I snap the shot, right before her fork crashes down, shattering dinosaur utopia. “Got it.”

“So,” she says around a bite. “Wanna tell me what’s up your butt?”

I post the picture to Instagram with the caption Might doodle this later. It would be really fucking cute on a card, minus the dinosaur chicken nuggets. I could definitely hide a solo pleasure pose in the salad.

“BeeBee.”

I drop my phone. “What’s up my butt? The burden of existence? The cruel truth that to stay open, a business must be patronized by customers?” I plunge my dino nugget in a nosedive, straight to its pool of ketchup doom. “I had a long day at work. Too much peopling.”

She shakes her head, spearing another bite of salad. “You really aren’t made for customer service.”

“Yeah, well, that’s true. But if I stop working the desk at the Edgy Envelope, I’d have to go back to painting to make up for lost wages. And seeing as I can’t paint to save my life these days, I’m kind of stuck.”

Jules nudges my foot beneath the island. “It’ll pass. Creative block happens to every artist.”

Guilt hits me unexpectedly hard. It always does when she’s being nice and I’m reminded that neither of my sisters knows the full story, that it’s much more than creative block I’m weathering. It’s the residue of a shitty relationship whose lingering grime I haven’t quite psychologically cleared in order to be able to paint again.

Avoiding her eyes, I tell her, “I can barely even draw anything original the past few weeks. It’s like my brain’s just wiped clean of ideas. My greatest inspiration lately has been this chicken nugget salad.”

“Maybe this date on Saturday, having a little romance, will kick your creative engine back into gear.”

I snap a carrot between my teeth. “We are not talking about that.”

“Have you been texting?” she asks, ignoring me entirely.

I pick up my T. rex nugget, stomp it across the table, and bash her diplodocus until its head falls off.

“Rude!” Jules flies her pterodactyl to my plate and smashes my triceratops.

“That one’s my favorite, you butthead!”

She gestures to her decapitated nugget. “Excuse me. Did you take your hypocritical pill today?”

I dip a carrot in ranch and use it to paint her cheek buttermilk white.

Jules gasps. Then she fishes out a halved cherry tomato from her salad and wedges it onto my nose. “So there, Rudolph!” she crows.

“Juliet!” I screech. “I hate tomatoes!”

We’re on the verge of a full-on food fight when our apartment’s buzzer cuts through the air.

“I’ll get it,” she says, springing up while wiping her cheek clean with her napkin. I launch another carrot at her and miss by a mile as she presses the intercom button. “Hello?”

“Juliet?”