We walked over to the bright pink building. Decades ago, the Juicery would have been frequented only by fad dieters and anxious athletes, but it was 20— and everyone wanted to be well.

Shit, do I pay or is that chivalrous? Yes, I’ll pay because I initiated.

We stood in line shoulder to shoulder, and I noticed her scent and the tips of her hair as we talked about the undergrad children, those who were post-tech and those who walked around in VR-immersion scenes.

“Where would you reside if you could live in VR?” I asked.

“Carthage,” she said, and did not elaborate.

We got to the cashier. I added flax, fish belly, and argan balls to my cucumber and clementine juice, and Stone got a ginger carrot, straight up.

“You Americans,” she said when I was handed my juice. She let me pay and we sat outside on a bench, facing the quad.

In a softly accented voice, she told me about her life. Stone was born in Greece, grew up in Portugal, and lived briefly in Philadelphia. Her parents were semi-stable professors who split over her father’s feminist leanings, which her mother found undisciplined and airy. Her younger half sister lived in Florence. She dated her first girlfriend at fourteen.

Stone unspooled her autobiography as if she had never questioned her origins or her desires or her right to pursue her interests, which happened to be studying points in time, “nodes,” when people made inlets against the force of capitalism. Yes, she was the student of that brilliant thinker and witch-lover. No, she was not a pessimist.

“My parents were geologists and died in an avalanche . . .”

I let myself remain in the ellipses.

A few days later, she offered me a ride home. She put her backpack in the trunk and then opened the door to the back seat and climbed in. She crawled to the far side, turned around, and beckoned for me to join her. Stone’s car was clean, aside from the dust motes swimming in the sunlight.

We made out in the back seat of her car, the most suburban act of my adulthood, and in the enclosed space, pressed against her, I floated through all the years of my life.

We stopped, grinning and dazed, and went to her place, a one-bedroom on a shady street near the U. It was messily well-kept, with plant vines trailing along windowsills. An entire wall of bookshelves made me yearn for a quiet afternoon indoors with her. A French press had been left out from earlier in the morning. I ran my eyes along her breakfast table. A sweater dried on the back of a chair.

The wall off the kitchen was covered in photos of fountains: a stern marble face with water pouring out of it, a lion spout, a small urn with water spilling off the top.