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she thought) was John Anderson. Lucas advertised him as good-looking, which turned out to be unconventionally true, and a Harvard graduate, which was misleading in that he wasn’t ambitious, moneyed, or conspicuously intelligent. Sara suspected his admission had something to do with geographic balance. Coincidentally, she’d written a story set at random in southeastern Idaho, and John’s recollections helped her add color to one of its unacclaimed revisions. Still, they weren’ta match, John and she. She was about to drop him but instead decided—with six hundred dollars, twice that in credit-card debt, and a trickle of freelance work—to go home for Christmas and sort of not come back. Quickly checkmated but not direly insolvent. Her excitement over learning how not to be the sweating provincial clogging up turnstiles with ineffectual swipes of her MetroCard, over walking to the G past the Polish delis and junky shops of Manhattan Avenue near her Greenpoint walk-up, over knowing there were a dozen interesting things not to do every night—all that excitement had been real but ephemeral. Within a month she felt deracinated and belated, as if she were in that joke about the restaurant no one goes to anymore because it’s too crowded. It was true that by tripping into Greenpoint she’d arrived in a neighborhood still only on the cusp of hipsterization, but watching the extension of her begrudged tribe held little appeal. Her bohemian experience would be a Maynard G. Krebs–like simulacrum at a time when the prospects for moderately talented writers without independent resources were grimmer than they’d been since—she didn’t have dates and numbers, but a long time, surely. Not that she was underprivileged. She had a grandfather with money, some money, though she didn’t feel right asking for any of it, and her dad made a decent salary installing database-management systems for Oracle, though he had three college-bound kids from his second marriage. Her mother had painfully unrealistic dreams of early retirement. So there was safety-net money, not write-your-novel money.
    Two nights before her departure, John affably made the haul from Harlem to Lucas and Sara’s apartment, where they were to be joined by John’s college roommate, just back from a long stay in the Lesser Antilles. The apartment’s row of four blippy rooms reminded Sara of a toy caterpillar. It wasn’t an altogether charmless place, but neither was it designed for nonamorous cohabitants or for so many bicycles. She hated walking through Lucas’s bedroom in the middle of thenight to go to the bathroom, not to mention all bathroom situations in which her noises weren’t entirely private. Lucas was in many ways a good roommate—cleanly despite his hoarding impulses, glad to pay a bigger share of the rent in return for the better room—but he didn’t always respect her work time. He would interrupt her writing and proofing with shouted reports of celebrity arrests, step into her room—granted, she didn’t keep the door closed—to show her some dubious new acquisition: a baseball cap signed by J Dilla, a roll of nonpareil handlebar tape. Sometimes during these visits he would massage her shoulders, making note of her supposedly tangible tension, partly produced by the unsolicited massage itself.
    Gemma, at least, rarely stayed overnight or even visited her former apartment, but she was there now with the others in Lucas’s bedroom, its futon couched to reference a living room, two vinyl-and-chrome chairs imported from the kitchen, shoeboxes stacked profusely against the walls. (Lucas was a pioneer of sneaker speculation; he’d recently sold a pair of vintage Adidas for more than four hundred dollars.) The plan was to go to an inauthentic Mexican restaurant—secretly Sara’s favorite kind, though at this restaurant there’d been an unpleasant