“You can stop apologizing now,” she always says. I don’t know if I ever can, don’t know how much regret it’d take to return to what we had as girls. As it is, we’ve made a distant love out of a bond that seemed once like life itself. We’re at home in each other’s imperfect recovery, the imperfect pasts we forget, remember, live around like conditions no one deserves but eventually, almost certainly, contracts. This I know: the certainty of tragedy and respite; Leah’s body across oceans and time. She is one beginning of my story. My mother is another. But there are more. Summer 2017, for example. Fifteen years ago. Some chain wax center in West Hollywood and my half-naked body reclined on a sheet of butcher paper. And every transformation that followed, every body I became. Up until now it’s been that beginning I’ve clung to, the past, my girlhood. But it’s my future on the table now, a future reality that’s mine to create. An old entrepreneurial script returns to me and I see that my story, which for so long I’ve kept silent, a source of shame, is the key to my next life, the rebrand I’ve been waiting for. Procedures are not the only measure of transformation. Nor is Instagram. But Aesthetica™ has worked. I am ready. I can speak. I can survive.

I’ve kept far enough behind Isabelle and her mom not to be an obvious tail. This is what I tell myself, though perhaps I’m wrong. We weave up and down the alley and I reach in my bag, remove my phone again, check the screen while I walk. The crowd has lifted, or I’ve surrendered to its press. I’m safe, if stifled, and the drugs I thought had failed make the phone I hold a mirror in which my own willingness to see failure stares back at me like a body I don’t want. I look at my reflection. I try to count her angles. From one she is beautiful, from another she is stuck, wrong. Then time has passed and she’s a spectrum. I select Leah’s last text, watch the cursor, blinking. I move to my Instagram, open my messages, press the reporter’s name. “I’m ready,” I write, and send. I know where to begin.