I thought about you today.
Of course, I think about you every day, but today I woke up in the hospital bed I spent last night in and my first thought was of the moment you found the flyer. It was your lunch break, I remember. You were walking back to the bookstore where you worked and the wind blew a flyer to your feet. Flyers are common enough around here and most people just ignore them. Usually. they’re just nonsense, ads for bands that don’t exist performing at bars that don’t exist. Some people think they’re an elaborate art project, a vast work scattered throughout the city that can only be understood if you collect all the pieces. Others think they’re garbage that’s blown in from another dimension, advertising real places and events, but ones that are out of our reach.
This flyer, however, caught your eye for a couple of reasons. First, it was a request for people to take part in an experiment. The nameless organization behind the poster claimed that it was attempting human trials for a drug that would give you abilities beyond what humans are capable of, beyond even what the laws of physics deemed possible. It was ridiculous nonsense, like all of the other flyers. Anyone would dismiss it in an instant. Except that you didn’t dismiss it. You knew that superpowers were only a thing in comic books, you had watched all the videos about all the different ludicrous ways they were impossible. However, the poster promised you hope. And no matter how unlikely, no matter how insane it was, you couldn’t ignore it because ignoring it would have been giving up hope entirely. The second reason the poster caught your eye was the address at the bottom. It was on Crucible Street, a street you knew. It was a real place.
* * *
I stay at the hospital a lot because they have an entire floor in one building that goes mostly unused. Sometimes they have to open it when they have too many patients, but mostly it just sits there, full of empty beds and empty of people. When I got up today, I dressed and freshened up in the bathroom, then dropped through the floor. I allowed myself to fall for three floors before landing on the ground floor. People saw me, I’m sure, but I don’t really care. There’s a rumor going around that I’m a ghost.
When you were in middle school, you were bullied relentlessly. The other children teased you about your small size, your nervous demeanor, your high-pitched voice, your intelligence, everything about you. Instead of using your name, they would use insulting words that rhyme with your name. They didn’t beat you up, but they would drop things on you, body check you, steal your things, shoot you with spitballs, constantly let you know that they saw themselves as above you, that your misery was entertaining to them. Not a day went by where they didn’t repeat something back to you in a screechy imitation of your voice.
You tried to seek help from the adults in your life. Your parents, your teachers and your guidance counselor all told you the same things. Just ignore it. Don’t let it affect you. You believed that your parents always loved you and that they knew best, you believed that the guidance counselor was a kindhearted man whose only goal was to make sure the students were cared for, and so you tried to follow this advice.
I hate them for telling you that.
Every time your bullies hurt you, every time you felt tears form in your eyes, every time you felt your face redden, it became a failure on your part. You were letting them affect you. The advice of the adults was so simple and yet you couldn’t even follow it. You couldn’t stop yourself from being hurt. Worse, you started to become aware that your bullies were changing you. You changed the way you dressed, stopped wearing jewelry to school. You stopped bringing anything to school that you cared about losing. You became quiet so as not to attract their attention. You could feel your identity slipping away, parts of your personality were being shaped by people you hated and you didn’t know how to stop it.
You tried. You tried so hard. You taught yourself to not give any outward signs that you were hurt. You learned to stop crying, to stop blushing. You discovered that things you thought of as reflexes were actually under your control. It was possible to not react. Finally, you thought, you were following the advice of the adults. You were not letting them affect you.
I hate them so much.
* * *
When you got home from work, you looked up the Crucible Street address online. It was a place called the Bruce Manley Building. You’d actually seen the building before. It was a fancy-looking one with a huge slanted glass front that faced the highway. It seemed to be made by an architect who was desperate to make a building that stood out. And it did, in a way. You recognized it, after all. But it was the kind of building that you never really thought about. You just drove past it on the highway, vaguely aware that the scenery was broken up by a building that managed to be noticeable yet not noteworthy, and never thought about the fact that that building was actually used for something, that it was anything more than a decoration.
Suddenly, you wondered what the Bruce Manley Building was. Was it part of a school? Was it some sort of research center? Or was it the kind of building that just rented out professional-looking rooms to people who needed one temporarily? Did buildings like that exist?
And of course you couldn’t help but note the irony that you of all people would be visiting a place called the Bruce Manley Building. You wondered who Bruce Manley is. Or was. Was he actually “manly?”
* * *
I stopped by the coffee stand at the hospital’s entrance. It’s closed on weekends, but that doesn’t matter because I don’t like coffee. What interested me was in the refrigerated case on one end of the stand. It’s one of those bottles of juice. You know, the kind with around seven different types of fruit and a label that lists off how many of each different kind were juiced to make a single bottle. The case was locked, of course, but that didn’t matter. I simply reached through the clear plastic front and grabbed a bottle.
As I stepped through the hospital doors someone catcalled me. I ignored it. I also ignored the “fuck you” he shouted at me immediately afterward. It didn’t affect me. Well, aside from me remembering it and mentioning it now.
* * *
By high school you had determined that you wanted to be a girl. This was impossible, you thought. Wanting to be a girl wasn’t like wanting to be a famous musician or a sports star. Those things were merely incredibly unlikely. Wanting to be a girl was like wanting to be a dog or a mountain or a dragon. It was physically impossible. You recognized that this was a big problem. You wanted it more than anything, you knew you could never be happy without it, but it simply couldn’t happen.
In a way, you were right. Therapy standards back then meant that you wouldn’t have been helped. Puberty blockers were almost never prescribed to people like you. Your parents would never have allowed you to wear skirts or grow out your hair or learn to apply makeup. And even if they had, pop culture had so poisoned you against trans women that you would never have seen yourself as anything more than a caricature, a mockery of women.
For this, I hate them, too.
You wanted to tell people. You wanted it to not be a big deal. You wanted to joke about it. “I desperately want to be a girl, isn’t that hilarious?” But you couldn’t. You had become so accustomed to closing yourself off that you no longer knew how to open up. How would you even bring it up? It wasn’t like you could just blurt it out while you were playing video games with someone. Besides, you feared that you might lose the few friends that you had if you actually told them, and you knew that was a loss you couldn’t afford.
* * *
On the day and time mentioned on the flyer, you arrived at the Bruce Manley building. The big, slanted glass wall entered into a huge lobby. The carpet and all the furniture looked clean and new, no stains or discoloration or marks on the walls. There was a display with nine flat screen televisions, each displaying a different news channel. You wondered how hot it got in the summer, with the sun pouring through the glass front.
The flyer had said room 304, so you found an elevator and took it up to the third floor, quickly finding the room in question. It appeared to be a chemistry classroom. There were rows of rectangular tables, each designed to seat two, a dry erase board in the front, and cases full of Bunsen burners, beakers, test tubes, and microscopes. There was even an eyewash station and chemical shower.
You were the first to arrive so you settled into the corner furthest from the door and waited. Others filed in shortly afterward. They were mostly men, mostly older than you, mostly stronger than you. You weren’t sure why you thought of it, and you chastised yourself and called yourself sexist, but it occurred to you that they could easily hurt you if they decided they wanted to. One man closer to your age had a face that reminded you of one of your high school bullies. You disliked him already and you hated yourself for disliking him.
Finally, a man arrived who stood at the front of the room, apparently the man who was running this experiment. He wore a plaid suit. You liked plaid suits, despite their bad reputation, but for some reason on this man it reminded you of a door-to-door salesman.
He introduced himself as Mr. Dream.
* * *
I stopped by the bank to get some money. I don’t have an account or anything. It doesn’t matter because I can just take what I want. I try to be subtle about it, in banks, slipping in and out without being noticed. If too many rumors of a thieving ghost girl start going around, people are going to start looking into them. And then they may find a way to affect even me without my permission. Obviously, I don’t want that.
* * *
In college, you bought a dress. It was black and lacy with a flared skirt. You tried it on once and felt so much shame and disgust that you took it off immediately and never wore it again. It hung in your closet collecting dust for the next several years. It seemed to you that a dress was too good for someone like you. You didn’t deserve to wear it. In fact, wearing it was an insult to such a beautiful garment. Can you imagine that? You thought so little of yourself that you placed a piece of clothing above you.
I wish I had been there. I wish I had hugged you and told you how beautiful you were. I wish I had done your makeup and made you look truly dazzling. I wish I had told you about how growing out your hair, taking a few pills, and getting electrolysis would have made even your traumatized, beaten-down brain see how amazing you looked. But I wasn’t there.
I’m so sorry for that.
* * *
Mr. Dream dismissed the only three women in the room. He explained that women were an unnecessary variable and might complicate the results of the experiment. You were a bit jealous and felt a bit silly about that jealousy. After all, if you were a woman, then you wouldn’t be getting superpowers today. Of course, you wouldn’t need them, either.
In a roundabout way, with lots of backtracking and tangents and long pauses when he lost his train of thought, Mr. Dream explained the drug being tested. Its original intent, he said, was to make people into who they most wanted to be. The superpowers, it seemed, were a happy side effect. It was created by an organization that chose to remain secret but who, he claimed, had only altruistic intents for this drug. He could not explain how it was made or how it worked or why it broke the laws of physics. However, he promised, it was perfectly safe and had no negative side effects.
He poured the drug from a thermos into a series of small paper cups, then passed it out. Once everyone had a cup, you all drank. The taste reminded you of a medicine you took when you were a child. A milky white medicine that was so disgusting that you threw it up nearly every time you tried to drink it. This time, however, you didn’t throw up.
The first man changed within a few minutes. He became taller, more muscular, nothing too surprising. Until he punched the man next to him in the face, sending him flying across the room. Apparently, the person he most wanted to be was someone who could fight all he wants.
In a flash, others started to change. Some of them became hairy, others became more slender. The man who looked like your old bully grew scales and began breathing fire. Most of the people in the room grew taller, most became more muscular. Most became more violent, too. Not all scary-looking men are violent by nature. But enough of them are. Terrified, you looked to Mr. Dream, hoping that he would somehow take control of the situation, but he just stood there with a satisfied smile on his face.
And then you became me.
I didn’t care about the violence. I just walked out of the room, not looking back, too busy feeling my new breasts to think about the chaos. I don’t know what happened to those men. The drug had likely brought out more than violence in them. I don’t usually think about it because doing so too much would affect me.
* * *
Since late junior high, you had been reading those stories online. The ones where male characters, usually unwilling, are transformed into women. It’s a whole genre of stories written by people who think they’re the only boy who wants to be a girl and read by people who think the same. They have their own tropes and trends, some of which are extremely specific like men being turned into women as punishment for saying or doing something sexist.
One of those tropes is called Identity Death. Identity Death is when the male character’s personality is completely overwritten by a new female personality, often with her own set of memories and a different sexual orientation. It was never your favorite trope.
You thought your power would be shapeshifting. It made sense. You wanted to change your shape and the drug was supposed to make you into who you most wanted to be, so your power would be shapeshifting. But the drug doesn’t work like that. See, when you boil it down, your ideal self had three essential traits.
The first trait is that she’s a woman. Obviously. You had been obsessed with being a girl for over a decade. You spent every night hoping you would wake up as a woman. Of course, you were always a woman. I can see that. I wish you could have, but I understand why you couldn’t.
The second trait is that nothing affects her if she doesn’t want it to. That’s where my power comes in. Nothing affects me, words or actions, if I don’t allow it. As long as I will it so, I’m completely intangible.
The third and most important trait is that she loves herself. That’s why I exist. To love you. And I do love you. I love you more than I love anyone except myself. But that doesn’t count anyway because I’m you. You were so beautiful, so perfect, and you were never allowed to see it.
Some people might call you becoming me tragic. Your family certainly seems to see it that way. They didn’t recognize me at first, of course. I look completely different. But eventually I convinced them that I was you. Still, they wanted nothing to do with me, they just wanted you back. I said you couldn’t come back and they said that I had killed you.
But that’s not how I see it. Even if you had known what the drug would do you would have chosen to drink it. You would have chosen to become me because you needed to change to stay alive. You were trapped under a rock and you cut off your own leg to survive. And your family mourns the leg and blames the rest of you for its loss.
I suppose some people would object to that. They would say equating transitioning to cutting off your own leg is insulting to trans people. But I think it’s insulting to everyone else. It’s insulting to everyone who made this a world where transitioning is a method of surviving instead of just a way of becoming the person you most want to be.
Because that’s the thing. You didn’t have to become me. You could have transitioned in the traditional way and you could have been happy and loved yourself. I’m not objecting to your choice because I like existing, but I think it’s important to understand that you could have stayed you and still been happy. Of course, if you had become happy, maybe you wouldn’t have been you anymore. Maybe you would have been me anyway. Your family would have thought so. They would have mourned the old you and ignored the new you in the same way.
I don’t believe that I was the cause of your Identity Death. Your Identity Death happened when you were mistreated and you reached out for help and were told to stop feeling. I’m what remained when you cut away the parts of your identity that the people who were supposed to help you had allowed to rot.
* * *
I went back there today, to the chemistry classroom in the Bruce Manley Building. The building is closed on weekends and all the lights are off. I didn’t bother turning them on. It seemed that someone had repaired the classroom after the experiment because it looks just as it did when you first arrived. I sat in the last chair you sat in and the first chair I sat in and I thought about your life and all of the events that led to you becoming me. It occurred to me that loving you was nice enough, but perhaps I could do more with my life. The world is a cruel place that doesn’t care about people like you and me. Maybe I can do something to change that. I have superpowers, after all. Of course, superheroes don’t change the world, they prevent it from being changed, so I can’t be a superhero.
But maybe I could be a supervillain.
Sonia Rippenkroeger (she/her) lives in Council Bluffs, Iowa, with three cats, three ferrets, two roommates, and a hedgehog. When she isn't writing stories about trans characters, she can be found cross stitching screenshots from old video games. She is on Twitter @msblackandblue