Work Text:
Abigail sat cross-legged on the kitchen counter, eating dry cereal from a mug, when her phone vibrated. It was a text from Leah.
"Hey, you heard about Leeroy?"
Abigail stared at the text. They hadn't been in touch since that strange night at Riley's bar. That night, he was unusually quiet, drinking ginger ale alone, seemingly smaller, huddled in the corner booth, as if figuring out how much space he could possibly occupy.
"What happened to him?" Abigail replied. A piece of cereal fell from her spoon and rolled across the counter. She let it slide.
Three dots. Then blank. Then three dots again. Then:
She came out.
Abigail's thumb hovered over her.
It was also posted on Instagram.
Abigail put down her mug. She opened Instagram, followed Leeroy, and found the post. A post in black text on a white background—the kind of post that always terrified her, because it could mean anything, from political opinions to obituaries. But this post read:
Hey, this is a little scary, but I'll say it anyway: I'm transgender. Or at least some kind of transgender. I'm still figuring it out. Currently using the pronoun "she/her," any pronoun will be acceptable later. Thanks for reading. Please don't be surprised.
Below, in smaller print: Yes, it's true. I'm not kidding. Yes, I know what I look like. Next question.
Abigail read it three times. Then she liked it, then unliked it and liked it again, then realized the notification history would make her look like a lunatic. She picked up her phone and called Leah.
"So," Leah answered after one ring, Abigail said.
"So," Leah said.
“Her.”
“Her.”
A moment of silence followed, as they processed the particular significance of that pronoun when applied to the six-foot-two-inch former high school football guard they knew, whose voice was as hoarse as sand from a blender.
“That’s good,” Abigail said, genuinely feeling it, because Abigail had been navigating the queer community since she was fifteen, spending more time on gender theory Tumblr than most graduate students. “What does she need? People? Resources? Brochures?”
“Brochures,” Leah repeated flatly. “Abigail, this isn’t 1997.”
“You know what I mean. Someone should talk to her. She might be going downhill.”
“She’s been out for about a week. She might still be in the ‘all good’ phase.”
“That’s the most dangerous phase,” Abigail said, swinging her leg off the counter. “Back then, people got all their information from Reddit.”
---
Three days later, Abigail arrived at Leeroy’s apartment. Strictly speaking, it was Leah’s apartment, because it was another story—a story about a terrible mother, a cold winter, and Leah’s seemingly limitless capacity for forgiveness, forgiving those who had treated her badly in high school.
The apartment was small and incredibly cluttered. Leah’s half. The living room and kitchen. Clean as if she had given up on perfection, only seeking “no obvious health problems.” Leeroy’s room. A converted bedroom at the end of the hallway, looking like a thrift store that had been blown up. Clothes were haphazardly draped over an office chair, bookshelves, and something that looked like a former exercise bike. A laptop lay open on the messy bed, its screen displaying a Reddit post with four hundred comments.
Leeroy sat on the floor beside the bed, wearing basketball shorts and an oversized hoodie, eating peanut butter directly from a jar with a spoon. When Abigail appeared in the doorway, she looked up, a fleeting expression crossing her face—surprise, wariness, hope—finally settling on a cautious neutrality.
“Leah let me in,” Abigail said.
“I knew it. She’s not very good at drawing lines.”
“She’s very good at drawing lines. Her lines are very clear. She just still has the key to your room.”
“That’s the complete opposite of drawing lines.”
Abigail stepped over a pile of clothes that looked like a mailman’s uniform and sat on the edge of the bed. She looked at Leeroy, at the peeling nail polish on her thumb, at her slightly uneasy shoulders, at how she clutched the peanut butter jar like a shield—a sudden, intense tenderness welled up within her, and she didn’t know how to react.
“So,” Abigail said, “congratulations.”
“Thank you,” Leeroy’s voice was cautious. They'd only met a few times: at a bar, at a dinner party Leah had organized, and once at a grocery store when they both reached for the same bag of crumbled cheese. They stood there silently for a moment, until Leeroy won. By no means were they close. But Abigail had never let that relationship get in the way before.
“First question,” Abigail said, “what name are you going to use?”
Leeroy blinked. “What?”
“Your name. Have you chosen one? Are you really going to keep calling yourself Leeroy? Should we discuss it together? I have a form I can give you—don't look at me like that, it's comprehensive, categorized by etymology, number of syllables, and feeling.”
“I haven’t—I haven’t—” Leeroy put down the peanut butter jar. “Please. It’s only been a week. How could I possibly come up with a good idea? I can barely decide what to order for a sandwich, and you expect me to choose a name that a stranger would yell at me in the supermarket?”
“Okay,” Abigail said. She placed her hands clasped on her knees, her patience evident as if she'd rehearsed in the bathroom. "Okay. Let's put it off for now. We'll talk about it later." Second question: Tell me you've at least downloaded Tumblr.
The ensuing silence, in Abigail's eyes, was utterly deadly.
"What's Tumblr?" Leeroy asked.
Abigail stared at her. She stared for a long time, so long that Leeroy became somewhat uncomfortable—quite impressive, considering he'd once stared at a raccoon disappearing into an apartment dumpster without blinking.
"What's Tumblr?" Abigail repeated.
"I know it's a website. Or used to be? I thought it was dead."
"It's not dead. It's evolved. It's the haunted house of the queer internet, and you need to live in it." Abigail clasped her hands together, as if praying for strength. “Oh, please. You don’t, where do you get your information from?” “Where do you get your knowledge from?”
Leeroy, still possessing a modicum of conscience, showed a hint of guilt. “X and Reddit?”
Abigail let out a strange cry. It wasn’t a word, more like the sound of a teapot forgotten on the stove, a sharp sigh, incredulous, as if containing a long, rambling discourse on how these platforms were utterly useless in any form of queer self-discovery.
“It’s criminal,” she said. “It really is criminal. X? X? That platform that algorithmically recommends transphobic content as leisure? Reddit, where every transgender-related subreddit is either a lifeline or a garbage dump, and you can’t tell the difference until you break down and cry? Is that your source of information?”
“Please,” Leeroy said, raising his hands, “six months ago, I thought the only social platform was Google Chat. You can’t blame me. You really can’t.” Six months ago, I was still using Google Chat to talk to my mom, which speaks volumes about my technological and emotional state at the time. “Google Chat,” Abigail whispered, as if Leeroy had just confessed some earth-shattering secret.
“I didn’t even know Instagram had Stories until March.”
Abigail stood up and paced around the small room, stepping over an exercise bike and a pile of Amazon packages. She turned and pointed at Leeroy.
“Give me your phone.”
“What? No.”
“Give me your phone. I’m going to download Tumblr, set up your profile, and give you a blogging starter kit to change your life. You won’t find your gender identity on an Elon Musk platform.” “Don’t even think about it.” “
Leeroy stared at her. Then, she slowly pulled her phone from her hoodie pocket and handed it to her.
“The password is 1234,” she said.
“Of course it’s 1234,” Abigail said, getting to work.
---
To understand why Leeroy was sleeping on a folding bed in Leah’s converted bedroom, eating peanut butter for dinner, and having his phone confiscated by a woman he’d only met four times, you have to go back to high school.
Leeroy and Leah became friends when they were thirteen, their friendship like all thirteen-year-olds—intense and passionate, completely unable to control their emotions, one moment affectionate, the next angry. They met in a science class, neither of them paying attention, but their shared dislike of the teacher always calling on them for questions fueled their friendship. Apparently, she didn’t know the answer, and she was inseparable from him for most of seventh and eighth grade.
Then high school came, and Lee… Roy, always tall and loud, tried hard to project a masculine image, but this masculinity was like wearing a sandpaper costume, attracting a group of friends who idolized a certain kind of "toughness." This "toughness" couldn't tolerate friends like Leah, who was petite and cautious, started wearing frog-patterned socks, and voiced her opinions on things that some of Roy's new friends would mock.
They started arguing. At first, they argued about everything: why Roy wouldn't eat lunch with her anymore, why Leah told the teacher about Roy's fights, and the borrowed hoodie she hadn't returned. The arguments grew increasingly heated. Roy said some very harsh things because she didn't understand that, when she felt desperate, harshness was the only weapon she was taught to use. Leah, on the other hand, spoke with precision because precision was her only weapon. She had once confronted someone twice her size.
They stopped interacting. Two years passed. Leeroy was terrible at soccer; the coach yelled at her, her average grade was a C-, and she was infamous for her almost sarcastic humor. She went home to her mother's moods, as unpredictable as the weather, sunny one moment, a Category 5 hurricane the next. Leeroy learned to interpret the atmosphere in a room like a sailor interprets the sky.
Meanwhile, Leah found a job at a pet store, attended community college, and quietly built her own small, refined life. She would occasionally think of Leeroy, like you would think of someone important once in your life—just a vague memory. She hoped Leeroy was doing well. She thought she was doing well.
She was wrong.
It was Leah's colleague Doug who told her that his cousin knew someone, who in turn knew someone else, and so the bad news spread, piecemeal, each piece worse than the last. Leeroy's... Her mother found something on her phone. (Later, Leeroy told Leah it was a text message she'd sent to a friend, just a tentative, fearful question about what it meant to dream of being a girl. Just a question.) The screaming continued for hours. The next day, Leeroy's things were left on the porch.
Leah didn't hesitate. She didn't think about the arguments, the vicious words, or the two years of silence. She drove to the abandoned apartment they'd mentioned, where Leeroy had slept for three nights, and found her sitting on the steps, wearing a t-shirt too thin for November, a garbage bag full of clothes beside her, her face bearing the expression of someone just told the earth is flat, struggling to reconcile her previous understanding of gravity.
"Get in the car," Leah said.
Leeroy looked up. Her eyes were red. She hadn't showered.
"Leah?"
"Get in the car, Leeroy."
"I—why are you here? We're both silent." "I—" she choked. "I've been so awful to you. I'm such an idiot, Leah, I—"
"I know," Leah said. "Get in the car."
Leeroy got in the car.
In the apartment, Leah made the sofa bed with clean sheets, pointed out where the towels were, and said, "We'll talk about the rest tomorrow." She didn't ask what had happened. She didn't need to; the garbage bag said it all. She just closed the door and let Leeroy cry, and he did cry—a soft sob, muffled by a pillow that smelled of fabric softener and a stranger's laundry detergent.
Three days later, while Leah was making scrambled eggs, Leeroy apologized to her.
"I'm sorry," Leeroy stood in the kitchen doorway in borrowed sweatpants, like a dilapidated building barely standing. "Middle school, high school, everything, I'm so sorry. I was such an idiot. I was scared and stupid, taking it out on you because you were safe, and that was the worst reason." “
Leah flipped an egg. “I know.”
“You always say that.”
“Because I’ve always known.” She pushed the plate across the counter. “Eat your egg. We’ll figure out the rest.”
They did. Slowly and clumsily, like two people standing on a bridge rebuilding it. Leeroy found a job as a mail carrier, a job that suited her well because it meant she was often out and about, constantly on the move, and could go for long periods without speaking to anyone. She paid rent, or rather, she tried to pay it. She learned to cook three dishes. She apologized about forty more times, each time less desperate and more specific than the last, until the apologies were no longer about what she had done, but about what kind of person she was becoming.
It was Leah who suggested going to Riley’s bar to celebrate her job. “You need to meet some people,” she said, in Leah’s euphemism, “you need to meet people other than me, because I love you, but I can’t be your entire social circle.” "
The bar was called Triangle, a name that was either awful or wonderful, depending on your tolerance for sexual innuendo. The owner was Riley, a non-binary woman with blue-tipped hair and a perpetually anxious air about her. Her Old Fashioned cocktails were the best in the Tri-States, and she'd argue with anyone who questioned them. The bar was small, cozy, and incredibly inclusive; of course, a rainbow flag hung in the air, and behind the bar was a hand-painted sign that read: Everyone's a mess, you're okay.
Leeroy walked in, looked at the sign, and said, 'That's the most honest thing I've ever heard in a business setting.'
Then, she saw Abigail.
---
That evening, when Leeroy walked into the bar, Abigail was sitting at the far end of the counter, sipping a bright blue drink and gesturing wildly, seemingly discussing something that required a great deal of hand gestures to express clearly. She was petite, no more than 1.6 meters tall, with long black hair that fell across her face, radiating an aura that was both anxious and captivating, like a remarkably friendly earthquake.
Lea introduced them. “Abigail, Leeroy. Leeroy, Abigail. Abigail is mine…”
“What is our relationship, Abigail?”
“Emotionally interdependent acquaintances,” Abigail said without looking up, her eyes never leaving her glass. Then she looked up, and Leeroy noticed her sharp, bright eyes, with a hint of wildness, as if she were processing far more information than her face could convey.
“Hey,” Leeroy said.
“Hey,” Abigail said. “You’re taller than I thought.”
“Most people are shorter than I thought.”
They didn’t become friends that night. Friendships require repeated contact, and that first meeting was just a data point. But it was significant because that night, Leeroy witnessed Abigail’s ease and fluency in the bar, which captivated her. Abigail knew everyone in the bar. She addressed people without hesitation. She hesitated for a moment, complimented a stranger’s binder, and had a fifteen-minute conversation with a bartender named Shonda about drag politics, during which she made an excuse to “go to the jukebox for some fun,” clearly wanting to request a Chappell Ron song.
Leeroy watched it all like someone learning a language watching a movie, understanding only one word out of every three, relying on intuition for the rest, but certainly sensing some important meaning within it.
Three weeks later, at a drag night at the "Loose Bolts" bar that Leah dragged Leeroy to, the second "transformation" occurred.
The performers were excellent—dramatic, hilarious, and so sharp it hurt Leeroy's ribs. But what truly broke her was the last act. A drag queen appeared on stage in a gown that flowed like a collapsing sunset, lip-syncing to a song Leeroy had never heard before for three-quarters of the time. In that short half-minute, she had Leeroy holding her breath with her expressions, body language, and the distance between her and the audience.
Afterwards, Leah found her in the restroom, sitting on an open toilet seat in a stall, a tissue in her hand, looking disheveled.
"Hey," Leah said, leaning against the doorframe, "Are you okay?"
"I wanted to try," Leeroy said.
“Crossdressing?”
“I don’t know. Not entirely crossdressing. Maybe it is. I don’t know what I want. I just know that when she’s on stage, I think, this is what it’s like for someone to truly be themselves.” “I don’t know who I am, but I think—” She stopped. She covered her face with a tissue. “I think I should probably figure it out.”
Two weeks later, after drinking a lot of tequila (all provided by Riley, who had a rule that anyone experiencing gender identity crisis could drink for free, a common practice in bars), Leeroy finally tried it. Not a full drag show, just one night meticulously planned by Abigail and a drag queen. Leeroy sat in the dressing room behind the bar, having her makeup done and being complimented on her beauty.
She cried, as she expected. But what she didn’t expect was that these tears weren’t tears of sadness. They were the kind of tears you shed when you’ve been carrying a heavy burden for a long time, and someone finally tells you, “You can put it down now.”
She looked in the mirror and saw not a drag queen, not a performer, not a character. Just a face. A face that was truly her own. She'd never imagined this possibility before. Softer. More open. More like the life she wanted to live.
“How does it feel?” Abigail asked, standing behind her, looking at herself in the mirror, trying to appear nonchalant but failing miserably.
“It feels like myself,” Leeroy said.
That night, she went home and sat on the tatami mat for a long time, reflecting on how for years she had played the role of an armor-like self—practical, protective, yet so heavy that she'd forgotten she was even wearing it.
A week later, she posted on Instagram, and the whole world saw it. It wasn't over; it was just rebuilding.
---
Abigail installed Tumblr on Leeroy's phone and followed about eighty blogs for her—a process that took forty-five minutes, during which Abigail muttered, "Oh, you need this, she draws watercolor comics about hormone replacement therapy" and "No, don't look at him, his views on non-binary gender identity are terrible," leaving Leeroy alone.
"Just browse," Abigail said, putting on her coat. "Don't rush into it. Just absorb it. Imagine it as a nature documentary, and you are nature itself."
Leeroy started browsing.
That night, she browsed; the next morning while eating cereal; and then…at lunchtime, she sat in her mail truck parked in the parking lot, engine off, phone resting on the steering wheel. She browsed all sorts of information, from transgender stories and poetry to memes she didn't understand, until she became so engrossed that she had to put down her phone and look up at the memes on the roof.
She scrolled over a post about Blåhaj. To those unfamiliar with the subject, and Leeroy at this moment clearly unaware, Blåhaj is a plush shark sold by IKEA. It's blue-grey, approximately 39 inches long, and soft to the touch, as if crafted by someone with a profound understanding of loneliness. Through the natural yet inexplicable spread of internet culture, it has become a symbol of the transgender community. No one can fully explain why. The explanations were varied, ranging from "it's the color of the transgender flag" (which isn't actually true) to "transgender people just like sharks," and "when you're rebuilding your identity from scratch, sometimes you need something soft to comfort yourself."
Leeroy spent twenty minutes reading about Blåhaj. She looked at photos of people holding Blåhaj in their hospital beds after surgery, in their cars after coming out, and in small, cluttered apartments like hers, all reflecting the reconstructive process. She saw one photo of a Blåhaj wearing a small knitted sweater; another showed someone had bought six Blåhaj and arranged them on a bed like a shark support group.
She opened the IKEA website.
The shark was $29.99. She added it to her cart. Then she looked at the "frequently buy together" option and added a smaller shark, since the big shark might be lonely.
She placed the order.
Two days later, the package arrived. Leeroy sat on her mattress, a three-foot-long plush shark on her lap, and felt—for the first time in a long time—that she was truly involved in something. Not performing, not surviving, not enduring. But participating. Participating in a culture, participating in a community, participating in this strange, beautiful, and absurd tradition: a group of queer people buying plush toys from a Swedish furniture company and finding meaning in them.
"Queer culture, you know?" “She said to the shark.
The shark didn’t respond; it was just a shark.
She sent Abigail a picture—just a shark on a Japanese-style mattress—without a caption.
Abigail replied with seven exclamation marks and a string of emojis, which Leeroy had to look up in the dictionary because she still couldn’t understand half of it.
Then Abigail texted: *Have you thought about your name?*
Leeroy looked at the shark. She looked at the ceiling. She looked at the shark again.
Maybe,” she typed.
She had. She had thought about it. It was like wanting a word but not being able to say it—you could feel its shape, its weight, but it always slipped through your fingers. She’d browsed Reddit and Tumblr threads about names, looking at things like “popular transgender names,” “wanting a name that sounds like your old name but isn’t quite the same,” and “names from mythology, literature, anime, or some cartoon character you saw when you were seven.” The list.
Leeroy always got stuck on the last category.
Because there was one thing she would never admit, never tell Abigail, never tell Leah, and probably not even the shark: she had watched *The Little Mermaid* about four hundred times as a child. She would watch it secretly after her mother fell asleep, hiding the videotape in a football magazine in her bedroom. She watched Ariel transform from one form to another, watched her trade her voice for legs, watched her become the person she was destined to be, and a strange feeling welled up in her chest, and now, at 23, she could finally describe what that feeling was.
Ariel. She liked the name Ariel.
But she also liked—another option, a name that made her feel safer, more secure, less likely to be ridiculed—Jackie. The name was simple, powerful, and cool, exactly the kind of quality Leeroy had always longed for.
She held the shark. She thought.
“Ariel or Jackie?” she texted Abigail. “Undecided.” "
'Ariel, like a mermaid?'
'No, Ariel is the font.'
'Wait, really?'
'No, not really. Yes, like that mermaid. Don't take it too seriously.'
'I definitely won't. That's a good name. How about Jackie?'
'Oh, that's too hard.' Both are good. What does Shark think?
Leeroy looked at Shark. 'What do you think?' "She asked it.
The shark still didn't respond. It was still a shark.
---
There was one more thing. Something none of them mentioned, because none of them quite remembered, and that was the point.
Two years ago, before all this happened, before the bar, before the couch, before the shark appeared, Leeroy, Abigail, Leah, and Riley all signed up for the same study, complete strangers to each other. The study, run by a university psychology department, advertised in flyers at cafes and laundromats, offered two hundred dollars for three trials. The flyers read, 'Explore cognitive responses to immersive digital environments,' which could mean 'watching some VR videos,' or it could mean 'playing a weird video game while we measure your brainwaves.'
Closer to the latter." This study used head-mounted devices, sensors, and a procedure researchers called "digital experience simulation." Participants were told they would spend several hours in a virtual environment, their cognitive and emotional responses were monitored, and due to the immersive nature of the program, they might not remember the specific details of the experience afterward.
They indeed couldn't remember the specific details. That's a fact. But sometimes, in dreams, in the shower, or in a semi-conscious state, when the brain's control over reality weakens, fragments surface.
Abigail sometimes dreams of circuses. Not real circuses, but brighter, more fantastical, geometrically more perfect ones, as if designed by someone who had never seen a circus but had meticulously studied a detailed manual. In the dream, she was small and frightened, wearing a clown hat, and she couldn't remember her name. The word, the fear, was so vivid and concrete that her heart raced when she woke. A belief, even as she tried to grasp it, gradually dissipated—in the dream, she had become someone else. Someone she couldn't leave.
Leeroy dreamed she was tall, golden, cold and ruthless, a cartoon rabbit, grinning as if in defiance—this dream always gave her an indescribable feeling, somewhere between joy and threat, as if she had spent the entire night playing a boundless, fearless, utterly devoid of tenderness. She didn't like the dream. Or perhaps she liked it too much. She couldn't explain it herself.
Lea dreamed she turned green, sitting on something. A stage? A water lily leaf? She dreamed she was detached, quiet, patient, unnoticed. The dream was so familiar that she didn't find it strange at all. Strange. She woke up and went to work as usual.
Riley never talked about their dreams. But shortly after the study ended, they began creating strange, asymmetrical sculptures from salvaged objects and displaying them on a shelf behind the bar.
None of them connected the dreams. There was no connection between them. The research records were sealed, and the researchers published a paper, but the data remained anonymous. The digital environment—referred to internally as the "Magical Digital Circus"—existed only on the university's server, backed up to a hard drive in a filing cabinet in a locked office. The hard drive contained thousands of hours of cognitive and emotional data, and the participants were unaware they had been research subjects.
But that's another story. Now, the protagonists are a shark, a name, and a trip to TJ. A Maxx Shopping Trip.
---
This message came on a Thursday morning in a group chat Leah had created called "Girls and Riley" (Riley replied with a thumbs-up emoji, the highest compliment they could give).
"We're going to TJ Maxx," Leah wrote, "Saturday, 11 a.m., no excuses."
Riley: "Why?"
Leah: "Because Leeroy hasn't changed those three hoodies in two months, it's torture!"
Abigail: "Seriously. And she needs some basics. Preferably in a different color, not grey." Leeroy swiped up to view the conversation and typed: I like gray.
Leah: Gray isn't a personality trait.
Leeroy: Maybe.
Abigail: It isn't. Saturday, 11 a.m., we'll pick you up.
Leeroy: I didn't agree.
Leah: You agreed when you moved into my apartment and ate all my peanut butter.
Leeroy had to admit, she had a point.
On Saturday morning, Abigail was in the passenger seat, already talking—Leeroy only caught the end of one sentence, something like, "The problem with fast fashion, but TJ Maxx is discount retail, it's different, and I need socks"—Leeroy reluctantly climbed into the back seat, as if he knew he was about to be forcibly transformed.
Saturday morning at TJ Maxx was a battlefield. Fluorescent lights hummed. A mother with two children was fiercely haggling near the toy section. The air was thick with the scent of new fabric and distant cinnamon, thanks to the ever-present aroma of candles—a scent that evoked either "harvest" or "emotional calm."
Leah immediately took control, as was typical of her. Ever since she drove over and said to LeeroyFrom the day she got on the bus," she began to orchestrate Leeroy's life. She entered the women's section of TJ Maxx with the same focus and determination she applied to everything—like a petite but capable general surveying a battlefield of discount shelves.
"Okay," Leah said, pulling over a shopping cart. "Let's get the essentials first. What do you need, what do you need?"
"I hope nobody looks at me," Leeroy said, her fight-or-flight response triggered abruptly, like a car alarm, as a woman near the scarf section glanced at her.
"Nobody's looking at you," Abigail said. "And if anyone is, it's because you're six feet tall, radiating anxiety, like a signal tower. Pretend to be happy."
"I'm not happy at all."
"Pretend to be happy. This is TJ Maxx, not a courtroom." “
Abigail led them to a row of shirts and began rapidly taking clothes from the hangers, her speed suggesting she'd done this before, perhaps even been a professional. “Okay, let’s get down to business. We’re not trying to make you look like someone else. We want to help you find your own style. So tell me: do you know what you like?”
Leeroy looked at the hangers. She saw patterns, colors, and fabrics, but couldn’t name them; this system of classification was completely foreign to her. For most of her life, clothes had been practical—T-shirts because they were cheap, hoodies because they covered things, jeans because everyone wore jeans back then. The idea that clothes could be a language, an expression of your personality, not just a cover-up, was both novel and overwhelming, making her palms sweat.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I like.”
“That’s okay,” Leah’s voice softened considerably. “Today is about solving that problem.”
They were at TJ Maxx spent two hours browsing. During that time, Leeroy tried on fourteen outfits, ultimately keeping six. She discovered she liked wrap skirts but disliked midi skirts. She found deep purple made her feel like her ideal self, while yellow made her feel like a traffic cone. She discovered she had her own preferences for fabrics; she liked fabrics that were both soft and crisp, textured yet not heavy, and that made her feel enveloped.
Abigail sat on a bench outside the dressing rooms, commenting on a variety of insightful remarks, from enthusiastic ("Oh yes, that neckline is really nice") to subtle ("Not that it's bad, but your shoulder posture doesn't suit this shirt; it's the shirt's problem, not yours"), to philosophical ("Clothes are costumes; we all play different roles. The key is to find..."). "To that kind of role-playing that makes you feel real."
Leah offered some practical advice ("This dress can only be dry cleaned, put it back," and "Do you have a belt? You need a belt," and "I'll buy it for you, don't argue with me, I've seen your bank account").
And Leeroy began to see herself. No longer the football back, no longer the jerk from high school, no longer the homeless kid standing on the porch with a garbage bag. Another person. A new face, wearing a dark green wrap dress and boots Abigail had found in the clearance section, talking to herself in the three-sided mirror: *Oh, it's you.*
"You look fantastic," Leah said, standing behind her.
"You look like yourself," Abigail said, which was a better compliment, and they both knew it.
---
Two weeks after her shopping spree, at 2:47 a.m. on a Tuesday, Leeroy made her decision.
That night, she saw a post, a self-narration by a 45-year-old transgender woman. The post was long and heartfelt, recounting her years of confusion, the slowly accumulating evidence, and how her true self had constantly signaled to her throughout her life—in dreams, in her preferences, and when others called her "Mr."—she would unconsciously flinch, yet never understand why.
"The name was the last thing I decided on," the woman wrote. "Everything else—clothes, hormones, procedures—was like steps. But the name was like reaching the finish line. With a name, I was no longer someone who was becoming myself, but truly becoming myself."
Leeroy read it three times. Then she put down her phone and stared at the ceiling.
Jax. Jackie. Jax.
She picked up her phone.
"I understand," she texted Abigail. 2:51 a.m. She didn't care.
"!!! What?!" "
(Obviously, Abigail was also awake at 2:51 a.m., which makes sense.)
"Jackie. But just call me Jax."
"Jax."
"Mm."
"Jax, Jax, Jax, Jax, I love the name. Sounds like you."
"It does, doesn't it?"
"It sounds exactly like you. How does it feel?"
"It feels like I've arrived at my destination," she typed.