The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

“Would I kid you? With this face? Come on.” Eastlin smiles.

“I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t from there. Looked like it, though. That lace trim, kind of torn, but, like, on purpose? Heavy. Expensive. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“Lace trim?” He brings a fingernail to his mouth and gives it a meditative chew. “We did lace two seasons ago. Stained in tea.”

“She was . . .” The right words won’t come. The right words usually don’t, for me. I mostly experience the world in images. I wish I could show Eastlin the film I took of this girl, in my mind. It unspools before my eyes, rolling forward like a silk ribbon falling out of someone’s hand, and I see the girl in the deconstructed dress smile.

“If she shops at Abraham Mas, I probably know her,” he offers.

A funny fluttering thing happens inside my chest, and I have to clear my throat to get rid of it. “She was young,” I say helpfully.

“Young.” He tears off the offending nail, examines the bare fingertip, and spits the nail out on the floor. “Most Mas girls are Madison Avenue types. You know. Lunch. Their hair, my God. Three hundred dollars a week, for the color. At least.”

“I think you’d recognize her,” I say, surprised at the urgency in my voice. I want him to know her. I want him to tell me who she is. “Definitely.”

Just then the pocket of my cargo shorts vibrates twice. I fish inside and pull out my phone. It’s got a huge crack in the glass from where I dropped it in the subway last week, but it still basically works. A bird icon informs me that someone’s mentioned me on Twitter.

“Huh.” Eastlin starts in on the next nail. “Well, at the very least, she’d be in the store system. We can stalk her.”

“Come on,” I say, peering at my phone.

The tweet is from a profile I don’t follow.

It says, I see you, @wesauckerman.

And it links to a picture of me on Instagram. In the picture my mouth is half open, like I’m in the middle of saying something. My hair is sticking up, and there’s pizza grease on my mouth. The glare of the fluorescent lights has been softened with a filter. I’m smiling.

I laugh, tugging on the forelock of my hair. The profile belongs to someone named Maddie, with no identifying details other than “NYC.” The profile picture is a cartoon unicorn galloping on an ocean of stars. The girl with 1950s bangs is webstalking me. Maybe it wasn’t the pizza that helped push away my disappointment.

“Look at you,” my roommate says, getting to his feet and tossing a towel over his shoulder. “She text you just now?”

“What?” I say, weighing whether or not I should respond.

She must have found me from an image search. I guess I know people can do that, but it’s not like it ever occurred to me to try. What should I say back to her? I should say something funny. But I’m not sure what Maddie will think is funny. I hesitate.

Maddie. Maddie who has Bettie Page pinup bangs. And a neck tattoo. My high school girlfriend thought all girls with tattoos were sluts. She could be kind of a bitch, though. What do I think of girls with tattoos?

“Pathetic,” Eastlin remarks as the door closes behind him. A second passes before the door opens again, and his head sticks back inside our dorm room. “And you realize I mean that in the worst possible way.”

“Asshole,” I say, laughing, and chuck his own sock back at him. With a grin he shuts the door and the sock misses by six feet.

I stare at Maddie’s profile, ruminating. There’s not much to it. Lots of retweets of joke memes. Her Instagram is mostly pictures of diner food, glistening French fries or hamburgers in primary colors. There are a few arty shots of corners of New York City. A curl of pilaster. A puddle. A pigeon with a gnarled foot.