Long before he left Exeter, the snowshoer made dinner for Nora and Em and me one night in our Amen Hall apartment kitchen. Elliot Barlow was the best cook I knew. Growing up in Europe must have had something to do with it. We’d just eaten his stuffed peppers in marinara sauce.

“Show me the Deuteronomy note,” Nora said. I’d told her and Em what Moses had to say about cross-dressers. I’d been using the note as a bookmark in whatever novel I was reading—not the smartest way to forget the judgmental Moses.

“Oh, boy,” Nora said, after I handed her the note. “I grew up with my mother’s handwriting—she was always giving me Bible notes.”

The snowshoer and I weren’t surprised. We were pretty sure my mom must have used the she or the her word for Elliot around Abigail and Martha.

“We’ve all heard Ray use she or her for you,” Nora told the snowshoer, with Em nodding her head off. It was clear that Nora and Em knew a lot more about men wanting to be women, and women wanting to be men, than Elliot and I did. When I’d told Nora and Em about the snowshoer’s adventures as a woman in the town of Exeter, they weren’t shocked. Like Coach Dearborn, Nora and Em knew there are innumerable men who are assholes. “Not only in New Hampshire,” Nora had said.

Em’s bodily movements, when she was pantomiming her thoughts about gender, were disturbingly similar to her enactments of childbirth and having sex; the graphic nature of her pantomime could be easily misunderstood, but Nora’s deadpan interpretation was quickly forthcoming. “Em says there are almost as many women who are assholes,” Nora reported; then she frowned. “No, there aren’t, Em,” Nora said. Em just shook her head.

Nora could remember a couple of the Bible notes her mother had written to her. There was a verse from one of the epistles of Paul to the Corinthians. “It was basically a list of wrongdoers who will not inherit the kingdom of God,” Nora told us. “Thieves and drunkards were on the list, as were fornicators. Adulterers, homosexuals, and sodomites were definitely listed among the fornicators,” Nora recalled. “And there was a scary one from Revelation about other abominable types, including murderers and the sexually immoral. We were all going to end up in something called ‘the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death’—that fucking part gave me nightmares,” Nora said.