“I just don’t want to, like, travel to the library,” Carla says. This isn’t technically a lie.

“That’s sensible,” Pooja says. “You’re finally making responsible decisions for yourself.”

Carla wants badly for Pooja to call bullshit, but Pooja uses her standard flat, half-distracted tone. Either she doesn’t care or she actually believes Carla. Sometimes Carla scares herself with how easy it is to lie.

Carla tries to forget the last fair, but she can’t help it. All year she’s told herself stories of last winter, psyching herself up not to go this time. Now the scenes fill her with greedy anticipation. Mifflin Street Fair, of course, isn’t the problem, just an environment where the problem thrives, like a slice of bread for a colony of mold. If she still wants to go, then it’s immaterial whether she goes or not. The spores are there, so it doesn’t matter if she sets them on spongy old bread. That’s not the recovery line, but it makes a certain kind of sense.

Last winter was Carla’s first in Madison. She was warned of a festival on her street for undergraduates, started in the sixties as a protest. She’d anticipated an innocent affair—fried dough, lemonade, chats about coursework. Instead, there she was, thirty-two years old, stumbling into a house with a banner specially welcoming freshmen, jerking down the pants of the closest guy. There was the bare wild-berry blue mattress in the next house, the short butch girl who told her she was a “rad lady.” Those people are her neighbors. She has to look into the middle distance when they pass with hauls of malt liquor and corn chips. Some of them just finished high school. They’re barely people.

But she’s okay now. She’s on step four, making a fearless moral inventory. She’s taking solace and inspiration from friends. She’s finding meaning in hobbies, if you count the ferrets. She’s counting them toward another goal too: the goal of loving something more than you love yourself.

Carla longs to get out to the fair. Instead she heaves the ferret cage onto the kitchen counter and sets to cleaning it. She scrubs between the bars with an old foot brush, using pure bleach, the strongest cleaning component she owns. She hand-washes the hammock and refreshes the litter and water. She works for an hour. Once the cage sparkles, she sets it on towels in the corner of her living room. Then she waits for the ferrets to encounter their new home.

Boo hovers at the entrance before stepping inside. Carla waits for him to bound into the newly clean environment, to cuddle and roll in the fresh hammock, slipping in and out of its pocket, depositing a poop in the center of the snowy fields of litter. Instead he cranes his head into the food bowl. Which Carla forgot to wash. Which she forgot to stock with kibble.

A sigh blasts through her. She can’t do anything right. She can’t stand it—she has to get out. She’s wearing leggings and a silky pajama top, which could pass for a club outfit in some circles, if she were slimmer. But she can’t wait any longer or she’ll go crazy. She slops kibble into the ferrets’ bowls as fast as she can, stray pellets rattling to the floor, then lunges across the room to seize her coat.