Denae entered Glory Lane, not from the street, but from the alley that was unseen. For the most part she knew that wouldn’t matter. The neighborhood knew the two story strip had apartments on the second floor. Customers though might frown at her presence. She looked far too much like what she was, a boy pretending to be a girl and not succeeding very well. So she used the hidden stairwell to access her apartment.

Denae entered her apartment. It could barely be considered an efficiency or studio apartment and she had to be ruthless in maintaining only the necessary items in the space. There was a full wall mirror in the room, hinting at what its probable other uses had been. She watched herself walk and worked on moving in a feminine manner. Gina had insisted on her wearing at least a one and a half inch heel to help facilitate that.

Calvin had to admit, as he had at the foot of the stairs, that his walk didn’t fall into anything that could be considered to be other than exaggerated. Denae was a lie. The question he asked as he looked at the pill crusher and a deadly dose of fentanyl was, did he want to live at all? He could become Calienté, a prostitute, like the other clownish boys on the street outside. He could drop the facade and become Calvin. He had heard Mack and even Gina tell him he was needed. The money that was paid for his work at the clinic should be proof, though for some reason he still hesitated to believe that.

He was an impostor he knew it. Everyone knew he was an impostor. He stripped to his skin. His hair hung long enough to need the attention of someone other than himself if it was to look acceptable. Even though he knew the balances he checked his accounts. Those he realized, were one of the myriad contradictions that made up Hammer. Calvin made a calculation of his income and expenses a second time. The math hadn’t changed. No matter what he wanted to do Calvin realized he needed to either have patience or improve his income.

He knew there were additional care shifts he could take, though neither Mack nor Gina would allow him to work more than four more hours on a normal work day. They weren’t being cruel just practical, he understood that the longer he was on shift over eight hours, the more he was apt to make critical errors.

Calvin stripped to his skin and carefully placed his scrub in the bin for dirty clothes as he added his underwear, he looked up. The lie of Denae, or even Calienté was laid bare and again his mind went to the fentanyl, he was alone no one would care what happened to him. His family didn’t care what happened to him, to Hammer he was just a line on a balance sheet. The weight of his young life bore down on him with a harsh grind that could crush him. No matter what he did some of that weight would continue to bear down on him. Death would not solve anything, he knew. He would check out yet the truth was that he knew that to leave the clinic worse, and though the kindness it represented was rough, and not without requiring its pound of flesh from both those who served and those who were served, it was still a kindness that he forced himself to acknowledge. He wouldn’t dwell on thinking of himself as a victim, which on most days made the deadly dose of fentanyl more of a floor than a cliff that he was walking along the edge of. His life might be heavy, but he could manage.

While he watched his reflection Calvin inventoried his clothing. He had one clean scrub left, the same was true of his other clothing a full change of clean gear remained. If he continued to live he would need to do laundry. Calvin mechanically bagged his dirty laundry, then he dressed to go out. He had one modest skirt and blouse that were beginning to show wear. He again thought he could abandon the girl disguise, it wouldn’t matter, his work clothes were indifferent, Mack was indifferent, he needed people, he could actually have used at least one more tech to handle the volume and smooth the flow of people the clinic served.

Most of this was actually background noise that Calvin knew, that he didn’t voice, internally or externally. He was dressed to go out again. He could have continued in the scrubs he worked in and no one would have paid any attention to whether or not he passed. Calvin knew this, he knew that so long as he contributed one way or another to the community he had a place he could be anything he wanted to be, except the feudal lord, then again, how different was that from life anywhere else? Small people, who started low rarely rose to the top, most people wherever they were lived lives of quiet desperation.

Calvin actually did think that, everyone lives a life of quiet desperation, even in his way, Hammer is constrained to one small patch of hell on Earth. There’s also one thing I know I’ll never have happen to me again, my step dad will never beat me with a rubber hose again to hide the evidence of a thorough beating. That, when a small cache of panties that were sized to fit him had been discovered when he didn’t even have a girlfriend to claim to have taken trophies from had actually been the final straw to drive him out of his home, Calvin realized he was reliving a memory of a decision to stay in Hammer’s corner of hell because it was moderately better than the last corner of hell he had left, even if Hammer had coerced him to sex. He counted the burns and half dozen hits with a cattle prod as very strong coercion, honesty he reminded himself. But don’t dwell on the past, because you can only learn from the past, not change it. Decisions made, or not made flow into the past every day. He’d limped the next day and cooperated. The pain stopped. At home the pain had escalated, even though he’d not had a single clothing item in his home that pertained to women, between the time that the initial find had been made and the final beating he’d received at least one beating a week, one of which had left visible bruises which led to uncomfortable questions being asked.

Calvin entered the subterranean laundromat that sat along the side of an abandoned subway station. The whole thing had been sealed off and would have probably remained unknown to anyone if Hammer hadn’t had a propensity to make sure that no one was using the city sewer system to sneak up on or surveil him. From what Calvin had gleaned in his time here this wasn’t the first time that Hammer’s proactive paranoia had produced a result that was something other than being aware of either city or rival gang activity intent on disrupting his small fiefdom.

“Hey, Denea!” the cheerful greeting by a cute and lively girl named Sally, another of Hammer’s ‘girls’ (because as far as he knew, Hammer didn’t have real females working as prostitutes), broke him out of his fugue.