My mom moved to a nicer place in Ann Arbor sometime in the last couple years, one of those neighborhoods where the professors and doctors live. It’s got two floors and a guesthouse at the end of the driveway, over the garage. The guesthouse is more like a cabin, or an extension of the garage — snug and insulated, but a lot of exposed wood. It’s got enough room for a sink, a bed, and a desk. That’s where I’m staying now, until I figure out what’s next.

It was full of leftover things from when my mom’s friend, fresh from divorce, had used it as an art studio while living in a tiny rental nearby. Paintbrushes, thinner, solvents, used palettes all piled in a corner. She’d bike there in the morning and leave a tiny painting in my mom’s mailbox at night before she left, about the size and shape of a halved envelope. Most of them were paintings of animals — a giraffe, a koala, a manatee. My mom had arranged them above the desk. To this I added a strand of Christmas lights and a pile of clothes and CDs on the floor. On the desk, I put a shoebox full of everything I needed to do my estrogen shot once a week, with the dwindling supply I got Marian’s friend to get me back in Philly. A full-length mirror in the shape of a truncated oval leaned against it.

Maybe the third day after I got back, I did my first estrogen shot since getting out of the facility. I came back from taking a shower in the house and ruffled the towel through my hair, which was almost down to my shoulders. At the desk, I pressed play on the little CD player on the desk, and Sonic Youth’s NYC Ghosts & Flowers started playing somewhere in the middle of the record from the built-in speakers. I got out the syringe and the drawing needle and the little vial and the little bottle of rubbing alcohol.

I always looked away when I stuck the needle in — I guided it into my left thigh as I glanced up out the window, to where the streetlight across the street illuminated the branches of the neighbor’s black walnut tree in a mess of half-outlines. Then, the blush of sensation spreading down from the injection point, not pain exactly but a heightening of awareness of the insides of my leg.

I put on an XXL t-shirt with the logo of a singer-songwriter on it that I had cut up into a tank top, with twin slashes underneath the armpits. It hung down to my knees. Under it, I wore a periwinkle sports bra, which was too tight around my rib cage. A girl at the facility had given it to me — it conferred no real support, but I liked that it was visible when viewed from the side.