Before the story: I’m having bottom surgery next week, so if you’ve ever wanted to support my work, any donation to my Ko-fi or giving me a paid sub would be deeply appreciated. There’s absolutely no obligation, but it would help tremendously while I’m recovering.
This is also my first proper fiction story, which is mildly terrifying because apparently writing theory wasn’t enough suffering. I hope you enjoy it.
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Chapter One
The Door That Will Lock For Good
Two years later, Lena could remember almost everything about the last party except leaving it.
She remembered the box fan rattling against the living-room window because somebody had folded an old issue of n+1 underneath one corner. She remembered Isa spilling vodka and Diet Coke into the carpet and immediately blaming the landlord for choosing a color that showed stains. She remembered the shoes piled against the wall by the door, including dirty Converse, black platform boots, little leather Mary Janes, a pair of enormous New Balance sneakers belonging to a girl who had been saying for three years that she'd stop dressing like a male graduate student after FFS, and one pair of cheap silver heels whose owner spent most of the night barefoot because estrogen hadn't changed the fact that heels hurt.
There was a gaff drying over the back of a dining chair. Someone's bra was wedged between the couch cushions. A bag of injection supplies had been abandoned beside the fruit bowl because somebody had done her shot before people arrived and then forgotten to put any of it away. Lena remembered thinking that a sharps container beside a bottle of tequila looked completely normal there.
She remembered the heat. The window unit had surrendered before ten, and by eleven everyone had the damp shine of people pretending they weren't sweating. Simone kept hooking two fingers underneath the collar of her white tank top and pulling it away from her chest to let air inside. Whenever the fabric settled again Lena could see the bars through her nipple piercings, which made it difficult to pay attention whenever Simone was talking directly to her.
She remembered being happy enough to think something stupid.
‘These people are going to know me when I'm thirty.’
She was twenty-three, and the apartment was 1801.
Mara lived there, technically. After a while people stopped saying Mara's apartment and simply said 1801. Someone would text, "You going to 1801?" Somebody else would ask, "Wait, who's even there right now." A girl having a bad night might announce that she was heading to 1801 and wait for the group chat to understand this meant she didn't want to be alone. The number developed a life independent of the lease.
Mara had been one of the first people Lena met after she moved north. Lena arrived in the city with three suitcases, eleven months of estrogen behind her, seven hundred dollars in checking, and the private suspicion that every stranger could identify rural poverty by looking at her shoes.
Cities frightened her initially because there were too many witnesses. Where Lena grew up in eastern North Carolina, privacy came from distance. There were soybean fields behind the Food Lion and drainage ditches along roads that became completely black after ten. The nearest gay bar was an expedition. The nearest endocrinologist willing to prescribe estrogen without behaving as though Lena had arrived carrying an unexploded device was even farther.
For most of adolescence she'd never actually seen another trans woman in person, and the first had been herself.
She was seventeen, sitting in her father's truck in a Walmart parking lot almost an hour from home because she'd calculated that fifty-seven miles was probably enough distance to buy lipstick without recognizing the cashier. The lipstick was called Wine Not, and she remembered hating the name.
She applied it using the little mirror above the windshield. Her hand shook badly enough that the left side came out crooked, and she wiped it away with the sleeve of an old hoodie before starting again. Then she stared at herself.
She didn't look convincing. That was the word she used back then, convincing, before she understood how much violence she'd managed to fit inside one adjective.
Still, something happened to her face. The mouth belonged to a woman before anything else did. She looked ridiculous and beautiful and doomed, though mostly she looked possible.
Then she wiped everything away because possibility still had to be home before dinner.
For years, that was Lena's relationship to wanting. She found something she desired and calculated whether surviving possession of it would cost more than going without, whether it was lipstick, a skirt, her own name, or a woman looking back at her for longer than friendship required.
By the time she met Mara, Lena had become better at taking things, though she hadn't become better at trusting that nobody would punish her afterward.
Mara invited Lena to 1801 after meeting her at a dance night held in the back of a bar where everyone seemed to know who had fucked whom except Lena. She spent most of that first evening standing near the wall drinking a vodka soda too fast and pretending she'd chosen the wall deliberately. Girls kept brushing past her smelling like cigarettes, vanilla perfume and sweat. One of them touched Lena's arm and said, "Okay, your eyeliner is insane, who did that," and Lena spent the next hour turning the compliment over like it might be a diagnosis, because she was still at the stage of transition where praise from other trans women felt clinical. Mara noticed.
A week later Lena stood outside apartment 1801 with her hand raised to knock and briefly considered going home. Mara opened the door before she could. She was barefoot, wearing gray sweatpants and an old sports bra. "You can smoke on the balcony," she said, already walking back toward the kitchen like the tour was over. "There's usually food. If you run out of estrogen, check the butter compartment, somebody's always got a vial hiding in there." Lena laughed and said she'd never heard estrogen offered the way normal people offered sugar. Mara smiled and said, "You'll get used to us," before stepping aside. "Come in."
That was how Mara remained in Lena's memory, standing at the door with one hand against the frame. After that, Lena remembered the apartment more clearly than the woman whose name had been on the lease.
People came through constantly. Girls arrived after laser appointments with aloe shining across their upper lips and immediately asked everyone whether the redness looked horrible. Somebody would appear carrying an estradiol vial because she'd worked herself into a panic about doing her first injection, and six people would begin contradicting one another about whether she should use the thigh or the ass. One girl insisted the stomach was better until everyone shouted her down because she'd spent six months injecting into a place none of them could understand and nobody was letting that go.
A girl would announce she'd switched to progesterone and spend the next month attributing every emotion, dream and cup-size fluctuation to it. "It's the prog" became a full sentence, an explanation for anything from crying at a commercial to forgetting your keys. Another would stop because it was making her insane, then start again three months later insisting this time would be different.
Someone was always asking whether her tits had gotten bigger, holding her phone up next to a photo from six months ago like she was presenting evidence. Every girl at 1801 seemed simultaneously convinced estrogen had done nothing and that one missed shot would reverse her entire transition by morning.
Trans men occupied the balcony and complained about women. Trans women joined them and told them, kindly, that this was a symptom of low ambition.
Someone was always changing her name or going back to an old one. Someone would show up boymoding in a giant hoodie and leave three hours later in eyeliner because another girl had cornered her in the bathroom and said, "Give me your face for one second," and refused to be told no.
There were women six years into transition who could clock a surgeon from the shape of a forehead in one photograph and women six weeks in who'd taken four hundred selfies since Monday. A girl saving for bottom surgery called her account Pussy Fund and put twenty dollars in it every Friday like a tithe. Another swore up and down she didn't want bottom surgery and somehow still knew the dilation schedule for two different techniques.
Someone did porn, someone worked retail, and someone worked remotely and answered Slack messages with a drink in her other hand while everybody around her got progressively louder. Somebody always needed rent, and somebody usually knew somebody who could float fifty dollars.
Girls borrowed dresses and traded hormones when the pharmacy ran short. Somebody would leave a gaff behind and text the group chat three days later, has anyone seen the black thing that compresses my shame. Sometimes two girls disappeared into a bedroom for half an hour and came out insisting, unconvincingly, that they had only been talking. Nobody believed them, and nobody particularly cared.
There were nights when nothing happened, and those were the nights Lena loved best. Six people might sit around complaining about work while somebody did her shot at the kitchen table, wincing before the needle even touched her. Another girl would lie across the couch with her skirt halfway up her thighs because she'd forgotten other people could see her underwear, and nobody would say anything. Someone would peel her wig off because her scalp was screaming, make ramen at midnight, or let another woman lean in under the kitchen light and tweeze the little dark hairs laser had missed beneath her chin.
At home, transness had made Lena feel constantly observable. At 1801, it became boring, and she hadn't known boring could feel so luxurious.
People there knew hormone doses, old names, surgery dates, court dates, whose voice dysphoria got worse when she was tired, which trans guy needed help changing his dressings, which woman had Xanax, and whose mother still mailed Christmas cards addressed to a son who hadn't existed in years. They knew whose tuck came undone when she danced too hard, who liked being called princess during sex, who got weird if somebody looked at her breasts for too long, and whose genitals were a neutral fact or a wound or simply part of how she liked to fuck.
Nobody needed to convert those differences into a theory before going back to whatever they had been doing.
Lena mistook this knowledge for protection. At twenty-three, she still believed intimacy accumulated. If one person knew you deeply, that was love. If thirty people knew you deeply, perhaps that became safety.
The arithmetic felt obvious, and so had plenty of things before they happened to her.
Lena became mildly famous within this little world mostly because she posted too much. She had a few thousand followers. She had a talent for becoming funniest when she was angry, which encouraged her to become angry more often. A clip of Lena arguing with someone during a panel had escaped the room and circulated for several months. After that, strangers occasionally approached her at dance nights and told her they loved her account, or hated it, or both in the same breath.
A girl once met Lena in a bathroom and said, immediately, "Okay, I thought you'd be taller." Lena asked what about her internet presence had suggested height. The girl blinked and had no answer.
Her reputation became larger than anything she'd actually done. People who liked her called her brilliant. People who disliked her called her exhausting. She got invited places partly because she could make a room laugh and partly because there was always the possibility she might start something.
Someone had called her dangerous before, and at the time it sounded sexy. Dangerous meant argumentative. It meant somebody had screenshotted her post and sent it to a private Discord with, this bitch again. It meant girls whispered about Lena and still wanted to make out with her afterward.
Sometimes it seemed to make them want her more. There was a kind of transsexual social capital in being the girl everyone warned everyone else about while continuing to invite her over. Half the room could call you impossible and then ask if you were staying the night.
The word hadn't yet become administrative.
The last party happened in July.
Lena arrived shortly before ten carrying two bottles of orange wine she couldn't afford because she'd recently decided she was the kind of woman who brought orange wine to parties.
Someone shouted her name before she'd even gotten the door all the way open. "Celebrity's here," a second voice called from the kitchen. "Shut the fuck up," Lena said, delighted. Somebody wanted to know, "Why are you late?" Lena said, "I was working," and immediately got a chorus of disbelief. "You don't have a job," Isa yelled from somewhere inside. "I'm literally employed," Lena yelled back. "Nobody's ever once seen the evidence, that's a you problem."
Then somebody kissed her on the cheek, somebody else relieved her of the wine, and a hand grabbed hers and dragged her farther into the apartment. There were already twenty people inside.
Simone sat on the kitchen counter, and Lena saw her and forgot whatever she'd been saying.
Simone wore a black skirt short enough that when she crossed one leg over the other Lena could see the edge of her underwear. Her white tank top had gone slightly translucent with sweat. There was a faint shadow along her jaw because she'd skipped laser that week and apparently decided everyone else could deal with it.
Lena loved that too.
Simone watched her notice. That was her favorite trick.
"You look ridiculous," Lena told her, stopping in front of her. Simone glanced down at herself like she was surprised to find clothes there and asked, "Good ridiculous?" Lena told her, "You know which kind." Simone opened her knees.
Lena stepped between them.
They had been sleeping together intermittently for six months, which meant they occupied the sort of T4T relationship that required a flowchart whenever anybody asked what they were. They were friends who fucked, except sometimes they went on dates. They weren't girlfriends, except Simone had cried once when Lena slept with another woman. They weren't exclusive, except both of them had committed minor acts of espionage through Instagram stories.
Simone had Lena's estrogen schedule memorized but claimed this meant nothing. Lena knew which nights Simone slept without underwear because dysphoria made anything tight around her hips unbearable. They had each seen the other cry naked, which seemed more intimate than sex and substantially more embarrassing.
Simone hooked a finger through Lena's belt loop and pulled her closer. "You're disgusting, you're sweating on me." Lena told her, "You're sweating too." Simone said, "I'm glowing." Lena replied, "You smell like cigarettes." Simone said, "That's also glowing."
Then Simone kissed her.
She always kissed Lena like she'd already been thinking about doing it for an hour. There was no tentative first contact. Simone went straight for Lena's lower lip and pulled her closer until Lena's knees touched the cabinet beneath the counter.
Lena still held one bottle of wine awkwardly against Simone's hip.
Somebody behind them complained they were blocking the freezer. Simone broke the kiss just long enough to announce that nobody in this apartment respected lesbian intimacy anymore. The girl said neither of them had respected lesbian intimacy for as long as she'd known them, actually, and could she please get to the ice.
Lena laughed into Simone's mouth. Their teeth bumped, and somehow that made Lena want her more.
She put one hand against Simone's bare thigh. Simone shifted closer and hooked one leg loosely around Lena's hip, enough that Lena could feel the heat of her through both their clothes.
For perhaps ten seconds Lena forgot there was anybody else in the kitchen.
Then the refrigerator door hit her ass. "Jesus Christ," Lena said, and the girl told her to move, then. "You're animals," Lena told her. The girl said, "You're the one dry-humping in front of the ice." Lena replied, "It's my constitutional right." Simone murmured against her mouth, "I don't think the Constitution covers this." Lena told her, "I've never read it." Simone said, "I know. You can't even read your medication instructions." Lena reminded her, "You overdosed your estrogen for six months." Simone said, "My tits looked incredible." Lena admitted, "They did."
Simone smiled.
That smile was the problem.
Two years later, Lena would remember the small chip in Simone's front tooth, the way one side of her mouth lifted before the other, and the way she looked at Lena when she knew she'd won. She would remember loving that face.
At twenty-three, she thought loving a face meant you'd continue to know it.
Chapter Two
The Last Party
By eleven, nobody was arriving anymore and nobody wanted to leave.
Someone sat cross-legged beside the coffee table rolling joints with the concentration of a surgeon. Eli arrived carrying beer and got immediate complaints about the brand. A girl was redoing her eyeliner using her phone camera because she'd convinced herself one wing made her forehead look masculine. "It doesn't," three women told her in the exact same tone, and she erased it anyway.
Someone's estrogen alarm went off from beneath a couch cushion and three people checked their phones at once. A girl in a tiny skirt had peeled off her shapewear and stuffed it into her purse. "I'd rather get clocked than suffocate," she announced to no one in particular. Another woman was on the kitchen counter explaining to a trans guy why she'd widened her Grindr age range again. Someone shouted that nobody wanted to hear this, and everybody kept listening anyway.
Lena drank too quickly. She had always been more careful when miserable. Happiness made her irresponsible.
At some point she ended up on the carpet beside Jules, who had been on estrogen for three weeks and had already developed the familiar early-transition conviction that every twenty-four hours should contain observable morphological change.
"My nipples hurt like hell," Jules told her. Lena said, "Congratulations." Jules insisted, "I'm serious." Lena replied, "No, genuinely, congratulations." Jules asked, "When does it stop?" Lena said, "I don't remember," which was true and unhelpful.
Jules pulled out her phone and held up two selfies taken nine days apart. "Does my face look different." Lena studied them and said, "Maybe a little." Jules told her, "You're lying." Lena said, "I've been on estrogen for twenty-one days, Jules, I'm not an expert." Jules corrected her, "Twenty-three." Lena said, "Forgive me, elder."
Jules rolled her eyes and shoved her shoulder, then went back to staring at the photograph like it might rearrange itself if she looked hard enough.
Lena recognized the expression.
"Do you think my face is actually going to change," Jules asked. Lena said, "Yes." Jules asked, "How much?" Lena told her, "I don't know. Enough." Jules asked, "What does enough mean?" Lena said, "It means stop staring at yourself." Jules told her, "That's not an answer." Lena replied, "No answer's gonna make you stop checking."
Jules went quiet. Then, without looking up, she asked, "Do you think I'm going to be pretty?"
Lena looked at her.
For a moment she was seventeen again with Wine Not trembling around her mouth. She knew what Jules was asking because every transsexual woman eventually learned the language beneath the language.
‘Tell me there's a future body waiting for me that I'll be able to live inside.’
"You're already pretty," Lena said. Jules told her, "That's bullshit." Lena said, "Fine. You're gonna get hotter." Jules said, "Promise." Lena replied, "I can't legally guarantee estrogen results, Jules." Jules said, "Bitch," and held out her pinky anyway.
Lena hooked hers around it and promised.
Two years later Jules was beautiful. Her hair reached past her shoulders, her cheeks had changed, and she'd become very good at eyeliner.
They didn't speak.
Lena never found out whether Jules had independently decided she was dangerous or merely learned that Lena belonged to the category of women one should be careful around. For months afterward Lena wondered whether Jules remembered the promise.
She hoped she did, and she hoped she'd forgotten.
Both hopes hurt for different reasons.
Around midnight Lena went onto the balcony with Eli.
He wore a white tank top and jeans, and testosterone had been offensively generous to his shoulders. Lena stole his cigarette even though she had her own pack.
"You have your own," he pointed out. Lena said, "Yours tastes better." Eli replied, "That's not how cigarettes work." Lena told him, "It's not how testosterone making you hotter than me works either, but here we are." Eli asked, "Wait, do you think I'm hotter than you?" Lena said, "I never said that." Eli told her, "You absolutely just said that." Lena diagnosed, "Male pattern delusion," and Eli laughed and took the cigarette back.
Below them, headlights moved between buildings. From eighteen floors up, the city seemed almost quiet.
"I spent my whole childhood wanting to live somewhere like this," Lena said. Eli asked, "Did that survive contact with Providence rent?" Lena replied, "Barely." Eli asked, "What'd you think cities were gonna be like?" Lena said, "Anonymous." Eli told her, "You're the least anonymous person I know." Lena said, "I know thirty transsexuals and five normal people." Eli replied, "That's everybody." Lena told him, "There's millions of other people, Eli." Eli said, "None you need to meet," and Lena smiled, and then they went quiet.
Two years later she'd interrogate that silence, trying to remember Eli's face and whether somebody had already spoken to him about her.
Memory refused to become evidence.
Eventually Lena would understand that repeatedly cross-examining a memory only taught it how to lie.
Eli looked toward the street. "You know people love you, right?" Lena asked, "What the fuck kind of thing is that to say." Eli told her, "It means people love you." Lena said, "That's ominous." Eli replied, "You make everything ominous." Lena said, "Nobody says that unless they're about to euthanize you." Eli told her, "You're insane." Lena said, "So I've heard," and Eli put an arm around her shoulders, and she rested her head against him, and he kissed the top of her hair.
‘You know people love you, right?’
Two years later, she heard the sentence exclusively in the past tense.
Inside, Simone was lying sideways across the couch with her legs across Carmen's lap and Carmen's hand resting high on her thigh.
Jealousy hit Lena instantly, which was stupid. They weren't exclusive, and everybody Lena knew could explain nonmonogamy, relationship anarchy, compulsory monogamy, lesbian possession and attachment theory while remaining emotionally governed by the Bronze Age.
Lena sat on the arm of the couch. Simone looked up, smiled, and slid her hand underneath the hem of Lena's skirt.
Jealousy disappeared.
‘Theory had apparently reached its jurisdictional limit.’
"You two are disgusting," Carmen told them. Lena said, "You're the one with your hand on her ass." Carmen replied, "That's different, she likes me." Simone said, "I like both of you," unhelpfully, and Lena looked down at her and there was the smile again.
She wanted to bend down and bite it off her face.
Instead she kissed her.
Carmen made a theatrical gagging sound and someone threw a pillow.
For the next few minutes Lena half sat, half lay across the couch with Simone's head against her shoulder and Carmen's legs underneath hers. Simone absentmindedly traced circles against the inside of Lena's thigh while telling somebody, at length, that a specific facial surgeon had started over-filling lips.
"Your skirt's basically at your waist," Carmen informed Lena. "Everyone can see your underwear." Lena said, "Cool." Simone told her, "It's cute, at least." Lena replied, "You've seen this exact pair, Simone." Simone said, "Still cute today," like that settled it.
That was another part of T4T Lena could never explain properly to people outside it.
Eroticism could become completely domestic without becoming less erotic. A hand under your skirt while somebody discussed insurance, a girl kissing the side of your breast and then asking if you had spare syringes, or a girlfriend rubbing moisturizer over the razor burn beneath your jaw and then biting your shoulder hard enough to leave a mark could all belong to the same evening without contradiction.
Lena had spent adolescence imagining trans sexuality as something extreme because the world only showed it to her as pornography or pathology. Then she found women who could grind against her at a party and interrupt themselves to ask whether her injection site had stopped bruising.
The ordinariness moved her more than novelty ever could.
Later, Simone pulled Lena into the bedroom.
Nothing particularly dramatic happened, and that was why Lena remembered it so clearly.
They sat on the edge of the bed kissing while somebody searched for a missing phone outside the door. Simone pushed Lena's shirt upward and kissed underneath her ribs.
Lena's body had changed quickly during the previous year. Her breasts had come in late and then suddenly enough that some old tops stopped fitting. Pale stretch marks ran along her hips and toward the inside of her thighs.
She hated them. Simone liked them.
"These are getting longer," Simone said, tracing one with her thumb. Lena told her, "Don't inspect me." Simone said, "I like them." Lena replied, "They look like I got attacked." Simone said, "That's hot." Lena told her, "You think yeast infections are hot too, apparently." Simone replied, "I never said that." Lena reminded her, "You called me cute while I had one." Simone said, "I called you cute while you were complaining about it. There's a difference." Lena told her, "There was no difference in the moment."
Simone laughed and leaned down and kissed the mark. Lena stopped talking. Simone kissed another one, and Lena put one hand in her hair.
Outside the door, somebody shouted that they'd found the phone. Nobody inside answered.
Simone's mouth moved along Lena's thigh slowly enough that Lena felt heat rise into her face.
"You're blushing," Simone said. Lena told her, "I'm drunk." Simone said, "You blush when you're horny." Lena replied, "Shut up." Simone told her, "I'm right, though."
"Simone," Lena said, and the way she said it changed something.
For a moment the joke left Simone's face. She rested her cheek against Lena's thigh. "You're really pretty, you know that?"
Lena hated being told that when she wanted to believe it.
"Don't." Simone said, "I'm serious." Lena replied, "I know." Simone asked, "Why are you being weird about it." Lena told her, "Because you're looking at me like that." Simone said, "That's generally how looking at someone works," and Lena laughed despite herself.
Simone reached up and took her hand. Something about the gesture was more intimate than anything else they'd been doing.
Neither spoke while the music from the living room came through the wall as a dull pulse.
Simone squeezed her hand.
Lena squeezed back.
‘Please stay exactly like this.’
She hated the thought as soon as she had it.
Wanting permanence was embarrassing.
Neither of them believed in permanence. They had discussed how relationships became property, how lesbians reproduced domestic expectations, and how monogamy could become possession.
None of the analysis had prevented Lena from wanting Simone's toothbrush beside hers.
Eventually somebody knocked because her jacket was underneath the pile on the bed. Simone pulled Lena's shirt down, and they went back to the party.
Nobody asked what they'd been doing.
Around one, alcohol transformed everybody into planners.
Somebody wanted a surgery recovery fund. Another girl wanted a shared spreadsheet of doctors who'd prescribe hormones without requiring patients to perform desperation for them. Carmen wanted a queer housing network. "People need to stop solving interpersonal problems by inventing institutions," Eli said, which Carmen informed him was exactly why men had no political imagination. "You tried to move in with an ex after three dates," he reminded her. Carmen replied, "That's personal, that's outside the scope of this."
Somebody proposed an emergency estrogen stockpile. Someone else pointed out they already had one by accident, since nobody ever threw anything away.
Eventually Isa announced that everybody should just rent a house together.
"That would destroy every relationship in this room," Eli said immediately, and got booed. Lena told him, "You're spiritually forty-eight." Eli said, "I have roommates. That's called evidence." Isa offered, "We'd have chore charts." Eli asked, "Has anyone currently living at 1801 washed a bathroom towel this month," and nobody answered, and the housing collective died there.
Then Lena and Isa decided to go camping.
"I've never been," Isa admitted. Lena asked, "How." Isa said, "I'm from New Jersey." Lena replied, "That explains a lot." Isa said, "Fuck off," mildly. Lena told her, "I'll take you." Isa asked, "Where." Lena said, "Somewhere with no service." Isa replied, "Absolutely not." Lena reminded her, "You already agreed." Isa said, "You're withholding material information." Lena told her, "I can't use Instagram in the woods." Isa replied, "You can't use Instagram without starting a controversy, that's not a woods thing." Lena said, "That has nothing to do with camping." Isa told her, "It has everything to do with your credibility," and Lena laughed.
They spent fifteen minutes planning a trip neither of them would ever take. Isa demanded a real bathroom. Lena refused. "I'll simply die," Isa said. "Fine, I'll bury you somewhere beautiful," Lena told her.
Eventually they hooked pinkies, and Lena remembered Isa's nails, almond-shaped with one rhinestone missing.
They never went.
Three weeks later, Isa began answering messages differently. Paragraphs became hearts, plans became maybe, and eventually Lena noticed she'd disappeared from Isa's private account.
By September she was blocked.
There was no clean beginning to the exile. Nobody called a meeting or issued a decision. People simply made choices until enough choices in the same direction became geography.
At 1801, Lena still believed intimacy multiplied into something larger than itself. If one woman loved you, that was a relationship. If thirty people loved you, surely that became community.
Years later, she understood that thirty relationships remained thirty relationships.
Around two, Lena sat at the kitchen table with Carmen and Simone while Carmen complained about a woman she'd stopped dating. The woman had posted something vague online that Carmen insisted was obviously about her.
"How do you know it's about you," Simone asked, and Carmen looked at her like she'd asked how gravity worked. Lena told Simone, "Nobody in history has ever vague-posted without one specific person in mind." Carmen pointed at her and said, "Exactly."
Simone rolled her eyes, and they laughed.
Lena remembered how casually everybody discussed absent people. Someone was difficult. Someone was unsafe. Somebody had treated her girlfriend horribly. Someone lied, manipulated people, wanted attention, dated the wrong person, or just stopped showing up and became the subject of six competing theories about why.
The information moved through the room with the intimacy of gossip and the authority of collective memory.
Lena participated. She had warned girls about people, removed someone from a guest list because another woman said she'd be uncomfortable, and repeated private stories because she believed somebody else needed to know.
Sometimes she'd protected people, and sometimes she'd probably been unfair.
At twenty-three, Lena believed the distinction would remain visible because everybody involved had good politics.
At twenty-five, she found that belief almost touching.
Marginalization had taught them plenty, but it hadn't removed vanity, jealousy, fear, status, attraction or cowardice from the human nervous system.
Around three, the downstairs neighbor complained about the music and someone turned it down.
The party softened. People spread across furniture and floor. A girl took her wig off and set it over a lamp. Someone used a makeup wipe to get lipstick off another woman's mouth without being asked. A couple who had spent the first half of the night pretending not to be fighting had fallen asleep touching feet.
Simone sat between Lena's knees while Lena braided and unbraided a small section of her hair.
"You coming Thursday?" Simone asked. Lena said, "What's Thursday?" Simone replied, "Are you fucking serious right now." Lena said, "Oh. That." Simone told her, "I've been talking about it for a week." Lena replied, "I talk about a lot of things." Simone said, "So you're coming." Lena answered, "Probably." Simone twisted around to look at her. "No. I want you there."
Lena looked down at her. Simone had that particular irritation she got when she'd accidentally been sincere.
Lena smiled.
"I'll be there." Simone said, "Before one." Lena replied, "Midnight." Simone said, "Eleven-thirty." Lena repeated, "Midnight," and Simone gave up.
Lena went Thursday, and Simone went too.
Nothing happened.
Years later, that became the tragedy.
There was eventually a night when Lena walked into a room and Simone didn't come over, and another when Simone smiled from across a bar and remained beside someone else.
There had to have been a first time, but Lena never discovered which one it was.
Relationships were rude that way. They became history without announcing the date.
At four, someone played a song Lena had listened to constantly before transition.
She started crying.
Nobody had hurt her. She was drunk enough that nostalgia had become physical.
"What happened," Simone asked. Lena said, "Nothing." Simone told her, "You're crying." Lena said, "I know." Simone asked, "Why?" Lena replied, "I hate this song." Simone told her, "You're smiling." Lena wiped her face and said, "I'm drunk, bitch," and Simone laughed and moved beside her, and Lena leaned against her shoulder.
Across the room, Jules slept beneath somebody's denim jacket. Eli was talking quietly on the balcony. Isa sat on the kitchen counter eating cold pizza directly from the box. Carmen had fallen asleep with her head in another girl's lap, and somebody had removed one false eyelash and forgotten the other, so she looked permanently skeptical even while unconscious.
Lena looked around, then made the mistake of becoming sincere.
"I never had this," she told Simone. Simone glanced around and asked, "A disgusting apartment?" Lena said, "People."
The joke left Simone's face.
Lena immediately wished she could take the sentence back. Where Lena came from, sincerity had usually preceded humiliation.
"Growing up, I thought I'd never meet another girl like me," she said. Simone kissed the side of her head. "You have way too many now." Lena agreed, "Way too many." Simone said, "You're welcome." Lena replied, "You didn't hear me say thank you."
Simone put an arm around her anyway.
Lena watched Jules under the jacket, Isa eating pizza, Eli outside, Carmen asleep, somebody's wig sitting over the lamp, an empty progesterone bottle beside an ashtray, and a packet of makeup wipes next to a bag of syringes.
The apartment was filthy and smelled terrible.
Lena had never seen anything more beautiful.
‘I finally found them.’
That was the shape of the belief.
She thought she'd found the girls she'd imagined somewhere beyond her little town when she was seventeen and wiping lipstick from her mouth. She had spent years believing there must be a place where women like her recognized one another and recognition meant something.
1801 felt like proof.
At five, Isa started cleaning.
Lena tried to help and nearly dropped a glass.
"You're drunk and holding glass," Isa said, taking it from her. "You're creating future labor." Lena insisted, "I'm helping." Isa said, "You're a workplace hazard." Lena replied, "This is anti-worker." Isa pointed out, "You don't currently work." Lena said, "That's what they all say," and Isa laughed, then looked at her differently.
"You okay?" Isa asked. Lena said, "Why does everybody keep asking me that tonight." Isa told her, "You seem weird." Lena replied, "I'm always weird." Isa said, "Other weird." Lena asked, "What does that mean." Isa shrugged. "Tired, maybe." Lena said, "I'm tired."
Isa nodded, and that was all.
For two years Lena would wonder whether Isa had known something, or whether she had simply loved Lena enough to notice she seemed tired.
Eventually Lena stopped making the party predict its own destruction.
People had loved her that night. Their later choices didn't travel backward through time and falsify the affection.
That was what made everything worse.
At dawn, only a handful of them remained awake.
Simone lay with her head in Lena's lap. Eli had migrated to the floor. Somebody slept underneath the table. The city beyond the windows slowly changed from black to gray.
Lena ran her fingers through Simone's hair.
Nobody spoke. For once there was nothing to negotiate or explain.
They were simply exhausted together.
Lena looked at them.
‘This is my family.’
Two years later, that was the thought she wished she could reach backward and stop.
Chapter Three
The Wrong Tense
The first strange message arrived two weeks later.
A woman Lena knew casually asked if they could talk. The conversation was painfully polite.
"Some people have concerns about you," she said. Lena asked, "What concerns." The woman replied, "I don't want to speak for anyone else." Lena asked, "Then who exactly are you speaking for." The woman said, "Nobody, exactly. There's just, there's feelings in the community right now." Lena asked, "What the hell does that mean." The woman said, "I think you should reflect." Lena asked, "On what." The woman replied, "You're being kind of defensive about this," and Lena laughed about it afterward.
That was her first mistake.
Then invitations slowed. A dinner happened without her. Someone forgot to tell her about a party. A girl who usually greeted Lena by wrapping both arms around her smiled from the opposite side of a bar and stayed there.
The change was small enough that Lena could accuse herself of paranoia.
Soon she began inspecting evidence against herself: who watched her story, who stopped liking posts, whose girlfriend unfollowed her, who became suddenly busy.
She hated this version of herself and continued anyway.
Then dangerous came back.
This time the word was no longer flirtatious.
Depending on who Lena asked, she'd become reactionary, enjoyed provocation, treated disagreement like spectacle, made people uncomfortable, liked attention too much, or had started moving in ways that concerned people.
"There's a pattern," someone told her. Lena asked, "What pattern." The answer was, "You'd have to ask around."
The answer referred her to somebody else, who referred her to another person, until the pattern seemed partly composed of the fact that enough people had heard there was one.
Lena didn't think she was innocent.
She had been cruel. She had used information she should have kept private, made quieter girls feel stupid because she could talk circles around them, fucked people she should have left alone, and apologized badly. Sometimes she'd refused to apologize because she thought humiliation was being sold to her as accountability.
There were people she'd hurt, and there were also accusations she thought were absurd.
Both realities existed.
Dangerous was easier.
Isa disappeared first.
One day Lena realized she hadn't heard from her in over a week and texted, "hey, everything okay?"
Isa never answered.
Lena watched the little Delivered underneath the text for several days before removing the thread from her favorites. She didn't delete it because deleting it seemed too dramatic.
By September, Isa had blocked her.
For months Lena would sometimes remember the missing rhinestone on Isa's nail. It annoyed her that grief preserved details nobody needed.
Eli lasted longer.
They met for coffee.
"Are people talking about me," Lena asked directly. Eli said, "Yeah." Lena asked, "What do you believe." Eli rubbed his face and said, "Some people have legitimate reasons to be angry." Lena replied, "I agree." Eli told her, "That's not what I meant." Lena asked, "Then what did you mean." Eli said, "I don't want to mediate this, Lena."
Lena laughed. It came out harsher than she meant it to.
"Is being my friend mediation now?" Lena asked. Eli said, "That's not fair." Lena replied, "I know."
When they left, Eli hugged her with both arms, his chin against her hair.
Lena almost wished he'd refused.
He never blocked her. They simply stopped finding reasons to speak.
Simone took longest.
There was no dramatic breakup because technically there was nothing to break up. They had designed the relationship to resist definitions and discovered this also allowed it to die without requiring a funeral.
The jokes disappeared first, followed by the pictures and the random messages about being horny. Simone stopped sending Lena outfits before going out, and eventually Lena realized she no longer knew when Simone's estrogen day was because Simone had stopped complaining about forgetting it.
One evening Lena sent a photograph of herself in a new bra because she knew Simone liked that color.
Simone reacted with a heart.
Nothing else.
There had once been weeks when a photograph like that would've produced six messages, three obscenities, an unsolicited evaluation of Lena's tits, and an accusation that she was deliberately ruining Simone's concentration at work.
Now there was a heart.
Lena wished Simone had ignored it.
Several days later she typed, "do you still want me," and sent it before she could think better of it.
The typing indicator appeared, disappeared, then returned.
Lena watched it like a vital sign.
Finally: "I don't know what you want me to say."
Lena put the phone face down.
Ten minutes later she checked again.
There was no second message.
The next morning Lena wrote back, "I understand."
She didn't.
For months afterward she'd remember Simone sitting on the bed at 1801, cheek pressed against Lena's thigh, the little scratch of stubble against her skin, Simone's hand resting over her hip and their fingers locked together.
‘Please stay exactly like this.’
The thought became grotesque in retrospect because Simone hadn't lied.
That moment had been real and still failed to become permanent.
For several months Lena expected somebody to intervene.
The people around her talked constantly about accountability, abolition, transformative justice and repair. She imagined somebody would eventually decide that whatever Lena had done required something more sophisticated than social disappearance.
She imagined difficult conversations, specific harms, apologies, limits and some possibility of repair.
Nothing happened.
People made individual choices.
That phrase eventually became funny to Lena in the bleakest possible way.
Nobody had exiled her. People established boundaries. Nobody had coordinated against her. People shared information. Nobody instructed anybody to stop associating with Lena. People explained what continued association might communicate.
Every statement remained reasonable.
Together they produced an exile nobody technically owned.
By winter, women Lena had never met knew not to invite her.
That was when she stopped asking whether she'd been thrown out. What interested her was discovering that there'd never been anything capable of throwing her out in the first place.
There was no trans community in the sense Lena had imagined. There were trans people, friendships, lovers, apartments, organizations and group chats. There were girls who fucked after parties, held one another's hands in emergency rooms, lent money for prescriptions, helped with tucks, brought soup after FFS and sat beside each other through electrolysis.
There were women who loved you and women who hated you, and sometimes they were the same woman six months apart.
Lena had believed all those relationships added up to something with obligations of its own.
That was the faith she lost.
Shared suffering didn't create shared ethics. Knowing abandonment didn't prevent somebody from abandoning another person. Opposing prisons did not remove the human desire for sentences.
Many people who left Lena genuinely believed distance was necessary. Some probably had good reasons. Others were afraid, preferred other people, or had always disliked her.
No conspiracy was required. Ordinary people were sufficient.
Lena stopped saying chosen family.
She had once loved the phrase.
When she was twenty-three, the possibility that family could be chosen had felt miraculous because her original family had taught her that love could be something you survived.
At twenty-five, Lena understood the other word: chosen. The choosing continued.
Nobody became permanent simply because she'd once called you sister.
That didn't mean the affection was false.
Lena had spent months trying to make herself believe it'd been false because betrayal was easier to understand than contingency.
She eventually gave up.
Simone had loved her. Eli had loved her. Isa probably had too.
People could love somebody and leave.
The revelation was banal enough to be unbearable.
Lena's life became smaller for a while, and then it became specific.
A woman named Noelle started coming over on Wednesdays.
They never called it anything.
Noelle worked late and usually arrived after eleven carrying something terrible from a gas station. Sometimes they fucked. Sometimes they watched reality television. Sometimes Lena lay with her head in Noelle's lap while Noelle scrolled through her phone and occasionally showed her pictures of women they both knew.
Sometimes Noelle slept over and left eyeliner on Lena's pillowcase. Lena would wake with one of Noelle's legs hooked over hers, pinned against the edge of the mattress because two women with estrogen-softened hips somehow still managed to occupy ninety percent of a bed.
Once, while Lena prepared her injection, Noelle asked, "You want me to do it?"
Lena almost laughed and handed her the syringe.
"That okay?" Noelle asked, pinching the skin. Lena said, "Yeah."
Noelle injected her, then put a little cartoon bandage over the spot even though Lena told her she was being ridiculous.
Later that night Noelle kissed the bandage before pulling Lena's underwear back up.
Nobody witnessed it.
Noelle had simply remembered Wednesday.
That came to matter more than declarations about what anybody collectively owed anybody else.
T4T survived Lena's loss of faith because it could remain small. It could be someone seeing you naked without turning your body into a question, laughing when an estrogen reminder went off during sex, knowing where you kept your needles, telling you your eyeliner really was fucked up, or answering honestly when you asked whether you looked clocky.
Lena still loved trans women.
She loved women who could discuss FFS with the seriousness of military procurement and then spend forty dollars on cigarettes. Women who complained their boobs hadn't grown while possessing boobs Lena would've committed crimes for at nineteen. Women in little skirts and old men's socks, with expensive perfume over cigarette smoke, wig glue beside condoms and spironolactone bottles loose at the bottom of purses.
She loved women who knew transition could feel sacred at breakfast and become a bureaucratic inconvenience by lunch.
She stopped requiring any of them to prove something about everyone else.
Noelle was Noelle. Simone had been Simone. Isa had been Isa. Eli had been Eli.
The difference sounded small, but it had cost Lena almost everything to learn it.
Two years after the party, Lena found the listing for 1801.
She had been looking at apartments for unrelated reasons when the address appeared.
The apartment had been renovated. The old carpet was gone. The walls were landlord white. The kitchen counters had been replaced with something gray and vaguely marble-looking.
The staged furniture made the living room seem enormous.
Lena had never realized how much room people took up.
She clicked through the photographs: the balcony where she'd stolen Eli's cigarette, the bedroom where Simone had kissed the stretch marks along her thigh, the kitchen where Isa had accused her of creating future labor, and the living room where Jules had hooked her pinky around Lena's and demanded a promise.
She wondered whether the new tenants knew how many estrogen injections had happened on the kitchen counter, or that somebody had once cried in that bathroom because her laser technician missed a strip beneath her chin and three women followed her inside until she laughed.
She wondered whether the bathroom mirror still contained some faint trace of the dry-erase marker they used around the edges.
TAKE YOUR MEDS.
TEXT ME WHEN YOU GET HOME.
YOU'RE HOT.
Lena could no longer remember whether the last one had actually said HOT or FINE.
That bothered her because she wanted the apartment remembered correctly.
The apartment didn't care.
She closed the listing.
Her life had continued. There were women who loved her and women she could call. There were friends who knew everything and friends who had never asked. Some people had heard stories before meeting her and eventually decided for themselves what to do with them.
Lena stopped asking anyone to declare which version of her they believed.
She was twenty-five.
She didn't want another community.
People heard this and assumed she meant she wanted to be alone.
She didn't.
Lena wanted friends, lovers, somebody who could call at two in the morning, women whose rent she might help pay and women who'd drive her home after surgery. She wanted somebody whose body she could learn without requiring the body to symbolize anything.
She wanted obligations that belonged to actual people and could therefore be discussed, broken, repaired or ended by the people who had made them.
She wanted to know whose hand she was holding.
She didn't need the hand to represent everybody.
Sometimes she still thought about the final morning at 1801.
Sometime after six, Lena had fallen asleep on the carpet. When she woke, somebody had placed a blanket over her, and her cheek hurt from the floor.
The apartment smelled like cigarettes, perfume, stale alcohol, cold pizza and people who had been sweating in the same rooms all night.
Simone slept nearby with one arm thrown across her face. The edge of her skirt had ridden up and one strap of her tank top had slipped down her shoulder. There was a faint lipstick mark underneath her jaw that Lena thought might be hers.
Lena reached over and pulled the blanket across Simone's legs.
Simone stirred and, without opening her eyes, found Lena's hand.
Her fingers closed around it.
Lena froze.
Simone squeezed once, pulled Lena's hand underneath her chin and went still again.
Lena lay there listening to her breathe while somebody snored in the hallway and the box fan rattled against the window.
Outside, the city had begun waking.
For a few seconds Lena had no idea where she was.
Then she saw Jules sleeping beneath somebody's denim jacket, Eli curled on the floor with one shoe still on, and Isa against the couch with her hand resting inches from an empty pizza box.
There was lipstick on a mug beside Lena, somebody's estrogen vial on the kitchen counter, a bra hanging from the back of a chair and one silver heel underneath the coffee table while its partner sat by the door.
The apartment looked completely used.
Lena felt Simone's breath against her knuckles.
‘I'm home.’
Two years later, Lena still remembered the exact pressure of Simone's fingers around hers.
That was the cruelty of it.
The apartment, the love, the desire, the stupid estrogen jokes, the girls asleep on the floor, and the woman holding Lena's hand in her sleep had all been real.
None of it had promised permanence.
Lena had added that part herself.