Page 48 of Counting the Days

Remember she was living in themodern twenties,track him down, and text him like a sexy, take-charge, badass feminist.

She pulled out her phone and sent a text.

Rhea:I need Danny’s number

Four minutes later, Tiny responded:Uh oh. What happened?

Rhea:Nothing bad. I just deleted it a few weeks back and I wanna text him

Tiny: Should I give it to you? Or are you going to regret not waiting for him to text first?

Rhea:I don’t know

Rhea:I hate dating

Rhea:I hate this feeling

Tiny:It’s not that late…

Tiny:He could still text

Rhea:You’re right. I’m gonna wait

Rhea waited three minutes.

Rhea:Actually gimme the number

Tiny responded with Danny’s number.

Rhea began crafting the perfect text, something that made her sound easygoing and playful.

Rhea:What’d I miss? Did Gary and Lisa’s finale blow your mind?

Rhea hit send and stared at her phone for sixteen minutes. And just when crippling regret started to take hold, making her wish she had never met Danny or Tiny or anyone involved in this whole devastating saga, Danny responded:I think I reached enlightenment

Rhea waited four minutes and wrote back:Wow, you’re taking my FOMO to a whole new level

Seven minutes later, Danny:Oh no! You didn’t miss much I promise. We did synchronized breathing. Would have much rather partnered with you than Greta…which is…WILD EYES’S NAME

Rhea tried to match his agonizing pace and wait seven minutes but caved at minute four and wrote:Oh my God. You are my hero

When he didn’t write back for five minutes, she added:I slept two hours past checkout

Six minutes after that, he wrote:Dammit. That’s on me. I tried to wake you up. But I didn’t try hard enough. You looked so peaceful and we stayed up so late

She waited to respond. She could feel him pulling away; something in the energy of the texts and the hourlong minutes between them. She wondered if he had not enjoyed the hookup as much as she had. She walked into her bathroom and examined her nose. The itch to make it smaller overcame her. She was used to this itch. Whenever a man did not reciprocate her feelings, she blamed the nose.

She sat down at her laptop, googledChinese foot binding,and read the entire Wikipedia page. She did this whenever her desire to alter her face became strong enough to consider making an actual appointment with a plastic surgeon.

“To enable the size of the feet to be reduced, the toes on each foot were curled under, then pressed with great force downward and squeezed into the sole of the foot until the toes broke.”

This was the sentence that kept Rhea from going through with cosmetic rhinoplasty. She had heard modern people judge the ancient practice of Chinese foot binding, the act of breaking a woman’s foot in half and folding it under so it could fit into a three-inch-long shoe. People talked about how insane and barbaric it was—“Can you imagine breaking yourown feet,just to make them smaller? Just to be considered attractive?”