Within Salem’s family, too, there was the good and the not-so-good. When, in late August 2017, they told their parents about being a trans woman and about naming themself Hannah, they weren’t kicked out of the house. Their mother helped Salem find a therapist — Tate. And their father helped them paint their bedroom in light blue, white and pink stripes, the colors of the trans flag, though he also had counseled Salem not to consider themself transgender until they’d had sex, as if Salem’s first romp with a girl would fix everything.

Their father got them a job keeping inventory within the chain of auto-repair shops where he worked, advising Salem to use their deadname and hide who they’d become. (About this, and the suggestion that Salem not settle on being trans until they’d lost their virginity, Salem’s father told me alternately that he hadn’t said these things, that he might have implied something about the effect of having sex for the first time and that too much time had passed; I should “write whatever Salem remembers,” he said.) Salem lasted through two days of training, anxiety spiking over what might happen if they were found out and depression deepening because they were making themself invisible, concealing Hannah and, beneath that, doubly burying their nonbinary self. “The salary was a good deal,” Salem said, but on the day they were supposed to turn in their paperwork and join the staff, “I just lay in bed.” They returned to being housebound. “I just couldn’t get out of bed.”

Salem had an inkling that there were other places, beyond their hometown, beyond North Carolina, where they might not feel quite so alien and alone. Tate had mentioned Philadelphia, where she’d trained, or Brooklyn. In therapy one day last spring, Salem talked about the main character in “Into the Wild”: a young man, cut off in the Alaskan wilderness, who starves to death because he’s unaware that there’s a spot, a half mile from where he’s wasting away, where he could cross the swollen river that entraps him. On the other side, he could soon get food. “People say the dude was an idiot,” Salem said to Tate, “because he could have lived if he realized there was a crossing nearby. But I can understand him. To me, he’s relatable.” It was as if Salem both knew and didn’t know that other places existed.

After the session, Salem drove northward on the state highway, toward the exit for their town. They passed the turnoff and kept going in the direction of the Virginia line. They’d never done anything like this before. They drove, they told me the next day, with their town behind them, for an hour before they turned around.

When I spent more time with them last summer, Salem had just noted their hormone treatment in a chat among players during an online game. Someone let loose with slurs, Salem fired back and another player piped up that she was a trans woman. This was a minor godsend amid the plundering and killing onscreen. Right away, the trans woman, who said she was 19, became Salem’s close friend, at a distance of hundreds of miles. They talked privately online every day and night; Salem listened to her troubles with her father, and she gave Salem the courage to try buying their first bra.

Salem’s breasts had grown. The plan was to buy a sports bra both for exercising and “to compress, because sometimes” — though the hormones seemed a success on most days — “I’m not a fan of my breasts.” Salem drove to Chapel Hill, the most liberal community in the area, and sat paralyzed in a shopping-center parking lot with the trans woman coaching them by phone. At last, they ventured into Target. They scouted the store, angling into the women’s section. They fled without touching an item, searching for a place where they could delay, bypassing electronics because a salesperson was sure to approach, and the last thing Salem wanted, in this state of mortification over bra shopping and over their mix of jeans, Vans, T-shirt, nail polish, mascara and small but noticeable breasts, was to interact with anyone. An aisle of groceries gave refuge. They stared at varieties of pasta. They got their new friend on the phone again and headed back to women’s clothing, figuring that this way it would seem they were shopping for someone else; they plucked two sports bras from a rack and made it through self-checkout.

To Tate, the friendship was reassuring progress, especially after Salem and the trans woman communicated by live video chat, proving that the friend was who she claimed to be. There was progress, too, in all the colors Salem had begun using on successive fingernails — greenish-yellow, pink, white, orange, purple, blue.