Aiden had brought along frozen smoothies that were starting to thaw. We pulled into a rest stop, and he handed me a deep green one before checking his tires.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m gonna get a hot dog, too. You want?”

“Ew. No.”

I shrugged, and he went off to a patch of cacti with his tripod. Maybe there was something restorative, if not 100 percent accurate, about the Gram, about framing a tableau with only the choicest cacti and leaving out the rest stop with its uniform offerings of hot dogs, cotton candy, coffee, and gender-segregated restrooms.

We got back in the car and drove through faded landscapes. I thought about myself as a girl, how I used to pretend to be mad when kids teased me for having a boy’s name. I had no recollection of wanting to be a “boy” as a child, as tempting as it is to try to revise history. I simply wanted to be a girl who was wild. My parents were almost androgynous to me in their matching T-shirts and jeans and boots, so the question of gender did not become poisonous until after they died and Margot tried to be a good guardian, draping outfits and accompanying tights on my bed before a celebration or party. Every time I was forced to put on a pair of tights, they chafed both my inner thighs and my soul, and yet I needed to prove to the world that we were okay, Margot and me, that we were still normal even after an avalanche.

After miles of emptiness, I spotted neon palm trees flashing across the front of the white box of a building in magenta, yellow, and orange.

“Let’s pull over,” I said.

“Pen . . .”

“Come on, it says diner in tiny letters. We can get coffee. You won’t be forced to eat saccharine pie with cherries from a can.”

“Fine.”

We entered through a curtain of hanging crystals and I praised my intuition. Servers of all genders wore checkered aprons and black platform shoes and posed by the host stand, braiding one another’s hair.

We were led to a sticky booth.

Our server, Lionel, had a nose ring, aqua glitter-nails, and a copy of the Inferno hanging out of their apron pocket. They set down a glass pitcher filled with what looked like bioluminescent water.

Aiden and I raised our eyebrows at each other. The liquid tasted like water with vague notes of moss. What sort of aqueduct had this come through? I asked myself, not yet ready to let Aiden into my inner whimsies.

Two ceiling fans turned slowly, and there was only one other occupied booth. A pile of black hair pooled down the vinyl booth-back.

We ordered coffee and it arrived in a silver pot with a slender spout. The coffee was as disgusting a drip as one could find anywhere. I didn’t mind. I diluted it with indeterminate nut milk. Aiden took his black.