It was hard, sometimes, putting up with the town’s cheerful, half-assed shtick, but most days the alternatives seemed worse. New York was a nightmare of pointless ambition, people waiting in endless lines for nothing. In Boston they didn’t bother with lines—they just jammed as many white people as possible into anyplace showing the Pats. She’d spent her early years in Princeton, with its liberal old-money complacency, dominated by “good families” who produced “good kids,” most of them zapped awful by divorce and private school. They’d never get her back there alive, at least not for more than a long weekend. She’d spent her childhood wanting to be from somewhere else, anywhere that didn’t draw a wince. Of course, name recognition was the whole appeal for her mother—when people asked where she lived, she could just say, “Princeton,” and they’d know she was a person of wealth and taste, whereas when people asked Leslie, she said, “Jersey,” then, if pressed, “Hopewell Valley, in Mercer County? Near Princeton?” Which was true—one good thing about New Jersey was that there were so many townships and villages and what have you that you could always just claim the nearest one that appealed. In Montana, the categories were broader. You were from Back East, Around Here, or California. It was best to not be from California.

She moved on to copyediting the arts section, her favorite part of the job. She hoped that if she hung around the office making snappy comments for long enough, she might someday be allowed to write a film or concert review. The current movie critic, Amy Freitch, trashed almost everything she saw in a biting, faux-naïve voice, saving her praise, it seemed, only for films about martial arts and animals. Leslie had gone camping with her once, and they’d taken mushrooms and read tarot cards. Amy claimed to know how to do it, but seemed to be making things up as she went along, possibly because she was hallucinating too much to interpret what the cards portended, probably just because she thought it was funny. Nevertheless, she’d predicted a hard year for Leslie, which had proved accurate. But wasn’t every year a hard year? Even a good year took a lot out of you.