“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.”

They went out to the alley behind the store, Kim carrying a box full of unsold literary magazines with the front covers ripped off for recycling. Leslie stood in the spot closer to the street as a lookout while Kim leaned against the wall and loaded the one-hitter painted to look like a cigarette. Their furtiveness was mostly for fun—they were aware of exactly no one who’d had any trouble getting stoned in Missoula. Still, Leslie found it hard to strike the surreptitious East Coast habits she’d developed as a teen during the late, feeble years of the war on drugs, even as, she’d been told, you could now smoke a joint on the street in Manhattan without fear of anything more than a ticket, at least if you were white.

“Yo, hit this,” Kim said, and Leslie did.

“We sold, like, three books today,” Kim said. “And they were, like, the gluten-free cookbook. All of them.”

Leslie passed the piece back.

“Is Max, what, selling organs on the side?” Leslie said.

“I wish he’d cut me in if he was,” said Kim, exhaling smoke. “I think he might just be rich somehow.”

Leslie took another hit.

“How’s the book coming?” she said.

“What are you, my agent?” Kim said.

“Sorry for being curious about your stupid life ambitions,” Leslie said.

“It’s going slow, man.” She looked down the barrel of the one-hitter and then tapped the ash out against the wall. “You think, like, Oh, it’s my life, I can write that, I went to graduate school. But you have to not hate what you write, you know? Which is hard if you hate yourself to begin with.”