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Tressa Fay Robeson fluffed her dark French bob and slapped two Post-its over her nipples, then bent one arm over her head and grasped her wrist with the opposite hand. She widened her stance and lifted her chin at her phone on the stand, popping off a series of pictures with her remote.

Right now, everything was perfect.

There was butternut-squash-and-cheese-tortellini soup on the stove. All her plants—and she had dozens—were perky and vibing cheerfulness. Epinephrine, her best boy orange tabby, had obliged her photo sesh by hanging on the back of the sofa, just in view of the camera.

Her pictures would have looked even hotter if she hadn’t had to use the Post-its to escape Instagram’s censors, but they were still definitely solid.

Someone knocked on her apartment door.

Damn.

“Tressa Fay!” Mary shouted through the door. “We know you’re hygge-bating in there, but we’re your best friends, so you have to let us in.”

“I’m naked!” Tressa Fay called out.

“So? You cut hair at the salon today with visible underboob.”

That was unfair. Tressa Fay had worn a full-coverage bra under her tiny crop top. Her eponymous salon was always a little warm.

Also, her clients took a lot of pictures. Many of them waited for months for their booking with her, and some drove long distances or even flew into Green Bay to have their hair cut because they followed her platforms or had read about her in a magazine. To reward their efforts, she liked to put on a little bit of a show.

She opened the door.

“Good night .” Guy put their hands over their eyes. “Some advance warning would be appreciated.”

Mary, Guy, and Linds came in, Guy keeping their eyes resolutely on the floor. Linds trailed a finger over Tressa Fay’s shoulder blades as she walked past. Linds was like a crab—she explored her environment by feel and liked to sun in a pile of other bodies.

Tressa Fay grabbed a cardigan off a chair and put it on. “I told you I was naked.”

“Naked, I could handle.” Guy sat in Tressa Fay’s rocking chair, their hair out of its characteristic bun and tumbling in pale waves to their waist. “Naked is natural. Whatever it is that you have on suggests something outside of nature.”

Guy liked to play the part of the prim miss. Tressa Fay shrugged, reached into the cardigan, and plucked the Post-it pasties off the black mesh bra top of her brown velvet bodysuit. She’d received it gratis, along with the matching thigh harnesses, from an indie lingerie designer who wanted to be on her feed.

“Being outside of nature is what makes it so good.” Linds collapsed her long legs and spread out along the floor, smiling at Tressa Fay.

“It’s a bodysuit,” Tressa Fay told Guy. “Which is perfectly regular.”

Linds wrinkled her nose. “ Bodysuit is the worst word ever. Like, you’re getting out of bed, and you’re a skeleton, and then you tug your legs into a bodysuit .”

“That’s how I felt before I got top surgery,” Guy said. “But now I just feel myself.” Linds laughed, and they leaned over and high-fived her.

“I have an agenda.” Mary directed this stern remark to Tressa Fay. “Which is you, out with us at the taproom.” Guy and Linds and Tressa Fay went all the way back to elementary school, but Mary had only joined their group four years ago, after Tressa Fay hired her to work in the salon. Mary’s agendas kept the rest of them from snuggling into a rut.

“No.” Tressa Fay lay down on the rug next to Linds, who reached out to hold her hand. “Your agenda will mess up my plan.”

“This is your plan?” Mary circled her finger around the apartment, which Tressa Fay had mood-lit with a million candles as soon as she got home before putting on her mom’s old Bikini Kill record, misting the plants, and making the soup.

All of which was better by an enormous factor than numbing herself with her phone or streaming shows while wondering why she couldn’t find a girl to make soup and listen to records from the nineties with. Tressa Fay loved this cozy world she’d made for herself. She also loved how the mythical girl in her imagination wasn’t cheating on her, complaining about cat hair, or wishing Tressa Fay were something she wasn’t.

“It’s hopeless, Mary.” Linds put her head on Tressa Fay’s shoulder. “Once our girl here starts taking sexy pictures with soup on the stove, she’s only getting freaky with herself.”

“True,” Tressa Fay said. “True, true.” She deliberately did not look at Mary. Despite how emotionally close Tressa Fay was to Linds and Guy, they didn’t know every part of the sad story of her last relationship, whereas Mary had greater knowledge and also had caught Tressa Fay opening dating apps a couple of times. Mary knew Tressa Fay’s wound was now a healed-over scar and that she was a romantic, couldn’t help it.

Also, Mary had brokered more love matches for her friends and family than it was safe to ignore. She had powers.

“I told this extremely fine girl about you last night, and she said she’d probably be at the taproom around nine,” Mary complained.

There it was. “I don’t do bars. As you know.” Tressa Fay ignored the small flare of interest, low in her belly, that had fired in response to the words extremely fine girl . It had been a long time since she looked at an attractive person across a table and tried to figure out if they liked what they saw while her nerves fluttered. A long time since she held someone, their body fitted against hers. She did, in fact, need that. But she did not want anything to do with the usual ways to get there. Bars. Apps. Loud restaurants with heavy menus.

“But it’s not a bar. It’s the taproom!” Mary said. “Very low-key. Like, the key of low. Only dogs and very chill, hot people can hear in this key. And you haven’t been out in forever, so it would be good for you even if you’re not interested in this painfully gorgeous person I found for you and didn’t even keep for myself.”

Mary fluffed the dark honey-blond shag Tressa Fay had touched up before they closed the salon today. She should have known that if Mary was begging for a cut at the tail end of the day, she was dreaming up one of her agendas.

“She’s not going,” Linds said, fixing her false eyelashes in her selfie camera.

“I’m not going.” Tressa Fay smiled. “But I love you very much.”

“What am I supposed to do about this dishy woman who was going to meet us there?”

Tressa Fay narrowed her eyes. “You said she was probably going to be there. As in, incidentally.”

“Same thing.”

“You can give her my number.”

Mary sighed, then stood up. “I love you, so I will try to understand.”

“I could loan you some books about introversion.” Guy stretched their arms over their head. “There are different types.”

Tressa Fay had a dusty stack of books Guy had given her when they were worried about her after her breakup. Guy was a lawyer. They genuinely believed any problem could be studied its way out of.

After a quick round of hugs, Tressa Fay briefly finger-styled Mary’s new cut and kissed Linds’s glossy brown pixie, and her friends left.

She put her back to the door, smiling to herself. The evening was hers.

She strode across her tiny living room, dropping her cardigan, then ladled herself an enormous bowl of soup with lots of parmesan, flipped over the album on her turntable, and curled up on the sofa, nearly purring over each tortellini.

It had taken her such a long time to figure out that the best way to give other people what they wanted was to make sure she had everything she needed.

When she started working toward her cosmetology license her senior year, it was mostly because she’d taken every art class that her Green Bay, Wisconsin, high school had to offer, and she knew she wanted to keep doing something creative, but she didn’t want to go to college. Plus, she had to earn money, because her dad had made it clear she’d be on her own once she walked across the school’s stage with a diploma in her hand.

To her great luck, she was a natural, at least at cutting hair. Maybe it was because of her name, which her mother had given her to honor a particularly transcendent house party frontwoman’s band named Tressa and the Over It Alreadies, with the addition of Fay to appease her dad, whose mother’s name was Fay and who also, as an observant Catholic, fervently believed in the power of two-name names.

Tressa Fay didn’t love talking to people, at least beyond the first conversation when they told her about their hair, and she especially didn’t love anyone telling her what to do. None of that was a deterrent, though. Lots of people preferred a stylist who wasn’t chatty. What almost ruined her career before it even started was that it turned out almost everything in the salon that she touched, smelled, rubbed, brushed, sprayed, or scrunched into someone’s hair made her sick.

So while it wasn’t long before she surpassed her classmates with a pair of scissors, a clipper, or a blade, she did the bare minimum she needed to do when it came to everything else, wearing gloves to protect her peeling hands and a mask against the onslaught of airborne chemicals. Her teachers acted like she was exaggerating. Most of her classmates simply didn’t get it. After four years working at three different salons—each one promising a “natural” and “organic” environment—two different allergy specialists she couldn’t afford, and prescriptions for steroids, inhalers, and immunomodulating topical creams, she ended up in the emergency room hooked up to a nebulizer after a coworker tripped and dumped a texturizing solution on the floor.

Tressa Fay was fired via text while she was talking to the hospital’s billing department. She then failed to make rent, and her next bed was her dad’s sofa, with a very firm thirty-day deadline.

She did the only thing she could do. She cut hair. Illicitly.

From her dad’s kitchen and deck while he was at work, she cut and barbered for cash. Ten bucks for short, twenty for long, no other services. Just her, her client, blades, and the birds that fluttered onto the deck, stealing bits of hair for their nests.

Tressa Fay loved it.

She loved figuring out what the natural texture of a person’s hair could do, sometimes showing the client the possibilities for the first time in their lives. She loved the different colors hair came in and the color clients had done somewhere else, or at home themselves. She loved making shapes, making statements, figuring out what was sharp, what was throwback, what was French, what was rock, what was queer.

She made enough money to nab a sketchy one-bedroom on the west side of Green Bay’s downtown, and she kept cutting. Other than the moment she had to convince her landlord that the steady stream of foot traffic to her place didn’t mean she was selling drugs, she was happy. Even better, she was healthy. Her skin cleared and stopped hurting. She could breathe. She didn’t wake up worried she was coming down with the flu because she was congested, fatigued, and foggy.

When a commercial space across the street from her apartment became available, she had a stack of cash, but she was twenty-six years old with no credit, no references, and very creative tax returns. She met with the real estate agent anyway, and while they were in no way willing to give her the space, they did connect her to a business incubator that changed her life.

Now she owned her own salon.

All it had was white walls, plants, a shampoo station with the blandest hypoallergenic product ever made, her chair, and her blades. Mary washed hair, booked appointments, and worked viral marketing. Tressa Fay made shapes and helped people feel how they wanted to feel.

It was everything she needed, and she had to believe that giving herself what she needed in her private life—quality time with her cat, good food, an occasional gloriously dirty bit of lingerie to remind her sex existed—would lead to her someday getting what she wanted. Someone who loved her for exactly who she was. Someone who chose to stick by her through good times and bad. Someone she picked for herself and who picked her back, over and over again, forever.

Just that.

She’d finished her dishes and was considering making a half batch of cookies when her phone buzzed with an incoming text.

Hey! So I’m the worst, but I don’t see you, and I have done a complete turn upstairs and down. Help!

Tressa Fay didn’t recognize the number. sorry! she replied. I don’t think I can. wrong number?

Three dots floated up, then slammed back down.

Look, it’s okay if you changed your mind, it’s even okay if you ghost, but the wrong number bit is just, no.

Uh-oh. Tressa Fay smiled sympathetically. Dating was extremely and very awful.

hey, so…this is the wrong number, for sure. my name’s Tressa Fay, and I’m at home communing with my cat and soup, and I didn’t have a date tonight or anytime in the foreseeable future, actually, but good luck out there, it’s the level worst

!!! I have the wrong number.

yes

I just realized. I used the wrong first three digits.

oh, no. numbers are so tricky

I’m an ENGINEER.

Tressa Fay laughed out loud. remind me not to drive over any of your bridges.

One collapsed bridge and a girl’s got a reputation.

She laughed again. This stranger was funny. did you find your date?

Yes. Well, no. She just texted. She “remembered she was supposed to do something for her sister” and she, in fact, has a lot of family stuff going on right now so…maybe she can circle back some other time?

oof, sorry. like I said, rough out there

at least I think it is?

Cat. Soup.

yep

You have the right idea. Sucks, too, because it’s such a gorgeous evening. I was looking forward to the Canyon Tacos patio to enjoy the last bit of light.

This engineer was very optimistic about her night, because it was cold and dark outside. Or she was being sarcastic.

Also.

Tressa Fay tapped her lip. Funny. Into girls. Hmm.

Hmm.

get a taco, and I’ll be your phone date

I just walked out!

don’t stand me up, get back in there and let’s do this thing

Pretty good game from the couch, there.

I do my best work from the couch

what are we having?

Got a seat at the bar. The special is their black bean and avocado tacos. I’m ordering three. And churros with the chocolate dipping stuff. And a Jarritos.

what flavor?

Watermelon.

thatta girl. come here often?

Yes. It’s why I picked the place. So I would feel comfortable. She…was really hot and, um. Came on strong? Not in a bad way? I needed the courage that only comes from someone hot having to eat a messy taco in front of you.

I thought that’s what happened after a date went really, really well

Three dots came up and went back down multiple times while Tressa Fay wondered if she had gone too far.

Everyone is looking at me like I’ve lost my mind because I’m laughing so hard all by myself.

Tressa Fay grinned. What’s your name, hot stuff?

Meryl. And you’re Tressa Fay. Wait.

what

You have that ultra-cool tiny salon on the west side.

I do

Wait.

what

Um. I am looking at your Insta. Oh no.

Tressa Fay glanced down at herself, still clad in just the bodysuit with the black mesh top. And only straps in the back. She had not put Post-its on her butt for the pictures.

Well.

oh no, what?

You are very much so very hot. This picture of you in the roller skates should win a Nobel Peace Prize.

Well, well, well . Tressa Fay grinned and let out a tiny squeal. If you built the cozy, the babes, they would come. However, it was interesting that Meryl had gone months back into her feed. Mary had taken that picture of Tressa Fay in short shorts and roller skates way back in April, during a freak warm-almost-hot day.

Tressa Fay was not complaining. She posted thirst traps for a reason. This, right here, was the reason. Trapping.

thank you. engineering and a sense of humor are too much hotness for me already , she typed. but if I were to openly spy? is there a handle?

@ItWasMyGrandmasName

Tressa Fay opened Insta, wiggling.

Oof.

Meryl hadn’t posted since a hashtag-tax-day-so-sad post forever ago, but hello, big-brown-eyed, curvelicious, freckly-nosed nerd trap. Tressa Fay scrolled through, sighing contentedly at her luck.

Meryl probably hadn’t thought about a haircut for her wavy, frizzy, elbow-length pale auburn mane in years. It was messy. Everywhere. It matched her amazing eyebrows over those Bambi eyes. She made math jokes. There was more than one fandom T-shirt barely containing her juicy. Sometimes she wore glasses, murdering Tressa Fay where she sat. Meryl had one of those mouths with a slightly bigger top lip than bottom, which fired Tressa Fay’s kissing imagination into a frenzy.

Yes, please. All of this.

She’d eaten a lot of soup, but maybe she could go for a churro?

Meryl

Yes.

I think we should take this somewhere IRL. what do you think?

I think I’m going to get this man next to me to give up his stool come hell or high water. Which I can do. I’m a stormwater engineer. High water is a real motivator.

Tressa Fay bit her lip and typed, don’t move. stay exactly, exactly, right there.

I’m a statue. A citizen protesting eminent domain. A stumped chess player.

Tressa Fay laughed out loud again. just be for real, and I will be there so fast, Meryl.

She jumped up from the sofa with enough urgent intention that Epinephrine complained at her.

“I know, baby boy, but this is an emergency. I have a funny engineer on the line, and you know how I feel about redheads. You, for example.” She scritched between his ears and then dashed into her bedroom, digging through her closet until she found her lucky jeans and a clean button-down. She put both over the bodysuit, pulled on her boots, and was on her way to Canyon in less than ten minutes.

Tressa Fay cursed downtown parking but eventually found a spot for her tiny green Fiat. Even with the cold, damp weather, people were spilling out of the restaurant. She jogged to the narrow two-story building, which sat in the same row as the old theater. On warm days, Canyon would open its entire front wall of windows to let people sit at an open-air bar looking out at the street, but right now it was closed and fogged from the people and food inside, the light casting a square on the dark sidewalk and the smokers huddled there.

It was packed. She looked over the bar and didn’t see Meryl at first glance.

“Can I help you?” The hostess widened her eyes. “Oh! Hi. Um, Tressa Fay? You cut my hair and changed my entire life.” She grinned.

“Katie?” Tressa Fay had to shove her hands into her own pockets to keep from fixing one of Katie’s curls near her face.

“Yes! You remember. I love this haircut so much. I have never loved my…” She gestured around her face. Tressa Fay remembered her self-consciousness over her acne scars. “Not ever. But I’ve felt completely different about that since I left your chair.”

“Can I?” Tressa Fay reached out.

“Yes!” Katie leaned forward, and Tressa Fay played with the hair near Katie’s face, changing her part, then stepping back. “You’re amazing. What can I help you with?”

“I’m meeting someone. She said she would be at the bar. Meryl. She ordered the black bean tacos, a Jarritos, and churros.”

“Be right back.” Katie winked and wove her way into the crowd.

Tressa stood on her tiptoes to look over all the people. She pulled out her phone when she felt it buzz in her pocket.

I just bought a mini pitcher of their limeades. So when you get here, I’m the girl in the red mathlete T-shirt with a pitcher of limeades at the downstairs bar.

Mathlete, God. Tressa Fay wasn’t going to survive this. She saw Katie weave back out of the crowd toward her. “I didn’t find any Meryls or see anything like that order in the system. Are you sure you have the right place?”

“Huh? Yes. I’m sure. Look.” Tressa Fay held up her phone. “She said she just got a mini pitcher of limeades, and only you guys do those. She’s wearing a red shirt and…hold on.” Tressa Fay pulled up Meryl’s Insta again. “This is her.”

Katie looked at the picture, her brow furrowed. “Okay. Yeah. Hold up. I’ll look again, and just in case, I’ll check the bar upstairs.”

it’s so busy. can’t find you

I’m by the door, and the hostess is helping me

raise your hand or come get me?

I’ll come get you!

Tressa Fay grinned and rose to her tiptoes again, waiting for her first glimpse of Meryl coming through the crowd. She hadn’t felt this ignited for a date in a long, long time, and they’d only flirted over text. Butterflies were racing so fast from her belly to her sternum that she had goose bumps.

Katie came back shaking her head. “I didn’t see her anywhere, and we haven’t had a limeade pitcher go out for an hour.” Her expression was apologetic.

No, not apologetic. Sad. For Tressa Fay. Because Katie believed that she had been stood up.

Tressa Fay’s phone buzzed in her hand.

I’m right here by the door! Where are you? Did you go someplace else? Or outside? It’s hot in here, even with the front windows wide open.

Tressa Fay shook her head slowly back and forth. Everyone talking was too loud. Suddenly, the hits of cold air from the door behind her as even more people piled into Canyon weren’t exciting but annoying. She wished she’d brought a coat. She looked at the tables by the front—tables that had been placed there once the restaurant moved the bar out of the front windows for the season. The big front windows that were completely closed.

I’m right by the door , Tressa Fay typed. my hand is on the red coat rack.

She was fairly tall. Five seven. Her dark, exaggerated French bob wasn’t a subtle look. It was her signature, in fact. And she had a port-wine stain birthmark that spilled from her left temple to the place where her ear and jaw met and over her neck, collarbones, and arm. It was in every picture of her. She never covered it up.

Hey. I am standing right by that coat rack? Did you move?

Three dots.

Or change your mind?

She shook her head again. She hadn’t changed her mind! She was right where Meryl said she was! Tressa Fay looked at Katie in desperation. “Is there another Canyon Tacos? Like maybe in Appleton or something?”

“Oh! No. There isn’t. This is it.” Katie tipped her head sympathetically. “Look, I’ll take one more tour around.” She reached out and squeezed Tressa Fay’s arm before she melted into the crowd.

I swear I’m right here. and there isn’t another Canyon Tacos

on washington street next to the theater

with a red coat rack and big windows that open, and you said they were open, but I’m looking at them right now, and they’re closed. it’s cold and windy and miserable out

Call me.

Tressa Fay waited a few moments to catch Katie coming back from her round and thanked her. She stepped outside and tapped the call button. It seemed like forever before the phone started to ring, and then it was a jerky, broken ringtone before someone picked up.

“Hey! Hello? Meryl?”

“Tress…so it…” Her voice was cloaked in static.

“I think we have a bad connection. Can you hear me?”

“…connec…do you…”

Tressa let out a short, frustrated growl and disconnected the call. Tried again. Same jerky ringtone. “Meryl? Is this better?”

“Hi!” Meryl’s voice came through clearly, but then the call dropped with another rush of static.

Tressa Fay pulled her phone away to look at their text messages. The bubbles were the color that indicated she and Meryl had the same kind of phone, and in Green Bay, they were likely to have the same carrier. Tressa Fay had a strong signal. Meryl’s number was local.

Her phone buzzed with another call. Unknown . Tressa Fay picked it up.

“Hello…Tre…” The call dropped.

Tressa Fay opened up the chat again.

we are not connecting

This is so ridiculous. Why this night? It’s so pretty out.

Tressa Fay looked around at the dark street that was acting like a shaft to direct freezing-cold air from the nearby Fox River right through her shirt. The navy-blue sky was covered in black clouds, and the air was so damp, it made the wind colder when it hit her in cruel bursts.

She felt sick.

It had been a long time since she’d been catfished like this, if ever. She was thirty-one. She hadn’t used apps to date for several years now. When she had, that was the last time she’d run across people who were so hurt, they would use another real human being to entertain themselves.

She toggled back to Meryl’s Instagram, wondering if this person on the other end of the phone was even Meryl. It was possible Meryl herself didn’t know that someone was using her name and profile to catfish strangers.

This was why Tressa Fay didn’t go out.

She swiped back to the chat, furiously blinking tears out of her eyes, freezing in the dark, cold wind. never contact me again , she typed.

She sent the message and stared at the screen. No response.

She scrolled back to the beginning of their chat, touching Meryl’s first funny message. One collapsed bridge and a girl’s got a reputation. She was about to block the number when she stopped.

Touching the message, she’d seen something strange. She slid it over.

7:25 p.m. May 1

Weird.

She slid each of the messages over, and the times got later, but the date stayed the same. She shook her phone, closed all the apps, and double-checked her time/date settings. They were correct. Then she opened the chat again. Still the first of May.

Today was .

Tressa Fay felt as if she were floating just enough to not fit in reality. It had to be some kind of random misfire. Or, if it wasn’t that, then it was something more ominous related to the upsetting and bizarre game this stranger had played with her. It was so dark, and she was so cold. She needed to rest. She’d gotten badly keyed up. Hopeful.

In the event this Meryl was a victim, too, she DMed her on Instagram with the bare details and the phone number she’d been messaging with. Then Tressa Fay blocked the number.

The drive back to her apartment barely made an impression on her.

Nothing bad ever came of staying the fuck home.