“Girl,” I said, “your body is fire. Now turn back and put this leg forward—” I knew where to find her angles; they were my angles, too. “Yeah, like that and tip your hip, yeah, good.” I shot her again. She smiled. For an instant, I saw my little girl friend and every character she had played. “Gorgeous,” I said, and Leah’s mouth parted, wanting, like mine. Abruptly, I lowered the phone.

“All done,” I said and opened the images to see how she looked, angled right, directed. But in the pictures I’d taken, every bone protruded, every hollow held a shadow. I’d thought our angles were the same; I’d been wrong and didn’t want to show her. But she came over to see and what choice did I have? I turned the screen and felt her change. She gave a little sigh. “Wow,” she said, and I wondered if she’d cry.

“I look—I look kind of great.” She took the phone from me without asking, pinched the screen. “AirDrop me?”

I TOOK SERVICE roads home, blinking extra to cut the painkillers’ haze. We passed under I-10, a lit-up billboard Leah craned to see. Pregnant? Scared? next to a shadow of a crying woman, face in her hands. Leah said, “You know those crisis pregnancy centers are run by anti-abortionists, right? Like, under the guise of helping women.”

I said, “Gross.”

“They’re considered offensive in Australia,” she said, and I flared inside, like she thought they weren’t offensive here, too. Like she thought her leaving, her political awakening, college education, had made her wise. “I used to only care about animals,” she said. “But then I realized women are endangered too. The world is so fucked.”

“Totally,” I said, “the oceans are dying.” I pulled in the driveway and sing-songed here we are, my voice high and chipper. Leah opened her door. The outside air had cooled.

“Maybe it’ll storm and you’ll get stuck,” I said and wondered if that was what I wanted. Leah didn’t answer. She let me carry her bag, followed me up the porch. I took a minute finding the right key, then pushed open the door, walked in ahead of her. She stopped on the threshold.

“It smells the same,” she said. “Essence of you and Naurene.”

“What do we smell like?”

“Bounce dryer sheets. I made my mom buy them for a while after we moved.” She came all the way in, stood slumped in the kitchen like it defeated her to return.

“That’s so cute,” I said, searching my brain for similar proof of my love for her, the trauma of its loss. I thought so often of our childhood closeness. But after she left, I was the one who had ghosted, and now that we were together, closeness felt superficial and abstract, a viral aphorism, a meme.