These days I am surprised to see my own face when I look in the mirror, so much time do I spend looking at Franny’s. We wear each other’s clothes and read each other’s books by day, she is my early morning and late night phone call, the person I reach for in my sleep. She tells me stories of kissing the movie star, and as she tells me she reaches out for me to draw me in to her, showing me how he held her, how he touched her. “But he snores, and you don’t make any noise in your sleep,” she says, and my head is on her heart, on the beating softness of her heart and her breast.

We call this autumn the autumn of our bravery. This is New York we live in, where we link arms and synch steps, when we plan to walk across every bridge in the city by the end of the school year.

The movie star leaves a crumpled theater ticket in her bed, which she shows me when I see her in the morning. Months later, for my birthday, she buys me tickets to the same Broadway show, which she likes, even though someone throws up in it. I like it because I discovered last summer that there are plays written after the year 1600, which my family never told me.

We call this autumn the autumn of our bravery. This is New York we live in, where we link arms and synch steps, when we plan to walk across every bridge in the city by the end of the school year. This is us dancing with our shadows overlapping, so we look like one body with four arms. Our shadows come together and rip apart fluidly, lengthening with the afternoon, disappearing behind trees and buildings as we walk across the avenues of New York. Sometimes we make men fall in love with us just for the fun of it, and then we leave them wondering as we walk away, singing, arms around each other’s waists.

This is the small apartment in Brooklyn I live in, where the day is pure light and our skin feels like the night blooming jasmine back home in Santa Barbara when we touch it with our eyes closed. When it is warm, we drink tea on the fire escape and glance at all of life as it passes below us, clear to the East River and the spires of Manhattan, an old-fashioned city in our modern time. We sit on my fire escape and make plans for our lives, which are about to start in a few months. Mostly this means we sit and try to conceive of making ourselves look more Victorian than ever.

We sit on my fire escape and make plans for our lives, which are about to start in a few months.

The apartment is a shingled owl house of improvised charm, full of found objects used for propping doors and decorating stolen end tables. It is a haven of improvised warmth in the pit of winter, with tiny heaters in corners that take next to no time to heat the small spaces they are responsible for, to dry the laundry that hangs on the backs of chairs snatched from cafes around the neighborhood. Its kitchen is a place of improvised cooking, with pots just large enough to coat with olive oil and fill with the things that are in season, to bake apple bread and lavender cake, although the stove only has two knobs left on it and the floor creaks like a frustrated child. It is a place also, as many have remarked, that despite sweeping and bleaching and scouring, betrays its unrenovated state when you look behind furniture at handy man jobs on the floorboards, and find the bathroom by going back out to the landing from which you came and opening a hidden door, where the toilet and gray bathtub are in a long corridor.

We match completely, my best friend and I, and in a perfect world we would have been born two halves of the same thing and would know all the same people. Even though it is day we wear white night gowns, cotton to our knees, monogrammed with our initials in cornflower blue script. We wear black leggings and wool socks and our matching necklaces, made from two old keys we found in an antique store in the East Village on the most perfect Saturday that anyone ever had. Franny’s Ouija board says our keys date from 1845 and belonged to a Ukranian bakery girl. “Pegs Apron,” it spelled out, in darting certainty. It told her she could trust the movie star the night we asked it, the warm night that had breath like a person. Conditions good, it said, and spelled his name, his movie star name. I don’t believe in the Ouija board, I tell her, and she says that’s why it doesn’t work when she plays with me. With her other friends it works, but the spirits know that I believe in about a hundred things before I believe in them telling us our futures.

“Tell me about home,” Franny says, because she doesn’t know where hers is, and looks for it in me.

“Everywhere you look there are fruit trees and mountains. There are seasons of light, intense in the summer and muted in the winter,” I begin.

“Tell me about us,” she says. I smell her, all around me, and it makes me heady, and I want to run my fingers through the straight ropes of her hair. I do.

Here’s the story I tell her, made of truth and fancy.

In the creaky kitchen of my apartment, you and I were looking at a cookbook. My mother was there too, throwing things in a large pot and adding spices to flavor. The cookbook fell open to a familiar cake recipe and the pages were stained with old fingerprints and marked with my notes. We were baking the cake as a surprise for my father, and it was the first time you were going to meet him.

“Flour,” I read aloud. You handed it to me.

“Sugar,” you said, and we carefully measured it out.

“Music,” I said, and though the recipe was old, I had never realized it called for music.

“How do you add music to a cake?” I asked my mother.

“Write down the names of songs and run your fingers over the words,” she said distractedly.

I turned to you. “I think my father would like Bach in his cake best of all.”

“Bach,” you wrote at the top of the paper in thick black script. “Bach what?”

Before the cake was finished I woke up, but I’m certain my father would have loved a cake with cello suites in it, and I would have too.

“Cello suites,” I told you. “I think the cello would add some weight to this cake.”

“G major,” you wrote, which seemed extraordinary. I didn’t think you knew the cello suites, and was pleased you did.

“Cello will bring out the flavor,” you said. What you were really saying was, I know the things you think before you think them.

We wrote down the six suites and my mother said, “Run your fingers over the words.” We did, and the ink turned to powder. Just enough really, for the two tablespoons we needed. We added it to the dry ingredients and the three of us sang a song with words we all knew. I spun on the wood floor in my socks.

“Next time we’ll put in banjo music for you,” I told you, and kissed your cheek.

You cleaned out the batter with your finger. There was raw egg in the recipe, but it didn’t seem to bother you this one time. It made me think something of me was rubbing off on you.

Before the cake was finished I woke up, but I’m certain my father would have loved a cake with cello suites in it, and I would have too.

Franny tells me she would never eat batter with raw egg in it, and also that she wishes she could put the story I told her in a jar and wear it on the inside of her jacket so that it always bangs against her chest. I wish I could do that with her. Our voices weave, and so do our legs, and our fingers, and our hair falls all around our shoulders in every color of brown and gold.

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.

“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.

“Want to do a walk by of his apartment?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say.

We walk by and look in the third floor window, where the lights are on and you can see nothing but bookcases lining the walls. The building is a small brownstone, as though anyone could live there if they wanted to enough. Downstairs, an ordinary hairdresser in an ordinary building could be any hairdresser on any Friday night. She cuts a woman’s wet hair and another woman sits with a magazine, silent behind the glass. None of them looks very concerned with the fact that there are no stars in the sky above New York City, or that certain things cannot ever be undone. An egg cannot be uncracked, for instance, and although a book can be forgotten, it can never be unread. Likewise, I can never go back to the time before I stood on this street with Franny. We are already here, minute-phantoms on this winter weekend night, looking in dark windows where a movie star is not. Don’t you realize, I want to shout, don’t you realize that there’s a whole world out here that we can never see, not all at once? How can we bear all the things we cannot see?

…I can never go back to the time before I stood on this street with Franny. We are already here, minute-phantoms on this winter weekend night, looking in dark windows where a movie star is not.

“That’s his living room,” Franny says. “Those are his bookcases. That spiral staircase goes to his room.” The lights are off, and I feel one singular feeling. It feels like longing, which pushes me to take her hand, because the room is dark where he begged her to sleep with him, where he asked if he could just talk about it with her, just think about it. There is still so much make believe, so much to imagine. There is that feeling of longing for something far away, so far away.

How ridiculous it strikes me to think of someone kissing Franny, of some man thinking she would sleep with him — he could not really believe this. Scaffolding shields us, and with my fingers wrapped around it, I feel not content, not discontent. We shuffle in the New York cold, in the cold night air, when all of life rushes around us as we look for a sign of breath in that window.

“I feel creepy,” Franny says. “This goes in the vault.”

“I won’t tell a soul,” I say. “But I don’t believe he really exists. It’s okay. I don’t blame you. Sometimes I need to make up an imaginary boy too, someone imposing who uses a leaf as a bookmarks and forgets why he has a pocket full of stones. But I’ve never made up a movie star.”

“He has no idea how to be a person,” she tells me, still looking up to the dark fourth floor, and in the blue night air the snow begins to fall. Somewhere, quite far away, snow falls down and greets the ground with silence as it lands. Looking up at the dark window feels as though someone has just told us a burdening secret, and Franny reaches out her arms, to hold close the brownstone across the street, maybe the street itself, or the entire island of Manhattan, the island that feels like our whole world just now.

“Do you think he can see us?” she asks.

“Not unless he’s looking out his dark window to the street,” I tell her.

“He’s shooting this week anyway, plus I think he’s starting to forget I exist,” she says.

Arm in arm, we walk down the street like a two-headed creature, and duck into the dirty warmth of the city’s subway. On the platform a man plays the pot lids, and I can’t decide whether it makes me want to laugh or cry more.

“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.