Miriam didn’t mean to kiss Hiren, only to dance close enough to show how much it was that she appreciated him. Only three years removed from living in Afghanistan, Hiren spoke perfect English, and was soon to be attending a four-year college. The kids Miriam had worked closely with in the ESL program were out on the dance floor in a circle, clapping as each one took turns dancing in the middle. And when they’d called her, waving vigorously with flailing corsages, to leave the open bar where the other chaperones of the prom had congregated, Miriam smiled and walked into the middle of the circle while pressing her glasses to her head. She realized then that perhaps she’d lingered just a little too long at that open bar, but she ignored her intuition and felt very much like dancing with them. She was cautious at first, standing on the periphery and clapping hands while one of her students danced dirty in the center of it all. Miriam looked back at all the other instructors, her new friends looking bemused and drunk, but encouraging. Carolina’s almond eyes, which had just recently arrived from Poland, fell on her and motioned that Miriam should dance in the center. At first Miriam waved it off with a laugh, and then, acting out of hesitance, circled her open hands in front of her, mouthing softly, “No, I’m ok, I don’t think that’s allowed.” She started rotating her hips more, entropy increased, and she was soon in the middle, feeling all dignified roles lifting, feeling righteous in doing so, thinking hierarchy should be abandoned during great celebration. Or whatever bubbly thoughts came up, like stupid grins, when you’re drinking and feeling good. Hiren moved close to her, and Miriam mimicked some of the moves she had seen Rani and Samira doing a little bit before, pushing her ass up while touching the ground with her hands. And when Hiren pushed his crotch up against her behind, she continued this pantomime, only dimly thinking about decorum and how useless it was. And when he turned her around and kissed her, her hair swirling in a quarter circle around their heads, she kissed him back.

How to recognize a face when it’s that close up? It’s just a damp, warm sensation. There must have been something fierce about their hook-up, but Miriam barely remembered the actual feeling of it. She knew there was an awed crowd around them. Maybe Ms. Rudolph, aged 68, married to American History, felt like she was watching something that was both innocent and sinful — the contradiction of the two leading her to a place she hadn’t mentally explored for some time. This wasn’t a cut and dry historical event. Samira, only moments before, carrying the biggest torch for Hiren, probably lowered it, now a Moroccan petroleuse, setting fire to the cheap curtains that ran along the walls of the banquet hall. Over two million people on the internet had found some resonance in their kiss, but still, Miriam really felt not much at all. Daytime talk shows discussed it, trying to find a way to mediate the boundaries broken with the visceral image — a perfectly passionate real-time real-life kiss.

A newspaper had run a photo a few weeks later of her face up against Hiren’s, a frame of the footage that had been broadcast by the real-time videographer throughout the hotel where the prom was being held. Hiren held her face between his two hands, spreading his fingers like he was palming a basketball — Miriam’s round head perfectly captured. She flipped the newspaper across the apartment and it bent like a villain shot against the wall. It made a right angle with its crease, exposing the horizontal headline vertically, that bizarre headline the editors had planted above the photo: TAPE OF BUSTY MAKE-OUT WITH TEACH IS INTERNET SENSATION. Miriam never thought of herself as busty, she was just wearing a dress that night that accentuated certain areas. Maybe she was trying to impress the young art teacher, but he was long gone. Now he was just one of the millions who’d received an embedded video in some inter-office communiqué, its popularity surging whenever someone else decided to put a new audio track underneath the footage. From “Unchained Melody to “Hot for Teacher”: people would watch Miriam doing something she’d regret for the rest of her life. Old pop songs recycled for weak comic effect.

The response to the sensation was that across the world, couples were posting prolonged kisses that tried to match the intensity of Miriam’s — but they’d consistently fail. It was staged, it was for the camera, and it was for the world to see. Hers wasn’t. She would watch videos made by Chilean students with the title “Como La Profesora!” and feel lonely and dispossessed, staring at the two faces looking at the camera after having tried to suck the other’s face off. They smiled and she cried, but then smiled a little, too.

Miriam sighed and counted the things she’d lost since then, besides her job. She’d lost her teaching certificate for New York State and was publicly instructed never to reapply. Her distant friends no longer answered her calls and her close ones were guarded and strangely tried to avoid public places when together. As if she really might grab the next 11-year-old who walked by and push his face up to hers. She had lost her patience during a series of AA meetings her family mandated she attend. Her family thought her participation would reflect an effort to reform herself, if ever she tried to find a teaching job elsewhere. But she didn’t have a habit, she drank just as much as everyone else her age (which was probably too much anyway, but that was something for someone else to answer to, not her). But still she drank a lot, so she was beginning to lose her grace as well.

One thing she had not lost was her boyfriend, Webster, who lay face down, sleeping off a hangover on the adjacent part of the L-shaped couch where she was sitting. For the first few weeks of that summer he had been out of touch, only occasionally mailing her expletive-laced letters, even though he had been living just a five-minute walk away from her. She would spend all day in her apartment, fielding a call or two from a newspaper asking for comment, and then make her way to the building’s mailroom in her robe. She had the singular joy of reading Webster’s scornful and inarticulate heart, one that would end a letter with phrases like: “You, the silver medal like an albatross” or “How could you fucking do this to me.” Eventually he knocked on her door late one evening, stinking like his dive bar, announcing he would take her back. And besides the vanity of such an admission, she took him, because she couldn’t really lose much else.

She fell behind on rent for her apartment two weeks later. Her landlord kept his eyes pointed downward as he explained she’d have to leave, even though he’d often let her pay a few months late, whenever school was on break. Only a few weeks before she kissed Hiren, the landlord had Webster and Miriam over for dinner with his very pregnant wife Maria. And now Miriam had never even seen the baby, only watched the elevator leave without her as Maria hastily reached over the stroller to pound the door close button. And Miriam would take the steps, angry at even the idea of an elevator.

Which is how she found herself living in Webster’s apartment, trying to figure out if this all would ever go away. Once you crack the national news cycle, is there no reparation to be made? In a truly desperate moment she called Google customer service, and asked if the video could be removed. She didn’t make it past the automation before chucking her cell phone against the wall. Even the waitressing job she’d taken to help Webster out with the rent had become a trial, as she swore some patrons, while ordering, would shield their children, elderly, and beloved, with the sides of their closed menus. And whisper hurriedly as she walked away. She would shrug this off by sometimes putting pieces of fingernail in their entrees.

Webster rolled over onto his side and scratched his hairy tan belly. Webster was a pudgy man born in India who moved to Albany when he was two, and now taught Mathematics at Hudson Valley Community. He was a little older than Miriam. He cleared his throat and sucked back the phlegm from his nostril in the one-two motion of the truly secure and unintentionally disgusting. Since he’d agreed to take her back, and especially since Miriam moved into his apartment, he felt especially entitled to her indisputable company. But if she wasn’t there, he’d be completely alone.

“You saw the paper, yea?” he asked.

Miriam got up and slouched over to the far wall, picking it up. She parted her hair away from her face. “I did see the paper.”

She moved herself beside Webster and rubbed the upturned side of his body, between his armpit and love handle. His skin felt warm and pliable, like she could dig her cold hand within it, her hand with the chipping blue polish and uneven fingernails.

In times of basic calm, she’d compulsively run through the facts of the matter, which hurled her into even deeper frustration: Hiren was nineteen years old when she’d kissed him, almost a high school graduate, and now a freshman at Duke. If she had kissed him at a cafe, in public life, only two months later, there would be no scandal — not even one piqued tabloid columnist. There is nothing wrong with a 19-year-old making out with a 25-year-old. She would constantly reminisce that before meeting Webster, she would buy drinks at some seedy bar for just-underage RPI students. Besides being named state capitol, pervy teacher was the most exciting thing to have happened to Albany in all its history. The attraction people had to this 47-second clip was unnatural, she felt. She would receive letters, forwarded through the newspaper gossip sections, asking her on dates. Telling her to go to hell.

She would move away, but she was flat broke.

Sometimes at the restaurant she realized how easy it would be to empty the cashbox, walk out the door, go the ten blocks to the bus station, and be in Montreal in under four hours. She would brush up her French and find a beautiful non-threatening Quebecois, refined like a Frenchman, as soft and melancholy as Leonard Cohen.

Webster positioned his head on her knee. He mumbled, “What if you were to make this into something productive, you know?” He left a small bit of saliva on her. He picked his head up and began rubbing the drool into her pants. She looked at him wide-eyed. Then he licked his thumb and began using more spit to wipe off the other spit.

“What I’m saying is that people like writing about you...”

He paused as he looked at her for some affirmation that a good idea might actually be about to come out of his mouth. He would always stop, perched on the crest of whatever flow of imagination he was having, with every intention of finishing.

“They’re giving out TV shows to anyone right now, you know? People have done much worse things and become famous television personalities...” His voice became soft and low. “Corrupt politicians win a dance with the stars...”

She stared at him with inscrutable intensity. She knew Webster had been trying to figure out for as long as he knew her whether this expression was deep thought or blind rage. She could be a stony Olmec, her brown eyes betraying nothing. Tenderness, no. Apoplexy, no. She felt that Miriam was all a guess to Webster. She would just seize up and stare forward and sometimes would then grab him by the ears and passionately kiss him. Other times she would end a date immediately and ask him to leave her apartment or storm out of a restaurant, throwing a twenty dollar bill on the table, and telling him to get lost, “And the extra is for the tip, because I know you won’t leave any.” She knew this was unfair, but at this point, her emotions were unstable things, prone to explosion or deep repression.

So Webster had mastered this Zen state of all possibilities, where his eyes unfocused, inverting her intensity. Maybe, she thought, it was something he associated with a quantum view of the universe, that there was a reality where she blew up at him and one where she ripped his clothes off. All legitimate and possible scenarios with varying waves of probability. Math guys thought like that, yes?

But he really did seem to be compatible with her storminess - he was the type of guy who would read a journal in the middle of a hurricane, running problems through his head until they asked him if he wanted to help clear all this debris. Then he would ask what the hell had just happened.

Waging on the former, in terms of whether she was in deep thought or blind rage, he elaborated, “Like what if you host a show that has new immigrants compete against each other for a date with you? You can teach them English as you also figure out which one will win a date with teacher.”

She dug her nails into the warmth of his belly fat.

“Hey!” Webster sprang to attention, sitting up and knocking away her hand.

She smiled, a hidden one, all mouth no teeth, removed her hold, and felt better for a second, keeping her face mostly unreadable. She leaned over and laid a hickey on where she’d dug in, while Webster contorted his body with stifled asthmatic laughing. He rolled off the couch, onto the dark red carpet, making a dulled thud like a splash heard from a while away.

Miriam looked down at Webster who was nestled between the couch and coffee table, strangely looking like an S.

“I don’t know. I don’t even like my voice on a recorder, much less a television show,” she said.

“It was more of a joke anyway... Mostly a joke.” Her curly black hair was covering his face and he began to twirl it between his fingers.

Webster moaned, “I don’t think I’m doing anything today.”

Miriam patted his belly twice, and moved to the far side of the room, towards the door. She put her boots on.

“But maybe I might try it out, Web,” she said. “I need the money.” He sat up and made the determination that she seemed very sad and resigned and he furrowed his brow, making his bushy eyebrows meet.

“I was really just kidding around,” he said.

“It’s time for me to meet my dad.” She hadn’t thought about what he just said. Then she did. Then she made her eyes wide,

“And I like you because you’re trying to be sweet to me. And that’s honesty.” She picked up her glasses from the coffee table and let out a sigh. “I’ve got nothing left to do but be entirely honest with everyone. In terms of how I’m feeling.”

He rubbed his hair and tried to be reassuring, “Sometimes I forget what you did.”

She threw on her cushy maroon jacket and before leaving the apartment, turned back and looked at him with a face made of brick.

“Webster.” She paused. “I really don’t know what I did, anymore either...”

 

Miriam’s father was late. It’s not that she minded — she sat, cross-legged statue still at all her AA meetings and had made no progress in finding a sponsor. What would she tell one? I’m just here for appearances, it’s you guys with the real problems. Increasingly though, she’d come to feel for the stories told to her by the naked souls on parade. She felt ashamed when she saw Marlo, a Colombian woman who reported she’d ended her hard drinking days, sitting on the far side of a bar counter from her. Miriam smiled, waved, and saw the hurt in Marlo’s eyes.

Miriam shifted her weight back and forth next to the large pile of snow that had been created by the snowplows outside of Webster’s apartment building. It was possible her father had forgotten about having to pick her up. Miriam pulled her coat tight and looked down the shiny avenue, slick with ice, bright in the January sun. There was no one beside an older woman pushing a shopping cart, taking small enough steps she might as well have been moving backwards. Miriam rubbed her hands together for warmth and started walking towards her parents’ home, just a little under a mile away. It wasn’t really her decision to move back to Rensselaer after college at Binghamton, it was only supposed to be the first year at home until she’d earned enough money to move down to the City. But the job she’d landed, working at the school that had a prominent ESL program, was better than anything she was offered in New York City. It was the type of work she wanted to be doing. And then Webster happened, and she became close to her students, even driving Samira and Rani to a performance of Madame Butterfly in Saratoga, and then it all completely unraveled.

The woman crossing the street continued her slow progress and instead of passing her, Miriam asked if she’d mind if she helped push the cart across the street. From behind a plastic hood and a mound of insulation, the woman assented, and Miriam pushed the rest of the way. There wasn’t a single car on the road. The old woman smiled at her and Miriam sensed some recognition of her features and saw that morning’s paper sticking out of the old woman’s purse. The woman thanked her profusely and then let out a little bark of a laugh.

“You kissed the hell out of that boy, hun.”

 

Hiren had called her a couple of weeks after the prom. She was sitting in her apartment, watching Colors on VHS, something she’d found on the library shelf in the laundry room of her building. She had been screening calls on her cell phone, only picking up for family members. She wore her depression like a wet headdress, constantly weary of its weight, unpleasantness, closing her eyes until they filled up with water. The coffee table vibrated and the phone skittered across the wooden surface. She knew it wasn’t too exploitative, it started with 518, the local area code. Could just be another lawyer asking if there’d be a civil case, and if so, would she like defense. Could be another paper asking for comment. Venturing that there was a possibility she’d never felt sadder, and she really couldn’t take another few hours talking to herself or her family, she picked it up. At first it was quiet, and then a familiar voice.

“Miriam?”

Her heart should have made a move fitting the occasion — Flight? Plummet? But instead she felt nothing, there was no notable change of heart rate, just a continued stubbornness in beating.

“Hello Hiren,” she answered, in an almost clerical voice. She wondered if she had actually expected this to happen. There was a silence of mutual inhalation.

“How are you?” He finally asked. She knew he probably had struggled with deciding whether to call her, it was probably advised that he didn’t, so she should cut the kid some slack for such a dumb question. There are no dumb questions, just dumb people, they told her. And that’s what she kept repeating to herself the last few weeks. I am dumb I am dumb I am dumb.

“Well, Hiren.” She let herself pause dramatically, although she disdained that she was sounding like she’d rehearsed the part of the victim (which she had, and who she wasn’t). “I’ve been better.”

“My parents said I shouldn’t call you, but Samira says I should.” He spoke with very little accent, enough to be recognizably foreign, but they’d worked on some exquisite tones he could hit when he wanted to be academic. He had expressed interest in not being instantly judged by his speech, and that’s how Hiren and Miriam had become a little bit closer than she’d been with the other students. They stayed after school and she showed him how to be half George Clooney and half Mahmoud Darwish. His English was fake twang poetic. He continued: “Miriam, I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about Hiren,” she answered quickly. “It was something that shouldn’t have happened, and I was completely responsible.”

“But that’s dumb. Of course it’s my fault.” His voice became sharp. “I kissed you.”

She shook her head emphatically, as if proving a point to herself. “But-BUT-that’s not even the issue Hiren.”

“And I want to kiss you again, if you want the truth.”

She stopped her head shaking. Her eyes narrowed: “What Hiren?”

“I would kiss you again.” He was bright, emphatic.

She let the statement hang for a moment, a tossed ball at the apex of flight.

“Hiren. Listen to me. Please don’t call again.” She hung up the phone, quickly. Then she said, “Goodbye.”

Great, she thought, he’s lovesick. And that’s the warmest thing I’ve heard in months.

 

She got to her parents house already twenty minutes late for the AA meeting. The house, two stories with a covered porch, an extension where she once shared a bedroom with her older sister, was as pristine a white as the fresh snow that surrounded it. It was dark inside and she realized she’d left her keys at Webster’s apartment. She trudged around the side of it in the foot-deep snow to see if she could peer into the living room, where her father liked to settle down with books promoting the silver standard. A few months ago he’d been talked into converting some of his personal assets to silver, whose value would not diminish during “these turbulent economic times”. Over the past few weeks he’d watched as the price of silver plunged, and he would explain to her worriedly, how he had kept from her mother exactly how much of the shared account he’d converted to silver. He’d wanted to surprise her at this year’s end by how much of their personal savings they’d been able to preserve as others had lost their retirement money. But now he consistently wore a hangdog expression, like he’d just had his lunch money beaten away from him.

The house appeared empty and Miriam returned back to the front. She took out her cell phone and called her mother (her father didn’t carry one), but there was no answer. A few cars passed and her father, driving his Volvo station wagon, the car he’d had since she was a little girl, pulled up, smoking a cigarette. Her father had been a court bailiff for a while before he began managing a private security company, and when he’d drive her to AA, she felt like he was tapping back into the solemn duty of a peace officer. Leading the criminal away from their family at a sentencing. But this was the reverse — the punishment is renewed service to the family, helping them out of the ignominy you’ve so irresponsibly gotten them into. Her father bore no resemblance to the jovial man who raised her, having her tag along to the malls and sporting events where he was contracted.

“Hi, sweetheart.” He reached across the passenger seat to open the door for her. He was wearing a grey canvas jacket and new jeans that fit his aging thighs a little awkwardly, like wrapping paper crumpled and reused. Miriam supposed he’d been shoveling, and had let the wet snow dry while wearing them still.

She climbed in, kicking her snow-covered shoes on the metal-blue of the underside.

“I’m sorry for coming late. I thought the meeting was at three, and by the time I pulled up to your place, Webster said you’d been gone for a half hour.”

“So I walked over-”she started.

“So I figured you’d walk over here.”

“Exactly.” She affirmed, awkwardly. He pulled out from in front of the house and drove to the stop sign. He took a long look both ways.

“How you doing, Dad?”

“I’m alright. I caught that picture of you in the paper.”

“Yea, me too.”

He stopped at the next stop sign and took even longer to look both ways.

“It gets me so...so...” He slammed his palms on the steering wheel and took off again. “I just don’t know who to be more mad at.”

It was her father who’d hooked her up with the job at the school, through a friend who worked security there. He’d taken it the hardest when everything began to go viral. When it got featured on late night opening monologues. He didn’t really understand the Internet either, so he kept asking how the hell did people find out about this thing? Can’t we have a little privacy to deal with this ourselves? He was quoted, probably incorrectly, as saying “I’ve raised a whore” when he’d actually said, “I would know If I’d raised a whore.” That’s what he had told everyone, but really he’d given that phone interview a few scotches in.

Her father was taking a small beating on a couple of fronts and Miriam excused his frustration. He’d never been great at directing it, but at least it wasn’t terribly destructive. No one had ever been hurt, just a few household objects had been beaten into obsolescence. She particularly remembered a spot on the wooden floor where a nail had stuck into her father’s foot. He smashed it with a hammer for a half-hour and off-color wood filler now marked the divot.

“If you’re still mad at me you should just stop this car.” She said, hitting a low, disappointed register.

Her father kept looking straight ahead. “I was never mad at you, Miriam. I’m sorry. That wasn’t what I meant to say. I am mad at the paper and the tabloid people who read that shit.” He looked over his shoulder for no reason and then glanced sideways, warmly at her.

“We’ve all suffered enough.”

It was those types of lines, the ones that made her feel so terribly inextricably tied to her family, the hideously visceral feeling of being completely unable to escape that small nation, that made her want to flee, escape, become a refugee.

 

She walked into the YMCA and passed through a group of kids, all bundled up but wearing shorts, sweaty from a basketball game, their parents trailing behind. The parents had grown accustomed to seeing her face from their bandstands on her way into the AA meetings, but because she was so late, she never had to wade through their brood. One mother cut off conversation with another, let out a little yelp and grabbed the hand of her 13-year-old. The kid shrugged her off, embarrassed to be handled by his mother in front of his friends. She grabbed his shoulders and said quickly and violently, “I’ll explain to you later.”

Miriam tried to keep her mouth shut at moments like this, to press forward, to not feel so much like she wanted to be someone else, but she turned around.

“Excuse me.” She was very severe in her tone. “Ma’am.” The woman walked hurriedly ahead with her son.

Miriam weaved through the basketball players, burst through the door and yelled after her as the mother bolted down the sidewalk, child dragging behind.

“What do you think I’m going to do? What do you think I want to do?”

 

Miriam slinked into the back of the room, meeting the eyes of the moderator before taking her seat mostly unnoticed. The room was the smaller gymnasium in the building, used for plays and support meetings like this. Light came from behind the front of the room, these large 15-foot windows, reminding her this used to be a union hall, an old industrial-minded place, the light floating in like a gray, wide, beacon. They were finishing up the discussion of the first member who had shared her story with them, a woman, Barbara. Barbara was trying to get clean to get her kids back, and she was trying to get off her medications as well. She felt one was enabling the other, and people were a little hesitant in recommending she kick the meds at the same time. Miriam was certain there wasn’t a chance Barbara would get those kids back. But if it helped Barb get clean, she thought, and she got only one but not the other, give her the wisdom to know the difference.

Miriam had originally thought of the AA meetings as some weak attempt at rehabilitating her image, a step taken by her parents, suggested by a distant aunt. But the longer she kept attending, the more she realized she was sticking her toes into something that involved much deeper pain than her public indiscretions. As such, the AA meetings were sorely needed grounding. The chance to trespass on someone else’s problems was considered a privilege.

Marlo, the Colombian woman, was sitting across the room, wearing a bright red sweater with a plastic rose poking out the fold across the breast. She waved at Miriam, smiling, meaning, “this is right where we’re supposed to be.”

And Miriam felt small in her seat.

 

Her father was listening to a basketball game in the car when she opened the door. Binghamton was down by 10. Miriam sat quietly and let her dad talk about how her alma mater had let the athletics department grow too fast. There was no discipline with the players. He recalled how a Serbian player had beaten a college kid at a bar to the point of death for staring at his girlfriend. There was no discipline anymore. And she assumed he was talking about her. It was a light blue dusk, reminding Miriam that it had been growing lighter outside for over a month now. They were stuck in traffic next to the Pepsi Center, and the orange lights that lined the overpass reminded her of the quality of light you see inside a house you know is warm. And that’s pretty sad, she thought, even streetlights seem inviting. My domestic life must really be suffering.

They pulled up outside of the crisis hotline Miriam’s mother took shifts at during the weekend. Miriam’s father walked in to retrieve her mother, and Miriam adjusted her seat back. It had begun to snow a little bit. The blue dusk darkened and mixed with pink city-sky clouds. Her father had left the motor running and the basketball game was low on the radio. The car vibrated, consistent bumps with the firing of the pistons.

The first thing they did when they worked with newcomers at the high school was to teach them English through storytelling. What was your trip to the United States like? Had you ever been on a plane before? What is happening to your country? And a lot of dumb glances would greet the questions, and she’d always assume the language barrier was still too difficult. But what if these concepts were just so completely beside the point- they were being met with total apprehension. Fear, even. Why does there even have to be a story? Emotion could just stay that way. There didn’t need to be a progression or narrative. Miriam thought about the useless exercises her family committed her to, motions dictated by a consensus decision about how best to deal with disgrace. A handful of strategies for atonement cribbed from supermarket checkout line magazines. She’d already had punishment meted out, no job no home no joy, but the rehabilitation was what would complete the story for all involved.

Her mother asked politely if she wouldn’t mind lifting her seat so she could climb into the back. She told Miriam and her father a story about how she had tried to convince a woman to stop smoking. The woman didn’t want to, and she told her to think of her kids, really played the guilt card, the sentimental ace in the hole. And the woman said she’d give not smoking a week and see how it went. But Miriam’s mother always wondered what these callers looked like. The phone was such a funny thing, she said.

“It’s like this great equalizer. That’s why they’ll never do these hotlines with Videochat.” Miriam’s mother was resting her hands on the back of her daughter’s neck. “Anyone can be anyone on the other line. Like sometimes I’ll know if they’re old or young, sometimes I can tell if they’re black or white...but not really. I don’t even let it factor in.”

Her mother had complained about the inability to be able to follow-up on callers, she’d plead with them to call back the same time next week, just to make sure everything was going well. But she was not a case-worker. She had no expertise besides referring people to the right services. She would list, during Saturday breakfast, the people who she wished she’d hear back from. The voices she could still remember, helping them get in touch with the right people, from several years ago. She had taken classes to become a social worker, but had never found the time to finish a degree.

“Nobody knows you’re a dog on the Internet,” Miriam said.

“What Miriam?” she dreamily asked, tightening her grip on her daughter’s neck, her hands a little colder than most.

“There’s a cartoon of a dog at a computer, and it tells this other dog ‘nobody knows you’re — ”

“Oh, I get it.” Her mother interrupted. “Yes, it’s exactly like that.”

Miriam’s mother was a rental manager for a local real estate business, showing run-down housing to college students. But she was not the most on-point individual. She’d let her mind drift away from the topic, from what was being spoken about, and it was her mother’s quality of tone, a few feet above the moving car, that made it hard for Miriam to believe she really got it.

“Do you guys want to go get pizza?” Her mother asked, suddenly very local.

“What do you think, Miriam?” Her father turned to her. He seemed pretty neutral about it.

She shook her head. “I have to be at work soon.”

Her mom pounded on the back of her headrest like an excited kid.

“Come on, Miriam. You can be five minutes late. You have to have some fun.”

Miriam did have some extra time before work, and although in her mood more time with her parents would probably just exacerbate things, she consented. Free food was free food.

 

They pulled up at a small restaurant that had an outdoor dining space, which was still covered with the few feet of snowfall. The restaurant was in a strip mall, and she watched the snow shift in waves across the concrete plain, settling on the cluster of cars parked outside the video store. Her mother moved a few feet behind her father, and Miriam a few more feet behind them, like a caravan up a steep desert ridge. Her father lingered at the top of the stoop for the restaurant.

“Do you have cash, Claire?”

“Why?”

“They only take cash.”

“Oh damn, I only have cards.”

“Do they take silver?” Miriam said.

Her father and mother looked at her sternly. Her two parents, looking down from the top of the pizza place, reprimand on their face. She had hit a weakness. A family of lions is called a Pride, combative and violent, but they’re considered beautiful too, right? Her parents seemed tired and crooked, standing two steps apart, blinking quickly as the light snow floated into their eyelashes. Something very passive and defeated within Miriam became animated. It hopped frantically around the front part of her chest, like those small brown birds who occupy bushes, and they fluttered for a bit just below her neck. She felt shaken, her extremities vibrated like the idling car. Something flew out her mouth,

“I have cash.”

Her father narrowed his eyes, still stung by her jab, and turned into the restaurant.

Miriam’s mother waited outside for a few more moments with her daughter, following a snowflake so light, it was going upwards. She redirected her focus.

“Be nice to your father, Miri.”

Miriam answered quickly, “He’s taking a beating on many fronts.”

Her mother looked down and she spoke in a low, heavy voice — “It could be put that way.”

 

The pizza took a while to be prepared and the family continued talking about phone calls, trying to avoid the topic of that morning’s newspaper article. Miriam recognized a few high schoolers she used to pass in the hallway and decided to venture a wave, but they quickly ducked their heads low.

“Do we all answer the phone the same?” Miriam’s mother asked.

Her father mimed a phone with his thumb and pinky. “Hello, Roger speaking.”

Miriam and her mother followed in turn.

“Hello, Miriam speaking.”

“Hello, Claire speaking.”

Besides their names, Miriam and her mother’s tones were perfect duplicates. They laughed.

“If Caroline were here she’d sound just like us,” Miriam said. Caroline was living in Chicago, a few years older than Miriam, working for an advertising agency.

“She would.” Her mother took a sip of her Sam Adams. As she swallowed, she tipped it towards Miriam, raising her eyebrows.

“Jesus, Claire. She just came from AA.” Her father said, and laughed. Miriam took the bottle. She drank.

“How was the meeting anyway?” Her mother asked.

Miriam handed back the bottle and became hushed as the waiter brought over the pizza. He looked at her again, probably confirming earlier suspicions.

“It was interesting. I don’t know. My problems are pretty small compared to them.”

Her father leveled a glance at her, and finished chewing quickly.

“Yes, Miriam, but none of them have your notoriety.”

It was comments like this that made her really unsure of how her father felt about her. Maybe he did call her a whore. She gripped the table tight.

“Well, it’s good you’re getting something out of it, Miri. And remember you’re there for appearances, not punishment,” her mother said.

Her father coughed up a small flake of pepper into his hand. Her mother smiled at him.

“Was there a conversation at the dinner table I missed?” Miriam snapped.

Her mother looked around her, as if this conversation was directed at someone else.

“Would it be better if I just left, so you wouldn’t have to care about being looked at or talked about?”

Miriam was speaking loudly, her eyes darting around the room at all the other patrons who’d turned their attention to their table.

“How badly do you want it to be known you’re doing the right thing as the conflicted and poor parents?”

She screamed, “Why do you think we are always being watched?”

Those little brown birds were pecking out her parent’s eyes at the table where she tried to make peace. They were carrying off the bits of sausage on the pizza, and flying southward.

She tossed her last bill on the table, a twenty-dollar bill, and before storming out, told them to tip generously.

 

She’d seen Hiren one last time though. Back in the middle of October, walking home from the restaurant where she worked, Miriam heard footsteps behind her. She was walking through one of the many pockets of industry in the city and knew that if she were to be jumped anywhere, this was it. She hurried her pace and swung her backpack in front of her, feeling around for the mace she carried in the outside pocket. She fumbled and dropped the bag and on a pile of damp leaves prepared to fight. Of course it was coming to this. Obviously she’d be robbed or raped or something. Insult to injury was how things had been progressing.

She breathed deep and turned into the light breeze, looking at Hiren, wearing a black hoodie.

“Damnit, Hiren.” She said, breathless, only moderately relieved, remembering the decorum lessons they’d gone over, and how not to walk around at night with your hood up, lest the police pick you up.

“I’m sorry for sneaking up on you, Miriam.” He sounded so nervous, he could be bowled over with the lightest reprimand. “You haven’t been answering my calls.”

She hadn’t. She’d had his number blocked. Never to be picked up again, a closed book.

“What do you want Hiren?” She leaned over to begin picking up her things, the bottle of mace, finally freed, rolled over towards a storm drain.

“I wanted to explain myself.”

“There’s nothing to explain, Hiren. You have to go. I’m not being seen with you.” And she realized this sounded like something out of a forbidden love movie. But it wasn’t a forbidden love. It was a disinteresting life-wrecker of a nothing. There was no beautiful narrative to this thing.

“I’m going to keep following you at a distance and talk while you walk ahead of me, is that ok? Yes?”

She started walking and she heard him wait a beat before following. She toyed with the idea of putting headphones on, but they were lost in the jumble of her backpack. She just wanted to get home. There was some rattling of nonsense behind her.

“You have been the only girl in this country who I’ve loved. Loved so deeply, Miriam. Did you feel that, did you feel that when we kissed? A kind of energy? Like a shock? You must have felt it.”

He stumbled behind her, pouring out sadness like a drain left open, always the same intensity. Its not that she didn’t empathize with his longing, which was something everyone felt. It’s that he was implicated so deeply in the cessation of control, the downward slide out of her independence. Whenever someone watched the video, they looked at their two mouths interlocking, she would always remember the sharp click of teeth on teeth.

“I am more like you than your boyfriend, don’t you get it? We understand what it means to spend meaningful time with one another, that’s true romance! Not sex, no way, not sex. But, yes, Sex would be nice. But that is not what I’m after.”

It was like Pygmalion, only kind of, except with an unshaven college freshman, with no reason to be back home, stumbling, shouting reveries. She felt invaded by his words, his presence, she was building a new life, albeit half-assed and sad, that didn’t involve teaching or kids, or impulse. Everything had to be methodical from now on. That’s what they told her.

In the park two blocks from her apartment, next to the statue of a revolutionary war hero, the bare lightbulbs on either side of it illuminating Miriam and keeping Hiren in shadow, she told him to get out of her goddamn life and grabbed him, pulling him into the light of the statue. She kissed him twice, hard, and then ran off, trailing her headphones on the ground.

Miriam looked back to see him in the light and they both felt a cool breeze heading towards the West. Hiren stood there dazed, hearing fainter footsteps and a kid playing with their father on the far swings, on the other side of the park.

After a few more calls to her, he lost interest. She figured he probably went back to college and found a girlfriend. Miriam’s landlord looked down at the floor that October night as he kicked her out, and she began leaving her life at just that moment. She called Webster to beg to let her move in, and told her parents she would attend all those meetings they’d been asking her so fervently to.

 

Now, over three months later, Webster was still sitting on the couch right where she’d left him that morning, watching television. The crumpled newspaper had been folded neatly beneath a bowl. He had made a microwavable pizza and had set half of it front of him. When she walked in, he smiled and said, “For you, my dear.” She gave him a vacant grin and walked into the bedroom, grabbing the clothes she found most necessary and shoving them into her large hiking backpack.

She had robbed the restaurant she’d worked at, after storming out of pizza with her parents. She waitressed on a relatively busy night, willing just one person to make her out for the pseudo-celebrity she was, begging them to give her even more reason to claim asylum elsewhere. It didn’t happen though, everyone was very thoughtful, and more than she could hope for paid in cash. So when, during closing, when taking all the money from the safe deposit envelopes, she had to check to see how much theft she could swallow. Under $5000 seemed just petty enough to not have to go to jail, if caught. Not that she had any sort of legal background, it just felt like the whole $5200 would be somehow even more illegal. For once she was committing a legitimate felony.

She’d rehearsed what she was going to say to Webster on the half-walk half-run home. But now she had lost it and sat down next to him as a football game played on the television and he patted her knee.

“I microwaved the pizza myself,” he said. He smiled at her and looked very placid. How can a person remain inside all day and stay perfectly calm? The life of Webster, how I might miss — but she stopped her sentimentality mid-stream. He reached out and she passed him the bowl that was on the far side of the table. He took a hit and offered it to her, but she waved him off. He caught sight of the hiking bag.

“Off somewhere?” he asked. But he smiled in a funny way, like he knew what was up.

“I’m outta here, Web.” Every step since paying for her parents’ food had been easier and easier, and this step was supposed to be the easiest of all. The last step on the way out of her life. But his calm, his kindness was causing distraction. Beside his deep character faults, Webster was filled with a certain type of naïve grace, the ability to forgive and try to forget. No one else was trying to forget.

“You rip off the restaurant?” he said, now laughing, acting as high as he was. And she was stony for a second, but Webster didn't really care anymore about apoplexy or tenderness, and reached up and gave her a kiss on her forehead, and whispered, “I got one thing to ask of you.”

Webster led her to his bedroom and shuffled through his belongings beneath the bed. He took out a video camera and connected it to the old computer the college had given him. Miriam sat there kind of breathless, amazed that Webster was showing spontaneity in the face of such a good mood, usually all his impulsiveness came out of spite or indecision. He set the camera to record and led her to a distance away from the computer.

He kissed her and she felt actual physical release, not in the sexual sense, but the higher absolution that should come with two pairs of locked lips.

Their video was just one of many trying to emulate that witnessed by the world, of which neither direct parties involved could even begin to understand. Miriam felt emancipated by just becoming one of the many.

Webster wrapped up the pizza for her to take on the bus.

 

She woke up on the Adirondack Lines bus, the smell of Canadian manure floating right past the border. They stopped in Malone, allowing the passengers to exchange money at the bank. She was helped by a teller who looked like Marlo, a little taller, a different town, probably a whole other set of problems. She thought a little bit about the Serenity Prayer, the trick of distinguishing what can or cannot be changed.

Miriam sat on a picnic bench, blowing on her hands and holding steady against a southward wind. She sat there waiting for other travelers to finish changing their money, listening to a song coming from a car idling at the drive-through teller. The song was something fuzzy that reminded her of innocent emotion. And then she felt that.