…when Melissa asked: “You ever play D&D growing up?” It was late August in Austin and the heat baked off the pavement with a vengeance, but Melissa was always willing to wait around to smoke someone else’s weed.

Beth paused, the vape pen halfway to her lips, and gave Melissa a strange look. “No, why, did you?” She finished the motion, and after blowing out a sweet-smelling cloud of THC vapor, passed it over. She looked cold-blooded and elegant as ever, high cheekbones under dark skin, but she couldn’t fool Melissa. Melissa had seen her crying on the phone with her folks and eating Chinese food after midnight and squirming on her dick.

Melissa puffed on the pen. “Elena is looking to put together a group. It’s for April’s birthday.” She passed off the pen and began to tie up her curly red hair for the ride on her scooter.

“April.” Beth attended the support group the least often and clearly had to scour her memory. “The one with the beat face all the time?” April attended both the trans woman support group in the basement of the Presbyterian Church and the monthly Trans and GenderQueer Social here at the Butterfly Bar religiously, ever since she’d moved to Austin a year ago, and she always looked like she’d just walked away from the counter at Sephora. She worried a lot about passing.

Beth didn’t, because Beth had transitioned early, before the big T could leave too much of a mark on her. And Melissa, although she had transitioned slightly later, never worried as a matter of policy.

“Yeah. I guess she used to play in high school and wanted to get a game together for her birthday. Elena asked me and I’m askin’ you.”

Beth shrugged, one shoulder, elegant in her tanktop. “Yeah okay. Could be fun. Who else is going to be there?”

“The Egg,” Melissa said. “I heard them talking about it, that’s how I even got involved.” Egg was slang for a trans woman who hadn’t figured it out yet; as in, her shell hasn’t cracked yet. But it would. Nobody showed up to trans support groups to talk, however haltingly, about trying on her mom’s support garments who wasn’t going to take the ride.

The latest Egg to join the support group was still in male drag, even had a beard, but Melissa liked to believe she had a sixth sense about these things. She could see the trans girl peeking out, round-cheeked and awkward and nerd-cute. Waiting to see if it was safe.

“Doesn’t she have a name?” Beth put the pen away and unlocked her car with a chirp.

“She didn’t pick one yet. What am I gonna do, call her her deadname?” There was no greater sin among the trans community, and Melissa was more scrupulous than most. She liked to brag that she’d forgotten all the deadnames she ever heard for her friends, and absolutely no one knew hers. Not even Beth. She’d left it in Jersey, buried in a crossroads with a stake through the vowels.

“It’s not dead yet if she’s still using it.”

Melissa shook her head and smirked. “Nah. It’s dead. She just doesn’t know it yet.”

The game was set in a homebrew quasi-Regency setting. By the end of the first session in April’s studio, Melissa had dubbed the group “Pride and Progesterone,” and the name stuck. The Egg showed up with the character sheet for a half-elf bard named Joanne Starr.

That name stuck too.