At the end of the book, when Maggie decides to return to her village a dishonored woman instead of marrying Stephen, she ends up drowning in that same river with her brother, Tom, after it floods. I read the book in April, around the time I was making plans for the summer, and that ending threatened the protective fort of learning I had built around myself. On my spring break visit to New York that year, Papa told me that my younger brother Tony had been arrested, because he was driving with a friend and an illegal gun had been found in the car. Tony too was seen as a different race when he got to the States, except Latino and not white, a perception that led to him getting involved in gangs and now facing juvenile detention at thirteen.

“Maybe you can come to California and help him,” Papa said.

As the most educated person in my family, I was certainly in the best position to navigate the American legal system with my brother. But going back to California also meant getting sucked into the muck not just of Tony’s arrest but of Mama’s addiction and the overwhelming expectation that I existed to support my family like a good Filipino child. When I finished The Mill on the Floss, I became convinced I couldn’t drown with my brother, that I needed to reach the bank of American success before my family dragged me down.

So instead of planning to go back to California, I applied for a summer grant to do research on women’s literature at the British Library. When I got my acceptance, it meant that I would once again drift further away from my family and travel to Europe for the first time, alone.

10.

May 2014, a month after I published my first article about being trans, I woke up at dawn between two naked men, on the top floor of a town house in Park Slope. I’d followed the rules of straight womanhood for over a decade, and it hadn’t made me happy, so I wanted to test my boundaries, push myself to be with people in ways I hadn’t before. That was when Barrett and Jason came along, a bisexual couple I met online who were interested in dating a woman.

I turned on my side to face Barrett, the one with whom I felt a stronger romantic attachment; Jason felt more like a friend I enjoyed having sex with. Bald and a decade older than me, Barrett had left his own rural upbringing in Alabama to become a modern dancer and interactive artist in New York, which led to a career as a digital consultant and allowed him to unexpectedly come into wealth. He and Jason didn’t know I was trans when we first met, but I sent them one of my articles and, as I had hoped, they treated my gender as a nonissue.