For all my saltiness, I never thought I would be allowed to participate in group rituals as a trans, or that the world would bend to include Aiden.

The orchestra played, and the air was amber, sweet and liquid and stuck.

After the ceremony, guests were free to walk in the sand or hide under the tent eating oysters. The couple stayed down by the water, posing with Rachel’s family. Only certain factions spoke to one another because of inheritances lost and regained. I stood with Stone, watching the Remedios clan, with their parasols and luxury watches and children who fought over Agatha’s leash and their desperate hold on wealth and their inability to wear their own desires. Meanwhile, Aiden’s mother was surely back in their house, on her couch, with her coffee, hoping that her husband and her child would not kill each other. And his twin? I couldn’t say.

I left Stone sitting on a pillow and went to procure her a glass cone of champagne, throw away the eggs, and find Aiden’s coach. I was proud. Finally, he was moving back toward his shadow. How simple it would have been for him to cut off the unsavory family organ and hide the rest of his life among celebrities and plants, getting yearly bonuses from the Rhiz for his excellence.

One of the catering staff, Rob, had scouted out a spot on the other side of the cliff wall that jutted out toward the water. Rob was to dig four posts into the sand and wrap a long-ass ball of twine around them. When the orchestra paused for a thirty-minute drone cymbal set, Aiden would make his way over.

I walked toward the table and was stopped by a round-faced leather daddy in a possibly vegan leather vest and pants, with nothing underneath.

“Good afternoon, Penfield,” the leather daddy said.

Surely an Operatrix.

I bowed to him and did not ask about my current status with the Rhiz.

He bowed back.

I grabbed a cone from a caterer and delivered it to Stone. I told her to meet me at the spot in fifteen minutes. She was content on her pillow, watching the guests with anthropological curiosity. I found Alicia at her post by the northern corner of the tent, and she pointed out Aiden’s coach to me. He stood alone by the one of the ice sculptures.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” he said, drinking a seltzer.

The ice artiste had chiseled a cascade of dicks in holes and hands on boobs and mouths under butts and grabbed hair. In the heat, breasts melted, and chubby dicks slimmed.

The coach seemed kindhearted, not macho, the type to hold ice on a friend’s bruise. He was white and young. He’d mastered the dress code by wearing a sand-colored button-down shirt that encased his muscles and loose navy slacks and sandals.

I wondered if he had a traumatic brain injury.