Unsurprisingly, all the new women hated Greg. Anytime he spoke they’d shoot one another looks, roll their eyes, exhale dramatically. During coffee one morning, while Nina was stretching, lifting her leg over her head in a way that felt obviously suggestive, his chastity bracelet snapped in half and shot across the room like a rubber band. “Oops,” he said, snickering, as Nina pretended to ignore him. Later that day, she was eating a bag of peanut M&Ms, and Greg called out, “Melts in your mouth, not in your hands!”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she yelled. “Why does everything have to be a sexual innuendo?”

He scratched his head, appearing genuinely confused. “Wait a minute, how was that sexual? It’s the slogan!”

She threw down her leg and looked at me over on the opposite couch. “How can you stand him?”

Greg sat down beside me and peeled open a banana. “He’s pretty harmless,” I said as he chomped into it. “Really.”

Molly tried to make friends with the incoming women. She’d sit outside with them at the picnic tables and they’d toss her scraps of attention, smiling tight-lipped at her comments before changing the subject. They didn’t invite her on their post-lunch or pre-coffee walks. They’d give her questions one-word responses without asking any in return. And they’d talk about her when she wasn’t around.

“Why does she pick at herself so much?” I overheard Nina say to the other women in the cafeteria one day. “I just want to tape oven mitts to her hands or something!”

As I eavesdropped on their conversation, I found myself wincing. I recognized her arbitrary, superficial judgments; they were just like the ones I came in with and applied to everyone there. I too had always felt repulsed whenever anyone tried to get close to me. But who was it I actually loathed? Who was I really judging?

“You know,” I said to Nina as we walked outside with our trays. “The picking is annoying. But maybe you shouldn’t hold it against her. She really hasn’t done anything to you except try to be your friend.”

Nina said nothing. And as my hypocrisy shined, it began to cast a light on other areas of my life.

“I think I know who you remind me of,” I said to Molly that afternoon. I so very much didn’t want to admit it. “You remind me of me. Or the me that I might’ve been, if my mom didn’t insist on whipping me into who she wanted me to be. I guess I miss that other version of myself, even though it sort of terrifies me.