B AND I PAIRED UP before we even met. I heard stories about her, mostly stories about her biting people. It seemed like everybody knew somebody she had bitten, a friend of a friend or an ex-lover, most often during a one-on-one conversation. They happened at moments when B felt cornered in the conversation or when something unpleasant came up. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to bite into another person. Usually one of the things I thought about when I bit down into something was how ill-suited my teeth were for biting down into anything.

When I got back to the apartment, the day was already close to ending, the light was growing dim. B sat on the couch in the living room facing the door, staring hard ahead of her with a drink in her hand. When I opened the door to find her there, clutching a plastic cup, she looked like she had been there ever since I had left, just waiting for me to walk back in. I stood at the edge of a room thick with my own absence, wondering whether to stick myself into it gradually or all at once.

I ran the tip of my tongue over my teeth, one by one. At the very back, the molars were short and crooked, angled rearward, pointed toward the throat. Then they were dull, blunt, herbivorous, with deep pits that roughened at the center. Their texture was disarrayed, unfinished. The points of the canines were rounded down, softened up like objects left out in the rain. Then the small white teeth at the front, divots in their backsides, the tiny incisors with their scalloped edges, registering some minor body crisis undergone when I was still a child. I felt sad for B. She seemed misequipped for her desires.

My conversations with other people about B always ended with something like this: You should meet her. You two would get along. You have a lot in common. But then I would ask what it was we had in common, and the person would say one thing, something B and I shared, that was true of me but didn’t really seem central to who I was or believed myself to be. The person would tell me that B and I were both single, or we had the same color hair, or we both liked to read, or we had the same name. And then they would just leave it there, with that single trait dangling before me as if hung from the ceiling on a very long thread, turning and turning around slowly, making me wonder if it could be true that this trait constituted me and, if so, how fragile might it be, how solid?

But I met B only when she came to look at the empty bedroom in my apartment. My summer sublettor had worked at a moped repair shop and spent all his time at home locked in his room with his computer, his microwave, and a case of instant ramen, and I was looking for someone who was more like me. I knew from what other people had told me that B was looking for a room only because her boyfriend had broken up with her. I was worried that there’d be emotional spillage, maybe even some tears, and comforting strangers always made me feel like a pervert. She seemed so fragile when I had first opened the door, startlingly small in an overlarge dress and bare face. But she wasn’t really any smaller than me—I just couldn’t see myself from the outside. She looked at the room that was for rent, empty except for a mattress and a basic desk, and then she asked to see mine.

I watched from the doorway as she drifted between items of furniture. She moved like someone in convenience store surveillance footage, someone who hopes they are being watched. She would stop and stare someplace downward and ahead, then look around, then down again, dragging her gaze somewhere new, to some other piece of floor or fabric. She touched my books, rubbing the tops where hundreds of pages blended into some single surface, and she touched the glass of water by my bedside, and she picked up the broken snow globe that C had given me and the small painted wood box on my mantel. She handled them, turning them around to see each of the sides. B sat down on the bed and put her palms on the quilt. She was angled like a drawing, a form in two dimensions set into a world of three. She seemed to hover, holding herself just above the bed’s surface so that she’d leave no mark on it with her weight.

Then she gazed up at me and said: I wish I could wear makeup on my eyes, like you. Then she said: You have so many things.

In second grade, I had a friend named Danielle who used to say the same thing whenever she came over for the playdates our parents arranged. You have so many things, she’d say. What’s this? And I would answer her, where it came from, what its name was, whatever, while she looked it over. If she liked it enough, she would try to trade me for it, using whatever was in her pockets at the time. She always had something strange in the pockets of her bedazzled overalls, something crushed and shadowy that resembled nothing. Once she wanted my favorite stuffed animal, a dog I called Pinky. Can I have him? she had said. I’ll give you this, it’ll be a best friend trade. “This” was a wadded-up washcloth with a picture of a reindeer on it and something spreading grayly at the left corner. I didn’t know exactly what happened, but then I was holding this washcloth, and Pinky was no longer mine. Looking down into my hands, it looked as though something awful had happened to my stuffed dog. He had been flattened out, creased deep, warped. He had these weird things pushing out through his skull.

I STOOD THERE IN THE living room, still waiting for B to say something to me. I knew she might be upset that I had left her home alone. It was early evening, and the sky through the windows was a deep, darkening blue. They must have sprayed the neighborhood for insects because I heard nothing but the trees, their leaves twitching in the warm night air. A heavy, calm feeling suffused the room, but I knew that was temporary and about to end. Lit up by the TV, B’s face was a mess of shadows. It reminded me of that first day, waiting for her mouth to move, standing in the doorway of my own bedroom wondering if she’d ever put her teeth in me.

“So you’re back now,” she said.

The word now sounded like an accusation.

“I’m back now,” I said.

“Where were you?” she asked.

“With C. You know. Watching sharks on TV, mostly,” I said, trying to shift the conversation a foot or two to my right.

“It was Shark Week, or still is, I guess. C knows everything about them. Did you know that you can tell the age of a shark by counting the rings on its vertebrae? Like a tree,” I said.

There was no reply.

“What are you watching?” I asked.

“I’m watching channel seek,” she replied.

Watching channel seek was when we pushed the button on the remote that made the TV automatically cycle through all of its stations one by one. You’d see a politician and he’d say the word institutions and then suddenly he’d be a tractor pushing through tall grass and then the tractor would be a bucket of steaming hot fried chicken being emptied onto a plate, et cetera. We watched channel seek when we were upset, because it was like experiencing several dozen small attachments and losses that you could maybe prevent but definitely would not do anything about.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

I looked at the side table. There were a few oranges with little gouges in them, as if someone had started to peel them and given up. From over here they looked like faces, with the eyes and mouths all misplaced.

“Have you eaten anything?” I asked. “We should have dinner.”

“It’s past dinner,” she said.

“Okay, a snack,” I said.

“I’m not hungry,” she said. She had turned the volume way up on channel seek.

“It’s past a snack,” she said softly, as if to herself.

With the television turned up so high, I saw the outline of her words but couldn’t hear them. The television speakers rattled softly with the force of their own output.

I went to the bathroom to see if there was anything going on with my face. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and registered the discrepancy between how I had looked last afternoon and how I looked now. In this way I measured the amount of life that had been extracted from me by loving someone, in person, face-to-face. I gauged the minus value by the dullness of my skin, the streaky, patchy black around my left eye, the miscellaneous redness that came from rubbing my face against C’s stubble as it increased in length and bristliness hour after hour. My skin felt looser from where he had squished it, playfully or in clumsy love. I had a swollen spot on my lip where I had gotten bitten or sucked. My face in the mirror looked like someone else’s staring back at me through an open window in her own bathroom, and all I could think was that hers looked very much my own, only much more tired.

I did the toothpaste and the floss, the facial wash and toner and moisturizer. I dabbed something on the dark spots to fade them, and I covered them over with concealer. I did a layer of primer and applied the foundation, rubbing it on in small circles as if I were buffing or sanding. A zone of creamy, skin-colored skin eked away at my own. It ate up the jaw, the chin, the nose, the forehead. I was looking more like myself every second. I did the eyes, drawing an eye-shaped outline around the whole thing. The spots were still there, but now they were putty colored, on their way out or between. They might have been residue on the surface of the mirror, except they moved when I did. I reached for more concealer to cover them up. I was watching the hand in the mirror rather than my own.

From out in the living room I heard the sounds of channel seek. If you’re looking for . . . brrrrrrrrrztztzt . . . an open door . . . by eight and three-fourths . . . kinder or better . . . ringdringdring I’m sorry . . . get it under . . . and then you rolllll your hips, kinda ro . . . ckclunk . . . I never said you could have her but . . . just got better . . . unlike the ostrich . . . anything, anything . . . reminder of our . . . If he knew, if he knew what was going to . . . a personal pizza for . . . lk klk klk klk kriiik . . . and then I start right over here, you see, sort of skating along the edge of the eye, just kind of skaaaating my pencil along the edge of the eye. There, you see how easy this is? There, again, just skaaaaate it along the line you’ve already got there, yes. Yes. Now we’re going to do the extensions. It always felt weird when channel seek started to make sense, like mistaking a real person for a mannequin. That the television made sense again meant that B had found something to stick with, but it did not necessarily mean that she was any happier. I walked back into the living room and found her hunched into a ball, hugging her knees to her chest the way I used to do when I was a child.

“What are you watching?” I asked.

“She’s teaching them how to do eyeliner,” B replied.

“Do you like that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” B said. “You can see the brush tugging on the skin near the eye. The skin bunches up and stretches at the same time. It looks like a balloon being written on. Or something.”

I looked at the screen. The woman who was speaking had her hand wrapped around the jaw of the other woman, holding it from beneath the way someone would hold a dog being force-fed a heartworm pill. She tilted the jaw up so that the eyes listed toward the ceiling, and then she brought the pencil point down toward the socket from above. It’s so simple, said the voice of the woman makeup artist. Just think of it as drawing a picture. You’re drawing a picture of your face, right smack onto your face. Draw the face you’d like to have. Draw your perfect face. Okay, now make sure your pencil’s sharp. I’m going to do little points at the end here, see? Looks just like a little wing. Now we’ll do blush. Right after this break. The camera pulled back for the first time to show the full view of the woman being made up. She was reasonably pretty, with a heavy nose and chin. A spattering of zits trailed from her temple down toward her ear. She turned her face silently toward the camera, revealing a half-finished face. One side was a uniform beige with a thick, elongated eye that swept up toward her temples. The other was bare. The eye within its socket seemed tiny and underprotected. It looked as though the second half of her face, previously hidden from the camera, were sliding off the side.

“She looks beautiful,” B said.

In the faintly electronic light of the television screen, I could see B’s T-zone pores, her untreated pimples, a small unexplained scar beneath her left eye, unnaturally smooth and white against the weak tissue. Sometimes a face could be so simple: even a couple of dark spots on a lighter surface or a dark oval in the distance might be a face. An electrical socket could be a face, a mailbox or a couple of punctuation marks could congeal suddenly into something with an expression. Our faces, on the other hand, were made of hundreds of different parts, each part separate and tenuous and capable of being ugly, each part waiting for a product designed to isolate and act upon it. Every time I looked at my face, I seemed to find another new piece to it, floating there next to or underneath or inside the others, all the parts together but impossible to connect.

B sat forward, trying to catch every word of the commercials as they unfolded one after another, her eyes darting from the left to the right over and over again as the bluish light played off her face. The two of them were like one now, B and the television. She balanced at the edge of the couch, clutching the remote with both hands. Then she looked right at me.

“You know, I think things would be better if I looked more like you,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, feeling nervous.

“I mean, I feel like if I looked more like you, maybe more people would talk to me. The way they talk to you,” B said.

“I’m sure people talk to you,” I said, though I had no idea if this was true.

“And when I looked in the mirror, maybe I wouldn’t mind so much when you stayed away,” B added, still looking right at me.

She said it with much more certainty than I expected from her. Her lower lip stuck out like a child’s, thick and center creased, with a wart on it that might have been caused by cigarettes or repeated biting.

“It would be like you were still here, so I wouldn’t really be alone,” she continued.

“Or maybe it would be like I wasn’t there as much, so I’d only feel partly as lonely,” she added.

Her eyes were looking much larger than I had remembered.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you could get a pet?”

B looked for a second like she was going to cry or bite me.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “You’ve always got yourself to keep you company.”

I wanted to disagree, but I didn’t even understand. The effort of the conversation was making me hungry, hungry for something more substantial than an orange. But when I tried to think it through, think about what I would prefer to eat instead, all I could see was oranges, all I could taste was oranges. It was as if my mind were the exact size of an orange. There was no room to move around it. I could think only of pulp, the soft, warm wad of sweetness on my tongue growing blander as the jaws closed on it, the tiny sacs of juice popping and the ropy bits of rind catching on the teeth. And then there was the amniotic sound, the edgelessness of wet against wet. The sound I imagined shifted into other sounds, related as water is to other water: a sameness displaced and separated, but only temporarily. I heard myself chewing, and it made my mouth water.

“You’re with me or you’re with C or you’re alone, and it doesn’t seem to matter. You’re the same all the time,” B said.

I was thinking of a perfect orange, whole in my palm. It fit there as if it were made for me. I was cupping it in my palm and then I was lifting it toward my mouth. I bit into it like an apple, peel and all.

“But it’s not like that for me,” she continued. “I’m less when nobody’s around. I do less, I move less, I eat less.”

The ooze of the peel burned at the edges of my lips as I bit in. A bitter, oily orange film slicked my lips and teeth. There were little grains of something sliding in the oil and I bit harder. I tongued the flaps of rind, dry as felt, and tore them from the flesh with my teeth. I bit into the sweet wedges, and the wound filled with juice around my lips. As I worked my tongue farther in, I felt the tips of seeds near the center.

“I think I even think less,” she said. “I don’t remember what happens when I’m alone. It’s like all that time just happens without me. It’s like being a chair or a table.”

B paused expectantly.

“Is there any way I can help?” I asked, hoping there wasn’t. But instead she looked eager, even happy.

“Can we have a slumber party?” she asked. “Where you give me a makeover?”

“Would that really help?” I asked.

Now she sat back, as if I had already agreed.

“Definitely,” she said. “Definitely.”

“Okay,” I said. “Do you want to go to the store to get makeup?” I asked.

“I’ll just use yours,” she said. Then she turned her face back to the TV and flipped a page of the magazine in her lap. The magazine was called Women Tomorrow. She reached over to the coffee table and primly picked up a paper cup. A lemon scent trailed from the paper cup, strong enough to sting your eyes.

I stood there feeling irrelevant. It was as though B had forgotten all about me the second I gave in. Usually B hung on me whenever I was in the common space, asking me what I thought about different TV shows, outfits, different kinds of food. Now she was acting more like I did when I wanted to remind her that this had been my apartment first, silence hardening up around her bony body as she watched her own things, as if I were the one with something I wanted from her. I wanted her to return me to the way I had been when I was confident, when each inch of this apartment was familiar to me, rather than a couple of steps removed, like a photograph of a drawing of a place you had once loved. I wanted her to act like herself, insofar as the B I had known always wanted to be like me, act like me, but was never quite able to do it. I wanted her to side with me on the weirdness of the house across the street, I wanted her to worry about what happened over there the other day and let me try to comfort her.

“Hey,” I said, “do you remember that family driving away the other day? Wearing sheets?”

“Duh,” said B, glancing at me for a second or two.

“What do you think that was?” I asked.

B shrugged. Her face had taken on a slurred look, drooping at the corners.

“Have they been back?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “And I don’t care. That family was all assholes anyway. The way they used to look at me. I mean, they wouldn’t look at me. Like if they saw me smoking out on the roof, they’d just stare straight ahead like robots, like they thought watching me doing it would give them lung cancer. People in this neighborhood don’t pay any attention to me, so I don’t pay any attention to them.

“It’s a matter of principle,” she added, taking a dainty sip from her paper cup.

The magazine lay open on her lap, revealing a photo of a famous actress astride a terrified-looking horse. The actress leaned forward, cuddling the horse with one arm, the other raised in a gesture of triumph. “Do you think I could do that?” B asked, pointing at the page. I looked at the photo. I honestly didn’t know.

I felt like gagging. I went to my room and closed the door. B and C would make a great couple, I realized. They’d get along like crazy. I could imagine them now facing the TV as noise poured from its wide glass eye, happy and content as the rampant weirdness unfolded outside, their hands clasped together like a single, monstrously large heart. He wouldn’t mind the way B drank—he’d love it, in fact, the novelty of it, the sweet deadness of her breath after disgorging, the sense her body gave off that living was a wet and collapsing struggle.

May we eat as one, I thought to myself, because I had no idea what else to think. I closed the door to my bedroom and lay belly-down on my bed, pressing my face up to the open window. Through the black mesh screen, the house across the street was dark and impossibly still. The yellow glow from the streetlights stopped just short of the lawn, leaving a large blue-black expanse leading toward the house, opaque as an ocean. I pressed up to the mesh screen and smelled the thick green growth of summer writhing in the night. I felt the dark air on my face. I angled my head around, trying to see into their windows. The door was still ajar, windows illegible. Someone had propped some sheets of particleboard against the garage door, blotting out several of the scrawled words, and there was debris on the driveway, dark clods of vegetative matter that could have been lawn related. It was possible that they had come back while I was out with C, that they had snuck their sedan silently in, leaned the boards up against the garage to fake disuse. But I doubted myself. The words that man had scrawled on the door were meant to be seen. If they had been covered, it had been by someone else.

I rolled over and stared at the ceiling. C and I went away on a long road trip once. On our way north we stopped at a quarry where people paid a fee to drive their cars in, park them in the little public lot, and spend a few hours lying on thin towels spread out on rocks beside the cloudy water. There was a sun-bleached diving board at the water’s edge that you weren’t supposed to use; a doughy man in yellow swim trunks lay dozing on it. At the other end of the quarry the water was supposed to be fifteen feet deep, and you could jump off into it from the rock cliff above. C wanted to do this with such great enthusiasm that it couldn’t even occur to him that I might not. He took my hand and was leading me up this path, both of our towels wadded up under his arm, and when I asked him where we were going, he just said, “The top,” in a cheery way.

At the top there was some random trash, plastic soda pop bottles, and a set of keys that looked like they had been there a long time. You could see a long way, all over the quarry, all the way to the skinny preteens putting each other in fake wrestling holds down by the ice cream stand. Far below us, the water looked milky and frothy at the same time. “Are you ready!” C shouted in a way that wasn’t a question. Then he grabbed me around the middle from behind, his crotch soft against my ass, and leapt us over the edge. Because I hadn’t intended to jump, had no plan to jump, it didn’t really feel like I was falling as I fell. I just felt the movement all around me, like a gust of wind coming from the bottom up. Nevertheless, a ragged scream tore from me, one that sounded as if it had been cut out of me by a steak knife, and when I hit the water I was still going, swallowing some of the water by accident, which tasted like blackboard chalk. When we had paddled over to land again, C was excited, laughing. He held me and said that it seemed like I wasn’t afraid of strong feelings, and I let him keep thinking that even though I knew it was nearly the opposite of how I actually was.

I lay there. Think this through, I said to myself. Just because you weren’t the person he thought you were doesn’t mean that you won’t be that person at some other time, someday. It doesn’t mean that B is that person, or could be that person if she tried. It doesn’t mean you’re not you. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love you. I had enumerated the doesn’ts.

By then I was tired or maybe sad, so I turned the TV on.

On-screen there was another Kandy Kakes commercial. In this one, Kandy Kat has become a scientist so that he can crack the problem of Kandy Kakes, find out what makes their matter so disastrously incompatible with his own. Kandy Kat guides us through a series of diagrams on the chalkboard that elucidate the basic structure of a Kandy Kake: outer coating of crispy candy shell sprinkled with crushed nuts and a patented candy substance known only as “Choco Shrapnel,” then a layer of gooey caramel followed by two layers of rich chocolate of slightly different consistencies. Then a layer of fluffy cake, kept moist by the four layers of airtight, watertight substances surrounding it, then a layer of crisp chocolate cookie. At the center is the top-secret “Kandy Kore,” a dense, sugary substance whose chemical composition is known to only a few privileged individuals within the Kandy Kakes empire. Rumor has it the Kandy Kore is not strictly edible per se, in the sense that the special materials that give it its unique flavor are not thought to be made of food, specifically. No food that I’ve ever eaten shimmers with such beautiful, rich shades of green and pink. It’s like eating a gasoline rainbow, if gasoline tasted good. Dressed in a white coat, Kandy Kat rubs his hands together eagerly near a gigantic machine that promises to do something scientific to the lone Kake sitting on a pedestal directly beneath its beam. Even in the coat his ribs show through; it’s painful to see them. He pulls a lever and a beam of sizzling green light envelops the Kandy Kake, which Kandy Kat approaches reverently, his eyes growing wider and wider behind his professorial glasses.

Suddenly I had a thought, and I muted the TV.

What I heard was unmistakably the sounds of the same commercial playing in the living room, where B was still presumably sitting. It was muffled, yes, as if it were wrapped in a blanket, but I could make out the terrible grinding and cracking sounds that happen when Kandy Kat tries unsuccessfully to bite down on a Kandy Kake. It sounded as if someone were trying to repair a car, but with tools all made of bone and meat. I tried to picture her sitting there on the couch and watching, but all I could picture was myself, sitting on my bed, trying hard to picture something. I stared at the screen, at Kandy Kat trying to eat. He was biting so hard that his teeth cracked.