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“That’s nice,” I said. “Okay, you can leave now!”

Manda paid me no mind. “So happy”—she paused to draw a deep, dramatic breath—“that I had an epiphany.”

I turned off the water and poked my head out again. Manda was still picking at her toenails, waiting for me to ask about her epiphany.

“Can I hear about your epiphany after I get dressed?”

“Prude,” she muttered as she walked out without bothering to shut the door behind her.

I slowly dried off and then wrapped the towel turban-style around my wet hair. I got dressed in a pair of weeks-unwashed cutoffs that could walk on their own and one of Hope’s white Hanes T-shirts, straight from the package, still stiff. I really need to do my laundry. I emerged from the steamy bathroom to see Manda waiting for me on the Olga couch, a plastic cup in her hand and a box of white zin on the floor. She had tapped a second cup for me, so I felt obliged to sit down next to her.

“Your epiphany?”

“I broke up with Shea!” She gripped my shoulders with her hands, as if I might reel from the shock. “Are you shocked?”

Manda wanted me to be shocked.

“I’m not shocked,” I said, and Manda limply removed her hands.

“Go on, then,” she said.

“Go on how?” I asked.

“Go on with how I’m a bad lesbian….”

“I don’t think you’re a bad lesbian….”

“How my open omnisexuality makes me a traitor to the cause…”

“What? Breaking up with Shea makes you a traitor?”

She nodded somberly.

“Well, I think you’ll be doing the lesbian community a favor by not settling for a relationship with Shea. I mean, I was kind of surprised that you two were together at all.”

Her eyes narrowed. “The girl-girl thing freaked you out? Oh, puh-leeze. And I thought you were open-minded….”

“I am open-minded,” I said. “I was fine with ‘the girl-girl thing.’ But I didn’t understand why you were with Shea, of all girls. A girl who acted like an idiot teenage boy.”

“My aunt would say it’s treason,” Manda said, dramatically covering her eyes in mock shame. “Not just against lesbians, but my whole gender.”

“How so?”

“Because I’m admitting that her idiot teenage boyness is what I found so attractive. That when I’m reincarnated, I want to come back as a teenage boy. I mean, what creature on this planet is freer, and more liberated, more about id and impulses than a teenage boy?”

I still didn’t get it.

“But you would have never dated a guy who acted like Shea,” I said. “You only dated Shea because she was a girl who acted like a guy. That’s the only reason you put up with her obnoxious behavior. It made no sense.”

“I know it didn’t make any sense,” she said. “If we only fell in love when it made sense, the human race would have died out long ago. Because who makes sense? Do Scotty and Sara make sense? Do Percy and Bridget make sense? Do you and Marcus?” She thrust an accusing finger right at my heart.

(We already know we don’t make sense. And never have.)

“Anyway,” she said, dropping her hand to examine a hangnail, “it was an easy break. Shea didn’t even care. She just said, ‘I’ll move out my shit, yo,’ and that was it. She was out in under two hours.”

“So she’s gone? For good?”

“I hope so,” she said. “I hate clingers. Clingers are the worst.”

“So that was your epiphany, to break up with Shea.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “That was just one small part of my greater epiphany. My epiphany was much bigger than Shea.”

Manda has a tendency to take frequent breaks in the middle of her stories, so the listener is forced to goad her on. It gives the illusion that the listener is more interested than she really is. I hate giving in to this gambit, but it’s the only way to speed things along.

“And?”

“Well, after I talked to Sara and Scotty, I realized that for all my redefining sex on my own terms, I’m not having all that much fun. I’m not all that happy. I need to be in a relationship that makes me happy.”

“Have any of your relationships made you happy?’

And she sighed into the couch cushions. “Only one.”

And I braced myself for what I knew she would say next.

“Len,