He She It

twelve: the bigot brigade

"Grace, meet Eve Hiller," Lilly said, dumping a pile of magazines onto Grace's hospital bed. "Eve, meet Grace. She's kind of a bitch, to be -"

"Excuse me, Lillian," Grace interrupted, holding up a fishing magazine and raising her eyebrows (which were steadily beginning to resemble Lilly's thanks to the hospital's distinct lack of tweezers and an incredibly specific shade of eyebrow pencil). "I'm pregnant. You have to be nice to me."

"I am nice to you. I bought you Fisher's Weekly."

"And I bet the time will just fly by when I read it," Grace said, rolling her eyes and swatting her friend with the magazine in question. A newly-named Eve shifted in the background, unsure whether to interpret Grace's apparent nonchalance about her being a her as a 'so you're trans, and that's okay,' or a 'you're trans, and that's not okay, but I feel too weird about the whole thing to even acknowledge it.'

(She was unaware, of course, about the text Lilly had sent beforehand that went a little something like: 'Adam is a girl. Don't freak out, call her Eve and tell her you like the mascara').

"I like the mascara," Grace said, gesturing to the seat beside her bed that Lilly wasn't occupying. "You know you don't have to stand there staring at the floor, right? Sit down."

"Right," Eve muttered, sitting next to Lilly and fiddling with a thread hanging from the hem of her t-shirt. She kept silent for another few minutes, while Grace flicked through one of the few magazines not marketed towards middle-aged men (along with Fisher's Weekly, Lilly had bought three editions of the Top Gear magazine, a finance-based newspaper, and a leaflet on male health concerning genital warts).

"Where did you even get this?" Grace asked, flicking to a page in the leaflet that was covered with photos capable of turning even the strongest of stomachs, never mind the stomach of a pregnant sixteen year old who'd once thrown up at the sight of her own infected paper cut. She gagged a little, and then started breathing like an asthmatic that had just run the London marathon. "I can't throw up again," she said in between gasps, "they're letting me out tomorrow, as long I keep their shitty food inside of me."

"It's from my Dad's house," Lilly told her, shrugging as though the thought of her Dad needing a magazine with such detailed explanations of what exactly might be wrong with his genitalia didn't disturb her in the slightest. "Oh, by the way, if you find any gay stuff in that pile, please give it back to me. Manuel flips if he doesn't get his weekly intake of guys in thigh-highs."

"Wait," Eve said, holding up one freshly manicured finger, courtesy of Lilly and her incapability to deal with emotional situations in any way other than nail painting and ridiculous quantities of ice-cream, the latter of which she was beginning to thoroughly regret eating. "Your Dad left your Mum for another man?"

"Yep," Lilly replied, taking the leaflet from Grace's bed and slipping it into her bag. In the absence of infected penises, Grace started to breathe at a slightly healthier rate again. "People always say he was selfish. That he should have kept pretending, for my sake."

"Do you wish he had?"

"I used to," she said. "But now I realise that would have done more harm than good. Pretending to be this straight, Catholic husband wasn't easy for him, you know?"

"I know," Eve said, squeezing her eyes shut for a few seconds. "Trust me, I know."

"He wasn't very good at it, anyway." Lilly laughed, "no straight, Catholic man has Ru Paul's Drag Race on series record."

There was silence again for a little while, filled only by the coughing of the girl in the bed over from Grace's and Eve's exaggerated sighing. On her fifth sigh, she opened her mouth:

"I'm sorry," she said, "but is the only thing you're really going to say about this is that you like my mascara?"

Grace shrugged. "The nail varnish is cool, too."

"The nail varnish?" Eve repeated, standing up. "Why are you being so chill about this? Are you not surprised at all? Was it that obvious? Jesus Chr-"

"Eve, babe," Grace said, leaning over as much as she could in her current wired-up, pregnant state to place a hand on Eve's arm. "Calm down. I'm not freaking out because there's nothing to freak out about. You're a girl with a dick. Stranger things have happened."

"If you want to see someone to go batshit crazy, you can always pay a visit to the delightful Michael," Lilly said, grinning as Eve returned to her seat, cheeks flushed red. "Or Mr Hades. I hear both are huge transgender supporters."

Eve buried her head in her hands and groaned. "Can we not talk about the bigot brigade? God knows what they're going to do when I get on stage in a dress."

"Oh, I've got a pretty good idea," Lilly said, but fortunately for Eve her phone started ringing, cutting her off from running through the list of possible reactions to Eve's appearance at the fashion show - which ranged from bad to worse, bad being a few awkward stares and murmurs of 'tranny,' and worse being downright abuse followed by expulsion (and not, funnily enough, of those carrying out the abuse). Lilly unlocked her phone, muttered 'I bet this is about the femidoms,' and then walked out of the ward.

"The femidoms?" Eve asked.

Grace shrugged. "Don't ask me," she said, and then smiled. "We should go clothes shopping when I get out of here."

"We should?"

"You want to look hot, right?"

Eve gave a reluctant nod, slightly concerned about what exactly 'looking hot' entailed when it came to clothes shopping with Grace, who was famed - among other things - for once spending three solid hours in a changing room and being dragged out by community police officers, who underestimated just how much Grace Hammond adored clothes and thought she was running some kind of elaborate shoplifting scheme.

And Eve might have been ready to have her nails painted bright pink, but something told her that her nerves were not quite cut out for being cornered by police officers while wearing a little black dress.

"Then yes," Grace said, "we should definitely go clothes shopping."