“This is as titillating as when I’d go into my parents’ bathroom as a kid to spray my dad’s cologne—all fir and tobacco. I’d sit on the floor in the closet underneath his pants, soaking in the scent.”

“Yeah, it’s insane how much pressure there is to just pretend like I never had a crush on myself when I was covered in Sunshine Splendor from the mall.”

“Is it in there?” I pointed to the row of bottles.

“Yeah, it’s so chemical it’s probably still intact.”

We sprayed his old perfumes on ourselves and spun around in Sunshine Splendor, Gardenia Moonlight, and the fancier Octavia, recalling those days when objects of girlhood delighted us. Then he sat on the floor while I perched on his bed and braided pieces of his hair, the purest therapy.

When we came back down, drunk on the past, his mom asked if I wanted to do the Elemental demo.

“Mom, leave him alone,” Blithe said.

“No, it’s fine, I’ll do it.”

She dug a small whiteboard out of a drawer. “Okay, I will give you a prompt and you’ll quickly jot down notes about how you would create episodic thrill. You have sixty seconds. Okay?”

“K.”

“How would you create conflict in a village of sailors’ widows?”

I glanced over at Blithe to see if he would understand that I telepathically needed to know if it was okay to make them all lesbians. He raised his eyebrows. Fine.

I wrote:

The captain’s wife falls in love with the cook’s wife, and her son threatens to tell the constable.

A psychic rolls into town and tells the women she can communicate with their husbands, who are not dead, but marooned on a distant island—some set off to find them.

This is feeling very patriarchal, so we would not even worry about the dead husbands but follow one character as she spots a large hole in the ocean from atop her widow’s walk and rows out, only to get sucked into a portal to another dimension.

The timer went off. I read my notes aloud and amused everyone. Then I had to come up with resolutions to a Line in which a young man has to give up his humanity to live as a fish with his lover, and finally his mom gave me three potential Lines and I had to guess which one had the greatest Violetizing potential. As we went back and forth, I wondered if Blithe’s mom did not have some hidden wishes to create that had been squashed.

We left their house with a paper bag of leftovers.

“Your parents are great,” I said to Blithe as he drove.

“Do you think they have any remorse for adopting an Asian baby?” he asked as we pulled onto the freeway.

“Probably not, but you could tell them about how hard it’s been.”