I kept reducing the message I wanted to send until I arrived at: left early, can I see you again?

It was totally insufficient but somehow more vulnerable than I wanted. As the time since I had sent the text piled up, into a day and then another, I felt worse and worse about it.

Eventually I asked Nadine:

“Nadine,” I started. We were in the grocery store. “What’s Violet’s deal?”

“She thinks she’s smarter than everyone else, and it’s because she kinda is,” Nadine said without pausing to consider the question. “But at the same time, she’s too self-conscious to really make anything happen. That’s why she still has that awful job, those boring friends. She’s never really failed at anything before, so she doesn’t try to do anything hard.”

We were standing in the produce section of the grocery store. She said all of this while examining a big bulb of fennel.

“I know you hooked up with her,” Nadine said. “She told me. It doesn’t bother me.”

“Oh.”

“How was it?” Nadine said. She put the fennel in her basket and reached for a bunch of rosemary at the top of the shelf.

“It was, uh, good,” I said. “Really good.”

“Nice,” Nadine said in apparent sincerity. “Are you going to see her again?”

“I texted her, but she didn’t get back to me.”

“Hmm,” Nadine said. “Yeah, she’ll do that. You should text her again.”

“Okay.”

“How do you feel about it?” Nadine said.

“Good,” I said.

The truth was that I was thinking about Violet constantly. I wanted her to fuck me like that every day. At night, after I turned the lights off, I would writhe under the covers and leave handprint-shaped marks on my breasts from grabbing their sensitive new flesh, trying to push past pain into pleasure the way she had done to me. I put my face into a pillow and pressed my abdomen into the mattress, unsure if I was even turned on, frustrated at my own lack of response.

My feelings about her were blooming into a huge, unreal-istic fantasy that made everything else look flat and dull and stupid. The passive-aggressive games of avoidance and feigned obliviousness that my roommates played became exasperating, and I was aware that I was wasting my time at my dumb job. The few friends from school who visited me at work became particularly grating. When I dropped out of school, my friends came up with half-baked solutions or would offer money, accommodations, help of all kinds that I didn’t really need and couldn’t imagine asking from anyone. Now they just came in for the novelty of knowing a barista’s name somewhere. Some of them tipped poorly and some of them tipped 100 percent or more, which were both depressing in different ways.