They turned to Kim with blaring love. Kim eased her feet onto the floor and straightened her back. Her lip twitched. Lesbians beamed at her, and she beamed back. Slowly, so as not to attract attention, Heidi dismounted the stool.

“You’re rad,” Anya said. “I didn’t score a girlfriend until college.”

“You’re a very impressive young woman, Kim,” Lisa Parsons said.

Kim blushed into her shoulder. God, she was endearing. Heidi wanted to bite that sweet smile off her.

“How old were you when you came out?” asked the woman with the panda bag.

Kim showed nine fingers, and the lesbians groaned. Anya shot out of her seat. “That deserves a cappuccino royale.”

Kim followed Anya like a dog, without a glance at Heidi. When they were gone, the room tittered back into conversations. But Kim’s glow lingered. The women’s mouths opened wider, their fingers massaging the air as though it were a substance from which they could pull meaning.

Heidi was abandoned on her end of the room. She pretended, like a little kid, that she was invisible with her eyes closed. If Kim was the cool, charming one again, Heidi would rather vanish. But before Heidi enjoyed two minutes of peace, Kim returned, stamping the carpet and carrying on to Anya as though everyone in the room beyond wanted to hear.

Kim rambled on and on about Scituate, speaking stridently. So this was her lying voice. Heidi couldn’t believe she’d never figured that out before. Kim claimed that the bathrooms in her old middle school were labeled genderqueer, that Gertrude Stein was the centerpiece of each lit course, that the class guinea pigs were lesbians together. Heidi waited for Anya or Twig Hair to scold her. They were adults, they should know better than Heidi, who was too old herself to have believed Kim for so long. Instead, they fell in love with Kim more and more by the second. Any minute, Kim would befriend these lesbians and leave Heidi behind. Heidi’s throat swelled and closed.

“Are you okay?” asked Lisa Parsons, padding over. “You look sad.”

Lisa Parsons reclaimed her seat on the couch. Under the coffee table, her hand returned to Heidi’s thigh, higher than a teacher or a mother or a tutor of wayward youth would dare. The hand slid yet an inch higher. Heidi leaned back against the cushion, nerves glowing from her groin to the tip of her brain. Lisa Parsons plopped her giant handbag on Heidi’s lap.