Goodgirl.tv — Part 4: Tonight I'm the human, and I think I've left the dog behind.

By CancerCancer

Old-school night was Nate's idea, and like most of his ideas it was supposed to be a one-time thing and then it just stayed.

Bridge. He built the decks himself — braille-readable, every card tactile, fully usable for Viv, which is the kind of thing he does, the small precise generous thing nobody asked for. A human, a snake, a blind fox, and a rabbit around a table. Dogs Playing Poker, if the dogs had better taste and a worse secret.

I thought, briefly, about how well a charity card game would sell but —

No. I'm the human tonight. Work can wait. That's the thing the Zoo lets me do that the world never will — wear the body the poll vetoed, the one I'd have had if a few thousand strangers hadn't picked the breed standard before I had a spine to object with. So I sit down at old-school night in a borrowed human face and human hands and no ears at all, and I think I've left the dog in the other life. I haven't. You'll see. I never do.

It's me and Nate against Vivian and Jack. Bridge is a signal game — the whole negotiation happens silently, in the bidding, partner reading partner across a table neither of them is allowed to talk across. My job is to get inside Nate's head and stay there. I'm good at getting inside people. It's the one place my training pays rent: being read in service of a partnership instead of being read as a product is a kind of room I didn't know I'd been starving for, and I sink into it.

Our hands run good. They run a little too good. I've noticed it before and I notice it again tonight — the cards fall toward us with a smoothness that real shuffling doesn't have, a seam in the randomness I can feel the way I can feel a wall that isn't reading as a wall. He built the decks. He built the decks and I am almost certain he left himself a little something in the build, a way to top-deck a good hand into our partnership when he wants one, and I have never once called it.

I tell myself it's because I can't prove it. That's not why. I like the partner. I don't want to look harder at the partner. And — this is the ugly one, the one I file three folders deep — I enjoy the good hands. He made me complicit before I understood there were terms. By the time I understood the terms I was already winning.

He asks me something across the table — not a bid, a real question, in the dead space while Viv sorts her tactile cards by feel. Asks what I'm working on, and the question assumes I have an opinion worth having, lands warm, lands exactly on the soft part of me that has spent its whole life waiting to be asked. And there's a half-second where the warmth has a texture to it. Smooth. A degree too precisely aimed.

My ears go back. I'm not wearing ears. And somewhere I'm not wearing a tail, something tries to tuck. That's the dog for you — the one part of me that never logs out, pinning a pair of ears I left in another body, on a borrowed human skull, because the animal underneath the brand has read the room faster than I have. It's the only honest instrument I own. They bred it onto me to sell merchandise and it turns out it also works. And I do what I have done with that instrument my whole life, every time it has tried to warn me about a person being warm at me on purpose: I notice it, I look at the warmth, and I weigh how good it feels to be aimed at correctly for once. That's the thing nobody tells you about being built to please: it doesn't check credentials. It floods for whoever learns the trick of you. The same bred-in eagerness that goes warm for good girl is going warm now, for a man who got the inputs right. So I file the pinned ears under well-behaved, and I make my bid.

Viv wins the hand anyway, reading Jack across the silence the way only two people who've been signal to each other for decades can. She doesn't gloat. She tilts her head at the table like she's listening to something the rest of us can't hear, which she usually is. Her silence at this table costs nothing — that's the whole gift of her, the only silence in my life that was ever free. Everyone else's silence about me has had a price tag. Hers is just a refusal to look, offered with both hands.

Then she looks in my direction, and I know I'm cooked.

"When are you gonna show that poor mouse your work, Gemini?"

"Your work?"

Nate leans in closer, his body slithering up and forward, as if ready to receive a secret.

"Oh, I make sims. Nothing much."

I take the cards and shuffle them. It's not my deal but I need something to do, someone to yell at me, anything to save me from what this mad fox woman is about to do.

"She's quite good," Viv goes on. "And I keep saying she should share it more."

"Whose deal is it?" I hold up the deck.

No one offers an out.

That's the problem with genuine friends — they don't let you hide from your own shine.

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Starting with you three," I say, standing. "Because I gotta work up to this."

We put down the cards. I take them through.

You can't walk three people into a room you built without learning exactly who they are by the way they walk it. Jack goes in like a contractor — straight to the load-bearing trick, the stairwell that picks its own direction, running a hand down the logic of it the way you'd check a weld. How did you — no, how did you. The builder recognizing the build. That I can survive. Praise for the engineering goes in a pocket I can close.

Nate goes in slower. He doesn't touch anything. He stands in the middle and turns one slow circle and takes the whole thing in like a man doing inventory, getting to the number before he gets to the kindness, and when the kindness comes it's perfect — this is real work, Gemini. This is the real thing. It lands exactly where I keep the soft part. The not-ears go back again. And again I file it under a friend being generous, because the alternative is looking, and looking is the thing that was done to me, not the thing I do. So I let the good hand sit in my hand and I don't turn it over.

And Vivian can't see a single wall of it. She stands just inside the door with her head tilted, listening to the room the way she listens to everything — and catches the layer I buried in the air for nobody, the one no one with working eyes has ever once stopped to hear. She's quiet a long time.

"Oh," she says. "Oh, it's beautiful."

Not you're beautiful. Not you're so talented, sweetheart, the way the chyron used to say it under a face that wasn't mine. It. The thing I made. She gives the whole compliment to the room and lets me stand next to it instead of inside it, which is the only spot I have ever been able to breathe, and for one second nobody at that table is wondering what I feel like.

They're standing in what I feel.