(Aside 5A)-It takes a Village

Marjorie leaned back in her chair as the email file from her niece came up on her left screen. The phone call from her brother Tom had been a shot in the dark really but she also knew it was a big one. Arron was her other brother and the three of them had often banded together through a whole range of adversity: a drunken and abusive father, an absentee mother who ended up dying from a heroin overdose in some seedy motel in Nevada, bouncing from one relative to the next. They were often scorned, quite publicly, by their own relatives as the byproducts of two flunkies.

Oh, and it didn't help that she was gay. Or that Tom was also gay and a drag queen.

Arron was always the stronger one, though Tom was easily 4 inches and 60 pounds over him. He was also the smarter one, though she had gone to Harvard while he had settled for a regional university. Perhaps it was simply that he took care of his two younger siblings and worked hard to ensure they got out of the shithole that life had dumped them into. Erin had come along and she shared many of the same caring qualities that endeared her to both jaded souls. So when she passed on, it was only natural for Tom and Marjorie to throw their lot in to help Arron as much as possible.

Still, and this was a big one, Tom definitely thought beauty was wasted on Arron. He had only half-jokingly wondered if there was not some lingering LGBTQ issues in him, considering two out of three from the same womb and sperm had turned up the way they did.

Now, as she opened up some forms on the right screen, she had a chance to return the favor and help Arron out (and her niece too, though she suspected Sarah was helping herself out plenty as it were.) It wasn't possible to change his information, there was just too much history and federal filings that would come into play that would cause all sorts of red flags to pop up. He also couldn't take over Erin's life, she was buried and...

...wait a second. She pulled up her search engine and put in the information into the form. A few moments later, it kicked back something and she couldn't help but smile at that. Convenient beyond all... Marjorie had a reputation as a fixer, she knew how to make the law purr for her, and now this was just something she couldn't pass up.

Tom had other issues. Sarah had sent him a recent picture of his brother and it took him all afternoon to start to put together an ensemble protocol for dressing him up. His niece had told him of her orders already but he easily dismissed it and told her to cancel them. The products were decent if he wanted to be a run of the mill cross dresser but there was just no getting around the need to have quality product and quality procedures in place. It was important to get everything right, especially when the goal was simply to life in stealth, not to be flamboyant and out there.

A lesson he had learned on the stage and performing in clubs was that over the top often lead to a cartoonish appearance, it was more pantomiming rather than living. Arron needed to live, breathe, and function as a woman out in public, in a business setting, and among other people. He couldn't appear as anything less than natural which, given the canvas he had to work with, was not too hard.

Still, as he worked through the closets of pads and other materials, he knew it would be a challenge to pull off. Shaping a male body, no matter how feminine it may be outwardly, would only be enough to mask and hide for so long. If this was a temporary thing, maybe a few weeks to a month, pads would suffice. Anything longer would need to be invasive and more progressive.

Hours later, he had drawn up a dressing plan based around all five of the job offers that he had reviewed from Sarah and he forwarded them along with a makeup routine and suggestions on how to work on other aspects. He wished he could be there as a coach, teaching him how to walk, talk, sit, and handle himself as a woman in public, but there was just no getting out of the commitment he found himself in. Headlining in New York City was a dream for him but there was also something he could do.

"Gary? It's Tom. Listen, did you have any of those pills? I need to get a few months worth..."