Ali put her hand on my shoulder and stopped me. I turned to look at her and she put her other hand on my other shoulder.

“Congratulations, Zach,” Ali said to me. “You are officially stoned.” She didn’t say anything else for a while, she just stared at me as if looking for something.

Clementine is someone etched into our brains, a pain we are too eager to rid ourselves of. I not only wanted to be Clementine, to have her hair, but to be with someone like her in the future, queer and whimsical as I was. At 30 years old, I did, finally, try the deluded experiment of love, and it was just as wild as Eternal Sunshine made it out to be, just as brilliant and mind bending and loving.

Greg handed the envelope to Lynne. She recognized the handwriting immediately—she had done exhaustive analysis on it at the Agency. It was hers, there was no question, and though the package had been signed, Lynne did not need to see it to know she was looking at the work of Carmen Sandiego.