“Sir, do you need a bag?” the cashier asked as she paid, his words firm like a steel pipe.

Edie shook off the cashier. She didn’t begrudge the man—how could he know? But she felt a pinprick of shame, for both herself and the man. She didn’t want to embarrass anyone; that was often the problem.

Outside, Angela waited in line for a small specialty market that limited entry to two customers at a time. Edie held out the bottles of wine for inspection. Angela was an expert—a sommelier by training, though she didn’t like using the term. The people who called themselves sommeliers reminded her of detectives slapping their badges on counters, demanding respect. Edie had been nervous to purchase the wine alone, but Angela insisted she trusted her.

She nodded at the bottles. “Do you know what they’re planning to cook?”

Edie didn’t.

“These should be fine,” she said, and they both broke into laughter. “I really mean it!”

“I know, I know,” Edie assured her, and wrapped her loosely in her arms.

A man sprung out the door of the market with his shirt pinched over his nose. He exhaled as if breaking the ocean’s surface after a dive. He was thin, unexpectedly bearded under the neck of his T-shirt. Edie hated the man in a way that had become familiar. It was so easy to read malice into forgetfulness—at worst, selfishness, a feeling Edie believed she understood a little too well.

The man looked to Edie for solidarity. “Barely made it out alive,” he said.

Edie tightened her mask over her nose.

Rejected, the man moved to a bench. His wife stepped outside carrying a paper sack by its twine handles. She gathered her husband and offered an apologetic nod to everyone waiting.

Edie and Angela bought cheeses and rosemary crackers for the friends they were seeing that evening. Friends. Was that the word for a couple you met on the Internet? A couple charging Edie money to see them?

As they walked to the rental car, a white hatchback pulled into the lot, and Edie nearly dropped the wine. Angela asked what was wrong. Edie waited until the driver stepped out of the car before she said, “Nothing.” A young woman wearing a baseball cap locked her car with the fob. Her ponytail hung through the back of the cap—Lucy would never have worn her hair in this fashion; the two women looked nothing alike.

“Is that her?” Angela asked.

“I thought it might be,” Edie answered. “I’m paranoid for no reason.”

“No reason,” Angela said. She reminded her to not minimize things.

Edie punched directions into her phone, and over the short drive—not even twenty minutes—night fell like a sheet. The pavement grumbled into dirt until the car was crawling over a dusty, divoted road. “You have arrived,” said the phone, as they pulled into an unlit driveway and, as per the email instructions, came to a stop under the car porch.

*

Edie met Lucy Kay at a writing conference on the Florida coast when she was a man and Lucy was her teacher. She was leading an intensive novel workshop where the students met every morning for one week, three hours a day, to discuss chapters from their unpublished novels. They traded praise and enthusiasm—encouragement was encouraged at the conference.

The first morning, Lucy entered the classroom a few minutes late wearing a baggy, cable knit sweater unfit for the weather and frayed denim shorts that ran a little close to pajamas. “Hello my loves,” she said, her tone flirtatious and ethereal. She drank coffee from a small white mug with the name of the conference glossed on the side. Edie had been reading Lucy’s work for years and admired her deeply, especially the excerpts from her most recent book that had been appearing online. But in person she seemed wary and needy, like a disgraced pop star unsure how to act when she wasn’t on camera.

She was only five years older than Edie but had already published four books to her zero. Until recently, she taught creative writing at Columbia but abruptly quit to find herself, she told anyone who would ask, though she ignored most follow up questions. Speculations surrounded her departure. She had left too quietly, too quickly, to have quit on her own terms. Surely a scandal was waiting to surface. Or, perhaps her hasty departure was proof the decision was hers—no hearings or student committees dragging on for months. These kinds of rumors were not new to her. Her first novel teased at her upbringing—her parents had scammed the entire population of a small Colorado town out of their savings—and readers scraped the details of her novels looking for truth underneath, as if they were taking nickels to lottery tickets. She seemed to relish the infamy. Like a porcupine relished its quills.

In class, a landscape description was praised. A mother needed further development. Lucy seemed underinvested and embarrassed to be in the room. It wasn’t her first time teaching here, and perhaps she no longer felt the need to prove her value to students. Months later, she would confess to Edie that she wasn’t supposed to teach at the conference that year. Another instructor dropped out at the last minute and she was invited as an alternate. “Afterthought” is the word that she used. Once the relationship ended, Edie wondered if this was her reason for treating her how she did. Her star had faded and she wanted to matter again, to feel powerful, even if only to one person.

*

Riley knocked on the driver’s window. He was wearing a white disposable mask that resembled the bill of a duck. Edie rolled the window down two inches and accepted the package of rapid tests. “Snap a photo when it’s ready,” said Riley. He returned to the house to await the results.

“We can always tell them we’re positive,” Angela said. She mimed drawing a second line on the results box.

“Do I seem that nervous?”

“You don’t not seem nervous,” she said.

Edie sent Riley a photo of their negative tests. “Come on in!” he texted back.

They lugged their suitcases over the dirt driveway to a pair of sliding glass doors that opened into the kitchen. Riley greeted them with a handshake that clobbered into a hug. He was a few inches taller than Edie and twenty years older, his mop of brown hair smeared with tufts of gray. His beard was a neat layer of puff dyed the color of syrup. His wife, Marguerite, waved from a barstool at the kitchen counter. She had a smooth, plum-like figure; her legs dangled like streamers off the seat of the chair. Her head was buzzed and Edie spotted sun marks darkening through the fuzz of remaining hair. She said, “It’s for the wigs,” as she stood to greet them.

“What is?” Edie asked.

“The wigs are important,” Riley added. “For verisimilitude.” He studded every syllable with a little medallion of pride. It was clear he loved presenting the word like a favorite child.

Marguerite beckoned for Angela to follow her, and the two women rolled the suitcases to the guest bedroom. Angela flashed a faux grimace at Edie, as if she were being led to her death.

“Should we–should I pay you?” Edie asked.

“You know this isn’t all about money for me,” Riley said. “This is my passion. Helping people live their best lives.” He opened the freezer and collected a pair of large round ice cubes and dropped each one into its own squat glass. “Gin and tonic okay?”

“We brought wine,” Edie said, and bent down to retrieve it.

“We’ll do that with dinner.”

“Gin and tonic sounds great.”

Riley nodded at a thin stack of papers on the counter. “Flip through that and see if it’s in order. We’re planning to start with the beach in the first trailer, couch in the second, then the bed, and end with the walk to the bar. Four total. Does that sound right?”

Dread thickened to the edges of Edie’s body. She glanced at her fingers—a grounding technique taught to her by a former therapist—and focused on her nails, painted road sign orange that morning, to match the desert sun. “I think so.”

“You think so or you know? This isn’t horseshoes. We’ve gotta be one hundred percent.”

“I’m sure,” Edie said. “Sorry. I’m nervous.”

“Nervous for what? You’re about to get better.” Riley winked and passed her a glass. He tipped his forward to clink. Edie held in a cough tasting the heft of liquor that Riley had given her; she was relieved to blunt her nerves. “You sign on the last page. And put someone other than your wife for the emergency contact—not much use if she’s here.”

“She’s not my wife,” Edie said.

“You know what I mean.”

“It’s been about a year,” she said. “She’s been great about everything. Compared to—”

“Compare and despair my friend.”

“Thirty-six hundred?” she asked.

“Four thousand. With the room.”

“Of course—you said that.” Edie didn’t remember him saying that, but there was no point arguing after coming all this way, after having already obtained so much money in cash. She squatted to retrieve the envelope out of her backpack pocket. Inside was only thirty-six hundred. “You don’t have an A-T—god of course not.”

“There’s one in town. You can pick up the rest after your hike.”

Edie thanked him, then passed the envelope over.

“Normally I’d call this whole thing off, you know. It’s not worth it for me if I can’t feel like I trust the person, and money—I hate to say it—is the fastest way to build trust in this world. Don’t think I like it. I won’t say that. But sometimes it is how it is.”

“Should we find another place to stay?”

“What I’m saying is normally I need money to trust a person. But you’re different. There’s something about you.”

“People don’t normally take me as trustworthy,” Edie said.

“I’m not saying you are,” Riley said. “But you’re scared. You’re scared of me. Which is weird because I’m not a scary person. I’m very nice. Ask Em. Em, am I a scary man?”

“The scariest,” Marguerite said, as she and Angela returned to the kitchen.

“Oh she’s biased,” he said.

Angela came up behind Edie and wrapped her arm around her waist. She sniffed at the gin and tonic, took the glass from her hand. “I’m not scared of you,” Edie said.

“This is a site of honesty, Edie.”

“Maybe a little,” she said.

“There we go,” Riley said with a laugh. “Much better.”

*

A few weeks before they broke up, Edie and Lucy flew to Joshua Tree to check on a house Lucy wanted to buy. It was November, the desert cool and polite; daylight was pinched tightly between sunup and down. Lucy had wanted a house in the desert for years, and after the sale of her latest novel—her fourth—she had the money to buy one outright. It was a squat stucco ranch without running water; in the photos online, dirt showed through cracks in the floor. It would take months of remodeling before it felt like a home. It was not the most elaborate or stylish house, and it wasn’t supposed to be. It was a house where writers could live, cheaply, writing their books.

“What do you think?” Lucy asked when they parked at the end of the driveway. They both got out of the car and leaned against the passenger side.

The current residents weren’t home to let them tour the inside. Edie squinted to get a look at the house from the road. “It looks like the pictures,” she said.

“See that covered porch in the back? You can put a table out there and spend your mornings writing outside in the shade. We’ll hike in the afternoons. You can do whatever you want. There’s not much water—we won’t be showering much. The sex will be sticky and gross.” She laced her fingers through Edie’s. “No phones. No Twitter. No stupid Internet fights and dumb shows on TV. Just the landscape and us and our books. Everything you wanted.”

Lucy liked to remind Edie what she wanted. What she wanted, Lucy insisted, was a long career writing books, and, living with Lucy, she could write as much as she wished. It was the perfect opportunity for her to build a career. Edie wouldn’t have to worry about money. Lucy would pay for everything. She would have to—Edie was down to a few hundred dollars after failing to find work in Denver, where she had moved to live with Lucy.

Lucy already paid for meals and groceries and trips to the movies and had even bought Edie a new bike after hers was stolen. She had a bad habit of allowing arrangements like this. Whenever a friend offered to buy a round, she accepted; she never argued when told not to worry about paying someone back. This was how Edie had always existed, beneath the circling palm of others’ beneficence. It seemed foolish to refuse generosity. Now, though, she worried what might happen if Lucy changed her mind. Would she really let her live there forever? Did she even want to?

“How does that sound?” Lucy asked.

“That sounds wonderful,” Edie said, but she angled away from Lucy. After only a few months in Denver, she felt tethered and possessed, even as Lucy encouraged her to branch out into the world and discover who she wanted to be. She was no longer confused about who she wanted to be—at least, not as confused as she’d been after coming out—but she was scared to leave the safety of knowing for the reality of experience.

She wasn’t an idiot. She knew the risks of pursuing the life she desired, and had already lost so much. People in her life loved reminding her of the things she would lose, as if it never occurred to her. She kept a running tally of what she would lose: stability, finances, pickup basketball, how handsome her jawline looked beneath a fine mist of stubble, safety.

Edie moved across the country to live with Lucy because she longed to live authentically. In Denver, in the home Lucy was renting, Lucy had given Edie makeup and old dresses and nail polish and encouraged her to dress as herself in her home, but that freedom had begun to brush against obligation. Lucy presented herself as a caring and safe person. However, standing beside her surveying the ranch house in the desert, the house they could very well share for the rest of their lives, it occurred to Edie that she hadn’t felt safe since Lucy entered her life.

That evening, at their cabin, Lucy was drunk. Edie lounged on the couch wearing a black cotton dress and sheer tights. She had shaved her legs that evening—partly because she wanted time away from Lucy and could get it by taking a bath—and kept rubbing her knees together, pleased by the sensation. Lucy squatted in front of the fireplace drinking a cooled can of beer. It was her fourth, so Edie had switched to water. The fourth drink always fractured something in Lucy, and her anger emerged more easily, like cold air through a broken window. Edie had learned to drift back toward sobriety in these situations, should they stumble into a fight.

“Maybe I’m just a way station for you,” said Lucy.

“You can’t really mean that.”

“I’m a stop on your journey. We can’t be everything for everyone—I’m not deluded.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better,” Edie said.

“I’m not trying to make you feel better,” she said. “I’m trying to make me feel better. I brought you all the way out here, I’m offering you whatever you want, and you can’t even say you’ll come with me. What more do you need?”

Edie apologized. Lucy was right—she had given her everything she had wanted and had asked for so little in return. The dress she was wearing belonged to Lucy, so did the eyeliner—Lucy even applied it—and she ought to be grateful. Wasn’t this the life she wanted? A world where she could write unimpeded? Where she could be her true self?

Lucy stepped to the couch and stood over Edie. “I just want you to appreciate all that I’m doing for you,” she said.

“I do,” Edie assured her.

“Then you need to show me,” she said.

Edie unbuttoned her jeans.

*

Angela and Edie left for the hike shortly after sunrise. Angela planned the excursion using a dusty guidebook she found in the bedside table in their guest bedroom. The grayscale maps inside appeared to have been drawn by hand and photo-copied haphazardly, pitched onto the pages at troubling angles. At the trailhead, Edie checked the publication date. The book was more than thirty years old.

“Thirty years is nothing in geological time,” Angela assured her. “The boulders haven’t moved. The dirt didn’t blow to the other side of the desert.”

“Okay, okay,” Edie said, but it was too late to stop her.

“The cactuses are still in the same positions.” She stretched her arms to the side, one bent up at the elbow, the other bent down, her face frozen in a cactus' gaze.

Edie kissed her on the cheek, a white flag of a kiss, and Angela laughed victoriously.

Last night, they’d finished the wine and nearly all of the gin, and now their legs were heavy, faces puffed, their words emerging without precision. Edie didn’t own the appropriate clothes—she had never owned hiking clothes—and the closest approximation she found in her closet, before leaving New York, was a pair of black running pants and a blue sweat-wicking shirt, both of which had been gifted to her by Lucy. So much of the present seemed to belong to Lucy, as if every part of Edie’s life had been rented from her and could be repossessed when she least expected. Edie was here, though, in the desert shelling out four thousand dollars, plus the cost of plane tickets—hers and Angela’s—and a rental car, to gain some control over the present. She wanted to be in the desert with Angela, her partner of nearly a year, and not trapped in a grain silo of memories, sinking ever deeper the more she tried to climb out. But she feared it might be impossible to ever get out, that the best she would ever accomplish was not escape but dragging another person into the silo beside her.

The terrain was flat, the path squeezed tightly between sage brush and the extra-terrestrial limbs of Joshua trees. Even at eight in the morning, the air was unforgiving and dry. Edie worried they were drinking too much water, too early, but Angela insisted it was best to drink when you were thirsty, without worrying how much they had left—they had more than enough.

In her early twenties, after college, Angela had worked as a trail guide in Sedona. She took the job on a whim because she wanted to get as far away as possible from Cambridge, where she had sat in a series of smaller and smaller rooms over the course of four years in order to obtain an economics degree she found arbitrary and suffocating. She wanted to be irresponsible, and moving to the southwest, where she knew no one, to pursue a career for which she had little experience, was the least responsible thing she could do after college.

She lived in the desert for two years, the only Asian trail guide in Sedona, she joked to her friends when they asked how she liked it, because she wasn’t sure whether she liked it. Liking it seemed beside the point. She needed a break from the path she had put herself on, and there was something fitting about finding herself on a series of literal paths, from sunup to down, pointing out landmarks and rattlesnake holes to the kind of people she had nearly become.

The sky was a wide, breathless blue, and by ten Edie was soaked in hangover stink.

“It’s not much farther,” Angela said.

“What is?” Edie asked.

“The Wonderland of Rocks,” Angela said. “I told you a thousand times.” She didn’t get angry often, so it was easy for Edie to recognize when she was.

“My mind is elsewhere,” she said.

“We should eat something,” Angela said. They rested on the smoothed foot of a boulder, sliding down as they shared handfuls of nuts. She said, “I can’t keep waiting for you.”

“Waiting for me to what?”

“You know.”

“To move on from being assaulted?”

“It’s unfair when you say it like that.”

Edie knew she was right.

“We’re in a relationship,” Angela said. “Or we should be, but I never feel like you’re with me. You’re always in some other conversation or some other moment, talking to memories, ghosts, whatever you want to call them, while I’m right here, trying to have a life with you, and you’re not anywhere in it.”

“I’m in it with you right now.”

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“We’re on a hike.”

“Tell me the name of the place where we’re going. The place I keep bringing up.”

“I’m bad with names,” Edie said.

“No you’re not,” Angela said.

“The Rock House.”

Angela took a long drink of water. “I am a very patient person. If I weren’t, I would have ended this months ago.”

“I guess I should be more grateful,” she snapped.

“But I love you. That’s why I’m patient. I’m not trying to threaten you or make you feel bad, but you keep tossing me aside for people who haven’t been in your life for three years.”

“Why come out here with me then if that’s how you feel?”

“Because I want to support you. I want this to work—whatever this is, whatever you’re paying that kook to perform. I don’t want to start over with someone else. But if I have to—I will. I want you to know that.”

Edie was ashamed for not seeing this sooner. Would she have put up with similar treatment? That wasn’t the point. The point was that she’d never know—she was always the one to have drama. She was a heavy person, emotionally, and she regretted making Angela carry the weight she had placed on her. “How much longer to the Wonderland?” Edie asked.

“Bad with names, huh?” Angela laughed.

Edie kissed her chastely on the mouth, their lips too dry for anything more. They packed their bags and continued.

*

“Where’d you get all this sand?” Edie asked.

“That’s a Riley problem,” said Riley. “You need to focus on Edie problems.”

Her problems included getting comfortable in the trailer, where Riley had piled a few hundred pounds of play sand to create the impression of a beach. Marguerite was sitting beside her wearing a green one piece like the one Lucy had worn the day after the conference, when she brought her to her friend’s beach house. The color was off—Lucy’s suit was a richer, shinier green, and there had been frills over the waist—but it was close enough to matter, and Edie was impressed by the care they had taken in trying to get it right. The wig Marguerite wore was uncannily accurate, the exact length of Lucy’s rib-length hair, its tangled, yellow-cake blond.

As Riley set up the projector, Edie took a stab at small talk but Marguerite didn’t respond. She inserted a small black earpiece into her left ear so that Riley could feed her her lines. Angela watched from outside the trailer with her arms crossed.

Riley flicked on the projector and a blue blanket of light coated the wall. He connected his phone, counted to three, and the blue transformed into rippling waves spotted with children and parents flouncing around in the water.

“I’ll leave you two to it,” Riley said.

Angela rushed in to give Edie a hug. “Love you,” she said.

Riley slammed the door behind him, and Edie and Marguerite were alone.

“It’s so beautiful here,” Marguerite said. She angled a little closer on the towel they were sharing. The scene had begun. “Do you want another one?”

“Sure,” Edie said. She crossed her arms over her bare chest, still so flat and dotted with the few stray hairs she hadn’t caught shaving that morning. She planned to start taking hormones when she returned to New York, after completing the exercise. Starting estrogen before her trip to the desert, she feared, might hinder her chances of obtaining closure. Riley had said nothing to make her believe this, nor had any of her friends back in New York, but she maintained an unwavering faith in this notion, out of fear and intuition alone, as if she were living 4,000 years in the past and terrified of enraging the sun.

Edie’s body was slender and firm as a diving board, and that afternoon she wore the same swimming trunks she had worn to the beach and no shirt. I’m topless, she thought, which she hadn’t thought the day Lucy brought her to the beach, so she tried to put that thought—that feeling—out of her mind, in service of the exercise.

Marguerite opened a beer and passed it to Edie, in such a way that their fingers grazed during the exchange. She took a sip and set the can to her left. Marguerite tilted her knee so it rested against Edie’s. “We didn’t touch,” she whispered. Marguerite removed her knee without speaking.

“It’s getting pretty late,” Edie said.

“We’re nearly out of beer,” Marguerite said. She opened a square mint tin and pulled out a joint. “Do you want to split this?”

“How many have you had?” Edie asked.

“This is our third,” she replied.

“Will you be able to drive?” she asked. “Back to my hotel?” Edie only agreed to join Lucy at the beach on the condition she take her back to her hotel. Though agreed is too strong of a word for what happened. The day after the conference, following a late night of flirting, Lucy texted Edie to ask if she wanted to go to the water. There was a riverfront downtown home to a stretch of restaurants and shops, and Edie assumed that is what Lucy meant by “the water.” In the car, Lucy passed the exits for downtown, and when Edie asked where they were going she said, “To the beach. I’m housesitting my friend’s place on the water. It’s stunning out there.” She promised her she would return her to her hotel that evening, and Edie accepted this arrangement because she liked Lucy, and she liked that Lucy liked her, and, she would later have trouble admitting, she wanted things from Lucy, things like professional advice and book edits and praise for the novel she was currently writing. Lucy had agreed to put in a good word with her editor. Edie feared Lucy might revoke this promise should she make a fuss.

“I was thinking about your hotel,” Marguerite said.

“It’s an hour drive,” Edie said.

“I really need one more joint,” Marguerite said. “And I’m not sure I’ll be able to drive all that way if we smoke it.” She was reading from a script—the very same script that Edie had provided to Marguerite—but Edie was rattled to hear these words, words she’d replayed in her head in the same particular voice for three years, from a stranger.

“But I need to get back tonight.”

“Do you really?”

“I’d like to, yes.”

“So you’d like to, but you don’t need to.”

“I paid a lot of money for that room.”

“Have you ever heard of sunk cost?”

At this point, three years ago, Edie had deflated. She’d agreed to stay on the condition that she sleep in the guest bedroom—only after Lucy sweetened the deal by offering to buy her dinner, saving her another thirty dollars she would have wasted ordering room service.

“I’m not interested in what you want from me,” Edie told Marguerite.

“And what do you think I want from you?” she asked.

Edie was aroused, and covered herself with her left hand.

Marguerite noticed. “Are you sure you don’t want anything from me?”

There was a time, after Edie ended things with Lucy, after she moved back home to live with her parents, when she would spend entire nights, midnight until six in the morning, pacing around her childhood home replaying this scene on the beach. As she paced, she repeated, “You promised to take me to my hotel. Take me to my hotel.” She attacked herself for not saying something so simple and true to Lucy when she had the chance. How much better her life would have been, she believed, if only she’d stood up to Lucy; she was ashamed of relenting, because it seemed to imply that she wanted this, that Lucy had seen something inside of her she failed—or refused—to admit to herself.

“Okay,” Edie said.

Riley pried open the door.

“That’s it?” she asked.

“This isn’t easy,” he said.

“You were so good,” she said to Marguerite. 

“That lady’s a true professional,” Riley said. 

“You’re doing amazing,” said Angela, back at the entrance. 

Riley heaved the door closed.

The second time, Edie told Marguerite what it was she wasn’t interested in doing with her. “I don’t want to hook up with you,” she’d said, her voice as earnest and small as a succulent, and Marguerite had replied with laughing indignity.

“That’s what you think of me? I’m your teacher. That’s wildly inappropriate of you to even suggest it. My god. This is my livelihood. This is my career. Do you really think I’m the type of person to trade sex for professional favors? One of those balding tenure-track creeps preying on freshmen. How old are you? Thirty? You’re not a child, okay, and if I wanted to have sex with you—I can’t even believe you would accuse me of that—I would ask you, like an adult, because I’m an adult and we’re both adults, I wouldn’t play whatever manipulative trick you’re insisting I’m playing on you.”

Edie apologized. They started the scene over again. The third time, she gave up as soon as Marguerite handed over the beer. The fourth time, she relented when asked to split a joint.

“Have you ever heard of sunk cost?” Marguerite asked for the fifth time.

“I have,” Edie said. Her exhaustion had mutated into anger.

“So you know it’ll be easier if you stay. We can hang out more, have dinner together—on me. How does that sound?”

“It sounds like you’re a predator,” Edie said.

“I’m sorry?”

“A predator.”

“You do know what I’ve been through, right? What I’ve done for women—for victims.”

“I saw the stories,” Edie said.

“I bought a billboard—out of my own pocket. Stop Rape, right outside the Stanford campus, a week after that predator—that real predator—got off with a slap on the wrist.” Marguerite’s performance—the sly mix of disbelief and aggression—no longer impressed Edie; instead, it disturbed her how easily she fell into this persona. “And who are you to accuse me of that? Predation. You’re just some student—I brought you here because I feel sorry for you, because you have talent, but you—like so many ‘writers’ your age are so obsessed with bringing down the people who paved the way for you to have a career. It’s sad.”

“You’re sad,” Edie said. “You’re pitiful. You’re an accomplished writer. You’ve published four books. You’ve won awards. You taught at Columbia.”

“Everyone teaches at Columbia.”

“And you’re so insecure you hit on your students, the people you promise to help, because they’re the only people who don’t yet see you for who you are. It’s sick. It’s humiliating. I don’t want any part of it.”

For three years, Edie imagined bursting into tears had she said this to Lucy, the very speech she had practically liquefied through countless iterations, but when Riley pulled open the door, clapping for Edie, she felt a bursting, unsatisfied rage she had never known in her life. She wanted to keep screaming at Marguerite, to sand her down with misplaced resentment, and, perhaps sensing this, Angela came to her and stepped in front of her rage like a mother rushing between a car and her child. “I’m so proud of you,” she said. “Bring that to the next one.”

In the next trailer, which had been fashioned to look like Lucy’s living room inside the home she owned in Denver, Marguerite straddled Edie on the couch. They were both in their underwear, as stipulated in the contract, and when Marguerite lifted her left hand to Edie’s throat, tightening her thumb and middle finger around the base of her neck, Edie slapped her hand away. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“I think it’s hot. You don’t think it’s hot?”

“No, I don’t think it’s hot when you choke me without asking permission.”

“Can I choke you?” she asked, in a sheepish, ironic voice.

“You can’t,” Edie said.

That was it. Riley entered the trailer. “Record time,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone get through it so quickly. You can feel how it’s working, right?”

Edie nodded. She knew he was praising himself, not her, and that endorsing his praise of himself was built into the cost. 

In the third trailer, Edie and Marguerite lay together in a king-sized bed, the edges of which pressed against the walls. “Goodnight,” Edie said, and pretended to turn off a lamp. Marguerite shut off her nonexistent lamp and scooted closer to her under the covers. She wrapped her top arm around Edie’s chest and lowered her hand to her waist while kissing the back of her neck. 

“I’m too tired,” Edie said. Marguerite slid her thumb under the waistband of her boxers—careful to not touch her where they had agreed to avoid but was close enough to make Edie aroused and frightened. “I’m tired,” she repeated. But Marguerite continued, guiding her fingers delicately along the inner edge of her thigh. Edie wanted her then, and was repulsed by wanting her, this imitation of Lucy doing the very things she despised Lucy for doing. Edie wrenched Marguerite’s hand out of her boxers. “What don’t you understand about I’m too tired?”

“You’re tired?” Marguerite said. “You should’ve told me.”

“You heard me.”

“You’re always so quiet, you’re practically whispering. You need to tell me when you don’t want to.”

“I told you, and I’m telling you now.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Edie said. “I’m very sure that I don’t want to be raped.”

“Please,” she said. “Don’t just throw around words.”

“Go sleep on the couch,” Edie said. It was more than she’d planned on saying.

“Excuse me.”

“I won’t sleep in the same bed as you.”

“You know this is my house, right?”

“If I go downstairs I’m calling the cops.”

“So you’re blackmailing me?”

“I’m protecting myself,” Edie said, taking more pleasure in saying this than she expected. “You have ten seconds.”

“You’re a psycho,” Marguerite said.

“Nine seconds. Eight. Seven.”

Riley slid open the door. “Goddamn! You two are like . . .” He made a chef’s kiss gesture. “Impeccable chemistry.”

In the fourth trailer, Marguerite and Edie paced from end to end, simulating a walk longer than the space allowed. The walls had been painted to resemble the restaurants and stores that Edie and Lucy had passed the first night she went out dressed as a woman.

Edie still owned the dress she had worn that evening—a slim, knee-length dress the color of black cherries—and was wearing it now, in the trailer. Lucy let her keep it after she left.

Marguerite asked Edie how she felt to be in the world this way, and she told her she was excited but scared. They continued speaking without saying much, passing time until Marguerite said, “You know, I was talking to my friends last weekend, everyone who came over, talking sex stuff, and they were getting so bent out of shape about consent, and I told them I don’t even believe in verbal consent. I think it’s all so over-determined. I said I do stuff to you all the time without asking, and afterward we decide whether it was okay. I think that’s how it should be. But they acted like I was some kind of freak.”

“Is that what you want? To do whatever you want to me?” Edie asked.

“Of course not,” Marguerite said. There was a tremor in her voice. She pulled her hair back, nervous, and knocked her earpiece loose to the floor.

“Without asking?” Edie said.

“What’s the phrase—better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”

“I think it’s the other way around.”

“There are things that I want,” Marguerite said. “There are things that everyone wants.”

Edie wanted this conversation to end. And she could end it—Riley had made that very clear to her, during orientation. She had a safe word. But she did not want to use it prematurely, not when she was already doing so well and was so close to the end.

“I want you when I want you,” Marguerite said.

“That’s just not possible.”

“You get me when you want me.”

“What are you saying?”

Marguerite crouched to retrieve the earpiece but accidentally kicked it into the corner.

“You assaulted me, Lucy,” Edie said. “Multiple times.”

“Is that the story you’re telling yourself?”

Edie spied the earpiece and wondered whether Marguerite was wearing a second one. She no longer sounded like Lucy—or not entirely like Lucy—but a blend of the two women. Edie couldn’t tell whether she was imitating Lucy or speaking as herself.

“Do you know the types of things that I’ve been subjected to? What happened to my mother? To my grandmother? To every single woman in my life? And you’re acting crazy because I accidentally grazed your neck during sex.”

“It wasn’t an accident.”

“You could kill me, you know.”

“What does that mean?”

“If you wanted to.”

“Marguerite?”

“It would be so easy for you. You’re so much stronger than I am.”

“Please, Marguerite.”

“It’s what men do when they’re angry. They kill their girlfriends. They choke them. The women never choke back. I dare you—tell me one story of a woman who chokes a man back. So don’t pretend like you’re scared of me when I’m the one who should be scared of you.”

Edie didn’t realize she’d pushed Marguerite until the woman was falling. She lunged to grab her, as if she might yank her back into a stand, but by the time her hand was lowered Marguerite was already on the ground, in a fetal position, protecting herself.

“You back the fuck up,” said Riley. Edie hadn’t heard him open the door. He crouched over Marguerite and removed her wig, inspecting her head for abrasions. “You’re not bleeding,” he told her. She landed on her backside and braced the fall with her forearm; as he examined her, she turned her wrist in circles to lessen the pain. 

Edie let out waves of apologies, not one of which was acknowledged.

“You should already be gone,” Riley said. “And if you even look at me like you want a refund I’ll sue you to the end of the earth.”

*

At the nearest hotel, Angela requested a room with two double beds.

“Should we push them together?” Edie joked, as they set down their stuff.

“I’m gonna take a shower.” Angela disappeared into the bathroom.

As the tub faucet ran, Edie listened for the sound of the showerhead screaming. What she heard was water splashing in water. Angela was taking a bath. The faucet stopped running. Water sloshed as Angela slipped into the tub.

Edie flicked on the TV and mindlessly climbed the channels, passing home remodeling shows and trash pickers scraping through repossessed barns and chefs competing for prizes to pay off medical debt. She clicked until the channels reset to the hotel’s directory page. Gentle piano music played over a slideshow of local attractions. At the bottom of the screen, in large bold script, were the words Welcome, Evan. Edie shut off the TV.

Angela unplugged the drain, earlier than expected, but remained in the bathroom. Edie tapped her knuckles against the door and entered before Angela answered. She lay naked in the empty tub. Her hands were over her face, knees bent at a soft angle. “Are you okay?” Edie asked. Angela inched to the far wall to make room. Edie eased herself down beside Angela, still wearing the loose T-shirt and mesh shorts she put on to sleep. She kept one leg spidered over the rim of the tub, foot flat on the tile. Eventually, she fit her arm under Angela’s waist, and Angela draped herself over Edie’s stomach, head resting on her neck. They remained this way, until the discomfort became too much to bear. ♦