When they first touched each other they were eight, sleeping in an old inner room without windows in the basement. They were hyper and laughing hard, and then her eyes were close to the freckles on his shoulders.

They talked about gayness exactly once, just after Hazel and her mom moved across the province. They were on the phone and about to start high school. Hazel was in a stage of proto-transness, a stage in which she was terrified of herself and had no idea why.

She brought it up this way: “What do you think about gay people? Are they okay, or should they be killed? I don’t know.”

“They should probably be killed,” Christopher said.

“Okay.”

They talked on the phone a lot after Hazel moved away. She’d always wondered if Christopher remembered that. It would’ve been unusual for two boys. (“Boys.”) Her mom let her call him for twenty minutes on the weekend. Long distance. Hazel would say, “But you talk to your boyfriend every night for hours!” And Hazel’s mom, forever calm, would respond, “This’ll make more sense to you as an adult.”

It did make sense to Hazel now, if not in the way her mother probably imagined.

Christopher was always happy to talk. He didn’t have the same emotional needs as Hazel back then, and even as a young teenager, Hazel recognized that. But he always made time for her. He did.

Hazel last saw Christopher when she was twenty. Home from out west, knowing her boy days were numbered, as were the reasons to come back to this part of the world. She and her mom were at her aunt’s for Christmas, and Hazel walked from the other end of town in the snow, the creak of her boots the only sound in the pale afternoon sunset.

She walked in the door of Christopher’s house and no one was on the first floor. She went down to the basement, noticed a bedroom off to the side with power tools everywhere and half-installed hardwood floors. In the rec room, Christopher and a couple other guys were watching The Departed with a two-four of Bud. (There was a particular kind of American, Hazel had learned since, who was bummed to know that Canadians drank Bud.) One of the guys said he wanted more beer but hated the girl who worked at the vendor.

Hazel had felt herself teetering on an edge then, between a fear of how volatile it might be to continue knowing these boys and a distant sadness at the knowledge that she might never see these stupid fuckers again.

Funnily enough, there had been a trans guy in town, her age, who’d come out around a year prior. He’d announced himself, then right away skipped off to the city. Hazel brought up his name like a test, like hazarding an exhibition round.

“So you guys hear about …?”

“Oh God, the dyke!”