When we are so full of each other, we reach for her phone and write a message to the movie star, sure that he will think we are as funny as we think we are. We were both prescribed the same medication this autumn, for an anxiety problem Franny has always had, and one I feel certain I must have too if she does. Franny has to keep a ritual log so she can keep track of how many times she washes her hands, how many unnecessary showers she takes every day. 7:10 pm, “Wouldn’t eat day-old cheese,” she writes. Distress level, 5. 2:30 am, “Thought something happened to my best friend.” Distress level, 6. 4:10 am, “Thought my best friend was dead.” Distress level, 8. The autumn of our bravery we learn to do new things, brave things, and make lists of which of our fears are real and which are false. We learn we can write to a movie star and he always writes back to us. I can, with a few deep breaths, go into a crowd of people without crying and I have recently stopped counting my steps and avoiding odd numbers and stepped on the spidery eruption of cracks on the block outside my apartment. Franny bought a plane ticket to come visit me over Christmas in California. She hates flying because she can’t see the horizon.

How are you? The movie star asks us.

The autumn of our bravery we learn to do new things, brave things, and make lists of which of our fears are real and which are false. We learn we can write to a movie star and he always writes back…

Fine, we write back. Went to the mountains yesterday and spat pickles into the Hudson, then made up a song about it. You?

He doesn’t know he is writing to two girls, and two girls are writing back. We are telling him about yesterday, when we took an early morning train to upstate New York on the sunniest day we could remember. We are telling him about real life: on our left was the winking Hudson, with the sky lapping on its surface.

“How many things do you think are on the bottom of the river?” I asked Franny yesterday on the train. We were folded into each other in our seats, and people around us saw us with our penny loafers and our red lips and heard our laughter. Beside me, she sang a tune by Bob Dylan softly, to no one but me.

“I’ll bet you there’s a whole world down there, just like this one,” she said. “A whole world that’s a secret from all of us.

Her dry hands were split at their seams but I wanted to hold them, and push the softness of mine into hers.

“I don’t believe in celebrities,” I told her.

“I don’t believe the boy I kiss is the boy in movies,” she tells me. “He looks way better in movies. In real life he has a crazy eyebrow and his hair goes everywhere, all the time.”

“I don’t believe in Africa either,” I tell her. “I know celebrities and Africa both take up space in the world, but I just think they’re too far away to really be there.”

On the dock at Beacon we unwrapped our city sandwiches and ate them out of wrinkled paper skins.

“You know what I was thinking?” Franny asked me. “Once you’re famous you can’t ever decide you don’t want to be any more. You just are, forever.”

My feet were over the edge and it made me dizzy. “He can’t just come take the train into the mountains and sit on the dock of the Hudson and eat sandwiches,” I told her.

“I know, I know. It’s so tragic.”

In the bag were three small depressing pickles. “Those are such orphan pickles,” I said. I put one in my mouth and spat it into the Hudson.

“I want to just make up a song about it,” Franny said, and she began singing at full tilt.

“I don’t even know if I like him,” she said. “Mostly it’s just something you and I do together that’s funny.” What she meant was, even though it’s not your memory, I will share it with you.