“My loyalty tendered imagina- tive lapses in perception. I’d ally with Howie however he needed, even if I never quite knew what was real or what was in his mind. It didn’t matter to me what was real, because my loneliness was alleviated. We lived in a bubble where true and false increasingly dropped their distinctions. It was the space of fantasy, and that space felt holy to me, just like the clothes at Charivari felt holy—clothes that were made for some fantasy body, a kind of personhood yet to be invented. The clothes opened the space for this person to spring into existence, just as Howie’s stories opened the space for us to become characters in them. The stories bonded us together—for if you shared the same fictions you shared the same reality.”