Soon, he invited her over for dinner, and when Nicole said, “Why don’t we do a bar?” Ant suggested Buddies without hesitation. He was really excited to meet her. Eight-thirty on Sunday if that wasn’t too late?

That Sunday Nicole napped in the afternoon, and then woke at six to winter darkness, the lights from the Chrysler factory across the way shining into her room.

She lifted her computer onto the bed and opened herself to touch her cunt. She jerked off before dates for the same reasons anyone did, she supposed. Also, she’d learned, often the hard way, that sometimes she came off too eager.

Nicole watched straight porn while rubbing it out. Boring ol’ exhaustingly misogynistic straight porn. Who gets to choose what does it for you? Gay porn had never done much for her, tranny porn could be fun but was too close to home, and queer porn, well, she’d tried.

She took a shower, soaping up her stinking pussy with Vagisil and delicately washing it clean. She shaved her legs and arms, her face, those crop circles around her nipples that had survived a decade-plus blast of estrogen. She got out and did her hair.

Her outfit? Nicole didn’t do loud (she’d tried that), and she didn’t do cute (she’d tried that). She liked black and dark blue with quiet patterns. Today, it was a navy blue dress with pinstripes and a silver half-slip underneath. Black tights and black boots. And when she did her face she put on black mascara but no lipstick or eyeliner. Some time ago, Nicole’d tried this combo and decided she passed better that way. Who knew how true this actually was, but. That was how Nicole did her makeup now.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck youuuuuu!” That was her neighbour next door. Nicole jolted and listened. Silence.

Her neighbour yelled like that often, and he always sounded mad and violent. Nicole could never hear the sounds of another person. It always sounded like he was alone.

She’d called the landlord after this first happened. He’d said, “You feel unsafe? Call the cops.” Nicole didn’t want to do that. Later, she’d asked her other neighbour on the floor, “Do you ever hear screaming from number two?” and the neighbour’d said, “No, no, not ever.”

“Fuck! Fuuuuuuck!” Nicole preferred to leave when this happened. So, lucky her, she was already going.

She looked in the mirror at a tall, fat woman wearing mascara and a navy blue dress. She had never gotten over this experience of mirrors. The gap between her internal sense of self and the figure calmly looking back at her—it had grown over the years, not narrowed. She wouldn’t call it dysphoria exactly (that had waned; it truly had). It was more unfamiliarity, a disidentification that some days felt more powerful than all those depressed teen years spent in the bathroom, squishing her face, pulling at her eyes, pressing her breasts together in strange fascination of the alien body in the glass.