Stepping outside the doors of the school I read a text from Shawn asking to meet at his house. Well, that was a little unusual but it’s not like I wasn’t dressed for the occasion. I’m always dressed for the occasion. I stood outside for a moment checking e-mails and finally, brought up the GAT tracker app that I’d gotten right after being promoted from pledge status last year. Our tracker app was a piece of custom software that we could use to track the GPS on eachother’s phones. A little invasive? Probably, but it came in handy a lot. I say invasive because it didn’t just track movement, it tracked the places you had stopped and for how long. Audrey had no idea what we’d secretly installed it on her phone and were tracking her every move, and that was probable insanely unethical. Still, it saved us from asking her where she was every minute of the day to make sure Mike hadn’t dragged her off to some abandoned warehouse, or another public bathroom.

On the map I could see Aleah on the practice field – she was probably doing her cheerleading stuff. Isabella was at the house, and Audrey was apparently in her dorm, probably playing that stupid Pantheon game. I tapped on her dot to pull up her weekly activity and sorted it by ‘food’. Well, that bitch, she’d been to exactly one restaurant this week and I knew she had no food in her dorm. For a normal person you could probably just write that off but for her it was a little more serious. Ever since we’d met her, we’d noticed that she was thin, stupidly thin. It didn’t take Aleah more than two seconds to figure out that she was starving herself, either that or the sunken eyes and her inability to offer physical resistance was the direct result of a LOT of meth. Either way, it was a problem, so we’d tried to encourage her to eat, a lot. Well, she’d eat on Friday. I was going to make sure of it. So would Aleah. I stopped and wondered why I even cared if she was healthy.

Knowing that she was at least at home, or at least her phone was, you can only imagine how shocked I was when I turned around and saw her standing there, with Chastity, her girlfriend. I literally nearly crapped myself.

“Oh, hey!” Chastity said to me, walking up to me with a smile. Audrey was now standing behind with her head pointed toward the ground. Probably blushing, or at least developing a low grade fever.

“Oh, wow, hi Chastity!” I blurted out. “It’s been a while!”

“Yeah it has,” She admitted. “Work and class have been taking up all my time.”

“Totally,” I nodded. “My communications class is getting so complicated.”

“Yeah?” She said. “How’s that going for you?”

“Pretty good, I think I’m passing this semester, so far.”

“That’s great to hear! Oh, this is my boyfriend, Todd, you two haven’t met,” She said, reaching back and pulling Audrey up to stand beside her. Audrey’s eyes darted away for a moment, then returned to meet mine.

“…Hi,” She said nervously.

“Hi Todd, I’m Tiffany,” I reached my hand out, she nervously took it and waited for me to shake. “So how long have you been together?”
“Oh um…three years since last fall!” Chastity said excitedly. “I think I talked about him a few times?”

I nodded.

“Yeah a few times, but you never introduced us!”

“Hah, sorry about that,” Chastity said almost apologetically. “We really need to catch up sometime!”

“Actually, yeah,” I agreed, nodding. “You know, you should drop by the house on Friday, we could have dinner and catch up.”

“Oh that would be amazing!” She smiled.

“Yeah and…why don’t you bring Todd with you?” I suggested. This wasn’t the way I’d wanted to ask her, but it worked, right?

“I don’t know,” She laughed. “I think Todd would rather sit at home playing games.”

“Yeah,” Audrey said quietly. “I do have a raid on Pantheon Friday-“

“I insist,” I said firmly. “And I won’t take no for an answer, both of you.”

Chastity laughed.

“Well alright,” She said. “We’ll be there, both of us.”

“Friday at 7 then?” I suggested.

“Yeah, totally, we’ll see you there!”

I watched them walk away, Audrey glanced back at me once. That was easy. I started to walk toward the parking lot, keys in hand when I heard Julia’s voice behind me.

“Cute couple, right?” She said. I jumped a bit, but then turned to face her. As always she was dressed in plain clothes but you could sense that air of authority about her. Today her badge was pretty visible on her belt; guess she was actually on duty.

“Yeah, cute,” I shrugged. “I just invited them to dinner at the Gamma house on Friday, you want to come too?”

“I’m afraid I’ve got a full plate for the next two weeks,” She shook her head. “But I would like to talk to you about that bruise on your arm. Why didn’t you come in?”

“No witnesses,” I shrugged. “What could you have done?”

“Taken a report,” She said. “The more we have on him, the better.”

“What did that do last time?” I demanded. “He’s still out running free, isn’t he?”

“There’s such a thing as due process,” She said to me with a very serious look on her face. “You wouldn’t like it if we could just go out and arrest people, trust me.”

She was referring of course to that stupid car accident last year. I’d bumped into another car and just driven off. They’d never proven it was me, but she knew.

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Come down to the station tomorrow,” She said. “Make a statement, let’s get it on record.”

“Who told you?”

“Aleah sent me the picture,” She explained. “Look it’s not going to get him arrested, but it’s a start, okay?”

“Yeah meanwhile…”

“How is Audrey?” She asked. “I haven’t heard from her, or seen her.”

“Well, you know,” I said dismissively. “She hangs out in her dorm a lot, comes over to work at the house.”

“Work?”

“Yeah we hired her to mow the grass and stuff, the maintenance position.”

“What happened to the other guy?”

“He just quit for some reason,” I shrugged. “People are unreliable, what can I say?”

“And you’re keeping an eye on her?”

“Yeah, we have someone with her all the time during the day. We don’t let her leave her dorm alone.”

“Would almost be safer to have her pledge to Delta, then she’d have the sorority backing her.”

“That’s true, yeah,” I nodded. “But we can’t take new pledges until next year and she’d have to be out…a lot further out than she is now.”

“Maybe you should give her a little push?” Julia suggested.

“Julia, there are a lot of trans people out there, we can’t save them all.”

Julia shifted weight to her other foot and put a hand on her hip. With her other hand she brushed her red hair aside.

“Do you remember what I told you? That night after you let her leave your house?”

“I remember.”

“I told you that if you guys actively helped her transition, instead of just giving her the number for a support group or something, then you would accept the consequences. This is a consequence.”

“You know when you said that I thought you were talking about hormones, or my clothes getting stretched out.”

“It’s called an unforeseen consequence, Tiffany,” She was getting impatient. So was I.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Be at the station, on Saturday, make sure you don’t forget.”