They would have gone to Anime Matsuri, the giant cosplay convention held in Houston every year, where maybe they would have dressed as Negasonic Teenage Warhead, the surly mutant telepath from the Deadpool franchise Helen bore such a strong resemblance to the character that kids at cons would routinely stop in their tracks. She would have completed the first year of what she hoped would be a triple-degree in art, psychology, and neurobiology maybe she would have decided to focus on only one of those things, or two, or none at all. They would have flounced around the snow-blanketed campus in shorts or a floral skirt, refusing to put on a coat even when their friends begged them to and when the frigid Ohio winters started to thaw, they would have spent lazy Sunday afternoons in the swing chair on the lawn outside their dorm. Helen, who used both the “she” and “them” pronouns, would have chased her Siberian therapy cat Willa down the halls of their dorm, picking up the tufts of fur she shed between her paws.

This is how Helen Hastings, 18, would have spent the past year: they would have been a sophomore at Oberlin College, a small liberal-arts school about an hour outside Cleveland, playing Dungeons and Dragons every Saturday in the dank basement of Burton Hall on North Quad, trying to sidetrack the game by reciting the entirety of the “Shrimp Heaven Now” dialogue from the podcast My Brother, My Brother, and Me.

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