“Kim left her sweatshirt,” Heidi said. The purple heap had been kicked down into the footwell. Heidi was careful not to soil it further as she slid inside.

Lisa Parsons collapsed back against her seat. Her foundation was cut with tear lines. Was this how the internet couple felt before they slipped away: gazing at the soft white world that was about to let them go?

“I can’t keep doing this,” Lisa Parsons said, her forehead bunched up like a towel. Her voice turned richer. “I’ve never crossed the line before. You should know that, okay? I get to here and delete my account. I use my name so I won’t be tempted. Something’s wrong with me.”

“Oh.” An adult had never spoken to Heidi like this before, in a secret, confidential tone. Heidi wanted to cuddle her spine against the seat and listen forever.

“I don’t know if I’d really do it. God, why am I telling you this?” She raked a hand through her hair. “Is Kim okay?”

Heidi nodded, her body floating beyond the car.

“She’s not, like, damaged? She seemed off.”

“She’s fine.”

“Okay,” Lisa Parsons heaved in a breath. “The stuff I said? It’s not, like, traumatizing her?”

Affection for Kim welled in Heidi. “She already knows all that stuff.”

Lisa Parsons wiped her forehead with her wrist. “Thanks.” She hesitated, staring into her lap. Her voice was so low that it was almost inaudible: “What about you?”

The words surged in Heidi’s underwear. She was part of this drama too, battering around at the center of the storm. “I liked when you touched me.”

Lisa Parsons snorted, her cheeks flaring red. “You shouldn’t.”

Heidi couldn’t stand it anymore. She leaned across the console and snatched Lisa Parsons’s mouth with her own. Lisa Parsons leaned back, and Heidi reached under her shirt, meeting breast abruptly: the slippery fullness, the heavy, taut flesh. The rest of the world blinked out. She’d reached the sweaty center of life: a nipple throbbing on her open palm.

Lisa Parsons pushed Heidi away so hard that Heidi struck the door, which she hadn’t fully closed, and it popped open. The air was frozen, a shock. She thrashed as she collapsed into the snow, falling through it deeper than seemed possible, sucking down into the white floor. Any moment Lisa Parsons would dash over, lift her onto the seat, run the heat, and mop her face with Kim’s sweatshirt. And there Lisa Parsons was now: reaching over the passenger seat, her eyes beaming like fat stars. She pulled the door shut, and then, shoulders over the wheel, she gunned the engine and was gone.