Gilded Cage

Chapter Five

There was a pond not too far from the castle. It was deep into the forest and vastly out of the recommended path, but we didn't have to walk much to reach the little oasis. I wasn't in the mood for a swim in the cold water, but Alexi reassured me it was reinvigorating and totally safe. Hence, when he knocked at my door that Sunday morning, I went with him without a second thought. I didn't own a swimsuit, so Thomas had to lend me one of his. It was a little too big on me, but I had to make due. Among all of them, Thomas' physique was the closest to mine. Christian was taller than me, but definitely smaller; Paola was the shortest, and Alexi was the biggest. He had a smooth chest, and firm abs, and looked like he could throw me on his shoulders and carry me like I weighed nothing. I had dreamt about him, once. I didn't clearly remember what happened in the dream, but I remembered the feelings; of safety and longing. If I focused hard enough, I could still feel his hands on me, his mouth, his...

"Earth to Benjamin."

I snapped out of my daydreaming and looked at Thomas. He was watching me with a raised eyebrow.

"What?" I asked.

"Are you going to take your clothes off, or do you want to keep staring at Alexi the whole morning?"

"I wasn't."

"Of course."

The four of them had already undressed. Thomas was standing on the shore, stretching, and the others were diving in. Alexi was swimming by himself, while Paola floated next to Christian, who was still on his feet, the water gracing his hips. He had a weird band around his chest; it was tight and looked very constricting. I folded my clothes on the ground and walked next to him. The water was as cold as ice.

"What is it?" I asked him, pointing at the clothing piece. My voice wavered as a shiver ran through me. I was starting to think that following Alexi hadn't been a great idea and that we were definitely going to die of hypothermia, but I seemed to be the only one suffering.

Christian smiled at me. He looked at ease. "It's a binder. It's for people like me."

Oh. I hadn't thought about that. "Do you wear it all the time?"

"Under my clothes? Yeah."

I admitted to myself that I know close to nothing about trans people. The only other time I met someone like Christian was when I was in London, and a friend of mine brought me to a shady place for his birthday. He had told me "There are boys who are girls here, Ben. It's perfect for you", as we were going grocery shopping and my sexual preference was just a peculiar taste of mine instead of a part of me. Needless to say, I despised the man. That night, I met a girl, who later told me she used to be a boy and only recently came to be her true self. Her family had disowned her for that, called her a freak, and left her with nothing; because of that, she was forced to find other means to survive. We hadn't talked that much; I wasn't interested in paying for sex and the whole neighbourhood reeked of delinquency, so I left pretty early. As I walked home, a few questions popped into my mind, like: how did we define what was normal and what was not? Who defined that? What was it about the so-called laws of nature that made men so prone to prejudice and injustice? I had wondered about that more than once, but never found an answer that could satisfy me. Until Jamie brought up Plato and his Form of the Good the day before. After reading an extract from The Republic, he asked us what we thought about following rules created in conjunction with what men believed to be good, rules that still nowadays dictated our society in all its forms. Alexi argued that Plato only cared about goodness in its purest form, and wanted to show men how to be good, not how to be just; but good and just were different things, he had said, and they didn't always go hand-in-hand, therefore Plato was wrong in believing goodness to be above fairness.