I was starting to realize that no, he wasn’t at the bus stop waiting for someone else—he was waiting for me.

“I bet you think you know all about men,” he said.

* * *

Isaac had been my first and only boyfriend. He was a photographer; I was his model. In the conversation that had led to our breakup just a few weeks before, he’d accused me of stagnating. He told me I needed to get out more and see the world. He said he thought college would be good for me, but I wanted to find my way back to the forest where I separated the bucks: there was another way to live. He had used to talk about smashing windows and destroying institutions and reinventing the world from the ground up. And now he was a studio art major at the University of North Carolina, part of the system. I said, “Your hypocrisy is unbelievable.” He explained that even a hypocrite could be an agent of change, an idea that, for a time, liberated me from understanding that a life without hypocrisy was desirable or possible.

He even got a claw tattoo to match mine—“to honor our relationship,” he’d said. Before I knew him I’d gotten two chickenlike claws on my shoulder blades. I’d wanted proper talons, but they’d come out fleshy and small, like something you’d fry. In March, when things were still going well for us, I’d accompanied him to Sirius. They’re not supposed to give you a face tattoo till you have one somewhere else. Yet suddenly I was holding his hand while the tattoo man pounded his left temple with the needle.

Even with the claw curling around his left eye as a sign, I’d thought, of loyalty, he told me I was stagnating. He told me when I was posing for a long exposure. I was wearing a nightgown and he wanted me to flit slowly around a candle that he’d placed on the floor. Only my feet would be legible in the photo. Well, of course he thought I was stagnating—I was his model; it was my job to stay still.

If the conversation had gone differently, maybe I would have applied to UNC with Isaac. My favorite part of school was track and field. I high-jumped. High-jumping was scary and I liked scaring myself, losing myself in the effort. Over time, I got good. Good enough that my teammates would gather and watch once I beat all my opponents and kept jumping just to see if I could beat myself. When I stood on my medical-tape marker, everyone liked to touch me to wish me luck. Back then, I could jump five feet six inches, which meant I could jump over my own body if I had to. “You’re flying!” my coach would say, and it was true, this was as close as I could get.