NOVEL NEXT 7. Consensus
7. Consensus
2019 October 15
Tuesday
Dear Mum, Dad and Petra,
I know what follows might sound bad, so I’m telling you upfront: I’m okay. I’m BETTER than okay! Happier than I’ve been in YEARS. But my degree isn’t working out, and I have to do something about it.
Things have been getting harder and harder for me. I know, I SHOULD have told you. But we haven’t seen each other much, especially since you moved away. For a long time I blamed you, but if I’m honest with myself, it’s MY fault. MY choice. I think I didn’t want you to see me so unhappy. You know how I struggled after Mark disappeared, and from there it just seemed like things kept getting worse. I started having trouble concentrating. I lost my motivation. I spent more and more time on my own.
After he was gone, I threw myself into my education. And that, I’ve only just realised, was the WRONG choice. I know, I know, my third year of uni is a BIT late to realise this, but at least I’m finally THINKING! It’s not even that I don’t like my degree; I do. But I’m burned out. I’ve been working hard for so many years that I don’t have any hard work left in me. I need a break.
So I’m taking one.
I’ve had to do resits but never actually had to repeat a year, so I can suspend my studies now and still access student loans when I return. And yes, I said return. Because I’m going on a trip.
I’m getting out of the country for a while. A year. Maybe two. I’m going TRAVELLING! I want to see Spain, Italy and Turkey. Maybe I’ll stay on somewhere, maybe I’ll keep going. I haven’t decided yet.
I won’t be taking my phone. I haven’t been able to afford credit for the thing for a while now, anyway.
As soon as I made this decision it felt like a weight I’ve been carrying for years just fell off my shoulders. I have hope, real hope, for the first time in a long time! I have a chance to find the real me.
So this is goodbye for a little while. But NOT forever. When I come back — and I will — I hope to be someone you can be proud of.
Petra, I love you SO much. I’ve seen your music in the videos Mum sent. You’re SO good! You inspire me, and not getting to see you for a while is the only dark cloud on my horizon. I’ll write again in a little while and tell you EVERYTHING I’ve been up to. Keep practising your trombone, work hard (but not too hard) in school, and we’ll see each other again before you know it.
All my love,
Stefan.
“Happier than you’ve been in years?” Pippa had said when she read it back.
He’d shrugged. “I’m selling it. They have to believe I’m serious, right? And, look, about Petra, I’ve said I’ll write. Can we do that? Every few months? Just so she doesn’t worry.”
“I don’t see why not,” Pippa said. “If you behave.” The whole time they’d been going over the letter she hadn’t looked at him much. Seemed more interested in playing with her bracelet, hooking a finger inside and turning it round on her wrist; a nervous tic?
“If you let me write,” Stefan replied, “I’ll do whatever you ask.”
Her little smile had been unmissable.
She left him alone after that. Said dinner would be delivered to him later, and suggested he use the time until then to get acclimatised to his new room. Stefan had been surprised, but now he’s had a chance to think about it, it makes sense: if the programme is about gradually eroding his supposed masculinity with a mix of hormones and manipulation — and surgery, eventually! — then it can’t all be someone getting in his face. He needs time to stew, to catastrophise. He wonders how the others reacted at this point; taken from a bare cell to a fully furnished room, shown the washing facilities and the limited entertainment options, it must have dawned on them that they’re in for a long stay. Away from friends and family. Away from the sun. No control over your meals, or your movements. Locks on every door. Handcuffs under your bed. They even pick your clothes for you.
None of them can have even the slightest idea what’s actually going on here. The weirdo who thinks it’s demons is probably closest.
When finally it becomes clear what’s going to happen to them, how will they react? It’s possible that if Stefan’s going to get through this, it’s his fellow inmates he’s going to need to understand and predict, not Pippa.
God, Pippa. Who did she used to be? He’s given up questioning that every woman he’s seen since waking up in his cell has gone through the whole process themselves, at least until an alternative and slightly less ridiculous reality presents itself; he’s more interested now in how they feel about it, having ‘graduated’. Christine is fiercely defensive of her gender. Proud of it! How does Pippa feel about hers? Does she truly not resent being grabbed off the street and forcibly remade? Christine said they get orchiectomies after six months; for someone who doesn’t want it, that’s mutilation! Did Pippa wake up one morning, slowly come to understand that something was terribly wrong, and start grabbing in pain and fear at her—
No. Horrible thought. Abandon it.
He laughed at Will. It doesn’t seem so funny any more; they’re going to castrate him. First chemically, which is reversible, but then with a scalpel.
Stefan balls up the duvet cover in his hands. He has to stop worrying about what happens to these people, because not only is he powerless to stop it, he’s not sure that he would if he could. Wife beaters, drunk drivers, misogynists. Bad men. At least, for now. Because that’s the other thing: believing Christine means believing that some or all of the men down here with him will eventually come to accept and embrace the new life that’s going to be forced on them. They’ll be rehabilitated. Christine insisted that was the purpose of this place: bad men, made better. She’s ashamed of having been like them, once. ‘Hate me,’ she said. Both her womanhood and her contempt for her old self, whoever he was, make a pretty compelling argument that the programme works.
Except for the dropouts. But, from the point of view of this Aunt Bea person — definitely the sort of name you’d adopt if you had a basement full of kidnapped men and wanted to add an air of respectability to the whole deal, while remaining comfortably anonymous — the dropouts are probably a key part of the plan. You take X bad men, you put them through the wringer, and by the end of the programme you have (X minus Y) women, reformed and ready to start new lives, where Y represents the men too bad, too stubborn, too inflexible to change. However large Y is, you’ve still removed X bad men from the world. Win-win.
Forget the morals for now. He can always blow the whistle on this place when he’s free, assuming he can find a way to do so without endangering Christine or Melissa. Or Pippa. Or any of the other graduates, probably. God, will he even want to, when he leaves? Will this place change him like it changed Christine? Will he leave not only as a woman, but as a true believer?
In a few years, will it be him standing on the other side of a glass door?
“Shut up, Stef,” he hisses to himself.
If the point of leaving him alone in his room is to make him spiral, then he’s right on schedule. Time for a distraction.
He takes inventory. Which didn’t pass much time when he was in his cell, but there’s considerably more stuff here.
The room is unglamorous, but comfortable. The wardrobe, which Stefan half-expected to be full of dresses, is mostly empty, with a few sets of near-identical outfits tucked away in various shelves: hoodies, t-shirts, jogging trousers, socks, in a handful of neutral shades. The shelves on the wall and the drawer in the bedside table are empty, and the vanity contains only a plastic hairbrush and his wash kit. There’s a small cabinet, or perhaps a dumbwaiter, set into the wall by the door with a soft green light — unlocked — that on opening contains a box of cereal bars and a large water bottle.
There’s even a rug on the floor between the vanity and the bed, and its slightly rubbery finish suggests it’ll make a serviceable yoga mat.
He laughs, remembering the look on Pippa’s face when he said this room is considerably nicer than his houseshare.
He fetches down the water bottle and a cereal bar, pulls the wooden chair over from the vanity to the metal desk, and starts investigating the computer. There’s a shortcut on the desktop labelled Message Sponsor, which loads a chat interface called Consensus. He can customise the name that’s been preloaded; he deletes the last two letters before he tries sending a message.
“Idiot,” he tells himself, as Pippa’s icon switches to idle. “Stop trying to be her friend.”
In search of further distractions, he browses through the directories on the PC, finding TV shows and movies (mostly romantic comedies), a large library of books (also mostly romances) and a handful of games: Stardew Valley, The Sims, Tetris, that sort of thing. Absorbing and, unless there’s something about The Sims he doesn’t know, largely nonviolent titles. The music folder is mostly women artists, biased towards pop, and everything bar the games seems also to be accessible through the phone.
He finds a pair of chunky, weathered headphones on an extremely long cable and plugs them into the PC, picks out a movie at random, and settles down on the bed.
* * *
There’s a kitchen on every floor at Dorley, bar the first — the new girls who live on the first floor are confined to a self-contained dorm-within-a-dorm, behind heavier locks than anywhere else above the basement, and are expected to use the ground floor facilities under supervision — and the one on the second floor, a short walk around the U-shaped corridor from Christine’s room, is particularly nice, with many advantages: low traffic, minimal chance of an Aunt Bea sighting, plenty of Weetabix, and a nice view out into the woods. What it doesn’t have, unfortunately, is a surfeit of leftovers, which is why Christine finds herself once again pushing aside the double doors into the ground floor kitchen on the hunt for something to heat up.
It feels like she’s spent more time down here in the past week than she did in whole prior months, even when she lived on the first floor. Still, with all her obligations discharged and Stef apparently settling nicely into his room, Christine will have time to do her own shopping again, and can go back to preparing her cheap little meals for one, in the blessed almost-solitude of the second floor.
It’s quiet down in the main kitchen, for once. There’s only Maria, eating her dinner at the big table and leafing through a binder, and some faint conversational sounds from the dining room next door. Christine realises as she relaxes that she’d been hunching her shoulders, and smiles sheepishly in Maria’s direction. Maria answers with a pinkie wave, so she doesn’t have to put down her fork.
“There’s salad,” Maria says, “and this sort of mushroom pie thing that I’m having, which is pretty good. And something with beef I’m not sure I can recommend.”
“Thanks, Maria.”
Christine’s still got her head in the fridge when someone grabs her from behind and hugs her hard enough to lift her slightly off the floor.
“Hi, Dira,” she wheezes, when her sponsor Sister puts her down again.
“Hi, Teenie!” Indira says, taking Christine gently by the shoulders and turning her around. “Sweetheart! When’s the last time you had any sleep?” she exclaims, when she gets a proper look. In Christine’s head, that guy from The Office wipes the number clean from a whiteboard which says, Number of hours since someone told me I look like shit.
Christine submits to the follow-up hug. “Last night,” she says, “but I don’t think it counted. It was like four hours. I have big plans for tonight, though.” She pulls away from Dira’s hug and smiles at her. “Big plans.”
“Cancel them,” says Paige, marching in from the dining hall and almost running up to Christine and Indira. She sings, “We got per-miss-ion!”
“Permission for what?”
“Aunt Bea said we can take you off-campus tonight,” Indira says, shutting the fridge and offering a steadying arm to Christine, who evidently looks like she might fall over at any moment.
“Off-campus?” Christine says, allowing herself to be steadied. Indira guides Christine’s bottom gently towards the kitchen table, where it parks itself without Christine’s conscious attention. “Where?” Off-campus means being out among people who don’t know what she used to be, and who won’t be minded to grant her any slack.
Not ‘what you used to be’; who you are, she corrects herself. She’s trying to be conscientious about that.
“Don’t worry, Teenie,” Indira says, tucking back a stray lock of Christine’s hair. “We’re going with Vicky and Lorna and some of their friends. Hasan was going to come but he has work, so you’ll just be one of nine or ten girls; no-one will look at you twice.”
“Thanks a lot,” Christine mutters.
“I mean,” Paige says, grinning, well aware of Christine’s faltering confidence and having none of it, “if you want them to look at you, we can make it happen. Make you look stunning! You’ll have to beat them off with the stick.”
“That’s Maria’s job!” Indira giggles. Maria, who up to this point has been ignoring the commotion, laughs and nearly chokes on a mushroom.
“I don’t want that,” Christine whispers, stiffening up, half-wondering if she’s going to leave fingerprints embedded in the kitchen table.
“But you’re so pretty, Christine!” Paige insists. “You could be gorgeous if you just let me at you.”
“I did let you!” Christine says, unwilling to give Paige any slack. “Just last week!”
“And you looked great.” Paige takes the victory and presses home her advantage. “You even pulled! What happened to that boy, anyway?”
“Oh, uh,” Christine stammers. Stalling, but also panicking. Idiot. Why bring up the party where she met Stef? She doesn’t want anyone thinking about that. “I kissed him, I sent him home. He was nice, but I’m not really ready for boys, you know?” Please don’t remember him, please don’t remember him!
“Wait,” Dira says, “she pulled? A real life boy? Tell me everything!”
Christine doesn’t know to which of them the question is directed, so she lets Paige pick it up. “There was a party on Saturday,” Paige enthuses, “in that new dorm building. Just a little thing; some people from the SU set it up. And you know I’ve been trying to get her to come out with me since forever.”
It’s true. Paige, social butterfly, has been cursed to live next door to Christine, the social equivalent of one of those burrowing creatures who only show up after midnight to eat the grubs the above-ground varmints don’t want, but persists in trying to drag Christine out of the dorm anyway. Probably because the only other options on their floor are all non-starters. Jodie, who dresses like Morticia Addams and who Christine generally only sees when she happens to catch her livestreamed World of Darkness games, has never willingly opened her door to Paige lest she be forcibly de-gothed. Vicky is already stunning, sociable, and capable of dressing herself, might defensively make Paige over instead, depending on who wins the tussle for dominance, and doesn't even technically live at Dorley any more. And Julia and Yasmin are both already trying to put their time in the programme behind them, having found jobs instead of returning to classes; once they’ve been officially released, Christine expects never to hear from them again. Yasmin, in particular, has an unaccountable reluctance to spend her leisure time with the people she spent a year locked in a torture basement with, Julia excepted.
Christine thinks it’s a shame, and doesn’t know if it’s a good or bad thing that she does. What she does know is that in the outside world she has nothing, but here at Dorley she has friends and family. Even if they are sometimes a little pushy.
“What did she wear?” Indira asks Paige, fully aware that Christine would prefer to die of anxiety or embarrassment than engage seriously with the question.
“I had a box come in from that place I was telling you about, and they had this beautiful scoop-neck brown top — I know, brown, but it was broken up with a repeating floral pattern in off-white that was just gorgeous—” Paige makes gestures around her chest to indicate that that wasn’t the only reason she liked the top; she has an obsession with getting Christine to show off her breasts, for some reason, “—so I put her in that with some Converse and a lovely loose cardigan in the same shade as that old skirt I’ve been carrying around with me since forever, you know the one, and I did her hair and her face. Hang on, I actually have pictures.”
Christine leans heavily on the table as Paige scrolls through her phone for a delighted Indira. She’s startled by a sudden warmth around her hand, but it’s just Maria, offering silent condolences. Or possibly congratulations. Difficult to tell without looking, and Christine would much rather examine the floor right now. She knows the pictures Paige will be swiping through for Indira, because Paige begged for permission to put them on her Insta and looked tremendously put out when she refused.
She did ask for copies, though. Nice to have proof that she can look good, with assistance.
“Teenie,” Indira says, “you look fantastic. You should dress up more often.”
Christine, wearing shorts, vest and shirt, nods silently. She’s not wrong. It’s just that, when she applies makeup, everything looks too bold, and when she chooses clothes, everything looks too showy. Trying to be beautiful and getting it wrong is so much more frightening than just throwing on a hoodie and putting up with the occasional boy at Saints asking her if she has a skateboard.
“Tell her about the boy,” Paige says, after a few more excitable back-and-forths with Dira.
“Oh.” Stalling again. But if she’s going to have to contribute to this conversation sooner or later, it might as well be with misinformation. “He was, um, tall, blonde. White. I liked his glasses.”
“And she talked to him all night,” Paige adds triumphantly, apparently not realising that of all the attributes Christine supplied, skin colour was the only correct one: Stef’s shorter than Christine, doesn’t wear glasses, and is strikingly ginger. Christine wonders if she should have given decoy-Stef a beard. It’s not that Paige is actually likely to remember correctly the face of the boy Christine kissed at the party, or connect him to the trans girl currently making terrifying decisions in their basement, but you never know. They used to get gangsters on tax evasion, after all.
“You said you kissed, right?” Indira asks, and as much as Christine loves her she wants to look away because she knows the next thing she says will put Indira’s energy level through the roof.
“A bit,” she admits, and tries not to grimace when Indira squeals and hugs her again. Ever since Dira started seeing her childhood friend Hasan she’s been romance crazy, and desperate to start matchmaking for Christine just as soon as she works out the sort of person she likes. Christine doesn’t see what the rush is; she’s been a woman for just one year, after all, and has spent most of that time inside. “He, um, didn’t really do anything for me,” she adds, silently apologising to Stef.
“You think maybe you might want to meet a girl instead?” Indira asks.
“I don’t know yet,” Christine says with a shrug.
“Then that’s exactly why it’s good that you’re coming out tonight,” Paige says. “You’re going to have fun with your friends—” she points an aggressive finger at herself and Indira, and a questioning one at Maria, who shakes her head and points to the binder on the table next to her plate, “—and you’re going to dance with hot people and see if any of them float your boat.”
Christine declines to comment on the state of her boat and whether or not it is capable of floating, even in theory. She has more pressing things to worry about: “What if they, you know, know?”
Paige rolls her eyes. Indira gasps. Maria puts down her fork, swallows, and says, slowly and patiently, “Christine, you could strip down to your underwear in front of anyone you care to name, and they wouldn’t ‘know’ anything. You have nothing to worry about.”
“They’d know you’re beautiful,” Indira insists, stroking Christine’s temple, “and sweet, and kind, and intelligent, and—”
“They’ll know all that just from seeing me naked?” Christine says, and Dira frowns at her; she’s told her off before for covering her insecurity with bad jokes.
“Okay,” Paige says, “then they’re going to know you have killer tits.” She bites the tip of her tongue at Christine.
Indira’s eyes flicker to the entrance from the dining room and Christine turns her head in time to see Aunt Bea step delicately inside, presumably intending to find out what all the noise is about.
“Aunt Bea!” Christine says, as a desperate last resort. “Help! They’re being mean to me!”
“Oh?” she says, packing a great deal of scepticism into a single syllable.
Indira leans on one of Christine’s shoulders, Paige the other. They both smile ingratiatingly at Aunt Bea. “We’re being very nice to her,” Paige says, “and paying her lots of compliments.”
At the table, mouth full, Maria silently nods, and Aunt Bea’s face assumes the pinched expression it often acquires when her charges are being playful: like she can’t quite believe her girls are so carefree; like she’s proud that they are.
Either that, Christine thinks, or she’s just going to the mental place boomers go when the kids are having too much fun near them.
“You’re going out tonight, I understand,” Aunt Bea says.
“We are,” Indira says.
“Take care of each other, then.”
“We will.”
With a satisfied nod, Aunt Bea returns to whatever she’s up to in the dining hall; paperwork, probably. She doesn’t like to eat in her office, and she doesn’t stop working, ever. Some of the still-new second-year girls are probably also being supervised alongside her. Her dislike of boys seems to extend to avoiding them as much as possible until they have become — at least nominally, in the case of the new second-years — girls, but once they are, she likes to be involved.
“See?” Indira says. “Official seal of approval.”
“I’m doomed, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” Paige says, pulling on Christine’s wrist. “Now come upstairs and we’ll help you make yourself all pretty again.”
* * *
However soundproofed the basement is from the outside, the walls between the bedrooms are obviously thinner: when Stefan removes his headphones after a marathon of honestly quite entertaining Meg Ryan movies — he now knows what movie ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ comes from, and retroactively understands several jokes — he hears thumping from next door. Someone hitting the wall, in the bedroom next to his. It’s faint, but just about audible.
Intrigued, he cups his hands around his ears and listens. The thumps pause after a few more seconds and then, at the very edge of legibility, a ragged voice practically screams, “You won’t keep me down here forever, you fuckers! You can’t cage me! I’ll get you! I’ll get all of you!”
Optimistic!
It must be disorientating, to be stuck down here for a week and still not know what’s going on. Stefan can’t find it in himself to sympathise with the guy, but he’d like to know who’s in the room next door so he can add impromptu outbursts to the notes he’s assembling on his fellow basement dwellers. His information is currently very thin.
He slips his headphones back on, leans over to the computer, and cues up another movie, dipping out of the Meg Ryan folder for now and starting something called The Princess Switch.
It feels indecent to be so relaxed, and not just because of the commotion next door. Christine talked this place up as a house of horrors! And it undoubtedly was, for her. But for Stefan, the pressure’s off. No more testosterone. No more trying to remain conscious in a lecture after a late shift at work. No more work! No more bills. Sure, there are downsides, like the total lack of freedom, but Stefan’s never felt all that free, anyway.
Barely ten minutes into the movie — a second Vanessa Hudgens has just entered the frame, which is probably the most exciting thing that’s going to happen to Stefan for the rest of the day, unless the magical old man who is definitely not Santa shows up again — it pauses and minimises itself, revealing a pulsing chat icon.
* * *
The explosion of noise from Indira when Christine opens the door to her dorm room and finds Abby still sitting cross-legged on the bed, futzing with a laptop, has the same effect on Christine’s limbic system as a tin of Red Bull and a kick in her sensitive parts, so when the two of them join her on the bed Christine manages to make the transition without her legs collapsing under her, the way they’d been threatening to on the stairs. Indira, it turns out, missed Abby.
The two of them exchange hugs, greetings, and gossip about Dira’s boyfriend and Abby’s still unfortunately tragic love life while Christine balances herself carefully against the headboard and tries subtly to check the laptop screen to make sure Abby closed the chat app. With relief: yes, she did. Abby throws her a smile and a wink when Dira’s attention is on pulling something out of her bag, and Christine lets some of her tension earth itself in the bedsheets.
Either their conversation diminishes in volume or some of Christine’s senses check out for a while from exhaustion, because she manages to get in six whole minutes of sleep before Paige comes piling in with an armful of clothes and a determined expression.
“Okay, girlie,” she says, when Christine has been successfully roused, “get up and let’s make you look gorgeous.”
“I thought I could just go, you know, like this. Girls wear shorts to clubs, right?”
“Not like those ones,” Dira says, laughing and trying to poke Christine in the thigh.
“Christine,” Paige says, marshalling all of her six feet of height to look as unstoppable as possible, and borrowing Aunt Bea’s diction, “you are a beautiful young woman and I will not have you slobbing around in shorts for the rest of your life.”
“What if we make a deal? I start wearing dresses again when I’m thirty?”
“No.”
“Just give me nine more years.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Christine,” Indira says, in her ‘sponsor’ voice, which Christine’s always thought makes her sound like the beleaguered oldest sister in a certain kind of family sitcom, “Aunt Bea’s mentioned the way you’ve been dressing.”
Christine’s fingers twitch. She couldn’t have mentioned this before? “Shit,” she says. “What did she say, exactly?”
“She reminded me,” Indira says, rolling over on the bed so she can be closer to Christine, “that the freedoms granted to third years are conditional on their ‘continued feminine development’. I’m sorry, sweetheart; I was trying to be quietly encouraging, you know, positive reinforcement, carrot instead of stick, but it’s time.”
Christine decides her brain needs a jump-start, or possibly to be jolted right out of her skull, so she bangs the back of her head on the bed frame a few times. “Shit,” she hisses, in percussive accompaniment. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Oh, Teenie, no,” Indira says, and immediately starts gently stroking the back of Christine’s head, “she’s not mad. And she’s not intervening. She’s just… paying attention. She’s still leaving it up to me, for now. But she did like the idea of you coming out tonight.”
Christine attempts a smile, but it doesn’t come out quite right, so she shuffles up on the bed a little, leans her back on the headboard so she can gather her knees under her chin. Sometimes the impulse to take up as little space as possible is too strong. “I just want to be done, Dira,” she says.
“I know, sweetheart, I know.”
“I don’t see what’s wrong with me right now.”
“I know.”
Paige sits back heavily on the bean bag chair. “You know what you have to do, then,” she says. “You suck it up.”
“Paige,” Indira says sharply.
“I get it,” Paige says. “You want to be done, yesterday. And all of this, Aunt Bea’s expectations, everything? It’s fucking hard. I get it. You just want to be you, right? Then this is what you have to do.” She leans back and lifts Christine’s all-but-abandoned makeup box up off her desk. “This is the last wall you have to climb. The final class. Advanced Woman in the Modern Age. Makeup and nice clothes and smiling and looking pretty and going out and meeting boys. And doing it all yourself. You had Indira and Abby to help you out with it last year, but ever since they stopped coordinating you, you’ve given up. And that’s bullshit, Christine. Because you know you’ve got to learn this stuff. And don’t—” she points a finger, sensing Christine’s imminent objections, “—give me all that shit about how this isn’t how girls have to be. No-one knows that better than me.” Christine doesn’t miss Paige’s wince, quickly hidden though it is, and remembers what happened at the end of their second year in the programme. Paige thought she’d changed enough. Thought she was ready. Rebelled against Aunt Bea’s requirements. It got her locked in her room for over a week. Privileges revoked. Freedoms curtailed. Almost like being back in that cell again; almost like she hadn’t changed at all. “You don’t have to agree with Aunt Bea to understand her point of view,” Paige adds, “although lately, I have to admit, I’ve actually come around to it.”
Of course you have, Christine thinks sourly. Instagram queen.
Immediately she’s glad she didn’t say it out loud. It’s unfair, because they’d all talked about it together, but only Paige was brave enough to say it to Aunt Bea’s face, and suffered for it. Later, Christine learned from Abby that something similar happens every year, to every batch of new girls. All of them making the same mistakes. All of them walking in the groove their Sisters laid down in the years before them.
Dorley has more powerful rituals than the Catholic church.
The logic of Aunt Bea’s position is clear enough: she wants her girls to have access to all the skills they might need in their lives, not just the ones her charges happen to believe are relevant at the time; and she believes that because her girls were raised as boys — if raised is even the term for the neglect some of them suffered in their youths — then the things that girls are taught as children must be taught now, with no exceptions.
And you can argue, as Paige has, that the expectation that girl children learn to dress in a feminine fashion, experiment with makeup, and so on, is sexist. Backward. Slowly losing relevance. You can argue that many of these children hate it, and are harmed by it. And you can find large numbers of children raised that way who are not girls at all, just as you can find many girls, cis and trans, who describe wholly difference experiences. Surely, then, to be a girl, to be a woman in the modern age, these things are not a requirement?
But Aunt Bea’s girls will have every chance when they leave her care, because she is not sloppy with her rehabilitation. Her girls will know how to make themselves look feminine and beautiful even if, the very moment they leave, they decide to cut their hair short and wear only overalls. Her girls will understand the demands made of women in this country, even if some of them come eventually to realise that they are not girls after all.
Her girls will be in a position, when they graduate from the programme, to make the choice as to who they are.
Christine had been surprised to learn that not every graduate remains a woman. None, apparently, have ever become men again, but Abby said their graduate pool probably has a higher incidence of nonbinary people and non-gender-conforming women than almost any random, age-appropriate sampling of the greater population. And Aunt Bea, with every appearance of joy, welcomes those people back when they visit. Christine saw it, at the holiday bash where she met Melissa: Aunt Bea, custodian of Dorley Hall, laughing with a nonbinary graduate, chatting with them about their job and their partner, agreeing to wear a pronoun pin. Never once messing up their new name. Never once misgendering them.
The hardest thing for Christine to grasp, when she remembers being locked in a cell, or waking up after her first surgery, or listening to Paige cry through a door she didn’t dare unlock, is that Aunt Bea seems, genuinely, to care for all of them, in her way.
“Don’t forget,” Paige says, “the goal is to be yourself. Fully yourself, whoever that is. You’ve gotten rid of the armour—” that’s always how Paige describes her former self: a scared child, clad in armour that was forced upon her, and lashing out because she believed herself strong, invulnerable to pain or consequence, “—but you haven’t yet explored who you are without it. You don’t know what you can do, what tools you have at your disposal, because you’re still too scared to experiment.”
“Paige—”
“This is me tough-loving you, Christine. Put on the fucking dress and come out with us.”
Indira is holding Christine’s hand, and she squeezes it as Paige finishes her speech. Christine tries to imagine a flow of energy between them, reinvigorating her just enough to say what she needs to say, because she needs to push back. Not against the clothes or the makeup — it’s been coming, and she’s known it for a while; there really is no fighting it — but, and she almost smiles at how mundane it is, the timing.
“I’m exhausted, Paige,” she says. “I can’t even describe how tired I am. I actually want to come out with you—” half a lie and half not; Christine really doesn’t want to be a hermit forever, but the early steps are the hardest and she’s taken so few, “—but I’ve had almost no sleep. Since, I think, Saturday. Can I come along next time, instead? I know it won’t be with such a big group but it might actually be better, for me, if it’s just us four and maybe Vicky and Lorna. Please? I’ll dress up, I’ll do my makeup. I promise. I just can’t do it tonight.”
Abby, still on the edge of the bed with her feet up on the hamper and biting her lip, meets her eyes, and Christine tries to emphasise, in that brief connection, just how much she needs the rest.
“Dira,” Abby says, “you’ve been away for a few days. You don’t know what’s been going on with her. We think it’s just stress from her classes—” God bless you for lying for me, Abby, Christine thinks, “—but you know how these things snowball. She had an evaluation with Aunt Bea, as well, during all this — more stress — and it’s all piled up. Every day she looks more tired. I think we should give her a break.”
Indira, pulled between her responsibilities as sponsor and her affection for Christine, hesitates.
“I need a time-out, Dira,” Christine says quietly.
“Are you sure?” she says, concern flooding her eyes. It’s been a while since her last time-out; Dira probably hoped she’d got past the need.
“I’m sure.”
Long ago, before Christine graduated to the second year, before she was named, when first she flickered into life inside the spiteful, hurt boy who’d come to Dorley nine months earlier, Indira sat her down on the bed in her awful little bedroom and laid it all out. Soon: no more concrete walls; no more communal bathroom; no more unexpected surgical interventions. Your first taste of freedom is coming. But it comes with responsibilities, which must be lived up to. And when she outlined them, and scared the nascent Christine to her bone, Indira sat next to her on the bed and took her hand, slowly and carefully, so as not to scare her, because when Christine first arrived in the basement she flinched away from all contact, and made her a promise:
I’m not just your sponsor any more; I’m your Sister. If ever it gets too much, if you need a break, if complying with a request of mine will hurt you more than it will help you, and if you understand that there are expectations upon me to ensure your progress and commit to helping me fulfil them, then all you need do is ask. Ask, and I will do everything I can to help you and to heal you, and if I have to I will move this whole building to keep you safe.
“Then you’re getting one,” Indira says. “Paige, Abby, go meet with Vicky and have some fun. Christine and I will stay here—”
“No,” Christine says, “I don’t want to spoil your night. You only just got back today. You should have fun.”
“I can have fun with you,” she insists. “We can watch movies. You won’t have to talk.”
“I’ll be fine. I promise. I’m just tired. So tired I can barely think. I need to switch off, rest, hopefully sleep, and get ready for classes tomorrow.”
Indira squeezes her hand again. “Okay, Teenie. You’ll come with us next week?”
“I will.”
“We’ll all go out together.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
“I’ll talk to Aunt Bea.”
“Thanks, Dira.”
“Be kind to yourself, Christine,” Indira says. A refrain as old as her name. Dira kisses her on the temple, pauses over her for a moment to stroke her cheek, then hops off the bed and silently gestures for Paige and Abby to follow. Abby offers a little wave on her way out; Paige mouths an apology. Christine smiles for all of them, watches as they close the door behind them, and rolls over on her bed, into the warm spot Indira left behind. She buries her face in her pillow, and lets go.
* * *
She’s been meaning to come up here since she moved to the second floor and legitimately was granted the run of Dorley Hall (and, in theory, the whole campus). It’s been do-able ever since she cracked Dorley’s security, but the roof has only one exit; not somewhere she ever wanted to get caught, unless she very quickly developed a talent for climbing down six storeys of vine trellis without breaking something, and even last year’s Christine had better self-preservation instincts than to test that.
There are two other people on the far side of the roof — two women, presumably, given that it’s Dorley, premier women’s dormitory on campus, please don’t ask about our wine cellar — so Christine gives them their space, and settles for the observation bench at the front of the building, which affords a wonderful view of the university grounds in general and the Student Union Bar in particular, its village-pub frontage cast in rainbows from the garish cursive Saints sign on the roof. The neon lights of home.
Dorley Hall’s roof is laid out a bit like a zen garden — an unknowingly ironic reflection of its basement — but Christine has no idea if it’s authentic or not. The central gravel square doesn’t seem to have any intentionality to it, being that its contents escape its boundaries on all sides, and she remembers reading somewhere that real zen gardens are supposed to reflect nature, which this one decidedly does not, so she settles on fake. There’s a set of white plastic garden chairs in the middle, anyway. The gravel square isn’t covered over but does have four brick pillars at its corners, and Christine’s heard that before the insurance got too expensive they used to drape a tarp between them and host official gatherings up here.
There’s a thick pathway around the central square, in which lurks the occasional clump of potted plants, wooden seating and tables, and every so often around the edge of the roof there are benches, each dedicated to a famous or notable alumni, all facing outwards.
Indira says you can have a wonderful picnic up here, in the summer.
Christine hopes Dira and the others are all having fun right now, dancing, drinking; she regrets missing out on the chance to meet Vicky’s girlfriend Lorna again, partly because she’s very sweet and partly because Christine’s now taken responsibility for a trans girl of her own and would love to ask Lorna a few discreet questions. Care and feeding, etc.
God, she wishes she was out there with them. Being normal. She pulls her hoodie tight, leans forward on the railing, and stares out into the night.
She doesn’t know why she isn’t better at being a girl by now. There’s nothing mechanically hard about putting on makeup or wearing a dress, and goodness knows she’s dressed up for parties and Dorley social events, under the instruction of Dira or Aunt Bea. Almost all her second year was spent prettied up at the hand of someone or other. And it’s not that she’s got any hang-ups left about participating in her own gradual transformation, either, because what was her voice training if not Christine enthusiastically embracing her new self, and the things she was required to do?
The first two fingers on her right hand twitch, and she curls them into a fist to keep them still.
It’s fear.
Well, no. Not precisely.
It’s true that she has no confidence in her ability to make herself look feminine without the help of her Sisters, that she remains steadfast in her belief that, left to her own devices and ordered to choose her own dress and makeup, she will render herself unavoidably clownish. Probably that’s a large component of what Paige called the last wall she has to climb.
But it’s not just that. It can’t be.
Maybe she’s just scared to let this place go. Becoming a free woman in the eyes of Dorley, in the eyes of Aunt Bea, means becoming a woman in the eyes of the world, too. And she wants that — God, she wants it, she thinks, stretching her left arm out in front of her, the sleeve of her hoodie pulled up, and smiling at the graceful fingers with the scrappily painted nails, at the beaded bracelet she made with Indira as part of a matched set, at the smooth skin that shines softly in the light of the stars and the Student Union’s neon sign; she made this woman, top to bottom, and she’s proud of her — but she fears it, too. Because what if, without the looming presence of Dorley behind her, encouraging her — forcing her, being honest — to be and remain the woman she’s become, she loses her? What if her womanhood crumbles, and Christine dies, and that boy, that vicious, lonely, evil little thing, rises again in her place?
“You’re being stupid, Christine,” she whispers to herself.
Maybe she’s just scared that without Dorley to tell her who she is, she won’t know at all?
Makeup, clothes, and the lessons in feminine grace they were all subjected to; Paige likes to call them her tools. She didn’t get all her tools from Dorley, she says, but Aunt Bea gave her a lot she didn’t have before, had never even thought about acquiring. And you can’t build yourself back up from nothing without access to all the tools available to you.
Think of them more like adjectives, Indira suggested once, that you can use to describe the person you eventually want to become. Who knows what possibilities you might miss, if you don’t have the words to witness them?
Put on the fucking dress, Christine.
“Hi,” someone says. “Are you okay?”
It’s the girls she saw earlier, walking up beside her bench. Christine only doesn’t jump because, a moment before one of them spoke, she smelled them coming: they’ve been smoking, and an ex-addict never gets fully desensitised.
She sits back and smiles at them. “I’m okay,” she says.
“It’s just,” the other one says, “we heard crying.”
“I wasn’t—” Christine starts, and then touches the back of a hand to her cheek. “Oh. Yeah. I was.” Too tired even to spot emotions when she’s having them; got to watch out for that. “Long day. Long week! Bad memories. I’m fine. I promise.”
“Good,” the shorter one says. She sits down on the bench next to Christine and pulls back her hood, revealing short black hair, golden brown skin and deep brown eyes. Christine can see the reflection of the neon pub sign in her irises. “I’m Naila and they’re Ren.” Naila smiles, the sort of beautiful, easy smile Christine always finds enviable.
“I’m Christine,” she says, and because she didn’t miss the pronoun Naila used for her friend — not two women, after all — adds, “she/her.”
Naila’s smile broadens, and Ren, leaning their backside on the railing, says, “I like your dress.”
Christine had almost forgotten about it. Paige left the pile of dresses when she left and, feeling guilty, she leafed through them, looking for something she liked, something she wouldn’t feel too self-conscious in; a Venn diagram with a very small intersection. She opens her hoodie back up, exposes more of the material. “Thanks,” she says. “It’s not mine. My friends were trying to get me to go out with them but… I just wasn’t feeling up to it.”
“They’re in there?” Ren asks, nodding their head sideways at the bar in the distance.
“No. Somewhere in town. Paige thinks I need to meet boys. I think I need to have a quiet evening at home. She got as far as putting a dress on me before my sis— before my best friend let me off the hook.”
“Oh!” Naila says. “You know Paige? From the second floor?”
“The floor with all those weird locks on the doors?” Ren says.
Christine’s fingers twitch again. Idiot. Too much information, always. Perhaps this is why she’s scared to leave the programme; she’ll meet someone socially and the first words out of her mouth will be, ‘I was force feminised in a secret basement and all I got was this lousy novelty mug.’ “Oh, yeah. I forget about the locks, honestly,” she says. “I think they’re a legacy thing.”
“I was wondering if we can ask the uni to pay for uberlocks for the fifth floor, too,” Naila says.
“You want to keep me out that much?” Ren says.
“They steal my cereal bars,” Naila mock-whispers to Christine.
“I’m a criminal,” Ren says. They recoil from Naila’s attempted grab and sit down heavily on the other end of the bench, with Christine between the two of them. Christine gets her first clear look at their clothes.
“I like your skirt,” she says, and Ren pulls at the hems in response, showing it off. It’s dark blue, near-black, with repeating patterns that look like tattoos would, if you could tattoo fabric.
“Thanks,” they say, beaming.
“They made it,” Naila says, “like, a week ago, and wouldn’t shut up about how awesome it is for days, so thank you for another few hours of—” she flaps her fingers, like the mouth of a Muppet, “—sound and fury.”
“Signifying fashion,” Ren says.
“I hate to ask,” Christine says, having finally given up wrestling with her temptation, “but can I bum a cigarette?”
Ren’s face falls. “Damn. You can smell it?”
“From a mile away. Sorry.”
Naila shakes a pack in front of Christine, dislodging a cigarette. “I told you deodorant doesn’t work,” she says to Ren, who rolls their eyes.
“Uh, can I get a light as well?” Christine asks sheepishly. “I’m supposed to have given up, like two years ago now, but…”
“Bad night,” Ren finishes.
“Bad week,” Naila remembers, sparking her lighter.
Christine ignites, inhales, and sighs. The smoke dissipates the neon light, casting them all into shimmering shadow for a moment. “I’m going to get such a headrush.”
“Just don’t fall off the roof,” Ren says.
“No promises,” Christine says, and inhales again.
“We have to go, actually,” Naila says, checking her phone and making significant eyes at Ren, “but it was nice meeting you, Christine.”
“You too.”
“Drop by the fifth floor common room if you want to say hi.”
“Or if you want to bum any more of Naila’s cigs,” Ren says.
Naila and Ren interlock fingers and return to the stairs. They respond to Christine’s wave by waggling their joined hands at her, before shutting the door and leaving her alone on the roof.
“See?” Christine mutters at herself, wreathing her head in smoke. “They both seemed nice and together and normal. Why not be like them? Which one?” She giggles in the mild cigarette high. “Pick one!”
She winces as the promised headrush is joined by a momentary stab of pain above her eye; her exhaustion making itself known. She should probably sleep soon.
But not yet. It’s not even midnight, and her first tutorial isn’t until eleven in the morning. She’s got some time.
Time to figure herself out. Time to ask herself the questions she’s been putting off answering. Time to lay it all out and get truly analytical. She takes a deep drag of her cigarette, watches the paper burn down, takes it in and holds it in her lungs. Lets it warm her, suffuse her, invigorate her, poison her.
She lets it go, and the smoke cloud catches the wind, rips itself to shreds, and billows away across the green.
“What do you know, Christine Hale?”