Such an idea had been a balming thought, for a while, a mediating safety wire on which David could move across a canyon from “Fuck, how do I live as a boy when I wish I were a woman?” all the way over to “Fuck, I am a woman.” But now, with its attendant realities fully bearing down on David, the thought of keeping his old life became slack and impossible. Because. Well.

Like—

Okay, put it this way. Let’s say he got on hormones and picked a new name and kept at least the restaurant job and rolled the dice with his mom. Let’s say he accepted his life would become less safe, but he could deal: he knew the stats; he was white and he wasn’t a prostitute and the odds of random murder were in fact low, so buy some pepper spray and ride your bike more and get over yourself. Let’s say he did all that and still came home to his awful apartment and played Smash. Two questions: a) Would Ray see him as a girl? And, more importantly, b) Would he even see himself as a girl?

Nope.

Five years ago, when David was eighteen, the stern but loving architect had learned of David’s gender issues and sat him down in the living room. The architect had said, “Some people, they’ll never be happy. Doesn’t matter what they do. If they think they want to have a sex change surgery, lose weight, quit their job. Doesn’t matter. They’re still not happy. And what you’re experiencing, David,” he said, with hope and gentleness in his eyes, “is no different from what millions of young men over centuries have experienced. Searching for a solution, but it’s a solution that doesn’t come. The only thing available? Be happy with who you are. It’s hard to learn. But transgendered: it’s something I tolerate but would never respect or support. And if I didn’t tell you this, it would mean I didn’t love you.”

It was the only time the architect ever told David he loved him. Connie had nodded at this solemnly.

David had no reason to disbelieve his stepfather then. Still didn’t, honestly. It was all very reasonable. And in the subsequent five years, he would be in a skirt alone in his room, often stoned, sometimes drunk, sometimes both, and a whirl would appear in his body, and visions would come of his skin soft and glittering, covered in translucent layers, his hair falling everywhere, breasts under his clothes, without any doubt on earth in this spinning world that he was not a boy. No, no doubt at all. The only other times he felt that way were mornings in a lover’s bed (never his own, never, ever his own), his eyes closed under the sheets, and he would shift his body in the bedding and imagine his lover and himself in this spinning, lucent sway. He would move to touch her—and in that fraction of time between beginning to move and actually touching her, that was when he most felt like a girl. The unreality he entered in those whisper-snapshots of seconds making a small and vibrant internal match to his drunk and high visions alone in his room, subsumed in his otherworldly, glowing, filtered, and frail version of himself.