But I also had made my decision, and I was sticking to it.

“Morning, Derek,” I said.

“Hiya, Maya!” He was a good guy, but, like Wolton, a little too cute. It almost seemed like me arriving each day was a dream come true for him. Maybe it was a sign that someday he would have lots of regulars, maybe even regulars who weren’t old people. Maybe his coffee shop could be hip! Even though I’m sure he knew deep down that nothing in Wolton would ever be hip.

“Want anything to eat?”

“Yeah, get me a bagel. Onion.”

“Feeling adventurous.”

“Derek, I don’t think I’m going to work today.”

Derek never asked me about my “job”—I think he felt like it would be rude—but I was glad because I didn’t really want to explain.

“Gonna go see the sights?”

“Are there any?” I smirked.

He laughed. “No, not really. Cowtown? It is Tuesday.”

“I mean, I’ve driven past it. I’ve never been, like, called to enter.”

“Oh my god. Big-city girl, you have no idea what you have been missing.”

“I don’t even really get what it is …”

“It’s a farmers’ market, but also a flea market, and also it has weird food. I have no idea why, but it’s kinda a big deal. It’s open on Tuesdays and Saturdays, so you’re in luck. Honestly, I’m sorry I can’t come with you, it’s pretty cool.”

I didn’t think that Derek’s idea of “pretty cool” was likely to be actually cool, but it was something to do at least.

He handed me my latte, and I said, “I guess I’m going to Cowtown.”

I ate my bagel and checked the Som. It was the only social media I used anymore. I privated my Twitter account after April died—I couldn’t handle the 99 percent of people who meant well, much less the 1 percent who didn’t. I mean, Jesus, I understand people didn’t like April, but how does it feel like a winning strategy to go after a recently deceased murder victim? Just a note to everyone: Don’t do that. Even if you’re right, it makes you look wrong. And I had figured out by this point that how things look is more or less the same as how they are. A story caught my eye, one that I’d been ignoring for a while. Not about New Jersey or Philly, but about Puerto Rico.

PETRAWICKI PROJECT NAMED

We’ve been following developments around the secret project Peter Petrawicki [PP] has been building and gathering funding for the last few months. Peter’s obsession with April and fear of the Dream brought him notoriety, and now he has somehow leveraged that into a project that has been hiring [EXT-WIRED-MAGAZINE] at a tremendous rate. This project has finally been named Altus meaning “High, deep, noble, or profound” in Latin. We are renaming the relevant thread [ALTUS].

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard about Peter’s new gig, but I also wasn’t spending any energy on it. I figured the world was done with him, and I knew I was. His bro project having a new bro name didn’t change that. I ate my bagel and got up to leave the café in an even worse mood than I’d entered it in. But then Derek called after me as I left, “See you, Maya! Get a hot sausage sandwich for me!” And that cheered me up a bit.

Cowtown was from another universe. I pulled up to it just after it opened around eight. Empty picnic tables filled a giant parking lot, a few buildings, and a bunch of outdoor stalls. What I did not realize was that one of the buildings, which looked fairly normal from the front, was enormously long. And whoever owned that building rented out stalls inside to anyone who wanted one. It was like pop-up shops, except instead of high-end retail, it was literally anything else.

I had imagined a farmers’ market with mostly produce and maybe a couple of stands selling wood carvings, but this was not that. There was produce, sure. But as I moved deeper into the building, most tables seemed to have just dedicated themselves to a single product that I would not know how to find if I was looking for them. There was a used vacuum cleaner table. There was a hubcap table. There was a booth from a company that would install a new shower in your bathroom. There was a table that had just men’s rings, and 90 percent of those rings had skulls on them. I was not in the market for a skull ring, nor did I feel particularly welcome at this tiny skull-ring emporium, but I still spent a lot of time looking at them because I was fascinated. As I wandered deeper and the minutes and then, somehow, hours passed by, the market got more and more crowded, and I realized that while the customers might be economically similar (it seemed like mostly lower-class folk), it was otherwise very diverse.

I spent a bunch of time looking at a huge booth of vintage dresses. The lady running it was in her sixties with long naturally gray hair. She was beautiful, and also helpful.

“Sweetie,” she called to me at one point. But of course I had no idea she meant me, so I just kept browsing.

“Young lady,” she called again. I turned and she said, “I thought this would be exactly the thing. It looks precisely your size, and I think you’d look just like Judy Pace in it.”

I didn’t know who Judy Pace was, but the dress was heavy, flowing red cotton with a high neck. It was also short. I did her the favor and tried it on in her little changing room.

Look, I’m not April. I’m a normal human who looks in the mirror and does not love what they see. I want to love my body, and I know I’m supposed to. I just don’t. But the dress did make my legs look … good. I took out my phone and snapped a picture thinking I might send it to someone to hype me up into buying it. What I really wanted was to send it to April, and I got so scared that I couldn’t think of anyone else in my life to message that I messaged Miranda.

MAYA: Does this dress look good?

The three little dots were there for a long time before a message finally came through.

MIRANDA: Yeah! Why?

MAYA: You’re such a dork. Peer-pressure me!

MIRANDA: Oh! Maya, you look like a literal goddess. You need that dress.

MAYA: That’s better.

Sometimes you need to buy a red dress because the alternative is the nightmare of loss.

By this time, the place was packed with people, and starting to smell like grilled meats. I was trying to sniff my way toward those meats when I spotted a familiar white cowboy hat. I’d all but forgotten that one of Carson’s contractors was a vendor, but the moment I saw the guy I knew it was him. The table in front of him sported a variety of rocks. Nice rocks—crystals and fossils and stuff.

Trying not to feel weird about the fact that I had followed this guy as he worked on several occasions, I inspected his table.

I picked up a perfectly smooth hunk of white rock, thinking it was going to be hefty in my hand, but it was light, and colder than I thought it should be. It was so light, it felt like it must be hollow. My mind flashed back to Carl, their parts that felt like they neither took nor gave heat. This wasn’t like that, in fact it felt cooler than it should, like metal, but without the weight. I looked at it more deeply and saw that it wasn’t the pure milky white I’d thought it was. Around the edges it clouded into a powdery blue, and when I turned it in my hands, tiny flecks of blue, green, and even pink appeared and disappeared. It was gorgeous.