A month before she dopes the mice, Agnes finds Jamie’s pills. They’re stashed in a basket with his new film rolls, under his bed, where he likely figures she won’t look. She’s only been visiting for a week, but already she feels like she can’t do anything right, that she doesn’t even know her boyfriend anymore, and whatever’s wrong he’s keeping it from her, so who can blame her for snooping? After the pills, she finds his note paper-weighted on the counter by his roommate Harold’s too-firm bananas: “Cornhole with Harold back tonight Love!”

“I cream your boy at cornhole,” Harold told her on her first night in Wilmington. She’d just lugged her suitcase and black parasol ten blocks from the bus stop on campus and found the two of them on the porch, tossing beanbags at each other.

“Cornhole?”

“We play at a bar downtown. Come with us.” He hurled his sack toward Jamie. “It’s a lawn game.”

“A lawn game?” she repeated, like Harold’s understudy running lines she didn’t believe.

Of course, she didn’t go, said the bus from Mary Baldwin, her small women’s college in Virginia, had exhausted her, which was true. She stayed in, drank the bottle of rosé she’d brought to share, started the first DVD in the Buffy box set she planned to watch with Jamie, and fell asleep before they got home. The next morning, woken before the sun by Harold clanking his rusty weights in the yard, when she turned to Jamie in bed and groaned, he was gone. She went to the window, and there was her boyfriend spread flat on a weight bench, Harold hovering over him as he struggled to push the bar up from his chest.

As the scene flickers back into her memory, she goes back to the bedroom and Googles the pills. Bupropion. An antidepressant. He has seemed happier, but she thought Harold was to blame. Because she and Jamie were each suffering through freshman years at separate colleges, Agnes first noticed Jamie changing over Skype. For most of the year, he’d been the same Jamie she loved in high school. They talked about how college made them sad or reminisced about their high school goth days and the hard things they’d helped each other through. They didn’t talk so much as commiserate, and she liked that. When they hung up, instead of I love you, they said Thank you for loving me. But then in the spring, Jamie moved in with Harold, and Harold handed down his summer clothes. From then on, whenever Jamie answered her Skype calls, he’d be drowning in Harold’s outgrown polo shirts and cargo shorts. He’d tell her about beach trips he took with Harold to photograph tide pools together. He’d show her the camera Harold lent him and proudly flex the new muscles he’d grown since Harold started personal training him. And when Agnes tried to complain that her mono was flaring up or her floormates’ incense was giving her hives or that she’d had the dream again, the one about her mom and the wake, Jamie would quote Harold like he was the Dalai Lama. “Harold says life is like the moon, Ag. You’ve got to look at the bright side.”

“Everything OK?” This is Harold in the doorway. They’re home, apparently, quietly.

She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t like being snuck up on. She doesn’t like Harold. She’s grossed out by the not-quite-masculinity of his big muscles beneath his tight pink polo shirt. With his frosted tips, he looks like Lance Bass on steroids. Why did Jamie even invite her to spend the summer here if he wanted to spend all his time with Harold? She works in the behavioral psych lab all day, and in the evening when the three of them are together, Jamie doesn’t look at her when she talks. He watches Harold squirm as she describes the lab mice, as if animal testing were her own sick invention, as if her whole body is tainted by it.

“Your boy’s a mess,” Harold says. “Tried to use the girls’ room. Got us kicked out. Have I told you he’s a flaming queen now?”

“You have.” This is Harold’s joke, that he’s turned her boyfriend gay. Jamie loves it. So what if he’s gay? Her best friend Melanie is gay. But if he is, he hasn’t told her. She doesn’t like the joke, doesn’t like how Harold used to pop into the Skype screen and say, “How’s Jamie’s fag-hAgnes?” She doesn’t like how, when she told him to quit it, Jamie looked at her and said, “He’s allowed to say that word, Ag,” as if the slur had been what she cared about.

“He’s puking out front. By the way, I promise I haven’t fucked your boyfriend yet.”

“You’re a card.”

“A card! You’re funny. If he chokes on his puke, you can have his room. A card.”

Harold mock foxtrots down the hall. She pockets two pills, re-hides the bottle, and stands at the window watching Jamie heave. The yard’s only tree is dead, and he’s pacing circles around it. After he comes inside, he takes forever in the bathroom. When he comes to bed, he smells like Harold’s minty Dr. Bronner’s soap. The sheets smell like it, too.

The testing room where Agnes spends her workdays is entirely dark except for a red light that she can see but the mice don’t register. The mouse’s tiny hands grip her blue gloved finger, and she flings it into the open field maze. The mouse runs to the wall and sprints along its circumference. Because their predators (owls, hawks) come from above, mice fear openness, so they cling to the safety of walls, even when that safety is false. This is called thigmotaxis, and none of these are facts Agnes ever wanted to know.

The open field maze isn’t really a maze, but rather a black circle she made on her first day working with her supervisor, Dr. Packard. They cut black poster board into strips three feet long and eight inches high and taped those strips together to make a circle. Then they glued the circle to black poster board and laid it on a wooden kids’ table bordered by a rainbow alphabet and the numbers up to twenty. Science is not as real as she used to think science was.

The mouse is aimless, pissing and shitting. Agnes doesn’t know where to put her eyes.

She doesn’t care about genetics—maybe she should; the cancer that killed her mom is heritable—but to spend summer with Jamie she applied for every open job at his college. This is the one she got. She would’ve taken a kitchen shift, campus patrol, janitorial staff. There isn’t much she won’t do to be close to Jamie, which she knows is bad because she has the internet and Melanie, whose love language is searing critique.

When the timer vibrates, she bends over and lifts the mouse by pinching its tail and flipping her middle finger beneath its stomach. It squirms to get away. She walks to the cage room, which is also lit red, and returns the mouse to its two cage mates. Now her job is to count the pieces of shit and puddles of piss it left behind. Later, she’ll watch the video—a camcorder is taped to the ceiling above the open field—and count how long the mouse spent against the wall. Together, these two figures quantify fear.

On her lunch break, she asks Dr. Packard about Jamie’s pills.

“They’re nothing to stigmatize,” he says. “Besides, they have nice side effects. I take bupropion, too. I’ve lost twelve pounds.”

Summer in the lab is casual, so when he clenches his stomach fat to show her, he does so through his faded Gary Johnson ‘16 t-shirt. Lunch breaks with Dr. Packard are sometimes insightful but usually insufferable, and maybe you can’t have one without the other.

“But things are going well for us. Why does he even need them?”

“I don’t need the Vicodin in my desk,” he says and turns back to his other experiment on his computer screen. His other experiment is looking at photos of undergrads to correlate the distance between their nose and forehead with their Kinsey scale rating. He doesn’t believe in a lot of things she thinks she believes in, like gender studies or social constructs. He thinks everything you need to know you can learn from watching a body then cutting it up, which she can’t do to Jamie, of course, but there’s no reason science has to stay in the lab.

She stands alone in the testing room on her phone and scrolls through placebo pills on Amazon until she finds ones that match Jamie’s bupropion. She orders a bottle to the lab. She’s not sure if she’ll use them, but it’s nice to know they’re on their way.

It’s not happiness but familiarity she feels in the banal danger of walking along the barely marked shoulder. She knows she looks as strange as she feels to anyone speeding by with doctors' appointments and grocery lists, but they’re coffined in metal and gone before she can see them looking. Because Jamie’s house is far from the beach, and she hates his neighborhood so close to campus—all sad rentals with frat boys playing beer pong in front yards—she walks out to the main drag whenever she calls Melanie. Melanie says Agnes is a clinger, the type of girl who throws herself into a romantic relationship and ignores everyone else in her life. Agnes doesn’t like this characterization, but it’s true that when she needs to talk about Jamie, there’s no one from high school left to call.

Today she asks, for maybe the third time, “Do you think I’m depressing him?”

“I don’t even know him.”

“Neither do I, I guess. Did I tell you he’s gay now?”

“Yes, with the roommate. You told me five minutes ago and yesterday and the day you got there and—”

“I get it.”

“And if he’s gay now he always was.”

Agnes suspects Melanie said this to hurt her, so she doesn’t respond right away. Streetlights in parking lots turn on one by one. Everything smells like gas and exhaust. She thought the palm trees here would cheer her up, but when they grow alongside the road and outside Rite Aid and McDonald's and AutoZone, they look as fake as everything else and make her sadder.

“I don’t want to be the dark depressing thing men cross state lines and change their gender to get away from.”

“Agnes, we take the same classes. You know gender and sexuality are not the same. And he moved to go to college.”

“To a state school that’s not even in our state! Who does that?”

“You’re dating what’s called a basic bitch. He wanted to live at the beach.”

Because Melanie’s rich, she doesn’t get it. In the words of Agnes and Jamie’s high school guidance counselor, they were each one half of a perfect college admissions essay. Or, in her other words, screwed. He’s poor with happy parents. She’s middle-class-ish with dead ones. Her grandma had some money, but not enough for her to actually choose a college. Agnes didn’t go to Mary Baldwin because she wanted to be surrounded by celibate Presbyterians and lesbians in argyle. She went because she couldn’t get a full ride anywhere else. Jamie chose to go out of state despite $18k in debt for each year at UNC-Wilmington. After calling off their break in the fall, then realizing he wouldn’t be able to claim residency, Jamie considered transferring back in-state to VCU, but then he “made friends” (read: Harold), and that was apparently worth the debt.

“Maybe Wilmington is Agnes rehab, and the pills help him cope with the trauma of me.”

“Agnes, can I tell you what Sandra told me?” Sandra is her therapist. The thing about therapy is everyone else is in it. Even if she doesn’t want her to, Melanie passes down whatever self-help clichés she learns there, like a Salvation Army of the abnormal mind.

“Go for it.”

“You’re catastrophizing. What you need to do is reorient your thinking by grounding yourself in the present. What do you have control over?”

“Nothing.”

“Wrong. You can control what you do in this moment. Focus on what you can control. Listen, I’ve got book club in an hour. I gave up on Mrs. Dalloway when she masturbated in a flower metaphor, so I have to skim the rest. Talk soon?”

A few blocks after hanging up, Agnes sees a pink juice box on the ground. It’s the kind her mom used to give her. Someone must’ve tossed it from a car. It feels heavy when she kicks it, probably almost full, and it squirts as it scrapes the pavement. When she picks it up and smells its leaky straw hole, one whiff makes her feel hopeful, hilarious, and tragic at once. Holding it she must look like a runaway or a girl who misbehaved on a trip and got left, but she’s not, she’s goddamn nineteen years old. She can control this. She can talk to him. Nothing that can happen is as bad as what’s happened.

But when she gets home, Jamie and Harold are on the futon under a blanket.

“Want to watch with us?” Harold asks.

“Come on, Ag. Harold showed me this film called Planet Earth. Have you heard of it?”

“Yes, I’ve heard it. Everyone has heard of it. We watched it in bio literally every day after Ms. Cane’s divorce. We watched it together.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s gorgeous.”

Has he ever even looked at her the way he looks at Planet Earth? Glossy eyed, shaking.

She’s in bed when she hears the TV turn off later that night, and Jamie comes bounding into the room. He pounces onto the bed, straddles her, and asks “Can we have sex?”

“Excuse me?” He’s wearing one of Harold’s old t-shirts. It’s so worn that Cher’s screen-printed face is faded and cracking, and for a second while Jamie kneels over her, she feels like she’s looking in a mirror at her own shattering self.

“Come on. Look how hard I am.”

And he is. It feels nice. Is that for her? She and Jamie barely had sex during high school. Neither of them liked sex. It’s exercise and a distraction from talking. But if she doesn’t do this, what will he do? Go into the bathroom with his phone and jack off to Harold’s pics? He strips off his Cher shirt and jean shorts. Each time he undresses in front of her she’s surprised by the little muscles growing on his arms, how sunburn masks the acne scars on his shoulders and chest.

“OK,” she says.

“Flip over. I like it that way.”

How does he know what way he likes it? But she doesn’t argue. On her hands and knees, staring down at the pillow, she tries to focus on his benzoyl peroxide’s ghostly little bleach stains, stains she knows from high school when they’d cuddle in these same sheets.

Who’s he thinking about when he pushes himself into her? She can’t be sure it’s her. She can’t see where his eyes are.

Two weeks in, Agnes finishes the first round of tests on the mice. Now she has to watch the hours of video she’s shot in the previous weeks, using a stop watch to record how long each mouse spends pressed to the walls of the open field. She spends a whole day, then a morning, watching mice wander the dark circle. When she zones out, the maze is no longer a maze, the mice not mice. In one video, after she places the mouse, it stands still. In her blurry stare, the black circle punctured by the white mouse body looks like a mammogram with something there that shouldn’t be. She swats at the screen as if it were dust to rub away. “Excuse me?” Dr. Packard says. He’s been beside her, hypnotized by the faces of maybe-gay undergrads.

“Sorry. I thought I saw something on the monitor. It was just the mouse.”

“Take the afternoon. Go cuddle with your sad boy. Self-care,” he says in a lispy voice meant to mock, she thinks, either a gay man or a woman.

But when she approaches the house, from the corner she already hears the rhythmic clank of metal, the grunts, so she’s not surprised when she sees the two of them, Harold and her boyfriend, shirtless and sweaty in the yard. What she’s surprised by is that Jamie is taking pictures of Harold. She watches from the street as Harold rotates between poses—holding a dumbbell, flexing his biceps, his back, his abs, making his chest move in a disturbing way, like it’s a part of him he can’t control.

Flash. Flash. Flash.

“What are you now, a pornographer?” she says, walking up behind Jamie.

“We’re wearing clothes, Ag.” Jamie tugs at his silky exercise shorts. “And we’re just killing time between sets.”

“I need new Grindr pictures,” Harold says. “My hookups keep telling me I’m so much hotter in person.”

She swears she sees Jamie frown when he mentions the hookups.

“Anyway,” Jamie says. “These are abs up until my boy stops skipping leg day.”

He holds out his fist to be pounded by Harold. Harold waves his fist at her boyfriend like a punch but turns it into a gentle pound.

Maybe Harold switched the antidepressants with a pill that turns men gay. She knows a gay pill is basically a Republican fever dream and maybe homophobic to even imagine, but she’s also vaguely heard of “poppers.” This may be something they’re capable of.

“Let’s do your back,” Jamie says. She leaves them, thinking she’ll be sick.

On the toilet, she scrolls through Harold’s Instagram. Just last year he was scrawny, constantly smiling too wide to show his brightly braced teeth. When she goes from picture to picture, she barely notices a difference until suddenly he’s coated in pounds of awful muscle, of greedy, obvious health. The speed of his body’s change makes her think you can’t trust anything, that reality is always on the verge of becoming monstrous. Did her boyfriend take these photos?

When she and Jamie started college at different schools this fall, they agreed to take a break, but it only lasted a month. It became unhealthy. That month she’d thought about nothing but him, fell behind on schoolwork, and channeled her want into any regressive craving that arose. She bulk-ordered the black wrist warmers she’d worn in high school when she used to cut. She listened exclusively to Gregorian chants. The nightshift guys at the convenience store near campus learned her name and really were such sweethearts, never judging her 2 a.m. attempts to recreate hers and Jamie’s after-school snacks of ramen and Lucky Charms. She gained six pounds. She broke out. She forgot how to be in public. Jamie never detailed how he felt that month, but it must’ve been bad—calling off the break was his idea.

When they got back together over Skype, they shared screenshots of their Tinder profiles and laughed about how bad they were. Hers mentioned she was into the Marquis de Sade, too much wine, and “telling it like it is.” She hadn’t gotten much attention. Arguably, his was worse, saying only, “Looking for my muse. Can I take you’re photo?”

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “We don’t have personalities, we have warning signs.”

“Well, Ag,” he said. “This is your official warning.”

“What?”

“Your official warning that I want to be with you forever.”

Then, without asking, without giving her a chance to prepare, he took a screenshot.

This was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to her. “What a weirdo!” she said and laughed and jittered and said, “I’m floating,” and when they hung up, she sprinted up two flights to Melanie’s room to say, “I think he sort of proposed?”

Now, she’d never mention that night. She can’t imagine them being so cheesily sincere. Now he’s cheesily sincere with Harold. Maybe he wants to be with Harold forever.

In bed that night she wants to ask about the antidepressants. She wants to ask why he’s taking them and why he didn’t tell her and if not telling her meant what they are to each other has changed. Instead, she asks, “Why do you and Harold call each other my boy? You never talked like that in high school.”

“I didn’t really have any ‘boy’ friends in high school.”

“You mean male friends. Guy friends. Boy friends is creepy. It sounds like boyfriends.”

Jamie groans and flips over, presses his face into the pillow, and they lie there, silent, in Harold’s minty scent.

“I’m not going to explain the English language to him,” she tells Melanie on her lunch break. “He acts like my impression of the world is incomprehensible. Is it? Am I delusional?”

“Do you mind if I quote Sappho?”

“I mind more than you can ever know.”

“Μὴ κίνη χέραδασ—”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s the point. Sappho exists to us only in fragments. We can never know what she means. It’s like life. A fragment from which we wrongly assume a whole.”

“You’re saying I’m delusional.”

“It’s case-by-case. In this case, yes.”

She decides to prove she isn’t. Her hypothesis: Jamie is only able to love her when he’s depressed, so to win him back, she needs to stop all this happiness. But what’s the cause: Harold or the pills? That night, when Harold and Jamie are out cornholing, she pours Jamie’s pills into a sandwich bag and stuffs it into the pocket of her lab coat, then pours the placebos into the little orange bottle.

The next morning, she waits at the kitchen table while Jamie goes back to his room to “take his vitamins.” What if he notices? What if he freaks out, blames her, threatens to have her arrested for poisoning, or attempted murder, or chemical warfare? But despite Jamie’s newfound love of photography, she knows he isn’t observant. He doesn’t notice a thing. Now she’ll find out: without the pills, will he come back to her? And if not, well, then he’s made his choice.

The internet said that by the end of the week he’d be in a downward spiral. When he wakes up on Friday, he does seem groggier. He pulls away from her more aggressively, groaning “I need my coffee,” but by breakfast he’s back to his giddy new self, saying things like, “Harold inspires me to make art.”

In high school she and Jamie both loved art. They looked at it online, but neither of them had the energy to make it. Now, Jamie is slicing a banana into his high fiber cereal as Harold holds out the tide pool photos they spend their afternoons taking. They’re beautiful, and she hates them. It’s the kind of art she secretly likes, art that’s pretty but not deep, that proves there are simpler ways to be in the world that she could embrace if she were to delude herself. She gets angrier as Harold explains what she’s seeing: algae’s blue-green gradient, wisps of seaweed, the fading prints of a terrapin.

“And none of it’s permanent. With the tide, it’ll be washed away. Just a natural flow,” he says. “That’s why I love the ocean. No walls. Boundaries are but sand.”

“Whoa.” Jamie exhales for a long time. She wants to scream. Jamie repeats, like a mantra, “boundaries are but sand” with a gauzy look in his eyes.

“Butt sand!” Agnes shouts, emphasizing the second T as she pours her cereal in the sink and leaves. Shouldn’t depressed people not have epiphanies? She’s pretty sure that’s part of it.

“They do this obnoxious thing,” she tells Melanie later, while she’s at Rite Aid, shopping for scented candles. “They talk about common knowledge like they’re learning it for the first time because they’re realizing it together. It’s like they’re stoned but they’re not, they’re just together.”

Agnes puts three awful smelling pumpkin spice candles into her basket. They smell like mean girls in the fall.

“Can I tell you something from the first third of Mrs. Dalloway?”

“Is Mrs. Dalloway an ancient Greek?”

“It’s actually super relevant. Mrs. Dalloway goes to this summer house when she’s just a girl, just Clarissa. And she has this friend, Sally, and they have all these big radical ideas for their future, and one day they kiss in the garden and it’s this magical moment Clarissa remembers for the rest of her life, but it’s just a memory. She marries a man. I didn’t read the end, but I don’t think anyone ends up happy for doing what they think they’re supposed to do.”

“You’re saying I need to fight for him.”

“I’m saying Harold might be his Sally. It sounds like they have something really special. I would have killed for that when I was coming out. It sounds like he’s confused. Like he wants something he can’t really express. You should be there for him. Let him have his Sally.”

If a gay male who shops at Hollister in the year 2017 can be Jamie’s Sally, then she can too. She just has to work for it. She spends the afternoon trying to find something beautiful or interesting to show him. If the bar for good content is “a puddle,” she should be able to find something, but everything she Googles or thinks of is boring. At dinner that night, she can’t follow Harold and Jamie’s inside jokes, so she goes to the laundry room and pulls out a tangle of Harold’s white tank tops. She drops them on the table and says, “Don’t be a hog, Harold.”

Harold and Jamie giggle like she’s telling a joke, or is one.

It doesn’t help that the mice don’t like her either.

“I ran some of the results,” Dr. Packard says on Monday. “Both strains have anxiety levels significantly higher than any similar studies.”

“Is that good? Is that significant?”

“Well, if one strain had significantly higher levels than the other, we’d have something big, but since they’re both equally elevated, it suggests an anomaly in the experiment. I don’t mean to imply you’re doing something wrong. But will you show me how you lift the mice?”

They go to the red room. She lures a mouse onto her finger.

“Good. Hm.”

Dr. Packard runs through other ways she might be messing up: too loud in the red room, too ominous while approaching the cages, too loud during the trials. Any time she’s noticed could be a disruption. When the questioning gets so intense that even he seems to realize it’s too much, he diffuses it by asking in his lispy voice, “Well, then what’s your sign?”

“Gemini sun, Taurus moon, Scorpio rising.”

“That must be it,” he says and laughs to himself as he walks back to his computer. “It’s cosmic, beyond your control, an aura.”

Think of what you can control, she hears Melanie saying. She’s sick of this. Sick of all this “beyond your control.” What in her life is not beyond her control? And then she remembers the antidepressants in her pocket. She Googles “can mice take wellbutrin,” vaguely skims the abstract of a paywalled article that seems to suggest they can, so she tells Dr. Packard she needs to go outside for a break. On the sidewalk she stomps on the sandwich-bagged pills until they’re crushed into a powder. Back inside, she chooses a strain—A (for Agnes, she thinks, excited about the coincidence)—and she sprinkles the crushed pills into the water bottles. She waits and watches the mice take their first sips.

That afternoon, she walks home in a state of delirious ecstasy. She ruined science! Maybe the study will be published, and she’ll get a credit, and Dr. Packard will write her a nice note about how important she is to him. Maybe it will create knowledge that only she knows is fake. The more she thinks about it, the more guilt overtakes ecstasy and the more that guilt starts to have existential implications. What is Truth???? That kind of thing. But for once her version of reality, in which the mice are drugged and Jamie is not, is the true one. She’s not catastrophizing. It’s everyone else who’s delusional.

She hasn’t run the stats, so she can’t prove the drugs are working, but she has a feeling. The mice come right to the bars of the cage and stare at her, refusing to break eye contact, as dumbly focused as the way Jamie looks at Harold. In the dark open field they sprint across, ignore the safety of the walls, and stand brazenly in the center. When she lowers her hand into the maze, they no longer treat her like a predator but come willingly.

She can’t say the same for Jamie. Any withdrawal symptoms he’s having seem to apply only to her, and he’s not so much sad as angry, like he’d rather she didn’t exist.

On the anniversary of her mom’s death, she lights her pumpkin spice candles in the bedroom and plays The Smiths on her laptop. Jamie pokes his head in and says, “Whoa, Ag, sensory overload.”

“You love The Smiths.”

“They’re depressing,” he says. “Morrissey is an ass. And these candles are awful.”

When her charcoal toothpaste stains the counter, Jamie spends the whole afternoon silently bleaching so Harold won’t notice.

When she clears her throat to talk—the North Carolina air makes her phlegmy—and Harold says, “Girl, you need the Heimlich?” Jamie laughs so hard that whatever she was about to say doesn’t matter anymore.

And when she flushes, apparently, one too many tampons, and a plumber has to snake the toilet, Jamie ices her out the whole day, tosses sacks back and forth with Harold in the living room “for practice” and at night disappears to whatever bar they cornhole at. No invite for her.

Jamie’s annoyance is getting so obvious that Harold seems to feel sorry for her. With a look on his face like he’s doing her a favor, he suggests she and Jamie go to the beach on the Fourth of July.

“For some time alone,” he says. “Anyway, I’ve got a hookup planned that afternoon, so it’ll be good to have the house.”

She watches Jamie’s face for signs of jealousy, but he just seems dulled, almost despondent—a glimmer of the Jamie she remembers. She resents that Harold made the suggestion, but she’s looking forward to the beach trip. By then almost eighteen unmedicated days will have passed, and maybe whatever angry comedown Jamie’s dealing with now will have reverted into the sadness she misses.

At work, as she carries the mice from their cages to the open field, she daydreams about the beach. They’ll judge the bros playing beach volleyball, but the bros will remind Jamie of boys who bullied him in high school. They’ll judge the sloppy shore families with their Corona beach umbrellas, loud kids, and overbearing moms, but the families will remind her that she doesn’t have one. She and Jamie will cuddle together in the surrounding screams and oncoming waves and feel out of place.

She loves the beach for what an ill fit she is there. She loves her black one piece and her black cover-up and her black parasol (which was a pain in the ass to bring down on the bus). She loves how her paleness implicitly mocks the orange sorority girls and at the same time marks her as fragile, at risk. She’s certain that if Jamie sees her like this, and if he just takes one picture of her, a single picture, it will show he loves her, and everything will be alright.

But right from the start the trip is bad. When she comes down from her room, Jamie says, “That’s a strange way to dress at the beach, Ag.”

They’ve been to the shore. He knows her bathing suit. He’s taken it off her.

When they set up near the water, she calms down. Beneath her parasol, Jamie gets close to her. They hold hands. Then he starts talking about Harold, and she can’t think of anything interesting to say to change the subject.

“I wonder how his hookup is going,” he says, scribbling something in the sand beside their blanket—Harold’s name, maybe?

“Oh yeah?” She peers over to see what he’s written but can’t. “You’re thinking about it? Imagining it?”

“Not imagining it, Ag.”

“What kind of guys does Harold like?”

“I don’t know.” There’s something in his voice, a kind of grim self-deprecation. He flicks at his thin calves. “Seems like he can have whatever guys he wants.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I love you,” she almost says but doesn’t.

“When Harold and I came here, you should have seen how far out he swam,” Jamie says, looking out at the waves.

“I bet he’s a really good swimmer.”

“I know you don’t get along with him.” He packs together some of the sand he’d dampened and hurls it, underhand like a cornhole sack, toward the water. “But I think you could. Eventually. He’s a really nice guy. Really, really cool.”

Above, a cloud slices the sun, the way a blade sliced an eye in a movie they’d watched together once.

“Can I tell you something?”

The way he pauses before he says it makes her think of her mom, the way she’d kept quiet about her diagnosis until it was undeniable she was sick. Reality was what it was whether or not she put words to it, but it didn’t feel any better—grocery store parking lot, crinkling pile of plastic bags in the trunk she slammed—when her mom finally told her.

“You can tell me anything.”

Her face feels hot, like its reddening, burning, even though they’re in the shade.

“It’s kind of embarrassing, but when he was swimming out, I couldn’t stop thinking about him never coming back. I was so scared. I knew it was stupid, but I couldn’t stop feeling scared. I was worried I’d lose him. I realized how much I love that guy.”

So he’s admitting it. She feels like she’s shrinking into herself. Under her parasol, she imagines how they must look from above—like a black hole, like an open field.

“You’re telling me you’re in love with Harold?”

He looks at her like he doesn’t know her, crushes the wet sand in his hand, lets it dribble down onto his stomach, the little bit of new muscle there.

“You’re putting words in my mouth again.”

“I’m interpreting the words you said.”

“You don’t listen. You take what I say and change it to what you want. Harold says you gaslight me. His ex gaslit him. It’s a type of abuse.”

“Are you seriously claiming—”

There are giggles behind them. She thinks she hears the word witch. She thinks it’s referring to her. She throws the parasol. The wind takes it, and it lands, swaying, a few feet away. Jamie doesn’t bother trying to retrieve it. She stands and turns to the giggling girls. Blond, pretty. She hates them. “What the fuck,” she says. “You don’t like how I dress? I need to dress like this. My mom died of skin cancer. She died!” She’s crying and shouting things that aren’t words now. The cancer isn’t a lie, just the type. Still, Jamie must think she’s being fake, even though she’s really feeling the way she’s acting. The girls stare at each other like they’re trying to unsee her, and Jamie’s looking not at her but at them, conspiring with them, making a face like “I know…” so she runs across the sand to the bathroom.

In the stall, she places her feet into the floor grime, lifts them, and watches the moisture of her footprints evaporate. Maybe she’s fading, too. If she isn’t what she was to Jamie, what is she? She tries to think of what Melanie might say to calm her: You can’t control how others see you, but you are yourself. Nothing can change that. But she isn’t sure it’s true that anyone is a single thing. More likely, everyone is just a stupid holey skin, letting in parts of people around them. She isn’t herself without Jamie. It’s not comforting, but what’s the alternative? That she’s reducible to a broken gene spilling out more of itself, so much, too much, the way this year over FaceTime after too much wine she’d babble to Jamie, repeating herself until he couldn’t deny her, drinking and talking until she’d wake the next morning bloated and achey. Thoughts like this will kill her before cancer does.

She goes back into the sun. The girls are gone. Jamie has her phone in his hand. Is the camera open? Is he going to take her picture?

“You’ve got like a hundred texts from that Packard guy,” Jamie says.

She grabs her phone from him and opens the texts. “Shit.”

“What’s wrong.”

“Fuck. Something at the lab. I need you to bring me.”

“Why is he at work on the Fourth?”

“He hates America. Just drop me off, OK?”

Dr. Packard explains that when he cleaned the water bottles, he found a strange white residue clogging the nubs.

“What could it be?”

“Well, then I found this bag on your desk, a shockingly similar powder, with a few pills large enough to recognize. Agnes, were you drugging the mice?"

She feels the way the lab mice must, wanting to back away but having nowhere to go. She confesses. She explains that she thought it might help make the experiment significant.

“It doesn’t matter if their behavior changes if the experiment isn’t controlled.”

She says she thought maybe no one needed to know.

“Agnes.” She wants him to tell her what she is—deranged, a mouse abuser—but he doesn’t even seem angry when he says, “I won’t need you to finish out the summer. You’re welcome to come in tomorrow to help euthanize the mice if you want the experience.”

She can’t even hear them in the other room. They should be awake.

“You’ll kill them because of me?”

“When experiments end, we put the mice down anyway, but now it’s just a matter of time until they’re going through withdrawal—seizures, exploding hearts. At most you lost them a month. I hadn’t expected my Independence Day afterparty to be loading mice into a CO2 chamber, but maybe it’s fitting.”

She says she’ll come in tomorrow to help. She doesn’t know what she’ll tell Jamie at home. Maybe she can play it off like she quit in protest of injustice. Maybe she can lead him and Harold on an assault of the lab, throw blood on Dr. Packard and all the damn mice.

“I’m really sorry,” she says, but Dr. Packard doesn’t lisp anything back.

When she gets home, there’s a note on the counter. “Cornhole with Harold.”

No love.

All summer she’d been annoyed by how he signed his notes. Just: “Love!” No I or You, like he wasn’t expressing love but merely acknowledging some vague directionless love wafting around in the ether. Now it’s gone altogether.

But he can’t get rid of her that easily. She knows where they cornhole. He probably wants her to come. This May for her birthday he gave her a fake ID, and why would he if he didn’t want her to watch him cornhole with Harold? It’s already in her wallet. She goes.

Through the crowd at the rooftop bar, she sees Harold’s pants straining to contain his ass as he lunges and hurls the sack. It smacks the wooden cornhole board. Her boyfriend makes a gesture with his hands in the air. Harold shoots again, and it sinks into the hole.

She orders whisky, trying to mark herself as different from all these bros and women in crop tops drinking pitchers of light beer, and she watches Harold and Jamie from where they can’t see her. Over the ledge, the fireworks display is visible, but it’s unimpressive, dud after dud, and the crowd ignores it. Everyone seems to be watching Jamie and Harold play.

When they win, her boyfriend gives Harold a look of pure joy and love, a look that excludes her entirely. How could he be so happy after what happened at the beach? Did it mean nothing to him? Did he really not know how he’d made her feel? She can’t take it. The ring of sweat on Harold’s back, Jamie’s gay little victory dance, the sandbags in their hands damp with humid beach air. As a distraction, she Googles euthanized lab mice. In the image, they’re still and cuddled together.

“I can’t take these fags anymore.”

A man has come up beside her. She quickly darkens her phone and says, “What?”

“Those two. They hog the game.”

This person, this man, this fraternity brother, he doesn’t seem like a bad person. He’s tall and pale and wearing a light blue tank top with a palm tree on it. His face is misshapen and brutish. She hates jocks, but this one seems innocent and simple. He’s worked up like a kid. His nose is sniffling a little bit. Yes, he is being homophobic, but what he’s saying isn’t untrue: they are being annoying, they are hogging the game. It annoys her, too.

“They’re fags,” the man says. “Skinny one can’t keep his hands off the big one’s ass.”

He can’t.

“They are,” she says.

He holds out his fist for a pound and she pounds it before he turns toward Harold and her boyfriend. He starts walking over, and she considers saying, “No, wait, I’ll talk to them,” but then the bro is running. Then he’s yelling faggot, faggot. Jamie sees him coming. He puts himself in front of Harold, and before the bro can touch them, Jamie punches him square in the face, and he doubles over. “Don’t touch him, bitch!” It’s embarrassing to hear her boyfriend screeching, but the bro stumbles backward and falls. Jamie puts his arm around Harold, and the whole crowd cheers. People are taking their picture together.

She knows, later, she’ll find the photos tagged online. She’ll scroll through the images of them triumphant in this moment, and in so many moments to come, moments she once imagined herself into: cuddling in a grassy field, at an altar, in front of a house, the stable kind she’d never known. She imagines the portrait Jamie will take. Harold smiling, his eyes not quite meeting the lens because they’re aimed above it at Jamie’s eyes, seeing him. Maybe one day she’ll want this for them.

From afar, Agnes counts her boyfriend’s sacks like she’s the scorekeeper—only one is lying on the board top beside the hole. All the others must have made it in. She feels a little proud of him, but there’s a security camera above her, and bouncer is rushing over, so she sneaks out of the bar. She Ubers to the lab, hopes her card key still works, and it does.

Night is day in the mouse room. All the lights are on, and the mice are quiet. They think they’re nocturnal. She’s only ever seen it lit red, a trick to keep the mice awake for testing. There’s a whole page in the lab manual about the reverse light/dark cycle, but she only realizes now, in the brightness, with the sleeping mice, how strange it is, how unfair. Never in their lives have they known day and night, but they believe what they know like they know it.

She feels shivery, nauseous, and hears Sandra via Melanie—Ground yourself in the present. She takes in a breath of piss and wood chips, grabs a box of gloves, and smells the latex. She bends and takes floor dust onto her fingertip. She rubs the dust onto the darkening sunburn on her thigh and arm and the uncovered top of her breast. The burn doesn’t hurt, which makes her feel like she’s separate from herself, watching herself from inside herself. Is this a catastrophe, is she a catastrophe? She hears the squeal of a single waking mouse and knows she needs to leave the room. She can’t see them awake knowing they’ll die.

The testing room with the open field is cold and dark and makes her want to sleep. She uses the remote to turn on the camcorder and climbs up into the maze. She’s so big in comparison to the dark circle, but once she’s in it, she’s sure she’ll never leave. If she were to die tonight, if Jamie were to leave her, if Melanie or her grandmother never saw her again, at least there’d be this video of her lying completely still in the center of the maze like she’s calm and unafraid. It’ll be nice for them to have something solid. All she has are gaps.

When she remembers her mother’s open casket, she remembers it empty. It wasn’t, she knows. She remembers looking into it, kneeling, crying. She knows what her mother looked like, but she can’t imagine her there. She’ll picture a woman, and the closer she looks to her mother, the more she’s sure it isn’t her. In middle school, after, for a year she barely spoke. She doesn’t remember all the things she might’ve said but didn’t. It doesn’t seem right to remember only the absences, a life of holes she’s tossed toward and left limp at the edge of. She has memories of her father she can’t possibly remember (she’d only been three): him tossing her in the air, him on a pitcher’s mound waiting for her to hit the ball even though she hasn’t played a sport in her life. Because they aren’t memories, maybe they’re what she wants. What gives her the right? Above, the red on-light is on her. She’s staring at it as the kids’ table holding up the open field breaks.

The snap of wood and thud of her body against the ground are loud enough to wake the mice in the other room. They kick up wood chips and squeal. Whatever mirror neurons anticipate the open field must be firing. The tiny metal balls in their undoped water bottles rattle. She knows they’re fighting for the nub, pushing each other aside for more of what’s no longer there. Tomorrow she’ll open the cages, take them somewhere new. No matter what they want or what they fear, they can’t imagine what’ll do them in—not a hawk but something so clear they’ll breathe it like air.