Workshop is held in what is called the Cave, but is really just a black-box theater in the basement of the Narrative Arts Center. No visible doors, no windows, and of course, no clocks. Only dark, damp walls that evoke the womb. I enter late and apologize under my breath—no sign of Ava at the diner, which was empty but for one red-faced man hunched at the counter, hissing at his plate. The Bunnies, seeing me come in, smile like librarians, then look away. They do not look hung over. At all. They are seated in their usual huddle on one side of the hollow square arrangement of tables, leaving the other three sides open to me. My stomach sinks a little to see this. But what did I expect anyway? For them to suddenly embrace me?

Cold dread in my chest. Fluttery hummingbird heart.

I look at them—my gaze a question—but they’re blinking thoughtfully through their designer reading eyewear at our teacher, Ursula, whom they have christened KareKare, because she cares so, so much. I call her Fosco, after the villain in the Gothic novel The Woman in White. I don’t know why. I suppose there is just something about her gravitas, her voice like a thick mist, her long, ever gesturing white hands and her saccadic violet eyes that suggests she has distressed maidens in her basement, human livers in her fridge, that she baby talks to pet mice, attends the opera in a box seat, clapping lightly from the shadows. My god, yes, Ava said when she saw her. My god.

“Samantha,” Fosco calls in her usual booming voice as the heavy double doors clang shut behind me. “So glad you could join us.”

They all watch me walk toward the stage at the center of the room, where they’re all seated as though they’re in a play. In what Fosco likes to call the “Hermeneutic Circle,” aka a “Safe Space” in which to bravely bare our souls to one another in the form of cryptic word art. Evoke our alchemical experiences and experiments. In which our work will perform the Body and the Body shall perform our work. Whatever that means. Even after a year at Warren, I’m still not totally sure. The school is known for its highly experimental approach to narrative. Hence no windows or clocks in the Cave. Because we cannot, we will not, be slaves to the time-space continuum aka plot. And yet she knows I’m late.

“We were worried,” Fosco says, tapping her bare wrist as though there is a watch there. It’s always unclear to me if Fosco is using the royal we or if she is referring to herself and the Bunnies.

“Worried?” I repeat.

“That something happened to you, weren’t we?”

She looks around at all the Bunnies for confirmation. They nod, their dewy faces turned toward her as though toward a goddess shrine. She was our Workshop leader last spring and though we were supposed to work with the Lion again this fall, they fought to have KareKare come back again. Because she just gets us more. Also, she is just so like a wondrous bear. A care bear! A karekare!

Yes, KareKare, they nod now. Worried. Very. Oh so concerned.

“Sorry,” I say. “I got . . .”

“Lost?” Creepy Doll fills in. Her tiger eyes betray nothing, but her Cupid’s-bow lips curl into a slight smile. I draped my red-riding-hood cloak on your shuddering shoulders while you drunk-cried. Remember?

“Lost,” Fosco repeats, her rich voice reverberating in the theater. When she repeats the word, the lilt in her tone suggests its aptness in my case. Perhaps, Samantha, you are lost in more ways than one?