“Me?” Jules said. “You switched your entire schedule around so you’d never have to see me again. And you’re calling me dramatic?”

“I think it’s reasonable to want some space!” If it was so reasonable, some distant, detached part of her wondered, why was she so defensive?

“You’re acting like a stranger, or like I don’t exist, like we never—”

“So what, you think I’m just overreacting?” Ava spat. It was one of the accusations that had stung her the most. She was emotionally volatile. She made mountains out of molehills. She couldn’t control her feelings. She’d never claimed otherwise, she’d just stopped being able to fake it around Jules.

Jules opened their mouth to answer, then snapped it shut. “I’m not gonna do this with you in this stupid room,” they said, and turned to go.

“This is why I changed my schedule,” Ava hissed at their back.

Jules suddenly stopped, and Ava felt her hackles rise. Was this it? A rehash of the fight, their last fight, which was just the same as every fight?

“Ava,” they said instead. And there was something in their voice that cut through the fight-or-flight haze: something low, confused, vulnerable. They said her name like they were reaching for a life jacket.

“What?” she replied. Still on guard, but putting away her guns.

“Weren’t we in the Bachelor Cube?”

What kind of question was that? But Jules’s uncertainty infected her. She glanced to the right; Fight Club and The Stranger were still on the bookshelf. “Yeah?” she said. “So?”

Jules slowly turned around. “Doesn’t it look kind of … big?”

The Nihilist Bachelor Cube—like its cousins Coked-out Divorcée, Parental Basement Dweller, and Massage Therapist Who Lived in Their Studio—were all two hundred square feet or smaller, with an open floor plan to make each feel less claustrophobic. Jules had stomped into a separate room that shouldn’t have existed, a room Ava hadn’t seen from the walkway. Its design was radically different: bright, colorful, filled with floral prints and fake plants, posters of fantastic places on the wall. It resembled the Midlife Crisis Mom room, but that was on the other side of the store, and had been painted a warm peach color. This one was done in sand and cerulean.

Past the edges of the cube, Ava could see a whole other walkway, one that shouldn’t exist. Her gaze traveled up, and she gasped as she saw a seam connecting the two rooms. It was a dark purple, the color of a fresh bruise, and wriggled and squirmed as if it were alive.

“This is weird, right?” Jules said from the other side of the seam. Their voice was normal. Ava had expected it to be warped by passing through the seam.