They also fill out paperwork and get certificates when required to do so for, say, a job or a driver’s license or Diane’s birth or the times they’re required to play the mandatory citywide lottery whose winners are fed to the hungry wolves at the Night Vale Petting Zoo.

But they do not want to be married. Our life together is just that: our life together, they might say if you asked them to succinctly grandstand about their choice. They might, but they probably wouldn’t. They aren’t sanctimonious or vociferous. They simply love each other, and that is enough for them to believe in.

Diane too wanted to be with someone and be in love with someone. She wanted to do these things without being married. She still does. She saw herself in her parents. She saw how she could be, how life could be, how love could be.

There is a correlation between seeing what could be and experiencing what is. But, as the well-spoken scientist who is often interviewed on the news says: “Correlation is not causation” and “Past performance is not a predictor of future results.”

Diane’s parents are also two different races. It matters which races, but it matters only to Diane and her parents and their family and friends, not to those who do not know them. Not everyone gets to know everything about everybody.

Growing up in the Southwest, Diane saw a few mixed-race parents, mixed-race children, but she did not always have the opportunity or inclination to befriend these families. When she was a kid, friends were still determined by City Council decree, based on the numerology of each child’s name, which had been considered the most solid foundation for a lasting friendship.

Sometimes she was teased, called terrible names by other children. Sometimes, those children were not the same race as one of her parents. Conversely, those same children were often the same race as her other parent.

As Diane became a teenager, she continued to hear not only about her race but also about her body.

She was a girl, not yet a woman. She was fifteen years old.

Imagine a fifteen-year-old girl of mixed-race parents.

That’s pretty good. That’s very close, she might say to anyone who described what she looked like. Diane didn’t know what she looked like. She never cared to know. Many people would tell her anyway.

When her body won the race to womanhood against her person, Diane began to hear that she was tall, short, fat, skinny, ugly, sexy, smiled too much, smiled too little, had bad hair, had beautiful hair, had something in her teeth, dressed nice, dressed cheap, had duck feet, had elegant feet. She was too dark. She was too pale.

She heard a lot of different descriptions of her, and she took them all as truth.