Ayanna almost walked into a low branch, ducked and avoided it, but still got some of it tangled in her ponytail. Felix turned and helped her untangle her hair, picked leaves out from the ends, and her heart felt so big and warm in her chest with his nearness and the tenderness of his fingers. He is the kind of person, Ayanna thought, that people probably regularly get crushes on; this is nothing. She touched his headphones that were now slung around her neck.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “It seems like you’re having a rough day.”

Ayanna told him maybe she was feeling hungover, then the rest of her thoughts kept coming out, from hearing from her mother for the first time in years, to the note cards under her door and in her mailbox, to being told twice about a woman named Marlie. How more and more she wondered if once she had been this woman named Liana. Felix nodded as she spoke. Put his hand out to touch her arm, then pulled back. She was surprised Stephen and Jane hadn’t told him what had happened yesterday. While they were quiet for a moment, Ayanna realized she had said, “The world is full of spirits, I see them everywhere, they speak to me,” and he had treated that as perfectly normal.

“Well, what do you need right now? Do you want me to listen, do you want advice, or I don’t know, something else?”

“I don’t know yet,” Ayanna said. “Oh, and my room smells like ass, and I can’t figure out where it’s coming from.”

“Do you still want to do this work today?”

“I would like to have money.”

She continued: “What do you think this is all about? Work.” Ayanna could tell how awkward she was being but could not crawl out of the deep crevice of discomfort she had built.

“Oh, that Earth is purgatory.” Felix shrugged. “Or maybe it’s a beautiful vestibule for the rest of the universe. Or for other dimensions. Or maybe it’s a vast experiment in loneliness. Sometimes, it feels like we learn about a new world or a new galaxy every other day and yet, still, we’re alone.”

She shrugged. All options felt possible and deeply depressing. Once, when she was a child, her mother had told her the story of Genesis, of God creating the sea, the skies, the animals, and man. But Ayanna had felt it wasn’t beautiful or miraculous; even young, she had thought, Oh, he was sad. That’s why Earth is here. Ayanna had told her mom, “God was lonely and he made some toys,” but her mother had hated that. Opal had told her, “Life is a beautiful gift. God was being generous. God is never lonely.”