“I think I just met the happiest person in the world!”

She wrote this declaration quietly in her journal, but even now her heart fluttered and sank in her chest at the thought of him.

“How could anyone be so perfectly happy,” she scratched, “when you told me that everyone has got a bad side? I don’t understand. Help me understand?”

It’s not like her mom would ever even read this. It just felt nice to have someone potential lying on the other side of the page.

Maybe it’d be some years later, when they were both packing her boxes for college that her mom would gently snatch the notebook and start flipping through. And when she arrived at the precise page Lily wrote on now, maybe she’d flip out. That was her normal reaction.

Pancake batter spilling halfway across the kitchen. New phone slipping down a toilet after only two weeks. Forgetting her homework, at home.

Actually, when Lily thought about it, she couldn’t remember a time when her mom had a calm, rational reaction to whatever the incident of the day was.

“Well, maybe I should start writing in some sort of code,” Lily wrote before slipping the journal into the night dresser, flipping the light off, and turning over on her side so that all she could see was the gaping abyss of her room.

“Goodnight, mom.”