It was summer when I checked in at the Brundage House; now there’s snow. Outside in the parking lot, holding a protein drink in a polystyrene cup and a paper tote with my personal effects, I wait for Phoebe. The snow falls like jazz music. I open my mouth to the sky but the flakes miss my tongue, dissolving on the salted blacktop. Finally, her Christmobile pulls in. Satellites wouldn’t have missed it.

“I forgot it’s Christmas Eve, really,” she says.

“Me too,” I say.

Every year on the first of November, Phoebe’s car molts into the Christmobile. The ceiling blooms red and green, a canopy of tinsel and battery lights, garlands draped over the chairs like boas. Phoebe steers with her knee while one hand scratches her cable-knit Frosty the Snowman sweater and the other spins the radio dial. “Love on Layaway” on one station, Ella Fitzgerald on the next, “Merry Christmas, Please Don’t Call” as she merges onto the interstate. Four months ago, her driving always made me motion sick. She swerved and overcorrected, and my vision blurred, bile surging in my throat. But she’s more careful now. Or somehow, in the slurry of worksheets and vitamins, I was permanently cured of motion sickness. Maybe I’ll never be sick again.

We’re on our way to our coworker Eileen’s. “A baby shower?” I said yesterday, on the communal landline where we made personal calls. I’d meant to ask Phoebe if I could stay with her until I could afford to live alone again. “Who do we know that’s having a baby?”

“It’s for Eileen,” Phoebe said. “And it’s not for a baby. She adopted a cat.”

“A cat baby shower.”

“I don’t know. It’s Eileen.”

She said this like she found the idea grandly stupid. I would’ve agreed, but I knew she was feigning indifference for my benefit. Phoebe loves an animal celebrating a milestone. If there were a dog wedding the same day, it would’ve been the double-booking of the century.

“Only if you want to,” she added. “She said to come around five, so we’d have to go straight there.”

“Who is we?”

“Oh, me and Chester.” Chester is her agoraphobic Basset hound. I heard him whining in alarm.

“You’re being sarcastic,” I said.

“Please think about it,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be an ordeal.”

“Eileen invited me?”

“She invited the whole store.”

“The whole store,” I repeated, drifting from the receiver. “Including Allison?”

“Excluding the fuck out of Allison.”

Before I left, Allison was a shift lead at the gourmet coffee bar where Phoebe and I have worked since high school. She pioneered a line of aloe-colored detox smoothies, spinach and flaxseed and spirulina powder that stained our fingers. Everyone despised her. We learned she’d been promoted to store manager the same day I was, at one moment, watching espresso beans eddy in the sink, and three hours later I awoke in the E.R. with a saline drip in my arm. My first assumption was Allison had shot me. Coming home, I hoped to hear she’d been fired, deposed by the proletariat in my honor. Apparently not.

“Am I supposed to bring something?” I asked.

Yesterday Phoebe said no, but on the Christmobile’s carpeted floor there’s a plastic Target bag wilting over my feet. A balsam candle, a greeting card, and a purple cat toy congruent in shape, size, and texture to a vibrator. It might just be a vibrator. Stupid, meaningless gifts, but still my hands tremble—not from panic, but because they want to be holding something. They are the hands of a body floating through space, who caught the wrong interplanetary ferry somewhere and can no longer remember who it used to be. I’m having a hard time convincing myself this is my real life. None of it is familiar at all.

“Did my phone just buzz?” Phoebe plumbs the compartment beneath the radio. “Could you read what it says?”

The time is 5:16. Her wallpaper, which once was her and her father on a kayak by Turnip Rock, is now a snowy forest. It’s a text from Eileen’s roommate Conan: So don’t kill me but Allison is here. Eileen has no spine. As I read it aloud, another appears: But Jack is too, so it evens out maybe?

“Okay,” Phoebe says. “What the fuck.”

“Should we just not go?” I say.

“Um. I don’t know.” She puffs her cheeks, exhales. “No, you know what? Let’s go anyway. Everyone was so excited to see you.”

Even this she can’t make sound true. But more than she loves Christmas and animals celebrating milestones, Phoebe loves a sentimental display of friendship. She wanted some fanfare for my return from the Brundage House. During our weekly calls, she proposed various celebrations depending on my release date: a potluck if by Thanksgiving, a midnight rager if by New Year’s. I didn’t help matters. We only spoke when I was exhausted or medicated out of my mind—which was always—and therefore susceptible to making promises I never intended to honor. I was, and remain, incapable of expressing to Phoebe exactly how little I want to celebrate my discharge from a facility that, for all intents and purposes, failed to cure the eating disorder that sent me there in the first place.

*

Eileen and Conan live in a squat gray building with no personality. There are three floors wedged into the space of two, the basement windows half-lidded in the snow. Their apartment is on the middle floor, at the end of a foul-smelling corridor with wrinkles in the carpeting.

“By the way,” Phoebe says before we knock, “you don’t owe anyone an explanation for where you were.”

“Sure,” I say.

Eileen opens the door immediately. “OhmygoshMerryChristmasandhel-looooo!”

She steps out to hug me, then Phoebe. Her black t-shirt is inside-out and reeks of peppermint. Clumps of her blonde fringe are gluey with syrup.

“Sorry,” Eileen says, “I’m so freaking nasty but I literally just got home from work.” She looks at me. “We missed you so much it’s not even funny.”

The apartment is cramped and old, popcorn ceilings and toenail-colored walls. The back of the living room is curtained with bangled gold ribbons among a network of fairy lights; in the middle, a stock banner: HAPPY GOTCHA DAY. Two Mylar balloons on cat-shaped weights flank a pyramid of candy wrappers on the coffee table. An alopecic Christmas tree shivers by the radiator. Eileen gestures for Phoebe and me to sit wherever.

Beneath the banner, Allison has annexed the loveseat. This leaves the three-seater sofa by the window, at the far end of which is Jack. He’s wearing the same outfit as the day I last saw him: cargo pants, faded Chelsea boots, gimlet-shaped earrings and a Mitski concert pullover. But his hair, once uniformly brunet, is highlit auburn. And he’s grown a mustache. Isa must have been responsible for that. Jack has the kind of inexpungible beauty that invites creative freedom; you want to decorate him every which way to test its resilience. Or he and Isa broke up, and the highlights and mustache evince something like a bachelor’s metamorphosis. Behind his lips might be gemmed teeth, beneath his pullover might be a studded navel. New ornaments for the holiday season.

“Conan, where’s the baby?” Eileen asks, poking under the furniture.

Conan is sunk in the beanbag chair by the television. “She should be in your room,” they say. Their cat, Juicy, vibrates in their lap. They stroke his back like a supervillain. “She was misbehaving, so I put her in timeout.”

Eileen makes a face. “Misbehaving?”

“Go see for yourself.” Conan points toward the kitchen. “My poor pasta jars. My god, Eileen, there was rigatoni everywhere. And the asshole just stared at me with her horrible eyes.”

“That’s wonderful. I’m gonna go shower.” Eileen disappears down the hall.

Conan reaches for the stack of papers on the coffee table. Juicy leaps to the floor, expresses his anus, and leaves. “It’s just a silly thing Eileen came up with. It’s not that serious.” They slide the top two sheets toward Phoebe and me.

It’s a trivia quiz, titled How Well Do You Know the Baby? in rainbow bubble letters. The questions are: “What is the baby’s favorite food?” and, “What was the baby’s name before she was adopted?” and, “Who is the baby’s favorite BLACKPINK member?” and so on. At the bottom, there’s a prompt for name suggestions. I spend five minutes on the first question. Despite Conan’s preface, I take the quiz very seriously. I want an A-plus-plus in fat red marker. But if I once had the creativity and wit for these questions, my brain has reapportioned that space for autonomic functions, breathing and blinking, and all I can think of is cat food. Which is my final answer. I glance at Phoebe’s paper; she’s written benzodiazepines.

“Done,” Allison says, slapping her paper on the coffee table as if one of those timed multiplication tests from elementary school. She sits criss-cross applesauce on the loveseat, in her Minnie Mouse pajama pants, groping the gap between the cushions with her bare toes. In a way, I feel awful for her.

“So what,” she says, her grin stretching, “I don’t get a hello?”

I look around. “Are you talking to me?”

“Of course I’m talking to you, silly. Long time no see.”

“Ha-ha.”

“What’s been up with you? What’s the haps? Where’ve you been?”

Phoebe clears her throat. “I’m also done.” She attempts to jettison her paper across the room but it catches and lands by her feet. She turns to me. “Are you done yet?”

“Almost,” I lie. I’m still on the second question.

“Listen,” Allison continues. “If you’re interested, I can get you rehired like that. I mean, better you than all these nitwits I’ve been interviewing. I did always wonder why you just up and vanished on us? We could’ve used you for the fall launch!” She makes a guttural, mammalian noise approximate to laughter. “What were our sales, Conan? Four grand?” Conan shrugs. “Five? Am I close?”

“I had a seizure at work,” I say.

Phoebe grips my wrist, her fingers meeting at my pulse.

“Excuse me?” Allison says.

“I’m all better now.”

She blinks. “A seizure.”

“They had to call an ambulance because I went unconscious. But I’m fine now.”

“I don’t remember that. Why don’t I remember that? Did no one think to loop me in?” She fires conspiratorial glares around the room. “I’ve been going around thinking you just walked out one day and never returned. A seizure? Are you epileptic? You should’ve told me if you were epileptic. I’m supposed to know those things.” She just can’t believe it. “How did that happen?”

Phoebe says, quickly, “That’s none of your business.”

“I’m not epileptic,” I say. “I was hypoglycemic from chronic malnutrition. They put me on a seventy-two hour hold and referred me to inpatient rehab.” I turn to Phoebe. “Everyone might as well know.”

The room assumes a tableau vivant. They stare at me, still and illegible, and I stare back. Except for Jack, whose expression I can’t see without turning, and I wouldn’t dare, but I can still envision it. His eyes like the amber eyes of Bastet. But the mustache isn’t there. The mustache, its own organism, beats its wings in a liminal chamber in my mind, nowhere to go. I open my mouth.

*

At six, Eileen returns from the bathroom to let Anais and Zulie in. She’s done a terrible job drying herself, leaving a damp footpath in the carpet. Opening the door, she greets the girls exactly as she greeted Phoebe and me, “OhmygoshMerryChristmasandhel-looooo!”

The breaking news about my stay at the Brundage House, and the eating disorder that precipitated it, circulated the room like a deflating balloon, farting as it went. No one cared. Conan stared uncomfortably. Jack murmured, “Damn.” Phoebe went into rigor mortis, her grip on my wrist ossifying. Then Allison went prattling on about the rehire process and everyone seemed to forget I’d said anything. Now I consider telling them again, but slower this time, with more gruesome details—the Purge Closet, the mirrors scabbed from the walls, zeroing out—so they could understand, if not the gravity of the disorder itself, the gravity of my pain. How awful, someone would say. Jesus, you poor thing. Someone else would say, I thought you looked frail, but I didn’t want to say anything. But there’s no use. If I’m not going to get the reaction I want, I might as well not degrade myself by begging for it.

Evidently Allison feels no shame, having spent the past fifteen minutes talking, uninterrupted, about herself and her boyfriend’s daughter.

“The other day, Brindley came home, dropped her bag, and said in the sweetest voice, ‘Mom? Dad? Isn’t socialism just, like, watered-down communism? How do Gen. Z leftists live with themselves knowing they’re basically advocating for the same regime that birthed the Soviet Union?’ I mean, the girl just turned ten! I swear she’s going places.”

I whisper to Phoebe, “‘Brindley?'”

She whispers back, “‘Mom?'”

Anais and Zulie, sugared with snow, arrive with matching cold brews and three bulging HomeGoods bags. They motion for me to make room on the three-seater. It’s a tight squeeze. Even with Phoebe between us, my proximity to Jack makes me shiver. I can smell his cologne. My cushion collapses into the undercarriage, which devastates me but I say nothing. Allison is spread-eagle on the loveseat like a malaised duchess, and the only somewhat covetable space on the floor is dark with Juicy’s urine. “He’s territorial,” Conan says, spraying the stain. “You know. With the baby.”

“Phoebe,” Anais says, “look at what we got Eileen.” Her bag is stuffed with cat toys, vector-art stickers, human and feline snacks, and a long, wrinkled receipt. Phoebe examines what looks to be a two-by-four, but turns out to have a design: a clip-art kitten etched by machine into the faux-wood particleboard, and an inscription, You Had Me At ‘Meow.’ “It was on clearance.” Anais shrugs. “I’m not sure if Eileen will like it.”

“You’re joking.” Phoebe scratches the kitten’s face as though it were real. “It’s literally perfect.”

“It had better be,” Anais says. “All this was, like, half my paycheck. Poof. Gone.”

“Dude, I’m gonna get evicted at this rate,” Phoebe lowers her voice, “with the twelve hours I was scheduled this week.”

“No, you’re lying,” Zulie says, leaning over Anais. “I got five last week. Five. And two of them overlapped with my geology final that I requested off, like, three months ago.”

“And we all have open availability, of course.” Anais goes red. “But the new-hires who call out for every fucking itch and sniffle get full time? She might as well write the schedule sitting on the keyboard.”

“She writes it on the back of Brindley’s custody agreement,” Phoebe says.

“‘Time-Off Request Denied,'” Zulie says, “scrawled in crayon and Valtrex dust.”

Allison is oblivious to the hushed conversation on the sofa. She’s in her own world, regaling Conan with another Brindley story, or maybe the same one again. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone have so much to say. I imagine the lengths it would take for me to talk that much about myself, and to feel safe in the assumption that whoever is listening will handle my words with care. I’d have to be on my deathbed, I decide, surrounded by loved ones, waiting for the EKG monitor to pronounce me gone. That’s the only time you can say anything and everyone will listen no matter what, because soon you’ll never say anything ever again, and they’re waiting, reaching for that suspenseful moment when you finish the story you’ve been telling all your life.

“That’s why you quit, right?” Zulie is pointing down at me, in the sofa’s bony trough.

“What?” I say.

“Because you had your hours cut down to basically nothing.”

Phoebe looks startled but doesn’t intervene.

“That’s not why I quit,” I say.

Anais looks confused. “Then why did you?”

“You were sick of our shit,” Zulie says, grinning privately at Anais.

“I thought I told you,” I say. “I was at a treatment facility, an hour upstate.”

“Oh.” Anais and Zulie stare.

Miserably, Phoebe says, “They weren’t here when you decided to tell everyone.”

“Like a psych ward?” Anais asks.

“What?” I say. “No. A center for eating disorders.”

“You have an eating disorder?” Zulie blurts, at a normal volume instead of our established sotto. Then, whispering again, “Shit. My bad.”

“It’s not a secret.”

“What kind?” Anais asks. “Sorry. Is that rude? I’m sorry. Like, bulimia?”

Her assumption of bulimia over anorexia is like a mortal wound. “Sure. Like bulimia.”

“Is that why you had that seizure?” Anais turns to Zulie. “You weren’t there. We had to call 9-1-1.”

“Anyway,” I say, “the schedule thing didn’t end up mattering so much. I had to quit anyway.”

Anais and Zulie go quiet, leaning into each other and away from me. The person inside me throttles my ribcage like prison bars. Look at me! they scream. I’m in here! I’m real! Look!

“Anais,” Conan calls from the beanbag chair, “come show me your haul.” Anais and Zulie present them the bag like Halloween candy. Juicy reappears at the sound of rustling plastic, probing the bag’s lumpy bottom.

Phoebe scooches so we’re level with each other, though still lower than Jack. “What was that?” she says. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? That was… ” She cocks her head. “I’m not sure how to describe it.”

“I’m fine, I just—” The end of the sentence scurries back down my throat. Phoebe stretches her neck, stares at the ceiling. “I don’t know.”

“If you want to leave,” she says, “I’m cool with going. If you want.”

“I don’t want to leave.” I breathe. “But I don’t want to be here.”

“That’s constructive.”

“I don’t feel like anyone cares that I came.”

She looks at me. “Everyone was begging me to bring you. They’ve been asking about you for months. And it’s not a pity invite, either. Trust me. No one here pities you.”

Without meaning to, I say, “I wish they did.”

Eileen appears from the kitchen with the cupcakes. 

* 

In the bathroom, I wash my hands five times. The soap smells like bow rosin. The suds go up my sleeves. I make a mess. I spill water on the floor and my socks darken with it. I wipe Eileen’s damp towel on the toilet seat and throw it in the tub. In high school I played the violin, the thinnest instrument ever made. I practiced scales in pizzicato, and the ballerina in my music box mind pointed her toes. (The mirror detaches easily. I prop it before the toilet and sit.) When I played D-flat major the ballerina shrunk like popcorn in reverse. When I played F-sharp Phrygian she left the music box and walked around my bedroom, leaving human-sized footprints. (I study my body in the mirror: organs and muscles and bones.) When I felt the violin’s four strings the ballerina told me who she was, and I listened. (I dig into my skin, picking and pulling and clawing my way inside.) She was formless inside me, malleable as clay. (My chest bursts open against the mirror like the gilded doors of heaven and I see everything: my lungs, my heart, my spinal column.) She told me what she wanted and I wanted it, too. (My nerves and veins and capillaries.) This is what she wanted, this, the pruning of the body. She wanted to know everything and feel everything and control everything. (The gray cosmos of my brain.) Life, the ballerina told me, is a dark bedroom at someone else’s party. You can hear their laughter in the walls. (I’m everywhere now, on the sink and rug and tile.) All she wanted was for someone to open the door. She wanted someone to reach their hands into the wreckage of her life and find her, small, crushed, and attempt to pull her out, to pull so hard their organs and muscles and bones snapped and curled like violin strings—and she wanted them to fail. I wanted it, too. I wanted to be found and failed and mourned, in that order. I wanted the whole world kneeling.

* 

“Are you coming back?” Jack asks me.

I look at him, finally. While I was in the bathroom, Phoebe joined Anais and Zulie on the floor, cat piss be damned, to play Uno. Everyone’s tongue is blue with frosting. I’ve disemboweled my cupcake like a toddler, smearing it around the paper plate. I really did try. But Jack’s attentiveness to me—he’s glanced three times at my plate without addressing it—is an unexpected permutation. I can’t be distracted by chewing and swallowing.

“I don’t even know if I’ll get rehired.”

“I’m sure you will.” He nods sagely. “I thought I heard you and Allison talking about it, but to be honest, I was tuning that bitch out.”

Allison is retelling the Brindley story, for the third time, to Eileen.

“Isa was like that,” Jack continues. “She’d just blah blah blah blah blah on and on for-fucking-ever. I told her she could talk her way out of a hostage situation. You know, ’cause she’s a talker. But I didn’t say it was because she’d be torturing them. I’m telling you, it was borderline abusive. I felt abused, anyway.”

Eileen used to say Isa would make a good grandmother. Immune from resentment and wealthy with influence. I’m certain now the mustache and highlights were her doing, along with the pants and boots and earrings. She knew how to leave a man better than she’d found him. If she stayed long enough, she could’ve done something about his words. The voice that doesn’t match the rest of him. Whoever comes next will assume that responsibility. It could be me. There’s no reason, not really, that it cannot be.

Jack spreads his legs so our knees touch. He’s as close as I was to Phoebe when there were five people on the sofa. Our hands brush, his tanned and soft with fine hairs, mine bald and coarse. “I’m done with those kinds of people,” he says. “The yappers. I need something new. Like, really new. Something insane. I don’t want to be bored my whole life. I want to go crazy, you know?”

I wish I did not know. He’s looking through me, at his own reflection in the void of my skull. I stay silent. I can’t risk the likelihood of saying something stupid. His leg is warm with electricity, his hand millimeters from my knee. My heart is beating itself out of my chest.

“Where did you say you went in September?” he asks. “A psych ward?”

“August,” I say. “And it was a residential treatment facility. For eating disorders.”

“Like anorexia.”

I suppress a smile. “That was the consensus, yes.”

“Uh-huh.” He grins without his eyes. “Did you like it there?”

“It’s government funded,” I lie. The Brundage House is privately owned. “I chose it because it was cheap as dirt.” It wasn’t. “Dietitians were running group therapy, random admin people were doing mental health screenings. It was chaos. We were packed like sardines in these bug-infested dorms.” I had a single with central heat and a private terrace. “And the food was disgusting. Actually the most vile shit I’ve ever seen in my life. I wouldn’t have eaten it if they paid me a million dollars.” I’m paying them ten thousand dollars, actually, to have not eaten it.

“But they forced you to, right? Isn’t that kind of the point?”

I shake my head. “They didn’t care enough to do that. If you were a healthy weight,” I say with air quotes, “they let you go no matter what. I put rocks in my pockets when they weighed me, and they were too stupid to notice. That’s how I got out.”

“Is that why you’re not eating your cupcake?”

He’s looking at my plate again. The cupcake I’ve gored into a confiture. It’s not like I tried to hide it. And isn’t this what I was waiting for? For someone to see how sick I am, how ruined I must be to intentionally remain so sick, and feel bad for me? To think of me at every meal, and remember me as that one person they know, that really, really unfortunate person who can’t stomach a fucking cupcake, and think, How sad, how so, so, so sad that this is their life, that they have to wake up every day, sick and only getting sicker, and go on with their miserable life—isn’t that what I wanted all along?

“I guess so,” I say.

Jack nods. He crosses his legs and folds his arms so he’s no longer touching me. I feel dirty and humiliated, a child covered in their own vomit. I look at Phoebe, who’s been watching us for who knows how long. I doubt she could hear our conversation, but maybe my expression is giving it away because she looks like she’s been knifed.

Eileen calls for everyone’s attention. “Okay, guys, it’s time to read these quizzes. Hopefully no one wrote anything embarrassing.”

She thumbs through the stack and reads each answer aloud. Allison managed to take the quiz more seriously than I did; her name suggestion is Whiskers, which is not only unoriginal in general but also the name of her own cat. Everyone else understood to write joke responses. Zulie wrote that the baby’s favorite pastime is racketeering; Phoebe wrote that the baby’s celebrity idol is Anna Delvey; and Anais offered Luicy as a name. “Like Lucy, but spelled like Juicy,” she says, which renders Conan hysterical.

After reading all the quizzes, Eileen goes down the hall and returns with the baby. Anais and Zulie scramble to greet her; the rest follow. She’s a Tonkinese with wild, sapient eyes, blue as hyacinths. The baby squirms and yowls in Eileen’s arms as everyone crowds around her. Phoebe and I exclude ourselves, exchanging sharp glances between each other and the door, a conversation requiring no words. Shall we? she mouths, and I nod. The room is too distracted to notice us collecting our coats and boots, but before we leave I catch the baby’s eyes. She is terrified. This creature of another world—all this attention must feel like torture.

*

On the drive to Phoebe’s, I watch her as I watched myself in the bathroom mirror. As if I could know her so deeply. The month before my seizure, our conversations acquired an urgency. She wanted to know everything about me. I felt completely, wonderfully unknowable. And then I was gone. Now she’s silent. She doesn’t question my remoteness, or my extraterrestrial behavior. Heavy snowflakes score the windows. She looks so alike to when, four months ago, she visited me at the hospital. She’d dragged the metal chair from the window to my bed, and when I awoke she was tracing the clear tape on my forearm where the IV had been inserted. The area was sore and blue, and I flinched at her touch. She apologized. I forgave her. She told me I looked horrible. Thanks for the honesty. No problem. How horrible? She could see right through me. So she thought I was skinny? She didn’t answer. I hoped she would leave after a while, and I’d get to be alone again, but she stayed for thirty-eight hours until the nurses came to take me away. She was silent like she is now, but occasionally she’d repeat herself. She could see right through me.