Dress for Revenge

My flight was delayed six hours at 3:40 on a Thursday and I found out my ex works Terminal C. So yeah, that was my day.

Let me back up. I'm Anders, I'm thirty-five, and I do risk analysis for a charter airline out of Dulles, which is a fancy way of saying I sit at a desk and worry about weather patterns. My boss Virginia hired me a year ago and mostly leaves me alone, which I appreciate. Six months ago I got dumped by Brooke, who is a flight attendant and who is also, as of this afternoon, very much employed at this exact airport.

We dated two years. She was thirty-one when we started, I was thirty-two, and for most of it things were good! Or I thought they were. Then she found the dress.

Here's what I need to explain, sort of, in my own head anyway. I crossdress. Have since my twenties. Nothing dramatic, no big reveal party planned, just... sometimes I like wearing a dress. It calms me down. I'd told exactly nobody, because who tells anybody that, and I'd kept a black wrap dress and a pair of heels in the bottom of my closet like some kind of shameful hamster hoard. Brooke found them while looking for a belt. And instead of asking, hey, what's this about, she laughed. Not a little laugh. The full thing. She took a photo, showed it to me, and said, and I quote because it lives in my skull rent-free, "Oh my god, you're not serious. That's the funniest thing I've ever seen."

Then she told her sister. Then she told, apparently, half her crew. And then she dumped me, which honestly was the least of it.

So anyway. Thursday. Gate C9. The board says DELAYED 6 HRS in red letters like it's scolding me, and I'm sitting in one of those airport chairs that might as well be a medieval torture device, staring at my carry-on, and the carry-on has the dress in it.

Wait, why does the carry-on have the dress in it? Fair question. Because about three months ago I packed it. I don't know why. I kept meaning to take it out and I never did, and it just rode around with my toothbrush and my spare charger like it belonged there. Like maybe part of me knew I'd want it some day and that some day would be a bad idea.

I saw her at 4:15.

She came walking past the gate with another attendant, a tall guy with a terrible mustache, and she was laughing at something he said. Same laugh. Head tipped back a little. Her hair's shorter now, shoulder length instead of way down her back, and there's a new scarf on her uniform, navy with little gold planes on it. She looks fine. She looks happy. She looks like someone who never once laughed at anybody in her life.

And something in my chest did the thing it does, the hot spinning thing, and I thought: I want her to see me.

I want her to walk past gate C9 and see me in that dress. The black one. The one she held up like a dead rat in a comedy routine. I want her face to do whatever it does. I won't pretend I'd worked out what happens after that, because I hadn't. There's no plan. There's just this burning, six months of it, and a dress in a carry-on.

Is that healthy? No! Obviously not! I know that! And knowing it did absolutely nothing to stop my hand from reaching down and unzipping the side pocket to check, for the fourth time, that it was still there. It was. Black crepe, knee length, wrap style. Size ten heels, I wear a ten, don't make it weird.

* * *

The family restroom near C7 has one room, one lock, and a sign with a cartoon family holding hands. I did a lap past it twice to make sure nobody was hovering, then wheeled my carry-on in and turned the little thumb lock. Click. Okay.

Okay! Now I'm in a bathroom with a dress. Now what?

I set the carry-on on the counter, which is probably against some rule, and unzipped it. The dress was folded the way I'd folded it three months ago, neat, like a present. The heels were wrapped in a shirt so they wouldn't scuff. I'd been careful with them. I'd been careful with them for months and never once worn them outside my apartment, and that fact alone made me want to laugh or scream or both.

I changed my shirt first. There's a linen button-down in the bag, the pale gray one, and I got it on and looked in the mirror and thought, hm, that's a start. My hair's gotten longish over the winter, curling at the collar, and I pushed it back off my forehead with my hands and didn't hate it.

Then the door handle rattled.

I froze. Full statue. The handle rattled again and I realized I hadn't done the little deadbolt thing properly, so I reached over and clicked it for real, heart pounding, and stood there listening.

Footsteps went away. Somebody else's problem. Somebody with a stroller, by the sound. Fine. Fine!

Where was I. Right, the dress.

I stepped out of my slacks, which is a weird feeling in an airport bathroom, cold tile on bare calves, and picked the dress up off the counter. And I just... held it for a second. The fabric is heavier than it looks. I don't know why that got me but it did, standing there in my briefs and a gray shirt holding a dress like it might bite.

Six months. She laughed six months ago and I have carried that laugh around like a stone in my shoe ever since, and here I was about to put the shoe on on purpose.

So I stepped into it. Pulled it up my legs, over my hips, worked my arms through, and started on the wrap ties. The mirror showed me a tall pale guy with half a dress situation going on and terrible posture, and I adjusted the ties and pulled the left side over, and it sat okay. It sat okay! The heels were next, and balancing on one foot in an airport bathroom while the overhead fan hums is a skill nobody trains you for, but I got both on. They fit. Of course they fit, I'd bought them years ago, before Brooke, back when this was still just mine.

And that's when it hit me, standing there in the dress in a family restroom at Dulles, that the plan was garbage. What was the plan? Walk past her gate? She'd see me for two seconds and I'd have humiliated... who, exactly? Me! Mostly me! And she'd laugh again and it would go in the group chat and I'd have handed her a whole new round for free.

But I couldn't stop either. My hands were shaking and I couldn't stop.

I was fixing the collar of the gray shirt in the mirror, trying to decide if I looked like anything at all or just a mess, when somebody knocked on the door. Three knocks, polite.

"Hello? Is someone in there?"

I said nothing. Great strategy, Anders.

"It's just, the light's been on a while," the voice said, and then it paused, and I knew it. Knew it before the second sentence. "Anders? Is that you in there?"

Virginia. My boss. My actual boss, who I would have sworn was on a red-eye to Denver right now.

"Uh," I said, in a voice about half an octave higher than usual. "Maybe?"

"It's Virginia. You looked off all afternoon and then you bolted out of the lounge with your bag. Are you okay in there?"

"Yeah! Yes. Totally. Just, um, freshening up."

Silence. Then, very evenly: "Anders, open the door."

So I opened the door. I don't even know why I opened the door. Maybe because it was her voice and not a stranger's, maybe because I was already half gone and one more humiliation didn't move the needle. I turned the thumb lock and pulled the door inward and there she was, thirty-eight years old, my operations manager, lanyard swinging, holding a coffee.

She looked at me. I stood there in the black crepe wrap dress and size ten heels, gray shirt collar poking out weird, and I waited for it. The laugh. Or the flat HR voice. Either one.

"Let me help you with the zipper," she said.

Wait. There's no zipper, it's a wrap. But that's not the point. The point is what she didn't say. She didn't say what are you doing, she didn't say is this some kind of joke, she didn't say anything with her eyebrows either. She stepped in, turned, and clicked the deadbolt behind her like she did this every Thursday.

"Virginia," I said. "I can explain."

"You don't have to explain anything to me. Sit down before you fall down, you're wobbling."

I was wobbling! I've worn heels before, in my twenties, alone in apartments, but never on airport tile and never with my hands shaking like that. I sat on the little folding bench they keep in there and she hung her coffee on the coat hook and looked at the dress, really looked, the way you look at a person's work.

"Black crepe. Knee length. That's a good cut on you," she said. "Turn around."

I turned around. I'm thirty-five and I turned around in a dress for my boss in a family restroom because she said turn around, and somehow it wasn't the strangest thing I'd done all day.

She fixed the left wrap panel where it gapped. She tucked the gray shirt collar down under the neckline so it stopped fighting the dress. She even smoothed the strap of the one thing I'd forgotten about, the little camisole strap that had slid down my shoulder, and she pushed it back up like it was no trouble.

"Okay," she said, and sat down on the counter next to the carry-on, which is definitely against some rule. "Now tell me why. Because you've been off for weeks, Anders. Missing the Thursday numbers twice. Snapping at Vince. And today you bolted out of that lounge like the building was on fire."

"It's stupid."

"So? I've got six hours of delay and a coffee going cold. Stupid is my favorite category."

And it just came out. All of it. Brooke, the two years, the way she went through my closet looking for a belt and found the dress folded in the back, and the laugh. I told her about the laugh. How it wasn't even a big laugh, it was worse than that, it was the little one, the one you do at a stranger's luggage. And then the phone call to her sister, and the crew, half her crew knew by Sunday. I told her about the three months the dress sat in my carry-on, packed and unpacked, and the plan, the garbage plan, to walk past Gate C9 in it so she'd have to look at me and feel