I nod and begin to ring him up. Am I really going to sell the thing that Celia loves? If the roles were reversed, she wouldn’t let the terrarium go. She would make up an elaborate excuse about how it wasn’t actually for sale, move it to the side, persuade him to buy a different thing.

I look across the store at Jess, my colleague. Why am I always listening to Celia?

“That’s sixty-five even,” I say, and swipe the man’s credit card with a twinge of guilt.

I watch him go. I’m slightly horrified at how easy it is, to sell the thing my friend loves. Celia is a much better friend than I am, no doubt about that. Though lately I’ve been wondering if there’s such a thing as too good a friend. Or if maybe there’s another reason Celia told me not to share the poem. If Celia’s kindness isn’t just about friendship, but something more, something I can’t give her.

Jess is rummaging around in the freezer behind me.

“How are we on orchids?” she asks.

Selling the terrarium was easy. You know what else is easy?

Rushing.

“I wrote a poem about you,” I say.

“Of course you did,” says Jess, into the freezer.

Then she turns and does a strange thing. With two fingers and her thumb, she plucks at my chain, a liquid gold thing I always wear, sleep in, shower in, swim in. No one has ever touched my chain this way. I feel like an instrument, and she is the only one who knows how to play.

Later, when darkness falls, when we are exhausted from kissing, rushed, intense kisses in Jess’s bedroom while her mom putters around downstairs, oblivious, I unfasten the chain from my neck and drop it in the outstretched palm of Jess’s hand.

“I miss you already,” Jess says, and she fastens the chain around her own neck.

I can’t believe I’ve met someone like this: someone who knows that rushing is the best part.

AVIAN DEMISE,
or Bruised Tailbones and Lost Sunglasses

The day that Into the Woods opened, a bird flew into the picture window at the Lily Pad.

It went like this: I was up early, was eating the (dregs) of (my) granola (that Touchstone had basically finished), enjoying what Phoebe assured me would be my last speck of free time. There were still two months of summer left, but the theater season was kicking into overdrive, and there was a lot to do in the costume shop. The next few weeks promised late nights of steaming garments and reaffixing rhinestones to Cinderella’s slippers. As I ate, I lost myself in the view out the picture window: the sparkling river, the sweep of the far bank. The tent we’d noticed our first week was gone now, and the view was pure and unobstructed.