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he can best smell her coconut shampoo and the dull, clean scent of her soap. She strokes his hairline and murmurs a series of indistinct soothing noises.
    â€œWhy did you think I wanted Waffle House?” he asks.
    â€œI guess Nicky didn’t mention our excursion?”
    â€œNo, but apparently she installed an alarm system so we wouldn’t have another one. What happened?”
    â€œYou woke me up in the middle of the night and you said you were hungry. You wanted Waffle House. I tried to pick the one with the fewest health code violations. And then it was like—Do you remember that obesity study we learned about in biology? The one with all the fat mice? It was like that.”
    In the study, scientists removed the gene that tells animals to stop eating when they’re full. The control group, chromosomes intact, remained trim and lively, while the experimental mice grew in size until they resembled furry scoops of mashed potatoes. In the pictures, their feet didn’t even show. There had been a close-up of a fat mouse’s face, its eyes haunted and insatiable, as though it were pleading “Help me” and “Feed me” at once.
    â€œThat’s what I was like?” Oliver asks. “A voracious rodent in distress?”
    â€œIf I were to list everything you ate that night, you would never stop throwing up. It wasn’t just the eating, though. You were all id without the lid. Here,” she says, picking up the sketchbook. “I drew it for you.”
    He snatches the book from her hands, paging past old drawings of the two of them driving in her car and lying on the beach and dancing in the pit at Lucky’s, random moments she’s chronicled from the previous year. She narrates the story as he absorbs her visuals of that night’s events. Here he is, wandering into the basement; here they are, walking down the side of the highway under the streetlights; here is a mortified Althea, watching as he throws the syrup across the restaurant; here is his own face, unrecognizable. Althea has added a close-up of the fat mouse for comparison.
    He thinks of the homeless people he sees downtown sometimes, a dozen garbage bags filled with cans and bottles strapped to their shopping carts, forming a hulking structure they coax along like a reluctant circus elephant while carrying on twitchy, one-sided conversations. No one comes out of the womb like that; it happens later, and Oliver wonders if it’s starting to happen to him.
    â€œSo it was some sort of psychotic break, right? I’m crazy, I’m literally one hundred percent bona fide batshit crazy. I’ll end up one of those sketchy guys who sits in the library all day, rocking in my chair and writing in my journal about my imaginary enemies until Nicky shows up begging me to take my medication.”
    â€œDon’t start making your tinfoil helmet yet, please,” Althea says. “I really don’t think you’re going crazy.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œBecause you’re lying here worrying about going crazy.”
    â€œThat’s it? That’s all you have for me?” Oliver asks, annoyed.
    â€œLook, I wish I knew more, I wish I had more answers, but I don’t. I’m just as scared as you—”
    â€œI seriously doubt that,” he says, and regrets it immediately.
    Sitting up, she pushes him away so roughly, he almost tumbles off the sofa. “The only thing that could possibly be scarier than not remembering the last three weeks is remembering them fucking perfectly.”
    â€œOkay, I get it, I’m sorry—”
    â€œI watched you disassociate over hash browns,” she shrieks. “It wasn’t cool.”
    â€œOkay, okay, please, calm your jangled nerves. I’m sorry.” He holds her tight until he feels the outburst gently halt, like a car pulling into a parking spot, and her rigid body relaxes as though she has just turned off