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compared with the image of myself I had in my head, which still put me at hardly twenty. I should have kissed her. The worst thing that could have happened was she hit me. The best thing was an impossible fuck story.
    â€œYou were on your way for a swim,” she reminded me. “I interrupted.”
    â€œI’ll let you know if I find that box.”
    â€œOkay,” she said and left.
    It wasn’t until the next day, when I made another limp attempt to leave the house, to go swimming in the lake that Ames had recommended—“A gorgeous bit of water that absolutely no one else in the world knows about,”—that I found Black Santa wrestling the woman’s sandals in the foyer, trying to break their neck. I hid them from her and didn’t leave the house that day, sat around in Zebulon’s swim trunks drinking just in case that woman came back. The next day I conceded the sandals to Black Santa and set down to rooting through the house, room to room, closet to closet, cranny to cranny, looking for that box.

Beginner | 5
    â€œAll my life I wanted to be somebody. I realize now I should have been more specific.”
—Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe
    One time, all Frances wanted to do was be awesome at karate. Karate would be her thing. You would look at Frances, and she would seem normal, if little, and you would never guess she could kill you in so many clean, graceful ways. Sizing up people in the street, scrutinizing them for weak points: this is how her mind would begin to work. Karate would be the new centre of Frances’s life, the drain down which everything else spiralled.
    This was the winter she abandoned her lit degree and the second time she’d bucked school.
    So Frances signed up for a beginner’s class at a dojo in a plaza along with a hairdresser’s, pizza place, and dollar store, and that first class was the best thing in the world. It was bare feet and flipping people. All the ground was mats there, all the walls were mirrors, and the whole studio smelled like a high school gym class held in a call centre. Louder than any of the other beginners, France yelled “Yes, Sensei!” at wide-shouldered, gel-haired Sensei Brian like she was ready to give up her life for him.
    The dojo supplied her with a crisp new karategi. All week Frances wore that gi around the house, waiting for someone to knock so she could answer the door in it. No one came by. It was exam time.
    At her second class Frances was physically awkward and weak and her height was not the evasive advantage she assumed it would be. She got flipped more than she flipped and the mats weren’t as soft as she thought they legally should be. The worst of it, Sensei Brian turned out to be a phenomenal asshole who used the word faggoty more than once and wouldn’t stop staring down Frances’s gi when she bowed. When she caught him he had winked and that great gi was just pajamas now.
    Another time, in the messy wake of a seven-month fling with a Women’s Studies major who liked to be strangled, Frances got fixed on becoming this amazing accordion player. She would play in any band around town, and be constantly on tour with whoever would have her. Off to the side and intense, accordion players were Frances’s favorite, the way they leaned over their squeezebox and listened hard to the thing the way she imagined mechanics listened to engines. Using squirrelled tip money she had been saving for a possible third stab at school, Frances bought an accordion, only it never occurred to her that she would have to learn how to play the thing. Frances had assumed that it would come naturally to her, like how a baby, chucked into a pool, just swims away.
    And then there were countless other times and countless other things. There were boyfriends and girlfriends, and university degrees, and philosophies both low- and highfalutin. There were trades and