This is How We Change the World Ch. 01

04 July 2022

Lyric did not do many things for herself. She lived a small life. She didn't go out much. She didn't drink. She got her internet from one of her neighbors' wifi. She only ever paid for Hulu OR Netflix, never both, on a month-to-month basis. She didn't smoke. She didn't date (in the traditional sense). She had her one bedroom apartment, and she had her job, and she had her hustles. That was about it.

She didn't do things because things cost money, which she did not have. The coffee shop where she worked, Downtown Grind, barely paid for her apartment. Sometimes the tips were okay, but they were never enough to cover all her expenses. To make ends meet for groceries, and her meds, power and water, Lyric would get a little dolled up, pop up on an app for a little while, and (most of the time) come home with an extra fifty bucks.

Most of the time.

Lyric did not do many things for herself, but she did do one thing. Once a week, if not more, on her days off from the shop, she would eat an edible gummy. Blue Raspberry, with a distinct body mellowing, was her favorite. An hour later, maybe two, she'd drift away from her troubles for a while. Have meaningful conversations with herself in the shower. Bake a batch of brownies. Jerk off two or three times. Eat a batch of brownies. Jerk off again.

This is how Lyric found herself at home, alone, in her one bedroom apartment on the seventh floor of her building, lying in bed on the Fourth of July. Lyric was feeling pretty good, and her guard was down, and in a moment where she was proud of herself and absolutely, profoundly feeling herself, she put her phone down on her bed, leaned it against a pillow, spent a minute finding the right pose, and took a picture. Then deleted it, and took another one. Then deleted it and took another one.

Then deleted that, and took another one, and that one she kept. That one, she liked.

That one, she submitted to her favorite subreddit. Fist tight around the base of her cock in the foreground, pushing her balls down and out, her own face all fuzzy and out of focus in the background. She laid there for another couple hours, paying almost no attention to the constant stream of videos playing on her laptop, while she played with herself, with almost all of her attention on the steady flow of upvotes. Five. Eight. Thirteen. Nineteen. Twenty three. Twenty seven.

She made it to about one in the morning before one hormone or another took her under, and she smiled all the way through the night.

***

15 Sep 2022

Madalyn closed the door behind her and hurried down the stairs. She hated the early shift, hated how gloomy the city looked when she trudged toward the subway station, still half asleep. She hated getting up before the sun. She hated that they lived so far away.

She yawned and pushed her hands deeper in her pockets, stifling a shiver. It would be much warmer later, but it was cool in the pre-dawn hours.

It makes sense to live here because Amy and François work here, she reminded herself, the thought running its course with well-practiced routine. It had a more sullen undertone than usual, and she clenched her jaw as she stood waiting for the train.

This is all because of the invitation, she thought. I'll feel better after I've had my first pot. That was the one good thing about working in a coffee shop: the coffee was good.

She sat on the nearly empty car and stared resolutely at her bleak reflection on the window, a pale ghost against the black of the tunnel, illuminated by the fluorescent lights behind her. She looked old and tired. Even from the unclear image she could make out the bags under her eyes. She hadn't slept well.

The invitation was from one of her and Amy's oldest friends, Stella, asking for them to attend her wedding. It was Stella's third marriage, and she and Amy had snickered a bit at how she still made such a big deal out of it. Amy had tossed the envelope on the coffee table, and now the sight of it had burned into Madalyn's mind.

It was the way it was addressed. Above their address Stella had written, in her curly and pompous cursive,

Amy Smith & François Dubois + Maddy

It made it look like she was just an afterthought, like their throuple wasn't really a throuple but a relationship between Amy and Frank, and she was just—yes, what exactly? A plus sign?

Stella should know better, Maddy thought sullenly and stared into the dark, swaying with the train's movement. She's known us forever, and besides, it was me and Ames first, long before Frank came along.

And yet, the thought wouldn't leave her alone.

She smiled a tight, smug little smile when she let herself into the almost-empty back room of Downtown Grind—the good part of coming in early was that she got to change in peace. Soon the hustle of people stopping in before work would sweep her along, and she could stop thinking.

***

04 Oct 2022

Downtown Grind was an old establishment, a coffee shop that had bought out the neighboring tenant thirty years ago, and the neighboring tenant on the other side ten years after that, which led to the current state of basically nothing lining up at all. There were three slightly different ground floors each at least a half step apart, hallways that went in circles, and sometimes it was possible for the power to go out but only in the northern side of the building, with the long window.

It did not lack for charm though. It was a warren of comfy, warm rooms, each uniquely appointed with plush chairs, tables, and a wide assortment of different lights. Ceiling lights, table lamps, spot lamps. It had a good clientele. Lyric knew a lot of her customer's names, and a lot of them knew her name. Many of them would come in with their laptop and spend six or more hours, several times a week, writing and reading and corresponding. For some, that was their job, while others just came in their free time.

For Lyric, this was almost the entirety of her social life. She spent time surrounded by people, laughing and being in on the joke about how double whip Kevin's novel received another round of rejections largely on the basis of its insufferable pretentiousness. Mrs. Petrović's string of dalliances, each one more salacious than the last. Hundreds of people each day came through, living their lives, and for a little while, for each of them, Lyric was a part of it.

This was an enduring victory for her, because Lyric lived a stealth life. She, as near as she could tell, passed. She was what people expected before their conscious brain had even started looking. Sure, her features were more handsome than cute, but her cute horn-rimmed glasses, cute asymmetrical fem-over, and assortment of cute knit wool caps did a lot to intercept the eye before it caught the set of her chin. The brow. She did a lot of little things, a bit of performative femininity here, a bit of makeup there, that were all in service of making that first, animal recognition go one way, and not another.

If she was pressed on it, though, Lyric would say it was her tits that did the heavy lifting. Lyric owned three beautiful, whole chest-covering breast forms. They sat low, and kind of far apart, and they matched her skin beautifully if not quite perfectly. She could wear a top with a lower neck and have cleavage. She had curves, and shapes, and if someone just saw her out of the corner of their eye they saw a girl. She also had some inserts she would wear if time was an issue, but they were plan B.

The stress of passing was fairly constant for her. It wasn't like she could just go out, make a good first impression on the city, and then be in the clear. It was a thing she kept up with every day. Every hour. With every interaction.

It could be exhausting, and Lyric often, privately, entertained the idea that she was doing something wrong, but the moments when everything came together gave her such a rush, such a surge of life, that she always came around. This was how it was supposed to be, she'd tell herself, and that made the effort so worthwhile. After a lifetime of being the odd one out, the ugly duckling, Lyric was finally fitting in.

She'd had the same job for three years, and although it wasn't a forever job, it was steady. It could be counted on, which was worth more than Lyric knew how to account for. This is to say that she was very invested in keeping everything the same, because it's a short trip from being in on the joke to being the joke.

It was a cool October morning and Lyric was bussing tables, with a tub under her arm. She'd just stood up and turned, passing her coworker Maddy, when Maddy made a sound. Lyric always jumped at the sounds people made when they discovered something, or were surprised, always expecting that it was about her, and in this she was not technically wrong.

Maddy was standing right behind her, rubbernecking this way and that, and peeking over Lyric's head. "Here," she said, gently guiding Lyric by her elbow back toward one of the hallways.

Lyric went along with it, because her way was always to go limp in confrontations of any kind. She wasn't positive that that's what this was, a confrontation, but it was her default reaction to others taking a controlling hand...

...but when they got into the hall, Maddy was looking at her neck. Lyric went full rigid as the redheaded woman reached up and gently tugged this way and that at her little black choker necklace. The one she wore to mask the seam at the top of her breast form, where the rubber ended and her skin began.

With a smart little smile, Maddy stood up, nodded, and gave her a gentle tap on the shoulder as she moved past, and Lyric was left standing in the hall, gently running her fingers over her neck. The necklace was in place now, which meant that it hadn't been before. Maddy knew about her breast form, or probably, or maybe, and she...

...hadn't made a big deal about it. She had to know what it was, didn't she? How else would she have known to help Lyric cover it up? Lyric set down her bussing tub and scurried into the bathroom. There was a slight indentation in her skin where the choker had been sitting, about a centimeter too high.

She'd been lax. She was normally so careful. It had ridden up mostly on the left side. Who else might have noticed? How many customers? How many coworkers before Maddy? What else had she missed?

She spent a full minute tugging at the neck of her button-down shirt, to make sure her bra was sitting the way it was supposed to, and that the shoulder seam was out where it was supposed to be, and that her shirt was sitting the way it was supposed to, and were her pants too tight?

A full minute. It took her a full minute to come back to herself. When she walked back out of the ladies room, she did a little trick she'd learned where she kept her eyes trained on the floor, but paid attention to her peripheral vision. Brain focusing on the edges, and ignoring what was right in front of her. She watched the whole shop as she picked up her tub, headed back through two rooms, and into the kitchen.

No one reacted. Maddy was, perhaps, smiling a bit more widely than usual. Maddy always had a very reserved smile, when she smiled at all, but this was genuine. Lyric didn't stop as she rushed past, into the back. She was still hip deep in damage control mode, trying to figure out if anyone had noticed.

That night, though, as Lyric was huddled on her couch, eating day-old garlic pasta while wrapped up in a blanket that had been in the apartment when she moved in but was too warm to throw out like her logical brain told her... That night, Lyric thought about how Maddy had handled the whole thing. She'd been considerate, and she'd been respectful of Lyric's presentation. It felt like a lot.

***

21 Nov 2022

Madalyn sat quietly on the subway, with her purse in her lap. Her matching white scarf and toboggan offset her red hair, but she felt very distant from the upbeat, Thanksgiving energy of everyone around her. François was cooking duck, and for the first time since 2019 they were hosting a full event. Members from each of their families.

For some reason, this year was different. She felt it in the pit of her stomach. A nameless, quiet agony, made worse by the fact that she knew she was going to hide it. She would paint on the smile and hug Amy's sister, who had never really liked her. She would pretend that she didn't understand what François's cousins were saying about them. She would, invariably, defend her relationship when her aunt finally got drunk enough to say what she really thought, and it was the defending, the insisting that everything was fine, that would hurt the most.

The holidays were always hard. She and Amy had gotten through many a gathering by rolling their eyes at each other whenever no one else was looking, but François had real baggage. Bad memories and loss. The three of them needed to talk, to have a real, honest, come to Jesus talk, but November was a bad time for it. November and December. She just needed to get to January, when the days started to get a little longer and the reminders of a previous life were out of sight and out of mind.

She just needed to get to January.

***

29 Nov 2022

Eight weeks. Lyric studied her coworker Maddy for nearly two months after the Brawl in the Hall. She called it that because it was funny, and it was something she was never going to tell anyone else about anyway so it could have whatever name she wanted to give it thank you very much. If she wanted a funny name to deflect from how uncomfortable she'd been afterwards, in the short term, for entirely understandable reasons, then it was going to have a funny name.

Eight weeks. She was as careful as she knew how to be. She watched Maddy with her peripheral vision, and she watched Maddy through reflective surfaces. She switched shifts with people to work more early mornings, so she could work alongside Maddy. She was typically an afternoon, evening, or night shift gal, but there was important work that needed to be done and she couldn't do it if they only overlapped by twenty minutes a day.

Maddy might have been ten years older than she was, and she might have been twenty. It was hard to tell, and Lyric didn't put a lot of effort into finding out. This was not an important detail.

Maddy had always been nice to her, but everyone was nice to her. Maddy's niceness didn't stand out, and Lyric had put down everyone's treatment of her to her stealth presentation. If Maddy knew... did that mean everyone knew? Had she not passed at all? She didn't think this was true, but she spent time analyzing everyone just in case. Her supervisors, the manager, her coworkers, all of her favorite customers.

Maddy had known. She thought, after eight weeks, that it was just Maddy and not everyone. She also knew, vaguely, that Maddy had some kind of non-traditional thing going on at home, but she'd never pried into it and Maddy had never been one to talk much about her personal life. She was quiet and professional, and a damn fine barista. Her foam heart drizzle game was the best in town.

Lyric had certainly had her share of bad discovery moments. Her side job exposed her to a lot of men who wanted something from her as long as it happened where nobody recognized them, or where it wouldn't get back to anyone else they knew. Sometimes, even when everything lined up perfectly, it still ended badly. Lyric knew what bad could look like, and so she treated every discovery as potentially that bad out of necessity.

At the end of eight weeks, Lyric still knew nothing, really. Nothing of importance, anyway, but she had also ruled out a lot of the worst case contingencies. That Maddy was going to blackmail her. That Maddy was going to use this against her somehow. Turn the rest of the staff against her once she'd had a chance to plan. Lyric's journey had provided her with enough other people being shitty toward her for no other reason than because they could, because she was vulnerable, that she just expected it. Eight weeks of watching Maddy continue to be nice to her, and kind and considerate, was still somehow not enough for Lyric to really let her guard down.

It was something, but she didn't know what.

It wasn't until she was at her support group meeting, with her hand raised, that she realized she was going to tell someone about the Brawl in the Hall after all. She was going to tell a whole bunch of someones.

***

03 Dec 2022

Maddy sighed heavily and slumped in an armchair. She had just finished cleaning the northern part of the shop, the old dry cleaners, and her back ached. They closed off two thirds of the shop after two in the morning, and used the hours of fewer customers to clean up and bake the bulk of the goodies for the next day. Madalyn had known this when she signed up for the night shift, but she hadn't remembered it was this hard.

Maybe she was just getting old.

She made a face and eyed around in the shadowy room. Most of the chairs were lifted onto the tables, and the hardwood floor gleamed in the dim light where she had just mopped it. She had switched off the main light to take her break in the quiet, before getting back to customer work and helping with the baking. All their chairs and tables were mismatched, and here, next to the hearth with the artificial fire that was now switched off, were the comfiest chairs in the whole place; a pair of plush armchairs. She stretched, lifted her legs over the armrest and curled up in the chair. Despite having just done physical work, she was chilly. Being awake at nights came with a cost.

The door burst open behind Maddy, slamming against the wall, and she jerked upright.

"I'm awake! I'm awake!"

Gertrude, the only employee who was older than Maddy, grunted at her, waved dismissively with her hand and sat heavily on the other armchair. She grumbled something under her breath, fished out a flask from the folds of her apron, and took a swig. Judging by her expression, it was something strong.

"What is it?" Maddy asked, peering toward the door. It didn't seem like Gertrude was mad at her for dozing off on the job, which she still wasn't sure she had done, but it was obvious the larger woman was agitated.

"Pretzels! Burned the fucking pretzels!" Gertrude growled and took another swig. "I should know better!"

Maddy stretched. She didn't know how she was supposed to react. She wasn't sure how long she had been zoning out in the chair, and felt the pull to get back to work, but it seemed inconsiderate to just leave when Gertrude had just arrived. Gertrude offered her the flask, and against her better judgement Maddy accepted.

The booze was strong and spicy, some kind of a herb flavored concoction. Maddy shuddered and made a noise, which in turn made Gertrude laugh. She was a big woman, tall and round, and her laugh was hearty. Loud and full. Maddy smiled weakly and gave the flask back.

"That'll grow some hair on your chest!" Gertrude said.

"Oof," Maddy said. She could feel the alcohol on her breath. "Do you often..."

"Drink on the job?" Maddy was afraid she'd overstepped, but Gertrude just leaned back on the chair and took another swig. "Who cares," she mused. "All they care about is the pretzels. So what if I'm a bit tipsy making them."

Maddy thought it would not be polite to point out Gertrude had just burned the pretzels, so she searched for other topics. "Do you always work the night?"

"Ja, ja," Gertrude admitted. "Monday to Thursday, every week, since I don't even want to remember. Ja. I make the pretzels. Something else too, you know. But that's why I'm here. Ever since I came to the States." Gertrude stared ahead for a while, then perked up and turned towards Maddy. "You've been here a while too, nicht wahr? I remember you starting, it was long ago. Before this section opened up. But you haven't worked at night. Why are you here now?"