She doesn’t give much up, but I like the way she holds herself. I like the way she hunches over a table, the volume of her voice, the way she eats. She’s not a little fluttering girl, though she looks practically malnourished. You can tell something about the way she was raised, that’s it. There’s a certain kind of childhood that spits out a certain naïve, anxious, occasionally blundering but ultimately charming person. She eats everything, that’s exactly what it is. You should’ve seen her at this dinner. I watched through the window as she just kept shoveling it in. I just want to keep feeding her.

Her writing inspired a certain amount of resentment in me. I had friends, or at least I felt I did, though we’d never been close and I hadn’t seen any of them for a long time. I decided to invite Sam out for a drink one night. She sat with her shoulders slunk inward, her back hunched as if she were trying to take up less room than she did—her posture a permanent apology. I’d had a lot of friends like that growing up. I suppose they made me feel good by comparison, made me feel confident and effervescent. I used to think girls like Sam looked up to me, but it’s just as likely that they were judging me all the time.

The loud music of the bar covered the silences that fell between us so I felt grateful for it.

“Are you seeing anyone?” I asked, when we’d worn out the subject of her work.

At first it felt like an imitation of interest, but I quickly realized I was hungry for it—this interaction.

“No,” she said. “Not right now.”

She smiled, but that was it, that was all she was going to say.

We’d never had these kinds of conversations. We’d always been capable of leaving well enough alone. She didn’t follow up with reciprocal questions. Maybe she was not as awkward as I imagined, but rather just incredibly self-involved. Why didn’t she care?

“I’ve been thinking lately, I don’t want to wear makeup anymore,” she said.

Sam was never someone I’d known to wear makeup in the first place. “Once I wore eyeliner,” she said. “And I found it blurred all over my face later that night. I can’t do it.”

She really did have a bad habit of touching her face constantly. When I thought about it too much everything about her disgusted me. I pictured her hands on the sticky bar, the subway pole, and now fiddling with her mouth—the lips natural, but too pink somehow, not the right shade for her face. “It just seems wrong though,” she said, “posturing that way.”