Cam Girl

by Leah Raeder

  A large Buck knife with gold caps and a woodgrain handle.

  I stopped moving. Brandt didn’t notice for a few seconds. By the time he came back, I’d taken the knife and returned to the boxes.

  “Forget something?” he said.

  I smiled, the sultry smile I used on Ellis to get her to do what I wanted.

  I cut into a random box and pretended to set the knife aside. It slid into my coat pocket.

  My mouth was saying something about a favorite hoodie, mocking Ellis and her creature comforts, but my mind was playing a memory of wood shavings in the recycling bin downstairs.

  I stood too fast, tried to brush past Brandt, but he caught my elbow.

  I looked at the hand on me, his long, slender fingers. Thinner than Max’s. Refined, elegant bones. Almost feminine, like Ellis’s.

  His eyes followed mine. Then our gazes rose, locked.

  “Is everything okay?” he said.

  where did you go?

  is everything okay?

  I slapped a big fake smile on my face like I did every day, as a cam girl, as a barista, as anything, because women are taught to smile, that smiling means men are less likely to hurt us.

  “Everything’s fine, Brandt.”

  I shrugged him off and walked to the stairs. As soon as I passed him my hand dipped into my pocket, gripping the knife.

  He was slower than me. Bad knee. I’d pulled my boots on by the time he caught up.

  someone i know used to be a star athlete.

  golden boy. bright future.

  “Leaving already?”

  “Don’t want to keep Ellis waiting.”

  “We’re still having Christmas here, right?”

  He said it in such an unassuming tone that I paused to glance at him. “Sure. Why wouldn’t we?”

  “No reason. I’m really looking forward to it.”

  He sounded utterly sincere.

  Like Blue had.

  “I’ll see you later,” I said.

  I dashed down the steps and was nearly out of sight when instinct struck like lightning.

  I turned around. Climbed silently back up the steps, avoiding the boards that creaked. Pressed my face to the door pane.

  He stood in the hall, thumbing his phone.

  My finger was pressing the bell before I realized what I was doing.

  Brandt opened the door, eyebrows raised. “Forget something again?”

  “I’m such an idiot. I didn’t charge my phone last night.” I gave him that seductive smile. “Can I borrow yours a sec?”

  I was taking it from his hand before he could agree.

  I flicked rapidly through the recently used apps. The last thing he’d done was send a text to Ellis.

  She was here. She knows.

  I opened the dialer and tapped Ellis’s number, still smiling at Brandt. He watched me, not blinking.

  “What did you tell her?”

  The first words out of Ellis’s mouth.

  I pulled the phone away from my face and hit END CALL.

  “Voice mail,” I said.

  My heart was beating so hard I could swear the air shook. I handed Brandt’s phone back.

  “Vada—”

  “Talk soon,” I said, whirling around. “See you.”

  As soon as I was out of sight of the house, I ran.

  * * *

  I couldn’t sit still on the ferry. I paced the top deck, melting a trail of slush through the snow. My mind couldn’t settle on a thought, either. Images flickered, unprocessed. The knife in his hand. His cold green eyes. His mangled arm, scarred face.

  this will change things between us.

  So afraid of meeting me. Of showing me his face, his body.

  I called Frankie on my very well charged phone. She was waiting to pick me up at the landing.

  “Want to tell me what’s going on?” she said when I slid into the passenger seat of her SUV.

  “Is Ellis at the house?”

  “She went out.” Frankie frowned. “I need to chat, but she won’t answer her phone. What’s wrong?”

  A fleece of snow layered the windshield between wiper strokes, a constant erasure and redrawing of the world.

  “Frankie, I need to ask you a favor.”

  She glanced at me over her sunglasses. “Yeah?”

  “Can you trace some IPs from a certain client?”

  “Is this about the bug?”

  “No,” I said, then turned to her and said, slower, “Wait, what about the bug?”

  “Do you think you’ve been compromised?”

  “Compromised how?”

  “Security-wise.”

  “I’m not sure. What exactly does the bug do?”

  She tsked, like my mother. “Didn’t Ellis tell you?”

  Of course not.

  “It opened some loopholes in our security protocols. Some cammer safety settings were temporarily disabled.”

  Even though I knew, I said, “Like region bans?”

  “Mm-hmm. It’s fixed now. But I can pull IP logs for you. Has someone been harassing you?”

  I looked out the window, into the snow.

  “Morgan?”

  “No. It’s fine.” I smiled. “Probably just being paranoid.”

  At the house I went straight to my room. Blood throbbed in my head as I kicked open my door, half expecting to see her. But the attic was empty.

  I threw my bag onto the bed and flipped open my laptop. Plugged the external drive in.

  it’ll change things.

  You were right, Blue.

  Ellis had partitioned the drive into two volumes: RYAN and SKYLAR. I clicked the latter.

  It was copied verbatim from the original. I navigated through system folders, looking for something personal.

  PICTURES.

  My heart hung in my throat. There was a chance these photos would be Ellis. Some weird connection, some—

  Folder after folder, all filled with the same girl: blond, skinny, pretty. I clicked through them rapidly.

  Skylar was just some girl. Some random girl.

  Why hide her? Why did it matter?

  I scanned them again, sharper. High-res photos. Professional DSLR. I recognized these places. The forest and the shore. His wood-paneled bedroom, the band posters. Peaks Island. Ryan had taken these.

  Your hand sees this. But your eyes see something different.

  Stop seeing with your eyes, Vada.

  Skylar was pretty, though she wore heavy makeup. Extremely skinny. Skirts, combat boots, beanies. Studded chokers and bracelets. Ryan wasn’t in any of the pics with her.

  Something made me go back to a certain photo.

  Her arms were bare. Light fell at just the right angle to reveal dozens of hash mark scars.

  there’s a bomb inside me, waiting to explode

  “Oh my god,” I said aloud.

  I stood up. Walked from one end of the room to the other in a gray haze.

  Took out my phone.

  Ellis wouldn’t answer.

  I kept moving, touching things, trying to distill order from the chaos in me. I could never do it without her. She grounded me, centered me. My anchor. My everything.

  I walked to the clothes rack, slowly.

  On the shelf above the bar, I’d tucked the box of animals beneath a pile of old T-shirts.

  But now, like the missing envelope, the box was gone, too.

  * * *

  One pair of footprints led up the snowy steps to the old oak tree house.

  I followed them, stepping inside the soles. The cabin was dusky blue, the afternoon light already dying. Snow swirled in when I opened the door.

  She sat hunched on the floor against the wall, knees up, head down, facing the light.

  “Ellis,” I whispered.

  Her head lifted partway, hair tumbling into her eyes.

  I shut the door. Walked to the wall across from her and leaned on it. Hands behind my back, my tailbone holding them down. Lest I do something unkind
with them.

  “You’re angry,” she said, her voice hoarse.

  “Yes. About so many things.”

  “Do you want to hurt me?” She finally looked up. Red-eyed, her lips swollen. “I’ll let you.”

  “I don’t want to touch you.”

  Ellis flinched as if I’d struck her.

  I took a step forward. “Give me the autopsy.”

  She reached into her coat, held the envelope out.

  Ryan Francis Vandermeer.

  I scanned through a litany of horrific injuries. Blunt force cranial trauma. Contusions, abrasions, bone fractures. I’d seen these words on my charts last year. Amazing, all the ways you could break a body and glue it back together, stronger than ever.

  But not this one.

  Scarring of the arms and legs, unrelated to cause of death.

  Medications: spironolactone, estradiol, progesterone (for treatment of gender identity disorder).

  Sex: F (transitioning from M).

  The paper trembled in my hand, matching my pulse.

  “Ryan was Skylar,” I said. “Skylar was transgender.”

  Ellis didn’t say anything.

  It all clicked.

  Rejected by the military because they didn’t allow trans people to enlist. Beaten for going to winter formal in a dress. Cutting and drinking to deal with the pain. Max clinging to memories of a son. Let me keep my memories, at least.

  How inexpressibly sad that the name on the autopsy was masculine. She didn’t even get to die as herself. Skylar hadn’t officially changed her name.

  Like Ellis.

  I knelt beside her, not quite looking at her face. Set the paper to one side and reached into my coat pocket. When Ellis saw the knife she startled, pulled away, but I seized her arm and wrenched her palm toward me.

  “Give me the box,” I said.

  My voice was guttural, unfamiliar.

  She withdrew it from her coat. I knocked the lid off. Pressed the wooden figurines into her hand, the knife into the other. I gripped her wrists, shaking so hard she trembled, too.

  These were the hands that fit. The photo, the bruises in my heart. The same hands I’d drawn a thousand times yet had somehow not recognized when I thought they were a man’s. Blue’s hands.

  We looked at each other.

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  I rocked back on my heels, jumped to my feet. I meant to walk right out the door but when I reached it my knuckles hit a glass pane and went straight through. I pulled out and tried again, but all I did was smash another.

  “Please stop,” Ellis said.

  My hand burned, tingling, dripping blood. I smeared it on my coat.

  Red and Blue.

  The same person.

  In the ancient past, there was no separate word for blue. It was just an inflection of red.

  I closed my eyes for a moment. Heat built there, an inferno, but of water. “Why, Ellis. Why did you do it.”

  “Because it’s who I am.”

  I turned partway, feeling nastiness twist across my face. “You’re some imaginary fucking guy who catfished me?”

  “I think I’m like Skylar.”

  My entire body cringed.

  “What the fuck are you saying?”

  “I don’t know a clearer way to say it.”

  “You’re not this fucking man you were pretending to be.”

  “I wasn’t pretending. I am him. I am Blue.”

  “You asshole.” My hand was raw. I wrapped the fist in my sleeve. “All this time. Gaslighting me. Pretending to be jealous of yourself. What the fuck, Ellis?”

  Her head lowered, half cowering. She was crying. “I don’t know. I felt like two different people sometimes.”

  “You planted that bug in the code. That’s how Max got through. You planted it to give yourself full access to me.” I laughed. “Sergio never existed, did he? God, that night you walked in on my chat with ‘Blue,’ tricking me into thinking it couldn’t be you. How’d you do it?”

  “It was a macro. I knew how you’d react when I walked in.”

  “Where’d the money come from?”

  “My mother.”

  “You devious little bitch.” Another flinch. “You never needed the job, you just needed access to me. You are so fucked-up, Ellis. You talked about getting hard. About your fucking dick. About coming in your fist and imagining it was me.” Now I couldn’t look at her. I stared at the red dots spattering my boots. “I believed you. I fantasized about you as a man. You messed with my head. This is so fucked-up.”

  “It wasn’t like that. It was real to me.”

  I laughed again, viciously. “News flash. In real life, I’m a girl. I never lied about it. But in real life, you’re not a man. You don’t have a fucking dick.”

  “That’s what makes someone a man?”

  “I can’t believe I’m saying this. This is the most insane conversation. Anatomically, yeah, that makes you a man.”

  “No, that makes you male. How you feel inside is what makes you a man. Your body doesn’t define you. If your hand doesn’t work anymore, you’re still an artist. If I’m born with two X chromosomes, I’m still not a girl.”

  “Stop with the fucking gender politics. The point is you catfished me. Nothing was real.”

  “It felt real to me. It felt real to you, too.”

  “Want to know what real is?” I lunged at her, dropped to my knees. Shoved my lacerated hand at her chest. “This. Flesh and blood. Not online bullshit. Not catfishing, fucking with my head. Not inventing a person who does not fucking exist.”

  “He does exist. I’m right in front of you, Vada.”

  I shoved her away, pushing myself back at the same time. And then sat there on the floor, crying.

  God, fuck. This was happening.

  “You liar,” I said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You broke my fucking heart, Blue. And you’re breaking it again right now.”

  “Vada, I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you. I was scared.”

  I spoke to the space beside her, unable to face her full-on. “You were scared? You? The one hiding behind a keyboard, spinning out fucking fairy tales? I bared my heart to you. I built my life around you. And the whole time you’ve been lying to me, hiding who you really are.”

  “You could barely stand me as a girl. Can you blame me for hiding it?” She sniffled. “I tried to show you, in Bar Harbor. To see how you’d react to me as . . . a guy. I wasn’t trying to hurt you, I was just afraid. Vada, will you look at me, please? I didn’t change into some monster. It’s me. Ellis.”

  The little wooden figures had fallen to the floor. Me, and her, and him.

  I wanted to go somewhere and curl into a very small ball and cry till the world disappeared.

  “I don’t know who you are,” I said hollowly. “And I don’t think I want to anymore.”

  Ellis gave a miserable cry and covered her mouth, muffling it.

  I had to get the fuck out of here before I lost my mind. I yanked the knife away from her, looked at the little figures.

  “Don’t go,” she said.

  don’t go, Blue had said.

  I could not process this.

  Ellis called my name. The door banged. Cold and snow in my face, soothing. The sting of air in open wounds. My teeth ached. I was grimacing, grinding them as hard as I could. I wished I could break my head open and let the cold inside me. Quench this feverish despair. Like Skylar.

  How could Ellis have done this to me? How could she?

  She? Was that even the right word?

  My mind was on fire.

  I stumbled down into the woods, heading toward the shore.

  There was only one person who had any idea what this felt like. And I needed to tell him something.

  Something I’d been trying to tell him—and myself—for a long time.

  —13—

  Peaks Island lay quiet and black on the horizon. Snow drifted from a charcoal sk
y, a billion tiny stars streaking into the ocean. The spray churning up beneath the prow flayed my skin, sharp as pins and brutally cold, and part of me wanted to drop the oars and hurl myself into the water. Let the salt eat away all the parts of me that could feel, leave my skeleton to grow coral and moss.

  The shoreline was encrusted with ice and I ran the boat at it heedlessly, heard the hull screech and tear, a sound like two vehicles meeting, shredding each other. I latched the oars and leaped into the shallows, soaking my legs to the thigh.

  Everything in my fucking life came down to that night a year ago. When I lost everything.

  And it was all my fault.

  I crashed through snow-thick woods, ran skidding over black ice on the road. Up the hill to the lonely house, only to sink to my knees in a snowbank, sucking air. I grasped soft white handfuls of oblivion.

  Sharp crystals pierced the snow beneath my face. It took a second to recognize my own tears, freezing.

  God, Ellis, why.

  Not because of what she was. In my heart, I already knew. Her androgyny. Her name. The way I’d never called her a girl except when I thought of our future, or when I wanted to hurt her. It wasn’t so much a shock as it was stepping back from the painting, seeing all the brushstrokes coalesce into a clear image. But she lied. To the one person on earth she should have told. Manipulated me, deceived me to experiment with her identity without my knowledge or consent, made me vulnerable, took advantage of my naivete. Screwed my head up. Put my heart in danger while she stayed safe behind the keyboard.

  That was it. I would have loved her no matter what, including this part of her, if only she’d told me the truth.

  I got up. Snow rushed from my clothes, the shedding of some old self.

  The house was dark and still, same as yesterday. I stood on the porch for a moment and then tried the door. Unlocked.

  “Max,” I called.

  My shoes left wet prints, staining this dry, dead place. Everything looked different now. Photos of Skylar in her boy costume, standing on a pier with Max, the two of them hoisting a huge striped bass that licked up the sun. Skylar swinging a bat, smashing a baseball like a pale meteor into the aching blue beyond. Stereotypical boy stuff.

  Max had always known her as a son. How do you reconcile losing someone twice—as the person you thought you knew, and the person they really were inside?