His eyebrows come together and then smooth as he starts to laugh. He points behind me. I turn. About five feet away a group of birds with black-and-white stripes are strutting around in the grass. Nene. On the lawn. Not on my plate.

“Oh,” I say. “Oh, thank god.”

Nick keeps laughing, until it’s hard for me not to laugh, too, in spite of everything. It is pretty funny. We laugh, and the geese honk, and for like five seconds I actually forget that my life is being turned upside down, and then Nick goes back to his phone and his game, and I resume eating the mystery meat, which is still, probably, pork.

After that Nick decides we’re buddies, and I don’t argue. He gravitates toward me whenever we stop, first at Rainbow Falls, which is gorgeous but crowded, and then to a beach where the sand is pure black. From the pier, Nick points out a sea turtle. But I can’t find it.

“I love turtles.” I squint to find the shape under the water, but all I see is reflections of light and gleams of darkness.

“What kind of turtles?”

I shrug. “Big ones. Small ones. Tortoises. Little snappers. They’re the best.” Something about turtles just speaks to me. I like their weird textures, their mix of being kind of rough and reptilian but also beautiful, somehow. Their quiet. Their steady intelligent eyes.

“Which ninja turtle are you?” Nick asks, a bit of a non sequitur. “You strike me as a Raphael,” he says. “Maybe a Leonardo.”

I don’t know the ninja turtles—they were before, and possibly after, my time—so I go with the OG artists. “Raphael was good—I like his portraits more than the religious stuff. Michelangelo’s genius kind of intimidates me—I could never accomplish what he did. But Donatello, now he’s approachable. He was interested in real people, not only ideas or storybook figures. He was a sculptor, and I’m not very good in that medium, but something about his work—I don’t know—it transfixes me. I get Donatello.”

The neural pathways of my brain immediately lead to me another sculptor: Diana Robinson, and from there, straight to Leo. Calling me his mom’s groupie. Saying that we didn’t have anything in common. If anyone asked me about my feelings for Leo at this point, I’d say I was over it now, it was yesterday’s news, but still, my chest gives a painful squeeze when I think of what he said about me.

But, again, I also recognize it for what it is: a minor bump in the hazardous road that’s become my life lately.

Nick smiles at me obliviously. “That’s right, you like art.”