Happiness and Abundance

Despite Spooky Spaghetti being the next day, despite Mina knowing it might be her only chance to get Devon back, she and Jacob stayed up all night drinking Vadorades—vodka mixed with Gatorade so you wouldn’t lose so many electrolytes or whatever—and playing Tekken 3 on the PlayStation Jacob had bought on eBay. After the vodka ran out, they moved on to boxed wine and really-not-that-big key bumps of coke, playing one more round and one more round until the sun came streaming through the broken blinds of Jacob’s mildewed apartment, causing Mina not only to lose a match she should’ve won (Ling Xiaoyu vs. Kuma) but also to think about her immediate future. She began sobbing that Spooky Spaghetti started in only five hours and that she loved Devon so so so much and that he seemed like he was probably maybe going to give her another chance but that she was going to fuck it up because she always fucked everything up, and Jacob slugged her in the shoulder, told her to “buck up, champ,” and cut the rest of the condom-packet-size baggie into lines in the hope that it would help them fake being functional adults and not the kind of thirtysomethings who did this on a regular basis.

And despite Devon’s clear dislike of him, Mina had told Jacob that of course he should come with her to Spooky Spaghetti, that Devon and his daughter, Juliette, would love to see him. It was stupid, she knew, and she wouldn’t have done it if the coke hadn’t been making her feel borderline omnipotent—probably—but sometimes she just needed Jacob around. Especially since her mother’s death six months earlier.

Mina and Jacob entered Juliette’s classroom and found several parents watching as Devon, his hands tied loosely behind his back with a shiny, expensive-looking women’s scarf, tried to capture a miniature donut hanging by fishing line from a light fixture, using only his mouth. It revolved slowly, dripping powdered sugar onto his open lips, his outstretched tongue. The image, Mina thought, was kind of kinky, and she wondered if anyone else thought the game a little weird for a children’s event.

“What is he doing?” Jacob asked.

Mina looked at the puff-paint sign on the door. “Dangling Donuts.”

“Dangling?”

Though neither Devon nor his ex-wife was religious, Juliette attended a Catholic school—not the kind with nuns, which Jacob found disappointing—“for the education.” And with Spooky Spaghetti, Saint Thomas had combined a spaghetti dinner and Halloween into a fund-raiser for a school that, Mina thought, didn’t need any money. She’d observed kids receiving king-size name-brand candy bars as they trick-or-treated down the high-ceilinged hallway, and the prize for Dangling Donuts was a forty-dollar chai pie from a chic Indian fusion place down the street. She couldn’t help but compare the whole thing to the Fall Festival at her own elementary school: the droopy homemade confections the cakewalk winners received, the Frog Toss—green beanbags with googly eyes, and a bucket—the laps around the gym that constituted the Spider Sprint.

Devon gripped the donut between his teeth and pulled, sprinkling white powder across the chest of his button-up. He nodded in Mina’s direction and gave a half smile. A hopeful half smile? Mrs. Becker, Juliette’s teacher, clapped, then untied him, leaned in close, and flicked her eyes at his daughter, indicating that they needed to talk about her.

The walls were adorned with religious paraphernalia as well as construction-paper pumpkins and bats, and Mina was pulling Jacob off a glossy poster depicting Jesus’s profile page on a fictional—she hoped—social-media site called Faithbook when a warm body slammed into her hip and threw its arms around her waist.

“Mina!” Juliette’s grin held none of the hesitation of her father’s, and Mina beamed back, though her smile grew more fragile as Devon approached. “Do you like my costume?” Juliette asked, stepping back and holding out the gingham skirt of her nightdress.

Or was it gingham? Was all blue-and-white-checkered material gingham or just some of it? She had no idea who Juliette was supposed to be.

“Mina,” Devon said. No hi, no hello, no I made a huge mistake and I want you back more than anything, just her name. “I need to talk to Mrs. Becker for a minute. Would you mind taking Juliette to the haunted house?”

Juliette curtsied to Mina, her braids flopping over her shoulders.

“No problem,” Mina said, hitching her purse up and trying to appear casual, though her heart was thumping against her chest like an excited rabbit and her internal monologue had been reduced to “Yes! Yes! Yes!” She had been mistaken: Devon wasn’t uncertain or cold; he was trusting her with his daughter. She imagined their reconciliation, the incredible sex that would follow, the two rescue beagles they would adopt.

“Hello, Jacob,” Devon said, in a tone that asked what he was doing there.

“Dev!” Jacob swooped in for a hug at the same time Devon extended his hand, and they ended up in an awkward elbow-to-chest bump.

“Thanks, Mean. Let’s meet in the cafeteria after,” Devon said to her. He gave Juliette a squeeze on the shoulder and returned to Mrs. Becker.

“Have you noticed how he always calls you ‘Mean’?” Jacob asked as they walked down the hallway, progressing backward through the seven sacraments in poster form. The ebullient minor piano chords of a Lizzo hit emanated from the cafeteria, and Juliette executed a pretty solid pirouette that turned into a downward shimmy, hands on hips, as she sang along to “Truth Hurts,” a disconcertingly mature challenge in her voice as she asserted the unbreakability of her heart. It reminded Mina of her mother, of her mortifyingly enthusiastic karaoke performance at Mina’s thirteenth birthday party. Her mother, who was now dead because of a random, stupid car accident that hadn’t even been anyone’s fault.

“It’s like he can’t be bothered with more than one syllable. And he named his daughter Jul-i-ette.”

Always a talker, on coke Jacob nattered on nonstop, like a caricature of a gossipy old woman; Mina tuned out and watched Juliette twirl down the hallway.

Mina was a fuckup, she knew that about herself, but she adored Devon’s daughter. She hadn’t realized how much until Devon had broken things off with her this last time and she found herself thinking about playing Pretty Pretty Princess with Juliette almost as much as about him putting his hand gently around her throat and telling her to be a good girl as he twisted his fingers inside her. Which had sounded creepy when she described it to Jacob later but was incredibly hot at the time.

But it wasn’t just the sex that she missed, that she needed back—though it’d been pretty great, Devon far more adventurous than his khakis suggested—or even Devon himself, his old-man sense of humor, the unselfconscious gusto with which he sang “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid with Juliette in the car. It was the way she’d felt when she was with him, the near-physical sense that she was somebody else. Somebody better.

When they reached the entrance to the haunted house, aka the gym, Mina handed three tickets to the parent manning the door, who was dressed as . . . the Easter Bunny? A clown? A court jester? Was it some kind of mash-up? She opened the door for Juliette, who curtsied again, and Jacob, who mimicked her. As it clanged shut behind them, latching loudly, almost all light vanished. She could just barely see the black velvet curtains that formed a narrow corridor, guiding them farther into the haunted house. A cloud that was probably supposed to be a bloody crimson but was more of a mauve-pink hovered around her waist.

“It’s dark,” Juliette said in a voice on the edge of trembling.

“It’ll take our eyes a minute to adjust.”

“I got it,” Jacob said, and he reached into his pocket and pulled out his lighter, a Zippo in the shape of a cowgirl with nipples that blinked red. In the flickering light Mina could see his bloodshot eyes, the dollop of snot peeking out of his left nostril. Shit, I’d better not look that bad, she thought.

“Put that out.”

“She can’t see,” he said, pointing to Juliette in defense.

“Now.”

He snapped it shut.

“Can I look at it?” Juliette asked.

Jacob started to hand her the lighter, but Mina slapped his hand away and jerked her head at his nose.

“What?”

She repeated the motion more forcefully.

“What?” he asked again. “I can’t understand you if you don’t use your words.” He leaned in close and put both hands on her shoulders. “Use. Your. Words.” Underneath the peppermint of the gum he was chewing, she caught a whiff of bad wine.

“You. Need. A. Tissue.”

He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jacket.

“Gross, Jake.”

“Fine,” he said in exasperation that seemed half-feigned. “I’ll go to the bathroom.”

His sneakers squeaked on the gym floor as he walked away, and just before he yanked the door open, Jacob flipped on the lighter again and stuck his tongue out at her.

“What’re those blinking lights?” Juliette asked.

“They’re nothing.”

Juliette took her hand, and they stood there in the black, sweaty palms pressed together, listening to the sounds of theatrical screaming, growling, and maniacal laughter coming from farther on.

“We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Mina told Juliette.

“I want to.”

Mina hesitated, not sure if it was okay to ask about Carl, but Carl’s absence or presence seemed like a crucial piece of information. A month ago, when Devon broke up with her “for real,” Carl had been a problem. Though Juliette was probably too old for a security blanket—and why had she named it Carl?—between the divorce and the move and the new school and her mother’s immediate remarriage to her fencing instructor, she just needed one. Mina understood. Devon, his ex-wife, and even the fencing instructor understood. Saint Thomas, however, did not. Particularly not the children of Saint Thomas, who had taken to calling Juliette a whiny-baby-pants and once threw the blanket in the mud and jumped on it. Juliette’s teacher and the school’s administration had, Mina felt, been inadequately sympathetic, suggesting therapy for Juliette rather than punishment for the Carl-jumpers. After the last parent-teacher conference, worried about the potential collapse of her daughter’s social life, Juliette’s mother had reluctantly proposed a ceremonial cremation. Devon and his ex-wife had still been locked in a series of circular texts and phone calls on the issue when he ended things with Mina.

“Do you have Carl with you?”

“I have Pocket Carl.”

“Pocket Carl?”

Pocket Carl, it turned out, was a fucking brilliant idea. Rather than getting rid of the security blanket, Devon had multiplied it, cut it into pieces that resided in different locales. There were Dad’s-House Carl, Mom’s-House Carl, Backpack Carl, Bedtime Carl, Car Carl, etc. The smallest but perhaps most important of the bunch, Pocket Carl, was safety-pinned to the inside of one of Juliette’s pockets every day before school. This would’ve delighted Mina under any circumstances, in any state of mind, but with the cocaine still vibrating through her system, she smiled so hard that her throat constricted.

Juliette took her hand again, and they began to walk, picking around the piles of fake bones littering the floor. Mina was already keyed up, so the anticipation of being scared, of knowing something was coming but not when or from what direction made her edgy. The velvet curtains seemed to billow ominously, and was that swirl of fog different from the rest, hiding something? She wished she had a Carl and noticed that his fringe was sticking out of Juliette’s pocket.

They turned the first corner, and “Like that!” Mina would try to tell Devon later, “we were hit in the face with all these strobe lights, and out of nowhere this insanely fast dude dressed as a skeleton and holding a sword ran right at us.” Mina stood “frozen with fear, frozen” for a moment as the glowing skeleton moved inexorably toward her, the flashing blue-tinged lights making it seem as though he were skipping through time and space, the eyes of the skull ever wider, ever blacker, the teeth turning into a sadistic grin, the sword glinting erratically. She swung Juliette into her arms and ran.

The strobe lights vanished as she rounded the corner, and the sound of the skeleton’s footsteps slowed. The voice that called after her sounded young and offended. “I’m not actually going to hurt you.”

“Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you?” Mina could barely suck air into her rattling chest.

He lifted his mask, revealing himself to be somebody’s acne-scarred older brother, and shrugged. “It’s a haunted house.” The blade that had been so menacingly sharp moments before became a foil-wrapped piece of cardboard.

Mina had Juliette clamped against her, and Juliette squirmed her mouth up to Mina’s ear and whispered, “You shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”

“I’m sorry,” Mina said softly, and she put her cheek on Juliette’s forehead. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I forgive you.” Juliette raised her head and kissed Mina on the bottom of her chin, right where neck meets face. “Also, I’m not scared.”

Mina put her down as the group ahead of them rounded the corner to see what all the fuss was about. It was the Hairy Hand all over again, Mina terrified and everyone else having a grand old time. As an adult, she could see how completely unscary it had been, just somebody’s dad wearing a furry glove. But the trepidation with which she’d put her arm through the circular-ish hole in the refrigerator box at her elementary school’s Fall Festival was still so vivid. The glove had been covered in coarse fur that was slightly sticky, and it had slowly, almost gently, put several Jolly Ranchers into her palm and dragged its cold plastic fingernails across it before suddenly grabbing her wrist and pulling. She’d screamed wildly, nearly wet herself, shaken and kicked the tempera-painted cardboard as the onlookers—classmates and parents and teachers—cracked up. Even her own mother had been hiding a smile. Mina was the type of person who would carry a slight, hug it to her chest for years, for decades, and she felt her face tingle at the memory. Then she remembered her mother dying, and a leaden guilt spread through her. It’d taken over an hour for the paramedics or fire-men or whoever did that sort of thing to get her out of the car.

“Have fun?” the Easter-Bunny-clown-jester asked as Mina squinted into the fluorescent lights after a truly harrowing seven minutes. Harrowing for her, that is; Juliette hadn’t reached for Pocket Carl once. She didn’t see Jacob, but after a moment she heard his voice and the words “So a priest, a rabbi, and an imam walk into a bar . . .”

Mina and Juliette followed the sound down the hallway, through a gauntlet of Kleenex ghosts, past a poster that assertively proclaimed “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ!”—there seemed to be an undue visual emphasis on the word “ashamed”—and found that Jacob had cornered a couple of moms. Literally cornered them, Mina thought, as she watched the visibly uncomfortable women press themselves against the wall.

“We have to go,” Mina said, taking Jacob’s arm.

“I’m in the middle of a joke!”

Mina placed the tip of her shoe on his Converse and pressed.

“Well, it was nice meeting you,” he told the relieved women with a wave.

“Jake,” Mina said, leaning into him as they walked, “this is a Catholic school. What were you thinking?”

“You don’t know the joke; the priest comes off well. Want to hear it? So, a priest, a rabbi, and an imam walk into a bar—”

“Stop.”

Jacob inhaled, preparing, Mina was sure, to argue, but she shoved him into the classroom with the cakewalk, where Juliette was pointing excitedly at the gourmet pastries adorned with three-inch-tall butter-cream roses. The music started, and they began shuffling around the room in a circle as Amy Winehouse assured the listener that she knew she was no good.

It was the hour her mother had been in the car alone that Mina couldn’t get out of her head. She didn’t know any details. Maybe her mother had been killed instantly, maybe she’d been unconscious. She imagined it like that sometimes. But she also imagined it all the other ways. The one in which her mother fumbled with the seat belt but couldn’t make her fingers work, the one in which she coughed blood onto the steering wheel, the one in which she had just enough breath to feel herself die.

“Mom!” Juliette cried.

Mina wanted to throw her purse down and scream. Obviously she’d known Bethany would be there, but she had imagined meeting Devon’s ex-wife while holding his hand in hers, after their heartfelt reconciliation, imagined Bethany looking resentfully from their lovingly clasped palms to Devon’s defiant eyes while Mina, who would stay cool and controlled, poised, smiled a charming smile that said “I won” without showing her bad teeth.

“Hi, Bethany,” Mina said weakly. “Hi . . .” She couldn’t remember the fencing instructor’s name. She and Devon just called him “the swordsman.”

The fencing instructor smiled amiably and nodded at her. Mina had always thought he was like a golden retriever: beautiful, sweet, nothing but fluff between the ears. He was even blond.

“I didn’t realize you would be here,” Bethany said. Devon had always insisted that his ex-wife didn’t dislike Mina, that she was just protective of Juliette, but Mina wasn’t convinced.

“I asked Daddy if Mina could come,” Juliette said, and Mina drooped. Devon had told her that it was Juliette’s idea, that she’d begged him to invite Mina to Spooky Spaghetti, but she’d thought, hoped, that it was just an excuse, that he missed her, that he was desperate to see her and had no problem lying about his daughter if it meant Mina’s glorious return to his life.

“We were just going to meet Devon in the cafeteria,” Jacob said, cheerily ignoring or oblivious to the iron tension radiating from Bethany.

“We’ll all go,” Bethany said, taking her daughter’s hand proprietarily.

The DJ, when they entered the cafeteria, seemed to be taking his job very seriously, pressing brightly colored headphones to an ear and futzing with one of those boards covered with buttons as the celebratory horns of Taylor Swift swelled.

Devon was sitting alone at a white laminate table with a barely touched plate of spaghetti in front of him. Though the pasta’s multicolored hues hinted at high-end cuisine, it had been sitting out for hours, leaving the sauce congealed.

Bethany made a face. “That looks awful.”

“Maybe we could get takeout instead,” the fencing instructor suggested hopefully.

Possibly trying to set an example, something about wastefulness and being happy with what you’ve got, Devon lifted a pile of limp noodles to his mouth.

“Can we get pizza?” Juliette asked, and the fencing instructor nodded enthusiastically.

“You know I’m off cheese.” Bethany looked at Juliette and bounced her shoulders to the beat in a helpless shrug, taking the edge off.

“Chinese?” Jacob suggested. Bethany stilled, and Mina knew that she hadn’t thought “we” would include them.

“I love Chinese,” Juliette said.

Devon pushed his plate away. “It’s pretty bad. Might as well give the lady what she wants.”

Bethany whipped out her phone. “I’ll call it in to Kang’s and pick it up on the way to your place,” she said, and Mina could feel herself being excluded.

“We’ll pick it up,” Jacob jumped in. He winked and grinned a see-what-I-did-there grin at Mina.

Bethany lagged behind the group as they walked out of the school and into the parking lot, digging for her keys in a massive bag while ordering moo shu pancakes in a tone that Mina thought unduly aggressive. She stumbled as she stepped off the curb and dropped everything. “Shit!” Bethany said, and Mina was gratified to see a few passersby give her disapproving looks. Deep in conversation and a few feet ahead, Devon and Juliette didn’t notice, and Mina saw her chance. As Jacob and the swordsman knelt to gather the pens and lipsticks and hair ties and lotions and, yes, keys, Mina caught up with the others.

“Did Juliette tell you about the haunted house?” she asked Devon.

“She was just about to. Why did you bring Jacob?”

Mina didn’t know how to explain, not in a way that Devon would understand, so she lied. “My car’s in the shop so he drove me.” Half lied; he had driven.

“I would’ve picked you up.”

She thrilled. Even though she lived twenty minutes away, in Houston proper, he would’ve picked her up.

“Can I ride with Mina?” Juliette asked.

Devon looked back at Bethany, still gathering her belongings from the pavement. “I suppose that’d be okay.”

“It’s the blue one,” Mina said, pointing. Juliette skipped ahead of them toward the car.

“Thank you for coming to this. It means a lot to her,” Devon said, gesturing to his daughter.

“Of course. Congratulations on your Dangling Donuts victory by the way.”

He shook his head. “This school . . .”

“Would you like to watch me play Dangling Donuts?” Mina asked flirtatiously.

He laughed out a “what?” and gave her a full-bodied smile for the first time all day. “I do miss you, you know.”

As Jacob drove past First Colony Mall and under the highway, Mina remembered taking the same road with Devon two months earlier, on the way to Juliette’s birthday party at Bethany’s house. He and his ex-wife were “committed to” (Mina would’ve said “obsessed with”) providing Juliette a sense of family postdivorce and forced themselves into all kinds of uncomfortable arrangements. Given how palpably tense these occasions were—God, the pissing contest between Devon and the swordsman on the Fourth of July—Mina wasn’t sure if they made things better or worse for Juliette.

She’d been on the phone with Jacob, who’d been in a tiff with a co-worker and was insisting that honesty was always the best policy while Mina tried to convince him, without coming off as a liar, that sometimes honesty was the stupid policy. Devon had seemed impatient, so she cut Jacob off when he took a pause for breath, told him she loved him, and hung up the phone. She turned to Devon. “Jake’s being an idiot.”

“Is that anything new?”

“He’s my best friend.”

“I don’t think he’s a good influence on you.”

Mina rolled her eyes. “Thanks, Dad.”

“Okay, that was patronizing.”

“When my mom died—”

“Mina, I would’vebeen there.”

And he would have. Of course he would have. If it hadn’t happened during breakup number two, if she had told him. But would Devon have let his other relationships rot for her, devoted himself to her drowning grief, rubbed her back as she cried into plates of food she couldn’t eat for weeks on end?

Mina had lived with Jacob for almost a month afterward, which Devon didn’t know. What did they do? They got drunk, they got really drunk, they played retro video games, they watched movies that Mina didn’t pay attention to. She said “what?” a lot and took hours-long naps every day. When Jacob was at work, and sometimes when he wasn’t, she would sit in his duct-taped purple beanbag chair, headphones on, seeing her mother’s death, every song the soundtrack. It didn’t matter what the song was about or whether Mina’s mother had liked it.

The conversation with Devon had felt precarious, as if things might be said that shouldn’t be, and she had steered the conversation away from Jacob by packaging this aspect of her grief as a humorous anecdote. “I don’t know if I’ve seen too many movies or what, but it was, like, totally cinematic,” she told Devon. “I’d put my iPod on shuffle, and occasionally it was totally appropriate, like ‘Hallelujah’”—she’d imagined the blood running slowly down her mother’s legs into her pink sneakers. “A lot of times it was that happy-music-violent-scene thing”—she’d watched her mother choke on her own vomit to a salsa beat and Cardi B’s staccato voice—“and sometimes it was just weird, like this whale song with tinkly bells that’s supposed to help you sleep”—her mother was dying, and she knew it, and she was alone, and Mina could never change that, only see it, over and over. “Why did I ever download that?” And then Mina laughed hard, leaning forward and slapping the glove compartment. When Devon, looking worried, asked why she hadn’t just stopped listening to music, she’d turned up the radio and mimicked Billie Eilish’s tight sexy simper as the beat dropped and the snaps started.

“Do I turn here?” Jacob asked, interrupting Mina’s thoughts.

“Where?”

“Here.” Jacob gestured not with his arms but with the car, and the truck behind them honked.

“Jake!”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

Mina glanced back at Juliette, who was obliviously kicking her feet to Kendrick Lamar’s bassline, and then down at the little orange balloon on her phone. “It’s the next one.”

“Roger that.”

Why was Jacob easier than her other friends, the little family she had? Why had he been the only person she could stand to have near her in those first weeks after her mother’s death? Because he didn’t tell her to talk to someone—meaning “someone besides me”—he didn’t suggest yoga or meditation, he didn’t try to identify her stage of grief, he didn’t say that her mother had had a good life, which was mostly true, or a long one, which wasn’t. He didn’t insist that she find meaning while her mother smelled the bitter iron of her own blood or strangled at the sight of bone protruding from her freckled skin as Chris Stapleton crooned a love song to whiskey. Or maybe it was a love song to a girl who was like whiskey; Mina had never been sure.

Jacob had just let her be fucked up and made her food. Eggs, eggs, eggs, or takeout, but mostly eggs. He cleaned up for her, sort of, moving piles of crap from the table to the counter or from the couch to the bed and then, a few hours later, moving them back. He’d brought home good drugs on the weekends. On the worst nights he would flop down on the bed next to her, put one earbud in his ear and one in hers, and talk about people who’d been mean to him in high school and celebrities until she fell asleep.

As they turned into the restaurant, Jacob nodded at the sign, which had “Kang’s” spelled out in chopsticks in front of a pagoda. “How do you feel about that? I mean, if Kang’s was owned by a white dude, it would be totally offensive.”

“Stop.”

“Why don’t you ever want to debate these things with me?” He turned to Juliette. “Right?”

Mina thought about Juliette’s birthday party, about playing in the bouncy house with the kids, relishing the way her hair lifted off her neck with each jump, letting them teach her a dance called “the floss,” how long ago it seemed. A familiar fog of despair crept underneath her rib cage, and her nose started to run.

“I’m going to stop at the bathroom,” she told Jacob as they entered the restaurant.

“You want a little more of,” Jacob patted his pocket, “this?”

“Seriously, Jake? You brought . . .” She flicked her eyes down to his pocket. “Didn’t I specifically tell you not to?”

“I thought you might need it.”

Mina walked down a narrow hallway and into the ladies’ room, raised her skirt, plunked down on the toilet, and put her head in her hands. Fuck fuck fuck. This wasn’t going to work, was it? She felt snot ooze toward her upper lip and grabbed a piece of toilet paper. She blew her nose, exhaled loudly, forced out a few drops of pee in case anyone was listening, and flushed. Get it together, Mina, she told herself.

She looked in the mirror at the general grayness of her skin, the dark circles, dug out her concealer and dabbed a generous amount under her eyes. As she rubbed it in vigorously, she remembered that you were supposed to pat it on, but whatever. Mina couldn’t think of what to do about her zombie face, but she applied a coat of Pervette, her go-to lipstick.

Jacob was standing outside the door when she emerged. “You good?” he asked.

She nodded, and he touched her shoulder as though to check.

“Where’s Juliette?”

“She’s fine. She’s just waiting for the food.”

“Jake, you can’t leave her by herself, she’s eight.” Mina hurried down the hallway and into the dining room just in time to see Juliette reach up on tiptoe for the pickup window, to see her bump a massive bowl of soup, to see the hot liquid pour across her skinny bare arms.

The moment before the shrieking lasted forever. There was only Juliette, arms rigid and held out from her body, like she wanted to get as far away from them as possible, wide eyes filled not with pain, not yet, but betrayal. Mina was standing across the restaurant and then she was crouching before Juliette, agonized wails echoing in her ears, grabbing Juliette’s wrists, accidentally hurting her, turning over her hands, seeing how red they were, watching them shake.

The middle-aged cashier leaped over the counter—“Seriously, she leaped,” Jacob would tell her later—shoved Mina aside, and pressed Juliette’s forearms to a large bag of frozen vegetables.

“Get the burn cream,” she shouted over her shoulder, then turned back to Devon’s daughter, making soft noises while Mina stood useless, hugging herself and imagining Juliette in a hospital bed, the smell of char and iodine, the doctor talking about skin grafts.

“I’m sure she’s going to be fine,” Jacob, equally ineffectual, said in her ear.

Juliette stopped crying sooner than Mina expected, slowing to a trickling snivel only a couple of minutes after the application of the green beans, water chestnuts, and carrots.

A uniformed teenager tapped Mina on the shoulder and handed her a tube of burn cream. “For your daughter.”

The counterwoman slowly removed the vegetables. “That’s not so bad,” she said.

Mina knelt and fumbled open the tube as Juliette held her arms out toward her, palms up. She touched Juliette’s skin and could feel the heat coming off it. The red had faded to pink, but it still looked painful, and Mina could barely hold back her tears as she gently rubbed in the cream.

“I’m sorry,” Juliette said.

“It’s not your fault.” It’s mine, Mina thought, for leaving you alone.

For leaving you with Jacob.

“I was just trying to get our food from behind the soup.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Can you get Pocket Carl for me?”

Mina reached into the pocket of Juliette’s nightgown—she still didn’t know what the costume was supposed to be—unhooked the safety pin, and eased Pocket Carl off it. She put the pin in her purse and gave Juliette the scrap of fabric, which she cuddled to her tearstained cheek.

Mina’s phone vibrated. Devon. Where ARE you? It’s been like 30 minutes and Bethany’s freaking out.

Her fingers felt heavy as she typed. Leaving Kang’s now. Sorry.

Jacob turned on the radio and began rapping along. As he drove, he made an absurd horse-riding motion using the steering wheel as the reins. He turned to Mina. “Is this song about sex,” he asked, looking at the back seat and lowering his voice for the word, “or is it literally about riding a horse?”

Mina had imagined the bowl to be a boiling hot pot, but it turned out to be egg drop soup that, in the words of the counterwoman, was “not so hot.” After the application of the burn cream, Juliette’s tears had stopped trickling, and she was now happily going through the bag of fortune cookies Kang’s had given her, reading each strip of paper aloud—A smile is your personal welcome mat, A faithful friend is a strong defense, Love lights up the world—and throwing the broken cookies back in the bag. But Mina couldn’t stop thinking about what could’ve happened, about a nurse gingerly applying damp cotton to Juliette’s arms as she screamed through the painkillers.

“This one’s yours,” Juliette said, handing her a cookie. Mina cracked it open.

“What does it say?” asked Jacob.

“Your future is full of happiness and abundance.”

Juliette gave her a thumbs-up.

Eager to show her parents her many fortunes, Juliette was out the door and sprinting up to the house as soon as they were half parked. Bethany “freaking out” meant nothing good for Mina, Juliette running into the house with burnt arms and a soup-stained nightgown meant nothing good for Mina, and she was heavy and awkward and nervous and reluctant all at once as she exited the car. Jacob picked up the fragrant plastic bags from the floor of the passenger’s side, and she slowly followed him up the driveway.

He stopped next to the side door, the one that led directly into the kitchen. “Aren’t you going to take off your sunglasses?”

Mina shook her head; with the sunglasses on, everything was muted and more manageable. She tugged a smile onto her face and stepped inside, where Devon was standing alone behind the faux-marble counter. The door to the dining room behind him was open only a crack.

“Sorry if you had to wait,” Jacob called as he pushed past Mina and dropped his load in front of Devon with an outsized air of exhaustion. “They were out of spring rolls, but I got them to give us free dumplings.”

“Don’t worry about it. Would you give me and Mina a minute?”

Jacob looked at Mina, her eyes still shielded by the rainbow-black plastic. “No problem.” He headed toward the dining room.

“Outside,” Devon said, “if you don’t mind.”

Jacob moved uncharacteristically slowly as he turned. “I’ll wait in the car,” he said to Mina. “Text if you need anything. If you need me.”

Mina struggled to hold on to her smile. “I didn’t get to finish telling you about the haunted house,” she said as the door shut behind Jacob. She leaned on the counter and squeezed her arms together in a way she knew made her tits look fantastic, even in a top that was only slightly low-cut, and tried to dredge up some charm. “So, we went around the first corner, and just like that—” she snapped her fingers but they only made a weak, wet thump—“we were hit in the face with all these strobe lights, and out of nowhere—”

“Mina.”

“this insanely fast dude dressed as a skeleton—”

“Mina, stop.”

She stopped. “Juliette’s okay, right?”

“What? She’s fine. I’m sorry, Mina, I thought Juliette told Bethany you were coming, but apparently she didn’t, and Bethany, I don’t know, she’s upset. She thinks seeing you might be confusing for Juliette.”

The despair-fog that had been filling up her chest since Kang’s swirled even as she tried to fight off what the words meant.

Devon tugged at his hair. “And she’s mad about the soup, even though I told her it wasn’t your fault. She doesn’t want you to eat with us. I’m sorry, I didn’t know she would be like this.”

The fog in Mina’s chest coalesced into something denser, more rock-like, and she had to twist her words around it. “But what about you and me?”

“I feel like you might have gotten the wrong idea. Look, could you at least take off your sunglasses? I feel like I’m talking to the Terminator.”

She left them on. “Why did you even invite me?” she asked, hating the small-sounding beg in her voice.

“Juliette asked me to. It was a mistake.”

“And you?”

He sighed. “Okay, I wanted to see you. But this was never about getting back together.”

“Things could be different.”

“Things are the same. You, Jacob—”

“This is about Jacob?”

“No. Well, yes and no. If it was just me, maybe, but . . .” He glanced over his shoulder, toward the dining room, and though he didn’t say it, she heard the echo of what he’d told her the most recent time, the last time, he’d broken up with her: “I already have a child.”

She swallowed down tears and, though it’d been hours, the gasoline taste of the coke, which really had been shit, not nearly as good as what Jake usually had. “Can I say goodbye to Juliette?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Mina looked through the sliver of open door. She couldn’t see Juliette’s face, just her legs swinging out from underneath the probable gingham. She thought about the haunted house, the way she’d instinctively tried to protect Devon’s daughter. Even if the danger hadn’t been real, didn’t that count for something? Didn’t Juliette’s kiss? Her forgiveness? Mina’s eyes grew hot.

“Who’s she supposed to be?” she choked out. “Juliette.”

“Wendy.”

“From the restaurant?” Mina made the redheaded logo’s flipped-out braids with her hands.

Devon half laughed. “From Peter Pan. You know, Captain Hook, the lost boys, kids who don’t want to grow up. Hence the nightgown.”

Through the door she could see Juliette making Carl—a bigger Carl, one that seemed more substantial—dance across the table, the inside of her forearms still a soft pink.

Mina turned and fast-walked, almost sprinted, out of the house without saying another word, feeling that rock inside heat up into something else, something more dangerous but equally familiar.

At Jacob’s car, she stopped, breathed, and slammed her fist into the door as hard as she could, hard enough for a flash to color everything yellow for an instant. Not hard enough. As she drew back her hand again, she heard Devon call out.

“Mean—”

She threw open the door and thrust herself into the passenger seat. She wanted to rip her skin off.

There was a long, soft silence before Jacob spoke. “I’m sorry.” He fidgeted with the keys hanging out of the ignition.

“Can you just drive?” Mina turned the radio on and bit the inside of her lip, feeling the flesh crimp, trying to draw blood. She knew Jacob could see the tears leaking from underneath her sunglasses, the sounds she was trying not to make, but the guy just couldn’t help himself, and he began quietly singing along to the music. As he and Lizzo proclaimed themselves to be half-goddesses, Mina leaned her head heavily on the window, trying not to give up.

“It’s Devon’s loss,” Jacob said when the song ended, leaning over the steering wheel for emphasis. “He could’ve had a bad bitch, like in the song.”

Mina stared out the windshield as the colorful signs for McDonald’s, Kroger, and, yes, Wendy’s marched by.

“Seriously, you want to be a suburban housewife?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like then?”

She flashed to playing Pretty Pretty Princess the night after Juliette’s birthday party. Devon had agreed to participate, letting Juliette pin back his minimal bangs and Mina do his makeup. The yellow plastic barrette with the bear on it had teetered precariously from his hair as Mina had smeared his eyes with kohl. And when Juliette ran to get the hair spray, she had kissed the lipstick off him, turning her own mouth a sloppy red. At its best, it’d been like that. Her hand was throbbing.

“I found out her costume,” Mina said. “She’s Wendy. Not from the restaurant.”

“Obviously not. That Wendy wears stripes.”

“How do you notice these things?”

“How do you not? What Wendy then?”

“From Peter Pan.”

“Oh, her.” Jacob rolled his eyes. “She was always my least favorite character. Who would choose to leave Neverland?” He shook his head in disapproval and changed lanes. “I didn’t want to say anything before,” he continued, “but Devon’s not the one for you.”

He went on and on, telling her everything she wanted to hear, saying all the lines that had worked before. That Devon wasn’t enough for her, that she was too alive for him, that she was dazzling, incandescent, that the world would soon recognize her awesomeness and throw itself prostrate at her feet. “It’s like the fortune cookie said, your future is full of happiness and abundance.”

Her future, which she tried so hard not to think about. But there it was, waiting for her, all the versions, all the time. The one in which she gets her shit together and finally goes for that graphic-design degree she’s always talking about; the one in which she moves to LA and marries a volatile but ultimately kindhearted chef; the one in which she develops ovarian cancer and dies a slow, anguished death; the one in which that restlessness inside her, that constant need to go go go, consumes her; and the one in which it finally stills.

Jacob put his hand on her knee. “Mina, you’re way too good for him.”

The problem, the thing that made her bones hurt, was that in all the good futures, all the ones she thought she could live through, Jacob, the only person who believed in the glorious version of herself he was describing, wasn’t there.

The song changed, Drake rapped over the Fugees, and in Mina’s head her mother breathed in a suffocating trickle of gasoline as the soft nubs of her sweater turned sticky and the sirens howled.

Read more from Issue 19.2.