“I want to ask you a very simple question, and you’re going to give me a straight answer, well, two questions,” Leina nodded as she pressed a button on the control panel, increasing the incline of the treadmill. Around us, the sound of pounding feet, dropped weights, and the occasional grunt resonated throughout the gym. Leina towered over us on her treadmill, dressed in a gray mid-riff tank top and a pair of skin tight black leggings. “Why are you asking this?”

“Well,” Tiffany said, stumbling over her words a bit. “I mean, Audrey…she doesn’t always listen to us and-“

“Is she supposed to listen to you?” Leina asked us, her voice filled with mock confusion. Tiffany sighed and tried to restart her line of dialogue.

“It’s…it’s kind of important, I’ve looked at…Theta Kappa’s list of…goals, and they want to this morality amendment before the school board. They want to make it so…you know, you have to be the one…gender to get into the sorority or uh..fraternity-“ Before Tiffany could finish speaking, Leina abruptly dismounted the treadmill and pushed past us, making her way across the floor and toward a set of weights.

“So you’re coming to me,” Leina said, as she began to perform a set of lunges, a ten pound weight in each hand. “Because she’s acting like the little brat you turned her into, and you want me to make her listen to you? That’s kind of pathetic, Aleah. You’re the sorority president. I’m not an expert on sororities, but she’s a pledge, you’re the president, you should kind of have her in your pocket.”

“Look, you know as well as I do that she’s…stubborn,” I sighed and stepped around Leina, leaning up against a stack of weights as she continued to perform her lunges. “Like, maybe we made the monster but there’s no way she wasn’t always stubborn.”

“Not wrong, but like I said,” Leina cleaned the weights and put them back on the rack, narrowly missing my fingers as she dropped them into their slots. “She’s taking her cues from YOU. Not anyone else, YOU. If I’d know she was trans before I never would have let her get into the whole Greek thing, I would have led by example and not turned her into a raving lunatic-“

“Okay bitch,” I interrupted her as I watched her grab an exercise mat off the wall and begin a series of stretches. “If you think we’re THIS much of a problem then WHY don’t you just pull the plug on this. She LISTENS to you. You could just tell her to quit and she’d be eating out of your hand. Then you could turn her into the ‘sister’ you want her to be.”
“Oh no, no no no,” Leina suddenly laughed as she assumed a planking position on the mat. “See that might work for you, then you’d be absolved of all responsibility. Me? I have class, I have extracurricular, most importantly I have SOME free time that I’d really like to keep. Teaching Audrey how to be a respectable young girl? That’s not on my radar right now. Deal with it.”

“Can you at least get her to listen to us?” I said, fully exasperated.

“Maybe you should try spanking her some more,” Leina suggested. I couldn’t tell if she was serious. “She was pretty calm for a few days after that.”

“I…Leina I can’t spank her every time she steps out of line.”

“Did you try candy?”

“What?”

“I mean did you try giving her candy every time she behaves? Look up Pavlov’s dog. Wait, you can read, right?”

I glared at her, though from her position on the floor it was doubtful that she could even see me, let alone my facial expressions.

“Bitch, I can read,” I growled.

“So tell me, what’s your plan, exactly? How are you going to put a stop to this Theta Kappa stuff? Audrey hasn’t quite caught on yet, but she will, I guarantee it. Then what?”

“Maybe she should catch on,” I muttered. “Then maybe she could see how serious this is.”

Leina suddenly leapt to her feet and turned to look at me.

“Okay look, Aleah,” She shook her head, face dripping with sweat as she spoke to me. “I know what you’re doing. You’re using Audrey to make your house look diverse and accepting. You’re going to use her to put an end to Theta Kappa because it makes YOU look good. You’re doing this for all the wrong reasons.”

“Do…you not care that Audrey will actually suffer if Theta Kappa gets their way?”

“It’s not the end of the world if Theta Kappa wins,” Leina said coldly. “Not even a little. You know what’ll happen? I’ll get my parents involved and we’ll move Audrey far, far away. Maybe send her back home for a while, find a college that’s a little more accepting. I mean jeez, North Carolina’s a terrible place to be a trans woman. We could ship her off to Michigan or maybe a nice school in California. Somewhere she’ll be safe. I’m not worried.”

“But what about the thing that happened in the bathroom, with Mike?”

Leina smiled at me but I could swear there was something much darker behind it, something I couldn’t place. For a brief moment I was literally afraid of her.

“Oh honey,” She said evenly with a hint of laughter in her voice. “Do you honestly, truly, really think that I’d let anything like that happen to her again? Audrey is my little sister and I’m going to do EVERYTHING in my power to protect her. And believe me, Aleah, I have a LOT of power. If anyone so much as touches a hair on her head I’ll bring down holy hellfire on the person that hurt her and then I’ll take her away from here. I’ll take her so far that none of you will ever see her again. I’m letting her have this college experience because she’s a young woman who needs some freedom. At the same time she’s a little girl whose just learning about the world. I’m not going to shelter her if I don’t have to but take me at my world when I say there will be blood if harm comes to her.”

She was serious, I could see it in her eyes. I shivered and stepped away, slowly at first and then bit my lower lip as I turned and made my way to the door. There was nothing more to be gained from talking to her and I felt her gaze on my back the entire way.

“Have a nice day!” The guy at the counter said as I blew by and practically ran toward the parking lot. Stepping down from the curb I made my way past a few cars and finally found my own parked comfortably between a blue Mercury Milan and a yellow bug.

“Yo, Aleah!” I heard the familiar sound of Shawn Derringer’s voice from a few cars over. I looked up to see him waving and offered him a pathetic half smile. I walked away from my car and met him halfway. “You look great.”

“Thanks, I just threw this together,” I sheepishly indicated my outfit.

“Well keep it up,” He laughed. “How have you been? It’s been forever since we talked.”

“You mean yesterday?” I laughed. “But yeah it feels like it’s been an entire year.”

“More like a year and six months,” Shawn joked. “I wonder why that is?”

“It’s almost like we’re characters in a story that the author forgot and just left sitting around?” I shrugged. “Almost like the author was going through some serious emotional issues and lashed out at everyone around them, slipped into an alcoholic depression and wrote some weird ass dystopian fiction instead of dealing with us. What a bitch, were the important ones.”

“Oh my god,” Shawn suddenly sighed and looked up toward the sky. “Hey, Audrissa, stop venting in the dialogue and just write the god damn story, okay?”

“Uh…” I looked around and then looked upward. “Who…literally who are you talking to?”

“What? No one,” Shawn shook his head. “So how’s the whole Audrey thing going?”

“Not so good,” I admitted. “You’ve heard about the whole Theta Kappa thing, yeah?”

“I saw the school paper,” Shawn admitted. “Isn’t a whole lot to be done about it at this point. I mean if Audrey needs protection we can bring her over to DAM. It’s a fraternity but we can give her a private room-“

“You can’t protect her, it’s not like Greek organizations are like…military.”

“True but-“

“We need to put a good spin on the whole thing and I need your help. I want to make Audrey the face of Gamma Alpha Tau. Can your dad get us a TV spot for some commercials?”

“What are you thinking?” Shawn eyed me curiously. “Like a PR campaign?”

“PR would be a good start,” I nodded “We need to show everyone on campus that she’s just a regular girl, that she has enjoys the same thing, has the same goals, same fear, same likes as everyone else. They need to not be scared of her.”

“But she’s not the only trans girl on campus,” Shawn told me. “What about that Kari girl? The one in Omega? Maybe you can coordinate something.”

“We can work on all of that,” I assured him. “But first we really need to work on getting a TV spot.”

“You’re going to need to do a lot more than that,” He took a quick look at his phone before putting it away. “What you’re doing affects the entire Greek council. You need to inform Panhellenic, I need to call the council together.”

“How long do you think that’s going to take?”

“We only meet like once a month,” He shook his head. “I can call an emergency meeting, given the circumstances.”

“Fine, do it. Oh, and Shawn? How big is your back seat?”