Cluster 2 chaining the.., p.18
Show Girl, page 18
“You look great!” she said, for the ten-thousandth time.
As I said, I never really thought much about my body and my appearance before, but I still had a very clear view of how I looked, and of how people could be expected to respond to me, and not even the dress and the shoes and the horrible bloody underwear could countermand that for long; I kept periodically resetting to my default view of myself as a questionably presentable and visually unimpressive dork. And, though I’d gotten dressed up and been made to look pretty before, at no other time had I been surrounded by women who were professionals at getting dressed up and looking pretty; even with Emily, back in the office, I’d outglammed her by a factor of at least five, thanks to Ben. Here, she and I were dressed identically, except she was taller, prettier, more confident and overall more real than me, embodying a grace and poise that seemed so far beyond me as to be unreachable. I was an imposter, suddenly all too aware of my fake boobs and my padded hips and bum, of the form and feel of my body, of its ugly, shapeless maleness.
So I kept turning to her for reassurance, and I kept not quite believing her.
My dick chose that moment to complain about its entrapment, twanging a nerve in my scrotum and causing me to flinch. Another reminder of who I really was, under everything.
You’re a fake, I told myself, in the relentless voice of self-hatred, the voice I couldn’t ever silence because a part of me didn’t want to silence it, because I deserved its opprobrium, because I knew it was right. You’re a fake and a liar and James will never love you the way he could love a real—
“Alex,” Emily said gently, breaking into my thoughts, protecting me from them. I wanted to push her away and almost did, not out of any animosity towards her but because, in that moment, the idea that anyone could understand how I felt was revolting. To understand how I felt would be to understand me, Alex, the scrawny boy under the façade, and I couldn’t ever let that happen.
“Yeah?” I replied, sounding husky. I held myself very still.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
She handed me a water bottle and I took a few swigs, imagined it flowing through me, cleansing me. “Don’t drink too much,” she said. “You don’t want to bloat up your belly in a dress this tight; it gets uncomfortable.”
“Thanks,” I said, forcing a smile. She’d seen my distress clear as day. There was a time I’d considered myself a pretty buttoned-up guy, but either these last few days had changed things — very possible! — or I’d always been easily readable, like an educational toy to teach kids about the perils of insecurity. At least the water had helped get my voice back under control.
“Where did that come from?” Emily asked, taking my hand.
“Old stuff. I’ll tell you some other time.” When she came to work for us and saw me in my natural habitat, she’d learn everything anyway. It’d probably explain a lot. “I’m okay, now,” I said. “I think.”
“Well,” Emily said, leaning in to whisper, “like I said, you look fantastic.”
The voice inside me quieted some; I wished I could package Emily up and take her with me everywhere I went. “I still feel silly,” I said, looking down at myself and experiencing another flash of revulsion — I could see my stupid angular body clearly through the dress so how did no-one else see it? — which I managed to turn into an almost real-sounding laugh.
“You look great,” she insisted, and I repeated her words inside me, held them close. “And—” she made a show of looking around the hall, “—when it comes down to it, we’re dressed fairly normal. I mean, look at some of those outfits. You should thank whoever picked ours.”
“Um, I picked them,” I admitted. “I just never thought I’d end up wearing one.”
“Then thank you. I guarantee you half the models here are jealous of us.” She snorted. “You should see some of the stuff I’ve had to wear at other events; crazy outfits like out of a video game. A lot like cosplay, except cosplay is usually better made and easier to move in. Tell you what, when you take your break, get out of this corner we’re stuck in and have a look at the other models, see what ridiculous shit they’re stuck in. Especially the big companies. Lots of money often equals lots of stupid accessories to lose. And temporary tattoos of the logo.”
“She’s right,” Martina said from the edge of her booth. “I’d kill to be on your stand right now. Do you know how hard it is to keep the seam straight on these effing stockings? Oops,” she added, as a man approaching her booth waved for her attention.
I laughed, and it was genuine this time. “Thanks for keeping me from going crazy, Emily,” I said.
“No problem,” Emily said, smiling. “Are you okay to cover solo for fifteen minutes? I need to pee.”
I felt recharged, so I shooed her away. “Go. Go! I’ll be fine. I can always yell for Kit to rescue me if someone gets weird.”
She flashed me a smile and disappeared in the direction of the maze of small rooms at the back of the convention hall. I watched her go — she really did look good in the dress, despite its obnoxious blueness — and fixed in my head the fact that if this ridiculously beautiful woman thought I looked perfectly okay, she was probably right.
You’re fine, I told myself. You’re fine. You’re just like everyone else here. You’re just like everyone else here. You don’t stand out. You don’t stand out. It seemed like a serviceable mantra, so I repeated it as I looked out over the intensifying crowds.
A minute or so later, a boy who didn’t look much older than I was trotted up to our booth. He’d been reading our signage as he approached, rather than watching where he was going, and he almost collided with me.
“Hi,” I said in my customer service voice, and he took several startled steps back. “Welcome to our stand. Is there anything you’d like to know about McCain Applied Computing or our products?”
“Um,” he said, and took a full two seconds to recover. His blush would have been visible from space if we weren’t indoors; you could likely have spotted it with one of those heat-mapping satellites anyway, if you knew where to look. Remembering what Emily said about controlling the interaction, I took a step forward, so we were only a metre apart, but knotted my hands in front of me, to establish that this was my space. I smiled at him, which only intensified his blush. I wasn’t worried about this kid trying anything; if it came to it, I could probably have beaten him up myself without taking my shoes off first.
“Uh,” he rallied, “I read your company’s promotional post on, um, Reddit? And I was interested to learn more about your software.”
And that was the other thing: boys like him, who I would normally count as peers, were dying of sheer nervousness just from being near me. It was, when I allowed myself to realise it, another reminder that I was not myself, not here, not any more. I was something else, someone else, and couldn’t rely on old assumptions. I held onto that, too, held it with Emily’s reassurances and Ben’s confidence in me, and put it all into my smile.
“I’m Alex,” I said, extending a hand. He took it limply and sort of waggled it. I deliberately didn’t look down to see if his trousers tented; I deliberately also did not giggle at the thought of it. My crisis seemed years in the past already. “I wrote that post. I’ve also had a hand in the code for most of our projects, although—” I disengaged from the handshake and shook a warning finger in what I hoped was an obviously lighthearted manner, “—I can’t give you a deep dive here on the show floor. What’s your name?” I added, when his only response was to swallow.
“Harry,” he said, after a good long pause. I put a small bet on his having needed some time to remember his name. “I— I write for Rayleigh’s Journal.”
Okay, that was impressive for someone so young. Rayleigh’s Journal was quite a big fish in the picayune-technical-details pond: a former print magazine, now entirely online, catering to the kind of technology nerd who never needs an acronym explained in the same way salmon cater to bears.
“Would you like to speak with one of our engineers?” I said, looking around. Marcus was on his break, Kit was showing someone our only demo unit, and James was presumably schmoozing people elsewhere. “They’re all engaged at the moment, but I’m sure someone will be available to talk to you soon.” I wouldn’t have bothered for a random blogger, would have told him to come back later, but I didn’t want to risk losing access to Rayleigh’s readership. I was kind of curious as to what they would say about our work anyway.
“I can wait,” Harry said. “You have one of the more interesting software proposals on the floor today. Um, if it works.”
I smiled again, enjoying the way his eyes widened slightly when I did so. “I can assure you it does,” I said. “You need a particular type of screen, but it definitely works.” I’d have shown him the selfies I’d taken with the screen and lens assembly we’d cobbled together to test it out, but I didn’t have my phone with me, and — I winced as I remembered, hoping it didn’t show — all the shots were of the old me, anyway. Not a good thing to show someone here.
“Then I’d love to see it,” he said.
“Kit can show you when he’s free,” I said, “or Marcus, or Mr McCain if he comes back before anyone else is free.” I decided to omit the inconvenient part of the truth: “I’d show you the selfies I took with it, but they’re saved on my phone and I’m not allowed to have personal equipment on the show floor.”
He swallowed. I realised I’d leaned towards him a little, as if sharing a scandalous secret, so I leaned back. A laugh I couldn’t quite suppress bubbled out.
I glanced back again and noticed Kit had finished showing off the demo phone. I reached back and picked it up, unspooling the wire that tethered it to our booth.
“Here,” I said, “why don’t you have a look at the demo unit?”
It wouldn’t pass as a modern phone even in low light — it was an older Samsung model from before they started doing the wraparound screens, and we’d hacked it apart to move the camera under the screen, so it was twice as thick as it should have been — but it worked well enough. I unlocked it and paged through a couple of apps, so he could see it working unimpeded, and then loaded up the camera software and handed it to him.
“Try and find the selfie camera,” I suggested.
Puzzled, he covered the place where the camera hole used to be, at the top of the phone, but he could still see his face, partially obscured by his palm. He slowly moved his finger down the screen until he finally found it, just below the centre. He covered and uncovered it, over and over, squinting at the image on the screen, looking for defects. I knew he wouldn’t find any; the implementation on our demo unit was carefully tuned.
“This is incredible,” he said.
“Thanks!” I said.
He jumped. I don’t think he’d realised I was watching over his shoulder. I took a step back and held out my hand. Reluctantly he gave the unit back to me, and I replaced it in its cradle.
“What was your name again?” he asked, biting his lip and then hurriedly retracting his teeth. I tried not to laugh again; I’d probably break his ego into a million bits. We were cut from similar cloth, but I’d never been as terrified of attractive women as he obviously was. Sure, they mostly hadn’t been interested in me, but that was another thing entirely.
“Alex,” I said, and he nodded. I’d realised shortly after talking to my first rep on the show floor that I was giving my real name to a whole lot of people who’d now seen (and photographed) me in a dress — James couldn’t have engineered a more awkward situation if he’d tried — but I decided that on the remote chance any of them ever swung by the office, I could just nip out the back and down the fire escape, or put on a really big hat or something. Perfect. Flawless. Foolproof. With plans like that, I could have been a supervillain.
He couldn’t find anything else to say and Kit was still unavailable, so to stop the silence becoming any more awkward than it already was, I asked him, “So, how did you come to work for Rayleigh’s?” I was curious, anyway, and it was a safe topic; one of the things we hadn’t had time for was briefing me on what level of disclosure was appropriate — Kit and Marcus had been fully briefed but they were also attending as their original genders, which left more of their morning free — and I didn’t want to rely on common sense and guesswork. And, when it came right down to it, I was just a gopher; an assistant, not a real engineer.
“Oh,” he said, “um.” He sat on the syllable for a bit while he thought. “I’m still at uni, so I’m only submitting the occasional article. My old project supervisor is also an editor at Rayleigh’s; he asked me to work for him.” When he mentioned his supervisor a look of pure joy temporarily replaced the nervously neutral expression on his face. “Part time,” he added. “He couldn’t attend the expo this year, so he sent me.”
Well, that was disturbingly like looking in a mirror (minus the university education and the sweatiness). An older man, a mentor, someone he admired, asked him to come work for him, probably worked him far more hours than he was contracted for, and eventually had him attend a trade show. I was half-tempted to warn the kid to run as fast as he could, lest his editor ever look at him with a smirk and a credit card and suggest he try wearing a dress, just for a change.
Actually, I realised, narrowing my eyes, Harry might have looked quite decent if he exfoliated and wore some foundation garments. His hair was already long enough, just about, and—
Alex Brewer, who have you even become?
We discussed his university project for a few minutes — he was working on an interesting idea to do with eliminating clipping artifacts in video games; not my field, but fascinating — and he came out of his shell a little. Yes, sure, his shell was definitely still there, and I could absolutely prompt a retreat back into it if I smiled at him too much, but he was doing pretty well!
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Kit finishing up with the man he was talking to, so I put a hand on Harry’s shoulder — he jumped again, which was adorable — and made to guide him over.
“Oh, er,” Harry said, blushing again, “before I go, could I get a selfie? I mean, one I can keep.”
I laughed. “Sure!”
He dug his phone out of his pocket and held it up, framing us on the screen. I put on my best smile, stuck one arm around his shoulders and did the peace sign with my other hand for the hell of it. He snapped a couple and I let him go.
He thanked me profusely.
“Old technology, now,” I said, indicating his phone.
It took a moment for him to get what I meant, and then he laughed far harder than the joke merited. Flatterer. “Um, yeah,” he said.
“It was nice meeting you, Harry,” I said. “Good luck at Rayleigh’s.”
I guided him over to Kit, made the introductions, patted him on the back, and returned to my position at the front of the stand, clamping down on my need to laugh as much as I could.
Being able to do that to guys was fun.
* * *
“Alex!” Emily hissed urgently as she walked up to me, her break over. “I just ran into Caitlyn from our agency, and they’ve got her dressed up like a sexy cop!”
“Oh my God. Can we see her from here?”
She pointed, I looked, and sure enough, when the crowds parted, I caught a glimpse of four cops at one of the larger booths in the mid-size section of the floor; except police uniforms weren’t normally quite so shiny, and the skirts generally left more to the imagination.
“Holy shit,” I said. We both laughed, and I felt grateful once again to Past Me for not fucking us over with ridiculously short dresses or midriff-revealing cutouts. “God, I just saw one of them have to tug her skirt down. I feel bad for laughing.”
“Don’t, seriously,” Emily said. “At the last one of these, she got to wear jeans and I had to be a fucking mermaid.”
“Oh no,” I said, “with the tail and everything?” She nodded and I lowered my voice. “How did you pee?”
She shuddered. “They had to drop a curtain around the pedestal I was on, so it wouldn’t ‘break the illusion’—” air-quotes and an extremely derisive tone of voice, “—and I had to shimmy out of the bloody thing right up there and peg it out the back door. At least they let me wear leggings under it.”
“Wow,” I said.
“I haven’t seen anything quite that egregious so far today. Which isn’t to say there aren’t some ugly bloody outfits. Check it out: over there—” she pointed, “—is a bunch of girls dressed in what I think is tin foil, with fairy wings, advertising something to do with… steering wheels? No, I have no idea what the connection is supposed to be. I think those women there are supposed to be some kind of strange plastic valkyrie army. And you can’t see them from here but there’s a booth with like a dozen women all in the same wig and coordinated makeup and they even have different size heels on to make them all the same height; it’s eerie. Oh yeah, and whoever’s done the outfits for that booth has a serious hard-on for platforms, look.”
I looked and saw five women who were wearing relatively simple skirt-and-jacket outfits but with four- or five-inch platform boots that made my back ache just at the thought of wearing them. I wondered if it was supposed to symbolise something, like, Our Software Stands Tall! or, Reach for Success! or, Our Boss is a Massive Perv!
“God,” I muttered, “there are so many sadists in trade show costume design.”
Emily shrugged. “Sadists; straight men; what’s the difference?”
“I will never complain about a simple blue dress ever again,” I promised.
* * *
A short while later one of the big brands announced some demonstration event and almost instantly cleared out the entire convention hall as every rep, journo and blogger disappeared in the direction of their huge, garish booth. Kit and Marcus, with encouragement from Emily and me, followed; I wasn’t particularly bothered about it as I’d never been as interested in finished products as I was in the building blocks, and I knew they’d come running back in a panic if they saw anything that could trump one of our projects. Besides, the prospect of milling around in a crowd while in this dress and playing this role did not appeal. I promised the boys I’d field all inquiries in their absence. I hadn’t really thought about it — understandably, I think, since I was preoccupied with, e.g., the fake breasts I was wearing — but they’d been working pretty hard, too, and being able to give them a break to go dork out over something was quite satisfying. Marcus was so grateful he said he wanted to kiss me; I suggested he kiss Kit instead, and he did, on the hand.
