She shrugged. “I’ve heard crazier.”

She took me to an old convenience store with boarded-up windows. The awning was ripped to shreds but a flapping plastic sign still showed the words Deli Liquor Snacks Cigarettes. We entered from the alley. She twisted one of the plywood boards, turned it like a clock hand to two o’clock, and we climbed in the gap of window behind. “Careful,” she said. “There’s a little glass left.”

Inside the ceiling had been stripped for parts and pieces. You could see through the building’s rotten wooden levels, sandwiched like layer cake between stripes of ragged cotton-candy insulation. “This place doesn’t get cops,” she said. “Or dealers.”

The shelves were mostly bare. There were a few cans of dog food and a bag of candy on the floor, tucked under one of the empty fridges. I could still remember the first time Nick entered my body. I’d focused on two cereal boxes—Happy Trails Granola, Sweet Harvest Flakes—while he was busy coming.

Toledo pulled out a sleeping bag and a few old rags, a dirty tin box, that she’d stashed under the counter. There was a cash register but it was junked. Half the buttons had been pried off and the paper was unspooled like a loose spring coil.

“You keep your things here?” I asked her. “They’re safe?”

“They’re not safe anywhere.” She tossed her rolled bag, cinched tight with knotted rope, into the air. “I just don’t like the extra weight.”

She untied the bag and laid it across the central aisle, then unzipped it and spread the whole thing to make the surface wide enough for both of us. “I cleaned the floor last week,” she said. “So don’t worry about that.”

I lay on the bag, on my back, and she lay next to me. We were perfectly straight and parallel, like two kids picking out constellations in the sky. I’d done that once with Dora: Don’t you see the stars of his knife? They’re right there, three in a row, falling off the belt. Don’t you see? She got frustrated when I couldn’t. Is there supposed to be a turtle? I’d asked. No, she said. There isn’t.

“I was strung out, but I wasn’t lying,” Toledo whispered.

“What?”

“My father,” she said. “He really died in Toledo.” Her words sounded husky and strange, as if she had an entirely new voice that only existed near the floor. You always treated me with respect, she’d said, meaning it.

That night I slept inside a world that she’d built from nothing. I dreamed about her body dreaming next to mine. She woke me while it was still dark and said we had to leave. We did. We climbed out the window just before dawn.

STELLA