“Today is the day that we learn to fly,” Fable announces to me as she hops onto one of the vinyl seats behind the counter, sticky from the summer heat. To anyone else, she might sound crazy. To me, she is just my Fable.

Ever since the first day of freshman year when she sat down at my lunch table and started telling me stories about the elves in her backyard, we’ve been one of those pairs the well-meaning but inattentive adults like to call “attached at the hip.” The sentiment is nice, but the truth is that we’re attached at the heart.

I set down the plate of eggs and hash browns in front of a man clearly not from around here. His hair is too slicked back and his watch looks too fancy for this town, where the nicest thing anyone owns is a pair of shiny church shoes. The second he nods thanks, I forget all about him.

“Zdrasti, Fae—Hello, Fae,” I start, causing my rosy-cheeked friend to smile because of the nickname’s connection to the supernatural and because I greeted her in my native Bulgarian, “humans can’t fly. Unless you mean in a plane, but neither of us have ever been in one of those.”

But I should have known better than to drop such a blatant bucket of doubt in front of my Fae. Her mouth drops into a frown, but her eyes remain bright. Then she’s smiling again, obviously ignoring my previous comment.

“You get off in ten, right?” she asks while glancing at the big brass-rimmed clock above the diner’s door. It’s the same one the owners hung on the wall when they opened the place eons before I was born. Time has taken a toll on its keeper, so now it is perpetually seventeen minutes slow. Everyone in town has learned to adjust.

I nod in response. “Sweet,” Fable remarks with a beam, and plops her messenger bag onto the counter.

Exactly ten minutes later, after I’ve changed out of my uniform in the stuffy break room and shoved my black apron into the locker, I swing open the door that takes me from behind the counter into the world. Fae is concentrating on something in her hands, her lips pressed together as she squints at it. Her curls act as a gentle but impenetrable curtain around her face. Once she notices I’m out she swivels the chair around and holds up her hand. In it is a bracelet made of green string with white and yellow beads twisting together into daisies.

“What do you think?” She holds the bracelet in between her thumb and pointer finger and twists it around.

I nod approvingly. “It’s great. Your best yet.” She laughs, because I say this every time.

“You want it?” she offers, still holding it up. I raise an eyebrow.

“Don’t you think I’m covered?”

She studies my wrist, which has a solid four inches of Fable creations encircling it. She’s really big on friendship bracelets, says that it’s “like handcuffs holding us together, but not in a creepy way where we can’t be alone sometimes.”

“Hm, maybe.” With that she puts the bracelet into her bag and hops up from her seat with as much vigor as she’d jumped into it with. “Come, my darling June. Let’s go fly.”

We end up in the forest. We almost always end up in the forest. One time we talked about going to the mall, but then agreed it didn’t have enough trees. The forest feels like it’s… ours, in a way. There could very well be a dozen of smials, or worse—a corporate retreat, within a couple of miles from us, but we wouldn’t know it. In the three years we’ve been coming here together—though it feels longer, like centuries or millennia, like I never could have possibly existed without her—we’ve managed to never come across another person. It’s as though we’re the only two people on Earth, cocooned within the loving arms of the weeping willows with a roof of oak branches sheltering us from the outside.

Our feet follow a path that runs through our veins. We stop at a stream, or brook, or creek. We can never decide what to call it. As I explained to Fable when we found this place, a creek can become a brook, and a brook can become a creek, while every creek is a stream, but not every stream is a creek. “Mostly,” she concluded, “it’s just our place, dear professor.”

Fable reaches into her bag and pulls out a crocheted blue pouch. From it she pulls out a worn picnic blanket and sets it on the ground with a flourish. I gave Fable this blanket for her first birthday in town. It came after a winter of having to bring extra jackets on our trips to the forest in order to have something to sit on. It never gets that cold here, but chilly enough that touching the forest floor comes with a little jolt of wintriness through our fingers that winds up and shudders through our ribs.

Fable sits down, then proceeds to take off her shoes (which have constellations painted on them, copied from a book on stars she’d checked out of the library three months before) and lies down. I put my shoes next to hers. Mine have suns painted on them. I’d protested when Fae shoe-napped them from my house, but she said it was so we could match—because I was the Sun in her life, “illuminating the mind-blowing intricacy of the world.” Where my left shoe has a sun, hers has Polaris. Sailors used to call it their Guiding Star, and Shakespeare called it love. She’s my Polaris.

“So, how does one go about flying?” I ask once I land next to her on the blanket, looking up at the canopy of glimmering sugar maple leaves above us.

“Close your eyes,” she instructs matter-of-factly. “The secret to flying is to feel the rest of the world, but also let it go. It’s not like… Superman or anything. It’s letting go of your gravitational pull, and just… poof.”

The “poof” is questionable, but I close my eyes anyway. I close my eyes and I listen. There’s a group of birds chatting not too far away. The water opposite my feet moves forward, pushing against rocks and gliding down like all the water before it.

I try to do what I can only imagine Fae is doing—picture my body (or soul, I suppose) gliding among the trees like the water in the stream. But the harder I try, the more I feel stuck to the ground.

I open my eyes. “Fae,” I whisper after what feels like a few minutes. “It’s not working.”

Through the corner of my vision, I see Fae open her eyes and turn onto her side, laying her hands under her head like a pillow.

“Why?”

“It’s just… It’s just not working, ok? I don’t see how I’m supposed to fly without actually flying. It’s impossible. You can’t just let go of everything, there’s too… there’s just-just too much!”

“Too much of what?”

“Everything! Today at the diner, I was clearing a table and glanced at the newspaper left behind by a customer. And everything is just so bad. It’s like this every day. You look at the news, even in our local paper, and nothing is good.”

Surprisingly, Fable doesn’t look deflated. But I feel like I am. I’m not sure I should have said that. It’s not that I can’t be honest with her. I think, sometimes, I’m more honest with Fable than I am with myself, and sometimes, I don’t even have to say anything. It’s just that telling Fae anything that comes from the dark taxonomies of my mind makes me feel like a birthday cake after someone accidentally sat on it.

 “How can everything be bad?” she asks me, sitting up now. I stay where I am on the picnic blanket, hands folded neatly on top of my stomach.

“Because everything is. Have you heard a grown-up talk lately? Nothing is the way they expect it to be. Happiness is unaffordable. Bureaucracies overpower people. Everyone is waiting for Godot, only to meet another career wheeler-dealer. My prospects in life depend on the language I speak at home and the fact that I can’t hold a conversation about any sport that involves a ball. And don’t get me started on the college admissions business. You read the news and any positivity is a goner, Fae, because it’s not all sunshine and rainbows and the world isn’t happy all the time. And the more you look at it, the more you realize that you’re… insignificant. Just a feeble speck floating around in the mess of,” I draw a large arc with an outstretched arm, “infinity. And you have no meaning. Insignificant.”

This is the first time I’ve ever said this out loud. It is not, however, the first time I’ve thought about it. Late at night when I’m alone in my head, no bright Fae the shining star to guide me out, I fall deeper and deeper into the earth. The roots of daytime depravity grab onto me and try to seize me, to take me away and trap me there. I think it works.

I wish everything were easier.

“Sometimes, easy isn’t the better option,” Fae says, and I realize that I had said the last part out loud. Biscuits.

She stands up and holds out her hand. Albeit somewhat reluctantly, I take it and let her pull me up. I think about putting my shoes on, but the little Fae voice in the back of my head tells me not to. My hand still grasped in hers, Fae pulls me gently towards the stream, and sits.

“Close your eyes.”

I roll them instead. “Fae, we already tried this.”

“Different reason, June-bug. Come on, close ‘em.”

I oblige. “Now open your hand.” I sigh, but comply. Whatever she puts into my hand is wet. It feels squishy, and kind of like…

“Dirt,” I say once I open my eyes. “Fae, are you trying to tell me something?”

Now she rolls her eyes. “Do you think this dirt is insignificant?”

I don’t answer. “What does that mean?”

“Do you think this dirt is insignificant?” she repeats. I consider it for a second, and shake my head faintly. Fable, with her own mud-streaked fingers, gestures for me to go on.

“Fae, I don’t understand what you’re talking about here.”

She just moves closer to me, so our knees are touching and our shoulders are pressed together. She doesn’t answer my question, only points at a spot in the brook.

“Do you think the water molecule that’s floating along right now is insignificant?” she asks while moving her arm with the flow of the creek, tracing the path of this molecule that we can’t see.

“I—” I almost say something else, but I pause. “No. But you have to tell me why this time.”

Fae smiles. “It’s not insignificant because it’s a part of something bigger. Remember how you told me that molecules stick together like beads in my bracelets? These “beads” make up this whole stream. The stream gives life. It’s a part of the forest, like the blood running through its veins. It’s part of all the water on Earth. It’s a part of the universe, which, yes, is kinda a big deal with all its planets… and suns, and constellations. They also might seem small, when you think of them as the dots on our shoes. But they aren’t just dots. Without that molecule, there would be no water, no stream, no oceans, no trees, no birds, no… love. That is pretty big. Being here with us, right now, was part of the journey it was supposed to take. Just like I’m supposed to be here with you. From the perspective of the universe, we might be physically small. But when I think about my universe? Well, June. What can I say? You make up quite a lot of it.”

There’s nothing I can say in response. All I can do is lay my head on Fae’s shoulder and gaze up to the porch of infinity. The crickets and the birds harmonize their songs as if on cue. As I look up at the sky, rain begins to fall. I laugh. Fae laughs and holds out her hands.

And I think I’m flying.