“Mmmhm,” said Randy.

“It’s like, don’t you finish concocting worlds like that when you’re fifteen?”

“What worlds?” Randy asked. He was thinking about how much longer he and Megan would stay together.

“The parallel worlds in which the lies aren’t lies,” said Megan. “It’s like, I remember I didn’t do some project on dinosaurs or whatever in sixth grade, so a week after it was due, I broke into my science teacher’s room and stuck my paper into the stack of graded papers. And then I convinced myself that she must have just overlooked it, and practiced how I would say ‘that’s strange, I wonder why you didn’t grade it?’ That’s what Jillian is doing, but she’s not a child. She has a child, and it’s terrifying to think of her in charge of something that fragile when she’s living in a delusional reality!”

“What happened with the dinosaur paper?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Megan. “I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter.” She picked up her beer and drank from it.

TWO

Jillian went into the bathroom that night and sat on the floor and cried while she listened to the radio. When the commercials came on, she felt self-conscious and had to stop crying for a second, but then when the music came back on she cried again. She did this for 20 minutes. The bathroom smelled like dog  urine.

AMANDA WAS AT HOME, thinking about sending Megan an email.

The email would say something like, “I’m sorry we got into a fight, but I don’t take back anything I said, because I really do think you have a huge problem that you need to snap out of or you’re going to find yourself without any friends someday very soon.”

But then she found herself saying things like, “Or has that day already come?” out loud to herself in her bedroom in a gravelly voice, and found herself cocking her head to the side and furrowing her brows while she said more things like, “I mean, who do you think you are?” so she decided maybe she wasn’t ready to write Megan an email, and she didn’t want to do it if her heart wasn’t in it.