I didn’t hear my bedroom door open the night I’d skipped out of the Footage Farm early to project the footage from my laptop on one of the blank walls. From his hunched shoulders I could see that Yusuf didn’t know yet that he needed to vent and needed me to coax it out of him. Before he even said anything to me, his eyes brightened at the sight of my doc on the wall.

“What are you working on?”

I’d already told him about my doc on Genesis and her work with nationwide synth rights. Well—the one-liner pitch version, free from the emotional dump truck of I think my friend killed herself and I don’t know that I can ever forgive her.

I filled him in on how this scene I was working on was supposed to be the opening of the doc because it was how she’d wanted everyone to see her, on stage in the glimmering lights and in control. I didn’t know when to cut the scene because I was too close to it and just wanted to watch her perform over and over again.

It was the night she’d hosted a ball during the week that the Supreme Court had mulled over striking down the Defense of Human Sanctity Act. She’d turned an old vaudeville house in Boston into her inaugural ball—she’s elected herself president, her girlfriend Dee had eye-rolled, dressed as a power lesbian Secret Service agent. Genesis had strutted out from the wings of the stage, her hands raised, wearing a prim red pantsuit and a blonde pinned-back wig snatched off some female presidential candidate who bemoaned the loss of American family values. The decaying theater had seemed held up only by filigree and streamers of red, white, and blue, with a banner spray-painted with United Synths of America stuck to the red curtain at the back of the stage.

A look of saintly patriotism had crossed her face while she’d lip synched the start of some long-dead pop star’s riff of the “Star-Spangled Banner” with overdrawn lips that looked so pumped with filler that they might burst. At “And the rocket’s red glare,” a sizzling electronic beat had dive-bombed through the song and I’d pulled in tight on the shot of her painted red nails clutching the waist of her suit. Then, she’d ripped off the tear-away fabric—the crowd collectively losing their shit with rapture below her—to reveal a spangled American flag bikini underneath, glittering with each of her burlesque shimmies, the beaded fringe swaying around her long legs.

“How did you know to zoom in?” Yusuf asked. “With everything that was happening, how did you know that was the right moment?”

He scooted close enough to me on the end of the bed that his breath rustled across my shoulder.

“I’m not sure it is.”