And Zoe … oh, Zoe. Zoe had always stayed in touch. She’d gone back to Eugene and stayed there, and when Vera went home to see her mom, Zoe would train up and visit. Connie and Zoe actually got along real nice. Once, they were all cruising down Division near Vera and Ray’s old apartment, and Vera looked up at the hurtling lines of condos above her and said, “It’s like they decided to put in a canyon.”

Vera’d left New York and wound up in rural Minnesota, living in a back-to-the-land queer house and working as a nurse in an ER. It was stressful as fuck but secure, and the work suited her. It gave her and Connie a lot to talk about, too.

Vera had a girlfriend she referred to as “my sweetie,” a tech tran going apeshit for the second Bernie campaign. The sweetie lived in Milwaukee. They’d met on HER. Vera had always only loved women. That never changed. Vera loved driving to the sweetie’s place and back. The sunset-slope of trees and hills. Gentle commas in her quiet little life. She was still kind of a loner, to be honest, even though her relationship was good. Vera didn’t really know what to do about that.

Now and then, she’d remember certain moments. Screaming at those dudes on the subway, or snapping surly insults at her friends. She’d remember: In those years, I could get angry. What had happened to that anger? Where did it lie, sleeping and lysogenic within her? Occasionally, Vera considered these lump-shaped memories of her rage, rare anomalous recollections that surfaced unpredictably, like outsized moons. She would remember, yes, that’s how she’d felt. But she couldn’t remember what that feeling had felt like. In an odd, melancholy way, it was almost like as she progressed through womanhood, she’d reverted to elements of her gentle teenage boy self. This wasn’t as contradictory to Vera as it would have seemed when she was younger. But it was strange.

Rural Minnesota. It was all right. She tended to pass now, so. She rarely got shit. It also didn’t snow out here as much as she thought it would? The sweetie once made fun of her for this. “Winter is an obsolution! It’s a relic of the twentieth century! Fake news!” Vera had rolled her eyes. “What the fuck is an obsolution?” The sweetie pulled out her phone and recited: “‘An old media format that is no longer popular or easily accessible, such as floppy disks, VHS tapes, or stone tablets.’ I like to think of it as when something no longer translates,” the sweetie explained. “It means something so wholly different now.” Interesting enough. Though: it definitely got colder than it did back home, but Vera was never, like, cold in the house? “It’s the structures,” the sweetie said absent-mindedly. “Where you grew up, you never get a real freeze. They didn’t need to build stuff that strong.”

Vera did like this girl. Long as she stuck around, Vera’d stick around, too. The sweetie had a power-femme thing going on, wore suit jackets and blouses with shiny slacks and lipstick. Paid out the ass for a studio in Milwaukee. A studio in Milwaukee! The real obsolution was a cheap apartment, Vera thought. Folks still used that phrase, but. It wasn’t useful anymore. Vera said “folks” now instead of “people.” Anyway, she and the sweetie did love each other, and Vera could see it working. She’d see. Things had worked out for Vera, really. Vera was the kind of transsexual things tended to work out for.