i’m sure i have more but i don’t know where they are.
he has a very hard time trying to get to the point where he feels comfortable calling himself trans because when he met (trans man) Bitty he felt like he wasn’t trans enough.
He also doesn’t come out to lots of people, like the team but that’s really it he keeps he/him pronouns and it’s not something he wants to explain over and over to people.
he does prefer using gender neutral restrooms though and he keeps his nails painted a lot of the time. (this becomes contentious when he starts playing in the AHL and then even worse when he’s in the NHL) he also wears mascara and occasionally lipstick.
Don’t Think about Jaqueline Zimmermann and the Samwell Women’s Hockey Team
Or.
Everyone is a woman (part 1.5)
Bitty makes goodie bags for the tadpoles because she is the most welcoming, sweetest, most awful human being to have ever graced Samwell Women’s Hockey and Jacky is mad jealous she didn’t get a goodie bag.
Enter the tadpoles:
Chowder is the one who stands out the most. She is 100% enthusiasm, 100% of the time, and she is awkward and precious. Bitty adopts her pretty much immediately. By the end of freshman orientation day, Chowder has also acquired a new bestie: Cait Farmer.
Dex can go from 0 to 60 on the rage scale in nine seconds flat (Ransom timed her once). She’s also really good with her hands; if she weren’t doing the college thing she would probably apprentice and go into home repair. She might be the most painfully pragmatic person on the team. Everything in her life comes with a purpose—gifts need to be useful, classes need to serve her career goals, even friends have a time and place in her book. The only frivolous thing in her life would, ironically, be hockey. But it also got her a killer scholarship, so it’s no too frivolous.
But then there’s Nursey.
Nursey is the product of a wealthy upbringing. She learned how to fence as a kid, and she passes it off like no big thing. She knows the difference between a salad fork and a dessert fork. She has had actual dinner with the actual president (granted she was, like, eight at the time but it’s all whatever). None of that makes Nursey, Nursey though.
Because Nursey’s heart belongs to forensics.
Forensics was a thing in her high school, and she was a big part of it all four years. She dabbled in debate, dramatic interp, persuasion and even prose, and one semester her team did a multiple that brought them all the way to nationals.
But her specialty was poetry.
(Way more under the cut)
Oh man, Nursey acts like she’s cooler than thou art, but poetry lights her up from the inside out. She remembers every piece she did, verbatim, blocking included. One time she was practicing a piece in a secluded little hallway, you know, as one does, and when she finished (head dropped down, eyes shut, knees planted on the floor and arms flung forth in a pose of supplication) the sound of frantic clapping made her fall over sideways. When she looked over, a windswept mother brushed tears—actual, real tears—from her eyes and choked out “That was beautiful. You’re really talented.” That encounter haunts Nursey to this day.
She may be on the hockey team, but poetry and forensics with it have branded her immortal soul. It’s amazing how many slam poetry contests she just so happens to come across on campus. And, gosh, she does have a piece ready that she can totes perform. What are the odds? Yes, she has a paper copy of it on her person to give to the judges, don’t ask her why.
When Dex mentions that she doesn’t really /get/ poetry, Nursey doesn’t bat an eyelash.
(But she does casually misplace Dex’s flash drive with her midterm project on it. So careless!)
Chowder and Cait Farmer are looking for Winter Screw dates, and they invite Dex and Nursey to get coffee with them so they can all strategize, but Nursey is too chill for dances and Dex is starting to go into a stress attack because she can’t find her flash drive. So Cait and Chowder go to the café with just themselves.
And, really, Chowder wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but here. The hockey team feels like a family, but Cait is Something Else. Like, closer than a bestie. Chowder has had besties before, and she never felt on the same level as this. Are platonic soulmates a thing? Because if they are, Caitlin is that for Chowder.
They drink their coffee and they try to talk about boys—cute, available boys—but the conversation keeps drifting to more interesting topics. Like, are the little pink cakes in the glass case any good? So what’s your dick teacher like? Whose team captain is a bigger hardass/whose practice is more grueling? And by the time they separate to go to class, they didn’t really strategize at all.
They’ll never get Winter Screw dates at this rate!
Enter August, The Guy Who Desperately Wants to Date Ransom. (Stay with me here.)
Now, August desperately wants to date Ransom, for reasons that he himself has trouble articulating. Mostly they come out as “She’s not like other girls!” which more or less translates to “Ransom frightens me in our shared bio lab and I associate abject terror with arousal. Also, she makes the best dick jokes.”
Unfortunately, Ransom doesn’t date. Not since the Winter Screw Debacle of 2014. She’ll take a guy to bed, she’ll even take a guy to dinner, but she’s not interested in anything longer term. Through some detective work, August learns that Ransom would totes go to Winter Screw with a date, PROVIDED Holster also goes to Winter Screw with a date.
Shitty wrote up a contract and everything.
So August starts cooking up a plan: he will trick/pay someone to take Holster out for a good time, and then Ransom will be his for the taking. Muahahaha. The trick is finding someone who can take a date taller than six feet, who also refuses to not wear heels, and not be a total baby about it. He does a bit more digging and he finds a guy named September (where do you find a guy named September? in this economy?!) who is willing to take a startled Holster on no fewer than three dates for thirty dollars in unmarked bills.
September takes the money and grins in August’s face. “Joke’s on you, pal. I’d’ve done it for a Snapple.”
September takes Holster to the movies, and to dinner, some weeks before the Big Date. And it’s actually really enjoyable, because Holster knows how to enjoy herself and that shit is infectious. She’s hilarious and saucy and really smart, and before he realizes what he’s doing September is making heart eyes at her.
September and Holster even wind up going on a double date with August and Ransom a week before Winter Screw, and there might have been a bar fight but none of them got arrested. That was a good day.
MEANWHILE at the Haus Chowder is power pouting into her cornflakes in full view of Bitty. She swipes her hands over her apron and heaves a sigh. “Please put the sad face away and use your words, Chowder.”
Chowder scrunches her face up at Bitty but she does use her words. “How do you get a date for Winter Screw?”
“I don’t,” Bitty tells her, more or less honestly. This may be Samwell, but it’s still not a good idea to fling your number at every woman you see wearing flannel. And when Bitty imagines the ideal Winter Screw date, her mind gets kind of static-y and comes up with all the descriptors for one Jacky Zimmermann, and Bitty isn’t delusional enough to imagine the straightest of straight girls going on a pity date with her.
Chowder makes that weird groaning chest noise of hers and throws her hands in the air. “It’s just! Boys are so boring!”
“How do you mean?”
“Like, they’re just! Boring! They don’t like anything except, I don’t know, first person shooting games and four wheelers. And some of them pretend they know how to party but they pass out after three jello shots!”
Yeah, inviting the men’s soccer team to Ransom’s birthday party and then letting Shitty and Holster make the drinks had been a recipe for disaster. It was a fun disaster for about ninety minutes, and then it was just a CSI crime scene where the blood had been replaced by vomit.
“Look!” she whipped out her phone and thumbed in her pass code. “I even signed up for a dating website, but all the guys look like serial killers. Look at this sad bastard, Bitty! How can you be twenty-one and not know how to take a selfie? And they’re all like that!”
Bitty took her phone gingerly and flicked through the matches, wincing. Yeah, selfie culture had definitely passed men behind. The profile pictures were more like mug shots, complete with poor lighting and cold, dead eyes. Bitty handed Chowder back her phone and swiped her hands over her apron again.“That’s…definitely. A challenge,” she said lamely.
Chowder groaned again and dropped her head onto the table with a thunk. “They’re just…all so terrible. All of them. It’s not fair!”Bitty patted her on the back.
“There, there.”
“And I don’t even know how they do it, Bits. Boys are just. They’re gross and they don’t know how to dress themselves and they don’t like anything and they think they’re interesting but they never have anything useful to say. But then, girls are always so pretty and we know how belts work and, like, we’re always. I don’t know. You talk to any girl on campus and I can always find something we share. But you talk to a boy and it’s like, what even are you?”
Bitty nodded slowly. “I think there’s a word for that. Um. Later you should ask Shitty what ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ is.”
Then Winter Screw happens.
And the first half of the night is about what you expect: dancing, talking, kissing, comingling. Pretty standard. And then September can’t stop himself from being useless for two goddamn minutes and he spills the beans. “August paid me to go out with you so he could date Ransom.”
Holster’s smile falls off her face. And it would be one thing if he just stopped there, but September’s attack of conscience comes with some kind of misplaced sense of valor. “He paid me to date you but I don’t want his money any more. I think I’m in love with you.”
Holster’s eyebrows furrow, and she frowns down at September like she’s just seeing him for the first time. “I’m sorry, what?” And in a way, she is.
This guy had been nothing but a total peach to her, but it was all for money?
“I’m in love with you! It doesn’t matter! The money doesn’t matter to me!”
And Holster isn’t by nature an angry person—she has to take a running start to get up a good rage—but she can feel something hot and ugly galloping in her chest. “Well it matters to me,” she says, voice deathly soft.
“I’m in love with you!”
“Yeah, you said!” She elbows her way through the crowd until she finds Ransom, talking with, ugh!, August. Tears are prickling at her eyes, but she zeroes in on August with September trailing in her wake.
This is what September did not know:
Holster’s childhood had been one long awkward phase, but her adolescence had been a train wreck. Her body grew all wrong, and no one else seemed to think it mattered. Over the course of a summer, she grew too tall, too broad, too hairy. And her family complimented her on it. Because in their eyes, this is what she should be.
College was a good time for her. For once she had the independence and the means to put herself to rights. But it would be two years before she could be comfortable in her own skin, and she would never be exactly the way she should be. She would never be delicate, or graceful, or cute. She would always tower over everyone else in any given room.
Holster knows she’s not going to get some fairytale happy ending. No one is going to wave a magic wand and have her parents stop calling her Adam. She won’t wake up one day and be pretty. But some small part of her saw how different, how wonderful, life away from home could be and started to wish for more.
She was a woman, and people were finally treating her like a woman instead of like an imposter. She had a bunch of friends who had her back. She lived in the Haus, and would graduate soon, and then she would get a job and maybe a little Haus of her own. Maybe she would get a dog or something. Maybe (and she didn’t hold her breath, but it would be nice) she would have someone to share that with.
“I love you!” September’s words clang in her ears. And Holster is a train wreck all over again. Because September was paid to take her out; of course he was. Why would someone want to date her? She’s a mess.
August is surprised when she walks up to him and gets right in his space.
And his little plan gets laid bare, in front of the whole party, in the middle of Winter Screw, and some part of Holster isn’t just angry and horrified. Some part of her is shit scared, because what if Ransom was in on this? What if Ransom, her best friend, her teammate, her sister in arms, her true north, knew about the whole sordid affair and still let it happen?
But then she looks up, through the prickle of tears just beginning to roll, and Ransom is gob smacked for exactly two seconds, and then she is pissed.
In the end, it takes the women’s hockey team and half of the rugby team to keep Ransom from tearing August’s face off, but she did get a few scratches in and there’s blood under her fingernails, and the cops show up and Shitty slides in and when it starts to sound like there’s been some low key prostitution (August paying someone to “date” another person) and dubious consent (Holster wouldn’t go on a date with a prostitute, at least not while he was working) August starts talking about how he won’t press charges. Even though his face is definitely fucked up and your nose isn’t supposed to look like that.
It’s a hot mess.
There’s a Haus meeting that night. Bitty stress bakes for hours, and Jacky is useless in these situations but she sits on Holster’s other side and pats her shoulder awkwardly. “This won’t happen again,” she promises, but she doesn’t know how to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The whole thing is sickening.
Holster squeezes her eyes shut and Ransom wraps her arm around her even tighter. In the quiet of their living room, with the TV turned down to a murmur, she could still hear September shouting “I love you!” like a mantra, like the magic words that would make him forgiven.
On the floor, Chowder and Cait sit with their backs pressed against Holster and Jacky’s calves. They aren’t holding hands anymore, but their fingertips are resting a hair’s breadth apart. If Cait’s eyes are a little red and puffy, Chowder is absolutely wrecked.
For once, Dex and Nursey don’t fight.
Dex sits curled in the armchair, exhausted and bewildered and so, so angry but the feeling has nowhere to go. Nursey perches on the arm of that same chair, her mouth a thin line and hands clenched tight over one knee. She knows a salad fork from a dessert fork, but she doesn’t know how to drive the wretchedness from Holster’s eyes.
Shitty stumbles into the Haus a little before midnight. “It’s taken care of,” she says, stiff in a way she never is. “Neither of them are going to come by here again, or we’ll have their asses in a vise.”
“They’re dead to us,” Jacky murmurs, and the words don’t sound metaphorical.
It’s Lardo who wraps Holster in a blanket and shoos her off to bed, Ransom following close behind. “It’ll all look better in the morning,” she promises. She doesn’t expect Holster to pause on the stairs and pull her into a tight hug. Lardo hugs her back, just as fiercely.
Ransom and Holster share the bottom bunk that night, Ransom’s head tucked under Holster’s chin. And, their voices so soft their words barely disturb the air between them, they talk. Holster tells her that tonight might suck, but she was so relieved Ransom had nothing to do with it. Ransom’s hands tighten against Holster’s pajamas. “I love you,” Ransom tells her, the words just a shape in the darkness. Holster presses a cheek to Ransom’s hair, and she holds onto her true north.
If they could have their way, Samwell Women’s Hockey would move on from that point. They would wake up and go about their business, lick their wounds, and be done with it.
The school newspaper, though, has other ideas. The bare bones of the events of Winter Screw make the paper the following morning, and in the weeks that come next give rise to an entire exposé. It’s a crappy college story, but then it starts to trickle into local news, and it gets way more attention than the Worst Night of Holster’s Actual Life should get.
A guy with a tripod and a camera shows up to the Haus and asks if he could grab a quick pic of Holster. Only Jacky’s the one who answers the door and that turns into a thirty minute conversation about camera equipment and the benefits of digital to analog. Mr. Photographer asks for Jacky’s number, and she sidesteps that awkwardness with her patented Zimmermann smile. Somehow, she insinuates herself into Holster’s photo op. The citywide newspaper sports both of their mugs later that week.
The article that goes with that picture is more involved. Specifically, it is more involved with the team, because Holster will mug for the camera all day long but answering something not hockey related is nigh well impossible. Any and all direct questions are met with cryptic answers, and when she “explains” those answers the article writers have even more questions. Also, Holster is pretty good at sending “I hate you now go die” vibes while still giving them a bright smile, and it’s super disconcerting.
So the writers talk to the team. But they don’t hear about Holster the trouble maker. They hear about Holster the loyal teammate. Holster the clumsy but well-meaning sous chef. Holster the trivia nut. Holster, the big sister who acquired a whole new family when she came to Samwell. Holster, the community fund raiser. Holster the prankster. Holster, captain material.
So the article that goes with the picture of Holster and Jacky arm in arm, beaming at the camera, outlines the Winter Screw Incident, but it’s not about senseless violence and a date gone wrong. It’s not even about a college athlete who got swept up in a heap of trouble she didn’t deserve.
NBC News invites Holster to do an interview and she shows up with half the Hockey team and a basket of the flakiest minipies the host has ever eaten. None of the team will wait patiently backstage during the interview; they all cram onto the loveseat. Holster is sandwiched between Ransom and Bitty, with Shitty laying across their laps and Chowder hovers behind them, smiling shyly into the camera.
Someone—probably some rando on the internet—starts calling it the Adalyn Birkholtz Story, but it isn’t, really. It’s a series of interviews and articles and photographs, and for the most part they’re not about Holster at all. The Winter Screw Debacle II (Revenge of the Debacle) is only the catalyst of events. It’s just the excuse to write these articles and take these pictures and do these interviews.
Because, at the end of the day, it’s not about Holster or what happened to her, or the assault, or the low key prostitution. It’s not about Bad Things Happening to Good People. It starts with something that happened to Holster, but it’s about the people who stepped in to lift her back up. What was meant to be sensationalist, in the span of one news cycle, became a human interest story.
Because the Adalyn Birkholtz story isn’t about Holster at all. It’s about family.
I love trans!Bitty, and trans!Holster and gender queer!Lardo, but you know what I would love even more?
If they were all trans together. Over Bitty’s college career he comes out as trans to his teammates one by one, and sometimes!!! they come out right back!!!! and the first two times he was only a little surprised, but then everyone kept coming out. Until he realizes the entire hockey team (and most of the LAX team, lbr) is trans af. And they’re just all super happy and comfortable and they share resources and play knife shoe ice sport and it’s a good time.
