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Esme talked about how she spent most weekends at the physical therapist, forcing various bones back into place. She talked about ballet like an arranged marriage, inevitable and unromantic, something she’d known about herself longer than she’d known herself. She compared her body to a rigged car th…

“A few days ago, I didn’t know women like you existed.”

Mitty scratches her cheek, clears her throat, trying her best to seem nonplussed. “What kind of woman is that?”

Lena speaks without hesitating. “A woman as confused about all of this”—she gestures to the empty parking lot, the sky—“as me…

Bethel always says beautiful women are lonely. Not that they are alone, but that their loneliness is somewhere out of view, in the depths of their psyche, a gorgeous melancholy reserved for people too special to feel part of the world around them.

Sebastian says gym equipment makes him feel like a hamster sprinting along an infinite wheel. He hates all the mirrors, the caustic smell of sweat and all-purpose cleaner, the fact that everyone is wearing headphones and immersed in their own little vanity projects without speaking to one another. …

What must it feel like to be so aligned with the fact of your beauty, Mitty thinks, that you assume the questions you ask will be answered, the invitations you make will be accepted, the strangers you bother will celebrate your interruption? The thought makes her want to say no, on the sheer basis …