Chapter Three #2
I’ve been asked this question kindly only once before.
I remember, with a sudden lurch of my stomach, how it felt when Elizabeth would lay her head down on my chest and tell me her plans for the future.
Like Kira, she wanted to follow her parents into their version of witch family business and become an academic.
When she had spoken about it, painting a glossy, confident picture of the future with her words, it had felt like anything was possible.
“Nothing,” I say. My words feel rotten in my mouth as I slump back in the creaky chair.
“Nothing?” Kira repeats.
“I have a job,” I say. “At Unicorn Grocery in Chorlton. I’m all set for a career.”
I can’t say more. I can barely breathe. It’s like I can still feel her, Elizabeth, pressing down on my sternum but now she’s a deadweight, literally.
“Okay, well…” Kira gives me a long look, as if she’s expecting me to speak. When I don’t, she sighs heavily. “Do you have any questions for me?”
“No.”
She closes her folder. She’s going to leave and I’m going to be left alone here, with the weight of my dead girlfriend pressing down on me.
I need to do something, anything to distract myself, and my mind is racing, trying to find something concrete.
Weirdly, the face of the guy from the first day of term suddenly pops into my head.
“Yes.”
“Really?” Kira perks right up. “Great! Go ahead!”
“Who’s the new transfer?” I ask.
“The new transfer?”
“Yeah, bloke, sapphire ring, I think he’s called Bastian?”
I watch her pull a different page out of her folder. The inside cover of the folder is coated in doodles, notes. With a pang, I see some of them have speech bubbles written in Elizabeth’s handwriting.
“Bastian Chevret.” Kira runs her finger down the page. “He’s transferred from a college in London. That’s all I know.”
“Bastian Chevret,” I repeat his name quietly. “Thanks.”
Kira nods and puts the file away, then hesitates.
“I have one last question for you.”
“Fine,” I sigh.
“Are you okay? Are you … feeling dysphoric and stuff?”
I stare at Kira. I can’t believe she has the balls to ask me this question, to even use this word in front of me.
“That’s on your peer mentoring questionnaire?”
“No.” She looks bashful for a moment then squares her shoulders and looks me in the eye. “She—Elizabeth—told me you sometimes felt that way. After shifts. That you told her you did.”
I stare at her. Those words are unaccountably painful.
Before Elizabeth, there was no one I could talk to about my shifts.
How, with every change, my parents pushed me to dress in the gender they felt was most appropriate to my form, how all of those past experiences had alienated me from myself, left me trapped under other people’s expectations, unable to breathe.
Talking to her made it hurt less. Now it hurts more, knowing she told someone else. I stand up.
“You’ll have to get your counseling degree before I answer you, and also”—I glare down at her—“I will never fucking answer that question.”
I march to the toilet and splash some water on my face.
I stare at myself in the mirror, trying to breathe normally and get that weighted feeling off my chest. Even after a few months, this face doesn’t look like mine yet.
None of my body does and there is absolutely nothing I can do to change it.
My face is heart-shaped and babyish, which definitely makes a male form seem more effeminate.
My hair is a light strawberry gold and sort of wispy, the same with my eyebrows.
My eyes are a kind of muddy green and my white skin is a little sallow.
I don’t yet know if it’s because I’m unhealthy or this is just what this new skin is like.
I touch Elizabeth’s earrings; the familiarity of them helps.
I wipe away tears I didn’t realize had fallen.
I sit on the loo and look at my phone. As always, I open the last messages between Elizabeth and me.
Come over today.
Is your mum working?
Yeah. I’ve got an idea.
Okay. Give me a hint?
Later.
I hate that our last messages aren’t something to do with love.
I flick back through my photos. I don’t have many with Elizabeth—she was the one who took the selfies and I reckon her mum has probably found and deleted every single one.
The ones I do have are either in her bedroom or outside in the garden of her parents’ house in Alderley Edge, taken lying down on her massive trampoline that had been there since her childhood.
I pause on one where the afternoon light is making her face glow so she looks sort of heavenly.
I’m in my second form that she knew me in; my hair is dark and curly and long, my cheekbones higher, my eyes dark green, my mouth pouty, and my face round and cherubic but I’m wearing her earrings.
I look at the picture of us and have a weird thought: Would Elizabeth still fancy me in my new form?
It’s pathetic, but right now I worry she wouldn’t.
Because she’s not here to tell me otherwise.
College doesn’t have a canteen or anything like that, just the frankly dangerous microwave and kettle in the upstairs common room and an outside space next to the car park where people can sit and smoke and eat takeaway on the wooden picnic tables.
The surprising September sun has persisted into lunchtime and a few students are going so far as to roll up their T-shirt sleeves and lie on the patch of grass.
People have pulled out sunglasses and I think someone’s got a bottle of cider and there’s a general air of lingering summertime, coconut-scented vape smoke in the air.
I find an empty picnic table and pull out my lunch.
That’s when I notice it. It’s down by the back stairs, leaning against the wall of college, slightly grubbed by the weather: a giant photograph surrounded by cheap bunches of flowers and balloons and grotty neon teddy bears.
A picture of Elizabeth. It’s the photo from her social media, where her hair is at its longest so she looks like Rapunzel.
I watch as someone, a second-year I’ve never spoken to, walks forward and produces a tacky bunch of carnations from their backpack.
They set them down and then twist their fingers in a sequence I recognize as one from a first-year craft module that helps flowers bloom.
A first-year spell I still can’t do. I turn my back to the entire charade.
I’m about to put my headphones on and listen to the next chapter of Carrie (to maybe get some ideas) when someone sits down opposite me on the slightly damp bench.
“Hi there,” Bastian says. He’s got the same open, pleasant face, the same distressed denim jacket. I’m not sure what I expected to change in two days.
“Hi.”
I watch him take a box of salad out of his leather satchel and set it down on the table. I watch him take out a reusable bamboo fork and open the salad. I watch him spear a leaf and eat it. Then I watch him notice me staring.
“You all right?” he asks, glancing between me and my sandwich. “Not eating?”
“No, I am.”
“Okay.” He crunches down on his salad leaves and pulls out a book. It’s a copy of Brideshead Revisited. I snort with laughter. He looks up at me. “What?”
“Bit on the nose, isn’t it?”
“What is?” He looks at the book cover. “You got a problem with Evelyn Waugh?”
“No, I just mean, like, you’re a Londoner, you’re queer, and you’re reading Brideshead Revisited?”
“What makes you think I’m a Londoner?” He wipes salad dressing off his chin. I notice he doesn’t say he’s not queer.
I don’t feel like admitting I asked my peer mentor to fact-check him, so I just say, “You’re not from the north, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah, not like you.” He smiles. “Proper northern brogue.”
“Ta very much.”
“I’m from Cornwall.” He digs his fork into his salad. Now he’s said it, I can hear it, the slight roll in his accent that makes me think of the sea. “I just went to college in London.”
“Nowhere closer?”
He pauses, the bite on the end of his fork midway between the salad and his mouth.
“My parents thought London would be good for us,” he says quietly. It’s weird when you just know that someone has been through something shitty. Maybe there’s some kind of sonar for broken people, but I can hear it in his voice.
“What’s it like, London?” I ask. I don’t know why I’m trying to be nice to him. Just because he’s sad about something doesn’t mean I have to be.
“Never been?”
I shake my head. I don’t want to say I’ve never been anywhere.
“Seen it on TV, though,” I say. “Seemed … loud.”
“It is loud, and busy. Fun, though, and the libraries are good,” he says, eating again.
“That’s your thing, then?” I ask. “Libraries?”
“Yeah, basically.” He smiles. I can’t work out if he’s a nerd who happens to be a very handsome man or if he’s a very handsome man who pretends to be a nerd for the humblebrag cred.
If he’s the second, then he’s probably a twat.
If he’s the first, then he’s the last thing I need.
However, I do wonder, as I slide the pickles out of my sandwich, if it’s not so bad to talk to him a bit.
I’m about to ask him what his favorite book is, the question is literally forming on the edge of my tongue, when something drops onto the table between us.
I stare at it. It’s a suicide hotline pamphlet with all the people’s eyes crossed out, crude doodles of various self-inflicted deaths scribbled around them.
I look up. Carl Lord is grinning down at me.
His ring isn’t glowing. He’s clearly taken the time to bring this in from home, like a serial killer.
“Just in case you get too depressed, shifter,” he says loudly, jerking his head toward Elizabeth’s photo. No one laughs. I’m aware of a siren somewhere in the city, of someone parking their car over the road, slamming the door shut. It’s like everyone is waiting for me to speak.
“Piss off,” I mutter, grabbing the pamphlet and scrunching it into my fist. I don’t look at Bastian.
“Aw, feeling guilty, shifter?” Carl laughs. “Well, you should, shouldn’t you? You’re the reason your girlfriend’s dead, mate!”
I don’t mean to blush, but I do, and I curse myself for it, as the best way to deal with Carl is to ignore him and then think of vengeful acts later.
I accidentally catch Bastian’s eye. He is frowning.
He’s working it out, I can tell, and now he’ll never talk to me again.
That’s worse than Carl, somehow, and I berate myself for letting my guard down, even for a second, for being so bloody stupid to ever think I could have a normal conversation with someone in this hellhole.
A bleak question from my days in the hospital comes back to me: What’s the fucking point?
Avoiding Bastian’s curious gaze and Carl’s sneer, I grab my sandwich and leave.