Edith arrived at Adam’s Somerville apartment red-cheeked and numb. The first thing she said was, It’s not going to snow, is it? I don’t own boots anymore. The first thing Adam said was, Holy shit look at you! His shirt read reject the order of creation. disfigure the face of man and woman. A quote from the pope. He held Edith’s shoulders, studying her in the doorway, mindless of the wind whipping in until his boyfriend called from the couch: Adam, door.

Edith found herself slightly embarrassed to have transitioned since she’d last seen Adam. How she looked now and how she used to, every piece of her loudly out of proportion. Six years ago, she wouldn’t have been caught dead with her nails painted. Here she was now with ketchup stains on her dress from an airport hot dog.

Edith, Michael. Adam’s boyfriend held a throw pillow on his lap and stared at the TV.

I didn’t know they still ran I Love the 80s.

They don’t.

Michael owns the largest private archive of 2000s reality shows. Caught between irony and admiration.

Second largest. I’m still trying to track down a few seasons of Room Raiders.

Edith sat on the kitchen counter while Adam prepared the kettle. Hands in her armpits, coat draped across her. Adam’s shoulders were bare in his tank top. There was his tattoo of the moon, the dark hair sweeping from his arms. He didn’t have the beard of most trans dudes she knew, instead affecting neat stubble. It shaped his face the way shadows shape a room.

You look really great, Adam.

So do you, girl. And his voice—still his, but honey-thick and beautiful where hers was scratchy and hopeless and ungirlish. They texted each other almost every day. Why was she self-conscious? Edith leaned back and unsettled a basket of bananas.

Adam did not stop moving when the tea was done. He mixed some sort of powder in a Pyrex measuring cup. He poured a bag of vegetables into a pan of cold oil.

Your apartment is so beautiful.

It’s all Michael. His taste, his money. Had Adam always been this energetic, or was it the hormones? Would Edith’s hands still be so cold, wrapped around the scalding mug, if not for the sluggishness of her blood? I’m fucking him for the furniture.

Michael from the living room: I heard that.

Love you, Mouse.

She turned the mug through her hands, letting different parts of her palms get burned.

Mouse?

Oh, ’cause you’ve never had a stupid pet name.

Not for a long time.

Adam asked if she was dating anyone.

You’d be the first to know if I were.

I hope I’d be, at best, third. The smell of sizzling onions and spices. The memory of college meals cobbled together from dining hall dishes. Edith was only good at following instructions; Adam, like Valerie, experimented with the recombinant qualities of food until he made either masterpiece or disaster. Tessa does know you’re in town, right?

Yeah of course. The thought of coming here without seeing Tessa made Edith sad on the scale of having her cat, Treats, die. She took out her phone to check in with Seb, who was cat-sitting back in Texas, but Adam said, You having second thoughts?

About Tess? No, why?

You know why.

We’ve been talking. Maybe ten phone calls in the last six years, maybe half those after Valerie died. Things have been good between us. Normal, even. Surely by saying this she could learn to believe it.

That’s good. Adam looked at her across his moon tattoo. She thought he’d say something about Valerie then, but all he said was, You seem really good.

At the dining room table, Edith coaxed pilaf onto her fork—a mixture of rice, pine nuts, raisins, other small things. They talked about Michael’s podcast, I Love “I Love the 80s,” and his job as a software engineer. Adam and Edith commiserated over their job searches. So many people want what I have, he said, and it makes me fucking miserable. Being an assistant professor of English literature was not the gateway to happiness he’d dreamed it’d be. The only thing that keeps me going is the kids. There’s like one other tranny on faculty, and these poor students. A small shake of his head.

Edith wrote SEO articles for websites of doubtful legitimacy. “Whether or not you believe you need a crocodile-skin wallet,” she quoted, “it’s hard to deny that they are versatile and fashionable for all occasions.”

Not a fund-raiser for crocodile conservation, Adam said.

Meeting your boyfriend’s vegan parents.

Or if you’re wearing a shirt that says, “No, I Don’t Like Crocodile-Skin Wallets, Please Stop Asking.”

Edith said she’d amend it to nearly any occasion.

From their texts and calls, each knew the shape of the other’s days but not the texture. Edith loved seeing Adam and Michael together. Their gentle coaxing through the border between passion and hyperfixation. Michael’s project to dissect people’s nostalgia for earlier nostalgias intrigued her, though it seemed exhausting in practice.

But still that discomfort. The last time you were in Boston, she thought, you were a dude. Whereas Adam became a dude here. A discontinuity that six days couldn’t solve.

How’s your new book going, Edith? Adam sounded coy.

Oh, what’s it about?

She won’t tell, babe.

Edith was not superstitious about sharing her work. It only sounded so dull and hollow when summarized. Her first novel, Someday We Won’t Remember This, was half about the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire, half about two trans astronauts in a space station circling a dying star. Usually, if she shared this with a stranger, they’d bring up Interstellar or ask what church she went to. If she’d been able to do it justice in her summary, maybe she’d have had an easier time getting it published. Maybe it would have made some sort of impact—in her life, in others.

I’m not sure anyone but me would care about it.

It’s not autofiction, is it?

Edith snorted. No, she said, which was not exactly a lie. It didn’t seem to her she had enough in common with the people who wrote those sorts of books—middle-aged cis people with tenure, unspooling their barely fictionalized lives—to ally her work with theirs. She was saved from saying more: a pine nut cracked between her tooth and plastic crown. She cried out, and Adam and Michael jolted from their seats, hoping to fix whatever hidden thing was broken.

The book Edith had been failing to write for a year now was sometimes called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy and sometimes called Black Pear Tree and sometimes Evening All Afternoon. It refused to stay contained to a narrow period of her life. It would grow until it became a Borgesian map the same size as its territory.

Many of the books she loved were about people trying and failing to write books. Sometimes it was the book you were reading, sometimes an unrealized project—a shadow text haunting the thing you held. People appreciated this illusory failure. Holding proof the writer had succeeded eventually. It let everyone hold their survivorship bias a little closer.

She was on her fourth attempt at the new book. She’d been sending scraps to the editor who’d bought her first; the editor said, Cool! Let me know when you have a whole thing. Edith had promised she would by September. The same time—in a move that Seb called fucking stupid—that her lease would end.

She’d been trying to write about Valerie. Two trans girls circling a dead love neither could live without. But she couldn’t talk about Val without talking about Tessa, and college, and all their years of love, and all their years of silence. Couldn’t tell stories about her life when she understood it so poorly.

*

There was a time when each lovely day was marked by the knowledge that Edith could not repeat it. She didn’t miss being young—those alien years of boydom—but missed wanting so little. The fake ghost-hunting documentaries she made with high school friends. The hungover college days with no obligations but instant ramen and Gossip Girl with Tess and Val. She knew: we won’t get this again; we might get something else good, but it won’t be this.

She’d thought transition would mitigate the worst of her nostalgia. That you could not feel homesick for a time before you were yourself.

In the morning, she walked the familiar path toward Harvard Square. There was the laundromat packed with used books. There was a bakery that she’d never gone into. The bar she and Tessa had seen women sobbing outside of on election night. She’d forgotten how nostalgia was geographically produced.

(Ancient memories of wind shredding her clothes as carefree undergrads passed her; the promise of bed, and warmth, and Tessa at the other end of this street. A summer day, not long before she left, eating small, expensive cups of frozen yogurt on a bench. The early mornings she’d slipped from bed before Tessa woke, writing in Peet’s Coffee—stories, unfinished novels, grad school applications.)

Adam had work. He asked her the night before what she’d do with her day. Any old haunts you want to check out?

I feel like all I ever did was go to coffee shops and bookstores.

That’s good. You can commune with Boston’s true heart at Dunkin’ Donuts.

She stopped when she hit a fork in the sidewalk. Dizzy, her path tangled, unsure which way was fastest to the Square. The benches were too cold and so she crouched, hovering above the pavement to keep her black jeans clean. Impossible that so much was the same. Adam and Tessa had been living there all that time, but she had to come back a stranger.

She’d felt this way when she’d gone home to see her dad in the hospital. Not yet a girl, or not in any way she’d claim. And yet that same sense of unfairness. Things staying the same and things changing. At least then Val had been with her.

There’d been a scene like that in her first book, a moment of the astronauts returning home before their final voyage. The Earth seemed both more and less solid. Every place so open, so crowded. One last look before fleeing from a broken life to a dying star.

But that hadn’t quite captured it. She’d wanted something like Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows. The hero returns to Leningrad after years in the gulag, and wonders at the Hermitage: “How could all those paintings have remained as beautiful as ever while he was being transformed into an old man? Why had they not changed? Maybe their immutability—their eternity—was not a strength but a weakness? Perhaps this was how art betrays the human beings that have engendered it?” Edith would like to think her mutability was a strength, but it had left her there, crouched inches above the frigid pavement.

Edith stood, brushed her clean knees cleaner. Seb had sent a picture of Treats cuddling with a stuffed IKEA shark twice her size. Perfect angel, Seb wrote. And then: She bit me like three seconds after this.

Each writing session began the same way: she put on the 1994 cast recording of Merrily We Roll Along and stared at one of Francis Bacon’s paintings until she began to cry. Today it was Painting 1946. It was usually Painting 1946. Something about the meat and rent bodies.

The music didn’t quite obscure the crowded bakery-café around her. Edith had claimed one corner of a table with her latte, her laptop, her copy of Sophie Calle’s Address Book. She’d eyed the seven-dollar pastries downstairs but deprived herself of their pleasure. On some deep level, she believed good work came from Protestant abstinence. All those mornings she could have stayed in bed beside Tessa and instead heaved herself through the cold.

In her headphones, a seduction unfolded: “Life is knowing what you want, darling. That’s the thing you have to know.”

Edith had only been to this bakery once, with Tessa and one of her dyke friends. They’d sat maybe ten feet away. You could see brick university buildings through the window, the leafless trees scratching the gray sky. They had probably talked about some protest, and Edith probably questioned their efficacy, and the friend probably rolled her eyes at Tessa like, Ugh, men. If she could remember what happened, Edith would run into that friend here again; she’d have married her girlfriend, maybe they’d have a kid. And Edith would say, We’ve met before. A familiar confusion across the woman’s face, the trick of matching past to present. The puzzle piece—oh shit he’s a girl now?—that allowed them to make sense of it.

Maybe she wouldn’t deal with that hitch of uncertainty if she passed better. Bigger tits, higher voice, flattering clothes. Her old self illegible to people—here’s this tall and striking girl in a coat no match for Boston wind. The undercutted barista would flirt with her. All her dreams would be beautiful black-and-white pastiches of classic Hollywood.

She was getting away with something, being here. Hiding the person she used to be. The mistakes that person made.

The music moved on to the painfully hopeful closing number and she stopped crying. She shut her computer without writing and read for a while. Sophie Calle was calling every name in an address book she’d found, interviewing people about its owner. Probably as good a way of arriving at knowledge as any other.

As she left the café, a ringing cut through her headphones, interrupting Merrily We Roll Along. Her mother’s name, first and last, flashing on her phone. She thumbed it away.

Cambridge’s bookstores were large, warm, almost memoryless places. She’d always gone to them alone. She’d finished Sophie Calle; she’d brought a handful of others, but none of them felt right.

Merrily We Roll Along was perhaps too on the nose. The musical proceeds backward in time, chronicling the dissolution of three friends’ relationships. “How did you get to be here?” the musical asks. “What was the moment? How can you get so far off the track? Why don’t you turn around and go back?”

(A memory: Tessa sticking her finger to the place Edith’s book would one day live. You’ll write so many they’ll have to give you your own shelf. An endless string of Edith McAllisters. But here the books were packed tight, and no spine bore Edith’s name.)

In two days she’d see Tessa. Tomorrow was the reading, but she insisted Tessa not come. Readings are terrible. I’m terrible. It won’t be fun.

It would absolutely be fun, Tessa said, but I do have plans, unfortunately.

At the breakfast table that morning, Edith had admitted she half-expected Tessa to bail.

She would never. Adam scraped more yogurt and granola out of his Portmeirion bowl. Floral patterns smeared with white like a new kind of snow.

Yeah, but why should she see me? What’s it going to do for her?

You think everyone but you is so mercenary.

No, I’m mercenary too. Edith popped a dried cherry in her mouth. I’m only here to steal your fancy granola.

When she’d called to tell Tessa she’d be in Boston, had there been hesitation before Tessa said, That’s amazing, it’ll be so good to see you? A memory of the street, the hill. Unasked questions, unstated prayers. Or were these Edith’s alone to bear?

In her headphones: “We’re not the three of us anymore, Mary. Now we’re one and one and one.”

Edith toyed with buying a dozen different books but wound up with only two: Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey and the journals of Katherine Mansfield. There was comfort in being taken away from yourself. There was comfort in being brought back.

Michael was recording a podcast episode that evening, so Edith and Adam went out for dinner. Veggie Galaxy was decked out in the same Diner Chic as six years before: Formica tables, red vinyl stools. New undergrads the inheritors of old habits: in the booths blowing straw wrappers at friends’ faces; on the sidewalk sucking smoke from ember-eyed cigarettes.

Oh my god. Edith studied both sides of the laminated menu. They got rid of the falafel burger?

Plus ça change.

Everything was shockingly expensive. Sixteen dollars for a bean burger, six more for fries. No wonder she never ate out when she lived here.

Rent only keeps going up, Adam said between bites of portobello. How much did you and Tessa pay for your place?

Like a thousand each.

He shook his head. You’d never manage that now. It was inexplicable. No one’s moving here and it keeps getting worse.

Every conversation Edith had in Texas eventually turned to the cost of living, too. New people moved there all the time. Was this simply part of getting older—the endless financial climb? Were there people who didn’t think about these things, who weren’t tech bros or Deloitte consultants?

It used to be easier, Edith said. You could forgo comforts when you were twenty-three. You could shiver through heatless nights or let yourself grow waifish on steamed vegetables and brown rice. She nibbled her bean patty accusatorily; it was no falafel. And with Val—Valerie had a way of freeing Edith from her financial anxiety. What was sixteen dollars? What was a hundred? You’d get it back somehow. But this moment—this bright and perfect flame—would be extinguished with the dawn.

Hey, Adam said, resting a hand on Edith’s knee. She tried to fix her face. I’m really sorry—

Nothing to be sorry for.

You seem fine, though.

Yeah, I’m good.

It’s barely been a year, it doesn’t have to be fine.

But it is.

He’d given his condolences over the phone. She’d forgotten most of the month after Tessa’s call. The car crash. There’d been no funeral, only a gravestone somewhere in west Texas that she’d never seen. Adam had offered to come see Edith, but she couldn’t have borne feeling pitied like that. At least she and Tessa had already been speaking; at least it hadn’t taken a death to bring them back to each other.

You still haven’t talked to Tessa about it. You and Val.

Good—something to dry her eyes.

I’m sure she knows.

That wasn’t the question, Edie. He bit his lip and flinched. You’d be surprised what people miss.

It’s not a real question if you already know the answer. Her first proper bite of the burger was delicious. Warm and hearty and texturally dense. Y’all still hang out, right?

Of course.

How does she seem to you?

She’s the same.

Another bite. Had she eaten lunch? Or had trekking up and down Cambridge left her so starving?

What about me?

Adam laughed. You’re the same, too.

Friday morning. Alone, again, in Cambridge, until the evening’s reading. She’d missed Boston’s grayness. The short buildings pressed against the paved sky. A place where, should you stand still long enough, the past’s light might come back to you. Bounced all across the universe only to return to your eyes, showing you who you used to be on a day no different from today.

His voice seeped up to her from the back of the bagel line, saying, Okay so tomato cream cheese if they do have everything bagels, but plain for a salt bagel? She turned back to scope out Charlie from the crowd. Hunched, as she knew he would be, in a black wool peacoat. A finger in one ear, his phone to his other. No different than in college.

What if they’re out of both? A pause. I mean they could. A pause. I like salt bagels. You like salt bagels. There are dozens of us.

Edith fought to make her voice soft and fem while ordering her plain butter bagel and large black coffee. Faced the windows while she waited. When she’d been home with Valerie, someone from high school had stopped beside them at a traffic light. He hadn’t hesitated a moment before calling out her old name. Never mind the years, her long hair, her smooth face.

Living with Charlie sophomore year left her with plenty of fondness for him. He used to get crossfaded beyond reason and start swing dancing. It had become so irrepressible he believed he had a strain of the sixteenth-century dancing plague. He’d gone to counseling.

But their lives had diverged. He’d stayed straight, gotten married. Edith had become a girl—a great excuse to lose touch with people. To most old friends it would come as a shock. The whiplash breaking whatever they’d built together.

Or so she assumed.

C’mon bitch, she thought. Be a fucking adult for once in your life.

Steeled for the inevitable (Haha yeah I’m a girl now isn’t that weird), she tapped his shoulder. Hand still cold with outside air. Hey, she said. Charlie.

He turned, probably expecting any number of more likely actors. He had a whole history here, a sprawling web of acquaintances and friends and coworkers and exes. The consequences of a still life. Any of them more plausibly behind him than Edith—this woman who used to be a boy he knew.

Oh my god, Edith?

Outside, their bagged bagels in hand, breath clouded the space between them.

I can’t believe you’re here! What are the odds. He nodded at her grease-spattered bag. You should eat that before it gets cold.

What about you?

He hoisted his slightly fatter bag. Gotta get these back to Polly. The glut of food for two, the paleolithic intimacy of bringing back what you foraged. (A cold night outside the campus bar, their fake IDs denied. Charlie asking, Why are there so many pretty girls. Am I ever going to be happy. Edith said, Cheer up, Chuck, I’ll dance with you, and he said, It’s not the same.)

How long are you here for? I’d love for you to meet her. What are you doing in town? Visiting Teresa? She didn’t tell him she was reading that night, only that she’d visit Adam’s class Monday. You’re like a big deal writer now, huh?

Something like that. Butter leaked onto her hands as she bit into the bagel. There were no good bagels in Texas; she’d lost the knack for them.

Triumphant homecoming and all. And all what? Neither triumph nor home nor coming seemed appropriate. She’d been dragged here. Before she could swallow her mouthful of gluten and salt, Charlie said, My wife read your book. Polly did. I haven’t had a chance to myself.

The bagel nearly fell from her hands. No one had read her book except a hodgepodge of very kind booksellers, editors of niche literary journals, and dorks on Twitter. Really?

Laughter from Charlie. Good old Charlie. What, you think I’d lie?

What did she think?

Ask her yourself. Come over for lunch Monday, before your class. He and Polly worked from home. We’ll make you something.

Edith tried to picture Charlie in domesticity. In college, he’d never so much as hung a poster. All she could see were stark plaster walls, a futon on its aluminum skeleton. A case of sugar-free energy drinks.

But Polly would have put up needlepoints and art prints, curated from Cambridge’s thrift stores. There’d be a rocking chair, probably. A scratchy yellow afghan big enough for two. The shock of this distance might kill her. That her own life might have looked like this.

Sure, she said.

Amazing! She’ll be thrilled.

Another remark on the coincidence. A quick hug, a phone number conversation. Neither had changed. Edith watched Charlie go, confident steps down the brick sidewalk. A path so familiar he probably dreamed about it.

(If he really wanted you to come over, he’d have asked you to now.)

But then, she hadn’t even let him know she was in town.

It felt like a kind of magic when the bouldering gym took Edith’s membership card. She’d felt betrayed, back in Texas, when Seb told her the gym was a national chain. Seattle Bouldering Project, Chicago Bouldering Project, Boulder Bouldering Project. Interchangeable. The illusion of locality. Now she was thankful: too wound up to work, ruminating on Charlie, trying not to think about that evening’s reading. She’d almost texted Tessa. Instead she borrowed a pair of Adam’s shorts, rented shoes for four dollars. She would not betray her impatience.

Somerville Bouldering Project was enormous, a cave-shaped cathedral. Color-coded knobs and rough beige walls to hide you from the horrors of surface life. A dance of gravity, and friction, and body.

At the back wall, people climbed higher than Edith dared. It was her fear of heights that made climbing useful for managing other anxieties. Nothing to think about when you were up ten, fifteen feet except not falling. It was a victory every time she got on the wall.

Headphones hooked to her ears. Sporty Somervilleans with chalky palms. She climbed, and tried not to think.

It wasn’t a lie when she told Tessa the reading would be bad. The idea appealed to her—all those nights she’d gone to bookstores in Cambridge and Brookline to hear real writers’ voices. The authority of it. The intimate history of geography, and class, and love that a voice carried. The patterns they’d burnished out and those left rough enough to show at certain angles: the slight twang of a Mississippi writer saying radio; an unplaceable vocabulary suddenly sensible in the accent of an Australian–­South African writer. And the minor ways writers altered their sentences, proving you cannot return to the past—even fixed in black marks on the page—without wishing it a little changed.

Edith hated reading, though. She didn’t like her voice, didn’t know how fast to read, couldn’t act out dialogue. Characters became flat, mirthless shadows that left the audience wishing they could see the brilliant light that cast them.

She lay on the floor to catch her breath.

The trouble with her new book was that she didn’t have any idea why someone would read it. It used to be that the showiness of her imagination stood in for substance; you read to find out what on earth could happen next. But her life with Valerie had been predictable from the start. Val came, and she went; they loved each other, and they didn’t. She was there through the thickest, thorniest moments, she was gone the second things got tough. Predictable was perhaps not the word for it. Tedious, maybe.

When she’d wanted to be a sci-fi writer, it had seemed so manageable. Now she’d be happiest writing books about lonely women living in New York City and thinking about dead German men and/or David Wojnarowicz. But she’d never lived in New York and didn’t care for Walser or Kafka. She didn’t have a single interesting thought.

Halfway up the wall, she had no idea if she was stable enough to grab the next handhold. The walls of her Texas gym only gave up their secrets to her over the course of weeks. She knew when to push herself and when to let go. Being good at climbing is not about failing to fall; it’s about knowing that if you do, you’ll be fine.

She dropped down, tried the wall again, and got stuck in the same spot.

In her headphones: “How does it start to go? Does it slip away slow, so you never really notice it’s happening?”

Edith loved Merrily We Roll Along. She loved all of Sondheim’s musicals, those rainy-day records in Tessa’s dorm room. The man wrote about obsession driving people to destroy their lives. Fairy tales taken past their moment of perfection until they succumbed to grim reality.

In Merrily’s reversed chronology, everyone grows more optimistic and in love with each other as they grow younger. Friendships and career dreams slip backward from despairing reality into bright hope. Characters lose the knowledge the audience is cursed with: there will be no redemption here. In the final, endlessly optimistic song “Our Time,” the three friends, hardly more than children, watch Sputnik move across the night sky. “After this moment, this moment that the three of us are sharing,” one reflects, “nothing is ever going to be the way it was ever again.” There’s no ambivalence in their hearts. The audience has to bear the pain alone.

Edith wished she could talk about this instead of reading anything she’d written. She could lecture there, halfway up the wall where her arms were shaking: unable to hold herself up, unwilling to let herself fall. Barely, she jumped, the shock of impact palpable in her knees. That was enough of that.

There were tables along the gym’s sidelines. Her mother called the moment she sat down.

Hey, Mom, this isn’t the best time. She got her computer from her bag, opened a PNG of Painting 1946 from her desktop.

Where are you? Are you at a club? “Hyperballad” was playing on the gym speakers.

Yes, Mother, I’m at a club at eleven o’clock on a Friday morning, and they’re playing Björk because the year is 1997.

What? Edith, I can’t hear you.

At least her mother was getting her name right. I’m in Boston.

Boston? You’ll go to Boston but not Virginia? Who’s in Boston?

Tessa. Adam. Half a million Red Sox fans.

Dear, I was watching Singin’ in the Rain the other day—do you remember that movie? We watched it when you were, oh, seven, eight years old.

Sure. It didn’t matter what she said. Across the gym the few Friday stragglers, safe from winter chill, climbed on. There were men in short yellow shorts, there was a woman with Kool Aid–­blue hair. A pair of enbies who might be lovers and might be twins. The locker room would probably be safe without her wearing a full face of makeup. They climbed like Valerie used to dance. The fluid motion of a whole body.

She’d barely thought of Valerie in Boston. Everywhere Val went had been hers, all American roads and cities. Anywhere Edith smelled gasoline and spearmint gum. A net cast wide, a life inescapable.

—and I got to thinking, her mother said, how beautifully Debbie Reynolds’s voice matched up with Jean Hagen’s mouth, and I thought that maybe you—­

Mother, it’s not a good time.

A sigh from the other side. She wondered if her father was listening on. I thought you and Tessa stopped speaking, her mother said.

Only temporarily. Something their relationship could use.

Another sigh. Before her mother could admonish her further, she goodbyed and set her phone on silent. Edith googled, is mercury in retrograde. No, the internet reported. Something else must be wrong with you.

With this in mind, she tried to pick something to read that evening.

At the table across from me, two people divvy up old photographs. They must have belonged to some lost family member, part of a long-established birthright. The photos, none larger than a palm, are of yellowed, far-off places. One of the people lists the documented subjects aloud, deals the pictures like cards in an inscrutable game.

I can make out the same three or four figures in each. What a world it would be if every piece of self was carried in photos too—not only their images but their desires, hates, embarrassments. The memories that an onion cooking with green pepper and garlic brought to mind. The drum of blood, a beating heart, separated from your ear by only a few layers of tendon and skin.

Then again, perhaps these images’ keepers can conjure a whole world, a whole person, from these flat, glossy stills. Perhaps what I’m really wishing is that I, too, could access it—could dive into their lives and come up, cupped hands dripping with pearls of lives so different from my own.

Or else I’m thinking of how few photos of V. I have. All from college, when even she looked less like herself, and I look like a stranger.

It was unlikely to make her cry, or less likely than some sections. There were few worse ways she could imagine the evening going—sobbing at the podium over a story that carried no emotional freight for anyone else. Like crying over the crumpled weight of a Taco Bell bag.

Experimentally, she studied one of the sex scenes. Something she’d never read, that probably wouldn’t make it into the book—for its falseness, for its truth. Her narrator-analog, her nameless I, pulled a knife over her girlfriend’s skin:

The horrible truth is that I liked this. Not because of the pleasure it gave her, or not solely. I wanted to punish her. Wanted to betray her, cut my heart into her back. I wanted to taste her blood so that there’d forever be a part of her, a microscopic iron core, that I carried in my own heart.

When she said, That’s enough. When she said, Babe, stop. I wanted to point the knife tip at every time she left me. At the scars on her legs and stomach. I wanted to remind her that you can only know what’s enough by knowing what’s more than enough.

Instead, I took the towel, the peroxide squares she used for hormone shots. I dabbed the blood from her back, kissed each vertebra. I coaxed her long body into my arms, knowing we’d both learn new limits in time.

Seb sent another picture of Treats. The cat curled in a window, green towel cushioning her orange head. Always already angelic, Seb texted. What’s up in Boston, you see your ex.

She’s a friend, and no. I’m at Somerville Bouldering Project if you can believe it.

That’s not a real place.

One of the guys in yellow shorts settled at a table across from Edith. He pulled a book from his bag, one she couldn’t identify at a distance.

Edith called Seb.

What’s up?

It wasn’t worth unpacking the malaise her mother’s call had left. Seb had heard it all before.

What do you think about autofiction?

I love it.

I do too.

Books about cars, right? Christine, et cetera.

Yeah exactly. Noted autofiction pioneer, Stephen King. Edith looked in time to catch the man smirking.

Are you thinking about writing it?

Not exactly. She Ctrl+F’d through her draft, deleting every instance of the word “just.” Why do you say it like that?

I think writing too directly from your life would fuck you up, you specifically. You’d lose track of where you end and the book begins.

Yeah probably. The solution, she thought, was to make it all true. Five years’ full emotions set down like a name in wet cement. But then there were ethical issues. I told you how mad Val got when Tessa tried to write that play about us, right?

More than once. Could you justify leaving a “just” if you meant it in the sense of “justice”? This was the problem with rules—following them only led to more questions. So you’re like terrified of seeing her tomorrow, huh.

What makes you say that?

You’re, like, quaking in your fucking gym shoes. I can hear from here.

You keep in touch with your exes, right? It’s never weird?

I get hotter every day, what’s there to be weird about. Why are you worried?

Edith didn’t know. It was the same inexplicable embarrassment to have left here a man and come back a girl. It was fear that Tessa would be mad about her and Valerie. Or worse—that everything would feel exactly the same. That she would be unable to escape the past’s pull.

She had no regrets about tapping Charlie’s shoulder, calling out his name. But to step into his apartment on Monday. To sit down to lunch with Tessa in a café where they might’ve once held each other close, traded bites of dessert, talked about a future together. All the eventualities she’d removed herself from. All the leaving she’d done.

A rustling in the background, a scampering.

Is that Treats? Put her on.

She’s climbing the shower curtains, I’ll put you on speaker.

Edith remembered too late that the cooing endearments one gives a pet are not suited to public spaces. The man was still eyeing her as she baby-talked into her phone. As seriously as she could, she said, I love you, kitten. Plausibly directed at a human love, though that was an embarrassing thought. Mother will see you soon. I miss you so much. This was getting worse.

Seb laughed. You make it sound like you’ve sent her into the country to escape the Blitz.

After they hung up, she took a final look at the guy’s book. It bothered her when she couldn’t identify something by sight. The guy held her gaze a little too long. Some shift of lid and brow. He set the book down and walked toward the men’s locker room.

Goddammit. She never got cruised like this when she was a dude. The polite thing would be to go suck this guy off. But she didn’t want to be the kind of girl who sucked dick out of obligation, only out of passion for the art of it.

This would never happen in Texas, she muttered, sloppily packing her things and putting on her thin coat. At least she’d never have to come back here.

Edith read slowly and tried not to think about the pitch of her voice. She tried not to think about her dress, her boots, her hands on the podium. Tomorrow she’d see Tessa. Tess would look no different—she’d be wearing the same banana-yellow coat she’d had since sophomore year. There’d be that chime in her laughter, that glow in her eyes. Hey there, Joni, she’d say. Been a while.

The section she read was from her first book. One of the astronauts told the other about her mother’s prophetic visions. “A path toward the end of the world,” Edith read, “and the exact steps to avert it. Every word to say, every move to make to ensure that future became fact. Stage-managing everyone into the correct positions. A kind of hell, a kind of prison. No life at all, only a character in someone else’s story.”

Maybe she wouldn’t publish the new book at all. Maybe it would only be for her, a digital gravestone to all her memories. But then she wouldn’t get paid for it.

Only one person asked a question. Were you thinking, the blue-haired girl asked from her seat, of the split between Old and New Testaments? The way that one is meant to be a prefiguration of the next? In the sort of books Edith wrote, she’d be the same blue-haired girl from the climbing gym. Coincidences stacking up until characters became unignorable.

Edith said, I saw Jenny Offill read once. Someone began a question: “Is it intentional that—” and before they could finish, Jenny Offill said, “Yes.” Scattered laughter from the students. Edith found Adam smiling in the front row, encouraging. It’s a testament to how finely worked Offill’s novels are. She knows every detail, every fragment, is in its right place. Were I so clever, I wouldn’t have written a book that’s twice as long as any of hers. More laughter. Anyway, the short answer is no, it’s not intentional. The longer answer is that I noticed it, too, at some point in rewriting, and left it that way. Like any of the few things in life we can actually control.

Don’t listen to me, Edith thought. Do the opposite of everything I say. I left this place to become someone and now I’m back and it’s clear I failed. It is better to do things by intent. It is better you make the world your puzzle box. Edith’s tooth ached as she clenched her jaw.

I don’t want to sound too woo-woo, but I believe in the novel as a living thing. They take so long to write, you’re inevitably several different people before they’re done. The novel becomes a shadow of your life. You step into the world and the world steps into you.

That was something Val had said to her. She’d never disentangle who she was from all the people she’d loved. She might as well have read part of the new novel. She might as well have broken down in front of all these twenty-year-olds, it would all come out the same.

This was good, though. She was right about writing. This was the only thing she’d dedicated a decade of her life to.

Some people can tame all the pieces. They know which belong. Some people—she gestured with her book—don’t. The girl seemed happy with this answer, as though she’d won an argument. Edith felt pleased. Felt like a writer.

The dinner after was a small production in the Alumni House. There were two married women, one a scholar of Romantic poetry and one in Hispanic Studies. There was a lanky man with long gray hair, damaged from being straightened; he’d given up on writing poetry to be department chair. There were three other professors, whose positions and names Edith forgot. There was a basket of rolls, pillow-soft and golden, which she did not touch.

God, Adam said to her quietly, remember going to these as students? They’d gone to every reading together senior year. Whether or not the visiting writers were good, producing a book was enough to charm Edith. To have part of yourself crystallize in the real world—a lingering thing. By now she’d learned you had to be comfortable with everything disappearing. The death of the last person who knew your name would come on a day like any other. The world a little lighter for your loss.

We were such babies.

You all should have seen Edith in college, Adam said to the table. Always first in line to get her books signed.

I was justified! Anne Carson only signed like five books before she went back to her room.

“I won’t be doing any more of that,” Adam said. Everyone laughed at his impression of the austere poet.

Were you so charming back then? the poetry professor asked. Edith eyed her, her wife beside her. Was she being flirted with? This was the reason to meet strangers: to make you alien to yourself. All your carefully rehearsed stories and tired interests, suddenly amusing again. She was charming. She was easy to love.

I was a math major. People laughed at her tone. I decided I needed to be more insufferable and that seemed the easiest way. More laughter. Edith took a sip of wine, took a roll.

The English chair was really indignant whenever she’d show up at these dinners, Adam said. “Shouldn’t you be doing calculus or something?”

And I pointed out that David Foster Wallace, Dostoevsky, Lewis Carroll—all started in mathematics.

He was such a dick about it! Adam flushed, smacking the table. They were a two-person comedy for academics. They could do a national tour. “Look what happened to Foster Wallace! And Lewis Carroll, why, he was diddling that Liddle girl!”

I should thank him, really. For years I wrote to spite him.

Well, the chair said, raising his glass of wine to her. Math major or not, we’re thrilled to have you here with us tonight.

Hear, hear! Adam said. He, and the chair, and Edith drained their glasses. It didn’t matter how much they drank. There was the pleasure of the moment. There was the warmth of the lights and salmon, cooked perfectly, served with lemon.

Conversation flowed. They talked about her work, about Philip K. Dick and Roberto Bolaño. Adam got into a good-natured argument with the Romantic poetry professor about Kathy Acker. However you feel about her, students always have something to say.

Wish I could say the same for Keats. The professor rolled her eyes and refilled her glass.

Keats never wrote about talking dogs, to be fair.

The Hispanic Studies professor was researching the memorialization of atrocities in Argentina and Chile. America’s comparative failure to reckon with genocide.

I feel like Germany only confronted their past because they had to, Edith said. No one’s made America do the work.

There’s something to that. But often these memorials are thought to be enough. The appearance of reckoning without the work.

Edith was drunk and tired and happy enough that when the chair asked what she was working on next, and Adam began to answer for her—She won’t talk about—she cut him off.

It’s about this friend of mine. Another sip of wine, another roll. Dessert was brought out on a silver cart. Reckoning with— With what? Her life, her death. The spaces they bridged and the bridges they burned. Maybe there was no need to close the prepositional phrase. Reckoning with. Full stop.

I didn’t know that, Adam said.

There’s nothing to know.

The chair—oblivious or eager to move past this quiet—said, Friendship is a tremendous topic in literature. From Don Quixote onward. Onegin. Crusoe and Friday. People went around adding examples: Brideshead Revisited, Frog and Toad. Edith was tempted to write these down, as though they might offer her tools to work through. To reckon with. Adam’s eyes stayed on her.

The moment passed. People wanted to know what it was like living in Texas. By the end of the night, everyone was effusively thanking her for joining them. She thought about asking if they wanted to give her a job. But no—let this be enough. To feel like a real writer, a real person. To feel warm. Not her endless days of love and hope and life with Tessa—but warmth all the same. Let the night end here, with nothing more complicated in the days to follow.