“Okay.”

“Listen, I have to go now but I’ll be home in three days. Let’s talk about it then?” He hangs up, and for a while I just sit there with the gun in my lap. I open my photo gallery and look at the picture of Rebecca and Akila in the garden. I put the gun back in the box, push it back under the bed, and wander around the house. I imagine all of it is mine. But even when I make myself comfortable, when I find an orange and eat it over the sink, I have the sensation of stepping into someone else’s shoes. I know that if Eric leaves his wife, we’ll have to move to another town. A suburb with rival high schools. A small apartment stocked with wax paper and bananas. A lightly used American car that we share. A place where our shoes appear side by side. A cabinet full of plastic Price Chopper bags and a nervous old dog that loves him more than it loves me. I could do it, though as I press the rind into the trash and see all the proof of life, the soggy cornflakes and chicken fat, I know that his declaration, the dangling carrot for which mistresses everywhere open their stupid mouths, is complete bullshit. Believing he will leave Rebecca is one of the few personal failures I can absolutely avoid, but then I see that picture of him in Greece again, his pit stains and passport necklace and vacation stubble, and I just eat it up. Because I have not been laid in a month, and everything looks good. Men in magazines who wear chambray and pretend to water plants. That self-portrait of Rembrandt where his collar is turned up. The Allstate insurance man and Stringer Bell. Thirty days have passed since Eric and I last fucked, and it is agony. I take the picture off the fridge and head to my room, but on the way I notice the door to Akila’s room is open.

* * *

Inside it smells like body butter and Hot Pockets, like a rank, pubescent Yankee Candle, but otherwise, this is the most fantastic room in the house. The cutesy stay out sign on the door now seems out of step if not ironic, the room less the product of petulant stoicism and more a tribute to earnest fandom, the walls papered in dragons, wiccan infographics, and lithe Korean boys, quartz and drusy stones and dirty zirconia hanging from strategically placed tacks, Gothic illustrations of woodland faeries on linen, steampunk goggles strapped to a wig stand where seven wigs are stacked in accordance with ROYGBIV. On the TV there are several figurines, though the only ones I recognize are Robin and the Takashi Murakami miniature of a girl spraying milk from her tits. Because of my sexless career as a high school studio art kid, I was frequently adjacent to the prototypes for girls like this, girls who were horse-girls except with cats, girls with patches and pins who uploaded their Suicide Girl auditions with the translucent computer lab Macs, girls who were Goth-lite, in and out of Hot Topic and Torrid with their weepy, sallow boys, shy dabblers in anime and D&D, though in the years I have been away I see it has gotten sexier and more bleak, the interludes between Akila’s shrines to Guillermo del Toro and Tim Burton dripping in intermediate sorcery and sex, bloody grindhouse stills framed next to fishnets and a wilted go-go boot, all the hairless CGI men with their hips canted, corollaries of the comic stacks and spell scrolls and everything else exalting the perfect and unreal.

Weirdly, the frankness of this intensity is hard on my conscience. I look through her closet and feel terrible about it. I find a cache of notebooks and scan through them, and all of it is raw—cruel, longing portraits of her classmates, careful records of calorie allotments, and in one totally nondescript composition notebook, pages upon pages of Batman fan fiction. I read it for a while because it is pretty good. The characters are believably drawn, Bruce Wayne out and about in Gotham in his playboy iteration, attending an auction for the last model of the gun that killed his parents, losing the auction to a black, omniscient sprite that is clearly Akila’s surrogate, though Clark Kent becomes more prominent as the story goes on, lounging around the Batcave post breakup with Lois Lane, who doesn’t take him seriously as a journalist or a man. I do not expect this fan fiction to become about how he reclaims his manhood, and I do not expect the lengthy description of the soaps in Bruce’s bat-shaped bath. Here, there are some character problems, the exclamation points in Batman’s dialogue ultimately less believable than his sexual awe and jealousy, as he is a human man with a complicated belt and Clark is an intergalactic softboi with infinite strength. It’s so dirty and engrossing that I don’t notice Akila until she is ripping the notebook out of my hands. She clutches it against her chest and looks at the floor. To see her there, the embarrassment open on her small face, feels like seeing an Olive Garden commercial after having already plowed through two bowls of fettuccini. The stark photorealism always beyond a terrible indulgence, in this case the invasion of her privacy, which I had shrugged off as an extension of Rebecca’s, though of course that was incorrect. Once Akila herself is grounded in the context of her room, her vulnerability, her personhood, is concrete. She doesn’t speak and puts the notebooks exactly where they were. It is strange to see that even these secret things have a fixed place. If I destroyed this marriage, I would be destroying this, too.

“Can you please leave?” she says in a high voice, her back still turned. I leave and go outside and have a cigarette. I am a creep. My bowels don’t work and maybe there are other things inside me that are dead, but there is so much life around me, tomatoes that beat the bugs and rot, waiting to be held by a hand. I watch the sunset. I’m not sure what day it is. Technically early September is not fall, but so many of the trees are already bald. Across the way that same white lady is watching me through her blinds. I salute her and she recedes. Rebecca comes out and glances at me, fishing her keys from her purse.

“A body came in. I have to work,” she says, and though she is speaking to me, I feel our last conversation still in the air. Her eyes linger on my cigarette and I think she’s going to ask me to put it out, but instead she asks for one. I light her up. “Akila has tae kwon do in an hour,” she says, turning to unlock her car. “You can take the Volvo. The studio is a mile down the road, in the shopping center.” She gets into her Lincoln Navigator and tears out of the driveway, and inside Akila is already dressed in her gi.

* * *

Later, we proceed to the car. She puts her gear in the back and we slide silently into our seats. It is only once I’m behind the wheel that I realize this is Eric’s car. I start the engine and try not to think about the last time I was in this spot, in his lap, the memory of his fist a heat behind my eyes. I open the glove compartment, and there are a handful of watermelon Jolly Ranchers. There is also a flask, and I close it quickly, glance at Akila to see if she saw. But she is looking out of the window, already engaged in the merciful act of pretending I’m not here. I haven’t driven in three years. I pull out onto the road and stop short at a red light. I turn and look at Akila, and beyond her there is an actual deer. I roll down the window and yell at it because I’m already dealing with too many moving parts. Akila turns and glares at me, and then her face softens and grows nervous. I know it’s because she can tell I’m nervous, and that makes it worse.