There’s an orange bottle next to the wine. I open it, shake a circle into my palm, pale pink as a contraceptive. I swallow, pick up the remote, scroll sound and color, pause on a home improvement network. A powder blond couple shops for a starter house in North Carolina. They look like real people, with eye bags and muffin tops. But nothing is what it looks like; the show is staged. Still, I watch for a while, top off my glass, drink. Mineral, dank notes of pear and flower. “Dream house,” the woman says. “Man cave,” says the man.

From the bedside table, my phone pings and I reach for it, find its glassy face stacked with notifications. Instagram DMs mostly: sex bots, scam bots and a reporter for Vanity Fair who writes to me often, asking for my story about a man from my past. I swipe away, open my texts, touch the one unread blue dot. “Reminder: your facial procedure at The Aesthetica Center is tomorrow, check in at 6 A.M., reply YES to confirm.”

“YES” I type, and send. The phone makes the sound of zipping and a bot responds, thanking me. I’ve waited months to be here, on the verge of the appointment I just confirmed. That I would cancel now, that I even could, plucks a dreaded cord behind my sternum. Because I have to go through with it. This is my chance. I won’t have another one.

I close the phone, put it face down on my chest and find the remote, pump the volume to drown out my thoughts. One episode ends, a new one begins. A mother and daughter want to flip a house together. Like magic, I watch them turn a total gut-job into a pristine starter home, open concept, with subway tile bathrooms. Fragments of my mother’s voice filter in: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Be the change you want to see. Revise the negative self-talk.

I pick up the phone again, open my photos and examine the picture I took of the girl at the hotel pool, the anxious mother in her background. Frizzy hair and foam noodles. Nothing is what it looks like. Their sameness and skin, my mother’s and mine. Seventeen years ago in Fairy Tale Land, her arm around my waist in front of Fairy Godmother’s Magic Wand Shop.

“Put your tongue behind your teeth when you smile,” I told her. “And one leg in front of the other.” We posed. The camera flashed. The Xanax meets the Vicodin and together they spread out inside me. The woman and girl walk the rooms of their renovated tract house. I dream, as I often do, of meals I didn’t mean to eat, drugs I didn’t mean to swallow, faceless men I didn’t want to fuck. Even in sleep, I open my mouth, and scream.

4.