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Sam has such a good life.
These are the kind of things he thinks about late and alone. He’s been so lucky. It’s cold, comfortable through a sweater just big enough to dip over his knuckles. His hands fit in their place around the plastic mop handle. The lights drip sugary orange, warding off the black tapping and fogging the windows with its breath. There’s nothing to want for. He has it all.
The house is quiet. At times, he doesn’t like it, the loneliness lurking in every stark white wall and behind every corner, but the stifling silence is a comfort. The mop hits the floorboards with a wet smack. The house is frozen.
Sam has it all, he knows. He draws the mop across the floor. Feathery hair brushes at his collarbones and falls over his face.
It’s clean, it’s soft, it’s peaceful. It’s everything he could ask.
On the glazed wooden floor, his reflection warps, warm wheat and honey brown and not quite shaped as it should be. He’s discolored through the amber, the watery shine stretching and twisting his face. The harsh lines of his features still peek through. His eyes don’t linger.
Something is missing.
It’s cruel to think, because Sam has been so lucky and he has everything he could have dreamed. He sweeps another wet line. His life is perfect and he still wants more. Like some hungry animal, some ever-greedy thing, he will never stop wanting.
Blond hair brushes his neck. In the broken mirror of his floor, he can just make out how the cut falls from his face, how if his cheeks were softer it could almost curl like bangs. A fire sparks to life in his chest and glows. He runs a hand up, slicks it back with its own sticky grease. The warmth fizzles out.
He has worked so hard to be where he is now. At the least, he should enjoy it. He has it all and he is still not content.
Sam pushes the mop away from his body. His heart bleeds out of his chest.
The train is still, no respite from the station and the washed layers of gray sky outside. Its side is ice against Sam’s arm. The seat is achingly stiff beneath him. Outside, it had been a wet, temperate spring—here in the air conditioning, gooseflesh pricks at his arms.
“Let’s play 20 questions,” Ben says. Sam’s eyes have drifted. The seat cushions are lavender-blue, not quite blending with Ben’s paler shorts. Sam looks up to the camera in his lap.
“I’ve thought of someone,” Sam says. He glances out the window. They remain perfectly stationary. The cobalt Monselice sign stares him down, mocking, cheery bright against the dull station brick. May rain storms roil on the horizon.
“Is it a man?”
A beat, a breath.
It’s an easy question. Sam chose himself, and yes, he is. His gaze wanders again. Over Ben’s head, the train lights are bright on the white ceiling, a little stinging. Sam tips his chin to the glass.
“Yes,” he says. It’s inexplicably uncomfortable, clunky and foreign in his mouth. His ribs tighten around his lungs.
“Okay,” Ben hums.
There’s a slimy emotion crawling through Sam’s chest. He did not lie.
“According to gender binaries,” he adds. It’s a small relief, an apology. He hadn’t done anything wrong.
Ben’s brow furrows. The thin sun from the window shines through his glasses, lighting the frames up dappled orange. He squints a little.
“People are allowed to identify as a man,” Ben says.
Sam’s throat squeezes. His heart is squirming, worms burrowing and biting through the valves. Blood clogs and pulses under his collarbones. There’s a tremble ricocheting through his hands, clammy with cold sweat. The vent above him blasts frostbite.
“Well, you didn’t ask—” he’s stammering. Ben’s face wrinkles, a bemused grimace, and his mouth slips open as his nose scrunches up. He’s talking again. Sam is looking right at him, not listening. Over Ben, he goes on, “—whether this person identified.”
He does.
Ben stutters out some unprepared rebuttal. Sam can't hear over the beat of his heart.
“I believe gender is a construct,” he says.
Silence.
Ben is making new faces Sam has not before seen. His lips shake with blowing air, but no sound comes out. Their train still isn’t moving. Sam is trapped right where he is.
“Sam,” Ben says.
Sam does not look him in the eye.
“A person who identifies as a man is a man.”
He does. He doesn’t know why this is a problem.
Outside the window, clouds roll in the stagnant sky. The station is not deserted, he knows, but there is not a soul visible from where he glances to his side. It’s just him and Ben.
“Would you disagree?”
On his other side, the seats near them are empty. Awareness of the camera trained on him itches almost as much as Ben’s gaze firm on his face. His lips press together and his eyes dart back and forth. Discomfort gnaws at him like a hundred insects, some wrongness, like feeling too big for his skin. Long hair brushes over his shoulders.
“Pass,” Sam says.
In line at the drugstore there are hair ties on a stand by the register.
They’re catching Sam’s eye. His hair sits heavy on the back of his neck, pleasantly so, but at the same time admittedly hot and impractical in the summer sun. The pack of brightly-colored elastics holds his gaze.
He sets them on the counter. In the car, he takes down the visor and slides open the mirror. It’s boiling him alive, cooking him like a lobster in a pot, thirsty wax on his lips and saltwater dripping down his forehead. The idea of opening the tinted windows stings worse than the sweat. One hand gathers his hair, fluffy and over-washed to prickling dry, as he stretches a lilac tie in the other. He pulls his hair through and lets it settle in a burst at the base of his skull. In the tiny mirror—
It looks fine. It’s out of the way where it won’t be flying in his mouth when he runs. His hair is pulled back, slicked away from his face. It’s not dissimilar to how he usually keeps it.
Something hollow rings in the carved-out cavity of his chest. It’s unsatisfying. Disappointing, almost.
He pulls the tie loose and threads a hand through. For a moment, he stares into the mirror. He tips his head forward and draws his hair up again, high off his neck, like he wanted. The elastic cracks on his fingers. His hair’s softness is gone from his skin and the ponytail pulls at his scalp. Its tautness is unpleasant, just a bit, and at once he aches for the missing weight. He looks up again.
It’s a sloppy style. The ponytail swishes with each turn of his head, free in the air, a sweet slap to his ears. Clumps of hair fall loose in the front. They curl over his forehead, sweeping down to frame his cheeks and jaw. Heat bubbles up in his stomach. His heart swells until it fills his ribs.
In the visor, his eyes shine. He tries out a smile.
It looks nice. He looks pretty. He looks undeniably, unabashedly feminine.
Sam takes his hair down.
In the end, it’s stupid how it happens.
Adam’s voice is squeaky over the Zoom call. His stuttering face on the screen beams straining blue light. Ben is nodding, a grainy motion blur. Sam mutes his microphone to tap on his desk. The noise drums through the room, over their speech.
“We should look into bringing on another female guest,” Adam is saying. Ben hums a tinny assent. Sam’s eyes burn a little and he looks up, above his camera, to blink and focus on the warm sun cast through his windows on the wall. Dim sunset orange and pink paints the plaster. The early evenings are darkening faster and faster, and he still hasn’t turned on the lights.
“Yeah,” Ben agrees, a little fizzy with distortion. “We’ve only had women on what, three seasons?”
Sam’s throat closes.
“It’s a very male dominated show,” Adam says.
They’re right, of course.
Sam meets his own gaze in the webcam view. Unlike Ben and Adam, it’s clear, motions smooth. The shadows fall over his face at sharp angles. His shoulders cut an imposing silhouette. Hundreds of little spiders crawl just under his skin, itching violent, a wracking chill, until the flesh that houses him feels alien.
“Sam,” Adam says, and Sam does not startle, nor does he look away. “Do you have anyone you’ve been thinking of inviting?”
Sam is not sure if he’s choking.
He unmutes. “Not off the top of my head,” he says. It’s croaky, even to his own ears, low and dull.
Ben says something. Sam nods so it looks like he’s listening and watches his hair fall, blond blotting out half his vision. It rounds his jaw and softens what features it doesn’t hide. The waves swoop in front of his face kind of, a little bit, like side swept bangs.
Ten of thirteen seasons had an all-male cast. It is a fact.
Sam’s stomach is eating him from the inside. He’s withering, curling up, until staring back at himself on the screen he looks hunched and small. His ribs clatter, his heart drums and drums loud in his ears. Some kind of shame burns at him. The spiders are chewing, spitting acid, whatever spiders do—hollowing him out. He is collapsing in on the emptiness.
It comes to him easily, like any other thought:
Sam doesn’t want to be a man.
Ben and Adam are talking, disagreeing, maybe, voices fast and frustrated. Their words only ring. Sam sits there, watching his eyes get wider and wider back at him. His heartbeat is growing in volume, a fervent hum, lighting up his blood with heat. He reaches up and tucks his hair behind his ear, just enough to see past. It still veils him.
Sam doesn’t want to be a man. It settles in his chest. He can imagine saying it, the edges of the sentence forming in his mouth, sliding off his tongue as cleanly as if they were meant to. The response comes in a voice that might be Ben’s or Adam’s or any friend he could try to hear:
He doesn’t have to.
Sam mutes. He checks to make sure he’s not sharing his screen. Ben and Adam are moving with haste, gesturing wildly. Sam tabs out. He Googles estrogen therapy Colorado. It’s a daydream, but it thrills him all the same.
The first thing Sam does is paint their nails.
At the drugstore, there are shelves and shelves of polish in every color under the sun. They don’t want to linger. Black is the most masculine shade, the least suspicious. They buy it, along with a distraction, a pack of bandaids they don’t need.
The cardboard from their last package gets fished out of the recycling. They spread it across the table. The afternoon is darkening early, autumn black seeping through the windows past the shield of their orange lamps. Sam screws the polish open and splays out their fingers.
Their hand is shaking.
Immediately, it’s harder than they thought. Tremors churn from their wrist to their smallest knuckles. There’s an airiness swimming through their chest, high and dizzy and faint. They bring the brush down close to their hand and draw a line across their thumb nail. Half the black gloss is on their skin. It’s slick, cold, a sticky film and at once they want to flinch away. Their finger curls, but it’s on them. It’s glued there for good.
They finish the left hand with two messy coats. All the polish on their fingers itches desperately. Their hand nearly fists, but they stop it halfway, and instead hold tense with their ashen nails bared and trembling. It’s not dry enough to deal with the excess.
Sam shudders. It almost hurts.
Discomfort leaves their hand rattling unsteady. The other comes out even worse, more paint smeared across their skin than their nails. Their fingers are wrecked, splattered with ink, ruined.
They raise their hands flat. It looks bad. Warmth blooms in their gut, spreads up to their heart and through their throat until they’re almost choking on the sparks.
The nail polish makes it through the night. In the morning, in the shower, Sam peels it off their skin. What’s left still feels strange—they run their fingers over their nails again and again, can’t decide whether to admire or cry for the foreign smoothness—but it’s pretty. It’s subtle, secret. They shiver, a little bit, every time the sheen catches their eye.
Adam compliments the polish the next time they see him. A day later, they pick it all off.
For New York, the café is deathly quiet. Ceiling lights wash the room in rich sunset heat. Outside, the just-risen sun is a contrast in pale gray. Sam swirls a wooden stirrer in their drink to watch the liquid move. Beside them, Ben gives a heavy sigh.
“Adam, Adam, Adam,” he mutters. Sam makes a noise of agreement.
“He’ll be here eventually,” they say.
Ben snorts. “What a ringing endorsement,” he says. “You have so much faith.”
They shrug and look back to their cup. The stick is tiny in their too-big hand, an awkward grip, knuckles bulging. Looking at the white peeling off their nails, their stomach swoops with sickness. Their mouth is sticky-dry.
“Oh man,” Ben says. His voice is muffled, and Sam looks up to see him chewing and glares. He sets down his pastry and lifts both his hands in surrender. For a moment, they stare him down, until he thickly swallows and smacks his arms on the table.
“I was looking for something to wear earlier,” he says pointedly. They wrap their fingers around their cup. “And you know what I found?”
Sam waits, and only once he raises his eyebrows and makes it clear he does not intend to continue do they ask, “What?”
“The dress from New Zealand,” Ben says, a grin splitting his face. “It’s still in my closet.”
They have to take a moment to recall and then huff a belated laugh. “Your disguise,” they say. Ben nods, his frizzy hair fluffing with the motion and his glasses shaking loose from his face. “You and Adam keep trying those disguises,” Sam says. They try to make their voice sound rich with amusement, but it just comes out stilted and thick.
“It’ll be so hype when it works,” he says. He tilts his chin just a bit too far up to look natural. When this fails to coax his glasses into place, he pushes them up the bridge of his nose.
“You’d think you’d have learned your lesson by now.”
“I’ve never learned a lesson in my life, Sam,” Ben replies. He gives a long, languid stretch, and settles with his back leaning on the wall and an arm slung over the top of his chair. A chill pries its fingers at the seams of the windows, chasing through the glass. He crosses his legs at the calves and lets his whole body tip backwards. Sam rolls their ankle just enough to bare it to the heating vent by their feet.
Silence draws a blanket around them both, brief and slight, but companionable. The last dregs of winter-bitten orange are fading from the outside sky. Warm air blows through the café, not quite enough to ward away the cold at every corner. Sam takes a drink.
“You should try a disguise next time,” Ben’s voice breaks through. “We’ll stack the odds. It’s gotta work eventually.”
The image of Sam in a dress is deeply unwelcome. At once, it sticks in their mind.
They pause, lower their cup, and then laugh. “I couldn’t pull it off.” Their figure is hulking, too boxy, too harsh.
Ugly.
Their ribs twist. Sharp chunks of bone pierce their lungs. The air flows out of them with a punch—or maybe it’s blood, rushing to their throat until they’re drowning. “I’m too tall,” they dismiss. It sounds even, not at all stuttered or strangled. It’s a statement of fact and it is painless.
Ben looks up. He looks them in the eyes.
“I think you’d make a beautiful woman, Sam,” he says. He flashes a toothy grin.
Their heart stops.
Sam has fallen before, tripped and hit the ground so hard they were paralyzed. They’ve had all the breath knocked out of them, twitching and gasping, lungs burning and fluttering and failing for that one choking moment they lay stunned. Right now, they’re sitting still on a steady wooden chair in an empty New York café. They look at Ben and they blink and they cannot breathe. A lightness whirls through them—lightheadedness—and they might be out of their body because they can’t feel their hands or feet or anything but the giddy heat rising from their heart to fill them whole.
Oh, wow.
So this is what it feels like.
Ben said it as a joke. With even just a moment spent recalling the words, it’s clear. He didn’t mean it.
Sam swallows. “Thanks,” they say. It’s dry enough nothing sounds amiss. They tap on the side of their cup, hiding how their hands still tremble. Ben laughs.
A beautiful woman.
This is the feeling people uproot their lives and transition for. Sam thinks she gets it, now.
In the middle of the night Sam stares up at the ceiling.
It’s very bland, the ceiling above the hotel bed, very white. Her blankets slump kicked off on the floor. It’s cold, prickling on her bare legs. Yellow and black flash across the chalk field of her vision.
She has such a good life, such a good thing going. Everything she has ever wanted is hers and she still keeps wanting more.
Sam is firmly a realist, and as a realist, she knows she’s a public figure. No matter what she does, it’ll be in the public view. She has worked so hard to make a name for herself. Transitioning is the kind of thing that will lose her fans, maybe a lot of them, maybe enough to blow up her career and her life and the lives of everyone working under her.
They should have a meeting about this.
In the absence of anything else to see, she’s making star charts with the phosphenes strobing on the ceiling. She doesn’t know the constellations. She’s drawing her own unguided lines.
This could destroy everything she has worked for all her adult life. She should be more afraid of that, she thinks.
Her phone lies shut off on the nightstand next to her. Sam rolls over and picks it up. In the black glass, her drowsy self looks back, hair mussed and eyes half-shut with the lingering crust of sleep. She’s picturing it before her mind catches up: her cheeks rounder, jaw softer, blonde waves curving around the sweet oval of her face. A bonfire smolders in her core. She doesn’t flush, but her blood is set alight with the sort of rush that makes her want to start running—or maybe just cut her hair.
Something has been missing. She felt it, the pit within her, the chasm slowly growing until it consumed her body and soul. Ben’s “beautiful woman” was insincere, but she found what she’s been searching for. She has an eerie sense there’s no going back now.
It is a fact: this could kill everything she knows. Maybe that should stop her.
She’ll take it slow.
Sam is still in New York when she goes to the hairdresser.
At home, in population-six-thousand Aspen, Colorado, she could show her hairdresser a picture of a woman's cut and never meet a neighbor who hadn’t heard of it again. She’s not quite prepared for that. In a late-night fit of confidence, she’d considered cutting it herself and gotten as far as looking up a tutorial before the fear of God and consequences struck her down. Now, standing outside the salon, the idea is surfacing again. It’s looking more and more appealing.
Her hand hovers and grazes across the door handle. Icy metal sinks fangs into her palm. She yanks away and shudders out a breath instead of cursing, shaking out her fingers painted bloody pulsing red. Her next inhale sears her nostrils. The air stings her skin, bitters the thin shroud of her clothes, a tingling ache not yet numb enough to be painless. If they glance to the windows, they’ll see her loitering awkwardly just past the glass. She clicks down the latch, pushes the door open, and steps in.
Heat blasts her face. Behind the small desk, a graying woman looks up and gives her a smile. Sam hunches her shoulders down into the biggest sweatshirt she owns.
“Do you have an appointment?” the woman asks.
Sam nods.
She sits in the chair. The woman asks her what she wants.
She has done stranger things, in public, than ask for a women’s haircut. Her heart is a drumbeat in her chest, pounding on her ribs until they creak and threaten to crack. She takes out her phone and fumbles to unlock it, shaking, her frozen hands drawing lines of dripping sweat across the screen. It’s a thick, rattling tremor ripping her apart. Her tongue is too dry for words. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because her heartbeat is such a battering ram it drowns out all other attempts at sound.
She gets her phone open. It’s too late to run home now.
The hairdresser smiles at the photo. “Sort of curtain bangs?” she asks, threading manicured fingers through the front pieces of Sam’s hair and letting it fall over her face. Sam takes a deep breath.
Scissors snip with gentle sounds. It doesn’t quite manage to soothe her nerves, but her breaths even out, and as the cut continues she relaxes somewhat into the chair. The stylist fluffs out her hair. It drifts down to sweep away from her forehead, a short, flowing layer veiling her in thick blonde. Sam meets her own eyes in the mirror. Silky cream is scrunched into her hair, and it curls, framing her face and softening the edges.
Sam is floating. Her lips tug with a smile and she gives in and lets them bare her teeth. She’s so warm inside, leaping flames licking at her lungs and her heart all the way up to her crinkling cheeks, that she feels like she could breathe fire.
The hairdresser steps back, asks what she thinks. Sam thinks she might start to cry.
She looks like a woman.
It’s not a perfect image. She has too many sharp angles, too square. Standing at the desk, in the mirror, her hair sways with each turn of her head. It’s a decidedly feminine style. A tall, heavily built woman—but it’s such a feeling, full to bursting, to see something she likes looking back.
She tips thirty percent. Her lashes are wet, weighted with frost fluttering down to nip at her cheeks the moment she steps out into the air. For one more indulgent second, she admires her bangs in the window, and then she tucks them up under her hat and continues on her way.
The bar lights are hot on Sam’s neck. Sparks of dust motes glint, oozing through syrupy thick rays of molasses orange, suspended in the air wet with close bodies and their leaden musk. Sweat drips from her forehead and sticks her shirt to her slick back. She sips her water. The ice clinks against her teeth.
“When is your flight?” Adam asks.
The cold is a shock flooding her mouth, sending shooting pain through her molars. She pulls her glass away and breathes through it. “Tomorrow afternoon,” she answers. In the following lull, she reconsiders and amends, “More like noon, actually.”
Adam lazily nods. He’s propping his chin up on his hand, elbow staked on the table, but his head is slipping to the heel of his palm. Relaxed, a rare sight. She drinks a little more water and savors it.
Ben’s knuckles knock on the table. The deep bronze wood is covered by a thin layer of plastic, tacky to the touch, and it makes a full-bodied crackling sort of sound. He’s smiling crookedly, eyes darting between Adam and Sam. His lips smack a little. She nudges his glass closer to his open arms. He glances down and snorts a soft laugh, but obeys and tips it to his mouth.
“Have fun in Colorado,” Ben says derisively. She gives him a flat look for his trouble, to which he grins and smugly continues, “We’ll be living it up in New York City, baby.”
“Greatest city in the world,” Adam adds, idly wrapping his fingers around his tall glass. The water itself is untouched, and the ice is rapidly melting, so the liquid edges precariously closer and closer to breaking over the rim.
“I will have so much fun in Colorado,” she says. “You’re both just haters.”
Dainty snowflakes alight on the window, washed ashen gray in the outside depths. They’re sparse and far between, each one dissolving into a shimmer before the next lands, barely any time to trace the lacy patterns in flakes so big the sky looks ravaged by slow-falling clumps of hail. Caramel lamps drip from the low ceiling. Across the table, Adam pulls his hand back, palm gleaming with condensation. He wipes it across his face.
The server stops beside them, a girl with one fist and forearm smoothing out a skirt-like apron flaring over her slacks, a yellow notepad gripped in her other small hand. Adam hastily folds his wrists on the table. “Can I get you guys anything to drink?” she asks.
Ben’s elbow bumps Sam as he leans around her. She presses her back against the booth, giving him space to see the waitress. As he talks, the girl nods and hums along, scribbling wide and loopy on her pad. She shifts her attention to Adam and makes an approving noise at what he tells her. Adam flashes Ben a victorious grin.
“And the pretty lady?” the server asks.
Sam blinks.
Adam makes a choked-off little squeak. She looks up and meets the girl’s bright eyes, her waiting smile. Sam sits frozen. From her heart’s faintly sputtering embers, a blaze roars to life, heat rushing to her cheeks in a way that despite the heavy air still feels so sunny warm. She’s not quite drowning in her shirt, but treading water—it hangs over her collarbones a few sizes too big, enough the seams drop off her shoulders. The nearly-exposed strap of a sports bra is suddenly very present on her skin. It’s nice. A glow bubbles up from her stomach to the very top lines of her chest.
She could get used to feeling like this.
“Um,” she starts.
The waitress recoils. “Oh my God,” she stammers, flushing scarlet. “I am so sorry, I thought you were—” Color creeps across her nose. She takes a step away, reaching up to nearly cover her face with her notepad, pale eyes just peeking over the top.
Sam feels a little as though she’s been knocked out of the air.
No, no, you were right, she wants to say, but as her lips part in the corner of her eye Adam is bursting with giggles. Ben snickers, quiet next to her ear.
They don’t know.
“It’s okay,” she says instead. The words are strange in her mouth, abrupt. Wrong.
“I’m not wearing my glasses,” the server apologizes, and then scuttles back into the kitchen. Hit over the head, stunned, Sam can only watch her go.
Adam lets out a full-throated laugh. Beside her, Ben chuckles.
“That poor girl was so embarrassed,” he says.
Sam pulls up her shirt collar.
“Oh God,” Adam echoes, rubbing his eyes, “that poor girl.”
It’s a weird feeling, uncomfortable, to remember they don’t know. A hollow ache fills the space left by the dying flames of the realest joy she’s maybe ever felt. It crawls—spiders again. Could be maggots this time. They squirm just between her flesh and filmy skin, drinking up all her warm blood until she’s an empty, brittle carcass rotting on the ground.
She’s taking it slow.
“Do you think they’ll send us a different waiter?” Ben asks.
“Oh my God.” Adam has yet to recover, laughter still every few moments shaking through him anew. “Don’t make fun of her. It was—” He takes a wheezy little breath, tries to get under control. His glass of water is too full to move. He snags Ben’s across the table, ignoring an indignant “hey!” and drinks long.
“It was an honest mistake,” Adam finishes. Ben giggles.
“Oh, Sam,” he says with a sudden frown. “You didn’t get a drink.”
“It’s fine,” she says. She sips the last of her water.
She cannot live like this forever.
The Planned Parenthood waiting room is silent.
Brightly-colored posters line the walls. Next to the chair Sam sits hunched in, a little stand promotes stickers with striped flags and progressive slogans, pamphlets on sexual health and gender-affirming care. She eyes them at a safe distance. It’s not sterile, not doctor’s office white, but close enough that despite the upbeat decoration there’s a distinctly medical sense of unease. The cold gray sky lurks behind the windows.
Mechanical typing cleaves the quiet into shattered halves. She doesn’t startle, but sits up a little straighter. The door by the desk swings open.
“Sam?” calls the person stepping out, voice dark and resonant. Their eyes briefly scan the empty room. Black hair sags in a loose bun, front strands untied to brush their jaw. In magenta scrubs, their face is strong, their silhouette broad yet curvy. Sam fists her hands in her lap and stands. She doesn’t stare.
They give her a smile and hold the door for her. Sam nearly stumbles on her way, spinning, a little woozy—whether it’s the disinfectant smell or the nerves rattling through her clenched fingers she’s not sure. The nurse has a tag on their shirt, she/her.
Sam breathes deep through the antiseptic. The woman is standing tall, shirt tied at the waist to accentuate the swell of her chest. She opens another door and guides Sam through.
“What are your pronouns?” asks the nurse.
She moves, she speaks, so fluidly, so easy, unafraid. Sam’s eyes keep catching, keep drifting to her, wide with some breathless spark she knows just well enough to name awe. This woman is a nurse here. She is doing her job and living her life.
She is doing it as a woman.
It’s so overwhelming that Sam, for a moment, is stuck. She wants a little bit to lie down and cry.
“She,” she says.
The woman’s smile doesn’t falter.
Sam’s never said it before. With the dam broken, some fear floods out of her, something she’d held so long she forgot it was there. Waves crash to the floor and leave her so drained the relief is a rush to her head. She said it, made it real. A bug of anxiety still skitters through her closing throat—but it’s dying. It’s moving slow.
She’s really doing this.
In the exam room, she sits in a blue padded chair, identical to the ones they’d left behind. The cheery waiting room decor is gone for a much more bland office. The end of her ponytail ghosts across the back of her neck. Her bangs sweep over her forehead.
The nurse asks her name, date of birth, medical history. She answers and answers and watches her words get typed onto a chart. “And you’re here for gender-affirming therapy?” Sam nods a response. “Do you want estrogen or testosterone?” the woman asks.
Sam almost laughs on impulse. “Estrogen,” she says. It rolls with barely a thought off her tongue.
The woman nods. Sam gets paperwork, a list of all the ways she’s going to die, and an informational video. She signs. The nurse takes it back and shuffles through. She pricks Sam’s finger and, minutes later, returns with the test to her computer.
“I’m going to add gender dysphoria to your file,” she says. “You should be able to pick up the prescription within the next few days.”
Sam’s voice clogs in her throat.
After all this, it was that easy. Just like that.
On the way out, she thanks her nurse and looks at her for no longer than normal. There’s a radiance to the woman, something statuesque, like Lady Liberty holding high the torch and showing Sam her future. It’s bright.
The pills rot in Sam’s bedroom for three days.
There’s a half-full glass of water on the table, shining in the rays it catches of sun, and tablets tipping into the creases of her palm. Bitter residue burns her skin. They’re small, tip-of-her-fingernail small, but the little pills loom. They would be mocking her if they had the words. Her mouth is shriveled dry, pricked full of cactus spines.
She hasn’t told anyone yet.
There’s the woman at Planned Parenthood, and the hairdresser might have guessed, but—of all her family and loving friends, she hasn’t told anyone. None of them know. When she does this, they’re going to have to.
She’s going to have to tell the world.
There will be no going back, no secrets, no pretending everything is the same as it was. It will all change in a moment.
She puts the tablets down.
It’s early and edging into dusk. The room has gone gray, enough to strain her eyes until she gets up to turn on the lights. She’ll do it eventually. It’s growing darker. Soon, it’ll start to hurt.
People will see. She can’t hide this forever.
Her phone buzzes with a message.
If she asked for advice, everyone would say the same thing. Their voices overlap in her head, their words on her screen: don’t worry about what other people think. Do what’s right for you.
Deep down, Sam knows what’s right for her. She slides the pills off the desk into her waiting hand.
Her lashes weigh over her eyes, vision blurring and swirling, cold on the skin below. She blinks the water clear and lets out a breath. A hot glow builds in her chest. Her hand is trembling. She’s bursting, anticipation winding almost painfully tight, almost too much to bear.
The nurse at Planned Parenthood was a woman and her life went on. Sam’s will, too.
She swallows. The tablets go down smooth. A weight settles in her stomach, soft like a winter comforter. She breathes in and out. She doesn’t cry.
Let them see. Her life is her own to live.
(Adam rubs the itch of sweat from his brow. This time of year, the heat should be dimming, but it boils in the thick stewpot air with an insect buzz wet in his ears. Salt crusts on his lips.
Ben pops his mouth. Adam glances up to him. They sit in stagnant eye contact.
“So Sam has bangs now,” Ben says. Adam shudders with his effort not to sigh in relief. Ben hesitates, then delicately adds, “…and boobs.”
Adam has also noticed this.
“Yes,” he says, partly just to have something to say but mostly to reassure Ben he’d seen the same thing. He’s kept the building anxiety to himself, to its place wrapping fingers around his windpipe, but Adam now is secretly so grateful the fading tension leaves him limp for the confirmation he hadn't been imagining his boss with a noticeably more feminine figure. Very little could be more embarrassing.
Ben doesn’t seem plagued by this same fear, but it never hurts to make sure.
“Is there a polite way to ask Sam about his chest?” Ben asks.
Adam considers this. “No,” he says. “I don’t think so.”
A pause.
“Maybe he’s just working out a lot,” Ben says.
Adam does not dignify this with a response.
It might have been rational, except Sam had already been working out a lot before this, and for a very long while. Adam would consider himself reasonably certain exercise does not spontaneously do that. Also, he’s pretty sure he once saw a navy bra strap peeking out from under one of Sam’s increasingly low-cut tops.
Not that he was looking.
Ben is watching him, brows cocked, waiting. Adam sighs.
“That wouldn’t explain the bangs,” he says.
“Men can have bangs.”
They don’t usually develop breasts, though.
“Maybe he has that condition,” Adam says. “That makes men—maybe he has cancer.”
Ben seems to think this over.
“He could also just be trans,” Ben says.
The whirring fans are neglecting their duty. Adam’s sweat darkens the couch cushions, unpleasantly sticky on his bare arms. The lack of air conditioning in Ben’s home should be grounds for his immediate arrest. Adam’s shirt is so soaked against his back it’s beginning to sting, the trickle down his inner arms a crawling discomfort, bugs under his clothes. He cannot shake them off. Red sunlight floods the room in a drowsy haze. Ben’s words hang above their heads with the pooling air, heavy.
A little hard to breathe.
“Sam would tell us if he was trans,” Adam says. He just barely winces hearing it from his mouth, so unsure his voice wavers and crackles like a staticky speakerphone. Ben raises his eyebrows again.
“All I’m saying is I don’t think cancer makes you wear headbands,” he says. “You know, the girl way.”
It is true. At their last meeting, Sam had sat there on the stuttery camera, nodding and interjecting with his usual placidly blank face. Adam would even say he looked absolutely normal. An inch-wide sky-blue headband gleamed behind his ears, firm plastic wrapped in a smooth layer of velvety fabric. It pushed back his blond to flare in waves behind his head, which might not have been out of the ordinary except it left free the front, showing off how very much he did have bangs sweeping past his cheeks and curling into the corners of his mouth. Overall it had the effect of making Sam look so like a woman Adam was briefly struck by the uncanny sense he had wandered into an alternate dimension.
Cancer probably doesn’t make people wear bras, either.
“I just don’t want to assume,” Adam says.
“I’m sure Sam knows he can tell us,” Ben says, which might have been more comforting if not for his almost patronizingly placating tone. “Maybe he’s just not ready.”
Adam scrubs at his collarbones with an open palm. Whether it’s the bites of insect swarms fat with summer or the cracking salt left when the sun sucks up the brine of his sweat he doesn’t know, but it itches and eats at his skin either way. A hot pink flush pulses under his hand. Ben slicks his hair back from his forehead and parts his lips, just a touch, to pant.
“We don’t seem transphobic,” Adam says. It pitches up with doubt.
Ben shrugs. “I mean, I’ve been told I look homophobic,” he says. Adam snorts. Ben grins, and his face doesn’t soften when he adds the blunt order, “Stop worrying.”
Adam leans towards him, so far he slides down the couch until his back is curled into the angle of the cushions like a crumpling shrimp, and kicks Ben’s leg. “Okay,” he says. It’s even easy.
“You’re the only one who suffered here,” Ben says. Adam’s shirt is scrunched into his armpits. He huffs a little laugh and drags himself up to sitting. They change the subject from there, and Sam does not come up again.)
Streetlights click on.
The late New York City summer is yellowing, a clear-eyed breeze sweeping through the heat. Feathery wind sighs in Sam’s hair. Even in the waning evening, the humid fog is so suffocating she’d fantasized in the hotel mirror about the fashion of going out in a bra. Now, in her fluttery t-shirt and shorts, each gust is a mercy.
“I sure do wish I was in Australia right now,” Ben grumbles. He is audibly dragging his feet. “Southern Hemisphere doesn't know how good they have it.”
“I think they probably do know, actually,” Adam chimes in. “It does get pretty hot in Australia.”
Ben gives him a halfhearted glare.
“It’s not that bad,” Sam says, mostly to bother him. Her hair is blistering on her neck, just on the edge of damp with the thick grime in the air. She slides a hand under and wipes the swamp off her skin.
“Where are we going?” Ben asks. They’re passing by a park, and the leaves just beginning to gild with the infant autumn are so lovely Sam is feeling charitable enough not to call his words a whine.
“We’re going on a walk,” she says. Her hat had been a shield while the sun was out, but now that the day has retreated to wash the streets in warm gray it’s only uncomfortably wet on her head. She takes it off and fans herself with the brim. It’s too floppy for much success.
“Sam is so cruel to us,” Ben tells Adam.
“Sure, buddy,” Adam says.
Sam shakes out her bangs. The sky is rich with the heavy oranges of sunset’s approach, dripping like honey on the horizon. Streetlamps burn white on the cracked pavement under her shoes. Her lips are still sticky with fruit juice. She flicks her tongue out and catches sugar. A single leaf, stark against the cityscape with premature crimson, drifts across the sidewalk, for a moment keeping their pace before stealing ahead.
“We have got to get somewhere with air conditioning,” Ben says.
“I think the idea was that we appreciate the outdoors for a while,” Adam says. He lags behind, and she glances over her shoulder to see him supportively bumping Ben’s arm.
“This isn’t outdoors,” Ben argues, sagging. “This doesn’t count. There are walls on all four sides of us.”
Adam hums. “Come on,” he says. “Sam’s doing—” He breaks off, hesitates, a split second but jarring, and awkwardly tries to pick up where he left off, “their best.”
It comes out stilted. There’s a throaty rumble leading into the “they,” incongruous with the word coming from the tip of his tongue, as if he’d thought better of something starting with a more guttural sound. Maybe as if he’d thought better of “he.”
He did notice.
She was afraid of that. It happened, and she feels… fine.
A gentle wind blows past. Her shorts are slipping off her waist, but snagging at the hips, leaving an inch of empty air between the band and her stomach. Downy shirt cotton hugs her meager curves. The breeze is pleasantly warm on the just bared skin of her middle, on her smooth legs. Her collar dips down over the softness of her chest.
Adam is trying. She’s so weightless she almost laughs.
“This is plenty outdoors,” she says. Adam exhales. “Look, there’s a leaf.”
There is a leaf, lipstick red on the pavement. She is going to be okay.
Outside the subway, the windows are black.
It’s easy to forget the hour underground, where noon blends into the same pitch as midnight, but the sleep dragging Sam down casts the bright train in a heavy late-night fog. Beside her, Ben yawns with voice. The empty car rumbles beneath them. They waited too long into the darkness and now they’re stuck on this train back from Adam’s. It will stop by Sam’s hotel and then carry on to take Ben home, but with her mind moving sluggish in the hollow silence only broken by droning white lights, the two of them may as well be on their isolated way into oblivion.
“How have you been?” Ben asks, abrupt. She looks up, blinks in surprise. Her eyes ache and she reaches up to rub knuckles hard into the sockets. White bursts across her vision.
“Um,” she says. He gives her a lopsided grin and tips his head to the ceiling. The fluorescent bulbs reflect searingly harsh off the walls. It’s making her remember, all at once, everything she’s learned about snow blindness.
“Good,” she says.
“Good,” he says, or maybe echoes. He leans back, spreads his knees and crosses his ankles. The train rattles and screeches to a dizzying halt. She’d gotten so used to the shaking it’s strange to be still. If she stood, she’s not sure her legs would hold her.
One stop left.
He tosses her a sideways look. The lights gleam ghastly blue on his jutting cheekbones.
“So,” he drawls, “should I be calling you something different?”
Sam’s heart catches in her throat.
She sucks in air, shaky, through it. His voice is firm and completely ordinary, almost flat. “What?” she asks. It comes out a little hoarse. He turns to look straight at her. His glasses are sliding down his nose.
“You know,” he says. “Name, pronouns.”
Maybe she should laugh, disarm this anxiety. It sticks under her collar and squirms. Her fingers curl stiff, digging into the linen of her shorts and twisting, until her nails bite hot like wasps into her thighs.
She had made it past this.
“I’m still Sam,” she says. It’s steady.
Ben nods and tilts his head away.
Her hands are trembling. She fists them tighter. Blood rushes to her skin.
She is going to be okay.
Sam lets out a breath.
“She/her is fine,” she says.
And it’s done.
It’s a casual conversation, but it feels monumental. Now that it’s over she thinks it hadn’t been so hard after all. They’d already seen. All she had to do was say it.
She relaxes her hands.
For a moment, Ben doesn’t react. He stares off. It’s still dead black outside the windows, like grave dirt closing in. The two of them are alone. This silent car will soon resume its journey hurtling into nowhere.
He blinks a few times fast and looks to her. “Good for you,” he says, and it’s genuine. He gives her a smile. She smiles back.
“Not that you have to,” he says, “but are you going to tell Adam?” He braces his palms on the plastic seat and pushes himself to sit up straight, angling his whole body to her. His lips twitch with a sharper grin. “He’s stressing himself out about misgendering you.”
She lets out a laugh, full and bright. “Yeah, I will,” she says. “It’s not a big deal.”
Ben nods. His glasses unhook off the tip of his nose, though stay lodged behind his ears, and he swears before pushing them up. She laughs again. He looks up to grimace at her, but there’s a glimmer in his eye.
“Hey, Sam?”
She hums.
“Not to sound stupid,” he says, “but—I’m proud of you.”
The train roars to life beneath them. A glow floods her from head to toe, a flush, a rush of adrenaline. Then it recedes, and where its tide had reached she’s left warm. They start moving. She sits back. The train rumbles on.
Rain patters on the windows. The lights are low, candy-apple rich, romantic candle lighting oozing from foggy bulbs above their heads. Sam reaches out a hand to the counter. The last chips of lavender paint on her nails are washed brick brown. Outside, the morning sky is thick as tar. She squints to see the blackboard menu behind the barista’s head.
“What can I get for you?” the girl asks. Her hat casts her face in yet more shadow, so all that pokes out is the white of her smiling teeth.
“A small latte,” Sam says. She makes her best polite face and then, after far too long has passed with the barista tapping her order onto the screen, remembers to add a belated, “Please.”
Ben snickers behind her. There’s a muffled fabric noise, as if Adam had whacked him, maybe the shoulder. Deliberately, she does not turn around. Mellow chatter fills the room, spoons clinking, drinks sloshing as the small café crowd bubbles and swells. A drizzle still clings to her clothes—it had been comfortable out under the hot clouds, but now in the air conditioning she’s fighting a shiver. Her hair sticks to her neck.
“And a name for the order?” the barista asks.
Sam opens her mouth and nearly answers. The idea strikes a moment faster, leaving her with lips open in just too long a silence—but she doesn’t wait to give it thought beyond that she has to somehow and it would be easy and it would be so very funny.
“Samantha,” she says.
Adam chokes.
“Oh boy,” Ben mutters, and there’s a thumping sound like a hard hit to the back. The barista’s eyes widen as she looks over Sam’s shoulder, whites visible all around dark irises, and conversation at the nearest tables has gone dead. Sam does not turn around. “So sorry,” Ben says to the room, as Adam coughs and hacks and wheezes. “He’s fine.”
She runs her card and walks around the counter. On the way, she allows a glance at Ben. He catches her eye and gives a broad grin. His arm raises from his side just enough to properly angle a subtle thumbs-up.
Sam tucks her skirt under her weight, soft hem brushing her ankles. Ben and Adam join her at the table. They’re by the window, where she looks out, cheek nearly flush to the glass. The rainfall is a gentle white noise and her ceramic for-here mug is hot under her hands. They’re comforts, soft and soothing, but she finds she doesn’t need them. Adam clears his throat as they sit. She watches the rain for one more beat and then turns to meet them.
“Did you mean for that to be funny?” Ben asks. Adam gives him a wide-eyed, scandalized look.
“Yes,” she says.
“It was so funny,” Ben tells her.
Adam’s face falls to long-suffering. He wallows briefly, dragging an agonized hand up through his hair, before he seemingly remembers the last few minutes all at once and his head snaps up to Sam.
“Samantha?” he asks.
Even when Ben had asked, she had been afraid. Very little has since changed. It’s not quite right to call it a new confidence—more like security. She did it. It was okay.
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m a woman.”
It doesn’t even feel strange.
Adam nods too many times, too fast. She takes a sip of her coffee. It’s warm down her throat.
There’s a quiet energy running through her blood, calm and awake to the moment. Water glimmers on the glass at her side.
“Out of pure selfish curiosity,” Ben starts. Adam sits up straight and turns to him in plain alarm, opening his mouth to cut him off, but Ben barrels ahead. “Are you going to tell the audience?”
She hums. Adam’s eyes flick between her and Ben. “I don’t want to do a big thing,” she says. “Just call me she next time we film, easy.”
Ben laughs. “Oh, the people will love it.”
“We’ll have a meeting first,” she says. Adam snorts and relaxes into his chair.
Sam drinks. Her coffee is sweet, thick enough to go down with the time to savor it. It’s raining harder, now, almost drowning out the rest of the café—just them, in their little window table, tucked away from the world. Softness blossoms in her chest and spreads its leaves to her farthest corners. Her lashes flutter with weight.
“Thank you guys,” she says.
The force of Adam’s smile dimples his whole face. “Don’t sweat it,” Ben says.
It’s contentment. That’s what she feels. It’s not knocking her over, not stealing her breath—just easy, simple, everyday happiness.
She gets to feel like this for the rest of her life.
She smiles into her drink.