She passed nearly 100 percent of the time, but she didn’t get it. Only once every five or six months would a stranger mispronoun Tiana or say something snide. But she didn’t get it, and she wouldn’t ever, and nothing short of a notarized letter from Janet Mock saying, “THIS IS HAPPENING” would make her realize this.

A lot of girls were coming out in her city, which she’d just returned to after years on the coast. Some of the girls were having a rough time, and some were having a rougher time. She found them at parties and on the street and on the internet. She put girls up at her place now and then. She invited people over a lot. She wanted to make her home a place girls could go; that was her hope. This is what she told herself was important.

She tried not to get too drunk around these girls when she met them at a party or bar.

She volunteered at the local gay centre. She tried to make a fuss about stuff now and then, but it was exhausting and she quit.

She tried to put together a nice adult life. Her hometown was cheap and she’d scored a manager retail job and the city had plays and movies and dances and sometimes Tiana went to them. And for every night she went out searching for boys, there were four nights where she stayed home and read. There was a diner around the corner where she was a regular, the kind of diner that gentrification just worked too slowly in this flyover town to either steamroll or slow-boil prices out of reason. She could afford to live on her own, an old place in West Broadway, and she could afford to do nice things like go to a homey diner on the regular. It was nice. She thought to herself, God, this is nice.

On Canada Day, she unlocked her bike and rode around the city with a flask of rye and it was kind of great. It was hot and everywhere there was gravel and dust and it was dirty and muggy and the wind that blew down was cool and swirled around her bike and clothes and the walls of old concrete. She biked through the most ancient district, where there were fans in every window of every building that wasn’t empty. She biked west and there were men hanging out of every window in the back lanes. They hollered at her—but not in a nasty way. She waved as she biked and toasted them with her rye. By the time the sun set, she was pleasantly tipsy. She climbed the fire escape stairs opposite a nineteenth-century hotel discharging drunks. She watched them wheel around below her and wave, while above her the fireworks burst over the trees on the river. Tiana loved the shit out of days like this, she really, really did.

In the fall, she went back to the coast to visit the big cramped city where she’d come out, and where Tall Girls were more on the radar. Right away, she felt the repulsion on her like air, like bugs. She was swaying on the bus, enormous and looming, and a man reading a self-help book scanned her, and then pushed himself away to another spot. This large space opened up in front of her.