“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.”

She says it with such a tidy certainty that Mitty can’t even begin to form some bashful protest. She couldn’t have predicted that the thing she hates most about herself, the reason she so often feels sore and alienated around other people, is the very thing that she and Lena share. Knowing she would no longer have to pretend her world is more abundant than it is—that she is less bewildered by life than she is—in front of a new person, and what they saw wouldn’t drive them away, brings her a thrilling peace. Maybe she is naïve for believing that this could be what she had been missing all along—a person to echo her endless confusion about the rules of living. But she is past the point of caring whether or not this makes her gullible; it feels too good to just drive, Lena with her hand out the open window, surfing the headwind, Mitty’s grip loosened around the wheel, as though the roads had become straighter and better paved since they’d left that morning. The brief reprieve of not knowing—not fearing—whatever comes next.

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 that had been in a series of small accidents, haphazardly pieced together with duct tape and mismatched fenders, reliable and dimpled with dings. She was enviably even-tempered in the way that girls try and sedate themselves into being at that age. But she wasn’t performing, not really. It was as if thrusting all of her weight onto the tip of her largest toe meant everything else was easy. Her ennui gave her a wisdom that made other girls—eager girls—seem stupid, still basking in stupid fantasies of disappearing into the stupid lives of stupid men.

Lena has never been to a funeral. She’s embarrassed by how unprepared she feels for the event, how many questions she wants to ask before they arrive. Will it be an open casket, even though the death was violent? Are there seating arrangements based on relation? Is she expected to cry? What if she can’t? She finds herself wondering if Sebastian ever wishes he were with someone who had more life experience, who understands the delicate combination of comfort and distance a person needs when they’re stepping into the fragile space of grief. In the beginning of their relationship, she would often wonder if Sebastian would be better off with someone who knew the fabric of the world with a seasoned intricacy—who had been divorced or traveled on her own or loved some niche artist enough to collect all their work. She imagined this woman, whom she’d built entirely as the antonym to her and her many personal shortcomings, until she seemed real enough to be waiting just around the corner while she and Sebastian took their morning walks. But each time she mustered the courage to ask him for reassurance or press him on the things he wished were different about her, he would wave her off. You’re perfect, he’d say. You’re exactly what I’ve always wanted.

“You’re not going to hurt me, you know,” Bethel says flatly. Mitty almost believes her. Her eyes are watchful, disappointed. Usually, Mitty would at least have to fight off the urge to apologize. But there’s an unusual absence of remorse. So much that she finds herself searching for it, wanting to feel it, if only to be sure that she still can. Bethel returns to the task of climbing toward her bedroom, not pushing herself to move any faster than she usually does. Her consistency is almost impressive, despite everything. Mitty can see the texture of Bethel’s ass, puckered with fat, beneath her thinning cotton nightgown. The stoop of muscle on her upper back. The pleated skin on her elbows. Mitty is so tired of thinking about aging. She shouldn’t have such thorough knowledge of the ways a body can drag itself out. Maybe Bethel is right, and she is preoccupied with Lena’s beauty. But that’s what was so nice about being with Lena, she thinks. Sitting across from a person whose features looked as though they’d been preserved by the glass armor of a china cabinet made Mitty feel like she deserved to be there. As if her proximity to Lena’s flushed girlishness meant she must have some version of it, too, some version of her that had been lying dormant beneath a layer of dust. Suddenly wiped clean.

Mitty couldn’t be certain if what they did was sex because she had nothing to hold it up against. She hadn’t yet learned what sex looked like between two girls, if sex was even possible without the burst of semen into the tip of an expired condom. With a boy, the act would’ve been obvious, marked by an inarguable start and finish, his initiation and completion. But with Esme, it ebbed and flowed so naturally, time stretching to meet them, that even the point at which their own bodies began and ended began to blur. Touching Esme made Mitty feel as though she was being touched back. She followed her instincts, searching the parts of Esme she’d only nervously hovered above until now, initiating acts she’d imagined solely in her most unfettered dreams. She felt like an explorer—starving and curious—and wondered briefly if this was how the boys felt too, moved not by expertise but by ambition, a confidence in their own will to discover.

“I’m pretty tired,” she said instead. She faced Mitty and gave her a painfully polite smile. “Give me a hug?” She opened her arms and Mitty, unable to muster an argument, stepped into them, resting her chin on Esme’s shoulder. She swallowed, attempting to drown out her urge to cry. Esme pulled away while Mitty was still holding on. And though the time in which Mitty’s arms were wrapped around her waist was brief, those few seconds felt like everything Mitty needed to know. It was suddenly too obvious, their asymmetry, one of them trying to stay and one already letting go.

At night, she fixated, pulverized by her own manic doubt. She tried to remind herself of all the things she hated about Esme. The fact that she didn’t have a sense of humor, too consumed by her own dilemmas to laugh at someone else’s jokes. She was rude to her mother, pushing out her lower jaw and hissing, What? whenever she answered the phone. And the third tooth from the center was shorter than the rest and yellow, like an ugly runt. Mitty pushed herself into anger, the only protected place she could float for a while. And when she finally surrendered to sleep, her dreams were nebulous and agonizing, only to wake up in the morning and face it all again.

“But there’s blood.” Bethel nods to the red pool collecting in the warped basin of the cutting board.

“They make that, too,” he says. “Heme, it’s called. Soy leghemoglobin.” He slaps the beef back down and begins dicing it. “But that’s an important observation, Bethel.” He lifts up his knife and wipes his finger against the flat side, coating his skin in red. “What I find the most interesting is that, even if people claim they’re disgusted by eating a dead animal, they still want to replicate the experience. That’s why people order meatless burgers, right? They don’t want pea protein. They want cow. But they still want to feel like good people. And so, in order to convince anyone to buy it, we have to reassure them of their own morality, while also allowing them to briefly believe that what they’re eating is real. And in order to do that? We have to give it blood.”

“What about it exactly isn’t ethical?” she says softly, attempting to cloak her timidness in a naïve curiosity.

Sebastian’s eyes trace her face, like he’s searching for whatever might make her qualified to have this conversation. “Well, don’t get me wrong. It’s fascinating. And groundbreaking,” he says. “But anytime humans are looking for a shortcut, ethics go out the window.” He pauses, allowing the question to remain unanswered. “That’s why, if you want to get anything done, you have to distance yourself from ethics.”

“Then how do all these guys justify doing it?” Bethel asks, crunching ice with her back teeth on each harsh syllable.

He stands and begins collecting their empty glasses. “By knowing that everyone else is unethical, too.”

The difference, one that would take years for Mitty to realize, was that Patricia had lived long enough to know that there is always somewhere else to go. That life, despite its brutal corners, is actually quite forgiving as long as you continue to move through it. But how could she expect her daughter, who had existed for less than two decades, who had only ever lived in the same small suburb, to know this? Mitty’s perspective was, like her, small and bordered.