The next morning, I was irritable after a night of sleeping next to Aiden, who rolled back and forth across the mattress, knocking into me. Even the desert outfit that he’d brought for me, light linen pants and a heat-stabilizing T-shirt and soft leather sandals, hardly soothed.

He had woken up at six to run around the lake. Instead of going back to sleep, I decided to meditate in the comforting strangeness of the motel room. Minna and my therapist had recommended the practice, but because of the pressure to somehow succeed at meditating, I’d always declined. At Rita’s, I was freer.

Aiden and I went to breakfast. We sat across from each other over our plastic bowls of cornflakes, sipping shitty coffee. Blithe was ignoring us from over at the rester table. In the sharpness of my fresh mind, I realized that he might think of us as I thought about Aiden, these bright and untainted beings. Shit.

“Hey, man, how do you keep up all your regimens? Where’d you learn all this discipline?”

“My father,” he said flatly, and a whiff of pain curled under my nose. “My whole life he’s gone to the boxing gym every other day at six thirty a.m. He was there when my twin and I were born. There’s a picture where he’s holding us in a hospital gown with a sweatband around his head.

I didn’t want to say cute if his parents were now estranged from him.

“But, like, how do you do it?”

“Well, I do it because when I don’t, I fall apart. If I don’t work out, I become unbelievably depressed. As much as waking up early sucks, it sucks less than the alternative. And this Gram stuff, let me ask you: Why do you think I photograph myself in favorable lighting every single day?”

Whoa. Even though I’d begged for it, I wasn’t ready for his realness.

“Because of all the frames that never fit.”

At the airport, I requested a wheelchair so everyone would know something was wrong with Blithe. Aiden was dropping off Blithe’s car at his parents’ house. His celebrity status meant that he would not have to go through security. I texted him that things were going smoothly and asked if he could get us into the special airport lounge. He didn’t respond.

At airports, it was always a shock to see so many normal families at once, screaming at and ignoring each other in matching airport sweatpants.

I was almost nostalgic for the wrong future, which would have turned a Bio-meter sickly red.

Blithe and I reached the security desk, and I handed over our tickets and IDs. Mine was from two years prior, when I’d begun dog-walking in the city as a new trans. I’d grown my hair shoulder-length, put it up in a man-bun, wore ribbed Henleys with a button open to flakes of chest hair, and joined a climbing gym, trying to evoke some long-forgotten adventurer. I put my fifty apartment keys on a carabiner and went to an REI outlet to get climbing pants and a synthetic Scylla fleece that Margot would never let me buy as a kid because it was “over-athletic,” even though now, in the 20—s, she wore yoga pants over her narrow hips like you wouldn’t believe, along with those high-performance gel clogs that had holes in them.