October in Boise was the best month and they were all too tired to appreciate it.

Michelle got home at noon on a Wednesday and dropped onto The Couch and looked at the ceiling for approximately four minutes before Priya came out of their room in her headphones and said, without removing them, "We're out of cereal."

"I know," Michelle said.

Priya looked at her for a moment, then went back in the room. This was a complete conversation.

Jenny was the next one home, at three, from her shift at the boutique in the 8th Street Marketplace that was theoretically a career-building exercise in retail merchandising and was practically four hours of folding linen pants for women who would not buy them. She came in and sat at the kitchen island and said: "Tell me something that isn't about school or work."

"Ridgeline's having a hot tub thing Friday," Dani said, from behind her sketchbook on the armchair.

"The hot tub has been broken since July."

"That's everything I have."

Kasey came home at six with a BioChem textbook she'd already read and a yogurt from the campus café that she'd bought as a treat and was now regretting not eating immediately, and she sat at the kitchen table and opened the textbook and this was, more or less, the shape of their evenings.

Five women in their twenties in a three-bedroom apartment in Boise, Idaho, spending the year doing school and the jobs that paid for school and the recovery from both, in a city that had a scene they had not yet located, in an apartment complex that had a broken hot tub and a mailroom that smelled like other people's packages.

This was fine. They were fine.

"I feel like something should happen," Jenny said, at seven-fifteen, to no one specifically.

"Define something," Michelle said.

"I don't know. Something. *Something.*"

Dani turned a page in her sketchbook. "Our neighbor brought cookies by last week."

"The one in 14F?" Michelle said.

"Josh. Yeah. Snickerdoodles. From scratch."

"From *scratch*?" Jenny said.

"He had leftover cream of tartar from something."

Everyone thought about this.

"We should have him over," Jenny said.

"He's been over," Dani said. "Twice. He watched the Bake-Off finale with us."

"He should come over again," Jenny said.

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