I wrote it all down. The cologne was labeled 1899, a date instead of a name. This struck me as romantic. The coral pinks of the lipstick and nail polish also struck me as romantic. I had probably ten tubes of cheap lipstick, at least ten bottles of nail polish at home, accumulated since adolescence, half of them gone gloppy, packed in my suitcase each time I moved as if they were precious. It was much more beautiful to have only one—the perfect one.

I had the sensation of stepping blindly as I listed the contents of her house’s hidden spaces. Of grasping at textures, trying to make out changes in light. I didn’t know what it was yet that I was inside, only that whatever I was immersed in was larger than my current understanding.

I was going through the rooms of her mind. Secret arrangements, shadows and light. There’s something feminine about boxes. Nothing I opened revealed anything about James. It’s girls who hide objects inside other objects—jewelry boxes, hope chests, dollhouses, decorative compacts with mirrors inside, boxes of love notes, tampons.

In her nightstand there was a wooden box with a peony inlay on top and a mirror inside, which reflected the contents when opened. I found a small jar of tiny pink crystals on a string, a lock of blond hair tied with a gold ribbon, an old dead corsage, a folded note in someone else’s handwriting:

On the balcony

I saw a girl,

Fucking asshole,

Who made a jerk of herself

And delighted in it.

Is it good? I asked her.

It is crappy-crappy, she said.

But I do it because it is crappy

And because it is vain

I copied the Stephen Crane satire into my notebook. I described the corsage—once-pink roses, yellowed baby’s breath, rhinestones on hair-thin wires.

I couldn’t find any of the writing she was supposedly working on, either in the desk or online, but I found old notebooks inside a small chest in her office. She wrote stray phrases and paragraphs without reference to one another:

So many men without women . . .

Jean says something like When in love one survives on air and cold water. All I want are apricots and strawberries.

Mallory, drunk and swaying, pointing for emphasis, imitates the Asian boy, David, in our class. She tells us that the nun wears that bandage around her ankle because it has little metal pieces in it that poke into her leg every time she walks. To remind her of Christ. Isn’t that creepy? she says. I don’t know.

Amy gave me her Marilyn Monroe lighter. No, in real life we would not be friends. But this isn’t real life.

There was a whole page where she cut the name “Johnny” from magazines and books and pasted them together.