Devin, a black teenage girl, rides a crowded bus to work in the morning turning to social media to distract herself from the anxiety of being surrounded by so many people. On her phone, she gets a recommendation to send a friend request to Fatima, whose picture makes Devin’s heart race. She keeps scrolling and triggers an ad which advertises a service promises "detox for the mind". At work, Devin sits through several boring meetings and thinks about whether she should spend the night out with her friends. The fact that Fatima will be there makes her nervous.

Devin arrives at the restaurant where she has planned to meet her friends. As she waits, she opens social media and sees the same ad from earlier about mind-clearing services. Having waited past the group’s scheduled meeting time without seeing her friends, she carefully formulates a text to one of them asking if she’d gotten the meeting time wrong. Her friend comes to get her, saying that the rest of the group had been waiting in the back. When Devin sees Fatima, she remembers the awkward joke she told when they first met, which may have been offensive, which would explain why Fatima has not talked to her much since then. Devin observes as her friends, who all work in education, talk about their jobs. She notices the feelings that some of her friends have for each other.

As they eat, the conversation topic turns to the mental agency ads that all of them have been seeing on social media. They decide to go to one of the local offices after the meal and try out the service. There, Devin deletes three memories: one in which she makes an awkward joke about 4/20 to an older, white coworker; one in which she tells the possible offensive joke to Fatima at their first meeting, and another which is not shown to the reader. Without that memory of Fatima, Devin is able to talk to her more confidently, and she offers to take a bus with Fatima towards her house. Fatima and Devin talk about how they both remember deleting something from the first time they met. Their conversation ends on an upbeat note with hints of romantic tension, as Devin tries to initiate handholding.