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absconded with his Modafinil prescription. Jen did not disclose to her charge that she herself had a prescription for a similar cognitive enhancer, Animexa, which she renewed at increasingly irregular intervals following the loss of her blue-chip Federloss Foundation health insurance.
    “You live in a fake neighborhood,” the sixteen-year-old had informed Jen one day.
    “Ditmas Park?” Jen replied. “It’s real. I’ve been there.”
    “You live,” the sixteen-year-old said, “in a real estate agent’s neologism.”
    This bothered Jen, mostly because the decision to live in a real estate agent’s neologism had originally been a marker of grown-up prudence and long-term thinking: The mindful marrieds enter their thirties, conserve their resources, steadily pay down their student loans, live well within their means, reserve space for a hypothetical tiny future boarder.
    “Feather your nest,” the real estate agent had said.
    Now, even living in a real estate agent’s neologism seemed like a grim necessity bordering on presumptuous overreach, regardless of the scuffed thirdhand furniture, the chewed gum–like residue constantly and mysteriously accumulating between the kitchen tiles, the canoe-sized kitchen separated by a cheap flapping strip of countertop from the deluxe canoe–sized living room, the dry rot in the windowsills, the closet doors eight inches too narrow for their frames. Even Franny the cat seemed like a luxury, all those unmonetized hours logged napping and grooming.
    Jen began writing down every single purchase she made in her notebook. With the same fountain pen, she also drew a picture of each item. Her student loan debit was represented one month by a graduation cap, another month by the hand-forged wrought-iron gate her college class had walked through on commencement day. Cat-food purchases were represented by drawings of Franny in various states of odalisque repose. Jen made stippled pencil drawings of toothpaste tubes and physics-defying stacks of little tissue packets from the pharmacy and curlicuing cornucopias from modest grocery runs.
    The first entry in Jen’s notebook was the price of the notebook. Inside the open notebook, Jen drew a picture of the open notebook, then another inside that one and another, collapsing infinitely into the center.

That
    “So, any news?” Jen’s mom asked.
    Jen’s mom never telephoned her, but if Jen did not call at regular intervals, Jen’s mom would complain to Jen’s dad, who would then send an email to Jen asking why she was ignoring her mother. The subject heading of these emails was “Your Mother.”
    (Jen’s mom became agitated, however, if Jen telephoned her too frequently. “Enough! I’m
fine,
” she’d say in lieu of greeting if one of Jen’s calls followed another too closely. The acceptable interval between calls widened and narrowed at will.)
    “Any news on work, you mean?” Jen asked. “Not just yet.”
    “Could that Meg find you a job?”
    Meg was a program director at the Bluff Foundation for Justice and Human Rights, a private behemoth so agelessly fortified by old money that its temporary hiring freeze was itself a metric of dire economic crisis.
    “Meg has been really helpful,” Jen said. “But obviously I don’t want to put it all on her to find me a job—”
    “Fine, fine,” Jen’s mom broke in. “Anyway.”
    Jen never knew if her mother’s conversational style was symptomatic of mere incuriosity or rather of an extreme wariness of any social transaction remotely resembling confrontation, which presumably included most exchanges of words. At cousins’ weddings and sisters-in-law’s baby showers, Jen watched with dismay as her mother attempted to mingle with people she’d known all their lives: arms folded in front of her as a shield, chin pulled defensively to her neck, poorly conditioned limbic system misinterpreting a niece’s attempts to inquire about her protracted kitchen renovation for a