We drove out to Joshua Tree for the star party—a gathering of amateur astronomers under a clear, dark sky. It was Holly’s idea, an impromptu adventure on a Friday after work: “Hey, Lou, do you want to go look at the moon tonight?”

Holly had the best ideas and the worst ideas, and in the daylight, it was hard to tell them apart at first glance. I took a gamble. I said yes.

And I meant it—I wanted nothing more than to lay down under the Milky Way with my hand in hers and gaze into forever. For a long time, our love was the biggest thing I knew how to believe in.

• • • •

When we met, I was trying to find God and Holly was trying to split the difference, looking for something halfway between the terrifying God of her youth and what she saw as heresy. She was looking for the right kind of God, because the only alternative was the sin of losing faith entirely.

I asked her if she was afraid of God, or if what she was really afraid of was people, after growing up in a family that used the Bible like a blunt weapon.

She considered it. We were in a church basement—Baptist, but the kind of liberal Baptists who’ve formally apologized for slavery—for a queer women’s prayer group. Holly looked like she was afraid of being struck down just for walking through the doors and years later I’d tell her I loved her at first sight, even though it wasn’t technically the truth.

“Can’t it be both?” Holly asked, after a lot of thoughtful hmm sounds from the circle of folding chairs. “I want a God I don’t have to fear, and I don’t want to fear the people who love Him, either.”

More hmm sounds, along with a deeply ponderous “Amen.” Then the pastor said “God is love, God is love,” and the conversation moved on.

I never stopped thinking about it: God without fear, and love without fear, as though they were opposite sides of a balanced equation. It felt trite, forced, even at the height of my desire to believe. Honestly, the more I reached for faith, the more everything felt trite and forced.

I didn’t grow up with God, not in the traditional sense, but I grew up loved so hard that it threatened to suffocate me. I grew up with love, and I grew up with fear, and maybe what I was really looking for was a way to separate the two.

That’s not something you can find in a church, but I didn’t know how to stop looking.

• • • •

“New friends!” someone bellowed as we turned into the roadside pullout.

Our headlights were off so as not to blind our fellow stargazers. We were over a hundred miles out of LA, in a sort of mecca for those who want to see the night sky without light pollution. It was so dark, the kind of velvet-black that should’ve had a texture against your skin, except for a circle of red-tinted flashlights set up about fifty yards from the parking area. It was the kind of darkness that felt amniotic. It reminded me of being terribly small—and terribly afraid—on a sort of instinctive level.

Someone pulled my door open before I could do it myself. A man, not very tall but quite round, with the sort of face that would have every other stranger approaching him like You look just like my long-lost cousin’s boyfriend’s brother. The kind of face that was, in and of itself, an invitation to conversation. As someone who also suffered from Resting Approachable Face, I sort of respected that he’d charged into this social situation without giving us a chance to be awkward at him.

“Welcome, friends,” he said, sticking out his hand. “I’m Orion.”

“Luna.” In those days, I found it easier to use my given name with strangers. It was a calculus of safety, both from physical harm and from the prying questions that came with using a man’s name. I wanted to trust Orion on sight, but I was wary of my own split-second assessment of him, and I didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of a national park with his assumptions about my gender. And people tend to see what they want to see, which meant that he’d see me as a woman no matter what I did.

I was right: he didn’t think twice before he moved on, scrambling around to Holly’s side of the truck and offering to help her wrangle her telescope out of the backseat. I turned the engine off and handed Holly the car keys, and she stowed them in the front pocket of her backpack.

“Oh—It’s not that heavy, really. I can do it,” Holly said, but she gave him the telescope, and that thing was her baby, prized above any of her other possessions. “Thanks. I’m Holly.”

I lifted the folded tripod over my shoulder and followed them into the circle of red light. The ground was bare and dry, and the wind was high, and the desert was cold at night even in August. I fumbled to zip up my coat one-handed, but the zipper got snagged on the strap for my binoculars.

“I brought new friends,” Orion called, and the group sent up a cheer, clearing a patch of dirt for us to lay down our blanket.

“Wow,” Holly said, knocking her elbow against mine. There were seven of them including Orion, and they had come prepared—really prepared. Everything I knew about stargazing equipment came from online gift guides, trying to spoil Holly every birthday and Christmas, but even I could tell that the telescopes and cameras were too good for amateurs. Holly’s telescope, which had relieved me of half of a paycheck, looked downright dinky in comparison.

I felt self-conscious about my shitty little binoculars and lack of technical knowledge, but Holly saw the circle of experienced astronomers as an opportunity. She’s always been braver than me about striking up conversations with strangers—or new friends, as Orion said. She turned her red-tinted headlamp to the woman set up to our right, who was sharing a telescope with a young boy.

“Nice to meet you,” Holly said. “Is tonight a good night to see Saturn, do you think?”

Holly made her way around the circle, making introductions for the both of us, asking little questions about what everyone was looking at. The network of relationships became plain: Orion and Aurora were married. The twelve-year-old, Virgo, was their son. I was almost jealous of the way his voice cracked when he introduced himself—his first victory in attrition warfare with puberty. Phoebe and Stella, who were Aurora’s sisters, were taking composite pictures of the bright, full moon as it crossed the sky. Castor and Pollux were, of course, brothers; they were drawing Jupiter on a large piece of butcher paper, the edges weighed down with fist-sized stones, their hands moving in tandem to create a single illustration. Their names, all of them related to astronomy, seemed self-chosen. I respected that.

I didn’t think it was strange that the star party was publicly advertised, but everyone here already knew each other. I’d been to about a billion churches where the doors were open to strangers even though the congregation had coalesced into a family, and this was a type of holy place. And I could practically see Holly thinking that they were all friends, and they wanted us to be their friends, and maybe someday we could have this. She could see a future: Friday nights driving out to Joshua Tree to watch the stars with people who had the skill to match her passion.

As Holly offered to share the trail mix and canned beer we’d brought, I looked at the sky. My binoculars hung against my chest, ignored—I could see more stars with my naked eyes than I had in a long, long time. Each star was in the past, the light an artifact of a nuclear reaction that had long fizzled out, but it still felt like looking into the future. Looking at the night sky had always felt like looking forwards, ever since I was a kid, but at this point it was still abstract. It was just a sort of itch at the back of my brain and in the pit of my stomach. Sense without meaning.

I turned my headlamp back on and watched Holly take the sketchpad and charcoal pencils out of her backpack. She sat on our blanket and aimed her telescope towards the full moon, just as I knew she would. She began to draw, just as she always did. She’d drawn the moon countless times in all of its phases, mostly from the roof of my apartment building. It was a proclivity I enjoyed teasing her about, though we’d been dating for four years and I’d never asked if there was a deeper reason.

I’d always been afraid to. The quiet way she loved the moon felt sacred, on par with the annotations she used to make in the margins of her Bible. I knew where that road could lead, if she let it. I’d grown up at the end of it.

I heard Castor make a joke and Aurora laugh. When I turned my head, the red light passed over Orion kissing Phoebe, a momentary brush of his mouth over hers. Familiarity prickled under my skin as I looked away, along with embarrassment. I felt like I wasn’t meant to see them. Orion was kissing his wife’s sister right out in the open, and I felt like I had done something wrong by looking.

I didn’t often think of my childhood—this was deliberate—but I did, in that moment. It was hard not to: the dark sky, the names, Orion’s generous affection.

So it was then that I finally asked Holly why, with so many photographs of the moon on the internet, she needed to see it with her own eyes to draw it. Why she even needed draw it at all.

“I like to draw pretty things,” she said.

“There are so many other pretty things,” I insisted, thinking of Aurora explaining how to locate Saturn as I watched Holly move the pencil in rapid strokes, forming the shape of a crater.

“I draw the moon whenever I want to draw you,” she said.

I was surprised. I could have made a list of all the world’s beauties, down to the way jacaranda blossoms piled into the gutters, and still not included my name on that list.

“I know I can get the moon right, but I can never pin you down on paper. Not all of you, anyway—the moon is an easier target.”

“Can I kiss you?” I asked.

“Not here,” Holly said, very quietly. She could be shy about touch in public—and then doubly shy about her own shyness. She held up the half-finished drawing. It looked the same as all the rest she’d shown me. We could have each wallpapered our apartments with them. “And you know what else? The moon stays still long enough to be drawn.”

I mumbled something about proving that I could stay still, but my feet were tapping against the blanket without conscious thought. I heard Aurora laugh again, her voice tangled up with Orion’s, and when I looked over my shoulder he was kissing Stella this time, just a quick touch that made me feel overheated inside with recognition. Strange to see those little moments of affection that hold so much weight. Stranger, still, that nothing was hidden from us.

I wanted to kiss Holly. I wanted to kiss her, and I sort of regretted using my birth name. I wanted to know what it would mean to be myself here, with these new people.

I laid on my back and used my binoculars to look at things I had no interest in identifying. Perhaps they were planets or stars or even distant galaxies, but it didn’t matter to me. Holly cared about the physics of the universe enough for the both of us. I couldn’t keep up with her—I’d never been an artist and I wasn’t much for science, aside from facts I’d collected growing up—but I was nonetheless drawn to the beauty of the night sky, and all the potential in it. My feet were still moving, but I felt like I could lay there long enough to watch the constellations shift as the night passed us by. I could have laid there for longer than a season, letting the stars show me in their own language what had happened, and what might happen, and—if I really concentrated—what would happen.

As it was, I stayed there long enough for my eyes to become unfocused, until all I saw were shapes made of light. Then Holly touched my hand and asked me to look at her sketchpad, where she’d moved on to drawing Saturn and one of its larger moons. I told her it was beautiful. Farther off—Aurora had pulled him away, towards a large rock formation that was hard to make out in the low light—I could hear Virgo crying with a child’s unabashed intensity.

I closed my eyes, tipped my head back, then opened them again. The Milky Way was a bright, white sprawl. I said to Holly, “I have a bad feeling about this,” even though I didn’t know entirely where the words came from. It was like the feeling of seeing Orion kiss his wife’s sister: the feeling of knowing something that wasn’t for me to know, building in my belly.

“He’s a kid,” she said. Virgo’s fit was the loudest thing—of course she’d assume it was him upsetting me. “Kids are dramatic. He’s probably tired.”

“Holly—”

“Kids cry all the time. Where else will I get a view like this?”

I looked at her drawing again. Her hand was still moving, another of Saturn’s moons taking shape on the paper, and it was true that nights as cloudless as this were rare. That didn’t take away the not-quite-right feeling behind my navel.

“Sweetheart, sweetheart, just try,” Aurora was saying, holding out a pair of binoculars for Virgo to take. “Just try one more time, okay?” He knocked the binoculars to the ground. I looked away, taking the light with me. I turned my headlamp off.

“Orion?” Holly asked. “Do you know what time Venus sets tonight?”

Orion crossed the circle towards us. He checked his watch. “About now, but you might still be able to catch her if you’re quick. Can I?”

She stepped out of the way, and he swung her telescope down towards the horizon, bending to follow the eyepiece. Turning my headlamp off was the equivalent of putting on sunglasses during the day: I could look wherever I wanted, without any indication of my focus. I watched Castor and Pollux move towards Virgo, and then one of them picked up the binoculars from the dirt and offered them to him again. The kid wailed, words I couldn’t make out, but later I thought it sounded like “I’m scared.” Castor grabbed his arm, and I could see that it was a firm grip, and as Orion snapped up to standing I caught the outline of a gun on his hip.

“Hey!” Orion hollered. The wind threw his voice back at us. “Cut that out. Now.”

Castor let go. Virgo didn’t stop crying.

Orion apologized to Holly, then went back to fiddling with her telescope. His sweatshirt had rucked up from the motion and that was definitely a pistol, small and satiny black, and it didn’t look real. It was the kind of thing you’d see in a movie, or a video game.

“What’s that about?” I asked, because I really wanted to trust him, and because I’ve got the kind of smile that makes people see the best in me, though I rarely ever use it. My mom used to say the expression made me look just like my father.

“What’s what about?” Orion peeked up at me, then at Aurora and Virgo, then back down at the telescope.

“The firearm. What’s that about?”

“Bears, coyotes.” His voice was the kind of mumble you can only manage with one eye squished shut and the other focusing hard. It reminded me of Holly doing her makeup. “You never know what you’ll run into out here.” He moved back from the telescope. “There, now take a look. Probably not enough time for a sketch, but I bet you can get a picture.” And then he bounded off towards the rock formation, his wife and his son and his mistresses and his brothers-in-law huddled in its shadow. That feeling, that wrong-feeling knowing, snaked up towards my sternum. I didn’t want it to make its way to my throat.

Holly lined up the lens of a little disposable film camera with the eyepiece of the telescope. Her telescope didn’t have a camera built in, and using her phone would’ve killed her night vision, along with everyone else’s.

“Let’s get out of here, after you get this shot,” I said.

The camera clicked. Holly didn’t answer. She picked her sketchpad back up, balanced it on her lap. The astronomers—all of them in a single cluster now—were speaking, quietly enough that I couldn’t make out the words. The men had gathered around their women and the boy like wild animals preparing to face a predator. I could still hear Virgo crying, even above the overlapping voices.

“Come on, Holly, I don’t like this.” I was going to choke on the sheer wrongness of it. I had never had a feeling like that before, with that degree of certainty.

“Give me a minute,” she said, fitting her eye to the telescope. “I really think I might have time to draw—”

Aurora started to march towards us, her arm around Virgo’s shoulders. Stella grabbed her by the hood of her sweatshirt and tugged her back into the circle so hard that she fell to the ground. She disappeared behind a wall of bodies.

I began to unmount Holly’s telescope from the tripod—never mind that Holly’s face was still turned towards the eyepiece—as Orion walked over to us, his face alarmingly placid. “Sorry about the scene,” he said. “Everyone’s tired, and Virgo can get quite emotional—gets it from his mother, you know how it is.”

“Oh, don’t worry about us, we’ll just go.” My cold fingers fumbled with the bolts and clasps.

“You don’t have to do that,” Orion said, but he started to help me take down our equipment. “We would really love to have you stay.” He had the telescope held in his arms like a newborn. “The thing is, we’ve gathered here for a religious observance, and we weren’t sure if you were comfortable with that.”

Holly had gotten with the program by then, thank God, and was shoving her sketchbook and pencils into her backpack.

“But hey,” Orion said, “we’re all friends here.”

There was a scream. It echoed terribly in the smooth darkness. I reached for the telescope, but Orion wouldn’t let go of it. He was looking at Aurora, sprawled out on the ground and begging, over and over, “Please, spare him. He’s a baby. Please spare my baby.”

She’d knocked over one of the flashlights, and the angle covered everything in patches of shadow. I clicked my headlamp on. I don’t know why I did it. I already knew.

Castor—or maybe it was Pollux—had Virgo pinned to the ground with a knee on his chest. Pollux—or perhaps it was Castor—had one of those rocks in his fist, the big and jagged ones that had held their drawing flat.

He swung the stone down into the child’s temple. Aurora’s scream almost covered the wet, thumping sound.

Holly took off running towards my car, and I followed her. The light from her headlamp swung into my eyes as she looked back—she kept looking back—and I was struggling to make out the ground at my feet. All it would take was a rock or a root to send me sprawling, and I would be lost. I knew it. I knew.

“This is a warning!” Orion shouted, in the same booming voice that had called us his friends, but I heard him as if underwater. All I knew was that I needed to get to the car, but I couldn’t push my legs or my lungs any harder, and I had to be sure not to trip.

His words made sense when the gunshot broke open the sky. I hadn’t ever heard a gunshot in real life before that. I had no idea how loud it would be, even at a distance. I had no idea that my ears would ring for minutes after. It didn’t matter—that was the push I’d needed, and I was somehow running faster, the ground disappearing from under me like it didn’t even matter. I caught up to Holly, then passed her, then came up against the driver’s side door.

The car was unlocked. The interior lights came on when I opened the door, awful and white after so much unbroken darkness, and my eyes began to water as I threw myself in, and I found I had to squint to look out at the pullout. I blinked and blinked, and I couldn’t see Holly, and I couldn’t start the car. The keys were in her backpack.

“Lou,” she said. Her voice came from below me, barely a wheeze. I looked down.

Orion had her pinned in the dirt beneath the jut of the car door, his weight on her chest and the pistol held to her shoulder. He looked up at me, his face hard and unbothered in the light shining down from the car, half of him still red-tinged from those distant flashlights.

“Well, friends,” Orion panted, “I can’t exactly let you leave now.”

• • • •

I’d been going to church with Holly for two years when I realized I didn’t really want God at all. What I wanted was to be someone else’s problem, for a change. I wanted to lay myself down at some divine father’s feet and say Take it, it’s all yours, and it’s your responsibility. I wanted someone to tell me that everything would be okay, and I wanted someone to blame for the sum of who I was; I wanted them to be the same someone.

I flung myself on altar after altar. God never showed. I figured He was dead, like my dad. Maybe, like my dad, He’d been dead since before I was born, and I had once again arrived too late for that kind of big belief.

I was a capital-A Atheist for a while, then a garden-variety nonbeliever. And then Holly, who had always been taken care of in the way that smothered, who had always wanted to learn what it looked like to love someone with a loose grip, said, “Let me love you.” She said, “Let your burdens be mine,” and I was hers in an instant.

“And at this point, it’s the practical thing to do, isn’t it?” asked Holly, who was always looking for ways to make her desires unimpeachable.

“Sure, let’s get together for practical reasons. Want to shake on it?”

She held out her hand. I took it, and pulled her in, and I was halfway to laughing when I kissed her for the first time. It was a clumsy, half-cocked effort: she was laughing too, and I wanted to hear the clear, bright sound almost more than I wanted to swallow it.

I said, “You’re ridiculous, do you know that?”

“I just figure you’ve been in my heart for so long,” said Holly. “You’ve probably got squatter’s rights by now.”

She was right—our lives had blurred together with the protracted inevitability of stars colliding in orbit, ever since that afternoon in the church basement, and it was past time to call it what it was.

This was what I found to believe in: I believed in Holly. I believed in us together. I believed in myself when I was with her.

It didn’t feel forced, like worship songs and altar calls had always felt forced. After trying so hard to love God, loving her was easy.

We’d been together for almost a year when Holly told me a secret: God had never clicked for her, either. He was a reflex, she said. He was something she reached for on instinct, like a child sucking their thumb. He was a habit she was ready to grow out of.

She could have fooled me. Her faith—or her performance of it—looked so genuine from the outside, in a way I used to envy. She looked peaceful, when she prayed. I always thought I just looked desperate.

“It’s not that I don’t believe in God,” she said, after a while. “God is something we construct. I believe in God the way I believe in, I don’t know, daylight savings time. The real problem is that I don’t know how to love Him without being afraid of Him, and I can’t do that anymore.”

Which is to say that, as Orion walked us back to the circle of red light, I was surprised that Holly began to mumble the Lord’s Prayer. I picked up the thread nonetheless, said “Forever and ever, Amen” along with her. She’d cut her palm on the rocky ground when Orion tackled her; when she squeezed my hand in hers, I felt blood smear between us.

“Lou, we’re gonna die,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“You’re not going to die,” said Orion, “if you do exactly what I say. If you’re just as guilty as we are, then you won’t go running to the cops.”

“We wouldn’t,” Holly promised. “We won’t.”

“Just tell me why you’re doing this,” I said, but I knew it was too late for his answer to change anything. It was all in Holly’s shift from hypothetical to definitive, wouldn’t to won’t. She could see a way out of this situation, and she was going to take it—whatever it turned out to be. She would do it for me, even though I hadn’t asked her to. She’d never mastered any other kind of love.

Orion didn’t answer. More of the flashlights had gotten tipped over. The roadside pullout was a confusion of astronomy gear and discarded coats, the silhouettes strange and shadows too large. Aurora’s sobbing felt loud and far away, and it took me a long moment to realize that the scraping sound was her digging into the ground with a small trowel.

“You said it was—You said it was a religious observance?” I asked. “What, you’re doing it because God told you to?”

At this, he huffed out a breath that was almost a laugh. “We don’t answer to any god you know. We answer only to the night sky, and the future.”

That wrong and bad feeling, still present, began to crawl up onto my tongue. I felt like I’d be sick.

Orion nudged one of the fallen flashlights with his foot so that the beam pointed towards Castor, Pollux, and what was left of Virgo. He’d been beaten so badly that his shapes were all wrong. He’d lost one of his sneakers, and his white tube sock was soaked through with blood.

“One of you has to hit him,” Orion said. He had the gun pressed against the back of Holly’s neck. “It’s the only way you’re leaving here alive.”

Castor hauled Virgo into something approximating uprightness. His head—uneven, cratered—hung limply from his neck. I remember that I was focused on the boy’s hands, because they were still moving. He had dirt under his nails. He kept splaying his fingers out and then closing his fists, over and over again. I wondered what he was reaching for.

I thought of Holly reaching for God, like a child with her skull caved in.

Holly held her hand out. Orion picked up her telescope and handed it to her. “I do this, and you let us go?” she asked.

“I swear,” said Orion.

Holly raised the telescope like a bat, the weight balanced over her shoulder. She told me not to look.

I watched her swing her telescope in a clean arc into Virgo’s head. I knew at once that I would never be able to stop seeing it, and she would never be able to stop living it. I knew at once that it should’ve been me.

• • • •

The rest felt like stop motion, sporadic bursts of half-remembered light.

Virgo’s hands stopped moving. There was nothing left of him, and nothing left for him to reach for.

Holly had a splatter of blood on her cheek shaped almost like California. Her tears made tracks through it, the Coast Range melting into the Mojave, and then obliterated it completely.

Orion walked us to the car, even as his voice went bright and frantic: “You can stay with us, if you want. You can come back. It’s not always like this. This isn’t—Don’t assume that this is all of who we are. You’ll understand with time. We could be friends.”

I answered with a single strained, “No,” but the sound didn’t quite come out even though my mouth made the shape of the word.

At the car, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of hundred-dollar bills. They were in my shaking hands between one blink and the next, and I didn’t even want them, because it wasn’t like money changed any of this. But he said, “For your telescope,” and his eyes looked old and sad, and I said, “Oh,” and handed the money to Holly.

I drove us back to the I-10 and away, away. When I blinked and realized I couldn’t remember the last forty miles, I pulled into a rest stop outside of Banning. We were near where I’d grown up. I thought, hollowly, that my mother, who I hadn’t spoken to in years, might be asleep a few miles away. And then I was leaning against the hood of my Subaru with no memory of getting out of the car, a puddle of vomit at my feet and the engine still running. And then Holly was opening the tailgate, dousing her face and hands with bottled water, shivering, scrubbing at the crust of blood in the lines of her palms and under one nostril. She took off her coat and her shirt, crossed the parking lot in just her bra to shove them into the dumpster, then came back and wrapped herself in a faded blue baja blanket that had been sitting in the trunk for a year, maybe longer.

She was crying again, or she hadn’t ever stopped, I didn’t know. I watched her hands grip the edges of the blanket. I thought of Virgo’s hands, opening and closing. I thought, Is this what it’s supposed to feel like? I only felt numb.

Holly pulled me under the blanket with her. We stayed there for a long time, and the sun came up over the desert.

• • • •

The first god Holly learned to worship was her mother.

They were everything to each other. They loved each other in their own private language, inside jokes and secret gestures. They had the same face. They had the same laugh. There were no walls up between them. No privacy, and no need for it.

When Holly was frightened as a child—and she was frightened quite a lot—she reached for her mom first, and God second.

Her youth ministry picketed pride parades and drag shows, and her mother told her she was an upstanding kid doing the Lord’s good work. She kissed a girl after softball practice, and her mother told her she would go to Hell if she didn’t clean up her sinful heart, and how could she destroy her family like this? Because Holly’s mother was going to Heaven, and if Holly got herself sent to that other place, they’d be separated in eternity. So it was selfish, wasn’t it, for Holly to lust after girls the way she did?

When we met, Holly was looking for God because she didn’t want to lose the woman who’d once been her entire world.

“My mom’s my best friend,” Holly said, after we’d known each other for half a year, and I knew she was lying but I didn’t think she knew it. I could see it on her, because we’d grown up in similar houses, though they were governed by different theology: the only children of widowed mothers who, for all their good intentions, only knew how to love their daughters as extensions of themselves.

“If your best friend thinks you’re going to Hell, maybe you need more friends,” I told her, as diplomatically as I could.

Holly didn’t talk to me for nearly a month, after that. I knew I’d prodded too hard at a gaping wound. When she was ready, she would outgrow her need for her mother. It was possible that, in doing so, she would outgrow the need for God.

I was so proud of her when she walked away from religion—and I wasn’t surprised at all that she called her mom as soon as we’d made it back to my apartment. It was a bright Saturday morning. I felt like all my edges had been worn down and like I needed at least three showers, but Holly took her phone and ducked into the bathroom. It didn’t matter that it was six a.m. in Texas; her mother would always pick up when her baby girl called, and I could hear Holly through the door, still crying, as she’d been steadily crying since Banning.

“Mommy? Are you there?” When she spoke to her mother, she sounded like she’d never stopped being that terrified child. Like she’d never stopped being helpless and easy to love. “I’m sorry to wake you, I just—I just needed to hear your voice. It was—I had a bad dream.” I heard a new rush of sobs, muffled under the running tap. “Can you pray for me? Just say you’ll pray for me. I’ll let you go back to sleep, just say a prayer first. I love you. I love you so, so much.”

I lay on the living room floor and wished I could just die. I still felt numb all the way through. I wanted to hurt. I wanted someone to hurt me.

I slapped myself across the face. I dug my nails into the curve of my cheek. I missed the father I had never known. I wished I had something to reach for after a fright, the way Holly backslid into faith. I wanted to believe, but I found no satisfaction in belief as both the means and the ends. I wanted to believe, and I wanted to be proven right.

• • • •

The first god I learned to worship was my father.

This isn’t something I talk about, not even with Holly, and it’s not for lack of trying. It’s just that God is so big for some people, and this isn’t my story—this has always been prologue. Here it goes.

My father was the leader of a fringe religious group. It would not have been a stretch to call it a cult. There’s even a Hulu documentary about him, if you care to look him up, but it’s all conjecture—none of the allegations ever stuck. It was the kind of congregation that gets really wrapped up in one person’s teachings and can’t possibly last forever, and they made this perfectly mortal man their god.

When I was an embryo, he had a heart attack. His followers scattered. I assumed they came to their senses, or moved on.

My mother never let go.

My father was her god, and he would live on in her. He would live on in us, because what was I, but a part of her? She’d held me tucked under her heart for nine frenzied months, a steady presence while her life fell apart around her. I always thought my mother loved me best when I was in her skin.

She kept pictures of my father in every room of the house. She dragged me to places where the sky was dark and holy for eclipses, meteor showers, every supermoon. There were things she wouldn’t tell me, and things she hid in metaphor, but the picture became clear enough: he was the kind of god who destroys that which doesn’t serve him; maybe even a more vengeful god than the one Holly had grown up fearing. He was a god, and he was looking for his heir, and the ends would justify the means. He was a god who wasn’t above killing his own sons, like so many gods before him.

It was all bullshit—I could see that, even as a kid—but I envied the fervency of my mother’s belief. I remember watching her tilt her face up to the Perseids on a moonless night, weeping, her arms flung wide in expectation. I felt unmoved by the sky full of falling stars, jealous that this moment could mean so much to her. I wanted conviction. I wanted, just once in my life, for something to feel that true to me.

When I met Holly, I was looking for a god big enough to kill for, or to die for. I wanted ecstasy, in the oldest sense of the word. I wanted to reach out to the divine and feel the divine reaching back.

I was looking for God, but here’s what I found: I’m far more my father’s son than I ever was my mother’s daughter, and my father would have beaten me to death for failing him.

Which is to say, the first time I was baptized, I was afraid the pastor would drown me.

The second time I was baptized, I sort of wished he would.

• • • •

Holly started going to church again. Just Sunday mornings at first, then Wednesday night Bible study and Saturday afternoon prayer group. It seemed to make her feel better. I didn’t hold it against her.

She woke up screaming nearly every night—always in my bed, because she was afraid to sleep alone and her place was too small for the both of us. She buried her face in the front of my shirt and cried like Virgo had cried, like a terrified child. I held her. I didn’t hold it against her.

Some nights, she didn’t wake in a panic. She woke quietly, slipped out of bed, and called her mother from the bathroom. This, I did hold against her, because it should have been me she woke with her grief and regret, because I had been there. I had lived through it with her. I knew the truth she could never tell anyone else, and lying to her mother about what upset her only made her more upset. And Holly’s mother knew her best, and knew how best to hurt her, and was careless with that power. Holly loved her mother with the sort of love that brings fear with it.

But on those nights, I took the stairs to the roof so that I wouldn’t have to overhear the conversations Holly tried to keep quiet. On those nights, I fed myself little glimpses of whatever stars I could make out.

I spent a lot of time looking down, because I thought this was the mark the star party had left on me: a feeling of knowing something I shouldn’t know, creeping up from my belly to my chest to my throat, that hit me whenever I looked at the night sky. It was the only real thing I felt, aside from the numbness, and I suspected that if I threw myself into it, something would happen. Finding out what would require its own kind of faith—a faith I simply lacked. I had no interest in trusting something I couldn’t see.

By February I was exhausted, everything felt impossible, and Holly was praying on the phone with her mother for the fourth night in a row. I couldn’t get back to sleep. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t frustrated. I didn’t feel much of anything, but I wanted to. I wanted to hurt. I wanted to experience something that would change me.

I looked up.

I could see the Big Dipper. The moon was a waning sliver. The breeze was cold, but not as cold as that night in the desert. I clenched my hands into fists.

I knew. I couldn’t say what or how, but I knew.

When I went back inside, Holly was curled up on the couch with a mug of tea steaming on the side table. I grabbed both of her hands. “Hey,” she said.

I felt like a passenger in my own body. I said, “I forgive you. You ruined your life, and you did it for me—so that I wouldn’t have to. I thank you, and I forgive you, and I know you need a bigger forgiveness than this.”

“Lou, what?” She looked confused, but her nose wrinkled like it did when she was about to cry.

“I’m going back to bed,” I told her.

• • • •

In the morning, she asked me what a bigger forgiveness would look like. I told her I had no idea. She said she’d pray on it.

I said, “I thought you couldn’t stand being afraid of God.” Six months on, and it was the first time I’d pushed.

Her smile, old and sad, reminded me of Orion. “Now I’ve felt real fear, and I know it’s not the same. It’s not like that at all,” Holly said. “I think what I felt was love all along. It doesn’t have to be complicated.”

With love and fear so blurred together, I wanted to ask Holly if she was ever afraid of me. If she was ever afraid that I would hurt her, like her mother hurt her over and over again.

Instead of asking, I waited for the sun to set, and I went up to the roof. I looked up at the sky.

• • • •

Every Wednesday evening, Holly injected a small amount of testosterone cypionate into the meat of my thigh. The needle was so tiny that I hardly felt it, but I couldn’t bear to watch it going in, and I didn’t have it in me to push the plunger. I never asked her to do it; the routine that we fell into just made sense, because she wasn’t afraid and I was. She knew I wanted this—needed it—and wasn’t going to watch my fear hold me back from becoming myself.

We started in August, the Wednesday before the star party. By February, it was a well-practiced choreography of hands and eyes. I sat on the edge of the bathtub in my boxers and cleaned the injection site with an alcohol swab. She stood beside the sink and drew the solution from the vial into the syringe. I tore open the wrapper of a plastic bandage, patterned with blue and green stars. She pressed her palm against my knee. I focused on that sensation, that warm and broad touch, and tried to slow my speeding pulse. I watched her face: focused, worrying the tip of her tongue between her incisors. She grasped an inch of my skin between her forefinger and thumb, lifting subcutaneous fat away from muscle. I closed my eyes.

A quick pinch as the needle went in, and then it was over—until the next Wednesday.

Another week of cataloging the gradual changes. Nothing for a while, at first. Then a sudden appearance of acne between my eyebrows. Broader shoulders, and newly defined muscle in my calves. Uneven stubble under my chin, so that I was always getting razor burn in the crease of my neck. The fine hair on my legs seeming to take on both texture and color overnight. Deepening of my voice, in stops and starts, which Holly said made me sound more certain of myself.

She said I seemed to enjoy talking more. She said I seemed to enjoy the daily realities of having a body more: eating, exercising, showering, existing in three dimensions.

I couldn’t tell. At the bottom of it all, I still felt that numbness.

Except for this: on Wednesdays, after Holly did my shot and left for Bible study, I started going up to the roof. That creeping knowing feeling, from belly to throat to mouth, grew stronger with each passing week. It didn’t feel wrong anymore. I found a sort of safety in it.

I looked at the smoggy sky, light pollution rendering most of the stars invisible, and I knew.

It was a series of little premonitions, things I could have written off as luck or intuition. Once, Holly misplaced her car keys and I knew she’d put them in the fridge door by accident, and put the little jar of capers in her purse. I had a good run of knowing just the right thing to say to calm her down or win her over.

It was a series of small moments that could have been called faith, if not for the blistering certainty I felt. I knew that I would see Orion before the year was out. I knew that Holly and I would be okay again, someday. I knew that the future spread out before us, an unbroken thread of possibility. Believing was never a challenge, because I knew these things were true.

Small truths, building up to a bigger one. Which meant that in July, when I told Holly that she would feel better if she visited her mother, I knew she would believe me.

“I hate that place,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like. I hate that place.”

She may have hated the town that raised her more than anything, but she refused to call anywhere else home. And her mother was her oldest god, and maybe she needed—just for a few days—the kind of love that smothered. And I had an errand to run, and needed her out of the way.

“Don’t you think it will feel circular? Don’t you think it’ll be a sort of closure?” I offered. “Maybe this is your big forgiveness.” She made a face, but she booked her flight the next day.

• • • •

Holly spent a week with her mother, in a small town I’d only seen in dreams and photographs. I spent a week in Joshua Tree.

A week of days in an AirBnB outside of the national park, a week of nights at that roadside pullout in darkness so bottomless I was afraid to get lost in it. Holly called me every night to tell me of the outrageous things her mother had said or done, and I answered the phone sitting on the blue-patterned baja blanket near the rock formation where Virgo died, looking at the stars. Looking at forever.

“What are you doing?” she asked, on the fifth night.

I was holding up a red-tinted flashlight, using my toe to poke at the place where I remembered the grave being. The ground had swallowed it up.

“Looking at the sky,” I told her. Holly didn’t question it.

She groaned, and I imagined her eyes going large and somber. “My mother knows I’m going to Hell,” she said. I waited her out. “She keeps talking about how my choices have eternal consequences, Lou. I think she knows. I’m going to Hell for—”

She let me cut her off. I knew she wouldn’t want to finish the sentence. “Holly, I’m pretty sure your mom still means you’re going to Hell for being queer.”

“Oh. Right.” Holly was silent for a while. I squinted at a point of light that might have been Venus, and wished I’d picked up new binoculars. “Why didn’t you come with me?” she asked.

“I couldn’t miss work,” I said, but that wasn’t it. The truth was this: I had to be here. I had a feeling.

“I know we haven’t really talked about it,” I said, “but you should move in with me.”

“I already have squatter’s rights,” she said. I could picture her touching her dark, curly hair—flirting, shy about it. “You’d have to evict me.”

“Let’s make it official.”

“Ooh, you know paperwork really gets me going.”

“For practical reasons.”

“Right, for practical reasons.”

“But don’t get the wrong idea,” I told her. “I’m not asking because I love you or anything.”

That made her laugh, which made me laugh, too. I hadn’t heard her really laugh in a long time. I didn’t know how much I’d missed it.

That numbness had started to ease—not just under the night sky but in the daylight, too. I think I was happy. I laid down on my blanket, and talked to Holly about nothing until she fell asleep.

• • • •

On my seventh and final Holly-less night, there was another car parked in my usual spot at the roadside pullout. A figure with a red headlamp sat by the rock formation.

“Hey, friend!” Orion called when I got out of the car. I turned on my own headlamp.

“Are those mine?” I asked, pointing to the binoculars around his neck as I sat down beside him.

“Do you want them back?”

“No, I’m good.”

He held them out for me anyway. I didn’t take them.

“You got a cold?” He gestured at his throat.

“What? I—No.” I laughed. I felt so at home with my new voice that I only noticed the way it had changed if I looked at an old video, and even then it was with a sort of detachment: Did I ever really sound like that? You must be joking. There must be a mistake. “I’m transgender.”

I expected follow-up questions, but Orion moved on. “How’s your girlfriend?”

“Holly.”

“Right. How’s Holly?”

“She’s fine,” I said, because I could tell that she would be. And then I asked the thing I had come here to ask: “Tell me about your god.”

Orion had a smile like a stock image, or maybe just one particular photo: my father, grayscale and grainy from magnification, hanging above my mother’s bed. She used to kiss her fingertips and then touch the glass of the frame, and the picture was always distorted with a thousand little smudges.

Orion smiled his familiar smile, and he told me the story of a gifted man—a man so gifted that he became sacred. A man who could look at celestial bodies and see the path forward. Such a gift brought acolytes from all over the world, looking for clarity and divine wisdom, and the man who became their god was happy to oblige. He could reassure the broken; he could look at people who were in pain and tell them, with complete certainty, that their suffering was not permanent. He provided hope, something so rare and precious and holy.

The problem was that he was still a man, and he would die, and he needed his gift to live on. The problem was that he needed an heir: someone who carried his blood, and his gift.

He knew the future, but only in broad strokes—he didn’t trade in specificity. He knew his heir would be his son, or maybe his grandson? He knew a lot of blood would be spilled along the way, boys rooted out as they failed to manifest his power of prophecy. His followers trusted him with their bodies, their children, their fate. They reached for him with their fears and their doubts, because he was their god.

When he died, the unworthy fell away like chaff from grain, leaving only the truest of believers. A small circle of those who carried his word, knowing his heir was on the way. It was just a matter of time. Time, and watching the stars.

“He was my father,” Orion said. “Virgo was my son.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“I had to. He wasn’t my father’s true heir, and I’m just the conduit.”

This was a man who’d grown up with a living god, all of that divine love and fear attached to something he could touch. His god fed him mushy peas as a baby. His god taught him how to ride a bike. His god kept him safe, waiting for him to hit puberty and either prove his worth or be put to death. He never had a chance.

I took my headlamp off and rested it on the ground between us. The shadows made Orion’s face sharp. He looked so much like those photos, in every room of my childhood home.

“Was one of your father’s wives called Pandora?” I asked.

“You look just like her,” he said. I wondered when exactly he’d pieced it together. I didn’t need to know.

But I looked into the spray of stars above us, willing myself to fall once more into the future. Trying to prove to myself that I wasn’t making this up, this gift I had.

I looked up, and it was the truest thing I’d ever felt.

“Stella’s pregnant,” I said, as I hauled myself up off the ground and turned towards my car. “Another son, and he’s going to live a long life.”

“He’s the heir?” Orion called after me, and I couldn’t help my long, startled laugh. Funny, that he couldn’t imagine any other way.

“I am,” I shouted back at him.

• • • •

“Hey, Lou, do you want to go look at the moon tonight?” Holly asked as she let herself into my apartment—our apartment—with her duffel bag in tow. “Nothing crazy, just from the roof.”

A summer Friday night, a little adventure. I took a gamble. I said yes.

We stood in silence for a long while, looking at the sky. I couldn’t see nearly as many stars here as at Joshua Tree, and Holly didn’t reach for her sketchpad, but it was enough: our fingers twined together and only the brightest constellations above us.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked her.

“Praying,” she said, and her voice was dreamy and peaceful, and for the first time I didn’t really envy her. I didn’t need faith, and I didn’t need belief, because I knew for certain.

All this time I had wanted proof, and I was the proof. I felt that my very existence was justified. I felt that I meant something bigger than my beating heart.

Holly said, “I need to remind myself that what they did in the desert wasn’t holy. Just because they said it was doesn’t make it true, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said, but I knew I’d have to tell her everything, all of it, and soon.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a ring: a silver band with a small pearlescent stone, a rainbow of colors in the low light. It wasn’t in a box or anything, and it was covered in lint from the fleecy lining of her hoodie. “Hey, Lou?”

“Yeah?”

She held the ring out towards me. “You should marry me.”

“You’re absurd, do you know that?” I was thinking about Orion and his family—telling him that I’m the son our father was promised, wondering if he felt disappointed or if he felt free—as I gave Holly my hand.

“For practical reasons,” she said, sliding the ring onto my finger.

“Right, for practical reasons.” I took her hand. “I have squatter’s rights on your heart. The sexy paperwork just makes it official.”

She laughed that real and sparkling laugh. The future snaked its way up my throat and dissolved on my tongue, irrefutable. I said, “I’ve loved you from the moment I saw you.”

The sky above us was the biggest thing I knew.