Chapter 1: Caught in the Act
The vinyl of the bus bench was cracked, sun-bleached to a sickly grey, and it groaned under a weight it wasn’t designed to hold. Ethan shifted, trying to find a position that didn’t make the silicone breasts dig into his ribcage or the padded hips feel like a loaded diaper. Every movement was a negotiation with physics. A breeze, cool and smelling of distant rain and diesel, cut across the park, and he shuddered. It wasn’t just the cold. It was the absurd, terrifying reality of sitting at a bus stop in a girl’s school uniform, a cheap black wig itching his scalp.
He’d thought it would be funny. A dare. An experiment. He hadn’t thought about sweat, how it would make the medical adhesive holding the prosthetics feel like a creeping fungal infection. He hadn’t considered how the pleated skirt would catch between his thighs, or how walking in the borrowed loafers would force his hips into an awkward, swinging gait that made his lower back ache.
Headlights washed over him. The 8:15 bus, its engine a rattling cough. He stood up too fast, the world tilting as the extra weight on his chest threw his balance. He grabbed the bench slat, the warped wood gritty under his palm.
“Final call for Ridgewood!” the driver barked, not looking at him.
Ethan clomped up the steps, the loafers half a size too big. He fumbled in the small handbag—another terrible idea—for the fare. His fingers, clumsy and unfamiliar with the clasp, finally dug out the coins.
“Hurry up, sweetheart. Some of us have a schedule.”
He dumped the change into the tray and hurried down the aisle, head down, feeling every eye like a physical touch. He slumped into a seat halfway back, the vinyl sighing. He stared out the window at the dying light, at the flickering streetlamp that made the shadows in the park seem to twitch and lean. His reflection was a ghost in the glass: pale, wide-eyed, a stranger in a bad wig. A flush of hot shame climbed his neck. This was stupid. He’d get off at the next stop, find a restroom, tear it all off, and burn it.
The bus hissed and pulled away from the curb.
A hand closed around his wrist.
It wasn’t gentle. It was an iron clamp, all business, the grip of someone used to being obeyed. Ethan’s heart hammered against the fake breasts, a frantic bird in a silicone cage.
“You,” a woman’s voice said, low and tight with anger. “Did you really think you could just walk out?”
He turned. The woman holding him was in her late forties, her face all sharp angles and severe lines, framed by a steely grey bob. Her eyes, the colour of flint, swept over him with forensic disappointment. She wore a sensible trench coat, belted tightly.
“I— I’m just going home,” Ethan stammered, his voice too high. He’d been practicing, but fear ripped the cadence away, leaving it a reedy, unconvincing thing.
“Home,” she repeated, her lip curling. “Is that what we’re calling it now? ‘Home’? Get up.”
She didn’t wait. She pulled, and Ethan stumbled into the aisle, his loose shoe nearly tripping him. The few other passengers stared openly. An old man shook his newspaper and looked away.
“You’ve got the wrong person,” Ethan hissed, trying to yank his arm back. Her grip was unbelievable. “Let go of me!”
“Abigail Thorne,” she said, as if issuing a sentence. “Head of House at St. Cecilia’s. And you, whoever you are trying to be today, are one of my girls. A very foolish, nearly-successful runaway.” She began marching him toward the front of the bus. “We do not appreciate drama, young lady. We appreciate order. And you are in profound disorder.”
Panic, cold and slick, flooded Ethan’s veins. This was spiraling. “My name isn’t— you don’t understand!”
“I understand perfectly. The dyed hair shoved under that atrocity of a wig. The street clothes under the uniform. The bag.” She wrenched his wrist, making him gasp. “You are coming back to campus, and you will explain yourself to the Headmistress. And you will be very, very lucky if expulsion is the only consequence.”
The bus jerked to a stop at a red light. Thorne didn’t pause. She hauled him down the steps, the rubber edges catching his heels. The night air hit him again, thicker now.
“Wait, the bus— my stop—” Ethan garbled.
“Your stop,” Ms. Thorne said, finally releasing his wrist to point a rigid finger at a dark, idling sedan parked across the street, “is right there. Move. Now.”
Ethan stared at the car, then back at the bus, its doors sighing closed. The driver glanced at them, shrugged, and pulled away, the taillights shrinking into the gloom. His escape route, his way back to being Ethan, dissolved into the night.
He was marooned.
“I’m not who you think I am,” he said, the words hollow, desperate. Thorne’s expression softened for a fraction of a second, a flicker of something that might have been pity before it hardened back into granite. “They all say that, dear. Right before they confess. Now, get in the car. We’re not discussing your poor life choices on a public street corner.”
She turned, heels clicking with definitive authority, and walked toward the sedan, expecting absolute compliance.
Ethan stood on the sidewalk, the weight on his chest feeling like it was suffocating him. He could run. Right now. But in these shoes? With this ridiculous, jiggling weight? He’d make it ten feet before she tackled him. The street was empty. The park behind him was a wall of darkness.
It was the wig, he thought, a bizarre, lucid spike of clarity. It was the cheap, shiny wig that convinced her. That, and the uniform he’d stupidly kept on as a base layer. She saw a girl trying to disguise herself as someone else. She didn’t see the truth at all.
Swallowing a throatful of bile, feeling the world narrow to this cracked pavement and the open car door ahead, he took the first hobbling step forward. The loafers scraped against the concrete. Each step was a surrender.
He slid into the passenger seat. The interior smelled of lemon polish and old leather. Thorne got in, started the engine, and turned the heat on high without looking at him.
“Seatbelt,” she said flatly.
He pulled the strap across the foreign landscape of his body, the click echoing in the silent car. She pulled away from the curb, the headlights cutting a path through the gathering fog. He watched his neighbourhood, his real life, pass by the window, blurring into indistinct streaks of light.
“This is a mistake,” he whispered, more to himself than to her.
“Indeed it is,” Ms. Thorne agreed, her eyes fixed on the road ahead, leading them deeper into the night, toward the gates of a school he was never meant to see. “One you’re going to have a very long time to reflect upon.”
The car was painfully warm. The blast from the vents dried the sweat on Ethan’s neck but made the silicone breasts feel like hot, weighted sacks of gel pressed against him. He stared straight ahead, watching the streetlights warp into streaks through the fog on the windshield. His mind raced, a frantic hamster on a wheel going nowhere.
“You can drop me at the next corner,” he tried again, forcing his voice into a lighter, more feminine register. It cracked on ‘corner.’
“I will do no such thing,” Ms. Thorne said, her hands at ten and two on the steering wheel. “You are my responsibility until you are back behind the gates of St. Cecilia’s. Where, I might add, you are supposed to be for study hall. Did you think no one would notice an empty bed?”
“It’s not my bed.”
“Semantics. Your assigned bed, then.”
Ethan squeezed his eyes shut. This was a nightmare. A stupid, self-inflicted nightmare. He could end it. Right now. He could just say it. I’m a guy. This is all a joke. A dare. Look, I’ll peel off the chest plate right here.
But the words stuck in his throat, glued down by a thick, primal mortification. The image of revealing himself—of her flinty eyes widening in horror or disgust, of having to explain the why of it all while sitting there in a skirt—was worse than the prospect of being dragged to some random school. Maybe he could just get to the school, find a real administrator, and explain. They’d call the police, probably. His parents. His stomach lurched.
“You’re very quiet,” Ms. Thorne observed, her tone shifting from anger to a clinical curiosity. “Most of the girls who try this are in tears by now. Or full of inventive excuses. You’re just… sitting there.”
“I’m thinking,” Ethan muttered.
“Good. Thinking is what you should have been doing three hours ago.”
They turned off the main road, onto a tree-lined avenue where the houses grew farther apart, their shapes large and dark behind iron fences. The school. It had to be. His palms were slick. He wiped them on the scratchy wool of the skirt.
“I need to use the bathroom,” he blurted out. It was the only play he had.
“You will have ample opportunity in your room. Which will be your residence, outside of classes, for the next four weeks. Social suspension is standard for a first attempt. A second attempt…” She let the sentence hang, a practiced technique. “Well, let’s not find out.”
The gates appeared through the fog: ornate, black iron, topped with sharp fleur-de-lis. They swung open silently as the car approached. Beyond them, a long, curved drive led to a massive, grey stone building. It looked less like a school and more like a penitentiary designed by a Gothic architect. Lights glowed in only a few of the many windows. Thorne pulled the car around to a side entrance, a heavy oak door under a dim lantern. She cut the engine. The sudden silence was a physical presence, broken only by the ticking of the cooling metal and the distant, lonely call of an owl.
“Out,” she said, unbuckling her own belt.
Ethan’s body refused to move. The weight of the prosthetics felt astronomical now, pinning him to the seat. This was it. The point of no return. Once he walked through that door as ‘her,’ the lie would become a reality he might not be able to untangle.
“Now,” Thorne said, and the word was a whip-crack.
He fumbled for the door handle, pushed it open, and spilled out onto the gravel drive. The cool night air was a relief for half a second before the reality of his surroundings closed in. The school loomed, all jagged peaks and dark, watching windows.
Thorne was at his side in an instant, her hand once again finding his arm, not as a grip but as a steel guide. “Head up. Shoulders back. You will walk in with what little dignity you have left.”
They crossed the threshold into a dim, polished hallway that smelled of floor wax and old books. The heels of Thorne’s shoes clicked a sharp, echoing rhythm on the parquet floor. Ethan’s too-big loafers made a pathetic, scuffling counterpoint.
A door opened halfway down the hall, and a large woman in a navy-blue cardigan and sensible trousers emerged. Her face was round and lined, her hair in a tight net. She held a clipboard.
“Ah, Matron. Just the person,” Ms. Thorne said, her voice dropping to a confidential murmur that still carried. “We have a returnee. Attempted egress via the city bus. No belongings. I found her in civilian disguise.”
Matron’s eyes, small and bead-like behind thick lenses, swept over Ethan. They paused at the ill-fitting wig, the slightly smudged eyeliner he’d experimented with, the straining buttons of the uniform blouse over the false chest. Her mouth puckered as if tasting something sour.
“Room Seven,” Matron said, her voice a low rasp. “I’ll fetch the kit.”
“The kit?” Ethan whispered, his real voice bleeding through.
“Standard health check after an unauthorized absence,” Ms. Thorne said, steering him toward a stark staircase. “You’ve been outside the walls. We need to ensure you haven’t picked up anything… undesirable. Matron will see to you.”
Health check. The words exploded in Ethan’s skull like flashbangs. No. No, no, no. That was the line. The absolute, irrevocable line.
He dug his heels in, the loafers slipping on the polished wood. “You don’t understand! You can’t! I’m not—”
“You are not in a position to dictate terms,” Thorne interrupted, her patience visibly fragmenting. She leaned closer, her words a hissed warning. “Listen to me. You are in serious, life-altering trouble. The kind that follows you to other schools. To university applications. The only path forward is compliance and contrition. Do you understand? Now, you will go with Matron. You will submit to the check. Then you will go to your room. We will speak in the morning when you are less… hysterical.”
Matron approached, a small metal case in her hand now. She gestured with her head toward a door marked ‘Infirmary.’ Her expression was one of bored routine.
Ethan looked from her face to Ms. Thorne’s, seeing not malice but a rigid, immovable certainty. They saw a runaway girl, a problem to be solved and sanitized. The truth was so ludicrous it had become invisible to them.
The weight in his chest wasn’t just silicone anymore. It was the crushing force of a mistake about to avalanche into a catastrophe. Matron’s hand, dry and strong, closed around his bicep.
“This way,” she said, and turned him, unresisting, toward the bright, sterile light leaking from the infirmary doorway.
The infirmary was small, cold, and smelled of sharp antiseptic covered by a sweet layer of air freshener. It made Ethan’s head swim. A single, too-bright fluorescent tube buzzed overhead, illuminating a framed diagram of the lymphatic system and a paper calendar still turned to August. Matron pointed to a vinyl-padded examination table covered in crinkly paper.
“Sit.”
Ethan sat. The paper crackled like gunfire in the silent room. Matron placed her metal case on a rolling stool and opened it with a click. Inside were a blood pressure cuff, a thermometer, a penlight, and a pair of disposable gloves. She snapped the gloves on, the sound unnaturally loud.
“State your name for the record,” Matron said, not looking at him as she unwrapped the thermometer.
“Eva,” Ethan choked out, picking the first name that came to mind. His heart was a frantic drum solo against the fake ribs.
“Full name.”
“Eva… Smith.”
Matron gave a short, dismissive huff, as if she’d heard a hundred unconvincing ‘Smiths’. She moved in front of him, penlight in hand. “Look straight ahead.” The light pierced his eyes, making him flinch. She checked his pupils, then his throat, her fingers pressing under his jaw. Her touch was impersonal, efficient. She smelled of lavender and rubbing alcohol.
“Open your blouse,” she said, turning to pick up the blood pressure cuff.
The air left Ethan’s lungs. “What?”
“Standard procedure. I need to listen to your heart and lungs. You were in an unsanitary public vehicle. You could have picked up any number of communicable conditions. Blouse. Now.”
This was it. The game was over. He’d have to confess, to face the humiliating unraveling of this entire night. His fingers, numb and clumsy, went to the buttons of the school blouse. He fumbled the top one.
Matron turned back, cuff in hand, her expression one of impatience. “Honestly, girl. It’s not a spa treatment. Hurry up.”
He undid the buttons with trembling hands, exposing the white cotton camisole he wore beneath. It was tight, stretched over the silicone forms. He held his breath, waiting for the gasp, the shout, the call for security.
Matron slipped the cold disc of the stethoscope under the edge of the camisole at his back. “Breathe deeply.” He did, the air hitching. She moved it around, her face blank. Then she moved to the front, sliding the disc just above the top of the camisole, near his collarbone. Her eyes were on the wall behind him, bored.
To Ethan's relief the silicone breasts and butt matched his skintone perfectly, and the seams were covered in makeup to blend into his real skin. In the harsh clinical light, the transition was invisible unless you were looking for it, unless you were touching it. And Matron wasn’t looking. She was just doing a job.
“Again,” she muttered. The disc was cold through the thin cotton. He breathed, his real heart hammering somewhere beneath the artificial weight. She listened, then straightened up, pulling the stethoscope from her ears. “Heart rate is elevated. Nerves, I expect. Lungs are clear.”
She wrapped the blood pressure cuff around his bicep and pumped. The pressure squeezed, a tight, distant sensation. Ethan felt detached, watching from somewhere near the buzzing light. She noted the numbers on a chart, scribbling with a chewed pen.
“Temperature,” she said, and before he could react, she inserted a digital thermometer into his ear. It beeped. “Normal. Stand up, please.”
He slid off the table, the loafers scuffing the linoleum. She did a visual once-over, her bead-like eyes scanning him from head to toe. They paused for a millisecond on his hips, but it was a glance of assessment, not discovery. The padding created a convincing silhouette under the pleated skirt.
“You’re intact. No signs of lice, no visible rash. You’ll take a shower with the provided wash and go directly to Room Seven. You will not speak to anyone. Do you understand?”
Ethan could only nod, a jerky, mechanical motion.
Matron peeled off her gloves, tossing them into a bin marked ‘Biohazard’. She took a plastic bottle of medicated shampoo from a shelf and thrust it into his hands. “End of the hall, left. Girls’ washroom is the third door. Be quick. Lights out is in twenty minutes.”
She turned her back on him, beginning to wipe down the examination table with a savage spritz of disinfectant. The dismissal was absolute.
Ethan stumbled out into the hallway, the bottle slippery in his sweat-damp palm. The blouse was still open. He buttoned it with frantic fingers, his mind a white-noise scream. He’d passed. By some insane, skin-deep miracle, he’d passed. But the relief was immediately swallowed by a deeper, colder dread. Passing the check meant the lie was now cemented. He was ‘Eva Smith,’ a wayward student of St. Cecilia’s, sentenced to Room Seven.
The hallway was empty and quiet, save for the distant, muffled sound of a girl’s laughter from behind a closed door. It sounded alien. He found the washroom, pushed the heavy door open, and locked himself in a stall, leaning his forehead against the cool metal partition.
He was trapped. Completely, utterly trapped. He couldn’t reveal the truth now—not after submitting to the check, not after letting them assign him a room. The embarrassment would be nuclear. He imagined his parents’ faces, the police report, the story getting around his actual school. The terrifying, stern Ms. Thorne’s face when she realized she’d dragged a boy into an all-girls dormitory.
He had to get out. Tonight. Before morning roll call, before anyone else saw him up close.
But how? The gates were surely locked. The walls looked high. He was dressed in a ridiculous, conspicuous uniform and shoes that mocked the concept of haste.
A door banged open in the washroom. The clatter of a plastic shower caddy. The sound of taps squeaking, then the rush of water hitting tile.
“—totally ghosted me after one text!” a girl’s voice complained, echoing off the tiles.
“Maybe he saw that picture from the swimming social,” another voice, lighter and teasing, replied. “Your chin looked weird in that light.”
“Shut up! Ugh, I hate Sunday nights. Did you finish the calculus?”
Ethan froze in his stall, not daring to breathe. The conversation faded as the shower streams intensified. This was his chance. He had to move. He had to find Room Seven, pretend to settle in, and then find a window, a fire escape, something.
He exited the stall, keeping his head down, and scurried out of the washroom before the showers stopped. The hallway directory listed room numbers. Seven was on the second floor, at the far end. He took the stairs two at a time, the clumsy shoes a constant threat.
The door to Room Seven was plain, varnished pine with a small, wired-glass window. He turned the knob. It was unlocked.
The room was small, Spartan: two narrow beds, two plain desks, two wardrobe cabinets. One side was neat, empty, and impersonal. The other was a riot of life—photos of friends tucked into the frame of a mirror, a garland of fairy lights, a stack of well-loved novels, a stuffed penguin wearing a tiny sorority shirt. A roommate.
Ethan’s stomach dropped through the floor. Of course there was a roommate.
The door behind him swung open.
A girl stood there, a towel wrapped around her hair and another around her body, steam wafting from her skin. She had a sharp, clever face, freckles across her nose, and eyes that widened in surprise, then narrowed in instant, analytical suspicion.
“Who the hell are you?” she asked, her voice flat. She didn’t sound scared. She sounded annoyed. “And why are you in my room?”