Best Canadian Stories 2020

1

When Hazel grew up and moved out of the prairies, she would learn from movies and the news that small towns were supposed to be poor and dying. But Hazel never thought of her unhappy childhood as horrific, and Christopher’s family was not only happy but rich. They lived in a cul-de-sac next to a canola field with a wide yard surrounded by poplars; they were always renovating their basement. If you had pressed Hazel as a child, she maybe could’ve admitted she was jealous. In a glossily submerged way, maybe. Mostly, at that age, she just loved being Christopher’s best friend.

When they first touched each other they were eight, sleeping in an old inner room without windows in the basement. They were hyper and laughing hard and then her eyes were close to the freckles on his shoulders.

They talked about gay-ness exactly once, just after Hazel and her mom moved across the province. They were on the phone and about to start high school. Hazel was in a stage of proto-transness, a stage in which she was terrified of herself and had no idea why.

She brought it up this way: “What do you think about gay people? Are they OK or should they be killed? I don’t know.”

“They should probably be killed,” Christopher said.

“OK.”

They talked on the phone a lot after Hazel moved away. She’d always wondered if Christopher remembered that. It would’ve been unusual for two boys. (“Boys.”) Mom let her call him for twenty minutes on the weekend. Long distance. Hazel’d say, “But you talk to your boyfriend every night for hours!” And Hazel’s mom, forever calm, just said, “This’ll make more sense to you as an adult.”

It did make sense to Hazel now, if not in the way her mother probably imagined.

Christopher was always happy to talk. He didn’t have the same emotional needs back then and even as a young teenager, Hazel recognized that. But he always made time for her. He did.

Hazel last saw Christopher when she was twenty. Home from out west, knowing her boy-days were numbered and so were the reasons to come back to this part of the world. She and her mom were at her aunt’s for Christmas and Hazel walked from the other end of town in the snow, the creak of her boots the only sound in the pale afternoon sunset.

She walked in the door of Christopher’s house and no one was on the first floor. She went down to the basement, noticed a bedroom off to the side with power tools everywhere and half-installed hardwood floors. In the rec room, Christopher and a couple other guys were watching The Departed with a two-four of Bud. (There was a particular kind of American, Hazel had learned since, who was bummed to know that Canadians drank Bud.) One of the guys said he wanted more beer, but hated the girl who worked at the vendor.

Hazel had felt herself teetering on an edge then, between a fear of how volatile it might be to continue knowing these boys, and a distant sadness in the knowledge she might never see these stupid fuckers again.

Crazily enough, there had been a trans guy in town, her age, who’d come out around a year prior. He’d announced himself, then right away skipped off to the city. Hazel brought up his name like a test, like hazarding an exhibition round.

“So you guys hear about…?”

“Oh god the dyke!”

And everyone laughed.

“I have no problem with gay people,” Christopher said. “But gender reassignment….” A visible shiver came over him, something real and revulsive. He shook his head like he’d stomped on something crawly and was trying to forget about it.

When the two-four ran out, they all went to a party where they did shots, then played a drinking game, then drank rum out of Solo cups, then shotgunned beers in the garage with their coats on, and when Hazel stumbled into a wall the boys laughed and said incredulously: “Are you drunk?!” It was 7 p.m. and the moon was shining behind a cloud of blankets and after that they went to the bar.

The main takeaway for her: How did Christopher Penner, in Pilot Mound, Manitoba, years before Chaz Bono would ever grace a magazine, know about the term gender reassignment? Weeks later, Hazel got on a plane and flew back west, and weeks later she transitioned, then dropped out of school, then fell away from all she’d ever known. And as the following decade churned, in tiny rooms in roiling bright cities, the thought of Christopher would flit down onto her, like a moonbeam startling her awake.

Ten years later Hazel crash-landed back home—untriumphantly, the prairie winter beginning its months-long descent into lightlessness. And among other things, she began to search for him.

She didn’t have any friends left in Pilot Mound. Her aunt wouldn’t talk to her, her mother didn’t know anything, having moved to the city years ago. And Hazel couldn’t even fucking find anything on social media. Last she’d heard of Christopher, years ago, he’d moved to the city, too. Even his parents she couldn’t track down.

Idly and with pleasure, she set up parameters for him on OkCupid, boys of a certain age and height range. She looked for boys with red hair and dustings of freckles around their collarbones. She checked this every week or so. When she heard of anyone with the name Chris, she would ask, “No chance you mean Christopher Penner, do you?”

Hazel really didn’t expect anything to come of any of this. Her searches were like periodically buying a lottery ticket: a nice, dependable, dopamine-filled surge where the come-up of hope somehow always eclipsed the comedown of disappointment.

She wasn’t doing much with her days besides going to AA and volunteering with a nascent sex workers’ rights organization, of whose members Hazel was somehow the only one who’d ever touched boy parts for money. The nights she was home, she made dinner for her mom, but usually Hazel’s mom was at her boyfriend’s place or at work, and usually that suited Hazel just fine.

She had no idea what to do with her life, if she had a future, or if she wanted one. In the absence of the alcohol she’d flooded herself with for half her life, her tired, newly sober body handed her a sense of alertness she hadn’t felt since she was a teenager. At the same time, she also felt herself turning into a slug as that body barely moved. Many days she never left the house. She slept and watched Netflix and cooked.

Hazel figured sooner or later one of three things would happen:

Or maybe all of those things would happen at once. Regardless, she didn’t imagine this quiet un-life would last forever.

In the meantime, she hoarded her cash, went to AA and the nascent sex workers’ rights organization and shut off her brain. And one of few bright spots in imagining her future was when she indulged this loving spot of her past and scanned the internet in search of Christopher.

Well, Hazel did do one other unusual thing in this period. She went on a date.

Marina from the nascent sex workers’ rights organization—Marina who was not a sex worker, but who was a grad student—introduced the two of them. Marina knew the guy through lefty something or other. Hazel had seen him around at a couple things. He was cute. Tall, blonde hair, glasses. Good politics, ungregarious. Hazel was into all of this.

“You’re getting dressed up like that?” asked her mom that evening.

Hazel was in the bathroom with the door open, in a flowery blue dress, applying eyeliner.

“I’m going on a date,” said Hazel.

“A date,” said her mom slowly. “Where?”

“Baked Expectations.”

“No shit,” said her mom. “Your dad and I went there once. Long time ago.”

“I haven’t been on a date in years. A real date, anyway. I don’t remember the last time that happened.” Hazel said this awkwardly, still re-learning how to talk to her mother as an adult, a woman, a person commiserating.

Her mother softened at this. “No, huh?”

“Nope.”

“It’d be nice if you met someone,” her mom said quietly.

Hazel turned to look at her. What a normal conversation, she thought. What a normal conversation for a daughter and a mother to be having. Her mother shut the door behind her, and Hazel stared at the towel hanging on a hook, her feet shifting in the fluff of the rug.

The guy had a steaming tea in front of him when she sat down and he invited her to get a coffee or something.

That was the most disappointing part. Not even dinner? she thought.

He didn’t get her, but he was smart, turned out to run an after-school arts program, and by the end of the night she’d started to like him. “I did a workshop in the country,” he said. “Seventh-day Adventists, right? And they asked me if I was an atheist, and I said yes. And then they had this look of shock on their faces. And they said to me—I swear—they said: ‘Do you live in Osborne Village?’” Hazel laughed.

It was eleven o’clock when he revealed he had a wife. And a kid at home. They were opening up their relationship after thirteen years. “She’s cool with us being here,” he stressed, as if this would soothe her. When he drove her home, he joked about making out in the car and she got out the second he parked.

Then a Facebook message half an hour later: I wish I had kissed you. I just wasn’t sure if you wanted to. I’m not always totally sensitive to—blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

“How was your date?!” her mom asked the next evening.

Hazel savoured the excited look on her mother’s face, letting its image settle and take root in her mind. “He had a wife and kids.”

“Ew!” her mom said instantly.

“I know.”

“Ugh! I. Well. You deserve better, I suppose that’s all I’ll say. You deserve better then someone expecting you to—slink around.”

Hazel didn’t tell her she wouldn’t have had to slink around, that that was the thing that pissed her off, the burning phrase in her head: “She’s cool with us being here.” I don’t care how goddamn cool your wife is. Was that progress, that the wife now gave the other woman her blessing? Why wouldn’t Marina have mentioned this? (Would she have done so with a cis girl?) Was it really so weird she wanted to see what Christopher was up to these days?

Months later, after the new year, she was restless. Her mom was spending more time at her boyfriend’s. She’d filed some job applications for real, but her heart wasn’t in it. Plus, having firmly committed herself to alcoholism and sex work for much of her twenties didn’t do much for her resume.

The nascent sex workers’ rights organization was plugging along, though. It had grown to ten members and consisted of two factions: white academics/camgirls and twinky Métis social workers. The latter were starting to get their way after a disastrous public event led by the former.

Hazel was cheered by this, though she didn’t say much in the meetings. When she’d joined she’d hoped to just do boring legwork, but once it became clear the group was in infancy—and the others discovered her to not only be the sole transsexual but also the sole person who’d sucked dick for money—suddenly everyone wanted her opinion on things, and a decade of Facebook and queer culture had made Hazel very tired of needing to have opinions.

So when Festival du Voyageur came along, Hazel went and she went alone. She wanted to be in a crowd and watch people get stupid. She put on her old faux-fur coat and vamped up with thick makeup and a purple toque and caught the 29 up Route 70 and then the 10 over to St. Boniface and began to feel alive and did not want to drink, not one iota. Hazel felt good about it. Those two things had been connected for a long time.

Drinking socially was never her problem anyway. Passing the LC after dark, being alone and sleepless ten blocks from the late-night vendor—that was hard. But now? Going to watch idiots instead of being the idiot? That sounded fun.

She had her last thirty dollars for the month in her pocket and paid fifteen to go in and watch Radio Radio thrill a crowd in a tent. Wandering outside in a cold chill of French and English and pretty young people in spacesuit coats, she saw a stand advertising “Giant Perogy Poutine with Bacon—$10” and barked: “Ha!” to no one. Throw in some bannock to soak up the gravy and you’d have the peak Manitoba food, she thought. Then she bought one. Twenty minutes later she was walking back from vomiting in the Porta-Potties, but even that didn’t feel horrible—who knew the last time she’d thrown up from something besides drinking? It felt innocent in its own way.

It was while drinking water in front of the main tent that she spotted red hair in a circle of snowsuits, and right then Hazel knew.

She lingered on the periphery of their circle. An alpha type with a ballcap who looked so much like Christopher’s old buddy Matthew was talking. The whole circle, actually, looked like those guys from years ago.

Christopher glanced at her with a second’s blankness, then went back to listening to the ballcap.

Hazel thought: He still looks so young. He looks so unbelievably young.

Tall—a couple inches taller than Hazel. She’d forgotten. Freckles all over his face. His mother’s Irish red hair grown just over his ears. Thick, loose black jeans, blue mitts, and a grey toque sticking up like a chef’s hat. And blue eyes with a ring of gold inside them. She was that close to him.

And he’d looked through her at first, as if she was any other girl. A specific kind of joy came to her in that, a joy she would always treasure in not being noticed.

The boys left to go back inside, and she said: “Christopher?”

He stopped, confused. “Yeah?”

“It’s Hazel,” she said.

“Hazel?”

At first he didn’t get it, and she waited for him to at best laugh or go lifeless—but then it was beautiful, old Hollywood in the finest way, and Hazel would never forget this scene for as long as she lived. A dawn of recognition traveled across Christopher’s body. She said, “Hazel Cameron,” and took off her toque and shook out her hair, letting it spill down her fake-fur coat, and added: “From Pilot Mound.”

His face spread and cracked, like sunlight coming out of an egg.

“We used to know each other,” she said, smiling. “A long time ago.”

“HOLY SHIT! HAZEL!” And without another word (they came later: “You look amazing!” “I’ve thought about you for years!”), he hugged her. He hugged her and lifted her off the ground, her boots kicking and her nose buried in the back of his hair. It all really happened exactly like this.

On the first call (he called), she made it clear: “Do you want to go have dinner with me?”

“Yes,” he said immediately. “Yes, I do.”

“Like a date,” Hazel said, unwilling to entertain any maybe-fantasies anymore. “You realize this, right, what I’m asking you is to go on a date?”

I sound like I’m his boss, she thought, leaning against the kitchen cabinets while her mom’s dinner burned.

“Yes,” he said again. “Yes. I want to go on a date with you, too.”

They went to Paradise, that Italian place by Gordon Bell with the tinted windows. It was almost empty, with a sweet, apologetic, middle-aged waiter and menus with two-word items and no descriptions and prices that, if Christopher didn’t offer to pay, were just low enough for Hazel to still make it to the next month. “Well, fuck, I dunno, you were in Toronto then?” he said to her. Christopher was wearing a hoodie and blank T-shirt, and Hazel wore a tank top and a pencil skirt.

“Montreal,” she said. “Though I did live in Toronto a couple years. And Vancouver before that.”

“I went with my parents to Montreal once,” he remarked. “In high school. For a fencing competition.”

“The fuck,” she said with a laugh. “A fencing competition?”

“I was on the fencing team in high school!” he said, grinning. “I did it all four years. I”—he paused with a sense of grandeur—“was internationally competitive.”

“Internationally competitive?”

“We went to Fargo once,” he said.

“Wow.”

“Montreal was better.”

“Yeah.”

“You still play hockey?” she said. (Chris was always into sports, Hazel tagging along to his games. What kind of fucking boy in grade school goes to watch his friend’s hockey games?) “No,” he said. “No, I haven’t played anything since high school.” He tugged at his hoodie. “I don’t mind.”

“No?”

“It gets—stupider as you get older,” he said, frowning. “Competition is more fun when you’re a kid. It’s literally the entire world but like it still gets to be pointless.”

He took a huge bite of his food. He ate by slowly gathering a large forkful on his plate, lowering his head, then quickly and decisively stabbing the food into his mouth, like domination. “It gets ridiculous when adults make it mean something,” he said. “You know?”

“I think so,” said Hazel.

“I go to Jets game with my dad sometimes.”

“I hate the Jets.”

“Aw, c’mon, really?” He bit into a piece of garlic bread and Hazel followed suit, sawing into it with her knife like an animal.

“I fucking hate hockey,” she said, scooping up butter.

“Nobody’s perfect,” he returned, unfazed. “How’s your mom doing?”

“Fine. I live with her. She’s fucking some guy who owns an art gallery.”

“Good for her,” he said. “She still—aw, shit. What does your mom do again? I can’t believe I don’t remember this.”

“Hospital tech. Sanitizes instruments. They ever cut you open at Health Sciences in the last five years, good chance my mom cleaned that scalpel.”

“Well, good for her, eh?”

“She does OK. And the guy has family money, so. What about your folks?”

“Um. My mom’s dead.”

“What?” Hazel said. Christopher’s parents had been very kind, and always seemed so in love. There’d been a short period, as a kid, where Hazel’d prayed seriously and nightly for her mother to have what they had.

Hazel reflected, in a nanosecond, that without realizing it she had always considered this a bulwark against death. As if there had been an x = x equation of happy straight marriages with long lives.

“Yeah,” Christopher said. “She killed herself, actually.”

“I’m so sorry.” She broke the last piece of bread. “When was this?”

“Like two years ago.”

Before she could stop herself, Hazel asked, “How’s your dad?”

“Never been the same.” Christopher delivered this information like he was in a meeting. It was calm as space outside, cars half-covered from vision by the snowdrifts. Hazel could make out antennas, the tops of SUVs.

“I’m sorry,” said Hazel. “I’ve lost a couple friends that way. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, showing the first signs of discomfort. “Not exactly nice dinner conversation, I guess.”

An old guy with a Michelin Man jacket walked in and shuffled over to a table.

“My mom’s here now,” Hazel said, offering this, knowing the difference between sympathy and self-concern. “In the city.”

“So you don’t have any connection to Pilot Mound anymore?” said Christopher. The guy in the Michelin jacket slowly lowered himself into a seat, putting his hands on the table and closing his eyes. The waiter sauntered over, now with a lazy smile.

“None. No reason to visit anymore. Ever.”

“Me either,” Christopher said, sounding scared and unsure. “Damn, I guess I really don’t. My dad moved here last year, too. Which is good. It’s good he’s near me.”

They ate in silence, then Hazel went to the bathroom, where an ad for a dating show stood next to the sink, a colourful list that said, “DOS AND DON’TS ON FIRST DATES.” Her eyes rested on a DO:

She straightened her ponytail, smoothed her skirt, and went back downstairs.

The old man had a half-carafe of wine and a basket of bread, staring ahead, inserting the food into his mouth. “So what were you doing in Montreal?” asked Christopher.

“Becoming a girl and a drunk. I came back to quit at least one of those. Got any advice?” She’d planned this line out, to say at some point during the night, to gauge his reaction—and it sounded so stupid coming out of her mouth, but Christopher laughed a true, un-self-conscious laugh, and Hazel started to like him for real.

When he kissed her, hours later, on her doorstep, after paying for both of their meals, Hazel started to cry. She went up into her mom’s bathroom but instead of peeing, she sat on the lid and cried. And then Hazel’s mom heard her crying. She entered without knocking and Hazel told her there was a boy. She said, You remember Christopher Penner, right? and her mom laughed a delirious, beautiful laugh, and got down on her knees and hugged Hazel where she was sitting. You two always did like each other so much. Hazel put her face in her mom’s coat and let her mother touch her as she sat there, the carpet of the toilet seat rustling against her skirt.

After they fucked for the first time, Hazel thought Christopher might cry. He had that look boys get after they come when the sex has really meant something to them. Something grateful unlocked from within his body, with Hazel’s legs wrapped around him like a spider. So many boys thought they were warriors after they had an orgasm. That, or they got sad. Or gave off waves of dissociation and then weeks later admitted they were girls. (This had happened to Hazel not once nor twice, but three times.) But Christopher didn’t cry—his eyes closed briefly, like he was with God, and it made Hazel feel beautiful.

2

Can I even begin to phrase how hard I began to re-believe in my life? How his bedroom is forever preserved in my memory as a centre of peace? Christopher had a big studio on Corydon with purple curtains and gentle traffic sounds and a neighbour who watched cable news that came through the walls as a burbling lull 24/7. For many months, when I stayed over at Christopher’s house, he would get up, make coffee, and kiss me, still sleeping in the bed, before he went to work. I lived between that apartment and my mother’s house, doing nothing. He didn’t seem to mind (something I would later realize I took for granted). It sounds chaste saying it now, though it wasn’t. We fucked against buildings, and I went with him to parties. God, he liked to drink, almost as much as I had in the old days, but that part wasn’t even hard. Once everybody knew I was sober and wasn’t trying to get me to drink, parties got fun! It was a kick to be around drunks and see so clearly now what was happening to them.

And sober sex. Do you know that had never happened before, either? It was in fucking Christopher that I felt my body flower and come back to me. I felt my skin as a real part of the world. It was weird. Sex became not something that I tolerated, or even assented to, but a thing I wanted and liked. It felt like the same restless and tingling part of me that stayed up late as a kid. A ghostly hand touching my insides, bringing something back to me about desire.

“You know, I only ever dated one other girl in my life,” he said one night, after we’d made love. The moon was out and tinged his red hair a pale blue. A car’s shadow from the street washed over the room.

“Really,” I said.

“We dated for four years,” he said, staring straight up from his pillow. “She had a kid, a little daughter.”

I propped myself up on my elbow. “Why’d you break up?” I didn’t mind hearing this stuff, and it wasn’t unprecedented. We liked filling each other in on the vast blankness of what had happened during the past half of our lives.

“She fell out of love with me,” he said.

“That’s cold.”

“No, it’s fine,” Christopher said. “I mean, it was awful, and it dragged out too long. But she didn’t have the guts to leave me. And I wanted to believe she still loved me. It happens all the time.”

“I see.”

“Not that I’d know, I guess,” he added. “The sample size is n=1, as they say.”

“Dating blows. You didn’t miss much. How’d you meet?”

He hesitated. “Speed dating.”

“What? That still exists?”

“It was in Fort Garry,” he laughed. “It wasn’t even at a bar or anything, it was so awkward. But we ended up liking each other. They give you a little piece of paper and they call you up if you marked each other as a match. We went on one date afterward and then it was just normal.”

“No shit.”

“Did you ever date girls, too?” he asked. “I mean, after you—after you—”

It never fails to amaze me, in a fond, quiet way, how boys can touch and fuck a transsexual body then stammer their way through any implication of how that body got there. I don’t know why I have a soft spot for that, but I do. “I’ve never dated a woman,” I said. “Except in high school, once. I hooked up with girls a few times and it was fun. I never really dated men, either, to be honest. I didn’t have many relationships as an adult, period.” Any relationships, I didn’t say.

We lay there in the moonlight. I’d never felt so calm. I felt like the first thirty years of my life were slipping into place and closing. We were very quiet for a while, but he wasn’t sleeping.

“What I can tell you,” I said, “is the first time I slept with a man. It was right after I moved east. This was in Toronto. I wasn’t in a good place. I worked with this boy and I lived in a shithole just east of downtown. Even today it’s a rough corner. Anyway. This boy, Will, he asked if I wanted to hang out. Twice I went over to his house and we watched TV, got drunk. We talked long into the night. Both times I expected—like, I thought: He’s hitting on me, right? This is how this works, this is how it ends up, right? But then around 1:00, 2:00 a.m. he’d say all abrupt that he had to get to sleep, had to get up early for work, see ya. I was like, I work at the same place, bitch! But whatever. The third time I go over again. Will says he’s gonna make tacos and he’s got a two-six of whiskey. I brought a six-pack. And right away, he says he broke up with his girlfriend the weekend before, so he’s all emotional. I was like, Ah, OK, here we go. He put bacon in the tacos. I told him to eat some of the spare bacon and take a shot of whiskey. We called them bacon chasers. I have a picture of me, still, that he took that night. I’ve got a flip phone and I’m wearing this stupid scarf. I look mad for some reason. But I was really happy.

“Anyway. Eventually the whiskey and the beer go and we are fucked up. And then I kiss him and he’s surprised! I don’t know. But he’s into it, and we have sex, and let me tell you, baby, it was bad, like it was nooooot good. I’ll spare the unsavoury details but like, we were both too drunk to stand. And we were scared, and we didn’t know what we were doing with each other’s bodies.”

Christopher sat up and put his arms around his knees, watching me talk to him.

“We blacked out and woke up the next day feeling terrible,” I said. “He had to work, but it was my day off. I walked him to the subway and said, Kiss me. He did, then he left, and almost right away I had a Facebook message saying he just wanted to be friends.”

“Motherfucker!” said Christopher.

“No, the sadness of that hadn’t kicked in yet,” I said. “I walked home, even though it took over an hour. And I felt so clearly that I had finally lost my virginity. It seems silly, right? It wasn’t the first time I’d had sex as a woman. It wasn’t the first time a lover had stuck something up me, either. It wasn’t even the first time I’d touched boy penis. But fucking him and sleeping in his bed felt special, like something I would read about. And I guess maybe part of that feeling was heterosexist patriarchal whatever. But it occurred to me, as I was walking, hungover in the wind, feeling so in my body—that virginity is not the lie. Singular virginity, that’s the lie. It made me think: Maybe virginity is real, and it can be lost, but it can also be given. Maybe there’s something beautiful in the concept, and not just … ruinous. Maybe the truth is just that virginities are malleable, personal, and there are lots of them. And maybe you can even do them over again if you don’t get it right the first time.”

Christopher was quiet. I’d like to say he eventually said or murmured something before we fell asleep, but I just don’t remember.

Once, when Christopher was drunk, he hit me in the balls. Well, he tapped me in the balls. It was supposed to be a joke, I guess. There was a split second where I didn’t understand where the pain was coming from.

“Haaaa,” he said. “You remember that? You remember that?”

I clocked him back before I even realized what was I was doing and then he was on the floor. He sobbed once, not from pain, I don’t think. He said he was sorry. He said he was drunk, and stupid, and that he was a bad and evil man he was bad he was bad he was bad he was evil.

Usually, when he was in blackout mode, I’d just guide him around like a cat. I remembered how pliable I used to be, at least the shadowy mental cross-stitch I could summon from pinpricks of memories and what my friends told me later.

But this time I told him that he was good, that I loved him, and that I’d never leave him. I said, “You’re a good man” over and over. I hoped it would sink in even if he didn’t remember. In grade school I used to hit him in the nuts all the time, unprompted, for fun, and he would go down just like that. Sometimes he’d get mad. Sometimes he’d laugh. No one thought it was weird. Boys. When I said I was an unhappy child, I meant that I was also an angry child.

Later that summer, a job offer came in for him in Kingston. They offered him a lot of money. For me it wasn’t a question at all. “I’m thinking of taking it,” he said.

“If you wanted me to come with you, I’d come with you,” I said.

He was silent.

Then he changed the conversation.

A couple hours passed that night where I said goodbye to him in my head. I thought: Okay. I thought: Never mind. I thought: This strange boy from my past sewed my heart back together. I will mourn, I will hold him until he leaves, and then I will move on.

As we were getting ready for bed, he turned to me with screaming eyes: “Are you coming with me? Are we doing this? Are we really doing this?” He was shaking as I kissed him.

So we left the city and I moved east, again. We settled into the second floor of an old house with a balcony, a house with no screaming outside, no one beating on doors, no sounds of male rage through the walls. Ontario Works got me a job in a rental management office and I closed my eyes the one time they evicted two hookers.

We lived there for a year. I’m thankful for all of this. If your early thirties can be a rebirth, after rebirth had, supposedly, already been part of your life (I bought into the transition-as-second puberty stuff hard), then any period of your life can bring renewal. Can’t it? I believe in that.

One day, I had this clear feeling: We went to this diner that had just opened. They used all local ingredients, claimed we really didn’t have to tip, said that they were proud to pay their workers an actual living wage. I had a sandwich with soft thick bread, a kind of cheese I’d never heard of, fresh greens, and coffee that was somehow so fucking good I didn’t even put cream in it. I’d paid for meals that nice before, but this was the first time without any regret or anxiety. That was the special thing. And we drove home (he drove home) and I thought, I made it.

3

And so then. The morning when it happened. You and I had been together eighteen months. We woke up in terrible heat; the A/C had broken during the night. You went to open the windows and the air outside was wavy. Our room was shimmering in the light. Kids outside were running through the back lane, burning in the sun.

I put my head in your neck when you laid back down. “Hazel,” you said.

“Christopher.” I folded my legs over yours. Your phone rang. I saw it was your dad. You said you didn’t want to speak with him.

I only found out later that you told me second. I was always grateful for that. I was grateful you didn’t tell me first.

When you did, I hated you instantly. Because I knew my hurt would need sealing immediately. That I would need to fold my pain, stow it somewhere to shrivel and grow pale. This is the order these things go. Someday, a girl might do the same thing to you.

You told me how you knew from when we were little, how you admired me from afar, how you thought, when we got together, that maybe you didn’t want to be a girl, that maybe just being with a trans girl would soothe this part of your mind. Do you know what it’s like to so completely understand the force about to blow up your life?—well. I barely remember what you said after that. You were vacating your guts and I was listening and nodding but I could only think, I don’t want you to transition. I don’t want you to be a girl. You were the sweetest boy to me, and I loved you, and I still love you but now I have to help you. I have to guide you through clothes and bras and every way of dealing with hair and I have to watch your eyes grow heavy and frightened when you step outside the way I’ve seen countless girls like you. I have to listen to it all, over and over, again. To see you grow out your hair—oh God, you’re going to dye it, aren’t you? Of course you are. You’ll dye it something besides that pretty, pretty red. That pretty red hair.

It only took me two weeks to break up with you. Isn’t that awful? I couldn’t—I don’t know. I couldn’t do it. You didn’t know what was coming and I did. I know you wanted to try, but I promise you, we wouldn’t have made it.

For the first couple months I’d get off work and I’d feel it in my body. I mean a heavy shroud would emerge from my arms and vibrate through my skin. I mean it was a physical feeling. If I hadn’t known that feeling, been able to name it, known exactly why it was happening and that eventually it would end, I probably would have ended up dead. You probably don’t want to hear that. But, well, I’m not dead.

I stayed sober for three weeks after I left you. I knew that was only a matter of time, too. I don’t feel awful that I started drinking again. I was sober for long enough, and if alcoholics are always alcoholics, then can’t that logic apply to sobriety too? I can feel sobriety still there, those years of clarity and re-sprung desire still alive and sleeping in my bones. Like a patient lover forgiving me more than she should, waiting to come back when I’m ready.

I’ve seen your pictures. You look beautiful now. I guess you always were—well, I mean. You know what I mean, don’t you?

You’re applying for arts grants somewhere out east, I think. Like, east-east. From what I heard, you’re living in an abandoned factory by the sea that’s been turned into beautiful apartments. Your career has turned into the good-paying part of the gig economy and your girlfriend’s name is Mauve. How can I honestly start to tell you how happy I am for you, and how much I want him back? Do you know I would never admit this to anyone? Do you know what it means to be turned into the kind of person you hate against your will? I’m writing this down in private. God forgive me, God please give me the strength, the kindness, the wisdom to cover this in my soul and keep it there. I would never tell you or another breathing creature how resentful I really feel.