Outlier

by Kyle Harris

  But she did see it. She really did. And it felt good to hug Libby.

  “I prayed God would return you,” said Libby, when they were untangling from each other. Her eyes shone. “If He will excuse my being transparent with our conversations, I have never prayed for anyone else to come back, and if He will also excuse my substitution of clichés for how I feel about you, you are very special, Chaz. You’re not wounded, and you never pretend to be, and I feel a strength beating inside you when I’m near you.” She smiled, and a tear dropped. “I promise I’ll learn to stop rambling. But I knew we had not met for the last time.”

  Chaz felt honest-to-God wetness in her own eyes too. If her body had been jumped on testosterone, they would’ve been deserts, but she’d been off the patch for the last week. Which meant the girly, sappy feelings were reemerging. Give it another twenty-four hours and she might be drawing hearts and compulsively buying stuffed animals.

  “I do want to ask you something,” said Libby. “How did you know about my father’s impotence?”

  “Read it somewhere.” Chaz quickly leapt to a new topic: “So, where’s that scumbag stalker hiding? Just point him out, and I’ll do the rest.”

  Libby shook her head, but she was beaming about something. “That’s not why I wanted you to meet me. I’m looking for your opinion.”

  Chaz crooked an eyebrow. “With what?”

  “Well, I want the boy inside you to help me pick out a dress.”

  Not at all what she’d expected. “Okay. He says you look hot in anything.”

  Libby tugged on Chaz’s wrist. “Come on. I have invited you to follow me into a dressing room, and still you’re delaying us with your jokes.”

  The layout of Urbanus Stroma was like a high-dollar entertainment franchise: central tube for the foot traffic, private rooms lined up on both sides. Chaz followed Libby farther into the tunnel-like store, past people wearing clothes that probably cost more than her monthly rent, and into an unoccupied room. The door sealed behind them, and the translucent walls seemed to hum. Two figures—projected reflections—materialized out of a fog in front of them.

  “Welcome to Urbanus Stroma,” said a female voice.

  Chaz thrust her hands into her pockets; her evil twin did the same. High resolution, null latency, steady framerate. There was also no apparent flattening effect like she’d seen on other large reflection screens, which meant either panoramic lenses or some kind of baked-in perspective interpolation. Snazzy shit.

  “Uh, Libs?” she said, noticing the lack of one key feature. “Isn’t this a clothing store?”

  Libby looked over at her in the reflection, her smile shifting to the corner of her mouth. “Have you never been in a clothing store like this?”

  “I’ve been in clothing stores that have clothes. Does that count?”

  She shook her head. “Nope.”

  Libby launched a navigation portal above their heads using eye contact. She cycled past RUNWAY FAVORITES and SALES over to AVAILABLE SCENES. The two of them were suddenly standing in the middle of a packed ballroom with a high-gloss dance floor and violet accent lighting. Soft jazz music came through hidden surround-sound speakers.

  Chaz’s eyes were on Libby first: her Gucci puffer coat was gone, and she was decked out in a long-sleeve red evening gown garnished with meticulous ruffles and sweeping patterns of floral lace across the bodice. Huge diamond earrings hung from her earlobes, and her blonde hair had been styled in perfect curls. A floating text bubble next to her head said the whole ensemble cost eight big ones.

  “Hot damn,” said Chaz. It must’ve been a little less under her breath than desired, because Libby immediately started giggling.

  “You like it?” she asked, twisting back and forth, causing the skirt of her dress to swish. She was blushing on both sides of the screen. “You should see yourself. You look beautiful.”

  Chaz marched her eyes over to the impostor. With the amount of skin that was showing, it was hard to say if the outfit was classy or desperate. Hookers had more modesty than this fucking tramp. The black velvet was form-fitting, just in case the onlookers weren’t sure enough that she was a woman, and the jewel-embellished neckline seemed to point straight down—Here’s your target after you’ve dumped a few drinks in her. And the fucking bitch was smiling too. Smiling. Chaz knew she wasn’t smiling; it was the software, trying to make her look happy in some fucking ugly dress, trying to make her think that this is what she should be, with a fucking clown face of makeup and cleavage. Someone’s one-night stand.

  There was a text bubble next to her: ELASTIC SKIRT FOR EASY LEG SPREADING.

  “Chaz? Are you all right?”

  The son of a bitch was there too, in the back among the other guests. It wasn’t a surprise; the software was pulling in people they knew from their biometric profiles. So of course Libby’s parents would be present. Chaz felt for the knife in her pocket. It wouldn’t be a clean getaway, but the motherfucker would be dead once and for all. But this fucking tramp in front of her hadn’t moved, hadn’t reached for the knife. Because she was a woman.

  So go over there and beg for it, you worthless fucking whore. Do it!

  Chaz flinched when a hand touched her shoulder. There were tears in her eyes. She scrubbed them dry, furious at herself for even letting them get wet in the first place.

  “Chaz—”

  “I’m fine.” Libby was gullible; she’d believe it. “I just don’t think this dress suits me. Hold up.”

  Using ocular navigation, Chaz opened up the same menu Libby had before. She followed a chain of links to reach Urbanus Stroma’s formal selection for men, where she picked out a slim-fit dark-navy tuxedo.

  A few milliseconds to queue it into the simulation, and presto. Much better.

  Libby’s white teeth sparkled as much as her earrings. “Handsome,” she asserted, putting her arm around Chaz’s shoulders. Then she was giggling. “There’s hair on your chin!”

  “The ladies like a little hair, cause it makes me manly.” Chaz talked like she had a sore throat. “Can’t you see how manly I am?”

  “You’ll have to work on that voice. Or surgery, right? I know those are terribly expensive, but I can help you pay—”

  “Nah, it’s bullshit,” said Chaz, and she sighed. Her digital reflection looked fucking retarded. Her face was still feminine—even with the combed hair and facial stubble, she looked like a damn circus freak. The Hideous Bearded Lady.

  “It’s not,” Libby tried to assure her. “You look very dapper, like there was a boy inside you all along.” She rested her head on Chaz’s shoulder, staring at the screen. “Handsome boy. Or pretty girl. You could pass as either.”

  Chaz cycled through the options, eventually landing on a settings menu. There was a checkbox for AUTOMATIC GENDER ASSIGNMENT, and it was marked. She unmarked it, collapsed the menu, and looked at herself in the tuxedo again.

  No beard stubble, no perfectly parted hair. Just her untouched-up face.

  “I just want to be myself,” she said. “Not a boy or a girl. Just me.”

  “Like gender fluid?”

  “Yeah. I mean, no.” Chaz recognized a woman in the background, mingling with strangers like it was a fucking normal thing for her to be at some rich ballroom party. She ignored her. “Scratch. If I say it, it would sound smooth.”

  “You can tell me.” Libby planted a kiss on her cheek to encourage her. It worked.

  “Okay.” Chaz drew in a long breath, released it. “Everything’s about that stupid spectrum. Fuck the spectrum. Fuck all the fucking words and categories. Fuck gender fluid, fuck nonbinary, fuck transgender. I just want to be me, without anyone telling me what the fuck I am. And you can be you, and everybody is just everybody, and no one gives a shit. We’re just us.” Anger flared inside her, and she shook her head. “See? It’s really fucking stupid. Forget I said it.”

  Libby nuzzled into Chaz’s cheek. “No. You are the furthest thing from stupid, Chaz. What you talk about is the
self—Don’t you see? In this life we have a gender. But God sees beneath that. That’s what you’re seeing when you look into a mirror. That is Him showing you what you really are, and you are beautiful.”

  Chaz always felt an urge to dissect Libby’s religion-speak, and now she was trying to picture this genderless oasis up in the clouds somewhere, all of God’s chosen ones like a herd of mindless eunuchs. And this widespread castration that she so heartily believed in was supposed to be included in heaven? Seemed like a bad trade-off, losing your junk to enter the afterlife.

  Looking ahead, the scene had dissolved into the default sterile backdrop. Libby was perusing casual dresses.

  “I would love to play dress-up in ball gowns all day,” she said, her eyes flicking through the selection. “I used to put on my mother’s dresses, when I had grown enough so they wouldn’t slide off. I thought I wanted to be her, to find a husband, and that was what being happy was.” She looked down. Then: “Or I thought dressing up as my mother would make what I was feeling go away.”

  “Doesn’t work,” said Chaz.

  “No. It doesn’t. But everyone will tell you it does. They say I just need to kiss a boy. And do more than kiss. But I have never felt that desire.”

  “You still haven’t told me why you’re looking for a dress,” said Chaz.

  “Because tonight’s a special occasion.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Libby’s browsing came to a stop on a floral-print crepon dress that ran for five hundred bucks. It looked nice on her, the fabric undulating around her legs as if there were a persistent air current on the other side of the illusory mirror.

  “The Methodist LGBT Club wants to grant me an award, and they have asked for me to appear and accept it. I need something nice, but not too nice.” She twirled back and forth, checking out the fit from all angles. “I think this will do.”

  “An award? What’d you do that was so awesome, Libs?”

  She turned to Chaz, all smiles, and then abruptly pulled her lips together again like she hadn’t intended to show so much happiness. She was shaking her head. “I should have brought this to you earlier. It was performed with the best intentions, but nonetheless I feel I must apologize. Chaz, I’m sorry.”

  Chaz couldn’t remember any time a preemptive apology had helped. “Libby—”

  “I donated one million dollars to their parent foundation.” She took two careful steps and grabbed Chaz’s hand. “Remember when you helped me withdraw three hundred thousand dollars to purchase a new set of kidneys for Brian, that gentleman at the diner? I went into the settings and changed the amount and the deposit date, and I took out a million dollars.” Her eyes fell. “I know my father will be furious, and he has every right to be—”

  “Fuck him,” said Chaz, coldly.

  Libby’s gaze lifted to look at her again. “You’re not upset with me?”

  It’s not my fucking money. Why would I be? But that wasn’t what Libby meant. God’s little angel had some Robin Hood in her, and it was more a question from thief-apprentice to thief-master: Did I steal too much?

  “No,” said Chaz. “Not even close.”

  “But I feel so awful accepting an award for a contribution that wasn’t my money, like they’re celebrating that I robbed my parents. I shouldn’t receive praise for something so…”

  “Charitable?”

  Libby smiled. “I was going to say ‘illegal.’ Despite my intentions, being a Christian is about virtues, and doing this has left me—”

  “No, Libby.” Chaz stooped a little until their eyes were level. “I’m not religious, so I can’t say what’s right or wrong under God, or whatever. I’m just gonna tell you what I think, and I think you’re doing the right thing. Just like you’ve always been doing. You’re helping people, Libby, and it’s fucking awesome. Remember? There’s nothing to be ashamed of.” She stood up straight again. “You know what would’ve been better? If you donated a hundred million.”

  Libby laughed. “And I would be locked in my room until the end of eternity.”

  “Just move out. You already got your infinite money tap in your pocket.”

  “I would if it were that simple.” She took a deep breath. “But my father won’t let me. Not until I renounce my ‘perverted desires.’”

  Oh. Right. The pile of shit that was Matthew Pruitt had gotten so large and so smelly that Chaz had forgotten the little turds buried at the bottom from the preliminary research.

  Libby pulled her purchase—the crepon dress—out of a slot in the wall. Some kind of belt-fed delivery system from a hidden storage room, Chaz deduced. One arcane mystery of the rich lifestyle solved, thousands more to go.

  Libby folded and stowed the dress into a provided bag. “Shall we?”

  When Chaz learned that this ceremony they were attending was being held in an auditorium, she pictured a grand theater like where Richard Barton and the rest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream would’ve performed to resounding applause. But it wasn’t anything like that; the “auditorium” was just a poorly lit basement underneath a Methodist church, metal folding chairs the most premium of seats.

  The assembly’s organizer—a middle-heavy woman named Alysia Fowler whose purple hair was so bright it could be observed from Akerman—shook Chaz’s hand. Others hugged her and thanked her for coming, passed her folded leaflets containing assembly schedules and emergency-assistance hotlines, pleaded for her enrollment in community programs, and machine-gunned compliments about her courage and her coming out.

  “We are all so proud that you’ve joined us, Chaz,” they’d say, wearing their pins that said I’M SUPER GAY AND I’M SUPER OKAY. “Among us you’ll only find love and support. We’re here for you.”

  Doubtful.

  Another: “We Methodists love you as much as God does. His heart is open to every sacred creature. Our exclusive service is on Wednesdays. You should come. Get to know everyone and share your story. You deserve to be heard. We participate in round-table discussions, and we leave no one out.”

  Chaz responded that Wednesday night was masturbation night, and she absolutely could not reschedule.

  Then a little old man—he looked like a goddamn hobbit, down to the almost-pointy ears—took her in close. He smelled like a roll of Mentos. “It ain’t easy, and it’ll never be easy,” he said. “But you’re a whole lot braver than I. If I’da come out thirty years ago, love might’ve found me. I don’t mean the love that these others preach about, son. Real, with-you-till-you’re-dead love.” He squeezed her on the shoulder. “The pond don’t have many gay fish.”

  “You got me all wrong,” she said. “I sexually identify as a mastodon. I was born a few millennia too late to find my one true love.”

  The minty hobbit-man bowed his head. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  After the torturous line of fake well-wishers, Chaz moseyed on over to a folding table laid out with sweets—mainly chocolate-covered pretzels and glazed donuts. She thought the food might stimulate a convenient hunger, but her stomach was mum. Really she just had to step away, find air to breathe that hadn’t been inside the lungs of these clowns. Love, pride, happiness. Such a bad joke. Outside, out in the real world, were people like Libby’s father, people like the Begotten Sons, and all the gay community had were handholding and rehearsed condolences. If this were a medieval battleground, these fucking people would throw down their swords and shields and beg for both sides to find common ground—right before all their heads got chopped off.

  Taking advice from fairy tales was an easy way to land in the obituaries, all that love and pride and happiness bullshit unable to treat a stab wound in the gut. Or a lynching.

  Chaz put a cigarette between her lips and was reaching for her lighter, and suddenly Alysia Fowler was next to her like the presence of tobacco had summoned the woman from an old magic lamp. A flabby arm shot out toward a NO SMOKING sign.

  “Right,” said Chaz, dropping the cigarette back into her coat pocket. “Equality
for gays, but not for gay smokers. Maybe in the next fifty years.”

  The woman walked away, her petulant glare seeming to lag behind like a brief afterimage.

  “Hey.” Libby came up behind Chaz, laying a hand on her shoulder. “You all right?”

  “Tootin’ and hootin’,” said Chaz, deftly flinging a broken-off pretzel piece into her mouth.

  Libby let out a laugh. “What does that mean?”

  “Well, I’m making noise out of both ends, so that must mean I’m alive.” She turned to Libby. “You know where they keep the booze in this joint?”

  “Chaz, it’s a church. They don’t keep alcohol.”

  “They keep wine. And Jesus had that superpower of turning water into wine. Being an alcoholic is just respecting the Christian faith.”

  Libby laughed again. “You have a point, but this is a Methodist church—they prohibit alcohol on the property. Even wine.”

  “Really? Damn. That’s no fun.”

  Libby had removed her coat since Chaz had last seen her. The crepon dress jibed with her blonde hair and blue eyes, which both seemed to shine from an intrinsic will of radiance. Chaz also saw that she’d inherited all the best parts from her mother’s figure.

  Shit, did I say Wednesday?

  “Come on,” said Libby, taking Chaz’s hand. “Let’s go sit down.”

  Shortly after seven o’clock, Alysia Fowler kicked things off with a prayer—after thwaping the mic three times to make sure it was on. While she confessed her unyielding love to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Chaz occupied herself with counting heads. The number she calculated was around fifty people. It was the largest concentration of gays she’d ever seen or been a part of, and the puckish part of her brain was itching to liven up the hokey monologue.

  —With our gay powers combined, we implore His One True Greatness to smite down the unholy hetero savages that lay waste to this blessed and beautiful haven! Stand up, brothers and sisters! Let them lay their frightful eyes on our gay flock and tremble! O Lord Almighty, let them tremble and beg for mercy! Henceforth, the gays will reign with fire and ferocity as their new supreme overlords!