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Saturday
“Yeah, I’m coming, give me a second!” I yell at whatever arsehole is knocking on my door at eight in the morning. I zip a fraying band hoodie on over my pyjamas and trudge over.
Scowl on. Twist the lock. Swing the door open. “Wha—” I cut myself off at the sight of a visibly distraught girl about my age.
“I need—Can I—Can I come in?” she stammers out. She’s a good few inches shorter than me – maybe like five-two? – her mousy-brown hair is a mess, and her pale skin is flushed red. She’s dressed in a T-shirt and jogging bottoms that are too big for her.
I glance side-to-side down the corridor. “Are you okay? Is somebody—”
She reaches briefly like she’s going to grab my forearm, but then hesitates, closing her hand in mid-air. “Just… I need your help, Emma,” she interrupts.
Huh. She knows my name. Do I know her? “Yeah, uh, come in,” I say, and step aside to wave her in. “What’s wrong?”
She paces back and forth for a moment before perching herself against the end of my metal bedframe. “I’m…” She trails off, wringing her hands. “You know Tom, from the ground-floor corridor? From Maths B?”
Jesus. “Did he do something to you?” I’d had him pegged as ‘just’ a routine misogynist, but I can’t say I’m totally surprised either.
“What? No! There’s no way that…” She frowns, looks down at the floor, doesn’t finish the sentence. She looks hurt by the idea?
“What is it, then?” I’m bad at this kind of thing, but I gingerly place what I hope is a comforting hand on her shoulder.
She looks back up at me, eyes wild. “I’m Tom.”
Sunday
I’m still thinking about it a day later. I shouldn’t be – I should just forget about it – but…
To his credit, it’s the weirdest, highest-effort transphobic harassment I’ve ever experienced in my life. Whoever that girl was he recruited, he gave her his phone and everything: it buzzed when I dug his number out of the building WhatsApp group and messaged him.
I felt a bit bad telling her to fuck off. She looked genuinely upset. But fuck her for going along with that dickhead’s shitty little stunt.
I mean, seriously? You accidentally barged into a woman on the street, and she said she was going to curse you, and then you woke up magically transformed into a girl? Hm, where have I heard that one before?
Although, honestly, where did Tom hear that one before? What was he doing at the devil’s sacrament?
Just my fucking luck if the first other trans person I meet at uni is a confused, toxic moron.
Monday
I keep an eye out for Tom at Maths B in the morning, but there’s no sign of him. Against my better instincts, I pull out my phone at the end and send another message underneath the test one from Saturday.
hey dickhead, don’t skip lectures just to try and sell your dumb bit
God, why am I letting myself get wound up about this? Fuck. I start typing again.
or do, I don’t care
go ahead and waste your £9000 for a bad joke
Typing bubbles show up for a second, but then they disappear. Good. Hopefully he feels bad. Or at least feels stupid.
Tuesday
What if, though?
No. Shut up, brain.
Wednesday
He’s not at the Wednesday morning lecture either.
Unable to help myself, I grab those two redheads who go everywhere together (still not sure if they’re sisters?) as we’re filing out – I know they’re on the same engineering course as him.
Apparently he hasn’t been at any lectures this week. At least, not that they’ve noticed.
“Why’re you looking for him?” says the one with glasses. “Trying to get a date?” she adds with a smirk.
“God, no! I’m…” I trail off, mind grasping for an excuse. “He left a textbook behind in Eight-West last week, I picked it up.”
“Oh, well we can take it if you like,” says the one without glasses. “We have all the same lectures.”
“Oh, uh, I don’t have it with me today.” Shit, this isn’t convincing. “It’s fine, I’m sure I’ll run into him sometime.”
“I bet you will,” says Glasses. She shoots me a wink before the two of them walk off together.
“Good luck, girl!” calls No Glasses over her shoulder.
Jesus, does everyone think I’m straight?
I head back across campus to the accommodation blocks, while weighing up whether I should change my hairstyle. A few guys in football kit walk across the main plaza, and it hits me: it’s Wednesday, the sports fixtures are all this afternoon.
I know for a fact Tom is on the rugby team – I’ve had the misfortune of running into the whole gaggle of them at the S.U. bar a few times – and no way he blows that off for a joke. I can wander over to the fields later, check that he’s there, and then my brain can stop entertaining the possibility that he really might’ve been turned into a girl by an angry witch.
Thursday
It’s Thursday evening and I’m still entertaining the possibility that he really might’ve been turned into a girl by an angry witch.
He never showed up at the rugby fixture. Or at the S.U. afterwards, where I loitered in a corner nursing a rum and Coke while I scanned the crowds. I did toy with the idea of approaching the other rugby dickheads to ask if they’d seen him, but I didn’t want to accidentally convince even more people that I’m trying to fuck him.
Now it’s like half-ten in the evening the next day and I’m lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, debating the same thing I’ve been debating since this morning.
Fuck.
I slip on a pair of sneakers and head down to the ground-floor corridor.
The building is dead, because every night is a big night out when you’re a first-year student, so at least there’ll be no witnesses for whatever happens next.
In theory I shouldn’t even be able to get into a corridor that isn’t mine, you only get keycard access for your floor, but in practice the doors always get propped open while people are pre-drinking in the kitchens. Sure enough, the ground-floor door is being held ajar by, of all things, a can of baked beans, and I slip inside.
Also just like my floor, people have been sticking stuff to their doors to identify themselves. I worry for a moment that Tom might not be enough of an arts-and-crafts type to have indulged in it – not every door has something – but as I walk briskly down the corridor, I’m relieved to find that he went to the minimum effort of writing ‘TOM’ in biro across a sheet of notepaper and taping it up.
Deep breath. I knock a couple of times.
Seconds pass. I knock again.
Still nothing.
“It’s Emma,” I say, trying to speak loud enough that I can be heard through Tom’s door, but not so loud I can be heard through anyone else’s.
Nothing. I sigh and start to turn away, but then I hear the sound of the lock turning. The door swings open and—
It’s the same girl. She meets my eyes, and somehow, instinctively, I know. It’s him. It’s fucking Tom. The rugby prick who inspired all the most annoying people in my year to start calling me ‘Morticia’ really did get turned into a girl overnight by a bloody witch.
She – no, he, I guess – starts speaking: “I swear, I’m really—”
“I believe you,” I interrupt.
“Oh, right,” he mumbles, clearly not having expected the immediate win. “Can you—Do you want to come in?” He looks hesitant. His shoulder-length hair is in an even worse state than when I last saw him, clearly he hasn’t washed it properly.
I brush past him into the room, and he closes the door halfway before pausing.
“Is it okay if…” He trails off. Somebody’s gotten very conscious of the power dynamics of being a woman all of a sudden, haven’t they?
“Yeah, close it,” I say. “I don’t think we want anyone overhearing the conversation that’s about to happen.”
He smiles weakly at me. “True.”
I move a stack of books off the room’s standard issue desk chair and sit down. He in turn takes a seat on the edge of his bed – and it’s interesting, he’s making himself small. Knees together, arms hugged around himself… You wouldn’t guess that this used to be a big, loud bloke. All the swagger’s gone.
First things first. “Why me?” I ask. “We barely know each other. Why not go to your actual friends?”
“I don’t—” He frowns. “I mean, there’s nobody who would believe me. But you’re, like… you’re into that witchy stuff, right? And you used to be, uh…”
I cut him off before he can decide how he wants to finish that sentence. “Oh my god, are you fucking stupid? You thought that me being trans and dressing alt meant I would have a useful perspective on you magically turning into a girl overnight?”
He blushes. “Um. Right. Sorry.” A moment of silence. “So you don’t know about witch stuff or anything?”
God, it’s almost endearing how thick he is. “They let any old poser wander into Superdrug and buy black lipstick, sorry.”
Friday
I’m too nice.
That’s what I’ve concluded. I don’t owe this guy anything. I shouldn’t care how he copes with this ridiculous situation he’s gotten himself into. It’s not like he’s even trans! Turns out magic is real and cis misogynists really do get turned into girls to learn an important lesson. Just like in the, ah, literature.
Which, honestly, is kind of fucked, right? If witches exist and have a spell to trans your sex, it feels like a pretty serious misallocation of resources for them to be doing this with it, and not running an off-the-books trans health clinic.
Although Tom reckons he’s eight inches shorter than he used to be, so maybe it’s for the best I didn’t get the same treatment, or else I’d probably have struggled to up get into the seats in this lecture theatre.
Tom is sitting next to me, gripping a pen way too tight and absolutely not absorbing anything our maths lecturer is saying. I convinced him to leave his room for the 11am today, arguing that there’s so many people on this unit that nobody would bat an eyelid at somebody they didn’t recognise. The one-on-one tutorial he’s supposed to have later is probably a non-starter, though.
He’s still obviously on edge from existing in public as a woman when we trudge with everyone up the stairs to the exit at the back of the room. I dug him out some of my own ratty lounging-around clothes this morning, which are less obviously big on his new frame, but the joggers are still bunched up around his ankles.
Which brings us to the next order of business: clothes shopping. I spring it on him as we walk along the main parade – was worried he’d balk and stay in his room if I let him know before we left for the lecture.
“What… kind of clothes?” he says, eyebrows furrowed. I hate to say it, but he’s honestly sort of adorable like this.
“Normal clothes,” I reply with a sigh. “We’re just going to the big Primark – I’m not taking you to buy a prom dress and have a bra fitting, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I’m not… no, it’s fine,” he murmurs back, obviously flustered.
Aww, big man scared of a little bra. We’ll get him a sports bra, probably less intimidating. “And to be clear, you’re paying. This isn’t one of those stories where you get a whole new girl wardrobe on somebody else’s credit card.”
“Huh?” He cocks his head, visibly confused.
“It’s… Don’t worry about it.”
Saturday
“Emma? It’s me.”
“Door’s open,” I call, not turning away from the nail polish I’m applying.
I hear the handle turn and Tom step inside. “I saw her again last night,” he says, once the door has clunked shut again.
That gets my attention. I screw shut the nail polish and spin in my desk chair to face him, where he’s hovering by the entrance. He’s wearing some of his new clothes – some cheap jeans and a women’s Star Wars T-shirt that was the only thing he picked out on his own initiative. “What, ‘her’ as in the witch?”
Seeming almost in a daze, he comes over and sits down heavily on the end of my bed. “I was kinda hungry after you left, so I went down to the vending machines, and it was like she’d been waiting for me.”
He pauses to adjust how he’s sitting, tucking one leg under himself. I noticed him doing that yesterday evening too – I think he might be a little taken with how limber he is now, in contrast with the brick-wall rugby player’s build he had before.
“She said she wanted to discuss my ‘progress’,” he continues, making the quotes in the air with his fingers while grimacing a little.
Not an encouraging look on his face. “Bad news, then? Did she want you in skirts by now?”
He laughs, but then breaks eye contact. “She… she knows you’ve been helping me,” he says, hesitantly.
“Oh, do you not score points for making a female friend?”
“No, she…” He goes silent again for a moment. “She called you a slur, actually.”
“What?!”
“Like, um, a transphobic one,” he quietly adds.
Christ. “That… God, that actually kind of makes sense,” I say, thinking aloud. “Of course the witch who sees womanhood as punishment is a fucking terf.”
“What’s a terf?” he asks.
“Somebody who’s transphobic but insists they’re doing it in a feminist way,” I explain, simply as I can. “So, what does she want you to do, then?”
His eyes are drilling holes in the floor now. “She wants me to go on a date with a guy before next Friday night. Or I never change back.”
Hm. “Okay, well, that’s… doable?” I say with a shrug.
“I really don’t wanna go on a date with a guy,” he mumbles, and for a moment my eyes overrule my brain, and I react emotionally to what I appear to be seeing – a poor anxious baby lesbian – rather than the reality – a dumb guy worried about seeming gay.
Toughen up, Emma.
“Look, yeah, you’re talking to a lesbian, I wouldn’t want to either,” I say, crossing my arms while carefully preserving my still-tacky nail polish, “but you’re an adult, you can handle going on one date to get your whole life back.”
He looks back up, gives me a small nod despite the look of worry I can still see on his face. “Right, yeah.”
Now, practicalities: “She give you any rules for it? Nice dress, makeup, stuff like that?”
“She just said that I have to…” He breaks eye contact again. “I have to kiss the guy at the end.”
“Ugh, gross,” I sneer, “I hate this bitch.” Feeling bad for him again, I reach over to pat him on one knee. “Don’t worry, though. We’ll find you somebody nice and safe, send you to Pizza Express, one course, quick kiss, and you’re done.”
He nods back at me again, silent this time.
I give him one more awkward pat before removing my hand. “Now, uh, can you give me a sec to finish my nails?” A silly thought strikes me. “I could do yours too, if you like,” I add, shooting Tom a smirk and waggling my eyebrows.
And then he surprises me by replying, quite sincerely, “Oh, um, sure?”
Sunday
“I’m sorry, by the way,” says Tom, sheepishly. “For how I was before.”
He’s sitting across from me in our booth in the S.U. bar, prodding his half-finished slice of apple pie with a disposable fork. Nobody comes here on Sunday nights, so they run a cheap pint-pizza-pie deal to try and lure people in. There’s still only about eight people in here total, though, which makes it perfect for the ‘practice date’ we’re currently on.
“What, before…” I wave my own fork around a bit to gesture at Tom’s body. “…this?”
After the unexpected consent to nail polish yesterday, I decided to push my luck some more before we came out this evening, and the eyeshadow he’s now wearing shimmers a little in the low light of the bar as he meets my gaze.
“Yeah,” he says, “I was a dickhead to you. To a bunch of people.” He sighs. “I’m really sorry.”
“Thanks, Tee,” I reply, using the public-safe epithet we’ve adopted for him. “I appreciate it.” Not that I agree with that witch’s dumb fucking sense of justice, but if Tom has learned a lesson from all this, I guess that’s no bad thing.
He eats a small forkful of pie, and continues: “I hate that ‘Morticia’ became a… whole thing. I was just—ugh, I was just trying to fit in with the rugby guys. But they’re all dickheads too.”
“I noticed.” I give him a sad smile.
He returns it. “This week has been kind of nice, honestly. Like a holiday from… well, from having to be ‘one of the lads’.”
Well. I can’t not probe more on that. “That’s a burden? Seems like a pretty good gig if you can get it. Top of the pecking order and all.”
“I dunno, it…” He has to think about this, apparently. “It’s never really felt like me. Just what’s expected of me.”
“Oh yeah?” I say, trying not to lead the conversation much more. I need to see where he goes with this on his own. Because it kind of seems as if…
“Okay, example: I don’t even like rugby that much, you know?” he continues. “But it’s what I’ve always done, since I was a kid. Because Dad played. And if I didn’t join the team here too, he’d ask questions. So… yeah.” He stops. He definitely hasn’t had to put this into words before. “I just go along with it all. This week I haven’t had to.”
I nod solemnly, mentally willing him to keep talking.
“Like, I think there’s maybe a part of me that’s always sort of envied girls?”
He keeps speaking after that, but I struggle to focus on what he’s saying as my mind races.
Monday
God dammit.
Do I say something to him? To fucking her, I guess?
I glance left to where the oblivious idiot is sitting next to me, taking down notes from the whiteboard.
I’ve never really bought all that ‘Egg Prime Directive’ crap, but I do think I’m in danger of spooking him into denial if I just up and say ‘hey, I think you might be trans.’
Ugh!
It’s really not helping matters that, now I’m entertaining the possibility Tee might be a girl, some animal part of my brain is cooing ‘and you like girls, don’t you Emma?’ at me.
I glance over again, just in time to see her making a cute little expression of confusion at whatever it was the lecturer just said.
Tuesday
“No, but, like… I would know, right?” says Tee, head tilted to one side. “That’s how it works.”
We’re sat cross-legged opposite each other on her bed, and honestly, I’m taking it as a win that she’s still talking, rather than having clammed up as soon as I shared my theory with her.
“Not necessarily,” I reply. “I know a few trans people who genuinely hadn’t considered they could be trans until something like this happened to them.”
Her eyes widen, and she leans in to whisper conspiratorially. “You said you didn’t know about magic stuff!”
“What? No, idiot, I mean like they put on a dress for Halloween or something!” God. It’s probably not very feminist of me that I find her cutest when she’s being stupid.
She blushes. “Oh… right, yeah, that makes more sense.”
“All I’m saying is… consider it, yeah?” I reach over and take one of her hands in mine. “A lot of what you’ve said to me about your experience of gender strikes me as really familiar.”
She opens and closes her mouth a few times like she’s not sure what to say. “But… I mean, I don’t…” She’s still struggling. “Isn’t it just… normal to be a bit jealous of girls?”
I shoot her a look, one eyebrow raised.
“Shit,” she mutters, and buries her face in her hands.
Wednesday
If she keeps up this pacing, she’s going to carve a trench into my floor and they’ll charge me when I move out at the end of the semester.
“This is so fucked!” she exclaims, having paused briefly to face me, before resuming her pacing.
She’s right. It’s an insane position to be in at all, let alone within your first twenty-four hours of understanding yourself to be trans.
She comes to a halt, finally, in front of where I’m standing. Hesitantly, start to I reach with both hands, trying to intuit if a hug is something that would be helpful for her right now, but to my surprise, she actively bats my arms away.
“You shouldn’t—ugh!” She drags both hands down her face. “You shouldn’t have told me!” Her eyes are sad and accusatory all at once.
“I…” I don’t know what to say.
She sighs and brushes past me to collapse onto my bed, from where she makes eye contact with the ceiling rather than me. Silence hangs in the air for a bit before she continues speaking.
“I could’ve gone on that stupid date, happily oblivious, turned back to—” She chokes a little here. “—to normal, and then, I dunno… I guess worked it out in my own time. But now? Now I have to give this up knowing I’m probably a girl! Because otherwise I lose my entire life!”
“I mean—”
She pushes herself back upright to glare at me. “Oh please, Emma, do you want to explain to my parents and my tutor and, like, the Student Loans Company how I got the surgery that makes you a foot shorter overnight?”
She’s right, of course. I lean against my desk, and as I exhale it feels like all my energy is draining out of me. “Maybe you’re right, yeah. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I just…” She gets back to her feet, heads over to the door. “I need to be alone for a bit,” she says, and as she leaves I can see her eyes starting to glisten with tears.
Thursday
We haven’t talked today.
I confirmed everything for this evening with Sam, the sweet bisexual guy I met at film soc – he thinks he’s helping a closeted lesbian throw prying family members off the scent – and sent Tee the details.
She thumbs-upped the message, no reply.
I’m worried for her. She needs somebody there for her – god knows I would – but I know it can’t be me: I’m too tangled up in all this. Except there’s nobody else.
I try to distract myself by putting together a set of links about HRT that I can send to her later.
Friday
I’m experiencing déjà vu.
Tee is standing in my doorway, eyes manic and hair messy. “Emma!” she blurts out. “I called her a bitch! To her face!” I’m still struggling to process these, the first words she’s said to me since Wednesday, as she brushes past me into my room, tangibly buzzing with energy.
“Who?” I ask as I turn to follow her. “The witch? Why would you—”
She interrupts me by getting close and grabbing me by my biceps. “It was going fine,” she says, staring up at me, “she knew about the date, somehow she saw the kiss, she was satisfied I’d ‘learned my lesson’.”
She’s very much inside my personal space and I wobble a little as I lean away from her, my hands landing on her waist to stabilise myself. “So what the hell happened?”
Her face falls now. “She insulted you. Called you slurs again. Said I succeeded in spite of you.”
Oh my god. It was for me. She has – assuming witches don’t take kindly to being called a bitch – thrown her life away for me. That stupid beautiful idiot.
“What were you thinking?” Guilt is starting to rise within me, and I slacken my fingers when I realise I’m gripping Tee’s waist too tightly.
“I mean, I wasn’t really thinking,” she replies, “and that was the best part!” She’s slipped away from me now, so she has room to wave her hands around for emphasis. “I’ve spent the last two weeks afraid – afraid to be seen as a girl, afraid to like it, afraid of that witch. All up in my own head the whole time. But tonight? Wow!”
Her energy is infectious, and it’s starting to wash away my own worries.
“I just let her have it!” she goes on. “I called her a fucking bitch! Told her you’re sweet and kind and—and beautiful, and ten times the woman she is! And it felt amazing!” She grabs both my hands in hers and just beams at me, and I know I must be blushing bright red.
“But what about you?” I whisper through a melancholy smile. “Your life. There’s no way she turns you back now.”
“Oh, she said as much, yeah,” she replies, her face still aglow with exhilaration. “But I’ll worry about it tomorrow. Tonight, I don’t want to let her have that power over me. I just want to…”
She tilts her head to one side as she trails off. Instinctively, I tilt mine to match.
And she goes up her toes to kiss me.
It’s good. I kiss back. But after a few seconds she pulls back, her face suddenly apologetic.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” she says. “I’m the worst, I shouldn’t have done that without ask—”
I shut her up by kissing her.
Saturday
I wake up disorientated, becoming aware of my ringing phone, the daylight, and Tee’s absence in roughly that order.
The phone gets answered with one flailing hand, and I slap it against my ear without looking at it properly, bleary-eyed as I am. “Hello?”
“Emma, what do you remember from the last two weeks?” says Tee’s voice. It’s unchanged, so I guess the witch did indeed decline undo her transformation overnight. I’m struggling to parse what she means, though.
“Tee?” I croak. “What are you talking about?”
“So you still…?” She pauses for a moment. “Emma, you have to come down to my room right now,” she continues.
“Why—what—are you okay?” I splutter, taken aback by her sudden urgency.
“It’s my… Look, just come down, okay?” She sounds frantic, but excited. “It’s easier to show you.”
“Okay, okay, yeah, just give me a minute,” I say, heaving myself into a sitting position with my free hand.
“I’ll time you!” she replies, drawing out the last word like she’s singing it – she’s still going when she hangs up.
Getting out of bed, I grab the first clothes that come to hand and throw them on. I realise too late that T-shirt I’ve pulled over my head was in fact Tee’s and is noticeably too small for me, but it’ll be a minor feat of contortion to get it off again now, so fuck it.
Within a few minutes, I’m down on her corridor, past the can of beans, and the first thing I notice is that the sheet of lined paper on Tee’s door has been replaced with a colourful nameplate, the kind of thing you buy off a spinner rack in a giftshop – a nameplate that reads ‘ALICE’.
Frowning, I knock hesitantly, only to have the door whipped open immediately by Tee, who had clearly been waiting by it, smile plastered across her face.
“What’s—” I begin, but she interrupts me straight away.
“Everything’s changed!” she says, pulling me inside by my sleeve. I catch her glancing down at my – her – shirt, and biting her lip briefly in reaction.
I take in the room, and realise that more than just the nameplate is different – new bedsheets, new clothes, a blu-tacked collage of photo printouts above the desk... “Wait, is this more magic?” I ask.
“She changed things more, so it’s as if I was always a girl!” she exclaims. “This must be her idea of punishing me.”
I step over to look at the photos, and sure enough they all feature Tee as a girl, including some where she’s noticeably younger than she is now. “Holy shit…” I whisper.
“Sorry that I disappeared on you,” she says, putting a gentle hand on my shoulder as I peer, “but I woke up and saw that my phone case had changed, and had to come down here to investigate!”
I turn back around to face her. “But wait, I can still remember everything, so how does that work?”
“Well, that’s the thing,” she replies. “I already called home, and mum remembers me as Alice! That’s when I phoned you, but you still called me Tee.”
“Huh,” I say, perplexed. “I guess it makes sense she’d leave you your memories, if she thought she was torturing you, but why me too?”
“It must’ve happened accidentally, because you were spooning me when we went to sleep,” suggests Tee, face screwed up into a thoughtful expression.
I let out a little laugh. “That can’t be how it works.”
“Oh, so now you are an expert on magic?” she shoots back, grinning at her own joke.
Sunday
“Are you okay with ‘Alice’?” I ask, interrupting the peaceful silence down by the little lake. “Because if you aren’t, you can go by something else – nobody bats an eyelid when cis people want to use a different name.”
“I actually quite like it!” she replies, looking down at me. I’m lying on the grass, head resting in her lap, and she’s been absent-mindedly stroking my hair as we enjoy the afternoon sun together. “I quite like everything about my new life, honestly, which feels weird? I think it must’ve all gotten set up on, like, autopilot by the magic – if that bitch had hand-crafted this life for me, I bet I’d have woken up with a boyfriend.”
A grim thought, not least because I want her all to myself. I pantomime a look of disgust for her. “And promise me you’ll quit field hockey if you don’t like it any better than rugby?” I add.
“I promise,” replies Alice, patting my head gently. “But I’m optimistic! And I bet I’ve got new magic muscle memory for it now, just like with eye makeup.”
“You know that’s such bullshit, right?” I say, raising an arm to wag a finger up at her. “It took me fucking forever to get this good at my eyeliner.”
I see her face fall. Shit. I was worried this might be a sore spot for her. I sit up and shuffle around so I can face her properly. “Alice? It’s okay, I—”
“It’s not, though,” she interrupts, clearly upset. “You’re the one that deserved this. You’re the real trans—” I interrupt her in turn with a finger pressed across her lips.
Looking her dead in the eyes, I say, “Alice, don’t you dare call yourself not a real trans girl.” She begins to open her mouth beneath my finger, so I continue, “I mean it!”
She gives me a melancholy smile. “It’s just… I’m some dumb arsehole who got all this handed to me on a platter. You had to work for it, for years. That sucks.”
“You got the express catch-up service,” I fire back. A giggle breaks through her sad face, and I lean in to press a kiss to her cheek. “Seriously though,” I go on, “I don’t resent you for it, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Are you sure?” she says, bashfully. Bless her.
“Yes,” is my emphatic reply. “I already transitioned, and that was basically magic. Just a bit slower.”
Alice smiles properly now.
“And besides, this way I’m the tall one,” I say, punctuated with a wink.
Monday
Alice leans her head on my shoulder. Being here with my girlfriend really does take the edge off Maths B at 8am.
Out of the blue, it occurs to me that I never really explained to her why I was so convinced she was taking the piss when she first turned up at my door, talking about witches and curses and overnight transformations.
Maybe I’ll show her some of those stories later.