I had not seen her in days. I would wake up for work and walk past her door. I would stand in front of it. The light was off, the drapes pulled closed, but after the rest of us left, she would turn on the lights, roam freely. I discovered this once, coming back into the apartment when I had forgotten to pack a book for the commute to work. Every day, I would find something missing. One night I made spaghetti; when I went to drain the pasta, I discovered that the colander was missing. Alice, my other roommate, was sitting at the kitchen table eating her broccoli coleslaw without dressing. Alice was anorexic. I suppose just the fact that she was eating could be considered a triumph, but I worried that the act of eating broccoli coleslaw might actually have negative calories: that the energy expended from chewing the food burned more calories than what was consumed. I had read once that that was true for celery. I looked at my spaghetti, floating in the pot with no way to drain it. I took a fork and started to fish out the strands of spaghetti, one by one.
