But Odilie didn’t want that. She wasn’t entirely sure what she wanted. She had her small joys. She liked the ephemeral joy of eating a good meal, drinking a good drink. The way that almost felt like love. She liked the clean, sterile feeling of the dental office. She liked the dental hygienist, Elena, who worked there with her. She sort of liked her tiny apartment, which she shared with her friend from high school, Kitty. She enjoyed being alone in it, watching Dr. Phil on the afternoons when she wasn’t in class or working at the dental office. She liked the way her sheets felt when she would fall asleep, cool against her skin that always ran hot.

She liked sex when she had it, though her assignations had been few and far between. Most of the time, though, it was never worth more than a handful of hours. It was never worth wrapping herself in another person’s sheets.

Odilie had simply accepted her mundane, uncluttered life. The way she could fade, ever so gently, into the walls of any room she was in, her voice too mousy for large groups, her looks too plain for any sort of wayward glances.

Gumption.

After dinner, while Page was still arguing with their parents, telling them that she had to go to Misty’s slumber party this weekend, despite her grades, because if she didn’t, she wouldn’t be invited to Misty’s birthday party, which was next month, and Misty was going to be a junior so this would set her up for next year, Odilie went into her parents’ bedroom and pulled out the blue, green, and red covered Oxford English Dictionary.

Gumption.

“shrewd or spirited initiative and resourcefulness”

Odilie sat on the bed, marking the page with one burnt finger. This wasn’t her. This woman, Peri, she was seeing something that wasn’t there, an aspirational Odilie that didn’t exist. Odilie traced her finger on her cheek, the same pattern, the same spot that Peri had. What had she seen? What had she seen that Odilie couldn’t see in herself?

The next morning at work Odilie lingered by the front desk, listening to Elena rant about her baby daddy, sharing a Danish. “He dropped off Cayla two hours late last weekend, no text, nothing, then explodes at me when I take fifteen minutes to respond to his text. Every single time. I’m this close to telling him he can’t have weekends anymore.” She prattled on. Usually, Odilie was attentive, a good listener. She was great at being a vessel into which people dropped their secrets. And she liked Elena, her spunkiness, her curly hair that she never straightened. But this morning Odilie’s attention wavered.

“What do you know about the last patient we had yesterday when you were out? Peri? Came in for a teeth whitening. Obviously not a local.”