When I head to the back bay to unwrap the Saran-wrapped pallets, Elin tells me the suicide girl is a patient of Health Services—not a Sympatric Incipient Phenotypic Plasticity sufferer but a plain old teenager—the one whose records I’ve been waiting on from her former university. That girl, the girl I’ve been complaining about, the girl who keeps rescheduling? She’s my patient, or was.

“Why bother to transfer if she wasn’t gonna give it a full week? Hold on, I gotta tinkle,” says Elin, gnawing on a pen cap.

We go on, Elin and I. What else can we do? The college sends a staff-wide email saying they are sending out a student-wide email. We meet with a few other patients during office hours. One comes in just afterwards, five after five. I agree to stay late.

“My cat can wait,” I tell the boy, who is dressed exclusively in denim. I escort him into a small room where I spend the next thirty-three minutes listening to him cry.

“My roommate knows her roommate!” He sobs, mucus stalactite swinging dangerously close to his open mouth. “She lived in Kruger! And now, on top of everything, I’ve got a head cold!”

At home, I find my cat to be louder than usual, but alive. Elin calls to thank me for being me, the sound of her children stampeding in the background. “Pretend you come in and see that I am dusting up your room!” screams Savannah, age seven.

The older one—Brandon, I want to say?—screams back so loudly I hear Elin shush him with a thwack: “Your dog Godzilla’d my house!”

“I’ll cover you next time, I swear,” Elin promises.

Next time, next time. We chat for five minutes about where she thinks I might find insecticide for my phlox, then hang up. The cat clicks across kitchen tile, turning back for me.

Step three of matriculation necessarily passes each student through our offices: ears muffled by headphones, torn backpacks resewn with fabric cut from out-of-date florals. Kids on antidepressants, kids on antibiotics; kids with chronic conditions, chronic prescriptions, chronic dry mouth from all the pills they take. SIPPs with early onset, SIPPS who don’t know they’ve got it, kids—with or without tampons, condoms, attention spans. Various levels of transparency, but we treat them all the same.

“The distressed look is in,” I explain to Elin, who has trouble understanding the students.

“Artists,” she says, rolling her eyes.

Good days, we give the students two thumbs up when they step on the school’s Detecto 337 Physician’s Scale. Less often, we don’t.

The small foiled cup of cranberry cocktail is an either way situation, in that whatever ailment you’re suffering from, you’ll leave Health Services with a paper bag stuffed with juice. It’s protocol, but also courtesy.

Elin is a nurse practitioner. I’m a medical assistant. Neither of us are physicians, but we have a high-tech scale – five-star rating in the Medline catalogue thirteen years running. If we wanted to be doctors, we’d have all the tools.

We get the cranberry from a good place. You know those commercials with the old man in coveralls and the young man in coveralls and the young man can’t do anything right and the old man just gives us this look? That’s the family we get the cranberry from.

Marie-Helene down at the registrar’s office does the order forms. 150 cans, once a month, except in August. Then it’s 225. She’s got access to the credit cards we keep trying to access, but the administration sees no need to give us any more authority than we already have.

“What authority do we already have?” Elin asks out loud and at random, at least twice a week. Sometimes she screams it down the linoleum hallway, and slaps at the eyesight test, which she thinks might be a conspiracy. “What is it that we are allowed to do?”

Elin checks the cranberry order forms. Marie-Helene rarely remembers the right amount. Once, at lunch, she told us that forgetting runs in her family, and now Elin is convinced that Marie-Helene is deteriorating right in front of our eyes, and if we don’t have the authority to fire her, we at least have the power to save ourselves from her mistakes.

“I’m no good at numbers,” Marie-Helene said, forking multi-colored pasta around a glass Tupperware.

“But that’s your job,” Elin snapped. She took her tuna salad back to her desk.

Every couple weeks, Elin and I talk about phoning up Marie-Helene’s daughter to check if there’s a situation going on that we don’t understand entirely, but the discussion always ends the same way.

“I don’t know,” I tell Elin, “I think that’s just the way she is.”

Elin stretches her lips thin. “Well, you know the daughter is,” she makes a swimming motion with her hands, “Right?”

“What are you trying to tell me?” I ask.

Elin gives me the look she normally reserves for artists. “Don’t say anything to Marie-Helene, got her head up her butt about it.”

“Oh,” I say, and Elin tells me we should try to be kind.

I think I already am kind.

I go to the debriefing held for faculty and staff before the memorial held for students and “community.” Marie-Helene is there; Elin is there. The SIPP who mans register at the smaller dining hall, whose face is sprouted in extra eyebrows? She’s there, too.

There, the administration informs us about grieving procedures and legal liability. It is okay to feel we could have done more. It is not okay to say that we feel we could have done more. Colleges do not act in loco parentis. Students have parents. Colleges have Health Services. Health Services have handouts, listing the psychiatric centers in the area.

There will be area psychiatrists in the Campus Center Fishbowl from 12 to 3pm on Tuesday. May staff attend? Staff may not attend.

The dean gives a speech about how we feel. We feel sad. During the speech, I feel not sad, but something more like hungry or angry or bored.

Next to me, Elin texts her husband: “Did u remember 2 defrost beef yes or no???”

The girl, who lived in other places long before she died here, suicided 2nd seat from the left in the Esther Kemp Memorial Screening Room in the Platt Center for Environmental Policy. The dean says we will read aloud the personal statement that got the suicide girl admitted during the college’s memorial for her suicide. Or rather, during the college’s memorial for this girl, who, incidentally, committed suicide. Found how? No comment. I don’t want to be the one exception to the mature adults who have no need to rubberneck how or why. I’ll Google it later, once someone unnamed breaks the no-media-speaking rule.

Marie-Helene spends the speech stealing glances at the woman sitting down the row from us. I think she works in the archives below the bottom floor of the library, filing senior theses. Equal opportunity employment, equal opportunity admission. Anyway, half her ear is molting. Feathers all over her linen slacks.

I voted in favor of the Permanence Blindness Bill on behalf of SIPP rights when they passed it a few years ago. I’m a veritable tender-heart. So sue me. It wasn’t one of the SIPPs who killed herself.

“It’s strange,” I tell Marie-Helene, “Because how does anyone eulogize a girl none of us actually knew? She got here on Sunday, and killed herself on Thursday. What kind of impression does that leave? Like, apart from the killing herself on our campus, she seemed sweet?”

Marie-Helene blinks like she is afraid of sudden muscular atrophy, then asks if I think she might have something caught in her eye. I think of her daughter, born before they could test for trace impermanence, wasting away on our medical-grade scales, turning fuchsia or lime in line for the salad bar. I look at Marie-Helene’s eye, flushed by water at the lip.

“Do you think it’s infected?” She asks, pulling to show the white.

People are always doing this: bringing up their medical issues in conversation with me, like they expect me to carry cranberry cocktail around in my purse.

The girl rescheduled twice. You know how many students do that? Make an appointment and then go to dinner with their boyfriends, skip dinner with their best friends, get caught up and never, ever notice the time they said they’d be somewhere—here, in the offices Elin has begged them to repaint in any shade other than the current dehydrated pee color (so pee-colored you can smell it, even when there aren’t urine samples to process)? The SIPPs, worse still, are liable to look like different kids every time they show up. No way to keep track of who made the appointment, who attended the appointment. If anyone attended the appointment at all, or if the moment the kid walked into our waiting room was also the moment they flat out stopped being opaque. So a student didn’t show up when she said she’d show up. What else is new?

Elin has been around longer than me, so when she says, “They don’t need your records, Sharleen, they have their own records,” I listen.

I listen to a lot from Elin. Interdepartmental memo affronts, what her kid did to another kid, who disappeared on our local SIPP roster, typos picked out and pocketed from road signs. Business signs, campus signs, photographic proof stockpiled on her phone, and, every month or so, what Elin’s living room might look like if, if, if, if. Much better that way, I say! Elin’s a talker. So what?

Still, there is something flummoxing in the record I’m holding over the shredder. That there would exist a record at all, maybe, and that the last existing record would record such useless information? Or, well— things go missing so often here. One day you’re eighteen, angry, and have a boyfriend with two perfectly functioning ears. The next? You’re standing over a shredder, holding something nobody needs in your hands.

“You see she was O-negative?” I ask Elin.

“Tell me about it,” Elin swivels her chair back around to the seasonal desk calendar depicting her children bunny-earring dolphins at the local aquarium. “SIPP blood donor register of the Greater Hudson Valley will be pissed. Another prospect they can’t harangue.”

“Maybe that’s why she killed herself,” I joke, “To get off their mailing list.”

Elin pops open a can of cranberry cocktail. “UT-ay-yi-yi,” she moans in her desk chair, “You want?”

“You get those emails?” I ask her. “I didn’t realize you were a donor. I mean, I didn’t realize you could give.”

Elin grunts. Which is honestly too much, so I keep my eyes on the forms while she doesn’t explain. Little girl handwriting in answer to all these adult questions. What, if any, conditions does the student display? Has the student ever been tested for trace impermanence? Is the student up to date on all vaccinations? None, yes, yes. Self-contained soap bubbles over all the I’s.

“Well, I wouldn’t trust ‘em to run the country, but I’m a nurse practitioner,” Elin says, finally, blowing her nose. “Everyone wants to live.”

“I told you, didn’t I?” she swivels, “Savannah’s got three in her class this year? That’s how young they can tell now. To me? Little ones mostly look normal, give or take the feathers.”

“My college boyfriend was one,” I tell her.

“Oh yeah?” She snorts, “Regular guy, right, till he disappeared?”

I wait till Elin turns, then send scrap paper through the shredder.

“Not really,” I say.

The SIPPs started showing up when the world got hotter. Some scientists blamed it on a hole in the ozone, or a hole in the research, which a patched hole in the funding might fix. Other loudmouths called out God, or cancer, neither of which seemed all that different in their effect on people, who got scared when a change in attitude didn’t signal a change in outcome, and started pointing fingers, calling fault. Our planet was rotting, it seemed, and here was the evidence—a slow-growing minority of people who simply couldn’t stick around any longer, who looked different every time we saw them. They were the ones who got new names.

I can’t remember which journalist coined the name first, but suddenly, it was everywhere, and they were everywhere. Supernatural, or maybe just super natural, because the natural world was in revolt.

Sympatric Incipient Phenotypic Plasticity. You can see why we had to come up with something a little easier on the tongue.

Who were these people who couldn’t keep their ears on straight, who tinted different pastels as the sun inched across the sky? Who were they to adapt this way, to grow fur, to sprout feathers, to shed bits of their bodies all over the sidewalk? Chosen? Evolved? Rude? Maybe this was where the name came from, in resistance to a higher plan that left the rest of us out.

Used to be you couldn’t tell till you could tell. One day you woke up markedly less opaque than the day before. You grew scaly wing bones which looked like bar food, or half your face had dripped into your clavicle pool.

And who could trust this sub-species, these SIPPs, whose very genetic code marked them as impermanent? Who could hire one, not knowing if she would show up to work the next day, or if an invisible She would show up to work and expect the same treatment, as if anyone knew where they were expected to look? Some of them, too, just disappeared, and that was that. They popped out, or some quick erosion switch was hit, and who knew if you—pathetically still physically permanent you—were someone to run away from?

Even more terrifying was the way personal offense catalyzed collective action. What was the point of polling voters we couldn’t be sure would be around for the next election? How to parse the rights of a parent who looked like a monster you might find under his child’s bed? We were split, and we were scared, and then there were the SIPPs—who were splitting in front of their own eyes, who woke at night screaming from the pain where a new limb had grown.

My own mother took the SIPPs in stride, as she strode everywhere, imparting her opinion on the state of this, our beloved country. “Sherri,” she said. “Don’t you play with those girls.”

“Nothing about the boys, though,” I would later whine into her lap, once Luis had left. The planet or me? Who knew? He was in a panic; he was growing algae along his left calf muscle; his right ear was lying on the pillow between us; he was gone.

“You couldn’t connect the goddamn dots?” My mother rolled her eyes. “Please.”

Then: “Don’t look at me like that. It’s not a Xenophobia thing. This is what I was protecting you from. Look at me in my eyes, Sherri. This.”

She would die six months later, of plain old heart disease. One of the worst things about the SIPPs? There were still all the smaller ways to go.

Reading the suicide girl’s file, I am reminded of my mother. I slosh bourbon across the pages during a couch plomp.

“Shit,” I tell my cat.

My cat doesn’t even look at me. I let the liquid pool to the floor, where it will stay once I’ve fallen asleep, hugging the body pillow, stained pages spread over my lap.

I am not a gossip. My mother was one. I respect boundaries. But my mother—who am I kidding, all mothers—are not in the business of boundaries. What boundaries? We were made by them.

The suicide girl is the exact kind of tragedy my mother liked to look at. “Oh, I’m just thinking about that child who died!” she would have said, sparkling, or “I can’t help but wonder why a person would do such a thing!” or best of all: “Awful, you know, where the mind goes.”

My mind goes. Is going, is gone. I lost it when I started to speak to Elin every day, or when I took the job at Health Services. I lost it when I dropped out of college to cry on my mother’s lap and then to protest on behalf of the Luis who had left, when Tender-hearts like me pushed back: More funding! More treatments! Make visible the rights of the invisible! I retained it, in increments. When the world got hotter, my search got colder. Luis left. I did my job.

In the morning, Elin is in an Elin mood. “Have you seen the stapler?” She says, throwing around stacks of paper. “I swear to God. Nothing stays where it should be.”

I sip coffee, look out the kitchenette window. On one side of the office, it is raining. The other? Sun.

Around eleven, Marie-Helene wanders into the waiting room. She stands just inside the screen door, looking confused. Elin and I watch her from behind our Plexiglas reception window, until Elin loses it and throws up her hands. “I can’t handle her today.”

She beelines to the bathroom. From the hall, I hear yelling. “Jesus Christ, will I ever not have to pee?”

I knock on the window, drawing Marie-Helene’s attention. “Good morning,” I ask, “Is there something I can help you with?”

Marie-Helene looks at me, then back out the screen door at the sheets of water soaking the patchy quad. “You know?” She shakes her head, beaming. “I can’t remember why I came in here. Isn’t that funny?”

“It’s something,” I say. “Can I jog your memory? Order issue, maybe?”

“There aren’t any orders out there right now, are there?” Marie-Helene looks worried. “The weather! I’m not sure where I—” She blinks rapidly. “Do you have time, actually, to look at my eye?”

I have an appointment in fifteen minutes, but depending on what side of the office the student is coming from, I may not have an appointment in fifteen minutes. SIPPs can be weather-skittish, blown off course. I learned that from Luis. He only took baths, worried that the force of vertical water might wash away loose skin.

I take Marie-Helene into the examination room farthest from the bathroom, sit her on a clean sheaf of exam paper. “That same eye?”

“My daughter,” explains Marie-Helene, fiddling with the crepe. “She says I’m—she seems to think it’s turning blue.”

“What?” I ask her. “The iris? Is blue?

“No, no.” She looks around the office, then closes her eyes for a moment. “The whole. Whole thing. Is.”

I’m not sure what is going on, so I tell Marie-Helene something I am sure of: “Your whole eye is not turning blue.”

“I know that!” She protests, and then looks up at me with two perfectly white, black, red, and brown eyes. “Are you sure though? Are you sure it’s not?”

We sit in silence. “Okay, you’re sure,” She shrugs. “Okay, I hear you. I hear you. Okay.”

“Are you seeing blue?”

“Of course not.” She sighs, buries her head in her hands, then raises her eyes, pulling at the lids. Stretching what she can see.

I know what will come next. I always know, and always, it comes.

“What is that?” Marie-Helene asks me. “That she sees that? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I really don’t know.”

Marie-Helene looks at me like I might be lying.

“I wish I were hiding something from you,” I say, “If I could spare your feelings, I would.”

She studies me, and then the walls of her rigid posture buckle— neck, shoulders, back—and by the time Marie-Helene is staring, lost, at her own folded hands, I feel as if I have borne witness to the collapse of an old and dignified building, at last falling in on itself.

The days before Luis disappeared, he remained unchanged, by which I mean, he was an awful hypochondriac. “Do you think this is a spore?” he would say, narrowing his eyes at a hair growing out of a mole. “Does my left thumbnail look kind of like a claw to you?”

“Are you listening?” he would ask me. “Sherri! Look at my arm! Is it out of focus? Does it look like it’s losing focus? Sharleen! Look at me.”

I looked at him. I traced circles on his back with my fingertips. I nuzzled my head into his lightly-furred neck. I made him large gala breakfasts, tiny late-night snacks. I spent classes Googling his symptoms, ignored my mother’s calls.

“Baby,” I shushed, holding his head to my chest. “You’re okay. I promise you. Really, really,” I told him. “I’ve got you. You’re okay.”

In the evening, I watch a news report about a cult leader in Arizona, who claims the SIPPs are the result of interbreeding between human women and Satan. He wants to limit what exposure women have to technology, certain that sonic waves are being dispatched from the dark web. I am not sure what the dark web is, or what makes it darker than the rest of the Internet, but he is quickly gaining followers—women who cite a life webbed by online living as the source of suffering. I am surprised. The Internet is a well-worn excuse, but I have not heard a lot from Satan lately. I thought maybe he had also left.