Chapter Six:Queers Never Die[content warning: death, suicide, transmisogyny, depersonalization, sexual trauma, dysphoria]

  A memorial for Midnight congeals at Tassel House from various half-connected pns, people arriving from all over the Bay, a few showing up ter in the day from Sacramento and Portnd and Riverside. Ivy goes, haunted by a nightmare about children praying to a traffic light that ate them, vacantly dissociating so badly that she remembers the day’s proceedings only in shuttered chunks. Everyone arriving. A lot of people she recognizes and a lot of people she doesn’t recognize. The trans men from Midnight’s house try to start a fight when they see Nylon but some other crustie arrayed with facial piercings manages to disentangle the conflict and negotiate a temporary peace. Several of Midnight’s close friends aren’t there, including Gravity, and some people Ivy doesn’t know are talking shit on everyone involved, saying this was preventable, that no one really cared. Eff gets mad and asks why, if they knew what to do, they didn’t do it? Someone Ivy has never met before gets back on meth and someone else Ivy has never met sees that as proof that they’re all doomed. There’s a lot of crying, some screaming, and Ivy does her best to comfort people when she can. She finds out that Midnight used to be a well-respected DJ who pyed shows, clubs, and pop-up raves all over the West Coast from Vancouver to Las Vegas to San Diego, until she transitioned. After coming out she lost most of her connections and income and became homeless, where she met Nylon, Jaime, and Eff. They all ended up in a few fucked up situations living out of vans and empty warehouses in West Oaknd. That was when they quit heroin together. Eventually things got complicated, and Midnight was already distant from the other three when Ivy ended up moving into the Richmond house Nylon had managed to convince a rich ex to let her stay in. So odd how the story only filled in after Midnight’s death, all the little ways they had passed each other by. Almost would have ended up being friends. In moments when she’s alone Ivy finds herself breaking down crying, feeling guilty to cry over someone she hardly knew. She can’t do it around the others, can’t prioritize herself when they’re going through so much firsthand grief. Yet the loss haunts her, the potential of what could have been another person in her life. From all the stories people tell, Midnight sounds like a wonderful woman. Ivy has nightmares about being at a rave in a warehouse, trying to get through the crowd to warn Midnight about her own future actions. Every time she gets near, something pushes her back, and for a few seconds she wakes up before drifting back to sleep. It resolves into a hypnogogic delirium where she sits in the audience, trying to enjoy the doomed performance conjured by her mind.

  Two days ter Ivy’s in therapy and she tries to process about what it’s like being in an environment saturated with death and suffering, again and again. Increasingly she’s worried that all these fantasies of her past are just a way of not dealing with something awful that’s happened to her. Her therapist brings up the idea that it might be about her wife. She’s not so sure. She’s not sure that woman existed at all, that any of that happened. She’s not sure what exists and what doesn’t. When she thinks about it too much all she can see is a centipede, a tremendous red and bck centipede, crawling along the ground. Tell me, what does the Demiurge mean to you? You don’t talk much about your parents. My parents were religious. They were assholes. I didn’t spend a lot of time with them. What did you do? I don’t know, what do kids do? I watched television. I read books. I read comics. I pyed with action figures, toys, dolls. I made up stories. You didn’t py with other kids? Not really. Other kids mostly wanted to hurt me. For being weak. They called me a girl. I guess they were right. Do you feel weak? Kinda. Maybe I make up a past to make myself feel strong? What are your goals? I don’t know. To heal, I guess. To be a better person. To be better at being a person. Sometimes, I feel like I’m not real. Like you’re not really a woman? No, I know I’m a girl. Just like, my personality, my existence, like I’m a, I don’t know, an object. I wanna feel like I have choices. Like I can do something with my life. Do fantasies help with that? Maybe, but they also hinder me. I’m full of fear. Fear of things that probably aren’t even real. Can you let go of that fear? I can try, yeah. Hey, can we talk about my friend’s suicide?

  Midnight’s family won’t let any transgender people—her entire community, her friends and partners—go to the funeral. The gravestone is carved with her deadname. Different obituaries tell entirely, exclusively different stories. If Ellie was real—the other Ellie, the one Ivy has only recently begun to remember—then what happened to her body? Wasn’t she some kind of estranged rich kid? Did Ivy watch her wife get shot and then a rich British family got notice and a body shipped to them from the middle of nowhere in Nevada, from a context they could never understand? Did they understand perfectly?

  Ivy has a nightmare someone has filled her up with fertilized eggs and she gives birth to a torrent of green and white slime with little eyes floating in it and little mewling mouths. She moves it to a bucket while downstairs her mother screams for more water for the bath, screams to come to dinner. She hides the bucket under the sink and tries to take care of her children but she doesn’t know what they need. When she wakes up an idea begins to haunt her: is she really a trans woman? Or is she the other Ellie? Is she an insane cis girl who takes hormones because she got a hysterectomy, did she take on the personality and the memories and the identity of her wife and then watched her wife get killed? Wouldn’t that make more sense, a dead tranny and a dissociative episode? Is she the mind of a trans girl in a cis girl’s body? Could her ovaries regrow? Could she become pregnant?

  She encountered the term circumgender a few months back: a trans person in a cis body. She begins obsessing over the idea. She pulls away from the other people in the house. Is she Helen? If so, what is she doing here? What is she doing in this safe space for trans women?

  She considers the possibility of a genetic test. The chromosomes will know. But what will they tell her? She feels like Ellie, she remembers being Ellie, being Lilly. She remembers being young and having what she called a penis, she remembers being in the boy’s locker room, she remembers facial hair and chest hair. Is it all a fiction? It wouldn’t be hard, if so much of her past is made up, couldn’t even that be?

  Yet— ‘Ivy’ has been her life. Since she met Eff she’s had a continuity of life. Is that just out of the fear of hurting Eff? Or being abandoned by her, abandoned by all of them? Should she—shouldn’t she go back to some other life?

  She’s sitting in the backyard staring at the ground when Sophia comes over and sits by her. “Hey, Ivy, I need to talk to you.”

  “Sorry,” says Ivy. “What, uh, what’s going on?”

  “That’s what I was going to ask you. Ever since Midnight died you’ve been pulling away really hard. You don’t hang out with people, you don’t talk to us. I miss you. And, honestly, you’ve been scaring me. I don’t want to lose anyone else, okay?”

  “I’m just dealing with some stuff.”

  “I know you are. So talk about it.”

  “It’s not easy stuff to just talk about.”

  “I don’t care! Look, it’s not a secret that I like you, right? It’s okay, I know you’ve had a really crazy life, you can tell me what’s going on for you.”

  “I don’t really think I can. I mean, it’s stuff that I feel like, if I talk to you about this, you won’t look at me the same way. You won’t see me the same way.” She’s not really trying to end the conversation. She knows Sophia wants to pry and she yearns to confess. Get it over with. Just get kicked out. Goodbye cozy couches and morning coffee, goodbye friends. Back to the sidewalk.

  “Look, everyone here has some really heavy stuff in the backlog of their trauma. That is what it is, that’s something I’m prepared for. I just.” Sophia sighs sharply, her face quivering. “Look, I just had to bury someone I care about. I don’t want to lose anyone, okay! Just talk to me and we’ll get through it. Even if it’s a big deal, even if I’m really pissed.”

  “What if I’m not who I say I am?” Having said it, Ivy’s heart is pounding with fear. She never knew there would be people she would care about so much that she would be this afraid of losing them. Whether or not it’s for the best.

  “Look, I know you have identity stuff going on. I know you’re having memory issues…”

  “I—I’m worried that—well—that I’m cis. That I’m circumgender.”

  Sophia nods. “Huh. Well, I’ll be honest, I was not expecting that. But it’s like, actually less worse than what I was expecting.”

  “But this isn’t a space for cis people.”

  “Yeah…” she bites her lower lip, works it back and forth between her teeth. “But it’s a space for trans women and as far as I’ve seen, I mean, it seems like you’re affected by this stuff about the same as any other passing trans woman, right?”

  “I’m lying to everyone, though.”

  Sophia shrugs. “Uh, well, I’m gonna go get some coffee, wanna join me in the kitchen and, I guess, tell me why you think you’re cis?”

  One of the few absolute essentials of the household is coffee. They've gone through pour-over brewing cones, french presses, percotors, and coffee makers, each inexorably drawn toward some ignominious end broken, smashed, sprayed with a fire extinguisher or dropped in cat shit. Currently coffee is prepared by pouring the grounds in a rge pyrex mixing cup, adding boiling water from the kettle, and stirring with a spoon. It doesn't taste that bad, not as bad as the old percotor did at least.

  The little rituals make it easier to talk. Coffee, butter on a stale toasted bagel (Nylon found a bakery dumpster nearby and now the pantry is stuffed with stale bagels and bread), cigarettes, picking at scabs, tidying up the backyard. It takes three hours of disjointed back and forth before Sophia finally shows Ivy search engine images of what hysterectomy scars look like, leaving Ivy thoroughly embarrassed, relieved, and confused.

  “I don’t know why I thought that had to be true,” she says. “It’s like, it just stuck in my mind. And then it was just in there and I kept obsessing.”

  “You’re looking for an answer,” says Sophia. “You’re trying to sort out a huge mess in your head and you’ve got all the questions and none of the answers.”

  “You have everything together though. I’m just an embarrassment.”

  “I really don’t. I think I’m just afraid to open up to you because I don’t want you to see what a mess I am, cuz I actually really care what you think about me. Besides, it always seems like you’re dealing with so much.”

  “I mean, I guess, but doesn’t that just make me everyone’s problem? I’m sick of being the person always dealing with so much. I mean, you can open up to me. You can talk to me about what’s going on for you. I don’t know that I’ll have anything useful to say but I can try to be there for you.”

  “Well, thank you, I appreciate that…”

  “No, really. What’s on your mind?”

  “I don’t know.” She shakes her head. “Okay, like, can we go somewhere? Can we go on a walk or something?”

  Ursu lets them borrow her car to drive to the Albany Bulb, a strange westward appendage of nd jutting into the San Francisco Bay. The uneven and paradoxically scenic terrain is a preview of the post-apocalyptic future. It rose from the water as a ndfill during the era of industrial development and expansion in the East Bay until somehow it had gone feral, defying its history to grow trees and bushes, flowers and sculptures of wood and metal interspersed with old brick and weathered gss. Once not long ago it had been the site of a community, a mixture of artists and travelers and nature lovers and people with no other pce to sleep, often a combination of all of the above, and from scraps and concrete they had built many beautiful things. In revenge, citing safety concerns, the city destroyed it and evicted its residents. So those who loved it rebuilt from the wreckage of the old, and the city destroyed that too. It’s now in the process of reaching an equilibrium between the needs of the living and the ravaging designs of the city. It seems destined that one day gentrification will figure out how to roll over it, to pave paths across it, remove any perilous drops in the piles of concrete, to charge for entry to view tremendous metal and wooden sculptures crafted by people who are no longer allowed in. But for the moment it’s in a liminal civic category, actively recimed by chaotic human creativity every time it’s demolished, covered in art and graffiti, sculpted figures of bent and twisted metal, driftwood screwed together to form tremendous dragons, tags and art pieces on cyclopean blocks of concrete jutting out of the earth at odd angles, scattered with handmade altars to gods and the dead.

  “City officials destroy what threatens their power: the fact that people have found a way to live even here, on a mountain of trash,” Ivy comments as they climb along the concrete bric-a-brac coming off of one of the beaches. Someone has painted on the concrete QUEERS NEVER DIE.

  “I love this pce,” says Sophia, her voice slipping into the tone of an eager academic. “The lie of the city, out there, is that people can’t do anything beautiful without the apparatuses of the state and the mechanisms of capital. Here we see the exact opposite: human creative potential unleashed. It is simultaneously being recimed by nature and by people, it has formed both a beautiful community space and a continual living communal art project. It’s a living testament to what we’re trying to do, to the fact that the city is not composed of the rule and order that rationalize it but is instead the living expression of the people that move within it.”

  “They’ll do their best to wipe this out of people’s memories, or make it like a theme park, or try to portray it as a scary, dangerous pce, or all three,” says Ivy.

  Sophia nods. “I can’t even stand to go to San Francisco anymore with what the developers and the techies have done there. The Haight Ashbury feels like Disneynd. The Castro is a joke if you’re not rich, white, cis, and conventionally attractive. Even SoMa is dying. They closed the Lexington st year. I was there for that, I didn’t go in, I didn’t have the heart, because, I mean, I’m a lesbian, I’m about lesbian culture, but I couldn’t have dealt with some trans guy or some terf telling me I didn’t belong, or that I had ruined it. I know I’m, like, a white queer from money, but even I can see that it’s the fucking gentrifiers that ruined it. It’s the goddamn tech money, the same shit that’s rotting Oaknd from its heart. I stood outside of the Lexington for a long time and watched that st party. As far as I know that was the st night a lesbian bar existed in San Francisco.”

  “I lived in the city for a little while but I thought I was straight. I never participated in the lesbian scene there,” says Ivy.

  “I hate that,” says Sophia. “It’s not fair, really, you should have gotten a chance to have community. All these fucking bars, and nineteen out of twenty are for straight people, and the other one out of twenty are for gay men.”

  “At least we can still climb around on rubble together.”

  “Those bars won’t st forever, but one day all of this will be rubble and we can climb around on that too. Rubble is the great twenty-first century public architecture, everything else is just virtual reality.”

  They reach an outlook over the sea, something like a small coastal fort made entirely of chunks of concrete and overgrown with wild shrubs rattling in the wind. Overlooking it is a small outcropping of dirt and a rectangur block of concrete like a tremendous canvas. Someone has spraypainted a line drawing of a weeping woman with cat eyes. Along the side is scrawled RIP OSCAR GRANT. The two of them sit on the outcropping while Ivy smokes.

  “You said there were things you don’t talk about,” says Ivy. “Tell me about yourself. What are you struggling with?”

  “Purpose,” says Sophia. “I mean, you know why I picked this name? It means ‘wisdom.’ I grew up reading, just reading, tons and tons of books. I lived near a library in a small town and we didn’t have internet or much television. It feels weird to say now, with the way things are. I was obsessed with books, with knowledge, or rather with the idea of knowledge. I was reading Pto in fourth grade, Kant and Hegel in high school. I don’t know whether I was desperately seeking meaning or seeking the idea of meaning. Maybe a little of both, maybe the seeking and seeking the idea were caught up in each other. I came to leftism through philosophy. Initially I was a liberal, a centrist really. I was reading Arendt and Sartre and Camus and Nietzsche, all of the existentialist standards any morose philosophy-obsessed teenager is bound to encounter. Have you ever read Nietzsche?”

  “Not really,” says Ivy. “What I’ve read has been all over the pce. Some theory, mostly from zines, but I’ve never sat down with philosophy.”

  “He’s not a fascist, he’s not really like people say.” She grins in a lopsided way, her eyes sparkling with sudden enthusiasm. “Nietzsche is a challenge to consciousness as it’s been practiced. He wants you to think about what you’re doing, whatever it is, and take it seriously. He feels things terribly strongly and that intercedes in his thought in a way that’s so honest. If he lived in the modern day he’d probably be, like, a soundcloud rapper or something. He broke down crying over someone beating a horse. And you can feel it in the writing, that deep sympathy running through his thought even in its most reactive moments. He wants to shake you into being something. It got me thinking about politics—Camus and Sartre, sure, but it was really Genealogy of Morals. He’s sorting through all of history, trying to sort out what is what. I’m drawn to that. From Nietzsche, I got into more explicitly leftist philosophers. Foucault, Butler, Deleuze and Guattari.”

  “I recognize some of those—Deleuze is mentioned in some of the stuff I’ve read, but I don’t really know about him.”

  “Guattari has this, it’s funny, because it’s not incredibly aware or what would get called politically correct, but he has this enthusiastic and problematic essay about trans women where he talks about it as ‘becoming-woman’. And there I am in the middle of winter curled up in front of the window drinking tea and I read this and it’s like, like for the first time I’m in a body. Because the whole time I had just been mind, in a way, this almost abstracted thing, just a consciousness floating along engaging with these concepts that dead men were throwing at me, and all of a sudden I’m a person, I’m this, I realize, I’m becoming-woman. And it’s part of Guattari’s thesis that in a way we all are, everyone is becoming-woman, and everyone is becoming-animal, becoming-cosmos, and so on, he’s really deconstructing these fixed notions, but I’m just sitting there obsessing because of course, like, I’ve seen Silence of the Lambs, I’ve heard of this concept of the transsexual, but this is the first time I’m thinking about the change, the idea of change, and now I’m not just philosophizing with a hammer, I’m taking a hammer to my conceptions of my identity, and realizing exactly what kind of cage I’ve been keeping my selfhood in, realizing the precise, like, problem of my existence as such.”

  “That almost sounds like how I felt when I came out as a lesbian.”

  “Right? Except I wasn’t coming out, well I guess I was to myself, but I was, basically, my egg was cracking as they say. Bit by bit I was putting together this idea of myself. There had always been one narrative for me: philosopher, philosophy student, reader, studying, etcetera, and it’s a very dry, isoting, somewhat miserable, and utterly aseptic sort of narrative. I had seen myself as a ck, as this space into which ideas could be poured, a body without organs or desiring-machines just a body as such, the vessel, the lover of knowledge. There’s a way in which the philosopher is, like, already castrated, already rendered as neuter, as a eunuch, sometimes literally in history, right? And this thing, resonating through me, a narrative, awakening desiring-machines, multiplicities of assembges, lines-of-flight, this crystalline concept called becoming-woman, is something my consciousness tches onto. And that’s a problem for me, for the Dasein, because I do not know what to do, I am already becoming-woman but I don’t know it yet, I’m infinitely deferred, afraid, petrified, and the closer desire pulls me the more it repels me because I absolutely do not know how to be embodied in this world. There’s this argument Guattari makes, that under patriarchy the process of embodiment is always becoming-woman, becoming-feminine, because woman has retained the retion to the body, whereas man has transferred his retion to the situation of domination, the phallic attachment in psychoanalytic terms. And I’m feeling this out, in my body, from moment to moment, and suddenly I’m struck with the wall. Abjection, the body, the hair on my arms and my legs and chest, my deep voice, the ck of breasts, the organ between my legs, a multiplying army of oversignifying organs. It’s something I’ve never felt before. So I pull back, back into the world of ideas, and for years more I did nothing about it. Then in 2010, I’m about to start my first year of a philosophy master’s degree. I met this trans girl, a student at the college. In retrospect she was a horrible person, but that’s not the point, I appreciate what she did for me because to see what I desired to be in another person, to have my mental existence reflected in the lived existence of another, did everything to shake me up. I found out about HRT, I found out about what it means to be trans in the embodied way I wanted. Obviously, like, I ended up in some bad pces, Susan’s Pce and some transmedicalist scenes. Still, I was transitioning, and all over again I was fighting with embodiment, fighting with being a person. It’s been a tremendous struggle… but I feel like I’ve gotten through it. I like my body. I’m pleased with my body, now, despite all the efforts of self-hating trans women, and so-called feminists, and men, and patriarchal assholes, all fucking trying to make my life miserable, trying to get me to fucking kill myself, I got past it all and I reached a point where I actually like being embodied.”

  For the first time in a few minutes she pauses, takes a real breath. She’s clearly overwhelmed at all she’s sharing, the words spilling out of her like they’ve been trying to get out for a long time.

  “And that’s where I hit another fucking god-damned wall! I have no idea what else to do. My whole life was defined by these two stages, the philosopher, and the becoming-woman, and now I’m drifting, listless, like Frankenstein’s monster wandering off across the frozen ice. I look at you and I see what feels impossible to me, I see, holy shit, here’s someone who’s as lost as I am, but you have some kind of focus, even if it’s all over the pce, you keep striving, keep trying, keep moving forward, and I admire that, I want to be close to that. I want to crack the egg of doing—being a person who does, the way that you do. Do you get what I’m saying? I was at the Lexington on the st night they were open and for two hours I stood outside the bar and watched the party, and then I walked away.”

  Ivy lets the words resonate in the air. “What are you looking for?”

  “I just want to be free. Free like this nd should be. I don’t know why I’ve made another cage around myself and I don’t understand the shape of it.”

  “I don’t know much about things, not really. I don’t even know what’s real. There’s huge chunks of my past where all I’ve got is made-up stories. But there’s one thing I can tell you for sure: being free is utterly terrifying and the terror doesn’t go away.”

  “That sounds like something I would tell you,” says Sophia.

  “Well, yeah, that’s how good advice works. You pass it around and sometimes you pass it back and forth.”

  “Like love.” Sophia sighs, gets up, gestures for them to keep walking. “Ivy, you’re always so alone. Do you believe in love?”

  “I do believe in love,” says Ivy. “I’ve felt it in the past. I guess I’ve been so damaged and fucked up that I’m afraid to even investigate those emotions.”

  “You… can you guess what I’m getting at?”

  “Are you asking me out?”

  “Do you want to be my girlfriend?”

  “I don’t even know what you’d be dating. I’m a total mess.”

  “I don’t care about that. I like you. I like the things you say, I like the way your mind works. The way you investigate the world. And you’re beautiful. And you’re very sweet. You’re nice to me. So, I know what I’m doing. Do you… would you want to date me?”

  “I like you. I enjoy being with you. I don’t know how to be with people.” She stops, stares off into the ocean. The sun will be setting soon, just beyond the gss and steel jaw of San Francisco rising up into the sky. Almost a whole day has gone by and she can’t even remember how it started. “I’m down to give it a try.”

  *****

  Lacey lights the bck candles. Fmes move to the breeze of the cool night air, wet from the sea. Thrumming bass drums from the other room where MaryLou is bsting some trancey EDM that’s meant to sound like ritual music.

  “You ready?” Lacey asks. The breeze pys around with the blue tips of her hair.

  “I’m feeling a little fucked up actually.” Ivy’s fingers awkwardly clutching the edge of the sweaty mattress. When you fuck you can feel the loose springs pressing against you.

  “Nothing to worry about. This is just to get you ready. We’re going to help you recover what you’ve lost.”

  Bloody flesh. Skulls and masks in the dark. Not here yet. Bck candles, light fme. Bck fme on the altar. She’s gone. Blood mixing into the mud. Pstic in the soil.

  Two scorpions in the desert. Facing each other, floating on sand.

  “You left me to die,” says one.

  “Pns change,” says the other.

  “We were supposed to die together.”

  “Nothing ever happens the way it’s supposed to.”

  She’s standing on a sidewalk in San Jose, screaming at a bald man who took advantage of her vulnerability to have sex with her when she was too young and too recently out of surgery, “What the hell am I supposed to do now?!”

  “How the fuck should I know? This is the post-endgame. Who won or lost doesn’t matter. I don’t want to be a part of what’s coming.”

  “What is it?” she asks. Her skin is red with blood, hardening, becoming a chitinous exoskeleton. “What’s coming? What is He pnning?”

  “They liquidated Coordination. I was almost killed,” Ian says, ughing in his hollow way.

  “They burned down the Institute,” says the other Ellie, standing beside her. “They tracked us down in Nevada and killed me.”

  “They’re preparing for the next stage,” says Ian. “I don’t want to be around, but there’s nowhere to go.”

  “What are you pnning?”

  “I’m seriously considering suicide. I might run off to the woods. I might disappear somewhere but then I will still have to face it.”

  “You were the first person I ever had sex with,” she says.

  “I don’t care about that at all,” he says. “I don’t see you, or me, as people. I don’t see people at all. I see forces of society. That is all. Perfect systems. Now I’m severed. I’m like a shed skin cell, waiting to be devoured by mites.”

  A man in bck military gear comes running up. His face is obscured behind a bck cloth mask. He has three camera eyes, glowing red and yellow. He raises an assault rifle, and fires. Ian explodes in gore like Larry, spttering her clothes. Beside her, the other Ellie is shot, falls to the ground. The man in bck military gear with no identifying marks turns toward her, and raises the rifle. It buzzes like a helicopter. She turns to run.

  She is in the desert. The other Ellie is beside her. They are walking up on a man in a t-shirt with no pants on.

  “Please, just leave me alone,” he’s begging. He’s crying. He looks like a very tough man, normally, but these are not normal circumstances.

  “Is that all the money?” she asks.

  “It’s all I have on me! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I was wrong, I won’t do it again, I won’t, I’m sorry. Please, I, I have dogs I have to feed, they don’t have anyone else.”

  “You remember our faces, so you won’t ever fuck with us again?” asks the other Ellie.

  “Yes, yes I remember, I’ll remember, I won’t fuck with you, I’ll leave you alone, please, I remember.”

  “That’s too bad for you,” says the other Ellie, and she raises the gun. “We all have our parts to py.”

  His flesh dissolves, leaving just the skull floating in the dry Nevada air, and cubes of bone beneath it, spinning around. The skull moves, speaks, says, “Hey dolllll why are you looooking so upsssset?”

  She sighs, and wraps her legs around the stupid hipster boy’s hips. “I’m just thinking. Don’t worry about it.”

  “It’s really funny how you always say you’re thinking when you have the most sad look on your face,” he says. He starts fingering her. The feeling of his fingertip is irritating, grating. He hasn’t understood that fingering dry flesh isn’t pleasant for her.

  The hotel room feels so enclosed and it smells like his body and mold and old fast food. The sounds of people suffering in the streets below radiate up through the windows, screams and calls, miserable. She hates it here. But she can never leave.

  She wakes up suddenly with a gasp, sits up. She’s in a warm bed. There’s a girl beside her. Sophia, right. She’s Ivy, now.

  “Hey sweetie, what is it?”

  “Nope, not gonna,” she says. “Not to that, fuckin, okay, yeah.”

  “Sweetie? What’s wrong?” Sophia turns toward her, eyes barely open.

  “I had a nightmare. Just nightmares again. Like always. That’s all.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “I need a cigarette.”

  “Come back to bed when you can.”

  “I will.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  She steps out to the porch. It’s been three months since Sophia asked her out, two months since she’s been sleeping in the same bed. She’s afraid of telling anyone that sharing a bed with someone has been making her sleep worse. Just the feeling of a body next to hers has been awakening strange neurons, trauma radiating through her flesh. She doesn’t want Sophia to feel guilty. She doesn’t really want to sleep alone again. Sophia is the sweetest partner she’s ever had. It’s a different experience of love. Not pining. Not desperate attachment in a pce of terror and crisis. Not resigned bonding built on self-delusion. There’s real mutual care here. And she’s utterly horrified at the thought of doing anything to disrupt this precious thing.

  At the same time, sleep has been difficult.

  Eff is out on the porch, staring into the distance. She jumps when Ivy comes out.

  “Oh, hey, you startled me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No problem, I just don’t expect anyone at four a.m.”

  “Trouble sleeping.”

  “Yeah, me too.” Eff starts rolling a joint. “I guess I haven’t slept alright since Trump got elected.”

  “Fuck, it’s been a time.”

  “No, that’s a lie,” says Eff. “It’s Midnight’s death. I haven’t been okay since that.”

  Ivy lights a cigarette and takes a few drags. Sensation returns to her body. “How have you been, with the grief?”

  “It’s always surreal. I’m bad at accepting when certain futures have been cut off. So I keep wanting to make pns with her. I can’t, because she’s dead. I keep thinking of them, though. I know Nylon’s been having a rough time. They’re drinking heavily again, that’s got me worried. And they don’t talk to Jaime anymore. I guess I’m just worried. I’ve seen, before. Sometimes trauma can bring a community closer. Sometimes it can ring through a community, trigger more trauma, more heartbreak. I’m scared of that.”

  “That makes a lot of sense. What would help address that?”

  “Reaching out more to Nylon I think. And giving them things to do other than drink. Ughhh I’m worried about Gravity too.”

  “Has fae moved out of that pce yet?”

  “No, and I think faer spiraling. Ever since Aiden called the cops on Michel, fae feel like fae have to be there to be some kind of mediator. It’s totally self-sacrificial. Michel would never do the same for faer. Now they’re the only person there who’s facing transmisogyny, and I don’t think anyone there acknowledges that, since faer nonbinary and you know Tassel House has shit gender politics.” She seems to wake up to the nearly finished joint she’s holding and licks it to seal it, then lights it and passes it to Sophia, who passes her the end of the cigarette. “Anyway, that’s all the shit on my mind. What brings you to the porch of insomnia and suffering?”

  “Grief also, of a different sort,” Ivy says. “Being with Sophia is lovely but being back in a retionship with someone is bringing up a lot of weird shit for me and I struggle to process it. So my dreams shove it in front of my face.”

  “Yeah, I remember when I met you, you were kinda fragile around the idea of interpersonal connection. To completely understate it.”

  “I’ve got all these memories and fake memories and weird fucking things stirring around in my head. I guess I’ve had a bad time with the idea of love in the past. I need to sort that out.”

  “How’s your therapist been with that?”

  “She stopped taking my insurance a few weeks ago and I haven’t had the spoons to find a new one.”

  “Fuck. I hope you can get your stuff sorted out.”

  “Thank you.” She smiles at Eff, passes the joint back. “Sorry, I’ve been camping this.”

  “No worries.”

  Her retionship with Sophia has provided Ivy with a strange and new type of stability, a stability not built on inertia or suffering or isotion. Sophia has begun teaching Ivy about her favorite philosophers: Deleuze, Nietzsche, Foucault. Ivy takes Sophia on adventures around the east bay. She never thought of herself as very knowledgeable about the area or very street smart but over time she has come to be and compared to Sophia she knows a great deal about how to find a path to a beautiful hidden spot or how to keep an eye out for security cameras. Some part of her brain has retained her anarchist punk past and the experiences living illegally with the other Ellie, even if some or all of those memories are fake. Fake memories are still stories, and stories can still teach her things that she can then pass on. What is the phenomenological distinction between a false memory and a true memory, when one either way has no connection to the past?

  Nylon is coming around bit by bit. One day they insist on giving everyone in the house stick n pokes from a journal of tattoo ideas belonging to someone who had once been a trainhopper with them before being crushed in a railyard. Flipping through the book, Ivy sees a line drawing of a centipede. She decides that it’s her story to py with, after all, her false memories. So she gets the centipede tattooed in a small spot on both sides of her hips, where she remembers the other Ellie having her hysterectomy scars. It’s her first tattoo. That night, she sleeps soundly.

  Trump takes office, and they all take to the street to protest the inauguration. A flood of people, not moving as a mass but as a swarm of individuals frantically seeking a way to turn their desperation into some real change, some real forestallment of the coming nightmare, watched by liberals and progressives who see only an encouraging dispy of partisan energy, who fail to see the thing they are trying to do. At every turn the police has outpnned, outmaneuvered, waiting blocks away in rows, zip ties on their belts, sending the uniformed women of color to stand before the furious and terrified crowd and watch in growing discomfort as the anarchists shout in unison, “All Cops Are Trump!” and burn the would-be dictator in effigy.

  They’re chased by a helicopter and barely get away running through several alleys and overgrown gulches where they discard their bck clothing and masks. Walking back to the BART in civilian wear, they see the next block over dozens of other protesters with their wrists bound behind their backs by oversized zipties. There are hundreds of cops around, all of them armed and armored as if for war, but they don’t murder anyone that night, at least as far as anyone knows.

  As Ivy settles into a sense of comfort with her day-to-day life with Sophia there is a rising swell of background pressure. The political environment is worsening and something in her mind says to be very, very afraid. She tells herself it’s the PTSD, that she doesn’t know how to respond to negative changes without extreme levels of stress. She’s terrified there will be one or several genocides soon. She sees a new apartment complex going up and the cranes give her an anxiety attack. The nightmares are seeping back into the daytime, no chance to rex.

  Killing time by walking around downtown waiting for Sophia to get out of an appointment she stumbles along MacArthur. It’s not the city she used to know. Other pedestrians wear cold, appraising expressions. She collects half-smoked cigarettes from the pnters outside Kaiser Permanente. Most of them are too damp to be of use, the nicotinic juices bleeding through the paper wrap and into the shredded bark. She doesn’t care that people are staring, not right now, she hopes to them she’s a sad story, a cautionary tale. She hopes they can look at her and think about how different they are, how they haven’t been caught up in the toxic vortex, as they fly back to their pces of business and their desote homes and she walks down the sidewalk staring into the windows of the apartments at all the bnk and empty walls of all the miserable little spaces they reserve to their own private property.

  A weird quiet. Suddenly there is no one around at all. Looking up and down Telegraph she can’t see any pedestrians, any cars, not even any homeless people camped out under the highway overpass. The gray hum of the city reverberating through the infrastructure is the only sign of occupancy. The beauty of a city comes from its people. So many have died there, in every absent moment it’s already a mausoleum. They strip down and destroy the things people left. Put up five-over-ones and bury pstic to kill the soil.

  That night, she dreams again of Coordination Division, of bureaucratic schemes carried out in empty buildings, nearly meaningless but imbued with a horrible purpose. The dreams feel more real than the city she walks through in the day. Sometimes she’ll walk for the whole daytime, from when she wakes up before noon until after sunset, not going anywhere. Just walking. And the city—the cities, Richmond and El Cerrito and Berkeley and Emeryville and Oaknd—glide around beneath her feet like the roller of a ballpoint pen.

  “Can I ask you an awkward question?” Sophia’s tense, her shoulders drawn up defensively, her voice that strained tone that it takes on when she’s pushing through yers of built-up apprehension.

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “It’s just… well, we’ve never, y’know… we’ve never really had sex, right? At least, not—I guess, I’m just wanting to ask, what’s going on with that. I mean, we’ve been sleeping in the same bed for months. It’s not like a problem, I mean we can move at whatever pace is comfortable for you. I just wanted to know, I guess I’ve gotten worried that maybe it’s about me? Because I know you’ve had cis partners in the past, and you said you weren’t ace, and since I haven’t had surgery, and we don’t really talk about it… am I attractive to you?”

  Ivy freezes. She’s not sure what to focus on, how to handle the conversation. She grabs Sophia’s hand. It’s warm and soft and her fingers are trembling.

  “You’re attractive,” she says very quietly. “I have a lot of trauma. It’s true I haven’t really slept with any other trans women. And most of my sexual experiences have been really awful. I guess at a certain point I stopped wanting to think about sex at all. It’s just become something I process trauma around. I don’t know how to have a positive retion to it.”

  “Would you want to try?”

  “Sometime. I mean, yes. I feel bad. I don’t want to put you through this. It’s not anything about your body.”

  “You don’t have to feel bad. I don’t want you to feel rushed, either. It’s just that we don’t talk about it. You know, I had a girlfriend break up with me because she said I was ugly naked.”

  “Fuck, Sophia, I didn’t know that.” Ivy puts her arms around Sophia and holds her tight. She’s trembling all over and seems very vulnerable. “That’s really awful. I don’t think you’re ugly at all.”

  “You don’t have to have sex. I just wanted to know.”

  “I understand. I—I’m sorry we don’t talk about it. I guess I’m not very good at communicating about my trauma.”

  Sophia curls her body into Ivy’s touch. “Communication is hard. It seems like you’ve been doing better tely.”

  She is soft and warm and some part of Ivy utterly wants to disappear into this girl who loves her. How could someone love her? And mean it and want to be with her, not just to use her, not just to have another body there to the side, or a bnk sheet on which to project images of desire? The madness of it drills through her flesh and makes her want to squirm and shake until she falls to pieces like a building in an earthquake. “I have been doing better. Reality has been seeming more real every day. You’re here with me. Every day I wake up here and I feel like I’m in a pce where I belong. Instead of getting lost in some illusion or stuck with someone I can’t stand. It used to drive me crazy, the push and pull of other people. When I was young I was good at being alone. As an adult I can’t stand it, but I can’t stand other people either. I’m rolling back and forth, toward and away from companionship. And then you were there, like a force saying, it’s okay, you can connect with someone now. It’s a revetion, in a way. Like all revetions, it’s shocking to me. It’s overwhelming. In a good way, though.”

  “I really appreciate being with you, it’s been really good for me. I know you’re dealing with a lot.”

  “I want to be there for you. I want to be giving you a good life.”

  “You are. Life is complicated. I never expected us to be problem-free.”

  “Have I been a problem?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. I just mean, stuff is gonna come up.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay. I—I’m not communicating well right now, I don’t know. You’re very important to me. I appreciate that we can talk about things.”

  Fingers curl together in various directions. Bodies pressing closer, as if two nervous systems seek to merge. Like the tips of neurons are untangling themselves and moving to coalesce.

  *****

  “I’ll be honest, I don’t know anything about consensus processes. Like, I’ve seen you all doing that for some stuff, but I’m not even going to pretend I understand what’s being talked about.” Ivy’s tired of trying to hold back the irritation for other peoples’ sake. She came to this house meeting to talk about how they were going to keep paying for the house, not to try to follow along with Jaime and Nylon’s insistence that everyone need to adopt some sort of esoteric meeting process derived from their experiences in communes far away. “I don’t like bureaucracy. I don’t want to do debate. I just want to talk about these things.”

  “Absolutely,” says Nylon. “No, this isn’t, like, directly bureaucracy or anything. This is about how people talk about things, actually talk. This is a form of hacking our social reality.”

  “It just seems like a huge waste of time.” The bad sleep makes it hard to put up with social situations.

  Nylon is practically vibrating with enthusiasm, fully oblivious to Ivy’s reticence. “I mean, it’s a fucking learning curve, yeah, that’s real. But how are you gonna, like, be a person socially if you don’t have the tools to interact socially? Like what the fuck is a house, right? You’re always talking about this—the architecture is making people, it turns people into little suburban fuckwits, right, gender assignment is an extension of the architecture of the hospital. So like what I’m saying is, this is a social architectural critique. Let’s fucking destroy the voting model, the fucking senate model, like, all that Roman shit. Let’s fucking look at anarchist ways of doing community, indigenous ways of doing community. And that makes what kind of people we’re going to become. That’s what I’m saying.”

  Everyone is stressed. The household money situation is increasingly burdensome. Ivy has come to understand that the house is owned by a techie ex of Nylon who pays the mortgage for a fraction of expected rent, partially as an act of community charity and partially so that Nylon doesn’t go public about the rape. But the homeowner lost her job in a post-Trump-election purge of “negative personalities” at her tech workpce, and the situation is becoming untenable as she has less money, less community, and has already attempted suicide. Increasingly those living at the house, which had for some time functioned as a sort of refuge for wayward trans women, are becoming aware that they either need to take in a lot more income, or they may need to find somewhere else to live. Income isn’t going to be easy. So what had been an informal conglomeration of many people from many backgrounds now struggles to change shape. Nylon is insisting that they need to become a real collective, and although Ivy likes Nylon she has no idea really what they mean. Politics to her has meant battle lines, discussions of care, nothing so dull and pragmatic as resource sharing. And her mind is firing a mile a minute trying not to get triggered into thinking about the endless meetings of Coordination Division. Some part of her is good at resource management, and she hates that part.

  Nylon insists that if Ivy lived with Scatter she must already know all this stuff but Ivy can’t remember it at all. Nylon has insisted this four times now.

  Everyone living at the house is assembled in a circle in the backyard on a haphazard collection of chairs and a yoga ball while Nylon tries to expin the basics of how they will structure the collective. This group doesn’t take well to meetings. Emiko can’t stand to sit still, and if she isn’t flitting around the edges of the circle she’s rocking back and forth and squirming in her seat. Sophia has trouble with big groups of people, even people she lives with, and is visibly anxious and very quiet. Jaime seems constantly impatient for others to get on the same page as her and frustrated with the slow process of people learning and adapting to something that’s new to them. Ursu is cultivating distraction, clutching her DS like a talisman when she’s not pying it. Eff is like a cat with a shoece, she can’t help derailing the conversation every time something more interesting is mentioned. Nylon is trying to bance being the most knowledgeable and not coming off like a teacher. And Ivy is on edge and self-conscious of how hostile she could come off. Really, it’s the nightmares. They won’t stop. Still, they’re all putting in genuine effort and trying to have a real conversation with each other, trying to be really present with each other.

  “Why can’t we just do things the ways we’ve been doing it?” asks Emiko.

  “That’s basically what this is,” says Jaime.

  “Okay so it’s like this,” says Nylon. “I have seen some fuckshit happen. When money’s in the equation, when we’re talking about collective responsibility. We have a house, we have a living situation. You know that I never intended to have a fucking house. Here we are. Let’s not fuck this up because I think it’s been really important to have a pce where people can be. It’s not exactly like there’s a lot of spaces where trans women can safely live.”

  “But if we all have to share our resources that’s just rent.” Ivy’s picking at the paint peeling off the chair leg. “Like, we’re just paying rent, one way or the other. So it’s not really a collective, right?”

  “No, because we’re not going to do this that way. Obviously like yes, it’s important that we are all contributing. At the same time, I can’t fucking work a regur job, right? You’ve said as much for yourself. I know Eff is going to struggle with that.”

  “I’ve got money from camming,” says Ursu.

  “Yeah, and I get, well, you know. I get some money,” says Emiko. She sells drugs, usually just coke and ket and shrooms to a whole scene of upper css party girls. It’s not much money but it pays for her food and clothes and makeup.

  “That’s great,” says Nylon. “And, like, some people have inherited money and we’ve got foodstamps and shit and like we can get food from pantries and dumpsters. What I’m saying is we need to work together and we use these processes to keep everything actually egalitarian. Right now I feel like I’m telling everyone what to fucking do and that sucks.”

  “No,” says Eff, “you’re not telling people what to do. I appreciate you sharing what you know.”

  Some others nod.

  “Well cool, okay, fucking excellent, because the st thing I want to do is be telling people what to do, I mean like, I can literally be out in a fucking tent by the river or something before I’m doing that shit.”

  “Yeah no, it’s good,” says Ivy. “I’m sorry if I’m grumpy about it. I think I just ended up here in a crisis because I needed a pce where I wouldn’t have to fit into that outside world and I’m scared that this might turn into that.”

  “No, no, not at all, that is what I’m trying to prevent here,” says Nylon. “We have a chance to do whatever we fucking want, right? There are certain limitations. Aggie needs so much each month to pay the mortgage. We gotta pay electricity and water and trash collection if we want those things to occur. There are limits to what is legally recognized as the boundaries of this private property. But within those limits, within that space, we can do whatever the fuck we want. We can fill the whole fucking thing with dirt and rocks. We can agree to a five year long vow of silence. Literally anything we agree to, that’s what we agree to. That’s our new reality. We can create a new reality from our process, from what we talk about and decide on together. That’s what I’m saying. That’s what I’m about.”

  “I don’t want to lose this pce,” says Sophia. “Like, I have never felt safe. Ever, before, in my life. Before I came here. I don’t want to lose that sense of safety. I don’t feel like I can work a full-time job or whatever. I—I do the tutoring, right, and some dogwalking. It’s not very much. And I have some money from my family. I tried applying for other work but it was really fucked up. Most pces even if they say they’re accepting they just won’t hire someone like me, or they’ll treat me like shit. And it’s really overstimuting. Seeing all these people come and go. I’m supposed to just go along with all the fucked up things they say. I can’t do that. I’m down to work for money. I could try camming, I guess, though I doubt anyone would want to pay for that. Maybe there’s something else I could do.”

  “Look, there’s a lot we can figure out the details of ter,” says Jaime. “We have to agree first to our basic principles.” She holds up three fingers. “We’re going to work on this together, we’re going to reach consensus about what we’re doing, we’re going to support each other.”

  “Voluntary fucking association,” says Nylon. “The right to come and go as we want to, no one has to be here or has to do anything they don’t want to.”

  “Okay, so should we vote on this?” asks Ursu.

  “What? Fuck voting,” says Nylon. “If it’s voluntary and you vote no then what the fuck does that mean? No I wanna talk this out until we’re all on the same page.” Ivy holds back a groan. This is going to take all day. “Voting is bullshit, let’s do actual fucking democracy. Let’s talk shit out.”

  If she thinks about it she can recall traces of consensus processes when she was living in Oaknd with Scatter and Houndstooth and Nails. Ghostly impressions, from the lens of her own hellish dreamworld. They would get together for a meeting and she would drink or smoke or stare at the ground, waiting for a the decisions to be made and split off into action committees that didn’t involve her, and then she would go back to her basement room to py Smash with Nails, who also didn’t give much of a fuck about meetings. Sometimes she would hang out with Scatter or Houndstooth afterwards, or one of the punks who stayed for days or weeks before moving on to other pces like Portnd or Tacoma or Denver or Austin or Chicago. New travelers would show up, smelling of sweat and covered in tattoos and scars, or shaking with trauma. One came in with a gash across his forehead that couldn’t have been more than a couple days old and when Lilly asked about it he said it was something that had allegedly involved a police officer in DC. She had spent a lot of time in those meetings too, but she hadn’t been present there, not like she had been during the Coordination Division meetings. In Coordination Division she was a participant, albeit in a structure that forced her to adopt certain roles. It was performative and easy in a certain way.

  If any of that was even real. So much of it seems like nothing but the product of her paranoid delusions. At the same time, if anything was real, surely the boring meetings were likely to be.

  Everywhere I go in life people have different ways of trying to figure out what the fuck they’re doing and I’m always on the outside, she thinks, and then, on a whim, she speaks it out loud.

  “Yeah,” says Nylon. “Exactly. Now let me ask: does it have to be that way?”

  “Do people have to have meetings? I guess so.”

  “No, I mean, do you have to be on the outside? What if it’s all in your hands? What if I say, you decide how this meeting goes?”

  “I mean, I couldn’t. I’ve never really had an experience like that before, maybe in retionships, but never in a group setting. I wouldn’t know what to do.”

  “It’s impossible to do it wrong. Just give it a try.”

  So she does. They hash things out, a tedious, grueling process of figuring out how to communicate precisely with each other. For how long they’ve lived together, she would never have guessed it would be this hard to try fitting a form to their way of life, their way of supporting each other. It’s a painful process, finding out that one person’s gentle reminder is another’s passive aggression, that one person’s pleasant solitude is another’s avoidance. They learn more about each other. Ursu still feels like she doesn’t belong here; she’s only been out a few years. Sophia feels like she has to prove her worth. Jaime doesn’t think anyone respects her. Sculpting it out in detail is a mythic act, the creation of a community, some sort of deep and timeless retion—also threatening. This could turn into autocracy, into the rule of a mad despot, if they do not precisely bance the weights and measures of the social form. Freedom is, on the one hand, the simplest thing, but now that they know what horrors can emerge from human structures, there's a caution to it. As if everyone contains the seed of fascism, just waiting for the right circumstances to erupt. Perhaps they do; perhaps that's what happened at Tassel House. Not authoritarianism imposed from above, authoritarianism erupting from within. The ghost of Midnight haunts the discussion.

  Unwinding in a booth at Denny’s that evening, Eff says, “You know it’s funny, I just keep thinking about the Hellraiser cenobites having, like, little meetings like this where they work out what they all want from their pain torment dimension.”

  Sophia ughs. “That’s kind of, uh, overdetermined. Like with you being a dom but also our whole lifestyle situation.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, do you know what the word cenobite means?”

  Eff shakes her head.

  “It’s a term from monastic orders. It comes from, um, koinos bios, life in common. People who live together, sharing resources and property, as opposed to hermits. Like a commune. You could say both those ideas—cenobites and communists—describe something simir, a way of living together.”

  “So why are they called that in the movie?”

  “It’s a monastic order. Maybe a reference to De Sade? The horror of it is in the fact that these people chose to be together and in so doing they separated from the rest of us, becoming something other. Demon to some, angel to others. Which is what a commune is to most people.”

  “Well, they didn’t all choose…”

  “It pys fast and loose with the idea of choice, certainly. There is the box—well, maybe that’s the horror of it too. How the societies we are in common with always close us off from other possibilities. I can’t remember who it was that said every culture is a cult, maybe Graeber, it’s an accurate observation. The whole world is made up of cults, some of which let you freely pass in and out, others of which are jealous, try to hold you in, or protective and try to keep you out.”

  “In that sense of the word. Like, ignoring the abuse,” Ivy pipes up. “Cuz I’m used to the abuse being a pretty central part of what makes something a cult.”

  “Abuse is fuzzier than we’d like, too,” says Sophia. “What one person can’t stand, another might take comfort in. That’s why anarchism is such an important concept. No one can say what another person might need. Some kind of hegemonic, totalitarian culture could never really work. It’s a harmful, delusional dream.”

  “A lot of people just want that sense of belonging,” says Eff. “I’m not too proud of it but I have to admit that it drives me too. I’ve made a lot of bad decisions hoping I could just belong among others.”

  “It’s awful when it hurts you,” says Sophia. “So is the isotion.” She pauses. “Maybe the isotion is worse. Or maybe I’ve just had too much of it.”

  The air is warm in the diner, filled with the smell of frying oil and disinfectant. It’s a familiar, comforting sensation, the sounds of families talking and children shouting and gsses clinking in the back. It’s a little easier to imagine herself being part of a world like that, if everyone could just get together and talk about what’s wrong. Maybe most of them need religion for that, some basis of mutual faith. Or they make family their religion.

  In the darkness outside, out of the corner of her eye, she sees a figure watching her. When she turns to look it’s gone, not even a shadow she confused, just completely vanished. She thought she saw her childhood pastor.

  Turning her back to the window, she smiles reassuringly at Sophia, who noticed her unease, and gets back to eating.

  *****

  That night, Sophia and Ivy are coiled up around each others’ bodies, naked, in bed, ignoring the anime pying on Sophia’s ptop. Ivy’s gently running her fingers through Sophia’s red hair, straightening out the curls that then softly spring back into pce. It feels so nice that it’s hard to be stressed about the money. Maybe the inertia of future events isn’t always a threat.

  “I don’t know why, I’m just anxious that like, if we put down this idea of bor equity without some sort of specific eboration, it will turn into these cycles of ressentiment around each other. Like things have already been weird,” Sophia sighs. “I just don’t get why people are so uncomfortable with a formalized pn.”

  “Well, I think a lot of people have had some really negative experiences with formalized structures,” Ivy says. “That’s not to say we can’t figure something out.”

  “Like, Jaime was saying that it would turn into people being held to expectations regardless of their ability but I don’t really think so. I think it’s just a matter of being clear. I don’t even know that I’m that clear on exactly what needs to be done, or what the expectations are!”

  “Hey, sweetheart.” Ivy rests her hand on Sophia’s cheek, glowing warm. “You’re getting overwhelmed. These are good people. We can talk it out.”

  “I just… yeah, fuck, I’m really anxious. We haven’t really had any big group conversations since Midnight’s death and I guess with all this coming up, and talking about money, it just put me in a pce. I don’t want to lose this pce. This has been the best pce I’ve ever lived.”

  “I understand. We’ll figure it out.”

  Sophia’s face shifts into a smile. “Wow, look at you. You sound so self-assured. When did this happen?”

  “I’m still working it out, I’m not half as stable as I sound right now. I guess being there for you is an important part of being there for myself. At the same time, I kinda, I don’t know. It’s not that I like myself, exactly, but I don’t feel as dire, or as lost, when I think about myself. Not like how it used to be.”

  She leans forward and kisses Sophia. Sophia’s lips are so soft, she tastes sweet and salty. She grabs tightly around Ivy’s upper body and pulls her closer until they’re pressed against each other.

  “I love you,” Ivy says.

  “I love you too.”

  Ivy kisses her chin, and her cheek, and her neck. Her colrbone, the center of her chest. Her pink nipples stiffen in between Ivy’s lips. Ivy starts to grind on her thighs, rubbing on the sweat.

  “Hey, is this okay?” asks Sophia.

  “Yes,” says Ivy. “Is it okay for you?”

  “Yes. Yes this is really good.” She kisses Ivy on the ear. “I just wanted to check in, cuz, I don’t know, we haven’t in a minute.”

  “I’ve been in a kinda weird pce,” says Ivy. “I think I’m feeling better.”

  “Do you want to sleep with me?”

  Ivy smirks mischievously. “I sleep with you every night. Do you mean sex?”

  “Yes.”

  They kiss again and then Ivy ys down beside her. “I’ve never had sex with another trans woman, did you know that?”

  “I think you said something like that.”

  “I don’t want to make you feel weird.”

  “I understand.” Sophia squeezes her fingers. Her eyes unfix from anything for a moment, like she’s dissociating, or maybe just lost in thought, and then she presses her face against Ivy’s neck. “Just, you know, treat me like what I am, treat my stuff like you would any other woman’s stuff. That’s really all that it comes down to. I don’t like to focus on how it’s different.”

  “What if I have a huge breakdown and start crying?”

  “That’s okay. Are you okay if I have a huge breakdown and start crying?”

  “Yes. Do… do you think that’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know.” She wraps her arms around Ivy’s arm. “I love you. I don’t want you to feel any pressure to do this.”

  “I don’t feel pressure. I feel good,” Ivy smiles. “I know today was really stressful, but I also think it was really good. We all came together and talked about things. I was intimidated by that but I ended up really liking it. I want to ride this high.” She kisses Sophia on the shoulder. “You’re really beautiful, you know.”

  “Thank you,” says Sophia. “I think you’re so gorgeous. I don’t know why you’d want to be with someone like me.”

  “I want to be with you because you’re sweet.” A kiss on her arm. “And you’re kind to me.” A kiss on her chest. “And you take care of me.” A kiss on her belly. “And you’re really smart.” Ivy kisses Sophia’s upper thigh and her leg trembles. “And you’re incredibly cute. So very cute.” Ivy kisses Sophia’s other thigh. Her clit is erect and Ivy positions her lips over it, almost touching. “Are you into this?”

  “Yes,” says Sophia. “This is really good.”

  Ivy slips her lips around Sophia’s clit and gently licks the tip with her tongue. She slides her tongue down the shaft and begins pying with the tip. The liquid already dripping out the end tastes familiar, the same as when she hooked up with cis women. Somehow she hadn’t known it would be like that.

  “Oh holy fuck that feels so good,” says Sophia. “I’ve never—oh my god—I’ve never felt this before.”

  Once Sophia’s clit is dripping wet with her saliva, Ivy moves back up her body, licking her nipples, sucking on them. She climbs on top of her and positions her pussy over Sophia’s junk then reaches down and guides Sophia’s clit into her. Their thighs press on each other as she feels Sophia inside of her, soft and warm, and she squeezes with her pelvic muscles until Sophia lets out a little squeak and a shudder runs up and down her body. Ivy moves up and down, up and down, enjoying the aching in her legs, and Sophia starts to rhythmically rock her hips, faster and faster, grabbing Ivy’s ass, running her fingers all over the small of Ivy’s back.

  “Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Yes! Yes! Fuck! Yes!”

  Afterward, they’re lying in bed next to each other, covered in sweat and saliva and body juices. Sophia came at least three times and she’s still panting trying to catch her breath when she says, “Hey, did you enjoy that?”

  “Yes. Yes I did.”

  “Even with like… I don’t know, it wasn’t weird? Cuz of my body?”

  “It wasn’t weird at all. That was really good. I think that was the best sex I’ve ever had.”

  Ivy’s body is still pulsing with pleasure, her muscles feeling more rexed than she can ever remember them feeling. She didn’t know it could be like this. No fear, no dissociation, just pleasure in the presence and enjoyment of a lover’s body. She curls up around Sophia, feeling the other woman’s chest rising and falling as she steadies her breath. A breeze comes through the window and Ivy shivers, the sweat suddenly cold, and pulls a bnket around her and her girlfriend.

  “I’m scared about the future but I guess it’s going to be okay,” says Sophia.

  “We don’t know anything at all about the future,” says Ivy. “But that doesn’t matter. Because this, right now, this feels really good.”