“It’s fine. I have to wash them anyway.”

“To be honest, they smell pretty strong of sex.”

“No they don’t.”

“It’s fine, at least you’re getting some.”

“As if you’re not.”

She took a sip of tea and bounced her eyebrows. “I’m on a little cleanse.”

“Are you still seeing that hand-holder?” I asked.

She held the tea in her mouth for a second before swallowing. “God no.”

Right before I’d left for London, she’d begun fucking a minor reality-television celebrity who grabbed her hand during sex right before he came. The first time he did it, she said she found it endearing. And every subsequent time increasingly repulsive.

“One night he was supposed to meet me at Bambi’s for a drink but didn’t show. And I sat there by myself for an hour.”

“An hour?”

“I was like, oh my god I’m just another girl waiting for a guy in a fucking bar like it’s the nineties.”

“I would’ve been out of there in fifteen minutes. You called him and told him to go fuck himself, right?”

She shrugged. “Eventually.” A small, momentary sadness played across her face. For all her bravado, she was eternally patient and forgiving of people who were shitty to her.

Just then her phone started to buzz on her bedside table. She leaned over and looked at it. “It’s my mom. Should I take it?” Without waiting for an answer she grabbed the phone and walked out of the room. I turned up the volume on her Mac with five chirps and realized she was playing Frank Ocean’s new album. Somehow, melancholic queer R&B felt like the appropriate soundtrack to the slow car crash of American democracy. I heard the rumble of a plane passing overhead on its way to Heathrow and the murmur of Ana’s voice in the next room. Yes. We were still good friends.

I texted Osama for a bit, but after half an hour or so the combination of CNN and the Sassy Saffron fumes had the effect of inducing both a headache and a profound state of drowsiness. The next thing I knew, Ana was standing in the doorway crying. Sobbing, even. Her shoulders shook with the effort of it. I had never seen her cry in real life before; as in, not onstage. If she cried, she did it in private and certainly never over the things that made me cry, like songs, boys, and cell phone bills. Her mom had called to tell her that Nana Ana had finally passed.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I know she was fucking old, but still.” She looked skyward and ran her two index fingers along the bottom of her eyes before her face crinkled again. I held out my arms. She crossed the room and folded herself into me. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and pulled away a long strand of snot. “Sorry,” she chuckled, wiping it on her jeans. “Gross.”