And everyone laughed.

“I have no problem with gay people,” Christopher said. “But gender reassignment …” A visible shiver came over him, something real and revulsive. He shook his head like he’d stomped on something crawly and was trying to forget about it.

When the two-four ran out, they all went to a party where the kitchen counters were so covered with bottles you couldn’t see the laminate. A snarling boy said, “Who the fuck is that?” when Hazel arrived and Christopher said, “It’s cool. He’s from here,” and the boy backed off and Hazel glowed as if she’d received wings. They all did shots, then played a drinking game, then drank rum out of Solo cups, then shotgunned beers in the garage with their coats on, and when Hazel stumbled into a wall, the boys laughed and said incredulously, “Are you drunk?!” It was seven p.m. and the moon was shining behind a blanket of clouds and after that they went to the bar.

Weeks later Hazel got on a plane and flew back west, and then she transitioned, then dropped out of school, and then fell away from all she’d ever known. And as the following decade churned, in tiny rooms in roiling bright cities, the thought of Christopher would flit down onto her, like a moonbeam startling her awake.

Ten years later, she crash-landed back home—untriumphantly bunking with her mother in the city, the prairie winter beginning its months-long descent into lightlessness. And, among other things, she began to search for him.

She didn’t have any friends left in Pilot Mound. Her aunt wouldn’t talk to her, and her mother didn’t know anything. Hazel couldn’t even fucking find anything about Christopher on social media. Last she’d heard, years ago, he’d moved to the city, too. Even his parents she couldn’t track down.

Idly and with pleasure, she set up her OkCupid preferences for him—boys of a certain age and height range. She looked for boys with red hair and dustings of freckles around their collarbones. She checked this every week or so. Whenever she heard of anyone with the name Chris, she would ask, “No chance you mean Christopher Penner, do you?”

Hazel really didn’t expect anything to come of this. Her searches were like periodically buying a lottery ticket: a nice, dependable, dopamine-filled surge where the come-up of hope somehow always eclipsed the comedown of disappointment.

She wasn’t doing much with her days besides going to AA and volunteering with a nascent sex workers’ rights organization, of whose members Hazel was somehow the only one who’d ever touched boy parts for money. The nights she was home, she made dinner for her mom, though usually Hazel’s mom was at her boyfriend’s place or at work, and usually that suited Hazel just fine.

She had no idea what to do with her existence—if she had a future, or if she wanted one. In the absence of the alcohol she’d flooded herself with for half her life, her tired, newly sober body had handed her a sense of alertness she hadn’t felt since she was a teenager. At the same time, she also felt herself turning into a slug as that body barely moved. Many days, she never left the house. She slept and watched Netflix and cooked.