At dinner I sat with the mathematicians again. I remembered the guy's name, Travis, but had to ask the woman to remind me of hers.

"Jing Li," she said, glancing at me briefly before continuing to talk to Travis.

I'm here recuperating from a gunshot wound to the back and learning how to live with lower limb paralysis. Travis was in a car accident, and Jing Li had surgery after a disastrous fall while playing soccer. Being among the youngest patients, the three of us naturally gravitated toward one another, but it's pretty clear Travis and Jing Li could get on fine without me. They speak their own language. Everybody here grouses about the food. Jing Li, though, remarked upon the massive delta between a fresh peach and packaged fruit compote. When she said that, I smiled politely. But when Travis deployed stochastic while talking about the work he used to do before having to take an indefinite leave of absence, I interrupted to ask the meaning of the term.

"Randomness," he replied. "But also with the idea of making an educated guess. Assessing probabilities."

That shut me up. After all, I've been doing little besides weeping and thinking of randomness since the shooting. Pride month. At a bar with my salsa-dancing friends. He's great, I remember saying moments before my best friend died on stage. I was talking about the DJ. Our group went dancing every week. It's just what we do, it was my ordinary life. At bars, at outdoor events, different places, we met up to dance to Latin beats. The club where Sebastian died was a place we seldom went to but they were having a Pride thing they called Faldas, and so we went for that. For skirts. We have faldas, and we wanted to lend them to the men in our group so they could wear them for Pride.

A heap of skirts on the table and only one guy brave enough to try them on: Sebastian, my best friend. They went on easily over his slim hips but were too big at the waist. We laughed when they slid down into a rainbow-hued puddle of ruffles at his feet. I used safety pins to take in the waist of the tiered and gathered cerulean blue one, Sebastian's favorite. I remember him asking, Why do women always have a large collection of safety pins? He'd been feeling down but that night was in high spirits. He tried to get me to go up on stage with him. Tugged at my wrist. I might have said yes. I'm comfortable dancing on stage, because I'm a good dancer, not as accomplished as Sebastian was but good enough to be his partner. I told him I wanted to finish my drink. He chose another partner.

Think of how it feels. No, don't. It happens, you sense it, only you don't. Clubs are loud, there's a heavy bass but not constant, and new sounds don't always come in gradually; sometimes the change is abrupt. Even so, the gunshots were different. We heard them. But the gunman didn't fire into the crowd, not at first. He targeted the people on stage. Before I was hit, I saw Sebastian fall backwards, the skirt fly up. I saw it without knowing it. I was unable to trust my own eyes.

Of the six people on stage, five died. It could have been any of us dying on stage. The precise number of wounded did not appear in the news. We are more than several but fewer than dozens, some of us critical. We are at home, in hospitals, and in skilled-nursing facilities, feeling lucky or grateful or something a whole lot darker—because of that delta, the him not us.


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