Charlie’s apartment was cloud-colored curtains, snake plants in the windows. Photos tacked to the wall: him and Polly in Iceland, in Croatia, in Greece. There were the things she had not imagined, too. Space rewritten, fantasy forgotten: two alphabetized bookshelves stretching to the ceiling; the Rauschenberg print over the TV. Papers strewn around the room: printed sheets and legal pads and loose leaves with tattered spines. The calico cat, Ari, lazing in a deep window.

Edith! Charlie hugged her. He was wearing a sleeveless shirt. Sorry about the heat, we don’t control the furnace. Polly, Edith.

It’s so good to meet you. Polly was shorter than she looked in photos, her dark hair pinned up. I’ve heard great things.

So you’ve been lying to her?

Don’t worry, I’m well ready to talk shit when you’re gone. You still owe me fifty dollars from when we saw Vampire Weekend.

In the kitchen was sourdough, smoked salmon, cucumbers. A cream-colored spread. I’ve gotten really into sandwiches since working at home, Charlie said as he sliced the bread. The humble sandwich is a tool of infinite flexibility.

Edith, how has your time in Boston been? Polly asked. Has it been strange being back?

It has and it hasn’t. Had anyone else asked her that? Everything seems the same but I know it can’t be—so I’m left trying to figure out what’s changed. It’s like a spot-the-differences puzzle with only one image. I guess I’ve changed a lot.

Charlie said, Maybe not as much as you think. Edith must have made a face, because he hastened to add: You look super different, I mean. But you’re very clearly still you.

The sandwich was delicious. The sauce—an aioli? Edith had never mastered what an aioli was—added a softness to the salmon, a creaminess beneath its delicate smoke.

What would life be, loving a boy who made you food like this every day.

Polly finished eating first, her plate immaculately clean. She gulped down her seltzer and, as if she’d been racing to this question, said, What was Charlie like in college?

I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of it from him.

He doesn’t talk about it much.

You know about the dancing?

Oh, Charlie said, already with the character assassination.

Polly side-eyed her husband. I know a version of it. Charlie, crossfaded, picking some pretty girl out of a party’s crowd to coerce her into swing dancing. I still can’t believe you know how to swing dance.

I don’t. Charlie looked very seriously at his sandwich. That’s what made it so weird.

He was really good. Swinging people through his legs, kicking in perfect time. Everyone was impressed.

Aw, don’t be embarrassed, love. She took his hand. A tiny intimacy, a familiarity with his body like the familiarity with her own.

I always told him, look man, some people have seizures and wake up speaking dead languages. At least yours is useful.

Did you have any hidden talents, Edith?

All my talents are hidden.

No, you did, you had the thing about hanging out of windows.

Oh god.

Charlie rubbed sweat from his palms. See, Edith was always trying to get people to dare her to dangle out of upper-story windows.

One time!

Three, at least. I have photos to prove it somewhere.

It had only ever been a game of chicken. An empty threat, a way to force her friends to prove they cared for her.

Ari sniffed their empty plates for salmon. Edith asked questions about their life together. They’d met on a group tour of Iceland. Just the two of us and fifteen retirees, Charlie said. After everyone was asleep, they’d gotten drunk on brennivín and snuck into a hot spring.

Polly grinned. Charlie insisted we’d see the aurora. Was it possible to be charmed by memories of the person you’d been so recently? Did marriage change you the way movement, graduate school, transition did? “Odin will bless our union!”

No swing dancing, though, thank god.

It was an improbable love, one that could only be god-given, aurora or no. The sort of story that belonged between scenes of a Nora Ephron movie. Were there dozens—hundreds—of people out there living like this?

Well, we paid for it quickly. Polly scratched Ari behind the ears. Or Charlie did.

We couldn’t find our clothes. Charlie ran around the Icelandic night, teeth chattering so hard he thought they’d shatter. In the end, he’d run back to the hotel and claimed a reindeer skin to wrap around them both.

He let me stay in the water. A perfect gentleman.

She lied about seeing the aurora when I came back. “It was so incredible! You missed it!”

I did not!

Don’t believe her, Edith.

The stories that made up a relationship. The rehearsed moves, the little tics. Was Edith charmed? By heterosexuality? That didn’t seem right.

She’d thought more than once that Charlie could be trans. People in college thought he was gay, or at least bi, because he dressed well and did theater and sometimes wore fishnets at parties. People would’ve found his transitioning less surprising than Edith’s. He’d never find out now.

Edith’s life could’ve looked like this—if she’d never left, if she’d never become a girl. She, too, would have the money to go on package tours to expansive Nordic paradises. She would have a beautiful house and a beautiful wife and not care how she’d gotten there.

Had it been worth it? Any of it?

They asked questions about life in Texas. They talked about books she and Polly had read and the dating shows everyone watched. (The moment they do a gay Bachelorette, Edith said, I will murder someone to be on it.) Ari took all the petting Edith could give.

She forgot to ask Polly about her book. Didn’t think to sign it until she was on her way to Adam’s class. Would have doubted the pair owned it at all, except she’d found it immediately on entering their apartment, at the top of the second shelf.

Adam’s class was full of upperclassmen English majors. Edith recognized the blue-haired girl from her reading, the one with the Bible question. Some had printed a scanned excerpt of her book.

I figured to start you could talk a little about how you ended up being a writer. Adam wore a tweed jacket that fit him perfectly. He’d greeted each student by name. Would Edith ever be as suited to anything as Adam was to the classroom? I’ve known Edith a long time, he told the class, and the whole time she had her eye on the writing life.

Yeah, but being a writer is the least remarkable thing about me. Laughter from the kids. I grew up in a house with two English teachers and a dozen packed bookshelves. My father used to read aloud from the boring parts of Moby-Dick to help me fall asleep. It would be way more interesting if I’d become a particle physicist, or a plumber, or tried to kill a president. But instead I’m a girl who writes. Edith had had a version of this conversation so many times, it was easy to slip into autopilot. At this point, I think it’d literally kill me to stop. I mean, how many of you want to be writers? All but two students raised their hands. Why?

A boy kept his hand raised. It feels like the egg riddle from The Hobbit. “A box without hinges, key, or lid” with golden treasure inside.

Yeah, Edith said. Egg treasure, sure.

People offered other answers. Variations on a theme of art and truth.

Yeah, see, for me I have to write to fix myself. Everything in my head is this big sloshing mass of liquid all the time. Writing freezes it. Makes it less disruptive to carry around, if harder to see through. You learn something and you give something up.

Here she was, surrounded by bright young fantasies of the future. In an hour she’d go back into the grayness of the day; in six hours or a week or a year none of them would remember her. This was what she had instead of love. Idioms and axioms. Knowledge she routinely found and lost by putting together sentences. She knew that if you’d asked her at twenty-four to give up love for writing, she would have reluctantly agreed. Children are fucking idiots.

The blue-haired girl raised her hand. So what did writing Someday teach you? Hers was the only copy in the room.

That I’m afraid of endings. No laughter this time. Edith met the students’ eyes one by one. More of them were trans than she’d first noticed. Kids who’d been on hormones since high school. Kids who’d maybe get to feel normal. Not the endings of books. It’s very easy to be cynical, though, about everything. At least she was getting away from her stock answers. You guys, many of you, are going to graduate with a thesis about Eliot or H. D. or whoever and never look at it again. You’ll get tech jobs designing UX, whatever that is, or doing tax law for the Koch family. Mostly our ambition outstrips our talent. We don’t get to be geniuses if we get to do anything at all. We give up a normal life and drag twenty-five boxes of books from apartment to apartment and we never read Foucault. And you know who’s really happy? People content to sit at home watching network sitcoms and getting food out five nights a week.

That’s what you learned by writing a book? the girl asked. That you’d be better off if you hadn’t?

What I learned writing a book is the same thing I learned becoming a girl: you still have to wake up every day and be the person you are. And now you don’t have the promise of being fixed by some future choice you’ve been waiting to make. One hand turning over and over in the air as though in the final act of a failed magic trick. The other dead on the table’s anonymous plastic. So you keep on searching for new things, or waiting for the old things to work in ways they never have, and then one day you’re twenty-nine years old and your ex-girlfriend is calling you to tell you that your other ex-girlfriend—if she counts, if she ever loved you in a way that matters—has died.

Okay, Edith, Adam said, just short of reassuring. Let’s try to stay on topic.

Sorry, sorry. Maybe if she had a comically large drink from Dunkin’ Donuts, she’d have something to do with her mouth besides talk. It’s just that, you’re absolutely never going to know if you’ve done the right thing or not. Maybe some people are lucky enough to not worry about it but maybe that’s naïveté. Do you guys know the Greek concept of kairos?

They all sat up straighter, happy to have a solvable problem.

A decisive moment for action, a boy said. The turning point in the still world.

A place where things might have gone another way if you decided differently.

Yeah, Edith said. And if you write, then you can at least pretend that you know when those moments arrive. You can map out a plot and make sense of the world, take godhood over the lives of some innocent creatures. You can be a psychopath about it and no one, not even the fiction editor at the New Yorker, can stop you.

I don’t want to tell you that this is the best your lives are ever going to be, she went on. If I thought I’d reached the best part of my life by now I’d straight up walk into traffic. But most of you—most of you—will not have the sort of love that songs are written about, and you will not do anything that lasts. You will live a small, still life in a small, still city and someday soon a combination of apocalyptic firestorm and plague will probably kill everyone you love. They were all watching her. Some may even have been smiling. Edith felt depleted, out of breath. It turns out that idea really scares me. Makes me want to believe in something else. And I guess that’s what I learned, blue-haired girl, in writing this book. That wanting to believe isn’t actually enough. Everyone but you is living a romcom life. Your exes will all find people less fucked up than you to love and you’ll go home and keep writing because it’s all you know how to do.

My name is Thea, said the blue-haired girl.

Sorry Thea, I’m not usually this honest.

It wasn’t honesty at all. All of these kids had a better handle on their shit than Edith ever had. Or no—she’d had a handle on her shit when she was their age too. She knew exactly what kind of life she would have, the sort of woman she’d marry, the sort of man she’d be. A perfect, glistening middle-class existence stretching out toward the horizon line. The spell of heterosexuality, where every kairotic moment advertised itself in blinking neon. But if she were one of these kids she’d have transitioned early, and Tessa would still love her, and Valerie wouldn’t be dead. Coffee would taste better and the War on Terror would have wrapped up.

Like I said, I’m scared of endings. I’m scared of what will happen when this class is through. I’m scared of how the fuck you live in the world when it keeps on getting worse. I don’t know how to deal with the death of someone important to me, and, you know, I might as well get used to it. It had been too late, by the time Val died, to fictionalize it in Someday, to process it through her trans astronauts. Instead she had an ending tinged with hope, now ringing false. Her name was Valerie, Edith said, after a stretch of silence. I hope no one you love ever dies.

Okay. Adam had withdrawn. Edith had the absurd desire to hide her face in his lap. Let’s maybe read from the excerpt, shall we?

When class ended, Thea asked Edith to sign her book. You know, your writing has a lot more hope in it than you give off.

I’m glad. To Thea, she wrote. I promise I’m not always like this. The book is smarter than I am.

You believe better things are possible.

Sure I do, Edith lied.

Adam and Edith walked back to his office. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t cried, still wasn’t crying. There was only the lingering, manic energy.

Guess they’re unlikely to forget that anytime soon, Adam said.

I’m sorry, Adam.

You don’t have to apologize, they loved it. A writer having a breakdown before their eyes. They’ve all read Foucault, you know.

Oh good, that’ll save them.

They passed through the cold, from one building to another. How novel, having class in a real city. There was so much else you could be doing.

What’s the matter with you, Edith?

Your guess is as good as mine.

I mean it. Why aren’t you talking to me?

Are you mad at me?

And fucking talk to Tessa too, while you’re at it.

Who said anything about Tessa.

Oh my god, Edith.

Look, you brought me here. You should’ve known what you were in for.

It was the only way to get you to fucking visit! It’s been six years, Edie, and we all love you. Only you would turn being loved into a crisis. Edith could think of at least one other person who would, but of course she was dead. You’ve been here for days, you’ve had time alone with me and time alone with Tessa and time with all of us together when any of us might have talked through whatever bullshit you were feeling and instead you just, fucking whatever, self-isolate in your own private Texas of the mind. Moping and mourning and feeling sorry that the world has to bear the weight of your soul.

I’m sorry.

Don’t be sorry, goddammit. Adam swatted at her. Mope if you gotta but be honest when you’re moping. I’m going to worry about you so much more now.

You don’t need to worry.

You’re doing it again! I can see you doing it right now. They’d reached his office door. Adam blocked the way forward. You need to call Tessa, he said. I’ll see you at home.

And what was she supposed to say? Hey, sorry I’m having sort of a crisis re: your sexuality and my personal history, could you explain yourself to me?

Okay, Edith said, you’re right. About all of it.

I love you, you asshole. Nothing has to be like this.

Yeah.

Adam turned to unlock his door. Tweed coat across his shoulders. So handsome and serious. They’d known each other for such a long time.

Adam?

Yeah?

Are you mad at me?

Jesus Christ, Edith.

Both laughed.

Sorry I’m like this, she said. I love you too.