I took a deep breath and reached for the chore wheel. I looked at the poem, the poem written in Ros’s handwriting, handwriting that I loved so much I’d copied it, adding roofs to my a’s, a habit that stuck, so that even when Ros stopped writing their a’s that way, I kept on, little traces of them on everything I wrote. I read:

Love Song for a Copepod

For years, the tops of these trees were thought to be a desert.

Nothing grew. Nothing lived. Up that high—how could there be life?

Eventually someone climbed.

And what she found was lush gardens of ferns, and moss growing a foot thick on branches, and furred flying squirrels that didn’t know how to be afraid of people. A wandering salamander—no lungs, no gills. Up there, a tree makes her own water, dense enough that creatures breathe through their skin.

In certain basal hollows, there are copepods: tiny, near-invisible shrimp meant to live only in the ocean. Impossible. And yet—

They’re here. I cup one in the palm of my hand.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, and as I said it, the tiny part of me that still hoped this poem was for me just up and died. This poem wasn’t for me. I didn’t even get it, this love poem that was supposed to move someone—move guess who—into falling in love with Ros. I couldn’t quite parse what it was trying to say, and I was sort of hung up on the copepod part—how could “tiny, near-invisible shrimp” be romantic? But I guess that’s why it wasn’t meant for me.

“So you like it,” said Ros, looking relieved.

“It’s different from what you usually write,” I said. Ros was a good writer, though normally, their poems made me laugh. They’d written one I particularly enjoyed about how bad the month of February was: “O February, Thou Deepest Pit of Suck…”

“You sound nervous,” I said.

“Well, I don’t usually write love poems,” said Ros.

“Right,” I said again, and I felt regret over having read it in the first place.

“Do you think she’ll like it?”

“She,” I repeated, playing dumb. I wanted Ros to say her name.

“Jess,” said Ros. “It’s for her. Well. It’s about her.”

Of course it was for her. My heart sank. I felt like Ros and I were on two separate conveyor belts, pushing us toward some inevitable future that wasn’t shared, and what I wanted to do was make mine run backward, to get us back to the point in time when we’d been on the same one.

“I know you don’t like her,” Ros said.