She bursts out laughing again, but I just ignore her. She can be as skeptical as she wants, but where she’s all about facts and logic, I’m the love expert, and there’s no doubt in my mind I’ve struck gold. “It’s all about monitoring the steps so you know your relationship is on the right track,” I say. “That way I can cut it off early if it’s doomed to fail anyway.”

“This is literally the opposite of what I meant.”

“Well, then maybe you should be more specific next time.”

She sighs that I’m too tired to keep calling you out, so whatever, do what you want sigh, but the way she looks at me now is just painful. I know she’s worried about me being out in the world on my own. Well, out in the world, and out to the offline world for the first time, but I’ve assured her I’m okay. Things are different now.

Sure, my parents were a little awkward when they dropped me off in Denver and kept driving for Cali, and yeah, my brother’s a bit of a jock and a frat boy, and I don’t think he even knew what the word “trans” meant until I told him it applied to me, but things aren’t all bad. Really, they aren’t. I’m finally away from our old high school—a place so conservative that the only trans girl who ever came out was bullied into a suicide attempt before dropping out during my freshman year. A place where prayer and God came before all things, and that God was even less convinced of my existence than I was of his.

And sure, we’re doing the long-distance thing, but I still have Becca. She’s still my best friend, and even while I’m on a quest for love and she’s doing some super elite, online college program with the University of Colorado this summer, I feel pretty confident she’ll never be able to completely replace me. I’m too damn special.

And every time she opens her transcripts, she’ll see Colorado and hopefully think of me, so there’s that.

“Noah.”

“What?” I ask.

“Did you see this note?”

My phone lights up with the link she sent me. I click on it and find some account called KissyKissyBangBang—which is surprisingly not a porn bot—reblogged the most recent Meet Cute Diary story with: this whole blog is a pile of bs. none of these stories are real. stop buying into it.