Blood. Soaking my boxer briefs.
Everything went fuzzy and dim. Reality on pause.
When I came back to myself Ingrid was banging on the door.
“Are you okay? Talk to me, dammit.”
“I’m fine,” I croaked, scrabbling in the toiletry cabinet.
Nothing but tampons. God, fuck. I could not. I would not.
“Please, just open the door. Let me see that you’re okay.”
Her tone was wild, high. I nearly screamed, then remembered: the belt, the closet, her finding me.
So I made myself presentable and unlocked the door.
Quickly she scanned the danger points: wrists, neck, pill bottles. Then she touched my cheek, tentatively.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“My own.”
Ingrid frowned. I sat on the rim of the tub, and so did she.
“Something’s wrong with me. All the symptoms add up.”
“What symptoms?”
“Moodiness, fatigue. Depression. And now this.” I couldn’t quite look at her. “I got my period, Inge.”
It sounded so wrong, so jarring. I half expected my old voice to squeak out. To look up at the mirror and see her sitting there, the skinny nervous wreck with a belt burn around her neck.
“What does it mean?”
“My hormones are messed-up again. If my period’s back, then my body’s running on estrogen.”
She laid a hand on my knee. “Why does this keep happening?”
“Who knows. Because I’m fucking with nature? Playing God, like Mom says? Maybe my body really, really wants to be a girl.”
“Or it’s stressed. Maybe your body’s telling you that you need a break.”
“From living?”
“From T.”
I detached myself from her, stood. “That’s not going to happen.”
“Okay, cool. Kill yourself in slow motion with hormones. I’ll just stand here and watch.”
“Don’t be a drama whore.”
“Don’t be a sexist prick.” She rose, loomed over me. “It’s been what, five years? Five fucking years. You got the changes you wanted. The voice, the beard. Listen to your body. You’re killing it.”
No matter how impassioned, Ingrid never called me Ren. It was a compromise we’d come to: I can’t call you some man’s name. You’ll always be Sofie to me. She’d dropped the deadname, at least, but at times like this I could hear it echo in her pauses. I could see the pearl blade of teeth knifing her bottom lip, forming the sibilants. Sofiya, Sofiya. Your name feels like a kiss. Then she’d smile. Or a bite.
“I need some privacy,” I said.
“To do what?”
“Not kill myself, okay? Just give me space.”
Pointless moments of glaring, sighing. Finally I locked the door behind her. Pulled the box of testosterone gel from the med cabinet.
APPLY 1 PACKET TO UPPER ARM/SHOULDER DAILY.
The clear gel smelled sharply of alcohol. I rubbed it in vigorously.
Then I opened another packet.
This time I smeared it over my pecs. My tats glistened, the colors bold and bright.
Then another.
It worked best in places with little hair, and close to a blood supply. This one I spread between my thighs. It looked obscene, like someone’s come on my skin. I squeezed my lap shut and imagined Ingrid’s foot there, and groaned.
Another.
Empathy is correlated with estrogen. Higher E means higher empathy, and empathy is the dampener between the spark of rage and the fuse of violence. It’s not that men have lower empathy than women, per se—it’s that testosterone raises the threshold for accessing compassion. It’s harder to feel for someone. To flip the switch from selfish to selfless. If too much T could turn you into a brute, maybe too much E did the opposite. Made you too human. Too able to feel.
So I’d dope myself till the bleeding stopped. Till all feeling stopped.
Make myself hard, cold.
The perfect monster.
The kind who could kill.
—5—
Watching Tamsin dance was sheer torture. That leather ran over her body like ink, and she knew I was watching, so she ran her hands over it, too, till I felt light-headed. Somehow her ass always pointed in my direction, my dick pointing back like a fucking compass needle. I’d come to Umbra at Ingrid’s urging. We were doing this: breaking away from Black Iris, seeking our own vengeance. Assuming Tam was game.
And I had a feeling Ms. Baylor was just as hooked as I was.
The lights painted her body, cyan and magenta scribbling over black leather, and people stared. Some frat fuckboy tried to get her to grind and she teased him with smiles, hip bops, the gleam in her eyes somewhere between invitation and scorn. Her sexuality was intimidating. While Blythe was seductive in a mad, unmoored way, Tamsin’s allure was precise and controlled, calculated. Like Laney’s mind in Blythe’s body.
Almost too much girl for me. Too much of what I wanted, what turned me on.
I always fell for the girls with fangs and claws.
Must have a death wish.
In all honesty, tonight was as much about seeing Tam as avoiding Ingrid. Our apartment felt like a powder keg. Months passed with barely a word, then in one night everything ramped right back to full-tilt batshit. Armin said we all followed the same pattern: Laney and Blythe, Ellis and Vada, me and Ingrid. Toxic homoerotic friendships crossing the line from platonic to something more. Like some kind of book series or something. At first it was innocent: We’d change into basketball shorts and jerseys in the girls’ locker room, our skin grazing carelessly. Inge played lookout while I squeezed into my binder every morning, helped me unmummify before going home each night. Lied to my parents (She was studying at my house when I saw an LGBT crisis counselor), kept me closeted, safe. Love crept over us like a stain. Not real love, but a delirious poison. Her fingers lingering on my skin, mine on hers, then that first time in a shower stall, her hands on my tits and her mouth hot and vampiric. You’re so pretty, she said, and kissed me, and kissed me, and kissed me. Denial and desire in one breath. I thought, She likes the parts of me I hate, but it feels so good. So I didn’t stop.
In the end, we broke Armin’s mold. No HEA for us. Ingrid liked girls, and I was a boy, and that was that.
As I skulked around Umbra, I ran into Ellis in the Cathedral. Sweater and tie, red hair raked roguishly. She made a prettier guy than I had before T.
“You’re dapper as fuck, dude.”
She blushed. “Seriously?”
“You could give Armin a run for his money.”
“But really, how do I look?”
“Like the cutest boy in the room.”
Crooked smile. Pride radiated off her like heat.
It made me feel . . . strange.
Yes, men actually are shit at parsing emotions.
“What are you doing tonight?” she said.
“Meeting someone.”
Ellis squinted at me, then at Tam. Without glasses her face was more angular, nymphish but male. For a moment I had a vivid image of her if she transitioned—a beautiful pixie boy, pretty enough to still make queer girls swoon—and it made me weirdly uneasy. Was I encouraging this in her? All my videos, groupies, the illusion of trans glamour—was I pushing it, like a drug? Take this pill for automatic male privilege and self-confidence. Rub this gel into your shoulders for instant muscle mass and internalized misogyny. Maybe she was experimenting for herself, or maybe she was trying to impress me. To feel like one of the guys.
Night after night in high school I’d watched transition videos, soft faces growing chiseled, soft voices hoarsening, and I’d felt a deep ache. Hunger for the body I didn’t have, the life that wasn’t mine. In Armin’s emotion map, jealousy lives in the core. In the bile and acid and bacteria of the gut. I’d felt it burning there, bitter and vile, as I watched other trans guys get ahead of me, grow facial hair and Adam’s apples and pass. I wante
d to be like them.
When I told Ingrid, she said, Have you thought about whether you’re actually transgender, or just want to fit in?
It crushed me.
I put off transition for the first year of college. Took classes to help me understand society’s sexism better, and why it hurt so much to be seen as a woman. Examined my own internalized misogyny: Did I want to transition to escape being a girl, or did I need to do it because I was a boy? And why did it have to be one or the other? Was it so horrible if part of my identity was a revolt against the way I was treated for having tits and a vag? I never wanted them. Maybe I could have tolerated them, in a better world. But in this world I experienced my physical womanhood as a stigma. And why did everyone keep telling me I had to be 100 percent sure I was male before I put the needle in my thigh? I was 100 percent sure I wasn’t a girl. Wasn’t that enough?
College showed me how deeply gendered everything is. How society would remind me, for the rest of my life, that I was assigned female at birth. A lifetime of the wrong name, wrong pronouns, wrong bathrooms. Of mammograms and Pap smears. Of When are you having children? and Don’t be so emotional and Stuck-up bitch. When I died and was buried and my flesh dissolved to dust, the bones that remained would say to history, This person was female.
Inside it made me scream.
In one of those classes—Women and Technology—I met a boy. At first he reminded me of Ellis, geeky and shy, oblivious to his own hotness. It’s messed up, right? he’d said. Nobody believes you’re a girl online unless you say something they don’t like. Then you’re a girl until proven guy.
He seemed different. Clued in to the absurdity of gender.
I’m Adam, he said. What’s your name?
And I thought: I don’t know. Maybe Inge is right. Maybe Ren is just a manifestation of my internalized misogyny.
So I said, Sofie.
Weeks later, lying with me in bed, he said, You’re not like other girls, Sofie.
What am I like?
One of the guys.
And my chest filled simultaneously with nausea and elation.
“You’re having a deep thought,” Ellis said. “Share.”
It was too heavy, and I was still too tender from Laney’s refusal to help. Instead I said, “I’m thinking about Tamsin Baylor’s ass.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Are you guys, like, a thing?”
“We’re an It’s Complicated. Mutually attracted against our better judgment.”
“This is perfect. She’s totally your type. And you’re—well, she seems to really like you.”
I laughed. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, old sport.”
“Oh my god. I didn’t mean—”
“Kidding. Hey, by the way.” I cocked my head, feigned cavalierness. “What do you know about Tamsin, exactly? Give me some details.”
“Age, place of birth?”
“More like psych profile.”
Laney had commissioned Armin to profile us all, himself included. We’d done video interviews—Delaney too—confessing that we were members of Black Iris, as collateral. So no one would turn. Then we’d watched them together. Each of us talked about why we joined: Blythe’s devil-may-care love for Laney, Armin’s hopeless devotion to them both.
Tamsin must have done one, too.
I’d kill to see it.
Ellis fidgeted with her tie. “You should really ask Laney about that.”
“Why, is it classified?”
“I don’t want to step on her toes after we screwed up that last mission.”
Ellis Carraway was too pure of heart to lie to my face. Or so I thought—but once upon a time, she’d catfished her best friend by posing online as a man named Blue. Blue was Vada’s dream guy: nerdy, sensitive, sexy when he wanted to be, and completely obsessed with her. Blue had everything Vada loved about her female BFF, but with one key advantage: the all-important dick. When Ellis finally came out as genderfluid, Vada realized the body didn’t matter—it was the person inside she loved.
If only Ingrid had been so understanding.
Now I looked at Ellis and said, “Did we really screw it up, old sport?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what was Tamsin doing there? Was she there to take Crito out, or for another reason?” I punched her shoulder playfully. “And how about you? You seemed pretty damn reluctant to let me go after him. Why was that?”
It took effort for Ellis to meet my eyes and say, “Because I was worried you’d get hurt.”
“By Crito?”
“By everything.”
“What’s ‘everything,’ E?”
She gave me a miserable look. “I really think you should talk to Laney.”
After Ingrid, Ellis was my oldest friend. She’d always known me as Ren. Accepted me, unconditionally. Took care of me during top surgery when Inge refused to even look because It breaks my heart to watch you ruin the body I loved. Ellis brought me into the Umbra fold. Gave me a new family when mine disowned me, gave me somewhere to belong. When she’d left for Maine, I’d lost an actual piece of myself. My shoulder angel. My pure-hearted boy. And soon she’d leave again, go home to her girl.
Ellis knew something I didn’t. Something about Laney’s plans, something she desperately wanted to share. But if E had a good reason for keeping secrets, I had to trust her.
When it mattered most, she’d been there for me. The one time Inge wasn’t.
“Forget I asked,” I said, smiling. “Getting way ahead of myself. Tam’s probably not even interested.”
“ ‘Tam’? You’re on a monosyllabic-name basis?”
“She beat me up the first night we met. We’re not big on formalities.”
The seriousness lifted. Ellis grinned.
“What’s so funny, Professor?”
“You always fall for girls like that. Glutton for punishment.”
“Look who’s talking. If you and Vada weren’t joined at the hip, I would’ve hit her up.” I puffed out my pecs. “She was into this.”
“She just said you had good muscle definition.”
“Then put her hands all over it. She was Swayze in Ghost, and I was the wet clay.”
“She’s an artist, Ren. It’s part of her process.”
“Her process sure is hands-on. But you’d know from experience.”
Ellis turned an impressive shade of red. I laughed and threw an arm around her, brotherly. These moments were priceless. Worth preserving.
It was late and she was tired, so I walked her to a cab. She hugged me before she got in.
“What’s that for?” I said.
“Calling me a boy.”
I watched the car pull away. In my gut, that acidity sizzled.
Back in the club I zeroed in on the sleazebag rubbing himself against Tamsin’s leg, and every muscle in me tensed. I threaded through the crowd, bodies parting around my broad shoulders. Tamsin held my eye as I drew near. The man beside her was nothing, a faceless bro, irrelevant. He tried to sound tough saying blah blah this guy bothering you babe and I cut in hard, elbowing him out.
“Bold,” Tamsin said. Her lips made me think of my finger parting freesia petals.
I didn’t speak. I let the beat pump in my veins, my blood drumming in sync. Tam moved with me. Oh, to touch her. Hips that could perfectly fit the cups of my palms. The smooth cut of her collarbone like carved wood. There was no one else—my peripheral awareness faded. Only this girl, and the music, and my body moving in response to both. We danced and the air between us teemed with lightning and salt, electrochemical. I slid closer; she mirrored me. We played with negative space, pushing into it, narrowing the gap, almost touching, almost, then pulling away. Her heat was thick and palpable against my skin. Every muscle in me coiled, biceps swelling, the V at my groin going taut. I hadn’t felt this present inside myself in so very long. Not once did we touch.
“You’re good,” she said.
“Actually, I’m very bad.”
“Much better at this than martial combat.”
“I could show you other things my body does well.”
That earned a laugh. “You talk a big game, Renard. But I’m faster. Harder. Meaner.”
“If you knew what I’ve been through, you’d see me differently.”
The track switched, the crowd spiraling around us. Her eyes searched mine.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “That first night, I didn’t know about you.”
That I’m trans, she meant. That’s always what they mean.
“Weren’t you stalking me?”
“I prefer to call it recreational reconnaissance.”
“As long as you admit there’s a double standard. If I’d done that to you, you’d have handled me like you did Crito.”
Tam shrugged. Light crazed over her hair, a thousand little rainbow wires. “Fair point. I took you for a bloke, and I don’t particularly give a fuck about boundaries and fairness with blokes.”
Something caught in my throat. Took you for a bloke.
As in, didn’t anymore.
Oh, hell.
“The thing is,” she went on, “I don’t see how my original assessment was wrong.”
“What?”
“You’re a bloke, mate. So, sorry-not-sorry, but you’re not getting the kid-glove treatment from me.”
I swallowed that sticky emotional unpleasantness. I could’ve kissed her then and there. “Thank you.”
“For treating you like shite because you’re a man?”
“Yes.”
“Masochist.”
“Totally.”
Tamsin smiled. “Me too. I like it rough.”
Her words dizzied me. All my blood was going to one place now. “I’m game for a rematch. Let me rough you up.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
Desire surged. I moved in, reached for her hips.
At the same moment she sidestepped and whispered, “Have you reconsidered my offer?”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Then we should go somewhere else to talk.”
Despite the fiery breath melting my ear, I froze.
By “else,” she meant “safe.”