The Debug Dress

My mom would cry if she saw me right now, and I mean that in the nicest possible way, because she's a sweet woman who raised me to hold doors open and say please and thank you and never, ever make a fuss, and here I was at nearly one in the morning standing in the gender neutral bathroom on the fourth floor of Hargrove Hall trying to haul a zipper up my spine while a sequined dress fought me like a live animal. I'm Simon, I'm twenty-nine, I test software for a living, which means my whole job is being the person who finds what's wrong, and somewhere around the middle of this year I got so tired of being careful that when a coworker dared me to do something stupid, I said yes before my brain finished loading the warning message. That's the part I keep coming back to, honestly. Not the dress, not yet. The yes.

It had started an hour earlier, in the Babbage lab, which is this long open plan room with linoleum floors and desks that predate some of my coworkers, smelling of dust and old soda the way old university buildings do, and Isabelle was there because she always is, grading or sulking or whatever adjuncts do at ten. Isabelle is thirty-two, teaches intro programming as an adjunct, and has the personality of a porcupine that reads a lot, and we'd been circling each other with this particular brand of polite hostility since they hired me three weeks ago. She was stuck on a bug that night, some race condition in her gradebook script that had been eating her alive for a week, and I found it in eleven minutes, which I confess I did not handle gracefully.

"Eleven minutes," she said, leaning back in her chair and looking at me the way you look at a vending machine that ate your dollar. "Eleven minutes, and I lost a whole night to it."

"I can bill you for the ten after the freebie," I said, and she laughed, one short bark, and then narrowed her eyes, because Isabelle does everything in that order, laugh first, threat second.

"You know what your problem is, Simon? You're a Boy Scout. You dress like a funeral. Grey pants, grey shirt, grey opinions."

"And you dress like a saleswoman at a mattress store," I said, which was unfair, her blazer was actually nice, and she grinned like I'd handed her a knife.

"Fine. Prove you're not a Boy Scout. I've got a dress in the supply closet, size eight, and if you wear it, heels included, through your whole shift, I'll admit in writing to the whole department that you're the better debugger. If you chicken out, you bring me coffee every Friday until winter break."

Now I probably should mention that some part of me, a part I had never let out of its cage, went very quiet and very interested the moment she said the word dress, and that part of me raised its hand before the rest of me could vote. I told myself it was about winning. I am an excellent liar to myself, it's a professional skill.

So that's how I ended up in the bathroom with a garment bag, locked door, fluorescent light buzzing overhead like it was nervous too. The dress was red, this deep dark red covered in little sequins that caught the light like fish scales, and it was a size eight and I am not a size eight in any direction, and getting into it was a whole engineering problem. I got my work shirt and grey pants off, stepped into it, and pulled it up my legs, and the sequins made this dry whispering sound against the tile that made my ears go hot. The hips were a fight. The bodice was a war. I pulled the two sides of the zipper together behind my back, arms crossed like I was being arrested, and hauled, and the zipper went up in three reluctant jumps and then stopped, and I stood there breathing, feeling the fabric hold me like a firm opinion, and I pulled one more time and it zipped. All the way. I have never been so victorious and so terrified at the same time.

The mirror did something I wasn't ready for. I'd expected to look like a joke, like a dare wearing a man, but the dress pulled my waist in and pushed everything else into a shape, and my face above it was still my face, flushed and stunned, and the total effect was not a joke. It was a person. I stood there a while, just looking, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't turn a little to see the side view, and then a little more.

The heels were the real boss fight. Isabelle had included a pair of black pumps, two inch, and I have never in my life balanced on a stick, so the first three minutes were just me holding the sink like it owed me money. But you figure it out, weight over the hips, small steps, and by the time I unlocked the door I could walk, more or less, in the way that a giraffe can more or less play piano.

The lab was dark except for my monitor glow and the little emergency lights, and the first click of a heel on linoleum is loud in a way I cannot describe, like a gunshot with manners. Click. Click. Click. I came out of the hallway and into the open room, one small step at a time, arms doing that thing arms do when you're on ice, and every click announced me to the entire empty building. Isabelle was at her desk, she had moved her chair so it faced the aisle, and she did not look away. Not once, not for a joke, not with a smirk, she just watched me come down the aisle with her chin on her hand and her eyes going from the shoes up and then back down again, slow, like she was reading a page she'd waited for.

"Well," she said, after I'd made it all the way to my own desk and gripped the back of my chair in the usual way.

"Well what," I said, and my voice came out strange and light, and I hated how pleased I sounded.

"Nothing. I'm just deciding whether I won or you did." She stood up, and I heard her heels on the floor too, hers confident, mine aspirational, and she came around behind me while I stood there frozen with my hands on the chair. "Turn around."

I turned, which took two wobbling steps and a prayer, and then Isabelle was close, closer than coworkers get, and she put one finger on