“Yeah, but didn’t your mom, like, leave you?” Callous, maybe, but not untrue. To this day, Zadie still wondered why Nora hadn’t taken any of her cassettes with her. Her mom’s ’97 RAV4 might have had a hole in the floor and sounded like a go-kart when it accelerated, but at least it had had a working tape deck. The day Zadie got her driver’s license, Nora had tossed her the keys and they drove around town for hours listening to the tapes Nora kept in the glove compartment. That’s how Zadie discovered Blondie, the Indigo Girls, and Prince. When Nora left two years later, she took the car, but Blondie and the rest of her musical idols stayed behind. It’s not like her, Zadie, still in shock, had thought at the time. She never goes anywhere without her music. In a way, it was more surprising than the disappearance itself.

Now it was Zadie’s turn to disappear. Dustin had asked that she “leave no trace” of ever having been in his apartment. As Zadie rinsed a lipstick smudge off one of his glass tumblers, she felt more like she was covering up a crime scene than surrendering the title of Dustin’s part-time live-in girlfriend. Soon she would go back to her own apartment, unpack her things, and decide how sad she really was about the breakup. Right now she didn’t feel much of anything, except maybe a little nauseous.

It’s not like she was totally alone. If she got lonely, she could talk to the Ladybug. According to the various mommy blogs, Zadie’s baby was the size of a sweet pea, but she found the whole food-to-child analogy creepy. It made it sound like her baby was something to be harvested when ripe, then stuffed in a cornucopia on Thanksgiving with some gourds and ears of corn. So instead she decided to measure the size of her child against other living things. At six weeks, her baby was approximately a quarter of an inch long, the size of a ladybug. In two weeks, it would be the size of a honeybee. Eventually it would be big enough that she could start comparing it to cuter animals: a chipmunk, maybe, or a kitten, but for now she’d have to settle for ones with exoskeletons.

“You were kind of his idea, you know.” Zadie addressed her midsection as she placed the clean glass in the dish rack. Dustin had broached the subject of kids a few months earlier during a trip to the animal shelter. As they browsed crates of underexercised dogs, he said, “You know what would be even cooler than a dog?”

Zadie thought he was going to suggest they adopt a snake or an iguana, some gross bachelor-pad animal that would require keeping tubs of crickets in their freezer. She opened her mouth to protest when he blurted, “A kid!”