“He’s making my life worse, not better,” Franny finally decides for us both.

I laugh and am grateful. “I have been a lot of places in the world, but the most surreal thing I have ever seen is the New York City Subway on Halloween night,” I tell her. “Doesn’t that sound like a line from a story?”

“Yes, and so does, ‘She passed raspberries to him under the table.’ I’m going to use it in my next story.” I have a chapter due on Monday and two essays to read, but all I want to do is draw designs of chandeliers we can make for our new apartment next year, wherever we run away to, an apartment near a lake where the sun shines high and warm through clean windows, where we can walk barefoot in white dresses and make our lives into works of art. It is a thought, an image that runs, not from room to room, but from a room to the whole wide outside, where the world catches it, an outside place where there is weather.

That was a week before the movie star stopped writing back to us, before we stopped believing in everything all over, brand new, as though children for the first time.

I spend that night in the same bed as Franny, and every night for the next three days, and we never separate, even in our sleep. She only has one nightmare while I’m there, and only cries once, hard, until her face feels full and she can only breathe when I hold her against my body and she matches her hiccupy breaths to mine, steady and sleepy.

2:15 am, “Had emotional meltdown over the ritual log.” Distress level, 9.

“Why would someone do that to a child?” she cries out, in salty sobs, and I know what she is really crying about. I hold her gently, the way I used to hold sand dollars when I was little, pressed against me so I didn’t drop them on the sand.

“Was your nightmare about your father?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says, “but it wasn’t a really bad one. I woke up before it got really bad.”

She cries that she feels crazy, and counts the things she cannot do. I count the things she can do now that she couldn’t do before. “You could never fly to California before, or go to grad school.”

“But everything in the ritual log,” she gasps out. “All those germs, everywhere, all the time.”

“What made you think of it?” I ask her.

“The movie star,” she says.

“What about him?”

“The way he fell asleep on top of me when I was at his apartment. The way he breathed heavily. And the way he mumbled. I couldn’t understand any of the things he was saying to me.” She must have dreamed of him too; she must dream of him more often than she admits. I wonder if in her dreams, he and I know each other; what matters to me just then is that she breathes evenly, like a machine, and who I am to her after she falls asleep.

That was a week before the movie star stopped writing back to us, before we stopped believing in everything all over, brand new, as though children for the first time. Though he forgot about us days ago, Franny keeps the crumpled theater ticket that fell from his pocket. A week passes by us, two. We do not hear from him. Perhaps he is already home for Christmas, or in Hollywood filming. By day, then by night, we sink into each other, struggling to find each other’s warm bodies in the cold room. This is how I would hold you if I loved you, I wanted to tell her. This is how it would feel for me to love someone in the world. It wouldn’t be the first time, and please God, don’t let it be the last.

And so in the morning I awake in the dark, collect my things, and leave Franny a note to make her laugh, a note from me and the movie star. It is what we would want him to say if he were the person we wanted him to be: You can wash my hair for me and I’ll tell you about my crazy nights sleeping in sandboxes and maybe at the end you can hold me close until I learn how to be a person.