Archive of Our Own ^beta

My life goes on. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something terrible to happen to me. Maybe Elliot will take his life back from me. Maybe the Dark Army will hunt me down. Maybe the FBI will arrest me for my crimes.

It never happens. 

I still have breakdowns. Crying in the corner, feeling trapped, feeling alone. But when it’s over, I call Leon, and he tells me all about The Good Place, and after a while I feel human again. I’m not fixed. But now I’m not alone, either.

Leon is the touchstone of my new life. Even when I fall down into the dark place, when I stop answering my phone and I stop talking to Darlene, I still make time to watch TV with Leon, once a week, like clockwork. I’ve never had a best friend before. It’s good.

The Good Place is between seasons right now, so we’re watching Seinfeld again. Seinfeld’s kind of become our thing. Leon brought weed - he always has the good stuff. We get high. We get so high.

As the smoke clouds my mind, I lean against Leon’s shoulder. If I get high enough, touch doesn’t scare me anymore. 

“You’re chilly,” I slur.

Leon chuckles, and takes a sip of his soda. “I’m always chilly, bro. Why you think I wear all these layers?”

I laugh. “I thought it was a fashion thing.”

“Oh, that too, cuz. That too.”

I reach out to toss an arm, loosely, around his shoulders - that’ll keep him warm - but as I do, my hand knocks into his soda, sending it spilling all over my coffee table. “Oh, shit - ”

Fuck. My coffee table is covered in a puddle of Pepsi, and it’s spreading towards the pile of papers on the left corner, concealed under a book about Python techniques. I was working on them before Leon showed up. I grab the book and discard it, and pick up my papers. The edges are wet with Pepsi, and the ink is running. Fuck. Elliot worked so hard on these.

“Oh, shit, cuz, I’m sorry.” Leon is grabbing paper towels, handing some of them to me and wiping the table with the others. “Shouldn’t have put it there.”

“No, it’s my fault, I wasn’t paying attention - ” I peel the top paper off the stack and press the paper towels to it, blotting away the liquid. There’s a faint brown stain, and the paper is warped, but to my relief, the drawing is still mostly intact. I set the drawing aside and start on the next one. 

Leon finishes with the table, and I freeze as he reaches out to pick up one of the drawings. “Wait, no, don’t - ” but he’s already holding the paper up to the light and admiring it. 

“Hey, this is pretty good. You do this?” he asks.

“No,” I say, my face going hot. “They’re Elliot’s.” I’ve already explained to him who I am, that my name is Shay, that I’m not the real Elliot. He doesn’t care. That means a lot to me.

“He’s good at this shit. This him in the drawings too?” Leon holds the drawing up, and my face burns. It’s a drawing of me, in black ink in Elliot’s stark style, wearing a slinky black dress.

“No,” I mutter, putting my hands in the pockets of my hoodie and hunching my shoulders up. “It’s me.” I’m obscurely embarrassed of myself. Leon is the most masculine guy I know. What’s he going to think of all this? And as soon as I become aware that I’m feeling that, I get angry at myself. I don’t have anything to be ashamed of. Who cares what the fuck other guys think? Since when did I give a shit about that? I pull my hands out of my pocket, force my shoulders down, and jutt my jaw, stubbornly.

But Leon just grins and says, “You look good in something that ain’t that hoodie, cuz.” He leafs through the drawings. Me in a long black-and-white gown. Me in a tasseled black crop-top and leopard-print shorts. Me in an off-the-shoulder blue-gray tunic and black tights. Me in a scruffy fur coat and heart sunglasses. “You thinking of branching out, bro? Wearing some color for a change?”

I sigh, crossing my arms around myself. “I don’t know. None of them feel right.” I asked Elliot to help me draw those, to show me what I might look like if I didn’t dress like a guy. To help me understand who I am. If I’m really nonbinary, like my friend Blair. The truth is, I don’t really know what being nonbinary is. I mean, I just learned about it this year. I don’t even know if I’m gay or straight - it’s alway been pretty low on my list of priorities. I’ve been with guys and girls but to be honest, my life is a fucking mess and I haven’t had time for this shit before. But none of these drawings look like me. I don’t want to be a femme fatale or an elegant lady or a disaffected punk. I want to be a blank slate. But you can’t be that if you’re not a man, can you? You’re always . . . something. Men in our society are undefined variables, default values - unquestioned, unseen. Safe. 

“We should go out sometime,” Leon says. “Get you some clothes that ain’t all the same. I can show you the ropes.”

I look back at Elliot’s drawings. "You know about women’s clothes?” I try to imagine Leon in a dress. It’s not that hard, actually. Leon looks comfortable in anything.

“Yeah, cuz. Had two sisters coming up, remember?” Leon says, tilting his head.

“I dunno,” I say. I run my hand through my hair, spasmodically. I struggle to put my thoughts into words. I picture myself wearing a dress, like in the pictures Elliot drew, and the thought scares me. “It’s not that important,” I say. I think about Carla, how important it was to her to have her hormones, her makeup, her identity. I’m not like that. I made it this far, didn’t I? “I don’t need clothing to express myself. They want to sell us our own identities back, make us think we need products to express ourselves. But that’s a lie.”

Leon turns his head to look at me straight on, and he asks me, in that way he has, one of those questions which cut me to the core. “You expressing yourself in a lot of other ways, cuz?”

I look down, my face burning. Leon sees what Tyrell didn’t: that I dress the way I do not because I’m some kind of iconoclast who doesn’t care what people think - but because I do care. Because I crave the complete control over my image that only hiding behind a keyboard can give me. 

There’s a thing people used to say, back in the day: On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. It’s a joke, but it’s also not. Text-based communication strips you of the corporeal, allows you to define your own identity outside of your own body. 

When I was thirteen, I got to talking with other hackers online. We were all noobs, really; not the real thing, just dabbling back then. But one of them was a girl. That was rare on the internet back then, or at least that’s what we told ourselves. She was cool, in a way most of us weren’t. She had real talent, and what’s more, she had what the rest of us didn’t: actual social skills. I looked up to her. 

One day she asked me who I was in RL. Even back then, I knew enough not to answer that question honestly. So I told her my name was Darlene. I still remember how happy she was to meet another girl. I felt guilty for lying to her, but I told myself it was to protect my privacy. I liked the way she talked to me. The other guys in our group were always on edge. Typical hacker paranoia, I guess. There was a sense of competition, every time we talked. Who could hack the biggest target? Who knew the most tricks? Who had been at it the longest? It wasn’t like that with her.

Of course, the anonymity of the internet goes both ways. A couple weeks after I told her I was Darlene, a plane crashed into the Twin Towers, and my new “friend” told me all about how this was the fault of all these immigrants coming in from the Middle East and taking over “our” country.

I replied by infecting her computer with the ILOVEYOU virus, and I never spoke to her again.

That was fifteen years ago. I was a different person then. Literally: It was Elliot who did that, not me, Shay. And since then, I’ve changed the world. 

“Whatcha say, Elli?” Leon says, leaning back against the couch cushions and taking a hit off his joint. “I know a place. Lemme show you around some.”

What was it I told you, right after I found out who I was? Changing the world is about being here, by showing up no matter how many times we get told we don’t belong, by staying true even when we’re shamed into being false. Wouldn’t I be a hypocrite if I let myself turn away from this?

I pick up my joint, and take a hit for courage. Exhaling smoke, I say, “All right. What’s a good time for you?”

Leon picks me up on Friday evening in what I’m choosing to believe is his own car. He launches right into a convoluted theory about what’s going to happen next season on The Good Place. When I get a word in edgewise, I ask, “Where are we going?”

Normally, it would worry me, not knowing where we’re going. But it’s Leon. There aren’t a lot of people in the world I trust, but Leon is right at the top of the list. 

“Going to a friend’s place,” Leon says, vaguely. That tells me exactly nothing. I’ve met Leon’s friends, and they’re the most fucking random group of people you could ever meet. Eccentrics, ex-cons, stoners, hackers, struggling actors, hired assassins - you never know what you’re gonna get with Leon’s friends. 

Leon takes us into Queens, to a little hole-in-the-wall place that says Maria’s Boutique on the storefront. The door is shut, and there’s a sign that says Closed, but Leon pays no notice and raps on the door. After a moment, the door opens, and a Latino man pops his head out. Or is he a man? Maybe he’s like Carla. Or maybe he’s like me. Either way, he’s got his hair grown out long in smooth black waves, and he’s wearing a crop top and a long skirt. 

“Hey, Leon!” he says, grinning. “Come on in.” He leads us into the interior of the shop, which is full of racks and racks of clothes - dresses, skirts, scarves, coats, tights. “I’m off the clock now, so I gotta get home before my better half starts to miss me. Lock up when you’re done, ‘kay? Whatever you want’s on the house - my treat, on account of that favor you did me.”

I realize what’s going on and protest. “I can pay for myself.” I don’t know how much these clothes are, but  even if I don’t have a job right now, I’ve got pretty good savings from AllSafe, the Ecoin hack and, well, the fact that I don’t spend money on anything but healthcare and computer parts. As a precaution, I pick up one of the dresses and peer at the price tag. The number on it makes me blink, but I can afford it. 

“Fifty percent off, then,” the shop owner says. “Discount for a friend - any friend of Leon’s is a friend of mine.” He smiles at me, and I stare awkwardly back, unsure of how to respond. 

“Thanks, Maria,” Leon says, fist-bumping the shop owner. “Tell Kevin and the kids I said hi, ‘kay?”

“Any time,” the shop owner says, smiling. “New clothes on the left, vintage on the right, shoes in the back.”

“Got it,” Leon says, and exchanges a hand-clasp with the shop owner. 

And then Maria is out the door, and I am alone in the store with Leon. I freeze up again, my eyes scanning the racks of clothing, unsure where to start. Why is this so hard? They’re just fucking dresses. Clothing doesn’t have gender. What am I, some kind of fragile, masculinity-obsessed dudebro? I know better than this.

Leon doesn’t seem to have any such concerns. He wanders the rows of racks, and picks up a dress to get a better look at it. “What about this one? This is tight - think it’s in your size too, cuz.” 

It’s a long-sleeved, hooded dress, kind of like an ankle-length hoodie, in bright red-and-black camo. I wince. “Don’t think that’s my style, man.”

“You gotta learn to get out of your comfort zone, cuz,” Leon says, shoving it into my hands. “But okay. What is your style?”

That’s the problem, isn’t it? I don’t have a style, I just have the one outfit. “Let me think,” I say, walking down the rows of racks.

Leon shakes his head. “Sometimes, cuz, I think you do too much of that.”

“What, thinking?” I chuckle.

“Yeah. You can’t get shit done if you’re caught up in your own mind all the time.”

He’s probably right. I shake my head. “I’m working on it.” My eyes catch on a coat, and I pull it away from the rack to examine it. It’s a big, fuzzy white jacket, emblazoned with a pattern of black stars. It looks kinda like something Darlene would wear. Well, I have to start somewhere. I take it off the rack and drape it over my arm to try on. 

I look around for something that would go well with the coat. My eyes settle on a long, shapeless black dress with short sleeves and a V-neck. It’s pretty covering, which is good - I’ve never been super comfortable with my body. Blair says that’s normal for transgender people, but I don’t know if they’re right. I mean, I don’t know if I am a transgender person, but if we’re being honest, it probably has more to do with my shitty parents.

I manage to direct my mind away from that thought process before it leads me anywhere I don’t want it to go. Stop process, restart. I’m not looking to have a breakdown right now. I pick up the long black dress.

“Classy,” Leon observes. “Not sure it goes with your kicks, though.”

I look down at my ratty black sneakers. Okay, yeah. True. 

Leon glances over at the shoes lining shelves at the back of the store, and grabs two, from different pairs. A grey ankle boot, and a black-and-gold ballet flat. “Depends on if you wanna dress it up or down,” he says.

I’ve never voluntarily dressed up in my life. I take the ankle boots and, before I can psych myself out again, find my way to the changing room.

Peeling myself out of my black hoodie, I feel like a snake shedding its skin. I avoid my own reflection in the mirror - big-eyed, awkward, scarred, too skinny, too short - and pull the dress over my head, followed by the coat. To put off the moment when I have to look into the mirror, I toe off my sneakers and pull on the grey ankle boots. They fit okay, which is a little surprising, when I think about it. The clothes Maria sells must be specifically made for men who wear women’s clothes. That probably explains why it’s so expensive: capitalist economics raise the price on niche products. 

I stand up, and force myself to look my reflection in the eyes. 

I look . . . weird. The black dress hangs off of my spare, angular shoulders, and the coat looks big on me. I look like I’m dressing up as Darlene, or cosplaying as the girl from Fight Club.

“You decent?” Leon asks, from outside the door.

“Yeah . . .” I open the door, and step out.

Leon looks me up and down, and smiles. I feel warmth bloom in my stomach. I look like a loser, but when Leon looks at me like that - I don’t feel like that. I lift my head and hold out my arms so he can get a better look. 

“You look good, cuz. Like . . .” Leon tilts his head, trying to come up with a good comparison. “Like it’s 1960 and you’re about to direct a French arthouse film.”

That makes me laugh. “Definitely not my style.”

“Yeah, you never wanna watch arthouse movies with me. I know what you’re doing when you got ‘other plans’,” he says, with finger quotes. 

I shake my head. “Two hours of a woman being miserable before the earth gets obliterated by a comet isn’t exactly my idea of a great time.”

“It’s not a comet, it’s a rogue planet, get your facts straight, cuz,” Leon says, shaking his head sorrowfully. “You got no respect for the masters, cuz. Lars von Trier is a straight-up artist.” 

“If you say so,” I say, still shaking my head. “But I look stupid like this.” I pull off the coat.

Next I pick out a lacy pink dress and dove-gray, knee high boots. I glance over to Leon, once again irrationally afraid that he’s gonna judge me, but he doesn’t seem to mind. I try it on, and look in the mirror.

I feel my face heat up. I look like the punchline to every dumb, homophobic cross-dressing joke on every sitcom I’ve ever watched. Somehow the black dress felt like a robe or a hospital gown, something neutral, ungendered, but this one - this feels like a woman’s dress. 

I get angry with myself. I keep freezing up, tripping over myself. Would I do this if I met someone else wearing a pink dress? That would be fucked up. I’m letting society get into my head, and what happened to “fuck society”? I’m supposed to be better than this.

I pull open the door to face Leon, my face still burning. “I look like an idiot,” I mutter. 

Leon shakes his head, laughing. “No you don’t, cuz. You look good.” He looks me up and down, his eyes catching on my legs in a way that makes my face burn even hotter, and then meets my eyes. “You psyching yourself out again?”

“Yeah,” I mutter, sulky and annoyed with myself. 

“Hey. Look at me.” I do, and Leon smiles at me. Somehow, when Leon smiles, it’s always like the sun coming out from behind the clouds, and I relax a little in the warmth of his gaze. 

 “You know me, right?” he asks me. “You know I’m not gonna judge you, no matter what you wear or what you do. And as for anyone out there, in the great big world outside our doors - ” He gestures to the doors of the boutique. “Who gives a shit about what they think? You know who you are. So rock whatever you got.”

I chuckle, my eyes sliding away from his. “You’re good at this whole pep talk thing. Maybe you should go into motivational speaking.”

Leon laughs. “Maybe I will, cuz. Go round giving speeches to all them RWAs I used to take orders from, and when they ask me how I got so good at it, I’ll say, ‘oh, I learned that shit while I was shooting people for money.’”

“Not sure that’s going to go over well.” But I let myself smile at the joke. It’s hard for even me to be too anxious around Leon. 

I try out at least a dozen outfits. A striped black-and-white dress with brown boots. A long-sleeved beige sweater dress with long, golden-tan suede boots. A black dress with a harness and skeleton hands emblazoned on the skirt, paired with thick-soled black boots with a chain dangling off the side. A wrap dress, half blue and half red, with a flower pattern and white cuffs paired with green ballet flats. A loose white blouse and a long black skirt with my usual black sneakers. A punk leather jacket over a black turtleneck and a knee-length flannel skirt. A retro red dress that’s flared at the waist, with black high heels. (They’re not that high. I nearly twist my ankle anyway.) A long, dramatic, gown with black and white speckles, so long that it doesn’t matter what shoes I’m wearing. 

None of them feel right. I feel over dressed, under dressed, garish, bland, and generally out of place in every one. I look skeptically at the last outfit I have picked out, a black trenchcoat that flares out to become a skirt at the bottom, black leggings (tossed into my arms by Leon after I complained about having my legs out) and a pair of glossy, black, laced up boots. If there’s one thing this whole ordeal has proved to me, it’s that black is definitely my color, but at this point, I’m not sure I have the energy to try on another dress.

But at this point, going home empty handed would feel like defeat, so I trudge back into the changing room to the sound of Leon’s encouragement. 

Leggings first, then I pull on the boots and lace them up and stand. Then it’s just the coat, over my normal t-shirt. I draw my breath and look in the mirror one last time.

I look - okay. I look like myself. 

I look like myself.

Okay. I like the dress. So now I buy it, right? I hesitate, struck by a sudden doubt. Am I really about to spend my own money - money I mostly made by hacking the 1% of the 1% - on some kind of weird crossdressing thing?

This is all stupid, anyway. All of it. Capitalism tricks us into thinking we need our clothing to express our identities, to commodify it. But as soon as that thought crosses my mind, I hear Leon’s voice in my head: You expressing yourself in a lot of other ways, cuz? 

Here’s a question for you, friend: how often do I use my politics as an excuse to isolate myself? To cut people off, to hide from the world, to raise my walls until no one can get in? To make myself smaller and smaller until I finally feel safe? And at what point does it stop being about politics, and start being about trauma? I’ve spent so long being afraid. Maybe it’s no wonder I’m scared to be anything other than a guy. 

I wonder if Elliot, the real Elliot, feels like this. I figured that’s what an anarchist hacker would come up with, he said to me. He’s angry, he has no life, he’s alone, he’s not normal. Is that why he created me? Somewhere he could put all those thoughts, all of the parts of him that weren’t normal, all of the parts that hurt, because he couldn’t bear to be that person anymore? Is that who I am?

I wonder if Elliot ever thinks that he might not be a man. If he remembers telling some racist white girl in 2001 that his name was Darlene. Is he just like me? Or did he cut off all of those parts of him and put them in me, so that he could be ‘normal’?

What about you, friend? Are you a man? A woman? Somewhere in between? Do you even know the answer to that question? I never gave you a name . . . but then again, I guess Elliot never gave me one either. Maybe you have a whole life that I don’t know about. 

I think about those black-and-white drawings on Elliot’s computer back in the dream world. The angry young man in his hoodie, staring out at the viewer. The angry anarchist hacker with no life. And I look in the mirror, and this time I see someone who isn’t that drawing.

I draw in a breath. Elliot wouldn’t be standing here, in a gay boutique, shopping for dresses with his friend the ex-hitman. And the angry black-and-white sketch he made up in his mind wouldn’t have either. I’m more than that. 

In the mirror, I manage a smile at myself. It looks awkward and weak, but it doesn’t look like Elliot. It looks like me. 

I open the door and nod, jerkily, at Leon, who’s on his phone. 

He looks up. “Looks good, cuz,” he says.

“Yeah, you’ve said that about all of them,” I say, rolling my eyes.

“What can I say?” Leon says, smiling long and slow. “You always look good, Elli.”

Those words settle, warm and tempting, in my stomach. I blink, and for the first time I wonder if Leon’s straight. I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard him mention girls . . . or guys, for that matter. Mostly he just talks about the car from Knight Rider. 

“I’m going to buy this one,” I say, because I can’t think of what else to say. I’m pretty sure that ruins the moment. 

“Maybe your taste isn’t so boring after all,” Leon says. “C’mon, I’ll play shopkeep. Unless you wanna take Maria up on his offer?”

“Nah.” I shake my head. “I’ll pay.”

Leon understands. He’s been poor too. He knows why this matters to me.

Afterwards, I change back into my hoodie, and he drives me back to my apartment. At the door, with my dress in a bag in my hands, I hesitate. I’d invite him up to hang up, but it’s late. He probably has to get going - and besides, I don’t want him to take it the wrong way and get offended.

“Leon - ” I start, unsure where I’m going with this.

Leon leans in, and kisses me. And for a moment, my mind goes blank.

When he pulls back, he’s grinning at me. “Goodnight, Elli,” he says. 

And then he’s gone.

I stare after his car long after he’s driven off. But when I finally make it up the stairs to my apartment, I’m smiling to myself.