Chapter 4: The Drive Home
The fluorescent hum of the hospital was replaced by the flat, grey light of a parked garage. Every step towards Andrea’s car was a production. The platform boots were loud, echoing off the concrete in a way my old sneakers never had. My hips kept trying to move in a straight line, but the skirt and the natural swing of this pelvis pulled them into a sway I couldn’t suppress. I felt like a badly piloted mech, all jerky corrections and unintended motion.
Andrea walked beside me, silent, keys clenched in her fist. She kept her eyes forward. I saw her reflection in a car window—her face was set, closed off. She was walking with a stranger.
Her silver sedan was a familiar relic, but approaching it from this new height, with this new body, made it alien. The passenger seat wasn’t my seat anymore. It was a stranger’s seat. I reached for the handle. My hand, with its black polish and web tattoo, looked absurd against the dirty silver paint.
Getting in was a puzzle. The skirt was too tight to allow a simple drop into the seat. I had to turn, place my butt on the edge, and swing my legs in together, a movement that felt prim, practiced. The leather was cold through the thin fabric of the thong. I pulled the door shut. The sound was final.
The inside smelled of our life—stale coffee, the cinnamon gum she chewed, the faint, permanent scent of wet paper from her school bags. It was the smell of home. It now felt like a violation to bring this body, smelling of hospital antiseptic and Sabrina’s clove perfume, into it.
Andrea started the engine. The familiar sputter was a comfort that lasted half a second.
Then she put the car in reverse, and my new world tilted.
The seatbelt. I pulled it across me. The diagonal strap sliced directly across the center of my chest, pressing the underwire of the bra into my sternum. The lap belt settled high, digging into the soft flesh of my lower stomach, just above the band of the skirt. It didn’t feel secure. It felt like it was bisecting me at all the wrong points.
We hit the first speed bump exiting the garage.
My body reacted before my mind could catch up. The mass on my chest, already lifted and compressed by the bra, had a distinct, independent momentum. It wasn’t just a jiggle. It was a heavy, liquid bounce, a pronounced upward and then downward pull that sent a shock through the wired harness and into my ribs. The sensation was deeply, intimately internal. I gasped.
Andrea flinched at the sound. “You okay?”
“The seatbelt,” I managed, my voice thin.
She didn’t say anything. We turned onto the rain-slicked city street. Every minor imperfection in the asphalt transmitted through the car’s tired suspension into my spine, and from there, into this new anatomy. A slight dip. The soft weight in the bra swayed, then settled, the padded cups brushing against the inner skin of my arms. A pothole. A sharper, more painful jolt that made my teeth click together and sent a secondary, deeply unsettling tremor through the flesh of my rear, which was now two pronounced, separate cushions compressed by the tight skirt. There was no flat, solid seat contact. It was a shifting, malleable pressure.
And between my legs, the void. It was more than an absence. It was a constant, screaming neural feedback loop. Every vibration of the car, every shift of my hips on the seat, my brain expected a tactile response that never came. Instead, there was the persistent, maddening presence of the thong’s string, a thin line of pressure riding deep in a cleft that felt exposed and vulnerable. It chafed. It was always there.
I stared out the fogged window, watching my blurred reflection in the glass. The pink hair. The stark makeup. The shape of the face that wasn’t mine. My mouth felt different. The lips were fuller, the piercings a cold, metallic presence against my teeth and tongue. When I closed my mouth, I felt the soft, waxy texture of lipstick. I resisted the insane urge to smear it off with the back of my hand.
“We need to stop at the pharmacy,” Andrea said, her voice tight with forced normalcy. “For your… medications. The anti-rejection drugs. And the… the other one.”
The hormone regulator. To stop Sabrina’s cycle. My stomach twisted.
“Okay.”
Silence again, thick and choking. The only sounds were the swish of the wipers, the rumble of the engine, and the faint, plastic rustle of the prescription bag at my feet.
“Does it hurt?” she asked suddenly, the words bursting out of her.
“Everything hurts,” I said, not looking at her. “But not in the way you mean. It feels… wrong. All the weight is in the wrong places. The center of balance is off. These clothes are like being strapped into a piece of furniture. And I’m… I’m cold. All the time. My skin is thinner.”
I chanced a glance at her. Her knuckles were white on the wheel. She was looking straight ahead, but her eyes were shimmering.
“I keep waiting for you to say something only Justin would know,” she whispered. “Something stupid, like the secret level code for Revenge of the Robo-Kongs. Or how you proposed. And you have. You did. But when I look over…” She trailed off, a tear finally breaking free and tracing a path down her cheek. “I see her.”
The truth of it was a physical blow. I saw it in every stiff line of her body. The man she loved was a voice coming from a carnival attraction. A ghost in a neon-lit machine.
“I’m in here, Andrea,” I said, desperation clawing at my throat. “I’m screaming in here.”
“I know,” she sobbed, the word ragged. “God, I know. And that’s what makes it worse. Because I look at you… at that body… and part of me is horrified. And another part, a part I hate, is just… jealous.”
The admission hung in the air, toxic and shocking.
“Jealous?” The word tasted like ash.
“Of her,” Andrea said, waving a hand at me, at Sabrina. “She’s twenty-five. She’s… she’s all of that. And I’m just me. And my husband is looking out of her eyes.” She pulled the car into the pharmacy lot with a jerky motion and slammed it into park. She didn’t turn off the engine. She just sat there, her forehead resting on the steering wheel, shoulders shaking.
I didn’t touch her. I couldn’t. My touch would be Sabrina’s touch. A young woman’s hand on my wife’s back. The wrongness of it paralyzed me.
I looked down at my own body. The tank top stretched over the inflated curve of the chest. The skirt riding up, exposing too much of my thighs in the boots. The tattoos a riot of someone else’s history on my skin. The jealousy was so profoundly misplaced it was laughable. This wasn’t a gift. It was a life sentence in a body that felt like a grotesque, hyper-sexualized costume, one I couldn’t take off. Every sensation was a reminder of what I’d lost, and what I’d been forced to gain.
Andrea sat up, wiping her face roughly with her sleeves. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. That was unfair.”
“It’s the truth,” I said dully. “Everything is unfair now.”
She took the prescriptions and went inside. I was left alone in the car, in this prison of flesh and lace. I watched people walk through the lot. A man in his forties glanced at the car. His eyes passed over me. They stopped. They lingered. They traveled from the pink hair, down the tank top, over the bare strip of tattooed stomach, to the skirt and boots. It wasn’t a look of recognition. It was an appraisal. A slow, interested once-over. Then he caught my own eyes staring back, wide with horror, and he quickly looked away, a slight smirk on his face.
My face burned. A hot, shameful flush spread from my neck down my chest. I wanted to vanish. I wanted to roll down the window and scream “I’m a man!” But the scream would come out in Sabrina’s voice, high and strained, and he would only leer harder.
Andrea returned with a small bag. She got in, placed it between us like a barrier. “They said to take the white one with food. The pink one is… for the other thing. It’ll take a few days to work.”
We drove the final miles home. The familiarity of the streets was a new kind of torture. There was our favorite coffee shop. There was the comic book store. There was the intersection where I’d stalled my old car, laughing while Andrea panicked. Every landmark was a headstone for my old life.
We turned onto our street. Our house, a modest blue split-level, came into view. The garden was overgrown. The rain had flattened the grass. My workbench was still visible in the open garage, a frozen tableau of a life interrupted.
Andrea pulled into the driveway. The engine cut, leaving a ringing silence.
We sat. The house waited. Our home. It held everything that was me—my books, my computers, my clothes, my smell. It was a museum I was about to desecrate by walking in as a curator from a different, darker exhibit.
“I don’t know if I can,” I whispered.
Andrea took a deep, shaky breath. She looked at the house, then at me—really looked, trying to see past the makeup and the piercings and the obscene curves.
“Neither do I,” she said. “But we’re here.”
She opened her door. The dome light came on, illuminating the desperate reality of my situation. I had to follow. There was nowhere else to go. I fumbled for the handle, my movements awkward in the tight clothes. I maneuvered my way out, the boots hitting the paved driveway with a solid, uncompromising clunk.
The cool evening air hit my exposed midriff. I stood on my own driveway, a stranger in my own life, every nerve ending screaming with the wrongness of it, the jiggling weight on my chest a sickening pendulum marking the death of Justin Harding and the terrifying birth of something else entirely. The front door loomed, twenty feet away. It might as well have been a continent.