Chapter Text
Victoria Chase has just finished her third cigarette of the day (it’s midterms, fucking sue her) when Chloe Price storms out into the Blackwell parking lot, locks her gaze onto her, and slams her into a wall.
“What’s your problem?!” she hisses. “Fucking psycho dyke bitch.”
Chloe drags her close, and Victoria’s pissed, because if she keeps manhandling her like that she’s going to tear a rip in her cashmere sweater. She’s probably already fucked it up- god knows where those fingers have been.
“What did you do ,” Chloe says, and Victoria realizes that there’s a pretty decent chance she gets her nose broken if she doesn’t handle this just right.
“I have no clue what you’re talking about,” Victoria says. “Now can we talk like adults, or is this getting you off?”
Chloe lets her go, and Victoria takes a moment to wipe off the residue Chloe left on her lapel before staring up at her with a withering gaze. Chloe looks fucking livid. She’s got her usual junkie dyke thing going on, her ink subtly shifting as she clenches and unclenches her fists. Shit, what did Victoria do ? She hasn’t so much as thought about Chloe Price since…
She remembers all at once, and it’s as if the floor has dropped out of her stomach. Her mouth goes dry. There’s only one logical conclusion: Chloe is here about-
“ Max, ” Chloe spits. “What the fuck did you do?”
She can’t stop herself. The lie is reflexive, automatic, and it’s only once it’s passed her lips that she realizes she’s made things much worse for herself.
“Nothing!”
Chloe cocks back a fist, and Victoria flinches.
“Don’t lie to me. I know you did something. He’s barely fucking talking to me. People saw you leave together on Halloween.”
She relents. “ Fine. Fine. Jesus Christ. Can we do this somewhere private?”
Chloe considers this for a moment, then huffs, satisfied. “My car. Now.”
Chloe’s car is a lot like Chloe, which is to say: beaten up, worn down, and smelling faintly of weed. Victoria’s boots brush up against a Two Whales coffee cup which rolls unrestrained around the passenger-side compartment. Victoria sniffs, taking in the overpowering aromas of cigarette smoke and pot.
“Nice place,” she says. Chloe rolls her eyes.
“If I’d known I was receiving royalty, I would have gotten an air freshener,” she says.
“Now spill, Chase.”
Victoria sighs, reflexively tensing and untensing her palms. She feels… fuck, is this guilt? Every time she’s passed Max in the halls she’s had a flash of that night, the look of pain on his face, the way he almost seemed to fold into himself and leave Victoria abandoned and alone. It feels awful, and the worst part about it is she has absolutely no clue what she did wrong. She used all the right moves. Max should have enjoyed it. Max was enjoying it, until she got on top of him and he went somewhere else.
“We had sex,” she says.
Chloe almost laughs at that. “Bull-fucking-shit, Princess.”
“I swear, it’s true. We were having sex, and everything was fine, and then he just… I don’t know. Freaked out. Got spooky quiet.”
“You, Victoria Chase, had sex with Max Fucking Caulfield.”
She groans. “Is that so hard to believe? He’s actually kind of cute once you get past the overpowering aura of social anxiety. Not that you’d care, either.”
“The fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“Oh come on , Chloe Price. We all saw the way you behaved around Rachel last year. It’s pretty goddamn obvious whose team you’re playing on.”
Chloe can’t manage a witty retort. Instead, she pulls a box of cigarettes out of her dashboard and lights up. “That’s over.”
Victoria can’t help but smirk. “Victim of Rachel Amber? Bitch, join the fucking club.”
Chloe lights the cigarette. Victoria can’t quite keep her eyes from grazing over Chloe’s hands as they work- they look strong, and calloused, and dextrous. Working hands. Not like hers, at all. Realistically, she should be disgusted, but instead she’s more curious than anything. Chloe smokes, one hand massaging her temple. Victoria’s tempted to ask for one of her own, but her self-preservation instinct suggests now isn’t exactly the time.
“Okay. Fine. Let me get this straight. You’re bored with your current dick, and so you go after Max. He agrees, because he’s drunk and he’s horny and for all his many positive qualities he’s stupid enough to fawn after any girl who bats a pair of false eyelashes at him. You treat him like a piece of meat, break his heart, and now he won’t fucking talk to me. That right?”
Victoria finds herself stunned into silence. On an abstract level, it’s one thing to know that most people at Blackwell resent her, that she’s clambered her way to the top of the school’s social ladder atop a mountain of bodies. It’s another to have someone lay out the most damning possible interpretation of her life, assuming she’d use up and toss away someone like Max for her own momentary satisfaction. And she might have, if he’d been any other way. If he hadn’t been so infuriatingly different. And now she’s hurt him, maybe broken him, and she realizes in that moment that she deserves every ounce of Chloe’s fury and more.
“It wasn’t like that,” she says, knowing how weak the words sound even as they exit her mouth.
“Oh yeah?” Chloe snaps. She taps her cigarette out on the window. “Then fucking enlighten me.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt him.” Her voice is… different. She’s spent so long training it, massaging it into the perfect mask of haughty indifference. Now it’s raw, unshielded, vulnerable. Chloe is looking at her with her terribly bright blue eyes and she wishes that she’d just let Chloe hit her in the face because surely it would be easier than sitting here, in this car, being forced to own up to wounds she doesn’t understand that she inflicted on a person she barely knows.
“Look,” she says. “I’m a bitch. I know that. But Max is- he’s different. I wanted… fuck, I just wanted…”
She hates this. She hates being here. She hates being anything other than Victoria Chase, Blackwell’s Ice-Queen-In-Residence. Victoria Chase doesn’t hang out with Chloe Price. Victoria Chase doesn’t let herself get all worked up over some dumb fucking geek boy who freaks after finally getting some action for the first time (from her, something that pretty much any other boy at Blackwell could only experience in their hormone-addled wet dreams.) Victoria Chase doesn’t fucking have feelings.
So who is she?
“I just wanted something good,” she says. “Something nice. Something warm. Something fucking normal. But I fucked it up. Like I fuck up everything in my goddamn life.”
She’s expecting Chloe to laugh at her, to kick her out of the car, to capitalize on this moment by pushing a switchblade between her ribs. Instead she just taps out her cigarette and nods.
“Okay,” she says. “I believe you.”
Victoria blinks. “What? Why?”
“I don’t know,” Chloe says, leaning back in her seat, her fingers lacing together behind her head. “Maybe you’re a terrible liar. Maybe I like watching you squirm. Maybe I like the idea that you’re just as fucked up as I am.”
She scowls at that. “We have nothing in common, dyke.”
“Keep pretending that,” Chloe says. God, Victoria fucking hates her. The worst part is that Chloe knows, and doesn’t care. She’s never cared, and all Victoria is capable of doing is caring too much, all the time.
Her feet find the empty coffee cup on the floor, and she bats it around the compartment with her toes. She needs to find something to distract herself. Anything is better than being here. Hate and envy and jealousy and something else are all brewing inside her body. She feels like an unbalanced chemical reaction rapidly approaching a tipping point.
“He loves you, you know.”
“Who?”
“You know who.”
Chloe clutches the leather cord around her neck, from which are suspended- huh. Two bullets. She could have sworn it was three. “You don’t know a thing, Regina.”
“Really, Price? Thought you were too butch to cop to watching Mean Girls. ”
“It’s a cultural touchstone. And whatever you think about me and Max, you’re wrong.”
Victoria’s never been good at talking about her own feelings, but she usually considers herself pretty receptive to those of others. You need to be, if you want to keep her position: you have to know which buttons to push, where to needle someone, how to tell what they want and how to give it to them. Mostly she’s used it for cruelty, for exploitation and self-advancement.
“I think you love him,” she says. “And I think he loves you. But it’s not the same kind of love, is it?”
Victoria’s expecting an eruption- Chloe ticking over and absolutely laying into her. She’s starting to welcome the idea, actually. Maybe it will be karmically cleansing, as if Chloe’s fist in her face will knock off the guilt she’s been carrying with her since Halloween. Instead Chloe just sighs.
“Get out, Victoria.”
The words are harsh, but they’ve been denuded of any real malice. Instead they’re just empty. Worn out. Victoria Chase looks at Chloe Price- really, genuinely looks at her, for what feels like the first time. She’s tall, slender, pale, her body looking so light as to be almost birdlike. With her bile drained out of her she looks younger, somehow. There are places where you can see blond strands of hair shining through the blue, and Victoria realizes without her butch accoutrement she’d actually be kind of pretty. She’s never going to be VC- no one would let her in- but maybe, in another universe, they might have been friends. It’s a strange thought: uncomfortable, but not entirely unwelcome.
She gets out.
***
She doesn’t think about Max or Chloe for a while, because after midterms it’s Winter Break and thus the Chase Family ski trip to Tahoe. It’s a yearly routine at this point, one upon which her feelings are thoroughly mixed. She loves the snow, the wind, the feeling of control, the momentum as she hurdles downhill. She dislikes the sun, the lifts, and the general expectation to spend Familial Bonding Time with her parents. So it’s no surprise that a few days in she makes an excuse about stomach trouble and slips over to the other side of the resort to a bar.
She’s only had the fake ID for a few months now, but if the bartender sees anything amiss he doesn’t kick her out. She buys herself a gin and tonic and surveys the crowd- it’s mostly older, middle-aged and up, which doesn’t preclude her getting hit on but does preclude the opportunity of her enjoying it. Outside its evening, and a few of the slopes are being taped off for the night. A figure in a bright orange puffer jacket drags their snowboard up to a rack outside and locks it into place.
Her phone buzzes. It’s Courtney, texting a pic of herself flashing a V sign while holding a mimosa. Judging by the bikini she has on, she’s somewhere hot.
Miss you girlieee ;) she says, and Victoria is halfway through texting U 2 bitch when a voice says:
“Victoria? Victoria Chase ?”
She turns. It takes her a moment to recognize the figure behind her beanie and garish orange jacket, but after accounting for some years and some sunburn Victoria recognizes Steph Gingrich. She’s a year older than her, and graduated when Victoria was just a junior. They never spoke much: Steph’s social circle was mostly informed by D&D, which exists at the exact inverse pole of Blackwell from the Vortex Club.
“Hi, Steph,” Victoria manages. Outside of her social circle she’s defensive, a little cagey. She hasn't had time to raise her barrier yet, and if she’s honest Steph has always made her a little nervous. She lowers her voice and leans in, attempting to look nonchalant. “ You’re not old enough to be here. ”
“ Neither are you, ” Steph says. “ But I won’t tell if you won’t. ”
Fuck. Mutually assured destruction. Better to just wait this out and finish her drink.
“Sooo,” Steph says. “What’s the White Witch of Blackwell doing in Tahoe, drinking alone at a ski resort?”
“Family trip,” she says.
“You close with them?”
In response, Victoria just gestures vaguely at her surroundings.
“Fair point. I’m in the same boat. Exhausted from dealing with uncle-Gingriches and aunt-Gingriches and niece-and-nephew Gingriches.”
Victoria sips her gin and tonic while Steph tries and fails to flag down the bartender. The drink is sharp and numbing and it’s starting to loosen Victoria up enough that the dangerous questions that lurk on the tip of her tongue are threatening to spill out.
“Is your family accepting?”
“Accepting.” Steph blinks, slowly. “Of…”
“You’re not going to make me say it, are you?”
“Ohhh,” Steph says. “You mean-“
She splits her fingers into a V, sticking her tongue between them and wriggling it in a way that’s incredibly gross. Victoria flushes, the burn in her cheeks spreading to other parts of her body. She almost chokes on her drink.
“Jesus Christ, Steph.”
She rolls her shoulders, languid and nonchalant. “You asked. Besides, since when do you even give a shit? Last I remember you were hissing ‘dyke’ under your breath whenever we passed in the halls.”
“I’m sorry,” she mumbles.
“What was that?”
She groans. “Steph Gingrich, I’m sorry for being a bitch to you.”
“Accepted,” Steph says. “And, anyway, I’m not too pissed about it. I am , in fact, a massive dyke.”
Something about the casualness with which Steph deploys that word- applies it to herself , even!- makes Victoria almost envious. She’s lived her whole life with the knowledge that there are certain types of woman that One Should Not Be, and ‘dyke’ is foremost among them. Steph talks about being gay like it was the color of her hair- noticeable, sure, but just another fact of life. Victoria can’t imagine living in a world like that.
She shouldn’t be talking about this. She shouldn’t even be thinking about this. But she’s drunk, and Steph’s out of Arcadia Bay for good so it’s pretty unlikely any of this is going to spill out into her actual circles. And, most selfishly: she wants to trust Steph because she wants Steph to trust her. She’s a nerd, and a dyke, and those two things alone should disqualify her from Victoria’s orbit, but something about her unflappability and the casualness with which she discusses her sexuality makes her kind of cool. Now, at least. While she’s drunk and about to get drunker.
“Can I talk to you about something personal?” Victoria says. At some point in the intervening time, Steph has obtained herself a cider, and she takes a conspiratorial sip.
“No shit. Is Victoria Chase actually going to talk to me about boy trouble ?”
It’s a joke, but Victoria just holds her face tight and tries to drill holes in the table with her eyes. Steph withdraws almost immediately.
“Oh, damn, you’re serious. Okay.” She nods. “Lay it on me.”
Victoria attempts to force the words up out of her throat. It takes a tremendous effort of will to push them past her tongue and out into the air, and she has to take a drink to steady her nerves before she can finally muster herself up to it.
“Do you like sex?”
“Wow,” Steph says. “That is not at all where I thought you were going with this.”
“Just answer the question.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I do. A lot, actually.”
She tries to imagine Steph with another girl, long limbs tangling together, her sighing and moaning as she-
Shit. She barely even knows what lesbians do. Scissor? She caught some footage of that in a porn thumbnail and it looked kind of awkward and unwieldy. What’s more awkward is that she’s just had a vivid sexual fantasy about a girl who’s sitting right next to her, and her frantic attempts to stomp the thought out are having the exact opposite effect.
“You’re supposed to,” she whispers. “Right?”
Steph waves a hand ambiguously. “Most people do. Some people don’t. Why, do you think you’re asexual?”
She snaps a hair tie against her wrist, attempting to focus herself, to little avail. She’s definitely not that, if Halloween was any indication.
“No,” she says. “No. It’s been good. Just once.”
“Oh,” Steph says, taking a swig of her cider. “Well, congratulations to you and the lucky boy. If it’s not too personal, what did it? What was the factor?”
“…he was wearing a dress at the time,” Victoria says, and there’s no amount of alcohol in the world that’s enough to alleviate the grotesque shame hammering through her entire body. What the fuck is wrong with her? What kind of fucked-up kink even is this? Victoria Chase can’t cum unless the man’s in lingerie. It’s humiliating. It’s pathetic. It’s gross.
“Oh,” Steph says, and then: “ Oh. I see. Halloween?”
Victoria nods sullenly, before raising an eyebrow. “That’s a suspiciously good guess.”
“It’s proximate enough that you’d still be this moody about it,” she says. “Plus, this girl I've been seeing ‘ironically’ crossdressed every Halloween for five years running until it stopped being ironic. Or crossdressing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Complete the sequence, Victoria. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, aaand…”
“She’s transgendered?” Victoria wrinkles her nose. The only experience she has with trans people is as something akin to drag queens, only sadder somehow, reduced. It’s hard to imagine Steph being interested in one of them. “Aren’t you gay?”
“Careful,” Steph says. There’s a note of iron there, and Victoria is suddenly keenly aware that being nonchalant is not the same thing as taking shit. “Yes, I’m gay. So is she. She just had to work her way out of her cocoon first.” She pauses. “So you had sex with a boy in a dress, and now you’re having a crisis about it. That the long and short of it?”
She shakes her head. “Not everything. It was going really well, and then I-“
She stops dead. Fuck, is she actually doing this? Is she actually discussing her sex life in public with a strange dyke she barely knows? And yet- Steph has been, thus far, the only person she’s even been able to discuss this with. Max is AWOL, Chloe fucking hates her, and Taylor and Courtney are still convinced Max just rejected her flat-out. She lowers her voice, half-covering her face. This can’t be happening.
“I let him inside me,” she says. “And he looked… weird. And hurt. And sad. Like he was somewhere else.”
“ Ah ,” Steph says, and that noise of recognition is the best and worst sound Victoria’s ever heard. “Yeah. I think I have a good idea what that is. Izzie would know more about it firsthand, but that sounds like dysphoria. For people like Izzie, and it sounds like for your… ah, ‘friend,’ it can be really painful.”
“Painful how?”
Steph flags down the bartender and orders them two more drinks before continuing. “Not like I have any firsthand experience, but Izzy describes it as like… a straitjacket. It restricts you, contains you, crushes you. If you’re lucky you can go by without noticing it directly, but sometimes the pain gets so crushing you can barely even move. And each day you go in your old body, in your old self, it gets a little tighter, until you transition, or it crushes you.”
“Jesus,” Victoria mutters. Strangely enough, parts of the description ring true for her. It’s not as if she minds being a girl or anything, and she doesn’t particularly loathe her body, but she’s beginning to become acutely aware of how little breathing room the identity of Victoria Chase truly contains. “That sounds awful.”
Steph nods. “Yeah. It wouldn’t be worth blowing up your life over if the alternative wasn’t a slow death.”
Victoria is quiet, trying to retrace what memories yet remain undamaged by the drunken fog she spent most of Halloween sinking into. Maybe it’s just confirmation bias, but as she pieces through her recollections of Max that night more and more of it seems to fall into place. Max wants to be a girl- or, according to Steph, already is one. And Max made Victoria feel like no one else has. So what does that make Victoria?
“Oh shit,” she whispers.
“Cheer up,” Steph says. “On the bright side, congratulations on finally joining the club.”
“What club?”
“You slept with a woman,” Steph says. “That’s pretty gay to me.”
The bar is swimming. Victoria feels hot all over. She’s drunk and she’s alone and she’s sad and she’s scared, and Steph’s feeding her with lies and she’s buying into them because she’s stupid. This isn’t who she is. She doesn’t have to listen to this bullshit. She’s going to go out into the snow and get back to her room and text Taylor and Courtney and forget about Max or Chloe or Steph Fucking Gingrich and how fucking soft her lips look even though they must be chapped as hell because she’s not like this, she’s not gay, she’s just a normal fucking girl who got tricked, and if she lets this go further she’s never going to be able to be normal again.
She stands up. “I need a cigarette,” she says, and before Steph can say shit edgewise she’s out the door.
She lingers on the porch. Mostly it’s because it’s dark out and the snow’s starting to come down hard and she’s waiting on one of the shuttles so she doesn’t end up freezing her tits off in the snow-blind night. It’s certainly not due to the part of her that wants Steph to follow her, to sit beside her, to keep whispering those poisonous words into her ears. She lights up and the nicotine is doing absolutely nothing against the nauseous slosh of booze in her body. Fuck. Is everything today going to go this shit?
Steph comes out after a moment. She lingers on the threshold, uncertain of whether or not to approach, before Victoria sighs and motions with her head to indicate it’s fine for Steph to take the bench.
“Are you okay?” Steph says.
“I’m fine,” she says, and hisses as she accidentally singes her glove against the cigarette. “Fuck.”
“You ran out pretty fast.”
“I needed a smoke.”
“Okay,” Steph says, and they sit like that for a while, neither of them willing to breach the silence. The snow comes down noiselessly. Soon it’ll be sparkling and pristine in the sunlight, but right now it’s just dense and heavy and suffocating.
“I’m not what you think I am,” Victoria says. “I’m not gay. I’m not.”
“Okay,” Steph says. “But you know… it wouldn’t be the end of the world if you were.”
Victoria doesn’t respond. She’s thinking about Max in his (her?) dress, thinking about Steph, kissing girls under the bleachers, thinking about Chloe, who owns a messenger bag with a pin of two interlocking scissors on it. She thinks about secrets and wanting and how much of her life has ever even really been hers, and it scares her that she doesn’t know.
“When did you know?” she says.
“There wasn’t a specific moment,” Steph says. “I had a few boyfriends in middle school- nothing serious. A few weeks at most. Kissing them always felt strange. Like having a slug on your lips. And I started to think about women, in ways that I had never thought about men. And I started to like thinking about them that way, too.”
Victoria Chase can’t be here right now. Victoria Chase can’t leave, either, because Steph Gingrich is the devil, and she is tempting her more than Victoria has ever been tempted before. Everything in her brain is telling her to resist. Everything else is telling her to give in, to succumb, to allow curiosity to take her where it may.
“Is it different?” she asks, her voice barely audible. “Kissing girls?”
She never gets an answer, because right at that moment the shuttle pulls up. She’s grateful for the lifeline. She hates herself for taking it. She snuffs out her cigarette in a snowdrift and stands to leave.
“I should go,” she says. “There won’t be another for a half-hour.”
Steph raises an eyebrow. “You’re going home, on a bus, alone, in the middle of the night.”
“It’s evening, at most.”
“Let me come with,” she says.
“Chivalrous.”
“Call me your dyke in shining armor.”
Victoria just acquiesces, because it’s not like she has much power to deny her anyway, and also she really doesn’t want to think about how that last sentence made her feel.
The ride home is quiet and uneventful. Steph has her headphones on, listening to some hipster shit that’s probably way too underground for Victoria to know or care about. Victoria, for her part, is trying very deliberately to pay as little attention to Steph as possible, because Steph is very close and knows way too much about her for Victoria to ever be entirely comfortable around her again.
She keeps catching glimpses of her own face, the night outside making the window glass reflective. She looks just like she almost always does, albeit a little more windburnt from the day’s excursions. She wonders how Max feels, looking in the mirror. She wonders how he would have looked if he were born a girl. She wonders if she still would have sought her, if she would have kissed her and let her touch her and let her put her mouth on her body and slid her fingers inside her-
The bus jolts. A chime rings out. The last few stragglers gather their things and shuffle out, Victoria and Steph included.
“Well, I’ll see you when I see you,” Steph says.
“Yeah,” Victoria says. “Thank you for… talking.”
“Of course,” Steph says. “You can add me on Facebook, if you like. You know. If you ever want to… talk again.”
She nods, silent . It feels like there are too many words inside her, and if she releases even a single one more she’ll never be able to stop.
“Oh,” Steph says. “One more thing before I go.”
She extends a hand, and tentatively, reticently, Victoria takes it. She glances up at Steph and her eyes are piercingly green and so close and her lips are half parted and she leans in and-
Steph kisses her.
It’s not long. It’s not particularly erotic, lacking the desperate want of Max’s mouth on hers. But it’s open-mouthed, and soft, and earnest , and Victoria feels like tiny fireworks are bursting all across her body at once.
Steph pulls away, letting her hand drop.
“I hope that answered your question,” she says, and Victoria doesn’t say anything at all.