Maybe that’s why I become secretly obsessed with Sari Epstein: her workshops and weekend retreats promise those who attend will magically rediscover their creative spark. Could this be my answer? I’m still not sure.

What I am sure about is that something is off with Sari Epstein’s appearance. I’ve known this for a while, but it isn’t until I show a certain picture of her to Glenn—who knows everything about everything—that the mystery is finally solved and it all falls into place. We’re at our favorite restaurant, Shepherd, in Harvard Square, sitting near the windows, when I show her Sari Epstein’s luminous Ali MacGraw–like head shot on my phone. Glenn puts her hand over her eyes and squints like we’re on a beach at high noon.

“Oh my God,” she rasps. “The glare off that forehead!”

I laugh slyly and sip my double decaf latte with whole milk slowly, trying to make it last. I have absolutely no business ordering a $5.25 drink with so little income, let alone the full-fat version, but I would rather die than drink coffee with skim or low-fat milk, and I can’t order nothing. Ordering nothing makes people uncomfortable. Why should Glenn have to breathe in the fumes of my failure when all she wants to do is distract herself with some cheap laughs about someone’s too-big forehead?

“Seriously! Look at it!” Glenn pokes the phone screen with her finger. “I need sunglasses!”

I bite my lip with fake guilt. “We’re terrible.”

“No! She’s terrible! For inflicting that giant over-Botoxed moon face on everyone.”

She takes a tiny sip from her wineglass—Glenn always orders prosecco, even in the early afternoon, which it is, and even though she isn’t supposed to drink now, which she does anyway. How am I supposed to get through this without alcohol? she always says. But now I think that Glenn just pretends to drink to create a sense of normalcy or for the taste of alcohol on her lips: the level of her glass today, I realize, hasn’t gone down. In all the months we’ve come, I wonder suddenly if it’s ever gone down. Not knowing the answer to that question, not noticing something so obvious, is part of my denial. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to see. I have been here before and I don’t want to be here now. I especially don’t want to be here with Glenn. She not only published Bird at Black Bear Books but, after that encounter with that boss, it was also her idea all those years ago—a short, illustrated, kids-oriented story about being yourself, a modern version of Free to Be . . . You and Me. At first I’d ignored her—children’s books were just what I did for work, fiction was what I wanted to write—but eventually, after playing around with some very simple pen-and-ink drawings, the story rushed out of me in rhymed verse. I’d tried and failed for years to write a novel, but Bird came together instantly and painlessly, as if it had been inside of me my whole life, just waiting for a way out.