Lark takes the photos out of Oli’s hand and turns them around so he can look at them. “Thanks,” he says. “I forgot.”


    Oli waves away his thanks. “It looks like we were just getting to the fun bit. A party, and everything.”


    Lark shakes his head at this idea. “Sure,” he says. “Sure.”


    Oli, tired, allows himself an uncharitable thought: Lark holds his misery too close. He has wrapped himself so tightly in regrets he has smothered more joyful memories.


    Why did Lark take the photos, Oli wonders, if there wasn’t something he wanted to remember. He was willing to concede that some milestones were bittersweet, but Lark’s sad response to party lights strikes him as excessively morose.


    Lark turns to the next picture, though, and closes his lips on the ghost of a smile.


    “What?” Oli asks.


    Lark shrugs. “Just remembering. Are you, like, a spiritual person?”


    “Um, no.” Oli, in fact, tires quickly of anything other than a scientific position. He finds himself, sometimes suddenly, unable to be polite when anyone asks him about his star sign. He has felt the pull of the stars; mystification, he thinks, cheapens the deeper mysteries of the universe.


    “Okay, well, me neither. But Dana, who I was living with in Portland, got into some kind of crystal magic? I don’t know. She started hanging rocks in our windows and giving us healing stones and stuff.”


    Oli makes a face at that.


    “It was sweet, really.” Lark remembers Dana pressing a hunk of amethyst into his hands when he was opening acceptance letters. For anxiety, she told him. He didn’t think the stone helped, but having someone with him—watching and hoping with him—had soothed him.


    “I guess,” Oli concedes. “That kind of thing just seems a bit—I don’t know. Like it takes advantage of how unhappy people can be.”


    Lark agrees with that. Dana had been brutally practical before they went to Portland. Months in that cramped apartment, trapped with Lark and Max, worried about money and her future, had her looking for hope anywhere she could find it. Lark wonders what she’s like now: if she’s reordered her life, applied new rules of logic, if she still reads her horoscope.


    “What can you do with crystals, you know?” Oli says. “It’s something to focus on while your life goes on without you.”Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    Lark frowns at the bluntness of Oli’s opinion, says only, “I guess. Sometimes it’s good to have the distraction.”


    “Sorry,” Oli says. “I’m tired.”


    Lark nods and drifts back to the living room, goes to sit on the sofa. The TV is still on, but The Lord of the Rings has paused. The first disc was played out: change to continue.


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