All the Difference

"All the Difference" is the 2024 winner of the Louis Begley Prize judged by R. F. Kuang.

Tess recognized the post-vomit face: green and trembling like a watery leaf. She was in the waiting room, scribbling out to-do’s from her gynecologist appointment – follow-up on birth control, buy iron supplements – when a retching sound began to emerge from the one-stall bathroom nearby. The two other patients in the room looked away. Tess stood, foot poised to nudge the door shut for the dignity of both agent and witness.

But at the foot of the door, she saw a tote bag, guts spilling like its owner: a pack of oil-blot wipes, a foil panel of allergy pills, a plump tube of anti-wrinkle concealer, an open notebook with cursive boldly stretching across the page. On the bag was an illustration of a tangerine sun, waggling in front of a camera with the label, “sundance team.” Tess hesitated, then angled her foot out instead of in. A woman was bent over the toilet, dark hair sticking to the seat. A small clip by her ear clung to a shred of silver.

“Hey, you okay? Let me pull your hair back.” The woman bobbed her head, which Tess took as a yes: gathering her hair into a ponytail with the elastic around her wrist. After a few rubs of the woman’s back, her heaving stopped. She raised her head, eyes fluttering to Tess.

“Oh, god. Tess?”

“Rana?”

“I can’t believe you’re seeing me like this. I’m sorry, I’m a mess.” Rana stumbled up, swiping at the yellowy dampness on her mouth. They embraced, awkwardly, as if staging their own encounter.

Tess hadn’t seen Rana in five years – since their college’s ten-year reunion, at which everyone began to tire of recalling the ego battles and brash optimisms of years past. But, Tess had kept an eye out for her, searching her up online when her own work felt uninspired. First, the occasional social media post; then, a screen credit at an indie theater; then, articles about Rana being an entertainment executive-turned writer-director with a passion for the screen, ever since she took some film classes in college. Which Tess credited herself for, but that was no matter, mostly. It wasn’t envy that she felt, seeing such news. It was more like how she felt walking to her old home twenty minutes away from her parents’ new condo, wistfully curious about how a new, nameless family had refilled its rooms.

They settled in the waiting room to let Rana calm her breath, though both were on their way out. Next to them was an empty umbrella stand and a coat rack, which dangled with unbuttoned coats in shades of auburn and olive, the sort one wore to feel privy to the closing of autumn. Rana filled a paper cup from the water dispenser, pulling her coat from the rack to wrap around herself, her face still ashen. Rana folded her own leather jacket into her lap as they traded factual niceties. Both of them were back to stay with their family in the Jersey suburbs: Rana, to spend her pregnancy with her child-crazy parents; and Tess, to be near the city until she found a nice one-bedroom in Hoboken.

“I was in Portland for ten years before coming back a few months ago.” Tess explained.

“What were you up to again, in Portland?”

“LAIKA Studios. You know I was obsessed with Coraline.” They let out nose-breath chuckles. Tess used to declare that if she didn’t have to straggle through her mechanical engineering degree, she’d write a thesis on horror in children’s films. “I picked up computer-generated animation because, you know, the times, and I learned so much from my team.” Tess smiled, bittersweet. “Visionary. It was hard to leave that, but I wanted to work on my own things.” She paused. Here is where they used to detect each others’ emotional breadcrumbs, encourage each other to articulate their murkiness.

Instead, Rana just offered a heartfelt, “That’s great, really.” Their voices trickled off, nostalgia percolating into the artificially dry air. Rana folded the paper cup in half. Tess pretended not to notice.

“I remember my first time here, with Dr. Park. I did not want my mom in there. The things she didn’t know,” she laughed.

“I guess that’s why they have that, in case you need someone.” Rana smiled curtly and pointed at a sign on the wall. Its rounded font encouraged patients to consent to a medical chaperone during their visits. 

“I mean, I can be your chaperone if you’re mine next time.” Tess joked, hoping to elicit a playful retort. But Rana just nodded, biting her lip as if she asked her to elope. God, did I agree to see Rana’s hooha? “Unless your partner is here. Sorry, that was weird.”

“I don’t have one.” Rana cleared her throat. “I used a donor.” She stood to toss out the cup, which had crumpled into itself. Tess flushed, unaware of this crucial intimacy. She pivoted, asking about the pregnancy, nodding as Rana laid out the timeline. Tess thought of all the times she’d held Rana’s hair back when they’d puke up their giddy naiveté, post-college party, throats flushed like sparrows. She thought of Rana, who now did everything on her own, including making a baby. As Rana described her upcoming first-trimester checkpoint, Tess jutted in. “Let me come with you.”

“To what?”

“Your next check-up. In two weeks, you said?”

“Well, yes, but that’s not necessary – ”

“I don’t have much going on anyway. Just preparing to move and all.”

To both of their surprise, or perhaps to no one’s surprise at all, Rana nodded. They exchanged numbers, which hadn’t changed in the past two decades, and made vague promises to text each other, wondering how things ended up like this.

Rana remembered how pathetic she felt, the winter during her junior year of college. The same office, an anxious mother in the waiting room; her, getting her first pap smear whose mechanics she regrettably looked up, until she was using a mirror under the covers to stare in horror at what was going to happen between her legs. But that wasn’t why she felt pathetic, exactly. No, after running through generic questions about birth control and self-breast exams, Dr. Joshi asked if there was anything else.

She lamely said her period was late, but she wasn’t sure. She was worried about being you-know-what. Dr. Joshi suggested they do a urine test. Rana asked if it’d show up on the insurance record, which she affirmed, to which Rana declined the test and lived in fear for the next two weeks, until she returned to school and could visit a pharmacy without her parents becoming suspicious.  She couldn’t forget the glimmer of sympathy in Dr. Joshi’s eyes. Another foolish girl, even the smart ones. Perhaps that utter aloneness, which never really left her since then, is how she wound up allowing an estranged friend to accompany her to a prenatal appointment.

After pondering, it still appeared like Tess was doing her a favor, rather than the other way around. So, Rana messaged her to treat her to coffee, thirty minutes before the appointment. That afternoon, Rana pulled into the lot of her local cafe, whose patio nested under a cherry-red awning. It overlooked a modest field of green, bordered by crisping trees. It had been a day like this, where she saw a family with two parents, two children, and a dog, breaking in the blueish snow of a new year on that field. Stumbling through a creative block over a cappucino, she had then decided to draw up plans for a baby instead. But this day, Tess was the one seated alone: back towards her, her neck craned upwards.

Rana squinted up. Clumps of dried grass and straw wrappers stuck out from behind the cafe sign pasted to the wall. The tufts trembled, and out squeezed an umber-streaked sparrow, then another. They chirped at each other, not angrily, before flittering away. Tess turned, easily smiling as if she knew she was there. “That’s a cute story idea, isn’t it?” Rana nodded, chest tight. She had already visited the cafe five times since coming home; yet, she had never noticed the nest was there.

Tess insisted on paying for her and also sharing a chocolate croissant. Rana didn’t like flaky things, bits of flimsy butter and flour that clung to her fingers. But she nodded again, slotting back into the worn groove of her softer, younger self, despite her hardening resilience over the past two decades. That early Rana, still amorphous and sticky, first bonded with Tess in the nascent weeks of college over their shared origins of suburban North Jersey. It was the sort of friendship where others rarely witnessed or mentioned one without the other. Rana didn’t mind then. She knew that it was some linguistic tendency that made people say Tess and Rana, not the other way around. Or, she tried not to think much of it in her weaker moments – even now, when the barista called their names, and they transferred foaming cups to their table in one collective breath.

Back then, their intimacy had neatly contained their loneliness. They were default companions whenever they did not fit in at social events, which happened often. Tess was the one who initiated their counter-revolutions: clubs to join that one else did, cafes to frequent on the outskirts of town. Rana felt safe in their little havens, pliable and grateful. They plucked sidewalk patches on the way to class and sold pressed bookmarks made of leaves and petals until a Do Not Pluck sign was put up. They danced – sometimes with strangers, always with each other – in skirts at dim bars, in pajamas to childhood sing-alongs. It was hard to resist Tess and her ideas.

Cup in hand, Tess leaned forward. “You used a donor? Tell me more,” she ventured, legs swinging on her chair.

Rana shifted, cinnamon lighting her temples. She had prepared a sales-pitch response for telling people about her pregnancy, after the first trimester. This was her first time, aside from her parents. Anxious, she stumbled through some version of, I wanted a kid to love, it didn’t require a partner, now or never, easier to control life schedule and film projects, not sure if you remember.

“Makes sense. Oh, remind me again. You’re still doing…”

“Just writing for now. I also do programming for Sundance. I like directing, but curation is fun these days. And easier to do, once I start considering maternity leave. If you're –”

Tess laughed, a tone of nervous solidarity. “Yep, I get it. The plight of the modern woman. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

“If you do what?”

“Have kids.”

“Are you saying I’m damned?” Rana shook her head. Slow, slow. “Sorry.”

Tess nodded, eyes coaxing and incisive. “Not at all.”

Rana knew that gaze, the kindly vulturine sort. In junior year, Tess had begged her to take a film class together, with the loose theme of bodies. For some, it was a brilliant survey of human viscerality, of the usurpation of the female body; for others, it was an excuse to consume porn-adjacent media. Their final project was the only film they had made together. The only requirement: no identifiable sexual noises or visuals, unless sampled from the syllabus. Thirteen minutes, screened in Hightower Hall to their classmates. Tess had taken point as lead director and writer, leaving Rana to be the main actor. The camera was shaky, the idea kitschy. It had four parts. First, breakfast: a double-yolk egg cracks, slipping into grease, golden and squirmy. Afternoon date: balloons burst red as they fly into some naked birch trees. Dinner: a mouth slurps broth until a pile of thick, wet udon noodles sits in the bowl. And movie night, Tess’ imagining: a stop-motion close-up shot, where a popcorn kernel is placed on a tongue, evolving into its popped form, then burnt ash. The lipstick smears, kisses and aftershave postmarking a left cheek. Roll credits.

“Here, take. Then we can go.” Tess tore a clump of croissant from the plate and reached towards Rana, her knuckles oily and speckled in brown.

They drove separately to the OB-GYN office.  Tucked on a single-lane street, it was a sepia-colored, two-story building converted from a family residence. They parked on each side of a red Toyota in the lot and reconvened in the waiting room, a new set of tweed coats draped on the rack like shadows. A graying husband smiled dutifully at them before returning to his magazine.

Until her recent visit, Tess hadn’t been here since she was twenty-two. The walls were refreshed to an electric blue, and a perky, plastic fern greeted entrants instead of a hunched fig. But besides that, the room’s dimensions, its sterile odor, and the ambiance of womanly agency and futility easily reformed from the recesses of her memory.  As Rana checked in with the receptionist, Tess sat across from the husband. A white shirt poked out of his navy jacket. All ironed and neat. But he was missing a cufflink, near his left wrist, she realized. An age-old story, the muddling of details. For her, it had been a random sock in the dryer, a mysterious earring on his pillow, her thirtieth birthday forgotten. That is, no one stuck over the years, not even when Tess was young and patient enough to make compliments rhyme, and even to fold origami doves for those lovers, thrice. The men sought to devour, with or without her.

In contrast, and maybe in her favor, Rana had always seemed determinedly prudish and single. She reported rejections of wispy suitors to Tess during their late-night dorm confessionals, tutting at the failed relationships amongst their peers. As a perhaps-natural result, Tess never mentioned how deeply her own romantic unsuccesses struck her, besides a flippant, I wish he used less tongue. Or just hugged me sometimes, she’d quietly add, when she’d slip back into the twin bed across from a drowsy Rana.

Rana’s face now was paler than usual, wobbling towards Tess. She pressed a hand to her left chest, a simulative calming force. Just a finger brushed her collarbone, and the husband’s cuffless wrist twitched. Tess stood, quickly. Asked if she was feeling nauseous. Rana shook her head, taking out a First Trimester checklist from her bag, scratching at it with her pen. Tess doodled on a pamphlet she found nearby, finches swooping amongst diagrams of breasts. A remnant of their old, communal silences held them in place, brittle enough such that it felt hard to break.

Soon, a nurse appeared by the doorway to the examination rooms. She called Rana, whose eyes darted back to Tess. A chance to leave, maybe. Tess ignored that too, and followed her in.

“Good job, mamma.” The nurse – Sandra, a leathery brunette – cooed, unwrapping the blood pressure cuff from Rana’s arm. “You do business and you make movies? Your baby is lucky. How did you get into it? What have you made? I’ll be right there, in the front row.” She waved the cuff with a dramatic flair before swiveling to type notes into the computer. Rana laughed and thanked her politely. Her thighs stuck to the thin, scratchy paper on the examination table. Tess echoed the chortle from her seat in the corner of the room.

As Rana had ascended the corporate ranks, she formalized her film interests in tandem through coffee chats and local university classes. Once she’d saved enough to travel, she spent paid time off going to film festivals – as an attendee, then as a friend to filmmakers and organizers, soon sheepishly asking them to let her experiment with those roles herself. She avoided Sandra’s complicated question of origins. “They’re not well-known, but maybe you’ve heard of these?” Sandra gasped upon realizing she’d watched one of the earlier films Rana had assistant-directed on.

“I have so much to learn still, really.” Rana deflected.

“Oh, don’t give me that. You’re doing it all.” Sandra insisted.

Tess emitted another tinny laugh. “I wonder if we have to.”

“I guess we don’t have to. But here she is.” Sandra winked at Rana and slipped out of the room, promising the prompt arrival of Dr. Joshi.

This expectant composition of her struck Rana’s breastbone, made her want to expel it from any orifice she had. Tears, perhaps; vomit; the baby, even, so at least she knew it – they – existed, instead of just another thing she faked her way through. She wished for naive self-assurance, a hallmark of youth she simply never had. Rana felt that lack especially when watching films in the eighteen-and-under category, at the festivals that had it. The film components were sometimes discordant: an overexposed light, a muted voice, cardboard props. But the story was always there. Simple, brave, collaged together with bits of sensation like color, depth, sound. Somehow, it all coagulated naturally.

Upon researching in vitro fertilization, Rana had mused at the careful configuration of her own baby, a form soon to experience those assembled dimensions of human perception. But the difficulty she had inseminating herself manually, forcing her to use in vitro; and even not finding a partner all these years, felt like ultimate confirmation that she was made to be alone. The skimming of genetic profiles, the plucking of eggs like apples from a tree, the adjoining of cells like dolls forced to kiss in a playhouse – it had all felt like a simulacrum, never the real thing: for parenthood, film, anything. Even though she was what others called “good” at directing films or working a boardroom of navy suits, her accolades abounding in turn. But years in, Rana knew that she had never, and never would, demonstrate the singular brilliance Tess had in her projects when they were twenty: puppets in chiaroscuro lighting, racking focus on paper planes. Her ideas always worked, even when Tess didn’t believe it herself.

In the film class Tess had persuaded her to take, after showing their film to their fellow students, a baseball cap had drawled a question. That was you in the last scene, right?

Of course not. Rana had grimaced.

Oh. Well just from the mise-en-scene, you know, it looks familiar –

A directing decision. Don’t sell the screenshots online. Thank you. Voice steely, Rana had sat down, mouth oily and hot. Tess’ eyes had followed her, hardening with a friend’s instinctive empathy, but tinged with an artistic obstinance. Rana had been able to tell, from the way she stayed standing.

From the less-lit corner of the room, Rana heard a delayed echo of what Sandra had said. Here she is anyway – too soft to decipher. She looked over, and there Tess was, the progenitor of it all, an uneven smile on her face.

The examination room was windowless, muffling time and its sounds as they awaited Dr. Joshi. A woman yelped next door, and a toilet flushed across the hall. A kettle in the breakroom started to whistle. Tess almost felt subsumed by the grayness of her corner, but Rana had suddenly turned her gaze onto her.

Tess rolled her chair into a triangle of light. “Well, it’s nice she saw it. Your film.”

“Thanks.” Rana’s consternated brows barely distracted from her tiny smile. Tess recognized that expression, desirous of inferiority and recognition, from whenever Rana had earned a good grade or other praise.  “The director overwrote my ideas, the whole team’s to be honest, so I think the whole film fell a bit flat. I kinda wish she saw the first film I made on my own instead. How To Stage. I think that’s when I started to get into the rhythm of things. You know how the only writing I did before was for the newspaper in school? I really started to get into fictional works with How To Stage, instead of documentaries.”

“Fiction? That’s nice.”

“Yeah, it was harder than expected. I’m not sure if you saw it.”

“I did.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize. What did you think?”

“A ‘refreshing twist on the crowded restaurant genre, with the bittersweet pains of growing together, then apart.’ What one review, said. I think.” Tess clamped her lips together, but she still felt her bitterness leaking from between. Rana drew her forearms close to her abdomen. “I don’t mean anything, of course, but it reminded me a little of Fleabag or Story of Frances Ha.”

“I know. It’s not uncommon to see stories like mine. I also read the reviews.” Rana exhaled like she was readying herself. Tess rolled her chair forward again, into the room’s dome of artificial fluorescence.

“All those stories about two girls: a successful one and a plebeian one who never made it. I just thought it was… ironic, this ‘gorgeously real story of alliance versus ambition’ when, you know.” She felt like a child stomping their foot over a spilled sweetness, whining, that was mine! She couldn’t bring herself to articulate blame for something as traceless as drifting.

Rana shifted, crinkling the paper beneath her. “I wish you had told me you saw it.” Not anger, but drenched in something.

Tess had watched How to Stage in another dark corner. A decade after graduation, Rana had mass-emailed the members of her old film class, inviting them to the premiere of her first short film, which she’d spent a few years making in secret. The discount code is RanaFriend, the message read, for twenty-five percent off. Hope to see you there!

At that point, Tess had been at LAIKA for a few years, her engineering degree and creative bents surprisingly useful for the fluidity and mechanics of animation. She’d driven the three hours up from Oregon into Seattle, eyes clouding as Mount Rainier emerged, stoic and lavender in an empty sky. She slipped into the theater once the lights dimmed. A first film didn’t often strike gold at a film festival of this scale. She probably had connections from her entertainment job, Tess reminded herself.

But for forty minutes, she witnessed a tapestry only an inexperienced prodigy could make, pieces barely strung together by film continuity norms but connected deliciously, in an associative sort of way. It was a story of two friends in culinary school. They race through farmer's markets collecting the wackiest ingredients for the other to use, julienne their traumas into cake batter. A splinter starts the end. A knife is dull, a palm is cut, a line cook is promoted. They go on until they don’t anymore: two chefs in cities thousands of miles away. Only one is a Michelin-star holder, though both are bereft of the novice palates that used to make any two flavors sing. Still, for them, farmer’s markets are a bloodline pulsing through urban stench, sustaining their tradition of locally farmed eggs. The final scene is a close-up: two yolks slipping into hot oil, bubbling into chunks of rubber. Overcooked, an amateur can even tell. A plastic lid thuds offscreen.

Fuck, this was good. And it was about her. Them. Throat tight, Tess scanned the credits, searching for a flimsy word like dedication or acknowledgment. She fled the theater before the post-screening interview began, which she later watched online. In the interview, Rana reflected that one of her inspirations was a horror film she watched in college, a film Tess had taken her to. In it, the characters’ doppelgangers materialize from their most concentrated insecurities, hoping to replace the original. I wanted to explore what happens when we treat ourselves as others, others as ourselves. And when we stop, Rana had told the audience.

Back in the room where no one had yet left, Rana repeated, dumbly. “I wish you’d told me.”

“I wish I could’ve been a part of it.”

“I wish you’d come.”

Tess shrugged. “I did. I drove up to Seattle. I watched the interview too.”

Oh. “Oh, Tess.” A small crack, with an almost-apology.

A gentle knock, a pointed pause as the whispers hushed themselves, only betrayed by a quivering eye, as Dr. Joshi pushed the door open. It was a power she didn’t expect to acquire in her profession, being able to summon quiet in a tangle of human nerves.

She was surprised to see another woman, an auburn tumble of hair and a wrinkled smile, sitting next to Rana. A quick peek at the notes from the nurse read, friend? – which was unexpected, since her longtime patient had come alone every year for the past two decades, flying in from Los Angeles for her annual visits during the holidays. Though, she had to tell Rana that she was retiring soon. Her hands were not as quick as they used to be, and she had already started transferring her patients to Dr. Park, her younger counterpart at the office.

Dr. Joshi went through her customary pre-natal checks for someone on the cusp of the second trimester, where things started to feel more real. Rana was measured, as always. Offered summaries of her diet and nausea, asked questions about mineral supplements and classes she’d suggest for expecting parents. It was just about twelve weeks, so Dr. Joshi suggested they look for a heartbeat, calling in the ultrasound technician. This was a moment she dually loved and feared, and a moment that the parents always remembered. Rana’s eyes were wide. Dr. Joshi remembered that same split-open expression on Rana as a girl, who had feared what she now hoped for. Rana had returned the year after, alone; and here she was, now. Dr. Joshi resolved to wait to retire until after Rana’s child arrived.

The technician entered, ultrasound machine in tow, and the friend held up her phone as a little drum heralded itself in the static. Smiling, Dr. Joshi asked if Rana wanted to hold the probe to her abdomen, as she explained what to expect in the upcoming weeks. Rana nodded, fingers reaching. The friend knew what she was doing: a steady hand, slowly zooming in towards Rana’s face, panning around the room. Dr. Joshi gave a friendly nod before the camera turned back to Rana. What do you think? the friend asked.

It sounds like a pulse on the train tracks, coming my way. Here, come closer, so you get a close-up of everything. The two of them gathered around her belly, anchored to a steady, finite beat.

Even though they had long diverged by then, Rana had messaged Tess shortly after the ten-year reunion, requesting the file for their first film together. Her last line was a lie. It’s for a project, it read. Will keep you posted. Upon rewatch, Rana saw the saturated yolks and her stained tongue, and she relived what it was like for someone to ask her – curiously, calmly – to salivate, to move her tongue, then hold it still, and move it again.

The day they shot that scene, Tess had lightly wondered if Rana wanted to get some physical experience in college. Even just her first kiss. Based on this last scene, we could just fake it, the lipstick marks and whatnot. Or I can do it too, just go find my guy. The word fake kicked Rana up from their sofa, and she said, be right back. She found baseball-cap boy, who had been eye-fucking her from the third row since September. He held up his own camera. She returned with her face oily with aftershave, a deep pain in all her orifices. She’d volunteered herself. No one’s fault, really.

Five weeks later, during the winter break of their junior year, she and Tess had met to catch up at a cafe on a Monday. They chose a middling point a thirty-minute drive from their respective hometowns. Rana’s mother dropped her off; Tess came alone.

Rana, I just had my first gyno appointment! It actually wasn’t that bad. It made everything feel… more official. Rana had stiffly nodded, said something about life feeling more serious these days. She considered asking Tess to drive her to a pharmacy, or to even come with her to her appointment on Friday. She thought they were close enough that Tess would know immediately, from how she squeezed her cup or equivocated her responses, that she was not alright. That she needed something. Maybe not telling Tess is where the resentment seeded, even though her pregnancy fears wound up being a false alarm. Rana couldn’t pick apart how her best friend, who chiseled her own creative dimensions, who noticed the slightest leaf trembles, could not sense how her solitude had prickled since that day.

Rana, lying on a slight incline on the table, now craned her neck forward. Her fingers clasped the ultrasound probe. Tess had risen from the chair to stand close to Rana’s front-right, nearly blurring into her periphery. Tess held the phone forward, obscuring the bottom half of her own face, her eyes peering from above: calm, focused, crinkling at the corners.

Rana thought of Tess – back then, able to tease out the essence of joy in her cartoon animations and inside jokes; and now, crouched close to the blooming in her belly. That’s something Tess always had, she thought: how to make you believe in the life of small things.

After saying goodbye to Dr. Joshi, the two exited into the waiting room. It was empty now, dust particles suspended mid-air, illuminated in stripes of dusk through the window blinds. The graying husband was gone. Tess foolishly wondered what would happen if his missing cufflink was left in his seat, or even in her coat pocket.

Rana thanked Tess for the video.

“Of course. You can use it for your next film. As you do.”

“If I do, I’ll be one of those film people really into showing how primal it is to be a woman. If I don’t, they’ll just say I’m an anti-kid feminist.” They smiled at her quip, in temporary equilibrium.

“I make films too, by the way.” Tess offered, casually and defensively.

“I know. Not with LAIKA anymore, right?”

“I have a film. It’s a work in progress, but I’m getting it out there by next year.” Her voice caught at next year. She tried not to think about her bird doodles, her five-second snippets of flight composed of feathers, clay, and computer graphics. That’s all there was now, but it would be something, Tess promised to the years of quiet enveloping them. She tried to ignore Rana’s tote bag, dangling from her shoulder: Sundance, one of the most prestigious film festivals in North America.

Rana glanced at her bag. She wondered if Tess would have offered to come otherwise. Wondered if Tess would’ve come all those years ago, if they could have made something else kitschy and beautiful, if she had asked.

In a panic, Tess blurted that she didn’t want a handout.

“Well, nothing wrong with using what you have. And you used to be better at networking than I was, right? You could make anyone listen.” Tess sucked in a breath, anticipating more condescensions about doing what it takes, get your story out there. It felt worse when she knew the advice-givers deserved their success, and they knew it as well. But all Rana added was, “Invite me to the premiere. The baby too.”

Tess nodded. Suddenly, she had a deep urge to offer herself, to accompany her old friend until her child was born, to actualize the seamless weaving of girlhood into womanhood. But as they slipped their coats off the rack, the bare hangers clinked thrice before regaining suspension. Somehow, that told both of them to also hold still.

Tess said her lease in Hoboken would start in a few weeks. She would move very soon. But she could come by, even come to more visits, if she wanted. Rana nodded, said she was grateful, though she needed to run an errand now. The door cracked open, and Tess watched Rana’s silhouette slip out and to the left, her lavender blouse billowing in the dimming light of the sun.

That hadn’t changed, at least: Rana’s wardrobe of flowing pastels, like when they were twenty. One day, out of curiosity, Tess had tried on one of Rana’s stylishly oversized shirts. Geez, what are you hiding in here? Tess, a serial crop-top wearer, was incredulous. She stuck both arms in one sleeve with room to spare, examining herself in the body-length mirror in their dorm. Rana was sitting behind her, scribbling something in a notepad on her lap. She looked up, saw her best friend’s odd arrangement of limbs, laughed, and resumed writing. As if to say, nothing you don’t already know.