It had been weeks since she’d climbed. Edith had lost strength in her fingers and forearms, back muscles stiff and straining the moment she got on the wall. At first, climbing had been a way to make friends. Now it struck her as a socially acceptable form of self-harm. Her body dragged across the rough face of the wall. The calluses on each finger fell away, leaving tender, stinging pink. She fell, stood, and began to climb again.

Up and up, her arms straining. Hands dusted with other hands’ chalk. Swinging, hip pivot, swap one foot for the other and if it slips, so what, it’ll be an ab workout getting back in position. She reached the top and kicked off the wall. The soft floor caught her and she lay there, sweaty, sore, and gasping.

She’d told Seb the truth: it would be useless to move back to Boston. Hers was not an unhappiness you left at state borders. Still, it might be nice to live somewhere that didn’t actively want her and all her friends to die.

Edith was pleased to see the Climbing Woman on a nearby wall, proof the world hadn’t changed much in her absence. The Climbing Woman would pick a single spot, a single color, and climb it endlessly. If someone else wished to give it a shot, she made space for them, sipping from her tempered-glass water bottle. When they finished, she was on the wall again, pulling herself skyward with the same graceful movements. Edith thought she must have been a dancer, more comfortable in repetition than change. Seb thought she was crazy. There’s something in her life she lost control over. This is her compensating.

That had to be what brought them all there. Only you could rely on yourself not to fall, to hold on, to reach far enough. You could measure progress, unlike in life; how high you rose, how your body ached.

She stood, climbed, fell, rested. The problem was, as you got better, your body became more resilient. Edith left her early days of climbing feeling steamrolled. She’d emerge, sweat-drenched, into the punishing Texas heat, hardly able to command her car home. Now, she had to push herself harder.

Edith read books to learn how to be a person. They were little Rube Goldberg machines that let you see where your worst and best choices might lead you. People often seemed to think that real life was more complicated than books, but, in fact, Edith found it was often precisely as simple. Life was a series of stimuli that most everyone responded to in the same ways. This was why there’d been such a panic in the nineteenth century about women reading—Madame Bovary, Eugene Onegin. Everyone knew it would make girls too powerful.

When she’d lived in Alabama, Valerie returned from the road with a dozen novels like the ones Edith had described to the editor. Visions and revisions of lives half-lived: 10:04 and Motherhood and Outline. In the throes of gender limbo, Edith found comfort in the autofictional frameworks—that you could give your life story a novelistic structure and come out knowing yourself better. She’d read to unlearn one sort of life and learn another. If you could learn number theory, or Italian, or the history of classical music by reading, surely you could learn how to be a person. How to be a girl.

Around the same time, she’d become obsessed with the diaries of women artists. Nin, Woolf, Sontag. At home she flipped through Katherine Mansfield’s; she’d mostly bought it because they’d both had tuberculosis. There was so much boredom in these books, the dailiness that Woolf would later call “cotton wool.” And Edith loved how boring they were, how they didn’t teach her anything.

Hey bitch. You get your back walls blown out yet? Seb’s voice was distorted, distant. They were driving.

You can’t say “bitch” anymore, Seb. You ceded your rights when you transitioned, it’s misogyny now.

You’re goddamn right it is.

Hi Edith! Sara’s voice was bright and clear. That was being twenty-three. That was the girlhood Edith never got.

Sara, tell your joyfriend they’re gonna get crucified by a bunch of women in pussyhats if they don’t reform their ways.

Sara repeated this verbatim while Seb spat and fumed over the word joyfriend.

Where you guys headed?

Dallas. The Kabakovs exhibit. Seb had invited her, but Edith begged off. Treats curled up on her lap and protested when Edith petted her too roughly. She’d never been to Dallas. She’d never been anywhere in Texas, really. Held down by inertia and her fear of gas station bathrooms. We’ll be back by Saturday, though, are you coming to Bernard’s party?

Sure. It was useless to decline Seb’s party invites. They’d drag her by the hair if they had to. Edith loved this about them.

Cyrus will be there.

I already said yes. Her dormant sexuality had been awakened while watching Cyrus pour cider into a docile femme’s mouth. He’d pulled her up by the chin and kissed her while her partner watched. The act’s odd taboo undercut by everyone’s polyamory. Edith regretted telling Seb any of this.

Does Edith have a crush on Cyrus? Sara asked, failing to whisper.

Everyone has a crush on Cyrus. Get in line, Edith.

Hanging up now.

Seb, she caught Sara saying, I don’t want to listen to Taylor Swift, I want to listen to Oingo Boingo.

Edith didn’t want to only get fucked; she wanted to get fucked and wake up next to a beautiful woman she loved every day for thirty-five years. Edith had barely dated at all for the last year—the prospect of knowing and being known was too much—but seeing people happy had a way of making you want, quite suddenly, what they had.

She redownloaded Tinder. She began with her real name, real enough information. The ironic detachment people expected from trans girls: 5’6”, full idiot, calls all vampires draculas. cat mom not a catgirl. Judith seeking Holofernes. But by the time she went to select photos, she couldn’t bear them. She only looked girlish at a distance or in low light. It would be unclear, later, the chain of decisions that led her to select from the old photos Tessa had taken. A different person, a boy who knew how to fake it. She erased all the personal information.

She named the boy Harry—a name that had never been hers but that she’d always liked. Harry was twenty-six and five eleven. I am like every other boy who went to a liberal arts college, his bio read. I am probably being crushed to death under a bookshelf. don’t say you’re “looking for adventure” if you aren’t going to help me steal the Declaration of Independence.

Edith had never used the apps as a boy. As a girl on Grindr, people were at least straightforward about wanting to fuck your throat. As Harry, she swiped right on every girl until she ran out of swipes for the day.

There was a shoebox at the back of her closet—rattling, light. The top folded back and there was the knife. Punisher logo dull with wear. Stolen from Valerie’s bag the last time Edith saw her. Now she only looked at it. There were no photos of the two of them. The knife was all.