I sat in the GAT living room early the next morning. Aleah had not only called me, she had sent Isabella to pick me up. The entire ride had gone by in complete silence. The other day, she’d done my makeup and chatted away, but now she was rigid, anxious. She’d said nothing as we pulled up in front of the house and stepped out of the car, nothing at all. I’d followed her to the house and up the steps, looking around nervously for signs of Mike. When we stepped inside the house, there were more GAT sisters than I remembered. I knew this was a big house, but there were at least thirty girls in here. Some of them were sitting on the sectional couch, others stood behind it. They all stared at me, some of them looked angry, others simply looked sad. I felt broken. I knew I was walking with a limp and my chest hurt with every single breath that I brought into my lungs. Aleah had instructed me to sit on the couch between two women I had never met.

Aleah stared at me in deafening silence for a time, and I didn’t dare say a word. Finally, she sighed and said, “Are you okay?”

I nodded. She stared at me for a bit longer. For the first time I noticed Olivia sitting behind her, staring at me intently, maybe more so than Aleah.

“Here’s the deal,” She said. “When we caught you a few days ago we could have had you arrested and that would have been the end of it. Truthfully? I should have, but I didn’t. I took pity on you. Let me tell you why.”

Aleah paused to gather herself. She had something important to tell me, and for all intents and purposes, I was her captive audience. I was too hurt to force myself up, and there was no way I could have made it out with all these girls here to stop me.

“First and foremost,” She said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You were attacked, that’s an irrefutable fact. It happened. What you’re doing wrong, is not telling us who did it. Like it or not, you’re connected to GAT in a way now, and if you get hurt, or killed, it’s going to make us look bad. You see, Audrey, I had a friend like you once, back in high school, but she never got a chance to transition. Her parents wouldn’t allow it, and now? Now she’s dead. You understand that, right? You’re not her. You can never BE her, but if she were here, she would tell me to help you. She would tell me not to leave you behind. SHE would tell me that your life is worth something. See, Audrey, I’m not helping you, I’m helping myself, and you’re helping me. Yeah, I’m selfish. I’m selfish to the core. I’m going to admit that right here in front of you because I don’t care. I want revenge. I want revenge for all of the years we don’t get to spend together now. All of the laughs, the midnight coffee runs, the hours we could have spent studying, laughing, loving, all of it stolen from me, and her, by her parents. Just because she was like you. You’re not her, but helping you is going to help me get through this.”

She walked briskly toward me and leaned in. In that moment, I was more terrified of her than I had ever been of Tiffany. I truly felt as if she was going to rip me to shreds.

“I’m going to ask you a question once, and you’re going to answer it. You don’t want to find out what happens if you don’t answer it,” Aleah turned and pointed to Olivia. “Was it her boyfriend?”

I was frozen in absolute terror. The seconds seemed to pass by like hours. I didn’t want to answer her. I was afraid, so afraid. My heart pounded inside my chest as Aleah pointed toward Olivia who stared at me in a mix of anticipation and horror. Finally, at long last, I said it, but it barely came out as a whisper.

“Yes.”

In an instant her expression softened. It’s hard to explain, but she almost looked compassionate. I was still terrified of her, but I felt as if I didn’t need to be.

“Stand up,” She said. The two girls beside me stood and helped me to my feet. She stepped toward me, and then two my absolute shock, she embraced me. I felt my fears melt away in an instant and for the first time since the hospital, I felt safe.

“I’m sorry honey,” She said. “I’m sorry I put you through that just now, but we had to know, okay?”

I had no response. I cried into her shoulder. I don’t know how long I stood there with her. Until my legs gave out, at least, and then I found myself back on the couch, staring in stunned silence. Olivia was gone. She’d walked out at some point during that exchange. Julia walked forward, I hadn’t noticed her there before.

“Okay,” Julia said as she pulled up a kitchen chair directly in front of me. She sat there with her notepad out and stared directly into my eyes. “We’re going to talk about Mike.”

“I…I don’t really know him,” I muttered, trying desperately to break eye contact with her and failing. “I just…ran into him.”

“So what the other girls tell me is that you ran into him on the porch here when you came for the party?”

My face reddened. Of course, she knew about the party.

“Yeah he just…tried to get me to leave…”

“You know he doesn’t have the right to do that, right?”

“I mean, I guess…”

“No,” Julia said, snapping her fingers and directing my attention to her, fully. “You are supposed to be here, he doesn’t have the right to tell you to leave, ever. This is important, are you listening?”

“Yeah…”

“You don’t let him, or anyone else intimidate you, period. Most importantly, don’t put yourself in danger. You don’t know these girls from Adam, but they know more about you than you know about yourself, thanks to all the forum posts.”

I hung my head at the mention of the posts. I suddenly started to wish that I’d never heard of the internet, or forums, or GAT.
“If they weren’t obligated to help you before, they are now, because you getting curb stomped? It’s not going to look good for them, not after all this. You do what they tell you, and what I tell you, understand?”

“Yeah.”

She asked me a few more questions, I answered them truthfully, and she left. The girls began to talk amongst themselves, but I didn’t hear a word they said. All I could concentrate on were Aleah’s words: “You’re not her.”. I’d never felt so small as I did in that moment. I was only here because she’d taken pity on me.

Finally, once the room was empty, I managed to rise from the couch and wandered toward the stairs. Resting against the bannister, I heard voices coming from the landing. It was Amelie and Aleah arguing, their voices were heated.

“Your little ‘experiment’ nearly turned into a scandal, Aleah,” Amelie hissed. “You could have just let her get arrested and be done with it. Now what are we supposed to do?”

“Send her home once Mike is out of the way, she can figure things out for herself,” Aleah said.

“Oh no, no, no, no. Then what, she goes and tells everyone that GAT nearly got her killed? No, I’m not risking an investigation. They’ll come in here and start removing people. You know this doesn’t end well.”

“We didn’t almost get her killed! It’s not our fault that Olivia is dating a psychopath!”

“Oh my god, Aleah,” I heard Amelie say in a completely exasperated tone. I could picture her angry hand motions, even though I couldn’t see them from down here. “You knew what he was like, you probably could have figured out what he would do if you’d put some thought into it! But you let this ‘thing’ continue and Audrey could have been found dead in a public toilet. Maybe there weren’t going to be any legal repercussions, but do you know what that could do to the house reputation?”

“What do you want me to do exactly?”

“Help her figure out her transition. She wants it, or she wouldn’t have come back.”

“You know, it’s not my fault Olivia has a psycho boyfriend.”

“Do you really think National is going to see it that way? Are you going to be running that line into the ground when the NPC gets involved? Fix this, Aleah.”

I didn’t want to hear the rest. It was time for me to go. They clearly had things under control and I was a problem. I didn’t want to be a problem. I turned toward the door and began to limp. Walking behind the sectional couch, I was able to use it for support, and finally managed to reach the door. I was about to turn the handle when Aleah’s voice came from the other side of the room.

“I’m going to make it right,” She said. I froze in my tracks, my fingertips just millimeters above the doorknob. “I promise you, I’m going to help you.”

I lowered my hand and pathetically turned around, grabbing the wall for support and nearly falling over.

“I don’t deserve your help,” I told her quietly. “I’m the problem, Aleah. I could have gone about this a million different ways, but I didn’t. I broke into your house, I put on that dress, I did wrong. I did wrong, Aleah, not you. You need to live your life, I need to live mine.”

“Let me tell you what’s wrong,” She said angrily as she strode toward me around the other side of the couch. “What’s wrong is that you felt you had to sneak into a sorority house and try on a stupid dress. What’s wrong is that you have to hide who you are from your best friend. That’s what’s wrong. You’re terrified of people finding out the truth because you’re afraid of what they’ll think of you and you’ve been conditioned to think that way. That’s the saddest thing ever and it makes me sick to my stomach, so why don’t you do me a favor and let me help you, so I can get over my own grief.”

“It’s a little selfish, I totally agree with what you said earlier,” I said to her.

“Yeah, it’s selfish,” Aleah said. “It’s super freaking selfish but look at it this way. You owe me. You owe me a lot. I didn’t get you arrested, I didn’t make fun of you, I accepted you, as you are, so why don’t you just play along with me for a little while longer.”

“I would do it,” Tiffany said. She was apparently standing behind the kitchen counter. “You know how many trans girls would kill to have a house full of sorority girls help with their transition? It’s not like we just take time out of our day to do this crap. We have lives, you know.”

“That was really eloquent, Tiffany,” Aleah shot towards her.

“Yeah, I’m a real wordsmith,” Tiffany agreed.

“Come on,” Aleah said, taking both of my hands in hers. “If nothing else, do it to help yourself. You don’t have to come out to anyone, you can just…come over here, we can show you how to do your makeup, we can even hook you up with some doctors. There are so many things we can help you with.”

She wasn’t wrong; I did need the help, and to be perfectly honest, I knew that if I told her no, I would regret it for the rest of my life, so I nodded, and uttered some form of agreement.

“Okay,” She said. “Then let’s get started.”