The Witch banned TV in common spaces but made an exception for Blithe. She perked up around him. I mean, the fact of his existence in our apartment did verify her powers. We played a nature documentary about the desert, and everyone fell asleep before the part where the giraffe escaped from a pride of lions. I woke up first and turned off the movie. Aiden’s food-delivery page was open on his computer, and I went to his history. Days of breakfast sandwiches, nights of Thai.

I still ached to know him.

“I’ll cook dinner, but is there a better grocery store?” Aiden asked when he woke up.

He was judging my entire unhealthy existence. “There’s a bougie health store by the train,” I said sharply.

I dug into a sticky drawer and pulled out bamboo shopping bags.

He came back looking like a hot stay-at-home dad with arms full of groceries. His large brown eyes were pretty under the denim cap.

“I went to a vegetable stand and found some good avocados. Help me chop some veggies.”

I started hacking at an onion, and he had to show me how to cut it properly. As Aiden leaned over me, for once I could not smell anything. He chopped peppers, mushrooms, and carrots into almost-perfect strips and slices.

“Where’d you learn to do that?”

“From an ex.”

“Who’s taking care of Agatha?”

“My bro. Not bio bro, bro bro.”

I wanted more info, more than adv-tech could provide, deep, chunky layers of his life, and he wanted to simmer vegetarian chili in the Witch’s second-best pot/cauldron.

How nice that our first day back is structured around sleep and food, not work or processing boxes of data, I thought, and went to read another page of the zine.

Aiden and I messed up a lot in the first few weeks. We talked at Blithe as if he were trying to speak our language and misusing it, when really he was speaking a variation. We tried to buy him what we thought he wanted, and our failures stared at us, unused, untouched. The Witch did not know how long the hex would last, and the Operatrix beamed into the kitchen every other day, observing our fumbles, measuring Aiden’s bio-levels and mine (Blithe’s were still unreadable), reminding us the queer community is nothing if not

. . . and that we had to combine all of these qualities to help Blithe.

I tried to retrain myself to have positive associations with Aiden’s face. The Bio-meter flashed its reading too rapidly for me to discern whether I was coral with object-centered rage or peach with vague hopefulness, but I didn’t want to end up on the Rhiz’s maladjusted charts. It really skewed your chances of them recommending a compatible person to date.