“You didn’t ask,” he said, popping two pieces of gluten-free bread into the toaster and twisting the plastic on the bag. We were down to the heels, the part no one wanted to eat. “You lied to your parents about Ros.”

“Seemed easier than explaining about Jess,” I said.

“For them, or for you?”

I shrugged this off. “Would you seriously go all the way to Paris to be a clown?”

“Maybe,” he said. “The school is supposed to be good. You don’t have to be so judgmental about it.”

“I just… you hated French,” I said.

“Are you talking about sixth grade? I hated Madame Ernst, and I hated that stupid project we had to do.”

“Where we built the café? That was kind of fun, I thought.”

“Yeah, because you were good at French,” he said. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said. The egg sizzled. “Paris is far.”

“You knew I wanted to go to school out east. Paris really isn’t all that far away, especially if you’re on the East Coast, too.”

“They’re on different continents, and they speak a different language, and there’s a time change and…”

“Okay, okay, okay. You’ve made your point.” He flipped the egg, counted to ten. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“We’re going to be seniors. We have to apply somewhere. Have you thought about where you might want to go?”

“Of course I’ve thought about it,” I said. If you’d asked me then, I would’ve told you that I wanted to go east to college, to one of a dozen small liberal arts schools in New England. But the closer we got to becoming seniors, the more I started to dislike this plan. New England, like Paris, seemed impossibly far away and lonely without Touch and Ros. I knew the idea was that you made friends in college, but I felt that familiar stab of homesickness just thinking about it, and I didn’t have Ros there to make the whole thing better.

“My mom thinks I should take a year off,” I said.

“And do what?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She’s got some loony idea as always. Move to Peru. Become a goat herder.”

“I like Audrey’s goats a lot, actually.”

“Yeah, I mean, goats are great. But do I want to spend a year working with goats? I don’t know. I mean, how does one figure out what they want, in the existential sense?”

Touchstone considered this, slid his egg onto the toast. My stomach rumbled. I was hungry.

“I think you have to ask yourself what you’re drawn to,” he said finally. I hated how wise and sure of himself he sounded. I was supposed to be the one who had everything figured out.