up a gentle incline, then slowly died out. All around me were the towering, thick trees of the Maine woods.
It wasn’t the same as feeling the sun on my face, exactly. But the forest was the only place I could go where I was certain I would be unseen.
Lucy stayed close to me, curious to see how all of this was going to end.
I sat down upon the trunk of a fallen tree. I looked down at my Frederick’s of Hollywood dress. It was white lace with a hanky hem, really the perfect outfit for the deep woods. The curls of my long blond wig fell below my water balloons.
Lucy looked off into the distance and suddenly began to bark. She bounced once on her front paws, then tore off into the woods. “No,” I said. “Come back! Lucy! No!”
But Lucy, true to form, paid me no mind. A moment later she had vanished into the forest.
“Lucy, come?”
I heard the sound of her distantly pursuing something, as well as another sound. Branches cracked beneath its footsteps. Lucy barked angrily, but whoever it was was drawing near.
Now I had a choice. It would not do for me to be discovered by this stranger, whoever he might be. We had a neighbor who lived in a trailer about a mile up the road, and her property backed onto this same stretch of the forest. I’d never met her, but she was said to have a troubled teenage son who’d been expelled from the local high school. I didn’t know his name, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t take well to running into me in full drag in the forest, assuming that drag was the proper name for it, which it wasn’t.
“Lucy?”
I felt my heart beating in my throat. I could run back to the house, I guess, but then that would still leave a loose Lucy. And it wasn’t a simple matter of going home, ripping off all these clothes, taking off the wig, and scrubbing off the makeup. I mean, yes, I could do all that, but removing eye makeup took a while, and often there was residue anyway that I was certain others could discern. Worse than this, of course, was the residue that was invisible, the kind that stayed on my heart. Every time I’d gone through this process, this transfiguration, a little of me remained, invisibly, in the world in which I’d traveled.
When I was young and crossed my eyes, people would say, Be careful, they’ll stick that way. This turns out not to be true, when it comes to eyes. With gender, though, it kind of is. At least for me.
The heavy footsteps drew near. Now there was no sound of Lucy at all.
And now, incredibly, a moose lumbered into view. She was chewing something in her mouth. The large, ungainly creature stepped toward me and then paused. She looked me in the eyes and froze.
We both had the same thought: Wow, you’re really hideous.
The moose stood there for a while, reviewing the situation, chewing her cud. We spent a long moment together, the lady moose and I. She was actually kind of lovely, if you looked at her with the right pair of eyes.
At last she turned and walked with equal measures elegance and awkwardness on into the forest. I watched her go. The heavy footsteps cracked deep in the woods long after the moose herself was no longer visible.
I was alone again, my heart still pounding. A sound escaped from my throat, a sound almost like laughter, but then my throat closed. I sat down on the fallen tree and felt the tears rushing to my eyes. I began to sob, about as hard as I had ever wept in my life.
I don’t know what to do.
I thought about the note that I might leave.
My sweet family. I am so sorry.
Oh, how the tears rolled down and the darkness closed in. I don’t know how long I sat there, a big damp, miserable, ecstatic, hopeful, doomed thing. A strange flower in a dark forest.
And then, out of nowhere—Lucy-dog was back before me. She looked at me uncertainly, put a paw upon my knee. Hey, she said. Snap out of it.
I looked up at her, my face wet. You don’t know, I told the dog. You can’t fucking imagine. I’m going to lose everything.
The dog thought this over. Not everything, she said.
No?
The dog rested her soft face in my lap. I was fairly sure she