One afternoon, I came home and heard them having sex. It wasn’t a secret. I was supposed to hear. I stood in the hallway and tried to guess the position. Afterwards, we went out. All three of us got dressed up and went out. In the cab, he told her she was the first person he’d played the track for. I went into the restaurant bathroom to throw up but found I couldn’t. On the bathroom floor, I felt my whole body shrink, like it could fit in a suitcase, be placed on a baggage carousel.

At dinner I was seated beside an older, stately woman my boyfriend called his agent. He handed me over to her. She ran her eyes over Candy and me, said it was just beautiful to see girls who could carry themselves correctly. I wanted Candy to do something that confirmed my low expectations of her – flash teeth, simper – but she looked towards the door. I withdrew my hundred imaginary phone calls to my hundred imaginary friends.

The agent reminded me of the psychic. In a way I couldn’t explain she was the psychic, completely her, so when she took my hand and said she would help me, I trusted her. She made me want to be a baby again, tiny and clean.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘I bet you would like a part on the show?’

A week later, I stood on set, in the vast maze of the fake university, feeling the weight of a mop in my hand. On a hanger beside me was a maid costume wrapped in plastic. The costume was like a question to which I had no answer. I wondered how I would put it on. In the normal fashion, I presumed. I would put it over my head. Then my neck. But what would happen after that?

I stopped a woman who was having trouble with her headset. ‘May I use the bathroom?’ I asked quietly.

She nodded. But I didn’t go to the bathroom.

I walked outside as if I was going home. But I didn’t go to the apartment either. I kept walking, a lone figure crossing a city desert. I thought about all of the things I had forgotten about myself and I tried to remember. Soon I was on the subway and an older woman, with brown-spotted, delicate ankles appearing from under her skirt, like feelings I couldn’t describe, smiled at me. I thought about my mother’s face then and I tried to picture it. Then off the subway and into the light. And I thought I would like weather – thunder, lightning, snow. I thought I would like weather and snow came from the sky.

Parrot

Parrot