The Dad Next Door

She blushes, and St. Clair bounds inside the box office and wrestles her into a hug. “Miiiiiiiiine!” he says. The couple buying tickets from me eyes him warily.

“Cut it out.” Anna pushes him off, laughing. “You’ll get fired. And then I’ll have to support your sorry arse for the rest of our lives.”

Life isn’t about what you get, it’s about what you DO with what you get.”

The one. He tastes salty like sea fog. But he tastes sweet, too, like . . .
“Cherries,” he says.
Yes. Wait. Was I talking out loud?
“You taste like cherries. Your hair smells like cherries. You’ve always smelled like cherries to me.”

hand in hand with the boy who gave me the moon and the stars.

A person can be sad and happy at the same time.

tion.”
“You can’t avoid your problems forever.”

My next one will be much smaller, a single layer, with a thin silk that will allow me to feel everything

And if I’m the stars, Cricket Bell is entire galaxies

“I know you aren’t perfect. But it’s a person’s imperfections that make them perfect for someone else.”

When he’d look out his window at night, he would start with one. One star. And the boy would make a wish on it, and the wish would be her name.
“At the sound of her name, a second star would appear. And then he’d wish her name again, and the stars would double into four. And four became eight, and eight became sixteen, and so on, in the greatest mathematical equation the universe had ever seen. And by the time an hour had passed, the sky would be filled with so many stars that it would wake his neighbors. People wondered who’d turned on the floodlights.
“The boy did. By thinking about the girl.”