“They slut-shamed you?”
—Yeah. Lesbians can be pretty judgmental of bisexuals. But Ingrid was always nice to me. Sympathetic. She said he’d played her, too, and she wanted to get back at him.
“That convinced you to accuse him of rape?”
—No. But she kept putting these ideas in my head. She’d say, “Are you sure you wanted it? Did you ask him to stop?” And she told me how sometimes, when she was with him, he’d keep going when she didn’t want to. It made me question myself.
“Do you feel the sex you had with him was coercive?” Laney said.
—No. No, I wanted it.
“Then why did you say it was rape?”
—Because I felt slutty, okay? Everyone made me feel like shit about it, except Ingrid. She said I could make myself look better if I played the victim. That I could fix my reputation.
“By ruining his.”
—I didn’t think it through that fully, but . . . yeah. That’s what it was.
“Didn’t think it through?” Tam echoed, anger in her voice.
—It’s like . . . I know he’s different, but guys do that kind of thing all the time, you know? And most of the time they get away with it. Ingrid kept saying that sometimes you need to make an example of someone to keep the others in line. It sounds crazy now, but it made sense then. I felt like such a pariah. I just wanted people to stop treating me like trash. I didn’t realize how much it would hurt him.
“Why did Ingrid want to ruin me?” I said.
—She hated that you became a man. She thought it was destroying you.
“Why couldn’t you let me be happy, Inge?”
No answer from her.
Softer, I said, “When did you start to hate me?”
Something wet and fractured glittered in her eyes. Breaking ice. But still she remained silent.
The lights and the camera switched off, and everyone else left, and the two of us remained, facing each other.
“I never hated you,” she said quietly.
I crossed the room and sat in the chair beside her. Pressed my palm to her cool marble cheek. Her eyes closed.
“Open them,” I said.
She looked at me.
“This is why I had to get away from you, Inge. You’re like my mother. You will never see me as I am.”
“I could try.”
I let my hand fall. “Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if I never transitioned. If I stayed the way you wanted.”
Now she put a hand to my face, tentatively. Brushed my scruff.
“You wouldn’t have been happy,” she whispered. “But I would.”
At least she didn’t lie.
Something prickly scratched my throat. I stood.
“What are you going to do to me?” she said.
“I’m going to let you go.”
At first she seemed to think I meant go free. Then she understood.
On my way out of the room she said, falteringly, “Ren.”
I shivered once, hard. Turned.
Ingrid never apologized. That statuesque face never cracked. In another era, she would have marched unflinchingly to the stake to burn, head high. For all that her heart was a twisted mess, I admired the diamond hardness of it.
If only you’d been a better friend to me, Inge.
If only we’d both been.
We held eye contact for a long moment. Then she said, “Kill that motherfucker.”
———
I kept you in the dark, Laney said, because I knew it would hurt you. If you knew I was using him.
Adam had been thinking about what happened between him and me. What happened. Like it was a force of nature, not man-made, not a brutality he inflicted on me but some unpreventable disaster our bodies had endured, a wreckage of limbs and skin. Well, he had been thinking, and he wanted to apologize. If I thought it was rape. Not because he did.
Amazing, that he managed to shirk responsibility even in his guilt.
Once Adam finished grad school, he moved back to Chicago, where he reunited with Jay, his old college friend.
Jay had always been a misogynist. The kind of guy who’d assign hotness numbers to girls straight to their faces, as if handing out compliments. The kind of guy who’d shame his best friend for not simply taking what was his by birthright, for not using my body the way it had been designed to be used by men. Without Adam to temper him, Jay had become radicalized. He called himself Crito and harassed women on the Internet, with the help of a hundred or so of his cronies.
And someone very powerful had noticed, and was sniffing out his trail. One by one, Crito’s “soldiers” had gone dark, scared silent.
I need a favor, Crito told Adam. Remember that hot blonde your ex-girlfriend was all dykey with?
Ingrid? Adam said.
Yeah. Remember how she never shut up about feminism? She’s gone off the deep end. She’s trying to ruin my life.
Adam had his own reasons to talk to Ingrid. She was his only link to Sofiya, and things had ended badly between them. So he went to see Inge.
He said, How is Sofie?
She said, Sofie wants you dead. And I do, too.
Adam expected as much. He said, Jay says your vigilante friends are ruining his life. He wants a truce. And I want to talk to Sofie.