The bug man’s office is in a building that looks like a pile of children’s blocks, carelessly stacked. The waiting room is empty and I settle happily on a chair. I like this kind of place, where you’re in between one thing and another. Hallways, waiting rooms, lobbies and so on; rooms where nothing is actually supposed to happen. It relieves a lot of pressure and lets me think.

The air smells strongly of cleaning products, a chemical impression of a flowering meadow. At some point in the future, I guess, almost no one will know what real meadow smells like. Maybe by then there won’t be any real meadows left and they’ll have to make flowers in labs. Then of course they’ll engineer them to smell like cleaning products, because they’ll think that’s right, and it will all go in a circle. These are the kinds of interesting thoughts I have while in waiting rooms and at crosswalks or standing in line at the grocery store.

The bug man appears and shows me in, adjusting his tie. I think I make him nervous. It’s my size. He hides it well most of the time. He has a belly like a little round scatter cushion, the kind Mommy liked so much. His hair is sparse and blond. Behind the glasses his eyes are blue and almost perfectly round.

Obviously I can’t recall his name. He looks like a friendly little shield bug, or a stag beetle. So the bug man is how I think of him.

The office is pale, pastel, containing far more chairs than could ever be needed in here. They’re all different sizes, shapes and colors. They put me in an agony of indecision. I wonder, is this the bug man’s way of judging my mood? Sometimes I try to think like Lauren, and guess which chair she would pick. She’d probably just throw them around the place.

I choose a dented, metal fold-out. I hope this severe choice will show him that I am serious about my progress.

“You’ve lost some more hair,” the bug man says mildly.

“I think my cat pulls it out at night.”

“And your left arm looks badly bruised. What’s up with that?”

I should have worn long sleeves, I wasn’t thinking.

“I was out on a date,” I say. “She shut the car door on my arm by accident.” I haven’t actually been on a date yet, but I feel like it’s more likely to happen if I say the words, like a spell that will force me to do it.

“That’s unfortunate,” he says. “Apart from that, did you feel the date went well?”