“Wow.”

“Yeah. Wow,” she repeated, underscoring what she clearly took to be a miracle and countering the tint of skepticism she detected in my reaction. She sighed and tilted her head to look at my left foot. “Not bad, eh? Maybe this is my true calling.” She looked down at the laptop for a few seconds, then blew a bubble with her gum that snapped like a slap. “God.”

“What?”

“I can’t believe we’re almost thirty.” She shook her head. “Fucking crazy.” Over the last year that had become her go-to word. Everything was “crazy” nowadays — a bus ride, pistachio gelato, venture capitalism. “But we’re still good friends, right?” she asked with a wink.

“We’ll see how these nails turn out.”

“I feel like —” She leaned over and took a sip from her giant mug of oolong tea. “I honestly feel like my life hasn’t changed since we were teenagers. Like this last decade?” She made a fart noise and a little sideways slash through the air with her hand. “I mean, our parents had fucking kids when they were our age, you know?” A bit of polish dripped off the brush onto my foot and she wiped it up with her finger. “But we were fucked from the start. We became teenagers the year of 9/11. And now we’re leaving our twenties with fucking Donald Trump,” she said, gesturing to the laptop.

“It’s not a done deal.”

She raised her eyebrows and scrunched up her mouth like if you say so. She handed me a magazine and motioned for me to start fan-drying my left foot. “Act one, scene one: cataclysm. Scene two: war of attrition, followed by the age of terror, the Great Recession, and then a false ending, the presumed conclusion, the first Black president, the dawn of a new Pax Americana.” Ana looked up at me and widened her eyes. “But our story was not a Disney film. It turned out it was just the latest installment in a tawdry, serialized drugstore thriller with embossed bold letters on the front cover. An installment which leaves off with a totally implausible cliffhanger.” She burst into a pained laugh. “And now we’re standing on the side of the road waiting for the Boomers to hand us the fucking keys already, though they seem intent on driving the world into the ground before they do.”

I looked over at the laptop and blanched. “He just took New Hampshire.”

“Fuck, I thought that place was like Vermont.”

“And look —”

“Babe, hold still.”

“Michigan.”

“Babe.”

“Sorry.”

“Just keep waving the magazine.”

“My arm hurts.”

“Surely you’ve given it enough of a workout over the years,” she said.

“No, I do that with this one.” I lunged towards her with my right hand and she yelped, laughing, rolling back in the bed, and knocking Sassy Saffron all over the sheets. “Oh fuck.” She grabbed a wad of Kleenex from a box on the floor and dabbed at the spill. “I’m so sorry.”