Title Page

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Dedication

For my sisters, Sara and Caroline,
and in memory of Greta Yegyan

No Cops

The ants had gotten in through the shattered bottom half of Leslie’s laptop screen. Now they crawled across her green-and-blue-tinted Word documents and websites one or two at a time, with no discernible pattern or destination. It must have been a hell of a place for an ant, all that glowing landscape to be negotiated, possibly forever. It wasn’t clear whether any ants ever escaped or if they all just died in there. If they were dying, they at least had the decency to do it over in the dark border area of the screen or down in the keyboard, rather than within her line of sight. She was trying to see how long she could go without buying a new computer. The sound of crackling glass every time she opened the screen suggested that the reckoning was nigh.

She was on her front porch, trying to make herself write an email to her ex-boyfriend Marcus, who was, she had just learned, due back in town in a week for an exhibition of his drawings at a local gallery. (Well, exhibition, gallery—his work was being featured in the basement of the camera store in downtown Missoula.) She wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t be worried about running into her, that she no longer had any loose feelings about the breakup, that she thought it would be nice to have a drink, even, if he found himself with some time on his hands. But these thoughts wouldn’t form themselves into coherent sentences on the screen, maybe because she wasn’t sure they were true. She hadn’t forgotten the ugly melodrama of their final months together and she hadn’t forgiven him for going off to Italy for a fellowship without her, like a punk-ass. The worst thing about studying art history was the artists.