Not to be stuck in this agitated, strange body any longer. Was something else she badly wanted. Don thought about love. Meaning: she watched more pornos—like everyone who thought about love. Everyone Don’s age was busy watching porn. Pornos were the basic foundation of sexual education for growing people. Boys learned how women should look and that they were always up for it. That they lounged about, women, and that you had to bang them long and hard to be a good lover. Girls learned that as a woman you had to writhe rapturously if someone kneaded your breasts roughly and prodded your vagina with a penis. As a result girls would mostly wait their entire lives for this wonderfully satisfying sensation when a penis was shoved inside them and their breasts were roughly kneaded, they learned they had to dress like porn stars in order to have the pleasure of a man who would treat them like shit. So all the girls Don’s age looked like hookers. They could then take pictures of themselves in their fantastic hooker wear and post on Instagram about what top-notch hooker clothes they had on. When they forgot to photograph themselves, the precautionarily installed cameras took care of it for them. There probably wasn’t a nook in the country that wasn’t covered by surveillance cameras. At the end of the 1990s the government had begun to install them for the protection of the citizenry. First at every intersection and bridge, every tunnel, then in the lamps of basement entrances, and by now the job was done. There were simply no more places to put cameras. Not a sliver of space between person and device. Nobody got upset about the cameras, because it was good for security. By 2001 at the latest it was because of the Muslims. Everyone understood.

It didn’t change anything about Don’s situation.

Even after she’d watched porn. And before. And at night. In fact always. Don was afraid of herself. She no longer knew herself or the feelings welling up inside her. Something dark had taken hold in her, something that had to do with life and death. She moved differently, more aggressively. She wanted to brush people away with her demeanor, wanted to see them jump out of her way. Don listened to “Stress” by Justice on repeat. When she wasn’t listening to Justice, she listened to Young M.A.: “Them bitches cold as ice, man you swear them chickens frozen / Them pieces maxing out, you would swear those bitches broken.”

She moved like Young M.A., boys stared at her, Don stared back, and she felt nothing. Any excitement, like when listening to music or masturbating, she did not feel. She started to box in a neighborhood club that, like all the clubs, was run by an ex-criminal who’d found god. When Don wasn’t boxing she practiced martial arts in the park.

But