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My name is Emily, and I like to fuck. October 21, 2018. The date sat on my phone like a badge of honor and regret. A notification pinged me at 6pm—a memory resurrected by whatever smug algorithm catalogs my worst decisions. I was at nineteen, half-crouched in a handicap stall with my hair a catastrophe and a pink thong in my hand like some sacrament. I tapped the picture until it blurred, because there’s a kind of shame that only comes when the past starts sending gifts. Divine comedy was a force. I stuffed the phone in my pocket, but only when I noticed my therapist was staring at me. Cynthia, that was her name. I already loathed her. “Sorry,” I gave her a weak smile. “What were we talking about?” She cleared her throat. “The summer you turned seventeen.” “Right, yeah, it’s not like trauma,” I dragged, “it’s more of a coming-of-age thing, kind of ridiculous.” She smiled that little neutral smile I was starting to hate. I knew she was waiting for me to go on, so I did. “The summer before senior year. My friends and I decided we needed a rebrand. Like, spiritually.” She asked what that meant. I told her I didn’t know—that we were bored, I guess. We wanted to look new. Everyone in our town looked like they’d been copy-pasted from a Target ad. So, we met up at this gas station on the edge of town, the one that always smelled faintly like hot dogs and car exhaust and decided to bleach our hair in the bathroom. That’s the part I kept insisting was funny. There were four of us: me, Jess, Lanie, and Brooke. We’d stolen a couple of boxes of drugstore bleach from CVS, shoved them in Brooke’s knockoff designer tote, and thought we were basically revolutionaries. Brooke had the kind of face that made adults forgive her for everything. She said she wanted to look like Courtney Love, but we were seventeen, so we looked more like raccoons with head injuries. The bathroom had flickering fluorescent lights that made everyone look like they’d been lightly embalmed. The floor was sticky with whatever they used to clean up gasoline spills, and the air was so thick with chemical smells that my eyes watered before we even opened the bleach. Lanie volunteered to go first. She said she trusted us, which was stupid. Jess mixed the powder and developer in a Big Gulp cup because we didn’t bring a bowl, and I stirred it with one of those long plastic straws. It fizzed up like a science experiment. The fumes hit so hard I started coughing, and Brooke yelled that I was killing the vibe. I picked up the scissors as Lanie was hyping herself up. They were the cheap ones with neon handles I bought a year ago because I used to think self-harm could be artisanal. There was a girl at school last week with bangs that cut her face like a thrift-store ad, and I’d been pining for those blunt edges on my own forehead. A haircut was an easy kind of violence: instantaneous, irreversible, and thrilling in the way a minor sabotage can be. I held my breath and cut. Closing my eyes to do anything that might turn out well was my signature move. When I opened them, the hair at the middle of my forehead lay in jagged flags—shorter than I’d intended, oddly triumphant. I looked like a child who had been interrupted mid-meltdown. Maybe it was French. Maybe it was avant-garde self-sabotage. I told myself it was alternative, high fashion. When I turned around, Brooke laughed so hard she almost peed. After I ruined myself, we smeared the bleach into Lanie’s hair with our bare hands. None of us thought about gloves. The stuff burned our skin and left these weird white fingerprints on our palms for days. Lanie kept saying it tingled, then itched, then hurt. We told her to shut up and wait, “pain is beauty,” right? Brooke said that as if it were scripture. Maybe it was at the time. I remember watching her scalp turn this shiny red through the foam. Her hair started smoking a little. I told her it was normal. I don’t know why. The smell was unreal. Peroxide and something metallic. It clung to my clothes for days, even after washing them. I can still smell it if I think too hard. Like disinfectant and rot had a baby. When we rinsed it out in the sink, her hair came out in clumps. Not funny clumps, like, actual bald patches. The drain got clogged instantly. She started crying, and I remember saying, “Don’t be dramatic, it’ll grow back.” I thought that was helpful. That’s when she threw up. Just leaned over and puked right into the sink, all over the hair. The smell of vomit mixed with the bleach, and for a second, I thought I was going to pass out. I told Cynthia this part too, like I was describing something that happened in a movie I liked. I even laughed a little. She didn’t. Buzzkill. I kept talking because silence felt worse, suffocating maybe. “We all looked terrible,” I deadpanned. “Our hair turned this color that wasn’t even blonde, it was like…raw meat that had been left in the sun too long, except Lanie, who looked like a molting bird. But we took pictures anyway. It’s funny looking back.” I told her that the picture is still somewhere on my old Facebook page—me holding a cigarette I didn’t light, Brooke flipping off the camera, Lanie with her head down. You can’t see her face. Just the back of her scalp, red and raw. I said it was funny because we thought we were reinventing ourselves. I said it was funny because none of us had anything to rebel against except boredom. I said it was funny because we thought destruction looked like freedom. I kept saying it was funny, and it was until Cynthia wrote something in her notes. “Let’s go a bit deeper into that,” she encouraged, putting the pen down. After that summer, everyone stopped talking to each other. No big fight or anything, it just unraveled. Lanie started wearing a beanie all the time and transferred schools. Jess got a fake ID and started dating a guy who worked at a vape shop. Brooke and I drifted apart. She started running cross country, got really into smoothies, and God. I dyed my hair black and told people it was natural. Sometimes I still dream about that bathroom. I see the flickering light, the mirror crusted with chemical spit and dried soap, the wet paper towels on the floor. There’s this moment where everything’s bright white, before the smoke, before the smell turns sour, and I think maybe that’s the moment I started mistaking pain for control. Cynthia asked me if I blamed myself. “For what?” “You mentioned she lost her hair,” she explained. I told her it wasn’t permanent, as if that made it okay. I told her Lanie’s hair grew back fine, probably healthier than before. I told her we were just kids. Then I told her about how, later that week, my mom found the bleach stains on my clothes and slapped me across the face. She said I was trying to ruin myself. I don’t think I said that out loud. But Cynthia probably heard it anyway. When you’re that age, you think identity is something you can just choose, like a playlist. That summer, everything was curated: our MySpace bios, our eyeliner, our breakdowns. I used to post song lyrics about heartbreak even though I’d never been in love. I thought being broken made me interesting. Brooke once said she wanted people to look at her and think she’s been through something. I remember thinking: me too. That’s what the bleach was about. Proof of pain, but make it pretty. After we did our hair, we walked to the diner across the parking lot. It was one of those 24-hour places with cracked red booths and a jukebox that only played songs from before we were born. The waitress looked at us like we were contagious. Lanie kept scratching her scalp, muttering that it burned. Brooke told her to stop touching it, that she was ruining the “look.” I remember dipping my fries in coffee just to see if I could stand the taste. Jess took a photo of the ketchup bottle and posted it with the caption “life imitates art.” She got three likes. I told Cynthia all of this. Every little irrelevant thing. She wrote something in her notebook and nodded. I imagined the words she was writing: Patient deflects. Patient fixates on sensory detail. Patient gets stuck on minor events. I thought about telling her that the bleach smell lingered for days. That my pillow smelled like it, and every time I turned over at night, I’d get a whiff and think of that bathroom, the way the air felt heavy with something I couldn’t undo. But that felt too earnest, so I just said, “Anyway, that was the first time I ever did something irreversible.” “What’s that mean to you?” She looked smug as she said it. I bristled at her, “Nothing. It’s just hair.” We were obsessed with transformation that year. Everyone was. Tumblr thinspo, Lana Del Rey sadness, fake rebellion packaged for girls who still lived with their parents. I tried to remember what music was playing that night, but it all blurs together. Maybe Arctic Monkeys, maybe The 1975. Something about love and cigarettes and not caring. I remember feeling outside my body, like I was watching a movie where I played the role of someone cooler than me. “Have you talked to any of them since?” Cynthia had started tapping her right foot. “No.” She asked if I’d want to. I thought about Jess and Lanie. About finding them online, seeing how they’d aged. Maybe they all became normal. Maybe they have kids now. Maybe their daughters will bleach their hair in gas station bathrooms one day, thinking it’s a rite of passage. “I don’t know,” I finally lied, “there’s nothing to say.” She smiled again. I couldn’t tell if it was pity or professionalism. Probably both. Because every time I think about that summer, I feel this phantom heat on my scalp, like the bleach is still there, eating through the hair, the skin, the skull. Like I’m still in that bathroom, pretending to be fearless, while everything tender in me starts to dissolve. When I got home that night, I Googled “bleach burn scalp recovery.” The first result said, chemical trauma to the skin can cause long-term sensitivity. I closed my laptop. Then I stood in the bathroom mirror and tried to picture myself at seventeen, the me who thought suffering looked glamorous. I wanted to tell her she was wrong, that she didn’t need to destroy herself to be seen. But even now, I don’t know if that’s true. ✦✦✦ By the second session, I’d figured out how to sit. Not like a normal person—normal people slump, or cross their legs, or check their phones, but in a way that made me look open but not too open. Relaxed, but not like I was trying to prove it. My posture was a performance. I think she knew that. Cynthia’s office smelled faintly of lemons and carpet cleaner. Everything in it was some shade of beige: The walls, the couch, the mug she drank from. Even her clothes were beige. I remember thinking she looked like she’d been printed on the wrong paper setting. “How have you been since last week?” She asked. “Fine. I’ve been thinking of the bleach again.” “And what did you think about it?” I sighed, watched her clock tick down. “Mostly that I sounded like an idiot.” She wrote something in her notebook. “I remembered more, though, after the fact,” I added. She smiled that therapist smile again, encouraging, empty, and said, “Go on.” So I did. We called it The Grape House. Not because of the color, it wasn’t purple or anything, but because of the smell. Brooke’s mom sold candles from one of those pyramid-scheme catalogs, so the entire house reeked of artificial fruit. The kitchen smelled like grape soda; the living room smelled like grape cough syrup. You could practically taste the sweetness in the air. Brooke didn’t notice it anymore. She said the scent was “homey.” I thought it smelled like a hangover. The Grape House was where everyone went when they had nowhere else to be. Her mom was always out hosting candle parties or “networking,” which meant we could smoke in the basement. I told Cynthia that part, and she wrote something down. I said, “You don’t need to write that—I wasn’t really doing anything bad.” “You don’t need to justify your memories.” I raised my hands in surrender. “I’m not justifying, I’m clarifying.” Anyway, the Grape House was sticky. Literally. Every surface had a thin film of wax or soda or something human. The couch cushions were stained with every shade of nail polish. There were always half-empty cans of Monster on the floor, and every time you picked one up, you had to shake it first to make sure it wasn’t full of cigarette butts. We’d sit around watching bad horror movies and pretending we weren’t afraid. Lanie brought over her older brother’s vape pen once, and we passed it around like communion. It tasted like burnt strawberries. “You probably had a house like that growing up,” I told her. “Maybe.” She said, and sipped at her boring mug, “Tell me more about yours.” “It wasn’t mine. That’s the thing.” That house felt like it belonged until it didn’t. There was one night that sticks. I told her this was the funny part. We were still seventeen by then, old enough to drive, not old enough to go anywhere interesting. It was raining, so we were stuck inside. Brooke put on this playlist called “Sad but Hot” and said some bullshit about a rebrand. Lanie rolled her eyes. Jess was trying to teach herself tarot, even though she only owned half a deck. We’d been drinking something Brooke’s mom called “wedding wine,” which I’m pretty sure came from the clearance bin at Walmart. Sweet, purple, barely alcoholic. It matched the air. At some point, Brooke’s boyfriend came over. He was older, twenty maybe, with a car that smelled like Febreze and weed. He looked like every boy who ever broke a promise and got away with it. She made us promise to “be cool,” which meant to act like we didn’t notice she was nervous. I remember sitting on the floor, pretending to scroll through my phone, listening to them make out on the couch. I don’t know why I stayed. Maybe because leaving would’ve looked like judgment, and staying made me part of it. The kissing noises were so wet they echoed. Lanie kept giggling into her sleeve. Jess pretended to fall asleep. I remember wanting to laugh, but then Brooke said, “Stop,” in this small, shaky voice. And then she said it again, louder. And he didn’t. I remember how my blood pounded in my ears. How I don’t remember standing up and going to the closet where I knew her mom kept a shotgun. Cynthia stopped writing. I told her, “It’s not what you think.” “What do I think?” Her brows raised a bit. “You think it was bad. That I shot him or something. It wasn’t that. Not really. She laughed after.” I waited for her to say something. She didn’t. “I mean, she laughed after,” I repeated. She paused, stuck on a thought before settling. “And how did that make you feel?” I said, “like I was supposed to laugh, too.” We never talked about it again. The assault, nor the fact that I pointed a gun I didn’t own at a boy I didn’t know. Brooke acted normally the next day, so we did too. I think that’s how friendship worked back then, mutual silence as a form of loyalty. But I remember her house feeling different after that. Like the smell turned sour overnight. Every candle she lit just made it worse. That was the last time we all hung out there together. The Grape House got quieter after that—less music, fewer people. I heard later that Brooke’s mom stopped selling candles and started drinking the “wedding wine” herself. I don’t know if that’s true. Small towns invent stories the way people invent excuses. Cynthia asked what happened to Brooke. “She moved away,” I said too quickly. “Where to?” I shrugged, “I don’t know.” Then I told her something I hadn’t said out loud before: that I sometimes look for her online. Not on Facebook, she deleted hers years ago, but on people search sites, or random Instagram tags, hoping to see her face at a wedding or something. I told Cynthia that I imagine Brooke got better. That she’s married now, maybe with a dog, maybe laughing for real. She said, “You imagine she’s happy.” “Yeah, I mean, I imagine she’s not me.” The memory always ends with that smell. Grape and sugar and something rotten underneath. I remember falling asleep on her couch that night, my hair sticking to the vinyl, my throat burning from the sweetness in the air. When I woke up, there were wax drips hardened on my arm like scars. I told Cynthia about that part, too. She asked why I remembered something so small. “I guess because that’s the thing that stayed.” When I got home after that session, I couldn’t get the smell out of my nose. I washed my hands three times. Still there. I lit one of those cheap vanilla candles I keep for emergencies, but it just made everything worse. I thought about Brooke again, her face in the candlelight, her lipstick smudged, her laughter trembling. The way she’d say “It’s fine” over and over. I wondered if she still smelled like grapes when she cried. Cynthia said we’d talk next week about themes of control. She said it like it was a class I could pass or fail. I wanted to tell her that control is a myth you invent when you’re scared of entropy. That girlhood is a kind of illness that never fully leaves your system. That even now, I buy cheap candles sometimes just to test myself, to see if I can stand the smell. But I didn’t say any of that. I just nodded and said, “Sure. Control sounds fun.” When I left, the receptionist smiled at me and said, “See you next time.” I smiled back, but my reflection in the glass door looked like it didn’t mean it. On the drive home, I opened my windows to let the air in. Somewhere down the street, someone was burning leaves, and for a second, it almost covered the phantom sweetness clinging to my skin. Almost. ✦✦✦ By the third session, I’d stopped pretending to like her. Not in an obvious way, I still smiled, still answered questions, but the act of pretending started to feel like holding in a sneeze. My face hurt. She must’ve noticed. She started every session with, “How have you been feeling this week?” in the same soft tone people use when asking about a dying pet. So that time, I said, “Hungry.” She smiled politely. “For attention, obviously.” That one got her. She laughed—quietly, but still. I felt like I’d won something. “Would you like to tell me more about that? The hunger?” She asked. I said, “Sure. I was nineteen and working at a nail salon. That should explain everything.” The salon was called Polish Me Pretty. Pink neon sign, bad pun, strip-mall location between a vape store and a payday loan center. It smelled like acetone and old gossip. I got the job because I lied on the application and said I was twenty-one. The owner, Kim, didn’t check IDs as long as you showed up on time and didn’t steal polish. I told Cynthia that. She said, “What drew you to that job?” “Money.” She nodded twice. “And what kept you there?” “Masochism.” She wrote something in her notebook. I leaned back on the couch and said, “Kidding.” But I wasn’t. The first day I walked in, I felt like I’d entered a different ecosystem. Women in smocks moved like surgeons, holding hands that didn’t belong to them. The air shimmered with dust from acrylic filings; it looked like snow if you squinted, or maybe fallout. My job was to sweep. That’s it. Sweep, take payments, refill the little bottles of lotion by the sinks. But I watched everything. There was something hypnotic about it, the rhythm of the drills, the hiss of acetone, the constant chatter about men, rent, weight. Everyone was always talking about weight. The women there were older, mostly in their thirties or forties, but they wore youth like an accessory: fake lashes, tight jeans, glittery phones. One of them, Lidia, used to say, “Pain is the rent for beauty.” I told her I’d heard that before. She said, “Then you didn’t pay enough attention.” I started biting my nails again that year. It wasn’t stress exactly, more like compulsion. Something about being surrounded by perfect, glossy hands made me want to ruin mine. The skin around my thumbs was always red and raw, and I’d hide my hands when customers came in. One day, Kim caught me doing it and slapped my hand lightly, like I was a kid. She told me, “You want to be pretty, you have to respect the product.” I laughed. I thought it was a joke. It wasn’t. I told Cynthia that, and she asked how it made me feel. “Like a product.” She asked if I quit after that. “No, I started painting my nails instead.” It became a ritual for me, brushing on the color, watching it dry, resisting the urge to ruin it. I’d sit in my crappy apartment, breathing in the fumes, feeling a little high from the polish remover. It was the only time my hands looked calm. I used to imagine someone noticing them, holding them, saying something like, you’ve got nice fingers. No one ever did. At the salon, we played Top 40 radio on loop. The same six songs every day. Customers would hum along without realizing it. There was one who came every Friday like clockwork—Mrs. D, we called her. She was old enough to be my grandmother but wore crop tops and lip gloss that smelled like watermelon. She’d sit down, sigh dramatically, and say, “Make me new.” I loved that. Make me new. Like we were surgeons of the soul. Once, she told me her husband had stopped touching her years ago. She said it so casually I almost missed it. She was picking lint off her purse when she said it, like it didn’t matter. Then she smiled at her reflection in the nail dryer and said, “But look at me now.” I told the therapist that part, and she said, “You seem to remember her vividly.” “Yeah, she tipped well.” But I did remember her. Her perfume was too sweet, and when she left, the smell lingered like regret. The worst part of the job was the noise. The drills, the gossip, the low hum of the fluorescent lights. By noon, my brain would start to buzz. I’d get home and hear phantom whirring in my ears. Once, a customer fainted from the fumes. We opened the door, fanned her with magazines, and Kim said, “She’s fine.” The woman woke up and apologized for making a scene. That’s what I remember most: everyone always apologizing. For being late, for sweating, for crying, for having opinions. It was like womanhood came with a built-in apology script. I think I started absorbing that without realizing it. I began saying sorry for things that weren’t mine to own. Sorry for bumping into tables. Sorry for running out of lotion. Sorry for existing too loudly. By the time I quit, I could say “sorry” in five different tones, and none of them meant it. Cynthia asked why I left the salon. I didn’t look at her. “Because I realized I was turning into them.” “Them?” She asked. I said, “The ones who kneel at the footbath.” Then I added, “That sounded smarter in my head.” She smiled. “It sounded honest.” The last day I worked there, Kim gave me a free manicure. She said it was a thank-you, but it felt more like a ritual burial. I picked a color called Cherry Bite. It looked dark and expensive under the lights, but once I stepped outside, it turned cheap and plasticky. She held my hand steady while she painted. Her hands were warm. She said, “You’ll go far, you’ve got good posture.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I nodded anyway. When she finished, she blew gently on my nails, and for some reason, that almost made me cry. Maybe it was the intimacy of it, the idea that someone was helping me dry. I bit off the polish that same night. One nail at a time. It tasted bitter, chemical, wrong. I swallowed most of it. Cynthia flinched a little at that part. She asked if I got sick. “No, but my tongue turned red.” She asked why I did it. “I don’t know. Habit, probably.” Her mouth pressed into a thin line before talking again. “You called it a ritual earlier.” “You write too much,” I told her. We both laughed, but I think she heard the edge in it. I told her it wasn’t about pain, not really. It was about control. Having something small and ugly that was just mine. The world felt too big, too slippery. That year, before I quit, I went through this phase where I’d paint over the bitten parts with glitter polish so no one would notice. It worked, kind of. From a distance, they looked fine. Up close, they looked infected. That’s the trick with most things. Distance forgives decay. I told her about the day a customer looked at me and said, “You’ve got a nice smile. You should use it more.” I smiled on command, like a dog. He tipped a dollar. After he left, I went to the back room and chewed off all my polish again. Lidia walked in, saw the mess, and said, “You girls think being broken makes you deep.” “You think it makes you interesting,” I snapped back. We didn’t talk for the rest of the day. When I finished telling her all that, Cynthia sat back and said, “You describe a lot of sensory detail. Smells, textures, tastes. But not much emotion.” “Sensory details are emotions,” I retorted. “They’re what you use instead of them,” she said. I didn’t like that. I told her maybe she was projecting. She said, “That’s possible.” Which made it worse, because I wanted her to fight me. “You ever work a job that made you feel like an object?” I asked, picking at my cuticles. She gave me a simple yes. “And did you quit?” “Eventually.” We stared at each other for a second too long. The air smelled faintly of the lemon cleaner again. I thought about the salon, how the smell of acetone could make you feel clean and dirty at the same time. How it stripped everything down, even the memory of who you were before. I didn’t tell her this part, but sometimes, when I’m anxious, I still run my tongue over my teeth and imagine they’re nails. Smooth, breakable, mine. Sometimes I think I can still taste the polish. Bitter and sweet, like control. ✦✦✦ By the fourth session, I’d decided I was done trying to be a good patient. I crossed my legs the other way, leaned back on the couch, and asked, “You ever feel like therapy makes you worse?” She smiled in that trained, noncommittal way that means keep going. I kept going. “Because lately I’ve been remembering too much. And it’s boring. Like reruns of my own failure.” “What came up this week?” She asked lightly. “Music.” I’d been twenty-two, working nights at a grocery store that stayed open twenty-four hours even though no one ever came after midnight. My job was to restock the shelves and pretend to care about expiration dates. The store’s sound system played the same ten pop songs, all about survival and dancing through heartbreak. I used to sing along under my breath, which made the security cameras look like they were watching a silent music video of my slow decline. After work, a few of us would sit in the parking lot, chain-smoking and eating expired pastries. We called ourselves the Choir. There was me, there was Lex, who had a baby she never talked about, and there was Cole, who played bass in a band that never performed anywhere. The three of us looked like we’d been scraped off the floor of the same bad decision. We’d sit on the curb, drinking warm gas-station wine from a paper bag, harmonizing badly to whatever song was stuck in our heads. It was always something stupid and somehow religious. The irony wasn’t lost on us. “You called yourselves the Choir,” Cynthia clarified. “Yeah,” I snorted, “because we were holy.” She smiled. I think she was starting to get my sense of humor, which felt like a small tragedy. That summer, the air always smelled like asphalt and rot. The dumpsters behind the store oozed this syrupy chemical smell, like fruit going bad under bleach. I kind of loved it. Lex said the smell made her nauseous. I told her nausea was a sign of sensitivity, which was secretly a compliment. We all pretended we weren’t waiting for something to happen, something cinematic, redemptive, but the truth was, we were bored. Dangerous kind of bored. That’s when the drugs started. I told Cynthia I didn’t remember how it started. She said, “But you remember the music.” She was right. I remember Cole’s phone lighting up with that blue glow, his playlist called Funeral Disco. I remember the pills rattling in the bottle like cheap maracas. We used to split them, our version of the body of Christ. One for the stress, one for the courage, one for the road. I told her I never liked the taste, too chalky. I’d swallow and chase it with Diet Coke, the fizz making my eyes water. She asked what the pills were. I told her, “various.” She wrote that down. I hated that she did that. It’s strange, what sticks in your memory. Not the overdose itself, I can’t even tell you what song was playing, but the small, stupid things: The fluorescent hum of the store sign flickering “24” in the dark. The way Lex’s hair smelled like burnt sugar. How my reflection in the window looked kind of pretty, in a sickly way. We’d been sitting on the hood of Cole’s car, feet on the bumper, the night humming around us. Someone said, “Let’s take more.” Maybe me, maybe not. The sky was this weird purple bruise color. After that, everything slowed down, like I was watching myself from far away. I remember thinking: I should write this down, it’ll make a good story someday. “And did you?” I looked at Cynthia’s beige boots. “Not until now.” She nodded. I hate that nod. The go on nod. The this is progress nod. Here’s the thing: I didn’t die. That’s the boring part. I just stopped being interesting for a while. Lex said later that I passed out and she panicked, slapped me, and poured water on my face. Cole ran for help but tripped on the curb and split his lip. They didn’t call an ambulance because none of us had insurance. I woke up in the back seat, choking on the taste of bile and old frosting. Lex was crying. I told her to stop because she looked ugly when she cried. I told the therapist that version, the funny, deflective version. “What about the other version?” She asked. “What other version?” I gave her a dumb smile. Cynthia had the trump card. “The one where you almost didn’t wake up.” “That one doesn’t photograph well,” I said. She didn’t smile. That was the first time she didn’t. “You tell it like a story someone else lived,” she pointed out. “That’s the only way it stays funny.” After that night, we stopped calling ourselves the Choir. Lex quit the store. Cole joined the army, then un-joined six months later. I stayed. I liked the night shift. The quiet hum of refrigeration felt honest. Sometimes, on breaks, I’d walk the aisles and rearrange things, soup cans in height order, cereal boxes by color. It made me feel like I could organize chaos. Like maybe that’s what control looked like: pretending the world could line up neatly if you worked hard enough. I told Cynthia that, too. She asked, “Do you think the overdose changed you?” “Define changed.” “Did it make you want to live differently?” She clarified. “It made me crave sugar.” She didn’t laugh this time either. The thing is, I did start eating more sweets after that. Cupcakes, donuts, jelly beans from the impulse racks. I think part of me wanted to fill the hollow space that night left behind. I gained ten pounds, dyed my hair a nauseating pink, started pretending I was healthy. But every now and then, I’d catch my reflection and think about the way Lex’s mascara had smeared when she thought I was dead. It looked like wings. Once, during a late shift, a customer came in singing softly to herself. Her voice was thin but steady. She was maybe fifty, wearing a name tag from another store. She hummed “Hallelujah.” I joined in, without thinking. For a few seconds, we were just two women in the fluorescent cathedral of aisle six, singing a song about mercy we didn’t really believe in. After she left, I cried into the freezer door. The glass fogged up, and I traced a cross on it with my finger. I didn’t tell Cynthia that part. Some things sound too cinematic, and I hate when life sounds like a metaphor. But I thought about it later, how maybe the Choir wasn’t dead, just reduced. Maybe the songs got smaller until they fit inside me, little hums under my breath when I couldn’t sleep. “You circle around something but never land,” Cynthia said. “Land,” I repeated, “birds die that way.” She wrote something again. I tried to peek, but she turned the notebook slightly. “You’re very protective of your secrets,” I said. “So are you.” By the end of the session, I felt strange, hollow, and overexposed, like a peeled fruit. She asked if I wanted to stop there. “Sometimes I think about that night and feel proud,” I told her. She asked why. “Because it proved I could go close to the edge and still come back.” “Do you ever worry you might want to go there again?” I thought about that. I pornographically rehearsed the moment where I could’ve been entirely different than I am, than I was: clean, precise, unfuckable, and inexplicably satisfied. It’s a fantasy not worth imagining. Finally, I truly looked at Cynthia. An infinity scarf and mousy sweater barely hiding the aged scars on her inner wrists, and I knew whatever was in that damn mug had gone cold. “Only when it’s quiet.”