“You want to help me with the chairs and stuff?” Kim said, finally turning to her.

“Sure.”

Kim was one of the good ones, a seriously noncomplacent person. She struggled openly with the borders of her life. She was writing a memoir about her peripatetic childhood, much of which involved traveling the country in a van with her family, moving between cultish New Age communities in dire poverty. Kim’s rejection of her family was partial and unhappy. She loved them and forgave them in principle but also had to stay away from them and have almost no contact with them whatsoever because most of their interactions triggered major depressive episodes.

Leslie had been at the Rose with Kim one night when Kim got a call from an unknown number. Usually she screened such calls, but she was drunk and expecting to hear from a man she’d recently slept with, so she answered it. Leslie watched as Kim listened in silence for a minute to someone speaking on the other end, and then held down the power button until the phone turned off.

“So that was my father?” she said. “I’m going to need you to hang with me for the rest of the night. Sorry.”

Then they’d gotten ugly drunk—drink-spilling, falling-off-of-barstools, shouting-at-the-TV drunk. Jamie had been there, blessedly, to drive them home, and they’d lain on the hardwood floor of Kim’s apartment, curled up against each other, Kim’s hair in Leslie’s face.

“I really hope I don’t puke in your hair,” Leslie said.

“If there’s any chance of that, you should not stay there,” Kim said.

“I’m sorry your family’s so fucked up,” Leslie said.

“It’s okay. I deserve it.”

“You were bad in a past life.”

“Past, present, future. There is no temporal zone in which I have not been, or will not be, a terrible person.”

“What did you ever do to anybody?”

“Nothing,” Kim said. “Not appreciated the gifts God gave me.”

“Well, what are you supposed to do?”

“Help people. Do something besides be selfish and wasteful.”

“You will,” Leslie said. “We’re still just little babies.”

“Drunk-ass babies,” Kim said. “Look out, America: the babies found the liquor cabinet.”

“This week’s episode: Babies get their stomachs pumped. Bad, bad babies.”

And more like that. They’d both thrown up eventually, Leslie in the middle of the night, Kim in the morning, though they’d made it to a trash can and the toilet, respectively. Respectably.

“Do you know this other girl who’s reading tonight?” Kim said.

“I didn’t know there was anybody else,” Leslie said.

“Megan D’Onofrio?” Kim said. “Lyric essayist?”

“Weren’t essays bad enough before they got lyrical?”

“Maybe she’s cool. Let’s try really, really hard to be open-minded. That might be interesting.”

“Do you have weed?” Leslie said.

“Yes!”

“My mind is open to smoking your weed.”