He has a new job: dispensary tech at a pain clinic. He’s been there a month, and for a month he’s been slipping Oxy pill by pill in his socks. Easier than anyone would think, he says. He sells them. He wants me to quit my job at the department store. He wants to take care of me, he says.

I’ve never needed the job, I tell him. I’m not at the department store for the money. My parents pay the rent. They give me money for almost anything we want. I work behind a counter in a department store that overwhelms me with perfume and glittering floor tiles because I don’t know what else to do and I ruined my chances at college exactly as my parents said I would ruin my chances at college. Because if I sit at home, I want to disappear.

At night, I flip through the channels from bed. I click back to a Law & Order rerun because, oh my God, it’s the woman, the woman from the store—but it’s not her at all. It’s just a brunette who on closer scrutiny does not look like the woman and does not even look like my mother. Criminal Intent, Trial by Jury.

I call my mother anyways. I believe in signs. We make plans to meet at La Palma the coming weekend, and she asks if I want to say hello to my father and I say hell no as usual.

Mario is completely knocked out next to me and I wrap my arm around his head and cradle it as I talk to him. I think about if his head were a baby and run my nails over his cheek. He looks so helpless this way. I just want to protect this head baby. From what, I don’t know.

It’s been only a month, together, in my apartment. And I want him to stay so bad that I am afraid. No man has ever given me so much attention, made me feel like some kind of savior. I am constantly calibrating who to be, what kind of woman Mario wants, though I know that he likes me because he thinks me the kind of woman not constantly calibrating who to be. For him.

So I try to be all things and nothing, and sometimes I feel that I am dissolving and I lean into the mirror, like my mother, and touch my face: I am still here. It bothers me that I can never really see myself as someone else can, as Mario can. I have to trust that the reflection is right. I have to trust that seeing in reverse is close enough to seeing straight on.