10 This garment was popularized in Spain and worn in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. I actually knew this word, even though I’d temporarily blanked on it, blinded by/focused as I was on Oliver Teller’s bare chest.

11 Yes. Oils. I said this.

LOVE SONG FOR A COPEPOD,
or My Mom’s Take on My Tennis Coach

Once again, I was excited to get home to the Lily Pad to tell Ros and Touch about my brush with fame.

I mean—he’d touched me on the cheek! There had been a lingering glance! Come on!

I was happy to have something newsy to report. I liked my job, but honestly, the ins and outs of what I did every day were not always the most interesting. I painted over black scuffs in shoes. I restrung pearls on a broken necklace. Meanwhile, both my friends seemed to be having romantic luck outside the Lily Pad, while I was being left behind.

But this—this afternoon with Oliver Teller—this was news.

Unfortunately, no one was there when I got home. I beat back my creeping feeling that this was the new normal—that my Veggie Burger Prophecy was coming true—and tried to look on the bright side. Maybe it’d be nice to have the place to myself. A Tale of Two Cities, my summer reading, was practically rotting from where I’d left it in my suitcase, as were the other books I’d bought at the bookstore on our first day in town. But as I contemplated reading, I took one half look around the Lily Pad and was suddenly struck by the mess of the place. There were errant cans of seltzer everywhere, the half-finished bag of sour candy on the coffee table—definitely Touch and Ros’s handiwork. Shoes had piled up in random places; laundry hung on the line that I hadn’t quite gotten to putting away. When we’d arrived, the space had felt snug, but now it felt cramped, overtaken by the onslaught of our stuff. I was suddenly distressed: Had I been the only one following the chore wheel? We’d been here, what, two weeks? How did the place already look this bad?

I set about gathering the seltzer cans, as well as the loitering cereal bowls and yogurt and granola dishes (even I was contributing to the mess). I set them onto the small island counter, a staging area before I would move them to the recycling or the dishwasher, and that was when I saw it.

A poem.

Ros had written a poem.

They’d written a poem on the back of the chore wheel, but okay, they’d written a poem.