“Good God,” Kurt said, clapping a hand over his eyes. “Are you trying to blind us?” He hurried into the bathroom, Madeline trailing behind him.

After the door slammed, Patty could hear Madeline saying, “You didn’t have to be so mean. She’s your sister.”

“Am I not letting her live here for free? She’s six years older than me, for fuck’s sake.”

This had become Patty’s life: a stampede of embarrassment. There was the rhinoceros of breaking her chair in the middle of a poetry reading, the gazelle of sweating through her white blouse on the walk to the post office. Ugliness would have been better. To be ugly was to be a victim of poor fortune, while to be fat was to advertise a failure of willpower. A failure of strength. Patty had only recently learned this, although it was something she had suspected all along, perhaps since she was a little girl and the kids at school had made fun of the obese lunch monitor, Miss Audrey. When it was time to wipe down the tables, nobody wanted to touch the washrags, which, according to third-grade folklore, were made from Miss Audrey’s soiled underwear.

Safe in Kurt’s computer den, which served as her makeshift bedroom, she hugged her pillow. It was technically Bryan’s pillow, but he’d let her keep it, most likely because it smelled like the prescription-strength deodorant she’d started using the summer before. Bryan hated the deodorant. He said it smelled like steel wool, although the fragrance advertised was spring showers.

No more crying, she told herself. Bryan had never liked crying. On the occasion she failed to hold back tears in his company—and there had been many of these occasions, before he kicked her out—he would look away, as if to give her privacy. She was allowed to pee in front of him, but crying was not tolerated.

She blew her nose and then went to the computer to look for jobs, a task that more often than not devolved into a marathon of YouTube videos. Slam poetry was her latest obsession. Here were women even younger than her—twenty-two, sixteen, seven—rhyming about global warming and bulimia and, in the case of the seven year old, why every little girl deserved a pet giraffe. Kurt’s computer chair creaked beneath her as she scooted toward the desk. She had one new e-mail, from Bryan. Her heart quickened. “Hi, Patty. You left your blender here. Do you want it? If not, I will use it. Take care. —Bryan Marconi.”

His last name! And take care? The room closed around her, making her keenly aware of the space she occupied. She could feel her belly cascading before her. Where was her belly button, even? It seemed the very source of her life had disappeared inside her.

Of course it had come to this. A last name, a blender. She had never deserved Bryan, who ran ultramarathons and was the highest paid app programmer at CellCo. Bryan, with his curly hair and that god-damned dimple that materialized when he shaved his beard. Bryan, who’d once been asked to model boxer briefs for Sears.