I felt better at Bloomingdale’s. I boarded the escalator, put my phone in selfie mode, star filtered, and filmed myself riding downward, past the Juniors’ floor, the Women’s. I pursed my lips, turned my head one way, then the other, like I was showing off diamond baguettes, not tarnished Target hoops. On the Contemporary floor, I got off and walked in circles. In my normal life I wore jeans, jean shorts in the summer, white T-shirts. Now I wanted something else, a black silk clutch, not designer, but nice enough to look like it. And a black bodycon dress I thought Jake would like. I took them to an empty fitting room.

The dress was tight in the ass, loose in the bust. I spun for the mirror’s flattering light, shot a selfie in the trifold glass. In it I looked bored and thirsty. I turned again, posed again. The mirror was like a door in the wall. Beyond it, a void that sucked me back to the beige JCPenney fitting room where my mom vetoed the crop tops me and Leah were suddenly into.

“These are for older girls, girls,” she said, the tags flipped over in her fingers. It was what she would say of this dress, too. I sent Jake the best selfie I could take. “What up playa ?” I wrote and waited for his response.

The summer of the crop tops was the summer Leah opened, sudden as a night-blooming flower, into a pair of D-cups nobody knew what to do with. I didn’t envy her. I wanted to be modelesque, thin and willowy, pliable. It seemed safer than what Leah had. The year before that, when we both turned ten and she got her period, it had frightened us both. Leah had been particularly avoidant: thick white pads with gashes of blood in the middle littered the bedroom like slain bodies, curled in on themselves and left on the battlefield to rot. The mess was aggressive, as if Leah was angry at someone, something, for butting in on her childhood. But when her breasts came, when men began to honk their horns as we walked the neighborhood, or once, stopped us at Starbucks and offered to buy our Frappuccinos, she indulged them like it was her job. Like indulger of men was a character for her to play, a woman, tinged with rage.

MY PHONE BUZZED. Jake wrote, “Hey giiiiiirl, you should get that, how much? I’ll send.” I craned my arm to find the tag. It tongued my skin, rough when I removed it. The original price was hidden by a sale sticker that said $499.00. Fuck, I whispered, and peeled the sticker off, found $900.00. I was sweating when I took a picture of the high number and sent it to Jake.

“You surrrreeee?” I wrote. Four hundred extra would get me shoes, too, and the black bag.

Another buzz with a notification: Jake Alton has sent you $900.00.