Page 65 of Saving Graces
“You really hate being vulnerable,” Kinsey observed and Rosalie scoffed and looked away. “What?” Kinsey stepped into her space again. “I can make you come but I’m not allowed to see you cry?”
Rosalie finally met her eyes properly.
“Yeah, that sounds about right,” she said, her voice a little wry, and Kinsey smiled.
She reached for Rosalie’s hand and pulled her close. She didn’t take her to the bed like she normally would, but over to the window seat looking out over the snowy forest and toward the lake. She sat down at one end and leaned her back against the wall, tugging Rosalie up to sit between her legs, her back resting against Kinsey’s front.
“Better?” Kinsey wrapped her arms around Rosalie and murmured in her ear. Rosalie’s body went soft in her arms, relaxing back against her, face angled away toward the snow.
“Yeah,” she said quietly.
Kinsey just held her, until her breathing slowed.
“Tell me about Rachel.”
Rosalie was quiet for long enough that Kinsey thought she was going to refuse. But eventually, she began to speak.
“She was 14 months older than me,” she said, “but to hear her talk you’d think there were eight years between us.”
She told Kinsey about her sister’s love of fashion and girly magazines and glamor. Of how she’d always known she was a girl, and Rosalie had always known it too.
“It was the rest of the fucking world,” she said, “that wouldn’t let her just be.”
She told her about how they’d met Savannah, their cozy little trio, the way hiding her bonded her and Rachel even harder together.
“We were all so tight.” Her voice broke. “Rachel and Savannah too. I always thought that at least one other person in the world would remember her the way she truly was. But for Savannah it’s just… the past. She’s forgetting Rachel and I can’t stand the idea that one day I might too. Then she’d really be gone, you know?”
Kinsey held her tight, kissing the side of her head.
“What happened to her?” Kinsey asked. She felt Rosalie take a deep breath in her arms.
Rosalie told her about the fight with her parents, about the threat of a conversion center, about how she’d left and Rosalie hadn’t gone after her.
“We never saw her again,” she whispered. “I decided that she was finally really free, that she’d left Tennessee and was living this beautiful life in California or New York, you know? That leaving her little sister behind without a word was just the cost of her freedom.” She took another deep breath. “Of course there were holes in that theory. It wasn’t just me she didn’t contact. She had all these friends that loved her and not one of them saw her after that night.”
She heard Rosalie swallow.
“Five months after she’d gone, two other girls she’d known disappeared. Her friend Daria was one of them. They found her body soon after that. She’d been strangled to death.”
Kinsey sucked in a deep breath. She kept her arms locked around Rosalie’s middle, like holding her this close could hold her together. After a minute Rosalie kept going.
“The other girl’s name was Mara,” she said. “And it was the same thing. Disappeared then found strangled. They were both young trans women. The police were never sure if it was the same person who did it. They never arrested anyone. I honestly don’t know how hard they tried. They were young, homeless, sex workers, you know?” Rosalie’s voice turned bitter. “There’s so much violence towards trans women that they figured it could be one murderer or ten. And as far as they were concerned, especially back then, they’d practically asked to be murdered just by daring to exist.”
Kinsey's eyes prickled, her throat going tight.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, though whether she was saying it to Rosalie or to the murdered women she wasn’t sure. Rosalie let her own hands rest on Kinsey’s encircling arms.
“Savannah eventually told me that Rachel had been doing sex work regularly for a long time. It was how she was paying for the hormones that my parents wouldn’t help her access, not to mention all her ridiculous wonderful wardrobe. She used to make such a big deal about not letting me sneak out with her and I always thought she was just trying to leave me out. It turns out that she really was just trying to protect me from the truth about how she was surviving.”
“She sounds like she was a wonderful big sister,” Kinsey said quietly and Rosalie squeezed her fingers.
“My parents eventually hired a private detective. He concluded that Rachel was dead,” she said flatly. “His findings were that she was either an earlier victim of someone hurting trans sex workers or that she’d died by suicide not long after leaving home. I never believed the second one.
“Rachel was the most alive person I’ve ever met. She wanted to live her whole damn life so fucking badly, that’s why she left. She was so close to eighteen. A couple more months and she could have told my parents to fuck off with their conversion center bullshit and just lived as she wanted.”
“She was never found?” Kinsey asked.
“No,” Rosie said shortly. “I still think of her being out there, living her life somewhere far away. Paris maybe. Or Barcelona. And I literally see her sometimes, like a woman will pass me in the street with her eyes, or I’ll see some girl with her hair and jump out of my skin before I have to remind myself that she wouldn’t be a teenager anymore. I’m not stupid. I know the chances are basically nil, but unless someone comes to me one day with incontrovertible proof, I don’t want to think of her dying a lonely violent death. I’m thirty-seven years old and I still want to think of her just… dancing.”
