“Poor boy,” I said back, looking across at the palisades. “He doesn’t even know how to be a person. We should teach him. We can start with how to love a girl.”

I give her plenty of ideas for the letters and messages we write him, of the things she will talk about in the late night hours they go to each other’s apartments to kiss and fall asleep, and then when she leaves or she makes him leave, she calls me at five in the morning and wakes me so we can laugh at him and the way that he is a movie star. We laugh at his dirty hair and the way he snores. We laugh that he doesn’t know how to have a conversation, that he tells a story until it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, a shape like a tree with too many branches, and then he says to her, “Say something. I like your voice, say something.” And she does. She tells him about us. It never occurs to me that he really exists.

We laugh that he doesn’t know how to have a conversation, that he tells a story until it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, a shape like a tree with too many branches…

The first time he saw her he must have registered her immediately. Her feline face is impossible not to notice, as is her soft voice and the way she takes up space, so much, so little, and resides in her own features with a discomfort and a charm. And still. One day she finally told me she loved the way he wrote on his hand and looked at her sideways. So I told her to talk to him, and what to say, and I gave her my clothes and my red beret so that he said she looked French.

“What’s you favorite place you ever slept that wasn’t a bed?” she asked him, like I told her to.

“A sandbox at an elementary school, after wandering the night drunk in high school,” he said. It seemed impossible to me that two girls can go everywhere together, and laugh at all the same things and wear each other’s clothes and have the same size body. And yet one of them has all the luck. One of them has a movie star who begs her to sleep with him, who says he’s wanted to for a year, and he doesn’t even know her best friend is home asleep.

We planned to run away together once graduate school ended in May, although her idea of the adventure was getting there, and mine began when we reached our destination. I wanted to be a lighthouse keeper, just the two of us locked in a tower, and she wanted to be a cattle wrangler somewhere where the light rusted orange in the evenings.

“What about your movie star?” I asked her.

“He’ll still be in the movies, and he can come visit and bring us stories from Hollywood. Besides, he’s not my movie star, he’s our movie star. We’ll be rich then, like real people. When I’m rich I’m going to have every different length of bloomers.”

I’d follow you anywhere, and if you went nowhere I’d go nowhere too, just so at the end of the night I could say goodnight and not goodbye…

“I just want to be old fashioned,” I told Franny.

“Promise you won’t change your mind and not want to run away with me next year?”

“I promise,” I said. “I’d follow you anywhere, and if you went nowhere I’d go nowhere too, just so at the end of the night I could say goodnight and not goodbye.”

And then, suddenly one day, it is winter. It is Friday night and we meet downtown, outside on a corner, where I hate to be on Friday nights. My breath quickens in panic, but Franny’s does too, just to match mine, and she wraps around me and tells me gently, “Okay, It will be okay.”

She is so soft that when she lets go, it feels like a small abandonment.

Together we buy two tomatoes for dinner, and we search the Westside Market bin until we find two perfect ones on the same branch, two red ones that don’t give in to a squeeze.