Seven months until her lease expired, seven months until her rent caught up to the untenable market standard. Seven months until she had promised the editor a complete book. Maybe she could sell her underwear online.

At the neighborhood coffee shop, she opened the file for Black Pear Tree. Boston was a reprieve, but now it was time to work.

V. said: The truth is, when you find the last person you’ll ever love, you’ll thank god for every failed relationship. Every move that led you here, every life you did not live, because this is the one that means something. This is the one that’s solid as the lid of a coffin or the glass observation deck of some tall building.

I knew that she meant well. She did not want either of us to be stuck here, hung up in the feverish Alabama dark. But what I wanted to say was, Shut the fuck up, V. What I wanted to say was, Let me make a life with you.

And, later:

I was very clear about what I needed and you were very clear you didn’t want to give it to me.

V: You’re the one who got in too deep. I got in the exact amount of deep I could take.

Edith and the editor had only ever spoken by email. She was a conjecture of keystrokes, her emails all questions and desire for explanations. When Edith googled her, the images that came up were grainy, as though taken at a great distance and cropped. She sometimes sent emails at four o’clock in the morning, and when Edith asked if everything was okay, she always said that her dog had woken her.

Maybe the trouble, Edith had written, is that my life is super boring. What she meant was that looking too closely at her life was like shining a laser pointer into her eyes.

Don’t make me quote Flannery O’Connor at you, the editor responded. Tell me what kind of book you’re trying to make.

Edith did her whole spiel: sad women in New York who were sexually obsessed with Albrecht Dürer. That’s spiritually the kind of novel I want anyway. The kind that white women with eating disorders publish with Semiotext(e).

What’s Dürer’s role in it? I don’t mean this rhetorically.

I don’t know. These people were always reaching outside of themselves, churning through culture until apophenia found them and they could pretend their fictional analogues had been redeemed. Maybe I need to read Proust. Anything to punch through all the messy brain stuff.

Do what you have to. I trust you implicitly. Whatever kind of book you want, that’s what I want to read.

This was too much freedom. Perhaps the editor didn’t want to be an editor at all; perhaps she’d only arrived here after failing at being a lawyer, a confidence artist, a gasoline pumper on the Jersey Turnpike. In place of guidance and shaping, there was only formlessness.

Edith closed her email and the manuscript and pulled up old photos, ripped from Facebook before shuttering her account. She should have gotten a picture with Adam and Tess, a record of how they had and had not changed. Next time.

It didn’t take much scrolling to reach photos of her life in Boston. Bare feet dangling some yards above the harbor. Sweatered and jacketed, snow dusting her beard like powdered sugar as she bit into a donut. Half-asleep on the T, her face resting against its ghost in the window. She’d felt so ambivalent about her looks back then. She didn’t hate herself, but couldn’t understood why anyone would find her attractive. Now, she’d sleep with that guy. He was cute, if a bit young for her. He’d probably put on the National while they made out.

He was so much better at being a guy than she was at being a girl. He knew how to style his hair. His clothes fit him. He was one of the good ones—a guy who didn’t take up space and would walk his femme friends home at night. Now what was she? A depressed trans girl who slept exclusively with men because she didn’t have to differentiate between being attracted to them and wanting to be them. What a joke.

If she’d really been good at being a man, of course, she wouldn’t have stopped being one. But it was easy to look at these photos, all taken by Tessa, and dream.

It was already hot at the protest. Edith sweated through her denim romper and flapped its collar ineffectually. A tall woman gave a speech about the importance of trans healthcare for teens. Most people know they’re trans by the time they’re children, she said.

Edith recognized three-quarters of the people in attendance. We don’t really know the whole trans community, do we?

We know the ones who come to protests. A generous estimation. Seb was the one who went to protests; they had a fifty-percent success rate at getting Edith to join. The secret, they’d found, was to play on her white guilt. Stop flapping.

I feel gross. Why is this state so hot.

Why are you dressed like a Riverdale character. Edith had no comeback; she had bought the romper after seeing it on Riverdale. She scanned the crowd: septum piercings, hand tattoos, rough mullets.

It’s like the T4T tab on Grindr out here.

Hush up, I’m trying to hear this.

The speaker was insisting on the importance of WPATH guidelines. We know what these children need.

They marched to the capital chanting slogans about burning down the state. There were signs explaining that trans rights were human rights, and there were girls with pink-white-blue knee socks. Cops watched the freak show pass by. This happened with their permission. After a few more chants the protest dispersed, and Seb and Edith walked through the streaming crowd to Seb’s car.

Can we go to 7-Eleven or something? If I don’t drink a Gatorade I’m gonna die.

Can’t take you anywhere, Seb said.

But you do anyway, because I’m so cute.

You were, like, trying to cruise the crowd.

She was so transparent. No, I was looking for the love of my life.

They sat on the curb outside 7-Eleven drinking Windex-blue Gatorades.

Look, it’s natural that you get thrown for a loop when your ex is getting married.

It’s not only that. Everyone I know in Boston is in a serious relationship.

Up there, you freeze to death if you don’t have another body around to keep you warm.

Yeah but does it have to be a cis dude? Because if Tessa’s problem hadn’t been Edith’s dudehood, then what? Some essential flaw rendering her unlovable. Something she could not transition her way out of. I am ready to be someone’s wife.

You’ve got—and I mean this from the bottom of my heart—to shut the fuck up. Seb took her hand in theirs; her fingers looked massive and deathly pale. Look, you want a girlfriend? Go to Bookpeople, every month there’s a new fresh-faced trans girl working the register.

They’re all twenty-three and studied photography and have snake tattoos. I’d have to learn what 100 gecs is. I’d have to watch anime.

Too high a price for intimacy, you’re right. They held the sweating Gatorade bottle against their neck. You have a snake tattoo.

I wouldn’t date me. What about you, how’re things with Sara?

Seb’s girlfriend was cis, and twenty-three, and had interned at the LGBTQ Research Center with them. They’d been the only two people of color working there. Edith pictured lots of steamy late nights digitizing lesbian zines from the nineties.

Things with Sara were fine. Seb never expressed strong feelings for her one way or another. A relationship like the lazy river around a swimming pool.

People don’t want to bone down when it’s hot out. That’s in the Kinsey Report.

In exactly those words, I’m sure. Edith drained her Gatorade, surveyed the shimmering Texas sidewalks. I don’t care so much about being lonely. But I miss being in love.

Do you know how fucking gay you sound?

Always nice to have a sympathetic ear.

Go get your shit wrecked, girl. You can’t spend your whole life moping.

Wanna bet?

Seb squeezed her hand and tossed their empty bottle into the trash in a neat arc.

People run from the rain, Seb said, but sit in bathtubs full of Cool Blue Gatorade.

Thanks, Bukowski.

I’m always right about your love life. I have a Ph.D. in being gay. They took Edith’s bottle from her. Another perfect shot.

Edith sighed, stood, and flapped her romper. At least it was cooling off. All this effort to look cute, and for what.