Sitting now in the middle of the gray water, with the sun sparkling down and the wind blowing cold, and this huge built-up city on either side of us, I wondered what I was heading to out there. I felt this sense of dread fall over me, which was strange, because all I’d heard of this building that was waiting for us was wonderful things, utopian things. Yet there was this fucking dread. What if ? What if ?

Lux once said that the things that seemed the best in her head always became completely shitted up the minute they got out of it and into the world. Her transition, for example. She told me once about the feeling of happiness and accomplishment and epiphany that she’d had when she worked through all the shit in her head, all the stuff that had been put there by a lifetime of living in this world, that said boy. All the clothes she’d been made to wear, the haircuts she’d been forced to have as a child, the pronouns people had put on her, the things people expected of her. She told me that for a few days, before she told anyone, everything had been perfect. She had walked around with a smile on her face. She had felt like everything made sense.

Then she told her parents and the what-would-Jesus-our- Lord-and-Savior-think started. Then the harassment started. Then she figured out that the thing that could be perfect in your head could be a disaster when it got outside of it.

What if this building was like that? What if ?

4 Getting to Brooklyn wasn’t the end of it. We still had a long walk, and while I’ve been to Brooklyn plenty of times, I’ve always gotten there underground. Things look a lot different above ground. I honestly couldn’t tell one street from the next.

José had a subway map, because he’s good with things like that. A long time ago, I had made fun of him for having it, called him a tourist and lots of other things. We had cheapo handheld screens and shit and nobody even used maps in a fucking decade. I was glad he had it now. We walked where the trains went, making our way slowly from one station to the next. It wasn’t super cold out, Januaries are like that. It wasn’t bad weather to be walking, but we’d walked all the way from the Bronx and we were starting to feel it. My leg had been throbbing for a while where the dog had bit me, even though the wound was almost closed. Our bags were heavy.