by Elliot Wake
“Are you quite sure you don’t want to join me?” she said.
For the last time.
It hurt too much.
Through a clenched jaw I said, “Save your appetite for tonight.”
“I will. And I’ll devour you.”
You are so lovely, I thought, when you’re lying to my face.
Before I ducked out, I caught the hint of hard metal peeking out from the clothes piled on the sink.
Her gun.
———
Ingrid wouldn’t answer her phone.
Days since I’d been home, but it felt like years. Out front the maple tree withered, stripped by winter to its dark skeleton, and the names on the mailbox—Ingrid Svensson & Renard Grant, a strip of Wite-Out beneath mine, where it had once read Sofiya Khoury—seemed unreal, like characters in some fiction. That white ink was my transition, the barrier between us. It had chipped away on one side, revealing the curved tail of the S, and I touched it, thinking, You’re still here, aren’t you? Just under the surface.
I rang the doorbell, waited. Nothing.
Unlike Ingrid to be completely unreachable. If they’d gotten to her—
I let myself in.
Bell wove eagerly around my feet, crying. Hungry. No one had fed her this morning.
I did a quick walkthrough of the apartment. Empty.
“Where is she?” I said, setting a food dish on the floor.
Her room was cold, the air clear. Felt like she hadn’t been here in a while. On the vanity lay the empty T packets she’d flung at me, accusing.
I sat at the mirror, crumpling them.
Why did this have to mean so fucking much to her?
She’d agreed not to put up old pics, save one: the two of us at senior prom, both in dorky tuxes. Solidarity, she’d said. They fuck with you, they’re fucking with me. The tuxes came off later in her parents’ basement, under a scratchy wool blanket. Sweat turned our skin so slick we could barely hold on. It darkened her wraith-white hair, and I gazed up at her, tucking it behind an ear. I love you, she said. I had never felt so needed by someone before. It made me want to do anything for her. Give her anything.
A year after that photo, I’d begun to take myself back, piece by piece.
My heart felt like the mauled foil in my fist.
I flung the packets into the trash beside the table. There were more in the basket, dozens. God.
I started to stand.
Then, impulsively, looked again at the tabletop.
Lined up among the vials of scent and tint were certain items that caught my eye: rubbing alcohol, hand sanitizer, superglue. All of which undoubtedly had cosmetic use—gluing nails on, removing polish, whatever.
As did the pair of precision scissors that stood in a jar.
And the bare razor blade.
And the unmarked bottle, filled with clear gel, sitting right there in plain sight.
I looked at the foil packets again. Pulled them out of the trash, spread them across the table. It took a minute to find what I was looking for:
The botched ones. The cuts that had gone awry, the edges that couldn’t be glued back together seamlessly.
I leaned on the table, dizzy.
My phone rang. INGRID SVENSSON.
I sent the call to voice mail and pocketed the unmarked bottle.
Get out. Get out of here, get air. Think.
I staggered through the apartment, down the stairs. Wasn’t sure if I’d shut the apartment door or not. Be a good girl, Bell. Don’t run.
On the street the light was too intense, the snow blinding, a white scream in my eyes. There had to be another reason. This was just my paranoia. Nothing real, Ren. All in your broken head.
Someone was calling my name from across the street.
Someone with a voice that made me shrivel inside.
I stood fixed to the pavement as he came closer. His jeans were tight, clinging to his quads. Shoulders wide like a yacht boom. Snow salted his hair. Maybe this was it, a psychotic break of some sort. Maybe I’d OD’d on T and gone off the deep end.
He stopped a few feet away and said, “Ren?”
Adam Halverson, calling me by my right name.
I reached for the Beretta.
His hands rose, palms up. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to talk.”
“All I have to say to you,” I rasped, “is in the barrel of this gun.”
“Listen to me. You’re not safe.”
If I hadn’t been knocked so off-center I would’ve drawn and fired then and there, in broad daylight. Instead, like an idiot, I engaged. “No fucking shit, you bastard. I will never be safe in a world where you exist.”
He stood there motionless, hands in the air. His eyes tracked rapidly over my face. I sensed him comparing images: the girl he’d last seen, the boy before him. The person he’d hurt and the person who was going to hurt him back, over, and over, and over.
“You sound so different,” he said softly.
My teeth gritted. Otherwise I would shriek.
Adam’s arms trembled, straining. “Look, there’ll be time for this later. I came to warn you.”
“Get the fuck out of my sight.”
“Ren.” My name in his mouth struck like a sucker punch. “You are not safe. She’s destroying you.”
I drew the gun. “Get the fuck. Out of my sight.”
“Ren, listen to me—”
“Stop fucking saying that.” Safety off. Raise and aim. “Leave before I kill you.”
He took several hasty steps back. “Okay. I’m just going to—”
“Turn around. Walk away.”
My voice was deeper than his now. It rang out over the pavement, hard as steel.
Obediently, he turned. Without another word he walked off.
I put the gun in my coat. When he was a speck at the end of the block, I turned in the other direction and ran.
———
In a blind fervor I crossed street after street, taking random turns through a maze of metal and stone. Lights flashed senselessly, devoid of meaning. There was nowhere to run that was safe but I kept moving anyway.
My phone was ringing.
Her.
“Thank fucking God you answered.” Ingrid’s voice was distant, windswept. Car tires crackled on pavement. “I need your help. Please.”
I breathed deeply. “What happened?”
“I’m being followed.”
I stopped in the middle of a sidewalk. Nearby a traffic light clicked from yellow to red, unsettlingly loud. “By who?”
“Who do you think? Your fucking psycho girlfriend.”
“Where are you?”
“On my way home.”
“Don’t go home.”
“No shit.” She sighed. “What the fuck should I do?”
I clutched the bottle in my pocket.
Truth was like a kaleidoscope. With every twist, it looked totally different. All the bits rearranged themselves, some coming clear, others growing obscure. But in the end it was the same pieces every time. All that changed was how you saw them.
“Come meet me at Umbra,” I said.
Long pause. “Black Iris is there.”
“I know. And Inge?”
“Yeah?”
“Bring Norah with you.”
———
Umbra, a place of undoings and endings. We always came back here to fall apart. The place where Laney had ripped Armin’s heart out, where a blonde and a brunette had ruined me. It devoured its own.
The bouncers eyed me coldly.
That would change, I thought. In time.
As I moved through the crowd heads turned, whispers swirling. It’s him, it’s him. How damning it seemed, the pronoun I once longed for. I kept my chin up, refusing to be cowed. Let them see my face. Let them see me unafraid, standing against the lie.
Soon they’d understand.
On my way downstairs, my phone vibrated.
TAMSIN: Here yet?
I froze on the marble steps. My pulse clogged my throat.
REN: Yes
REN: Is she with you?
No answer. Then, a photo:
Ingrid, sitting in a pool of warm candlelight. Hair in her face as she glowered at the camera. Wrists and ankles taped to the chair.
REN: Don’t hurt her, Tam
TAMSIN: Oh, I won’t
TAMSIN: We’re saving her for you
I took the steps two at a time.
At the bottom I sprinted, my heart gunning wildly. The door to the Black Iris meeting chamber was shut. I hauled it open, remembering Adam inside, defenseless.
How badly I’d wanted to hurt him.
How badly I wanted to hurt her now.
Tamsin turned, gun in hand. It hung at her thigh and she didn’t raise it. Her face wore that wry, savvy expression I found so lovely. Ingrid’s face was a total blank. A cipher, a zero.
I closed the door.
“Where’s Laney?” I said.
“Upstairs, with the others. Waiting.” Tamsin stepped aside. “This is yours, Ren.”
Ingrid watched me approach.
On the court, when we stood side by side, people feared us. They knew how strong we were together. I’d spent years learning her: first her mind, when we were young, its inexorable clockwork, its sharp steel gears clicking, clicking. Then her body, in adolescence. The unrealness of its beauty, her paper-white skin, her boy-straight bones. Then, when we moved away from home, I finally learned her heart. That crag of cruel ice lying beneath still water, a thing that would shipwreck whatever came near it.
I had feared her all this time, too. Her power over me. Her cold, jagged love.
I still feared her now.
“Ingrid,” I said, and it came out a croon.
She watched me kneel at her feet. Watched me draw the Beretta, lay it on the floor, and push.
Tam caught it beneath her heel.
“Don’t let me use that,” I said.
“She bloody deserves it.”
“I know.”
Inge smiled, bitter. Still silent.
I touched her leg. Wrapped my hand around that sinewy calf, as I had before. But now I kept squeezing till it felt like I could rip meat off bone.
“It hurts,” she said finally. Satisfaction in her voice.
I let go.
“You have put so much pain into this world,” I said.
“Oh, don’t be so fucking banal.”
I took the bottle out of my pocket. “Is this what I think it is?”
Her eyes glittered. No answer.
I rolled up her pant leg. Uncapped the bottle, dipped my finger inside. A whiff of alcohol stropped the air like a razor.
My hand moved toward her skin.
“Don’t poison me with that shit,” Ingrid said.
Something heavy tumbled to the bottom of my chest. A closing book, the end of a story. Of me and you, Inge.
I wiped the testosterone gel on my forearm. Rubbed it in.
Then I said, “Did you tamper with it from the beginning?”
She didn’t answer. But she didn’t pretend not to understand the question.
And that, in itself, was an answer.
SIX MONTHS AGO
PRIVATE VLOG: GASLIGHTING
REN: I’m not uploading this. This is for me. I feel like I’m going crazy and I just—
I need to get this out.
Ingrid watches these. I know she does. Pretends it’s so disgusting, that she’s grossed out by my beard and dick and all this boy stuff, but she’s seen every single video. I test her, sometimes. Casually mention something I said in a vlog, and she’ll know what I mean. I joke about my shitty memory so she won’t suspect.
I think she’s trying to change me.
Like, back. To a girl. The way I was.
I have this dread that someday I’ll come home to a trans intervention, and she’ll be sitting on the couch where we fucked, and my family will be there, my tyrant mother, my spineless father, and Inge will say, “We care about you, Sofie. We want to help you get well.”
By “well,” she means female.
I swear I’m not crazy.
My endocrinologist says my T levels don’t make sense. Sometimes they start to taper off, as if I’m lowering my dose. But I’m not.
For a while he had me on shots instead of gel. Inge did them. I’m squeamish with needles so she volunteered to help, which was nice, I thought, until I started feeling strange between injections. Irritable, tired. Depressed. Low sex drive.
Signs of low T.
She marked the shots on a calendar. Every two weeks, on the dot, was an X, but some of those were wrong. Days I wasn’t home, or days she was sick. The schedule was off by a day or two here and there. I added it up and I was actually only getting one shot a month. Half my dose.
She’s not sloppy. This is Ingrid. Ingrid doesn’t know the meaning of that word. Everything she’s ever done is precise, deliberate. Like Laney.
There’s no way she didn’t notice the calendar was wrong.
I’m not saying it’s intentional, but—
I don’t know what I’m saying.
Anyway, I switched back to gel. Packets, not the pump. They’re foil, sealed.
I figure, remove the temptation, right?
Not that I think she’d ever do something like that. Not to hurt me. Not to fuck with my health.
But if she thought it was helping, not hurting . . .
This is nuts. Can’t believe I’m saying this. Even thinking it. It’s paranoia.
I looked up my feelings online. I’m nothing if not an expert self-diagnoser. Every trans person is. This one word kept coming up: “gaslighting.” It’s from an old film where a husband lies to his wife over and over, telling her she’s imagining things—that the gaslights in the house aren’t really flickering when they are. When he’s the one messing with them.
When someone gaslights you, they make you doubt reality. They make you feel like you’re going crazy, being unreasonable, overreacting. It’s a form of emotional abuse so effective that the abuser only needs to plant the seeds of doubt—your brain takes care of it from there, growing them, nourishing them. Feeding on them.
Poisoning itself.
Ingrid has been there for me through everything. Through him. Through so much other bullshit. I know she hates this, thinks I could be happy without hormones, but she’d never actually fuck with my body. She wouldn’t.
Except.
Except sometimes, when she looks at me, I think she sees Ren the same way I saw Sofie. As someone temporary.
Someone she could kill.
—9—
Old friends don’t need words. Everything in a glance, a touch. All the things that meant more because they were unspoken. Ingrid and I stared at each other, wordlessly.
To Tamsin I said, “Where’s her phone?”
She handed it over.
It was there, just as I knew it would be. The video of the liar’s face, streaked with mascara. Norah. Filmed by Ingrid. Orchestrated beautifully.
“She’s behind it all,” Tamsin said. “The blonde and brunette. Ingrid and Norah. This is the person who tried to ruin you, Ren.”
I kept staring at that lovely pale face. The one I thought I knew.
“All of you were in on it. This whole time, you all knew Crito wasn’t the real threat.”
“Yes.”
“What did Laney actually want with him that night?”
“A meeting. I was merely checking in with him till you twits showed up. I bound him to make it look like a mission, like I’d come to scare him straight. But then you wanted to take his gag off, so I had to bloody shoot him.”
“Laney was working with Adam.”
“Yes, but now you can see the big picture.” Tam shook her head. “Adam went to Ingrid with a plea bargain for Crito. Crito thought she was involved with Black Iris’s missions against him. He was wrong, but it tipped Ingrid off. She learned about us. She
learned you were one of us. And she tried to turn you against us. But we’re smarter, stronger, bigger. We let her watch us while we watched her. She was right about me following her—I’ve been surveilling her since summer.”
“What did you see?”
“Everything. She met with Adam. She ‘befriended’ Norah, used her as a pawn. She manipulated you in so many subtle ways. I wanted to tell you—wanted to throw the whole thing, expose her, but Laney told me to wait. Armin had suspicions that someone was tampering with your medication. We needed to be absolutely sure before we unmasked her.” Tamsin stared at Ingrid with a look of puzzled revulsion. “What I don’t understand is why. Why did she tamper with your medicine?”
My knees burned on the freezing cement floor. “Because she wants me to go back.”
“Back to what?”
“Sofiya.”
Ingrid leaned forward, her face unsettling in its implacable calm. Those intense eyes, that softly fervent voice. “His life is ruined, not yours. You don’t have to be him anymore.”
It wasn’t just my reputation. It was my fucking body.
Tampering with my meds. My bloodwork always coming back weird, the T levels too low. How good it felt when I “overdosed.” How right.
She’d been trying to undo my transition.
“You are the sickest person I’ve ever known,” I said.
Ingrid rolled her eyes. “So are you, Sofie. You used to be so pretty. And now look at you.”
A spasm racked my body. I reined back the arm that wanted to hit her.
Do not. Do not fucking do it.
Don’t prove her right.
“Show some fucking appreciation,” she said. “I freed you from this. Your ‘masculinity,’ your delusions of gender. You’re not trapped anymore.”
“I was never fucking trapped, you lunatic. I’m not delusional. This is who I am.”
“You were suffering.” Her teeth met in a rictus between words. “You were miserable. I watched you writhe in agony every day. It was mercy to stop it.”
“I was suffering because of you.” I lunged, shook her till her head jerked, hair flying. “You were never fucking happy for me. You dragged your heels the whole way. You hated what I was doing but you wouldn’t let me go.” My jaw was about to drive straight through my skull. “You’re the reason I dated Adam. So I could break free of your fucking Svengali hold on me. You’re the reason all of this happened. You toxic fucking bitch, this is all on you.”