Chapter Seven:Cold Light of Dawn[content warning: slurs, drug use, suicide, police violence, transmisogynoir, sexual abuse]

  Ivy gazes into the impcable face of Immanuel Kant. He’s like a gargoyle looming out of the darkness. Or a prison warden. Do you want to read it, was what Sophia had asked her before heading off to work. Does she want to read Kant? She wants to be able to talk to Sophia about Kant. She’s spent a lot of time reading philosophy and theory because she wants to be able to talk to people she likes about these things. It’s a private nguage, in a way, a strange lover’s nguage, the way others have used fandoms or shared mythologies. The Critique of Pure Reason may be something that expands her reality, her connection to others, or it might just drive her crazy.

  Why read philosophy if I don’t really care about it? Or do I care? Is the illusion that I’m doing this for others, that I’m doing any of this for others, because I’m too scared to say what I want, what I need? Do I even know what I want or need?

  It’s been over a half hour since Sophia left to go tutor some rich college kid. Eff and Emiko slide open the patio door and step into the backyard.

  “Hey, Ivy, you look devastated, is everything okay?” asks Eff as she lights a cigarette.

  “I’m facing off with Kant and I think he’s winning,” says Ivy. “Why, what’s up?”

  “We’re going on a dispensary run, wanna come?”

  Since Emiko moved in they had been making consolidated trips to the weed dispensary off of her medical marijuana card and now that weed is legalized in California the stoners of the house are still in the habit of going out together. Besides, they’ve agreed to split the costs and pool their weed. Which means it skews a little more toward the biggest stoners—tely, Emiko—but that’s not too much of a problem as long as there’s enough resources for everyone. Like many things, it could become a problem if resources become too scarce or if someone starts exploiting the others. The whole situation is riding on mutual good faith.

  “Yeah, let me get my things.”

  She leaves Kant on the bedside table.

  On the way there Emiko swings by a friend’s house to drop something off and emerges ten minutes ter with a crumpled wad of twenties that they take to Oaksterdam. After picking up a half ounce and a few pre-rolls they hotbox the car with Blue Dream and roll down to the Emeryville shoreline. The waves are soft today, little bits of styrofoam bobbing around on them like alien sealife.

  “I’m just fucking sick of the drama,” Emiko says, tossing a stone into the water. “Like, I don’t know, I started spending all my time online back when I was living in that house full of cis fags and they were all just treating me like some kind of oddity, like a drag queen who went too far or something, and I just couldn’t deal with that. It was like 2014 and it seemed like everyone was way nicer on the internet. Then all the terfs started showing up. And the crypto-fash. Now it’s tankies and sissies. The admins are making it harder and harder to do camming and get paid, and there’s more chasers than ever. It’s just totally toxic. And instead of addressing the problems everyone’s just going after each other.”

  “Trans women hate ourselves,” says Ursu. “No one wants to be seen being the one defending other trans women online. You can always get social capital for being the good tranny and selling each other out.”

  “Like, look at this!” Emiko has her phone out. “I got four anon questions. One’s saying I’m a binarist colonialist imperialist because I do porn. One’s saying I’m not really trans. One’s calling me an AGP and a baeddel. And one’s asking, I quote, ‘How big is your lovely dy dick please send measurements’. What the fuck, this is not a fucking community it’s a nightmare.”

  “What’s an AGP and a baeddel?” asks Ivy.

  “Oh god I don’t even want to get into it,” says Emiko. “It’s just all stupid shit, right, nine thousand ways of saying I’m bad because I’m posting nudes, bad because I’m asking for money, bad for being a trans woman, bad for being a lesbian, whatever else. Yesterday someone starts reblogging my posts calling me antibck because I’m asian—no other reason, she literally said that was why, and this bitch was white! Right there in her bio, white twenty-two-year-old intersectional feminist what the fuck! It’s nonsense, it’s fucking toxic. It’s actually not okay.”

  “You need to take a break from that,” says Eff.

  “Except I need the fucking money,” says Emiko.

  “Do you?” asks Ursu.

  “We all do. Besides the money buys the stuff I sell to pay for the makeup and clothes for camming. It’s a vicious cycle, right? And occasionally I eat food.”

  “Then keep posting nudes, but take a break from the engagement. Ignore all the stupid asks.”

  “I’ll be earning less then, the money always comes from the engagement.”

  “If anyone at the house has a problem with it, I will talk to them myself,” says Eff, resting her hand on Emiko’s shoulder. “Look, you need a fucking break. We will figure it out.”

  “I mean, the budget’s been okay recently,” Ivy volunteers. “I know Sophia’s just got another tutoring job. And I’m about ready to be looking for work. If you need to take a break you should.”

  “That’s real,” says Ursu, who’s been down by the water kicking at slimy rocks with her sneakers. “Emi, I haven’t seen you rex in like a month. It’s not all on you. Take a break if you’ve got to. No one’s gonna be upset with you.”

  “No, because, like—because.” Suddenly Emiko starts crying. “I… I just don’t like being dependent on people. I like having shit figured out. It shouldn’t be getting to me.” She grabs at her hair, tugging like she’s trying to dig her brain out of her skull. “I shouldn’t let it get to me. I shouldn’t. Fuck! I guess that’s my mom talking, I don’t know. You know, I never figured how to be an adult, except to be like my mom, in some kind of way. I hate it. I’m so anxious about fucking things up. Like, after Midnight died, for a minute, I kinda had to be the mom of the house. No offense to anyone but like some people were grieving and Ivy you were still totally off your shit and Sophia was busy helping you and Ursu you were gone all the time, I mean I know you were working and doing stuff you had to do it’s just I felt like I had to be everyone’s mom, like I’d be doing coke just to keep the fucking bathroom clean or the kitchen counters or the dishes—do you know how many dishes we go through on, like, a single day? Like every meal, we don’t even have a dishwasher, it’s me, I’m the dishwasher. I’m the one keeping the mold back from growing in the shower. And I have to be online all day selling pics except I have to be going out to parties to deal and make connections. Oh and I have to keep up with everyone’s fucking personal issues because I’m living with a bunch of white people with egos like tissue paper. Like Sophia’s cool and all and I don’t mean to dish on your girlfriend but if I’m short with her for like a minute her jaw starts quivering and she looks like she expects me to hit her. Nylon’s got super thick skin because she’s such a punk who’s been through so many hard times but god forbid you ask her to fucking clean something or take a shower or fucking help out with anything other than smoking weed and cigarettes. I mean I like living here, it’s just not fair.”

  “I didn’t know you were going through that,” says Ursu, putting her arm around Emiko. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Cuz I shouldn’t have to! I mean, I don’t know, don’t people pay attention to these things? Or is everyone so lost in their own little world they can’t notice?”

  “Honestly, yeah, we’re all lost in our own little worlds a lot,” says Ivy. There’s heat in her chest, a little fire of guilt over her heart. “I’m trying to be more present with other people’s needs. I’m used to kinda being on the outside of things and not really thinking about the group dynamics so much.”

  “Well it sucks,” says Emiko. “I’m on the outside too! I’m just, like, taking care of everyone else. Fuck, Ivy, every trans girl thinks she’s on the outside of the group. It’s so dysfunctional because we’re actually all just the group so it falls to someone to make sure people eat and have a pce to live and everything. You need to be more aware of this. And Ursu, sweetie, you’re never fucking around. I don’t—I don’t wanna be living like this anymore. My mom used to be on speed a lot. I guess I kinda fell into that pattern. And it’s good that we’re talking about things and pnning things intentionally now. No, it is, it really is. It’s good that we’re acting with real intention and we’re talking about being interdependent and everything. It’s just—I’m not gonna be able to ask people to do what they should already be doing! How am I supposed to do that? Everything clicks together when I’m managing things. When I’m taking care of things. If I’m just, like, living, then what am I doing with my life? I couldn’t—I can’t—”

  She stops crying and stiffens, barely breathing, staring off into the water. Across the bay, the skyscrapers of San Francisco grow taller every day, compelled by forces unseen from here. Ursu hugs her then goes and grabs a lukewarm soda from the car. After a few sips, it breaks her out of the spell.

  “I like being part of a group. But it’s a little bit like a family. The thing with it is, everyone is supporting each other. And when one of us breaks down, everyone is supporting her. Like you’re all supporting me right now. No, I see it, I appreciate it. It’s great. What happens if everyone breaks down? If everyone’s doing badly, how do you bance everyone’s needs? If everyone’s going crazy who pys therapist? If everyone’s too depressed to clean the kitchen who makes the food? We are perched on the tip of a knife right now. I mean, even look at like, we all still have medical needs, only some of which are even being addressed, only some of us even have access to hormones right now, so we’re failing, right? We’re all still carrying all of this trauma and so much of it is just not being dealt with. Even still, right now things are okay. What happens when things go wrong? With the wailing and the gnashing of teeth? Do we all just go mad?”

  “Maybe we do,” says Eff. “How is that any worse than before?”

  “It’s not,” says Emiko. “Fuck, I think it’s better than before, because now we can actually talk about it. That doesn’t mean I’m not terrified to see it happen. And the more I interact with you all, the more I get to know you, the more there’s this horrible sense of dread creeping at the edges of my mind, saying that this cannot st. That six months from now I’m going to be alone somewhere and you’re all going to be posting horrible shit about me on the internet.”

  “I’m not gonna,” says Ivy. “I barely even use the internet.”

  “We’re not just going to abandon you,” says Ursu. “Even if things get tough, we don’t just abandon you, you understand that right?”

  “Sure, in my brain.” Emiko throws another rock into the water, a big one that nds with a ker-plunk sending up a vertical spew like a whalespout. “There were people before who I understood that about. Who I could trust. I understood that my mom wasn’t going to abandon me. I understood that Hailey wasn’t going to abandon me. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ve seen too many people kill themselves! I’ve seen too many people I thought were friends turn on me for a little social capital, turn me into something expendable!”

  “Let’s make a promise right here, that we’re going to look out for each other.” Ursu smiles, holding Emiko’s hand.

  Eff is visibly uncomfortable, standing a little ways away where only Ivy can see the look on her face. She’s spent a lot of her life navigating on the principle that she’s beholden to no one. Several times in the past few weeks she’s needed to privately process with Ivy about the difficulty of becoming such an integral part of a house collective when she never expected to be in one pce this long. One of the reasons she drifted apart from Midnight was because Midnight had gotten dependent on her and she couldn’t stand that. The same reason she’d ter given for why she abandoned Ivy in Santa Cruz.

  “I can’t guarantee that I’ll never leave, that I’ll never have to go somewhere,” says Ivy to address what Eff won’t say. “I will promise that I’m never going to turn on you, on any of you. If we have a problem, we talk it out. We’ve been there for each other. You were all there for me back when I was losing my mind. If I’m around, I’ll do what I can to look out for you. The same goes for everyone else at the house.”

  “Yeah, I agree,” says Eff. “Same.”

  Emiko puts out her other hand and Ivy holds it. She’s trembling a little. Ivy’s never seen her break down like this, even when she’s been high as fuck. And she almost never talks about her mom, or her mom’s suicide.

  I won’t say I won’t die, is the thing Ivy’s afraid to vocalize. I can’t promise you that I won’t kill myself, not while looking you in the eye. I’m working on it, though. I’m working on being able to say that I’m going to live.

  She hadn’t realized she’s still in that pce, until this moment, until she has to think about it truthfully. A lot has changed since she started dating Sophia, since she came to this house, since she started working on her trauma. A lot more still has to change.

  *****

  The sky is a mottled salmon pink like faded old lingerie smeared across infinity. She’s driving through endless streets of suburbs, identical two-story houses one after another after another all of them unpoputed, occasional real estate billboards with eerie white cis women advertising the new developments. The sun is beating down on the asphalt and the array of houses from an odd angle out of her sight. Garbled voices mumble through the radio about bodycounts.

  She passes a cul de sac with two unbeled semi trucks parked inside. The backs of the containers are open and they’re filled with person-sized opaque pstic bags piled along the inner walls. Men in white full body Tyvek suits struggle to move the heavy bags in and out of the empty houses. She sees this only for a moment and then is again passing the repetitive houses, faded wns, silent doors.

  Occasionally she drives past blocks where thick high voltage wires run out of garage doors and kitchen windows and onto the sidewalks, bundled together to disappear into the gutters. These houses have a variety of satellite dishes on the roofs, sprouting up like mushrooms. The angry electric buzzing is audible even inside the vehicle

  She sees all of this without care. This is not why she’s here. She’s searching for something.

  Though the houses are empty she sees the flicker of a television in many of them. The ground rumbles and a jet flies overhead, very low, not a passenger jet. Military. Squat and dark gray.

  She reaches the edge of the development and drives along it. To her right, an endless expanse of identical beige houses with astroturf wns, motionless like rocks on the moon. To her left, a short picket fence and beyond that an empty field of dirt, nothing but clods of dust and star thistle and bits of pstic trash, baking in the fleshy sunlight, stretched out toward the horizon of brass hills.

  “Here it is, turn here,” says Houndstooth from the backseat. She looks over her shoulder, but there’s no one in the backseat. She thinks she sees a twisted mask with a distorted screaming face and bent tusks for teeth, but it’s not there. Just the humming of the engine.

  She turns. Another long road. It winds past house after house with no intersections. It twists left and right and suddenly ends in a cul de sac. Between two houses is a sidewalk that continues out into the dead field. Piper is standing there in a yellow sundress at the edge of the sidewalk as if it were the bow of a ship.

  Lilly parks the car, gets out, and walks up to Piper. Her footsteps echo on the concrete.

  “Hey,” says Piper, smiling at her with immense sadness in her eyes.

  “I was looking for you,” says Lilly, breath tangled up in her throat.

  “Well. You found me.”

  They stare out at the dirt and the distant hills. The sun is setting and the hills turn from purple to deep ocean blue in the fading lights. Three jets cross the sky, roaring as they do so, leaving a triple vapor trail fading in the evening light.

  “Happy 9/11,” says Piper. “Did you blow out the lights?”

  “The sky is so big,” says Lilly. She feels foolish. It’s like they’re being swallowed up by the night sky. So many stars, meteors, pnets, asteroids, drifting around in a tremendous vacuum. The world could shrink to a point inside all that. “It’s bigger than anything. We’re on a tiny little isnd compared to these open expanses.”

  “Am I in the sky now?” asks Piper. “Or in the ocean?”

  Lilly starts to hear the sound, the buzzing sound, like tinnitus with static. There’s torn pieces of paper, advertisements and newspaper, tumbling across the street and into the dirt. “What do you mean?”

  “I found a way out. I’ve found a pce where they can’t get to me anymore. A pce where no one’s looking at me that way I hate. It’s funny, really. The answer for me was there all along but I was approaching it the wrong way. Now I get to be all alone,” says Piper. “Thank you for your help. I remember you were there. I found a way out of the night. I’ve always been looking for the light of the sun.”

  She starts ughing, a sad soft ughter. And she begins to fade into the night like the vapor trails, the edges of her becoming murky and drifting on the air.

  In the field, Lilly realizes, there are bodies among the clods of dirt. Human bodies, dozens, hundreds, still. Some half-buried, some on the surface as if they have just fallen.

  “Wait, what’s happening?” asks Lilly. “What are you doing?”

  “It’s nice to sleep,” says Piper, “but you’ve been sleeping a lot tely. I hope you’re rested up, cuz the time is coming. Pretty soon you’re going to need to look into the light of the sun.”

  “Am I dreaming?” asks Lilly.

  “Everyone is,” says Piper. She smirks. “I found a way out.” She’s suddenly glowing in the headlights of the car and she proudly holds out her arms and Lilly can see the heavy cuts across her wrists, the dark blood pouring out onto the pavement.

  “Oh no,” says Lilly, rushing forward. “No, baby, what are you doing?”

  It’s too te. Piper’s already lying on the sidewalk in a puddle of blood, smiling, still, dead. Her eyes are motionless and cloudy. Where she’s been lying since before Lilly found her. Cockroaches swarm out of the dirt around the sidewalk onto her body, like a liquid shadow, swarming to devour her flesh.

  “NO!”

  Ivy jumps up in bed, shrieking, awakened by the sound of her own screams. The room twists and spins and settles into pce as reality comes to her and Sophia’s rising now, looking bleary-eyed but armed, terrified, between the tangles of her hair, her hand already gripping Ivy’s wrist. A blob of dried spit on the corner of her mouth. The door swings open as Nylon runs into the room, followed by Eff, Emiko, Ursu at the doorway, looking in.

  “Fuck,” Ivy’s saying, catching uneven breaths. “Fuck. Fuck.”

  “What’s going on? Are you okay?” asks Nylon, clearly expecting a serious emergency. From the look on their face they might’ve come in with a bat or a crowbar if they’d had one on hand.

  “No. Yeah. Sorry. Nightmare. I. I just. It was a nightmare, that’s all. It was a nightmare.”

  For a moment the blood rushes to her head and she can’t see anything but static, can’t hear anything at all but that humming, buzzing sound. Then it fades, leaving behind a headache, and she can see the people around her again: Sophia, hand on her shoulder, Nylon standing over the bed in a sports bra and camo pajama pants ready to fight the ineffable, Eff naked, and Emiko and Ursu behind her in baggy t-shirts, all processing the adrenaline spike that had woken them in terror. “I’m sorry for screaming.”

  “That’s okay,” says Eff in a soft tone indicating she’s gone from crisis to caretaking mode. “What kind of support do you need?”

  “I don’t know, I think I’ll be okay,” says Ivy. “I’m sorry for waking people up. I just had a nightmare about something really bad that happened to me once.”

  She closes her eyes and she can see those endless crawling expanses of identical beige suburban houses. She notices she’s crying and once she notices it goes from a trickle to a river of tears.

  There are people around her. Sophia and Eff and Emiko. Sophia is holding her hand, another hand on her shoulder. Eff is standing nearby, Emiko sitting on the bed looking concerned. It’s so sweet to have people looking after you when you’re going through it, she thinks, and then wonders why she thought it in the second person.

  “It’s just. I just remembered someone I knew who died,” she says finally, feeling like she owes some expnation. Sophia squeezes her hand and Eff nods sadly and puts a hand on her other shoulder. “I forgot. Because my memory is so fucked. I forgot she died. I forgot how she died. It was bad. I found… I found her there.” At that she breaks down, unable to communicate, totally overwhelmed. She feels nauseating vertigo, like she’s falling off a cliff again and again. She’s aware that there are people around her but she can’t see them anymore. She is falling, falling, nowhere to nd. She sees the body, on the pavement, where she found her. Why would she pick that pce?

  The smell of dirt blowing on the evening wind. The look of that bloodstained yellow sundress blinking red and blue in the police lights. The smile, frozen on her face, already distorted by the body breaking down. It had been hours before, the coroner said. You could tell from the insects and how the blood settled in the body.

  Later she’s outside, smoking a cigarette. Not really smoking, it went out halfway where it got wet from tears and she’s just been holding it, staring at the dandelions popping up from beside a pile of old bricks. It’s just dawn, the sky turning blue as the unforgiving sun peaks over the horizon. Every now and then a semi truck starting their day rolls past and the fluffy edges of the dandelion shake with the rattling of the ground.

  “Hey,” says Nylon. Ivy hadn’t noticed them coming outside. “I know you’re having a rough time but I have an emergency I need input on. Is that okay?”

  Ivy nods.

  “Gravity needs housing right now. Things at Tassel House have gotten really bad. I know you haven’t met faer but fae’s a bck trans person I’ve known for several years. I can vouch for faer. And the situation there is super hostile. We’ve talked about it before, I think. Are you okay with faer moving in here?”

  “Sure,” says Ivy. “I trust your judgment.”

  “Yes,” says Sophia, slouching barely awake in a chair nearby. “Where’s fae going to sleep?”

  “Maybe the central room with Eff, maybe with me and Jaime, we haven’t really figured it out.”

  “Okay,” says Sophia. “Do you need any support?”

  “We don’t right now, uh, but Gravity might when fae gets here. Fae’s been dealing with some real bullshit over there.”

  “Alright, I’ll keep that in mind,” says Sophia. “I’m super sleepy so I might be a little out of it today.”

  “Yeah, no worries. We’re all present today I think so like, it’s not on you or anything. Both of you just take care of yourselves.”

  Nylon pulls out a handrolled cigarette from the pocket of their vest. They don’t say anything about Ivy’s but once they light theirs they hold out the lighter and Ivy relights hers. They smoke in silence. She notices one of their pins fell off, a little wooden raccoon, and picks it up for them. It’s handmade, glued to a safety pin, and the metal has completely rusted through.

  As Ivy finishes her cigarette she asks, “Why do so many people want to die?”

  “Because life is really hard for the people you know,” says Nylon. “You have to be resolute to always want to face that, day after day. A lot of people don’t have that resolve.”

  “I’ve wanted to die for a lot of reasons,” says Ivy. “I haven’t done it yet though, as far as I know.”

  “I’m gd you’re not dead,” says Sophia.

  “Me too,” says Nylon. There’s a distant look in their face, and Ivy realizes they must be thinking of Midnight. Or other people they were close to who died. There have been a number, from what she’s heard. Nylon used to be on the road all the time and they’ve seen some really horrible things.

  Sophia comments that Emiko is getting up and rushes to go do the dishes. Eff had talked to her the night before and now she’s decided it’s her personal duty to beat Emiko to any chores. She talked about it for over an hour before going to bed, about her guilt over not doing enough for the house. Ivy could point out that it’s not just her, that Ivy and Ursu and Eff and Nylon and Jaime all do less than Emiko and Sophia does more than most of them. It’s the fire in Sophia’s eyes that stops her. She likes helping people, it fulfills something in her. Like she likes to help Ivy. So Ivy watches her go, watches Nylon go to talk to other people about Gravity, watches until she’s all alone.

  Now I get to be all alone.

  Without a word, Sophia returns sometime ter to sit beside her. Her hand is warm from the hot water. Ivy is watching the rush of morning traffic. People going off to work, off to ordinary jobs, baristas, office workers, data analysts, city pnners, techies, yuppies, gardeners, traffic cops, garbagemen, flight attendants, all the hustling of a whole society that’s grown so intricately complicated it needs to carve up huge chunks of everyone’s lives in order to make itself a manifest reality. The frontier, always being conquered: the minutes, hours, and days of everyone’s life. Some choose, instead, to burn it down, salt the nd. Maybe some of these people are rushing off to think about abusive households, gender norms and body standards, to talk people out of suicide. She’s guessing that most of them are avidly avoiding the specter of death.

  “When you’re trying to talk someone out of killing themselves, what do you say?” asks Ivy.

  “I don’t know,” says Sophia. “It’s hard to figure out. It depends on the specific person. The specific situation.”

  “Do you always try to talk people out of killing themselves?”

  “If I’m given the opportunity, yes, I do. I always try to respond, figure out something to say. I think most people do.”

  “That’s right, we do. It’s funny, all the time we wish death on others and we act so unaffected by other people and we participate in all these things, css structures and wars and prisons, but when two people are facing each other we say, no, don’t die. Do you think it’s selfish?”

  “Maybe. Maybe for some people. Maybe they see someone thinking about death and they imagine themselves in the situation and they say, no, I wouldn’t want to die, so by extension I don’t want this other person to die. At the same time, maybe there’s some deep down human instinct to all of it. Maybe we have a reason we don’t want to let each other die. Some in-built human need to protect each others’ life.”

  Ivy stands up, stretches. Her spine’s all fucked up, holding the trauma. Sitting in a chair outside for hours barely moving. The spine that has to bear all the weight of her fucked up brain, all the bad decisions and sudden jolts, holding it up away from the ground like a skyscraper. It would be better to slink along the dirt like a snake. “Jaime would bring up Kropotkin, right? Mutual aid. We have evolved to look out for each other.”

  “It’s a nice idea but I get a little suspicious every time human behavior is attributed to evolution. It’s nonfalsifiable, right?”

  “That’s true.” There’s a beat up little dandelion nearly ground into the earth in front of Ivy, and she begins sorting out its crushed leaves, petting and smoothing them like the fur of a prize dog covered in mud. “Do you think I’m selfish?”

  Sophia pauses for a minute, thinking. Ivy really appreciates that about her. When she puts forward a difficult question, she doesn’t get an immediate answer. Sophia takes the time to really think through what she’s going to say.

  “I don’t know if you’re selfish or not. There’s a lot I haven’t figured out about you. I think maybe you don’t really have a core answer to that. Why do you do the things you do?”

  “Sometimes for other people. Sometimes for self-preservation, or because I want to. Often it’s instinct. No. No, not instinct; habit. I’m following patterns I’ve learned even as they spiral into pces I don’t expect them to go.”

  “Do you think more about the big picture or your immediate world?”

  “I think a lot about the big picture. I don’t know how to act in retion to it. I act in retion to my own little reality and sometimes the distance between the two tears me apart. Like when I’m smoking too much or when someone needs help and I don’t do anything or enough. Or when there’s something I should act on and I don’t. To some degree I’m following my own self-satisfaction and hoping that at the end of the line it collides with what I should have been doing the whole time.”

  “And what do you want to be doing?”

  “I want a good life for myself and others.”

  “When it comes down to it, though?”

  “I have absolutely no clue.” Despondent.

  Sophia puts her arm around Ivy. “Hey, you don’t have to have it all figured out.”

  “Is that something you say to someone who’s suicidal?”

  “Are you suicidal?” Her tone suddenly sharp, worried.

  “No. Not right now. I mean, no, I just have been before in my life but no, it’s not something you need to worry about.”

  Sophia rexes, and Ivy continues, “I just feel guilty. I feel like I should’ve known what to say. I talked to her about it several times. Piper, I mean, the girl I used to know. I was dealing with some weird trauma, I don’t even know how much of this is delusions from all the drugs and trauma and everything, and I was kinda focused on myself and my issues but then she was doing horribly and I tried to be there for her but I didn’t know what to say and I didn’t know what to do. I’d been out for a while, but I—I pass, most the time, I passed back then too. I was stealth and I didn’t really know how to be around other trans people. I didn’t know things about, like, what kinds of traumas other trans girls were going to be dealing with or how to help them or how it was going to affect me to try to help them. And someone died. Was I trying to help her, trying to be a good person, just trying not to deal with the trauma of seeing her dead? In the end I had to, either way.”

  “Can I tell you about something heavy?”

  “Yeah, yeah of course, we’re just mindspilling right? Or at least I am…”

  “When I had just come out there was a girl I met in the college LGBT club. She was a math major. She had a very analytical mind. We ended up talking a lot because even though we had mostly different interests and different life experiences, we were able to connect around that rigorous, critical perspective, which was like a distance keeping us away from the rest of the world even as it gave us a lens through which to observe that world. We would talk about many things. About the world and the state of it and why things were so miserable. About the problem of evil. About how to be a good person, how to interact with others, how to conduct oneself in society. Occasionally we ventured into the realm of discussing our transitions, gender, our personal lives, but those were mostly conversations reserved for other times and other parts of our lives. I knew in some ways very little about her life. I would go to one of the cafes on campus, and sit with her eating a sandwich and drinking tea and talking about the nature of consciousness or whether or not knowledge is possible or how information retes to reality. I knew that she was a very lonely person, but I thought very little about her personal life, and when I did I just reassured myself that I was, after all, connecting with her, doing the right thing. You might see where this is going. She jumped off one of the campus buildings. She didn’t die, at first, she was hospitalized for a long time. Eventually she was able to walk and she killed herself with pills.”

  Ivy squeezes Sophia in her arms. Sophia’s jaw is trembling and her eyes are twitching back and forth but she keeps talking. “When I visited her in the hospital she only talked about how lonely she was. Her whole life. She said that I was the only person who ever talked to her like a person and it made her realize how lonely she had been and she was afraid of that isotion, she didn’t want to feel it anymore, to be left alone, in her head. She kept saying she needed someone to touch her and mean it. It was true that I didn’t really want to be with her, I liked her a lot as a friend but I didn’t find her attractive in that way but I would’ve lied to save her life. Until she could have found more people. Maybe she knew that, maybe she knew all of it, or none of it. We talked sometimes in the hospital but it was hard to see her there. I didn’t really think she would go through with it again. Somehow it was in my head that if someone lives through a suicide attempt they won’t try again. I think that’s just because that’s how it was for me.”

  “You tried to kill yourself?”

  “Yeah, when I was fourteen. Benzos. I passed out and vomited them up.”

  “I’m sorry sweetie, I had no idea.”

  Sophia nods. “That’s what I’m saying. You never know other people. You do what you can but you can’t make yourself responsible for the things you don’t know. Could I have talked her out of it? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe me talking to her made her more likely to do it, or maybe the opposite effect. I’ve considered it back and forth in my head a lot over the years and I’ve never come to any kind of solid answer at all.”

  Jaime’s old sedan pulls up in front of the house, the sound of ughter and manic screaming inside. “Unbelievable! They never said shit about it?” Nylon is saying as they get out of the passenger side. Jaime pops the catch on the trunk and Nylon starts unloading beat up luggage.

  “Nope! Even though they were all in the room when it happened!” says Jaime.

  “Fucking typical,” says a voice from inside the sedan. Gravity.

  Sophia and Ivy stand and hug each other. “Thanks for talking,” says Ivy. “I appreciate you sharing stuff. I’m sorry you’ve got so much awfulness on your pte.”

  “Likewise,” says Sophia, her cheeks red with the force of holding back tears. “I appreciate you opening up. I hope you’re feeling a little bit better? Like obviously not good, just like better than this morning?”

  Ivy smiles and nods. “Yeah, I’m—”

  She stops because Gravity has gotten out of the car and is staring at her, and she’s staring back. It’s six AM and she’s barely had any sleep but neurons are rapidly firing in her brain because something is wrong.

  Gravity walks over to the two of them.

  “Hi, I’m Sophia.” She puts out her hand, trying to py off the fact that she was clearly about to cry.

  “I’m, uh, Gravity.” Fae turns to Ivy. “Fuck, it’s been a minute, hasn’t it?”

  Ivy’s breath catches and freezes still. “I… I know you, don’t I?”

  “Yeah, Lilly. I was going by Nails back then.”

  The ground falls away, everything drops away, vanishes, into a thick cloud of gray-bck smoke. Splinters of wood, the taste of blood, the smell of mold in the pre-dawn air. Heavy footfalls on concrete. The feeling of being a hunted animal.

  “Police! Open up!” He shouts it, clear and commanding, right as the metal hits the door and knocks it off the frame, never intending to give them a chance to respond. As if everything was scripted. Lilly is shocked into wakefulness at this, grabbing at her sleeping bag—no, they’re two or three rooms away at most, no time for that, where’s her pack? Dust stirring up in the morning air, moving in slow motion, everything in slow motion. No, she doesn’t know where the pack is either—heavy footfalls on the floor and she hears someone scream, Houndstooth maybe, and then Nails is running past her, and she’s pulling herself out of the sleeping bag, covered in sweat, naked, the bag is sticking to her, and her legs are sticking to each other, sweaty skin electrified with adrenaline, shoving the pstic material of the sleeping bag down, stumbles, a knee onto the concrete floor, pain she doesn’t feel, and her scrambling hands find her pack, fingers coiling into the material, grabbing it from the side, pushing off its contents to rise. The air is slowly falling in the room, the office of an abandoned factory. Nails is already gone, they went through the doorframe opposite where the cops are coming, past where someone had tagged with bright pink in a frenzied handstyle THIRD EYEZ, and now Scatter is vibrating into view, holding a bck coat and a bck convenience store bandana in her two hands, knuckles tight with tension. The sound of a body hitting the floor in the other room. In pain, screaming, Houndstooth, shouting something, but Lilly’s brain isn’t processing words, she’s just holding her pack, and a coat, and a bandana, covered in sweat but otherwise ass naked, smelling of grime and exhaustion and Steel Reserve. The sound of gss shattering in another room, and it sounds so beautiful. Scatter is pulling something, a big ft sheet of concrete, no, a mattress, in front of the door, and Lilly sets down all her stuff and goes to join her.

  “Put on some clothes!” Scatter hisses. “It’ll be hell for you if they catch you naked!”

  She nods but helps Scatter pull the mattress in front of the door. She can hear, like a hunted animal in the forest, the details of their movements, the sound of rifling through people’s stuff in the next room over, and Lilly remembers there’s a sports bag there, full of pns and maps and clothes, and another full of food, and four bikes, all gone now. It’s been maybe twenty, maybe thirty seconds since they busted the door down, and now as she remembers the other room, bits of the night before filling in, she starts putting on the coat and then the door jerks in front of her as someone tries to open it and the adrenaline kicks it up another notch and the world stretches—

  Pop.

  “Hey, anyone in there?”

  She’s zoned out staring at the mossy makeshift bird fountain that had been turned into a urinal for the girls. There’s a pillow in it, floating in water and urine, a big, fancy one. She’s on a lot of drugs, isn’t she? Fuck, where is she? She was just at the shitty squat, the one in that old half-finished apartment complex, and then… no, no, that was a decade ago. She’s at that fucking party. There’s something she’s here to do but she got too fucked up.

  Knocking on the door again. “Sorry!” she says, and unlocks it. Three girls she doesn’t know very well, younger than her, in their twenties, come rolling into the bathroom, all at least as high as she is, giggling and mumbling things to each other. The one in the center is wearing a shirt that says Daddy’s Little Devil that’s strained by her huge breasts and she immediately drops her pink hot shorts and starts peeing right in front of Ivy. She has a checkerboard tattooed on the shaft of her penis. One of the other girls, the short one with long hair, says, “Hey, you’re Ivy, right? How are you liking the party?”

  “It’s—it’s good,” says Ivy, trying not to stare too hard at the arrangement of tattoos on the other girl, who is very pointedly trying to make eye contact and to be stared at. Her pupils are very, very dited, bck pools in her face. “I’m, like, really high, I’m pretty out of it.”

  “Yeah, this stuff’s great,” says the short girl, whose name Ivy knew a few minutes ago but can’t now remember. She just met all three today, or yesterday, or the day before, whenever the party started. “This is your first time here right?”

  “Yes,” says Ivy.

  “It’s a good time to be here,” says the tattooed girl as she finishes peeing. “It’s been weird sometimes, there were a few real creeps that were coming by for a while, but they kinda got the picture. This is a good crowd of people. It’s just like a really good experience, so beautiful, just another fucking world. A portal to another world. Everyone here is so beautiful.”

  The third girl, who has remained silent, is now running her fingers up and down the tattooed girl’s thighs, dancing in little curlicues, psychedelic arabesques of movement, and attention turns away from Ivy.

  “By the way,” says the short girl, “you might want to leave if you don’t want to be part of this.”

  “Not that we would mind,” says the tattooed girl, smiling ambiguously.

  Ivy doesn’t know what she wants. Part of her wants to take off—what is it, a skirt? She’s wearing a skirt. Something cutesy, bubblegum pink with ce flourishes, the kind of thing Emiko would wear. She could take it off, bend over here in the overgrown makeshift bathroom of this broken down amusement park, and glide the tattooed girl into her pussy or her ass. It would feel so good. At the same time, she feels like she’s here for a reason. Why would there be a reason? Is there a mission to this? She remembers, being here with someone—Eff—and someone else? Her brain is so fucking foggy, and she tries to focus on what it was, and when she starts to think about it, starts to get close to the idea, her mind wants to skirt away, wants to slip back to the possibilities of this foursome being offered to her, because she never used to do things like this, because right now she could. In this moment, she’s here, feels like a tourist in a future utopia, a world where she doesn’t have to worry about all those horrible things out there. He’s out there, she knows he is. This is a strange little fantasy come real, a peak into a far better world that is just hiding beneath the veil of normative reality, bulging outward. So beautiful in every way.

  “Maybe just a little,” she says, but she doesn’t move. The tattooed girl smirks, and then that smirk turns into a moan as the quiet girl slides her tongue up her thigh and onto her erection. She begins licking it like a dog pping up water, pying with the tip of her tongue against the tip of the other girl’s junk, until it’s dripping with saliva.

  Ivy unzips her skirt. Taking her clothes off feels amazing on molly. Just fresh air, swirling around, carrying the breaths of the others to her. The short girl comes over to her and grabs her around the waist. “Do you want to join us?” she asks. Ivy nods. “Condom,” she breathes, but the short girl’s already got one in hand. She guides Ivy’s fingers to her own skirt, up under it to the erection in her panties. She slips the panties off. Ivy closes her grip around the soft flesh of the other girl’s genitals and while she works her fingers up and down the girl tears open the metallic condom wrapper and readies the rubber, then brushes aside Ivy’s fingers to slide it on. “Inside,” Ivy whispers, gesturing to her pussy. “Please.”

  There’s an old tiled wall nearby, a spraypaint portrait of the yellow and pink pony from My Little Pony the only thing on it newer than the lichen. This had been a shower stall for a pool that has sat empty of water for several years. She has to believe this pce is real, that things can be like this. A break from the pain. The tattooed girl is still standing, moaning with increasing volume as the quiet girl works her tongue up and down the shaft of her genitals with expert skill. Ivy leans back against the wall and with one hand pulls off her panties, squirming one leg out of them until they rest around her ankle. The other leg she wraps around the short girl’s waist, pulling her closer, and the girl guides herself into Ivy’s pussy.

  Over there, though, in the cafeteria, there, just a few walls between them, it’s not Eff she’s thinking about, it’s—

  “Hey! Hey. You okay?” Sophia is asking.

  They’re sitting on the couch in the living room of the Richmond house. It smells like sweaty girls, cigarette breath, and spilled coffee.

  “You were moaning,” Sophia says.

  “I think I was having a sex dream,” says Ivy, still trying to sort out what happened. Piper, she remembers that. And the police. All the good feelings draining from her brain, repced by chilly air.

  “That’s great, that’s fucking hirious,” says a voice that at first sounds judgmental but no, it’s not, it’s just strained. Gravity. So that part was real. Nails. Back again.

  “What happened?” asks Ivy, sitting up as Sophia hands her a gss of water.

  “You bnked, practically fell over and dissociated really hard, like, something had just fucking happened, I don’t know, the moment that you saw me,” says Gravity.

  “Yeah I do that,” says Ivy. “Fuck. I haven’t done that in a minute. I just passed out?”

  “More or less,” says Sophia.

  “Empty?”

  “No, just staring,” says Sophia. “I was worried.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” says Ivy, sighing. She feels exhausted, as if she’s just been running for her life.

  “Gravity was saying, you two have a bit of a history,” says Nylon, joining them with an energy drink. “Sorry for the fucking surprise, I would’ve given you a heads up if I knew.”

  “Oh it was surprises all around,” says Gravity. “Everyone’s name changing and shit. I’m sorry about putting y’all out, I just, I don’t really feel safe with where things were at with Tassel House. It’s gotten pretty bad. But I don’t mean to fuck up your shit or anything. Hopefully I can find a new pce soon.”

  “No, it’s okay,” says Ivy. Gravity looks like fae doesn’t believe it so she says, “Really, I mean it, stay as long as you need to. That’s all I’m doing too. I’m sorry about the awkward greeting, I really wasn’t pnning to pass out.”

  The awkward ughter breaks the tension, a little.

  “I’m sorry, my memory is really bad these days,” says Ivy, “at least in terms of that period of my life. There’s probably a lot of stuff I don’t remember. I know it’s been a while.”

  “I’ll say. Almost a decade. Last time I saw you we were running from the police. Did you make it out of that?”

  “I don’t know,” says Ivy. “I didn’t even remember that until, maybe, a minute ago. I think. A squat being raided.”

  “Yup,” Gravity says. “Bad times. They got that kid, Houndstooth, for like four years on B and E. And resisting arrest. I ended up at some point doing jail support, we met up when they got out in like 2014. Guess that’s five years.” Fae awkwardly tugs at the upholstery of the couch for a moment. “Y’know, I kinda thought you died. I guess no one heard about you. It’s easy to assume the worst.”

  Ursu wanders into the room in a robe and panties. “Oh, good morning,” she says to no one in particur. Then she sees Gravity. “Shit, right, should I get dressed?”

  “I don’t care if you don’t.”

  “I’m getting coffee.” It turns out the pot is empty so she starts making more, and as she does she just starts talking in a voice half asleep. “So what even happened, I heard they were like, what they’re accusing you of something, they said they were gonna call the cops, right? Like something like that?”

  “Uh, yeah,” says Gravity. Ivy can’t not notice how the years have worn on faer. Fae had once been the kind of person to speak faer mind no matter what, constantly discarding caution in favor of direct communication. Now faer haunted, pausing before speaking, nervously chewing faer lower lip or scratching faer hair, pulling at the curls until they turn into frizz. “Yeah, so, like, things got pretty bad after Midnight died. I think, like, I don’t know. Everyone was kinda on some shit. I sorta felt like it was the kinda thing where I was supposed to keep it together. But they were also coming for me. But yeah they said they were gonna call the cops if I’m there by the end of the week but then I heard them saying some shit and like. I just didn’t feel safe being there any longer, you know? Nylon had already talked to me about the situation here but I didn’t really wanna fuck up your shit. But like, I don’t know, they’ve called the cops on someone before, and I’m just like, a bck trans femme and a bunch of white afabs, I know how that looks, it’s a bad scene. I don’t wanna be in that.”

  “Totally, that’s fucked,” says Ursu, sounding as if she’s only half-processing the content, or storing it for another time to process when she’s more awake.

  Gravity turns to Ivy. “I just, I wanna make sure it’s not going to be a problem? Me being here? Because I know I was kinda a mess back then.”

  “We were both messes back then, it is what it is,” says Ivy. “I just had a shock. I’ve had some real confusing memory issues, some crazy stuff, or not crazy, I shouldn’t say that, but like just stuff that didn’t make sense, and I can’t really sort out reality from what’s not real, when it comes to that time in my past. The story bleeds through and takes over from time to time. I knew that you’re a real person, but I guess it all still seemed like a story to me, right? And then to suddenly see you here like this, was just a shock for my brain.”

  “Yeah, I guess you always did have a lot going on with your mental wellbeing,” says Gravity. Fae sighs and gets up. “I’m gonna have a smoke. Do you wanna join me?”

  “Sure,” says Ivy. “I could use one.”

  Sophia gets up along with her and gives her a hug. “I need a moment to decompress. Are you gonna be okay?”

  “Yeah, it’s probably good for me to talk this through. Renormalize things.”

  “Okay. I’ll be in our room.” She gives Ivy a little kiss on the cheek, and Ivy turns toward her for a longer, fuller kiss.

  “I love you. Thank you for looking out for me.”

  “I love you too.”

  Ivy smiles. Sophia has such a cute look on her face when she’s being romantic, a blushing smirk, as if she’s fighting through some self-consciousness around expressing sweet things. As soon as she walks away, Ivy wishes that she’d asked her to stick around. It’s easier to process things with her soft arm around Ivy’s waist. Ivy turns toward the patio door glowing with morning light.

  Gravity waits for her to get about a third of the way through her cigarette before saying anything.

  “So. I wasn’t going to bring it up in front of other people. But, uh, I guess you got rounded up by Coordination Division again. They fucked with your head again, didn’t they? That’s why you can’t remember stuff.”

  All the warmth Ivy had felt from Sophia’s touch drains away and suddenly the world seems very stark and uncomfortable.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what’s real. I didn’t—I thought Coordination Division wasn’t real. That it was a schizophrenic paranoid delusion. That’s what my therapist told me.”

  “Shit. Sorry to break the news. Like what the fuck do therapists know? Well I doubt she was working for them. Probably just didn’t believe. I mean I guess if you’re like some bourgie motherfucker who went to college and shit and you’re hearing about someone going around rounding up homeless people for experiments you’re gonna say, okay, yeah, you’ve been reading too much Bill Cooper or something, right? It happened though, I saw them too, and you when you showed up with Houndstooth and Scatter, all fucked in the head. You were like a wreck at first, barely knew how to button a shirt up or tie your shoes.”

  “This is—this is a lot to hear.”

  “So they did get you again?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “But are you like—shit, I don’t know how to ask it right. Are you compromised? Are you working for them?”

  A shudder runs through her body. “No. Not at all, not for a long time. I don’t remember that part of my life very well at all. I… whatever kind of fog I was in, I came out of it in 2013, in San Francisco. From that point forward I have pretty clear memories, even if the continuity is a little choppy. I didn’t really know what I was doing for a few years. Eventually I linked up with Eff, and that eventually led me to living here. I didn’t know what happened to anyone from before. I didn’t remember very much at all. Not even—no, not very much. What about you? What have you been up to?”

  “Well, I stayed out of the way of the cops and Coordination for a few years. They were never gunning after me originally but I guess after the shit we pulled—I guess you don’t remember it, maybe that’s better—we kinda had targets on our heads and I was fleeing a bit for a while til things cooled down. I tried to stay in touch with Scatter but something happened to her, I don’t know what, and we lost communication. I ended up in the bay for a while. Houndstooth got out of jail, they’re alright now, kinda a normie, they’re a sound technician in Toronto, so whatever that’s cool. Like I guess you go through that much sometimes you just wanna assimite, I’m just gd they’re okay. I ended up in, like, a really bad retionship, that ate up a lot of the past several years for me, only just got out like a year ago, and a lot of people didn’t wanna talk to me because I had kinda been an asshole. And people said things about me. I don’t know, I guess somehow people started saying I was a predator. Cuz there was this cis woman who only liked to date t-girls who weren’t getting surgery, right, and said some really fucked up shit, like she was always talking about like dickgirl this, girlcock that, and she treated a lot of people like shit, and I kinda said some stuff about her being a chaser, because like she was touching me in weird ways at parties and shit, and she starts gunning for me, and posted a bunch of callouts and shit and basically they ran me out of Chicago and that’s how I ended up here again. Like 2015, Cutie never forgave me for us getting kicked out of that spot. I feel like I’ve always gotta be watching my back. I don’t even like, like, I don’t know, I’m not trying to start anything, but it’s like, there’s a lot of shit people are talking. Sorry if that’s a lot I just feel like I have to let people know about it so they don’t think I’m like trying to hide anything because there’s so much stuff circuting. Shit, I should talk to other people here about that. Anyway, yeah, that’s been like, a lot of the time, is just trying to find a pce I can stay. And people will like want you to sleep with them and push you into it, it’s really not okay. Like I’m just not looking to fuck I want a fucking pce to sleep, right? But people are weird about that, they have these expectations, and I’m like not trying to be that way, but it’ll be like ‘oh I saw your tweet about being horny’ and I’m like ‘did I even tell you my twitter this is not about you’ but they’re drunk or whatever. And when you say no it’s like ‘oh, you’re so fucking aggressive, I’m gonna call the cops and tell everyone you’re a rapist’ and it’s like bitch, who do you think is fucking raping who, if you’re threatening to throw me out on the street or call the cops or whatever if I won’t suck your shrimp dick? It’s total fucking shit but people just believe whatever they hear cuz I don’t look like anyone they wanna give a fuck about. I’ve been kinda kicked back and forth between Seattle and Chicago and the bay. I’m here now cuz there’s not, like, actively groups of people trying to fuck up my shit like in Chicago and it’s not as white as Seattle but it’s still a mess. Honestly I just feel like, fuck all those fake motherfuckers. Anyway, it’s basically been a lot of that, and I am really tired of that shit.”

  Fae shrugs as if apologizing for faer story.

  “Fuck,” says Ivy. “It sounds like you’ve had a really rough time. I’m sorry.”

  Gravity shrugs again. “Well, yeah, I mean, we all have, I don’t mean to make a big deal about it.”

  Ivy notices that Gravity’s just hovering over a chair and she gestures for fae to sit in it, which fae does right away. “You can make a big deal about shit that’s fucked up.”

  “Yeah, it’s just like, why does everyone pretend to care about this or that but in the end they just wanna fuck me over? That’s what I wanna know. I guess it’s just more valuable to fuck everyone over these days. Whoever taught white people about callouts made a big fucking mistake. Fuck white queers. I mean, not you, or like—”

  “It’s okay, I’m an adult, you can say ‘fuck white people’ to me.”

  “Yeah, well, you used to be kinda sensitive. I don’t know, I’m fucking exhausted, is all.” Fae reaches into faer pocket, pulls out an empty pack. Ivy offers faer a cigarette from the box on the table and after a moment of hesitation Gravity accepts in. “Thank you. Thank you. I’m sorry your shit got all fucked up. Like, I did try to look for you, afterward, I just didn’t hear anything except that you got scooped up. I didn’t even know you were in California or anything.”

  “It’s not your responsibility. Besides, I’m doing okay now.” She sighs. “Oh also, you should know, if some of my worst memories are right, there is no Coordination Division anymore. They got superseded by something even worse and most of them were killed.”

  “Oh, uhh. Fuck. Worse?”

  “Yeah… definitely thought that was all a paranoid delusion. I don’t know, maybe it was. But the anxiety’s gonna be rough for the next few weeks.” She tries to ugh. It comes out as a nervous chitter.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” says a woman’s voice over her left shoulder. She turns, startled. There’s no one there.

  The sky starts to swim, dissolving into itself. Behind it, three furious red eyes, staring down at her, the clouds and the morning air draining away from the space in front of them. “No,” she mumbles. “I’m… I don’t…”