It was Krystal. “I didn’t win,” she said. “The house! Now I’ll never have it.” She was crying.

“Calm down,” I told her. My voice surprised me by sounding thin, hoarse, as if I had swallowed something too hot.

I had just won the lottery. I had done it. I had bet on myself, and I had won.

I moved my hand in front of my face and I perceived it slowly, as if I had exited my body. Through the phone I could hear Krystal sob.

The night she picked me up from the hospital, she had greeted me with a smile. I was stuffing my soiled clothing into a bag, my back to the door, when she knocked on the doorframe of my room. My ears were still half-deaf from the gunshots, but when I heard the knock I jerked my head around and I saw her register it, my too-quick motion, as a sign of something deeply wrong.

But she had not looked at me with sympathy. She didn’t look sad or unhappy or stunned. She didn’t look like her parents and brother had just died. Her face was unreadable. All she said then was, “Hey, Bon Bon, you ready for the Days Inn experience?” And then she’d smiled a little, and I could have wept. The kindness of others was the worst.

On the phone now she started hiccuping on her tears. “It’s all gone,” she kept repeating. “It’s all gone now.”

“You’re overreacting, Krys. Just take a breath. I’ll come over.”

When I arrived at her place I did what she did for me on that night five years before: I got her situated on the couch and brought her comfort food, keeping silent company with her. I turned off all the lights and we sat and watched television in the dark. Sometimes I could hear her sniffle. I said, “It doesn’t matter, that old house. Probably better, anyway.”

She stayed quiet, her breath evening, and eventually she drifted off.

I became drowsy and my brain started crawling the way it always did at the edge of sleep, loosely holding wonder, idly thinking about the past, or the day, or my life, or how luck unfolds. How time folds in on itself, and how so many versions of a person live and die and resurrect over the course of one life. An hour and a half earlier, when I found my friend in her living room, on the floor, her television babbling commercials, the TV screen caught my eye and I recalled discovering Three’s Company on that very machine, and the world shifted in the same way it did on voting days, when I walked into my old, unchanged elementary school cafeteria and saw it as an adult. I’d belonged there once, but not anymore. I hadn’t belonged for a while. Between the moment the announcer read the lottery numbers and the moment my brain confirmed that I’d won, the world stayed the same but I molted into my next stage. This apartment had become a relic. A museum piece. And there was Krystal, crumpled on the carpet, abject, face mottled and wet, the star of the exhibition.