From the other side of the couch, she told Kitty, “You’re just jealous of all of them. You would love to be as desperate and slutty as any of them. You’d love to do anything but sit on this brown couch and grind your teeth and pick at your toenails and work for your father. Anything. You’re just too slow and sad to do anything about it.” And then Odilie got up, leaving Kitty’s jaw hanging open.

Odilie went to her room to think about Peri.

She knew this feeling, of course. It was like a crush, waiting for a boy to text her after a date. She wasn’t exactly attracted to Peri. It was more than that, more powerful, more all consuming. She wanted to be in Peri’s presence. She wanted to bask in her halo. She wanted her attention, to see the curve of her lips when she smiled. She wanted to feel Peri’s innate confidence swathing her like a quilt around her shoulders.

On day four Odilie began to worry. She gnashed on her gum, began to bite at her cuticles. She replayed the entire night, all the way through to their time on the beach, their confessions, Peri’s tale about her childhood. Had Odilie said something wrong? Had she made some kind of slight that Peri took as judgmental? Did Peri wake up the next morning and wonder why she had wasted her time on someone like Odilie?

She was distracted at work. She called in the wrong medication for a patient. She mixed up schedules, overbooking and underbooking. She’d stopped listening to the hygienist, Elena; zoned out during their morning chats. “What is up with you?” Elena asked as they shared a Krispy Kreme doughnut.

“Nothing. Just a bad period,” Odilie answered. She wasn’t hungry. And every time she gazed at the doughnut’s crumbs she thought about Peri, her rail-thin arms, the way her waist and hips and thighs could fit between two cars parked bumper to bumper.

Life seemed gray suddenly, as much of a cliché as that was. Kitty wasn’t talking to her, resorting to passive-aggressive jabs like leaving one bowl in the sink unwashed. Odilie didn’t care about that, though.

The small joys of the sun on her back, the feel of her sheets after a day of work, they were all tinged with the memory of Peri, of her silence. Peri had suddenly become everything fun and adventurous and bright in Odilie’s small, small world.

And then, on the seventh day, Odilie’s phone pinged and she saw that name, the name she had been dreaming about seeing on her phone for what felt like years.

Let’s get together again soon! Xx.

And a comment on one of her Instagram posts.