Nevada by Imogen Binnie Page A

hated his parents, he hated school, he hated movies and music and hippies and jocks. Obviously mostly he just hated himself. He worked in the receiving department of a Wal-Mart, carrying heavy stuff around, and every couple weeks he took all the money he made at that job into Philadelphia, spent it all on heroin, brought it home, and shot up two or three times a day until he ran out.
    Pretty classy.
    But they were friends. Eventually Maria figured out in therapy that their friendship worked because she was emotionally shut off trying not to be trans and he was emotionally shut off being an addict, so they could hang out and be emotionally shut off together. He was always trying to get her to shoot up, too. She never did it though. She snorted lines from his bags a few times and once or twice she gave him twenty dollars to bring back a couple bags for her. She never got hooked though. She’d do it once or twice and then wait a week, terrified of losing control, but a little bit fascinated by the glamour of it. It was the era of heroin chic.
    So Maria is aware that heroin totally rules. Like, being asleep rules, and being high on heroin is like being asleep times twenty. You just feel at rest. Mostly she would snort five or six dollars worth of heroin and lie face down on a carpet somewhere, hoping not to be disturbed, eventually puking somewhere.
    She stopped doing it when she left town for college, stopped talking to people where she was from and stopped having a connection.
    Piranha is explaining the justifications that surgeons have for not operating on people with endocrinal and immunological situations like hers. Maria’s just looking at her face, though. She’s gorgeous, but not the kind of gorgeous where you want to shove your hand down her pants and your tongue into her mouth—the kind of gorgeous that you want to marry and keep next to you all the time. Her cheeks make up the majority of her face; her eyes and hair are the same shade of brunette, two shades darker than her skin; her lips are full enough to match her cheeks. Some trans women mostly date other trans women, but Maria probably isn’t strong enough to handle shared trauma like that. But for a second she wishes she could date Pirahna.
    Fuck, darlin, she says again. I wish there was something I could do.
    Yeah. I wish people would come if I had a benefit. Like trans guys who have top surgery benefits? Fuckers.
    Haha, she says to Piranha, yeah, it’s pretty much you and me against the entire world.
    You and me against the rest of the queer community, she says back, only she’s not really kidding.

23.
    They watch movies. Heroin isn’t cocaine; Piranha doesn’t do more than one or two more lines all night, and she doesn’t chatter away. She actually looks way less stressed than usual, just kind of lying back, watching zombies eat faces and monsters destroy New York, but not really responding to anything. Maria falls asleep. Piranha probably does too.
    Then the sun is coming up through her one small semi-opaque window. Maria snaps awake and realizes that she has to go to work. She carries razors and makeup with her; she runs the water until it’s hot, gets a presentable shave, does her eyes, and checks in on Piranha. She’s sleeping calmly, chest rising and falling, same clothes as last night. It’s awesome that she’s got this moment of peace; Piranha really does have way more shit to deal with than she deserves.
    Maria, on the other hand, leads a super-charmed life. Steph broke up with her, she went to her friend’s house and got drunk, and then this morning she doesn’t have anything worse than the same headache she has every morning. Jesus. She considers riding her bike all the way to work, but that’ll take forever from out here, so she buys a coffee and a bagel and gets on the train. She kind of resents spending two dollars on a Metrocard, though.
    Mostly what she’s taken from her conversation with Piranha last night is that she needs to