We pay for a stack of cas­settes and walk slow up the street, smok­ing and peo­ple watch­ing. We pause so Veron­i­ca can grind out her cig­a­rette and look in the win­dow while she applies her lip­stick. Our eyes meet in the reflec­tion. ​“You okay?” she asks. 

“I just, I want to for­get about stuff for a while.” 

“Sheila?” 

I shrug. 

“Gimme.” She ges­tures at my half-smoked cigarette. 

I pass it to her. Where my lips were, hers are now. 

“I feel stuck. I’m ready for what­ev­er the next thing is.” 

“Well, we can make it hap­pen, right?” 

I nod, even though I don’t know what that looks like. What the next thing is. 

“What about Patrick?” she asks. ​“He’s cute.” She has a slight smudge of lip­stick on her front tooth. 

Patrick is doe-eyed, with a good leather jack­et. He didn’t say much when I gave him my pass­port pho­to and thir­ty dol­lars, just bobbed his head and then told me he’d be in touch when it was done. He’s cute, I guess. 

“You need a sum­mer fling.” She exhales, her chin tilt­ed up so the smoke plumes toward the sky.

Do I need a sum­mer fling? I let the idea unfurl in my mind. It feels abstract, but love­ly, maybe. 

“He is cute,” I agree. 

“I’ll call Jack to meet us, make it a dou­ble date.” She winks at me. 

Inside Jupiter, amid the clang­ing beep­ing ding-ding-ding and the roar of the Godzil­la game and smell of but­tered pop­corn, Veron­i­ca slides her quar­ter into the pay phone and grins at me. I am con­scious of my body, the fact of me as an object in rela­tion­ship to others. 

Patrick is a pos­si­bil­i­ty; the new ID is a pos­si­bil­i­ty; the vod­ka Veron­i­ca buys at the cor­ner store while I wait out­side is a pos­si­bil­i­ty; the falling dusk is a pos­si­bil­i­ty; my face, already flushed in the bath­room mir­ror at Zappo’s Burg­ers while we wait for the boys, is a pos­si­bil­i­ty. I can become this new ver­sion of myself.

_______

Patrick hands over the ID. ​“Nice to meet you, Jen­nifer Eddings, born April 19th, 1961, age 22.” 

Jen­nifer Eddings. The new me. 

“That, uh, makes you an Aries, if any­one ever asks.” Patrick’s mousy hair flops over his face, so he has to toss it back to see. His eyes are brown and sleepy and a patchy expanse of fuzz on his upper lip makes it look like he’s try­ing to grow a mustache. 

“I nev­er real­ly know what those things mean.” 

Patrick shrugs, gives a small half grin. ​“Me nei­ther. I think it’s sup­posed to tell you about your per­son­al­i­ty, or your future.” 

Like play­er stats in D&D, I think. But I don’t say that, because this new me — Jen­nifer, Jen, no: Jen­ny — isn’t into com­put­er games. Jen­ny doesn’t day­dream about defeat­ing trolls or trav­el­ing across mag­i­cal king­doms. Jen­ny flirts; she has sum­mer flings. 

“You want to race?” he asks. 

Veron­i­ca and Jack are on Game Hunter; he wraps his arms around her to aim the plas­tic gun and she wrig­gles away, then kiss­es him. 

“Yeah,” I say. ​“Let’s race.” 

We have to stand close and our shoul­ders bump as we steer through the course. I feel the vodka’s warmth expand into the space where our bod­ies touch. 

Usu­al­ly I hate rac­ing games. There’s no mean­ing to it, no sto­ry. They’re all thrill, no think­ing. Rac­ing games, like shoot­ing games, you and I used to call them ​“pop­corn.” No meat, no real sub­stance to them. 

Good games let you do some­thing mean­ing­ful inside the game world, change some­thing, and in the chang­ing, the play­er is also trans­formed some­how. Comes out dif­fer­ent than they were when they pressed start. 

But Jen­ny likes rac­ing games. I let my shoul­der linger against Patrick’s before I steer my car around the track. I like the way the alco­hol has loos­ened me. 

“You’re good,” he says, when we’ve played through the first round of quarters. 

“Why thank you. Not too shab­by yourself.” 

Veron­i­ca and Jack have moved on to the old pin­ball machine; she’s play­ing one side and he’s play­ing the oth­er, their hips synced as they rack up points. She laughs, turns, and shoots me a grin. 

“You want to go for a smoke?” I ask Patrick.

Out­side, Short Vine is neon and dark­ness. Across town, Sheila will be pick­ing up Bubbe for Shab­bat din­ner at our house. When I was lit­tle, it was Bubbe who host­ed, and until you moved for grad school, you were there too, ready to play chess with me every Fri­day night. 

The year I was nine, we played with a spe­cial rule: every move had to be accom­pa­nied by part of a sto­ry, a slow plot that swept the pieces up in a mad, ridicu­lous dra­ma. A queen whose spies and sol­diers are all ani­mals, fight­ing against a vil­lage of farm­ers and wood­cut­ters. A coven of witch­es, divid­ed in a civ­il war over the next leader. A girl, trav­el­ing to Ashmedai’s king­dom to retrieve her best friend from the shed­im, who claimed the friend was secret­ly their prince. 

Our games often con­tin­ued after din­ner, the long-burn­ing Shab­bat can­dles trans­port­ing us, pro­tect­ing us. In our sto­ries, I was alive beyond space and time, alive in a thou­sand dimen­sions at once. 

I think of that now — the games, the sto­ry­telling, you — as I bend my cig­a­rette to Patrick’s Zip­po, inhale. And then I let them go. Imag­ine them behind me, light and emp­ty as a snakeskin. 

Patrick’s gaze is heavy and soft, his pupils wide. He can’t see any of the secrets. I’m just Veronica’s friend, who plays rac­ing games and pays atten­tion to him. 

And it’s easy: to lean for­ward and kiss him in the fad­ing June heat, to let him tan­gle his hand in my hair, to whis­per, ​“Let’s go some­where” and then to go with him.

Excerpt­ed from Home­bound by Por­tia Elan. Copy­right © 2026 by Por­tia Elan. Reprint­ed by per­mis­sion of Scrib­n­er, an Imprint of Simon & Schus­ter, LLC.