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giving stability
     to the rest of his face, like the keel of a yacht. His eyebrows were heavy dashes
     rushing away, toward his ears, which were rounded, large, princess-pink. “You want
     to go back to the game or …?” He seemed to be implying that the “or” could be far
     better.
    “Sure,” she said, realizing that she didn’t know this person, knew nothing about him.
     But because he had those bottles, and because she’d lost Annie, and because she trusted
     everyone within these Circle walls—she had at that moment so much love for everyone
     within those walls, where everything was new and everything allowed—she followed him
     back to the party, to the outskirts of it anyway, where they sat on a high ring of
     steps overlooking the lawn, and watched the silhouettes run and squeal and fall below.
    He opened both bottles, gave one to Mae, took a sip from his, and said his name was
     Francis.
    “Not Frank?” she asked. She took the bottle and filled her mouth with the candysweet
     wine.
    “People try to call me that and I … I ask them not to.”
    She laughed, and he laughed.
    He was a developer, he said, and had been at the company for almost two years. Before
     that he’d been a kind of anarchist, a provocateur.He’d gotten the job here by hacking further into the Circle system than anyone else.
     Now he was on the security team.
    “This is my first day,” Mae noted.
    “No way.”
    And then Mae, who intended to say “I shit you not,” instead decided to innovate, but
     something got garbled during her verbal innovation, and she uttered the words “I fuck
     you not,” knowing almost instantly that she would remember these words, and hate herself
     for them, for decades to come.
    “You fuck me not?” he asked, deadpan. “That sounds very conclusive. You’ve made a
     decision with very little information. You fuck me not. Wow.”
    Mae tried to explain what she meant to say, how she thought, or some department of
     her brain thought, that she would turn the phrase around a bit … But it didn’t matter.
     He was laughing now, and he knew she had a sense of humor, and she knew he did, too,
     and somehow he made her feel safe, made her trust that he would never bring it up
     again, that this terrible thing she said would remain between them, that they both
     understood mistakes are made by all and that they should, if everyone is acknowledging
     our common humanity, our common frailty and propensity for sounding and looking ridiculous
     a thousand times a day, that these mistakes should be allowed to be forgotten.
    “First day,” he said. “Well congratulations. A toast.”
    They clinked bottles and took sips. Mae held her bottle up to the moon to see how
     much was left; the liquid turned an otherworldly blue and she saw that she’d already
     swallowed half. She put the bottle down.
    “I like your voice,” he said. “Was it always that way?”
    “Low and scratchy?”
    “I would call it
seasoned
. I would call it
soulful
. You know Tatum O’Neal?”
    “My parents made me watch
Paper Moon
a hundred times. They wanted me to feel better.”
    “I love that movie,” he said.
    “They thought I’d grow up like Addie Pray, streetwise but adorable. They wanted a
     tomboy. They cut my hair like hers.”
    “I like it.”
    “You like bowl cuts.”
    “No. Your voice. So far it’s the best thing about you.”
    Mae said nothing. She felt like she’d been slapped.
    “Shit,” he said. “Did that sound weird? I was trying to give you a compliment.”
    There was a troubling pause; Mae had had a few terrible experiences with men who spoke
     too well, who leaped over any number of steps to land on inappropriate compliments.
     She turned to him, to confirm he was not what she thought he was—generous, harmless—but
     actually warped, troubled, asymmetrical. But when she looked at him, she saw the same
     smooth face, blue glasses, ancient eyes. His expression was pained.
    He looked at his