She sways, eerily, as though she is being moved on a string like a puppet. I remember the massive bong hit I took earlier. I remind myself that everything is okay, I am just very high. I take a deep breath and try to steady myself, act normal. Nothing matters, I say to myself in a loop.

“So crazy” is all I can come up with. I feel dizzy.

“So,” she says, “speaking of crazy, I have a crazy coincidence to tell you about.” Her scarf suddenly seems more taut, as though it is attached to the invisible string, holding her head up—tightening, tightening, tightening. “I was just helping my mentor with some shopping at Amsterdam Modern. I don’t know if you’ve been—it’s on Glendale near Echo Park. They have the most fab midcentury modern furniture selection.”

She smiles and her teeth are blindingly white. There is something artificial about her mouth. This isn’t the mouth I grew up with. I think she got new teeth.

“Side note,” she says, putting her face close to my face. “You look so fucking beautiful, Em. I’d forgotten about your eyes.” Her gaze grabs me by the throat. I refocus my attention onto a can of organic tuna on the shelf behind her. I will buy it for Lydia if I survive this conversation.

“Thanks,” I manage. The main reason I was friends with Zoe, I remember, is because she required very little engagement from me. She would just look at me and tell me I was pretty and then talk about whatever she wanted, as if I would know about a midcentury modern design store, as if I didn’t find all my furniture on the street.

“So, anyway,” she says, “my mentor met with Nico Nadler yesterday. He’s decorating Nico’s home office in Los Feliz.”

I look up at the sterile yellow lights and feel a strong urge to sit down. Zoe keeps talking.

“I told him about you, and he said he’d mention you to Nico as an icebreaker.” She taps her gold ballet flat on the linoleum, then blows a small bubble with a piece of gum I didn’t notice before. “He showed up to Amsterdam Modern utterly humiliated.”

The saliva evaporates from my mouth. The bubble pops and echoes. Zoe May smiles.

“Nico Nadler has no idea who you are,” she says.

I drop my basket.

I pace in the fish aisle for several minutes, trying to remember how Zoe and I parted ways, praying the whole thing was a hallucination. I’ve read about cannabis-induced psychosis. It’s possible that it never happened, that I never ran into Zoe, that I was just extremely high.