“Carrie’s mother responded by washing her young daughter’s mouth out with a bar of Ivory soap, twisting it so hard that the bright white cake turned red from her bleeding gums. After that her mother gave up on the layaway analogy, realizing it was close to what she meant but not quite right. Instead she took to reminding Carrie that she should live an exemplary pure-hearted life and to thank God for it while she could because none of us knows how long we’ll be here anyway.

“She explained that what she really meant when she brought up the metaphor of a layaway plan was that life on earth is like being in the back room of a department store. Some of us will be in that back room a shorter time than others, depending on ‘what we came equipped with before we were put in storage on this earth, waiting for Jesus.’

“In other words, what her mother really was referring to when she used that corny layaway analogy was the family flaw, a potentially fatal one that Carrie had inherited. This wasn’t made up. It was an unfortunate fact, and by Carrie’s fourteenth year she’d lost both her maternal grandmother and her mother to a thromboembolism caused by the bone marrow abnormality polycythemia vera. Carrie made a pact with God that she wouldn’t suffer a similar fate, and like clockwork every two months she underwent phlebotomy, removing as much as a pint of blood that she would retain for her own personal use. It wasn’t the only interesting ritual that would follow her well into adulthood.”

Carrie walks around the dorm room, gesturing, looking into the camera. She’s enjoying herself. She’s loving this.

“Eventually odd rumors about her would circulate at the FBI’s Engineering Research Facility,” she continues, “where it would have been a civil rights violation to question their most senior civilian computer savant about her health, about her personal beliefs and how they were manifested. It was nobody’s business if she saved or drank her own blood or was poly-sexual or communed with the Other World. Her appetites and fantasies were of no concern as long as she kept them to herself.

“How long she lived wasn’t relevant either, only that she finished the important job the federal government had recruited her to do, a technical feat that didn’t call for an FBI special agent, and Carrie wasn’t one. Professionally she was classified as a non–law enforcement, non-military independent contractor with special security clearances. Personally she was considered a nerd, a weirdo, a nobody who was called derisive and crude nicknames behind her back.”