"Samuel, dinner time!"

I looked up from my game just as my wizard character ate a faceful of axe from a virtual goblin and the screen announced my violent demise. "I'll be down in a minute!" I yelled. 

Gotta go, dinner. I typed into the chatbox at the bottom of the screen.

That's cool, gotta call Melissa, Sean typed back.

You gonna get on after? I replied. My math homework could wait.

We'll see, he typed back, which probably meant "no," before TTYL dude. His hulking warrior character blinked out of existence and I logged out a few seconds after, feeling somewhat annoyed at Melissa but grateful, nonetheless, that Sean still seemed to find the time to slice and dice our through mythical villains online. I pulled myself out of my squeaky old office chair and made my way downstairs where a casserole of some kind was waiting for me, as well as both of my parents.

"I made string beans!" Mom said excitedly as soon as I sat down, forgetting that I hated them. My dad was slowly eating while looking at the sports section of the Arizona Central. He glanced up for a few seconds before going back to his reading. I loaded up my plate and began picking at it while my mom asked how my day was.

"Fine," was all I said.

"I saw an email that some counselors from Arizona State were going to be at the school today," Mom chirped pleasantly after a short pause. "Did you go see them?"

My dad coughed and looked up from his paper for a second. I glanced at him, and then back at my mom. "Uh, no. I didn't know they were coming."

"Isn't, erhm, your friend, Steven... isn't he going to ASU?" My dad entered the conversation in the style of his parenting: awkward and unsure. He meant Sean of course, which mom promptly corrected him on, but the way they were going about the whole thing seemed painfully rehearsed and I was not in the mood for that.

"So what's your point?" I asked finally after a few more unsteady starts and stops. I was beginning to hate the conversation as much as I hated string beans.

"We just think that, well, maybe you wouldn't be so..."

"Moody" Dad cut in, looking back down at the paper.

"Distracted," Mom said, giving him a look before turning back to me and smiling, "if you would put a little thought into what you were going to do after you graduated high school."

I opened my mouth to reply but my face twisted in defiance instead. This lecture seemed to be occurring more and more often as the weeks of Senior year chugged slowly by. "It's barely even September yet," I said, pushing my beans from one side of my plate to the other with my fork. "Why do I have to think about this now?"

"Well, Sammy, we just think that perhaps it would be good for your... health, if you were to think about the future a little bit." Mom pursed her lips like she did when she was uncomfortable.

"My health?" I looked up. "I'm not sick or anything."

At this, my dad coughed and shuffled the paper. I sat back slowly in my chair as it slowly dawned on me what we were actually talking about here. "This is about my counseling, huh?" I said finally, looking back and forth between them.

"Well, we just want to make sure it's actually helping," Mom said, smiling weakly at me.

"It's been, like, a month," I replied shaking my head.

"We just want to see you get better," she said.

"I am getting better," I said automatically, before adding "I think."

"Well that's good!" Mom forced a big smile and looked over at Dad, who shrugged. "So you'll look into colleges, then? Please?"

"Fine," I said, knowing that resisting would only bring us full circle. I really didn't want to think about it (the future) though, so I knew I probably wouldn't make a real effort to do research. "Can I be excused, please?"

"You didn't eat your beans, Sammy," Mom said, making a face and forgetting I was seventeen. I shrugged and mumbled an apology before getting up and rinsing my plate in the sink, then taking the stairs two at a time up to my room, I flopped down into my desk chair and reached for the power button on my computer before remembering that Sean was on the phone with Melissa and probably would be all night. I sighed out loud and threw my hands up in frustration; my left on flopped down with a thud onto the book of Dickinson poems the Quinn had left for me. I opened it for the hundredth time in the last two days and looked at her looping handwriting, which seemed elegant yet pointed. It was, in my opinion, excellent handwriting. I pulled my cellphone from my pocket and in a flurry of frustrated energy I dialed the number (which I had already memorized) and began second guessing myself as soon as the line began to ring. I let it ring three times before I completely lost my nerve and had almost ended the call when--

"Hello?" 

The voice on the other end of the phone sounded far more unsure of itself than I had ever heard in person and I thought for a moment that I had called the wrong number. I opened my mouth to say something and realized I hadn't really planned on anyone answering.

"Hello?" The voice said again. "Samuel?"

"Uh, yeah," was the best I could muster. I rolled my eyes at myself and sank down into the desk chair in front of my computer. My heart was pounding somewhere in the region of my throat and my palms were already sweating profusely. "How'd you know it was me?"

"I've only recently started handing out my phone number to strangers." I could hear the grin in Quinn's voice and her confidence rushed back in a torrent.

"We had smoothies together. I didn't think I was a stranger," I said, wiping my sweating palms on my shorts. It wasn't all that hot out but my room felt like a sauna for some reason.

"Fair enough," came her reply. "So, what's up?" 

"Not much," I said, realizing a little too late that I had nothing to talk about.

"Cool," she replied, and there was a pause. "So, obviously you got the book from Mr. Spencer. How d'you like it?"

"Yes. Good. Um, yeah," I sat there with my mind blank and my mouth half-open. I hadn't made it this far in my head when I had imagined myself, at least twelve times already, calling her. "Hold on a second," I said, eyeing the thin volume where it sat on my desk. "How, um, did you know I would go back to the bookstore?"

"Please," Quinn said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "All we have are memories, Samuel, and we always return to what's familiar."

"Oh." I said. Then, as if to prove to myself that I could be as airy and confident as she was, I tried to make a joke: "That's awfully pretentious of you." It sounded wrong as soon as the words left my mouth and I cringed.

"Of course it is," she laughed, to my surprise. "We intellectual types rarely say anything unless it makes us look like an arrogant ass."

"Sounds about right," I said, grinning at my reflection on my blank computer screen and marvelling at how I was actually beginning to feel at ease.

"So, what did you think of the poem?"

"It was..." I struggled to think of the proper word for it. "It was appropriate."

"That's the best you've got? Appropriate?"

"I liked the part about the drumming," I offered. I wasn't much for poetry, or reading in general, but I could appreciate words that were well put together. "The end was good, too, with the falling and everything."

There was a pause on the other end of the phone, then a sigh. "Obviously I need to get you some more books, kid, 'cause I'm not going to do this with someone who calls the best Dickenson poem ever things like appropriate or good."

"I could suffer through some reading, I guess," I replied, wondering what she meant by "do this," figuring it probably meant nothing but wondering if maybe it didn't. I worked up every bit of courage inside me to say what came out of my mouth next: "So, um, I don't have any homework this afternoon, you want to, uh, go get a smoothie or something?"

Silence. It was the longest two second pause that I had ever felt. I squeezed my eyes shut and wished that I hadn't asked.

"Oh." she said quietly, and with a strange sort of strain that I didn't recognize. "Now's probably not the best time, sorry."

"Well... okay," I said, trying not to feel too crushed. It shouldn't have mattered, but it hurt for some reason. Maybe it was because Sean seemed too busy with Melissa to return to our comfortable and unhurried friendship and it made me feel... abandoned. Or perhaps it was something else entirely, like the feeling that I had finally found someone who understood the feeling of rainclouds on the brain and didn't force me to act normal, but rather let me embrace them and enjoy the drizzle. Whatever it was, I felt the bite of rejection as badly as if smoothies had been a proposal for a date. Maybe it was, I didn't know; I was new to all this.

"How about we get smoothie tomorrow, or maybe the next day? Usually I'm feeling better after I've had some sleep."

"Oh. Really?" I felt my spirits rise immediately. "Wait, what do you mean, are you alright?"

"I'm fine," Quinn sighed and I could imagine her flopping back on the couch, or her bed, or wherever it was that she might be. "I'm not chronic or anything, but I do get some pretty bad headaches. Migraines, actually."

"Oh." I frowned, taking a moment to marvel at the fact that someone who seemed so extraordinary suffered from a problem so common, so... unremarkable. "That sucks," I added as the obligatory remark to hearing of an ailment that you yourself have no experience with.

"In the realm of things that suck, from vacuum cleaners to F5 tornados, my migraines sit somewhere in the upper three-fifths," she said, sounding tired but not unhappy. "I'll be fine, Samuel, and I demand that you do not worry about me."

"No promises," I said, though I wasn't particularly worried because Quinn seemed like the kind of girl who could handle anything, 

She laughed softly. "Cute," she said, and we sat there in silence for a few moments. "Samuel, may I ask you a question?"

"Um, sure," I said, taken aback by both the word cute and the sudden change in topic.

"What's the deal with tap water?" she blurted suddenly and forcefully, as if the topic was frustrating her beyond belief.

"What?" I made a face at the phone in my hand. "What do you mean?"

"Well, I've been laying in the dark for three hours now with an axe in my skull while wondering what the hell is up with tap water."

"You're talking about, like, water from the sink, right?" I said, perplexed.

"Precisely. Water from the sink," she said in a matter-of-fact manner. "The kind of water that everyone in America has wondrously and magically piped up into their houses, yet no one ever wants to admit that they drink because it's just plain ol' tap water."

I considered her words for a moment and thought of my mom, who had one of those pitchers with a filter sitting in the fridge, and of my dad, who always bought one of those big bottles of name-brand water every day and threw it away (half-empty) when he got home from work. "I guess you're right," I said, finding myself amused at the observation. "I mean water is water, right?"

"Wrong," she said confidently. "Sure, the fancy water may have additives that make it taste better, but the water that comes out of the sink is clean, healthy, and unlimited. Water that comes out of a ditch in the Congo is good enough for the people who live there, so how in the hell can we even complain about the miracle water that comes right into the kitchen?"

"You have a fair point," I deadpanned, feeling as if an uncomfortable and rather political conversation may be coming on.

"Look, it's not like I'm going to just up and start lecturing people about donating money or shipping water, or whatever. I was thinking that, maybe, it would be kind of nice if people were thankful for the ordinary little miracles, like tap water."

"Wow." was all I said, looking blankly down at my lap. "That's cool. I've never considered tap water a miracle."

"And I've never considered my migraines a miracle, but at least I don't have cancer, right?"

At least people would know you had an illness, I thought to myself, but it seemed to bitter to say out loud to Quinn. So I said "right," and we sat in silence for another few moments.

"Well, I better lie down in the dark and loathe my affliction in relative quietness."

"Okay," was all I could think to say. "So, uh, I'll see you on Thursday?"

"Unless the world ends," she said cheerily, and I found myself grinning.

"Cool."

More silence. Finally, "Goodbye, Samuel."

"Bye."

Click.

I sighed and flopped down on my bed, phone still clutched into my sweaty palm. We had hardly even talked about the book, and I guessed that I needed to come up with something better than appropriate or good before we discussed the nuances of fine literature again. It didn't seem to matter what it was--literature, existentialism, faucet water--Quinn seemed to explore each and every thought deeply before the accompanying words ever made it out of her mouth. Ironic, really, for a girl who claimed she suffered from apathy. 

I sighed, suddenly remembering my conversation with my parents over dinner and realized that, even though they could be intrusive and awkward, at least I had parents. Mom and Dad were my tap water, I supposed, and I felt the knot of annoyance in my stomach loosen a little. There were a million other things I didn't have to deal with, and if the worst of my burden was perpetual bitterness, I could probably live with it. 

I considered logging into my computer but instead I picked up Quinn's book from my desk and flipped back to the poem. There had to be a method, I thought to myself, to unlocking the enigmatic madness of Quinn's thoughts. I squinted down at the page and tried to imagine I could think like Quinn, determined to find something ethereal and immortal hidden somewhere where the ink met the slightly yellowing pages.