“How’s my Maggie?” he asked.

“She’s great.” Arun loved Maggie best. Everyone did. She was pretty, like a fairytale girl lost in the woods, but brilliant. Everyone said she should go for a PhD before she got too old. “She’s waiting upstairs.”

“I forgot what she looks like, it’s been so long.” He scratched the stiff chin of the taxidermied prairie dog we’d all bought on a joyride to Centennial. “If it weren’t for the paperwork, I wouldn’t have seen you either.”

“Things have been rough.”

He looked up, eyes big. “Oh, I know.”

“Can I get you a drink?”

“Nice seduction technique,” he said. “It’s 2:00 p.m.”

“How about pork rinds?”

“I’ll take a drink. By the way, this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever done.”

I’d been headed to the kitchen and I turned to laugh—Arun always put me at ease, how had I forgotten—but his face, forever photo-ready, had collapsed.

“You okay?”

“Just get me a drink.” His tone was steely.

In the kitchen, I fretted over what to serve. I’d stocked his favorites—beer, Jack and Coke, single-serving cans of a spritzer called Naughty Fruits—but none felt tonally appropriate. I pulled down a bottle of tangerine Schnapps, left over from a Christmas pudding, some bitters, and a novelty soda called Cool Mint Surprise. I whipped these with egg whites, grape jelly, and coconut shavings. The colors refused to integrate, though, and the drink was a bubbling, breathing rainbow.

Arun took one confused peek at my creation, helped himself to a swig, and grimaced. I wanted to tell him the drink was supposed to be funny. When he swallowed, liquid bulged down his throat. His face squished like he might throw up.

“Listen,” I said. “You don’t have to do this.”

Arun gulped more rainbow. Egg white foamed on his chin. “You know I want to.” He threw back another sip and the green layer of the drink splashed his shirt. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Are you worried you won’t get off or something?”

He nodded slowly. “I don’t masturbate that often.”

I held my face steady. “You don’t?”

“I’m sure I’ll squeeze one out.”

“Great.” In my comic, Arun was a lanky, long-legged tortoise named AJ who stopped by with sour-cream-and-onion snails and reptile puns. As a Shakespeare scholar, Arun found my comic unforgivably bizarre, though he treasured the small fame it afforded him with queer hipsters on campus. He’d been the most popular character since the beginning, according to the Twitterverse. If AJ isn’t on the show, I’ll slit my wrist with a box cutter, a tween had typed.

“You guys are good?” he asked, shifting his focus to the ceiling.

“Of course.” Since we’d moved to Laramie, I’d never seen Arun alone. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged at the ink on my wrist. I hadn’t slept, so I’d drawn all night. “Your career.”

This startled me. The issue with Maggie had always been kids. Everything else was perfect—the sex, the conversation; we both loved hiking and rice and audiobooks and begging bakeries for fresh bread at 4:00 a.m. Neither of us cleaned refrigerators or harped on dusting. The lesbian turtles had the same sole problem. In one strip, they gazed into each other’s beady eyes and whispered that they wished baby turtles didn’t exist, that eggs couldn’t gel in their ovaries, or that reproduction was automatic or mandatory, so no decision was necessary. “There’s just that one issue between Maggie and me,” I’d told friends. “That one hitch.”