6. When I Get a Round Tuit

2019 October 15
Tuesday

She’s wearing ordinary sleeping clothes: a long nightgown with a cutesy pattern on it, leggings, and an open shirt, loose enough to hang off her shoulders, with the now-damp sleeves rolled a little way up her forearms. Her mid-brown hair, which hung around her chin when he first met her, is now brushed messily out of her eyes, with the longest strands gathered in a small ponytail. And her face, still slightly wet, shines red around her cheeks.

Stefan can’t remember the last woman he saw who was so beautiful.

To recentre himself he pulls back his sleeves and scratches at the back of his hand. An old habit: habitually he hides his hands from himself under shirts two sizes too big, pulled so far over his fingers that he wears out the fabric in weeks, but sometimes, when he needs the self-control, he’ll expose them. Run fingers around each other. Pick at the flesh at the base of the thumb. Examine the tight skin, the stubby nails, the veins that lace elbow to knuckle. Self-hatred as self-indulgence.

When he was younger, a teacher caught him stabbing himself in the palm with a compass. Sent him to the head of year for punishment. He hadn’t been able to tell her why he was doing it, only that he felt compelled to.

Christine’s hands, so graceful compared to his, are currently clasped in front of her, fingers intertwined and fidgeting, and they betray her mood as surely as his, now buried again in his lap and the sleeves of his hoodie pulled tight, betray his.

“Stefan?” she says. “What do you mean, you want to stay?”

Even the way her lips move…

“I need a moment,” he manages to say, pulling out the words like staples.

She nods. Raises a finger to tuck a lock of hair behind her ears, bites her lip. She’s worried about him, and he should be grateful for her concern, but all he can see in her now, all he can think about, is the girl he might have become.

Come clean with yourself, Stefan, while it’s not too late. Admit to yourself once and for all what you’ve been denying since you were old enough to sort men from women. Trust the part of yourself that knows you well enough to realise that this place, obscene though it seems, is the only place left that can help you.

What are your doubts? Really? That you’ve never been able to say, with no caveats, even to yourself, I am a woman? Does that even matter? Say I want to be a woman instead, because that fits, and you can go from there. Even I don’t want to be a man is enough. Why would it need to be more? Who’s judging you, really, apart from yourself?

You think you’ll be ugly? Unpassable? Does that even matter any more, in the face of the losing battle you’re fighting with yourself? Besides, if you’re going to take this place’s resources for yourself, well, every woman you’ve seen here is beautiful. And surely some of them must have started out like you.

You think you can’t do it? You think you’re not strong enough? Then what better place for you than right here, where they will make you do it?

Stefan swallows. Incredible that it takes a place like this to make it all so simple. Assuming he believes Christine, of course. Her claims, while they — somewhat perversely — explain the whole setup he’s seen down here, describe something so absurd he can still barely grasp at it. She’s a woman who was once a man, brought here against her will and… changed.

And so is Melissa.

He can just about imagine Christine as a trans girl who caught her testosterone puberty early enough to negate or mitigate the worst of its effects, or who got a very lucky play in the genetic lottery. It’s harder to imagine her as being like one of the men he met before, swaggering around the basement, revelling in unpleasantness.

She got upset when he called her a man. How can someone be transformed so completely?

What do you know, Stefan Riley?

Mark/Melissa was very unhappy for her whole last year of school and, looking back with adult eyes, for a lot longer than that. At the time, he’d believed she was just lonely, as friends of hers moved on and she didn’t replace them; with hindsight, he read it as dysphoria. But what if it was something else? Something darker? What if she came here to Saints, alone, and did… something? Something bad enough to be taken by the Sisters?

No. He knows her! No matter who she became in that time, she wouldn’t hurt anyone. Ever.

He only realises he’s shaking his head in disbelief when Christine says, “What is it?”

“I can’t believe you,” he says.

“What?” It bursts out of her as she spins on her heel and walks away from the cell a few paces, towards the far wall. “No,” she says, turning around again and pointing at him, “you have to believe me. Do you know how hard it was for me to just— just fucking tell you my history? You think I like talking about it?”

“Christine,” he says, pushing himself back up the wall, standing but leaning on the concrete for support, not trusting his shaking legs, “none of this makes any sense! I mean, look at you!”

“Yes?” she says, frowning. “So what?”

“When we met, I thought you were a cis girl. And I can believe you’re trans, just like, really lucky. Or incredibly rich. But then you tell me you’re a—”

“Careful, Stefan.”

“And Melissa?” he says. The dizziness is back; if he could dig his fingers into the wall he would. “You expect me to believe she did something so awful it warranted kidnapping and transforming her? She’s not like that, Christine! She’s a good person. She was never anything but kind to me!”

“She—” Christine starts, but she interrupts herself. Slaps the glass wall. “Shit. I should have guessed this would be a sticking point.” She glares at him. “Why do you want to stay, Stefan?”

“I’ll tell you when you start making sense!”

“I could just drag you out of here, you know.” She pulls her phone out of her pocket and waves it at the lock on the door. It buzzes open, startlingly loud even compared to their raised voices.

“I’ll shout!” Stefan says, desperate. “You’re not supposed to be down here, right? I’ll raise hell! Everyone will come running!”

“Shit!” she says, and kicks the glass. “What if I just leave you here to rot? You’ll find out just how much fun this place can be.”

“Good!” he yells.

Christine near-screams in frustration, and slaps a hand over her mouth. Swears under her breath. Closes her eyes and leans against the far wall. Her chest rises and falls as she calms herself.

When she opens her eyes again, she says, “Let’s talk.”

“I need to understand this place,” Stefan says, unprepared to back down just yet, “and you. And Melissa.” He realises he’s taken several steps forward, and carefully he steps back to the support of the wall, before his adrenaline collapses and takes him with it.

“Okay,” Christine says, making conciliatory gestures with both hands, “but you have to know: we’re running out of time. If I don’t get you out of here in the next hour or so, that’s it. You’re here for good. So ask your questions quickly, and don’t waste time bugging me if there’s something I won’t answer.”

“Why wouldn’t you—?”

“There are a lot of secrets here,” she says, “and not all of them are mine to share.”

“Okay,” Stefan says. “I get it.”

“Can I trust you, Stefan?” she says. When he nods, she pushes open the unlocked door and joins him in the cell, sitting heavily on the concrete and wincing as her outstretched hand takes more of the force of landing than she expected.

It’s the first time he’s been in the same space as her since the party. Her shampoo smells of strawberries. He sits opposite her, cross-legged. Less than thirty centimetres between them.

“All the raised voices,” she explains, pushing the door shut with a toe. “It makes me nervous. If I’m going to shout again, I want another layer between us and everyone else.” He nods again. “You want to understand Melissa?” she says. “How she ended up here?”

“Yeah. I can’t believe she became like Aaron or Will or Martin. Never in a million years.”

Christine starts tapping on her phone. “This is a huge no-no, by the way,” she says. “When someone leaves this place — or is on the verge of it, like me — her past is hers. It’s another country. Another planet. She’s someone new, with her own choices to make; the… the man who was here before is, for all intents and purposes, dead. And good riddance. This whole place fails, otherwise.”

“Got it. I won’t ask anyone.”

“But I need to make you understand Dorley, so, for you, I’m breaking that rule just this once. And only because I think Melissa will understand. Okay,” she adds, after frowning at her phone for a moment, “I’ve found it. Abby’s final write-up. Highly confidential. You need two-source authorisation to get at this.” She grins. “Or you have to be me. Good news: she didn’t do anything violent. Abby doesn’t go into all the dirty details — those’ll be in the intake files in the office upstairs; it gets purged from the database every couple of years — but it looks like Melissa was starting to go down a dark path. Isolated, self-destructive, yadda yadda…” She twirls a finger. “Questionable online activity. Nothing we haven’t seen before. After years of watching men like that grow up and seeing the things they end up doing, Aunt Bea started recommending we take them. Ah, and there might have been some kind of accident, reading between the lines.”

“Accident?”

“It won’t have been a serious one,” Christine says. “Maybe a near-miss? Something that could have gone bad but didn’t? No-one was hurt, whatever happened; the basic personnel files are marked if there’s been death or serious injury, and we generally don’t bring killers in, anyway. Yes, Martin, I know, but it wasn’t deliberate. Abby is being her usual self here — the woman could see the good in the devil, I swear — but reading through… yeah, I’m pretty sure I have the picture, now. We have men like her occasionally: nihilistic, lonely, mostly only a danger to themselves. A handful of them go on to do really terrible things. She must have done or said something to make one of us think she was potentially dangerous in the future, but still worth saving. So we brought her in. And, I’ve been reminded,” she adds, rolling her eyes, “we’re not a court of law, we’re a secret extrajudicial dungeon; our standards of evidence can be, like, half bad vibes.”

“Changing a man into a woman is about saving him?”

She looks at him like he just questioned the colour of the sky. “Well, yeah. Saved me.”

“And all those guys out there? They’re worth saving?”

She nods. “Aunt Bea thinks so, and, officially, so do Maria and Pippa and the rest. I mean, those guys are definitely all awful people, probably all of them bigger bastards than everyone in our intake except the one guy who washed out. I wouldn’t be sorry, personally, if every single one of them followed him. Washed out. Which is why I’m not and never will be a sponsor. Although I think we may have bitten off more than we can chew with some of these guys; wanting to change, wanting to be saved, is a part of it, and not everyone does. Sometimes someone is just too big of a piece of shit, too invested in their own supposed masculinity, too unable to see over their massive dick.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, well. Noble goals. Unpleasant methods.”

“I’m getting that.”

“You believe me now?”

“Maybe.”

“Enough to answer my question?”

“Maybe.”

“Please, Stefan,” she says. “I have to understand why you want to stay. I know I come off like a bit of a mean bitch, but I can’t stand the thought of leaving someone down here who doesn’t deserve to be here.”

“You don’t come off like a bitch.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve been thinking of you as pretty kind, actually.”

She laughs. It’s cynical and over almost as soon as it starts, and when it’s done she’s not looking at him any more. “Thank you,” she says quietly.

“As for why I want to stay…” he says, and lapses into silence. He considers prefacing his statement with the usual justifications he marshals when he imagines this moment: stories from his childhood and his difficult teenage years; his litany of self-loathing. But, it’s finally clear, those are all just excuses. A pre-emptive defence against his disclosure being considered ridiculous, or disgusting, or impossible. It’s bad enough for a boy to claim to be a girl; for a particularly masculine-looking boy to do so…

He bites his tongue to stop himself spiralling, and the pain returns him to the present. Christine’s looking at him again, her earlier irritation and anger replaced by honest interest, and he briefly tries to imagine her here. Waking up in the cell, as whoever she was back then. As a man. Almost impossible.

Except… she’s almost exactly his height; a couple of centimetres taller, maybe. He noticed when they were standing, yelling at each other. Noticed when she kissed him, when they first met. A single small way in which, despite the gulf between them, they are more or less alike.

Maybe womanhood isn’t so unobtainable, after all.

“I want to stay because I think I want to be a girl,” he says quickly, before he can take it back. And winces; he managed to force equivocation in there, anyway. A little doubt, a little wiggle room, enough to let him take it back, should he need to. Fuck that. “I am a girl,” he says. “A trans girl,” he adds. “As in, I’m a—”

“Understood,” she says, smiling, and then she blinks and her eyes widen. “Shit. It makes sense now. That’s why you were looking for this place: you were looking for Melissa, for your friend, like you said, because you thought she’s trans, and… God…”

“Yeah,” he says, matching her smile, “I thought you lot helped her transition.”

“I mean. We did. Just. You know. Not like that.”

“I was genuinely looking for her, as well,” he says. “It’s true that I wanted Dorley’s help, but I wanted to see her again, too. I missed her.” Warmth spreads in his chest as he remembers the last time he saw her close-up, pictures the smile on her face as she gave him back his absurd little box of stuffing, outside the Tesco. “I miss her so much.”

Christine holds out a hand and Stefan, after a moment’s hesitation, takes it. Her fingers are warm. Christine blushes, withdraws, and says, “So, uh, to be clear, because I think in this situation we need to be incredibly clear, you’re planning on undergoing biomedical and possibly surgical treatment to become a girl, yes? And yeah, I know, ‘become a girl’ is cissexist framing, but—”

“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s the easiest way to be sure. Draw the stick figures first, paint on the detail later.” He giggles, feeling dizzy again. He always thought he didn’t have dysphoria, had never seriously connected the idea to the way he feels about his body; if his first encounter with Pippa, where she gendered him viciously male and forced him into dissociation, showed him how absurd that idea was, then sharing a space with Christine again is final confirmation. He wants what she has, wants it so desperately and completely it’s a challenge to think about much else. Now he just needs to make sure she doesn’t take him away from the place that can give it to him. “Oh, sorry,” he adds, seeing her frown, “that’s just something Melissa used to say, when she helped with my homework.”

“Abby says something very similar, sometimes,” Christine says. “Probably got it from Melissa.”

“They’re close, are they?”

Christine rolls her eyes. “Incredibly close. We often bond with our sponsors — Indira, my sponsor, is like my older sister — but they’re closer than most. Abby was a mess when Melissa moved out. And they talk, constantly. Like, if you’re in a room with Abby and you hear her tapping away on her phone, odds are she’s talking to Melissa. Sometimes she shows me the terrible memes she sends.”

“Good,” Stefan says. “I don’t like to think of her being lonely, that’s all. So, to answer your question: yes. I want to become a girl. Hormonally, surgically, whatever. In any and every way possible.”

“Then this is the wrong place for you, Stef,” Christine says, switching to the more gender-neutral version of his name. “We’re not set up for actual, real trans girls, and I have no idea what Aunt Bea would do to an outsider who knows so much about us. She might be benevolent and give you everything; she might, honestly, kill you, just to keep the secret. I’m scared of her, and I’m not the only one. Like I said, we don’t know what happens to the ones who wash out. God,” she adds, rubbing her face, “this whole situation won’t stop getting more fucked up. I’m so sorry I dragged you into this.”

“I dragged myself into this, remember,” he says. “And, besides, I don’t intend to tell anyone.”

“Please don’t tell me you’re saying what I think you’re saying.”

“I’ll be one of the arsehole guys,” Stefan says, spreading his hands the way Christine had when she came out to him.

“Stef, that’s insane. They’re already set up to think of you as a terrible person — a terrible man — and if you stay here, that’s how you’ll be treated. And we go hard here. Dorley Hall is where toxic masculinity comes to die. To be killed. By us. We hammer at them, over and over again, because the men we bring down here, most of them cling to their masculinity like—” she hesitates, then laughs weakly, “—like it’s a piece of driftwood in the middle of the ocean. Even as they get farther and farther from shore, they can’t bring themselves to let go, because they’ve never known anything else. We have to pry their fingers off, one by one. Force them to learn how to swim.” She looks away again. “It’s something Dira said to me. Several times.”

She’s resting her forearms on her knees, staring at the wall. She’s repeatedly flicking her forefinger against her other thumb, and she’s playing with her lower lip with her teeth. A collection of nervous habits; a picture of grace. Stefan balances jealousy with disbelief.

“You keep saying you were down here,” he says, “that you were a… not like you are now. I’m trying, but I still can’t picture it.”

“Good.” She shudders. “I don’t want you looking at me and seeing them. Even though maybe you should.” Before Stefan can interject to contradict her, she continues, “I know what I said, about saving them, but the guys down here, right now, are nasty, bigoted, small-minded, and either so astonishingly sexist they’re incapable of thinking of women as real people, or so blisteringly nihilistic they’re practically solipsists. And all of them have hurt people. Mostly women but not all. This place, Dorley, what it does… it makes people out of bastards.”

“By turning men into women.”

“By taking away their masculinity,” she says, prodding a finger into the floor with every word. “Their driftwood. These are men who have only one lens to see the world through, and it’s a fucking distorted one. A lot of them don’t even realise how skewed their view is. It’s perfectly possible to be masculine and a good person, but the official position here — explained to me at length — is that it’s almost impossible to reform someone whose masculinity has… curdled. It’s poisoning them and everyone around them, but they don’t know it. So it has to be completely excised. Extracted from their psyche with a scalpel, layer by layer, until there’s nothing left but whoever existed before they were poisoned. It, uh, doesn’t always come out cleanly.”

“I can’t believe it’s the only way to change them.”

She doesn’t get frustrated this time. She smiles wryly, like she thinks he’s naive. “Then you try it,” she says. “Fix them. Take one of those guys and fix him without changing anything else. And do it before he hits a woman.” She scowls. “Or hits another woman. Because almost none of them will reform on their own, not in a country so in love with toxic pigs that it puts them in government. That celebrates them on every front page. So, actually, don’t try it. Leave them here, and hope we can change them. But you should go.”

“I can’t.”

“Stef! This place will treat you like them. It’ll paint you with all their sins and their arrogance and their cruelty and it’ll punish you for it! And I saw how you were when Pippa got done with you; that was just a taste. She went easy on you.”

“She did?”

“Yeah. She thought she was triggering you in a way she wasn’t trying to trigger you, so she laid off. Which I’d think was a good omen for your future wellbeing except the other Sisters, the more experienced ones, told her you seemed a lot like one of those total psychos who do the wounded, innocent guy routine until the girl’s dropped her guard, and she should treat you just like them.”

“Do I really come across that way?”

“No! You seem, I don’t know, like a nice girl. Kinda sad, maybe—”

“Please don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Don’t call me a girl.”

“But you are a girl. You said—”

“I don’t deserve it.”

“Stef, that is super fucked up. You don’t have to ‘deserve’ your gender.” Christine frowns as she says it, trips up a little in the middle of her sentence. “It’s just your gender,” she adds thoughtfully. “It’s yours.”

“Maybe that’s the wrong way to say it,” he says. Thinking it through as he goes, he continues, “I don’t like who I am now. Who I’ve been for the last, I don’t know, five years? More? I’m not dangerous, not the way the guys out there are, but I’m not anyone I can be proud of. I’ve never grown, Christine. I’ve wilted. I’m barely alive. And I don’t want this guy—” he jabs himself in the chest with an aggressive thumb, “—to be someone I carry through into my future. I want to start again. To become someone new. And, I think, if you call me a girl right now, it taints who I want to be. If that makes sense?”

“Yeah,” she says. “It makes sense. A scary amount of sense, actually. Which it shouldn’t, because my gender formed here, in this… pressure cooker.”

“You think it’s that different out there? For a closeted trans girl?”

She’s been leaning forward, and she catches herself, bites her lip again, and sits back. “Yeah,” she says slowly. “I don’t know. I never was one. But, yeah. Maybe it’s not. And, uh, if you don’t want me calling you a girl, should I start calling you Stefan again?”

“Stef’s fine. Melissa always called me Stef.”

“Okay. Good. I still think this is the worst possible place for you. I know you look at Melissa, or Pippa, or even me and think that because we turned out okay, you can, too, but we were very different from you when we came here.”

“I can’t leave,” Stefan says.

“This place will hurt you.”

He smiles. “I think you need to understand where I’m coming from. I’ve been denying myself for almost as long as I’ve been alive. There was always a reason: maybe every boy feels this way, I thought; maybe I’m not like those other trans people, the real trans people. And then later, as I grew up, it became: I’m too masculine-looking to transition; I’m not strong enough to transition.”

“Okay, but—”

“Listen. This is important. I’ve always known. And I’ve always denied it. And every year I’ve denied it, it’s gotten worse. Every year, I’ve made it harder for myself. And not just because I’ve got more and more masculine, although I have. Because I’ve got weaker and weaker. Less and less able to cope with just living. Let alone transitioning! It’s like there’s a cliff in front of me, and it keeps getting taller and the handholds keep getting farther apart. And I know I should have started climbing years ago, but I’ve never even tried, because I know I’ll fall.”

“I can help you,” Christine says, almost pleading. “I’ll get you out of here and then I’ll help you.”

“You can’t help me enough. Not unless I’m in here.”

“This place will kill you, Stef,” she whispers.

He laughs, suddenly. Surprises himself with it. But the adrenaline’s back, and carrying him through this bizarre confessional with a forthrightness he hadn’t imagined himself capable of. “I won’t pretend dealing with Pippa wasn’t hard. But if I know what to expect, I can prepare for it.”

“It’s more than just what she said to you. It’s a total psychological invasion. And there’ll be whole months where we make you feel shame for the changes we’re putting your body through. I’m still not quite over that myself!”

“You can’t make me feel shame for changes I want.”

“Yes, but…”

“What kind of changes are we talking about?” he says. “Specifically. HRT?”

“Um. Yeah. That’s already started, actually, with the anti-androgen implant. You’ll get a new one every so often. They dissolve.”

The little bump on his belly. Stefan places a protective finger over it. “How long on just the implant? And do they ever do anything to make the implant… not necessary any more?”

“Estradiol in, like, a month? Two months? It depends. And, uh…” She trails off, and then shakes her head. Looks irritated with herself. “Yeah. Orchi at the six month mark. Sorry. I wasn’t going to tell you about it. It’s kind of my default to assume anyone down here would find the idea terrifying. I did.”

“How did you deal with it when it happened to you?”

She bites a finger for a second, and inspects the tooth imprints. “Some of the others got really angry. I just shut down. I wouldn’t talk to Dira for a couple of weeks. Vicky talked me around, in the end.”

“Vicky?”

“She was in the programme with us. I don’t know what for, to this day. But she got it, right from the start. Where I was at the end of the first year, that was her after, like, a month.”

“Is she trans?”

“She says she isn’t. Just adaptable. And very eager to leave her old self behind.”

“I’m sorry it was all so hard for you,” Stefan says. “I know how it must feel, me coming here asking for all this.”

“No, no no no no,” Christine says. “You don’t need to apologise. I needed remaking. It hurt, but…” She sniffs. “And I don’t resent you, or anything. Not now that I understand why you’re here. I just think you’re making a huge mistake.”

“What else did you get?” Stefan says, returning to his point. “Hair removal?”

“Yeah. Laser for me, electrolysis for the blondes and the redheads, like you.”

“Facial surgery?”

“Yeah, for most.”

“You?”

She glares at him. “Yes,” she snaps, and then holds up a hand in apology. “Sorry. I’m defensive about it, but I probably shouldn’t be. Not with you, anyway. I, uh, had this bit shaved down—” she runs a finger across her forehead, “—and a nose job. Oh,” she adds, rubbing at her neck, “and a trach shave. I looked like a giraffe who just swallowed a tennis ball.”

“What about your voice?”

Her smile returns. “Oh, that’s all me. Hours of practise, every day. Even got singing lessons. I know all the words to almost everything Taylor Swift’s ever recorded.”

“Huh. Thought you’d’ve got vocal surgery or something. How did they make you do that?”

“What? Oh. They didn’t. I was cooperating by that point. More than cooperating; couldn’t wait to be a new person. Practically begged Dira to let me start the lessons early.”

“And that happens to everyone?” Stefan asks.

“Most. After a point, if you don’t get on board, you get put back to the start, or you wash out, and that’s that. We don’t all proceed through the steps the same way, though; every sponsor is different, every girl is different.”

Stefan nods. “So,” he says, leaning forward, “how much do you think all that cost?”

The question surprises her. “I don’t know,” she admits.

“Last time I looked I had less than twenty quid in my bank account. All that stuff? I couldn’t afford it in a hundred years. So, let’s math it out, yeah?” Christine looks suddenly like a small forest animal caught in the headlights of the night bus. Stefan starts counting on his fingers. “Hormones, that’s, what, fifty a month, getting them online? At a guess?”

“Maybe?”

“And as for FFS, I know some girls don’t need it at all to pass, but I’ve spent a lot of time looking at this face. I’m under no illusions: I need the works. Brow job. Nose job. Hairline. Jaw work. Chin work. Trach shave. Tens of thousands of pounds. And electrolysis? Chuck another grand on the pile.”

“What about—?”

“The NHS? Maybe I try it. Get hormones and bottom surgery for free. But they don’t do FFS and even speech therapy is hard to get, and the whole process is, from what I’ve read, frustrating, humiliating, and dehumanising. And do you know how long the waiting list is?”

“Yes,” Christine says, nodding, clearly on firmer ground. “Vicky’s girlfriend’s been waiting two years already. She gets her HRT out of our supply.” She bangs her head against the glass again. “Shit. Stef, I did not just say that. It’s a secret. But, actually, that’s it! I can do that for you!”

“You can get me free hormones?”

“Yes!”

“Free facial surgery? Free electrolysis?”

“Well. No.”

“Pay my rent? Buy my food?”

“No.”

“Because I need all that stuff. I’m not some wealthy student with transition resources coming out of my arse and a loving family backing me all the way. I’m falling apart, Christine. All that’s left of me is the front I put up. I’m probably already fired for missing work, but I was on the way to getting shitcanned anyway, and even with my job, which I hate, I can’t make rent for more than another few months. And maybe I could have done better — got more hours at work, got a better job, tried harder in my classes, whatever — but it takes everything I have just to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Forget transitioning; I can barely survive. And if I somehow got on hormones? It wouldn’t fix anything else. Except now I’d be a complete hermit, because I know I’m not strong enough to transition out in the world. I don’t know how other trans women do it; I just know I can’t. The thought of people, people looking at me…”

“Hey.” Christine takes his hand again. He’s shaking, he realises. “Stef. It’s okay. Breathe.”

He almost snaps at her, but it dies in his throat. He takes a deep breath instead. Lets it out slowly. “And then there’s Dorley. Everything I need, all in one place. Wasted on guys like Aaron and Will and that drunk-driver piece of shit.”

“Not wasted,” Christine says. “It wasn’t wasted on me. Or Melissa.”

“But you didn’t ask for it, did you?”

“We needed it.”

“So do I! And so do any number of trans people.”

“I know!” Her shoulders slump. “God, Stef. I know. Don’t you think I’d love to just give our shit out to every trans person at Saints?”

“I’m not accusing you. But you can imagine what it’s like, yeah? Seeing this… this bounty get handed out while I can’t even afford a bloody estrogen pill?”

“I get it,” she says. “I wish it was different. But I’m not in charge; I just live here.”

“Christine,” he says, raising his voice, “I don’t understand; how are you not completely miserable? How are you not clawing at your own skin? You say you’re not trans, but they made you into a girl! I don’t even know your real name!”

“It’s Christine,” she says, hardening.

Stupid boy! Keep calm, idiot. “Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean it like that. Or maybe I did, but you’re making my head spin. I’m having to make myself remember that you’re… you know. You seem so normal and nice and then it hits me again and… I don’t get how this isn’t a living nightmare for you.”

“Why would it be? Being a girl isn’t so bad.”

“But—”

“I don’t think it’s the same for me as it is for you.”

“It can’t be so simple.”

“It isn’t, not really, but we don’t have time to get into it. For now, Stef, you’ll just have to accept that I’m fine. I’m happy! And so is Melissa. So’s Abby, so are my other friends, who you don’t know. Even Pippa.”

And there’s his opening. “I want to be happy, too,” he says. “Please, Christine, help me be happy.”

She raises a finger. Lowers it. Contemplates it for a moment. “Shit,” she says. “Shit, Stefan. I give in. Your… financial conclusions are impossible to argue with. We have obscene resources here, and it’s only right you should benefit from them. And you know what’s going on in your head better than I do. If you really think you can survive this place—”

“Honestly?” he says. “I don’t know if I can. But I know I won’t make it out there. This is my last chance, Christine. I have no money. No friends. I’m struggling with my classes. I need, at the very least, major facial work done—”

“You’re not being fair to yourself with that,” Christine insists. “You never know what HRT will do.”

“Oh? Now that I’ve seen you, do you think I could be at all happy out there, rolling the dice, hoping against hope that hormones will plump up my face enough to disguise all this?” He waves a contemptuous hand at his face. Can almost feel the ugly contours in the air that passes under his fingers. “You’re gorgeous, Christine. Absolutely beautiful. Don’t scowl; you are. And if I stay, I don’t just get to transition, which may very well save my life, I get the chance to be beautiful, like you. Out there, even if I start on HRT immediately and even if it ultimately changes my face beyond my wildest dreams, I’ve still got to live long enough to get there. Months and months. Years, maybe. Finding ways to make money, to go to classes, to struggle along with life, and those are all things I’ve already failed at. It’s terrifying, Christine, and I just can’t face it. I want— I need what you have.”

“Even if you have to go through hell to get it?”

“I’m in hell,” he says. “At least your hell has catering.”

 

* * *

 

“Christine, dear. Weren’t you endeavouring to sleep?”

Christine raises her head from the kitchen table and on the second try successfully props it on what is, at a guess, currently her most reliable hand. In front of her, in assorted states of focus, are an empty coffee mug, a half-eaten croissant, a half-dozen other girls looking on with concern and/or amusement, and Aunt Bea, standing in the double doors and frowning down at her like the Queen of Hearts sweeping into her court and finding it packed with Mad Hatters, Alices, and rodents hiding in her teapot.

At least two of the Alices escape while Aunt Bea’s attention is on her.

“I endeavoured,” Christine says, wincing at the gravel in her voice, “I really did. It didn’t help. And I have classes today.”

“Your studies are important, of course,” Aunt Bea allows. She makes a beeline for the coffeemaker. “A refill, perhaps?”

It’s not like Aunt Bea to wait on her girls. Christine doesn’t know whether to be flattered or concerned. “Thank you, Aunt Bea,” she says, holding up her mug and regretting not picking something more dainty and feminine than the chunky grey Round Tuit.

Aunt Bea pours coffee and oat milk, and grins at Christine’s choice. “Ah,” she says, “always a favourite of mine. Rather a fun joke.”

On the other hand, maybe Christine picked exactly the right one. Boomer humour! She smiles her gratitude and immediately drains half the mug, taking care not to slurp. Stef kept her up until five this morning, arguing, brainstorming, and eventually just talking. He might be an idiot for wanting to stay — for all that she ultimately came to agree that, in a world with no good options left for him, this might, absurdly, be the least awful — but he’s an enjoyable conversationalist. For a moment Christine wishes that, on the first night they met, they’d both been what they appeared to be. Cis girl and cis boy, meeting at a party. For an hour or so, she’d felt normal.

She finishes her coffee.

“Hi, all,” Pippa says, marching into the kitchen from the hallway and looking disgustingly chipper, like she’s just woken up from nine restful hours of dreams about how super horrible she’s going to be to Stef. “Oh, Christine, you poor thing. You look terrible.”

“You’re so kind,” Christine mumbles.

Aunt Bea is handing out coffees to all the Sisters in the kitchen, and picking only the most dubiously funny mugs off the mug tree. Pippa’s has a repeating pattern of a cartoon ant and bee around the rim, which takes Christine a second to get. Blearily she looks down the row of coffees on the table, all provided by the custodian of Dorley Hall, all in novelty mugs; one of them says, in thick black letters, You don’t have to be a girl to work here, but it helps!

Aunt Bea must simply be in an unusually good mood. A serotonin jolt from the addition of a new boy to the torture basement, perhaps.

“I’m actually very mean,” Pippa says, pulling out the chair next to Christine and bumping gently against her arm as she sits down, “and you know it.” Christine grimaces at her, prompting Pippa to rub her shoulder in gentle encouragement.

Christine hasn’t been in the third year of the programme for all that long, and up until the last few days has been spending time mainly with Indira, Abby, Paige and Vicky; maybe everyone being nice to her is just what happens when you’re no longer a second-year scrub. Suddenly just one of the girls.

Actually, she remembers, Vicky’s been hanging around with all the other Sisters since she started her second year. Possibly they’ve all been waiting for Christine to stop being quite so consistently antisocial, then.

“Yes, you’re very mean,” Christine agrees. They inhale their coffee in silence for a little while, until Pippa pulls out her phone and starts scrolling through her notes on Stef, and reminding Christine she has an obligation to fulfil before she leaves for her Linguistics workshop. “Um, Pippa,” she says, “I wanted to talk to you. About the disappearance. Have you done it yet?”

Everyone inducted into the programme disappears, as Stef noticed when he started his investigation. Engineering the circumstances of their disappearance and ensuring no suspicion falls on Dorley Hall is the responsibility of the sponsor. It apparently hadn’t occurred to Stef that he would be required to disappear, too, and the thought made him quite distressed; just because he isn’t close with his parents, he insisted, doesn’t mean he wants his family to think he’s dead. He’s just been scared of what they’ll say when they find out he’s a girl, that’s all. But no sooner had Christine thought she’d found the motivation that would wake him from his madness, the little shit came up with an idea, and an irritatingly good one, at that. If Christine had been half as together in her first week…

“Not yet,” Pippa says. Her eyes dart to Aunt Bea, who is buttering toast and paying no apparent attention. “I was just going to have him vanish on the way to work, you know? Keep it simple?”

“What if he doesn’t have to ‘disappear’ at all?” Christine says, leaning hard on the caffeine and wishing there was considerably more of it in her blood. “I had an idea. It requires his cooperation, but I don’t think it’ll be difficult to get it.”

“Oh?” Aunt Bea says. “Why would he cooperate so early in the programme? He’s been here less than a week, has he not?”

“Days, Aunt Bea,” Pippa says. “I accelerated his induction to bring him in line with the schedules of the others.”

“Wise. So, Christine, why do you think he will cooperate?”

There’s that adrenaline rush. Christine swallows, and locks her legs so they can’t run away without her. “I know him, a little,” she says, running through the story they concocted together. “He takes Linguistics, like me. Different years, but a girl in my advanced unit knows him pretty well from a module they did together last year. She, uh, wanted to set me up with him, actually,” she adds, laying on the shyness as thickly as she dares. If she could force a blush, she would, but the capillaries in her cheeks are as tired as the rest of her. “We talked a couple of times, and I kinda liked him. Not, like, that way, but I thought he was sweet. I was surprised to see him in here; he didn’t seem like the type.”

“They often don’t,” one of the others at the table says. Edy. Nice girl. Tall. Drinking from a mug that says, Shoe therapy is better than regular therapy. Borrowed one of Christine’s skirts, once. Never gave it back. Sponsoring someone this year; is it Adam? The demons-make-you-gay nut?

“What’s your idea?” Aunt Bea asks, with every impression of encouragement.

“I think he should ‘go travelling’.” Christine air-quotes with just one careful finger; she needs the rest to hold up her head. “He’s been having problems with his classes and with at least one of his professors. He had resits over the summer. And everyone knows he’s not been happy. It wouldn’t be hard to create the impression that he’s decided to just forget everything and take a year or three off. Go off-grid, backpacking around Europe or something.”

“If everyone knows he’s been unhappy,” Aunt Bea says, “why not take the suicide route? It’s considerably simpler.”

“Suicide means attention. Sometimes even more attention than a disappearance. And we’ve got a big haul this year; I’ve heard people talking about missing boys.” A lie, but one with a purpose; she really does think they need to be more careful, both with who they haul in — the ‘evidence’ she manufactured for Stef isn’t even the sketchiest she’s seen — and how they handle the cover stories. With any luck, she can prompt a rethink without ever having to suggest it herself. “Now, he’s not all that close with his parents, but he has a little sister, and when he talks about her, he lights up.” She can’t help smiling; the video he showed her on his phone, back at the party, of his sister playing the trombone, was adorable, and his love for her had been so obvious that she’d just had to— oh, God, she kissed him, didn’t she? No more alcohol for Christine for a good, long time.

“Christine?” Aunt Bea prompts.

“Oh,” she says, and shakes her head, making a show of clearing it. “Sorry. I was just remembering a conversation we had about her. He really does love her. And her thinking he’s dead? He’ll hate it. He’ll fight it. Might even resist the programme just because of it. So, instead—” she raises a finger, fatigue forgotten, “—you offer him an out. You outline the way things would normally go — he vanishes on the way to work, is eventually declared missing, family informed, grief, eventual memorial service, years and years of trauma for his little sister — and then you say, there’s another way.” She points at an imaginary Stef in the middle of the table. “All he has to do is hand-write a couple of letters, one for his family and one for the guys he lives with, saying he’s gone travelling. Gone to find himself. He can include a bunch of authentic personal details to really sell it. And then, no police. No investigation. No-one showing up at his family’s doorstep to tell them he’s ‘missing’. And his baby sister won’t have to grow up with a dead older brother, always wondering what happened to him.” Her phrasing is deliberate: Pippa has a cousin, and Abby says she misses her dearly. “Sure, eventually he doesn’t come back from Europe, or wherever, but we just don’t tell him that part.” Actually, Stef insisted to Christine that he can just leave once he’s got everything he needs from Dorley, and go see his sister in person, and if Aunt Bea deploys the usual threats to stop him, he can ask to have his records unsealed and show her that he — by then, Christine assumes, she — was kidnapped on a lie. Will it work? Only God knows.

Aunt Bea hums in thought. “It’s a workable plan,” she says, and Christine carefully doesn’t show her relief, “but it does tip our hand as to how long we expect him to stay with us, information that is up to the sponsor to deploy or withhold. Information he might pass on to the others. What do you think, Pippa? He is, after all, your charge.” He’s Pippa’s responsibility, she means. The buck (doe) stops with her.

“We’ll have to pretend he has a chance ever to see his sister again,” Pippa says, frowning, “but that’s probably a useful lever. Yes.” She nods to herself. “Once he’s written the letters, I can hold them over him. Say I’ll release information to his family that suggests he’s died while backpacking abroad, unless he cooperates fully with the programme. Carrot and stick. Handy for some of the more… complex elements of the programme.”

Christine sips some more coffee so doesn’t snort in amusement; if Pippa’s thinking about the orchi, she’s not going to have any problems with Stef on that front. The boy’s ready for the snip right now. She controls a wince, remembering her sheer panic when she woke up from hers; one of her hardest days.

“And I doubt he’ll tell the others anything,” Pippa continues. “He hates them. A lot more than I expected.” She looks thoughtful. “He might not like seeing himself in them. Hmm. Anyway, I can make his silence a requirement.” She stops contemplating her mug and looks up at Aunt Bea. “It’s a good idea.”

“Excellent, Pippa,” Aunt Bea says. “Proceed with my blessing. And well done, Christine.”

In a perfect world, Christine would be allowed to faint as the adrenaline leaves her system, but she has a subterfuge to maintain and a Linguistics workshop to get to. She takes the offered second refill from Aunt Bea instead, downs it, accepts a hug from a grateful Pippa, and manages not to stagger from fatigue until she’s halfway along the path to campus and safely out of everyone’s sight.

 

* * *

 

He’s not trying to antagonise Pippa by being caught in yoga poses whenever she visits him, but there’s nothing else to do in his concrete box besides sleep or grudgingly operate the horrible metal squat toilet. Except, perhaps, panic, and that’s possible to route around, for Stefan, now that he has a better handle on what’s going on. These concrete boxes clearly were designed to psych out people who’ve had less practise than him at carefully avoiding spending time alone with their thoughts.

She glares at him, and he glares back, trying to communicate nonverbally that if she doesn’t want to find him with his feet over his head then she should provide magazines.

She looks good, though.

Stefan’s sample size of Dorley women is currently at two, with background data provided by a few glances at the one he thinks is Maria and some others whose names he doesn’t know, and he can’t help but be intrigued at the way these women who were once, supposedly, ordinary cis men — men who were extremely unpleasant in unspecified but luridly implied ways! — choose to present themselves. Christine, with the exception of the night they met, seems always to dress in simple, comfortable, unfeminine clothes, with little to no makeup, as Stefan might expect from a new-ish woman still acclimatising to her role. Pippa, by contrast, seems to live in dresses. Today’s is dark green, gathers around the mid-calf, and bears a pattern of roses down her left side. She wears heeled sandals — which, he notices as he stands to meet her, elevate her to almost exactly his height — and a simple, hand-made bracelet around her right wrist; it looks old and well-loved, and she’s worn it every time he’s seen her. She accentuates her pale skin with dark eye makeup that stands out brilliantly under her bleached pixie cut.

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, and after several hours of conversation with and verbal pummelling from Christine, he’s had to accept that the women of Dorley — the Sisters — genuinely are who she says they are; he’s also very much not supposed to know that at this stage of the programme, so he tries not to stare, and wonders if he can get away with complimenting Pippa’s eyeliner, because it’s great.

He remembers, moments before he opens his mouth, that he’s supposed to be confused, disorientated, and extremely unhappy to be locked in a basement. At least he has reassurances from Christine that Pippa, after some prompting from the more experienced sponsors, fully expects him to be more of a quiet and manipulative type than a full-blown raging arsehole, and while the idea doesn’t make him feel good it is at least easy to play, requiring little enough of him that he can focus his efforts elsewhere, like on preparing for her next attempt at wearing him down. The memory of the last time is vivid enough that it flickers a frown onto his face for a moment.

Perfect. Use it.

“Pippa,” he says.

“Well?” she replies. “Have you made your decision?”

Straight to business. “Stay or wash out, yes? And the washouts are never heard from again, correct?”

“Those are your choices.”

He shrugs. Pretends indifference. “Then I choose to stay.” He can’t resist adding, “You can’t keep me locked up forever, after all.”

Pippa fails to control her smirk at Stefan’s rebelliousness. “Good,” she says. “Come with me.”

Out of the cell, Stefan keeps his distance. Pippa doesn’t have guards this time, but he doesn’t doubt he’s being watched on the monitors by women with tasers and batons and other things he doesn’t want pointed or swung in his direction. There are male guards, too; trained professionals. Christine said they have them stay in a rec room a level up from here, cut off from everything but heavily armed and ready to charge in if needed. She said they’re kept intentionally ignorant of most of what goes on here, and rotated out regularly, bound to the sort of NDAs major corporations use when they fire people. Wise to keep them out of the loop; in Stefan’s experience, men are very protective of other men’s masculinity.

They round the corner and pass the reinforced glass doors to the communal rooms. Aaron, clustered around the television with some of the others, watches him pass, and fires finger guns at him with a wink that Stefan does not respond to. At the end of the corridor, opposite the entrance to the communal bathroom, there’s a pair of opaque double doors, solid and metal and much more like Stefan’s idea of a security door. Behind them lies another concrete corridor, painted in the duck-egg off-white he associates with cheap rental flats; colour theory for ‘you can live here, but you won’t like it’. There’s an emergency exit at the far end, described by Christine as leading to two more sealed ‘airlock’ rooms and a long passageway that eventually opens into a pair of bunker doors out in the woods, biometrically sealed and only to be used in, presumably, very slow-moving emergencies. And lining the walls are ten doors, five to each side, all decorated in wood-effect laminate. They look like ordinary bedroom doors that have just materialised inside a concrete bunker, and absurdly out of place. They all have the bulky biometric locks, but in deference to the homey atmosphere they’ve also been covered in laminate.

The door at the end is open and Pippa guides him into an ordinary dorm room, similar to the one he had in his first year at Saints; slightly nicer, even. There’s a generous bed, a wardrobe with full-length mirrors, a set of shelves, a metal desk with a computer — bolted down, on closer inspection — and a utilitarian-looking vanity and chest of drawers. There’s even a phone sitting by the computer, presumably with its cellular radio neutered.

Still no windows. Stefan makes a mental note to ask about vitamin D supplements.

Snaking out from under the bed and nestling in the middle of the duvet is something Stefan’s first dorm room definitely didn’t have: a pair of handcuffs on the end of a heavy chain.

Pippa’s been standing in the doorway, and when he sits on the edge of the mattress and weighs the cuffs in his hands, she says, “Behave, and you’ll never have to put them on. You can tuck them under the bed and it’ll be like they’re not even here. Antagonise me, and they go on and stay on until I—” she clicks a device Stefan hadn’t noticed she had, and in his grip the cuffs pop open, “—say they come off. So don’t piss me off, Stefan Riley.”

He puts them carefully back on the bed. “Understood,” he says, and unconsciously massages his wrists.

“We have more to discuss, but before we get to it, you need to take a shower.”

“Now?”

She wrinkles her nose. “Now.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry. Must have gotten used to it.”

Pippa directs him to a bag of toiletries on the vanity, and fetches him a clean towel and a dressing gown out of the wardrobe. She escorts him down the hall to the communal bathroom and snorts when he asks for some privacy. He has, she informs him, nothing she wishes to see again.

When he saw the bathroom yesterday, on his short tour of the facilities, it put him in mind of the changing rooms from his old school, transplanted underground, shrunk a fair bit, and heavily cleaned. There’s a full-length mirror by the paper towel dispenser — they really don’t want the inmates missing a chance to observe their bodies in full, excruciating detail — and while normally Stefan would avoid his reflection, today he follows an impulse to examine himself. If, in the hands of Pippa and the Sisters, his body is going to be remoulded, he wants to familiarise himself with the starting state of the clay.

He disrobes, down to his underwear, and slings the dressing gown around his shoulders. Wonders where he’ll see the changes first: in the rough edges of his face? in his veined, wiry arms? in his taut, waxy belly, a legacy of poor diet and persistent poverty? He runs a hand through his hair, spills ginger strands across his forehead. Counts the freckles on his cheeks. His finger brushes against his stubble, which breaks the spell; that, at least, he can take care of on his own, right now.

He keeps looking at his reflection as he unpacks the little battery shaver. He’s been so used to viewing himself, his body, his face, as aberrations, mutations forced onto him by a puberty he didn’t want. Now? They’re still just as ugly to him, but perhaps they no longer represent a trap he can’t escape.

God, he even smells different. He’s been marinading in his own sweat for, what, nearly three days, and the odour isn’t at all what he expects. Is that even possible? After just days of having his testosterone blocked?

Maybe. Maybe not. Wishful thinking.

Will Schroeder interrupts his thoughts, ducking out of the shower annexe and rubbing his hair with a towel. In the small mirror over the sink, shaver in hand, Stefan can’t stop himself from staring; Will is well-built, and naked.

“What are you looking at, homo?” Will says.

Ah, yes. He’s also a prick.

Stefan buzzes the shaver and starts working on his whiskers, turning his back so he can’t see Will in the reflection. He doesn’t reply. Doesn’t trust himself not to break up mid-sentence, because now he can’t stop picturing the effects a year of testosterone blockers and estrogen will have on the muscle-bound piece of shit.

When finally the man leaves the bathroom, visibly irritated but not having said or done anything else, Stefan loses all control, and laughs so hard he drops the electric shaver in the sink.

 

* * *

 

She should be sleeping. Goodness knows she needs it! But Christine is glued to her laptop screen. It’s a pivotal time for Stef, after all: not just his longest conversation yet with Pippa, but the one in which they discuss the content of the letters he’s going to write. He’s playing his part tolerably, sitting cross-legged on his new bed and idly turning over the cuffs in his hands as he pretends to think about Pippa’s suggestions. To Christine, he comes across too innocent; even if she didn’t already know him, she wouldn’t take the boy on the screen for a creep, but institutional inertia is working in their favour. He must be bad: he’s at Dorley!

Pippa’s behaving a little strangely around him, though. She’s not being nice to him, heaven forfend, but the edge of controlled anger is gone from her voice. Good news for Stef, probably, as long as Pippa doesn’t figure him out.

She keeps playing with something on her wrist, and suddenly Christine gets it: Pippa’s thinking about her cousin, who made her the bracelet she never takes off. Shit. Playing on Pippa’s weak spot to get her to agree to the plan definitely seemed to work, but now Christine will forever have to wonder if such clumsy manipulation was even necessary.

She marks another check on her mental list of people she’s accidentally hurt as she flails around, attempting to clean up her own mess.

Christine slams the laptop lid shut. “Be kind to yourself, Christine,” she mutters. The hard part’s over! Stef’s in place, Pippa’s going along with it, and Aunt Bea approved the letter idea. Another normal year begins: eight boys in the basement, one of whom is, handily, already a girl, so that’s a time-saver; six newly-minted girls on the first floor, one of whom is, apparently, a capable and strangely violent baker; and six completely and utterly normal young women on the second floor, one of whom is, currently, not getting the sleep her body is crying out for, and chewing on a finger out of stress.

She rubs at the tooth imprints and dries it on a tissue.

Everything’s fine. Not so much for Stef, but he is at least getting what he asked for, even if he’s not going to enjoy it much.

“Relax,” she says to herself. When it doesn’t, unaccountably, work, she adds, “Relax, idiot!”

She’s still a mess, so she puts on 1989, pulls out her phone and starts going through her week planner. She moves her shoulders to the music, lets her tension out with the beat. She laughs, as she always does, at the one-minute-thirty-five mark: Everybody here was someone else before. It hasn’t yet stopped being funny.

Christine sings.

Four tracks in, her intercom goes off. She scrabbles to pause the music and check her room for incriminating evidence, and almost falls over a pair of shoes on the way to answer it.

It’s Abby.

Shit.

She forgot: she has one last obligation to discharge before things are genuinely back to normal.

“Chrissy!” Abby hisses, as soon as the door closes behind her. She wastes no time: “What did you find out about Stefan?”

“Okay,” Christine says, bouncing back onto the bed, “I have so much to tell you. But I might be getting a little manic from fatigue? So if I get weird, or fall asleep mid-sentence, just poke me.”

Abby pokes her, but Christine’s complaints fizzle out when she hands her a can of Red Bull. “I came prepared,” Abby says.

“God,” Christine says, downing half the can and deciding that with its help she can probably hold off unconsciousness for another hour or two, “thank you. Are you ready for something really complicated and really weird?”

Abby nods, sitting down on the chair she dragged over from Christine’s desk. “I came back to Dorley Hall. I live for complicated and weird.”

Christine belches, and grins at Abby’s mock-censorious eye-roll. She’s the only one here who doesn’t try particularly hard to get her to be more ladylike. “I thought you came back here so you wouldn’t have to pay rent?”

“I can have more than one reason. So? What’s going on with Stefan?”

Christine launches into the story she agreed with Stef. Helpfully, for her tired mind, it’s very close to the truth; he didn’t want Melissa’s best friend thinking ill of him, and Christine assured him that she’s trustworthy. They did, however, alter certain details so Christine doesn’t come off — in Stef’s words — like a psychopath. “He’s not a bad guy. Not Dorley material at all. No history of violence. No antisocial behaviour. He’s not here because he’s a bastard, Abs. In fact, you were kind of right: you said it was our fault he ended up here, and it kind of is. Because, years after Melissa vanished from his life, he saw her.”

“He saw her?”

“Yeah.”

“He saw her?”

“Yeah.” Christine smiles. “While they were both buying groceries. And, uh, that’s probably something we should be more careful about in the future? Just passing that up the chain.”

“I mean, it’s kind of a unique set of circumstances. Do you know when he saw her? What year?”

“Uh, yeah. About… two, no, three-ish months into her second year. Early 2014.”

“Well then,” Abby says, crossing her arms, “she was only half-done with the changes. And Stefan knew her basically all his life, and lived close enough to randomly bump into her. And she looks more like her old self than most of us because she barely had to get any work done. She was always beautiful, even before.” She coughs and looks away from Christine. “So, uh, it’s a perfect storm, really,” she continues briskly. “We’ll just be more careful when the girl is local. I don’t even know if it’s ever happened before, actually. I should check—”

“Can I finish my story?”

“Oh. Yes. Sorry.” Abby taps her temple. “Work mode.”

“So, they recognise each other. And they both know they’ve recognised each other. She tries to play it off like she’s not actually the old Melissa, she just knows her — sorry, that’s confusing, but I’ve forgotten what her old name was, except that it also starts with an M — but he says she knew his name without him ever saying it. And that sort of clinched it. He starts researching us.”

“Us?”

“Us. And he’s, what, fifteen at the time, so this is early work, but he’s a precocious brat.”

“Brat?” Abby says. “Isn’t he your age?”

Christine shrugs. “Yeah, I guess, but, like, I’m almost done with the programme and he’s just starting. It’s weird to think that we’re both twenty-one. Anyway. Stop interrupting me!” She swats at her Sister.

“You interrupted yourself!”

“Then stop encouraging me!” she says, laughing and belching again.

“God, Chrissy, you’re so feminine.”

“I know. I’m an example to the other girls. Okay. Right.” Christine closes her eyes for a moment, tamps down on the slight hysteria that’s been building inside her. Too much Red Bull; she finishes the can, anyway. “So, he researches us. And figures out we have kind of a vanishing problem, here at Saints, so maybe Melissa disappearing wasn’t just some fluke accident, maybe it’s part of a pattern. Yes, I know—” she holds up a finger, “—we don’t exactly come off as a competent and slick operation in this story, I can see it on your face that you want to say something, but don’t, because I’m not done. He looks into Saints, picks the degree here he thinks he’s most likely to make the entry requirements for, and studies his arse off. And he gets in! Starts attending classes, starts looking for Melissa. It takes him another two years to narrow it down to Dorley, though, so, you know, we’re not that sloppy.”

“All the same…” Abby says, knotting her eyebrows. “I think I might tag Maria at the weekend and review some procedures.”

“Good idea. So now he knows about Dorley — not all the facts, not even ten percent of the facts, but enough that we’re his natural focus — and he goes looking for help on the Dark Web.” Christine resists the urge to wiggle her fingers in a spooky fashion. Invoking the sinister ‘dark web’ had been her suggestion; Stef’s original idea had been, ‘I don’t know, Bitcoins or something.’ “He finds a hacker, they doctor his records so he looks shady as fuck, and he stages an incident. Below Pippa’s window, it turns out! And voilà; he’s inside, and ready to start investigating this place, looking for Melissa. But—”

“But she’s not here!” Abby finishes. “Oh, God, Chrissy, is all this really true?”

“As far as I can tell,” Christine says. “I checked up on his Dark Web stuff. It looks legit.”

“So he’s stuck here. We have to get him out!”

“Yeah, that’s what I said. But—” Christine pauses for effect, “—he wants to stay.”

“What?!”

“That’s also what I said. He’s trans, Abby.”

“Oh, God. Really?”

“Yeah. He’s a trans woman. He hasn’t been able to transition yet because he says he needs FFS and all that stuff but he’s too broke even to buy hormones, and he’s desperate and actually kind of pissy about how we have all these transition resources that we very deliberately don’t use on trans people except, you know, accidentally. And he has a point, there, Abs.” She has to admit, he took the words, had she ever had the courage to put them to Aunt Bea, right out of her mouth. Since Vicky started dating Lorna it’s rankled that all their procedures remain pointed stubbornly basementwards. “He wants to game the system. He’ll pretend to be like, well, us, at least until he’s gotten everything he needs.”

“That’s crazy,” Abby says.

“I thought so, too. But he really, genuinely believes he has no other option, and I’ve argued with him for ages about it and not changed his mind. He won’t let me take him out of here, so what choices do we actually have? We either tell Aunt Bea, or we don’t. And, Abby, I’m a bit scared of what Aunt Bea might do if we tell her.”

“You don’t think she’d wash him out, do you?”

“I don’t know that she wouldn’t. You know what she’s like. I was in the kitchen this morning and she was being all sweetness and light, handing out coffees to all the girls, and then she just raises the idea that Pippa should stage a suicide for Stef, solely because it’s the simplest option. That woman’s mind can go to dark places on a bloody dime, Abs. I know you’re closer to her than I am, but—”

“No,” Abby says, “no, you’re right.”

“So we stay quiet?”

“We stay quiet.”

“I mean,” Christine says, tapping her nails on the empty can, “ultimately, it’s his risk to take. All we have to do is pretend we don’t know anything.”

“God, this is fucked up.”

“I know.”

“He really can’t transition away from this place?”

“I went through it with him,” Christine says. “Numbers and everything. Honestly? I think he’s right. It sucks, but he’s right. Or right enough, anyway. You know how long Vicky’s girlfriend’s been on the waiting list?”

Abby nods, and goes quiet for a moment. Taps her thumb on the crook of her elbow, thinking. Then she smiles. “At least he’s going to get the care he needs. Even if it’s not in an ideal form. And we can assist him, help him weather the storm. Wait; shouldn’t we be calling her, well, her?”

“He actually asked me not to. Had a whole thing about it, which I won’t break your brain with. For now, he asked me not to change pronouns. He likes it when I call him Stef, though. Apparently it was what Melissa always called him.”

“Stef,” Abby says, frowning in concentration and muttering under her breath, the way Christine’s seen her do when a batch of girls moves up from the basement and she has to commit a lot of new names to memory. “Stef. Stef. Stef. Stef.”

Christine giggles. “I remember you doing that with me.”

“I did?”

“Yep. It was, like, a day or two after I moved up onto the first floor, and I was in the kitchen. Dira was supervising me as I made breakfast, but she got waylaid by a bunch of third-year girls and it was all really noisy and intimidating. I ended up just kind of huddled in the corner, feeling like one of the rabbits from Watership Down shortly before everything goes to shit, and then you came in and squatted down beside me, all, ‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced!’ And you gave me your name like you’d never seen me before, and you were the first person I told my name to since Dira gave it to me, and you talked to me. Kept me company for like an hour. Made me feel like I wasn’t just some… some broken ex-boy.” Christine reaches out a hand; Abby takes it and squeezes her fingers. “How are you always so sweet?”

Abby looks at her, very serious. “I eat a lot of sugar.”

The distance between them is suddenly too great, so Christine steps off the bed and pulls at Abby’s hand. Abby joins her in the middle of the room and they embrace, arms locked around each other, Abby standing on tiptoes so she can rest her head on Christine’s shoulder.

No-one ever really held her until she came here.

“Thank you,” she whispers. “For everything.”

“You’re my sister,” Abby replies, and stretches as far as she can so she can kiss Christine gently on the forehead. “I love you.”

Christine steps away, and wipes her face with her sleeve. “Love you too, Abs.” She kisses Abby on the cheek and sits down again, slowly, enervated and not wanting to overbalance. Abby takes a step forward, offers her arm as support until she’s steady.

What was that about being indecently lucky?

“I meant to ask,” Abby says, returning to her chair, “how did you talk to Stef? Did you get on the intercom?”

Too tired and too buzzed to make anything up, Christine says sheepishly, “I figured out how to hack the biometric locks a while ago. So I waited until everyone was asleep and just visited him in his cell. Please don’t be mad at me?”

“What?” Abby says, almost shouting. “Christine!” She flaps her hands for a second, momentarily too overcome to speak, and then leans forward and adds in a whisper, “That’s amazing! What else can you do?”