Grace spends the rest of the night staring up at Yuki’s ceiling, wishing for her own plastic, glow-in-the-dark stars. She spends the rest of the night breathing through the feeling of her chest aching, her heart breaking, wishing she could believe the stories as simply as Yuki does. In the real world, people do not easily accept the things on the fringes, the things with teeth and claws and wants and dreams. Stories do not change that.

Grace gets up at eight while Yuki is snoring away next to her. She sleeps in, Grace will learn, until about noon, then wakes up angry to be alive until she’s had her toast with jam.

Grace meanders into the living space.

No one is cooking breakfast, but Dhorian is slinking in the door with a hoodie pulled on over his hospital scrubs. He waves a tired hand at Grace before he collapses against the kitchen counter and sighs longingly at their cheap coffee maker.

“I need coffee,” he says, “but I’m too tired to make coffee.”

She hesitates. “Do you want me to—” she starts to ask, voice breaking in the middle. “Do you want me to make your coffee?”

He tilts his head. “Porter,” he says quietly, “if you make the machine do the thing, I will fly to Vegas and marry you, too.”

She laughs quietly, coming out of the shadows. She waggles her fingers until her gold band is visible. “I think I did okay the first time around.” The coffee machine gurgles. “How was work?” she asks, anxious to fill the space with words that aren’t about her drunken night with desert flowers and forever vows.

Dhorian groans. He instructs Grace on how to work the machine between yawns. “Night shift in the ED. Sorry, the emergency department. It’s—what’s a nicer phrase for ‘absolutely fucking ghoulish’?”

“I think that works.”

“Okay.” He looks like he could fall asleep right here on the counter. “Then, it was absolutely fucking ghoulish. Kid came in with a broken arm and a suspected case of negligence. Probably child abuse. The paperwork alone is enough to kill you,” he says, “but it’s really fucked up when you gotta send the kid home. Sugar and cream, please.”

She gets the sugar and cream.

“What made you choose that field?” she asks him. “You’re a resident, right?”

He nods. Watchful, sleepy eyes follow her progress. “Mom’s a pediatrician. Dad’s a pediatrician. Sister’s finishing up her pediatric residency,” he says ruefully. He stands up to stretch. “What’s a rebel without a cause, huh?” He grabs his mug with both hands and shuffles down the hall to the room he shares with Fletcher. “Next time you see me, remind me to ask you about your work, okay? Thank you, Porter,” he says, before his bedroom door shuts behind him.

If Grace has anything to say about it, she won’t remind him. She doesn’t even want to think about it herself.

Instead, she wanders around the apartment, careful of creaking floorboards. She runs her hand along all the exposed brick, and the rough scratchy surface reminds her of the asteroid particles back in the MacMillan lab. Their little living room is exploding with pictures and magazines and a film of glitter. There’s a fish tank in the corner of the room filled with neon-bright fish. They are the same color as Grace’s stick-on ceiling stars, the ones that hear all her hopes and dreams and fears and worries.

She crouches down in front of the tank and wonders if these fish, innocuous and quiet, have heard the same from the people in this apartment. She presses a finger to the glass and taps lightly. One darts toward the sound.

“Hello,” she says quietly, watching it flick from side to side. She taps again, and it follows. “Hello, bright little thing.”

The fish swims away, back into its little coven of neon friends. They are mesmerizing to watch, content as they are to swim in their little group in their little tank in their little world.

“What do you think about?” she asks the fish in the tank. “Do you ever think about the big, wide ocean, and how you would feel if you could swim in it?” She taps the glass again, and another, or maybe the same fish, darts forward. “I thought I wanted to be out of my tank,” she confesses with a whisper. “But the ocean is big, you know, and I am very, very small.” The fish follows her finger. “I don’t know that I like it,” she says, so softly she can barely hear it herself. “I don’t know that I like feeling this small at all.”

Eleven

On the nights Yuki doesn’t close up the restaurant and come home with aching feet and meager tips, she does the radio show. Grace watches her undo her work-sanctioned white button-down and black tie, and turn soft and pink and relaxed after a shower. She only wears comfy clothes to the radio station, and tonight she tumbles out of her steamy bathroom in black leggings and oversize lesbian flannel and settles on the couch.

Fletcher has been trying to teach Sani and Grace how to play Egyptian Rat Screw for the past hour, still in his suit jacket and tie from school. His hands are covered in paint.

The end of the school year is bullshit, he said when he came in. I just let them finger-paint.

Now he says, “Seriously, how have you guys never played this?” He deals the cards evenly. “Every day at recess I used to wipe the floor with those uppity punks who tried to out-slap me.”

Fletcher is from Queens.