She wanted the answer to the question. She was living in the before of something, and she was getting tired of it. The dangerous thing about the way she felt . . . was that she didn't know exactly what she wanted to happen, and she didn't care that she didn't know. Almost any change would do.

The frustrating part of it, writing a book she wasn't really writing, was that she had been good at this once, when she was young.

She wanted to be what she already was, even if nobody knew it yet: a celebrity. A person, exaggerated.

Her aloneness was so random, so total and unprovoked . . .

She was thinking that all that stretched in front of her was doing things she didn't want to do.

. . . though she couldn't admit it directly, not even to herself.

The smile she gave back to him made her feel like she was someone else, someone used to being part of things.

But it didn't really matter how much time she spent clicking around his life, how many times she entered his name into a search box or how many days she managed not to. She was always waiting, still.

She understood now, in a way that she hadn't in college, that waiting for him was just part of her life. That she would never really stop.