The next day she brought the jacket close to her face. “Smells good,” she said. “I woulda washed it too.” She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and unfolded it, a take-out menu from a Chinese place called Peking Palace. The other side showed the charcoal sketch of an old man’s face. I took the paper and stared at the lines—strong and black, fluid like water.

“I saw that guy on the street yesterday,” she explained. “Just sitting there and staring at his hands.”

She closed my fingers over the paper and I understood: She wanted me to have something in return.

I started bringing her food. I never packed a separate lunch because I thought it might make her feel embarrassed. Instead I brought extras of whatever I’d brought for myself: another tuna sandwich, a couple muffins from Stella’s work. One time I asked her why she’d named herself Toledo but she shook her head and kept silent. I didn’t ask again.

I liked what she drew: long human faces with their wrinkles jagged like branches. Never anything imagined, only things she’d seen. She told me she used to do this for money all the time—“like that guy in L.A,” she said, “the guy with all the poems”—but stopped because it felt like she was giving away too much. “Once you give it to another person, you can’t keep it for yourself.”

“I don’t think that’s necessarily true,” I told her. “I hope it’s not.” The sound of my own voice surprised me. The word “hope” was like a splinter I’d choked on. Now I was trying to spit it up.

April often stopped by my cubicle on her way to the coffee lounge. It got to be a routine. She was nicer than she looked, told me things about being a small-town kid. I used to count my rabbit’s heartbeats. My mother made me drink vinegar every time I used a bad word. She seemed surprised that I was interested. “You actually give a fuck about this crap, don’t you?” She made me realize how ugly the words really were—fuck, shit, shitfucker, asshole—though I couldn’t imagine her using any words but those. Her mother’s vinegar wasn’t anywhere in sight. I liked how these words contorted her face into definite expressions. I didn’t see that very much from anyone. People were always hidden behind their faces. I knew I never was.

Stella suggested we use our weekends to explore the city. One time she got tickets to an art exhibit full of petroleum-jelly sculptures. A wall had gotten torn down, she said, to make room for the statues. She seemed pleased about this.

“I should warn you,” I told her. “I’m not really an art person.”

But we went. The exhibit even had a movie. It played in a dark room that smelled like suede. All the action happened on a whaling ship. There was a storm. Two lovers sliced each other with knives. Body parts floated away from other body parts. There weren’t any words.