“So let’s talk.” She cocked her head. “In my room.”
I hadn’t been inside in a long, long time. I paused at the door, that habitual hesitation triggering. One night I’d walked in while she sat at the vanity in bra and panties, a hand on her heart and her hair curling over her shoulders like gold shavings on porcelain. I’d stood there staring till I realized she was watching me in her mirror. At the question in my eyes she answered, Checking if it’s still beating. Come here, Sofie. Touch it. For all that I hated the world seeing me as a girl, I didn’t hate it, always, when she did. It didn’t even feel like we were girls. Just wild things, rough beasts wrapped in soft skin. Sometimes I thought I could hold on to androgyny for her. Live in some gender limbo to stay that close, that deep, caught under each other’s nails. It frightened me, that willingness. I’d joke and call her Svengali but it wasn’t a joke, really, the same way it wasn’t a joke when she said Be a girl for me, just for tonight and touched me till I couldn’t say no. So when Adam Halverson kept asking me out, kept pushing his nice-guy act, I said Yes. I fucked him. Let him come between us, figuratively. Literally.
Let the whole disgusting narrative play out.
Like the weak little boy I am.
I drifted through Ingrid’s room, fingers gliding over things. Brass-plated basketball trophies. Framed newspaper clippings. DOUBLE TROUBLE: SVENSSON AND KHOURY ARE UNSTOPPABLE TOGETHER. My stomach clenched as I looked at my seventeen-year-old body. So small, so delicate, all bone and glass, like something made purposefully to tempt the world into smashing it.
Ingrid watched me in silence. Different now: My body was strong, hard. Not that frail thing anymore.
“What’s the big secret?” she said.
I touched the bottles arrayed around the mirror. Her smell was everywhere, cool and mysterious. White-blond hair knotted in a brush like a glistening spiderweb. These strange things I’d never understood: liquids and powders and creams, wands and sponges, the insane amount of work it took to be a girl, to put a mask on each day so the world wouldn’t eat you alive. Beauty as battle armor.
There was an unmarked vial filled with something clear, viscous. I wondered what it was. Some chemical to correct a minor flaw.
Funny. In a way, that’s what I was doing, too. Correcting myself from the inside out.
“You know my friend Laney? You’ve seen her in pics.”
Promise me, she’d said, running the blade against my palm. Hot blood kissed cool steel. Never tell anyone about us. Never betray us.
“Creepster with the hot Aussie girlfriend?”
I promise, I’d said.
“And Armin, and Ellis.”
“Your friends from that nightclub.”
“We’re not just friends, Inge.”
She gave me a look. “Is this about to get X-rated?”
“I’m serious. It had to be this way, okay? I couldn’t tell you before.”
Ingrid flopped onto her bed. “Fucking spill it already.”
There’s a scene in every superhero movie where the mask comes off and the loved one reacts with shock. As if a scrap of polyester hides everything. As if you don’t know someone you love by their eyes, the inner self that shines through.
My parents had been searching my room. I should’ve known. Ellis helped hide my tracks online, all the transition videos and before/after pics I fantasized over, but it didn’t matter. They found Mina’s assignment. What am I, Clark Kent? I’d said. I put on a pair of glasses and suddenly you can’t see what’s so obvious to everyone? I’m a boy, Mom. I’ve always been a boy. Everyone else saw it but you.
I crouched at Inge’s feet. I’m no hero, and she’s seen through every mask I’ve ever worn.
“Ingrid, I’m a member of a secret vigilante group that avenges women who’ve been wronged. We do very illegal stuff. Very bone-breaking, scar-making stuff. Laney, Armin, Ellis, Blythe—they’re all part of it, too. We call ourselves Black Iris.”
Blank stare. Then she started laughing.
“Ingrid—”
“You’re good. You almost had me.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“So, what, you’re a superhero, saving damsels in distress?”
“Not exactly. More like . . . balancing the scales of justice.”
“Oh my god, you sound like a comic book. Is this for YouTube? Are you filming this?”
I frowned. “I’d never do that to you. I’m dead serious, Inge. I’m deep into some heavy shit.”
Slowly, her smile faded. “With Black Iris?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve heard of them. Of you, I guess. Why did you hide this?”
“Because it would have endangered you.”
“Why are you telling me now?”
It had been so long since I’d touched her. When I grazed her bare shin I couldn’t stop. Fingers wrapped around bone, skin, felt her calf flex, her muscle hot and firm. She gazed down at me, pitiless. Ever so slightly her legs parted.