She was blinking very fast. Her skin was pale but her cheeks were flushed. Her hair had the ragged quality of fur. She’s a woman, I told myself. A woman.

“You should sleep,” I said.

“I can’t.”

I turned to leave. I felt guilty. I felt tired.

“Stella?” she said.

I turned back.

“Did you have to piss?”

I nodded.

“Then go ahead,” she said. “I’m not a cripple.”

“Thanks.”

She walked slowly. I steadied her elbow. “It’ll get better,” I said. “Tomorrow’s another day.”

“Another day,” she said. “I can’t wait.”

I woke to find her lying in a fetal position, clutching her stomach. She stayed that way the whole morning. “Something is wrong in there,” she said. Her sweat made patterns like Rorschach blots on the sheets: a stag with broken horns, an infant with two heads, a syringe stuck in a thumb.

She said she wasn’t hungry, but I made food anyway: hot-pot noodles, soup in the microwave, macaroni and cheese from a box covered in cartoons. “Can you take that stuff outside?” she asked. “The smell is making me sick.”

She accepted salted crackers, butter cookies, nothing else. She took the vitamins I fed her every morning. I hid the bottle and told her they were pills from a doctor.

“What can I do?” I said. “Tell me.”

She sighed. “I’m not supposed to go off it like this.”

I shook my head.

She was so goddamn bored, she said. She was losing her mind. She wasn’t used to all this time—hours after hours after hours of this wide-awake and breathing. Maybe I could distract her?

“Tell me stories like that woman,” she said. “The one who told them for all those nights.”

“Scheherazade?”

“Yeah,” she said. “You be her.”

I told her about my own problems. At least they weren’t hers, I told myself, and the truth was I hadn’t talked about them for a while. I missed them like old friends.

I told her about starving myself for two years straight, waking up so hungry in the middle of night that I snuck down to the basement of my dorm and found a jar of peanut butter in a Dumpster. I crouched down and stuck my finger into the jar and licked it clean, over and over again, until I caught sight of a mouse running past a crumpled plastic bag and thought, This is when I stop. I couldn’t bear the thought of those empty hours without sleep or company, the hours that kept repeating themselves in front of me.

I told her about skipping breakfast and getting dizzy from early-morning cigarettes. I told her I’d done eight miles on the treadmill every morning. I could hear the old pride creeping back.

She didn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell if she was interested or in pain. I didn’t know what was happening inside her body, only that it hurt.

“What did your family say?” she asked. “Your mother?”

“She helped,” I said. “She tried.”