The following is from Nell Zink’s Sister Europe. Zink did a variety of service and administrative jobs before becoming a professional novelist at age fifty. Her books include The Wallcreeper, Mislaid, Private Novelist, Nicotine, Doxology, and Avalon. Three of her books became New York Times Notable Books, and one was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Granta, and Harper’s Magazine. She lives near Berlin.
His daughter Nicole, age fifteen, maneuvered carefully between a column of parked cars and a column of those not yet parked. She made eye contact with yet another driver, and again he shook his head. She had been displaying herself for an entire eight minutes, but no one had stopped for her. On the contrary, whenever she approached a passenger-side window, the driver touched the gas pedal, pulling up as close to the car in front as possible, his face impassive or even hostile.
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She wore a calf-length dress and an expression of agony. The damp of the oncoming night seemed to be attacking from all directions, frizzing her hair, mussing her makeup, making her outfit cling like latex. She heard her phone ding. For a moment she ignored it. She felt faintly that she should have turned it off, because people might spy on her. Then she reconsidered, and turned, head down, to read a text from her mother in the narrow defile between two SUVs. “Back by dark,” she replied.
She stashed the phone and looked up. A man on the sidewalk was facing her directly, looking interested. Squat and bald, he wore droopy slacks and an ugly nylon bomber jacket that mushroomed around his belly. It was her first promising contact since her quest to play at turning tricks had begun, ten minutes before.
She grinned, producing again the involuntary look of anguish, her eyes glistening with fear.
“Fuck out of my space!” the man said. “Way, away now! Move on!” A grayish-skinned, round-faced maiden in unseasonably knee-free skinny jeans joined in from the other side of the street to share similar sentiments. Another young woman, in a fuzzy white miniskirt that matched her strawlike hair, with an uneven spray tan in place of stockings, emerged from behind a panel truck and commenced marching stiffly toward Nicole, offering to cut her face.
The three unfriendly people bumped her nerves to a higher phase of excitement, so she did the sensible thing and walked into traffic. The driver whose way she blocked had just accelerated. As he braked, he glared, but she paid him no mind, leaning briefly on his hood to leave a distinct palm print in cold sweat—a neat outline of her hand, lined in transparent droplets. “Schwuchtel!” he shouted. (“Faggot!”) She turned left around the car to walk shakily westward on Kurfürstenstrasse, head high, eyes frantic with terror. It was hard for anyone—especially her—to say what in hell she thought she was doing. The logic that had brought her there was easily articulated. She needed honest answers. She had asked a few friends whether she could pass. Of course their “Yes!” was immediate and unqualified. They had said this even at the stage when her fashion experiments had been limited to scoop-necked T-shirts and sandals with narrower straps. Her parents were likewise one-hundred-percent affirmative. Everyone flattered, cosseted, and coddled her. It made no sense. Because whenever she looked in the mirror, she experienced body dysphoria. That was the point! She wasn’t okay, much less beautiful! That’s why she needed her parents to step up and let her have puberty blockers before she got any older!
But would it even work? Would she ever be beautiful? Who would tell her the truth about her face, her hands, her ankles—her bones?
The obvious answer: total strangers. Strangers who were also kind of assholes. Straight men.
But not, like, men in some dark bar who would follow her outside to beat her up. She wanted spontaneous reactions from card-carrying ladies’ men in a busy public place where she felt safe. Obviously nothing could be simpler than posing as a streetwalker on Kurfürstenstrasse for a few minutes.
At least that’s what she had thought—that it would be easy.
Envisioning the situation had posed no challenge. A sashay down the catwalk, with a point for each wolf whistle. But she had gravely misjudged how it would make her feel.
She had put on a stretchy, glittery black dress, a polyester knit with silver metallic threads and a sequinned neckline, the kind of thing that gets produced by the thousands for New Year’s Eve and thrown away rather than washed. She had bought it at a department store (a friendly one, where they let anybody try on anything and carried women’s shoes in size forty-three) a month before, marked down by eighty percent. The boots were her first-ever high heels—not cheap, but due to her inexperience, the metal-reinforced kind whose heel strikes on concrete ring like a bell, soled with slick, hard leather.
She had bought the things because Harriet owned neither a dress nor a pair of high-heeled shoes. She had gone through her mother’s underwear drawer to find, not the hoped-for stash of sexy lingerie, but a disordered mass of sports bras and all-cotton granny panties in the same drab black as the rest of her clothing. Her medicine cabinet was devoid of makeup, cosmetics, and perfume, because she washed her face in the shower with diluted hand soap. The two had exchanged harsh words, with Harriet—who had broken free of a sect that enforced long dresses and white bonnets to spend her life achieving dominance in a male-dominated field—expressing disdain for the idea that becoming a woman might entail adjustments to a person’s behavior. She was the opposite of a TERF, in a way that drove her daughter straight up the wall: she accepted their shared femaleness on its face, with the bored shrug of the unfazed.
Some friends argued that her mom was autistic, while others thought she was pathetic—a repressed trans man, in self-hating denial. But Nicole knew that if it had been up to Harriet, she could have started hormone therapy the year before. All the blame for her delayed transition lay with her dad. She’d have the beginnings of breasts by now, instead of a clammy set of sticky falsies that push-up bras turned into a warped and jutting debacle. For months now, she had gone braless in protest, concentrating on modulating her voice and movements and building up her glutes.
She had practiced walking at home, all around the large apartment, and up and down the stairwell, and she had thought she was getting pretty good. But the street’s surface was uneven, the asphalt arranged in subtle waves and marred with spot repairs. The distance was orders of magnitude beyond anything she had tried at home. Her toes throbbed and her calf muscles ached. She moved to the sidewalk. The street was still jam-packed with cars. She sought the drivers’ eyes, but they looked away. She realized that they might be searching not for the warmth of human companionship, but for parking.
At some point—for her, indefinable—she left the red-light district. If no one was working a given street, did that make its territory available, or irrelevant?
If nothing else, she decided, her misadventure might retroactively be cleansed of mortification if she framed it as getting practice walking in the boots. She decided to walk the length of Kurfürstenstrasse and board the S7 at Bahnhof Zoo. Among other things, she needed to unload a heavy burden of physical energy. The idea of being seen by crowds of commuters at the train station made her twang with half-ecstatic ambivalence. Cross-dressing was like a dish of fried brains to a starving vegetarian. It was not what she needed. But it had something undeniably to do with what she needed.
Not so long ago, her identity quest had lacked a tangible goal. It had veered around inside her brain, emerging unbidden at intervals, sudden and searing as a solar flare. Euphoria alternated with self-hatred drenched in tears, and a playful erotic what-if with visceral revulsion. She looked at women and girls searchingly, desperate for answers. Were they performances, were they female flesh, was there anything worse than female flesh when it stopped performing? She looked at men and boys surreptitiously, fearing to be misunderstood. She had plucked her brows, shaved her legs, and the next morning faked a fever so she could stay home from school. She had applied pink nail polish and scrubbed it off with acetone. But the mandate to transition socially was clear. A person couldn’t hang back, sort things out, and suddenly get gender-affirming hormones and surgery on demand; to get her body rectified, she had to put in her time. She worried that she was still male in her sleep. Her therapist assured her that morning wood had a function for growing girls as an inner dilator, taking their future neo-vaginas to a serviceable size. It wasn’t confusing to her in the least, once she accepted inside-out dilation as a metaphor for her whole life.
As she moved westward, the street widened into a boulevard.
Few pedestrians remained, for which she was grateful. Inside her too-tight gaff from an online shop, her balls itched. She wasn’t having an out-of-body experience—it was more like the opposite—but still she was struggling to maintain her own perspective, a view of the world through her own eyes. She felt looked-at and hollowed-out. In her party dress and scarlet bee-stung mouth on a Tuesday afternoon, she was coming to feel that outfits designed to draw attention might be better confined to situations where distractions were plentiful and attention was hard to come by, such as nightclubs. The scenery consisted of gray concrete sidewalks with granite curbs bordering asphalt in a darker gray, gray trees streaked with black, and façades the color of ashes. Her sensitive, suffering flesh with its chafed red highlights was like a gaping wound that had heaved to its pointy feet and was lurching around. Her face was a portal leaking anguish to an inanimate world, and with every step, her dress ratcheted upward, climbing her tights like a lumberjack. The dress wasn’t lined, and she hadn’t thought—or even known—to wear a full slip. It was rising steadily, yet the crotch of her tights would soon reach her knees. The public catastrophe was near complete.
Staring downward like a child trying not to step on the cracks, she fumbled through multiple layers of fabric. She stopped and turned to face away from the wind. After yet another cursory, futile yank on her underwear, she realized that she was freezing. She surrendered and buttoned up her woolen overcoat, hiding the dress. It was the longest coat she owned—an oversize leftover from last year, in navy-blue tweed, with raglan sleeves and her deadname written in black marker on the pale-blue lining of the collar. Fumbling under the shelter it provided, she pulled her hem up to her waist, rearranged her undies, and fixed her stockings. There was nothing discreet about any of it. She was, she decided, authentically a hot mess. She wished her friends could see her. She pulled out her phone, flashing a coquettish V-for-Victory sign as she took a quick series of selfies that she deleted frowning, shoulders hunched. She did a full 360-degree turn to see whether anyone had watched her. Again she saw a man she had noticed blocks before.
Either he was strolling innocently up Kurfürstenstrasse to the Zoo railroad station at a similar pace, or he was following her and staring; she wasn’t sure. He wore a maroon fleece under a black windbreaker, with jeans and sneakers. His hair was salt-and-pepper, in a brush cut, his eyes obscured by the horizontal bars of boxy sunglasses, his mouth by a bristly mustache.
She took a few steps, stopped, and glanced back to see him turn toward a shop window, which he examined intently. Having just passed the shop, she knew it was a car rental—not the kind of thing people usually stopped to look at. She kept walking, checking back twice to see him still captivated by posters about vehicles. A man window-shopping for vehicles after work—why not. She crossed her arms tight as she stomped painfully toward Zoo, heels clanging rhythmically in the din of rush-hour traffic.
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From Sister Europe by Nell Zink. Used with permission of the publisher, Knopf. Copyright © 2025 by Nell Zink.