How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers

man was sleeping in her mother’s bed.
    I’d never been interested in someone like Erin before. She had an MBA, which I didn’t understand—MBAs generally or the fact that she’d wanted one. She knew menus and cheeses and Caribbean islands named after saints. But she was very strong and even reckless. She had quit her job in D.C. and now she was here.
    She wanted to start an ex-pat community in London, or Scotland or Ireland. Or Norway. She hadn’t made up her mind, and was auditioning possible locations—somewhere, she said, “where all the churches aren’t covered in scaffolding.” Skye was among the candidates. She’d just been to Montenegro and was disappointed. “I expected more mustaches,” she said. “Mustaches and fedoras.”
    I had the feeling that she’d overromanticized the idea of living elsewhere, but I didn’t tell her this. We stepped through the castle museum, so many old things behind new glass. She complained that she was losing friends to substances and babies, that she was fighting, over the phone, with everyone she knew in the U.S. She was convinced she was right each time, but still, she wanted to know if she seemed insane. I told her she was perfect.
    “I’m always on your side,” I said.
    “Fine. You stay close, and together we’ll systematically remove all the crazies from my life.”
    The car didn’t have a CD player but Erin had an adapter that connected her portable disc player to the tape deck. While she drove us down the hill and into the town, I hooked everything up, only to find that the wires wouldn’t stay connected without some kind of adhesive.
    “Hold on,” she said.
    She stopped the car at a small market on the back end of the castle and ran in. It was the first time we’d been apart since the airport, and it was too soon. I put my hand on the leather where she’d been sitting. I wanted it to be warmer.
    She jogged back to the car grinning like she’d stolen something The door opened, rain and wind scrambled in loudly, and she came inside. The door closed behind her with a clump.
    “Guess what I just bought?” she asked.
    I guessed: “Tape.”
    “Riiiiight…” She was twirling her index finger in the air, pulling more words from my mouth, like winding a yo-yo. It drove me half-mad with desire.
    “Special tape?” I ventured, wanting to take her face and squeeze it and lick it.
    “Not just tape. Scotch tape.”
    “Right.”
    “Get it,
Scotch
tape?”
    “Oh.”
    The rain pattered.
    She pulled it out of the white paper bag with a flourish. I widened my eyes, trying to seem impressed.
    The tape was yellowed, an amber sort of color. It looked like the tape we’d used in grade school, before they invented good tape.
    “It looks old,” I said.
    “No, no, this is the best. They invented it, these people! Probably up there, in that castle. A bunch of monks, took them centuries.” She was desperately trying to get some tape from the roll but it wasn’t attached to any standard tape dispensing device. I wanted to help but knew she’d ask me if she felt she needed it. That was the rule.
    In a few seconds she was done assembling, wrapping the tape around the adapter and the walkman. But the tape wasn’t sticking. It fell off immediately. It was like paper. It was not tape. It had no adhesive qualities whatsoever.
    I laughed and then stopped. She was angry. She peeled off another strip and tested its stickiness against her fingers.
    “It’s not even sticky,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”
    She started the car and pulled out.
    “This is
Scotch tape
, right?” she said. “God
damn
it.”
    Up through the highlands at dusk. Throughout the electric-green hills were great white stones flung like teeth.
    “I see this and I think glory,” I said to Erin, loving the sound of the word
glory
, and hoping it would impress her in some way. I was driving now, and soon realized that driving on the wrong side wasn’t very difficult.
    “I’d love to live