The taxi pulled to a stop outside the row of East Village townhouses. I swiped my debit card, refused the receipt, and opened the passenger side door. I kept my legs together and tugged the end of my skirt down as I got out, swinging my purse to my shoulder.

I looked up at the side of the building. It looked tired and dingy in the way that only a Manhattan apartment exterior can. The bricks were pitted but clean, the mortar stained but sound. Years of rain had created permanent lines like mascara stains on a crying face.

Ever since the conversion, I had stayed mostly at home. It wasn’t because I was anxious about interacting with the world as a woman, or at least not only that. Most summers I spent indoors, playing video games and ordering pizza and generally participating with humanity only through a digital filter. It was part of what had attracted me to this internship, since eNext had some of the best devices and software on the market. Plus, I had not told any of my friends about it, preferring to let the summer run its course without having to break that kind of news.

Sitting in a recliner in front of the television, I had leisure to forget I was female for a little while. My clothing allotment came with a couple of pairs of yoga pants, which were just as comfortable as advertised. I discovered that I could wear my hair up, which kept me from leaning back on the knot of a ponytail. I generally got up, threw on a tank top and the yoga pants, and went braless throughout the day. It probably gave the pizza delivery guy a thrill, but it only took thirty seconds to sign the credit card receipt. Anyway, it let me get away with a lower tip.

Those few days of personal neglect had been fun, but they came to an end all too soon. The day before, I had packed up all my new possessions and delivered them to the car service to deliver to my new Manhattan apartment. I took a shower that night to save time, and this morning had caught the bus from Poughkeepsie. I was wearing a skirt that came down to my shins, and a peasant blouse with strings that tied at the back. I kept the jewelry to a minimum, just some earrings and my usual finger rings, and a necklace — a cameo brooch, looped through a bit of ribbon to hang between my collar bones. I had on the same sandals that I wore out of the clinic.

I opened the door, but not before checking the address on my phone one last time. Nope, this was the place. The apartment was described as a “fourth floor walk-up,” which meant that there was no elevator. The stairwell was narrow and smelled vaguely of urine, but that comes with the territory. The climb got my heartrate up, but did not put me out of breath. Score one for BodyMat, because I couldn’t have done that in my old body.

I took the key out of my purse and turned it in the lock of 403. “Hello?” I called. I had spoken so little over the last few days that my voice continued to surprise me. I had no idea how it might sound outside my head, but to my ears it was sort of hollow sounding. It was higher too, but honestly not all that much. It was less complicated, I guess, lacking some of the depth and overtone that my male voice had possessed.

“Just a second!” Another woman’s voice came from the other room. I hung back at the door and observed. The apartment was tiny, a short hallway with a door to the bathroom, leading to the living room. Well, one side was a living room, with a couch and a single chair up against the wall. The other side was a kitchen, fridge and microwave and sink, and a few spare feet of counter space. There were three doors at the back, which were presumably bedrooms.

A moment later, a blond girl came out through the leftmost room. She had short hair, bobbed in a sort of pixie cut, glasses, and a face that was more friendly than pretty. Her height was about the same as mine, but she was skinnier, flat of both chest and ass. She had a welcoming smile.

“Hi, I’m Chloe!” she said.

“Holly,” I replied. “So... summer intern?”

“Uh huh.”

We kind of stared at each other for a moment. I did not usually have a hard time talking to someone, but I felt lost at sea in this interaction. How did women talk to each other? I had heard them do it thousands of times hadn’t I? Not when there were no men around, though. The silence stretched.

“I’m sorry,” said Chloe suddenly. “I’m just so AWKWARD sometimes. I never know how to talk to someone.”

“No, I’m sorry!” I said. “I was just thinking the same thing, like, here’s this girl I just met and I have to live with all summer....”

“...And she’s going to think I’m a total idiot,” Chloe finished.

We laughed, and the ice was broken.

“Let me show you around the place,” said Chloe. She turned in a circle. “That’s about it! The bathroom is the smallest thing I’ve ever seen. Like, there are airplane bathrooms that are smaller.”

“Oh my God,” I said when she led me to the door. She was right. You’d have to stand in the shower to pee in the toilet. Or at least, I amended, a man would. Chloe and I would have our knees on the shower curtain, though. “There’s no sink.”

“Only in the kitchen. So that way, everyone can tell if you wash your hands. Come on, let me show you your room.”

Mine was in the middle. “I haven’t met her yet,” said Chloe, pointing to the door on the right. “I heard her come in late last night, but she was gone when I got up this morning.”

My room had a bed and a nightstand on one wall, a built in desk and closet combo on the other, and pretty much nothing else. There was one window which looked out upon a brick wall about six feet away. My suitcases were on the floor, taking up what small amount of room there was to walk.

“You can stick your empties in the loft,” said Chloe. “That’s what I’m calling the space above the hall closet that’s way too high up for anyone to reach. Do you want a hand unpacking?”

I bit back the automatic no. Why not? Maybe this was something women did for each other. “Sure!” I opened the closet, which was full of wire hangers. I scooped them up and put them on the bed. “I’ll pass you stuff as I hang it up.”

The job went quick with both of us talking. Chloe was actually from Manhattan, but I gathered from her disdain for the apartment that it was a much larger place. I told her I was from Poughkeepsie, about my older brother and his wife and my younger sister. She asked about my parents, which I expected, but her reaction when I said they had died was different than I had experienced before. She bowled me over with a hug.

“It’s okay, really,” I said, prying myself off. “It was years ago now. My brother and his wife raised us. I was a little girl when it happened.” My heart jumped as a shot of adrenaline went through me, but even though I had tried to say “boy,” it had come out as “girl.” I revised my opinion of the mental conditioning.

Soon the suitcases were unpacked. Chloe was enraptured by several of my outfits, and expressed her sadness that we weren’t the same size, so she couldn’t borrow any of them. It was true — any of my clothes would have been baggy on her slim frame. I experienced the strange sensation of being more traditionally feminine than a “real” woman.

My stomach rumbled. “What’s good to eat around here?” I asked. I had just stuffed my last bit of underwear into the drawer.

“Oh, loads of stuff. I figured we could just walk to St. Marks Place and see what looked good.”

We. It was nice to have a friend.

“Let’s just put these bags in the loft.” I was able to wrangle them both out of the small room. The hall closet was nothing more than a recessed space in the wall with some shelves in it, and a curtain hiding it from the outside, but there was a considerable amount of room at the top. I lifted one suitcase.

“Here, let me get a chair, you’ll never reach that.”

She was right, of course. As a man, I could have reached it without a problem, but Holly was shorter. My height had never really occurred to be before. It had its advantages, though; I tried to imagine how small the apartment would have felt with another eight to ten inches on me.

I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. My hair had escaped the bounds of the scrunchie I had pulled it back with. “Oh, man, I need some work here,” I told Chloe.

“I wish my hair did that,” she told me as I brushed it out quickly and restored the ponytail. “I keep it short because it just kind of hangs here no matter what.”

“It looks great on you! I like the way you keep the sides longer so it frames your face. And I bet it’s so quick.” We traded compliments for a few minutes longer as I touched up my makeup. We were at the door and ready to leave when a key turned in the lock, and the door burst inward.

A very tall, very leggy raven-haired woman was standing here. “Ugggghhhh,” she said as she pushed past us. She looked vaguely familiar for a moment, and then I placed it. At BodyMat, there had been several options for women that could have stepped right out of a fashion magazine. This woman was not any one of them in particular, but she had the same look — every attribute turned up to perfection. I felt immediately inferior, and chastised myself for feeling so. I could have looked like that if I wanted to. Really.

“Hi!” said Chloe brightly. “You must be...” The woman had reached the other side of the apartment. She swung open her door stepped through, and slammed it shut. “...our other roommate,” she concluded. “Should we ask her to dinner?”

“You first.”

“Let’s... just let her be,” said Chloe, and we closed and locked the door behind us.

Only a little ways down the stairs, I encountered yet another side effect of my new boobs. Despite the restraint of my bra, they kept bouncing up and down as I went down the stairs. There was something about the rate I was walking versus the natural period of their motion, or something, but after a few steps I clutched my arms to my chest and stopped fast.

“What... oh. Yeah, I get it,” said Chloe.

“I’m just not used to....”. With a gasp, I put my hand to my mouth. It wasn’t taboo to talk about a body conversion, but I didn’t want to get too close to the truth about my gender.

“It’s okay,” said Chloe. “I got one too. I think everyone at the company did, and the interns for sure.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I know we’re not supposed to talk about it or whatever, but fuck ‘em.” The obscenity made me laugh, and we kept going down the stairs. I walked more slowly, which helped, and crossed my arms underneath for extra support. “I was actually a lot bigger before. The titty fairy visited me pretty early on. I haven’t been this small since fifth grade.”

“Oh geez!” I said, and meant it. “Is it weird?”

“Kind of. I keep compensating for it before I realize I don’t have to. It’s way less trouble, but I don’t know. I kind of miss them too.” She shrugged. “Society does a number on us, you know? They’re a giant hassle and everyone stares at you. You can’t wear anything with any sort of neckline without being called a slut, as if they’re something you put on in the morning and take off at night. Better cover up, or the boys will get distracted, and somehow that’s YOUR fault.” She shook her head bitterly as we came to the end of the stairs and exited into the early evening. “And even with all of that, I look at myself in the mirror, and I feel like less of a woman.”

“Well that’s just bullshit,” I told her, taking my language cue from her. Somehow, I never realized that girls cussed this much. “No, seriously! You are fucking adorable. You’ve got that whole,” I waved a hand in her direction, “like, sexy petite thing going. Any dude would want to just pick you up and have his way with you.”

She laughed, a giant belly laugh. “What about you? You’ve got the whole package.” She leaned back to scope out my ass. “The whole package.” I grabbed my butt as if to hide it and stared at her in mock outrage. “I’m serious, you are eminently fuckable. Rocking ass, rocking tits. I bet your legs are amazing. And that hair! Jesus.”

We were at the restaurant before I realized just how weird the conversation was. I had certainly never talked to any of my male friends this way. I had complimented women on their appearance before, but always as a man talking to a woman, not as two women talking about each other. We were bawdy and explicit and we swore after every other word. We were describing each other in terms I would have blushed to use as a man, but — and this was the strangest part — with no sexual overtones. I wasn’t flirting with her, and she wasn’t flirting with me. I had been telling the truth when I talked about how sexy she was, but it was not something I had any interest in acting on. It was like one musician telling another how nice her guitar solo was. Just because I liked the music didn’t mean I wanted to be the guitar.

The conversation continued after we were seated, at a patio table at a Thai restaurant. “I guess that I’ve never really dated anyone who didn’t turn out to be a shallow dick,” Chloe told me, sipping on a Thai iced tea. “They start out, and I’m like, ‘Oh, he’s different, he’s not like the others,’ but three months later, boom, just the same.”

I nodded. I had discovered, after a careful test, that pronouns swapped automatically for my own past girlfriends. “I’m just tired of being a placeholder. I mean, I know I’m not what most guys aren’t looking for. Things will be going fine, and then suddenly he sits me down for a conversation about how it’s not me, it’s him, and can’t we just be friends. Then two weeks later, he’s off fucking some dude in his dorm room.”

Chloe’s eyes widened. “Wow, turned him gay, huh?”

Ah. So apparently the pronoun swap didn’t make it to the third degree. Time to cover. “Just once. The rest of the time, it was some girl.” I though back to my last relationship, to finding her straddling my (now former) best friend on our sofa. It was why I had my own place, now. “Or my best friend.”

“Guys,” she said, holding up her glass for a toast. “Fuck ‘em.”

“You know that could be taken two ways,” I said, raising my own. She shrugged impishly as we clinked glasses.

After dinner, neither of us were in the mood to go back to the cramped apartment. (“Not with the Amazon bitch queen there,” Chloe added.). We poked our heads into half a dozen bars until we found one that wasn’t too crowded. It was Irish themed, like half of the bars in New York City, but with a low key ambiance and a stack of beaten-up board games in the corner. We nabbed a copy of Connect Four and found a table.

I ordered a beer before I remembered it wasn’t lady-like, but then Chloe got one too and it stopped mattering. In between trash talking each other about the game, we talked about the internship, wondering what they would have us do. That turned to our love for electronics, which turned to video games, and before long we were debating whether the SNES Classic would turn out to be easier to find than the NES version.

I was pleasantly buzzed. Perhaps it was the alcohol, or the very pleasant conversation, or just the passage of time, but I was feeling more comfortable in my body than I had since I got it. I found I was crossing my legs like a girl, fiddling with my hair like a girl, even putting my lips on the glass while keeping track of my lipstick like a girl. Thanks to my shorter height, our table was right at boob level, but I had stopped noticing the way they pressed into the edge as I leaned forward.

“Can we get either of you ladies a drink?”

I was about to order, when I realized it wasn’t a waiter. Through the haze of a few beers, they were all jeans and stubble and plain shirts. One of them had blue eyes, I think.

“No, I think we’re good. Holly?”

“I’m fine. In fact, I think I’m done.”

“Holly. That’s a pretty name. Like Christmas.” His smile widened. “If you don’t want a drink, how about a dance?”

I shook my head and turned back to the game. I pretended like they weren’t there, and after a minute, Chloe whispered, “Coast is clear.”

“Thanks. You’d think they’d wait until they were invited.”

“When you’re a girl, they think your tits are their invitation.” Chloe studied her own next move, but before she could play, looked up with a frown. “Watch out, they’re back.”

“We brought you something,” said one of them, putting a couple of shot glasses down on the table.

“No thank you,” I said.

“Come on, just do a shot with us!”

“One shot!” said the other.

Chloe made a sound of disgust. “No, I really, really think it’s time for us to go. Come on, Holly.”

Thankfully we had paid as we went, so leaving the bar was no more trouble than getting off the stool and going outside, leaving our half-played game behind us. The night air was cool, and sobered me up enough to feel a little uneasy.

Damn. This was one aspect of womanhood that I had heard about, but never experienced. I mean, we were just having a couple of drinks. We weren’t looking for dudes to come up and hit on us. I expressed as much to Chloe.

“Well, don’t look now, but I don’t think they’re done yet.” Of course, I looked immediately, and saw the two of them edge out of the bar. They stood outside, as if reading the No Parking sign, but loped down the street after us a few seconds later.

“How close are we?” I asked.

“Just a few blocks. I think we’ll make it.”

But we underestimated how fast they could walk, or maybe how slow I was going. It wasn’t long before they came within shouting distance. “Hey, if you don’t want a dance, how about a fuck?” I turned around to say something, but Chloe grabbed me by the arm.

“Keep moving. Ignore them.”

The comments continued as we turned onto our street. The apartment was up on the right. I realized, with a pang, that the front door did not require a key to get in. Only the apartments were actually locked, which meant we had four flights of stairs to climb before we were safe.

We mounted the stairs to the front door, past a guy who was on the steps talking on his cell. He nodded to us in a friendly manner as we passed.

It was on the landing where the stairs turned, halfway between the first and second story, that we heard the altercation.

“That’s our girlfriends. They’re expecting us.” I paused, and after one tug of my arm, Chloe stopped to listen too.

“Which one is your girlfriend?”

“The one with the big tits,” said one of the guys, to the laughter of the other. I covered up my chest in embarrassment.

“Yeah, I don’t think so. Since you don’t live here, and you weren’t invited, I don’t think you have any business here, do you?”

I’m not sure what was said next, but there was a yell, and the door slammed. I poked my head around the corner to see the guy who was on the cell phone, back to the door, trying to keep it closed. “Little help here?” he said, straining.

We ran down the stairs and threw our own backs against it. It slammed home. “Calling the cops now!” our friend said. “Hope you’re still here when they arrive!” There were a few more bangs, as if to try to say that they could come in if they wanted to, but were choosing to leave for completely different reasons.

My heart was racing. “Thanks,” said Chloe, and introduced himself.

“Lamar.” He shook Chloe’s hand, then mine. “On behalf of my gender, please allow me to apologize.”

“Are you an asshole? Because they were assholes. No comparison.” Chloe peered through the narrow strip of glass next to the door that served as a window. “No sign of them. Care to make a run for it? We’re on the fourth floor.”

“Me too. 401.” Lamar cracked the door open. “No sign of them. I’ll walk you up.”

Good as his word, Lamar saw us into our own apartment. Chloe flopped onto the sofa. “Well. He was cute.”

“You think so?”

“You don’t?”

I hadn’t really considered it. I was not accustomed to the notion of looking at a guy and judging his physical appearance, certainly not in relation to myself. I did so, and realized she was entirely right. “Okay, maybe.”

“You dating anyone now?”

I shook my head. “I’m not sure I’m looking.”

“Easiest way to find it.” Chloe shrugged. “He was definitely interested, though.”

“In... in me? You’re kidding!”

“Oh my poor naive Holly. You didn’t see his eyes as he was coming up the stairs. I was ahead of you, so when we turned a corner I could see right where he was looking.” Confusion must have shown on my face. “Your ass. Who can blame him?”

I felt a rush of blood suffuse my face, which made Chloe laugh, and she laughed even harder as I protested that I wasn’t embarrassed in the slightest. I was, of course. I was unused to having parts of my body, sexually charged parts of my body, on easy display. I was unused to being checked out, or even noticed. The guys at the bar were one side of that coin, and a bad one, but maybe Lamar was the other side.

We talked for a few minutes, but our outing had gotten the better of us, and I soon excused myself to bed. As I lay there, enjoying the feeling of the cool clean sheets, my mind kept wandering back to Lamar, the feel of his hand as he shook mine, and his ready smile.