Holly comes back with wine, and then the man with cat ears comes up to jaw at Ava and lead her away to some other circle. “Popular girl,” Gemma remarks.

Holly giggles. “Yeah, dude, everyone at work loves her. Sometimes I’m like, ‘Hello! Original Team Ava over here. A little appreciation?!’”

“Original, eh? Got any stories I should hear?” Gemma says it jokingly, but Holly’s expression turns thoughtful. She lets a silence sit between them.

Then Holly says, “Here’s one.” She lights another smoke and sits by the firepit. Gemma follows suit.

“So it was almost Christmas,” Holly says. “And we were chatting online. I was like, ‘Whatcha doing for Santa Day?’ and she said, ‘Ordering pizza and watching every Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.’ I thought she was joking. As you might guess, she wasn’t. So I was like, ‘Fuck it. Do you want to come to Alberta with me?’ I was leaving the next day! But she rolled up to my apartment at six a.m. with a bag. And that girl never left her fuckin’ house in those days.” (Mmm, thought Gemma.) “We drove to my stepmom’s in the mountains—”

“Wait, wait, wait”—Gemma laughs—“you’re telling me you show up at your family’s house in the wilds of Alberta with your transsexual buddy one night, like, ‘Surprise!’?”

Melancholy crosses Holly’s face. “My stepmom’s house was like that,” she says. “Everybody was always welcome in her home. It was one of those places. She had this big rambling log house … It was just one of those places. I texted my dad I had a friend coming; I believe his response was ‘Cool, we’ll put a sleeping bag in your room, please tell me that unlike my crazy daughter she eats meat?’”

“Dad sounds all right.” Gemma smiles.

“He is. They’re not together anymore, which—anyway. But dude, Ava had such a good time. I’d almost never seen her that happy. She usually fucking hates Christmas … ”

Holly’s eyes are suddenly glassy with emotion. This makes Gemma feel cold. Gemma feels a way about certain flavours of sympathy from cis women, cis women believing they’d witnessed something fragile and private, thinking they’d glimpsed trans pain or joy. Joy that wasn’t fragile and often wasn’t joy. Gemma can respect such good intentions. But she’s not excited about them.

Holly blinks and she’s bubbly again. “So we have a great Christmas, and then it’s Boxing Day. Ava and I are both kitchen peons at shittyass restaurants and we’ve got work the next morning—”

“Hey homos!” yells Ava. “Can I introduce you to someone?”

Holly turns on a dime. “Shall I hold that thought? Allow me to hold that thought.”

They go to Ava’s circle—work talk that Gemma can’t follow. She drinks another glass of wine. The sun begins to dip below the horizon, and she looks back to the lake. She can just make out some splashing. Almost certainly kids, all right. Bored teenagers. That whole thing. Age she is, Gemma probably knows some of their parents. People have kids young around here.