Bonus Chapter - End of Line

Holly wasn’t like the other kids. If you asked her, she’d have told you that was because no two people were alike. That nothing was wrong with her.

If you asked her teachers, they’d have told you they expected her to be on the spectrum. A little bit of autism, some social anxiety, but please don’t change that well-behaved little girl; we already have too many troublemakers to shepherd.

If you asked her parents, they’d have told you that her pretty little girl was exceptionally and very genius. You would be hard-pressed to deny that, as she at least knew how to use the word “genius” in a sentence properly.

If you asked a priest, they’d have told you that they can’t tell you what they heard in confession, even if the person in question had moved to England when she was nine. Getting him drunk and praising the Irish loud enough might have gotten him to slip and tell you he very exceptionally sure wouldn’t not never tell ya anything that boy had told him.

Holly was eleven when she had her first crush on a boy. It confused her mightily. See, until that point, the bright and shy little Holly had misdiagnosed how she felt about herself. That is an easy thing to do at that age when all you have is the heavily filtered internet at the school library. Even if she had known the keywords “sexual orientation” and “sexual identity”, all she would have found out was that the “blocked” page still looked the same. Still none the wiser, she blamed hormonal imbalances for the crush and moved on.

It took until her second suicide attempt at sixteen for him to be diagnosed correctly. That it happened was a stroke of luck, as the court-appointed psychologist had fallen ill, and his son, in the last year of studying to one day take over his father’s practice, had filled in. He wasn’t supposed to do that, but both he and his father agreed that simply talking to the girl to provide stability couldn’t hurt.

That got things rolling. Not fast, nor decidedly, but even the regular talks with a professional helped Holly to come to grips with her situation and no longer have the wrongness he had felt all his life creep into his head, trying to strangle him. He took to hormone treatments, not ready to face transitioning openly.

Two days after he finished school, he dared to dress as Harry for the first time in public. It felt almost as bad as he had feared, just for a different reason. Instead of living his nightmare, where every single person pointed at him with their fingers, nobody looked twice at him. He passed.

The first year was a roller-coaster for him. Unlearning all the minute details of female behaviour he had trained himself to copy since he was little while also starting a new job wasn’t easy. More than once, he just wanted to throw it all out, don one of the dresses he hadn’t dared to throw away and live an easier life with a lie he was used to.

But he didn’t need to walk the path alone. That old doctor still hadn’t retired, but his son now took a big chunk of his workload off his shoulders. But there was one case the son never touched, as it would be highly unethical to have a patient you also were friends with. And it was just friends; his wife made sure of that.

It was that friendship, that one person who knew him for what he really was, that carried Harry over most of the first year. In February, a second pillar started to emerge as they together visited a nice bar to celebrate one thing or another. The friend had selected it without hinting at all that the visit was for Harry.

Harry wasn’t much for going out. As Holly, it never sat right with him, playing the girl he didn’t feel like. But at this place, he felt at home. People were friendly, and there wasn’t a woman in sight to remind him of his past. Nobody wanted to know more about him but a name, and even that seemed to be more about how to address someone.

That little bar, hidden away in a side street with merely a small sign next to the door pointing to its existence, became his favourite hangout spot and made him come out of the shell he had hidden in for so long. He became a regular soon, even before he realised it was a gay bar.

“Hey, Harry, what’cha dreaming about? That stick up your arse? It’s your turn,” Eric shouted from the billiard table.

“It’s called a cue,” Harry replied, long used to Eric’s foul mouth. “And I’ll stick it up yours if you cheated while I wasn’t looking.

“Deal,” Eric replied. Harry laughed it off. His first surgery was scheduled for early ‘26, and until those were all done, his pants would stay locked.

Harry lay alone in his bed in August, sleeping soundly, when 5:03 came around with a dream. It promised him to change him, make him whole, fully functioning. No knives, no pain, no scars. And all the stamina he wanted, all he needed to finally show Eric how to do it right.