“Lie to me again and I’ll knock the rest of your teeth down your throat.”
“I’m not lying, man. I’m retired.” Crito shrugged uneasily in his bonds. “This shit isn’t worth my life. You ever had a bullet in you?”
I didn’t answer. Instead I stood, half turned. “They asked you to deliver flowers. The way you used to do, to threaten girls.”
“Those weren’t threats.”
“What were they?”
“Reality checks.”
Tamsin cracked her knuckles. “He could still chew with a few less teeth, don’t you think?”
Some catastrophe was happening inside me, a feeling of bones snapping, collapsing inward. This conversation was leading to a place I’d hoped it never would.
“Why did you pretend not to recognize me, Jay? You know who I am.”
“I didn’t know you were . . . her.”
“Liar. You and Adam have been after me since he came back.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t play dumb, you human garbage fire. Are you working with the Wolf to ruin my life?”
“The hell you talking about, man?”
“Those girls who came to see you. Why did they ask you to do this? To use my deadname, to threaten me?”
Crito looked me in the eye. “Because that’s how women are. They hate us.”
A part of me remained there while another part went back to a memory. The morning after it happened, my body both tight as wire and unraveled like frayed thread, while Ingrid paced in the dawn light, silvering the sunbeams with her smoke. Only once did I voice the question screaming inside me: Why? Why did this happen, Inge?
She stopped pacing. Her face was cold wrath. Because that’s how men are. They hate us.
All these years, it sat inside me. That othering. There were men, hateful, violent, and on the other side, us. Girls.
But she was wrong. I was never really either, was I? Not a girl, not a real boy. Just this other. This defective, fucked-up thing.
“Why did they come to you, Jay?”
“They’ve been after me for months. Picked off my officers one by one. It was just a matter of time till they got to me. So I preempted them—I made a deal.”
“Let me shut his lying mouth,” Tamsin said.
I waved her quiet. “What kind of deal?”
“You know Adam’s back?”
“No fucking shit.”
“Well, I asked him to help me out. To get those bitches off my dick.”
I frowned. “You sent him to . . . meet with her? With the Little Wolf?”
“Yeah.”
My thoughts raced. “Why would she make a deal with you? You have nothing to offer except going away.”
Crito shook his head. “She didn’t. The deal’s with Adam.”
Adam, sitting there in Black Iris HQ. As a guest.
A partner.
“What was the deal?”
“Don’t know. You’d have to ask him.”
“What did you get out of this?” I pressed.
“She let me go.”
“After everything you’ve done, all the people you’ve hurt—she just let you go?”
Crito smiled. For a moment I saw the old Jay, that sly, knowing grin he’d shoot at me when I was her. As if he could see right through me. All the conflict inside me, the boy’s name I hid from my boyfriend, the longing to start T. One night when we were alone together for a moment at a restaurant, Jay leaned obscenely close and said, So, are you a tranny? His tone was faux friendly. My heart spiked into my throat. What are you talking about? I’d said, stammering, so obvious, and he said, still cheerful, Did you have the surgery? You know, cut your dick off, make a slit? It had taken every ounce of restraint in me to not show my relief. He was calling me a trans girl—interweaving homophobia and transphobia, implying I wanted to trick straight men. In the most insane way, his awfulness was a blessing. It was so maliciously ignorant that it hid the truth. Shut up, you creep, I’d said, and Jay laughed. If it’s real, he said, sliding a hand between my thighs before I could stop him, why don’t you like dick in it the way you like it in your mouth? Before I could react, Adam returned to the table.
This person was the abomination who Adam had let indoctrinate him. Let into his head, his heart. He’d let Jay turn him inside out till his monster parts showed, too.
They’re both dangerous, Inge had warned me. Your boyfriend’s “bestie” is poisoning him.
I know the feeling, I’d said.
And I’d paid the price for that. For not trusting the one person who really loved me.
“Why?” I said now. “Why would they make a deal with either of you?”
Crito lifted his good shoulder. “We’re not the biggest fish in the pond. They don’t want us as bad as they want someone else.”
“Who?” I said.
He merely shrugged that shoulder higher. He didn’t know.
But I had a pretty good feeling I did.
———