I deposited my shoes in the pile and then, after hesitating, pulled off my shirt, scampered into the river and found a rock in a deeper spot of the river that hid me up to my waist. Irvine’s swim trunks billowed under me with the current.

I was sitting next to Steph. I turned and said hi.

She looked me up and down. “‘Sup, Kieran. Or — K?” She looked at me inquisitively.

“Uh, either’s fine.”

“For sure. So what’s new with you?”

I contemplated putting my head underwater instead of answering. “Well, um, I just moved back to Ann Arbor. I’m working for my dad right now, and — ”

“Ahhh, cool. You went to Michigan, right? What for again?”

“Yeah. Um, I did a double major in English literature and sociology.”

“Mm. You were in — Philly? New York?”

“I lived in New York for a bit and then I moved to Philly with my, um, I guess you’d say ex-girlfriend. And now I’m here.”

“Gotcha, gotcha.” I tried to make a furtive glance down at my chest seem casual. She noticed, or I thought she did.

“What are your pronouns, by the way?” she said, casual as ever. “Irv called you K, but is it like the letter, or like C-A-Y? Sorry for just calling you Kieran out of the gate.”

“Um. Yeah, I’m not too public about it, but I go by Cay now. Like, the second one. And uh, like, they/them I guess? Or she/her if you want to.”

She seemed nonplussed. “Word. It’s nice to see you, Cay.”

It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. (I’ve been Cay ever since.) Steph continued asking me questions:

“Are you gonna stick around here?”

“Probably not, I just needed, um, I just needed a break.”

She sighed. “I’m on break, I guess, too.”

She went on to update me on her life: She was working in an office at EMU; before that she worked for U of M at the vast labs on the north side as an assistant to a chemist — she was hoping to go to graduate school the following year, but had been summarily fired when the chemist was denied tenure. She still wanted to go to grad school, and named a long list of institutions where people were working on what she was working on, but was disillusioned with academia following her firing. She told me that she was just hoping to get to a better place with her mental health — she had been diagnosed with BPD at about the same time she had been fired — before she could think about her future. I nodded along.

Hanin splashed over and offered their gloss on the situation (that everyone who worked in academia was selfish and that it wasn’t worth it). “Hi Kieran, by the way,” they said.

“Find me a place where I can do science all day that isn’t graduate school or, like, the military,” Steph said, clearly irritated by the interruption. “And she goes by Cay now.”