This was how I was able to remain friends with Lenora, as we began to see each other again, through the conviction that Richard would be mine in the end. Lenora was unfailingly supportive as my appearance shifted, giving me pointers about how to live as a woman in the world, because while I passed almost all the time, there were still people who could detect that I wasn’t like other girls.

I once went to a party with Lenora at an art school friend’s loft, during that early period when I only started wearing women’s clothes. We walked into a large, open room painted dark gray with a pool table in the middle and a few dozen people, skinny guys in skinny jeans and pretty girls who seemed to hover around them, as one of the guys who was Lenora’s friend said hi to us. The party felt straight in a way that made me uneasy.

“Let’s just stay for a little while,” Lenora said.

I told her I’d circulate while she played a game of pool. I walked over to the kitchen, tried to join a couple of conversations that fizzled out, so I decided to go back to the living room to check on Lenora, but she found me first before I got there. Her brow was furrowed, her mouth clenched into a hard pout.

“We should go,” she said.

Lenora didn’t make eye contact with anyone as we walked through the now-crowded party. I spied her friend near the door as we left, but he only eyed me then turned back to his conversation and didn’t acknowledge her at all, while I heard mumbles and whispers as we exited.

“What happened?” I asked when we got outside.

Lenora explained that as she was playing pool, her friend started asking about me. Apparently, I looked familiar from a party of hers he’d gone to, but I looked different then. Lenora said he must be confusing me with someone else as she signaled with her eyes for him to stop talking, but he wouldn’t.

“I’ll spare you the details, but he was a jerk,” Lenora said. “We’re not friends anymore.”

Her loyalty touched me, the way she remained resolute in her friendship through the radical change in my appearance, when she must have known even before I said it out loud that this wasn’t just an experiment, what was happening to me. When I got home from that party, it was Ralph who was waiting for me at home, who made good on his promise never to ask me to take off my makeup again.