Nevada

Maria Griffiths is a 29-year-old trans woman living in Brooklyn with her girlfriend, Steph. She works at a well-known used bookstore in lower Manhattan. The novel opens with Maria in bed with Steph, faking sexual engagement and, eventually, an orgasm. Her interior monologue reveals she cannot be present during sex; the moment her clothes come off, she dissociates. She fakes intimacy to shield Steph from a hopelessness she cannot articulate, and she resents Steph for having the body she wishes she had.

Maria's daily life is shaped by social exhaustion. Some coworkers remember her from before she transitioned, keeping her on uncertain footing about who knows she is trans. She describes the fatigue of being reduced to stereotypes, burdens that mirror those faced by anyone not white, heterosexual, male, and able-bodied.

At Sunday brunch, Steph confesses that she slept with Kieran, a trans man who works with Maria at the bookstore. Maria's response is emotional shutdown; she watches herself from a remove, a pattern she traces to a childhood spent policing her gender. Steph grows furious at Maria's apparent indifference, accusing her of never being emotionally present. Maria leaves and rides her bike through Brooklyn, feeling a flash of exhilaration at the prospect of the relationship ending.

Maria's backstory unfolds in fragments. She grew up in a small town she calls Cow Town, Pennsylvania, where she spent adolescence feeling strange without understanding why, experimenting with drugs including heroin, and collecting zines as proof that a wider world existed. She did not realize she was trans until around age 20. After college, she moved to New York and transitioned.

Kieran presses Maria to talk at work, and Steph appears at the bookstore to announce she is staying with a friend for a few nights, demanding Maria figure out what she wants. That night, Maria sleeps deeply for once, wakes early, and goes to a diner. Over coffee, she reaches a realization: She needs to be single. She has never been unattached, always cushioned by relationships that kept her from confronting herself. She also notices she is over a week late for her estrogen injection, explaining her mood swings.

Before her next shift, Kieran reveals the truth: He and Steph never slept together. The story was a scheme to provoke an emotional response from Maria, whom Steph felt she could no longer reach. Maria is shaken but recognizes that her desire to end the relationship predates the fabrication. At lunch, Steph explains the confession was an impulsive provocation. Maria tells Steph she is only happy when alone. They agree to talk more that evening.

When Maria arrives home, Steph breaks up with her, preempting the breakup Maria had been planning. Both cry a little. Maria leaves on her bike and rides to the apartment of Piranha, her closest friend and a fellow trans woman. Piranha reveals she has been using heroin because she recently learned that her chronic health condition makes her ineligible for gender-affirming genital surgery, devastating news after a decade of saving.

The narrative briefly shifts to Steph's perspective. Sitting alone at a bar, Steph reflects on Maria's patterns: Every autumn Maria has some dramatic episode that she spins into a narrative of personal transformation, but nothing ever changes. She considers the void in their relationship: Maria's orgasm-faking, her emotional distance, and her inability to manage basic tasks. Steph concludes that Maria needs something bad but not catastrophic to happen, but doubts this breakup will be sufficient.

The next day, Maria leaves work without permission and returns soaking wet. Her manager fires her for repeated lateness and unauthorized absences. Newly unemployed and single, Maria borrows Steph's car, packs a bag with her estrogen supplies, and contacts Piranha's heroin dealer. She spends $400 from savings she had set aside for surgery on 40 bags of heroin, gives herself her overdue injection, and drives west through the Holland Tunnel with no fixed destination.

Part II opens in Star City, Nevada, a desolate settlement built around a Walmart on a mountainside in the mid-1990s. James Hanson, a 20-year-old Walmart employee, lives alone in a sparse apartment. His girlfriend, Nicole, a self-identified feminist frustrated by his passivity, has just stormed out after a fight. James smokes compulsively, using marijuana to avoid confronting whatever is wrong with him.

James's secret inner life is consumed by gender-related sexual fantasies. He spends nights looking at captioned images online depicting scenarios of men being magically transformed into women. He labels his fixation autogynephilia, a clinical term for sexual arousal at the thought of oneself as female, and understands the label as marking him as deviant rather than truly trans. He once ordered a dress online; trying it on left him feeling empty, but he kept the dress in his closet.

Maria arrives at the Walmart and identifies James as likely trans: "As soon as Maria Griffiths sees James Hanson in the Star City, Nevada, Wal-Mart, she's like, that kid is trans and he doesn't even know it yet" (170). She returns and asks James to hang out. They spend the evening smoking weed at his apartment. Maria falls asleep while James stays up watching videos about transitioning.

The next morning, James asks Maria directly if she is trans. She confirms it, then asks if he is. He deflects, but when he mentions autogynephilia, Maria launches into an extended deconstruction. She argues that the term classifies trans women as deviant men and that fantasizing about being female makes sense for someone who is female but forbidden from acknowledging it. James grows irritated, feeling Maria has already decided he needs to transition.

They drive to Reno. Maria shares the story of her breakup and a phone call with Piranha that reframed her lifelong dissociation as a childhood survival strategy that hardened into a destructive pattern. She has resolved to stop using and carries the heroin pointlessly. James pushes back, forcing Maria to admit Steph broke up with her, and asks what Maria's own desires reveal about herself. She falls silent for 40 minutes.

At a burrito restaurant, Maria tells James about calling in to a National Public Radio show to challenge Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist who advocates pressuring trans children to conform to their assigned gender, only to freeze on air and emit a single sob before being disconnected. Something shifts for James. He has a girlfriend, a job, a father he cannot imagine telling; he decides he is not transitioning. The decision brings him calm. While Maria is in the bathroom, he opens the glove box and takes roughly half of her heroin.

At a casino, Maria heads to a slot machine. James wanders the building, resentful that Maria treats him as a project. He boards a downtown shuttle and leaves without telling her, then texts Nicole, who drives to Reno to pick him up. On the ride home, he lies about how he ended up there. The novel closes with James fantasizing about sex with Nicole at the truck stop where they had their first date, wondering whether nostalgia might make him present enough in his body to function. Maria's story is left unresolved.