Page 6 of Make Room for Love

“Hi,” Mira said. Would Isabel ever become less intimidating? “This is my friend Frankie. Frankie, this is Isabel, my, uh, roommate.”

“Nice to meet you!” Frankie said. Isabel gave her a nod, and they sized each other up in the way that butches did, at least in Mira’s limited experience. Although the two of them couldn’t have been more different. They were both Chinese—so Mira surmised, from the paperwork that had readIsabel Wong. But Frankie was grinning, short-haired, and half a foot shorter.

“Here are your keys,” Isabel said, handing them to Mira. “You got anything else in the car?”

Between the three of them—mostly Isabel and Frankie—they made quick work of carrying Mira’s clothes, books, plastic dresser, new twin-size mattress, and pile of used bed-frame parts up two flights of stairs and into Mira’s new room. “Let me know if you need anything,” Isabel said.

Without waiting for a response, she went back to her own room and shut the door. Her room shared a wall with Mira’s, but it may as well have been a continent away.

Mira and Frankie exchanged a look. “You weren’t kidding about her being the strong, silent type,” Frankie said quietly.

Mira smiled, then stopped smiling as she surveyed the room. She had a suitcase of clothes, two boxes of books, and an unassembled bed. There was nothing like seeing your worldly possessions all in one place to make you question your entire life.

In her two-plus years of living with Dylan, his apartment had never become hers. All the expensive furniture had been his. She had been just another nice thing that he owned.

“You look like you’re thinking too much,” Frankie said. “You want me to tell you what we’re growing on the farm this month?”

“Yes, please,” Mira said. She learned all about the end of the growing season at Frankie’s rooftop farm as they puzzled over putting the used bed frame together—without instructions, it took the better part of an hour. Finally, they unrolled the foam mattress from the box and made the bed.

It was sinking in: This was Mira’s new home. She had the uncomfortable sense of regressing to an earlier stage of life. Frankie and Vivian lived like grown adults; Mira was single, starting over, and sleeping in a twin bed for the first time since college. Adrift and lost.

She hung up a few dresses and blouses in the tiny closet and put her other clothes in the flimsy plastic drawers, gratefully letting Frankie do most of the talking. Once she was done, she sat on her new bed, suddenly exhausted.

“You okay?” Frankie said. “Need a break?”

“Yeah. I think I can take care of the rest myself.”

Frankie sat down and put an arm around her. “You sure?”

Mira leaned against her friend. “Yeah, I’m sure. Thanks a lot, Frankie. I really appreciate it.”

Frankie squeezed her. “You know you can call me and Vivian any time, okay? We’re here for you. And we’re so proud of you.”

Frankie and Vivian were basically her lesbian moms. Vivian was the first trans woman Mira had met in New York City, back when Mira had turned up, painfully shy, at a support group for Asian trans women that Vivian was running at the time. She and Frankie lived together in their apartment full of plants, watching over Mira, letting her cry on their shoulders. They’dtaken care of her after her surgeries. They’d hated Dylan from the beginning.

Mira had mixed feelings. She loved Vivian and Frankie, and she would trust them with her life. But she was twenty-seven years old, and maybe she shouldn’t need her friends to hover over her all the time.

Mira’s parents in Chicago loved her too, in their own way. They were eighty percent there in understanding her, which wasn’t terrible. But the matter of why she’d had to run from Dylan—and why she’d stayed for so long—was firmly in the other twenty percent. They couldn’t understand all the compromises she’d been forced to make, and she didn’t want to face their pity.

“Thanks,” she said to Frankie. She needed to be alone for a while.

They hugged each other goodbye at the door. “Those plants are in bad shape,” Frankie said, looking at the windowsill. “Text me some close-up photos. I bet we can bring them back to life. And keep us updated, okay?”

With Frankie gone, Mira returned to her room. The boxes of books took up too much of what little space she had, and they were too tall to fit under the bed. She struggled as she pushed one of them against the wall. How could a few dozen books be so heavy?

She’d been stubborn in bringing them with her. But her books had been among the few things in Dylan’s apartment that had truly been hers. They’d reminded her that she was a person with her own intellectual ambitions, not just Dylan’s girlfriend. Even if Dylan hadn’t wanted to make space on his own shelves, and they’d gone under the bed.

Now she was alone in her own room with her own books. She was finally free, and she’d never let herself be trapped again. But whatever comfort she took in that was drowned out by her fear.This was her home now, a cramped room in a near-stranger’s apartment in an unknown neighborhood.What now?

She sighed.One thing at a time, Vivian had told her. There had been a half-empty bookshelf in the living room. It wasn’t nearly big enough, but maybe Isabel would let her put a few books there.

Mira returned to the living room. It was spacious and full of sunlight, with a comfortable couch that Mira had sat on, a similarly well-worn armchair, and a coffee table made of what looked like real wood instead of particleboard. At the other end of the apartment was a tidy kitchen, separated from the living room only by a small dining table.

The apartment wasn’t slick and curated like Dylan’s, but it didn’t look lived-in, either. The blanket and throw pillows on the couch seemed undisturbed since Mira’s first visit. There was something chilly about the apartment, even if it wasn’t nearly as forbidding as Isabel herself.

Maybe Mira would get used to having dinner at the table and curling up on the couch with a book, and the apartment would eventually feel cozy and warm—but would she have time to get used to it? She would be leaving in a few months. And she couldn’t imagine Isabel doing any of those mundane, domestic things herself.

Mira went to the bookshelf. There were a few dozen hard sci-fi paperbacks she didn’t recognize, alongside the classics by Le Guin and Butler. A framed photo sat on the top shelf. She picked it up.