Cruel Summer:
make it home alright?
i hope your uncle didn’t give you shit about staying the night
sweetly bitter:
Are you kidding?
He congratulated me when I got home.
“So, you’re finally manning up!”
One of these days I’m gonna just give in and stab him with a sword.
Cruel Summer:
then your journey towards the dark side will be complete
sweetly bitter:
Assigned Jedi At Birth
Cruel Summer:
is that why you like fencing?
want to use a lightsaber?
sweetly bitter:
No, it was actually...
I can’t believe I’m going to tell you this.
Did you ever see that one Bond movie? You know, with Madonna as a fencing instructor?
Cruel Summer:
one sec, googling
omfg, how did i forget this corset
sweetly bitter:
The rest of the film was so deeply forgettable that it must have taken the corset with it.
But I saw it when I was ten and I wanted to be her so bad.
Cruel Summer:
i know the feeling
my bond villain-sona is xenia onatopp
her: *chokes a man to death with her thunder thighs* me, age 11: “hope this doesn’t awaken anything in me”
sweetly bitter:
Kinky.
Cruel Summer:
i try
sweetly bitter:
You know, shaving is really the worst.
Who even invented facial hair? I’d like to speak to the manager.
Cruel Summer:
spoken like a true upper-middle-class white woman
…you know
if your uncle doesn’t mind you staying the night
maybe we can start electro after all
sweetly bitter:
Really???
Cruel Summer:
sure
your face should look ok by the next morning if I’m careful
you’ll have to grow out your stubble during the week tho
we’ll just do a little test patch near the back of your jaw the first time
make sure it’ll look ok
sweetly bitter:
Can’t say I’m looking forward to that...
But it’ll be worth it.
Can we do the test on Sunday?
Cruel Summer:
I’ll save a pack of probes for you
and a toothbrush
* * *
Over the last few weeks, Monday mornings had turned into impromptu phone-based mini-sponsor meetings with Tabby. The day after Halloween was no exception; Summer was sitting at her kitchen table once more, talking to Tabby through the speaker on the table.
“So,” Tabby said after Summer finished relating the events of the last twenty-four hours, “obviously the elephant in the room is the ‘swapping spit with your girl’ thing, but honestly it sounds like you have that under control. So let’s talk about your little slumber party instead. What are the sleeping arrangements going to be?”
“Well,” Summer said, “it’s not like I have a cot or anything, so I guess she’ll be sleeping with me.”
There was an expectant pause from the other end.
“Not fucking, just sleeping, guttermind!” Summer said.
Tabby laughed a little. “Just fucking with you. But anyway, do you think she’s going to be comfortable with that?”
“Hmm.” Summer stood and paced a little, thinking over her clients. “I don’t think I’ve actually had to address this since I got here,” Summer said. “How badly have your trans girls needed BSR?”
Body Shame Resocialization was the process of teaching a new girl that it was okay to be underdressed or undressed around other women. It was part of the reason that the first and second years used communal showers: showering with their buddies as their bodies slowly feminized eased them into it so gradually that by the time they became girls, they were already fairly comfortable with female nudity.
“Desperately,” Tabby said. “Possibly more than the boys, even. They often aren’t comfortable around boys or girls at first, and they’re prone to regressions due to dysphoria.”
“And she doesn’t have a shower buddy, of course…so I guess it’s gonna have to be me.”
“As long as it doesn’t turn into another game of Snog The Sponsor,” Tabby teased.
“You can’t snog your sponsor if you don’t have a sponsor,” Summer said primly. “And she doesn’t. Remember?”
“Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe.”
“Fuck you, Tabs.”
“Love you too, babe.” Tabby’s smirk was audible.
“God, I didn’t even think about BSR,” Summer said. “And I almost missed an opportunity to start her on hair removal this morning. There are so many details to keep track of when you’re this involved with a girl’s transition.”
“Did you ever write up an intake plan for her?” Tabby asked.
“She’s not an intake, remember?”
“Tch.” Summer could see the dismissive flick of Tabby’s hand in her mind’s eye. “Something analogous to an intake plan, anyway.”
“Not really, no. Do you really think that’s necessary?”
“Maybe. Our experience has been that the basic sponsor procedures are still very useful with trans girls. In the first couple years, we treated it like the sponsorship was just a formality, or like it was an easy job that an experienced sponsor could do on autopilot, but it’s actually still pretty challenging. Different—and a little easier in some ways, especially on the conscience—but still something that needed to be taken seriously. And intake plans, activity reports, lever lists—all still useful for the same reasons they are for boys.”
Summer sighed. “I can see the logic in that,” she said.
“Look,” Tabby said. “Let me talk to Christine, our IT girl. I’ll ask her to set up a little fake intake—‘2023-A’ or whatever—with one girl, Persephone, and one sponsor, you. Then you can use our systems to keep track of this stuff.”
Summer shook her head, then realized that Tabby couldn’t see her. “I’m not her sponsor, and she’s not a subject. Remember?”
“It’d just be pro forma. A fiction that exists only in some data table in Dorleybase.”
After a moment, Summer sighed and admitted that she didn’t really have any rational reason to refuse. But somehow, it still felt like she was bringing Persephone one step closer to a stay in an underground cell.
“Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind, child of Zeus, who twists lures, I beg you: Do not break with hard pains, O lady, my poor, hairy face.”
Summer snorted. “No need to be melodramatic about it. I only did a dozen hairs!”
After girlmoding for an evening at a pub—one much gayer than The Worlds End—the two of them had headed to Summer’s workplace long after its closing time to give Persephone her first taste of electrolysis. Now they were walking back to Summer’s flat. The cold night air—it was not terribly far above freezing—was soothing on Persephone’s skin, but not enough to keep her from complaining.
“I’m not being melodramatic,” Persephone sniffed. “I’m just reciting poetry. Sappho Fragment 1 Voigt.”
“Of course,” Summer teased. “I’m sure that’s exactly what Sappho wrote twenty-five hundred years ago, with no alterations.”
“Translations are never perfect,” Persephone said, “but I think I did her justice.”
“So, am I the Aphrodite in this situation?” Summer asked.
“Well, you’re pretty enough,” Persephone said with a grin. “But don’t go comparing yourself to the gods—terrible things happen to those who do.”
“Don’t worry,” Summer said offhandedly, “I’ve learned my lesson about hubris. Besides, isn’t Aphrodite cis?”
“Depends on the tradition. On Cyprus, they worshipped an Aphrodite who had a beard, which sounds pretty trans to me.”
“She should come to me,” Summer said. “I have enough open bookings for another client. But back to Sappho. Did she have any other poems about electrolysis?”
“Well,” Persephone said thoughtfully, “‘yellow-haired Helen’ from Fragment 23 certainly wasn’t a candidate for laser. Nor was ‘the one who has hair yellower than a pinetorch’ in 98A. We have no context for the word ‘paingiver’ in 172, but I’m beginning to think it may have been describing an electrologist. And 31 has the line ‘fire is racing under skin’, which certainly seems like a familiar sensation now.”
“I get it, I get it!” Summer laughed. “We’ll put on some lidocaine cream before your first full session.”
“Like, numbing cream? That’s a thing? Why didn’t we do that this time?” Persephone said indignantly.
“Because if you’d never experienced it without the cream, you wouldn’t know how important it was to put it on,” Summer said with a grin.
“Meanie,” Persephone said.
“Nope!”
“Torturer,” she continued.
“Can’t prove it!”
“Sadist,” she accused.
“Only in bed,” Summer shot back with a smirk.
The rest of Persephone’s face turned red. “You can’t just—just say things like that!” she sputtered.
“And why can’t I?” Summer said. “You enjoy hearing them.”
Persephone squeaked in reply, and Summer reached out and took her hand.
“This sort of...pause can be rather fun if you let it be,” Summer explained. “You don’t have to wonder if I like you; you know that the answer is ‘yes’. But you also don’t have to feel pressure to make decisions; those are for later. You can just…be. Here. With me. Okay?”
Persephone looked up at her. Painted in the haphazard colors of street lamps and moonlight, Summer’s face was pale, her lips dark. Shapely. Kissable.
“Okay,” Persephone said, forcing her eyes away from Summer’s lips. Surely there must be something else to occupy her mind.
* * *
She’s embarrassed, Summer realized. In another situation she would have pressed Persephone further, but there was really no point when they weren’t going to go beyond light flirting. So instead she decided to throw the girl a lifeline.
“You know,” Summer said, “I’ve been wondering—why ‘Persephone’? I looked her up, but all I found was a story about her being taken to hell or something, which doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you’d want to be named after.”
Persephone lit up the way she always did when she talked about classics. Cute. “Well, the ancient Greek underworld is rather different from the Christian hell. All of the dead go there, and most of them are simply guests of the king and queen of the underworld, Hades and Persephone. And that’s the thing about her. The story of Persephone’s abduction—when Hades dragged her down into the underworld to force her to become his bride—originally existed in a larger culture that knew a lot more about her, and the story’s portrayal of her as a helpless victim was meant to contrast with what she became later.”
Ah, she’d provoked a classics lecture. Good—that would thoroughly shift Persephone’s thoughts to a different topic. Plus, Summer always enjoyed these talks; the girl’s passion for the subject was infectious.
“Because Persephone was a seriously important goddess,” Persephone the mortal continued. “Hades was seen as impersonal and impartial—almost more a force of nature than a person—but Persephone would listen to your prayers and might be swayed by them. So when people wanted someone to be punished or rewarded in the afterlife, they usually prayed to Persephone. And they feared her too—Homer and Hesiod call her ‘dread Persephone’, and in some places there seems to have been a taboo against saying her name. She was the undisputed queen of the underworld, a goddess of death and rebirth, of women and spring, beautiful and terrible; the abduction was just her origin story.”
As always, Summer was amazed by both the depth of Persephone’s knowledge and her ability to articulate it. When she got going like this, the sentences came out of her fully-formed, as though she had prepared and rehearsed a lecture. Perhaps she already had done in her own head; perhaps she’d thought all these sentences before and all she had to decide in the moment was how to string them together.
“And I suppose it’s that whole path that appealed to me. The helpless girl, torn from her rightful family, forced to endure a terrible fate she did not choose, who seizes control of the situation and grows into someone who is loved and respected and, when appropriate, feared. That’s sort of who I hope to become.” She shrugged. “That, and it sounds pretty.”
“It does,” Summer said with a soft smile. “It’s a beautiful name, and even more now that I know what it means to you.” But then she paused for a moment; something Persephone had said didn’t quite fit. “‘Torn from her rightful family’, though—I thought your uncle was the only family you had left?”
“My only blood family,” Persephone said. “But I had a godmother—a close friend of my parents. Their will called for her to take me in, but Albert sued for custody and won. ‘An avowed lesbian cannot be regarded as a suitable guardian for a young man of Mr. Chase’s stature,’ the judge said.”
“A judge said that? In, what, 2015 or something?” Persephone nodded. “That’s so fucked! I can’t believe it wasn’t in the news.”
“Everything was sealed,” Persephone said, “‘for the privacy of the family.’ Very convenient for Uncle Albert.” She shook her head. “In any case, I hoped my godmother would try to get in contact again once I reached majority, but she never reached out to me or even responded to my messages. I…I guess she forgot about me,” she finished sadly.
Summer hated that any of her girls had to experience lonely transitions. But to hear that Persephone nearly had support, but the adults around her snatched it away? It was too cruel.
“I’m sorry,” Summer said, squeezing her hand lightly. “She should be here now. But I am, and I’ll stay with you for as long as you need me.”
Persephone bit her lip. “Promise?” she said, in a small but hopeful voice.
“Promise,” Summer answered. “Together, remember?”
“Together,” Persephone agreed, and she squeezed Summer’s hand tight.
* * *
Summer had only just kicked off her shoes when Persephone spoke up. “I’ll take the couch,” she said.
“To sleep on? I have a bed, you know,” Summer said.
“I don’t want to kick you out of your own bed, though,” Persephone said.
There it was. Time to push her a little.
Summer took her hands. “Persephone, you’re a girl, right?”
“Right...?”
“Girls don’t need to tiptoe around each other’s bodies,” Summer told her. “You can share a bed with another girl, and nobody will think anything of it.” Summer let go of one hand and tugged Persephone towards the bedroom with the other.
“But...but I have—um, and you have—“
“You have nothing I didn’t have eleven years ago,” Summer reminded her gently, “and I have nothing you might not choose to have a few years from now. It’s fine.”
“I...right,” Persephone said. “I sort of forget that sometimes. But also…like, I’m, y’know, gay, and um…”
“Sweetie,” Summer replied, “I’ve shared a bed with a woman I would’ve married if she’d asked, and I didn’t ravish her even a little bit. That ‘predatory lesbian’ feeling is just internalized homophobia. Something we all have to get over.”
“Oh,” Persephone said. Then she squeaked as Summer turned away from her and peeled her sweater and cami off, tossing them in the direction of a laundry hamper.
Summer looked over her shoulder at Persephone. “Changing, too,” she said, then she leaned down to extract a sleep shirt from a drawer. “Girls change clothes in front of each other. It’s so normal that cis women think it’s weird if you’re not comfortable with it. Not, like, offensive or an immediate clocking, but they wonder what’s going on.”
She reached back behind her and undid her bra with a sigh of relief; she still faced away from Persephone, though, because her goal was to notmake this a sex thing. Instead, she pulled on the sleep shirt before turning to face her again.
“So as long as we’re doing these sleepovers, I’ll be helping you get over these hang-ups. Alright?”
Persephone shook off the deer-in-headlights expression she’d been wearing. “I…um…that is…fine,” she sputtered.
“Good.” Summer turned away, dug through the drawer she’d set aside for Persephone’s small but growing wardrobe, and extracted a set of pajamas that she then tossed to the other girl. They were pink and covered in drawings of French cats: cats drinking wine, cats wearing scarves and berets, cats pawing at wheels of cheese, cats spraying perfume bottles, cats in chef hats holding croissants. “Then you should get ready for bed.”
A few minutes later, with clothes changed and teeth brushed, they both climbed into bed. But Summer glanced over and had to stifle her giggles: Persephone was on her side, facing away from Summer, as close to the edge of the bed as possible. “Hun, you’re gonna fall off the bed like that. Scoot over—there’s plenty of room.”
Persephone hesitantly obeyed. “I just…I don’t want to, y’know. Touch you by accident in the night.”
Summer shrugged. “If your hands somehow end up somewhere I don’t want them, I’ll move them; I won’t take it as intentional. And if we just end up moving closer in the night? Honestly, ‘good morning’ cuddles are a bonus, not a downside. Alright?”
“Alright,” Persephone said, and she relaxed a little, shifted into a more comfortable position as Summer turned out the light. But after a moment, she asked “Summer?”
“Yes, Persephone?”
“Can I…can I ask you something very personal?”
“Of course, though I might not answer.”
“That’s okay. What...” Persephone paused for a moment. “What’s it like to have a...y’know...a…”
Summer rolled onto her side. “Sweetheart, a girl’s vagina is as much a part of her body as her elbow. It’s okay for you to say the word. Try it.”
“...fine.” Persephone took a breath. “What’s it like to have a…a vagina?”
“Good girl,” she said, smiling in the darkness. “And the answer is…well, it feels a lot like having an elbow. My vagina is just a part of me, like any other. It’s hard to imagine myself without it anymore; sometimes I have to remind myself that I didn’t always have it. Certainly wasn’t the case with the old equipment.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. By the time I got rid of that, I couldn’t stand having it.” This wasn’t a lie; as Summer began to think of herself as a girl, the remaining incongruities had become more and more dysphoric. What would have been unthinkable in January 2013 had become absolutely necessary only a year later. It was one of many reasons Summer thought of herself as trans.
“Oh. Um, thanks for telling me.”
“Of course.”
Another moment of silence before Persephone spoke again. “Summer?”
“Yes, Persephone?”
“Thank you. For-for everything today, and everything you’ve done. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
And hopefully, Summer thought, you never will. “You’re welcome,” she said aloud. “You remember what I told you about gratitude?”
“To repay you by helping another girl someday,” Persephone said. “I won’t forget.” Persephone settled in a little more, and a moment later, she was fast asleep.
Summer listened to the other girl’s breathing, the rhythmic sound beginning to lull her to sleep. She might not have Persephone’s encyclopedic knowledge of Sappho, but she did remember a few favorites. May you sleep on the breast of your delicate friend, she thought with a soft smile.
* * *
Persephone awoke to the muted howl of an ambulance siren. It wasn’t that loud this far above the street, but she was a bit sensitive to that kind of sound, being unaccustomed to sleeping in a city as large and busy as Edinburgh.
Nor was she accustomed to sleeping on a pillow as warm as the one beneath her cheek. Probably because it wasn’t a pillow. It was a girl—a girl who still smelled faintly of flowers, even all these hours after she’d applied the perfume.
Persephone considered moving away, but she could feel Summer’s arm around her; she was tucked beneath the taller girl’s arm, and she doubted she could get out without waking her.
Only the barest hint of light peeked around the curtains; it was still far too early to wake. There was really nothing Persephone could do except lie there in her crush’s arms, enjoying the warmth welling in her own chest.
So that she did until she fell asleep once more.
* * *