At the time, David didn’t realize electric bills were a game to Ray, like beating a high score, numbers that meant whatever they felt like they meant. So David turned the heat back down and got his robe and said, “I had such a good time with Iris, man. It was really good to see her.”

The months went on. David got closer to the moody bandana’d trans woman from the Arnold house. At one party, as David blubbered about hormones (“Do I take them? What if I don’t like them? What if they make me sick? What if I die? What if they make me depressed?”), she said, “Hey hon? What you want and what you need are the same thing.”

David didn’t believe this, but it did make him think.

That fall, he began dating this girl who lived in a creaking walk-up off Sandy, and when she told David the rent his mind blew up. “That’s not what this kind of apartment is supposed to cost!” And a world he knew gave way to another. The girl was short and pierced everywhere, and when he brought up the whole gender-issues thing, she breathed in sharply and said, “I think androgyny is hot.” Being honest, it was the kind of relationship he fell into? A thing that happened to him. The girlfriend connected him with a second job dishwashing, since data entry wouldn’t carry him far once school ended.

The following spring, David graduated from PSU. Like a chump, he went to his commencement at the Rose Quarter, and when the crowd broke, he realized he hadn’t made one real friend at that school, not one, and he threaded through the throng alone. He left the arena and stood on a corner in slacks and a sweater, waiting for Connie to pick him up. They went out for an awkward dinner together with his girlfriend at Sivalai, that Thai place on Stark where the food was perfect and bleary-eyed cheap, where the owner high-fived you walking in and hugged you going out.

Then. One Saturday that July. David got cut from work early and emerged to stand in front of the restaurant in a black skirt with red ovals. It was uncommonly humid, air and windows waxy, sweat covering his back under his shirt. He felt the stink of himself rising into the street, but when he realized My girlfriend thinks I’m off at midnight, endorphins popped in him like oxygen. He texted Ray to see if he wanted to go dancing.

Recognizing this hooray-no-girlfriend-tonight feeling, he thought, Fuck. Again? David, what is wrong with you?!

Buzz in his bag. Probably her. He sat on a bench, pulled on his hair, opened his phone guiltily, and it was Iris: Hey sweetiepants! I’m drunk near your restaurant, whatcha doing?

The feeling of sweat and grossness flickered brighter exactly once in his body. Then he called her. “Hey drunkface!”