Hidden Tabs
“They’re ‘un abomination, Andy. A god damn abomination,” his brother Joe said. They were sitting outside drinking their cans of Lone Star by the fire pit. Joe’s wife Jill helped Andy’s wife Tricia put the kids to bed and clean up after their crawdad boil.
“Yeah, if any one of them she males tries to come near me with a hidden dick. I swear I’ll kill ‘em,” Andy says and takes another swig of his beer as if to bring home the point. His brother, satisfied with the answer, sits back in the lawn chair, his salmon-pink short-sleeved angler’s splaying open on each side of a notable beer belly.
Ding!
Andy’s phone lights up with a social media notification. @hotgrrrll694eva has sent you a message. Intrigued, he flicks his finger across the screen and unlocks with face id.
“Just had to say…you’re so sexy. I love a guy who hunts. Wouldn’t mind being your prey in my bed tonight.”
Andy’s face flushes and he looks over at Joe who is just mindlessly staring up at the stars, an uneven Winnie the Pooh grin settled on his face. He should just delete it. He hovers his thumb over the message to do just that, then instead decides to click on the profile.
A bleach blonde with gigantic fake boobs and the most gorgeous slender face he’d ever seen. Just his type, a little sleazy but coquettish, heavy on the makeup. The complete opposite of his wife Tricia, plain, mousy brunette, small boobs and a shapeless rail, aside from the kangaroo pooch leftover after kids. They’d dated since high school, and he kept her around since. Although, he always had the strongest inclination that he could do better. This latest message was just additional reinforcement.
He continues to scan her photos and thinks it’s a shame he isn’t alone right now. He scrolls back up to her bio, the first time he even thinks to look. A secondary concern. There he sees:
Lola Jane
🏳️🌈 | trans | she/her
His stomach drops for half a second. Not in disgust. Just in that sharp, electric way you feel when you realize you’ve stepped somewhere you swore you never would. Maybe a little fear.
He glances over at Joe again. Joe’s still staring at the stars, scratching his belly and looking like he might fall asleep in the chair, his arm dangling off the side of the chair, the beer can precariously dangling from between his thumb and index finger.
Andy scrolls back through the photos again. The pictures don’t change, the trans woman’s body doesn’t but the electricity in his does.
He swallows.
Ding!
Another message.
“Don’t get shy on me now, hunter.”
His thumb hovers again. You should block her. He types instead.
“How’d you find me?”
Three dots appear almost instantly. He feels a cold stone in his stomach that contrasts with the hot spark in his frontal cortex.
“You pop up in my feed a lot. You like what I post,” Lola responds.
His throat tightens. Confusion takes over the excitement. He doesn’t remember liking anything.
But maybe he did. Maybe late at night. Maybe drunk. Maybe half asleep.
He switches apps. Opens his browser. Incognito mode. Types in words he knows by muscle memory now. Words he never says out loud. Words he clears from history before he closes the tab.
The images flood the screen. His pulse kicks up. Back to the message. He sees the three dots appear again. Then her message flashes again on his phone.
“You into girls like me?” she types.
He stares at the fire pit, at the coals collapsing inward.
Before his brain even knows what his fingers are doing, “Maybe,” he types.
Joe laughs at something in his own head. Andy angles the phone away from him and waits. He sees Joe looking at his phone now, “Oh, look at this. This dude’s launching bottle rockets out of his mouth. HOLY SHIT! Shit’s hilarious!”
Andy holds back a sigh of relief and chuckles, “Oh, yeah, reminds me of Fourth of July this year when Dallas launched them out of his butthole.”
“Ha! Yeah, that was funny as hell. We should start our own Ticky-Tock if it weren’t for the Chinese watching us,” his brother responded. Andy didn’t want to point out that his brother was watching the very app that was potentially spying on him. He wants to get back to his conversation. He’s itching to get back to it.
“What’s maybe? Are you scared?” she had replied.
He feels that little rush. That stupid boyish one he hasn’t felt since high school, before Tricia, before the mortgage, before crawdad boils and matching Christmas pajamas, even before whiskey girls (what he is supposed to like) and smoky bars and men being men (the way he was supposed to be). When there was Shawn.
“I ain’t scared,” he types.
“Prove it.”
His breath comes shallow now.
“What you want?”
“A picture.”
He hesitates.
He hasn’t done that before. Not really. Not with someone real.
“You first,” he writes.
A pause.
Then an image loads.
She’s on a bed. He? Red lace. Hair spilling over one eye. Perfect lighting like a damn magazine shoot. Too perfect maybe. But he doesn’t linger there. He zooms in. His mouth goes dry.
“Your turn,” she writes.
He looks at Joe again.
Joe’s humming some country song under his breath.
Andy stands up.
“Gonna take a leak,” he mutters.
He walks around the side of the house. The yard dark, cicadas whining in the trees. He leans against the siding and unbuttons his jeans. Snaps a quick photo. Not artistic. Not posed. Just enough.
He stares at it.
You’re not that kind of man.
He sends it anyway.
The three dots appear immediately.
“Soooo much better than I imagined.”
His chest expands at that.
“You trust me?” she writes.
He doesn’t answer. Instead, she does.
“Tuesday. 11:42 PM. You searched ‘motel trans fantasy rural.’”
The blood drains from his face.
He didn’t tell her that. He never told anyone that.
He types slow now.
“What the fuck? How the hell you know that?”
“Don’t get nervous,” she replies. “I pay attention.”
A breeze lifts the edge of his shirt. He suddenly feels watched. Like the dark itself has eyes. The cicadas feel louder in his ears. His breath hitches painfully in his lungs.
He goes back to the browser. Checks his history.
It’s empty. Of course it is. Incognito.
Ding!
“You look good,” she writes. “But I want more.”
He’s breath is hot, his head feels ready to explode. “No, I want to know how you know what the fuck I’m looking at. Who are you?” he types.
“I want to see you how you really are.”
His stomach flips.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know.”
He stares at that for a long time.
The house behind him is quiet now. Kids asleep. Tricia probably done rinsing dishes at the sink, sitting on the couch now drinking Moscato with Jill bitching about their husbands and talking about the next gymnastics meet for the girls.
“You ever wonder?” she writes.
He does.
He always has.
Late nights when the house is still. When he scrolls through profiles he’d spit on in daylight. When the shame burns but the curiosity burns hotter.
“I ain’t like that,” he types.
Three dots.
“Then prove it.”
Another image comes through.
This one closer. More intimate. But something’s off. The background repeats faintly at the edges. Like the wallpaper loops wrong. Like it was stitched together.
He ignores it.
“What you want me to do?” he writes.
“Put something on,” she replies. “Let me see.”
He almost laughs.
“You’re crazy. I’m done with this shit. BYE!”
“Are you scared?”
That word again.
He isn’t scared.
“Hey man, Jill and I better get on outta here. Gotta go meet a guy who wants to buy my trailer tomorrow. You good?”
“Yeah man, cool, sounds good.” He walks back inside and he and Tricia say their goodbyes. The living room dark. Joe and Jill gone. Tricia looks at him, “You coming to bed?”
“Yeah, babe. In a sec. Be right there,” she gives him a skeptical look. “Promise,” he says and lifts up his pinky finger giving her the sly good-ol’-boy look that always charms her.
“Alright, see ya up there,” she says and walks up the stairs.
He moves quietly to the laundry room. He knows where her things are.
He shouldn’t do this.
But he does.
He grabs a blouse. Soft blue. Smells like detergent and something faintly floral.
His hands shake as he pulls it over his head. It hangs wrong on him. Tight at the shoulders. Loose at the waist. He stares at himself in the mirror hanging on the back of the laundry room door.
There’s something in his eyes he doesn’t recognize.
He takes the picture.
Deletes it.
Takes another.
Sends it.
The dots appear instantly.
“Beautiful,” she writes.
He exhales, long and slow. Then:
“Go out like that,” she types.
His heart stutters.
“What?”
“To the bar. Tomorrow. I’ll be there.”
His first instinct is to laugh it off. But the idea lodges itself in him like a splinter. All night he dreams in flashes. Red lace. Neon signs. Then nightmares: Joe’s face twisted in confusion.
The next evening he drinks before he leaves. Two beers. Then a third. The blouse again. This time a pair of Tricia’s jeans. Too tight. He shoves his boots on anyway.
In the mirror he looks ridiculous. He feels exposed. He doesn’t recognize his face. Not only that he used Tricia’s makeup doing his best to emulate what she does and settling on a YouTube tutorial. Tricia was going to a Colleen Hoover book club, his kids were at the grandparents, he told her he’d just take it easy at home and watch the game.
His phone buzzes as he steps outside the car in the bar parking lot. “The Klamshell” glowing neon above the door of the dive.
Andy no longer feels like he’s controlling his own body any more. He’s not commanding this ship any more. He thinks about getting back into the car and driving himself to the nearest state mental hospital. But, his logical Andy brain is completely dissociated from this new persona.
“I see you,” Lola writes.
He freezes.
The street is empty.
“You’re brave,” she writes.
The bar’s neon sign hums like it’s telling him, “Yes, over here sweetie.
Inside it smells like beer and grease and sweat.
Conversation dies the second he walks in. His brother Joe is at the pool table.
Joe turns.
The silence is a living thing now.
“Andy?” Joe says.
His name sounds wrong in his mouth.
Someone coughs. Then laughs. Not kindly.
Joe comes over, his startled expression gives way to a furrowed-brow and pursed lips. He sounds out of breath when he says again, “Ah-Andy. Wh-what’s going on? Does Tricia know you-you’re here?” He then smiles hesitantly, “Wait, is this a fucked up joke?” He looks at his buddies giving them an it’s-okay-guys nod.
“I’m not Andy, I’m Angela,”
Joe’s face shifts from confusion to something harder.
“You sick son of a—” another man behind Joe’s shoulder comes forward.
The first punch knocks him sideways.
The second splits his lip.
Boots. Fists. Shouting.
He curls in on himself but they keep coming. He hears Joe at first, but then the tornado of denim and cowboys boots crunching in his face and crushing his ribs takes over.
He tastes blood. Metal. Dirt.
Somewhere in the chaos his phone skitters across the floor.
The last thing he hears before everything goes dark is someone saying, “Abomination.”
***
When he wakes up, everything hurts. Fluorescent hospital lights buzz overhead. His jaw is wired. One eye swollen shut. Tricia isn’t there. Joe isn’t either.
There’s a phone on the tray table. It’s not his.
He reaches for it slowly. One notification displays. The phone opens to his face id.
From: Lola Jane
Subject: Welcome Home.
His vision swims but he opens it. Inside is a list.
Username.
Password.
Backup codes.
Recovery email changed.
“All yours,” the message says.
He scrolls down. There’s one more line.
“You wanted to know who I am.”
He sucks in a breath. His ribs scream.
Another message appears.
“It’s you.”
He opens the social media app.
The profile loads.
Lola Jane.
🏳️🌈 | trans | she/her
No new posts.
No new messages.
Just waiting.
His reflection in the dark screen looks unfamiliar. Bruised. Split. Lips swollen and red.
He types with clumsy fingers.
He changes the profile picture.
Uploads the one from the laundry room.
He edits the bio.
Deletes everything except:
she/her
He sets the account to public.
Then he closes his eyes.
And doesn’t switch back.
Horror Sleaze Trash 