While Patricia served the salad, Kevin told Deedee and Racheline about the psychology of dog walking. (Some of the times Kevin had tried to sneak out after sleeping with Patricia, he’d run into her roommates, still half-awake on the couch. They’d started calling him Mr. No-Overnight, although not to his face.)

Deedee was talking about her ska band’s latest gig, in which as usual the blue-haired, wiry singer exuded so much raw Kathleen Hanna-esque sexuality, nobody would ever guess that she identified as asexual.

Just as Patricia was fetching the bread, Taylor glanced around and said this was a nice apartment. Too bad Patricia might have to move to Portland soon.

“What?” Patricia dropped her mitt on the floor. She was standing by the open oven, so she felt frozen on one side and red hot on the other.

“Oh,” Taylor leaned back, hands raised. “I thought you knew. They’re thinking of sending you to Portland.”

“Who is ‘they’?” Kevin blinked.

“Forget I said anything. I was talking out of school.” Taylor’s smile had vanished, replaced with wide eyes and a clenched jaw. This was so like Taylor: They were so closed off you could barely tell what they were thinking most of the time, but then they would toss out these bombs just to see everyone jump.

Patricia seized the bread with her bare hands. Let it burn her. “This is bullshit. They can’t make me move to Portland.” In Portland, all the young witches lived in one group house, with a curfew, and a few older witches supervised them.

“When were you going to tell me you were moving to Portland?” Kevin said.

“I’m not,” Patricia said, choking and coughing.

“Who’s making you move?” Deedee asked from the sofa, pierced eyebrows raised. “I don’t get it.”

“Please forget I said anything.” Taylor was squirming now. “Let’s just eat.”

Everybody stared at their plates and each other, but nobody said anything. Until Racheline broke the silence.

“Actually, I think you had better explain,” said Racheline, who was older than everyone else and the master tenant on the apartment. “Who are these people, and why are they forcing Patricia to move?” Racheline was a quiet woman, a perennial grad student with wild red hair and a placid round face, but when she decided to assert herself everybody snapped to attention.

Everybody stared at Taylor, including Patricia. “I’m not allowed to say,” Taylor stammered. “Let’s just say Patricia and I both have the same … the same caseworker. And everybody worries about her. Like, she goes off on her own for days. She tries to take everything on herself, and she doesn’t let anyone help her. She needs to let other people in.”

“I let people in.” Patricia felt bloodless. Her ears were ringing. “Right now, this moment, I am interacting with people.” She should have known.