We Are Not This - Carolina Writers for Equality

TL;DR

by Michael G. Williams

Posted 1 May 2017 by FashionBoi100

You guys! You are gonna die! I'm sorry for such a ridiculous text post, but I have a lot to tell you. Are you excited? I am!

Okay, first off, yesterday was my first anniversary as the Triangle's PREMIER #food and #fashion blogger, and I just want to say THANK YOU for coming along on my ridiculous adventure. At first I was pretty sure no one cared — I mean, I can see how many followers I have right there on my dash, right? — but after a week of posting #food and #chic and #fashion, I had three followers, and I was like, this is real! This bitch is working the mean streets! Who snapped a pic of Queen Bey reigning over the TSA at RDU? Who got a personal invitation to the opening of the first new soda shop in downtown Durham in thirty-seven years?

Um, yes, #mymilkshake was on effing fire that night, and not just from the Everclear I spiked it with when nobody was looking, praise Jesus. A year later, it feels like the flames have yet to subside!

Crazy! It's been a year (and a day  —  I forgot!) so HAPPY TUMBLRVERSARY TO US!

Anyway!

Not to brag, but last night it was all hands on deck for a big affair atop The Durham  —  heavy apps and free wells in the open air of the rooftop bar. I was there, posing as mild-mannered server, Clark Kent (no, pwilder97, I will not use the unbelievably filthy variation you suggested in PM. I think that's very disrespectful, and also, I'm not a bottom   —   #teampowertop4life).

Truth told, I miiiiight be fibbing just a teensy bit about my job at these events, but darlings, it's important I stay #anon. Saying I'm the bartender in no way compromises the truth of my perspective on the evening. If you know who I am, you know you're my friend. If you don't know who I am, your opinion of me must matter. Either way, I thank you for coming along with me on these little adventures. I mean, for one thing, I need the help after Eric up and ditched his job. We've been shorthanded ever since, but that's the way it is in the hospitality industry: inhospitable. I thought he and I had a good thing going, too. Eric was the first guy in a while to be sweet to me. I don't mean suave or sexy. I mean sweet. It's harder to find than you'd think. If you've found it, hold on tight.

So anyway, the crowd at this thing was wild. These people were not the usual mix of aspirational upper-middles splurging on a five-hundo-a-head cover charge. These people were upper-crust with an uppercase crust. They were way past rich and into decadent. I may come off as a queen seeking the nightlife, but my inner simple farm gurl was dazzled beyond description. These people were special. First of all, they had to flash a pendant to get in, even the stodgy old codgers with the bristle-brush mustaches. They were dressed to the nines, but they were understated, too. They were legit keeping it #classy, socioeconomically and #fashionably, and yes, as you can see, I did learn a few vocabulary words in school.

Anyway, once they were inside, these people all had to wear  —  I am not lying  —  tiaras. Ain't no BK birthday action up in here, gurl. These were the real deal. I know gold when I see it. They were almost like wire sculptures: one long piece of gold, folded and woven together a hundred times. Tiny jewels, unmistakably real and so tasteful I was gagging, were mounted along the delicate lines of these glittering coronets, each alike, but each fitting perfectly on a wearer's head whether affixed to bald spot or bouffant.

Visually, these babies were a feast. When I got close enough to give one a better look, the very first thought that popped into my head was of the stars themselves. The bar was candles-only that night, and the breeze made the flames dance. The way the light reflected off these people's head-couture left me absolutely breathless. At one point, I blinked, and I won't lie, honey, I realized my gaze had wandered off and I was, in fact, staring up, at the sky, at the actual stars. I had to wipe drool from my chin, babes. I am not embarrassed. I am honored to lose myself in beauty for a moment. Ain't no shame in my #fashionblogger game. If my mind wanders while I ogle, so be it.

Even fabled Atalanta was distracted from the hunt when she saw Melanion's beautiful golden apples, wasn't she? It got her a husband in the end, though, so maybe really she won. (Melanion sounds like something you'd buy on the natural remedies aisle to sleep after bad dreams. Lord.)

(Bad dreams last night. I've been doing some Googling.)

Oh, I ramble! Anyway, these people had their cocktail party and ate their apps. I wondered backstage if these people were, like, an immigrant group? Because their food  —  no offense  —  looked and smelled like deviled assholes. Eventually they made a few toasts to all the work we've done to make this our home and we all remember the sacrifice of our forefathers and then, hand to Jesus, they started singing songs from the old country.

U gurls know I'm not a racist  —  I'm as multicultural as it gets  —  but I am going to tell you right now my first reaction to their singing was to put my hands over my ears. They sounded like thirty cats trying to fuck and fight at the same time. I wasn't even sure they were all singing in the same tongue, blessed be their folksy native ways or whatever, but after a few bars, they seemed to get their shit in line. SORT OF. It was relative.

Randy was all are they some kind of rich wetbacks that hate music, and I told him that was racist and not to be tolerated, and would you believe he slapped me on the ass and told me to learn to take a joke? Assholes are as assholes do, or whatever that quote is from that movie about Tom Hanks and the box of chocolates.

Singing over, the hoitiest of Durham's toitiest made a few more rounds of the un-appetizers and clapped each other on the back and smiled. I kept doing my server thang, but every time I got close to one of those absolutely devilish crowns, I found myself entirely distracted.

Eventually I got so lost studying their design I dropped a plate of deviled assholes right there on the concrete floor. The whole crystal serving platter shattered into a million jagged shards, spraying blotches of presumed food all over the fucking place. While I was apologizing and running backstage for a mop, the Richie Riches all crowded around, studying the mess and talking rapid-fire about what it meant. At that point I figured they were just rich New Age freaks like all the other ones you read about  —  you know, not that I'd actually buy one, but like the DIANA'S ASTROLOGER TRIED TO WARN HER kind of stuff you see on the covers of the tabloids at the grocery store. (Okay, maybe I bought that one.) When I returned, they were taking pictures and posting them online! Can you believe it? I was so embarrassed. I turned as red as the sauce on one of those apps.

Lord help me, but at long last, the big do was big done. My colleagues and I mopped up like ragamuffins in the background of a production of Annie, and after some discussion, we all agreed the natural way to celebrate was to go get some cheap wells for ourselves from The Bar because why not? Alley 26 is to die for, I know, but that night we got zero tips. Nobody felt like a splurge.

Fleeing into the night, we were off down Rigsbee, past the MickeyD's of the Living Dead and that skate park that empties as soon as the sun goes down. I always wonder about that place. I mean, it's open, it's lighted, and there's a police station on that block. You'd think it would stay busy.

Well, I used to wonder, anyway.

Immediately past the park is that place that used to be the Liberty Warehouse. They tore it down, you know, after what the city found inside, and now it's being turned into high-end condominiums. The whole block was dark, with earth-moving equipment and construction scaffolding and a giant crane emerging from that pit of blood-red, clay-choked soil like an arm reaching out to snare unwary prey, and even though there were no lights inside, nothing to which lights could even be mounted, a faint luminescence cast wild, exaggerated shadows across the surfaces of what little stands there now.

Randy and Sherlene were talking about how they couldn't imagine people wanting to live there after what they found, even if it's a whole different building now, and I said, It isn't a whole different building. They kept that part on the corner, you know? The one that says LIBERTY in big letters?

Dreadfully uneducated, Sherlene tried to say, Oh, you mean the façade, but she pronounced it fah-CH-ayyyyyyyd, somehow getting the two phonemes wrong and adding a syllable. I laughed, and she called me a queer, and like a shot out of a gun, this homeless person came barreling at us from the darkness, right out of a gap in that very façade. He was waving around a sign on a piece of cardboard, a pizza box, and he walked like something was wrong with his back and both of his legs: this staggering, jerking, hyperactive hop from one foot to the other. It made me think nonsensically of an insect on its back, its legs flailing, even though he was upright and moving around. That image was just burned into my head. He was hollering at us in a voice that sounded more like a cough than words, and GURL, he looked like he hadn't taken a bath since they invented indoor plumbing.

Opposite of #fashion, to say the least!

Of course, I am always a humanitarian above all, so I tried to make sense of what he was saying because doesn't everyone deserve that much respect? Sherlene and Randy were trying to get around him, but there was a car in the street and the sidewalk is narrow there where the construction fence is up, and the horn blared them back out of the path of the car and into the path of the bum, and honest to Jesus, I thought Sherlene was going to shit her hot pants right there on Rigsbee Avenue.

Moaning and mumbling, the bum went toward them, shouting, QUEER? I'LL TELL YOU WHAT'S QUEER, but then he tottered past them altogether and came straight at me, waving his goddamn sign around with one hand and pointing at moi with the other! YOU'VE SEEN IT, he cried at me, YOU'VE SEEN THE PATTERN, and God as my witness, when he got close enough, I could see who he was  —  he was Eric, the guy I said ditched his job! Three weeks earlier he'd been just another server on our crew. He was quiet, maybe, and he didn't go out with us very often after a gig, but he was personable. He was clean, as awful as that is of me to say. He shaved and he wore clothes that weren't rags, and he wasn't waving around a pizza box and screaming at people.

Eric? I squeaked it out, frozen in my tracks, so he walked right up to me and put a hand on my arm. His grip was like goddamned iron, like he was a machine made for squeezing things. I was worried he was going to hurt me, and you know I don't scare easy.

Damned if Eric didn't get right up in my face, and I could smell two weeks of the street on his breath. It was disgusting. It stank to high heaven, like it came here straight from hell.

It smelled, I realized, like the appetizers from the event that night. He smelled like what I called deviled assholes.

As I recoiled from Eric, tearing at his hand with my own, shrieking for Randy or Sherlene or one of the cops from the station across the street or somebody, anybody to come fucking help me, Eric started waving that piece of cardboard at me.

Make way for them! he cried at me, shouting it in my face, breath a corrupt reek. Make preparations for their greatness! Their time has come, Sylvester, their time has finally come.

Sylvester! He knew my name! Yes, I'm telling you my real name; it doesn't matter anymore, and anyway, I've always liked it. I've always loved that mean old cartoon cat and the disco singer, the one who sang Sell My Soul, and so I love my name, and from here on out, you can feel free to call me that. I was convinced by then that Eric must have spent two weeks in the middle of a psychotic break. However, he was sane enough to know who I was. It wasn't for just anyone that he came barreling out of the mud under the ass-end of Future Site of Durham Skylines: A Luxury Living Experience Now Accepting Applications. He came barreling out at me.

Of course, I wasn't thinking about that at the time. I was trying to get away from what appeared to be Crazy Eric rather than feeling glad to unearth Sweet Eric. He was waving that sign around, and I happened to glance at it as I tried to pry his fingers from my arm  —  those fingers that were so gentle with me once.

So maybe I missed Eric more than I've admitted. I apologize if my FUCK ERIC post was too harsh. Sometimes I Tumbl without thinking.

Once I actually looked at the sign, my jaw dropped open. I'll be goddamned if it wasn't the same pattern as was formed by those tiny, glittering jewels on the crowns the rich kids were wearing atop The Durham that night.

Rubies, sapphires, and emeralds, arranged in intricate and sweeping patterns, ran from the middle to the side of those delicate hair-thin golden crowns.

Red, blue, and green dots, and a series of magic marker lines between them, were scrawled on the cardboard with all the precision and realism of a kindergartner's refrigerator art.

Yet they were the same, unmistakably so. There was no denying it. Crazy Eric was trying to show me the pattern I had just seen an hour before.

I got free of him then, or perhaps once my eyes lingered on the sign, he knew he could finally let go. Either way, I staggered backwards  —  Randy and Sherlene were backing away instead of helping, those bitches  —  and I tripped on a brick or something on the sidewalk, and when I landed, I think I hit my head because I saw stars.

All the stars in the sky were there, but it was like looking at them through a transparency from when we were kids in school. There was a second layer of red and blue and green, and thin lines between them, and they almost matched up with the real stars in the sky above me but not quite. A few stars were exactly right. A few others were off by just a scooch.

Maybe I screamed, too, because some cops getting out of a car at the station across the street finally noticed and started shouting at Eric to leave me alone. Eric started shouting back, in that cough-choke-gag voice he used before when he came out of the shadows at us. One of the cops drew a gun, and the other yelled at Eric to put his hands behind his head and get down on the ground.

Sherlene finally recognized Eric, too, and screamed his name, and then Randy shouted it, and it was like having all his old coworkers see him again, know him, made something snap inside Eric's mind. Eric threw down the cardboard with the star pattern on it, looked down at his crazy mismatched, ill-fitted clothes, put his hands to his face like Rip Van Winkle waking up and finding he grew a beard, and did the saddest thing I could imagine: he sobbed.

One heaving cry of sorrow and regret and animalistic fear welled up out of him and turned into a long, distended moan, a wail of loss and terror, the sort of sound a child makes when her mother dies and she feels it, deep in her gut, from halfway around the world. The part of me that maybe loved Eric a little  —  even though we only went out for six weeks and even though he was only okay in the sack, because when he saw me, he smiled, and whenever I showed up for a date, he would look me in the eye and say something nice instead of something shitty  —  that part of me felt like someone drove an iron rod right through me. Seeing Eric gone mad was bad, but seeing Eric have that one awful moment of horrified awareness was way worse.

Red-faced and shouting, the cop repeated his command that Eric surrender, but he did exactly the opposite. Eric looked at the cop, his eyes opened, and a beatific smile broke out across Eric's face. I finally let out a breath. Maybe this confrontation was what Eric needed to shake him out of whatever was going on. Maybe we could get him help! Maybe we could call 911 and get him into the psych ward and then... well, life is made of maybe, isn't it?

Rather than lie down, Eric ran right at the cop, his arms out wide, his chest puffed up. What bothers me now, when I think about it, isn't that the cop shot Eric. I can understand why he did that. What bothers me is that Eric was laughing and how relieved he sounded when he died.

Yet more cops came running out of the station at the sound of gunshots  —  I guess screams aren't good enough?  —  and we were surrounded for a little while. They took statements from Randy and Sherlene and me, and then they told us to go home and get some rest. Just like that, we were supposed to go home and get some rest? They asked me if I knew Eric.

I said no, I didn't. But I did reach down when no one was looking and take Eric's cardboard sign.

Drinks didn't hold the same appeal after that, but I wanted one all the same. I had a lot to process, and I needed help to process it.

Once we were at the bar, Randy ordered drinks for all three of us. Sherlene and I sat out in the backyard in one of those conversation alcoves or whatever they call them, the little benches with a coffee table under a shelter in case of weather. The skies were clear that night, no chance of rain, but I felt the need to hide from something, and I wasn't exactly sure what.

None of the drinks helped. I tried ones that got progressively stronger, all to no avail.

To be sure, darlings, I got drunk. It just didn't do me any good.

Knowing I was freaked out, Randy kept the drinks coming. He might be a racist, but he wasn't entirely bad. He just didn't know better. He was the sort of guy who grows up in a place where prejudice is in the water and it's hard to get it all entirely out of your system. Sherlene, bless her, just wasn't very educated. I told her I was sorry for laughing at her pronunciation of façade. You kids know I'm a class act, and a class act knows when to apologize.

Never mind, she slurred at me, poor drunk thing. We've all got bigger stuff to worry about now. She laughed, a short, sharp bark of something. Bigger fish to fry! She squealed that and for reasons not apparent to moi, it amused the shit out of her. She cackled like an old hen, her big hair flopping around in the shadowed recesses of our booze hut.

Oh, but she certainly was not wrong. We had plenty bigger things to worry about. Eric was dead, dear sweet Eric, Eric who I think I probably loved more than I really want to admit, Eric whose abandonment of his job, and of me, had me so upset in my heart of hearts. You babes probably remember the post I put up and then took down, the one about Eric telling me I was his first? I told you I only posted that because I was drunk, and I was, but it was true: I was so honored, felt so blessed, to walk with him across that threshold into being an awake and aware and fully sexual adult. Oh, the irony of me being someone's first.

What a tangled web we weave when we post, edit, and delete because we fear our own heart's most secret whispers.

We sat in silence, waiting for Randy to get back with those fucking drinks, and I took out the piece of cardboard to stare at it again. The stars almost matched, and I couldn't help but feel that mattered somehow. Sherlene was staring at it with me, and when I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, I guessed she was even drunker than her slur suggested because she was moving her mouth soundlessly as though reading along over my shoulder. The only problem was, there weren't any words on the sign. There were only stars.

Here is where it gets really weird, babes, and I hate to have to take the blog in this direction, but I have always thought of myself as a journalist more than just a #fashion #blogger, and so I'm going to tell you the unvarnished truth of what happened. I looked at Sherlene to ask what she was saying, because the music was just random techno, no words to sing along to, and no words written on the sign, and her eyes were as dull and dead as an old marble. They weren't looking at anything in particular. I wasn't even sure they were focused on the same thing. Sherlene's face was slack, and her mouth was slightly open. Her tongue moved, and her lips twitched...

...And she reached out and flipped the sign over. On the back, not written in pen or marker but scratched almost invisibly into its surface by something like the nib of a dead pen, one with no ink left, was this:

THE FIRSTS SHALL RETURN

THE FIRSTS ARE ALL THAT MATTERS

OH STARS ALIGN

DEATH COMES FOR US ALL

ONCE THE STARS

ARE RIGHT AGAIN

Before I could say anything, she started whispering, her face coming back to life, giving some small voice to the shapes her mouth had been making. She was chanting those words to herself under her breath.

Over the sound of Sherlene's chanting, I heard Randy return. The bar in there is fucking swamped, he said to us, carrying three specialties of the house: slut buckets, ten dollar buckets of rum punch on ice with a straw sticking out. Sorry that took so long.

Uselessly, I shook my head at Randy, trying to warn him away, not even sure from what, but knowing something was wrong, something was bad wrong. As he caught my eye, trying to figure out what I wanted to say, Sherlene pulled the switchblade knife out of her purse and drove it between Randy's ribs.

The drinks fell to the ground, then Randy followed them, then Sherlene followed him as she straddled his torso. She drew the knife from Randy's chest, held it up over him with both hands like an illustration of an Incan Empire human sacrifice from my unbelievably racy fourth grade history textbook, and with her eyes rolled back she moaned, You've seen the pattern.

I screamed as Sherlene brought the knife down again, and then again, and then again, and after stabbing Randy in the chest what must have been a dozen times, maybe two dozen, she drew the knife out a final time. Blood was all over him, all over her hands, spattered across her face, her chest, even that ridiculous nest of hair extensions. Her eyes were still rolled back, but with exquisitely awful precision, she used the tip of the blade to draw lines between the stab wounds, lines that matched perfectly with the ones Eric had drawn on his cardboard sign, lines that matched perfectly with the delicate gold strands of the crowns our clients had worn that evening as they toasted the sacrifice of their forefathers and the arrival of the time they would make this place their new home. When she was done, Sherlene lifted the blade one more time, let out a scream for the ages, a B-movie queen kind of scream that could have shattered glasses if we'd been in a classier bar, and drove the switchblade into her own chest with all her strength. Her body spasmed, her legs kicked, and then her head drooped and sank, and one last breath rattled out between her lips.

Then things made sense for me somehow. I don't know if I'm just slow, or if there was something about seeing the pattern a third time, or if there was something about seeing it drawn in blood, but images flooded my mind. I saw a field of stars, and the way they moved through the heavens like the clockwork innards of the universe. I saw the people from the party. I saw the things they say the city found in the old Liberty Warehouse. I saw the construction crane and the scaffolding and the pattern they formed, shadows cast against a clear night sky. I saw the madness in Eric's eyes  —  madness transmuted to joy when death finally came for him in simple human forms. I saw the stars as they were last night and the way they will be three days from now. I saw the sacrifice of their forefathers, the blades held high, the way the world was mapped and the future written with the ink and parchment of blood and flesh.

I heard the other patrons of The Bar screaming. People were running this way and that. Someone rushed the back gate  —  you know, the emergency exit  —  and an alarm went off. Others started climbing over the fence to the bar next door. I heard sirens from a block away and was surprised the cops were so quick to answer this time. With all that raging around me, I knew what I had to do. I knew what all this meant. I pulled out my phone, babes, the very one I'm using to type this right now, and I took two pictures, just like those hoity-toity fuckers at their fancy party not two hours before. I took a picture of Eric's cardboard star map, and I took I picture of the pattern carved into Randy's chest. I uploaded them along with the picture I managed to snap of one of the crowns the rich kids were wearing at the party.

All three will go up between now and the fourth. The first one, of the crown, is scheduled to go up at midnight tonight, immediately after this text post. Eric's sign will be published tomorrow. Randy's chest will be published the next night. I'm sorry to make you see this, babes. I'm sorry to be the one to do this to you. But I know now what the pattern means, and I know it's pointless to resist. Sherlene's simple mind had the simplest reaction: spread the pattern and die. Maybe I'm too smart for my own good because my mind has been made to do a lot more than spread the pattern one time to one person.

I used to hope and pray for the photo or the review or the event that would make me go viral, that would take this blog and blow it up to the big time. I'm so sorry this is what did it, kids. I'm so sorry I have to show this to you. But I have to. I have to. There's no point fighting this impulse. I don't know how Eric knew, but he tried to run away to protect me. I believe that, or I want to. I think it was a way of showing his love.

And doing this, getting it all over with at once for as many of you as I can, is mine. I know most of you won't read something this long. I also know reading this won't save the ones of you who do. We're all fucked, sweetie. The only difference is, some of us are into that. The rich fucks from the hotel were into that, I guess. I'm not. I'm terrified. But the rest of me has to obey. The rest of me knows fear won't stop them. The rest of me hopes one of you out there will read this and be immune, maybe even able to fight back. Godspeed, babycakes. You've come with me on this wild ride, and this is where I get off. I hope you're stronger than I was.

THE END

Trapped

by Theresa Glover

Choosing between suicide and lace panties gets harder every time.

It's enough, most days, to go through the ritual of unlocking the gun case and stare at the Glock in its custom foam padding while Anna eats her breakfast in the other room. A few minutes gives me the strength to lock the case and put it back on the closet's top shelf.

On bad days I sit at my wife's antique dressing table, pull out the 9mm and look deep into the welcoming void of the barrel. Those days I court the executioner.

For one more day with my daughter, I risk being who I really am in some small way.

It would be easier to have cancer. To have a living, mutating thing eat you alive. People understand cancer. They blame the disease for what makes you different. They find a mass and zap it with radiation. They pump poison into your veins and assure you that you're getting better despite the uncontrollable vomiting. They understand curable causes and pursue scientific ways to make you normal.

But the wrong body?

They don't get it. They don't believe it's possible, so they invoke God. He doesn't make mistakes, they insist. Be happy the way He made you.

The problem is me, they insist, not that I am, somehow, inhabiting the wrong body.

I'm surprised I'm still alive.

Even if I get out of this, my days are numbered.

Something as simple as putting on a pair of panties shouldn't be a life or death decision, but it is. Painting my toes might get me arrested. For the secret relief of wearing a satin camisole, I risk rehabilitation. All it takes is a flash of color glimpsed through the crack in a bathroom stall, or the shadow of lace through a button up shirt.

The signs at bus stops, on bathroom walls, and in school corridors say it all, See something? Say something. Protect our children. Or my favorite, Protect what's natural. Reporting rehabilitates our society.

I take precautions, but they don't eliminate risk.

Today is no different, except I may have lost the battle.

Tate's silence in the elevator should have been warning enough, but I didn't notice his brusque nod or his diligent focus on his phone. Instead, I replayed my little girl's clinging, her tearful reluctance to leave home and her refusal to join the kids playing outside at school. Tate and I rode the elevator thirty-five floors without exchanging a word because my Anna-banana didn't giggle when I tickled her in her car seat.

Sitting at my desk and clicking aimlessly through email, I try to figure out what might be wrong. I consider calling Rose in Seattle and waking her up. My hand drifts to the handset, but I pull it back. She'll be home tomorrow. If Anna isn't back to normal when I pick her up, I'll call Rose and see if she has any ideas.

For once, my desk phone doesn't ring incessantly. The longer I enjoy the reprieve, the more I notice the parade of co-workers past my desk is wrong. Denise walks by without her characteristic greeting, gnawing at her lip and picking at her nails. A moment later, Bernie passes, his brow screwed up in concentration and muttering to himself. The young intern who flirted with me yesterday runs past, a stack of papers clutched to her chest, her cheeks bright red.

I wait, but none return.

I sit and listen.

Instead of the usual muted cacophony under the white noise dampers, only a few voices reach me. Phones in cubes around me ring once or twice before voice mail silences them. The night setting.

I stand and peer over the low walls around me into empty cubes. But as I notice the closed conference room doors across the room, I notice him.

As if ripped from the Center for Social Health's propaganda posters, a man in a blue suit and sunglasses stands between the elevators. He is stiff and angular, an obvious product of military training. Feet shoulder width apart, hands clasped behind his back. Before I can sit he nods  —  a slow, deliberate acknowledgment.

Prickles of apprehension skitter across my neck. I return the gesture and sink into my seat.

He's part of a rehabilitation patrol.

My guts churn, but I don't dare go to the bathroom. If he's at the door, there's no telling what they've done to the bathroom. Cameras. Peep patrols. I shouldn't have worn the panties and camisole. I lean over my folded arms, forehead beaded with sweat.

Still, it might not be me.

The phone in a neighboring cube chirps twice before it falls silent.

I wiggle the mouse to wake my computer. My shaking hands fumble my password twice before entering it correctly.

I open the browser and type the URL for the Center. A family beams at me from a splash page. An impossibly young woman nestles against the chest of a muscular, clean-shaven man, their free hands on the shoulders of the young boy and girl in front of them. None of them bear the burden of wearing the wrong skin. None of them have to pretend to be normal. All of them are what they're supposed to be. Natural. The way they were made.

Words scroll across the bottom. Protect our children by protecting our society.

I shudder, and click Continue in the corner.

The image dissolves, the same family re-appearing in the page banner. Headlines promote the latest restrictions against immoral behaviors, and a quiz flashes at me from one column, asking Are you aberrant? I scroll, looking for the Recent Rehabilitations.

Know someone who needs help? the page asks. We strengthen society through remediation therapy, it assures me as a list of names scrolls over a North Carolina map. Click for recent interventions.

I click, select Mecklenburg County, and close my eyes.

When I open the list, none of the names are familiar, though I recognize a few faces. Index card icons promise more information, but it doesn't matter. There's no one from the office.

I have been careful. It can't be me.

My phone beeps and I jump, reflexively closing the