Trick Mirror. Jia Tolentino

but we packed up in early summer. My boyfriend, who’d just finished grad school, needed to look for a job. In our little blue house in Michigan, I tinkered with some of my somber and ponderous short stories, unsure if this would feel different once I had formal guidance. I met up with my soon-to-be classmates and drank big sour beers and talked about Train Dreams and Lorrie Moore. Mostly I drifted around the lovely college town in what I accurately sensed would be my last stretch of true aimlessness for a long time. I walked my dog, looked at fireflies, went to yoga. One day, I was at a studio on the west side of town when a woman next to me queefed a thick, wet queef while sinking deep into Warrior II. I held back my laughter. She kept queefing, and kept queefing, and queefed and queefed and queefed. Over the course of the hour, as she continued queefing, my emotions went fractal—hysterical amusement and unplaceable panic combining and recombining in a kaleidoscopic blur. By the time we hit final resting pose, my heart was racing. I heard the queefing woman get up and leave the room. When she returned, I peeked an eye open to look at her. Clothed, disturbingly, in a different pair of pants, she lay down next to me and sighed, satisfied. Then, with a serene smile on her face, she queefed one more time.

      At that moment, my soul having been flayed by secondhand vaginal exhalation, I wanted nothing more than to jump out of my skin. I wanted to land in a new life where everything—bodies, ambitions—would work seamlessly and efficiently. Trapped in corpse pose, in a motionlessness that was supposed to be relaxing, I felt the specter of stagnation hovering over my existence. I missed, suddenly, the part of me that thrilled to sharpness, harshness, discipline. I had directed these instincts at my mind, kept them away from my body, but why? I needed a break from yoga, which had reminded me, just then, of how I’d felt all throughout Peace Corps—as if I didn’t know what I was doing, and never would.

      So, later that week, after exploring the limitless bounty of Groupon, I printed out a trial offer at a studio called Pure Barre. I was greeted there by an instructor who looked like Jessica Rabbit: ice-green eyes, a physically impossible hourglass figure, honey-colored hair rippling down past her waist. She ushered me into a cave-dark room full of sinewy women gathering mysterious red rubber props. The front wall was mirrored. The women stared at their reflections, stone-faced, preparing.

      Then class started, and it was an immediate state of emergency. Barre is a manic and ritualized activity, often set to deafening music and lighting changes; that day, I felt like a police car was doing donuts in my frontal cortex for fifty-five minutes straight. The rapid-fire series of positions and movements, dictated and enforced by the instructor, resembled what a ballerina might do if you concussed her and then made her snort caffeine pills—a fanatical, repetitive routine of arm gestures, leg lifts, and pelvic tilts. Jessica Rabbit strode through the middle of the room, commanding us coyly to “put on our highest heels,” meaning get on our tiptoes, and “tuck,” meaning hump the air. I fumbled with my props: the rubber ball, the latex strap.