Felix shrugged. “I don’t think she’s that cynical. But I’m sure it’s one of those reinforcing cycles. People find you attractive because they can tell you’re emotionally unavailable, you feel good because people find you attractive, and then, well.” He used one of his fingers and made a motion of creating a perpetual circle. Today, his fingernails were a shiny black. She could tell by what he was saying, how he was saying it, that he had also been going to therapy for a while. He was also older, having taken a few years off because of family issues, he had said—although he’d said it in a way where Ayanna could feel the distance—but it was still wild to Ayanna to hear anyone around her age articulating something like that so thoughtfully. “Anyway, I doubt I’ll be hanging out on Saturday. I have an exam on Monday.”

She nodded despite the fact he couldn’t see her.

“If you want to come here on Sunday and try Professor Collins’s meditation plan with me, we can both get paid, and I can talk you through part of the ideas and theories here.”

She said that would be great, still a little amused by the idea of how easily she had been given the job. Finally, growing up in a weird religion had done something positive for her. Ayanna watched him walk ahead of her, looked at his locs from behind, how beautiful they were. With the rain beading on top of his hair, Felix was a freshly watered plant. She liked the way he tried to move through the world, wanting to be precise with and kind to people even when he was saying borderline judgmental things.

There was something, too, that made Ayanna sure he had lost someone important to him. She took a deep breath, focused, willed herself to look, but there was no spirit hovering around him. Yet there was another sense Ayanna felt she’d gained from traveling through the door: the ability to see whose personality had been formed around mourning and those who had lived only in the lands of minor inconveniences and forgettable heartaches.

“I’m a twin,” Ayanna said, because for the first time in years the urge was there to say it. “Well, was. I don’t know how to put it yet.”

She would never have said it if she’d had to look at his face. Ayanna noted the way he stopped walking for a half second, how he stopped himself from looking back at her.