Author’s Note
A couple days after originally publishing this chapter, I revised it a little bit. Nothing has been changed, I just added a little more context about her university experience. The expanded sections are bolded, in case you, dear reader, would like to re-read just those.
Chapter 11
More than anything else, Valerie was confused by the man’s words and his treatment of her. She didn’t believe his assurance that he meant her no harm- He’d already drugged her, and her cramped and bruised body seemed to pass the bar for “hurting” as far as she was concerned. The car hit a small bump that knocked her up and down against the unpadded trunk floor, and she whimpered, and tried without success to find a position that was comfortable.
Yet, while she didn’t trust his assurances, he had not regarded her with the hate or the hunger that might make her fear the worst. Those outcomes were never far from her mind, but she felt deeply uncertain about them, though she had no better idea, either.
She turned over the events her fractured memory could piece together, and his precise words as best she could recall them. She couldn’t figure out what he had meant by “home”— he’d taken her from her little apartment in San Francisco, the only place that she had ever lived that felt anything like home, even counting the house she’d been raised in.
She thought back to that house— thought of anything, to avoid fixating on her situation. It had just been a house— never a home. She had learned, there, to hide the things that felt wrong and different. She had learned not only to stay in the closet, but to construct it, piece by piece, around her. The darkness and isolation felt safer than scorn and corporal punishment, but she always knew those dangers lived there with her, just one slip-up away. She could not remember even once feeling the kind of safety, love, and longing that she thought a home should evoke.
She had left that place and gone to college in Bend— her grades were good enough to get her into the university branch campus there, with a small scholarship, meager stipend, and a bed in a triple-occupancy dorm room. At that point in her life, transition and gender identity were not concepts she thought applied to her; despite staring at the “gender identity” options on the application form for what felt like hours, she had eventually marked ‘male’, and been assigned two young men as a roommates. They were religious and conservative, ostensibly a similar background to hers. In her heart, she had long rejected both of these ideologies, and her strangeness and lack of confidence made her an easy target. They bullied her relentlessly, just below the threshold where anyone from the university would intervene. It’s just a joke, bro. She found no safety or love there, either.
College was difficult for her. She struggled to focus on schoolwork, and to tear herself away from the myriad distractions independent college life offered. She had generally excelled on tests throughout high school, but always had trouble completing outside assignments at all, much less on time. Without her parents’ disapproving glare as motivation, university-level classes proved even less forgiving. Still, she persisted, unwilling to return home and live with her parents, and doubly unwilling to do so while bearing the burden of failure.
Her grades floated just above the line where she wouldn’t be given a choice of staying, occasionally dipping low enough to put her on academic probation for a semester or two. She always managed to pull her grades up quickly enough, strategically balancing the classes she knew she would struggle with against in-major computer science classes that she could breeze through with her eyes closed. Consistent As in the latter category buoyed her overall grade average enough to keep her enrolled, but she never entertained hopes of making it on the dean’s list.
Over time, she learned to limit her class load, and found ways to motivate herself to study and complete her assigned projects. She found a job on campus programming research tools, which helped supplement the meager stipend left over from her scholarships, and also gave her a quiet place that helped focus her mind.
It occurred to her that that little office with a salvaged desk and decaying vinyl chair was the first place that approached a feeling of ‘home’ for her, in its safety and solitude. She spent many long nights there, working on school or side projects, hours after everyone else had left. She felt safe behind the locked door of her office, in the doubly-locked and brightly lit academic building.
Valerie entered her fifth year of higher education with more confidence than she’d had before, though that was a low bar; and with systems and tricks she had found to manage her coursework, hard-won skills that let her barely accomplish the things so many other people seemed to find easy. Her peers often referred to a fifth year as a “victory lap,” but to her it felt more like finally limping, injured, across a finish line after refusing to quit the race.
In the intervening years, unfettered exposure to the internet and casual interactions with queer and gender non-conforming students had given increasingly loud voice to the discomfort and uncertainty inside her, and she had started attending some of the campus LGBTQ events— just as a good ally, she told everyone else.
Valerie had met Heather at one such mixer— she was a first-year graduate student, and had introduced herself in the circle with she/they pronouns and as bisexual. The two started dating within a couple weeks, and in the early days it was Heather’s support that had given Valerie the boost she needed to start to reckon with her own transness.
Six months later, Valerie came out to her parents as a trans woman, at the end of winter break. They did not take it well— her father had stormed out of the house, apparently on the edge of violence. Her mother had sobbed, and called Valerie “crazy,” and truly meant it. When her father had returned hours later, drunk, he had told her that she could either give up all of this “tranny bullshit” or leave and never come back. That was the last time she went home for Christmas.
Valerie’s stomach twisted with a sinking, deeply sick feeling, and she couldn’t help but start crying all over again. She understood what was happening, now— the man was driving her back to Oregon, back to her parents. The misgendering wasn’t even him clocking her as trans and being an asshole about it— it was deliberate, intentional, and cruel. The logo on his shirt was the logo of the church she’d been raised in, and which she’d left years before she even transitioned.
She couldn’t understand why this was happening now, and knowing what was happening did not make her feel any better about the situation. Nobody would go through all of this trouble just to try and talk her out of transition again- she was sure they were going to try to force her into some kind of religious treatment or commitment.
Valerie had moved after Heather left, even though that had meant draining the last of her savings to pay a new security deposit. The letters she had found meant that Heather had given Valerie’s mother their address; against Valerie’s express wishes. She had never shared that address with any of her family, and was careful to keep it from showing up online. She had tried to keep her new address secret from them, as well, but evidently they had found it somehow.
True to the man’s word, at least, she felt the car slow and turn onto what must be a local road, before ultimately stopping. As the vehicle slowed, the stereo starting blasting music, loud enough that she covered her ears to try and block it out, yet too muffled and low quality to make out the specifics. She didn’t think she could make a sound loud enough to be heard over it, even if she was willing to try. She didn’t know if there was anyone else out here. She didn’t know where “here” was, but she knew a lot of the middle-of-nowhere highways had totally automated gas stations without even a clerk on duty. With her ankles bound in steel, she couldn’t run even if she managed to find a way out of the trunk. She wasn’t sure she could so much as stand in them with the way they pressed on her tendons, and dug in painfully when she flexed her feet.
She was too scared of what might happen to her if she tried to get someone to help, especially without knowing if there was anyone even out there. She cried as quietly as she could manage as a voice inside berated her for succumbing to fear instead of trying anything, however slim the chance, to save herself. The voice didn’t help spur her to action; she only cried harder. She struggled to even imagine the kind of hell she was being delivered into, and she felt at once like that moment was her only chance at escape, and also that it was no chance at all, and her situation was utterly hopeless.
Filling the tank didn’t take the man long at all. Even with the speakers blaring from the car, her vantage point laying just above the gas tank meant she could hear the fuel flowing into it, and hear it stop. With no preamble, she felt the car start back up and pull back onto the road, and as the car picked up speed the stereo was turned back down until it was inaudible to her, and she was left just with the darkness, the rumbling of the engine, and the thrumming of tires.
She drifted off into an extremely anxious and fitful sleep. She didn’t know how long the drugs had left her insensate; or how long she drifted anxiously between sleep and wakefulness, but she thought it was closing in on two or three in the morning. She had not been brimming with energy when this had started, nearly midnight after a long work day, and any adrenaline her body produce had long since been exhausted.
She was startled awake by the car stopping suddenly; not quite slamming on the brakes, but not far from it. She was thrown against the front bulkhead of the trunk, and she was suddenly terrified that she had somehow done something wrong, that she had fallen afoul of his promise to “make her regret it,” whatever that meant and whatever “it” was. She couldn’t figure out what she might’ve done, but the fear chewed her up inside, and it had no interest in listening to reason.
She heard the car door open, and then slam shut; then the man’s voice shouting indistinctly. The engine cut off, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying from inside the car trunk, and when— after another minute or two of shouting- the trunk opened, she had squeezed herself back into the far corner of the trunk, pulled her knees up to her chest, and covered her face with her trembling arms to try and protect herself from the rage she knew was coming; to try and hide from its inevitability.