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  Brian

  I spent the night thinking ‘oh fuck what have I done’ over and over again, and when I woke up the next morning, the proverbial broken record had yet to stop. Because, frankly, oh fuck, what have I done?

  Okay, calm down, O’Neil, you can fix this. Don’t know how yet: coming clean didn’t seem like it would lead to anything other than a potentially friendship-ending screaming match, at which point I’d have to look for a new roommate and possibly hire a maid. Oh God, I did not want to hire a maid. Even if I could afford it, it was just so… So… Tacky. So gauche. So ‘obnoxious rich person doesn’t want to do their own work.’

  Even if that was kinda objectively what I was…

  No, no time for that now! I had a video date tonight, and I had to make sure Kyle didn’t figure out who I really was. The most obvious solution was… Frightening. Mostly because I’d made a promise fifteen years ago to put that part of myself away, lock it up and chuck the key into the ocean, never to be acknowledged again. I couldn’t go back to doing THAT. I shouldn’t. I wouldn’t!

  What choice did I have, though? I didn’t have any female friends, and there was no way in hell any of my sisters would agree to swap in for me. The most logical course of action was…

  Was…

  I leapt out of bed and made a beeline for the bathroom, spshing hot water on my face and staring at myself in the mirror. I was still the same height that I was at fifteen, still basically the same weight thanks to my strict diet and exercise regimen. If I still had any of my old clothes, I could probably fit into them-

  No! I said, spping myself. We are not entertaining this idea!

  And yet here I was, entertaining it. I washed and exfoliated my pasty face, shaving myself thoroughly and methodically. I retrieved the tweezer from my kit, plucking out any stray hair from between my eyebrows. Then I held the tweezers in front of the left eyebrow itself, contempting digging in, doing some shaping, thinning them out into feminine arches. I stopped just shy of it, even if I wanted to.

  I hated that I wanted to.

  I hated that I needed to even more. I finished up in the bathroom and then went for a walk to clear my head, shaking in the bitter cold as I ambled towards the coffee shop a few blocks away. It was a small, cozy little pce on the bottom floor of a rger building, with low-lighting and dark mahogany floors and what I hoped were faux-leather couches atop plush carpets. The scent of coffee percoting and pastries baking in the brick oven behind the front counter filled the air, while the hum of early morning chatter and cssical music- Mahler, good choice- reverberated off of the brick walls. I ordered a bck coffee and a yogurt and grano combination, spshed skim milk into the coffee to dull the bitterness, then sat down in front of the firepce and stared at it, hoping beyond hope that some alternative solution y within the hearth.

  Nothing. Just burning wood. Fmes the same color as my hair. I fingered the ginger tresses that hung messily over my forehead. I kept it tightly parted for work, but hadn’t brushed it before leaving the house that day. How embarrassing. It wasn’t long or styled enough to pass for a girl’s haircut, but…

  But it wasn’t so long that a wig couldn’t fit over it.

  I finished my yogurt and stood up. I knew what had to be done. And if I was VERY careful about it, I could probably even pull it off. Hopefully my makeup skills hadn’t psed.

  ***

  They had, in fact, psed.

  I’d kept things simple, just bought a long red wig and some foundation and lipstick and mascara and eyeliner. I’d sworn never to buy women’s clothes again, and TECHNICALLY I still hadn’t. Wigs and cosmetics were their own thing. Obviously. Totally. One hundred and eleven percent their own thing.

  I knew that this whole endeavor would fall apart if I took the video call from inside my bedroom while Kyle took it from his, separated only by thin walls and faith, so I dipped into my supply of hotel points accumuted from extensive travels and rented a room for the night. I got to work putting on my face– or Rose’s face, I suppose– only to find that it was not exactly like riding a bicycle. I wound up looking like an untalented cospyer at a comic convention, a deranged clown staring back at me from the mirror. I scrubbed it all off and tried again, and again, and a-fucking-gain!

  And I still looked like a damn juggalo!

  Come on, I used to know how to do this. Just use the brushes, apply it gently, and smooth it out. Blend it, make it look natural.

  Deep breath, Br… No, not Brian. I needed to get into character. I needed to make this convincing. If I didn’t want Kyle to see Brian and get his heart broken and destroy our friendship, I couldn’t be Brian. Shouldn’t be that hard: Brian was barely a person to begin with. All I had to do was not be someone who had no personality and no friends and no life. Simple.

  I blended the foundation together, and finally, as the sun began to set outside, it looked natural. Perfectly settled atop my pale skin. The lipstick took a few dozen tries as well, but eventually I managed to get that down, and the mascara came retively easily. Just blink over the wand: that’s all there really was to it.

  “Hi, I’m Rose,” I said. And then my eyes tore wide open, devouring my face entirely, while panic and shame bayonnetted me through the heart and the stomach. If the mirror in front of me had shattered upon the soundwaves of my hideous, low, ft, baritone man-voice, I wouldn’t have been surprised. I certainly wanted to fall to pieces after hearing it come out of my… Rose’s… Mouth. That didn’t belong there, coming from those red lips on that girly face. And that was a problem; that was an extremely, very, terribly significant problem. Fuck. FUCK!

  I got up and started pacing up and down my hotel room, a beige affair with a single king-sized bed that threatened to swallow up my dainty frame every time I flopped onto it, and drummed my fingers on my pale thighs. The motor activity soothed me a bit as I went up and down, tearing through the dark and cobwebbed hallways in the dry and empty stone byrinth of my mind. Okay. You can figure this out. You have technology. There are ways to do this. There are workarounds. Visualize one. Picture a light at the far end of this proverbial hallway. Imagine yourself walking towards it. And when you reach it, when you’re basking in it, tell yourself you will find the solution.

  One foot in front of the other. And another. And another. And another.

  And when it was over, I stood in the light

  A manic smile erupted upon my face as I pirouetted about the room, dancing around my oversized bed and spinning on my heels. I held my hands together in front of my face while drumming them together and shaking my hips while I pranced. Truly, I was an evil genius for this idea.

  A sharp knocking exploded against my door. My heart nearly exploded as I tripped and nded on my side, yelping upon impact. I cwed my way up from the ground and stumbled towards the door, tearing it open to find a hotel worker on the other side. She was a tall, wide woman in her te-middle years, gray-haired and exhausted-looking. “Just checking on you, sir, someone heard you-”

  She trailed off, staring at my painted face and red wig. “Oh. I see.”

  “What?” I said, my face doing an impression of paper through a shredder at the sound of it.

  “I understand completely, miss, don’t you worry-”

  “I’m not a- I think there’s been a misunderstanding.”

  “Hey, it’s all good. Just making sure you were okay. You are okay, aren’t you?”

  “... I don’t really know how to answer that.”

  “Bet there’s a lotta questions you don’t quite know how to answer right now, huh girly?” she said, hand on her hip, brow raised.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I… You know what, never mind. Not my job. I’m sure you’ve got people in your life who worry about you-”

  “Why does everyone keep saying things like that?!”

  “- I’ll let them sort you out. Have a nice evening, miss.”

  She turned and walked away, leaving me standing in the arches of my door. I wanted to correct her, to say ‘it’s sir,’ but something stopped me. I wasn’t sure what.

  Whatever. Time to get down to business.

  ***

  As the call connected on my ptop (my work ptop, obviously. No way the meathead would be able to trace it back to me that way), I took in a deep breath through my nose, held in my chest for a moment, then exhaled slowly out my mouth. The room was darkened, and I mustered up my most winning smile (after practicing it for the past two hours, it better be good) as I saw Kyle on the other end of the screen, wearing a tight-fitting tank top while he id on his familiar bed.

  “Hey there,” he said, fshing those perfect teeth, waving one of his massive hands. “Bit dark in there. Everything alright?”

  I typed away into the group chat, responding with, ‘my power is out and my microphone is busted.’

  His brow furrowed, confusion evident on his perfect face. “Uh-huh.”

  ‘It is. Honest,’ I typed, checking my expression in the self-camera view and trying my best for a doe-eyed look of innocence. ‘I’m so sorry about all this. I really am.’

  “It’s… Alright,” he said slowly and deliberately.

  Fuck. He’s on to me. I should’ve known this would never work. Goddammit Goddammit Goddammit FUCK!

  “Hey, hey, seriously, it’s alright,” Kyle said, offering a conciliatory smile while holding up both his hands, palms held ft towards me. “Just… Just don’t freak out. I’m not mad. Just a little surprised.”

  I stifled a squeak of fear, my mascara-widened eyes breaking off contact. I stared down at my keyboard and slowly, calmly, CALMLY, messaged him, ‘Surprised by what?’

  “Well, you look a little different from your profile pic.”

  Okay. Okay, stay the course. You can do this. “I know, I know. I’m sorry about that. I’m just… I’m just a little insecure about my appearance. Tonight was the first night in forever that I’ve even done my makeup and I just kept screwing it up all afternoon and made myself look even more hideous than usual and I just… I get panicked when people look at me.”

  Best lies are repurposed truths.

  He nodded severely. “I think I understand.”

  ‘You do?’

  “Yeah. I’ll admit, I was a little annoyed about st night, but I think I get it now.”

  ‘Oh thank God!’ I wrote before steepling my fingers together and smiling widely.

  “Heh.”

  ‘What?’

  “Oh, that was just… I can’t believe you think you’re ugly,” he chuckled. “You’re stunning.”

  I ughed, then waved my hand dismissively.

  “Not to mention cute.”

  I squeaked again, my jaw dropping.

  “Yeah, like that!” he said, pointing at me.

  I watched my cheeks turn red in the self-camera. It’s a surreal thing to see happen to yourself in real-time.

  “And that,” he said, still chuckling.

  In spite of myself, I ughed too. Kyle had always had the most infectious ugh: once you heard it, whether it was his casual, contended chuckle or his jovial belly-ugh, you couldn’t help doing so yourself. Or at least, I’d never been able to help myself, anyway.

  “And for what it’s worth, I think your makeup looks fantastic,” he said. “Great job with your eyeliner. It looks perfect.”

  This son of a bitch. I’d seen him use that line a million times before. See, most guys never notice when girls are wearing makeup, unless it’s very specifically dark red lipstick. But a guy like Kyle, a devastatingly hot and hiriously buff guy who had women throwing themselves at him left and right, had learned tricks of the trade. Taught himself what actually goes into a girl putting on her face, and that way, when he had one on his arm, as he very often did, it was a simple matter of mentioning how well-blended her foundation was, how her mascara made her eyes look extra big and beautiful, and suddenly they were even more into him. It signaled that he wasn’t just hot, but he noticed things, that he paid attention more than the other guys.

  Granted, he DID pay more attention than most guys. That was why I couldn’t exactly call him out on it: he actually took the time to learn about makeup so this would work, and he knew his stuff. He was always looking for new subjects to learn about, presumably so that no matter what his paramour of the week was interested in, he’d be able to keep up conversationally. The end result was that he was a surprisingly well-rounded person. It was one of the things I admired about him.

  And he was correct. My eyeliner was IMMACULATE.

  ‘Thank you,’ I responded. ‘You’re very sweet.’

  “So, tell me about yourself?”

  ‘Not much to tell. I work in a convenience store, I follow hockey, I like to go to bars and concerts, and I’m attempting to become a fashion influencer.’

  “What kinda music do you like?”

  ‘Oh, cssical and jazz, mostly.’

  “Hm. Interesting,” he said after a moment’s hesitation.

  ‘Why’s that interesting?’

  “Just wouldn’t have expected a girl like you to be into those.”

  Confusion bubbled up inside my head. ‘And what kinda girl is that?’

  “... More of a working css one,” he said, finally.

  ‘I contain multitudes,’ I replied.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “Everyone does. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on either of those two genres, but my roommate pys them a lot, so I’ve heard some of the biggees.”

  I flinched, hoping it was imperceptible in the scant radiance. ‘Is that right?’

  “Yeah. O’Neil. Kind of a weird guy, but he’s got his charms.”

  ‘Good to know.’

  “He’s not around too often, though. Travels a lot for work,” he said, offering me a wink.

  I shivered a little bit, a warm sensation flickering inside my stomach. ‘Also good to know.’

  “So, what I’m saying is, we can have the apartment all to ourselves, probably real soon,” he said, giving me a look that… Wow. WOW. I’d seen that look. I’d witnessed him giving it to women in real time. It was a hungry look. Ravenous, really. The kind that said ‘I want something and I’m not gonna rest until I get it.’ He’d always been respectful of boundaries, always backed off the second he got an inkling the girl wasn’t receptive (sometimes without her even having to say it, either), but if she was interested, then he’d indulge his appetite. And my guy had a VERY big appetite. I’d never been on the receiving end of it. Not from him, not from… Anyone, near as I can tell. It was like I was the only person in the world who could make him happy, the only one who would be able to satisfy him, the only one who mattered. I was the center of his attention, and it felt…

  It felt good.

  … Because I was so in character! Yes, obviously, that was the only reason. I was just that good of an actor. Method, truly. Eat your heart out, Daniel Day-Lewis!

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  “Yeah,” Kyle said. “That sound good to you?”

  I nearly typed out and sent a resounding yes, but I stopped short. Saying yes would guarantee me a clean apartment for a week. Pying the long game a little bit would guarantee me one for my entire forced vacation. ‘Well, I wanna meet in person somewhere else first. Girl’s gotta be careful, you know?’

  Another warm flush at the way I’d phrased that. ‘Girl.’ It made me feel like I was-

  No, no stop that. Stay on task.

  “How about a bar sometime this week?” he asked. “I know a good pce. We can watch some hockey, hang out. Sound good?”

  I nodded, still fighting back against the part of me that was enjoying all this. That was sick. Sick and wrong, and besides, I’d outgrown this whole… This whole PHASE that had dominated my childhood. It was behind me. Right now I was just using a skill I’d acquired in order to get something that I wanted. That was all it was. That was all it could be.

  ‘Sounds great,’ I typed. ‘Just make sure your pce is nice and clean, okay? Nothing I love more than a nice, clean apartment.’

  He smiled. “I think I can arrange that.

  As the call went on, and he talked and I listened and typed back my responses, I found myself rexing more and more. Video calls are usually awkward by nature, but this was surprisingly good. Maybe it was because it was Kyle, because I’d known him for years, because I’d always been able to rex around him (most of the time anyway). But as the night wore on, I was more and more content just to listen to his soothing voice. I found myself nodding along as he spoke, lost in his gaze, hoping he would give me that look again.

  As the call came to a close, and he blew me a kiss good-night, I blew him one right back before settling back into the darkness of my hotel room, unable to move. Oh God, what have I done? Something bad. Something I shouldn’t be doing, for several reasons.

  But on the plus side, at least he bought it?