Dinner that night was a slurry of quinoa and kale and black beans, delivered in one enormous bowl to each table in the long, loud dining room. On the way in, just past the door, there was a little station with stacks of plates. The plates were mismatched in color and size, probably donated; the one I picked up had an unbearably twee strawberry-and-picket-fence pattern. I turned it slowly in my hands and touched my fingers to the smallest, most delicate strawberry, feeling suddenly tender. Then I was promptly jabbed in the back. When I turned to look at the girl behind me, she only grinned. She might have even looked pleasant, except that her mouth seemed twice as large as it had any right to be, her teeth twice as white.

I smiled weakly back; I felt the urge to run, or at least to slink off to a corner where no one would catch me fingering cute plates in my spare time. But I wasn’t here to be the same person I was at home, I reminded myself. I was here for a reason. So, still feeling a tingling in my back where I’d been prodded, I took my dumb little plate over to Janet and Laurel’s otherwise empty table, right in the center of the room. I sat down, leaving a few chairs between us for the sake of plausible deniability; they ignored me without effort. Above us, the rafters were wound with hundreds of prayer flags in faded primary colors that looked as though they’d hung there for decades.

There was a basket of fruit on the table. I reached out and palmed a plum, but no—it was plastic. I went to put it back, but stopped when I saw two curved wounds, thin creases in the fake purple skin. Someone else had tried to bite into it. Which meant that someone, weeks or years or minutes ago, had known even less than I did. I turned the plum over in my hand. I rubbed my thumb along the creases. As comforts go, it was a mild one, but still. I placed the plum back in its basket, tooth marks turned in for privacy.

“Always kale,” I heard Janet mutter, pressing her bamboo fork aimlessly into the back of her hand. She turned her head, and for the first time I got a good look at her left cheek. It wasn’t paint that I’d seen the day before; it was a birthmark, in the shape of a crown tipped on its side. It was a deep eggplant color, the same exact shade as her hair. She must have spent considerable time searching for the dye to match it.

“It’s like they think we’re rabbits,” Laurel said, holding up a big green leaf, drawing out the a: raaaabbits.