Free Nevada by Imogen Binnie Page A

says. We didn’t even kiss, but I was talking about you, and how hard it is to get through to you, close to you, to figure out where your feelings are, but the only way I know how to do it any more is to wait for you to write about it on your stupid blog.
    Steph has always hated Maria’s blog.
    Then Maria is all the way gone and out of the conversation. The word blog. Maybe Maria can’t deal with criticism or maybe when Steph gets attacky she gets defensive which means shut-offy. Who knows. Steph is explaining about how she and Kieran became friends online, how they exchanged a bunch of Myspace messages, she ended up coming clean about feeling stifled in their relationship, that she didn’t know how to get through to Maria any more. This is all true, Maria’s watching Steph say these things, but it’s not like they’re getting into her head; it’s like being stuck in a state of perma-meta. Maria kind of wishes she could videotape what Steph is saying and take it in later, one sentence at a time, pausing it whenever she starts to dissociate.
    Steph explains that Kieran thought she should do something brash, provoke a response, get Maria present and then talk about their relationship and how, once the courtship phase ended, Maria’d had her face in a book way more often than in Steph’s cunt, but Maria’s thinking: well, living in meta-analytical space is a coping mechanism, isn’t it? When I was little, I internalized that I wasn’t a girl, and couldn’t be a girl. Not even like my parents beat gender normativity into me, the way the repression therapists recommend you do to trans kids nowadays. Just more, like, y’know, you learn from the television that a man in a dress is a hilarious, funny thing, and that he is still a man, even if he is wearing a dress, and nothing can change that, and nothing can change the fact that it’s funny. Or you have an uncle who sees that you are wearing jelly bracelets, when you are six or seven years old, so he goes, Wow, my nephew, wearing girl jewelry, in a barely even mocking tone you internalize to mean: Not Okay. Being present in her body meant feeling things like: My gender is wrong, and My body feels weird, and My mind feels like it’s being ground into the concrete by how bad I need to fix that.
    She’s so far gone into her own head, she only barely catches Steph asking: Are you even here now?
    I am, Maria says. Kind of. There’s a lot going on in my head, and I can’t process this whole thing at once.
    All I’m saying, Steph sighs, is that I didn’t even mean to act like I fucked Kieran. He was just being an asshole on the Internet, taking up so much space and attention even in the virtual email computer thing, saying like, Tell her you fucked me! That’ll wake her up! But then we were at brunch and your eyes were so far away, I was thinking how they’re always so far away lately, how much I miss you—how I can barely get you to come back even when I’m fucking you—and I got mad, decided to provoke you. I’m sorry I lied, but I really don’t know what to do.
    Her voice catches and her eyes well up.
    She asks: Is this salvageable, do you think?
    I don’t know, Maria answers, frantically trying to come up with something else to say. Her mind feels like the empty room in that Metallica video. Something snaps. Just be honest.
    I don’t know, she says again, but I’ll tell you where I am with it. I rode to work that day, thinking about it. I went home thinking about it. I can’t stop thinking about what we’re going to do. Steph relaxes visibly, relieved that Maria is working on this. But I’ve been thinking about my bike. You know I love my bike. I’ve just been thinking, I don’t think my bike is just this thing that sits outside the bookstore rusting, or inside the kitchen, rusting. That bike is, like, the only way I know to really be in touch with my life, with the world outside myself. It sounds totally hippie, but Steph, all I ever want to do is