My train leaves the station just before noon. This wasn’t how I’d planned to spend the day, but now that I’m en route, it feels so right. Flexing the soles of these old boots feels so right, too. I tap my heels together: stacked leather against worn leather. Through double-paned safety glass, the world whirls pink and green.

To think: a crucifix did this.

At coffee this morning, when Bess noticed me noticing the turquoise-and-silver cross around her neck and answered, “No, I’m not Catholic,” before I could ask, she explained, with a straight face, how the pendant is her superhero talisman. It had belonged to her late mother, who’d charged it with love and strength. Now Bess wears it to prep for things like job interviews—or, even though she’s sick of talking about him, her impending breakup with Rick, who is too boring to see Bess as more than an object of his desire or proof of his desirability. We agreed that a crucifix-as-armor is doubly fitting when confronting an emotional vampire.

Bess said, “I know it’s silly, but . . .” so I told her the truth: to me, it isn’t silly at all. Then, before old superstitions (if I talk about it, I’ll ruin it) could intervene, I confessed that I used to do something similar with a pair of boots—the Frye shit-kickers I wore all through high school and into college, the ones I was wearing when Shae went through the windshield of her sister’s Camaro while I thought, Keep your knees down, Elizabeth. Keep your feet on the floor, and, Don’t you dare look away, and, Oh my God, don’t you dare go away.