“I know he’s just a dog,” Beth said, voice shaky, breath sour with stress and travel.

Chowder had been her main concern for years, her prodigy, her heir. Beth was talking crap. But Molly didn’t know what to say either. At all. “He did his job,” she finally mumbled. “And now he’s gone.” James’s words sounded lame in her throat.

“You shouldn’t have let him off the leash.” Beth shifted onto her back, a quarter roll toward Molly. “Now I’ll have to pay off James Masterson. Jesus.”

“I’m sorry.” Molly could go on apologizing forever, shaving chips off the block of what she’d done. She reached through the sheets and found Beth’s wrist. She squeezed it, like she used to do in Girl Scouts, in a circle while singing. The gesture was stupid, but it was all she managed. Beth turned in the blue light and studied Molly like she was from a different world.

“I fucked up. But I have to tell you something.”

“What?” Beth sounded skeptical, like Molly had killed another animal or corrupted poor James Masterson in yet more twisted ways.

Molly took a breath. “I’m in love with you.” The words came out like bad acting. She wanted to swallow them immediately, delete them from the air.

Beth studied Molly’s face. “That’s crazy. That’s rat-shit crazy.”

Beth would yell at Molly all through the next morning. She would cry every night before bed for weeks, sleep with the leash wrapping her forearm like tefillin. The leather would go soft from how hard she wound it. She wouldn’t say she loved Molly back for months. Some days she’d barely even look at her. Molly would suffer. Maybe more than she deserved.

But for now, Molly and Beth stared together at the same ceiling, frosted with moonlit curves, the cake a grounding weight in their bellies. Molly matched her breath to Beth’s and focused on the love gelling between them, however hard it was, sometimes, to find.

Sunny Talks

HUNCHED OVER MY COMPUTER IN MY CUBICLE, I prepare for my nephew’s visit by watching one of his YouTube videos. His backdrop is his bedroom, the walls painted black, centaur and mermaid posters freshly hung. His mascots, he calls them. He pops into the frame, flaunting his naked, scar-free chest. He’s fifteen but looks ten. His wrists are so frail, his shoulders so narrow, that I worry that he’ll break his arms with his eager, sweeping gestures. His audience is ten or twenty thousand people who litter his page with rainbow emojis, kissing emojis, shining sun emojis, interrupted by trolls reminding him he’s a damaged and mutilated female.

“Welcome to Sunny’s channel.” He rolls his eyes like everyone knows already. Sunny was always his name, so when people threaten to publish his real name he has a laugh, thrusting his head back against the wall of his bedroom, which is beside my older sister’s bedroom in their little house in Shrewsbury, though Sunny doesn’t reveal where he dispatches from; he’s learned from millennial elders on the platform at least the basics of safe internet practices.