By eight p.m., it was already dark in the city, and unlike so many other places in the world, this one hadn't let up for a second. The chaos of neon signs, motorcycles, and half-wrecked trucks spun an endless loop where you couldn't tell when the day began or the night ended.

After Brenda dropped me off outside the hotel, a grimy old building with hardly any rooms that I'd found on some sketchy online deal a month ago , it didn't take long for me to collapse into bed. The jet lag mixed with the sweat and the still-raw shock of seeing Pablo act that way, all of it pulling me into such a deep sleep that when I finally surfaced hours later, I felt even more lost than before. What was I even supposed to do now? The pale blue folder with the house sale papers was still sitting on a wicker stool next to the bed. I spent a while staring at it as the chaos of the city pressed me down deeper into the mattress. Pablo kept drifting in and out of my head , sometimes the boy I'd fallen in love with, sometimes the voluptuous trans woman I'd met that very morning. And out of all the images, the one that kept coming back was that last look he shot me before walking out of the house while that kid was grabbing his ass. What was in his eyes? Curiosity? Guilt? Surprise?

A car horn snapped me out of my thoughts, and I got up to grab my phone. The hotel WiFi was just barely good enough to check WhatsApp. Pablo's mom's message was still there, asking whether I'd talked to her son yet. I still hadn't replied. Actually, I hadn't even finished reading it, because, what was I supposed to say? That her son was now a woman working at a nightclub, that he had a channel where he danced around touching himself under a schoolgirl skirt and fucked some guy who looked like he'd walked straight out of a gym? How on earth could I respond to that?

Behind me, the wall of the room vibrated as a truck thundered past at full speed. The traffic and the music seemed to be finding their rhythm, bleeding into each other until they became, at times, impossible to tell apart. That's when Brenda's message came through.

I'm picking you up in half an hour, sweetie. Get dolled up, we're going to a party.

I read the message twice, then tapped on that Latina woman's profile picture. It took forever to load. And when it finally did, I got that same dizzy, out-of-control feeling I'd had all morning. Brenda and Pablo were cheek to cheek, heavily made up, a little glitter dusted across their eyelids, like they'd just come from a night out. I zoomed in with two fingers until Pablo's face filled the frame. Those impossibly long lashes, the eyeshadow on his lids. He was still him, but he was also her. A mix so deep it left me profoundly uneasy.

I shot back a curt "ok" and headed for the half-busted shower in my room. Part of me wanted to just run away, forget everything, and go back to my life and start over from scratch. But another part of me felt this enormous curiosity about what had happened to Pablo. I had to understand, firsthand, how he'd become Stella. I needed to talk to him.

"Get dolled up, we're going to a party," I thought as I turned on the cold-water faucet, which wasn't cold and didn't even really feel like water. I'd barely brought any clothes with me, and definitely nothing you could wear to a party. Standing in front of the mirror, I took a good look at myself while the water ran and saw a girl with a worn-out face, exhausted and completely out of place in the middle of a city moving way too fast.

Half an hour later I was out on the street, waiting for Brenda. The sheer number of vehicles and people pushing along that road should have caused two hundred million accidents, and yet somehow, the whole machine ran smooth as glass. Groups of tourists dressed to the nines mingled with locals in gauzy, pale-colored clothing, who dodged the foreigners with the same ease the motorcycles weaved between cars. A horn kept sounding in the distance, so insistent it finally pulled my focus. A few yards away, I made out Brenda's face as she stuck an arm out of a white taxi from an era I was pretty sure I hadn't been born into yet.

"Leti! Come on!" she yelled.

I hopped over a couple of puddles in my sneakers, even though it hadn't rained, and a second later I was inside the vehicle. The heat really hit when my t-shirt stuck to the brown leather seat. Next to me was Brenda, looking stunning in a long silver dress, and up front, next to the driver, sat a very skinny kid with a buzz cut and big hoop earrings.

"Did you get some rest?" Brenda asked, smiling.

"Yeah. No. I don't know," I said, rolling the window down as far as it would go. I felt completely suffocated inside that cramped little box.

Even inside the taxi, Brenda glowed under the city lights. The silver dress left her shoulders bare, and probably her whole back too. She smiled at me kindly, looking me up and down.

"You're going to the party dressed like that?"

"I don't have anything else," I said, embarrassed.

She shook her head, and her black curly hair swayed with it.

"If you'd told me, I would've lent you something. Joseph, has Steve texted you back yet?" she asked then.

The boy, or girl, nodded without looking at us. Motorcycles shot past on all sides like we were being fired at with missiles.

"Stella gets off work at one," Brenda told me, pulling her phone out of her purse — silver, like the dress. "But tonight's kind of a big deal. It's the club's annual party, so it'll probably go on forever."

The taxi crossed more streets than I could possibly remember. All of them pretty much identical, all of them drowning in noise. A few miles later, it pulled over at a corner. The kid up front got out first after handing the driver a wad of orange bills, and when I looked to my right, Brenda was already waiting for me outside.

There was a massive line of people trying to get into the club, all of them done up for the party. The heavy makeup, the micro-miniskirts, the guys in suits over t-shirts, they all blurred into a nearly identical line that seemed to wrap around the corner. A pair of Black bouncers, each one as big as the double doors of the nightclub, smiled when they saw Brenda walk up.

"She's with us," she said, not bothering with any further explanation.

Under the scrutiny of both bouncers, plus that of half the people waiting in line, I felt embarrassed. I've never been the type to doll myself up much. With Pablo, it was just the bare minimum, a little mascara, a little eyeshadow, nothing too noticeable. And clothes-wise, the bare minimum too. Neither of us was big on going out, let alone getting dressed up for it. We really liked knowing who we were underneath, and we never needed anything artificial to feel comfortable in our own skin. Still, when I caught my reflection in the entrance mirror walking in behind Brenda, I thought about turning around and heading back to the hotel. This wasn't going to work. But then I spotted Pablo right away. At the back of the club's main room, which was huge and had several floors above, all of them packed with people, I caught a glimpse of those blonde and pink pigtails zipping past behind one of the bars. The pounding music, at a relentless, steady beat, hammered down on every corner of the place so hard it was impossible to hear anything else. I tried to shake off a group that was shoving into me and edged closer to Brenda's bare back. I craned my neck further.

Pablo, with those two blonde-and-pink pigtails and those two thin strands of hair framing his face, was moving back and forth behind the bar in the service area. There were a couple other girls working alongside him. Pablo dodged around them with this playful, effortless ease whenever they crossed paths, smiling at them like they were friends. The smooth way he handled the bottles, reached for the highball glasses, tossed in the ice, all of it proved that Brenda had been telling the truth about that year. When a customer leaned in close to shout an order in his ear, Pablo spun around without a second thought, and in no time he had the glasses filled and served. Over and over. Every now and then he'd pause to chat with one of the other bartenders, and he did it with that femininity I still found so jarring. His gestures, his laugh, the way he moved his hands, they were all a woman's, without a single trace of my Pablo.

Thanks to Brenda's height, I made my way toward the bar slowly, following a path that kept opening up ahead of us.

"What are you having?" Brenda shouted over the music.

It took me a few seconds to decide.

"Vodka lemon," I said, thinking back to when I was sixteen. It had been forever since I'd bothered drinking when I went out. Pablo never drank, and doing it alone was no fun either.

Brenda crossed the last few yards of the club and leaned against the bar. Pablo rushed past at lightning speed. But even moving that fast, Pablo spotted his friend, stopped, and they traded two quick kisses before Brenda whispered our drinks into his ear. When Pablo looked up again, his eyes met mine, and we had yet another awkward moment. This one was much shorter, though, because Pablo immediately turned toward the bottles. I just stood there, frozen, not knowing what to say, in the middle of a whole group of tourists who were already pretty drunk.

That's how I spent most of the next hour. Forced smiles, a few more vodka lemons, and above all, getting jostled and yelled at whenever someone came up to talk to me and realized I didn't speak their language. After about an hour, I figured it had been more than enough, and the sad truth was, by the time Pablo got off work I'd be way too tired to have such an important conversation. As I spun around to look for Brenda on the dance floor to tell her I was calling it a night, I noticed Pablo slipping away from the bar and heading toward one of the club's corners.

"Leti, come here a sec," Brenda called out, gesturing me over from where she stood. "Let me introduce you to Mariola," she said when I got closer. "She's Spanish too. Works at an international marketing firm."

Mariola was a woman my height, which I was immediately grateful for. Still, her beauty made me feel small all over again. You could tell by her style that she had serious money. It wasn't just the jewelry or that gauzy dress that looked so comfortable and elegant; it was the way she carried herself, her hair pulled into a ponytail that flowed out of some kind of gold clasp. There was something about that woman that just breathed money.

"So you really didn't know anything about Stella?" she asked me with a strange smile.

I shook my head as the song changed, trying to keep track of Pablo with my eyes.

"Must have been quite a shock, huh?" she asked, stating the obvious.

"Yeah. Definitely," I said, bobbing my head as some six-foot-six guy planted himself right in my line of sight.

"Stella is a lovely girl," the woman said. "A total sweetheart."

I was still looking for a way out of there. And with any luck, I'd at least get to talk to Pablo before I left the club. I excused myself as politely as I could manage.

"Excuse me a second, I need to use the restroom," I shouted, leaning close to the smooth, flawless face of that posh girl. She smiled and nodded.

"In the back, that way," she said, pointing with her perfectly manicured fingers. It was the same corner where Pablo had disappeared.

Shoved and stepped on a few times, I made my way to the restroom doors. Luckily, or because there must have been a ton of them, there was no line. I pushed open the women's bathroom door, my eyes scanning for Pablo. But I didn't see him. Had he gone into the men's room? I couldn't go in there. Around me there were only three or four tourist girls primping and fixing their hair quickly while shouting over each other in English. All three froze and stared at me for a second, probably thinking I was there to clean the urinals, and then strutted off on their huge, skinny heels.

Since I was already there, I opened the stall door and sat down on the toilet, my bladder about to burst. The three vodkas had done their job, and I started pissing hard as I thought, once again, what a mistake it had been to come to this party. A loud bang on the wall to my left made me jump. Then I heard a high-pitched giggle. Then a guy's voice.

"Careful with the phone," he whispered.

The bathroom door swung open a few more times while I finished peeing, letting in all the noise from the club. Another thud, another little giggle, and I found myself staring at the wall of the stall to my left. I knew exactly what must be going on in there, but maybe because the vodka had gone to my head a little, or because those deep, guttural groans from a man stirred up something I didn't want to name: excitement, curiosity. I pressed my eye to a small hole in the wall, like one of the screws from a coat hook had fallen out.

Was that guy Steve? No question. This close, it was unmistakably him. His pants were down, and every now and then he'd tilt his head back toward the ceiling, biting his lip in pleasure. When I shifted to look lower through the hole, to where his cock should have been, all I could see was the head of a woman with blonde and pink pigtails moving back and forth at his crotch at a fast pace. With his big hands, Steve was gripping Pablo's head, controlling the rhythm, pulling him off and pushing him down. The huge hoop earrings tangled between Pablo's straight hair and the man's fingers. Those blonde and pink pigtails, that one-piece black dress, those tall, shiny white boots...

I nearly lost my footing and almost slammed face-first into the sticky bathroom floor. Mesmerized by the spectacle, unable to tear my eyes from the back-and-forth of Pablo's neck, I stayed there peeping through the little hole the whole time the blowjob lasted. When Steve came without pulling Pablo's head away, I flushed even harder. Pablo had swallowed every drop of that guy's come without saying a word. In our entire relationship, we'd never had an experience like that. Not once. Sure, we'd had some oral sex, we weren't prudes, but Pablo had never shown the slightest interest in sex with other men.

While Steve pulled his pants up, Pablo got to his feet, grabbing a bunch of toilet paper and wiping it over those full lips lined in black.

"You want some?" Steve was now asking Pablo, showing him something I couldn't see through the hole. I tried to shift a little, but Pablo's black latex dress blocked my view.

Pablo must have said yes, because they both stepped aside from the toilet. Steve put the white lid down, wiped some paper over it, opened a small bottle, and laid out a couple of lines of what had to be cocaine. Then he pulled out a credit card and made them longer and thinner. Pablo knelt down on those white boots with the huge, chunky heel. The hoop earrings clanked against the lid with a sharp knock. Pablo took a little gold tube Steve handed him from above, brought it to his nose, and snorted the cocaine hard, pressing those mile-long black nails to his septum to scratch at whatever sensation hit as the drug pushed inside his body. Then, still on his knees, he tilted his head back toward the ceiling, letting the two pigtails fall gracefully against the shiny latex of his back, the earrings nearly grazing his bare shoulders. A second later, Steve grabbed Pablo's ass as Pablo stood up, and they made out with raw passion.

Steve left the bathroom, leaving Pablo alone. On the other side of the wall, I was trying to process the sequence of events. That wasn't Pablo. Pablo would never, ever have done anything like that, I told myself. Giving another man a blowjob? Doing drugs? It was too much. By the time I decided to get out and confront him, Pablo had already slipped out of the stall, and before I could open my door, he was gone.

I ran out, trying to chase him down, but when I stepped out of the bathrooms, I slammed right into a wall of people. I managed to break free from a few, trying not to lose sight of him, and we crossed the whole club that way, all the way to a security door that shouldn't have been open. Pablo disappeared through it fast. Right at the moment it was about to shut, I managed to wedge the tip of my sneaker in and kept it propped open. I shoved the door outward, and suddenly I was outside, in an alley behind the club. It was fully dark now, and Pablo was just a few steps ahead of me. He had a pack of cigarettes in one hand and had just lit one, standing alone by yet another one of those puddles that appeared everywhere for no reason at all.

My heart was pounding faster than the muffled beat of the club's music, which now sounded distant behind the walls, behind the traffic and the chaos of the city. Pablo, from behind, blew a thick column of smoke up toward the sky while I stood there frozen, trying to figure out how to make my move. His body was truly sculptural. Those intricate tattoos climbed over his shoulders in a deeply sensual way, and the white boots must have lifted him at least two inches off those thick platform soles. He had a tight, perfect ass, and nobody, I mean nobody, out of everyone who'd known Pablo would have ever guessed, from behind, that the woman standing there was him.

A group of three girls rounded the corner, and one of them shouted something when she realized it was Pablo.

"Hey, girl, what a night!" yelled one of them, the brunette. All three had impossibly thin bodies, and their party dresses were impossibly short.

Pablo gave all three of them two very feminine air kisses, never actually touching their cheeks.

"You got a cigarette?" one of them asked.

Pablo handed her his pack of cigarettes and then offered her a light.

"Have you seen Marco?" the same one asked after blowing smoke into the alley air.

"He's inside, in the main room," Pablo answered in that voice that was so high-pitched and yet still so unmistakably his own. There was a hint of the local accent in it now, though not as heavy as on the stream. He was probably playing it up for the video. "Hey, Cris, he's perfect. Daniel. I met him at Paula's place yesterday. And I gotta say, he's an absolute sweetheart. I loved him. If you ever break up with him and I ever leave Steve..."

"You bitch!" the woman cut him off with a half-laugh.

"You guys heading in?" Pablo asked after taking another drag and smoothing down the front of his skirt, both white boots pressed together.

"Yeah, we're going now. You coming?"

Pablo raised his hand, letting the bracelets slide down his arm as he showed off the half-smoked cigarette.

"You girls go on in while I finish this, you sluts, we're all here now!" Pablo exclaimed, raising his voice.

The three women picked their way around the puddles and disappeared around the corner. That's when Pablo, taking one last drag on his cigarette, turned around and saw me standing there. The long silence was swallowed up by the city. I opened my mouth. Then I closed it. Pablo blew the smoke out in a thin stream and flicked the butt off into the dark, never taking his eyes off me.

"I don't have time right now," he said, his voice flat. "I'm working."

I raised both hands, as if the gesture could somehow say I came in peace.

"Pablo..."

"Please don't call me that," he said without moving.

"But... what do you want me to call you? Stella? Since when are you... I mean... how...?"

Pablo, very serious, walked past me toward the door. I could smell the sex, the vinyl of the dress, his sweat soaked with cigarette smoke, a strong, sharp cologne. And at such close range, I could see for sure that his face had, indeed, gone under the knife. His cheekbones jutted out far more than normal, his nose was much finer and thinner, his eyebrows, two sculpted arches against a perfectly smooth forehead...

"What happened to you, Pablo?" I finally managed to ask.

"Leti, I'm not Pablo anymore," he said. And he said it, for the first time, in a way that sounded an awful lot like the Pablo I used to know. "Now I need to get back to work. I'll see you later, babe?"

Babe? I thought. Did he just call me babe?

"Yeah... sure..."

Pablo smiled with his full lips and kept walking gracefully toward the door. He opened it by pressing a black card against a silver panel and yanked it open. The club music came roaring out, deafening. Then he looked me up and down.

"I'm glad you're doing okay, Leti. Really. I'd have fixed myself up a little more, but you look fine."

"Pablo, your mom..." I started to say, taking advantage of that brief pause he'd given me.

Pablo lifted one of those impossibly long black nails and pressed it between his lips. In the same hand he was holding the red pack of cigarettes and a pink lighter. He paused and smiled again. I was never going to get used to seeing him like this. His enormous breasts showed the outline of piercings beneath the black latex of his dress. The cheekbones, the nose, the eyebrows... there was no way I was ever going to pull Pablo back from wherever he'd chosen to go, I thought, just for a second.

"We'll talk later, honey," he said. "Now go in through here unless you want them charging you cover. Want me to get you another vodka lemon?"