I went upstairs and called for Lydia, who came bounding around a corner, toweringly large and covered in drool. I attached her lead, and we wandered around my new neighborhood—quieter than my old one, with weirder coffee shops and expensive independent clothing boutiques that seemed to exclusively sell outfits for aging psychics heading out of town on a cottage weekend.
Lydia was a well-behaved dope with no idea how huge she was, deferring instantly to the much smaller, more confident dogs that strolled right up to get in her face or sniff her butthole. I bought a coffee and a cardamom bun from a cash-only place decorated in black-and-white pictures of lattes.
When I got home, I let Lydia off her leash and said hello to Betty and Inessa, Merris’s housemates. They were old and vaguely bohemian and politely uninterested in me; Merris had told them all the relevant details, and they were engaged in a heated argument about whether an arborist needed to be called about a concerning fungus Inessa had found on the big tree in the backyard. Betty, to whom Lydia belonged, had her foot in a plastic boot.
I went back out the front door, walked around the house, and entered the basement through my dingy little side entrance. I filled a large trash bag with several pairs of size 33 jeans and some other old clothes and headed to the secondhand store.
The shop door made an aggressive honking sound when I opened it, and the woman behind the counter looked up. She was tall and slender and had a bunch of little tattoos on her long, graceful hands. She looked like she lived in a pottery studio on a boat, or a van she’d painstakingly renovated with her freelance model boyfriend, or maybe just an enormous downtown condo her parents had purchased. I did not really want to show her my clothes.
There was no one else in the store. I considered pretending to browse for a few minutes then leaving, but was conspicuously carrying a translucent bag full of old clothing, which made it implausible to suggest I was on my way somewhere else. I reluctantly heaved the bag onto the counter and began an Idiot’s Monologue about how I’d never done this before, wasn’t quite sure how it worked, and hoped she’d be interested in some of my wares. I said “wares.” Actually, I said “wares, as it were.” I wanted to die.
The woman sighed. She was impeccably dressed, with a haircut I recognized from Instagram. Only cool girls had it, and it seemed like you had to go to San Francisco to get it done, but she had probably cut hers herself, with scissors rescued from an old shipwreck.
She dumped my items in front of her, pulling at seams and evaluating labels, occasionally tutting or raising an eyebrow. Everything was sorted into three piles according to some opaque proprietary system. Occasionally she would say “nice” or “cute,” and I would grin monstrously and stammer something about where I’d acquired it and why I no longer wanted it: “Oh yeah, hahaha, I got that at Topshop, my mom was with me and literally thought the store only did tops, isn’t that . . . ! Anyway, it’s too small now, because of what birth control did to my boobs.”
The woman smiled a tight-lipped smile, leaving her eyes out of it. She pawed through the rubble of my life: ambitiously tall heels I’d worn exactly once, a bunch of those woven belts that makeover shows basically sutured to the bodies of big girls in the mid-aughts, a long chain necklace with an owl on it. Twenty-nine years on earth, and this was what I had to show for myself. I had argued many times with my Catholic grandmother that there was no such thing as hell. I wanted to call her and apologize: hell was real, and this was it.
Finally, the woman had sorted everything. “We’ll keep these,” she said, gesturing to the two largest piles. “And we can donate the rest of those if you want, but I’m going to have to give you back these trousers.” She slid a pair of corduroy pants across the counter with a sympathetic expression. “The thing is, we can’t accept clothes that have been soiled.”
My ears flattened against my head like a cat’s.
“Soiled . . . ?”
“Not laundered.”
“That’s not what soiled means.”
“Well, there’s a stain on them.”
I grabbed the pants, nervously examining the relevant areas. I found nothing. I turned them over and saw a small purple dot near the hem.
“The stain is on the leg,” I said. “And it’s juice or something.”
“It’s none of my business what it is,” she said. “No judgment, obviously, but we can’t accept them.”
The woman pushed the pants across the counter. I was shoving them hurriedly into my tote bag when a man’s voice said, “You shouldn’t shit in your clothes.”
Simon was smiling too widely, unable to hide how pleased he was with himself for the joke. The smile took some of the bite out of his initial cool guy move （appearing behind me with a gently teasing line） but added to the overall impression of him （a straightforward, almost weirdly affable man）。
“Exactly, sir, thank you,” said the woman. “There’s a policy.”
I dropped my bag on the floor and turned to Simon. He was looking at me with the same unembarrassed interest he had at axe throwing.
“You got curtains,” I said.
He laughed, and I realized with some anxiety that I was happy to see him.
“I did.”
There was a silence. To break it, I told him work had been busy, and I’d been moving apartments, and I had a lot on my plate right now, and I was sorry I hadn’t texted.
“Oh, don’t worry about me,” he said. “My bedroom’s pitch-black, and I’m loving every minute.”
“Excuse me, ma’am, can you also take this?”
The woman was holding up a T-shirt the Laurens had made for my bachelorette party, featuring my face photoshopped onto a sexy undead body wearing a wedding dress. Above me they’d scrawled in Sharpie, mags’ boo-chelorette 2016 and, beneath, last dick ever. My zombie hand was holding a severed penis.
“It was inside out before, and now that I see it—I mean, realistically speaking, we probably can’t sell something so crude,” she said. “Like on the back it says ‘RIP,’ but the R stands for—”
“‘Rim in Peace,’ yeah,” I said quickly. “It’s not serious. It’s a funny, um—I just thought, maybe, it might be funny to someone. Like someone might buy it ironically, you know . . . to be funny.”
I stopped talking, defeated. I could feel my face getting hot and red, which I knew from experience would only make it redder and hotter. I was in real danger of a sweaty upper lip. What was this woman’s problem? I was just trying to make a few extra bucks selling old clothing I no longer needed. Was that a crime, wanting to pass these along for someone else to enjoy, instead of fulfilling the toxic prophecy of fast fashion and consigning them to the landfill? For fuck’s sake, I was trying to recycle.
The woman turned to Simon: “Do you think it’s funny?”
“I do, I’m afraid.” Simon smiled.
I protested heavily, though it was no use. He fished five dollars out of his pocket, bought the shirt, and pulled it on. “So,” he said, making a big show of primping in the mirror. “You’re married!” My undead eyes and big zombie boobs stared back at me.