And we don’t stop her.

We don’t have the energy.

Lily’s death has left us weak and despondent.

Plus, we know it would be useless to try to stop her. Penelope would continue. And the truth is, we want her to continue because even though our minds know that her enterprise is hopeless, our hearts can’t stop hoping—stupidly and relentlessly.

Jack is the last one to see Penelope.

That was three days ago. He said she looked bad—haggard and pale—and that she’d lost weight. In the middle of her living room floor was Lily, close to being fully recomposed. But the same problem kept happening. Each time she was almost back together, she’d crumble.

Jack was upset to discover that there was no food in Penelope’s fridge or cabinets. He bought her groceries and made her promise to eat.

His account was so disturbing that each of us made concerted efforts to see her after that. But we failed; she was no longer receiving visitors, saying she needed to work on Lily without distractions.

Thankfully, we don’t have to endure the situation much longer. Everything changes dramatically one evening when Jack’s phone rings while we’re gathered at my place, brooding over Lily’s recomposition and Penelope’s decomposition.

Peter is not with us. As my cuts have been fading, so has his presence from my life. I still see him once or twice a week, but I sense his visits will grow farther apart. He’s been withdrawing because he feels that nothing has changed between us, that I’m still blocked, that we have no future beyond a friendship. And I can’t say I disagree. Lily’s ugliness as a new beauty trend has in no way touched the core of the beauty worship problem. Just because beauty’s been redefined doesn’t mean it has lost its importance. And I’m resigned to being stuck for as long as beauty rules—which I expect to be forever.

This night, Jack almost doesn’t pick up his ringing phone. At the last minute he checks the caller ID. “It’s Penelope,” he says, and eagerly answers it.

He listens for a few seconds and then snaps the phone shut.

“What did she say?” Georgia asks.

“It was her number, but it wasn’t Penelope,” he answers, in shock. “It was Lily. She said ‘Help us.’ And then the line went dead.”

We rush to the elevator, out the building, hop in a cab, and reach Penelope’s apartment in under ten minutes.

It takes us another ten minutes to persuade the doorman and the super to open Penelope’s door with the spare key they have.

We find Penelope and Lily unconscious on the living room floor. We call 911, and while we wait for the ambulance to arrive, we’re able to find a pulse on each of our friends. We can’t believe Lily is alive again, and not only alive but not reflective.

The superintendent, who is hovering over us, seems perplexed as to why Penelope’s unconscious state terrifies us while Lily’s delights us.

The ambulance squad arrives within minutes and Lily regains consciousness on the way to the hospital but Penelope doesn’t. The doctors say she’s dehydrated and malnourished. Her vital signs are weak.

Much of the ecstasy we feel over Lily’s resurrection is dampened by our worry for Penelope.

NOW THAT WE’VE got Lily back and that Penelope possibly sacrificed her life to reassemble her, I want to place Lily on a shelf with a big sign that reads: “Fragile. If you break her you will pay.”

When word gets out that Lily is back and alive, journalists start calling her incessantly, asking for interviews. She doesn’t give a single one, being in no mood to talk about herself when the friend who brought her back to life is in the hospital in a coma.

In an effort to distract her from her crushing feelings of guilt, we show Lily how much the world of fashion has changed during the past few weeks. We want her to see that, at least for now, she’s beautiful in this world. But Lily doesn’t care. She doesn’t care about the many fashion magazines that use models who resemble her. She doesn’t care that on the streets, many women who, until last month, would have been considered unattractive are now carrying themselves with more confidence and self-appreciation. She doesn’t care that her physical appearance is now desired.

And not only does she not care, she doesn’t believe it. She doesn’t feel beautiful. How can she, after years of being ignored, dismissed, avoided, insulted—insulted like she was by that man at the bar who ended up murdered. The damage to her self-esteem was far too great for her to feel beautiful now. As though all it would take would be for the whole world to find her beautiful.

Lily is swamped by adoring fans and by men who want to date her. But she’s not interested in men who see the beauty in her ugliness only now that everyone else does.

She is contacted by old schoolmates and acquaintances who never showed much interest in her before. Those are the worst. Extricating herself from having to meet up, catch up, or hook up is so awkward that she changes her phone number and becomes a recluse within a week of coming back to life. This, of course, only increases her mystique and feeds the frenzy.

She also hires a bodyguard (at our insistence), after Jack points out that she might be a tempting target for kidnappers, now that Georgia’s article has revealed the extent of Lily’s powers and her ability to beautify—and create a desire for—not only objects but people, and not only a desire for those objects and people who are present, but also for those who are not.

It doesn’t take long for her fans, acquaintances, and old schoolmates to start approaching me and Georgia and Jack to try to get to Lily. We tell them she doesn’t want to talk to anybody. There is one old schoolmate who is not only persistent but evasive—a particularly annoying combination. He says his name is Derek Pearce. He has contacted all three of us multiple times but won’t tell us why he wants to reach Lily beyond saying it’s important.

We give Lily everyone’s messages. She’s not in the mood to call back anyone, including Derek Pearce.

Lily’s only regular daily outing is to visit the hospital where Penelope is languishing on life support, and play for her on her portable synthesizer. She composes music that she hopes will awaken Penelope from her coma. In vain. She keeps lamenting that her skills are nowhere near capable of achieving such a feat. She can tell she’s not even close.

ONE RAINY AFTERNOON, after eleven days in the hospital, Penelope comes out of her coma. According to Lily, it has nothing to do with her music because nothing she composed had that kind of power.

Penelope simply awakes on her own—as comatose patients sometimes do. We are euphoric and relieved.

Physically, she looks okay except for several purple patches on her arms, legs, and torso where the doctors have been injecting her twice a day with a blood thinner.

She’s released from the hospital the next day with instructions to get physical therapy three to five days a week until her strength returns.

MY MOM CALLS and says, “You haven’t put your fat suit back on, have you?”

“Not yet,” I reply, to torture her.

“Seriously, Barb, please don’t wear your disguise to protect yourself from ending up like me. I know you think your father loved me for my beauty and had affairs when it faded. But it wasn’t as simple as that. I mean, yes he did become increasingly attracted to younger, more beautiful women as I aged, but that wasn’t our only problem. We also grew apart, we had different interests. In a lot of ways we simply weren’t compatible. I like not having to cater to a man anymore. And who knows, I may still meet another special man someday, but in the meantime I’m content, and often even happy—definitely happier than I was with your father at the end. I like my solitary life. I’m having a good time traveling. I have good friends. Don’t deny yourself happiness while you’re young. Ending up like me is not the worst thing that could happen to you.”