“You in college?” The guy isn’t young but he’s attractive. He isn’t as old as most of the guys Quinn sees in town. She almost didn’t leave Maddie but then thought better of it. She couldn’t sit another night in that apartment, so pissed at her selfish stupid fucking mother, scrolling then rescrolling through her Facebook feed. It feels good to let herself feel angry, after so long being performatively good. Maybe, also, it’s an excuse for just a little bit of recklessness.

“Sure,” she says. “College.” She’s joking, but he doesn’t know she’s joking, so she goes along with it. She imagines him imagining her: a student, at a study group or something, in a dorm suite. She imagines he thinks this lie makes her smart. She still tracks Maddie’s dad on Facebook. She never told him. He finished college this year. She wonders, each time she clicks through his pictures, if he feels the lack of Maddie somehow.

“Nice,” says the guy. His skin is red and sun worn, though it’s winter.

“You?” she says.

“Construction,” he says.

She nods.

“No use for me,” he says. “College.”

“I like learning,” she says, thinking now maybe she’s pretending to be Maddie. She aches, just then, to go home to her girl.

“You look like it,” he says. “Back for the holidays?”

“For Christmas. Celebrating with my mom.”

“Just you two?”

Quinn nods. Her mom was, in fact, super into Christmas. The flutter of activity at church and the attention paid to her because she baked extra for the bake sale, dressed Quinn up: Such a pretty girl, they said, touching Quinn with cold hands, her mother’s twin, they said, and Quinn had to work hard not to run away or wince.

“I’m all she has,” Quinn says, thinking, still, of Maddie.

“That’s nice,” the guy says, nodding toward her drink: an offer.

She nods, lets him ask the bartender, Matt—who is neither mean nor nice, and Quinn likes this about him—for two more. Matt sets down her beer and eyes the guy.

“What you studying?” the guy says.

“Astrophysics,” she says. It’s a word Maddie uses, a thing she claims to want to be. Quinn also said it because she figures if he asks her questions to which she doesn’t know the answer, she can make up the answer and he won’t know.

“Fancy,” he says.

“I’m into black holes,” she says.