Somewhere in her room was a picture of a young girl. It was from a long time ago, when Heath Ledger was fresh from his first round of Oscar bait and Kathleen Hanna was still sweaty from her last Michfest. The picture came from a fretty, alarmed article about trans children. Which sucked, but. The picture was lovely. The girl was wearing a dress, had a flower in her hair, and was—kind of amazingly for the time, she thinks—holding a baseball bat, ready to swing.

Like Tiana’d seen her mother do when she was a kid, she had carefully cut out the picture from the magazine and put it on her wall. And then a week later, she put it in a box because she’d had a visitor and her guts squirmed at the prospect of explaining why she had a strange little girl’s picture on her wall. She knew she still had the picture somewhere—she’d kept it for years. She looked through her closet but couldn’t find it.

She sat in a chair by her bed and thought. Kid might be graduating high school now. Maybe already had.

She leaned forward in the chair. She thought of a generation of girls who might grow up strong and unbothered and untouched, healthy, beautiful, learned, and full of love, who could fall into adulthood knowing girlhood, girlhood in full, having the chance at normal kinds of pain, who would grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and become oceans, gentle armies, thick with passed-down wisdom and love. She believed and took heart from that. She did.

She picked up her bottle. She was about to go to bed but then saw a friend’s message filling the room with light, so as she did, as she had always done, she picked up her phone and opened the message up.

OBSOLUTION

“I always knew I was shitty to you,” said David. “I know it doesn’t matter much now, but I’m sorry.”

Iris exhaled in a stream that dissipated into the cricket-filled North Dakota night. David scuffed his shoes in front of the Amtrak station. Beyond them, a red lineup of brake lights waited to turn into a little downtown.

“We were in college, kid,” she said. “And you were going through a lot.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks, that’s sweet of you.”

Iris shrugged. She had a boy waiting for her in New York. He sounded nice. David wanted to meet him. He could go to their dinner parties, and meet them for lunch now and then, and maybe tag along when her mom showed up to visit?

Okay, let’s not get hasty, kid.

They re-boarded, dumped their coats in the nest of their seats where they’d spent the last thirty hours, and Iris picked up this weirdo card game of hers. They went to the service car as the train moved through nighttime fields toward Minnesota.

Iris gazed out the window. “This is where my dad grew up.”