“I’ll tell you what I want,” I said. “I want the three of us—you, me, and Ros—to go live in a yurt, and fill it with plants, and have it be like My Side of the Mountain, or like The Boxcar Children, and where we, like, toast tangerine slices on a sunny tree branch and no one bothers us, except there’s also, like, a really good ice cream place down the street that’s never crowded and always open.”

“So you want this,” Touch said, looking around the Lily Pad. “You want real life, but magic.”

“I… is that from something?”

“Blanche DuBois says something similar,” Touch said. “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

“Oh, Jesus. I don’t want to be Blanche DuBois!”

“Dude, you are not Blanche DuBois. Blanche DuBois wouldn’t be caught dead in overalls, and she sure as hell would not be a fan of Power Jam.”

He cut into his egg, and the yellow broke over the toast like water over a dam.

“We can’t live in the same place forever,” he said.

“Maybe not.”

“You’d get tired of toasted tangerine.”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“Do you want me to fry you the last egg?”

“Yes, please. I’m so hungry.”

He laughed and started to move about the kitchen. He had a dish towel slung over his shoulder, an expression of mild concentration on his face. His red hair caught the light, turning different shades of copper and auburn; his freckles had deepened since the start of summer. He cracked pepper over the egg, which sizzled in the pan, whistling as he did so. He seemed somehow so confident and grown-up to me: I could see him preparing this same meal for his kids twenty years from now.

“One egg coming up,” he said.

“In Paris, I believe that’s called an œuf.”

“Mais oui,” he said.

We spoke in French for a while—or I spoke in French and Touchstone shouted certain vocabulary words back at me—and when I finally ran out of vocabulary, we moved to French accents. The egg tasted good: buttery, with golden frilly edges and just the right amount of salt and a single twist of pepper. If I didn’t think about it too hard, I hardly noticed it was the heel of the bread.

And then, in the few days after Into the Woods closed and The Trojan Women opened, Oliver Teller asked me out.

That’s right. The extremely hot star of Power Jam asked me out. Not to do anything fancy, just go on a hike—but still. A date with a celebrity: There was a bucket-list item I could check off.

But here was the real kicker: I thought about saying no.