Vi Liu is 24, half-Taiwanese, dumped by her boyfriend, dropped out of school without telling her parents, and working the front desk at a motel in the Indiana college town she grew up in. She doesn’t even have the energy to be a hot mess—she’s lukewarm-turning-cold one. Outside a bar one night, she finds a beige gelatinous thing on the ground with eyes and a mouth. She takes it home. It eats. It breathes. It learns. So she starts shaping it — literally, with her hands — into a white guy assembled out of movie stars, and calls him Bob. For a while, it works. She has somebody to take care of, somebody the world approves of, somebody with no history to argue over. Then Bob gets a personality of his own and walks out the door, and the whole deal stops being hers to run.