PRAISE FOR GIRLFRIENDS

“Girlfriends sounds a loud bell announcing the change of guard: a generational arrival. Here is a writer who can scrap with the likes of Ann Beattie or Richard Ford but attends parties to which those boomers (or for that matter, we millennials) would never get invited.”

—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby`

“Emily Zhou’s stories remind me of late night phone conversations with a dear friend — a space that always feels fresh, no matter how many social triumphs and dysfunctions are nursed and examined — and where despite impossible ambiguities and distances, love strikes.”

—Dodie Bellamy, author of The Letters of Mina Harker

“Emily Zhou is a writer that doesn't let you take sides. These exquisite and discomforting stories are untidy, hilarious, heartbreaking, and always satisfying. Zhou is a true witness. This is the fiction we've been waiting for.”

—Corinne Manning, author of We Had No Rules

“Reading these pages immersed me in the slow transformative thrill of refusal. Emily Zhou knows how to arrive at an ending. Her stories capture the texture of those moments in which we turn away, not yet knowing what we're turning towards, but certain whatever we’ve become used to is over.”

—H Felix Chau Bradley, author of Personal Attention Roleplay

“Soaked in melancholy and the easy rhythm of café hangs, ad hoc photoshoots, and cutting remarks, these seven sharply observed stories navigate identities, fraying relationships, and the parties and mores of today's transsexual demimonde. Here Emily Zhou comes fully into her own terrifying powers: a writer to watch, just as she's watching all of us.”

—Jeanne Thornton, author of Summer Fun

Copyright © 2023 by Emily Zhou
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means — graphic, electronic, or mechanical — without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review.

Published by LittlePuss Press, Brooklyn, NY

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.

A version of “Affection” was previously published in Joyland, 2023.

Cover image by Liu Xiaodong

Three Transsexuals, 2001

200x200cm Oil on Canvas

© Liu Xiaodong, Courtesy of Lisson Gallery

Cover design by Zoe Norvell

Edited by Casey Plett

ISBN 978-1-7367168-4-7 (print)

ISBN 978-1-7367168-5-4 (e-book)

Table of Contents

Affection

Performance

Means to an End

Separate Ways

Do-over

Ponytail

Gap Year

girlfriends

Emily Zhou

Affection

Affection

After Sylvie found out that Marina was dropping out of graduate school, she sent her a long, philosophical email that ended with an invitation to her new girlfriend’s housewarming party at the end of the week, with the implication that they’d talk it all out there.

Marina didn’t respond to the email. Sylvie used to send her links to Instagram flyers for events around campus: mixers for grad students in the humanities, a “queer and trans clothing swap” at the one gay bar, themed happy hours. This was just like that, exactly like that.

On Friday, she got back from work and realized that she would, despite herself, regret it if she didn’t go. It was better than nothing, and nothing else was going on, and she knew barely anyone else in this town. Wading into her barely unpacked bedroom, she found her one good dress and some lipstick in the bottom of a suitcase, gritted her teeth as she made herself pretty while leaning over the bathroom sink.

An hour later she got off the bus on the other side of town and followed the map on her phone to a short, dead-end street. The sun had just slipped out of sight. In the few lit windows in the suburban bungalows, couples watched TV and families ate dinner. Light and the smell of smoke came from the backyard of the house on the corner, hidden by a tall wooden fence. She took slow steps down the street, examining each house, before arriving at a big, tall Victorian mansion at the end of the street.

She double-checked the address and then stood there, dis-believing, until a pair of men came around the mansion from the side yard and walked past her, seeming not to notice. She went on standing there. When they were almost out of sight, one of them turned around and called out, “it’s around back, honey.”

She opened the gate and shuffled cautiously around the house. Sure enough, just behind the side yard there was a lower building with a separate driveway — an old, two-story carriage house under the shadow of a few big, twisted trees. Purple light and electronic music came out of the windows. The heavy double doors on one side were flung open and small groups of people stood in the gravel in front of them. Marina walked past them without saying a word and stood in the entryway.

Inside was one long room with a kitchen at one end. A couple dozen people — young, queerish, wearing flannels and jeans or big skirts and hoop earrings — milled around, sitting on each other’s laps or leaning against walls, gesturing with drinks in their hands, drifting around, never alone. No one seemed to pay much attention to her as she stood there, chewing on the end of a strand of hair and looking around the room for anyone she knew. Watching the motion of the crowd, a familiar feeling of immobility settled in her. She willed herself to take a step forward, then another one.

She spotted Sylvie on the other side of the room, on a couch draped over her girlfriend, Perrin, who was spindly and had a lot of facial piercings. When Marina shuffled over, the two disentangled and Sylvie gave her a brief hug, her hands only just touching Marina’s shoulders before drawing away. Perrin nodded and smiled at her.

“We have to talk,” Sylvie said to Marina, shouting to be heard. “I’m sure I’ll run into you. I want to give it a good chunk of time. Maybe outside.” With that, she kissed Perrin on the back of her neck and rose from the couch. After a moment, Perrin got up and followed her.

Marina took their spot and looked around. After a minute or two of feeling very outside of the scene, with everyone talking loudly and touching each other, Marina politely asked the boy next to her for a hit of the orange bong he was smoking. He wordlessly handed it to her. She inhaled too hard, coughed, and then couldn’t stop coughing. People looked over at her from their conversations.

“Water’s in the kitchen, babe,” the boy next to her said, looking sympathetically at her.

She got up and caught her breath in front of the sink, drank two glasses of water, then realized that she was already alarmingly high, to the point that talking to someone would be complicated. For a moment she sank into the pleasurable sensation, her whole body floating away from where she stood on the surface of the earth, then she felt the resignation, the muteness, come back. It faintly occurred to her that Sylviecould have introduced her to the rest of the circle. Maybe Sylvie had given up on her too.

She sat back down and tried to just let her mind rest neutrally on the scene in front of her. At least I’m here, she thought. And then: How hard can it be to just sit there and wait for something to happen?

She found that she could calm herself, prevent everything from floating away, by focusing on the body language of the people right in front of her: two gay-looking guys and one vaguely nonbinary-looking person with an undercut wearing a silver jumpsuit. She didn’t stare but let her eyes sort of drift over the trio as they moved their hands, drank from red plastic cups, adjusted their bodies.

“I said, what’s your name?”

She blinked. The silver jumpsuit person was looking at her.

“Marina.”

Silver Jumpsuit leaned in and widened their eyes. “Oh, you’re Sylvie’s friend! The writer.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“What do you write?” said one of the gay guys. The other one had run off. Marina got a fresh look at him and noticed that he was very attractive. Her eyes ascended from his hands up his long, thin arms fluted with muscle and spotted with freckles, to his shoulders, bare in a black tank top. There were little red flowers embroidered on the thin strip of fabric that covered his collarbones. He had a face as square as a Roman statue and a nest of brownish curls that got in his eyes.

“Poetry,” Marina said.

(Was it possible that he would be into girls? Maybe she wasn’t, like, girl enough yet for him to be, like, categorically uninterested? It’s not like in a sane world her pronouns would be a determining factor there. She let herself fall into that hypothetical. She was wearing a dress, and had long hair that was up in a braided bun, but, well, that was about all. But then she had the thought that men and women are beautiful in different ways, and it’s not like your credits transfer over.)

“What kind of poetry?” he said.

“I mean, I — I’m not really writing. I mean, I’m not really writing anything right now, but I did write poetry before. Sorry, I’m really high and I didn’t get your name. Either of your names.”

He laughed and held out his hand. She felt what she imagined to be an electric charge go up her forearm as his fingers curled under her hand.

“Nico.”

“He’s Nicki sometimes,” Silver Jumpsuit said.

“Not right now,” he said, smiling as if embarrassed.

“I’m Marina. Full-time,” Marina said.

Silver Jumpsuit nodded. “I’m Aubrey, they/them/theirs.”

Marina nodded back. “Um, how do you two know Perrin?”

“I work with her at the gallery,” Nico said.

“I show my work there a lot,” Aubrey said. Their voice had shades of vocal fry around the edges. “I’m a photographer, and Nico and Perrin are basically the only actual gallerists in this town that show, like, art that takes risks right now.”

“Cool,” Marina said, unsure what the expected response was.

“I think I want to smoke a cigarette,” Nico announced.

“Yeah, I’ll come with,” Aubrey said.

He seemed bored. Marina looked at him again. “Me too,” she said.

♒

They went upstairs to a dim hallway and out to the roof through Perrin’s bedroom.

“Finally,” Aubrey breathed into the hot night air. “Ugh. A moment of calm.”

“Amen to that,” Nico said, sitting on the sloped tiles and looking out into the deserted street. Before long they were talking about something incomprehensible to Marina. He handed her his lighter. She lay on her back and watched an air-plane passing between mackerel clouds way up there, all her being focused on its flickering track.

Gradually, Aubrey’s conversation with Nico dried up. They turned to Marina. “So, like, what do you do now,” they asked, “if you used to be a poet?”

“I think I’m still a poet,” Marina said, not sitting up. “I haven’t forgotten how to do it.”

“That’s real,” Aubrey said.

“Is the Nicki thing like your drag queen persona?” Marina asked, turning her head to Nico.

“Yeah, from back when I lived in Chicago,” he said. “It’s sort of becoming its own thing, though.”

“Oh,” Marina said.

When the silence seemed to stretch out, she asked Aubrey if she could see their photographs. Aubrey obligingly pulled up their artist website on their phone.

The pictures were arranged in a grid that moved when Marina swiped at the screen with her index finger. Black-and-white pictures of parts of naked bodies, zoomed in to closer-than-intimate distances, to an abstracting closeness that rendered body parts as collections of shapes. A hand grabbed a thigh covered in flower tattoos, a hand held a knife flat to a torso, another hand held a mouth open, the rest of the head out of view. In most of them, she couldn’t discern the number or gender of their subjects, for all the overlapping limbs and indistinct layers of fabric covering and revealing by turns.

“Wow, these are — intense,” Marina said, flicking through the grid faster.

“That’s the word everyone uses,” Aubrey said with evident satisfaction.

“It’s hard to describe their stuff, right?” Nico said. “Like, I dunno, so much art about bodies is so boring, or self-congratulating, like the artist expects a gold star for showing people doing uncomfortable things or even just for displaying the body. Aub is more interesting than that.”

“Definitely,” Marina said.

When she looked up from the phone at Nico, she was surprised again by his beauty and looked back down, unseeing, at Aubrey’s art, to disguise her eyes.

“Definitely,” Marina said again. She gestured with her hands and continued: “The, um, scenarios that these people are in seem kind of dangerous, or aggressive, almost? But there’s this sense of affection there, even if you don’t get to see the whole person. Or, like, the fact that you don’t get to see the whole person, but you get to see their sense of affection, even if that affection is dangerous — you know?”

Aubrey smiled. “Yeah, exactly,” they said.

“Can you guess which ones are me?” Nico said.

Marina looked back at the phone. She picked one at random and looked between him and the phone. It was a photograph of someone’s hairy, skinny torso with four female-looking hands palming it. He looked back at her with an expectant face, and she locked eyes with him for a moment.

“No,” she said, and Aubrey laughed.

“One time when they had an opening it was full of our friends pointing at the wall and going, ‘that’s me!’” Nico said. “They bring the camera everywhere. I bet they have it tonight.”

“Do you?” Marina said.

“Oh, yeah,” Aubrey said, smiling and not looking at her. “I take a lot of pictures at parties just for, like, myself, Instagram, you know. I don’t do it that much anymore, but, y’know, I like to have the option.”

“We could get more drunk and take pictures of each other,” Nico said.

“Sure,” Aubrey said. “I’m not taking it out here, though, and I don’t really feel like taking it out downstairs; it’s like, as soon as I take that thing out everybody is suddenly not being themselves, they’re acting. I bet Perrin would be fine with us using her bedroom.”

They crawled through the window and Nico sprawled out on Perrin’s bed, his arms splayed behind him. The room was small and neat — museum postcards pinned to the walls, an incense burner next to a jewelry rack and a little makeup mirror on the dresser, cream-colored bedding. Nico reached behind the bedposts and found a switch for some red LED lights that snaked around the top of the walls.

“Cute,” Aubrey said approvingly as the room turned a deep, computer red. “Maybe I’ll keep the color in these for the first time in forever. Grey to red. Probably not though. Keep those on, I like that kinda dim light.”

They finished attaching the lens to the camera and pointed it from across the room at Nico, who smiled a coy smile at it. Marina watched Aubrey get progressively closer to Nico’s face with the camera lens until it was almost right up against it. Nico covered parts of his face with his hands and giggled while Aubrey snapped pictures. Eventually he grabbed the camera out of their hands with a single graceful gesture and took one with the flash on right in Aubrey’s face when they tried to take it back from him.

“Oh fuck you,” Aubrey said, laughing. “Here, you two can amuse yourselves with that thing, I’ll be back. If you break it you owe me six hundred dollars.”

I get it, Marina thought. This is fun. It’s a game.

“Honestly, when you suggested this I was worried I’d have to get naked like everyone in those photographs,” Marina said once Aubrey was gone. She sat on the floor facing Nico, who was still sitting on the bed.

“I mean, we could,” he said.

“Display the body,” Marina quoted, imitating Nico’s lisp.

“It’s kind of bullshit but you have to believe in it for it to work,” Nico said, aiming the camera lens at her. She instinctively started to cover her face, and then something in her made her drop her hands and stare head-on at the device. She had no idea what facial expression she was making. He snapped the shutter and the flash went off, blinding her.

“What’s bullshit?” she said, blinking. “Getting naked for art?”

“Yeah,” he said. “And just, like, in general. You have to suspend doubt.”

“I feel like you’re asking me to take off my clothes,” Marina said recklessly.

“Knock yourself out, girl,” Nico said, taking another picture, with the flash off this time.

“Sure,” Marina said, and before she could think she had undone her bra and taken off her dowdy shirt dress. “Let’s do some nudes.”

He laughed. “Okay, fine. I’m no Aubrey, but I’ll try.”

They traded places, Nico on the floor and Marina standing next to the bed, the LED lights coloring her bare skin a deep mauve. Neither moved for a moment. The only solution to this situation was to move, she thought, and she was immobile.

She experimentally covered her mouth with the back of her forearm and Nico clicked the shutter once. She dropped her hand; he clicked the shutter again. Marina sat heavily on the bed, crossed and uncrossed her legs, cracked her neck, undid the swirly knot at the top of her head and heard the small clattering of her hairpins bouncing off the wooden floor as her hair cascaded down the side of her face. She arched her back so that her rib cage protruded and her breasts disappeared, she craned her head way to the side. Click click click. He kept looking up and over the camera body at her, smiling. She smiled back, came close to laughing a few times but kept herself in check. It took some practice to not flinch at the snap of the mechanism.

“Okay, okay,” she said finally. It could have been five minutes or an hour. She waved her hand at him and then lay down on the bed so she wouldn’t have to look at the lens anymore. He snapped one last picture of her laying there in her panties and then walked over to the bed and lay down next to her.

“I feel like some of those are gonna turn out good,” he said. He was scrolling through something on his phone with one hand.

“Yeah, maybe,” Marina said.

“You wanna take some of me?” he said.

“No,” she said. She was suddenly tired of all of this and wanted to go home again, but she tried to sound simply dis-interested. “Okay, here, I’ll do one,” she said. She turned on her side and propped her elbow on the bed. She took the camera from him and took a picture of him looking at his phone. He turned to look at her, and they were both laying there.

The door opened.

“I need to take back the expensive thing I use to make my art,” Aubrey announced. “Sorry. Oh, Marina, you’re naked, that’s cool.”

The shame hit her belatedly and she tried to cover her body with Perrin’s blankets.

“I took some nudes of her,” Nico said, still looking at whatever was on his phone.

“Oh, lemme see,” Aubrey said, taking the camera back from Marina. “Oh, I love this one,” they said, looking into the little screen. “Yeah, I can edit these and send them to you?”

“Sure,” Marina said. She was sure she was red in the face.

“I really like these,” Aubrey said. Nico and Marina both looked intently at them as they pressed buttons on the back of the camera. Then they looked up at the two of them, seemed to think, and cautiously raised the camera and took a picture of the two of them sitting side by side on the bed.

“Sorry, I should have asked,” Aubrey said, lowering the camera. “But you two just look, like, so good next to each other.”

“I bet,” Marina said.

“We could do some together,” Nico said.

“Yeah? How does that sound, Marina?”

“Sure,” Marina said before she could get herself to think better of it. It seemed like a good way to remain with Nico, even if she had already resigned herself to her feeling that he was probably not interested at all.

“Yay,” Aubrey said softly, already fiddling with the camera settings.

“That means Nico has to take off his clothes too,” Marina added.

“It’s only fair,” he said, taking off his shirt. “Feminist, even.” He turned to her. “Ready?”

“Yeah,” Marina said, her voice coming out breathy and sustained as she looked at him shamelessly. He didn’t seem to notice.

“How should we start?” Nico asked, looking at Aubrey.

“Hmm, maybe Marina, you could stand on the bed and Nico, lie down? Yeah, like — oh, maybe you could put one foot on either side of his legs, and sort of let your hair — yes, exactly.”

There she was, awkwardly looking down at him. She thought she was shivering and wondered if either of them would notice, if the camera would pick up some residue from her trembling body. She closed her eyes and reached down with both hands for him, bent her knees, almost fell toward him. Aubrey clicked the shutter.

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