, and she’s almost surprised. Yesterday he accepted the mantra easily enough, but she’s had enough experience with him that she’s come to expect resistance. Mostly she’s tried to lead him as she might a frightened animal: allowing him to make his own moves and come to his own conclusions. Her role is to prepare the route such that the only conclusions that can possibly be reached are those she prefers. It’s helpful for his progress for him to believe that it comes from within, because, for a person who claims to value the empirical, he sure does persist in his belief, against all evidence, that everyone around him is fucking stupid.

But sometimes he needs a push. Sometimes, very much like a frightened animal, he needs to be picked up and bloody well moved, regardless of how much he might thrash against it.

He wants to be fixed. He knows the ruin he’s made of himself. He knows, despite the arguments he can sometimes marshal to defend any word or deed, the difference between right and wrong, and he knows on which side of that line he’s placed himself. He needs, above all else, to escape the nightmares he’s inflicted on himself, the memories of unearned and disproportionate violence.

Will Schroeder has been in pain for a long time.

“You’re who you decide to be,” she agrees. “How are you feeling?”

She’s had to really work to make him understand that when she asks this kind of question in this kind of context, she’s not being nice; she really does want to know. She wants him to make progress; she also needs to know she’s safe. So he nods and swallows and takes the time to think about it, and she smiles, because that’s another thing she’s been trying to drill into him: you don’t need to have the correct answer right away.

“Okay,” he says.

“Do you want to talk about yesterday?”

He starts to reply and then stops himself, remembering. No quick answers. And no artifice: Tabby is uninterested in his masculine posturing, and she’s made clear to him that she believes it prevents him from properly understanding himself.

Because he doesn’t snap. She told him this. She told him this because she understands, because she was once similar, though she hasn’t yet told him how similar. He told her and he told Steph that he felt like the moments of violence came from nowhere, that they were the unpredictable instances when everything that had been placed inside him ignited. And she told him that they are instead the inevitable consequence of his own behaviour, his contempt for himself, his fear of himself. She told him she believes they started getting worse — culminating in an attack on his brother — because the layers of rationalisation were getting corroded by guilt, that his facade was disintegrating, that something else, something less stable, was building up in its place.

“You’re like a star,” she told him, “riding the last of its lighter elements. You’re going to burn through them until there’s nothing left but the core. Nothing left but what’s real.”

“That’s an imperfect metaphor,” he replied. “The core is no more or less real than the rest of the star.”

And she laughed and told him to remember that.

He’s still thinking. “I don’t know,” he says eventually, and Tabby revels in the honesty. “I still don’t think I believe you.”

She sits down next to him, takes his hand the way she did yesterday, closes her fingers over his so he can’t rip them away from her, and says, “I don’t want to replace you, Will. What I want you to realise is that none of the things you hate about yourself are necessary, and that the things you don’t understand about yourself have explanations you haven’t yet considered. When Steph came to see you in that cell, you said you thought you and she were a lot alike, and then yesterday you said you were wrong about that. You said you were more like Oliver and Raphael.” She squeezes his hands, balled into fists as they are under her grip. “I would like you to consider that you might have been wrong both times.”

He’s quiet for a very long time.

“You said you were like me,” he says eventually.

“I said we were once similar,” she corrects.

“Semantics.” It comes out quickly and with a hint of his old arrogance. “Sorry,” he adds, softening his tone. “I wanted to ask what exactly you meant by that.”

“You can ask,” she says, and rises again, dragging on his hands. “Come on. I want you to see something. But—” and she wrinkles her nose, “—I would also like you to shower.”

 

* * *

 

They’d pulled the mattress off her childhood bed and made up for the missing width with an inflatable out of the camping kit in the garage. They covered their makeshift three-person bed with sheets and pillows and shored it up with university textbooks out of the bottom of Shahida’s wardrobe. And when they fell asleep last night it was still as friends, not as a twosome and a third wheel, because Shahida was serious: before anything can happen between Melissa and her, they have to talk to Abby. Christine’s stayed in touch, and it seems more and more as if Abby’s about to disconnect from the Hall and all her Sisters.

One look at Melissa tells Shahida that’s not a solution. Abigail Meyer might have a family — something Melissa still lacks — but when you can’t be the whole of yourself with the people you love, it takes a toll. And Abby wouldn’t be who she is today without the terrible, wonderful secret of Dorley Hall.

A secret they’re having to keep from Amy. They played for time when she asked what she’d missed, changed the subject, exaggerated their sleepiness from dinner, and Amy was only a little upset when Melissa told her she wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. The remedy, Amy had claimed, was for Melissa to make it up to her another way.

And so Melissa sat very gamely still while Amy brushed and tied and twisted and plaited and otherwise played with her hair.

She did protest: hadn’t Amy had years to play with Shahida’s hair? And Rachel’s? But Amy responded that, true, Shahida’s hair was like spun silk and wonderful to style, but Melissa’s was like a blanket of woven gold; charms all of its own.

And Rachel, even Shahida had to acknowledge, had over the years of their friendship gotten very good at fending Amy off.

Shahida had wondered, as they fell asleep together, intertwined and content, if the Sisters ever slept this way; if Christine or Vicky or Pippa ever found themselves sharing between three or more girls a space made only for one or two.

She surfaces through the memories, experiences once again the brief sorrow that Melissa had to spend so much time apart from her and their other friends, that her teenage years and her young adult life had been so cruelly limited — by ignorance as much as anything else — and when she opens her eyes she rolls over to face her friends.

Only Amy is there, and she’s still sleeping.

It doesn’t take her long to find Melissa, though the moment of panic keeps her heart beating in her throat for several minutes after. Melissa’s sitting on the padded window seat with the window open a crack. She’s hugging her shins and resting her chin on her knees and she is messily, silently crying.

Shahida doesn’t say anything. Just sits down behind her, drapes herself across Melissa’s back, takes the hand she can reach in hers, and kisses her gently on the back of the neck where she’s tied up her hair and left herself accessible.

“Hey, Em,” she whispers. She loves that she can still use that name, and every time she does it feels like a victory: the broken, dying thing she saw in Melissa’s home, the last time she saw her before she disappeared, revoked Shahida’s right to that name, and Melissa — the real Melissa, the girl inside who for the longest time had never even had a name, nor known who or what she was — kept the name safe for her for all those years, eventually to hand it back.

“Hey, Ess.”

“Been up long?”

“Don’t know. An hour? Maybe a bit less.”

“You want to talk about it?”

Melissa relaxes her grip on her shins, allows herself to lean back into Shahida’s steady embrace.

“It’s Mum. I can’t stop thinking about her.”

“Oh, Melissa…” Shahida tightens her grip on Melissa’s hand. She still has the iPod Melissa’s mother left her, the iPod Melissa destroyed on what she thought would be her last day. She could have had it fixed; she hasn’t. And she hasn’t yet told Melissa because she doesn’t know what to do with it. Doesn’t know whether to hand it back to her whole but altered or unchanged but broken. Or whether she should give it back at all. Maybe it’ll just be an awful reminder.

“I avoided coming out this far for so long,” Melissa says. She’s staring out of the window as she speaks, through the crack she’s opened, and the cold air whistling through mingles with her soft alto voice. “I went into the city centre with Abby and with you. I even went to the bloody Tesco, and you know how that turned out. But I never came out here. Never came back to my childhood. I think I was scared.”

“Amy’s promised to be quiet.”

“Not scared of any person. At least, no-one who’s still alive. It’s Mum, like I said. We moved here when she was still alive. She lived barely a couple of miles from here. She died in that house. And it’s so close, Shy. It’s so fucking close.”

“Em…”

“She never knew me. I was her little boy. I think she told me to be strong because she knew Dad would, and she didn’t want all that shit coming from him. She wanted me to grow up to be… I don’t know what. I wasn’t old enough to have that kind of conversation with her. And then she was gone. While I was Mark.” She sniffs. Shakes her head and looks at a different patch of ground outside. “I like to think she would approve of me,” she continues, quieter than before. “I like to think she’d love me. But Dad changed. He changed so fucking much, Shy. Just got worse and worse and fucking worse. What if that would have been her? What if she’d’ve hated me?”

Shahida shushes her, insistently and persistently, until Melissa stops mumbling nonsense and consents to be comforted. “Your mother,” Shahida says, having drawn Melissa back so her head rests in her lap, having wiped Melissa’s eyes and nose with a tissue, “was one of the kindest and most gentle people I’ve ever met. She would have loved you, Liss. She would have been delighted to see the beautiful woman you’ve grown to be.”

“I hope so.” Melissa sounds different, her voice constrained by her new position, but still in that lovely, lilting pitch Shahida’s grown to adore. “I really do hope so. I think she loved another woman, Shy. She loved my dad, too, at least to begin with, but there was another woman, the one I used to babysit for. They did everything together as kids, as teenagers. Listened to all the same music. There’s photos somewhere, a whole album. They’re wearing the most ridiculous clothes and they’re covered in, like, spraypaint and glitter…” She smiles wistfully. “Jenny Yau. A connection to Mum. Still alive. And so fucking close I feel like I can almost touch her.”

“We could—”

“We can’t,” Melissa says flatly. “We’ve pushed things way too far already. I’ve had to accept that there are things I want that just—” she sighs, and her chest rubs against Shahida’s forearm, “—aren’t possible.”

For want of anything to say, Shahida starts stroking Melissa’s cheek with the knuckle of her forefinger. She traces the light dusting of freckles across the cheekbone, tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear, brushes her nails along Melissa’s jaw. She loves what a girl Melissa’s become, all soft skin and smooth cheeks and long, dazzling hair. She wonders if Melissa loves it as much as she does.

A gust of wind causes the whole bay window to creak, and Melissa winces.

“God,” she says, “I can smell it, Shy. It comes and goes; it’s the wrong time of year for it, but we’re close enough to the woods here… It’s the same smell. It’s what I always remember about the day at the railway tracks.”

Shahida had been about to ask the significance of the smell, so when Melissa preempted her question, her mouth was already hanging open, and an, “Oh,” dropped out of it.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about that day, Shy. You and me and the railway tracks. And your red and white picnic blanket. You know, in that first year, when I wasn’t allowed out, when I couldn’t even see the sky, I thought about the railway tracks a lot. Dreamed about them. Not because I wanted to… end things, no, as soon as I knew what they were doing to me, I knew I wanted to live, no matter how much it cost me. But I think it was the freedom. You feel so free when you think you’re about to die. So released. So I’d think about being back there, with nothing but green all around me, except for the railway tracks cutting through like a knife. And the smell would keep coming back to me. Damp grass. Moss. And the wind.”

“Liss…” Amy says, startling them. Shahida’s sure they both thought she was still asleep. “What the hell happened to you? What didn’t you want to tell me last night?”

Melissa laughs. “The only thing that could possibly happen. The only thing left.”

“You were… locked in a room?”

With that, something in Melissa changes. Something in her wakes up, and she sits, smiles her thanks to Shahida, and leans forward on her knees.

“Please, Amy,” she says, “forget I said anything.”

“I don’t think I can,” Amy says, frowning.

“It’s really important,” Shahida says.

Amy cocks her head. “Really? How important?”

And that’s when Shahida knows Amy’s about to extort her for a free breakfast.

 

* * *

 

Back to the cells again. The drapes are still hung in front of the doors and the furniture’s still there, but when he was last here they’d kept the area directly in front of his cell door relatively clear, so he could converse with Tabby free of distractions. Now that it’s just Ollie in here — someone who, when he is charitable to himself, he thinks the sponsors genuinely might not prefer to him — the couch and the chairs and the little tables have assumed a more chaotic configuration, and when Harmony rises from one of the chairs to greet them, she has to kick a pizza box out of the way.

“Hey, Tab. Will.”

“Happy Boxing Day, Harm,” Tabby says.

Not knowing how else to respond to her, he nods, and he could swear her eyes narrow as she acknowledges him. An understandable response: he sees Maria in all their faces, and he expects they see what he did to her when they look at him. He’ll never be forgiven, and that is correct, because he never should be forgiven, and if he can’t be fixed he should be allowed to rot.

A long time in that cell with no-one but himself. A long time to remember every moment of violence. He doesn’t know how Tabby can stand to be in the same room as him. She doesn’t fear him — not as much as she ought, anyway — but she should be repulsed by him.

William — never Will, not in his own head; nicknames are familiarities, and William’s never felt like he knows himself — also doesn’t know why Tabby’s brought him back to the cells, but if it’s to put him back inside, he won’t argue.

The lock behind him buzzes again, and he steps against the wall, hands clasped behind his back, to allow Jane past. She greets everyone present — him included — withdraws her taser from her pocket, and nods at Harmony.

Tabby leans against the wall next to him. “From now on,” she whispers, “you and I are not here. You are to make no noise and give no indication of your presence, okay? And remember, Jane, Harmony and I are all armed, and if you fuck this up, we’ll tase you until you shit yourself.”

“No noise,” he says.

“Good lad.”

Tabby gives Harmony the nod and Harmony steps forward, sweeps aside the drapes that cover the cell door from floor to ceiling, and raps twice on the glass. A quick click from above suggests to William that the intercom has been switched on.

“Fuck off,” Ollie says. A strong opening statement. William can’t see him but he can imagine how he looks as he says it, the contemptuous bite of his jaw, the stance designed to accentuate his size even as the diet and the hormones shrink him.

A shudder: he associated with this man and he didn’t even have the good grace to hate himself for it until after they put a woman in the hospital together.

“Good morning, Oliver!” Harmony says brightly. “And how are we feeling today?”

“Fuck off.”

William closes his eyes. Why is he here? Is he supposed to learn something from this? If he’s to grant that the purpose of this place is twisted benevolence, if he’s to believe that the desired outcome is not that he be effectively erased, that there be another personality crafted to replace him, then why is he here? What can listening to Ollie grunt and posture his way through another conversation possibly teach him?

He knows what Ollie would say to such thoughts. He’d say William is a pussy. Giving in. But what else is there to do? The only routes out of here are those provided by the sponsors.

And he’s not giving in. Giving in would be to do the other thing. The thing he did to his brother and to Maria and to so many other people. He won’t ever give in again.

A fist slams into glass and William jumps, opens his eyes, looks quickly around, but it’s just Ollie, thumping his hands against the door to his cell, the sound magnified by the microphones. It’s not until Tabby takes his hand again that he understands what he must have looked like, suddenly wide-eyed, looking around for an exit.

Ollie’s yelling at Harmony. “I want—” he bangs his fists on the glass again, “—to see—” bang, “—the fucking—” bang, “—sun!” Gunshots all. Each one impacts William’s heart, causes it to skip and thump against his chest.

“You’re safe,” whispers Tabby, and he nods, unsure why he needs the reassurance but grateful for it.

Harmony seems unmoved by Ollie’s outburst. “Tell me why you want to see it.”

“What?” Ollie yells. Footsteps: he’s walking around in his cell, bouncing back and forth in the tiny space afforded him, the way he did when the three of them were in the cells together.

“Tell me why—”

“Fuck off!”

Harmony taps on the glass again, and it sounds like he immediately lunges at her. He collides with it, and the violence of it is almost too much.

“I’m here,” Tabby whispers.

“You’re going to have to do better than that, Oliver,” Harmony says.

Ollie grunts his response. “Why?”

“Because I need to know that under that thick skull is a brain that can think, that can feel, that has any tools available to it other than… this.”

“I’m not a fag.”

“Interesting!” Harmony says, and with her inflection and the stance she takes William could almost believe she does find his response interesting, and not tedious, ridiculous and utterly pointless. Fascinating is the one thing Ollie isn’t, and has never been. “Do you believe only gay men can express emotion?”

“Fuck off.”

“You have to answer me, Oliver. I had a big breakfast; I can do this for hours. You can’t fight me and you can’t run from me and you can’t shut me out. So unless you want to keep repeating yourself, over and over and over again—” she twirls her finger in the air with a momentum that suggests inevitability, “—you have to answer me. Why do you want to see the sun?”

“Be! Cause!”

“Try again.”

He hits the glass. “Because I fucking miss it, okay?”

“Tell me why you miss it,” Harmony says. He hesitates, so she continues, “You want a burger for lunch? A proper burger with chips on the side? You can have one if you tell me exactly why you miss the sun. Take your time.”

To William’s surprise, it’s the burger that does it. But it makes sense: if Ollie’s still on the same diet as before, he’ll have had no variety and he’ll have rarely been full. Something in William adds, it’s also the kind of desire allowed to men. Food, fighting and fucking; the joys and limitations of life.

“With Sonia,” Ollie says eventually. “We used to sit out together. It was our first place. Shitty little house but she liked the garden. She did it up and she was proud of it but she got me to do the deck. Said we’d sit out every morning in the summer, watch the sunrise. We only did it a few times.”

“Must have been nice,” Harmony muses. “The rush of warmth from the sun, your wife by your side, the house you owned, the garden that was yours. Must have been nice.”

“Yeah.” Another pause. “I miss it.”

“And then you hit your wife,” Harmony says, businesslike. There’s an outraged splutter from inside the cell, but she continues, “You hit your wife — sorry, your ex-wife — and you beat up her new boyfriend and though they chose not to press charges through some level of sympathy for you I can’t personally imagine, they probably should have done. Because it was less than two months later that you hit another woman. And you’re a big man, Oliver — or you were. Are you proud of those actions?”

“Fuck you.”

“Do you think men who hit women deserve to see the sun, Oliver? Do men who break other men’s legs deserve to see the sun? You’re entirely in my power, Oliver; maybe if you tell me why you deserve to see the sun, maybe if you convince me, I’ll open the doors and I’ll let you out to see it.”

“Fuck. You.”

“You know the funny thing?” Harmony says. She’s walking up and down the corridor now, probably in and out of Ollie’s sight, and William suspects she’s doing it to show him the freedom he’s denied. “We’re not here to teach you right from wrong. We know you know it already. You knew it was wrong to hit her and yet you still did it, because you could. What I want to know—” and her voice is shaking a little here; William wonders if Ollie can tell, if he’s even capable of such subtle discernment, “—is why you did it.”

“She fucking left me.”

“And you wanted to punish her for it, is that right?”

“No! She— She—” He slams against the glass again. “Fuck you.”

“Your burger is on the line here, Oliver.”

“I don’t care!”

“Well, I do— Ah.” Harmony interrupts herself and steps away from the cell, and it takes William a moment to understand why. All that’s different is there’s some extra background static on the speakers.

“Your wife took your power from you, Oliver,” says a voice over the speakers. ‘Aunt Bea’, the woman who addressed Raph and Ollie in the common room. The mistress of this place. “She took your power from you and you wanted it back. But after you hit her you were exactly as powerless as before, weren’t you?”

“Fuck you!” Ollie yells.

“Ah. Originality,” Aunt Bea says. Harmony exchanges a look with Jane and the two of them walk away, gathering Tabby and William as they go and exiting into the main corridor. As the door to the cells slowly closes, Aunt Bea continues, “I will deprive you of food, Oliver. I will make you hungry and I will make you thirsty and, now that I know you miss the sun, I’m going to turn out your light. Oh, and you’ll find I’ve switched your tablet off. No more movies. Goodbye for now, Oliver.”

The intercom clicks off at almost the same moment that the door to the cell corridor finally closes, the safety hinges having slowed it to a crawl for the last handful of centimetres. The lock engages with a shockingly loud whine, and Harmony leans against the far wall.

“Jesus Christ,” she says. “I’m really going to enjoy cutting off that man’s balls.”

“Easy, girl,” Jane says, offering an arm for support.

“I don’t want to wash him out. I don’t. There’s a human somewhere under there and I’m going to dig him out.”

“It’s still early. He’ll make it.”

“I hope so,” Harmony says. And then she looks at William directly, and in her eyes he sees none of the hatred he expects. That he hopes for. “How about you, Will? You okay?”

He nods slowly. Hands still behind his back. “I think so. That was hard to listen to. And I still don’t understand why I had to listen to it.”

“Take a moment,” Tabby says.

William takes a moment to think. “You want me to see him… from your perspective?”

“And to try to see yourself that way, too.”

“That’s who you see when you look at me?”

Almost immediately he wants to take it back — it’s the kind of outburst he’s been trying to keep down lately — but his anger is defused when Tabby shakes her head, puts her hand on his shoulder.

“It’s who I used to see,” she says.

 

* * *

 

Shahida’s idea. Rachel doesn’t get it, personally, but then, she wasn’t there. Shy messaged her with everything that had happened that morning, with a summary of everything Melissa said, and attached a photo of her and Amy eating breakfast together. There’s no denying that, compared to how she was the last time Rachel saw her, Melissa looks tired. Withdrawn. A little too much like Mark.

Haunted, perhaps.

She remembers too well what it was like for Mark. She also remembers what it was like for Shahida, after Mark ‘died’, and there’s no way she’s going to watch that play out again. So she’s coming on this little field trip, even if she did have to lie to her family about why, exactly, because if there’s something she can do, she’ll do it.

And so she piled into the back of an unexpectedly massive car, greeted Amy with a grin and a roll of her eyes at the self-denying lovebirds in the front seats, and let Melissa drive them out to the nature reserve, and now they’re marching double-time along the trail in Shahida’s determined wake, headed for the train tracks and the bridge.

At least Melissa and Shahida are holding hands now.

“That’s as far as they’re going,” Amy confides, when Melissa and Shahida are far enough ahead to be out of earshot. “Shy wants to talk to some girl called Abby.”

Abby… Abby… Did Rachel meet an Abby? She thinks back to the Hall, home of all Melissa’s secrets and seemingly about a hundred giggling women, most of whom went carefully quiet when she looked at them. One of them was called Abby, she’s certain. “I think I met her at the Hall,” Rachel concludes with a shrug. “Don’t know her, though.”

“What hall?”

“It’s this dorm on the uni campus. Part of this whole mysterious backstory Melissa’s got going on. Something about a secret transition fund they need to keep quiet from the press? Or the NHS? Shy seems to know everything but when I pushed, she just asked me to trust her. So I decided to trust her. I don’t like it — I don’t want her to get hurt again — but I’m trusting her.”

“You think Shy’s going to get hurt?”

“I think Melissa still isn’t quite over all her shit, and she has a tendency to drag people into it.”

Amy frowns. “That’s not quite fair, Rach. If you remember, it was Shy who did most of the dragging. Liss just came along for the ride. God,” she adds suddenly, brightening up, “remember at that party? When we started calling her Emma?”

“Emily,” Rachel says. “And yes, I remember. I also remember how it ended. Shahida was a mess for months.”

“And that was something Shy dragged her to. Is that what you’re so worried about? Mark pulling another disappearing act and leaving Shy in shambles? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Rach, but Mark isn’t here any more.”

“And yet Melissa’s still following Shahida wherever she wants to go.”

Amy tugs on Rachel’s sleeve. “And we’re lagging behind,” she says. “Come on.”

“You’re really not worried that they won’t tell us everything?” Rachel says, staggering for a moment as Amy catches her off-step.

Amy looks back at her. “No. I don’t care. If Melissa’s happy and whole, she’s happy and whole. And look at her, Rach! She’s fucking gorgeous!”

With that, Amy lets go of her and stamps off after Melissa and Shahida, leaving Rachel wondering why she’s so worried. It’s not all for Shy’s sake, is it? Because Amy’s right: Melissa’s prior motivation for running off is no longer valid, and basically all her teenage behaviour is suddenly explicable. Besides, Shahida’s older now, has had multiple relationships, and is more emotionally resilient.

Although practically the first thing she did on coming back to England was to cover the uni where Melissa went missing with flyers…

Saint Almsworth. It all comes back to that bloody place. The Royal College and Dorley Hall and a mass of curious, guarded faces.

At least Shy brought a bunch of spare pairs of wellies. The winter sludge would have ruined her shoes.

 

* * *

 

It took two bowls of cereal from the little variety boxes, three cups of coffee and a couple of co-codamol courtesy of Maria, but Steph finally feels ready to face the day. And, as she insisted to Bethany when they went back for a shower together, it still counts even if the day has gone well past noon before she feels willing and able to open her eyes beyond a crack.

At least it’s looking like a normal, boring afternoon in the Dorley Hall basement. They’ve got the couches set up so everyone can see the TV, they’ve got some reality show on where impossibly fashionable women sell impossibly priced houses to impossibly short men, and she’s got Bethany in her arms again.

Bethany. They talked a bit more about her name while they were showering; Bethany said she likes the ‘Erin’ in the middle, feels that it represents the crumb of her old self that’s coming along for the ride. And, she added, with Erin in the middle, her other two names can keep an eye on it.

Steph loves it. Loves the name, loves that Bethany chose it for herself, loves that Bethany felt able to choose it after so little time. Pippa said it’s proof there was a remarkable level of maturity hidden inside that head of hers; Maria just smiled smugly.

“You’ll never sell that place for nine mil,” Bethany’s saying. “Look at those windows, like, yes, sure, floor-to-ceiling windows may look nice, but you’re in Los Angeles; why do you want to let more sun in? Not to mention that everyone can see in, all the time, unless you close the blinds, and then what’s the point of having floor-to-ceiling windows? ‘Oh hi, Joanne, do you like my new house? Yes, it cost nine million dollars, but that’s because it has floor-to-ceiling windows. No, you can’t see them, I have to keep the blinds closed because otherwise the guy next door wolf whistles when I go to the toilet.’ Imagine living in a place like that. You’d have to have a secret second house just to get changed in, because fuck me if I’d want to use that kitchen without looking immaculate first. You couldn’t just wander around in your PJs throwing Weetabix in a bowl; what if the paparazzi saw you? I like the infinity pool, though.”

“They all have infinity pools,” Martin says, and Steph quickly looks over to see if the pattern she’s observed repeats itself and, sure enough, Pamela gives Martin a friendly nudge. She’s been doing that every time he talks lately, and Steph hasn’t decided whether it’s some kind of Pavlovian positive reinforcement technique or if Ella really is just super psyched whenever Martin has something to contribute.

She gave him a bracelet for Christmas. Handmade. To celebrate the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, she told him, barely maintaining a straight face — neither of them is Christian, as far as Steph knows — and also, she added more seriously, to celebrate three months sober, or thereabouts. They’d both cried; Martin said he wanted to make sure he never had a reason to take it off.

Dorley’s big on bracelets; maybe someone upstairs likes arts and crafts.

“Yes, but that’s a particularly nice infinity pool,” Bethany insists. “The forced perspective makes it properly terrifying. I’d never use it.”

“It’s ornamental,” Pamela suggests.

“Exactly!”

After their shower, Steph asked if Bethany wanted to wear something a bit more feminine than her usual fitnesswear, and she struggled with the question for several seconds before wilting and admitting that, no, she doesn’t feel ready. She’s got the name and the pronouns and the shot-glass boobs; isn’t that enough for now? She wanted to try girl clothes but the moment she opened Steph’s wardrobe and looked at something other than herself she had a couple of minor heart attacks, she said.

She agreed to one of Steph’s tank tops over her sports bra, and no hoodie. Baby steps, Steph said. Microdosing girl clothes, Bethany said.

Steph didn’t point out that it’s a unisex tank top. It would defeat the point.

“I think it’s nice,” Martin says. “You could swim up to the edge and look out on the valley.”

She thinks she could almost like this new Martin. He’s certainly better than the guilt-ridden man she first met, and a lot less creepy than the motile shell he became for a while. There’s still flashes of his old self, moments where he retreats into one or the other of his previous guises, but three months of continuous attention from Pamela seem to have gone a long way towards healing him.

It’s like they’re always telling her: ultimately, this place is about love.

A shame Will seems to have taken Martin’s place. Tabby dropped him off in the common room a few minutes before the start of the latest episode, and so far he’s been quiet. He’s not even reading one of his many books — Tabby got him even more for Christmas — he’s just… sitting there in his customary bean bag chair at the other end of the room. Steph might have thought he was asleep if his eyes weren’t open.

“Why would you even want to look at the valley?” Bethany says, waving at the television the arm that’s not holding Steph’s in place around her belly. “The trees look half-dead, the grass looks completely dead, and I’m pretty sure I just saw a bird spontaneously combust when it flew out of the shade.”

“I’d live there,” Maria says. She’s sitting with Pippa at one of the tables, and she’s supposedly been working away at her laptop but she’s been just as drawn in by the reality show as the rest of them. “It looks warm,” she adds wistfully. “I’ve had enough of cold weather.”

Bethany snorts. “Please point to the people in this room who have recently had the opportunity to experience cold weather.”

“No.”

Bethany sits up out of Steph’s embrace so she can look at Maria. “You have to,” she says. “You have to indulge me! I changed my name and everything. That means I get favours.”

“You had two bowls of cereal at breakfast,” Pippa says.

“If I change my name again, do I get a third bowl?”

“No.”

“Aaron,” Will says, and the use of Bethany’s old name is like a slap; everyone else falls instantly silent. “What do you mean, you changed your name?”

“I mean,” Bethany says, “that I changed my name.”

“Why?” Will demands, his voice so flat and devoid of emotion it barely sounds like a question.

“Mate, you were literally just telling Ollie what this place does the other day. Did you forget?”

“Of course I didn’t forget, but how are you—? What are you—? For fuck’s sake, Aaron!”

“It’s Bethany,” Bethany says.

“When?”

“Yesterday,” Steph says.

“While you were sulking,” Bethany adds.

“I don’t fucking believe you, man.”

“Not a man any more. Not even on a technicality, soon.” She makes snip-snip motions with her first two fingers.

“What—? Fuck, Aaron—”

“Bethany.”

“I don’t believe this,” Will mutters, and then repeats himself, louder and with considerably more force. “I don’t fucking believe this. This isn’t— Aaron, you’re not like her. You’re not like Stefan or Steph or whatever. You shouldn’t be… You shouldn’t be doing this yet.”

“Her name is Bethany,” Maria says quietly, “and if you’re not going to respect that, you know where you can go.”

“‘Her’?” Will says, standing up. “Jesus Christ, no, I’m not going to respect this coercive shit. Tabby keeps telling me it’s all for the better and it’s going to work and I’m not going to be some fucking Twilight Zone zombie afterwards and I’m stupid enough to want to believe her but look at this!” Pippa, Maria and Pamela all subtly reach for their tasers. Not subtly enough, evidently, because Will notices. “Oh, here we go,” he continues, “Will’s angry and scary and suddenly we’re all pissing ourselves, time to—”

“William Schroeder!” Maria shouts, standing up and slamming her closed fist into the table in one movement. “You will respect her and you will call her by her name or I won’t bother to tase you and I won’t bother to consult with Tabitha; I will pick you up by the scruff of your greasy little neck and I will wash you out. Do you hear me, William?”

“I don’t— Fuck—”

It seems finally to have gotten through to him that he’s talking back to the woman he put in the hospital, and his legs collapse under him. He shrinks back into his bean bag chair, his eyes never leaving her, and while his mouth opens again, he doesn’t — can’t? — say anything.

“Do you hear me, William?” Maria demands. “You will call her the name she gives you and you will never deviate from it or I will make you wish you hadn’t.” She punches the table again. “Say you understand and agree.”

He can’t say anything. He just stammers, nailed to the spot by Maria’s anger. Steph can imagine what’s playing through his mind, and a vicious, vengeful part of her hopes he never gets over it.

Tabby rushes in from the corridor, bangs her shin on the door in her rush to get to Will, and kneels protectively by him. She must have been watching from the security room, or someone there must have messaged her. “Will?” she says. “William?”

He refocuses on her. Gives her all his attention. But he still can’t talk.

“Make him acknowledge me, Tabitha,” Maria says.

Tabby snaps back, “Take a break, Maria.”

Steph’s so caught up watching Will, she almost doesn’t notice when Bethany breaks from her grip entirely. She hops over the back of the couch and stands by Maria, reaches for her hand, suggests she stand up with her. Maria nods, accepts Bethany’s hand, and together they walk towards the exit to the corridor.

As they pass, Maria stops and says in a calmer voice, “No more deadnaming, Will. No more misgendering. You will respect Bethany and you will respect Steph, or I will bring Beatrice down on your head.”

He doesn’t look at her, but says, “I understand and agree,” in a voice that cracks and breaks, and Steph realises that this is probably the first time one of his victims has not only held power over him, but exercised that power.

And then Maria and Bethany are gone, and Steph is left alone on the couch.

 

* * *

 

The rain didn’t start in earnest until they were almost at the railway bridge, and it provides an excuse for Shahida to link arms with Melissa so they can share one umbrella. Granted, it’s not automatically an intimate act — Rachel and Amy, trudging along a few metres behind, are also sharing an umbrella — and neither is holding hands, but Shahida has yet to become jaded to the sheer joy of getting to do it with Melissa. And that’s without even considering the fact that Melissa kissed her back last night. She wants her. She always did. And though teen Shahida made some counterproductive decisions, she allows herself to feel vindicated.

Melissa’s quiet, though, and Shahida doesn’t have to guess why. And she knows Rachel and Amy have been talking, and she’s got a fair idea what they’ve been talking about, but so long as they don’t ask questions — or are willing to accept partial answers — there should be no problem. Rach has been to the Hall, she’s even overheard the second years joking about being kidnapped, and she still hasn’t put it together.

No-one would. Refuge in audacity.

The bridge has a covered section, an iron plate that covers the middle, and they rush up the stairs together, borrowed wellies splashing mud against the metal, any suggestion that they might be there for sombre reflection abandoned for the need to seek shelter. When they reach it and Shahida almost skids to a halt, she looks around for Melissa, worried that she’ll be upset by their attitude, or just from being in this place. It takes her a moment to find her, and when she does, she’s leaning over the edge of the bridge, looking down on the rails.

Terror takes her voice from her, pushes her down, and she can’t reach for Melissa, she can’t shout for her, and the seconds before Melissa moves again pass like hours.

And then Melissa turns, and she’s smiling, open-mouthed and manic. She meets Shahida’s eyes and she yells out with what Shahida would call, if she dared hope, joy.

“Holy shit!” Melissa says, bouncing on the spot in her wellies. She’s outside the shelter of the metal bridge cover and the rain’s plastering her hair to her face and she doesn’t care. “This is so perfect, Shy! I’ve been seeing this place in my dreams for, fuck, years, and it’s just… It’s just this! It’s just a bloody bridge!”

“You’re going to freeze to death!” Rachel calls.

Something about that makes Melissa almost double over with mirth, but she joins them anyway, squeezing water out of her hair and shaking out the droplets.

“You okay, Em?” Shahida asks, unpacking the blanket from her backpack and laying it out. She didn’t choose the red and white one this time, the one Melissa seems to find so funny; this was supposed to be a serious occasion.

“Better than okay,” Melissa says, sitting down and waiting for the others to join her before she continues. “Abby always used to talk about how when you have a bad memory, you should create a good one to counteract it. And this place… I’m here with you again, but I’m me now, and—” she smiles at Amy and Rachel, “—you two are here, too—”

“Thanks for noticing,” Rachel says, but she’s grinning so Shahida doesn’t kick her.

“—and it’s just a… a place now.” She looks around. “A muddy, rainy, cold, windy place.”

“Very cold,” Amy says, through chattering teeth.

Shahida swings her backpack around to her side and starts rummaging through it. It’s a camping rucksack, and though it’s on the smaller side it can fit everything her friends would probably never have thought to bring on such an excursion. She unrolls a padded raincoat and passes it wordlessly to Amy, who smiles her thanks and starts putting it on.

“Who wants hot tea?” she says.

“You brought tea?” Melissa asks, pausing in the act of smoothing out her sopping hair to boggle at her.

“I brought lunch, Em,” Shahida says, and starts unpacking thermoses and bagged sandwiches from her bag.

“When did you have time to make this?”

“While you were showering. Mum helped.” She shrugs. “It’s mostly leftovers inside bread.”

“You’re both just ridiculously wonderful, you know that?”

“She was so pleased you stayed for dinner. I know she didn’t want to crowd you, but she wanted me to ask if we could maybe make it a regular thing?”

“I’d love that,” Melissa says, taking her hand. Shahida tries not to let her immense satisfaction at the repeated contact show.

As they eat, and as Melissa helps Shahida pour the tea, Shahida briefly regrets that she didn’t think to bring some kind of portable heater. Hot baths all round when they get back to her place, she decides.

“Thank you, Shy,” Melissa says, after a while. “I’m glad we came here. And I’m glad I saw your place again, and not just because I got to see Rupa. The last memories I had from here, from your house, and from yours, Amy… they’re very bad.”

“What happened to you?” Amy asks quietly, pausing with her sandwich halfway to her mouth. “I mean, I know roughly what happened, that you ran away, that you transitioned, but… That’s all I have. You don’t have to tell me,” she adds quickly. “Just, if you want to, ever, I’m here to listen.”

Shahida glances at Rachel, who’s been carefully looking away. Rach has been needling Amy, for sure, the same way she’s been needling Shahida: over texts and private messages, away from Melissa’s eyes. So far she’s been content to accept Shahida’s dissembling, but she’s definitely looking out for contradictory information.

“I didn’t run away,” Melissa says. She’s leaning against the iron wall, head against the metal. “I think the only time I actually tried to run away was when I came here, to this bridge. I didn’t even know what I wanted to do until I got here, and Shy’ll tell you I’d been standing here just watching the trains when she found me. But the night I disappeared, I knew what I wanted. I wasn’t running away.

“I was always trans. Always a girl, a woman, whatever. But I didn’t know. I had all this shit crowding my head that I couldn’t interpret, and I could never get away from it to think about it clearly. The closest I got was when I was with all of you. Sometimes you could all make me feel… almost normal. But I never got it. Because you can’t get clear air to think about your problems when they’re contained entirely within you, right? Especially when you don’t even have a name for them. So I just spiralled. And the things I felt — the shame, the fear, the way I hated being touched or spoken to or even seen — just made me feel more like I was dangerous. Toxic. Like I would corrupt people just by being around them. Even though it was all just the way anyone could feel, being a teenage girl trying and failing to live the life of a teenage boy.” She shrugs. “I didn’t know.”

“So what happened?” Rachel asks. “When you disappeared?”

“I knew a girl called Abby. We met by chance originally; she was doing interviews for a part-time thing she had with the university paper. But she noticed me. Saw I was doing badly in ways she recognised. And then she heard about a— a situation I got into, which was nothing, really, I bumped against someone and I just got really, really in my head about it, and she worried I might do something drastic.” She laughs. “She was right. I went out one night intending not to come home. I left my mum’s iPod at the bus station and I went and tried to get drunk and I planned to just walk out into the cold air and see what I could do to myself. But she found me. Took me home. Helped me see who I really am. Who I always was.” She looks up suddenly, smiles for Amy, and Shahida’s certain it’s a genuine smile, that this hasn’t been a traumatic retelling or anything, not for the most part, that Melissa genuinely just wants Amy to know. “And that’s it,” she finishes. “I let everyone think I was dead because, well, see above; I thought I was toxic and dangerous. It took her a while to help me get rid of that. And by the time I had, it was years later. And I was Melissa, and Shahida was out of the country, and everything was different. I thought it was best to… remain a memory.”

Shahida grasps Melissa’s hand firmly. “I’m so glad you were wrong,” she says.

“I’m so glad you found me.”

“God, yes,” Amy says, energised again, “so how did that go down?”

Melissa shares a glance with Shahida and nods, which Shahida takes as her cue to take over. Melissa sips from her tea as Shahida tells an improvised embellishment of the day they were reunited, and from the look on her face, maybe even Rachel is mollified.

 

* * *

 

She’s not mad at Maria. Rather, she shouldn’t be. The woman basically runs the Hall, sponsors full time and has a civilian job, and on top of that the bastard she yelled at was the guy who attacked her, so she can and should be forgiven for losing her temper. And it might not be counterproductive yet; Will hasn’t exactly ever faced such direct consequences for an individual act of violence.

It’ll also be good for him to learn to respect other people’s identities.

Yes, this incident isn’t too far off the curve of her planned interventions. And if what she suspects about him is even close to true, it might be exactly what he needs. She hasn’t been confident enough of her assessment yet to force the issue herself, but…

The little shit’s still shivering, so she perches on the edge of the bean bag chair he’s claimed, shifting his balance and causing him to fall against her. He doesn’t react, which is a shame — she’d have liked to have the opportunity to confirm to him that it’s okay for them to touch each other so casually — but he also doesn’t flinch away.

Tabby’ll take it.

Oh, Will. You poor fucker. Everyone took a turn at screwing you up, didn’t they? And when they were done, you kept at it yourself. Built a rock-hard shell of physical and intellectual superiority, filled — as you said to Steph — with gunpowder. And you’re so scared I’m going to erase you, you can barely let me in. Do you even know what it looks like when someone tries to help you?

She knows his reply: help doesn’t normally begin with a kidnapping.

This is why she doesn’t say such things out loud; it’ll convince him of his righteousness all over again, and while she does want him to remain exactly as didactic and persistent as he always was, she needs time to crowbar his head a bit first.

He’s still unmoving, so she slips an arm around him. It might be too early for such intimacy, but if she’s not careful he’ll vanish the way Martin did, and that would be so much extra work for her.

She checks the room. Steph’s sitting on one of the couches with Pippa, and talking quietly; she seems perhaps a little concerned — about Bethany? about Maria? — but they have each other, so Tabby needn’t get involved. And Martin and Pamela are on the other couch, engrossed in the latest episode of that dumb reality show. Edy and Adam? Probably together in Adam’s room, as is their habit, as will probably remain their habit until she successfully prays him a new heart, or whatever the hell they’re doing in there. Poor kid never really recovered after Will attacked Maria. At least he looks cute in the matching necklace Edy got him for Christmas. And Raph’s probably locked in his room, considering Jane wants to keep an eye on him and she’s still upstairs with Harmony, calming her down after her momentary loss of composure. Tabby smiles; Harmony’s a great sponsor, but she could really stand to stop compartmentalising so much. Although, if she’s honest, Tabby can’t see Ollie making it.

She’s not going to say they bit off more than they can chew this year — Tabby herself has been involved with more difficult boys — but this lot remains an ordeal after the previous two intakes. Maybe next time she’ll try to pick out a Steph or a Bethany.

And then the doors from the corridor swing open and in steps—

What. The. Fuck.

Tabby can’t imagine Maria did all this. She acceded to the late, lamented Aaron’s request for a tux to wear to the Christmas Eve party, even found one in his size, but where did she even get the wig?

Ah. Paige. She’s standing with Maria in the corridor, watching Bethany sashay into the room with an amusement Tabby would be very annoyed with if she wasn’t, herself, trying not to laugh.

“Bethany?” Steph says.

“Hey, babe,” Bethany says, interrupting her chewing to finger-wave at Steph and blow a huge pink bubble. When she’s sure all eyes in the room are on her — Will’s included; his head’s following her like she’s magnetic — she struts across the room to her girlfriend and leans over the back of the couch, grabbing Steph by the chin and positioning her so they can kiss. They remain that way for several seconds, during which Will’s breathing becomes laboured, and then Bethany straightens up again, directs her grin squarely at Will, and resumes chewing her bubblegum.

“Hmm,” Steph says. “Strawberry.”

“Oh,” Bethany says, “hey, Will. Didn’t see you there! You like the look?” She poses, and blows and pops another bubble. “Think it’ll help you remember my name?”

Will swallows. “Uh—” he says.

“Oh, come on, Will.” Bethany walks closer, drops into a crouch just a metre away. She keeps her knees together, but when Will’s eyes flick downward she cracks them open just a little. “Like what you see?”

Bethany’s wearing what Tabby can only think to call a slutty catholic schoolgirl uniform, right out of a Halloween costume catalogue. Her white blouse is buttoned dangerously low, and sheer enough to show off the lacy bra she has on underneath. She’s wearing a checked school tie loosely around her neck, tied in a delinquent knot, with a pattern that matches her skirt.

Her very, very short skirt. She must have tucked under there, because she’s still crouched in front of them teasing Will, and Tabby can see, very clearly, her underwear: not the modest and practically unisex boyshorts any more. Black stockings — and an honest-to-God garter belt — complete the look, and they were probably a necessity because Tabby happens to know Bethany isn’t shaving her legs yet.

Probably only a matter of time, though, at this rate.

Bethany giggles, and it’s a very practised and girly giggle that Tabby hadn’t expected to hear from her for a long time, based on what Maria’s been saying about her progress. To pick a new name by Christmas is, yes, practically unprecedented, but Bethany may just have set a record for— for fucking something. For whatever this is.

“Fuck you, Aaron,” Will whispers, and Bethany responds with another blown bubble. She rolls her eyes at him, stands easily, flicks disdainfully at the hair of her long, chestnut-brown wig, offers Will a final flourish of her skirt, and joins Steph on the couch, dropping onto the cushion and crossing her legs at the knee.

“There’s just no helping some people,” she says in her most creditable attempt at head voice yet.

For Will it’s the last straw. He pulls his way out of Tabby’s grip and charges out of the room without a backward glance, and Tabby knows that the last thing he hears before the doors close behind him is another impish giggle.

“Did you really have to do that, Beth?” Tabby says, pushing up off the bean bag chair and frowning at Maria.

“Yes,” she says. And then she’s up off the couch again and reaching out a hand, and Tabby looks around to find Maria walking forward with a hoodie and a pair of jogging trousers. Bethany quickly pulls them on, zips the hoodie closed with a sigh of relief, and sits again, accepting Steph’s hug and leaning into Maria’s when she joins them. “Jesus,” she mutters, visibly shaking, “that was nerve-wracking. How do girls do that every day?”

“Practice,” Pamela says. “And it’s ‘the other girls’ now, remember? You joined Team Pink.”

“Yaaaay.”

“You’re keeping the outfit, though, right?” Steph says.

Tabby leaves them to it.

In the corridor, she checks the camera. She doesn’t think he’ll respond violently if she enters, but it’s best to be sure. And Will’s put the cuffs on again, his wrists locked into the restraints and the wire looped around his arms, to further restrict his movements. Even on the tiny screen, she can see the fear in his eyes.

Fear that he’ll hurt someone? Or fear of something else?

Only one way to find out.

She opens the door as quietly as she knows how. On the other side, Will hasn’t moved.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to— I wanted to fucking get him. It was all I could think about. I’m sorry. You should wash me out, Tab. You should fucking kill me or ship me off to Antarctica or whatever it is you do.” His voice quietens to barely a breath. “I wanted to hurt him so bad.”

Tabby sits on the bed next to him. He shuffles further into the corner.

“Bethany’s a she, Will.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

He’s breathing heavily but he speaks in whispers and punctuates with wheezes. He wasn’t like this after he attacked Maria; he wasn’t even like this when they brought him in. She thinks again of the frightened animal.

Sometimes they need to be guided. Sometimes they need to be moved.

“Will—” she starts.

He interrupts her. “What do you see, Tabitha?”

“What do you want me to see?”

“I don’t want you to see someone like Ollie.”

“I told you,” she says. “That’s not you any more. You walked away from this, remember?”

“I don’t want you to see…”

“What?”

He covers his face with his hands, and the wire tying his wrists to the bolt on the floor under the bed is so taut she worries it might be cutting into his forearm, but she doesn’t try to pull his hands away. Only the most gentle, careful contact for now.

“It was when you saw her, wasn’t it?” she says. “I saw it in you when it was Steph, but she’s more of a natural, isn’t she? Easier to deal with.” He says nothing. “But now Bethany, not just with her new name, but with her… playful attitude… It was too much, wasn’t it?” Still nothing. “You weren’t attracted to her, I know that much. I know that look, Will. I know it. It’s not lust; it’s envy.” That gets a reaction from him, just barely, and she takes him into her arms.

“I’m not—”

“You saw Steph. Now you’ve seen Bethany. And I’ve seen the way you look at them, Will.” She strokes his upper arm with her nails, softly drawing lines in the skin. “How long have you wanted to be a girl, Will?”

His reply is almost buried by his tears and suffocated by his hands but she’s close enough to hear it, close enough to grip him tightly, close enough to reassure him that she’s not going anywhere. She’s glad she has comforting hands around him and she’s glad to be his Sister, because what he whispers sounds an awful lot like, “Forever.”

 

2019 December 28
Saturday

In an ordinary job, in an ordinary place, the persistent stench of stale smoke that surrounds Jake Henshall would without a doubt be the worst thing about him. The stuff clings to him for hours after, and he wraps himself in it, relishes it with the same satisfied smirk he retains for all his sins. He knows it bothers Frankie, too, in the way heavy smokers can spot ex-smokers by how their fingers twitch when someone lights up; she could swear he smokes double when he knows she’s going to have to spend time around him. And it’s not simply that the smell teases the decades-old craving that still lurks in her throat, it’s that it reminds her unavoidably of her tenure at Dorley Hall, of stepping out into the woods on cold, wet nights and grinding one sodden, lipstick-stained filter after another into the dirt, trying to regain her equilibrium after a night spent debasing some doomed boy-girl.

Because that’s the fucking thing, isn’t it? This isn’t an ordinary job and this isn’t an ordinary place. This is the manor at Stenordale, whose empty halls could swallow Dorley thrice over, whose grounds were rotten with death even before Crispin Smyth-Farrow began burying girls in the central quad, and the job Frankie’s taken up is the same one she walked gratefully away from fifteen years ago. If she could, she would snatch the cigarette from Jake’s mouth and with it start a fire to consume them all.

She wishes sometimes that her nerve had never failed, that her rage had never subsided, that the impelling flame that carried her through those early years at the Hall hadn’t faltered in the face of Val and Beatrice’s affection for each other. Because that had been a simple world: every man was the man who hurt her sister; every newly born girl was her naivete personified, stumbling around on new legs and despicably vulnerable. And other times she wishes that she’d given it up completely, that she hadn’t retained enough residual self-satisfied sadism to continue the work until Beatrice returned and kicked them all out, that she’d exposed her moral weakness to old Dotty somehow, because then the dozens of boys and girls whose transformations she oversaw might never have been taken.

But she became broken. Not comprehensively, not in a manner that would be useful to anyone else, or even so noticeably that she even realised it at first, but enough that the fractures crept through every aspect of her until she was utterly and completely and forever altered.

Funny that it had been Val who did it. Valérie and the boy who would become Beatrice Quinn. When Frankie had run up behind Beatrice, protected her as best she could from the wrath of Smyth-Farrow’s hired thugs, risked everything to give the two girls five more minutes together, she’d imagined her actions had been simple expediency. And perhaps they were.

They did not remain so.

Even then, however, she kept her silence. Sure, she granted invisible kindnesses, ignored the things Beatrice hid imperfectly, directed her colleagues to look the other way, but until the night Beatrice finally escaped, until Frankie had the opportunity to lose her and ensure she remained lost, she did nothing that would show up in anyone’s memory but her own. Because how do you tell the girl you’re torturing that you daren’t stop, daren’t even significantly ease up, lest you be removed, to be replaced by someone with no such reservations? She’d be right not to care; she’d be right to spit your words back in your face, there to stain you. And it would have been a lie, anyway: she and her sister sponsors were, in all practical terms, irreplaceable. For the work they performed you needed a very particular kind of madwoman.

If she’d had the courage of her convictions, if she’d walked away or resisted Dorothy unto death, the capacity of Dorley Hall would have been permanently reduced, and twenty or so men would be alive today. Lately she sees their faces, pretty and painted and afraid, a lot more than she used to.

Val says she sees the faces of the dead, too, but she has the luxury of not being a willing component of the machine that murdered them. Oh, she says she is, claims in careless moments that she should have tried harder with them, helped them better to survive the predilections and perversions and ultimately the boredom of Crispin Smyth-Farrow, but she’s not and never has been anything like Frankie. Val is a victim; at worst, a weapon wielded against her will, at herself as much as at the other girls who came from Dorley.

No-one would call Frankie a victim.

In her years away from the Hall, Frankie would occasionally pull her secret second phone out of its hiding place and check the search alerts for Beatrice Quinn and a handful of other names. She’d spend a night reading and rereading the sparse information she’d collected, reminding herself that, despite her, they thrive. She’d comfort herself and, every time, consider releasing the lock on the living room window of her sixth-floor flat and just stepping out.

Beatrice and her girls are the salve on Frankie’s conscience, wretched and wounded thing that it is. If Frankie hadn’t taken a chance, none of them would be who they are today.

Every time old Dotty rants about Elle Lambert, about Peckinville, about the constraints she’s had to live under and the indignities she’s had to suffer and the theft of her rightful property — by which she means both Dorley Hall and the men she tortured in its depths — Frankie feels a flicker of satisfaction in the depths of what she might call her soul, if she were inclined to believe she had one any more. Because it was Beatrice who did that, who was a key instrument in the dismantling of Dorothy’s support and financial network; Lambert could never have accomplished it all on her own, not without a passionate and motivated woman who did not, until mere weeks before the coup, officially exist. Too many eyes in the employ of too many important people.

A familiar grunt of satisfaction draws her out of her introspection and reminds her what prompted her mind to wander in the first place: Jake, contriving to take up an entire two-person sofa by himself, signalling his appreciation for the person who has just presented himself for inspection.

“Good morning, Mr Henshall,” Declan says. This morning he doesn’t need prompting to curtsey, does it as he speaks, and Frankie wants to throw up. It’s the sort of shit Karen liked to see from her boys; overt and exaggerated displays of femininity calculated to extract maximum humiliation from the man inside the altered, abused body.

Frankie always preferred her girls a little more punk rock. Oh, she broke them, and broke them good and proper, because that was the work she was paid for, the work she was kept at by the knife at her throat. But Dotty gave her the jobs for clients who wanted marginally more functional humans at the end of it all. Still toys, but toys less apt immediately to break. Few of her girls ever ended up here, buried in the quad at Stenordale.

She almost laughs: a prize for the cunt with a tiny speck of gold buried somewhere inside her heart. Fat lot of good it did most of her girls. Beatrice is likely the only one of hers, bar those rescued in the coup, who still lives.

Fucking Declan. Subservient and scared and all painted up; with the generic bone shave done to feminise his face, it all contrives to make him look like every girl the Hall ever sent off to die.

The faces of the dead, everywhere she fucking looks.

“Morning, Dina,” Jake says, and his leer speaks of the same mix of lust and contempt Frankie used to see on her fellow ‘sponsors’ back at the Hall. A shame for Jake that Karen, the worst of them, is almost definitely dead; they would have got along like a stately home on fire.

Declan’s wardrobe has been doubling in size daily — Christ only knows what the Silver River guys who make the deliveries think about the boxes of borderline fetishwear they’ve been shuttling in — and Frankie’s had to see the lad in every wank-mag outfit Jake’s sordid little mind can dream up. Worse, she knows Dotty’s having a wonderful time with it, too; with Trev largely off-limits, Jake’s got the old woman’s approval to humiliate Declan any way he sees fit. Today he’s in a maid costume that hails from the darkest days of Val’s duties under the dearly departed Crispin Smyth-Farrow, and it does exactly what it’s supposed to: Declan won’t be able to pass a single mirror without having to see his new body in all its glory.

Frankie snorts. Jake and Dotty’ve told the idiot he’s going to be put back to normal if he just cooperates, and if Declan knew anything about anything he’d realise how impossible that is. She’s not sure she’s ever seen such a comprehensive package of alterations made in such a short time, not even at Dorley, when Dorothy was at her most maliciously creative. They’ve done everything to him but shorten the tendons in his ankles. Dotty said she read about it on some website and wanted to try it, but this was a mere year before the coup and, fortunately for the people under her power, she ran out of time. Frankie still can’t imagine what the point would be except to make it painful to walk, and Dorothy isn’t usually into pain for pain’s sake; she prefers it as a motivator.

“Something to add, Frankie?” Jake says.

“I was just admiring your choice of outfit for young Dina here,” she says, unable to resist twisting the knife a little; Declan very clearly hates it when people use the name Jake gave him, and Frankie’s only human.

There’s a laugh from the other side of the room, where Val and Trev are walking back and forth together across a small patch of uncarpeted floor. Trev’s been trying to match her steps all morning, marching along with a hardback book on his head in a series of taller and taller heels, and he’s fallen on his arse several times. Frankie left them alone after a while because his attitude and incompetence were making her dangerously nostalgic.

“Sarcasm is unbecoming, Frances,” Val says, pausing in her strut to look Declan up and down. She transfers her contemptuous gaze to Jake and adds, “As is that ensemble. Declan, you look like a tart.”

Frankie hides her smile as best she can. Val despises Declan. The lad has zero allies.

“Dina,” Jake says, reaching out to pat Declan on the behind. Declan jumps. “What do you have to say to Vincent over there?”

“Um…” The lad looks lost.

“Why don’t you tell him that — oh, let me think — he’s a bitter, ageing old tranny who should have been put down years ago?”

Val laughs again. “Declan,” she says, “why don’t you tell your sugar daddy there how sad it is that he has to make a girl to drool over.”

Jake’s smirk drops from his face. “Dina—” he starts.

But Declan’s had enough. Again, something all too familiar to Frankie: people can only progress so fast, especially if you want them to remain somewhat functional at the end of it all, and Jake is an amateur hand, driven by his pugnacious desires and his erotic fascination with Declan’s transformation and humiliation. He’s pushing too hard, and no matter the bullshit promises he and Dotty might have made, sometimes the girls push back.

It starts formless, a scream of frustration and agony and sheer hatred. It’s ragged and it’ll give the lad a sore throat later, because that’s how it works when you’ve been bottling your emotions for days upon days; eventually you just can’t fucking do it any more. Especially if, like Declan, you were never particularly emotionally sophisticated to begin with. The scream becomes a yell and eventually, in the face of Jake’s disgusted snarl, a barely controlled rasp.

“I don’t want this!”

“Dina,” Jake says firmly, as if he can resolve this outburst with a stern voice. Fucking amateur.

“My name is Dec—”

He doesn’t get to finish. Jake’s up and in his face almost faster than Frankie can follow — and that’s concerning; his middle-age spread hadn’t slowed him down as much as she’s been hoping — and the slap practically spins the lad around, causing him to stumble on his ridiculous heels and fall sideways to the floor. He’s on the carpeted side of the room, so it’s not as bad as it could have been, but Frankie still winces; that has to have hurt.

“Your name is Dina,” Jake says, leaning over Declan and failing to control his fury. And, God, he really is furious; Frankie’s reminded of something Karen used to say, back when Dorothy was trying to recruit. Men shouldn’t do this job, she said, over and over at the kitchen table, because they don’t know when to control themselves and when to let loose. They’re so used to getting what they want, when they want it, that they’d lose it the first time a boy talked back, and that would be that. Men will lose them money, she told Dorothy; they might even get them shut down.

“It’s—”

Jake doesn’t hit him again, just lashes out as if he’s going to, his flat palm inches from Declan’s face. Declan’s flinch takes his whole body, causes him to pull his knees up to his chest. The stupid maid costume rips, exposing his underwear.

“What is your name?” Jake says.

“I don’t—”

“What is your name?”

There’s a long silence. Declan’s facing away from her, but Frankie can imagine him perfectly: reddening eyes, cheeks flushed with fury and shame, limbs shaking and heart pumping with the need to fight or flee. But he can do neither; all he can do is appease.

“Dina,” Declan whispers.

“Again.”

“Dina.”

Jake holds out his hand. Declan flinches again, but Jake merely beckons irritably with his fingers, and slowly Declan unfolds, takes the hand that’s been offered him, and stands, unsteady and unwilling. Jake pulls on his hand, causing him to lose his balance again, but this time Declan falls into Jake’s arms.

The contrast between them, despite the situation, is almost amusing. They’re of a height, but Jake is entirely the stocky man Declan once was. Declan, it is clear, is coming to a similar conclusion.

Finally, perhaps, understanding the level of shit he’s in.

“Tell me your name,” Jake says gently.

“Dina.”

“Claim it.”

“Dina.”

“Claim it.”

Declan swallows. Jake’s face is inches from his, and the fear of what Jake might do next looks like it threatens to overwhelm him. From what Frankie knows, Jake and Dotty have focused on humiliation and feminisation, reserving the threat of taking things further for, well, times like this. It offers a powerful level of control. It’s possible Dorothy has even brought in one of her oldest motivations: behave or we go after your family. That she might no longer have that reach is irrelevant; it’s beyond effective.

Frankie, again, feels as if she could throw up. One thing to regret her past life, to seek some undeserved and absurd atonement or, more likely and perhaps preferably, death; another to see her actions replayed in front of her.

She did this shit for years. And she was good at it.

“My name is Dina Shaw,” Declan says, and Frankie has to turn away.

 

* * *

 

The moment she hears the lock cycle, Bethany knows she should have pulled the pillow over her head, the way her instincts suggested. Because the cameras and because the constant surveillance and because no-one, least of all her, can be allowed to have an unobserved emotional moment.

Because with every two steps forward she takes several steps back, the exact quantity of which seems to be tied to a random number generator strapped to the back of her fucking head, where she can’t get at it.

Because Steph’s trans and that’s fine and aspirational and all that shit but now Will’s trans and, seriously, what the actual fuck? Bethany got the briefing from Maria yesterday, about how the bulky bastard spent his whole life repressing or some shit, how he successfully logic’d his way into a belief system that allowed no basis for human growth or whatever, and when Bethany asked Maria if perhaps such a level of gross stupidity was a basis for washing out or at the very least some good hard tasering she gave her this look that wasn’t exactly disappointed but did successfully communicate that if Bethany’s going to say that shit again she should maybe work on her inflection so it’s more clear that it’s a joke.

How the fuck is Will trans? How is he trans and yet actively fighting this place? How do you tie yourself in so many knots that you do this to yourself?

What a fucking idiot.

Bethany slept badly last night. Again.

Steph looks at her like she’s a girl. Steph touches her like she’s a girl. Steph says her name like she’s a girl. And for, like, five minutes, that had been fine.

Because now Will’s trans, too, and she’s starting to wonder, what if everyone is, what if she’s been scooped up by mistake, one lonely rock in a basket full of eggs, what if that’s how it’s always worked, and Maria and Steph and everyone else — Bethany herself absolutely included — have been operating on the assumption that if they just dig deep enough into the depths of the thing that is/was Aaron Holt they’ll discover she was a geode all along.

She can’t even bring this to Steph, because she knows what she’ll say. Steph’s talked of her conversations with countless sponsors, dissecting the gender theories this place generates as a practical outcome of its operations, like potato skins when you’re making mash, and she’ll have a hundred answers to Bethany’s doubts, not least of which will be, why are you allowing Will, of all people, to shake you so?

She also can’t bring it to Steph because she’s fucking gone. Upstairs with Pippa, to Steph’s room. They asked her if she wanted to come with, and Bethany had felt so ashamed of and yet so consumed by the need to turn their invitation down that she’d raced back from the common room and dove immediately back into her bed, the bed she’s barely occupied lately, the bed that smells a bit like it needs to have its sheets changed, because even her smell’s changed lately, and the covers smell a little too much like she used to, a little too much like Aaron.

“Please come,” Pippa had said, and Steph had nodded and then put that concerned look on her face Bethany’s grown to dread, because it usually means she’s worried her in some way, and that’s something that shouldn’t happen.

People shouldn’t worry about her; people should forget about her.

“I can’t,” she’d said, and by the constriction of her throat she knew instantly that she’d said the wrong thing, that I can’t in that desperate tone of voice is indicative of internal strife or serious physical impairment and there was nothing she could do to walk it back. She tried, though. She was tired, she said, entirely at odds with the three cups of coffee she’d knocked back and the long conversation she’d had with Steph about Even Quarterbacks Get the Blues, in which she expressed some opinions she had difficulty supporting about the coverage provided by the cheerleader outfits.

Pippa, obviously trying to salvage the situation, had made some jokey remark about what it was that could possibly have tired Bethany out, and had nudged Steph with her elbow at the same time, and that was when Bethany snapped, “It’s not because of her.”

Telling the truth; fucking fatal down here.

“Beth—” Steph had said.

She’d cut her off: “A bunch of maniacs are turning me into a girl, Steph. Gives me weird dreams.”

There was no way after that to continue the conversation without getting into shit Bethany absolutely did not want to get into, so she did the only valiant thing: she fucking legged it.

She just wanted a few minutes or hours or years to herself to figure out why she’s balking so hard at everything. Again. But here’s Maria, poking her head around the half-open door with a pair of steaming mugs and, yes, that concerned look on her face.

“Bethany?” she says, entering and closing the door behind her.

She should have hidden under the pillow; if you can’t see your sponsor, she can’t see you. She settles for, “Hi.”

“How’re you doing?”

She rolls over so she’s facing the wall, which is ugly but which at least won’t make concerned faces at him. “I know you talked to Pippa,” she says. “Or watched the video. Or both.”

“Steph, actually.” The mattress depresses and Bethany rolls a little; Maria’s sat down next to her. “And she said I should leave you alone.”

God fucking bless her, as always. “And so you decided to ignore her suggestion and immediately come see what’s up with the angsty basement boy.”

“You’re not a boy, Bethany.”

“Well, I’m not fucking trans, am I? Put Steph or, Christ, even Will in a doctor’s office and they’ll take one look at them and go, ah yes—” she pushes an imaginary pair of glasses up her nose, “—a classic case of gender dysphoria. What would they say to me? ‘Holy shit, this idiot’s let himself get gaslit into girlhood’?”

Maria’s hand closes around Bethany’s ankle. “First of all,” she says, “you have a charmingly generous understanding of how trans people are treated by doctors.”

“Postulated,” Bethany says, to sound like Will and thus be annoying.

Maria ignores that she probably used the word wrong. “And, second, you know how many of us were like you once.”

She rolls over. The wall isn’t helping, and even if Maria’s going to make faces at her, at least she’s pretty. “Tell that to my brain.”

“I’m trying.”

“Well, maybe yell.”

“Is this about Will?”

“No. Yes.”

“Tell me?”

“What am I going to do,” Bethany says, “when sponsor shenanigans manoeuvre Martin fucking Moody into a position where he admits that he got really into drinking his body weight and playing real-life GTA because he was in denial about his gender dysphoria? When Raph reveals he kicks things because he hates how big his feet are and he’s trying to starve his toes of blood? When—”

“You don’t need to go on,” Maria says.

“I had more.”

“I know.”

She wants to keep at it, wants to say the words that are on the tip of her tongue, but she feels Aaron holding her back, warning her of the consequences of revealing herself, reminding her what happens to boys who show weakness.

Maria lies down next to her. Shoves her a bit to move her over, so they have space to lie together on the narrow bed. She pulls her phone out of her bag, runs through the familiar process of turning off the cameras embedded in the ceiling, and drops it all behind her.

“Tell me,” Maria says again.

“I feel so fucking alone,” Bethany whispers. Maria doesn’t reply, instead taking Bethany’s hand in hers. She locks their fingers together, like she did the day she came clean. The day she told Bethany everything. “I don’t know why.”

“We’ve been pushing you. Not the same way we usually do, and definitely not on the same timeframe. But we’ve been pushing you, nonetheless.” Maria smiles gently. “Remember Christine?”

“Yeah. I like her.”

Maria snorts. “Everyone likes her. It’s why she keeps getting more and more work. Indira was her sponsor, you know, and—”

“Indira was her sponsor? And she’s not, like, dead?”

“Indira did nothing with you I wouldn’t have done,” Maria says sternly. “You were proceeding along one of our predicted tracks, she was following our established best practices, and— God. Listen to me. The thing is, this whole intake has gone a little off the rails. It’s been a long time since one of us was hospitalised by someone down here, and—”

Maria’s interrupted by Bethany snatching her hand away so she can wrap it around Maria’s waist. The suddenness of the hug pulls a little hiccup from her.

“Oh,” Bethany says, pulling back. “Sorry.”

Maria cranes her neck so she can kiss Bethany on the forehead. “You’ve illustrated my point. First we had Steph, and though she kept herself a secret for a while — and we kept the secret from you even longer — she had a… distorting effect. Like Vicky, two years ago, only way more intense; like Melissa might have done, if she hadn’t been so isolated.” She’s frowning as she remembers. She shakes her head, to the extent that she can, lying sideways on this cramped bed. “Steph. My attack. Your temporary entanglement with Indira. You and Steph developing a relationship. All of it. It all pushed you forward far earlier than we would expect from someone with your history. If you don’t mind me dropping into slightly more institutional language—”

“Sure.”

“—you were someone who always felt deeply. We have transcripts from your school; dressings down from your housemaster, mostly. After-action stuff from the few assaults you reported. Some boys, Bethany, are outraged when they are attacked and demand restitution; some are resigned, because it happens all the time; others are… I could go on. You, however, acted as if you deserved it. Not just that it was an inevitability, given your size and your social position compared to the other boys… You thought it was—”

“Karma.”

“Sorry,” Maria says. “I don’t want to rehash it all. My point is, all your life, you’ve been punished for weakness and rewarded for strength, but what was defined as strength was out of reach—”

“Literally,” Bethany mutters.

“—and what was called weakness was… you. And in that,” she adds briskly, “you were not and are not alone. You should see our stats, Beth. Seriously. Boys don’t normally become girls anything like this soon. Usually they haven’t even begun to consider it! They, and you, have an emotional response mechanism that needs to be completely retuned, rebuilt, whatever. Except now you’re here: you’ve accepted yourself as a woman, you’re trying to move forward with everything involved with that, you’re in a developing relationship with Steph, and you are — if you’ll pardon the presumption — quite attached to your sponsor. Which is great, but the thing about going fast is that, sometimes, parts of you need to catch up.”

Bethany wriggles, tries to get comfortable again. Realises that may be a doomed endeavour: the bed is tiny and Maria’s dissected her on it.

“What does that mean?” she asks, when it becomes clear Maria’s run out of things to say.

“It means,” Maria says, rolling herself into a seated position, “that I want to give you some time.” She pulls at Bethany, tries to yank her up. Bethany, feeling stubborn, stays put. “There’s a favour I want to ask of you, but that can wait. Come on; I brought hot chocolate.”

Bethany laughs. It’s always hot chocolate. She sits up, feeling unnaturally stiff and putting it down to the stress. Maria hands her a mug.

“Don’t worry,” Maria says. “It’s low calorie.”

Pointing to the bag of marshmallows, Bethany says, “Don’t they defeat the point of buying low-calorie hot chocolate?”

“No! Low cal means we have room for marshmallows. These are the things you have to learn, now you’re a girl, Bethany. Cheers.”

Maria clinks their mugs together.

“Isn’t that a little reductive?” Bethany says, and sips from her mug. It’s very good: she wouldn’t have guessed it was low calorie.

“Who taught you that word?”

Bethany sticks out a chocolatey tongue. “Monica.”

They drink in silence for a few moments. Bethany has a chance to check her mug for the dreaded ‘joke’, and finds it: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. ‘Hope’ is crossed out, but whatever replaced it seems to have faded to illegibility.

“It’s the dishwasher,” Maria says. “Some of these older ones have become so battered they’re almost tasteful again.” She holds hers up so Bethany can read it: I might look like I’m working, but in my head I’m dancing wondering what you would look like as a girl.

“That one’s not so bad,” Bethany says. She drops a marshmallow into her mug and, trying to appear casual about it, asks, “What sort of favour?”

“Hmm?”

“You said you have a favour to ask?”

“Oh. Right.” Maria sips deeply from her mug, watching Bethany. “It’s Will,” she says after a while. “I think you broke him.”

Bethany almost chokes on her marshmallow. “Really?”

It’s the best thing she’s heard all day.

 

* * *

 

Trev makes it three times in a row from one end of the room to the other, across two levels of uneven floor and three hardwood-to-carpet-and-back-again transitions, in three-inch heels and a long but relatively restrictive skirt, and doesn’t even come close to losing the book off the top of his head. Frankie can’t help herself: she claps.

“Well done, Trev!”

And it seems almost as if he’s having fun. He executes a little spin at the terminus of his route and poses for a moment, before nodding his head, dropping the book — an eighties copy of the British National Formulary — into his waiting hands.

“Ta-da,” he says.

“Good work, Trevor,” Val says. She’s been sitting cross-legged at a dining table on one side of the room, leaning with one arm on the wood and the other curled delicately in her lap with an elegance Frankie still, after all this time, admires. Val stopped walking with Trev after his first successful traversal of the room, and instead found a vantage point from which she could critique his form and drink coffee.

“Yes,” calls a harsher voice from the other end of the room, an unwelcome reminder that Jake has continued to inflict his presence on them. “Well fucking done, Theresa. I was starting to think you’d be at that shit all day.”

Trev’s fingers twitch, and if he didn’t have a heavy book in his hands he’d be giving Jake the finger, Frankie’s certain; if Jake were closer, he’d have hurled it at him. She catches Trev’s eye, minutely shakes her head, and he turns away, places the book carefully on the dining table, and sits down near Val, copying her posture and, remarkably, only wincing a little when he crosses his legs the same way she does.

Makes sense; his dick’s had a lot less time to shrink than hers. Val’s is probably—

She coughs. She’s not supposed to be thinking about that.

Val and Trev bend closer, begin a whispered conversation, and Frankie swallows, forces herself to concentrate. She has a role to play: keep Jake away from them, at least for the moment.

She can have a little fun while doing it, too.

“Bet your girl can’t do that,” she says to Jake.

“Why would I want her to?”

Frankie leans forward on the battered armchair she’s colonised. She knows the effect she has on men like Jake; they hate the idea of a woman who doesn’t care what they think, who is beyond being even slightly interested in them as an object of arousal, and she’s not above using it to her advantage. He resents her, resents having to answer to her — at least in some aspects of the day-to-day — because as an older woman she ought to have quietly put herself out of his life. Checked into a home or something. And fuck that: Frankie will die on her feet.

Quite soon, probably.

“Are you a fucking idiot, Jacob?” she asks. “Ms Marsden turned Dina’s care over to you, and so far she’s let you do what you like. But Val there isn’t going to last forever and Trev’s getting packed off to the poshos, and then it’s going to be you and Dorothy and that idiot Callum and this… broken bird of yours.” She flaps a hand in Declan’s direction; the lad is currently sitting curled up in another half-dead old armchair, staring at nothing. Frankie’d bet money he’s dissociating. “Can she cook? Can she clean? Can she cross the room in heels without tripping? Fuck, mate; can she express herself in complete sentences? No, no, no and no. You’re fucking it, Jake, lad. Old Dotty likes results. And you plainly don’t know how to get them because you can’t stop thinking with your dick.”

She could go on, but she doesn’t. She wants him irritated, she wants him taken down a peg in the eyes of people he considers below him: subjugated men like Trevor and Declan; women like Val and herself. But she doesn’t want him mad, not yet. She sneaks a glance at Val, still observing the situation from her straight-backed chair, and smiles to herself.

Jake doesn’t reply, and when she looks back at him, he’s glaring. She smiles for him, her broadest, ugliest grin — she used to be pretty proud of her teeth, but time and coffee and neglect have yellowed them, and who the fuck can afford the dentist, anyway? Not on her salary.

“Dina,” Jake grunts. He has to repeat himself a couple of times before the lad uncurls and stands.

“Yes, Mr Henshaw,” Declan mumbles, sounding for all the world like a teen boy trying to ingratiate himself with the father of his date.

“You were watching Theresa? You have an idea what to do?”

“Yes, Mr Henshaw.”

“Then get over there and fucking well do it.”

The next several minutes provide a spectacle so embarrassing Frankie almost feels sorry for the lad, and she has to keep reminding herself that of all the girls and boys she’s seen receive this treatment, he is perhaps the closest to actually deserving it. Though she wonders, as he drops his book, fumbles his step and trips over the edge of the carpet for the sixth time, what he would do if returned to his life as-is; have his experiences chastened him or merely ruined him? Or would he, given appropriate bodily restitution, return enthusiastically to the behaviour that minded Beatrice Quinn to remove him from the world in the first place? She’s always wondered how much of the new programme at Dorley Hall is dependent on the physical modifications versus the… Christ, she doesn’t even know what to call it. Brainwashing? Gaslighting? She’s seen one of their documents — for internal circulation only, nabbed by Silver River earlier in the year, shortly before the holes in the Hall’s security all closed up — written by a sponsor called Tabitha, and she was vehement that none of her girls have ever been brainwashed or mind-wiped or otherwise fucked with. They all have a choice, she insisted at the end of the memo; a coerced choice, for sure, but a choice. The ones who choose otherwise — or who are like Declan — go to Elle Lambert. What she does with them, Frankie doesn’t know, but it’s probably not what Dorothy’s allowing Jake to do to Declan.

After Declan’s seventh fall, upon which Jake yells at him, Val stands with an audible cluck of her tongue and marches over to where the stricken boy lies. He’s crying — he’s humiliated and full of hormones so it’s no fucking surprise — and she yanks him up from the floor with one arm and with the other holds out a handkerchief.

“Clean yourself,” she says shortly.

“He’s to do it on his own,” Jake says, his voice still the loudest in the room, and Frankie doesn’t miss the slight sneer of amusement that twists Val’s lips: in his irritation, Jake forgot what gender he’s supposed to be forcing on Declan.

“Clearly, he cannot.”

With that Val turns her back to him, returns her attention to Declan. He’s still trying to hold the torn skirt of his hideous dress tight enough to his thighs that his crotch remains hidden, so she wipes his face for him, dabs at his eyes. She produces a second handkerchief, licks it, and pats at the smudges on Declan’s cheeks. It’d be quite motherly, if she wasn’t very obviously pressing harder than she needs to.

“Now,” she says, “let’s try again. Without the book, for the moment. You’ll walk behind me and try to match my steps. Notice our heels are almost the same height? If I can do it, anyone can.”

“I don’t want to,” Declan whispers.

“Oh, Dina,” Val says, cupping his cheek with her hand, “then you should not have raped that girl, should you?”

 

* * *

 

Some are born women.

Some become women.

Some have womanhood thrust upon them; most of the women here, apparently.

Bethany’s becoming a woman out of spite.

They watched one of Maria’s favourite old movies together. If she loved Heathers, Maria said, then how about Pump Up the Volume? It’s like the last gasp of the eighties, she said. It’s ridiculous, she said. So they watched it, with Maria ignoring Bethany’s reaction when the schoolkids onscreen start passing around a cassette tape of someone playing loud music and talking about his dick — “I thought you disapproved of that kind of behaviour!” — and afterwards she asked if she could call home and play the song Hello Dad… I’m in Jail! from the end of the movie down the phone. Maria said no. She’d do it anonymously! Maria said no. It’d be so funny. Maria laughed and agreed and said no.

And the whole time she thought about Will. She sat there on the bed and leaned against Maria and thought about Will, about why she felt so reduced by the revelation of his transness. Or his supposed transness. His probable transness. By the end of it she couldn’t claim to be closer to a conclusion, but she was considerably more irritated with the fuckwit, and she decided that was reason enough to get up off the bed and go aggressively be a girl at him.

Because fuck him for knocking her confidence around.

Because fuck her for allowing herself to be so thrown.

Because fake it till you make it, right? Just because it’s trite doesn’t mean it can’t be a way of life. And it’s what Maria did, anyway.

So now she’s on her way back from the shower, towel-drying her hair and feeling very scrubbed. Maria got her a cleanser and an exfoliator and told her Steph was right about haircare, so she rubbed in the conditioner with her good hand and left it to soak in while she subjected her face to a cleansing process which left it looking pink.

Maria’s waiting outside her room with a couple of wheelie suitcases, and together they unlock it and head inside. While Bethany swaps her robe for underwear — including the push-up bra she borrowed the other day for the schoolgirl costume — Maria starts stocking the wardrobe with the contents of the suitcases.

The very tightly packed suitcases.

“That’s too much,” Bethany says.

Maria turns to her with an expression of angelic innocence. “Too much what?”

“Too much clothes.” Shit. Very grammatical; she’s going to have to watch that in front of Will, lest he lecture her on the proper and orderly use of English grammar. Again. Although that one time it’d almost been worth it when Steph — still Stefan back then — came suddenly out of her shell and made fun of Will for not knowing what a gerund was.

“Beth,” Maria says, “do you know how many boxes of this stuff we have upstairs? I’ll answer for you—” she spins around in her crouch and continues unpacking, “—because you don’t. You saw one room. You got hassled by Paige one time. We have whole rooms full of clothes, enough to fit every possible body type, and Paige’s enthusiasm is unstoppable.”

“Postulated,” Bethany says again, because it’s fun to say, and that’s something to concentrate on that isn’t, for example, the burgundy skirt Maria just unrolled. Why is it so short?

“You’ve got to stop saying that.”

Bethany sits heavily on the bed, wincing as her tucked-under penis compresses against her crotch. “Look, Maria, this is scary, okay? This is…” She can’t finish it. She doesn’t have to: the magic of her relationship with Maria is that she doesn’t have to vocalise every thought that dances across her brain; she merely has to be stunningly insecure and terrified and Maria will, magically, pick up on it.

Maria picks up on it. She puts away the shoes in her hands — black ankle boots with, thank fuck, a tiny heel — and joins Bethany on the bed, holding out an arm and, as ever, accepting her into her embrace as if the two of them were born to fit together. As if they’d been doing this all their lives.

“Talk to me, Beth,” she says.

“It’s nothing new.”

“Moving too fast?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think so.” Maria knocks the side of her head against Bethany’s, gently enough that it probably doesn’t hurt even Maria’s still-sensitive skull but hard enough that it makes a sound, extracting a giggle from Bethany. A dirty tactic: just because Bethany’s amused by funny noises — among many other things — doesn’t mean Maria gets to use them against her. “I wasn’t quite honest,” she continues, “about my ulterior motive. Or I wasn’t comprehensive, I suppose. I don’t want you to talk to Will because I think you’ll help him. Tabby actually wanted Steph to do it, but I pulled rank. I don’t want to keep giving her all this work to do for us, especially not for Will’s sake. Frankly — though I wouldn’t say it outside these walls — I don’t much care for him.”

“You hide it well.”

“Thank you. I want you to talk to Will, Bethany, because I think you need to. For you. Because I know what’s going on in that head—” she pokes it, “—beyond just what you’ve told me. So I know it’s not enough for you to know that I survived as a woman despite my background, same as you will, same as Jane and Harmony and Pippa did.”

“Not Tabby?”

Maria smiles. “Tabitha was, with hindsight, more like Melissa than, say, me. More like Will, even, though without his… randomly directed aggressive tendencies.” She winces as she says this, and Bethany bumps shoulders with her. “You’ve had a knock to your confidence. You need to shore it up. You need to talk to him. You need to see for yourself that his progress — or otherwise — has no influence on yours.”

Bethany nods slowly. “So,” she says, thinking it through, “that’s why you went to get clothes.”

“You’re an actress, Beth. You sink into roles so deeply that after a while you don’t even know yourself any more. And I think you know that about yourself: remember ‘Aaron’?” She articulates his name with some of the most expressive scare quotes Bethany’s ever seen. “You still need to feel out how to be Bethany. You can’t do that just hanging around Steph and me all the time. And, before you say it, I don’t want her to be an act forever — because we’re going to keep checking in like this, all the time, until you’re comfortable in her, comfortable in yourself — but in the short term you can exploit your… acting abilities.”

“Fake it till you make it.”

“Exactly. I did it; Pippa did it—”

“Mia did it,” Bethany says. To Maria’s surprised expression, she adds, “We spoke. While I was still thinking about names. She said that’s how she gets along.”

“She’s sensible,” Maria says, “as long as you ignore the cat-ear hoodies. And she’s closer than she thinks.”

Bethany nods. Why is she so nervous about the clothes, anyway? They don’t mean anything. She was all geared up to go yell at Will and be obnoxious about her name and pronouns until Maria started unpacking, and why is that?

There are rumblings from Aaron, deep inside her, but they’re not what she expects. Thinking too much and remembering too little, lately. Feeling too much, perhaps. Because it’s not that he’s scared of the clothes, and it’s not that he’s even scared of what the clothes mean; he’s scared of what they mean to other people. He’s scared of making a choice, of being seen to have made it, and living with the consequences. He’s scared of being seen to care about something.

Jesus Christ, he’s an idiot.

Yeah. He was.

“Okay,” she says. “I’m ready.”

She’s not. Not at all. But she will be someday, and until then? She knows what she can do.

 

* * *

 

“This isn’t working.”

Val says it through her teeth, like she’s an auto mechanic examining an engine that persists, despite her efforts, in leaping out of the bonnet and scattering itself across the pavement. She helps Declan up again and walks him carefully to the dining table, sits him down next to Trevor. Frankie braces for what is inevitably to come; what they hoped would/wouldn’t come.

“No!” Jake barks from the other end of the room, on cue. “You don’t stop.”

“She stops,” Val says sharply.

Jake ignores her. “Get back to it, Dina.”

Jake’s getting antsy. Has he realised how alone he is here? How outnumbered? There he is, sinking into his armchair at the far end of the room, like a decrepit dad decomposing in front of the football while his family live their lives around him. With Declan now sitting next to Trevor and trying to copy the way he’s sitting — knees together, ankles crossed — and Val leaning against the back of a chair close by, all the men-become-women are clustered as far away from Jake as they possibly can be. Frankie’s closer, occupying a neutral space in the centre, keeping him from them.

“She cannot ‘get back to it’,” Val says, her arms stiffening on the back of the chair. She’s readied for action; what kind, none of them can predict. But she’s spent her entire life around bastards with hair-trigger tempers and no depths to their depravities, so she’s probably best equipped of all of them to spot a problem coming.

Or provoke one.

“What do you mean?” Jake snaps. Frankie’s got her eye on his feet. She’s still trying to learn his tics and tells, the better to predict his moods and movements. He was damn fast earlier when he struck Declan, and Frankie’s rattled.

Val pushes away from the chair and crosses the floor, her carefully chosen heels striking sharply against the hardwood. Straight-backed and steady of shoulder, she’s everything she’s been trying to drill into Trevor since Boxing Day. If she wasn’t in her fifties, she might belong on the catwalk.

Fuck it, Frankie decides; she would own the catwalk, age be damned. Amid the sin that curdles inside the manor at Stenordale, Valérie Barbier is the only thing worth looking at, the only thing worth retaining.

Val stops just short of Frankie’s chair. The furniture is scattered such that she almost completely bars entry to the other side of the room; if Jake wants to get at Declan, he’ll have to go through her or through Frankie.

Not a happy thought.

“She cannot learn to walk,” Val says, glaring down at Jake, “while she is forced to use both hands to retain her dignity.”

“Her— What dignity?”

“He’s been trying to cover his dick, Jake,” Frankie says. “You haven’t seen how he keeps stopping to pull down that stupid plastic skirt you made him wear?”

“He—”

“Trevor,” Val says, interrupting Jake’s nascent response and turning away from him, “go to my room and fetch something knee-length, please. There should be some modest dresses in my wardrobe. And bear in mind the height disparity; if in doubt, go long.”

“Wait,” Jake says, rising from his chair, “you can’t just—”

“Do you want her trained?” Val snaps, turning back to him and taking another step towards him. “Or do you wish simply to ogle her?”

Frankie doesn’t laugh at the way ‘ogle’ sounds in Val’s accent; she always sounds more French when she’s angry. “You should listen to her,” she says. “Val’s the expert.”

“She’s—” Jake says, and then restarts with a sneer. “He’s nothing but a toy.”

“Careful, Mr Henshaw,” Val says in a voice that could butter crumpets. “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

Jake covers some of the ground between them. “You forget your place. And you’re not sending your little friend out there alone.”

Val sighs theatrically. “Jake, I’ve been here thirty years. If there was an escape route, I would have found it.”

“The old man was sloppy. This is protocol.”

“Fine. Frances, you want to take him?”

“You’re the boss,” Frankie says, dropping a subtle emphasis on the final word. She makes a show of pushing up out of her chair, stopping halfway with her hand theatrically pressed against her back. “Trev, hun, would you help me up?”

Trevor taps his way across the hardwood, exhibiting more skill on his heels than Frankie’s ever managed, and cocks his hip as he stops in front of her, causing the tasteful outfit Val chose for him to flare ever so slightly. Frankie takes his hand and allows herself to be pulled up, and together they leave out of the door at the far end. The last thing she hears is Jake ordering Val to resume ‘Dina’s’ training, and Val refusing.

Christ, she hopes Val doesn’t push him too hard.

She checks for cameras in the corridor. She knows there aren’t any, not until they hit the foyer, because she’s memorised the security system, but Val said she should always remain alert, and Val’s the expert at surviving in such a hostile environment, so alert Frankie remains, to the best of her ability.

“Christ, I want to throw up,” Trevor mutters, letting her go and releasing all his stored tension. Frankie’d hoped he could be encouraged to be more like Val or Bea or any of the other girls who’d grown accustomed to and even embraced their femininity and their womanhood — it’d certainly make his day-to-day easier if he wasn’t battling his own bile every time he passed a mirror — but some men are just wired to be men, and Trev, the poor kid, seems to be one of them.

Exactly the way old Dotty likes them. What a find he would be, if she were allowed to keep him.

“Later, lad,” Frankie says, straightening up and quickening her step. “It’s quite a way to Val’s room, so we’ve got to fucking hustle, and that wasn’t entirely for show in there; my back isn’t what it used to be.”

“We couldn’t have left something closer?”

“Do you want us to look like we planned this?” Frankie whispers. “Besides, we didn’t know this was how it’d go. We’re winging it, Trev; it’s all improvisation. Val seized on the dress thing and now here we are. So come on.”

 

* * *

 

Truthfully, the outfit isn’t as bad as the schoolgirl costume. Maria, failing to hide her smirk as they discussed Bethany’s needs, helped her select from the minimal options in her wardrobe a light, easy-to-wear dress in dark grey. It billows out a little above the knee — to flatter hips she doesn’t yet have — and is generously proportioned around the chest, leaving ample space for the bra; another padded one. She’s wearing leggings so she doesn’t have to feel self-conscious about her legs, her leg hair or her underwear, and she’s satisfied that there’s little enough on show up top that she’s not going to have to worry about flashing the fucker with the extremely limited chest she’s managed to grow. And with the subtle makeup she got Maria to do for her, she looks…

Oh, Christ.

She looks like a girl.

The costume had been one thing. One over-the-top and very obviously silly thing, a teen boy’s fantasy, and that had helped when it came to putting it on and it helped even more when it came to rationalising it after. In Steph’s arms, bundled up in hoodie and jogging trousers, she quickly came to see it all as a performance, as a bit of fun.

Bethany looks at herself and sees no performance. No costume. And her knees start to wobble and she feels like she might fall but Maria’s there, holding her by the shoulders, guiding her back to the bed, sitting her down and saying something about how she doesn’t have to do this today, she doesn’t have to do this ever, they can just sit here and watch movies together, they can get more hot chocolate in even less pleasant mugs, and Maria will help her take it all off right now, and—

“No,” Bethany whispers.

She reaches up, takes a few of Maria’s fingers clumsily in hers and squeezes, and then stands and returns to the mirror.

This face, made up and tense.

This body, clothed and pretty and hugging itself.

This girl.

Well, she had to start being her sooner or later. Or, at the very least, faking it.

She forces a smile, and when Maria comes back to join her, embraces her again, kisses her lightly on the temple, emphasises with her presence their growing similarity, Bethany’s smile broadens, becomes genuine, and she returns her sister’s embrace with everything she has.

And then she turns back to herself.

Well, now she knows something new about Bethany Erin: she looks cute in a dress. She loves Steph and she’s Maria’s sister and she looks really fucking cute in a dress.

Only one more question to ask now: “So, do I get to tell him? Please can I tell him?”

Maria knows what she’s asking. “Beth, you don’t know how much I would love to say yes. But you can’t. Will doesn’t get to find out about the rest of us until Tabby says so. It’s her prerogative.”

“Fine. Fine. I get it. I do.” She pauses, experiments in the mirror with a pose: one hand on her hip, the other playing with her bottom lip. “Can I hint at it?”

“No.” Maria nudges her. “Absolutely not.”

“Spoilsport.”

And then Maria’s hand loops around her waist again. “Bethany,” she says quietly, resting her chin on Bethany’s shoulder, “it’s check-in time. You okay?”

The girl in the mirror grins at both of them. “Yeah,” she says. “It’s… I won’t pretend it’s not really fucking weird, Maria. Like, I look at her — I look at me — and there’s a part of me that just won’t stop screaming, but I don’t think it’s got anything to do with what I’m wearing.” She leans her head against Maria’s. “I read up on dysphoria, you know. After Steph. After you showed me the video from her intake. And, I mean, I knew kind of what it was already, I think everyone who’s ever been on the internet does, but I saw things in her that I never want to experience. And you know what’s weird?” She’s watching her lips as she talks, and the light colour Maria applied makes the shapes they form all the more pleasing. “I get it. And not the way I expected to.”

Maria squeezes her. “What do you mean?”

“I expected to hate this,” Bethany says, nodding at her reflection. “And when I put on the— the thing the other day, got all dressed up, I kind of did. But I didn’t feel like that about it. Scared and overwhelmed and super fucking stupid, sure, like I’d just jumped off a cliff without a rope or a parachute or one of those cartoon trampolines at the bottom, like I’d gone way too far way too quickly, but you know that, we talked about that, that’s just, like, baseline. But I never felt the way Steph did when Pippa was saying all that to her. And in the shower, too, that one time when she got burned. Looking back, I think she was trying to ruin herself, and I just don’t feel that when I look at myself. You know when I do? When I think about him. About Aaron. And it’s not about bodies or being a man or whatever, it’s about what he represents, who he is or was or whatever. I think about him and it makes my feet itch, makes me want to batter down these doors and run and keep running until he’s just a memory, until everyone’s forgotten his name and in his place there’s just… me.”

Maria nods, her hair mingling with Bethany’s as she does so. “You remind me of Christine,” she says. “And Yasmin and Faye and so many other girls here. It’s a stage a lot of them go through.”

“Not you?”

“No.” Another squeeze, but this time Maria’s looking away as she speaks. “I missed him. I still do. But he was killed and I survived in his place. It’s not really the same dynamic. As a boy, I was loved. Shown kindness. I’m not sure you ever were.”

Bethany snorts. “I didn’t deserve kindness.”

“You weren’t always the man we picked up, Bethany. You were innocent, once. As innocent as I ever was.”

It’s a lovely idea. Untrue, obviously; Aaron’s first reprimand for bad behaviour came early in junior school, and she winces when she remembers his disbelief that he’d been caught, his anger at being denied. Where did he learn such things? How can she be sure she won’t learn them again? Or that she can ever fully discard them?

It pulls at her, though. “Do you think I could ever be that innocent again?” she asks, quickly and shamefully.

Maria’s embrace tightens once more. “No,” she says. “But I’m not innocent any more, either. You’re just like the rest of us now.”

 

* * *

 

Frankie hasn’t been in Val’s room without her before. It’s uncomfortable despite Trevor’s presence; this is Val’s private place, the only part of her life that has, for uncountable years, been hers and hers alone. Without her, it’s an invasion.

Since Frankie got here, she’s twice had to talk Dotty out of fucking with it. Dorothy would love to play with Val, but she also, as Frankie pointed out, likes eating meals and living in a clean home, and it’s not like Silver River’s going to provide them with a maid, especially if they break the one they’ve already got.

It’s a cosy space. Strangely timeless. Most of Val’s belongings, aside from her clothes, are decades old, with pride of place given to a smallish TV/VCR combo and a wall of books and video tapes. Of course, thanks largely to Frankie, Val now knows about Blu-ray discs and mobile phones and the internet and 9/11, but nothing of that has been able to infect her room.

Frankie could probably stay here forever.

“You think this’ll look good on Dina?” Trev says, and Frankie blinks, remembering why they’re here.

“I really don’t care,” she says. “The question is, is it long enough?”

“Yeah,” he says, holding the dark blue dress up against himself. “Should be.” He flaps idly at the loose skirt. The gesture is feminine enough that Frankie schools her reaction to it; ordinarily she might laugh — and tell herself afterwards that she ought to hate herself for it — but that would be downright counterproductive right now. The lad’s got enough to deal with, and she and Val need him functional.

“Good,” she says. “Let’s go, then.”

As they close in on the training room, Frankie can hear yelling. Fuck only knows if that’s a good sign or a bad one, but she hurries herself anyway, and as a result doesn’t have to fake the limp that almost trips her a dozen times.

Trev barges through the door first, momentarily but understandably forgetting his role in all this, and rushes over to help Val while Frankie just leans against the door frame and tries hard not to vomit from the exertion. Inconvenient, at such a time, to be so fucking old.

“What the fuck is going on here, Jacob?” she wheezes.

The tableau which greeted them as they arrived: Declan on the floor at the edge of the carpet, having fallen again; Val parked on her arse in the middle of the carpet, hand clasped to a cheek Frankie would bet money is red and swelling; Jake standing between them with one hand raised.

Someone who didn’t know the man might assume he would be pleased at this point, having reasserted his authority, but he looks angrier than ever. His chest is pumping with the short, sharp breaths he’s taking, and his fist — fortunately not the one he used to slap Val — is clenched. Frankie’s contempt near doubles; he was even easier to provoke than she thought.

Declan’s crying, and Frankie knows why because she’s seen that look before on the face of too many girls over too many years: the absolute and inescapable despair of someone who’s been remade and trained and pumped so full of hormones they barely recognise their own emotions any more. Declan just watched Val, one of the people he might once have hoped would stand up for him, take a punishment meant for him. He just watched it floor her.

And Frankie would have difficulty tearing her eyes from him, if it weren’t for Val, who takes advantage of Trev’s outstretched arm and levers herself back to her feet. She steps away from him, towards Jake, and Frankie tries not to bite the inside of her mouth as Trev stiffens.

Control yourself, lad.

“You do not touch me,” Val says, low and steady, glaring at Jake. “Do you hear me, you contemptible rat of a man? You do not touch me.”

Jake is twice her size and he knows it. With a sneer he matches her step forward and says, “I will do what I fucking like with you. You’re a toy, Vincent. A piece of meat. Past your best and overcooked but a piece of meat all the same. And I can do what the fuck I—”

Valérie’s slap takes him by surprise. She puts her whole arm into it, and the noise from the impact is shockingly loud.

It stops him for no more than a second. And then he laughs, the humourless laugh of a man about to mete out just and delectable punishment, and kicks her full in the stomach. Val sees the kick coming, enough to bend with the blow, but still she staggers, and only saves herself from falling by grasping blindly at the back of a dust-sheeted couch. She loses a shoe and might have twisted her ankle and she’s in no shape to respond to whatever he does next.

He doesn’t get to do it. Trevor shoulder-barges him, pushes him back, knocks the wind out of him, almost trips him, and he follows through, stepping around him and hooking a foot around Jake’s lower leg.

Jake goes down, his head striking the carpet, and for a heart-freezing moment Frankie’s convinced they’ve put it all into motion too early, because he’s not got his gun with him; if they kill him now, they’ve no leverage, they’ve achieved nothing, and Silver River will triple their guard and all hope will be lost.

That’s not the plan.

Frankie holds her breath.

And then Jake kicks out, unbalances Trevor with a kick to his ankle, and he’s up, pulling Trevor into his reach with one hand and closing the other into a fist. There’s the look of triumph she’s been waiting for; there’s his victory.

There’s his first punch.

Before Jake can do it again, before he has the opportunity seriously to hurt poor Trevor, Frankie puts all her years of authority into her voice and yells, “Don’t hit the fucking merchandise, you idiot!”

 

* * *

 

It’s only a few steps from Bethany’s room to Will’s, but Tabby’s there by his door, her eyes narrowing when she sees how Bethany’s dressed, and the voice of Aaron resurfaces briefly to remind her that these judgements haven’t gone away, will never go away, because there will always be people who knew her as Aaron, who knew what he did, who will see him when they ought to see her, and—

Bethany shuts him up by knocking her head briefly against the wall. The horrible wood-effect laminate wallpaper cushions the impact, but it has the desired effect.

The world moves on without you, Christine said, and the girls here all make the effort to move with it. If you want him to, Aaron Holt can fade away.

God, she wants him to.

“Uh,” Tabby says, “Beth?”

“Yes?” Bethany says brightly.

“Never mind. You want to talk to Will?”

“‘Want’ is a strong word, but yeah.”

“Is he okay?” Maria asks.

Tabby shakes her head. “Far from it.”

“How come?” Bethany asks. “I mean, he admitted it, didn’t he? His dark little secret?”

“It’s not that simple,” Tabby says, shrugging her shoulders against the wall. “It’s never that simple. He’s trans, but he’s not trans like Steph is. She held off on transition because she had some damn stupid ideas about how she was too weak or too masculine or whatever—”

“And some very reasonable notions about the NHS,” Maria adds.

“Yeah, sure. Will… Yes, he’s known all his life. But he buried it. Why exactly, I don’t know — although look out the fucking window and take your pick; this country isn’t exactly short on reasons to stay closeted — but since he did so, it’ll have found its way out in other ways. Ways that are easier for him to deny, to pathologise. Fetishes and secret desires and fleeting moments of revelation. He’ll have crushed them all. Put them right back where he thinks they belong. No, Beth, I think he’s got a long way to go before he can accept himself.”

“He told you all this?” Bethany says.

“No. We’ve barely talked since. That’s why I wanted Steph; he opened up to her before.”

“Yes,” Maria says, “but he closed right up again after. In fact, that might have been where he started thinking we were basically going to Stepford Wife him.”

“If he didn’t tell you all that,” Bethany persists, “then how do you know it?”

Tabby shrugs again. “Experience. Personal and otherwise. Opening his file for the first time was a bit like looking in a really pasty mirror.” She sighs. “There are ways in which it’s simpler, dealing with someone down here with a head start on transness: there are women like Will in every community of trans women. Makes him a little more predictable, now we know his deal. But there are ways in which it’s much, much harder: we’re not just dismantling his false ideas about masculinity, manhood, womanhood, and so on; we have to teach him a whole new way to think about being trans, too.”

Maria brings Bethany into a quick shoulder hug. “Told you I got the best one,” she says.

“Beth,” Tabby says, “could you perhaps backslide a bit, please? Get sent to the cells, or something? Maria’s become so annoying.”

“Sorry,” Bethany says, and does her best to keep a straight face. “I’m a good girl now.”

“Now that I’ll believe when I see it.”

“Oh, Tab,” Maria says, interrupting Tabby as she reaches for the door lock, “Bea wants you to contact Shahida. She wants to see her and Melissa together. Soon.”

“Oh?” Tabby frowns. “She can’t do that herself?”

“She wants to speak to you, too.”

“Oh. Joy. Go on, then.” She thumbs the biometric reader and pushes Will’s door open with her foot. “Don’t break him again.”

 

* * *

 

Jake clears out. He reminds them all that the camera in the corner will have seen everything and that they shouldn’t test his authority and then he clears the fuck out, because if he harms the Smyth-Farrows’ brand new prize he’ll be bloody well segmented, like Karen. Frankie breathes her first clear breath since last night, when she and Val first talked it all through, when they came up with their bare-bones plan. But then her throat closes up again, because Val’s still on the floor, on her knees now, looking at nothing, her fingers twitching, and Frankie has to wonder how hard she was hurt.

“What’s up with her?” Declan says. Sullen little fuck. He watched it all go down with a hungry look in his eyes, which died the moment he realised Trevor was no match for Jake. That none of them are.

“Shut up, Declan,” Frankie mutters. “Go to your room.”

“But I—”

She resummons the remains of her authority and practically screams at him. “Go to your room!”

He leaves. He’ll probably take the long way round, stay as far away from the soldiers as he can. Frankie doesn’t care. He can go claw at the windows and get tased by Callum if he wants. He’s not part of this.

“Don’t yell at me,” Trevor says quietly, crouching down next to Val, “but is she okay?”

She wants to tell him off just for the hell of it, but she’s replaying the fight, trying to understand what’s happening, and when she reaches the end of it she goes cold, and curses herself for her rank, careless stupidity. The training room starts to take on the aspect of the old kitchen at Dorley Hall, with another girl in Val’s place, knocked bloody nosed to the tile.

Beatrice, come to catch her friend before she leaves.

Valérie, struggling against her captors, about to be taken from her forever.

And Frankie, who bought them five minutes to comfort each other, to say their goodbyes.

Don’t hit the merchandise.

“Bad memories, lad,” Frankie says absently. “Don’t worry about it.”

 

* * *

 

He’s sleeping when she enters, and he’s got the covers off and very little clothing on. It’s a banal observation — she and Steph have discussed it several times — but the Will who currently lurks in his room bears little resemblance to the man they met back at the start of all this. Where he was once muscled he’s now spare, where he was once energetic he’s now enervated, and where he was once arrogant to the point of aggravation, well, he’s now a twitching fucking wreck of a man, a man who can’t keep himself still unless he has something in his hands, something in front of his eyes, something to keep his attention off the people around him, containing his fear in his book or his phone or in the knuckleprints he leaves in the bean bag chairs.

There’s a stress ball on his bedside table. It says Greetings from Wookey Hole! around the equator, and Bethany frowns; if that’s a joke, like on the mugs, it’s an obscure one.

She wonders if she should leave. Not because she doesn’t want to disturb him, but because the mere sight of him has reminded her exactly what she thinks of him, and because, she has to admit to herself, that while it was fun to tease the fucker a few days ago, she doesn’t necessarily want to be seen as a girl by him. Not yet.

No, actually.

No, no and bollocks to him. She doesn’t care what he thinks. In fact, she invites his contempt! If he sneers at her for embracing the womanhood he’s been running from his entire life, all that proves is that he’s a shithead, and that he knows about a hundredth of what he thinks he knows. And there is no fucking way Bethany Erin Something-or-Other is turning down the chance to lord it over Will Schroeder.

Lady it over him. Whatever.

She sits carefully and quietly in the wheelie chair, crosses her legs at the knees — and then reconsiders and crosses them at the ankle, trying for the benefit of the overhead cameras not to wince. There must be a special, secret way to tuck that makes the other way less painful.

Maybe that secret is the orchiectomy.

Someone — one of the girls watching on their phone screens just outside the door — turns on the lights and activates the alarm on Will’s phone. Look What You Made Me Do.

Maria warned her about Dorley Hall’s Taylor Swift problem. In the bed, Will stirs and reaches out a hand for his phone.

“Hey, Will,” Bethany says quietly.

He reacts like she just hooked him up to the mains via his spine, sitting up straight and pulling the covers around his chest in the same instant. He winces and Bethany smirks. Sensitive nipples. Join the club.

“How did you get in here?” he says. Christ. He talks like he just learned how, with an unsteady rhythm and in a whisper so broken it could be a death rattle. Unsettling.

You are so not feeling sorry for Will, Bethany.

“Tabby let me in,” she says, pushing indifference into her voice. “She’s worried about you.”

Will frowns and gathers the sheets tighter around himself. “Why did she let you in?”

Bethany leans forward. “Because you’re a broken doll, Will. And I’m the one who broke you.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. And just what the fuck are you wearing?”

Ah; the opportunity she’s been waiting for. She silences her inhibitions, even though she still feels them numbing her limbs and biting at her belly, and leans back again, pushes on the chair latch so she can keep going until she’s practically horizontal, the better to show off her dress. Will’s expression freezes.

Yeah. She’s got him. She lets the recoil on the seat push her back into a normal sitting position and then uncrosses her ankles, smooths down her dress and shuffles in the seat. In his face she sees a lot of what she saw two days ago: a confused mixture of fear, desire and shame. She expected that.

What she didn’t expect: it feels good. Better than good, it feels powerful; she feels powerful. She’s always sought to control the attention she receives, the better to direct the reactions she may or may not inspire in the people around her, but to be the site of such— such—

Fuck. She can only call it awe.

She should have gone shorter on the dress. Bolder on the makeup. Maybe worn the wig again. She wants this feeling and she wants it more than practically anything she’s ever experienced, because this is actual fucking control, real influence, not the petty crap she habitually extracts from those willing to listen.

Aaron screams at her but she doesn’t care; no-one ever looked at him like this.

“Do you like it?” she says, in the sweetest, most winsome voice she can manage. She should have voice trained harder; it would have been more effective. “I think it’s cute, don’t you?”

“No,” Will says, his customary venom creeping back into his manner. “You should take all that shit off.”

One last protest from Aaron before she shuts him the fuck up: you shouldn’t be looked at like that, men shouldn’t see you this way, you shouldn’t be doing this! What a whiner.

“You want me to undress?” she asks. “But that would be so… inappropriate.”

“Shut up.”

“Trying to get a girl naked on a first date…”

“You’re not a girl, Aaron,” Will says.

Bethany sniffs. Drops the act. But remembers how it felt; maybe she’ll try it out on Steph. “Interesting!” she says, in something closer to her everyday voice. “Because I hear you are a girl, Will, so why am I so much better at this than you?”

It’s like she’s knifed him. And that’s probably a reasonable reaction; he will have assumed that it was privileged information, that Tabby would keep it a secret as long as he needed her to, but sponsors talk, and one sponsor in particular fucking hates you, buddy…

Besides, Will’s misery is affecting Tabby, and she quite likes Tabby. He needs some sense knocked into him.

Will looks like he wants to run. His eyes are darting around the room, from the door to the end of the bed to the wardrobe and back again. But he’s got to know he’s trapped: he’s in his room and in his bed with the sheets pulled practically over his head; he’s retreated as far as he can already.

She’s briefly concerned that he might attack, but she discussed it with Maria while she was getting changed. She and Tabby will be right outside, waiting on either side of the doorway, tasers ready, lock set to quick release. They’ve drilled it: by the time Will finishes untangling himself from his bedsheets, he’ll already be stuck with taser darts.

Bethany asked, what if he’s just getting up to pee, or something?

Maria said, I’d find a way to live with the guilt.

“I’m not a girl…” Will says. Unconvincing.

“Maria told me,” Bethany says conversationally, “and I’ve got to admit, Will, I’m confused. You’ve wanted to be a girl all your life, and now these girls are literally forcing estrogen into your system, so why the long face? I mean, yes, sure, it’s genetic, and you don’t know how sorry I am for you about that, but—”

“Aaron—”

“Deadnaming me is not nice, Will.”

“Then stop calling me that!”

She rolls her eyes. “What the fuck else am I supposed to call you? Do you even have a name, buried deep down inside your fortress of logic and reason and sudden violent episodes? Or have you wound yourself up so tight you can’t even imagine it? Jesus Christ, I knew you were pathetic, Will, but this is… Is there a word that’s, like, pathetic but worse? You’re like pathetic got all folded in on itself and collapsed under its own mass. You’re pathetic with an event horizon.”

“You don’t know anything.”

She leans forward again. “That surprises me, Will, that you would say that, and I’ll tell you why: because you gave a lecture recently about the purpose of this place that was very neat and sensible and put it all into perspective. About the inevitability of it all and the stupidity of resistance. You know, the one you gave to Ollie about his sad little rebellion? I mean, sure, it was basically everything Steph’s ever said but reworded to be slightly more annoying — sorry, my bad: far more annoying — but all I can think, looking at you now, is why doesn’t this bitch take her own advice?”

He freezes. “Don’t…”

“You’re a girl, Will. Tabby asked how long you’ve wanted to be a girl, and you said, ‘Always,’ or something. So what gives?”

He can’t look at her and she thrills with it. Is this what it’s like to be a sponsor? To find the vulnerable spot in some macho piece of shit and just keep pressing on it until it collapses? Until it reveals itself to be supported by nothing but arrogance and supposition and superstition and really, really bad gender politics?

Will mumbles something, his face almost buried in the matted bedsheets.

“Louder, William,” Bethany says.

“It’s not the same!” Will shouts. Loud despite the muffling from his sheets. And then he looks back up at Bethany, right at her, his eyes red and his hands shaking. “It’s not the same! I’m not the same.”

He’s taking a breath to say something else stupid, so Bethany gets there first. “What does it matter, Will?”

Clearly, he finds the question absurd enough that his imminent tantrum is redirected. He gasps for a few moments, like a fish out of its element, and then says, “It fucking matters, okay? Of course it matters.”

“So explain it to me.” She props her elbow on her knee and cups her jaw in her hand. Imagines she looks like an interested primary school teacher, in her grey dress and sensible makeup. He remains silent, so she decides to give him a push. “Look, mate, you know I fucking hate you, right? You’re pompous and annoying and you’re like if Wikipedia was made up of only its worst editors. And I’m pretty sure you hate me right back.” He grunts his agreement, frowning, wondering where she’s headed with this. “So look at me! Right here! Right now! It’s that guy you hate, only he’s dressed up as a girl and he’s calling himself Bethany. I couldn’t have made myself more vulnerable in front of you if I tried. So what does it matter what you say to me? What dark secrets you spill? How can I, someone already way farther down the rabbit hole than you, possibly leverage it against you?”

He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t tense up, either. He stays still, his gaze having slipped away from hers, now locked somewhere around her chin. Thinking. Or so she hopes.

“You talked to Steph,” she says. “When you were in the cells, she came to see you. I was against it, by the way. I found out after and I made Maria promise that she’d never be put in that kind of position again, because, and I don’t know if you remember this, you’re a violent piece of shit. A violent piece of shit who hurt my sister—” She bites off the escalation before it can get going. “But you talked. And she thought you’d had a breakthrough. Of sorts.”

He nods slowly. “I remember.”

“So? What happened?”

His lip curls into a sneer. “Nothing. Nothing happened. That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it? I talked to Steph and she listened and that made me feel good about myself for the first time in years. Maybe ever. And I did nothing with it. I got out of the cell and went back to my room and read the books Tab got me and kept to myself and did nothing. Because I didn’t know what to do! So I just waited around for something to happen to me. Oh, I kept my promise, I didn’t stir shit any more and I definitely didn’t attack anyone else, but those aren’t good things, Aaron. That’s just… the absence of bad things. I’ve never been so passive in my life. And do you know how hard it was? How much work? Keeping him at bay?”

“‘Him’?”

“Who do you fucking think?”

She taps her fingers on her cheek. Watches him. He’s moving carefully again, without the jitters brought on by panic or by fear of himself. “I’m early, you know,” she says. “According to Maria. I’m early. Steph’s influence, maybe. Or because I bonded so well with Maria. Or because I got just enough of a break from being Aaron—” with her free hand she measures a tiny space between her thumb and forefinger, “—to realise just how much shit he used to talk. All the time. All the excuses and all the justifications and all that bullshit. I realised I really fucking hated him.” She nods to herself. “I mean, you get that, right? Of all people, you should understand what a little bastard I was.”

“‘Was’?” he says with something almost like a smile.

Got him again. “I like to think I’ve improved,” she says, stretching, showing herself off again before returning to a neutral, interested position. “So,” she continues, “if I can do it, why can’t you?”

The faint hint of humour vanishes. “Because it doesn’t work like that.”

“Haven’t you been reading Tabby’s books? You can just choose to be a girl, Will. It’s fine. It’s normal. Christ, going by the numbers, being a girl’s actually more normal than being a boy. By, like, almost a whole percent, globally.”

“But you can’t just be a girl.”

Okay. This is getting annoying now. “Yes, you can. You know this. At least, I assume you do; you have heard of trans women, yes?” Nothing from him again. What does she do? Back off? Push him harder? And what if she breaks him?

She laughs to herself; not only does she not particularly care if she does, he probably can’t get any more broken.

“Give me something, Will. Give me a name, maybe. Names are easy; I picked one. What would your parents have called you if you were—?”

“Nothing!” He hits both fists against the mattress as he says it, like a child having a tantrum, only scary as shit; even in his reduced state, he has five inches on her at least.

Behind her, she hears the soft whirr-click of the lock engaging. The slow rollover; almost silent. A recent innovation, apparently, and a comforting one. Maria’s that much closer.

Will doesn’t appear to hear it.

“What do you mean, ’nothing’?” she asks.

It takes him a while to come out with it, and she decides she’s pushed hard enough, that if anything’s going to happen, it’ll have to happen without her encouragement. When he speaks, he’s quiet but steady, practically toneless.

“I asked Mum once. What she would’ve called me. If I’d been born a girl. I was six or something. Maybe five. She said she never chose another name. Said she knew from the start I’d be a boy. She just knew. So she and Dad never came up with another name. Just William. Just Will.” The closed fists buried in the mattress start to wind themselves into the sheets. “I think that might be my earliest memory.”

Well.

Shit.

“Will?” Bethany says carefully.

“Don’t. Just fucking don’t.” He unwinds, loosens his grip on the sheets, presses his head back into the wall, stares up at the ceiling. Bethany wonders if he’s looking at one of the cameras or if he’s just looking at nothing. “You want secrets?” he says. “You want my fucking secrets? When I was fourteen I tried on my mum’s clothes and I was already tall and filling out and I looked like shit, but it didn’t stop me wanking one out on her bed. And after I felt like the worst fucking person imaginable, do you know what I did? The next day I went the fuck off on the first guy at school who pissed me off, and the next night I put on my mum’s dress and did it all over again. And I kept doing it. For a year. Until my dad almost caught me. Sweaty and naked in their bedroom. I stuffed her dress back in the wardrobe and when he found me he demanded to know what I was doing so I… I showed him his porn mags. The ones he kept under the box with his dress shoes in the back of the wardrobe. And he was proud. He’d been working out with me and teaching me to fight and then he caught me masturbating to his dirty mags and… and I was a man in his eyes now. Fifteen and a fucking man. I didn’t go in my parents’ room again. I sure did hit a lot more people, though.”

“Will…”

“There’s words for what I am,” he says. “Pervert. Transvestite. Fucking autogynephile, except that one doesn’t work for me because I don’t— Shit. No.” He closes his eyes. “I’m all those things and I’m a bully, too. Unpredictable. Violent. Male.”

He’s got his eyes closed now so she takes advantage, quietly rolls her chair a little farther away from him. Because, yeah: unpredictable; violent. Male might be up for debate, but suddenly Maria and her taser seem dangerously distant.

“Will—”

“Oh, fuck off, Aaron,” he says, and, yeah, okay. Fine. Maria’s outside with the taser? Let’s take off the fucking gloves, then.

“You almost had me sympathising with you there,” she says. “Almost. But you can’t stop yourself, can you?”

“What are you on about?”

He sounds tired. She doesn’t care.

“My name, Will. It’s Bethany. Not Aaron. You haven’t got it right once.”

“So? Why is it so important to you, anyway? You’re not trans, not like Steph. You’re just—”

“No, William, I’m not ‘just’ anything. And who gives a shit if I’m not trans? Does it even matter?”

“I’m not talking about if it matters or not — why don’t you listen? — I’m saying it makes no sense for you to be so sensitive about this name they forced on you when you’re not actually… You know. You’re not real.”

His leg’s dangling over the edge of the bed, so she kicks it. And she’s wearing shoes, so it probably hurt. He looks at her again for the first time in a while, and some of the life returns to his eyes.

He speaks first. “You piece of—”

“Oh my God,” she says. “Will. William. First, no-one forced a name on me; I picked it. All by myself. It’s mine. Second, why do you even care what’s real? Why do you think it matters? Do you think maybe that God, or whatever abstract creature of pure logic you built to replace God, gives even the slightest lump of drippy shit that Will Schroeder’s been torturing himself his entire life because he had a few risky wanks as a kid and now he thinks that defines him for life? Are you earning little logic prizes for your self-denial? Because holy fucking shit, Will, before I came to Dorley I was wound up like a fucking Duracell Bunny and I’m still approximately one-millionth as fucked up as you.”

She pauses for breath, is momentarily surprised that she needs to, but as she spoke she started to tense, to cling to her chair, and she forces herself to relax. Yelling won’t fix the stupid bastard.

What would Steph do? Probably empathise and gently draw out from him a lifetime of salted wounds, just like she did with some dumb Geology student she no longer cares to name. A shame she’s not Steph, then.

Will glares at her. “You don’t wind the Duracell Bunny,” he says. “It’s got batteries.”

“You suck, you know that?” Bethany says, standing and kicking the chair away. “That’s all you have to say? That’s what you thought was important right now? Priorities, Will. We’re here to talk about your neuroses, and while your pathological need to correct people might be among them it’s hardly the most interesting, is it? Remember the whole ‘putting on your mother’s dress’ thing? That sounds just awful, Will. And I’ve got a fair idea now of what it’s like, growing up as a girl while having to fake being a guy. Steph’s talked about it. It sounds like the worst thing I can imagine, and you know what? I fucking resent that I have to look at you and understand that you and she share something I can’t. Yeah, something painful and traumatic but still, it’s something I have to imagine. But you know the difference between you two? I mean, aside from the obvious ones, like she’s kind and pretty and funny and you’re a violent, pedantic arsewipe. The big difference is, when she got here, she did something about it. She connected with her sponsor. She asked the right questions. And then she reached out and started helping me. Not just me, actually; you talked to Adam lately? Well, she has. And Martin, too, for some reason. And you already know she’s tried helping you.”

“Aaron—”

“Bethany, Will. It’s Bethany. Say it or I’ll scream and get Maria in here to tase you until your hair turns white.”

“Bethany. Fine.”

Frustrated, she kicks the chair again. “Just fucking do something, Will!” she says, throwing her arms up. “You’re in the one place on the entire planet that’ll give you free hormones and free surgeries and free clothes and a free best friend for life — and it’s doing so in spite of the shit you’ve done, including hurting my sister — and what are you doing? You’re lying here in the fucking dark, moping about your tragic history with masturbation and your, I don’t know, your broad shoulders? Girls with broad shoulders are hot, Will, so if that’s what’s stopping you—”

“It’s not.”

“Then I don’t get it. Who cares if you think you’re a transvestite or whatever the fuck? You seriously thought that was worth all this? The God of Logic doesn’t care if you’re a boy or a girl or a crossdresser or a fucking dinosaur, mate. The only people whose opinions matter are the people you choose. That’s what I did; I didn’t just choose to be a girl, I chose whose opinions I give a shit about. And I decided I care about Steph’s opinion. I decided I care about my sister’s opinion. And they both happen to think I can be a woman. I bet Tabby thinks you can be a woman, too, and yeah, that’s basically the only flaw in an otherwise remarkable human being, but whatever. She believes in you.”

“You keep calling Maria your sister. She’s just your sponsor, Aa— Bethany.”

“And you keep changing the subject. And you like that ‘just’ word, don’t you? I’m just a boy they’re turning into a girl. Maria’s just my sponsor. You’re just an autogroinophile.”

“That’s not— Never mind.”

“This is your problem, Will. You keep reducing beautiful and strange and weird and wonderful things! You keep fucking compacting them to fit into your rigid little brain. It’s stupid. It’s wasteful. Because you know what? Maria is my sister. Aaron was an only child, but Bethany’s got a sister. Yes, she’s, like, eighteen years older than me and her parents were from Hong Kong, not Barnet, and she’s different from Aaron in every way I can think of, but she picked me, and she told me something very important: I get to leave Aaron behind if I want to. And I do, because he didn’t deserve someone like Maria as his sister.”

“And ‘Bethany’ does?”

“She’s fucking working on it, Will. Give her a break, she’s been around less than a week.”

 

* * *

 

“Do you think he was right?”

Frankie, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of Val, inches away from her and wondering if she ought to try a physical form of comfort, wondering if that wouldn’t just make it worse, flinches in irritation as Trevor breaks her concentration. But she doesn’t yell at him, for Val’s sake if not his; her eyes are wet and she’s chewing on her lip, but she’s not absent, not like Declan was. She’s just, if Frankie has to guess, fucking tired of it all. Taking a break.

“About what, lad?” she says quietly.

“Jake. When he left. He said I wasn’t a soldier any more. Said I never was.”

She quickly looks around, checks her memory of the camera layout in here: just one, near the back of the room. Mic’d up and, unfortunately, facing her.

“I mean, yeah,” she says, hoping he’ll understand that she can’t speak her mind here, and neither should he. “You’re one of us now. Just another girl under the aegis of Dorothy Marsden and Silver River Solutions. Try to enjoy it.”

He doesn’t say anything and she doesn’t especially enjoy coddling him, so she returns her attention to Val. She’s looking right at her, it turns out; Frankie almost jumps in surprise, and feels the strain of the cancelled motion in her creaking knees.

“Think of it as an upgrade, Trevor,” Val says, releasing Frankie from her gaze. She speaks more carefully than normal and sounds comparatively deep, at the bottom end of alto. Frankie never did ask how Val trained her voice, although she got the impression it was largely by trial and error, down in Dorley Hall’s concrete dungeon. “You will never again be ordered to kill. The downside is—” and an unsettling smile crinkles her lips, “—you might still die.”

He still doesn’t say anything, and Val turns her eyes back to Frankie.

“You feeling okay, Val?” Frankie asks.

“Are you asking after my belly, my face or my feelings?”

Frankie shrugs. “Take your pick.”

“I am sore.”

“Want me to walk you to your room?”

“I can manage that all by myself, Frances,” Val says.

“Yeah? Well, I want to eat lunch tomorrow, Val, and that means I’m taking you back to your room, one way or another. Right now, I don’t trust you to wash your face without drowning in the sink.”

Val’s expression sharpens, her eyebrows pinching slightly. “I am not suicidal, Frances.”

“No, but you’re a mess. Trev, lad, give me a— Oh.” She looks around and discovers that the absence she’s been feeling behind her is indeed because Trevor took off. Barefoot; he’s left his heels behind. “Shit. I’ll have to discipline him for that.”

“Good at that, aren’t you?”

Frankie rolls her eyes. “Give me a break, Val. We’ve all got our jobs to do.” She pushes her legs out, stretches the knees painfully, massages her thighs. “Come on,” she says, “let’s get you back to your room.”

Better in theory than in practise; she’s stuck. Her legs are simply unwilling to push her up, and she knows that if she tries to get her arms involved she’ll probably dislocate a shoulder or something.

Val’s face pinches with momentary amusement, and then in one lithe motion she’s standing, unfolding from the crouch she’s been maintaining with little appearance of effort. Something to be said for staying active.

“Get up,” Val says, holding out a hand for her. “I don’t have all night.”

 

* * *

 

Bethany leans on the outside of Will’s door for a moment after she closes it behind her, more for the theatricality of it than for any support it might offer her, because holy fucking shit, that boy is more wound up than a fleet of advertising mascot rabbits. Christ, if her shit is undergraduate level — and she’s perfectly willing to admit that Maria and Steph between them accomplished quite the feat in exhuming it all and dumping it in front of her, gross slimy wiggly creatures and all — Will’s tangled horror of neuroses and repression could probably survive multiple graduate research projects without giving up all its secrets.

“Rough day?” Maria asks. She’s squatting against the wall on the other side of the corridor, and she rubs at her back as she stands. Tabby’s gone, presumably to contact Shahida and/or gird her loins for an encounter with Beatrice in her role as boss, chief feminiser, mug inspector, whatever.

“Do we have, like, a decontamination chamber or something?” Bethany says, mimicking Maria and massaging the small of her back. Those shitty chairs really aren’t comfortable after a while, and it absolutely had taken a while to talk Will around to admitting that, maybe, just maybe, Tabby had a fucking point when she said you can just be a girl, dumbass. “One of those rooms from the sexy prison dramas where you strip off and get hit with the hoses and then the big lady inmate comes up and whispers—”

“No. Sorry.”

“Shit. I’m going to catch the worms that live in his brain.” When Maria rolls her eyes, Bethany, seized by the need to make Maria suffer just a little for putting her through all that, grabs at Maria’s arm and pulls on it, affecting extreme distress. “Maria,” she whines, “I don’t want to catch his worms! I only just got rid of my own!”

“You did, did you?” Maria responds, pushing her away. “That’s funny, because I remember just recently you were panicking over a simple grey dress.”

“Oh, please. That was hours ago.”

It’s Maria’s turn to grab at Bethany, and she does, reeling her in and placing her in the middle of the corridor. Suddenly serious, she says, “Bethany, you know this confidence, this comfort, it can come and go. Especially with you.”

Bethany squirms under her grip. “I know, I know.”

“If you wake up in the morning and you want to wear neutral clothes again, that’s fine.”

“I know.”

“It’s not backsliding.”

“I know.”

“And we don’t have an infinite supply of repressed trans girls for you to retraumatise every time you need to push yourself.”

“I know.”

“I think we’re limited to just the one, actually.”

Bethany can’t keep it up; she laughs. “Christ, imagine if Ollie really did turn out to be trans all along. He’s really sorry, all that intimate partner violence was just his way of— Uh, whoops.” Maria’s frowning at her. “Bad taste?”

“Bad taste,” Maria says, smirking. “Now, you want to come upstairs? Edy and I are having a movie night. Steph and Pippa’ll be there. Probably a few others, too.”

“Is this a sponsor tactic?” Bethany asks. “Encouraging me to form bonds with the women who live here, to—”

“Yes,” Maria says, and pulls on her again, kisses her on the forehead, “but it’s also a big sister tactic. I want to keep an eye on you.”

“Fine.”

She can’t help thinking of Will, alone in his room. He’ll have dimmed the lights again, she’s sure of it — it’s what she did when she wanted to convince herself the best way forward was to dig a deep hole and pull the dirt back on top of her — and she doesn’t even make it to the first floor basement before she has to ask: “You think Will’s going to be okay?”

Maria looks around, presumably checking for Tabby, and says, “God, I don’t care.”

“Maria!” someone says from inside the security room.

“I’m off the clock, Nell,” Maria yells. “I don’t have to care.” She turns back to Bethany, reaches out for her. “What do you think?” she asks. “Is he going to be okay?”

Will in his room, in the dark, wrapped in his sweat-soaked sheets, replaying over and over in his head the pivotal memories from his childhood, the memories that after years and years of overthinking and repression he’s transformed into reasons to keep his real self undernourished and neglected. Did she help? Did she inject enough doubt into his iron-thick self-hatred and self-disgust? Did she, in the end, reinforce Tabby’s point, or did she contradict it?

Anyone can be a fucking girl, Will. Even you.

“Yes,” Bethany says. “Probably. I mean, his head’s so far up his arse he’s eating yesterday’s dinner, but… yes. Probably.”

“Proud of you, Beth.”

“Yeah. I’m kind of proud of me, too.”

 

* * *

 

Frankie doesn’t immediately offer to carry Val back to her room — not with the state of her joints — but Val’s insistence that she can, in fact, make it entirely under her own power is rendered moot when she nearly falls twice in just the first corridor. So Frankie ducks under Val’s shoulder, ignores the shooting pains in her hip, and together they walk slowly and almost drunkenly through the maze that is Stenordale Manor.

“It is not supposed to make you feel weak, I thought,” Val’s saying, practically muttering, almost inaudible and more heavily accented than ever. “The fight or flight. I am supposed to be energised, to be ready to run or to fight, and goodness, I wanted to fight, Frances. I wanted to take my heel and ram it right through his eye socket. The only thing stopping me was that I knew I wouldn’t get away with it. Because he will have trained for it, won’t he? Soldier classes. Advanced shoe-blocking for imperialist bastards. What to do if a maddened transsexual comes at you with an improvised weapon. Why do I feel so weak, Frances?”

“Shush, love,” Frankie says, providing the majority of the impelling force to get them around the last corner into the servants’ quarters.

“I am going to have a bruise,” Val says, steadying them both against the awful wallpaper, “right in the middle of my belly, the exact shape of that bastard’s foot.”

“No bikinis for you for a while.”

“No. No bikinis.”

“Can you—? Shit. Sorry. Val, can you get the door?”

“Hmm? Oh. Yes.”

She had grand plans about making them both a cup of tea in Val’s kitchenette, about putting her to bed and sitting herself down in the rocking chair and watching her until she falls asleep, but getting the both of them back here’s cost Frankie almost as much as facing down Jake cost Val, just without the bruises. So when they both collapse onto Val’s bed she’s pleased she had the presence of mind to kick the door closed, because she doesn’t think either of them are getting up again for a while.

Frankie lies there and she wheezes.

“Thank you,” Val says quietly. Frankie almost doesn’t hear her over her own breath. “For Béatrice.”

Frankie manages to gasp something out. “You don’t—have—to—”

“I don’t have to,” Val says with a trace of irritation, “but I prefer to. I didn’t believe you at first,” she continues, regaining enough energy to pile up some pillows and cushions behind her head, “with all your talk about helping Béatrice, helping some of the other girls. I thought you were… selectively remembering events to your benefit. But what you said today…”

“I’m really fucking sorry about that,” Frankie says quickly.

“Don’t be,” Val snaps. “Jacob and Trevor needed the reminder.”

“Val—”

“And so did I, I think. That night, that morning — whenever it was — the memory of it carried me through some difficult times. I think it probably saved my life.”

Frankie takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “I still don’t deserve thanks,” she says, and pushes herself more upright as she does so, accepting a pillow from Val and shoving it behind her head. “No more than a kid who crushes insects for fun deserves thanks from the ones he decides to spare. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this, Val, and even then I spent most of it focused on a… particular perspective: mine. It’s taken meeting you again for me to get beyond the guilt I’ve been carrying, to realise how fucking self-serving it is and always has been. I should’ve walked away, Val. I could’ve. Yeah, I probably would’ve got killed, but better me than… than my girls.”

Val’s quiet for a long time. Frankie can feel her eyes on her. Can’t meet them.

“They would have found someone else to do the work,” Val says.

“Nah. Not necessarily. We were flukes, our lot. New blood to replace the old, the ones who wouldn’t get with the new programme. We were just angry enough and stupid enough to fall under her spell, and old Dorothy wasn’t getting any more charming with age, I’ll tell you that. And you can look and look for someone like Karen, someone who’ll do it just because it’s fun, but there’s never a guarantee you’d find one. Dotty was trying to recruit for the whole nineties. Found one new sponsor in all that time. One. S’why we’re all so fucking old together.”

Val nods. “Will you make it?” she asks. “You’re having trouble with your knees, your back. Your hip, I think. When the time comes, will you make it? Will you be able to go all the way?”

“Val, I’ll do my part. If it kills me. And Jake, well, he thinks we’re all pushovers now. Even Trev. He won’t have his guard up quite so much in future.” Including, crucially, those times when he is properly armed.

Rubbing her reddened cheek, Val says, “An expensive lesson.”

“Yeah. You want to talk next steps?”

Val laughs and reaches under the bed. Returns with two bottles of wine and a bottle opener. “No,” she says. “I think I want to get drunk, Frances.”

“Fair enough,” Frankie says, and laughs with her. “You want me to get glasses or something?”

Val pops the cork on one of the bottles and takes a swig before passing the other and the opener to Frankie. “No,” she says.

Frankie struggles with the opener as Val roots around for the remote for the TV and starts whatever tape is currently in the machine. A trailer flickers onto the screen for the VHS release of Batman Returns. Wow; a really old tape, then.

She manages, finally, to get the cork out of her bottle, and throws it in the rough direction of the bin. A clanging sound suggests she hit the target, and she raises her bottle to Val: a toast.

“To getting the fuck out of here,” Frankie says.

“To miracles,” Val replies, and they clink the necks of their bottles together.

“So,” Frankie says, and takes a swig, “what are we watching?”

Val laughs again. Almost carefree. She matches Frankie, taking another swig and wiping her mouth with her sleeve.

“I have no idea,” she says.