Seb and Edith watched Gossip Girl from opposite ends of her couch, their feet crossed in the middle. Popcorn spilled from a silver mixing bowl. Treats snoozed on Seb’s lap, ears twitching.

I leave for six days and she decides she likes you better.

I’m the fun stepdad. I let her bite me for fifteen minutes without chastisement.

Oh so it’s your fault she chewed through my sweater?

Popcorn?

In this episode, Dan Humphrey was inviting his friends to his book release party later that day; none of them even knew he had a book coming out.

This is the sort of shit you’d do.

No, I’d change my name and move to a different state.

Is that why you became a girl? They tossed a puff of popcorn and it stuck in Edith’s hair.

Everyone on Gossip Girl was livid with Dan for fictionalizing them. Their lives were already a spectacle—reported by Page Six and its approximants—but it’s different, seeing yourself refracted through the eye of someone who really knows you.

Do you feel jealous of these guys?

What, for my “lost boyhood” or whatever? Seb shifted their weight on the couch, shifted it again. At home but never comfortable. Honestly, yeah, sometimes. But no one actually gets a life like that.

I meant your acting career.

Oh. That. Seb grew up in California. They’d never trained as an actor, never done much beyond high school theater, but they’d been in the final round of casting for a network teen drama. Seb was half Honduran, half Filipino; the exact right ambiguous shade of beige, they’d said, to play a plucky sidekick. The network had chosen a different brown girl with a Juilliard degree. You know, all the people from that show have podcasts now. Their income is just residuals and Stamps.com ads.

That’s luxury, baby.

And I’d probably be a huge asshole.

Good thing you’re such a humble tenderqueer instead.

Thing is, Seb said, you can end up as pretty much anyone. Either of us might have joined a cult or gotten Ayn Rand–­pilled at a vulnerable age or—whatever, ended up as congressional pages who only fucked as a form of social climbing.

You don’t really believe that, do you?

Why the fuck not? You think you can measure the distance to your unlived lives in inches? They ornamented Treats with stray popcorn. I’m cool, I’m smart. I don’t hate myself most of the time. The world sucks but that’s not my fault. What about you?

Oh yeah, it’s for sure my fault the world sucks. Seb rolled their eyes. Do I feel envy for them? Yeah, also sometimes. It was impossible to watch all the beautiful thin girls live their beautiful lives—trainwreck lives, but never unglamorous, or sexless, or loveless—and not wish she were one of them.

You think it’s fucked up that Dan wrote a book about all his friends?

Why, you worried you’ll alienate everyone who loves you?

Only a question, Seb.

A little bit. But mostly because he obviously hates them.

Writing about your life was something that other people did—people who had more things keeping them alive than fifty milligrams of sertraline and a delicate fistful of friendships.

There had been lots of chatter the last few years about what it meant to write about other people. What lives were up for grabs. Every time some revelatory article came out (I was the inspiration for such-and-such!!!) Edith thought, shouldn’t you keep that to yourself? Didn’t it expose the petty disappointments of your life to a level of scrutiny that no one should allow? Or was there so strong a need to set the record straight that it didn’t matter if you brought down more ridicule, more ire. You took the wheel, even if it meant crashing the car.

There’d been Tessa’s play. The distress Valerie felt at seeing her words repeated, twisted just gently enough that they fell into the uncanny valley between reality and fable.

Maybe it should be a book like Wittgenstein’s Mistress, she wrote to the editor. You know, a woman alone(?) at the end(?) of the world(?).

And she’s sexually obsessed with Albrecht Dürer?

I feel like you’re really hung up on this Dürer thing.

Not to say sexually obsessed.

Edith could never tell if the editor was joking or not.

Aren’t there enough books about friendship and love and death and marriage? she wrote. Don’t we need more books about people languishing?

And what will they languish over if not friendship and love and death and marriage? Don’t say Albrecht Dürer, Edith told herself. Do not say Albrecht Dürer.

When she was a kid, Edith told herself an endless story using her toys as props. A white Lucky Cat from Epcot became a powerful sage, a force of light; a black rubber rat its natural antagonist. She declared the cat’s disciple, a mustached LEGO figure, part of the French Foreign Legion. The story was an endless series of reversals and soap-opera betrayals. Items from around her room, a marble or a watch-back, co-opted into magical totems. New LEGO worlds built for everyone to occupy. She had loved her characters, the good turning evil and the evil, good. But she’d kept the story secret. She didn’t know if her parents noticed the way the room rearranged itself, if they heard her whispering dialogue to herself in the hot part of summer afternoons. She didn’t think so.

It wasn’t just that writing about her real life would expose her—all her slights and joys—to friends and strangers, her child-voice now audible through that summer door. It was that she was still too angry. She couldn’t love her V. and her own nameless analog like she loved her trans astronauts and her persecuted Christians and Lucky Cat and the rat and the LEGO man she’d called Frenchy. She loved Val, but it wasn’t enough, or it was the wrong kind of love. And without that, she could never tell the story right.

But there didn’t seem to be another option. There wasn’t another way to the other side of this hurt.

Whenever she finished writing her SEO articles about leather care and bathing with a new tattoo, Edith went walking. She called friends without notice, gambling on their willingness to chat.

She called Adam after reading his article on Into the Woods. Having not read Lee Edelman, Edith didn’t really follow his line of argument.

There’s a reason one of us didn’t become an academic.

The point basically, he said, is that all the musical’s conflicts are driven by people’s attachment to the children’s future. It takes the framework of fairy-tale-as-guidance—lessons on the world’s dangers—and morphs it into a set of parent–­child relationships.

Uh-huh.

It’s interesting, right? A gay man writing a whole musical about the anxiety of reproduction.

This did not strike Edith as contradictory. Into the Woods was so clearly, for her, a musical about how bad we are at wanting. Wanting too much (a new and exciting lover), wanting the wrong thing (marriage, riches, a child, revenge). All the characters trapped between fairy-tale logic and life’s relentless march. She was ashamed to tell Adam how strongly she identified with them.

How’re things up there? she asked him. Have there been a lot of protests? A document had leaked revealing that abortion rights were in jeopardy. The sudden and unrelenting dismay surprised Edith; she thought they’d all known months ago that this was coming.

Oh yeah, it’s like 2017 again. People in the streets every weekend. I think everyone’s vaguely smug about it.

Right, it’s us Texans who are to blame.

No one really thinks that.

“If only we’d killed RBG in the Obama years,” everyone here is saying. “It would have been so easy to replace her necklace thing with the shotgun collar from Saw 3.”

Adam laughed. Edith, you’re going to be put on a list.

Well it’s not like I can kill her now!

Don’t blame the old woman. Everything was going to get worse eventually. Edith gave a pinecone a good, hard kick. It skittered into the road and was smashed by a pickup truck. God, you know what one of the medievalists said the other day? She said that maybe now the Republicans have killed Roe, they’ll lose steam. Like, no, Cynthia, I’m sorry, but they’re already coming for trans people.

Edith described the Texan protests. Everyone walked and chanted and yelled at the cops. One or two white men broke off from the group and got arrested. It feels so safe. I hate it.

What else are you going to do? You’re not going to redacted a police station.

Our NSA handlers know what you mean even if you say “redacted,” bud. She looked for another pinecone to invest with her ire. What’s the point, though? We could be in the streets every day and nothing would change. Edith had gone to Occupy Wall Street during her first year of college; it had left her a pessimist.

It feels worse doing nothing. You should talk to Tessa about this, I’m sure she has something smart to say.

Yeah.

Have you guys been talking?

He knew they hadn’t. We send each other cake recipes that neither of us has time to make.

You should talk. There’s been enough years of silence.

There were only two options if they spoke: to discuss Tessa’s engagement or to pointedly avoid it. Cake recipes were easier.

Still, the next time she went for a walk, Edith tried calling. Tessa didn’t answer—a relief.

In her early days of transition, Edith had hated feeling in-between. Hated the scrutiny with which even well-meaning people tried to read her. She didn’t want to transition, only to have transitioned. To emerge from her room the next morning a girl with clear skin and a respectable cup size. Waiting in this space where Tessa was getting, but not yet, married—where Edith was waiting to be in love again—was a bit like that. If only they could skip it. If they could be fifty-five years old and vacationing in the Berkshires with their spouses, making light of old times.

Sorry, Tess texted her. Have lunch in fifteen, call you back then?

Sure. Her easy reprieve, lost. Fifteen minutes to steel herself.

At least Tessa wouldn’t invite her to the wedding. To be friends with your ex was one thing but to have them present for the quote-unquote happiest day of your (ever more hetero-passing) life? An impossibility.

Edith swiped through faces on Tinder as Harry. It was easy to match with an anonymous stranger, talk for a while, and abandon the conversations before anyone was the wiser. She’d become more discerning with her double’s love life, only swiping right on girls she could imagine Harry happy with.

A girl asked what Harry was reading.

Norwegian Wood, Edith lied. Have you read it?

Another wanted to know what sort of things he wrote.

Right now I’m working on a long fable about a war between angels and insects.

Someone asked where he’d moved here from.

Iowa. Not the cities.

The girl’s sister went to Grinnell, she actually knew Iowa pretty well. Edith blocked her.

The woman was hard to recognize in her set of static photos. She had the same facial expression in each: not quite smiling as she toasted with a glass of white wine, walked a fluffy white dog and looked over her shoulder. It was only because her final photo showed her—where else—on the climbing wall that Edith placed her as the Climbing Woman. In motion and rising. Her name was Natalie; she was thirty-five and an art librarian. Before Edith could pick which way to swipe, a call came through.

Hello?

Edith. Her mother’s voice was sharp and tired. Do you have time for me in your schedule?

This was how her mother began every conversation lately.

I’m actually— She checked; no calls from Tessa. I have a minute.

In the aftermath of her father’s illness, Edith had been better about calling. Though he’d been fine, there’d been the lingering guilt, the what-ifs. As life took her farther from the crisis, she’d reverted to her old ways.

I was watching The Philadelphia Story on TCM, her mother said. You know, you don’t get names like that anymore. C. K. Dexter Haven. Macaulay Connor. Tracy Lord. That’s the sort of name you could plant an oak tree on.

Is that the one with Tom Hanks? Edith baited.

After that, her mother went on, they were showing His Girl Friday, have you seen that? All about writers.

They’re journalists, Mother.

What you do is a kind of journalism, isn’t it?

What I do isn’t a kind of anything, it’s pure, unadulterated
emptiness.

That Cary Grant, her mother said. I would watch him read a pickle jar. He’s the most beautiful man to ever walk the Earth.

How’s Dad doing? Edith missed half the answer, checking her phone again. Tessa said something had come up, talk another time? Edith sighed.

—on account of the squirrel problem. It’s nothing to laugh at, having squirrels in your attic. They can do a lot of damage.

Edith was lucky, in many ways, with her parents. They taught English and the occasional film elective at a high school. (Not, thank god, the one Edith had gone to.) They’d given her a love of British modernism and Ella Fitzgerald. They weren’t transphobic, just clueless. But she couldn’t bring herself to be closer to them. She sat out holidays, only saw family when one of her seventeen cis, straight cousins got married. A crowd and a flood of booze to take the edge off.

There had been a time she’d hoped for more. As she aged and came into herself, as she learned better how to be a person in the world, she’d hoped they would find new names for an old love. They would be close the way Tessa was to her parents. Supporting each other through the tilting world.

Her mother was back to movies. She’d gone to a Billy Wilder retrospective in Richmond, she was going on about Jack Lemmon.

You know, Edith cut in, I went on a date with a boy the other day who loves Cary Grant.

Oh! Rarely did Edith share information about her romantic life. Did he—does he know—­

I’m trans? Yes, Mother, obviously. It would take more strength than was available to her to explain that Bernard was trans too.

Lovely, dear. What does he do for work?

Bernard worked downtown as a living statue of La Llorona. He’s a performer.

What, like an exotic dancer?

How’s Dad?

He’s fiddling with his drones.

Edith didn’t ask if her father wanted to speak to her. She’d once timed the silence between them, that dull antiquated phone hum, at eight and a half minutes.

All set for a career with the military, then.

They wouldn’t have him. One of his toys got tangled with a meteorological balloon. He got a citation. Edith was still thinking about Bernard. He’d come to hers and carried Treats around like a baby. The sex had been disappointing—gentle and rhythmic and full of check-ins. They’d ended the night watching compilations of commercials from their childhood.

Edith had once gone out with a boy who had her birth name. She kept this a secret from him, took pleasure in saying it at opportune moments. Calling across a crowded restaurant, or a soft expiration in his ear at a sentence’s end. He’d also been too gentle. She wanted to scream at these boys. They’d been trained to be careful and loving rather than rampant and destructive. She found them pathetic. If they broke some part of her, she’d be gladly broken.

They have publications, her mother said. Trade journals. Drone Weekly. Aerial Photography Enthusiasts’ Club. Every week we get these things.

It’s good to have hobbies.

I think it’s awfully weird. Her mother picked at the ragged ends of her fingernails. A sound like a leaky faucet’s drip. Looking at the world from so far away.

When Edith walked or drove through the city, she rarely thought of Valerie. There was only the occasional whiff: the leftist bookstore on North Loop, the café porch overlooking the lake, the gas station where Texas Chainsaw had been filmed. The city had never really been Val’s; Edith had picked it, and Edith had stayed here.

It was when she went anywhere else that she missed her dead friend. The flat ugly openness surrounding the city. The racks of deathless snack cakes crowding gas stations. Every pothole-pitted stretch, every fresh yellow line. The way power lines cut up the sky when there were no buildings to be seen. These things that had come to her through the phone, in all those months when Valerie was away. A day, and a day, and a day, and a day.