While many old buildings repurposed into bars had an obsequious, self-conscious feel, always winking at you when your wine at the old shoe factory arrives with a submerged shoelace, Piastres was dark and unfinished. The forge still stood in a once-neglected corner, and the building hadn’t been sold because the already-wealthy children who inherited the building from their grandmother could not be bothered to venture past Bedford Avenue, for fear of ending up in lands beyond the reach of their car service.

I wanted to celebrate my name change but didn’t have the energy to fill Jillian in about Blithe and the hex.

I spoon-fed her pieces of my life, morsel by morsel.

Outside the bar, I heard low chatter and glasses clinking.

By the door, a dog’s paw print had been pressed into the cement. BLOOPIE, 2005. I caught sight of Jillian’s bun and felt the usual hesitation about entering a place I used to go to before I transitioned.

Head to toe flow, head to toe flow, hands on pants. I started my mindfulness exercise.

Oh, fuck it, I’m not that fragile.

I tapped her shoulder. “Heyy.”

She put down her drink and turned. “Hi, Pen. You’re looking good, hot actually, except for the fact you’re wearing a polka-dotted sweater and striped pants. I would do you.”

I tried to let my irritation and the phrase power-clashing float off into the noisy bar.

“You look good, too.”

She did, in a generic straight-woman way, with a white button-down shirt and black dress pants, no hint of hipness about her, and that was what I admired about Jillian. She was something of a constant in my ever-shifting universe. She’d even kept a Clayton High School Greyhounds sweatshirt and had worn it one Sunday morning when I stopped by her apartment with coffee. She was hungover and wanted to complain to me about cis dudes.

“It’s better than girl talk, you know, because you’ve seen both sides. You could be the ultimate negotiator.”

I was already too cozy under a fleece blanket watching Clueless without any Witchy burnt-sienna smells to start arguing about how I was not Switzerland in the battle of the sexes, that in fact I had my own battles against the entire gender system, as well as an ever-growing need to assert my sexed-up masculinity and press all my discarded feminine objects (an old purse with lush flowers painted on it, a horse poster) between waxen paper. Her parents had bought her an apartment in the city, and the womb of parental comfort had stunted her emotional intelligence.

I ordered a glass of champagne from the bartender who used to ignore me for about fifteen minutes before I was on T, and occupied the no-man’s-land of not passing as a man, woman, radical no-fucks queer, or anything, really.

There had been freedom in that impenetrability.

“Is champagne girly?” I asked Jillian.

“Only if you’re giggling while you drink it,” she said.