Tell Me I'm Worthless(60)

Alice and Ila


Ila and Alice both make it out of the House alive. They stumble back down the street and into Ila’s bed, crying together well into the next day. Ila’s skin is not bleached, although her nose is a little bruised. Alice has not been cut open. They don’t sleep together.

The following week, Alice moves out of her flat and into Ila’s. It feels like the most natural thing in the world to do – they love each other, despite everything, and they will continue to love each other until the end of time.

A month or so later, both girls go back to the House. They pour lighter fluid around the circumference of it, in a great, wide ring. Alice sets it alight. The old ivy burns well, but they stand well back because the smoke that billows out from it is toxic. The ivy catches alight, then the House itself, or what remains of it, goes up in flames.

“It’s so beautiful,” says Alice, and hugs Ila to her closely. They stand there as long as they dare. The fire spreads out, and, in the centre, it folds around the red room, the walls melt away until there is only a pure colourless centre. Then, even that is gone. The people in the block of flats over the street stand at their windows watching it in amazement, and by the time the fire brigade show up, both girls are gone, and the House is as good as gone too. Just black ash drifting in the night air.





Epilogue:

Glad Day


It takes time, but eventually a contractor buys the land and begins to build on the ground where there was once a very evil House. People tell the men working there, hey, this used to be a haunted house, but the men laugh, because they don’t believe in ghosts. They’re rational men. A new block of flats goes up. Families move in. In a flat on the third floor, a family lives, and they have a son. And that son is confused and lonely. His parents are panicked, manic things.

The face in his wall is ignored. It screams, banging its fists against the inside of the building, but he can’t hear. He sits on his computer, looking at the forums, and the pdf files people send him. There is a storm coming, say the men online.

The boy begins to learn things. He begins to learn about chemistry, and the chemical compounds to create an explosion. It’s not too hard, really. He realised that he had most of the things he needed at home, and the rest he managed to steal from school. His parents didn’t know at all. The government didn’t know, either. They didn’t think to look at him. Why would they?

I’m going to do it, he tells the men online, anonymously. Someone posts something like this every day. They’re always posting that they’re going to do it, they’re going to go after that girl that rejected them, they’re going to bring a gun to school, and so on and so on. This happens enough times that the people on the forum don’t really believe anyone now. But the boy posts it anyway. Sure, the people say. Do it. Go on.

He makes the bomb. He makes a mechanism that will ignite it if he calls a burner phone he straps to it, and he puts it in his rucksack. He is quiet and clever and resourceful. He knows that the Pride parade is coming up next week. It is the height of summer, and his room is a cube of sweat. Hannah, in the wall, watches helplessly as he picks up his bag on the day of the parade and leaves. A glad day will come, he thinks. A glad day will dawn.

It is, almost, like it used to be. They push into the parade, in the middle of the crowd, and the security guards come for them but they can’t do anything.

“Fuck,” says Harry sweat dripping from his hairline. “I’ve missed this.”

Alice marches next to him. She’s holding a loudspeaker in one hand and is getting ready to shout into it with all the force she has in her lungs. But before she does, she looks down at Harry. She’s so much taller than him. It’s almost comical, but at the same time people find it sweet, their height difference. Harry feels like he’s gotten shorter since he started taking T, which is probably just a trick of his mind, but it pisses him off anyway.

Their fingers are entwined. Alice holds the loudspeaker to her mouth. “The government,” she calls into it, and her voice expands up and down the street, “are trying to bring back Section 28! They are trying to make it illegal to discuss transness in public! That is the endgame here! What do we say to that?”

Everyone else in the crowd, Harry included, responds. “Fuck off!”

“That’s right!” shouts Alice. “What was the first pride, everyone?”

“A riot!” they call back.

“What was that?”

“A riot!”

The people watching from the side-lines of the parade, who came here to see pink things and floats and a particular kind of gayness, are nervous. One of them, a man, calls out at them. “Stop ruining it!” he shouts. But they march onward.

Harry loves Alice more than he thought it was possible to love another human, and he loves her, seeing her there, striding like a giant, holding the loudspeaker like a sword. He scratches his face, and feels the beard that has grown there bountifully since he started T. He worries that it doesn’t look enough like a real beard, but whenever he vocalises this Alice kisses his cheeks and tells him he is beautiful, and he kisses her back and says, darling you’re so handsome. Harry can’t believe he used to hate her. He can’t believe he would have once been a counter protestor, screaming that the group of trans people who had pushed their way into pride were a bunch of misogynists. Sometimes, the old version of himself floats above him near his bedroom ceiling, and tells him he’ll always be Ila, but that happens less and less now. Ila isn’t a real person, these days. That was another person, in another time.