The first year living with Trent was somewhat miserable as he was frequently on drugs and prone to lapsing into slam poetry in regular conversation. He seldom bathed and never did his laundry so our room stank, not just of his sweat and crotch rot, but of a deeper, more earthy, troubling fecal smell. He also loved eggs, hard-boiled eggs, and he would boil a dozen and then eat them out of the pot of water as he sat on the floor, the shells and wisps of membrane scattered around him on the carpet. Still, early on in our rooming together, I had decided it was best to be straightforward and tell him I was gay and make sure he had no problem with it. I did not want to live with someone I felt unsafe around, but it took me several weeks into the fall semester to realize that I felt this way and to become sure that I had a right to it at all.

“I absolutely understand if you feel uncomfortable,” I said, “and I’d be happy to switch rooms, no hard feelings.”

“I think it’s righteous,” Trent said, and held up his skinny fist. “Gender is fluid and nonbinary, sexuality’s a spectrum. I’ve had sex with dudes,” he said.

“Oh,” I said.

“I fucked a tree once.”

“Did it hurt?” I asked.

“Not at the time,” he said, “but later it was pretty brutal. Mr. Happy was scratched up like a Dionysian sacrifice.”

“Wow,” I said.

Still, it was a radical improvement over living with Jason. Trent was bizarre and ridiculous and very, very annoying, but at the end of the year he wrapped me in a bear hug I hadn’t been expecting and whispered in my ear, “I will love you forever, homie, and always put light around you in my heart.”

We rarely saw each other on campus, but when we did he would smile and nod at me. After that first year, I became an RA, which suited me perfectly, bossing people around, having a single room, getting paid a small stipend for making sure we had enough toilet paper. I was queen of that dorm and I ruled our floor with an iron fist in a velvet glove.

My sophomore year, I began dating a junior named Evan. He was a poet and he had handsome ears that were just on the verge of being too big but were instead distinctive. He lived off campus in an apartment because his parents were rich. He was lean and he had curly brown hair and a face that was delicate without being feminine. He had big fat lips like a little kid’s. He was very good at being adorable. I’d never met someone who could make it seem cute to have failed at something. Once, he forgot to pay his electricity bill for several months. “Michael, I, like, forgot there even was electricity. As, like, a force in the universe. What is electricity, I don’t even know!” He was a vegetarian. He was never mean to me. Not once. Not even in a single conversation was he once slightly mean. In fact, if he thought he had accidentally slighted me, he would apologize profusely. He often picked me wildflowers and gave them to me as a surprise.

Despite these things, I never managed to fall in love with Evan. I cared about him. I lusted after him. I loved his narrow buttocks and his delicate, ticklish rib cage. I loved the large oblong brown mole on his pale forearm. But I did not fall in love with him the way I fell in love with Anthony, and I wondered if maybe I was too happy to fall in love, too already fulfilled.

I did see Anthony again while I was in college. It was the summer between sophomore and junior year, and I texted him out of the blue, and said: I just wanted to say thank you for our time together. I don’t think I was grown up enough to thank you at the time, but I think in many ways you saved my life.

We texted back and forth, and he mentioned he would love to get together for lunch nonromantically to catch up, and I said I was driving out that way to drop a friend off at LAX, which was true, and we agreed to meet in North Shore at a sandwich shop where they made their own bread that Bunny and I used to go to all the time.

I lied to myself that I was not nervous about this encounter, but I changed my shirt five times before taking my friend to the airport. I didn’t want to reopen the romantic door with Anthony, and at that point Evan and I were still technically together, although I already knew it was mostly over, but I did want Anthony to be impressed when he saw me. Gone was my septum piercing, gone the black eyeliner. I had cut my long hair at Evan’s insistence, but it was very chic the way the girl had done it, short on the sides and long and floppy on top. I had a tan. I had muscles. I was wearing shoes made out of actual leather. I was terrified.

It wasn’t just seeing Anthony. It was being in North Shore again. It was being in a place Bunny had been. By that point, she had been released from prison, but I knew she wasn’t in North Shore anymore, so it wasn’t that I was afraid to run into her. I was afraid of the memory of her, but also the memory of who I had been. I found my own self unfathomable and grotesque. How had I subsisted on so little? How had I lived hunched over in fear of my very self, scuttling about like a crab? I felt ashamed that I had ever been anything other than I was now.

I was also, on some level, upset that the town still existed. That people went on living here as though nothing had happened, which was absurd, obviously. I kept expecting to be recognized, but I met no one I knew. The town, I saw, had gotten richer. Its metamorphosis was almost complete. On every block there were only one or two of the old houses clinging to existence between the mansions.

The sandwich shop was exactly the same, its ambient air temperature as hot and weirdly humid as ever. I recognized the woman behind the counter, though I did not know her name, but she didn’t recognize me. And then I saw Anthony at a table in the back, and I knew all of a sudden that I was wildly happy to see him. Just to look at his face produced ripples of joy in my solar plexus. It was involuntary. I walked over, and he looked up from his book. “Good golly Miss Molly,” he said.

“I’m so happy to see you,” I said. I was busy looking at him, and I was beaming stupidly as I took the chair across from him. He looked older, but it was hard to say why. Perhaps it was a softness in the jaw, a feebleness in the neck. He had lost some weight and his shoulders were narrower and more bowed. But he was still smiling at me with those wonderful, slightly crooked teeth. I had not known I would recognize his teeth. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I can’t stop looking at you.”

“I can’t stop looking at you either,” he said.

“It’s okay, it doesn’t actually matter what we say.”

“No, it doesn’t,” he agreed.

I suppose I had thought that I dreamed it. That I was so desperate for love back then that I was willing to project it onto even an old man who lied to me. But it was still here, whatever it was. I didn’t know whether to call it love or joy or just connection, but it was all of those things, and it was generated by our proximity, like an electromagnetic field. I had never felt anything like it with anyone else, and the fact that it was still here—what did it mean?

“I brought this book for you,” he said. He flashed me the cover. It was a book of Adrienne Rich poems. I liked Adrienne Rich, but I didn’t have any of her collections, so I was happy. It seemed so amazing and wonderful. That he would bring me a present. As though he had known all along that it would be like this, exactly the same as it had been, only different.