Lace and Leverage

So here's how I usually tell this story when I've had a couple drinks and I trust the room, I don't do it often, but tonight I do. I'm Liv, I'm thirty years old, and these days I wear things that would have given Jimmy a heart attack. But that came later. The part I actually want to talk about starts at a Halloween party in Oakland, in a dress I borrowed from someone I barely knew.

Let me back up, because the dress was only half of it. The other half was this thing I'd been carrying around since I was twenty-one and drunk enough to admit to myself, which was that I thought about being a girl sometimes, or at least being dressed like one by somebody who knew what they were doing, and not in a giggly drag-show way but in a slow, deliberate, this-is-happening-to-you-now way, some confident woman with cold hands and a warm voice taking her time with me, and God, even typing that out at my kitchen table with no audience makes my ears go hot. I'd built my whole personality around not saying that out loud. I was Jimmy then, six foot one, worked in IT, owned exactly zero items of clothing that didn't have a logo on them somewhere, and if you'd told me at twenty-six that in a year I'd be walking into rooms full of strangers in a green dress and heels I'd have laughed myself into a hernia.

Anyway, the party. My coworker Devon threw it every year at his place, the kind where the costume is technically optional but socially mandatory, and I'd shown up as a vampire in a black cape and plastic fangs because it took four minutes and I could still drive home in it. Devon's girlfriend brought her friend Alba, who I'd met maybe twice before at this same party in other years, and Alba, who is twenty-six and nonbinary and has the comedic timing of a sniper, had come as, I don't even know, some kind of gothic librarian, long black dress, dark lipstick, the whole atmosphere. We got to talking on the balcony because we were both hiding from the beer pong tournament, and at some point Alba looked at my cape and said, "That's a coward's costume, Jimmy."

"Excuse me?"

"It's a coward's costume. You spent zero effort and you know it. I dare you." And they nodded toward the apartment, casual as anything. "I dare you to go put on my spare dress. It's in a garment bag by the door. Ten minutes. Everyone here is too drunk to remember their own names, let alone yours."

Now, I want to be careful about what I say next, because the honest version is embarrassing and the flattering version is a lie. The honest version is that my stomach did a full drop, the drop you get when you miss a step in the dark, and underneath the fear there was this awful little spark of want that I recognized immediately and had been sitting on for five years. And I said no. I said no twice. I made jokes about it, I remember that, something about my shoulders and the dress's opinion of them, and Alba just sipped their drink and said, "Okay," in this totally unbothered voice, and that "okay" sat in my chest for the next forty minutes while I stood around pretending to care about somebody's fantasy football league.

The thing about a dare like that is it doesn't expire. Alba never brought it up again, never needled me, just went back to talking to people like nothing had happened, and somehow that made it worse, because now the only person keeping the dare alive was me. Around eleven I found myself in the hallway by the door, telling myself I was just going to look at the garment bag. Just look. It was a black slip dress, simple, the kind of thing that doesn't argue with your body, it just drapes and goes, and I stood there holding it on its hanger for what felt an endless stretch before I took it to the bathroom.

I won't pretend I looked good. I didn't have makeup, I didn't have anything, and my hair was short in the world's most boring way. But the second the fabric settled against me, something in my shoulders came down about two inches, like a hand I hadn't known was on my neck had finally let go, and I stood in that bathroom staring at the mirror, a big clumsy vampire in a black slip dress with his cape still on, and I thought, oh. Oh, this is the thing. This has been the thing the whole time.

I only meant to hide in there and change back. Really. I had a whole plan, one minute of looking, then the dress comes off and goes back in the bag and I go home and never think about it again, and instead I walked out of the bathroom. Into the party. In the dress. With the cape, because my brain, under pressure, makes the worst possible choices, and apparently I thought the cape would be funny, like a bit, like it was a joke, look at Jimmy doing a funny joke, and some guys actually did laugh, one of them shouted something about a haunted prom, and I was standing there with my ears burning, halfway between laughing along and dying, when Alba appeared at my elbow like they'd been waiting.

"Look at you," they said, quiet, just for me, and they steered me with two fingers on my arm toward the kitchen, away from the shouting, and once the door swung shut behind us they looked me up and down with this expression I couldn't read. Not mocking. Curious, maybe. Hungry, a little.

"Say something," I said, because the silence was going to kill me.

"I'm deciding what to do with you," they said.

* * *

What Alba did with me, that night, was nothing dramatic. We sat on the kitchen counter with our feet knocking against the cabinets and they asked me questions nobody had ever asked me, not in a therapy way, in a friendly way, when did you know, what does it feel like, do you want it to be a costume or do you want it to be you, and I answered all of them honestly for the first time in my life because they weren't laughing and somehow that was the permission I'd been waiting five years for. They told me, near the end of the night, when the party had thinned down to the stubborn drunks, that they'd been doing this longer than me, playing with presentation, gender, the whole menu, and that if I ever wanted somebody to actually show me the ropes, makeup, clothes that fit a body like mine, how to walk in heels without looking like a crash test, they'd happily be my mentor, and that I should think about it, no pressure, they weren't running a cult.

I thought about it for exactly nine days. On day nine I texted them, deleted the text, retyped it four times, and finally sent something so gutless I'm not even going to repeat it here, and they replied within a minute with an address in Temescal and a time, Saturday afternoon, and one more line that I read probably forty times: "Fair warning, if you come to my apartment, you come as my student, and my students don't get to half-ass things."

Saturday I stood outside their building for twenty minutes arguing with myself, and then I rang the bell, and Alba opened the door in paint-stained overalls with their hair tied up and said, "There you are. Get in here, we're starting with your eyebrows."

"My eyebrows?"

"Everything's negotiable later," they said, pulling me inside by the wrist, "but nothing's negotiable today."

The apartment smelled like paint and coffee, and it was small in a way that felt lived in rather than messy, canvases stacked against walls, a rack of clothes that seemed to go on forever, and a kitchen table that had clearly been cleared of everything just for me. Alba sat me down in a chair by the window and stood behind me, chin practically resting on top of my head, studying my face in the little mirror they'd propped against a jar.

"Okay," they said. "First lesson. Your brows are not the problem. Your brows are the opportunity."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you've been plucking them like an IT guy who read one article in 2019, and we're going to fix that, and then you're going to stop flinching every time I come at your face with a tool, because flinching is a habit and habits are for people who aren't serious." They said all of this while threading something, I never actually saw what, and it hurt in a small bright way, and I found, weirdly, that I liked being talked to like that, brisk and sure, like my job was just to sit still and be worked on.

They must have seen something in my face in the mirror, because they paused and smiled, slow. "Huh. You like being told what to do."

"I like not having to decide things," I said, which was as close as I could get to it that day.

"Sure. That's what everybody says the first month." They went back to work. "We're going to need a second opinion on clothes, though. I do makeup and attitude. Structure is not my department."

"Structure?"

"Your body, dummy. What to put on it so it stops fighting you." They were already typing one-handed. "I know somebody. You'll like her. She's terrifying."

* * *

Her name was Michelle, she was thirty-four, and she ran a styling business out of a studio above a nail place on Telegraph, and when Alba brought me there the following Saturday she looked me up and down exactly once, the way a carpenter looks at a crooked doorframe, and said, "Six one? Shoulders?" and then, without waiting for answers, "Come here, stand on the mark, arms out."

She had me try on, over the next two hours, what felt like forty dresses, and she rejected most of them herself before I could even form an opinion, muttering things like "no, the waist is wrong" and "this one's good, don't make that face," and somewhere in the middle of it Alba, who had taken over the couch with a coffee and an air of supervising, said the thing.

"You know, Michelle, he used to manage whole server teams. Man ran oncall rotations for a fintech company. And look at him now, standing on a mark, arms out, not one word of argument."

"He argues," Michelle said, zipping me into something dark green. "He