I was spending a lot of time nervously searching stuff about hormones on the internet. It’s funny how much I take it forgranted now, because back then, the thought of having to ask a doctor, politely, for estrogen made me so anxious that it threatened to undo the whole thing. Elena suggested to me, over the phone, to wait until I got back to school to think about it.

September rolled around. My mom was slightly incredulous about the shabby mansion, carved into twenty-five little rooms, that I was moving into. People streamed in and out of the narrow front door carrying boxes and suitcases.

“This?” she said, looking across the gearbox at me.

“Yeah,” I said.

She hugged me outside and then drove away once I got my two suitcases out of the backseat. Once she was gone, I spotted Elena sitting on the porch, wearing a bandana around her forehead and big sunglasses that covered half her face. When she saw me, she grinned and came down to hug me. I winced a little bit when she used my new name.

Inside, people came and went, putting their rooms together. Murals covered every surface of the walls, months-old flyers corroded on a poster board outside the cavernous kitchen, cardboard signs taped to the wall indicated chore assignments, whose stuff was whose, and how to keep the public spaces clean. The furniture was all second-hand. None of the chairs matched and there were marker drawings and deep scratches all over the long, wide kitchen table. There was, inexplicably, a church pew in the kitchen. Elena told me, after she finished helping me unpack, about the tradition of “hippie Christmas” — apparently, there was a lot of good stuff to be had in the weeks after graduation if one rooted around in the dumpsters behind the houses on Frat Row. Working kitchen appliances, textbooks in original plastic wrappers, houseplants still clinging to life, bags of drugs, mysterious curiosities. The people who spent the summer here would go in the middle of the night, stifling their laughter and shushing each other.

The co-ops were a kind of paradise for the sort of post-adolescent who needs to “figure themselves out” on a large, permissive canvas of potential. I was like that, obviously, but there were extremes I didn’t know were possible. Elena and I walked past the open doorway of a guy who had stripped the curtains from the windows and was in the process of painting everything, including the floorboards, solid white. Elena told him it looked like “a temple to the sun” and he didn’t get that she was making fun of him.

“Is he just gonna, like, sleep on the couch tonight?” Elena said later. She was sitting on my bed while I hung up posters on the eggplant-purple walls. “It’s gonna smell like paint for days.”

“I guess so.”