Free She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan

the crowd: “Everybody get the fuck out!”
    â€œI think she left,” said Bobby.
    I headed toward the exit. Which was when I felt a finger on my shoulder and turned around.
    It was Donna.
    â€œI got lost,” she said, blushing. “I got to the station at two-fifteen and you weren’t there. I bought some peanuts from the
vendah
and went across the street and sat on the steps a some church and ate them. I just sat there, tryin’ not to cry.”
    â€œDon’t cry,” I said. “Do you want to get out of here?”
    â€œYep,” she said, and we put our arms around each other and walked out onto the street.
    It had stopped raining, and now a warm wind had turned all that rain to mist. The steam was rising up from the cobbles and dissipating around our knees. We began walking through the deserted streets of London. I didn’t know where we were going, and neither did she. It didn’t matter.
    â€œHow was the concert?”
    â€œUh man, it sucked! Fuckin’ noise, and I’m not kidding. Everybody loved it. Me, I just kept thinking how I’d fucked up with you, Boylan. I thought I’d nevah see you again.”
    After a while we came to a restaurant I knew, the Three Lanterns. We had somehow snaked our way through the mist back to Marylebone and were by now only a few blocks from my apartment, where my bonehead roommates were probably awake and drinking Pepsi.
    Donna and I went into the Three Lanterns. The place was deserted. A cat crawled around our legs, then sat in the window. It was incredibly quiet. The waitress, who knew me, came to the table and said, “The usual, sir?”
    I nodded. “The usual” was a bottle of retsina. The waitress brought us the bottle with two glasses, and we drank the whole thing as we talked and didn’t talk. At one point, Donna leaned over the table and kissed me. We kissed for a long time.
    Then we left the Three Lanterns. We walked up the street toward the British Telecom Tower, then up the stairs of my apartment on Maple Street.
    Where my bonehead roommates were sitting around drinking Pepsi. There was Frank, who wanted to become a composer of whimsical music, like Leroy Anderson. He played Leroy Anderson music at every hour of the day—“The Syncopated Clock,” “The Typewriter,” even the one with the mewing cat. And there was Lou Muggins, a computer nerd, who had curved shoulders and a sad little mustache and thick aviator glasses. He liked to make the noise
Haink
in response to things. Like “Lou Muggins, there’s a spaceship outside!”
    Lou Muggins: “Haink!”
    Or “Lou Muggins, there’s a man here to give you a check for two million dollars!”
    Lou Muggins: “Haink!”
    We entered the apartment and I simply said to the guys, “I need the double for a while.” At that time, we had a double room and a single. I was in the double with Mr. Syncopated Clock. Frank agreed to stay out in the kitchen for a while. Lou Muggins didn’t offer to let me use his single room. He just said, “Haink!”
    Donna and I went into the bedroom, and there we talked and we kissed and we made out and did not have sex. I’m not sure if she was expecting for us to have sex then and there, but it didn’t really occur to me that that’s what was supposed to happen. I was a twenty-year-old virgin—unsure, awkward, stupid, transgendered. Still, my life had changed. I didn’t want to be a woman so much. I wanted to be in love with Donna Fierenza.
    At two in the morning, Frank started making noises outside the door about how he wanted to go to sleep (“I’m tired, Boylan, I mean it!”), so Donna and I left the apartment and walked out into the night again. Now thick fog was everywhere, and the streets were deserted. In the morning of the next day, she was flying back to America.
    A taxi’s lights stabbed through the fog. The