And it was clear to David he didn’t have to. Being with Iris, in the way he was with Iris, it all felt luckier than he’d ever hoped for. He did go to a support group once … Everyone was sad or exhausted or angry. Urban exhaustion, itself, scared David (returned childhood memories he preferred to forget), and anger was not an emotion he understood. A woman complained of a doctor’s mistreatment—foot-dragging on getting her hormones—and David piped up with advice on how to talk to doctors better—his mom was one; he knew. They stared at him like static. So solely, they all seemed: sad, exhausted, angry. David’s id screamed at him on the bus ride home: This is the life I’d have? No thanks!

Plus, he wore his dresses a few times around Iris and she said nothing. He really was lucky with her. He had time to figure this out. Maybe later, he could take, like, a small dose of hormones? Nothing drastic. If his skin could feel less heavy, if it could feel softer and less gross to the touch, sometimes it felt like that would be enough to solve his internal screaming. He had to research this more, he supposed. But he had time; he was in no rush. He was so young! He knew. He was so young.

“I wish there were more men in the world like you, not less,” was a thing Leah’d said when he’d first come out to her. In the three years since, he’d carried that phrase around with him like an heirloom. A reminder of responsibility. This was the other thing: men were shitheads; he knew that. The obligation to stick around and be a less shitty shithead? It weighed on him.

Leah was the first one David had come out to, over AIM. The very first thing she had said was this: “As much as I used to joke (okay, dream) about you being gay, this isn’t a surprise. You’ve always loved women. I don’t mean in a creepy way. I mean you appreciate things about women in a way most men just don’t.” It had removed the first demon in David’s head, to hear this. Months later, Leah’d taught him how to do makeup, sitting on his toilet in an apartment above Hawthorne. “It’s an art, not a science,” she’d said. “Here, you want to do foundation first. No, lip liner works like this. Here, it’s okay. I’ll show you.”

So in the end, David could only think of it all: God, I’m so lucky. There was a weekend in October when Iris’s parents visited. They’d all gone to Pambiche, that Cuban place in Northeast with apartments above that were painted green, pink, and yellow. They sat on the patio and Iris’s mother pointed at a bay window hovering above them. “Can you imagine getting a little place there?” “Dreamy,” said Iris.

“It’s probably not that easy,” her mother said to David with lit-up eyes. “We’re so silly, being from the East Coast. We think it’s so easy to live anywhere else. Where we live, you know, there’s all these young people who just think they’ll show up in the city, and all of a sudden”—she gestured with good nature—“find the perfect place!”