Her father, though, had said nothing. Was it possible he truly believed she would buy and wear a shirt like that? Did he not see that it was too large on her not by design but because it had once been worn on a bigger body, a male body that had shaped it into its current shape? He had to have. Surely he couldn’t be that clueless.

She imagined him driving to work, thinking about what she might have been doing instead of having dinner with him. She hoped he was. She hoped, too, that his imaginings came close to the truth.

She lifted the collar of the shirt and raised it over her nose. Breathing in, she smelled the faint remnants of pot smoke. She smelled, too, the sweat-musk of Nick’s body mixed with some kind of cheap cologne. She remembered the saltiness of his neck where her lips had grazed the skin, the way his hair had crackled, gel hardened, under her fingers.

Another woman would have sensed all of this in the way she wore Nick’s shirt. Like a high school ring wrapped with yarn to make it fit over a slender finger, the shirt was a trophy, a skin claimed in victory after a victorious hunt. Not that she’d had to beg Nick for it; she’d simply not given it back to him. Made sleepy by the pot and his orgasm, he hadn’t even noticed. She’d left him in his bed with promises to come see him again.

She would keep the promise, she decided. This realization surprised her. She’d intended Nick to be a momentary distraction, a source of irritation to her father and proof that she couldn’t be controlled. But she found that she liked him, or at least liked something about having him at her disposal. If nothing else, he was a source of fairly good pot. She’d taken some of that, too, along with the shirt.

Ultimately he would be a disappointment. They always were. But at least this time she expected nothing. Not like she had with some of the others, even though she should have known better, even though she’d been warned by friends and by her own sense of self-preservation not to get too close. Those hurts had surprised her, caught her off guard and rendered her vulnerable. But this time she knew what she was doing.

She got up and poured what was left of her coffee down the drain. It had left a bitter taste in her throat, and she asked herself why she had insisted on drinking it at all. She didn’t even like coffee. She’d done it hoping to annoy her father, although she couldn’t remember now why she thought something so mundane would raise his ire.

She opened the refrigerator. With the orange juice gone, it contained very little: a carton of half-and-half almost certainly well beyond safe usage, a piece of cheese mummified in plastic wrap, a container of something unpleasant in both appearance and odor that she suspected belonged not in the refrigerator but in her father’s lab. She wondered where he’d gotten the eggs for his failed attempts at eggs in a hat, then decided she didn’t want to know the answer.