Inge smiled, bitter. Still silent.
I touched her leg. Wrapped my hand around that sinewy calf, as I had before. But now I kept squeezing till it felt like I could rip meat off bone.
“It hurts,” she said finally. Satisfaction in her voice.
I let go.
“You have put so much pain into this world,” I said.
“Oh, don’t be so fucking banal.”
I took the bottle out of my pocket. “Is this what I think it is?”
Her eyes glittered. No answer.
I rolled up her pant leg. Uncapped the bottle, dipped my finger inside. A whiff of alcohol stropped the air like a razor.
My hand moved toward her skin.
“Don’t poison me with that shit,” Ingrid said.
Something heavy tumbled to the bottom of my chest. A closing book, the end of a story. Of me and you, Inge.
I wiped the testosterone gel on my forearm. Rubbed it in.
Then I said, “Did you tamper with it from the beginning?”
She didn’t answer. But she didn’t pretend not to understand the question.
And that, in itself, was an answer.
SIX MONTHS AGO
PRIVATE VLOG: GASLIGHTING
REN: I’m not uploading this. This is for me. I feel like I’m going crazy and I just— I need to get this out.
Ingrid watches these. I know she does. Pretends it’s so disgusting, that she’s grossed out by my beard and dick and all this boy stuff, but she’s seen every single video. I test her, sometimes. Casually mention something I said in a vlog, and she’ll know what I mean. I joke about my shitty memory so she won’t suspect.
I think she’s trying to change me.
Like, back. To a girl. The way I was.
I have this dread that someday I’ll come home to a trans intervention, and she’ll be sitting on the couch where we fucked, and my family will be there, my tyrant mother, my spineless father, and Inge will say, “We care about you, Sofie. We want to help you get well.”
By “well,” she means female.
I swear I’m not crazy.
My endocrinologist says my T levels don’t make sense. Sometimes they start to taper off, as if I’m lowering my dose. But I’m not.
For a while he had me on shots instead of gel. Inge did them. I’m squeamish with needles so she volunteered to help, which was nice, I thought, until I started feeling strange between injections. Irritable, tired. Depressed. Low sex drive.
Signs of low T.
She marked the shots on a calendar. Every two weeks, on the dot, was an X, but some of those were wrong. Days I wasn’t home, or days she was sick. The schedule was off by a day or two here and there. I added it up and I was actually only getting one shot a month. Half my dose.
She’s not sloppy. This is Ingrid. Ingrid doesn’t know the meaning of that word. Everything she’s ever done is precise, deliberate. Like Laney.
There’s no way she didn’t notice the calendar was wrong.
I’m not saying it’s intentional, but—
I don’t know what I’m saying.
Anyway, I switched back to gel. Packets, not the pump. They’re foil, sealed.
I figure, remove the temptation, right?
Not that I think she’d ever do something like that. Not to hurt me. Not to fuck with my health.
But if she thought it was helping, not hurting . . .
This is nuts. Can’t believe I’m saying this. Even thinking it. It’s paranoia.
I looked up my feelings online. I’m nothing if not an expert self-diagnoser. Every trans person is. This one word kept coming up: “gaslighting.” It’s from an old film where a husband lies to his wife over and over, telling her she’s imagining things—that the gaslights in the house aren’t really flickering when they are. When he’s the one messing with them.
When someone gaslights you, they make you doubt reality. They make you feel like you’re going crazy, being unreasonable, overreacting. It’s a form of emotional abuse so effective that the abuser only needs to plant the seeds of doubt—your brain takes care of it from there, growing them, nourishing them. Feeding on them.
Poisoning itself.
Ingrid has been there for me through everything. Through him. Through so much other bullshit. I know she hates this, thinks I could be happy without hormones, but she’d never actually fuck with my body. She wouldn’t.
Except.
Except sometimes, when she looks at me, I think she sees Ren the same way I saw Sofie. As someone temporary.
Someone she could kill.
—9—
Old friends don’t need words. Everything in a glance, a touch. All the things that meant more because they were unspoken. Ingrid and I stared at each other, wordlessly.
To Tamsin I said, “Where’s her phone?”
She handed it over.
It was there, just as I knew it would be. The video of the liar’s face, streaked with mascara. Norah. Filmed by Ingrid. Orchestrated beautifully.
“She’s behind it all,” Tamsin said. “The blonde and brunette. Ingrid and Norah. This is the person who tried to ruin you, Ren.”