“Let’s toast to my name change,” I said, hoping she’d feel a little guilty about missing the court date after my last-minute text.

“What should I call you now? Bubbles?”

“I took the Ruth out and left the initial.”

“Not terribly dramatic. How’s Margot dealing with all this these days?”

My jaw tightened. She always took Margot’s side. “She says she’s grieving for the old Penfield, which is shitty to me because in all the years after my parents died, she never once let me see her sadness, and now here I am, alive and trying to flourish for fuck’s sake, and she’s wearing a mourning dress and covering all the mirrors. She started following my Gram, but now I’m not using it that much.”

“Well, it’s a new era. Give her a break. She’s trying.”

Jillian was talking about herself, how I needed to make space for her stupidity. Where was the middle ground, the mythological bridge between experiences? A certain lightness, a way of turning things over like compost, letting air in . . .

“Well, it was a sort of breakthrough when Margot told me that she started watching the TV show where people cut vegetables into animal shapes really quickly and that there’s a transgendered person on it.”

“See, it’s a start.”

“I think I understand the smallest fraction of Black rage at all the missteps white people make in trying to become allies, accomplices, actual human beings.”

“Yeah,” was all Jillian said.

The bridge was not sturdy.

The first conversation where we dug into race came during college after another police shooting of an unarmed Black person. I, overcome by horror and guilt and wanting to bring everything together and closer and up to a soulful fever pitch of no more bullshit, texted her to say, I’m with you, which I somewhat hoped would be followed by I’m with you, too, Pen, but all I got was a K, and then at brunch, after I made a long heartfelt proclamation about how I stood with Black Lives Matter and had made a sizable donation, like any good white person, she stirred her drink and said, “I want to be more than the visceral abstraction of another Black body.”

Around that time, she had started speaking with a forcefulness that betrayed how tense she had become, how being the only Black person in her office had not radicalized her in the political sense, but in the fleshier beingness of existence. She wanted to be more than not-dead; she wanted to be living.

“Even tho Black Lives Matter is presumably about the living, the movement is situated in the endless deaths of Black people at the hands of police and the entire white system of power,” she’d said, and tho I had been waiting all of my twenties for her to bring up race, in order to link all my reading and theorizing with her real experience, once she started speaking, I did not know what to say. I was afraid of her hating my whiteness and I froze up, letting guilt wash over me in an annihilating wave.