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like, beard shadow on your face. A lot of people will tell you to slather on tons and tons of foundation, or the trick where you put lipstick all over your head and then cover it in foundation, but they are stupid. The truth is that nobody is going to look at your chin very hard, so all you need is normal foundation you can get at Sephora. The cheapest stuff there. Powder foundation, liquid foundation, who cares. Get it all over your face, your nose, down your throat to past where your fur ends. Sometimes you can get lucky at the drug store, but mostly you just want the cheapest stuff at the fancy store. If everything else is working right, heavy layers of makeup are more of a This Person Is Trans sign than the implication that there’s a mustache hibernating under that foundation.
    Secret trick number three is to get as much eye makeup on your eyes as you can. People will disagree about this but fuck them. It took years of research but the current theory on the reason this works, and complimentarily why lipstick makes you look all unhinged, is that you are drawing the beholder’s eye toward your eyes, away from your beard shadow area. Lipstick draws the eye toward the bottom of your face, where the hibernating stubble lives. Fuck that.
    So put lots of black shit around your eyes, like Ally Sheedy in the Breakfast Club. You will look kind of goth. Can you pull off kind of goth? Do you want to? If not, here is secret thing number four: sparkles. Apparently sparkles on a trans woman are kind of a cliché, but this is the thing, the truth that underlies all of this makeup advice: nobody is expecting to see a trans person. Girls are allowed to wear sparkles on their eyes. If you wear lots of sparkles and, like, blood red lipstick, without foundation, and a low-cut shirt that shows off a flat expanse of chest, then yes: people will heckle you and try to intimidate you. But nobody expects trans women to be wearing sparkles, to have a fucked up growing out dye job and tons of dykey punk shit covering every inch of their skin. So.
    Maria is tall and thin, though. She’s already getting the benefit of the doubt. None of this stuff might work for you.
    This ritual takes five minutes from the time the kettle starts whining.
    A couple weeks ago Maria bought a four-foot tall rip-off print of Piss Christ, the picture of a crucifix in urine that everybody flipped out about in the early nineties, for fifteen bucks from a weirdo on St. Mark’s. She brought it out to Piranha on the train because she thought Piranha would be into it. And she was. She literally teared up when Maria showed up at her door with a huge and awkward framed piece of art. She didn’t cry though, she was fine in a second, and then she insisted on giving Maria a bag of pills. Maria was like, okay, that’s cool, thanks, while Piranha explained which pills were which. These ones are Percocets, these are morphine, these are Adderall, these are Vicodin, careful with these. Maria’s not really even that into drugs any more. Nowadays taking drugs just seems exhausting, four hours of yay and then like three days of ugh. Plus, puking. The worst is the part where you are choking up your guts and you can’t breathe, and it seems like more and more, as she gets older, that’s all that happens.
    Pills are okay. Whatever. Heroin’s too down; coke’s too up and then too down. Psychedelics just take too long, and then you feel weird for a week. Smoking weed makes you totally stupid, and Maria’s already pretty dumb. No, to be more specific, smoking weed makes her useless and unable to do anything, and she’s already pretty bad at making herself do anything besides beat herself up for not doing anything.
    So once she’s put on her face, she takes two Adderall from the crumpled and powdery little sandwich bag with the idea that they’ll kick in by the end of her half-hour bike ride to work, and then she’ll be super productive all day. Or at least, for the first six